The "Augean Stables" — How Corruption Has Amended the Constitution

Hercules starting to clean a 1,000-cattle stable that hadn't been emptied in 30 years. Like the U.S. government, says Gary Hart. (Hercules quickly gives up on the shovel.)

by Gaius Publius

Not something you don't already know if you're a regular reader of these pages, but it's becoming more and more mainstream to deliver a radical* analysis of government in the U.S. That's why I found the following so interesting — the source is former U.S. Senator and former presidential candidate Gary Hart. And believe me, this is a radical analysis.

But first, two definitions. The Augean Stables is a reference to the Fifth Labor of Hercules, one of the Twelve (click to read the context). The task was to clean the king's stables, which housed 1,000 cattle and which hadn't been cleaned in 30 years, the life of the man who owned it. Cleaned of what? Surely you know:

The fifth Labour of Heracles (Hercules in Latin) was to clean the Augean (/ɔːˈdʒiːən/) stables. Eurystheus [the king assigning the tasks to Hercules] intended this assignment both as humiliating (rather than impressive, like the previous labours) and as impossible, since the livestock were divinely healthy (immortal) and therefore produced an enormous quantity of dung (ἡ ὄνθος). These stables had not been cleaned in over 30 years, and over 1,000 cattle lived there. However, Heracles succeeded by rerouting the rivers Alpheus and Peneus to wash out the filth.

The second definition — corruption. Most think of corruption as an outcome that's perverted for the sake of money. Hart, correctly, says, Not so:

From Plato and Aristotle forward, corruption was meant to describe actions and decisions that put a narrow, special, or personal interest ahead of the interest of the public or commonwealth. Corruption did not have to stoop to money under the table, vote buying, or even renting out the Lincoln bedroom. In the governing of a republic, corruption was self-interest placed above the interest of all—the public interest.

Corruption is "self-interest placed above the interest of all," or in some cases, one's legal or contractual obligation. Thus, for example, some college football referees and refereeing groups are obviously corrupt. When Conference A plays Conference B using Conference B's referees, and year after year the bad calls go Conference B's way, especially with the game on the line, the referees are corrupt.

Are they betraying their obligation for money? No, likely not. Are they betraying their obligation in order to satisfy animus against Conference A, or to make sure the "home teams" win? That's an obvious explanation, and by this definition (and mine), that's corrupt.

Or take another situation. By this definition, the Supreme Court since at least 2000 and likely before has acted corruptly, if the definition is "self-interest placed above the interest of all." No legal analysis of Bush v. Gore passes the "upholds the interest of all" test — the Republicans on the Court simply put a Republican (the home team candidate) in the White House because they could. Nor do the major decisions around money and corporate rights, like Citizens United or even Buckley v. Valeo, the 1976 Burger Court decision that lifted restrictions on campaign contributions, and its follow-up, First National Bank of Boston vs. Bellotti, whose majority opinion was authored by Lewis Powell, of the infamous Powell memo.

By this definition — perverting an outcome to benefit a group in which one has a personal interest — the Supreme Court acted corruptly in the cases above. Likely corrupt in Buckley, Citizens United, and First National Bank of Boston. Certainly corrupt in Bush v. Gore, where Republican justices favored a Republican candidate for president over a Democratic one on no defensible grounds. They weren't metaphorically "corrupt," with the quotes. They were corrupt by definition.

Gary Hart on the Systemic Corruption of the U.S. Government

Hart's piece is an interesting Time magazine essay, and also a long section from his new book, The Republic of Conscience (I don't support Amazon, so no Amazon link). I don't want to quote a ton of it, since its main argument is likely familiar to you. But he makes a systemic point in a way that seems original; that is, he puts pieces together to make a bigger whole than most of us were aware of. For example, it's likely that the "army of lobbyists" we all hate aren't a perversion of government — they are government.

A few notable sections (all emphasis mine):

Gary Hart: America’s Founding Principles Are in Danger of Corruption

Welcome to the age of vanity politics and campaigns-for-hire. What would our founders make of this nightmare?

Four qualities have distinguished republican government from ancient Athens forward: the sovereignty of the people; a sense of the common good; government dedicated to the commonwealth; and resistance to corruption. Measured against the standards established for republics from ancient times, the American Republic is massively corrupt.

From Plato and Aristotle forward, corruption was meant to describe actions and decisions that put a narrow, special, or personal interest ahead of the interest of the public or commonwealth. Corruption did not have to stoop to money under the table, vote buying, or even renting out the Lincoln bedroom. In the governing of a republic, corruption was self-interest placed above the interest of all—the public interest.

By that standard, can anyone seriously doubt that our republic, our government, is corrupt? There have been Teapot Domes and financial scandals of one kind or another throughout our nation’s history. There has never been a time, however, when the government of the United States was so perversely and systematically dedicated to special interests, earmarks, side deals, log-rolling, vote-trading, and sweetheart deals of one kind or another.

What brought us to this? A sinister system combining staggering campaign costs, political contributions, political action committees, special interest payments for access, and, most of all, the rise of the lobbying class.

Worst of all, the army of lobbyists that started relatively small in the mid-twentieth century has now grown to big battalions of law firms and lobbying firms of the right, left, and an amalgam of both. And that gargantuan, if not reptilian, industry now takes on board former members of the House and the Senate and their personal and committee staffs. And they are all getting fabulously rich.

Gargantuan numbers of lobbyists with gargantuan amounts of money. There's a point where corruption of government on that scale systemically changes government itself.

The "Big Three" Lobbying Conglomerates Are a "Fourth Branch of Government"

For Hart, the movement of office-holders and their staffs between lobbying firms and government is not a "revolving door" to government; that revolving door is government. Hart makes his point by looking at the lobbying firm WPP, the largest of three giant lobbying conglomerates. WPP isn't just a lobbying firm, it's an international conglomerate of firms that wields enormous power and wealth.

Consider — WPP has been eating up lobbying firms the way Macy's, Inc. eats department stores or Darden eats restaurant chains. At some point, you simply own the business you're in, and the size of your operation changes the nature of the game itself.

Hart on how lobbying at this scale changes our government:

[T]he largest [lobbying "predator" (his term)] by far is WPP (originally called Wire and Plastic Products; is there a metaphor here?), which has its headquarters in London and more than 150,000 employees in 2,500 offices spread around 107 countries. It, together with one or two conglomerating competitors, represents a fourth branch of government, vacuuming up former senators and House members and their spouses and families, key committee staff, former senior administration officials of both parties and several administrations, and ambassadors, diplomats, and retired senior military officers.

WPP has swallowed giant public relations, advertising, and lobbying outfits such as Hill & Knowlton and BursonMarsteller, along with dozens of smaller members of the highly lucrative special interest and influence-manipulation world. Close behind WPP is the Orwellian-named Omnicom Group and another converger vaguely called the Interpublic Group of Companies. According to Mr. Edsall, WPP had billings last year of $72.3 billion, larger than the budgets of quite a number of countries.

