#383 – Dick Bernard: The Quandary for Big (and Small) Business, and its impact on all of us.

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This mornings New York Times (NYT) had an interesting article about a St. Paul area business man reluctant to hire workers.
A couple of days earlier the Minneapolis Star Tribune had an equally interesting column by a long time very prominent business executive essentially rebutting the oft-repeated and false argument of conservatives that taxes will cause a drain of business to lower tax places.
The two news pieces are among many similar commentaries these days, but people tend not to read information, particularly that which does not support their own view of reality. So we have the continuation of our economic storm.
Capitalism is, it seems, tying itself in knots.
“The Quandary”? See the end of this commentary.
For some reason, the Times column caused me to revisit a little adventure from several years ago, and this afternoon I jumped in my car to view in the present day what I had first viewed eight years earlier, June 19, 2003, in Fridley MN*.
On the way home I traveled by the company featured in the NYT column. It is a small place across the street from the tony suburb of North Oaks (below, click on photo to enlarge). I’m always curious how such places and people get chosen for news analyses, out of hundreds of thousands of possibilities.

Vista, in Vadnais Heights MN June 10, 2011


I had been at the Fridley company the pleasant June day in 2003 when George Bush visited. The place looks, today, much as I remember it eight years ago:

Micro Control Co. Fridley MN June 10, 2011


That visit by the President of the United States was one of the most tightly controlled events one could possibly imagine. I could understand avoiding protestors with anti-war signs; but even Bush’s supporters were denied even a glimpse of the motorcade, and they were not pleased. Here is what the President said that day in June, 2003, less than two months after we had “won” the war in Iraq (oh, we were naive then…and still). The Presidents message emphasizes tax cuts, along with some bragging about the War on Terror, and assorted other promises. It is worth reading the history in President Bush’s own words eight years ago this month.
The Quandary: The Alliance of Business and Conservative Ideology has won the battle, but simultaneously lost the war…for all of us.

I have no doubt that corporations and government are full of very smart people, and that leaders of organizations of all types are also very smart. But there is all manner of dissonance between what is stated as truth and what is real. Compare George Bush’s dream in 2003 against the reality only five years later, in mid-2008.
Capitalism is a philosophy that thrives on consumption of goods, which generates revenue through spending of money, which generates profits, and something called the multiplier of money (a dollar spent is actually more than a dollar, because it is spent over and over.) But in many ways the contemporary economy has become nothing more than a gigantic Ponzi scheme. People need money to buy goods; if fewer people have money to spend, less goods can be bought. If the money spent is borrowed (credit card) etc., it is actually not money in hand. It is only a debt to later be repaid.
The rich, who were the greatest beneficiaries of the Bush tax cuts, generally put most of their money out of circulation (personal savings). It is money for which they have no immediate use. The poor, on the other hand, need to spend all of their money, and even if they spend it foolishly, it goes into circulation. It can be argued that the poor stimulate the economy more than the rich, simply because they spend their money to survive.
During the years of false prosperity in the Bush years, particularly 2001-2008, the Iraq War was financed off the federal budget books – on borrowed money. The borrowed money brought false prosperity, but also a debt that has come due.
At the same time the economy needs to be stimulated, largely by government infusion of capital, while the conservative drum beat is to strangle government, which costs people jobs, and again cripples the economy. Corporations are sitting on mountains of cash, but decline to hire people for one reason or another. In the long run they are hurting themselves and the country.
The only solution is an informed and active citizenry – you and I. Are we up to the task? We ARE, after all, the government.

