George Packer: The Dark Side of American Democracy

Beach reading for Mad Dog, with one eye on the pelicans, was rewarding this weekend. 
It was an odd confluence, vacationing down South, among the upper 1% of the upper 1%, and hearing off hand stories about people who worked for organizations which are not Goldman Sacks or Morgan, but "non profit" corporations in healthcare, who were given going away presents by boards of directors--a million dollars a year for life. 
Hey, you did a great job, here's a million a year for life. Open ended. Nice retirement plan, don't you think? Of course, nobody else in the organization even has a retirement plan. But you do. Nice pat on the back. I know you'll do the same for me some day, when you sit on the board of my corporation. 

Not my money.  Corporate money. Enjoy.

In an organization with a budget north of half a billion a year, this may not seem like a break the bank proposition, but the idea that idea would even occur to anyone on the board of directors, much less be approved,  floored Mad Dog. 

What that says about the sense of entitlement of the very rich speaks volumes--and these are the very people who would be quick to speak in deprecating tones about welfare queens with a "sense of entitlement."

Against this backdrop was George Packer's odd Jackson Pollack style book--in which he splatters a bunch of stories against the wall and something more or less coherent emerges about the unraveling of the "American dream,"  whatever that is--mostly the sense that if you work hard and "play by the rules" you will prosper in this country. 

Among the people whose stories he tells are a longtime Democratic party yeoman who works for Joseph Biden off and on, who witnesses the criminal greed of big wall street operatives go unpunished, and who is disappointed in President Obama for having no appetite for going after these miscreants who would have brought the entire economy down in the process of getting their own pots of gold.  Mr. Obama is painted, likely accurately, as someone acutely aware of his own lack of economic experience, and he does not have enough of a moral compass or deep seeded confidence in his own outrage to spurn the Larry Summers, the Timothy Geithners, the Robert Rubins, the guys who in some measure got us into the mess of 2008. So Mr. Obama simply does not have the balls  to go after the men on Wall Street who should have been thrown in jail.

Or maybe Mr. Obama made the simple calculation if he went after Wall Street scions, he would be a one term President.

But really, these guys make Bernie Madoff look like a piker. 

Packer tells the tale of a Florida lawyer who uncovers the depths of the incompetence, gross negligence, unconscionable indifference of Florida judges, prosecutors and sheriffs who foreclose on people who were more innocent victim than intemperate borrower. If anyone had listened and believed this lawyer in 2006, 2007, when he was screaming his Jeremiads, the crisis might have been averted and a lot of deserving billionaires at Goldman, Lehman, Morgan and Citibank might now be in jail. 

The whole  zoo of wheelers/dealers who packaged rotten mortgage backed securities were guilty of enough malpractice to transform the word "malpractice"  into a euphemism --we would really have to invent a new phrase--"criminal negligence" does not begin to describe what these rich men did because it does not include the aspect of how these guys sold snake oil they knew was worthless and should have known would eventually be poisonous. 

Not that this is anything new in American history--Huckleberry Finn depicts snake oil salesmen--but those were small time grifters who only poisoned a townsman or two--these 21st century Wall Street hucksters poisoned the entire economy and the body politic to boot.

And still the rich pay 15% income tax while the 99% pay more than twice that.

It's a bracing read. It even has a part on Elizabeth Warren--one of the best hopes for a brighter American future.

Make Way For the Ducklings New Hampshire Version or Tone Deaf Police

Wood Ducks

This morning the Portsmouth Herald carried a story about a woman, Hallie Bibeau,  who stopped on the median strip of Route 101 in an attempt to rescue wood duck ducklings whose mother had been killed crossing the highway and the ducklings were still trying to cross.  Ahead of her, she saw a car swerving to avoid something and she realized it was ducklings. Two were killed before her eyes. She was able to rescue two others. How many were left behind is not reported. WMUR says these were the only two survivors. 

The woman was accosted by a New Hampshire Highway Patrol detective and given a ticket and summons for reasons which are not entirely clear, but apparently it had to do with some law which says you can only stop on the median for "emergencies."