With a budget so astronomical, think how much good WPP can do in the campaign finance arena, especially since the Citizens United decision. The possibilities are almost limitless. Why pay for a senator or congresswoman here or there when you can buy an entire committee? Think of the banks that can be bailed out, the range of elaborate weapons systems that can be sold to the government, the protection from congressional scrutiny that can be paid for, the economic policies that can be manipulated.

The lobbying business is no longer about votes up or down on particular measures that may emerge in Congress or policies made in the White House. It is about setting agendas, deciding what should and should not be brought up for hearings and legislation. We have gone way beyond mere vote buying now. The converging Influence World represents nothing less than an unofficial but enormously powerful fourth branch of government.

To whom is this branch of government accountable? Who sets the agenda for its rising army of influence marketers? How easy will it be to not only go from office to a lucrative lobbying job but, more important, from lucrative lobbying job to holding office?

When one lobbying firm has billings of nearly $75 billion, you can "buy committees," not just individual votes; and you can "set agendas" rather than just pass laws.

Now consider that "revolving door" again. Is that a door out of government and back into it, or is it a door into another branch of government, one where policy decisions also get made?

Does an International Lobbying Firm Serve One Nation's Interest or Many?

And a final question: If the lobbying firm is international, with international clients and governmental "targets," are its interests "American" in any way? If not, how compromised are those who take its money?

Where are its [WPP's] loyalties if it is manipulating and influencing governments around the world? Other than as a trough of money of gigantic proportions, how does it view the government of the United States?

Why would not WPP act to modify the laws of one country to serve the interests of clients in another? And I'll ask again, are those who take its money compromised by the international goals of these mega-firms?

"Purchasing" Candidates and Office-Holders — Even Former Senators Are Saying It

Just as "corruption" is not a metaphor when it comes to decisions like Bush v. Gore, "buying" and "sponsoring" candidates and office-holders — the way soap is bought and race cars are sponsored — is not a metaphor, at least according to Hart:

The advent of legalized corruption launched by the Supreme Court empowers the superrich to fund their own presidential and congressional campaigns as pet projects, to foster pet policies, and to represent pet political enclaves. You have a billion, or even several hundred million, then purchase a candidate from the endless reserve bench of minor politicians and make him or her a star, a mouthpiece for any cause or purpose however questionable, and that candidate will mouth your script in endless political debates and through as many television spots as you are willing to pay for. All legal now. ...

The five prevailing Supreme Court justices, holding that a legal entity called a corporation has First Amendment rights of free speech, might at least have required the bought-and-paid-for candidates to wear sponsor labels on their suits as stock-car drivers do. Though, for the time being, sponsored candidates will not be openly promoted by Exxon-Mobil or the Stardust Resort and Casino but by phony “committees for good government” smokescreens.

I think he's literally correct. In the old days, it didn't take much money to wholly own a back-bench Congress person from coal country, say, and one coal company, if big enough, could do it. But the major office-holders had to be funded by competing interests. Now you can tag several  presidential candidates, at least on the Republican side, with the single name of their "benefactor."

For example:

• Marco Rubio — Sponsored by Norman Braman & (he hopes) Sheldon Adelson
• Scott Walker — Sponsored by the Koch Brothers
• Ted Cruz — Sponsored by hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer
• Rick Santorum — Sponsored by Foster Friess
• Rand Paul — Sponsored by [this slot available]

And so on. Joe Biden's been called the "Senator from MBNA," and Chuck Schumer the "Senator from Wall Street." Seems right. In cases of such complete "sponsorship" I agree that wearing of badges should be required. Partial sponsorship could be handled like NASCAR jackets:

But this treats a serious problem too lightly. Remember, I said this was a radical analysis. In fact, by this practice we're actually amending the Constitution — not the one as written; the one as practiced.

The Other Way to Amend the Constitution

All constitutions and all systems of laws are amended in two ways, by formal agreement (legal process) and by informal agreement. In England, the second ways is in fact the primary way their "constitution" is amended.

In the U.S., if both parties enforce a law in the same way, even though that way deviates from the way the law is written, the law is amended until forced back to its original form in practice. Thus:

▪ We have, by bipartisan agreement, revoked the Fourth Amendment. Neither party enforces it, so it's gone. Do you think you'll see it enforced in your lifetime? It's possible. Is that likely, do you think, without another radical change?

▪ We have changed the "rule of law" to add a "circle of immunity" amendment. It started with Nixon — the circle of "who cannot be prosecuted" included one person, the president. That was granted him by Gerald Ford's pardon with no objection from Congress and confirmed by Obama's refusal to indict Bush II for violating laws against torture. (Can you see Obama being indicted by anyone for extrajudicial murder, assassination really, of Americans, some mere propagandists and some completely innocent?)

Under Reagan–Bush I that circle expanded to include their top cabinet officers, like Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger. Under Bush II–Obama it includes all money-center bankers and former senators (and outright crooks) like Jon Corzine.

▪ Regarding that parenthetical comment about Obama and his drone kills above, we've now amended the trial-by-jury section of the Sixth Amendment to allow executive assassination, death by executive fiat. It just awaits a Republican president to confirm it by following suit, but Congress has already approved.

And so on. Now we can add one more:

▪ The mega-lobbying firms, with their combined more-than-$100 billion annual budget, are a fourth branch of government. Policy is set in these firms and passed to Congress and the executive branch to "discuss." Once discussed and passed, those who passed these policies then return to the firms to set more policy — and receive what's often the biggest payoff of their lifetime.

Was TPP drafted first in these mega-firms before being negotiated between nations? There aren't many other ways to convene 600 lobbyists (pdf).

Cleaning the Augean Stables

Back to Hart's essay and where we started, with the Augean Stables. The way out of this mess, if Greek myth is any indicator, is not incremental. You can't shovel your way out. Remember, that's a 1,000-cattle stable, and in our case a literal army of lobbyists. With a mere shovel, we'd be buried to our necks before the fourth toss of filth out the window.

How did Hercules clean his stable? He diverted a river and ran the whole mess out to sea in one pass. There's a word for that equivalent in government life — radical change, and it comes in several forms.

I recommend the peaceful kind, like backing this guy for president. Click to support; you can adjust the split at the link.

* Did you know that "radical" means "going to the root or source"?

Radically yours,

GP

GOP candidates flip-flop in the breeze -- all except Scott Walker, who just lies

With a Doonesbury bonus: The deep roots
of modern conservative policy-making

"None of the leading Republicans," says E. J. Dionne Jr., is willing to offer a more fundamental challenge to the party’s rightward lurch over the past decade."


"Unfortunately for the Republican Party and the country, [Wisconsin Gov. Scott] Walker’s careful parsing of shape-shifting counts as one of the cerebral high points of the debate among the party’s 2016 presidential candidates."

