Where are the Troops for Paul Krugman?

Paul Krugman is predicting another Depression because governments are refusing to keep pumping more money into the economies of Europe and the United States. He has written that the mistake of 1938 is being repeated. At that time, Franklin Roosevelt listened to the deficit hawks and cut back on federal subsidies meant to create jobs and fuel the economy. The economy tanked and the New Deal hit a brick wall.

After an $800 billion stimulus package spearheaded by President Obama and a Democratic Congress, job creation is stalled and deficits are ballooning. Republicans smell blood as the November elections approach. Political will has softened among moderate Democrats for more government spending to spur employment and growth. A large cadre of first term Democrats in Congress were elected in conservative districts fed up with George Bush and failing Republican policies.

But now Obama is the incumbent and his policies have become the target of an increasingly agitated American electorate. Wall Street’s collapse has left average citizens with a bitter taste in their mouths. The detritus is strewn throughout middle America. Millions of soured mortgages, confiscated homes, failed businesses and lost jobs remain as financial titans responsible for the carnage are nursed back to health with taxpayer subsidies. Polls show decisive majorities for shrinking government rather than embracing the pump priming policies of John Maynard Keynes that were the Democratic formula for the New Deal, Fair Deal, New Frontier and the Great Society. Read More »

Hello Again

After a brief respite, I’m back. I intend to periodically record my thoughts on matters of public interest. My column in Bay Area Media News papers has run the agreed upon three years and now I will record my thoughts for a vastly reduced readership. No matter. I learned a powerful lesson from having a deadline every Tuesday. The benefits to self from writing – apart from whether or not anyone ever reads your content – are awesome.

When I was a student, my seminary English professor made us write a daily essay. I remember the grueling nights spent dissecting Shakespeare’s poetry. But the forced regimen, learned long ago, to condense ideas into one clear message, has served me well throughout the rest of my life. Also, there is a certain value in the simple discipline of articulating your own thoughts and impressions only to yourself. We sometimes don’t know what we think until we reflect and organize our precise thinking.

But writers write to be read. So let us begin… Read More »

Obama in the Bubble

Election cycles, like candidates, all seem to have their own slogan.

Congressional Democrats surged back into power in 2006 because of the “culture of corruption” Republicans had fostered in Washington. In 2008, after eight disastrous years of George W. Bush, the election was simply about “change.”

This year, with unemployment hovering around 10 percent and little hope for a quick recovery, conservatives and liberals alike have pre-branded this year’s mid-terms: This year, it’s about “ordinary Americans.”

Both parties have practically fallen over themselves trying to show their commitment to the average voter. While Republicans try to cast President Obama and congressional Democrats as “out of touch,” Democrats scramble to tie the GOP to Wall Street.

Sensing danger, Obama has laid out a “reconnection strategy” to renew ties with the first-time voters and independents who swept him into office.

That’s what makes his nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court so baffling. Read More »

Challenging Celibacy

Two Fridays back, I attended the 13th annual Catholic Charities Loaves and Fishes Dinner, which my wife and I started and ran for its first 10 years. I quickly discovered that the priest pedophilia scandal has reignited the debate about celibacy within the Catholic Church.

Although many contend that there is no direct correlation between pedophilia and celibacy, Catholics in the pews are beginning to discuss the Church’s ban against a married priesthood.

Former United States Federal Attorney Kevin Ryan and his wife Ann sat at our table. As the retired U.S. Attorney in the Region, Ryan was deeply troubled by the revelations of molestation by priests against innocent children.

I recently wrote that the celibacy topic was above my pay grade but Ryan challenged me to focus a column on this important issue.

So, last week I asked my mother – a devout Catholic – whether she favored lifting the ban on a married priesthood. She was baptized as a convert at St. Felicitas Church in San Leandro nearly sixty years ago. Read More »

We called him “Kes”

We called him “Kes.” He was a big, burly guy who played center on the basketball team and hurled the shot put in track.

Kes was an excellent student; very smart. We liked him. He was our classmate at St. Joseph’s High School in Mountain View and St. Patrick’s College/Seminary in Menlo Park during the 1960s.

There were hundreds of students in the seminary and dozens in our class. The all-male seminary was filled with young Catholic teenagers and men studying to become priests from throughout the Bay Area, Sacramento and the Central Valley, as well as Hawaii.

On the two campuses, students ranged from 13 to 25 years old.

Kes and I were both students for the priesthood from the Oakland Diocese so we sometimes commuted home together on Christmas and holidays. I left in 1969 but Kes stayed and was ordained a priest in 1972.

“Kes” was Steve Kiesle, the pedophile priest who was allowed to continue in his role for years after being convicted for tying up and molesting two young boys in a church rectory in 1978.

Kiesle’s story has taken on new weight after recent revelations that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger – now Pope Benedict – ignored pleas from Oakland Bishop John Cummins to remove Kiesle from the priesthood in 1985. Read More »

Harboring Pedophile Priests

The sexual abuse of children is so vilified in our society that the mere possession of child pornography by an adult is grounds for an automatic jail sentence.

One well known local writer, Ken Kelley, died in jail after kiddie porn was found on his computer. Radio talk show host Bernie Ward is serving time for sending illicit sex pictures of underage children over the Internet.

Nevertheless, thousands of priest child abusers all over the world – in the U.S., Ireland, Germany, the Philippines and elsewhere – were allowed by both ecclesiastical and civilian authorities to roam like predators molesting innocent children.

Buried stories continue to be uncovered like mass graves at a holocaust site. Now, like Watergate slowly winding its way into the Oval Office and engulfing Richard Nixon, two new stories implicate Pope Benedict himself.

