Gradual insolvency about to speed up
Including the unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare, the United States owes 911 percent of gross domestic product, more than even Greece.
By Mark Steyn
The Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com/
March 23, 2012
I was in Australia earlier this month, and there, as elsewhere on my recent travels, the consensus among the politicians I met (at least in private) was that Washington lacked the will for meaningful course correction, and that, therefore, the trick was to ensure that, when the behemoth goes over the cliff, you're not dragged down with it. It is faintly surreal to be sitting in paneled offices lined by formal portraits listening to eminent persons who assume the collapse of the dominant global power is a fait accompli. "I don't feel America is quite a First World country anymore," a robustly pro-American Aussie told me, with a sigh of regret.
Well, what does some rinky-dink 'roo-infested didgeridoo mill on the other side of the planet know about anything? Fair enough. But Australia was the only major Western nation not to go into recession after 2008. And in the past decade the U.S. dollar has fallen by half against the Oz buck: That's to say, in 2002, one greenback bought you a buck-ninety Down Under; now it buys you 95 cents. More of that a bit later.
I have now returned from Oz to the Emerald City, where everything is built with borrowed green. President Obama has run up more debt in three years than President Bush did in eight, and he plans to run up more still – from ten trillion in 2008 to fifteen-and-a-half trillion now to 20 trillion and beyond. Onward and upward! The president doesn't see this as a problem, nor do his party, and nor do at least fortysomething percent of the American people. The Democrats' plan is to have no plan, and their budget is not to budget at all. "We don't need to bring a budget," said Harry Reid. Why tie yourself down? "We're not coming before you to say we have a definitive solution," the Treasury Secretary told House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan. "What we do know is we don't like yours."
Nor do some of Ryan's fellow conservatives. Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert, for whom I have a high regard, was among those representatives who appeared at the Heritage Foundation to express misgivings regarding the Ryan plan's timidity. They're not wrong on that: the alleged terrorizer of widows and orphans does not propose to balance the budget of the Government of the United States until the year 2040. That would be 27 years after Congressman Ryan's current term of office expires. Who knows what could throw a wrench in those numbers? Suppose Beijing decides to seize Taiwan. The U.S. is obligated to defend it militarily. But U.S. taxpayers would be funding both sides of the war – the home team, via the Pentagon budget, and the Chinese military, through the interest payments on the debt. (We'll be bankrolling the entire People's Liberation Army by some point this decade.) A Beijing-Taipei conflict would be, in budget terms, a U.S. civil war relocated to the straits of Taiwan. Which is why plans for midcentury are of limited value. When the most notorious extreme callous budget-slasher of the age cannot foresee the government living within its means within the next three decades, you begin to appreciate why foreign observers doubt whether there'll be a 2040, not for anything recognizable as "the United States."
Yet it's widely agreed that Ryan's plan is about as far as you can push it while retaining minimal political viability. A second-term Obama would roar full throttle to the cliff edge, while a President Romney would be unlikely to do much more than ease off to third gear. At this point, it's traditional for pundits to warn that if we don't change course we're going to wind up like Greece. Presumably they mean that, right now, our national debt, which crossed the Rubicon of 100 percent of GDP just before Christmas, is not as bad as that of Athens, although it's worse than Britain, Canada, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, and every other European nation except Portugal, Ireland and Italy. Or perhaps they mean that America's current deficit-to-GDP ratio is not quite as bad as Greece's, although it's worse than that of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, and every other European nation except Ireland.
But these comparisons tend to understate the insolvency of America, failing as they do to take into account state and municipal debts and public pension liabilities. When Morgan Stanley ran those numbers in 2009, the debt-to-revenue ratio in Greece was 312 percent; in the United States it was 358 percent. If Greece has been knocking back the ouzo, we're facedown in the vat. Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute calculates that, if you take into account unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare versus their European equivalents, Greece owes 875 percent of GDP; the United States owes 911 percent – or getting on for twice as much as the second-most insolvent Continental: France at 549 percent.
And if you're thinking, wow, all these percentages are making my head hurt, forget 'em: When you're spending on the scale Washington does, what matters is the hard dollar numbers. Greece's total debt is a few rinky-dink billions, a rounding error in the average Obama budget. Only America is spending trillions. The 2011 budget deficit, for example, is about the size of the entire Russian economy. By 2010, the Obama administration was issuing about a hundred billion dollars of Treasury bonds every month – or, to put it another way, Washington is dependent on the bond markets being willing to absorb an increase of U.S. debt equivalent to the GDP of Canada or India – every year. And those numbers don't take into account the huge levels of personal debt run up by Americans. College debt alone is over a trillion dollars, or the equivalent of the entire South Korean economy – tied up just in one small boutique niche market of debt which barely exists in most other developed nations.
"We are headed for the most predictable economic crisis in history," says Paul Ryan. And he's right. But precisely because it's so predictable the political class has already discounted it. Which is why a plan for pie now and spinach later, maybe even two decades later, is the only real menu on the table. There's a famous exchange in Hemingway's "A Place In The Sun." Someone asks Mike Campbell, "How did you go bankrupt?" "Two ways," he replies. "Gradually, then suddenly." We've been going through the gradual phase so long, we're kinda used to it. But it's coming to an end, and what happens next will be the second way: sudden, and very bad.
By the way, that decline in the U.S./Australian exchange isn't the only one. Ten years ago the U.S. dollar was worth 1.6 Canadian; now it's at par. A decade ago, the dollar was worth over 10 Swedish Kroner, now 6.7; 1.8 Singapore dollars, now 1.2. I get asked with distressing frequency by Americans where I would recommend fleeing to. The reality is, given the dollar's decline over the past decade, that most Americans can no longer afford to flee to any place worth fleeing to. What's left is the non-flee option: taking a stand here, stopping the spendaholism, closing federal agencies, privatizing departments, block-granting to the states – not in 2040, but now. "Suddenly" is about to show up.
