SO GAY ABOUT RIGHTS

The progressive left and the moderate middle are certainly pleased with themselves this week.  After days of demonstrations and threats of boycotts, Arizona Republican governor Jan Brewer vetoed a two-page, vaguely and awkwardly worded bill (SB 1062) which would have enabled people and businesses to deny service to others on the basis of an exercise of their religion.  (Would someone please explain to me why an exercise of religion means treating people badly?)

Most believed that SB 1062 would apply only to members of the LGBT community because other civil rights laws forbid denial of service to others on the basis of race, gender, religion, and nationality.  I am less sanguine.  Aside from the problem of double-counting (e.g., someone black and gay), I suspect that, had the law countenanced this “exercise-of-religion” basis for denial of service, it would have led to challenges to those civil rights laws on the same basis.  Litigation for one, litigation for all—forever and ever.

Most are also gratified that many American corporations and other economic organizations like the Chamber of Commerce and the Super Bowl committee spoke in opposition to this proposed law and probably brought about its veto.  They warned about the economic consequences of adverse reactions to SB 1062 if it had been signed into law, and they prevailed.  But it is fair to wonder what position the business community would have taken if discrimination promised to show a profit.

Along the way, some commentators disgraced themselves, among them, Andrew Sullivan, a gay Catholic, increasingly conservative, commentator for several decades.  His position on this issue was straight out of the Barry Goldwater playbook opposing the Civil Rights Act on 1964.  The Senator from Arizona—is there something in Arizona’s drinking water to account for its craziness?—proclaimed that a civil rights law can not change peoples’ hearts.  He was absolutely right and totally irrelevant; the issue is not deeply felt convictions, but public conduct.  Laws do not apply to beliefs or creeds, but to behavior in the public sphere, where business takes place.  So what did Sullivan say?  Just what Goldwater had said: protests and threats to boycott cannot change peoples’ hearts—right and irrelevant again—and were an unsatisfactory approach to SB 1062.

Throughout the hullabaloo, a few voices here and there spoke up about equality under the law, but they were drowned out by this hue-and-cry of economic harm to Arizona.  Still, the term came into play far less than I had thought it would, even though it is at the start and the center of American political thought.  We give so much lip-service to those famous words from the Declaration of Independence—you know the ones: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness”—that we often skip over them at crucial times as if they are “needless to say.”  I shall return to these words at another time; for now, I want to move on to the less famous words which immediately follow them.  I want to provide a much–needed lesson for the likes of Goldwater, Sullivan, and most of today’s Republicans and Tea Partiers, who populate and pollute the Right and who have overlooked them.

Ready?  Here goes: “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”  Not a word about changing hearts or even minds.  In their belief in the reasonableness of civil society, the Founding Fathers further believed that government was the guarantor of these rights, not guns in the hands of the country’s citizens.

A moment’s reflection indicates that government controls the public square for the good of all and that all those governed have a means to express or withhold their consent.  So the efforts of today’s Republicans and Tea Partiers to discriminate on the basis of gender orientation are efforts to divide the people and deny some of them their full rights as citizens.  The efforts of Republican- and Tea-Party-controlled state legislatures to impede the votes of the young, the old, the working middle class, and blacks and other minorities are further efforts to divide the people and deny them the opportunity to express or withhold their consent.  Indeed, Republicans and Tea Partiers are silent about, and are not committed to, ensuring civil and electoral rights, and eliminating obstacles to those rights; instead, they are dedicated to undermining and destroying those rights for those whom they have segregated by law and administrative fiat.

The bottom line: Allegiance to equality is what distinguishes Real Americans from bigoted pretenders who profess to be patriots and to pledge their allegiance to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.   Hypocrites all: today’s Republicans and Tea Partiers are un-American in their basic hostility to equality, civil government of all the people, and the democratic processes which enable their representation.

