tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17757228515321444812024-02-21T08:02:12.686-05:00Xavier Center for the Study of the American DreamWe believe in the American Dream, and its on-going importance to the uniquely American character, economy, and spirit. The Center's mission is to study the history of the American Dream, to examine and report on the present state the American Dream, and to identify trends and analyze shifts in the future evolution of the American Dream.Michael F. Ford, Founding Director of the Center for the Study of the American Dreamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12763616333765541012noreply@blogger.comBlogger29125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1775722851532144481.post-71274649767519070432012-07-05T10:57:00.001-04:002012-07-05T11:00:42.798-04:00The Declaration of Independence and the American Dream<br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">Today, we acknowledge and celebrate
the inextricable link between the Declaration of Independence and the American
Dream. After all, the Declaration is the parent of our Dreams. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">Protected by the principles of the
Declaration, the American Dream is an attitude a person is born with whether or
not they are born in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">America</st1:place></st1:country-region>
-- which is one reason why immigration is so important to <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">America</st1:place></st1:country-region>'s
growth and prosperity. It's about an attitude and it's about navigable pathways
to achievement. These pathways are not guarantees but they are legally and
culturally encouraged and protected here. We don’t want to convey the dreamy
idea that because we dream, we are perfect, or that everything is always hunky
dory in Dreamland. It's tough out there. It's tough everywhere. But we are free
and that makes all the difference. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">The Dream is too often represented
inaccurately and self interestedly by commentators, candidates, advertisers and
economists. Surprising to some, the American Dream is not primarily about
material acquisition or wealth accumulation. It is more than anything an
attitude about possibility and improvement. This can only be fostered in an
atmosphere dedicated to freedom enduringly put into play by the Declaration. "Freedom"
consistently tops the list of Dream definitions in the American mind. In that
context, the economy certainly plays a part, but it is not the star of the show</span><span style="font-family: 'Book Antiqua', serif; font-size: 14pt;">. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"> We must remind ourselves that the term
"American Dream" was coined in the midst of the Great Depression, not
in a time of great prosperity. The Dream is personal and is sustained by the
oxygen of freedom. Americans fully understand that freedom is the basic
requirement for whatever our Dreams may be,</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 14pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">and it's not reliant on the current state of the economy. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">The Dream is not about a job. A job
is an American assumption despite the current discouraging employment state of
affairs. Americans don't spend their Dream time imagining a job but rather what
a job enables. We can worry about jobs, but we don't Dream about them. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">The American Dream is one of the few
unifying ideas in our republic and the point of the Dream is that ultimately
personal outcomes can be influenced or determined by individuals. Believing
this <i><u>is</u></i> the Dream. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">American Dreamers seem well suited to tough
times and tough news. Without this toughness, the Dream would have withered
away long ago. </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;">Without this toughness,
there never would have been a Declaration of Independence in the first place.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Happy Birthday, <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">America</st1:place></st1:country-region>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>Michael F. Ford, Founding Director of the Center for the Study of the American Dreamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12763616333765541012noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1775722851532144481.post-3918636465245786102012-04-26T20:47:00.000-04:002012-04-26T20:51:35.193-04:00Civic Illiteracy: A Threat to the American DreamImmigrants desiring American citizenship must pass a naturalization test demonstrating basic civic literacy. <a href="http://www.uscis.gov/USCIS/files/Records_Study_for_the_Naturalization_Test.pdf">97.5% of immigrants pass this test</a>. <br /><br /><div>
Xavier University’s <a href="http://www.xavier.edu/americandream/">Center for the Study of the American Dream</a> undertook a survey to learn details of the civic literacy rate of native-born Americans measured identically by the same test. Our work over the last three years has consistently re-enforced the strong American belief in the relationship between the American Dream and freedom. Freedom is not found in the state of nature, and must be fought for and vigilantly guarded. In order to do this successfully, Americans are expected to know what freedom means beyond sloganeering and applause lines. This includes understanding the nature of the freedoms won by those who have gone before us and the obligations freedom demands of us to ensure its continuance and to protect those who will follow us. <br /><br />In order to do this, we must first understand what those freedoms are. <br /><br />It is our strong contention that civic illiteracy is a threat to the American Dream because it is a threat to the freedom we treasure. Civic illiteracy makes us less likely to exercise freedom by understanding and engaging in our public life. Failure to achieve and maintain this understanding inevitably makes us more susceptible to manipulation and abuses of power. If we do participate with limited knowledge of what makes America, America, we mock the history we revere. <br /><br />Concurrent to our national civic literacy survey, the Center for the Study of the American Dream <a href="http://www.xavier.edu/americandream/programs/documents/3AprilEyeOpeners.pdf">asked native-born US citizens</a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1775722851532144481"></a>: “Immigrants are expected to pass a civic literacy test. Do you think all Americans should be able to pass that test?” A strong majority, 77%, said, yes. Furthermore, 60% agreed that high school students should have to pass the naturalization test as a requirement for graduation.<br /> <br /> However, <a href="http://www.xavier.edu/americandream/programs/National-Civic-Literacy-Survey.cfm">our national survey revealed</a> that one in three native-born citizens failed the civic literacy test, based on the INS passing score of 6 out of 10 correct answers. This pass rate is 32% less than the average immigrant passing rate. In and of itself, these numbers don't appear alarming because we have heard them before. However, our persistence in civic unawareness is no comfort simply because it is consistent. There is no honorable connection between civic illiteracy and resistance to and distrust of government authority. Quite the contrary.<br /><br />If the passing score for native-born Americans was raised to 70% from 60% --- seven correct answers out of ten --- the failure rate would climb to 50% --- one in two.<br /><br /> Understanding the true nature of our national civic literacy requires more than averaging scores alone. For example, if we were trying to gauge the average US household net worth and we asked 1,000 Americans and one of them happened to be Bill Gates, the consequent skew would be grossly misleading. Similarly, in the civic literacy test, college graduates performed best with an 82% average pass rate --- still 15% less than the immigrant pass rate. However, high school grads or less performed poorly with a 44% pass rate --- 53% less than the immigrant pass rate. Less than 1/3rd of Americans graduate from college but their impact on the civic literacy test skews the picture. <br /><br /> However, the central issue at hand is not sensationalizing who passed and who failed, but more a demonstration of what vote-eligible Americans specifically know and do not know in the midst of an important presidential election, after 12-18 years of school and 24/7 exposure to unfiltered multi-media information sources.<br /><br />Americans do well with elementary school level questions such as: "What is the name of the President of the United States?", "What is the capital of the United States?", "Where is the Statue of Liberty?", “Who was the first President?", "When do we celebrate Independence Day?", and "What are the two major political parties in the United States?". No doubt, these answers might easily be offered by people around the world. <br /><br />However, of <a href="http://www.xavier.edu/americandream/programs/documents/5CivicTestpowerpointfinalPDF.pdf">greater material importance</a> are questions about the US Constitution, legal and political structures of the American constitutional republic, and basic facts related to current political life and key political decision-makers. For example:<br /><br />* 85% did not know the meaning of the "the rule of law."<br />* 82% could not name "two rights stated in the Declaration of Independence."<br />* 77% could not identify "one power of the states under the Constitution."<br />* 75% were not able to correctly answer "What does the judiciary branch do?"<br />* 71% were unable to identify the Constitution as the "supreme law of the land."<br />* 63% could not name one of their two US Senators.<br />* 62% could not identify "What happened at the Constitutional Convention?"<br />* 62% did not know who the Governor of their state is.<br />* 62% could not answer "the name of the Speaker of the US House."<br /><br />The effects of civic illiteracy take their toll over time, and while Americans are almost defiantly indifferent about their lack of civic understanding, the consequences to our basic rights and freedoms and the general health of our republic could be dire. The American Dream, which requires the rule of law and civic understanding to protect the freedoms and opportunities we value, could be deeply damaged.<br /><br />When Ben Franklin left Independence Hall after the Constitution was finally produced after much deliberation and amidst much contention (in 1787 --- a question answered incorrectly by 91% of native-born Americans), he was asked by a woman waiting outside to learn what the fate of her new country would be. <br /><br />"What do we have, Mr. Franklin?"</div>
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"A Republic, Madam, if we can keep it." <br /><br />It is tempting to blame the schools for our low civic literacy scores but schools can only lead us to water. They cannot make us drink nor remember where the water is. It is an individual responsibility. <br /><br />After all, Mr. Franklin did not say: "A Republic Madam, if the school system can keep it."</div>Michael F. Ford, Founding Director of the Center for the Study of the American Dreamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12763616333765541012noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1775722851532144481.post-11000037246845961392012-01-30T16:28:00.000-05:002012-01-30T16:28:11.196-05:00Five Myths About the American DreamFew ideas are as central to American self-identity as the “American dream.” Politicians invoke it, immigrants pursue it, and despite unremittingly negative economic news, citizens embrace it. But what is the American dream? We began regular study of how people define and perceive the dream three years ago, and have discovered many misunderstandings worth a second look.<br />
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<strong>1. The American dream is about getting rich.</strong><br />
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In a <a href="http://www.xavier.edu/americandream/programs/documents/Final-American-Dream-Survey-PowerPoint.pdf">national survey of more than 1,300 adults</a> that we completed in March, only 6 percent of Americans ranked “wealth” as their first or second definition of the American dream. Forty-five percent named “a good life for my family,” while 34 percent put “financial security” — material comfort that is not necessarily synonymous with Bill Gates-like riches — on top.<br />
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While money may certainly be part of a good life, the American dream isn’t just about dollars and cents. Thirty-two percent of our respondents pointed to “freedom” as their dream; 29 percent to “opportunity”; and 21 percent to the “pursuit of happiness.” A fat bank account can be a means to these ends, but only a small minority believe that money is a worthy end in itself.<br />
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<strong>2. Homeownership is the American dream.</strong><br />
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In June, a New York Times-CBS News poll found that almost 90 percent of Americans think that homeownership is an important part of the American dream. But only 7 percent of Americans we surveyed ranked homeownership as their first or second definition of the American dream.Why the discrepancy? Owning real estate is important to some Americans, but not as important — or as financially rewarding — as we’re led to believe.<br />
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Federal support of homeownership greatly overvalues its meaning in American life. Through tax breaks and guarantees, the government boosted homeownership to its peak in 2004, when <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/housing/2010-08-11-housing11_cv_N.htm">69 percent of American households owned homes</a>. Subsidies for homeownership, including the mortgage interest deduction, reached $230 billion in 2009, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Meanwhile, only $60 billion in tax breaks and spending programs aided renters.<br />
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The result of this real estate spending spree? According to the Federal Reserve, American real estate <a href="http://money.cnn.com/2011/06/09/news/economy/household_wealth/index.htm">lost more than $6 trillion</a> in value, or almost 30 percent, between 2006 and 2010. One in five American homeowners is underwater, owing more on a mortgage than what the home is worth.<br />
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Those who profit most from homeownership are far and away the largest source of political campaign contributions. Insurance companies, securities and investment firms, real estate interests, and commercial banks <a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/index.php">gave more than $100 million</a> to federal candidates and parties in 2011, according to the <a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/index.php">Center for Responsive Politics</a>. The National Association of Realtors alone gave more than $950,000 — more than Morgan Stanley, Citigroup or Ernst & Young.<br />
Homeownership is more important to special interests than it is to most Americans, who, according to our research, care more about “a good job,” “the pursuit of happiness” and “freedom.”<br />
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<strong>3. The American dream is American.</strong><br />
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The term “American dream” was coined in 1931 by James Truslow Adams in his history “The Epic of America.” In the midst of the Great Depression, Adams discovered the same counterintuitive optimism that we observe in today’s Great Recession, and he dubbed it “the American dream” — “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement.”<br />