First, there is a sickening account in the New York Times of serial abuse by a Wisconsin priest who went unpunished for decades. He continued to molest children while being transferred periodically by higher ups who were aware of his history. Pope Benedict is linked to the chain of leniency.

Second, Europe has just been rocked by new revelations that Archbishop Ratzinger – now Pope Benedict – allegedly did not oust a known child molester when he led the Munich Diocese as a younger prelate. Read More »

PROGRESS

Fantastic! Triple high fives to Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi. Hail to Harry Reid, too.

Kudos to our Bay Area Democratic congressional delegation which has been out front on the battle for years – Anna Eshoo, Jackie Speier, Barbara Lee, Pete Stark, Mike Honda, Zoe Lofgren, George Miller, Lynn Woolsey and John Garamendi.

Thank you United States Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer!

A political war as bloody and monumental as the Battle of Gettysburg has been waged and won.

It’s about time Democratic leaders ignored GOP obstructionism and rejected the fiction of “post partisanship.” Health care reform is finally here.

It should have been here long ago.

Despite being the wealthiest country on earth, our embarrassing Rube Goldberg device of a health care system is ranked 37th in the world.

We are eating up a greater percentage of our GDP on health costs than Germany, France, Great Britain or Japan – all countries that have universal care. In fact, we are the only industrialized nation without universal coverage.

The health care victory was vital for Democrats. The core message of the Democratic Party is an unremitting commitment to drive progress for the average citizen. But what is “progress” for a family if they have no health care for their children?

How can we justify workers who are on a payroll but lack health insurance? What kind of society prices health care so high for workers in their 50s that employers are incentivized to jettison them in favor of younger workers with cheaper premiums?
How can we say it’s OK for a woman with a history of past illness to be denied coverage?

These injustices have been a part of American reality for so long that we are inured to their backwardness, their primitiveness, their barbarism. Read More »

Drowning Democracy

When it happened, no one is quite sure. But during the late 1970s and early 1980s, the stream of money flowing into our political system began to swell. Since then, the river has become a raging flood that is now drowning our democracy.

I remember managing my first victorious campaign in the 1970s. We spent less than $20,000 on a major race and won handily.

Another time, I was able to win a campaign for my client by spending less than $2,000. We placed brochures on the seats of every transit rider and delivered our literature door to door with teenage volunteers.

During those lean years, I needed a day job to support my forays into political campaigning. I opened a store on the San Francisco waterfront at 33 Filbert Street just to pay my bills.

I would have starved to death if I had tried to live on my pittance wages from running campaigns.

But by 1980, my fee alone for running a single congressional race in Los Angeles was well over $100,000. In 1987, my firm earned millions when I was hired to direct a package of initiatives on the California ballot. And our bill was only a slice of the nearly $80 million spent on the races.

At the time, I thought this huge sum would become a high water mark for spending. In fact, the amount has been exceeded multiple times in the intervening decades.

The mega sums now spent on elections are nothing compared to the gusher of cash paid out by special interests for lobbying and public relations. Read More »

American Gridlock

Change is supposed to be difficult. Major progress – like reforming a country’s education system or achieving universal health care – takes vision, patience and will.

But it’s not supposed to be impossible.

Especially not for the most economically prosperous, militarily powerful and politically advanced country in the world.

Still, here we are.

Nearly 15 months into the Obama presidency – with huge Democratic congressional majorities – we’re still waiting for health care reform. Our corrupt and broken banking system remains unaddressed. A climate bill? Please.

These are just a few of the big problems now confronting us. Dig a little deeper and you’ll find a rapidly deteriorating education system, a fragmented immigration policy, the looming insolvency of Social Security, and the absence of a rational plan for energy independence.

Conservatives implore the president to slow down, that “America” doesn’t want big change. They throw sand in the gears of government. So, nothing happens at all.

It’s no wonder that a recent poll showed that 86% of Americans believe our system of government is broken. Time and again we have proven incapable of addressing major national concerns without the boot of acute crisis bearing down on our necks. Read More »

Terrorism’s Exploding Cost

Last month we learned that lax security procedures allowed a terrorist to board a commercial flight bound for Detroit with a bomb sewn into his underwear. Luckily, the device’s detonator failed, sparing the lives of hundreds of passengers.

Nevertheless, the botched plot exacted a heavy economic and psychological toll.

The subsequent national uproar forced President Obama to call for full body scanners at airports and led to severely tightened security precautions at airports around the world. Air travelers reported tortuous delays and federal officials laid plans to spend $1 billion on full-body scanners.

As I watched the president and his White House aides call for even tighter airline security measures, I wondered why the gold plated equipment and elaborate precautions already in place had missed an underwear bomb.

It may feel like we’re fighting terrorism by instituting draconian security at airports and vulnerable facilities across the nation, but I am beginning to feel that the gigantic expense of defending Western society against a small band of terrorists is itself a massive victory for terrorism. Read More »

Mea Culpa!

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa are the key words of remorse in the Act of Contrition – the Christian rite of asking God and one’s fellow human beings for forgiveness of sins.

But one class of sinners seems to have dropped the need for priest and confessional.

The voting public can expect more public mea culpas from an adulterous politician than wiped out investors will ever receive from Bernie Madoff.

The press conference of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford – complete with choreographed apology – might have been a Saturday Night Live opening skit. The tearful disclosure, the excruciatingly detailed description of how his affair evolved, and the tortured explanation of his disappearance cried out for Will Ferrell or Darrell Hammond.

Sometimes – like Sarah Palin and Tina Fey – it’s hard to tell the difference between the politician and the satirist.

