Late Night Laugh: Slipping Through The Cracks At The DMV

How Disasters Help: The Upside To Catastrophe

From Boston.com:

Traditionally, analysts have cautioned that Chinese growth figures should be greeted with skepticism, but, according to one school of economic thought, there may be something to the idea that the quake served as a brutal stimulus. In fact, some economists argue that hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions, ice storms, and the like, despite the widespread destruction they leave behind – indeed, largely because of it – can spur economic growth.

THE EARTHQUAKE THAT struck China’s Sichuan Province in May left behind scenes of almost apocalyptic devastation: mountaintops sheared off into valleys, cities reduced to rubble and dust, cracked dams, collapsed bridges, and at least 80,000 dead.

If the Chinese government is to be believed, the earthquake also did something else: it helped the country’s economy. A little over a month after the quake, the State Information Center, a Chinese government research body, announced that the massive rebuilding effort, and the billions of dollars it would pump into the Chinese economy, would far outweigh the economic losses from the quake, enough to bump up national economic growth by 0.3 percent – a small but not insignificant part of a 2008 growth rate most estimates put at just under 10 percent.

Traditionally, analysts have cautioned that Chinese growth figures should be greeted with skepticism, but, according to one school of economic thought, there may be something to the idea that the quake served as a brutal stimulus. In fact, some economists argue that hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions, ice storms, and the like, despite the widespread destruction they leave behind – indeed, largely because of it – can spur economic growth.

Rebuilding efforts serve as a short-term boost by attracting resources to a country, and the disasters themselves, by destroying old factories and old roads, airports, and bridges, allow new and more efficient public and private infrastructure to be built, forcing the transition to a sleeker, more productive economy in the long term.

“When something is destroyed you don’t necessarily rebuild the same thing that you had. You might use updated technology, you might do things more efficiently. It bumps you up,” says Mark Skidmore, an economics professor at Michigan State University. “Disasters help people think about things differently.”

Studies have found that earthquakes in California and Alaska helped stir economic activity there, and that countries with more hurricanes and storms tend to see higher rates of growth. Some of the most recent work has found a link between disasters and subsequent innovation.

The study of the economics of disasters remains a small field, with few major papers. And skeptics charge disaster economists with oversimplifying enormously complex economic systems and seeing illusory effects that stem only from the crudeness of the available economic measuring tools.

But as more people move to riskier areas, and the world’s climate shifts, the debate over natural disasters and their impact has been gaining in resonance. The population of coastal hurricane zones and cities, from San Francisco to Mexico City to Tokyo, that sit on or near major seismic faults, continues to grow, and climatologists warn that climate change could increase the number of extreme weather events in many parts of the world. While not even the most fervent believer in the economy-catalyzing qualities of disasters would wish for one, the study of the costs and possible benefits of such events may help us better understand how to target recovery efforts – and, perhaps, how to replicate the salutary effects of disasters without the disasters themselves.

It may be, then, that disaster economics works best as a guide in those times when we don’t have disasters to contend with. Investing in human capital, replacing outdated plants and infrastructure – the things that Kunreuther and Skidmore argue disasters drive us to do – are also, it turns out, good ideas even in the absence of a crippling catastrophe. If the disaster economists are right, calamities are simply pushing societies to make the sort of sound economic decisions that inertia or fear or bureaucratic sclerosis prevents them from otherwise making. Governments and businesses might do well to adopt some of the urgency and innovation of a post-disaster mind-set even in more clement times.

. . .

The economic study of natural disasters has roots in the study of human disasters – in particular, the effects of wars, real and imagined. In the 1950s and 1960s, analysts at the RAND Corporation think tank, trying to work out the total impact of a nuclear attack on the United States, created models for how such an attack would affect our economy. The best-known of these thinkers was Herman Kahn, a physicist and systems analyst notorious for his willingness, even eagerness, to reduce the seemingly unthinkable to dry actuarial calculations. In his 1961 book, “On Thermonuclear War,” Kahn wrote that, thanks to the United States’ strong growth rate at the time, even a nuclear attack that destroyed all of its major metropolitan areas and killed one-third of its population “does not seem to be a total economic catastrophe. It may simply set the nation’s productive capacity back a decade or two plus destroying many ‘luxuries.’ “

Natural disasters provided an opportunity to see how societies actually recovered from such large-scale shocks. In 1969, Douglas Dacy and Howard Kunreuther, two young analysts at the Institute for Defense Analyses, published a book called “The Economics of Natural Disasters,” one of the first attempts to quantify the economic impact of catastrophes. The book was largely a case study of the Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964, the most powerful ever recorded in North America. Dacy and Kunreuther found that the money that rushed into the Alaskan economy after the temblor, as well as generous government loans and grants for rebuilding, meant that many Alaskans were actually better off afterward than before.

“We got a lot of hate mail for that finding,” recalls Kunreuther, now a professor of business and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

But though it may have proved unpopular among Alaskans still dealing with the aftermath of the disaster – which killed 131 people, destroyed several towns along the Alaskan coast, and leveled portions of Anchorage – the idea that disasters trigger short-term growth has gained adherents among economists.

“The data are pretty clear about it,” says Gus Faucher, director of macroeconomics at Moody’s Economy.com, an economic consulting firm.

Faucher has looked at disasters in regional US economies and found in some cases a dramatic impact. The year after Hurricane Andrew struck southeast Florida in 1992, causing what would today be more than $40 billion in damages, the state saw sharp increases in employment thanks to new construction jobs. And Faucher credits the rebuilding jobs and aid and investment that followed the 1994 Northridge earthquake for helping pull the Los Angeles area out of its early-1990s economic slump. Hurricane Katrina, Faucher says, has proved an exception: Because so many residents left the area and because government aid was so slow to arrive and insurance payouts so low, the area didn’t see an economic bounce.

To critics of this line of thinking, the problem is that it is, at best, a partial picture. It ignores, they argue, the fact that the money and labor that go into post-disaster rebuilding are simply being redirected from other productive uses.

“If you’re a carpenter, a trash remover, a physician, you may be made better off, but the things that those producers would have otherwise produced are not going to be produced,” says Donald Boudreaux, an economics professor at George Mason University. “Over any reasonably relevant period of time, society is not made wealthier by destroying resources,” he adds. If it were, “Beirut should be one of the wealthiest places in the world.”

The research on longer-run effects, its supporters argue, is less vulnerable to this criticism, because the key factor is not merely new stuff but better stuff. In this model, disasters perform the economic service of clearing out outdated infrastructure to make way for more efficient replacements – Mother Nature’s contribution to what the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter famously called capitalism’s “creative destruction.” The economy, as it recovers, actually becomes more productive than it was before, and some economists argue that the effect can be seen decades after the disaster.

When Dacy and Kunreuther looked at Alaska after the quake, they found that the state’s fishing fleet, refurbished after being decimated by the ensuing tsunami, was able to increase its yield over pre-quake levels. And the building industry grew more innovative, as well. Whereas before, construction had been limited to the warmer months of the year, the pressure to rebuild quickly drove the adoption of new methods and technologies like the use of “visqueen” plastic films to protect construction sites, allowing work to continue year-round despite the bitter Alaskan winter.

