A Tale of Two Republics: Arizona and California during the Coronavirus Pandemic

An educated and virtuous citizenry is essential for a republic to endure, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, two former U.S. presidents and rivals, agreed in an exchange of letters. Interestingly, both men died on July 4, 1826. Of course, the vote on independence had occurred on July 3, 1776 and the Declaration was signed over weeks rather than dramatically on July 4, 1776. Unfortunately, false narratives can take on a life of their own. Another example involves the U.S.'s "sun-belt" states, whose surging popularity from the 1980s at least through 2020 has masked the true conditions of the underlying cultures. Maricopa county, in which Phoenix, Arizona is located, was in the top 10 nationally for numeric increases in population from 2010 to 2020. Lest it be supposed that that county improved, a survey in July, 2019 listed Arizona as 49th out of the 50 States on elementary education (K-12th grade). 

Relatedly, Arizona's Medicaid system had a sordid reputation in terms of how well the subcontracting companies and non-profits managed themselves and were held accountable. As of 2020, Arizona still had a significant number of ideological voters who believed that Medicaid was a form of sordid socialism, which unjustly had taken the place of horrid communism. Because Medicaid had become the unwanted step-child in that political culture that still boasted that "taxes are theft," tight budgets and the State's bad education system resulted in subcontracting organizations, including medical clinics, conveniently embellishing their low-wage employees. Reports emerged of nurse-practitioners claiming to have the same training as physicians and even specialists such as psychiatrists and dermatologists, and of counselors misrepresenting themselves as being synonymous with therapists. In fact, Arizona's Medicaid tumor even reduced mental health to behavioral health so the cheaper behavior-trained counselors rather than therapists could be hired and relied upon. 

Furthermore, the organizations in Arizona receiving most or all of their funding from public-aid agencies like Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and Medicaid were reputed to suffer from administrative incompetence without much accountability from either of those two government agencies. It was quite strange to read of the non-profit organizations and companies, including medical clinics, refer to themselves as agencies. Such lying with impunity also served to dissimulate any criticism of administrative incompetence. That low-class sub-culture of dependent organizations could count on the low education level in the state and its notable anti-science (and anti-intellectualism) ideology not to know better. In fact, no one would be likely to push-back on the Medicaid employees in the state who mispronounce the technocratic acronym for the state's Medicaid program, AHCCCS, as access rather than ah-kehs. In Arizona, the letter C is not hard (like a K) if an S follows, rather than just an E or I. You're wrong, ignorance that can't be wrong has the gall to say. You're wrong, I don't need to keep six-feet away from people. You're wrong, my people don't need enforceable government orders. Relative to California, we could rightly expect that Arizona would botch its management of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. 

The full essay is at "Arizona and California React to Coronavirus."

Presidential Authority and Bureaucracy: Regulatory Agencies

Circulating in Congress in the fall of 2012 was a bill that would have allowed "the White House to second-guess major rules and mandate that agencies carefully study the economic effects of new regulation. The change could, in effect, delay a number of rules for the financial industry. Those who support preserving the status quo where Wall Street regulates itself will find much to like in this legislation," said Amit Narang, a regulatory policy advocate at Public Citizen, a nonprofit government watchdog group.[1] President Obama had received $1 million from Goldman Sachs as a campaign contribution in 2008. Yet of how much value to Wall Street is a mere delay in regulation? Some, surely, but not enough to make this the decisive issue here. Rather, I submit that the president's control as chief executive of the regulatory agencies and the added bureaucracy are more salient in this case study. 

The full essay is at "Presidential Authority and Bureaucracy." 

1. Ben Protess, “Lawmakers Push to Increase WhiteHouse Oversight of Financial Regulators,” The New York Times, September 10, 2012. 

So You Want to Become an Excellent Writer?

A good writer writes well. This truism maintains that a good writer is has mastered the craft of writing. Unfortunately, this feat does not come without considerable effort, for takes some good old-fashioned study in grammar and spelling. Unfortunately, the linguistic mechanics furnish only the means of entry, though this point seems to be lost on the American English teachers who slighted grammar pedagogically in the opening decades of the twenty-first century. Perhaps the novelists who have felt immune from being grammatical for the sake of style have been the interlarded culprits behind the trend of grammar be viewed as relative or an elective. To be sure, style has right of exception, but the problem is when the exceptions become the norm and even an excuse for bad grammar. This is all just foundational stuff; the quality distinguishing the excellent writer from even a good one is passion-fueled insight. The writer who writes out of a strong urge, or instinct, to express an insight publicly naturally finds his or her own voice, and thus identity, as a writer.  In this sense, a writer is like an entrepreneur whose passion breaks through the confines of an organizational structure like lava pushes through the tough shell of a lava dome.

