Chip Benson

THE MEEK SHALL INHERIT THE GOVERNMENT

The Providence Journal

January 21,2024

Big business is booming in the United States, and rightly so. Almost 50 years of free-market policies have allowed the biggest and best companies in the world to flourish. The American Dream and its way of life are fairy tales come true, courtesy of Apple, Microsoft, Google, Tesla and the S&P 500 companies. American businesses are the embodiment and intent of all that the country has strived for, and, globally, they project American influence and its ideals of independence, hard work, creativity and wealth.

Ironically, the principles in business that the American government and society have fought so ardently for are not the principles for how the government is run. The difference between the quality of the government sector and the quality of the private sector in America is stark. Compare the quality of service between Federal Express and the post office. One is modern. The other is not. Start at the top, where the CEO of FedEx, Raj Subramaniam, makes $13.25 million per year, while the postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, makes $480,985.

The same goes for the U.S. military services. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Charles Q. Brown Jr., makes $266,000, while the CEO of Raytheon, Thomas Kennedy, makes $23 million per year. Finally, look at Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, who makes $99 million per year, while the president of the United States, Joe Biden, is paid $400,000 annually.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren testified in Congress last week, and her comments were echoed by Republican Senators J.D. Vance, of Ohio, and Patrick McHenry of North Carolina: “No one wants to waste taxpayer dollars, but Congress needs to be more realistic about what it takes to attract the top people to public service across the board.”

Numbers and salary reflect a person’s worth and importance in the U.S. system; no surprise then that the best and brightest no longer go into government service, they go into business. There are exceptions, of course. A few good people step up and try to do the right thing, but by and large this hollowing out of the government into a meek enterprise has been a steady and insidious slide mirroring the improvement in the fortunes of private sector America.

Is this dynamic the Achilles heel of the American system? Or is it a natural political evolution away from big government and to a more democratic society by way of a strong and diverse private sector? Certainly, at the moment many things look good for the United States, but change doesn’t begin to explain what the next hundred years will look like. Will it be necessary to have an enormous centralized government as they do in China, so that the big things get done well? Or will the fractured, seemingly unhappy, but nevertheless successful and strong American system prevail?

In the ultimate book of morality, the meek were said to inherit the earth; but thousands of years later, we live in an age determined by science, math and data. Morals are meek, and numbers are biblical.

Chip Benson is an occasional contributor, and lives in South Kingstown.

The monster that ate Fenway Park

The Providence Journal: April 1, 2013

The Red Sox have always had high-minded scrutiny. Every year the bleachers get filled with a new litter of Harvard and MIT students. The best sports journalism in America continues to come out of Boston and Providence, where young seamheads follow familiar paths from Boston College, Brown University and other local schools to The Boston Globe, The Providence Journal and many other sports media outlets. Recently, yet another beat writer from The Globe, Greg Bedard, ascended to Sports Illustrated magazine to become its senior writer covering football.

After two World Series wins in the last decade, the Red Sox have become a very rich and very powerful team, and, of course, they have been corrupted by it. Now, in addition to high-minded scrutiny, there is the low-brow demand to keep winning every year. Theo Epstein, the former general manager of the Red Sox, referred to it as "having to feed the monster."

The low-brow demands of the Fenway fan mob and media, a.k.a. the monster, boiled over in an eruption at the end of last season, when the Red Sox carried out a stunning trade of arguably their three best players, Josh Beckett, Adrian Gonzalez and Carl Crawford. Seemingly acting on a familiar refrain from an angry old timer, "For that kind of money ..." (they actually did) "... trade the bums!" Given the Sox history of trading Babe Ruth away to the Yankees, and the resulting 86-year curse, it bears watching how the Dodgers do this year with the former Red Sox stars.

Certainly the three were among the highest-paid players on the team, even in the league. The Red Sox spent years pursuing Gonzalez, likening him to Ted Williams, and traded away several young prospects to finally acquire him for $154 million in 2011. Josh Beckett led the 2007 World Series team, and continued on through 2012 as the tough, loyal leader of the pitching staff. Carl Crawford signed a 2011 contract with Boston for $142 million after stellar seasons in Tampa Bay.

Yet they had a bad year, or even just a bad month, or an injury.

The Red Sox panicked, and under the pressure of the Monster, broomed all three to Los Angeles, and gave in to the grumbling, heckling and outright disgust that now hounds the team through the media after every loss.

