Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs says that, after working with people who have the dirtiest jobs in America, they’re happier than most people. And they’re getting rich by going where everyone else wasn’t; they’re not following their passion.
He also says our society is at war with work.
Two things have struck me lately. One was meeting Jennifer Eccleston and Arwa Damon in Iraq (and their equipment guy) — they were embedded with the Marines to report on the war. I also am impressed with Anderson Cooper’s effort in Haiti, as well as his previous reporting in other parts of the world. These people have crazy field experience as well as access to get the ground truth.
The other thing is the Breaking News Online team on Twitter. It’s a motley crew of young men who live in different countries but collaborate to routinely find news before mainstream media gets it — sometimes up to hours before it hits the TV or press. They also put value in calling to verify news, a technique that “real” journalists have somewhat forgotten as of late.
So these two trends together… What if you could form a lightweight guerrilla journalist team? It would start with one field reporter and two people as a social media team. Very small. Basically, the field reporter finds an interesting story (e.g. Haiti) and goes to that area to report what he sees on the ground. The two people back home provide intelligence to the reporter from the social media world, as well as verify information and make the logistics and verification calls that the reporter needs.
The strength of this system is that it’s small and adaptable, and the team benefits not only from sentiment on the ground (with active content creation with photos, video, etc.) but also from incorporating what other news outlets are saying, what people are saying on Twitter, etc. The two people back home work 12-hour shifts to provide 24-hour coverage, adapting to what hours are needed to sustain the story.
The media is getting far better at using Twitter to complement its other news-gathering functions but it still gets hung up on editorial process, requirements to satisfy a public that wants only certain stories, and other things detracting from the usefulness of journalism.
Three people would be pretty cheap; most of the costs would be towards supporting the field reporter. The social media team would have to be pretty capable at multiple tasks (manipulating multimedia, scouring social media and networks, making calls and maintaining connections with other journalists), but the costs associated with that are low (besides salary).
I have seen some amazing stuff done by people who aren’t tied down to larger organizations in terms of reporting the news… And I do think the model would be sustainable, if not profitable. Most likely it’d start through donations or through a foundation, but I think the efficiencies of the team’s structure and its ability to deliver news would vault it to the top of the food chain in terms of accurate, timely reporting.
The social media team might also be able to handle two other field reporters at most at the same time, thus improving coverage.
The key is to not get laden with constraints that bigger organizations have.
Things I did in 2009 (in no particular order):
What I plan to accomplish in 2010:
Here’s the list of books I read during 2009.
I finished 49 books in 2009, ahead of my goal of 40. In 2010 I will attempt 40 books again.
This only captures a sliver of what my eyes have consumed in 2009, since there’s just so much content online these days. Hopefully at some point we’ll be able to measure every word consumed annually at some point, possibly with neural/optical implants.
The books are rated on a 1-10 scale, with 1 being awful in every respect, 10 being both interesting & readable. This is very subjective but basically, if a book is a 10, everyone must read it. If it’s a 7, it brings a good perspective but either isn’t rigorous or is too niche. If it’s a 5, it was informational but otherwise boring. Below that? Avoid! The list is in chronological order.
You can also read ratings of books I’ve read going back to before 2006 from my Google Spreadsheet.
This post, which I want to keep pretty short, feeds off my post on re-orienting national security priorities.
I read a fascinating paper provocatively entitled “How the US Lost the Naval War of 2015″ (PDF), by James Kraska.
It takes a look at what is happening now as the US Navy flounders and the Chinese Navy quickly ramps up, and then suggests what might happen if China decided to sink the USS George Washington in 2015.
What fascinates me about this is that US Navy dominance is sort of seen as a given these days, something not worth worrying about, but naval supremacy has always been a significant factor behind any superpower’s reign of world affairs. The US gladly took over the mantle of naval superiority and its positive externalities for world security after the United Kingdom found it in their best interest to ally with the US. The Royal Navy’s battleship-style fleet did not transition well into the age of submarines and aircraft carriers. The loss of the Suez Canal was a significant barrier, as well.
So the US took over after World War 2 and has since controlled the oceans. This has enabled it to push an era of free trade and open water travel that has made it cheaper to ship resources than even to fly them, so much that the cost is almost negligent. In terms of protecting capitalism, having the US superpower in control of the oceans has been incredibly successful.
Now the US focuses more on satellite/overhead imagery, and more recently, on asymmetric warfare. Which has left several gaps in the American strategic security worldview.
The paper suggests that China could destroy a US carrier, which would have a psychological effect on Americans perhaps bigger than a physical effect, although with a Chinese contractor shutting down the Suez for “repairs” and China throwing up other roadblocks, this could delay the US in appropriately responding its massive, yet diffused fleet into the Pacific. Control of the Pacific would shift as China’s neighbors, by sheer proximity, would be reluctant to move to counter China’s naval aggression. What would the US be able to do?
It’s a fascinating paper although obviously it only looks at an American military perspective and not all the other factors: economic, cultural, etc.
But it also makes me wonder why the US is so focused on a small group of jihadists when there are bigger fish to fry for continued American dominance.
1) It is in the US interest to ensure continued and unfettered control of the oceans, to ensure open trade, safe shipping lines, and access to necessary strategic hold-points like Guam, Hawai’i, Okinawa, Europe, and other navy bases.
Robert Kaplan is associated with the neo-cons but he is an excellent security historian. What he says about US naval moves against China is that we should focus on building our presence so enmeshed with Pacific interests that China will be more inclined to ally with us than to try to displace us. This is a strategy akin to the UK realizing it had to partner with the US after WW2, and akin to the argument that alienating Japan before WW2 would push them to attack the US for control of the Pacific.
