Ted Auch

Given the recent announcement by President Obama that he will be upping the ante by 30,000 troops in Afghanistan I was left to ponder for what seemed to me a logical question: Mr. President what in your portfolio of beliefs and objectives is worth losing an election for? Do you not have any ideologies that you feel so passionate about that you are willing to sacrifice all or most of your political capital to steward such beliefs across the finish line? I voted for you sir and I am not sure at this point whether you have any convictions you feel so strongly about that you would put your political neck on the line for. That is quite disheartening to me because when I saw you speak on the steps of the Ira Allen Chapel here in Burlington, Vermont in March of 2006 I was convinced that you were a man with a spine, conscience, and an intellect unsurpassed in modern day politics. I still believe that the latter is true but as for your spine and to a lesser degree your conscience I am left wondering what you stand for and what you will fight for to the very end, whether it means political suicide or not.

Show us some fight sir! Show us that the issues you campaigned on are part of your very fiber and not simply the populist rhetoric you knew would get the vote of people like myself. It is beginning to feel like you are ashamed that the left supported you and your “progressive” agenda. That is not the man I saw speak in 2006. That is not the man I promptly told my friend Dennis Ailor would win the presidency in 2008. And that is most assuredly not the man I thought was capable of thinking through some of the most complex issues ever to face an incoming president. Sure you were handed a mess but are you going to continue to compare your administration to the one that preceded you? I would caution against such comparisons given that the bar could not have been set any lower.

Sir you know that the right would gladly fall on their sword for issues like abortion, the sanctity of marriage, gun rights, and the military industrial complex. That is a given and that for better or worse is one thing I respect about the neoclassical and neoconservative movement. When they give speeches in Portland or Corpus Christi you know what you’re gonna get and they make absolutely no apologies for their beliefs. It is time you get a little neocon in you Mr. Obama and by that I mean pick an issue any issue, whether it be health care, climate change, FISA, bank reform, or torture and go to the wall for it. Own the issue sir. Take back any one of these issues from those in your party that are self-hating Democrats. Just like Iraq and Katrina will define George W Bush (and no one else!!) one of these issues will define you and it would be a shame if you let the spineless wing of your party co-opt your presidency.

I and many like me – and I would hasten to guess those on the right – are anxiously or should I say nervously waiting and wondering if you will ever stand up and be accounted for with respect to some of the aforementioned issues. I would suggest firing Geithner, Summers, et al as a start. The left rightly sees them as an extension of the Greenspan-Rubin virus that has infected the nation’s financial services regulations for far too long now and the right won’t support them because….well who cares they just won’t because you do and that is reason enough for them.

Apologizing for our hegemonic history and bowing to Emperor Akihito shows that you are sensitive to our fragile status as a global power and more importantly the proper way in which you interact with others when on their turf. However, tacitly apologizing for being liberal or in any way concerned with the appalling trend in wealth, health, and education distribution in this country makes those of us on the left wonder if we were sold a bill of goods and those on the right question your leadership capabilities, both from a foreign and domestic perspective.

You may be wondering at this point why we don’t have your back on some of these crucial issues? Well all is not lost and believe me if we see fight emanating from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue we will most assuredly get in the ring with you but until then you’ll have to rely on the likes of the Blue Dog Democrats. BTW how’s that working out so far?

I for one do not? Does that make me an advocate of Big Brother type big government advocate? Nope. I don’t want government to be looking in our bedrooms or bookshelves or email or tapping our phones. Rather I want them to do with our precious tax dollars what they should be doing…..fixing stuff, supporting those in need, and fueling innovation. You may ask what does it mean to starve the beast? (bartlett_starve-the-beast)

Well “starving the beast” is a term originally coined in a WSJ article by Paul Blustein (http://www.wordspy.com/words/starvethebeast.asp) and adamantly preached by the neoconservative wunderkind. This theory reduces taxes on the upper 2% via reduced capital gains, estate, and income taxes, primarily by allowing the elite to declare income as capital gains, which reduces taxable income from 34-38% to 15%. A classic example of this is Warren Buffet noting his personal assistant coughs up a greater percentage of her annual income in taxes than he does, because most of his income is declared as capital gains.

The starve the beast argument foments outright hatred of government by conflating taxes with socialism and the near and dear gun rights of this nations many cowboys. Of course this plays to the underlying fears of an already petrified nation. The last thing this country needs is another thing to be afraid of as we now have climate change, Iran, the Taliban, North Korea, China, Russia, lawyers, unemployment, diabetes, etc. Yet, given all this neocons feel the best remedy is adding to rather than ameliorating these fears. What a bunch of great folks? They must be true patriots.

However, I ask of those interested in an anorexic beast: Do you drive a car or better yet do you like smooth drivable roads? You do? Of course you do we all enjoy our asphalt alleys winding their way through urban centers and rural outposts alike. Well there is a price associated with that privilege and it is a privilege when compared to developed and undeveloped nations alike. Congress has been forced to bailout the fund that pays for the various interstate transportation projects this country takes on every year. Don’t worry its just $7 billion which pales in comparison to things like defense spending (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/us/31brfs-TRANSPORTATI_BRF.html?ref=todayspaper).

Starving the beast is a convenient and short-term method of consolidating wealth, is completely counter intuitive, and a theory that we should hope is entering the twilight of its relevance.

