Other Voices

Leigh Caldwell on his Knowing and Making blog, provides some analysis of How Much Blagojevich SHOULD have asked for?  After all, how much is a U.S. Senate seat worth? And what is the discount for the risk of discovery?

We've all grown pretty accustomed to obfuscation, and outright lying from our political leaders and other's trying to sell us something. So which economists should we trust when it comes to understanding our current financial crisis with all the money being handed out? Need help? Check out the Economist Rankings at IDEAS. Let's see, Paul Krugman is ranked 15th. Nuriel Roubini is 403rd! (Hmm, maybe I'd better stop listening to him.) Larry Summers is 12th. Good. Glad I don't have to worry about that anymore! I forgot to mention, Joseph Stiglitz is ranked number one.

One more voice I want to recommend is that of Jeffrey Sachs. I particularly liked his article on the American Anti-Intellectual Threat, published in September on Project Syndicate.

a Trillion Here, a Trillion There...

(updated below)

It's hard for me to wrap my mind around the dollar amounts involved in the financial rescue/bailout. In one sense, they're just numbers. But the thing that's finally gotten me thinking about how much money we're talking about, is thinking about the discussions we used to have about the money being spent on the war in Iraq.

In addition to lives and families lost and wrecked, we mourned the better uses that money could have been put to—universal healthcare, energy independence. (Never mind that the money we spent in Iraq was borrowed and wasn't really available for alternative projects.) But now, compared to the money we're giving financial institutions, that amount pales.

The above is already out of date.  The $4.6 trillion was as of November. (From The Big Picture. by way of mindtangle.) I've seen the figure estimated as high as $7.4 trillion. Every day, that number will be more and more out of date. Wait, here's yet a higher number already!

I am going to have to find some time when I can quiet my mind and try to find an explanation for what happened that requires all this money to fix. (I expect the place to start may be Wikipedia's article on the Subprime Mortgage Crisis Housing Bubble.)

UPDATE: I want to add a couple of links I found trying to put the cost of the Iraq War in perspective. The first, is a graph comparing Iraq war spending vs. spending on renewable energy from Solar Power Rocks! (The chart is too big to fit on this page!) Another link, from Ted Kennedy, put's the Real Cost of the War in Iraq in perspective by comparing the cost of one day of war expenditures to what that money could buy.

Car Bombs!

Here's an idea! We buy up a bunch of cars from the Big Three automakers, load them up in bombers, and drop them on our enemies in Iraq and on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border—car bombs!

The cars that aren't completely destroyed when they fall on the terrorists—they can fix up and drive. This will help promote our modern way of life—and they'll have to build roads and buy spare parts from our auto parts stores! We bail out the auto industry, kill some terrorists, and spread good old American Capitalism! Everybody wins! (Except for the evil terrorists, of course.)

I mean, we're going to have to do something with all the cars Detroit will be making. We could condition the bailouts on not building cars—like agriculture subsidies, where we pay the farmer not to grow their crop this year. But, the problem with this is that it doesn't help the dealerships or the industries that supply the parts and materials to make the cars. To solve the economic problem of the automakers—and all those other businesses—we have to come up with a solution where they keep making cars.

So, if we're not going to have the military buy them up and drop them out of bombers, what are we going to do with them. I guess the government could buy them and give them away to people who deserve a new car, but just can't afford to buy one. (But that sounds like a potentially serious ethical conundrum!)  

I know! We can give them to veterans! Or, we can give them to people who're homeless, 'cause they defaulted on their subprime mortgages. There might be some retooling required—like making sure the seats will lie flat for sleeping. (While we're at it, we could replace the cigarette lighters with toilet paper holders.)

If none of these ideas succeeds maybe we can at least give tax credits to people for buying American-made cars. Like we did for energy efficient vehicles through the Energy Policy Act of 2005. (Unless there's some anti-protectionism rule against helping American automakers.) Plus, we could ease the credit blockage by offering some kind of guarantee to banks making the loans to the people buying the cars.

Suspicious Statistics

Paul Krugman has a chart from the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics showing the ratio of civilian employment to population (EMRATIO) on his Conscience of a Liberal blog today.

"The chart above shows the employment-population ratio,  the ratio of employed Americans to the adult population. By this measure it’s been a weak economy all along — and now it’s falling off a cliff."

