PS. This is what I meant when I said competence.
REH June 2, 2011 A White Woman From Kansas By ROGER COHEN <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/columns/rogercohen/?inline =nyt-per> LONDON For a long time Barack Obama <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/o/barack_obama/i ndex.html?inline=nyt-per> s mother was little more than the white woman from Wichita mentioned in an early Los Angeles Times profile of the future president. She was the pale Kansan silhouette against whom Obama drew the vivid Kenyan figure of his absent Dad in his Bildungsroman of discovered black identity, Dreams from My Father. Now, thanks to Janny Scotts remarkable A Singular Woman, absence has become presence. Stanley Ann Dunham <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/stanley_ann_du nham/index.html?inline=nyt-per> , the parent who raised Obama, emerges from romanticized vagueness into contours as original as her name. Far from floating through foreign things, as one colleague in Indonesia observes, She was as type A as anybody on the team. That may seem a far-fetched description of a woman who was not good with money, had no fixed abode and did not see life through ambitions narrow prism. It was the journey not the destination that mattered to Dunham. She was, in her daughter Maya Soetoro-Ngs words, fascinated with lifes gorgeous minutiae. To her son the president, idealism and naïveté were embedded in her. Yet she was also a pioneering advocate of microcredit <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/m/microfinance /index.html?inline=nyt-classifier> in the rural communities of the developing world, an unrivaled authority on Javanese blacksmithing, and a firm voice for female empowerment in an Indonesia of smiling or gentle oppression toward women, as she wrote in one memo for the Ford Foundation. Unbound by convention, Dunham the anthropologist was nonetheless the anti-hippie with her cache of can-do Kansan wisdom: Youre not okay, Im not okay, and I know how to fix it. The fixing was not quick. Dunham knew that. Well, life is what it is, she would say: As in getting pregnant at 17 by the first African student to enroll at the University of Hawaii, the brilliant Barack Hussein Obama <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/o/barack_obama/i ndex.html?inline=nyt-per> Sr., who loved her and left her for Harvard. Adulthood was thrust on her early. One colleague recalls her saying: Dont conclude before you understand. After you understand, dont judge. Such forbearance is one of her many obvious influences on her son. Taken to Indonesia as a young child on Dunhams second marriage, then dispatched aged nine back to Hawaii to become an American in his grandparents care, Obama emerges here as a product of his mothers presence and absence. To an unusual degree, because of the absence and because he was half-black, he had to define his own identity hence the almost feline coolness, the hermetic quality in the president. To an equally unusual degree, because Dunham loved him fiercely, he had the emotional grounding to survive such self-definition. If you are going to grow into a human being, she told him early, you are going to need some values. Hers were all about bridging, connecting. Doing field research in Javanese villages, she would complain that an interview had been cut after 3 or 4 hours with poor results no zapper, she. Improving the lot of people was not about rapid industrialization, but about empowering. It was essential to dig. As she noted, A Javanese woman may have agricultural skills in transplanting, weeding and harvesting rice, but she may also know how to make batik cloth, operate a roadside stall deliver babies for her neighbor. Her beliefs were summed up by one colleague: Development, like democracy, is a learning process. People have to learn to have freedom, on one side, and also responsibility, the rule of law, social discipline. Yes, fixing is not quick and nor is it necessary to look much further to understand Obamas bridging instinct or his response to the Arab Spring. I found myself liking Dunham the nonjudgmental irreverence; the determination to live what she loved; the humor (after a stomach-turning surfeit of peanuts, she notes, Yes, peanuts do have faces smirky, nasty little faces, in fact); the frankness with friends I dont like you in your arrogant bitch mode. Her 52 years were rich. She missed her son. The decision to send him to get educated in America was brave and has changed the world in that Obama would not otherwise have become a black American. This is a central conundrum of a book that makes Obamas white parent palpable for the first time. In an affecting passage one colleague, Don Johnston, describes how Dunham felt a little bit wistful or sad that Barack had essentially moved to Chicago and chosen to take on a really strongly identified black identity that had not really been part of who he was when he was growing up. She felt that he was distancing himself from her in a professional choice. Was it political calculation, love of Michelle Robinson, dreams of his father, or irritation with a dreamer-mother that made Obama black? After all, he was raised white. He chose black. Or perhaps he had no choice. Being biracial in the America Obama grew up in was not much of an option. I said Bildungsroman in some essential sense Dreams from My Father was fictionalized. Obamas ballast, the fact of his life, was his mother. This book reveals in a singular woman just why he had the wit and the heart to forge himself, as in those Indonesian blacksmithing villages where Dunham long listened to the light counterpoint of the master smith tapping instructions on the anvil. From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ray Harrell Sent: Thursday, June 02, 2011 8:59 PM To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION' Subject: Re: [Futurework] American economy Been here, done this before. Good to hear from you Ed. REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ed Weick Sent: Thursday, June 02, 2011 7:47 PM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION Subject: Re: [Futurework] American economy I do believe that "competency" figures into economics, Ray, even though "scarcity" is a more basic concept. In a capitalist society, the competent take scarce resources and combine them into uses that serve their self-interest - i.e. that pay off to the maximum extent. In so doing, they hire people and thereby serve the economic interests of society. That is what happens under capitalism. Under socialism, the resources are combined not to serve individual interests but rather communal interests --- or so the theory might go. Another concept that is often left out is morality, the "golden rule" kind of thing, like you wouldn't do anything to hurt other people just as you wouldn't want to hurt yourself. In capitalist societies, laws are enacted in place of morality -- e.g. the now gone Glass-Steagal or the US law that prevented corporate interests from buying politicians and converting them into lobbyists. There is another way of building morality into economic behaviour. I did a job in the Los Santos area of Costa Rica a few years