Morning Fog

Citizens, Soldier On Without Soldier Citizens

In the upcoming U.S. Congressional elections next week, the Republican Party candidate in my district is a retired U.S. Army Colonel; and the Green Party candidate (believe it or not) is a retired U.S. Navy career man, though I forget now the rank he attained.  There are a number of other ex-military people running for office locally, and the same phenomenon is noticeable in many other races I read about across the country.  I'll watch with interest this coming week to see how many of these candidates get elected.  In the current political environment, their chances are pretty good, as voters seem willing to try almost anything.

I've expressed my view before that notwithstanding the achievements and dedication of our career military force, we lose something of value to our society when we allow the professional military to bear the whole burden of a war, and we also risk our democratic tradition of civilian control of the military by doing so.  A professional force, no matter how effective, needs the leavening of exposure to a civilian mindset to avoid becoming an insular warrior caste.  That's why we we still need conscription in our society.

It's the caste mindset that concerns me when I see military professionals flocking to run for public office at all levels of government as they now seem to be doing. Gen. McCrystal was not an isolated case. It's known that many military officers, in recent decades, harbor contempt for civilian leaders, and impatience for the messy and sometimes slow nature of decision-making in a democracy.  They (the military) think they can do better.  A few may; most cannot, because their successes usually have been won in a rather one-dimensional arena that is far less complex than the broader civilian political environment.

The greater danger is that to the extent military professionals quietly (and not necessarily with malice aforethought) assume civilian political leadership roles, we then have the military in charge of the military.  And that is a danger.  Here too, some may succeed in totally reinventing themselves adopting a purely civilian approach to issues; most will not.  And here too, conscription provides the answer. 

Civilian society needs leavening too -- by exposure to a military approach -- and the way we've always achieved that was to create a pool of civilian soldiers who learned about military issues and solutions but left the profession after two or three years.  When they ran for political office, they remained civilians.  The current crop of candidates, I fear, does not.

In Politics, Follow The Money

I've heard it said for many years that money wins elections.  All things being equal, goes the conventional wisdom, the candidate with more bucks to spend on advertising will come out on top.  Like many such "common knowledge" principles, it's true enough, often enough, to be believable, even though there are many exceptions.  And it's true enough that the media spend inordinate amounts of time tracking how each party's/candidate's fundraising is going, compared to his/her opponent's. 

Still, it's a depressing feeling, in a democracy, to keep reading all the front-page stories about who is raising how much money, as if that were all that mattered.  Obama's recent personal campaign efforts have partly driven that money talk off the news, yet even in covering it, journalists always have to add that he raised X million in Washington, or Y million in Massachusetts.

Further, as Obama has pointed out, more depressing still is the fact that organizations, from corporations to unions, are now free to spend as much as they can raise on political advertising, as long as they don't consult with a candidate.  With their much greater purchasing power, such organizational oaks threaten to drown out the low murmurs of the grass roots, further distorting the political process.

If the overweening role of money in our political process is a disease, is there a cure?  One hasn't been found yet.  The one value of publicizing the fundraising factor may be that it could spur at least some voters to explore the issues behind the ads more thoroughly.  It's a weak reed on which to base an election system. 

Inflation - Should We Encourage It?

I'm generally a fan of James Surowiecki, who writes the financial column at The New Yorker.  He explores interesting economic phenomena, generally gets it right, and is able to present often murky economic concepts in a cogent and understandable way.

In one recent column, he defended - in fact, lauded - inflation as a beneficial economic phenomenon.  Quoting a 1996 study of attitudes toward inflation, he notes that most people think inflation lowers their standard of living and makes them poorer.   Surowiecki argues that this is misguided.  Inflation, he says, benefits most and does little harm to anyone.  But I would have to disagree with this characterization.

The columnist concedes that the exception is people on fixed incomes or living on their savings, who are indeed damaged by inflation.  Then he writes them off as (apparently) not worth further consideration.  Yet it's common knowledge that the percentage of oldsters in our population continues to grow; the fixed-income crowd is large now, and getting larger every year.

