Further Musings

It’s voting day here in Chapel Hill. I love voting here. I love walking to and from the polls on the crushed gravel sidewalks littered with orange maple and brown oak leafs. It’s also fun to see the workers at the polls get excited to see someone under the age of 50 in our precinct. And finally, my vote matters! The polls have been open for two hours and CP was vote 14 and I’m 15. That’s a lot more say than I have in any of the national elections.

There aren’t many things in the world that terrify me.  This NYTimes video about water quality does.

When your teenage daughters and your wife stop menstruating and then start again when your family switches to bottled water then you know you have water quality problems.

Terrifying.  Simply terrifying.  I’m so thankful to be served by such a safe water system.   One thing I’m stumped about though is how to know what water quality will look like when and if we move and how to factor that into a moving decision.

When we were in the Minneapolis airport we had a several hour layoff.  In our hunt for good food we happened past this store.

Nice patriotic look.  Image of a revolutionary war cannon on the banner.  A US soldier on the TV feed.  The whole presentation is carefully considered to stir up proud patriotic feelings and associate them with the store (and I confess it works).

What caught my eye was the blacked out section above the news counter to the right.  On closer inspection . . .

It’s one thing to claim to be the channel of truth and goodness and apple pie but to claim to be the channel of truth and goodness and apple pie which is concerned with the decline of America but is happy to sell America pornography makes my blood boil.  It makes my stomach turn to see the Revolutionary War and American troops evoked next to this.  Blah.

After finishing Power Broker last week I sat down to process a bit more about the book.  The biography is one part the story of New York, one part the story of the man, and two parts an extended lesson in how power is gained, used, and lost.  It’s a book full lessons about how to build a kingdom and I wrote out a list (see below), a bald and shocking list, to help me process and understand his methods, some of which are wise and some repulsive.  Many are relevant only to those in politics but more than a few are wise words for every setting.  Moses used them all, ruthlessly and effectively, and Caro details how he used each of them to create New York’s parks, bridges and highways, building some of America’s greatest public works, and used each of them to destroy people, treasured public places, and hundreds of thousands of homes.

I often think of novels as case studies that are amazing for how they show me how people think and how they live.  This biography was a case study of just how ruthless a person can become and Moses absolutely lived by these rules.

In the end, for all his kingdom building, for his unparalleled power, for his unparalleled 40 year reign, he still lost it all.  He ended exiled and ostracized, a victim of the rules he lived by.  I’ve been reading Ecclesiastes lately and the meditations on the loss of power in chapter two echoed through Moses’s story.  They’re a reminder of how temporary every earthly kingdom is.

Moses’s Lessons of Power

Gaining Power

1) Understand the realities of power where you are.  Understand who can crush you, how they can do it, and what they want.

2) Competence is rewarded.  The way to stay employed and at the center of any job is to be so competent that people need you.

3) Work harder than everyone else.

4) Know and write the laws.  If others are too lazy or trusting to read and understand them then you can create your own power.

5) Know the organizational structure.  Understand how everything is connected so you can know both how to attack and how to defend.

5) Create an organization of people loyal to you.  Pick the competent and reward them with responsibility and money.  Use them to stack boards in your favor.  Ostracize anyone who crosses you.

Keeping Power

1) Associate yourself with something virtuous in the public’s eye.  Who could be against parks?

2) Insulate yourself from public opinion, it will turn one day.  Create power that public opinion can’t take from you.

3) Create policies that outlast you.  For example, if you want to keep people can’t afford cars away from your parks one option is to ban buses from the access roads leading to them.  But this only works if you remain powerful enough to keep the laws from changing.  If you build the bridges to low for buses then people who have to ride the buses will never come to your parks.

4) You can’t win fight with the media, they control the dialogue.  Fighting with them inevitably makes you look bad.

5) Manipulating the media is key to success.  They are people.  Win their ear with hospitality.  Make them feel powerful.

6) Controlling money matters.  Money is where policy meets the road.  Politicians want jobs, parks, roads, schools, hospitals.  If you control whether and how those are built then you control them.

7) Winning flies with honey is important: if you can give people pleasure through food and drink and entertainment and they will thank you for it.