Other, more recent academic work has taken a broader look at the question. Mark Skidmore of Michigan State, along with the economist Hideki Toya of Japan’s Nagoya City University, published a 2002 paper in the journal Economic Inquiry that mapped the disaster frequency of 89 countries against their economic growth over a 30-year period. The paper controlled for everything the authors could think of that might skew the findings – including country size (large countries would presumably experience more natural disasters), size of government, openness to trade, and distance from the equator.

Skidmore and Toya found that, in the case of climatic disasters – hurricanes and cyclones, as opposed to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions – the more the better: nations with more climatic disasters grew faster over the long run than the less disaster-prone. Why only climatic disasters? The authors suggest that, as we’ve gotten better at forecasting violent weather, its human costs, at least, can be mitigated much more easily than with geological disasters, which still take us by surprise.

Jesus Crespo Cuaresma, a professor of economics at the University of Innsbruck, has found some support for Skidmore and Toya’s argument. In a paper published earlier this year, Crespo Cuaresma examined post-disaster rebuilding efforts in developing countries and found that, at least in wealthier developing countries like Brazil and South Africa, there is indeed a tendency to use the rebuilding process as an opportunity to upgrade infrastructure that might otherwise have been allowed to grow obsolete.

Other work, however, has challenged the disaster-growth linkage. Ilan Noy, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Hawaii, has looked at long-term growth and disaster data and found that natural disasters hurt growth in the short term, and can barely be said to have any effect over the long run. According to Noy, the problem with studies that see a long-term positive effect is that their measurements are too crude – they average growth over decades rather than breaking it down into shorter periods of time, and they don’t account for the varying severity of the disasters in question.

Like Crespo Cuaresma, Noy focused on developing countries (Noy argues that it would be impossible to find any impact at all on national economies in the wealthy world). And he concedes that aid money and materials do tend to stream in after a major catastrophe. It’s just that at the same time an even greater amount of private money is leaving the country. “There’s a perception that it’s more of a dangerous place,” he says.

. . .

Of course, even analysts of the “creative destruction” school don’t see disasters as good things – disasters kill people, often in great numbers, and uproot many more. Skidmore is careful to point out that, even from a coldly economic standpoint, the most productive disasters are those that don’t take lives. In harming buildings but not people, they encourage societies to invest less in vulnerable, immovable things like factories, he argues, and more in human capital, in skills and education, “things that won’t be destroyed if a disaster strikes,” he says.

Nonetheless, a recovery planned only to maximize growth might well conflict with more basic humanitarian concerns. Those most in need of help and resources in the wake of a disaster – the poor and the uninsured near-poor – are going to contribute the least to growing the economy as it recovers. On the other hand, those best equipped to find opportunities for growth in the rubble – large corporations and the wealthy – are also those best able to survive the catastrophe on their own.

“If you took all the disaster relief money and gave it out to the corporations affected, you will have spent a lot of money very intelligently in terms of urban growth,” says Larry Rosenthal, executive director of the program on housing and urban policy at the University of California, Berkeley, “but not in terms of fairness.”

Indeed, disaster recovery has attracted critics who see it as a predatory industry in disguise; in a book published last fall called “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” the journalist Naomi Klein argued that corporations, first-world governments, and aid organizations treat natural disasters as chances to open up new markets – with dismal results for the recovering nations themselves.

Obama Uber Alles

From Der Speigel:

Placards and banners have been banned around the Siegessäule — Obama’s team clearly doesn’t want to leave anything to chance. They don’t want to see anti-McCain slogans or anti-American statements that wouldn’t be well-received back home. One thing you can be sure about, though, is that Obama’s campaign helpers will have packed enough merchandising articles to make sure that they get some fantastic images from Berlin. For some time now, T-shirts bearing the slogan “Berlin for Obama” have been available for purchase on the Internet.

The Berlin-based PR agency helping to organize the event hasn’t answered questions about whether there will be any warm-up acts before the speech, if German sausages or American-style hamburgers will be on offer and whether the concession stands will be pouring German soft drinks or Coke. The word is that all the details will be set on Tuesday.

Don’t bring bags or placards, but make sure to smile for the camera! Barack Obama doesn’t want to let anything steal the show at his Berlin debut, where the streets and the Victory Column are being transformed into a “fan mile” for the US Democratic Party’s presidential candidate.

The profile, distinctive. The eyes, visionary. The mouth, just cracked enough to show that the man has something to say. The poster and flyers say it all. In big white-on-blue letters, they announce that the Barack Obama Show is coming to Berlin.

The campaign team of the presumed Democratic presidential candidate has already had the advertising theme on file for quite some time now. With all the wrangling over the last few days, all the graphic designer has had to do — a number of times — is switch out the name of the event location: first the Brandenburg Gate, then the Gendarmenmarkt, then Templehof airport and now — finally: “Tiergarten, Siegessäule, Am Grossen Stern (east side), Berlin.”

When all is said and done, Thursday’s speech will have been the only outdoor public speech delivered by the political pop star on European soil. “It’s a one-of-a-kind event,” says Michael Steltzer, “a gift to the city.” Steltzer is the American head of the Berlin chapter of Democrats Abroad, the official organization representing American Democrats living in foreign countries. Obama’s visit has nothing to do with the organization, but the Democrats Abroad here want to help make sure that as many people as possible show up to listen to Obama deliver his speech, which is scheduled to begin at 7 p.m. and is expected to last a little less than an hour.

More than 13,000 US citizens are officially registered as residents of Berlin, and Steltzer is convinced that Americans living in nearby countries will make a pilgrimage to Germany to get a glimpse of their idol. Steltzer learned from some fellow Democrats in Paris that some of them were hoping to make the trip to Berlin. Democrats Abroad in neighboring Denmark and the Netherlands have announced similar plans. And Christine Marques, who heads Democrats Abroad, will be coming to Germany’s capital on Thursday from Switzerland.

Whether it turns out to be a couple thousand or a million, no one knows for sure how many people will ultimately converge near the Grosse Stern traffic circle in the middle of Berlin’s Tiergarten park, the geographical heart of the city. And there is very little time left for dealing with the organization and logistics of the event. Nonetheless, city officials seem to be taking a laid back approach to Obama’s planned speech. “There’s nothing left that can shock us,” an official at the municipal office in charge of the event says. After the Love Parade and the so-called “fan miles” held for soccer fans in the Tiergarten for the 2006 World Cup and the 2008 European Championship that persistently drew crowds of over 1 million beer-swilling soccer enthusiasts, Obama’s appearance should be a piece of cake.

A Fan Mile for the Presidential Candidate

Obama is going to get his fan mile, too, and construction on it will get underway on Tuesday. The stage has to be set just right so that the TV cameras fixed on Obama will be able to capture him, the crowd and the Brandenburg Gate looming in the distance behind him in one shot. Of course, the senator would have preferred to speak at the gate itself, but Angela Merkel’s Chancellery put up stiff — and successful — opposition to that idea.

And lest people standing in the back rows can’t get a good view of the speech, they’ll be able to watch it on enormous screens set up by the authorities, just like there were for the soccer fan miles. A handful of the country’s biggest national TV and cable news networks plan to show the speech live. The major US networks also appear to be planning to broadcast the event live from the German capital on Thursday.