Last week, New York Times columnist David Brooks attacked the lack of dignity that has infected much of our public life. Citing the stoic pride of our forefathers, Brooks wrote, “The old dignity code has not survived modern life.” As evidence, he cited Sanford’s press conference, noting, “Here was a guy utterly lacking in any sense of reticence, who was given to rambling self-exposure even in his moment of disgrace.” Read More »

Disrespecting our Elders

John F. Kennedy once said that the strength and durability of a society can be judged by how it treats its elderly.

Proving his point more than four decades later, the careening state of California is considering cutting off vital in-home services to thousands of dependent seniors.

Of course, with the Golden State staring down the barrel of a $24 billion deficit that swells with each passing nanosecond, we must expect our elected officials to make difficult spending decisions.

But the proposal to dramatically slash In-Home Supportive Services is best described with one word: “stupid.”

Or perhaps two: “astonishingly stupid.”

IHSS is one of a select breed of programs that serve thousands and actually save the state money.

The program helps pay for in-home caregivers for more than 400,000 elderly and disabled Californians.

These home-care providers are often responsible for the most intimate self-care tasks that most people take for granted, like feeding, bathing and dressing. They also do day-to-day chores, provide transportation to and from medical appointments and administer various other medical and domestic services.

It’s a big job, but it doesn’t exactly equate to big bucks. The statewide average hourly wage for an IHSS provider is less than $10. In many rural California counties, home-care providers are making minimum wage for their efforts.

So, yes; IHSS costs the state money. But consider the alternative. Read More »

Too Big to Succeed

General Motors. Lehman Bros. The San Francisco Chronicle. The State Capitol. The Church. The Republican Party.

Why are these fortresses under attack?

Formerly impregnable bulwarks of our society – banks and car companies, churches, governments and newspapers – are facing convulsive challenges, wrenching change or extinction.

The printed word, long a building block of our democracy, is passing away in many communities, taking with it the local columnist and the blistering editorial. Many young people no longer find newspapers relevant to their lives.

California’s democratic government has hit the wall. The ever-widening gulf between rising expectations and shrinking pocketbooks has caused Sacramento to grind to a halt. Apparent needs have far outpaced the willingness of citizens to foot the bill. But that’s only part of the problem. The legislature seems increasingly unable to solve problems. Special interest money calls the shots.

Unbridled capitalism has fewer worshipers today than 20 years ago. And Ronald Reagan, the standard bearer of capitalism’s triumph, is a much-diminished figure after his hands-off policies toward the free market nearly ended in global bankruptcy.

“What’s good for General Motors is good for America,” now seems more like an Andy Warhol screen print than a paean to quality. The Republican Party no longer has a message that resonates. Home ownership is a questionable aspiration. The stock market is a casino. The line between borrowing and binging, success and excess, just rewards and greed has closed. The Greek columns that symbolize banks’ timeless stability are now just reminders of false promises made upon rotten foundations.

The church pews are thinning. A clergy shortage continues to pose challenges. A child abuse scandal rocks the Catholic Church. Vigorous debate over such controversial issues as contraception, abortion, gay marriage, married clergy and the ordination of women have wracked Catholicism and Anglicanism on both sides of the Atlantic. Fundamentalist Christians face off in a culture war against “godless elites.”

Our crumbling institutions suffer from many of the same ailments. Read More »

The Big Pushback

Graduation day at most American universities usually isn’t the occasion for a debate about abortion.

But don’t tell that to the tiny minority of Catholic bishops who decried Notre Dame’s invitation to President Obama to deliver the university’s commencement address last month.

In the end, their protests backfired.

Obama’s eloquent plea for common ground in the abortion debate drowned out the polarizing demonstrations against his appearance.

Echoing the words of Notre Dame’s president, Father John Jenkins, Obama asked:

“How does each of us remain firm in our principles, and fight for what we consider right, without demonizing those with just as strongly held convictions on the other side?”

President Obama appealed to our shared values, noting that while we might not agree on abortion, “we can still agree that this heart-wrenching decision for any woman is not made casually; it has both moral and spiritual dimensions.”

Most important, Obama outlined concrete steps for people on both sides of the issue to take together:

Reduce the number of women seeking abortions. Reduce unintended pregnancies. Make adoption more available. Provide care and support for women who do carry their children to term. Promote health care policies that respect science and the equality of women.

Of course, many pro-life advocates remain unconvinced. In the wake of Obama’s call for unity, they cling closer than ever to the venomous rhetoric that has been used to assail pro-choice Americans for 30 years.

Such polemics are the reason why pro-life activists have made almost no headway in changing public policy on abortion in more than three decades. Read More »

Jarvis & Reagan are Dead

The ghosts of Ronald Reagan and Howard Jarvis are all that’s left of a dying Republican Party in California.

In 1984, I managed the initiative campaign that defeated Proposition 36, Howard Jarvis’s sequel to Proposition 13. Double-digit annual property tax increases had driven Jarvis’s citizen rebellion that blasted politicians out of the water with Prop 13’s passage in 1978.

Six years later, Jarvis wanted to put additional restrictions on government taxation and spending but the voters thought Prop 13 was enough.

The best part of the campaign was Jarvis himself. A burly character with a deep, gravelly voice, Jarvis barreled ahead with a twinkle in his eye and a real gut passion for fundamental reform of state fiscal policy.

The anti-tax Republican legislators in Sacramento are what remain of Howard’s movement that began to die in that Prop 36 campaign in 1984.

Like the dull descendants of a founding patriarch, they mouth slogans and recite numbers that don’t add up. They live off the remnants of a charismatic forebear’s accomplishments. Read More »

Middle Class Meltdown

Since the 1970s, the American middle class has been the object of a violent political tug-of-war between Republicans and Democrats.

Each side has had its moments, but I bet that our economic collapse has settled the fight: We could be witnessing a Democratic realignment that may last for 20 years, or until Americans recover and become complacent again.