UPDATE: Overnight came a most interesting commentary that supplements the above. It is worth a read as well.
* – What I wrote June 19, 2003, about President Bushs visit:
Well, I went. Along with quite a few Republicans, I didn’t even see GWB’s limousine, much less the little guy himself.
We were at a sort of non-descript warehouse type of building in the Minneapolis suburb of Fridley, the headquarters of the company at which he was appearing. We thought we were at the right door. About 1:15 pm CDT, I heard what sounded like a muffled cheer coming from within the building, and I think it was then he made his grand entrance through the back door. I guess we should have had a clue when a U-Haul pulled up to the same front door a few minutes earlier to load up stuff. Hope springs eternal. I wasn’t the only one fooled.
The small consolation is that he “stiffed” everybody – including true believers with tickets who couldn’t get in, and were waiting to see their patron saint, and perhaps even press the sacred flesh. They were not inclined to complain…at least not within the group along the roadside with us.
If you had any interest, you saw the lucky true believers on TV, from inside the warehouse. The disciples looked to be basically very well dressed. Apparently a few dissidents got in, but I don’t know for sure.
It was a beautiful day, and I was surprised that there weren’t more people. There was a good enough crowd, but even on a work day I have seen much higher attendance at political events. Somebody said there were a couple of thousand in the building, which seems a bit on the high side. Anyone who was seated in the building had to go through what seemed to be pretty tight security. The rest of us – perhaps a thousand or so – cooled our heels outside.
There were a few peace activists there (good for them), and beside them were a few true red-blooded Americans, most with their “Liberate Iraq” signs. Either the red-blooded American liberators didn’t hear the president’s speech from the USS Abraham Lincoln, when he said that Iraq was liberated; or he’s told them something that he hasn’t told me; or they thought the signs were too good to waste, after all the official war was very short. An hour or two before the Chief was scheduled to arrive, at the front of the liberator contingent was a little girl, perhaps five, waving a flag bigger than she was, and reciting the mantra over and over “God bless America”. A true patriot, doubtless.
At one point, a phalanx of peace activists quietly approached the front lines – where the Republicans who couldn’t get in, and I, were standing. It was a quietly uncomfortable time. One of the well-dressed types asked another “what do the masks signify” (some of the protestors were wearing masks, I guess). There was no answer, except somebody said they were “rabble rousers”. All this happened very gently. “Minnesota Nice” was dripping.
One young lady with a sign talking about 79,000 lost jobs per month during Bush times, was an object of some derision by two well-dressed people, a man and woman. The man wondered if the demonstrator was an exempt or non-exempt employee. No one directly took her on, however.
Some adult lady in my section sang the first stanza of God Bless America, but no one joined in. She went a little ways down the line, and tried again. Still no takers. Somebody said “Star Spangled Banner”, but no one went there, either, including the singer.
Two protestors came through behind us, one chanting “Who is a terrorist?”, to which the other responded “Bush is a terrorist.” A tall well dressed young guy standing near me, who I had thought must be a secret service agent, dark glasses and all, sort of under his breath muttered “Liberals with radical ideas are terrorists”. I guess I am a terrorist…. He apparently was not a secret service agent. Shortly after that, he disappeared.
Actually, I felt a bit sorry for the Republicans who apparently had tickets for the event but couldn’t get in. I don’t know what the snafu was. I had zero interest in going in, so it didn’t bother me.
Right before leaving I visited briefly with three women who were protesting. We had a nice visit. Peace people are peaceful people!
I left with a guy who does independent media stuff, and he suggested a visit to www.twincities.indymedia.org [his work is most likely no longer on-line, though the web address still is active]. Go to “The rest”, click on “Search”, then select photos and Bert Schlauch, and you’ll see some excellent stuff he has posted (and doubtless will post about today). The site is a very good one. So there you have it.
We have a virtual president. The closest I came to actually seeing him today was five mobile transmission towers for the television stations.
Keep the faith. Keep on, keeping on!
Peace.

#382 – Dick Bernard: Lying our way to mediocrity, and perhaps worse….

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In two years and 381 blog posts, I can think of only one other posting in which I emphasized a single piece of writing I had seen elsewhere.
Today is the second.
I’d highly recommend a reading of this lengthy item, “The fascinating story of how shameless right-wing lies came to rule our politics” by Rick Perlstein in Mother Jones magazine. (There are endless self-righteous and always anonymous comments on this article, as with most articles. I never waste much time reading these arguments back and forth.)
OK, you’ve already tuned out because you’re conservative and you align with the right wing, and you’ve heard Mother Jones magazine is lefty or worse, and you think you know how biased I must be…. (On the final point, you don’t know, but no matter.)
Fine.
Bill Clinton’s famous 1998 lie is in this article. Democrats don’t get a pass*.
But as Perlstein points out, for sheer volume and gall, there is no contest between the right-wing disinformation machine and the left.
To speak truth in politics in this age is to be a loser, and the more lies you can convincingly tell, the better. This goes for high profile clergy, as well as everyone. You’re taught to lie with gravitas. “The ends justify the means.”
My favorite political lie, recently, is not in the article. Recently former vice-president Dick Cheney was quoted famously, about Paul Ryan’s crusade in Congress. The May 26 quote can be read and seen here, plus an earlier statement on the same general topic by the exact same person, taking precisely the opposite public position.
The simple response to this business of political lying, which I have heard with my own ears, is “they all lie”, which gives the person making this claim the permission to lazily vote for the individual he/she prefers (or not vote at all), without getting into the fine points of whether their candidate has any grasp of the truth, or even cares.
It is rationalized that in politics, the truth really doesn’t matter: “they all lie”.
But it definitely does matter.
As most all of us learned when we were kids, what goes around comes around.
What happens to us individually, when we lie and finally get caught, is no different than what will happen to our entire society, if we don’t start paying attention to facts versus fiction*.
We the people are the government of the United States, not the Legislators we elect (and who we seem to loathe as a group as they do battle against each other.
We have asked for, indeed demanded, what we detest.
We get exactly what we deserve.
* As I was writing this, Rep. Anthony Weiner of NY (Dem) admitted, after days of denial, that he indeed did the infamous Twitter and several others in past years. He becomes only the most recent in a long list of politicians caught in personal lying about sex – his Twitter caper will dominate “news” for the next few days…to be followed by someone else. (Re Weiner, I didn’t think he did the deed – it was too stupid. But, he did do it, and so be it. His voters will decide his fate next year.) I differentiate between what he did, and what this column is about: official lying for the purpose of moving political agendas. Politics being politics, what Weiner did, personally, will be mixed into the political agenda and beget more lies, by extending and implicating…. Sad but true.
Also, yesterday, it was revealed that the staff of Sarah Palin had attempted to revise the history of Paul Revere’s ride on Wikipedia, to cover for Palin’s historical gaffe about his action. “History” is fair game for liars too….

