The Mediasphere

August 25, 2011, 9:00 PM Stop Waiting for Superman By TIMOTHY EGAN

Hope and audacity hung in the winter air those early months of the perilous presidency of Barack Obama, a time when street vendors were selling pictures of him as Superman, complete with an “S” across his chest.

I remember picking one up, thinking the collage might be worth something down the road. Of course it was never realistic, despite Obama’s gifts of oration and the power of his narrative, for him to be The One, or The Natural, let alone a superhero. We can’t help it, though; every inauguration is like the start of a new baseball season, filled with hope for the rookie to hit 60 home runs.

A year and change from the next election, the politics of the season are mean and raw. A conservative in Eastern Washington State runs for local office on a platform of shooting illegal immigrants on sight. A Republican senate candidate in Nebraska compares poor people to scavenging raccoons. And the leading Republicans who want to take Obama’s place deny the existence of basic science, scoffing at everything from evolution to the global consensus on climate change. Is gravity next?

Through the haze of this dystopia, Obama has no skip in his step, no lift in his voice. His poll numbers are the worst of his time in office. His enemies no longer call him Muslim, socialist or Kenyan. They don’t have to: they point to 9.1 percent unemployment, and seek to ride the wave pushed by three-fourths of the country that feels the nation is going in the wrong direction.
 
The president’s supporters expect him to emerge from a deserved vacation with a term-saving jobs plan, and maybe the old cape out of the closet. They should forget such delusions. The jobs proposal will go nowhere in a Congress that has made clear from the beginning it cares about only one thing: ensuring that Obama fails.

And the Superman hype — that came with the froth of the 2008 campaign, when his words seemed strong enough to break up a storm, and the idea of a black man becoming leader of a nation born with slavery was so potent.

As president, he’s been a sober, cautious, tongue-shackled realist — a moderate Republican of the pre-crazy, pre-Tea Party era. Having failed to come up with a Big Idea to guide his presidency, he will sink or swim now on strengths that don’t lend themselves to large rallies or passionate enthusiasm. Sobriety and moderation, by definition, are boring.

Urban liberals, labor, blacks and Hispanics, environmentalists, the young – the core of Obama’s army in 2008 — are disappointed in the president of August, 2011. They’re right when they say he caved on the debt talks: the evidence is House Speaker John Boehner’s boast that he got 98 percent of what he wanted from the president.

But instead of waiting for an arm-flapping populist to emerge from the genteel summer redoubt on Martha’s Vineyard, the left should focus on the coming ground war, and try to fill Congress with new people who can at least tell fact from fiction.

For Obama the political mortal, two lines of governance present themselves.

One is simply to be the executive whose policies, with a few exceptions, are backed by the majority of the public, and opposed by Republicans in thrall to kooks and corporate absolutists.

Tax cuts for wage-earners, but not for millionaires and billionaires, has deep, bipartisan support across the land, sensibly articulated by Warren Buffett, who pointed out the absurdity his secretary paying a higher tax rate than he.

If Obama plays this issue right, those Republican presidential candidates who said they would never raise taxes even with 10 spending cuts for every increase will wish they never made such a pledge to extremism.

He doesn’t have to launch a class war — merely to engage one that’s already underway. So far, surprisingly, he has not taken a side. He should make Republicans defend the politics of grotesque economic inequality.

The health care reform law is not radical. The so-called individual mandate — requiring everyone to have some coverage — grew out of Republican think tanks, and of course was institutionalized in Massachusetts by Mitt Romney.

About 50 million American have no health care. If that’s the status quo Republicans want, Obama should make them own the misery, highlighting Rick Perry’s Texas, where one in four citizens are without this basic right, which the rest of the industrial world shares.

The second tack is to run against the lunacy of the opposition. In the same week that scientists announced the discovery of fossils 3.4 billion years old, evidence of explosive growth of early life through evolution, Rick Perry showed he will take his science from the Bible. He called evolution “a theory that’s out there.” If he thinks it is just a theory, he should get last year’s flu shot.

Sensible business leaders are looking to the Federal Reserve for some help with a sick global economy. Yet one leading Republican candidate, Ron Paul, wants to abolish the central bank. Another, Rick Perry, has threatened physical harm of some vague sort against the chairman.

On social issues, Perry wants to amend the Constitution to take away rights from gays and pregnant women, and eliminate the power of citizens to directly elect their senators (that’s the Seventeenth Amendment, which Perry opposed in his book).

Public opinion, again, is on Obama’s side on these issues. But to leverage it, he has to practice a much more muscular brand of politics. He doesn’t have to be Superman; Clark Kent with a strong dose of brio would do it.

The greatest danger of current educational policy is that it does not develop critical thinking capacities. In an effort to standardize achievement and churn out productive workers, we are going to produce dangerous citizens. The dismal state of journalism and the easy access to so-called information makes it even more important that schools put critical thinking at the center of the curriculum.

Perhaps the greatest threat posed by charter schools, voucher programs and privatization is that more and more schools will become propaganda mills. Imagine, if you have the stomach for it, what a school designed by Rick Perry might look like.

This danger has become increasingly clear in the last few years. One particularly sharp example came during a CNN report on health care reform in 2009 when a woman in the audience vented her spleen at one of the rash of Town Hall meetings. When her aggressive, inaccurate assertions about the Obama administration’s intentions were challenged, she turned up the volume and screamed, “I saw it on television!”

This frustrating moment, while perhaps insignificant when viewed in isolation, is symptomatic of the slow death of critical thinking. Critical thought is endangered, in part, because understanding of scientific method has waned. Scientific method involves developing a hypothesis to explain a phenomenon and then testing the hypothesis through experimentation. Scientific rigor is rooted in skepticism and the persistent effort to disprove the hypothesis. Many, if not most, advances in human knowledge have come through scientific method. Combine the decline of critical capacity with the explosion of information in the digital age and you have the seeds of a society where truth is whatever one chooses to believe.