CREATIONISM VERSUS EVOLUTION: HAM VERSUS NYE

The recent televised debate on creation versus evolution between Ken Ham, director of the Creation Museum in Kentucky, and Bill Nye, formerly “the Science Guy” for PBS, was a disappointment.  Afterwards, their followers deplored them for poorly advocating their positions.  I saw a draw between a master of duplicitous rhetoric and a master of ineffective details.  Neither directly addressed the others’ arguments.  Ham operates within a closed system impervious to, and, in defense, obfuscatory of, the ordinary meaning of words and the plain import of facts and inferences.  Nye over-emphasized empirical data without providing and elaborating the larger theoretical framework which justifies science and undermines creationism.  I focused then and focus now on Ham’s creationism, fascinating as an ideological dissent from received opinion.

I am an interested observer.  As a recovering science-technology-engineering-mathematician type who began as a “nature boy” watching birds, keeping animals, and collecting fossils, I have always had an interest in the natural world.  As a continuing humanist, I have also had interests in history, literature, philosophy, and religion.  I am conversant with both the scientific and the humanistic views of the world, and I have little problem with respecting each in its proper functions.

I make this biographical statement because Ham presents individuals who are both scientists and creationists as if the fact that scientists can also be creationists implies that creationism is science.  The reasoning behind this presentation is fallacious in two ways.  One, the fact that scientists can be Catholics, Protestants, or Jews does not imply that Catholicism, Protestantism, or Judaism is science.  Two, flesh-and-blood examples of people who are both begs the question—assumes what it must demonstrate—whether creationism is science and not religious belief masquerading as science.

A little background is in order for a technical subject like this one.  Creationism is a religious ideology used to defend or advance the Biblical account of creation against the scientific enterprise which has established the theory of evolution as close to fact as theory can be.  (For convenience, I use the term “Darwinism” hereafter, though less used today because slightly misleading about modern evolutionary theory).  Both creationism and Darwinism claim to explain the origin and development of the earth and the species inhabiting it.  Ham is one of the “young earth” creationists, who believe in the creation of earth 6000 years ago in the six, 24-hour days specified by the Bible, with species fixed at the beginning and unchanged since.  (Others are “old earth” creationists, who treat the six-day creation of earth metaphorically to accord with scientific estimates of the earth’s age.)  Nye accepts the scientific estimates of the earth’s age of about 4.5 billion years, with species arising, vanishing, or evolving over more than 3.5 billion years.

The debate between creationism and Darwinian arose in the mid-nineteenth-century in the larger controversy between religion and science.  It has continued to this day, but its importance today derives from recent efforts by creationists to introduce creationism into the curriculum of public schools.  Because of the First Amendment prohibition of an establishment of religion, these efforts depend on a daring innovation: an argument that their religious doctrine accounting for creation—the usual term for which is “creation science”—is a legitimate science, The ultimate issue of any debate between a creationist and a scientist, or conflicting testimony before administrative, legislative, or judicial bodies, is simple: is creationism religion or science?

Ham offers an audacious answer which perverts the meaning of the word “science” and inverts its application.  Counter-factually, he claims that Darwinians have “hijacked” the word “science” and attached it to the theory of evolution.  Contrariwise, creationists like Ham have appropriated this term, with its generally favorably connotations, and applied it to creation theory.  His purpose in making this claim is to confuse laypersons in the public and on boards of education, and to inveigle the inclusion of creationism in the public school science curriculum.  Yet, to his credit but perhaps to his followers’ dismay, Ham explicitly links the word “science” to the explicitly religious, specifically Christian, doctrine of salvation.

So it is critical to any debate or discussion to be clear about what is or is not science.  The word “science,” from the Latin “scientia,” means knowledge.  Of the many kinds of knowledge (or, likely in most cases, strong belief), only one of them is scientific.  What distinguishes scientific knowledge from other kinds is a formal set of assumptions, methodologies, and objectives to establish a rational and verifiable (demonstrable or replicable; also public and objective) basis of knowledge.  Science collects data in laboratory experiments or field observations.  It formulates hypotheses on the basis of statistical correlations or causal sequences (temporal in nature) to explain the data.  In some cases, it formulates hypotheses on the basis of mathematical computations (think Einstein).  It scrutinizes these hypotheses with additional experiments, observations, or predictions in order to confirm, refine, or refute them.  In sum, science begins with data, develops hypotheses, and subjects them to scrutiny to verify or falsify them.  Indeed, scientists regard falsifiability as a criterion exclusive to science.  Often what science proposes, science later disposes.

