I’m getting more than a little tired of the right-wing propaganda about how everything would be better if business did it.  While I’ll happily admit that sometimes government does get in the way, more often than not the reason it gets in the way is because lots of people get tired of powerful businesses running over people, the environment, and public health in general in pursuit of power and money. Government may indeed go too far at times, but the motivations behind those acts are spurred by the excesses of business.

As for the myth of “business creativity,” as pointed out in Mariana Mazzacuto’s book, The Entrepreneurial State, the basis for a great many vital corporations, particularly in the United States, was created by government funding on research and development. The U.S. armed forces pioneered the internet, GPS positioning, and the first voice-actuated computerized assistants, not to mention significant early funding for Silicon Valley. Scientists in publicly funded universities and laboratories developed the touchscreen and the HTML language, and the U.S. government funds almost 60% of pure basic research in the U.S.  The U.S. government even lent Apple half a million dollars before it went public.  A grant from the National Science Foundation funded the research that produced Google’s search algorithm.  U.S. pharmaceutical firms have reaped billions from the results of government-funded research. This is far from new in U.S. history.  The transcontinental railway system was built on the basis of federal land grants to railroads, and the federal government effectively prototyped and tested not only ironclad vessels with the U.S.S. Monitor, but proved the efficacy of the screw propeller over paddlewheels.

There is a reason why government funding is necessary for research, and that reason is simple.  In business terms, pure R&D is “wasteful.”  It discovers more often than not what doesn’t work, and even when a successful outcome occurs, that research may not further the corporation’s goals. In addition, too narrow a targeting of pure research is often a recipe for failure. But… as Mazzacutto’s book also points out, those countries that spend the least on government-funded education and R&D, even in the industrialized world (such as Greece and Italy), are the ones suffering the most in today’s economy, and that the United States, which has historically funded more education and R&D, has recovered far better than other countries. But that is likely to change because American company companies are largely abandoning basic research, and political pressures are reducing federal government R&D programs and grants.

In short, a whole lot of that so-called blue-sky, ivory-tower, “wasteful”, and useless government-funded research pays off big time… and that’s something that business, the far-right, and too many other Americans still don’t get… or don’t want to.    

When the West Wing was on network television, I tried to watch it and couldn’t, not for more than ten minutes at a stretch.  After a hiatus of more than a few years, I tried again, this time through Netflix… and had exactly the same inability to watch for any length of time, despite seeing sections of episode after episode.  After my initial reaction, I didn’t analyze why I felt the way I did, but the second time around, I did, because my wife pointed out that the acting was good, the dialogue crisp and often moving and  ironically cynical and humorous.  From my own time in national politics in Washington, D.C., I also knew that the majority, if not virtually all of the scenarios – the ones I saw anyway – were definitely realistic and representative.  So… why didn’t I like it?

Part of the answer, I know, was because it was too realistic in some ways, and called up too many painful memories… but there was more, and it took me a while to figure out what that happened to be.  The fact is… West Wing still isn’t realistic. Oh… the situations are difficult and realistic, and the series often captures, from what little I’ve seen, the infighting, the maneuvering, and even the absurdity of politics, but what the series doesn’t capture, not nearly enough, is the absolute pettiness and griminess of national politics behind the high-sounding rhetoric and superficial glamor. Being a political staffer – and this is something I know all too well from years in such positions – is anything but glamorous.  It is demanding, grinding, and usually thankless work that consumes every waking moment.  There are very good reasons why most political staffers are young, and why most of those who are not have strained marriages, if not multiple ones, or spouses who take on what amount to additional and very demanding support duties. 

The stress is endless and unremitting, and nothing you can do is ever enough. There is never enough time to do what needs to be done.  Your worst enemies are often theoretically your allies in your own party, not to mention the ambitious subordinates and superiors in the political infrastructure, and most egos of elected politicians or cabinet secretaries dwarf Mount Everest.  And no television show can truly capture more than a tiny fraction of that… and perhaps it’s just as well that it can’t.

