Four years ago, during the last spring before the global economy collapsed, I attended a house party in one of the grand, worn colonial apartments down the street from Tahrir Square. The fridge was stocked with beer. Various other forms of contraband circulated. The DJ played Michael Jackson. The only way to tell the difference between the Egyptian and expatriate guests was that the Egyptians were not drinking—though you’d never know it from the way they were dancing. Conversations ranged from Islam to search-engine optimization, but the exchange that has remained etched in my mind over the years is the impassioned debate between young, educated, politically engaged Egyptians about whether there was something in their national character that made them lack the courage to rise up against Hosni Mubarak.

After all, by this point—three years before crowds would assemble down the street and successfully demand Mubarak’s ouster—some kind of national quirk was one of the only remaining logical explanations. Egypt under Mubarak was visibly crumbling. Unemployment was out of control. Young people couldn’t get married because there was no way for young men to amass the money required to buy an apartment. Writer Alaa al Aswany had garnered international fame with a novel calling out the Mubarak regime for its corruption, hypocrisy, and brutality. Political dissidents gave interviews to CNN, and a generation of democracy activists flourished online, despite arrests and censorship from a shaken regime. Mubarak’s ineptitude and disregard for his people’s welfare were all documented and openly discussed—and yet nothing changed.

Until everything did.

One of the great contributions of Marc Lynch’s excellent book on the Arab Spring, The Arab Uprising: The Unfinished Revolutions of the New Middle East, is his batting down of the widely held notions that the wave of protest that unseated Mubarak either came out of nowhere or was chiefly the result of American-generated social media. Facebook and Twitter played important roles, he argues, but no more so than Al Jazeera or the efforts of democracy activists across the region over the last decade. The U.S. played a role, too, but not the one the Bush ad-ministration signed us up for—spreader of democracy across the globe. Rather, shared opposition to unpopular American policies from support for Israel to the invasion of Iraq helped revive a sense of pan-Arab identity that had lain dormant for decades, and ensured that once the spark of revolution flared up in Tunisia, it would spread across the region like wildfire.

Interestingly, Lynch avoids using the term “Arab Spring” to describe this phenomenon—despite admitting that he may have “unintentionally coined” the phrase in a January 6, 2011, article for Foreign Policy. In that piece, which picked up the “Arab Spring” handle from the media-fueled protests in Beirut in 2005, he wrote, “I don’t expect these protests to bring down any regimes, but really who knows? It’s an unpredictable moment.” In the book, he argues simply that the term “does not do justice to the nature of the change,” preferring to call the protests “Arab uprisings,” without really explaining why. Perhaps it’s because “Spring” has be-come a cliché on the order of “-gate.” And perhaps it’s because, as the period the book examines closed toward the end of 2011, the sense of hopefulness and rebirth that “Spring” connotes was no longer applicable to a narrative that included Western inaction in the face of bloody crackdowns in Bahrain and Syria.

Lynch, however, is no pessimist. An associate professor of political science at Georgetown University and one of the best-known Western bloggers on Middle East affairs, Lynch has long had a special focus on Al Jazeera and the role that the media plays in shaping Arab public opinion. For him, a few falling dictators are less important than what he sees as “a powerful change in the basic stuff of the region’s politics”—a new, media-enabled reality where regimes have to listen to their publics. If experts seemed surprised by the contagiousness of the uprisings, he argues, it was because they did not understand the unique media conditions in the Arab world that bound together separate national struggles into a single narrative.

Lynch traces the roots of this shared media space back to former Egyptian Pres-ident Gamal Abdel Nasser and his use of Voice of the Arabs radio in the 1950s and ’60s to spread pan-Arabism. But Lynch points to this same tumultuous period, dubbed the “Arab Cold War,” as a warning against irrational exuberance among the current moment of pan-Arab unity. Then, like now, mass protests flooded the streets, governments fell, and the region felt swept up in pan-national movement. But none of that tumult led to democracy. On the contrary, it led to decades of despotism, censorship, and the ever-present threat of detention and torture by the secret police.

But this time around, the Arab satellite channels like Al Jazeera and social media outlets have helped to create a new kind of pan-Arabism, built largely around shared anger at the plight of the Palestinians and the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Arabs might not be able to agree on much, but they can agree on opposition to America.

Lynch makes clear from the beginning of the book that he has deep ties to the Obama administration. He signed on to Barack Obama’s then-long-shot presidential campaign in 2007 as a policy advisor on the Middle East. Although he holds no official role today, he has consulted with many administration officials on the uprisings and even debated Egypt policy with President Obama himself.

These political ties should be kept in mind as we read his condemnation of the Bush ad -ministration’s Middle East policy, which is the one moment when Lynch’s otherwise calm, clear prose bristles with anger. In almost every way, he considers Bush’s approach to the region a disaster. “The Bush administration managed American strategic interests in the Middle East in an almost uniquely bad manner,” he writes, adding, “There is little evidence for the vindication of neoconservatives beyond the fairly self-evident truth that Arabs want democracy.”

Still, his praise for Obama’s handling of the Arab Spring is less than effusive. “Obama’s approach to the regional transformation was in the end about as effective as could have been hoped for,” Lynch writes. He calls the administration’s handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “disastrous” and accuses it of having “fumbled Bahrain badly” and being “overly deferential to Saudi concerns.”

Indeed, the case of Bahrain was useful in showing the world exactly where Obama’s uplifting talk of standing “squarely on the side of those who are reaching for their rights” ended and realpolitik began. President Obama may have mentioned Bahrain in his May 19th speech on the regional turmoil, but his administration did nothing to keep its ally Saudi Arabia from rolling in tanks to crush the protests there. The U.S. had a military base in Bahrain, an important ally in Saudi Arabia, and shared interests in pushing back against Iran, making it impossible for the Obama administration to call for the Bahraini monarchy to step aside as it had for other beleaguered rulers in the region. In Lynch’s view, the lack of response made Bahrain the “graveyard of American credibility in the Arab uprisings” in the mind of the Arab public.

One little-remarked-upon aspect of all this turmoil, Lynch notes, is how it has made losers of the “resistance” axis of Iran, Hezbollah, and Syria—who all might have been expected to benefit from the popular toppling of Western-backed regimes like Egypt and Tunisia. Lynch argues that, despite Washington’s obsession with Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Iran is actually a receding political force in the region, its influence having peaked under George W. Bush. The uprising in Syria, which had thought it-self immune, put Hezbollah in an “iron vise, unable to reconcile its attempts to align with the broad Arab public with its strategic dependence on Syrian support.”

But the biggest loser from the last year’s worth of changes in the Middle East is Israel. For decades, Arab states from Egypt to the Gulf aligned with Israel against the will of their own people. Now the despots doing those backroom deals are gone or imperiled, and Israel is understandably worried. Lynch argues that this shift will require the U.S. to rethink its relationship with Israel, no matter how politically difficult that may be domestically. “A vast industry has been devoted to convincing American policy makers that there is no real relationship between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and wider strategic issues in the region,” he writes. “This is poppycock.”

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has never stopped mattering to the Arab public, and the recent changes make that public more powerful than ever before. So long as the conflict continues without a serious peace process, the U.S. will have a credibility problem in the region.

Lynch has written a clear-eyed, highly readable guide to the forces in the region that gave rise to the Arab uprisings and the very real challenges they present for the U.S. Indispensably, he presents the material in a way that is neither excessively romantic about democracy’s chances nor excessively fearful about the greater role Islamists will no doubt play in a newly empowered Arab public square.

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

The post Arab Springboard appeared first on Washington Monthly.

On Sunday, March 20th, my friend and mentor Jonathan Rowe, a contributing editor of the Washington Monthly, died, swiftly and unexpectedly, of a sudden infection. The shock of this news has not worn off. The tragedy of it is still sinking in.

Jon was sixty-five, by all accounts healthy and supremely happy, living the good life in Point Reyes Station, California, with his wife, Mary Jean Espulgar-Rowe, and their eight-year-old son, Joshua. As a writer, he was in a zone, producing well-crafted pieces for a variety of outlets on the subject that had occupied his brilliant mind for decades: the failure of conventional economic thinking to account for or explain the workings of vast parts of our lived reality, in particular the cooperative realms of family and neighborhood and civic society, and the way the market has been relentlessly eating into these invaluable realms. Much recent history, from the collapse of the financial markets to the rise of behavioral economics to the failure of rising GDP to increase wages or wellbeing, has essentially validated Jon’s insights. In a just world he would have lived long enough to garner some glory for his prescience.

The funny and touching thing about Jon, though, was his almost complete lack of interest in personal glory. I have never worked with someone—certainly no writer— more genuinely humble and self-effacing. He was unfailingly kind, with an unmistakable inner light— he was a man of faith, though he almost never talked about it. He spoke with a gentleness bordering on diffidence, but also with a winning twinkle of humor. He had a subtle, original, and powerful mind, and a way of elevating any conversation such that you found yourself trying to express your own ideas with greater care, the intellectual equivalent of sitting up a little straighter in your chair. He was indifferent to money and material possessions—a characteristic he shared with his first boss in Washington, Ralph Nader (who calls Jon “as incorruptible a person as you will ever meet—honest to his intellectual and ethical core”), and with his first editor, Charlie Peters (who says Jon was “the nearest thing to a saint” to ever come out of the magazine).

His talent was such that when he left the Washington Monthly in 1985 I’m sure he could have landed a job and become a star at the Times or the Post or at one of the newsmagazines. He chose instead to join the humbler Christian Science Monitor, where he had the freedom to pursue the kinds of stories that furthered his vision.

For Jon, journalism was not so much a career as a means to an end, the end being the advancement of his ideas and the causes he believed in. After leaving the Monitor he found, or founded, venues in which to do this. He edited a short-lived magazine, New York Mix, dedicated to providing jobs for the homeless. He worked as a staffer and idea guru for Senator Byron Dorgan, a man he very much admired (and I know from Dorgan that the feeling was mutual). He joined a startup nonprofit, Redefining Progress, and cowrote with its founder Ted Halsted a famous Atlantic piece called “If the GDP Is Up, Why Is America Down?” He then created his own nonprofit, the Tomales Bay Institute, to further develop his ideas, while on the side hosting a talk show on his local community radio station.

But it was during his years as an editor at the Washington Monthly that I got to know him. I was an intern at the magazine, and Jon, along with fellow editors Tim Noah and Phil Keisling, took me under their wings. Jon assigned me my first big story, a survey of the Reagan administration’s budget-cutting record called “The Reagan Scorecard.” I did vast amounts of reporting on it, but got completely lost in the writing; Jon had to jump in and rewrite the thing top to bottom—I felt like a drowning man rescued by a lifeguard—and we shared the byline.

In those years and after, much of Jon’s best work appeared in the Washington Monthly. We’ve pulled those pieces from our archive and made them available here (see below). It seemed the least we could do to memorialize our dear friend.

Jonathan Rowe articles appearing in Washington Monthly:

1. The Cult of M1 (November 1983)

2. Weirton Steel: Buying Out the Bosses (January 1984)

3. Murder by Deportation (February 1984)

4. Why Liberals Should Hate the Insanity Defense (May 1984)

5. Nobel Fever: Why the Engineers Left the Shop Floor (June 1984)

6. The Official 1984 Reagan Scorecard (July 1984)

7. Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Foreign Policy (October 1984)

8. I Was a Spear Carrier in the War on Poverty (November 1984)

9. What the Democrats Can Learn From Jack Kemp (January 1985)

10. Ralph Nader Reconsidered (March 1985)

11. Down and Out in Washington on $89,000 a Year (July 1989)

12. America’s Inc. Stain (September 1990)

13. The Case for the Clean Slate (November 1994)

14. What’s Un-Christian About the Christian Right (December 1995)

15. Reinventing the Corporation (April 1996)

16. The GDP Myth (March 1999)

17. Reach Out and Annoy Someone (November 2000)

18. Reassigning Tim Russert (March 2001)

19. Is the Corporation Obsolete (July 2001)

20. The Majesty of the Commons (April 2002)

21. Maid to Order (July 2003)

22. Gubernatorial Goldrush (December 2003)

23. The Freedom Tax (October 2004)

24. The Coffeehouse Candidate (April 2006)

If you’d like to contribute to a fund to support his family, please email his friend Gary Ruskin for details at gary.ruskin@gmail.com.

UPDATE: Check out two other tributes to Jon by collaborators David Bollier and Russ Baker.

The post Remembering Jonathan Rowe appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The Wichita Divide:
The Murder of Dr. George
Tiller and the Battle
Over Abortion
by Stephen Singular
St. Martin’s Press, 352 pp.

Tiller came to his specialization through a family tragedy: the son of a physician and already trained as a doctor, he had made the decision to become a dermatologist when, in 1970, his father, mother, sister, and brother-in-law were all killed in an airplane crash. Feeling compelled to take over his father’s practice, Tiller discovered in the process that his father had long provided abortions to women who had few other options. Tiller chose to continue providing this service.

While drawing on a national clientele of women who had no access to such abortions where they lived, he also caught the early and persistent attention of protesters from the more radical elements of the anti-abortion movement. The outspoken Tiller became a symbol of the dispute over late-term abortions, a hero to abortion rights advocates, and a brazen mass murderer to their most vociferous opponents.

Shut down temporarily on several occasions—and shot once in each arm—Tiller was also regularly harassed by powerful conservative politicians in Kansas. His visibility helped make Wichita ground zero for anti-abortion street theater. Then, beginning in 2005, Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly lifted him to a new level of national notoriety with frequent features on the Wichita clinic, calling him “Tiller the baby killer.”

The denouement was inevitable, according to Stephen Singular, who tells Dr. Tiller’s story in his new book, The Wichita Divide: The Murder of Dr. George Tiller and the Battle Over Abortion. On May 31, 2009, sixty-seven-year-old George Tiller was shot dead in the foyer of the Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas, where he was serving as an usher at a Sunday-morning service.

Tiller’s murderer, Scott Roeder, seemed to have come right out of central casting: a mentally unstable and financially improvident middle-aged Kansan who had lost his wife, son, and home in no small part because of his semiliterate fundamentalist religious ravings and his fixation on abortion. He was a regular among the protesters at Tiller’s (and other) clinics and an intimate of the most violent fringe personalities in the anti-abortion movement and its militia-oriented cousins. Indeed, Roeder, according to Singular, eventually came to see the murder of Tiller as his divinely appointed destiny.

Singular is the author of a number of other “true crime” books with cultural and political undertones, including Presumed Guilty: An Investigation Into the JonBenet Ramsey Case, the Media, and the Culture of Pornography and A Killing in the Family. He works well within this genre, and in The Wichita Divide he adeptly charts the trajectories of Tiller and Roeder as they head toward their violent confrontation. There’s little surprise when Tiller is killed; the only real mystery is the identity of the killer, and that problem is quickly solved when Roeder is tracked down a few hours after the murder. The trial is interesting mainly because the defense sought, unsuccessfully, to launch a legal argument that would have validated Roeder’s belief that he was acting justifiably in defending the unborn whom Tiller would have otherwise killed.

Where Singular lets the reader down is in failing to put the entire saga in the broader context of the actual battle over abortion in America. Roeder, his friends, and most of the anti-abortion activists profiled in this book are far-right fringe characters for whom legalized abortion is only the most paramount of countless grievances. Many of the activists are members of the tiny religious cults that form the foundation of the antiabortion movement. These small groups have little power other than the ability to command media attention with violent and outrageous acts, hoping to intimidate abortion providers and their patients. As Roeder learned when virtually every “respectable” anti-abortion group condemned his act and distanced itself from his defense, these extremists’ main political significance is the disrepute they happily share with their more mainstream allies.

Singular, however, seems more interested in the links between radical antiabortionists and other violence-prone right-wing groups and individuals— which is, in fact, his area of expertise. Much of the book suggests a long and ever-intensifying wave of reactionary extremism and violence, extending not just to the militia movement or radical racists but to incidents like the shootings at Columbine. Whether or not you buy that hypothesis, it leaves little room for a more nuanced examination of the battle over abortion specifically.