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However, the American dream pre-dated 1931. Starting in the 16th century, Western European settlers came to this land at great risk to build a better life. Today, this dream is sustained by immigrants from different parts of the world who still come here seeking to do the same thing.<br />
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Perceptions of the dream today are often more positive among those who are new to America. When asked to rate the condition of the American dream on a scale of one to 10, where 10 means the best possible condition and one means the worst, 42 percent of immigrants responded between six and 10. Only 31 percent of the general population answered in that range.<br />
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<strong>4. China threatens the American dream.</strong><br />
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Our surveys revealed that 57 percent of Americans believe that “the world now looks to many different countries,” not just ours, to “represent the future.” When we asked participants which region or country is charting that future, more than half chose China. Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed mistakenly believe that the Chinese economy is already larger than the U.S. economy — it is actually one-third the size, with a population four times larger. China does own more than $1.1 trillion of U.S. debt, however; it is our largest creditor.<br />
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But the problem isn’t just one nation. Japan holds almost <a href="http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/tic/Documents/mfh.txt">$1 trillion of U.S. debt</a>. Britain owns more than $400 billion. In 1970, less than 5 percent of U.S. debt was held by non-citizens. Today, <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/DC-Decoder/2011/0204/National-debt-Whom-does-the-US-owe">almost half is</a>. Neither China nor these other countries can be blamed for U.S. choices that have placed our financial future increasingly out of our hands.<br />
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Still, no matter how much we owe, the United States remains the world’s land of opportunity. In fact, the largest international group coming to America to study is from China — 157,000 students in the 2010-2011 academic year. As recently <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/campus-overload/post/chinese-students-enroll-in-record-numbers-at-us-colleges/2011/11/14/gIQAyYlKLN_blog.html">reported in The Washington Post</a>, the number of Chinese undergraduates at U.S. colleges increased 43 percent over the previous year.<br />
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<strong>5. Economic decline and political gridlock are killing the American dream.</strong><br />
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Our research showed a stunning lack of confidence in U.S. institutions. Sixty-five percent of those surveyed believe that America is in decline; 83 percent said they have less trust in “politics in general” than they did 10 or 15 years ago; 79 percent said they have less trust in big business and major corporations; 78 percent said they have less trust in government; 72 percent reported declining trust in the media. These recent figures are more startling when contrasted against <a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/5392/trust-government.aspx">Gallup polling from the 1970s</a>, when as many as 70 percent of Americans had “trust and confidence” that the government could handle domestic problems.<br />
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Even so, 63 percent of Americans said they are confident that they will attain their American dream, regardless of what the nation’s institutions do or don’t do. While they may be worried about future generations, their dream today stands defiantly against the odds.Michael F. Ford, Founding Director of the Center for the Study of the American Dreamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12763616333765541012noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1775722851532144481.post-59224564672777926242011-10-17T15:18:00.002-04:002011-10-17T15:21:35.076-04:00The American Dream, Politics, and the ProtestersProtests make people uncomfortable. That's why protests are organized. Waking a dormant public or a lazy political infrastructure with an uncomfortably forced focus is their purpose.<br /><br />The Tea Party did a magnificent job and now the Occupy Wall Street protests are percolating equally important activity. Both are non-violent and fueled by social media. Both make their targets uncomfortable. Both animate each other with their polar enthusiasms.<br /><br />The protests raise the specter of the demise of the American Dream. But in spite of dire predictions it turns out that the Dream lives. However, efforts by candidates (and causes and corporate advertisers) to "co-brand" themselves with the Dream are doomed to fail.<br /><br />The American Dream is an ingrained idea, not a partisan ideology nor a corporate objective. The important thing about the Dream, based on our national survey work at the<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-ford/xavier.edu/americandream" target="_hplink"> Center for the Study of the American Dream</a>, is that a strong majority of American adults still believe in the Dream (72%), but to an astonishing degree they have lost confidence in the institutions traditionally seen as Dream guardians. 82% are disgusted with "all politics". 79% have lost trust in "big business"; 78% distrust "government" and 72% distrust the traditional media.<br /><br />The idea that a political or corporate initiative can be launched in the context of the Dream is doomed from the start because of the intense distrust of the launching institutions.<br /><br />Americans feel they are on their own but they haven't lost the Dream. They have confidence in themselves, their families and their personal networks. Institutional appeals based on the Dream are transparently ineffective "me too-isms." The implicit message to traditional authority is that "we don't believe you... we don't trust you..." but most damaging, "WE DON'T NEED YOU."<br /><br />These protests are NOT political proxies for political parties. The political cognoscenti, as a matter of arrogant habit, require anything like these protests to be fitted into the molds their own experience has verified. They need to force the square pegs of public resistance into the round holes of their personal worldview.<br /><br />Lately everything is squeezed through a political colander forcing comfortably defined political pasta while throwing out the boiling water that made the pasta palatable in the first place. But any good cook knows that you don't throw away the boiled and flavorful pasta water but keep it to blend into the sauce. So it is with the protests. The trick for institutions is to figure out how to fit into the protests rather than the other way around.<br /><br />While the Tea Party is heavily Republican, it's also true that they are not willing tools of the Republican Party. They maintain a difficult-to-control distance. They exhaust the Party establishment even as they nervously inspire it.<br /><br />The Wall Street protest confuses the Democrats too. Both offer to their remotely connected political associations an uneasy and undependable alliance. Leverage for the Parties is non-existent. These protesters owe nothing to the Parties which failed or betrayed them. The parties have nothing to offer them. You can't scare them. You can't buy them off.<br /><br />The Dream belongs to Americans, not to the institutions, candidates or corporate advertisers who try to co-opt it.<br /><br />The breathless rush to belittle the protests is typical of those being protested against. A unified criticism of the Wall Street Occupiers is that "they have no leader and no agenda." It is a protest that emerged, sui generis, from the earthen public, leaderless and fertilized by anger, not by a specific agenda. That's the way truly bottom up efforts begin.<br /><br />The anti-Vietnam war protest movement had leaders and a very specific goal. This protest was also not welcomed, despite conforming to the requirements of today's protest bashers. These complaints are a rouse.<br /><br />There is no Wall Street protest or Tea Party leader. The protests are against institutional authority. Leaders are institutional. There was no leader in the Egyptian protests which led to the ouster of Mubarak. There was no leader in Libya in the movement leading to the ousting of Kaddafi.<br /><br />Swarm intelligence is on the rise through unprecedented use of social media and the beehive of public opinion knows exactly what it doesn't want -- exactly what it does want will be determined. Unity among protesters is fueled by broad dismissals by the "powers of that be" and protesters are texting and tweeting their brains out, driving a stake through the heart of our ennui. Its instantaneousness and its reach is vast.<br /><br />Think of Martin Luther's Protestant Reformation. Luther didn't really post the 93 Theses on the Wittenberg cathedral door. He respectfully submitted the work to the Archbishop who forwarded the toxic package to Rome. There was no response -- for three years! Nonetheless, because of the new social media of the 16th century -- the printing press -- the 93 Theses were translated, printed and circulated throughout Germany within two weeks and throughout Europe in two months. The Pope downplayed it and tried the leverage of excommunication failing to understand the heart of the matter and the powerlessness of his institutional influence. Luther's Reformation still abides nearly 500 years later.<br /><br />What was the initial agenda of the U.S civil rights protests? Justice and equality initially lacked specificity but not power. The agenda took time to percolate through an ascending movement. What initially was the specific agenda of the feminist movement? What is the agenda of those calling to "take our country back" uttered from both the left and from the right. "Take our country back?" What does that mean?<br /><br />The Wall Street Occupiers' agenda will evolve or die. In the meantime, protest or not, Americans still believe America promises a fair chance. A shot, not in the dark of a destiny over which they have no control, but in world where opportunity for betterment tomorrow is in their own hands, no matter what the institutions and their mouthpieces say today.<br /><br />Follow Michael Ford on Twitter: <a href="http://www.twitter.com/XUAmericanDream">http://www.twitter.com/XUAmericanDream</a>Michael F. Ford, Founding Director of the Center for the Study of the American Dreamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12763616333765541012noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1775722851532144481.post-89969640173363042282011-06-14T15:37:00.002-04:002011-06-14T15:40:56.051-04:00Survey Suggests Why The Public Distrusts The MediaThe Second Annual State of the American Dream Survey recently released by Xavier University's Center for the Study of the American Dream showed that apart from the military, there is a new low water mark of distrust in the nation's major institutions.<br /><br /> 83% say of American adults say they have less trust in "politics in general" than they did 10 or 15 years ago;<br /><br /> 79% say they have less trust in big business and major corporations;<br /><br /> 78% say they have less trust in government;<br /><br /> 72% report declining trust in the media.<br /><br />Distrust of government and Big Business is not new and has been trending negatively for decades. However, the distrust numbers have grown to such startling negative levels that the confidence of the nation in itself and in the capacity to create the future leaves the Dream wondering about itself. <br /><br />Disgust and public separation from politics is clear. Big Business now seems to be an important and recklessly self-interested arm of the political process. So how does the media get into the distrust formulation?<br /><br />As late as May of 1972, 70% of Americans "had trust and confidence that the government could handle its domestic problems." But the Watergate break-in happened one month later and the decline of trust in government has never abated.<br /><br />In 1980 CNN was created by Ted Turner. This led to the creation of a 24/7 news cycle. Cable has proliferated and the Internet has transformed communication to an extent unimaginable in 1980.<br /><br />In spite these changes, legacy media still authenticates news while cable and alternative media elaborates it and serves as a GPS for like-mindedness as these fertilize segregated communities of interest . When trying to analyze the distrust of the media there are many theories. Here are four.<br /><br />1. <strong>Roughly half the US the population, (Gen X,Y,Z) doesn't know the media is supposed to be trusted</strong> as a public watchdog. They have their own personalized media and know no other world and their most trusted news person today is John Stewart, host of a pretend news program. Among these younger Americans traditional media is simply irrelevant. <br /><br />2. <strong>Proportionality</strong> - is the appropriate ratio of one quantity to another, especially the ratio of a part compared to a whole. The media persistently displays for ratings, a loss of proportionality by over-coverage of the unimportant events such as Charlie Sheen's crack-up, the impending royal wedding and Donald Trump's Birther campaign. <br /><br />3. <strong>Factoids</strong>; a term coined by Norman Mailer is not about little facts. It's about unmelodious fabrication lazily repeated so often in the media, that it becomes "true". In terms of the American Dream, factoids are rampant and begin with the idea, still peddled desperately by the real estate, home building and mortgage industries, that "homeownership" is the American Dream. In fact, only 3% in the Survey indicated this was their American Dream. Among many other examples is the China story told to Americans in such a way that 62% of us believe China has the largest and most powerful economy in the world even though it is one-third the size of the U.S. 52% of us believe "the future will be created by China."<br /><br />4. <strong>Information Theory</strong> - A central principle of Information Theory is that information is received in inverse proportion to its predictability. Predictability leads to the incubation and multiplication of factoids. One reason we are losing confidence in the nation is because we are now accustomed to bad news about ourselves. Our sails are trimmed every day and the nation's self-worth is bruised.<br /><br />Here's an example of how the three problems of proportionality, factoids and information theory play out in practice.<br /><br />47% of the US debt held by the public is held by foreigners and the greatest holder of that debt is China ($1.1 trillion). Is China the most important part of that story? Probably not. Japan is 9.7% of the Chinese population but itself owns 80% of the amount of US debt owned by China ($885 billion). The story isn't China. The story is that nearly half of the US publically owned debt is non-American hands whereas in 1970 it was less than 5%. China is not the point. The point is that our financial future is increasingly not in our own hands.<br /><br />The American public is in the dark and increasingly afraid of China based on disproportionate factoid driven stories.Michael F. Ford, Founding Director of the Center for the Study of the American Dreamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12763616333765541012noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1775722851532144481.post-77852727969117751422011-06-13T21:47:00.013-04:002011-06-14T20:52:18.228-04:00Xavier University's Recent State of the American Dream Survey Reveals Irrational U.S. Fears About China<p><span style="font-family:verdana;">A growing majority of Americans believe "the future will be created somewhere other than America." (57% in 2011- 52% in 2010.)