8 ) The media is powerful.  They are powerful in their monopoly of public discourse.  They can be blinded but they can be voracious when scandal drives their incentives to be so. But there are things more powerful than the media, particularly the law, so control the law if you can.

9) The silence and ignorance of the media are just as powerful.  They can’t report on what they can’t understand and the world is often so complex that they can’t get it.  Especially when blinded by preconceived notions.

Getting Things Done

1) Come to meetings with detailed plans to solve complicated problems.  Detailed plans get put into place.  Anybody can have vague dreams about building highways.  Having a detailed and completed plan when no one else has one makes your plan implemented by default.

2) Lie about people when it’s prudent and useful.  If you can destroy their reputations then no one will listen to their criticisms of you.

3) Lie about costs of your projects.  Once 1/3 of it is built you will get the funding for the rest.  The people who approved the project will be too invested to not give you the rest of the money.

4) Lie about the costs of others ideas if they can’t prove they are right.

5) Use the resources of the state.  Private citizens can only fight as long as they can pay lawyers to do so.  Public servants have the state paying for their lawyers.  You’ll win through attrition nine times out of ten.

6) Start projects.  Even if you’re legally in the wrong if you’ve already torn down the original building then your project will follow.

For the last thirteen weeks I’ve been plowing through a long biography, Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro.  I picked it up because my grandfather and uncle both recommended it and because I’ve read Caro’s other series and enjoyed it.  Over the weekend Dad asked me if I enjoyed reading Power Broker.  I said it’s hard to say one enjoys reading something so wrenching.

Though it was long (1,126 pages long) I kept at because it was the best book I’ve ever read about raw political power displayed in city and state government. In college the topic of city and state government put me to sleep but this book changed forever how I think about the awing power of city governments to build and shape their communities. Moses captured that power and wielded it like a sword.  His accomplishments are breathtaking for what they created and destroyed.

I think a lot about power these days.  As a political scientist power is ultimately what I study.  Professionally I study why governments take money or land from some people and give it to others but I do so from a 30,000 ft level.  Caro studies power on the street level (literally).  He details how Moses threw over 400,000 out of their homes, sometimes for the public good, sometimes as a favor to cronies.  Moses built himself an empire and it was so strong that, though unelected, he gave orders to mayors and governors.

Caro deserved his Pulitzer Prize for his portrait both New York and of Moses, a man who once held 12 appointed offices simultaneously and was so powerful that President Franklin Roosevelt was unable to displace him, and for creating a record of all Moses accomplished, both for good and for ill.

I won’t go so far as to recommend reading Power Broker (unless you have a fetish for 1,000 page histories or biographies) but I will recommend reading the introduction sometime when you’re in a bookstore and have 45 minutes.  It’s a short 20 pages that survey the massive book.  While few people today have the power that Robert Moses had, our society has its own power brokers and I think it’s worth reflecting a bit on the tremendous power that they have.  Most of what they do floats around on the edges of our consciousnesses . . . huh, a new school, a new highway, I wonder why they put it there.  I think it’s worth 45 minutes and a cup of tea to survey to bring those thoughts to the front of the mind by reading about how powerful Robert Moses was, what kind of person he was, and then reflecting about the power of the powerful today.

(and, as a bonus you’ll learn a bit about the great city of New York, a bit about how it and Moses shaped America, and about who Moses was as a person)

My recent discovery at work has been hulu.com. I’ve enjoyed the access to the Daily Show and to the Colbert Report over my tuperwares full of lunch. I particularly enjoyed this clip for how it takes the major media outlets to task. In fairness I haven’t read the report and don’t know how partisan it is but I love the way that Stewart treats the major media outlets. As DeLong would say: John Stewart is a national treasure!

In trying to post the clip above I’ve learned a little bit about international media laws . . . you readers abroad will not be able to see it. Stinky. Even stinkier has been my inability to watch Euro 2008 highlights or any part of the games.  In an era of free information there are some hard and fast boundaries that leave those without cable or TiVo out.

Almost two years ago I blogged about a radio interview with Thomas Ricks about his book Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. During a recent trip to the public library I picked it up and last week I finished it . . . whew. It’s an in-depth, well documented, history of the lead up to the war and the first year of the war. It was quite the read.