The tone deaf New Hampshire state police spokeswoman is heard on WMUR saying this was not an "emergency."

The woman later delivered the two ducklings to a rescue organization--in Maine.

The facts of the case are unintelligible (a frequent problem with the Herald) but  from the WMUR report, it appears the ducks tried to cross from the right hand side of the East bound road toward the West bound side of the road, across a broad median strip of grass, but the mother was killed on the right hand shoulder and some of the ducklings (number unknown) were killed crossing the road but two made it to the median strip where Ms. Bibeau rescued them. Why she was there for more than few minutes is not clear. Was she looking for others?  The median strip is no "strip" at that point of Route 101 but is at least 30 yards of grassy knoll. 

The woman apparently remained long enough for a passing ambulance to stop and inquire after her and leave. She was still there when the policeman arrived and apparently ordered her to move on. 

Trying to imagine why the policeman would give her a ticket rather than try to help, one can think he might have said to himself, this woman can get killed out here trying to save a bunch of ducks and cause an accident in the process. 

The woman claims cars were swerving trying to avoid hitting ducklings and that collecting the ducks was probably better for public safety.  Where the ducks were exactly, where they were headed, how many were out there are not stated.

What did strike Mad Dog, as he drove along Route 101 East bound this morning, was that police cars are often parked in that grassy dividing strip, talking to each other and sometimes they park at the turn off to Route 95, between Exit 12 and Exit 13 and they pull cars over to the shoulder or the dividing strip because the speed limit drops, for no discernible reason, from 65 to 55 at that point and many motorists continue blithely on and are easy pickings. 

So when the police stop their cars or stop "speeders" that is not a safety risk to the public. When the police sit in their cars in the same strip, that does not put anyone at risk, but when a citizen stops her car on that strip, well...

Was this a matter of control or a matter of concern for safety?

All we can be sure of is Hallie Bibeau will not have be out  that $44 fine--actually WMUR says it's $100.  She will likely get lots of dollars from the public to do that. 

Hallie Bibeau

Clearly, we don't want citizens lolling along the median strip. Highway 101 is not a place to dawdle. But one has to ask who was minding the Public Relations office at the New Hampshire State Police when they responded like so many mindless robots, both at the scene and in the police station later, when they were questioned about this story, which has been played as police against mothers, mindless, ruthless, heartless police indifferent to life and death, bureaucrats mouthing empty bromides about, "our concern is always for safety," or better yet, "we did not want this new mother to make her new child motherless." As if this mother was such a complete moron or so emotionally overwrought (as women are apt to be, we must infer from the policeman) that she was about to run out in front of a car, attempting to save ducklings. 

Boston Commons

Of course, there is a statue in the Boston Commons based on the book which shows with a kindly policeman holding up traffic so a mother duck and her ducklings can cross the road.  Here in New Hampshire the statue would likely show the policeman with his hunting rifle, picking them off. 

Three Ducklings 

The bigger questions are who controls the median strip and who controls the police?

Atlanta Teacher Test "Cheats": Trying to Find Humanity in Bureaucracy

Mad Dog has been thinking more about those teachers at Atlanta's Parks Middle School, who tried to save their school, cynics might say, tried to save their own jobs, by changing wrong answers to right answers after the students had handed in the answer sheets.

Yesterday, Mad Dog compared the teachers to Schindler, who rescued children from death in the concentration camps by cheating the system. The system in that case was so manifestly horrific any undermining of its implacable process seemed heroic--so why not see these Atlanta teachers as heroes?

On the other hand, the system of schools in Atlanta, which attempts to teach math and writing to students who are in no way prepared to learn is not a system designed to destroy the students. It is simply designed to help them in a very limited way.

What the teachers were saying is you can't teach these kids algebra if they are living in shattered homes, hungry, up all night slinging drugs on the corners, escaping abusive parents, dodging bullets on the street and unable to see what you are teaching them has any relevance in their lives. They simply do not have the faith in the adult who stands before them, at the head of the class.

