Suggestion #18: Time to do something about gerrymandering

Posting two-a day in order to finish by the end of New Years' day. Please check in case you've missed any entries in this series!

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Amid all the attention given to the presidential election, something politically earth shaking went almost unnoticed, in California, where Proposition 11 imposed neutral redistricting upon the state.  Since this change will be much to the detriment of the majority Democratic party, it amounted to a stunning act of civic minded fairness on the part of a largely Democratic electorate.  One almost certain result will be the loss of Democratic seats in Congress and the state legislature, in 2010.  

This clearly moves gerrymandering up to the front burner of American politics. Indeed, few other issues merit greater urgency than solving a desperate injustice, one that has contributed greatly to America’s political and social jeopardy.


(Part of a 12/08 series of “unusual suggestions for America and the Obama Administration.”)
 
From the Weekly Standard:”The practice of drawing less than honest legislative boundaries is as old as the republic itself. It got its name in 1812, when Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry, who went on to become Madison's vice president, signed a redistricting bill that positioned his Jeffersonian Democrats in the legislature to take seats from the Federalists by concentrating their supporters in a minimum number of districts. The Boston Gazette ran a cartoon depicting the new district as a contorted animal and proclaiming the "Gerry-mander, a new species of monster."

Since then, the monster has thrived and been used by successive major parties. New mapping software has made gerrymandering easier and more precise in eliminating competition to incumbents. Incoming Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, then chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, opined: "Every redistricting is a partisan political exercise, but this is going to put it at a level we have never seen. That's the gift that the Supreme Court and Tom DeLay have given us.”

 Effects are blatant.  For example, despite this being a "landslide" year for Democrats, safe districting ensured that they would gain only 18 net seats (out of 435) in the House of Representatives. This malignant sickness is also responsible for some of the radicalization of most Republican -- and many Democratic -- officeholders, who need only cater to their districts’ rabid base and can safely ignore the clear desire of most Americans for pragmatic moderation.

What the California bombshell suggests is that the Democratic Party will NOT enjoy the fruits of further gerrymandering. It may even suffer, if more blue states follow this course.

 This puts the democratic officeholders in a bind.  As individuals, they love their gerried districts.  As legislators, statesmen, party members and Americans, they should loathe and take up arms against this horrid practice. See a detailed series, analyzing gerrymandering from top to bottom.

One solution might be for President Obama -- or several governors -- to call a meeting of all states, encouraging them to negotiate among themselves a uniform method (as they did with the Uniform Business Code) for ending a modern travesty. Recalcitrant states can be pressured with both lawsuits and a persistent information campaign. Doing this in an evenhanded manner could use the standard method -- independent redistricting commissions.

Or, a far more clever approach would simply require minimal overlap between state assembly, state senate and Congressional districts.  This solution would instantly transform politics for all of us, in all our neighborhoods and eliminate the evils of gerrymnandering at a stroke, while minimizing interference in the authority of legislatures.   It may be hard, at first, to visualize, but let it sink in.

As I said in a much longer essay on this topic, I hold out little hope for gerrymandering to be eliminated by politicians, without intense outside pressure. At one level, there is all the difference in the world between good and bad politicians, and we have reason to hope that good ones are now entering power.

But, at another level, they are all members of a political caste that has been complicit in the gerrymandering scam. If President Obama really wants to prove he is above this kind of thing, he could start in no better place.

Suggestion 17: POLITICAL MATTERS

These suggestions have, more often than not, steered toward pragmatic problem solving and away (mostly) from partisan matters. Frankly, I dislike having to line up with a particular party on all issues and very often seek themes that cut away at unusual angles. (I even once keynoted a Libertarian Party National Conference!)

And yet... can there be any doubt who has to win, in the near-term, if the treason called “culture war” is to be cured and sensible negotiation resume in America? Until decent conservatives gather the courage to perform their own “Miracle of 1947” and reclaim their movement from the loonies who hijacked it, we really have no choice (alas) but to offer help, advice and passionate support to the Democrats... and to hope that this will be one of their better (less flaky) eras.

And so, to politics!  Let’s start with some ideas I posted back in December 2006 -- Suggestions to The New Democratic Congress. 

Alas, the first term of Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House featured almost no accomplishments at all. Sure, it is convenient to blame Senate GOP filibusters and presidential vetoes, but we have to insist that the 2008 Congress will show more guts, verve, imagination and hard work.


(Part of a 12/08 series of “unusual suggestions for America and the Obama Administration.)”
 

Here’s a brief remise of some of those 2006 ideas (with others set aside for my “crackpot suggestions” segment, at the very end.):

* Adjust house rules to limit "pork" -- the earmarking of tax dollars that benefit special interests or specific districts. Wasn’t this a favorite issue of Jophn McCain?  Terrific!  Then steal this issue out from under Republican noses. (I’ll have more to say about this, next time.) Some ways to do this:

- reduce pork allocations from 15,000 down to 1,000 (the number allocated last time Democrats ran Congress)... or even a symbolically redolent limit of one earmark per member, per year.

- require that all future earmarks come from a single pool, no larger than one tenth of a percent of the discretionary budget.

- insist they be placed in clearly-marked and severable portions of a bill, weeks before it’s voted on.

* Spread the power of subpoena -- and include the minority party.

Here’s a note to Congressional Democrats; remember, a day will come when you’ll be back on the outs. Now is the time to set permanent precedents, that ensure you’ll still have a little power to poke after truth, when that happens. Establish processes NOW so that even a congressional minority can hold some future Bush-like administration at least somewhat accountable!

One way would be to give today’s GOP minority what they never had the maturity to give you -- the general power to summon witnesses and demand some answers, even when a party is out of power.

There is no way that Speaker Pelosi and the leadership will want to do this, now that the GOP is reduced to an irksome nuisance.  Still, please think about it.  Just giving them the right to grill a few people won’t let them do much mischief to an open and honest and competent Obama Administration.  Meanwhile, such a precedent could guarantee we’ll never again have an era as dark as the Bush years, without the other side getting to light some candles.  

Here’s an idea. Allow any three representatives to jointly issue one subpoena per year, beyond those voted by committees -- and provide a venue with some staff support. One for every three members -- that's 140 member-chosen testimonies... maybe sixty a year from the minority party. A large enough number to make sure that pokes-at-truth will keep going on, even during eras when a single party machine dominates every branch of government. And yet, it's small enough not to disrupt House business too much.  See details.

* Do something ruthless about K Street.   For about fifty reasons.  And you know them all.  Above all, to make sure the old “revolving door” turns into ashes in their mouths. Enough said.

* Take a sensible next step toward public financing of elections. Of course, it has to be in stages.  But respected scholar Lawrence Lessig makes a strong case for a method that would free all Congressmen and Congresswomen from the hundreds of hours of fundraising they must do, every year, making their lives more livable and allowing them to go back to deliberation, instead of relentless sucking-up.  Lessig’s proposal seems plausible and within reach.  Indeed, something like it may be necessary, if a gerrymandering reform takes place (See next time.)

* Reduce secrecy. Say it.  Do it.  Stand by it.

* The Henchman's Act has a provocative name, but the aim is simple. A permanent office might be created, outside the justice or intelligence communities, that will confidentially and securely advise any person, in America or around the world, who may be thinking about revealing information about bad activities, including those that are illegal or harmful to the people, or that impair the effective operation of justice, democracy, or fair markets. According to each individual's needs, the informant may be steered toward intelligence or law-enforcement services, or toward open source networks, or even toward mass media.  Judiciously, some varying types of protection and/or rewards would be made available to brave whistleblowers. Yes, this one will confuse some people.  But I hope it will percolate in the minds of some.

* An Elections Reform Act will ensure that the nation's voting take splace in a manner that citizens can trust and verify. Political interference in elections will be a federal crime. Strong auditing procedures and transparency will be augmented by a requirement that all voting machines and associated software belong to the People and shall be subjected to relentless open-source testing. States will be encouraged to try a variety of incentives to encourage greater (and more secure) voter registration and participation in elections.  Negotiate a compromise with decent conservatives, so that their fears over voter fraud are addressed, too.

* Now, while gas prices are low, take an advantage of an opportunity to switch from a cents-per-gallon tax to a percentage tax!  This can be revenue neutral at the time it is enacted!  But when gas prices rise, so would revenues.

Another option, do a tradeoff of higher gas tax vs lowered FICA, since both mostly affect the middle class.

* Start thinking about how to end the catastrophic Drug War.  Start a series of nationwide open town halls to explore whether it is politically possible to do something about this endless quagmire. Make it a matter of medicine and science.  Start building quiet consensus, so that, if Obama succeeds at his first wave of endeavors, this can be addressed in the next wave.  Consider the possibility of state-by-state experiments.

* Reinstate something like the Fairness Doctrine of the airwaves.  It doesn’t have to be the old one.  But something!  

My reason is deadly serious and has nothing to do with party politics. Today, you can drive across many parts of the country -- and it is no coincidence that these sections are “red” -- without hearing any breadth of opinion, news, fact or commentary.  Radio, in these regions, feautures only the most bile-drenched and horrific hate fests.

We need to remember what happened in the years that led up to the first American Civil War. Before the breakout of hostilities in 1861, there was a similar absolute uniformity of rabble-roused opinion, all across the South, where even a slight effort to widen the debate led to the mob-torching of newspapers and the smashing ot their presses.  (In contrast, there were “copperhead” or Democratic Party newspapers and broadsheets available in most Northern areas.)  Remember, also, that Timothy McVeigh lived immersed in such uniformity.  If we want to end this phase of the Civil War, instead of seeing it burst into conflagration, the best tool is to encourage diversity of input and a spirit of peaceful argument.

Truth & Reconciliation Addendum: How radical might it all get?

Following up on the last two unconventional suggestions, with a little deep perspective.  All this talk about dealing with recent crimes and “truth commissions” has got me thinking about the Big Picture Context -- where all this may fit in the epic of human history.  So let’s take a little time to play thought experiment.

Suppose we discover the worst, to our blinking, unbelieving dismay, is worse than we ever imagined. What if the coming wave of revelations really rocks us back in stunned dismay.

Thomas Jefferson said that each generation must hammer together a new and revolutionary set of methods to use, in vigorously defending freedom.  One reason for this is that technologies and other social factors change, requiring new and innovative solutions.  Also, the “solutions” of a previous generation often get spoiled or suborned by new waves of parasites, who learn how to twist them to their advantage.

Take the way agencies like the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) and the Bell System all started with the intent of overcoming monopolistic abuses, but wound up being “captured” by the industries they were supposed to regulate.  Hence a little known historical fact -- that it was the Democratic Party, particularly under Jimmy Carter, who performed the biggest and most effective deregulations in U.S. history, by breaking up all three of these calcified entities and several others, restoring healthy competition to railroads, trucking, airlines, telecommunications and many other fields.  

(In contrast, GOP-led ‘deregulations’ in S&Ls, banking, securities and mortgage lending all led directly to locust-swarms of loophole-using vampirism. The clear lesson of history: if you want decent de-regulation, that both reduces government meddling and fosters open, honest competition, ask Dems to do it.)

Or witness what happened to the supposedly “progressive” income tax. An innovation that appreciably limited aristocratic power for a while, but now seems fine-tuned to serve the interests of a newer aristocratic clade—one that grew up knowing every twist in the creaky and arcane and outdated law.

Why do I raise this now?  Because we do not yet know how deep the rot goes, how far parasitic tentacles have penetrated, during the last decade.  Suppose Special Prosecutors or a “truth commission” were to reveal something truly pervasive and nasty?  Might our leaders try to hide this information from us, for our own good? (See #16.)  Or, if it’s revealed, might people be so radicalized they demand draconian, even revolutionary measures?

This is the ultimate, illogical foolishness of insatiable/rapacious, top-level parasitism.  Aristocrats who think they are mutant-smart (instead of merely lucky) tend to assume they are immune to history.  That cyclical patterns can never apply to them, or that sheep don’t look up. Or that tumbrels can never again roll through the streets.

Time for a historical factoid. At around the time of the 1775 uprising that sparked the American Revolution, vast sections (up to half) of the colonies of Georgia, New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland were owned by individual families under charters granted by the British crown. The great landlords were mostly royal cronies - personal friends of the king - who never even visited their vast new fiefs. (Such cronyism was cited by Adam Smith as the great destroyer of free markets, rather than socialism, which he considered a much less worrisme threat.)

How did that earlier generation of Founders solve the problem? Certainly seizure of some Tory assets had a great deal to do with the breakup of those grossly unfair, unearned estates -- and such things might happen again, if the People must rise up against a new feudalism. Still, mass confiscation is a bludgeon, at-best unreliable. Often, it only leads to a new class of meddling masters, even worse than those who came before.
 
Fortunately the main rebalancing technique that was used, just after the revolution was far gentler and less socialistic. Across the 1780s and 1790s, many states passed laws against “primogeniture"... the automatic inheritance of all real property and titles by the eldest son.  