While scientific method isn’t called “scientific” for nothing, its principles should inform education and civic life as well. Skepticism and questioning of authority, in all its manifestations, are keys to enlightened citizenship. But these days it seems that the civic version of scientific method has been turned on its head. Many Americans seem more inclined to adopt an emotionally or ideologically satisfying point of view (the hypothesis) and then cherry pick observations of so-called authorities (the evidence). This accounts for folks like the woman on CNN. One can’t fairly claim to know her motivation or political ideology, but her angry insistence that she “saw it on television,” and it was therefore true, spoke volumes.

I’m sure she did “see it on television.” Sarah Palin invented death panels on television. Members of the Bush administration found weapons of mass destruction on television. Sunday morning evangelicals produce miracles on television. According to a recent survey, 46% of Americans believe God created humans in our current form within the last few thousand years. Their convictions are supported on television, somewhere. “Birthers” continue to use television to insist that Barack Obama is not a citizen and that he is a Muslim. According to Fox News, Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor is a racist. Conspiracy theorists claim that our own government blew up the World Trade Center on 9/ 11. You can find authority for any of these absurd points of view by flipping through television channels any time, night or day.

Two very troubling aspects of contemporary life contribute to the “I saw it on television” approach to critical thinking.

One is education, in and out of school. While not all schools in the past were exemplary, educational practice these days is nearly devoid of critical examination. In 21st century schools, children don’t learn — they are taught. These are distinctly different things. Learning involves active exploration, curiosity, skepticism and imagination. Being taught is to be a passive recipient of whatever information or viewpoint the “teacher” deems important and being conditioned to reiterate it as precisely as possible. Skepticism is not only discouraged, it is punished. Outside of school, children are taught to unconditionally respect their elders rather than to respectfully question them. Too many religious institutions insist on infallible authority instead of inspiring spiritual discovery. Here too skepticism is punished, with the threat of even more severe consequences than in schools.

The second is the easy availability of the trappings of authority. There have always been charlatans, snake oil salesmen, con men and liars, but they used to operate in the shadows, not the spotlight. For many, many decades, leading newspapers and broadcast television news presented objective, well-vetted information. Credibility was affirmed by formal newsprint, clear distinctions between news and opinion, widely respected broadcast journalists and a set of generally accepted standards that should guide legitimate print and electronic journalism. Nowadays, any yahoo with a pin striped suit and/ or a modicum of technological capability can host a high definition cable talk show or start a very authoritative-looking blog.

In recent decades the line has been blurred between advertising and news, between infomercial and journalism, between honest political discourse and corporate-funded propaganda. It’s already bad enough, but I worry for our country as a generation of students with stunted critical capacities encounters a world where an authoritative voice affirming their “truth” is just a channel change away. 

Follow Steve Nelson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/snelson0248

By David DeGraw, Amped Status

With an unprecedented sum of wealth, tens of trillions of dollars, held within the top one-tenth of one percent of the US population, we now have the most severe inequality of wealth in US history. Not even the robber barons of the Gilded Age were as greedy as the modern-day economic elite.

As American philosopher John Dewey said, “There is no such thing as the liberty or effective power of an individual, group, or class, except in relation to the liberties, the effective powers, of other individuals, groups or classes.”

In my report, The Economic Elite vs. the People, I reported on the strategic withholding of wealth from 99 percent of the US population over the past generation. Since the mid-1970s, worker production and wealth creation has exploded. As the statistics throughout this report prove, the dramatic increase in wealth has been almost entirely absorbed by the economic top one-tenth of one percent of the population, with most of it going to the top one-hundredth of one percent.

If you are wondering why a critical mass of people desperately struggling to make ends meet are still not fighting back with overwhelming force and running the mega-wealthy aristocrats out of town, let’s consider two significant factors:

1) People are so busy trying to maintain their current standard of living that their energies are consumed by holding onto the little they have left.

2) People have very little understanding of how much wealth has been consolidated within the top economic one-tenth of one percent.

Considering the first factor, it is obvious that people have become beaten down psychologically and financially. A report in the Guardian titled, “Anxiety keeps the super-rich safe from middle-class rage,” suggests that people are so desperate to hold onto what they have that they are too busy looking down to look up: “As psychologists will tell you, fear of loss is more powerful than the prospect of gain. The struggling middle classes look down more anxiously than they look up, particularly in recession and sluggish recovery.”

Considering the second factor, people do not understand how much wealth has been withheld from them. The average person has never personally experienced or seen the excessive wealth and luxury that the mega-rich live in. Wealth inequality has grown so extreme and the wealthy have become so far removed from average society, it is as if the rich exist in some outer stratosphere beyond the comprehension of the average person. As the Guardian report states:

“… having little daily contact with the rich and little knowledge of how they lived, they simply didn’t think about inequality much, or regard the wealthy as direct competitors for resources. As the sociologist Garry Runciman observed: ‘Envy is a difficult emotion to sustain across a broad social distance.’… Even now most underestimate the rewards of bankers and executives. Top pay has reached such levels that, rather like interstellar distances, what the figures mean is hard to grasp.”

In fact, the average American vastly underestimates our nation’s severe wealth disparity. This survey, featured in the NY Times, reveals that Americans think our society is far more equal than it actually is:

“In a recent survey of Americans, my colleague Dan Ariely and I found that Americans drastically underestimated the level of wealth inequality in the United States. While recent data indicates that the richest 20 percent of Americans own 84 percent of all wealth, people estimated that this group owned just 59 percent – believing that total wealth in this country is far more evenly divided among poorer Americans.

What’s more, when we asked them how they thought wealth should be distributed, they told us they wanted an even more equitable distribution, with the richest 20 percent owning just 32 percent of the wealth. This was true of Democrats and Republicans, rich and poor – all groups we surveyed approved of some inequality, but their ideal was far more equal than the current level.”

