Dear Barack,
You've sent me so many emails for the past year that I feel like I know you. Things are looking good, aren't they? So let's take a few minutes and plan for the first Hundred Days. As a scholar of the New Deal, I think I am the perfect person to help you establish an agenda. But first some background from a more recent history.
Back in 1981 when Ronald Reagan was inaugurated, what we now call the conservative "base" hoped that Reagan would act by presidential decree to address pressing issues that conservatives, many of whom were activist Christian evangelicals, called a "family values" agenda. This included critical constitutional issues like banning abortion, making school prayer legal, ending desegregation (otherwise known by segregationists as "forced busing"), and making flag desecration a criminal offense. It's probably worth noting that, since we can all probably acknowledge that the Reagan revolution was a turning point in the history of the United States, Reagan did not use his power this way, and that this agenda was never moved forward in the absolute way conservatives wanted. In fact, Reagan did little for the first Hundred Days, and for a number of days thereafter.
So since you are promising change, I would like to present a modest list of things you might accomplish by presidential decree in
your first hundred days. These policy interventions, great and small, would actually change the lives of those folks on Main Street we keep hearing about. They might even change the lives of some of those people who live on the Back Streets, the ones who work for minimum wage and no health insurance benefits for Joe the Plumber. Some of these acts would address areas in which a country that has aspired to, and actually achieved, greatness throughout its history has systematically become the laughing stock (as opposed to the leader) of the Free World.
Transportation. Eliminate the color-coded warning system that alerts people who are already traveling of the possibility of a terrorist attack. Orange, orange, orange. When is it anything but orange? Although we are warned constantly that there is
some likelihood that there will be a terrorist attack on the United States, or on our own indifferent persons, we all go about our business anyway. Because what else can we do? I know no one who has been deterred from travel because we are on orange alert, or anyone who devotes precious airport time to anything other than finding the nicest sandwich possible, since the deregulation of airline travel means that they no longer serve real food on airplanes. Can we just admit that the color-coded alert system was a public relations stunt, intended to frighten everyone into supporting two disastrous wars that have accomplished nothing?
While we are still in the airport, let's drop the stupid business of putting our toiletries in tiny bottles that then have to be sorted into quart sized clear plastic bags. This has never made me feel safer, particularly since the notorious Shoe Bomber,
Richard Reid, could not have had more than 3.5 ounces of explosives in his sneakers when he was detected in 2005. The squishing sounds would have been, well, obvious, wouldn't they? I haven't asked the Zenith chemistry department, but I bet there are some explosive combinations that could cause a lot of havoc that could be produced by mixing as few as three 3.5 ounce bottles of liquid.
Energy. Leaving the airport, let's put federal restrictions on energy companies charging their paying customers more because said customers pay their bills and because they are conserving energy. Many of us in Shoreline are in receipt of a letter from
United Illuminating that says exactly that. The letter I received two days ago is dated October 6, and informs me that I may attend hearings that commenced
eleven days ago about a rate hike that is necessary because of a decline in electrical sales over the past two years, an increase in uncollectible amounts, and "an increased distribution capital expenditure program needed for reliability," to the tune of $62.5 million over 2009-10.
Ok, this may be a little trickier for you to accomplish Barack, since utilities are mostly regulated -- to the extent that they are regulated at all -- by the states. So here's my question: if our captains of industry believe so much in the free market, what is my incentive to save energy if it only causes my bills to go up? And if UI's deadbeat collection rate is similar to
Consolidated Edison in nearby New York City, only 1.5% of those bills are ultimately uncollectible. So why am I paying other people's bills? And why am I being taxed, in essence, for rebuilding the energy infrastructure, particularly when I am already paying a surcharge for the privilege of purchasing power generated by wind farms?
Barack, Franklin D. Roosevelt tackled the power companies, getting electricity to millions of rural people. You could make a big impact by preventing power companies from shifting shifting responsibility for their declining revenues onto the consumer.
Education. End No Child Left Behind as an unfunded mandate that puts standardized testing, not critical thinking, at the center of a young person's education. NCLB has been the ultimate Bushie achievement. Urban schools no longer resemble the prison industrial complex, they are part of it. Because of the federal testing mandate, that is unsupported by any funds to either pay for the testing or support better education, dollars devoted to actual teaching have diminished. Furthermore, as the
New York Times recently reported, even
schools that have succeeded will fail next year, since the bar for success is raised even higher when a school actually succeeds. The idea, as far as I can tell, is to frighten students, teachers and principals into succeeding by threatening to withdraw their education and careers. It is almost impossible for a school to succeed under NCLB except by rote drill aimed at passing multiple choice tests. Oh yeah -- the other way to succeed is to expel students who are not succeeding, or encourage them to drop out, dooming them to a life of ill-paid labor for Joe the Plumber, poverty or prison:
New York State loses 44% of the students who matriculate in the ninth grade by the time their class graduates four years later.