It’s strange to read about an occupation that has affected the lives of so many Americans and Iraqis and that I know so little about.

The book first and foremost a history of the war. His research is extensive and his work is respected in both the military and the media. Fiasco describes the decisions, strategies and tactics of the American military and their civilian masters during this two year period. If you’re interested in learning about this period I highly recommend it.

I like Ricks. In an age where every media article hems and haws by quoting experts on both sides Hicks is a journalist who isn’t afraid to call a spade a spade: not with the Congress, not with the military leadership, not with the media. He’s critical of specific people, of their leadership styles and of their specific decisions.

In Fiasco he’s ruthless in his critiques of leadership decisions that spectacularly failed to plan for the occupation phase of the military operation, of a heavy-handed military occupation that failed to see the Iraqi people as the prize to be won and instead saw the militants as the ones to be destroyed (if that alienates the civilians oh well), and of a leadership that was slow to realize what kind of battle it was engaged in and put soldiers at risk through their lack of understanding.

I hope he writes another history that updates what’s happened since 2005. The course of the war has tremendous consequence for us in dollars, lives, and the future of how the world will be functioning through this century.

I’ve been reading over this Europe trip and much of what I read was a series of essays by David James Duncan titled My Story as Told by Water. It was one of those books that got me agitated in a serious way especially about the issues addressed by this group: http://www.wildsalmon.org/

The gist of the issue is that there are 4 dams on the Snake River that are churning up wild salmon populations and driving them towards extinction. It’s not clear that building these dams were a good idea to begin with: yes they generate power, power boating recreation, and barge runs but the costs are enormous. Aside from flooding beautiful rivers to kayak and fish on, they are driving these salmon species towards extinction. (see the website for details) They also prevent a salmon fishing industry from existing and fish that could be thriving if the dams were removed.

The economic arguments for removal are sound but what really got me was Duncan’s quote from Genesis:

“And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creatures that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God blessed them saying, Be fruitful, and multiply and fill the waters in the seas.”

So economic arguments to bring down the dams aside (and I think they are good ones) it seems to me that God thought creating these salmon was good. He thought that salmon had something good to say about who he is and what He’s about. Perhaps it’s the sacrificial act of the salmon’s runs, climbing all that way to one’s death to create life? Perhaps it’s God’s provision for us in the food and sport that comes swimming up out of the ocean to us? Perhaps that God loves beautiful and amazing sights and animals?

Whatever his reasons He saw fit to bring these fish into being. To countenance their extinction is to say to God that we think he’s wrong about having creating these species.

It seems to me that for whatever reason God made these fish I’m inclined to defer to his reasoning.

So I’m encouraging you to take a look and sign the petition online. I think it’s a good idea.

The NYTimes ran an article titled “Oil Industry Says Biofuel Push May Hurt at Pump” in today’s paper.  The gist of the article is that a governent push towards biofuels is keeping oil companies from investing in increasing their production thereby driving up prices . . . oops.

“Gas prices are spiking again — to an average of $3.22 a gallon, and close to $4 a gallon in many areas.

And some oil executives are now warning that the current shortages of fuel could become a long-term problem, leading to stubbornly higher prices at the pump.

They point to a surprising culprit: uncertainty created by the government’s push to increase the supply of biofuels like ethanol in coming years.

In his State of the Union address in January, President Bush called for a sharp increase in the use of biofuels, along with some improvement in automobile fuel efficiency to reduce America’s use of gasoline by 20 percent within 10 years. Congress is considering legislation calling for a nearly fivefold increase in the use of ethanol.

That has forced many oil companies to reconsider or scale back their plans for constructing new refinery capacity.”

So here’s my wild thought, what if it’s not an oops?  I don’t think this is true but here’s a conspiracy theory that popped to mind:

Let’s say that “the government” had the goal of reducing oil consumption in mind.  Theoretically this could have all kinds of nice benefits: decreased pollution, less asthma in children, less dependence on foreign oil and other benefits you can probably think of.  It would have all kinds of costs as well.