Starting at 4 p.m., Obama fans will be allowed to start converging around the Grosse Stern and the Strasse des 17. Juni, the wide boulevard running east-west between the traffic circle and the Brandenburg Gate. But they won’t be allowed to bring much more than the shirts on their backs. “Please limit your possessions to personnel effects,” reads the poster, which also warns that people carrying bags will be the first to be denied access for security reasons. Security measures in the area surrounding the stage will be tight. The German Federal Police Office has classified the Obama event as a class-two danger level (“a terrorist attack cannot be ruled out”), and more than 700 officers are planned for the event.

Placards and banners have been banned around the Siegessäule — Obama’s team clearly doesn’t want to leave anything to chance. They don’t want to see anti-McCain slogans or anti-American statements that wouldn’t be well-received back home. One thing you can be sure about, though, is that Obama’s campaign helpers will have packed enough merchandising articles to make sure that they get some fantastic images from Berlin. For some time now, T-shirts bearing the slogan “Berlin for Obama” have been available for purchase on the Internet.

The Berlin-based PR agency helping to organize the event hasn’t answered questions about whether there will be any warm-up acts before the speech, if German sausages or American-style hamburgers will be on offer and whether the concession stands will be pouring German soft drinks or Coke. The word is that all the details will be set on Tuesday.

A Crammed Schedule

Before Obama’s appearance at the Siegessäule, he has meetings penciled in his day planner with some of Germany’s leading politicians. Just after 10 a.m., Obama’s Boeing 757 will land in the military area of Berlin’s Tegel airport. The plane, recently dubbed “Obama One,” wears “Change We Can Believe In” livery. There won’t be an official reception on the tarmac, but Angela Merkel will host Obama at her Chancellery at 11 a.m. Then, in the early afternoon, he’ll have a chance to meet Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier. The schedule includes some time for photo sessions, but no press conferences are planned.

To a large extent, Obama’s schedule for the afternoon is still top secret. A widely reported in the Berlin media has it that Obama might make a little sightseeing tour through the capital and stop at some of the historical highlights, such as Tempelhof Airport, Checkpoint Charlie, the Berlin Wall Memorial and the Holocaust Memorial.

There’s also no word yet as to when and where Obama will meet with Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit. On Wednesday, Wowereit will be in Athens for Greek singer Nana Mouskouri’s farewell concert. He’ll be interrupting his vacation especially for Obama’s visit, and taxpayers in Berlin are expected to get stuck picking up the tab for his business trip back.

According to all official statements, Obama has yet to make plans to meet with expat Americans living in Berlin. But Michael Steltzer and his fellow Democrats still plan to take advantage of Obama’s appearance to register as many US citizens to vote as possible at information stands. “We’re looking for the needle in the haystack,” Steltzer says, “and Obama is our magnet.”

After the speech, a number of Democrats will cap off the evening at the Max und Moritz pub and restaurant in Berlin’s Kreuzberg neighborhood, where singer Roberta Kelly will perform a song she wrote about Obama especially for the occasion. But Steltzer isn’t getting his hopes up that the political star will be present in person to hear the song before he retires for the evening in the Hotel Adlon, Berlin’s luxury hotel just a stone’s throw away from the Brandenburg Gate.

Going To War In LA

From The Wall Street Journal:

Jan Perry, a Los Angeles city-council member, is spearheading legislation that would ban new fast-food restaurants like McDonald’s and KFC from opening in a 32-square-mile chunk of the city, including her district. The targeted area is already home to some 400 fast-food restaurants, she says, possibly contributing to high obesity rates there — 30% of adults, compared with about 21% in the rest of the city. Nationally, 25.6% of adults are obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Despite its health-crazy reputation, parts of Los Angeles are plagued by obesity rates that rival any city in America. Now, the city may join a growing roster of local governments aiming to put their residents on diets by cracking down on the fast-food industry.

Jan Perry, a Los Angeles city-council member, is spearheading legislation that would ban new fast-food restaurants like McDonald’s and KFC from opening in a 32-square-mile chunk of the city, including her district. The targeted area is already home to some 400 fast-food restaurants, she says, possibly contributing to high obesity rates there — 30% of adults, compared with about 21% in the rest of the city. Nationally, 25.6% of adults are obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

While some cities have bans on new fast-food establishments, they typically are for aesthetic reasons or to protect local businesses. Ms. Perry’s initiative seems to be a rare instance in which a major city brings health issues into restaurant zoning. The fast-food ban would last a year, although Ms. Perry hopes to make it permanent. On Tuesday, a committee will make a recommendation on the measure before sending it on to the full city council for a vote.

With the ordinance, Los Angeles is tapping into a tougher attitude toward fast food that is emerging at city halls around the country. Cities have begun banning ingredients, regulating menu information and now dictating whether restaurants are healthy enough to open in their communities. Advocates say the measures are crucial in the fight against obesity, diabetes and other diseases and health conditions. Foes say the rules go too far, violating important freedoms.

“It’s very much the example of a nanny state,” says Alan Hoffenblum, a Republican lobbyist in Los Angeles.

The restaurant industry says the measures place too much blame at its door.

“We have a fundamental problem with government stepping in and treating restaurants as if they are engaged in activity that is at the root of the obesity epidemic,” says Jot Condie, president of the California Restaurant Association. He blames the epidemic on a web of factors, including sedentary lifestyles and lack of nutrition education.

While most local legislation applies to chain restaurants, typically defined as restaurants with more than 10 or 15 branches in the area or state, the ordinance in Los Angeles specifically targets fast food. It defines fast food as having characteristics including “a limited menu” and “food served in disposable wrapping or containers.”

In New York City, a law kicked in earlier this year requiring fast-food restaurants to post calorie counts on the main menu right above the counter. San Francisco plans to implement a similar regulation later this year. In both cities, the restaurant industry is suing to try to block the calorie-disclosure rules; in New York, appeals-court judges allowed the city to proceed with the program while they consider the case.

The calorie-posting rules come on the heels of a ban on coronary-clogging artificial transfats, or fats with added hydrogen, in New York City restaurants. Many chains have already removed transfats from their kitchens. Now, copycat legislation is popping up around the country. A ban in Boston goes into effect in September; in Baltimore, a ban takes effect next year. California legislators have sent a bill to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger that would remove transfats from restaurants and bakeries statewide.

Government officials say they must attack all causes of obesity. In New York, city officials have said the new information on menus will save people from obesity and diabetes. The ordinance pending in Los Angeles appears particularly tough, because it would halt the opening of any fast-food restaurant in a large part of the city. But it might not be the last such measure. The Los Angeles planning department says it has had calls from several cities asking for copies of the pending ordinance. Already, “the influence is there,” says Faisal Roble, the city planner who drafted the ordinance.

Many area residents say they support the ban — even those who patronize the restaurants regularly. “It’s a good idea,” particularly for children, says Rafael Escobar, 69 years old, as he bites into a McDonald’s sausage breakfast burrito. He thinks the move might encourage other types of food businesses to come into the neighborhood.

“There’s not that many alternatives,” says Hector Rodriguez, a bus driver toting a bag from the Del Taco chain of Mexican fast-food restaurants. He says he frequently stops along the strip of fast-food restaurants lining Figueroa Boulevard to pick up a snack or lunch. “If there were other choices, like a salad place or a supermarket, it would be better,” he says.

But Brian Mason, a student stopping off at McDonald’s, says a ban on further fast-food restaurants will do little to address underlying health problems. A better solution, Mr. Mason says, is nutrition education. And several patrons, including families with children, say they will keep coming, their young children in tow, no matter what other choices a fast-food ban might bring.

