Another basket case of social engineering

The Shame of the Cities and the Shade of LBJ

by WALTER RUSSELL MEAD

President Lyndon Johnson and the “best and the brightest” who staffed his administration led this country into three quagmires.  By far the most famous, but perhaps not the most expensive and dangerous resulted from LBJ’s escalation of the Vietnam War.  More than 50,000 Americans and many more Vietnamese died as a result of that policy; our country was bitterly divided in ways that still weaken us today, and the economic cost of the war was immense.  It contributed to the wave of inflation that shook the country in the 1970s and in addition to the interest on the debt from this ill-starred venture we are still paying (as we certainly should) pensions and medical costs for the vets and their spouses.

The Second Great Johnson Quagmire now destroying the nation is the Medicare/Medicaid complex.  These entitlement programs are the biggest single financial problem we face.  They dwarf all the Bush-Obama wars; they make TARP look like small change.  They not only cost money we don’t have — and are scheduled to cost inexorably more until they literally ruin the nation — they have distorted our entire health system into the world’s most bloated and expensive monstrosity.  Thanks to these programs, we have a health system that marries the greed of the private sector to the ineptitude of government, and unless we can somehow tame these beasts America and everything it stands for could be lost. (Note, please, that by comparison Social Security can be relatively easily reformed to be solvent for the next 75 years.  The New Deal, whatever its shortcomings, was almost infinitely more realistic and sustainable than the Great Society.)

LBJ Signing the Medicare Bill 

But that is a subject for another day.  The third Johnson Quagmire is the War on Poverty, and specifically the attempt to treat inner city poverty primarily as a racial problem.  After the Medicare/Medicaid catastrophe the single greatest policy failure of modern America is urban policy.  Since the Great Society era of Lyndon Johnson, the country has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into poor urban neighborhoods.  The violence and crime generated in these neighborhoods costs hundreds of billions more.  And after all this time, all this money and all this energy, the inner city populations are worse off than before.  There is more drug addiction and more social and family breakdown among this population than when the Great Society was launched.  Incarceration rates have risen to levels that shock the world (though they make for safer streets); the inner city abortion rate has reached levels that must surely appall even the most resolute pro-choicers not on the Planned Parenthood payroll.  Forty percent of all pregnancies in New York end in abortion, with higher rates among Blacks; nationally, the rate among Blacks is three times the rate among white women.  Put it all together and you have a holocaust of youth and hope on a scale hard to match.

Crime as an employment opportunity

An Unhappy Ending To The Drug War?

by WALTER RUSSELL MEAD

American drug policy may be on the verge of big changes, but the results won’t be the Stoner Utopia drug activists dream of — and the changes may not do very much for the inner city.

I’ve been posting about the inner cities lately and there is one subject that can’t be avoided in dealing with urban problems: the catastrophic human cost both of drugs and of our faltering War on Drugs.  The widespread use of drugs in our inner cities and elsewhere in our society is both a cause and a symptom of social decay.  Drug addicts and heavy, habitual users do not make good students, good workers, good citizens, good neighbors or good parents.  This has nothing to do with illegality: cocaine could be as legal as parsley and it would still ruin lives.

The Drug War, with an impact stretching far beyond the inner cities, is one of America’s worst policies.  It costs billions we don’t have; it promotes the growth of transnational criminal gangs and supports large black markets in money and arms that terrorists as well as drug lords can use; if fills the prisons and it hasn’t stopped either the use of existing illegal drugs or the development of new ones.  Furthermore, as a Cato Institute paper estimates that legalizing and taxing drugs would yield more than $80 billion a year in savings and new revenue.  (Something tells me that even the hardiest Tea Partiers might see their way to a hefty excise tax on heroin and cocaine.) 

What we are doing now isn’t working.  My old CFR colleague and Coast Guard official Steve Flynn used to say that if terrorists wanted to smuggle a nuclear warhead into the United States their best bet would be to hide it in a shipment of cocaine.  Since our interdiction rate is so low, the bomb would have an excellent chance of getting through.

The drug war inevitably leads to corruption in the forces recruited to fight it.  It erodes civil liberties.  It diverts law enforcement resources from other tasks.  In a society which believes that lap dancers in strip bars are exercising their constitutionally protected right of free expression and that virtually any government interference in the termination of unborn life is an obscene and inexcusable violation of the right to privacy, it is hard to find good reasons why government should have the right to tell us what chemicals to put in our bloodstreams.