-- E. J. Dionne Jr., in his Washington Post column
"The right's political correctness"

by Ken

In case you're coming late to Governor Walker's "shape-shifting," it's the lying scumbag's way of explaining that he's not a "flip-flopper," not he!, no way, no matter how often or how conveniently he may change his positions on any subject to suit alterations in the political temper of the moment. As E. J. Dionne Jr. explains the governor's position -- and I'm going to trust him, in part because I consider him a highly trustworthy observer and for the rest because I'm damned if I'm going to watch the vile sack of filth:

“A flip would be someone who voted on something and did something different,” the Wisconsin governor explained last week on Fox News. His altered views on immigration don’t count because he is not a legislator. “These are not votes,” he helpfully pointed out.

Oh.

E.J., declaring this "sheer brilliance!," goes on to note a lucky -- for Governor Walker, that is -- coincidence:

Other than former Florida governor Jeb Bush, Walker’s major rivals at the moment are Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.). They have all cast lots of votes. So Walker can accuse them of flip-flopping while claiming blanket immunity for himself.

If the governor had an honest cell anywhere in his lying carcass, he could have offered the simpler and truer explanation that when he takes a position, only his all-consuming self-servingness comes into play, and never the truth, except possibly for his apparently inborn aversion to it. And as a right-winger, he has official sanction to lie, which he exercises at all opportunities except when he's cornered and can't come up with a suitable lie.

I assume E.J. doesn't feel it necessary to point out the obvious: that Governor Walker's new position on flip-flopping is utter bullshit, just like everything else he says. You either take a position or you don't, and while everyone is certainly entitled to change a position, and indeed should be encouraged to do so when they find their previous position unsatisfactory, you can't pretend that you haven't changed your position. Well, you can, but then you would be lying. Which is certainly nothing that would faze Governor Walker. It's where he lives.


At last week's Southern Republican Leadership Conference in Oklahoma City (which Howie wrote about earlier today), Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker makes sure that none of his rivals can tell more lies per microphone minute -- and the Right kinds of lies -- than he does.

The immediate issue for the governor is his flip-flop on immigration. And this leads E.J. to his mournful observation that his creative obfuscation "counts as one of the cerebral high points of the debate" among his party's 2016 presidential aspirants. "The shortage of philosophical adventure and the eagerness of GOP hopefuls to alter their positions to make them more conservative," says E.J., "a Republican primary electorate that has moved so far right that it brooks no deviation."

And so, E.J. notes, even Rand Paul, currently best known for his one-man stand against the Republicans' official position on the national-security state (they're all for it, in case you've forgotten), "even Paul has recast his foreign policy positions to make them sound more hawkish and thus more in keeping with prevailing Republican views."

The same is true, E.J., says of the band of self-styled "reform conservatives," who seem incapable of taking any even slightly unorthodox position without simultaneously declaring their unbroken fealty to the most rightward of right-wing "beliefs," or at least the beliefs of the moment.

With occasional exceptions, they have been far more interested in proving their faithfulness to today’s hard-line right than in declaring, as conservatives in so many other democracies have been willing to do, that sprawling market economies need a rather large dose of government. Conservatives, Levin says, are “eager to build on the longstanding institutions of our society to improve things.” Good idea. But somehow, the successes of decades-old governmental institutions in areas such as retirement security, health-care provision and environmental protection are rarely acknowledged.

"Where, for example," E.J. wonders,

is the candidate willing to acknowledge that, like it or not, there’s no way that anywhere close to all Americans will be able to get health insurance unless government plays a very large role? Where is the Republican who will admit that if the party had its way on further tax cuts, many programs Americans like would fall by the wayside?

And this is awkward, E.J. points out, because "many Republicans, especially reform conservatives, know that most Americans who criticize government in the abstract still welcome many of its activities."

Yet stating this obvious fact is now politically incorrect on the right. Conservatives who condemn political correctness in others need to start calling it out on their own side. Otherwise, Scott Walker’s artful redefinition of flip-flopping could become the 2016 Republican debate’s most creative intellectual contribution.

What E.J. is again too polite to point out is that these same right-wing pols have done much to create this situation by encouraging and exploiting the hardening of the Republican base's position -- precisely because it then makes that base so poliically exploitable.

Which doesn't create much of a problem as long as your only consideration is the personal gain you can derive from swearing loyalty to what the base wants to hear at any given moment. But if in a moment of weakness you want to consider what might be good for the country or for Americans generally, well, if you know what's good for you, you'll keep your trap shut.

The comfort lies in knowing that if at any moment there's a change in the voodoo bromides the organized American crazies want to hear, you can always change your position -- as long as you don't have a voting record to answer to, according to one newly enunciated lying-scumbag theory.


IS THE SKY BLUE? OR, THE DEEP ROOTS
OF MODERN CONSERVATIVE "THINKING"

DOONESBURY     by G. B. Trudeau

[Click to enlarge.]

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Update: "Is this why we hate the gummint?" -- the sequel

Again, pay no attention to the "NO BICYCLE RIDING IN SUBWAY TUNNEL" sign. After all, no bicycle riders did in the time the sign was up. It's gone now.

by Ken

I just wanted to provide a quick update on the situation ("Closed for repairs that aren't being made: Is this why we hate the gummint?," December 10) at the entrance to the three-block-long pedestrian tunnel that links my stretch of upper Broadway (roughly at what would be 190th Street) to the IRT 191st Street station of the no. 1 train to the east, which lies far below St. Nicholas Avenue -- it's the deepest station in the subway system -- running north-south atop Fort George hill.

It's a tunnel of considerable historical -- and present-day -- importance, providing acess fromt the north-south valley in which Broadway runs, between the Fort George hill and the Fort Washington hill to the west -- to mass rapid transit. (Later, when the IND train that's now the A was dug beneath the Fort Washington hill, shorter pedestrian tunnels were built to join the valley to its 181st and 190th Street stations.)

At the entrance from Broadway, as I tried to explain, there is an immediate descent of about a story to the grade of the tunnel, which is managed two ways. The width of the opening is split in half, the left half as you face the tunnel being a stairway, the right half a fairly steep concrete ramp.

Last month, flimsy wooden barriers suddenly appeared at the top and bottom of the stairway, with cryptic signs stating that it would be closed for necessary repairs from 7/12/14 to 8/12/14. Well, what are you going to do? Necessary repairs are, you know, necessary. (A commenter on my original post contributed the helpful information that "actually, one of the steps is broken.") And, after all, we still had access to -- and egress from -- this vital tunnel via the ramp. Or at least access/egress of a sort; the incline is pretty steep. For some of us, it's manageable but not easily so. I imagine that for others it's just plain not manageable.

The thing was, though, that as days and weeks passed, and 8/12 began to become closer than 7/12, there was no evidence of any attention of any kind to these famously necessary repairs. ABout the only development was a gradual accumulation of trash on the orphaned steps. As the supposed reopening date of 8/12 approached, there was still no indication of any of this necessary repair work being begun. No doubt there were other necessary repair projects around town deemed more necessary -- not to mention conceivable others on the to-do list that weren't getting much more attention than ours.

