It is my pleasure to invite you, loyal readers, to visit my page at examiner.com, an online newspaper that saw fit to hire yours truly to write about public policy in Atlanta and elsewhere.
http://www.examiner.com/x-1163-Atlanta-Public-Policy-Examiner~y2008m10d6-Racism-in-the-shadow-of-the-Big-Chicken
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-PBG
Prose and Thorn is the place to read pointed prose with a progressive social and political slant.
Monday, October 06, 2008
Thursday, October 02, 2008
The Last Money Grab
Wall Street and Main Street Lay Siege to Easy Street
Best not to get stuck on Easy Street in these economic times.
It may seem oxymoronic to think of Easy Street and Wall Street as developments on the opposite sides of an economic rift, but that is just what is being created with this economic earthquake. While denizens of both may be sweating the distance of their fall, those on Easy Street, by implication, are really confident they have found a way to come out okay.
Those on Main Street, meanwhile, run around like town folk in a spaghetti western when the bad guys ride into town, ducking into clapboard buildings, horse troughs and rain barrels, lest the meteoric fall of the economy crush them under its growing shadow. If they knew what was good for them, they would scramble to higher ground, take buggies and coaches to the gates of Easy Street and rattle the gilded cage.
The Main Streeters wouldn't be alone. At the gate on the other end of Easy Street are the folks from Wall Street. They are going through a ring of keys, desperately trying each one in the gate's chained padlock, their hands sweating while they yell at each other and shake their heads.
"It's key number two!"
"No, it's key seven!"
"I say one! Key number one!"
It will take the traders a while to realize that the bankers on Easy Street have changed the locks, and they did it with the help of congress and Hank Paulsen. "Suspicion falls ... on the objectivity of Paulsen who is a former merchant banker." - October 3, 2008, canberratimes.au.com
"A lost cause."
If we were worried before about a growing disparity and the shrinking of the middle class, we should really be worried now. We lost 159,000 jobs in September, the worst monthly jobless report in five years. According to the NY Times, "with the job market now swiftly deteriorating and fear dogging the financial system, what optimism remained has given way to the broad assumption that 2008 is a lost cause."
And with the Fed contemplating another rate cut, there is little incentive to save. Not that it matters, since over 6% of us are not working and making money anyway.
So the bankers will take this money that congress is approving and the president will sign, go inside their ivory towers and shut the gates on Easy Street and the American Dream. "...banks may continue to hoard their dollars regardless of a rescue package from Washington, depriving businesses of capital needed to expand," the Times article goes on to say. If that's the case, what's the point of the package, except that Bush and Cheney will have succeeded in bankrupting the country of more than just its principles?
I wonder if the lamest lame duck administration in my lifetime will be forced by the courts to sell their own personal assets to help settle this debt and calm the markets. Yeah. Right. They'll be locked safely away, while Main Streeters and Wall Streeters alike slowly go broke, starve and die. Brother, can you spare grande mocha latte?
-PBG
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Managing the Conversation for Change
There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.—Niccolo Machiavelli
If national elections in the United States are about one thing, that thing is change. We change from liberal to conservative, from peace to war, from a strong domestic commitment stressing economic equity to a commitment to economic disenfranchisement. We give entitlements to the poor or we give tax breaks to the wealthy. We secure the futures of our working class or gild the parachutes of CEOs and CFOs, and grant them pardons when they do to their employees what our government cannot. We vote. We change.
The thing is, you can go three or four presidents and - unless there's a war or an economic collapse - not notice a thing. Sure, you may get a little more or a little less money back from your taxes, and there is the occasional media sensation or scandal, but as long as your working, life goes on; the paychecks come in; you fill your car with gas and take your vacations and love your family and take this wonderful American routine for granted.
It should come as little surprise then, that Americans tend to wallow in the rut of secure sameness, holding on to the day-to-day like a toddler to a binky. The times that allow this static lifestyle are numbing, so much so that politicians and purveyors cannot resist taking advantage of a lulled populace, picking our futures from our pockets like back alley thieves.
Indeed, it could be said that some Americans get to choose change, while others have change thrust upon them.
Just because Bush and Cheney have run our country over the cliff in a barrel of mismanaged change does not mean we are doomed to to splat like Wile E. Coyote on the stark floor of the Painted Desert, while they peer over the edge and dusts off their hands in satisfactory glee.