Nationally, the restaurant industry is taking different approaches to the situation. One is basic: introducing healthier menu items and voluntarily removing transfats to meet customers’ demands and in the hope of heading off legislation.

But where it views local legislation as going too far, the industry hasn’t hesitated to sue. In New York and San Francisco, it is fighting the new calorie-posting rules partly on the grounds that they are violations of free speech, because they force businesses to articulate government messages. New York has already retooled its requirements once, because a judge last year agreed with restaurateurs that the proposed rule conflicted with federal regulations.

In Los Angeles, the industry is taking a more conciliatory approach. “There is a point where we have to accept a reality, whether we like it or not, and try to make it as workable as possible,” says Mr. Condie of the restaurant association. For example, the industry successfully lobbied for a proviso that will allow for exceptions to the ban if fast-food restaurants meet certain conditions, like forgoing the construction of a drive-through window and proving there isn’t a rival fast-food restaurant within 750 feet.

Councilman Ed Reyes, part of whose district would be affected by the ban, says he expects many complaints from fast-food owners about their right to do business in the neighborhood. He is prepared with counterarguments. “Health and social issues are the overriding issues, in my mind,” he says. “It’s not too different to how we regulate liquor stores.”

Ms. Perry, the council member leading the legislation, says she sees the measure as just one part of a multipronged effort to fight obesity, including building parks to encourage exercise, encouraging more grocery stores to come into the neighborhood, boosting nutrition education and improving health care. Reining in fast food “is just one factor, but as an elected official, it’s my prerogative” to work on all fronts, she says.

Why Obama Models Dukakis

From The American Spectator:

“This election isn’t about ideology, it’s about competence.”
– Michael Dukakis, 1988

“The choice in this election is not between left or right, it’s not between liberal or conservative, it’s between the past and the future.”
– Barack Obama, 2008

Why? Why do liberals who capture their party’s presidential nomination say things like this? Why are they so afraid to say, “I’m an out and out card-carrying liberal and I’m proud of it!” Why do they try and hide their liberalism behind “competence” and screeds about “the past and the future”?

There is a reason. There are lots of reasons, as a matter of fact. Liberalism did not become a laughing stock overnight. It took a while since it began to rule the political roost in 1932 for Americans to understand that what once was considered an honorable philosophy had come to represent repeated and vivid lapses in common sense and good judgment. So the past Senator Barack Obama wants Americans to ignore will do nicely for illustration purposes. It is — how could it not be? — a mere update of why then-Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis tried the same denial routine once he secured the Democrats’ nomination in 1988.

What exactly is in the liberal past that makes these people want to run from liberalism when the presidential campaign spotlight goes on? For Dukakis it was furloughed murderer Willie Horton and a disdain for fighting for the Pledge of Allegiance, to name but two liberal ideas that brought Dukakis to his proclamations about competence over ideology. But what is it that drives Obama to say essentially the same thing in 2008? Why would he be concerned that a voting majority would flee modern liberalism — and his candidacy — if they understood, as they did twenty years ago, what it was really all about?

Let’s look in just one policy area that we are all acutely aware of and use one of America’s most famous actors to illustrate precisely why Obama wants to run from liberalism just as Dukakis did in 1988.

Energy is the issue. Leonardo DiCaprio the actor.

How exactly did we get in this place where the cost of energy is doing such damage to Americans? Why are you paying so much for gas at the pump? For running your air conditioner or heating your home? What is the connection between Obama’s liberalism and the reality of your life? Here’s an example of liberalism at work on five critical energy issues. Our actor friend Leo is involved with the very first one.

* Building refineries: This story is as reported on July 10, 2008 by CNSNews.com senior editor Susan Jones:

Environmental Group Sues to Block Oil Refinery Expansion

(CNSNews.com) — An environmental group on Wednesday filed a lawsuit intended to stop the expansion of a BP oil refinery in Whiting, Indiana. A shortage of oil refining capacity is often mentioned as one reason for soaring gasoline prices.

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) is challenging air permits granted to the refinery by the State of Indiana.
OK. Stop right there. Liberalism alert in Indiana. Here we are in this major energy crisis, which Americans are reminded of every single time they pull up at the gas pump. As this news story correctly says, a shortage of refinery capacity in the United States is one of the culprits in sending the price of gas at the pump skyward. But why do we have a shortage of refinery capacity in the first place? Who, very specifically, is out to stop the expansion of this particular Indiana refinery? Why, the Natural Resources Defense Council, a longtime liberal special-interest environmental group. And who sits on the board of the NRDC? Yes indeed, America’s favorite Titanic star, Leonardo DiCaprio himself.

THIS IS BUT ONE REASON why Senator Obama wants to brusquely dismiss the idea that this election is about “liberal or conservative” and re-make it Dukakis-style to something else — the future versus the past. Were the American people ever to fully understand that it is liberal political philosophy in action that is directly responsible for high gas prices, well, can you say President McCain? But don’t think for a moment that I’m picking on just poor Leo here. OK, rich Leo. Here are other recent examples of liberalism at work in causing America’s energy problems that don’t involve a rich liberal movie star:

* Building nuclear power plants: Here’s an AP dispatch from July 9, 2008:

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — An environmental group has filed a petition with federal regulators, seeking to block Duke Energy Corp.’s plan to build and operate two nuclear reactors near Gaffney, S.C.

In its filing with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League said the cost to build nuclear power plants and the inherent dangers of operating them outweigh the benefits of increased power generation.* Drilling for oil: This story is an Associated Press report from December 2007:

Environmental and Native Alaskan groups asked a federal appeals court Tuesday to block Royal Dutch Shell PLC’s plans for exploratory drilling near the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Lawyers for the groups challenged the U.S. Mineral Management Service’s decision earlier this year to allow the energy giant to drill up to 12 exploratory oil wells in the Beaufort Sea off the northern coast of Alaska.

The attorneys told a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that the federal agency failed to adequately consider the impact of Shell’s exploratory activities on endangered bowhead whales and other marine mammals.”

“An oil spill in this area can have a potentially devastating impact that could linger,” said Dierdre McDonnell, an attorney representing the Alaska Wilderness League, Sierra Club and other conservation groups.* Drilling for natural gas: Here’s a July 11, 2008 story from the Denver Business Journal:

Ten environmental groups filed suit in federal court Friday, seeking to block new natural-gas leases on western Colorado’s Roan Plateau until federal officials evaluate alternative ways to develop the area’s energy resources.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Denver, names as defendants U.S. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, the US Bureau of Land Management, an Interior Department agency that administers the Roan Plateau, and two regional BLM officials.

The suit asks that the BLM’s resource-management plan for the Roan be set aside and that the agency be barred from leasing drillin g sites on the plateau on Aug. 14 as planned.* Mining for oil shale: Here’s a May 15, 2008 story from the Rocky Mountain News about the response of U.S. Senate liberals and the Democrat who is Governor of Colorado. Need it be said that Sen. Wayne Allard (R-CO) is the conservative in this story?

The Senate Appropriations Committee today narrowly defeated Sen. Wayne Allard’s attempt to end a moratorium related to oil shale development in Colorado.

It was a big day for Colorado energy issues on Capitol Hill as Gov. Bill Ritter testified before a Senate committee asking lawmakers to move cautiously on oil-shale development until more is known about the environmental impact and other issues.

