I don’t agree with a lot of what I read in Mother Jones, being as I am somewhere to the right of Karl Marx. Occasionally, however, they make a good point, and I often find it lurking in the writings of Adam Weinstein as he writes on security issues.

While I think Weinstein oversimplifies aplenty in this article, I’m mostly with him when he writes:

Is the military in a bad way when it comes to staying up-to-date? Not really. But is it paying through the nose for what it gets nowadays? Absolutely. Perhaps if congressional conservatives and generals attacked military contractors the way they attack defense-budget hawks, they could afford their guns and butter.

The problem with defense procurement is that it is the single largest specimen of a larger species, the uncontrollable government budget. The problem, however, is not defense: it is self-perpetuating bureaucracies and unkillable programs, brought to you by careerist officers in the Pentagon and pork-barrel rollers on Capitol Hill.

It is time for us to start slashing the fat in the government. Let’s begin by killing the Humvee, the F-35, the F-22, the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, and the Littoral Combat Ship.

In a retrospective on the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, a chorus of scholars and writers has chimed in at the National Archives to consider the legacy of the Man from Hyde Park.

Much of what was written was laudatory, some was panegyric, but one thoughtful quote by Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter was worthy of repeating:

Today we live in another conservative era, but Roosevelt’s legacy is in a new place. While it would be an exaggeration to call FDR fashionable, liberals are looking to the past as a source of renewal for today’s political battles. And conservatives are finding that much of what Roosevelt wrought is permanent. When government does not respond to Americans who need help, as Bush found after Katrina, the President pays a steep price. In that sense, FDR is now part of the DNA of America.

We can have ideological arguments about the FDR’s policies, and I was a strong supporter of Ronald Reagan’s efforts to dismantle the runaway excesses of both the New Deal and the Great Society. But it is essential to recognize that the majority of Americans has no desire to yank the country back to the 1890s or 1920s.

To give but one example: whatever Rick Perry‘s virtues, it would be fair to say that he would have been unelectable in a general election with a platform that sought to end Social Security and demolish what remains of the New Deal. Even Ike, a mere seven years after FDR’s death, acknowledged that there were chunks of the New Deal that were simply part of the American landscape.

That acknowledgement, however, should not be interpreted as an endorsement of everything that is done in the name of those policies FDR put into place. Excesses lurk in every corner, and the price of government involvement is eternal vigilance, lest scandals like the Long Island Rail Road disability claims fraud expand to engulf our tax dollars.

Related articles

• The Day FDR Died: His Legacy Now (themoderatevoice.com)
• FDR on FDIC (openmarket.org)

WASHINGTON (July 1, 2011) Official portrait of Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta. (Dept. of Defense photo/Released) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Report: Defense Secretary Panetta Defends $860,000 Cost for Weekend Trips Home | CNSNews.com.

Leon Panetta is being called to task for racking up US$860,000 in personal travel costs to his home in California since becoming Secretary of Defense.

To me the issue is not whether he should have flown commercial (probably not – he is in the chain of command) or whether this will make a dent in the DoD budget (absolutely not.) Rather, the issue is that when you lead an organization with a budget that is the largest single line item in any government on the planet, every penny you spend sends a message. When you spend the people’s money like this, you are telling every civilian, officer, and enlisted man on the payroll that they, too, should be entitled to such perks.

This is the wrong message to be sending to the troops, and it is the wrong message to be sending to the American people. It reflects a tin-ear insensitivity to the challenges the department faces.

It is time to end the spendthrift ways of our government, and that effort must begin with the Pentagon. Panetta has demonstrated his lack of disposition to lead that effort.

Related articles

• Leon Panetta Talks About Racking Up $860,000 In Airfare (inquisitr.com)
• Axelrod: People won’t ‘begrudge’ Panetta for travel expenses (thehill.com)
• Panetta Regrets Expensive Plane Trips (abcnews.go.com)
• New found awareness with Panetta? (jbsanctuary.wordpress.com)
• Panetta’s commuting tab: $860,000 so far (wnd.com)

Alice Waters of Chez Panisse (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Cultivating Failure – Magazine – The Atlantic

In this excellent review of Thomas McNamee’s biography of legendary chef Alice Waters (of Berkeley’s Chez Panisse,) The Atlantic’s Caitlin Flanagan tears into Waters’ effort to turn her celebrity into influence over the curriculum of California schools.

Waters is a major proponent of the importance of school gardens as a teaching tool, the Edible Schoolyard Program, offering students an opportunity to achieve some very high-minded goals, but that does nothing to help them pass math or english exams or get into the university of their choice.

The article debunks, often with brutal statistics and scathing logic, the high-minded movement that has put gardens in 2,000 of 9,000 of California’s cash-strapped elementary and secondary schools. Flanagan then takes a step back, surveys the history of fads in California education, and notes:

With the Edible Schoolyard, and the thousands of similar programs, the idea of a school as a venue in which to advance a social agenda has reached rock bottom. This kind of misuse of instructional time began in the Progressive Era, and it has been employed to cheat kids out of thousands of crucial learning hours over the years, so that they might be indoctrinated in whatever the fashionable idea of the moment or the school district might be. One year it’s hygiene and another it’s anti-Communism; in one city it’s safe-sex “outer-course,” and in another it’s abstinence-only education. (Sixth-graders at King spend an hour and a half each week in the garden or the kitchen—and that doesn’t include the time they spend in the classroom, in efforts effective or not, to apply the experiences of planting and cooking to learning the skills and subjects that the state of California mandates must be mastered.) But with these gardens—and their implication that one of the few important things we as a culture have to teach the next generation is what and how to eat—we’re mocking one of our most ennobling American ideals. Our children don’t get an education because they’re lucky, or because we’ve generously decided to give them one as a special gift. Our children get an education—or should get an education—because they have a right to one. At the very least, shouldn’t we ensure that the person who makes her mark on the curricula we teach be someone other than an extremely talented cook with a highly political agenda?