My personal brush with the war on drugs came when I was 18 years old and foolishly hitch-hiked on the New York State Thruway with a pipe that had marijuana residue on it.  Since I couldn’t get bailed out over the weekend, I spent a very instructive couple of nights in jail and once suitable amounts of money had been handed round I was able to plead guilty to a charge of disorderly conduct and go about my business.  Of course no inhalation ever took place in my preternaturally sober and sensible youth and I have no idea how that pipe got into my backpack, but nothing about that experience made me a fan of the drug war.

Distaste for the drug war didn’t make me a fan of drugs.  In my own case I soon realized that I had to make the choice between indulging in drugs or wrecking my life and wasting any talent I might have; ultimately I came to understand that alcohol was as bad for me as any other drug.  Some of my friends made different choices; a couple went to prison for long stretches; others had their lives wrecked because they took too many drugs or the wrong drugs.

Low intensity warfare

Chicago's long, hot summer of gun violence

by Rick Moran

Every day I click on the Chicago Tribune website and every day it seems I read a headline like this:

At least 11 wounded across city on steamy night

A headline from the day before indicated that 2 were dead and at least 11 wounded on Saturday night.
The city that has some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation - and vigorously enforced - is a shooting gallery. Here are some of the latest victims:

• A 13-year-old boy told police that he was standing on the street in the 7200 block of South Campbell Avenue at about 12:25 a.m., when he heard gunshots and realized he'd been shot in the leg, police said.
The boy was taken Holy Cross, where he was being treated. Police couldn't offer a motive for the shooting, but Chicago Lawn District officers said the boy denied being in a street gang.
• Just before 12:30 a.m. Monday, a man and woman were sitting in the vehicle in the 7200 block of South Dobson Avenue in the Grand Crossing neighborhood when police said a gunman inside a dark-colored vehicle pulled up alongside them and opened fire.
The man, 54, was struck in the eye, while the woman, 56, was struck in the head, said police, citing early reports. Despite the wounds, both victims were talking at the scene and were taken to Stroger Hospital in critical condition, police said.
• At about 1:50 a.m. Monday, a 31-year-old man was with a group of friends getting into a car in the 5500 block of South Pulaski Road when his group began arguing with a man in another vehicle, police said.
The man got out, pulled a handgun and opened fire, striking the victim in the upper back and delivering a graze wound to his head, police said.
The victim's friends drove him to Holy Cross Hospital before he was transferred to Christ, where his condition was described as "guarded," police said.
No arrests were made in any of the shootings.

No arrests - and no answers - for why Chicago has as many casualties on some nights as a city in a war zone. 

The Attorney General as Hitman

The Stimulation Of Murder

The ATF's gun-running disaster was funded in the stimulus bill. Think about all the criminal and drug cartel jobs saved or created. And our attorney general once bragged to a Mexican audience about implementing it.

This could be, no pun intended, the proverbial smoking gun in a growing administration scandal that deserves as much mainstream media attention as Iran-Contra or Watergate.

Right there in the stimulus bill that no one in Congress bothered to read is $10 million for Project Gunrunner (aka Operation Fast and Furious), which resulted in the death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and increased drug cartel violence.

Right there in the "shovel ready" stimulus, no black humor intended, is a provision for $40 million for "state and local law enforcement assistance" along our border with Mexico and in high drug-trafficking areas, "of which $10 million shall be transferred to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, salaries and expenses for the ATF Project Gunrunner."

Attorney General Eric Holder's "I know nothing" imitation of TV's Sgt. Schultz has evaporated with the discovery of an April 2, 2009, speech to authorities in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in which he took Gunrunner credit for himself and the rest of the Obama administration.

Holder told the audience: "Last week, our administration launched a major new effort to break the backs of the cartels. My department is committing 100 new ATF personnel to the Southwest border in the next 100 days to supplement our ongoing Project Gunrunner. DEA is adding 16 new positions on the border, as well as mobile enforcement teams, and the FBI is creating a new intelligence group focusing on kidnapping and extortion."

So which administration official put the Gunrunner money in the stimulus? Which congressman insisted on this deadliest of earmarks?

