New America in California: Latest Articles

Dialogue Isn't the Last Word

Ron Tang — Mon, 05 May 2008 07:19:00 -0400

Barack Obama loves reconciliation, but it isn't all it's cracked up to be. Sometimes it isn't even possible, and let's be honest, it isn't always the point.

About six weeks ago, during his "More Perfect Union" speech on race that some heralded as the second coming of Abraham Lincoln, Obama had a choice between reconciliation and renunciation, and, true to form, he chose the former. He protested that he could "no more disown" the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. than he could disown "the black community" or his own (sometimes politically incorrect) white grandmother. Really?

Right about now, his much-heralded tutorial on… more

Schwarzenegger-Shriver: Protecting the Brand

Ron Tang — Sun, 04 May 2008 02:18:00 -0400

One afternoon early in his second year as governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger flew home from Sacramento to Los Angeles with a vexing political problem. He needed to cut $2 billion from the budget he was putting together, and any of his best options for doing it could get him into trouble.

If he raised taxes, he'd anger his fellow Republicans. Break a promise to increase education funding and he'd alienate the top Democratic interest group, the California Teachers Assn. Option 3: Cut health and human services, the next biggest category in the budget. He didn't like the idea, but some of his… more

Confessions Of a Sweatshop Inspector

Ron Tang — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 06:53:00 -0400

I remember one particularly bad factory in China. It produced outdoor tables, parasols, and gazebos, and the place was a mess. Work floors were so crowded with production materials that I could barely make my way from one end to the other. In one area, where metals were being chemically treated, workers squatted at the edge of steaming pools as if contemplating a sudden, final swim. The dormitories were filthy: the hallways were strewn with garbage -- orange peels, tea leaves -- and the only way for anyone to bathe was to fill a bucket with cold water. In a… more

Cracks In the Foundation

Ron Tang — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 07:47:00 -0400

While Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain appear anxious to move into the White House, none of them have much to say about housing. Yet rarely a day goes by that the headlines don't mention the current housing crisis and its threat to the financial markets and the economy. This has led to a strange disconnect between the presidential campaigns and national reality.

Subprime lending and the ensuing foreclosures are being blamed for the crisis, but the problems and blame go much deeper. The fact is, our nation does not have a housing plan, and has not had one for… more

Dusting Off a Managing Tome

Ron Tang — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 07:28:00 -0400

Of all of Peter Drucker's achievements -- advising captains of industry and heads of state, coining the term "knowledge worker," winning the Presidential Medal of Freedom -- the most remarkable may be this: In 1974, his 800-plus-page tome, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, vaulted past The Joy of Sex on the national best seller list.

Last week, HarperCollins released a revised edition of Management. And regardless of whether it winds up eclipsing Bonk, the latest hot-selling volume on the physiology and psychology of sex, I can tell you this: It deserves a spot on every manager's shelf, much as the Physicians' Desk… more

The Joe Lunch Bucket Strategy

Ron Tang — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 08:52:00 -0400

If Americans are such huge fans of big dreams and high rolling, self-made tycoons and upward mobility, why then do we insist on seeing our national political elites -- who are also generally our economic and educational elites -- throw back a shot of whiskey or lace up bowling shoes?

Why do we need to pretend that high-flying politicians who graduated from the fanciest schools and dine at the toniest restaurants really don't live in a different world and -- dare I say it -- class than the rest of us?

The easy answer is that we want to identify with them,… more

Throw Out the Tax Code

Ron Tang — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 07:25:00 -0400

Politicians don't like to talk about taxes except to brag about cutting them. But with California's widening budget deficit threatening deep cuts in education and other public services, it's difficult to avoid discussions about raising taxes.

Unfortunately, what's likely to be lost in the upcoming partisan melee over whether new taxes are needed to close the $16-billion gap is an equally important tax issue -- California's aging and often unfair tax system needs to be overhauled.

The goal of tax reform should be twofold. One is to generate a more reliable revenue stream. The other is to make the tax… more

Absolut Canard

Ron Tang — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 04:01:00 -0400

If I didn't already prefer Ketel One vodka in my martinis, I might very well call for my own boycott against Absolut.

Not because I agree with the knuckleheads who fear that the Swedish company's advertisement featuring a map of the American Southwest as Mexican territory is fueling ethnic secessionism, but because, in its attempt to lure upper-middle-class consumers in Mexico, the company played on an age-old canard that has historically been used to justify discrimination against Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans here in the United States.

Last week I was in Las Vegas, and I found myself having a depressing… more

Arnold vs. Arnold

Ron Tang — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 10:00:00 -0400

Education cuts and reform campaigns can be the drinking and driving of California politics. Each carries certain risks when pursued separately. Combined, they can be deadly.

This is a truth that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has found hard to accept. Three years ago, just as he launched his breakneck drive to win voter approval of budget and political reforms, he decided to withhold part of a mandated increase in education funding from his 2005-06 budget proposal. The delay in Proposition 98 funding soon consumed the public attention that Schwarzenegger wanted directed toward his reform proposals. His favorability rating dropped more than 20… more

Automatic Americans

Ron Tang — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 08:42:00 -0400

Ending birthright citizenship is a placebo, not a solution to illegal immigration.

The debate over immigration is fundamentally about who we are as a nation,who we are not, and who we want to be.

It is thus no surprise that those most afraid of who we are becoming have moved to redraw the rules of inclusion by proposing to do away with birthright citizenship. Such a move is not only legally dubious, it is a threat to American prosperity.

