My favorite Princeton Economist is back from vacation and stepping up to the plate over at the times with the first in a series of columns on the state of health care in the US:

To get effective reform, however, we'll need to shed some preconceptions - in particular, the ideologically driven belief that government is always the problem and market competition is always the solution.

If we can drive that notion home, we'll be halfway there, and it will get people thinking freely and creatively about all sorts of other things.

The moustached-man at the Times, five years behind as usual, drops a witty title and a pretty decent summation of what's really going on with Globalization: It's a Flat World, After All.

...the dynamic force in Globalization 3.0 -- the thing that gives it its unique character -- is individuals and small groups globalizing. Individuals must, and can, now ask: where do I fit into the global competition and opportunities of the day, and how can I, on my own, collaborate with others globally?
...
When the world is flat, you can innovate without having to emigrate. This is going to get interesting. We are about to see creative destruction on steroids.

The piece is worth reading if you're new to the idea that the American economy is in enormous peril becuase we're really no smarter than anyone else and the labor market for intelectual products (engineering, analysis, digital culture) is truly being globalized. Friedman still isn't hip to open source, and doesn't seem to understand that this shift in how the world works is going to substantially change the role of nation-states going forward, but he's got the basic points right. Give him another 5 years and I'm sure he'll catch on to the rest.

He also has some very good advice for national poliitcs:

Meeting the challenges of flatism requires as comprehensive, energetic and focused a response as did meeting the challenge of Communism. It requires a president who can summon the nation to work harder, get smarter, attract more young women and men to science and engineering and build the broadband infrastructure, portable pensions and health care that will help every American become more employable in an age in which no one can guarantee you lifetime employment.

And some stern advice for parents:

We need to get going immediately. It takes 15 years to train a good engineer, because, ladies and gentlemen, this really is rocket science. So parents, throw away the Game Boy, turn off the television and get your kids to work. There is no sugar-coating this: in a flat world, every individual is going to have to run a little faster if he or she wants to advance his or her standard of living.

The problem here is that Americans already work too hard for too little. If we want to maintain, let alone advance, our standard of living in the 21st Century, we need to work on strengthening our local economies.

I'm fine to play on the global market, but not everyone can do it, nor will everyone ever be able to. For those who can't, having a vibrant local economy with lots of opportunities for small business, craft production, and livable wages for service-sector work is the only viable alternative. For those of us who can compete globally, our task is to get as much value as we can for our time, and driving as much of that as possible back into our own communities.

Simply urging the USA to bear down and grind out more engineers isn't a real solution for the 21st Century. It's a beginning, but for this country to pull though we're going to have to dig a little deeper. We need to start looking beyond material acumulation as a prime metric for "standard of living." We need to start looking at developing a way of life and a set of values that create more enjoyment while consuming less energy. We need to figure out how to live better and work smarter, not just harder.

Allan Greenspan, sometime GOP shill and full-time market fundamentalist on America's energy prospects:

"The experience of the past fifty years--and indeed much longer than that--affirms that market forces play the key role in conserving scarce energy resources, directing those resources to their most highly valued uses,"

Really. Is that what the experience of the last fifty years (and much longer) shows? I rather think not. The only time America has had any kind of scarcity with regard to energy was the OPEC embargo of the 70s. The immediate reaction was rationing (such a hallmark of a free enterprise), and the increases in efficiency that actually resulted were largely the result of the CAFE laws and other public sector moves, not the fabled invisible hand of the market.

The market can theoretically correct itself in two ways, either industry has to spontaneously decide to produce products for which there is no clear demand, or consumers can prompt change. The former is very unlikely, so we can assume Greenspan is pinning the future of this country on consumers, that is to say for consumers start making smarter choices about what they drive (the hybrid becoming the new Hummer), where they shop (penalizing big box retailers that rely on long-distance transit for customers and long-haul trucking), what they eat (penalizing commercial agricorps which use petroleum-based fertilizers) and where they live (away from places with 100+ mile daily commutes). Let's get real, the "market" isn't going to solve this one for us. The market for energy is elastic enough to be very profitable right up to the end, when it isn't, and we've got another 15 years worth of infrastructure that no longer works.