Admittedly, the news of the day is not good: Wall Street is teetering; McCain has been bumped up by throngs of white men in love with the legs and lies of Sarah "Peggy Hill" Palin (or her husband); gas is over four dollars a gallon again. But all that is what happens when "change" is unfurled like a "Mission Accomplished" banner. It's not change we can believe in; it's change they want us to believe. It's the kind of change where things are really just the same, which is what they really want. Our kind of change, Barack's change, really scares them, and their chants of "burn baby burn" (oops!) I mean "drill baby drill", in turn, scare us.
I may just be paranoid, but I fear that Palin especially - with her neocon church beliefs - is using words like "some of these CEOs and top management people" as code when she says they are "addicted to other people's money." I fear that Palin will foment an atmosphere of anti-Semitism disguised as classism. That is why we have to pull together behind Barack Obama.
Obama and Biden are challenging us to believe in change and be their agents in affecting it. If this change is going to happen, we must make it happen. Unlike the current administration that just wants us to go shopping and fill our cars with four dollar a gallon gasoline, the Democratic ticket wants us to have a hand in determining the course of our own democracy. What a radical idea!
"...creating change starts with creating a vision for change and then empowering individuals to act as change agents to attain that vision. The empowered change management agents need plans that provide a total systems approach, are realistic, and are future oriented. Change management encompasses the effective strategies and programs to enable those change agents to achieve the new vision." from Managing Change: An Overview, by Nancy M. Lorenzi, PhD and Robert T. Riley, PhD, published by JAMIA, Mar-Apr 2000
Unlike the populist politics of Obama, I think that when Bush 41 had his vision of "A New World Order" he was counting on the participation of multinational corporations, NATO, the IMF, the WTO and the World Bank to help create it. They are who he wanted to "empower." Not the people. God no.
Forty-one's legacy staff in Bush 43's White House wanted to continue in that direction. Even after 9/11 happened, they still went to Haliburton and Blackwater to help fight this stupid war in Iraq. They didn't ask anything out of us except to "go shopping."According to a 2007 article published in Foreign Affairs, a publication of the Council on Foreign Relations (who conspiracy folks think are in on this whole mess), "George W. Bush has revived George H. W. Bush's call for a 'new world order' -- by creating, in effect, a new new world order." But even this cabal isn't sure the world is ready. "Because the U.S. government is viewed as having undercut many global governance structures in recent years, any effort by this administration to rewrite the rules of the global game is naturally seen as yet another attempt by Washington to escape the constraints of international law."
Included in the JAMIA "Managing Change" article there is a table entitled "Reasons for Contemporary System Failures" which lists ways in which change implementation fails in a corporate environment. One does not have to look far to find the failures of the Bush-Cheney administration in their efforts to change the USA's approach to global politics. Of course, these (in italics) are just my associations and interpretations. Feel free to use your own:
"Members of the Bush administration keep talking about what a promising moment for peace this is. The suggestion is that the departure of Saddam Hussein, and the arrival of a new Palestinian Prime Minister, Abu Mazen, has changed everything. It is hard to see precisely how Saddam Hussein was preventing the Israelis and Palestinians from making peace. What has really changed is President Bush himself.
.........................
"Commentators have fixated on the invocation of 'preemptive' military action to counter enemies seeking 'the world's most destructive technologies.' Yet this is not the crazy idea it is often portrayed to be. To enforce a robust nonproliferation regime, preemption might actually make sense in certain cases. The real problem in the new strategy is not preemption but narrowness -- the focus on three wretched governments and terrorists, and the emphasis on force, coercion, and selective treaty enforcement as the main instruments of national policy.
Conservative defense intellectuals and officials deserve credit for highlighting the fact that effective nonproliferation requires changes in the policies or governments of states unwilling to abide by international laws and norms. Yet they then proceed to make the reverse mistake, looking only at the outlaws and ignoring the challenges posed by nuclear weapons in general. So long as some states are allowed to possess nuclear weapons legitimately and derive the benefits that flow from them, then other states in the system will want them too -- including, perhaps, the successors to the governments the Bush administration currently opposes. The proliferation threat thus stems from the existence and possession of nuclear weapons and theft-prone materials, not merely from the intentions of today's 'axis of evil.'
If national elections in the United States are about one thing, that thing is change. We change from liberal to conservative, from peace to war, from a strong domestic commitment stressing economic equity to a commitment to economic disenfranchisement. We give entitlements to the poor or we give tax breaks to the wealthy. We secure the futures of our working class or gild the parachutes of CEOs and CFOs, and grant them pardons when they do to their employees what our government cannot. We vote. We change.
The thing is, you can go three or four presidents and - unless there's a war or an economic collapse - not notice a thing. Sure, you may get a little more or a little less money back from your taxes, and there is the occasional media sensation or scandal, but as long as your working, life goes on; the paychecks come in; you fill your car with gas and take your vacations and love your family and take this wonderful American routine for granted.
