Unit 32

Mississippi State Penitentiary (also known as Parchman Farm) is located upstate –northwest in the Mississippi Delta region – and is the only maximum security prison in the state for men. Currently housing just under 5,000 inmates, it also houses the only death house in the state. Built in 1901, it is Mississippi’s oldest prison facility, and much of the housing on this 18 thousand acre working prison farm was horribly outmoded and worn, so a new on-site facility was built in the 1970s.

Parchman was also the prison where Mississippi was fond of confining the Freedom Riders (163 civil rights activists) in the early 60s. So it is perhaps unexpected that corrections officials in “backwater” Mississippi were among the first to challenge the widely-held belief that all inmates deemed violent and dangerous should live their sentences – and hence often their entire lives – in 23-hour-a-day lockdown isolation. In some states, just being a clear member of a violent gang earns such isolation.

Before it was closed in 2010, special housing Unit 32 served as Parchman’s isolation section, 34.4 acres of hell on earth. A “modern facility” (built in 1990), it was the prison’s “supermax,” designed to hold a thousand inmates, including death row prisoners. Life there was both miserable and still amazingly dangerous. Men would lie motionless on searingly hot summer days on their concrete slab beds. “Kept in solitary confinement for up to 23 hours each day, allowed out only in shackles and escorted by guards, they were restless and angry — made more so by the excrement-smeared walls, the insects, the filthy food trays and the mentally ill inmates who screamed in the night, conditions that a judge had already ruled unacceptable… So it was not really surprising when violence erupted in 2007: an inmate stabbed to death with a homemade spear that May; in June, a suicide; in July, another stabbing; in August, a prisoner killed by a member of a rival gang.” New York Times, March 10^th.

What happened next would seem to be out of kilter for a facility with an old-world reputation of insensitive incarceration. Instead of tightening security, prison officials decided that perhaps the excessive isolation and the bitterness and anger engendered in these most cloistered inmates were the problem. “What was surprising was what happened next… They allowed most inmates out of their cells for hours each day. They built a basketball court and a group dining area. They put rehabilitation programs in place and let prisoners work their way to greater privileges.

“In response, the inmates became better behaved. Violence went down. The number of prisoners in isolation dropped to about 300 from more than 1,000. So many inmates were moved into the general population of other prisons that Unit 32 was closed in 2010, saving the state more than $5 million.” NY Times.

In a country that represents 5% of the world’s population yet houses 25% of all prisoners on earth – half for drug-related crimes (and half of those for possession or dealing) – the “same old-same old” doesn’t cut it anymore. The United States doesn’t have the money anymore to keep solving its problems by slamming miscreants in prison under some of the longest sentences on earth, believing that our systems will best serve society. For those prisoners who do get released, they are better-trained at criminality, pretty much relegated to the bottom end of the workforce (which in today’s impaired economy means unemployment) and often bitterly angry at the society that put them “inside.” Even the tattoos that helped them survive prison label them as workforce undesirables when they get out.

Some states are reaching the same conclusion about the value of isolating prisoners: “Colorado, Illinois, Maine, Ohio and Washington State have been taking steps to reduce the number of prisoners in long-term isolation; others have plans to do so. On [March 9^th], officials in California announced a plan for policy changes that could result in fewer prisoners being sent to the state’s three super-maximum-security units.” NY Times. But we need a ground up re-think of our propensity to incarcerate, whether our drug laws help or actually hurt our nation by keeping prices high enough to encourage violent criminal enterprise (there’s certainly no shortage of narcotics on the street; we don’t seemed to have learned the lesson of Prohibition), and whether our sentencing and prison methods really make sense anymore.

I’m Peter Dekom, and that massive “tough on crime” slogan of a few years ago seems to have resulted in a “tough on society” result.

Suture Yourself… and Save

A recent government study (released March 7^th) – the Centers for Disease Control's National Health Interview Survey – polled 52,000 Americans on the issue of healthcare affordability, and what they discovered was a profoundly dangerous trend. While in 2010, only one in five Americans was struggling to pay pent up medical bills, that number hit a staggering one in three just one year later. Interesting since the largest impact of the Obama’s healthcare legislation, so viciously attacked by the pro-business GOP, was to create billions of new mandatory new customers for the most expensive (aggregate and on average… by far!!!) private healthcare insurance system on earth without any competitive pressures from a bargain basement government alternative (go big bad insurance companies!) while making sure our pharmaceutical companies face zero competition from reasonably priced alternatives from Canada or Europe. And while clearly America does have the best doctors, hospitals and facilities on earth, unfortunately for most of us, we get what we can afford, and that often results in unparalleled access to a most mediocre standard of medical care.

In short, with the new legislation, we got a big mandate with very little in the way of genuine cost control. Oh sure, the statute paid lip service to restraining massive administrative costs (which hit 31% of the entire American medical cost budget), but since medical costs and health insurance amped up another 9% last year, it would seem that neither Republicans nor Democrats really got what they wanted. But you can bet that this administration isn’t going to do anything, and face the do-nothing road-block House of Representatives, unless they win in November… and one way or another depending on who is president and the composition of the new Congress… we’ll either see a massive repeal effort or half-assed tweaking with very little in the way of logic… unless you are a member of the vast pool of highly successful lobbyists from the medical insurance/pharma world.

PBS (March 8^th) summarizes the results of that CDC report: “In 2011, one in three Americans were part of a family that would call their medical bills a ‘financial burden.’ One in five struggled to pay those bills each month and one in 10 admitted they wouldn't be able to pay them at all. Perhaps just as startling: even for those who have private insurance, 26.7 percent needed to stagger their medical payments because they couldn't afford to pay off those bills entirely at the end of the month… After speaking with 52,000 people between January and June of 2011, the researchers also concluded that the chances of having trouble paying medical bills decreased with age. According to Robin Cohen, a statistician and principal author of the report, children 17 years old and younger were more than three times as likely as adults aged 75 and over to be in families having problems paying medical bills in the past year.”

And Congress is continuing to hack away at Medicare coverage… ostensibly because we simply can’t afford the safety net anymore by reason of our ballooning deficit… but they’d rather let old folks suffer than truly address the cuts in defense spending – why do we really need to spend more than the next ten nations combined spend on their military budget – from a bloated budget dictated by a powerful coterie of defense contractors who make it plain that post-military-career-lucrative jobs await flag officers who play ball during their final years of active service.