#378 – Dick Bernard: Words

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This morning a friend of mine came in to the coffee shop about the time I was leaving, sat down at the table next to me and opened to the Opinion Page of the Wall Street Journal for May 28-29 weekend edition. The banner headline was “Word of the Decade” ‘Unsustainable’ “ by Peggy Noonan. A featured photo was Rep. Paul Ryan.
Noonan is a well known writer, former member of the Ronald Reagan administration, and chief speechwriter for George H.W. Bush when he ran for President in 1988.
Earlier, before coming for coffee, I’d read a piece by Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, in which certain public ‘facts’ from said Rep. Paul Ryan about medical costs were challenged. That article is here.
The previous Saturday, I heard former U.S. Representative Jim Oberstar, a veteran of 18 terms in the House of Representatives, talk with encyclopedic knowledge about things like Medicare and Social Security. Ryan and Oberstar could as well as have been on different planets.
Into this mess of interpretations of data comes the unsuspecting citizen, not knowing what to believe.
Peggy Noonan, on the conservative side, writes well – she was a Presidential speech writer after all. She knows how to lay out words.
Paul Ryan, another conservative, seems like a nice sincere intelligent young man. Certainly he wouldn’t lie, especially to his younger cohort.
Ezra Klein, a liberal, is a very young but recognized columnist for Washington D.C.’s main newspaper – he’s a young man who has access that the rest of us cannot imagine.
Jim Oberstar, another liberal, knows the real data probably better than any of the others from having lived within the institution that is the Congress for 46 years.
Each of these persons, and everyone else who uses words or images in print or in voice or visual media, seek to make a convincing case that their particular ‘spin’ will become policy.
Of course, policy can be tilted in a direction that will prove anyone’s point. If you wish to make something ‘unsustainable’ – to “starve the beast” as government was once described – you seek policies to make that result happen. You can’t starve someone, and make the victim stronger.
If you believe that certain government policies can be of value, and protected for the long term with relatively minor changes, you seek that result.
There is a war of words going on, and it is the task of the citizen, the voter, to attempt to discern somewhere the truth of the matter, and the protection of his or her best interest. But peoples eyes glaze over at words. “They’re all lying” is too common a mantra.
For the common person, which most of us are, discerning truth can be very difficult because Big Money controls in very substantial part the media of this country. The Wall Street Journal, for instance, is not the champion of the little guy or gal.
So, who’s truth is the truth? Noonan’s? The Wall Street Journal Editorial Pages? Paul Ryan’s? Ezra Klein’s? Jim Oberstar? And on and on and on and on.
Caveat Emptor.
UPDATE: I keep these columns brief on purpose – even the above 513 words (a regular newspaper column is about 600 words) is too long for many people to take time to read, much less to think about. Besides, I’m just an ordinary person: what do I know? (by implication, I know less than the four experts cited above). I beg to differ, but who cares….
But sometimes you need length. And just a few hours after I published the above came this much longer post by a Los Angeles blogger , on essentially the same topic of Words, in this case, focusing on the recent visit on the topic of Israel/Palestine. (I mention the words “Los Angeles” because this makes the blogger seem more important, coming from a bigger city than I. Of course, “Los Angeles” can be spun in different ways as well. Words….)
In this Twitter and Facebook Generation, sparcity of words is most essential.
But this will certainly kill us all, if we don’t begin to think things through.
Consider reading the longer post…and really consider the implications, to you, of official lying.

#376 – Dick Bernard: Listening to Jim Oberstar and Thinking About Our Collective Lack of Political "Wisdom": "shoot first, and ask questions later"?