©MARK STEYN
By Mark Steyn
The Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com/
March 23, 2012
Well, what does some rinky-dink 'roo-infested didgeridoo mill on the other side of the planet know about anything? Fair enough. But Australia was the only major Western nation not to go into recession after 2008. And in the past decade the U.S. dollar has fallen by half against the Oz buck: That's to say, in 2002, one greenback bought you a buck-ninety Down Under; now it buys you 95 cents. More of that a bit later.
I have now returned from Oz to the Emerald City, where everything is built with borrowed green. President Obama has run up more debt in three years than President Bush did in eight, and he plans to run up more still – from ten trillion in 2008 to fifteen-and-a-half trillion now to 20 trillion and beyond. Onward and upward! The president doesn't see this as a problem, nor do his party, and nor do at least fortysomething percent of the American people. The Democrats' plan is to have no plan, and their budget is not to budget at all. "We don't need to bring a budget," said Harry Reid. Why tie yourself down? "We're not coming before you to say we have a definitive solution," the Treasury Secretary told House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan. "What we do know is we don't like yours."
Nor do some of Ryan's fellow conservatives. Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert, for whom I have a high regard, was among those representatives who appeared at the Heritage Foundation to express misgivings regarding the Ryan plan's timidity. They're not wrong on that: the alleged terrorizer of widows and orphans does not propose to balance the budget of the Government of the United States until the year 2040. That would be 27 years after Congressman Ryan's current term of office expires. Who knows what could throw a wrench in those numbers? Suppose Beijing decides to seize Taiwan. The U.S. is obligated to defend it militarily. But U.S. taxpayers would be funding both sides of the war – the home team, via the Pentagon budget, and the Chinese military, through the interest payments on the debt. (We'll be bankrolling the entire People's Liberation Army by some point this decade.) A Beijing-Taipei conflict would be, in budget terms, a U.S. civil war relocated to the straits of Taiwan. Which is why plans for midcentury are of limited value. When the most notorious extreme callous budget-slasher of the age cannot foresee the government living within its means within the next three decades, you begin to appreciate why foreign observers doubt whether there'll be a 2040, not for anything recognizable as "the United States."
Yet it's widely agreed that Ryan's plan is about as far as you can push it while retaining minimal political viability. A second-term Obama would roar full throttle to the cliff edge, while a President Romney would be unlikely to do much more than ease off to third gear. At this point, it's traditional for pundits to warn that if we don't change course we're going to wind up like Greece. Presumably they mean that, right now, our national debt, which crossed the Rubicon of 100 percent of GDP just before Christmas, is not as bad as that of Athens, although it's worse than Britain, Canada, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, and every other European nation except Portugal, Ireland and Italy. Or perhaps they mean that America's current deficit-to-GDP ratio is not quite as bad as Greece's, although it's worse than that of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, and every other European nation except Ireland.
But these comparisons tend to understate the insolvency of America, failing as they do to take into account state and municipal debts and public pension liabilities. When Morgan Stanley ran those numbers in 2009, the debt-to-revenue ratio in Greece was 312 percent; in the United States it was 358 percent. If Greece has been knocking back the ouzo, we're facedown in the vat. Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute calculates that, if you take into account unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare versus their European equivalents, Greece owes 875 percent of GDP; the United States owes 911 percent – or getting on for twice as much as the second-most insolvent Continental: France at 549 percent.
And if you're thinking, wow, all these percentages are making my head hurt, forget 'em: When you're spending on the scale Washington does, what matters is the hard dollar numbers. Greece's total debt is a few rinky-dink billions, a rounding error in the average Obama budget. Only America is spending trillions. The 2011 budget deficit, for example, is about the size of the entire Russian economy. By 2010, the Obama administration was issuing about a hundred billion dollars of Treasury bonds every month – or, to put it another way, Washington is dependent on the bond markets being willing to absorb an increase of U.S. debt equivalent to the GDP of Canada or India – every year. And those numbers don't take into account the huge levels of personal debt run up by Americans. College debt alone is over a trillion dollars, or the equivalent of the entire South Korean economy – tied up just in one small boutique niche market of debt which barely exists in most other developed nations.
"We are headed for the most predictable economic crisis in history," says Paul Ryan. And he's right. But precisely because it's so predictable the political class has already discounted it. Which is why a plan for pie now and spinach later, maybe even two decades later, is the only real menu on the table. There's a famous exchange in Hemingway's "A Place In The Sun." Someone asks Mike Campbell, "How did you go bankrupt?" "Two ways," he replies. "Gradually, then suddenly." We've been going through the gradual phase so long, we're kinda used to it. But it's coming to an end, and what happens next will be the second way: sudden, and very bad.
By the way, that decline in the U.S./Australian exchange isn't the only one. Ten years ago the U.S. dollar was worth 1.6 Canadian; now it's at par. A decade ago, the dollar was worth over 10 Swedish Kroner, now 6.7; 1.8 Singapore dollars, now 1.2. I get asked with distressing frequency by Americans where I would recommend fleeing to. The reality is, given the dollar's decline over the past decade, that most Americans can no longer afford to flee to any place worth fleeing to. What's left is the non-flee option: taking a stand here, stopping the spendaholism, closing federal agencies, privatizing departments, block-granting to the states – not in 2040, but now. "Suddenly" is about to show up.
©MARK STEYN
Bill Ayers' Semi-Fictional Black Surrogates
By Jack Cashill
http://www.americanthinker.com/
March 23, 2012
In this much ballyhooed season of "vetting," please allow me to zero in anew on Barack Obama's Achilles heel -- namely, his willingness to take credit for a book that he did not write in any meaningful way. This would be the book on which his genius myth is founded: his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father.
From early on, I have argued that terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers, a skilled writer and editor, is the primary craftsman behind Dreams. Thanks to the video interview of mailman Allen Hulton by WND's Jerome Corsi, we have a clearer picture of why Ayers would have invested so much time in this project and how he might have been reimbursed.