With labor trends moving away from traditional employment toward contract workers and outsourcing, American workers are increasingly left to fend for themselves when it comes to health insurance. They are self-employed and have to write those monthly checks (or go without)… there’s no union or company plan that makes such costs fade away. It’s a question of priorities, of course, but picture yourself waking up in a hospital – after an unexpected traumatic event – immobile with tubes in your nose, bandages everywhere, an IV bag over your head and a nasty monitor telling you all is not well with your world. Then picture that in addition to this horrible situation, when you get out of the hospital, if you don’t have enough coverage or any coverage at all, your next trauma awaits: bankruptcy.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I am wondering when this Christian concern for your fellow man is scheduled to begin, because I’d like to mark it in my calendar.

Capital Punishment

No, not that kind! We’re not talking about the death sentence for various crimes. This one is about money, pure and simple, and it’s about how a legal and economic system that has strangled (hmmmm?) small businesses with complexity and expense that currently requires very high costs to raise risk capital at time when banks simply will not lend to early stage entrepreneurs or small businesses. Credit is simply there for the big boys, including the mega-financial institutions that got us into this mess in the first place. For small business, these have been particularly harsh times.

How important is small business to the United States? The government’s Small Business Administration provides these facts on the FAQ (citing Bureau of Labor Statistics data) page: “Of 120.6 million non-farm private sector workers in 2007, small firms employed 59.9 million and large firms employed 60.7 million. About half of small firm employment is in second-stage companies (10-99 employees), and half is in firms that are 15 years or older. Small firms’ share of employment in rural areas is slightly higher than in urban areas; their share of part-time workers (22 percent) is similar to large firms’ share (19 percent). Small firms’ employment share remains steady since some small firms grow into large firms over time… Small firms accounted for 65 percent (or 9.8 million) of the 15 million net new jobs created between 1993 and 2009.”

After the 1929 “Black Tuesday” stock market crash, the federal government passed the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, basically reactions to the seeming fraud-laced capital markets of the 1920s, imposing standards on public and private offerings and requiring government clearance for access to the general public and trading in the secondary markets. State governments serially followed suit (since most offerings require compliance with federal laws and each state in which a solicitation is made), some with laws even more strict that those imposed by the feds. More statutes followed, and the federal Securities and Exchange Commission (and the state equivalents) promulgated a litany of policies, procedures and regulations on folks seeking passive investors.

Most of these laws focused on full disclosure and making sure the investors were actually able to afford the investment. But as the legal field got complex, this maze of regulation that applied to most levels of fund-raising created a hurdle that few on the small size could afford. Complex business plans with risk-driven projections prepared by expensive experts joined some of the most expensive legal talent in the country needed to create the necessary compliance documents, and where needed, to complete the registration procedures. Even the simplest transactions required tens of thousands of dollars of expertise, and significant raises started with six figure up-front costs and more often than not, hit the seven figure mark. For most small companies, until they could afford compliance, this often meant borrowing from family and friends, mortgaging the house (good luck in this market) or simply violating the law.

While the risks for smaller offerings may be low – but only because they often fall below the radar – the fact is that violating these securities laws can be a very serious felony (state and federal), may create debts that cannot be discharged even in a bankruptcy, and create so many civil liabilities that it would take pages and pages just to list the risks. Most folks don’t even know this and get angry when they are told how the law works, clearly giving the big companies and already-rich segment of our population (who can afford the compliance costs) access to capital that simply is not affordable for the rest. The playing field is anything but level.

That small firms account for so many jobs and so much job growth suggests that these barriers are no longer viable. Enter “crowdfunding.” While donations and sponsorships aren’t generally “securities,” much of the rest of this practice is currently on the wrong end of legal regulation. As Deborah Cohen writes for the March 2012 ABA Journal: “Websites such as Kickstarter and IndieGoGo—where filmmakers, food truck owners and more tell their stories in hopes of raising funds—have popularized the process. And President Barack Obama even endorsed crowdfunding in his September jobs speech last year… The largely Internet-based fundraising practice allows individuals, small businesses and others to raise capital from a variety of sources, including donations, sponsorships and the sale of products or services, with no expected financial return such as equity.

“As the funding form has grown in popularity, a diverse group of backers ranging from grassroots community activists to old-line conservatives has voiced support to allow crowdfunding to expand beyond current models. Securities and Exchange Commission and state regulations currently impose certain registration requirements on investors and the recipients of their financial largesse when securities are to be exchanged.

“But several bills now wending their way through Congress would eliminate some of those regulatory hurdles and open up investment from a broader range of backers… One of those bills, the Entrepreneur Access to Capital Act, HR 2930, eliminates an SEC registration requirement for small companies using crowdfunding to raise low levels of investment, a barrier proponents say inhibits many start-ups from getting out of the gate. Companies could raise up to $2 million annually from investors pledging no more than $10,000, or 10 percent of their annual income… The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., says the legislation ‘would modernize outdated securities regulations in order to free up capital for small businesses and entrepreneurs.’… A bill introduced by Republican Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown would allow for even lower investment thresholds.”

Critics post concerns about the risks of fraudulent practices and exaggerated claims by entrepreneurs who just can’t help but extol the virtues of their offerings without believing in the risks. While indeed these are risks, at the levels contemplated in these bills, the balance of benefits to a nation desperate for job-creation against the highly limited losses any individual can face in the proposed levels of investment provide a clear path for both Republicans and Democrats to embrace this much-needed change. If anything, the proposals don’t go nearly far enough.

I’m Peter Dekom, and there are points in our legal system where overregulation actually does impair growth with little or no benefit to the country as a whole.

Ever Get that Sinking Feeling?

For many island-dwellers in the South Pacific, clustered on tiny islands and narrow atolls, global warming is a catastrophe in the making… of titanic proportions. The uptick in nasty typhoons, also attributed to rising global temperatures, only accelerates the process. With melting glaciers and polar ice caps, the reality of rising oceans has a particularly harsh impact on these low-lying oceanic outposts where there is no higher ground to escape to. Off the Australian coast, for example, there are six little islands that have gone from bad to worse: “Part of Australia is being regularly inundated yet the people affected feel like they're being ignored... For nearly a decade communities in the Torres Strait have been asking the [Australian] Federal Government for funding to build seawalls... Climate projections suggest six low-lying islands will only get worse and the people fear that secret plans are being made to abandon the islands.” ABC.net.au (Australian Broadcasting), March 2^nd.

