Accountability and Government spending

I was reading an article in Newsweek about private for profit companies that do contract work for the U. S. Government. I think that the topic especially resonated in light of the failure of the IT team that built the Affordable Care web site. The gist of the article was that while non-profits are held to a high standard by the government, profit based companies often are not.

The article referred to this government site and suggested taking the data on here with a grain of salt-USA Spending Government Site

And here is another interesting government site  Payment Accuracy

Twelve Steps Toward Political Revelation

Walter Mosley's 2011 book, "Twelve Steps Toward Political Revelation" is based on the 12 step program for addicts and really compares our lack of political awareness around our role to that of an addict. He explains how we are manipulated to believe many falsehoods by the power brokers of our current economic system. His term for the wealthy is to call them the "joes" in an effort to point out how they are really just ordinary human beings who have somehow managed to control our system to which we all play our proscribed roles.

Step One is simply admitting there is a problem and then defining that problem. I think we can all agree that there is a problem. 

Step Two is learning how to speak to the problem. I think that is a huge step because we are manipulated by the words that are thrown around, terms like socialism or welfare. Mosley uses this chapter to point to our failed educational system as one of the reasons we cannot have a common language to discuss big ideas. 

Step Three is telling the truth and he advocates that many of us lie to ourselves out of fear. When we see a truth but are afraid to speak out, we should write it down. Perhaps sometime in the future, we can work our way to speaking the truth. I found this chapter compelling and tried to think of an example that I could call out. One of the lies I think is that we have come to believe is that government cannot do a good job of anything. While government is not perfect, neither are profit based corporations.  

Step Four is Defining the Classes and this goes back to the truth telling. Can you really say where you fit in. He makes the point and I agree that if you live paycheck to paycheck, no matter to what scale, you are not really solid middle class. You are one bad thing away from being poor, a job loss, a sickness, etc.

Step Five is about using psychotherapy in political development and the ideas are a tad esoteric. 

Step Six is about practicing this truth telling, questioning, and re-evaluation every day. It is like any new habit, you have to do it regularly or it never catches.

Steps Seven and Eight are about becoming better citizens 

Step Nine is about not  living in the past and is one of my personal favorites. 

Step Ten is truth telling around really understanding cost and the true value of things. 

This leads to Step Eleven which is understanding your own true worth. 

Step Twelve is the coming together of minds to become greater than anyone of us. The sum is greater than its parts.

I think the idea of examining the things we are told is key. We know we have to do that in our lives. An unexamined life is not worth living. But we have to do that politically and economically as well. Who knows where it all might lead?

The Christmas Season

With the holiday season upon us, I was thinking about f how conservatives and the religious right try to claim that the country, patriotism, religion, marriage, or even holidays fall within their own purview.   They have done that with the Founding of the US, turning Jefferson and Franklin into religious zealots that they never were. 

We see the fights at city halls around the country over displaying Nativity Scenes.

It was a Republican presidency that pushed the idea that it was our patriotic duty to shop in order to restore the 2008 collapsing economy. And that idea was never truer than at Christmas time.  So I asked myself, what does Christmas mean really? is it too commercial, is it strictly a religious holiday or culturally does is now encompass so much more?

Christmas Customs

According to this website, we don’t really know why Christmas is celebrated on December 25th but it definitely looks like it has some relationship to earlier celebrations of the Winter Solstice. Before there were Christmas carols, there were pagan carols sung around the Winter Solstice. Ironically, the Puritans in England and then later after they emigrated to the US were very much against the singing of Christmas carols. They actually attempted to ban the celebration of Christmas altogether.  This trend surfaced several time in the US and it was not really until the 19 century that Christmas was taken in by more conservative Christian groups that were spawned by the Puritans.

So as with all things, the history is much less cut and dry. Perspectives change. Institution change and what is conservative now would have been radical once. We can all define what Christmas means to us and none of us have to be right or wrong.

Third World America

Arianna Huffington makes many of the points in her book, "Third World America" that I found in Barbara Garson's book, "Down the Up Escalator".  Huffington shares statistics and examples of many middle class Americans that met their demise not only from the economic downturn of 2008 but even before. Her fear, which is a consistent theme, is that there will someday soon be only those who belong in one extreme or the other. 

Defining the middle class statistically is difficult but you know it when you see it. She gave some income ranges but I felt that the low end of 45,000 per year for a household is pretty darn low if that income has to support several children and a mortgage in a location with high property values. On the other hand, if a couple is retired with a paid for home, then that can become a comfortable income. 

She points to the obvious culprits. Washington is completely broken and controlled exclusively by Wall Street and high priced lobbyist who speak for corporations and not people. While President Obama has at least tried some things to help, his successes are limited and approaches are timid. She points to the recovery act as a positive idea but because the substance was put together by politicians who are bought and paid for, it was not able to do what the WPA did during the Great Depression. 