The best way to reduce US oil consumption would be to raise prices.  From a societal standpoint the best way to raise prices might be increasing the gas tax.  This would be regressive, but theoretically the government could make it up to those of us not-so-rich people with tax breaks/credits in other areas.   The problem is that this solution is politically intractable.   Would any politicians have the courage to call for this solution even if it was “the best one”?

So . . . what other way could the government raise the price of gas without having the public approve of it . . . oh yeah, they could create uncertainty in the oil markets, thereby raising prices and having the same effect and inducing the same benefits . . . except that all that money that would have been raised in taxes is instead collected by the oil companies . . . but all those good things (less asthma etc) would still be achieved . . .

Oops?

Granted, this argument stipulates that 1) consumers would believe that prices are permanently raised therefore adjusting their behavior and 2) that numerous politicians could collude in this way, but I thought it was an interesting thought experiment.

So that’s my musing for the afternoon.

Since Christmas I’ve been working my way through God Laughs & Plays: Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right.  I asked for it for Christmas as I greatly enjoyed David James Duncan’s two novels. 

This book, a collection of essays, has interesting things to say.  It’s interesting to read the thoughts of someone who uses different key words, who takes them to represent different truths about politics and art and religion, that I am used to hearing. 

What’s great about his writing is that he takes apart and looks at the key words and investigates the truths inhabited by the “Fundamentalist Right” from a different perspective.  And part of what I really like about the book is the compassion and earnestness with which he engages and challenges those with more firm ideologies.

It’s doubly interesting as I think for the most part he is valuing and describing many of the same things I value from a different view point, different from my viewpoint and from that of the “Fundamentalist Right.”  It’s almost like reading a cross-cultural text and one that is elegantly and beautifully written to boot.  I think this kind of reading great alongside being a great pleasure is great to help me sort and think. 

So with that intro I thought I’d share a couple of selections from Duncan about the nature of writing and reading that I liked from the essay I read last night:

Read the rest of this entry »

Remember when Al Gore and George Bush argued over what to do with budget surpluses back in 2000. Gore said we should pay down the national debt. Bush said we should cut taxes. It seemed to me that paying the debt down was the right thing to do. Why? Because paying down the debt back then would lower future interest payments resulting in either lower taxes or higher public spending today.

Today the NYTimes reports that rising interest rates have had an affect on more than just homeowners:

“a much larger group of Americans is already paying a steeper price: taxpayers. After all, the United States government is the largest adjustable-rate borrower in the world. Each year, the national debt grows. Congress spends more than it is willing to raise in taxes, so it finances operations by selling debt to the public. In the last five years, the gross national debt, which includes bonds pledged to fund Social Security and other entitlements, has risen 46 percent, to about $8.5 trillion, from $5.8 trillion at the end of September 2001.”

So what does that mean in a world of rising interest rates?

“The Congressional Budget Office projects that the interest bill, after climbing nearly 20 percent this year, will rise 13.2 percent in 2007, to $240 billion, and more than 8 percent in 2008, to $270 billion. With each passing year, interest payments are likely to eat up a bigger chunk of total spending and crowd out other priorities.”

For a little perspective, the $220,000,000,000 interest bill this year is $730 per American (and more per tax payer if you remove those who don’t pay taxes). It’s three times the education budget, 38 times the National Science Foundation’s budget, and over 23 times what we give to developing countries through USAID.

And who might we be paying that interest to? Much of it isn’t to Americans:

“And so the rising interest rates are contributing to rising income in China, the Persian Gulf region and Japan. In 2005, the United States government paid about $77 billion in interest to foreign creditors, according to the Commerce Department.”

Now I’m not complaining that other countries have been financing our way of life for as long as I’ve been studying the global economy, it’s just that $730 per person is a lot to be giving up.

I can’t but wonder what would have happened if we would have paid down the debt.

Brad DeLong linked yesterday to a radio interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tom Ricks, the Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post, about his new book Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq

I’ve been listening to it this afternoon and it grieves me deeply to do so. I’d recommend a listen, even though it’s been hard and uncomfortable for me to listen to.

I like the way Ricks mixes his clear respect and enjoyment of specific military commanders and policies with his criticism of others whose actions make one wonder what was being thought of at the time.