This chart shows the survey’s results: 

The overwhelming majority of the US population is unaware of the vast wealth at hand. An entire generation of unprecedented wealth creation has been concealed from 99 percent of the population for over 35 years. Having never personally experienced this wealth, the average American cannot comprehend what is possible if even a fraction of the money was used for the betterment of society.

Given modern technology and wealth, American citizens should not be living in poverty. The statistics demonstrate that we now live in a neo-feudal society. In comparison to the wealthiest one-tenth of one percent of the population, who are sitting on top of tens of trillions of dollars in wealth, we are essentially propagandized peasants.

The fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans are struggling to get by, while tens of trillions of dollars are consolidated within a small fraction of the population, is a crime against humanity.

The next time you are stressed out, struggling to make ends meet and pay off your debts, just think about the trillions of dollars sitting in the obscenely bloated pockets of the financial elites. I still cling to the hope that once enough people become aware of this fact, we can have the non-violent revolution we so urgently need. Until then, the rich get richer as a critical mass with increasingly dire economic prospects desperately struggles to make ends meet.

[w2]

Here are Six Stories You Must Read About Rick Perry —By Tim Murphy

Rick Perry’s first week on the campaign trail was, it’s pretty safe to say, an eventful one. Last Saturday, the Texas governor officially entered the GOP presidential race with a pledge to make “Washington, DC, as inconsequential in your life as I can.” On Sunday, he alleged that the United States military does not respect President Obama. On Monday, he threatened to murder (or something) the Republican-appointed chairman of the Federal Reserve. On Wednesday, he blew the whistle on an international conspiracy by climatologists to secure more money for research grants. On Thursday, he disclosed that the earth was “pretty old” and that creationism should be taught in public schools.

Perry, Texas’ governor since the last days of the Clinton administration, has taken the race by storm, soaring to the top of the polls in Iowa and throwing conservatives into a tizzy as to whether he’s really cut out to lead the Republican party forward. So who is Rick Perry, anyway—and what has he done to Texas?

We combed the Internet to bring you our favorite deep dives on the GOP’s new pony—and the people and events that made him. Enjoy:

“Trial by Fire,” David Grann, The New Yorker: Cameron Todd Willingham was executed via lethal injection in 2004 for murdering his wife and three kids via arson. There was one serious problem: It now appears almost certain that Willingham was innocent. Perry, who presided over more executions than any governor in modern American history, declined to grant a stay to Willingham when presented with evidence that his case had been mishandled and key evidence was ignored. When the Texas Forensic Science Commission seemed on the verge of concluding that the fire might not have been arson after all (after taking the unprecedented step of re-examining the case), Perry promptly replaced three of its members. Grann painstakingly details the 12-year process by which Texas, under Perry’s watch, killed an innocent man—and the effort he took to sweep it under the rug. The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait calls this piece, “the single greatest piece of journalism I have ever read in my life.” See also: ”Innocence Lost,” Pamela Colloff, Texas Monthly—in which a reporter succeeds in freeing a man who spent 18 years on death row for a crime he didn’t commit.

“The NAFTA Superhighway,” Chris Hayes, The Nation: ”When completed, the highway will run from Mexico City to Toronto, slicing through the heartland like a dagger sunk into a heifer at the loins and pulled clean to the throat. It will be four football fields wide, an expansive gully of concrete, noise and exhaust, swelled with cars, trucks, trains and pipelines carrying water, wires and God knows what else. Through towns large and small it will run, plowing under family farms, subdevelopments, acres of wilderness.”

At least, that’s how Hayes’ conspiracy theorists—which include the Montana Legislature and at least one member of Congress—saw it. Hayes cuts through the myths surrounding the Trans-Texas Corridor, one of Perry’s most ambitious and controversial proposals in his decade as governor—and one that helped spawn a conservative insurrection in the 2010 gubernatorial primary.

“Bob Perry Needs a Hug,” S.C. Gwynne, Texas Monthly: No one in America has given more money to Rick Perry over the last decade than Texas homebuilder and Swift Boat financier Bob Perry (no relation): $2.5 million. Perry the builder, whose business success is heavily dependent on cheap immigrant labor, is widely seen as a driving force behind the governor’s relatively moderate approach to curbing undocumented immigration. Gov. Perry has been accused of being a corporatist and not an ideologue; his relationship with Bob Perry is a testament to that.

“Revisionaries,” Mariah Blake, Washington Monthly: Texas public schools don’t officially push creationism on students as Perry suggests, but it’s not for lack of effort. Blake profiles one of Perry’s most controversial appointments, his selection of a creationist dentist to chair the State Board of Education, tasked with setting the curriculum standards for classrooms across the state.

Don McLeroy is a balding, paunchy man with a thick broom-handle mustache who lives in a rambling two-story brick home in a suburb near Bryan, Texas. When he greeted me at the door one evening last October, he was clutching a thin paperback with the skeleton of a seahorse on its cover, a primer on natural selection penned by famed evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr. We sat down at his dining table, which was piled high with three-ring binders, and his wife, Nancy, brought us ice water in cut-crystal glasses with matching coasters. Then McLeroy cracked the book open…

“Rick Perry’s Army of God,” Forrest Wilder, Texas Observer: Before he announced his run for president Rick Perry held a massive prayer and fasting festival at an NFL stadium in Houston. You may have heard. Wilder provides valuable background on Perry’s allies on the religious right—specifically a radical new movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation.