It should come as little surprise then, that Americans tend to wallow in the rut of secure sameness, holding on to the day-to-day like a toddler to a binky. The times that allow this static lifestyle are numbing, so much so that politicians and purveyors cannot resist taking advantage of a lulled populace, picking our futures from our pockets like back alley thieves.
Indeed, it could be said that some Americans get to choose change, while others have change thrust upon them.
Just because Bush and Cheney have run our country over the cliff in a barrel of mismanaged change does not mean we are doomed to to splat like Wile E. Coyote on the stark floor of the Painted Desert, while they peer over the edge and dusts off their hands in satisfactory glee.
Admittedly, the news of the day is not good: Wall Street is teetering; McCain has been bumped up by throngs of white men in love with the legs and lies of Sarah "Peggy Hill" Palin (or her husband); gas is over four dollars a gallon again. But all that is what happens when "change" is unfurled like a "Mission Accomplished" banner. It's not change we can believe in; it's change they want us to believe. It's the kind of change where things are really just the same, which is what they really want. Our kind of change, Barack's change, really scares them, and their chants of "burn baby burn" (oops!) I mean "drill baby drill", in turn, scare us.
I may just be paranoid, but I fear that Palin especially - with her neocon church beliefs - is using words like "some of these CEOs and top management people" as code when she says they are "addicted to other people's money." I fear that Palin will foment an atmosphere of anti-Semitism disguised as classism. That is why we have to pull together behind Barack Obama.
Obama and Biden are challenging us to believe in change and be their agents in affecting it. If this change is going to happen, we must make it happen. Unlike the current administration that just wants us to go shopping and fill our cars with four dollar a gallon gasoline, the Democratic ticket wants us to have a hand in determining the course of our own democracy. What a radical idea!
"...creating change starts with creating a vision for change and then empowering individuals to act as change agents to attain that vision. The empowered change management agents need plans that provide a total systems approach, are realistic, and are future oriented. Change management encompasses the effective strategies and programs to enable those change agents to achieve the new vision." from Managing Change: An Overview, by Nancy M. Lorenzi, PhD and Robert T. Riley, PhD, published by JAMIA, Mar-Apr 2000
Unlike the populist politics of Obama, I think that when Bush 41 had his vision of "A New World Order" he was counting on the participation of multinational corporations, NATO, the IMF, the WTO and the World Bank to help create it. They are who he wanted to "empower." Not the people. God no.
Forty-one's legacy staff in Bush 43's White House wanted to continue in that direction. Even after 9/11 happened, they still went to Haliburton and Blackwater to help fight this stupid war in Iraq. They didn't ask anything out of us except to "go shopping."According to a 2007 article published in Foreign Affairs, a publication of the Council on Foreign Relations (who conspiracy folks think are in on this whole mess), "George W. Bush has revived George H. W. Bush's call for a 'new world order' -- by creating, in effect, a new new world order." But even this cabal isn't sure the world is ready. "Because the U.S. government is viewed as having undercut many global governance structures in recent years, any effort by this administration to rewrite the rules of the global game is naturally seen as yet another attempt by Washington to escape the constraints of international law."