It is the reversal of a long trend. In sociologist Ben Wattenberg’s seminal 1974 book, The Real Majority, he wrote, “Something has happened in the United States that has never happened before anywhere: the massive majority of the population is now in the middle class.”

He reiterated the point in 1984, as Ronald Reagan’s first term drew to a close. “I believe we live in a nation that has never had it so good,” he wrote.

With such a rise in the standard of living (powered largely by debt) government was viewed as a non-profit foundation for the poor rather than an indispensable protector of the average American. Anti-government sentiment grew on both sides of the aisle.

Central to the Republican appeal was a growing suspicion among middle class Americans that their tax dollars were paying for social programs which almost entirely benefited the disadvantaged – not them. Read More »

What’s Your Job Worth?

I  grew up in a working class enclave in San Leandro. My dad was a milkman. Our next door neighbor was an airplane navigator. In our neighborhood there was a plumber, a carpenter, a mailman, an Oakland fire department captain and two Berkeley Farms Creamery drivers who worked with my father.

Each job held a fascination for us kids, and our dads were very serious about their work. We watched the carpenter build custom furniture for his own home and were proud to be coached by a genuine fire captain in Little League baseball. Of course, we were on the edge of our seats listening to flight stories by the navigator who flew all over the world.

But the value of a day’s labor in America has become dangerously distorted.

The eye-popping paychecks in the financial services industry are dangerously undermining the egalitarian ethic that helped make America the greatest country on earth.

Wall Street’s outrageous pay packages are luring a disproportionate percentage of our most talented young people away from science, engineering, technology, teaching, medicine, architecture and the arts – jobs that are vital to America’s future competitiveness. Read More »

Don’t Buy the Big Lie

For decades, corporate fat cats have warded off government oversight and regulation with a big lie: “Government bureaucrats are incompetent managers who can’t tie their own shoelaces, much less oversee or run complex corporations.”

As a young political consultant, I officially named this the “Post Office Argument.”

Thirty years ago, a disorganized and bankrupt postal service became the poster child for the government’s fiscal irresponsibility and inefficient management. Perennial deficits, cost overruns, price hikes, erratically delivered mail and scandals plagued the agency until Bay Area businessman Anthony Frank was appointed to clean up the mess.

But the negative image of the “government bureaucrat” stuck. It was then exploited by an entire generation of conservative ideologues to resist regulation. Big landlords, big energy companies – just about every arm of big business – have exploited the cliché of the flailing government dinosaur.

The Reagan-era canard has been dusted off yet again, this time to argue against federal oversight of the banks receiving taxpayer dollars meant to reignite lending. Predictably, most of the money has been used to acquire other banks, shore up balance sheets or earn interest. Lending has dried up.

America faces a dual crisis. Yes, economically, we are on the brink. But politically, our democratic institutions are failing as a forum to solve critical national problems. The same old discredited clichés are recycled as truth by paid advertising and carefully crafted public relations campaigns. Ads have become a substitute for rational discourse. Read More »

A Lesson from the Roosevelts

As a young political consultant, two books about the eras of Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt profoundly shaped my core convictions about the role of government in a democratic society: The Age of Reform, by Richard Hofstadter, and The Coming of the New Deal, by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Hofstadter was the foremost authority on the Progressive Era during and after Theodore Roosevelt. Schlesinger wrote the definitive account of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency.

These two books are more important now than ever because they provide powerful lessons about how to address our current economic crisis.

In The Age of Reform, Hofstadter eloquently described the reform impulse that began in the early 20th century and endures in the spirit of the Obama presidential campaign today. “A great part of both the strength and weakness of our national existence is that Americans do not abide very quietly the evils of life,” he wrote in the introduction to his book.

“It has been the function of the liberal tradition in American politics from the time of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democracy through Populism, Progressivism and the New Deal, to broaden the number of those who could benefit from the great American bonanza and then to humanize its workings and help heal its casualties.”

Hofstadter chronicled the role of government regulation as the only answer to the inevitable excesses of unchecked capitalism. Events at the end of the 19th century had proven that a powerful counterforce to corporate power was needed to protect the public interest. Read More »

America’s False God

By deifying the private accumulation of extraordinary wealth rather than the performance of extraordinary work, our culture worships a false god.

Wall Street has become a metaphor for a system that has forgotten basic values like sacrifice, thrift, saving for a rainy day, integrity and moderation. Unfortunately, the contributions of those ordinary Americans who work hard, raise families and play by the rules are made to seem trivial.

If we are to repair the country, that perception needs to change.

The secret to America’s success is simple: We are an egalitarian society where ideas are celebrated and equal opportunity is a protected right. Sadly, the gap between rich and poor has grown since Ronald Reagan lowered tax rates on both capital gains and personal income in the 1980’s.

We have falsely convinced ourselves that America has the world’s best standard of living. We look down our nose at countries that have higher tax rates and more comprehensive social services like universal health care. At the same time, it’s clear that neither our federal nor state governments have enough money to pay for the smaller level of services provided in the United States.

California’s projected $45 billion deficit is a prime example. The reason for chronic deficits and deficient levels of education and health services is that our tax rates are too low, particularly for the wealthy. Read More »

Your Memories of Mervyn’s

Last week, I told the sad story of the death of Mervyn’s.

I recounted my childhood memories of the first Mervyn’s store in San Lorenzo, and how that single store eventually grew to nearly 300 across 12 states with $4.5 billion in annual sales, only to be brought to its knees by corporate greed.

I received dozens of thoughtful messages from folks who came from families like my own and who wished to share their own fond memories of Mervyn’s.

The unnecessary demise of this Bay Area retailing icon evoked deep emotions. It was more like the death of a person than the passing of a department store chain.