What the teachers tried, at least what some of the teachers tried, was doing the laundry, literally, of their students, tried to build relationships, trust, tried to be surrogate parents, tried to do all the things parent should have been doing.  

The school system, unconsciously was saying, "We don't care about all those warm and fuzzy things. We care only about the test result numbers. We don't care whether or not those kids are abused at home or on the streets. We care only about what happens in the classroom. That is our job. All the other stuff belongs to social services. There is a fracture. I must fix it. If the school cannot function as a learning factory, it should be closed down and the kids sent to a school which does function as a learning factory.

The teachers say, then No Child Left Behind, is an oxymoron--it means that all these children will be left behind. Not in school, because they will, none of them, continue to go to school. 

Of course, there was more venality there--careers were built on phony "success" as test scores soared, when any fool could see there is no way those improved test scores could have been honest. 

At Parks Middle School, a teacher  pointed out a vicious teenager in the hallway, who was a chronic truant, in and out of jail, disruptive in class, dangerous to teachers and students alike. That teenager's test scores were exemplary, really high. "Some kids just test well," the administrator shrugged.  That, or somebody made sure that kid tested well. Hear no evil; see no evil.

None of the administrators whose job it was to measure success or failure wanted to see failure. 

When a system is broke, can you blame the people on the front line from choosing to do the job the way they think the job ought to be done?  

No system tolerates a Jimmy McNulty, but many systems depend on people like him.

Atlanta Test Score Scandal

Mr. Prezbo Instructs.  "The Wire"

If ever there was an example of unintended consequences in the passage of a law, No Child Left Behind and the disaster it unleashed,  has got to be it.

It may be argued that it wasn't the law,  but the mindless application of its principles and the utterly inane application of "statistics" and meeting the numbers which were the problems.

Metrics have been used by lazy executives and administrators to ruin police departments, businesses, medical care delivery systems and military efforts . But the metrics which NCLB spawned  were used to injure millions.

Michael Lewis glorified Billie Bean, who used metrics intelligently to revolutionize the assessment of talent for baseball players. But what Bean did was to recognize that certain numbers, like batting averages and runs batted in and runs scored,  can be very misleading and beyond the control of the player.  He came up with more meaningful metrics.

In her article in The New Yorker , "Wrong Answer," Rachel Aviv quotes John Ewing, the executive director of the American Mathematical Society who said he was perplexed by the infatuation with data by educational authorities, who placed faith in data rather than probing what that data actually meant.  Here is a numbers guy, who knows how numbers are derived, saying you have to understand "garbage in garbage out."

Mad Dog wonders how anyone reading "Wrong Answer" can really appreciate why those teachers doctored up the answer sheets of their students' exams,  without having seen the fourth season of "The Wire."  

One of the most telling remarks in Aviv's piece was from the mother of Damany Lewis, the first teacher to be fired for changing students' wrong answers to correct answers--the mother said when she read what the teachers had done,  she knew immediately her son must have been involved because it was, to her, plainly an act of "civil disobedience."

Damany Lewis :  A latter day Schindler?

Mad Dog thinks of teachers in public schools who were entirely incompetent, who sat behind their desks, happy and secure in their jobs and determined to do nothing, to learn nothing, to teach nothing--not because they were bad people but because they had been produced by the same environment their students now were drowning in and the teachers could not imagine anything better.  You had the blind leading the blind in Washington, D.C. schools--teachers who might have meant well, but who simply were not themselves well educated enough to help their students.

Not meeting the goals of percentages of students scoring high enough gave license to fire these inadequate teachers, but it was not used to get rid of just the hopeless cases--it was applied so blindly it threw the babies out with the bathwater. Smart, well educated, emotionally involved, highly ethical teachers were fired because their students did not, could never (as long as they lived in the ghetto) pass the tests.