One of the many interesting perspectives was his criticism of the Congress as “the dog that didn’t bark.” I was impressed by his historical analogies to the Congress’s behavior in the Civil War and World War Two. He rattled off statistics about the activeness of the Congress in questioning the actions of the executive branch and the military.

I wonder also about the role of the media in today’s society which seems so polarized. The sober consequences of how we relate to the media, how we get the information we process and our lack of debate (at least in my circles) about a topic so vast, they all make me stop to think. I wonder a lot about the systems and individuals that participated in the war and the occupation. No good answers just lots of thoughts.

Since we don’t get cable (or even ABC since our neighbors moved in) I don’t often get the chance to laugh this hard. I’m not sure if reading macro-economic blogs is a substitute but it did point me right for this link. How can you not love it when the TV news media gets mocked this well?

. . . and then I watched this interview. I actually cried. I do respect the Congressman for his willingness to go on the air with Stephen Colbert and for his unflappableness.

Having watched one or two more it appears that Colbert is going to work his way across the 435 districts.  I think that Colbert poses more serious questions to the right and left than “real” political journalists.  I like his mix of real and hilarious questions and how pins when they make standard political responses.

The Washington Post has an interesting article today on the history of the federal farm subsidies program and one particularly odd facet of it. It’s interesting, quite long, and does a good job of showing how politics creates and influences policy.

On the sidebar they have a series of graphs and slide shows. The most interesting graph shows how much each county is receiving “direct and countercyclical payments” and who’s getting how much the top recipients are receiving. There is also an interesting timeline of the history of farm subsidies.

I wonder if there is more to come on this topic from the Post.

The NYTimes ran an article this morning on the effects of ethanol subsidies in
America's heartland.

"That the United States is using corn, among the more expensive crops to grow and harvest, to help meet the country's fuel needs is a testament to the politics underlying ethanol's 30-year rise to prominence. Brazilian farmers produce ethanol from sugar at a cost roughly 30 percent less.

But in America's farm belt, politicians have backed the ethanol movement as a way to promote the use of corn, the nation's most plentiful and heavily subsidized crop. Those generous government subsidies have kept corn prices artificially low — at about $2 a bushel — and encouraged flat-out production by farmers, leading to large surpluses symbolized by golden corn piles towering next to grain silos in Iowa and Illinois.

While farmers are seeing little of the huge profits ethanol refiners like Archer Daniels Midland are banking, many farmers are investing in ethanol plants through cooperatives or simply benefiting from the rising demand for corn. With Iowa home to the nation's first presidential caucuses every four years, just about every candidate who visits the state pays obeisance to ethanol."

So let me make sure I get the story straight. Large corporations are lobbying politicians to pass laws that require that my tax dollars fund their business instead of them earning that money by competing in a level market with producers of other crops. How do they do this? By staying out of the spotlight when they can and claiming (falsely) that the subsidies help average American farmers and is good for the environment (debatable).

I'm not sure why the Times has its ear to the ground on the issue of agricultural subsidies as much as it does. Perhaps it's because the US government paid out over 22,900,000,000 dollars in agricultural subsidies in 2000 (though a little less over the last couple of years, closer to $20,000,000,000). Since there are about 300,000,000 Americans we can say that each year each of us writes a $75 check to America's farmers (that includes a check for each of our children) on top of what we pay at the store. I can't help but wonder why I couldn't just pay more for my food.

Ah, you say, but doesn't that just mean that our food is cheaper? Well yes the grains we eat are cheaper and so is the meat from the animals we eat, and so is the food the Japanese and other countries eat. That is because America exports huge amounts of grain and meat each year so our $75 checks (or $300 checks if you're a family of four), in effect, make it cheaper for Japanese consumers to eat our corn and soybeans.

Oh yeah, and did I mention that the government doesn't subsidize fruits and vegetables, so therefore processed foods with all the corn syrup are relatively cheaper in the supermarket than the things that are healthier? In a significant way it's the law, not the market that determines that difference. And let's not start on sugar, politics, poor farmers in other nations, and corn syrup.

But I digress. The point of the article was the effects of subsidizing ethanol. The article does a good job of talking about the pure politics of it.

Thinking about the whole situation raises my blood pressure.