Democratic Accountability in the US

Three profoundly depressing stories from the USA over the last month seem to me to have a common link, that of the dilution of democratic accountability.

First we have police violence, with Ferguson and Staten Island as examples. This story has generally been labeled a race issue, and indeed it raises profound questions about race relations. But for me the accountability issue is even more significant.

On this one The Economist hit the nail on the head. The police in the USA in some districts appear to have lost sight of their primary purpose, which is to serve their community. To achieve this they have to balance the need to maintain law and order with building a trust and respect.

The scale of police overreaction in the US is disgraceful, and in Europe would be cause for major public debate and for significant change. True, guns on the street require extra vigilance, and there are districts where I would not wish to serve myself as an officer. But surely every life lost at the hands of the police should count as a serious failure?

There are simple ways to help to achieve this. Simply counting the bodies would be a great start. In business, a well-known saying is that what gets measured gets done. So how come no-one seems to keep a national count of people killed by police? The lack of a count betrays a lack of true concern.

Body cameras would be cheap and effective. Merging some forces to enable them to train and churn officers to more closely resemble their communities would help as well, and save money, as would the reconfiguration tribunals and other procedures to reduce conflicts of interests.

The second example is even more disgraceful. It refers to the senate report of CIA activities in the years immediately following 9/11. This report should make every American ashamed, and is an affront to human decency and the founding fathers.

I guess the pressures were great and mistakes can happen. What I cannot abide is the rush of people who should know better trying to challenge the report. We have heard exactly the same arguments, from similar people, as came up after the Snowden revelations.

Some say that the report is unrepresentative, did not involve direct interviews, and so on. Yet the CIA obstructed the process at every turn and still insists on major redactions, hiding behind some sort of plainly spurious defence that enemies would stand to gain from such revelations.

Others accept that torture occurred (well, never torture, only Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, we wouldn’t want to be sued now, would we?), but claim it was rare and stopped after a period. Some of these same people even claim EIT was a good idea because it worked, though their evidence is woeful. These arguments are the most disgraceful of all.

The US would surely be better served by leaders who acknowledged any mistakes and put steps in place to minimize the chance of a repeat? Only that way can international credibility be restored, and only that way can the US earn even a modicum of legitimacy is criticizing other countries, a role which the world sorely needs. That can only start by beefing up congressional oversight, rather than undermining it.

The third example is a little different, that of the spending bill recently passed by Congress. I took the time to look up its main provisions – not simple since the press and TV did not seem to care much.

A provision reduced regulatory requirements on banks. Campaign finance restrictions were also reduced. The possibility was raised of reducing pensions for federal staff. The department responsible for immigration control was only given a budget for a short period.

Areas with funding cut included school lunches, common core standards, food banks, parts of Obamacare, environmental protection and the tax collecting service. Regulation was reduced on clean water, lower emission light bulbs and permitted working hours of truckers, and increased on abortion and recreational drugs.

Internationally, Israel, Jordan and Egypt (yes Egypt) got more, while restrictions were placed on funding Palestine, Afghanistan and the UN.

There were small victories for those fighting Ebola and carrying out health research, those seeking to reduce sexual offences in the military, reformers of veterans affairs, and for certain mass transit projects.

At least it is a bill and it came from a process of compromise and the country can continue to operate. Furthermore, we can be relieved that most things that matter in the US happen at state level rather than federally.

But what an extraordinary list this is. There is almost nothing that might benefit the typical US family, despite the challenges facing most and the onward march of inequality. Almost all of the provisions seem to reward large funders and lobbyists. The Democrats could just publish this list and use it as the core of their next campaign – if they were not so in hock to the same interest groups and lobbyists themselves.

In this way democratic accountability is lost. There was recently an election campaign. I did not see any of these items campaigned for by anyone or given any coverage in the media. Because of shameless gerrymandering, most congress people from the house side have no need whatsoever to answer to the general public, only to zealots from their own side and the providers of their campaign cash.

In such a situation, we might hope that other groups might rise up to fill the vacuum. Local politics sometimes does a good job of this, especially in big cities like New York. Despite the Staten Island case, it is no coincidence that the NYPD seem to have a greater sense of their role and their community than other forces.

But where are the media? PBS do an excellent job, but few care to tune in. The rest have been infiltrated by the same virus, and are controlled or otherwise in need of big money interest groups.

The judiciary is at least powerful, and not corrupt. But big money plays a growing role there, as seen by the increased polarization in the Supreme Court.

