Opinon-Columns.com, political and social commentary by Jim Freeman

SORTING OUT THE RHETORIC

2009-12-03T17:07:14+01:00

To even begin to progress in the political/economic arena, the populist labels are, at best, unhelpful. Do a sort of Rorschach-test for yourself in words instead of ink-blots. What do you immediately think of the following?

Liberal
Conservative
Atheist
Believer
Socialism
Communism
Capitalism
Left
Right

And that’s just the smallest segment of what divides us. Homeless, jobless and bankrupt all have entirely different meanings, depending on whether you are out of a job, on the streets or drowning in debt. They say as people get older they become more intolerant of both the mistakes and intentions of those younger than themselves, but I‘ve found it not to be the case. Experience is the word for having known, gone through and survived the ups and downs of a lived life. Wisdom sometimes, but not always, comes from that.

But we’re polarized. God knows we’re been told that often enough to believe it, even though perfectly rational conversation is still possible among our like-minded friends.

Compasses are not often wrong, but I was once dangerously lost in the mountains of Montana at night, as the thermometer plunged toward -50 degrees. An otherwise pleasurable elk-hunting trip got downright scary in a matter of hours. It turned out that the manufacturer of the compass I carried had installed the dial upside down. Easy enough to catch in daylight, had I reason to look, but confoundingly purposeless at night.

I often reflect on that.

Socialism is a case in point, not always true-north, nor is capitalism, or the over two hundred isms (an inordinate number of them religion-based) that dandy themselves about. Ism is a kind of tincture for me, a trace color that’s likely to mask a personal interpretation and I usually try to get a definition before chatting further.

Isms are not usually stand-alones, they beg for modifiers; Godless communism and reckless capitalism come to mind. Daylight and a reason to look is usually good advice.

Take Sweden, everyone’s knee-jerk response to the evils of socialism, leavened perhaps (or not) by the enormous and profitable success of IKEA and the number one Information Technology nation in the world, for the fourth consecutive year.

Forbes magazine has this to say:

The new face of Swedish socialism

By Richard Heller, Forbes

Swedish snapshot A: Shows a taxed-to-the-eyeballs welfare state where the government grabs more than 52% of the country's GDP—the highest percentage of any industrial country. A Swedish businessman who earns Euro 200,000 a year gets to keep just 49% of his paycheck. Of OECD countries, only France comes close to Sweden in taxing its most successful businesspeople (for complete tax data on 33 countries, see "The tax grab 2001," Forbes Global, Feb. 5).

Swedish snapshot B: Shows a booming economy bubbling with entrepreneurial activity. Growth is predicted to be 3.5% for 2001; inflation, 1.7%; unemployment, 4% (less than half the European average). In 1999, according to the European Information Technology Observatory, Sweden ranked first in the world in investment in information technology and telecommunications. Venture capital is pouring into Sweden, and labor productivity is rocketing: From 1990 to 1999 productivity climbed 47% in Sweden, against 39% in the U.S. and 31% (on average) in the EU. Last year, Sweden topped the global standings in R&D spending as a percentage of GDP with 3.7% (in the U.S. it was 3.1%), according to the OECD.

Will the real Sweden please step forward? Taxed to the eyeballs, yet with a booming economy. Rhetoric again, with both tax and boom in the eye of the beholder.

Uninformed, we throw generalities at one another and nothing much gets accomplished in the way of revising, upgrading, junking or bowing-down to our current economic and political (read that health-care) issues.

Would some comparisons help? Perhaps just a bit, something to put some definition to the argument:

NAME OF COMPARED RANKING	YEAR	AMERICAN RANK	OUT OF	SWEDISH RANK
CIA World Factbook – GDP per capita	2008	10	229	26
CIA World Factbook – life expectancy	2008	³⁶	223	10
World Economic Forum – Enabling Trade Index ranking	2008	¹⁴	118	3
Yale University / Columbia University - Environmental Performance Index	2008	³⁹	149	3
The Economist Intelligence Unit - e-readiness	2008	¹	70	3
The Economist Intelligence Unit - Global Peace Index	2008	⁹⁷	140	13
United States Patent and Trademark Office's list of patents by country	2007	¹	172	11
Save the Children - Mother's Index	2007	²⁷	141	1
Save the Children - Women's Index		²²	141	1
Save the Children - Children's Index	2007	³⁰	141	4
Wall Street Journal / The Heritage Foundation - Index of Economic Freedom	2007	⁵	157	27
United Nations - Human Development Index	2007	¹⁵	179	6
World Economic Forum - Global Competitiveness Report	2007	¹	177	4
World Economic Forum - The Global Gender Gap Report	2007	³¹	128	1
World Bank - Ease of Doing Business Index	2007	³	178	14
Reporters Without Borders - Worldwide Press Freedom Index	2007	⁴⁸	169	5
Transparency International - Corruption Perceptions Index	2008	²⁰	180	1
The Economist Intelligence Unit - Index of Democracy	2007	¹⁷	167	1
Privacy International - Privacy index (EU and 11 other selected countries)	2006	³⁰	36	28
New Economics Foundation – Happy Planet Index	2006	150	¹⁷⁸	119
The Economist Intelligence Unit - Quality-of-life index	2005	¹³	111	5
World Health Organization - suicide rates by country	2004	⁴⁶	100	31
NationMaster's index of civil and political liberties	2004	⁷	140	3
Save the Children – seats in the national government held by women	2004	¹⁰	141	1
NationMaster's index of asylum seekers (per capita)	2001	²²	28	4
NationMaster's index of economic aid (donor, per capita)	2001	¹⁹	24	5
NationMaster's index of technological achievement	2001	²	68	3

