In one of those coincidences that get you thinking in historical analogies, President Obama announced support for same-sex marriage just a few days after the publication of Robert Caro’s fourth volume on the life of Lyndon B. Johnson, “The Passage of Power.” Obama arrived at his position in very much the way that John F. Kennedy decided to put the force of the White House behind civil rights: slowly, reluctantly, and with a big assist from his overlooked, often ridiculed Vice-President.

I spent the summer of 1980 as an intern at a legal-aid office in southern Alabama, and in the houses of poor black people I got used to seeing a sign on the wall that said, “The three who set us free,” beneath pictures of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. It always struck me as unfair that Johnson had been erased from history, not just in those homes in Alabama, but in the judgment of liberal-minded Americans all over the country. After all, it was President Johnson who got civil rights and voting rights passed, along with the entire program of social-justice legislation known as the Great Society.

For their part, President Kennedy and his brother, the attorney general, spent their first two and a half years in office doing everything possible to avoid taking a position on the central moral issue of their time. The Freedom Rides, sit-ins, James Meredith, Albany, Georgia, Birmingham, and Bull Connor-time after time, the Kennedys watched Americans risking and giving their lives for basic rights and refused to take a clear side. Instead, the President urged patience and talked about enforcing laws and court orders, as if it were a purely legal question. In May, 1963, in the midst of police violence and massive arrests of schoolchildren in Birmingham, Kennedy was asked by a reporter whether it would be useful to speak to the country on the issue.

“Well, it might. If I thought it would I would give one,” was his non-committal answer. The next day, Erwin Griswold, a member of Kennedy’s civil-rights commission, said, “It seems clear to me that he hasn’t even started to use the powers that are available to him.” According to Richard Reeves’s “President Kennedy: Profile of Power,” Kennedy privately fumed, “That son-of-a-bitch! Let him try.” Compared with his attitude toward the unfolding Buddhist crisis in Saigon that same month, “The President seemed more detached about the events in Birmingham,” Reeves wrote. “ ’Life is unfair,’ he had said many times. His sense of irony and his wit kept him out of corners where he might have to choose between right and wrong.”

A month later, on June 10th, after another crisis-Governor George Wallace blocking the door to the University of Alabama-Kennedy finally gave the speech, on national television, from the Oval Office. It was one of the best and most important of his Presidency. “This is not a sectional issue,” he told the country.

Nor is this a partisan issue…This is not even a legal or legislative issue alone…We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.

From then on, there was little doubt that the President of the United States stood with the marchers, and not the police-although Kennedy was unable to get his civil-rights bill through Congress and left it to his successor to succeed where he had not.

History remembers that much, even if most Americans forget. But what the great Robert Caro has revealed is the role L.B.J. played in civil rights during the Kennedy years. Ignored and humiliated by both brothers, convinced that his political life-that is, his whole life-was over, Johnson only showed signs of his old vitality when it came to civil rights. Kennedy hardly bothered to ask for the advice of the one American politician who had managed to get a civil-rights bill passed in the twentieth century (as Senate majority leader, in 1957, the climax of Caro’s previous book, “Master of the Senate”). But given the chance, on June 3, 1963, Johnson weighed in with the full passion and shrewdness of which he was capable.

First, tactically, he urged Kennedy to wait on a civil-rights bill, since the Southerners who controlled the key Senate committees would block every other Kennedy bill in order to defeat it. He explained how Kennedy could hold up other bills that every senator wanted-appropriations bills for dams and other public works-as he slowly built enough support for civil rights to defeat a filibuster. Johnson had to give Kennedy’s alter-ego, Ted Sorensen, a primer in the workings of the Senate, one that the Kennedy White House appeared to need badly. And in terms of the principle of civil rights, Johnson was clear. “I think that I know one thing,” he told Sorensen, according to Caro, “that the Negroes are tired of this patient stuff and tired of this piecemeal stuff and what they want more than anything else is not an executive order or legislation, they want a moral commitment that he’s behind them.”

Sorensen assured the Vice-President that he would pass on his suggestions. A week later, Kennedy gave his civil-rights speech and used the same word that Johnson had used-”moral.” How much direct influence Johnson might have had on the speech isn’t clear, since, having allowed the Vice-President literally fifteen minutes of advice, Kennedy and his brother quickly returned to shutting out and undermining Johnson, and L.B.J. fell back into a deep depression. But one thing is clear: Johnson got there ahead of Kennedy. And he already had a strategy for how to get a bill through a seemingly intractable Congress-a strategy that Kennedy would ignore, leaving it to Johnson to follow his own advice in 1964.

For better and worse, the President Barack Obama most readily calls to mind is Kennedy. He has J.F.K.’s intellect, his detachment, his cool under pressure, his carefulness, his aversion to either-or thinking, his equivocations, his good looks. Like so many Americans, Obama has always characterized Kennedy in heroic terms, and in the 2008 campaign he seemed disinclined to acknowledge the contributions of Lyndon Johnson to American justice. His campaign got into a silly argument when Hillary Clinton alluded to Johnson’s key role in passing civil rights, as if this obvious point were a slight against Martin Luther King, Jr. And at the convention in Denver, the nominee gave his acceptance speech on the forty-fifth anniversary of the March on Washington, an event that Obama rightly saluted-while neglecting to mention that the previous day, August 27th, had been the centennial of the birth of the greatest civil-rights President in the twentieth century.

If Obama identifies with Kennedy, it’s worth wondering if Biden feels at all close to the ghost of L.B.J. Both men rose to power in the Senate by learning to master its byzantine ways. Both were defeated for the Presidential nomination by much younger, more glamorous senators whom they regarded as less than their equals, at least as colleagues in the Senate. Both suffered unflattering leaks and periodic scorn from members of the White House staff once they became Vice-President. Neither was considered a great friend of equal rights by those on the front lines of the issue of their day.

There are big differences, too. Obama seems to hold Biden in far higher regard than Kennedy did Johnson, in Caro’s portrait. Johnson’s Vice-Presidency nearly destroyed him; Biden’s has, for the most part, elevated him. And while Kennedy took very few risks in domestic policy until that speech on June 10, 1963, Obama gambled-and might have gambled away-his first term with a historic health-care bill that consumed his first year in office.