Other kinds of knowledge, because they do not meet these criteria, are not scientific knowledge and are not science.  Whatever may be said of religious knowledge, it is not scientific knowledge or science, for it meets no scientific criteria.  Religions may accept their stories of creation as literally true—rather as scientists accept hypotheses—but, in propounding their stories, such religions include only data which confirm their account and either ignore or reject data to the contrary, or try to discredit them with unreasonable objections or distractions.  Religions may have motive and means to scrutinize their claims to knowledge for the purpose of refining it, but not of falsifying it.

Ham tries to avoid the problem posed by these criteria of science by distinguishing traditional science—“experimental or observational science,” as he labels it—and “historical science,” his euphemism for “creation science," with its taint of religion.  By relabeling traditional science, Ham constricts the scope of traditional science to the present, or the recent past of history, and insinuates that traditional science is unable to address the remote past because no one was present to experiment with, or observe, it.  Ergo: no scientific knowledge according to his tendentious, not traditional, definition or standards of science.

Ironically, this effort at evasion does not serve Ham well, for its conclusion equally applies to “historical science” for an obvious reason:  no one was present to witness the Creation.  Although Ham’s creationism goes back only 6000 years ago, no one saw God do anything in the first five days and probably much of the sixth day; no one saw Adam or Eve, they left no record of their experience, and no one has found the Garden of Eden; no one saw Noah and his family build the ark, and no one has found evidence of a single, worldwide flood with its waters covering the entire earth for a year.  Whereas traditional science proceeds from data to inference, “historical science” proceeds from documents to faith.  Plain old traditional “science” endures that old-time religion.

Although Ham does not define “historical science," he does rightly assume that the cultural boundary of literacy as manifest in written records marks the divide between pre-history and history.  “Historical science” is exclusively the written account of creation in the Bible; he excludes all other written stories of creation like the Greek account in Hesiod’s Theogony because they are not “God’s Word.”  Thus, he bases “historical science,” not on data, not even on all written creation stories, but on only one creation document, the Bible, which Ham regards as God’s witness.  One difficulty for this “science” is that a disinterested person cannot independently arrive at, confirm, or refute the Bible’s account of creation because no data independent of the Bible exist.  The result: “historical science” is nothing more or less than Christian history, achieving its climax in Christ, His Crucifixion, and His Resurrection—not any kind of science at all.

However, even on his terms, Ham’s “historical science” based on “God’s Word” as a textbook has problems of authorship.  We cannot know that God wrote it, and we do not know all of those who did write it.  No one saw God write it or heard God say it—no one copied or transcribed His words—not once, but twice, first as Holy Scriptures, then as the New Testament.  Indeed, differences among the writings collectively known as the Bible indicate that different authors at different times wrote them.  They wrote not one creation story in Genesis, but two; not one genealogy tracing Jesus’ descent from David, but two; not one story of the annunciation of Jesus’ birth, but two.  Their writings abound in other differences and discrepancies, not to mention improbabilities.  And, over time, first Catholic, then Protestant, religious authorities argued about, and voted on, what writings to include in, or exclude from, the Bible, and in what order to present those included.  “God’s Word” combines the writings of diverse authors and reflects much committee work; it is men’s words.  So the Bible, the basis of “historical science,” is not the unequivocal text which Ham pretends that it is.  Apparently, God mumbled; if not, its writers fumbled.  It may be that all disparities nevertheless signify its truths behind its words.  But we cannot know what those truths are because “historical science” has no scientific way to analyze the Bible to ascertain the truths of “God’s Word.”