That was it.  Simple.  But it sufficed.

Recall that primogeniture had been a strong tradition, that let aristocratic wealth and power remain concentrated in a few families.  Hence, for a generation, American society (through consensus political action) stepped in to severely limit a landowner's right to decide which of his children would receive what. Instead, for a while, the law demanded equal distribution among all offspring.

It sounds meddlesome and anathema to libertarian principles. Yet, without such innovations, America would have started as a true feudal-oligarchy. But thanks to anti-primogeniture laws, within two generations all the remaining giant estates had broken down to fair economic units, without much actual confiscation, by simple division of inheritance among large families.

The result: a win-win situation. Profit motive was retained and wealth continued to be a draw for innovators, yet aristocracy was forestalled. Moreover, having done its job, the solution was then allowed to wither away! Today, by phrasing a will correctly, a man or woman can bequeath to whichever child he or she likes best.

Why do I raise this now?  Making this posting so long that hardly anybody will have reached this point anyway?

Because we were blessed, since the era of George Marshall, with an era that featured the flattest social structure in human history, a period without major class conflict, dominated by a highly mobile and empowered middle class.  One in which by far a majority of American millionaires were “self-made” through having delivered competitive goods or services or innovations. A time when billionaires left far more to their foundations than to hyper-privileged offspring.  

But we need to prepare against the very real possibility that we’re re-entering a more “normal” period of history.  One riven by steep cliffs of disparity of and inherited privilege -- tendencies that appear to be rooted in human nature and our genes. The very same trends that ruined free markets and democracy in hundreds of other nations and eras. Precisely the trends that the Enlightenment was invented to resist.

 This could be our generation’s time of testing.  

Just suppose that it is so, then we have a duty.  We must emulate our pragmatic reformer ancestors and avoid the excesses seen in France, Germany, Russia and China and so many other places, where anti-artistocracy uprisings went too fgar.  Where they radicalized and then turned monstrous, in their own right. Resisting the tempting allure of class hatred and simplistic ideology, we should recall that nothing good ever came of the hoary and stupid and utterly destructive/insane so-called “left-right political axis.” It has nothing to tell us. Toss it out! (After all, isn’t it... French?)

No. If we find our nation slipping into an age-old human failure mode -- if some fraction of the monied elites... if disloyal capitalists and kleptocratic thieves... are doing the same-old, tiresomely predictable human thing that over-privileged fools have done in most eras -- trying to turn their advantages permanent, into something like feudalism -- that doesn’t automatically make the answer socialism!  

Indeed, I doubt very many Democrats -- and certainly not the pragmatists currently running the party -- lean that way, even slightly.  After all, Adam Smith would be a Democrat, today.

No, if we do find ourselves in such a crisis, forced to reconsider the fate of class and nation on a basic level, well, there are many details of capitalism that might be revised. But we are Americans. No one ever benefited more from the positive side of markets  We can and must do as our ancestors did, when they faced similar problems.  Fine-tuning in ways punish the wicked and prevent feudalism while still incentivizing the creative and dynamically inventive!  Ways that serve to stimulate new and brighter and better and more competitive/creative markets.  

We need to save and care for the baby, even if the bathwater stinks.

Every generation of Americans has had to strike the balance in new ways.  We need to gird ourselves with courage, imagination, goodwill, pragmatism, dedication and plenty of good old common sense.

Suggestion 16: More Truth and Reconciliation - Will President Obama soft pedal bringing some crooks to justice?

Last time, we talked about the need to bring light to the festering skullduggeries that were rife, during the last eight years -- either through official malfeasance or private turpitude that was fostered and enabled by a general atmostmere of lawlessness. Many people are frothing for a time of comeuppance. For a fierce and ferociously determined version of this drive, see -- Justice after Bush:Prosecuting an outlaw administration, by Scott Horton, in Harpers.  Nice to see folks out there who make me seem mild and moderate. forgiving.

Of course, much of the tone will be set by President Barack Obama.  I have no private window to the President-Elect’s inner thoughts.  Having discussed, last time, the curing benefits of light, let me admit that he might choose a different tack -- to quash some scandalous revelations about Bush era travesties.

One can picture the lowest of reasons -- in order to gain leverage with many of the top players in the New Aristocracy.  Yes, BHO seems to have the smallest list of IOUs of anyone ever elected to the presidency.  Still, he’s human and that means keeping a corner of our minds skeptical.

Or, perhaps, some members of his circle have already been suborned, either by direct corruption or by the kind of blackmail trap that I caution against in another place.  (If I could grab the lapel of every single young idealist, now heading for Washington, and force them to read one thing, it would be this desperately urgent warning!)

Or else -- more likely -- Barack Obama may go to the opposite extreme, and justify downplaying the full extent of recent crimes, with the highminded purpose expressed by Frederick March, when he played President Lyman in Seven Days in May... preferring that the American people never learn how terribly they were betrayed, in order to maintain the beneficial illusion that we truly are a blessed nation, somehow above the dismal and fetid cesspools of corruption that spoiled Rome and so many other empires.  


(Part of a 12/08 series of “unusual suggestions for America and the Obama Administration.)”
 

Indeed, we already have some evidence that this kind of thinking is at work.  Certainly much more went on than the public ever knew, a couple of years ago, when a large number of generals and admirals must have staged some kind of work action or warning that forced George Bush to replace Donald Rumsfeld with Robert Gates, as Secretary of Defense, prying immature fingers off the tiller of national survival.  

Anybody else -- any other group -- would have blabbed or bragged afterward, but not the flag officers.  Their subsequent stony silence over what happened may represent their loyal effort to preserve a sacred image... that of total and perpetual subservience to civilian authority.  A supremely honorable, if frustratingly mysterious event, for which (if it really happened) we owe the officer corps, a lot.  (See#9)

President Obama may decide to not to pursue Bush-era dirt, for some reason like that.  And, if so, I suppose I can understand...

...but no.  I am author of The Transparent Society. So which side of all of this do you expect me to come down on, in the end? 

Judge Louis Brandeis said that “light is the best disinfectant.”  It is also the one great advantage of an open society.   People find it all too easy to come up with rationalizations not to step under the glare.  It is a trap of human nature, and even decent leaders are tempted by secrecy. But there comes a point when sunshine becomes our only hope

Steady progress toward light is what makes us healthier, when all other forms of government shrivel under the naked sun.

Suggestion 15: “Truth and Reconciliation?”

It’s time to explore one of many political minefields that lie in front of President Barack Obama, and some of the hardest tradeoffs he must face.

Yes, American national governance may finally be back in the hands of grownups, who (by all appearances, so far) consider power something to be used in a pragmatic search for the common good, rather than as an ultimate goal, in itself. Yet, Mr. Obama and the Democrats cannot ignore some facts of life:

1) Amid an atmosphere of rancorous culture war, we cannot expect the core rulers of the GOP to negotiate in good faith, as a loyal opposition. They can read the election results and demographic trends -- e.g. the surge in young and latino and other minority voters, who seem poised to give strong generational loyalty to the Democratic Party.  There is also a rising education effect -- the higher the fraction of Americans who get a college degree and beyond, the more devastating things look for a party that deliberately paints itself as biliously anti intellectual.  

Given also that the Republican “big tent coalition” is in danger of shredding under the strain of internal contradictions (e.g. libertarians vs bedroom police, budget balancers vs supply-side wastrels, and freemarketers vs kleptocrats) the party would seem to have only one hope -- a catastrophic failure of the Obama Presidency.  


(Part of a 12/08 series of “unusual suggestions for America and the Obama Administration.”)
 

It is either that or try to revitalize conservatism, back into a constructive force in American life -- a strenuous and painful task.  One that I fervently believe possible! (See elsewhere my article about “The Miracle of 1947”.)   Rather than dangerously leaving all asseriveness in democratic hands, a rejuvenated “adult conservatism” could have a great deal to contribute to our national negotiations.  Still, who would be so naive as to bet thatRupert Murdoch won’t order his boys at Fox to go for the Obama Failure Option -- even if America suffers, as a result?

2) President Obama could not have hoped for a better “before” picture to enter office with. Despite contortions floated by Coulter and Limbaugh, it’s clear that blame for our current mess will fall on the Bush era and the GOP’s swing down Loony Lane.  Indeed, the public may give Obama extra time to dig us out of this hole, perhaps avoiding the usual electoral setback for the presidential party, in 2010.  Hence,almost any “after” picture ought to look good, by comparison.

Of course, there are wild cards.  For example, how many scandals await public revelation, once eight thousand Bush appointees no longer obstruct the FBI and other civil servants from doing their jobs?  (See suggestions #6&7.)  What if these disclosures come as rapidly as they have in November and December, when we successively learned that CitiBank concealed billions in off-book assets, that Bernard Madoff was sheltered, in his Ponzi scheme, by a complicit SEC, and that federal regulators actively helped IndyMac engage in outrageously illegal, secret practices?  How much of the iceberg is yet to be discovered... and how much more damage to our Titanic?

A lot may depend on what George Bush does with his power to pardon.  Elsewhere I talk about how Democrats ought to do some hurried contingency planning, in case Bush unleashes a “tsunami” of get-out-of-jail-free cards for cronies and potential stool pigeons.  If this happens... and especially if it doesn’t... The Obama Administration and Democrats in Congress face a critical decision:

3) ”Shall we vigorously pursue the truth about the full range of dark activities that went on, under he dark tenure of George W. Bush?  

There are serious concerns to balance.  On the one hand, yanking malfeasance and betrayal-of-trust into the spotlight can have a cleansing effect.

* It would punish the wicked and serve as a warning against anyone ever again so horrifically abusing power -- treating the U.S. people and government as an enemy fiefdom, to be ravished and raided at will.  

* There might also be a chance to recover substantial amounts of restitution... ill gotten gains that rightfully belong to American citizens. Especially if “emergency” contracts awarded during the Iraq War can be proved to be sweetheart deals. (See #12)

* It could help galvanize decent conservatives in their coming effort to purge their movement of the immature (at best) elements that hijacked it, for so many years.  No single event might benefit the United States more.

* And, of course, proof of systematic criminality on the part of Bush backers could help reinforce the Democrats’ image as the cleaner, preferable party.

But there is also danger in that very advantage. One of Barack Obama’s chief goals -- and a top priority for anyone who genuinely loves America -- must be to end Culture War and return our nation to its tradition of practical negotiation among citizens and groups, bridging our ideological gulfs with genuine goodwill.   In effect, emulating Abraham Lincoln and -- with malice toward none -- ending phase three of America’s Civil War.

This great project of national healing could be made more difficult, if “red” America perceives wave after wave of Republicans plunged into indictment or prison -- whether or not there is copious proof against them.  Oh, but the irony!  Especially since a real witch hunt, extending across fourteen years, costing upwards toward a billion dollars, diverting public resources and involving Vesuvius-spews of bile from talk-radio hosts across the land, never resulted in a single Clinton era official ever being imprisoned or even indicted for actual crimes having to do with malfeasance in the performance of their official duties.  Not one, ever.

 To a scientist, this would come as close to “disproof by failure to find supporting evidence” as one could get.  (Absence of evidence can be evidence of absence, when the search for evidence was so relentless and thorough.) Indeed, the implication -- galling to all of my Republican friends -- is that the Clintonites were not only the most honest governing clade in US history, but in the history of government on Earth.

(Disagree?  Then come up with another explanation that comes anywhere near as close to satisfying Occam’s Razor!)

Ironic, also -- any flood of revelations about Bush era corruption should unfold as a natural consequence of FBI agents and civil servants no longer being impeded in their normal duties.  Or as a result of attention drawn to pardoned individuals.  Or because whistleblowers will feel safe, at last.  Even so, it would spur howls of an Obama-instigated inquisition.

The crux?  President Obama and the Congressional Democrats should divide any push for investigations aside from both the White House and the Congressional leadership, while ensuring that truth-finding and revelation moves ahead, in ways that strike at least a large majority of Americans as fair and above-board.

One method? Try the independent Inspector General of the United States approach I recommended earlier (see#7).  Or consider the “truth and reconciliation commissions” that have worked overseas e.g. South Africa, with a credibly bipartisan look and feel.  Especially if there are a lot of last-minute Bush pardons.

In fact, some potential pardon recipients may think twice about taking up one of those safety-from-jail cards.  Because, once they have been pardoned-in-advance, they can no longer claim the Fifth Amendment privilege against self incrimination, if subpoenaed to testify, either before Congress or an empaneled truth commission.  Any evasion of full disclosure can be cited as contempt of Congress.  And there will be no possibility at all - having accepted such a pre-pardon -- of appealing to the court of public opinion.