Saddest of all, where is the Church? In Europe, the Churches can sometimes be seen as behind the times, but at least the leaders are occasionally prepared to speak publicly in favour of things like human rights and executive overreach. The Pope does an excellent job in providing some conscience to lawmakers, but he is rather peripheral in the US. Local Church leaders are shamefully silent, focusing solely on issues like abortion and contraception, and, as far as I can tell, local priests are discouraged from advocating any social message outside of safe areas. Why? I fear the same interest groups and donors are dictating to the Churches as well. Truly, the moneychangers have taken over the temple once again.

That only leaves micro action. In the end, this will win, as the society of the individual gradually takes over, and the state finds it progressively harder to control the debate. But this will be slow and fitful. In the meantime, there are only mass protests, of such intensity that authorities must sit up and take note. I have never been such a protester, but I think if I was a US citizen and thirty years younger I would be out on the streets now. How else can any sort of democratic accountability be re-established?

There are reasons to hope. The president can be brave, as witnessed this week over Cuba. Local accountability is alive and well in some big cities. At least in the US there is some freedom to debate, and we should remember that this is not the case everywhere. But the US also needs some mass activism. Go (lawful, peaceful) protesters!        

A Letter from Queens

The Guardian weekly publishes an article each week in the form of a letter from a particular place, submitted by a reader. I decided to have a go at getting published, and have just submitted a proposal for them to consider. It would be exciting to have it printed. But in the likely event that the submission does not receive such a wide audience, here I am making it available to a narrow one.

The letter is entitled: "Letter from Queens, NYC: Gateway to the World"

Thirty years ago I lived in Balham, the south London suburb ironically labeled “Gateway to the South” by Tony Hancock. I now find myself in Queens, which could easily be described as the Gateway to the World.

Many people pass through Queens. If you have ever flown to JFK or La Guardia airports, you will have sat in traffic on our crowded highways or ridden on our dirty subways on your way to our glamorous neighbour, Manhattan. You may have noticed suburb after suburb, squeezed together just like in south London.

In addition to the throngs of Long Island commuters and global tourists just passing through, we are home to the most ethnically diverse two million residents on the planet. Many of us are just passing through as well, staying for a few years rather than the few minutes of the visitors. It is a transitory sort of place, but it has its unique charms.

You can discover almost every culture of the world here, established by waves of immigrants creating their home from home. Within a mile of our home, I find Uzbek Jewish, Greek, Colombian and Philippine hamlets, to name just a few. Even south London has left its mark – Queens suburbs include Kew Gardens and Richmond Hill. New arrivals cluster around their own type, but then interact with others to blur the boundaries. Fusion could have been invented here: we can find authentic cuisine and traditions from anywhere, but also a plethora of exotic combinations.

Folks from Queens associate the metropolis on the other side of the East river with different things. It can be a place of work or a destination for abundant culture. But for others it might as well be on the other side of the world – we know people who haven’t visited “the city” in thirty years. Mind you, try asking Manhattan residents to come to your concert in Queens and many will look at you as if you’ve asked them to cross an ocean. 

Sometimes my daily walk takes me through Corona Park. In forty short minutes, I cross two frantic highways, a railway and a subway line, and pass examples of most types of housing, with their associated range of affluence. The park hosts a top quality museum, the massive homes of the US tennis open and baseball’s Mets, and sundry relics from a World Fair of sixty years ago. It is a feast for the senses. I see the Manhattan skyscrapers but also wonderful spring blossoms and games of cricket. I hear screaming jets descending into La Guardia but also birdsong and happy kids. I smell garbage and transport fumes, but also a park full of joyful family barbecues. It is all here if you are alive to it, even peace.

Arriving New Yorkers soon pick up the habits of our city. We’ll readily start a dialogue, loudly tell you what we are thinking, and frequently test the horn in our cars. We also laugh a lot, are generous with help, and celebrate humanity in all its diversity. I feel blessed to be passing through the Gateway to the World.

End of Letter

Meanwhile, I have also started blogging for the company I work part time for, called Synthetron. I'll submit posts once per month or so, on the general theme of situations where Synthetron could offer help. My first post follows up a Time interview with Mary Barra, the new CEO of GM. Here is a link to the post.

http://www.synthetron.com/mary-barras-staff-engagement-challenge/

Creating a Joy Bank

There was an interesting article in the Guardian Weekly last week about nostalgia. Only recently have scientists started to study the potential benefits of nostalgic memories. Before that such things were seen as related to denial and of little use.

But it seems that nostalgia has a positive purpose after all. If people can store and recall happy moments from their past, that can act as insurance against anxiety and depression.

This stands to reason, if only because our brains seem wired to seek out positive past memories, and evolution has ensured that most things our brains do have some benefits, even if we don’t always know what these are. It also gels with my personal experience, and, as far as I can tell, that of most of my friends and family.