The Maldives gets slammed really hard when tsunamis roll across their archipelago, such as the disaster that struck in December of 2004: “[A]t least 82 people were killed and 26 unaccounted for from a population just over 270,000, according to the Maldives Disaster Management Center. Sixty-nine islands were completely flooded and a further 30 islands half flooded.” From a 2008 CNN report. According to that report, there is a “very likely possibility that the Maldives will sink under water if the current pace of climate change keeps raising sea levels... The Maldives is an archipelago of almost 1,200 coral islands located south-southwest of India. Most of the islands lie just 4.9 feet (1.5 meters) above sea level.”

As rising saltwater tides decimated the fertile land in Papua New Guinea’s Carteret Islands, thousands of locals were relocated to nearby Bougainville Island. A similar fate awaits islanders off the coast of New Zealand as well as the Solomon Islands. There are other ways that some islanders are preparing for what may be unavoidable. Take for example the leaders of the tiny Pacific island equatorial nation of Kiribati (near the International Date Line; noted in red on the map above), who are watching the seas rise and feeling the impact of increasingly ferocious storms with more than a little apprehension.

What’s their solution? “Kiribati President Anote Tong told The Associated Press on [March 9^th] that his Cabinet this week endorsed a plan to buy nearly 6,000 acres on Fiji's main island, Viti Levu. He said the fertile land, being sold by a church group for about $9.6 million, could be insurance for Kiribati’s entire population of 103,000, though he hopes it will never be necessary for everyone to leave.” Huffington Post, March 9^th. This option is definitely less expensive than building sea walls, but the pressure to move inland is nothing new to these islanders: “Tong said some villages have already moved and there have been increasing instances of sea water contaminating the island's underground fresh water, which remains vital for trees and crops ...

“Fiji, home to about 850,000 people, is about 1,400 miles south of Kiribati. But just what people there think about potentially providing a home for thousands of their neighbors remains unclear. Tong said he's awaiting full parliamentary approval for the land purchase, which he expects in April, before discussing the plan formally with Fijian officials.” Huffington Post. And we think we’ve got problems!

Oh, we do, actually. “[N]ew research [a study on sea level rise led by Dr. Strauss for the nonprofit organization Climate Central published on March 14^th by the journal Environmental Research Letters] calculates the size of the [U.S.] population living within one meter, or 3.3 feet, of the mean high tide level, as estimated in a new tidal data set from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In the lower 48 states, that zone contains 3.7 million people today, the papers estimate, a figure exceeding 1 percent of the nation’s population… Under current coastal policies, the population and the value of property at risk in that zone are expected to continue rising… The land below the 3.3-foot line is expected to be permanently inundated someday, possibly as early as 2100, except in places where extensive fortifications are built to hold back the sea.” New York Times, March 14^th. It seems that the federal government is considering excluding such properties from coverage under available national flood insurance policies, so taxpayers don’t subsidize expensive coastal properties that the fed believe inevitably will be inundated.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it is probably too late to stop the damage from rising seas, but in a world where the industrialized nations made fortunes from fossil-fuel-driven economies, it is interesting as who is picking up the dollar tab for the damage.

Exactly Who is the Opposition in Syria?

Syria is obviously in the middle of a civil war. It’s the “opposition” who all want the Assad family gone from power and a new __________ government to take its place… versus the Assad regime itself. Russia is still selling arms to the old guard, and both China and Russia have rendered the United Nations helpless in forcing an end to the brutal violence that Bashar Assad (pictured in his younger days above) seems to need to perpetrate against his own people. But notice the blank in the first sentence. Right now, the unifying feature of the “opposition” is a desire for regime change. But what kind of regime change? What kind of government would step in if Assad truly were deposed? Would it be the Islamists or the secularists or would prevail… or someone or something else?

“There’s the Islamists versus the secularists; there’s the young versus the old; there's the inside leaders who are on the streets versus the SNC [Syrian National Council] type leaders ... who have been out of the country for a long time and who are very savvy at talking to the West,” notes Joshua Landis, an associate professor and director of the Centre for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma in the CBC News Website for February 1st (Canadian Broadcasting). The Alawi/Shiite minority (note that much of the senior military leadership as well as the Assad family itself is Alawi) also faces hostility from the Sunni majority, and yet somehow the anti-Assad factions within this Shiite-leaning element needs to be joined with the other protesting citizenry. But there are many factions struggling for attention.

“Of the 14 or more opposition groups in the country, only two, the Syrian National Council (SNC) and the National Coordination Committee (NCC), are being considered by the West as feasible groups to work with to bring about democratic change inside Syria. The SNC and NCC were created specifically to represent the protesters and the political opposition movement, while the other groups have their own long-held agendas or have too few members to be practical alternatives.” Stratfor Global Intelligence, February 20^th.

Obviously, the Western world wants to deal with the SNC and the NCC, which organizations entered into a joint pro-democracy agreement in late December, but again, this union hardly addresses the reality of the factious local groups fighting for their lives within Syria itself. As many in the West have observed, the SNC/NCC still need a broader power base to be effective. Off-shore forces need to meld with those on the ground within Syria struggling every day against brutal armed forces firing bullets, artillery and tank shells at civilian targets.

Easy to say, of course, but in a country where the rebellion seems to explode in local pockets and where the incumbents are going everything in their power to keep the various factions isolated from each other, pursuing unity may be a difficult goal at this point. Homs has been the city where much of the action has been focused, but rebellion is afoot all across the land. Unfortunately, that resistance often has been driven by small local factions, bodies of defectors from the Syrian army and smaller group with differing agendas. As with the fall of Tunisia, getting all these diverse groups to agree on any form of new government is a gargantuan task, assuming that the Assad regime eventually falls. The once militant Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, oddly enough, has surfaced as a primary element in the SNC, and small bands of Christians and Kurds have also folded in… all seeking Western aid in toppling Assad.

To the Western world, watching Egyptian parliamentary elections place a very clear Islamic fundamentalist majority in place, the thought of another unpredictable Syrian militancy with anti-Western feelings (with probable overt hostility towards Israel) is making some leaders squirm with discomfort. To the locals, making sure that the West doesn’t have that much of an influence in the replacement government is an equally strong concern, particularly among those with strong leanings for a Muslim/Sharia style structure.