The moral dilemma here was this:  In a hell hole of a neighborhood, the school became the only refuge for children who had no fathers, whose mothers were high on drugs, children who worked on the corners slinging drugs. These children floated in a sea sea of despair and deprivation; in that living hell, the school provided meals, some modicum of safety, sometimes clean clothes.  

This school was not a school, in the sense of being able to teach kids algebra, so much as an institution of a safe harbor for the refugees of a failed economy and a shattered social structure.  The "school" would be closed down if the test scores were not high enough. The lifeboat would be scuttled. The teachers saw all this and they knew that all they had to do was to violate that measurement tool, for the school to remain viable.

Suppose you had a concentration camp staff which falsified records of the number of inmates received and killed?  Supposed those camp guards conspired to make this a camp where inmates would be protected and spared?  Would you condemn those guards as unethical for falsifying reports?  Suppose each month, the guards sent back to Berlin reports of increasing production of war implements and increasing numbers of killings of received "unproductive" Jews, the elderly, the weak, children who could not produce water materiel and by doing this, the camp was praised, the safe-house preserved?  Would you condemn this collusion for a benign purpose?

Of course, the teachers at Parks Middle School were ultimately found out. And the school was closed and the children "transferred" to other middle schools, where their presence would lower tests scores, but their low scores might be diluted in the new schools. 

In a sense, the system worked: The school was not a school, but a social service facility and it was closed down for being a fraud. 

The empty building was not reopened as a refuge, of course. That refuge is gone. The children are now adrift at other buildings, where, perhaps, other students are actually going to school and learning,  and the kids from Parks are sinking beneath the waves, likely leaving "school" altogether, which is fine with the new schools,  who don't want these under-performers dirtying up their statistics. 

Schools have to be schools, not refugee centers. Ruthless? Yes, but at least consistent. No child was left behind in the Parks Middle School, once it was closed--children were simply expelled from the one institution which provided a safety net. 

Not the school system's  fault.  the school system is focused only on what schools are supposed to do: teach the subject matter, demonstrate this has happened with testing.

Safety net is somebody else's problem. We are here to teach and test. Or to test and teach. 

The problem,  of course,  was the superintendent of the system was like that orthopedic resident in "There is a fracture, I must fix it,"  who is so focused on one narrow problem--the fracture--he completely misses the fact the  patient is already dead. 

There were other, nastier people along the way: The superintendent could not possibly have been unaware of the fraud in testing throughout the school system, at least on some level. If she did not know about it, it was because she did not want to know about it. Those rising test scores were just too beautiful.  Don't destroy the  fantasy--it feels too good.

If ever there was an example of what can go wrong with public policy, with national goals visited like a plague upon local people,  this law with its accompanying distortion of data was it. Of course, it came, so predictably, out of Texas, and was visited upon the rest of the nation, from Baltimore to Atlanta. 

Stupidity institutionalized.  "Government" living up to Ronald Reagan's quip about, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you."

It is a cautionary tale, which progressives ought not forget--every time you push for a "reform," remember what damage has been done in the name of reform--when it gets into the wrong hands.

It's things like this which give government-- the whole idea of government as an instrument for social good--a bad name. Small wonder people who have seen No Child Left Behind would be cynical about the possibility any other government project--like health care--could do more good than harm.

And, much as Mad Dog celebrates the joy of an Obama presidency, it has been a great disappointment to see Mr. Obama embrace the idea that poor performance of ghetto children ought to be laid upon the heads of schoolteachers in these combat zones, who are just trying to provide a safe house,  while the neighborhood around them burns.

Mr. Obama is said to be a fan of "The Wire." Watch the 4th season, Mr. President, then tell us what you think about judging the teachers by the test scores. 

Children Crossing Illegally: Nothing Left to Lose

An NPR reporter  remarked this morning she had interviewed the parents of children who were deported back to Nicaragua from the USA. This was the much bally hooed event of "send them back on the next plane" strategy all the Republicans are screaming will end this crisis.  Just send a few planeloads of kids back and they'll stop coming. 

