The post The Future of Success appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Arthur S. Brisbane, the ombudsman for the New York Times, wrote a column this spring urging his paper’s reporters to take “a hard look at the president,” implying that they had not been doing so. His main evidence of pro-Obama bias dated from the 2008 campaign and the president’s first year in office. The fact is that from mid-2009 until today, the Times’s reporting of the White House has been very tough.

The real challenge for political coverage for the Times and the rest of the media is to tell the truth about the Republicans in Congress and get it on the front pages. Here’s why: the political scientists Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein have demonstrated that it was Republicans who were mostly responsible for congressional failures during the Obama years, but the public remains so unaware of this fact that there is a strong chance that the Republicans will win both the House and the Senate in November.

Think of how many times you’ve read articles that blame both parties—or blame “Congress” without identifying which party. The media is sacrificing truth to the appearance of evenhandedness.

The littlest one-percenters

A recent Thursday Styles section in the New York Times gave prominent display— including a photograph that took up at least a third of the front page—to two children wearing the latest preschool fashion. One wore a $375 Burberry trench coat from Bergdorf Goodman, a $180 kilt from Bloomingdale’s, and a $32 pair of Converse sneakers (how did they get in here?); the other girl wore a $1,200 Lanvin tulle dress and a $1,570 taffeta coat from Barneys, with $190 Rachel Riley flats. Over the last two years, the Times reports, Lanvin, Gucci, Sheila McCartney, and Marni have entered “the children’s market.” Gucci is offering a silk dress for $370. You can get it at Bergdorf’s.

Diluted and delayed

You have probably read about Wall Street’s attempts to water down the Volcker Rule. Less well known, and just as disturbing to me, is that the rule will not truly take effect for two more years.

Allen Ginsberg and me

I see that this fall will bring two new movies about Allen Ginsberg and the beats, which reminds me, since I’m getting along in years, that it’s time to try to recapture more of my memories of Allen.

I met Allen in October of 1946. I was a member of a class of Lionel Trilling’s at Columbia that was discussing William Blake. Allen was sitting in that day, and his observations about Blake impressed me enough that I struck up a conversation walking out of Hamilton Hall and proceeding to the Amsterdam Avenue bus stop. Amazingly, after boarding the bus at 116th Street, and leaving it at 92nd, we found ourselves entering the same building, at 200 West 92nd (Considerably spiffed up, it was still standing the last time I was in Manhattan.) He lived on the second floor in Mrs. O’Connor’s apartment, and I lived on the fourth in Mrs. Goldhurst’s.

I liked to think of myself as cool, though the word was not in use back then. The fact was that I was nineteen, had only arrived from West Virginia in January of that year, and was not nearly as sophisticated as I thought I was. To say that I found much of what I learned from Allen novel if not shocking would be a considerable understatement.

The first lesson was easy: it was to say “hip” instead of “hep.” The second, however, took a little more adjusting to. Allen introduced me to one of his friends, a gaunt thirty-one-year-old named Herbert Huncke, describing him as a petty thief and hustler, words that had theretofore not struck me as commendatory. (By the way, in those days Allen used the term “beat” to refer not to himself or Jack Kerouac or Neal Cassady, but to people like Herbert, who seemed drained of hope and resigned to life on the margins.) Allen and Herbert introduced me to marijuana, a substance that had been unknown at my high school in Charleston. And while I was just worldly enough to realize that Reefer Madness had exaggerated the drug’s perils, I wasn’t quite sure by how much. In any event, it turned out that I couldn’t inhale, which would later make me the only living citizen of the United States of America who believed Bill Clinton.

Allen had met Herbert through their mutual friend William Burroughs, who, Allen would later tell me, had tried to imitate William Tell with a .22 pistol but had missed and accidentally killed his wife Joan. Was Allen making this stuff up? Then he told me about how his friend Lucien Carr had not only murdered his gay lover in Riverside Park but had gotten away with it. Allen assured me that Lucien now had his life back together, working as a reporter for United Press. Still, you will understand that it was with fascination tinged with wariness that my friendship with Allen began. It was to last for fifty years. More about it next time.

Department of missed connections

Have you noticed how many of the commercials on cable television are by manufacturers of pharmaceuticals and medical devices? And aren’t you just a bit troubled by how many of the other commercials are from law firms soliciting claims from people injured or sickened by these products?

How’s this for moral hazard

Speaking of overpaid corporate executives, did you know that Vikram Pandit received a total compensation of $42,815,263 as CEO of CitiCorp in 2011, even though his shareholders saw their returns fall by 44 percent? William Weldon, who was CEO of Johnson & Johnson until April of this year, presided over a series of recalls of “Tylenol, Benadryl, Motrin and Zyrtec as a result of such problems as metal shavings found in medicines, incorrect levels of an active ingredient and bad odors,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Weldon stands to collect pension benefits and deferred compensation currently valued at $143.5 million.

It’s not just the return of giant glasses and leggings

Have you noticed how many of the unfortunate trends of recent years, though they may have had earlier roots, really took off in the 1980s? Most notable was the explosion of greed and selfishness that inspired so many talented young people to flock to Wall Street for no other purpose than to get rich. But income inequality, too, would take a giant step in the ’80s in its growth to extremes not known since the 1920s. And incredibly enough, the 1980s saw the first great increase in the American obesity rate, as it rose 50 percent.

Not tough, just obvious

All that I dislike about CNBC was captured recently in an interview of Sheila Bair, the former head of the FDIC, by CNBC’s Michelle Caruso-Cabrera. When Bair would start to say something that Caruso-Cabrera didn’t like or didn’t want to hear, Caruso-Cabrera cut her off. This happened first when Bair tried to explain that JP Morgan Chase was too big to manage effectively and then when Caruso-Cabrera wanted to pin responsibility for the mortgage debacle on the borrowers, and Bair tried to say that often both borrowers and lenders were at fault.

A bit too obvious

The job of general counsel of the West Virginia Educational Association, the teacher’s union in my home state, recently became vacant. “We had an opening and saw this as an opportunity to hire a highly qualified, well-respected attorney,” explained the association’s president. He was describing Rick Thompson, who just happens to also be the speaker of the House of Delegates, the lower house of the state legislature. Even in West Virginia, where conflicts of interest tend to be viewed charitably, having the speaker of the house simultaneously serve as a union’s general counsel proved to be too much for the state ethics commission to stomach. It has refused to give its approval of the appointment.

The informant

Speaking of West Virginia, the former superintendent of the Upper Big Branch Mine, the scene of the 2010 explosion that cost twenty-nine miners their lives, has testified, according to the Charleston Gazette’s Ken Ward Jr., that officials from the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration “regularly revealed to mine officials when they planned to visit the Raleigh County mine.” In other words, the feds were tipping off the mine officials so that they could temporarily halt their dangerous practices while the inspectors were onsite.

Lost in translation

One of the consistent problems with our foreign policy is that those executing it have been less than fluent in the languages of the people with whom they are working. The good news is that the State Department is improving: the number of positions filled with people qualified in the appropriate language now stands at 75 percent. The bad news is that, for the Defense Department, the figure is at just 25 percent.

The clowns in black

Be sure to read Tim Weiner’s Enemies. It is a history of the FBI’s many failures and occasional successes. The former include Ruby Ridge; Waco; the escape of the traitor Eddy Howard, who was able to flee to Moscow with the names of CIA agents because the FBI was parked in front of his house while he departed from the back; the failure to sniff out traitor Robert Hanson who, for twenty-two years, while working for the FBI, slipped name after name of American agents to the Russians, often leading to their execution; and the similar failure with regard to Katrina Leung, a Chinese spy who managed to bed two FBI agents while collecting $1.7 million from the FBI because she was supposed to be spying on the Chinese, not for them.

But in contrast to Mark Sullivan, the head of the Secret Service, who appears to be clueless, Robert Mueller, the latest head of the FBI, strikes Weiner as the best so far because he is instituting needed reform.

CSI: FBI

That Mueller’s efforts have not been totally successful, however, is suggested by a recent series on the FBI’s forensic labs, by Spencer Hsu of The Washington Post. Flaws in the labs’ procedures began to emerge a decade ago, and we were told a task force had been appointed to investigate. But the full results of the investigation have yet to emerge. And The Post is still finding convictions that were unjustly obtained because of defective lab work. The Post has also found that the work of only one analyst was reviewed by the task force, despite the fact that errors were made by others. Another troubling fact that emerges from the Post series is that when defective lab work is uncovered, the prosecutors are notified, but not the defense attorney.

The floating cost of a vestigial organ

A study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine and reported by The Associated Press reveals that in California, the cost of an appendectomy can range from $1,500 to $180,000, with the average coming in at $33,000. Lest you think these costs reflect a range of wildly different conditions, they don’t. The appendectomies covered by this study all had roughly the same low degree of complexity. “Researchers and other experts” tell the AP that “the results aren’t unique to California.”

Strong hair, weak spine

Two suggestions for those who were shocked when Mitt Romney joined hands with Donald Trump at a Las Vegas fund-raiser just hours after Trump had restated his doubts about Obama’s birthplace: first, recall Romney’s failure to confront a speaker at an event in Euclid, Ohio, who said Obama “should be tried for treason.” Then remember how he failed to reproach Rush Limbaugh for calling the Georgetown student who testified about birth control “a slut.”

It is said that Romney inherited his aversion to confrontation from his mother. It may have been forgivable in the mother. But not in a son who needs to convince us that he has the courage to be president.

Of bullies and blowing smoke

If the recent story of Romney’s prep school bullying belonged on the front page of the Washington Post, so does the story of Obama’s collegiate pot smoking. So goes the argument in a recent piece by Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei in Politico. But Obama had told the story of his drug use years ago—it is no longer news. Romney, however, had never confessed to forcibly holding down a fellow student who was screaming for help. That is news.

Though Allen and Herbert failed to teach me how to smoke marijuana, most of my colleagues at the Washington Monthly over the last forty-three years have been users from time to time. Many of them have become lifelong friends for whom I have the highest esteem. On the other hand, when I was fourteen, I was the victim of a bully. I have never wanted to see that guy again, much less vote for him to be president of the United States.