This policy cannot be reformed or repaired, Barack: it was bad to begin with. It has, in the past eight years, only achieved the conservative goal of undermining public education as a viable resource for sustaining civil society, and privatizing our school system. End it completely and start over.
Health care. Demand that interstate companies that employ thousands of workers at minimum wage, and that take advantage of federal treaties like NAFTA to provide consumer goods at rock-bottom prices, create employer-based health family health insurance and prescription plans at a cost no greater than 5% of an employee's taxable wage. Companies like Walmart, CVS, Walgreens, Costco, and other big-box giants could take advantage of their own ability to purchase prescription drugs in bulk to offer employees and their families medications at the cost they have negotiated with the drug companies. And with one stroke of the pen, Barack, you could void the law that prohibits the federal government from negotiating such prices from the drug companies so that seniors and the unemployed poor could have the basic medications they need to stay healthy.
Military policy. The Iraq war cannot simply be ended by decree: we know that. But you know what we could end? Military recruiting in public schools, and mandatory access for military recruiters in schools that take federal money. We could also prohibit the use of information collected in public schools by military recruiters so that they can bombard economically vulnerable students with recruiting pitches. Here's a place to let the free market reign: if it' a good war that citizens believe in, they will sign up to fight it, right? If not, not. But I haven't noticed Choate-Rosemary Hall being forced to let military recruiters in the door, whereas schools in Shoreline are not permitted to prevent military recruiters from wooing the children of the poor.
Actually, my friend, you could do all these things on the First Day, but since we have been waiting eight, long years, I am willing to wait for a hundred days. See you at the polls!
Yours sincerely,
The Tenured Radical
Cross posted at Cliopatria.
Dear Barack,
Yesterday all of us in the Zenith Community received a message from (Not So) New President saying that the economic situation is grave in our part of the world, and will be for a while. Personally, I like it when someone will just admit that things are bad. It also increases my capacity for trust in the Authorities to be reassured that the people in charge feel that they know what they are doing. The message states directly that any budgets cuts, difficult as they may be to swallow, will be across the board; no part of the university will be spared or favored. "All of us," (Not So) New President notes in this email, "will be asked to make sacrifices."
One of my responses to the financial meltdown was to cancel a bunch of credit cards. How did I acquire all these credit cards in the first place? Well, in several ways, but most of all because they were offered to me by banks at low (or no) interest. They were offered to me as great opportunities, full of flattering language about how my credit history had caused me to be selected as a Particularly Prestigious Customer. In fact, I was getting them because we sold a house, bought a house, paid off a mortgage, acquired a new (relatively modest) primary mortgage, added a small construction loan, and made our payments punctually. In other words, because financial institutions share so much information, it was clear that the Radical family was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in the space of about sixteen months. And much as I would like to imagine myself as Particularly Prestigious, I wasn't born under a rock. I was actually being offered these cards in hopes that I would overreach: that I would charge up a bunch of stuff, miss a payment (or not), and end up paying as high as 29% on purchases, accumulated interest, late payment penalties and miscellaneous fees. Which leads me to propose that in all the fuss about subprime mortgage lending, it is the extension of these fraudulent practices to the credit card market that has caused the second great weakness in our economy. 
And yet there are two problems with having a lot of extra credit cards. One is that it is easy to lose track of them, because they blend in easily with ordinary household junk. One of my habits when I travel is to stick one of these cards in a Secret Location, so that if my pocket is picked I am not entirely without funds. Once, however, utterly by accident, I discovered that two ladies who had arrived under the auspices of Happy Housewives Homecleaning Services, and who left claiming that they had forgotten their vacuum cleaner (??), had filched one of these cards from an open suitcase. They were able to fill up their SUV and buy many cartons of ciggies at the Pequot reservation before I realized what was going on, canceled the card, and reported them. Not fun, on any level, particularly having to choose between reporting two desperately poor (but ambitious) women who wanted to go into the tobacco business and picking up the bill for their enterprise. Fortunately they were just petty thieves, and didn't find themselves in need of a set of antique nesting tables. But that taught me a lesson: if you are going to keep extra credit cards around, secure them.