For the sake of argument, I want to go farther than Ham might want to go in dealing with the fossil record (which I accept as interpreted by Darwinians).  I posit that, when, according to Genesis, God made heaven and earth, He made it in six, 24-hour days to look exactly as people have found it to be for the past 6000 years.  I posit that He made the fossils and positioned them in strata exactly as Darwinians have discovered, and will continue to discover, them.  In short, I posit that creationists are right about the origins of the universe, the earth, and humankind and all other kinds, and that Darwinians are wrong because they mistake as evidence of evolution over billions of years the geologic and paleontological features of God’s six-day creation.

Then I want to pose a single question: why did God so create this world that it would deceive, and has deceived, many good and decent people?

DOWN AND OUT IN NEW MEXICO AND LAS CRUCES

[NOTE: By request, I post this column, with its introductory covering note to my email subscribers, which appeared in the Las Cruces Sun-News on 25 January.]

Introductory covering note:

The truth hurts, so the Sun-News ran the story about 51% of NM high school graduates requiring remediation on an inside page and did not display it on the website under “News-education” or “Opinion.”  I added a significant local tidbit in editing earlier drafts of this column.  You can find the original by typing in “Simonich,” but I provide the link here: http://www.lcsun-news.com/las_cruces-news/ci_24952943/study-51-percent-new-mexico-graduates-ill-prepared?IADID=Search-www.lcsun-news.com-www.lcsun-news.com.  The larger point of my column is that New Mexico officials continue to recycle stupidity and practice duplicity when it comes to dealing with its persistent and interdependent problems.

This story takes on more importance in light of a headline story in today’s [23 January] Sun-News.  According to it, the LCPS school board voted unanimously without any prior readings—talk about policy made in panic--to substitute “an alternate path to graduate from high school without having to pass the state standardized test.”  The Board wants graduation for those who cannot pass state standardized tests to depend on “grade point averages, final exam grades, portfolios and work and extracurricular experience.”  I congratulate the Board—Connie Phillips, Chuck David, Maria Flores, Bonnie Votaw, and Barbara Hall—for their honesty in abandoning any pretense to setting meaningful academic standards for graduation.  This proposal enables the District to avoid higher (but not very high) state standards, conceal continued rot in academic performance, but lower the bar so that the school can placate parents by awarding the same “diploma of excellence” received by students who pass the state test.  Other than grade point averages and final exam grades (though all course grades, especially those reliant on essay-type assignments or answers, can be inflated), there are no standards, only subjective appraisals, for portfolios, work experience, and extracurricular activities (football, anyone?).  Has anyone ever failed according to these criteria?  Does anyone think that these devices will mean fewer high school graduates requiring remediation?  Employers beware.  Lottery scholarships for these high achievers?

One point which I do not address in discussing the ineffectuality of programs to “reform” education is the latest “silver bullet,” early childhood education.  The theory seems to be “as the twig is bent, so grows the tree.”  Wishful thinking or unsupported rot—take your pick.  A similar effort, Headstart, has built a wonderful reputation, a professional constituency, and a record of no success.  By high school graduation, there is no statistically significant academic difference between students who had been in the program and peers who had not.  So it will be with early childhood education.  If schools cannot reinforce and add value to what entering students have acquired, then these efforts are simply a waste of resources.  But they give self-promoters opportunities to make fine speeches at gala events of assembled dignitaries to kick off programs of little or no use.

A personal note.  When, at the age of 5, I entered kindergarten in 1945, I learned how to behave as a student.  A year later, I learned to read and write (that would be by hand!) the alphabet and numerals within a few weeks, and then to read silently and aloud age-appropriate books by the end of the school year.  Of course, my teachers were well educated as they are not now and used methods now not in favor.  It all worked for my classmates and me.  Those who wanted to go to college did so, and few needed remediation.  But we have come such a long way since then.  Is everybody proud of our recent improvements in teacher preparation, academic curriculum, and instructional methods?

Column: Down and Out in New Mexico and Las Cruces

If we had met, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Teddy’s eldest child, would have invited me, as she once invited another, to join her, in long-since-famous words: “If you haven’t got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me.”  I would have much to say.