I can't believe anyone still takes Allen Greenspan seriously. "Fifty years and much longer" my ass. Going back further, America has never had an energy crisis. Our own territory contained vast amounts of oil, which built some of America's first great fortunes, and after WWII we secured friendly relations with Saudi Arabia which helped ease us off the oil peak. The little shock-let of the OPEC embargo is the last and only energy crisis in this nation's history.

Greenspan is so intense a market fundamentalist that he creates imaginary history to support his beliefs that the invisible hand of the market will deftly handle any energy crunch. He goes on to say:

Sustained higher price will "stimulate the research and development that will unlock new approaches to energy production and use that we can now only scarcely envision," Greenspan said.

Ah science, the American religion. I love science, but we're talking about 100 years of infrastructure that's predicated on affordable automotive transport for goods and people. Over at GM, they used to have a two-man team of engineers who would trot out the same electric car at every concept show all through the 80s and 90s. Their job was to design and fit a new body onto the same chassis and power-train by the time next year's show rolled around.

Sustained higher prices are going to stimulate profit-taking in the near future, not serious research. The "hydrogen economy" is decades away if not a total mirage. We need stronger investment in the kind of basic research which corporations will never do -- the fuel cell came out of NASA -- and we need to make a serious public investment in renewing our infrastructure for the 21st Century.

Kind of like the Apollo Alliance idea. Energy policy is a national security issue. It is the national security issue at the moment, actually. It's also an economic issue and an environmental issue. Right now the Republican message on this is ridiculously weak and flat-out wrong. Will anyone step up to champion the alternative view?

Over at The American Prospect former Fugazi-fan Kevin Mattson has a rather lengthy piece on why protest politics are not a recipie for success these days. I've got a few responses.

First of all -- here's your snark -- Mike and I wrote this about two years ago:

1. Protest had become an impotent act in today's political arena.

Protesters tend to be reactionary and turn more people off of politics than they turn on, and this administration has shown that no matter how large an outcry is heard from the people, it will pursue its own agenda. Millions of people, many of us politically active for the first time, took to the streets on February 15th, 2003, yet the administration, and the media, dismissed us as a "focus group. Protest may still be a necessary activity, but it is no longer an effective means of producing political change.

I don't mind being ahead of the pack, but it would be nice if there were any signs that the professionals were making headway up the learning curve here.

Digby has a more substantive rebuttal to the piece's implicit anti-60s thesis which I suggest reading also, but I have to say I agree with a lot of what Mattson has to say. He's dead-on about not mistaking the times, and very correct in his evaluation of "expressive anti-politics" which "bursts like a flame and then burns out, to be felt only in the heart of the participant while the ruling class, unperturbed, goes on its merry way." Ain't that the truth. I also give a heartfelt second to his call for the development of a new "publc philosophy" on which to base the return of liberalism to America.

However, the rhetorical strategy of attacking modern-day (or 1960s) protest movements without bothering to examine the reasons for their existence or the record of their accomplishments is frankly a cowardly analytical tactic, one far too often employed by centrist "liberals" who for one reason or another seem to feel defensive. I could go into some suppositions as to why this is -- most insiders and think-tankers realize that they are uncool and out of touch and need to justify themselves vis-a-vis groups and individuals who are more popular or culturally resonant -- but that would be missing the point. The point is that you are welcome bash the Yippies for the spectacle of '68, but to do so in good faith you have to admit they were right about Vietnam, and that the Democratic establishment was wrong. Likewise, you're free to quibble with the methods of the Yes Men, but to do so while ignoring the issues they seek to address is intellectually dishonest.

Establishment organs like the Prospect -- who have resources and influence to spare -- and intelligent academic writers like Mattson -- who have the time and knowledge to bring to bear -- need to take the next step. They need to begin concretely engaging with the issues themselves rather than deriding those who are already, albiet hamfistedly, attempting to do so. It's a lot more frightening that critiquing the Yippies and saying we should take a look at what Goldwater's kids have done over the past 40 years (no shit, Sherlock), but at some point you have to take a real step forward from your expressive anti-anti-politics and start making the kind of statements that aren't 100% safe, certain and correct. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

It's hard to read the news. Very hard. Taking in the broad scope of human events around the world, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that things are going seriously wrong. I call myself an optimist, and I believe that I am, but I also have a sense of urgency about things.

