Nothing Left to Do

One of the students in my Honors English class mentioned yesterday that they had discovered my blog. Several nodded, confirming that they had also seen it. A polite silence ensued.
"You must have been pretty bored reading it," I said. "It's all politics."
"I didn't even read it," one girl said. I think she meant she couldn't even read it. After all, how many high school juniors would get a joke about Thomas Friedman?
"What else could I write about?" I asked. "I can't write about you guys. It wouldn't be right. What else am I going to write about? My daughter's soccer games? I spend my time doing my homework on Saturday and Sunday nights. To break up the monotony, I go to work out at the Y."
My life: work; study; reading the news; watching 5th graders play soccer on the weekend. It's only on days like today, when I have no one to claim my time (Sharon and the kids have gone to the Big E with her parents), that I wonder if I am anything more than a pacing animal, counting on movement alone to transport him beyond the bars in his cage, and coming to the realization that the restlessness movement only serves to map another part of the cage.

It's Morning in America

Every administration has its scandals.
Though few, however, have received the free ride GWB was given by the press for his first five and a half years in office. The difference isn't the president, his people, or his policies. It's the fact that the MSM has finally started to report on them. Everyday the White House transforms itself fromt the sublime to the ridiculous. Michael Brown, who resigned as head of FEMA is rehired as a consultant at FEMA. A U.S. attorney was demoted and banned from investigations of public corruption when he began to investigate sleazoid lobbyist, con man Jack Abramoff. The LATimes reports that the Pentagon's Inspector General is under investigation for slowing the investigation of Bush appointees.
Everyday another rock is turned over and another Bush crony slithers out.
It's morning in America and the MSM has awakened.

More Marxist Analysis from David Brooks

The Education Gap
By DAVID BROOKS
Especially in these days after Katrina, everybody laments poverty and inequality. But what are you doing about it? For example, let's say you work at a university or a college. You are a cog in the one of the great inequality producing machines this country has known. What are you doing to change that?As you doubtless know, as the information age matures, a new sort of stratification is setting in, between those with higher education and those without. College graduates earn nearly twice as much as high school graduates, and people with professional degrees earn nearly twice as much as those with college degrees. But worse, this economic stratification is translating into social stratification. Only 28 percent of American adults have a college degree, but most of us in this group find ourselves in workplaces in social milieus where almost everybody has been to college. A social chasm is opening up between those in educated society and those in noneducated society, and you are beginning to see vast behavioral differences between the two groups. For example, divorce rates for college grads are plummeting, but they are not for everyone else. The divorce rate for high school grads is now twice as high as that of college grads.There are other behavior differences, large and small, which reflect the different social norms in the two classes. High school grads are twice as likely to smoke as college grads. They are much less likely to exercise. College grads are nearly twice as likely to vote. They are more than twice as likely to do voluntary work. They are much more likely to give blood. These behavioral gaps are widening.We once had a society stratified by bloodlines, in which the Protestant Establishment was in one class, immigrants were in another and African-Americans were in another. Now we live in a society stratified by education. In many ways this system is more fair, but as the information economy matures, we are learning it comes with its own brutal barriers to opportunity and ascent.In an agricultural or industrial society, you might grow up in a poor or disorganized family, but you could get a job in a factory and with some grit and determination work your way to respectability. But in an information society, college is the gateway to opportunity. Crucial life paths are set at age 18, which means family and upbringing matter more. Educated parents not only pass down economic resources to their children, they pass down expectations, habits, knowledge and cognitive abilities. Pretty soon you end up with a hereditary meritocratic class that reinforces itself generation after generation. You see the results in the college graduation data. In the 1970's, when the information age was young, kids from poorer, less educated families were catching up to kids from more affluent families when it came to earning college degrees. But now the gap between rich and poor is widening. Students in the poorest quarter of the population have an 8.6 percent chance of getting a college degree. Students in the top quarter have a 74.9 percent chance.The most damning indictment of our university system is that these poorer kids are graduating from high school in greater numbers. It's when they get to college that they begin failing and dropping out. Thomas Mortenson of the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education has collected a mountain of data on growing educational inequality. As he points out, universities have done a wonderful job educating affluent kids since 1980. But they ''have done a terrible job of including those from the bottom half of the family income distribution. In this respect, higher education is now causing most of the growing inequality and strengthening class structure of the United States.''Part of the problem is that kids from poorer families have trouble affording higher education. But given the rising flow of aid money, financial barriers are not the main issue. A lot of it has to do with being academically prepared, psychologically prepared and culturally prepared for college. I'm going to come back to this subject and write about what some colleges are doing to help these students and how most colleges are neglecting them. But let me conclude with the thought that while we have big political debates in this country about equality of results, all those on the left and right say they believe in equality of opportunity. This is where America is failing most.