Some quotes:
“None of this will change our need for basing rights in the Pacific, of course. The more access to bases we have, the more flexibility we’ll have—to support unmanned flights, to allow aerial refueling, and perhaps most important, to force the Chinese military to concentrate on a host of problems rather than just a few. Never provide your adversary with only a few problems to solve (finding and hitting a carrier, for example), because if you do, he’ll solve them.
“Andersen Air Force Base, on Guam’s northern tip, rep- resents the future of U.S. strategy in the Pacific. It is the most potent platform anywhere in the world for the projection of American military power. Landing there recently in a military aircraft, I beheld long lines of B-52 bombers, C-17 Globemasters, F/A-18 Hornets, and E-2 Hawkeye surveillance planes, among others. Andersen’s 10,000-foot runways can handle any plane in the Air Force’s arsenal, and could accommodate the space shuttle should it need to make an emergency landing. The sprawl of runways and taxiways is so vast that when I arrived, I barely noticed a carrier air wing from the USS Kitty Hawk, which was making live practice bombing runs that it could not make from its home port in Japan. I saw a truck filled with cruise missiles on one of the runways. No other Air Force base in the Pacific stores as much weaponry as Andersen: some 100,000 bombs and missiles at any one time. Andersen also stores 66 million gallons of jet fuel, making it the Air Force’s biggest strategic gas-and-go in the world.
“Guam, which is also home to a submarine squadron and an expanding naval base, is significant because of its location. From the island an Air Force equivalent of a Marine or Army division can cover almost all of PACOM’s area of responsibility. Flying to North Korea from the West Coast of the United States takes thirteen hours; from Guam it takes four.
“”This is not like Okinawa,” Major General Dennis Larsen, the Air Force commander there at the time of my visit, told me. “This is American soil in the midst of the Pacific. Guam is a U.S. territory.” The United States can do anything it wants here, and make huge investments without fear of being thrown out. Indeed, what struck me about Andersen was how great the space was for expansion to the south and west of the current perimeters. Hundreds of millions of dollars of construction funds were being allocated. This little island, close to China, has the potential to become the hub in the wheel of a new, worldwide constellation of bases that will move the locus of U.S. power from Europe to Asia. In the event of a conflict with Taiwan, if we had a carrier battle group at Guam we would force the Chinese either to attack it in port—thereby launching an assault on sovereign U.S. territory, and instantly becoming the aggressor in the eyes of the world—or to let it sail, in which case the carrier group could arrive off the coast of Taiwan only two days later.
“During the Cold War the Navy had a specific infrastructure for a specific threat: war with the Soviet Union. But now the threat is multiple and uncertain: we need to be prepared at any time to fight, say, a conventional war against North Korea or an unconventional counterinsurgency battle against a Chinese-backed rogue island-state. This requires a more agile Navy presence on the island, which in turn means outsourcing services to the civilian community on Guam so that the Navy can concentrate on military matters. One Navy captain I met with had grown up all over the Pacific Rim. He told me of the Navy’s plans to expand the waterfront, build more bachelors’ quarters, and harden the electrical-power system by putting it underground. “The fact that we have lots of space today is meaningless,” he said. “The question is, How would we handle the surge requirement necessitated by a full-scale war?”
“There could be a problem with all of this. By making Guam a Hawaii of the western Pacific, we make life simple for the Chinese, because we give them just one problem to solve: how to threaten or intimidate Guam. The way to counter them will be not by concentration but by dispersion. So how will we prevent Guam from becoming too big?
“In a number of ways. We may build up Palau, an archipelago of 20,000 inhabitants between Mindanao, in the Philippines, and the Federated States of Micronesia, whose financial aid is contingent on a defense agreement with us. We will keep up our bases in Central Asia, close to western China—among them Karshi-Khanabad, in Uzbekistan, and Manas, in Kyrgyzstan, which were developed and expanded for the invasion of Afghanistan. And we will establish what are known as cooperative security locations.
“A cooperative security location can be a tucked-away corner of a host country’s civilian airport, or a dirt runway somewhere with fuel and mechanical help nearby, or a military airport in a friendly country with which we have no formal basing agreement but, rather, an informal arrangement with private contractors acting as go-betweens. Because the CSL concept is built on subtle relationships, it’s where the war-fighting ability of the Pentagon and the diplomacy of the State Department coincide—or should. The problem with big bases in, say, Turkey—as we learned on the eve of the invasion of Iraq—is that they are an intrusive, intimidating symbol of American power, and the only power left to a host country is the power to deny us use of such bases. In the future, therefore, we will want unobtrusive bases that benefit the host country much more obviously than they benefit us. Allowing us the use of such a base would ramp up power for a country rather than humiliating it.
“I have visited a number of CSLs in East Africa and Asia. Here is how they work. The United States provides aid to upgrade maintenance facilities, thereby helping the host country to better project its own air and naval power in the region. At the same time, we hold periodic exercises with the host country’s military, in which the base is a focus. We also offer humanitarian help to the surrounding area. Such civil-affairs projects garner positive publicity for our military in the local media—and they long preceded the response to the tsunami, which marked the first time that many in the world media paid attention to the humanitarian work done all over the world, all the time, by the U.S. military. The result is a positive diplomatic context for getting the host country’s approval for use of the base when and if we need it.
…
“The first part of the twenty-first century will be not nearly as stable as the second half of the twentieth, because the world will be not nearly as bipolar as it was during the Cold War. The fight between Beijing and Washington over the Pacific will not dominate all of world politics, but it will be the most important of several regional struggles. Yet it will be the organizing focus for the U.S. defense posture abroad. If we are smart, this should lead us back into concert with Europe. No matter how successfully our military adapts to the rise of China, it is clear that our current dominance in the Pacific will not last. The Asia expert Mark Helprin has argued that while we pursue our democratization efforts in the Middle East, increasingly befriending only those states whose internal systems resemble our own, China is poised to reap the substantial benefits of pursuing its interests amorally—what the United States did during the Cold War. The Chinese surely hope, for example, that our chilly attitude toward the brutal Uzbek dictator, Islam Karimov, becomes even chillier; this would open up the possibility of more pipeline and other deals with him, and might persuade him to deny us use of the air base at Karshi-Khanabad. Were Karimov to be toppled in an uprising like the one in Kyrgyzstan, we would immediately have to stabilize the new regime or risk losing sections of the country to Chinese influence.”