On September 28, 2009, at 1:40 p.m., God’s messengers visited Rick Perry. On this day, the Lord’s messengers arrived in the form of two Texas pastors, Tom Schlueter of Arlington and Bob Long of San Marcos, who called on Perry in the governor’s office inside the state Capitol. Schlueter and Long both oversee small congregations, but they are more than just pastors. They consider themselves modern-day apostles and prophets, blessed with the same gifts as Old Testament prophets or New Testament apostles. The pastors told Perry of God’s grand plan for Texas. A chain of powerful prophecies had proclaimed that Texas was “The Prophet State,” anointed by God to lead the United States into revival and Godly government. And the governor would have a special role.

“Right Place, Right Time,” Paul Burka, Texas Monthly: This one’s politics, plain and simple. Burka, one of Texas’ most respected political analysts, explains what makes Perry tick, and makes the compelling case that the governor has been preparing for his presidential run for years.

Most people who follow Texas politics know by now the conventional wisdom about Perry: that he is an accidental governor who inherited the job when George W. Bush became president; that he is “Governor Goodhair” or “Governor 39 Percent” or some similar appellation of mild disrespect accompanied by a twist of humor; that he doesn’t really do anything well except win elections, which he has done with regularity. There is truth in the conventional wisdom, but there is also blindness. Perry has been so often viewed as a caricature that many Texans have failed to recognize his talent.

With the recent Iowa straw poll [1] and President Obama’s bus tour [2], Americans are hearing a cacophony of arguments about the wobbly economy. The federal stimulus package passed in 2009 was either a deficit-busting failure full of wasteful projects or an unparalleled rescue that would have been more successful if it had only been bigger. Taxes are either stifling or the lowest they’ve ever been. America needs to invest in infrastructure, or “infrastructure” is merely a euphemism for more government spending. So, here’s our guide to the most prevalent economic myths.

1. Taxes have been going up and are high compared to levels in other countries.

The first part is wrong; the second is also wrong but contains a grain of truth.

The percentage of income that Americans spend on taxes is the lowest it’s been since 1958, according an analysis by USA Today [3]. And with the exception of five years after the 1986 Tax Reform Act, the highest marginal income [4] and corporate tax rates [5] are the lowest they’ve been since World War II.

Federal taxes as a share of GDP are at their lowest point since 1950 [6], according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office [7]. When all taxes, including state and local, are added up, the proportion of GDP going to taxes has been essentially flat for nearly half a century, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The OECD figures also show that, as a share of GDP, taxes in the United States are lower than in most other developed nations:

The only tax increases passed during the Obama administration were part of the health-care reform bill, through which Congress, among other things, raised the Medicare payroll tax for high earners, said Curtis Dubay, a senior tax policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation [8]. The problem, he said, is the federal corporate tax rate [9], which stands at 35 percent.

“We have the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world,” Dubay said. “It’s driving new investments overseas and the jobs that come with that overseas as well.”

While it’s true the official rate is high, few corporations pay it, said Roberton Williams of the Tax Policy Center [10].

“The effective tax rates that corporations pay actually goes down a lot with deductions and puts us closer to the middle of the pack,” he said. “It complicates the tax system substantially and makes it more difficult for corporations to figure out what their taxes are.”

A study he oversaw at the Congressional Budget Office [11] illustrates the point. While the United States has one of the highest tax rates for investments in machinery financed with equity (Figure 2-14), it offers a generous deduction for investments in machinery funded by debt (Figure 2-23).

2. The stimulus failed./The stimulus rescued the economy.

Neither. It clearly hasn’t hauled the country back to full employment, but widely-cited economic models show it probably prevented a deeper downturn.

Many economists and nonpartisan forecasting firms have credited the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act with increasing employment by at least two million jobs [12] (see Table 8). Although the unemployment rate remains stuck at 9 percent, several economists estimate that unemployment would have been as high as 12 percent and remained high longer without the act.

One of the most prominent studies on the stimulus [13] was put out by the economists Alan Blinder and Mark Zandi in July 2010. The pair concluded that while the bank bailout and actions by the Federal Reserve had a greater impact in ending the recession, the stimulus was a critical part of the remedy. “We do not believe it a coincidence that the turnaround from recession to recovery occurred last summer, just as the ARRA was providing its maximum economic benefit,” they wrote.

Other analyses have shown less of an impact2014that aid for state budgets and education “funded staffing that would have occurred anyway [14]” and that the stimulus saved government jobs [15] while doing little to boost private-sector employment.

Critics say it failed because it fell short of what administration officials claimed it would do. They point to a chart, produced shortly before Obama’s inauguration by two of his economic advisers, Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein, which showed that if the stimulus plan were passed, unemployment wouldn’t top 8 percent [16]. But the recession turned out to be much more severe than they and blue-chip economists realized.

The goal of the stimulus “was to end the Great Recession and jumpstart our recovery,” said Zandi, who has advised John McCain but has said he’s a registered Democrat [17]. “It did that. It was never intended nor should it be expected to be the source of long-term growth. The plan was always to hand the baton to the private sector. And that was going smoothly until we got creamed” by the European debt crisis and rising gas prices.

3. The stimulus should have been bigger.

This is a red herring. Politically, the initial stimulus package almost certainly couldn’t have been bigger because the moderate senators who provided the key votes wouldn’t stomach a package over $800 billion. Indeed, late in the game, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and others were looking to trim the bill to $650 billion [18].

Regardless of the politics, many economists, including New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, insist the stimulus was too weak to deal with the crisis. Other economists, including John F. Cogan and John B. Taylor at Stanford University and the Hoover Institution, argue that the amount of stimulus spending wouldn’t have mattered [19] because it mainly reduced borrowing by state and local governments rather than increasing spending. So, they contend, the predicted benefits were washed out.

In any case, the total stimulus is bigger than you might have thought. Since the Recovery Act, Congress has approved hundreds of billions of dollars in additional stimulus measures, including the renewal of unemployment benefits, this year’s payroll tax cut and the extensions of the education jobs fund and the homebuyer tax credit. The total is now well over a trillion dollars.