The original Southwest Border Violence Reduction Act of 2009 was sponsored by Rep. Ciro Rodriguez, D-Texas. Rodriguez's co-sponsors were two other Texans, Henry Cuellar and Silvestre Reyes, plus Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., and Harry Teague, D-N.M.

The Disparate Impact theory in action

Holder Launches Witch Hunt Against Biased Banks

By PAUL SPERRY, INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

In what could be a repeat of the easy-lending cycle that led to the housing crisis, the Justice Department has asked several banks to relax their mortgage underwriting standards and approve loans for minorities with poor credit as part of a new crackdown on alleged discrimination, according to court documents reviewed by IBD.

Prosecutions have already generated more than $20 million in loan set-asides and other subsidies from banks that have settled out of court rather than battle the federal government and risk being branded racist. An additional 60 banks are under investigation, a DOJ spokeswoman says.

No Job, No Problem

Settlements include setting aside prime-rate mortgages for low-income blacks and Hispanics with blemished credit and even counting "public assistance" as valid income in mortgage applications.

In several cases, the government has ordered bank defendants to post in all their branches and marketing materials a notice informing minority customers that they cannot be turned down for credit because they receive public aid, such as unemployment benefits, welfare payments or food stamps.

Among other remedies: favorable interest rates and down-payment assistance for minority borrowers with weak credit.

For example, the government has ordered Midwest BankCentre to set aside almost $1 million in "special financing" for residents living in predominantly black areas of St. Louis. The program includes originating conventional home loans at fixed prime rates for African-American borrowers "who would ordinarily not qualify for such rates for reasons including the lack of required credit quality, income or down payment."

The same federal order, signed last month, praises Midwest for adopting "less stringent underwriting criteria" while under investigation.

In the case against Citizens Bank of Detroit, settled in May, the U.S. decrees that "the bank may choose to apply more flexible underwriting standards in connection with the programs under this order."

Such efforts risk recreating the government-imposed lax underwriting that led to the housing boom and bust, critics fear.

"It's absolutely outrageous after what we've just gone through," said former Rep. Ernest Istook, a Heritage Foundation fellow. "How can someone both be financially stable enough to merit a mortgage at the same time they're on public assistance? By definition, you don't have the kind of employment that can support such a loan."

Justice March

Justice spokeswoman Xochitl Hinojosa said the anti-discrimination notice "does not compel the banks to make loans to people who do not qualify." She said such measures are "essential to remedy the harmful effects of the banks' conduct."

But industry analysts fear Attorney General Eric Holder is rekindling an anti-bank witch hunt launched by Attorney General Janet Reno in the 1990s, when Holder served as her deputy.

Some blame that in part for the subprime boom, because banks were ordered to throw open their lending windows to credit-poor minorities. That crackdown spurred the American Bankers Association to distribute to its thousands of members "fair-lend ing tool kits" advising the adoption of more permissive underwriting criteria to help inoculate them from prosecution.

In the new prosecutions, Justice acknowledges in every case it did not prove charges of intentional discrimination, while banks have denied any wrongdoing. Many, in fact, earned outstanding ratings from anti-redlining regulators enforcing the Community Reinvestment Act.

Istook calls Holder's crusade an "egregious overreach by the government." He says many of the targets are smaller banks without the resources to fight a protracted legal battle.

The House Judiciary Committee plans to investigate.

"This is an expansion of the law," said a congressional investigator. "They're pushing the envelope as far as they can go in the enforcement of civil rights."

UN Demands $76 Trillion for “Green Technology”  

by James Heiser    

With the Western nations continuing their downward economic spiral, the advocates of the United Nations’ redistributionist schemes also continue to exploit the environmental agenda in their effort to fundamentally alter the global economy to serve their own ends.

Despite the failure of the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in December 2009 to achieve its goal of a treaty binding the industrialized world to an economic suicide pact, the "voluntary" agreements are still a threat to the West. The UN is engaged in an effort to use the imagined environmental crisis as the justification for a program of sweeping economic redistribution that would shift trillions of dollars from the industrialized nations to the Third World. The UN is now demanding an “investment” of $1.9 trillion per year in “green technology” to meet the goals that the internationalists have set for the nations of the world. An AFP story entitled “World needs $1.9tn a year for green technology:UN” sets forth the lament of an elite for whom “real money” is measured in tens of trillions of dollars:

"Over the next 40 years, $1.9 trillion (1.31 trillion euros) per year will be needed for incremental investments in green technologies," the UN Economic and Social Affairs body said in its annual survey.