So I wonder if Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Princeton have respective $35, 23, 17, and 16 billion dollar endowments what are they doing with all that money and what for that matter are universities doing with the difference between the 17.2% they earn on investments and the 4.6% they spend? Well we have the folks at Amherst College to thank for the answer they gave at a discussion in September of last year with congressman Peter Welch and Senator Chuck Grassley of Vermont and Iowa, respectively (Lewin 2008 New York Times). They for point of reference spend $80,000 dollars per year on each student…that’s right $80,000! Lotta money huh? Well we don’t have an overwhelming reason not to believe them but like the old saying “The plural of anecdote is data!” and I want the data all of it. I won’t to know, and so should you parents and students, where every penny is going, because I know it isn’t going towards astronomical bonuses like the boys and girls on Wall Street got last year, I mean imagine what this country’s struggling undergraduates could have done with $18.4 billion? I would imagine the response from the administration at Amherst or any other college for that matter would be that they are working to produce the best and the brightest. Well it is true that extremely great and intelligent kids are coming out of our college system, but the disturbing trend is that in the same vain as Warren Buffet’s “ovarian lottery” those kids are coming more and more from a smaller sector of society with the net college cost for familes being 55% of income for the lowest category and only 9-16% for the upper-middle and highest tax brackets. A recent report by the folks at The College Board (ie the SAT folks) found that while median family incomes rose 147% between 1982 and 2007 college tuition rose 439% (Lewin 2008 New York Times). Annual total expenditures currently range from $14,054 for public two-year commuter institutions to $29,193-37,390 for public four-year out-of-state on-campus and private four-year on-campus universities. Overall increases or tuition + room and board for private and public four-year universities rose by 221 and 200%, respectively.

This is not democracy at its finest. Some would argue well hey tough luck! I would reply at some point you will be pushed aside, because if you’re not familiar with what an exponential growth curve looks like you better get acquainted with them real quick. They are nasty and cold critters who make no exceptions and when they peak boy is the corresponding crash an ugly thing. We are a nation that was founded on lifting up those that deserved a fighting chance and want desperately to contribute to present and future trajectories. These people should not be forced to beg inclusion. We need to demand that any and all qualified student have the opportunity to attend college and we need to demand that this charter school initiative not usurp in stature or assistance our public institutions. These types of initiatives start with holding university/college administrations and DC accountable and with asking why it is that the Department of Defense has never been denied a thing in its existence, while education is deemed as expendable a commodity as bottled water.  Where does all this money in tuition go? Exactly where does it go and if we don’t like where it goes don’t we have the right to question the policy and people that put it there? I might reveal my idealism here but I strongly believe that education is not something you go into to get rich and institution of higher learning are not corporations they are conduits for knowledge, facilitators of creativity, and more importantly members of a community. It is high time they engage in transparency and maybe even a little bit of altruism, while addressing the recent increase in town-gown rifts.

What you may ask is too important to fail? Well the answer is lots of things like publication education, local and national newspapers, true democracy, and the NFL. Just kidding! Seriously I would argue one object that is too important to fail is the blackboard. The blackboard you ask who the heck cares if it goes by the way of the 8-track or VHS or basic discourse? Again just kidding about the last one…..I think! The blackboard was at one time a pallet for instructors at every level of education to convey an idea and then another and another, while all the while retaining on the board that initial concept for students to…Now don’t jump out of your seat….actually learn to synthesize to make those nuanced connections that only a young brain receptive to all types of input can manage. We have turned in recent years to Microsoft Powerpoint an all to evil invention of an otherwise seminal corporation. This wonder of the folks in Washington has facilitated an abrupt transition to rote and overly simplified learning. I would argue that what is occurring in high school and college classrooms where Powerpoint is present is far from learning, rather we get respective questions and comments from students like “Is this going to be on the test?” or “I that wasn’t exactly what your Powerpoint handout said!”

I once tried an experiment when giving a guest lecture I waited till everyone was in the room and proceeded to give a lame excuse for why I wouldn’t be using my Powerpoint presentation that morning and instead would turn to the blackboard. Immediately I had students asking how I was going to decide what would and would not be on the test and if I didn’t write something on the blackboard I couldn’t put it on the test. Well I chuckled and said you know let’s just give this a shot and I proceeded to go through the lecture on the board starting at the top-left and ending at the bottom right of two adjacent blackboards, repeating this process twice in the span of 70 minutes. However, half way through I turned to the class and asked if it was all making sense what with them being used to Dr. Evil (i.e. Powerpoint) and all. The response was an emphatic yes and even better they said what they really loved about the blackboard was that it all flowed and they could go back and see the connections right there on the board, which they said facilitated more informed and directed questioning. They said that with Powerpoint it was a race against the next slide, while with the blackboard the pace was slowed down as was the learning, which facilitated true absorption of the information, questioning, and debate that followed. I couldn’t help but ask why they had never voiced these issues with other instructors and they were basically under the impression that the ship had left the dock and they better get with the times or risk the consequences.

This is not how learning is supposed to happen especially with the fact that, as Tamar Lewin reported a while back in The New York Times, college tuition fees and median family incomes between 1982-2007 increased by 439 and 147%. If we are going to send our kids to college and people like myself are going to truly teach rather than talk at them we need to be equipped with the best tools and believe me when I tell you those fancy classrooms with overhead projectors, speakers, etc may look great but we’re not going on tour with Pink Floyd here we’re trying to foster thinking and discourse, neither of which are facilitated under the conforming pressures of Powerpoint and “Is this going to be on the test?” lines of questioning. We have really smart kids in this country that will at some point be handed the baton. I for one want to make sure they are equipped to think holistically and are not in the business of having information spoon fed to them. Powerpoint doesn’t just squash synthesized learning and curiosity it makes students and I would imagine many in the workplace apathetic, lazy, and stupid. Yeah I had to say it because it is true. If we continue to mechanize and desensitize the classroom we won’t produce graduates but rather robots. This planet doesn’t have the luxury of deciding its fate, but we do and I would trust flesh and blood over a robot any day.