The full essay is at "Excellent Writing Is More than Grammar."

The Federal Reserve Expanded Its Turf in Spite of Having Come Up Short

Testifying before the US Senate Finance Committee on his re-appointment, Ben Bernanke volunteered that the Fed had been “slow” in protecting consumers from high-risk mortgages during the housing bubble and that it should have forced banks to hold more capital for all the risks they were taking on.  “In the area where we had responsibility, the bank holding companies, we should have done more.” he told lawmakers.  The hearing provided new evidence of doubt among lawmakers about the Federal Reserve’s  role as the nation’s guardian of the financial system. “In the face of rising home prices and risky mortgage underwriting, the Fed failed to act,” said Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, the senior Republican on the banking committee. “Many of the Fed’s responses, in my view, greatly amplified the problem of moral hazard stemming from ‘too big to fail’ treatment of large financial institutions and activities.”  Accordingly, Senator Dodd proposed that the Fed’s powers as a bank regulator ought to be transferred to a new consolidated agency. Even though Bernanke admitted that the Fed made mistakes as a regulator of the bank holding companies, he and other top Fed officials adamantly opposed Dodd's proposal, arguing that the Fed has unique expertise nonetheless and that the Fed's ability to preserve financial stability depends on having the detailed information that only a regulator has about the inner workings of major institutions.

The full essay is at "The Federal Reserve Bank."

Bureaucratizing Leadership into Management

Fuqua/COLE surveyed 205 executives of public- and private-sector companies. Based on the results, I provide a critique that renders transparent some of the questionable assumptions that leadership-advisors and even business leaders themselves may have without realizing it. 

The full essay is at "Bureaucratizing Leadership."

Pope Francis Puts Up A Syrian Refugee Family: An Opportunity to Clean House

During wars, houses of worship have become temporary hospitals meeting very practical needs. Caring for the suffering is particularly close to the message and example that Jesus provided. In response to Pope Francis’s call for each parish in Europe to take in at least one refugee family amid the tremendous influx of mostly Syrian refugees in 2015, the pope himself arranged to take in a family. Leading by example is certainly fitting for a follower of Jesus. I submit that the pope could have gone even further to drive home the message of what it means to be a Christian.

The complete essay is at “Pope Francis Puts Up Syrian Refugee Family.” 

Pope Francis washing the feet of men and women in a juvenile detention center on Holy Thursday in 2013. That he washed women's feet flustered some people in the Vatican who missed the main point of the ritual. 

The Emperor: Above the Clouds of Petty Protocol

In complex social arrangements, such as exist in governments, business firms, and religious organizations, a person must climb through many levels before reaching persons of sufficient height and occupational breadth that what had been said to be binding requirements suddenly become as though unfettered butterflies. Astoundingly, the mid-level subordinates may even object as the rules are relegated back to their true status as guidelines. Beyond the element of greater authority, a greater perspective in terms of what truly matters is profoundly important in this regard. Having many decades of lived experience, plus a certain maturity in place of pettiness, is also in the mix. A Pope of the Roman Catholic Church, for example, may be more likely to pick up on a sincere heart of the sort Jesus would praise than run through a laundry list of doctrinal requirements.

In the film Emperor (2012), religion and government are intertwined in the Japanese emperor, who was until shortly after World War II also officially a living god. Although his aides attempt to put General MacArthur into a straightjacket of protocol for the meeting with the emperor at the end of the film, both the general and the emperor are off sufficient maturity and perspective to disabuse themselves of the protocols and focus on the truly important stuff. To discern the petty from the profoundly important is a key feature of upper-echelon leadership.

The entire essay is at “The Emperor”

The State of the Union Address: The Presidency as Visionary or Bureaucratic Leadership?

Just after President Obama’s 2014 State of the Union Address, CNN found that among the Americans who had watched the speech, 76 percent had a “ total positive” reaction, 44 percent of which being “very positive,” and 22 percent had a negative reaction.[1] What is left unsaid can be even more useful than what is reported. In this case, the poll does not reveal the criteria used by the respondents to assess the speech. The devil lies in the details here, in not only the actual criteria used, but also the very content of the speech. In this essay, I investigate the suitability of the criterion that can be labeled “extent of detail in the speech,” given the purpose of the speech as laid out in the U.S. Constitution and, moreover, the presidential office.