Once upon a time, a consultant with whom I worked and I co-authored a book [The Green Progression] a near-future SF novel set in Washington, D.C., with a political/environmental theme and a plot that was part-mystery, part-thriller. The book got good reviews… and was one of the worst-selling books my publisher put out in the 1990s, but I’d like to think that it did a decent job of capturing some of what the West Wing, at least to my way of thinking, does not.  But that may well be one of the reasons for our book’s lack of popularity. It’s obviously no longer in print and not available as an ebook, and that may be for the best.

As the adage attributed to both Bismarck and Churchill goes, people who love law and sausage should not observe either being made.  And from what I’ve seen, most people really don’t want to know, at least not in realistic detail. And that, too, is a bit strange, when you consider the proliferation of grimy sex and graphic violence in all areas of visual media.

Barrack Obama spent a portion of August touring areas of New York and elsewhere championing, among other things, the need for colleges to keep tuition and costs down. He also set forth a policy and a proposal for rating colleges on their efforts to keep education “affordable.” Quite a few people have jumped on this bandwagon, including even a columnist or two, and one on the staff of The Economist, and more than a few of them are citing the need to keep the salaries of teachers and professors in line.  Yes, college costs are going up, but the President and others don’t seem to understand the causes… or don’t want to address the real problems.

To begin with, the term “costs” doesn’t really refer to the total cost of educating a student, but the costs incurred by the student.  In the past, a significant fraction of the total cost, and in some cases at state institutions almost all of it, was paid through funding from state legislatures or other sources, such as endowments at private institutions. Over the past thirty years, the share of state funding for higher education has dropped by half or more, while the percentage of high school graduates entering colleges has essentially doubled.  To make up the shortfall, tuition and fees have increased far faster than have the actual total costs, a fact that gets overlooked.

With some few exceptions, largely in “for profit” education and some elite non-profit colleges and universities, the bulk of increasing costs haven’t come about because salaries of teachers and professors have increased markedly. For the most part, except for a handful of “celebrity” professors and teachers at each institution, those individuals actually doing the teaching haven’t been getting significant raises in years.  Many haven’t gotten raises at all, and more and more teaching at the college level is being handled by grossly underpaid part-time adjuncts, who seldom if ever get benefits, and struggle along on wages more in line with the fast-food industry in hopes of getting the experience that will eventually land them a full-time position.

The second greatest single reason for increasing costs at state colleges and universities – and those are the institutions that the vast majority of students attend – is that non-educational costs have skyrocketed. It’s not the salaries of the teachers and professors that budget-cutters should be going after, but the numbers of executive level administrators and their compensation. This is also happening on the secondary school level, where high-paid executives are cutting out programs and canning teachers at the same time that their salaries are increasing. On the collegiate level, athletic programs expand year after year, and university after university tries to climb higher on the athletic totem pole, with higher–paid coaches, more facilities and assistants, while replacing retiring professors with inexperienced part-timers.  Universities also build lavish student centers and other such facilities to lure students because in most states legislative funding is based on enrollment increases.

 The third reason for increasing costs is that more than half of all incoming college students require remedial courses because they aren’t prepared for college level work, and this is despite a considerable dumbing-down of the collegiate academic requirements.  More remedial work requires more teachers and for students to spend longer in college.

Despite these various obvious and real causes, the President and others are focusing on rising tuition and threatening to punish institutions that increase tuition without focusing in the slightest on the underlying problems creating the need for such increases. State legislators demand that state colleges and universities admit more students, but they continue to cut state financial support, and then politicians at all levels, including the President of the United States, castigate those same state universities for increasing tuition.  This is nothing new.  It’s been going on for well over a decade… and no one in either the state or national political levels is willing to address the fundamental problem. More students, and more with learning difficulties or poor preparation, require more resources at a time when all too many of those resources are going to non-academic aspects of education and when states are cutting their support of higher education.

Same song, umpteenth verse; should get better, but it just gets worse.

While I was traveling, the freezer quit, and it quit over Labor Day weekend, spoiling a great deal of food.  Since I wasn’t there, and my wife was traveling part of that time [elsewhere], we lost a lot of food.  Upon my return, I set out to find a replacement. Surely, this could not be that difficult, even where I live, and finding a freezer was not, indeed, difficult.  Getting it delivered was the difficult part. 