One of the first things that strikes me about this graph is the range of employment percentage (Y-axis). If the chart showed the percentage fluctuation in the context of zero to one hundred percent employment, the variation would look pretty minimal. And why are we looking at only ten years?

So I went out to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis website to see what else I could find.  Sure enough, here's the same chart, but showing employment since the 1940's.

This picture seems to tell a different story! But now you have to take into account that women were joining the workforce in greater numbers during this period.  (In fact, given the relatively narrow percentage range, I surprised the increase isn't greater.)

Here's another period to look at—the last two administrations.

What do you think? Do Clinton and the Democrats get credit for the first half of the period? The Republican congress? Do Bush and the Republicans get the blame for the last half? Whose fault were the two burst bubbles?

So, I started this suspicious of Dr. Krugman for cherry-picking data to support his position. After thinking about it, I'm not so suspicious of him. I'm suspicious of statistics! It's not trivial to avoid making them say what you want them to say.

Wandering Wikipedia: Financialization

Barreling along the road of life with only low beams for illumination, today's headlines replace yesterday's and yesterday's problems are soon replaced with today's. The economic crisis gets replaced, if even for a short time, by terrorist attacks in Mumbai. Top stories of the day seem to demand equal attention, whether it's a child kidnapping or the end of the world as we know it.

A meeting between Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke with congressional leaders on the evening of September 18 placed the current financial crisis squarely in the nation's headlights! Congressional leaders were stunned! Senators gulped! Paulson had a plan, but we had to move fast! He needed $700 billion and he needed it now! The original language stated: "Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of the Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency." Whoa!

Paulson's plan was only three pages long. We were in crisis mode. But why?

The other day I was browsing through old podcasts of On Point with Tom Ashbrook.  I found one from January 23, 2008, Global Market Meltdown?, with guests Jeffrey Frankel, Robert Kuttner, Philip Coggan and Amit Seru.  This conversation followed two days of turmoil in the stock market and a three quarter percent cut in the federal funds rate. Kutter, co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect magazine, who had been predicting a tough recession for months, told Ashbrook that "this was a needless recession, caused by excessive financial engineering that now has led to serious damage to the balance sheets of large financial institutions which then cascades into the rest of the economy." A month earlier he had written an article, The Solvency Crisis, for the American Prospect, where he referred to the unfolding crisis as a "perfect economic storm". He wrote: "Ours is a resilient nation. The eventual recovery will require a repudiation of free-market economics, as bold as the New Deal."

So why, in September 2008, were we in what seemed to be such a reaction mode? I decided to go wandering through Wikipedia for some answers.

The subprime mortgage crisis had lead to the global financial crisis of 2008, and beyond the financial markets to the global economic crisis of 2008! But, this has been coming since before January, 2008 (the financial crisis of 2007-2008). It was at about this point that I was introduced to the term, financialization.

Wikipedia tells us that financialization "is a term used in discussions of a form of capitalism which developed over several decades leading up to the 2007-2008 financial crisis, and in which financial leverage and exotic financial instruments tended to override capital (equity), and financial markets tended to dominate over the traditional industrial economy." We've been hearing about some of these financial instruments in the news recently, like mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and collateralized debt obligations (CDO). (The Wall Street Journal has a nice set of explanatory graphics, The Making of a Mortgage CDO, as does Portfolio.com.) And let's not forget credit default swaps (CDS)!

The article on financialization includes the following quote from Financialization and the World Economy, editor Gerald A. Epstein.

"in the mid- to late 1970s or early 1980s, structural shifts of dramatic proportions took place in a number of countries that led to significant increases in financial transactions, real interest rates, the profitability of financial firms, and the shares of national income accruing to the holders of financial assets. This set of phenomena reflects the processes of financialization in the world economy . . .

". . . finance benefits handsomely from the same processes that create economic crises and injure so many others. Hence the costs of financial crises are paid by the bulk of the population, while large benefits accrue to finance. Duménil and Lévy provide new and valuable data documenting these trends in the case of France and the USA . . .

"Using the case of the US economy, Crotty argues that financialization has had a profound and largely negative impact on the operations of US nonfinancial corporations. This is partly reflected in the increasing incomes extracted by financial markets from these corporations; trends identified also by Duménil and Lévy and Epstein and Jayadev. For example, Crotty shows that the payments US NFCs paid out to financial markets more than doubled as a share of their cash flow between the 1960s and the 1970s, on one hand, and the 1980s and 1990s on the other . . .