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Among the many magnificent gifts the U.S. Founding Fathers gave us when framing the Constitution and Bill of Rights of the United States ca 1787 was the right to select our representatives.
To be sure, the framers initial draft was imperfect: only certain kinds of people could vote, then, and so on…but over time near universal franchise was given to Americans over 18 years of age.
As often happens, it is easy to take for granted that which comes free, such as voting. But one day you wake up and what you thought you had was gone, and if you look closely, you had something to do with that which you lost, which you cannot recover.
I got to thinking of this last Saturday when I was privileged to be among too-small a group able to soak up some of the collected wisdom of former MN 8th District Congressman Jim Oberstar. Oberstar was defeated in his run for reelection in November, 2010 by a Tea Party candidate known to virtually no one.

Cong. Jim Oberstar, May 21, 2011


For eight years, from 1983-91, Cong. Oberstar was my Congressman. But Congressional Districts encompass much geography and several hundred thousand people, and I can recall actually seeing him in person only a few times in the immense 8th District. He always had a sterling reputation and until 2010 was easily reelected every two years.
Oberstars predecessor, John Blatnik, had served in Congress from 1946-74 and was one of the five co-authors of the 1956 legislation that led to the Interstate Highway System.
Jim Oberstar joined Cong. Blatnik’s staff in 1963; and when Blatnik retired, Oberstar ran for and won his office, in which he served with distinction for 36 years.
Congress is seniority based, and the party in power names the powerful chairs of the assorted committees.
In Oberstars case, he followed in his mentors footsteps and became an acknowledged expert on Transportation issues. A good share of his talk on Saturday was about our short-sightedness as a country: our failing to deal with future needs in many and sundry transportation areas. Succinctly, places like China, Brazil and Europe are leaving us in the dust, while we live in the past.
Oberstar is so knowledgeable that in the fall of 2010 he’ll become a professor at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. But rather than make actually make policy, he’s now just another expert.
Of course, Oberstar knows more than just Transportation. In the hour he spent with us he also dissected the assorted myths about Social Security and Medicare (pick the indictment you’ve heard about them – it’s likely massaged mythology).
But in the end analysis, none of this matters. Oberstar was thrown out of office, replaced with a non-entity Tea Partier with no power and (likely) almost no knowledge: a guy who railed against Big Government; a Freshman who will likely last one term and be forgotten.
There is endless analysis of why Oberstar lost in 2010, but rarely is responsibility fixed on the voters (including tens of thousands who didn’t even bother to vote). Oberstar likely won’t be running for office in 2012. And were he reelected, he’d have to start over as a Freshman again.
This is the fallacy of a “teaching the bums a lesson by throwing them out” philosophy.
Sad to say, we “pick our poison” in this country by ignoring the responsibility we hold as citizens to not only vote, but to cast an informed vote.
I am hopeful, as we enter a new election cycle, that more and more of we fellow Americans have learned that voting against, rather than for; or not voting at all, did not bring positive results for our country in 2010.
Time to go to work for a new direction in 2012.
UPDATE May 25.
It is difficult to assess the true feelings of the ‘body politic’ about our countries direction. News is slanted towards the bias of the media (including blogs such as this); polling and advertising is commissioned to help move and manage public opinion, and on and on and on.
Last nights special election results in New York State’s 26th CD at least signaled a discontent with the Tea Party philosophy which seems to be running the current Congress. A very conservative district elected a Democrat as new Congresswoman. In my opinion, this doesn’t mean the district is ‘liberal’; rather that the so-called radical right wing has taken the Republican party too far off the traditional Republican center. The new Congresswoman will doubtless serve as a moderate to conservative Democrat, reflecting her constituency. This is how politics works.
Also, last evening, I attended a year-end dinner for the teacher union local with which I began my union career from 1968-82. The dinner has been an annual event for at least the last ten years. I expected the mood to be depressed, given the attacks on labor in the past months. Rather, I felt optimism and willingness to work for change. In that local situation, too, polling is revealing what is called ‘voter remorse’ – people not supporting their own vote in the past election.
People are, apparently, thinking about what they have done.
Perhaps 2010 and its calamitous turn to the radical right might end up as a blip in the long term history of this country.
One can hope.

#375 – Dick Bernard: Dooms Day 2011: Remembering a trip to Israel, January, 1996

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It is appropriate that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in the United States on the very day that Harold Camping has determined is Judgment Day: May 21, 2011, at 6 p.m. (As I write at 8 a.m. CDT, it is already 6 p.m. in Kabul, Afghanistan, and later still in Japan and Australia, and there have been no bulletins as yet, so perhaps Camping’s calculations were again off, as they were the last time he made his definitive prediction, but no matter…as I learned the End Times business in Catholic school, nobody knows the day or the hour or anything else for that matter. Sometimes mere mortals manage to attract and capture attention before returning to well-deserved obscurity. But people panic anyway.)
I’ve long considered New Jersey sized Israel to be the U.S.’s 51st state, albeit unofficial, and I’ve long considered the little country to have something of a death wish. With those biases up front, here are some memories from a January, 1996, trip to that tinderbox, particularly for those who’ve never been able to go there (it is worth the trip, by the way.)
First, three ‘background’ pieces:
1. Here is a geopolitical ‘picture’ of the place, from a postcard somebody distributed two or three years ago (click on photo to enlarge):

