Dickens Redux

Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona was reported to have argued on the Senate floor on Monday of this week that unemployment benefits dissuade people from job-hunting "because people are being paid even though they're not working." Unemployment insurance "doesn't create new jobs. In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work," Kyl said during debate over whether unemployment insurance and other benefits that expired amid GOP objections Sunday should be extended. "I'm sure most of them would like work and probably have tried to seek it, but you can't argue that it's a job enhancer. If anything, as I said, it's a disincentive. And the same thing with the COBRA extension and the other extensions here," said Kyl.


I am reminded of Ebenezer Scrooge's colloquy with the two gentlemen who barge into his counting house raising funds for the poor: 

"At this festive season of the year, Mr Scrooge,'' said the gentleman, taking up a pen, "it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.''

"Are there no prisons?'' asked Scrooge.

"Plenty of prisons,'' said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.

"And the Union workhouses?'' demanded Scrooge. "Are they still in operation?''

"They are. Still,'' returned the gentleman, "I wish I could say they were not.''

"The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?'' said Scrooge.

"Both very busy, sir.''

"Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,'' said Scrooge. "I'm very glad to hear it.''

And so it goes....

I suppose I shouldn't be startled by the fact that it has been months since my last post and the Republic still endures. Guess I'm just no that important.

I recently was prodded into reflection by David Brooks' recent column on the subject of his education at the feet of Bruce Springsteen. It occurred to me that the great musico-cultural influences in my early life, in Brooksian terms, were such figures as Pete Seeger, the Weavers, Woody and Arlo Guthrie and Odetta. Now, I am far from a flag-burning radical or a Communist sympathizer, and I don't have much truck with the labor union movement. In fact, I was just telling a friend this morning that I was one of those old-fashioned Republicans who voted for Nelson Rockefeller, Jacob Javits, Clifford Case, Tom Kean, Christie Whitman, et al. The fact is, far from having an interest in the success of modern day litmus-tested, "Family-member," Republican stalwarts such as Ensign, Pence, or Imhof, I am repulsed by their dogmatic, exclusionary, demagogic politics. True, "old-fashioned" Republicans like Chris Daggett are reduced to running as Independents, and I am compelled to vote for them. Perhaps this idiocy is limited to New Jersey, but it is in danger of metastasizing.

I am reduced to stringing adjectives like a looney!

It's fun to rant every once in a while!

South Carolinian Civility

Joe Wilson's outburst the other night recalled another instance of Congressional incivility, when Preston Brooks, Representative of South Carolina, confronted Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts on May 22, 1856, during the "Bleeding Kansas" crisis, and beat him nearly to death. Have health care and immigration reforms assumed the passionate intensity of the slavery debates? In both events, it was South Carolina, which boasts of a culture of gentility and chivalrous virtues.

Ooops! Cynthia Tucker beat me to it!

Bringing Sanity to the Health Care Wars

In my youth, my uncle Elliott, an insurance man, drummed into me that insurance was designed to protect against catastrophe, against those losses that our household asset base could not absorb without risking insolvency. (I recognize that businesses may use insurance for somewhat different purposes from time time. I'm focusing on non-business households.) I was always puzzled at the way the insurance industry had taken over healthcare, starting with servicing the billing and payment process. The whole system seemed to promote the attitude that we were entitled to have our healthcare bills paid by a third party, that there was something wrong with us if we had to pay medical bills out of our own pocket.

Consequently, I was recently struck by a recent column by David Brooks, Let’s Get Fundamental, and, as is frequently my wont, I decided to read a couple of the essays to which Brooks had referred. I have been getting progressively more frustrated by the so-called "health-care debate," which has been giving off huge amounts of heat but very little light. Brooks has been a steady voice in favor of reform of the system, and has focused on the perversity of the incentives in America's delivery of health care, which have driven the country to the brink of bankruptcy.

One of the essays Brooks commended appeared in September's The Atlantic and was authored by David Goldhill. In How American Health Care Killed My Father, Goldhill summarizes the situation in this way:

"A wasteful insurance system; distorted incentives; a bias toward treatment; moral hazard; hidden costs and a lack of transparency; curbed competition; service to the wrong customer. These are the problems at the foundation of our health-care system, resulting in a slow rot and requiring more and more money just to keep the system from collapsing."