When they arrived at the airport in Nicaragua  what the kids said and what the parents said, pretty uniformly, was: "We'll try again."

So much for the Republican plan to, "Just send back a few planeloads of kids and their parents will get the message. That'll stop this thing in its tracks."

Of course, what the Just Send 'Em Back crowd is engaging in is wishful thinking.  They purport to know how other people, people in Central America think and from there, how to predict what they will in response to what we do.

Americans have never been very good at this sort of thing.

From the infamous "They will welcome us with open arms" assurances coming from Cheney and Rumsfeld when they were asked about what they expected when American troops rolled into Baghdad, to the "win their hearts and minds" in Vietnam, Afghanistan, you name it... we just do not understand other cultures very well and we do not put ourselves into  other people's minds very well.

Mad Dog is the first to admit, he has no good idea about what to do with 60,000 kids and who knows how many more to come.  But what irks Mad Dog is listening to all those Republicans like John Boehner, the editors of the Wall Street Journal, Rush Limbaugh,  who are so sure they do know what needs to be done. Of course, these Tea Party savants  are even more sure this is all, very simply, Mr. Obama's fault. 

Basically, people who don't like Mr. Obama are shamelessly using this. It's a bad thing and ipso facto, it has to be Mr. Obama's fault. If Democrats had reacted this way on September 11, 2001, how the Republicans would have reviled them for being unpatriotic at a time we needed to all come together. 

One can only imagine what the Republicans would say if the lunatics manage to pull off another big, high profile attack: It's definitely Mr. Obama's fault.  The fact we have paralyzed the government leaves us blameless.

Listening to a CNN call in show this morning, Mad Dog was surprised to hear a Black man from Chicago allude to that ship with people fleeing Hitler, who we sent back to Germany, where all aboard died in concentration camps.  Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State, refused to allow the ship to dock in the USA, pointing to the flag by his desk, saying he would have violated his sacred oath to defend that flag if he had allowed the ship to dock. The problem was each passenger, according to US law, required a letter from his local police chief attesting to his good character and for most of the passengers that letter would have had to be generated by some Gestapo official. The Gestapo writing letters of recommendation for Jews. Somehow, didn't happen.

 So, Secretary Hull did his duty by his flag and  sent men, women and children back to the gas chambers.

We do not have information to suggest what these kids face in Nicaragua or Honduras is the equivalent of annihilation in concentration camps, but what do we really know about what is going on down there in Central America?  

Could be pretty horrific. Maybe, maybe not, but the sudden influx must mean something. 

Mad Dog is humble before his own ignorance. Would that he could say the same for John Boehner and his entire cohort of Republican hyenas. 

John Boehner and the Ultimate Con

"This is a problem of the President's own making," the Ohio Republican thundered on Thursday. "He's been President for five and a half years! When is he going to take responsibility for something?"

Another Republican, hearing the President had declined to travel to the border for a photo op, looking sternly South, accused the President of not caring about this problem, as evidenced by his refusal to see the problem "first hand." The President replied, cooly as always: "This is not about theater. This is about real people."

Well, folks, you heard it here first:  Almost 60,000 children have managed to sneak across the border and present themselves, like so many foundlings, from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua and points south,  and now we know whose fault it is.

It's not that thousands of parents have decided the terror of living in these places is so bad whatever risks their children face trying to get into the United States are worth the near certainty of a short, brutish life at home. It's not that the Republican Congress has refused to act on any sort of immigration plan. It's not that the Republicans have refused to fund judges and all the government nuts and bolts required to process this tidal wave. It's not that, like the rich European countries which have attracted similar tidal waves of immigration, the USA, being rich,  has discovered it is a magnet for poor neighbors. 

It's not that the Republicans, having told us time and again we do not need government and having set to the task of if not dismantling government, at least paralyzing it; it's not that Mr. Boehner and his Republican cronies bear any responsibility.  Oh, no. They have always known exactly how to deal with immigration, but nobody in the Democratic White House would listen! Now, what was it, exactly, they proposed doing about all these illegals crossing the border?