She spends a great deal of time on the "Too Big to Fail" banks and what an obvious scam it was to bail them out. If they were in fact too big to fail, then they were too big. And why has there been no meaningful reform? Well again, we know the answer to that. You can hardly call it capitalism when corporations take no risk for loss but pocket all the profits. 

What does Arianna Huffington, publisher of the The Huffington Post suggest we can do to turn things around? A lot of her ideas are not political and fall into the realm of what we can all do as human beings to help our fellow citizens that are suffering. She also suggests we boycott the big banks and keep our money in local small banks or credit unions. This is an idea that I love and fully support. She does suggest that we absolutely must have vast, meaningful campaign finance reform. Without it, we will never be able to look to government to do the right thing. And without a government working for the best interest of the people, it is really hard to imagine that anything will ever change. 

The Digital Age is upon us

I want to showcase three writers whose work intersects with this content and helps us think   differently. The common theme within all their writing is the presumption that the economic framework, morality, and organizations of our world are not scaling well to a new digital age.

Eli Pariser is the chief executive of Upworthy. He was also on the board of MoveOn.Org.  In his book, the Filter Bubble,  he examines how the internet is filtering out what we want to see and what we don’t want to see.  That is concerning as allows many of us to filter out views that are counter to our own. This can be very dangerous in a democracy.

Then there is Don Tapscott, who wrote, “Grown up Digital” and “Macrowikinomics”

Tapscott suggests that we really need to develop new frameworks and paradigms.

Here is a quote from a Forbes interview that he gave, “In one sense, the Internet is like the discovery of the printing press, only it’s very different. The printing press gave us access to recorded knowledge. The Internet gives us access not just to knowledge but to the intelligence contained in people’s crania, access to the intelligence of people on a global basis. This is not an information age. It’s an age of communication, of collective intelligence, of major collaboration, of major participation.”

And finally, Michael Sandel is a a writer for Atlantic and his book "What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets," is an examination of how market based thinking so completely dominates that we assume we can “buy anything”. But we all know that you can’t buy love.  You can however, pay someone to stand in line for you and sell advertising space on your body if you live in Japan.  In the "Case Against Perfection," he continues this line of thought by pointing out that our morality is not evolving at the same pace as our technology.

 

Down the Up Escalator

In her book, "Down the Up Escalator," Barbara Garson chronicles real life stories from the recent "Great Recession" showing us the personal pain and loss that so many ordinary Americans experienced. She interviews a group that she called the "Pink Slip Club" where no one's life has returned to normal after being laid off from their modest but solid middle class jobs. She looks at workers in retail sales and highlights how this once secure service sector job has now become part time work without benefits. 

She tells the story of many faced with losing their homes from the mortgage crisis. In many cases, we see individuals who made bad choices to refinance at the wrong time or buy up in a speculative manner only to end up losing it all. One point she makes is that many solid citizens who once would have thought it unthinkable to walk away from debt did just that and walked away from their homes and mortgages. I can't say that this all has a distant ring for me. Some of my own friends at work were laid off during this time and I know that they often dug themselves into a deep hole by living on credit cards and dipping into retirement accounts. Even once they found a new job, their salaries never met what they once had. And my own next door neighbors, going through a divorce, found a short sale on their house to be the best solution when they found that they had refinanced one too many times and now owed more than the house was worth. 

While the book is full of individual stories, her real focus is on the cause and consequences of this long period of history where wages have not come even close to keeping pace with productivity. This has been a time where the wealth in America has gradually transferred to the hands of fewer and fewer. From the dot com bubble to the real estate bubble, it is always the average American that comes out on the losing end because they simply do not have the access or the means to weather these storms.

She ends her book with a few profound thoughts. First, she acknowledges that this is not like the Great Depression. These folks are not hungry and by in large not homeless. But they are not sure if they will ever work again and have lost any sense of security around home ownership and retirement. Planning for their own future has become day to day. We as human beings do not like uncertainty and yet we have allowed an economic system to dominate where safety nets are considered a sign of weakness.

Malcolm Gladwell

Just finished my second Malcolm Gladwell book. The "Tipping Point" triggered my thoughts around what the country would look like when marriage equality hit the "tipping point" and fortunately, we just saw that happen in 2013.
The one I just finished, "What the Dog Saw" is a collection of his writings in the New Yorker. The only one I did not enjoy was on Ron Popeil, the kitchen gadget guy. But the rest of the collection will really inspire you to look at things in a different way and that is really what this blog is all about. How can we face all the challenges we find in our world and cast them in a new light?

One of the most interesting pieces was on the Enron scandal. He points out that while we think things like that happen because of secret accounting practices that hid the problems. The truth is that they were not secret at all and it was all out there for anyone to see. But it was so completely complex and convoluted that no one was able to easily draw out what was going on. So while we definitely need oversight, it is also imperative that those overseeing the accounting need to have the skills and knowledge to understand what they are seeing.