Such an examination might have begun with some consideration of why late-term abortions have become such a lightning rod in the first place. After all, according to orthodox life-begins-at-conception true believers, George Tiller was no more of a “mass murderer” than any other abortion provider, or, for that matter, a technician discarding frozen embryos at a fertility clinic or a pharmacist dispensing Plan B contraceptive pills (a practice dubbed “abortifacients” by virtually all right-to-lifers). Anti-abortion activists have seized on late-term abortions—particularly the so-called partial-birth abortions that were the object of the congressional ban and many state prohibitions—because of their impact on people who do not share their views on when life begins. Pointing fingers at George Tiller as a “baby killer” is a tactical exercise in agitprop, intended to make abortion rights advocates look like the extremists. Violent actions against providers like Tiller rather obviously defeat the very purpose of this exercise in persuasion.

So even if “mainstream” anti-choicers were insincere in their professions of horror at Roeder’s act, there is no question that they viewed it as a setback. Tiller’s murder hampered their efforts to convince those Americans who support some but not all abortion rights to consider themselves “pro-life,” and to eventually begin thinking that way systematically.

By conflating the anti-abortion movement with people like Roeder, Singular doesn’t simply slur the vast majority of nonviolent right-to-lifers. Just as crucially, he underestimates them. Throughout the book he treats all forms of right-wing violence—indeed, of right-wing politics—as symptoms of anxiety over cultural and economic change. This anxiety, he suggests, has reached a crisis point, but will subside once Americans regain their moorings. The reader is left with a vague sense of optimism that the abortion battle will end with the good guys winning, just as the good guys won earlier fights against segregationists and other reactionaries.

Unfortunately for pro-choicers— among whom I emphatically count myself—there is very little evidence that anti-abortion views will fade away anytime soon. The country as a whole may be moving on from the past (though it’s a past to which older white folks, as candidate Obama so unartfully put it in 2008, tend to “cling”). But in sharp contrast to public opinion trends on the other red-hot cultural issue of our times, same-sex marriage, there’s no sign that generational change is affecting opinion on abortion. The country is as divided on the fundamental issues as it was when Roe v. Wade was handed down—and, if anything, anti-choicers have gained some ground. Meanwhile, the Republican Party has been in large part taken over by antiabortion activists, who hold an absolute veto over GOP presidential tickets and considerable power over Congress’s priorities, as demonstrated in the recent efforts of House Republicans to deny all federal funding to Planned Parenthood. The antichoicers also presently have a realistic hope that the next president could appoint enough Supreme Court justices to overturn or sharply limit the right to choose.

The battle over abortion is far from over. While Singular’s book is a well wrought popular account of one incident in that battle, a clear accounting of where the battle stands awaits other writers.

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

The post Tiller’s Killer appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The American Way to Change:How National Service andVolunteers Are Transforming
America
by Shirley Sagawa
Jossey-Bass, 256 pp.

In April 2009, President Obama signed the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, which put AmeriCorps, the domestic Peace Corps-like program created under President Bill Clinton, on a path to grow from 75,000 to 250,000 members per year. Almost half of Senate Republicans (twenty of forty-one) voted for the measure, as did seventy House Republicans. This show of bipartisan support was as rare as it was timely. By more than tripling the number of AmeriCorps slots, the new law would give young people frozen out of the job market by high unemployment rates a chance to serve their country and communities at precisely the time when social needs are at their greatest.

Yet less than two years later, in February 2011, the GOP-controlled House voted to eliminate funding for AmeriCorps entirely. Sixty of the Republicans who voted to end the program had, two years earlier, elected to triple its size.

Such voting behavior cannot be explained by anything regarding AmeriCorps itself. The program had not substantively changed between 2009 and 2011. Nevertheless, the House vote signals that AmeriCorpss supporters now have to put forth arguments defending the programs basic reason for beingarguments that, two years ago, they might reasonably have assumed they no longer needed to make.

Fortunately, those interested in understanding the accomplishments of AmeriCorpseither to make a case for its continuation or, if the money can be had, to plan sensibly for its expansioncan draw on two recent books, Peter Frumkin and JoAnn Jastrzabs Serving Country and Community: Who Benefits from National Service? and Shirley Sagawas The American Way to Change: How National Service and Volunteers Are Transforming America. Each is an excellent contribution to the field, and together they complement one another well in terms of their authors perspective, focus, methods, and scope.

Frumkin and Jastrzab come to their work as academic and professional researchers, respectively; Frumkin studies social entrepreneurship and philanthropy, and Jastrzab evaluates efforts to aid young adults transition into work and careers. Shirley Sagawa, dubbed a founding mother of the national service movement, has worked on national service policy for three presidents. She also served as the first managing director of the Corporation for National and Community Service, the federal agency that houses AmeriCorpss three component programs. Those are the National Civilian Community Corps (NCCC), a small, residential service program with military-type elements whose members often aid in disaster relief; VISTA, a Great Society-era antipoverty-focused program; and AmeriCorps*State and National, by far the biggest of the three, which provides grants to nonprofit organizations like Habitat for Humanity so they can put AmeriCorps members to work. Some members serve full-time, others part-time. Many receive a small stipend for living expenses; all can earn an award to help pay for higher education.

Frumkin and Jastrzabs work focuses more on explaining what servers gain from their experience, while Sagawas places greater emphasis on how service is helping to address the nations challenges. Frumkin and Jastrzabs work is based on their extensive and outstanding new research: a quantitative, longitudinal study of AmeriCorps members and a qualitative, retrospective study of VISTA volunteers, both funded by the Corporation for National and Community Service. Sagawas work synthesizes a multitude of existing documentary sources and new interviews. In terms of scope, Frumkin and Jastrzabs work focuses on AmeriCorps as a program, while Sagawas book places AmeriCorps in the context of the larger service movement. Read together, the books provide a multifaceted view of AmeriCorps, sometimes confirming and other times confounding what we might expect the program to achieve for both its members and those they serve. Both also provide valuable insight into the tensions that arise in a program intended to fulfill so many goals simultaneously.

AmeriCorpss motto and top priority is Getting Things Done: members service is supposed to make a tangible difference for those they serve. Although we know more about the success of particular AmeriCorps-funded projects than we do about AmeriCorps as a whole, the best evidence suggests that the program is meeting its charge.

One way to measure the value of AmeriCorpss service is to ask whether its benefits outweigh its costs. One admittedly rough method to gauge thiswhich Frumkin and Jastrzab useis to compare AmeriCorpss cost to the federal government (although it is not the programs sole funder) to the value of members service, measured as the number of service hours worked times the average U.S. hourly wage ($18.77). By this standard the program is cost-effective: for every dollar the federal government allocates to AmeriCorps*State and National, for instance, members generate $3.52 of work, and even the more costly residential NCCC program returns $1.45 per dollar. But this doesnt tell us the actual value of the work; it simply assumes that the work is worthy of an average wage.

What wed like know is whether members are getting things done with the time they spend serving. One way to do this across the program is to ask beneficiaries and other community representatives to rate their local AmeriCorps projects effectivenes. When Aguirre International did this early in the programs history, between 82 and 85 percent of those surveyed rated the overall project impact, quality, community impact, and achievement of project goals and objectives as outstanding, excellent, or very good.

Due to the diversity of AmeriCorps-funded projectseach is run by a different nonprofit group, focusing on everything from tutoring to staffing health clinics to coordinating volunteers getting more detailed data on AmeriCorpss results typically requires a project-by-project approach. Some projects are easily amenable to experiment-based evaluation: for example, we can measure whether preschoolers in the Jumpstart early education program who are randomly assigned an AmeriCorps mentor score higher on school-readiness tests than those assigned to a control group. (The answer is yes.) Others compare their own situation before and after AmeriCorps. In schools with AmeriCorps members serving as recess coaches through the nonprofit Playworks program, for instance, 70 percent of principals report a decrease in student fights. With the aid of VISTA members, the antipoverty group LIFT was able to increase its volunteer force by 450 percent and increase services provided by 68 percent in just six months. In other cases, AmeriCorps enables organizations to meet new challenges: following Hurricane Katrina, Equal Justice Works placed ten AmeriCorps attorneys and 106 AmeriCorps law students in the Gulf area to help meet residents legal needs and recruit volunteer lawyers and law students to do the same. Sagawas work profiles these and other AmeriCorps projects (as well as nonnational service volunteer efforts) that through studies and stories provide strong evidence that they are not only getting things done, but also solving real problems.

In highlighting these successful programs, Sagawa shows the particular value added by national service participants, answering the questionoften posed by conservative skeptics of the programof why we should pay people to serve when so many volunteer for free. Her examples show that by serving full-time or over the long term, AmeriCorps members can provide leadership, consistency, and particular kinds of talent that others cannot. (Traditional social service providers love AmeriCorps for this reason.) Like the VISTA volunteer who oversees more than 200 volunteers at the Rhode Island Free Clinic, they can manage programs and recruit, train, and supervise community volunteers. Like the Jumpstart AmeriCorps members, they will be around long enough to make significant training worth an organizations time, and they can work day in and day out with the same students. They can be top college graduates in Teach for America or on their way to becoming green skilled workers through a youth corps.

Identifying and profiling a wide range of particularly effective AmeriCorps programs not only gives advocates compelling stories to tell to a tightfisted Congress in the short term, it also provides a solid foundation for long-term growth. We know there are programs that make a real difference; what we need to know is how to better determine effectiveness, how to better support the most effective programs, and how to get more of them. Knowing in what ways, with whom, and how AmeriCorps worksin this case by studying its demonstrably high-impact programsgives advocates their best chance to build on its successes and address its shortcomings.

Although AmeriCorpss foremost purpose is providing service and getting things done, it has other goals as well, mainly focused on member development. On this score, the best evidence provided by the Frumkin and Jastrzab studiessuggests a mixed and often unexpected record.

AmeriCorps explicitly strives to instill an ethic of service in its members, hoping to heighten levels of civic responsibility through lifelong volunteer activity. And it does for some of its membersthose in the residential NCCC program and those in the State and National program who come without prior volunteer experience. But it doesnt for most of its members, when compared to a group of similar individuals who expressed interest in joining AmeriCorps but did not ultimately join. There is a logic to this outcome: many of those interested in AmeriCorps are interested precisely because they already have a strong commitment to service, and for those who join, AmeriCorps allows them to express that commitment without altering it. Still, for a program that had hoped to boost lifelong volunteering by its members overall, including those with a background in service, this is a disappointing result.

Another important goal is to increase members willingness and ability to work across lines of difference. To help accomplish this, local projects are required to actively seek participants from diverse backgrounds, to create service environments that include a mix of races and classes. Earlier research showed that more than two-thirds of sites with at least ten members were moderately to highly diverse in terms of race and ethnicity, creating the potential for cross-cultural learning. Further, even relatively homogenous AmeriCorps groups often work in demographically different communities, providing similar opportunities.

The Frumkin and Jastrzab study came at this issue from several angles: they gauged whether members gain an increased appreciation for diversity; whether they are more likely to participate in groups characterized by openness, consideration, and tolerance; and whether they are more likely to behave in ways that encourage these traits when they are in groups.

The results here are disappointing, with members scoring no differently than similar nonmembers with one exception: in the short term, AmeriCorps participation actually led NCCC members to have lower levels of diversity appreciation. Although less diverse than the State and National program, as a residential, team-based program NCCC was expected to foster especially high levels of group cohesion; instead the programs intense environment may have temporarily increased interpersonal conflict.

Given the importance of these elements and the unexpected study results, AmeriCorpss advocates need to take these findings seriously. But just because AmeriCorps doesnt appear to increase civic responsibility or strengthen communities in the ways it most expected or originally intended to doesnt mean it cant, or that it doesnt accomplish these things by other means. Indeed, it does so. For example, AmeriCorps members show an increased connection to community, as measured by their feelings of community attachment, thinking about how larger political issues affect their community, and awareness of how to meet community needs. They show increased levels of efficacy, the belief that they can identify and act on local problems and make a difference in their community. Finally, they show an increased willingness to try to make a difference and increased levels of community involvement, through attendance at local meetings and other community activities and events.

AmeriCorps also hopes to expand opportunity for its members, both by imparting work skills during service and making college more affordable afterward. Of the two, the education award has received far greater attention. It certainly may be justified simply as a reward for service, but it is also important to know whether it is serving its larger educational purpose. To what extent is it helping members pay for college and further their education? On the positive side, a large proportion of membersmore than three out of fourmake use of their awards. On the negative side, it turns out that members are no more likely to have completed college courses in the short term or earned a degree in the longer term. This may be explained by how little education the award came to buy: because the original $4,725 award did not increase for fifteen years even for inflation while college costs increased well beyond inflation meant that on average it came to cover less than one semesters tuition at a public university. Given other sources of aid available to anyone, the award was not enough to give members an educational advantage.

That said, AmeriCorps members do gain a skill advantage that may result in any number of positive work outcomes. The Frumkin and Jastrzab study measured members self-assessment on a wide range of basic work skills, including problem solving, collecting and analyzing information, listening to and learning from others, resolving conflicts, leading teams, managing time and meeting deadlines, adapting to changing circumstances, and working under difficult conditions. While similar nonmembers identified no overall change in these skills during the study period, both State and National members and NCCC members did: after their AmeriCorps experience they rated their skills significantly higher overall than they had at the start of their service.

These two books, then, provide scant fodder for those looking to argue against further funding of AmeriCorps, and plenty of evidence for advocates to make the case that the program is achieving its goals. Both books also offer recommendations for how the program can be improved. Whether one emphasizes getting things done or member development, Frumkin and Jastrzabs call for more careful matching of members skills and interests with their service assignments makes sense. (Given AmeriCorpss placement model, the challenge is how exactly to do this.) Other suggestions raise the question of trade-offs. From a member development perspective, it makes sense to target recruitment efforts to those without service experience, since they gain the most from being in AmeriCorps in several key areas. What we dont know is whether these members contribute as much to the program through their service work. Conversely, from a service work perspective, AmeriCorps should certainly place greater emphasis on outcome evaluation and increase funding for programs that move the needle on a problem. What we dont know is whether programs that have the greatest impact on problems also have the greatest impact on members. These works tell us much, and leave us wanting to know more.

Finally, some suggestions make the trade-offs plain. If one views AmeriCorps from an administrative perspective, it might well benefit from narrowing the focus of its work to fewer types of projects in fewer issue areas. A greater concentration of effort, as Frumkin and Jastrzab argue, would facilitate training and evaluation and likely lead to improved work outcomes over time. (There would be a cost in lost support from those whose work was cut, but the benefits might more than compensate.) But if one sees AmeriCorps as part of a larger movementone designed to engage citizens in helping to solve public problemsAmeriCorps needs to be involved across the range of problems, perhaps even more than it currently is.

To a great degree, meeting the immediate challenge presented by the House Republicans vote and the longer-term challenge of fulfilling the Kennedy Serve America Acts vision leads AmeriCorpss advocates to the same place: in thinking about how to best remain viable and get bigger, AmeriCorps also has to think about what it does well and how it can get better. These books provide an excellent place to start.

If you are interested in purchasing these books, we have included links for your convenience.

The post No Good Deed Goes Unpunished appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Gray Lady Down:
What the Decline and
Fall of the New York Times
Means for America
by William McGowan
Encounter Books, 276 pp.

With little concern for journalism as a civic craft, the new owners are transforming what used to be known as the public into an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of consumer audiences, assembled on whatever ideological, religious, erotic, or nihilist pretexts might draw eyeballs and, with them, advertisers. As new publishers and editors dumb the news down or tart it up in pursuit of maximum profit, they may just be making their newspapers deserve to die the deaths they were already dying. What, then, should be the public obligations of todays news organizations? And can media conglomerates be induced to care about them? Journalist William McGowan claims to have thought deeply about these questions, so I went looking for answers in his recent book, Gray Lady Down.

But instead of walking us through the near-cataclysmic upheavals that have compromised the Times and, by implication, other papers, McGowan argues that the most destructive force in American journalism is the moralistic worldview of Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. According to McGowan, Sulzberger has debased the papers high standards by trying to propagate the views of a politically correct, elitist subculture that has lost touch with the American people as well as with market imperatives. McGowan acknowledges that times are tough for all newspapers, and that some of Sulzbergers business moves failed not because they were ideologically motivated but because they were dumb. In his telling, however, the Times is failing mainly because Sulzberger feels driven to make the newspapers profit seeking compatible with his peculiarly liberal, rich, preppie, Manhattanite, and slightly guilt-ridden moralism.