But it was Johnson who pushed hard on civil rights where Kennedy, assuming he’d get to it after his reëlection, hesitated. And it was Biden who, inadvertently, forced Obama to stop evolving and declare himself on an issue that the President clearly hoped would leave him alone until after November. Though same-sex marriage isn’t a cause on the same scale of historic injustice as the color line in America, it is the issue that forces today’s politicians to take a clear and politically difficult moral stand. It’s an issue for politicians whose egos are not under tight rational control-who are, come heaven or hell, passionate.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/05/lbjs-biden-civil-rights-gay-marriage.html#ixzz1v23gQL34

It may not seem like much in such a depressed real estate market, but builder confidence in the market for newly built, single-family homes gained five points in May from a downwardly revised reading in the previous month to reach a level of 29 on the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index (HMI), released today. This is the index’s strongest reading since May of 2007. And that will give a boost to several other industries, including construction and finance.

Graph: Calculated Risk

“Builders in many markets are reporting that buyer traffic and sales have picked back up after a pause this April,” said Barry Rutenberg, chairman of the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB). “It seems we have resumed the gradual upward trend in confidence that started at the beginning of this year, as stabilizing prices and excellent affordability encourage more people to pursue a new-home purchase.”

More good news is that mortgage delinquencies continue to decline, reports the Mortgage Bankers Association. “The delinquency rate for mortgage loans on one-to-four-unit residential properties decreased to a seasonally adjusted rate of 7.40 percent of all loans outstanding as of the end of the first quarter of 2012, a decrease of 18 basis points from the fourth quarter of 2011, and a decrease of 92 basis points from one year ago”, according to the MBA’s National Delinquency Survey. “The non-seasonally adjusted delinquency rate decreased 121 basis points to 6.94 percent this quarter from 8.15 percent last quarter.”

And Realtors in some markets are reporting multiple offers, reports Calculated Risk.

Jon Lansner at the Orange Country, California Register: O.C. homes draw multiple-offer ‘avalanche’ (an excerpt from Steve Thomas’ report) “Below $500,000 range is NUTS. Homes priced at or near their market value are generating an avalanche of multiple offers. A home in this range is placed on the market and, within moments, cars filled with buyers are touring the home. …Upon writing an offer, buyers quickly find that they are one of many, sometimes over ten, offers on the home. Suddenly … In the end, the seller factors the highest price with the largest down payment. I know, you are thinking, “What about the appraisal?” In many instances, shrewd sellers and Realtors are leveraging the competition to drop the appraisal contingency and require the buyer to make up the difference between the appraisal price and the purchase price, IF there is an appraisal problem. … Supply has dropped to levels not seen since June 2005. … The expected market time for all of Orange County is 1.5 months, or six weeks.”

So, “While home building still has quite a way to go toward a fully healthy market, the fact that the HMI has returned to trend is an excellent sign that firming home values, improving employment and low mortgage rates are drawing consumers back,” said NAHB Chief Economist David Crowe. “The pace of this emerging recovery could be stronger were it not for the significant impediments that the market continues to face with regard to builder and consumer access to credit, inaccurate appraisals, and more recently, rising materials prices.”

Harlan Green © 2012

I met Patrick at a multi-organization meeting that my agency ran. Patrick asked me the usual questions about Peace Corps: specifically what is Peace Corps and how does it work? I explained that it is an agency of the U.S. government that places volunteers in developing countries. I told him that we received living allowances and that most volunteers are placed with NGOs to do capacity building and such. I told him about the three goals of Peace Corps.

Patrick was impressed and asked if there were a Peace Corps program for Jamaicans to travel to the United States and reciprocate the three goals. I’ve had encountered other people in developing countries where Peace Corps serves who have expressed similar sentiments.

It is a question that is a bit difficult to answer. You definitely do not want to come across as an ugly American who believes that only the United States has all the answers. After engaging in such a conversations I too ponder why it is that I have this wonderful opportunity to come here and offer my services while learning about the culture and then returning home enriched by my experience while the people I serve realistically do not have a comparable opportunity.

Sure there are exchange programs that bring people from foreign countries to the United States for cultural exchange, but they are for people from other 1st world countries. If people in developing countries are fortunate and exceptional they might have an opportunity to come study in the United States. Someone from a developing nation who is educated and has some skills, but is lacking in wealth or connections (someone who is an average person such as myself) would find it difficult to come to the United States to do something similar to what I am doing here in Jamaica.

The United States has plenty of agencies doing community development that would be well served by someone coming from a developing country that could offer other ways of approaching issues that these agencies address. Many inner cities in the United States have the same problems and challenges as countries in the developing world. It would be eye-opening for all involved if people from the developing world were brought to the United States to serve much as Peace Corps volunteers do in their countries.

It would be Peace Corps in reverse. Imagine someone from a developing country who has lived their whole life in a sustainable way out of necessity coming to the United States to help capacity build at an agency that is newly addressing issues of sustainability in somewhere like the midwest. People from the third world could come to the United States, share their culture, and show us that life can be lived without two cars, a large screen TV and etc. They could help create community gardens, beekeeping and goat raising projects. Reverse Peace Corps Volunteers could help us remember that the United States was founded by immigrants representing many cultures. They could teach language classes in our schools.

This Reverse Peace Corps I propose could work under the exact same goals as the Peace Corps. Potential Reverse Peace Corps volunteers would have to have a certain level of education, skills and abilities. They would have to be willing to serve in parts of the United States where people may have never heard of their country or met someone who looks like them.

One idea I had for this Reverse Peace Corps volunteer program would be have a counterpart who worked with a volunteer have an opportunity to then come to the United States and work with that same volunteer at a United State’s NGO - this time the counterpart would become the volunteer and serve for two years and the RPCV would be the host country counterpart working for an agency as either an employee or intern. For this to work partnerships with American agencies would have to be formed to place RPCVs and their counterparts with agencies that request such a program. One brilliant aspect of this proposal is that the RPCV could basically act as the trainer for the Reverse Volunteers service in the U.S. The RPCV would be able to offer cultural, language and technical training and support to their counterpart who would now be the Peace Corps volunteer.

Consider how powerful a program this could be. It would definitely reinforce the third goal and also provide many more opportunities for the transfer of skills and ideas for all involved. It would also help ensure that RPCVs were bringing back their expertise in development work to be put to good use where needed while bringing an added element of the Reverse Peace Corps volunteer who would have the opportunity to give back to people from the U.S. for what the Peace Corps volunteer provided him and his country. I often hear host country nationals express the wish to be able to do something in return for what Peace Corps did for them, and this would be one way to do that.

I am sure some may scoff at this idea. They will state many reasons why it would be impossible, but I am sure that 50 years ago JFK and Sargent Shriver had many people tell them that the Peace Corps was impossible or frivolous. Peace Corps has a legacy that has now extended past 50 years.