"At least one-half, or $1.1 trillion per year, of the required investments will need to be made in developing countries to meet their rapidly increasing food and energy demands through the application of green technologies," it added. At the moment, "external financing currently available for green technology investments in developing countries is far from sufficient to meet the challenge," it assessed.

Over the last two years, climate change funds managed by World Bank disbursed about $20 billion, a fraction of the sum necessary for developing countries to build up clean energy technologies, sustainable farming techniques and technologies that help cut non-biodegradable waste production. Even though states agreed during a 2009 Copenhagen summit to spend $30 billion over 2010 to 2012 and $100 billion a year by 2020 in transfers to developing countries, these sums have not been realised.

In other words, the costly “feel good” language adopted at Copenhagen — though far from the crushing obligations a treaty would have imposed — still means the World Bank and the United Nations will be playing the role of an international collection agency, metaphorically beating on the doors of various heads of state until they “cough up” the demanded funds.

Generations of Pork

How Greece's Political Elite Ruined the Country

The latest tranche of loans from the EU and the IMF has helped buy debt-ridden Greece some time. But the Greeks will find it hard to get back on their feet. Their country has been ruined by three political dynasties, which created a bloated system of cronyism that is hard to change.  

By Spiegel Staff

The queue of hungry people snaked across the courtyard and into the street at the homeless shelter behind Omonoia Square in Athens last Thursday, just as it does every day at lunchtime. The retired, the unemployed, mothers with children, immigrants; they were all waiting patiently for church members to press something to eat into their hands.
Georgios Levedogiannis, 38, managed to get his hands on some peas with root vegetables and potatoes, along with three hunks of bread and a few cups of yoghurt. Levedogiannis has been coming here regularly for nine months. "I have to, in order to survive," he says.
Levedogiannis worked in security at Athens Airport for seven years. He wasn't rich, but he got by -- until his bosses fired him in 2009. At the moment, his poverty is not yet visible. Levedogiannis wears a clean shirt, smart blue slacks and a new-looking bag slung around his waist. He clearly makes an effort. But there are tears in the man's eyes as he says: "If I had work, I wouldn't do this to myself." He says he has "zero" money and that he sleeps at the Red Cross, eats at the church and dreams of a different time, a time where there was still work. "If you don't have connections, no one will take you," he explains. "And it's only getting worse."
Number of Needy Increasing Rapidly
Nearly all of Greece's 400 church districts have started distributing food to the poor, including at Omonoia Square. "The number of needy is increasing rapidly," says one helper there, "and we don't know whether the end is even in sight."
In fact, it probably isn't. Last Wednesday, the governing Socialists passed a massive austerity package in parliament by a slim majority, despite intense protests. The decision paves the way for the next round of emergency loans from the EU and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Without this €12 billion ($17 billion), Athens would default on its debt within two weeks.
George Provopoulos, governor of the Bank of Greece, believes torpedoing the austerity package, as the country's conservative opposition tried, would have been "suicide." Still, Provopoulos also believes Greece has "reached the limit" and that it would be impossible to squeeze any more out of the people.
In remarks to the conservative newspaper Kathimerini, he spoke about what he saw as the root cause of the crisis. "There is little doubt that the failings of (the existing social and political) system hindered the implementation of policies that would have averted the existing ills," he said. "We are paying the price of past mistakes."
The emergency financing will help Greece through the next months and it will buy the rest of the EU some time -- time in which the euro crisis may ease somewhat. But it's unlikely that it can save Greece. The last few decades have seen an elite, with the Papandreou, Karamanlis and Mitsotakis families at its core, establish a system of economic patronage. They threw around billions the government didn't actually have and showered friends and relatives with prosperity that was all based on credit. These leaders bloated their country's administration so that everyone could have a piece, and created a bureaucratic monster in the process.
The political parties' business dealings were always more about favors than policies. Anyone with access to public funds used them to buy friends and voters, who were then beholden to the party -- and to the family running it. The result for Greece has been a feudal democracy, where the generations come and go, but the names remain the same: Papandreou and Karamanlis and Karamanlis and Papandreou, with a Mitsotakis thrown in every now and then. No other European democracy has seen the like.

