Category Archives: New York Times

Who Will Stand Up to the Superrich?

Frank Rich wrote an interesting article, today, in The New York Times, Who Will Stand Up to the Superrich?

Rich tells us that Americans don’t hate the rich; in some cases even admire the rich. The wealthy who lost elections, he goes on, also provided jobs for people. Rich, though, tells us that we should worry about another kind of rich American, the unseen:

The wealthy Americans we should worry about instead are the ones who implicitly won the election — those who take far more from America than they give back. They were not on the ballot, and most of them are not household names. Unlike Whitman and the other defeated self-financing candidates, they are all but certain to cash in on the Nov. 2 results. There’s no one in Washington in either party with the fortitude to try to stop them from grabbing anything that’s not nailed down.

This is serious because a democracy requires an informed citizenry; however, if this citizenry can’t see, we therefore aren’t ever sure where ideas and their motivations come from, thus trust suffers a serious blow.

As Rich suggests, “The bigger issue is whether the country can afford the systemic damage being done by the ever-growing income inequality between the wealthiest Americans and everyone else, whether poor, middle class or even rich.” Are we prepared to live in a country where the evidence — physical and otherwise — will uncover an abyss between the superrich and rich and the working class, and by working class I mean, as is evident in Rich’s column, people earning less than $200,000 and below? (Believe me, this isn’t a lot of money)

What happens in this world, this “new normal,” as we like to say, is that we lose our narrative, we can’t trust it; we also begin to sense that perhaps it’s never exited. Rich says, “That burden is inflicted not just on the debt but on the very idea of America — our Horatio Alger faith in social mobility over plutocracy, our belief that our brand of can-do capitalism brings about innovation and growth, and our fundamental sense of fairness. Incredibly, the top 1 percent of Americans now have tax rates a third lower than the same top percentile had in 1970.” The entire American concept is Romantic — it’s a romantic story that grows out of Enlightenment thinking. The trick, actually, is to reach for the Romantic sense of authenticity that shuns aristocratic values for real experience but never quite really getting there; this keeps us going or moving towards a vision of what’s real, what’s truthful. In my mind, this is what Rich is pointing to — the erosion of this Romance with the real, the lived experience, the authentic self and the journey towards that self.

I read Rich’s editorial as an explanation of the law of unintended consequences — that is, as the rich, those unseen ones especially, continue to garner more of our resources to sustain their lives, we, the workers of America, begin to realize that we’re in fact working to sustain that small percentage of citizens that reap the rewards of our labors. Thus, a percentage, an increasingly larger percentage of our value — our worth — is determined, according to Rich, by people we don’t know and people who are pulling at strings we don’t see.

How do we work through this? What do we have to do to better understand our roles in the world of labor (yet to come for you)? How does Rich make you feel? What is the relationship between Rich’s editorial and McKibben’s Eaarth?

Smart-Growth Policy Splits Environmentalists

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In class and in our reading we’ve been learning about the divide between the environmental justice movement and the environmental movement. This article talks about another split in the environmental movement; between those who support investing in a “smart-growth policy” in urban areas and those who don’t. Developing environmentally friendly “green” building projects (parks, housing) seems like a good idea, but the Sierra Club has been experiencing a lot of opposition. Many club members are against the new focus on urban environment and “see efforts to promote density as colluding with developers.”

Do you think this represents an outdated vision of environmentalism? Is incorporating urban development into the environmental movement a good thing? (Do you agree with Arreguin, that the club should “look at the bigger picture of how (we) can be more sustainable”?)

And finally, is it possible to bring these movements together despite the apparent conflicting ideals and differences?

Is There Hope?

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Through our discussions and readings, we can all agree that corporations will do anything to maximize profit, even at the expense of the environment. As Emily’s article pointed out, companies that try to utilize environmentally friendly techniques will only continue to do so if they are benefitting.

Nonetheless, about a month ago, an interesting article was published in the New York Times about the Cascade line of detergents. Because of stricter regulations that were enforced in 17 states, detergent producers such as Cascade were forced to reduce the amount of phosphates from their products. Users of these detergents were not very pleased with the results. Check out the article: Cleaner for the Environment, Not for the Dishes.

Do you see this as a step that will generate more changes that will help the environment? Or do you ultimately think that corporate interests will prevail?