Meanwhile downstairs, the appropriations committee was considering a massive Emergency Supplemental Spending Bill. Allard, a member of the committee, attempted to insert an amendment that would reverse the moratorium that lawmakers approved late last year.

The moratorium prevents the Department of Interior from issuing regulations so that oil companies can move forward on oil-shale projects in Colorado and Utah. Allard said the moratorium has left uncertainties at a time when companies need to move forward and in the long term make the United States more energy independent.

“If we are really serious about reducing pain at the pump, this is a vote that would make a difference in people’s lives,” Allard argued.

But in a 14-15 vote, the committee spilt strictly on party lines and rejected the amendment.Day in and day out for decades liberals have actively pushed some version of the above when it comes to energy policy. Their activist groups sue to block the construction of refinery plants, as Leo DiCaprio’s group is doing right now in Indiana, or nuclear power plants, as another liberal group is doing in South Carolina. They refuse to allow oil shale mining, as they are doing in Colorado, or they won’t go along with drilling for either oil in offshore Alaska (note: this isn’t even ANWR) or natural gas in gas-rich Colorado.

Is there any wonder Barack Obama echoes Dukakis in saying this election is not about being liberal or conservative? When it comes specifically to just one issue, the energy issue, it is liberals — as environmental activists, as lawyers, as Hollywood celebrities, as governors, presidents, legislators and judges — who have insisted for decades on the very policies that now have a stranglehold on your personal economic windpipe.

LEO ISN’T ALONE as a liberal Hollywood celebrity on that NRDC board, either. Laurie David, the famous liberal activist and ex-spouse of comedian Larry David, he of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm fame sits there as well. Ms. David, of course, was behind Al Gore’s slide show-as-movie An Inconvenient Truth and has given bucks to every liberal candidate out there, Obama included. Both Leo and Ms. David are, according to the FEC, also financial contributors to MoveOn.org., that famous home of Obama supporters.

One could go on endlessly connecting these dots between specific liberals known and unknown and their active efforts to shut down the U.S. energy supply according to liberal philosophical guidelines. They have sued, legislated, voted, and judged us all to the exact moment America is at today in terms of energy.

The point here is really quite simple. How much did you pay for gas today?

Do you think Senator Obama wishes to acknowledge that the liberal philosophy he and his liberal (and frequently very rich) friends champion has gotten us to this exact point in American energy history? Of course not. If the American people figure out the connection between the price of gas and liberalism, they won’t put a liberal in the White House. Which is why Obama, as with Dukakis, has to hide his liberalism. Connecting the dots between what we see in our everyday lives and illustrating the folly of whatever liberal idea got us here is what the rest of us have to do.

Can we do it? Ask former President Dukakis.

The Great African-American Awakening: ‘No one can save us from us but us’

From City Journal:

“A house without a father is a challenge,” Cosby and Poussaint write. “A neighborhood without fathers is a catastrophe.”

“What the hell good is Brown v. Board of Education if nobody wants it?”

The conversation about race that Barack Obama says America needs is already in full swing—and it is a conversation among blacks. Its spark was a speech that TV star Bill Cosby gave at the NAACP in 2004. In books and articles, on talk shows and in town meetings, at barbecues and barber shops, African-Americans have been arguing over his words ever since. Their impassioned discussion is the most hopeful development in race relations in years.

With a 50 percent high school dropout rate and a 70 percent illegitimacy rate, with African-Americans committing half the nation’s murders though only 13 percent of the population, black America—especially the poorer part of it—is in trouble. “We cannot blame white people,” Cosby asserted in his incendiary speech commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board school desegregation decision. “It’s not what they’re doing to us. It’s what we’re not doing.” As Jesse Jackson used to say, Cosby recalls, “No one can save us from us but us.”

Sure, racism hasn’t vanished, Cosby acknowledges in his 2007 book Come On People, a follow-up to his speech written with Harvard psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint. “But for all the talk of systemic racism and governmental screw-ups, we must look at ourselves and understand our own responsibility.” Even with lingering discrimination, “there are more doors of opportunity open for black people today than ever before in the history of America,” and “these doors are tall enough and wide enough” for just about all black people “to walk through with their heads held high.” So while “there are forces that make the effort to escape poverty difficult,” African-Americans are by no means merely the playthings of vast forces and helpless victims of racism. “When people tell you, ‘You can’t get up, you’re a victim,’ ” Cosby warns, “that’s when you know it is the devil you’re hearing.”

Why do so many blacks, especially men, find it so hard to grasp the opportunity that is theirs for the taking? Why are “so many of our black youth squandering their freedom?” Cosby and Poussaint’s answer is that the social structure and culture of poor black neighborhoods distort the psychology of the children who grow up there, often shackling them in “psychological slavery.” The authors zero in on the permanently destructive effects of fractured families and slapdash child rearing—much more slapdash than middle-class parents, with their years spent nurturing, encouraging, and cajoling their children, could easily imagine. “In the neighborhood that most of us grew up in, parenting is not going on,” Cosby told the NAACP. “You have the pile-up of these sweet beautiful things born by nature—raised by no one.”

Certainly their fathers aren’t raising them. That 70 percent illegitimacy rate, troubling in itself, isn’t evenly distributed but is concentrated in poor neighborhoods, where it soars above 85 percent and can approach 100 percent. “A house without a father is a challenge,” Cosby and Poussaint write. “A neighborhood without fathers is a catastrophe.” That’s because mothers “have difficulty showing a son how to be a man,” a truly toxic problem when there are no father figures around to show boys how to channel their natural aggressiveness in constructive ways. Worse still, the authors muse, “We wonder if much of these kids’ rage was born when their fathers abandoned them.”

To come into the world already abandoned by your father is damaging enough, but Come On People teems with children abandoned by their mothers as well. Many end up among America’s half-million foster children, two-thirds of whom—more than 300,000 abused or cast-off souls—are black. We meet a Kentuckian born in a housing project and taken away from her jailed, drug-addicted mother at the age of six. After a string of foster homes and group facilities, she began doing “drugs, alcohol, shoplifting, gangbanging, hustling. I was in and out of jail,” she says. “I was angry. I would fight at the drop of a dime.” We hear of an eight-year-old smash-and-grab burglar abandoned even more abruptly. A cop tells the authors about catching him. The boy wouldn’t say one word, beyond the address of his housing-project home. The officer drove the boy there, followed him into his apartment, and saw his mother on the sofa. The boy finally spoke. “She’s dead, ain’t she?” And she was, with the needle that killed her lying on the floor. The boy calmly ate a bowl of cereal as he watched the cop deal with the body.

We hear of children abandoned emotionally if not literally. Another cop tells of a seven-year-old he picked up for bashing out car windows. “I’m very good at making these kids cry,” the cop said. “But this one, I couldn’t touch him.” He drove the kid home to what looked like a shack. The boy opened the door, and there was his mother on a mattress on the floor, having sex. The boy walked past the couple “and sealed himself off behind a curtain.” The man fled; the mother signed the form the cop held out to her, “pulled the covers over her head, and left her son standing mutely behind the curtain.”