Child abuse still going on in Greece

Τι θα έκανα με το άγος του ΟΣΕ

Απο Κώστα Λυμπουρίδη http://e-drasis.blogspot.com/2011/05/blog-post_31.html

Ο Οργανισμός Σιδηροδρόμων Ελλάδας είναι μια ιστορία αθλιότητας, την οποία ανέχονται αδιαμαρτύρητα οι Έλληνες φορολογούμενοι για πολλά χρόνια. Θα παραθέσω ορισμένα στοιχεία που συνθέτουν το μέγεθος της καταστροφής.

Τα βασικά οικονομικά στοιχεία του Οργανισμού τα τελευταία χρόνια έχουν ως εξής:

(χιλιάδες ευρώ)	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009
Πωλήσεις (έσοδα)	94.898	104.780	105.439	195.618	174.006
Κόστος προσωπικού		374.543	386.119	292.001	290.575
Αποτέλεσμα (ζημιές)	-829.550	-845.111	-939.910	-794.570	-936.812
Επιδότηση Ελλ. Δημοσίου	287.312	334.867	506.105	462.858	548.314
Νέος δανεισμός	1.427.600	968.700	110.477	330.500	482.891
Σύνολο δανείων	6.438.064	7.325.743	8.408.948	9.756.461	10.712.778

Αυτό σημαίνει ότι:

• για κάθε εισιτήριο των 17 ευρώ που αγοράζουμε, ο ΟΣΕ καταβάλλει μισθό 29 ευρώ, μπαίνει συνολικά μέσα 93, επιδοτείται από το Δημόσιο με 54 και δανείζεται άλλα 48!
• κάθε Έλληνας χρωστάει 1.000 χρέος, απλά για να υπάρχει ο ΟΣΕ!
• το κόστος προσωπικού (ακόμα και το μειωμένο του 2009) αντιστοιχεί σε 4.182 εργαζόμενους (κυρίως βασικής εκπαίδευσης), δηλαδή μέσο κόστος 70.000 ευρώ ανά εργαζόμενο!

Το άγος συμπληρώνεται από τα παρακάτω στοιχεία:

• ο ΟΣΕ καλύπτει μόλις το 2,5% των εμπορευματικών μεταφορών στην Ελλάδα (το 97,5% διενεργείται οδικώς, δηλαδή με νταλίκες). Αλλά και σε αυτό ακόμα το ποσοστό, πρέπει να υπολογίσουμε και το «παραμάγαζο» που πρόσφατα αποκαλύφθηκε ότι είχαν στήσει εργαζόμενοι και εκμεταλλεύονταν το δίκτυο του ΟΣΕ εισπράττοντας οι ίδιοι.
• το 30% των 2.500 χλμ δικτύου του είναι στο παλαιό, μη ευρωπαϊκό, πλάτος και στην ουσία είναι άχρηστο.
• το δίκτυο του ΟΣΕ καλύπτει περίπου 20 από τους 51 νομούς της Ελλάδας, ενώ όλοι οι νομοί διαθέτουν ΚΤΕΛ, τα οποία τον ανταγωνίζονται στη μεταφορά επιβατών
• 2.700 υπάλληλοι πρόκειται να μεταταγούν στο Δημόσιο, προκειμένου να πάψει ο ΟΣΕ να είναι ζημιογόνος. Αυτό σημαίνει ότι αφενός έτσι κι αλλιώς θα μπορούσε να δουλεύει με 1.500 εργαζόμενους, αφετέρου ότι το κόστος μισθοδοσίας απλά «θα κρυφτεί» στο αχανές Δημόσιο.

Δυστυχώς, η μόνη λύση για τον ΟΣΕ είναι το άμεσο κλείσιμο. Μια ανώνυμη εταιρία με ζημιές 4 με 9 φορές το τζίρο της θα είχε κλείσει προ πολλού, καθώς κανείς μέτοχος δεν θα έβαζε πλέον λεφτά. Πρέπει επιτέλους και ο μέτοχος του ΟΣΕ, το Ελληνικό Δημόσιο, να αντιληφθεί ότι εκπροσωπεί όλους εμάς τους φορολογούμενους που δεν δεχόμαστε πλέον να χρηματοδοτούμε 4.200 υπαλλήλους Δημοτικού με 70.000 ευρώ το χρόνο.