In the stands, there is an unfamiliar quiet, an inattentiveness teetering on boredom - most probably the by-product of losing and pricey tickets that put corporate clients in too many themed chit-chat seats. Fenway Park is now part amusement park. "Oh, what's that on the field, a baseball game?"

Yes, the players make a ridiculous amount of money, but it's relative, and baseball players have always had  bad years over the course of a career. No more. Now the Red Sox have the patience of a Steinbrenner. In addition to the big trade, many other players like Kevin Youkilis have been released or fled the team under the excruciating tenure of last season's one-year manager Bobby Valentine.

In 2012 the world did come to an end ... for the Red Sox.

The 2013 Red Sox team is largely unknown to the general public. New, shiny overpaid faces have been hurried in to placate the low-browbeaters, much to the skepticism of high-minded scrutiny - Dan Shaughnessy picks the Red Sox and Yankees to battle it out for last place!

Despite the new manager John Farrell and the new marketing campaign, "What's Broken Can Be Fixed," the Red Sox and perhaps more importantly their fans and media have lost their way. They are too big. It is more like a large impersonal corporation. Powerful, wealthy and intelligent but missing the intangibles.

Terry Francona, the former manager of the Red Sox, cited the tangible of needing to be "all in" as an organization to be the best. Boston will be good. Throwing money at things will do that. But until Red Sox Nation is "all in" it together, the monster will continue to chew up Fenway Park.

Chip Benson is an occasional contributor.

Romney brings the ides of business

The Providence Journal: November 6, 2012

By Chip Benson

NEEDHAM

Mitt Romney isn't so much about ideas per se, he's about the efficiency of ideas. He's not a political animal, but he is a pragmatic animal. He gets criticized for changing his position on policies, and post-debate is widely viewed to have agreed with President Obama on too much, but that's because he's interested in process and efficacy, not ideology.

Sure, Romney has a Web site full of ideas, and a five-point plan, but if he could speak freely (as in the surreptitiously recorded "47 percent'' speech!), he might say that at this point in America's history it's not the policies of government but the management of them that is most important. That it's not the quantity of government, but the quality of it.

Conservatives are agog over the inefficiencies, waste and incompetence in government - too much so - but this is where Mitt connected with them, as an efficiency expert, a businessman. For Romney is not of the Tea Party, Neo-Con and Ronald Reagan world. On policy, he is a traditional old-school Republican from the 1950s, which is to say he is pre-partisan! He even dresses the part.

Romney personifies the ideology of business, and is very much of the economic moment right now, but he probably has not connected enough of the dots necessary to become president. He has, however, ushered in the Ides of Business unto the presidential political spectrum. We are in the age of business, of economics, pragmatism, of digital automation. So the next election will surely bring a Michael Bloomberg or a Bill Gates type to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, to lead the United States of Economics. E pluribus debitum: From many, much debt.

Obama may be transcendent, but time is running out on the government of the United States. Too many competing ideas (lawyers!) and not enough bottom-line accounting (businessmen) have left the U.S. stretched thin at home and around the world, and on the precipice of insolvency. It's not really a matter of ideas anymore but of the effectiveness and efficiency of those ideas.

Many areas of government do a terrific job of delivering services at a very low cost, but ideological partisanship over the past 30 years have created a dire situation in which Democrats and Republicans don't want to admit to compromise with the other side. We are a competitive society after all! So taxes aren't raised, programs aren't cut, and economists increasingly call the national deficit as an existential issue.

Yet political ideology is almost dead. The days of trickle-down government and trickle-down economics are numbered. A freight train filled with cans previously kicked down the road is headed toward a fiscal cliff.

The Ides of Business are upon us, and soon a turnaround specialist, such as Mitt Romney, will take the country through a managed bankruptcy. It will be called something else, though! The reaper will be grim, possibly Chinese, and very painful. There will be tumult. We will try to kill our way out of it, but a different era will begin in America. Ideas will not matter. Executing efficient systems will.

Chip Benson is an occasional contributor to The Providence Journal.

UNSEASONABLE RED SOX SEASON

The Providence Journal

April 7, 2012

NEEDHAM

The great Red Sox Championship teams of 2004 and 2007 are sadly gone — slowly picked apart by ego over the years, and then finally dismantled in a panicked off-season of finger-pointing. This year the team is so unrecognizable, and so unlikeable, that 100-year-old Fenway Park will be the featured star instead of the spoiled rotten players and diffident management.