Opponents of birthright citizenship assert that we have it wrong when we interpret the 14th Amendment as granting citizenship to anyone born here. They… more

Waste Not

Ron Tang — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 07:24:00 -0400

Forty years ago, the steel mills and factories south of Chicago were known for their sooty smokestacks, plumes of steam, and throngs of workers. Clean-air laws have since gotten rid of the smoke, and labor-productivity initiatives have eliminated most of the workers. What remains is the steam, billowing up into the sky day after day, just as it did a generation ago.

The U.S. economy wastes 55 percent of the energy it consumes, and while American companies have ruthlessly wrung out other forms of inefficiency, that figure hasn’t changed much in recent decades. The amount lost by electric utilities alone could… more

A 670-Mile-Long Shrine To American Insecurity

Ron Tang — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 08:51:00 -0400

Last February, I found myself in the difficult position of explaining American insecurity to a group of Mexican undergraduates at a college in Matamoros, Mexico, just south of the border at Brownsville, Texas. I was taking questions after delivering a lecture on the long-term prospects of Mexican immigrants being accepted into U.S. society. A neatly dressed young man in the back stood up to ask a pointed question. "How," he said politely in Spanish, "could such a rich and powerful country be so self-centered as to build a wall on its border to keep people out?"

For a moment, I figured… more

The Perfect Candidate

Ron Tang — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 12:43:00 -0400

If Americans have such a low opinion of politicians -- and they do -- why then do they invest so many hopes and expectations in one of them every four years?

Are they stupid? Naive? Like continually heartbroken but eternally hopeful lovers, do they really think their next suitor will not disappoint them like all the rest?

Try writing a newspaper column for a few weeks and, if you dare check your e-mail, you'll get a whiff of how much people want to love, revere and believe in the perfection of the presidential candidate of their choice. Like loyal servants or younger… more

Drucker And the Complexities Of Race

Ron Tang — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 11:22:00 -0400

Long before so much of the nation became fixated on what was being preached inside black churches on Sunday mornings, Peter Drucker would go on occasion and listen for himself.

It was the late 1930s, and Drucker had just landed in New York, having fled the Nazis. Whenever he happened to spend the weekend in Washington, Drucker recalled years later, he would sneak into Rankin Chapel to be "shaken and moved" by Howard Thurman, the chaplain at Howard University. His was the kind of voice, said Drucker, that "reached the inner core of one's being."

Thurman's soul-stirring oratory, as well as relationships… more

Obama's Brilliant Bad Speech

Ron Tang — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 22:00:00 -0400

In some ways, Barack Obama's speech on race last week was as brilliant as it was nuanced. But for all its rhetorical beauty, it was also an enormous step backward and, in the end, a rather self-serving call for more discussion about racial grievance in a country that has already done way too much talking.

Until last week, so much of Obama's appeal lay in the fact that he was not asking us to talk about the racial divide. Instead, he offered himself as a living and breathing symbol of racial reconciliation; his very origins pointed to the goal of unity… more

Put Teachers To the Test

Ron Tang — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 20:00:00 -0400

In recent years, reformers have sought to improve our failing public education system by tightening and standardizing the measures we use to judge performance. From the numerical requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act to California's increased focus on assessment and accountability, there's been a conscious attempt to use hard data to measure success at every level of the education system.

But one group does not have its performance measured this way: teachers. Determining the effectiveness of individual teachers -- are they helping our kids learn or not? -- remains a mostly subjective judgment. Yet there's no reason why teachers… more

Don't Link School Spending To Oil Companies' Profits

Ron Tang — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 08:33:00 -0400

Last week, a bill was proposed by a majority of Assemly Democrats to impose extra taxes on oil companies to help prevent pink slips for teachers. A March 12 vote, mostly along party lines, failed to garner the required two-thirds majority for passage of a tax increase.

But Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez has said he does not plan to give up on the idea.

Despite the importance of not laying off teachers, failure to pass was a good result. The bill, ABX3 9, is not the solution for keeping teachers employed or solving California's budget problems.

Budget problems cannot be solved with taxes… more

Core Arguments

Ron Tang — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 05:24:00 -0400

A generation after Three Mile Island's near-disaster in 1979, nuclear power remains politically radioactive. Though energy consumption has increased dramatically -- Americans upped their per capita household electrical use by a third between 1980 and 2001 -- no new nuclear plants have been built since 1996. We've let the Mighty Atom sit in the penalty box rather than settle whether we're Pro-Nuke or No-Nuke once and for all.

In her provocative yet flawed and often frustrating book, "Power to Save the World," Gwyneth Cravens does us all the service of taking a fresh look at nuclear power and asking whether the… more

White Suspicion, Black 'Luck'

Ron Tang — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 20:00:00 -0400

For decades, critics of affirmative action on both sides of the aisle have argued that the policy calls into question the talents and qualifications of the minorities who benefit from it. They insisted that it generates a cloud of suspicion around the successful black or Latino student or professional. It makes whites wonder whether their minority colleagues really "earned" their positions.

It turns out those critics are right about the suspicion part. And evidently you don't even have to be an actual beneficiary of affirmative action to be accused of having an unfair advantage. Geraldine Ferraro's remark that "if [Barack] Obama… more

Buffett's Plan For Successful Succession

Ron Tang — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 23:00:00 -0400

A couple of weeks ago, Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett officially put the kibosh on what many an investor must have regarded as the ultimate succession plan: "I've reluctantly discarded the notion of continuing to manage the portfolio after my death -- abandoning my hope to give new meaning to the term 'thinking outside the box,'" Buffett, 77, wrote in his annual letter to shareholders.

Despite his tongue-in-cheek approach, Buffett touched on one of the most important issues an enterprise faces: figuring out who's the right person to one day take the reins.

A company's very "survival," Peter Drucker wrote in his… more