On the Contrary

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.

Oh there have been so many interesting tidbits in the news lately that I hardly know where to start.  So I will start with Wednesday and work backward:

• The brutal attack in New York by four white boys out to “f*ckup some Mexicans” was admirably covered by Rick Sanchez on CNN.  Rick tried to play down the political implications while condemning the attacks, but CNN only has to look in their own back yard to see Lou Dobbs spinning this hate.  When Ted Turner confronted Lou on his treatment of Hispanics, Lou responded by denying any such behavior.  Fat white men are the last to get it.  And of course it is political as the attacks don’t come from the left, but from the Republican right.  The xenophobia and fear that was used by the Republican Party to stir up their base is coming home to roast.  It is a grand old party isn’t it?
• Sarah Palin was being interviewed by Wolf Biltzer on Wednesday and he asked her point blank if she regretted trying to tie Barack Obama to an American former weatherman and her inflammatory language.  Her answer went something like this.  “I am still very concerned with his relationship with this individual (there was no relationship) but lets put all that behind us.”  Anybody see this is contradictory?  “I am still concerned, let’s put it behind us?”  The woman cannot think and talk in logical sentences.  Then there is the problem of checking peoples causal associations.  I am sure McCarthyism doesn’t even ring a bell with this ding dong.   I think the more exposure she gets and people see how she twist reality, the less most will accept her in mainstream politics.
• The Republicans are having a meeting of their Governors in Florida to see a way forward.  This is billed as a war between the pragmatists and the social conservatives.  The pragmatists see that the party has to modernize and move away from issues that are no longer registering with younger voters and most of the country.  They also recognize that the small government, no regulation approach is not keeping up with the times.  The social conservatives think we simply haven’t had enough of this stuff.  What I found interesting was that they wanted to learn from Barack Obama’s campaign and modernize, meaning learn how to use technology to get their message out.  But nowhere in this entire discussion did they discuss the elephant in the room:  The message is faulty.
• The New York Times on Tuesday ran a story about the wanning impact of the South in our elections (For South, A Waning Hold on National Elections).  I cannot think of a more welcome circumstance.  This part of the country is the center for the Republican base made up of poorly educated white people, evangelical Christians (mostly poorly educated white people), and the center of overt racism in this country.  This deep South voted more Republican than they did in 2004 and went almost 60% for John McCain.  Could you be more out of touch?  As the New York Times put it, “By leaving the mainstream so decisively, the Deep South and Appalachia will no longer be able to dictate that winning Democrats have Southern accents or adhere to conservative policies on issues like welfare and tax policy, experts say.”  Thank god because they have almost destroyed our country.  Here is one of the milder comments from one of the fine citizens down there, “I think any time you have someone elected president of the United States with a Muslim name, whether they are white or black, there are some very unsettling things.”  It will be nice to know that the most ignorant part of our country no longer decides who we have for President.
• And last but not least relating to our economic woes were two stories the were highly interesting and show once again we can’t let go of that old conventional wisdom that the market place knows better than government.  Right now it clearly doesn’t and Detroit wants a major bailout from the government.  Actually this is bailout number two in the current crisis.  Tom Friedman put it best in his op-ed on Wednesday (How to Fix a Flat) when he said that there needs to be strings.  These companies have made bad choice after bad choice, fought raising standards on gas mileage standards, while our Japanese friends are making money.  We have say to that it’s our money and if you want to be saved, here are the conditions.  We are now part owner.  Will the Demos finally see this and put real teeth into a bailout that gives us some say about how our money is used?  I will wait to see, but you know President Moron won’t go for it.  Sixty eight days and counting
• The other economic story is after two months Treasury Secretary Paulson is finally figuring out it is about mortgage foreclosures.  So he says he is going to shift some of that $700 billion from buying mortgages to free up credit for Americans, or some form thereof.  Once again it is wrong headed an too mild to help.  It is about the mortgage crisis, but at almost every step, we have cushioned the blow to  banks and investors from the losses they have help perpetuate.  The fear is that investors, if banks renegotiate loan terms, will sue for loss of their earnings (Lawmakers Debate Loan Modification). There are complicated arguments here about who owns the loans, but my feeling is that government needs to step in a major way and make sure the pain of these devaluating home values is felt by the investors also.  How that is done is still up in the air, but it has to be done.  Once again, against conventional wisdom, in the short term the government is going to have to stop this hemorrhaging and it will not be by assuming these loans at their original value and thus preserving the banks and their investors.  Welcome to the pain felt on Main Street guys.

There was one other story, I think on Sunday, about how the carefully choreographed Republican campaign of xenophobia and hate (remember the shots of “kill him” at their rallies as they spewed disinformation or outright lies) will in fact increase the violence (see item 1 above) and intolerance among our less educated and already intolerant population.  But I will leave that to another day.  Anybody who is still a proud Republican needs to have a brain transplant.

The media bashing I am talking about is not the GOP’s, but mine.  The mainstream media has a long way to go before they are really doing “fair and balanced” coverage, and except for FOX noise, Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs and some of the other blovators (yes even Keith Olberman from time to time), they are really trying to be balanced.  Their approach to this daunting task is fatally flawed by removing any judgment from their interviews by representing both sides with a passive moderator.  In effect they simply monitor the food fight.  They have eschewed any responsibility to ascertain the truth to avoid the appearance of bias and they will let the viewer decide.  So what is the problem?