Included in the JAMIA "Managing Change" article there is a table entitled "Reasons for Contemporary System Failures" which lists ways in which change implementation fails in a corporate environment. One does not have to look far to find the failures of the Bush-Cheney administration in their efforts to change the USA's approach to global politics. Of course, these (in italics) are just my associations and interpretations. Feel free to use your own:
| Category | Examples | |
| Communication | Ineffective outgoing communication | |
| Ineffective listening President’s August 2001 Daily Briefing: “Bin Laden Determined to Attack” Phoenix FBI Pet Goat | ||
| Failure to effectively prepare the staff for the new system Condi and the NSA Differences with Colin Powell, Richard Clarke and Paul O’Neill | ||
| Culture | Hostile culture within the information systems organization Facts don’t matter; politics do. We'll make the facts fit. The Cheney push to reclassify documents, including a “new” kind of classification Outing Valerie Plame | |
| Hostile culture toward the information systems area They don’t have to know what we do, just what we say. We’ll make the press afraid to speak against us. | ||
| No strategies to nurture or grow a new culture Could have used the opportunity after 9/11 to reach out to the rest of the world and unite to find a way to resolve the terrorist situation in a statesman like manner. Instead, things like “Dead or Alive,” “Bring it on!” Also, dissolving the Iraqi Army, not guarding the borders. Basically not having a strategy for peace. | ||
| Underestimation of complexity | Missed deadlines and cost overruns It’s hard to be president. Surplus to deficit How many billions has this war cost us? | |
| Lost credibility Mission Accomplished. Katrina: You’re doing a heckuva job, Brownie. Medals for the idiots who planned and mishandled Iraq. Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson
| ||
| Scope creep | Failure to define and maintain original success criteria Find WMDs Welcomed as liberators It will pay for itself | |
| Failure to renegotiate deadlines and resources if criteria do change Refusal to deal with Iran Refusal to re-evaluate relationship with Russia Refusal to acknowledge the bad intelligence, even before March ‘03 Refusal to allow the UN inspectors to do their jobs | ||
| Organizational | No clear vision for the change Holding on to the Cold War mentality of an evil enemy that must be vanquished. Holding that everyone longs for democracy and freedom – also a Cold War legacy | |
| Unintended consequences 5,000 dead soldiers Longest war the US has ever fought Loss of credibility in the rest of the world Shifting allegiances to try to find a suitable ally among the sects of Baghdad. Huge deficit. | ||
| Ineffective reporting structure Abu Ghraib Reporting to Cheney and not the Pres. | ||
| Staff turnover | ||
| Staff competency | ||
| Provision of a technical “fix” to a management problem Gonzales and Rove firing Federal Prosecutors Visiting Ashcroft in the hospital to get his approval for illegal wiretaps rather than agree with the acting AG | ||
| Lack of full support of “boss(es)” Powell was against it; Lack of support of the American people, and we are the bosses | ||
| Roles and responsibilities not clearly defined or understood by everyone Scott McClellan Richard Clarke The US Military W did not ask us to play our part; he felt as though he didn't need it. "Go shopping," he said. | ||
| Several people vying to be “in charge” Cheney, Ashcroft, Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld (remember Rummy’s wanting to co-opt all intelligence for the DoD?) | ||
| Adequate resources not available from the beginning
Not enough intelligence, both the spy kind and the brain kind | ||
| Failure to benchmark existing practices Well, there have been benchmarks. They just haven’t been met. | ||
| Inability to measure success “When they stand up we’ll stand down.” They do keep moving the line lower. Can you say “everybody limbo!”? | ||
| Technology | System too technology oriented Too complicated for simple minds | |
| Poor procurement | ||
| Lure of the leading (bleeding) edge Democracy anywhere will bring democracy everywhere. We fight them there so we won’t have to fight them here. A small force ought to be enough to do it. | ||
| Inadequate testing Did anyone think this through, I mean with their brains? | ||
| Training | Inadequate or poor-quality training | |
| Poor timing of training—too early or too late | ||
| Leadership issues | Leader too emotionally committed “Bring ‘em on!” | |
| Leader's time over committed It’s hard to read stories to kids and saw logs in Crawford. | ||
| Too much delegation without control Haliburton, Blackwater and Dick Cheney | ||
| Failure to get ownership in the effort No call to join in the effort. Just go shopping. | ||
| Leader's political skills weak duh | ||
| “Lying” to get initial approval WMDs Spurious ties between Saddam and Al Qaeda Nigerian yellowcake Downing Street’s “Dodgy Dossier” |
Again, the italics are mine. The rest is from: J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2000 Mar–Apr; 7(2): 116–124. Copyright © 2000, American Medical Informatics Association
Like I said, these are just my ideas. I'm curious to know if you have your own. Let me know. Even the briefest internet search brings a handful of past news stories illustrating the issue of Bush trying to shift us to this change of his:
"Members of the Bush administration keep talking about what a promising moment for peace this is. The suggestion is that the departure of Saddam Hussein, and the arrival of a new Palestinian Prime Minister, Abu Mazen, has changed everything. It is hard to see precisely how Saddam Hussein was preventing the Israelis and Palestinians from making peace. What has really changed is President Bush himself.
"Suddenly he is taking a strong personal interest in the peace process, and putting his own personal political capital on the line. But what motivates him is still a bit of a mystery."
| | by Jon Leyne BBC State Department correspondent |
.........................
"Commentators have fixated on the invocation of 'preemptive' military action to counter enemies seeking 'the world's most destructive technologies.' Yet this is not the crazy idea it is often portrayed to be. To enforce a robust nonproliferation regime, preemption might actually make sense in certain cases. The real problem in the new strategy is not preemption but narrowness -- the focus on three wretched governments and terrorists, and the emphasis on force, coercion, and selective treaty enforcement as the main instruments of national policy.