Here's the short and sweet: A coherent energy policy is vital to the safety of US citizens, and in its absence we are becoming a brutal and dissipated imperial power. The lack of a such a policy in the US is our greatest security liability, and the lack of an effective message on the issue is our greatest political failur. As it stands, if gasoline prices spiked, Bush would like be able to advance an unvarnished "blood for oil" campaign as a pure kitchen-table pocketbook issue.

Meanwhile, we're beating POWs to death faster than the Communist Vietnamese because no one has any better ideas. This is lunacy. (1,200 words)

It's three and a half years after 9/11, and my country is engaged in an ill advised imperialisic misadventure that it cannot win without resorting to pure barbarism. By my standards, barbarism is in itself be a loss, and unfortunately it's already happening.

In case you didn't hear, we've killed about as many prisoners of war in the past three years as the Communist Vietnamese did in a decade. Yeah, and that's not counting people we turned over to Egypt or Pakistan with a nudge and a wink. Nobody really keeps track of those people. Oh, and the guy who wrote the legal mumbojumbo that made it all possible? He got a promotion, got made the official layer for the Department of Justice.

This kind of specific brutality, torturing prisoners, beating them to death, is part of the bigger picture. At the moment, our United States is spending about a hundred billion borrowed dollarsand near a thousand American lives -- plus maybe 100x that many non-American souls, however much they're all worth -- every year to occupy a couple countries in the Middle Aast in an ill-advised attempt to control the entire region.

This is a criminally stupid waste of life and energy. These wars have been promoted under various auspices, but as the motive of Fear has waned (and "weapons of mass distruction" failed to materialize on cue) they have increasingly been sold as acts of revenge and liberation. These are dangerous illusions.

The people who attacked us were not from or supported by Iraq. In fact, the people who attacked us are flourishing as a result of our invasions. This is a hard fact. If our goal is to neutralize these terrorist networks by reducing their numbers and sapping their base of support, our actions sine 9/11 have been an abject failure. We are not getting revenge. We are giving aid and comfort to our enemy.

Furthermore, the notion of libearation is deeply flawed. US troops were not "greeted as liberators" because this is not what they are. The US has never been in a position to "give" freedom to people halfway around the world. The notion of bringing democracy to a country by force is a nice fantasy, but it is self contradictory and has no grounding in history.

In every historical case, the idea of unilaterally liberating the people of another nation has been a rationalization of empire-building. Just as Stalin had "socialism," the Modern American Empire has "freedom," an ideal which the people at home unquestionably support but which has no real meaning or true moral content.

This is all plainly obvious to anyone who cares to look, but American politics is a total mess. There are no prominant voices of principled opposition to this misguided policy of neo-imperialism, and more importantly no prominant voices advocating smarter alternatives.

And there are alternatives! Anyone who believes that our current allocation of resources is wise should have their head examined. If we are willing to spend $100 Billion and risk killing a few thousand solders, there's quite a lot we could do for standing up to dictators and making ourselves safe without occupying countries. And it would be more effective.

You want a strategy to win peace in the Middle East? Stop buying oil, start supporting civil society and education directly rather than through oppressive regimes set up around petrolium exports (whether that's the Saudi Royals or our own occupation force). This will be incredibly expensive and dangerous, but it's far more likely to succeed and it will make the US safer from attack and more secure in the long run.

Radical Islamic terrorist like Al-Qaeda are not motivated to attack the US because they "hate our freedom" (notice again the use of "freedom" as a meaningless abstract associated with war), but because they want to make significant changes in their own area of the world, and are finding it difficult to engage or topple the power structures which we support. This is a hard fact, and has been clear for more than a decade. If we want to deal with the threats that we face, we need to understand them in real terms and put away childish rhetoric.

Now, Radican Islamic ideas for running a society based on a harsh interperetation of Islamic law are objectionable -- particularly with regards to the role of women -- and we're quite right to oppose this, but it's important to realize that opposing someone else's cultural values (no matter how disagreeable) can only be done effectively through political, cultural and economic engagement or through the rule of law. Using military force to achieve cultural change is a loosing strategy¹.

The truth is that our hands are tied in Middle Eastern geopolitics because of the oil question. Not only does it prevent us from standing up to oppressive regimes, it also taints our every move in the eyes of the population. Until we can put this question to rest, we will have no peace.

