Buttermilk & Molasses

Kristi Way? No Way!

Really. How could I not post that title? It was sitting there, dying for someone to use it.

10 Reasons I LOVE the Obama Administration

I'm mindful that we're still in the honeymoon phase of governance, and that Bill Clinton let me down repeatedly during his early years in the White House, but there's something to be said about President Obama's initial flurry of executive orders and public statements. In fact, here are 10 good things to be said about them:

1. Obama's Memorandum on Transparency promises to create "an unprecedented level of openness in Government."
2. The January 21 memo on the Freedom of Information Act sets a new tone across the federal government about the public's right to access information.
3. A ban on lobbyist gifts and post-employment lobbying by executive appointees is a welcome change in expectation, as is the wage freeze for executive employees during a time of economic difficulty. The freeze will save the federal government $443,000 next year.
4. He's closing Gitmo -- and doing it in a measured way. But he's doing it after receiving "a passionate plea," from military flag officers, "that we restore the standards of due process and core constitutional values that make this country great even in the midst of war." He also prohibited the CIA from holding detainees in so-called "black prisons."
5. Torture is officially less likely to happen under the Obama administration: "We can abide by a rule that says 'We don't torture,' " he said. He added that doing so follows a campaign promise but also "an understanding that dates back to our Founding Fathers that we are willing to observe…standards of conduct not just when it is easy but also when it's hard."
6. He acknowledged the 36th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, stating that "we are reminded that this decision not only protects women's health and reproductive freedom, but stands for a broader principle: that government should not intrude on our most private family matters. I remain committed to protecting a woman's right to choose."
7. He just screwed Bush's ability to invoke executive privilege and prevent the release of Presidential records.
8. The White House website actually looks and feels more open and free now.
9. He pissed off some Bush staffers during his inaugural address. Karl Rove wrote, "in a last angry frenzy his critics again distorted his record, maligned his character and repeated untruths about his years in the Oval Office." I'm not sure we've had the last angry frenzy related to Mr. Bush.
10. This headline: "Obama Picks Critics of Warrantless Wiretapping for Slot at Justice Dept."

Secretary of the Arts: An Idea Worth Stealing

That crazy Quincy Jones and his notion that what the United States is a Cabinet level Secretary of the Arts is starting to spark a little attention. Paste Magazine jumped on the bandwagon this week with their picks for such a role -- winning major points from me simply by putting Tom Waits at the top of their list. (An online petition for the creation of a Department of Art had 179,619 signatures as of today.)

Imagine if the City of Richmond had someone, anyone, actively advocating for the arts? Okay, I know, gluing arts and government together is bad, the last thing we need is more government, this would just be a shill for the corporate community. But I just came from a half-day budgeting session where a group of art advocates tried to divvy up a paltry $38,000 between 19 arts organizations representing Richmond, Henrico and Chesterfield. (The other $400,000+ landed in the laps of a group of established organizations who signed onto a collaborative budgeting process some 14 years ago.)

My takeaway this morning was twofold -- the public funding mechanism for arts and culture in the Richmond region is broken, and there are a lot of amazing cultural organizations in our region doing incredible work on bare-bones budgets. Haggling over $1,000 in public monies for an organization borders on the absurd -- even though that represents as much as 5% of the annual operating budget of some smaller arts organizations.

My sense is that the Richmond Region Cultural Action Plan process has begun to identify public funding as a serious issue -- not necessarily a need for more funding (though there are advocates for that) but at a minimum a better process to distribute existing funding.

So, a Richmond Arts Administator? Maybe not. A better process to fund arts organizations? Absolutely.

A Change Is Coming

A few weeks ago, I posted some random thoughts calling on Richmond's political leaders to stop viewing residents as consumers, and start viewing us as citizens. Next thing you know, I'm reading pollster John Zogby's latest screed "The Way We'll Be" and his prognastication that our society is moving toward living with limits as consumers and citizens, and are demanding more authenticity from our leaders and each other.

And then, lo and behold, uber-strategist John Robb shows up and echoes it all over again from a slightly different vantage point. The makings of a trend!

Robb talks about the consumer label as masking a transformation already in progress, and that will make our society much more resilient going forward. Here are a few things Robb sees us becoming as a culture:

• Frugal. Elimination of financial debt and dependency.
  
