Tom Watson

Punting on the Public Option...But Expanding Public Healthcare?

WASHINGTON — The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, said Tuesday night that he and a group of 10 Democratic senators had reached “a broad agreement” to resolve a dispute over a proposed government-run health insurance plan, which has posed the biggest obstacle to passage of sweeping health care legislation.

via www.nytimes.com

It appears from the scant details making the rounds this morning that this Senate is punting the public option down the field to some future Congress (and President) - while expanding the nation's current public healthcare system (namely Medicare) and enacting new regulations on private insurance. The White House calls the news of the "deal" between 10 Senators of the middle "great progress" but I'm not so sure. While it appears to improve what is un-ironically referred to as the "American healthcare system," the deal abandons true public healthcare under a Democratic President and Congress. Said Russ Feingold: "“I do not support proposals that would replace the public option in the bill with a purely private approach.” with the absence of Barack Obama in the jaw-boning on this issue - in my view, one of the poorest strategic decisions of this still-young Administration - a handful of Senators is batting around an increasingly frayed reform package that may in the end accomplish very little.

Elizabeth Warren: Killing the Middle Class

Today, one in five Americans is unemployed, underemployed or just plain out of work. One in nine families can't make the minimum payment on their credit cards. One in eight mortgages is in default or foreclosure. One in eight Americans is on food stamps. More than 120,000 families are filing for bankruptcy every month. The economic crisis has wiped more than $5 trillion from pensions and savings, has left family balance sheets upside down, and threatens to put ten million homeowners out on the street.

via www.huffingtonpost.com

The truth hurts - and the truth is the last two "booms" actually weakened the American middle class, setting it up for further slippage during down-turns. The right decries "class warfare"but we'll have it if the wealth gap continues to grow. Why? Because we're an aspirational society at heart, at the very core, and without realistic aspirations the modern American society is dead in the water. Elizabeth Warren, an important voice, makes great sense.

Social Good, Social Contests

Online giving contests such as the Case Foundation's America's Giving Challenge are offering nonprofit groups new opportunities to raise money and awareness. How can charities make the most of these opportunities? Tom Watson, an author and consultant, and Kari Dunn Saratovsky, of the Case Foundation, in Washington, discuss the answers to this and other questions with Allison Fine, the host of Social Good.

via philanthropy.com

I enjoyed appearing on Allison's excellent Chronicle of Philanthropy podcast today with Kari Dunn Saratovsky of the Case Foundation. You can listen right here:

New Media, No Media

Back in the late 90s, Jason Chervokas and I briefly worked on a book proposal we tentatively entitled "No Media." Our contention was that the global network would eventually devalue the existing media universe to the point of its near-disappearance. We believed that the evolution of the Web and the growth of DIY "content" - a word we both came to loathe - would explode the market for expensive, professional news stories, music, movies, television....the works. I think we were partly right, and it was somewhat ironic to see mention in David Carr's dark death-of-media Times column of the very vehicle we used to test some of those ideas at the time.

In the late days of our involvement with @NY, the newsletter and website we founded in 1995 and sold to Alan Meckler in 1999, Jason and I were recruited to work on a start-up media project called Inside. It was a print magazine (we wrote the end-paper column), a website, a media trade-pub community - and it was more than half a decade before its time.

Inside was the brainchild of Michael Hirschorn, Deanna Brown and Kurt Andersen - an all-star team of media veterans hell-bent on creating the, well, inside venue for the whole media industry during its incipient period of turmoil. It was funded by Flatiron Partners and our friends Fred Wilson and Jerry Colonna and it was a great, but sadly brief, writing gig - we wrote about subjects we were interested in and were paid very well. Here's how Carr places the Inside story (it failed within a year and was sold off to Steve Brill, who didn't do much with the carcass) into the narrative of the dying professional media landscape:

That feeling of age, of a coming sunset, is tough to avoid in all corners of traditional publishing. Earlier in November, the New York comptroller said that employment in communications in New York had lost 60,000 jobs since 2000, a year when the media industry here seemed at the height of its powers.

I arrived in New York that same year as part of Inside.com, a digital news site conceived to cover a media space that was converging and morphing into something wholly new. The site covered the mainstream media’s efforts to come to grips with new realities and efforts by new players to cash in on emerging technology.

Few of us could have conceived that in the next decade some of the reigning titans of media would be routed. Profligate dot-com ad money that had fattened print went away in a digital wipeout, and when digital media came back, it was to dine on the mainstream media rather than engorge it. After 2000, jobs in traditional media industries declined at a rate of about 2.5 percent annually and then went into a dive in 2008 or so. (Inside.com, an idea before its time — hey, let’s charge for high-quality, business-oriented content — disappeared after about 18 months.)