The orange big-box store near us [you know to what I’m referring] had a freezer of the type and size we wanted, and the price was the lowest… but they couldn’t deliver for more than two weeks, and that wouldn’t work because I’d be on the road again, and they only deliver during hours when my wife couldn’t be home [Don’t ever talk to either of us about “cushy hours” for university professors in the performing arts!]. It also took the staff fifteen minutes to figure that out.  Another retailer could deliver in four days, and could give me the answers in less than five minutes, but the price was some fifteen percent higher.  Except… in either case, carting away the old freezer wasn’t going to  be that easy – because the local landfill/waste disposal site won’t take refrigeration equipment until it’s been certified to be drained of its coolant, and that costs more. In the end, I bought the more expensive unit because the “service” supposedly provided for “free” by the large big box outfit would have required waiting almost a month… if I could even count on that.

When I went to upgrade my antique cell phone – only very slightly – I had to wait a half hour for anyone to get to me… and that was at the second cell phone retailer.  At the first one, no one even noticed me.

This is far from the first time events such as these have occurred, and while I’m reluctantly willing to pay more for service that reduces the stress in our lives, what bothers me about all this is that I see those kinds of choices vanishing, and the ones remaining becoming more and more highly priced.  If you want to take enough clothes on a trip or vacation to provide a choice of what to wear – it’s going to cost you more one way or another.  If you want an appliance delivered in a short period of time, it’s going to cost you more.  If you need service on your cell phone, you’re going to wait.

At the same time, there are people who need jobs…and for all the increases in employment that the government statistics say are happening, an awful lot of them aren’t getting hired, and those same statistics don’t reveal the true costs of goods and services, which are rising.  The result is that we’re all seeing higher prices, less service, and fewer jobs, even as all the economists are claiming we’re moving to a service economy.  Come again?

On a recent book-related trip and then at a dinner after I returned I overheard two conversations remarkably similar in content, if from two dissimilar sets of individuals.  Both were discussing, often heatedly, concerns about the mistreatment of animals in the United States and the concerns about starving and suffering children in war zones and third-world nations across the globe. The underlying question posed by one person in each of those settings was, essentially, why are Americans so concerned about suffering animals in the United States when there are so many suffering people, especially children, in the world who could use the dollars and caring lavished on animals here in the U.S.?

It’s a seemingly straight-forward question that isn’t, similar in many ways to the statement made a few generations ago to children who wouldn’t “clean their plate” by parents who said, “Finish your dinner. There are millions of starving children in China,” or some variation on that theme. Just as I wondered how cleaning my plate would do anything for starving children, since I perceived no way that my uneaten dinner could get to China, so too, today, the problem remains that much of the care lavished on mistreated domestic animals in the U.S. cannot be transferred economically or practically to malnourished children, even in the U.S., let alone across the globe.

But beyond that rather practical observation, and beyond the protests that there must be a way, lie even more fundamental questions/issues. Why must some people assume that concern over mistreated or deserted animals precludes concern over maltreated, abused, starving children?  Does a preoccupation with alleviating human misery, to the extent of ignoring animal misery, reflect not only real concern, but also an innate assumption of human “superiority” and a minimization of the ills of living creatures less able to control their fate and destiny?  Given that we are a part of the ecological weft and web of the world, and that our survival requires the continuation and prosperity of that web that is also the food chain of the world, in the “grand scheme” of the universe are we really that special?  Who says so?  Besides us, that is?  More and more studies show that the more intelligent mammals, as well as some reptiles, have what we term feelings, such as concern for offspring, affection, grief, and even forms of altruism.

Add to that the fact that studies have indicated that individuals prone to mistreating animals have a far higher propensity to mistreat vulnerable humans, such as children, spouses, and the elderly, and given that, wouldn’t it be better to not to create such a firm dividing line between the need to help animals who clearly experience suffering and humans who do?  That might also have a social and political effect on those not-so-“human” individuals, not only throughout history, but even today, who characterize groups of humans that they dislike as “little more than animals,” because in a very real and absolutely physical sense, none of us are more than animals who can think and use tools better than the other animals.