The World is Not So Flat

When Thomas Friedman wrote his groundbreaking “The World Is Flat” many felt the way to the future had been defined. Friedman’s basic premise that the economy was exceedingly “macro” and the United States’ economy is increasingly dependent on the world economy. What happens in Redding, California affects what happens in Tokyo and so on.

And, regardless of what we might want, this is a force that is irresistible. Millions of jobs have been exported, as America imports cheaply made goods from China, India; etc.

And, according to Friedman and others this is somehow good. The middle classes of China, Brazil and India for example are growing, poverty is shrinking in developing countries, and American consumers enjoy cheap and quality made goods.

Friedman, to his credit, did warn that political instability in developing countries could hinder the flat world, disrupting communications and distribution. In fact, as we witness Egypt and now Libya, political disruptions indeed can threaten the flat world’s distribution system.

Another, larger threat is growing everyday; peak oil. The days of cheap oil are over!

Japan’s earthquake and the Ipad2 is a vivid example of the weaknesses of the flat world that depends on worldwide distribution and production systems. The earthquake disrupted production of the new Ipad2 chips at the same time the new electronic device was opened for sale. Instantly delivery dates went from a three day turnaround to a three week or more turnaround. Dozens of other electronic devices are likewise affected

As the “Coalition Forces” bomb Libya, oil prices soar. Just the threat of a conflict that could disrupt Middle East oil supplies have shot American gasoline prices up. The damage to the American gluttonous energy economy is dramatic.

The world may be flat, but is not predictable. The United States once was the “arsenal of democracy” precisely because we did have a production and distribution system that was stable, protected at the time by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

America’s political system is another asset that has been discounted in its importance by the Flat World. In fact, a stable political system, where power is transferred without upheavals and uncertainty, is essential to economic stability. If the trains and trucks run on time, products can get to market predictably; and a stable, growing economy results.

The Flat World is not so stable. Global Warming, that Friedman to his credit predicts, offers another destabilizing affect to the world markets. It just so happens that areas of mass production, that use brutally cheap labor to make our electronic miracle devices, are particularly subject to global warming. Many of the production areas are in low lying areas, close to the ocean, that will flood with the rise in ocean levels that are coming due to the melting of arctic ice. Moreover, political instability is the standard in these regions, and stands to increase due to the stresses of global warming devastating the food supplies. Egypt is an example of what happens when the food supply is disrupted by high prices caused by speculation tied to global warming effects.

The rich nations, America included, have put themselves at the mercy of a worlwide, unpredictable and unstable production and distribution system.

Finally, there is the oil (or lack of it). We may think the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans are mere “inconveniences” that hinder distribution, but their vastness means it takes a lot of energy to traverse them. Ships burning diesel travel back and forth on these water highways, much like diesel trucks pass back and forth on America’s highway systems. This wasteful distribution system depends to its core on cheap, accessible energy.

Moreover, developing nations like Brazil for example, are dependent on cheap energy to bring consumer goods to their emerging middle class.

HD TVs are made in Asia for the most part. It takes a lot of diesel to get them to the Americas.

So, as the cost of diesel accelerates, there is no doubt the cost of distribution of cheap Asian made goods will explode; for emerging markets like Brazil and for older markets like the United States.

In one area the Flat World will remain, and that is communications. Satellite transmissions have tied the world together electronically; business can be conducted across vast distances. But talking, planning and working electronically doesn't move product. The product still needs to me moved and it takes energy to move it.

Unfortunately moving an HD TV is not possible through a cell phone. Regardless of science fiction predictions, cellular modulation methods are a long way off to move a TV from India to Topeka.

Japan’s disaster is a wake up call for the United States. The lag in getting an Ipad2 foretells the Achilles heel of the Flat World. Distance is still distance; the energy it takes to move products is becoming less available not more, with permanent oil decline the hard reality. The world is running out of oil!

It is time to start planning to bring the work home. We can still move our products within the United States using the most energy efficient way, trains. We frankly don’t have a choice!

The world is indeed shrinking, but not in the Flat World way. People will not be able to fly all over the world if the price of a ticket is so high they can’t afford it. Ships, solar powered, will become the norm in the near future as diesel supplies dwindle. In a sense the world will collapse upon itself, local will become the best way to organize a production and distribution system.

The more self-sufficient a country is, the stronger it will be. The United States still enjoys the protection of those two huge oceans, and to date a stable political system.