The unseasonable spring of 2012 aptly features the highly mislocated personality of Bobby Valentine as the new Red Sox manager. Bobby V! Like a hummingbird seen in March — but worse, a hummingbird with an ego problem — the Machiavellian Valentine is better suited to the brash, outspoken climes and culture from which he came.

Who hired a New Yorker to be the manager of the Boston Red Sox, anyway?

Oh, that’s right, the brash outspoken-and-still-standing president and CEO of Fenway Sports Group, Larry Lucchino, the last ego standing.

Long gone or recently departed are the icons and heroes of an era: Theo Epstein, Terry Francona, Jonathan Papelbon, Jason Varitek, Johnny Damon, Manny Ramirez, Pedro Martinez and many others. They all got paid, they all got rich, and fame tumbled down around them. They were once the Kings of New England, but their egos got the better of the team.

Many of the players grew up poor in America, or very poor in the Dominican Republic, yet, after a few successful seasons in Boston and at a relatively young age, they left the team — in one instance, to make the difference between making $42 million and $50 million. Others stayed, but for a price, specifically an absurd, obscene ticket price. In 2012, after eight years of winning baseball and rising ticket prices, a night at Fenway Park in good seats for a family of four will cost in excess of $1,000.

Soon, you will need a 401(k) just to pay for sporting events.

Thankfully, the parades, posters, autographs and cheers have a few claw-back provisions. Some players and managers may eventually return to cheers at Fenway, but others will remain in hiding. In exchange.

The average baseball player makes $3 million a year. So what if he can’t eat in public, in peace? David Ortiz has made roughly $84 million in the last eight years, enough to open his own restaurant, Big Papi’s Grill.

As they say in Washington, “That’s your money!”

This increasingly unseemly exchange is about to get much worse in the unseasonable season of 2012. The Red Sox are not projected to do well, and an annoying manager will probably exacerbate their public-relations problems and threaten their profitable sell-out streak.

Although the Red Sox are not a publicly traded company, they are big business, and the players and their big salaries are under a microscope worthy of Wall Street. (If only Wall Street itself were this thoroughly scrutinized!)

There aren’t many windows into the super-rich, and that’s exactly what the Red Sox and their players have become. Most highly paid business executives or rich individuals operate behind walls of secrecy and security, at work and at home. The fortunes of the Red Sox play out daily in the pages of The Providence Journal, and the merciless WEEI sports-radio talk shows, among many other media outlets.

In the end, most of the players cashed in and went their own way because of team success. Greed and ego trumped modesty and honor. There are a few exceptions. Dustin Pedroia, Kevin Youkilis and Jon Lester signed “team” contracts for notably less money, but the Red Sox way, articulated by Theo Epstein, eventually gave way to the free-agent way embodied by the salaries of Adrian Gonzalez ($21 million per year), Carl Crawford ($20 million a year) and John Lackey ($16 million a year).

They are now too big, and will fail.

The fans have the championship memories and costly paraphernalia, and a creeping feeling that it is all so very hollow. These guys did something special together that we were all a part of, but that success led to a thousand roads out of town and away from the team that made it all possible. Again, the individual trumps the collective. America.

There is no $ in team.

Beantown's drama kings

The Providence Journal: October 18, 2011

By Chip Benson

   If it were a hit television show, the Boston Red Sox season just ended with a perfect cliffhanger. You want the drama? You can’t handle the drama! Fenway Park is drowning in drama. 

    The face of the franchise, David Ortiz, aka Big Papi, says he would prefer to play for the Yankees, because they are a more stable team. Ouch! Terry Francona, the “greatest manager in Red Sox history”, resigned feeling unappreciated. Sniff! And now the brains behind the baseball operations, Theo Epstein, is leaving, as the culmination of a long simmering power struggle against Fenway Sports Group President Larry Lucchino. Woof! 

     Yes, women still watch soap operas during the day, but men are far worse with their baseball games at night. Red Sox fans of the male variety seemingly call into sports talk- radio shows at all hours for the pleasure of yelling at each other about their opinions. Talk radio? It’s more like yell radio! The sports journalists at WEEI and 98.5 The Sports Hub stir the pot like bad troublemaking trial lawyers. Add in the daily criticism from newspaper, television and on-line reporters, and sports bloggers (that’s a real word now!), and the resulting scrutiny and drama—some call it journalism—are enough to drive a team stark raving mad! 