Say what one will about the sanity of Ayers' educational philosophy, there is no denying his sincerity. He has been plugging away at educational reform his entire adult life. Dreams, I will argue, gave him the opportunity to address the one great obstacle to the reform of Chicago schools -- namely, an obstructionist black educational bureaucracy. To make his case in the book, Ayers employs three semi-fictional African American surrogates, the third of whom easily being the least fictional and most useful.
To be sure, there is much other evidence to believe that Ayers crafted Dreams: the comprehensive postmodern patois that Obama and Ayers share, the matching 50 or so nautical metaphors, the shared use of the Conrad-like triple-parallels, the nearly fetishistic eye and eyebrow metaphors, the three stunning parallel stories, the four matching errors, the same weary '60s worldview, the borrowed Ayers girlfriend in Dreams, the inarguably similar Homeric openings, the dramatically inferior writings of Obama before and after Dreams, and more. It is Ayers' strategic use of black surrogates, however, that will tell us why he involved himself in Dreams.
The first of the surrogates readers of Dreams know as "Frank." In real life, of course, he was poet, pornographer, and Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis. Despite his influential role as mentor to the teenage Obama and his talents as a writer, Davis remains unknown to 99 percent of Obama supporters. The media are queasy about the "Communist" part.
In Dreams, Frank tells the college-bound Obama, "Understand something, boy. You're not going to college to get educated. You're going there to get trained." He continues, "They'll train you to forget what it is that you already know. They'll train you so good, you'll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit."
Not surprisingly, Ayers too has strong opinions about "education" on the one hand and "training" on the other. "Education is for self-activating explorers of life, for those who would challenge fate, for doers and activists, for citizens," he writes in his 1993 book To Teach. "Training," on the other hand, "is for slaves, for loyal subjects, for tractable employees, for willing consumers, for obedient soldiers." Adds Ayers, "What we call education is usually no more than training. We are so busy operating schools that we have lost sight of learning."
Just as Ayers makes the case that students are often stripped of their ethnic identity and "taught to be like whites," Frank argues that university expectations include "leaving your race at the door." I call Frank "semi-fictional" because Ayers used him to voice an educational philosophy that was not Davis's own.
As Davis makes clear in his own memoir, Livin' the Blues, he loved college! He was the rare African-American to get a college education in the 1920s, and he savored every minute of it. The years he spent at Kansas State University proved particularly rewarding. The campus was "beautiful," the students "usually agreeable," and his journalism department "excellent." It was here that he discovered his gift for poetry, a gift that was praised and nurtured by his uniformly white professors. In fact, he dedicated his second book of poetry to Charles Elkin Rogers, the department head with whom he shared "a fine friendship."
Throughout his memoir, Davis meets fellow black writers and cites their college backgrounds approvingly. He also meets open-minded white college students, whom he sees as the hope for America's racial future. His college poetry-reading tours on the mainland in 1973 and 1974 are huge successes. They fill him with hope and confidence. The "Frank" who speaks ill of university life is pure Ayers sock-puppet.
The second semi-fictional surrogate in Dreams goes by the phonied-up name "Asante Moran," likely a knowing tip of the hat to the Afrocentric educator Molefi Kete Asante. In Dreams, Moran lectures Obama and his pal "Johnnie" on the nature of public education:
In Dreams, Moran elaborates on the fate of the black student: "From day one, what's he learning about? Someone else's history. Someone else's culture. Not only that, this culture he's supposed to learn is the same culture that's systematically rejected him, denied his humanity."
Precociously Afrocentric, especially for a white guy, Ayers has been making the same case since he first got involved in education. In 1968, as the 23-year-old director of an alternative school in Ann Arbor, he told the Toledo Blade:
The essay by Ayers and his nominal co-author, former New Communist Movement leader Michael Klonsky, has the kind of title one would expect from a former merchant seaman fond of nautical metaphors: "Navigating a restless sea: The continuing struggle to achieve a decent education for African American youngsters in Chicago." The "Obama" excerpts are all from Dreams. The Ayers excerpts come from "Navigating."
For reasons both ideological and practical, Ayers did not wish to confront this bureaucracy. In none of his writing, in fact, can he bring himself to challenge black leadership, however flawed. He inevitably traces Chicago school problems to white people: Mayor Daley, Chicago businessmen, unnamed "professionals," Reagan education secretary William Bennett, even "right-wing academic Chester Finn." In "Navigating," he disingenuously affirms the black activists who gripe that assaults on the bureaucracy were based not "on hopes for educational change, but on simple Chicago race politics."
On this racially tender issue, not so strangely, Dreams tells a different story. Obama openly chides the black "teachers, principals, and district superintendents" who "knew too much" to send their own children to public school. "The biggest source of resistance was rarely talked about," Obama continues -- namely, that these educators "would defend the status quo with the same skill and vigor as their white counterparts of two decades before."
Black obstructionism was "rarely talked about" because white people who did would almost invariably be called racist, and blacks feared blowback from the bureaucracy. Ayers himself would not talk about it, at least not publicly. In the Obama of Dreams, however, Ayers finally had someone black who could voice his own private opinions publicly.
As to the claims of these educators, affirmed in "Navigating," that "cutbacks in the bureaucracy "were part of a white effort to wrest back control," the author of Dreams says teasingly, "not so true." Not so true? In these three words one can anticipate Obama's potential return on Ayers' investment.
Bill Ayers surely recognized this. Tom Ayers likely did, too. Dreams was a careful book, one written to launch the career of a deeply indebted and highly malleable Chicago politician, maybe even a mayor -- one who saw the world through white eyes, as the Ayers family did, but one who could articulate the city's real problems in words that only an African-American could access.
In 1994, however, Obama was still struggling with a book commissioned three years earlier. He had already blown one advance and was struggling with a second. As Ayers surely knew, a published author -- indeed, the author of "the best memoir ever produced by an American politician" according to Time Magazine -- had a much better political future than a failed writer with a contract hanging over his head.