These are the extreme cases, but even among normal poor black single-parent families Cosby and Poussaint find child-rearing patterns that prime kids for failure. Since the authors believe that too many black adults “are giving up their main responsibility to look after their children,” they make a portion of their book a child-raising handbook—an inner-city Dr. Spock—whose sound, simply stated advice makes clear what they think is going wrong in numerous ghetto families. Their optimistic, encouraging precepts, in spite of themselves, lift the curtain on a world of heartrending childhood sorrow and suffering, which ordinarily no one comes to help or comfort, and which leaves scars that never heal.

Above all, they counsel, spare the rod. “Many black parents use physical punishment—not just spanking, but also hitting, slapping, and beating kids with objects,” they report. Indeed, “many black parents have told us that physical punishment is part of black culture.” But, Cosby and Poussaint warn, “when they beat their kids they are sending a message that it is okay to use violence to resolve conflicts,” rather than helping them develop self-control and a sense of right and wrong. Too often, physical punishment turns into child abuse; too often, parents (or caregivers, especially the mother’s boyfriend) “beat their kids, not to discipline them, but to exorcise their own demons. . . . They take their anger out on the child,” who “serves as a ‘whupping’ object for peevish adults. . . . These beatings often produce angry children who treat others as violently as they have been treated.” The prisons are bursting with grown-up abused children.

In addition to physical abuse, Cosby and Poussaint observe, we’ve all cringed at hearing inner-city mothers abusing kids verbally as well, making them feel worthless and unwanted. “Words like ‘You’re stupid,’ ‘You’re an idiot,’ ‘I’m sorry you were born,’ or ‘You’ll never amount to anything’ can stick a dagger in a child’s heart.” Single mothers angry with men, whether their current boyfriends or their children’s fathers, regularly transfer their rage to their sons, since they’re afraid to take it out on the adult males. “If they hear their mom say, ‘Black men ain’t worth s—-,’ the boys wonder whether that includes them. When their moms yell, ‘You’re no good, just like your father!’ all the doubt goes away.” When such racially tinged verbal abuse takes the form of “ ‘Nigger, I’ll kick your f——— black a—,’ ” the child ends up ashamed of being black, as well—a danger anyway in a society where rumors of black inferiority still echo, if more faintly.

One of black America’s most disabling problems, Cosby and Poussaint think, is this wounded anger—of children toward parents, women toward men, men toward their mothers and women in general. Some try self-sedation, whether by “wallowing in sedated victimhood,” by music “loud enough to wake the dead,” by “a lover or some crack or, if nothing else, a bag of burgers.” Another way that “black men have tried to maintain their dignity and to keep control of their anger is by being ‘cool.’ . . . Many who feel abandoned by a parent protect themselves from being hurt by putting on a cool detachment.” Trouble is, beyond becoming emotionally frigid, they too easily lose their cool and explode in violence. Still, their effort is better than the hotheadedness of today’s young black gangstas, as touchy and ready to duel to the death as the Three Musketeers. “He dissed me so I shot him” is now a common ghetto refrain, Cosby and Poussaint report. Hence African-Americans account for 44 percent of U.S. prisoners; six out of ten black high school dropouts have been in prison before they hit the age of 40; and what Cosby and Poussaint call “a culture of imprisonment devastates black families and communities.”

We are celebrating a great civil rights victory, Cosby told the NAACP. People actually present in the audience “marched and were hit in the face with rocks” so that black kids could get a decent education. But now? “What the hell good is Brown v. Board of Education if nobody wants it?” What did those brave marchers achieve if, 50 years later, half of African-American kids drop out of high school and can’t speak standard English—especially since all it takes to get started in today’s more open America is a high school diploma and the ability to impress potential bosses as articulate, polite, and dependable?

This failure, too, is largely a failure of parenting. Yes, ghetto schools are bad, Cosby and Poussaint acknowledge, and parents can’t fix them. “But you can make the best use of what you have to get the best you can for your child,” they advise. You can make sure he does his homework and pays attention in class. And much of what a kid learns he learns at home, after all—especially in his crucial first five years. “Talking and reading to infants and children help lay down the physical structures in the brain to develop skills in language,” the authors point out.

But many ghetto moms aren’t imparting the language and cognitive skills without which children can’t succeed once they get to school. “Teachers report that in poor neighborhoods children often begin school not knowing their colors or the letters of the alphabet,” Cosby and Poussaint write. “Some have limited vocabularies and little knowledge of numbers. Some don’t even know that sheep go ‘Baaa.’ ” These deficits are hard to correct later on. Indeed, “sharp-eyed teachers can identify the children who will become high school dropouts the day they walk in the kindergarten door.” The damage is already done.

Readers of Come On People and the thousands who waited for hours to hear Cosby press home his message in dozens of free town meetings nationwide will surely profit from his levelheaded advice. They, and thousands more like them, will talk to their kids (in standard English and in a tone that doesn’t “sound like a prison guard”), listen to them, read to them, encourage them, discipline them with gentle firmness, limit their TV watching, and never give up on them. But these are the caring parents. The problem is the ones who don’t care—who don’t understand, as a California doctor tells Cosby, that “you have a choice as to whether to have children or not” and to “decide who gets to be your baby’s daddy,” and that once you’ve made that decision, “both of you are supposed to have something to do with that child for the rest of its life.” The problem is the girls who view sex, in Cosby’s terms, as “You see me. I see you. You want it. . . . We’re both hot. Now let’s do it”—the girls who have “five or six different children—same woman, eight, ten different husbands or whatever.”

What will become of all these “kids with different fathers,” who “compete, often unequally, for whatever attention is going around,” so that (as with the offspring of polygamous sheikhs) “there is bound to be bad blood”? What can we expect from families with “grandmother, mother, and great grandmother in the same room, raising children, and the child knows nothing about love or respect of any one of the three of them”? How much of the cultivation of civility and virtue, which makes strong families the building blocks of a strong society, can happen here? “When we see these boys walking around the neighborhood,” say Cosby and Poussaint, “we imagine them thirty or forty years down the road wandering around just as aimlessly, and we want to cry.” For they are lost.

Black conservatives have said such things for years, only to be unthinkingly ostracized as race traitors for breaking with orthodoxy. But no one could dismiss the lovable Cosby: African-Americans are proud of his success and admire his munificence to black charities. What’s more, as Princeton prof and sometime rapper Cornel West put it, the TV star “is not in the right wing. He’s not Clarence Thomas. He is not Ward Connerly.” Nor could anyone dismiss National Public Radio’s respected Juan Williams when he emphatically endorsed Cosby’s views in a 2006 book, Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America—and What We Can Do About It. When a longtime liberal like Williams embraces these ideas, something important is changing in the black mainstream—despite racial arsonist Al Sharpton’s effort to demonize Williams as “the black Ann Coulter.”

It requires explanation that black leaders don’t mob Cosby with support, Williams points out, because he is so obviously right. Of course today’s African-Americans have full civil rights and ample opportunity. Look at how immigrants from far-flung Ethiopia and Nigeria—no less black—succeed in their new land of opportunity. Moreover, notes Williams, Cosby’s views mirror those of the civil rights greats of old. Booker T. Washington similarly urged education and self-reliance and cautioned that “we should not permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities.” W. E. B. Du Bois, despite differences with Washington, shared his “goal of black self-reliance.” Martin Luther King “said he wanted above all else to get black people to shed the idea that they did not control their destiny.” And from the moment of emancipation, “education was a radical tool of liberation for black people so recently enslaved and purposely denied the chance to learn.” From the founding of the Tuskegee Institute to Thurgood Marshall’s Brown v. Board victory to James Meredith bravely entering Ole Miss in 1962, the right to education was central to the civil rights movement. As for out-of-wedlock childbearing, married couples headed 78 percent of black families in 1950, compared with 34 percent today.