McGowan isnt always wrong to charge that Sulzbergers biases have compromised the Times coverage of race, foreign policy, and immigration. (I made similar arguments in my book Liberal Racism: How Fixating on Race Subverts the American Dream.) He may be right that Sulzbergers strategy is turning off more readers than its attracting and that its weakening the papers professional public stature. But more alarming to him, what he calls the Timesslavish devotion to the ideology of diversity may keep certain facts and people from being reported on. He reprises as examples Times reporters subpar coverage of the Duke lacrosse team rape case and their months of under-reporting (amid Times columnists and editorialists relentless denigrations) of the surge in Iraq even when it was succeeding. McGowan slams the paper for its Obamamania during the 2008 campaign. And he argues that Times editors fell so completely for their former reporter Judith Millers rightward-tacking fabrications about Saddam Husseins weaponry only because they wanted to offset the papers liberal excesses.

Reading McGowan, one would think that the Times is alone in undermining journalistic standards: he never acknowledges that media conglomerates such as Murdoch news outlets are just as guilty of subverting the standards he accuses the Times of betraying. And because of this, McGowans criticisms of the Times are without context.

Certainly the Times has managed to misconstrue its subjects and miss the real story. In a 1998 discussion paper for Harvards Shorenstein Center on the Press, I approvingly quoted McGowans observation that assimilating immigrants into a shared American civic-republican identity can be liberating if its pursued by authorities who join a reformers passion for social improvement with a nationalists insistence on assimilation. That the Times underreported this is unfortunate, but it was the papers failure to grasp that most immigrants are themselves hungry for this kind of assimilation that was the real disservice.

But McGowan doesnt stop there, complaining that when Sami al-Arian, a Palestinian-born professor of computer science, was dismissed by the University of South Florida and indicted by the federal government for helping to fund a terrorist organization through his involvement in a charity, the Times went to bat for himand not just on the editorial pages. In one news story, he tells us, reporter Neil MacFarquhar, ignoring all prior court evidence, said that al-Arian was nothing more sinister than an outspoken Palestinian activist who was being unjustly punished.

But MacFarquhar never said that. He did say, following the standard he-said/she-said reporters convention, the following:

The Justice Department and some independent terrorism investigators have long accused Mr. Al-Arian of being the main North America organizer for Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which the United States has designated a terrorist organization. Mr. Al-Arians supporters, though, say that he is nothing more sinister than an outspoken Palestinian activist, and that the Justice Department has tried to exploit the post-September 11 mood in the United States.

At the Times, claims McGowan, pressure has steadily increased to erase the distinction between legal and illegal immigration. The Times rarely uses the term illegal alien. A 2004 story headlined 160 Migrants Seized at Upscale Arizona Home was obviously about illegal immigrants being smuggled into the country, but the headline refused to say so. Really? While McGowan claims that facts are airbrushed out of the record, Pravda-like, at the Times, here he himself airbrushes out the fact that this story opened by noting that border agents found a posh house packed with people, 136 of whom they arrestedall of them illegal immigrants from Latin America.

In the end McGowan seems driven more by his own mostly conservative passions concerning race, sexuality, immigration, and law enforcement than any poor reportage the Times may be guilty of. Writing, for instance, about immigrants from the Indian subcontinent, McGowan observes that they may be a model minority for their above-average incomes and levels of education, but their impaired sense of social equality and their ethnocentric exclusivity are problems that they should not import into their new country. One wonders what Dinesh DSouza, Ramesh Ponnuru, and Reihan Salamstars of the right-wing media allmight think.

In his 2002 book, Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism, McGowan argued (somewhat persuasively) that the Times hadnt always covered racial politics very intelligently or fairly. Now hes keen to show that in 2008 the paper abandoned all objectivity to crusade for Barack Obama because hes black. Writing with the telltale vagueness of a journalist trying to gin up a controversy, McGowan tells us that while many praised Obamas speech on race in Philadelphia in 2008, others described [it] as subject-changing in trying to deflect attention from Pastor Jeremiah Wright. Obamas public invocations of his white relatives and his restraint in the face of racial provocations have clearly elevated the national conversation about race, but they dont seem to have dented McGowans ire at either the president or the Times coverage of him.

McGowan also flays Sulzbergers handpicked liberal op-ed columnists. Every liberal Times columnist shows up more than once in this book, and always in a bad light: Paul Krugman is mentioned eight times, Bob Herbert seven, Nicholas Kristof four. McGowan fails to mention that Sulzberger has also hand-picked conservatives David Brooks, William Kristol, and Ross Douthat as op-ed page columnists, and conservative spin-meisters such as Tobin Harshaw (of the Times Opinionator), who orchestrates much of the online commentary. Brooks appears only once in Gray Lady Down, as one of the two house conservatives, but poor Ross Douthat doesnt even rate a mention. Bill Kristol, who wrote a column twice a week for a year for the Times (which McGowan doesnt tell his readers) also pops up just onceto declare, from his perch at the Weekly Standard, that the Times is part of an axis of appeasement.

Reporting like this isnt in error; either its dishonest or it reflects a blockage in McGowans thinking thats unnerving in a would-be arbiter of good journalism. Still, his conclusion affirmswith an eloquence uncharacteristic of the rest of the bookthat

[o]ur civic culture needs a common narrative and a national forum that is free of cantan honest broker of hard news and detached analysis, where the editorial pages are not spread like invisible ink between the lines of its news and cultural reviews. As our political system grows more polarized, and political parties play harder toward their base, it is even more important that we have news organizations whose honest reporting can form a DMZ between opposing forces trapped in their own information cocoons.

Amen. Unfortunately, Gray Lady Down never breaks out of its own ideological cocoon long enough to stop compounding the problem.

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

The post Misreading the <em>New York Times</em> appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Legitimacy Crisis in
Thailand
edited by Marc Askew
University of Washington
Press/Silkworm Press, 350 pp.

Fifteen years later, in 2006, Chamlong again rallied tens of thousands of Bangkokians to demonstrate in the old part of the city agitating for the government to step down. Only this time, they were fighting to push out not an army supremo but an elected leader, Thaksin Shinawatra. As I wandered among the protesters, I found something of a blockparty atmosphere: families sat on blankets snacking on mango ices while a young singer serenaded them from a nearby stage. Many of these largely middle-class demonstrators were dressed in yellow, the color of the Thai monarchyone institution revered by Thais across the political spectrum. But their message was a little chilling: most expressed the hope that the army would step in to restore democracy after Thaksin had undermined the courts and the media. Later, I ran into a prominent Thai official whom Id known for years and who had become a supporter of these protests, even though he once had been a powerful voice for bringing democracy to neighboring nations like Burma. They might call it democracy here [in Thailand], because there was an election, but its not democracy just because someone wins the most votes, he told me.

By September of that year, Thai armed forces took over the government, and Thaksin fled into exile, where he remains today. At intersections across Bangkok, middle-class Thais, many of whom had fought on the very same streets against military regimes, now gathered to toss flowers on the troops. But in the twenty-first century, an era of globalized economies and news at Internet speed, military juntas cant manage. Thailands new military leaders badly mishandled financial decisions, leading to panic by foreign investors, and seemed incapable of understanding how to address the countrys numerous new economic and trade deals. And if Thaksin eroded democratic controls on his power, the Thai military damaged democracy far more.

After 2006, Thailand spiraled into serious bloodshed and anarchy. As the middle class turned against democracy, rather than trying to fix its flaws, the working class lost their faith in the countrys political institutions. Instead, they built their own mass protest organizations, and last spring these demonstrators, clad in redThaksins signature colortook over large swaths of Bangkoks central business district. When the so-called red shirts refused to give way to a heavy police and army presence, the security forces unleashed a furious attack, shooting live bullets into the crowds, which included many journalists. Some of the red shirts fought back with makeshift weapons and, occasionally, guns, and by the end of last May, at least eighty people had been killed in Bangkok street fighting, and thousands were injured. The Thai capital, which normally looks like a modern city, full of flashy hotels, wine bars, and coffee shops, now more closely resembled Baghdad, with gutted buildings and streets cordoned off by blockades and hospitals crammed full of bodies.

It took only fifteen years for Thailands democracyonce considered among the most promising in Asiato break down and return to autocratic rule. As we watch the mass demonstrations that are roiling the Middle East we would be wise to remember what happened in Thailand. After the first joyous years following the militarys exit two decades ago, Thailands reformerslike their peers in other nascent democracies in Asia, Latin America, and Africagot lazy. They did not build strong democratic institutions to check power, nor promote policies that materially benefited the poor and working-class Thais who make up the majority of the country, thus paving the way for the election of a populist autocrat. And once Thaksin built his power, the Thai middle class, rather than doing the difficult work of fighting him through the ballot box, the press, and other democratic means, took the easy way out: they looked for the men in green to step back in.

Its a lesson that people in countries like Egypt or Tunisia should pay close attention to: ten years from now, Cairo or Tunis may have reverted to strongman rule. Once the initial joy of toppling leaders like Mubarak fades, these Middle Eastern nations easily could fall prey to an authoritarian-leaning populist. And if that happens, many Egyptian or Tunisian middle-class men and women easily might look for salvation at hands of those in uniform.

In Legitimacy Crisis in Thailand, a recent collection of essays edited by Marc Askew, several authors insightfully chronicle the breakdown and ultimate demise of Thai democracy. Overall, their sympathies clearly lie with Thailands working class and poor, who voted for Thaksin, then saw their votes annulled by a coup, and then watched as electoral shenanigans in post-coup elections led to the formation of a government dominated by a party sympathetic to middle-class and elite concerns. But the authors, most of whom have spent years in Thailand, understand the country well enough to know there is more than enough blame for Thailands national meltdown to go around.

In the 1990s, Thailand, like many developing nations in post-Cold War Asia, Latin America, and Africa, seemed poised for a democratic transition. It was a country that seemingly enjoyed many advantages the kind that Tunisia, a relatively wealthy and stable nation, does today. Thailand had a well-educated and relatively homogenous population, with near-universal literacy, a high-performing economy, and peace on its borders. In the 1990s and early 2000s, when I lived in Bangkok, the country held several free elections and passed a progressive constitution that guaranteed a wide range of civil liberties. Most of my Thai friends at the time assumed that the country would continue to strengthen its young democracy. Foreign visitors lavished praise on Thailand. Secretary of State Colin Powell declared in 2002, Thailand has lived up to our expectations in so many ways. In its 1999 report on freedom in the world, monitoring organization Freedom House ranked Thailand a free nation. The Thais who had protested in the streets of Bangkok in the early 1990s exulted in their countrys progress.

Yet today, Thailand looks almost nothing like that model emerging democracy. The never-ending cycle of street protest, by both the middle class and the poor, paralyzes policymaking, hinders economic growth, and deters investment at a time when the countrys authoritarian competitors, like China and Vietnam, are vacuuming up foreign capital. Few Thais now trust the impartiality of the judiciary, the civil service, or other national institutions; some even have begun to wonder about the impartiality of the king, once so revered that Thais worshipped him like a god. The Thai military once again wields enormous influence from behind the scenes, a dramatic reversal from the 1990s, when most Thais genuinely believed the military had returned to the barracks for good. Perhaps worst of all, a once freewheeling media has become increasingly shuttered and servile. The Thai government now blocks over 100,000 Web sites, more than in neighboring Vietnam.

How did the model collapse so quickly? As Michael Montesano, one of the contributors to Legitimacy Crisis in Thailand, notes, the election of Thaksin Shinawatra in 2001 was a catalyst, and a warning to other emerging democracies. But many of the factors that allowed Thaksin to corrupt the Thai political system were already in evidence.

As several of the contributors note, the flaws in Thailands young democracy appeared very quickly after the excitement of the first protests, and the early period of post-protest change was critical, as it will be in the Middle East. After passing a new constitution in 1997, many Thai reformers relaxed, excited and comfortable that they had finally, finally achieved democracy. I lived in Thailand at that time, and even as democracy seemed to be prospering, the country was hit hard by the Asian financial crisis, which decimated Thailands currency, wrecked the stock market, and led to skyrocketing unemployment.

As the country, which had been one of the best-performing economies in the world for decades, slowly recovered from the financial crisis, many of my progressive Thai friends gave up their NGOs or their crusading newspaper columns and focused instead on makingand spendingmoney. Megamalls sprung up in downtown Bangkok to cater to this consumer exuberance, selling coffees that cost more than an average Thai persons daily wage and mobile phones with the latest updates. Many of my Thai friends joined consulting firms or banking houses, and the stock market rebounded along with massive consumption. But with less pressure for good governance, and the media focusing on soccer and celebrity murders, the institutions that had been launched in the early 1990s withered. A new, high ranking court designed to stop graft and insider political dealing became weaker and politicized; watchdog nonprofits folded; efforts to strip the military of its remaining political powers died down.

Those early mistakes might not have mattered, but Thailand got unlucky. In 2001, Thaksin, a tycoon who sold himself as a get-things-done type, morphed into an elected populist autocrat, uninterested in compromise and any loyal opposition. Unlike previous Thai politicians, Thaksin launched several programs to help reduce poverty that proved enormously successful, including cheap universal health insurance, an initiative to provide micro-loans to villages, and others; inequality dropped significantly, and the poor had genuine reasons to celebrate Thaksins administration. Before Thaksins era, Thailand had grown strongly, but the urban middle class, in concert with the army and the royal family, had produced a closed and self-dealing economic system in which the vast majority of the benefits accrued to urbanites, often with army and palace connections, while the majority of the country, the rural poor, was excluded from the Thai miracle. It was the kind of system that, in many ways, was similar to the rise of the urban middle class in Egypt or Tunisia today: economic mobility based not so much on innovation but on connections, often to autocratic rulers.

Thaksin helped explode these connections and cronyism. But Thaksin, himself a billionaire and an extremely charismatic politician, also soon used his power to neuter the Thai media, with his company and his allies buying into major media outlets and then using the influence to silence critical reporting. He shredded the independence of Thailands bureaucracy and judiciary, promoting his cronies. He oversaw a crackdown on the narcotics trade that morphed into what appeared to be a witch hunt for political opponents. In the crackdown, more than 2,000 people were killed, some by suspicious gunshots to the back of the head. By 2005, after being elected a second time by a wide majority, Thaksin wielded enormous power.

The elected autocrat now seems common to new democracies, despite cultural or regional differences, and in nations with large poor populations, like Yemen, or historically repressed religious majorities, like Bahrain, its easy to imagine such a figure coming to power in a relatively free and fair election. Already, in Venezuela Hugo Chávez has used his domination of broadcasting licenses to replace critical private television stations with state TV, and has forced the most vocal private channel off the air. Chávez has introduced legislation that makes it a crime for critics to offer false information that harms the interests of the state.

In Nicaragua, the former Sandinista Daniel Ortega survived Ronald Reagan, the Contras, and Oliver North and, after winning the presidency again in 2006, began using the judiciary to intimidate any media outlet he or his family did not control, and the police to raid the offices of one of Ortegas most prominent media critics. Completing his power grab, in the 2008 elections Ortega presided over alleged massive fraud.

Throughout the former Soviet Union, the initial generation of elected leaders, most of whom received their political education in the Soviet system, have revealed themselves to be autocrats at heart. In Kyrgyzstan, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who had been one of the leaders of Kyrgyzstans 2005 Tulip Revolution against the autocratic regime of President Askar Akayev, soon proved himself nearly as authoritarian as his predecessor. Perhaps most infamously, Vladimir Putin, who learned his political lessons in the KGB, has undone nearly all the political progress made in Russia during the Yeltsin era.

With Thailands institutions only half developed following the euphoria of the early 1990s, its middle class, which once had fought for democracy, now faced an extremely tough choice as it watched Thaksin undermine the rule of law and gather enormous power around himself. Would they stick to the hard road of fighting for good governance and reform, when it could take years to oust Thaksin, if it ousted him at all? While Thailands political space had narrowed, it was hardly Libya or Belarus. Even under Thaksin, independent media voices still existed, with opposition newspapers openly criticizing the prime minister; the major opposition political party, the Democrat Party, still had a sizable group of seats, and could campaign openly in elections in a manner that would have been impossible in a place like Eritrea or Zimbabwe; though Thaksin enjoyed the support of the poor, Thai voters could be fickle, and it was not assured that hed remain in power for decades. But the middle classes also realized that his populist rule stood to cost them their social and economic privilegestheir dominance of banking and other business in the capital, and their links to the Thai monarchy, which assured those who had these ties of exalted status in society and business opportunities .