2. Here’s a recent and fascinating geopolitical history of the Middle East that takes perhaps two minutes to view.
3. Roger Cohen of the New York Times had an interesting column about the general history May 21. It is here.
In January, 1996, I was able to join a Christian group which spent a very meaningful week or more in Israel. One of our leaders had an apparent connection to the conservative Zionist ‘side’ – something I didn’t realize till much later, particularly when I reread the tour book we each were given. This sanction gave us a perspective and access probably not as readily available to other groups.
It was a powerful trip.
This was a time of relative peace in Israel:
There was no wall separating Palestinian Bethlehem from Israel; in Manger Square fluttered a two story banner with an image of Yasir Arafat, a candidate for President of Palestine.
I spent too much money (my opinion) buying a Christian manger set from Palestinian merchant in Jerusalem: I still have the figures carved from Olive wood, and we still display it at Christmas time.
We were able to visit the Moslem Dome of the Rock on Temple Mount. No shoes allowed….
Earlier we had visited Armageddon, actually Megiddo, which overlooks the Plain of Armageddon, which is where the end times are supposed to materialize; later we visited the south end of the Dead Sea, the fabled place of Sodom and Gomorrah. (There’s a hotel there now, fronting on the smelly sea. I suppose someone could actually drown in the Dead Sea, but they’d have to work at it.)
Even though it was a time of relative peace, belligerence was not far below the surface. We visited the fresh grave of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, assassinated by a right-wing Israeli barely two months before we arrived, on November 4, 1995.
At the purported site on the Sea of Galilee where Jesus appointed Peter to lead the new Christian Church, our leader was reading the relevant Gospel text, when his words were drowned out by two Israeli warplanes screaming low and overhead, coming from the southeast across Galilee, heading to some unknown place. When we visited the River Jordan, of John the Baptist fame, security was tighter than usual as U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher was apparently meeting some leader at a nearby location.
And so it went, at a peaceful time in Israel, an epicenter of three major world religions, January, 1996.
So, on today’s “judgement day”, the odds do not mitigate for a peaceful end for us, and particularly for Israel, and it will be humans refusing to deal with each other who will do ourselves in, if we can’t learn to cooperatively live together.

#362 – Dick Bernard: The Challenge of Change, and "Spin"

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Back in the 1970s, when overhead projectors were the way of conveying information, and handouts were the takeaway record from attending a meeting, I once attended a meeting where the below handout left, and stuck, with me. (Click on it to enlarge.)

The premise of the handout is very simple and timeless: change is not only inevitable for everyone, but is desirable, and often essential. It doesn’t take much thought to identify someone – maybe ourself – whose ‘bad habit’ may have all but killed them.
BUT, even if one knows that a certain change can be demonstrated to have long term positive benefits, there is a huge challenge to actually changing the behavior (see the chart). Adjusting to the change, whatever it might happen to be, is extremely hard work until the new behavior has become a new habit.
While change is terribly difficult for individuals; it is far more difficult for organizations of any kind. Change can be imposed by law, threat or whatever, but lack of buy-in is a real problem. A surly undercurrent of attitudes held by people who weren’t sold on the great idea can sabotage change.
It’s even worse when competing ideologies demand change, as is true in our country today. Change is what the other side must do, since we know what is right.
So, politically these days we have constant talk about the need for deep change in how our American society does business. It comes from left, right, center about most everything…. But precious few are talking with each other. More prevalent is talking AT each other. The objective is to win the war of ideas. The win is always temporary. The war is continual.
Almost always this conversation is premised on the need for the OTHER person or group to change. The initiator gives him (or her, or their) self a pass: “if you accept my superior idea or wisdom, and change by conforming to my views, all will be good. But I don’t need to change my own attitudes or beliefs.”
It just doesn’t work out quite that simply. Societal change is a team sport.
An immense contemporary impediment to positive change is “Spin”.
“Spin”, the increasingly black art of buttressing one’s argument, while simultaneously dismissing an opposing point of view, essentially sabotages change initiatives. These can be perceived as positive or negative changes (depending on one’s point of view).
Spin has always been a part of the political conversation, but until fairly recent history, a receiver of information would have at least some assurance that “facts”, while skewed, did indeed exist, and could even be found, to support or refute an argument.
Today, almost anyone on any side of any issue can successfully avoid personal accountability by choice of information, image, expert…. It takes very hard work to find some semblance of “truth” in any political positioning statement. Even ‘truth’ becomes suspect. Most recently, The President’s release of his full birth certificate does not quiet the birthers. For assorted reasons, they deny reality to keep the issues alive.
I don’t think it is possible to find a well known pundit or personality who is ‘objective’. Their bias is embedded somewhere in their writing or script. If we share their bias, we like their thinking; if we don’t, we reject it.
We pick and choose who we wish to believe. “They’re all liars”, I’ve heard a good friend say, then she selects the liar she wants to believe – the one which confirms her bias.
If you’ve read this so far, you’re already thinking of the people you don’t like who are the real culprits in this deadly game.
Best we think of ourselves, and how we’re complicit as well.