In the 1960s, this can-do worldview changed. A vast transformation of American culture combined with the black-power movement and the War on Poverty to brew a toxic new orthodoxy among black leaders, who remain stuck in that era to this day. “Very few new ideas are allowed into this stifling echo chamber,” Williams reports. Despite startling African-American progress in the intervening half-century, “the official message from civil rights leaders remains the same. Black people are victims of the system, and the government needs to increase social spending. . . . Even the most dysfunctional and criminal behavior among black people is not to be criticized by black leaders” but must “be denied and hidden in the name of protecting the image of blacks as disadvantaged, oppressed, and perpetually victimized.” Dissent, and you’re an “Uncle Tom and a sellout.”

That half-century of progress, though, makes it hard to profess the orthodoxy in good faith. Some, such as Barack Obama’s ex-pastor Jeremiah Wright, whose “black liberation theology” is pure sixties black-power political radicalism preserved in amber, still spout it sincerely. But Williams’s view of most of today’s black leaders recalls Eric Hoffer’s dictum that great causes often start out as movements but degenerate into rackets. Today’s leaders have made lucrative careers out of preaching a crippling ideology that ensures that they will never run out of poor blacks to agitate for. As Cosby quipped in one of his town meetings, “There are people who want you to remain in a hole, and they rejoice in your hopelessness because they have jobs mismanaging you.”

Williams presents a rogues’ gallery of African-American leaders who harm the people they claim to serve by blinding them to the opportunity all around them and stoking resentments that serve as excuses for wrongdoing. Jesse Jackson, “the unofficial president of black America,” takes pride of place, with Al Sharpton as runner-up. Williams “detects a smell of extortion” about them; their main business, he says, is “staging phony protest marches for money.” What blacks has Jackson benefited, except for two of his sons, whom his pressure tactics helped win a multimillion-dollar beer distributorship? Sharpton, Williams thinks, is lower still: he took a campaign contribution from a GOP operative who aimed to weaken the Democrats by keeping so polarizing a figure in their 2004 presidential primary.

When black politicians actually have won power, their politics of victimhood has often proved a rationale for not even trying to help the black masses but rather for decrying the white racism that supposedly causes their plight. Congresswoman Maxine Waters, for instance, spewed charges of racism to block officials from reforming a dysfunctional (and now closed) Los Angeles hospital that had become a high-paying jobs program for some blacks but whose poor care was harming its many black patients. Mayors Sharpe James of Newark and Marion Barry of Washington, Williams says, “saw political opportunity in making themselves masters of large pools of black people dependent on state and federal poverty programs.” The money flowed in, mayoral aides stole it and went to jail, the schools got worse, crime festered, and finally prosecutors nailed James himself for rigging the sale of city property to enrich his mistress. By contrast, Cory Booker, James’s successor, is (so to speak) the Bill Cosby of urban governance, exemplifying the right way forward for African-American pols.

If black leaders really wanted to help the black poor, Williams argues, they’d combat the “cultural belief that being ‘authentically black’ does not allow for high quality intellectual engagement in school,” as columnist Joseph H. Brown put it. They’d demand radical school reform, including vouchers. It’s a hopeful sign, Williams thinks, that New York Times editorialist Brent Staples, normally part of black orthodoxy’s amen choir, has declared that if the civil rights establishment doesn’t push hard for real school reform, even if it “would discomfort the teachers among its supporters, . . . it will inevitably be viewed as having missed the most important civil rights battle of the last half-century.”

If black leaders really wanted to help the black poor, they’d stop decrying “police brutality and the increasing number of black people in jail” and focus instead “on having black people take personal responsibility for the exorbitant amount of crime committed by black people against other black people” (which accounts for the exorbitant number of African-Americans in jail). But they don’t. As Cosby pointed out to Williams, the NAACP has its headquarters in murder-ridden Baltimore, but “I’ve never once heard the NAACP say, ‘Let’s do something about this.’ ” Indeed, Williams notes, “they never marched or organized, or even criticized the criminals.” Nor did they exhort poor black people to stop smoking crack.

But black crime devastates African-American communities. Residents live with “a sense of an enemy within. That enemy is a neighbor, a friend, possibly a child, any of whom is capable of robbing or assaulting them.” In some cities, like Baltimore, drug dealers still terrorize entire neighborhoods, which resemble Sadr City. The thugs are as vicious as Sadr City militiamen, too. Williams tells of a Baltimore woman who testified against drug dealers operating outside her house in 2002. The next day, gangbangers firebombed her house, though she managed to put out the flames. Two weeks later, they firebombed her house again, this time kicking in the front door and dousing the staircase with gasoline, incinerating the woman, her husband, and their five kids. As she was dying, the woman fruitlessly screamed, “Help me get my children out!”

Even as old-style racism fades, Williams says, the black-crime epidemic is incubating a new racism. The crime “gives credence to the racist stereotype of black people, especially young black men, as a race of marauding, jobless thugs”—a stereotype that even Jesse Jackson shares. “There is nothing so painful to me at this stage of my life,” Jackson said in 1993, “than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery and then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.” This grim development makes it all the more urgent for black leaders to say that “the black criminal is no friend of black progress.”

So now imagine one of Bill Cosby’s “sweet beautiful things born by nature—raised by no one”—grown to teen-age, filled with rage and buried sorrow at abandonment by his father and emotional abandonment, or worse, by his mother. Imagine that his mother never nurtured his basic language and cognitive skills, or properly disciplined and encouraged him, in his crucial first five years, so that learning and even sitting still in school have been hard for him. No respected civil rights group has used its moral capital to demand school reform that could give him the structured, rigorous teaching he especially needs. Almost no national black celebrity—until Cosby—has come into his neighborhood exhorting him to stay in school and work hard, because he could become a physical therapy assistant, say, or a car mechanic, starting at $35,000 to $50,000 a year. No reverend has come down from his pulpit to lead a march against the drug dealers and gangbangers who infest his neighborhood.

Instead, whenever a cop accidentally shoots an unarmed African-American, he hears of Al Sharpton leading a rent-a-demonstration, chanting, “No justice, no peace,” a motley relic of black-power radicalism, which keeps distrust of the police alive in neighborhoods that, to be livable, need policing more than most. Come election time, perhaps he hears a local pol or campaign worker rail against racism and demand more government money. He hears his elders rage against the stinginess of the welfare office and the injustice of the Man, a convenient outlet for a deeper anger about more personal injustice and deprivation.

But most of all, he hears rap. Pumped out from CDs, videos, and television (especially Black Entertainment Television), which black kids watch even more excessively than white kids, “nihilistic glorifications of ‘thug life’ ” and celebrations of gangbangers, drug dealers, and pimps “as black heroes” constantly wash over him, says Williams. “Black rappers, dressed for every video in convict style, posturing with menacing faces, hands flashing gang signals, their heads wrapped in prison-issue do-rags, pants hanging down in the convict style, and gangland tattoos covering their bodies” do their part “to promote black identity as the criminals’ identity.” Rap, says Williams, markets the idea that “violence, murder, and self-hatred” are “true blackness—authentic black identity.” It is “an open sewer throwing up the idea that black men are most genuine, most in touch with their power, when they are getting vengeance with a gun in hand.”