So, America’s kicking butt in GDP, although both nations are in the top 10%. Ditto on patents, economic freedom and ease of doing business.

But Sweden, poster-boy for that mean old socialism, leads us by a bunch in life expectancy, environmental performance, global peace, mothers, women and children indexes, gender-gap issues, press freedom, corruption perception, seats in government held by women, asylum seeker acceptance, economic donor aid, political freedom and (gasp) democracy.

Democracy was always our trump card. We owned democracy. Now, out of 167 countries, we are 17th and they are 1st. Now, the issues we own are GDP and patents; ease of doing business and political freedom (which some of us thought might be growing less in America).

Socialist Sweden lays claim to a higher tax rate (49% to 33%), but what they buy with their taxes are life enhancing benefits and the personal freedoms usually associated with our constitution.

Which does not a ball-game make.

But the next time someone demagogues you with socialist legislation and the slippery slope to socialism, you might ask just what they mean.

Socialism is often defined as “the doctrine of centralized state control of wealth and property.” But, like so many oft-stated truisms, it’s not always that way. So it may pay to take a look at the conversation about the word and determine ahead of time who means what.

The face of the rhetorical compass is not always screwed on properly and reading it wrong can give rise to a long, cold night in the mountains.

A FIRST STEP IN THE REMODELING OF INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM

2009-11-30T15:16:36+01:00

Tim Luckhurst, in a Guardian-UK article, Why Journalism Needs Paywalls, argues that “It's time to admit that giving away value undermines democracy.”

“Johnston Press is starting to charge for certain online content.

Johnston Press, Britain's most prolific newspaper publisher with 286 titles, will place the online content of six of its local titles behind paywalls.

“Online readers of the Worksop Guardian, Ripley and Heanor News, Whitby Gazette, Northumberland Gazette, Carrick Gazette and Southern Reporter will have to pay £5 for a three-month subscription.”

I’m not sure he makes the case that democracy is any real trouble, but newspapers surely are. They’re losing tons of money and, in an effort to staunch the blood-flow, are tossing everything toss-able overboard. The fact seems to remain that, in a world of instant on-line technology, pulling a daily print edition together, rolling the presses and sending countless trucks off to thump the bales of paper at news-stands and front porches is unprofitable—in the extreme.

Johnny Carson used to say, “If you buy the premise, you buy the bit.” My premise is that print editions of The New York Times (insert your personal favorite here) will not survive. If you buy that premise, the bit has to do with how to rescue investigative journalism from the life-boats.

One major paper after another has closed down foreign bureaus and heaved their best investigative staff into the choppy waters of early retirement. These are not lightweights and many, if not dead and buried, are still working at their place of choice:

Christiane Amanpour

James Baldwin

Carl Bernstein

Ed Bradley

Jimmy Breslin

Joel Brinkley

Walter Cronkite

Thomas Friedman

Amy Goodman

Adam Gopnik

David Halberstam

Seymour Hersh

Peter Jennings

Pauline Kael

Ted Koppel

Norman Mailer

Bill Moyers

Edward R. Murrow

Morley Safer

Diane Sawyer

Nina Totenberg

Bob Woodward

But the writing is on their wall and ours. Those who glibly pass off print media as not as New Age as blogging and the Internet, would do well to pause and reflect on where the content comes from that is so cheaply and irreverently commented upon in cyberspace. Consider the Washington Post expose, “Soldiers Face Neglect, Frustration At Army’s Top Medical Facility,” by investigative reporters Dana Priest and Anne Hull.

The blogosphere, the Congress and the American public went ballistic at this travesty of care, particularly as it occurred in the midst of a bloody and miserable war in Iraq and Afghanistan. No Dana Priest and Anne Hull . . . no story, no exposure, no cleanup of the medical care at Reed.