The growing body of defectors, which some number at as many as 40,000 soldiers, has blended into a fairly uncoordinated set of military units generally described as the Free Syrian Army: “The FSA is a loosely organized militant group that reportedly enjoys some support from Syrian protesters. It was formed July 29, 2011, and consists of mostly Sunni army defectors and armed civilians. The FSA began to claim military-style operations against the Syrian regime in early October 2011. The group's primary goals are to topple the regime, protect protesters and undermine the Syrian army. Its leadership, including commander Col. Riad al-Asaad, is reportedly located in various Turkish refugee camps near the border with Syria. Though the FSA claims to have obtained its weapons inside of Syria, either from defected soldiers or through the domestic black market, it also relies on weapons and supplies smuggled from neighboring countries.” Stratfor.

In the end, we have no real clue how this drama will unfold and if there is a regime change, what that means for the world in general, the Syrian people or the Western perspective. Change is coming… and it will be what it will be.

I’m Peter Dekom, and there is no clear path to a free and democratic Syria.

Masters of the Universe

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. Rolling Stone, April 5, 2010

Over twelve years, Greg Smith worked his way up the Goldman Sachs hierarchy from lowly analyst to executive director of the London-based derivatives trading group for the firm. On Wednesday, March 14^th, he went out with a bang. He penned an Op-Ed piece, his letter of resignation from Goldman, in the New York Times. What his letter said (and the salient parts are excerpted below) is an indictment not only of Goldman, but of the “anything-for-money” culture that defines Wall Street today, an industry where the big boyz and girlz don’t get paid unless they move product – sell, sell, sell, without apparent concern for either the social consequences of their actions or even the fact that their efforts place their interests above those of their clients.

After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it… To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money… The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for.

It might sound surprising to a skeptical public, but culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs’s success. It revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients. The culture was the secret sauce that made this place great and allowed us to earn our clients’ trust for 143 years. It wasn’t just about making money; this alone will not sustain a firm for so long. It had something to do with pride and belief in the organization. I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm for many years. I no longer have the pride, or the belief…

Today, many of [Goldman’s] leaders display a Goldman Sachs culture quotient of exactly zero percent. I attend derivatives sales meetings where not one single minute is spent asking questions about how we can help clients. It’s purely about how we can make the most possible money off of them. If you were an alien from Mars and sat in on one of these meetings, you would believe that a client’s success or progress was not part of the thought process at all…

These days, the most common question I get from junior analysts about derivatives is, “How much money did we make off the client?” It bothers me every time I hear it, because it is a clear reflection of what they are observing from their leaders about the way they should behave. Now project 10 years into the future: You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the junior analyst sitting quietly in the corner of the room hearing about “muppets,” “ripping eyeballs out” and “getting paid” doesn’t exactly turn into a model citizen.”

It isn’t just Goldman; the system is about rewarding those at top with little or no concern for anyone else. Take for example this March 9^th write-up in the Wall Street Journal: “Citigroup Inc. CEO Vikram Pandit received $14.9 million in compensation for 2011, a year in which the New York company posted its second straight annual profit but saw its shares tumble 44% amid a broad-based selloff in large financial companies… The company said in a regulatory filing [March 8^th] that Mr. Pandit got a $5.3 million cash bonus -- his first since the financial crisis -- and stock options valued at $7.8 million. The bank said last year that Mr. Pandit would get $1.7 million in salary for 2011.” But shortly thereafter the Federal Reserve applied its annual “stress test” to 19 of America’s largest banks: Of that group, “[f]our of the biggest U.S. banks failed… the Fed said [March 13^th], meaning [the failed banks] have to give up hopes of giving more money to shareholders, and may even have to go hat in hand to those shareholders for more cash.” One of them was Citigroup.

In the end, it seems painfully obvious that notwithstanding the collapse of the global financial markets in 2008, an event very clearly linked to the “money-at-all-costs” mentality of the self-declared “masters of the universe” mega-financial players, nothing has changed. There hasn’t been the slightest evidence of any self-regulation, and the millions and millions of dollars paid to Wall Street lobbyists and contributed to political campaigns has paid off for the financial sector in ineffective and watered-down federal laws and regulations (like the Dodd-Frank legislation) that have literally changed nothing, failed rather dramatically to protect the general public from the same evils that collapsed the system and threaten to allow another “perfect storm” of financial failure sometime in the foreseeable future. When will this country start representing the majority of Americans again? Or will it ever again?

I’m Peter Dekom, and tomorrow you can bet that the impact of Greg Smith’s stunning indictment of his former firm will have the following effect on Goldman Sachs: none.

All-American City with an All-American Problem

There’s really nothing particularly special about this small American city of under 300,000 people that sits in the middle of some of our richest agricultural land, the California Central Valley, sort of in the middle of the whole state. You might not have traveled up Interstate 5 to enjoy the annual Asparagus Festival or explored the thousands of miles of regional waterways and canals that form the San Joaquin Delta or recall the town’s heyday during the Gold Rush, because these days Stockton is one of those places you’re likely to pass on the way to somewhere else.

But there’s a new crowd of visitors to Stockton these days, and warm and friend is not exactly how they feel. They’re lawyers, politicians, bankers and Wall Street mavens that are struggling with a small city on the verge of going under. It would be the largest city in the United States to file for protection under Chapter 9 of the Bankruptcy code, an event that seems increasingly likely.

“During a contentious meeting that stretched late into the night [on February 28^th], the City Council decided, nearly unanimously, to begin mediation with public employee unions and major bond creditors in what is widely seen as the city’s last-ditch attempt to restructure its finances outside of bankruptcy. Facing a budget deficit from $20 million to $38 million on a budget of roughly $165 million, the Council declared a fiscal emergency for the third year in a row…

“Under a law passed by the California Legislature last year, cities must hire a third-party mediator to help negotiate with unions and debtors for a period of 90 days before declaring Chapter 9 bankruptcy. Stockton will be the first to test the new procedure. Nearby, Vallejo, Calif., declared bankruptcy in 2008, and Stockton has hired the same bankruptcy lawyer who represented that city… Stockton officials say they hope mediation will allow them to avoid bankruptcy and indicated they might focus their push on reducing generous retiree health benefits. The city is also suspending $2 million in debt payments this year.” New York Times, February 29^th.

Things are truly deteriorating in this economically slammed community. At a staggering 15.9% rate, unemployment sits well above the levels even for California. The real estate market here collapsed in the subprime debt crisis, and the city led the nation in resulting foreclosures. The tax base simply vaporized. Depressed people generate some even more depressing realities. The sad state of affairs in this small town are amplified in some rather unpleasant numbers and facts reported in Wikipedia: “In the February 2, 2011 issue of Forbes, the magazine gave Stockton the dubious distinction of being the ‘most miserable’ US city, largely as a result of the steep drop in home values…Central Connecticut State University surveys from 2005 and 2006 ranked the city as the least literate of all U.S. cities with a population of more than 250,000… According to a Gallup poll, Stockton was tied with Montgomery, Alabama for the most obese metro area in the United States of America with an obesity rate of 34.6 percent… Stockton was rated by Forbes in 2009 as America's fifth most dangerous city because of its crime rate.”