But even that isn’t sufficient knowing what we do now, according to Romer. As she recently told the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein, the economy “probably needed about $2 trillion given what we were actually up against.” [20]

4. The stimulus was all projects.

Nope. The Recovery Act as passed was estimated to cost about $787 billion. More than a third of that was tax cuts, [21] and another third was entitlements, such as unemployment benefits and Medicaid assistance. Of the $275 billion in spending by federal agencies, less than $200 billion was dedicated to projects [22].

The projected cost of the Recovery Act is now $830 billion [23], largely because of the qualification of more people qualifying for entitlements and the popularity of some tax credits.

5. The stimulus will have no lasting legacy.

False. It’s been said that while the New Deal left behind a landscape of bridges and dams, the stimulus did little more than fill potholes and create a lot of temporary jobs. In truth, the Recovery Act provided critical funding for a number of projects that people will be able to point to generations from now.

Here are 10 significant projects, most under construction, funded by the Recovery Act:

BrightSource Ivanpah Solar Project [24] With a capacity to generate 400 megawatts, the array in the Mojave Desert will be one of the largest solar power plants in the world. Under construction; targeted for completion 2013. CA $1.6 billion loan guarantee Caithness Shepherds Flat Wind Farm [25] At 845-megawatt capacity, it will be the largest wind farm in the world.* Under construction; expected to start commercial operation 2012. OR $1.3 billion loan guarantee Savannah River Site Environmental Cleanup [26] Thousands of workers cleaned up radioactive waste at the Cold War nuclear plant and sealed up two reactor buildings with cement. Mostly completed 2011. SC $1.6 billion Johnson Controls battery plant [27] The new plant is part of a $2.4 billion program [28] to create a battery industry for hybrid and electric vehicles in the United States. Completed 2011. MI $299 million Caldecott Tunnel Fourth Bore [29] The new tunnel will ease traffic on the heavily traveled highway between Oakland and the suburbs. Under construction; targeted for completion late 2013/early 2014. CA $176 million Cleveland Innerbelt Bridge [30] The funding is helping to replace a 50-year-old bridge in downtown Cleveland. Under construction; targeted for completion 2014. OH $79 million Crow Creek Tribal School [31] A new K-12 school on the Sioux Tribe2019s Crow Creek Reservation. Under construction; targeted for completion 2012. SD $37 million Moynihan Station [32] A new Amtrak train hall at the site of the Beaux Arts monument James A. Farley Post Office building. Under construction; targeted for completion 2016. NY $83 million Coast Guard headquarters [33] The first phase of the new Homeland Security headquarters, which the White House has called the largest federal building project since the Pentagon. Under construction; targeted for completion 2013. DC $650 million (for DHS headquarters project) Camp Pendleton Naval Hospital [34] The new military hospital will contain four levels and 500,000 square feet. Under construction; targeted for completion 2014. CA $394 million

*House Republicans have argued [35] that an internal White House memo [36] indicates that subsidies for the wind farm might be overly generous. 

Are the jobs only temporary? A lot of stimulus money allowed schools to retain permanent employees, and some short-term workers landed full-time jobs. As for construction work, it’s by nature a compilation of temporary jobs. When business is strong, workers move from one project to the next earning steady paychecks. During cold spells and downturns, work dries up and the firms lay off their crews for months at a time.

6. The stimulus has been full of/free of fraud, waste and abuse.

After Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq reconstruction, many analysts predicted that the federal stimulus program would be rife with fraud, waste and abuse. At least so far, it hasn’t been.

Earl Devaney, the inspector general put in charge of stimulus oversight, testified at a congressional hearing in June that “there have been only 144 convictions involving a little over $1.9 million.” That’s less than 0.01 percent of the total program.

Still, criminal fraud cases take a long time to develop. Since Devaney spoke, 41 new convictions have been added to the books, and more could come. The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board has received more than 7,000 complaints [37] leading to 1,500 open investigations.

None of this accounts for waste, which is ultimately subjective. Sen. Tom Coburn has now released three reports detailing hundreds of projects that didn’t pass his smell test. Here they are if you want to judge for yourself:

• 100 Stimulus Projects: A Second Opinion [38]
• Stimulus Checkup [39]
• Summertime Blues [40]

7. Infrastructure is the answer for unemployment.

Partly, but not as much as advocates have claimed. After the debt-ceiling compromise, President Obama said:

“We also need to give more opportunities to all those construction workers out there who lost their jobs when the housing boom went bust. We could put them to work right now by giving loans to private companies that want to repair our roads and our bridges and our airports, rebuilding our infrastructure.”

The construction industry was one of the hardest-hit sectors in the recession, with 27 percent unemployment at its worst. (It’s now 14 percent.) But building homes requires skills different from building infrastructure, said Ken Simonson, economist for the construction trade group Associated General Contractors of America. And unemployment is running high in heavy and civil engineering construction, which has lost 160,000 jobs since July 2007, nearly twice as many as the stimulus transportation projects created. Those workers are likely to land infrastructure jobs ahead of the 400,000 homebuilders who lost their jobs over the same period.

For all sectors of the economy, a grim problem is the long-term unemployed2014those out of work six months or longer2014who now make up 44 percent of the total jobless pool. The Federal Reserve reported in July that workers unemployed a month or less had a three in 10 chance of finding a job while the odds for the long-term jobless were one in 10 [41].

Author Michael Grabell is working on a book Money Well Spent?: What Really Happened to the Trillion-Dollar Stimulus Plan [42], due out in January from PublicAffairs.

First Posted: 8/14/11 06:15 PM ET Updated: 8/14/11 06:21 PM ET

The bright red skull-and-crossbones signs are hard to miss and increasingly common on Pacific Northwest beaches. A whole new fleet just popped up along the shores of a small bay between the Pacific Ocean and Puget Sound.