"Financial markets’ demands for more income and more rapidly growing stock prices occurred at the same time as stagnant economic growth and increased product market competition made it increasingly difficult to earn profits. Crotty calls this the ‘neoliberal’ paradox. Non-financial corporations responded to this pressure in three ways, none of them healthy for the average citizen: 1) they cut wages and benefits to workers; 2) they engaged in fraud and deception to increase apparent profits and 3) they moved into financial operations to increase profits. Hence, Crotty argues that financialization in conjunction with neoliberalism and globalization has had a significantly negative impact on the prospects for economic prosperity."

And this is going to cost us how much to fix?

According to Wikipedia, the end of the post-WWII Bretton Woods system of fixed international exchange rates and the decoupling of the U.S. dollar to gold in 1971 were significant impetuses to the rise of financialization.

Another, possibly more significant, contributing factor was the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. This bill repealed the ban on single-stock futures and deregulated credit default swaps. The bill was introduced in the House on December 14, 2000, and in the Senate on the following day - just prior to the Christmas break. There were no hearings and no debate. Republican leadership incorporated this act, H.R.5660, by reference into the 11,000 page long omnibus bill, The Consolidated Appropriations Act for FY2001. Both Republicans and Democrats overwhelming supported this budget bill, the Senate passed it by unanimous consent, and President Clinton signed it into law on December 21, 2000.

Check out Section 105, Hybrid Instruments; Swap Transactions in H.R.5660. Want more? Read Title 7, Chapter 1, Section 2, Jurisdiction of Commission; liability of principal for act of agent; Commodity Futures Trading Commission; transaction in interstate commerce from the Cornell Law School's U.S. Code collection.

This is going to cost a lot of money to fix. And it's not enough to just get the old system running again. On September 26, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, currently also the President of the European Union, said "We must rethink the financial system from scratch, as at Bretton Woods."[*] On October 13, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said: "We must have a new Bretton Woods, building a new international financial architecture for the years ahead."[*] The latest step toward a new financial system was the G-20 Leaders Summit on Financial Markets and the World Economy, on November 14-15, 2008, in Washington, D.C.

It will be interesting to see what happens.

...subject to revision...

Rescue the Automakers?

Should congress give the Big Three automakers $25 billion to try to stave off bankruptcy? How should I know! There are too many unknowns for me to be able to construct an informed opinion. By the time I do enough research to begin to figure out what's really going on, we will have moved on to the next issue. I just hope the people making the decisions in Washington know what they're doing.

I've watched excerpts from a couple of congressional hearings where our representatives criticize the automaker CEOs for coming to Washington in separate private jets. (Is this like not wearing a flag lapel pin? Is this really about political correctness?) Everyone seems pretty down on these executives, as if they're personally responsible for driving their companies into the ground. Are they? Have they? Or, are we just mad that they make so much money?

Maybe they just make the cars people want to buy. It's certainly true that they can't build a 'green' car that people don't want and sell it at a price people aren't willing to pay. Or maybe they spend the big advertising bucks to convince us that we want to buy the cars they want to make. Is it that they aren't building the cars that people want to buy? Or, is nobody buying cars? 

For the sake of argument, let's say nobody's buying cars. If that's the case, what do we expect from our automakers? Do we expect them to hibernate until we get past this recession, or at least past the credit crunch? Should they be crushed by the Invisible Hand of the Free Market or are they too big to fail?

Chapter 11 is supposed to handle situations where a business has just gotten in over its head and, if reorganized, can get back on its feet. But, if none of the car companies are selling cars how would reorganization help? Some say people won't buy a car from a bankrupt company and that, Chapter 11 would lead to Chapter 7, and that would be the end of the company, causing a domino effect through all the other companies that are linked by doing business together - millions of people out of work! Are these companies too big to fail?

What does that mean for a company to be too big to fail? Does it mean the United States government must guarantee its survival? If that's the case, this has got to work in some way other than these companies just coming to us for money whenever things don't go their way. I'm not sure these CEOs have even brought a plan with them to show how this $25 billion is going to help.

If a company is too big to fail and the taxpayers are going to be responsible for rescuing it when it gets into trouble, then I expect my government to do everything it can to make sure it doesn't get in trouble. This means regulations and oversight, maybe not allowing a company to get to the point where its that important.