“I remember many times when my children gathered their allowance to purchase Hot Wheels or a Barbie outfit,” wrote one parent.

Another reader recalled a time when “credit” was more personal: “When I was about eight years old, my mother would give me a note saying it was OK to charge a new shirt or a pair of shoes at Mervyn’s.

“Mr. Mervin Morris would check our account on a 3×5 card and I would soon be on my way with my purchase.”

One mother’s story showed how Mervyn’s remained true to its community roots through the years. “Our family will never forget the “Local Hero” scholarship that Mervyn’s gave our daughter,” she wrote. “It was a company that understood and honored the need to give back to its community.” Read More »

No Pain, No Gain

History is about to take a whole new generation of Americans to the woodshed. Hopefully, the old-fashioned backyard beating will leave a lasting impression about the virtues of hard work, saving money and sacrifice for others, values that made the United States the world’s greatest country in the first place.

My parents’ generation – those now in their 80’s – developed values that are as scarce today as material wealth was during the 1930s.

My parents both lived through the Great Depression, as did my grandparents. The grave lifestyle and dire conditions shaped their attitudes about both career and money.

A good job was treasured. During the 1930s, both of my grandfathers lost their jobs and never really regained their economic footing for the rest of their lives.

My mother particularly understood the importance of my dad’s job as a milk deliveryman for Berkeley Farms Creamery and later as a driver for Dreyer’s Ice Cream. In an era in which 25% were unemployed, financial calamity was always a fearsome possibility.

This had two effects on my parents. First, even though they were not deprived, they feared deprivation. Second, they stretched every dollar to provide maximum benefit for their family. Read More »

There Are No Answers

Three of the top five Wall Street investment banks have been financially destroyed in the past two months – Lehman Bros., Merrill Lynch and Bear Stearns.

If investment banking leaders created this mess, why have we tasked one of them with resurrecting the global financial system?

Consider it part of our national delusion. We blindly assume that our leaders have all the answers when they obviously don’t.

We watch as Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson improvises his way through the current fiscal crisis. In the beginning, he promised that the federal government would buy troubled assets with a $700 billion bailout fund – disbursed at his sole discretion. Then he abruptly reversed course last week, announcing that he will focus instead on thawing the still frozen credit markets.

The fact is neither Henry Paulson – nor Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke – has ever confronted a problem anything like the meltdown of the global financial system. Read More »

Keeping the Flame Alive

Barack Obama’s landslide was an awesome victory for all Americans and a personal triumph for Obama. As he strode to the podium to declare victory, it was also apparent that Obama had become the surrogate for the hopes and dreams of millions of people who were finished with the callousness, selfishness and bankruptcy of a failed governing philosophy.

It was the last battle in a long war that has raged for the past 30 years.

I remember vividly when it all began, the night Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter and the demonization of government became a mainstream political platform.

Reagan’s overwhelming victory, like Obama’s last week, brought massive gains for his party all the way down the ticket.

I was not immune to Reagan’s coattails. I was advising five Democratic campaigns in California and two of my candidates suffered razor-thin losses that would have been wins in a normal year. Read More »

Reagan Revolution, RIP

In his book, “The Crisis of Global Capitalism,” legendary investor George Soros warned that free markets needed to be supervised by a force more powerful than corporations or they would reel out of control.

Soros was prescient: “I argue that the current state of affairs is unsustainable. Financial markets are inherently unstable and there are social needs that cannot be met by giving market forces free rein.”

Nevertheless, Republicans have preached the virtues of deregulation since Ronald Reagan routed Jimmy Carter in 1980. Moreover, they have demonized government’s role as watchdog of the public interest.

Republicans so successfully undermined the vital importance of good government that they forgot how to govern in a stark emergency like Katrina. They have essentially asserted that unfettered markets would transform the world by seeding democracy and employing the planet into middle class prosperity, while deriding the concept that a powerful arbiter must protect the common good.

A blind promise to lower taxes is the primary Republican domestic platform. Frankly, it’s little more than a bribe that promises the nation prosperity and preeminence without an honest assessment of the money needed to sustain these high standards. Read More »

The Gilded Age Implodes

The Republican Party is a dying elephant. But can Democrats seal the deal with the American people and craft a 21st century coalition that rivals the power and durability of their 20th century New Deal coalition?

The 2006 midterm elections made Nancy Pelosi Speaker of the House with a sizable majority. Barack Obama is now poised to capture the White House. But it will take more than a simple rejection of George Bush to sustain a lasting Democratic majority.

The devastating collapse of seemingly impregnable financial institutions laid bare the rotting pillars of an unregulated Wall Street. Gone is the cloak of probity that allowed so many big players to reap undue rewards.

The biggest lesson of the $1 trillion bailout is that capitalism needs democratic government as much as democratic government needs capitalism. As President Theodore Roosevelt realized at the end of the 19th century’s Gilded Age, business must be overseen and regulated by government to assert and protect the common good.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan ignited a revolution by mobilizing taxpayers against the very “big government” that had rescued their parents from the Great Depression. But without checks and balances for the common good, free markets ultimately unhinge in binges of excess and greed. The gilded age implodes.

We are witnessing more than the death of our free-for-all financial system; the passing of a governing philosophy is also at hand. The question is whether we will use this moment of reflection to chart a new course. Read More »

The Snobs at the Times

With friends like New York Times columnists Thomas Friedman, Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich – does Barack Obama need enemies?

Forget the exhausted claims of “liberal bias”; the Times has a serious smugness problem on its hands. Even I – a life-long Democrat, Obama supporter, Times subscriber and daily reader – find the paper’s pomposity and orthodoxy difficult to stomach. An October 1 column on the Times op-ed page illustrates my point.