Conservative defense intellectuals and officials deserve credit for highlighting the fact that effective nonproliferation requires changes in the policies or governments of states unwilling to abide by international laws and norms. Yet they then proceed to make the reverse mistake, looking only at the outlaws and ignoring the challenges posed by nuclear weapons in general. So long as some states are allowed to possess nuclear weapons legitimately and derive the benefits that flow from them, then other states in the system will want them too -- including, perhaps, the successors to the governments the Bush administration currently opposes. The proliferation threat thus stems from the existence and possession of nuclear weapons and theft-prone materials, not merely from the intentions of today's 'axis of evil.'
"The nonproliferation radicals recognize that the good guys of today can become the bad guys of tomorrow. So they say the United States must retain and 'upgrade' an enormous strategic arsenal forever to deter or defeat any adversary. At the same time, they argue that the new bad guys (rogue states and terrorists), unlike the old bad guys (the Soviet Union), cannot be deterred and contained and so must be eliminated quickly. The Bush administration thus essentially favors a strategy of repeated regime change plus a large, steadily modernizing nuclear arsenal.
"This bleak vision makes sense only if the determination to retain deployed nuclear arsenals forever does not exacerbate proliferation risks, and if the weapons being retained provide a necessary, usable, and effective deterrent against threats that are greater than proliferation. Since neither of these assumptions is valid, the strategy is flawed."
Bush's Nuclear Revolution: A Regime Change in Nonproliferation
George Perkovich
From Foreign Affairs, March/April 2003
BUSH: "We've got a plan in place. The plan says there will be elections in January, and there will be. The plan says we'll train Iraqi soldiers so they can do the hard work, and we are. And it's not only just America, but NATO is now helping, Jordan's helping train police, UAE is helping train police. We've allocated $7 billion over the next months for reconstruction efforts. And we're making progress there. And our alliance is strong. We're making progress.
"It is hard work. It is hard work to go from a tyranny to a democracy. It's hard work to go from a place where people get their hands cut off, or executed, to a place where people are free. But it's necessary work. And a free Iraq is going to make this world a more peaceful place."
from the first Presidential debate, Kerry/Bush-Sept 30, 2004
-------------------------------
"Our work in Iraq has been hard.
"Our agenda, in contrast, is freedom and independence, security and prosperity for the Iraqi people. And by removing a source of terrorist violence and instability in the Middle East, we also make our own country more secure.
"Our coalition has a clear goal, understood by all -- to see the Iraqi people in charge of Iraq for the first time in generations. America's task in Iraq is not only to defeat an enemy, it is to give strength to a friend - a free, representative government that serves its people and fights on their behalf. And the sooner this goal is achieved, the sooner our job will be done."
-- President Outlines Steps to Help Iraq Achieve Democracy and Freedom
Remarks by the President on Iraq and the War on Terror
United States Army War College
Carlisle, Pennsylvania--May 24, 2004
So I guess now that we have started re-regulating the financial industry, we're in for a newer new new world order. Can I order a new leader who listens to the people and not the New World Order?
-PBG
Thursday, August 07, 2008
Remembering My Mother
Be Grateful You Have Someone Who Worries
Be grateful if you ever had Betty Goodfriend's thick shabbes cholent,
Or sipped her perfect matzo ball soup on Passover,
Or dug a fork into her fluffy blintz souffle on Shavuos,
Or tasted the sweet and tangy marmalade that she made from esrogim after Sukkos.
Be grateful you had someone who worried -
You shouldn't go away from the table hungry.
Be grateful if you ever heard Betty Goodfriend tell a story of the shtetl,
Or if you sat next to her in synagogue (or in her vicinity) and heard her honest opinions,
Or sat in a classroom or a congregation and heard her talk about the ultimate evil of people
And the strength of her faith and commitment to Israel she thought
Every Jew should have - must have - in order for our people to survive.
Be grateful you had someone who worried -
You should have a Jewish education.
Be grateful if you ever had Betty Goodfriend visit you in the hospital,
Or hold your hand, or pour out the tsoris of her life to you;
Or if you had her listen to you as you poured out your pain to her
So she could offer the right advice - advice that while empathetic was not always sympathetic,
And just as often, the most difficult advice to take.
Of my mother's many such wisdoms, which in my life I dismissed so many times,
The one I will never again let go of is this:
Be grateful you have someone who worries about you.
-PBG
PS. I presented the above tribute at my mother's funeral service last Wednesday, 30 July. My mother died the previous Monday from a brain hemorrhage. She was 81 years old. I am taking some extra time this month, so I don't know when I will next post. Thank you for your continuing support.
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