In his 2014 address, Barak Obama stayed largely away from “the vision thing.” This point is significant to the extent that “presiding over the whole” is an important feature of his office. Even realistic bipartisan legislative items, such as immigration and trade reform, received only cursory mention. This is understandable, given the gridlock that had made 2013 one of the least productive Congresses in U.S. history. Under the circumstances, the president could have done worse than lean on his constitutional obligation “to give to the Congress information of the state of the Union.” Pursuing this tract may have given the president (and the office) more reputational capital (e.g., standing above the fray; not being partisan). Sadly, he truncated that duty to sell his executive actions to a weary citizenry and Congress. In other words, like presidents before him, Barak Obama chose to make the speech fit almost exclusively within the second part of the constitutional obligation—to “recommend to [Congress’s] consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.”[2] To be sure, he did push a few “incrementalist” legislative proposals, such as increasing the minimum wage a few dollars and extending unemployment compensation three months. Unfortunately, the public seemed to recognize the partisan nature of these “agenda items.”

Perhaps the main thrust of the address fell on announcements of, and justifications for executive actions, including tightening industrial carbon-emission limits, increasing the minimum wage that federal contractors would have to pay their workers as a condition of accepting contracts in the future, and providing a new retirement-savings device for any employees without an employer-based plan. The White House readily admitted the diminished returns afforded by executive orders relative to legislation. “I wouldn’t tell you that executive action is a substitute for major bipartisan legislation; it’s not,” Dan Pfeiffer, a senior advisor to the president, admitted.[3]

The implication that the state of the Union hinged on such “micro” measures somehow escaped the notice of viewers, the media, and the political elite. By the time the president got to his “achievement” in having secured the voluntary agreement of several CEOs not to discriminate against the long-term unemployed, he was past even the encroachments of the recommendations part. The showcasing of hand-picked people in the gallery entirely bypasses the constitutional purpose of the report and recommendations.

To be sure, Barak Obama was hardly alone among U.S. presidents in steering the address toward partisan recommendations. In fact, by the time of the 2014 address, most Americans probably expected a partisan list of proposals. His contribution may have been in moving the de facto standard for what counts as a State of the Union Address even further along in terms future expectations of presidents using the address to sell their respective agendas. In the context of legislative gridlock and perhaps even a media-fomented general sense that the stuff of visionary leadership must finally bow down to American pragmatism in the era of managerialism, the president’s addition of executive actions took the address even further from the “big picture” inherent in the condition of the Union itself—that is to say, further away from transformational and visionary leadership and closer to bureaucratic and politicized management. This is bad news for the presidency if the presiding role of the office (e.g., looking out for the good of the whole systemically) is as much a part of the job as are commanding the military and acting as chief executive.

Burns’ distinction between transactional and transformational leadership may shed some light here. Burns classifies both types under moral leadership in his definitive work, Leadership.[4] The transactional leader takes the followers’ needs as given and attends, via particular (i.e., incrementalist) transactions with the followers, to the extant lower needs already preoccupying the followers as well as the leader (e.g., raising the minimum wage). In contrast, the transformational leader raises, or transforms, the needs that the followers consider the most important to higher, distinctively moral, needs that would transform both the followers and the leader, even if merely in looking at a problem in a new light (i.e., through the lenses of a novel paradigm). It should come as no surprise that “the vision thing” and charisma have great value in transformational leadership and none at all in the transactional sort. For example, the president could have inserted his recommendation for a raise in the minimum wage within a vision of sustenance as a fundamental, and thus unconditional, human right. The transformation would involve raising the perceived need at issue from that of negotiating a new conditional set of terms for domestic food aid (“food stamps”) and a maximum in unemployment compensation to replacing that mindset among leaders and followers alike with one that is rooted and justified in basic (i.e., unconditional) human rights.

In conclusion, the gradual shift in emphasis that has gone virtually unnoticed at the societal level as Americans have critiqued State of the Union addresses is “the canary in the coal mine” already letting us know that both the presiding and related non-partisan leadership roles of the U.S. presidency are well on their way to extinction. Unfortunately, many Americans seem to have been pegging their assessment criteria to what the address itself has become—even if this means validating successive presidential lapses. Lest shirking the presiding and “big picture” leadership roles of the office in favor of getting as much of a partisan agenda put into law as possible is not sufficiently narcissistic, the presumptuousness involved in feeling free to “tweak” the office in a more convenient direction surely suffices. Yet such gradual moves effectively evade notice as if by stealth.