What's more, it wasn't at all clear where one might complain, or inquire. The pair of signs at the head and foot of the steps didn't indicate who had closed off the steps, or who could provide information. I should explain that jurisdiction in the tunnel is always problematic. Since it's officially mapped as a street, New York City Transit, which operates the subways (itself a division of the MTA, the Metropolitan Transportation Association), always points out that it's under the control of the NYC Dept. of Transportation. For such cleaning of the tunnel as is done, DoT hands off to the Dept. of Sanitation. On the signs, no agency claimed, er, credit for the planning and accomplishment of the necessary repairs. Meanwhile, one recalled tales told of street-connecting stairways around town -- there are some pretty big hills in parts of NYC -- remaining closed and unrepaired for eons.

I first wrote about this situation, with 8/12 on the horizon and still no evidence of the start of work. This led me to wonder whether this sort of thing isn't why we hate government? Then 8/12 came and went. Still nothing.

Until one day -- maybe ten days ago, as I recall -- the lower "barricade" (really just a wood frame held up by police-activity-type yellow tape) was down. Literally down, lying flat on the floor of the tunnel at the foot of the steps. A day or two later the upper barricade was down too! At which point intrepid pedestrians began stomping over the downed barricades to resume use of the now-heavily-trash-littered steps.

A couple of days later, both barricades could be found leaning against the wall of the tunnel, leaving free access to the steps! And then, one day earlier this week, they were gone, vanished! And the steps themselves had been swept, perhaps the most miraculous occurrence in the whole business. Cleaning of the tunnel is always a rarely practiced and highly contentious affair, with NYCT, DoT, and Sanitation pointing "Who, us?" fingers. I'm embarrassed to say that many of my fellow tunnel-walkers are wicked bad litterers. (I just noticed that Wikipedia says "the passageway . . . is maintained by the Parks Department rather than the MTA." Okay.)

And this is where the matter stands. The steps are once again freely accessible, still in need of those necessary repairs. (I really must remember to look for that broken step.) Where the barricades came from and where they went remain a mystery.

#

Closed for repairs that aren't being made: Is this why we hate the gummint?

The artwork comes and goes, but the "I.R.T. SUBWAY 191st ST. ENTRANCE" remains -- leading down a flight of stairs (or a steep concrete ramp) to the three-block-long tunnel that links those of us on Broadway to the subway -- though not so well when the stairway on the left is closed for "repairs" that aren't happening. (Pay no attention to the "NO BICYCLE RIDING IN SUBWAY TUNNEL" sign, which was dismantled by the kids who use the tunnel as a bike speedway. But that's another story.)

by Ken

Maybe I'm getting carried away with this "why we hate gummint" business, when what this really is is a really annoying personal peeve. Still, there doesn't seem anyone else to bitch to, so count this as therapy, if nothing else.

What you see in the photo above is a view from Broadway of the entrance to a tunnel that cuts through the Fort George hill to the east of Broadway, providing us here in the valley that is Broadway with access to the IRT No. 1 train.

It's a tunnel of immense geopolitical importance. When the subway line that we now know as the No. 1 was first extended above 145th Street not long after the original subway line opened in 1907, it led to a development boom up top of the hill (which was -- and is -- connected to the subway below by elevators), along St. Nicholas Avenue and the blocks adjoining it. At that time, however, development remained fitful down here in the valley, because there really was no practical way to get from here to there. Until the tunnel was built, at which point the residential development of this stretch of Broadway opened up.

(In the early 1930s, when New York City built the IND subway line, including one that runs under the Fort Washington hill to the west. Tunnels through the side of the hill were built to provide access to both the 181st and 190th Street stations of what is now the A train.)

The tunnel really is a lifeline, but it has always been trouble, not least in the matter of maintenance, and in this regard not least because of a jurisdictional jumble. The tunnel is officially mapped as a street, and so whatever authority runs the subways -- at the moment it's the NYC Transit division of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority -- always responds to complainst by pointing out that it's the responsibility of the Dept. of Transportation, and DoT can be counted on to point a finger at the Dept. of Sanitation, and in the end, after each periodic bout of shouting and crying, somebody eventually does a little something.

Nevertheless, complaints about sanitation, lighting, drainage, and general safety are pretty much ongoing. Just a week or two ago DNAinfo New York's Lindsay Armstrong filed a report called "Upkeep of 191st St. 1 Train Passageway Blocked by Bureaucracy, Locals Say," which began:

WASHINGTON HEIGHTS — Locals are fed up with filthy, dark and dangerous conditions in an underground tunnel that connects the 191st Street 1 train subway station at St. Nicholas Avenue to Broadway — but say their complaints to city agencies only lead to bureaucratic finger-pointing.

BUT THAT'S NOT MY CURRENT PEEVE

Hey, I've seen the tunnel in much worse shape. I can see where parents might be uneasy about letting children walk through it unattended, but that seems to me built into the fact of there being such a tunnel. A tunnel user is quoted in the article saying, "There should really be a security person there. At the very least, it should be better lit and there should be a phone in case someone needs help."

However, such things have never been figured in any way in the tunnel's conception or functioning, and I can't begin to imagine what it would cost to provide this degree of safety. So no, that's not my peeve, which concerns access to the below-grade tunnel from street level at Broadway. As shown in the photo, there's a a flight of stairs on the left and a steep concrete ramp on the right. The ramp long predates the era of "accessibility," and is much too steep for most such uses.

For a month now, the stairway has been closed, with signs saying that it would be closed from something like 7/12 to 8/12 for necessary repairs. Okay, I can believe that repairs are needed. My problem is that they aren't happening." According to the signs -- which, by the way, don't carry any indication of a responsible agency -- the stairway should be just about ready for reopening. I don't think that's going to happen, though, because as far as I can see, not the least little lick of work has been done. All that has happened in the month that the stairs have been cordoned off to users is that trash has piled up on them.

Meanwhile that steep concrete ramp, which I'm sure isn't 45 degrees but sure looks like it when you're faced with going up or down it, makes access for a lot of people quite difficult, or even impossible.

In many situations in the city, when construction work is being done, permits are required to be in place, along with descriptions of the work done and a phone number for questions or complaints. As I mentioned, these signs don't even indicate who the responsible authority is.

Longtime New Yorkers are familiar with cases of public outdoor stairways around the city which have closed for repairs and remained closed not just for weeks but for months and even years. I imagine our little stairway is on somebody's list somewhere, behind a list of other stairways that haven't been repaired either -- and ours is probably judged as "low priority" since there is, after all, that concrete ramp to provide "access."

It will be interesting to see what happens once we pass the posted "completion" date on the signs by two or three months. My guess is that they'll just cover over that imaginary date.

So I ask, are we really sure that this isn't why people hate the gummint?

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For government officials, is anything more important than making the boss(es) look good?

by Ken

This story is left over from late last week, but I don't think that, in the time it has taken me to get around to it, it has lost its topicality. It got a certain amount of attention, but it needs more.

It's one of those periodic stark reminders of how the world so often doesn't run quite the way we naively think it does, or at least should. And it puts me in mind of a plot line last season on Blue Bloods involving Police Commissioner Reagan's daughter, Erin (Bridget Moynahan), who's an ADA in the Manhattan District Attorney's office.