On Friday, Washington State health officials reported the first U.S. illnesses linked to one particular strain of toxin triggered by an algal bloom. Three people came down with Diarrhetic Shellfish Poisoning (DSP) after eating mussels from Sequim Bay, in the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The bay is now closed to shellfish harvesting.

Although the culprit biotoxin hadn’t been previously detected at unsafe levels in U.S. shellfish, thousands of people in Europe, Asia and South America have reportedly suffered its unpleasant gastrointestinal symptoms in recent years. The long-term health effects from DSP are not yet clear; some experts think they might include an increased risk of cancer.

“Whether this is really the first case of poisoning here, we don’t know,” said Vera Trainer, program manager of the Marine Biotoxin Group at NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle. “But it certainly looks to me like things are getting worse.”

Harmful algal blooms, often called red tides, can occur naturally in both marine or fresh waters, and have been a recognized public health threat since well before humans began significantly altering the environment. In the late 1700s, members of Capt. George Vancouver’s exploration crew died after eating mussels contaminated with another toxic strain, Paralytic Shellfish Poisoning (PSP).

Still, experts suggest that some of the toxins released by various algae species are becoming more prevalent, frequent and virulent across the U.S. from the Oregon coast to Chesapeake Bay. They have been known to pose a range of threats to marine environments, local economies and public health.

“The strongest algal blooms occur during very hot weather, where there is lots of sun and not a whole lot of wind,” explained Chris Moore of the nonprofitChesapeake Bay Foundation. He pointed to this summer’s extreme heat along the east coast as “perfect bloom conditions,” and suggested that the high temperatures may have played a role in what continues to be a particularly problematic algal bloom season in Maryland. The local strain does not produce any toxins, but rather suffocates fish and oysters by clogging their gills. But what Moore calls “mahogany tides” can cause devastating damage to economies dependent on the shellfish.

Excess nutrients entering the waterway, including fertilizers, pet waste and sewage, might also contribute to the proliferation of the microscopic marine plants. “A heavy rainfall could produce the last slug of nutrients for algae to start blooming in mass,” said Moore.

While experts expect climate change to bring both warmer waters and episodes of heavier rains, they are cautious about making a direct link between global and local phenomena. The role of pollution, and why these microorganisms produce the poisons in the first place, also remains unclear.

What does seem clear is that the Pacific Northwest in particular is getting flooded with the toxins and their consequences: DSP joins the region’s potentially fatal PSP and amnesic shellfish poisoning (ASP) strains.

“Poor Puget Sound seems to have pretty much everything,” says Trainer. “Although the Florida Red Tide has not yet come out here.”

That Florida Red Tide produces a biotoxin that can cause non-fatal Neurotoxic Shellfish Poisoning (NSP) through ingestion as well as respiratory troubles through inhalation, in addition to killing fish, marine mammals and seabirds en masse.

While the Florida Red Tide and other algal blooms are often colored a shade of red — or purple, brown or green — the term can be a misnomer. Just because the water turns an odd color doesn’t mean it will make people sick, though beaches may become less than appealing, like when a bright green bloom took over a beach in Qingdao, China in July.

And microorganisms don’t need to concentrate in color-changing levels in order to cause harm. Shellfish that feed upon low levels of them over a prolonged period of time still accumulate enough poison to sicken human consumers.

Researchers are just now starting to understand why the algae excrete the physiologically expensive toxin. “They don’t produce it to harm to fish and human, but rather to have better success in their environment,” pointed out William Cochlan, senior research scientist of marine microbial ecology and oceanography at San Francisco State University. “How does the toxin make their life better?”

So far, Cochlan’s research has suggested that the toxins may allow single-celled organisms to more easily acquire essential elements, such as iron or copper, from the water.

His research lab has also found that the nutrients associated with man-made activities, such as sewage and agricultural fertilizer, only cause certain species of algae to become more toxic. “We cannot generalize to all toxin-producing species,” said Cochlan.

“If we can understand what the toxin does, then we can figure out ways that the cell can be happy without the toxin, and ensure that the people and the environment aren’t harmed by the species,” he added.

That knowledge could increase researchers’ ability to monitor coastal areas, and quickly close them before an algal bloom begins to cause harm.

This might then also allow lucrative fisheries to stay open longer. California, for example, shuts down all coastal areas for recreational mussel harvesting between May and October as a precaution. In the Pacific Northwest, many Native Americans living off of Sequim Bay rely on selling shellfish for subsistence.

“They want to know when they can harvest again,” said Trainer.

– Bernard Golden, CIO

August 12, 2011 

The latest trend (or over-hyped term, if you like) is “consumerization of IT.” As with cloud computing, the term is somewhat ambiguous and is applied to a number of things that are recognizably related, but which differ in details.

Consumerization of IT is usually contrasted with “enterprise IT, ” which carries connotations of interminable rollouts, bewildering interfaces, obscure functionality and high prices. The poster child ordinarily cited for “enterprise IT” is SAP, which seems to raise particular ire in commentators.

Consumerization of IT, on the other hand, is associated with ease-of-use, attractive interfaces, intuitive functionality and low prices. Apple is ordinarily referenced as the exemplar of this type of computing. (Apple may not be known for low prices, but you get my point.)

Admittedly, Apple may not be known for low prices, but consumerized IT as delivered by the company can be delightful. I received a Google (GOOG) phone when attending Google I/O a couple of years ago. To get it configured and connected to Google’s own email service required me to configure ports and various settings, none of which I knew off the top of my head. Between looking up the information and configuring the phone, the process required 20 minutes, most of which was consumed with me inputting stuff that I had no idea was correct. The iPhone, by contrast, required my email address and password. Within 10 seconds I was accessing my email.

Why was one easier and the other harder? Apple achieved its superior ease of use by designing its configuration to assume standard defaults and automate the configuration process. Only if the default configuration fails would the user then be forced to drill down into configuration options. After all, it’s fairly uncommon that someone uses unusual ports for email access (although it can be done), so why not implement a configuration flow that assumes the typical mode as default and allows customization if necessary, instead of requiring everyone to configure their system as though custom?