    Boston sports journalism has long had a misanthropic reputation, and this latest chapter in the 99- year history of Fenway Park has them perhaps rightfully claiming back their position of power and authority in town. The owners of the Red Sox, John Henry, Tom Werner and Larry Lucchino, have built a very successful and first-class business over the past eight years. They acquired other sports properties, in and out of the United States, to try to build a better, stronger overall product, with deep pockets. The better to compete with the Yankees. Yet now they face an even bigger challenge:  the wrath of local sports journalists who act like angry union reps for the legion of baseball fans in New England and beyond. 

    Like any good soap opera, the Red Sox have no real off-season. True, they don’t play baseball games from November through February, but the Hot Stove season of speculation and gossip is already upon us, and it is extra-personal, scurrilous, and scandalous Witness the past two weeks. 

    New Yorkers are just as bad at losing, but in a much bigger city, the spotlight quickly falls elsewhere. Not so in Boston. The unbearable light of being with the Red Sox eventually seems to get to everybody, and then they have to leave. When will it get to ownership? If and when that happens, New Yorkers will truly celebrate the stunning fall from grace of their chief rival, and still the only team to win the World Series twice in the 21^st Century.  

 

Next Generation Baseball Fan

The Providence Journal

Friday, April 8, 2011  

By Chip Benson

 

NEEDHAM

How much longer can the Red Sox draw 37,000-plus fans to Fenway Park to sit and watch baseball games without offering an interactive digital component as part of the experience?

The next generation of baseball fans, 15 to 24, are highly active two-way participants in their online entertainment and communications. The notion of just sitting and watching something for three hours is beyond antiquated; it’s what only their parents would do!

Mobile computing and digital technologies have wired a new generation, one every bit as sharp-elbowed and opinionated as previous generations of Red Sox fans.

The Red Sox spent a king’s ransom on new players this year to get back to their winning ways, but they will have to cater to young people if they are to continue the longest sellout streak in Major League Baseball history (seven years). Sellout streaks are important in baseball because gate receipts constitute the majority of revenue that each team generates.

Unlike the more egalitarian National Football League, which has a salary cap and whose teams pool their television revenue, Major League Baseball leaves its owners largely on their own to run their businesses as they see fit. Significantly, 65 percent of the Red Sox business ($176 million) is in ticket sales.

Expensive architectural renovations to 99-year-old Fenway Park have been completed, and are nice for the old folks, but for the next Red Sox century, the organization needs an upgrade to the digital experience on the field.

The innovative owners of the Red Sox could start by handing out wireless digital controllers, or mobile devices, to interested season-ticket holders. With the appropriate controllers, or eventually the right software that could be installed in any mobile phone, fans at the game could vote in real time on a whole host of in-game tactics and decisions.

For instance, fans could try to guess what pitch is coming before the pitcher delivers. These votes could be tabulated and displayed in real time on the new $10 million video boards before and after every pitch. Same thing for the batter: Will he swing and miss, take a pitch, bunt or get a hit?

Managing the Red Sox has never been easy; Terry Francona reportedly chews over 70 pieces of gum every game. But imagine if fans could vote their opinions on what they think the manager should do during the game: What pitches he should call for? Should the batter swing, take a pitch or bunt? Should Francona insert a pinch hitter for J.D. Drew?

Perhaps the television audience could be on-line participants also, with their real-time votes pitted against the attending fans’ or simply added to the overall votes. Imagine the bleacher votes versus the loge, first-base grandstand versus third-base grandstand, creating an online digital stadium “wave” for the next generation of baseball fans.

Go ahead and shake your head, but this is the way the culture is going, and it will likely wag the future of professional sports. The secret to the success of “American Idol” and similar shows is live online voting and other interactive features that are everyday tools of the young computerati.

Professional sports and their live events are late to the game. NASCAR provides those in attendance with headphones to listen in on the communications between a driver and pit crew. The NFL has helped develop a Fanvision handheld device that gives the viewer instant replay from multiple angles as well as something called cheerleader cam, which could be useful if the league ever plays again. Meanwhile, your average 13-year-old is doing things with Madden 2011 that make watching an actual game seem like watching grass grow.

