Dana Blankenhorn

30-Year Property

2008-12-02T14:39:13-05:00

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 49 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

Perhaps the biggest policy failure of my generation is the demise of 30-year property.

Back when I was in college (30 years ago now coincidentally) we talked a lot about 30-year property. It was, as you might guess, property which could hold its value over 30 years and thus could justify a 30-year depreciation schedule. Roads. Airports. Ports. Homes. Skyscrapers. Things that were permanent.

Partly due to the computer revolution this concept nearly disappeared from the business lexicon over the last 30 years. It disappeared from corporate America, which decided that research needed a shorter "pay-off," and that all other property needed shorter depreciation. And it left the lexicon of government as well, so roads deteriorated and suburbs grew in density willy-nilly with no regard for how people would use them.

Why blame computing? Computing really defines my generation, as manufacturing defined that of my parents. And what we've learned about computers is that they're valuable for far less than their useful life. (Note the contrast with, say, cars.) A five-year old PC is technically sound, but it's entirely obsolete. The same can be true of goods designed by computers, including the gear used to make computer chips. When you accelerate the pace of change this is just a byproduct, and its impact gets into the heads of policymakers at all levels.

A house should be 30-year property, but no one really thinks of housing that way anymore. Most folks are in-and-out of a house within three years, paying a 15% "tax" (two sales commissions plus moving costs) on each transaction. We have come to look at homes solely in terms of their price appreciation, not their depreciation costs, and this helped accelerate the crash we have just seen.

Point is, it's time to take another hard look at 30-year property. I think this is the concept that should drive what history will know as the Obama Economic Plan.

A whole bunch of special pleaders are descending on Washington right now, drawn by the scent of free money and driven by the lack of any hope at home. And this is how their claims should be evaluated, in my opinion.

Call it Dana's 30-year test.

If the government puts money into your project what will we have in 30 years?

(Cool train, huh? Too bad it's in Shanghai.)

A lot of the answers here won't pass the smell test. But some will. Space investments are 30-year property -- we're still flying shuttles designed in the 1970s. Basic research is good 30-year property. Roads are 30-year property, and so are railroads. (Railroads are also far more energy-efficient than roads in transporting both goods and people.) Ports are 30-year property. So is the re-construction of our electrical infrastructure, the "Enter-Net" that can both buy and sell power, saving the excess as hydrogen.

When cities and states come to Washington with their hands out they're not offering to put it into 30-year property, so most of their pleadings should be rejected. The only way Detroit should get a dime is if they can convince us they have a future with a 30-year time horizon, given the investment we are being asked to make.

On everything else, the idea should be to save money, to reduce costs. In health care, in education, in the War Against Oil, the investments with the best bang for the buck are those which reduce costs in the short run. That's where government needs to be re-engineered, and where the low-hanging fruit is for private industry.

This 30-year concept may be hard for baby boomers to get their arms around. For one thing we've never thought in this way before. For another 30 years from now most of us will be dead. But as our own horizons narrow our imaginations must expand. The time has come for us to think of those who will come after us and to do for them as Frederick Law Olmsted said he did for us. "Look, we built this for you."

In the last century we had only two decades that could really be called high points for the creation of 30-year property. The 1930s gave us many of our public buildings, our electrical grid, and our greatest centers of commerce -- New York, Chicago, LA. The 1960s gave us the Interstate Highway System, which has defined how we have built our cities ever since, and the Space Program, whose technical breakthroughs still power our industry.

These were public projects because, for the most part, only the government has the power to see ahead 30 years. Companies like Control Data (or even General Motors) that tried to look 30 years out failed, as their sunk costs could never pay off and their carrying costs could not be recouped. Only government can look ahead that far.

We have spent a generation being told that "government is the problem" and that "government is them." Government is neither always-positive nor is it always-negative. It's the people who run the government, and those who maintain them in office, who choose which it will be. Most important, government is not them -- it's us. It always was us, and when we were told it was "them" it was because a specific group wanted control of the government, for their own ideological purposes. (What Lincoln Steffens wrote over a century ago remains true -- eternal vigilance is the price of belonging to a civil society.)

It is when we think in terms of 30-year property that we need to look first to government, because there men and women of vision can have that time horizon. That's another of the 20th century's great lessons.

So when you think in terms of 30-year property you do two things. You direct funds most effectively to the crisis. And you learn a powerful lesson, one you need to teach your children and grandchildren. In a democracy, government is us, and it is our duty, as citizens, to keep a close watch on it at all times, not being distracted by ideology, by cynicism, or (as in this decade) by an ideology of cynicism.

