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Category Archives: Essays
February 20, 2012
ESSAY
Beyond Blue 5: Jobs, Jobs, Jobs
America’s economic structure, the labor market and the American workplace have changed greatly in the last twenty years and will likely change even more in the twenty years to come. Some of these changes are unpredictable; others look baked into the cake. But as the blue social model continues to fade, the question of jobs will rise even higher on the national agenda. The American economy will not only need to create new jobs, it will need to create new kinds of jobs and new relationships between workers and employers as we work to build the next version of the American dream.
Continue reading
February 19, 2012
ESSAY
The Great American Impasse
Not all the Democrats are celebrating the January unemployment numbers as morning in Obama’s America. Robert Reich, Clinton’s labor secretary and one of Via Meadia‘s favorite liberals, notes dourly that most of the hiring is happening in lower-wage sectors. With more Americans impoverished than at any other point over the past fifty years, Reich finds candidate Romney’s proposals to, as Reich would have it, eviscerate safety nets and benefits for the poor especially wrongheaded. Continue reading
February 17, 2012
ESSAY
The Game of Thrones Goes DC
Earlier this week I was in Washington, teaching a class and attending some events connected to the visit of China’s vice president. It was an instructive time; in meetings with US officials, experts who follow China closely, and at the “state lunch” when Vice President Xi was the guest of honor at a State Department luncheon hosted by Secretary Clinton and Vice President Biden, I was able to get a close up view of some of the factors at work in shaping what just about everybody on the planet considers — in a hackneyed phrase — the most important bilateral relationship on planet Earth.
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February 8, 2012
ESSAY
Beyond Blue Part Four: Better Living in the 21st Century
An inevitable question as we look at the demise of the 20th century economy is how shall we live? As the manufacturing that remains to us becomes more automated, reducing employment even as output climbs; as agriculture continues to need fewer hands; as outsourcing and technological change sweep through the knowledge guilds and the learned professions; and as government downsizing decimates the serried ranks of the bureaucrats and postal workers — what jobs will be left? What will we eat and what will we wear when few if any of us make stuff anymore?
These are natural questions and for millions of Americans they are pressing personal ones. The answers to them will do much to shape the economic structure of the 21st century and that, in turn, will heavily influence the way we re-conceive the American Dream.
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February 5, 2012
ESSAY
Beyond Blue Part Three: The Power of Infostructure
The quest for a new social model has to start with economics. America could survive without growing prosperity and rising standards of living, but it would not flourish — and it would not be living up to its potential to create a better life not only for Americans but for people all over the world. The drive for economic prosperity is deeply planted in American politics and society; when the economy isn’t performing well, politicians tend to lose their jobs while the public looks for alternative ideas.
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ESSAY
Russia’s Syrian Bet Explained
Why did Russia veto the UN Security Council resolution over Syria?
Vladimir Isachenkov has an AP piece that offers some background; with that piece and the vast database and computer resources here at Team Mead’s GHQ in glamorous Queens, it’s possible to explain why Russia did what it did.
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February 1, 2012
ESSAY
Beyond Blue Part Two: Recasting The Dream
A reader responding to my essay on Governor Brown and the Great White Train asked a cogent question: if building high speed rail is the wrong thing for the governor of California to be doing, what should he be working on instead? Other readers have asked similar questions as they’ve read my essays on the decline of the blue social model. What model do I propose in its place?
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January 29, 2012
ESSAY
Beyond Blue Part One: The Crisis of the American Dream
The frustration and bitterness that fills American politics these days reflects the failure of our current social, political and economic institutions and practices to deliver the results that Americans want and expect. It’s comparable to the frustration and fear that swept through the country in the late 19th and early 20th century as the first American dream – that every family could prosper on its own farm – gradually died.
From the era of the first European settlements in North America up through World War I, the family farm was the key social, economic and even political institution in the country. Until the 1920 census, a majority of Americans lived in rural areas and, unlike the oppressed peasants of Europe most owned and worked their own land.
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January 27, 2012
ESSAY
Thank God For Humanitarian Bombs?
Each day that goes by gives the White House more reason to regret its Libyan adventure. The overthrow of Gaddafi was a good thing, but from both the humanitarian and strategic points of view, nothing has changed. The war continues to look at best like a diversion, at worst as if the US fell for a cynical French ploy to get oil in a way that damaged our long term strategic interests.
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January 26, 2012
ESSAY
Turkey: Islamist Nightmare or Misunderstood Friend?
Four days before he dropped out of the Republican race, Governor Rick Perry created an uproar by saying that Turkey is “being ruled by what many would perceive to be Islamic terrorists,” suggesting it was time to reevaluate Turkey’s place in NATO and to consider zeroing-out US aid to the country.
There was, of course, a huge media uproar in Turkey over these comments, but after the first shock wore off, something of a debate has erupted among Turkish and American commentators regarding the state of relations between the two countries.
Major Turkish newspapers described the incident as “scandalous,” with distinguished columnists like Mustafa Akyol opining “Rick Perry: What an Idiot.”
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January 22, 2012
ESSAY
How To Read A Pudding
For a literature and history buff like me, teaching political studies has been an eye opening experience. For one thing, I’ve slowly come to realize that students trained in political studies and philosophy approach what people my age used to call “books” and what my younger colleagues call “texts” in different ways.
Back in the stone age when I was an undergraduate major in English lit at Pundit U, we read two kinds of texts. There were poems, which we read quite slowly and deliberately, and there were novels and plays that we read in great gulps. In history, back in those halcyon days of yore, we also read whole books in big gulps.
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January 21, 2012
ESSAY
The Great Minnesota Pension Scam
If you are a current or former state employee in the state of Minnesota, watch out. Your pension depends on hot air, sketchy arithmetic, and the willingness of future taxpayers to make huge sacrifices to cover the deceit, wishful thinking and sketchy math at the heart of your pension system.
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January 16, 2012
ESSAY
Time For More Eurofudge?
The Euro-mess took another turn for the worse over the weekend following news that Standard & Poor’s has downgraded the debt of a flock of European countries, most notably France. Last night markets weakened across Asia as once again the rest of the world looked at Europe and wondered just how those people were going to get out of this debacle.
As Via Meadia readers know, while Franco-German politics are not the root cause of the eurozone’s woes, the deep division between Germany and France over the way a European monetary union should work is crippling the eurozone and has prevented a clear strategy from emerging to cope with the worsening, deepening and widening crisis.
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January 15, 2012
ESSAY
California Rail Fail: Captain Brown and the Great White Train
California’s bullet train is going off the rails, and the overseers are running for cover. The WSJ reports that Roelof van Ark, the chief executive, and Thomas Umberg, the chairman of the High Speed Rail Authority, announced they will step down from their posts as the odds against the project grow longer.
The highly indebted, cash strapped state has commitments of $3.3 billion of federal money in hand against the roughly $100 billion that the train is now estimated to cost (the price will certainly go even higher). Voters authorized almost $10 billion in bonds in a referendum, but that was when the train looked much cheaper and more federal funding was available. Since then the cost estimates more than doubled to $99 billion, ridership estimates have been slashed indicating that the completed system will require unending subsidies, and Congress has stopped voting new funds for high speed rail.
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January 7, 2012
ESSAY
Chaos on the Shores of Tripoli?
Libya may be in a better place without Muammar Gaddafi, but the country is certainly not out of the woods quite yet. Nobody expected a functioning government by now, but there was reason think Libya’s future would brighten.
The Washington Post, though, reports that factional violence between rival rebel groups has picked up again, casting doubt on the possibility of a healthy democracy emerging any time soon. Continue reading