Ever notice how people often criticize in others what they secretly know they are guilty of themselves? Oh, the President. He refuses to take responsibility for anything! We know all about people who hide from their responsibilities. 

It's all Obama's fault. And likely it's Obamacare, the lure of free medical care, drawing all those children north,  like flies to honey.

Why can Obama simply not admit his culpability?

He should have done what I told him to do: Call out the National Guard! That would've fixed the problem. Built a great wall,  like the Chinese once did. Build one straight across the southern border and sink steel plates down half a mile so they can't tunnel under it and put up drones to hover over it and string nets out along our entire seacoast, so they can't come in by boat. 

And cut taxes to pay for it. And do not even think of paying for contraceptives. Oh, sorry, that's another rant.

Or, maybe, we could build big camps and put all those kids in them. Put them down at Guantanamo! Don't ask us what to do about it. It's the President's responsibility! He should know! He's President!

And why does he just not admit what a complete failure he has been as President and resign?

And if we say this often enough, and if the Koch brothers give us enough money to buy enough air time to repeat this often enough, why then, eventually, it will be like, conventional wisdom. "Everybody knows" it's true.

Why hasn't anybody said, "Mr. Boehner, have you, at long last, no shame?"

Well, Boehner knows all about that warm medium--just look aggrieved and nobody listens to the cool, reasoned response from the President; they just respond to the emotion.

But,  even given the Republicans' mastery of the airways, have we not, at long last, reached the point where we can see through all this bluster,  to the truth? 

Ten Thousand Illegal Immigrant Children: Yikes!

What do you do when children are loaded into vans, boats, whatever conveyances the imagination can provide, shipped from desperate poverty, violence, lives of no promise other than "short, brutish and sad" variety and they wind up in the custody of adults, across the border in the United States?

The first thing is to pick the right spokesman, and Cecilia Munoz, President Obama's White House czar of immigration,  is clearly not that. She uses phrases like, "We are taking this very, very seriously" and speaks in legaleese and sounds like the right wing's send up of  a fuzzy minded liberal bureaucratic. "Well, we don't want to deny any of  those children who qualify as asylum seekers, so we have to respect the process and the law." 

Then she is followed by some Congressman from Arizona saying, "Look, the way to stop this is to send a planeload of these illegal kids back to Guatemala, another to Brazil, and another to Nicaragua,  three days after they cross the US border, and that'll stop this flood."

As is true for so many Republicans, the answers are always simple. 9/11? Just load up the troops and blow Sadam Hussein out of Iraq, that'll learn 'em.

But there is a certain truth in what he is saying: When we are confronted with a tidal wave of children, we cannot proceed with business as usual. Our rules were never meant to deal with this.  If we have to send back some deserving children with the "undeserving" then we will, just to get the contagion under control.

The fact is, they are all deserving. We are making distinctions which are game playing. No kid deserves to be raised in squalor and desperation. Trouble is, we cannot just adopt every desperate kid. We had foundling hospitals in this country once, but we had to devise better solutions than that when the numbers overwhelmed them.

But this problem has clearly caught President Obama unprepared and he needs to think about how to communicate with his countrymen about the problem and its solutions.  And don't sound too concerned about sending home the twelve kids who, by law, should really be granted asylum,  when you've got 10,000 kids to deal with. Even in medicine, you have to do the greatest good for the greatest number:  Quarantine sacrifices people,  so the general population is protected. If you have to send back a dozen deserving kids so 10,000 more kids don't wind up on their way to our shores, so be it.

One thing which really inflames white Americans is the idea that people will come here and "freeload," live off welfare, not work, simply ask to be given a handout. Children are always "freeloading" even white children. You have to support them until they can become independent. So, in a sense, it is a very clever idea to send children, if you are a desperate parent in Bolivia. Nobody can really blame the kids. Your heart has to go out to them. 

But if we throw open our doors to the world's children, what are we taking on? 

Sound tough. Sound reasonable. Do not sound like a lawyer.