To me this Peace Corps Reverse proposal could be the next step in maintaining the relevance of Peace Corps in the future. The gap between the developing world continues to shrink. We have now been thrust into a more and more global world. It is very important that the people of the United States do not fall into isolation. Countries that we once looked at as backwards and Third World are now out-competing us in many areas while the United States turns more inward and we are more and more becoming a divided country that is unwilling to accept the diversity of cultures that was once celebrated as the melting pot that made the United States. The exception to this is the type of people who are people who join Peace Corps. Others do not have the same kind of experiences either because of choice or because they are unable to. With Peace Corps Reverse, Peace Corps could come to them.

Think about a young RPCV fresh back from serving in someplace like Ghana coming home to work at a Head Start program in a rural community in the south … and coming to America to work two years with them is their Ghana counterpart who was a pre-school teacher in Ghana. Or an agriculture extension volunteer who served in Central America coming back to a serve in an USDA extension program or to work with 4-H or FFA and they bring along their counterpart who has knowledge of more sustainable farming practices, but then is also able to experience for two years the big Agribusiness model of the United States. This kind of service would open a lot of interesting dialogue and learning opportunities for all involved. The cultural exchange would be incredible since you would have a RPCV who would be basically a bridge between the two cultures.

Suitable partnership agencies and communities would have to be found. It would be a bit more complicated than Peace Corps placement as you would be placing a RPCV and their host country counterpart with an agency and in a community for two years.

This idea would show that the United States is willing to reciprocate and that we in the United States recognise that we do not have all the expertise or all the answers.

I believe it would not be too difficult to administer such a Reverse Peace Corps. There are already agencies in place that with some additions could administer such a program. Americorps is the main possibility. RPCVs could continue their service when they come back to the U.S. as Americorps volunteers, but with the added bonus of doing it with a counterpart from their country of service. It could be a partnership that would strengthen both Americorps and Peace Corps by creating more opportunities for both agencies.

This idea all came to me in a rush, as ideas often do when you are a Peace Corps volunteer. It basically incubated from the time I spoke to Patrick to the time I reached my apartment and pulled out my laptop to write this out. I asked Patrick if I could take full credit for the idea that he actually planted in my mind. He said that of course I could, but I actually give credit to all the host country nationals who showed equal or more interest in me and my culture as I did with theirs and who sincerely said that they wished they could serve as Peace Corps volunteers themselves.

I hope that people who know more than I do and are the movers and shakers of development work will read this and run with it. You can even claim it as your own idea, after all JFK was not the first to express the idea of international service opportunities for Americans, but he is the one who made it happen.

The Iranian woman is just as passionate about her work, and almost as out of her comfort zone, as we were back then, and the work is familiar. First there is the skeptical but compliant soldier who dutifully protects the female whom he is certain should not be doing this kind of thing. Then there is her first encounter with a potential voter. He runs away in terror, and the ballot seeker has her soldier driver chase him down across the desert in the jeep.

Like us, she has her spiel about the importance of her mission. As with Peace Corps vaccinators, this is met with resistance limited only by the imagination. One old man nodding and uttering one syllable finally admits he doesn’t understand Farsi. Each response illuminates much about the clash of tradition and modernity, about country and city lives, about gender roles.

"Once in Afghanistan"

Seeing my youthful idealism, my bizarre exchanges with the women, my racing against the clock brought short bursts of laughter from me as I watched this beautifully told story. Long sighs, as well, at my bullying, at the irony of vaccinating people who don’t have enough to eat, with my despair that maybe this effort won’t count.

The ending is a comfort. As my friend Linda from Group XV put it, there is magic in those moments that resonate with our being more alike than different.

At the time he was reading, as they say at Oxford, English Language and Literature, and his courses included tutorials on Middle English, Spenser, Shakespeare, the seventeenth century, and the eighteenth century. At the start of the Michaelmas term, he saw a notice that the St. Aldates Police Station was looking for volunteers to stand in identity parades. They paid ten pounds per parade.

So Peter went down to the station and signed up. His first parade was for stealing bikes. The station hadn’t finished constructing its viewing room, which would feature a one-way mirror. For the time being, the parades took place in a room where nothing separated the witness from the suspect and the volunteers.

In his piece, Peter writes how he didn’t like the witness nor the way he took his role so seriously. This seemed to be a small matter, stealing bikes. The witness stared hard at Hessler when he walked past the first time. Peter stared back. When he returned, Peter looked in his eyes, holding steady for a moment, and then he glanced away. The witness paused.

The next time he walked past, Peter does it again.

The witness walks through five times.

And then the witness points at Hessler and identifies him.

Peter goes back again in another line up at the police station. Besides himself, the lineup if for an arson crime and included volunteers from southeast Oxford; most of them seemed to be unemployed. The arson case revolved around someone setting fire to a building which housed a family of Somali refugees who lived close to Cowley Road. The authorities suspected that the arson had been racially motivated. All of the volunteers wore fake mustaches. The suspect was standing next to Peter and something about the man’s eyes told Peter that he might be mentally disable. He could hear the suspect breathing hard beside him.

Now the station has a one-way mirror, and Peter can’t see clearly through the glass, but it was possible to tell if there was a presence behind it. A shadow behind the glass passed five times, each time more slowly than the last. After the fifth time, another officer walked into the room. “The witness did not make an identification,” he announced. The suspect exhaled loudly. All the volunteers filed out of the room.

The entire article is in the current issue of The New Yorker, May 21, 2012. Check is out.

Peter left Oxford and went to China, falling in love with the place, he returned later as a PCV and would write about it in his first book, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze. Today he is living in Egypt with his wife and their young twins.

“Ellis Hock never believed that he would return to Africa. He runs an old-fashioned menswear store in a small town in Massachusetts but still dreams of his Eden, the four years he spent in Malawi with the Peace Corps, cut short when he had to return to take over the family business. When his wife leaves him, and he is on his own, he realizes that there is one place for him to go: back to his village in Malawi, on the remote Lower River, where he can be happy again.

Arriving at the dusty village, he finds it transformed: the school he built is a ruin, the church and clinic are gone, and poverty and apathy have set in among the people. They remember him-the White Man with no fear of snakes-and welcome him. But is his new life, his journey back, an escape or a trap?”

Norm Rush begins his two-page review with a cautionary note, saying of the novel, “It’s a notable creation, but one that sits oddly in the Theroux oeuvre.”

He goes onto say, ”Few writers, even those as or more prolific than Theroux, have managed to create–through the full range of their works–a voice so unified, so unwavering, so unmistakable.”

Rush thinks he has another novel of that kind, but by the end the first section of his review  there is a warning shot for readers across the literary landscape as Rush writes, ”The Lower River confounds.”