Indeed, I recommended that Congress consider a bill that could hem in (without trying to eliminate) Bush’s pardoning power, by defining any pardon as only applying to actions that the pardonee freely avows, admits and describes in detail.  See elsewhere for details.  This trick -- an ironically appropriate reversal of Bush’s “signing statement” tactic -- could both hew to the Constitution and allow the investigators of wrongdoing to get to the bottom of things.  It might also allow maximum possibilities for civil and financial restitution.

Next time... Why President Obama might instead choose to soft-pedal bringing some crooks to justice.

Suggestion #14: Insure the kids.

These are “unusual suggestions” and everybody else is already talking about health care.  So why would I weigh in?  Three words. Start with kids.

The greatest mistake Hillary Clinton made, way back in 1993 -- the calamitous opening she gave the neocons, who then came roaring into power -- was to try fixing the health mess all at once, in a sweeping act of policy-wonkdom.  It only gave her foes an opening to ridicule the complexity and centralized, federal hubris of her plan.  

Moreover, it ignored some basics of American psychology. Our inherited frontier ethos idolizes a type of individualist self-reliance that -- even when it is mostly illusory -- we often cling to at all costs.  One result: an attitude that adults ought to find their own way, sink or swim.  Or, at least, enough Americans felt that way to reject any thought of an overall federal system.


(Part of a 12/08 series of “unusual suggestions for America and the Obama Administration.”)
 

But Americans are a lot less callous, and effectively more socialistic, when it comes to kids!  An overwhelming majority support public education and (more narrowly) backed affirmative action in schools.  Because it is far easier to persuade us that all young people should be helped to the same starting line than it is to suggest fixing the final results of the race.

Let’s chew on that distinction, for a moment.  “All men are created equal.”  That isn’t the same as ensuring equality of outcomes.  (Bill O’Reilly’s relentless false accusation is that liberals aim at leveling outcomes -- an out-and-out, bald-faced lie that is supremely laughable, especially since a capitalism and competitive markets always do better under Democrats.)

Nevertheless,  “All men are created equal” does suggest that... well... no child should be crippled before the starting gun is fired.

Face it.  If Hillary in 1993 had said: “Let’s just concentrate now on taking care of all the kids,” she would have won, easily.  Newt never would have had his killer issue.  And by now, after 14 years, the Child Health Care system would have had enough kinks ironed out and would be covering the elderly, too.  

And the grownups who were left with private insurance? They would be pushing theit policy companies against a wall, demanding they improve or face their bitter end.

Key point:  President Obama has plenty on his plate already and very little spending money.  Yet, people expect something to be done about health care.  Hence, I suggest that he at least consider this option of starting with the kids.

This approach has several advantages:

1) It can be done swiftly.  No complicated insurance company illusions.  Simply go to Canadian-style single payer just for those under 18.  Perhaps bill all parents on their income tax for a basic, FICA-like premium.  We’ll all love it, especially if the cost is lower than the kid-premiums in our present policies.

2) Conservatives wouldn’t dare say no.  They’ll scream about “slippery slopes.”  But the American psyche would be on Obama’s side this time.  So would a hundred million worried parents.

3)  It will terrify the insurance companies into cooperating on some next step.

4)  All kids would get uniform preventive care, at relatively low cost, attacking the crisis at its most basic level. Moreover, there would not be an issue of European style age-based care rationing, since children get maximum care, no matter what.  That quagmire can be put off for a while.

All right, that’s my unusual suggestion about health care.  I don’t expect either side to like it at all!

But that’s what I do.

Suggestion 13: Restore independent advisory agencies for science, technology and other areas of skilled analysis

(Part of a 12/08 series of “unusual suggestions for America and the Obama Administration.”)
 
(Note! I am posting sometimes two a day, in oder to clear these away before new years!)

I’m proud to have lent some modest help to the ScienceDebate2008
 effort, which got both the Barack Obama and John McCain campaigns to answer questions on science and technology policy.  Before making my own science-related recommendations, let me clip a recent statement from the folks at Science Debate 2008:

We want to congratulate President-elect Obama on continuing to assemble an outstanding science team, starting with Nobel Laureate and experienced scientific administrator Steven Chu as Energy Secretary. Two more outstanding appointments are:

a.  John Holdren as President Obama's Science Advisor.  John has an excellent knowledge of science policy, and a deep understanding of how the public needs the government to engage on science policy issues.  He is a recent past president of the AAAS and an early and ardent Science Debate 2008 supporter.

b. Jane Lubchenco, we're told, will head up President Obama's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Admninistration (NOAA).  She is an outstanding choice with a deep background in marine biology.  Jane is also a past AAAS president, and also an early supporter of Science Debate 2008.


What other evidence is there, that we may have reversed directions veering away from the know-nothing cliff? During the recent election campaign, Barack Obama received endorsement from 61 of the country’s Nobel laureates in physics, medicine and chemistry — scientific heavyweights who used the occasion to both call for a scientific renewal in America and critique the state of American science at the end of the Bush era.
    
Nothing could better indicate the turn in our national fortunes than to see science no longer dismissed as a realm of pointy-headed boffins, but viewed as part and parcel of our nation’s future.  Now, let me go farther with some added proposals:

1)  Rebuild OTA and other science advisory agencies in Congress

Yes, we look back at Newt Gingrich as having been mild and reasonable - ahem, well, relatively - compared to the horrific troglodytes who followed.  Still, among the truly loathsome crimes that occurred on his watch was the dismantling -- with malice and absolutely open-eyes toward the likely disastrous consequences -- of the in-house scientific and technical advisory apparatus that used to help senators and representatives base their deliberations on fact, rather that arm-waving dogma.  One of the greatest disappointments of the 2006 Congress that elevated Nancy Pelosi as Speaker, was its timidity about reversing this crime against the Republic.

The idea of bringing back the Office of  (Science and) Technology Assessment has never been dormant. In the 13 years since the OTA closed, Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) and Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) have championed several attempts to reopen its doors. Other efforts are mounting. Yet, as noted science journalist Chris Mooney wrote in a Science Progress column earlier this year, “the quest to restore dedicated science advice for Congress through a reborn Office of Technology Assessment has proven more difficult than one might have supposed.”

This situation must be rectified, as soon as possible.  Moreover, steps should be taken -- perhaps backed up by an Inspector General of the United States (see #7) -- to ensure that in future, technical reports may not be rewritten by politicians, changing their meaning at the last minute.  (See also my remarks about the Civil Service -- and rooting out the “burrowers” who started as fanatical Bush political appointees and wrangled civil service slots as permanent endowments from which to keep spreading idiocy.)


2) Try to get more scientific-minded people into high office, especially Congress.  

Advisors are one thing.  It will be quite another thing for some of the worst, troglodyte Congresscritters to know that several of their congressional peers sitting nearby know -- and can rise to point out -- how foolish they sound.  In other words, why should there not be a few Congressfolk who actually know something about the world and how it works?

Let’s reduce this to fundamentals - is there any inherent reason why our policy-making legislative and executive apparatus should be dominated almost entirely by lawyers?  That is almost as unwise as it was to fill upper management in commerce and industry with solely MBA business majors, who never built a product or delivered a single palpable service.

Specifically, the governors who are appointing replacements for Senators jave resigned in order to enter the Obama Administration should be encouraged to go outside the political caste and go directly to the kinds of people who are so sorely lacking in Congress.  Instead of scions of famous political dynasties, why not prove you really are “above politics” by appointing somebody prestigious and brilliant from a field the public actually respects?  A couple of politically savvy scientist-senators might change the entire tenor of deliberation, on the floor of that august body.

Well. Naive hope springs, eternal.

3) Yes, re-emphasize science and technology education, the way we did after Sputnik.  But go farther!  Let’s make this renewed emphasis sharp enough for even the obstinate to notice.

Investment maven David A. Rosenberg recently commented: “We have 1.2 million unemployed construction workers. We have 123,000 unemployed architects and engineers. We have 83,000 unemployed machinery workers. We have 145,000 unemployed transportation-related workers. So that brings us to barely more than 1.5 million of a labor pool the government can tap into for all the new building activity. But the bulk of the joblessness is in financials (up to half a million), retail/wholesale (1.2 million), leisure/hospitality (1.3 million) and health/education (1.2 million). And if investment bankers, shopkeepers, bell captains and medical chart technicians have anything in common it is that they don't have much experience in shovel-ready activities.”

To which I must reply -- so what?  Barack Obama talks about how we must return to being a technologically adept and innovative society.  But all the scholarships and propaganda in the world will not do as much to change minds about that as the sight of thousands of MBAs and business school graduates -- who drove our nation into the ground while preening and posing as geniuses and grabbing loot hand-over fist -- frantically learning to do something that is actually useful, making a product or delivering a service. Or else honorably driving bulldozers, developing sun tans and new muscles, helping to build infrastructure that will make America strong again.

Watch.  Just watch how quickly some of those “financial geniuses” discover the value of practical knowledge, or math, or facts, or any of the other things that boffins and wage slaves -- both the scientists and the practical workers -- knew all along.  That money serves us all best when it plays the role of helper, and not tyrant.

4) Get grassroots science advisory systems going in every community.

Again, the theme of citizen-level resilience that I have raised elsewhere.  There are so many ways to do this.  For example, get inexpensive chemical sensors into public hands -- even into some cell phones  -- and watch how quickly they pour data both into public agency databases and ad hoc citizen networks.  Communities will be able to monitor their own waste streams, or zero in to help everyone spot and fix energy hemorrhages.  There are a million other ideas, awaiting only the right environment of can-do encouragement.

Yes, we need federal action.  But I am sure President Obama will grasp what George Bush never could -- even though it is supposedly” conservative” wisdom -- that the best solutions are often local ones.

Try a “crackpot idea” or two...

All right, this one really belongs in Suggestion #19: “Crackpot Ideas.”  But thematically it has a home here.  I suggest the creation of a Shadow Congress that will be an outer, advisory commission, consisting of one eminent scientist or other professional, appointed by each member of Congress. Ideally, these 535 luminaries (serving pro-bono) would be the “best” technically savvy people in each congress-person’s district, who is also basically compatible with his or her viewpoint.

Each delegate would receive all congressional technical reports and have the right to post, online, their own appraisals and discussions, with the aim of thrashing out matters of FACT... just as the Senators and representatives are charged with deliberating matters of POLICY.  At minimum, the resulting online deliberations should be interesting and involve a higher level of scientific discourse than those in Congress itself. But advantages go further.

1) This could staunch propaganda about the main Congressional advisory panels being biased, since the shadow commission would keep a wary eye.

2) If this outer commission reaches consensus to accept (or revise) a particular proposal, then it would provide political cover for the Senator or Congressperson to do the same.  A valuable escape clause for any representative worried about offending the fanatics back home.

3) And, yes, this body would bridge the world of science and politics, because many members would be appointed by representatives who have their own burning agendas.   So?  This commission will put the congressional fanatics into a terrible bind. If they choose somebody eminent, with genuine credentials and peer respect, they risk getting unwelcome news from their own appointee. If they pick a “scientist” of the flaky, fifth tier -- based on some dogma-driven agenda like climate change denial or creationism -- then the appointment will be open for glaring scrutiny... and politically-damaging hilarity.   

In what way would this not be a win-win for the pro-science and pro-future majority in the new Congress?


6) Above all, speak up often about the future...

...about how it will be different.  It cannot help but be.  But Americans have always done best when we dealt with change in a way that no other people did -- with a spirit of excitement and confidence and hope.

After all.  This year, change is exactly what we asked for.dvantages go further.

Suggestion 12: Investigate wartime contracts that were allocated under “emergency” over-rides to bypass competitive bidding rules.

All right, this one is sure to sound even more boring than talking about just in-time industrial practices!  But it is an important way that the Obama Administration might recoup many billions of dollars.  It would also be an ideal topic for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. (See below)

Earlier, I spoke of how, under normal conditions, the federal government is supposed to offer contracts in ways that maximize opportunities for competition among a wide range of manufacturers or service providers.  Moreover, another goal is to ensure that the field is left with at least several players who can bid for future contracts.  These policies aim at preventing crony-favoritism and spurring creative efficiency.  It is also in keeping with fundamental premise of capitalism.   That competition is the best way to avoid corruption and to get the most out of every tax dollar.

But these same rules allow a president to make exceptions for cases of “national emergency.” As we’ve already mentioned several times, exceptional “emergency” bypasses during the last eight years have amounted to tens of billions, all the way to hundreds of billions of dollars.  


Part of a 12/08 series of “unusual suggestions for America and the Obama Administration.”
 

Of course, some of these executive decisions were legitimate, under a perceived dire threat after the 9/11 attacks, or when our troops needed rapid deliveries of protective vests and up-armored vehicles, to safeguard them from new types of urban warfare.  

In other cases - e.g. huge field-services contracts to support semi permanent bases in Iraq - were granted directly to Bush-Cheney friends and business partners.  Vice President Dick Cheney’s old firm, Halliburton, benefited so prodigiously that it recently moved its corporate headquarters to Dubai.

