How can a simple public profession of one's faith in the context of describing an averted tragedy become offensive? When does it become destructive? Let's outline a situation: a warm Christmas-time story in a local newspaper about an energetic and engaging young woman who contracts a life-threatening condition, but who subsequently recovers through intercession, through the fervent prayers of family, friends and strangers. A close-knit family, more secure in their faith than ever, understands that this is nothing less than a miracle and that God has a purpose for the young woman. What kind of cold-hearted reprobate would begrudge these folks their joy, their celebration of this moment of grace? What kind indeed?
Well, let's fill in the outline just a bit. A previously healthy young woman suddenly and unexpectedly suffers a seizure. An MRI reveals she has a brain tumor. Across the country, a neurosurgeon at Mayo Clinic removes the malignant tumor, though the surgery and its aftermath pose life-threatening complications of blood clots and infection. And, finally, her recovery is faster and more complete than any of her medical caregivers anticipate.
The miracle, has in fact been mediated by, among other things, the diagnostics of MRI and radiologists and by access, the many different layers of access, to one of the world's foremost medical facilities, to an extraordinarily accomplished neurosurgeon, and cutting edge pharmaceuticals.
To me, attributing the recovery of this woman to miraculous intervention by a loving God is, frankly, offensive. At its root it insults the long, difficult, rational and deliberate path that led to understanding the principles and developing MRI technology, it overlooks all those who spent long years educating and training those crack medical personnel, it avoids considering the dedication and effort those medical personnel have invested in their careers, it sidesteps the understanding that an experienced neurosurgeon must necessarily have gained from inevitable mistakes and the suffering of others, it elides examination of the economic conditions that make access to medical "miracles" accessible to some but not others, it implies, however mildly, that there is no purpose for those whose outcomes are less fortunate, and on and on.
In short, the claim of a miracle in a case like this, seems to me to be one symptom of a society that has so little understanding of the sacrifice, the investment, the infrastructure, the regulation, the very social contract that has made their lives livable; a society that has so interwoven these "miracles" into the fabric of people's lives that to many of them, the "miracles" and their origins have become transparent; a society that, because of that transparency, is in fact busy betraying their "miracles". "Miracles" like this, then can even be seen as destructive because rather than fully recognizing the investment necessary to make them possible it enhances their transparency. For this reason, and between you and me and the fencepost, I prefer my miracles to be weeping faces of Mary in a pan of bacon drippings than this kind.
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Monday, April 27, 2009
Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy.
As a Nobel prize winning and widely respected scientist, a big part of Dr. Chu’s job now is to bring that expertise to bear in collaboration with intelligent and well-informed individuals trying to solve the gravest problems that confront this nation. The other part of his job is to work with congress.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
The Intersection of Laffer Curves and Torture Policy
An overly simple and probably substantially wrong understanding of the so-called Laffer curve is that, with low tax rates, increasing tax rates produce more revenue for the government, but with diminishing returns. Upslope. Finally, at some point, an “optimal” tax rate, increasing the rate causes revenues to fall due to disincentives and other impacts on the economy. Downslope. A flawed but easy to grasp analogy is that government revenues follow the trajectory of a thrown softball: as the softball gets further (increasing tax rates) from the hand that flung it, it rises higher and higher (revenues increase), upslope, reaches a highest point (greatest revenue), and then as it continues (tax rates continuing to increase), it comes crashing back to earth (revenues collapse), downslope.
As my understanding of the torture policies instituted by our government has unfolded over the years, I have always, always, deep in my liberal, bleeding-heart gut, known them for what they are: an unmitigated horror. I am now convinced that I did not speak out enough against torture polices, send enough letters to the editor, communicate frequently enough with my legislators with strong enough language opposing the institutionalization of torture. Why?
I blame my godforsaken liberal, knee-jerk willingness to listen to all sides of an argument and to reevaluate my position on an issue, and my rather unusual (for a liberal) personal portfolio of national security experience. I listened carefully to the arguments that “enhanced interrogations, black prisons, extraordinary renditions” and so on, were necessary for national security. I was also somewhat sympathetic that a fearful if not cowardly electorate had, for whatever reason, directly through elected leaders and indirectly through the appointments and approvals of those leaders, chosen to place into policy-making positions a stunning array of those who were demonstrably incompetent, and thus incapable of conceiving how to implement an effective long-term national security policy addressing a complex issue like terrorism without resort to such unsavory and inadvisable backstops.