#361 – Dick Bernard: Atlas Shrugged Part I

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I went to Atlas Shrugged on Monday afternoon at a local theatre.
My only certain prediction: Part III of this apparent three part made-for-the-theater movie will be released just in time to attempt to influence the 2012 election.
This is a hard-edged propaganda film.
It is pretty hard to make ruthless Capitalist Captains of Industry into heroic looking figures, but the film takes a shot at this (unsuccessfully, I felt).
I’d recommend people go see the film for themselves, so I don’t plan to give away much of the ‘story’, except to say that when one woman walked out about an hour in, I was tempted to follow her out the door. But I elected to stay it through. I’m glad I did.
There was no applause at the end from the dozen or so of us remaining.
Other than a waitress, I don’t recall seeing any workers in the film, except that it is clear that workers are slugs, except for a few superstars who are held in check by totally worthless unions whose henchmen (people like I was for an entire career, always men) are anti-progress disheveled gangster types imposing stupid work and safety rules.
Of course, Government itself is obstructive and evil and represented by nefarious types wanting to take us back to the good old days of collective farms. (If they thought it would work, the film producers would probably have used Communist terms like Commissar and the like. Even they must have thought that was a bit much. But they have some pretty good synonyms in both words and images.)
There is a certain audience – I think very limited in size – who will gobble up every word and nuance of this made-for-a-movie novel. They would be people like I sometimes see at my coffee shop, like the two guys after a Bible Study last week who are working stiffs but were complaining about how they dislike unions because they, the complainers, are superior to the shiftless rank and file and particularly union stewards.
While I know there is a tiny element of truth in their complaint, I can’t imagine even these guys taking much of a shine to the Capitalist King-Pins who are the obvious ‘stars’ of this movie.
(A favorite scene of mine is when one of the Tycoons is approached by his “tree-hugger” relative and asked for a handout for some cause or other. It is a Mr. Hard and Mr. Soft scene. In an instant the Capitalist offers $100,000 – one gathers it is a mere pittance for him – tax deductible of course. Tree-hugger demurs, saying that the ‘progressives’ – the word is intentional – he’s working with in Washington wouldn’t want the money to be identified with this specific Capitalist. Couldn’t it be sent another way? The story line is not completed in the film.)
To a certain kind of audience this will play well.
As for Ayn Rand (Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum), whose book “Atlas Shrugged” (1957) brings this to the silver screen, it’s worth learning a little bit about her, too. She had the misfortune of being 12 years old in St. Petersburg (later Petrograd, later Leningrad, now St. Petersburg again) when the Bolshevik Revolution upset her families applecart in 1917. The Revolution began in her home town. She came to the U.S. in 1925.
I’ve been to St. Petersburg (2003, two weeks after President George W. Bush made a visit), and I wondered to myself how things might have turned out differently had young Alisa really gotten to know why the Revolution got its legs in 1917. Revolutions aren’t child’s play, after all. They’re very risky business.
It doesn’t take long at the obscenely rich Peterhof or Catherine Palace outside St. Petersburg to get a sense of the kind of life the peasant class was forced to live in Czarist Russia. We spent several hours in both Palaces.
The run-up to revolution doesn’t seem to register, much, in Rand’s personal narrative. Her bourgeois family was a petty beneficiary of the Czars….
My thoughts went back to leaving Peterhof Palace in June, 2003. We were boarding the bus after several hours in the opulence of the Palace. Across the parking lot came two old hags – elderly women in rags, begging.
I couldn’t bear to take a photograph of them, but the image is burned in my mind…. Talk about compare and contrast.
See Atlas Shrugged Part I. See for yourself.