That carnage has left behind an island of misfit toys, trains whose cabooses have square wheels and bird fish who are trying to swim in thin air. The skills that once commanded $4 for every shiny word are far less valuable at a time when the supply of both editorial and advertising content more or less doubles every year.

Carr tries to lift his depressing tale at the end with the observation that the young and media-ambitious are still coming to New York to find their futures - and that they will invent a new future. That may be so, but I suspect that it will continue to be a world in which the market for "content" remains almost infinite - thereby generally devaluing its creation. I kinda wish we'd written that book after all.

Obama's War

From tonight onward, the relevance of George W. Bush to the foreign policy of the United States begins to diminish like a lifting winter fog to the vanishing point. This war in Afghanistan is Barack Obama's war, and he traveled to West Point to boldly claim that ownership before some of the young men and women who may soon face death under the terms of his order.

President Obama's team, transported nearly whole from its triumphant political campaign, has a sure-handed mastery of the image, the words, the brand. So there was no mistaking any intention whatsoever in tonight's speech upon the Hudson - and any continued carping about inherited warfare and the failed policies of a predecessor in office conflicts with the image of strength and decisiveness the President projected at the U.S. Military Academy.

To put it bluntly: he was not forced into this decision. The failures of the opposition party are no longer all that relevant to what happens now. The Afghanistan policy - more fully understood, in my view, as the Pakistan-Afghanistan policy - is the Obama Administration's policy. It is not some moth-eaten hand-me-down hybrid forced on a unwilling President.

Liberals, who have long deluded themselves into believing Obama was a fellow traveler (in John Heileman's words), have got to find a way to accept this - to understand that President Obama is both the best and the brightest and a practical centrist to the core of his being. (This stands in stark contrast, of course, to the sheer lunacy of the hard right, which insists on branding the Administration as socialist). Progressives who somehow intuited an anti-war politician, a near-pacifist, based on Obama's opposition to Bush's Iraq misadventure must finally understand that this is a President who won't shy away from ordering military action.

Indeed, the President's national security and diplomatic team is resolutely interventionist - committed to military strength and its strategic use - even if they're not wild-eyed exceptionalist cowpokes like the previous Cheneyites. The key words in tonight's address were these:

“We are in Afghanistan to prevent a cancer from once again spreading through that country. But this same cancer has also taken root in the border region of Pakistan. That is why we need a strategy that works on both sides of the border.”

This is about the danger from that region to American interests and lives. While I may believe Afghanistan to be an unwinnable quagmire that only cost lives and dollars with short results, that it's useless to try and prop up what Bob Herbert calls "ragtag and less-than-energetic Afghan military" and the corrupt regime, President Obama has decided differently. Clearly, the U.S. does have a national security interest in the immediate future of Pakistan and Afghanistan - and so, I might add, does the civilized world.

As David Sirota writes in a tough post tonight (he seems somehow personally hurt that Obama has decided to retain the mantle of "wartime President"), the punditry around this decision is tiresome:

Why do so many pundits and pro-Obama activists continue to focus on how "hard" and "difficult" and "trying" this decision is for President Obama, rather than on how "hard" and "difficult" and "trying" this will be for the soldiers who are killed? Doesn't Obama get to make this decision, and then go home to the comfortable confines of a butlered White House, while thousands of Americans will be sent 7,000 miles from home to face their potential deaths? Isn't the latter "harder" than the former?

I suspect the President himself would agree. Of course this wasn't an easy decision, but it was the President's decision - and the decision he ran so hard to make. Yes, he took his time and that's to his credit. And now it's his war.

And because he acts in your name and mine, it's still ours.

Keeping Cyberspace a Public Space: Is Twitter Ours?

We can see how much public space matters in the furore over what might seem at first to be a relatively small change to the way Twitter operates. The micro-blogging service may be a minority occupation and its attractions may be a mystery to the vast majority of internet users, but the hype does not diminish its importance as a bellwether for the future development of social media.

via www.thebillblog.com

A fascinating must-read post for social media geeks from my British friend Bill Thompson, who goes into some depth on a subject I've merely been chatting about recently - the fact that Twitter has been largely invented by its users and is, in large part, a public space worthy of protection. Bill focuses in on the humble "retweet" and Twitter's corporate move to take control over its crowd-sourced feature. It'll be really interesting to see how that crowd reacts when Twitter - the company - starts in 2010 to try and extract money from Twitter, the community. I suspect that today's massive Project Red/World AIDS Day marketing campaign on Twitter is the kind of thing we'll see a lot more of. Will it work, or will the Twitter crowd merely route around the advertising messaging?