In retrospect, the completion of the book by Ayers seems part of a calculated launch. With Ayers' help, Obama assumed the chairmanship of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) in February 1995. The Annenberg Foundation had breathed the CAC to life that same year with a $50-million grant to be matched by $100 million from other sources. The money was to fund educational reform projects.
Ayers was the co-founder and guiding force behind this massive slush fund. Ayers' own radical projects received enough funding to raise eyebrows even within the CAC. As a chairman more than a little indebted to Ayers, Obama seemed indifferent to possible conflicts of interest as he happily signed off on Ayers' adventures.
In June of 1995, Dreams was published, and in September 1995, Ayers hosted a campaign kick-off for Obama at Ayers' home. In November 2008, Ayers had the nerve to tell the audience of ABC's Good Morning America, "I think he was probably in 20 homes that day as far as I know. But that was the first time I really met him."
This background makes sense of Ayers' decision to rescue Dreams from an Obama whose sluggish work ethic and sophomoric writing style were betraying their shared ambitions. Having been called in to rescue a few books myself, I have a good sense of the effort Ayers put into the project. It was considerable. If Tom Ayers were indeed behind the Obama launch, as the mailman suggests, he could have made it worth Bill's while. Someone apparently did.
http://www.americanthinker.com/
March 23, 2012
From early on, I have argued that terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers, a skilled writer and editor, is the primary craftsman behind Dreams. Thanks to the video interview of mailman Allen Hulton by WND's Jerome Corsi, we have a clearer picture of why Ayers would have invested so much time in this project and how he might have been reimbursed.
Say what one will about the sanity of Ayers' educational philosophy, there is no denying his sincerity. He has been plugging away at educational reform his entire adult life. Dreams, I will argue, gave him the opportunity to address the one great obstacle to the reform of Chicago schools -- namely, an obstructionist black educational bureaucracy. To make his case in the book, Ayers employs three semi-fictional African American surrogates, the third of whom easily being the least fictional and most useful.
To be sure, there is much other evidence to believe that Ayers crafted Dreams: the comprehensive postmodern patois that Obama and Ayers share, the matching 50 or so nautical metaphors, the shared use of the Conrad-like triple-parallels, the nearly fetishistic eye and eyebrow metaphors, the three stunning parallel stories, the four matching errors, the same weary '60s worldview, the borrowed Ayers girlfriend in Dreams, the inarguably similar Homeric openings, the dramatically inferior writings of Obama before and after Dreams, and more. It is Ayers' strategic use of black surrogates, however, that will tell us why he involved himself in Dreams.
The first of the surrogates readers of Dreams know as "Frank." In real life, of course, he was poet, pornographer, and Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis. Despite his influential role as mentor to the teenage Obama and his talents as a writer, Davis remains unknown to 99 percent of Obama supporters. The media are queasy about the "Communist" part.
In Dreams, Frank tells the college-bound Obama, "Understand something, boy. You're not going to college to get educated. You're going there to get trained." He continues, "They'll train you to forget what it is that you already know. They'll train you so good, you'll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit."
Not surprisingly, Ayers too has strong opinions about "education" on the one hand and "training" on the other. "Education is for self-activating explorers of life, for those who would challenge fate, for doers and activists, for citizens," he writes in his 1993 book To Teach. "Training," on the other hand, "is for slaves, for loyal subjects, for tractable employees, for willing consumers, for obedient soldiers." Adds Ayers, "What we call education is usually no more than training. We are so busy operating schools that we have lost sight of learning."
Just as Ayers makes the case that students are often stripped of their ethnic identity and "taught to be like whites," Frank argues that university expectations include "leaving your race at the door." I call Frank "semi-fictional" because Ayers used him to voice an educational philosophy that was not Davis's own.
As Davis makes clear in his own memoir, Livin' the Blues, he loved college! He was the rare African-American to get a college education in the 1920s, and he savored every minute of it. The years he spent at Kansas State University proved particularly rewarding. The campus was "beautiful," the students "usually agreeable," and his journalism department "excellent." It was here that he discovered his gift for poetry, a gift that was praised and nurtured by his uniformly white professors. In fact, he dedicated his second book of poetry to Charles Elkin Rogers, the department head with whom he shared "a fine friendship."
Throughout his memoir, Davis meets fellow black writers and cites their college backgrounds approvingly. He also meets open-minded white college students, whom he sees as the hope for America's racial future. His college poetry-reading tours on the mainland in 1973 and 1974 are huge successes. They fill him with hope and confidence. The "Frank" who speaks ill of university life is pure Ayers sock-puppet.
The second semi-fictional surrogate in Dreams goes by the phonied-up name "Asante Moran," likely a knowing tip of the hat to the Afrocentric educator Molefi Kete Asante. In Dreams, Moran lectures Obama and his pal "Johnnie" on the nature of public education:
"The first thing you have to realize," he said, looking at Johnnie and me in turn, "is that the public school system is not about educating black children. Never has been. Inner-city schools are about social control. Period.""Social control" is an Ayers obsession. "The message to Black people was that at any moment and for any reason whatsoever your life or the lives of your loved ones could be randomly snuffed out," he writes in his 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days. "The intention was social control through random intimidation and unpredictable violence."
In Dreams, Moran elaborates on the fate of the black student: "From day one, what's he learning about? Someone else's history. Someone else's culture. Not only that, this culture he's supposed to learn is the same culture that's systematically rejected him, denied his humanity."
Precociously Afrocentric, especially for a white guy, Ayers has been making the same case since he first got involved in education. In 1968, as the 23-year-old director of an alternative school in Ann Arbor, he told the Toledo Blade:
The public schools' idea of integration is racist. They put Negro children into school and demand that they give up their Negro culture. Negro children are forced to speak, behave, and react according to middle-class standards.The third and most important semi-fictional Ayers surrogate is Barack Obama himself. Again, I say semi-fictional because the thoughts the Obama of Dreams voices about educational reform are no more his own than Moran's or Frank's are. What is more, these thoughts happen to match point by point those spelled out by Bill Ayers in a 1994 essay, the same year Ayers would have been polishing up Dreams.