ago and what amazed me there was the huge array of cooperatives active in the area. It seemed that everyone wanted to help everyone else. Why? I attributed it to the influence of the huge church in the middle of each community -- love thy neighbour (or be eternally damned?) etc. I'd better quit here because next thing I say may be something silly or even sillier than what I've said already. Getting tired. Regards, Ed ----- Original Message ----- From: Ray Harrell <mailto:[email protected]> To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION,EDUCATION' <mailto:[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, June 02, 2011 5:15 PM Subject: Re: [Futurework] American economy One thing neither of you are taking into account is term limits. We are guaranteed an amateur president who just learns the office and leaves. It doesnt even work for mayors. Term limits on Congress guarantees short term thinking. Term limits are also used as a weapon by the right wing to demean the very idea of government itself. It doesnt help when ex-government employees lift their legs on government either. Ive worked in the private sector for fifty years and grew up in the public sector with both parents in public education. Ive always defended public education and the need for a private sector but I certainly know the problems in both. I would argue that it would help if people didnt think as if they werent a part of all this but had a stake in helping it work and making it work for everyone. No one seems to see the problem in the basic premise of economics that is grounded in the scarcity construct rather than in a competency construct and the development of the Field of Plenty. Everyone says that solar power isnt economical. The implication is that its too expensive when the reality is that what is free is NOT economical at all. No one want to purchase sand if they live on the beach and no one wants to buy castor bean beer either just because its scarce. The very idea of business is the idea of winners and losers. I would argue that to complain when the religion of the market effects the government negatively and yet refuse to question the religion itself as a system, is to make the choice to be a loser in the game of life. Good to hear from you Ed and Keith I enjoyed your post about the Chinese. Well done. The sole qualm I had was about womens suffrage and the roots of the problem. I think it has more to do with the private sector having too much power, too little regulation by the society and term limiting the governors so they dont have time to build power groups that accomplish things. The issue of morality (cronyism) is a problem of religion and personal judgment. It would help if the society could learn the elements that go into teaching both and teach them. Then give people a decent time to learn the Art of Government. If one religion had too many lawbreakers perhaps we could apply the rule that they apply to teachers who fail. Cut their tax deduction until they do a better job with their constituency or teach the foundations of morality and critical judgment to everyone in public school. REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ed Weick Sent: Thursday, June 02, 2011 4:44 PM To: Keith Hudson; RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION Subject: Re: [Futurework] American economy Keith, I'll just have to take you at your word on the actual rate of US GDP growth. It may well be higher than the 1.8% Reich claims it is. However, many of the other things he mentions, and which others have mentioned, suggest an economy in decline and perhaps in severe decline. Everything seemed to be looking up until about the 1970s and then ever so many things started going down hill after that. The best book I have on the reasons for it is Hacker's and Pierson's "Winner Take All Politics" which lays out how the rich got very much richer, the middle class became eroded and the poor became poorer from the mid-1970s to the present. I should take another look at the book, but some of the most significant trends H&P (and Riech) mention relate to changing political power, enabling the rich to control politicians to make decisions to their advantage (e.g. Bush tax cuts, financial donations to politicians making them, in effect, lobbyists for finance and industry) and the politically fostered decline of unions. As well, the US government and many state governments have become hugely indebted and therefore greatly constrained with regard to the kinds of stimulus programs they can launch. All in all, whether the rate of growth is as Reich says or a little higher, the US does not appear to have much of a chance of a return to the kind of growth, hope and prosperity we witnessed in the decades following WWII. Ed ----- Original Message ----- From: Keith Hudson <mailto:[email protected]> To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION <mailto:[email protected]> ; Ed Weick <mailto:[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, June 02, 2011 3:02 PM Subject: Re: [Futurework] American economy Ed, At 15:09 02/06/2011, you wrote: Robert Reich's take on what has happened to the USA since world war II. http://truthout.org/truth-about-american-economy/1306953884 This is a pretty accurate account of the American economy since '45. However, towards the end he writes: <<<< Democrats, meanwhile, are behaving as if theyre powerless to affect the economy even though a Democrat occupies the White House and his appointees run the federal government. >>>> . . . and then gives no hint of what policy the Democrats should be advocating! OK, it's true enough that they don't have a policy (except more public spending which would only make the deficit worse) but that he -- one of the most articulate economists on the left -- hasn't been able to sketch out something that's anywhere near relevant is eloquent enough. But there's another point that intrigues me for which Reich is not to blame. This is the figure of 1.8% that's officially quoted for present GDP growth. This cannot be so. In America, as in the UK and Europe, the average income and well being of ordinary folk has actually been declining for decades. And yet GDP has supposedly been tanking along at anything between 3% and 5% p.a. for year after year! There's clearly a discrepancy here of at least 2%. Far from being 1.8% today, it ought to be 0% or even a negative figure. This is pure spin by government statisticians and economists. Much the same applies in the case of official figures for inflation -- except the fix is in the opposite direction. To be realistic, at least 2% or 3% should be added to the officially quoted rate. This is why Bernanke is so ambiguous as to know what he's going to do next. He knows that America is not far away from galloping inflation. "Can I get away with yet another dose of QE", he must be asking himself. He must be very fearful that if he does so he might go down in the history books as the person who transformed the Great Recession into the Great Depression Mark II. Keith Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2011/06/ _____ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
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