robertreich:

“Why Public Education is More Important Than Wall Street, and What We Must Do”

All over America right now, public education is in crisis.  Teachers are being fired as next year’s school budgets shrink. Next fall’s classrooms will be far more crowded. Some districts are going to four-day weeks.  And the nation’s public universities are in deep trouble.

The answer is for the federal government to bail out public education until state and local revenues return as the economy strengthens.

After all, the government bailed out Wall Street.  What our kids learn — America’s human capital — is more important to our economy than Wall Street’s financial capital.

In addition, we should rebalance the economy away from finance and toward people. Congress should enact a small one-half of one percent transfer tax on all financial deals. This might slow down Wall Street a bit but generate $200 billion a year for our public schools and universities.

Last year, America’s top 25 hedge fund managers earned an average of $1 billion each — enough to pay for 20,000 teachers.

Please watch this video, and pass it on.

Robert Reich’s final lecture in Public Policy 103 Wednesday afternoon really spoke to me personally.  Amidst a bunch of stories about his youth and how he got involved in the “business of helping others”, he talked about leadership, its essence, and what it takes to lead. 

There was in particular one piece of wisdom that I wanted to chronicle and have as reference about work avoidance mechanisms.  How very pertinent during this essential time of finals studying.

This is the general gist of what he said:

To lead, one must overcome four work avoidance mechanisms: Denial, Escapism, Scapegoating, and the biggest one - Cynicism.

1. Denial: Leaders mobilize and energize change to make sure that people can understand and overcome reality.  Leaders must overcome the act of denying certain pieces of reality for their personal piece of mind.

2. Escapism: is escaping from issues because they don’t affect you.

3. Scapegoating: blaming problems on others.  Saying the economy today is doing badly because of foreign investment, etc., Scapegoating takes away the moral imperative, and leaders will not allow it.

4. Cynicism: is the biggest work avoidance mechanism.  The idea that nothing we can do will change the state of things is cynical, and true leaders will think and look for small victories in order to gradually convince people that things are, in fact, possible. 

Finally, he said that the essence of leadership is to work to close the gap between ideals and reality.   mobilizing, organizing, and energizing others. Leadership is not synonymous to formal authority.

Thank you, Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, for giving me something to think about while hopelessly trying to teach myself a semesters’ worth of information about the macroeconomy  =(