Read once, then bang head repeatedly

Back to West Virginia: the Charleston Gazette’s Phil Kabler recently uncovered a maddening catch-22 for 1,800 inmates of the state’s regional jails. The regionals are the jails that house lower- risk inmates who should be the best bets for parole. But state law requires that, to be eligible for parole, these prisoners must have completed treatment programs for drugs, alcohol, anger management, etc. However, treatment has not been available because of its cost. Providing it would require only four dollars a day per prisoner. On the other hand, paroling them would save the state $48.80 a day.

Even a broken clock…

The Columnist, a new play about Joseph Alsop, whose observations on public affairs were a staple of op-ed pages for forty years, has attracted a lot of attention and praise for its devastating portrait of Alsop’s malign influence on American foreign policy in Vietnam. I did not get to know Alsop until a decade or so later, but his arrogance was still obvious. So that and everything I heard about him from friends during the Kennedy-Johnson era combines to confirm that his portrayal in the play is accurate.

There was a time, however, when Alsop was not wrong. During the years 1940 and 1941, when the Republican presidential nominee Wendell Wilkie and Franklin Roosevelt joined in the effort to save Britain and prepare this country for World War II, no other American was more influential in the success of that effort than Joseph Alsop. Though his activities may have been questionable for a journalist, they were sublimely right for a citizen. He organized and manipulated behind the scenes and, in his column, tirelessly propagandized for the cause, consistently finding the right buttons to push to move the country in the direction it had to go to first stop and then defeat Adolf Hitler.

Details, details

It is the contention of many people that Obama’s stimulus should have been quicker and bigger. But the facts are that his stimulus bill became law on February 17, 2009, less than one month after he took office. And the two crucial Republican votes were obtained only by Obama’s agreement to reduce the amount of the stimulus to under $800 billion.

First in class

You may have read about the recent death of Lieutenant Commander Wesley A. Brown, who in 1949 became the first black midshipman to graduate from the U.S. Naval Academy. Other blacks had tried—my wife’s grandfather, who was at Annapolis in the 1880s, received a letter in which his mother urged him to be nice to the one black midshipman in his class—but all had fallen victim to the bigotry that was so powerful in those days. Brown himself endured “racial epithets and ostracism from his classmates,” according to the Washington Post’s obituary. “A group of upperclassmen gave him so many demerits during his first term, mostly for fabricated actions or petty offenses, that he was threatened with expulsion.”

It was bad enough that when he was later asked if he had thought about quitting, his answer was: “Every day.”

Sticking it out was made easier by the midshipmen who rallied around him, encouraging him with their friendship. Among them, improbably, was a young man from rural Georgia whose background would have given him every excuse to join in the prevailing prejudice. His name was Jimmy Carter.

The post Tilting at Windmills appeared first on Washington Monthly.

So which is it?

Chris Christie:
The Inside Story of
His Rise to Power
by Bob Ingle and Michael Symons
St. Martin’s Press, 320 pp.

In their new book, Chris Christie: The Inside Story of His Rise To Power, veteran New Jersey reporters Bob Ingle and Michael Symons seem to be suggesting it’s the former, painting a mostly glowing portrait of the man who once called a state assemblyman “numbnuts.” The authors use upbeat phrases like “humorous crime-buster,” “blunt establishment challenger,” and “a leader since childhood” to describe Christie, especially in comparison to his Democratic predecessor, Jon Corzine. (Ingle and Symons make little effort to hide their disdain for Corzine and his team, referring, for instance, to his reelection staff as the “Kiddie Corps.”) Christie, by contrast, they say, “has the makings of a productive vice president” because of his take-no-prisoners approach to both campaigning and governing.

Despite his own avowals to the contrary, Christie is still considered a likely top contender to be Mitt Romney’s running mate this fall. Christie is highly regarded for taking on New Jersey’s powerful public-sector unions—especially the teachers—even though it turns out that his mother was a Democrat who once belonged to the New Jersey Education Association. Ingle and Symons describe how Christie pushed a 2 percent property tax increase cap, which meant that there was less money for salary increases at the local level, and attempted to balance the overburdened state budget by slashing state aid to local school districts, forcing towns to make tough choices about capital improvements and class size. It was, however, Jon Corzine who did much of the hard work that moved New Jersey toward solvency. Indeed, Corzine became wildly unpopular with his own base when he forced public employees to pay 1.5 percent of their salaries toward their own health care and raised the retirement age.

Christie, however, has endeared himself to Tea Party types by telling public servants they should choose another line of work if they don’t like his reforms, or suggesting that billionaire Warren Buffet (who would like to raise taxes on the rich) should “just write a check and shut up.” (Another favorite quote that riled up the base was Christie’s comment that President Obama “is a guy who literally is walking around in a dark room trying to find the light switch of leadership.”)

The book opens with a fawning account of one of Christie’s favorite anecdotes—one that he has told to constituents across the state innumerable times—about the last moments he shared with his mother before she died in 2004. As the story goes, Christie raced to her side when it became clear she didn’t have much longer to live, but she insisted that he didn’t need to be there. “Christopher, go to work,” she told her oldest son. “It’s where you belong. There’s nothing left unsaid between us.” The authors use this exchange between mother and son to explain why Christie isn’t afraid to use language that sometimes makes the political elite clutch their collective pearls. Like the time he told the press to “take the bat out on” State Senator Loretta Weinberg, a seventy-six-year-old widow, for collecting a pension and criticizing his legislative agenda. It’s just Christie speaking his mind, leaving nothing unsaid, being the way his mom taught him to be.

In fairness, Ingle and Symons do not gloss over the many controversies and criticisms that have plagued the Christie administration over the past two years. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that the authors give Christie the benefit of the doubt a little too easily. Remember the massive snowstorms at the end of 2010 when the governor was at Disney World with his family and didn’t come back right away? That was Christie being a family man because he had promised to take his kids, even though the lieutenant governor was also out of state at the time and had (amazingly) also declined to come home.

As for the charges that Christie rewards his friends and former colleagues—like former Attorney General John Ashcroft, his former boss at the Justice Department—with paid government positions and fat contracts? Christie is loyal, say his biographers, and likes working with people he knows. And the controversy over taking the state helicopter to his son’s baseball game? On this Christie gets the last word, too.

For those not well versed in New Jersey politics, the book details Christie’s erratic path to the governorship. He started out small as a candidate for the state senate in 1993. He ran as a Republican on a platform of gun control and pension reform for lawmakers. His candidacy lasted all of nine days before it fizzled out. The next year, he was elected Morris County freeholder—a member of the county legislature—but his tenure was marked by lawsuits, and his combative demeanor won him no friends within his own party. Three years later, he was voted out of office. The GOP crowd that had assembled to hear his concession speech turned their backs on him and began talking when he took the stage.

Christie left for the private sector and began a lucrative career as a lobbyist at Dughi, Hewit, a friend’s law firm, advocating for such clients as the University of Phoenix, a for-profit college; Edison Schools, a for-profit operator of public schools; and the Hackensack University Medical Center.

Whether he meant it or not at the time, Christie said he would never run for office again, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t still be involved in politics. He volunteered his legal services to the 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign and raised, with the help of a longtime friend, more than $500,000 for their coffers. The effort didn’t go unnoticed. When it came time to hand out appointments, Bush offered the position of U.S. attorney to Christie—whom he had nicknamed “Big Boy”—despite the fact that Christie had little prosecutorial experience. During his seven-year tenure as a federal prosecutor, Christie became infamous for his perp walks, parading dozens of corrupt politicians in front of the cameras to show off his tough-on-crime credentials. He amassed more than a thousand convictions, bringing down child pornographers, violent gang members, and crooked politicians. (His record against corrupt public servants was more than 130 convictions to zero acquittals.) Christie’s office squeezed a $311 million settlement out of hip and knee replacement companies that had been paying off doctors to use their products. It was this record as a federal prosecutor that most cite as his main qualification to be the chief executive of New Jersey. Of course, it also helped that he wasn’t Jon Corzine, who had become an anathema even to members of his own party, thanks to an $8 billion budget shortfall and a difficult relationship with the legislative leadership.

The best part of the book is the meticulously researched glimpse into Christie’s upbringing. The governor grew up with two siblings in a strict home in a well-to-do suburb of Newark even though the family had limited means. All five Christies shared one bathroom and rarely went on vacation. Christie shared a small room with his younger brother, Todd, and was an athlete all throughout high school, eventually becoming captain of the baseball team.

Christie’s Republican father and Democratic mother were both strong-willed and quick-tempered, which led to many arguments over the years. Their incongruent political philosophies may explain why Chris Christie has an independent streak that riles the party faithful at times and could spoil his chances for higher office. Even though he pulled the Garden State out of regional climate change initiatives, Christie has acknowledged that global warming is both real and caused by humans. He nominated a Muslim man, Sohail Mohammed, for a state judgeship. When conservative critics accused Mohammed of following sharia law, Christie defended his choice, calling the criticism “crap.” He has also staked out a moderate position on illegal immigration, saying it’s not a crime to be in the United States without the proper documentation and advocating for a path to citizenship.

Whether Christie will become a force in national politics remains to be seen, but it looks like his spot in New Jersey is certainly secure for the next few years, if recent polling is any guide. Which is good for Christie, who has said he’s not ready to leave, because he still has a long list of things to do as governor. But wherever he ends up, as Ingle and Symons note, whether you love him or hate him, at least he won’t be boring.

If you are interested in purchasing this book, we have included a link for your convenience.

The post The Ascent of Chris Christie appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Better Off Without ‘Em:
A Northern Manifesto for
Southern Secession
by Chuck Thompson
Simon and Schuster, 336 pp.

What sets Thompson apart is his bold assertion that Uncle Sam should hack off his gangrenous right leg before the infection spreads any further. Most southerners, he suspects, “really just want the same thing I do: a country liberated from the tyranny of Mormons and seditionists, and the freedom to say about the other side, in all honesty and with complete accuracy, that we might be better off without ’em.”