The dynamics of the live sporting experience should change dramatically. It’s possible that Red Sox fans could be both more engaged during the game and yet quieter, furiously typing away on their mobile devices with a Fenway App. Baseball has always been a statistics-fueled sport. Real-time interactive computing would advance the sport and keep America’s pastime in step with the new generation of digital Americans.

“Popcorn! Soda! Peanuts! Who needs a Fenway App?”

Chip Benson is an occasional contributor.

Red Sox at core of New England

The Providence Journal: April 2, 2010

New Englanders are arguably more fully engaged as fans of the Boston Red Sox than in any other endeavor in life. Ask the average man on the street what he’s thinking about, and you’ll sometimes get a line-by-line player analysis and critique of the team so staggeringly thorough as to be worthy of an IRS audit. For that matter, ask a woman the same question, and you’ll get an equal response, only kinder and gentler, and with attention to a favorite player’s good looks!

April is tax season, also sump-pump season, but, more importantly, it’s the perennial season of baseball that continues to excite and capture the imagination of most people in these parts. It defies rational explanation. Red Sox fandom is part article of faith, which the team has used to ceaselessly market itself with an advertising campaign titled Faith Rewarded. Ceaselessly being a complimentary business term. In an increasingly bottom-line tangible culture, the rewards of Red Sox Nation are intangible. No matter.

This year, Opening Night at Fenway Park, featuring the World Series Champion Yankees versus the Red Sox, falls on Easter Sunday. Or is it the other way around? While Easter is the most sacred holiday for Christians, New Englanders will spend more time on Sunday with the Red Sox than they will in church. Roughly 37,000 fans will attend the likely four-hour event in person, hundreds of thousands will listen on-line and by radio, and millions more will watch on the highest rated regional sports-television channel in America, NESN.

Bostonians, in particular, are increasingly obsessed with not only obscure baseball statistics and baseball math — but also with the characters and personalities of the players, what cars they drive, what they are wearing, and the soap opera that each season eventually now becomes.

Fueling this attention and scrutiny is the transparency of daily high-definition broadcasts of the game, the replays and slow motion of every pitch, and the way in which the faces of the players and their every movement on the field can be idolized, emulated, second-guessed, and ultimately ridiculed.

Nomar Garciaparra, the star of the team in the decade that preceded Faith Rewarded, only recently returned to the Red Sox fold, and retired as a member of the team. He had been estranged for years after getting “Bostoned out”, says manager Terry Francona.

The tipping point in Scott Brown’s U.S. Senate campaign, which became, at least for a while, a tipping point for American politics this year, came mere days before the vote, when Massachusetts Atty. Gen. Martha Coakley mistook Curt Schilling to be a Yankee fan instead of a Red Sox hero.

The resulting upset and improbable vote with its national political ramifications all stem from the citizen fans of Red Sox Nation. For better or worse, through the prism of a green diamond on Yawkey Way, beneath the Green Monster, all matters near and dear to the hearts and minds of New Englanders are decided.

Play ball!

http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/CT_benson2_04-02-10_ULHUJL7_v14.4057a0b.html

The Truth In The Rumpus

The Providence Journal: November 12, 2009 

The movie of the moment, “Where the Wild Things Are,” ends up as a muddle of a film story. Except that life is also a muddle. There don’t seem to be clear answers anymore, to anything — except those two points of light that recently arrived at the same place at the same time 7.3 billion years ago, reconfirming Einstein’s theory of relativity. Maybe we were not meant to be peaceful, or to keep a balanced budget, or to watch PBS instead of “Dancing with the Stars.” Maybe religion, politics and business can all ultimately be deconstructed as Madoff Ponzi schemes, befitting the most talented and daring schemers, the James Gandolfinis of the world.

Yes, we were born to be wild, and when we can’t be, we’re unhappy, but when we are wild, we create unhappiness. We want to play in puddles, but someone always gets splashed the wrong way, and so we end up in a muddle. Defeat, resignation and death ultimately save us from ourselves. Yet the final moment of the movie “Where the Wild Things Are” shows Max, the main character, smile at the thought of all this wildness. The point is laughter, and humor. That’s your wild side. It’s all a mess, we’re all gonna die, the sun is going to burst and the earth will become a dark cold, and uninhabitable place. So you might as well embrace your inner 10-year-old and laugh.

