On the Contrary

There was a breath of fresh air in the attitude toward government workers when Barack Obama was elected President.  This attitude that government service is for flunkies and the indolent  got its start in the Reagan era (Government is the problem) and has been a mainstay of the Republican philosophy ever since.  Monday, Michelle Obama went to the Interior Department to thank many of its employees for their service.  She noted that some of the people on the stage with her had started work for the Interior Department before she was born.  It is the beginning of the recognition that government service by competent civil servants is critical to our way forward.  These are not some losers who couldn’t make it in the private sector, but people dedicated to public service whose motives are not primarily financial.

This conservative attitude toward government and government workers is at the heart of many of our failures today.  In many ways the Katrina fiasco and the financial collapse we are suffering today are the direct result of the actions of the conservatives toward government.  They have underfunded government for its assigned tasks making it basically ineffective; put political operatives into government positions to facilitate ideological and business goals at the expense of the general public; and have privatized the moral mission of government.

Let’s take each one of those actions.  First they underfunded the government for its mission.  The conservatives have railed against illegal immigration, but until recently would not fund Homeland Security for the task.  The same can be said for the FDA, FAA, No Child Left Behind, FEMA, Energy Department, I could go on forever.  The point here is not fiscal responsibility, but the Republicans basic belief that government is a hindrance to business and under funding it is a way to make it ineffective.  They have succeeded and we see problems in our country across the board from food inspection, import inspection to drug approval and broken down and ancient air traffic control equipment.  If things are important to do, they are important to do right which requires the appropriate resources both in people and money.

On the second issue of putting political operatives in government positions to facilitate ideological goals and business interests we saw what happened when political operatives in EPA and NOAA tried to stifle scientific findings about global warming and the impact of carbon emissions on our environment.  We saw in the Justice Department how political operatives misused the department to go after Democratic candidates and set up an ideological test for hiring.  We saw how the FDA and other oversight organizations were so tight with industry as to be guided by what that industry wanted instead of considering the public good first.  You cannot forget President Cheney’s energy task force made up entirely of business executives that threw out environmentalists to come up with an energy policy that met the industries requirements but left us even more dependent on oil.  Probably the best description of this merging of government and business was summed up in Dr. James Galbraith’s book, The Predator State, in what he called predation:

“The systematic abuse of public institutions for private profit, or, equivalently, the systematic undermining of public protections for the benefit of private clients.”

Finally there is the privatization of the moral mission of government or as Professor Galbraith called it, “undermining of public protections for the benefit of private clients.”  The most obvious example of this is the failure of SEC to regulate our economy or to even detect the obvious criminality of Bernie Madoff.  The organization became a revolving door for industry whose primary client was the industry it rated.  You might also want to know how private firms got into the business of providing credit ratings for the industry that paid for those ratings.  It wasn’t just the SEC that failed, but it was a failure throughout government to regulate the financial industry.

My point here is that as George Lakoff said in his book The Political Mind;

“What progressives see as government protection (moral), conservatives see as government interference (immoral) that imposes restrictions on making profits.”

We have seen what deregulation and privatization do:  They “do not eliminate government; they make it unaccountable and take away its moral mission.”  This is a direct result of the conservative attitude toward government and government service.

I spent 31 years serving in federal service, 11 in the military (which they don’t disparage) and 20 in civil service (which they take every opportunity to disparage).  I worked with some wonderful people who cared about our nation, our environment, our security, and were driven not by the profit motive, but by being able to further the good works of our government.  It is time to change our attitude about these people and recognize that without them we are screwed.  It is true that business is the engine of our economy, but government is the backbone of our society that keeps business focused in the right direction.   It is time we recognized that.