Of course, his prescription is not limited to increased access to the exisitng system. In his view, with which I agree, we need to wrest the system away from the insurance middleman, and retake responsibility for our health.

A report by the Brookings Institution, Bending the Curve: Effective Steps to Address Long-Term Health Care Spending Growth, also cited by Brooks, reaches conclusions similar to Goldhill about how to move forward:

This strategy consists of four interrelated pillars. First, as a foundation for improving value, all stakeholders in the system need better information and tools to be more effective. Second, provider payments should be redirected toward rewarding improvements in quality and reductions in cost growth, providing support for health care delivery reforms that save money while emphasizing disease prevention and better coordination of care. Third, health insurance markets should be reformed and government subsidies restructured to create competition and improve incentives around value improvement rather than risk selection. This step requires near-universal participation in insurance markets to succeed. Finally, individual patients should be given greater support for improving their health and lowering overall health care costs, including incentives for achieving measurable health goals.

It will be interesting to see what the President's prescription is. Has he allowed the dysfunctional legislative train to get too far down the track? There's no question in my mind that he and his people understand the perverse incentives emmbedded in the current system. Does he have the courage to put on the brakes and stake out a new direction? We'll see.

PIMCO's Common Sense

I never thought that PIMCO would vote for an inflationary Fed policy and monetizing long-term Treasury Debt. But Paul McCulley, in his "Global Central Bank Focus," has just done so, in a very perceptive and balanced speech to the Money Marketeers Club. McCulley points out the policy paradox we find ourselves in, with a need to greatly expand the nation's balance sheet through borrowing while the private economy is deleveraging with a vengeance. This has the Republicans and traditional conservatives predictably frothing at the mouth. The policy prescription also calls for vastly expanded temporary federal spending to fill the demand gap, again causing the GOP leadership to pull out what's left of their hair. As McCulley puts it, the Fed has placed itself at the service of fiscal policy, normally the province of the Congress.

He also deftly points out the difficulty of the Euro Zone, where the ECB has the power to conduct a unified monetary policy, but no unified political authority exists to exercise fiscal policy. As he puts it,

To be sure, the ECB (European Central Bank) has difficulty with the concept of QE [quantitative easing], in part because Euroland represents monetary union without political union and, thus, fiscal policy union. Put differently, if the ECB wants to be accommodative of more Keynesian fiscal policy stimulus, de facto monetizing it, what fiscal authority does the ECB call to cut the deal?

I thought this was great stuff. I have been a recent convert to reading Bill Gross, but I think I will start following Paul McCulley as well. We're all Keynesians now!

Moderates Unite (cont'd)

I was searching madly earlier for support for the view with which I agree that are no backups for the propeller-heads, particularly the Props-in-Chief, Tim Geithner and Larry Summers. Well, Deborah Solomon in the WSJ has it nailed. While lack of staff is a problem throughout the Administration, it is especially tough on Treasury, which is bearing the brunt of the bailouts.

And Solomon's piece lays the blame on the difficulty vetting prospective candidates in light of the post-Daschle standards.

Moderates Unite

Again, I find that this morning David Brooks speaks to my sense of unease with the new administration's early moves. About all I can say for our President is that he is within the first 45 days. As I emailed to my friend Prince Charles of Birmingham yesterday, What choice do we have?

I am struck by Brooks' observation that, "The only thing more scary than Obama's experiment is the thought that it might fail and the political power will swing over to a Republican Party that is currently unfit to wield it." So we are kind of stuck, and the quandary Brooks and I (and no doubt many others) find themselves is that we have no home.

As I said to Birmingham Charlie yesterday, I am a lifelong Republican, but of the Rockefeller variety. Somewhere along the way, my party got hijacked by a bunch of ideological "whack-jobs" with whom I find I share no values whatsoever. I long for a return to a Hamiltonian view of government, with a Constitutional mission to "promote the general welfare," in such a way that all the people benefit.