Letting the South secede, he argues, would be best for everyone. “Freed from its standing as a hind tit, guilt-by-association international embarrassment to the rest of the country, the politically repressive religious monarchy of the born-again Confederacy would be transformed overnight into a travel destination swarming with trendsetting elites,” Thompson, author of comedic travelogues To Hellholes and Back and Smile When You’re Lying, writes at the outset. “Lonely Planet types from around the world would immediately embrace the South as … an indigenous society teeming with underappreciated folk wisdom, ancient values, and fascinating dialects deserving of fierce protection and a slew of new expat-financed eco-lodges.” It would be another Mexico, in other words, “only with an even weaker currency and more corrupt government.”

Better Off Without ’Em maintains this fevered and irreverent tone—as if Phillips’s American Theocracy were being narrated by Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi—throughout its grand tour of the American South, a circuit that took Thompson two years to complete. Viciously funny and thoroughly tasteless, it’s an easy and cathartic read for anyone fed up with the Confederate influence on the national discourse. But like Taibbi or Bill Maher, Thompson isn’t aiming just to entertain; he wants readers to take his underlying argument seriously. That’s where things get dicey.

At the outset, Thompson confronts that perennial political science problem: Where is “the South” exactly? Is it everything south of the Mason-Dixon line (including Maryland and excluding Kentucky?) or the old Confederacy (what about West Virginia?) or all the slave states of 1860 (hello, Missouri)? Is Texas in or out? How about Oklahoma, or southern portions of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio? Even Pennsylvania is said by politicos to be Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between. If the South were to rise again, how big a chunk of turf are we talking about?

I’ve offered a two-part answer in my recent book, American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. There’s never been a single South, but, rather, three distinct regional cultures that, while on different sides of the Civil War, formed a durable alliance during the crucible of Reconstruction. These cultures—the Deep South, Tidewater, and Greater Appalachia—don’t observe state boundaries, so if you wanted to be rid of them altogether, you’d have to say good-bye to a big piece of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Missouri, and the lower Great Lakes states, and most of Delaware, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas to boot. That’s not an amputation, it’s a vivisection.

Thompson—who, for the record, is from Alaska—takes an uncharacteristically cautious approach to the problem. He’s willing to let go of the ten Confederate states, plus West Virginia and Kentucky, but not D.C.’s northern Virginia suburbs (as they’re no longer southern) or Texas (because “we can’t afford to lose it”). Military installations in places like Norfolk and Pensacola will remain under joint title as part of “Gitmo-like treaties.” That leaves tens of millions of “southerners” living on their “native” territory within the rump of the United States, which sounds like a recipe for internal dissension and Balkan-like territorial squabbles. If amputation is really the best way to save the body politic, one wonders if Thompson isn’t making a fatal mistake in trying to save a knee.

The question of subject settled, Thompson lets us ride shotgun on his two-year odyssey through the South, where we encounter bigots, religious fanatics, hypocrites, and good ol’ boy politicians. We visit school districts that closed their best-performing (and almost entirely black) school to save money while the district was running a surplus. There’s an obligatory stop at that temple of Flat Earth magical thinking, the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky,
and a Baptist megachurch in suburban Georgia, where worshippers are asked to stand and applaud a favored political candidate. We’re shown how the South “has spent the past forty years systematically siphoning auto jobs from Michigan and the Midwest by keeping workers’ salaries low and inhibiting their rights to organize.” A spin around the South Carolina State House grounds confirms the presence of bronze statues of Ben Tillman (public advocate of lynching all black voters) and Strom Thurmond (the segregationist who, at twenty-two, fathered a child with his family’s sixteen-year-old black housekeeper). At a store on the courthouse square of Laurens, South Carolina, Thompson buys an entire Klan uniform while recordings of old KKK rallies play in the background.

The foregone conclusion: the South has a negative influence on the rest of the country—economy and all—as “it jilts workers, promotes poverty, sells out American interests to foreigners, wrecks the environment, [and] makes trans fat pushers like Paula Deen and Paul Prudhomme into national heroes.” There’s even an entire chapter devoted to its corrosive effect on college football through an unholy alliance between the Southeastern Conference and ESPN—territory Phillips, Lind, and Cummings never ventured into. The solution: “waving buh-bye to a passel of religious fanatics, bloviating politicians, and Larry the Cable Guy.”

Unfortunately, the sections of the book dealing with the merits of breaking up the country and the technical aspects of doing so aren’t as compelling and thought out as one might hope from a book promising to provide a manifesto on the subject. Thompson assumes a friendly diplomatic breakup with “a series of military treaties and economic agreements that play both to southern strengths and American needs.” The two states would be tied together in a cooperative defense agreement with what sounds like a joint standing army, while open borders and existing interstate commerce laws would remain in effect “for a minimum of fifty years.” Anyone who felt they wound up in the wrong country could automatically become a citizen of the other during an extended probationary period. Thompson makes the process sound as calm and technocratic as the proceedings of the European Commission.

Maybe it’s because I spent the 1990s covering eastern Europe and the Balkans, but I feel far less assured that Thompson’s Second Confederacy would have a peaceful birth. We have most of the ingredients here for a nasty bloodbath: long-suppressed national grievances, religious extremists in positions of power, a militant culture (in Appalachia), an armed and poorly educated populace, a formal ethnically based caste system in place within living memory, and a history of conflict with the federation it would be leaving. Call me crazy to suggest things could spin out of control during the fractious effort to undo the federation, but remember that in 1990 alarmists in Sarajevo laughed at that concept too. My assessment of the human condition prevents me from endorsing or advocating a breakup of the United States, as convenient a solution as it might seem on paper. If anything, Thompson’s work heightens rather than allays these concerns.

Apparently I’m not alone in feeling this way. As the book barrels toward its conclusion, Thompson describes trying to get various figures to engage with his secession plan. James Carville, Paul Krugman, and Lindsey Graham wouldn’t return his repeated interview requests. Lind, a native Texan and author of Made in Texas, wrote back that he disapproved of the project. “The last thing we need at this moment is one group of Americans suggesting others belong in another country,” Lind’s e-mail read. “Even as a joke, it is not funny.” Even the three University of Georgia professors who agreed to chat with Thompson at a pub slipped away when, as he writes, they saw “the slushy, truth-serum effects of beer and political talk with a loudmouthed Yankee [sic] descending upon the evening.”

Many of our federation’s problems are indeed due to profound, historically based differences in the ideals, values, religious attitudes, and political behavior of its component regional cultures. Perhaps, decades or centuries down the line, we will break up, but it’s not something we should wish for. Things might turn out as Thompson imagines, but we might also find ourselves in a far darker scenario, wishing we were still with ’em after all.

If you are interested in purchasing this book, we have included a link for your convenience.

The post Tempting but Insane appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The Obamians:
The Struggle Inside the
White House to Redefine
American Power
by James Mann
Viking Adult, 416 pp.

Three and a half years is a long enough time to begin to generalize and draw conclusions.The Obamians, by former Los Angeles Times reporter James Mann, takes a careful look at Obama’s foreign policy and the people who run it. The book follows Mann’s successful 2004 study, Rise of the Vulcans, which chronicled Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and the other fearless bullies who jumped into the pool and splashed all the water right out of it. The Obamians has many strengths, although the pair of catchy titles that grace Mann’s last two books suggests a weakness: shaping complex events to a simple, pithy narrative. It is a very Washington way to tell a story. The generation of Democratic foreign policy leaders that preceded the Obamians and opposed the Vulcans, Mann says, are the Trout Fishers. This is their name because they like to fish for trout during the Aspen Strategy Group conference in Colorado. Perhaps the Democrats’ rising stars for 2016 will be known as the Golfers—or the Frisbee Golfers. Their opponents will break from the past and use clever methods; we will call them the Sneaky Bastards.

The cover of the book depicts Obama’s foreign policy cabinet: Vice President Joe Biden, flashing that ridiculous, toothy, baby-kissing smile; Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; Defense Secretary Leon Panetta; and former Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Yet these luminaries are not the Obamians, and the book is not about them. Rather, Mann focuses on a handful of younger worthies who do not hold cabinet positions but nevertheless have the president’s ear. No one would recognize them if they were put on the cover of a book. They ran foreign policy for the Obama campaign in 2008 and now mainly work at the National Security Council. The principal Obamians are Ben Rhodes, Mark Lippert, Denis McDonough, and Samantha Power. The United States ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, is not, strictly speaking, an Obamian, but her philosophy aligns with theirs and she may be considered an honorary member.

That philosophy is, in a word, “rebalancing,” and its proponents’ main advantage is generational:

[T]he Obamians’ personal involvement in foreign policy began in a different era—in the 2000s, the decade of the September 11 attacks, the U.S. intervention in Iraq and, later, the international financial crisis of 2008. These events gave the Obamians a distinctly more modest and downbeat outlook on America’s role in the world. The United States no longer seemed like a hyperpower.

Yet Republicans eager to paint members of the administration as defeatist facilitators of American decline are incorrect. Mann’s analysis of this sensitive issue is nuanced and persuasive. Obamians, he contends, recognize that China, India, and Brazil are no longer rising powers; they are now powers. The United States’ reputation took a serious hit during the 2000s, its military is overextended, and its economy is in the toilet like Europe’s. Consequently, the United States cannot be complacent but must take affirmative steps to ensure its own leadership over the coming decades. This is cold realism in the face of conservatives’ woolly idealistic belief that America is inherently supreme and will remain so for all time. Mann is carefully nonpartisan in this book, and otherwise would have mentioned that one reason for the United States’ tenuous position in the world today is the disastrous adventurism and economic policy of the Bush administration.