Stuck In The Middle With You

John Heilemann has a cover story in the current issue of NY Magazine titled Obama Lost, Obama Found in which he details the challenges and opportunities facing the President. I took the time to read it last night, on the eve of the President's trip up to my birthplace and childhood home at West Point.

via www.avc.com

Fred Wilson agrees with the "far centrist" take of Heilemann's NY magazine piece. Not surprisingly, he has the most difficulty with the President's soon-to-be-announced escalation in Afghanistan - which may come to define his Presidency, alas.

The Booklist: Eric Ambler's Noir

It's an addiction that I've never really fought, never even tried to battle in any sort of therapeutic way. I just give in and float downstream, and collateral continues to build. It's books, really. Piles of them. Dusty and finished and sitting by the bed, or in the small home office, or beside my chair in the living room. A dirty habit, if dust mites measure the effects of habituation. And it's an addiction that has me considering a methadone-like therapy this joyous holiday in the form a Kindle or a Nook or similar "e-reader" as these machines are known. (Recommendations welcome).

No, the piles must be reduced or I face a middle-aged future not all that dissimilar from the Collyer brothers, though I do get out quite a bit and the piles are only thigh-high at their worst. However, before the physical expulsion of allergen-filled material from my bed-chamber, some intellectual exercise may also prove beneficial and I find I am called upon to share my thoughts on reading with the readers of this wayward blog, book-list hungry hordes that you are. So in recognition of the shopping demands (personal and otherwise) of the above-mentioned joyous holiday season - or JHS™ - I've decided on a series of irregular posts on the books I can safely recommend from the past year's reading.

At the top of the stack lie four or five paperback reissues from the canon of Eric Ambler. Now, this choice should carry a bit of foreshadowing against future entries in the series: I fairly wallowed in detective and espionage noir this last year; I needed escape - or at minimum, brief transportation - from the difficulties of worry and creeping despair (I suspect I'm not alone in this) and what better way outside a pill bottle than dark mayhem in the alleys of, oh say, wartime London or the salons of Istanbul. There's a reason so many video games feature the thrill of machine-gunning vast squads of Nazi thugs - it brings such good cheer.

In any case, if you need an escape hatch from the sparkly holiday lights proclaiming "shop, for you must be happy!" then Ambler's the man for you - or that reader on your list.

Early this year, I read Ambler's best-known novel, his 1939 A Coffin for Dimitrios, later made into a film starring Peter Lorre. It features what became Ambler's favorite plot device - the innocent traveler caught in a web of espionage or crime. The writing is straightforward and the characters and settings always serve the plot. Ambler will sometimes allow some of his protagonists' inner struggles and fears to surface, but he also keeps things moving. Sometimes the reader understand more of the situation than the hapless, bumbling traveler - but sometimes the innocent improves his thinking and surges ahead, while the writer holds back the deduction. Ambler, an Englishman who died in 1998, inspired a generation of noteworthy noir writers, including Philip Kerr and Alan Furst.

This summer, I went  on an Ambler tear, plowing through Epitaph for a Spy, Journey of Fear, and The Schirmer Inheritance - visiting the south of France, Parish, Istanbul, Italy and Greece with a collection of unknowing Englishmen, shadowy assassins, bluster police officials, assorted femmes fatales and the odd ex-Nazi.

There is always a moment  in the Ambler novels when the dupe - a novelist, a salesman, a teacher and the like - realizes with sinking fear that they're not in a movie or an Agatha Christie tale; that the danger is real and outlook fairly grim. It seems formulaic (and it is ) but Ambler had the rare gift of lifting such tales with his spare writing. Here's that moment from A Coffin for Dimitrios:

Besides, here was real murder; not neat, tidy book-murder with corpse and clues and suspects and hangman, but murder over which a chief of police shrugged his shoulders, wiped his hands and consigned the stinking victim to a coffin. Yes, that was it. It was real. Dimitrios was or had been real. Here were no strutting paper figures, but tangible evocative men and women, as real as Proudhon, Montesquieu and Rosa Luxemburg.

Ambler was born in London in 1909 to music hall musicians and actors, and toured Europe quite a bit as a child. He uses those experiences well, and began his novels at a propitious time: as fascism was descending on the continent like acid rain. John LeCarre once referred to Ambler as 'the source on which we all draw' but I wasn't after the roots of literary noir when I fished out his novels - I was looking for a good read, and if I'm honest, a hide-away from these times. Ambler put me on a tramp steamer in an unfriendly port or on the overnight train across the Alps - and in a better place entirely.

Note: Here's the Amazon link. I particularly like the Vintage paperback covers.

What Your Facebook Page Says About Who You 'Really' Are

It's becoming increasingly common to "meet" someone online before you encounter them in real life. In my experience, people I meet online are generally quite recognizable when I finally get together with them at a conference or physical meeting. But maybe I'm just lucky.

via scienceblogs.com

A fascinating study by Max Weisbuch, Zorana Ivcevic, and Nalini Ambady shows that - in large part - we really are who we pose as on Facebook. The article's from Cognitive Daily. I do think we tend to present a idealized version of ourselves - the cool side of our lives we want everyone to perceive as us. But then again, we also do that in face-to-face relationships, don't we?

