Civility in American Politics:  The Long Good Bayh

By Stuart H. Brody

The political landscape sustained another aftershock last week when Evan Bayh called it quits in the United Sates Senate.  More jarring than the news of his retirement was the uncommonly frank terms in which he criticized the partisanship that had immobilized the political world he inhabited for twelve years.

Just a few weeks early, Massachusetts voters expressed a similar frustration by electing Scott Brown to the Senate, and in the process ended President Obama’s supermajority, doomed safe passage of his signature domestic issue, and all but buried the promising story line of his early Presidency.

Seeking relief from the collapse of leadership brought low by partisanship, the President’s State of the Union called for a revival of the “bold action and big ideas” that had fueled previous national triumphs over adversity.  Yet he must surely have known, as Senator Bayh lamented, that the men and women listening to him in the House Chamber that night are incapable of providing it.

Our Founding Fathers dazzled the world with their inventiveness and inspired two centuries of descendants to sustain their noble work by collaboration and compromise.   These days, our political parties, like warring sects of a once common religion, have sunk into the delusion of encrusted myth, nearly incapable of rational action

The Republican myth views the “market” has the power to correct all economic abuses despite overwhelming evidence of its blindness to civil rights, labor fairness, anti trust violations, natural resource exploitation, securities fraud, campaign finance abuse, food and drug security and the list goes on.  In their free market zeal they have elevated cutthroat competition to the level of virtue and have thus abandoned not only the true tenets of free enterprise but their trust in a government that has shown remarkable power to educate, heal, invent and build.

The Democrats cling with equal fervor to the myth of government as the prime societal force for good, with the power to ameliorate human nature and deliver us to the threshold of utopia.  Democrats act as if by taxing regulating and spending they can soften every sharp blow of capitalism.  Democrats foist on government these expectations of moral achievement while decrying the very vehicle—our free enterprise system—that has delivered incalculable economic improvement.

The extremism of these political ideologies stymies cooperation and subverts our collective aspirations.   In asserting their agendas, and fueled by the fringe groups that finance them, our Senators and Representatives behave in the halls of Congress like members of a radical cult:  dialog through denunciation, communication through confrontation, insistence on personal infallibility, consistency at all costs and the identification of personal integrity with rigidity of belief.

And so, the chasm of American politics gets wider, the excuses for not acting more convoluted, the blame more fierce, the problems deeper and the solutions more distant. 

This past year has made clear that even the charisma of a natural born leader –that old standby of American political revival-is insufficient to bridge this gulf.   Expecting that President Obama can reinvent himself to cure this turmoil is unrealistic and deepens the cycle of disappointment.

Nor can the breakthrough that he implored at the State of the Union come from some magical unity over policy.  Current economic stresses, looming environmental catastrophe, the chokehold of dependence on foreign oil, freelance terrorism, two endless wars and the dawning realization that we are becoming No. 2 in the world have been insufficient to bring us together politically.

No, the breakthrough will come neither from some charismatic repackaging of Presidential rhetoric nor magical unification around policy.  If there is to be a breakthrough, it must come from ordinary men and women, or, from a politician acting like one.

In our individual lives, not as Americans, but as human beings, we bridge our differences by simple gestures:  an act of kindness, forgiveness, and generosity, often without expectation of reciprocation or guarantee of success.   This is the real source of American greatness:  men and women who confirm our impulse for common decency by grace, modesty and humility, as parents, at work, and in their communities. 

Americans like this were so memorably depicted in the movies we flocked to for inspiration during the last depression and from parents and teachers who instilled in us the belief that you could get ahead in America and do it honestly.  Their memory is all but drowned out by the cult of egoism all around us, in sports, business, the media, religion, and, of course, politics. 

Our breakthrough as a people will not come from the podium of political calculation but from the well of personal commitment, from an ordinary person who transcends politics in a simple but extraordinary act. 

Like Rosa Parks refusing to walk to the back of the bus, perhaps a United States Senator will take a few steps across the aisle, pull a colleague from the rubble of partisanship and start leading the nation out of this ego-drenched, cliché-ridden, finger-pointing culture that threatens to permanently squelch our national spirit.  

That would be a story line we might be proud to tell our children when we teach them about what America did in the depression.

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Stu Brody is former Chair of the New York State Democratic Rural Conference and teaches Business and Political Ethics at SUNY New Paltz.

The Coakley Chasm and Unbridgeable Depths of American Politics

By Stuart H. Brody

Last week, Martha Coakley failed to execute a political assignment so routine that few people gave any thought to the enormous consequences of failure; that is, before it occurred.   She was defeated in her Senate race by Scott Brown whose victory may have spelled the doom of the health care bill that had been the life’s work of his predecessor and the signature domestic issue of his President.  The next day, President Obama shed his customary equilibrium and began attacking the banks in a populist imitation of Brown.