Tragedy In Black And White

PAUL KRUGMAN writes:
"By three to one, African-Americans believe that federal aid took so long to arrive in New Orleans in part because the city was poor and black. By an equally large margin, whites disagree.The truth is that there's no way to know. Maybe President Bush would have been mugging with a guitar the day after the levees broke even if New Orleans had been a mostly white city. Maybe Palm Beach would also have had to wait five days after a hurricane hit before key military units received orders to join rescue operations. But in a larger sense, the administration's lethally inept response to Hurricane Katrina had a lot to do with race. For race is the biggest reason the United States, uniquely among advanced countries, is ruled by a political movement that is hostile to the idea of helping citizens in need.Race, after all, was central to the emergence of a Republican majority: essentially, the South switched sides after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Today, states that had slavery in 1860 are much more likely to vote Republican than states that didn't. And who can honestly deny that race is a major reason America treats its poor more harshly than any other advanced country? To put it crudely: a middle-class European, thinking about the poor, says to himself, ''There but for the grace of God go I.'' A middle-class American is all too likely to think, perhaps without admitting it to himself, ''Why should I be taxed to support those people?''Above all, race-based hostility to the idea of helping the poor created an environment in which a political movement hostile to government aid in general could flourish. By all accounts Ronald Reagan, who declared in his Inaugural Address that ''government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,'' wasn't personally racist. But he repeatedly used a bogus tale about a Cadillac-driving Chicago ''welfare queen'' to bash big government. And he launched his 1980 campaign with a pro-states'-rights speech in Philadelphia, Miss., a small town whose only claim to fame was the 1964 murder of three civil rights workers.Under George W. Bush -- who, like Mr. Reagan, isn't personally racist but relies on the support of racists -- the anti-government right has reached a new pinnacle of power. And the incompetent response to Katrina was the direct result of his political philosophy. When an administration doesn't believe in an agency's mission, the agency quickly loses its ability to perform that mission. By now everyone knows that the Bush administration treated the Federal Emergency Management Agency as a dumping ground for cronies and political hacks, leaving the agency incapable of dealing with disasters. But FEMA's degradation isn't unique. It reflects a more general decline in the competence of government agencies whose job is to help people in need. For example, housing for Katrina refugees is one of the most urgent problems now facing the nation. The FEMAvilles springing up across the gulf region could all too easily turn into squalid symbols of national failure. But the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which should be a source of expertise in tackling this problem, has been reduced to a hollow shell, with eight of its principal staff positions vacant.But let me not blame the Bush administration for everything. The sad truth is that the only exceptional thing about the neglect of our fellow citizens we saw after Katrina struck is that for once the consequences of that neglect were visible on national TV. Consider this: in the United States, unlike any other advanced country, many people fail to receive basic health care because they can't afford it. Lack of health insurance kills many more Americans each year than Katrina and 9/11 combined. But the health care crisis hasn't had much effect on politics. And one reason is that it isn't yet a crisis among middle-class, white Americans (although it's getting there). Instead, the worst effects are falling on the poor and black, who have third-world levels of infant mortality and life expectancy. I'd like to believe that Katrina will change everything -- that we'll all now realize how important it is to have a government committed to helping those in need, whatever the color of their skin. But I wouldn't bet on it."