I hear bonuses are down but earnings up on Wall Street these days, and if you’ve traveled to our nation’s capital recently, you might be aware of how expensive real estate remains there, a reflection of the insulation from the pain that many parts of this great land are facing… so far away. As we make tough choices in reducing our deficit, exactly whom are we going to choose to sacrifice? Stockton seems to be one of the likely choices. Then again, we could keep spending on a military, where it seems, it costs a staggering $850,000 to keep a single soldier in Afghanistan for a year, according to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s testimony before a Congressional committee. Being the world’s policeman doesn’t come cheap, even if our missions seem to fail a lot these days. Who are we anyway in today’s world, and exactly what are our priorities? What does it mean to be an American today?

I’m Peter Dekom, and where exactly is that great American spirit, laced with concern for our fellow citizens, that once defined our very essence?

The Big Bad Reveal

Technology has given us the few glimpses of brutal Syrian repression we have from smart phone-collected imagery, generated by protesters in the streets and bold journalists sneaking into the country and Skyping or “phoning” their reports back to their media outlets’ headquarters. BlackBerry Messenger allowed opposition forces to gather and protest, coordinating the downfall of Hosni Mubarak’s regime in Egypt. Technology is truly a force against brutal repression and an enabler of populist causes. But aside from simple overall repressive technological responses – such as Iran’s closing its Internet reach at its borders and tracking key word to find dissidents – the very technology that has enabled such pervasive journalism is now being used to track and kill them where they stand.

The old standard, arresting/detaining or expelling journalists, has given way to a different governmental quest where death is the goal. In the third week of February, four journalists – including world-famous Marie Colvin (from the Times of London) and French photojournalist Rémi Ochlik – lost their lives in a Homs neighborhood (Baba Amr) as pinpoint artillery shelling found its mark, taking out an opposition media center with clinical precision. The tell-tale signs of electronic communications probably left easily-traceable finger prints that gave away the location as if it were clearly identified on a map... which in fact was the ultimate result.

Electronic communications can be traced. Start with Skype, which is a bandwidth hog, and so in the middle of an intense attack, if someone is consuming massive Web capacity when everyone else is ducking for cover, finding the user is pretty easy. Colvin was particularly fond of sending in her reports via Skype, which she felt was more secure than cell phones. The media center also provided a VSAT satellite hook-up for reporters, but the Syrians were well-equipped with state-of-the-art technology to hone in on that link that was a huge easily-tracked electronic beacon. The Syrian government has clearly dedicated the manpower and commitment to technology to undermine efforts to communicate the horrors of their actions by crushing the ability to send signals overseas. For those with the willingness to prioritize such efforts, the ability to crack down is clearly available.

“A 2011 report from the Horst-Goertz Institute for IT Security in Germany found serious flaws in satellite phone cryptography. The vast majority of satellite phones--even those used by war reporters--send GPS info up into orbit. Security researcher Jacob Appelbaum of Tor told the Electronic Frontier Foundation that it’s easy for satellite phone providers to accidentally disclose the location of users. In addition, technology is also commercially available that lets governments eavesdrop on satellite phone conversations and locate individual users. American government agencies are particular fans of the Portable Thuraya monitoring system for satellite phones, manufactured by Polish firm TS2.... What is known is that the Syrian government does have sophisticated surveillance equipment. Last year, American firms Blue Coat Systems and NetApp were caught violating embargo laws by selling monitoring software to the Syrian government.” FastCompany.com, March 6^th.

Journalists are finding ways to wear flak-jackets, and where their media won’t fund that costs, there are agencies “lending” such equipment to reporters heading into the field. There are other defensive responses as well: “Nonprofit organization MobileActive recently launched a project called SaferMobile that provides various encryption and anonymizing apps for mobile phones. SaferMobile’s toolkit is directly intended for use by activists and journalists working under the noses of repressive regimes around the world. Funding for SaferMobile is provided by the U.S. State Department, Google, and a number of other donors...One of the longest-running advocacy groups around, the Committee to Protect Journalists, runs an education and training program for journalists in dire situations, including financial and logistical assistance in going into exile if necessary. The CPJ is currently warning journalists in Syria not to use satellite phones.” FastCompany.

Syria’s efforts are extremely focused. When a local makes waves, he or she seems to be signing their own death warrant. “Rami al-Sayed, the best known Syrian war video blogger, hosted his footage and livestreams on Bambuser's website. [In early March], al-Sayed was killed in a government shelling attack in Homs, shortly after his footage was used by Al Jazeera, the BBC, and Sky News.” FastCompany. As Syria’s brutal repression, mindlessly taking out civilian targets and decimating its own people, it seems as if this rage against civilians looks more like genocide and less like civil war every day.

I’m Peter Dekom, and these words sung by the late Janis Joplin ring in my ears: “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose...”

Retail Corruption

Here’s what the Department of Justice says about American residents who join in the local overseas celebration and “the way we do business in these parts” called bribery: “The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977, as amended [in 1998], 15 U.S.C. §§ 78dd-1, et seq. ("FCPA"), was enacted for the purpose of making it unlawful for certain classes of persons and entities to make payments to foreign government officials to assist in obtaining or retaining business. Specifically, the anti-bribery provisions of the FCPA prohibit the willful use of the mails or any means of instrumentality of interstate commerce corruptly in furtherance of any offer, payment, promise to pay, or authorization of the payment of money or anything of value to any person, while knowing that all or a portion of such money or thing of value will be offered, given or promised, directly or indirectly, to a foreign official to influence the foreign official in his or her official capacity, induce the foreign official to do or omit to do an act in violation of his or her lawful duty, or to secure any improper advantage in order to assist in obtaining or retaining business for or with, or directing business to, any person.” Cool, huh?

Half (at least) the world operates on formalized bribery, and failure to partake unless you have something that they can’t get anywhere else often means the deal is gone. So folks hire expediters to “get the job done,” but if you (as a U.S. resident) have any reason (really!) to believe some of that expediting you are paying for actually winds up as bribery, you could be a FIT: felon in training!