I do agree that the need to save the economy should not necessarily sweep aside the addressing of important goals, such as health care and education reform. But fiscal discipline has always been part of the Hamiltonian credo.

My faith in our new President has not entirely dissipated. But I would like to see some backup to the propeller-heads that Obama has assembled. Geithner needs an Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy, for Debt Management, for Economic Policy, and I am sure other key posts. Neel Kashkari, a Paulson holdover, is still running TARP. How long does it take to sort out the Plum Book? Probably too many casualties to the no-lobbyist, no "tax cheats" Puritanism of the new guys. As the Washington Post reported many in Washington (and in Bedminster) feel that the problems of the markets and the economy are too complex to be left to Larry Summers and Tim Geithner.

So what's my course? I am tempted to fall back on the mantra of Julian of Norwich -- "All will be well; all will be well; and all manner of thinge will be well." But she was a Anchorite and lived in a box! What did she know about credit default swaps and CMOs?

The Fox and the Hedgehog

David Brooks' column this morning  put me in mind of Isaiah Berlin's famous essay, "The Hedgehog and the Fox." The title was based on a fragment from the Greek poet Archilochus about the nature of knowledge: The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. There is naturally lots of disagreement abut the meaning of these words. Typically, the scholars might postulate that the fox for all his cunning is defeated by the hedgehog's one defense. Berlin goes on to suggest a quite different interpretation: Essentially, this describes the differences among human beings. On one side are those who think in terms of a single organizing principle giving meaning to all that they think and experience. On the other are those who pursue many ends and ideas, very possibly unrelated and contradictory, moving through their lives operating on many levels, without any compulsion to fit their experiences or thoughts into any overarching framework. The first group constitute the "hedgehogs," the second the "foxes." Berlin proceeds to relate this to the domain of aesthetics, classifying Dante as a hedgehog, Shakespeare as a fox, Pushkin a fox and Dostoevsky as the quintessential hedgehog. I don't need to follow the meat of his essay, which goes on to explore the appropriate place of Tolstoy.

My question of the moment is: Where am I in this great dichotomy. And the corollary (because I have such deep faith that Barack Obama is the right man at the right time to lead at this turning point in American, and perhaps Human history) is where is President Obama. I note from today's survey results that I am not alone in my confidence in the President. But where are we being led? If I have developed any philosophy over the years, it is pragmatism: If it works, use it, it has meaning; and if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Obama and his "propeller heads" may not have the answer, may not even know the question, but we have to wait until it plays out for at least a few bars. Too many are prepared to condemn policies and approaches out of ideological prejudgments. My tentative conclusion is that the President is the Fox-in-chief at this stage, and I believe that is the right place to be.

As for me, I too am a fox, but a pretty pitiful one. As I said last night, I believe the old saw: If you can keep your head when all about you men are losing theirs, then you probably don't understand the situation. 

Rev. Lowery's Benediction

Rev. Joseph Lowery's benediction was so moving and such a high point of January 20th, that I couldn't resist setting it out in my journal. You can also watch and listen to it here.

God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, thou, who has brought us thus far along the way, thou, who has by thy might led us into the light, keep us forever in the path we pray, lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met thee, lest our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget thee.
Shadowed beneath thy hand, may we forever stand true to thee, oh God, and true to our native land.
We truly give thanks for the glorious experience we've shared this day.
We pray now, oh Lord, for your blessing upon thy servant Barack Obama, the 44th president of these United States, his family and his administration.
He has come to this high office at a low moment in the national, and indeed the global, fiscal climate. But because we know you got the whole world in your hands, we pray for not only our nation, but for the community of nations.
Our faith does not shrink though pressed by the flood of mortal ills.
For we know that, Lord, you are able and you're willing to work through faithful leadership to restore stability, mend our brokenness, heal our wounds, and deliver us from the exploitation of the poor, of the least of these, and from favoritism toward the rich, the elite of these.
We thank you for the empowering of thy servant, our 44th president, to inspire our nation to believe that yes we can work together to achieve a more perfect union.
And while we have sown the seeds of greed — the wind of greed and corruption, and even as we reap the whirlwind of social and economic disruption, we seek forgiveness and we come in a spirit of unity and solidarity to commit our support to our president by our willingness to make sacrifices, to respect your creation, to turn to each other and not on each other.
And now, Lord, in the complex arena of human relations, help us to make choices on the side of love, not hate; on the side of inclusion, not exclusion; tolerance, not intolerance.
And as we leave this mountain top, help us to hold on to the spirit of fellowship and the oneness of our family. Let us take that power back to our homes, our workplaces, our churches, our temples, our mosques, or wherever we seek your will.
Bless President Barack, First Lady Michelle. Look over our little angelic Sasha and Malia.
We go now to walk together as children, pledging that we won't get weary in the difficult days ahead. We know you will not leave us alone.
With your hands of power and your heart of love, help us then, now, Lord, to work for that day when nations shall not lift up sword against nation, when tanks will be beaten into tractors, when every man and every woman shall sit under his or her own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid, when justice will roll down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.
Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around ... when yellow will be mellow ... when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right. That all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen.