We have to bring the work home now, and products will cost more at first. But in the long run, homegrown production will be the ONLY alternative, because of the huge costs of moving goods across huge oceans.

Energy is now a scarcity. We have a world economy that at its core depends on cheap energy to move products thousands of miles from cheap labor factories to rich countries. The Flat World has a huge problem, it depends for its very existence on cheap oil.

Those days are beginning to end. Another paradigm shift is happening before our eyes, and the Ipad2 delay in delivery is what pointed us to it.

Bring the jobs home before we can’t afford to do so!

Research Shows!

I was interested today in reading that comparative educational system studies show that the single largest indicator of educational success for a system is teacher status and decent salaries.

The United States supposedly has the most expensive educational system in the world, but the lowest teacher status and salaries (that goes for all personnel, Counselors, Administrators, aids; etc.).

So how, I am sure the public is thinking can it be the most expensive?

First, it depends on how you do the study. If you do it per capita, per student, I am sure the United States would probably not be as expensive.

However, we are running three or four educational systems today in the United States. One is at the Federal level, and is the least expensive overall. The federal presence is not large compared to other countries, which have centralized control of their educational system long ago. But with its comparative cheapness comes a lack of control and authority. States can, in cases where no federal grant dollars are at issue, tell the federal government to mind its own business. This happened for years when the federal government attempted to enforce equal educational opportunity statutes in the south for example. It still is happening in scores of instances, where the federal guidance of education is blunted by state law. In short, federalism based on states rights, had NOT been good for educational reform.

The next is the state level. A large amount of money lies here, with little or no connection to the classroom. This is the state bureaucracy that you read about. States have actively resisted national reforms for years.

The next is the county level. This is a left-over of educational organization in the 1800s. County school offices exist to provide services often for very small districts who can’t afford them. County schools offices are another barricade to reform.

Finally, there are the local districts. These can range from single school districts, to multiple schools and mega districts; like L.A. Unified. There are layers of bureaucracies in these districts. Local districts often are ruled by Superintendents and Boards who are more into power than education. Unions have taken over many local districts, standing in the way of reforms that threaten their members.

I did not mention college districts and structures that lie outside of the K-12 system.

This labyrinth of educational organization does indeed siphon funds away from the staff who actually deal with children. This mess also blunts real reform constantly.

California for example, once a shining example of educational progress, has the lowest counselor and administrator ratio to children than any other state. What this means is less help for the children, and less supervision for the classroom. California’s budget mess threatens the very existence of public education.

Teachers love to bash administrators and claim too much is spent on them. The fact, substantiated by the recent study, is that educational leadership is a critical ingredient in student achievement.

The recent panic about teacher effectiveness, calling for the firing of “incompetent” teachers, runs headlong into a system that right now is woefully understaffed with administrators who are charged with evaluating the very poor teacher performance that the public zealots are so concerned with. Evaluations don’t get done when you don’t have the people to do them!

Moreover, without adequate support personnel, teacher’s aides, clerical staff; etc., the classroom environment suffers. The cuts that are going on right now across the United States are rightfully avoiding the classroom as much as possible, but crippling teacher’s efforts, because their support is being obliterated.

So, how do we reform this mess?

First, admit that the job we are demanding of our schools is larger and more complex than we care to admit. United States schools deal with extremely heterogeneous populations. For example, the African American population represents a tremendous challenge due to the nearly three hundred year subjugation which we really began to even address in 1964 with the Civil Rights Act.

Americans expected that in 10 years we could reverse educational inequality that had taken three hundred years to build. That was nonsense and present test scores prove we have a long way to go!

The “War on Poverty” was short-lived, and conservative Presidents stopped forced integration and other efforts to right an educational wrong that Jim Crowe had fostered.

The result is our present multi-tiered educational system, where African Americans consistently score lower on standardized tests than white children. In fact, the test scores have not improved much in the past fifty years, proving that what we are doing now does not work.

Add to this the challenges of Mexican-Americans and language difficulties, plus other immigrant groups, and what are left with is a very expensive proposition.

Therefore, our open society, that encourages upward mobility, and access to America opportunity for all, results in a very expensive system compared to Japan’s for example, with their homogeneous society.

And what has America done? Well, we have answered this challenge with shrinking the resources we dedicate to education. States are right now cutting billions from public schools, starving an already dysfunctional system; and demanding more efficiency.

