Monthly Archives: November 2010

The Wedding of Peleus and Thetis

The first 21 lines of Catullus’ Song 64, in my translation:

Sprouted at the peak of Mt. Pelion,
the pines, they say, pushed right through Neptune’s waves
to the surf at Phasis, Aeëtes’ realm,
when the hand-picked force, those young oaks of Greece,
wanting to snatch from Colchis the Golden Fleece,
risked riding the salty waves on a ship,
and brushed the sky-blue sea with fir-wood oars.
Athena, who protects their citadel,
invented their light flying vehicle,
weaving the pine boards into one curved keel.

This ship was a first for the sea goddess.
When with its prow it plowed her wind-blown swell,
and its oar strokes sprayed white spume on her waves,
a face arose from the froth-covered strait,
a miracle the sea nymphs marveled at.

This one and many others they beheld,
the mortals, staring in the ocean sun:
nymphs rising out, naked, breasts in the foam.

Then Peleus was on fire for the nymph Thetis.
Then Thetis was not above a human match.
Then even father Jupiter knew it:
she was meant to be wife for Peleus.

(The whole long poem is well translated by Thomas Banks. The Latin I used is here.)

guest post by Hank Topper: Next Steps for Rebuilding Democracy

Hank Topper lives in Santa Rosa, California where he has been helping to organize a broad city-wide effort to strengthen neighborhoods and improve the partnership between neighborhoods and city government. Hank is also a part of a small national group that meets regularly to share ideas on the work to rebuild local democracies. Before moving to Santa Rosa, Hank worked for the Environmental Protection Agency where he helped to design and lead the CARE program, EPA’s model community-based initiative. I have written about CARE before on this blog. The following post is by Hank.

It may be a good time for us, the various and diverse individuals and organizations working consciously in some way to strengthen democracy, to rethink our message and our strategy. The far reaching events of the last two years warrant this reexamination. The following are some thoughts to contribute to this reexamination. Let’s start with the first years of the Obama administration and their meaning for our work. It is, unfortunately, safe to say that our politics are in more disarray than two years ago. Not only are dissatisfaction and even despair more widespread, but we also now have a Tea Party movement making gains in directing this despair in ways fundamentally harmful to democracy. While the Obama administration may not be primarily responsible for these developments, it is, none the less, getting a large share of the blame. And, Obama, I would argue, is responsible for some of this the disappointment. He has, to date, failed to articulate either a clear picture of a “new politics” or a clear path we can to take to move towards changing our politics. With the bright promise of the new politics unfulfilled, many are left now to view Obama’s articulation of this hope as only another political trick.

Obama seems to be modeling his presidency on FDR’s government “for the people”, not on the strengthening of a democracy “by the people”. As a result, his practice has too often looked more like “politics as usual” than a new politics. The health care initiative was a classic example of this. Obama chose a Washington centered approach designed to get quick passage of health care reform. While this approach did not include the nation in this discussion, it did include the normal behind the scenes deals with special interests. This left the nation confused and the administration vulnerable to charges that the reform was just another power grab of big government. This appears to be a classic choice of short term over long term gains –politics as is over politics as it could be. There is no doubt that these are extremely difficult times and finding a way to address pressing immediate needs and work on deeper long term change could not be more challenging. So we can only say that Obama has not succeeded in finding a balance that could do this, and that, despite his intentions, the result of the administration’s work to date has resulted in some short term gains at the expense of long term progress in the creation of a new politics.

Continue reading

a community economic development primer

(This post is meant to resemble my primer on relational community organizing; I plan to write others on community service, practical deliberation work, etc.)

Many thousands of not-for-profit institutions are involved in various forms of economic development in the communities where they are located. For example, some use federal Community Development Block Grants and other funds to develop low-income housing. Sometimes they can plow the proceeds from their investments into further development. They solicit public participation in their decisions, both as a matter of ethical commitment and in order to comply with funders’ rules. Hence these institutions belong in the fields of community organizing and public deliberation; but their emphasis on managing tangible assets makes them different. They contribute to civic renewal by promoting democratic deliberation, magnifying the voice of poor people, building civic skills–and creating assets that are subject to democratic control because they cannot be moved.

In 2005, there were 4,600 community development corporations (CDCs) in the United States, employing nearly 200,000 people, building about 86,000 residential units annually, and managing commercial property and spawning other enterprises.

The concept of a CDC is not defined in federal law, and in practice, CDC’s resemble other non-profit organizations that have similar missions. For example, a community development bank specializes in lending rather than developing property, but those two roles overlap. Like CDC’s, community development financial institutions (such as banks and credit unions) are widespread and influential, holding more than $25 billion in assets in 2007.

Churches may also build, lease, finance, or sell homes and other buildings for the good of their communities. Sometimes they create spinoffs formally known as CDCs, but often they handle the financing directly. A famous example is the Greater Allen African Methodist Episcopal Cathedral in Queens, New York, which manages assets worth over $100 million, including rental properties, businesses, and a school.

Meanwhile, community land trusts tend to purchase open space for preservation, but some urban land trusts operate much like CDCs, and some CDCs buy land to preserve or create open space. Community organizing groups such as the Industrial Areas Foundation have created CDCs; and some CDCs have affiliated with community organizing networks.