I submit for your wise consideration, therefore, the following question: Is democracy unknowingly susceptible to death by increments? If so, republics may be destined by the fates, or, more likely, inherent design to unwittingly suffer a prolonged decline without any awareness that the anchors are being gradually moved down the hill. The lack of recognition that the markers have been moved means that the new positions are taken to be the old default. Accordingly, no serial decline is discerned; no “big picture” vision that is historically as well as idealistically informed breaks through the ice, as the marker on what counts as leadership has shifted too over time. It is difficult to follow the bread crumbs if they are being eaten by birds. By yet another analogy, the state of the Union might include the point that we are skiing downhill in “white-out” conditions, utterly clueless as to where we, the self-governing people (ideally), are going until it is too late.

See "The State of the Union Address: The Presidency as Presiding or Partisan?" in The Essence of Leadership, which is available at Amazon in print and as an ebook.

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1. Ariel Edwards-Levy and Mark Blumenthal, “State of the Union Poll Gives Obama Positive Marks,” The Huffington Post, January 29, 2014.

2. The U.S. Constitution, Article 2, Section 3.

3.Susan Page, “Speech-wise: What a Difference [a] Year Makes,” USA Today, January 29, 2014.

4. James M. Burns, Leadership (New York: HarperCollins, 1978). 

U.S. Postal Service: Home Delivery Up Next?

After years of billion-dollar losses, the U.S. Postal Service announced in February 2013 that the “long-held tradition of Saturday delivery” would come to an end. Only packages would still be delivered on Saturdays. The Postal Service expected the change to save $2 billion a year. That even such a minor “tradition” would have had such staying power amid billions of dollars of losses supports the old adage, old habits die hard. It is as if even a minor change from a long-standing practice would throw us into chaos. Our tolerance for ending things that have been around seemingly forever is far too limited.

Moreover, the human aversion to changing long-standing customs or practices adversely narrows perception itself. For example, the much costlier, labor-intensive practice of delivering mail to homes was as though above critique. Particularly with many Americans paying their bills online, the “need” for mail delivery even five days a week to one’s house can alternatively be viewed as antiquated.  It is as if that practice had gone on as though without any thought on it itself.

                                               Is this highly labor-intensive custom really necessary?    source: zimbio

The door-to-door salesmen selling vacuums or Bibles had surely become a relic long after the film Paper Moon popularized the lifestyle. Why then have we held on to the notion that mail should be delivered to one’s apartment building or house? We go to stores to get food and medicine. Particularly with so many people paying bills online, is mail so much more vital than food or medicine that we couldn’t just as well stop by our local post office to pick up our mail a few times a week? At the very least, we would not be bothered by the anxiety of whether a threatening notice is waiting for us at home. Just as computer technology has enabled the automation of stored-book retrieval in a few academic libraries (e.g., the University of Chicago), the Postal Service could automate mail retrieval so millions of P.O. Boxes would not be necessary.

In short, we humans are not very good at “thinking outside the box” of current custom. Put another way, habits that have gone on seemingly forever have a habit of going on mindlessly. The U.S. Postal Service has suffered greatly from this particular human proclivity. Perhaps with a wider perspective other institutions can be found that are similarly suffering assumed demands to perpetuate practices that are no longer justified.

Source:

“U.S. Postal Service Right to End Era of Saturday Delivery: Poll,” The Huffington Post, February 9, 2013.

South Korea’s President: Emblematic of a Culture of Corruption

Mired in corruption, President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea reflected on the matter on television in July 2012. “The more I think about it, the more it crushes my heart,” he said. “But whom can I blame now? It’s all because of my negligence . . . . I bow before the people in apology.” He had offered a similar apology the previous January during his New Year’s speech. Although Kim himself was not as of July implicated, three relatives, four senior staff, and several former senior officials in the cabinet and government-run companies had been indicted or convicted.

According to the New York Times, “The president’s brother, a former lawmaker, has been charged with accepting bribes from two bankers. Prosecutors said the bankers asked him to help prevent regulators from shutting down their banks. The bankers have been charged with embezzlement and bribery, and their banks’ operations have been suspended.” Moreover, Kim was just the latest in a series of South Korean presidents politically damaged by corruption scandals. It would appear that personal profiting from one’s governmental (or business) position was at the very least a part of the South Korean culture, if not tacitly accepted in government circles.