Erin, coming from a police-saturated family (including not just a father but a grandfather who was the commissioner), is naturally a criminal-justice straight arrow, who sees her job as a prosecutor as serving the ends of justice and integrity and all those good things, until she finds herself suddenly being fast-tracked for Big Things in the office by a new superior, which is great until she's faced with compromising a case because, as the boss explains to her, nothing in her job is more important than making the boss look good.

It had a really uncomfortable ring of reality to it, and probably all of us who pay any attention at all to the workings of government have caught glimmerings of this mentality: that making superiors look good is not only a part of the job of many (most?) government officials, but sometimes almost seems as if it is the job. And it seems to me well to remember that, given the hierarchical nature of government structures, while most people have subordinates they can look to to make them look good, they also have superiors whom they have to make look good.

I think this item from the Washington Post's "In the Loop" column speaks quite well for itself. Since it was the lead item of the column, I'm guessing it was written by Loop-master Al Kamen, but the column was bylined "Al Kamen and Colby Itkowitz."

HHS official pens a caustic resignation letter

Frustrated by a federal government bureaucracy that was "profoundly dysfunctional" and that left him "offended as an American taxpayer," the director of a Department of Health and Human Services agency detailed his grievances in a pointed resignation letter.

For two years, David Wright ran the Office of Research Integrity, responsible for reviewing any misconduct in research projects. But Wright, in a letter obtained and published by ScienceInsider, said the role was "the very worst job I have ever had" the majority of the time.

Wright describes his inability to obtain approval to spend $35 to convert old cassette tapes to CDs. He tried to fill a vacancy in his office, but an HHS deputy secretary said there was a secret priority list and couldn't tell him where his open job fell.

Wright asserts in the letter, addressed to Assistant Secretary for Health Howard Koh, that government officials care more about their own advancement than the public good:

"Since I've been here I've been advised by my superiors that I had 'to make my bosses look good.' I've been admonished: 'Dave, you are a visionary leader but what we need here are team players.' Recently, I was advised that if I wanted to be happy in government service, I had to 'lower my expectations.' The one thing no one in OASH [Office of the Assistant Secretary of Health] leadership has said to me in two years is 'how can we help ORI better serve the research community?' Not once."

Wright alleges in the letter that Koh himself described his office as operating in an "intensely political environment."

No comment so far from OASH, HHS or the White House on Wright's takedown.

In an admittedly quick search, I found a number of outlets that had picked up the story, but I still didn't find any comment from OASH, HHS, or the White House.

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Is Robert "No Relation to Paul" Samuelson the reason we can't have any serious discussion of the functioning of government?

Would it help if "No Relation" occasionally read a book by someone peddling something other than the mindless platitudes of conventional economic wisdom? You know, I really don't think so.

by Ken

Okay, I've overdramatized. No, of course, Robert "No Relation to Paul" Samuelson isn't the reason we can't have any serious discussion of the functioning of government. He's much more a symptom than a cause of the problem(s). But if you don't think the problem is made worse by having a venue as august as the Washington Post offering license to pontificate on finance and economics to someone who knows, well, perhaps less about these subjects than anyone on the planet, then we disagree.

(It's true that the Post maintains a whole roster of people as inexpert on the subjects they're engaged to analyze. This is what I mean by "No Relation" being more a symptom than a cause of the problem. They've got a whole lot of symptons there.)

In my Wednesday post, "Step right up and vote for that 'transparent faker' Willard Inc. and the unknowable contents of his campaign Mystery Box," writing about the 13-installment symposium on the election published in the current (November 8) issue of the New York Review of Books (in that post I also included a laboriously assembled linked list of the 13 individual pieces), I ventured that "Jeffrey Sachs's piece may be the most important" of the 13 and formally reserved the right to return to it. Tonight we're returning back to it.

I characterized the subject tackled by Sachs, who's director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University (and author most recently of The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity), as --

the insanity, built into our political system, of operating the U.S. government, "the world’s largest enterprise, with $3.7 trillion in outlays, $2.5 trillion in revenues, and 2.1 million civilian workers," and "also the most complex, operating in every sector of the world’s largest economy, in every country of the world, and in every possible setting: markets, technology development, social programs, basic science, and much, much more" without any kind of planning beyond our day-to-day seat-of-the-pants partisan brinksmanship.

Sachs naturally explains his case way better than I can:

The US federal government is the world's largest enterprise, with $3.7 trillion in outlays, $2.5 trillion in revenues, and 2.1 million civilian workers. It is also the most complex, operating in every sector of the world's largest economy, in every country of the world, and in every possible setting: markets, technology development, social programs, basic science, and much, much more.

A behemoth of this size requires goals, plans, strategies, and budgets that look forward for years, even decades. This is especially true in our era, when unprecedented shifts in technology, demography, the world economy, and the physical environment require deep structural changes in our economic and social life. Old skills and sectors are obsolete. The energy, health, and education systems require large-scale overhauls. And yet we operate almost blindly, month by month, fiscal cliff by fiscal cliff, without any clear pathway ahead.

Imagine running the largest global Fortune 500 company, Royal Dutch Shell (at around one fifth the federal government revenues), without plans, strategies, and budgets. Some companies may try it but they don't last long. The federal government has the advantage of the Federal Reserve's printing press (which has been covering much of the deficit as the Federal Reserve buys up Treasury bills and bonds) as well as a constitutional monopoly on power. Still, these should be no excuse for running the government like a bumper-car derby, pushed and pulled by the random collisions of competing interests and factions.

To put it mildly, our system isn't set up terribly well to accomplish much of this sort of planning.

The game of politics has almost completely overshadowed the hard work of governing. Most of the time of President Obama and his congressional counterparts is taken up by campaigning and fund-raising, posturing and messaging, negotiating and horse-trading on short-term transactions, and occasionally debating real issues of importance, such as government's responsibility for supporting the poor and elderly. Yet none of this political activity substitutes for public management, which means the arduous task of defining goals, and then planning, strategizing, and budgeting toward them.

We've gotten so used to the breakdown of actual governing that the public is not aware of what's gone. The prevailing interpretation is that our government is broken because of political gridlock. There is some truth to that, of course. Yet one of the main reasons that it's gridlocked is that running the government is now viewed as nothing more than an extension of electoral politics, which in turn amounts to little more than a clash of competing interest groups that finance the politicians and try to keep their teams in power. If the government were approached differently, as a complex venture requiring serious planning, budgeting, and strategy, the process itself of governing would actually rescue the government from the current political trap that keeps it so dysfunctional.

"Some government agencies still work brilliantly," Sachs says, citing NASA and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). But they're "not the norm," he says.

The government is mostly led by appointees or elected officials with little technical knowledge, less management experience, and an expected job duration of a few years at most, often culminating in a lobbying position on K Street after leaving government. The alternation of power between the two political parties does almost nothing to compel better managerial performance.