2) To reinforce naval supremacy will require control of the skies and space. Orbital satellites provide significant communications for all American forces and commercial interests, and a satellite war would cripple American capabilities.
3) Protecting satellites and increasing outer space security will require something akin to George Friedman’s (CEO of STRATFOR) battle stars (read “The Next 100 Years”), large manned orbital stations that provide armaments and increased surveillance for protecting satellites, providing imagery and comms to the ground, and even shooting down rockets, planes, or attacking ground targets. Friedman suggests 3 battle stars could be required, orbiting continually in line with the earth’s orbit to always provide overhead support in certain regions.
Says John Reilly in a fair review (read the rest) of George Friedman’s book:
“The section on the Third World War allows the author to wax techno-thrillerish on the matter of mid-21st- century weaponry. We learn a great deal about hypersonic weapons and their ability to blow up unsatisfactory objects anywhere on Earth in a matter of minutes. He has plainly thought a great deal about the military applications of space which, again, he views as an extension of Mahan’s strategy of controlling the world’s trade routes. We get a description of geosynchronous Battle Star observation-and-command stations. (He adopts the term “Battle Star,” without noting the implications of that term for his optimistic view of the military and civilian applications of robots of all kinds.) We also get an excursion to bases on the Moon that sounds not altogether unlike Robert Heinlein’s “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.””
4) UAVs will continue to improve in sophistication and lethality, and are already providing extra eyes for American border security (see San Diego), Afghanistan/Pakistan targets, and eventually everywhere. They are rapidly getting improved optics, more dangerous armaments, higher altitudes, and more time overhead (like these UAVs that can hover instead of do racetracks). UAVs will probably be complementing increasingly robotic android armies, taking humans off the front lines to be replaced with dispensable robots to do war-fighting and perimeter security.
These seem like very far-off strategic priorities but these must be driven by intentional funding, innovative projects, and understanding by the citizenry of their importance. I am far more in favor of continued intelligence dominance by the US than I am of attempting to do neo-colonial counter-insurgency and nation-building abroad, when domestic security and international respect for governments would suffice in building networks against terrorist plots.
There are plenty of other questions, too, such as whether it would be bad for China to compete with us or take over the seas. Or what the impact would be of increased naval presence in the Pacific (see below the long comment about Guam). Or whether alternatives are viable (building floating bases instead of using land). I’d like to see more discussion on all of that below, if you could take the time.
HD NFL football on a big screen is amazing, and far more exciting than being at the actual game. But the most interesting thing about football for me is the anthropology behind it, and this aspect is best documented in HBO’s annual mini-series, Hard Knocks: Training Camp. It’s a 5ish episode-long series that covers a different NFL team every pre-season training camp; this year they covered the Cincinnati Bengals, last year they covered the Dallas Cowboys.
I don’t talk about television much, but if I see some niche show that doesn’t get play or explanation, then I’ll get curious and write about it, like I did with the Japanese show VIKING: The Ultimate Obstacle Course Challenge, whose genre has now grown into the Ultimate Ninja Warrior etc. shows you see on G4TV (right now there’s a series for picking the next UNW from the US).
The Hard Knocks annual series is short, but it shows rookies, veterans, and superstars as they prepare to leave for camp, as they get acclimated to the daily grind of training, and as they fight through scrimmages and become a team. In it you see glimpses of the goofing off, the strange vocabulary used to describe different plays (that players must be able to recall within seconds or else they’ll get burned on the play), the hazing of rookies, the disparity of treatment of rookies and superstars, and the lives of kids barely out of high school thrusted into the limelight with million dollar salaries.
I started watching during the first season Hard Knocks aired (2001) when they covered the Ravens; the best moments were when Tony Siragusa, a veteran, locked the rookies in a trailer, and when they showed Shannon Sharpe’s (veteran) ridiculously tenacious training regimen.
The Cowboys series had this gem, when Roy Williams makes fun of Terrell Owens running on the beach:
The Bengals episodes also document the “Oklahoma drill”, a football drill that pits linemen against each other in a brief, explosive brawl:
This year’s Bengals season shows Chad Ochocinco, a great showman, dealing with a capricious NFL that curbs Twitter and Ustream, the two sites he uses to reach out and interact with his fans directly.
This is where it gets frustrating. The NFL is doing this, while the NBA is doing things like fining rookie Brandon Jennings for twittering. Needless to say (and from my own experiences getting in trouble for blogging/using social media), big organizations still don’t understand how their customers prefer to enjoy the experience they create.
Social media is one thing, but what’s inexcusable in the case of Hard Knocks is that HBO and the NFL don’t even make the Hard Knocks series available on DVD or online, once the episodes have aired on HBO and the NFL Network! In other words, if I wanted to purchase Hard Knocks or rent it, I wouldn’t be able to unless I caught it on TV. Sort of a live performance type of experience.
This makes no sense. It makes me ask one of my personal “Rules of Running Successful Business” questions: I want to give you money! Why are you making it so hard for me to give you money?
The Wikipedia page of course has more info on it than the actual site. And it’s likely that even the YouTube videos I post here will stop working once HBO or the NFL catches wind of them. Why do companies do this? Why do they need to control distribution even at the threat of losing their own word of mouth force multiplier? How can they make money with such bad operating practices?