Graft and corruption have sapped developing and third world economies, fomented angry extremists who proselytize military religion to help angry mobs deal with the corrupt governments that have drained the lifeblood out of their hopes and dreams, leaders often supported by massive U.S. aid because they are willing to oppose a declared enemy of the United States. Such enemies were once the Soviet Union and “communism,” but today it’s Iran, al Qaeda and comparable terrorists. It’s OK for the U.S. to support the pillar of corruption at the top – the Hamid Karzai-du-jour – but woe to American business people trying to compete against unscrupulous competition not constrained by the FCPA. It’s good to be a government... the laws don’t actually apply to “foreign policy,” like bribing Pakistan not to spread nukes to their neighbors... and you thought it was about helping us in our war against terrorism.... Silly you!

Our entire mission in Afghanistan has long since failed – not just for our inept assumption about the Taliban – but precisely because we installed one of the most corrupt regimes on earth that has little geographic control and virtually no popular support: “Betting thousands of dollars a night [in poker games] in a country where most families live off a few hundred dollars a year would seem like a bad play for Sherkhan Farnood, the founder and former chairman of Kabul Bank, the country’s biggest. His assets are supposed to be frozen, and he is still facing the threat of prosecution over a scandal that could end up costing the Afghan government — and, by extension, the Western countries that pay most of its expenses — almost $900 million, a sum that nearly equals the government’s total annual revenues… As Americans pull back from Afghanistan, Mr. Farnood’s case exemplifies how the United States is leaving behind a problem it underwrote over the past decade with tens of billions of dollars of aid and logistical support: a narrow business and political elite defined by its corruption, and despised by most Afghans for it.

“The Americans and Afghans blame each other for the problem’s seeming intractability, contributing to the deterioration in relations that now threatens to scuttle talks on the shape of ties between the countries after the NATO combat mission ends in 2014. What is clear is that the pervasive graft has badly undercut the American war strategy, which hinged on building the Karzai administration into a credible alternative to the Taliban… Still, the Obama administration has concluded that pressing the fight against corruption, as many American officials tried to do in recent years, could further alienate Mr. Karzai and others around him whom Washington is relying on as it tries to manage a graceful drawdown. New York Times, March 7^th. But corruption at the top of most such countries simply is a signal to those below that graft is “okay.”

So let’s drop this corruption thang way down to the bottom of the spectrum... even beneath the drug cartels buying the corner cops... into the grassroots where the bribes are smaller but are simply a way of life. As the son of a U.S. diplomat stationed in Beirut, Lebanon back in the sixties, I heard my dad talk about how clean and well-organized bribery had become. A de facto rate card system – clearing customs, paying traffic tickets, getting a sewer line checked, a new phone line approved and installed, reducing a jail sentence, deciding a case, getting a private parking spot in a public place, reducing your taxes, etc. – all had pretty established rates, and if the relevant government official kept within those boundaries, nobody got hurt... well not too badly, and the system rolled on. The rich obviously did better at this game than those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, of course, but how is that different from anywhere else?

India produced some nasty visual shocks, like the time I saw a cop in Mumbai shake down a four-year-old beggar girl accosting cars at a stop light (Mumbai traffic really doesn’t need traffic lights, since it is stopped all the time anyway!), taking a roughly seized cut of her meager proceeds to allow her to stay... pulling her arm way too hard for her little frail body... but that’s just the way life is isn’t it? Life’s hard, and life at the bottom... well...

Generally, people are angry at corrupt regimes, occasionally so angry that they topple a government when they think the officials have just gone too far. Sorry Hosni, you just took a tad more than you should have. But this rate card structure is now prevalent all over the world. “The cost of claiming a legitimate income tax refund in Hyderabad, India? 10,000 rupees… The going rate to get a child who has already passed the entrance requirements into high school in Nairobi, Kenya? 20,000 shillings… The expense of obtaining a driver’s license after having passed the test in Karachi, Pakistan? 3,000 rupees.

“Such is the price of what Swati Ramanathan calls ‘retail corruption,’ the sort of nickel-and-dime bribery, as opposed to large-scale graft, that infects everyday life in so many parts of the world…Ms. Ramanathan and her husband, Ramesh, along with Sridar Iyengar, set out to change all that in August 2010 when they started ipaidabribe.com, a site [see above picture] that collects anonymous reports of bribes paid, bribes requested but not paid and requests that were expected but not forthcoming.” New York Times, March 6^th.

Before you go to the site, and you really should, you need to know that roughly 50 rupees = US$1, and a lakh = Rps 100,000. Add into that mix that the average annual per capita (number of people divided into GDP) in the U.S. is about $48 thousand, while in India, it’s more like $3,500. Have at the site and look at the results... all in English, thank you. But it’s not just Asia and Africa. Greece is dying because her billionaires cheat on their taxes, bribe when they get caught and export their gains to Swiss bank accounts, laughing all the way. Italy isn’t too far behind, and tax evasion and a little grease of the palm is just a way of life. Everybody does it, so what harm can it really inflict? Other than toppling a few regimes along the way?

“Last year, the Kingdom of Bhutan’s Anti-Corruption Commission created an online form to allow the anonymous reporting of corruption, and a similar site was created in Pakistan, ipaidbribe, which estimates that the country’s economy has lost some 8.5 trillion rupees, or about $94 billion, over the last four years to corruption, tax evasion and weak governance.” NY Times. The underlying horrible is that bribes and corruption push money into the hands of the corrupt elites and sap those on the edge… creating hopelessness and anger. And hopelessness and anger foment extremism. Exactly where do you think al Qaeda and its clones would be if the world’s leaders had pushed all their ill-gotten gains back down to the people to create schools, hospitals, roads and factories? Where would Hamas be if Palestine were a successful economy? Would Israel even be threatened by these malevolent forces? Exact how many people have perished because of corruption?

I’m Peter Dekom, and in the end, those with little or nothing to lose can become the most dangerous people on earth.

Polar Opposites

As I watched the contraception exchange between various political factions – a struggle to find issues where distinct actions can be taken – I thought there is an intense desire in the body politic these days to find differences in our thinking and very little effort from any faction to find the commonality that makes us Americans. If this quest for differentiation continues, history teaches us that social structures with this level of divisiveness cannot endure. It’s Lincoln’s 1858 “a house divided against itself cannot stand” speech in spades. We fought a civil war over those differences.