</span></p><ul><li><span style="font-family:verdana;">52% believe the future will be created by China.</span></li><br /><li><span style="font-family:verdana;">16% by the European Union.</span></li><br /><li><span style="font-family:verdana;">10% by Japan</span><br /></li><br /><li><span style="font-family:verdana;">3% by India</span></li></ul><p><span style="font-family:verdana;">In addition, 63% of Americans believe that the Chinese economy is larger than the US economy although it is actually one-third the size.</span><br /></p><p><span style="font-family:verdana;">It's not unusual for Americans to misunderstand foreign affairs but these numbers reveal a chink in the armor of the American Dream which is ultimately fueled by self confidence. The famous "can do" spirit doesn' wilt from challenges. </span><br /></p><p><span style="font-family:verdana;">Complicating matters are new counter-intuitive economic wrinkles. Advanced economies grow primarily through innovation and technology breakthroughs. Developing economies offer investor advantages that developed nations do not; low wages, higher returns on capital, the freedom to adopt or reverse engineer technology rather than invent it. The incessant pressure to innovate, create new technologies, products, and processes is the curse of success. Thus, it is the natural economic order that investor capital flows from wealthy countries to developing countries. </span><br /></p><p><span style="font-family:verdana;">But according to World Bank numbers it appears counter intuitively that money is flowing more from rich countries to rich countries. In 2007 as the US was entering its economic slide and facing the loss of 8 million jobs, direct foreign investment in the US was $240 billion. In China it was $138 billion. Despite all the hype, that's about the same as the direct foreign investment into the Netherlands with a population 1% of China's. </span><br /></p><p><span style="font-family:verdana;">There has been phenomenal growth in China and other successfully developing economies. But before we turn over the future to China there are some important considerations.</span></p><ol><li><span style="font-family:verdana;">China is still not fully a free market economy and the irony is that Americans distrust both their government and big business but we are evidently willing to trust that the communist Chinese government and businesses have competence we do not.</span></li><br /><li><span style="font-family:verdana;">The "cheap labor" in China is becoming more expensive. Wages doubled between 2002 and 2008 and cheap labor has declined as a priority for US companies. According to a survey of by KPMG, labor costs are now less important to buisinesses than "product quality, fluctuations in shipping rates and currencies." </span></li><br /><li><span style="font-family:verdana;">Quality issues - A survey by MFG.com indicated that 19% of companies surveyed brought all or part of their manufacturing operations back to North America in 2010, (up from 7% from 2009.) This action is largely credited for the increase of 136,000 jobs last year --- the most since 1997.</span></li></ol><p><span style="font-family:verdana;">The idea that countries like China and India are successfully creating a "middle class", a legendary signal of economic health, are exaggerated. Based on the calculations of the World Bank, in 1980, the per capita GDP in China was $525 per person, while in the US it was $25,000 per person. This means there was a differential between China and the US of about $25,000 per person. </span></p><p><span style="font-family:verdana;">China has had spectacular growth and the per capita GDP there is now about $7,000. However, per capita GDP in the US has also grown in the same period to $46,000. This means, counter intuitively, that despite China's remarkable growth, the per cap GDP differential has actually widened from $25,000 per person to $39,000 per person.</span><br /></p><p><span style="font-family:verdana;">According to Branko Milanovic, head of research at the World Bank, "if the US per cap GDP grows by 1%, India will need to grow at 17% and China by 8.6% a year, just to keep absolute income differentials from rising." </span><br /></p><p><span style="font-family:verdana;">A relevant question is whether the odds are greater that China can persistently grow at nearly 9% a year or whether the US will only grow at 1% or less per year? The average growth rate for the US has been 3.1% for 65 years and in the recent very tough years (2003 - 2011) the US has still averaged 3.2% with only one year of negative growth. </span><br /></p><p><span style="font-family:verdana;">The point is that our fate is in our own hands not in China's or anyone else's. If we feed the beast of innovation by keeping up with the educational and financial commitments necessary to do so, it's America's game to lose. </span></p>Michael F. Ford, Founding Director of the Center for the Study of the American Dreamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12763616333765541012noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1775722851532144481.post-10352544378143880372011-06-13T21:25:00.002-04:002011-06-13T21:28:56.809-04:00Immigration and the National State of the American Dream Survey<div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The 2nd annual Xavier University State of the American Dream Survey shows that whatever conflict may exist concerning immigration, 60% of Americans still believe that "immigration --- diverse groups coming to America for a better life --- is important for keeping the American Dream alive." </div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>While America has always attracted immigrants it has not always welcomed them warmly. </div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>In the late 18th Century, there was a massive emigration to American cities. In 1749 alone, German immigrants to Philadelphia nearly equaled the city’s resident population. While he later changed his view, Ben Franklin, whose father was an immigrant, initially felt an overwhelming sense of encroachment:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><i>“This will in a few years time become a German colony; instead of their learning our <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Language, we must learn theirs or live as in a foreign country.”</i></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>In Lincoln’s time the American population swelled through immigration by 15% in 1845 alone. The "Know Nothing Party" was established to fight immigration, especially of Irish Catholics prompting Lincoln to say: </div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><i>“Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid...we began by declaring <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>that all men are created equal’… When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners and catholics’. When it comes to <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>liberty...” </i></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>There is currently an acceleration of immigrant resistance. Some people falsely believe that immigrants get special treatment like free housing and business loans unavailable to native born Americans. Yet the Dream Survey showed by a ratio of 2:1 that immigrants over the general sample believed that "hard work" was the way to get ahead in America. </div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>No one nation, including the United States, has the in-house creative talent to rule the economic world forever. Look at our history and the legendary creative fire given us by immigrants. America has traditionally supplied the oxygen necessary to ignite and keep that fire burning. Perhaps the greatest measurable impact of immigrants can be found in the entrepreneurial world where success requires a certain fearlessness, vision and determination which many immigrants bring with them. They provide it to the country. The country doesn't provide it to them. </div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Research at the Kauffman Foundation found that in 25% of the U.S. science and technology companies the chief executive or lead technologist was foreign-born. In Silicon Valley, the percentage of immigrant-founded startups was 52 percent. These immigrant founders are highly educated—96 percent held bachelor's degrees and 74 percent held graduate or postgraduate degrees mostly in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics-related fields. The vast majority of these company founders didn't come to the United States as entrepreneurs—52 percent came to study and 40 percent came to work. Only 1.6 percent came to start companies. But they typically ended up starting their companies within a decade after arriving in the US.</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Amidst anti-immigrant rumblings, our ability to compete for global talent is simultaneously being challenged by other economies and most unforgivably by our own prejudice. Meanwhile, for the first time since WW II, the Dream Survey indicates that 57% of us believe the future will be created somewhere other than the U.S. Contributing to this concern we have a brain drain that's been seeping for 30 years. Cornell’s Nobel Prize winning physicist, Robert Richardson, says we have a serious scientific manpower problem that’s been developing since the 1970s.<i> “We now rank 23rd in the world in terms of the percentage of our college graduates who become scientists and engineers. Thirty years ago we ranked third.” </i></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>There is also a dark undercurrent in these tough economic times manifested in strident resistance to things like the National Dream Act and a number of similar state initiatives. This is partially based on a fear that the children of undocumented immigrants, (even if they pay taxes and complete in-state high school graduation requirements), may "take our slots in public universities.” The same vague references are made about jobs as if either the number of jobs or educational opportunities were a fixed number in an economy committed to growth. </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Are we afraid some immigrant children may be more qualified for college? What happened to the meritocracy of the free market system? This kind of intellectual tariff is not in the national interest.</div><div><br /></div>Michael F. Ford, Founding Director of the Center for the Study of the American Dreamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12763616333765541012noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1775722851532144481.post-7690465757053443872011-03-31T11:30:00.002-04:002011-03-31T11:37:05.638-04:00The American Dream is held dear by individuals; it takes a village to ruin it.<a href="http://www.xavier.edu/americandream/documents/Second-Annual-American-Dream-Survey.pdf">The Second Annual State of the American Dream</a> released by the <a href="http://www.xavier.edu/americandream/">Center for the Study of the American Dream</a> shows that Americans, and particularly immigrants, are keeping the American Dream alive, despite economic and job turmoil, three simultaneous US wars, intense institutional distrust, and natural disasters. <br /><br />With a defiant optimism, 63% of Americans still believe that they will achieve their American Dream. For first and second generation immigrants, that number is even higher at 70%.<br /><br />This is remarkable, as the survey also reveals that the very institutions charged with safeguarding the Dream--those who govern us, who employ us, who take care of us, and inform us, are wholeheartedly distrusted by substantial majorities.<br /><br />• 83% distrust the political process in general.<br />• 79% distrust big business and corporations<br />• 78% distrust government<br />• 72% distrust the media.<br /><br /> These institutions appear to be piling onto our chances, rather than protecting them-- in other words--- the American Dream is held dear by individuals; it takes a village to ruin it.<br /><br />How is this distrust articulated in the survey?<br /><br />• 54% believe that "their freedoms are being taken away."<br />• 76 % "do not believe that the world looks up to America like they used to."<br />• 65% think the country is "in decline."<br /><br />These are staggering numbers. No partisan interests benefit from these findings. It’s a resounding wake-up call for all political parties and everyone engaged in public life. It's a pox on all houses. To preserve the Dream, these institutions must win back the public’s trust.<br /><br />Simply put, the American public trusts no one, except themselves. That's not the way it's supposed to be.Michael F. Ford, Founding Director of the Center for the Study of the American Dreamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12763616333765541012noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1775722851532144481.post-14613556915143517592010-12-05T09:32:00.002-05:002010-12-05T09:38:59.953-05:00Ayn Rand and the VIP-DIPersDespite persistent rumors, Rand Paul was not named in honor of influential conservative thinker, Ayn Rand. His name is Randall. <br /><br />It's good he was not named for Ayn Rand because her real name was Alisa Zinovievna Rosenbaum which she changed honoring her Rand typewriter.<br /> <br />Miss Rand, famously a believer in rugged individualism and personal responsibility, was a strong defender of self-interest. She was a staunch opponent of government programs from the New Deal and Social Security to the Great Society and Medicare. <br /><br />A Library of Congress survey of the most influential books on American readers, "Atlas Shrugged" ranked second only to the Bible. Rand's influence is encyclopedic ranging from Alan Greenspan to Paul "I grew up on Ayn Rand" Ryan (R-Wis), a "Young Gun" who aims to cut or privatize Medicare and Social Security. <br /><br />The Right should be commended politically for their ability to develop and stick to a unified message. But close inspection of this unified message reveals a disappointing secret identified by a student of the Godfather of Neo-conservatism, --- the University of Chicago's Leo Strauss. The student, Anne Norton ("Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire") identified what she called VIP-DIP meaning <span style="font-style:italic;">Venerated in Public, Disdained in Private.</span> "Do as I say, not as I do." The list of vip-dipers on the Right runs from Harold Bloom to Newt Gingrich, but certainly not Ayn Rand. Right? <br /><br />Say it ain't so Alisa Zinovievna Rosenbaum.<br /> <br />A heavy smoker who refused to believe that smoking causes cancer brings to mind those today who are equally certain there is no such thing as global warming. Unfortunately, Miss Rand was a fatal victim of lung cancer.<br /><br />However, it was revealed in the recent "Oral History of Ayn Rand" by Scott McConnell (founder of the media department at the Ayn Rand Institute) that in the end Ayn was a vip-dipper as well. An interview with Evva Pryror, a social worker and consultant to Miss Rand's law firm of Ernst, Cane, Gitlin and Winick verified that on Miss Rand's behalf she secured Rand's Social Security and Medicare payments which Ayn received under the name of Ann O'Connor (husband Frank O'Connor). <br /><br />As Pryor said, "Doctors cost a lot more money than books earn and she could be totally wiped out" without the aid of these two government programs. Ayn took the bail out even though Ayn "despised government interference and felt that people should and could live independently... She didn't feel that an individual should take help." <br /><br />But alas she did and said it was wrong for everyone else to do so. Apart from the strong implication that those who take the help are morally weak, it is also a philosophic point that such help dulls the will to work, to save and government assistance is said to dull the entrepreneurial spirit.