The essay by Ayers and his nominal co-author, former New Communist Movement leader Michael Klonsky, has the kind of title one would expect from a former merchant seaman fond of nautical metaphors: "Navigating a restless sea: The continuing struggle to achieve a decent education for African American youngsters in Chicago." The "Obama" excerpts are all from Dreams. The Ayers excerpts come from "Navigating."
- Obama: Chicago's schools "remained in a state of perpetual crisis."
- Ayers: Chicago schools remained in a "perpetual state of conflict, paralysis, and stagnation."
- Obama: Problems include a "bloated bureaucracy" and "a teachers' union that went out on strike at least once every two years" as another.
- Ayers: The "bureaucracy has grown steadily in the past decade." Ayers also confirms "Dreams" math, citing a "ninth walkout in 18 years."
- Obama: "Self-interest" is at the heart of the bureaucratic mess.
- Ayers: "Survivalist bureaucracies" struggle for power "to protect their narrow, self-interested positions against any common, public purpose."
- Obama: Educators "defend the status quo" and blame problems on "impossible" children and their "bad parents."
- Ayers: An educator serves as "apologist for the status quo" and "place[s] the blame for school failure on children and families."
- Obama: One problem is "an indifferent state legislature."
- Ayers: One problem is an "unwillingness on [the legislature's] part to adequately fund Chicago schools."
- Obama: "School reform" is the only solution.
- Ayers: The only solution is "reforming Chicago's schools."
For reasons both ideological and practical, Ayers did not wish to confront this bureaucracy. In none of his writing, in fact, can he bring himself to challenge black leadership, however flawed. He inevitably traces Chicago school problems to white people: Mayor Daley, Chicago businessmen, unnamed "professionals," Reagan education secretary William Bennett, even "right-wing academic Chester Finn." In "Navigating," he disingenuously affirms the black activists who gripe that assaults on the bureaucracy were based not "on hopes for educational change, but on simple Chicago race politics."
On this racially tender issue, not so strangely, Dreams tells a different story. Obama openly chides the black "teachers, principals, and district superintendents" who "knew too much" to send their own children to public school. "The biggest source of resistance was rarely talked about," Obama continues -- namely, that these educators "would defend the status quo with the same skill and vigor as their white counterparts of two decades before."
Black obstructionism was "rarely talked about" because white people who did would almost invariably be called racist, and blacks feared blowback from the bureaucracy. Ayers himself would not talk about it, at least not publicly. In the Obama of Dreams, however, Ayers finally had someone black who could voice his own private opinions publicly.
As to the claims of these educators, affirmed in "Navigating," that "cutbacks in the bureaucracy "were part of a white effort to wrest back control," the author of Dreams says teasingly, "not so true." Not so true? In these three words one can anticipate Obama's potential return on Ayers' investment.
Bill Ayers surely recognized this. Tom Ayers likely did, too. Dreams was a careful book, one written to launch the career of a deeply indebted and highly malleable Chicago politician, maybe even a mayor -- one who saw the world through white eyes, as the Ayers family did, but one who could articulate the city's real problems in words that only an African-American could access.
In 1994, however, Obama was still struggling with a book commissioned three years earlier. He had already blown one advance and was struggling with a second. As Ayers surely knew, a published author -- indeed, the author of "the best memoir ever produced by an American politician" according to Time Magazine -- had a much better political future than a failed writer with a contract hanging over his head.
In retrospect, the completion of the book by Ayers seems part of a calculated launch. With Ayers' help, Obama assumed the chairmanship of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) in February 1995. The Annenberg Foundation had breathed the CAC to life that same year with a $50-million grant to be matched by $100 million from other sources. The money was to fund educational reform projects.
Ayers was the co-founder and guiding force behind this massive slush fund. Ayers' own radical projects received enough funding to raise eyebrows even within the CAC. As a chairman more than a little indebted to Ayers, Obama seemed indifferent to possible conflicts of interest as he happily signed off on Ayers' adventures.
In June of 1995, Dreams was published, and in September 1995, Ayers hosted a campaign kick-off for Obama at Ayers' home. In November 2008, Ayers had the nerve to tell the audience of ABC's Good Morning America, "I think he was probably in 20 homes that day as far as I know. But that was the first time I really met him."
This background makes sense of Ayers' decision to rescue Dreams from an Obama whose sluggish work ethic and sophomoric writing style were betraying their shared ambitions. Having been called in to rescue a few books myself, I have a good sense of the effort Ayers put into the project. It was considerable. If Tom Ayers were indeed behind the Obama launch, as the mailman suggests, he could have made it worth Bill's while. Someone apparently did.
Book details bond shared by Yankee legends Berra, Guidry
By Steve Gardner, USA TODAY
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/dailypitch/
March 15, 2012
TAMPA -- In baseball, spring training is all about the rhythm of the daily routine.
For the active players, everything is geared toward getting ready for the regular season. But for former players, spring training may be the only chance they get to put on the old uniform.
A new book by New York Times columnist Harvey Araton chronicles a cross-generational friendship between former New York Yankees Yogi Berra and Ron Guidry that is renewed every spring when the two icons become almost inseparable both on and off the field.
Driving Mr. Yogi details how Guidry, who won 170 games in 14 seasons for the Yankees and was serving as a spring training instructor, volunteered to pick up the Hall of Fame catcher at the airport in March of 1999 when Berra famously ended his 14-year boycott of the franchise.
That simple act developed over the years into much more than a spring training ritual.
It's a story about baseball, yes. But it's also a story about a friendship. And it's a story about caring for and respecting those of an earlier generation.
The book hits store shelves on April 3, the day before the 2012 season opens.
Araton says Guidry's unquestioned devotion to Berra was a story that needed to be told. "After spending one day with him (last May in Louisiana), I was able to get a sense of the depth of feeling he has for Yogi just by the way he spoke about him in an emotional way," the author says.
For each of the past 14 years, Guidry drives his pickup truck from Louisiana to Florida while Berra arrives on a flight from his home in New Jersey. And they spend just about all of the following month together.