Another characteristic of Obama’s foreign policy leaders is their lack of Vietnam-era angst and baggage. As Rice put it to Mann in a frank interview, “What frustrated me about the 2004 campaign was, there we were, re-litigating, ‘where were you in nineteen sixty-whatever?’ . . . and I’m thinking, what the hell does this have to do with me and the world we’re living in today?” Rice, who was on the National Security Council under Bill Clinton, was seared by a different formative experience: U.S. inaction during the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Thus, when Richard Holbrooke, a loud and uneasy transplant from Hillary Clinton’s campaign to the Obama administration, gave an interview to the New Yorker comparing Afghanistan to Vietnam, he sealed his own fate. Mann reports that Obama’s senior staff were furious and marginalized Holbrooke as a “character actor,” keeping him on board merely because he would be noisier and more troublesome outside the administration. Holbrooke, who died of a heart attack in 2010, also appears on the cover of The Obamians, off to the side and facing away.

Mann describes an Obama foreign policy that was initially realist in the tradition of George H. W. Bush, despite the president’s soaring and idealistic speeches. Through the efforts of Clinton, Gates, and Biden, the administration declined to support the Green movement after Iran’s fraudulent 2009 election, and it pragmatically altered the missile defense plans that had needlessly strained relations with Russia. Obama fulfilled campaign promises by ending the war in Iraq and renewing focus on Afghanistan, sending a surge of tens of thousands of new troops to pursue a strategy of counterinsurgency. Wary of sounding like his predecessor, Obama shied away from promoting democracy around the world.

Yet the Obamians soon took over, and their defining issue was Libya. Here was a humanitarian war led by allies and launched in a country with few strategic interests. And yet for all that, the coalition succeeded. Mann represents Libya as a watershed moment in Obama’s foreign policy:

It showed, once again, that Obama was no pacifist; he was willing to use military power. It demonstrated for the first time that he was willing to put the American military to work on behalf of humanitarian goals, in a way that the realists he admired would not. Above all, it demonstrated the Obama administration’s intense commitment to multilateralism, having approached the use of military force only after the urging of his closest allies and only after getting formal approval from the Arab League and the UN Security Council.

But strains of realism continued to show through. The administration did not give blanket support to freedom movements in the Arab Spring, instead reacting according to U.S. interests and the precise circumstances of each teetering state. Egypt was not Syria and Tunisia was not Bahrain. Obama struggled to portray a coherent policy that was more inspiring than “acting according to our interests”—even though that is exactly what states do and must do.

Throughout his chapters on each of these issues, Mann presents sober, cogent strategic analysis. But Rice’s candor notwithstanding, Mann gives few new details that flesh out the personalities and decisions he discusses. This is surprising, because he interviewed some 125 people for the book. For instance, he contends that Power and Rice propelled the decision to use force in Libya, but does not show how they did so. Did they work over cabinet secretaries, canvas the Hill, or make their case directly to the president? What arguments did they use—did they appeal to moral obligations, strategic considerations, or both? Similar holes fill the chapter on the decision to strike at bin Laden. A paragraph notes the final meeting in which top aides gave their bottom line, but is silent on what they said. Mann tantalizingly mentions the president’s tense phone conversation with President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan after the raid. Yet he merely records the fact of the call, rather than specifying what transpired. The Obamians could use more of the Woodwards.

Mann presents an administration whose foreign policy has succeeded in important but not all respects. Obama and his team understand the new limitations within which the United States must operate; their approach has been restrained but not defensive, coherent but not ideological, idealistic when it can be and realistic when it must be. Certainly not every problem has been solved: Iran and North Korea remain as intractable as ever. China continues to assert itself politically and economically. Success in Afghanistan is elusive. There is plenty, in other words, for a Romney administration to bungle should it get the chance.

If you are interested in purchasing this book, we have included a link for your convenience.

The post Young Guns appeared first on Washington Monthly.

On January 8, San Francisco’s political and business elite gathered under the soaring rotunda of city hall for the inauguration of Edwin M. Lee, who had just been elected to a full term as mayor. Trumpets heralded the recently obscure city administrator as he made his way down the grand marble staircase.

Already front and center on the broad landing that served as the stage for the occasion was Willie L. Brown Jr. Brown’s days as an elected official—he served as speaker of the state assembly, and then two terms as San Francisco’s mayor—are long past. But he remains very much the star of the show, and was arguably the most powerful man in the room.

The ascent of Ed Lee that morning was the public culmination of Brown’s deft maneuvering over the previous two years to ensure that a safe and reliable ally would continue to control San Francisco’s local government. Lee’s predecessor, Gavin Newsom, was himself a Brown protégé, getting his start in city politics when Brown appointed him to the parking commission and then the board of supervisors.

Brown and his longtime ally Rose Pak, a community organizer and a powerful figure from the city’s Chinese Chamber of Commerce, had managed to get Lee, an obscure city hall apparatchik, appointed interim mayor in January 2011 when Newsom left office early to become lieutenant governor. As an incumbent, Lee was then a shoo-in to win a full term. Brown had built up Lee’s public service bona fides for years, appointing the former Asian Law Caucus attorney to a series of posts, including head of the city’s purchasing office and the department of public works. If Lee wins a second term, he will be in place until 2020, giving Brown a hold on San Francisco’s government that will span a quarter century.

So the victory being celebrated on January 8 was Brown’s. The very public stagecraft of the inauguration left no doubt about who remains the city’s Alpha Male.

“Charlotte! We are mad at you!” Brown jovially shouted across the stage as Lee made his way down the stairs. Charlotte Mailliard Shultz, a glamorous socialite and the wife of former U.S. Secretary of State George P. Shultz, was long ago appointed by Brown as San Francisco’s chief of protocol. She managed this inauguration, as she had countless official parties for Brown and other politicians and dignitaries over the years. “We”—Brown stood in the opulently decorated Beaux Arts temple with four other former mayors, including U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein—“didn’t get this!”

The horns quieted. Lee stood meekly behind Brown. He tugged at his baggy business suit, clasped and unclasped his hands. The most colorful thing about him is his moustache, which is brown.

“Ed, if you want to sit down, it’s all right. It’s perfectly all right,” Brown said, gesturing back toward a chair.

Lee sat.

Brown and the crowd laughed.

Brown then held forth for most of the next hour, cracking jokes and explaining what Lee’s mayoralty was all about. He told Lee, who sat dutifully in his chair, gray and mute, that he had better learn to recognize the state and national political figures in the audience who could be pressured to support high-speed rail, a favorite public works project of Brown and, presumably, his clients.

“I should identify some of your real friends,” Brown said. “People like Ron Conway, who is here. Where are you, Ron Conway?”

The influential technology investor, a Republican who had not been politically active before falling in with Brown and becoming Lee’s largest donor, stood and beamed. The parties Conway hosted or funded for Lee had been the talk of the town. A widely distributed campaign commercial was filmed at Conway’s home; it featured sports and tech celebrities like Twitter cofounder Biz Stone and Google’s Marissa Mayer dancing merrily to demonstrate their enthusiasm for Lee as MC Hammer performed “U Can’t Touch This.” (Brown has been talking up Hammer, whose real name is Stanley Kirk Burrell, as the next mayor of Oakland.)

Conway’s and the tech industry’s support of Lee had already yielded a spectacular return. Shortly after being named interim mayor, Lee pushed through what became known as the “Twitter tax break.” The deal allows San Francisco tech companies to avoid huge payroll taxes on employee stock options when they go public. San Francisco-based Twitter is among Conway’s portfolio companies. After the inauguration, Lee put on hold an effort by city tax authorities to force another Conway-backed company, Airbnb, to comply with the city’s steep lodging tax.

After making sure that everyone understood how much Lee owed Ron Conway, Brown did cede the podium—reluctantly, promising he would soon return—and allowed Lee to speak. But Brown took a seat so very near the new mayor that even in the closest-cropped photos and videos of Lee’s speech, Brown’s familiar bald visage looms large, seemingly grafted to Lee’s left arm.

Brown remains sparklingly charismatic and jaunty despite his seventy-eight years. He is possibly more powerful and certainly less controversial now than when he held public office. The ethics and criminal investigations that dogged his entire political career (no charges were ever filed) have been largely forgotten. The well-dressed bon vivant lives downtown in his St. Regis apartment and seems to never tire of the party circuit.

Brown is now a private attorney under no obligation to disclose the identity of his clients or his interactions with the legion of public officials and others who owe their careers to him. (The most promising of these may be California Attorney General Kamala Harris, Brown’s onetime girlfriend.) Brown operates in a post-partisan, post-paper trail world in which he reaps the benefits of power while bearing none of the unpleasant culpability or scrutiny that typically comes with that.

There is no scandal here. Brown helped create the system that allows him to flourish now. And he plays that system like a born musician who rarely if ever hits a wrong note. “He is smarter than everyone else. That is what it comes down to. He’s a chess player playing at a level far more advanced than everyone else,” says Corey Cook, a politics professor at the University of San Francisco. “He has always been able to figure out how to find the gray area, and never cross the line.”

There have long been political machines or political bosses calling the shots in cities across the country. Ed Rendell’s post-political career in Philadelphia, after serving as mayor and then governor, springs to mind. Bill Clinton’s post-presidential life in the private sector, the tedious scandals of his public life all but forgotten, does as well.

But the forces that made Willie Brown possible are somewhat unique. The term limits that forced him from office twice, first from the state assembly and then from the mayor’s office, ironically make his informal power and that of all his term-limited brethren all the more potent. Willie Brown’s power springs from his web of relationships and his intricate and strategic understanding, cultivated over six decades, of how politics in San Francisco and California is played. With term limits in place, it is all but impossible that a creature quite like Brown could rise again.

“I don’t think it’s any mystery how he continues to be powerful. In a term-limited era, people behind the scenes who know how to mobilize coalitions, raise money, have the advantage over other players in the system,” says Bruce Cain, a political scientist and executive director of the University of California’s Washington Center. Cain worked on Brown’s staff in the 1980s and recalls firsthand how “intimidatingly smart” Brown is. “Ironically, term limits made Willie more powerful, not less. Lots of [newly elected or short-timer politicians] have no knowledge of how the system works. That knowledge becomes even more valuable in a world where no more Willie Browns are possible.”

Still widely referred to as “Da Mayor,” Brown held that office from 1996 until 2004. Before that, he was the most powerful political figure in California as speaker of the state assembly. In the 1990s, state term limits were adopted, expelling Brown from Sacramento. So after thirty years there, Brown returned to San Francisco, the city he had migrated to in 1951 as a penniless, poorly educated seventeen-year-old from segregated Mineola, Texas.