  Despite persistent poverty, poor education, poor health, poor housing, and poor nutrition, New Mexicans are innately conservative because they fear that change, not to mention reform, makes things worse.  State and city officials fear to enact legislation to address and alleviate these ills systematically or to anticipate changing circumstances and conditions which, unaddressed, will worsen them.

As things related to the economy and education worsen, the future vigor of New Mexico and Las Cruces comes into question.  The news is uniformly bad.  As the nation emerges from the Great Recession, New Mexico lags.  Its economic growth is about half that in neighboring states.  As nationwide housing starts and housing prices slowly increase, New Mexico’s remain flat, and Las Cruces’s slide.  Although more people with advanced degrees are entering than leaving the state, more are leaving than entering the city.  Northern New Mexico is standing still; southern New Mexico, with Las Cruces at its center, is slipping.

Education is the state’s and the city’s paramount problem because it undermines the economy, present and future.  By comparison with education in countries with advanced economies, American education continues to be middling overall.  For grades K-12, New Mexico’s public school system ranks 50^th in the nation, and its second largest district, Las Cruces Public School District, ranks mediocre.  The LCPS District is one of the country’s worst.

Yet in this State of Denial, local leaders tout LCPS’s wonderful schools and wonderful teachers.  The reality is not wonderful to those facing the facts and their implications.  LCPS has a preponderance of teachers ineffective for many reasons, and teachers, principals, and district officials dishonest and dissembling.  Oñate, Mayfield and Las Cruces High are three of the top five high schools in numbers of graduates needing remedial work in state colleges.  Yet, for unworthy purposes, officials promote college for everyone.  One, protect employment in the education industry in the state with the highest number of colleges per capita in the country.  Second, push colleges to teach graduates today what high schools taught graduates fifty years ago.

Rhetorical question: wonderful?  Real question: how possible?  Answer: diplomas for those who cannot make change or multiply and divide numbers.  LCPS wants citizens to believe that students who cannot do arithmetic can pass algebra!  Its job: lying to students, parents, the public, and public officials that graduates with “diplomas of excellence” are ready for careers or college.

State and District, not to mention NMSU School of Education, education leaders offer nothing to change this dynamic of deficiencies and deceits in public education.  No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and Common Core State Standards education “reforms” have been little more than ideologically driven stunts without substance or success.  Even well-intentioned lottery scholarships merely encourage mediocre students to go to mediocre state colleges and delay their difficulty getting decent jobs in the state even if they graduate.

LCPS announces new programs to overcome continuing problems unsolved by similar PR programs similarly ballyhooed a few years earlier.  Days ago, the School Board voted unanimously to substitute work-arounds for a state standardized test as a graduation requirement.  Its decision, a White Flag of surrender, admits that the District cannot educate 20% of its students well enough to graduate by a state standard, allows it to conceal ineffective teaching, but enables it to placate parents with worthless diplomas but ensure enrollments for per-capita funding.

This bankruptcy of education foretells economic deterioration.  Unable to provide a workforce attractive to businesses, state and city offer financial inducements in exchange for low-skill, low-wage jobs requiring little education—which jobs hide their educational failures.  By reducing revenues—lowering corporate income and other business tax rates and receiving lower tax revenues from low-income earners—they cannot design, develop, and invest in reforms to educate students well enough to staff or attract companies requiring well-educated, well-paid employees.  Thus, state and city perpetuate a cycle of self-impoverishment.

The issues of economics and education come together at LCPS and NMSU.  Instead of serving as engines of economic development and educational excellence, they serve as the city’s largest employers.  Both churn out poorly educated graduates fit mainly for low-skill, low-pay jobs in agriculture and construction, or low-standard positions in law enforcement, business, or education.  NMSU’s mediocre Arrowhead Business and Research Park has failed to attract high-skilled, innovative entrepreneurs, who confront an unreceptive developer-oriented, Chamber-based bloc, the city’s poor schools, and an unready workforce.

State and city officials have no strategy for a different future.  Largely dependent on the federal government, New Mexico operates more like a territory than a state.  So the Big Picture for state and city is not enchanting.  Have I said enough, Alice?