The problem, which was described much more eloquently by Ruth Marcus in he Washington Post Op-Ed, True Whoppers, talking about misrepresentations and lies goes like this:

“All campaigns fall short, but some fall far shorter than others. And it is a phony evenhandedness, comfortable for journalists but ultimately misleading, that equates these failures without measuring the grossness of their deviation from the standard of decency.”

Said another way if the viewer isn’t given some frame of reference for the veracity of the statements being made by the participants from the moderator, he/she is left to let their own partisanship decide whose facts to believe.  If you have a debate between flat earthers and people who claim the world is round and you accord their claims equal footing, you are misleading people about the equality of the facts of each argument.  Note the media did this on the issue of Intelligent Design until the whole edifice of this faith-based system was destroyed in a Pennsylvania court room.   Now they try to avoid the whole debate because it seems rude to challenged faith with facts.  The economic argument may be proceeding in the same fashion.

At any rate, this kind of coverage is increasing the impact of the misrepresentations, and not clearing the air.  The critical thing that the journalist has to bring to these exchanges is knowledge of the facrs and push back.  Instead of allowing known misrepresentations to be voiced by one partisan spokesperson or the other, they push back where they know the facts are being misrepresented.  Of course they have to know the facts to push back which may be a reach for some of them.  The key is that the push back has to be unbiased i.e. usually David Schuster of MSNBC as opposed to Fox News or Lou Dobbs of CNN.  Then the debate would be on more level playing ground.  But because of their passive interview style of moderating debate, they are being run over by partisan flacks and their mission of balanced reporting goes out the window as they become a bullhorn for one side or the other.

I witnessed an example of what I call the passive aggressive attack on CNN’s Rick Sanchez as he was trying to inform the public about what is going on with the investigation of Sarah Palin in Alaska.  The moderator is passive, while the interviewee is agressive.  Having spent a portion of my career negotiating with bonding company lawyers in construction contract defaults, I immediately recognized the tactic.  A lawyer representing the McCain organization in Alaska was laying out their case for why the proceedings investigating Trooper Gate, in their view were tainted.  The technique is to begin a non-stop monologue/diatribe and get as many of your allegations in as quickly as possible so that the conclusion seems obvious while not allowing your opponent to question any of the allegations that makes up your argument.

The only journalist I have seen push back on this technique is Rachel Maddow, trying to stop the dialogue and examine some of the false allegations.  Well in this case poor Rick was trying to be fair and let the person state their case, but he got submarined by this technique as he let this monologue go on forever.  Worse, he appeared to not have a good grasp on the history of this investigation that could challenge some of the lawyer’s allegations.  He asked for a Democrat to come on the show to counter this argument, also showing his naiveté  in that no Democrats wants to get involved with this internal state investigation and make it a distracting (for the Democrats) campaign issue.

Here were some of the specific questions that Rick needed to ask to get a more balanced view of the claims of the McCain team.  The lawyer claimed the whole process was tainted by the Obama Campaign, but Rick never asked him how this could be when there was a team of twelve McCain Campaign people in Alaska helping manage this attack on the investigating board, but no personnel  with the Obama Campaign. He did press the lawyer for any evidence for contact with the Obama campaign and of course there wasn’t any except an alleged rumor.  He never asked why this investigation was biased when it started before the Governor was a candidate for VP and approved by a unanimous vote of the Republicans and Democrats in the legislature.  He never asked why the commission that was conducting this investigation made up of three Republicans and two Democrats could be biased if the majority were Republicans and could control its actions.  He never asked why the requested move to the personnel board would then be an unbiased review if the board was made up of Palin appointees that serve at her pleasure.  So all in all it was another example of nice try, but you became a soapbox for a very partisan view and participated in more disinformation.

Finally on Friday, I watched David Gregory of MSNBC (and of the famous quote, “I asked all the right questions before the invasion of Iraq” but never followed up on the lies he was told) ask his panel of commentators, isn’t this whole disaster on Wall Street due to the housing bubble?  In other words fix this problem and the rest of the system can press on which indicates to me he had little understanding of the real issues.  They had to explain to him that the housing crisis was just the effect, and the cause was the underlying structure of wall street to increase profits, short term gains and CEO compensation based upon those gains, greed and a culture of greed, and lack of regulation leading  all of which led to under capitalized and grossly leveraged firms.  I still don’t think he gets it so how is he going to help inform us of the choices for the future as each side makes their pitch and he has no basis for understanding their arguments?

I don’t know why journalists allow themselves to be abused by these partisan flacks.  I don’t know why they are so passive and allow themselves to be used to reinforce miss-information.  I don’t understand why they don’t fight back and start standing up for their profession.  I don’t know why we get pertty faces instead of smart and well informed journalists.  An interview should be a trial by fire for all concerned, not a chance to repeat your talking points.  Come on guys, get up to date, learn your subject, and start pushing back.  The fate of this country depends on you guys doing your job.  So far you get an F.