There's a second category of people who are also damaged by inflation:  People on defined-benefit retirement programs.  It's odd that Surowiecki would leave out this group, because I recall reading in his column, perhaps about two years ago, of this very phenomenon.   As inflation proceeds, salaries and prices edge upward together in general.  But those who depend on some form of inflation adjustment (this is usually based on the government's cost of living index) such as anyone on social security or most government and military pension plans, will experience gradual but significant loss of real buying power over time. 

Surowiecki himself explained it better than I can, but the problem relates mainly to timing.  In a year when prices and salaries increase by 5%, the cost of living is not measured until the end of the year; by the time it's reflected in retirement income, costs have continue to rise still more.  Frequently, the actual measured rate of inflation is also reduced for political reasons, so that the 5% increase is "compensated" by (maybe) 3.5 % or less. 

These differences sound small, but they can add up surprisingly quickly.  I can recall my father's surprise to find that my starting salary as an army lieutenant in 1970 was more than his had been ten years earlier as a full colonel with 30 years' service.   His pension, of course, was based on some percentage (probably about 70% - fairly generous, right?)of that salary, with cost of living increases.  But it wasn't a question of having just slightly less buying power than I did; it was less by roughly half, after only 10 years. 

In short, far more people are affected negatively by inflation than Surowiecki admits; and unlike the rest of the population, those people have no way to maintain buying power.  No wonder then, that most of us fear inflation.  We can accept that it's inevitable, over the long term; but we shouldn't be consciously working toward it.    

Juan Williams? Never Heard Of Him, But...

Juan Williams, described as a former "commentator" for NPR, got fired.  Many reports suggest that was due solely to comments he made regarding being nervous about Muslims on airplanes.   Would NPR have been right to fire him for that reason? No.

But that wasn't the issue.  Was NPR right to fire him because he had consistently overstepped limits established by NPR for a "commentator?"  Yes. 

I don't listen to NPR much but when I catch it on radio accidentally I am usually impressed by its efforts to present both sides of an issue, and to deal in facts, not opinions.  Could NPR, as Williams claims, have been looking for a pretext to fire him?  Perhaps.  After all, Williams's overall record (not just this one incident) damaged his credibility as a balanced newsman.  At the same time, his apparently frequent guest stints on Fox News shows suggests that he was really looking to bolt to Fox anyway, so the score seems about even on this one.

Why then the tempest?  Republican politicians who would under any other circumstances defend an employer's right to terminate an employee for cause, are in this case wailing about "defunding NPR."  They demonstrate not only their hypocrisy but their ignorance, since in fact NPR isn't  funded by government.  But factual or not, it makes a good stick with which to stir the pot of politics.

Will Republican Wins Change Them?

David Broder's column intrigued me today, first because it is datelined Lawrence, Kansas - a place where I matriculated - but more so because it offers a fairly rosy view of how American politics might change after the elections two weeks hence.

Using his presence at the Dole Institute of Politics, Broder recalls how "it used to be," as the headline in the print paper says, when country came first for politicians, and evokes the careers of Dole and a close colleague, Gerald Ford, as examples of how the two parties used to work together. 

Broder also attributes to Obama the view that it should be very possible, even productive, to work with the Republicans after November 2.  The theory there is that the GOP (if its results are less than expected) might conclude that its strategy of "no" didn't work, or conversely (if the Republicans succeed in retaking the House) that they would realize voters are looking to them to produce solutions.  Either way, it might be possible for the President and both parties to work together on issues.

That would be a wonderful outcome, and it's probably what the American people are hoping for, but I think it's a little too optimistic.  There might be some chance under the first scenario (Republican candidates do less well than hoped), but hardly any if Republicans do as well as pundits now predict in these mid-term elections.  Instead, I think the current mood is more likely to drive them toward an overexultant expectation that they can go back to the failed policies of the Bush II administration and seek to undo changes that have been made in the past two years.  Further, moderates in the Dole-Ford mode are scarce these days in either party, so from whence could a move toward more bipartisanship develop?

Still, I suppose we can keep our fingers crossed and hope for the best.   