That way lies the madness we've just gone through.

Phone FUD Targets Google

2008-11-30T15:34:18-05:00

It may be the first challenge to the new President's tech policy.

For the last several months advocates for the nation's phone monopolists have been ginning up a public relations campaign against Google. They claim it's a monopolist. They claim it's a threat to freedom, a violator of privacy, evil.

It's being done in clever ways, through academics and think tanks you don't usually think of as Bell shills. Privacy advocates are being taken in, even the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

But it doesn't take a genius to see where all this is coming for, or where it's leading. All it takes is a little knowledge of the industry's history, a quick look at who stands to benefit, and a short Google of who's cheering from the sidelines.

Just read Scott Cleland's blog. Cleland, a notorious phone monopoly booster of long standing, has been hammering Google this year at every opportunity.

Google itself seems unable to understand the situation, or properly respond to it. CEO Eric Schmidt has tried to be personally charming. The company's other officials have sought to be transparent, and answer questions honestly.

Meanwhile, the stock market crash has hit Google hard. The company is now worth only about what Verizon is worth -- AT&T is now worth nearly twice that. And Google's stock valuation has begun tracking the phone giants. Suddenly it's no longer a growth stock.

How should Google respond? Aggressively. And it needs to understand who its opposition really is, the ruthlessness of that opposition, and the nature of the struggle.

It is a political struggle.

Google isn't limiting how much Internet bandwidth customers can consume, or telling them what they can do with it. The phone monopolists are.
Google isn't the "gatekeeper" to your use of the Internet. The phone monopolists are.
Google has almost no presence in mobile. Verizon and AT&T control nearly all the real estate, and make both state and federal regulators dance to their tune.

I often write here about the phone and cable duopoly, in that urban consumers have only two choices for broadband service -- the phone monopoly and cable monopoly. But it's important to note that these are separate, and that Google can take advantage by dividing the two on as many issues as possible.

It's already trying to do this with mobile, partnering with cable operators in Clearwire. It needs to focus more public attention there, and publicly attack the Verizon-AT&T duopoly that currently controls the U.S. cellular market. Hit them where their profits are.

Google has extensive investments in "dark fiber" around the country, which is used (when it's used) to move data back-and-forth between its servers and consumers. But DWDM technology means that fiber capacity can be dramatically increased, at relatively low cost, and Google needs to publicly make that investment.

Mainly Google needs to get consumers to understand where their real limits are -- in the number of bits they can move about from their homes -- and who has been limiting access to those bits -- the phone monopolists.

In business, you must know who your opponent is and play offense. Otherwise you're going to get beat. Google needs to understand who its opponents are, understand that they are ruthless monopolists who will stop at nothing and have influence in all sorts of institutions you wouldn't expect to be in their pocket, then respond accordingly.

Just as important, Google needs to expose phone monopoly shills like Cleland for what they are. Follow the phone money, and make certain that the monopoly's media manipulation is as transparent as possible. Hire Bruce Kushnick, if only as a consultant.

Hate Fuels Hate

2008-11-28T13:45:21-05:00

It's easy to see how the Mumbai terrorists need to be fought, because we're over here and they're over there.

The lesson is simple, obvious, and it tastes like bile if you're being told to administer it. It's precisely what we didn't do after 9-11, and precisely what led us down the road to today.

Use police methods to decapitate the leaders.
Use media to expose the methods.
Use popular will to improve security.
Use social methods to reduce the foe.

How would you have felt like if some Indian told you that after 9-11? How would you have felt if you were told not to go to war precipitously, that going on your gut instincts was going to make things infinitely worse, or that transparency would succeed and paranoia fail?

Some tried to say just this. They were instantly exiled from the discussion. Anyone who questioned the path of madness was then exorcised as well -- whether in the media, or in entertainment, or even online.

In fact those who made things worse by disregarding these obvious truths remain in power today, and remain influential even within the incoming Administration. They are said to be the "grown-ups."

If the last 7 years have taught us anything, it should be that these people are not grown-ups. They were grown-up children. They were infantile, acting out paranoid basement fantasies of how to fight while sending real heroes to die. I remain angrier at our own leaders than even those who perpetrated the Mumbai attacks, because we should know better.

You don't fight hate with hate. Your victories doing so are only temporary. I look around at my own state of Georgia, 140 years after the hate-filled Confederacy was abolished, and I still see the same racist attitudes, the same racist objections, the same backwardness throughout the Deep South which existed then. So how do you expect the struggle against religious extremism to be quick or easy?