And I have to admit that the national security arguments bought from me some good part of what their authors probably intended – they left me just unsure enough of the slope of the moral ground on which I was standing. Who am I to express moral outrage over policies that might save a mother from the tragedy of losing a child to a terrorist attack? In retrospect, I suppose I rationalized that as detainee policy and interrogation techniques increase away from a zero point of perfectly and transparently (and anyway unrealizable) idealized humane treatment, there may, in fact, be some national security benefits to be obtained. Upslope.
But as the issue has exploded over the past several weeks, the national security argument has reemerged in full force, with many now arguing that being aware of, considering, and investigating the policies, and perhaps prosecuting those responsible where appropriate, seriously endangers, has already endangered our national security. See, for instance, Porter Goss. Or Dick Fergodssake Cheney.
I simply want those who are pressing this position to understand what its effect on my consideration of this issue has been. Those developing and implementing these policies, if nothing else, had to operate from an understanding that this is a free and democratic country, a country with a constitution and established laws and treaties, and that whatever policies they developed and implemented for national security had to operate and would necessarily succeed or fail within that fundamental structure. Those responsible for the torture policies who are trying to silence their antagonists and who are now arguing that our national security is being compromised, has already been compromised, by the democratic, constitutional, legal processes that are unfolding relating to these policies, rather are, apparently transparently and unselfconciously, compounding with that argument the increasingly compelling evidence that these policies, probably in the short term, and certainly in the long term, undermine our national security.
Here, then, is my point: those who developed and implemented these policies were responsible for one ultimate purpose – to provide for national security. So much of their opposition to investigation and prosecution now rests on the pivot of national security. But they, themselves, are arguing that their misbegotten torture policies and implementation, in the context of a democratic, constitutional, legal, moral nation, went so far that their consequences in that context decrease our national security. Downslope.
These people, now even by their own argument, took us so far along the Torture Laffer Curve that our national security is crashing and burning. Their responsibility WAS national security and by their own admission the policies they developed and implemented have failed, impairing our national security. It is time to unravel these policies and to drag us back along the axis of the Torture Laffer Curve. I don’t see any way for us to do this in the long term except to: Investigate and prosecute where appropriate. Investigate and prosecute where appropriate. Investigate and prosecute where appropriate. Investigate and prosecute where appropriate. Investigate and prosecute where appropriate. Investigate and prosecute where appropriate.
As my understanding of the torture policies instituted by our government has unfolded over the years, I have always, always, deep in my liberal, bleeding-heart gut, known them for what they are: an unmitigated horror. I am now convinced that I did not speak out enough against torture polices, send enough letters to the editor, communicate frequently enough with my legislators with strong enough language opposing the institutionalization of torture. Why?
I blame my godforsaken liberal, knee-jerk willingness to listen to all sides of an argument and to reevaluate my position on an issue, and my rather unusual (for a liberal) personal portfolio of national security experience. I listened carefully to the arguments that “enhanced interrogations, black prisons, extraordinary renditions” and so on, were necessary for national security. I was also somewhat sympathetic that a fearful if not cowardly electorate had, for whatever reason, directly through elected leaders and indirectly through the appointments and approvals of those leaders, chosen to place into policy-making positions a stunning array of those who were demonstrably incompetent, and thus incapable of conceiving how to implement an effective long-term national security policy addressing a complex issue like terrorism without resort to such unsavory and inadvisable backstops.
And I have to admit that the national security arguments bought from me some good part of what their authors probably intended – they left me just unsure enough of the slope of the moral ground on which I was standing. Who am I to express moral outrage over policies that might save a mother from the tragedy of losing a child to a terrorist attack? In retrospect, I suppose I rationalized that as detainee policy and interrogation techniques increase away from a zero point of perfectly and transparently (and anyway unrealizable) idealized humane treatment, there may, in fact, be some national security benefits to be obtained. Upslope.
But as the issue has exploded over the past several weeks, the national security argument has reemerged in full force, with many now arguing that being aware of, considering, and investigating the policies, and perhaps prosecuting those responsible where appropriate, seriously endangers, has already endangered our national security. See, for instance, Porter Goss. Or Dick Fergodssake Cheney.
I simply want those who are pressing this position to understand what its effect on my consideration of this issue has been. Those developing and implementing these policies, if nothing else, had to operate from an understanding that this is a free and democratic country, a country with a constitution and established laws and treaties, and that whatever policies they developed and implemented for national security had to operate and would necessarily succeed or fail within that fundamental structure. Those responsible for the torture policies who are trying to silence their antagonists and who are now arguing that our national security is being compromised, has already been compromised, by the democratic, constitutional, legal processes that are unfolding relating to these policies, rather are, apparently transparently and unselfconciously, compounding with that argument the increasingly compelling evidence that these policies, probably in the short term, and certainly in the long term, undermine our national security.