Interpreting The Law

In his "The High Court" column recently, Robert Barnes describes how the work of the Supreme Court often boils down to interpreting a word or two in a law.  The law has always been very much a word game, so it hardly comes as a surprise that the Supremes play it too. 

What's surprising, if Barnes's depiction is accurate, is that the justices seem to spend a lot of time trying to determine the exact meaning of some word or phrase.  Yet the reality is that there is no such thing as an "exact meaning" for most words (the exception may be a few words that describe simple concrete objects).

Instead, the thing that makes two words of similar meaning different is often something we know, or perceive, but that isn't ever in a dictionary.  One of the cases described in the article involves whether the plaintiff "filed" a complaint when he told his boss orally.  The justices reportedly batted around the question of whether "filing" requires something in a written form. 

If we think about it, however, filing might be written, but the concept that distinguishes it from "telling" or "announcing" is that something has been presented at a higher level to a person or body that might be expected to act on it.  It's not the same as telling your buddy over a cup of coffee, or even griping to the press.  So in this case, when the worker told his supervisor that a certain act was illegal, there is no question in my mind -- that's filing!

Legislators who write the laws play the word game too.  They're often more interested in political hairsplitting than in clarity.  This gives justices the best opportunity to "make law."  And make no mistake, the conservatives and the progressives both do it.  Barnes describes the court attempting to decide if damaging side effects from a drug are "unavoidable."  Strictly speaking, nothing is ever "unavoidable," and the writers of the law probably knew that language could easily be challenged.  Most of us recognize that that word means "unavoidable under existing circumstances," while lawyers will argue it means "unavoidable under any circumstances."  Depending on their own political predilections, justices will arrive at an interpretation based on whether it benefits the plaintiff, the defendant, or an abstract concept of "The Law."

I'll wager the justices have fun with these arguments; there is no profession better suited to grammar geeks and wordsmiths than jurisprudence.

 

Savings In Government

"There's gold in that tha'r red tape!"  

This appears to be the message from a group of high-powered business execs, who have analyzed how some software developments recently applied in business might be able to save big bucks in government operations, too.

The ideas presented seem rational, and in this age, businesses, governments, and individuals alike are all looking for ways to save money.   Further, it can be done, when conditions are precisely right -- at times in the past, government has successfully adopted new ideas to streamline operations and save money. 

But I remain a bit of a skeptic regarding the feasibility of applying some of the recommended "fixes" to government, mainly for two reasons:

First: Government and business are different. 

I've had both education and training in both sectors, and I have seen plenty of business executives who were going to reform government, make it more cost effective or save it money by applying the "lessons" of the private sector, who foundered on one simple disconnect:   They did not understand that government works differently, and with different goals.  Profit isn't the motive in government; in fact, I've often argued that government seems inefficient largely because it's charged with solving the most difficult problems, and usually those in which the monetary returns are unlikely.

One of the examples cited in the above article is that government might save by eliminating mispayments in outlays like Medicare, food stamps, or tax refunds.  Undoubtedly there is room for eliminating error here, yet caution is required.  In the private sector, the elimination of error and speed in processing can take precedence because a corporate entity is responsible for its own bottom line, and has no requirement to consider the customer as an individual.  In government at all levels, the focus is -- and by taxpayer desire and Congressional mandate, must be -- on the effects its actions have on the individual. 

Of course there can be awful mistakes in either case, but if the business accidentally forecloses on a homeowner whose payments are not in arrears, there is no consequence, and it's dealt with by an offhand admission of error, often after the fact and with no remedy.  If the government does the same, perhaps denying a social security check to someone who depends on it, the consequences are dire and government hasn't done its job.

Second:  Funding is different.

In business and government alike, even the smallest improvements usually require funding.  The CEOs quoted in the above article can make their decision to spend money quickly and without fuss; a million or two to install a new information system is peanuts, and can be funded out of profits. 

In government, there is no uncommitted pool of money sitting around waiting to be used, or available to be swapped to a new use.  Every penny in the budget is the result of a hard-fought battle; in the federal case, it's between government managers and administrators, on the one side, and Congressional appropriators and others on the other.  Obtaining new funding for anything is always difficult (Congressmen don't like to increase new taxes), even if it promises to save millions.  Further, a request for an extra million to implement some of the ideas the Technology CEO Council is suggesting is likely to take three years to be approved (if it is approved at all).  This is the reason that government adoption of technology often lags years behind the private sector's.