As our problems have gotten more complex in a more global, technological, and environmentally unstable era, the two parties have adopted increasingly naive ideological positions to justify their chronic managerial failures.

"The Republicans' answer, of course, is that no management is needed: the market will do it."

Their increasingly absurd elixir of tax cuts and deregulation is supposed to solve any problem: poverty, pollution, unemployment, health care, climate change, and even national security. Fortunately, it looks like the public is not buying this nonsense.

And the Democrats?

Sadly, President Obama and the congressional Democrats have had their own mythology that the economic problems will generally sort themselves out without long-term plans and with short-term patches such as a bit more demand stimulus. Democrats rightly believe in government, but they give little evidence that they believe in public management. The stimulus legislation in 2009 was a $900 billion hodgepodge thrown together in a few weeks, on the mistaken and panicked grounds that even a few months of delay for planning would have meant a great depression. And even if fear itself could justify the rushed first stimulus package, little can justify the continuing resort to short-run measures—temporary tax cuts, temporary spending programs, repeated quantitative easing—that have done almost nothing to restructure the economy. Keynesian stimulus policies have become the substitute for strategy, planning, and implementation.

Sachs declares himself "an Obama supporter," but worries about the prospect of "four more years of improvisation." There would be, he suggests, "a narrow window in which Obama can lay out real and long-term options for the country, before those options are overwhelmed by the deepening economic, social, and environmental crises wracking the US and the world." And he asks us to "consider three pivotal issues that will likely determine our country's well-being for decades to come: energy, health care, and skills."

I'm sorry to skip over Sachs's investigation of the situation in each of these sectors. It's the heart of the matter, and you really owe it to yourself to read it for yourself. But we really can't get into that here. He proceeds to register horror at the expectations aroused by Willard Inc.'s mangling of these issues, to the extent that he even touched on them, in his campaign and in the first debate (you know, the one he "won"). But he's not all that confident that President Obama ("a very smart, honest, and ambitious leader") can be counted on to take charge in a productive way.

[S]uccess will require a very different second term. America's deepest problems are structural, not cyclical. We need to reinvigorate government for the twenty-first century, and to put away childish things, just as Obama once promised to do. Obama has faced childish opposition, it is true, but grown-up leadership that eschews gimmicks could recapture the support he needs to begin leading the nation away from its current morass.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A DOPE LIKE "NO RELATION"
BLUNDERS HIS WAY INTO REAL-WORLD ISSUES?

What "No Relation" has done, besides parlaying the accident of his last name (as I've written before, I believe he'd have no career if he were forced to announce himself as Robert "No Relation to Paul" Samuelson, since I'm quite persuaded that lots of people believe, to the contrary, that he's a "chip off the old block," the legendary economist) and a bunch of mindless "conventional wisdom" economic platitudes that he hasn't either the inclination or the tools to evaluate. Like, for example, the familiar right-wing shibboleth that "government can't create jobs." In "No Relation"'s cosmos, only rich white moguls who suck the life out of the economy can create jobs.

Economist Dean Baker, co-founder (with Mark Weisbrot) of the economics think tank Center for Economic and Policy Research, took him on the other day on the CEPR website.

Robert Samuelson Takes on NYT Editorial Board: Government Does Not Create Jobs!

Thursday, 25 October 2012 15:53

Robert Samuelson was sufficiently outraged by a NYT editorial claiming that the government creates jobs that for the first time in his 35 years as a columnist he felt the need to attack a newspaper editorial. Samuelson called the NYT view "the flat earth theory of job creation" in his column's headline. Since on its face it might be a bit hard to understand -- there are lots of people who do work for the government and get paychecks -- let's look more closely at what Samuelson has to say on the topic.

Samuelson tells readers:

"It's true that, legally, government does expand employment. But economically, it doesn't — and that's what people usually mean when they say 'government doesn't create jobs.'

What the Times omits is the money to support all these government jobs. It must come from somewhere — generally, taxes or loans (bonds, bills). But if the people whose money is taken via taxation or borrowing had kept the money, they would have spent most or all of it on something — and that spending would have boosted employment."

Okay, so we can at least agree that all of those people working as teachers, firefighters, forest rangers etc. do legally have jobs. That seems like progress. But let's look at the second part of the story:

"the money to support all these government jobs. It must come from somewhere."

Yes, that part is true also. But the last time I looked, the money to pay workers at Apple, General Electric, and Goldman Sachs also came from somewhere. Where's the difference?

Samuelson tells us that if the government didn't tax or borrow or the money to pay its workers (he makes a recession exception later in the piece) people "would have spent most or all of it on something -- and that spending would have boosted employment."

Again, this is true, but how does it differ from the private sector? If the new iPhone wasn't released last month people would have spent most or all of that money on something -- and that spending would have boosted employment. Does this mean that workers at Apple don't have real jobs either?

The confusion gets even greater when we start to consider the range of services that can be provided by either the public or private sector. In Robert Samuelson's world we know that public school teachers don't have real jobs, but what about teachers at private schools? Presumably the jobs held by professors at major public universities, like Berkeley or the University of Michigan are not real, but the jobs held at for-profit universities, like Phoenix or the Washington Post's own Kaplan Inc., are real.

How about health care? Currently the vast majority of workers in the health care industry are employed by the private sector. Presumably these are real jobs according to Samuelson. Suppose that we replace our private health care system with a national health care service like the one they have in the U.K. Would the jobs in the health care no longer be real?

If our new system was as efficient as the one in the U.K. we would not even need any additional tax revenue to pay for it. According to the OECD, the whole expense of the U.K., system, $3,433 per person in 2010, is less than the $3,967 per person (in 2010) that the government already pays for health care. So by replacing a less efficient private system with a more efficient public system will the government have eliminated all the real jobs in the health care sector?

It keeps getting harder and harder to figure out what is supposed to be a real job in Robert Samuelson's world. If the government requires drivers to buy auto insurance, do the people at the auto insurance companies have real jobs? Suppose the insurance companies were run by the government? Suppose that they were private but drivers paid for most of their insurance via a tax on gasoline? (You can have differential rates so that dangerous drivers pay an additional premium.)

How about when the government finances an industry by granting it a state sanctioned monopoly as when it grants patent monopolies on prescription drugs. Do the researchers at Pfizer have real jobs even though their income is dependent on a government granted monopoly? Would they have real jobs if the government instead paid for research out of tax revenue and let drugs be sold in a free market, saving consumers $250 billion a year?

Robert Samuelson obviously thinks there is something very important about the difference between working for the government and working in the private sector. Unfortunately his column does not do a very good job of explaining why. It would probably be best if he waited another 35 years before again attacking a newspaper editorial.

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Re. the "'you don't build that' fight," Richard Cohen says: "The president has nothing but truth and history on his side"

"Romney's embrace of tea-party thinking is just ideological womanizing. (He won't call in the morning.)"

-- Richard Cohen, in his latest WaPo column,
"The gap in the ‘you didn't build that' fight"

by Ken

I've just done a quick to check on stuff I've written about Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, and I've turned up such nooks of memory as "It feels creepy agreeing with Richard Cohen, but I agree with him about 'The missing Obama'," from November 2009, but also the less snarky October 2010 "Richard Cohen gets it seriously right about right-wing hate speech."