Here, then, is my point: those who developed and implemented these policies were responsible for one ultimate purpose – to provide for national security. So much of their opposition to investigation and prosecution now rests on the pivot of national security. But they, themselves, are arguing that their misbegotten torture policies and implementation, in the context of a democratic, constitutional, legal, moral nation, went so far that their consequences in that context decrease our national security. Downslope.
These people, now even by their own argument, took us so far along the Torture Laffer Curve that our national security is crashing and burning. Their responsibility WAS national security and by their own admission the policies they developed and implemented have failed, impairing our national security. It is time to unravel these policies and to drag us back along the axis of the Torture Laffer Curve. I don’t see any way for us to do this in the long term except to: Investigate and prosecute where appropriate. Investigate and prosecute where appropriate. Investigate and prosecute where appropriate. Investigate and prosecute where appropriate. Investigate and prosecute where appropriate. Investigate and prosecute where appropriate.
Friday, March 27, 2009
An Open Letter to Jake DeSantis
Dear Mr. DeSantis,
It occurs to me that the experience of betrayal and persecution you described in your AIG resignation letter is qualitatively indistinguishable from that of millions of American workers. According to your account: contractual obligations to you were, in some sense, breached, just like, for instance, the thousands of Delphi retirees who have had their retirement and health benefits eliminated as a consequence of the company’s bankruptcy and the unwillingness of automotive executives to undertake rational changes to their business model; you accepted a significant short-term economic disadvantage in trade for what was presented to you as attractive long-term benefits that will, now, never be realized, just like the millions of manufacturing workers who have had their livelihoods exported so that, for instance, underwear could be fifty cents cheaper at Wal-Mart and inexpensive toxic pet food could be imported from China; you were betrayed and your compensation was sacrificed on the altar of painfully myopic considerations by executives, politicians, pundits, and, ultimately, a fickle and ill-informed public, just like the tens of thousands of competent, dedicated, and hard-working teachers who are expected to single-handedly address all of a consumer society’s ills with less and less resources, yet who are routinely vilified to gain a few precious ideological points; you were compensated at a level that didn’t fully recognize the effort you have invested in preparing for and conducting your career and that amounted to only a tiny fraction of the value of your contribution, just like the thousands of academic, government, and corporate PhD scientists and engineers who are responsible for the technological foundations on which our multi-trillion dollar economy is built; you had to work in a miserably stressful and demanding environment, forgoing any semblance of a healthy family life, just like the thousands of single mothers who work two and three life-draining jobs, trying to make ends meet so that their children might have a remote chance to escape the cycle of poverty; your company’s misfortune was due not to your actions but to the ill-advised, unethical, or outright fraudulent corporate policies of others, just like the thousands of Enron workers who lost their life-savings and their careers.
In this light, your personal experience really is terribly mundane, has been repeated across the country a million times over and for decades and in every variation, is old hat, causing one to wonder why it warranted such central placement in the national media. Forgive me this indulgence, but I can’t help but suspect those who placed your story in the media spotlight, who wanted it there, are an unreflective, incapable-of-recognizing-irony cohort of media, business and political elite who probably misunderstood its ultimate nature, not recognizing the mind-numbingly repetitive themes in it that I have identified above. But I do find it genuinely unusual in several ways. First, it is striking that so many of these economic realities with which the elite have endlessly browbeaten the American public have finally reached into the very boardroom which has for so long been their champions, and that in doing so they have elicited the most bitter remonstrance. Second the quantitative nature of the situation is striking: the admittedly severe imposition of a high special tax on your bonus payment would still have left you with nearly twice the U.S. median household income, something that left you reeling at the injustice and yet which, presumably due to your prior earnings, you were in a position to reject. Even further, the situation has highlighted the paradoxical nature of the astronomical amounts of money at play: to justify the bonuses, it has been correctly, and yet oddly dismissively pointed out that $165,000,000 is only a fraction of a percent of AIG’s taxpayer financed bailout package, a truly tiny amount; yet that amount of money would pay for the operation of a university educating 20,000 students for an entire year, or would purchase health insurance for 10,000 children for a year, or could be used to erect 100 Megawatts of wind turbine capacity, enough to supply electricity for up to 100,000 homes. Why do I find it likely that most of those pointing out the “tiny” aspect of the bonuses would scream bloody murder at the use of those funds for these alternative purposes? Finally, I find your attitude about your education at MIT, quite frankly, ugly. You have every right to be proud of the accomplishment represented by that education, but somewhere along the line you seem to have missed an important point: that education was not provided solely so that you could enrich yourself, Gordon Gekko notwithstanding. A great deal of public money was invested in your education through hundreds of millions of dollars of government grants and loans and tax incentives for charitable giving to MIT and its students over many years. That investment came with an implicit understanding, a social contract if you will, that your education would benefit not just you but the nation as a whole. So where were you when AIG was constructing their financial weapon of mass destruction that would implode not just your company, not just the national economy, but the world economy? Where the hell were you? You were a hell of a lot closer to ground zero than I was, and I had enough sense to recognize something had gone terribly amiss years ago, I had enough information to write to my legislators and ask them to do something to back us out of the impending disaster, fat lot of good that did. Where the hell were you? A very conservative reading of your apparently healthy compensation during those halcyon years at AIG came with, presumably, some level of fiduciary responsibility. How can you argue that you met that responsibility, short of the innocence by incompetence excuse perfected by the Bush adminstration: "nobody could have predicted?" How? Again, forgive me my indulgence, but your protestations of innocence in the events that precipitated this unmitigated disaster sound to me strangely like those of the arsonist who returns to the scene of his crime to help put out the fire and then expects to be treated as a hero.