OBAMA'S PRESIDENCY--TOWARD AN ADVERSE ASSESSMENT

Everything in my earlier life prepared me to approve of Obama as a black president.  Raised in a family which included or had friends across the demographic spectrum, I grew up without the racial prejudices which afflict so many.  The scariest moment in my life occurred, not while I served in Vietnam in 1965-1966, but while I drove south to Ft. Benning in a VW with Ohio plates in 1964.  I feared a shotgun slaying like that in Easy Rider.  While I was getting my infantry MOS, I integrated two restaurants in Columbus, GA.  I became a life member of the NAACP in 1968.  So I was pleased when America seemed to vote down a racial barrier when it elected Barack Hussein Obama as its president.

That background, with the resulting confidence in my motives, has enabled me to assess Obama’s performance without the biases of racial prejudice or the fluctuations in his popularity.  I think that many more would recognize or admit to his deficiencies were it not for race-motivated attacks—incessant, ignorant, and unreasonable—which have made it uncomfortable for them to make a reasonable appraisal of his presidency for fear of being labeled racist themselves.  Blinded by race-hatred, bigots have deterred deliberate consideration of his performance in office.  Otherwise, I am sure that even progressives would have much unflattering to say about Obama’s presidency.

I do not accept whining excuses from die-hard devotees that his failures are his opposition’s fault.  I know that, from the moment of his Inauguration, Republicans conspired to oppose him, his legislative initiatives, and his administrative and judicial appointments.  I know that they pretended to want bipartisanship and negotiation, even as they offered legislation to repeal his programs, and poison pill amendments or procedural intransigence to prevent legislation or deny appointment.  I know of their repeated efforts to thereby punish the President for not compromising with them: that is, do what they want or their way, or it will not get done.

Republicans have made his job difficult, but they have not make it impossible.  They have not denied him the executive powers of the presidency.  They have not denied him his policy choices.  They have not denied him his decisions to try to negotiate with them as if they were as he hoped them to be or would become if he compromised with them: that is, moderate Republicans.  Indeed, his policies and temperament identify Obama himself is a moderate Republican in the Democratic Party; he is a Democrat in name only (DINO).  Not surprisingly, he fails because he cannot resolve the contradiction between his Republican instincts and his Democratic identification, and, thus, is, misunderstood and distrusted by almost everyone.

For a long time, I have wanted to write a comprehensive assessment of Obama’s presidency.  It may have three more years, but it is, for all intents and purposes, over; as we know the past, so we know the prologue.  He is the wrong person in the wrong position at the wrong time.  Even so, I lack the space, time, energy, and enthusiasm for the task; I leave it to the historians of the future.

My dissatisfaction with his presidency goes back to its earliest months, shortly after his inauguration in 2009.  If I had had a “honeymoon” with Obama—I did not, or not much of one—it ended with an episode involving Israel.  Prime Minister Netanyahu announced additional West Bank developments; Obama stated his opposition to them; Netanyahu ignored him and let the developments continue; Obama said and did exactly nothing.  It became clear then—mentioned by foes, muttered by friends—that he is all talk and no walk.  This first and many subsequent episodes have led to my judgment: Obama may be the worst president since the election of Roosevelt; his only rivals are Peanut and Shrub.  But, as I say, I cannot make that larger case here.

I focus on only one area of many, domestic economic policy—perhaps not the area in which Obama is doing greatest lasting damage, public education—to show some of his personal or political deficiencies.  I am prompted and focused by his remarks on the economy in his recent State of the Union address which indicate major shortcomings.  One, although, if his speech is to be believed, he is now turning his attention to economic inequality, he seems unaware of, or indifferent to, his previous decisions which have allowed or approved a variety of structural changes actually augmenting economic inequality.  Two, having lost respect and trust as a leader and knowing himself unable to inspire and lead on large and worthy issues, he offers important, appealing, but relatively small-bore placebos which he pretends address this problem.