However they were first justified, these arrangements should have been converted to normal competitive bidding after the first year or so. Extending “emergency” contracting for six or seven years, far beyond any rational need, created an aroma of cronyism and waste that - at minimum - should be subjected to close scrutiny.

Note to the Obama Administration - watch out for this failure mode, when awarding “emergency recovery” contracts in the coming economic stimulus programs!  When the government offers to pay for grand infrastructure projects, in order to get unemployed men and women working, there is a serious danger  of (1) rushing to accept uncompetitive bids, and (2) having urgency contracts extend far into the future, when the terms won’t seem to be such a good deal, anymore.

One idea is to limit the hurry-contracts to just one year, in order to hire workers and get them started at tasks that don’t need extensive planning (or implementing already existing plans).  It should be required that the one-year contractor cooperate thereupon fully with all possible competitors, eliminating any advantage when it comes to the followup work. (One method: insist that the government own the work site and all equipment bought during the hurry-year, and that employee contracts be easily transferable.  In that case, the first-year contractor would have little long term advantage.)


Is there a general way to ensure that "emergency" clauses are never again abused as a way to reap outrageous profit under some trumped-up pretext? Well, By the very logic of the word "crisis," any company that seeks such a contract ought to be patriotic! Hence, they should be proud to accept terms severely limiting war-time profit -- the way big corporations did during World War II -- to a maximum of 5%, with no bonuses and with executives receiving no more than 10x the lowest paid employee. Not only is this patriotic, but it would ensure there is no lucrative incentive to bend the definition of "emergency" for improper purposes.

But lets get back to the wartime “emergency” contracts set up under the Bush Administration.  However legally binding these deals might appear, on the surface, there ought to be plenty of ways to apply leverage.

These companies might be pressed into renegotiation, rebidding, cancellation and even fee-recovery, if this practice of abusing emergency overrides can be shown to have a stench of collusion.  The possibility of recovering tens of billions of dollars in graft or overcharges should not be overlooked.  Moreover, offers of safety and rewards for whistleblowers may put the US government in an unfamiliar position of actually holding the high cards.

For a change.

What our Eyes and souls can see: reflections on Christmas at the Moon

We'll take a pause, in honor of the holiday, to offer something a little more poetical -- commemorating one of humanity's great moments, th Christmas Day sojourn of Apollo 8 in orbit around the moon, in 1968. The following is a book review I wrote -- it appears in my new collection of nonfiction insights and essays Through Stranger Eyes.

------
Art, Technology and Modernity

RIVER OF SHADOWS: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, by Rebecca Solnit. Reviewed by David Brin

Despite our human bent for defining things, the most-subjective mental realm -- art -- stays elusive. Still, for the sake of discussion, suppose we call effective visual art any human-created work that changes people who view it, challenging perceptions or assumptions, transforming hearts and minds nonverbally.

A painting, photo or sculpture may tug empathy, revulsion, longing, regret, determination or re-evaluation, without ever resorting to argument or verbal suasion. By this way of reckoning, the 20th century featured two outstandingly potent works of effective visual art -- images that inarguably penetrated millions through their eyes and optic nerves, transforming many of us forever.

The first of these --the terrifying image of the atom bomb -- warned that it was time to put down our little-boy romantic attachment to glorious war. Faced with an awesome new power to destroy nearly everything, defense became the business of serious adults. Even among soldiers, combat is generally seen as evidence of failure - an urgent, risky measure arising out of inadequate diplomacy, preparation or deterrence. True, this transition remains incomplete, yet it seems remarkable in contrast to attitudes widely held just a few generations back. Moreover, the lesson came largely unspoken. Words were unneeded. For multitudes, that awful mushroom cloud sufficed.

The second great image of the Twentieth Century arrived as coda to the most difficult year many of us can remember - 1968 - one that brought Americans to the brink of exhaustion and despair. Week after week of assassinations, riots, warfare, brutality, brinkmanship and numbing loss culminated with a final token -- like a gleam of hope shining at the bottom of Pandora’s Box -- when Apollo 8 astronauts brought home that first perfect image of Planet Earth, rising over the airless Moon. A floating blue marble in space. That picture moved all but the most cynical hearts, helped spur environmentalism and changed forever our outlook toward this fragile oasis-world.

These images -- one of them searing us with dread, the other with resolution -- are seldom called “art.” They did not flow from the stereotypical studio of some romantic genius, solitary and contemptuously solipsistic. Rather, they came about as side effects from vast technological undertakings. The same agents -- physicists and engineers -- who were producing pell mell progress, also delivered the requisite sermon: use these powers well.

Other influential images surely rank just below those two. They range from snapshots of faraway planets to documentary footage of concentration camps. From war’s brutality to moments of sublime poignancy. The greatest untold story of art -- a story that romantics strive to repress -- is how much of it seems to arise out of nerdy inventiveness, or gritty journalism, or ingenuous amateurism, or even (shudder) team efforts. Images that impress, persuade and become part of our ongoing conversation about how to save the world.

Moreover, the medium that decisively empowered this role for art was itself a technological breakthrough -- photography.

In RIVER OF SHADOWS: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, author Rebecca Solnit documents a crucial phase of photography’s transformation from a static adjunct of portraiture to something far more dynamic, cogent and liberating. In Muybridge -- who famously captured the multiple movements of a running horse -- she found an icon for everything disreputable and admirable about a time of rapid change. Inventor, explorer, businessman, huckster, murderer, photo-journalist and innovator, Muybridge was among the most colorful figures of mid-19th Century San Francisco, possibly the most colorful place humans ever lived. As a passionate photographer, Muybridge helped propel his era and his art.

An art in rapid transition. Until fast emulsions became available, exposure times were agonizingly long. People took on stiff poses. Any riffle of wind would make nature seem a-blur. Most outdoor shots were taken mid-day, when direct sunshine seems to flatten everything -- till Muybridge captured clouds and waterfalls in a fraction of a heartbeat. Natural wonders like Yosemite burst into three dimensions, caught in slanting dawn light.

But a horse named Occident gave Muybridge his biggest challenge and success. Devising dozens of new techniques, he arranged for a series of cameras to trip in rapid sequence, reproducing motion in a series of still images. “Photography arose out of the desire to fix the two-dimensional image that the camera obscura created from the visible world,” Solnit writes. From the 1830s through the 1860s, artisans such as Daguerre and Brady pioneered techniques for capturing a sliced moment, preserving memory of a particular person or place, in a narrow slice of time. But Muybridge’s horse broke out of that slice. Occident moved. Each frame had past, a future, and thus movement. Even ambition.

Meanwhile, time itself was under assault. Railroads and industry demanded both precision and repeatability. Workers who formerly knew only day, night, mealtimes and seasons now had to regulate their rhythms in tempo with uncompromising clocks, consoling themselves with the cornucopia of goods that industry provided. Not everyone liked this bargain, as Solnit writes -- “Nathaniel Hawthorne’s grimly comic short story of 1846, ‘the Celestial Railroad,’ sent a group of pilgrims by rail across the landscape of the great spiritual allegory The Pilgrim’s progress. The harsh terrain that John Bunyan’s Pilgrim had trod on foot sped by pleasantly, but the train ended up in hell rather than paradise. The old world, Hawthorne seems to argue, was arduous, but it knew where it was going.”

In following Muybridge’s own pilgrimage west, Solnit describes a San Francisco that surely seemed hell-bent -- or at least blithely accepting of tumult. A place without so-called eternal verities, where men -- and many dynamic women -- felt free to re-invent themselves at will, as Muybridge repeatedly changed his own name. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner, portrayed the frontier as the fundamental wellspring of American development and character, and it was here that the spirit of unrestrained opportunity reached its zenith, as mere shopkeepers like Leland Stanford mixed chicanery with pioneering acumen, launching themselves into the Olympic stratosphere of nouveau wealth and self-made power. As patron to Muybridge’s time-and-motion studies, Stanford would contribute not only to the study of horses, but to the advance of rapid photography and all that ensued.

Solnit portrays technical innovations, like faster photographic emulsions and ingenious quick-shutters, with the drama of a gold strike or a lynching -- and the latter almost did happen to Muybridge one day, shortly after he gunned down his wife’s lover in one of the most infamous scandals of the old west. Set free by a jury on grounds of “defending honor”, Muybridge went on to perform his most famous experiments, capturing details in the motion of horses, runners, dancers and even birds. While pioneering the art of rapidly sequenced images, he met Thomas Edison and provided many key elements that led to motion pictures, cinema and later video.

“This is the paradox of Muybridge’s work. He was using his state-of-the-art equipment to feed that ravenous appetite for place, for time, for bodies. He had turned his back on the slow world of his grandfather’s barges and pigeons to embrace the new railroad and photographic technology, and with electricity and chemistry he made the latter faster than ever.” And yet -- “His inventive technology was depicting ... bodies that seemed ever more alienated by technological change.”

Nowhere is this more evident than in Muybridge’s journalistic pictures of the Modoc War, documenting one of the most eerie conflicts between the United States and a native people. Viewing them now, we see a core truth. Ours is not the first era to be riven by change. Technology can disrupt. It eases some old pains while amplifying others. And if that were the whole story, romantics might be right to call the cost too high.

But technology is also a mother of art. New kinds of art that shine light into old shadows, art that nags the conscience, that shows the cost. And therein lies our hope. As we gain power over space and time and even life itself, art reminds us. Use these powers well.

Suggestion #11: Control the borders

Part of a series of “unusual suggestions for America and the Obama Administration.”

If I seemed to lean a little “left” in some of my earlier missives criticizing a worldwide drift toward crony-aristocratism, and then to the right in supporting a repair of the U.S. military, and then left again by pushing the vital importance of citizen-level resilience... then prepare for another of my patented sudden veers!  Because I believe the Obama Administration can, should... and will... act swiftly to regain control over the borders of the United States.  In fact, I will lay heavy odds that he does it very soon.

This may sound surprising, but it shouldn’t, if you had been paying attention to one of the great ironies of the last 16 years -- one that lay in plain sight, largely unnoticed.

As one of his first acts, upon entering office, Bill Clinton doubled the number of field agents in the Border Patrol.  And one of George W. Bush’s first endeavors was to savagely undercut that service.

It sounds counter-intuitive, of course, and neither political party ever spoke up about it much.  But the reasons are simple.  Democrats like legal immigration, which results in lots of new voters and new union workers, while illegals drain resources, get embroiled (against their will) into crime, and prevent domestic programs from achieving full effectiveness.  On the other hand, Republicans -- well, not your neighbors, but some influential people near the top of the party -- like access to pools of cheap, undocumented labor that won’t talk back.  Only when border state citizens began getting riled did the GOP start talking tough about immigration.  And talk, for the most part, is all they ever did.

I fully expect the same political factors to apply under Barack Obama.  Watch for a serious attempt to increase cross-border trade and legal human contacts, but to crack down on illegal crossers and smuggling.  This change of emphasis also happens to be a good idea for enhancing homeland security.  And those who are offended by this illustrate that “liberal” and “leftist” really are different terms that apply to different sets of political passions that are only allied most of the time. We must not assume that the former have to always cater to the latter.

What I further expect is a change in the tilt of immigration laws.  There has to be a limit to the chain of “family re-uniting” visas.  It isn’t logical at all to make that the fundamental basis for ingress of new legal residents.  It isn’t even fair in a human sense, since families here can already send home remittances, but what about other people in the old countries?  Don’t they deserve a chance, too?

Let there be no mistake, I am proud of America’s heritage - and present-day status - as the world’s leader (by far) in offering opportunities to hope-filled people from all over the globe.  Diversity is our greatest strength and immigrants often give far more than they take.  Anybody who takes this posting as xenophobic simply doesn’t get it.

Nevertheless, as a nation, we have a right to have immigration be orderly and legal, at a pace that doesn’t overstrain services.  So long as we continue to be generous and prudently open, overall, immigration can even be tuned to benefit America in directly tangible ways.  For example, by restoring somewhat of a merit system, especially when it comes to skilled workers that our industries desperately need.  After all, half a million people is half a million people.  There’s no rule of honor or nature that says we can’t look for some of them to enter as a win-win deal.

America deserves plaudits for being the nation of fresh starts. It is a moral claim that can never be taken away from us.  But we have to use some basis  to choose among those wanting-in, doing it in an orderly and rational way.  One that is both generous and in keeping with our own best interests.

Suggestion #10: Enhance our nation's (and civilization's) overall resilience

First a reminder: see me on “The Universe” Tuesday night, on the History Channel. Also, see my cover story on Salon Magazine (online), about “Is the Web helping us evolve?”

Again - this is part of a December 2008 series of “unusual suggestions for America and the Obama Administration.”


== Boosting resilience should be a top priority ==

Restoring our military reserves should be only the beginning. If we are serious about preparing for dangerous times, more should be done to deepen the supply of Americans who are ready to help, rather than be helpless, in future crises.