Simply, the United States is breaking itself apart, suggesting that in fewer than 100 years, the geographical boundaries we know today will long since have splintered into distinct new nations, perhaps with some lingering animosity for their former brethren. As natural disasters – from rising oceans, the drying out of major water supplies like the Plains States’ Ogallala Aquifer to extreme shortages in necessary commodities – press into our great land, battles over resources and disaster relief can only accelerate the process.

The duality of philosophy, even as factions literally reject the clear limits of our constitution as to imposing the religious doctrines of one particular Christian viewpoint on everyone else, is a strong suggestion that these people actually do not believe that the government proposed by our Founding Fathers actually works anymore. They seem to embrace the potential a new religious police enforcing Evangelical Christianity under the force of law, not particularly different from what occurs in Iran and Saudi Arabia today. In a world where Christians are admonished not to sit in judgment of others, that only those individuals “without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone …” (Bible, John 8:7), there are huge assemblages of purported Christians busy hurling judgmental boulders at others. The notion that there is only one way to live is quite opposite to accepting the diversity that once defined our country. We are truly splintered into intolerant factions.

Look at splits. The richest 1% has never had a greater share of income and wealth in our entire American history. Since statistics were officially compiled, we have never had so many people (half actually) defined as low income or below the poverty line. We’ve never had such extreme differentiation in the tax rates that apply at one level to the kind of income that usually is generated to the wealthy (capital gains rates and fund manager carried interest rates) and an entirely different set of higher rates applied to people who work for a living. So we have more wealth-income polarization than we have had in our statistically-recorded history. If the “let them eat cake” historical lesson retains any validity, sooner or later, this extreme skewing of ownership and income will morph into militant rage, sputtering at first, but eventually erupting in violent objection, another factor that could split America into smaller nations.

Yet, I believe that the biggest schism in our country is how we feel about the role of government in or daily lives. Strangely enough, despite claims to the contrary, neither left nor right wants less government interference in the lives of Americans. It is where each faction wants more government controls that sets the tone. The left sees government as providing a safety net, investing in infrastructure, education, research, etc., providing for safety and environmental regulations as well as reigns on the unbridled greed that they believe the financial power elites fomented the most recent financial debacle. They are prepared to raise taxes to provide all of the above and more; they abhor the austerity efforts and believe only government can restore balance and order from the chaos that surrounds us. The left has yet to identify how all these programs will actually be funded without inflating the currency and destroying the buying power of the dollar.

The right, on the other hand, only wants to see government expenditures on an-already-bloated military (that already spends close to half the world’s military budget by itself; they see the ability to force others to do what we want to be valuable), but this extreme faction wants to see massive new government regulations on what they perceive to be moral Christian issues, from a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, to statutes allowing the removal of contraception from medical insurance plans on “moral” grounds or even from discussion in high school classrooms, making abortion at any stage one a crime of murder, premarital sex, school prayer and the list continues. They believe that government is otherwise regulating and taxing our country way too much, and they want to balance the budget solely based on cuts they want to see imposed (primarily on each element of the agenda of the left). Yet they have a pretty good point that we cannot keep spending what we do not have; that the massive deficit borrowing has to stop.

What about folks in the middle? And that probably is most of us. Well, perhaps in part because of the financial capacity of billionaires who wield their power to cut their taxes and vitiate regulations by mixing their messages with populist Evangelical movements under the Citizens United ruling, as we are seeing in the GOP race, Republican moderates no longer matter; they are without a voice or a representative as each candidate tries to “out right” the others. On the Democratic side, it’s hard to see exactly what this administration stands for… or even past recent Democratic administrations. Having left a budget surplus and repealed a vital check and balance on our big financial institutions (the repeal of the most relevant part of Glass-Steagall which kept the trading industry very separate from traditional commercial banking), Bill Clinton may have been the most effective Republican president in recent history. I like the middle road better.

Until we start believing we are Americans, until we understand that our political system is built on horse-trading where compromise trumps “my way or the highway,” until we understand that extremes, left or right, will only break us apart if we cannot yield, we are collectively voting – with or without a ballot – to end the United States of America and replace it with new smaller countries where extremes can live under their harsh view of the world and others where moderates can pursue what once was the American dream. Maybe it’s just this horrific economic time that makes us misbehave this way, where unemployment/under-employment and decimated homes values have destroyed dreams everywhere, and perhaps when our economy resumes a more even keel we will then decide to stop destroying our country. Only time will tell.

I’m Peter Dekom, and if people realized that they are actually contributing to the destruction of their country with extremes – left or right – would they really care… I fear that more than just a few really wouldn’t.

A $457 Million Surplus

When two of the big three automakers – General Motors and Chrysler – filed for Chapter 11 protection under our bankruptcy law in June of 2009, as collective bargaining agreements and job tenure collapsed, Michigan began scrambling to slice and dice, slash and burn as much in the way of state expenditures as they could. The strongest element of their tax base had just rolled over and hovered near death. The economic malaise that infected just about every other state since 2008 had been Michigan’s lot in life since 2000 (revenues had been flat during that time period except for one year). The recession slammed the state even harder.

Unemployment peaked in 2009 at 14.1% and dropped to a manageable (but still above US average) 9.3% in December, but manufacturing jobs have begun to pick up, notwithstanding a belief that the rust belt had finally rusted all the way through. GM returned as the world’s largest carmaker. The cuts to police forces, education (schools were closed and teachers were laid off), infrastructure maintenance deferred, that prisons were closed, libraries cut back, daycare reduced, raises to state employees ceased (many of whom were let go) left Michigan with a pretty austere reality, but the seemingly never-ending deficit finally… ended. Growth, albeit modest, returned. The state just reported a $457 million surplus for the current fiscal year. Can we expect the Michigan experience to replicate?

“Now, however, as a majority of states have begun collecting tax revenues that are on par with or even above expectations, they face some measure of Michigan’s situation — trying to sort out whether the worst is really over, whether it is safe to start spending again, or whether a rainy day fund may be the prudent course… ‘Revenues are definitely improving, but it’s just unsure where it’s going to head from here,’ said Todd Haggerty, an analyst with the National Conference of State Legislatures, who noted that although revenues in many states have not returned to pre-recession levels, 17 states exceeded their expected personal income tax collections in the first quarter of the current budget year, and 18 states got more in sales tax than they had anticipated.” New York Times, February 8^th.