  
• Thrifty with expenses. New sources of low cost food, energy, security, etc. that are financially sustainable.
  
  
• More physical. Not backbreaking 19th Century labor, but the nominal investments required to enable the transition. Re-skilling to accomplish basic tasks.
  
• Virtual. Knowledge work without commutes, offices, etc. sold to global customers via online collaboration. New skills in social software. Free agency.
  
  
• Cooperative. New geographic and global virtual communities. To share ideas, designs, insight, encouragement, physical work, etc. To build community platforms.

Where Will You Experience History on Tuesday?

So far, I've found three public spaces in the Richmond area that will be throwing down with democratic fervor when President George W. Bush lets his 78% disapproval rating hit him on the rearside, and America welcomes Barack Obama and Joe Biden to the White House.

• Toad's Place: Style Weekly and Toad's Place will bring an appropriate amount of urban and urbane energy to the swearing-in with 15 big screens from 11:00 a.m. until 2:00 p.m. I was oddly disappointed that Toad's Place did not develop signature sandwiches for the event. It's free. It's downtown.

• St. Paul's Episcopal Church: A few things you should know. St. Paul's is where Robert E. Lee worshipped. It's also where the nation's first elected black governor held his pre-inaugural prayer service. That'd be L. Douglas Wilder if you dozed off in history class, or life. On Tuesday, the downtown church will host an interfaith service of prayer and music, open to the public. The service will be followed by a gathering in the church's Parrish Hall to watch the swearing-in.

• Northminster Baptist Church: This Northside church has a couple of really big TV screens, and they're opening their doors to the community from 11:00 a.m. until 3:00 p.m. for an informal gathering and viewing of the big event.

Nikole, Thea and I will celebrate and watch the inauguration with friends at their Northside home. Where are you going to be inspired?

Does Panetta Represent a Change in Intel Strategy?

I'm sure my Richmond readers have been biting their nails over the appointment of former Clinton Chief of Staff Leon Panetta as Director of Central Intelligence. It's clear that more than one Democrat is miffed over the notion of a non-spy leading one of the nation's largest intelligence operations.

But a reader at Talking Points Cafe makes a compelling argument that Panetta is exactly what the agency, and the nation, need right now -- a competent manager who will return the CIA to the role of providing high-level, strategic intel to the President, rather than a tactical, on-the-ground outfit fighting for scraps with a dozen other groups trying to provide warfighting intel to troops on the front:

The issue is not intell guy or non-intell guy. The big issue for Blair and Panetta is strategic or tactical orientation. We are fighting two wars and the warfighter always screams they don't have enough intel or enough of anything for that matter. The dice are so loaded for support to the warfighter that critical strategic intelligence for the President and other senior leaders goes wanting due to time constraints on collection assets.

We need a significant re-orientation away from tactical support by CIA and other National agencies and back to their primary mission - direct intelligence support to the President. The last 15 years have seen an explosion of tactical intelligence capability with the advent of UAVs (which DoD fought against for so long due to the fighter pilot mentality). National systems need to be re-oriented to national priorities and away from tactical or operational desires of the warfighter.

Hmm. A president who operates using strategic intelligence. That'd be a nice change.

What If Richmond Created Citizens, Instead of Consumers?

I read Michelle Singletary's columns on personal finance almost every Sunday in the Washington Post, operating under the assumption that eventually some of her common sense will bleed into my life without any awareness on my part.

This week, I read her column and immediately started thinking about the various downtown development schemes in play around Richmond these days.

It's time, Singletary suggests, to stop thinking of ourselves as consumers.

This recession has proved that things have to change, and still the message from many of our leaders continues to be that consumerism -- consumers -- will save the day. To be a consumer is equivalent to being a good American...

...We track closely the results of the Consumer Confidence Survey. Ever wonder why it isn't billed as the survey of confidence among the American people -- moms, dads, engineers, teachers, social workers, bus drivers, doctors, church-goers, etc.? It's not billed that way because we've come to gauge where we stand -- for good or bad -- by people's purchasing intentions.

As Richmond enters the Dwight Jones/Kathy Graziano era of city government, wouldn't it be an interesting moment to begin to change -- or at least add to -- the measures we use to gauge our success as a city?