It’s really a shame, because the NFL is sitting on a massive goldmine with letting people see behind the gridiron and into the business, training, and raising of NFL athletes and organizations. Hard Knocks is just a little taste of what the NFL is really like, and what we end up seeing every weekend is just a facade; in fact it took the recent policy shift from the NFL on treating NFL players’ concussions with more gravity to show that the game is less like a video game with faceless players and more of one where kids start off playing peewee football, train their entire school careers, and then cash in in the NFL, only to become feebled old hobbling elderly men.
Hard Knocks shows the humanity of the game, and I’d argue the NFL could use more of it.
Some of my old classmates from Georgetown met up to discuss Nick Kristof’s and Sheryl WuDunn’s book, “Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide”, a couple weeks ago. Most of the group was women, but among international development folks, there’s definitely a tribe of guys who are male feminists.
That is to say that we are men but believe that educating girls and having more of an equal balance of men and women in society and politics will by causation improve conditions for society’s well-being as a whole.
Singles Map, from Richard Florida's "Who's Your City?" http://creativeclass.com/whos_your_city/maps/#The_Singles_Map
I live in DC, the city with the highest proportion of highly-educated (and single) women in the country. More girls are in school than boys now, and they are out-performing the boys. What does this mean in the long run, if women are selecting the most fit mate?
And that introduces the Fight Club problem of future masculinity. What qualities will be desired in a man? Not too long ago, men derived their pride from fighting and being the bread-winners. Now that many families combine two salaries, war is an undesired quality, and sports is an option only for the few, where will men go? Will they have to re-commit to education and improve as well?
How long can men coast through life being more aggressive, stronger, and louder than women? I would agree that men and boys get their way just through sheer force of nature much of the time, but in a world of equal gender proportions, how will this change?
Women are able to give birth, and are natural nurturers and protectors of societal fabric. What do men bring?
Perhaps the future man will be fighting still, but instead for universal rights, for equal rights, for the diffusing of power. Today’s programmers may become those who bring transparency and accountability to those who would rather have no part in it. Today’s warriors may become tomorrow’s pacifists, who seek diplomacy and providing space for tomorrow’s tribes to be able to have their own identities.
And there’s always honor. I always think of Gangs of New York, that much-panned Martin Scorsese movie about “natives” fighting immigrant Europeans for the five points of New York. In it, Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day Lewis) fights Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson) and slays him. But Bill, as evil a villain as he is, later remembers his nemesis by saying, “I killed the last honorable man 15 years ago.” “He was the only man I ever killed worth remembering.”
He also expounded, “We hold in our hearts the memory of our fallen brothers whose blood stains the very streets we walk today. Also on this night we pay tribute to the leader of our enemies, an honorable man, who crossed over bravely, fighting for what he believed in. To defeat my enemy, I extinguish his life, and consume him as I consume these flames. In honor of Priest Vallon.”
Marine Staff Sergeant John Jones (see http://www.hbo.com/aliveday/bios/jones.html)
That is, even though they were enemies, at least Vallon was a man of principle and honor, and that was noble enough even for Bill to recognize.
And now we send another 30,000+ (mostly male) soldiers to Afghanistan, who’ve been fighting wars for almost a decade, to get maimed or killed. That hidden class of warriors, who participate in almost a shunned profession, will bear permanent scars of a machismo past, unable to hide missing limbs and large burns on their bodies.
I hope that a noble place is found for them, and for all men.
I just finished Karen Ho’s “Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street”. It tied together various experiences I had daytrading from 1998-2002 and 2006-2007 and the recruitment sessions that big banks and consulting companies would have for Georgetown Master’s students.
Some things the book helped to confirm:
1) Time differentials. Wall Street works very often 100-120 hours a week. This doubles the minimum hours worked by corporate America. So that affects time scales; Wall Street is constantly trying to create profit through liquidity and exchange and deals. Corporate America works on a much slower timeline, to create products or services. It is a more human scale. Wall Street works not for salary but for bonuses, which are created through quantity and size of deals. It doesn’t get compensated for long-term corporate success.
2) A large number of students from Ivy League Plus schools chase the money into finance. They get paid a fortune if they can cut it. But the net loss is to society — these brilliant minds do not seem to be employing their money back into philanthropic pursuits, ambitious programs, or bettering the world. The money is put into unsustainable, wasteful lifestyles which the east coast thrives off of. (read the Washington Post’s article about Rhodes Scholars herding into finance)
3) CEOs and executives care about “shareholder value” and the stock price, but these things are no longer linked to the internal health or long-term success of a firm. It is corporate raiding.
4) Wall Street is transferring wealth away from those who create it, by facilitating “deals” which leak commissions to the banks. How many deals have you seen executed by public companies lately which actually make any sense? Remember AOL and Time Warner? That was the pinnacle.
5) Wall Street wasn’t destroyed in 2007 — it did what it always does; quickly it reinvented itself, laid people off, and adapted. No other sector is able to reconstitute itself so quickly. It does this by pursuing talent at any cost. It recruits the best, unattached minds in the nation from the top universities, and promotes a cult of personality of “smartness” — you will be among the best people if you go to work on Wall Street. I saw the degree to which Wall Street pursues talent; one of my classmates at Georgetown had a standing job offer even throughout the 2007-2008 financial crisis!
6) Downsizing is good to Wall Street. If a company lays off workers, this means the company is reducing its overhead. Wall Street does not care about Main Street. It pulls from the elite, and the job does not care about how Main Street is doing or whether workers are suffering. Wall Street enjoys higher unemployment as long as productivity increases and costs are reduced — and as Professor Ho points out, this job insecurity mirrors what Wall Street is constantly under the threat of.
7) Even within Wall Street, there is segregation. Cost center people, like support staff, take different elevators within buildings than the people who make the profits for the banks.
8) Investing in the stock market is a sucker’s game. Owning stock in a company is not worthwhile, because common stock is so diluted that it doesn’t constitute any sort of ownership in the firm (and Professor Ho points out it never did). The stock market is its own entity and should be treated as a quick trading vehicle: volatility and liquidity are the only things that matter.