<br /> <br />In the end, Miss Rand was a hypocrite but she could never be faulted for failing to act in her own self-interest.Michael F. Ford, Founding Director of the Center for the Study of the American Dreamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12763616333765541012noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1775722851532144481.post-46698086126378145202010-12-05T09:10:00.003-05:002010-12-05T09:14:54.667-05:00Washington Post Editorial Board as Movie CriticThe <span style="font-style:italic;">Washington Post</span> editorial board as movie critic (Dirty 'Game', 12/4/2010) is an embarrassment of riches for lovers of irony.<br /><br />The editorial reminds of the Andre Gide story about a man and his dog who go to the park everyday and engage in games of checkers. The dog has considered and patient checker strategies and thoughtfully moves his pieces around the board. A passerby is positively amazed at the skills of the dog and pauses to watch the game. He marvels at the dog and tells the owner so. The owner, scoffs and indignantly says "don't be too impressed, I've beaten the dog two out of three matches." <br /><br />The poor owner misses the point and so too does the <span style="font-style:italic;">Post</span>. The dog played checkers for crying out loud whether he won or lost isn't the point. We went to war is the point and one determinative reason was WMDs in Iraq. That was what? Bad intelligence? A lie? Does it matter? The dog played checkers.<br /><br />In going after Plame and Wilson's stories makes sure the spotlight is on them and not the fact that we went to war in Iraq based, at least in part, on a phony story. That's the only fact in the case of which we are certain. It was touching that the Post was concerned for the accuracy of the historical assessment of this story on behalf of President Bush.<br /><br />The decision to go to war was not made by Plame and Wilson. It was made by President Bush and history will no doubt show how mistaken his judgment was and how the consequences have been tragic for American soldiers, their families, innocent civilians and the US Treasury.<br /><br />Lastly, where does the <span style="font-style:italic;">Post</span> get their information for this scolding? From the people who look bad if Plame and Wilson were right? Why should these assertions made by the Post be believed? The only possible source for the information they cite is a source who will look very bad if Plame and Wilson's claims were true. Apparently the <span style="font-style:italic;">Post</span> has underestimated the problem of its own credibility in the matter. Many believe there was media complicity in the false story of WMDs which they all carried with little question --- like the sinking of the Maine (excuse for Spanish American War) or the Lusitania (excuse for WW I), the Gulf of Tonkin Maddox incident which it turns out never happened (excuse for Viet Nam) or the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand or any other absurd story falsely given the moral suasion to rationalize going to war. All of these stories were largely unchallenged and beaten like a drum by the media. <br /><br />We don't know who to believe because our institutions, including if not especially the media, have lost credibility and the faith and trust of the American people. Hopefully the historians will get that right. We should be pulling for that checker playing dog anyway.Michael F. Ford, Founding Director of the Center for the Study of the American Dreamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12763616333765541012noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1775722851532144481.post-15754153069560804322010-11-12T11:40:00.004-05:002010-11-12T11:51:53.020-05:00Election Day wrap-up and the State of the American Dream<meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"><meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 12"><meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 12"><link rel="File-List" href="file:///C:%5CUsers%5COwner%5CAppData%5CLocal%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml"><link rel="themeData" href="file:///C:%5CUsers%5COwner%5CAppData%5CLocal%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_themedata.thmx"><link rel="colorSchemeMapping" href="file:///C:%5CUsers%5COwner%5CAppData%5CLocal%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_colorschememapping.xml"><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> 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mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} </style> <![endif]--> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-size:100%;" >Interest in the American Dream heightened recently because the mid-term election was an opportunity for the American people to express their frustrations about this difficult economy. And express they did. But what did this election really say about the American Dream?<span style=""> </span>As it turns out, not much.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-size:100%;" >It is important to make the distinction between THE American Dream and individuals' American Dreams. While it is painfully true that many individual American Dreams are currently struggling because of the economy, THE American Dream itself is not in trouble. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-size:100%;" >When we recently surveyed Americans' definitions of the American Dream, it was primarily not about homeownership, or wealth accumulation or a good job. It was overwhelmingly and unmistakably about two things: freedom and opportunity. So while it is important to understand that some individual dreams are in trouble, it is also important to remember that the<b> freedom and opportunity to pursue them are not.</b><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-size:100%;" >Our survey revealed that Americans have not lost faith in the American Dream BUT they have lost faith in nearly all of the very institutions traditionally seen as the guardians of the Dream...all of them...be they in politics, government, business, religion, sports, and especially the mainstream media reporting all the bad news.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-size:100%;" > <b>But, despite everything, we still believe in ourselves. </b><span style="">In fact<b>, </b></span>67% of us are still confident that we can reach the Dream in our lifetime. This is essential to the American Dream for the very reason that it does not depend upon or wait for circumstances to change or someone else to create the future. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-size:100%;" >Inextricably linked to the ideas of freedom and opportunity is something else --- unspoken. Perhaps we take it for granted in our political, intellectual and capitalist marketplace today. Perhaps we forgot. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-size:100%;" > Freedom and opportunity require having no fear.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><i><u><span style="line-height: 115%;">The American Dream is fearless</span></u></i></span><span style="line-height: 115%;font-size:100%;" > -- unafraid of failure or suppression or doubt or criticism or ridicule or of claims of impossibility. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-size:100%;" >Our institutions need to be committed to upholding this fearlessness. This is where our public doubt lives... and it should, especially in today's politically partisan, fear-mongering world.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-size:100%;" >The American Dream relies on confident new investment-- not nostalgia, uncertainty, fear, and cutbacks at the time we need investment the most.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-size:100%;" ><span style=""> </span>George Bernard Shaw, who, as it turns out had little affection for the US, unintentionally gave a special meaning to the American Dream.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:100%;">He said that "the reasonable man sees the world as it is and adapts himself to it. The unreasonable man sees the world and expects it to adapt to him. Thus, all progress depends upon the unreasonable man."</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:100%;">The American Dream is defiantly the "unreasonable man."
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<br /><!--[endif]--></span>Michael F. Ford, Founding Director of the Center for the Study of the American Dreamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12763616333765541012noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1775722851532144481.post-49534169569637636732010-08-14T21:07:00.004-04:002010-08-16T17:33:47.087-04:00Perspective on War Costs ---Is It Worth It?<span style="font-size:85%;"></span><span style="font-size:85%;">Originally, the "War On Terror" was projected to cost no more than $50 billion and after being greeted as "liberators", the "cakewalk" would take no more than six months -- maybe a year.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">Nine years later it has cost more than $1.1 trillion and growing. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">In the face of severe economic difficulties at home. accumulation of mountains of debt, and questions about Defense Department spending excesses raised by non-partisan Defense Secretary Gates, financial perspective on the war is called for.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">Apart from the painful costs in life and limb suffered by our military forces and their families, basic costs must be held to an emotionally unencumbered cost/benefit analysis. For starters:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">1. The cost to date for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is over $1.1 trillion. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">* This is the equivalent of spending $1 million a day --- for 3,200 years.<br />* 3200 years ago Christ was not yet born and Moses was a newborn</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">floating down the Nile in a basket.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">2. Estimates are that there are 150 full time insurgent Taliban forces and we've spent $337.8 billion to date in Afghanistan.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">* That's $2.2 billion per full time Taliban insurgent. If we can't kill them with 150,000 troops maybe we should try to buy them off by giving each Taliban insurgent the same net worth as Baron Hilton. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">3. Americans have spent an average of $8,000 per taxpayer to support the wars.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">* The average Bush "middle class tax cut" for 4 out of 5 families was about $350.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">4. President Bush's much maligned TARP program is projected to cost about $110 billion. less than originally estimated, or about $800 per taxpayer (and some of that has already been paid back and more will be paid back).</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">* The government's attempt to bolster or "bail out" the economy (however you wish to catagorize it) is 10% of the cost of Iraq and Afghanistan.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">5. America is not at war.</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">Only the military and their families are at war.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">The troops are exhausted from a war that has already extended beyond WW II by three years. While philosophic, ideological and political discussions are indulged in at home, the troops are out of sight and sadly, out of the public mind. The troops are overextended and overlooked beyond bumper sticker sloganisms and their experience contrarily makes them more uncertain and less confident concerning their mission. In an extraordinarily unpatriotic fashion, we ignore the problems they face and the burdens they carry as if they were problem free, ever dependable robots. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">Their dependability is not at issue here.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">It is our dependability as thoughtful and respectful citizens that is at issue.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">* During the past year, active duty suicides and "high risk behavior" killed more soldiers than combat in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">*While there were a record number of 239 suicides among active duty and reservist soldiers, (74 of these were from drug overdoses). This number has tripled since 2001.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">* There were also an additional known 1,712 failed suicide attempts by active duty soldiers.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">*The rate of suicides by post conflict veterans aged 20-24 is twice the rate of their active duty brethren.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">* A recently issued US Army report indicated that one-third of the troops are taking at least one prescription drug and 14% are taking powerful pain killers. The report further indicates that "the force is becoming increasingly dependent on drugs, anti-depressants,amphetamines and narcotics."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">We know the costs. Can we afford it? Is it worth it?</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"></span>Michael F. Ford, Founding Director of the Center for the Study of the American Dreamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12763616333765541012noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1775722851532144481.post-36256478337349081222010-08-08T18:33:00.004-04:002010-08-08T23:17:13.690-04:00Socialism in America? You Ain't Just Whistlin DixieHave you heard rumblings of a counter tea party movement afoot in the land which calls the tea party "the bite the hand that feeds you caucus?" A rogue e-mail making the rounds called the movement: "free loading, progress-blocking, benefit grabbing,resource sucking, violent and hypocritical."<br /><br />Southern politicians in particular complain about BIG GOVERNMENT and TAXES because it resonates easily and conforms to the post civil war self-perception of that region as victims of northern conspiracies.<br /><br />However, as it turns out, in spite of their persistent anti-government rhetoric, Southern politicians are complety comfortable accepting the last line of Tennessee Williams' play, "<em>A Streetcar Named Desire</em>": "<strong><em>I have always depended on the kindness of strangers</em></strong>." Down South it has become habitual to do just that. Southerners get back a whole lot more than they give in taxes.<br /><br />America's wealth is indeed being redistributed -- from what the independent Tax Foundation calls the "giving states" of New York, New Jersey, New England, most of the northeast and California --- to the receiving states" consisting of all of the south and ironically, Alaska.<br /><br />For example, those poor socialists in New Jersey only get back 56 cents on the tax dollar. But for every tax dollar Mississippi sends to Washington they get back $2.02, more than doubling their money! That's a Madoff return paid by the "giving states". Same for Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, West Virginia, Rand Paul's Kentucky, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Virginia, and North Carolina. Then of course, there is Alaska.<br /><br /><strong>The South gets the re-distribution of federal tax money because it seems least capable of helping itself out, It has:</strong><br /><br />* The lowest per cap % of high school diplomas.<br /><br />* The fewest college degrees per capita.