Now Be Thankful

Some hippie-dippy British trad-rock Celtic goodness circa 1970 from Fairport Convention on this Thanksgiving Day, 2009 - written by Dave Swarbick and Richard Thompson - somehow seems fitting in the pre-turkey mists of morning.

When the stone is grown too cold to kneel
In crystal waters I'll be bound
Cold as stone, weary to the sounds upon the wheel

Now be thankful for good things below
Now be thankful to your maker
For the rose, the red rose blooms for all to know

Fired Up - Ready to Go on Climate Change?

That President Obama will travel, after all, to Copenhagen next month to take part in the United Nations climate change conference is huge news in my house - or at least, in my daughter's high school environmental activism club.

There are those who argue that the U.S., even with a Democratic President and Congress, is not ready to come in from the cold on climate change in a formal manner, that the Obama Administration has moved too slowly in joining international action. But the actions of the President speak loudly, particularly to young activists who very often drive this issue with more passion than their political professional elders.

So Obama's trip to Copenhagen, where he will speak at the beginning of the conference and then zip over to Oslo to collect his Nobel, is important to the environmental movement in the U.S. I know that I was hearing a bit of "why should we bother?" after a long day of telephone-banking to Congressional offices - but that was when the young activists believed the Administration would skip Copenhagen.

Welcome too is the small bit of policy the President will bring with him: "a tentative promise to reduce production of climate-altering gases," the first time the U.S. has ever entered in the arena of concrete emission numbers. According to John Broder in the Times, Obama "will tell the delegates to the climate conference that the United States intends to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions “in the range of” 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050, officials said. No American administration has ever delivered even a tentative pledge on emissions reductions because Congress has never enacted climate legislation or approved an international global warming agreement with binding emissions targets."

But the White House is doing something else as well: firing up the portion of the activist base that spends long afternoons calling Congress about climate change.

The New Good Guys - Murdoch and Microsoft

...Until we develop peer-to-peer currencies or come up with some other idea, we must pit the corporations who would exploit us against one another. By surrendering to just one publicly held company—no matter how little evil it says it wants to do—we doom ourselves to working for free.

via www.thedailybeast.com

Doug Rushkoff is right about this: Google is on its way to being the gatekeeper to the Internet - which should be the province of no single company. If Murdoch and Microsoft can shake things up by trying to route around Google, that's a good thing. I admire Google's products and use them every day - indeed my small consulting company essentially "runs on Google" - but I think some competition and some new models are crucial.

Rock-and-Roll Data: Those Audio Lists

I use a lot of music web services but I don't like to invest in this sector. Nonetheless, it's an area that I spend a lot of time thinking about. I've written endlessly on this blog about the music web services I use, why I use them, and where I think the music web is going.

The most interesting music web service to me has been audioscrobbler (aka last.fm). I'm not all that interested in last.fm as a social network, but I am obsessed with it's value as a data asset. I report all my music listens to last.fm via the audioscrobbler technology and it has built a deep data asset on my musical listening habits (and therefore musical taste).

via www.avc.com

I use audioscrobbler too, but not as deeply as Fred Wilson
, one of the best tech bloggers around. If you look on the lower right-hand side of my blog layout, you'll see a chart that's tied to the last.fm API - click on the blue arrows and you can scroll through the recent faves (the ones I've listened to via iTunes and on my iPod , anyway). Warning: acres of classic rock.

Ponte Vecchio Shutters

Ponte Vecchio shutters, originally uploaded by Tom Watson.

Another picture from my brief Florence sojourn - this probably the most-photographed structure in town: the Ponte Vecchio. This shot is a view of the back windows of the gold shops and tiny apartments above the Arno. It was early, so the light was terrific. The bridge dates to 1345 and was famously spared by the retreating German Army in 1944, when all the other Arno bridges were destroyed.

James K. Galbraith: Old Mistakes Die Hard

I'm tempted to say that the United States is plainly unable to cope with the economic crisis in a serious way. The barriers are philosophical, procedural, and constitutional. So long as economic thinking is mired in a world that disappeared with the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, so long as any action requires 60 Senate votes, and so long as political capital erodes from the start of a fixed four-year presidential term, we're stuck.

via www.huffingtonpost.com

It's been pretty clear for a while that the U.S. needs a major jobs program, that unemployment will linger (or worsen) for years, but 'business reporting' in this country isn't up to the standards of TMZ.com - and we seem to lack the political will. James Galbraith almost throws in the towel in this rant, and he jabs both the President and Congress for their Wall Street ways.