In Thailand, some of the anti-Thaksin protestors attended the 2006 rallies because of genuine concern about how the prime minister had amassed enormous power for himself. But others, including protest leader Sondhi Limthongkul, a wealthy media mogul who turned against Thaksin only after the prime minister threatened Sondhis holdings, came to the demonstrations because they realized that if Thaksin stayed in power, Thailands old orderin which a small number of businessmen, royalists, army officers, and civil servants had steered the country for yearswould eventually be overturned. That old order, after all, had served the Bangkok middle class very well.

So, rather than battling Thaksin within the framework of democracy, and adopting some of Thaksins populist-style policies (which now, belatedly, the Thai government has done), the middle-class protestors endorsed a different concept of democracy from that of the working class, writes Marc Askew, editor of Legitimacy Crisis in Thailand. For the middle class, he says, Western-style electoral democracy will always be compromised by Thailands corrupt politicians. Indeed, many of Chamlongs supporters encouraged a return to older forms of Thai democracy, in which a small oligarchy essentially controlled politics through unelected positions in parliament and the bureaucracy and the army, and the masses voting power mattered much less.

In elections scheduled for later this year, the party of Thailands urban middle class, the Democrats, will again contest the poll nationwide, running against pro-poor parties that have picked up the mantle for the exiled Thaksin. But for the Democrats to win, most Thai observers agree, the army and the royalists will have to convince some smaller political parties to join with the Democrats in a coalition. This is already happening: in the run-up to the new election, according to several Thai human rights activists, army leaders are quietly approaching top politicians and twisting arms to get them to join with the Democrat Party. In other nations, the middle classes have used similarly dubious means to push out elected leaders. Often, the middle-class men and women who first grabbed democracy in the street have turned again to the street.

In the Philippines, for example, the middle classes have become almost addicted to demonstrations designed to oust elected leaders they dont like by means other than the ballot box. In 2001, urban Filipinos poured into the streets to topple President Joseph Estrada, a former actor who rose to power on his macho appeal with the masa, the underclass in the Philippines, and then demonstrated again in an attempt to remove his successor, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

In Honduras, a similar story has played out. President Manuel Zelaya, who took office in early 2006, pushed to change the constitution to give himself more terms in office. Zelaya also enacted populist economic policies, like a hike in the minimum wage, which angered many middle-class business owners. As the day of a referendum on constitutional change drew near in 2009, Zelayas middle-class opponents began to openly protest his plans and agitate for him to be removed by force. In June 2009, the military stepped in, an intervention welcomed by many in the capital, Tegucigalpa. The army ousted Zelaya, forcing him into exile.

This middle-class habit of relying on street protests and military intervention to check the excesses of democratically elected populist leaders is hardly a solution. Instead, it merely motivates the working class to resort to similar tactics. Hence the events in Thailand last spring, when the red-shirted supporters of the exiled Thaksin took to the streets, sparking a deadly response from the security forces and the ultimate cataclysm of violence that destroyed central Bangkok.

Unlike, say, two decades ago, when they might have simply accepted a middleclass-backed putsch and an illegitimate government, now the Thai working class will no longer stand for it. As in the Middle East at the moment, many rural Thais have cell phones, computers, and access to the Internet; they can listen to clandestine opposition radio stations or follow opposition Thai blogs that criticize the government and play a cat-and-mouse game with censors.

As several of the authors in the book note, many poor Thais, too, have attained enough education to be able to scrutinize government promises and interact directly with local officials and politicians. Twenty years ago, with less education and more fear of Bangkok urbanites and the military, many poor Thais accepted that they could not control politics, and that their fate in life was the result of bad karma, a kind of Buddhist punishment. Today, that type of fatalism is far more rare. With Thaksin, they sawas poor Venezuelans saw with Chávez or poor Bolivians with Evo Moralesthat if they became engaged in politics and banded together, they could elect a leader sympathetic to their concerns. Thaksin was a very flawed leader, and as a billionaire himself he was hardly familiar with poverty, but his policies did endear him to the working class.

As nearly all the authors in Legitimacy Crisis in Thailand agree, Thailand is not likely to rebound quickly from its current meltdown. The decision by Chamlong and other middle-class democrats to turn against Thaksin has badly split Thailand along class lines, with trust between the middle class and the working class vanishing. That trust will be hard to rebuild, and the current government, dominated by middle-class urbanites, isnt exactly trying: just as Thaksin once did, the government in Thailand now jails demonstrators allied with the opposition, blocks the Internet, and harasses any critical journalists. The middle classs support for military intervention could undermine the integrity of civilian government for generations. Violence has become increasingly common in a country once regarded as one of the most stable nations in Southeast Asia and an example of democratic consolidation to other developing countries.

Violence is almost certain to explode again this year, and it would not be surprising to see such a cycle of violence in a country like Egypt or Tunisia either, should the euphoria of today slowly disintegrate, leaving harsh divides.

Thailands fate, however, is not necessarily destined to be repeated in Egypt or Tunisia or other parts of the Middle East. In some young democracies, leaders are able to uphold both electoral democracy (winning the most votes) and constitutional democracy (upholding laws and institutions). In Brazil, the two-term president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who came from a leftist and populist trade union background, both implemented policies that made a real dent in absolute poverty and reassured middle-class and elite voters that he would respect their economic power and their property rights. Lula shepherded Brazil into an economic boom and left office as probably the most popular president in the countrys history, with both the poor and the middle class. Brazils middle class largely bought into Lulas plans, supporting cash transfers for the poor as one means to reduce inequality in the country and improve the social welfare of the poor. In so doing, they helped bridge divides in Brazilian society and prevent politics from disintegrating into the kind of class-based warfare that has enveloped Thailand. This has allowed the Brazilian military to step back in as a guarantor of stability.

Other developing nations, too, seem to be heading in the direction of Brazil. A basket case ten years ago after the fall of longtime dictator Suharto, Indonesia has developed into a real democratic success story, with multiple free elections, a vibrant media, and far less of the middle-class longing for a military strongman that you see in countries like Thailand or the Philippines. Unlike Thailand, Indonesia has decentralized a good deal of political and economic power, letting poor rural voters feel much more connected to democracy.

But if Egypt and other Middle Eastern nations are to achieve the kind of democratic stability seen in Brazil and Indonesia, they will first have to deal with internal conditions that are likely to guide them down Thailands path. In most countries in the region, the middle classes, as in Thailand, have often made their money through connections, rather than by building new companies, and are going to be far more protective of their economic and social privileges. Many of these countries, including Syria, Jordan, and some of the Persian Gulf states, have large majorities that have long been ruled by a minority elite, and so in democracy a populist could rise to power with the kind of pro-poor policies that Thaksin mastered. Whats more, as in Thailand, in many Middle Eastern nations the army has obliterated nearly all other national institutions. If such institutions are not built soon, and built well, then when middle-class men and women look for a solution to some future elected autocrat, they will have nowhere to turn but the boys in uniform.

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

The post Bangkok on the Nile appeared first on Washington Monthly.

A few years ago, land agents representing natural gas companies began knocking on doors throughout Pennsylvania and upstate New York offering residents vast sums for the right to drill on their land. One such resident was filmmaker Josh Fox, who owns property close to the Delaware River in Milanville, Pennsylvania. Torn by the nearly hundred-thousand-dollar deal presented to him, he decided to learn all he could about the revolution going on within the natural gas industry and to make a documentary about what he learned.

Fox discovered first that his land was atop the Marcellus Shale reserve, a formation of shale rock larger than Greece and potentially containing more cubic feet of natural gas than any single site on earth except the South Pars field in Iran. New drilling technologiescommonly called hydraulic fracturing, or frackingmade it possible to exploit these vast reserves for the first time. As he soon discovered, however, the process was not without some grave environmental risks.

Fox traveled across the country talking to landowners who had signed away their mineral rights and allowed drilling for natural gas on their land. Many reported that their groundwater wells had been contaminated and their health compromised. In the films most memorable scene, a man from Colorado takes a match to his running kitchen tap and sparks a ball of flame. I smell hair, the man chuckles, before admitting, that one was kind of spooky.

Last year, Foxs documentary, called Gasland, won a Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Aired repeatedly on HBO and public television, it soon elevated fracking to a major issue, especially in New York. There, the state legislature had recently passed a bill enlarging the maximum possible spacing unit for gas wells, effectively allowing the industry to implement its controversial new drilling techniques. In response, residents began raising questions about what the effects would be on upstate tourism and on New York Citys water supply, which comes from areas where gas drilling was expected to be intensive.

Facing an outpouring of concern from their constituents, state legislators scrambled in the waning days of 2010 to pass a moratorium on natural gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale. The states outgoing governor, David Patterson, refused to sign the legislation. But he issued an executive order that placed a moratorium on the most modern and productive practices now used to extract natural gas, including not just high-volume hydraulic fracturing, but horizontal drilling. The effect has been to block virtually all new gas drilling in New Yorks sizable portion of the Marcellus until the state issues a revised environmental impact assessment sometime in mid-2011.

Beyond then, the fate of the industry remains unclear. In the early spring of 2011, the New York Times concluded a three-part investigative series that raised alarms about the discharge of wastewater used in the fracking process into rivers, including the Monongahela, which supplies Pittsburghs drinking water. Though the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has reported finding no threatening amounts of radioactivity in rivers downstream from gas drilling fields, it is also considering more stringent disclosure of the chemicals used in fracking. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, meanwhile, has documented the presence of potentially dangerous chemicals in thirty-nine wells in a Wyoming community surrounded by gas drilling and, over the strident objection of the industry, is currently engaged in a major new study that will look more comprehensively at the possible environmental threats posed by gas drilling.

So far, the drama over gas drilling might seem like a straightforward victory of the environmental movement over further exploitation of fossil fuels. But the view among national environmental organizations has been decidedly more nuanced. Groups like the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council have increasingly come to embrace the potential role that natural gas can play as a bridge fuel to a low-carbon domestic energy economyand for good reason. Newly abundant and potentially cheap, natural gas produces around half as much carbon pollution as coal when burned for electricity. It is also relatively easy to convert coalfired boilers to the use of natural gas.

Better yet, moving to greater use of natural gas in electrical generation can also solve one of the big obstacles facing wind and solar power, which is their need for a reliable backup system for calm or cloudy days. Unlike coal-fired generators, gas-fired plants are easy to turn on and off, and thus work better with intermittent wind and solar power than does coal.

Moreover, natural gas has many promising applications in transportation that could help reduce our dependency on gasoline and diesel fuel, both of which are dirtier and have extremely limited domestic supply. Natural gas doesnt work very well as an energy source for automobiles, because it is far bulkier than gasoline and there are hardly any service stations currently set up to sell it. But as a way to power local truck, taxi, and bus fleets, as well as ships and locomotives, natural gas offers a fossil fuel alternative that is abundant, practical, and far greener than any alternative on the horizon. Natural gas is also a logical choice for generating much of the juice needed to power electric cars.

Both the promise and potential perils of natural gas make knee-jerk reactions to fracking hardly appropriate. This applies to people who instinctively reject any further use of fossil fuels without being able to point to any realistic, short-term alternatives. It also applies to many powerful figures in the gas industry itself, who reflexively and unrealistically reject any further regulatory oversight despite the very real dangers involved in natural gas production.

Between the two, we are headed for the worst of all possible outcomesone in which misguided environmentalism combines with industry intransigence to create a political climate that shuts off further natural gas production, thereby delaying the move toward cleaner, renewable sources of energy for perhaps another generation. If a few contaminated wells in rural towns were enough to put a hold on gas drilling in New York State, its easy to imagine how an incident that was far from catastrophic would still be enough to create an effective moratorium on new drilling, especially since most of the new gas happens to be in areas that are close to major population centers. Even the status quo, argues Scott Anderson at the Environmental Defense Fund, is a sort of slow-moving Three Mile Island. Its more the cumulative effect of a large number of smaller problems.

Not all members of the natural gas industry are oblivious to this reality. Scott Anderson likes to say industry is shooting itself in the foot, and quite frankly I agree with him, says Mark Boling, executive vice president and general counsel of Southwestern Energy, a large independent natural gas producer. Far too many in the industry, however, have stood firm in their opposition to tighter regulations, even as some putative environmentalists continue to seek draconian regulation that would shut the industry down altogether. Thus it is important for all sides to get the facts about fracking straight and to put them in context, in order to establish the regulatory regime we need to avoid a far dirtier and more dangerous energy future.

Hydraulic fracturing first got under way in 1949, when engineers from the Halliburton Oil Well Cementing Co. experimented with a new drilling technique that involved pumping gasoline, napalm, crude oil, and sand into a deep oil well at high pressure in order to stimulate increased production. The experiment proved a big success and helped increase the amount of recoverable oil and gas reserves in North America by as much as a third. Natural gas, however, was still widely considered a declining fuel source and a bit player in the domestic energy game until the 1980s, when a Texas wildcatter named George Mitchell figured out how to extract it from shale rock formations previously considered impenetrable.

Mitchell began his experiments in the Barnett Shale formation near Fort Worth, Texas; after much trial and error, his engineers discovered that fracturing shale rock with a mixture of water, sand, and assorted chemicals allowed natural gas locked inside the rock formation to escape. Previously, it was thought that water would cause the clay in the shale to swell, locking in the gas for good, but instead it caused the shale to shatter like glass. His fracking technology was later combined with horizontal drilling techniques that radically altered the amount of gas that could be recovered from a single well. Suddenly, large shale formations in Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas previously untouchablewere up for grabs, as was the vast amount of gas trapped in the Marcellus Shale.

Spanning large swaths of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, the Marcellus formation contains approximately 500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, enough to supply all U.S. needs for nearly two decades. While its unlikely that the industry will be able to recover even half of the estimated supply, the newfound abundance is enough to lower natural gas prices dramatically and fundamentally change the economics of clean energy in the U.S. for the better, potentially displacing as much as a third of all coal-fired power generation.

Yet this abundance of gas in the Marcellus Shale also happens to be located where a lot of people live, and unlike in Oklahoma or Wyoming, few of them have any experience of living amid gas wells. Were in a part of the world where were trying to apply a process weve carried out with great success, but were trying to explain it to folks with no background and no cultural awareness of what we do or how we do it, laments Chris Tucker, a spokesman for Energy In Depth, a natural gas and oil trade organization.

Thats true, but it still doesnt contradict the very real need to close the myriad of regulatory loopholes the gas industry has managed to secure for itself over the years. For example, in 2005, thanks to heavy lobbying by Halliburton (one of the three largest providers of fracturing services), plus the help of a few well-placed friends of the industry, such as Dick Cheney, Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, and Rep. Joe Barton of Texas (and BP apology fame), Congress passed a provision that effectively exempts fracking from any regulation by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

With what came to be known as the Halliburton loophole in place, natural gas production took off, including in places where it had never been seen before. The backlash among environmentalists was fierce, however, and all the more since the players involved in creating the loophole had already been widely demonized by progressives on other grounds. In 2009, that distrust found expression in congressional legislation that sought to re-empower the EPA and force the natural gas industry to provide detailed disclosure of the chemicals used in the fracturing process. Predictably, the bill, introduced by Rep. Diana DeGette of Colorado and Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, immediately faced heavy opposition from the industry, which argued that the current state-level regulations for natural gas drilling were sufficient. What really killed the bill, however, was an ironic twist in the politics of global warming. In order to coax the oil and gas industry along on an overarching climate bill, the Democratic leadership agreed to put off its push to regulate fracking. After the climate bill stalled in the Senate, the natural gas industry was left retaining its loophole.

Since then, the political battles over natural gas have fanned out, flaring up as skirmishes in state legislatures and local permitting fights across the Marcellus, with both sides claiming bad faith. I think right from the playbook, page one [of environmentalists] is to find any areas where the perception might be played up that big companies might be hiding something, then go to the communities and scare the hell out of them, says industry spokesman Tucker. Then youve got a good bumper sticker. And if they can weave a narrative that hydraulic fracturing is new, that it was invented by Dick Cheney, that Halliburton is involvedthe H wordall the better.