In the city where I write this post, the Somerville Community Corporation is a not-for-profit real estate developer that invests its profits in new development, a provider of adult education, an emergency lender to low-income renters, a community organizing group affiliated with the Industrial Areas Foundation, a convener of public deliberations about matters like planning and municipal budgeting, and a lobby on behalf of employment, transportation, and welfare programs. This combination of functions is typical, and as a result the Somerville Community Corporation could be listed under several categories of civic work–as could the Allen Cathedral or the Industrial Areas Foundation itself.

Regardless of their precise status, all these institutions are anchored legally in their physical communities. They manage assets that have market value and they use business techniques (such as charging fees for services and lending money with interest), but they are not permitted to move. Their structure honors the civic virtue of loyalty and gives them a practical need to employ “voice” rather than “exit” to address problems. How they exercise “voice” varies, but extremely common are public meetings, boards that represent local residents, and public events designed to solicit public input. Meanwhile, all these organizations express—at least in theory—an ethic of trusteeship and public service. That ethic is usually codified in the organization’s nonprofit status and by-laws, but there is no reason that a for-profit business cannot serve the same purposes if it is anchored in a community and accountable to residents.

CDC’s have roots in Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, and specifically the thousands of Community Action Agencies (CAA’s) that were created under federal law and asked to oversee local federal welfare programs, including Head Start, Legal Services, and public housing. The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 had required that all new federal welfare programs be “developed, conducted, and administered with the maximum feasible participation of the residents of the areas and the members of the groups served.” CAA’s arose to meet that need.

They still exist; more than one thousand belong to the Community Action Partnership, and many of those are also classified as CDC’s. But the typical mechanisms for encouraging the participation of residents have evolved. In the 1960s, it was common to hold public elections for board members. This was problematic because the United States was already covered by a smooth tessellation of local governments with their own elected leaders. Adding a new layer with different boundaries caused constant jurisdictional conflicts and struggles for power. CAAs were supposed to avoid patronage and corruption, but often turnout was poor, and elections offered opportunities for corruption. Today it is much more common for a community-based development organization to be structured as a private, not-for-profit corporation that has a board with fiduciary obligations to the public. Some or all members may be elected, but some may be representatives of local institutions, including municipal governments. Foundations and governments also exercise considerable power by deciding what to fund. CDC’s and kindred organizations do not claim the kind of democratic mandate that comes from public elections, but they do welcome and promote participation.

civic agency

Based on blog reports by Cecilia Orphan and Harry Boyte, it sounds as if the recent Civic Agency meeting in Washington was excellent. It was organized by the American Democracy Project of the American Association of State Colleges & Universities (AASCU) along with the Center for Democracy and Citizenship. The AASCU has a valuable grassroots base in the form of its member campuses, which mostly serve first-generation college students. Other participants in the meeting included: “Rock the Vote, Sojourners, the White House Office of Social Innovation, community colleges, the American Library Association, National Issues Forums and Strengthening our Nation’s Democracy network.”

Boyte summarizes three key themes:

1. “A focus on the empowerment gap needs to replace the achievement gap. … [The] deepest problem in our education is that young people – especially children and teens of low income, minority, and immigrant backgrounds – feel “acted upon,” not agents of their education.”

2. Public knowledge: people can create knowledge that is otherwise unavailable, by working together outside of specialized knowledge centers such as labs and academic departments.

3. “A new public narrative: We the People is not something in the future – it is emerging all over the place, as our colleagues, students, staff, and faculty rework relations with elected officials and other decision making bodies to be partners in public work, not mainly providers of services.”

contra Krugman

I find that I have written 17 blog posts critical of Paul Krugman since 2005. Since 2008, these posts have generally been defenses of Barack Obama. As I wrote in February 2009, “Krugman’s critiques of Barack Obama … represent one of the most interesting debates in American politics.”

Today’s Krugman column provides an opportunity to sum it up. This is the key paragraph:

    In retrospect, the roots of current Democratic despond go all the way back to the way Mr. Obama ran for president. Again and again, he defined America’s problem as one of process, not substance–we were in trouble not because we had been governed by people with the wrong ideas, but because partisan divisions and politics as usual had prevented men and women of good will from coming together to solve our problems. And he promised to transcend those partisan divisions.

During the campaign, Krugman wanted Obama to capitalize on the unpopularity of George W. Bush to make a sweeping and persuasive case to the American people: things had gone badly because of conservative ideas; liberal ideas were better. It was deeply frustrating to Krugman, Sean Wilentz, and many others (including some of my friends) that Barack Obama wouldn’t say that forcefully and relentlessly. He did say much of it, but mixed with other themes that had no resonance for Paul Krugman. What Krugman heard was a call for “bipartisanship,” which seemed exactly the opposite of what we needed. Bipartisanship meant blurring the distinctions between liberals and “people with the wrong ideas” and signaling an excessive willingness to compromise.