This is but the latest rotation in a cycle of disappointment that has become a tradition in American politics:  expectation of great leadership, brought low by partisanship, followed by stalemate and renewed clamor for deliverance by a fresh messenger of change. 

Last night, in his State of the Union last week, The President sought relief from this story line in his reminiscence of our ancestors pulling together in times of economic upheaval and transformation, to “respond with bold action and big ideas”. Our founding itself was the most remarkable transformation and one of the biggest ideas in history.   The founders dazzled the world with their inventiveness and inspired two centuries of descendants to sustain their noble work by collaboration and compromise.  

From what source though, does the President expect a modern revival of sacrifice and devotion to the common good?    He asked for it from the politicians assembled in the House Chamber last night, but he must know that they are incapable of providing it.   Like warring sects of a once common religion, the parties have sunk into the delusion of encrusted myth.

The Republican myth is the assertion that the “market” has the power to correct all abuses despite overwhelming evidence of its blindness to civil rights, labor fairness, anti trust violations, natural resource exploitation, securities fraud, campaign finance abuse, food and drug security and the list goes on.  In their free market zeal they have elevated cutthroat competition to the level of virtue and have thus abandoned not only the tenets of free enterprise but their faith in a government that has shown remarkable power to educate, heal, invent and build.

The Democrats cling with equal fervor to the myth of government as the prime societal force for good, with the power to ameliorate human nature and deliver us to the threshold of utopia.  Democrats act as if by taxing regulating and spending they can soften every blow of capitalism.  Democrats foist on government these expectations of moral improvement while decrying the very vehicle—our free enterprise system—that has delivered incalculable economic improvement.

The extremism of these political ideologies stymies cooperation and subverts our collective aspirations.   In asserting their agendas, our Senators and Representatives behave in the halls of Congress like members of a radical cult:  dialog through denunciation, communication through confrontation, insistence on personal infallibility, consistency at all costs and the equation of rigidity of belief with personal integrity. 

And so, the chasm gets wider, the excuses for not acting more convoluted, the blame more fierce, the problems deeper and the solutions more distant. 

This past year has made clear that even the charisma of a natural born leader –that old standby of American political revival-is insufficient to bridge this chasm.   Expecting that President Obama can reinvent himself to cure this turmoil is unrealistic and deepens the cycle of disappointment.

Nor can the breakthrough come from some magical unity over policy.  Current economic stresses, looming environmental catastrophe, the chokehold of dependence on foreign oil, freelance terrorism, two endless wars and the dawning realization that we are becoming No. 2 in the world have been insufficient to bring us together politically.

No, the breakthrough will not come from some charismatic repackaging of Presidential rhetoric or magical unification around policy because the politicians, their parties and their egos have become too inflexible to bend to reality.   The breakthrough must come from ordinary men and women, or, from a politician acting like one.

In our individual lives, not as Americans, but as human beings, we bridge our differences by simple gestures:  an act of kindness, forgiveness, and generosity, often without expectation of reciprocation or guarantee of success.   This is the real source of American greatness:  men and women who confirm our impulse for common decency by grace, modesty and humility, as parents, at work, and in their communities. 

Americans like this were so memorably depicted in the movies we flocked to for inspiration during the last depression and from parents and teachers who instilled in us the belief that you could get ahead in America and do it honestly.  Their memory is all but drowned out by the cult of egoism all around us, in sports, business, the media, religion, and, of course, politics. 

Our breakthrough as a people will not come from the podium of political calculation but from the well of personal commitment, from an ordinary person who transcends politics in a simple but extraordinary act. 

Like Rosa Parks refusing to walk to the back of the bus, perhaps a United States Senator will take a few steps across the aisle, pull a colleague from the rubble of partisanship and start leading the nation out of this ego-drenched, cliché-ridden, finger-pointing culture that threatens to permanently squelch our national spirit.  

That would be a story line we might be proud to tell our children when we teach them about what America did in the depression.

The Common Weal in America Has Run Dry?

By Stuart H. Brody

Comments of Stu Brody to Empire Page Roundtable  October 2009.

The question posed to this Roundtable is whether Americans should willingly pay for public benefits of which they will never partake.  In my mind most striking aspect of this question is that it needs be asked at all.  Not that a democratic people shouldn’t debate the role of their commitments to the nation’s collective well being, but that the debate in modern America has taken such a narrow and selfish turn. 