<br /><br />* The highest rates of adult illiteracy and often their illiteracy rate exceeds their unemployment rate. E.G. in Mississippi, adult illiteracy is 16% and unemployment is 11.5%. Illiteracy in Alabama is 15% and unemployment is 11%. These means that Southern states have may adults working who cannot read beyond the 5th grade level. THUS ---<br /><br />* The highest poverty rates and the lowest average household income in the nation.<br /><br />* The highest percentages of citizens without health insurance yet most likely to call health care reform "socialism."<br /><br />* The most unhealthy region in the nation, leading in obesity, smoking, hypertension, diabetes, cancer deaths per 100,000 while managing to excerise the least.<br /><br />* The most violent region in the country being a majority of the top 18 states states in deaths by firearms. (Louisiana - 19.5 firearm deaths per 100,000. Mississippi, 17.3 deaths per 100,000 etc. as oppposed to New York with 5.1 per 100,000 or Massachusetts with 3.1 per 100,000 etc.)<br /><br />* With 35% of the population, the South has created only 17% of the nation's patents over the last 25 years. California alone with 10% of the national population, has nearly 20% of the patents over the last 25 years.<br /><br />* Louisiana is a special welfare case having a long established dysfunctional dependence on the oil industry in its economy, its politics, in its winking willingness to debase the environment all combining to create an oil based modern plantation mentality. They attack the federal government on the national news everyday for being slow or for failing to act to "restore our way of life" after the BP disaster as if American taxpayers are morally obligated to maintain the oil plantation to which Louisianans' sold out long ago.<br /><br />Now some Southern public office holders and seekers from Tennessee to Texas are directly or indirectly talking about sucession and this has many others wondering if that is a threat or a promise.<br /><br />Redistribution of wealth? The South appears to be on the dole and things there have a way of never managing to get any better. Perhaps our Southern brethren should stand up for their outspoken beliefs and send the money back. Or perhaps they should consider jumping on the "Street Car Named Get Serious".Michael F. Ford, Founding Director of the Center for the Study of the American Dreamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12763616333765541012noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1775722851532144481.post-24990591999997681032010-07-19T09:27:00.002-04:002010-07-19T09:44:01.784-04:00Is American Capitalism Dead?In the life cycle of an individual investor, age impacts investment decisions big time. The older the investor, the greater the caution and safety and the less growth is sought. That makes sense for aging retirees or soon-to-be retirees. When it comes to a capitalist economy that invests like an old retiree, that's a different story--an end-of-the-road story.<br /><br />We are depending on the government to take care of just about everything even as we blame it for just about anything.<br /><br />Capitalism--no economy for old men.<br /><br />As the economy flounders, non-financial companies are sitting on $1.8 trillion in cash, which is a 25 percent greater cash reserve than existed at the start of the recession. Why don't they invest it in new job creation now?<br /><br />Credit-worthy small businesses can't get to financial company capital despite their bonuses paying stock resurrection. Why won't they lend?<br /><br />It will take years to receover the more than eight million jobs lost during the contraction. Remember, it took the entire decade of the '80s to create 1.3 million jobs for small businesses while Fortune 500 companies lost about two million jobs.<br /><br />Only innovation generates new jobs. Not financial engineering. Historically, the times of the greatest financial stress were also the times of the greatest innovation in American history.<br /><br />Nearly one third of American workers are in jobs that weren't listed in the Census Bureau's occupation codes in the 1960s.<br /><br />So, eight million jobs just to get even? It can be done. During the Clinton presidency there were an average of 240,000 new jobs per month powered by the Internet, the Information Age and wireless communication. There were more than 22 million new jobs created in those eight years.<br /><br />In the Bush years, three million new jobs were created, averaging 31,300 new jobs per month.<br /><br />Where will the new jobs come from?<br /><br />What Information Age equivalent is afoot? Name an industry or industries that can create 240,000 new jobs a month. Or 133,000 new net jobs a month, which is what it will take to recover in five years.<br /><br />There isn't such an industry, and as long as the best brains in the nation are working on non-productive financial and defense innovation, there won't be one for a long, long time.<br /><br />We have been engaged in the search for "certainly" in financial markets--not for new ideas, products and employment in the actual marketplace. If it were supposed to be certain, it would be called "entitlement" and not "investment."<br /><br />Certainty was what derivatives and CDOs supposedly gave--the certainly of algorithms. Instead, we got the proverbial "madness of crowds" all following the same algorithmic strategies at once.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">If taxes and government regulation are the determining factors n terms of successful business, then why bother with capitalism?</span><br /><br />Evidently, capital is waiting for daddy to tell them when they will be immune from risk and have guaranteed profits. In baseball, umpires have different strike zones and all a pitcher can ask is consistency. Obama isn't doing anything he didn't promise he would do before he was elected. Elections have consequences. There are no surprises. There is empirical consistency. Play some ball. Swing away and quite hoping for a walk.Michael F. Ford, Founding Director of the Center for the Study of the American Dreamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12763616333765541012noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1775722851532144481.post-82220153194264128522010-05-24T11:05:00.005-04:002010-07-07T09:42:31.313-04:00Advice to Newt Gingrich Upon Reading His Newest Book<span style="font-size:85%;">Dear Newt,</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><br />Relax man! Time wastes too quickly to be calling people who disagree with you "Socialists" and "Nazis." Is it worth it, Newt? </span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"></span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">Whenever you think it's the end of the world or before you punch out people who disagree with you, read this. Take a deep breath. Remember the next part of <span style="font-style: italic;">carpe diem</span> is that "tomorrow we die."</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"></span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><strong>Prelude</strong> (from Book 9) </span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">William Wordsworth</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"></span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">Twas in truth an hour</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">Of universal ferment: mildest men</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">Were agitated, and commotions, strife</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">Of passion and opinion, filled the walls</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">Of peaceful houses with unquiet sounds.</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">The soil of common life was, at that time,</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">Too hot to tred upon. Oft said I then,</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">And not then only, "What a mockery this</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">Of history. the past and that to come!</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"></span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">Now do I feel how all men are deceived,</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">Reading of nations and their works, in faith,</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">Faith given to vanity and emptiness;</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">Oh! laughter for the page that would reflect</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">To future times the face of what now is!</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">The land all swarmed with passion, like a plain</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">Devoured by locusts, --Carra, Gorsas, -- add</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">A hundred other names, forgotten now,</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">Nor to be heard of more; yet, they were powers,</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">Like earthquakes, shocks repeated day by day,</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">And felt through every nook of town and field.</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"></span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">Such was the state of things.</span>Michael F. Ford, Founding Director of the Center for the Study of the American Dreamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12763616333765541012noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1775722851532144481.post-89864399682367644822010-04-27T11:04:00.011-04:002010-04-29T17:23:05.301-04:00Lady Liberty to the World: 'Eines Tages Alles' or 'Just Kidding?'Immigrants have always been the driving force behind the American Dream. Xavier University's Institute for Politics and the American Dream <a href="http://www.xavier.edu/politics/documents/American-Dream-Presentation.pdf" target="_hplink">recent survey</a> verifies that the most fervent believers in the American Dream are immigrants, Latinos and African Americans.<br /><br />And, yet, American history is loaded with varying degrees of resistance to immigrants. It's; therefore, ironic that in America immigration could be stridently resisted by native-born citizens. For Americans, this is a paradox because everyone, apart from Native Americans, is connected to immigrants.<br /><br />Everyone.<br /><br />Ben Franklin was upset in 1749 because the German immigrant population that year nearly equaled Philadelphia's resident population. Franklin feared Philadelphia would become a "German colony."<br /><br />Abraham Lincoln, noting the emergence of the Know Nothing Party formed to stop Irish-Catholic immigration said, "We began by declaring that 'all men are created equal' and when the Know Nothings get control, it will read, 'all men are created equal except Negroes, foreigners and Catholics.'"<br /><br />And now in 2010 the Arizona legislature, spearheading an anti-immigration movement, has declared that police are required to stop "illegal-looking" persons on Arizona streets requiring them to produce "papers."<br /><br />A little-mentioned but disturbing part of the law is that private citizens may sue local governments or agencies "if they think the law is not being enforced," inspiring legalistic and costly vigilantism and citizens "reporting" anyone they have a mind to. If the police think the charge is groundless, the put-off citizen can still tie up courts and run up bills by suing the government.<br /><br />Maybe it's about the fear of losing jobs?<br /><br />No. As a 2010 study by the Fiscal Policy Institute shows, "immigration and growth go hand in hand, and areas with low levels of growth wind up with low levels of immigration but with highly skilled immigrants."<br /><br />So, if your community is teeming with immigrants: congratulations. It means you are in the midst of a boom.<br /><br />In Phoenix, the region with the highest economic growth rate in America over the last 20 years, the immigrant worker population is only 21 percent of the work force. In places such as New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, they have nearly twice Phoenix's immigrant workforce percentage and, yet, they have not needed to bring in the Gestapo.<br /><br />In fact, Phoenix actually contradicts the Fiscal Policy study because, in spite of the massive growth, it has a relatively small immigrant worker population.<br /><br />Areas with the lowest growth and lowest rates of immigration also have the highest skill, education and income in these areas. It is these immigrants who take the "good-paying jobs" because there aren't enough natives qualified to meet the needs of these low-growth, lower-education communities.<br /><br />If we look at places with very low immigrant workforces like Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Detroit (all under 10 percent), we discover that these immigrant groups are often equally or, more likely, better educated than the native population. In Pittsburgh for example, 63 percent of the native population has "some college" but among immigrants there 79 percent have attended college.<br /><br />Then there's "border security." But we're closing borders quite effectively in the largest sense. In the U.S., 25 percent of all scientists and engineers are foreign born as are 40 percent of all engineering professors and 50 percent of all PhDs in engineering, computer sciences and life sciences. Since 9/11 the number of foreigners with exceptional skills or advanced degrees allowed into this country has dropped 65 percent!<br /><br />In 2003, for the first time, America began importing more technology than it exported. According to Cornell's physics Nobel Prize winner, Robert Richardson, we have a serious scientific and engineering manpower problem. We rank 23rd in the world in the percentage of students who become engineers and scientists.<br /><br />Less than three years ago we ranked third.<br /><br />The anti-immigration movement in Arizona reeks of a police state that, ironically, could not be more intrusive in our personal lives while simultaneously expanding the role of government to levels seen only in totalitarian states.<br /><br />A dear friend of mine is a German-Jewish immigrant, and he came here with his parents and sister at the end of WWII--the parents having escaped Nazi Germany by the skin of their teeth. My friend was 6 years old when their ship arrived in New York Harbor. His mother took his hand and guided him to the main deck to see his new homeland. The dominant scene was not the New York skyline but the overwhelming and powerful presence of the Statue of Liberty.<br /><br />"What's that?" he shouted in German, breaking the awed silence of his fellow passengers.<br /><br />His mother leaned over and in German whispered, "Eines tages alles." Or, "In time, everything."<br /><br />Still true?<br /><br />Or do we have a new Know Nothing movement on our hands?<br /><br />Or worse, does the lady in the harbor now wear a sign that says: "Just kidding, suckers?"Michael F. Ford, Founding Director of the Center for the Study of the American Dreamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12763616333765541012noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1775722851532144481.post-848050240294495892010-04-06T15:50:00.007-04:002010-04-07T13:55:15.998-04:00Fear and Grieving on the Protest TrailThe recent State of the American Dream Survey by Xavier University's Institute for Politics and the American Dream shows a predictable overall decline of faith that the American Dream can be achieved in our time.<br /><div><br />While understandable in this major recession, underlying the numbers are indications that the dim view of the future is deeper than the recession.<br /><br />Certain numbers are harbingers of something new and possibly disturbing. For example,<br /><br />1. The core idea of a positive American Dream legacy is in trouble with 68% of us doubting the possibility of American Dream achievement for our descendants.<br /><br />2. 74% believe the world doesn't look up to America the way it used to.