I rarely take advantage of commercial credit now except for expedience, such as charging up reimbursable professional expenses (warning: when reimbursed, do not go out and buy a TV instead of paying the bill.) Mostly, for internet purchases and low-cash situations, I use my handy debit card (warning: if you pay for monthly expenses on a credit card and have no savings, you need to wean yourself to this system gradually, otherwise you suddenly run out of money in the middle of the month, as you are paying for everything twice in a single thirty-day cycle. And never give a hotel a debit card at the beginning of your stay, as they will put a hold on your checking account for a substantial sum of money that takes weeks to release.) But I also make enough money that I don't have to rely on credit to go on vacation, pay a medical bill or a car repair, the kind of thing that can put an ordinary person (an assistant professor paying student loans, for example) behind the eight ball for several months. As a household, we have a great, fixed-rate mortgage we can afford, and we have enough savings that we can make up a month's budget shortfall from our other resources, even in the midst of this great crash. But my own experiences doing business with (read: getting screwed by) huge interstate commercial banks do give me cause me to believe that the de-regulation of our financial system has made a great many people into permanent debtors by locking them into multiple "agreements" with banks that they cannot possibly understand, "agreements" that are deliberately altered in arcane and unpredictable ways to fool people into violating the terms they have "agreed" to. That I keep receiving such offers every day, and multiple offers over the internet, to consolidate my debt into one low, low payment when I am simultaneously hearing on the news that small businesses cannot get the loans they need to maintain inventory, suggests to me that we are still swimming with the sharks economically; and that as a nation, we are a long way from grappling with the corrupt corporate practices designed to take money from those who can least afford it and siphon it upward.
You know, Connecticut rarely gets to be the center of attention. But we are today! Three weeks before the most important election in recent American history, the Connecticut State Supreme Court has ruled that we in the Radical household have the constitutional right to marry. It takes effect a day or so before the election, barring the End of Days or some legal delay by lemon-sucking, family values conservatives. Take that Sarah Palin!
One of the consequences of last night's presidential debate was that I overcooked the applesauce. You would think maybe I should follow the advice of both candidates and act responsibly with the apples, an untapped national resource which arrive in large bags every week from the farm share I belong to. Am I supposed to save them in the basement like a squirrel so that I can eat locally all winter? Turn them into ethanol? Or sell them on a street corner in downtown New York as a dramatic re-enactment of the Great Depression?
Imagine the Radical in front of the Senate Committee on Disloyal Activity. She is being questioned by Senator McCarthy-Cain, a ranking Republican member of the committee who has aspirations for Higher Office.
Senator McCarthy-Cain (beginning to unloose his famous temper, causing his voice to go up a notch): "And can you describe to me, Professor Radical, why these would be suitable readings for a college course, and why you are in any way suited to teaching college history?"
Because we were catching up on old episodes of Army Wives before I came upstairs this evening, I am reminded of a fact few people know about the Radical: her connections to the military. Two of my cousins served in Gulf I; and we had a family connection who was deployed to Afghanistan with the Special Forces a couple years back. In fact I, and my sister, are the first generation of my father's family to have not served in the military since at least the American Revolution (since our family comes from western Massachusetts, it seems likely that we could take that date back to the French and Indian War, and perhaps even Metacom's War.) Not accidentally, one of my current favorite activities is reading the blogs of military wives (who probably detest Army Wives, much as medical people scoff at ER and Grey's Anatomy.) At The Real Army Wife you can read the thoughts of an infantry Lieutenant's spouse; her husband is deployed in the Sand Box (this is the kind of lingo you learn if you watch Army Wives, friends, the first season of which can be obtained on DVD.) While the Lieutenant is away, Real Army Wife is organizing for Obama, in addition to living her real life as a marketing exec. Rock on, dear. I hope you are on a base in a swing state. Like North Carolina.
I am reminded when I read military family blogs that for those of us who are against the war it is a complicated issue to extend our sympathy and affection to those who have agreed to fight it. But it is something worth attempting because it expands the world of those of us who the government has deliberately shielded from the emotional consequences of this endless conflict (it does seem the economic consequences are coming home to roost, although as usual, those who made the war will suffer the least.) I can't help extending myself, since my family, as well as my accidental, connections to the military keep me alert to those around me for whom the war is their life context right now (for example, the son of one of my Zenith colleagues was in Desert Storm, having joined the Army to get a civil service ranking that would allow him to be a forest ranger; another friend volunteers to help resettle Iraqi refugees, many of whom have had to flee because they worked for the American military.) 
I just got back from the Little Berks, which is a weekend conference composed of the group of people who organize the Big Berks every three years. One of the things we do in the meeting immediately following the conference is elect the new President. I am happy to say that the results of the election can now be revealed: the new President of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians is Kathleen Brown, Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. She replaces Ruth Mazo Karras, Professor of History from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Ruth has done a great job, and Kathy will too.
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