But the current approach taken by the natural gas industrythat drilling is sufficiently regulated and its detractors deludedis also wrongheaded. It not only ignores the real threats to groundwater and other environmental risks of gas production, it also fuels the very perception that the natural gas industry claims to seek to avoid: that it is hiding something.

Industry executives are fond of declaring that there have been no confirmed incidents of groundwater contamination from hydraulic fracturing. Yet their argument is largely a matter of semantics. Its true that frackingunderstood as the moment at which a water-sand-chemical mixture is pumped into a shale formation at high pressureoccurs deep underground. Often as much as 8,000 feet of sediment separates the fractures created in the shale and the freshwater aquifers above, and there is not much chance of the water flowing upward. Yet there are other ways that the process of fracking and other aspects of gas drilling can lead to water contamination.

One example is a blowout, like the one that occurred at BPs Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf of Mexico. As we learned from that catastrophe, you cant just take well integrity for granted in the absence of effective regulation. Moreover, the process of fracking can itself contribute to the likelihood of blowouts in poorly constructed wells. What do these [well integrity] issues have to do with fracking? asks Amy Mall, a senior policy analyst at the NRDC. The process of fracking creates a lot of high pressure in the well. A well that failswhether its the casing, cementing, or what have youdid it fail during fracking or would it have failed anyway? Sometimes it fails and fracking is not a contributing factor, and sometimes it happens during fracking. Industry will always say that it doesnt have to do with fracking, just well construction. But that is not necessarily true.

What to do with all the wastewater produced by frackingwhich contains all sorts of chemicals the industry refuses to disclose, as well as carcinogens like benzene and radioactive elements like radium, both of which also exist naturally undergroundis also a big problem. In some states companies send their drilling waste to injection wells for storage deep underground, while others are learning to recycle it for use in future operations, but in states like Pennsylvania the majority of wastewater is dropped off at water treatment plants illequipped to handle such contaminants. While we do not yet have the science to be sure how the discharge of such wastewater into rivers may affect downstream drinking supplies, many people are understandably concerned. Industry resistance to further monitoring and regulation is a surefire way to stir up hysterical opposition to more drilling.

In addition, fractures induced in the shale rock, while rarely extending beyond several hundred feet, have the potential to interact with nearby abandoned gas wells or naturally occurring fractures in the deposit. This could lead to gas and fracturing fluids rising up and finding their way into the water table. A three-year study completed in 2008 by Garfield County, Colorado, one of the most intensely drilled areas in the United States, indicated in new detail how a system of interconnected natural fractures and faults could extend from gas layers deep underground up to the earths surface. It challenges the view that natural gas, and the suite of hydrocarbons that exist around it, is isolated from water supplies by its extreme depth, Judith Jordan, the oil and gas liaison for Garfield County and former hydrogeologist with DuPont, told the nonprofit news organization ProPublica at the time of the studys release.

The natural gas industry has also long resisted disclosing exactly what chemicals it is inserting into the ground when it engages in fracking, arguing that disclosure could expose trade secrets; there is no public need to know. Lee Fuller, vice president of government relations at the Independent Petroleum Association of America, states that the less specific data already provided on worker-safety documents are sufficient. Any more detailed disclosure, he told a panel at the Heritage Foundation, would put at risk the ability to then convince the public that fracturing is safe.

But Fullers line of reasoningthat disclosure will jeopardize public confidence in frackingmisjudges the level of distrust generated by the industrys efforts to keep its chemical formulas secret. Without detailed disclosure, argues Anderson at EDF, government agencies and third-party scientific studies have been unable to properly carry out investigations of complaints of water contamination near well sites, leaving the door open for continued speculation about the role of toxic chemicals employed by the industry. Moreover, nothing good will happen for the natural gas industry in terms of public acceptance until the gas industry puts behind it the issue of disclosure, adds Anderson. Its not as if it looks like the industry is hiding something. They are hiding something, he told Reuters.

Beyond those posed by fracking itself, there are other environmental threats caused by gas drilling. These, too, must be addressed if America is going to succeed in moving to cleaner energy sources, including wind and solar power, whose full development depends, as explained above, on the greater use of gas in electricity generation.

Certainly local communities deserve some compensation and/or protection from the disruption gas exploration can cause. Says Eileen Millett, a lecturer in environmental law at Syracuse University, You have the number of rigs coming into communities, the miles of pipelines that will be required, the hundreds of heavy trucks, the pumping of thousands of gallons of fresh water. All of those are issues that as a small municipality youd want to be concerned about.

In addition, natural gas production can release substantial amounts of methane into the atmosphere unless properly regulated. This can occur either through intentional venting or from leaks throughout the system. At present, oil and gas systems are the second largest source of methane emissions in the United States, accounting for approximately 23 percent of methane and 2 percent of total greenhouse gas pollution. There are proven ways for industry to capture and harvest these fugitive methane emissions, but until it is required to do so, its harder to make the case that natural gas production represents a huge improvement over burning coal.

Given the current composition of Congress, much of the push for greater regulation of gas production is now being directed at the state level. In 2009, Colorado became one of the first states to update its regulations for gas drilling and hydraulic fracturing, and Pennsylvania, too, overhauled some of its antiquated regulations. Last year also marked the passage of the first mandatory chemical disclosure laws in two states Wyoming and Arkansas.

At least some large independent producers are pleased with these developments and see the need for still more regulation. Southwestern Energy has agreed to collaborate with the Environmental Defense Fund, for instance, on devising stricter guidelines for the integrity of gas wells that undergo hydraulic fracturing. The goal, says Mark Boling of Southwestern, is to create a guide for states in setting higher standards. The problem with having voluntary standards is first, it makes people say, Oh, yeah right, and second, our industry is only as good as its lowest common denominator, Boling adds.

But a patchwork of state laws is a poor substitute for a strong federal law that would set a uniform minimum safety standard for industry. Moreover, state laws, no matter how tough, mean little if state governments are too cash-strapped to enforce them. A study by ProPublica of twenty-two gas drilling states found that between 2004 and 2008 the number of new wells drilled increased 42 percent, while enforcement staff grew by only 9 percent. New York State reduced field inspector staffing in its oil and gas division by 20 percent during the same period, while its Department of Environmental Conservation allowed a 676 percent increase in new wells drilled each year. Since the recession, most states have been forced to make cuts to their regulatory budgets, further ensuring that they have inadequate staff to investigate, inspect, or monitor gas wells.

Ultimately, this weak regulatory structure could be the Achilles heel of the whole effort to expand domestic natural gas exploration. To see how, consider what happened last year to offshore oil drilling in America. For years, the petroleum industry had been lobbying Washington to open up more of the U.S. coastline for oil drilling, even as it successfully fought stricter federal oversight of existing wells. Finally, last March, the industry seemed to win big when the Obama administration eager to court GOP support for climate change legislation announced that it would end a long-held moratorium on oil exploration along the Eastern Seaboard from Delaware to central Florida and in the eastern Gulf of Mexico. Three weeks later, the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, spilling several million barrels of oil into the Gulf. Eight months after that, the administration rescinded its lifting of the moratorium; now, new drilling will have to wait until at least 2017, and possibly longer. It is not hard to imagine a similarly traumatic accident involving natural gassay, dangerous chemicals from fracking showing up in Pittsburghs drinking waterleading to a wholesale, years-long ban on gas drilling in any number of states.

Yet instead of welcoming increased regulation as a hedge against such a public backlash, many in the industry, including major oil companies like BP and ExxonMobil, maintain a deeply engrained antiregulatory zeal and put out all manner of contradictory arguments for why they should be trusted to drill without more government oversight. They say theyre not the problem and all the accidents are caused by all the small companies, says Mall at the NRDC, but then they turn around and say they cant have new rules because of the cost concerns for their smaller brothers and sisters. In fact, large oil and gas companies have been quite up front about their opposition to enhanced regulations. When ExxonMobil acquired XTO Energy and its large natural gas holdings last year, the company wrote into its merger deal that if Congress makes the practice of hydraulic fracturing illegal or commercially impracticable, it reserves the right to back out.

Clearly, making fracking illegal or commercially impracticable would be a grievous and irresponsible blow to the natural gas industry and the fate of the climate alike, and environmentalists who have that as their real goal are doing the country and the planet no favors. But when industry stands in the way of the commonsense increases in regulation that will be necessary to develop our gas reserves safely, it too is being irresponsible and incredibly shortsighted.

The post Clean, Cheap, and Out of Control appeared first on Washington Monthly.

If you are an informed, fair-minded person, chances are you feel at least conflicted about all the hard-knuckle attacks on public employee unions in Madison, Wisconsin, and other state capitols. While Governor Scott Walkers agenda was clearly much larger than balancing his current budget, there is no denying the magnitude of the pension crisis. Long predicted, its finally here, and its constricting the art of the possible in almost every state.

California finds itself paying more for benefits to public workers pensions than it does to fund higher education. And because public employees now on the job keep accruing new, underfunded retirement benefits, the pension debt keeps growing. Despite having some of the most underfunded public pensions in the country, Illinois will reduce its pension trust holdings this year to meet its pension payroll. One study suggests it will exhaust its assets by 2018 and finds that New Jersey is close behind. In places like Indiana and Louisiana, where policymakers have been making added pension contributions to cover past underfunding, they are still losing ground. Perhaps needless to say, any money that state and local governments use to bail out their pension plans cant be used for any other purpose. Not only is that money needed to replace the teachers and police officers now retiring in their fifties; it could also be spent on exploding costs for health care and other pressing social needs.

Yet many Americans are uncomfortable with the solution being pursued by Governor Walker and some of his Republican counterparts, which boils down to busting public employee unions. Whatever the faults and excesses of some unions, polls confirm that most of us support a basic right to collective bargaining, even in the public sector. Its one thing to, say, criticize the opposition of some teachers unions to merit pay or demand that firemen contribute more to the cost of their own pensions and not game the system, and quite another to assert that teachers and firemen have no right to organize and communicate their grievances collectively to their employers. Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights identifies trade union organizing as a fundamental human right.

There are also political considerations that factor into the discussion. Many people are concerned about the ramifications of the Supreme Courts Citizens United decision, which struck down any restraint on political spending by corporations and wealthy individuals to influence elections. Not only partisan liberals fear that, without a counterbalance, there will be no effective check on the power of well-heeled corporations in either party. Public-sector unions can serve as an important element of this counterbalance. At the same time, however, nothing could be more toxic for the Democrats than insisting that ordinary taxpayers fund pensions that are far more generous than what most can ever expect to receive themselves.

The problem doesnt just involve the egregious cases that grab headlines, such as the small-town California fire chief described by the Wall Street Journal who was able to retire at age fifty with a pension of $241,000 a yearand who was then hired back as a consultant at $176,400 to help find his replacement. Even the pensions received by ordinary government employees are practically unheard of in the private sector these days, particularly among younger Americans.

Outside of government, only about 15 percent of private workers are covered by a defined-benefit pension, and even those are not as generous as those enjoyed by public workers, which promise to replace a substantial portion of their final salary for life regardless of market conditions and are often adjusted for inflation as well. It would be great if someone had a credible plan for offering every American that kind of retirement security, but no one does.

Public employees sometimes complain that they receive lower salaries than their counterparts in the private sector. Thats often true, but when the value of their pensions and other benefits are factored in, their total compensation, especially for blue-collar jobs, is frequently at least competitive, if not superior. Proof of this is how few public employees quit. Its telling that workers in the private sector, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, are more than three times more likely to quit their jobs than state and local workers, whose monthly turnover is just .5 percent.

But the preferred solution by some policymakers bust the unionsisnt the appropriate response. Thats because it doesnt address the core problem, which predates collective bargaining in the public sector and is found even where unions dont exist. Instead, the real problem is something no one wants to talk about precisely because its so bipartisan: both political parties, for different reasons, have incentives to use pensions as ways to borrow from the future. The way to fix, or at least alleviate, this problem is not to take rights away from unions. It is to give more power to voters.

Theres plenty of blame for the pension crisis to go around, but no particularly good reason to blame only the unions. Military retirees, after all, dont have a union, and yet the cost of the pensions promised to them by Congress over the years now comes to $1.3 trillion, or $10,700 for every U.S. household. Similarly, long before most federal workers earned any formal right to collective bargaining under the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, the Civil Service Retirement System, created in 1920, was amassing huge unfunded liabilities for which we are still paying now. Today, the handful of states that dont allow collective bargaining among their public employees generally have benefit plans that are just as generous as states that do allow it. One of those nonunion states, Virginia, faces $17.6 billion in unfunded pension liabilities.

Consider as well that by the late 1920sa time when unions still had almost no toehold in government employment and were often violently repressedall major cities in the United States had pension plans for either policemen or firemen or both, and twenty-one states had formal pension plans for their teachers. These plans were far more generous than what was typically found in the private sector, where most workers got no pensions whatsoever. And without the meddling of union bosses, public-sector plans were almost universally mismanaged and underfunded, if they were funded at all. In Massachusetts, pension assets simply consisted of such amounts as shall be appropriated by the general assembly from time to time. As economic historian Lee Craig has documented, other states and municipalities pretended to fund the pension plans simply by having them purchase their own bonds, meaning that the pension funds so-called assets were in fact being used to meet the other costs of government, such as paying off favored contractors. Already actuarially unsound, and with their so-called assets already spent, most failed or had to be bailed out in the 1930s.

The real cause of the crisis is the inherent conflict of interest politicians face when they have the option of handing out or maintaining pension promises to favored constituencies, including themselves, without the public understanding whats going on and without the bills coming due until after they are gone from office. Politicians have two basic ways of doing this. First, they can, as Republican Christine Todd Whitman and subsequent governors of New Jersey did, simply stop contributing money to the pension fund or tap their credit card to pay the pension mortgage. This is especially easy to pull off during periods of irrational exuberance. In 1997, Whitman had New Jersey borrow $2.7 billion in pension obligation bonds on the assumption that the state could use the money (or what was left of it after the tax cut Whitman had promised in order to win the election) to make a big kill on Wall Street. When New Jerseys investments went south, it was stuck not only with the cost of servicing the bonds, but also with a giant hole in its pension fund. Illinois did the same thing in 2003, by borrowing money from Wall Street at 5.5 percent on the assumption that it could make 8.5 percent by investing it on Wall Street. Predictably, this Wizard of Oz fund-raising hasnt worked out. In December 2010, Illinoiss then comptroller, Dan Hynes, was on a segment of 60 Minutes saying that he had $5 billion worth of bills in his office and no money to pay them. Unable to even pay its other bills, Illinois is now proposing to issue another $3.7 billion in bonds to make this years pension contribution.

Politicians can also make benefits more lush without coming up with the money to pay for them. Thats what happened in California in 1999 under Democratic Governor Gray Davis, when the state enacted the largest pension increase in its historyone that now has become the single biggest threat to the states continued solvency. For regular employees, the legislation reduced the age at which unreduced benefits could be claimed, from sixty to fifty-five. For highway patrolmen, it left the age for claiming unreduced benefits at age fifty but sweetened the benefit formula by 50 percent. For peace officers and firefighters, the new enriched formula applied at age fifty-five and after. The bill also provided an added cost-of-living adjustment on top of the annual adjustment built into the existing system.

Who was responsible for figuring out how much these other technical changes in the big benefits bill would cost? Why, the actuaries employed by the California Public Employee Retirement System, of coursewhose own pensions would be enriched by the legislation they were being asked to evaluate. Not surprisingly, the actuaries declared the bill easily affordable, though in fact, as we now know, they underestimated its cost by a factor of five.

And who made the final decision? Why, the members of the California legislature, Republicans and Democrats alikewho, like the actuaries, would see their own pensions increased by passage of the bill, and who would win votes from public employees if they voted yes. The pension bill passed 39-0 in the state senate and 70-7 in the assembly, while barely making the papers. As far as the average Californian could tell, the big news out of Sacramento that day was passage of a bill to provide gay students legal protection against abuse and an agreement to allow expanded Indian gambling operations around the state.

So this is the world as we find it. Government decisionmakers face an inherent conflict of interest when it comes to making pension policy for government employees, and so do their staffs. This is true whether or not unions are involved. Beyond the enticement of self-dealing is the temptation to self-aggrandizement that comes when politicians are allowed to take credit for delivering benefits whose full cost only becomes apparent after they are long gone. That all this can be done within a tight circle of insiders without the press or the public taking much notice only further perverts the logic of decisionmaking.