The opening lines of Rev. Lowery's benediction come from the hymn, now a Gospel standard, "Lift Every Voice and Sing":

Lift every voice and sing, till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise high as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us;
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.

Stony the road we trod, bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died; 
Yet with a steady beat, have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered;
We have come, treading our path thru the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past, till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

God of our weary years, God of our silent tears,
Thou who has brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who hast by thy might led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we meet thee;
Lest our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget thee;
Shadowed beneath thy hand, may we forever stand,
True to our God, true to our native land.

Words: James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938)

Music: J. Rosamond Johnson (1873-1954)

You can hear it here, rendered by Chip Days.

But the best part is Rev. Lowery's peroration, an inspired take-off on Big Bill Broonzy's blues song "Black, Brown & White."

Cromwell Dissolves the Long Parliament

It was suggested after I posted Wolsey's Farewell from Henry VIII that another, perhaps more appropriate, send-off was Oliver Cromwell's words dissolving the Long Parliament in 1653:

It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonored by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice; ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government; ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money.

Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not possess? Ye have no more religion than my horse; gold is your God; which of you have not barter'd your conscience for bribes? Is there a man amongst you that has the least care for the good of the Commonwealth?

Ye sordid prostitutes have you not defil'd this sacred place, and turn'd the Lord's temple into a den of thieves, by your immoral principles and wicked practices? Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation; you were deputed here by the people to get grievances redress'd, are yourselves gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors.

In the name of God, go!

In any event, Tuesday was a wonderful day not only for supporters of President Obama (i.e., 80% of the American People) but also for those of us (probably the same 80%) overwhelmingly gratified to see the back of GWB and his cronies.

Larry Summers

All the talk about Larry Summers as possible candidate for Treasury Secretary reminds me of listening to a talk he gave 10 years ago to the New York State Bankers Association. The talk was so dense and opaque that many in the audience looked about, wondering whether they would be given a snap quiz on the subject matter.

The problem appears to me to be that Mrs. Summers' little boy Lawrence doesn't play well with other kids. Stanley Fish hits the nail on the head: Summers does not possess the virtues that a Treasury Secretary needs at this moment in history, when there are likely to be tense negotiations with Congress, foreign finance ministers and other stakeholders, before a way out of the current economic crisis is fashioned.

Death to Intellectuals

You may think from recent posts that I have an unhealthy obsession with Sarah Palin. The triumph of Barack Obama's election is the signal it sends, at least to me, that the intellect has not been totally discounted in this country, despite an alarming rise during the Bush reign of Know-Nothingism and scorn for rational thought. Sarah Palin represents to me the end-product of the Bush gestalt, and so I remain anxious for the future of thoughtful, rational, analytical government.

Dick Cavett on Sarah Palin

For those of you who might have missed it, Dick Cavett's blog entry today, The Wild Wordsmith of Wasilla,  on the subject of Sarah Palin and the death of language is masterful. I commend it to all who love America's "native" tongue.

If you want to watch Matt Lauer's interview, have fun:

Part II:

The Republic has survived a lot, but this may be a sign of the end.

