The Stupidity of My Local Officials

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City of Charleston

NOTICE TO PUBLIC

Termination of Residential Recycling Drop-off Bins

Due to Limited Resources & Availability of Local Recycling Alternatives.

Please contact Local Waste Collectors offering curbside recycling services…

I loaded up my truck with two weeks of recycling the other day and Bear and I headed out to do our civic duty, only to find that the dumpsters were missing. A few years ago the city moved them without much public notice and, with a little digging, I found them again, so I figured it had happened again. This is just part of living in this strangely dysfunctional Midwest town.

When went to my “progressive” city’s website, however, I found that the recycling program had ended. The country goes one way, making at least some small strides towards sanity, and the bozos in my town go in the opposite direction. It makes no sense at all to have these private companies collecting garbage in the first place, and now they’ve cut off public support of recycling.

Here, the market still rules, despite all evidence of its inefficiency and lack of ethics. I’d like to know more about the local businesses who benefit from this change. My guess is that they are either big contributors to our local politicians or closely associated with them in some way or some combination of both. Market ideology always sounds disinterested but is always very much interested.

Posted in: Composition, Language, Writing

Unraveling the U.S. Middle Class

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Interest rates on student loans, including on popular federal programs like the unsubsidized Stafford (now nearly 7 percent) and Parent Plus (8.5 percent), are running several percentage points higher than the rates on secured loans, like home equity lines of credit.

“The difference of rates between secured and unsecured loans is higher than I have ever seen,” said Scott White, director of counseling services at Westfield High School in New Jersey. “This is one further impediment to access to post-secondary education for all but the well-to-do.”

Judy Campbell, Brennan’s guidance counselor at Hollywood High School, where three of every four students qualify for a free or reduced-price lunch, suggested that his family was “not poor enough for need-based aid and not rich enough to write a check.”

When asked over dinner whether she felt guilty that Brennan had taken so much upon himself, his mother, Caryn, began to cry. “We didn’t expect to end up in this situation,” she said.

Goal Is College. Hurdle Is Finding Financial Aid, New York Times, JACQUES STEINBERG, April 30, 2009

Americans take the middle class society of the last half-century for granted, assuming that if “the economy” is prosperous then “most of us” will be prosperous. It’s not surprising, since “most of us” have never known any other culture /economy (unless you are older than 60 or even 70) and few have been overseas.

In fact, there is no real reason why the U.S. economy can’t become something else. We could become a society permanently and sharply split between cultural and financial haves and have not’s, with little in-between. As long as we buy into Reagan’s first principal (“government isn’t the solution, it’s the problem”) this is the risk we take.

Markets, left to themselves, will concentrate the wealth of a society in smaller and smaller groups. The ideals of a democracy make it clear that this concentration of wealth is unproductive at best and dangerous at worst. So we need the government (among others) to counter this concentration.

There are all sorts of ways to do this, from the income tax (minus the loop holes that make it so regressive) to inheritance taxes to educational funding. The conservative focus on Regan’s aphorism, then, has only ensured that the United States has become progressively less democratic.

Cheap, accessible education is not a luxury to be set aside until the economic crisis is over. A recession will shift capital in all sorts of ways but it will not prevent the ongoing concentration of wealth and power. If we don’t drive down the cost of education, and make more (non-loan) money available for students, Obama’s election won’t mean a thing.

Posted in: Composition, Economics, Professional

What Ignorance Looks Like, Part II: Willful Ignorance

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This extraordinary consensus was possible, an examination by The New York Times shows, largely because no one involved — not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees — investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate.

According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.

New York Times, SCOTT SHANE and MARK MAZZETTI, April 21, 2009

I thought I would write about this in the abstract, starting with my shock that this story hasn’t created an ongoing scandal. Imagine that you went to the doctor and he or she was unsuccessful at treating your disease. That’s upsetting enough. Now imagine that you read an interview with that doctor and he or she says that reading medical journals is a waste of time. That’s a scandal.

So this is doubly freakish and bizarre. We had a government that chose to ignore history; more than that, a set of officials at the highest level who thought that history was unnecessary. It just doesn’t occur to them. Then we have the mainstream media– today busily debating the ‘hundred days’ faux issue– that collectively cannot seem to recognize and criticize basic incompetence.

I am thinking much more concretely this morning, however, because I have been trying to deal with a student who thinks writing about “global warming” is inappropriate. It’s not hard to see where this is coming from: years of silly right wing propaganda suggesting that global warming isn’t real and so on. I disagree but that’s not what is so upsetting.

What is upsetting is that this student has a workable hypothesis– it may be unlikely in the extreme that thousands of scientists and thousands of experiments are wrong, of course, but it is still a hypothesis– that he refuses to examine. One problem, of course, is that he’s too ambitious. Global Warming is a very complicated theory with a lot of different kinds of supporting evidence.

I would not expect him to try to address everything of course or to be systematic in any sense. But he could pick one aspect of global warming, review the evidence, and then conclude with his (now well-informed) opinion on the science. Yet it seems to be that process– a careful review of assumptions– that he, and the Bush administration, finds so loathsome. That’s a scandal.

Posted in: Economics, Language, Writing