Brown worked as a janitor and doorman to put himself through San Francisco State University and then the University of California’s Hastings School of Law. He became close to the Burton clan, a major power in California politics. Phillip Burton represented San Francisco in Congress for nearly twenty years, and after he died of an aneurysm in 1983, his wife, Sala, took over his seat and served until she died in 1987. John Burton, Phil Burton’s brother and a longtime state legislator, is now head of the state Democratic Party.

Brown’s early idealism—he was a dedicated follower of the political economist Henry George, who advocated a system of sky-high land-value taxation that would have put real estate speculators and developers out of business—gave way to a more pragmatic mix of a strong commitment to civil rights and support of public-sector unions, balanced with a long track record as a great proponent and friend of real estate developers, particularly those who sought to build on land formerly owned by the government. After winning the 1995 mayoral election, Brown presided over the boomiest of cities in the boomiest of times. He was a smashing and popular success, overseeing a splendid (if expensive) renovation of the city’s palatial city hall, the development of the beautiful waterfront ballpark for the San Francisco Giants, the gentrification of the South of Market area—“SoMa”—into a techie haven, and so on.

But a steady drumbeat of mini scandals—contracts awarded to politically connected friends and the like—led to a short-lived voter revolt. The city’s progressives (versus business-friendly moderates, like Brown) took control of the elected eleven-member board of supervisors around the time of the first dotcom bust. Amid this, Gavin Newsom, Brown’s well-funded chosen successor, won the 2003 mayoral election. His challenger was Matt Gonzalez, a progressive Stanford Law grad (who went on, as a footnote, to be Ralph Nader’s running mate in 2008).

Newsom brashly ignored Brown’s advice to wait his turn and in 2010 ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination for governor, which went to Jerry Brown. Without the support of Willie Brown and the tight group of state Democratic political grandees, Newsom’s campaign sputtered, and he had to settle for lieutenant governor, a humiliatingly ceremonial role.

That meant that Newsom vacated the mayor’s office with a year left in the term. Anyone picked to be interim mayor by the city’s board of supervisors would have a tremendous advantage in the 2011 mayoral election. David Chiu, the Harvard Law-trained president of the board, had already announced he would run.

So Newsom and Brown proposed that the job go to Lee. The previously obscure city administrator vowed repeatedly that he would be a simple caretaker who would never run for a full term. And perhaps Lee believed that to be true, or that such a decision would be his to make. But Brown, and Rose Pak, had other plans. The giggly, unassuming Lee was their creation. A new citizen’s group, funded chiefly by businessmen tied to Pak, clamored for Lee to run. Lee dithered. Chiu, sensing he had been outmaneuvered and betrayed, confronted Lee. “So Ed,” Chiu said to Lee at a mayoral debate in August, “you told me that you had looked at yourself in the mirror … you didn’t want to run, but that you were having trouble saying no to Willie Brown and Rose Pak.” And by that point, everyone knew that Lee had not, in the end, said no to his powerful patrons. Lee’s most valuable characteristic is his ability to say yes.

There cannot be a scandal if there is no lie. And there is no need to lie when there are no rules requiring one to disclose anything at all. Brown managed to create this post-partisan, post-scandal world that allows him to flourish by turning the very concept of disclosure or openness or accountability on its head.

He is very publicly a rascal, a roue, in a city that loathes the boring and conventional. Let ham-handed buffoons like John Edwards hide from the press in hotel stairwells and risk jail time for steering money to a mistress. When Brown, married since 1958, got an aide pregnant while still in office, he invited everyone to congratulate him on the happy news. “There is nothing unseemly about this at all,” Brown told San Francisco Chronicle columnists Phil Matier and Andrew Ross. “She’s a great friend.” The woman, whose fund-raising business enjoyed rent-free city-owned office space, received nearly $2.5 million in payments from city commissions and campaign funds controlled by Brown or his allies, the newspaper reported later. No one batted an eye.

What many powerful players would conceal, Brown announces with glee in the weekly column he has written for the Chronicle since 2008. The Chron once covered Brown’s dealings aggressively, but it is now so weak that Hearst Corp. nearly folded it a few years ago. Brown often uses his column to promote friends and punish enemies, and his column is not subject to the paper’s ethics policy.

Brown does not discuss the identity of his legal clients, and he did not respond to an interview request for this story. Brown’s major clients are thought to be companies tied to land use (like Lennar, developing huge tracts of formerly government-owned land along the Bay) or big public works projects like the $1.6 billion Central Subway, which will terminate in politically powerful Chinatown.

Rose Pak insists that Brown often works for his many friends for free, and that he is far from being a rich man. It is true that, despite the Brioni suits and the St. Regis condo purchased for $1.8 million in 2006, Brown does not openly display trappings of great wealth, like a country place in Napa or even a full-time car and driver. “Most people think he is wallowing in wealth. Let me tell you, he isn’t,” Pak says. “Willie Brown is very generous with his time and his efforts. Some of [his clients] pay him, and some of them don’t. He still advises the governor’s office and half of the legislature. People all pick on him for advice, and two-thirds of the time, he doesn’t get paid. He is just very generous. He is not a money-motivated guy. If you are a friend, you are a friend forever. He is loyal to his friends. How do you charge a friend?”

Indeed, Pak says that Brown was strapped for cash in the eight years he served as mayor, since a city law prohibited him from working as an attorney on the side, which he had done in the decades he spent in the state assembly. “He is the straightest and poorest of all the politicians I know,” Pak says. “Before he left the mayoral thing, I knew he was in trouble financially. So I asked some of our closest friends … your company better not pick on him to do things for free.”

Having the Chronicle column allows Brown to brush off reporters’ questions about his private business life by saying that he is now a newspaper columnist, not a public official who must answer for his actions. And when Brown has faced questions about using his Chronicle column to settle political scores or advance the interests of his corporate clients, he counters that he is not a journalist who can be held accountable on that score, either. So Brown appears to talk freely about everything while not having to disclose anything at all. It works because Brown “doesn’t get caught in lies,” Cook says. “He is very open.” But what about Brown’s work on behalf of his unnamed clients? Cook pauses. “He is selectively transparent, let’s put in that way.”

Brown’s “influence is that of a party boss,” working the nexus of business and politics, Cook says. “It’s not a political machine in a classical sense.” Continuity is key, and many of the legion of loyalists Brown appointed to government posts are still in place. For example, Steve Kawa, Brown’s chief of staff, has held fast to his role as the city’s shadow mayor, continuing in that appointed post for Gavin Newsom and now Ed Lee.

Brown “has figured out a way—many ways—of wielding political power,” Cook continues. “His strength is figuring out how all these pieces go together. He is a legal advocate, a political player, an adviser to the mayor, a columnist in the local paper [where he is] advocating for his clients. He does so in accordance with the law, having figured out how to mobilize all these access points in the system.”

Who in any position of influence would ever want to take this on? There would be nothing to gain. Brown has too many friends and longtime political and business allies. And with the scandals of his years in public office largely forgotten, raising a hue and cry would seem gauche or unsophisticated, even a meanspirited assault on the city’s beloved old uncle.

“We expect him to be flamboyant,” says Nathan Ballard, a Democratic strategist who was Mayor Newsom’s communication director in the days when Newsom was heralded as a Kennedy-esque political prince in such publications as Harper’s Bazaar and the New York Times Magazine. “A flamboyant rascal. It’s part of what gives San Francisco its charm.

“There’s no law against being a power broker,” continues Ballard, an admirer of Brown. “He is too much a part of the DNA of the city” for anyone in a position of influence—or ambition—to raise a stink. Willie Brown “is an iconic figure, part of what defines us, and he has been for fifty years. It would be like criticizing North Beach for having strip clubs. It would be like criticizing a cable car for traveling too slow.”

Now that he’s no longer an elected official, Brown is freer than ever to leverage his power and relationships. And because he is an attorney, and not registered as a lobbyist, nothing needs to be disclosed. “Arranging for a deal to get done is not a reportable act. It’s just good, old-fashioned deal making,” Ballard explains. Brown “is hiding in plain sight. He was never caught at anything, and the last thing he would be caught at is having these clients. He is too wired.”

Perhaps hiding in plain sight is Brown’s greatest tactical accomplishment. By appearing everywhere, doing and saying openly in public what many would seek to conceal, Brown has made himself unassailable.

It’s not a scandal to have a baby with a woman who is not your wife if you celebrate it yourself in the local newspaper.

It’s not a scandal that Willie Brown is doing all he can to get the Central Subway built, even if he advises Aecom, the contractor set to manage the $1.6 billion project that will transport people just 3,000 yards. (Aecom did not respond to a request for comment.)

That’s not to say that a few hardy souls aren’t scandalized by the Central Subway, or fearful of how much it might end up costing San Francisco taxpayers in the end. “This is a dog,” said Quentin Kopp, a retired state senator, city supervisor, and judge who earnestly if crankily rails against Brown and his crowd, who smugly refer to themselves publicly as “the City Family.” The Central Subway was originally supposed to cost $600 million, Kopp notes, about a third of its more recent estimate. A now-forgotten alternate proposal to revamp a key bus route would have cost just $9.1 million, Kopp says.

Proponents argue that state and federal money will cover all but $124 million of the Central Subway cost. But if all or part of the state or federal funding doesn’t come through, or if the project’s costs exceed its current budget, the city of San Francisco is on the hook to pay the difference.

And don’t get Kopp started on Recology, the company that has for eighty years enjoyed a no-bid, no-franchise-fee monopoly on the city’s trash collection business. “It’s a virtual criminal enterprise!” the retired judge rails. Brown served as an attorney for the waste company when it operated under its old name, Norcal (abandoned after a public bribery scandal tarred its name elsewhere in the state). An old Sacramento aide of Brown’s sits on the Recology board, and suggestions every few years from the board of supervisors’ independent and respected budget analyst that San Francisco put the monopoly up for bid never go anywhere.