I wish your expertise could be applied to unwind the AIG catastrophe, to save this country the billions of dollars we desperately need to invest in other places than the now worthless financial instruments assembled by your company. I wish you no ill will and genuinely hope you can rebuild your life and your career in a way that is productive for both you and your family and for the nation. But in the end, sir, in your story to this point, I see not only the depth of your betrayal, but the height of your hubris.
It occurs to me that the experience of betrayal and persecution you described in your AIG resignation letter is qualitatively indistinguishable from that of millions of American workers. According to your account: contractual obligations to you were, in some sense, breached, just like, for instance, the thousands of Delphi retirees who have had their retirement and health benefits eliminated as a consequence of the company’s bankruptcy and the unwillingness of automotive executives to undertake rational changes to their business model; you accepted a significant short-term economic disadvantage in trade for what was presented to you as attractive long-term benefits that will, now, never be realized, just like the millions of manufacturing workers who have had their livelihoods exported so that, for instance, underwear could be fifty cents cheaper at Wal-Mart and inexpensive toxic pet food could be imported from China; you were betrayed and your compensation was sacrificed on the altar of painfully myopic considerations by executives, politicians, pundits, and, ultimately, a fickle and ill-informed public, just like the tens of thousands of competent, dedicated, and hard-working teachers who are expected to single-handedly address all of a consumer society’s ills with less and less resources, yet who are routinely vilified to gain a few precious ideological points; you were compensated at a level that didn’t fully recognize the effort you have invested in preparing for and conducting your career and that amounted to only a tiny fraction of the value of your contribution, just like the thousands of academic, government, and corporate PhD scientists and engineers who are responsible for the technological foundations on which our multi-trillion dollar economy is built; you had to work in a miserably stressful and demanding environment, forgoing any semblance of a healthy family life, just like the thousands of single mothers who work two and three life-draining jobs, trying to make ends meet so that their children might have a remote chance to escape the cycle of poverty; your company’s misfortune was due not to your actions but to the ill-advised, unethical, or outright fraudulent corporate policies of others, just like the thousands of Enron workers who lost their life-savings and their careers.