After the election, Krugman argues, Barack Obama should have explained and defended liberal policies, whether or not they could get through Congress. Above all, he should have “fought” for an “economic plan commensurate with the scale of the crisis.” Krugman doesn’t explain what “fighting” means for a president, but perhaps it means vigorously debating one’s opponents in public forums. If, despite Obama’s most vigorous ideological arguments, a huge stimulus package failed in Congress, the “people with the wrong ideas” would have to take the blame.

Instead, Krugman believes, the president compromised on his liberalism, and therefore Americans did not understand their options. Communication is everything for Krugman. From today’s column: “What Mr. Obama should have said … Mr. Obama could and should be hammering Republicans …There were no catchy slogans, no clear statements of principle … ” The president “has the bully pulpit.”

I don’t believe that bipartisanship was the distinctive message of the Obama campaign; in fact, the candidate paid no more than the usual and customary homage to it. But Obama did reject the diagnosis that we were simply “in trouble … because we had been governed by people with the wrong ideas.” He didn’t think that he could explain or argue the American people into a different political philosophy, one in which our major troubles stemmed from conservative ideas and the solutions lay in a more activist government. Obama wanted a more activist government and has taken the largest step in that direction since 1974 with the health care bill. But he didn’t believe that the way to get there was to conduct a debate on ideology. He did think, contra Krugman, that the main problem was the process and not the misguided people in office.

After all, the number of “people with the wrong ideas” (as defined by Krugman) is very large. All Republican elected officials, plus the majority of American voters who supported that party in several recent elections, have the wrong ideas, from Krugman’s perspective. So do at least one third of elected Democrats and a large proportion of Democratic voters. So do all the leaders of major foreign economies, who are asking Obama to lower deficits and not spend. So do many impressive economists. I personally find Krugman’s economics quite persuasive, but the task of explanation and persuasion is much harder than he realizes.

People begin with a very deep distrust of the federal government. Because of that distrust, just six percent of Americans believed that the $787 billion stimulus package had created even one job a full year after it passed Congress. I suppose Krugman would say that the stimulus was too small to be noticeable. But the kind of stimulus he wanted was certainly too big to pass Congress, so Obama could only have won the debate, not the policies he needed. In any case, if you live in a country where 94% of people believe that almost one trillion dollars of their money bought no jobs, you have a deeper problem than being “governed by people with the wrong ideas.” You need to diagnose why most people are so deeply distrustful and skeptical.

One reason is a natural and healthy distrust of a large and distant federal government. No other diverse, continental-sized country has a central government that has addressed national problems and won broad popular support. The European democracies are far smaller; Russia, India, and China have worse governance problems than we do. Governing from Washington is a tough task.

A second reason is poor results. We devote large amounts of our income to taxes, but because of military spending, wasteful health spending, and misconceived programs like the Farm Bill and the mortgage income deduction, we don’t get very good value for our money.

A third reason is distaste for political leaders who appear to squabble and score points rather than cooperate to solve our problems. Krugman wants Democrats to pin the blame for bad policy and obstructionism on Republicans. But Americans hear the counter-charges as well as the charges and decide that they don’t want to entrust large amounts of their money to any of these people.

A fourth reason is exclusion from public life. For a generation, we have been replacing democratic participation in public institutions (like schools) with technocratic governance: with efficiency measures, accountability systems, and other tools that ordinary people cannot control.

A fifth reason is “the Big Sort“–our mass migration to enclaves (whether neighborhoods, news sources, or organizations and associations) where we only encounter others who agree with us. The Big Sort lowers trust in government because individuals believe that most other people agree with them, yet the government acts contrary to their values. They underestimate the degree to which we actually disagree with one other. Our opponents, meanwhile, become shadowy enemies motivated by terrible values, instead of flesh-and-blood neighbors with different life experiences.

A sixth reason is the collapse of powerful intermediary organizations, associations with grassroots chapters and national lobbies that once connected people to the policy process. Those associations included fraternal and ethnic clubs, unions, and churches (of which only the evangelical conservative ones remain strong). They gave people a feeling of ownership by multiplying their power.

And a final reason is a terrible process. As long as elections are privately funded, districts are gerrymandered, and legislative procedures are rigged, it doesn’t matter who makes what argument or what the people believe who govern us. Policy will be determined by power.

Obama explicitly understood these points. He concluded that the problem was the process. Debate wouldn’t solve anything, but we needed to build new relationships–relationships of trust between citizens and the government and among diverse citizens. Krugman scoffs at the idea of “men and women of good will … coming together to solve our problems.” That is indeed too much to expect of Congress, but it happens regularly in civil society. At the national level, politicians can at least display more of the civility that Americans expect of fellow citizens. (Civility, by the way, is not the same as bipartisanship.)

I think Obama’s diagnosis and promise were correct. That doesn’t mean that the execution has been satisfactory. There have been no new policies that permit or encourage broad public participation. There have been no serious changes in the rules and processes of Washington. The administration has tried to negotiate its way to satisfactory policies and explain their merits to the American people, instead of changing the system itself. In that sense, they have been doing what Krugman recommends, but with less economic ambition and impact. We need the kind of transformational presidency that Barack Obama promised and that Paul Krugman considered a mistake.