Calling BS on The Republicans This Time

I saw a fascinating documentary last night.  It is Robert Reich's Inequality for All.  He served in various administrations of both parties for all of his career but he can tell you about that. 

I knew about many of the facts and economic trends in the documentary beforehand but what surprised me was that it started much earlier.  The economic trend of minimizing/eliminating the middle class goes back to at least 1970.  In other words, my entire working life has been spent as part of a middle class that has now shrunk almost to the point of invisibility.

He punches holes in one of the biggest Republican lies in current vogue - the 'impairment of the job creators' through asking them to ... well actually pay their current taxes for one thing, or pay a rate that is commensurate with the huge wealth increases they are reaping without contributing anything to the economy...and certainly not jobs.

Reich makes a compelling point that the middle class represents the true 'job creators'. After all, I don't think a CEO of a large corporation making, oh, $90 million per year is going to go out January 1st and say "I am going to create some jobs this year so I can make less money next year." 

No, for the large majority of American businesses, demand = job creation, and the middle class is overwhelmingly responsible for demand in this country and economy.  Of course, if the middle class ceases to exist or suffers huge losses in real income as they have since 1970....there is no demand, and no job creation.  Sound like any economies you know of?

This is a well done, very factual documentary and is done without the usual preachiness of someone on a pulpit.  One gets the sense that Reich is done with Washington politics and wants to very much leave it in his rear view mirror, but because he understands what is going on, he cares about what is going on.

I don't give a fig about voter ID to vote in US elections, but I really think it should be a requirement for every American voter to sit down and watch this documentary and understand it before casting another misguided vote based on the most charismatic candidate, the richest, or heaven forbid based on political party membership!

Update: That whooshing sound you heard was the Canadian middle class zooming by the US, eh?

And Now For Something Completely Different

Sometimes I think Thomas Friedman gets to have all the fun!

To H**l with SATs, ACTs, Give Me Thinkers!!

There is a lot of fluff flying about as to redoing the SATs and possibly the ACTs in reaction to that. The SAT's decision to do away with the essay portion of the tests is possibly the most colossally stupid move that they could have made. 

I swear...I would like to take all of these "universal test" organizations into a waterproof room and then fill it with water!.   They are SO out of touch with the real world.

I have been involved in hiring on and off for the last decade either as an advisor to a hiring manager or a hiring manager myself.  And I can tell you plainly, I have never been so disappointed with the candidates presented to me.   I mean, most recruiters are absolutely, completely worthless, lets face facts - it is an easy field to get into and you don't even have to really understand who you are recruiting.

But the candidates they do send are even worse.  We live in a flat world which is a world of ideas which people much smarter than me have written about. 

We live in a world where ideas are really the only marketable item for the future...and  our college graduates cannot express their ideas in any intelligible format (believe me I have tried to extract/read them).  

If you have the greatest idea in the world you have to be able to intelligently express it, support it, and define it in terms the world will understand and accept.  

Facebook/Twitter ain't going to make it folks....

No Way to Dress This Up Folks!

The US continues its race to the bottom in terms of knowledge/achievement levels for its high school students. 

Not only are we plummeting to the bottom and contesting countries such as Lithuania and Croatia for position, we have the "states rights" folks who seem determined to drive us even further down this road, each with their own narrow-minded ideals, like the folks in Tennessee who tried to declare that 'slavery never really happened'.

We have got to get our act together people -- the countries who are 'cleaning our clock' in education (like China, Japan, Canada, Australia....heck everyone) are all beneficiaries of a strong centrally administered education standards process that applies to everyone in the country (kinda like Common Core?).

"Average is Officially Over"

I mentioned elsewhere that I have been rather disappointed in the whole "boomer" generation, which is actually the "me first at all costs" generation if you scratch the surface.  I have also mentioned I am reading the book by Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum titled "That Used To Be Us: How America Fell Behind In The World It Invented and How We Can Come Back".

I am enjoying this book immensely, but that makes it a "slow read" because frankly I need to stop and think/assimilate occasionally.  This book pulls no punches, and it is full of facts and observations about the American experience the last several decades.  One of the most direct is from the chapter titled "This is Our Due" in a section entitled "The War on Math and Physics":

There is no other way to say this: Somewhere in the last twenty years of baby boomer rule, Americans decided to act as if we had a divine right to everything -- low energy prices and big cars, higher spending and lower taxes, home ownership and health care, booms without ceilings and busts without massive unemployment -- all at a time when the country was waging wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and then Libya, Our sense of entitlement expanded far beyond Social Security and Medicare to encompass...well, everything.  