One consequence is for parents. Subconsciously we seek to create special memories for our kids while they are young. Of course, we cannot control such things, and most of the time our role is to let the kid learn and grow on their own. But we can help. One method is by trying – though not too hard – to make a birthday event especially memorable. We can do this not by spending thousands or by showering the child with hugs and presents, but by associating the event with something fun and unusual.

 We are more likely to recall an event more frequently if something weird happened – such as someone singing a funny song, or a surprise guest arriving. It can even be something unplanned and annoying at the time, like getting lost on the road or a guest vomiting over grandma. The incident will plant the event into the memory more deeply, and, if the overall event was a happy one, it can be worth more in the nostalgia bank of the child later.

This gels with my experience. As a result, though we must be careful what we contrive, we can use the idea to offer lasting gifts to our children. We can make it slightly more likely that something offbeat (but ultimately safe) might happen, then we can help the child associate the event with the happy occasion and remember the occasion more easily that way.

This concept got me thinking about my own joy bank. Counting blessings has become something I advise for others, and I remember to do it myself too, but often in a rather vague way. Do we take time to note and count specific blessings, or do we just acknowledge that we have many blessings to count?

Even more specifically, could we record our joys? We might consider the gifts of serenity to lie inside four concentric circles. In the middle is love, then peace, joy and blessings. If you accept this model that I have just made up, all experiences of love are also peaceful, all peaceful experiences are joyful, and all joyful moments come from blessings. The wider our circle of blessings, the more we can hope for joy. The wider the circle of joy, the more we can hope for peace, and the more peace, we can hope for love.

The great thing about all the circles is that we have the power to grow them ourselves, indeed in most situations it is quite easy to do so. True, external things arise which push the circles inwards, but for most of us we can compensate by pushing them outwards with our own actions and attitudes. Hence the mantra of counting blessings, a thought, if habitual, which will surely grow the circle on its own.

It is not all that simple to actively grow the love circle, though eminently possible. For peace, we can adopt various lifestyle aids, though this takes effort and works against other perceived priorities for most of us.

But what about joy? We can hold ourselves open to joy, and we can savour it when it arrives. Perhaps we might also be able to savour it in such a way that it can live beyond its moment. We might be able to add moments of joy to what we could call a joy bank – this will happen subconsciously, but maybe we can take actions to help the process.

Perhaps this is a good way to understand the modern tendency to capture everything in a photo. It seems to traditionalists like me that some kids take so many photos nowadays that they could be forgetting how to enjoy a moment, and I am skeptical that more than a tiny fraction of photos endures any length of time, such is the sheer number of photos taken.

But Instagram and the others are clearly on to something; they have captured some sort of human impulse to record joy. I have yet to succumb, and it will also be interesting to see how that trend plays out over the next few years – surely some restraint and some segmentation will occur.

Instead, I tried something different this week. It is the time of year to put together summaries of the year and newsletters for friends, so I tried to come up with my list of top joyful moments from 2014. I set a rule that it had to be specific enough to pin down to a couple of hours of time – “that holiday in Portugal” would be too vague.

It turned out to be a wonderful exercise. The first takeaway was just how much joy I am blessed with, and perhaps most of us are if we only stop to consider. From the awe from attending major US sports event to the perennial joy of a good breakfast or an excellent article over a café latte, from moments of personal intimacy to the serenity from great performances or exhibitions, joy is everywhere.

Then there was the selection of highlights. Most involved family reunions. Many involved personal recognition, often of a paternal variety. The top one was a miraculous couple of hours when my wife and I arrived through unexpected serendipity at an event in the Netherlands along with many dear friends we had not seen for a long time.

The takeaway from that could be that the strongest remembered joyful moments were the ones within the love circle. I could also conclude that family only becomes more important as we grow older, and that I have a personal hot button for being recognized by people I have coached or otherwise respect. That is useful insight.

Another takeaway was just how good I felt during the days I carried this exercise out – it gave me a lot of strength.

A final takeaway came from trying to go further back in time. Compiling joy highlights for 2014 was not difficult. To do it for the five years before that was much harder, and for the twenty years before that impossible – I ended up resorting to obvious headline moments such as weddings or Christmases, and the remembered joy was far less intense and even sometimes tinged with bitterness. Perhaps this tells me that I was not as happy then. It also makes me wonder whether joyful memories fade unless stored carefully and consciously.

So I think I might have stumbled upon a powerful new practice. Considering joyful highlights each year might make those highlights linger longer, and keep my bank account of joy healthy and topped up. I’ll certainly try this for the next few years to test the theory. I recommend the exercise – what were your top joy highlight moments in 2014?