Τι θα έκανα τον ΟΣΕ; Θα τον έκλεινα σε μια μέρα και θα έδινα στους υπαλλήλους του το προβλεπόμενο επίδομα ανεργίας, που έτσι κι αλλιώς θα έπαιρνε κάθε μη προνομιούχος εργαζόμενος του ιδιωτικού τομέα. Στο κράτος θα έμενε ένα χρέος περίπου 11 δις ευρώ, αλλά και η υποδομή. Με έναν πλειοδοτικό διαγωνισμό θα καλούσα οποιαδήποτε σιδηροδρομική εταιρία της Ευρώπης στήσει μια νέα εταιρία εκ του μηδενός, προσλαμβάνοντας και πολλούς απολυμένους του ΟΣΕ, με μισθούς αγοράς. Στη νέα σιδηροδρομική εταιρία θα παρείχα πλήρως ελεύθερα τιμολόγια, και μάλιστα στους νομούς όπου υπάρχει σιδηροδρομικό δίκτυο θα απελευθέρωνα και τα τιμολόγια των τοπικών ΚΤΕΛ. Ο ανταγωνισμός των δύο φορέων θα οδηγούσε σε μικρότερες τιμές και καλύτερες υπηρεσίες.

Δυστυχώς αυτά θα έκανε κάποιος που επιχειρούσε να βάλει μια τάξη στη μαύρη τρύπα του Δημοσίου, και όχι μια Κυβέρνηση, βασική προτεραιότητα της οποίας είναι να διαφυλάξει τα παιδιά που προσέλαβε, να κρύψει από τους φορολογουμένους τους τεράστιους μισθούς που παίρνουν για μηδενικό έργο και να μας αναγκάσει να συνεχίσουμε να πληρώνουμε κοντά στο 1 δις το χρόνο λόγω της «κοινωνικής σημασίας του σιδηρόδρομου».

British journalism is having its cojones removed

After the News of the World, who’s safe?

The unprecedented harrying to extinction of a tabloid newspaper is likely to have a chilling effect across the British media.

By Brendan O’Neill

 Around the world, miles of column inches and hours of television and radio debate have been devoted to the closure of the News of the World. And yet the gravity of what occurred yesterday, the unprecedented, head-turningly historic nature of it, has not been grasped anywhere. A newspaper of some 168 years’ standing, a public institution patronised by millions of people, has been wiped from history – not as a result of some jackbooted military intrusion or intolerant executive decree or coup d’état, but under pressure from so-called liberal campaigners who ultimately felt disgust for the newspaper’s ‘culture’. History should record yesterday as a dark day for press freedom.

 In a civilised society we tend to associate the loss of a newspaper, the pressured shutting down of a media outlet, with some major corrosion of public or democratic values. We look upon the extinction of a paper for non-commercial reasons, whatever the paper’s reputation or sins, as a sad thing, normally the consequence of a tyrannical force stamping its boot and its authority over the upstarts of the media. Yet yesterday’s loss of a newspaper has given rise, at best, to speculative analysis of what is going on inside News International, or at worst to expressions of schadenfreude and glee that the four million dimwits who liked reading phone-hacked stories about Wayne Rooney on a Sunday morning will no longer be at liberty to do so. Many of those politically sensitive commentators who shake their heads in solemn fury upon hearing that a newspaper in a place like Belarus has closed down have barely been able to contain their excitement about the self-immolation of a tabloid here at home.

 Many people, including us at spiked, had reservations about the News of the World’s mode of behaviour, especially following this week’s revelations of deplorable phone-hacking activity involving murdered teenager Milly Dowler and the families of dead British soldiers. The paper undoubtedly infuriated many people, too. Yet this was a longstanding public institution. Just because a newspaper is the private property of an individual – even if that individual is Rupert Murdoch – does not detract from the fact that it is also a public institution, with an historic reputation and an ongoing political and social engagement with a regular, in this case numerically formidable readership. That such a public institution can be dispensed with so swiftly, that a huge swathe of the British people can overnight be deprived of an institution they had a close relationship with, ought to be causing way more discomfort and concern than it is. How would we feel if other public institutions – the BBC, perhaps, or parliament – were likewise to disappear?