 This principle holds fast to a basic, grassroots spirit that was the hallmark of the Obama Campaign -- and to traditions that go all the way back through American history.  It certainly ought to be a basic theme of the new administration. Here are just a few (of many) examples that have critical implications for the nation’s defense and (ultimately) survival:

* Admit that the post-Vietnam professionalization of the U.S. Armed Forces may have gone a bit too far.

Nobody denies that today’s military is ultra high tech and few are arguing for a return of the draft. But all previous generations of Americans were called upon, eventually, to augment the “thin blue line,” with waves of volunteers, and we ignore this tradition at our peril.  

The services could be encouraged to re-engage this spirit.  Serious attention might be given to shortening recruitment and training ramp-up times, in case of urgent need. A semi-trained corps of “under-reserves” might also be created, with as little experience as a three-month summer camp, especially for people who have badly needed, non-combat skill sets.  

(Those who disparage the usefulness of such a “reserve” should consider its psychological value, alone. Never under-rate the effect that raw numbers can have, on the calculations of a potential foe. Note also, a pre-vetted pool of high quality and willing volunteers would be better, by far, than hurriedly trying to ramp up to a draft, in an emergency. Anyway, the “summer camp” option is already on the table, as a way to give millions of young people exposure to many different paths of public service.)

*  Civilians matter, especially on the home front, where first responders can be overwhelmed by sudden disasters.  

Recall that citizens performed every action that proved decisive or effective, on 9/11.  Yet, almost nothing has been subsequently spent on augmenting the abilities of average folk to deal with crises.  For example, today’s modest Citizen Emergency Response Teams (CERT) -- all that is left of Civil Defense -- could be enhanced, preparing millions to be citizen-helpers in an emergency, instead of helpless victims.  No investment might have a bigger payoff, if something terrible ever happens.  And it will.

* Pursue robustness in our communications systems.  

The Internet was originally designed to network messages around areas of devastation, agilely re-routing them anywhere, under any circumstance.  So, why won’t our cell phones work when we need them most, if the nearby cell towers fail in a disaster?  During Hurricane Katrina a quarter of a million people were cut-off, with sophisticated-but-useless radios in their pockets.  

Even worse, almost nothing has been done, since then, to correct a potentially devastating design flaw.

But let’s imagine. What if mobile phones were empowered to simply pass along text messages, from one to another, via peer-to-peer packet switching, all the way out of any affected area? (Until finally reaching an intact cell tower.)  This simple bypass capability could ensure coast-to-coast messaging, even during substantial nationwide havoc.  It would cost little to implement and the cell companies needn’t suffer any loss of revenue.  (Not if their billing departments have any imagination, at all.)  In fact, failure to implement such a simple fix could constitute deliberate sabotage, since its potential benefits, during any disaster, are simply overwhelming.

Lack of time and space requires that I forebear listing.many other possible resilience suggestions, for how we could better prepare for an uncertain future, at a tiny fraction of what we spend at the Department of Homeland Security.  But take my word for it, there are plenty that I’ve offered in briefings for the CIA, Defense Threat Reduction Agency and other groups.  In any event, you may notice a common theme, as several of my other suggestions had to do with enhancing the reserves, or empowering citizens with transparency, or reducing our brittle dependence upon just-in-time industrial practices.

One core lesson emerges from all this.  

We must rediscover a key role of the state as the principal agent of robustness. 

Economic sub-units like corporations can afford to make rosy, pollyanna assumptions, in pursuit of squeezing the last drop of current-day profits, risking only the equity of stockholders. It’s not their job to plan for just-in-case scenarios of major breakdown.

In contrast, national policy should ensure readiness for the inevitable rainy day. 

Suggestion #9: Act swiftly to restore the Army, the Reserves and National Guard.

First: James Fallows, a columnist for The Atlantic whom I have long respected and cited, recently commented on a theme that I’ve oft-reiterated -- that we should shift a bit of our managerial emphasis away from obsessive professionalism and efficiency, back toward equally valuable but long neglected traits like resiliency and local self-reliance.  He mentions the same brittleness trap that I did -- just-in-time industrial practices. Moreover, alerted by a mutual fan, Fallows kindly mentioned my overlapping interest.

Second: keep an eye open for my cover story on Salon Magazine (online) tonight, about “Is the Internet Helping Us Evolve?” 

Oh, and see me Tuesday night on "The Universe" on the History Channel!

Again - this is part of a series of “unusual suggestions for America and the Obama Administration," taking up all of my December 2008 postings.


=== Save the US Army and National Readiness ===

During the election, both parties had reasons of their own to avoid mentioning one of the most scandalous results of the Iraq War -- a dramatic and disturbing plummet in U.S. military readiness.  

The Republicans were, naturally, not going to draw attention to what has happened to the United States Army, which has ceased nearly all war-fighting training or large unit exercises, instead converting nearly all of its battalions into glorified urban swat teams.  When Bill Clinton left office, all of our brigades were rated fully combat ready.  Now, that number is zero -- a stunning and terrifyingly perfect reversal, almost as surprising as the fact that it has gone unmentioned, in the press..

So, why did the democrats refuse to raise such a blatant decline in readiness, during the campaign?  (I’ve been hectoring folks about this for four years.)  Possibly, it never occurred to many liberals, to examine military matters closely enough to notice what’s happened. But I don’t think it applies at the highest levels.  

No, a clue is to be found in the retention of Secretary of Defense Gates.  His continuing in service under Barack Obama screams verification of something I’ve long maintained: that there was a quiet revolt of the US Officer Corps, a couple of years ago.  The forced ouster of Donald Rumsfeld from the Pentagon was only a surface manifestation that the public saw.  In effect, the Bush-Cheney clade had their hands pried off of the tiller of American defense policy, restoring adult supervision where it mattered most.  

A further sign of this can be seen wherever the Navy has risen in influence -- e.g. Adm. Mike Mullen’s elevation to JCS Chairman, or retired Adm. Dennis Blair being appointed National Intelligence Director, or the appointment of former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig to be Gates’s understudy and eventual replacement at Defense.  All of this is indicative to those who pay attention, since the Navy is the one service that was least damaged and that proved most capable of resisting political pressure, across the last eight years.

I predict -- it goes beyond a mere suggestion -- that the Obama Administration will rapidly zoom in on rebuilding the Army, and military readiness in general.  Despite all our economic distractions, the incoming group of adults can see what needs to be done, and urgently.

Now comes the truly pertinent question.  As a young John F. Kennedy wrote in Why England Slept,” the most dangerous time is after your nation has awakened an point -- at the inflection curve -- is when it seems most appropriate to be wary and worried.


=== Even more important: Save the Reserves! ===

This deterioration of U.S. military readiness has an aspect that is even more worrisome. After seven years of attrition, our National Guard and reserve units are in very bad shape.  It is a problem not only of attrition and abuse, but also of design.  

The men and women who signed up to train for a month each summer, and a dozen weekends a year, were always ready to serve either their communities or the nation, in an emergency -- say a natural disaster or sudden armed conflict.  What they never expected was for that word “emergency” to be so abused.  Nor to be torn away from their careers and families for several deployments stretching longer than a year.  (Note: this theme repeats a theme I posed earlier about another long suffering group, the members of the U.S. Civil Service.)

Repairing the damage that’s been done to America’s reserves will take more than time and money.  In order to restore a sense of trust, serious attention should be given to the inherent difference between two kinds of war. 

To use medical terminology, an “acute” crisis is a bona fide emergency, when the nation must call up whatever resources it can, in order to confront a surprise threat.  The events of 9/11 certainly seemed to qualify.  

However, there is no such thing as a legitimate seven-year “surprise”. Over longer time scales, words like “crisis” become crutches, or even excuses for corruption.  When a serious situation shifts from acute to chronic, we have no business using up and draining reserves.  

(Which would be like running up repeated deficits in good times, leaving nothing to spend during economic hardship. And who would do that?)

The key point: if it seems that some long term situation or commitment will require a larger Army, we should go ahead and build it!

This especially applies to all non-emergency wars of national policy, no matter how well-justified they may be. (The medical equivalent is elective surgery.)  Unlike many others, I believe that such wars can be justified -- under a stiff burden of proof.  But they should never again be driven by a trumped-up sense of crisis.

The Obama Administration should make clear that it understands this distinction, even if its predecessors didn’t.  The brave and dedicated men and women of the reserves need to be assured they’ll never again be treated this way.

#8: Micro-Suggestions about the economic crisis

The new Congress will gather on January 6 and immediately set to work in a two-week whirlwind, hoping to get something cogent and useful on President Obama’s desk, for him to sign as soon as the Innauguration festivities are over.  Meanwhile, with a month to go until a change of administrations, the outgoing Congress is working hard with Bush officials to enact interim measures.  

While we can take some pride in this flurry of urgent action, there are also causes for concern.

1) Current Secretary of the Treasury Paulson, having blown through the first 350 billion dollars of $700B emergency TARP funding, is now asking the outgoing legislature to release the second lump.  Congress must not do this. Not without a steep price.  

That price should be early installation of Obama’s own tean in offices just down the hall from Paulson at Treasury and at every other economic agency, with informal but decisively effective veto power over all future expenditure of TARP funds.  The reason is simple.  We the People have a right to protection from seeing this treasure trove distributed willy-nilly by -- at best -- self-admitted incompetents.  At worst, by leaders of a clade that seems deeply untrustworthy.

2) A further price.  Demand equity and restitution. Use TARP to buy only items that might offer good returns, when things turn around.

Those who long howled that “government should be run like a business” have no right to complain when the United States takes advantage of an opportunity to buy, low, in order to sell high later on. Whiners who don’t like this are hypocrites .

 Note that the Big Three automakers qualify under this condition, while distressed derivative wagers, held by foolish aristocrats, do not.  

3) Require that beneficiary companies make good faith efforts toward reclaiming unfair and absurd executive compensation.  In fact, all future aided companies that have experienced outrageous executive compensation should be asked to file a lawsuit against those past executives, at least on a pro forma basis, in order to establish a legal basis for discovery processes.

Similar principles should guide the new economic stimulus plan, involving up to $850B that soon-to-be President Obama and Congressional leaders plan to spend, largely on public infrastructure projects.  Among the guiding principles ought to be:

* Spend quickly, so that a maximum number of unemployed get to work... but...

* Spend in ways that also maximize national benefit -- the purpose of concentrating on infrastructure.

* Do not stimulate with tax or other changes that will be hard to rescind, once the crisis is over.  

(Unless this is part of an overall plan, e.g. reducing FICA payroll taxes in exchange for a permanent percentage based fuels tax or a windfall bonus tax.)

* Do not fall for “emergency” scams that favor specific companies, cronies or Congressional districts.  

(This was done by the Bush Group, using 9/11 and Iraq as excuses to sign “emergency” bypasses to contracting laws, favoring pals to the tune of tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars.  This is, in fact, history’s largest loophole-for-theft, and it’s gon unmentioned in the press.)

* Establish a principle that no region of the country will benefit more than 10% more than the tax-proportion they contribute.  

Yes, Red America will howl, and Obama might have to back down on this one.  But even broaching it would be a great way to make a political point:-- to drill into peoples’ minds how hypocritical it has been to bash the blue zones, while they have been carrying more than their fair share of the burden.  Ironically, this could help ease “culture war” by making clear where Red America’s self interest lies... in toning down the bitterness.

----------

Finally, I feel I really need to reiterate my assertion that any bailout of the Big Three U.S. automakers ought to entail a imaginative compromise deal with the workers.  

Neither side has been either up-front, or right, in the tussle over further UAW concessions.  The Unions must realize that their present deal is archaic, brittle and contributing to the collapse of a U.S. motor industry.  On the other hand, those troglodyte Southern senators who demanded concessions simply in the form of across the board pay and benefits cuts are at-best waging civil war on behalf of the South and Toyota and the horrifically stupid managerial caste that ran Detroit into the ground.

Common sense demands that the workers accept that a third or more of their rigid wages and benefits should change its form... but not necessarily go away!  It is time for labor and pensioners to accept the blatantly obvious, that their enforceable obligations make them the top creditors of Ford, GM and Chrysler.  

For once George W. Bush said something right. Treat this as a bankruptcy!  With present shareholders and management dropping to the bottom of priority, that would leave the workers and pensioners - effectively - the owners of the Big Three. 

Live with it.  Yes, both labor and management have struggled desperately, for decades, to avoid facing this inevitable day.  But the era employee ownership has arrived. 

 So?  Turn lemons into lemonade.  

Show what you are made of, by turning these companies profitable!  And then pass out those profits to member owners.  That ought to make up for bringing formal, line wages down to competitive levels.  Think about it.  As both workers and owners, UAW folk ought to come out ahead!  That is, if they believe in themselves and in their products and potential.