#359 – Dick Bernard: Teachers and Teaching – searching for "truth"

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April 11, 2011, found me in a hotel near Bernalillo NM. The hotel offered complimentary newspapers, and as I usually do I picked up the local paper, in this case the Albuquerque Journal.
Front page, front and center, was a “Beyond the Classroom” story about teacher Kathleen Cox, and her 12 year old student, Elizabeth, whose Mom is struggling with cancer. [To read the article, and the editorial which follows, you need to sign on for a temporary access pass, which is a very simple process.]
The column was a wonderful story about a teacher going above and beyond. It had absolutely nothing to do with test scores, or classes. It had everything to do with relationships. And most likely Elizabeth was not able to perform academically as she normally might have because of difficulties at home. Kathleen was doing what she could.
I migrated, as usual, to the editorial page or the paper, and the lead editorial was titled “Most Important School Unit is Accountability“. It was an interesting counterpoint to the lead article on the front page. It was about bean counting, and holding people accountable for the number of beans.
Therein seems to lie the struggle in contemporary public education. Relationships versus quantifiable data (“accountability”).
Of course, there has been massive effort over the last few years to figure out some way to get rid of “bad” or “ineffective” teachers. It is some kind of generic label, and I have yet to hear someone say publicly the name of the “bad” or “ineffective” teacher(s) they have in mind. They just must be out there somewhere. Apparently Ms Cox is not one of those marked for extinction, but we really don’t know.
I was in New Mexico to talk with retired teachers of the the National Education Association. Enroute from the airport to the conference center a retired teacher from Nebraska was remembering some teacher who’d made a big difference in her life. It just came up in conversation.
One of my handouts was a list of positive school employee qualities generated by teachers at a 1999 leadership conference I had led. I had asked the participants to think of a school employee who had had a particularly significant impact on them. Having thought of this person (it could be any school employee), I asked them to come up with a one word descriptor of that person: what was it about the employee who made a difference in their lives? In all there were about 60 participants. Only one of the 60 could not think of a single education personnel who he had positive feelings about. I have no idea why this was. The purpose of the exercise was not to probe or value judge but just to establish criteria used by teachers themselves.
In all the teachers identified 47 different characteristics of educational personnel who made a difference in their lives. Here are the characteristics, as identified by the participants: OUTSTANDING-BEHAVIORS-OF-EDUCATION-PERSONNEL
If you look at the qualities that made a difference in school personnel, one is hard pressed to find a single quality that emphasizes directly or indirectly test scores or such as that.
The employees who were remembered were the ones who were very positive in their relationship with their young person.
Is there a need for accountability? Absolutely.
Are there school employees who shouldn’t be school employees? Of course. In a cohort of millions of school employees serving 50 million students, there is without any question at all less than desirable “apples”.
But until the labelers attach names of actual people to these supposed “bad” or “ineffective” anonymous teachers, I am going to challenge them every time to show me the evidence.
They don’t show the evidence, because they can’t…or are afraid that they might be wrong in their judgment.

#358 – Dick Bernard: Averting a shutdown. A tiny bit of optimism.

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April 7 I was at committee meeting unrelated to politics or political parties, and my colleague sitting next to me showed me a book he was reading, which he felt was a must-read for anyone interested in politics. The book: “Winner Take All Politics” by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson. I have yet to pick up the volume, but I will.
A day later, late the evening of April 8, a government shutdown was averted by an agreement between House, Senate and White House. It is much too early to know what it means, and most of us will never know as the aftermath will be buried in the same rhetorical fog that accompanied the negotiations of the agreement. I kept thinking of assorted cliff-hanger negotiations I was involved with from time to time in my career. If people we were negotiating for only knew…. Sooner or later you’re stuck with making a deal.
Like the old story about the optimistic kid who comes into a barn full of manure and starts digging because “there must be a pony in here somewhere”, I have a little bit of optimism that maybe a tiny bit of sanity is beginning to prevail in this country. There needs to be a whole lot more, but at least there’s a start.
Even the sudden turnaround in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election due to quite certainly administrator incompetence rather than fraud is a hopeful sign for me. What had appeared to be an easy race for the apparent winner, turned into a near loss for him. What normally would have been a low profile boring election with a certain outcome turned into a cliff-hanger in the national spotlight. People are paying attention.
Winner take all politics is killing our country, and maybe, finally, some of us are paying attention. Maybe there is that pony down there. But if so, it’s a long ways down, and there’s a whole lot of digging to be done to find it.
Between the meeting and the drama in Washington, I attended a hugely informative two hour session entitled “Reality Meets Rhetoric: The Hidden Costs of State Budget Cuts“.
There were about 50 of us in attendance at the gathering. The session was expertly conducted. (click on photo to enlarge it)

Citizens generating questions after one of the presentations April 7.