It won’t happen. The first reason is good teachers will be leaving the system in droves, once the economy gets better. A large percentage will be leaving anyway due to budget cutbacks. Who would want to be the public’s whipping boy?

Competent and talented leadership is shying away. Administrators come from the teaching ranks (they should), any most teachers today who survive the budget cuts say, “No Way” to becoming a boss who everyone hates. When you have to lay off the Kindergarten teacher everyone loves, it is not a nice place to be; when an administrator has to evaluate out a failing teacher who is burned out from dealing with years of recalcitrant students, and it is a horrible experience.

No one likes to fire people; except in the private sector where it is almost considered sport. A school is a tight knit culture, any loss is grieved deeply. Teachers can fail for many reasons and many very decent, caring people fail because the stress of dealing with angry, resentful, and sometimes violent people everyday can wear on the best teachers.

Teaching in many areas of America today is one of the hardest jobs in the world. Unfortunately the American public holds teachers in very low regard, choosing to make heroes of doctors and lawyers in the media. How many T.V. shows are there about teachers these days?

So, we continue to believe that we are paying too much for education, while we admit that we are paying good teachers too little (note the use of the word good), and we blindly cut budgets, which lay off the good teachers.

Now, some brainless hacks are suggesting we lay off the senior teachers so we can protect the good new teachers. This stupidly ignores that it takes at least seven years for a beginning teacher to learn their craft, and many more to become accomplished; like any other profession. If you eliminate seniority in layoffs, in the present broken system, the truly good teachers will be fired primarily because they COST too much, leaving poorly paid and less experienced teachers to do their jobs. In some regressive states, like Florida, this madness is already being done, applying “business practices” to teacher layoffs, resulting in firing the most expensive teachers,

A comparative approach would be to cut experienced surgeons who had a malpractice suit against them and keep interns while trying to save money in the health care system; and then acting surprised when the interns slaughter their patients due to their inexperience.

It is remarkable that the health care system in the United States is way more expensive than the educational system comparatively speaking, but nobody cutting the rich doctors to save costs.

Our dedicated teacher corps stand defenseless against people like the Wisconsin governor who cut taxes then made up the difference with attacks on senior teachers by gutting collective bargaining. Last hired first fired exists for a reason; protecting experience!

The result of all this? The President is right when he says that education will be the prime ingredient to compete in the World Economy. America is failing the test by refusing to reform its hopeless educational bureaucracy and attacking the very people who are making the biggest difference in the future of the country: teachers, counselors, aides, administrators, school nurses, librarians, secretaries, bus drivers and the rest.

It’s the people stupid! People are who make our schools successful. You cut them, you make American unsuccessful. Listening to those who preach the simple solution (fire bad teachers) ignores the underlying cause of the failure.

Here is how to reform:

Federalize the entire educational system in the United States. Enforce nationwide standards. Federalize all educational personnel. Eliminate all state and local school districts. Establish, along other successful country’s guidelines, a federal system of school control, leaving the local schools to be led by Principals. Allow site based leadership to be the norm, not the exception.

Increase teacher pay by 40% across the board as well as support personnel (including administrators).

Improve administrative training in evaluation and remediation of teachers, making it possible without spending millions to release incompetent teachers. Allow for retraining of teachers who fail, so their commitment to teaching is not without some insurance.

Again, teaching is NOT easy; having an Ivy League education is no guarantee a teacher will succeed in south central L.A.

There will be consequences of this action. Thousands of state and local educational personnel will be displaced. There will be some room in the new system, and pushing former administrators back to the schools to supervise will not be a bad thing.

Currently, successful administrators become Superintendents or work for the state department, putting them as far away from teachers and students as possible. We need to keep the competent leadership as close to the classroom as possible.

Establish regional professional Boards, staffed by professional educators with citizen representation, who administer regions of 50,000 students (adjusting for geography). These Board would be responsible for personnel, curriculum; etc. The local school would depend on this bureaucracy for support, but would be free to order supplies and materials on their own as much as possible. School administration, which would be larger than currently, would have site based management of their school. Site Councils would be mandatory, where the stakeholders in the school would have their say.

Unions would still be a factor of course, but would negotiate at the federal representational level. We would try to keep union interference as far away from the local school as possible.