Our very founding and survival was built on enormous compromises to serve union and freedom, even if particular interests were ill served in the short run.   We can point to the Golden Age of the Senate when Henry Clay, the Great Compromiser, and others, stitched together complex regional accommodations to keep the nation together—and allow it to grow—forestalling war for thirty years.

We have a history of sharing the privileges and bounty of our rich nation freely in order to expand prosperity.   DeToqueville marveled at what he termed our volunteerism and boosterism.  Still, today, you can hardly visit an American town or county that does not boast large community service calendars and festivals for public entertainment and community promotion.

We are also a massively generous people–by far the highest per capita contributors to charity in the world, notwithstanding our collective skepticism about forking over tax money each April.

I believe, that deep down, most people hold as one of the blessed privileges of freedom, the free partaking of the grandeur that our wealth has produced. 

The parks of our great cities and our great public monuments and museums offered the world weary urban poor a moment of tranquility in which to nurture their dreams, dreams which, by God’s grace, were realized by so many.

Walking in a national forest, as others have commented, imparts a power of belonging that is unmatched, and diminished, if you have to pay for it.

Yet we live now in a time of stinginess.  From Congress with its earmarks, to Wall Street with its bonuses, the rule of the day is “take the money and run” before anyone catches up with you.

Just weeks ago, Senator John Kyle from Arizona actually complained in a Senate Committee debate on health care that he was required to pay for a health care policy that included maternity benefits since he would never use them.

In our own state, the best plans to fund the  MTA which fuels our most potent economic machine—the City of New York—fell victim to the narrowest of selfish interests in our legislature.

Like a family bitterly divided over a contested will, in America, the bonds of common devotion have been loosened by fierce and mindless emotion, and often it’s our politicians leading this desperate movement.  Too many cloak narrow interests with passionate rhetoric while subjecting anyone who disagrees with them to intemperate and often vile denunciation. 

How can such men and women summon the grace and generosity to provide for the general welfare and inspire others to achieve what Jefferson called the most noble ambition of free men:  pursuing individual happiness while contributing to the collective well being.

Perhaps they can learn something of public courage from Supervisor Mary Ellen Keith of tiny Franklin, New York who was voted out of office twenty years ago for spending the last remaining federal revenue sharing funds to purchase land for a park, instead of putting it in to the General Fund, because she wanted “something lasting.” 

Now, in her eighties, and freshly returned to office, she spends every summer morning making 100 sandwiches for the sons and daughters of her electors, grateful for her foresight.

Rural New York:  Life at Sub Prime

By Stuart H. Brody

Originally Posted at www.empirepage.com/whataboutupstate  (2008)

The American banking community has come under fire lately.  The term “sub prime mortgage” is now familiar to most Americans, whether they hold a mortgage or not.   The banking establishment, in its wisdom, embarked on a plan to loosen the standards for granting a mortgage, jettisoning time honored conditions such as:  having a source of income, a credit history and some money down.

The security industry, not to be left out of a financial boondoggle, packaged these mortgages and sold them as securities, in a feverish reprise of the junk bond mentality of the 80’s.  As the economy now lunges toward collapse,  Americans watch helplessly from the sidelines wondering whether the free enterprise system that spawned this disease can cure it.

Upstate New Yorkers know that sinking feeling:   distant players who put the region at the mercy of unpredictable economic forces.  Yet, there is a home grown variety of banking excess—right here in rural New York—which subverts the economic well being of the region.  It’s called the doctrine of “external obsolescence.” 

External Obsolescence is a complicated name for an automatic rule applied by Upstate banks to business assets owned by rural New Yorkers.  It works like this.  If an entrepreneur wants to set up a business in rural New York, the building he constructs or buys to conduct the business will be automatically devalued, typically by 25%.  Here’s an actual example from the North Country.  A local entrepreneur decided to begin a furniture manufacturing facility, hiring 25 people, paying them good wages with health care benefits,  precisely the kind of jobs the region needs.  In order to finance the business, he collateralized the building which he built for $1M.     The problem was that the local bank valued it at $750,000 instead of $1M, claiming the rule of “external obsolescence” .  The rule dictates that the rural location of the facility, in and of itself, without reference to any objective factors such as actual value, recent property sales, or cost of materials, demeans its value by 25%.   To make up the difference in his capital requirements, the entrepreneur mortgaged his house and furnishings.  Some businessmen can’t meet this added financial burden and abandon their projects, and the jobs that go with them.