There is another realm of government where much the same misalignment of incentives applies, and what we do to check against it suggests an answer for how to deal with the pension crisis. When a city or state is considering whether to float bonds to finance a major project, like building a school or a highway, the rule almost everywhere is that the issue has to be approved by referendum. In Wisconsin, for example, no school board can commit to a capital project of more than $1 million without taking it to the district for a vote. Thats because otherwise there is too little check on politicians borrowing from the future to benefit their favorite contractors and other constituents. With so much backroom self-dealing possible, sunshine and direct democracy are a necessary corrective.

We could easily apply the same rule to public employee pensions. Let the unions and the politicians negotiate all they want, but if they come up with a contract that puts future taxpayers on the hook for the cost of making pension and other retirement benefits more generous, it should go to a vote of the people. If the people are feeling generous, or if they feel there is indeed a strong case for why public employees need more generous pensions, they may well go along. If they feel there are more compelling purposes for which they should be spending their own or their childrens money, they will not.

Just by being on the ballot, these questions would attract more press attention to the issue of pension finance, give a greater platform for government watchdog groups and disinterested pension experts, and promote better public understanding generally of the trade-offs involved, all of which is sorely needed. The League of Women Voters would print brochures explaining the pros and cons. Newspapers would weigh in with editorials. In contract negotiations, politicians and other insiders would know that whatever deal they struck would have to win a majority vote of the peoplewho will ultimately have to pay the bill. It might mean that public employees wouldnt see another pension hike for another generation. So be it. That would give the majority of Americans who lack pensions some time to organize and catch up.

Referendum is, of course, not a perfect solution. By itself it does nothing to reduce the cost of the pension promises already made, many of which are protected by state constitutions as well as ordinary contract law. (Eliminating collective bargaining rights for unions wont solve this problem, either.) Its also important to apply the same strict regulation regarding how liabilities and rates of return are calculated in public-sector plans as is now generally found in the private sector. But going forward, subjecting pension enrichments to the vote of the people would both grant public workers the right to collective bargaining while also giving much stronger protection to the public from existing moral hazards we can no longer afford to ignore.

The post The Fallacy of Union Busting appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Cowboys and labor? Plotting together? Polo shirt and bolo tie? In recent years, the two groups have, on occasion, signed the same statements against foreign trade. But closer to home, ranchers and unions have tended to view one another as rivals for the same wafer-thin slice of the retail dollar and as parties on opposite ends of a gaping cultural divide. It wasnt easy, one union organizer summed it up recently. In recent years, we have not been friends.

Yet half a year on, its evident that the alliance was no momentary fling, no mere enemy of my enemy excuse to clink a few beer bottles before stumbling back to opposite ends of the political corral. When the Justice Department held a series of hearings last year on concentration in agriculture markets, including cattle, the UFCW helped to pack the room for the cattlemens testimony, one of the only times in recent decades that an American labor union has promoted stronger enforcement of anti-monopoly law.

And in exchange? While in that room, the UFCW got a chance to make the case that the trustbusters should take on Walmart. The union views the retailing goliath as the main force smashing down the wages and benefits of the retail workers the union represents. More to the point, the union has also come to view Walmart as the real power driving the big meatpackers assault on both cattlemen and packinghouse workers. (The basic thinking here is that Walmart now controls such a giant swath of the U.S. marketplace that it can dictate prices even to the biggest of suppliers, which leaves less money in the system for the people who actually produce goods and provide labor.)

Ever since Scott Walker and the Republican Party of Wisconsin set out to bust the public-sector unions in that state, one of the biggest questions in American politics has been whether organized labor, seventy-five years after winning a seat at the mahogany table, is about to get the bums rush. And if so, what does this mean for the Democratic Party and for popular politics in general?

Yet the future may be brighter than even the most optimistic of union members hope. If, that is, the UFCWs example inspires the rest of organized labor to open its eyes to the political and economic dangers posed by the radical consolidation evident in most sectors of Americas political economy over the last generation. Doing so would give organized labor a far more complete and sophisticated grasp of how the few exert power over the many in America today. And it would arm organized workers with a message that enables them to reach out to all sorts of economic groups that now tend to oppose labor politicallynot least Americas independent entrepreneurs.

In a recent editorial, the Wall Street Journal urged GOP operatives to attack the monopoly power of unions to win votes and undermine popular political structures. If organized workers respond in kind, and attack the monopoly power of actual monopoliststhe people who pose real threats to the economic and political well-being of the great majority of Americansmaybe they too would win some votes. Better yet, maybe they could begin to undermine the ideological and institutional foundations of the very groups that are now using both major parties to organize the assault against labor.

The idea that labor is doomed to imminent irrelevance has become an accepted truth of American politics. The story of labors long decline has been told and retold so often that the blunt numbersunionization has fallen from about a third of all non-farm workers to less than 10 percenthave lost much of their power to shock.

This story of decline and fall is built on two main arguments. First, that labor began to lose political clout long ago. At the level of the party, this is certainly true. Organized labors relationship with the GOP was tenuous even at the best of times, and Ronald Reagan all but drove unions from the party in 1981. Labors problems with Democrats, meanwhile, date to the 1960s, when younger activists began to break ranks with workers. The usual take here focuses on the rise of the New Left and political fights over the Vietnam War. But the breach was also philosophical. In the 1970s, a number of left-leaning economists and a new breed of consumer activists associated with groups like the Consumers Union tended to view the wages of organized labor as a cost to drive down, rather than an achievement to prop up.

The second argument is simply that times have changed that immense and irresistible forces have destroyed the economic environment that first gave birth to big labor. According to this theory, unionism requires great assembly lines and industrial campuses to grow and thrive. But globalization and technological advance have done away with these forever. As a reporter for that bastion of left liberalism, Mother Jones, put it recently, Unions, for better or worse, are history.

But is this really so?

For starters, the idea that popular support for collective bargaining has dropped dramatically is simply not true. Perhaps the most fascinating fact to emerge from the battle in Wisconsin is that support for unions was far stronger and more widespread than party leaders have assumed. This is true even when unions represent public-sector workers, and even among citizens who identify themselves as Republicans.

Meanwhile, the idea that globalization and technology have scoured away the soil in which unions grow is even harder to defend. On the contrary, millions of American citizens continue to labor in highly commodified jobsas teachers, nurses, bus drivers, maids, janitors, home care workers largely untouched by either of these factors. If anything, entirely new pockets of the American workforceones that dont necessarily enjoy collective bargaining rights, narrowly definednow stand in desperate need of collective bargaining power. As the cattlemen can attest, when a single packer captures control over an entire market, even the most self-reliant of ranchers can become just as subject to the arbitrary whims of a local boss as any salaried worker.

The American people, in other words, still want unions. And the American people still stand to benefit from unions.

The question, then, is not whether the Democratic Partyor progressives in generalcan survive without organized labor. The question is whether labor can radically change its thinking. More specifically, will organized workers notice that many other groups of American workers and entrepreneurs are also fighting for survival against the same powers that have fingered labor for extinction? And if so, will labor have the savvy to link up with these other groups to form a broad political alliance that can fight back effectively, over the long run?

The first big challenge is intellectual. The idea that labor should attack big business for being big strikes many in the movement as hypocritical, and potentially dangerous. After all, the basic premise of labor law is that workers can earn a license to cartelize some particular labor market. And among labor leaders, the standard response to the mere mention of the word antitrust tends to be big is better for us.

Indeed, labor leaders for decades have generally assumed it is easier to organize workers after they have been lined up in rows by capitalists using giant corporations. And labor leaders have also tended to assume that bosses who enjoy sufficient market power to charge higher prices for their products will also be willing to share some of this booty with their employees.

Yet it doesnt take much sifting through Americas political economy to realize that far bigger dangers are posed by labors complete failure to account for the effects of the radical changes in the enforcement of anti-monopoly law over the last generation.

For 200 years, Americans used various forms of antimonopoly lawat the local, state, and federal levelsto disperse power, foster productive competition, and protect open markets. Americans used these laws, in essence, to extend the system of checks and balances into the political economy. Then, beginning in the late 1970s, an odd coalition of the consumerist (and Democratic Socialist) left and laissez-faire rightled by such Chicago School stalwarts as Robert Borkimposed a new consumer welfare test for anti-monopoly enforcement.

The goal now was to promote greater efficiency, even if this meant outright monopoly. And corporate managers and financiers were quick to oblige, responding with the greatest merger frenzy in American history, a deal-making mania that has crested four times in the years since.

The revolutionary result, a generation later, is that the U.S. economy as a whole is, if anything, more concentrated today than during the age of John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan. Back then, Americas citizens faced private corporate control over heavy industry, transport, and banking. Today, these sectors are often even more consolidated than a century ago. And we also face private dominion over retail (the sale of eyeglasses, for instance, is dominated by the Italian firm Luxottica, which controls such chains as LensCrafters and Pearle Vision); farming (more than 90 percent of all soybeans grown in America contain genes patented by one company, Monsanto); and information (one company, Intel, still makes and sells some 90 percent of all semiconductors used in personal computers). And to complicate matters, unlike a century ago, many of todays powers are based overseas.

Arguably, this massive consolidation of power is the single biggest political economic story of the last thirty years. It is a story that helps to explain the extreme and growing concentration of wealth and power that is fast remaking our political system. It helps to explain the radical restructuring and relocation of huge amounts of manufacturing activity. Yet organized labor in America has all but willfully ignored this revolution, despite the fact that these changes have directly affected organized workers in innumerable ways.

Take jobs. In recent years, labor has devoted a huge amount of time and money to calling on the federal government and big business to create new jobs. Yet not once did labor question the laws that enable many of these same companies to engage in forms of consolidation that tend to result in fewer jobs in America.

The simple fact is that almost every large merger is followed by significant cuts in staff. The Pfizer takeover of Wyeth in 2009, for instance, resulted in the destruction of 19,000 jobs. Mergers also reduce the impulse for big business to create new jobs. Lack of competition means bosses can increase revenue simply by charging more for less. Giant firms today already boast of record profits, even without running the risk of investing in new lines of business. Mergers can also reduce the ability of smaller businesses to create new jobs. Not only does the fencing in of markets make it harder for up-and-coming entrepreneurs to launch new firms, it can prevent successful entrepreneurs from growing proven firms to scale (see Who Broke Americas Jobs Machine?, March/April 2010).

Or take the quality of jobs. Here again the equation is simple: the fewer the number of employers, the easier it is for bosses to exert power down onto workers, even when those workers are organized. As Stephen Ross, an antitrust attorney who has worked at the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission, says, Theres a tipping point when a more concentrated market is no longer good for workers. A good example of this was the 2003 mutual aid pact in which three California supermarkets agreed to pool profits to fight a looming strike. In the years leading up to this deal, the employers had strengthened their hand through a long series of mergers. At least in this case, Ross says, unionized workers were better off when they had six or seven big supermarkets than only three.

Much of this consolidation has occurred right under the nose of labor leaders. The Big Three American automakers, for instance, have cut more than half a million jobs since 1980. Some firings were due to the loss of market share, and others to greater automation. Many, however, were due to consolidation, albeit not among the branded automakers whose labels we know so well. Rather, the consolidation took place down within the supply system, among, say, the companies that make dashboards and windshield wipers.

Over the last ten years organized labor has launched attack after attack on outsourcing, as the breaking apart of a vertically integrated corporation is often called. Yet during this period, labor appears not to have noticed that, in many instances, as fast as the carmakers spun off internal partsmaking operations, monopolists swooped in to roll up control. Or that, once in control, these new bosses used this more consolidated power to drive down wages and benefits and to speed the process of shifting work offshore.

Even more embarrassing is labors failure to make sense of the nature and scope of the threat posed by big box trading companies like Walmart and Home Depot. Consider the case of Walmart itself. Even as this firm grew to be well more than five times bigger than any previous retailer ever (relative to the overall size of the U.S. economy), labor leaders tended to view the giant trading company mainly as a vast pool of retail workers in need of organizing. Indeed, until the UFCWs recent efforts, labor all but ignored the fact that Walmart had grown big enough to essentially dictate terms even to the largest of its suppliers and hence, indirectly, to the individual employees who work for those suppliers, many of whom are unionized.

Most stunning, perhaps, has been labors failure to connect the dots when it comes to whos been funding the attacks on public education, teachers unions, and public-sector unions generally. As many in labor know, the Gates Foundation, established by Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, has been one of the more active institutions in America in advocating policies that weaken the clout of teachers unions. And as many in labor also know, one of the main institutions behind the school voucher movement has been the Walton Family Foundation. What labor has all but ignored is that, a generation ago, neither Bill Gates nor the heirs of Walmart founder Sam Walton would have commanded nearly so much personal political power, in no small part because robust enforcement of antitrust laws would have limited their ability to build and exploit monopolies.

As organized labor leans on the ropes, absorbing blow after blow to head and body, it has no idea who hits it or how. Labor believes it cant see its opponent because of all the blood pouring over its face, from cuts opened in a brutal and one-sided battle. The real reason labor cant see? It has been covering its own eyes.

Organized labor is one of the few institutions in Washington with any sense of history. Labor leaders are often lifers, who love to swap stories about antique victories and are wont to break into song about battles lost long ago. Yet labors version of history, like all versions, is highly selective.

For decades one of labors mantras has been that the American middle class of the twentieth century was built on a simple foundationthe freedom to organize the workplace. It is a story that is routinely repeated back to workers whenever Democratic politicians panhandle for support. As Vice President Joe Biden put it in 2009, Over the last 100 years the middle class was built on the back of organized labor.

Yet it is a story based on an incomplete reading of the achievements of American citizens in the 1930s.

The Wagner Act of 1935designed to protect the right of citizens to organize and bargain collectivelywas undoubtedly one of the great political milestones in the decades-long effort to restore, after two generations of top-down plutocratic rule, some measure of the economic freedom and dignity that Americans enjoyed for the first hundred years of the nations existence, when most citizens were independent farmers, mechanics, craftsmen, and shop keeps. So too the creation of Social Security, also in 1935. What is missing from labors standard history of the New Deal era, however, is the fact that 1935 also saw the Roosevelt administration reverse itself 180 degrees on the regulation of competition, as it moved from promoting monopoly and the centralization of power to promoting competition and the distribution of power.

Soon after taking power in 1933, the New Dealers essentially suspended antitrust enforcement, as part of the National Industrial Recovery Act. The authors of NIRA believed the best way to restore the wage and price levels that existed before the Depression was to empower business and labor leaders and government officials to cooperate as closely as possible.They believed these groups would be able to rationally plan economic output, and to set production levels, prices, and wages throughout the industrial portion of the economy. But after the Supreme Court, in a 9-0 decision, declared this grand experiment in corporatism to be unconstitutional, both Congress and the administration took another look at antimonopoly law. (The fact that NIRA also failed economically contributed to this rethink.)

By the late 1930s, the Justice Department had developed an entirely new approach to managing competition in the industrial sphere. This second generation of New Dealers did not seek to impose government directors atop corporate giants, nor did they seek to break giant industry into little pieces. Rather their goal was to ensure at least some competition among a few large oligopolies manufacturing more or less the same basic product. Outside the industrial sphere, meanwhile, in sectors such as farming, retail, and services, Congress often took the lead. Here the aim was, often, nothing less than to restore the Jeffersonian yeoman to his property, and then to protect the open markets of these citizens from enclosure within the fences of private corporations.

The basic thinking was expressed by Wright Patman, the populist congressman from Texas. In a book he wrote to explain the workings of his 1936 Robinson-Patman Antitrust Act, often called the Anti-Chain Store Act, Patman said the purpose of the bill was to protect the independent merchant, the public whom he serves, and the manufacturer from whom he buys from the use of predatory tactics by overcapitalized traders. And in the event, the act, along with a wide-ranging set of other anti-monopoly laws, largely reversed the growth of retail chains and agricultural combines that had emerged as a major force in the economy during the plutocratic era.

By the early 1970s, the American economy had settled into a balance. Roughly half the economy was controlled by 1,000 industrial giants. The other half was divided among some twelve million small enterprises, competing in open market systems.