I am beginning to wonder if we are the problem.  Or said another way, I am not sure we know what we know.  We think in comfortable patterns or frames, that is, ways to conceptualize things, and I am wondering if we have almost everything wrong.  Let me give you an example:

I was watching/listening to Rick Sanchez on CNN yesterday at lunch while I worked out.  Rick’s news show tries to involve the listener into the news.  He is using feedback from Twitter, email, etc.  Yesterday he had a group of “average” citizens who he was interviewing about various news items.  The one that caught my attention was the one about the 8-year old that shot his dad and a friend, or alleged to have.  He invited on of his guest to comment and she began by saying, “I have an eight year old and…..”.  She has an 8-year old like the rest of us haven’t at one point in our lives and now she has real insight into this event.  Not only do we not know what we don’t know, we are using this misinformation as informative.  My point is simply this:  Someone who has studied child psychology and deviant behavior might have had some insight into this child, and been able to a give us a little perspective.  What we got was the blind leading the blind masquerading as informative.  She could have had some real insight or it could be totally misleading based upon anecdotal experience.  We don’t differentiate anymore.

Why do I bring this up?  Because we are facing challenging times that require us to rethink everything we have been doing.  It would appear that we have gotten almost everything wrong.  We thought we could bully our way through the world and it has turned out to be a nightmare.  We find out there are limits to military power.  We thought the ends justify the means when interrogating “terrorists” and now we have a compete mess at Guantanamo.  We thought the market would make all the right decisions if we just let its invisible hand flop free.    Now that we have found that all these “conventional wisdoms” were wrong and we are looking for answers, my fear is that we have a tendency to fall back on false logic once again.

The biggie out there is the economy and what to do about it.  We all have lived under the sway of conservative economic philosophy that says low taxes stimulates the economy, along with few government regulations, low government spending, low deficits, and lots of savings.  Guess what, that may all be wrong.  I would recommend a wonderfully challenging book, “The Predator State”, by James Galbraith, that questions many of these beliefs.  To make a long story short, he challenges all these premises with, oh dare I say it, facts.  For instance he says we will always have a deficit in our economy and attempts to wipe it out have caused some of our severe recessions.  The point here is that he is afraid liberals have bought into the conservative group-think and we could be prolonging our misery.

Now Barack Obama’s economic team is coming up with a plan that challenges some of these assumptions and he is going to have a fight selling it because there are some who just can’t let go of the old ideas.  John Boehner, House Minority leader has challenged the Democrat’s plan of major investments in infrastructure to stimulate the economy by chanting the conservative dogma, lowering taxes and reducing government spending.  Now this appeals to us because it is the conventional wisdom and we are use to believing in it, but if you look around us, all you see is lowered taxes that did not stimulate the spending necessary to jump start the economy, and cutting government spending will just further exacerbate the problem.  In fact maybe lowering taxes just allowed people to have more money to spend on frivolities that does not move us forward instead of investing in our energy future through government planning and spending.  Anybody need another Hummer?

So it is time to think outside the box.  Clearly the knee-jerk reaction is where is this money for spending going to come from.  We are going to have to grow the deficit.  We have no choice.  The real discussion here ought to be about how we invest in our future through investments in infrastructure (roads, bridges, water treatment, high speed railroads, alternate energy), while keeping the deficit manageable.  In other words, what is a manageable deficit?  Haven’t heard that one discussed because we are still in the debt free mode.  As Obama and his team try to actually think outside the box, the media and the mindless criticism based upon old thinking is all the rage on the cable news shows.  Just keep in mind that the people who didn’t see this coming are the same people who are now experts on criticizing plans to get us out.

One last little thought here:  Yesterday there was a report compiled by prominent former policymakers from the United States and Latin America by the Brookings Institution that basically found that our whole approach to Latin America is backward.  Most prominent was a call to totally reverse our strategy of isolating Cuba.  What we have been doing is counterproductive.  No fooling.  We have allowed policy to be set by old thinking, conventional wisdom, and of course a lunatic fringe in South Florida.  It is just another example of thinking outside the box and doing things that work instead of things that satisfy some emotional or idealistic need.  It is time to step back and really see what’s around us instead of reflexively doing what we have been doing.  Kind of the opposite of being conservative.