For example, equality of pay for women and an increase in the minimum wage.  If women achieve pay equality, as Obama wishes, they will be only as well off as men in the middle and lower classes—which is not well off at all.  They will still have inadequate incomes to support themselves and their families; to save for housing, education, and even some health care; and to assist their parents.  Stagnant wages and diminishing employment benefits will abide.  Although raising the minimum wage will do some good, it will solve no problems of economic inequality.  The haves will have more, and the have-nots will have no more.  The underlying structural features of the economy will continue to disproportionately benefit large corporations and rich individuals.

From the outset, as the country’s Great Recession worsened in 2009, Obama showed his pro-big-business priorities by endorsing and expanding his predecessor’s policies, all of which reinforce economic inequality.  His policy for recovery was to save Big Business and Wall Street, not small business and Main Street.  More specifically, it was to save equity holders in the large corporations, manufacturing or financial, not those losing their livelihoods, their homes, their health insurance, their education, and much else.

He believed that the “Big Three” car and truck manufacturers had to be saved.  Unquestionably, if they had failed, many jobs in those and supplier companies would have been lost, at least temporarily.  But just as unquestionably, their resources would have been acquired by others, some domestic, some foreign.  It may have been right—I convinced myself that it was right—to prevent dislocations which would have severely, though temporarily, added to the depth of the recession.  So saving the equity of the rich also saved jobs of working Americans at just the right time.  Whether it did anything good for the longer term remains to be seen.  Detroit and the surrounding region connected to its automobile industry have continued to slide, and Detroit itself has filed for bankruptcy, the largest American city to do so.

He believed that the financial system which caused the collapse would itself collapse if not rescued by taxpayer dollars.  The banks, Obama told us, had become “too big to fail” without grievous damage to the economy and had to be saved first.  Like Republican capitalists, he abandoned one of the first principles of capitalism—let the free market determine success or failure—when failure of a Big Business looms.

Actually, the damage would have been relatively limited in scope and duration.  Equity holders in the banks would have lost their equity—which risk their rate of return reflects.  Obama provided public money to bail out private mismanagers, some his campaign contributors, and got little in the way of financial reforms in return.  Worse, after passage of the Dodd-Frank reform legislation, he allowed his administration to accede to the wishes of the financial industry in developing flaccid regulations and to decline to investigate or prosecute wrongdoing—friends helping friends.  The result: the banks have more than recovered, and their equity holders have prospered.

Even his major apparent success in domestic affairs, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA; aka “Obamacare”), reflects a lack of leadership and a lack of commitment to policy—all perpetuating economic inequality.  First, Obama exercised no leadership in proposing legislation to achieve his stated purposes.  He let Congress wrangle over it and then accommodated the interests of insurance industry, which makes profits but adds no value to health care.  Apologists defended his approach by arguing that alternatives were politically infeasible.  They ignored polls showing that, despite a vociferous minority, most Americans favored universal health insurance, and many favored a single-payer program like Medicare.  If Obama had cared less to protect the industry and its profits with a program needlessly complicated in a 2500-page monument to bureaucratic bloat, and had cared more to serve, appeal to, and save for the American people, he could likely have sold a “Medicare for All” program in 2 pages. 

Second, important as the ACA program is to millions, to the economy, and to his standing, Obama ignored the opposition and left its implementation to the obtuse, the over-confident, and the incompetent.  Much as I have admired Kathleen Sibelius, she appears never to have left Kansas.  In the end, the ACA will struggle slowly onward and gradually upward; problems will be solved, and improvements will be made.  Obama’s “signature” achievement is a legacy more properly others’ and a tribute to his timidity.

For the time being, the economy is improving.  However, as structural arrangements protect gargantuan corporate profits, increase disparities in income, accelerate the concentration of wealth, and keep wages and benefits low, the economy will start to deteriorate.  The means to prevent another deep recession or even a depression will be far more drastic and even more politically difficult.  Obama’s preference for, and surrender to, the already rich have set disastrous precedents for future recovery or reforms.  For his economic decisions have structurally increased the very inequalities which he now professes to deplore.  His recent talk about economic inequality in light of this performance suggests lofty but empty rhetoric which will have no meaningful follow-through.