For a guy who started out saying he didn't know enough to have an informed opinion, here I am talking about government regulation of big business like I was some kind of expert! You know how pretty soon after the polls close on election night, the networks announce that, "with one percent of the votes counted, we're calling the election for Joe Blow", or whomever? When I start thinking I can solve the automakers' problems, there ought to be a little announcer in my head saying "with one percent of the facts in, we're declaring the solution to be..."

I can't help but have lots of uninformed opinions. People who reinforce what I already think look smart; those who disagree make me uncomfortable. But I think I'm going to have to rely on my representatives in Washington to figure out what to do.  

One more thing. Conservatives, opposed to government action in response to this crisis, who justify their objections using axioms or aphorisms, are not persuasive. These platitudes oversimplify the situation in order to make it easier to understand and to justify the use of stock responses. It's important that we deal with the the entire complexity of problems that confront us, not symbolic caricatures that only capacitate the ideology of one segment of society.

Monopoly

When my son was very young, my wife and I played lots of board games with him. I half-jokingly tell a story that he learned arithmetic from being the banker when we played Monopoly. Actually, I think we all did our own banking. But board games, especially Monopoly, provided an opportunity for him to learn basic arithmetic and the rudiments of handling money.

Well, the times have certainly changed - I just saw an ad on TV for the Monopoly Electronic Banking edition! Who needs cash? 

Wheel and deal your way to a fortune even faster using debit cards instead of cash! All it takes is a card swipe for money to change hands. Now you can collect rent, buy properties and pay fines - with the touch of a button! It’s a new way to play the family classic that’s been brought up-to-date with modernized tokens (including a Segway personal transporter, an Altoids tin, space shuttle, flat-screen TV, baseball cap and a dog in handbag!), higher property values and locations based on your favorite landmarks Gameboard comes with title deed cards, chance and community chest cards, 6 debit cards, 2 dice, 6 tokens, 32 houses, 12 hotels and instructions.

2-6 Players. 2 "AAA" Batteries Required (not included).

Making change is so old-fashioned!  With this game, kids can learn the modern ways of buying and paying! Hey, it's not like we're giving them credit cards - these are only debit cards!

Lest I make it seem like Hasbro is dumbing down future consumers, I should point out that they still sell the old familiar versions that use cash.  And for those of you who still wish to use Monopoly to teach your children about currency, the learning doesn't have to stop at the consumer level.  Players take turns being the banker. And, with today's rough financial times, they can prepare for a career at Treasury or the Fed by printing more money!

Other Voices

For those who can't get enough politics and are looking ahead to 2010 and beyond, Electoral-vote.com has a nice chart in today's News From the Votemaster with data and analysis on the senate races two years from now. Another political site that I visit daily is Real Clear Politics. It's a good place to find out who's saying what. Both of these sites did a good job of tracking the polls during the election 'season'.

From a British Perspective?

Here's an election map from the BBC.

Compare this to the map below. Could be just my imagination, but I'm thinking that the difference between the two might have something to do with a sense of familiarity with the states in our union that a non-native could not share.

Electing Electorally

Looking at the map above you'd think we lived in a mostly red country. If we elected our president based on acreage that would be true. But we don't. We elect our president based on what seems to be an obsolete method laid out in our Constitution. But, like so many things, it's not that simple!

Before we get into it, here's another way of looking at the just concluded presidential election, based on the distribution of electoral votes.

(By the way, earlier in the campaign - before Obama took the lead in Virginia, North Carolina and Florida - I thought it was interesting comparing a map of who was leading where with a map of the North and South during the Civil War. The states where slavery was legal were for the Republicans and the states where slavery was outlawed were for Obama and the Democrats. Hmm.)

Back to the Electoral College.  Here in Texas, millions of people voted for Obama, without it having any effect on the electoral vote.  In fact, nationwide, he was elected by about 40 percent of the people who voted. Over 30 percent of the people who voted for Obama could have stayed home without having any effect on the electoral totals.  It was worse for the Republicans.  Nearly 70 percent of them could have stayed home!  

Maybe we should just dump this system and elect our presidents directly. The assumption is that, of course, the Electoral College was meant to implement the will of the People. After all, we are a Democracy, right? Well... Maybe the idea was to have Congress choose the president and vice president, but in a way that would balance the influence of the Congress, the states, and the people.