For his part, Guidry doesn't feel he's doing anything special by picking Berra up every day and driving him to the park, looking after him at camp and then going out to dinner each night -- among other duties.
"Even though it's routine ... it's always been fun. I'm not doing it for any particular purpose, he's just my best friend. He's one of my heroes," Guidry says.
The deep friendship with Berra is readily apparent. Asked why he continues t0 go to such lengths, it seems appropriate that Guidry would sum it all up his own Yogi-ism: "Who wouldn't want to do what I'm doing? And I'm not doing nothing!"
By HARVEY ARATON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
February 23, 2011
When Yogi Berra arrived on Tuesday afternoon at Tampa International Airport, Ron Guidry was waiting for him. (Edward Linsmier for The New York Times)
TAMPA, Fla. — With all the yearly changes made by the Yankees, Yogi Berra’s arrival at their spring training base adds a timeless quality to baseball’s most historic franchise.
Berra, the catching legend and pop culture icon, slips back into the uniform with the famous and familiar No. 8. He checks into the same hotel in the vicinity of George M. Steinbrenner Field and requests the same room. He plans his days methodically — wake up at 6 a.m., breakfast at 6:30, depart for the complex by 7 — and steps outside to be greeted by the same driver he has had for the past dozen years.
The driver has a rather famous name, and nickname, as well.
“It’s like I’m the valet,” said Ron Guidry, the former star pitcher known around the Yankees as Gator for his Louisiana roots. “Actually, I am the valet.”
When Berra arrived on Tuesday afternoon from New Jersey for his three- to four-week stay, Guidry, as always, was waiting for him at Tampa International Airport. Since Berra forgave George Steinbrenner in 1999 for firing him as the manager in 1985 through a subordinate and ended a 14-year boycott of the team, Guidry has been his faithful friend and loyal shepherd.
Guidry had a custom-made cap to certify his proud standing. The inscription reads, “Driving Mr. Yogi.”
“He’s a good guy,” Berra, the Yankees’ 85-year-old honorary patriarch, said during an interview at his museum in Little Falls, N.J. “We hang out together in spring training.”
By “hanging out,” Berra means being in uniform with the Yankees by day and having dinner with Guidry by night. That is, until Guidry, who loves to cook and rents a two-bedroom apartment across the road from where Berra stays, demands a break from their spring training rotation of the five restaurants that meet Berra’s approval.
“See, I really love the old man, but because of what we share — which is something very special — I can treat him more as a friend and I can say, ‘Get your butt in my truck or you’re staying,’ ” Guidry said. “He likes that kind of camaraderie, wants to be treated like everybody else, but because of who he is, that’s not how everybody around here treats him.
“So I’ll say, ‘Yogi, tonight we’re going to Fleming’s, then to Lee Roy Selmon’s tomorrow, and then the night after that you stay in your damn room, have a ham sandwich or whatever, because the world doesn’t revolve around you and I’m taking a night off.’ ”
Berra played 18 years for the Yankees, from 1946 to 1963, and was part of 10 World Series champions. Guidry pitched from the mid-1970s through 1988, played on two World Series winners and was a Cy Young Award winner in 1978, when he was 25-3 with a 1.74 earned run average.
While Guidry was blossoming into one of baseball’s premier left-handers, Berra was a coach on Manager Billy Martin’s staff (and later became Guidry’s manager). They dressed at adjacent stalls in the clubhouse of the old Yankee Stadium. Eager to learn, Guidry would pepper Berra with questions about what he, as a former catcher, thought of hitters.
Berra would say, “You got a great catcher right over there,” nodding in the direction of Thurman Munson. But Guidry persisted, and their bond was formed.
During Berra’s self-imposed absence, Guidry saw him only on occasion, at card-signing shows and at Berra’s charity golf tournament near his home in Montclair, N.J. When Berra returned, the retired players he knew best were no longer part of the spring training instructional staff.
“There was really nobody else that he had to sit and talk with, to be around after the day at the ballpark,” Guidry said. “So I just told him, ‘I’ll pick you up, we’ll go out to supper,’ and that’s how it started. It wasn’t like I planned it. It just developed.”
In offering his companionship, Guidry discovered that he was the luckier side of the partnership spanning generations of Yankees greatness.
“I never got to pitch against Ted Williams, for example,” Guidry said. “I’d say, ‘Yogi, when you guys had to go to Boston and you had to face Williams, how did you work him?’ You know, he’s like an encyclopedia, and that’s what I loved, all the stories and just being with him. If he’s not the most beloved man in America, I don’t know who is.”
Berra’s wife, Carmen, typically joins her husband in Tampa during spring training, but charity and family obligations generally limit her time here to a few days. Guidry, she said, has been “so special to Yogi, like a member of the family.”
He has asked Berra to stay with him in his apartment, but Berra prefers the hotel.
“I mean, the only time we’re really not together is when he’s asleep,” Guidry said. “But you can’t get him out of there because that’s how it’s been. You can’t change him. When he does it one day, it’s going to be that way for the next 1,000 days.”
Berra was 73 when he rejoined the Yankees family, but his rigid need for routines had little to do with his age, said Carmen Berra, his wife of 62 years.
“That’s always been Yogi,” she said. “If the doctor tells him to take a pill at 9 a.m., the bottle is open at 5 of 9.”
That is why Guidry considers his supreme achievement in their dozen years as the Yankees’ odd couple to be the day — he guessed it was five years ago — that he persuaded Berra to try a Cajun culinary staple.
Every spring, Guidry brings from his home near Lafayette, La., about 200 frog legs and a flour mix to fry them. One day, he took a batch to the clubhouse to share with the former pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre, turned to Berra and said, “Try these.”
Berra shook his head, as if Guidry were offering him tofu.
Guidry told him, “You don’t try it, we’re not going out to supper tonight.”