Rush’s review has a quick summary of the early narrative of the novel, and he tells how the main character, Ellis Hock, impulsively decides to return to Africa, to the “remote Malawian village of Malabo” where he once was a happy PCV.

Would-be RPCV writers might perk up at this point and ask themselves: How’s ol’ Paul fictionally going to handle his return to his Peace Corps site?

Well, Theroux’s protagonist finds not the Africa of his  Peace Corps days. “None of what he saw from the car was lovely: the African of people, not of animals.” His old village is worse than could have been imagined.  Next, he falls under the hands and control of the grandson of an his acquaintance from his Peace Corps days.

As Rush notes in his review, “Protocol forbids revealing further detail of Hock’s voyage toward the bottom of things…”

But Norm then goes onto asks this question: “What sort of story is being told in this novel?”

Rush praises the “quality of the author’s workmanship” adding, “The Lower River may be Paul Theroux’s most unnerving novel, but he would probably agree that it’s not his strongest, or his most richly developed.”

He locates Paul as a literary writer within the terrain of such great writers as Robert Stone, Graham Greene, Joseph Conrad and Bob Shacochis (yes, our own Bob Schacochis (Eastern Caribbean 1975-76).

Still, Rush is bothered: What does the novel mean? he wonders.

Well, he is not so sure. He thinks it might be an allegory, if not outright parable, about Western aid to Africa.

What then is  Theroux  saying? That “Western assistance programs in impoverished Africa are worthless?

No, Paul doesn’t think that, Norm knows. To get at what Theroux really believes about Africa, Rush quotes a 1995 interview he gave to Stephen Capen that shows “Theroux’s broad and humane sentiments.

Then he adds,  “In 2009, he (Theroux) endorsed Peace Corps service as a life choice for young Americans. Last year he was featured speaker at the event celebrating the fifty anniversary of the founding of the Peace Corps.”

Rush’s finally decides that The Lower River is a different sort of book. It is a “successful exercise in straight horror/fantasy genre writing. It was never intended to produce maxims. This is no moral to this tale, or at least no moral that would not read as an apostate’s curse, coming from Paul  Theroux.”

In other words Stephen King or our own Christopher Conlon (Bostwana 1988-90) could have written the novel.

Well, that’s not so bad either.

As for Norm Rush….Well, his long awaited next novel is entitled, Subtle Bodies. It will be published in 2013. I think I’ll ask Theroux to review it for Peace Corps Writers!

We are seeing what can only be called a war on workers by Tea Party Republicans in particular. Who are workers? The 80 percent of consumers who are wage and salary earners. And they have not done well since the 1970s while corporations have made record profits, as I have been saying.

Graph: EPI

It is the current crop of conservative Republicans, such as Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who has even been caught on video declaring Republicans’ strategy of “divide and conquer” on public service workers and teachers, that have declared outright war. Their campaign would essentially wipe out the middle class by blocking all attempts to raise workers’ incomes in both the private and public sectors, and so their standard of living. Yet in doing so, Republicans will destroy the very foundation of our economic strength. Governor Walker’s efforts in particular have put Wisconsin at the bottom of Midwestern states’ job creation list.

Employers have always tried to maximize profits by limiting workers’ pay, but wage suppression today because of Republican efforts to limit collective bargaining is as bad as it was during the Great Depression. And the result has been disastrous for both jobs and economic growth.

For instance, the 40 years from 1961 to 2000, when the White House was shared equally by Republican and Democratic presidents (20 years each), pro-labor rights Democrats had the far superior record both for economic growth, and jobs. This can be found in numerous government data, but summarized by the Currency Thoughts blog. Bush 43’s record (GW Bush) was even worse.

% Per Annum      Democrat      Republican      Bush43

GDP Growth      4.1 percent      2.9 percent      2.2 percent

Employment      2.9 percent      1.7 percent      0.5 percent

Even more convincing proof that Republicans’ ideological war on workers will prolong this recession is their record on job creation. The Wall Street Journal has run articles on this fact. Since Harry Truman, 57.5 million jobs were created during Democratic Administrations, vs. 36.2 million jobs created during Republican Administrations.

President Clinton is the winner with 23.1 million jobs created during his 8 years, whereas President Reagan leads Repubs with 16 million created during his term. There are pundits who say these job totals are not totally accurate because policies created in one administration will affect job formation in the next. But that would have to work both ways, cancelling out any effects of one administration’s policies over another.

We aren’t even counting President Obama’s almost 4 million jobs created to date after our Greatest Recession that followed on the heels of GW Bush’s worst track record of just 3 million jobs created 2000-2008.

Why? This is one of the most basic economic truths, yet conservative Republicans in particular don’t seem to care. They want to believe that lower taxes will stimulate more jobs by transferring more revenue to the private sector. But that hasn’t happened—historically their policies have depressed the jobs and incomes of wage and salary earners that would stimulate more demand for their products.

And this is in spite of record corporate profits, which belies the ideology that greater tax cuts (even abolishing corporate taxes) will bring greater prosperity. In fact, as corporate profits have risen over the past 30 years, workers’ incomes have fallen. A recent New York Times’ article highlighted recent revisions of 2010 and 2011 Department of Commerce data. The new figures indicate that corporate profits accounted for 14 percent of the total national income in 2010, the highest proportion ever recorded. The previous peak, of 13.6 percent, was set in 1942 when the need for war materials filled the order books of companies at the same time as the government imposed wage and price controls, holding down the costs companies had to pay.

‘Employees have always received more than half the total national income, until now,” said the New York Times. (But) “In 2010, the percentage of national income devoted to wages and salaries fell to 49.9 percent, and it slipped a little more to 49.6 percent in the first quarter of this year. That continued decline may help explain the economic worries of many Americans who have jobs but still fear they are falling behind.”

Graph of wages/benefits vs. profits: New York Times

The private sector war is being waged by conservative states with their Right-to-Work laws that say though it can’t be illegal to organize into unions (because it’s federal law), it can make it illegal for workers in individual states to have to join and pay dues to support the unions. Twenty four states in the Midwest and South now have such laws.

This should be a no-brainer, in other words, which is why in not heeding the most basic economic truths—one cannot create demand without more income to support it—Republicans have declared a defacto war on workers. It is the worst kind of blindness. Republicans are also destroying their own economic homeland, the U.S. economy, and our competitiveness in the ever more worldwide economy.