Who is the oracle of this, you ask? Who is the living embodiment of not Einstein’s theory, but the theory of “Wild Things”author Maurice Sendak? Perhaps it’s the comedian Larry David. His secret is to behave like a 10-year-old, albeit through the platform of a television show. Mr. David says the key is to embrace your immaturity and run with it. His show “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” now in its seventh glorious season, was the natural extension to the defining humor of the ’90s, “Seinfeld.” While Mr. Seinfeld presumably moved on and grew up, and had a scandal, and a family and kids, Mr. David kept it going!

The essence of “Where the Wild Things Are” can better be found on Mr. David’s HBO show. Everyone is yelling and screaming and acting out, but ultimately laughing their way through the muddle.

Actual truth is probably 7.3 billion light years away. We mostly just want to know that someone is listening to our version of truth. The rumpus is in comedy. It’s in a smile, the moment that a face cannot hide. The moment that we give up all pretenses and laugh at what ego has erected around us, but which also keeps us too far from the wild ride we were meant to enjoy.

-- Chip Benson

http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/CT_chip12_11-12-09_J2GD8A4_v13.3f8ab2c.html

 

RIGHT-WINGERS GO MAD

The Providence Journal: December 6, 2008

The sky is falling for hard-core Republicans. The not quite vast enough right-wing conspiracy lost badly on Election Day. Heavy drinking and scowling have begun in earnest. Stiff upper lips will need a fresh shot of Botox. The conservative kooks are in exile, acting scary to get America scared.

Many of these kooks will go stark raving mad, huffing and puffing their way through Obama’s first term. He’s black! He’s a Muslim! He’s a liberal! He’s says he’s a non-smoker, but he’s really a smoker! Sure, Fox News will have it all covered, in ultra-venting style, but let us prepare for the Exile of the Insufferable, and hope that it can be quarantined on Fox.

“Barack Obama is a socialist dictator!”

How quaint. Clearly many conservatives are already neo-mad, and will soon have to up their medications; after all, the future of America is at stake. The hypocritical have such a hard time with change. Back on Republican Main Streets turned Scorsese-mean, years of potential therapy loom. Where does a doctor begin? “Tell me about your problems”? “No, I’ve only got four years; let’s just deal with the economy and get out of Iraq.”

(Bush will probably get things off his chest and feel better through a multimillion-dollar book deal — trickle-down political confessions.)

Where did it all go wrong for the Rush Limbaugh-tarian’s — champions of trillion-dollar government spending programs in Iraq and Wall Street, the big book-enders to the Bush presidency. Joe the Plumber’s Republican mirror now has many faces: nation builders, corporate-welfare providers and budget busters.

If the kooks could acknowledge their failings and hypocrisies then maybe they could embrace Barack, and humbly join the rest of the world in at least hoping for a better tomorrow. Instead, look for enrollment to go up in right-wing fringe organizations, over obscure land and gun issues. The kooks prefer hand-to-hand conflict over reality (and not just at cocktail parties).

The reality is that talk is cheap and necessary, because trickle-down global governance doesn’t work. Just as trickle-down economics no longer works. The world needs to be engaged, warts and all, especially given our Made in China, borrowed in Dubai, bought in Wal-Mart lifestyle. They may be despotic countries with nationalized banks and exploited workers, but they’re our despots, dollars and cheap labor!

Sigh. Presidents and some other politicians of the right may say one thing to get elected, and yet govern very differently to stay elected. The last 16 years of Bush-Clinton certainly can prove that. So as consolation to the inconsolable right, who have been spectacularly wrong lately, perhaps Obama may talk like a Democrat, but govern like a conservative Kansan.

— Chip Benson

OUR UNCHALLENGED FATUITY

The Providence Journal: September 5th, 2008

We have met the enemy and he is us.

—Cartoonist Walt Kelly’s Pogo

NEEDHAM. Mass. The environmentalist T-shirt company says, “Life is Good” but really, in political terms, life is just a little too good for too many people in America. Are we really solving the dire problems of the world by driving hybrid SUVs to shop at Whole Foods three times a week? Yes, it’s a green recyclable bag, but the fruit and fish needed a complex exploitive global economy to be collected and tons of smelly jet fuel to get here from Chile, only then to be tossed out on a whim after the expiration dates.