Berra relented, and soon a dinner of frog legs, green beans wrapped in bacon and a sweet potato at Guidry’s apartment — usually timed to a weekend of N.C.A.A. basketball tournament games — became as much a rite of spring as pitchers and catchers.
“He calls me at home this year to remind me about the frogs’ legs — ‘Did you get ’em yet?’ ” Guidry said. “I said, ‘Yogi, it’s freaking January, calm down.’ ”
Though Berra often calls Guidry during the off-season, he has never visited him in Louisiana. “He lives in the swamps, you know,” Berra said.
When Guidry was the Yankees’ pitching coach in 2006 and 2007, Berra could count on him being in spring training. Now Guidry must receive an invitation from the Yankees, which he and Berra anxiously await.
During exhibition games, they sit on the bench together, in the corner by the water cooler, studying the game. “Every once in a while, Yogi will see something about a guy and think that he can help,” Guidry said.
Last season, Berra noticed that pitchers were getting Nick Swisher out with breaking balls and mentioned to Guidry that he thought Swisher might try moving up in the batter’s box to attack the pitch sooner.
“Tell him, not me,” Guidry said.
“Nah, I don’t want to bother him,” Berra said.
After Swisher grounded out, he walked past Guidry and Berra in the dugout. Guidry stood up, pointed at Berra. “He wants to talk to you,” Guidry said. Swisher sat down, heard Berra out and doubled off the wall in his next at-bat. After he scored, he returned to the dugout and parked himself alongside Berra.
“For Yogi, that meant everything,” Guidry said. “Now who knows if that had anything to do with the great season Swisher had? But in Yogi’s mind, he made a friend and he felt, ‘O.K., that justifies me being here,’ even though everybody loves having him here anyway.
“But that’s the thing — for Yogi, spring training is his last hold on baseball,” Guidry added. “When he walks through that door in the clubhouse, sits at the locker, puts on his uniform, talks to everybody, jokes around, watches batting practice, goes back in, has something to eat, and then he and I will go on the bench and watch the game, believe me, I know how much he really looks forward to it.”
Since taking a fall outside his home last summer that required hospitalization and a period of inactivity, Berra has slowed. His voice is softer. His words seem to be sparser.
“I know Carmen feels he’s going to be fine and occupied because I’m around,” Guidry said. “But this year may be harder than the rest because of what happened. I’m just going to have to watch a little more closely to see what he can do.”
The first item on Berra’s agenda, he said, would be to go shopping.
“He buys his roast beef, I buy my bottle of vodka,” Berra said, with a twinkle in his eye. “We get along real good.”
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/dailypitch/
March 15, 2012
For the active players, everything is geared toward getting ready for the regular season. But for former players, spring training may be the only chance they get to put on the old uniform.
A new book by New York Times columnist Harvey Araton chronicles a cross-generational friendship between former New York Yankees Yogi Berra and Ron Guidry that is renewed every spring when the two icons become almost inseparable both on and off the field.
Driving Mr. Yogi details how Guidry, who won 170 games in 14 seasons for the Yankees and was serving as a spring training instructor, volunteered to pick up the Hall of Fame catcher at the airport in March of 1999 when Berra famously ended his 14-year boycott of the franchise.
That simple act developed over the years into much more than a spring training ritual.
It's a story about baseball, yes. But it's also a story about a friendship. And it's a story about caring for and respecting those of an earlier generation.
The book hits store shelves on April 3, the day before the 2012 season opens.
Araton says Guidry's unquestioned devotion to Berra was a story that needed to be told. "After spending one day with him (last May in Louisiana), I was able to get a sense of the depth of feeling he has for Yogi just by the way he spoke about him in an emotional way," the author says.
For each of the past 14 years, Guidry drives his pickup truck from Louisiana to Florida while Berra arrives on a flight from his home in New Jersey. And they spend just about all of the following month together.
For his part, Guidry doesn't feel he's doing anything special by picking Berra up every day and driving him to the park, looking after him at camp and then going out to dinner each night -- among other duties.
"Even though it's routine ... it's always been fun. I'm not doing it for any particular purpose, he's just my best friend. He's one of my heroes," Guidry says.
The deep friendship with Berra is readily apparent. Asked why he continues t0 go to such lengths, it seems appropriate that Guidry would sum it all up his own Yogi-ism: "Who wouldn't want to do what I'm doing? And I'm not doing nothing!"
For Berra and Guidry, It Happens Every Spring
TAMPA, Fla. — With all the yearly changes made by the Yankees, Yogi Berra’s arrival at their spring training base adds a timeless quality to baseball’s most historic franchise.
Berra, the catching legend and pop culture icon, slips back into the uniform with the famous and familiar No. 8. He checks into the same hotel in the vicinity of George M. Steinbrenner Field and requests the same room. He plans his days methodically — wake up at 6 a.m., breakfast at 6:30, depart for the complex by 7 — and steps outside to be greeted by the same driver he has had for the past dozen years.
The driver has a rather famous name, and nickname, as well.
“It’s like I’m the valet,” said Ron Guidry, the former star pitcher known around the Yankees as Gator for his Louisiana roots. “Actually, I am the valet.”
When Berra arrived on Tuesday afternoon from New Jersey for his three- to four-week stay, Guidry, as always, was waiting for him at Tampa International Airport. Since Berra forgave George Steinbrenner in 1999 for firing him as the manager in 1985 through a subordinate and ended a 14-year boycott of the team, Guidry has been his faithful friend and loyal shepherd.
Guidry had a custom-made cap to certify his proud standing. The inscription reads, “Driving Mr. Yogi.”
“He’s a good guy,” Berra, the Yankees’ 85-year-old honorary patriarch, said during an interview at his museum in Little Falls, N.J. “We hang out together in spring training.”
By “hanging out,” Berra means being in uniform with the Yankees by day and having dinner with Guidry by night. That is, until Guidry, who loves to cook and rents a two-bedroom apartment across the road from where Berra stays, demands a break from their spring training rotation of the five restaurants that meet Berra’s approval.