In this light, your personal experience really is terribly mundane, has been repeated across the country a million times over and for decades and in every variation, is old hat, causing one to wonder why it warranted such central placement in the national media. Forgive me this indulgence, but I can’t help but suspect those who placed your story in the media spotlight, who wanted it there, are an unreflective, incapable-of-recognizing-irony cohort of media, business and political elite who probably misunderstood its ultimate nature, not recognizing the mind-numbingly repetitive themes in it that I have identified above. But I do find it genuinely unusual in several ways. First, it is striking that so many of these economic realities with which the elite have endlessly browbeaten the American public have finally reached into the very boardroom which has for so long been their champions, and that in doing so they have elicited the most bitter remonstrance. Second the quantitative nature of the situation is striking: the admittedly severe imposition of a high special tax on your bonus payment would still have left you with nearly twice the U.S. median household income, something that left you reeling at the injustice and yet which, presumably due to your prior earnings, you were in a position to reject. Even further, the situation has highlighted the paradoxical nature of the astronomical amounts of money at play: to justify the bonuses, it has been correctly, and yet oddly dismissively pointed out that $165,000,000 is only a fraction of a percent of AIG’s taxpayer financed bailout package, a truly tiny amount; yet that amount of money would pay for the operation of a university educating 20,000 students for an entire year, or would purchase health insurance for 10,000 children for a year, or could be used to erect 100 Megawatts of wind turbine capacity, enough to supply electricity for up to 100,000 homes. Why do I find it likely that most of those pointing out the “tiny” aspect of the bonuses would scream bloody murder at the use of those funds for these alternative purposes? Finally, I find your attitude about your education at MIT, quite frankly, ugly. You have every right to be proud of the accomplishment represented by that education, but somewhere along the line you seem to have missed an important point: that education was not provided solely so that you could enrich yourself, Gordon Gekko notwithstanding. A great deal of public money was invested in your education through hundreds of millions of dollars of government grants and loans and tax incentives for charitable giving to MIT and its students over many years. That investment came with an implicit understanding, a social contract if you will, that your education would benefit not just you but the nation as a whole. So where were you when AIG was constructing their financial weapon of mass destruction that would implode not just your company, not just the national economy, but the world economy? Where the hell were you? You were a hell of a lot closer to ground zero than I was, and I had enough sense to recognize something had gone terribly amiss years ago, I had enough information to write to my legislators and ask them to do something to back us out of the impending disaster, fat lot of good that did. Where the hell were you? A very conservative reading of your apparently healthy compensation during those halcyon years at AIG came with, presumably, some level of fiduciary responsibility. How can you argue that you met that responsibility, short of the innocence by incompetence excuse perfected by the Bush adminstration: "nobody could have predicted?" How? Again, forgive me my indulgence, but your protestations of innocence in the events that precipitated this unmitigated disaster sound to me strangely like those of the arsonist who returns to the scene of his crime to help put out the fire and then expects to be treated as a hero.
I wish your expertise could be applied to unwind the AIG catastrophe, to save this country the billions of dollars we desperately need to invest in other places than the now worthless financial instruments assembled by your company. I wish you no ill will and genuinely hope you can rebuild your life and your career in a way that is productive for both you and your family and for the nation. But in the end, sir, in your story to this point, I see not only the depth of your betrayal, but the height of your hubris.
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Trapped Squirming Vermin
Watching the exchanges suggests to me trapped squirming vermin - evidence that Jon Stewart has these racketeers dead to rights. Dead to rights.
Saturday, March 7, 2009
The Michelle Obama Cell-Phone Portrait Session
It seems to me that many commentators are missing the broader meaning of the brouhaha over the photo of a soup kitchen cell-phone portrait session with Michelle Obama. Those who read into that photo either a contradiction or the irresponsibility self-evident in owning a cell phone while accepting help in a soup kitchen and food pantry, who saw a confirmation of their disdain for the poor and for programs that minister to them, are simply participating in a wide-ranging long term American campaign. Some various elements of the campaign with which you may be familiar include pointing out the obesity of the poor, John Galt, Rick Santelli and his Chicago Mercantile cohorts’ tirade against “losers”, the justification of obscene CEO compensation packages, the welfare cadillac, and NY Times stories about the tragedy of a former executive working as a janitor. At its root, that campaign advances the understanding that economic well-being is perfectly correlated with personal worth, that being poor, should, in and of itself, be a source of shame, is due solely to irreducible personal failings. In order to accomplish this, though, those who pick up the threads of the campaign need to ignore any countervailing evidence: structural elements of the economy, prejudice, inequality of opportunity and education. It must ruthlessly ignore that the predominant CEO compensation mechanisms are subject to positive feedback distortions, that the businesses operating in poor neighborhoods, agricultural and corporate policies, and rational decisions about how to convert money into calories conspire in determining the diet of the impoverished, that wealth can be built with activities that are not only unproductive but counterproductive to social welfare, and the role and economics of cell-phones in 2009 (not to mention a lack of any semblance of reportorial due diligence in examining the context of a particular photograph). And with this as a backdrop, it is trivial to look over the shoulder of a young black man, scornful of how he has (apparently) chosen to spend his money, secure in the superiority of our own money management, our own net worth, the content of our character.
Friday, February 20, 2009
Ya know what I'd like to see...
...purely as a dispassionate scientific inquiry, is Rick Santelli and Elizabeth Warren along with three commodity brokers, three investment bankers, three mortgage officers, three bankrupt former autoworkers, three defrauded sub-prime mortgage holders, and three workers with gutted retirement accounts, locked in a room with a stack of economic data and a rack of Louisville Sluggers. Just to, you know, verify which way the outrage pendulum is swinging right now.
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