What if, in addition to dollars invested and commercial square footage leased, Richmond's leaders began talking seriously about the outcomes of human investment? What if the Department of Social Services initiated a Social Master Plan that mirrored the Downtown Master Plan in its efforts to engage residents in a conversation about what mattered in their lives? What if the School Board and its dramatically new membership were to create a public process that brought parents and teachers and students together to invent a different future for our educational system?

What if our leaders began to invest as much of their time and energy in the creation (or empowerment) of citizens as they in the creation of capital?

What if It's Worse than We Thought?

David Brin, the social scientist and science fiction author turned weblogger, has been posting a series of well-informed and well-articulated thoughts about what the Obama administration might consider tackling in its first months. He floated the idea of a "Truth and Reconciliation" commission earlier this month, and followed it up today with a provocative post on the possibility that the last eight years represented something more malicious than deliberate incompetence.

Along the way, Brin serves up a historical reminder of a simple action taken in 1775 that directed American society along a distinctly different course than its European counterparts. That action, simply put, was state laws managing the redistribution of wealth:

At around the time of the 1775 uprising that sparked the American Revolution, vast sections (up to half) of the colonies of Georgia, New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland were owned by individual families under charters granted by the British crown. The great landlords were mostly royal cronies - personal friends of the king - who never even visited their vast new fiefs. (Such cronyism was cited by Adam Smith as the great destroyer of free markets, rather than socialism, which he considered a much less worrisme threat.)

How did that earlier generation of Founders solve the problem? Certainly seizure of some Tory assets had a great deal to do with the breakup of those grossly unfair, unearned estates -- and such things might happen again, if the People must rise up against a new feudalism. Still, mass confiscation is a bludgeon, at-best unreliable. Often, it only leads to a new class of meddling masters, even worse than those who came before.
 
Fortunately the main rebalancing technique that was used, just after the revolution was far gentler and less socialistic. Across the 1780s and 1790s, many states passed laws against “primogeniture"... the automatic inheritance of all real property and titles by the eldest son.  

That was it.  Simple.  But it sufficed.

Recall that primogeniture had been a strong tradition, that let aristocratic wealth and power remain concentrated in a few families.  Hence, for a generation, American society (through consensus political action) stepped in to severely limit a landowner's right to decide which of his children would receive what. Instead, for a while, the law demanded equal distribution among all offspring.

It sounds meddlesome and anathema to libertarian principles. Yet, without such innovations, America would have started as a true feudal-oligarchy. But thanks to anti-primogeniture laws, within two generations all the remaining giant estates had broken down to fair economic units, without much actual confiscation, by simple division of inheritance among large families.

Brin posits that the current testing of our system of capital might force some similar creativity in the months and years to come -- and suggests we consider (again) taking a different course than our European cousins.

I'm Going to Really Enjoy Being a European

I was just complaining the other day about how Europeans put a splash of cheap red wine in sippy cups for fussy toddlers; apparently, that's taboo here in the States. Fortunately, by the time Thea turns three I'll be able to give her wine, cigarettes and cheap, plastic sandals. At least of you believe former KGB analyst Igor Panarin. From BLDGBlog:

In what sounds to be very obviously an act of wishful projection, a former KGB intelligence analyst turned public intellectual named Igor Panarin has explained to the Wall Street Journal
that the United States only has about 18 months left to live. In the summer of 2010, it will "disintegrate" into six politically separate realms...

And from the Wall Street Journal piece itself:

[Panarin] predicts that economic, financial and demographic trends will provoke a political and social crisis in the U.S. When the going gets tough, he says, wealthier states will withhold funds from the federal government and effectively secede from the union. Social unrest up to and including a civil war will follow. The U.S. will then split along ethnic lines, and foreign powers will move in.

In addition to the fact that Canada and Mexico suddenly develop dramatic political and social influence over populations twice their own, I just really appreciate the notion that as a resident of Atlantic America my cash (which will be Euros, thank you) will be worth six times that of the Chinese-led California Republic. The map pretty much tells the story:

There's something to be said about good, clean mapping. It really takes the messiness out of political restructuring.

In Which a Young Barack Obama Channels His Inner Truman Capote

It all shook down in 1980, according to TIME Magazine.