9) Neo-liberal economic theory permeates Wall Street, but it is unsustainable for most people. While Wall Street is made up of the best and brightest who easily transition from job to job, Main Street would not be able to withstand this “creative destruction”.
This is a sobering book, but also a fascinating move for anthropology: I think most people associate anthropology with studying small, backwards, tribal groups. But this studies incredibly modern, adaptive Wall Street tribes.
As a citizen I’m deeply concerned about how easily the finance sector controls what happens in this country, and even President Obama has succumbed to a lot of the banks’ demands. What’s worst is that finance is intellectual magic to create new ideas and derivatives and “products” while the actual economic base of development in the US has taken a back seat. How long can that last, with our greatest minds essentially creating nothing but instability, instead of new technologies, theories, and breakthroughs?
What do I hope to accomplish within my lifetime?
The American Dream is an incredibly alluring concept. It resonates with me because my parents came from England to work and start a family back in the 60’s, and have done well for themselves. They were not leaving a horrible situation in England, but I imagine they smelled opportunity.
This whiff of opportunity inspires new generations to come to the US, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve learned just how many obstacles to progress there still are here. The civil rights movement was a brief generation or two ago, I have to keep reminding myself. Cosmopolitanism and multiethnic communities are still not feasible for most, and views on immigration are muddled and confused.
The idea that you can come to the US with nothing except the clothes on your back and then build a life for yourself is still more true here than anywhere else. But the pursuit of the Dream comes now at greater cost: the protection of the ideal of a middle class is being chipped away, while the desire for unfettered capitalism is powerful. In other words, you have to want to get rich or die tryin’. The safety net underneath taking risks and undertaking entrepreneurship is no longer so safe.
I love capitalism. I love open, competitive markets. I would love to duke it out as a business fighting competitors. I love maximizing profit. However, I also know that not everyone is an entrepreneur, not everyone can or wants to slug it out every day.
And it’s not enough to just get rich and then retire off to buy big boats and go to the best parties.
The idea of the American Dream is not complete until it includes the responsibility to plow philanthropic projects back into the country. The biggest robber-barons, capitalists, and monopolists of our history, like the Kennedys, Morgans, Rockefellers, Carnegies, Gateses, Vanderbilts, Waltons, and Buffetts turned their money into philanthropic juggernauts.
No one does private philanthropy like the US has. We look beyond ourselves, towards ideals and virtues, using wealth to create what would be impossible without that wealth. We take on human-changing projects and change the course of history…for the better. Who else can claim to have this in their genes?
Combine this with a theory of mine: there’s plenty of money and food and resources in the world. Those are not issues. What are the central issues now are power, injustice, corruption, and tribal affiliation. These factors restrict which people have access to all that money and food, in order to get and maintain influence.
The underlying sense of my beliefs is becoming more strongly linked to building human capital. Some of my fellow Georgetown MSFS grads who studied international development met up to discuss Sheryl WuDunn’s and Nick Kristof’s “Half the Sky”, a book about female empowerment and girls’ education.
In my studies I never really thought much of most development projects, which seem like dei ex machina, disregarding lifetimes of habits and traditions for the sake of Western scientific rationalism (which is not always correct and certainly isn’t embraced universally). But bottom-up microfinance and whatnot also seemed to be like pushing a Sisyphean rock up a hill.
What I’ve come to believe is that children’s education should be viewed as a force multiplier. Universal human rights should be viewed as a force multiplier. Look at it this way: if you were to spend all your money solely on 5 girls to go from birth to graduating college, making sure they received proper diets, health screenings, and education, then they may not choose to go on and use their educations. They may even choose to just get married and have kids. But that education is impossible to ignore: they will raise their children better, and will probably send them on to school. They might be so compelled by their educations that they seek to better their situations through social entrepreneurship. At the least, it won’t just be them that’s affected. At best, they will steer their children, demand more suitable conditions for a husband and community, and undertake more community roles.
Everyone is unique, surely, and they must be allowed to go off in the directions that they were given the talent and interest for. Shoehorning women into jobs isn’t sustainable, but having them go to school will allow them to make more informed decisions.
With that, here’s what I intend to do with the rest of my life.
1) Found Galapag.us. This is of course the key, since it will be subsidizing everything else. Add in tricky twists like my needing to maintain another job until Galapag.us takes off, and my not wanting to cash out on my personal baby project. But I do think Galapag.us as a new measurement and identity/reputation system has the potential to disrupt a lot of different sectors, while bringing back human traditions. So that should be bank…if not directly then indirectly through building a public good!
2) Get Married, Have Kids. I mean, otherwise, what’s the point? I believe in the security and strength of having an equal companion to rely on, and raising kids has to be the greatest educational lesson one could ever receive.
3) Build a New School. I was watching Andre Agassi’s interview on 60 Minutes. He reveals that his father thought his education was a waste of time, and he preferred that Andre would go practice tennis instead. Andre was a meal ticket, and he loathed tennis for it. Later he would bottom out, CHOOSE to play tennis, and become a great player because he found the love. What really made the story, though, was hearing that Andre had created a school in Las Vegas to give selected students the education he never had, as long as they and their parents swore to go to college afterwards. Andre just had his first graduating class, and ALL the kids were going on to college.
How can you measure the social good of that?
4) Subsidize Co-Working Locations and Up-and-Comers. For me, raising capital isn’t the main barrier to starting a project. It’s finding enough incentive to not just get a normal job that provides stability. So provide consummate hard-workers and creative types with a competitive salary ($70k-ish) so they can work on their projects without the stigma of not actually having any income. As for the social environment that work provides, a co-working area with other alpha-dog social entrepreneurs with common, open offices that allow for collaboration, sharing, and resources to build businesses or work on “20%” ideas. Certain people will always work hard and try to create things; they just need security and stability in order to feel safe enough to reach higher. Web folks championed this idea; see Citizen Space in San Francisco.
