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As I had suspected, Barak Obama’s 2010 speech at the UN’s annual opening lacked tangible proposals.  For example, he urged progress on the middle east peace talks, but proffered no proposal.  He said Africa could be prosperous agriculturally, but gave no proposal for how.  Also, he said corruption in governments of developing countries is a problem, but offered no solution.  Pointing to corruption in general diffuses responsibility so talking about it does not shame anyone into making hard choices.  In my view, more radical (i.e., systemic) changes are needed, but the politicians are too mainstream/moderate for that.For example, he could have urged African leaders to cede more governmental sovereignty to the African Union, which in turn could then act as a check on government corruption at the state level.  Also, Obama could have proposed a loose federal confederation for the middle east, which would mitigate the middle east conflict, or he could have given a proposal involving the borders of a possible Palestinian state (i.e., what to do with Jerusalem). Finally, the President could have gone beyond citing his efforts to reduce the risk of nuclear proliferation to announce that the US would join the ten countries that have created a movement with the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons completely—even from the present nuclear powers such as the US. Meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York, the 10 countries launched the new initiative to work towards a world without nuclear weapons. Foreign ministers, led by Japan and Australia, hoped to bring new life to efforts for nonproliferation and disarmament. Their mission statement said: “The only guarantee against the use and threat of nuclear weapons is their total elimination.” This would be real change.  In contrast, Obama said his goal is securing loose nuclear material around the world in four years.  This sort of goal shows that he is inside the box—an incrementalist rather than a leader.

I wish the President and his advisors had thought more to create new proposals and to think outside the box than simply putting a nice-sounding speech together. In short, in place of politics as usual, there could have been real change in the speech.  What good do platitudes do?

See: http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,6035871,00.html

On October 13, 2010, Fox News reported a poll that found that women are turning on Obama.  The reason cited was that they feel there has been too much change—that it has been “jarring.”  This reminded me of when I was sampling a food item in a grocery store and the old woman who gave me the sample, said, “We have lots of devils here.”  She was referring to the array of food samples in the store that day.  My reaction, which I did not act on, was to ask her what century she was from. I wondered why some people can’t seem to let go of what is so antiquated—why they are so resistant to any change. In terms of the jarring change being reported on Fox News, the journalist pointed to the health-insurance reform law as a case in point.  In spite of its purported “socialism,” the law relies on private health-insurance companies, whose lobby pressured Obama into dropping his “public option” requirement and adding a mandate that requires Americans to become customers of those companies.  If relying on extant private companies—giving them a guaranteed and vastly enlarged customer base—represents “jarring” change, I have to start wondering about whether those Americans have some sort of pathological issue with change itself.  I have to wonder whether there isn’t in the American culture—and I am an American—some sort of pathology in which any change is felt to be traumatic.  If so, we could add this pathology to that which involves denial in relying on companies (both insurance companies and banks too big to fail) that we know have been culpable. The extreme aversion to change and the tacit willingness to rely on problematic institutions can be expected to result in stagnation and continued systemic failures.  The source of the problem is in us.

Not surprisingly, much of the campaigning in the 2010 midterm elections has been oriented to incremental change on given issues, rather than to real change. Even in states bordering on bankruptcy, like California, Florida and Illinois, it is campaigning as usual.  I watched a candidate forum from Illinois and one of the main questions was why a candidate’s business was so successful.  Meanwhile, the last governor had been impeached and removed from office by a nearly-unanimous vote in the legislature, and the government was borrowing $18 billion in 2010 alone.  The forum made “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic” look like an everyday phenomenon.  Lest one blame the candidates alone, it is important to note that it was a citizen who asked about the candidate’s business. In the California Governor’s race, Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman had a chance in their debates to persuade a statewide audience they could turn around the economically troubled state. Instead, they resorted—at least in their third debate—“to many of the personal attacks that have dominated the last few weeks of the campaign,” according to MSNBC. “Neither candidate presented any new ideas.” A poll released two weeks before the third debate found about half the respondents were dissatisfied with both candidates. No wonder.

In contrast to status quo campaigning amid major systemic governmental problems, my inclination regarding either republic would have been to discuss drastic tax increases and non-sustenance budget cuts in that state, as well as to suggest that the two states both adopt a federal system—their respective regions becoming states.  Germany is the size of Montana and is a federal state with 15 regions. As soon as it is realized that Germany as a EU state is federal, federalism can be recognized to be applicable to any large US state.  Comparing apples to apples enables new insights!  However, if we are afraid of “jarring” change, we will be apt to resist adjusting our comparisons for any errors; we will continue to see the world just as it has been seen, and this will make it difficult for us to envision change.