War orphans

The Divorce Generation

Having survived their own family splits, Generation X parents are determined to keep their marriages together. It doesn't always work.

 

By SUSAN GREGORY THOMAS

Every generation has its life-defining moments. If you want to find out what it was for a member of the Greatest Generation, you ask: "Where were you on D-Day?" For baby boomers, the questions are: "Where were you when Kennedy was shot?" or "What were you doing when Nixon resigned?"

Every generation has its defining moment. For Generation X, it could be: "When did your parents get divorced?" Susan Gregory Thomas, author of the memoir "In Spite of Everything," explains what she sees as its long-term effects on marriage and parenting.

For much of my generation—Generation X, born between 1965 and 1980—there is only one question: "When did your parents get divorced?" Our lives have been framed by the answer. Ask us. We remember everything.

When my dad left in the spring of 1981 and moved five states away with his executive assistant and her four kids, the world as I had known it came to an end. In my 12-year-old eyes, my mother, formerly a regal, erudite figure, was transformed into a phantom in a sweaty nightgown and matted hair, howling on the floor of our gray-carpeted playroom. My brother, a sweet, goofy boy, grew into a sad, glowering giant, barricaded in his room with dark graphic novels and computer games.

I spent the rest of middle and high school getting into trouble in suburban Philadelphia: chain-smoking, doing drugs, getting kicked out of schools, spending a good part of my senior year in a psychiatric ward. Whenever I saw my father, which was rarely, he grew more and more to embody Darth Vader: a brutal machine encasing raw human guts.

Growing up, my brother and I were often left to our own devices, members of the giant flock of migrant latchkey kids in the 1970s and '80s. Our suburb was littered with sad-eyed, bruised nomads, who wandered back and forth between used-record shops to the sheds behind the train station where they got high and then trudged off, back and forth from their mothers' houses during the week to their fathers' apartments every other weekend.

The divorced parents of a boy I knew in high school installed him in his own apartment because neither of them wanted him at home. Naturally, we all descended on his place after school—sometimes during school—to drink and do drugs. He was always wasted, no matter what time we arrived. A few years ago, a friend told me that she had learned that he had drunk himself to death by age 30.

"Whatever happens, we're never going to get divorced." Over the course of 16 years, I said that often to my husband, especially after our children were born. Apparently, much of my generation feels at least roughly the same way: Divorce rates, which peaked around 1980, are now at their lowest level since 1970. In fact, the often-cited statistic that half of all marriages end in divorce was true only in the 1970s—in other words, our parents' marriages.

Not ours. According to U.S. Census data released this May, 77% of couples who married since 1990 have reached their 10-year anniversaries. We're also marrying later in life, if at all. The average marrying age in 1950 was 23 for men and 20 for women; in 2009, it was 28 for men and 26 for women.

Before we get married, we like to know what our daily relationship with a partner will be like. Are we good roommates? A 2007 study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research showed that, among those entering first marriages in the early 2000s, nearly 60% had previously cohabited with their future spouses. According to the U.S. government's 2002 National Survey of Fertility Growth, 34% of couples who move in together have announced publicly that marriage is in the future; 36% felt "almost certain" that they'd get hitched, while 46% said there was "a pretty good chance" or "a 50-50 chance."

I believed that I had married my best friend as fervently as I believed that I'd never get divorced. No marital scenario, I told myself, could become so bleak or hopeless as to compel me to embed my children in the torture of a split family. And I wasn't the only one with strong personal reasons to make this commitment. According to a 2004 marketing study about generational differences, my age cohort "went through its all-important, formative years as one of the least parented, least nurtured generations in U.S. history." Census data show that almost half of us come from split families; 40% were latch-key kids.

People my parents' age say things like: "Of course you'd feel devastated by divorce, honey—it was a horrible, disorienting time for you as a child! Of course you wouldn't want it for yourself and your family, but sometimes it's better for everyone that parents part ways; everyone is happier."

Such sentiments bring to mind a set of statistics in "Generations" by William Strauss and Neil Howe that has stuck with me: In 1962, half of all adult women believed that parents in bad marriages should stay together for the children's sake; by 1980, only one in five felt that way. "Four-fifths of [those] divorced adults profess to being happier afterward," the authors write, "but a majority of their children feel otherwise."