Chuck > Recent Status Updates

[Dreamers] were smart, poised, and resilient- as full of potential as my own daughters. I’d anything, I found the Dreamers to be less cynical about America than many of their native-born contemporaries- precisely because their circumstances had taught them not to take life in this country for granted.

Although American consumers benefited from this invisible workforce, many feared that immigrants were taking jobs from citizens, burdening social services programs, and changing the nations racial and cultural makeup.

I hadn’t changed my mind on any of this- getting the rich to pay more i taxes was it only a matter of fairness but also the only way to find new initiatives. But as had been true with so many of my campaign proposals, the financial crisis had forced me to rethink when we should try to do it.

For they seemed to lie in wait everywhere, ready to resurface whenever growth rates stalled or demographics changed or a charismatic leader chose to ride the wave of people’s fears and resentments.

…and improved education enough to temper humanity’s based impulses. Except now I found myself asking whether those impulses- of violence, greed, corruption, nationalism, racism, and religious intolerance, the all-too-human desire to beat back our own uncertainty and mortality and sense of insignificance by subordinating others- were too strong for any democracy to permanently contain.

…especially in big, multiethnic, multi-religious societies like India and the United States. Not revolutionary leaps or major cultural overhauls; not a fix for every social pathology or lasting answers for those in search of purpose and meaning in their lives. Just the observance of rules that allowed us to sort out or at least tolerate our differences, and government policies that raised living standards…

[the prime minister] had done his part, following the playbook of liberal democracies across the post-Cold War world: upholding the constitutional order; attending to the quotidian, often technical work of boosting the GDP; and expanding the social safety net. Like me, he had come to believe that this was all any of us could expect from democracy…!

“In uncertain times, Mr. President,” the prime minister said, “the call of religious and ethnic solidarity can be intoxicating. And it’s not so hard for politicians to exploit that, in India or anywhere else.”

[Gandhi’s] devotion to truth, and the power of nonviolent resistance to stir the conscience, his insistence on our common humanity and the essential oneness of all religions; and his belief in every society’s obligation, through its political, economic, and social arrangements, to recognize the equal worth and dignity of all people- each of these ideas resonated with me.

Our problem…was that so long as Republicans uniformly resisted our overtures and raised bell over even the most moderate of proposals, nothing we did could be portrayed as partisan, controversial, radical- even illegitimate.

The one thing I could be certain of was that for all the outrage being expressed at the moment about wetlands and sea turtles and pelicans, what the majority of us were really interested in was having the problem go away, for me to clean up yet one more mess decades in the making with some quick and easy fix so that we could all go back to our carbon-spewing, energy-wasting ways without having to feel guilty about it

[CEO Tony Hayward’s] obtuseness reminded me that BP- previously known as British Petroleum- had started off as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company: the same company whose unwillingness to split royalties with Iran’s government in the 1950s had led to the coup that has ultimately resulted in that country’s Islamic Revolution.

For centuries, humans had fought to bend this primordial landscape to their will…rebuilding time and time again after hurricanes and floods, undaunted by the implacable tides. There was a certain nobility in such stubbornness, I thought, part of the can-do spirit that had built America. Yet when it came to the ocean…the victories of engineering turned out to be fleeting, the prospect of control illusory.

It’s obsession with quarterly earnings had warped corporate decision making and encouraged short-term thinking. Untethered to place, indifferent to the impact of globalization, lol on particular workers and communities, the financial markets had helped accelerate the offshoring of jobs and the concentration of wealth management n a handful of cities and economic sectors, leaving huge swaths of the country drained.

I had some sympathy for the Left’s indictment of the status quo. Rather than efficiently allocate capital to productive used, Wall Street really did increasingly function like a trillion-dollar casino, it’s outsized profits and compensation packages overly dependent on ever-greater leverage and speculation.

You had to sell your program, reward supporters, punch back against opponents, and amplify the facts that helped your cause while fudging the details that didn’t. I found myself wondering whether we’d somehow turned virtue into a vice; whether, trapped in my own high-mindedness, I’d failed to tell the American people a story they could believe in.

[FDR had] known that in a crisis people needed a story that made sense of their hardships and spoke to their emotions- a morality tale with clear good guys and bad guys and a plot they could easily follow. In other words, FDR understood that to be effective, governance couldn’t be so antiseptic that it set aside the basic stuff of politics:

Voters in focus groups couldn’t distinguish between TARP, which I’d inherited, and the stimulus; they just new that the well-connected were getting theirs while they were getting screwed.

There was no getting around the fact that many of the people most culpable for the nations economic woes remained fabulously wealthy and had avoided prosecution… the whole thing reeked of unfairness.

Across the political al spectrum, voters considered the bank bailouts a scam that had allowed the barons of finance to emerge from the crisis unscathed.

I realized that for all the power inherent in the seat I now occupied, there would always be a chasm between what I knew should be done to achieve a better world and what in a day, a week, or year I found myself actually able to accomplish.

Federal, state, and local governments had invested trillions of dollars-whether through direct subsidies and tax breaks or through the construction of infrastructure…- to help maintain both the steady supply of and the constant demand for cheap fossil fuels. US oil companies were among the worlds most profitable companies and yet still received millions in federal tax breaks each year.

Just about every renewable energy company…faced the same dilemma: No matter how good their technology was, they still had to operate in an economy that for more than a century had been constructed almost entirely around oil, gas, and coal. This structural disadvantage wasn’t simply the result of free-market forces.