Harlan Green © 2012

Bending with the Wind: Memoir of a Cambodian Couple’s Escape to America

•

Magic Hours: Essays on Creators and Creation
by Tom Bissell (Uzbekistan 1996-97)
McSweeney’s, Believer Books
$14.00
300 pages
April 2012
(more about the book)

•

Unofficial Peace Corps Volunteer Handbook
by Travis Hellstrom (Mongolia 2008–11)
Advance Humanity Publishing
$15.95
234 pages
2010
(PCWW review)

•

The Master Blaster
by P.F. Kluge (Micronesia 1969-70)
Overlook Press
$25.95
304 pages
April, 2012
(re NYTimes review)

•

Far Away In The Sky: A Memoir of the Biafran Airlift
by David L. Koren (1965–66)
Createspace
$17.99 (paperback); $8.60 (Kindle)
332 pages
April 2011

•

Peace Corps Experience: Write and Publish Your Memoir
by Lawrence F. Lihosit (Honduras 1975–77)
iUniverse
$13.95 (paperback); $3.03 (Kindle)
127 pages
April 2012

•

A Breeze in Bulgaria
by Bruce McDonald (2002–04)
BookBrewer
$21.29 (paperback), $6.99 (Kindle)
341 pages
February 2012

•

Life Under the Eastern Sky: Essays on Contemporary Chinese Culture
by Valerie Sartor (Korea 1980–81; Central African Republic 1981–83)
and Yang Jun Heng
CreateSpace
$6.99
214 pages
April 2012

First of all, I would point out that USAID is replete with RPCVs among its staff both home and abroad.  No surprise here since USAID is a natural next step for those who volunteered to help the less fortunate people of the world.  And Peace Corps experience is directly related to what one encounters in a career with USAID. 

Next I would mention my near career ending battle with my colleagues when as our Commercial Attache in Ankara, Turkey I argued long and hard that our development assistance could be used in a manner to both benefit the Turks and American business.  I was in Turkey during one of its darkest economic times since the formation of the Turkish Republic.  Things were so bad the Turks did not even have the foreign exchange to import coffee and thus there was practically no “Turkish coffee” available.  The most appreciated gift I could give was a pound of coffee brought in via my US government status. 

My point at the time was that our main assist to Turkey was the famous or infamous balance of payments support program under which we simply pumped foreign exchange, dollars, into the Turkish treasury to allow it to pay for vital imports.  At the time, and I believe even to this day, this cash payment program was the largest, if not dominant,  USAID program.   I recall once paying a call on the Turkish treasury to hand over a check for $2 million.  And believe it or not the Turks were given free choice in how to spend the funds with very little accountability other than to show that it was spent.   Needless to say, the balance of payments support program was the main channel for diversion of US funds to private bank accounts

My demand was that the funds should have been used to pay for imports from the USA and not from other countries. Thus the dual benefits, the Turks got balance of payment support and we got paid for our exports.  Granted we paid for them ourselves with the nominal promise of  the Turks repaying the balance of payments support in the future.  But as far as I can determine, there is no case in which this balance of payments support was ever repaid. 

My colleagues both at the embassy and in Washington beat me to death with the accusation of demanding “tied aid” which meant aid that can only be used to buy US products.  They refused to acknowledge that all other donor countries to Turkey were at that time “tying” their aid to their own exports.  More importantly, the US at that time was exporting much more to Turkey than our assistance could finance.  Therefore, the funds would have been fully used to provide balance of payments support.

Since my demand was totally rejected, the balance of payments support, including the checks I delivered, continued to be turned over to the Turks with no idea of how the funds would be used.  And believe me, many of the uses would cause even the most  sympathetic donor to shudder. 

My next USAID story came while living in Namibia as a “dependent” spouse.  My wife was at our embassy there and I was providing consulting services to several companies in Southern Africa.  The USAID team there invited me to do a financial and sustainability analysis of its main development project for Namibia.  The project was an environmentalist dream, improve land utilization by returning large tracts of land to those who formerly lived on them.  A main target here was to return people to the lands that had been placed into large nature reserves.  The theory was that those who had lived on the land for centuries were better able to use the land in sustainable ways.

Since much of the land was in nature parks USAID formulated the project with the Namibian agency that managed these parks.  I started my analysis by saying USAID had the wrong local partner for the project.  It should have been working with the Ministry of Agriculture instead of the park management agency.  I ended by saying, “this project promises to be an expensive exercise in bringing the Indians back to the buffaloes.”

Needless to say USAID Namibia was not happy with my analysis and got others to do further studies that eventually filled in the blanks to allow the project to go forward.  A year or so after leaving Namibia I read in the New York Times that USAID had to close its major undertaking in Namibia with the loss of $6 million.  You guessed it, the project was the one to ”bring the Indians back to the buffaloes.”

While I can go on with more stories about USAID, I do not mean to say that it has been a questionable undertaking.  On the contrary, I consider it to be the best development effort ever undertaken by any country.  I merely mean to suggest the extreme difficulty of implementing successful development programs.   And the wide diversity of opinions about how to go about this business.

Levingston writes:

Kindle Singles is a 15-month-old e-book venture from Amazon that strives to publish original fiction and nonfiction works at Goldilocks length: not too long, not too short but just right. Its Web site lays out the ambition: “Compelling Ideas Expressed at Their Natural Length.” The books, as short as David Baldacci’s 15-page story “No Time Left” or as long as Dean Koontz’s 102-page “The Moonlit Mind,” are vetted, accepted (or rejected) and edited by David Blum and put on sale at the very modern price of 99 cents to $4.99.

Kindle Singles isn’t just for brand-name authors. It serves its greatest purpose by showcasing the work of unknown authors of exceptional ability, such as the journalist Terrence M. McCoy. His just-released book, “The Playground” is an ire-inspiring account of cash-rich Chinese corporations sweeping into Cambodian villages at the urging of the despotic Hun Sen government and sweeping out the locals to make way for five-star hotels and shopping malls. It’s a tale of tag-team tyranny over the defenseless. The work’s length - longer than many magazine articles but shorter than most books - and its strong storytelling are perfect for a few commutes on the Metro and, more important, for engaging the uninitiated in an issue of growing global importance: the ugliness that arises from the lust for economic development in certain parts of the world. At $1.99, the price of enlightenment is low.

McCoy became fluent in Khmer during a two-year stint with the Peace Corps in Cambodia and is now completing a one-year Master’s program in journalism at Columbia University. For his Master’s project, he returned to Cambodia to investigate the tactics of Chinese corporations. His crisp, vivid narrative depicts the one-sided battles that rage between developers intent on having their way with the less-powerful and villagers hoping to cling to their homes. In one village, “Soldiers had Tasered and sent to prison dozens of villagers - including two children - with their heads bashed,” McCoy writes, adding that one woman, distraught over her eviction, killed herself by leaping off a bridge over the Mekong River.