5) Philanthropic Contribution to American Education, Health. I’ve long had a dream of giving away money to developmental projects. Studied the damn subject in grad school. And nothing seems to be more of a force multiplier than education, particularly girls’ education. And nothing seems more measurable in developmental work than disease vaccinations, hygiene, and nutrition. Final point: I don’t know any country as well as I know my own, and there is a LOT of poverty, illiteracy, and other scarcities of human capital to address. So my developmental work would focus on the United States. Similar to what Bill Gates is doing up in Seattle for their schools.
6) Open a Digitized Restaurant. I would like to build a ChurchKey-like dark-woodish comfort food bar that is built from the ground up around digital technology. Touchscreens at every table and at the bar for ordering, having seamless order processing and check-out ease for large groups. A strong, embracing neighborhood presence with approachable comfort food items. Suggested: a damn good burger, gourmet PB&J, smoothies.
7) Own an NBA Basketball Team with My Buddy Chris. Surely the most selfish thing on the list. It’s an idea we’ve been throwing around for a while. I guess my angle is that basketball is full of some pretty insipid business people who seem to run franchises into the ground, so why not give it a shot? Hell, there’s so many things I’ve always wanted at a game that you’ll NEVER see because owners are all pretty conservative… Read Bill Simmons’s “Welcome to the No Benjamins Association”.
8) Contribute Legal Fees for Key Cases. It seems true that the scales of justice are easily tipped by enough money and lawyers. For a mega millionaire, throwing a million dollars’ worth in legal fees towards a significant intellectual property or civil rights case seems justified, and keeps your dogs in the fight, instead of letting justice fail just because a sole voice of dissent can’t afford the financial bullying cost (i.e. SourceWatch, “Goliath and David: Monsanto’s Legal Battles Against Farmers”).
See this propaganda, by the way: Monsanto, MPAA.
So yeah, there you have it. That’s what I’ll be up to. Of course, it won’t turn out this way — you can’t predict anything — but these are my dreams.
[read my previous post on this subject for more context]
On Wednesday, I went on a 5 mile run to the Capitol and back to my apartment before my afternoon shift of work began. On the west lawn of the Capitol was a fairly sizeable Tea Party rally that took up most of the greens. I’d heard a whiff of this rally while reading some of the political blogs, knowing that Michele Bachmann would be leading it, but knew little else. There were more people than I thought there’d be, I suppose, and filling that lawn was pretty decent.
I stopped at the half-point of my run to walk through the rally and to get a sense of what it was like. I’d seen the previous Tea Party that was held on the Washington Mall; it was much larger and more boisterous. The stories and photos online of some of the horribly racist, offensive, and ignorant things at the rally were true: that first rally really was a national disgrace and a panoply of the worst elements you could imagine.
However, this rally on Wednesday was not much like the previous one. Gone were the disgusting signs, replaced with signs that were far more focused on just health care and big government (and not the panoply of other conservative pet issues). It looked much more like a good ol’ fashioned American political protest.
The signs still compared Obama to socialism and communism, implying that he endorses Mao, that sort of stuff. But this at least makes sense from the perspective of people who believe that Obama is ushering in a predatory government. I have no problem with that line of reasoning from the Tea Party.
The audience seemed to be more fit this time, fewer obese and grossly overweight families. I would attribute this to the rally taking place on a weekday and with much less fanfare: people from the midwest and south couldn’t make the trip out for this one, because they had to work. This is just a hypothesis, though. The people at Wednesday’s rally seemed like the smarter, more politically savvy/motivated types.
The rally was, again, composed almost entirely of white people, most approaching their 50s or older. Again, most of the blacks, Latinos, etc. were DC and Capitol security.
This rally seemed only tainted by the large number of anti-abortion demonstrations, whereas the earlier rally in September only had anti-abortionists as a fringe element. But these people seemed to take center stage. I stopped by one demonstration, in which a man dressed up as the Grim Reaper with black covering his face, used a megaphone to mock Reid and Pelosi. Those two were played by characters wearing suits but covered in fake blood, locked in chains attached to fake baby fetuses. “Reid” and “Pelosi” wailed while the Grim Reaper taunted them about supporting abortion. I thought this was pretty grotesque, some sort of macabre scene you’d picture right before a stake-burning in Victorian England of some village witch.
I didn’t stay long, so I missed witnessing what some pretty decent independent reporting published about later that day:
“A seemingly endless parade of speakers seemed to encompass virtually the whole of the House GOP caucus.
“What really set this event apart from all others is that the long list of Republican lawmakers assembled before the crowd did so as part of a day’s work in Congress on the steps of U.S. Capitol, cheerfully facing a barrage of signs that decried Pelosi and President Barack Obama as socialists, and the president as a usurper and transgressor of the Constitution.
“Sure, you’ve heard that that story before, even bits and pieces of it out of the mouths of individual members of Congress. And, yes, U.S. senators and representatives have been present before on podiums where the Obama-as-fascist-socialist-Marxist-Muslim-foreigner story revealed itself in the chants and signage of protesters. But here was the leader of the House Republicans, addressing just such a crowd as part of his day job, leading perhaps 20 members of Congress to join that fray.”
This latest rally was a last-ditch attempt to lobby Congress to block “Obamacare”, which was debated extensively yesterday (Saturday) for a vote later that evening. I went for another run to the Capitol yesterday and there was a much smaller rally on the southeast Capitol lawn, participating I suppose in a vigil during the health care wrangling inside the building.
The President’s convoy was seen leaving the Capitol to the White House, and later I saw the Marine 1 helo convoy leaving the White House to God knows where. It was a busy day on the Hill while the rest of us DCists enjoyed our beautifully sunny and unseasonable warm weekends.