Salary schedules would hence be negotiated regionally, but bands of salary would be enforced, so teachers could transfer all over the country, into any area, and not realize a substantial change in salary. This would end the current practice of rich suburbs getting the best paid teachers. All teachers in the United States would ultimately make over $125,000 as they became more experienced, with full health care coverage. All would pay into social security and Medicare, and would have the same hybrid federal pension system as current federal employees. This would end the local pension system headaches for states and local districts.

Firewalls should be built into the legislation prohibiting Congress from making changes to the system unless strong quantitative testing data showed the need. National testing norms would be established along with other criteria for judging the success of a school. WASC would merge with the federal Boards to evaluate the schools periodically at every level to determine school effectiveness. Schools that were not effective over a reasonable period of time would have staff transfers and changes to change the school culture. This determination would be made by WACS/Federal school evaluators. The same school qualitative review would occur all across the country according to national criteria.

You get the idea. Every other country that is currently embarrassing the United States with their test scores have centralized unified school systems. These systems maximize centralization for process and policy, but minimize it for teaching and children. Site based education works best.

Only the United States continues with a system that is positively a labyrinth of failure. School funding is so complex in most states that even the state department doesn’t understand it. It is no wonder districts go broke.

Our educational system is broken, but not because of the poor overworked teachers, counselors and administrators. The system is broken because it is antiquated and no long fits our modern, mobile, urban society. As long as we continue with the present structure, or better lack of, we will continue to fail our children.

Poverty Flats: Redding, California

My home town has become a study in the deadly stupidity of conservative economic thought.

When I was born in 1947 Redding was a Democratic town. Shasta Dam had recently been completed, beginning thirty years of a succession of reclamation projects, repairing the damage done to the environment and watershed caused by the Gold Rush.

Of course, nobody talked about these projects in those terms. The dams of Northern California were depicted as water conservation projects, saving rainwater for the great Sacramento Valley, aimed at creating an agricultural mother load. However, the damage done to the watershed over fifty years of mindless gold mining had also taken its toll, reducing the Sacramento River to a muddy killer ditch, that overflowed its banks every year, virtually destroying agriculture in a series of killer floods. The floods were caused by the disruption to the water shed due to unregulated mining.

But in the thirties things changed. The nation decided, on the verge of economic collapse, to invest in infrastructure, repair the damage caused by the last surge of frankly stupid, unregulated free enterprise (the gold rush destroyed more than watershed; thousands of native Americans were exterminated because they were in the way).

But the depression changed that. The United States looked over the cliff caused by free enterpriser's run amuck, and decided to change things. Cooperation, through government projects, was stressed to save the capitalist system.

Redding was called “Poverty Flats” at first. Shasta City was the county seat, and the hub of the economy in Shasta County because of the gold mining located there. As the mines panned out, and the streams were raped, people became “dirt farmers”, scratching out a living, waiting for the railroad to bring commerce to the area. My grandfather was one of those “sod busters” who lived hand to mouth, raising eight children barely on a small parcel of land.

Life was not very nice in Redding then. The copper industry, that also blighted the north state until the end of World War I, ended; leaving economic and ecological ruin in its path. The foothills north of Redding, where Shasta Dam is now, were denuded of vegetation, adding to the flood potential of the Sacramento River. So, Gold Mining, and Copper Mining, had poisoned the water, leaving no vegetation or gravel to regulate flooding, and reduced the Sacramento Valley to ruin. All this a direct product of mindless free enterprise economic theory, that dictated a laissez-faire approach, while destroying the natural flow of rivers and streams.

So the few citizens in Redding suffered. Most, when they could afford it, fled. The population dragged along, helped a little by the railroad’s coming, but not much.

The Great Depression dragged the area even further down. The poor got even poorer. My mother told stories of how “we didn’t know we were poor, everyone was poor”. My father, the son of a railroad worker, describes waiting in line for potato soup, since my grandfather had lost his job due to depression railroad layoffs.

Conventional wisdom dictated that government had to balance its budget, cut spending to get out of the depression. Hoover held to this philosophy creating a Hooverville of the United States.

In Redding, this resulted in even more misery. There simply was NO MONEY anywhere; a subsistence economy developed.

Then Shasta Dam came. Suddenly there was a payroll, and people with money. Redding began to recover. After World War II, the housing boom opened the logging industry to in Northern California. More dams were built to the east, as the water reclamation projects culminated over thirty years. Interstate 5 was completed, spanning two decades and providing hundreds of jobs for the local economy.