Noted Times columnist and best-selling author Thomas Friedman (The World Is Flat) was irate. The U.S. House of Representatives had just voted down the $700 billion bailout. Friedman fumed, smoke billowing from his column in great clouds:

“I’ve always believed America’s government was a unique political system – one designed by geniuses so it could be run by idiots. I was wrong. We have House members, many of whom I suspect can’t balance their checkbooks, rejecting a complex rescue package because some voters, whom I fear also don’t understand, swamped them with phone calls…”

No words more clearly illustrate the attitude of moral superiority and intellectual certainty that perfumes the op-ed pages of the New York Times. Read More »

Blind Watchdogs

As the stock market reels and storied houses of American finance crumble into the pages of history, the long-running myth of Wall Street’s superior intelligence has also begun to unravel.

A false belief in the supremacy of financial engineering over substantive accomplishment and socially meaningful labor has sapped our country’s commitment to true innovation and seduced a generation of potential entrepreneurs.

To some extent, the press is complicit. By focusing its scrutiny on easy targets in the public sector – while the financial world runs amok – the Fourth Estate has promulgated unyielding faith in the power of high finance.

But this faith has proven poisonous, allowing corporate greed, dishonest business practices and unchecked avarice to corrode not only the gilded foundations of Wall Street, but also the lives and dreams of average Americans across the country.

What about the destruction – before our very eyes – of old-fashioned values like hard work and integrity? What value system rewards the CEO of Merrill Lynch with a $150 million golden parachute following more than $30 billion in losses under his watch?

It is the same system that provided his three successors with $200 million in severance just months later after they sold the company under duress to Bank of America. Read More »

An Idea for a Better World

Even in today’s age of cutting-edge science and technology, it is important to remember that history can still be shaped by big ideas.

In the 18th century, a philosophy of knowledge emboldened the Founding Fathers to build our democracy – a system of government based on the meritocracy of ideas, rights of the individual and a free press. Capitalism itself is rooted in an innate belief in the power of individual initiative rather than the supremacy of group action – which inspired Marxism and Communism.

Philosophy can be mind numbingly boring. But it can help us more clearly see the path to a better world. Read More »

Avoiding “The Bomb”

After a long hiatus, recent events have put the “mushroom cloud” back on the front page.

On August 15, one large Bay Area city is conducting an emergency response to a simulated nuclear attack by terrorists.

There are well-founded fears that terrorists will obtain an illicit nuclear weapon and mount an attack on a large American city.

Also, the specter of a nuclear-equipped Iran has shaken governments around the globe. In some hard-line neoconservative circles, the mere possibility of Iran’s extremist leaders obtaining a bomb warrants a preemptive nuclear strike.

As nuclear proliferation becomes a burning international issue among policymakers once again, I worry that many of us have forgotten the stakes. Read More »

Expose the Real Culprits!

It is a sobering fact that a penny ante political scandal often provokes more outrage, elicits more ink and attracts more attention from law enforcement than a multi-billion-dollar financial scandal that wipes out the savings of millions of people.

Without trivializing any potential public corruption or graft, a few examples of misplaced outrage come to mind:

In 1958, Sherman Adams, Dwight Eisenhower’s chief of staff, was toppled after he accepted a vicuña overcoat from a Boston textile manufacturer.

Here in California, Secretary of State Kevin Shelley was driven from office by the twin accusations of abrasive language toward staffers and illegal campaign finance activity. Even as it became clear that he had nothing to do with the illicit campaign funds, a drumbeat of hysterical exposés about his behavior hounded him until he resigned. Read More »

Followship, not Leadership

Do leaders really lead in the political arena or do they follow?

I think our system elects followers and calls them leaders. This creates both a false perception and a false expectation.

The false perception is that politicians have answers to our problems. The false expectation is that politicians will pursue answers to our problems. The fact that neither is precisely true drives Americans’ disillusionment with their government when their expectations are unmet.

I know my analysis is cynical and not universally true. But let me explain how I arrive at my conclusion.

I can still remember a well-known client during my political consulting days saying to me, “Clint, tell me what I believe.”
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The Battle for Labor’s Soul

The biggest battle in the American labor movement today is raging right here in the Bay Area.

The epic clash is between two leaders of the same union with opposing philosophies on the same question: What is the best way to organize workers in an environment that has seen union membership decline from 28 percent of employed workers in 1954, to 12 percent in 2007?

Andy Stern, the Washington D.C.-based president of the 1.9 million-member Service Employees International Union, came to power by calling for a return to organizing workers as the best way to restore union power in America.

However, Stern has now largely abandoned on-the-ground organizing – labor’s core principle – in order to pursue cooperative alliances with corporations. These deals often trade the union’s greatest piece of leverage – political clout – for symbolic concessions of little benefit to the union’s members. Read More »

Beyond Bread-and-Butter Politics

The post-war explosion of wealth and the spread of basic financial security to an ever-wider range of Americans has altered the national political agenda.

In the Depression Era of the 1930s and the difficult World War II years of the decade following, working class Americans skirted poverty at best or were trapped in a hand-to-mouth existence.

But by the 1970s the sociologist Ben Wattenberg was able to proclaim in his book, The Real America, “Something has happened in the United States that has never happened before anywhere: the massive majority of the population is now in the middle class.”

Brink Lindsay – vice president for research at the Cato Institute – expanded on the theme in his 2007 book, The Age of Abundance, arguing that unprecedented prosperity has fundamentally transformed America’s politics. Read More »

A Legacy of Service

“It is well to be prepared for life as it is. But it is better to be prepared to make life better than it is.”