<br /><br />3. A majority of Americans (52%) now believe that the world looks elsewhere for the creation of the future.<br /><br />4. In the midst of otherwise overwhelming concern about jobs and the recession, only 6% consider "a good job" to be elemental to the American Dream. It's an assumption--not a dream.<br /><br />This is bigger than the recession.<br /><br />A positive outlook toward the future is a core aspect of the American Dream because it is based on opportunity. The tension in the country today is oddly disconnected from the future and its energy seems committed to extending the present. It's about maintenance, not improvement. It's not about aspiration; it's about the status quo. The American Dream is not being endangered by the new protest movement. It's being ignored.<br /><br />While Americans remain confident in themselves, there is deep disappointment in the institutions entrusted with the job of steering our future course. Institutional failures are seen across the board. Political institutions. Corporate and religious institutions as well.<br /><br />The strongest belief in the American Dream and in the future exists among immigrants, Latinos and African Americans. The American Dream always was and continues persistently to be created and re-created in the imaginations of people on the outside--outside the country or outside mainstream successes taken for granted by those whose families have achieved them.<br /><br />Amidst a very critical view of the American Dream's current status, there is a consistent disparity in outlook between non-whites and whites, immigrants and native-born Americans.<br /><br />African Americans, Latinos, and first- or second-generation immigrants view the American Dream more positively on nearly every measure in this survey than do white Americans. The part of our society still worst off in terms of social or economic measurements is the same group that is most positive about the American Dream.<br /><br />African Americans are the only demographic group where a majority believes that reaching the American Dream is easier than it was for their parents. More than 40% believe it will be even easier for their own children to reach.<br /><br />The United States has 305 million people today. Immigration will continue to change America's ethnic and racial makeup. The population is projected to reach 439 million in 2050.<br /><br /><em></em><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8lg14lW6WVjFIwX6lT5wJ8OeV7bG4eltq5C6qoLP3wfHv31Q8c658nZ2onKNA9gwdctAKzwtRSOWVFN7g0QxARyvgFd6uK8osCUc1vw_a6UZM3xVq2EIyZjzifsHMgKd139y8PpwBQg4/s1600/CensusChart.JPG"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 188px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8lg14lW6WVjFIwX6lT5wJ8OeV7bG4eltq5C6qoLP3wfHv31Q8c658nZ2onKNA9gwdctAKzwtRSOWVFN7g0QxARyvgFd6uK8osCUc1vw_a6UZM3xVq2EIyZjzifsHMgKd139y8PpwBQg4/s200/CensusChart.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5457453416496853362" border="0" /></a>In the division between the hopeful and the less hopeful, there is behavioral evidence from a social science point of view that something resembling "grief" is being played out in certain parts of the white community. The sense of encroachment by immigrants and non-whites is not uncommon, but the realization that minority status will soon be applicable to white America has, for some, a desperate finality to it. There is a concerning sense of loss of control and consequent fear.<br /><br />The stages of grief, usually connected with death, were identified by psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross:<br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;">*Denial<br />*Anger<br />*Bargaining<br />*Depression<br />*Acceptance<br /></div><br />The hopeful prospects seen in the Africa-American and Hispanic communities are partly consequent to the election of President Obama. Similarly, it is not a difficult step to symbolically link Obama's election to a sense of demise among certain parts of the white community. For these, the morning after Obama's election began a period of denial, which now quite obviously has moved to anger.<br /><br />Denial is the "birther" movement refusing to accept Obama's legitimacy fed by an underlying belief that their country has been stolen from them.<br /><br />Denial is the irrational refusal to accept reality--such as the passage of the healthcare law. At least 10 members of Congress are reporting threats of violence. Racial epithets and spitting on black Congressmen have been televised. These and other incidents are an angry consequence to passage of the healthcare law.<br /><br />Bargaining has yet to appear but acceptance, perhaps a long way off, is nonetheless inevitable. The question is how extensive and lasting will be the corrosive effects of denial and anger--particularly in the upcoming elections?<br /><em></em><br /><em></em><br /><br /><br /></div>Michael F. Ford, Founding Director of the Center for the Study of the American Dreamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12763616333765541012noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1775722851532144481.post-13705792941395197312010-03-16T14:13:00.004-04:002010-04-07T13:40:18.319-04:00What Happened To The White Picket Fence?<em></em>In the American Consumer Republic, the Xavier University for Politics and the American Dream's first national survey of the Dream found that the alleged sanctity of home ownership may be the creation of advertisers and the realtor lobby.<br /><br />This shift in the "ownership society" mentality may or may not be permanent, but for now and probably for years to come, it's likely to be bad for real estate developers, agents, home builders,, building materials, furniture and appliance manufacturers.<br /><br />Only 6% of Survey respondents made home ownership their first choice when asked: "what comes to mind --- not in terms of what anyone else believes the dream is --- but in terms of what you think the American Dream is." (Another 7% made it their second choice.)<br /><br /><strong><em>"Opportunity" was the first choice of 21% and for 14% it was the second choice. Not far behind were "freedom" and "family."</em></strong> (Of course there is nothing particularly "American" about "family." )<br /><br />On the housing market front, lenders are finding that the social stigma of walking away from mortgage obligations is becoming culturally acceptable and seen as smart in some cases. This moral elasticity would have mortified home owners in the past. Part of "making it" was not just owning a home, but also being able to afford it.<br /><br /><strong><em>As market watchers wait for housing numbers to improve to the peak levels 0f 2005, as if it were inevitably only a matter of time, someone should tell them that they have a better chance of Godot stopping by for dinner</em></strong>.<br /><br />To hear the gurus talk about the housing market and new construction gives the impression that the housing industry exists to create jobs and economic activity --- not houses. But this isn't a "build it and they will come proposition." Take a tour of Tokyo and see the number of buildings and other projects constructed unnecessarily that now remain virtually empty. It's reminiscent of old Soviet bloc make-work projects where the fruit of labor is being busy, not being productive economically or otherwise.<br /><br />Corroborating the Dream Survey, a recent article in US News, "Surviving the American Makeover," notes that:<br /><br />"America's consumer industrial complex has an arsenal of tools for prying money out of consumers. But they're based on the dated premise that material stuff represents success."<br /><br />Undeniably, advertising has influenced American Dream folklore and helped fashion the American tableaux in its clients' images. But the chances of an unvarnished assessment of the Dream is greatest in bad times like ours -- when people are most skeptical about the re-castings advertising makes possible.<br /><br />In these tough economic times, the Survey catches the perceived value of hard work at its peak because the rewards for it are directly connected to accomplishment and not luck or social position as they seem to be in our gilded ages.<br /><br />Sometimes advertisers seem angry at consumers for not spending in tough times. During the Depression, the consumer was portrayed as tight-fisted because of "unwarranted fear" or weakness rather than as unemployed or impoverished. Allstate uses a softened version of this today by appropriating FDR's "nothing to fear but fear itself" speech which is an indirect way of blaming the consumer for not spending -- as if the only constraints to a booming economy were psychological.<br /><br />In the Survey, the expression of concern about the recession and jobs was strong but not in connection with the Dream, as only 8% thought it was important to the dream.<br /><br /><strong><em>That's because it is not a dream to have a good job in America. It's an assumption --- upon which the launch of a personal Dream is predicated.</em></strong><br /><strong><em></em></strong><br />Hope for Dream attainment is declining along with America's view of political and corporate leadership.<br /><br />On the plus side, Americans are realizing that there's more to the Dream than stuff.Michael F. Ford, Founding Director of the Center for the Study of the American Dreamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12763616333765541012noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1775722851532144481.post-57735696055483538832010-03-14T20:35:00.005-04:002010-04-07T13:41:30.887-04:00How We See the Future" <strong><em>A majority now believes, after the end of the so-called American Century and victory in the Cold War, that the world is looking elsewhere in terms of future success or direction</em></strong>."<br /><br />You might expect that the American Dream would appear to be in trouble in the midst of the longest recession since the great Depression. However, the first State of the American Dream Survey from Xavier University's Institute for Politics and the American Dream indicates the problems perceived by Americans are <em>much deeper than this recession</em>.<br /><br /> To recover the 8.4 million jobs lost so far in this recession would already require creation of 175,000 new jobs every month for 48 consecutive months --- just to get even with December 2007.<br /><br /> The only time in US history when new job creation equaled 175,000 per month was in the 1990s when the Internet was commercialized and the world was first digitized, monies were transferred electronically, all glitz/no substance dot.coms grew like typhoid, cell phone usage and the stock market exploded and real estate blossomed at "Tulip Mania" multiples.<br /><br /> Here's the point amplified by the Dream Survey.<br /><br /> The American people know that there is no new industry or set of industries on the horizon capable of creating 175,000 American jobs per month in the global economy.<br /><br /> This can only come from beyond the horizon --- in currently UNKNOWN industries.<br /><br /> Let's face it, 76% of the jobs in America's economy are service jobs. This is the highest such percentage in the developed world. Service jobs are primarily about maintenance, not growth. US tech firms have been moving to emerging markets because they can get the same work at 1/5th the cost.<br /><br /> Technology as we know it cannot save the day, because it relies on newer and cheaper iterations of increasingly mature industries and worn technologies. This may well lead to productivity increases, but that creates profits, not jobs. As legendary Wall Streeter Leon Levy writes, "<em>one point of productivity eliminates about 1.3 million jobs</em>." As a point of context, it took the entire decade of the 1980s to create 1.3 million jobs.<br /><br /> For the first time in 100 years, a majority of Americans doubt that the US will create the future.<br /><br /> 75% of us "don't think the rest of the world looks up to America and our society the way it used to. This has nothing to do with the recession but it has a lot to do with doubting the achievement of the dream for next generations.<br /><br /> Americans have not lost confidence in themselves. Nearly two-thirds still see themselves as achieving the Dream. It's their kids and grandkids they're worried about.<br /><br /> But they have lost confidence and have little faith in the stable of leaders in the political and corporate world. There is no political advantage here for anyone. Americans know that the structural changes in this global economy give no credit for past performances.<br /><br /> Perhaps we are inured to the "legacy problem." America's traditional confidence that each generation's lot will improve over the last has eroded, and we seem to be getting used to it.<br /><br /> What will happen? What can happen is what happened in 1961 when the US emerged from the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union; when the Cold War peaked. It was the year when the Berlin Wall was constructed. Tension between the US and Soviet Russia was the central global fact.<br /><br /> Also in 1961, Soviet Premier Khrushchev promised at the 22nd Communist Party Congress that within 20 years the Soviets would outproduce America in all of the major industrial sectors --- coal, steel, cement, fertilizer, tractors etc.<br /><br /> And they did too.<br /><br /> This would have been a major achievement if it had been 1951 and not 1981. The US had moved on with an explosion of imagination and invention, and created a new technological world to which the rest of the world had to conform.<br /><br /> The American people want to believe that we still possess the daring-do leadership and burning inventiveness to do it again --- but they doubt it right now. Who could blame them when we look around at political warriors engaged in Pyrrhic warfare and timid corporate leaders concerned for the next quarter not the next decade.<br /><br /> Inventing the future is the Dream's signature because that is what freedom and opportunity uniquely allow --- but cannot guarantee.Michael F. Ford, Founding Director of the Center for the Study of the American Dreamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12763616333765541012noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1775722851532144481.post-89415583684189410462010-02-11T09:53:00.003-05:002010-02-11T10:37:59.531-05:00Pouting as a National Political Strategy?While our politics is quite nasty and unproductive right now, we would be wrong to think it is an unprecedented moment for small-minded political crankiness.<br /><br />It's not.<br /><br />But this doesn't make explaining it any easier. I tried stepping back from the maelstrom and looked for a lead in science at things like Godel's "Incompleteness Theorem" and Heisenberg's "Uncertainty Principle," but the most accessible scientific thing I could find was some graffiti in a pancake house bathroom in Princeton that said, "Einstein peed here." Then below that it said, "Heisenberg MAY have peed here." That didn't help either.<br /><br />Finally, going through old government books I rediscovered John C. Calhoun's plan for "Concurrent Majorities." The essence of the concurrent doctrine is that in order to pass law, Congress needed a super majority that consisted of a majority of the majority party and a majority of the minority party.<br /><br />This raises an important question: What's the point of elections? More important, what's the purpose of representative government?<br /><br />Nonetheless, the idea of concurrent majorities is always going to find a sympathetic ear from the party in the minority, whether is't the Democrats or the Republicans. While it would perhaps please the minority party, it didn't find support outside Calhoun's South Carolina back then. So, South Carolina introduced the Ordinance of Nullification that stipulated that states could decide what national laws would apply to them and which wouldn't. Again, this may well appeal today in some places; however, it simply failed to become law.