The Post, of course, cut its teeth on the Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein Watergate break-in story that brought down Richard Nixon. That was a piece of investigative reporting that, if it didn’t define the term, certainly popularized it. Yet that kind of digging is expensive. A major piece may last for three or four updated editions and take months to prepare and source accurately. The reporters entrusted with that job are the cream of the crop . . . and expensive, when it comes to word-for-word costs. I have a suggestion or, perhaps, more of a template than an actual solution.

The newspaper industry has long supported the Associated Press for breaking news. The organization is a cooperative, owned by newspapers, which both contribute to and use AP material written by its staff journalists. Non-members outside the United States pay a fee. Likewise, the British-Canadian Reuters and American Bloomberg make a profit from the hustling of financial news. The need seems to be there for a similar organization in the field of investigative journalism.

Consider the advantages:

Major newspapers, as they struggle to slide out from under a cost-structure that no longer works, would be relieved of the direct overhead attributable to investigative journalists with star-power.

Journalists would be relieved of the drudgery that comes of meeting the individual editorial policies of their parent publication.

Major stories would savor the breaking-news élan of stories they bid to carry, which would then enter the public domain (after perhaps 24 hours) and require a by-line from both the source and the reporter.

Lesser events (of state or local interest) would bring lower prices or syndication. Syndication made guys like Mike Royko very wealthy (writing over 7,500 columns, ultimately syndicated in over 600 newspapers).

Considering disadvantages, I can really think of none.

Such an organization would depend upon the reputation and integrity of its contributors. But they are out there now, on smaller and smaller ice-flows; thousands of highly regarded professionals who could bring up a next generation of young reporters by the oldest method in history . . . apprenticeship.

Someone is going to do it, perhaps a Mike Bloomberg type, with lots of know-how, experience and a regard for the public sphere.

Let’s hope so, before they are lost and the print world becomes one tedious and uninformed blog, with nothing upon which to feed. Giving away value does not spell the end of democracy, but it goes a long way towards frittering away the investigative report.

Of Mice and Men, Global Warming and Hundred-Year Storms

2009-07-01T16:08:00+02:00

Letter from Prague

The best laid plans, we are told, of mice and men often go astray. That’s particularly the fact when the plans are postponed for reasons of budget, inattention, better things to do and the assurance promised in the very phrase “hundred-year storm.” I have had experience with all of the above.

As for budget, was there ever a plan that could not be reamed of its very essence by budgetary constraint? These are hard times, budgeting times, and thus infrastructure must be put off. Recent times were flush times, but other excuses sufficed as bridges in Minneapolis fell into the river. Here in Prague, the government was too busy selling state assets and running off with the dough to invest in dams and floodgates and damn floodgates.

We are (by the by) frantically building a flood wall at the moment along the scenic Prague river named Vltava. It’s been raining off and on for the past three months, more on than off. The timeless and historic watercourse that’s threaded its way under the Charles Bridge for lo these past 552 years is licking its chops for another flood, the hundred-year event arriving 93 years ahead of schedule.

As a younger man, in what seems an alternative existence, I had occasion to appear before various Chicago-area planning boards. I was the hired gun, the mercenary assuring the various raised eyebrows of skeptical commissioners that this or that planned community or corporate layout would scarcely affect the environment. Traffic? No problem. Air quality? Hey, we have the charts and expert witness to calm your fears. And yet commutes edge toward two hours and groundwater is so unsafe we opt for the bottled variety.

I wish they had found a more accurate term for what’s happening to the planet than global warming, because we have temperatures rising in some parts of the world and dropping in others. One can kayak to the North Pole while the Antarctic ice fields expand. What we have is global temperature disruption. North America is scheduled to get warmer and drier, while here in Europe we expect cooler and wetter weather patterns. Thus the Vltava lurks.

Seven years and six weeks ago, mid-August of 2002, our friendly river was twenty feet above flood stage and halfway up the second story windows of buildings familiar to tourists in the quiet side streets of the Old Town. 50,000 people had been evacuated and huge outlying areas of the country were underwater. Damage took two years to repair and the Karlin section of Prague had to be essentially rebuilt. Now Karlin is home to the brightest and most glossy new developer complexes and the Vltava lurks once again. This weather pattern is nearly identical to 2002 and the middle of August is six weeks away.

Well, Prague will survive, but the message (if there is a message) is that the world is no longer the same. Basic weather patterns such as the Atlantic Gulf Stream are shifting while we argue about whether Chicago is really all that much hotter this summer. Perhaps we’re gazing at the wrong navel.

It’s a shame to watch this fine old city gird for another assault, but that’s a tale of mice and men. The late and insightful George Carlin had it right; “The planet is not in trouble. The planet is perfectly all right and will continue to be just fine. It’s man who is in danger of extinction.”