That's the real enemy here. Religious extremism in all its forms. Love of God can so easily be perverted into hatred for man, of the other, and thus into blasphemy. Every religion is susceptible. Absolutely every religion. Anyone who denies this obvious fact is a liar, and self-deluded.

Yet every religion at its heart teaches the same things. Kindness, temperance, living in ways that will grow society, not tear it down. It is the hearts of our religious leaders that need to be reached, and it's our religious leaders who need to be rejected when they teach hatred or intolerance of anyone. (Yes, I'm thinking here of both Mormons and Catholics, as well as our own Protestant Fundamentalists.)

This is not a battle of civilizations. This is a war between civilization and the simple teachings that bound people together before there was such a thing as civilization. Faith is fine and lovely, but we must distinguish between that and blind obedience to dogma, in all its forms.

Easy for me to say. I'm comfortable. Try telling that to an Indian Muslim who may be treated as less than an Untouchable, and whose only source of education is the blasphemy of war. Or any oppressed people in the same situation, anywhere in the world.

We are in a race, worldwide, between the forces of civilization and those who would tear it down, and it does our side no good when we become The Other, as we have, here in America, this decade.

There are times when you must defend yourself, when civilization must fight back. But civilization can only fight back effectively when it knows precisely who it is fighting, and what its objectives are. The objectives in any fight are notoriously limited.

Wisdom is needed. Wise acts and wise leaders. But more important, wise citizens who know the difference between what needs to be done and what our lizard brains want to do.

Joy Amid the Ruins

2008-11-26T17:38:49-05:00

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 48 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

There is a feeling felt by earthquake and hurricane survivors, in common with those who have made it through war or a terrifying disease.

Joy amid the ruins. (Love Among the Ruins is a painting by Edward Burns-Jones.)

We are thankful for having made it through. We have life and (hopefully) people who care about us, still. Everything narrows to that fine point. We dare not look around at the devastation all around us. We concentrate on what we have, and we pray that the storm really has passed, that the rebuilding can now begin.

Yeah, it's the election. But also the post-election. (UPDATE: Don't assume every terrorist attack is all about you.)

For a generation Americans have been playing a zero-sum game with power, even while evidence of its futility piles up around us. We have felt hopeless, cynical. We have believed that tossing out one bunch of bums merely means another bunch of bums, that all we can do is trade hates, that life is nothing but conflict, the idea of political peace an illusion.

It takes great events to jolt Americans out of their complacency, forcing us into a search for unity and renewed purpose. Each disaster in our history has provided such an opportunity. At the end of each conflict we have promised, never again. And then again happens, again.

We have spent the last decade building a bridge to the 19th century. It has been fueled by our own hatreds, one for the other, our own hubris, our own fear. This only accelerated with the end of the Cold War, the latest "last time" in our history, and I have argued it happened precisely as a result of that event.

Most Americans came here, or has ancestors who came here, due to unacceptable conditions somewhere else. Whether it was over the Bering land bridge thousands of years ago, on ships hundreds of years ago, or by plane just decades ago, you saw in America a new chance to make a new start, and to do it different this time. (And if you are descended from West African slaves, you may have been given that chance by relatives still living. Thank them.)

But the better angels of our nature are easy to vanquish. They are easily distracted -- maybe our better angels have ADD. Comfort can distract them. Theories can distract them. Religion can distract them. Desire can distract them. Every generation has had its excuse for taking its eye off what mattered, and focusing instead on threats, on the other.

Even the Greatest Generation succumbed. It was our parents who saw the value of uniting against Depression and War, who built our prosperity and who then let themselves be distracted, by harsh words and oppresion overseas, into thinking that "killing is the only thing they understand." Never mind that resolution and defense are not the same thing as war, and containment was not meant as an excuse to send young men off to die.

In the great conflict that was the Cold War, fighting was just one tactic. Usually it was the wrong one. That war was eventually won on the strength of our economy, of our economic, political and social liberties, which drew the other side's best and brightest here and let us build a future Marx could not even conceive of. That's why the wall fell. Reagan's words and spending merely accelerated the inevitable, perhaps by a year, perhaps by a decade. But the die had long been cast, and if we really believed the words we would have acted on them.

So for 16 years we've had it out. Cheney and those who believed as he did created a new enemy, potentially just as dangerous, on the ruins of Afghanistan. Liberals sought to redress every wrong of the past. The big political question gradually changed from "What did you do in the War," to "What about the war against the war?" Fighting in the latter was the disqualifier.

Everything the Clintonites built up, the Bushies tore down. It was enough for a cause to be supported by liberals to win the undying enmity of so-called conservatives. All the lessons of the 20th century needed to be forgotten, all the gains of the Progressives and the Populists were tainted. Even economic equity, which Adam Smith had supported in his "The Wealth of Nations," gained the smell of socialism, as the winning side sought to destroy the losing one and use 21st century weapons to re-create 18th century conditions.