How did this happen?  For one thing Washington DC showed more stupidity than is normal even for that brain-addled burg...of course the worst inhabitants are put there by the American people (paraphrased from the book):

Paul O'Neill (George W. Bush's first Treasury Secretary) warned Vice President Cheney that the growing budget deficits were unsustainable, and the huge tax cuts being pushed by the administration were unaffordable.  Cheney's response?  "You know Paul, Reagan proved deficits don't matter. We won the midterms, this is our due."  A month later, Cheney told the Treasury Secretary to find a new job.

...Senator Jon Kyl, an Arizona Republican, went on Fox News Sunday [July 11, 2010] and declared -- with no sense of irony at all -- that when Democrats raise spending in one area, the spending needs to be offset by a spending reduction in another area, but when Republicans cut taxes in one area, the cut does not have to be offset by any cut in spending.    [...] In other words, raising spending means that one and one makes two and the deficit grows.  But in the case of lowering taxes without lowering spending, one and one make one: there is no effect on the deficit.

I am getting into the part of the book where the authors map out a plan to fix things, but one very simple statement from the book that we as Americans have to understand and act on sticks in my mind:

"Average is officially over."

Mother Nature and Iran

This is a very interesting column by Tom Friedman about the challenges Iran is facing (specifically environmental) that don't make the sound-byte TV news or the headlines. 

One of the many things I enjoy about Mr. Friedman's analyses is that he has a keen eye for the complexities of a truly global world (even if US politicians still largely think the world is flat and the US solely occupies the "top" side).  He frequently looks in the 'odd corner' or for other underlying factors that the blonde TV bimbos tend to either miss entirely or gloss over.

Happy Thinking!

The Tea Party Hates the US

The Tea Party heralds itself as some kind of a heroic 'back to the roots' of America type organization, but I and a number of other thinkers I respect believe it is just the opposite.  They are in fact holding us back from the things that need done to undo the damage that has been wreaked on the country by the government and most particularly the "me generation" since the end of the Cold War. 

A Soviet expert on the United States (Georgi Arbatov) was prescient at the time when he said "We are going to do a terrible thing to you.  We are going to deprive you of an enemy."  Oscar Wilde said "In this world there are only two tragedies.  One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it."

Since the late 80s, the US has turned inward...while the rest of the world took the innovations largely fostered in the US and used them to open up the rest of the world.  In many ways we are now the cloistered, festering, ignorant country that China was before they were 'opened' to the rest of the world. The sad thing is, the Tea Party in particular but all of Washington DC in particular seems to want to keep it that way and nail the doors shut permanently.

The above link is to Tom Friedman's column, and I have just started reading his book (co-authored with Michael Mandelbaum)  "That Used To Be Us".  This linked column is essentially the theme of the book in a nutshell.  Watch this space for a review when I finish it -- it is sobering, yet hopeful reading about the future of the US and what we can yet leave our children if only we can keep the Neanderthals like the Tea Party out of the way.   

EU "Spying" Pique

I have been doing some reading on the EU's hissy fit over US "spying" on their embassies and citizens.  The embassy spying sounds bad...but come on folks, get real.  This has been going on at least since the days of horseback messengers when climbing over an embassy fence with a candle was high spy craft...and every single country in the world does it.  There is no surer way to tell embassy row in a world-class city other than the buildings bristling with antennas of all shapes and sizes...and the fact you can't get a decent Wi-Fi signal within a mile or so without a black helicopter appearing overhead.

Spying on citizens is a bit more problematic, but to be honest the EU is the new hotbed of terrorism, particularly against the US and I hope the US government does NOT stop its vigilance.  After all, if the EU is so peeved...maybe they should stop welcoming terrorist organizations with open arms.   

Enjoy That Steak

It has been known for some time that food production is yet another looming catastrophe for the world.  Climate change, plus the wasteful practices of the western world (the US throws away or never harvests almost half of its food,  and the rest of the world is not much better) is a major part of the problem. 

But it turns out the biggest problem may be prosperity -- with more countries successfully raising their living standards, the tendency is to migrate toward more animal-origin food sources.  This article talks about research in one particular area -- substitutes for chicken eggs.

In its typically informative and fact-based manner, PBS has formed a joint effort with Public Radio International's Center for Investigative Reporting to study what else is being done about the problem.