What separates McCoy’s book from other tales of authoritarian capitalism run amok is his discovery of a unique form of protest - led by a most uncommon rebel. During his Peace Corps years, McCoy writes, “I’d gotten to know hundreds of Cambodians, dozens of them intimately, and thought I’d met every sort of Khmer personality the country had to offer. But then I met Vanny.”

Vanny Tep is a former fashion model whose “life, she says, has no space for vanity” and who, at 32, “has become the de facto leader of a [Phnom Penh]-based grassroots movement against the government, violent land eviction, and development itself,” McCoy writes. He tags along with her to a meeting of rebels in the village of Boeung Kak, a fishing village once rich in freshwater fish and water buffalo, and now “something out of a post-apocalyptic film, barren and cragged” after nearly two-thirds of its 20,000 residents have fled because of violence and intimidation. The Boeung Kak rebels at the meeting are not the angry men you’d expect but a group of about 20 boisterous women.

A few years ago, Vanny had a realization about the power of women protesters. While Cambodian soldiers willingly whack the skulls of male resisters, they hesitate before women. “It’s the Khmer way,” McCoy writes. “A man would be shamed if he publicly beat a woman.”

For Vanny, the route to effective protest was obvious: “I need to gather all the women,” she thought, and soon she had a resistance movement of young and old Cambodian women wearing Khmer scarves around their necks, waists or bandana-like around their heads as a symbol of resistance. Their protests befuddled the police and prevented violence. It also publicized their cause, even though the outlook for containing China’s corporate aggression is uncertain.

In McCoy’s adroit hands, the story doesn’t end on the public battlefield but goes inside the home, where the female protesters are also rattling Cambodian domestic traditions. Women whose lives typically revolve around child care, cooking and cleaning have found a new sense of power. Husbands, used to subservient wives, grumble and adjust. “This clash of tradition and gender equality,” McCoy writes, “represented not only a profound shift in culture, but another wrinkle in the story of development.”

I take one day where what I take from you
is proportionate to the nourishment you provide.

One day where I don’t see you as something to be fixed up,
or tied down
or drilled through.

One day where I recognize in each moment your core as my heart,
your soil as my flesh,
your stars as my eyes.

One day where I celebrate you as you deserve to be celebrated
with quiet and slowness
and reverence.

One day of union with you,
your way, not mine.

A walk along the creek in awe of the great diversity of your work.
A swing in the hammock beneath the tapestry of your creation.

Bathing in your color,
swooning in your sound,
Gaping at infinite texture,
Breathing in every fragrance.

This day you are not the object–
the round planet where I reside,
suspended with so many others.
My Earth, My land, My home.

Today instead, for once,
I am yours.

]]> http://peacecorpsworldwide.org/unofficial-peace-corps/2012/05/12/no-going-back-there-is-only-forward/ http://peacecorpsworldwide.org/unofficial-peace-corps/2012/05/12/no-going-back-there-is-only-forward/#comments Sun, 13 May 2012 04:35:01 +0000 Travis Hellstrom http://peacecorpsworldwide.org/unofficial-peace-corps/?p=37 Earlier this month I had the honor of interviewing Jessica, who served in Zambia as a Peace Corps Volunteer and was medically evacuated after she contracted HIV. Her popular blog, No Going Back. There Is Only Forward. follows her story, medical evacuation from Peace Corps, and her current adventure as she applies to be reinstated as a PCV.

You can listen to the interview live streaming here and also download it here.

One of my favorite things about Jessica, and one of the things that I think really makes her an outstanding PCV, is how she supports others. Jessica has received a lot of support from PCVs, RPCVs, Peace Corps staff and many more people over the past few months, but she has never hesitated to be one of those supportive people herself.

It’s Jessica’s hope (and mine too) that the supportive community around difficult issues, like medical evacuation and separation from service, will continue to grow. There is an effort underway to bring together Peace Corps, National Peace Corps Association, RPCV groups and others around health issues and medical evacuation and we could really use your support.

If you are interested, email us anytime at medevac@peacecorps101.com or message Jessica directly here, and please listen to the interview to learn more.

I hope you all enjoy meeting Jessica as much as I did!

We know Victor Hugo’s message is alive and well when Paul Ryan’s latest budget proposal continues to punish the poorest for the sins of the wealthiest who caused the Great Recession, and have yet to be punished. Les Miserables’ Jean Valjean is punished for stealing a loaf of bread while the French aristocracy refused to share their wealth. Then came the French Revolution, of course

And Republican Paul Ryan’s latest budget proposal punishes the poor to pay for the excesses of the wealthiest that created the worst budget deficit since WWII. “We propose to stop fraud in the food-stamp program by ensuring that individuals are actually eligible for the taxpayer benefits they receive,” said Ryan at a recent press conference.

Yet congressional Republicans will do nothing to return the fraudulently obtained $trillions of the wealthiest beneficiaries of the burst housing bubble by raising their taxes. The fraud of those like Goldman Sachs who benefitted most has been well-documented by Chairman Philip Angelides’ Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which was set up to determine the causes of the financial meltdown that led to the Great Depression, among them criminal fraud.

“The bipartisan panel appointed by Congress to investigate the financial crisis has concluded that several financial industry figures appear to have broken the law and has referred multiple cases to state or federal authorities for potential prosecution, according to two sources directly involved in the deliberations,” said the Huffington Post.

“Though civil charges appear a more likely outcome should prosecution result, one source familiar with the panel’s deliberations said criminal charges should not be ruled out. The commission’s decision to refer conduct for prosecution underscores the severity of the activities it has uncovered and plans to detail in its widely anticipated final report, the sources said.”

One-quarter of the House GOP spending cuts come from programs directly benefitting the poor; such as Medicaid, food stamps, the Social Services Block Grant, and a child tax credit claimed by working immigrants.

“This plan hits the food and nutrition programs but totally exempts all the agricultural subsidies,” said House Democrat Chris Van Hollen. Republicans would also eliminate Social Services Block Grants, a $1.7 billion a year program that gives states money for Meals on Wheels, day dare, adoption assistance and transportation help for the elderly and disabled.

And the Bureau of Labor Statistics in its latest JOLTS report  said the number of job openings in March (not seasonally adjusted) increased over the year for total nonfarm, total private, and government. Job openings increased over the year for durable goods manufacturing, nondurable goods manufacturing, retail trade, health care and social assistance, and state and local government. Job openings in the Midwest and South regions increased over the year. The total number of job vacancies jumped 172K from an upward-revised level in February. The 3.737 million job openings for March 2012 is the highest since July 2008.

