economic disconnect

We’re all aware by now that Wall Street firms and major banks and insurance companies have been stealing the country blind trading in abstractions built on nothing.  People have finally realized the emperor has no clothes and the whole airy enterprise is collapsing like a loaf of Wonder Bread.  But what I don’t think is obvious enough yet is how divorced the “economy” has become from the tangible marketplace. I read the Wall Street Journal everyday and see terms like GDP or consumer confidence bandied about as if they were actual facts, like someone’s blood sugar level.  I mean what exactly is being “produced”?  Can all production be quantified?  Is continuous increasing production a sustainable enterprise?  What are consumers confident about?  You get the idea.

The tangible marketplace exists organically.  People need food, clothes, and shelter.  Their wants are pretty consistent, too:  entertainment, artistic pleasure, socialization.  They need education, child care, medical care, haircuts, plumbing repairs.  They need transportation, whether via private cars, planes, trains, busses, or bicycles.  The number of people in the world keeps increasing.  Surely there must be valuable work for everyone to do!  I’m not surprised to hear of unemployed mortgage brokers or advertising executives, but when I see teachers, nurses, and architects looking for work, something is askew with the system.  When I see my three talented and capable adult children, along with many of their talented and capable friends, unemployed or woefully underemployed something’s wrong with the system.  And then at the same time, classrooms overflow due to lack of teachers, patients go untreated due to lack of nurses…someone must making money here, but I bet they aren’t people providing actual goods and services.  The companies traded about on the stock exchange have little to do with the actual provision of these services. 

Frankly provision of actual services hasn’t been what’s valued in our society.  Even the profession of medicine, every Jewish mother’s dream, has been devalued in relationship to health maintenance organization administrators and insurers who can’t so much as take a blood pressure.  College professors, artists, plumbers, farmers, cooks, child care workers…everyone takes a back seat to people who trade in abstractions.  Now that those abstractions are collapsing,  it’s high time to connect economic exchange to tangible goods and services.  If the economy is built on sturdier pillars, it won’t be nearly as vulnerable to recessions, depressions, or implosions.

How to go about this is a long and very complicated process but breaking economic units down to smaller, more localized businesse would help.  It’s very hard to promote accountability in huge multinational corporations.  We may not need to get rid of the stock exchange, but we could certainly regulate its actions much more closely and not insist that companies meet Street-defined “expectations”, sacrifice long value for short term gains, or for that matter, continue to grow, like cancerous cells. We could let medical professionals run medical care (see Wendy’s healthcare plan).  We could promote small businesses (see Wendy’s bailout plan).  As a society we could value people who create real things and care for real people.  We could value beauty and craftsmanship over blind efficiency and planned obsolescence.   

It might be wise if we make those choices now, in a controlled manner, before this entire puffed up enterprise completely collapses.

wendy’s recipe file: cannellini bean salad

I buy an (admittedly delicious) preprepared version of this salad at New Seasons but was appalled to see that a small container carried an almost six dollar pricetag.  Come on, we’re talking about beans!  I’ll think I’ll be making it at home from now on.  YOu can substitute butter beans or fava beans in this; there’s an excellent canned version of butter beans imported from Italy.

TUSCAN CANNELLINI BEAN SALAD

4 cups cooked cannellini beans (canned are fine, but to save money, and for a slightly chewier taste, make your own)

one-quarter cup diced roasted red bell peppers (ideally, use your own, frozen from summer’s bounty)

one-half cup fresh basil, slivered

one-quarter cup fresh Italian parsley or cilantro, minced

2 cloves garlic, crushed

one cup extra virgin olive oil

one-quarter cup balsamic vinegar

one-quarter cup grated romano cheese

2 T sea salt

black pepper to taste (about 1 T)

feet of clay

A day doesn’t go by where you don’t hear about another politician’s career sidetracked as the truth comes out about his personal foibles, whether they be sexual or financial.  Some of these “mistakes” do reflect on them pretty badly.  Surely someone in charge of nationwide economic reform, a REGULATOR himself, should know how to dot all the is and cross all the ts on his income taxes.  Surely an elected official should know better than to chase after a seventeen year old boy and have sex with him, whether or not he was technically of age at the time.

And yet I still can’t get too enraged at most of these screwups.  Embarrassing as they may be, they pale at the outrages perpetrated by political and business leaders who send young people to die in pointless wars, who imprison innocent people, who order waterboarding and extraordinary renditions, who knowingly send salmonella-contaminated food out on the market, who manufacture costly drugs that are life threatening at worst and useless at best.  Some of these folks might pay their taxes on time and never ever cheat on their spouse, but they are perpetrating much worse evils.  They get away scot free while we are distracted by the Mc Guffin of these relatively minor infractions.

Ideally, I would like my leaders to be individuals I could admire in all respects. I think we need to maintain reasonable standards for our elected officials.  But I respect that people come in complicated packages, and often you have to balance the good with the bad. Politicians , like actors and rock stars, seem to need constant approval and ego gratification, which apparently makes it really difficult for them to keep their pants on.  Politicians tend to be wealthy, with abundant household help , investments, honoraria, and employment perks, tending to complicate their tax returns more than the average Joe.  None of these failings necessarily mean  they can’t enact good health care legislation or broker a peace agreement in the Middle East.