Money is seemingly everywhere, except in our savings accounts, and especially our government’s treasury, where we continue to rack up the national debt by vast income transfers to the not-so-innocent sovereign-wealth funds held by the emir of Dubai and other fossil-fuel luminaries.

We’re encouraged to spend now, and save less, but miraculously are entitled to more later. We’ve been through a costly war that the general public supported through retail sales at Bloomingdales, and here we go again into yet another presidential election.

The phrase that Ronald Reagan pinned on Jimmy Carter, “There he goes again,” should now be the political-T-shirt slogan for the American people, of both parties. “There we go again.”

In polls and focus groups we say that there are dire economic, environmental and political problems that call for drastic change, but politicians want to get elected, and people don’t want to pay more taxes.

So the charade of T-shirt change continues. We want change, but we don’t want to change. Progress is demanded, but sacrifice isn’t.

Where is the candidate at the Brandenburg Gate calling for sacrifice from the American public? We know it, and now we need to hear it from our leaders. Life is too good.

Yes, your personal trainer recommends drinking a lot of water — it’s good for you — but sacrifice requires that you drink it from a tap, not from a plastic bottle with a pretty picture of a pine tree on it. Gasp. Yes, cheap oil is good for you, and our economy, but too much of it is bad for the Olympic bicyclists, and it also funds the tyrants and terrorists of the Middle East.

The problems of America are not the government’s fault. The main fault is with the American people, unchallenged by ambitious politicians, who would rather win now than govern well later.

What we need is the political party and politicians that promise the least. We need the speech that challenges us, and bumper stickers not on the rear of our cars but in front of our faces.

 

THE ECONOMY, IT'S STUPID

The Providence Journal: May 5, 2008

AS THE LAST few billion dollars of liquidity are sucked into the national debt and scarfed up by Wall Street, strange things are happening with the U.S. dollar and American economy in general. Bonds are inverted, Chinese goods are expensive, and John McCain may soon be in charge of it all!

The winning political slogan of the 1990s was “It’s the economy, stupid.”

In ’08 for McCain, it should be “The economy: It’s stupid”.

In political terms this is also known as turning a negative into a positive, because when John McCain tries to talk about economics he starts to grammaticate like George Bush. He means well, but perhaps somewhere in the wings waits VP Mitt Romney.

However, no one, not even Mitt, really knows what’s going on with high finance; the New York Times said so!

A rising tide of economic uncertainty floats all boats of opinion equally, elevating non-economists like me, John McCain, and our new slogan, “The economy: It’s stupid.”

The economy is stupid because we made it so. Too many tax cuts, unfunded social programs, unfunded wars and other failed policies from the last 25 years have been tucked away into the mother of all subprime mortgages, the $10 trillion national debt.

Wall Street’s got nuthin’ on Washington when it comes to credit issues. Admonishing the CEOs of Bear Stearns, Citibank, Bank of America and others is like a stern lecture from “Mr. T” regarding fiscal discipline.

The elephant in the room, with a big dunce cap on, is the national debt. It’s the unspoken, unintended punch line to all of the CNBC punditry-talk. It’s a black hole from which all rational economic law and free-market principles are slowly disappearing into, along with Jim Cramer. At some point soon it will render moot the discussion of stocks, bonds, and interest rates; do not pass Go, or collect $200, proceed directly to Jail!

The economy: It’s stupid. There is no believable explanation for the markets, and perhaps soon the American system, because so much has not been paid for. John Adams once “United the States of America,” but today we are more like Thomas Jefferson in our insolvency.

“In God We Trust” has given way to “In Debt We Trust.” It was spending money that united us post 9/11, E Pluribus Unum now means, “From many, one giant, stupid debt.”

It’s a conversation my mother and I have had for years. We start things off with, “Where does money come from?” From there it gets very complicated, but now we know that we’re on the same level as Ben Bernanke.

The economy: It’s stupid. I think that McCain could actually run on this slogan, with the promise that we need to pay down the national debt for it and us to make sense again.

Bring on the marketers and branded entertainment pros. We need a catchy advertising campaign for the national debt! When it’s time to get serious, it’s time for a coordinated media plan. There will be dress-down breakout meetings to get a creative handle on what the national debt should look like — Spielberg’s final shot in Indiana Jones?

If we’ve become a nation of compartmentalizers, than this surely is the biggest deposit of them all.