Now I'm nonplussed to say that his latest column seems to me both seriously right and seriously needed, in an election season that's going to be dominated by nonsensical lies from the Rampaging Right. (Links onsite.)

The gap in the ‘you didn't build that' fight

By Richard Cohen

My boyhood friend Jack became a doctor -- and a conservative. He had gone to public schools, attended college with the help of a government scholarship, went to medical school on the Army's dime, and learned his specialty in military hospitals. He insisted that the government had done nothing for him. In that way, he is both the soul and the wit of the Republican Party.

It was in rebuttal to the Jacks of this world that Barack Obama earlier this month updated John Donne's "No man is an island" by knocking the idea that individual success is always the product of individual qualities, such as industriousness: "Let me tell you something: There are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help."

This observation, so obvious you'd think it didn't have to be stated, was then followed by what became a gotcha sound bite: "If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet."

The entire GOP, including its claque in the press, pounced. You would have thought Obama had just belittled self-discipline and other virtues and quoted from "Das Kapital" or, even worse, a ditty by Pete Seeger. To his critics, Obama's version of It Takes a Village was further proof of his commie creds, possibly Islamic as well. Mitt Romney found the line totally -- and I mean like totally -- "disconcerting." As to the charge that Obama was being quoted out of context, Romney declared that "the context is worse than the quote." OMG!

Of course, the president has nothing but truth and history on his side. Every schoolchild in my neck of the woods learned that the Erie Canal, which made New York truly the Empire State, was government-funded -- $7 million appropriated at the insistence of Gov. DeWitt Clinton. The railroads did not come from nowhere and neither did the ports or the highway system. Government played a role. Government has always played a role. If it just got out of the way, the mindless mantra of the tea party's heavy thinkers, we would all be in deep trouble.

Across the mighty ocean, the Economist magazine has taken note of this debate over the role of government and pronounced it healthy in principle but pathetic in execution. Both the right and the left have trivialized this important issue, but conservatives have gone from simplistic formulas to bravely idiotic ones. "American conservatism has grown so angry that it has become a parody of its former self," the magazine says. "Tax cuts are always right (even if they inflate the deficit); government activism is always wrong (even if stimulus helped avert a depression). And the right's hypocrisy when it comes to spending on conservative projects (prisons, the armed forces, subsidies to big business) is breathtaking. George W. Bush presided over a huge growth in government." The Economist, a right-of-center publication, has it nailed.

Romney's embrace of tea-party thinking is just ideological womanizing. (He won't call in the morning.) While in Israel, he mentioned that one of the books that influenced his thinking on foreign affairs is "Start-Up Nation" by Dan Senor and Saul Singer. (Senor is one of Romney's important foreign policy advisers.) It is a good book, mentioned favorably by me in a recent column, and it accounts for why little Israel has become such a high-tech giant. As always, there is no single answer. Large-scale immigration (mostly from Russia) contributed, and certainly the conversion from an essentially socialist economy to a capitalist one has made a huge difference.

But so has the government -- in particular, the army with its own culture of innovation and intellectually elite units devoted to high-tech training and warfare. Graduates of these programs, having satisfied their military obligation, populate Israel's high-tech sector -- and, to Israel's chagrin, America's as well. Israel is the start-up nation because the government helped start it up.

As the Economist notes, this is not a trivial debate. The refusal of the contemporary Republican Party to acknowledge a role for government is linked to an illogical determination never to raise taxes. Obama may be too liberal for some, but the alternative that Romney offers by parroting the conservative GOP line is simply not credible. Prosperity may not always take a village, but it sure doesn't take the village idiot.

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Can The Presidential Campaign Really Turn Into A Debate On The Role Of Government? Let's Hope So

The Daily Show
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People complain that the presidential debate isn't issue-oriented enough and that Obama and Romney are sniping at each other over peripheral matters like Romney's taxes, his shady offshore dealings and his role at Bain. But there is a full-fledged debate raging between the two parties on the role of government in society. And it goes beyond the dire warnings from Republican former-Congressman Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) this week that the extremists who have captured the House GOP are attempting to drive the whole nation off a cliff in the name of a destructive "ideological fantasy," puked out by right-wing dream girl Ayn Rand.

This week, it seemed to all come down to government's role in helping entrepreneurs build their businesses-- through providing security, building roads, educating a workforce to helping with basic research, loans, contracts and subsidies. But, let's be real for a minute: Romney's purposelessly misleading new "Built by Us" website is housed where? On the government-created Internet.

Let's take a step back, though, forget about the Romney campaign's flooding the media with blatant lies about what President Obama said about government's role is in the economy. Instead, let's look at the generational lies conservatives have been making, for the most part hypocritically, about the role of government. And we'll call on our old friend Joshua Holland and his book, The Fifteen Biggest Lies About The Economy, once again. At the end of the 6th chapter, "Republicans Have Never Cared About The Deficit," he asks us to have a closer look: "How More Government (of One Sort) Brings Greater Individual Liberty and Personal Choice." This isn't the kind of thing you'll be hearing from the Romney campaign-- or, for that matter, from any of the crazed and deranged Ayn Rand acolytes running the GOP these days.

In April 2010, the Pew Trust released a poll that got pundits’ tongues wagging. “By almost every conceivable measure Americans are less positive and more critical of government these days,” Pew told us.

According to the polling firm, Americans’ distrust of government had increased dramatically since 1997. “Over this period, a larger minority of the public also has come to view the federal government as a major threat to their personal freedom... 30% feel this way, up from 18% in a 2003 ABC News/Washington Post survey.”

In part, Pew’s findings were a sign of the success of the “conservative noise machine.” They also touched on an important and largely unexamined assumption in our political discourse: that when “government” grows, our individual freedoms and personal choices decline by definition.

To see how facile that equation really is, you have to disaggregate what we mean by “government.” You can divide it up, roughly, into a “security state,” a “social welfare state,” a “public infrastructure state,” and a “regulatory state” (there’s obviously some overlap with such broad categories). The security state can and does add to our personal freedom. If there’s no competent police force and you’re afraid to leave your house for fear of assault by marauding bandits, then you’re not really free.

Having said that, I certainly agree that the expansion of the security state-- criminalizing more behavior, increasing law enforcement’s surveillance of the public, and locking up more people-- is a real threat to our personal liberties. A security state is necessary, but there’s a lot of potential for abuse, and people are right to be wary of its growth.

The regulatory state is obviously subject to fierce debate. Conservatives are right when they point out that it has the capacity to overreach. But in theory, at least, the regulatory state constrains the “freedom” to harm others, which is an entirely good thing. Most of us don’t want companies to have the “liberty” to sell us defective products, tempt us with grossly misleading advertising, hire children to toil away in sweatshops, or spew toxic sludge into our air.