Which means that the great middle class of twentieth-century America stood atop two foundations. One was freedom to organize the industrial workplace, to erect a countervailing power within a necessarily hierarchical governance structure. The other was freedom from organization, the freedom to be ones own boss, the freedom to build up a business thatthanks to anti-monopoly lawwas largely safe from predation. Every American could choose the path that fit best. A citizen who wanted to be her own boss, or run his own family business, could count on robust anti-monopoly law to protect farm, factory, or store from predators wielding massed capital. Citizens who wanted the security of a weekly wage could hire themselves out to an industrial giant or government monopoly, confident that they were protected against economic exploitation and arbitrary rule by open market systems and robust labor law.

And until the rise of the socialistic New Left and the laissez-faire Chicago School crew, this great alliance of workers and proprietors, for all intents, controlled both major parties.

Admittedly, today, it can be hard to conjure an image of labor leaders and small business leaders marching arm in arm toward the political barricades. On the contrary, small business and labor groups find themselves almost always on opposite sides of the line. Theres little mystery as to why. The nations main small business group, the National Federation of Independent Business, is even more intricately woven into the structure of the GOP than labor is woven into the structure of the Democratic Party. Last November, twenty-five members of the NFIB won new seats in the House or Senate. Every one was a Republican.

Yet a closer look reveals that this iron alliance between small business and the GOP may be much more brittle than it first appears. For one thing, recent surveys of small business owners show the portion who identify themselves as Democrats is roughly equal to the portion who identify themselves as Republicans. For another, many of the most energetic and creative of todays small businesses are in sectorsrestaurants, brewing, organic farming, technology and informationthat tend to attract more progressive entrepreneurs.

Further, the traditional mom-and-pop businesses that have long been the backbone of the NFIB are in deep trouble, often precisely because of concentration. Between 2006 and 2009 the NFIB reduced its membership rolls from some 600,000 enterprises to roughly 350,000. Although the organization claims most of the drop was the result of better accounting, a spokesman recently admitted that it is also due to the fact that the number of main street businesses in America have been diminished by the big box stores.

Which leads us to what appears to be the NFIBs failure to stand up for some of the most basic interests of its members. As Inc. magazine reporter Robb Mandelbaum wrote recently in the New York Times, the NFIB has never made halting the big box expansion one of its battle cries, despite the fact that the big box stores are crushing its members. On the contrary, as Mandelbaum noted, NFIB members have found themselves roped into supporting tax cuts for the very big businesses that already enjoy such a huge advantage of power against them.

All of which means theres a good chance that many existing members of the NFIB are looking for a new date.

Labor may never be able to ally effectively with the present leadership of the NFIB. But a well-structured appeal to Congress and the administration to take real practical action now to protect Americas independent proprietors from being wiped from the land by a few giant corporations might open the way for all sorts of new partnerships. At a minimum, such a strategy will attract the support of at least some individual small businesspeople and smaller associations. And it is not inconceivable that an honest discussion of monopolization in America today will weaken or even split this pillar of the GOP, much as labors push for a more aggressive response to Chinas trade policies has helped to whittle down the once-great power of the National Association of Manufacturers. But even if labor does not win a single small business ally, theres another reason for it to ramp up attacks on the enclosure of Americas markets. Defending open markets may well prove one of the most effective ways to educate unorganized groups of workers of the need to support stronger unions. After all, even if Congress and the administration moved tomorrow to take on Americas many monopolies, few of these powers will go easily into the good night. Which means that in many cases, employees would be wise to work together to protect themselves now.

To understand the potential stakes, consider the Justice Departments revelation last September that Google, Apple, Intel, and other tech giants had secretly colluded not to hire each others workers. The agreement, the DOJ said, had eliminated a significant form of competition to attract highly skilled employees.

The fact that some of the worlds biggest and richest firms openly conspired to drive down wages and to restrict the most basic freedoms of individual employees would be, one might think, of some use to organized labor. Here, after all, is a perfect story to illuminate the fact that even the smartest and best educated of AmericansPhD scientists and PhD engineerssometimes need protection when their markets are enclosed, just like autoworkers and nurses and teachers. Indeed, given that such concentration has begun to destroy the open market systems that have long helped to protect all sorts of white-collar professionalsranging from book editors to advertising executives to doctorsa generalized attack on monopolization might prove to be a highly effective way to go on the offensive among groups of salaried employees who have, until now, viewed themselves as, somehow, immune to such rude treatment.

But when I recently mentioned the DOJs Silicon Valley settlement to a top executive at the AFL-CIO, he had never even heard of the case. It wasnt that he and his team didnt understand the value of the story. On the contrary, he immediately interrupted our talk to pick up the phone to yell at one of his subordinates. It was just that, as he explained later, he and his staff were not used to sifting for prospects in antitrust cases.

He neednt fret about missing this particular opportunity. The Obama administrations settlement will remain in place for only five years, so unions will soon enough have another chance to point out the Silicon Valley hiring cartel as an appeal to Americas high-tech workers.

Seven years ago, Thomas Frank wrote a book, Whats the Matter with Kansas?, about people getting their fundamental interests wrong, because they voted for Republicans rather than Democrats. Six years ago, Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat, in an article for the Weekly Standard, largely agreed with Frank. After noting that a large portion of GOP voters were comfortable with bad-but-popular liberal ideas like raising the minimum wage, expanding clumsy environmental regulations, or hiking taxes on the wealthy to fund a health care entitlement, they concluded the GOP was out of touch with many of its own voters. Then two years ago, after watching their leaders join Democrats in using tax dollars to bail out banks that had been made Too Big to Fail, a goodly portion of this same GOP wandered off the ranch to form the Tea Party.

The achievement of convincing so many hardworking entrepreneurs and farmers and salaried workers to vote GOP, supposedly against their own interests, is usually credited to the schemes of party hacks, or the purchase of votes by the malefactors of great wealth, or the pounding of propaganda machines like Fox News. And certainly, all of these have some effect.

But this version of recent political history seems to get cause and effect backward. Our parties today, just like the parties of yore, are merely the tools of the groups who know how to use them. And given that today labor and small business, two very large and politically active groups of American citizens, find that neither party works for them, it may be worth assigning at least some of the fault to labor and small business.

The traditional goals of organized labordemocracy, liberty, rule of law, the economic independence of the individual citizen, and the protection of property (in the form of labor)do not differ all that much from the dreams that animate most small business owners and most farmers. (Or, for that matter, most members of the Tea Party.) Nor do many of these same business owners and farmers (or, for that matter, most members of the Tea Party) object to the fundamental idea behind organized laborthat individual citizens, to protect themselves and their families and their communities from impoverishment and autocracy, must link arms with one another.

Yet in recent decades, as the same concentrations of power that have been used to deprive workers of their most basic rights have also been used to deprive small business owners of their economic liberties and properties, organized labor has chosen to look away, largely because these neighbors, cousins, and brothers stood beneath a red banner rather than a blue.

Organized labor, in other words, violated the first rule of solidarity. By failing to understand the powers arrayed against their fellow citizens, by failing to reach out to their own neighbors, by failing to lock arms within their own communities, labor made it easier for the powerful few to split organized workers away from their own allies.

Americas independent entrepreneurs desperately need an organized brain to help them make sense of the dangers they perceive. Labor, meanwhile, retains an institutional capacity to think, but has lost the ability to see. If organized labor learns once more to open its eyes, learns again how to talk to its own neighbors about the powers that surround and threaten us allthen who knows what new coalitions can be built, and what power can be concentrated in the name of the people.

The post The Real Enemy of Unions appeared first on Washington Monthly.

One day in the spring of 2009, Edward Tufte, the statistician and graphic design theorist, took the train from his home in Cheshire, Connecticut, to Washington, D.C., for a meeting with a few members of the Obama administration. A few weeks earlier, he had received a phone call from Earl Devaney, a former inspector general in the Department of the Interior, who is best known for leading that agencys investigation of the lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Devaney had recently been appointed head of the Recovery Act Accountability and Transparency Board, the body created by the Obama administration to keep track of the $780 billion in federal stimulus money that has spread out across the country.

Whereas Devaney once led a team of professional investigators responsible for sniffing out waste, fraud, and abuse, he was now faced with a rather different, but related, task: designing a Web site. In the stimulus bill, Congress had called for the creation of user-friendly visual presentations of data that would allow the American public to watch over the disbursement of the giant funding package. This wasnt exactly familiar territory for Devaney, a career lawman. Perhaps Tufte could offer some advice?

And so, that April, in an office building blocks from the White House, Tufte spent a few hours with Devaney looking at sketches of some of the displays the board was preparing. Devaney showed Tufte a prototype of Recovery.gov, the site that catalogs all the projects funded with federal stimulus money around the country. Thinking about it now, Devaney remembers that the proposed pages were full of classic Web site gobbledygook, with lots of simple pie charts and bar graphs. Tufte took one look at the Web site mockups that the boards designer had prepared and pronounced them intellectually impoverished.

It was a classic Tufte moment: a spontaneous and undiplomatic assessment that immediately struck everyone in the room, even the designer himself, as undeniably true. The site would get a wholesale redesign. The model, as Tufte explained it, should be the Web site of a major newspaper, with Devaney and his staff as reporters and editors. I told them that it isnt an annual report, Tufte told me later. It shouldnt look stylish or slick. Its about facts. As Tufte and Devaney talked, a number of staffers gathered in the hall, waiting for the meeting to finish. The guys from the IT department had lined up outside my door to shake his hand and say they met the guy, Devaney remembers.

Edward Tufte occupies a revered and solitary place in the world of graphic design. Over the last three decades, he has become a kind of oracle in the growing field of data visualizationthe practice of taking the sprawling, messy universe of information that makes up the quantitative backbone of everyday life and turning it into an understandable story. His four books on the subject have sold almost two million copies, and in his crusade against euphemism and gloss, he casts a shadow over the world of graphs and charts similar to the specter of George Orwell over essay and argument.

Tufte is a philosopher king who reigns over his field largely because he invented it. For years, graphic designers were regarded as decorators, whose primary job was to dress up facts with pretty pictures. Tufte introduced a reverence for math and science to the discipline and, in turn, codified the rules that would create a new one, which has come to be called, alternatively, information design or analytical design. His is often the authoritative word on what makes a good chart or graph, and over the years his influence has changed the way places like the Wall Street Journal and NASA display data.

In policy circles, he has exerted a quiet but profound influence on those seeking to harness the terabytes of data flowing out of government offices. In recent years, several large American cities, including New York, Oakland, and Washington, D.C., have opened up entire universes of municipal statistics, giving birth to a cottage industry of programs and applications that chart everything from the best commuting routes to block-by-block crime patterns. And under the Obama administrations Open Government Directive of 2009, the federal government has been releasing scores of downloadable data sets. In the public realm, data has never been more ubiquitousor more valuable to those who know how to use it. If you display information the right way, anybody can be an analyst, Tufte once told me. Anybody can be an investigator.

Tufte is equal parts historian, critic, and traveling revival preacher. For a few days each month, he goes on the road to teach a course called Presenting Data and Information in hotel ballrooms and convention centers. One afternoon, shortly after his meeting with Devaney, Tufte was teaching his course in the downstairs ballroom at the Marriott hotel in Seattle, Washington. There were 400 people in the crowd. Tufte, who is sixty-nine, and has a thinning slash of silver hair and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses that hang off his nose, was standing at the front of the room. He was wearing a wireless microphone, and held a copy of a small map above his head.

This, he said, is War and Peace as told by a visual Tolstoy. The map is about the size of a car window, and follows the French invasion of Russia in 1812. It was drawn in 1869 by a French engineer named Charles Joseph Minard. On the left of the map, on the banks of the Niemen River, near Kovno in modern-day Lithuania, a horizontal tan stripe represents the initial invasion force of 420,000 French soldiers. As they march east, toward Moscowto the right, on the mapthey begin to die, and the stripe narrows.

The map itself is elegant and restrained, but it tells the story of a sprawling, bloody horror: cold and hunger begin to finish off whatever French soldiers the Russians havent killed in battle. As the French army retreats, the tan line turns black and doubles back on itself to the left, or to the west, away from Moscow. A series of thin gray lines intersect the path of the army, showing the winters cruel temperatures. On November 9 it is 9 degrees below freezing. On November 14, it is 21 degrees below.

Then, on the 28th of November, a catastrophe: in a rush to cross the Berezina River, half of the retreating army, 22,000 men, drowns in the rivers icy waters. The black line, already thinned to a fraction of its initial size, abruptly reduces by half. Finally, in late December, six months after they set off, the surviving French soldiers cross back over the Niemen River. The map shows their number: 10,000 men. Ultimately, only one in forty-two soldiers survives the doomed campaign.

Tufte pointed to the far left of the map, where the tan and black lines intersect. And it is there, he said, at the beginning and at the end of the campaign, where we have a small but poignant example of the first grand principle of analytical design: above all else, always show comparisons.

Over the years, in his books and courses, Tufte has called the Minard map perhaps the best statistical graphic ever made, and his endorsement has turned this obscure historical artifact into something of a cult object. Tuftes long and discursive speech on the map serves as the dramatic climax of his courses, the equivalent of an old rock band playing its greatest hit on tour.

He usually does his explication of the map just before lunch. In Seattle, we were about to break, and he was finishing up. His voice quickened. Minard made this because he hated war, he said. The map wasnt about Napoleon, the wars surviving hero, who is mentioned nowhere on the page, Tufte explained, but of the quiet, anonymous misery of tens of thousands of French soldiers. This was meant as an antiwar poster.

The man sitting behind me, a middle-aged software engineer with a laptop, let out a puff of air. Wow.

The course finished at five that evening. I walked outside to the hotels parking lot, where a white stretch limousine was parked near the entrance. Two men in loose black suits were leaning against the hood, and they introduced themselves as the limos drivers, Vlad and Vlad. A minute later, Tufte came out, his face tired and hair wet. These shows can really wipe me out, he said. Behind him walked two roadies who travel with him from city to city, helping to set up the equipment for each class and handling registration. We all got in the limo, pulled onto Interstate 5, and headed toward Portland, where Tufte would be teaching the course again two days later.

Tufte, who taught political science and statistics at Yale from 1977 to 1999, first gave his six-hour course in 1993. Since then, more than 190,000 people have attended. The day costs $380, which includes Tuftes four books, which he self-publishes under the name Graphics Press. He is a very wealthy man. In his carriage and attitude, Tufte appears most comfortable still thinking of himself as an academic: at his courses, many people in the audience call him Professor, and during breaks and lunch he answers questions and signs books as part of office hours. (More than a decade after leaving the university, he still uses his yale.edu email address.) But he is not beholden to any institution, nor to any product except his own, of which he has become a highly refined salesman.

Tuftes rise mirrors that of information itself, which, since the dawn of the computer age, has infiltrated every aspect of modern life. If the production of data and its graphic representation was once a specialized trade, it is now accessible to nearly everyone. Information is all around us, but so is what Richard Saul Wurman, an architect who, along with Tufte, shaped the field of information design in the 1970s and 80s, calls non-information, the flotsam and noise that are the by-products of a hyperactively quantitative culture.

The modern history of information design has its roots in the Bauhaus, an arts institute founded in 1919 in Weimar, Germany. Later, in postwar America, designers like Nigel Holmes at Time magazine and George Rorick, who invented the modern weather map at USA Today, began to draw playful graphics that boiled down a question to a few numbers and then presented them in a colorful package. They were inviting and simple drawings, like a cascading stack of oil drums to show the rising price of oil, and were generally more full of good cheer than hard data. Tufte has derided the genre, calling them chartoons.

For a long time, there was a split between designers who were making graphics for mass consumption and scientists who relied on graphics to communicate their findings. What was meant to be accessible should not look too technical, while for those making complex and substantive points, there was a sort of honor in making impenetrable graphics. Making something look good was considered treacherous, said Erik Spiekermann, a German typographer and designer who created the typeface used on German railways. If you make something look pretty it means youre lying. If you want something true its got to hurt.

In his books, the first of which, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, came out in 1983, Tufte aimed to destroy this myth, largely by relying on historical examples like the Minard map. Tufte killed the idea that we are afraid of numbers, said Tobias Frere-Jones, a typographer who keeps Tuftes books on a shelf above his desk in downtown New York. And once you get over that idea, you cant really justify the birthday-party-clown school of data visualization, where you need bright colors and shiny things to convey that the stock market went down this week.

