Friedman: Bush Disarms, Unilaterally (US under * losing Hi Tech race)

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/15/opinion/15friedman.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&position=

One of the things that I can't figure out about the Bush team is why an administration that is so focused on projecting U.S. military strength abroad has taken such little interest in America's economic competitiveness at home - the underlying engine of our strength. At a time when the global economic playing field is being flattened - enabling young Indians and Chinese to collaborate and compete with Americans more than ever before - this administration is off on an ideological jag. It is trying to take apart the New Deal by privatizing Social Security, when what we really need most today is a New New Deal to make more Americans employable in 21st-century jobs.

We have a Treasury secretary from the railroad industry. We have an administration that won't lift a finger to prevent the expensing of stock options, which is going to inhibit the ability of U.S. high-tech firms to attract talent - at a time when China encourages its start-ups to grant stock options to young innovators. And we have movie theaters in certain U.S. towns afraid to show science films because they are based on evolution and not creationism.

The Bush team is proposing cutting the Pentagon's budget for basic science and technology research by 20 percent next year - after President Bush and the Republican Congress already slashed the 2005 budget of the National Science Foundation by $100 million.

When the National Innovation Initiative, a bipartisan study by the country's leading technologists and industrialists about how to re-energize U.S. competitiveness, was unveiled last December, it was virtually ignored by the White House. Did you hear about it? Probably not, because the president preferred to focus all attention on privatizing Social Security.

It's as if we have an industrial-age presidency, catering to a pre-industrial ideological base, in a post-industrial era.

......Thomas Bleha, a former U.S. Foreign Service officer in Japan, has a fascinating piece in the May-June issue of Foreign Affairs that begins like this: "In the first three years of the Bush administration, the United States dropped from 4th to 13th place in global rankings of broadband Internet usage. Today, most U.S. homes can access only 'basic' broadband, among the slowest, most expensive and least reliable in the developed world, and the United States has fallen even further behind in mobile-phone-based Internet access. The lag is arguably the result of the Bush administration's failure to make a priority of developing these networks. In fact, the United States is the only industrialized state without an explicit national policy for promoting broadband."

Since it took over in 2001, the Bush team has made it clear that its priorities are tax cuts, missile defense and the war on terrorism - not keeping the U.S. at the forefront of Internet innovation. In the administration's first three years, President Bush barely uttered the word "broadband," Mr. Bleha notes, but when America "dropped the Internet leadership baton, Japan picked it up. In 2001, Japan was well behind the United States in the broadband race. But thanks to top-level political leadership and ambitious goals, it soon began to move ahead.

"By May 2003, a higher percentage of homes in Japan than the United States had broadband. ...

"Today, nearly all Japanese have access to 'high-speed' broadband, with an average connection time 16 times faster than in the United States - for only about $22 a month. ... And that is to say nothing of Internet access through mobile phones, an area in which Japan is even further ahead of the United States. It is now clear that Japan and its neighbors will lead the charge in high-speed broadband over the next several years."

This was a problem that has been around since before Bush, but it isn't being helped under Bush either.

The simple frank truth of the matter is that our so-called leaders in charge of the money have utterly failed to stand up for people in this country. We're falling behind in education and health care in this country, and as a result, we're becoming less competitive as a people. I lay this on the doorstep of Congress. Both parties failed.

At least he understood the importance of internet and science technology and would've been pushing the U.S. to be a leader not a straggler. This country under * and the Repuke theocons is heading rapidly towards 2nd class status for most of us.

Underfunded education has been a problem for decades even during the Clinton years. I like results, and the government under both Democratic and Republican control hasn't done much to deliver better results. If I had to choose between the two, yes, I'd choose Gore, but in the back of the mind, I can't help but think I'm choosing between "mediocre" and just plain "horrible."

for being stupid. He may hold two college degrees, but he's never shown himself to be intellectually active nor expert on any single topic of industry, economics, education, technology, etc. He was in and of the oil industry, but he's never expressed much of an opinion nor used detailed expertise to support any position of the industry. Of course, he was a dilettante CEO in all that he did. I doubt that he could even quote Ranger statistics if push came to shove.

He's as close to a non-thinking, non-questioning, non-intellectual that has ever been elected to the Presidency - and certainly represents that group rather well since 1920.

There is a reason that Bush is mocked for being stupid. He is.

which in my opinion is worse than being stupid.

One of the claims made is that all these changes made by BushCo doesn't really have an effect on things like civil rights, science, education, innovation, etc.

Now you can point to this as an example of how far we've fallen in just a few short years.

Remember when we were a technologically advanced society?

Technology moves quickly, and with tech workers now painting houses or delivering pizzas (losing their tech edge), we will fall quickly behind the rest of the world as we move backwards into Jeebusland. :-(

Some comments:

One remark you always hear about low-paid production jobs going overseas is that the US excels in technology, and it is our technological expertise that will keep us on top, and who needs those low-paid jobs anyway. You hear this time and again. Sadly, we are losing our technological edge, and this administration is contributing to the loss.

Friedman's got it right on cell phones as well. Okay, I find it hard to acknowledge the need for all the whistles and bells, so let's put that aside for a moment. The "advanced" GSM system that is only now being implemented sketchily throughout the US has been available in Africa -- yes, that Africa -- for more than a decade. Cell phones and cell phone services that are touted as being state of the art and stupendously fantastic were available in the early 1990s in Africa. Companies are introducing it in the US only now and then charging a premium for the phones and the service. Amazing.