<br /><br />So, America has replaced the Ordinance of Nullification with the filibuster. The advantage of the filibuster is that the support of a state or congressional majority is unnecessary for bringing the Congress to a dead halt. It requires a super majority (60 votsd today--not as tough as Calhoun's plan) to stop a filibuster. The odds of many Democrats agreeing on anything is embarrassingly small. So the minority has decided to use the threat of the filibuster to stop or slow virtually every initiative of consequence before the Congress. It's their right and may be quite a clever technique. But as such, it also runs the risk of confirming that the only place in America where pouting is protected by law is the U.S. Senate.<br /><br />That's what a filibuster is about most of the time. It is an honored technique because of Jimmy Stewart's "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington." And, yes, there have been some fine filibusters in life and in the movies.<br /><br />But the filibuster is the strategy of a spoiled child pouting and threatening to stop anything and everything from happening in Washington because on a straight-up vote they would lose. A filibuster is like Little Lord Fauntleroy holding his breath as a punishment to an adult. As we all know this can only be a very short-term victory, especially if done all the time because one will eventually implode into what is likely to become a dishonorable splat on the Senate floor and on our TV and computer screens.<br /><br />Why Democrats are so afraid of the filibuster threat is amazing. Even without a filibuster-proof Senate, they still have a bigger majority than President Bush had.<br /><br />To get simple up or down votes the old-fashioned way, the first thing to do is to call their bluff. Whomever it is. Let them filibuster their brains out. The second thing is to see who tires of the game first, the parched senators of the American people who eventually demand that Little Lord Fauntleroy get over himself.<br /><br />The mid-term elections typically go in favor of the "out" party and it's going strongly in that direction now. Why would the minority party risk that win by purposefully manifesting petulance and holding its breath?<br /><br /><span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: "Georgia","serif";"></span>Michael F. Ford, Founding Director of the Center for the Study of the American Dreamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12763616333765541012noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1775722851532144481.post-21335591101085866622010-02-10T10:47:00.003-05:002010-03-03T14:41:41.679-05:00New Biographies of Ayn Rand Resurrect "Selfishness" as a Courageous Philosophical PropositionThere are two new biographies of Alissa Rosenbaum, aka Ayn Rand, and there is something magnetically car accidental about them and about her, even for someone who thinks selfishness is not a virtue. We can't help but rubberneck her life simply from amazement. Rand beats reality TV because, whether or not you like her, she mattered.<br /><br />A recent survey sponsored by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Monday Club discovered that after the Bible, Rand's work had the greatest impact on the live of those surveyed. She still sells about 300,000 books a year--best-seller proportions--long after her death.<br /><br />I have read all her books (and three of her biographies) in the same way I watch right-wing commentators, fanatical religious preachers, and CNBC "Don't Regulate Me" financial news. I listen from time to time to country music and now and then even watch a soap opera or "The View." They are part of the culture and I feel the obligation to understand it and that effort alone would be condemned by Rand and certainly her intellectual precursor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, because it reflects an interest in what other people thing. Such things were a waste of time of Rand and Emerson because what others think, do or need is a waste; it "scatters and withdraws such force from your life...it loses your time...," as Emerson wrote in <span style="font-style: italic;">Self-Reliance. </span>Good works are like penances and we are made invalids by them and they are "apologies for living in the world."<br /><br />I like and admire Rand at a distance. She learned plotting by studying the work of Victor Hugo and this was a good choice because he moves a complex story well and satisfies the reading needs of the non-experts. Despite the opportunity, she did little for women's rights--quite the opposite in fact, as she believed woman's role was to serve men and she had some convoluted sexual ideas that played out in her fiction and in her real life. Her romantic models in <span style="font-style: italic;">The</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">Fountainhead</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Atlas Shrugged</span> are for submissive women and manly, dominant, cold and rough men. That's a branch of thinking part from philosophy.<br /><br />There is something absolutely compelling and alluring about Rand that is unavoidable to anyone who looks into the matter. You don't have to like or agree with her to be amazed at her unbending will, fierce confidence, and marketing skill to invent herself against the bad odds presented by a nation that imagines itself to be Christian. For religious people, especially Christians, she eliminates the thorny problem of sin because she believes in neither God nor the Golden Rule.<br /><br />However, in a capitalist society she remains and icon. She made herself up and succeeded in making selfishness, cloaked in individualism and objectivism to be sensible, courageous and honest. The despised idea of anything collectives is at the heart of her absolutely dire opposition to Marxism (she's an immigrant from Soviet Russia) or any collective mentality to include church life. It is perhaps ironic that she named her philosophy "objectivism" considering that in the writings of Max, communism was to be an answer to the objectification of workers as capitalism eliminated their creativity and individuality. Marx believed that man was a creative being and that capitalism squashed this instinct--or need--into a mashed together pea soub combining man with his labor.<br /><br />I do think Rand was courageious and honest. Her task was made easier perhaps because of her committed atheism. It was this atheism, along with her well-known and extended adultery that limited her p9olitical connection with her contemporary conservatives (especially William Buckley and his religious friends) who wanted to adore her. Adultery today is public and increasingly commonplace among our leaders, most ironically among right-wing Christian leaders in the Congress and in the churches.<br /><br />In the end it appears that Rand's philosophy was not a philosophy at all but an entrepreneurial marketing tool for the institution of herself while giving her fancs and excuse for guilt-free self-centeredness. It's OK. Remember you're courageous and bold and the only person on earth.<br /><br />These are both fine biographies (although I much prefer the one by Anne Heller) and are wroth rading in order to understand her intellectual resurgence that is periodic and tracks precisley with peiords of conservative political retrenchment.<br /><br />Reading her intellectual and spiritual anti-matter predecessor, Emerson, is less entertaining for sure and I'd rather have dinner with Rand. I think she would have preferred Emerson's America of the mid-19th century when public financial regulation was essentially non-existent.<br /><br />Emerson, the found of Transendentalsm, was described by Herman Melville after their 1849 meeting as a man who had a "defect in the region of the heart" and a "self conceit so intensely intelectual that at first on hesitates to call it by its right name." Such a man would be hampered, would he not, b the care of the world? At least Rand can be seen as a living reaction against a Soviet world she new too well. It seems, though, that the things she hated were a natural response in the extreme, to the very things she advocated.Michael F. Ford, Founding Director of the Center for the Study of the American Dreamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12763616333765541012noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1775722851532144481.post-50031290551897468462010-02-10T09:17:00.002-05:002010-02-10T09:54:03.165-05:00The Pope's DilemmaIn politics, if a story runs continuously for three or more days, it has legs. If it's a bad story then whatever you've done to kill it has failed and it gains an independent life as it's released into the ether where it freely metastasizes.<br /><br />Right now, Pope Benedict has such a story on his hands in the case of his recent revocation of the excommunication of Richard Williamson, a priest who went rogue long ago.<br /><br />If you were the Pope's political consultant in this, the City of Man, what would you advise him to do in this now decidedly public matter?<br /><br />If you're worth your salt, you have to be brutally honest with him in devising a public strategy. You can't b an ego cozy or adoring sycophant trying to protect him from or denying the relevance of public criticism. You have to help him understand the criticism and figure out how to most effectively absorb and then deal with it. You must be able to look in the eye and say: "On this matter, Your Holiness, you have not spoken <span style="font-style: italic;">ex cathedra,</span> but <span style="font-style: italic;">ex ignorare.</span><br /><br />Oh, and don't forget that just as it is with presidents, governors and mayors, a staunch cadre of loyal insiders are ever present and dedicated to protecting their own interests ad power in their relationship with the Boss. This means they will do anything to discredit you, the outsider, who doesn't understand the way things really work and who doesn't understand that they are different from everyone else.<br /><br />Your Brief:<br /><br />1. Richard Williamson, and Englishman and current resident of Argentina, is a 1971 Roman Catholic convert from Anglicanism who was ordained a Catholic priest in 1976. In 1988, he was excommunicated because he represented himself as a bishop in direct and willful contravention of a papal edict against it. He was excommunicated for violation of Canon Law for that act. This excommunication has now been reversed.<br /><br />2. Much of the world has the impression that Williamson was excommunicated for his Holocaust denials and an additional string of ultra right-wing ideological pronouncements. This impression has complicated the public reaction to the revocation of the excommunication because it seems to them he had been cut off from the Church for those actions, not a procedural canonical violation. It, therefore, seems to the public that he has been fortiven his Holocaust denials and asociated views.<br /><br />3. Among his publicly pronounced and recorded views are these samples:<br /><br /><ul><li>During a 1989 speaking tour of Canada he stated that Jews, the "enemies of Christ," fabricated the Holocaust as part of a Zionist scheme to found the state of Israel. </li><li>He called the claim that six million Jews were murdered by the Nazi regime another fabrication and stated that no Jews were gassed to death in concentration camps. He gussied up this claim by saying that "no more than 200,000-300,000 died in the camps and that none of these were gassed." Somehow, murdering <span style="font-style: italic;">only </span>300,000 Jews by means other than asphyxiation was OK?</li><li>He blamed Israel for the 1991 Gulf War and called it another consequence of their "false Messianic vocation of Jewish world domination."</li><li>He condemned the film, "The Sound of Music," for "putting friendliness and fun ahead of authority and rules," which is to say ahead of the authority and rules of Nazism!</li><li>Since "modern man does not want women to do what God wants them to do, namely have children, she takes her revenge by invading all kinds of things God intended only men to do." For example, women should not attend universities or seek formal education of any kind, and "if you want to stop abortion, do it by example. Women should never wear trousers or shorts."</li><li>Women make poorly focused and incompetent lawyers because before going into court they would look in a mirror to check their hair and, if they did not do so, they would make poorly focused and incompetent women. Williamson holds in common with Islamic terrorists' views on the primacy of God in civic matters, misogynistic views of women, irrational resistance to "modernity" as if it could be prevented by opposing it, and virulent anti-Semitism.</li></ul>4. You are a German pope and greater sensitivity to the Holocaust is particularly expected of you, who have been forgiven for serving in the Hitler Youth because you were conscripted into it as a boy. You are the first German pope in 500 years and your action, on one hand, and lack of action, on the other, has caused the most horrific response among not just the worldwide Jewish community and concerned Catholics everywhere but, in particular, among the citizens of your homeland. Germany's Chancellor Merkel has rebuked your lifting of Williamson's excommunication, saying that the Vatican has "given the impression that Holocaust denial might be tolerated." As you know, Germany is the only country in the world where it is a civil crime to deny the Holocaust and, for that reason, a public prosecution of Richard Williamson for Holocaust denial is being prepared consequent to statements he made in Germany. Some theological historians hold the view that Williamson is "not a heretic, he's just a liar."<br /><br />This may be canonically accurate, but in the City of Man, perception equals truth and you and counselors are on the wrong side of perception on this one. While the world prosecuted and denounced Nazis and their sympathizers for crimes against humanity, the Church seem stuck with a morally indefensible position wherein they excommunicate and then forgive a mere violation of Church law but seem unaware of the big picture--crimes against humanity.Michael F. Ford, Founding Director of the Center for the Study of the American Dreamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12763616333765541012noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1775722851532144481.post-50803569220881320642009-12-04T11:32:00.006-05:002009-12-04T11:57:00.303-05:00How we (could have) won in VietnamThe cover story of <span style="font-style: italic;">Newsweek</span> (11/16/09) suggest that if we had stuck to our guns, committed more troops and had more patience we "could have won in Vietnam." The underlying purpose of this piece was to suggest that we could win now in Afghanistan if we stick to it. That's great news, I guess.<br /><br />If only...<br /><br />How would things be different today if we had <span style="font-style: italic;">not</span> lost Vietnam anyway?<br /><br />Vietnam is a trading partner and part of the global fee markets surge. They are a market for U.S. goods and we for theirs. Vietnam is a member of the WTO and they have a seat on the UN Security Council. We have a negative trade balance with Vietnam. We export to them an annual average of about $2.5 billion in goods and services. They export to us an average of $10 billion a year, up 258 percent in the last four years. Would that be different today if we stuck it out in Vietnam? Would the trade imbalance be even greater, or what?<br /><br />Nam is a tourist attraction for Americans. We love Vietnamese food.<br /><br />Soviet communism collapsed without the help of Vietnam's victory over the greatest military force in the world.<br /><br />But Vietnam remains a communist government!<br /><br />We would have won nothing we didn't get by losing. That's the truth of it.