It’s pretty satisfying to be drinking beer with friends at a bar and see your House Representatives still slaving away at work.
Last night the House passed the bill and no one really knows what it all means and none of it probably matters till the Senate is ready to vote, anyway.
So here’s my take on all this. Please read my previous post on the Tea Party for more context, first.
First of all, I think the Tea Party is intellectually bankrupt. The Gadsden flag, a yellow flag with a snake on it, accompanied by the phrase “Don’t Tread on Me”, is the prominent symbol displayed. This rattlesnake symbology is not really relevant anymore. Said Benjamin Franklin of the rattlesnake:
“I recollected that her eye excelled in brightness, that of any other animal, and that she has no eye-lids—She may therefore be esteemed an emblem of vigilance.—She never begins an attack, nor, when once engaged, ever surrenders: She is therefore an emblem of magnanimity and true courage.—As if anxious to prevent all pretensions of quarreling with her, the weapons with which nature has furnished her, she conceals in the roof of her mouth, so that, to those who are unacquainted with her, she appears to be a most defenseless animal; and even when those weapons are shewn and extended for her defense, they appear weak and contemptible; but their wounds however small, are decisive and fatal:—Conscious of this, she never wounds till she has generously given notice, even to her enemy, and cautioned him against the danger of treading on her.—Was I wrong, Sir, in thinking this a strong picture of the temper and conduct of America?”
This played well when America was an upstart group of colonies finding its cajones against an imperial British oppressor. Glenn Beck’s 9/12 Project also plays off the rattlesnake, cut into 13 pieces for the original colonies. What the Hell is this supposed to symbolize back to the past? We should return to the colonial days before the Revolutionary War? Doesn’t it seem kind of silly to treat the world superpower as a rattlesnake that will bite if it’s not left alone?
Surely the thought behind this is that common working folk in America just want to be left alone and not be harassed with a corrupt, growing government welfare nanny state that usurps them through taxation.
Fine. But tie this into health care. Health care costs have skyrocketed and the system is not sustainable. The middle states will be even more burdened by this inflation of costs as the jobs that currently exist there disappear, combined with atrophying job skills.
Seriously, you want to be left alone? The American way of life will cease to be if you just want to be left alone. Encroaching corporate interests, already brethren with government regulatory precedents, are Big Brother’s brothers and sisters. You have as much to fear from big business as you do from Big Brother.
The spirit of the Tea Party should be thus: elites, whether they be government or business, are encroaching on our personal rights and freedoms. Elites, whether they be government or business, seek fees, taxes, scams, oligopolies, and changes in the law in order to take away our hard-earning money. We, Americans, coming from a capitalist tradition, value first amendment rights, competition, and fairness above all.
Playing business off government is the only way to ensure proper competition: left alone, they will corrupt each other to take advantage of the people. Health care is uncompetitive, with 90% market concentration in some states. Telecom, retail (see grocery store shelf-space positioning), sports teams, et al are just some of the sectors in which we do not benefit from competitive markets but instead only have an illusion of competition. Yes, you have 20,000 products to choose from, but they’re owned by 5 companies. Yes, you have several telecom providers to choose from, but they all fix prices to be very similar, block new entrants, and are notoriously opaque about their operating practices. Yes, there are plenty of sports teams, but any attempts to compete against their leagues results in failure and artificially priced closed markets.
This is what the Tea Party should rally against. When I can see Drudge Report going off on Obama’s spending, and then go to Huffington Post to see them complaining against GM and Goldman Sachs funneling taxpayer money out to executives, there SHOULD be common interest there.
Democrats and Republicans enjoy the two-party system because they have no viable competition from new entrants. They can play off each other as it suits them and take bribes and lobbying knowing that any corruption is just written off as DC politics and not as a referendum to kill that party entirely.
The Tea Party has glimpses of being this way: it sounds like Palin and Beck are playing the populist drumbeat, fighting against the big party Republicans like Gingrich in, for example, east coast politics. But the bottom line is that the Tea Party is organized and motivated by staunchly conservative lobbyists. It is not grassroots by any means.
The Tea Party should attack it as big interests dividing and conquering the American citizen.
That the House GOP caucus made an appearance at the latest Tea Party rally might end up being a key moment. These career politicians and lobbyists, in an effort to thwart Obama and health care reform, are throwing their lot in with the anti-federal government right-wing that could just as easily turn on their masters and throw the top Republicans to the wolves when the wind changes.
So this is why I can’t take the Tea Party seriously. Clearly we need to break open all the monopolies and oligopolies that exist throughout our systems, but it won’t happen. Clearly the Tea Party could forge itself as the strong Public point of the triangle between Government, Business, and Public, but seeing as how the Tea Party is conservative, that makes it anti-union and anti-anyone who isn’t of the party (i.e. immigrants, minorities, the coasters).
When I was at Georgetown, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Eric Maskin came to speak about voting systems in the US. One of the ideas floated about in this discussion was having a multi-party election where conceivably you could come in second in every state and still win, because the people who came in first in every state were all different. That is, if there were 3 states voting:
Alabama: #1 A, #2 B, #3 C, #4 D
California: #1 C, #2 B, #3 A, #4 D
Texas: #1 D, #2 B, #3 A, #4 C
Then B would win, because it’d have gotten the highest number of higher positions. What this conveys is that party politics would become more about consensus, and not winner-takes-all. It incentivizes being less radical. It captures the silent majority’s opinions, which both the Democrats and Republicans both routinely claim backs them.
A viable third party would need something like this in order to ever be successful.
Health Care Chickenhawks
A chickenhawk is someone who pushes for military aggression (usually conservative) without having ever served in the armed forces. But from time to time, Republicans have dared attack the only socialized medicine in the US outside of Medicare: military health care. Take Tom Tancredo, racist former presidential candidate. He argued that veterans want vouchers (lol, the only people who know what vouchers are are creative libertarians) instead of their government-provided health care.