And, finally, re broadband, does he ever have that one nailed. Ever try to get high-speed internet access if you're slightly off the beaten path? More than three miles from the telephone company's central office, and DSL is out of the question. If your local cable company chooses not to wire a particular area because the returns are not sufficient, and you can kiss goodbye to cable access. What is particularly galling about this one is that cable companies often have exclusive rights in towns, and the towns are simply not powerful enough to insist that service be provided universally. Wireless internet access can work in some areas, subject to investment by a company willing to offer such services and suitable topography. So that's not always an option. And then there's satellite service, which is appallingly varied, and expensive (both up front and monthly costs).

But instead of addressing these needs head-on, we are plunging headlong into a 19th century theocracy.

standards in Europe and elsewhere--it was debated a long time ago here and rejected ... under Clinton? Bush I? Standardization helped interchangeability, unified networks, less duplication of infrastructure, and earlier and better implementation and expansion of the domestic markets.

Part of the equation is need. We're wired. Africa's not. Cheaper to set up a cell network even in a sparsely populated area than wire the houses and businesses.

Broadband is an easier proposition in a lot of countries: they're smaller, population's more concentrated in cities, and the government handles much of the infrastructure, or requires it (which is the same thing). Even with government involvement in infrastructure we're still more dispersed than in, say, people in Italy or Japan are. It's the same as the public transportation problem: having the government secure broadband access or public transit in NYC is one thing ... doing it for S. Dakota would be an entirely different matter.

Whether consciously thought out or not, the RW is reacting against the new tech sector as a market competitor to their weedy and dying dinosaurs and sluggish portfolio growth. They'd rather beat that down and uneducate the masses here first as a priority.

The second thing, which puzzles some, is almost the requirement for high tech bully tools to replace boots on the ground and blackmail nations from afar with impunity. I think throwing the bright makers out of jobs is to allow them to drift into the RW controlled defense(offense) industry. OR.. to import non-Americans with even less interest or clout or potential threat(they can always fear deportation) into the military hi tech.

Lay waste...remake. use our dominance fast and hard in the interim. No one has spelled out the GOP social engineering going on, but in essence that is what it might shape up to be.

The free flow of private sector creativity that feeds the whole? They could care less and fear it too much already to see it as a necessary good. Look to more ways to lay waste to the Internet and drive people like cattle, picking out lost souls and villains from the herd to accomplish their ends.

I don't think they give a damn how incompetent or pathetic their use of tech and education is so long as it is simply a machine in their total simple-minded control. They rationalize their lunacy with an obvious fear. The burgeoning high tech civilization is an explosive, unpredictable monster in the hands of unevolved, divided humans.

It is easy to be mystified by thinking about this in too small a way because in all likelihood the RW operates unconsciously and narrow-mindedly itself so that the Big Picture is not only invisible but irrelevant. But like history, it still is there and their effect upon it is close to 99% destructive.

Companies like Verizon will fight to the death to prevent smaller companies from competing in the provision of any type of service - wireless internet, DSL, whatever even in areas where they cannot or will not provide it yet

Friedman doesn't understand anything if he is ever right it is by accident not because he is in the least bit perceptive. For example, he expresses dismay that "We have a Treasury secretary from the railroad industry." Putting aside the fact that our treasury secretary is horrible anyway, what is the problem with a treasury secretary from the railroad industry? In Friedman's mind railroads are "so last century" and our treasury bureacrats should all be former execs at some hip internet biz, but one of the crucial economic issues this country faces is the long-term degradation of our rail infrastructure. Relative to Europe and Japan our rail system is pathetic, and there are a lot of exciting new developments in Rail that the U.S. has nothing to do with because our Rail industry is basically non-existent. I would much rather have a treasury secretary who would put focus on these issues than the typical Wall Street stooge.

I know its not the main point of his article, but Friedman's idiocy with respect to how a real economy works grates on me.

because if you go into engineering, you will be treated like DIRT by the Rethugnican bosses in industry. They will promise you anything to get you to work night-and-day to make those breakthrus -- then promote themselves and their buddies on your innovations and fire & blacklist you right out of the middle class. (One of the best ways to get fired in almost any Fortune 500 company is to make a breakthru that's big enough to make the annual report. And the Rethug bosses will smear you in the same vicious style that Rethugs smear Democrats.) They will cut your resources and demand 80 hour weeks, while they themselves come in at 10, take 2 hour lunches, and leave at 3 or 4. And all with a George W. Bu$h type smirk on their smug faces -- smirking at you because you're fool enough to put in the hard work needed to make a breathru actually work, while white-bread smart boys like themselves know that hard work is for workers, engineers, and other 'suckers'.

So the problem isn't just George W. Bu$h -- it's the Rethugnican ruling class in both industry and government. Bu$h and Cheney are horrible specimens, but they're just two of many.

Until the U.S. gets a new ruling class -- a decent, humane, constructive ruling class, it cannot be trusted with an advanced technology and does not DESERVE to have an advanced technology.

Vitruvius

P.S: There's no point in your making inventions or breakthrus when ALL the benefits will go to the Rethug rich, the Rethug bosses, and the Rethug ruling class, while everybody else gets NOTHING. Right now, making breakthrus benefits the rich racist Rethugnican enemy and does nothing whatsoever for decent people.