We know that this message reaches its listeners, says Williams, when we see ghetto kids “dress like rappers . . . and act hard-core, using nigger, cursing, and fighting on the way to school, in school, and after school—assuming they are still in school.” And we know it as well from the crime statistics.

We know that rap’s message about sex also hits home. Its cartoon-simple sentiment, says Williams: “All black women are sexually crazed, lack discrimination about men, and deserve to be treated as mindless bitches—dogs.” In rap, Cosby once said, there is “nothing about I care for you, nothing about may I go for a walk with you . . . just I’m hot, I’m leaking, I’m dripping, come on, and I know you want it too”—or, as the title of one rap song has it, “Face Down, Ass Up, C’mon.” There is something tragic, Williams says, about poor black girls “trying to find a way to feel good about their identity in a culture that gives little reinforcement to black women” being asked to dance to music that describes them as whores and bitches. “Rap’s pumped up message to them is to get naked and shake it before giving it up to do the wild thing,” he says. And many will do just that, bearing another generation of doomed innocents, who, despite the evil done them, grow up to be responsible for their own acts.

Of course, white kids listen to this music and see these videos, too, including kids who will grow up to be corporate America’s bosses, and it affects the way they see black people, Williams says. They will come away with an image of black women as indiscriminate sluts, and black men, as African-American journalist Stanley Crouch puts it, as “monkey-moving, gold-chain-wearing, illiteracy-spouting, penis-pulling, sullen, combative buffoons.” “Who would hire such a person?” Williams asks. “Who would want to live next to them?” This $4-billion-a-year industry, in which blacks are the performers, the designers, and many of the executives, presents African-Americans to the entire world in terms the Ku Klux Klan would use. Where are the civil rights leaders?

Williams’s rogues’ gallery includes—beside the stuck-in-the-sixties civil rights pooh-bahs, the racketeering reverends, the corrupt pols, and the exploitative rappers—also the nutty black-studies professors. A typical specimen, Georgetown prof Michael Eric Dyson, leaped into the Cosby debate in 2005 with Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind? Dyson’s attack, just the old victimology with a twenty-first-century twist, usefully underscores how specious and destructive that orthodoxy is. It also calls into question academe’s push for the black “perspective” on its faculties, when that perspective is by definition the harmful one of victimhood and grievance.

Cosby’s “blaming of the poor,” Dyson says, is the traditional attitude of an African-American elite “fatally obsessed with white approval” and persuaded that an embrace of “Victorian values” will win “acceptance from the white majority.” But the “pathologies” of the poor subvert their efforts, “ruining the reputation of the race.” And so, beginning long ago, the black aristocracy began “a program of moral rebuke disguised as social uplift.” Like Cosby, “they policed poor black communities from the . . . lectern,” trying to impose on them “temperance, thrift, refined manners, and Victorian sexual morals.”

But they were wrong to think that “if only the poor were willing to work harder, act better, get educated, stay out of jail and parent more effectively, their problems would go away.” It is not the personal behavior of the black poor but American society’s “structural barriers,” including the “export of jobs and ongoing racial stigma,” that prevent blacks from rising. Similar “structural barriers” hold black kids back educationally. While the suburbs boast “$60-million schools with state-of-the-art technology, . . . inner-city schools fight desperately for funding,” ensuring that “our children will continue to spiral down stairwells of suffering and oppression.”

Even black crime has a structural component, since society has consigned the black poor to “conditions that offer them limited options, which often, yes, lead to poor choices”—so that society is partly to blame. Moreover, the war on drugs “is a war on black and brown people,” and innovations in “policing measures (leading eventually to racial profiling) . . . greatly increased the odds that blacks would do serious time for nonviolent and often first-time offenses”—assertions with an untruth in almost every word. But white America has a reason for its war on minorities. “The prison-industrial complex literally provides white economic opportunity across class strata,” Dyson explains. “Big money is at stake when it comes to making a crucial choice: to support blacks at the state university or the state penitentiary.” Cosby’s call for personal responsibility is thus doubly cruel: it asks the black poor to feel undeserved blame for their own victimization, while excusing whites from coming to their rescue.

Dyson spruces up the old-style victimology with a dash of hip, multiculti relativism. In thinking he has achieved a universal humanity beyond race, because the virtues he embodies are supposedly universal, Cosby has made an error that most whites and many blacks (thanks to white dominance) make, says Dyson: that “white identity [is] normative, and hence universal.” But for black people to aspire to that identity requires “unhealthy doses of self-abnegation” and “conscious rejection of the identity they have inherited or invented.”

Much better, says Dyson, for black people to “ ‘keep it real,’ which often means honoring the ghetto roots of black identity.” African-Americans should value the “elements of mass black culture that enable black folk to resist oppression, transcend their suffering and transform their pain.” Hence Cosby is wrong to reject black English—which “grows out of the fierce linguisticality of black existence, the insistence by blacks of carving a speech of their own”—and to scoff at supposedly African names like “Shaniqua, Shaligua, Mohammed.” Though such names may be African “only in that they reflected flair and creativity,” Dyson says, the important thing is that they recall “the freedom to name themselves” that blacks asserted under slavery, “refusing to tie their identities to the names their owners gave them.”

Cosby is at his most wrong, though, Dyson says, in his hatred of rap, which expresses the authentically black “gangsta” belief that “the lifestyle and ideology of the outlaw, the rebel and the bandit challenge the corrupt norms of the state, the government, and the rule of law in society.” So too with hip-hop fashion, with its “hats on backward, pants down around the crack” that Cosby deplored in his speech. “Fashion in black urban circles rises to performance art,” Dyson tells us. “The more daring their fashions, the less cooperative they are with bourgeois elegance, and the more they undermine bland conformism, the more likely black youth are to understand their bodies as battlefields of fierce moral contest.” Do their pants hang low? “This may be understood as sympathy dress,” an “overidentification” with relatives “who may have been caught up in a bloody urban drama. . . . It is a way of reclaiming the body of a loved one from its demobilized confinement and granting it, vicariously, the freedom to walk on the streets from which it has been removed.” And in truth, “many black youth who wear baggy pants may feel that they are already in prison, at least one of perception, built by the white mainstream and by their dismissive, demeaning elders.” Thus does the idle sophistry of armchair elites come to ratify cultural patterns once recognized as fatal to the poor.

The debate raging throughout black America is the more historic because it is also raging within the soul of America’s first black presidential nominee. Which Obama will prevail? The old-orthodoxy Obama, who sat for 20 years listening to Reverend Wright saying “God damn America” and claiming that the government purposely infected the ghetto with AIDS, who brought his daughters to hear him, and who named a book after one of his sermons? The Obama whose wife, in her grievances and resentments, her whine that America is “just downright mean,” uncannily embodies the black bourgeois attitudes that Ellis Cose described 15 years ago as The Rage of a Privileged Class? Or will it be the Obama who will truly usher in the age of postracial politics, as he seemed to promise when he first emerged as so fresh and attractive a candidate? The Obama who marked Father’s Day with a moving speech on black America’s need for responsible fathers that Bill Cosby would cheer?

At the very least, his nomination, as he himself has said, shows how much progress black America has made. Let’s hope the African-American majority will take the lesson to heart.