George Will has an article, The Final Repudiation, in the November 17th issue of Newsweek Magazine, where he talks about the presidential election process.  Will refers us to an article in the Claremont Review of Books by James W. Ceaser, a professor of politics at the University of Virginia, to make the case that the United States has actually utilized six presidential selection systems so far!

"The Founders’ presidential selection system, the first of six the nation has had so far, was feasible only when it was dispensable—in the first two elections, when George Washington was everyone’s preference. By the time he left office in 1797, political parties, which were not anticipated when the Constitution was drafted just 10 years earlier, were coalescing.

"Subsequent systems included: The selection of presidential candidates by the parties’ congressional caucuses (1796–1820); nonpartisan selection (1824–28); national nominating conventions controlled by parties’ organizations (1832–1908); a system of such conventions leavened by popular choice through a few state party primaries and caucuses (1912–68)—in 1968, Vice President Hubert Humphrey won the Democratic nomination without entering any primaries; since 1972, selection of nominees entirely by popular choice. Thus have conventions been reduced from deliberative bodies to mere ratifying bodies."

Ceaser's very interesting article, The Presidential Nomination Mess, makes the case that the founders were trying to avoid just the sort of process we have just been through.

"The founders' intent was above all to prevent having the decision turn on a demonstration of skill in the 'popular arts' as displayed in a campaign. They were deeply fearful of leaders deploying popular oratory as the means of winning distinction; this would open the door to demagoguery, which, as the ancients had shown, was the greatest threat to the maintenance of moderate popular government."

This has been a concern of mine since the Howard Dean campaign in 2004, when it first became apparent that a candidate could raise enough money, using the Internet, to be competitive without having to rely on contributions from those with larger financial stakes in the outcome of the election.

Confused yet?  I am.  I think this is probably "above my pay grade" as they say.

Here's a scary thought. Fabius Maximus thinks that the current financial crisis is going to require the country to assume new roles and powers such that that maybe it's time for the Constitution to go the way of the Articles of Confederation and be replaced by a 'Mark 3' Version of the United States!

Other Voices

An interesting survey on The Republican Disconnect at the Democracy Corps website (by way of Paul Krugman). I'd love to see the Republican Party move away from anti-intellectual social conservatives and toward a more moderate-libertarian stance.  But, that may not happen.  And speaking of libertarians, Ron Paul demonstrated that the philosophy has a dedicated core following,  But where are they in the Pew Research Center's 2005 Political Typology report?  I'll be looking forward to a new report coming out of the 2008 elections.

And for those of you who just can't get enough, here are a couple more political links: the Poole-Rosenthal Voteview website (again by way of Paul Krugman) and The Green Papers.

Yellow Dog Republicans

(updated below)

I drive through my neighborhood and am yet again amazed by all the McCain/Palin yard signs. What campaign have they been following? What are they thinking? It would be easier to just assume they were ignorant or crazy. But this is the South and there are so many of them.  And I know some of them - which makes it harder to demonize them. What are they thinking?

Maybe it's me that's out of step?  Maybe I shouldn't be deconstructing what the Republicans are saying.  Maybe if I'd grown up here and come from a long line of good conservatives, I wouldn't have to think.  Or, at least, I wouldn't have to think about the rhetoric.  I'd know who I was.

But, we live in a technological age of instant communication and widely cast virtual communities. I don't have to either integrate myself into the local dominant social order or be an outcast.  At the same time, there's still this tendency to want to see the world in terms of us and them.

"In spite of limitless opportunities for enriching understanding, adding potentials, and cocreating new worlds through the expanding arena of relationship, many people seem to vastly prefer using these technologies to cement their relationships with those who already share their ways of life. Certainly one can appreciate the sense of security and support to which such tendencies contribute, But the result has increasingly become a dangerous distancing. When congregating with others who already share one's realities and values, strong tendencies are unleashed for such groups to seal themselves off from the rest of the world, to develop a sense of a superior good, and to brand those outside the network as a problem if not downright evil. The technologies of saturation thus lend themselves to islands of self-righteousness in a sea of antagonism." - Kenneth J. Gergen, The Saturated Self

I'm tired. I'm ready for this election to be over.  I'm ready to move forward, get past being in a red state or a blue state, and get on with being part of the United States of America! Wouldn't that be nice? If only...

By the way, somebody stole my Obama/Biden yard sign again last night!