– R. Sargent Shriver

California’s First Lady, Maria Shriver, turned heads when she joined Oprah Winfrey and Caroline Kennedy at a recent rally to endorse Barack Obama for president. A Republican governor’s spouse supporting a liberal Democrat would normally evoke a loud outcry from conservatives and skepticism from the press. But Maria Shriver’s mother is Eunice Kennedy – sister of President John F. Kennedy. Her bloodlines go back to Camelot.

A lifetime lived in proximity to one of the 20th century’s great political dynasties might have been a heavy burden for a daughter of the next generation. But Maria Shriver is living proof that great parents leave an indelible imprint on a child. Read More »

The Obama Revolt

The success of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign can be explained as a partnership between a great candidate and an idea whose time has come. The winning idea is simple: democratic government has cracked beneath the weight of special interest money.

Many average American citizens have decided to fight back via Obama’s candidacy, fueling his campaign with $32 million in January alone. With their relatively small donations, they are storming the barricades in protest against the special interest campaign dollars flooding government at every level – local, state and federal.

It has been difficult to stem the tide of special interest money because it takes so many shadowy forms. Much has been written about special interest contributions to political campaigns. Now they have invented new ways to influence the democratic process, such as independent campaign expenditures, expensive trips lavished upon public officials and the illicit use of charities and nonprofit organizations for political purposes. Read More »

Capitalism Without Values

Are the barons of high finance ever called to account for their avarice, or for the billions squandered by their schemes?

A culture has evolved which allows the corporate executives of public companies to achieve monumental pay packages without investing a dime of their own money. I recently talked to the 45-year-old retired CFO of a famous Silicon Valley company who justified his $250 million stock package by saying that he had worked six days a week for five years. I thought of my father, who worked six- and seven-day weeks for 40 years as a deliveryman for Berkeley Farms and Dreyer’s Ice Cream.

Business leaders are portrayed as omnipotent gurus who blame the ills of society on a recalcitrant government bureaucracy and a self-dealing political class. The myth of the meritocracy of financial genius is perpetuated by horserace coverage of wealth, such as the Forbes 400 list. Here the accumulation of money is more than lauded; it is mythologized. Success has become so equated with money that critical professions such as teaching, journalism, medicine, public health and government service, which require a spirit of sacrifice, are made to seem less important than pure capitalistic endeavors.

But current events are challenging the myth of the omnipotent businessman. Read More »

The Streets of San Francisco

While cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles – with huge populations and complex problems – report historic decreases in crime and murder rates, San Francisco faces a wave of senseless killings. San Francisco also continues to be plagued by an epidemic of homelessness and anti-social behavior on its streets that has long since disappeared from more seemingly ungovernable cities in America, Europe and Asia.

The problem is rooted in an archaic approach to law enforcement taken by Mayor Gavin Newsom and the San Francisco Police Department.

Newsom’s 2003 mayoral campaign heavily promoted the “Broken Windows” theory of law enforcement first implemented by William Bratton, the highly successful Police Chief of Los Angeles who restored order to New York City in the 1990’s. Newsom also loudly promised to appoint an outsider as police chief who was conversant with Bratton’s widely acclaimed tactics, which have become the “best practices” for managing a 21st-century law enforcement agency. Read More »

The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia

The lines of photographs stare blankly like rows and rows of stark mug shots. These are not criminals, but the faces of innocent victims of the twentieth century’s second holocaust.

The Khmer Rouge murdered almost two million Cambodians during a bloody four-year purge in the 1970’s. Tuol Sleng Prison in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, was a school converted into a prison where more than 14,000 men, women and children were killed by the Khmer Rouge between 1976 and 1979. My wife and I visited Tuol Sleng last week. Read More »

Marshall McLuhan

Just about any consumer, traveler, artist, museum curator, entrepreneur, executive, pro athlete, sports fan, politician or religious leader understands globalization. Globalization is the mass marketing of business, sports, culture, fashion and values through the “universalization” of media. In fifty short years since 1960, the spread of mass media has shrunk the planet. All of this was predicted by Marshall McLuhan in his book “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man” published in 1964.

McLuhan observed that electronic media’s ability to transport events, leaders, political and religious ideas, celebrities, and entertainment or consumer products – even wars – into our living rooms via television would transform the world. Read More »

Philanthropy

Bill Clinton has written a new book, GIVING, about “the explosion of private citizens doing public good.” Environmentalist Paul Hawken‘s book, BLESSED UNREST, chronicles a nonpartisan humanitarian movement comprising tens of millions of citizen activists spanning every continent. Citizens no longer depend purely on government to solve social problems. Even the trendy new moniker given to non profits – NGO’s – stands for Non-Governmental Organizations. In Europe, high tax rates heavily discouraged private giving. Europeans feared they would tacitly permit government to curtail its social agenda by donating to private charities which duplicated the state’s cradle-to-grave responsibilities. However, in the United States a tradition of giving has prevailed since the founding of the republic. The French writer Alexis de Tocqueville, author of Democracy in America, observed in the 1830’s, “I must say that Americans make great and real sacrifices to the public welfare, and I have noticed a hundred instances in which they hardly ever failed to lend faithful support to one another.”

Every day, millions of Americans donate time or money to more than 1.5 million nonprofit organizations. Donations to America’s nonprofit organizations totaled 260 billion dollars in 2005. More than 80% of contributions were from individuals. The Bureau of Labor Statistics asserts that 64.5 million Americans have volunteered their time to assist a nonprofit organization at least one time per year. Read More »

Followship

Voters say they want leaders who have the courage to take unpopular stands. But election results often prove otherwise. Leaders who advocate out-of-favor positions are often defeated. Leadership conjures the image of the Old Testament prophet who goes out ahead of a wandering people and finds the way to a safe haven. The leader travels in front guiding the way. In fact, political leaders follow their constituents.