<br /><br />We probably save ourselves some money when you think about what we would have needed to spend to prop up an artificial "democracy" rather than the self-determined government they have today with all its lack of human rights and its corruption.<br /><br />But look at what we lost. We lost 60,000 American troops, many more physically and psychologically wounded for life, which created a boon for the homeless industry here at home.<br /><br />Twenty-three percent of America's homeless population is composed of veterans, almost half of those from the Vietnam War. Eighty-nine percent were honorably discharged and two-thirds of them served three or more years. For recent service veterans, unemployment is 11.2 percent, which is 4 percent higher than the similar age group in the general population.<br /><br />So, when President Obama called for 30,000 new American troops (at a cost of $1 million a year <span style="font-style: italic;">each</span>) what does that mean?<br /><br />It means that among those who make it back, about 3,500 of them will not be able to find work and a number will be homeless and troubled by alcohol, drugs and mental problems.<br /><br />The President was sincere and moving in his call to essentially support the reissue of the Busy policy, but there are two things I don't understand here. After 9 years of war:<br /><br /><ul><li>What leads us to believe that terrorists train and recruit only in Afghanistan as opposed to, say, Tampa, FL, or London or in Somalia? It's as if we believe that if you "win" in Afghanistan and that country suddenly becomes a full-fledged, uncorrupted, democratic republic with a capitalist economy relying on something other than exporting heroin (fat chance), terrorism will be defeated because that's the only place to train terrorists? Terrorists don't wear uniforms and they don't have a home field. Terrorists are like roaches, they are impossibly durable and they adapt to a nomadic life on the move according to their needs. They live on hate, and that's some mighty good eatin' in the Middle East.<br /></li></ul><ul><li>There will now be 100,000 American troops plus NATO troops and an unreliable (in every sense of the word) number of crack Afghani troops. And when I say "crack" I mean the kind you smoke, not the kind you're proud of. <span style="font-weight: bold;">All this firepower (about 200,000 all told) is assembled to defeat the awesome Taliban whose monumentally scary fighting force numbers about 10,000!</span></li></ul>This 200,000 to 10,000 sound like a fair fight, right? It's worth the economic and the personal cost, right? Right? Sure, right after we get all terrorists to agree to go to Afghanistan so we can kill them.<br /><br />Look, we've launched unmanned intelligence-gathering drones with regular and infrared cameras from German to survey Afghanistan for 24-hour periods, sent all the pictures to Washington in flight and returned the drone back to Germany unharmed. If we have to do something in Afghanistan, then I support VP Biden's call for drones and Special Forces. If you can find Taliban miles above the earth, what do you need 100,00 guys for? If you find them, use Special Forces to close the deal. You know the Taliban will know where our guys are.Michael F. Ford, Founding Director of the Center for the Study of the American Dreamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12763616333765541012noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1775722851532144481.post-38791525656308698582009-11-24T15:09:00.003-05:002009-11-24T15:23:30.464-05:00Religion and Politics – Part 1Evangelicals believe the idea of “a wall of separation” between Church and State is a product of liberal imagination because no such thing is even mentioned in the Constitution.<br /><br />Neither is God.<br /><br />Were the Founders anti-God? Of course not. But to them, God was a private matter, thus the private practice of religion is what is protected by the Constitution. As renowned Catholic historian Garry Wills wrote: “The American Republic is the first and only secularly based government in world history.” The legitimacy of the nation rests in the will of the people not “God’s will.”<br /><br />Rewriting American history from the “Christian nation” point of view leans heavily on the Puritan era. Every schoolchild is taught that the Puritans came to the New World to escape religious persecution. The persecution they escaped however was persecution by other Christians (the state religion) not godless heathens.<br /><br />Revisionist history implies that the Puritan mission in the New Canaan was to create a new religious freedom however this manifestly was not the case.<br /><br />The Puritans did establish a pre-American Christian state marked by persecution inside and outside their own community (e.g. the Salem Witch Trials, Indians, Quakers, Catholics.) Colonial citizens were taxed to support the church in 11 of the 13 original colonies and there was a religious “test” for holding public office. In many cases the test was also applied to voting rights. Delaware required that public officials take an oath swearing support for “faith in God the Father, and Jesus Christ His Son and in the Holy Ghost, one God blessed and forevermore.” Pennsylvania required officeholders to be Protestants who not only believed in God, but also in the “divine inspiration of the Old and the New Testaments.” Only New York and Virginia excluded the religious test. The Virginia Constitution, under the strong influence of Jefferson, Madison, Mason, Patrick Henry and Washington, banned the “religious test” and became the model for the US Constitution. The New York Constitution went further:<br /><blockquote style="font-style: italic;"><br />Guard against that spiritual oppression and intolerance wherewith bigotry and ambition of the weak and wicked priests and princes have scourged mankind.</blockquote><br />Fundamentalists like David Limbaugh today insist “that America was founded as a Christian polity which persisted until subverted by a cabal of 20th Century liberals and freethinkers who replaced it with a ‘un-American’ secular state.” Just nonsense. There was no America until 1789, long after the Puritans stopped burning “witches” and cutting off Quaker ears.<br /><br />The Founders feared tyranny of all kinds, including religious tyranny to which the Puritans showed an easy propensity. As Madison wrote in Federalist Paper #10:<br /><br /><blockquote style="font-style: italic;">A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points…an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power…have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good. </blockquote><br />In the bitter 1800 presidential campaign, Christian extremists did great personal damage to Thomas Jefferson. In an anonymous piece written for the <span style="font-style: italic;">New England Palladium</span>:<br /><br /><blockquote style="font-style: italic;">Should the infidel Jefferson be elected to the Presidency, the seal of death is at that moment set on our whole religion; our churches will be prostrated and some infamous prostitute under the name of Reason will preside in the sanctuary now devoted to the worship of the Most High.</blockquote><br />The religionists believed Jefferson’s devotion to the principles of reason showed “disrespect Jefferson won the election of 1800 in a tie breaking vote cast in the US House of Representatives but the damage caused to his reputation by the un-Christian Christian campaign was long lasting. FDR put Jefferson on a US Postal stamp, then the nickel, and finally, the Jefferson Memorial in 1943. It took 125 years after his death.<br /><br />Because “God was ignored in America’s founding document” campaigns to “fix” this were launched six times over the next 82 years. The first campaign for the “God” amendment to the US Constitution called for a Constitutional Amendment to acknowledge “the rulership of Jesus Christ and the supremacy of the divine law.” The Christian Amendment, in various forms, was pushed with major campaigns in 1864, 1874, 1894, 1910, 1945, and 1954. The attempt to de-secularize the Constitution failed every time it was tried.<br /><br />Religious tolerance is typically not found in religions themselves. As Will Durant wrote in “The Age of Faith,” “Intolerance is the natural concomitant of strong faith; tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty, certainty is murderous.”<br /><br />Facts may be ignored or re-shaped in the interest of a religious political message. For example, Newt Gingrich manipulated the facts in his latest presidential campaign book “Winning the Future,” which includes a DC walking tour for Christians. In a classic misdirection, he cites a Jefferson quote engraved around the rotunda in the Jefferson Memorial. “I have sworn on the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” This is falsely presented by Gingrich as an example of Jefferson’s support of Christianity in government just as it was once used to rationalize racial segregation. However, the quote is from a letter Jefferson wrote to Benjamin Rush complaining precisely about the forces of organized religion and the clergy who tried to destroy him in 1800.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"></span><blockquote><span style="font-style: italic;">They (the clergy) believe that any portion of power confided to me will be exerted in opposition to their schemes and they believe rightly: for I have sworn on the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny (i.e. including religious tyranny) over the mind of man. But that is all they have to fear from me; and enough too in their opinion.</span></blockquote><br />The Constitutional Convention, after great deliberation, abandoned the Christian state model and the states agreed with them and ratified the secular Republic. The religious right is trying to overturn that vote today through propaganda because they have never had the votes to do it with the truth.Michael F. Ford, Founding Director of the Center for the Study of the American Dreamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12763616333765541012noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1775722851532144481.post-14013338195703456072009-11-12T13:15:00.002-05:002009-11-17T11:18:43.573-05:00Veteran’s DayHeartfelt thanks and respect to all of our veterans, past and present.<br /><br />Less can be said the jingoistic judgments of who send the troops into harms way and the rest of us who stand by and watch it happen as if we were watching the Weather Channel.<br /><br />The Class of 2010 has lived with the “War on Terror” since they were in seventh grade. Now we will be asking them to go and fight. It’s ironic that as we pay homage to our war dead and wounded, the urgent issue now is whether to send an additional 40,000 troops to Afghanistan.<br /><br />This is not a political decision. Take it and the entire question of Wars on Terror out of politics and emotion. Place it into the barest of government questions. What is the greater good?<br /><br />Over the centuries, Afghanistan has been invaded, occupied and given up by the Persians, the Greeks, the Arabs, the Mongols, the British and the Russians. And now, it’s America’s turn to prove history wrong for the first time again.<br /><br />In the last two weeks I had opportunities to speak privately with a US Senator who just returned from Afghanistan and who sits on the Intelligence Committee. As well, I spent more extensive time with the retired US General who headed security in Afghanistan.<br /><br />In unconnected conversations they both said to me two things almost word for word.<br /><br />“We’re just blowing up rocks.”<br /><br />“How can we ask Americans to sacrifice for a corrupt regime?”<br /><br />H.P Lovecraft (1890-1937) “the most important American writer of weird fiction since Poe” said that “the most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” Ironies and contradictions abound within us, as if our psyche were an ocean liner with guests carefully scheduled so as to never run into each other.<br /><br />Who is the enemy in Afghanistan? The Taliban or is it the War on Drugs opium trade which ends up as heroin on US streets? Opium accounts for about 50% of Afghanistan’s GNP.<br /><br />How is that battle for hearts and minds going? Our soldiers are handing out candy to kids while we fight to prop up a blatantly corrupt and abusive political system just because it is not the Taliban. At the same time we are trying to destroy 50% of the Afghan GDP. They gotta love us.<br /><br />The war on terrorism is undeclared in the sense that there is no one to declare it against and the funding for it is “off the books,” as if it were free to wage or that the debts we pass on here are much less burdensome than the cost of say a national health care program.<br /><br />MATERIAL COST<br /><br />The fight over health care reform includes the stubborn issue of cost. Many Americans compartmentalize health care into a financial deficit problem while such a view is ignored when it comes to these wars. The “War on Terror” already costs Americans in economic terms alone, more than the projected costs of the most extravagant health care proposals. If they cost the same and you can’t afford both, how would you decide? Is our national health unconnected to our physical and economic security?<br /><br />Regarding the national economic stimulus package it ‘s disconcerting to some that adding or retaining a job is estimated to be a one-time cost of $235,000 per job even though every dollar of that money is being invested one way or another in the American economy. It seems less alarming than the $1-million-per-soldier cost, per year in Afghanistan alone. These costs were calculated in connection with adding 40,000 new troops in Afghanistan. Is that productive? The question is not about 40,000 troops or a compromise number of some kind. It’s about whether we should be there at all given the other priorities we face.<br /><br />Of course estimating costs for a war with a non-existent state, a non-standing army, a geographically indeterminate and an unknown enemy is difficult to be sure. In inflation adjusted dollars, Viet Nam cost about $400 billion to lose. It would cost the US almost $200 billion just to support the proposed 40,000 troops over the next ten years.<br /><br />Another ten years of this war on terror at the current run rate will reach up to $2 trillion. It cost $2 trillion in inflation adjusted dollars to defeat Hitler, Tojo and Mussolini in half the time we have already spent on the “War on Terror.”<br /><br />What conviction have we that the war on terror will ever end? Or that it will not spread to Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Iran or Somalia or Florida or Fort Hood?<br /><br />HOW DO WE DEFINE “VICTORY” IN THE WAR ON TERROR?<br /><br />If we cannot answer that then not only can we never estimate the real cost but we can never win. Do all terrorists need to come forward and surrender? Do we win when everyone likes us?<br /><br />A JUST WAR?<br /><br />For those of you who were in seventh grade when the war on terror was sold to the American public, you should know that an actual rationale offered was St. Augustine’s calculus of a “just war.” The absurdity of this application is immediately clear on the pivotal matter of “proportionality.” We have sent the best soldiers in the world in superior numbers, with the best training and technology in world history to fight a “war” with mosquitoes and to bomb rocks.<br /><br />There are good reasons to make war decisions unemotionally and in the context of the greater good. Offering up American lives, limbs and public treasure in Afghanistan to make political points is what Spinoza called fighting:<br /><br />“… as we would for salvation and will not think it is shameful, but a most honorable achievement, to give their life and blood that a man may have a ground for boasting.”<br /><br />NO MORE TROOPS. GET OUT!Michael F. Ford, Founding Director of the Center for the Study of the American Dreamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12763616333765541012noreply@blogger.com0