UPDATE: Gergen's The Saturated Self has a link to the Public Conversations Project website.  The site provides information and tools for facilitating dialog between groups or individuals separated by 'essentially contested concepts', including downloadable publications such as Fostering Dialog Across Divides and Reaching our across the Red/Blue Divide, One Person at a Time.

Political Rhetoric

Somehow this doesn't seem quite as bad when unraveled:

It's very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where–where do they go?  - Sarah Palin

This diagram is from an article by Kitty Burns Florey, Diagramming Sarah - Can Palin's Sentences Stand Up to a Grammarian?, at Slate.com.

I've always felt an attraction for (this old-styled) sentence diagramming, and own a copy of Florey's Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences.  (I also have a poster-sized diagram of a 958 word sentence from Marcel Proust's Cities of the Plain!)

Other Voices

George Will, in today's Washington Post, says "Under the pressure of the financial crisis, one presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high. It is not Barack Obama. ... It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?" (McCain Loses His Head)

Caucasian Males - Vanishing Demographic?

I've found some interesting statistics having to do with the national delegates selected at the Texas Democratic Party State Convention.

Of the 227 Texas delegates to the Democratic National Convention, 126 were allocated based on the district-level primary vote. Another 42 at-large delegates were selected at the state convention in proportion to their candidates' success in the caucus process. In addition, 56 party leaders and elected officials (25 pledged and 31 unpledged) got to go. There were an additional 3 unpledged add-ons selected at the convention.

I found this chart of the diversity goals for the Texas delegation.

- http://www.burntorangereport.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=6207

Out of 202 district-level, at-large, and unpledged delegates selected, the goal was to select at least 72 Hispanics, 54 African Americans, 9 Asian Pacific Islander Americans, and 1 Native American. The goals for ethnic diversity add up to 136. But, the convention exceeded these goals, selecting 78 Hispanics, 75 African Americans, 11 Asian Pacific Islander Americans, and 5 Native Americans. That adds up to 169, leaving 33 Caucasian delegates - 16 of which were party leaders and elected officials and got to go anyway!

So, of the 168 national delegates selected at the state convention, only 17 were Caucasian? Can this be right? Am I missing overlap of the ethnic classification? (The Statement of Candidacy form says to select only one ethnic group.) And this when almost 50 percent of the Texas population is 'White non-Hispanic'?

Now, how about male versus female.

According to recent Pew Research polls, nationally, 60 percent of men identify themselves as Republican or Republican-leaning. And McCain leads Obama 55-35 percent with Caucasian males. (By the way, of the people who identify themselves as Democrats, 23 percent are Black and 11 percent are Hispanic.)

I did a quick scan of the delegate list from the Texas Democratic Party. If you look at the 168 delegates chosen at the convention (disregarding the party leaders and elected officials), it comes out to be 94 women and 71 men (with one not listed). Maybe that's representative of the gender split in the Texas Democratic Party.

- http://www.thegreenpapers.com/P08/TX-D.phtml

Of the district level delegates, the count was 66 women and 57 men. You would expect this to be close since we were instructed to select an equal number of men and women in each of the 62 caucuses (two - one each for Obama and Clinton - for each of the 31 senatorial districts). The different totals result from caucuses electing an odd number of delegates. (The count was 50-50 when there were an even number of delegates to be chosen, and 16 women versus 7 men, when an odd number of delegates was selected.)

Finally, of the 42 at-large delegates - the convention's Nominations At Large committee's tool for effecting ethnic, gender, and other diversity goals - they picked 27 women and 15 men.

So, of the delegates selected at the convention, there were 93 women and 72 men. I guess this somewhat compensates for the fact that the people in charge are mostly men. It turns out that the only group that has more men than women is the PLEO (party leaders and elected officials), where men lead women 41-18.

Does this mean that the Texas Democratic Party needs to reach out to Caucasian males to add some diversity to the organization? Or maybe this is just Fun With Numbers and it doesn't really matter who goes to the national convention!

NOTE: This post was written three weeks ago - before the Democratic convention (where the Texas delegation didn't actually get to vote).

Social Animal

(updated below)

I look forward to hearing what David Brooks has to say on TV and reading what he writes in the New York Times. Since Palin's selection as the Republican vice-presidential nominee, I've been waiting for him to validate my belief that she's unqualified and McCain's judgement defective. I'm waiting for him to either denounce McCain's pick, explain how she is qualified to be a heartbeat away from the presidency, or explain why it doesn't matter.