But let’s turn to the largely unexamined belief that more government leads to less personal liberty in relation to its other tasks. Maintaining our public spaces and infrastructure enhances our personal freedoms. Tomorrow, I can choose to go to a national park or a public beach that I know is safe and clean. I don’t drive a car, but thanks to our government-funded public transportation system, I can get around freely. I have a choice of paying the top rate to catch a cab-- a convenient private sector transaction-- but if I can’t afford that, I’m still able to take the (government-subsidized) bus. Having reliable delivery of fresh water to my home liberates me from the task of trudging to a river to fetch it by bucket, as people do in many places. It’d be hard to name something that added more to Americans’ individual freedom and choice than the establishment of the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System, a massive socialist undertaking by the standards of today’s conservatives.

And now we come to the social welfare state. Although one obviously can’t opt out of financing one’s share for it-- you have to pay your taxes-- it provides us with an enormous amount of individual liberty and freedom of choice. And I’m not just talking about the “freedom from want” that is common to Marxist thinking. Consider a few examples.

In the United States, it’s not uncommon for people to stay in dead-end jobs or crappy relationships for fear of losing their health coverage. In Canada or France or any other industrialized country, a citizen’s health care is his or her own. People in those countries have the very real freedom to quit that lousy job or dump that asshole without worrying about losing their coverage. In this example, Americans are slaves not to an overarching state, but to the way our private insurance system works.

Or consider the millions of people who want to go to college but can’t afford to pick up the tab for tuition and living expenses. Many still have the choice to get a higher education through federal education grants and subsidized student loans. That’s a personal choice that the private sector has no incentive to provide to citizens.

There are also programs that help people start new businesses or buy homes that they couldn’t otherwise afford. There are programs that offer them new job skills. Even if you’re dirt poor, you can still get into a program to help you ick a drug addiction. You can go to the library and read a book or search job listings on the Internet. All of these things give people real choices they wouldn’t otherwise have.

I could go on and on. The young researcher working on an NIH-funded science project, the farmer who has the choice to maintain his or her family’s tradition only because of agricultural subsidies, or the actor performing in an off-off-Broadway play that couldn’t be produced without a grant from the
National Endowment for the Arts-- all of these are living examples of people who have the freedom to pursue options that would be closed to them without Big Government “intervention” in the economy.

When progressives advocate for better public transportation, they’re trying to increase ordinary Americans’ freedom of movement. When they promote the wonders of municipal WiFi, they’re talking about the freedom to work anywhere in a city, anytime you want, without having to suck down a cup of stale Starbucks coffee.

Once again, governance all comes down to a question of priorities. And, in rough figures, we spend about a fifth of our federal budget on the social welfare state, around 5 percent on the regulatory state, and about 10 percent on the infrastructure state.

And the security state? It sucks up around two-thirds of the national budget.

Careful What You Eat, Drink Or Breathe-- And It'll Get Worse When The New "Caveat Emptor" Congress Starts Asserting Itself

Not many people want big government interfering in their lives-- reading their e-mails, telling them who they can or can't love, forcing them to subsidize social parasites like the banksters who chronically gambled, lost and demanded-- successfully-- to be reimbursed by the taxpayers. However, in a modern, complex, impersonal society, big government serves as a countervailing force for society in general against the special interests of powerful private, selfish corporations and individuals.

In Chicago this week, for example, around 100 people got sick after eating a dessert from Rolf's Patisserie in suburban Lincolnwood-- some at company events and catered parties, others at restaurants or private holiday parties. The desserts were contaminated with staphylococcus aureus bacteria, a staph infection that causes nausea, vomiting, stomach cramps and diarrhea. Normally the contamination is caused by unhygienic procedures and after ingesting the toxins people can get ill in as little as 30 minutes, although more typically the infection manifests itself in between an hour and six hours. Usually a day or two later the victim is back to normal.

The Illinois Department of Public Health issued a warning to consumers and closed down the bakery, and the company is "voluntarily" recalling all products made after November 1, 2010, while retailers and restaurants were asked to remove and discard the recalled desserts from their shelves.

Government needs to protect consumers by making sure companies that prepare food for the public follow the procedures that protect against foodborne illnesses. This is how staphylococcus aureus infection is prevented:

1. Wash hands and under fingernails vigorously with soap and water before handling and preparing food.

2. Do not prepare food if you have a nose or eye infection.

3. Do not prepare or serve food for others if you have wounds or skin infections on your hands or wrists.

4. Keep kitchens and food-serving areas clean and sanitized.

5. If food is to be stored longer than two hours, keep hot foods hot (over 140°F) and cold foods cold (40°F or under).

6. Store cooked food in a wide, shallow container and refrigerate as soon as possible.

I'm in Marrakech, Morocco, right now. I started coming here in 1969, and I've been here at least a dozen times since. One of the rights-of-passage for a Morocco traveler is to eat in a food stall in the main square, the Jemaa el Fna, even if you don't want to go all the way and sit down for some goat's-head soup.

These days it isn't only hippies and jet-setters visiting Marrakech. Thousands and thousands of middle- and working-class Europeans flood the city-- and the Jemma-- every day.And even Morocco now has food inspectors trying to keep tourists from getting sick by pressuring the food stalls to use hygienic procedures. Since all dishes are washed in buckets of turgid water, I doubt it works too well. But Morocco is very dependent on its burgeoning tourist industry, and if tourists routinely get sick, it would badly impact the economy.

Although conservatives and "free market" ideologues have always fought against government regulation of business-- claiming businesses that make people ill, or even kill them, will be driven out of business-- most modern societies have recognized that conservatives (as usual) were on the wrong side of history.

Let's go back to Rolf's Patisserie in Lakewood for a moment. Never been there, never heard of the joint or even of the Cook County community, right? OK, what about Whole Foods? Whole Foods, a commercialized quasi-version of a national chain of health food stores, sells Rolf's infected products in 23 states. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced a national recall of Rolf's gingerbread houses on Friday.

All desserts made by Rolf's, which are sold through retail outlets, wholesalers and online, are being recalled after being connected to several outbreaks of staphylococcus aureus food poisoning... A total of 100 cases have been reported from four separate events in November and December, most of them in Illinois and Wisconsin.

The FDA recommends disposing of the desserts in a sealed container so people and animals cannot access or eat them. The company is working with retailers and restaurants to remove and discard the contaminated products from shelves.

Yep, online too. And government? Protecting the public, whether from avaricious banksters or careless food processors-- YES; interfering with individual rights-- NEVER! Today's NY Times has a profile of unlikely congressional victor Joe Walsh from the 'burbs north of Chicago (north of Rolf's Patisserie), a teabagger who vanquished corrupt New Dem Melissa Bean. He promptly turned down congressional healthcare, pension and retirement packages. Honorable, given that his priorities are to repeal healthcare for Americans and gut Social Security. He has a very limited view of government's role: “Protect my borders, protect Americans on their streets, keep our highways paved and our environment clean, defend us overseas, and help those who can’t help themselves." That's it. “I’m going to D.C. absolutely prepared to lose in two years," he declared.