In Denial of Climate Change

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In this editorial, In Denial of Climate Change, we learn about a perspective that’s being taken by some Republican candidates.

The candidates are not simply rejecting solutions, like putting a price on carbon, though these, too, are demonized. They are re-running the strategy of denial perfected by Mr. Cheney a decade ago, repudiating years of peer-reviewed findings about global warming and creating an alternative reality in which climate change is a hoax or conspiracy.

This is a perspective that’s not uncommon among many people across the USA. I wonder, then, what we have to do to demonstrate that we, indeed, have affected — and continue to affect — Nature?

These elections (November) and this mediated hype without debate comes at a time when we’re witnessing the questioning the “value,” “worth” and significance of the Humanities in colleges and universities. For instance, there is a debate, ongoing, in Do Colleges Need French Departments.

In her response, Martha Naussbum argues that,

Cuts in the humanities are bad for business and bad for democracy. Even if a nation’s only goal were economic prosperity, the humanities supply essential ingredients for a healthy business culture.

Nations such as China and Singapore, which previously ignored the humanities, are now aggressively promoting them, because they have concluded that the cultivation of the imagination through the study of literature, film, and the other arts is essential to fostering creativity and innovation. They also have found that teaching critical thinking and argumentation (a skill associated with courses in philosophy) is essential in order to foster healthy debate inside a business world that might too easily become complacent or corrupt.

We in the U.S. are moving away from the humanities just at the time that our rivals are discovering their worth. But a healthy business culture is not all that life in America is about.

What might be the connections between Republican rejection of man-made climate change, the media hype without debate or dialog, and the willingness of citizens to accept the notion that climate change is happening — and has happened — outside our influence?

What Democracy?

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Following our discussion on Thursday, defining terms — Democracy, Socialism, Communism, Capitalism and The Yankees — several parallel stories have appeared that suggest the struggle and the tension we discovered in our exercise, in our discussion.

Please examine these, carefully, and again per group (each group, except one, still is behind and has to do the Scott Page post), determine HOW these stories define Democracy/Capitalims/Us and HOW these stories parallel Empire of Illusion.

The first story is from Terry Gross’s Fresh Air, ” ‘Citizens United’ Ruling Opened Floodgates on Groups’ Ad Spending.”

The next 2 are not stories, but rather, commentaries. First, Bob Herbert, writing for the New York Times, in Policy at its Worst, tells us that, “We can’t put the population to work, or get the kids through college, or raise the living standards of the middle class and the poor. We can’t rebuild the infrastructure or curb our destructive overreliance on fossil fuels.”

The next opinion, also from the Times, is by Charles M. Blow, High Cost of Crime. Here, Blow informs us that, “Our approach to this crime problem for more than two decades has been the mass incarceration of millions of Americans and the industrializing of our criminal justice system. Over the last 25 years, the prison population has quadrupled. This is a race to the bottom and a waste of human capital. A prosperous country cannot remain so by following this path.” Take a look at how much a single murder costs — then ask yourself: why do we incarcerate more people than anyone else in the industrial world?

The last story, which parallels Hedges’ chapter, “The Illusion of Wisdom,” and written by the indefatigable Camille Paglia, was sent to me by Izzy Ocampo. In “Revalorizing the Trades,” Paglia asks, “what if a student wants a different, less remunerative or status-oriented but more personally fulfilling career?” She responds to her question, saying that, “There is little flexibility in American higher education to allow for alternative career tracks.”

In a moment, Paglia sounds a lot like Hedges:

Jobs, and the preparation of students for them, should be front and center in the thinking of educators. The idea that college is a contemplative realm of humanistic inquiry, removed from vulgar material needs, is nonsense. The humanities have been gutted by four decades of pretentious postmodernist theory and insular identity politics. They bear little relationship to the liberal arts of broad perspective and profound erudition that I was lucky enough to experience in college in the 1960s.

Examine each of the stories and the editorials, then discuss, online, how all this fits our notion of the struggle for democracy, our struggle for the truth?

Some (perhaps) Depressing Updates

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Panel Blasts Government On Gulf Oil Spill Response

October 7, 2010
A preliminary report released Wednesday by the federal commission investigating the BP oil spill blames the Obama administration for misrepresenting “the amount and fate of the oil” in the Gulf of Mexico.