Four outstanding panelists gave an overview of and some context for our state’s deficit situation*. None of the presentors were politicians; all of them were in high level positions of advising, administrating agencies or lobbying. They know the lay of the land – what is inside that fog bank of political rhetoric. I could name their names and their credentials, but it wouldn’t matter. They were talking straight about a pretty harsh future if our lawmakers don’t grow up (my state is like most these days: politically divided and polarized. Not a whole lot unlike Washington DC or even Wisconsin.)
I was tired when I got home from the meeting, but nonetheless I felt better informed.
I wrote a thank you e-mail to one of the people who seemed to have an important role in helping set up the meeting, and she wondered: “It will be interesting to see what percentage of the participants are the same people who are super involved in the political process already and what percentage are just getting their feet wet. My goal was to start reaching the latter. How do we do that?”
“How do we do that?” is a legitimate question with an easy answer:
One person at a time.
I will always believe in the long term benefit of what I call “each one reach two”. It seems so simple. If the 50 of us who were in that room reached two others, that would be 100 more. If those 100 each reached two, that would be 300….
But you need to actually start doing this, first; and become as good at listening as talking. Results generally don’t come by just wishing for them, or blaming somebody else.
* – “Scribbles”: of course, in such presentations, the macro is emphasized. So, for instance, we’re dealing in Minnesota with a $5 billion dollar deficit which seems awful. But if one does the calculations, that is roughly $1,500 per Minnesotan, which MOST Minnesotans could absorb quite easily, and which SOME (the wealthy) could very easily handle, and MANY (the poor) could not. It would take very little creativity and little sharing of the wealth to deal with the entire deficit. Of course, the $5 billion was a deliberately created mess due to a refusal to “tax” to fund the programs Minnesotans demand.
Similarly, one of the presentors talked about the most expensive students to educate in Minnesota Public Schools. I recall the number was $12,000 per student per year (the average was, if I remember right, about $8,000 per pupil). This covers every cent of every expenditure by schools for educating our youth. For the most expensive student, it amounts to about $70 a school day, less if you factor in that the buildings must be maintained during the rest of the year etc. Is $70 a day for a child’s education too much? Where would you cut? I recalled being at a fundraiser for a private school for special needs kids – kids whose needs are beyond the capacity of public schools to serve. That school, two years ago, said the cost per student was $25,000 per year, double the most expensive public school student this year.
In short, talking MACRO can be scary; talking MICRO is more real….
Related Posts are here, here, and here.

#357 – Dick Bernard: Lurching towards catastrophe

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My opinion: some kind of agreement will be cobbled together to avoid a partial government shutdown tomorrow. That won’t solve the problem, only delay what seems inevitable: the gradual but inexorable slide of the U.S. to at minimum mediocrity. As a society we are “doing stupid”, as a Forrest Gump might say. You don’t translate coffee klatch conversations among people of like minds into good policy for a complex country. But that seems to be what we’re about.
Actually the game plan of the radicals who pretend to be Republicans is very, very simple. It plays out over and over and over again.
1. Refuse to compromise, and when you do compromise, deny that you compromised at all.
2. Substitute belief for reason, and wrap your belief in the label “truth”. Scoff at Science. (My favorite in this regard comes from my own Catholic Church which has devised something that they call “objective truth” which is truth so purified that there can be no legitimate alternative realities. “We have said it; thus it is so”. Of course, it is only the Church’s opinion about the “truth”, but nonetheless it is portrayed as the genuine, real truth.)
3. If something goes right, take credit for it, even if you had nothing to do with it; if it goes wrong, blame the opposition.
4. Demonize the opposition; canonize your heroes….
5. Never, never, never get off message.
And on and on and on. When it comes to propaganda, one only needs your own core principles and the gall to attempt to impose them ruthlessly. I have such a tip sheet, used against myself and my organization almost 40 years ago. It is a single typewritten sheet, one side, double space. You don’t need 300 pages of explanation to lie. You just need the gall.
Just today came two items, separately, which seem to fit this conversation. An e-mail came from a retired friend who lives in Madison WI and has been involved in the protests there. I knew she lived there, but not that she’d been involved in the demonstrations.
An hour or two earlier, in today’s U.S. mail, came five pages from William L. Shirer’s “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” captioned “THE SERFDOM OF LABOR”. (See it here: Shirer 3rd Reich001 ) The person who sent this to me is a retired teacher who grew up in Nazi Germany (born 1926), lived through the war in Germany, and came to the U.S. in 1947. She says this section of Shirer’s book perfectly describes what happened in the pre-War Nazi Germany she lived in, and she sees the same happening here with the assorted moves to kill union influence through assorted means.
Of course, the “rule”, now, is to never ever compare what is happening here to what happened in Nazi Germany. Take it from our German friend. Take what is happening here very, very seriously. It can indeed happen here. It is only a slight modification of the modus operandi that kept the Nazis in power till their country was destroyed.
There is a famous descriptor of we rubes which goes: “There is a sucker born every minute“. Too often, in this media age, this is true. We are so easily manipulated in working against our own interests.
We are in control of our own destiny only if we do the requisite hard workl.
And where we start is to begin to question the politicians who we freely elect, particularly those who represent us in Congress and State Legislatures – they are the ones closest to us.