Catching Up

The news doesn't stop when you go away for a few days so here are a couple of things that happened while I was gone that I can't get out of my head:

From a story in USA Today, about the recovery efforts underway in Haiti, the world has provided over $8 billion in aid to Haiti since 1969.  So what does the world have to show for all this money and effort in raising the living standard in one of the poorest countries on earth?  Haiti's unemployment rate, before this latest disaster, is 25% higher than it was in 1969.  This is what culminates when you mix massive amounts of money with a plethora of unfocused and uncoordinated agencies and organizations run at the behest and oversight of corrupt officials.  

Speaking of colossal failure and mismanagement on a grand scale, on Morning Joe earlier this week, Melissa Harris-Lacewell, an associate professor of Politics and African-American studies at Princeton University, and a regular guest on the show, said that African-American politicians, like Barack Obama, often find themselves elected to high office in places that have been "hollowed out" by greedy corporations and poor urban planning.  She used this president and the City of Detroit as examples.   This statement went unchallenged by everyone on the panel.  Just for the record Ms. Harris-Lacewell, Detroit had the highest per capita income in 1950.  It was a great American city until President   Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and the riots of 1967 drove whites to the suburbs.  Since then, Detroit has been a model of progressive government; a living wage, militant school and public employee unions, and a tax system that aggressively redistributes income from businesses and the wealthy to the poor and government bureaucracies.  Often dubbed the most liberal city in America, Detroit was hardly "hollowed out" before Coleman Young became mayor in 1974.

From last week's State of the Union speech by President Obama, he reeled off a bunch of policy initiatives like additional tax cuts, pro-business  plans and home grown energy development for oil. coal, and nuclear power that sounded eerily familiar to conservatives.  Although we've heard such rhetoric before, is this an embrace of the policies of the past?  Are the very policies he demagogued on the road to the White House his salvation?  We shall see.