John Cleese on Sarah Palin

I thought this was too funny.

The Palin-Couric Interview (SNL version)

Here is Tina Fey's take on the Palin-Couric interview. Amazing....

http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/video/clips/couric-palin-open/704042/

George Packer

George Packer says it all. The hypocrisy has reached new heights in the wake of the failure of the so-called "bail-out bill." What an unfortunate label. Was it the MSM that gave it that moniker? Whoever did bears some of the blame for whatever follows Black Monday II.

I have never heard so much drivel from our nation's supposed leaders. It lends a new dimension to my friend Kit's observation that "politics is the least demanding of all the professions."

Embarrassing

Pretty bad, and another reason for shunning John McCain, is the incident involving his interview with Spanish language station Caracol. Embarrassing is the word.

Dave Barry on the New Hampshire Primary

MANCHESTER, N.H. -- The voters of New Hampshire have made their decision, and the big winner is: Change. Here's the final vote tally:

Change -- 43 percent

Hope -- 28 percent

Hope For Change -- 17 percent

Hair -- 9 percent

Experience -- 2 percent

Dennis Kucinich -- 1 percent:

Now it's time for the politicians and the press to drop New Hampshire like an ant-covered corn dog and sprint for the airport, leaving the residents of The Granite State to spend the rest of the winter plucking 239 billion candidate signs out of their snowbanks, all the while wondering if there ever really was a candidate named ''Mike Gravel,'' or if that was just teenagers playing a sign-planting prank.

Meanwhile the eyeballs of the nation will turn toward the Next Crucial Phase of the presidential race, South (or North) Carolina, which at the moment is the epicenter of the political world, not to mention Dick Harpootlian. I have not, personally, conducted any journalism research in North (or South) Carolina, but based on sitting in my hotel room eating Cheez-Its and thinking about it, I would say that the issue most on the minds of voters there, at the moment, is: Change. Although of course that could change.

Meanwhile there are many unanswered questions about the races in both parties. On the Democratic side: Is Barack Obama for real? Or is he, as sources inside the Hillary Clinton campaign have suggested, a hologram formed by laser beams? Is the nation truly ready for a hologram president? And speaking of Hillary Clinton: When her eyes appeared to well up with tears during a campaign appearance at a New Hampshire diner, was thatreal welling? Or did she fake the welling? If she did, in fact, well, do we know for certain that those were her own personal tears? Why was no sample made available to the media for testing?

Among the unanswered questions on the Republican side are: Is John McCain, at 117, too old and cranky to be president? Like, during the White House Easter Egg Roll, would he come outside in his bathrobe and yell, ''You kids get off my lawn!'' Does Mitt Romney contain any human DNA whatsoever? Does he, for example, burp? Can he emit bodily aromas? And is there any TV show that Mike Huckabee will NOT appear on? Are we going to see him one of these nights on Deal or No Deal? Why does anybody, aside from Howie Mandel's immediate family, watch that show?

These are only some of the questions that we, as a nation, will be trying to answer in the critical days ahead. But before we do, let's take a moment to look back on both the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primaries, and ask ourselves if these two non-representative states -- which have, between them, roughly the same total minority population as Gladys Knight and the Pips -- should play such a huge role in selecting our presidential nominees. This is a very complex issue, with many strong arguments on both sides.

No, sorry, correction: It's actually a simple issue. The Iowa/New Hampshire system is insane. It's like a 50-table restaurant with a big, varied menu, except that only two tables are allowed to order. If these two tables order clams, for example, or Michael Dukakis, that's what gets served to all the other tables. But at this point I don't think there's anything the rest of the states can do about it. Iowa and New Hampshire will do anything to be first. You populous states can't beat them, because they want it more than you do. They're like the people who camp out for two weeks so they can be in front of the line to buy tickets for a hot concert, except that instead of a hot concert, it's a chance to shake hands with Duncan Hunter six different times. Tough luck, residents of populous states! At least you don't have to deal with the snowbank signs.

Anyway, this concludes my New Hampshire coverage. I will write further campaign reports as events warrant, meaning after I do my laundry. Until then, America: Don't go changing.