Suggestion 7: Free The Inspectors General!

Last time, we pondered the importance of the “fourth branch of government” -- the U.S. Civil Service, proposing that the new Obama Administration ought to visibly reach out to the millions of skilled men and women who were so beleaguered, thwarted and bullied during the Bush years.  A series of concrete steps were offered, and I concluded by recommending establishment of a new and important post, the office of Inspector General of the United States... or IGUS.  Now, I’d like to go into that notion, in some detail.

Far from creating another vast new bureaucracy, this proposal would mostly utilize  payroll slots that already exist, today.  Every major department or agency has an internal Inspector General (IG), charged with examining operations and issuing warnings -- when it comes to minor infractions -- or else stepping in more vigorously, when things get out of hand.

The problem? Nearly all of these inspectors owe their jobs and paychecks to the very same secretaries and directors who head the agencies they are charged to scrutinize. Often, they are old pals, ensuring partiality and conflict of interest. In other cases, the IGs are just biding their time, maneuvering toward promotions that have nothing to do with a career in accountability.

Even when an Inspector General does his or her job with devotion and skill, there is no guarantee of being heeded, or even safety from retribution.  Under the Bush Administration, vigorous examiners were actively intimidated, or stripped of resources to do their jobs. Or put into a cloud of ambiguity. It is a dismal record and one that demonstrates the desperate need for reform.


Accountability Systematically Stymied

Picking from a myriad examples, take the recently revealed story of investigators at the Securities and Exchange Commission.  According to a December 2008 report in the New York Times -- “The latest black eye for the commission came when it was disclosed that inspectors and agency lawyers had missed a series of warning signs at Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities. If it had checked out the warnings, the commission might well have discovered years ago that the firm was concealing its losses by using billions of dollars from some investors to pay others. The firm was the subject of several inquiries over the years, including one last year that was closed by the agency's New York office after it had received a referral of potentially significant problems from the Boston office.

“Similarly, the commission's chairman, Christopher Cox, assured investors nine months ago that all was well at Bear Stearns, which collapsed three days later.  Between those two events, David Kotz, the commission's new inspector general, has documented several major botched investigations. He has told lawmakers of one case in which the commission's enforcement chief improperly tipped off a private lawyer about an insider-trading inquiry.”

“...The enforcement division has been hamstrung by budget cuts and changes adopted by the SEC that make it harder to impose penalties on corporations, even when there has been egregious wrongdoing, Arthur Levitt Jr., the SEC chairman from 1993 to 2001, told the U.S. Congress in October. The result has been "a demoralizing of the enforcement staff," Levitt said.

Yes, we hope to soon be entering a new era.  Nevertheless, even if the Obama Administration returns to a policy of good and diligent government, will it be doing the nation a service by ignoring the systemic and systematic flaws that enabled the Bush Cabal to wreak such havoc upon our mechanisms of accountability?  By far the most patriotic and beneficial thing for the new team to do, while they are still in the full flush of their initial idealism, would be to change the system in simple ways that ensure this will never happen again.


Autonomy, dedication and accountability

Wouldn’t it make sense to appoint, train, and pay our inspectors through a channel that is completely separate from each department's political chain of command? Indeed, a system that is detached and safe from pressure by the legislative, executive and judicial branches?

Picture a uniformed service, with its own elite career path like the Coast Guard, or NOAA, or the Public Health Service, charged with protecting the legal and ethical health of government.  Under a relatively simple law, the inspectors and auditors would transfer to serve under the authority of the Inspector General of the United States.

Note: the Public Health Service is led by a real general - the Surgeon General of the United States.  By all accounts, these uniformed agencies are especially well-run.  Their dedicated staff perform with unusual elan, low turnover and punctilious attention to military-style rectitude. It is a tried and true method for instilling higher-than-normal standards of training and conduct.  

IGUS would command a corps of trusted inspectors and observers, some of them with security clearance at the highest level and empowered to go anywhere and to see anything.  Trained to parse carefully the minefield of legal and ethical error, this corps would have to do much more than simply watch for outright legality.  They would also be advisors who best-understand the balance that every institution must strike differently, between short-term confidentiality and long-term transparency.
    
What better way to assure the American people that the government is still theirs, to own and control, even if some matters must remain discreet or secret from the public view?   One might imagine special rules requiring inspectors to stay mum when it comes to legal policy decisions that fall rightly in the political sphere, but giving them a range of options when they uncover violations of basic ethics and/or the law.  For example, an IG could not rebuke executive officials for their closed-door musings, but should speak up, confidentially, when a plan seems likely to break a law.

In recent years, the Executive Branch freely used “emergency” over-rides of many laws, especially those concerning competitive bidding for government contracts, granting hundred of billions in deals to close friends of administration officials, e.g. for reconstruction projects in Iraq.  It turned out that there was no recourse, no way to stop this dodge of the law, even when the “emergency” stretched six or more years. IGUS could offer a way to assure the public that the “E-word” will not be similarly abused in the future, by offering a check to this peremptory power.  One might even picture the Inspectorate as a way to provide basic rights to people who are being held under urgent "special circumstances" -- ensuring that those rare exceptions aren't abused or over-used. And, above all, that all exceptions are temporary.

IGUS could be appointed by a commission consisting of all past presidents and retired justices of the US Supreme Court, plus other nationally respected sages, with advice and consent of Congress.

Politically, this could be a move that has powerful resonance. The very act of establishing such a General Inspectorate would so clearly be neutral, offering no visible long-term advantage to the Democratic Party, that this law would (ironically) likely benefit the Democrats. Indeed how could the GOP dare oppose it?  Also, consider how this would allow fierce investigation of past crimes without sullying the image of a new Administration that wants to be seen as above petty vengeance.

Who needs a special prosecutor when every agency already contains all the elements for full investigation?  

With a simple change in the organizational chart, we might create an ideal force for accountability, a professional service that serves the people and the republic and the cause of honest government.

-------


Addenda: (1) A politically-oriented blog that I often highly recommend is written by my friend, investor Russ Daggatt.  It is well worth a visit, any time.  But his most recent entry is especially cogent, referring to Michael Kinsley’s recent call for an increase in the gasoline tax, compensated by reducing Americans’ payroll(FICA) tax. Oh... and (2) this appears to be my 500th posting.... argh...

Suggestion#6: Repair the U.S. Civil Service

Some of the proposals I’ve been offering may be “unusual” - unspoken elsewhere - simply because they seem... well... boring!  Have you heard anyone else raise the plight of the civil servants, for example?  It sounds like a tedious “process issue.”  And yet, please do bear with me. For there are few matters facing the next administration that could be more important than the skilled and honest performance of our “fourth branch of government.”

By some measures - especially if you include the military Officer Corps - there are at least three million professional public servants in America, most of whom have suffered for eight years under bullying misrule by eight thousand appointees of the Bush Administration... political hacks who filled the top slots in every federal agency, from EPA to the Justice Department, from FDA to NASA to the CIA. All too often, those top appointees seemed to have just one purpose -- making it difficult, even impossible, for the civil servants to do their jobs.  

Of course, it has long been stylish to dismiss “bureaucrats” as faceless drones, or as officious, petty tyrants who stand in the way of free-spirited American enterprise and individualism.  Nor is this a completely misguided reflex!  Suspicion of authority is healthy, and it’s good to keep a libertarian corner of the mind asking - “Is this rule necessary?”  Al Gore’s greatest accomplishment, as Vice President, was to cut both the non-military federal manpower total and government paperwork by substantial amounts, the only time it’s happened since 1950.  

Nevertheless, we citizens co-own a republic of laws that were deliberated by freely elected delegates and passed according to a Constitution we all share.  For better or worse, those laws ought to be honestly and openly and capably enforced -- while we continue arguing over how to further change them.  We have hired, at great expense, a large number of highly trained and skilled professionals to help our nation deal with a myriad problems in this complex world.  We all lose when they are thwarted from giving taxpayers their money’s worth.

Which is what the neocons did, all across the initial part of the Twenty-First Century -- whether motivated by a dogma of hating government or some far more nefarious agenda -- interfering with our FBI agents and prosecutors, with the inspectors who keep our dams and roads safe and our food and toys safe, with scientists investigating climate change and auditors charged with keeping an eye on financial institutions.

Might the latter have spotted some of the disastrous practices that led to our present economic meltdown, and taken action much earlier, if not for active and relentless hindrance from above?  Perhaps we’ll never know.  Still, the matter is an important one.  

Indeed, it can be argued that Barack Obama will accomplish fully half of what America needs, simply by unleashing a couple of million skilled men and women, letting them get back to doing their jobs.  And it can happen without passing a single new law.


Reclaim The Spirit of Government Competence

Still, there is more that ought to be done.  I have several very specific proposals that would be easy to implement.


MY FIRST PROPOSAL is that Obama Transition Team visibly act to promote civil servants into second and third tier positions, just below that of cabinet secretary.  It would do wonders for morale, showing that this important cadre has not been forgotten and that things really have changed.  It would also offer a chance to reward exemplars of courage and foresight -- individuals who stood up to political pressure during the Bush years, who issued prescient warnings, or who exhibited remarkable displays of rectitude.


THERE IS A FLIP SIDE TO THIS.  As they saw change coming, a number of Bush era political appointees performed something called the “Washington Side-Step,” getting themselves hired into the bureaucracy as members of the supposedly nonpartisan -- and legally protected -- civil service.  There are hundreds of these people, by now ensconced in positions for which they would normally never have been qualified.  Ways should be explored to do something about this.

Yes, Barack Obama is entering office determined to keep things cool and calm and grownup.  He will disappoint his most passionate followers by eschewing many opportunities for political vendetta or revenge. This policy is wise, overall.  Nevertheless, as I plan to argue -- here and elsewhere -- President Obama reasonably cannot let predators and toadies get away completely free. Surely, some bright people can be assigned to find imaginative ways to both stay cool and rid the republic of parasites.   

(Just one possibility: pass a law allowing all the civil servants in any agency to vote one percent of their colleagues either up or out -- to be promoted or booted. One percent should not infringe overmuch upon administration prerogatives or upon bureaucratic due process.  Surely that would offer a legal and understandable way for the rank and file of agency personnel to supplement and enhance regular hiring/promotion processes, knowledgeably rewarding the very best and getting rid of the very worst, purely as a matter of consensus wisdom, while keeping politics out of it.)


A THIRD PROPOSAL should be obvious.  Improve whistle-blower protections, so that we will never again see bureaucrats intimidated by a competence-hating administration into biting their lips in silence over violations of the law.


A SIDE NOTE: the shift of the state of Virginia into the Democratic column, during the 2008 election, may have had a great deal to do with anger on the part of members of the U.S. Civil Service toward the Bush Administration, and the GOP in general.  This topic has political ramifications, as well as those having to do with the general national good.


And finally --

MY FIFTH & TOP PROPOSAL may seem a bit strange, at first.  But it is simple and would prevent recurrence of countless travesties. Create the office of Inspector General of the United States...

... or IGUS, who will head a uniformed agency akin to the Coast Guard or the Public Health Service, charged with protecting the legal and ethical health of government.

This one requires some explaining.  Which I’ll do next time.

Suggestion #5: Avoid a crisis caused by "just-in-time"

Those who brought us the Financial Implosion have set the stage for another, worse calamity.  We must act to prevent a similar disaster in the Real Economy -- that could affect manufacturing, commerce and possibly survival -- exacerbated by a dangerous over-reliance on “just in time.”

To be clear, I am not talking about the plight of the U.S. auto-makers, who are near collapse because of inefficiency, bad management, and failures of imagination by both owners and workers. Nor do I refer to the painful-but-expected retrenchment and layoffs we’re seeing in many industries.  These are worrisome, but there is another problem looming on the horizon -- one that may hammer even competent enterprises, that imagine they are healthy enough to weather the storm.

I refer to a brittle weakness in our economy, courtesy of the same smartaleck caste of MBAs who brought us derivatives and hyper-leveraged finance.  A frailty that could, potentially, turn some short-term crisis into full-scale disaster -- and all because of a good theory that’s been taken way too far.


Another trick of “optimization”

For decades, we’ve been told -- by the same fellows who brought us “efficient finance” -- that manufacturing and commerce should be fine-tuned to squeeze every penny of profit, by trimming away all “fat.” Industries that hew close to the teachings of W. Edwards Deming and Toyota’s Taichi Ohno require that their suppliers deliver parts and raw materials at the precise moment when they are needed.  Under this principle, any reserves that are kept on-premises will only encourage sloppy management and incur unnecessary storage costs -- a calculation that has long been exacerbated by shortsighted tax policies that punish warehousing and inventory-keeping.

This approach, called “Just-In-Time,” is based upon the very same postulate that led the business-major types to bet our economic farm on arcane financial instruments, leading to catastrophic failure, in 2007 and 2008.  A wholly unjustified wager that the economy and its supporting systems will always remain stable and never experience disruption.  