“See, I really love the old man, but because of what we share — which is something very special — I can treat him more as a friend and I can say, ‘Get your butt in my truck or you’re staying,’ ” Guidry said. “He likes that kind of camaraderie, wants to be treated like everybody else, but because of who he is, that’s not how everybody around here treats him.
“So I’ll say, ‘Yogi, tonight we’re going to Fleming’s, then to Lee Roy Selmon’s tomorrow, and then the night after that you stay in your damn room, have a ham sandwich or whatever, because the world doesn’t revolve around you and I’m taking a night off.’ ”
Berra played 18 years for the Yankees, from 1946 to 1963, and was part of 10 World Series champions. Guidry pitched from the mid-1970s through 1988, played on two World Series winners and was a Cy Young Award winner in 1978, when he was 25-3 with a 1.74 earned run average.
While Guidry was blossoming into one of baseball’s premier left-handers, Berra was a coach on Manager Billy Martin’s staff (and later became Guidry’s manager). They dressed at adjacent stalls in the clubhouse of the old Yankee Stadium. Eager to learn, Guidry would pepper Berra with questions about what he, as a former catcher, thought of hitters.
Berra would say, “You got a great catcher right over there,” nodding in the direction of Thurman Munson. But Guidry persisted, and their bond was formed.
During Berra’s self-imposed absence, Guidry saw him only on occasion, at card-signing shows and at Berra’s charity golf tournament near his home in Montclair, N.J. When Berra returned, the retired players he knew best were no longer part of the spring training instructional staff.
“There was really nobody else that he had to sit and talk with, to be around after the day at the ballpark,” Guidry said. “So I just told him, ‘I’ll pick you up, we’ll go out to supper,’ and that’s how it started. It wasn’t like I planned it. It just developed.”
In offering his companionship, Guidry discovered that he was the luckier side of the partnership spanning generations of Yankees greatness.
“I never got to pitch against Ted Williams, for example,” Guidry said. “I’d say, ‘Yogi, when you guys had to go to Boston and you had to face Williams, how did you work him?’ You know, he’s like an encyclopedia, and that’s what I loved, all the stories and just being with him. If he’s not the most beloved man in America, I don’t know who is.”
Berra’s wife, Carmen, typically joins her husband in Tampa during spring training, but charity and family obligations generally limit her time here to a few days. Guidry, she said, has been “so special to Yogi, like a member of the family.”
He has asked Berra to stay with him in his apartment, but Berra prefers the hotel.
“I mean, the only time we’re really not together is when he’s asleep,” Guidry said. “But you can’t get him out of there because that’s how it’s been. You can’t change him. When he does it one day, it’s going to be that way for the next 1,000 days.”
Berra was 73 when he rejoined the Yankees family, but his rigid need for routines had little to do with his age, said Carmen Berra, his wife of 62 years.
“That’s always been Yogi,” she said. “If the doctor tells him to take a pill at 9 a.m., the bottle is open at 5 of 9.”
That is why Guidry considers his supreme achievement in their dozen years as the Yankees’ odd couple to be the day — he guessed it was five years ago — that he persuaded Berra to try a Cajun culinary staple.
Every spring, Guidry brings from his home near Lafayette, La., about 200 frog legs and a flour mix to fry them. One day, he took a batch to the clubhouse to share with the former pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre, turned to Berra and said, “Try these.”
Berra shook his head, as if Guidry were offering him tofu.
Guidry told him, “You don’t try it, we’re not going out to supper tonight.”
Berra relented, and soon a dinner of frog legs, green beans wrapped in bacon and a sweet potato at Guidry’s apartment — usually timed to a weekend of N.C.A.A. basketball tournament games — became as much a rite of spring as pitchers and catchers.
“He calls me at home this year to remind me about the frogs’ legs — ‘Did you get ’em yet?’ ” Guidry said. “I said, ‘Yogi, it’s freaking January, calm down.’ ”
Though Berra often calls Guidry during the off-season, he has never visited him in Louisiana. “He lives in the swamps, you know,” Berra said.
When Guidry was the Yankees’ pitching coach in 2006 and 2007, Berra could count on him being in spring training. Now Guidry must receive an invitation from the Yankees, which he and Berra anxiously await.
During exhibition games, they sit on the bench together, in the corner by the water cooler, studying the game. “Every once in a while, Yogi will see something about a guy and think that he can help,” Guidry said.
Last season, Berra noticed that pitchers were getting Nick Swisher out with breaking balls and mentioned to Guidry that he thought Swisher might try moving up in the batter’s box to attack the pitch sooner.
“Tell him, not me,” Guidry said.
“Nah, I don’t want to bother him,” Berra said.
After Swisher grounded out, he walked past Guidry and Berra in the dugout. Guidry stood up, pointed at Berra. “He wants to talk to you,” Guidry said. Swisher sat down, heard Berra out and doubled off the wall in his next at-bat. After he scored, he returned to the dugout and parked himself alongside Berra.
“For Yogi, that meant everything,” Guidry said. “Now who knows if that had anything to do with the great season Swisher had? But in Yogi’s mind, he made a friend and he felt, ‘O.K., that justifies me being here,’ even though everybody loves having him here anyway.
“But that’s the thing — for Yogi, spring training is his last hold on baseball,” Guidry added. “When he walks through that door in the clubhouse, sits at the locker, puts on his uniform, talks to everybody, jokes around, watches batting practice, goes back in, has something to eat, and then he and I will go on the bench and watch the game, believe me, I know how much he really looks forward to it.”
Since taking a fall outside his home last summer that required hospitalization and a period of inactivity, Berra has slowed. His voice is softer. His words seem to be sparser.
“I know Carmen feels he’s going to be fine and occupied because I’m around,” Guidry said. “But this year may be harder than the rest because of what happened. I’m just going to have to watch a little more closely to see what he can do.”
The first item on Berra’s agenda, he said, would be to go shopping.
“He buys his roast beef, I buy my bottle of vodka,” Berra said, with a twinkle in his eye. “We get along real good.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