Redding prospered. Education and medical centers were erected as Redding became the hub of Northern California, eclipsing even Chico in importance.

Then came Proposition 13 and the tax cutting conservative reaction.... The Logging Industry stalled, due to the practice of clear cutting that rewarded sheer volume of timber and reduced old growth forests to practically nothing. Citizens did not blame the companies for their greed, but were fed by conservatives the nonsense that environmentalists were to blame.

Next, thanks to the Reagan Revolution and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, many white Democrats swung to the right, alarmed by the blatant economic nonsense that Reagan spouted, and the manufactured outrage aimed at minorities (who practically did not exist in Redding) and revulsion toward the war protesters who were so annoying because they were right!

Redding began a slow slide into conservative obscurity. Progressive families either put up with the conservative crap, or moved to the Bay Area.

From 1963 when John Kennedy visited to dedicate Whiskeytown Dam, a month before he was assassinated, until 2008 when President Obama was elected, Shasta County trended from a blue county to a red county.

Meanwhile the economy trended downward at about the same rate as the conservative majority grew.

There is a large medical community in Redding that serves several rural counties. This medical elite have grown into an aristocracy, making hundreds of times more than the average citizen. ?Rich doctors and their corporations operate behind the scenes to spread the con influence.

Large government projects are gone. And, the ruling powers in Redding are convinced that small businesses without pesky government regulation, will create a economic recovery. Any innovative ideas, like solar panel production for example, are scared away by the repressive and short-sighted economic leadership.

Progressive businesses turn away from Redding now, because the political/economic climate is poisoned by the tea party that has practically taken over the city council.

The Tea Party is very large in Redding. Lately, a majority on the City Council has floated the notion that the city government change from a City Manager organization to a “Charter City” one. This will result in even more of a partisan city government, with high salaries paid to the mayor and the council; and repression of the public employee union.

It is noteworthy that those who most stand to gain from this, are two tea party members whose personal economic situations are tenuous at best. It is also important to note that parallel to the rightward slide in Redding, has been a matching slide of union membership. Redding used to be a union town, with decent middle class salaries. Redding is now an anti-union town, led by retired former union tea party members, who are driving to destroy all unions (public and private).

Today, our local paper published a story that Redding is dead last when compared to other like-sized Northern California and Nevada cities. Dead last!

A representative of economic development , made an inane statement that this is to be expected since Redding is transitioning from an agricultural base to a service one. This is hogwash, and is a perfect example of the mindlessness of the conservative majority in the town.

First, Redding transitioned from an agricultural based economy (dirt farming) to a logging and government project fed economy over sixty years ago. The cluelessness of the economic development representative says it all.

Second, the industrial park that is being pushed to create industry lies miles away from a rail line. The total disregard for the role railroads will play in the next 100 years of dwindling oil supplies is amazing.

Moreover, a council member is pushing for more urban sprawl, with the “idea” of building yet another mall along I-5; completely ignoring the fact that this will destroy downtown commerce, since consumers will stop just off the freeway and keep on going, bypassing downtown Redding completely.

Of course, this same council member was treated to a expense paid trip to Washington D.C. to seek a grant for the mall, by the mall’s developer! That’s right, payola is alive an well in our little town!

We have followed this corrupt, worthless conservative economic philosophy for over thirty years now.

Today, after a very brief relapse due to the election of President Obama, conservatives are again on the march, pushing for spending cuts at every level of government, screaming that government deficits will destroy us all, telling us layoffs of public workers and cuts of their pensions will fix the economy.

Nonsense! Redding is a perfect example of what happens when government spending is first introduced to an area bringing decades of prosperity, then shunned, bringing economic ruin.

When you cease making public investments in the future, your economy dies.

The present City Council is blindly cutting salaries and the workforce of the city, following the tea party goal of attacking and destroying the middle class.

And the result…DEAD LAST IN ECONOMIC GROWTH AND VITALITY.

There is no doubt that progressives have fled Redding in droves. There is no doubt that an aristocracy has grown with rich doctors hoarding their wealth in 7000 square foot houses, fighting tax increases and raising their fees. Redding has one of the highest uninsured population in the state, and a growing homeless population thanks to this huge disparity in wealth distribution.

Meanwhile the idiot tea partiers continue their propaganda as Redding slides into Poverty Flats again.