Meanwhile, Recology is making piles of money from its San Francisco monopoly; it made about $220 million in the fiscal year ending June 2010. A May 2011 report by the city budget analyst found that commercial garbage rates in San Francisco, which are unregulated, are far higher than those in other Bay Area communities. Recology’s contract guarantees it about a 9.5 percent profit over its costs of doing business, so the more costly its operations, the more profit it makes. And though Recology is a private company (technically an employee-owned stock corporation, a structure that enables it to avoid most corporate income taxes) and reports little financial information, a consultants’ analysis prepared in early 2010 reported that Recology’s pretax profit margin was well over twice the industry average.

Given Recology’s reliance on political protection afforded by its long relationship with Brown, it spends quite a bit of energy on political matters. Two months before the November election, a scandal arose over allegations that Recology employees violated campaign finance laws to help Ed Lee’s campaign. San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón declined to investigate, and the matter was soon forgotten. “Nothing ever happened,” says Kopp. “You aren’t going to get anything out of this DA. He’s part of this operation. How do you think he became DA?”

Gascón became DA when Gavin Newsom appointed him, in January 2011 (he was then serving as the city’s chief of police); the post had been vacated by Kamala Harris when she became the state’s attorney general. Running as an incumbent, Gascón was elected to a full term in the November 2011 election. The feds are also unlikely to take an interest in the allegations, given that Harris’s brother-in-law, Tony West, is third in command at the U.S. Department of Justice.

Kopp placed a measure on the June 2012 ballot to put the city’s garbage contract up for competitive bid, but even before the election he recognized that the effort was likely doomed. “Gail Kaufman [Brown’s former aide and current Recology board member] will spend $2 million to defeat it. We have zero. I’ve done my duty as a citizen” and put it on the ballot, Kopp says. Now, the “citizens of San Francisco have to assume some responsibility, too.” Kopp’s measure drew just 23 percent of the votes cast, and Recology’s monopoly remained secure.

Here, Kopp has hit on the real scandal afoot in San Francisco: all of this goes on, and most of the 800,000 people who call San Francisco home have little idea how their city actually runs. The city is in dire financial straits, and no one cares. But they love Da Mayor.

Put plainly, these tax breaks for politically connected tech companies or sweet deals for politically connected garbage haulers are not abstract curiosities. San Francisco desperately needs cash. As a financial entity, the city and county of San Francisco is in sorry shape. Tax revenues have been improving, but the city controller reported in March that the city, which has annual revenue of about $3 billion, faces a string of unbroken projected deficits until at least 2015, totaling $1.5 billion.

The root of the problem is the city’s huge payroll and benefit costs. The city and county of San Francisco has about 23,000 employees, while nearby San Jose, a larger city by population, has just 4,000. San Francisco’s mayor is paid $272,000 a year, considerably more than the mayor of far-larger Los Angeles. Until recently, anyone who had worked for the city for just five years was entitled to lifelong retiree health benefits.

Those ballooning employee costs were ominous enough that Lee acknowledged in the spring of 2011 that the city would be bankrupt in five to ten years if a way was not found to slash these costs by about $400 million a year. (Lee was given a new PR person shortly thereafter and spent the rest of the year denying the bankruptcy talk, even though he had been taped as he addressed a room full of reporters.) Lee and a group of public employee union officials and local business leaders did strike a deal to cut about a third of what Lee had said was required. Later, a much-needed change in the overly optimistic returns projected for the city’s pension fund essentially wiped out all of the annual savings of the pension-reform plan. (Lowering the anticipated return means that the city needs to contribute more each year to cover the fund’s anticipated obligations.) Lee trumpets his pension reform plan as the great achievement of his first year in office.

With employee costs out of control, and layoffs a verboten notion, the city has been forced to cut costs elsewhere. Summer school was axed in 2010. The city’s community college system—a behemoth with twelve campuses, 90,000 students, and a $200 million operating budget—has cut so many classes and is in such poor financial shape that its academic accreditation is at risk, the Chronicle reported in June. The streets are in deplorable condition, and Lee pushed through a $248 million bond measure last year to pay for maintenance that better-run cities fund out of annual routine operating budgets. Lee also saved a few million dollars by decreeing last year that the burden and legal responsibility of caring for thousands of street trees the city planted in the Newsom era would now fall on the property owner living nearest the tree. If a property owner—perhaps disabled or too elderly to prune the city’s former tree—is an inadequate arborist, the city will levy a fine.

So San Francisco serves its average citizens less well each passing year, and no one seems to mind—about that, or about the fact that the city is run to an unknown degree by a former mayor who openly holds sway in the public sphere yet answers to no one. “There is no way to hold Willie Brown accountable. He doesn’t serve in any capacity. That’s why machines are worrisome,” says Jessica Trounstine, a political science professor specializing in city government at University of California, Merced.

Trounstine, who says she studies historical political machines because no one will talk about a machine currently in power, says that the lack of popular interest or concern is to be expected. The local newspapers in San Francisco are a particularly listless bunch, and the dominant Chronicle can hardly be expected to look too critically at the day job of its star columnist. “It takes a lot for people to become outraged in local politics,” says Trounstine, noting that it commonly takes fifteen or twenty years for a city’s voters to grow disenchanted enough
with a political machine or boss to vote it or him out of power.

At the root of the geologic pace of change is the scarcity of credible news coverage of local government, which is a problem almost everywhere, and certainly in San Francisco. “Machines exist by telling people what is going on,” Trounstine continues. “Local politics is a very low-information environment. The lower the information environment, the less information the voters have, and the more likely it is that incumbents will stay in power. ‘Incumbents,’ broadly speaking, are the [not necessarily elected] power brokers” like Willie Brown.

Recently, however, there have been faint signs that Lee is not being as compliant as Brown had hoped. When appointing a new supervisor shortly after being inaugurated, Lee passed over Brown’s pick and chose a more liberal woman, who as head of the planning commission had opposed development deals Brown had favored. Then Lee failed to reappoint a popular local defense lawyer to the police commission. And then Lee appeared ready to allow the professional staff of the city’s pension board to select its new chief, rather than appoint a reliable political ally to the post.

So Brown used his Chronicle column to teach his wayward creation a lesson.

“Ed Lee’s Lack of Political Experience Is Showing,” ran the headline on April 15. “The mayor is answerable for everything that happens in city government,” Brown wrote, “so he needs to have agencies being run by people he can live with.” With Da Mayor still very much in charge, the implication was clear: Brown made Lee, and he can just as easily make a replacement. He—and his clients, whoever they are—need to have San Francisco being run by people he can live with.

The post The Power Broker appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Heady always wanted to continue the family tradition, but in the hyperspecialized world of twenty-first-century America, he had neither the training nor the kind of facility it required. So he wound up working as an AutoZone manager and a sometime motorcycle mechanic, living in a modest single-family home outside Tampa, Florida.

Then one day a few years ago, Heady’s dad told him about a new program run by the Department of Veterans Affairs. Known as the medical foster home program, it not only offers a solution for one of the deepest challenges facing American society—the explosive growth in the numbers of frail elderly—it also offers homeowners like Heady a way to earn a modest and meaningful living.

Under the program, the VA pairs veterans who would otherwise live in nursing homes with ordinary citizens who are willing to take them into their homes and help them with tasks like bathing, administering medication, cooking meals, changing diapers, and the like. Veterans pay their caregivers an average of just under $2,500 a month, using their Social Security checks, VA pensions, and whatever other benefits and savings they have. And most crucially, the VA supplies primary medical care for the veterans right in their foster homes via what is essentially a suped-up system of old-fashioned house calls from nurses, doctors, and therapists—who thereby also provide regular oversight of the homes. This allows for dramatically lower cost, and better-coordinated care. (Treating a vet in a medical foster home costs the VA about $52 a day, compared with an average of $580 a day for those in nursing homes.) It also helps prevent the neglect and elder abuse that can be common in other small residential settings.

Today, Heady cares for two disabled vets in his home. (The VA allows a maximum of three.) The guys live right down the hall from Heady’s teenage stepdaughter, whose room is decked out in Twilight paraphernalia and painted deep purple. The family had to renovate one of its bathrooms to accommodate a wheelchair-friendly shower, but otherwise the place has the look and feel of a normal, buzzing household. “You have to have the right mindset,” he says. “But you don’t have to put in a hundred-thousand-dollar sprinkler system.”

A blond-haired, thickset man with a handlebar mustache, Heady brims with pride in his work—and in the knowledge that he is keeping two men out of the escalating clockwork of institutional long-term care. “These are my guys forever,” Heady says. “When they require a higher level of care, I’m going to be able to provide it without them having to start all over somewhere else.”

Today, only about 500 veterans live in medical foster homes. But a little-known component of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, which as of this writing may or may not be struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, could open up this model to a far larger population. The bill sets up a demonstration project called Independence at Home that will extend something much like the VA’s home-based primary care program to some 10,000 homebound Americans on Medicare. The study got started last month. If it succeeds, a vastly expanded system of foster care for the disabled elderly could follow.

Such an approach could provide high-quality, cost-effective care for millions of Americans who would otherwise languish in nursing homes. It also could provide economic sustenance for able-bodied older homeowners who lack adequate retirement savings but have rooms to spare and, quite often, personal experience taking care of sick loved ones.

These are the sort of folks who have already been drawn to the program. One caregiver I met in Florida was a widow who had cared for her husband in his last years. Another was a former teacher who had recently taken care of a brother with terminal lung cancer; she signed up to take a veteran into her home shortly after he died. It just seemed like a natural move, she said. And she assured me that she would just as soon take in a civilian.

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“There was a policeman, three officials from the city, a fireman, and a couple of others that I didn’t recognize,” recalled Hogan. Despite their numbers, the authorities had not come to search for drugs or apprehend a fugitive. Instead, they were there because of an advertisement Hogan had posted on the Internet.