It is time to pull all of our political agendas, left and right, out of the classroom, save one: the goal to ensure our children are academically prepared for life. Leave the enrichment to extra-curricular activities.

Related articles

• Alice Waters – Edible Schoolyard Takedown in the ‘Atlantic Monthly’: Wrong, Wrong, Wrong (definitiveink.typepad.com)

Florence Roofs (Photo credit: plemeljr)

The Great Hangover: 21 Tales of the New Recession from the Pages of Vanity Fair by Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter.

This compilation of Vanity Fair stories includes a little heralded piece by Nina Munk describing how Harvard University, once possessed of the largest university endowment in the world, has watched its nest egg implode in the wake of the global financial meltdown.

The temptation to schadenfreude is rarely more overwhelming, but push it off for a brief moment and contemplate this excerpt from Munk’s original story in VF:

Let’s back up for a moment and return to more prosperous times. It’s 2001 and Larry Summers has just been named president of Harvard University. Unapologetically combative, Summers is determined to lead (or force) the university into a glorious renaissance. Gazing into the future, Summers envisions smaller class sizes, a more diverse student body, a younger and more energetic faculty, a revitalized core curriculum, cooperation among Harvard’s Balkanized divisions, and a greatly expanded campus. Above all, at a university best known for its focus on the humanities, business, and law, Summers hopes to make science a priority. Belatedly, Harvard will match and even surpass the lavish investments that Princeton and Stanford have plowed into the sciences.
As Summers recently remarked to one of his colleagues, “I held out the hope that Boston would be to this century what Florence was to the 15th century.”

And, like that, the dream is gone. Harvard will not be leading Boston to become the Florence of the 21st Century after all.

My bet is on California, warts and all. Let’s not argue if. Instead, let’s discuss how.

Former U.S. Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman (Pete Souza) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Jon Huntsman Criticizes Republican Party, Compares Actions To Communist China.

I’m glad Jon Huntsman is speaking out like this, and I wish more Republicans would. To me the key graf is this one:

“Gone are the days when the Republican Party used to put forward big, bold, visionary stuff,” Huntsman said during the February interview with MSNBC that got him disinvited from the RNC fundraiser. “I think we’re going to have problems politically until we get some sort of third-party movement or some alternative voice out there that can put forward new ideas.”

I think too much has been made of the “third Party” comment. The real issue is not the creation of some rump third party that will split the vote, but a unified effort to take the Republican Party back from the Neocon/Social Conservative axis that has yanked it to the reactionary right and let it ossify.

Zachary Karabell at The Daily Beast takes strong exception to Mitt Romney‘s characterization of China as the big villain in Main Street’s economic downturn. While I suspect Karabell’s partisan motives and disagree with some of his premises, I do agree with this point:

But in terms of pure competitive advantage, all of the many American freedoms and cultural incentives to be innovative, be entrepreneurial, build a business, or go to college to create a career do not change one iota the sclerotic inability of government to urgently and productively invest for the common future. American government did that for the middle years of the 20th century to great effect, and even in smaller ways in the 19th century. No longer.

Karabell stops short of mentioning the name of Dwight Eisenhower, but that is who he is talking about.

Related articles

• China is Cheating (thestatesunited.com)
• China’s Explosive Growth Isn’t So Explosive Any More (theatlanticwire.com)
• China’s Not the Bad Guy (thedailybeast.com)

Paul Volcker, former head of the Federal Reserve Board . (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A great quote from Brian Collins’ article “The Great Shock” in the October 17, 2011 edition of the Los Angeles Review of Books.

What clearly separates Volcker from many of those advising the current President (Rubin, Geithner, Summers, et al.) is his riposte to financiers who defend deregulation as a great innovation of the times. “The only financial innovation I recall in my long career,” Volcker responded, “was the invention of the ATM.”)

Deregulation is no more innovation in finance than it is on a school playground. The minute you take the rules away, people are going to get hurt. Will some do very well? Absolutely. But that same dynamic worked in the jungle as well, and I’m in no rush to go back there.

Related articles

• The benefits of the system: Why finance is good for us (economist.com)
• Russell Sage-Century Foundation “Rethinking Finance” Conference: Socially-Useful Finance (delong.typepad.com)

Admiral Luke McNamee (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

One of our biggest causes is that of citizen involvement. Captain Luke McNamee, USN, at the time serving as Director of Naval Intelligence, put it better than I could when he said the following in the May 1923 issue of Proceedings:

If popular government is not to fail, our voters cannot take up too soon the earnest study of their duties and responsibilities as citizens of America. Our country has become so vast and so diversified in its interests that those voters capable of taking a broad national view of our necessities are in danger of sharing the fate of the dodo. Yet statesmen can accomplish little without your support.

Hear, hear.

Related articles

• Citizenship as Office or Virtue? (citizenthink.net)
• Why Older Citizens are More Likely to Vote (money.usnews.com)

First, the primary focus should be on reviving American industry, which includes everything from machine tool factories to software producers and from auto companies to biotech labs. Doing that will entail modifying our arrangement with Asia. Making these kinds of changes can be difficult, but it has happened before—during Reagan’s second term and in the first two years of Clinton’s presidency, when the United States got tough with its trading partners and subsidized innovation and growth.

Despite the title, Judis’ point is not that we should ignore the need to re-regulate the financial sector, but that shackling the Wall Street beast alone will not be enough to return America to competitiveness.

Well said.