Certainly, there’s no question that apps designed with ease-of-use as a primary objective are much simpler and more satisfying to use. I will note, however, that Apple is not perfect in this regard, despite what its multitude of enthusiasts believe. The latest version of iOS has discarded iOS’s annoying screen-based notification system in favor of Android’s superior pull-down notification mechanism.

In the corporate IT world, this move to “consumerized” IT has been described as the penetration of employee-purchased mobile devices like the iPhone, iPad, and Android phones and tablets. This phenomenon is going to swell to greater and greater dimensions. If you read my prediction blog last week, in which I forecast the enormous, gigantic growth of special purpose devices, you know that I think corporate IT will face that growth from here on out. IT organizations are going to face more and more pressure to support the BYOD (bring your own device) world.

However, challenging as this is—and it’s plenty challenging, make no mistake—viewing the consumerization of IT as an extension of employee use of internal IT applications seriously oversimplies what the trend really represents. Consumerization of IT isn’t about employees using consumer devices; it’s about consumers becoming the primary users of internal IT applications. Dealing with this challenge will be significantly more difficult than supporting an employee BYOD environment.

Simply put, we are reorganizing the way companies do business. We have moved past the analog age and are truly in the digital age. What does that mean? Consider how business was done pre-digital. A lot of interaction happened on an analog basis: sales meetings, mailing a brochure, fielding a telephone call. Lots and lots of human and physical interaction. Finally (one hoped), it resulted in a digital business transaction. A sale. A re-order. A claim. At which point, someone from your company interacted with your internal IT systems to enter the transaction. Subsequent handling of the transaction was more analog. A phone inquiry to check on shipment status. A query regarding progress of a claim. Easily over 90 percent of the value chain was non-digital.

Today, companies are moving to all-digital, self-service customer interaction. Learn about the company’s products (i.e., be marketed to) by browsing the product Website. Place an order via the company’s mobile phone app. Check the status of a transaction by logging in or using the automated phone tree. Companies are getting out of the human interaction business as fast as they can, which means that the volume of digital interaction—the stuff of IT—is skyrocketing. Today, a company’s internal user base is far outnumbered by external users, who may be customers, partners or suppliers. This is the consumerization of IT, and it poses perhaps the greatest challenge to IT organizations ever.

Let me explain.

First, if you think your users had a variety of devices, wait until you see the rest of the world. Every device under the sun is in the hands of users, and more pop up every day. The notion of an “approved device list” is laughable. Instead of accepting a few and excluding the rest, IT has to develop a strategy that makes it possible to accept everything from everyone. This requires making it easy (and possible) to integrate an app on a device into corporate IT systems.

And by the way, the driver for this device explosion isn’t frivolous users with time to waste on their smartphones. It’s your business delivering its own apps to give customers a way to interact with the company on their terms, at their convenience. It’s your business making it easy for business partnerships to spring to life by saying, “We can work together; it’s easy. Just integrate your app with ours via this mechanism.”

Solution: You need well-defined, convenient integration points that do not require a project team to get the handshaking complete. The buzzword today is APIs, but this need is the fulfillment of the SOA movement of a decade ago. The difference between now and then is that before it was a “should,” i.e., “We should have a well-defined integration layer with standardized interfaces because that’s the most elegant way to do it.” Today, it’s a “must,” i.e., “To support ongoing partnerships and manage the plethora of devices that accompany them, we must have a convenient integration point that does not require custom engineering on our part or the partner’s part.”

If you’re in IT, you’re now a software supplier, and you need to offer and document straightforward interfaces with which partners can integrate without joint engineering projects.

Second, application load will be much more variable. Corporate IT was usually quite predictable. A known user population. Common use patterns: Log on at 8:00 AM, big surge at 8:30, slowdown around lunch, higher volumes through mid-afternoon, tailing off in the late afternoon. When mobile apps are in the hands of external parties, it’s hard to know when they’ll be moved to interact with you. It could be upon waking at 6:00 AM, during the day, as their schedules permit, mid-evening after dinner, or even in the middle of the night because progress on the order is keeping the person awake. Applications don’t have downtime in this world, only varying levels of use around the clock.

Solution: It’s not enough to implement virtualization. You need a solution that is elastic, that can expand and shrink according to load. This is where cloud computing and mobile come together nicely. Just be sure your cloud is really elastic and not just warmed-over virtualization with limited flexibility of application topology. When a highly variable load meets a highly static application infrastructure, bad things happen, career-wise.

Third, application load will be much higher. Not only does the availability of mobile make your user population’s use profiles more variable, you’re now subject to their use profiles, and that can drive enormous traffic to your systems.

Let me offer an example. One large US retailer is finding new life as a fulfillment backend for other companies’ Websites. This is a great way for the company, which has struggled to remain relevant in today’s retail environment, to obtain business from other retailers and even businesses that don’t appear to be retailers (think domain enthusiast sites) who have close relationships with an entirely different consumer base. The US retailer provides an easy way for other retailers to drive transactions for its goods.

However, it also means this retailer is subject to the vagaries of those companies’ promotions and user bases. It only takes one mention of that partner company’s mobile app on Oprah (or America’s Got Talent or some other mass media show—remember, this is all about consumerization) to potentially drive huge volume and transactions back to the retailer. And, by the way, the retailer might not have any idea that the partner was going to drive this much traffic. In fact, the partner might not know it’s going to drive that much traffic. That’s what consumerization of IT means.