Hogan—who requested that we not use his real name—had recently fallen on hard times. He lost his job as an art vendor during the recession, and with five children, two of whom had recently gone off to college, and a hefty mortgage to pay, he had been left scrambling to make ends meet. The one asset he did possess was his house, which had several spare rooms and an apartment sitting unused in one of the most desirable neighborhoods to visit in Manhattan. At first, he rented them out to friends from Ireland who were passing through the city, but soon he converted them into rental apartments and began to post ads online to draw in lodgers from all over the world.

“I worked hard, gave my guests excellent service and value, and it was just starting to catch on,” Hogan said. His monthly finances were beginning to stabilize, his visitors were gaining access to a cheaper, cozier alternative to a hotel, and the city was drawing in additional tourists who might otherwise have been unable to afford to visit New York and support the local economy. Many of his guests enjoyed their stay enough to write positive reviews on Web sites like TripAdvisor, but with this enhanced reputation came another kind of attention, one that had brought the NYPD to his door.

For more than a year now, New York City has been enforcing a new state law that makes it illegal for homeowners like Hogan to rent out their house or apartment for less than a month. All across the city, police raids have shut down hundreds of similar informal bed-and-breakfast establishments, with nearly 1,900 different violations issued in under twelve months. Often, the fees associated with the citations stretch into tens of thousands of dollars. Hogan was threatened with a $25,000 fine—all for marketing the empty rooms in his house.

Short-term vacation rentals have existed for years with little attempt by local governments to stamp them out. But thanks to the Internet, an industry that was once small and underground has, in a few short years, exploded into a multibillion-dollar worldwide business. Airbnb, an Internet booking engine launched in 2008, connects more than a million renters and hosts in 192 countries. Homeowners, many of them left jobless by the economic downturn, have increasingly turned to the practice as a relatively secure, entrepreneurial way to leverage the value of their most significant asset.

But an opportunity for some can be seen as a threat by others. Short-term vacation rentals like Hogan’s cut into the bottom line of some powerful interests, and those interests are pressing local governments to put a stop to the practice. The dynamics that have led to the crackdown in New York are playing out nationally—and internationally—as governments struggle with how, or whether, to accommodate a burgeoning new vacation rental industry. While some regulation and taxation of this new market is inevitable and necessary, the danger is that we may strangle precisely the kind of small, entrepreneurial markets we should be fostering.

New York City has long been one of the world’s most enticing tourist destinations; more than fifty million visitors arrive annually in the Big Apple to stroll through Central Park and Times Square. But in recent years, the tourist landscape of the city has become a battleground between a powerful, entrenched hotel industry and a decentralized world of entrepreneurial homeowners doing business with short-term renters via the Internet. For much of the past decade, the entrepreneurs flew under the radar, making use of Web sites like Craigslist, sparking a boom in short rentals by tourists wanting to save a buck and have a more intimate vacation. However, with the onset of the recession and a decline in tourism across the board, hotels teamed up with hotel unions and began flexing their muscles and working their connections in city hall and Albany. They also found unlikely political allies among the city’s politically powerful tenant activists—there are more than a million rent-regulated apartments in New York City—who worried that legitimizing vacation rentals would encourage greedy landlords to get rid of their regulated tenants.

With the endorsement of the tenant activists, the hotel industry took its cause to city officials, who, in turn, lobbied Democrats in the state legislature. In 2010 New York passed a law requiring a minimum thirty-day stay for any rental in a residential building—in effect making shorter-term rentals, the bulk of the market, illegal. The law also required health and safety features, like sprinkler systems in each room, that the average homeowner usually doesn’t have and can’t afford. When the law went into effect last May, Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration began enforcing it with gusto.

The crackdown in New York is similar to ones happening in several major European cities. Paris, for instance, passed a law in 2005 banning the rental of any residential property for less than a year, and began enforcing that law in 2010. London is now engaging in a wave of enforcement in the run-up to the 2012 Summer Olympics.

Many American cities have long had laws on their books banning short-term rentals. In New Orleans, for instance, rentals must be for a minimum of thirty days—sixty days in the French Quarter. As with many rules in the Big Easy, this one has been neither scrupulously followed nor enforced. But as homeowners have begun to soak up some of the massive tourist demand that floods the city during Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest by offering lodging over the Internet, signs that the local government will soon stop ignoring the phenomenon have begun to appear. Under increasing pressure from hotels and neighborhood associations to crack down, the city has launched a series of law enforcement sweeps to target people renting out multiple units in violation of the law. (This has netted some surprising offenders, like Henry Coaxum, a close associate of Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s who had been renting out rooms in a spare home.) The city has yet to target the average Craigslist advertiser offering up a room in the Vieux Carre, but if pressure from the hotel industry were to continue, those types of rentals could be next to face scrutiny.

Laws against short-term rentals have also long existed in some of the tonier cities in Florida, such as Boca Raton and Del Ray Beach. But similar restrictions have recently spread to other cities in the state, thanks, ironically, to a new state law intended to help individual homeowners take advantage of the Internet-empowered vacation rental market. The law set a date after which municipalities could no longer pass ordinances against short-term rentals. Predictably, a number of cities hurriedly pushed through such ordinances in order to beat the deadline.

Crackdowns against vacation rentals are also happening in other cities across the United States, in part for fiscal reasons: municipalities need the money. Cities like Palm Desert, California, and resort communities in Colorado have recently required short-term rental owners to buy permits and pay taxes, as well as abide by parking, trash, noise, and other ordinances. But these restrictions don’t seem unreasonable. The permits aren’t prohibitively expensive (a few hundred dollars), the taxes aren’t unfair, and unruly guests can legitimately upset neighbors.

Indeed, in a rare instance of an industry asking for more regulation and taxes, a group representing New York’s besieged short-term rental owners is backing a proposed state law that would similarly define, regulate, certify, and tax legitimate vacation rental apartments. In return for legitimacy and freedom from harassment and fines, the group, the Short Term Rental and Hospitality Association (STRAHA), says its members would gladly pay the same occupancy tax that regular hotels pay.

“License us and provide a way for visitors from Europe, South America, and Asia to check legitimate establishments, so that overseas visitors won’t get scammed by criminals pretending to offer accommodations,” said a STRAHA representative. “The scam artists would be driven out and safe vacation apartment rentals would be allowed to prosper.”

The danger of any ordinance restricting commerce is that it will wind up protecting incumbent interests at the expense of new entrants into the market. So even the more reasonable-sounding laws bear watching. But if done right, these lighter rules could ensure that necessary taxes are paid, legitimate neighborhood concerns are respected, and average citizens are free to make use of an untapped, valuable asset: their own homes.

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Like a lot of aging Baby Boomers these days, Rob Robinson and Sherrill Berger of Washington, D.C., are what you might call semiretired. That is to say, they work when they can, at whatever short-term gigs they can rustle up—he in communications, she in administration and fund-raising. Otherwise they struggle to get by on income from a small rental property they own. That rental property and the home they live in are their only assets.

A few years ago they made a smart move that has helped them get a better return on those assets. They bought a three-kilowatt solar electric system and hired a contractor to install it on the roof of their home. The solar unit was $24,000, but a generous renewable energy grant from the D.C. government and a 30 percent federal tax credit for renewable energy reduced their net out-of-pocket cost to around $5,000.

That investment saves the couple about $1,500 a year on their electric bill. But the financial advantage doesn’t end there; since they are producing green energy and feeding it back to the electric grid, they actually make money, around $1,200 annually. In just three years the couple has earned back their original investment, and Sherrill now uses the $325 quarterly checks to pay the mortgage and phone bill. “I never realized how great it would be,” she says. The solar panels have been low maintenance so far (the technology is less complex than the average air conditioner). Indeed, things worked out so well on the house that they recently installed a second solar system, on their rental property. After the system is paid off, they expect a combined return of about $4,500 a year off their electric bill and close to $3,600 in additional income—and those returns are guaranteed by contract for five years. Rob and Sherrill don’t just use solar to help the environment, they also use it to help make ends meet, and increase the value of their only assets.

A solar investment opportunity like this, in which owners get paid a fixed amount for the green energy they produce, is one many hard-pressed Americans would doubtlessly welcome for themselves. With CDs paying less than 1 percent and the stock market highly volatile, it’s hard to think of another savings vehicle that offers the same secure rate of return. Such opportunities are desperately needed, with incomes flat, jobs in short supply, millions of homes under water, and most Baby Boomers financially ill-prepared for retirement. And with the price of solar panels having plummeted (if Rob and Sherrill were to buy their equipment today, it would cost them half as much), more and more Americans can afford to get in the game.

Trouble is, such opportunities aren’t available to the vast majority of Americans, and won’t be anytime soon without changes in energy policy. There’s plenty of money to be made producing solar energy. But the way the rules are currently written, corporations, not individuals, reap the gains.

The renewable energy business has exploded in recent years. The growth has been mainly in large, corporate- owned wind and solar farms in places like Texas and Nevada. These ventures have generally been built to take advantage of various government incentives, including billions in federal grants and tax breaks and, at the state level, mandates called Renewable Portfolio Standards. RPSs require utilities to supply a certain percentage of their electricity from renewable sources. To meet these requirements, utilities sign long-term contracts to buy power from the wind and solar farms or renewable energy “credits” that the farms generate when they put the energy on the grid (the credits cover the higher cost of producing energy from renewable sources like solar compared to, say, coal).

Financing for these projects has generally come from major Wall Street banks looking for lower tax burdens on their huge profits. More recently, cash-rich firms like Google and Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway have been putting big money into solar ventures, attracted by rates of return of 15 percent or higher. “A solar power project with a long-term sales agreement could be viewed as a machine that generates revenue,” an attorney who helped arrange a solar deal for Buffett told Bloomberg this spring.

Buffett, of course, has famously complained of the unfairness of a tax system that lets him pay a smaller portion of his income in taxes than his secretary. But a similar unfairness governs U.S. energy policy: for the most part, only corporations and rich guys like Buffett get to invest in solar energy production ventures that promise high long-term rates of returns. Exceptions can be found only in D.C. and a handful of states like Colorado, California, New Jersey, and Vermont, where governments have put two key policies in place. The first is the enactment of rules that require utilities to accept onto the grid any power homeowners and other small players produce themselves, a practice known as “net metering.” The second is the setting of renewable portfolio standards that are designed to allow average families to be paid for that extra green energy they produce, just as the big boys are. Since late 2008, D.C. has had both, which is how Rob and Sherrill got into the market.