The modern science of political research enables politicians to poll voters in order to ascertain their views on any subject. Focus groups pre-test speeches, television commercials, programs and policies. Finely honed solutions are calculated to appeal to constituents – not jolt them with unwanted medicine. Political marketers, like brand marketers for consumer products, create messages for their clients that are carefully calibrated to avoid sparking disagreement. Read More »

Leadership

During the 2007/08 presidential season Chris Matthews, the touted MSNBC commentator, will utter the Leadership word ad nauseam. In fact, I heard Matthews ask all of the following questions on his Sunday August 26 show. Is Barack Obama too young to provide leadership? Are American men ready to accept leadership from Hillary Clinton? Is Rudy Giuliani’s 9/11 leadership enough to elect him President? Is John McCain too old to provide energetic leadership? Will other religions reject leadership from a practicing Mormon – Mitt Romney? Leadership is a much abused word.

Politicians in today’s 24/7 news cycle are not the only spin doctors. The constant repetition of political clichés by reporters and journalists trivializes the meaning of important words and concepts critical to our democracy and numbs the body politic like a narcotic. Read More »

Why We Need Newspapers

Al Gore is deeply concerned that a precipitous decline in reading is an ominous sign for our democracy. His new book, Assault on Reason, is an indictment of democratic government’s growing incapacity to solve big problems. The glacial, twenty-year process of making an obvious crisis like global warming a top national issue is only confirmation to Gore that rational discourse is failing to identify and resolve key social problems and conflicts. At the center of Gore’s critique is a surprising assessment: “Our facility with rational analysis is not what it used to be. The truth is reading and writing don’t play as important a role in how we interact with the world as they used to. Our ability to operate the intricate machinery of self government has always depended, to an under appreciated degree, on a widespread competence and familiarity with printed words.”

One symptom of the former Vice President’s grave concern for the decline of reading and writing in America is the bleeding circulation of daily newspapers across the nation. Here in the Bay Area, newspapers have faced significant drops in subscribers. Younger, educated readers are said to be turning to the Internet for their news. Another rationale is that today’s 24/7 pace is forcing the news consumer to cable television’s ready-when-you-are programming. But these glib rationales ignore key facts. First, statistics are clear that few Americans are reading local news on the Internet. Television news is not the same as the printed word. Local television news is only able to cherry-pick high profile, regional stories. And national television news is a headline service for breaking national and international stories. The hard truth is that a growing cadre of college- educated Americans are less informed on local civic affairs than their high school-educated parents for whom the newspaper was a daily must-read. A slow decline in newspaper readership among younger Americans undermines our democracy. Read More »

Earl Warren

As time marches on it’s easy to forget that one of the most influential Supreme Court Justices in American history began his career in Oakland in the 1920′s. After graduating from UC Berkeley Law School, Earl Warren became Alameda County District Attorney, Attorney General of California and Governor of California. President Dwight Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court in 1954. Almost immediately after his ascendancy to the High Court, Warren was confronted with a landmark legal case that would impact politics, education and the law in the nation for the next fifty years. The case was known simply as “Brown v. Board of Education.” Warren led a potentially divided Court to issue a unanimous opinion banning segregated schools in America.

The civil rights movement of the 1960′s was waged over the principles laid down by the monumental ruling of The Warren Court in Brown v. Board of Education and other rulings for civil rights and racial justice made under Warren’s leadership. Read More »

Deconstructing Public Service

Deconstructing the motives of those who serve the public interest is America’s favorite indoor sport. Consider the case of Senator John Kerry. As a young man, Kerry voluntarily enlisted in the Armed Forces and served admirably in Vietnam as a Swift Boat captain. Kerry was awarded for exemplary leadership in combat. Nevertheless, as a Presidential candidate, Kerry’s combat record was smeared and twisted until a sizeable percentage of Americans doubted his courage and deeds. A new phrase was created to describe the successful smear – swiftboating. In an era when voters are dissatisfied with government, it has become too easy to discredit honor and too difficult to confer praise where it is legitimately due.

The greatest challenge that public servants have today is communicating their good deeds. Voters are predisposed to believe negative information and reject positive facts. Politicians have always faced a wall of doubt. Today the National Inquirer would have run an expose on George Washington having chopped down the cherry tree before he had a chance to confess. How would “Honest Abe” fare on Fox News? Read More »

Decline of the Printed Word

Newspaper readership is declining. The fact is reported by newspapers. Isn’t this like the dead man reading his own obituary? The death march of layoffs, budget cuts, disappearing revenues, downsizings is dutifully told each quarter when publicly-owned newspaper companies report earnings. These reports are proxies for an industry under siege. The internet, cable television, satellite radio, free news on the web are cited as the familiar culprits.

Exhibit number one is right here in the Bay Area. The San Francisco Chronicle has lost 350 million dollars since being purchased by the Hearst Corporation in 2000. Including a purchase cost in excess of 700 million, Hearst has now invested more than one billion in the Chronicle without so much as a dime returned. In fact, the Hearst Corporation has effectively subsidized the Chronicle for the last seven years. During these seven years of fiscal pestilence, Hearst has changed publishers at the Chronicle three times. Hearst has conducted two rounds of buyouts and layoffs effecting more than 35% of the reporters and editors. Hearst has announced a plan to outsource the printing of the newspaper to a Canadian company that will produce the paper for lower cost. What Hearst has not done is to announce a plan for how it will return the Chronicle to profitability and financially stabilize one of the Bay Areas most important civic institutions. At best, recent changes will save only 20 million of the more than fifty million per year the Chronicle is bleeding in red ink. And what about Adam Smith’s outmoded concept of a return on Hearst’s one billion dollar investment? Read More »