Of course, this was just another expression of the basic concept underlying America’s vaunted way-of-life -- thinking only for today, spending all we had, with the lowest savings rate in the industrial world, while assuming tomorrow will always be kind. The freighters will keep bustling into our ports while foreigners continue to buy our debts.  Trucks and trains will keep delivering everything where it needs to go, with perfect, computer-controlled precision.

Our ancestors’ age-old wisdom of putting a little aside for just-in-case robustness has been replaced by a delusion of just-in-time efficiency, based on a belief in perfectly reliable global interdependence.

But, in real life, animals - even efficient ones - carry fat reserves. Surprises and disruptions happen. And when they do, we worry less about tweaking widgets-per second, and more about survival.


For the record, and lest anyone misconstrue, I actually have a great deal of respect for W. Edwards Deming and the first- order effects that his teachings had on industrial practice, not only in 1950s Japan, where he was pivotal in rebuilding that shattered nation into a prosperous economic powerhouse, but everywhere that Just in Time and related notions had positive effects, introducing tight discipline into management. For example, when Toyota eliminated on-site parts overstocks, they exposed countless inefficiencies in production that would have been overlooked, if employees could just reach over and grab replacements from a big pile. I'll be the last to deny the benefits that spartan efficiency have brought to industry and commerce. Nor does my praise of the warehouse overlook the fact that inventories do incur an inherent cost.

Nevertheless, any good thing can be taken obsessively too far, especially when a conflict arises between corporate profit and the common good. It is the job of the state to ensure that robustness and resiliency are desiderata that are included in the mix. Rules and market forces can be tweaked that encourage a balance. Above all, Deming-style practices, when followed obsessively, constitute what's called "success dependent planning" - or fine tuning everything to be based upon an assumption that all eventualities have already been taken into account. And as Nobelist F. Hayek clearly demonstrated, that notion can be carried over a cliff into pure (and self-destructive) delusion.

NASA got into a lot of trouble trying to use success-dependent planning. And when it is done by armed forces (and today's U.S. military show many signs of falling into this trap), there is a sequence of events that will follow, as inevitable as sunset. Surprise, dismay and then defeat.

Let’s go back to the example of tax laws that punish warehousing and inventory keeping. These are nothing less than inducements for fragility. If such disincentives were removed, even reversed, good managers might feel more ready to stockpile a little. Perhaps even enough supplies to keep their enterprises going for a while, say, during an unexpected ice storm, or if terrorists toppled a few of our vulnerable, chokepoint bridges.  Or if any of ten thousand other things broke down, in our humming national and international grid.

Moreover -- and here’s a little bonus that’s highly relevant during a recession -- in the short term, just filling such expanded inventories could add to national demand, providing a little more economic stimulus at a critical time. By rewarding companies for investing in inventory, we might also foster a self-fulfilling expectation that good times will return. This, alone, might justify innovating ways to ease back from just in-time thinking.

Even more convincing is the robustness argument. A modicum of warehoused supplies could someday make a crucial difference. And this applies not only to industrial supplies, but to the food and other vital consumables that the people of a city might need, if they found themselves cut off for a while. The ancient Egyptians knew this. The puritans did. Anybody with a gram of wisdom does, especially if they accept that we still live in dangerous times.

Above all, this is the opposite of what the MBA caste wants us to do.  And, nowadays, what better sign could there be, that an idea is worth looking-at?

==========

And that completes my short list of unconventional ideas about the current economic crisis.  Next: foreign policy and national security.unconventional ideas about the current economic crisis.  Next: foreign policy and national security.

Suggestion 4: Watch out for a supra-national aristocracy

THIS ECONOMIC CRISIS... AND THE NEXT ONE

Suggestion #4) Make government agile enough to deal successively with the new Global Players.

We've heard a lot about the benefits of an international economy that is globalized, fast-paced, information-driven and “flat.”  But there are also worrisome downsides.  For example, when international elites and corporations can shift funds at the speed of light, jet to new locales, recharter or relocate headquarters at will and seek best-deals with whatever government they like, this puts severe pressure on the two hundred slow, stodgy “legacy nations.”

These older behemoths, tied to static territories and accountable institutions, have much slower reaction times.  They -- and especially their middle classes -- must shoulder the burdens of maintaining infrastructure, educating the workforce, pensioning the elderly, resolving disputes, and keeping order, even as they are fast losing track of their tax base.

And now, those legacy commonwealths are being asked to rescue the same caste that called themselves financial geniuses, after they spent two decades expressing contempt for the nations that made their wealth possible.

Note that this is not exactly the same problem that was addressed in Suggestion #3. In that case, I suggested that radical transparency might reduce or neutralize the rampant and often cryptic cheating that threatens to shatter our social compact.  Indeed, it is the only way that honesty, balance and trust can be re-struck without inviting waves of new bureaucratic meddling that - well-meaning or not - would surely open even more avenues for cheating.  Ironically, folks on the right reflexively denounce radical transparency, even though it is compatible with every theory of capitalism.  Indeed, it might be open market capitalism’s last and best hope.

But this time, we’ll shift to an issue that is a little different than using light to heal corruption.  Here, I want to talk about how super-empowered and ultra-mobile elites have a new and growing structural advantage that they would retain, even if everything were transparently legal and open.  It is the ancient problem of aristocratic advantage, and it is worth noting that only one civilization ever solved it -- for a while.

We’re all very proud of the flat, mobile and egalitarian social order that emerged in America after the Second World War.  (That is, if we squint past little problems like racism, sexism, etc.)  We grew so used to it, across just two generations, that even mentioning “aristocracy” is tantamount to waging despised “class warfare.”  We tend to forget that, as recently as the Nineteen Thirties, even the United States used to be riven by deep and bilious resentments between the masses and those few who passed down privilege, they way their children might inherit eye or hair color .

It was the typical way in nearly all past civilizations, all times and all continents, and you can’t help but to realize that there is a relentless and all-but ubiquitous, natural attractor state -- one that is not good for democracy, freedom, or market capitalism. It is, in fact, the condition that Adam Smith railed against, in Wealth of Nations, wherein he inveighed far more against collusive aristocracy than he ever did against socialism.   One doesn’t have to be a socialist . Indeed, any honest anti-socialist can also see that momentum is building toward the re-creation of an unaccountable, quasi-feudal, aristocratic caste system.  Only this time, on a truly global scale.

And no, I’m not talking about revolution, or sending tumbrels through the streets.  The calm progress that our parents and grandparents made, in resolving class injustices without at all hampering the wealth-incentivized cornucopia of market capitalism should inspire us. What they accomplished, we should too, with innovative and moderate solutions.  Clearly, it's time to put some fresh ideas on the table.  

Let’s start by throwing out the hoary old “Left-Right Political Axis,” which has become a metaphor of crippling stupidity.  After Republican administrations incurred 98% of all US indebtedness and economic failure, in an era when capitalism, small business and stocks always do much better under Democrats, who then is the better defender of Free Enterprise? Perhaps we can shrug off that insipid, strawman fear of government, at least long enough to use it for what government does best -- addressing acute and temporary problems.

(If we set aside the routine matters of defense and delivering justice, one can argue that chronic issues are where government bureaucracies tend to stagnate and fester, while well-chosen incentives can stimulate market forces to deal with such long-term matters effectively, over time. On the other hand, governments seem best suited to deal with urgencies, shocks and the unanticipated. An oversimplification, but one with few noxious or tendentious side effects.)

One case in point.  We should not be afraid of nationalizing failed businesses -- like General Motors or Citi Bank -- so long as the intent is to offer them on the block later, when things settle down.  This isn’t nationalization in any radical or permanent sense.  Moreover, those who praise markets should not be offended if the people’s government takes advantage of an opportunity to “buy low and sell high.”


A toxic example of “white flight”

Let me conclude here with a second, possibly more lefty-sounding case in point.  (Note though, that this is from a fellow who once was a keynoter at a Libertarian National Convention!)

Anyone can see how badly the nation’s airlines and airports are deteriorating.  Now add in the grotesquely expensive and humiliating TSA security experience and you realize that we are living through a serious decline in the American way of life.  For a traditionally and joyfully mobile people, nothing like this has been seen since the collapse of passenger railroading, in the sixties.   Many factors are being blamed.  But seldom mentioned has been the flight of the aristocracy from first class.

I can barely remember the last time I encountered anybody truly rich or famous riding first class.  Today, that section is for weary second-tier managers and upgrades thast help the companies soak up frequent flier miles.  Service has declined as a result, of course.  But the key question is: where have the rich folks gone?  

The answer is -- to charter and private jet terminals nearby, where they aren’t frisked and probed.  Where they need share none of our inconveniences or humiliations.
 
Note this basic historical fact: when the aristocracy abandons a mode of transit, or any other aspect of public life, decline sets in. Remember, these are society’s most influential people.  If they were sharing the pain, they would be the loudest and most effective at pushing for improvements!  

A suggestion?  At minimum, the charters and private jets should no longer be taxpayer subsidized.  Indeed, this “new white flight” to private, secluded services, ought to be taxed, like any other vice.

As a general priciple, the same logic holds for countless other ways that elites have learned how to benefit from our nations, from their fellow citizens, while floating away from responsibility, like butterflies.  Like gods.

Unusual Suggestions: Radical Transparency

These quirky missives about “what I’d do if president” are mere droplets in a tidal wave pouring from columnists, sages, bloggers and citizens.  So what’s special?  These proposals - ranging from economics to domestic and foreign affairs, to politics - were chosen to be unusual, different... even weird. It's a promise, or I’ll eat my hat.

Suggestion #3:  Ensure that  world money flows can no longer be invisible.

Our present economic calamity has many roots.  Here are just a few.

- The surge of U.S. “sub-prime” mortgages, spurred by both easy credit and bankers who forgot their basic business -- close management of lending.  

- Lax regulation of financial “innovators” -- starting in the City of London -- who turned “investment products” into a huge pyramid of grotesquely leveraged wagers and counter-wagers, only tenuously connected to the real world... leading envious financiers elsewhere to lobby for a chance to join the fun.

- A U.S. leadership caste that frittered away the reserves we would need to save, against harder times, because of a dogmatic belief -- despite relentless disproof -- that deficits lead to balanced budgets and that a lavishly subsidized aristocracy will naturally invest and manage well.

- A sixty year worldwide assumption that the American consumer can forever propel economic growth, while saving nothing at all.

- A world system that’s supposedly based on open markets, filled with knowledgeable producers, consumers and policy makers who make rational decisions -- but where, in fact, nobody even knows how much money there is, where it is, or even who owns much of the planet’s wealth.

The last of these factors may be the least discussed, but it goes to our core assumptions about capitalism.  Even the libertarian, Nobel-winning economist F. Hayek said that markets without information-openness will be lethally compromised. The poor worker and middle class investor and company manager can only strike their “best-deals” if they know what’s going on.  And when that implicit contract fails, capitalism loses any moral basis, whatsoever.

In order for either governmental or capitalist solutions to work, the clouds of needless secrecy simply have to part.  Opposing this is not a matter of “left” or “right,” but of dangerous hypocrisy.  It is mendacious (though human) to proclaim fealty to markets, while shrouding what others need to know, in order to play the same game.

Of course, you would expect this stance from the author of The Transparent Society.  So let’s be clear that I’m not attacking intellectual property or the basic confidentiality that businesses need, to operate.  

Still, consider. Right now the world’s governments are under pressure to create a new structure of regulations and regulators -- a “new Bretton Woods” -- to supervise international finance. Perhaps even a nascent World SEC or World Fed.   

This is only the latest step in a trend -- a creeping ratchet toward backdoor Planetary Government -- that may be necessary for a tightly interlocked 21st century world... but the process certainly merits a lot more open and skeptical discussion than it is getting. Left unexamined, it may lead to the worst possible combination -- deteriorated national sovereignty and competence, plus a bureaucratic “world government” that is both overweening and unaccountable.

Above all, those who object to such planetwide regulation must offer an alternative. And there is only one that would empower markets to “police themselves.”  Especially now that the "trust us" CEO clade has proved utterly untrustworthy.

Far greater levels of transparency.  

Might this extend to a consensus decision to find out, at long last, who actually owns what, all over the globe?

Or to trace corporate management so that responsibility (the ‘buck’) actually stops at real people?

Or for America to call-in its paper currency for responsible replacement, as every other nation has done?

Or to list, in detail, who has benefited most during the gilded first decade of the Twenty-First Century... the Naughtie Oughties? Or even to require -- in exchange for any bailout money -- the kind of open books that any lender would require, as part of due diligence?

These would be denounced as radical ideas, of course.  But note, there is nothing inherently socialistic or confiscatory about any of them. Or indeed, any move toward simple transparency.  In fact, the resulting boon in recovered tax revenues -- from evaders alone -- might allow tax rates on legitimate individuals and enterprises to fall. A win-win of staggering magnitude.  