I'm sure the Council's recommendations are sound and could procure significant savings; I'm equally sure that they will some day be implemented; but until we change the way government is funded and the attitudes of Congress about funding it, that day will always be long in coming. 

China, And Its Sea

A couple of weeks ago Robert Kaplan wrote "China's Caribbean," about China's growing power in the South China Sea, its attempt to create a blue-water navy, and the threat that it could come to dominate sea lanes and trade routes as far away as Afghanistan and Australia.  Just a few days later, Anne Applebaum also sounded the alarm, somewhat more shrilly, about "China's Quiet Power Grab," lamenting in particular (as did Kaplan) that while we fight and expend billions to provide "security" in Afghanistan, the Chinese have moved in to land a contract to exploit that country's copper and possibly other resources.  

Obviously these journalists aren't the only ones alarmed, because the curiously close timing of their two reports suggests that there's someone out there, in government or the CIA, who's also concerned and has chosen to leak a report, or share intelligence.  So, time for the first grain of salt:  The alarm on this question may exist largely in the mind of one surreptitiously influential person.

Is the Chinese ability to control trade routes, and to corner the market in key minerals and resources, a threat to the U.S.?  It certainly seems so, at first glance.  In traditional terms, economically powerful nations have sought to maintain control of the resources they need.  Think back to Dutch efforts to monopolize the spice trade, and to keep secret the sources of some of the most esoteric tropical spices; or consider why the U.S., rich in many resources, nevertheless expends billions to fight wars and/or create stability in the petroleum-rich Near East, where we have no other clear national interest; or again, why in WWII the resource-poor Japanese were so bent on controlling the resources of China.

So, potentially serious problem, yes.  Can we do anything about it?  Probably not.  I believe the change would have come anyway, and probably at about the same pace, both because of conscious Chinese policy decisions and because economic power generally translates into military power at some point. 

On the military side, it may be true that our squandering of our military power and of our investment base over the past 20 years has helped China to develop its own quietly and without attracting attention.  Realizing that now won't help us much, though.  We can't regain that lost "edge" -- mere recovery from the waste of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could easily take a decade or more, even if we were to back away from them immediately.   

Economically, a more far-sighted perspective is that we enabled the rise of China three decades ago, when we threw in the towel on our manufacturing industries and allowed nearly everything we use to be made in China (and some other countries).

Where the global economy is concerned, will China use its control of key resources to quadruple the prices of (for example) cell phones?  That seems unlikely.  Another way of looking at the issue is that, if we're going to concede to China the role of "producer nation of practically everything" (which we have in fact done), maybe we ought to welcome its efforts to control the resources it needs to manufacture those items; it could make for lower, rather than higher, prices. 

There's another cost issue afoot, too:  The larger a nation's military establishment, the greater the cost of maintaining it, and the greater the drag on the productive economy.  If China is really adding a major military component to its global profile, it is planting the seeds of its economic decline.

  

The Politics of Childishness

Here's an old-fashioned riddle for you:  Why is the U.S. Senate like a typical third-grade elementary school class? 

The real trick of the answer to this one is that there are probably at least a dozen equally valid "correct" answers, and none of them is a compliment to the Senate.  But the one I'm thinking of just now is that they both have "recess."

In today's Washington Post, Steven J. Bradbury and John P. Elwood have written a revealing look at what's occurring, recess-wise, in the Senate right now (see "Call the Senate's Bluff on Recess Appointments").  As these writers point out, the grudging approval by the Party of No that allowed 54 long-delayed Presidential nominees to federal positions to go forward carried with it a gentlemen's agreement between the two parties to keep the Senate in pro-forma session during the long pre-election recess.

This might seem meaningless (a pro-forma session requires only that one sole member of the Senate appear to momentarily open the session, then immediately gavel it closed again) except that it is being used as a ploy to prevent the President from using his power of recess appointment.