Lastly, the NFIB Small Business Confidence Survey shows both increased hiring and income.  It outperformed expectations in April, rising two full points to a level of 94.5, and thereby matching the recovery high set in February 2011. The employment-related measures improved as had been previously reported, and there were some pleasant surprises among the other components.

Graph: NFIB

We can therefore say those who want to punish the poor, without punishing those who caused the Great Recession for their misdeeds has a historical precedent, thanks to Victor Hugo. Do we really want to repeat the mistakes of the French aristocracy?

Harlan Green © 2012

What keeps him on the move is his writing and research. Tom has just published a new collection of essays that “explores the highs and lows of the creative process.” He takes us from the set of The Big Bang Theory to the first novel of Ernest Hemingway to the final work of David Foster Wallace; from the films of Werner Herzog to Tommy Wiseau’s disastrous cult classic The Room to the editorial meeting in which Paul Fox’s Desperate Characters was relaunched into the world.

In these essays, Tom asks a lot of questions, including: What are sitcoms for exactly? Can art be both bad and genius? Why do some books survive and others vanish?

The book has received starred reviews from both Kirkus and Publishers Weekly. It is a collection of essays from one smart RPCV that is well worth reading.

Magic Hour Essays on Creators and Creation was published in trade paperback last month by Believer Books, a division of McSweeney’s. If you are interested in good writing, the creative process, and wise words, pick it up.

https://store.mcsweeneys.net/products/magic-hours

My Colombian co-teachers and fellow adventurers.

I remember getting a call from the Peace Corps for my final interview. I had been teaching English at a private, after-school academy in Seoul, South Korea, for eight months while I played in two folk / rock bands and searched for new work opportunities to consider. I really liked Korea (loved, actually), but I was excited about the possibility to leave the country and join the Peace Corps. (It’s funny, as a current Peace Corps Volunteer, I’m now searching for ways to get back to Seoul after I’m finished).

So Krugman is on the same page as am I, i.e. the recovery has been rather lackluster and fallen well short of expectations.  He differs from me in his remedy to improve the situation.  Krugman calls for more “stimulus” from the Feds.  He argues that rather than cutting Fed expenditures, given the cheap cost for the Feds to borrow, the Feds should be borrowing more to channel to state and local governments.  It is worthwhile noting here that most of  President Obama’s “stimulus” money in 2009 was indeed channeled to state governments. 

Krugman argues that Fed money for state governments will allow the states to reemploy teachers and other state employees let go because of tight budgets.   And in this he is right.  The question remains, however, if $900 billion did not do the job, why would his suggestion of $300 billion to do the job work now?

The issue is, as I said in my last blog, that the recovery has not been as effective as we had hoped.  The question now is what will be more effective?  Krugman argues for another stimulus bill.  I argue for recreating the “mountain” of consumer debt that was effectively destroyed by the “housing bubble” collapse.  And there are other remedies being postulated in this election year.

Peter is best known for his best-selling comic novels: The Deal, The Dreyfus Affair, Di & I, Abbreviating Ernie, The Woody, Eleven Karens and The Manhattan Project.

This, however,  is a much more serious book.

An American Family is told through the shifting points of view of the five Perl siblings born in the 1940’s, and between the two iconic dates of the last fifty years: the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the catastrophe of 9/11. Within this time frame one family is swept up in the sweeping cultural changes of those years: the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, rock music, drugs, women’s liberation, the turbulence in American culture.

Writing this book took Peter away from what he has done to make a living since his Peace Corps years, i.e., working in television.  Among his credits are Cagney and Lacey, for which he won an Emmy Award; Monte Carlo, in which he managed to keep Joan Collins in the same wardrobe for 35 pages; the relentlessly sentimental “Danielle Steel’s Fine Things,” and the underrated and hurried “The Women of Windsor,” the most sordid, and thankfully last, miniseries about the British Royal Family. He plays golf to a thirty handicap, drinks too much good wine, and has never been awarded the Nobel Prize for anything, he says.

This is also what he had to say about An American Family that you can buy today on line at Amazon.com as an ebook. It sells for $3.99.

“I am a first generation American Jew. My father was born in Poland; my mother was the twelfth child of a Russian immigrant couple and the only one born in America. My father grew up in a shtetl village in eastern Poland, where he spoke Yiddish and studied to be a religious scholar. He came to New York, in 1922, learned English, put himself through law school, bought a house in the suburbs and started a family.

“I grew up in Queens, playing stickball, watching “Ed Sullivan,” going to summer camp, joining a high school fraternity - all activities foreign to my father. I attended a sub-Ivy league college, studied English literature, joined the Peace Corps, moved to Los Angeles, married a non-Jew and eventually became a writer. My father never read anything I published.

“My son grew up in Beverly Hills and France, where we owned an apartment. He went to Yale and then Sciences-Po in Paris. He speaks fluent French and Russian, as well as his native English. He doesn’t understand a word of Yiddish, except the usual terms coopted into our daily language. He is presently a humanitarian worker, traveling to difficult and dangerous places, married to a Kyrgyz woman, who works for the United Nation. He has recently made me a grandfather.

“This flow of the generations, this voyage of immigrant families, this phenomenon of change and adaptation over the generations is what I wanted to write about. American immigrant families change over time as the new culture accretes to their roots, producing an interesting hybrid. My son and his son retain some of the characteristics of their Polish-Jewish grandfather and great grandfather. There is a through-line that survives, in spite of the assimilation the family has undergone.

“And I wanted to take this story and set it against the dramatic events of the second-half of the Twentieth Century - specifically, from the day Kennedy was assassinated to 9/11. The five siblings whose story I tell were all born in the 1940’s and came of age during these years.

“Though this is not an autobiographical novel, it is, in a larger sense, a “cultural autobiography” - specifically that of Jewish-Americans born in the 1940’s. But I believe that our experiences are similar to that of all immigrants - Italian, Irish, Vietnamese, Iranian, etc. - as we all navigate the tide of our new culture - and that the story told here is one that many will relate to. As the French are fond of saying, ‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.’”

Hogan in his day was the Tiger Wood of golf, unbeatable and unapproachable, a man who had overcome a terrible 1949 automobile accident to come back to golf. Nearing the end of his long career, Hogan was seeking his fifth Open championship.

Jack Fleck, on the other hand, was a unknown assistant driving range pro from Iowa. He had joined the PGA tour only six months before the Open. As  the author of this book, Neil Sagebiel, carefully and with great prose, tells this tale of triumph and also, a little tragedy. It is a David-and-Goliath clash in California.