Yet even in places like D.C. and New Jersey that are friendly to small-scale green energy producers, big corporations are muscling into the market. In the last two years, Wall Street behemoths like Morgan Stanley and Bank of America Merrill Lynch have joined forces with new national solar panel leasing companies like SolarCity and Sungevity to offer homeowners a hassle-free way to go solar. For little or no money down, these companies, often operating out of big-box retailers like Home Depot, will put their company-owned solar panels on your roof. In return, you sign a long-term lease to buy electricity from the company, usually at a lower rate than what you are currently paying for power from your utility. For homeowners interested in only lowering their electric bills, it’s not a bad deal. But it’s the leasing companies and their Wall Street financiers who reap the biggest gains, by pocketing the tax credits and the revenue earned from selling the green energy back to the grid. That is money that could be going to homeowners if they knew they had a choice (which the leasing companies seldom tell them about).

Is it really possible to create a system that allows the great mass of ordinary people to earn a return selling the energy they produce? Consider the case of Germany. In 1991, the country determined that the best and most equitable way to spur the development of renewable energy was to incentivize its own citizens to produce it. So it created a system of so-called “feed-in tariffs,” whereby any homeowner, farmer, church, or small business owner can set up a solar, wind, or geothermal production facility on their property and send the excess energy back to the grid with virtually no restrictions or permits required. These small-scale producers get fixed, long-term contracts for their energy designed to deliver a profit of 7 to 9 percent. As a consequence, nearly 900,000 Germans have become renewable energy entrepreneurs, and Germany itself now gets more than 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources.

Making feed-in tariffs work in the United States is tough because, unlike in Germany, regulatory authority here is fragmented among federal, state, and local agencies. Still, plenty can be done to make the American system more amenable to small-scale green energy producers.

First, every state should require that utilities allow net metering so that small-scale suppliers—homeowners as well as renters, small businesses, and nonprofits—have the basic ability to send any excess energy they produce onto the grid. This right to “produce your own juice” would seem like a no-brainer. But most utilities are deeply resistant to the idea because the more power comes from many small producers, the more the whole centralized- production-and-control business model that has defined the industry for more than a century is threatened.

Second, all states should have renewable portfolio standards with carve-outs for small-scale green producers. This too would seem like common sense. But it runs against the interests of the big solar and wind companies and their Wall Street backers, who want to keep the government-subsidized profits from green energy for themselves. And sadly, major environmental groups, eager to get as much renewable energy on line as fast as possible, have advocated strenuously for the federal subsidies that enrich the big green power companies but have put much less effort into lobbying for changes that allow average people to join in.

Third, more should be done to give individuals the choice to own, rather than lease, solar panels, so they can reap the greater financial rewards. Right now, even those who know they have the option are often dissuaded from buying their own panels because of the up-front costs. A big part of the problem is that the contractors who sell and install solar systems for people like Rob and Sherrill—typically local firms that don’t have big Wall Street money behind them—can’t necessarily arrange financing for those systems, especially for people with lower incomes or whose mortgages are under water. Such financing, however, could arise naturally in the marketplace with some modest changes in regulations—for instance, allowing those who want to own their solar panels to pay off the purchase and installation costs as a percentage of the return on their future energy output.

The federal government could mandate many of these changes. Though the political barriers would certainly be immense—millions of unorganized homeowners are no match for the concentrated lobbying power of utilities and megabanks—the political rewards would be great, if leaders were willing to change the way they think and talk about green energy. Until now, elected officials who support renewable power have stressed its environmental benefits and potential to create “green jobs.” Yet the number of Americans who can realistically imagine themselves working in a green job is limited, whereas every American family gets an electric bill, and two out of three own their own homes. The prospect that anyone could turn an unused roof or piece of land into a moneymaking asset, and help the environment in the bargain, ought to be hugely appealing.

Americans know in their guts that an economy that relies so heavily on ever-higher levels of consumer spending and debt, as ours does, isn’t healthy. We need to become a nation of savers and producers again. Giving every American the chance to produce and sell green energy at a fair price is a good way to begin.

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It may also be a great idea whose time has finally come.

The U.S. economy desperately needs more Americans with college credentials: by 2018, more than 60 percent of U.S. job openings will require some form of post-secondary education, according to the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. Unfortunately, our existing system of colleges and universities doesn’t appear up to the challenge. The richest, most well-known schools have little interest in enrolling and graduating more students—prestige in higher education, after all, is measured by how many applicants you turn away. Many public colleges and universities have experienced severe budget cuts since the 2008 recession, resulting in higher prices and fewer course offerings for students. Some (although certainly not all) of the for-profit colleges that have grown rapidly over the last decade used questionable recruitment tactics to lure students into borrowing too much money for low-value degrees. The higher education industry as a whole is caught in an upward price spiral that makes pushing millions of new students through college a dauntingly expensive proposition.

Meanwhile, after years of stagnant wages, and growing debt burdens, followed by a devastating recession, few families have the savings they would need to be able to send a student to school for that ever-more-expensive credential that might enhance his or her earnings power. A report by the Pew Charitable Trusts suggests that the 54 percent decline in home equity experienced by low- and middle-income families may have led to reduced college enrollment among the children of these families by as much as 30 percent.

Which is why more people are starting to ask: Is there a way to get students legitimate college credit without the college itself?

Enter “credit for life experience,” or, to use the currently popular phrase, “prior learning assessment.” Legitimate organizations are increasingly offering innovative ways of assessing the skills and knowledge that prospective students, especially working adults, already have between their ears—the human capital they’ve accumulated though past schooling, work experience, or independent study—and building on this preexisting knowledge base with carefully tailored coursework.
One such institution is Western Governors University, a fast-growing nonprofit online school that, as we wrote last year (“The College For-profits Should Fear,” September/October 2011), offers its students “a college degree that is of greater demonstrable value than what its for-profit competitors offer—and [does] so for about a third the price, in half the time.” Another is American Public University, a fully accredited (albeit confusingly named), private for-profit institution that has largely avoided opprobrium by keeping prices relatively low and not loading up its students, who are mostly members of the military, with tons of debt. APU has forged a partnership with Wal-Mart to help the retailing behemoth’s employees earn online degrees. The process will include granting credit for work experience and on-the-job training earned in various Wal-Mart job categories. When the world’s largest private employer gets into the prior learning assessment business, you know the concept has arrived.

In truth, legitimate versions of the prior learning model have existed in certain niches of the higher ed world for a long time. The higher education industry’s primary lobbying group, the American Council for Education, has been certifying military and business courses as credit-worthy for decades. “ACE credit” for military training began in 1945. Courses taken at McDonald’s’ Hamburger University have been transferable to regular colleges via ACE since the 1960s. Excelsior College, created by New York state as Regents College in 1971, allows students to transfer in nearly all of the credits needed for a degree from other colleges, or earn credits by passing Excelsior-developed standardized proficiency exams rather than sit through classes. Thomas Edison State College, founded in the same year on similar principles by the state of New Jersey, counts Arthur Brooks, the economist and president of the American Enterprise Institute, among its alumni. The popular Advanced Placement tests for high school students are just another form of prior learning assessment. So are the College Board’s CLEP exams, which are geared toward adults.

Yet most of these institutions and processes have been relatively marginalized over the years, limited to nontraditional students, high schoolers, and others outside of traditional higher education. That’s because the higher education cost/benefit proposition used to be very different: college was a relatively inexpensive experience limited to a small fraction of the population. If you chose to skip it, you could still get a good job. Spending four years living on a college campus can be a wonderful time; why shorten it unnecessarily or avoid it altogether?

Today’s world is different. The dividing line of economic opportunity increasingly falls between those who have graduated from college and those who have not. Tuition has become terrifyingly expensive, and students and families are rightly becoming afraid of taking on ruinous debt.

All this has created a potentially huge demand for legitimate prior learning programs, and a number of organizations are beginning to vie for that market. The nonprofit Council for Adult Education and Learning (CAEL) is now spearheading a process whereby students can pay to enroll in a six-week course that helps them organize a variety of information and evidence about their prior learning into a portfolio that is then evaluated for credits that can be transferred to scores of public and private colleges. “You have learned many things in your life,” notes CAEL on their LearningCounts.org Web site. “Why not earn college credit for this learning?” For-profit Kaplan University offers a similar new service at Knext.com, where the introductory video notes that participating students earn an average of twenty-nine college credits and save $10,000 in tuition. Knext can “save you time and money by turning your past learning and life experience into college credits.” The matchbook has gone mainstream.

In fact, the cutting edge of nontraditional credentialing increasingly can be found outside the realm of college altogether. LearningCounts, Knext, and Excelsior can help you get college credit without attending college. Other people are developing systems of credit that have nothing to do with “college” at all. The Open Badges movement, sponsored by the Mozilla Foundation (creators of the popular Firefox Web browser), is helping build whole online, information-rich credentialing systems for all manner of knowledge, expertise, and experience, much of it acquired in the workplace, local and virtual communities, and other places far from the traditional lecture hall. Start-up companies like Smarterer (not a typo) are building test- and badge-based systems that allow people to catalog, organize, and prove their knowledge in a variety of ways. The recently announced edX initiative, bankrolled by Harvard and MIT, will give students formal recognition of what they’ve learned in free online courses. They won’t be “Harvard credits” but they will be something creditlike, issued by someone closely affiliated with Harvard. After decades of monoculture, new forms of credentials are proliferating in wild and interesting ways.

All of which points toward a world where people have many options beyond their local college for getting the equivalent of college credit. That’s a welcome development and a huge net positive for dynamic labor markets in which people form associations with organizations and other people far outside of their local communities and need credible proof of knowledge and skills. The more the sum of human knowledge and skill is represented in credentials that can be used to access jobs and education, the better off we’ll be.

Excelsior’s philosophy is “What you know is more important than where or how you learned it.” That was true in 1971, but it is far more true today.

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