Scientists and Soldiers Solve a Bee Mystery

October 6, 2010
Since 2006, 20 to 40 percent of the bee colonies in the United States alone have suffered “colony collapse.” Suspected culprits ranged from pesticides to genetically modified food.

Obama talks green, GOP talks freeze

October 2, 2010
Wind, solar and other clean energy technologies produce jobs and are essential for the country’s environment and economy, President Barack Obama said in promoting his administration’s efforts.

The president used his weekly radio and Internet address Saturday, a month away from congressional elections, to charge Republicans with wanting to scrap incentives for such projects.

The End of Nature, FEMA Trailers, and Bed Bugs

Are We Pulling in the Same Direction?

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Or are we pulling against what we need, since, as Thomas Friedman says, all we have are big problems?

In Too Many Hamburgers, Friedman says that, “For democracy to be effective and deliver the policies and infrastructure our societies need requires the political center to be focused, united and energized. That means electing candidates who will do what is right for the country not just for their ideological wing or whoever comes with the biggest bag of money. For democracies to address big problems — and that’s all we have these days — requires a lot of people pulling in the same direction, and that is precisely what we’re lacking.”

The editorial is interesting in that it points to a particular need for changing our perspective — and our energies, particularly when it comes to work. It’s very similar to what I said in class, Tuesday, about doing rather than waiting to be told what to do?

Since you guys all determined that geography establishes a context for success — kids with mothers and fathers that are college grads are more apt to go to college and succeed, for instance, to say it in a general way, and the concomitant social class follows this success, thus the inverse is true, too — might the malaise America is in have had some collective affect on the psyche of our citizens, including you? I mean, your generation’s touchstone is 9/11, since, you’ve experienced decline after decline, negativity after negativity, politically speaking, and you’ve experienced the dumbing down of the public sphere where nothing but a gloss of contemporary America is possible, particularly when mixed with hatred, so I’m wondering what your opinion might be concerning how these conditions affect us psychologically and perhaps hinder what we focus on?

A Recovery’s Long Odds

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In A Recovery’s Long Odds, Bob Herbert, of the New York Times, discusses how “Americans are not being honest with themselves about the structural changes in the economy that have bestowed fabulous wealth on a tiny sliver at the top, while undermining the living standards of the middle class and absolutely crushing the poor.”

Herbert is pointing us in two directions: first, that Americans appear to be delusional — or that somehow we’ve been complacent with the direction leaders — and the media — say we’re heading. The notion that American citizens are dormant is beginning to get some notice. Arianna Huffington, in her new book, Third World America, evolves this notion, but gives us some solutions — how to turn this around. You can hear a good interview with here in On Point: “All countries have rich and poor. What Third World countries don’t have is a strong middle class. Neither, right now, does the United States,” says Huffington. The second notion is that of course, following on Huffington’s notion of a declining middle class, is that we have a huge gap in wealth acquisition — the disparities are now too great not to be noticed.

The middle class is finally on its knees. Jobs are scarce and good jobs even scarcer. Government and corporate policies have been whacking working Americans every which way for the past three or four decades. While globalization and technological wizardry were wreaking employment havoc, the movers and shakers in government and in the board rooms of the great corporations were embracing privatization and deregulation with the fervor of fanatics. The safety net was shredded, unions were brutally attacked and demonized, employment training and jobs programs were eliminated, higher education costs skyrocketed, and the nation’s infrastructure, a key to long-term industrial and economic health, deteriorated.

Of course, this has everything to do with sustainability – can we sustain the America we have or, perhaps better put: can we sustain the America we’ve had?

Since we’re heading towards Bill McKibben’s End of Nature, it’s appropriate to wonder how deeply the human alterations of nature have gone; that is, it may be that our processes and procedures, our ways of living — socially, economically, intellectually and spiritually — have genuinely altered our ways of being, socioeconomically, and now we find ourselves, like nature, on the ropes.

After reading End of Nature, Herbert and Huffington, I wonder what you think about where we stand in America — and where we may be heading? To put it another way, as first years, what do you see down the line for you in 3 or so years? Or, what do you have to do now to prepare to what seems to be an alternate state of being, one quite different than you’re perhaps accustomed to?