But, it hasn't happened yet. Maybe he doesn't think it's his place. Maybe he thinks that if she is unacceptable, it will eventually become obvious. Or maybe I'm missing something. Could she actually be qualified? It seems pretty obvious to me that she's not. But it's also pretty obvious that a lot of Republicans think she is. How can that be?!

David Brooks, in his latest column for the New York Times, The Social Animal, doesn't address my concerns about the McCain/Palin ticket. But he hints at something that I think is important and that might be helpful in understanding the cognitive dissonance people like me are experiencing with politics.

Brooks states that we are "deeply interconnected with one another". His point is that the Republican Party needs to do more to nurture the social institutions providing the scaffolding our individuality is built on.  But he's also saying something else about what it is to be human. This is at least the second time recently that Brooks has referred to the connection of the self to social relationships (see The Neural Buddhists published this past May).

Maybe the reason there is so much cognitive dissonance in politics is that Democrats and Republicans live in separate social realities, speaking separate languages!

I like to tell people that one of my favorite activities is thinking about thinking! But, when it really comes down to it, that's not a very easy thing to do. So, in the end, I spend less time thinking about thinking and more time just thinking about thinking about thinking! And talking about thinking about thinking! (I can be a silly guy!)

I am very interested in how we construct our concepts of self and the world we live in. And how we use these constructs to navigate our way through life. I'll share more of my thinking on philosophical topics in future posts but, for now, let me just mention a theory of knowledge known as Social Construction. This theory explains that a lot of what we perceive as facts about the world only exist by social agreement. For example, a twenty dollar bill only has value because we agree that it has value. Otherwise, it's just a piece of decorated paper.

Social Construction may be helpful in trying to begin to understand how Democrats and Republicans can hold such opposing opinions on so many issues of the day - and with such confidence! We live in different socially constructed worlds! As David Brooks might say, this sounds pretty "airy-fairy".  But there's something to this.

It's easier to assume that the other guys are either stupid or dishonest and stop thinking about all the contradictions. That's certainly easier.  Too easy!  That's the cartoon version of reality!

I'm still thinking about it.

UPDATE: I was encouraged to see David Brooks' column of September 15, 2008, Why Experience Matters, where he points out that: "Democracy is not average people selecting average leaders. It is average people with the wisdom to select the best prepared" and states that Sarah Palin "has not been engaged in national issues, does not have a repertoire of historic patterns and, like President Bush, she seems to compensate for her lack of experience with brashness and excessive decisiveness"!  Thanks, David.

Where to start? How about politics!

A letter to the editor:

John McCain's reckless pandering to gynocentrists and the religious faction of the party in choosing an unprepared running mate exacerbates the desperate position Republicans find themselves in.  His choice is demeaning to women and insulting to those of us who grew up believing in a Republican Party that stood for reason, competence and responsibility.  I am embarrassed watching respectable Republicans pretend that she's qualified for the position. Where are America's true conservative leaders?  Will Republicans have to wait four more years for a candidate worth going to the polls for. 

OK, so maybe 'gynocentrists' is too fancy a word.  And, yes, that's an awfully long sentence.

By the time this was actually published in one of our local newspapers - several days after McCain's choice of Sara Palin and my initial reaction - the story had evolved, as had my thinking.  At this point, this position doesn't appear as desperate as I would have thought.  But maybe the exacerbation part is still to come.

While it might sound like I'm a Republican based on my letter, I'm not.  I was trying to speak with the people I was trying to influence, not at them.  When it comes to politics these days, I don't think Republicans and Democrats can hear each other.  Maybe it's a way to deal with the cognitive dissonance.

Republicans seem to have constructed a reality where McCain's selection of Palin establishes his social conservative credentials.  Never mind that he almost chose Joe Lieberman!  His motto is 'Country First', but he chooses a running mate who is not ready to be president, or even ready to talk to the press for that matter. Doesn't anyone see this as putting the lie to his motto?  Isn't he putting politics first?  

I feel like a kid about to cry out that the emperor has no clothes, but first looking around and wondering if I'm the only one who sees it.  What's going on?  Does it not matter whether she is qualified?  Can it be that she is qualified?  I'm waiting for David Brooks or George Will or Pat Buchanan or, at least, David Gergen to speak up! Maybe it's going to take someone like Chuck Hagel or Richard Lugar to tell their fellow Republicans that she is unacceptable.

We'll see...