That is not the only banking anomaly in rural New York.  A mortgage won’t be granted unless it can be packaged for the security market, just like the sub prime mortgages.  This practice requires rural homeowners to build wells and install central heat, just to get a mortgage.  And if you’re more than a few miles from a fire station you might not get one either.  A beautiful home whose water needs are served by a reliable spring, rather than a well,  won’t get a mortgage because it can’t be packaged.  The rules of homogenization  always play to the greatest number but the minority has been left out, and upstaters are New York’s ignored minority.

We succumb to homogenization in other ways too.  Take the big box stores.  Retail powerhouses like Wal-Mart hire local politicians to proclaim the virtue of these enterprises as economic anchors.  In reality, these big businesses drive out local stores using their enormous economic leverage to do sweetheart deals with suppliers.  They pay low wages with no benefits, and drain off precious local capital for shipment outside of New York.  Adding insult to injury, these behemoths scar the countryside and impede the ability of rural communities to commoditize their natural beauty and pristine way of life.  

Free marketers, the same happy crew that brought us sub prime mortgages, respond that consumers are free to pay a little more to shop locally if they wish.  Yet, when life is scratched out at the margins, a few cents more looms large.  A striking example of this patronizing mentality was displayed by none other than Al Gore, the guru of climate change.

Appearing recently on Meet the Press, Gore was criticized for building a 10,000 square foot home while espousing energy conservation.  With obvious discomfort, Gore conceded that he isn’t perfect but countered that he paid extra to power the edifice with green energy.   Gore’s ready substitution of personal desire for public integrity was not lost on rural New Yorkers who see it as more of the same facile rhetoric in service of faulty logic. 

Upstaters are a hardy lot.  We don’t expect hand outs or give-aways;  just a little respect will do, starting with some legal and moral scrutiny of some of the practices that beset us:  like external obsolescence, those sweetheart deals that the big boxes make with their suppliers, the public servants paid off to espouse the virtues of corporate predators, and banks who refuse mortgages to homeowners who heat with wood or get their water from a spring.

While the media obsess on the global economic picture, New York’s political leaders would do well to look at the smaller world around them where the little things often hurt the most.

At Empire State:   Two Heads Are Not Better Than One

By Stuart H. Brody

Originally Posted on www.empirepage.com/whataboutupstate.com in April 2008

In government, an idea sometimes takes hold that promises a rare breakthrough in efficiency.   The downstate/upstate split of leadership at the Empire State Development Corporation seemed to some like such an idea.  In implementing it, Eliot Spitzer intended to highlight the specific needs of Upstate and ensure they would be seriously addressed. 

He hired two accomplished professionals to do the job or, should I say, jobs:  Pat Foye, who recently resigned, was the Downstate representative, and Dan Gunderson still serves as the Upstate representative. 

From the standpoint of execution, the idea has been a disaster.  Empire State Development—the key development arm of the State–has been crippled by competing philosophies and internal power struggles.  Anyone who has had the remotest dealings with ESD understands that a once effective state agency has languished into dysfunction and distracting turf wars. 

Yet, in an uncommonly fierce challenge, Unshackle New York and other Upstate advocacy groups have roundly criticized Governor Paterson’s decision to combine ESD efforts in to one leader.  Surely, these groups which have been so thoughtful, committed and accomplished in the service of Upstate, are aware of what’s going on at ESD.  Yet, they are calling out the militia in service of the wrong war.

The battle is not the number of heads at ESD, it’s the strength of the voice.  Far too often, as Upstate leaders know, the rhetoric from Downstaters has been patronizing, cliché driven and uninformed, but not from this Governor.   As Senator, then Lt. Governor, David Paterson has demonstrated both understanding of and commitment to Upstate challenges and has traveled extensively to assert both. 

As Governor, he has reemphasized his commitment to the Upstate Revitalization Fund, property tax reform, regionalization of economic development, environmental vigilance, Wicks law revision, energy reform and a host of other important Upstate concerns.   This record entitles him to deference in his organizational preference for one leader as well as  his choice of leader

While the idea of a powerful head of upstate development is symbolically attractive, it is largely a vacant gesture if ESD as a whole is not working affectively.   Clinging to a symbol which does not serve the cause it symbolizes is neither good strategy nor sound policy.  

As a fall back position, some groups have called for Dan Gunderson’s selection as the sole leader of ESD.  Dan Gunderson, coming to New York from Pennsylvania tirelessly traversed Upstate to gain an understanding of its issues, and has succeeded by most accounts admirably.  How ironic it would then be to dilute that focus by shifting him to the state-wide role.

This sudden flare-up over ESD leadership is a negative signal to New York and out-of-state business interests who must wonder what the fuss is about over implementing a standard business practice of consolidating executive power in one leader. 

After all, it’s the buck that stops at the second floor, not two 50 cent pieces.