In my albeit rather limited association with South Korean business, I have found the organizational culture to be extremely hierarchical in the sense that officials at the top have near carte-blanche (i.e., near absolute) power from the perspective of their subordinates. Additionally, the underlings tend to cover up any mistakes or failures from their bosses, whose world is thus held as though in the clouds. In such a context, corruption can be rife.

It should be noted that the extreme psychological distance in the organizational world in South Korea is not without a basis in fact. The mentality of an employee at a customer service call center is oceans away from that of even a mid-level manager, who in turn can be distinguished from an organizational leader. Often times, only the latter has the maturity to relegate the red tape by prioritizing common sense and even just that which is natural in human-to-human interaction. It is not uncommon, for instance, for people used to a certain height to instinctively sense and relegate the gate-keeping games of the herd. I suspect that in South Korea, the latter know they are eons away from their superiors. The latter can use this natural distance to their own advantage in covering up bribery and kick-backs. To this extent, the distance assumed by the underlings is unjustified, even if on a general mentality basis it is fully natural (and justified).

Therefore, even though the corruption in South Korean government and business is hardly justified from an ethical standpoint, a Nietzschean would quickly point out that distance is natural, even necessary, for the strong such that they not become infected by the narrowness of the herd. In the West, the organizational creature can be rather insistent that its mentality must be binding even on those above. In South Korean culture, by contrast, a lower mentality may have a better sense of its place, and thus of the inherently limited nature of its reach. That is to say, the presumptuousness of the herd animal is checked, whereas it roams like an undisciplined child in the West. The question regarding South Korea is thus how corruption may be checked without tossing the baby out with the bathwater. 

Source:

Choe Sang-Hun, “South Korean President Apologizes for Corruption Scandals,” The New York Times, July 24, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/25/world/asia/lee-myung-bak-of-south-korea-apologizes-for-corruption-scandals.html?ref=world

The E.U. Agenda: Taming Bloated Greek Patronage

As E.U. leaders wrestled in the fall of 2011 with how to bail out those state governments that had been amassing relatively large semi-sovereign debt loads, residents in relatively solvent states such as Germany were frustrated with what they perceived as profligate over-spending in Greece. It is possible that even the Germans did not realize how engrained the excessive politically-based Greek bureaucracy had become. I suspect that for many Greeks, news of their living beyond their means was met more with denial and utter disbelief than an attitude-adjustment. In other words, a vast disparity in perspective exists on the ground as the E.U. struggled to come to grips with the debt crisis. The “ever closer union” necessary for the E.U. to rise to the occasion has as its foremost obstacle the disparate perceptions existing within the union (and enforceable by state governments).

The full essay is at Essays on the E.U. Political Economy: Federalism and the Debt Crisis, available at Amazon.

Organizational Bureaucracy at Odds with Creativity in Film

Art through corporate bureaucracy can be likened to oil and water. The rise of the studio system to produce film as an art form thus evinces a necessary evil. To be sure, organization is necessary to literally organize the various facets involved in the production of a film. However, needless managerial levels have gone beyond what is needed for coordination, particularly in television, and have stifled good narrative in the process.

The full essay is at "Organizational Bureaucracy and Film."

South Sudan as a Sovereign State: Governmental Change in Slow Motion

Announced in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, on February 7, 2011, voters in the oil-producing south overwhelming chose to secede from the Arab north. According to the New York Times, 98.83 percent of the more than 3.8 million registered voters in the south chose to separate from the north. The referendum had been agreed to as part of the peace agreement in 2005, after two long and brutal civil wars between the Arab Muslim north and the mostly animist and Christian south. “Today we received these results and we accept and welcome these results because they represent the will of the southern people,” President Bashir said in a statement on state television, according to Reuters. In Washington, the White House released a statement by President Obama congratulating the people of south Sudan and announcing “the intention of the United States to formally recognize southern Sudan as a sovereign, independent state in July 2011.” The New York Times reported that actual independence would be declared on July 9, when the peace agreement that set the stage for the vote expired. In the meantime, issues regarding citizenship, oil-revenue rights and the contested and volatile region of Abyei would be settled.

The full essay is at "South Sudan."

A Yale College Dean Functioning as a Government Official

A fraternity at Yale had its new members chat “no means yes”…meaning that if a woman says no, she means yes…in pledging during the Fall of 2010.  The dean of Yale College asked the college’s executive committee to look into the matter.  This seems to me to evince a penchant for bureaucracy for its own sake. 

The full essay is at "A Yale College Dean."