Problem was, I guess he didn’t know his opponent, Markos Koulitsas, was a US Army veteran! I guess he just assumed that a liberal must be a pussy who would never fight.
So Markos laughs at Tom and calls Tancredo out for getting a deferment from Vietnam because he had depression. Tancredo got pissy and stormed off the set.
Chickenhawks are pretty vile because there’s a slew of them who continually send our nation’s children to war without having been to war themselves. This is a cardinal sin for anyone who’s been in the military: you don’t ask your soldiers to do something that you aren’t willing to do yourself. The list of Republicans, I might add, who never served, is pretty substantial.
The list is not exactly partial, nor does it include Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi, who clearly never served, themselves. But let’s be honest. No left-wingers like Reid or Pelosi either, so it’s funny to see the right attack those two and expect a defense from progressives. They’ll get very little response.
My opinion is that I would rather have an integrated, digital health care 2.0. I enjoyed the days of walking into the Army clinic to get my yearly physical or shots or whatever and never having to worry about paperwork. It was done without my having to push it through the whole way.
Certainly, if I need some heart transplant, I’d want to pay for the best doctor I could find. But for most stuff? To include preventative treatment (which went out the door because of rising health care costs)? I’d rather walk into a government clinic, have it done, and never worry about it again.
Slack-Jawed Ideologues
The chickenhawks are examples of a larger trend: Republican ideologues are increasingly career politicians. No military experience, no public policy experience. They didn’t earn their way up through any institutions. They’ve been tucked away in think-tanks and lobbyist groups. They have no actual experience running anything, and if they did, it probably failed (see Bush the Younger, or Rove/Rumsfeld during Nixon).
Go ahead! Wiki it. Pick a Republican leader and see what his/her background is. John Boehner? He got a “bad back” and dropped out of the military, to go become a prolific House tearjerker. Phil Gramm? Got into military academy because of his dad, but then didn’t join the military. Studied economics instead, and went totally neo-liberal/Friedman (a fiery mess of economics we’re still recovering from, in reality and intellectually). Rush Limbaugh? Family of lawyers, was classified as injured and so was an emergency Vietnam draftee never called up. Glenn Beck? He was a morning zoo jockey!
I mean those were the first (and most notable) names I came up with! Total hacks. There’s absolutely no experience running anything except a media juggernaut or a courtroom there. [Note: Reid and Pelosi were little better...]
What’s worse: half these folks go absolutely gay for Ayn Rand. You know Ayn Rand. Fountainhead. Atlas Shrugged. Yes, she was a fiction author. FICTION. See this biographer talk about Rand on the Daily Show (I apologize for the lefty link). Yet she’s the heroine of some movement for entrepreneurship. Really? How many of today’s tech/social entrepreneurs love Ayn Rand? The selfishness and lack of empathy is so perfectly captured in Stephen Colbert’s book title, “I Am America (and So Can You!)”. It’s a wonderful mix of rugged narcissism and consumerism and desire for success all wrapped up in one. Even “Don’t Tread on Me” is essentially a selfish slogan. Quite a bit deal different than my old Special Forces unit’s motto, “De Oppresso Liber”, or “To Free the Oppressed” (or alternate translations).
Business
Excuse me, but if you love small business or any kind of business, why would you advocate that businesses should have to provide health care coverage? This saddles businesses with paperwork, operating costs, and a lot of headaches that reduce their competitiveness worldwide.
Competition
It is no lie that America is home to commerce. But it’s also true that the US has some of the least competitive markets in the world. And these markets are backed by government subsidy and loose regulation.
The same for health care. For Americans who value competition so much, it just seems ignorant that they wouldn’t seek to have more competition for health care insurance providers.
I can seen an argument that the government should not get into health insurance, because governments tend to grow in influence and power and crowd out business. Okay, I can buy that. That’s why you have to have a legal spirit of regulation allowing for a government option to compete vigorously against private interests. The government option’s interest is in protecting the health of its citizens, while the private interest is to make profit.
These two must be put together in a system which encourages them to compete. This is the only way to make it sustainable.
Balance of Powers
To me, there should be a vigorously-fought balance between Government, Business, Citizenry, and the Media.
Government is currently made up of lawyers. It should be made up of public policy people whose only interest is to protect and encourage the Citizenry to be more active. That is, make sure the Citizenry is healthy, happy, and has protections and rights.
Business seeks profit. It is doing its job just fine in America, but it corrupts the country through lax regulation. While I see business as working fairly successfully, I see the Government as having been infiltrated by private interests and lobbyists so that the Government has not been doing its job of protecting the Citizenry’s interest.
Citizenry needs to hold Government and Business to account. Contesting large amounts of tax payer money for programs is key. But so is attacking companies that pollute the Citizenry’s land and environment. So is attacking the media for not providing them proper information.
The media could also use more competition. MSNBC and FOXNews are as partisan as you can get, and offer no value to the Citizenry at all. CNN is just plain worthless. There are plenty of journalists who are trained and professional enough to seek multiple views for their stories, but a corporate-dominated media structure means that ratings win, and the best way to get ratings is through opinion. Despite government-run organizations like NPR, PBS, and BBC providing good reporting, the Internet has now turned into the best source of news.
The Internet I did not include because it’s a medium, not a “branch” of government. But the Internet is the only place that still has options for the Citizenry to disrupt the other branches. This may change. If the Citizenry wants to maintain any sort of fingerhold on Business and Government, it needs to ensure that the Internet is a public space for the Citizenry to organize, learn, innovate, and experiment.
Boy, have I digressed… Sorry for this sprawling post.
[P.S. A couple Tea Party links. 1: divisions amongst the ranks. 2: some in Tea Party promote Russian analyst's US-breakup prediction.]
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