California’s still underwater, but even that state could see a rebound. And of course, the instant a surplus becomes apparent, all those lost and crushed constituencies want to be restored as close to their former glory as possible: “The [Michigan] attorney general wants 1,000 new police officers after 3,200 were cut around the state over the last decade. Schools leaders say they need to offset cutbacks that have left teachers laid off and schools closed. Child advocates want money for early education for toddlers from poor families; construction workers want money for Michigan’s crumbling roads; and on and on.” NY Times. And then there’s Detroit, a roiling sea of failed government and desperate deficits, still deeply underwater. Spending that money would create jobs, and both education and infrastructure are really longer-term investments that actually pay dividends and not merely expenditures, but exactly how certain is the sustainability of the new levels of tax revenues? Could a collapse of the European market, notwithstanding the recent progress on the situation in Greece, rekindle the fire that killed jobs and tanked growth? What would you decide?

I’m Peter Dekom, and even in a world of teetering economics and lowered expectations, growth can and does return.

Do Americans Remotely Care About the Next Generations?

Oh sure, most parents and grandparents – with bizarre criminal and extreme negligent exceptions – love their children. But preparing their children to survive and perhaps thrive in life appears to have a fallen off the list of American priorities to the point where it is barely visible on our master list, which instead seems to favor deficit reduction over growth-directed investment and making sure our military spends at least what the next ten big military spending-nations combined commit to defense over education.

I’ve already blogged heavily on primary and secondary education, so today I am focusing on post-secondary skills that we desperately need and the kind of infrastructure commitment we need to support so that our children can actually cross bridges safely, feel secure in their drinking water, remain healthy as sewage is properly removed, commute to work within reasonable times and prosper from the free flow of goods and services across our roads and highways while remaining safe from dam and levee collapses. We have put infrastructure on a back burner, even though financing such projects is actually an investment with a measurable rate of return, since the collapse in 2008.

Between 2007 to 2011, the United States has seriously de-prioritized building and repairing our infrastructure: “The United States has fallen sharply in the World Economic Forum's ranking of national infrastructure systems. In the forum's 2007-2008 report, American infrastructure was ranked 6th best in the world…The 2011-2012 report due in September [showed] America at No. 16, with South Korea overtaking the United States during the last year, according to a copy of the rankings obtained by Reuters… The quality of American roads is about on par with those of Malaysia. They lag Hong Kong, whose infrastructure tops the overall list…

“Weak transport infrastructure alone will shave 0.2 percentage points off economic growth this year, said Steven Landau, a researcher in Boston at the Economic Development Research Group… America spends roughly 2 percent of GDP on infrastructure, about half what it did 50 years ago, according to a U.S. government report from October [2010]. Europe spends around 5 percent and China 9 percent… Because American spending is falling, the drag on growth will grow to 1.3 percentage points in 2020, Landau said.” Reuters, August 16^th.

In August of 2008, before our infrastructure repair budgets were further reduced, CNN noted: “Across the United States, there are about 600,000 bridges. The Federal Highway Administration reported in 2006 that one quarter of the nation's bridges were at risk. The American Society for Civil Engineers said in 2006 that it would cost nearly $10 billion every year for the next two decades to fix them.” Estimates today are that between 60,000 and 75,000 U.S. bridges are seriously unsafe.

From February 8^th damsafety.org, the organ of the state dam and levee safety officials: “The latest back and forth stems from the creation of a new database of the nation’s 2,200 federal levee systems. 10 percent of the nation’s levees have been declared ‘unacceptable.’ Only 9 percent of the nation’s levees have been rated “acceptable,’ while 80 percent have been deemed ‘minimally acceptable.’” 4,000 dams are in imminent danger of collapse according to that organization. Adds the June 20^th Scientific American: “As the U.S. and China endure record-breaking floods [in the 2011] spring, there is a risk that is being overlooked amidst the inundated towns, evacuations and rising waters. Dams in the U.S. boast an average age of 50 years, and the American Society of Civil Engineers continues to give the nation’s dams a D grade overall in terms of maintenance. Will it take the catastrophic collapse of a dam—like the five [failures] in the 1970s in the U.S. that killed hundreds—before the infrastructure is repaired?” Think about how expensive it is to deal with a massive levee or dam collapse as opposed to fixing it in the first place. Apparently, we just don’t give a damn!

Further, in a world where jobs in engineering and healthcare still go begging, instead of building up our post-secondary capacity in these arenas, because teaching these skills requires costly facilities, equipment and laboratories beyond average instruction, we are deficit-cutting these programs because they create the greatest “savings” in state budgets. It doesn’t seem to matter that the new jobs they create, the resulting growing tax base and productivity cycle that benefits us all, and the multiplier effort on job creation would go a long way to help shift our deficit ways into a potential surplus. Politicians are only looking for short-term solutions.

“Technical, engineering and health care expertise are among the few skills in huge demand even in today’s lackluster job market. They are also, unfortunately, some of the most expensive subjects to teach. As a result, state colleges in Nebraska, Nevada, South Dakota, Colorado, Michigan, Florida and Texas have eliminated entire engineering and computer science departments… At one community college in North Carolina — a state with a severe nursing shortage — nursing program applicants so outnumber available slots that there is a waiting list just to get on the waiting list.” New York Times, March 1^st.

We simply don’t seem to differentiate between wasteful spending – like the $850,000 per U.S. soldier in Afghanistan that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta testified before a Congressional subcommittee – and long term investments – supporting education, infrastructure and research – that pay long-term cash dividends and support economic growth. We are killing our post-secondary education system and crushing students in an impaired economy with impossible higher levels of tuition and student debt. “Even large tuition increases have not fully offset state cuts, since many state legislatures cap how much colleges can charge for each course. So classes get bigger, tenured faculty members are replaced with adjuncts and technical courses are sacrificed.

“State appropriations for colleges fell by 7.6 percent in 2011-12, the largest annual decline in at least five decades, according to a report from the Center for the Study of Education Policy at Illinois State University. In one extreme example, Arizona has slashed its college budget by 31 percent since the recession began in 2007… It is this cumulative public divestment — and not extravagances like climbing walls or recreational centers advertised on a few elite campuses — that is primarily responsible for skyrocketing tuitions at state institutions, which enroll three out of every four college students.” NY Times. Are those seeking a better life, sacrificing to put their kids through school doing nothing more than fostering snobbery? Is this the new American value system? Does America really want to shoot itself in the head and simply step out of the global economic race by under-training the next generation? So if someone asks me if Americans really love their children, I’d have to answer, on paper and at Christmas… maybe.

I’m Peter Dekom, and our commitment to our children needs a lot more affirmative action than mere loving platitudes.