It was madness, all of it. On both sides. My generation fought a battle our parents set up for us, one based on false choices and phony equivalence. Meanwhile the storm came up all around us. Iraq. Katrina. The economic meltdown. The destruction of all we'd said we stood in the previous century, wiped away.

Enough. My generation has crashed the ambulance. It is time for a new generation, rebelling against the lessons we thought we were teaching, to take command. It is time to chart a new course, based on first principles, into a world we know is complicated, into struggles we know will be difficult, into the new world of the future which my generation dreamt of but could never reach for, so bound were we by the Civil Wars of our youth.

Walk away, Baby Boom. It is not your world any more. You didn't start the fire but you did nothing to put it out. Help when you're asked to, but otherwise please be quiet.

And it's that quiet I am most thankful for this Thanksgiving.

Shame of the South: Clayton County

2008-11-24T16:21:47-05:00

When reformers condemn Georgia's pay to play government under House Speaker Glenn Richardson, they may ask how white voters tolerate it.

The answer, as any white blogger will tell you (and some racists are far from subtle about it), can be summarized in two words.

Clayton County. (To the right, former school board chair Norreese Haynes.)

While the problem of white governance is one of money and political organization, the problem of black governance is one of apathy and political opportunism. You decide which is worse for the prospect of real reform.

Clayton County went from mostly-white to mostly-black in the 1990s, then acquired one of the most dysfunctional governments anywhere. The county as a whole is in the process of going broke, despite having a ton of taxable business property within its boundaries, as well as the Atlanta Airport.

But the real story here, its true shame, is Clayton County's school board.

Whose fault is it? While both sides in this fiasco charge their critics with racism, this travesty is mainly the result of apathy on the part of Clayton voters and the machinations of a white influence peddler named John Trotter (left).

Trotter's "teacher" group, the Metro Association of Classroom Educators, got five of its members onto that board, and Trotter personally contributed to the campaigns of three more. Its field director was Haynes, eventually thrown off the board for not living in the county.

Trotter was able to do this by taking advantage of changing demographics. His candidates were black in a county that had recently become majority-black and whose previous white political regime had a habit of dismissing black complaints.

But in the process Clayton acquired a school board that was lazy, petty, and so foolish it lost the district's accreditation. Pleas by the kids were ignored, people who tried to volunteer time and help were dismissed, and the response by the accused to their accusers was usually racism.

The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools took away the district's accreditation for at least a year on September 1. Just before they acted Governor Sonny Perdue, moving belatedly on a judge's recommendation, personally fired four board members -- Yolanda Everett, Lois Baines-Hunter, Sandra Scott and Michelle Strong. SACS' objections to the four mainly involved their ties to MACE, and charges they were doing the group's bidding. The reaction by the four? Defiance, blame-shifting, and more charges of racism.

Oh, and the district is now broke.

Most of the real crimes were petty, pathetically so. Sandra Scott tried to get her kid's football coach fired. Haynes supported raises for his members, never mind the obvious conflict of interest. Strong got her husband hired as a "graduation coach," then voted to give him a raise.

The Sunday Paper, a white-owned weekly launched by former Atlanta Journal-Constitution employees, pinned the blame on citizens:

So, with the stakes so high, and seven school board seats up for grabs, one would think that voters would have lined up at the polls last Tuesday.

Nope. Only about 12 percent of registered voters turned out to cast ballots for 31 school board candidates competing for seven seats.

While voters were willing to reject the incompetents in May elections, the first reformer to step up to the plate was stymied by the majority. A superintendent hired on a questionable contract by the old board majority pleaded for patience. So far the only concrete policy has been on uniforms. They want them.

The larger problem is the divisions within the black community. Everyone, it seems, is a one man (or one woman) interest group. Everyone wants to use the tragedy to advance a narrow agenda. The county lacks the kind of business leadership that could create a united front for reform, developing a solid program and a list of candidates who could turn things around.

That could yet come, perhaps from the battered real estate community. It would not take a lot of money to turn things around. The main investment would be time -- time spent developing a program of reform, identifying people to lead it, and bringing voters along. Time making sure that everyone associated with the effort was ethical and competent.

But until that leadership arrives whites will use the example of Clayton County to argue that black leadership is, by its nature, inept, that any candidate favored by black voters is not to be trusted. Thus the two machines, white and black, buttress one another.

As you will see later in this series, it's the same throughout the South.