The setup in 1955 was 4 rounds played over 3 days, with a grueling 36 on Saturday. If there was need for a playoff, 18 more holes would be played on Sunday. The tournament was just the third golf event televised to a national audience.

No one could have foreseen a playoff as Hogan began to take charge of the tournament on the second round. But Fleck, nine shots off the lead, began to slowing move up the leader board late on Friday afternoon. Still he was a long shot.

On Saturday afternoon, however, when Hogan finished with a comfortable lead, it was assumed he had won. So certain was NBC that they signed off the telecast and proclaimed Ben the winner. Fleck was still on the course. Then Jack Fleck, staging an odds-defying rally over the final few holes, caught Hogan late on Saturday to tie him and force a Sunday 18-hole playoff.

This is just the beginning of a historic golf story, one that is dramatically told. If you are looking for a Father’s Day present for the family member who plays golf, this is it!

The book comes out this month from Thomas Dunne Books. Neil Sagebiel, as I said, is the author and he is also the blogger on Armchair Golf, one of the top golf blogs on the internet. Check out his site. And buy his book! Read it quickly! Then gift wrap it and give the copy to your Dad or husband as his Father’s Day present!

You can’t lose and you may be tempted to take up the game.

A Journey from Trauma to Triumph

I am proof of the American dream. Not in the house-in-the-suburbs-two-point-five-kids-two-car-garage kind of way, but that I was so passionate about making something happen and I did it.

In 2009, I was sexually assaulted as a Peace Corps Volunteer in South Africa. It has proven to be the most devastating experience of my life. The tablecloth of my life was ripped out from under me before I was finished with the meal.

What followed the assault itself was a winding trail through the inner workings of a complex government system that had proven over its 50-year history to be classically unsupportive of survivors. Peace Corps had no global policy on how to effectively respond to and manage rape and sexual assault. Many survivors were blamed, shamed and pushed out of their countries as quickly as possible.

My American dream was to change the system to support survivors. I wanted Peace Corps to be known for its support of survivors of sexual violence. I saw Peace Corps emerging as a leader in women’s rights and spreading support for women in the dozens of countries where it has volunteers stationed.

The first step in my American dream was to start an organization, First Response Action, and gather a committee of fellow former Peace Corps Volunteers who were both advocates and survivors. Our mission was simple - make the system work for survivors. No more blame. No more shame.

Few other American institutions are as well-respected as the Peace Corps, so this task to uncover a flaw in the system wasn’t easy. Some people criticized us and were concerned that discussing this issue would tarnish the organization. Peace Corps is a great organization that does honorable work around the world. My colleagues and I know this - we merely wanted to make it better for everyone, including those who experience sexual violence.

Most people supported our mission. Women and men who were survivors of sexual violence in Peace Corps came out of the woodwork to share their experiences with us. I was humbled by the support we received from members of Congress like Ted Poe of Texas, Johnny Isakson of Georgia and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, who chaired a Congressional hearing about safety issues in Peace Corps a year ago this week.

Following the hearing, the members of First Response Action and I worked with Congressional staffers on drafting legislation to support survivors. It was one of the proudest moments of my life when that legislation was signed into law on November 21, 2011, by President Barack Obama.

This legislation serves as a guide for Peace Corps officials to adequately respond to and work with survivors of sexual violence in a compassionate and informed manner. Survivors now have a framework to begin their healing processes.

This is my American dream.

It is really disgusting that there isn’t the political will to grow more jobs, both here and in Europe. And creating more jobs is the key to bringing us out of the deep hole of the Great Recession, of course. For if we don’t climb out soon, the U.S. could become just another Third World country—not only in terms of income inequality, but other indicators of national well-being, such as health care.

Why isn’t more being done, both here and in Europe? Paul Krugman’s piece on the death of the confidence fairy explains the fallacies behind the German’s belief that cutting back on government spending and benefits would cause interest rates to fall and employers to hire because they would have more confidence in the future.

“What’s wrong with the prescription of spending cuts as the remedy for Europe’s ills,” asks Krugman? “One answer is that the confidence fairy doesn’t exist — that is, claims that slashing government spending would somehow encourage consumers and businesses to spend more have been overwhelmingly refuted by the experience of the past two years. So spending cuts in a depressed economy just make the depression deeper.”

The confidence fairies in the U.S. are led by extreme right wing conservatives who continue their attempts to divert wealth to the wealthiest by reducing government spending enough "to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub", as Grover Norquist once famously said, architect of the no tax increase pledge signed by more than 200 Republican legislators, or Ron Paul, who wants to turn the clock back 150 years when the U.S. was a rural economy and there was less need for an effective national government that would benefit the majority of citizens.

The U.S. has done much better with the various fiscal stimulus plans, including the 2 percent payroll tax and GW Bush tax cuts, both due to expire this year. But since conservatives have not allowed additional stimulus measures, 2012 doesn’t look as favorable, says the Congressional Budget Office,  in a Bloomberg Marketwatch article.

“Since the stimulus began to wane in late 2010, real sales in the private sector have grown at a 2.8 percent annual rate, while government consumption expenditures and investment (goods and services the government buys directly) have fallen at a 2.8 percent annual rate, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The other big category of government spending — transfer payments to individuals in the form of Social Security, Medicare, unemployment, food stamps and the like — has also turned negative, falling at a 0.9 percent annual rate after jumping nearly 17 percent in late 2009.”

So if Republicans succeed in preventing more stimulus spending, it could stall the U.S. recovery, not to speak of our standing among developed countries. As an example, the New York Times highlighted how far the U.S. has fallen behind in health care in a recently released World Health Organization study of premature births.  This is on top of many other studies that show the U.S. falling further behind in longevity, and even average heights, as our health care system continues to deteriorate.

It is no coincidence all developed countries have universal health care that Republicans continue to attack as too much government. That is why one of the largest casualties of the enormous diversion of wealth from the middle class to the wealthiest one percent has been affordable health care. Minnesota is just one battleground, where Republicans are attempting to block insurance exchanges that would make health insurance more affordable.

And we know why. “The exchange is the centerpiece of the new health care system envisioned by Mr. Obama,” said the New York Times article. “In the exchange, people who do not have insurance from employers will be able to get comparative information on health plans, insurers will compete on price and benefits, and the federal government will offer subsidies to lower- and middle-income people buying insurance.”

Can there be anything more important than improving the overall health of Americans? Improving their health care system is the first step taken by underdeveloped countries on their path to entering the modern world, while U.S. conservatives seem bent on returning the U.S. to a less-developed status to enhance their already wealthy supporters.

Harlan Green © 2012