Tufte has coined several terms that have come to define his style, such as data-ink ratio, the proportion of graphical detail that does not represent statistical information, and chartjunk, ornamental and often saccharine design flourishes that impede understanding. Jonathan Corum, a former graduate student of Tuftes at Yale who is now the science graphics editor at the New York Times, said that using Tuftes principles is a way of respecting the readers intelligence. I think of it like Im starting with this rough, unpolished stone, he said. So how do you cut the perfect gem?

Many of Tuftes neologisms have come to carry a sort of Talmudic authority in design firms and newsrooms, though they are also quoted by engineers, financial analysts, consultants, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, political strategists. Karl Rove, senior adviser to former President George W. Bush, attended one of Tuftes courses in Austin in the 1990s and considers himself a huge fan. I must have bought a hundredplus copies of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information for colleagues and friends, he told me. Particularly in the early days in the White House, someone would come in and show me a presentation full of chartjunkin this context, Rove explained, extraneous graphics or, say, bar charts drawn from interlocking dollar signsand I would send them off with Tuftes book to do it again.

Tufte may be one of the few theoristsdesign or otherwiselauded in both the Bush and Obama administrations. After their first meeting on Pennsylvania Avenue, Earl Devaney sent Tuftes resume to the White House, leading to his appointment last March as an official adviser to the Recovery Transparency and Accountability Board. But his influence in the administration has reverberated beyond that office. Peter Orszag, who left his post as head of Obamas Office of Management and Budget last year and then took a job as vice chairman of global banking at Citigroup, spoke to me recently in his office on the thirty-ninth floor of the banks headquarters in lower Manhattan. He was first given a copy of Tuftes Visual Display of Quantitative Information as a college graduation present. As Orszag explained, the challenge of designing graphics to represent the nearly infinite stream of data coming out of government offices is to be compelling but not to oversimplify. The description sounded like many of the maxims I heard on tour with Tufte. Indeed, at the end of our conversation, Orszag told me that Tuftes spirit has been taken to heart by an entire generation of data analysts.

Before his work with Devaney, Tuftes most public engagement with the federal government came in the form of a scathing crusade against its endemic use of Microsoft PowerPoint. In January 2003, the space shuttle Columbia took off from Kennedy Space Center. Seconds into its flight, a piece of foam insulation broke off from the shuttles fuel tank and punctured its left wing. For days, as the shuttle orbited the earth, engineers at NASA and Boeing debated how serious the hole might be. Much of this communication was done in the form of PowerPoint, a software program that Tufte says is constricting and obfuscating and turns information into a sales pitch.

After reviewing several PowerPoint presentations, NASA officials decided to proceed with the shuttles return flight. On February 1, Columbia burned up as it reentered the earths atmosphere, killing all seven crewmembers on board. Tufte has called PowerPoint a coconspirator in the shuttle disaster.

Tufte dissected NASAs PowerPoint slides on his Web site, showing that the program didnt allow engineers to write in scientific notation and replaced complex quantitative measurement with imprecise words like significant. He then published a twenty-eight-page essay called The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, in which he analyzed hundreds of existing PowerPoint slides and showed that the statistical graphics used in PowerPoint presentations show an average of twelve numbers each, which, in Tuftes analysis, ranks it below every major world publication except for Pravda. The low information density of PowerPoint is approaching dementia, he wrote.

Later that year, in August 2003, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board issued its own report on the shuttle accident. On page 191, in a section called Engineering By Viewgraphs, the board cited Tuftes research, and wrote that it views the endemic use of PowerPoint slides as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA.

While PowerPoint still takes a rather severe lashing at Tuftes courses, he says he has largely moved on from the debate. Its a public and corporate disaster for Microsoft, he said. But its a trivial issue to me. The general backlash against PowerPoint has only grown, however. In 2009, Thomas X. Hammes, a retired Marine Corps colonel who is now a fellow at the National Defense University, wrote a widely circulated essay in Armed Forces Journal that argues that PowerPoint has had a toxic effect on the culture of debate and discussion within the U.S. military, claiming that senior decision-makers are making more decisions with less preparation and less time for thought.

As Hammes explains it, the reliance on PowerPoint often means that battle orders are rendered in incomplete, often unclear sentences and maps are squashed and stripped of meaningful detail, leaving essential battlefield questions of geography dangerously unclear. The details are classified, but Hammes told me that he has seen war plans for the Korean peninsula prepared in PowerPoint in which massive terrain issues were completely glossed over. On the whole, Hammes told me, the rise of PowerPoint in the military has made the decision-making process less intellectually active. And Tufte, he added, is the master on this whole thing.

The spread of technology over recent decades has fostered a comfort with data, and an appetite for more of it, in an ever-increasing portion of the general public. This cultural shift was especially visible in the dense data displays that appeared in newspapers, and especially online, in the run-up to the 2008 presidential election. Here, too, Tuftes influence was evident. Nate Silver, who runs the political Web site FiveThirtyEight, now part of the New York Times, uses many of Tuftes maxims in the sites design. Silver told me that he tries to keep the data-ink ratio of his current site very high, meaning most of the pixels on the screen show actual numbers or data points; he also thinks of the sites design in terms of small multiples, another Tufte neologism that refers to a series of related numbers that reveal subtle differences over time. Tufte treats data like good writing, he said. You have a certain thoughthow clearly and beautifully are you conveying it?

Good design, then, is not about making dull numbers somehow become magically exhilarating, it is about picking the right numbers in the first place. Its about data that matters to you, said Dona Wong, who was a student of Tuftes at Yale in the 1980s and later the graphics director at the Wall Street Journal.

This idea is especially relevant for how the federal government measures and displays the impact of the stimulus. What are the most informative comparisons? And what, for lack of a better word, is simply chartjunk? Tufte first suggested that the recovery board rethink how the projects are ranked. Until now, they have been sorted by location, with the idea that any person could look up projects in his or her county or zip code. But whats it matter where the project is? We already know where Texas and California are, Tufte said. Geographic space helps little in this context. Always order things substantively, Tufte explained. He would like to bring in all other kinds of data sources to add context to the stimulus and track its actual effects. Soon, if Tufte has his way, Recovery. gov will display analytical graphics that measure funded projects alongside metrics like infant mortality, traffic flows, and education. After all, as he told me, understanding doesnt come from project descriptions.

Someday, the Web site might also use what has proven to be one of Tuftes more popular inventions. In his 2007 book Beautiful Evidence, Tufte introduced what he called sparklines, numerically dense, word-size graphics that show variation over time. They have since appeared on the financial pages of Yahoo! and the sports section of the New York Times. (As an example, the fluctuations of the Dow Jones Industrial Average over the course of February and March look like this: . The dramatic dip in the figure represents the March 16th panic over the nuclear disaster in Japan.)

In November 2009, Tuftes old bte noire, Microsoft, attempted to patent sparklines for use within the spreadsheets that will appear in the latest version of Excel. The notion that the company could patent an innovation that Tufte has championed for several years struck him as a great lark, and a sign of characteristic overreaching on the part of Microsoft. But for a man who clearly takes no small satisfaction in seeing his ideas adopted, even by nefarious software conglomerates, it wasnt an entirely awful development. Im happy, Tufte told me. Sparklines are everywhere else, so why not in Excel too?

The underlying philosophy behind sparklinesand, really, all of Tuftes workis that data, when presented elegantly and with respect, is not confounding but clarifying. (Click here see an example). There is no such thing as information overload, Tufte says at the start of his courses. Only bad design. (In Portland, this last line received some applause, as well as a cry of God, yes!)

As Richard Grefe, the executive director of the American Institute of Graphic Artists, which awarded Tufte its highest medal in 2004, explained, Tufte has shifted how designers approach the job of turning information into understanding. Its not about making the complex simple, Grefe told me. Its about making the complex clear.

Tufte was born in 1942 in Kansas City, Missouri. His mother graduated high school at the age of thirteen, and four years later she became the first female reporter at the Omaha World-Herald. His father was an engineer, and Tufte remembers his parents marriage as the first sign that words and numbers belong together.

He studied statistics at Stanford and then went on to get a doctorate in political science at Yale. In 1967, he took a job teaching at Princeton. While there, Tufte was asked to give a course on statistics to a group of visiting journalists and, in looking for examples to include in the course packet, quickly became dissatisfied with the available primers on how to represent data. They were either too shallow and unserious or hopelessly arcane. He began to write up some ideas of his own.

A few years later, Tufte moved to Yale. He became friendly with Inge Druckrey, a German-born designer and teacher who had studied in the 1960s at the Basel School of Design in Switzerland, then an incubator for modernist style. The two would talk about design theory, and Tufte would visit Druckreys classes to critique student work. Before long, the two began dating.

Soon, Tuftes notes on information design had grown into a book-length manuscript. He showed it around to publishers, who insisted on redesigning many pages in the book, and imagined it as a niche title, only worth printing a couple thousand copies. Frustrated, Tufte took out a second mortgage on his home at 18 percent interest to print the book himself. He spent most of the next summer with a book designer named Howard Gralla. The two of them sat side by side in Grallas apartment, eating bagels and rearranging text so words and images would be woven together on the page. Self-publishing, Tufte told me, allowed for an incredible, bizarre fussiness.

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information came out in April 1983. To save costs, Tufte told the printer to bind only half of the initial print run of 5,000 copies. The book is now in its twentieth printing, and is one of the most successful self-published books of all time.

As one of his close friends, the psychologist and author Paul Ekman, told me, Tufte is a profoundly unconventional fellow. During those years in New Haven, Tufte would leave daily memos for his staff in a shoe box. One day, when he had been dating Druckrey for some time, his office manager came in to work, opened the shoe box, and saw a piece of torn paper that said, Find out how to get married. Druckrey was taken with Tuftes intensity. He was endlessly curious, she told me. He has this special eye and judgment, and was beaming with ideas. In 1985, they married.

If Tuftes first book was a critique, his second was a manifesto. Envisioning Information, published in 1990, implored readers to think of information design as a discipline that encompassed far more than the charts, tables, and other purely quantitative forms that had traditionally dominated the field. Graphics arent just useful for displaying numbers, in other words, but for clarifying just about anything one person is trying to tell someone else. The book opens with a print of a visitors guide to the Ise shrine in Japan and ends around 120 pages later with Galileo Galileis drawing of the rings of Saturn from 1613.

Galileo is Tuftes greatest inspiration as a designer. He is the best visual thinker ever, the best graphic designer ever, Tufte once told me. During his courses, he pulls out an original copy from 1613 of Galileos Istoria e Dimostrazioni Intorno Alle Macchie Solari from a duffel bag, and opens it to a page with a passage describing Saturn and its rings. In the book, Galileo uses words and drawings laid out next to one another to show how the planet appeared on different nights. (The shape of Saturn is thus as shown by perfect vision and perfect instruments, Galileo writes, but appears thus where perfection is lacking.) It is the same idea that showed up almost 400 years later in Tuftes sparklines.

Galileo faced the same display issues, and I want to see how he solved them, Tufte said one day in his library at his home in Connecticut. In doing research and making prints for his books, Tufte has insisted on working only from original documents, which has made him a rather prolific collector. In one visit to his library, Tufte showed me a Victorian book diagramming popular dance steps of the time, a sketchbook made by Pablo Picasso during his Paris years, and a copy of the Hypnerotomachia, a dreamlike love story that was printed in Venice in 1499, which Tufte bought at auction for $385,000. On another shelf was a first edition of Starry Messenger, Galileos book from 1610 that was the first to rely on observations from a telescope (which Tufte has since sold). It is a reminder to be better, to work harder, Tufte said.

Tuftes books feel unattached from any time or place. They are anachronistic in their images, styling, and soft-beige paper, as if dropped into the present from a vague and altogether more genteel past. A woman in the audience at his course in Seattle said that when she first saw Tuftes books she thought they were college textbooks long out of print; another man told me his friends at work had assumed that guy named Edward Tufte was British and died years ago.

After the publication of Envisioning Information, Tufte decided, he told me, to be indifferent to culture or history or time. He became increasingly consumed with what he calls forever knowledge, or the idea that design is meant to guide fundamental cognitive tasks and therefore is rooted in principles that apply regardless of the material being displayed and the technology used to produce it. As Tufte explains it, basic human cognitive questions are universal, which means that design questions should be universal too. I purposely dont write books with names like How to Design a Web Site or How to Make a Presentation, he told me.

This attitude puts him in opposition, at least in his own mind, to much of the contemporary design world. As Tufte sees it, graphic design has become a tragic field, a rich and storied craft knowledge that has been taken out of the realm of nonfiction, as he calls it, and into that of fiction, or marketing and propaganda. He told me several times of his contempt for commercial art, the graphic design that is part of a fashion and a style and will be different someday. Most designers, he said, want to do something new each time. But Im interested in the solved problem, he said. Im interested in high art and real science.

Some designers have questioned whether Tuftes reverence for elegance and accuracy can verge on dogmatism, with too little consideration of context or audience. The world is not filled with professional statisticians, said Donald Norman, the codirector of the Segal Design Institute at Northwestern University and the author of The Design of Everyday Things. Many of us would like a quick glance just to get a good idea of something. If a graph is made easier to understand by such irrelevancies as a pile of oil cans or cars, then I say all the better. (Tufte deflects this criticism by pointing out that Norman has been a paid consultant to Microsoft; Norman says his consulting work has nothing to do with his own thinking and writing.)

But when Tufte feels sure of somethingwhich is to say, quite oftenhe can have little interest in entertaining criticism. There are some people who have reached a certain position in life and will be amused and interested in a contrary opinion, and have a scholarly banter about it, said Christopher Pullman, who taught in the design program at Yale on and off since the 1960s. But thats not Tufte.

After decades of battling over the proper use of two dimensional space, Tufte has turned much of his attention in recent years to a new undertaking: outdoor sculpture. It is perhaps no coincidence that he called his first piece, made in 1997, Escaping Flatlanda name that not only describes the works bending waves of stainless steel that jut out from the ground, but also evokes a sort of personal emancipation. So much of what I did before was a war against stupidity, he told me not long ago. With sculpture its just about private pleasure.

A couple of years ago, the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, not far from Tuftes house in Connecticut, invited him to put on a solo exhibition of his work, which mainly consists of abstract pieces built at extremely large scale. On to the fourth career, Tufte joked with friends. The exhibition ran until the spring of 2010; then, in April, Tufte signed a lease for an empty gallery space on West Twentieth Street in New Yorks Chelsea arts district to continue showing his work. One day over the summer, Tufte was in the gallery making some final adjustments. One long, crane-necked metal sculpture wasnt quite catching the light, and a piece that looks like a cartoonish lunar module had to be shifted so it was more visible through the gallerys picture windows.

Tufte had just returned from Washington. Pro bono consulting for government has meant a rather noticeable lifestyle changein the past, when Tufte traveled to Washington to teach his courses, he stayed at the Hay-Adams, a stately hotel on Lafayette Square, just across from the White House. Now the government puts him up at the Crowne Plaza across the river in Arlington, Virginia, which, as Tufte described it, seems to be largely populated by fifteen-year-olds from North Dakota. He showed me his GSA Smart Pay Travel Card, the government-issued credit card that federal employees and contractors use to pay for expenses. Soldiers have them, too, he said, his voice buoyant and proud. He laughed. But it comes with stern prohibitions about the minibar.

So far, Tuftes most visible contribution to Recovery.gov is a map that he designed, which shows the rollout of 101,236 stimulus projects between February 2009 and December 2010 as a proliferating series of white lights overlaid on top of a nighttime map of the United States. Tufte has been pushing Devaney and the board to do more with the data it collects and faster. But acquainting Tufte with the slow, procedural pace of bureaucracy has been the greatest challenge, Devaney told me. Tufte drives race cars, Devaney said, and most people in Washington drive tanks.

We took a walk around the gallery, stepping past a large, bemused-looking fish cast in divoted shiny metal. Tufte started telling me about the official appointment letter that he was issued by the White House. It is an ornate and formal document, with the presidents signature in the lower left corner. Soon after receiving it, Tufte took it to a frame shop near his house in Connecticut. The framer came back with a proposal. Its too square, he told Tufte, not at all the sort of golden rectangle that artists and designers tend to favor. Perhaps he could cut a few inches here and there to make it look more presentable in the frame? Tufte politely declined. Thats the very reason Im here! he told me, laughing. To fight against decoration replacing precious substance.”

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