Currently, we consume 72 billion barrels of oil a year, more than half of it imported. In terms of the energy it takes to "power America," this oil represents more than 10x our total electricity generating capacity, including all coal, nuclear, hydro and natural gas generators. About 70% of all this oil goes to transportation.

Changing this will be an enormous challenge, but this cursory analysis of the numbers shows it is emminently possible. Our oil consumption is way out of step with any other country in the world. Part of this is because of our geography, but mostly it's a matter of the political influence of the petrochemical and auto corporations. It will take significant public investment in research, infrastructure and urban planning to change the nature of US energy consumption, but it's something we're going to have to do sooner or later.

This is a national calling; it requires political will. But it's a damn better step to take for our national security than beating a bunch of Arabs, Pakistanis and Afghans to death. What we're doing right now is literally digging our own grave.

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¹But then, if you think these invasions are really about protecting women in Iraq and Afghanistan, I'm afraid you've been taken in by more of that "freedom" rhetoric. While it's true that the Taliban were really awful in their treatment of women and that Saddam's sons were power-mad monsters, the real situation for women in both places has not improved since we bombed, invaded and occupied. In many cases, because of lawlessness and chaos, it's gotten significantly worse.

I'm living in New York at the moment, and so I guess that makes Hillary my Senator. So I'm a little annoyed that she trotted out the old hooker killin' line attacking violent videogames (and in particular Grand Theft Auto) today.

I'm annoyed by what she said, but what really ticks me off is the fact that it's a 100% politically moronic thing to do.

Look, you can take the perfectly respectible position that young children should not play violent video games. You can call for game retailers to be more responsible in who they sell to, and to parents for what they buy for their kids. But seriously, don't go and replay the whole partental advisory scene over again. The only hope the Democrats have as a party is cultivating support among young americans. Attacking our culture with right-wing talking points isn't going to help you out.

Jon Stewart continues to reveal the naked lunch of 24-hour cable news: video here.

There's a movement afoot to "unmuzzle" religious leaders and allow them to directly speak to political issues from the pulpit. This is, understandably, causing some consternation on the left, coming on the heels of an election where with the help of an energized conservative/evangelical network, the Republican party beat the Democrats (across the board, though clearly with some dirty tricks too) on turnout.

However, I think this could be a good thing, as long as there are a few exceptions.

1) If Churches are allowed to retain their tax exemption and speak to political issues, there must be a secular equivalency created so that non-religious community and charitable organizations can enjoy the same freedom, or else the IRS definition of "church" itself must be expanded somewhat to accomodate secular communities of conscience.

2) Any Church (or secular community organization) which decides to take advantage of this new-found freedom must have more strict financial reporting requirements. We don't want our communities of concience to become political money-laundering operations, so greater financial transparency and due dilligence are a must. For those churches who don't see a need to bring politics to the pulpit, the more relaxed rules could remain in place.

In real terms, politicized preachers already give endorsements from the pulpit. Allowing it to happen openly and honestly is a winner for us. It's not going to boost turnout on the right or markedly increase the political power of already polticized churches. However, when you give individual pastors, ministers and priests the ability to speak freely from the pulpit you increase their political independence.

Currently, the hands-off relationship allows dedicated political groups -- closely tied to churches, but professionalized, tolerant of hipocrisy, and with cozy relationships to the party -- to more or less fix who the "annointed" candidates are for most spiritual communities. Allowing individual religious leaders to find their own way in the political landscape will sap the power of the moral majority. This will hasten to fracturing of the conservative coalition as individual churches more actively advance their own favorite candidates.

Lifting a ban on political speech from the pulpit would decentralize the political power of churches in America. It's not only the right thing to do, it's a winning strategy for progressives.

How to Turn Your Red State Blue, by Christopher Hays is one of the best articles on progressive political organizing that I have yet read. Particularly with the high-level view:

Currently, a dysfunctional division of labor exists between Democratic politicians and the progressive base, in which the base spends much of its energy attempting to stop Democratic politicians from selling out core progressive principles, while it is left to the politicians to reach out to those in the mushy middle.

Ideally progressives should be giving candidates cover to implement a progressive agenda by doing the reaching out and convincing themselves... If a political party’s job is to win elections by doing what is politically expedient, the activist’s job is to make doing the right thing politically expedient.