Solution: You definitely need elasticity to be able to respond to high volumes. But you also need to ensure that your elasticity works end-to-end. If your database can handle tens of thousands of transactions per minute, but your load balancer can’t support more than one tenth of the received traffic, you’ve got a bottleneck. The only way to expose and fix bottlenecks like these—before the crush of traffic takes down your system—is to load test it, fixing each problem as it arises during testing. Again, this is where cloud computing comes in. It’s this kind of situation where “the illusion of infinite capacity” is important.

If you take one thing away from this post, it’s that the consumerization of IT raises the importance of load testing apps.

Fourth, your systems need to be easy to use and the functionality has to work, always. In the old days of enterprise apps, if users were unhappy, so what? They were employees. Even if they griped, nobody resigned because the application was clunky. And even if they did, there was always someone else who would take their place. Today, your users are fickle. They’ll try an app, and if they can’t get it to work right away, they’ll go on to another. It’s a “live by the sword, die by the sword” scenario. If people can’t do what they want with two or three clicks, you’re going to end up with a gaping wound in your company’s forecast.

Solution: Learn from the best out there. Examine the most popular business mobile applications. I use The Weather Channel’s and FlightTrack Pro’s apps all the time. They’re elegant, single-purpose applications that I rely on during my travels. Find your own application exemplars. Learn from them. Your applications should deliver value on the opening page—without someone having to do more than enter some simple information (like the iPhone email configuration example cited earlier). Your applications should make even more valuable information available via progressively deeper interaction. Find people who have never used your application before and see how they get on. If you make it easy for first-timers to get going, you’ll be on the right track.

In summary, the consumerization of IT is far more profound than slapping a pretty interface on a decade-old enterprise application. That’s just lipstick on a pig. It’s even more than adopting an easy-to-use SaaS application. It’s all about recognizing that the boundary between your company and the rest of the world is getting blurry—and that’s a good thing. Letting end users engage with your systems can transform your business relationships and your economics. Just be sure you’re ready for the real consumerization of IT.

Bernard Golden is CEO of consulting firm HyperStratus, which specializes in virtualization, cloud computing and related issues. He is also the author of “Virtualization for Dummies,” the best-selling book on virtualization to date.

Follow Bernard Golden on Twitter @bernardgolden. Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter@CIOonline

© 2010 CXO Media Inc.

mooderino:

I’ve decided to do a couple of posts on writing styles. The first will be on clean, simple prose as mostly identified with writers like Ernest Hemingway or Raymond Carver.

This kind of writing, where you don’t use long words or complicated sentence structures is easy to read and can build into a powerful way to tell a story. However, simple does not mean simplistic.

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Omaha

OUR leaders have asked for “shared sacrifice.” But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched.

While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to classify our income as “carried interest,” thereby getting a bargain 15 percent tax rate. Others own stock index futures for 10 minutes and have 60 percent of their gain taxed at 15 percent, as if they’d been long-term investors.

These and other blessings are showered upon us by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us, much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species. It’s nice to have friends in high places.

Last year my federal tax bill — the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf — was $6,938,744. That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income — and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent.

If you make money with money, as some of my super-rich friends do, your percentage may be a bit lower than mine. But if you earn money from a job, your percentage will surely exceed mine — most likely by a lot.

To understand why, you need to examine the sources of government revenue. Last year about 80 percent of these revenues came from personal income taxes and payroll taxes. The mega-rich pay income taxes at a rate of 15 percent on most of their earnings but pay practically nothing in payroll taxes. It’s a different story for the middle class: typically, they fall into the 15 percent and 25 percent income tax brackets, and then are hit with heavy payroll taxes to boot.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, tax rates for the rich were far higher, and my percentage rate was in the middle of the pack. According to a theory I sometimes hear, I should have thrown a fit and refused to invest because of the elevated tax rates on capital gains and dividends.

I didn’t refuse, nor did others. I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone — not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 — shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain. People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off. And to those who argue that higher rates hurt job creation, I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000. You know what’s happened since then: lower tax rates and far lower job creation.

Since 1992, the I.R.S. has compiled data from the returns of the 400 Americans reporting the largest income. In 1992, the top 400 had aggregate taxable income of $16.9 billion and paid federal taxes of 29.2 percent on that sum. In 2008, the aggregate income of the highest 400 had soared to $90.9 billion — a staggering $227.4 million on average — but the rate paid had fallen to 21.5 percent.

The taxes I refer to here include only federal income tax, but you can be sure that any payroll tax for the 400 was inconsequential compared to income. In fact, 88 of the 400 in 2008 reported no wages at all, though every one of them reported capital gains. Some of my brethren may shun work but they all like to invest. (I can relate to that.)

I know well many of the mega-rich and, by and large, they are very decent people. They love America and appreciate the opportunity this country has given them. Many have joined the Giving Pledge, promising to give most of their wealth to philanthropy. Most wouldn’t mind being told to pay more in taxes as well, particularly when so many of their fellow citizens are truly suffering.

Twelve members of Congress will soon take on the crucial job of rearranging our country’s finances. They’ve been instructed to devise a plan that reduces the 10-year deficit by at least $1.5 trillion. It’s vital, however, that they achieve far more than that. Americans are rapidly losing faith in the ability of Congress to deal with our country’s fiscal problems. Only action that is immediate, real and very substantial will prevent that doubt from morphing into hopelessness. That feeling can create its own reality.

Job one for the 12 is to pare down some future promises that even a rich America can’t fulfill. Big money must be saved here. The 12 should then turn to the issue of revenues. I would leave rates for 99.7 percent of taxpayers unchanged and continue the current 2-percentage-point reduction in the employee contribution to the payroll tax. This cut helps the poor and the middle class, who need every break they can get.

But for those making more than $1 million — there were 236,883 such households in 2009 — I would raise rates immediately on taxable income in excess of $1 million, including, of course, dividends and capital gains. And for those who make $10 million or more — there were 8,274 in 2009 — I would suggest an additional increase in rate.

My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice.

Warren E. Buffett is the chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway.

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