As Bradbury and Elwood also point out, the recess appointment was provided as a way to keep government functioning.  There is strong precedent to suggest that the current pro-forma sessions, at which no business is, or possibly can be, done, do not truly break the Senate's "recess," and the President would be within his rights to proceed with appointments.  Finally, the writers also point out that this pointless posturing, if allowed to stand, could become yet another of those many arbitrary, senseless, delaying political tactics (with which the Senate is already replete) that could make this legislative body even more gridlocked than it already is.

The proposed answer, that the President should challenge the concept of pro-forma sessions by moving ahead with recess nominations, seems to be a sensible one.  Future Presidents of either party would applaud his doing so.

But I'd move one step further.  Let's eliminate "recess" entirely.  In the 19th century (seemingly about the last time the Senate considered changing any of its rules), long travel times to distant constituencies may have justified lengthy recesses.  As everyone but Senators knows, that is no longer the case.  Senators don't like recess appointments by the President, and it's probably a good check on the power of a President to require that the Senate confirm higher-level appointees. 

Abandoning recess entirely would solve the problem; the Senate could be fully engaged in providing its advice and consent.  There might be one or two recesses during the year of no more than a week each; otherwise, Senators could depart Washington any time to visit their constituencies but, like any other working stiff, they'd have to decide on priorities -- is it more important for me to be here for the important vote on proclaiming a National Reptile, or to be home drumming up funds?   A secondary benefit to national politics would be that a bit of the overwhelming advantage in elections that accrues to incumbents might be eroded a little bit.

And, in the end, the Senate might be a little less like a third-grade class of petulant kids, and start functioning more like regular working adults with real jobs.  With this start, maybe they could also work their way around to giving up the eternal game of "Jimmy stole my ball and won't give it back!" (i.e. the Senatorial "hold" on nominees),   

Responsibility

Two recent news stories demonstrate the continuing diminution of personal responsibility as a part of our societal and civic psyche. 

On a national scale, Congresspersons facing elections soon are rushing to get on the bandwagon of a "national freeze on foreclosures."  The idea is that a lot of "innocent" people are losing their homes to foreclosure.  The counterargument is that a lot of not-so-innocent people - speculators and get-rich-quick schemers are also losing their shirts on real estate investments.  Further, the "freeze" is just further meddling with a process of economic recovery that no one really understands, or knows how to control.  Nor is it clear that we need a law to govern something that lenders appear to be doing already -- after all, not every foreclosure is unjustified.

Even the "innocents," however, are in difficult situation that were often of their own making.  Loans greater than the assessed value of a property?  Adjustable-rate mortgages with ridiculously low initial payments and balloons five years later when the state of the economy would be a complete unknown?  No down payment?  None of these is a sensible idea for anyone whose income has limits; just because lenders were willing to make such loans doesn't mean it was a good idea to enter into them.

The idea that either category of foreclosed homeowners should be rescued from the consquences of their own decisions reflects dangerously fuzzy thinking about the nature of personal responsibility.  If Congress collectively believes a humanitarian case can be made for stepping in to rescue the "innocent" group, they ought at least to be willing to tailor legislation that would define that group without including the speculators.  Any such freeze might allow for postponement, but not forgiveness, of debts accrued. 

On a local level, people who built or bought houses on an unstable oceanside cliff seem to think the government ought to pull their chestnuts out of the fire, too.  Many are inclined to blame the "puritan tiger beetle," an endangered insect whose habitat includes these cliffs, and thus prevents efforts to "stabilize" the cliffs.  The facts are, though, that a house on a cliff 20 feet from the sea (now 6 feet) is inherently dangerous; that the process of building these homes itself helped destabilize the cliff; but that the sea inevitably would have done so. 

Again, no one need consider just accepting his/her own personal responsibility and coping with the consequence.  Bad individual decisions for some reason trigger efforts to spend taxpayers' money to resolve them.  The current plan is for $4 million in mostly federal funds to help these property owners relocate.  That would certainly be cheaper than an ongoing, 20-, 50- or 100-year battle to shore up cliffs that will never be stable; but should we fund even that much?  Do these folks have insurance?