I think we go after these public servants with feet of clay because it is easier and safer to attack their relatively minor infractions than to bring truly evil people to justice.  If we want real change, it’s the CEOS of Monsanto and Halliburton, and people like them who need to be shamed and brought down, not the Daschles and Adams of the world.

wendy’s recipe file: red pepper beef goulash

Fans of my lamb stew with fennel:  this winter comfort food may be even better!  I developed this recipe (adapted from The New Basics Cookbook, by Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins) while planning a meal to entertain some Romanian friends.   It’s Hungarian, but whatever.  Serve with pappardelle noodles.

RED PEPPER BEEF GOULASH

2 T p;ove po;

2 pounds boneless beef stew meat

1 large onion, chopped

1 orange and 1 yellow bell pepper, seeded and chopped

About 8 oz roasted red peppers (I used peppers that I roasted and froze last summer.  You can substitute a jar of roasted peppers, though it will not have the same rich taste)

2 cloves garlic, minced

2 T caraway seeds

2 T smoky paprika (don’t substitute cheap flavorless red powder for the real thing!)

2-3 cups beef broth (homemade or Imagine brand aseptic)

one-third cup tomato paste (again, I used tomato jam that I made during the summer.  To replicate, you could use good quality tomato paste with a dash of cinnamon, a dash of hot pepper, and a pinch of brown sugar)

one-third cup heavy cream

one-third cup sour cream (I like Nancy’s)

1) Heat the oil in a Dutch oven.  Brown the beef over medium high heat, in batches if necessary.  Using a slotted spoon, transfer the beef to a bowl and set aside.

2)  Add the onion, orange and yellow bell peppers, garlic, caraway, and paprika to the Dutch oven. Cook over low heat, stirring, until just tender (around 10 minutes)

3) Add the stock and tomato puree, deglazing the pan. Return the meat to the mixture. Cover and simmer until meat is fork-tender, around one and a half hours.  Season with salt and pepper if needed.  Add the roasted red peppers and cook, uncovered, another 10 minutes.  Meanwhile, combine heavy cream and sour cream in a small bowl.

4) Add creams to the goulash and serve.

danger to oneself and others

Well, we’ve had our own Columbine here in downtown Portland, and while there’s been lots of information about the promising young lives the shooter snuffed out or did irreperable damage to, there hasn’t been a whole lot of detail about him, save that he was a “student of concern” at his high school, had been “depressed and on medication” and was calm and provided proper documentation when buying his gun at a Tigard store.  And, as seems to be the case with most mass murderers, his neighbors didn’t know him very well and didn’t sense anything amiss.  He was “quiet”.  His former employers rated him highly although the woman in the neighboring cubicle found him “peculiar” and complained to no avail. 

No one accepts blame yet so many deserve it.

I can’t blame the owner of the gun shop–who, to his credit, admits feeling guilt–but I do blame the laws under which he operates. Gun ownership is legal in this country.  I admit the eight years of the Bush administration have weakened my opposition to the Second Amendment.  Should Cheney et al have staged a military coup, I would have regretted not owning a gun.  I couldn’t get it out of my mind that in prewar Germany Jews, unlike their Christian countrymen, did not own guns. Nevertheless, some degree of restriction is necessary for public safety.  To drive a car, a device with the capacity to be a lethal weapon, you need to take lessons, prove your capability to drive, have your vision tested, renew the license periodically with further testing, and present twenty zillion kinds of ID.  Surely to buying a gun, whose sole purpose is as a lethal weapon, should require a comparable degree of proof of responsibility? Not in this country.

Some say that these restrictions could be readily evaded by criminals, as evidenced by the saying “if guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns”.  That’s probably true.  I’m sure the Mafia would still manage to get the weapons they needed.  Drug dealers shouldn’t have any more trouble obtaining illegal weapons than they do illegal substances.  But it would be a lot harder for psychopaths to buy guns, and they’re a lot more likely to kill innocent people.

In Oregon–and this is a recent development–gun buyers are required to prove they haven’t been convicted of a felony or committed to a mental institution.  They don’t need to reveal whether they’ve ever been treated for mental illness.  That’s protected by “privacy laws”.  While privacy laws were enacted in response to legitimate abuse, and while a history of mental illness is irrelevant for many purposes–bank loans and most employment, to name a couple–it is relevant to the purchase of a gun. 

And as for the committment to a mental institution, business, forget it.  As anyone whose had contact with what passes for our mental health system knows, you can’t even commit yourself voluntarily to a mental ward unless you are a “danger to oneself and others”.  It doesn’t matter if you, or someone you love, are standing there in the emergency room babbling that God is telling you to murder the infidels.  You’ve got to literally shove that knife up to somebody’s throat.

I don’t know what the problem is.  I don’t know if health personnel are more afraid of legal liability than mad gunmen, or whether it runs even deeper than that and they are terrified of the personal risk and accountability they incur when they reach beyond the letter of the law and accept responsibility for another human being.  We are very protective, as Americans, of the right of people to destroy themselves.  That’s why troubled people are not enclosed within a circle of protection, why they are set adrift to live in anonymous apartments and play video games and work temp jobs and be “quiet”–until they’re not.  When people destroy themselves, they all too often take innocent others along with them.

I realize there is no specific person to blame. Our fascination with firearms is to blame.  Our atomized society is to blame.  Our reliance on law and regulation as a substitute for responsibility to the human community is to blame. All the people who encountered the troubled Erik Ayala and passed the buck can now breathe a sigh of relief that they are free of legal liability.  He’s proved beyond a doubt that he’s a danger to himself and others.   Too bad that he and the others are dead.