There's the very real issue that it's exceedingly difficult for activists to reach out with much vigor if there's no one with a high public profile leading the charge. I would never have done what I did in the past two years, for instance, if a certain Democratic primary candidate hadn't taken the words right out of my mouth. The response to this sort of thing is electric: "Finally! Someone's saying it! Yes!"

Anyway, the whole thing is worth reading. I strongly recommend.

Bob Felton's Civil Commotion is a blog I discovered doing a little technorati-surfing just now. I'm intrigued because the author is clearly a conservative, but clearly a thinking one. He wrote a really great post (actually, a bunch) about the current right-to-die case that's got everyone's attention.

So after approvingly linking to the above, and hopeful because of the very reasonable content, I'm going to dispute another post and use the ol' trackback. Maybe we can get a little cross-blog debate going. Here's an old movement-conservative saw I'd like to take a crack at:

Oh, yeah, that bias

The Columbia School of Journalism has just released a study which finds — GASP! — that news stories were slanted anti-Bush 3-times more often than slanted anti-Kerry during the 2004 election.

My prediction: The MSM will roll their eyes, insist it isn’t so, and continue to wonder where their readers are going.

It’s evolution at work, right in front of our eyes; non-adapters die.

It's fun to bash the MainStream Media and all, but I have serious doubts about the study in question. A look at the footnotes reveals the following:

The analysis of election coverage begins after March 1 (Super Tuesday) after John Kerry emerged as the all-but-official Democratic candidate. The cross-media comparisons of campaign coverage included stories focused at least 50% on one candidate or the other so that deriving a sense of tone about the candidate was logical. Those totaled 250 stories. The findings, moreover, reinforce what the Project found in a separate study that looked at tone in the final month of the campaign, surrounding the debates, and in a pre-convention study using a different methodology that mapped coverage of different character themes about the candidates.

This is highly problematic. Looking at a total of 250 stories in an eight-month timespan in which a 24-hour news cycle is at work is hardly a scientifically significant sample. There's no actual data given about the separate studies referenced, and it's also unclear from the footnotes what sources these 250 stories came from, as they were apparently not drawn from the same sample as the much broader study of the war coverage (which included 10x as many stories).

And then there's this:

The findings on tone also mirror those of Robert Lichter and the Center on Media and Public Affairs, which employs a different approach to studying tone.

Robert Lichter is a conservative activist, and the CMPA (while claiming non-partisan tax-exempt status) is a well known conservative organ with an agenda of hostility to environmentalism and consumer's rights. Their "scientific" the metrics for determining a "positive" or "negative" attitude are notoriously bogus, and Lichter has been pushing to discredit the press as liberally-biased and "elite" for more than two decades. The fact that he was cited as a supporting example raises many more questions about this study than it answers.

Furthermore, the study's small sample of stories voids the impact of contextualization, and clearly didn't take into account the influence of anchor-opinion, which is widely understood as having as much (or more) impact on public sentiment than individual press reports themselves. In fact, when Bob remarks that the MSM will continue to wonder "where their readers go," he fails to complete the loop which is that more and more people turn to opinionated columnists and news-roundup anchors (and, yes, bloggers) not for raw information, but more importantly for meaning.

To bring it on home, I'm as upset with the state of journalism and the media as anyone, but the idea that there's a "liberal bias" at work is crap. It's a documented revolutionary tactic designed to discredit sources of information that are hostile to movement conservativism. It's part of a conscious strategy that has been at work for decades, and the fact that intelligent and moral people still fall for it is a testiment to how well Trotskyite tactics have worked for the radical right.

If there's a bias in the mainstream media it's towards mediocrity, towards compacency, towards consumption, towards business as usual. I agree that there's an information revolution coming, but the reasons for this revolution have to do with the unaccountability of the media establishment -- note this is different from "elitism" -- how easily the press corps can be manipulated, and how poorly the current state of journalism fulfills its role of guarding the public interest against the private. The answer isn't a more partisan media or a more "balanced" media, it's a more inquisitive and truthful one which concerns itself not just with telling two sides of the story, but in finding out which one is right.

An honest media with a driving sense of public service would likely still be imbalanced in covering a presidential election. But it's hard to accuse the facts of bias.