The Big Uneasy

The Big Uneasy
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Although Hurricane Katrina drowned much of New Orleans, the damage to America's economic infrastructure actually fell short of early predictions. Of course, Rita may make up for that.But Katrina did more than physical damage; it was a blow to our self-image as a nation. Maybe people will quickly forget the horrible scenes from the Superdome, and the frustration of wondering why no help had arrived, once cable TV returns to nonstop coverage of missing white women. But my guess is that Katrina's shock to our sense of ourselves will persist for years. America's current state of mind reminds me of the demoralized mood of late 1979, when a confluence of events -- double-digit inflation, gas lines and the Iranian hostage crisis -- led to a national crisis of confidence. Start with economic confidence. The available measures say that consumer confidence, which was already declining before Katrina hit, has now fallen off a cliff. One well-respected survey, from the University of Michigan, says that consumer sentiment is at its lowest level since George Bush the elder was president and ''America: What Went Wrong?'' was a national best seller. It's true that gasoline prices have receded from their post-Katrina peaks. But even if Rita spares the refineries, a full recovery of economic confidence seems unlikely. For one thing, it looks as if we're in for a long, cold winter: natural gas and fuel oil are still near their price peaks. And most families were already struggling even before Katrina. A few weeks ago, the Census Bureau reported that in 2004, while Washington and Wall Street were hailing a ''Bush boom,'' poverty increased, and median family income failed to keep up with inflation. It's safe to assume that most families did even worse this year. Then there's the war in Iraq, which is rapidly becoming impossible to spin positively: the purple fingers have come and gone, and there are no more corners to turn. As a result, views that people like Howard Dean were once derided for are becoming the majority opinion. Most Americans say the war was a mistake; a majority say the administration deliberately misled the country into war; almost 4 in 10 say Iraq will turn into another Vietnam.And many people are outraged by the war's cost. The general public doesn't closely follow economists' arguments about the risks of budget deficits, or try to decide between competing budget projections. But people do know that there's a big deficit, that politicians keep calling for cuts in spending and that rebuilding after Katrina will cost a lot of money. They resent the idea that large sums are being spent in a faraway country, where we're waging a war whose purpose seems increasingly obscure.Finally, fragmentary evidence -- like a sharp drop in the fraction of Americans who approve of President Bush's performance in handling terrorism and the failure of large crowds to show up for the Pentagon's ''America Supports You'' march and country music concert -- suggests that the confluence of Katrina and the fourth anniversary of 9/11 has caused something to snap in public perceptions about the ''war on terror.'' In the early months after 9/11, America's self-confidence actually seemed to have been bolstered by the attack: the Taliban were quickly overthrown, and President Bush looked like an effective leader. The positive perception of what happened after 9/11 has, needless to say, been a mainstay of Mr. Bush's political stature. But now that more time has elapsed since 9/11 than the whole stretch from Pearl Harbor to V-J Day, people are losing faith. Osama, it turns out, could both run and hide. It's obvious from the evening news that Al Qaeda and violent Islamic extremism in general are flourishing. And the hapless response to Katrina, which should have been easier to deal with than a terrorist attack, has shown that our leaders have done virtually nothing to make us safer.And here's the important point: these blows to our national self-image are mutually reinforcing. The sense that we're caught in an unwinnable war reinforces the sense that the economy is getting worse, and vice versa. So we're having a crisis of confidence.It's the kind of crisis that opens the door for dramatic political changes -- possibly, but not necessarily, in a good direction. But who will provide leadership, now that Mr. Bush is damaged goods?

Cynical Sunday

The Bush Administration is falling apart before our eyes. Time and Newsweek are taking on the cronyism. Bill Frist is going the way of Martha Stewart. DeLay's days are numbered, though we don't know the number. The right wingers are blaming Laura Bush, and, of all people, Ronald Reagan for the President's crash and burn.

They have a funny way of showing it. I heard a clip from a nightly talk show on This Week, some show call something in the DL. The host says, "They've found that stem cells can be used to regenerate the damaged spines of mice. This is good news for the Democrats."

Plato thought everything would be great when kings were philosophers and philosophers kings. I'd settle for a society where the average person knew as much about politics as he does about the National Football League.

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