Any American administration that is serious about the future must make transparency -- even somewhat radical transparency -- a paramount goal.

 

 

Followup:

Transparency International does tremendously important work, helping shine sunlight patches of malignant corruption all over the world. By some estimates, graft may slice away a quarter of potential economic progress -- and much more in parts of the developing world. TI publishes an annual Perceptions of Corruption index that highlights which countries are perceived by outsiders as getting -- or desperately needing -- clean government... and where they don’t.

This year's list covers 180 countries and autonomous territories, with the country considered "cleanest" ranking first, and the country perceived as most corrupt placing 180th. It finds Denmark, New Zealand, and Sweden in a three-way tie for the cleanest reputations, with Singapore just behind. Somalia beats Iraq and Burma for the worst. The United States ties with Japan and Belgium for an unremarkable 18th place,* just below Ireland and the United Kingdom and just above St. Lucia, Barbados, and Chile.

A scan of this list should convince any reader that the whole world would benefit, if this matter got top priority. Let there be no doubt that it will be difficult. Just witness the chaos in Mexico, where a brave administration is attempting to wean its bureaucrats and police and other public servants off a generations-old tradition of mordita graft and omerto silence. And this is just a taste of what might happen, if the world's true money interests were ever to fear light shining upon them. It is going to be really hard.

But it is the one thing that might ensure civilization through the middle of the 21st Century.

Unusual Suggestions: The Horn of Africa

Skipping ahead because it is timely... here is one on...
NATIONAL DEFENSE AND FOREIGN POLICY

Try a fresh approach in the Horn of Africa... and (carefully) assert power for good.


A recent surge of high-profile piracy has drawn attention to the Gulf of Aden - one of the world’s most important seaways - now under siege and frequent assault by brazen pirates, based in Somalia.

That lawless land has been a calamity in many other ways, for example by offering a haven for terrorist organizations to train and operate. Unpoliced Somali territorial waters have become a handy dumping ground for unscrupulous companies to get rid of toxic waste,letting it flow into the world's currents. Criminal gangs launder cash and stolen goods. Meanwhile, millions of innocents suffer under horrific warlords, in a land where schools, hospitals and basic services have almost vanished from memory.

The world community has tried a variety of timid “solutions” that range from increasing naval patrols to encouraging an incursion by neighboring Ethiopia -- all to no avail. The entire region, from the Kenyan border, past the national capital, Mogadishu, all the way to the Horn of Africa, remains a hellish maelstrom of fanatics, marauders and tribal vendettas. Sure, we got our fingers burned in the early 1990s, trying to bring order to Somalia with peacekeeping troops. So? Must we therefore stand aside, wringing our hands while an important region festers in catastrophic lawlessness?

One potential alternative has been avoided, till now, for reasons never made publicly clear. Go online and look up Somaliland, as opposed to Somalia. It turns out that this northern third of the country -- the portion formerly colonized by Britain -- is already at peace and relatively well-ordered.

It also sits directly adjacent to the Gulf of Aden. And yet, this region has striven to be a solution, not a part of the problem. “Our coast is extremely long, but we have kept our waters free of pirates,” said Abdillahi Duale, foreign minister of Somaliland, in a statement last week, offering the use of his territory’s ports for foreign naval patrols. This overture, like many others, appears likely to be ignored. Why?

Ever since attempting to declare its independence in 1991, Somaliland has failed to gain recognition from a single nation, because of an archaic diplomatic consensus that original national boundaries should be held sacrosanct -- an axiom that has had hellish effects in Africa and that was shrugged aside, in places as wide-ranging as Tibet, Bangladesh, Kashmir, Eritrea, East Timor, Kosovo and Georgia. Still, because of this standing principle, for almost two decades, four million people in northern Somalia have been told that they could not legally detach themselves from the madness in the south.

But all right. If that’s the iron rule of diplomacy, then why not turn the matter around? Here’s an alternative idea.

Recognize Somaliland as the one calm region of Somalia. Establish and upgrade western consulates in its capital, Hargeisa. Assist improvements in democracy and human rights. Beef up aid to this promising zone and make clear to southern factions which way the wind is blowing. Reward any tribes who choose to turn away from madness and join a growing confederation that already has a record of providing at least basic law and safety, under a purely Somalian umbrella.

Moreover, with modest international aid, a Somalian constabulary based right there at the Gulf of Aden might carry out far more effective efforts against piracy - both at sea and on land, taking the fight to the pirate enclaves. (This, historically, was always the best solution to piracy.)

One Somali territory that immediately borders Somaliland, Puntland, is a major pirate haven. It ought to be possible to sway Puntland, with a combination of carrots and sticks, to join in confederation with Somaliland, or else face quarantine, while watching Somaliland grow overwhelmingly strong, next door. In any event, the cost of such an experiment would be low, and no western or foreign troops need put a foot on the ground.

There may be little time to try something like this. The rising power in the south is an extreme Islamist movement, Shabab, which models itself after the Taliban. As they have captured southern cities, some Shabab leaders have imposed ultra-harsh Sharia rules, killed humanitarian workers and terrorized women. In Kismayo, a 13-year old rape victim was accused of adultery and stoned to death. If this movement gains full sway in the south, as they did in 2006, before the Ethiopians invaded (and the Ethiopians appear about to withdraw), then the world may see a Taliban-style fait accompli and have no choice but to accept Somaliland's first preference of complete secession.

Is the alternative of assisting the pro-western and liberal-minded north a panacea? Of course not. But it does at least offer a way to attack the piracy problem at low cost and to show the rest of Somalia the rewards of joining the civilized world. Why not offer this purely Somali option -- to join a growing portion of the nation that is sane, moderate and increasingly democratic -- to any Somalian who wants to live like a civilized person?

Or, at least, could we finally hear an explanation from the U.S. State Department, as to why not?

Unusual Suggestions for an America Undergoing Change (An ongoing series)

It seems that everybody is writing memos to Barack Obama.  Missives about “what I’d do if I were president” pour forth from columnists, political-sages, bloggers and citizens.  The official transition team has even set up an online suggestion box to sample this eager tidal wave of participatory democracy.

Of course, any tsunami is mostly water and air, with only a small amount of material that’s surprising or unique.  Likewise, most of the recommendations for the coming administration are pretty predictable.  Fix health care. Get us out of Iraq. Create jobs. Prosecute some of the klepto-thieves who turned the first decade of the 21st Century into the Naughtie Oughties.  These unsurprising exhortations do help measure public concern - or outrage - but they won’t fire off many new light bulbs the minds of Team Obama  

Or take Discover Magazine’s recent feature "Advice for the Next President."  I was asked to opine alongside Edward O. Wilson, Steven Weinberg, Jack Horner, C. Everett Koop, Danny Hillis and others about ways to restore America’s position as world leader in science and technology.  Several of us urged that science education should get top priority, and that Congress restore the independent advisory commissions that Republicans demolished, so that policy deliberations can be based on facts, rather than stories.

Important?  Sure.  But also pretty obvious.  

And so, I refrained for a month, browsing what everyone else was saying, winnowing my own list down to only items that are different, unconventional... perhaps even a bit contrary.  

Oh, I won’t claim total originality. A few of my suggestions may have appeared elsewhere -- just not to my knowledge.  They range from slightly-skewed perspectives, to some that may seem arcane, or even bizarre. From nonpartisan and pragmatic to a few that are fiercely partisan.  But when it comes to saving the Republic, can the earnest folk in the new government afford to overlook anything?

Let’s start with the economic mess. Then we’ll continue - bit by bit - to defense, foreign affairs, domestic policy, politics and, finally, some ideas that are really out there, on the fringe.


THIS ECONOMIC CRISIS... AND THE NEXT ONE
 
1) Offer a fresh deal to labor and management

It’s a new century and time to chuck some obsolete ways of thinking.  Take this bemusing realization. On paper, the sum of all obligations owed to union workers, company health plans and pension funds would make organized labor by far the biggest net owner of capital in the United States.  

By some ways of reckoning, the workers already own the means of production. This was actually foreseen a long time ago.

Indeed, for decades, both labor and management have sought ways to avoid confronting this fact - for example, by separating off pension funds to be controlled by neutral specialists.  Labor leaders are comfortable with an old-fashioned, adversarial relationship toward management. The idea of sharing some hybrid role terrifies them.  Moreover, a few experiments in worker-ownership - such as United Airlines - seemed to prove it a bad idea. (These were contrived-to-fail.)

But there may be no avoiding this issue, any longer.  With unfunded obligations adding up to hundreds of billions, the pension plans need to start getting imaginative, or taxpayers will be stuck with that bill, in addition to all the others that are piling up.  In striving to preserve an illusion, labor may risk losing everything.  Meanwhile, American car companies with UAW contracts suffer a crippling competitive disadvantage against foreign automakers who pay far less for non-union labor, just a few states away.  A situation exacerbated by the blatant, greedy corporate vampirism of a dullard, parasitical managerial caste.

Is the solution yet another a mammoth federal rescue plan? Not without a stiff price, please!  There has to be a meeting of the minds, to thrash out an entirely new deal.

Everybody may have to give up something.  Stockholders, much of their delusional equity.  Managers, most of their recent crony-voted bonuses, even digging back some years.  Unions, their illusions. And non-union states, their unfair intra-national advantage in cheap labor laws.  Workers in Michigan might have to get NewGM or NewChrysler shares, in lieu of a third of their wages.  Workers at a Honda plant in Kentucky may have to get used to becoming union men and women.

In fact, just after I wrote this in first draft, the United Auto Workers announced (December 3) that it is willing to change its contracts with U.S. automakers and accept delayed payments of billions of dollars to a union-run health care trust to do its part to help the struggling companies secure $34 billion in government loans.  

That’s fine.  We’re negotiating at last.  But it still reflects a desperate will to avoid facing the obvious.

The unions and pensions funds should “defer” nothing.  They should instead accept payment in the form of preferred, convertible stock in completely re-shaped and renewed companies.  And if worker-ownership hasn’t worked in the past, then it is high time that due attention is paid to making it work.

What should not be accepted any longer is the illusion that stockholder equity in GM etc is sacrosanct.  This is a bankruptcy reorganization, accept it.  Get past it.


On a broader scale, this notion of holding a grand conference, at which everybody sits and everything is on the table, will be raised again, and again.  After twenty years of partisan intransigence, we can no longer afford ideological impracticality.  All parties, from environmentalists to free-traders, all the way to xenophobes, will have to gather up a new maturity and go back to the old, American genius at negotiating for the best deal -- the best positive sum game -- trading away a little, in order to get a little.  So that we all can move forward.

More about this, soon.

Epochal media events: 200 years ago... and next week

I can't believe it almost slipped by without notice.

Right now... give or take a couple of weeks... we are passing through the two hundredth anniversary of one of the greatest events in the history of art. Perhaps of all humanity. The "Winter Concert" of 1808, when Ludwig Von Beethoven unveiled and conducted, for the very first time:

The Fourth Piano Concerto
The Fifth Symphony
The Sixth Symphony
and
The Violin Concerto in D

Most of you know the two symphonies. Arguably his best in many ways. Lyrical, evocative, filled with color and imagery and drama. Certainly more measured and less tinged in overweening ego than the glorious Ninth. They, alone, would have made that debut concert an event for the ages.

But the Fourth Piano Concerto is just as wondrous, as beautiful and awe inspiring as the symphonies.

As for the Violin Concerto...?

Matters of art are subjective, of course. But I deem Beethoven's Violin Concerto to be the greatest work of music ever conceived by Man.

How could such an event go by, unremarked at the time... and its bicentennial barely noted, even today? That question is almost as fascinating as: how were people able to sit still for so long in one place, even to experience such beauty? Dang, they must have had iron bottoms. And -- in an era without recordings -- they must have really hungered for music.

Twenty years ago, I began a time travel story, about a famed cellist from the future who travels back to sneak into Beethoven's 1808 orchestra. Like all my other time travel stories, it remains unfinished. In this case, because - despite having played violin in orchestras, in my youth, and having sung in a semi-pro chorale group - I simply know too little musicology to do the story justice. I'd need JUST the right collaborator... alas.

Still, I can't believe the bicentennial almost went by.

Well, SOMEBODY must have noticed. Because last night, getting in my car after seeing Kim Stanley Robinson and Geoff Ryman do wonderful readings at Sheldon Brown's SCALABLE CITY event, I tuned into NPR and found them playing a terrific version of the 4th Piano Concerto, with some of the best cadenzas I've heard. And I got to wave my arms, conducting it, all the way home.

=======

Oh, but art never stops!

Tune in to "my" latest episode of the ongoing History Channel show The Universe, entitled "Alien Faces," and produced by John Greenwald. It will premier this Tuesday night, December 09th at 9:00pm!

See a preview. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1RSZDtm8Zw