Ontario Teacher spills his secrets...tragicomically...are there humans amid those wires?

By Kevin Bray, Globe and Mail, January 26, 2012
I work with zombies, or ICU patients, or pod-bodies plugged into the Matrix. Whatever they are, they are rarely “in the moment” and engaged with other pod-bodies. Well, they do sometimes interact with one another, usually by taking photos (every moment is infused with significance, apparently), or sharing the umbilical cord that sustains their rich interior life. When they do communicate it’s often done through texting or Facebook. I’ve watched the pod-bodies do this even when just one metre separates them; it’s as if they have willingly given away their tongues for more dexterous thumbs.

You can see them on the street, in packs or alone, shuffling along, oblivious to traffic or weather or birdsong. They are plugged into a smartphone or iPod, and carry them like patients shuffling down the hospital hallway tethered to an IV drip. They never go anywhere without the constant drip of music; every moment is accompanied by a soundtrack. I wonder how many of them suffer falls on the icy sidewalks only holding out their thumbs, locked mid-text message, to block the hard concrete while they hear I’m Sexy and I Know It played at 110 decibels.

I am speaking of teenagers, of course. For 20 years I have walked among them as a teacher and witnessed the slow accretion of technology into their lives and mine. How different they have become in just two decades. Everyone is disengaged or hiding. In math class they beg to listen to music while working and I acquiesce. It’s easier to ask them to lower the volume and plug the leaking sounds of Bruno Mars than to argue and suffer their mood for an hour. Once plugged in, they work on simple interest questions while listening to music that I guess charges their souls or assaults their equilibrium. All this music must be doing something to them. Studies are finding that teens who listen to a lot of music suffer depression, but maybe the emotion came before the tune rather than the opposite. If Pitbull sings “for all we know we might not get tomorrow” and the Mayans predict that before the year is out we are doomed, then it’s tough to convince a 16-year-old about the power of compound interest over their lifetime.
I grew up in a small logging town in northern British Columbia in the 1970s and we did not have iPods, iPhones, Facebook, Twitter or rap. We had one television station – the CBC – and one radio station. I listened to music on LPs and suitcase-sized speakers. We daydreamed in math class or fell asleep during movies in English; most of us talked too much when we were supposed to be working and the only games we played were either on a board or at the arcade (at least pinball involved some physical activity). We were engaged even when it seemed that we weren’t. We had nowhere to hide from teachers or friends except in our heads. I know this sounds a bit like the Monty Python skit “oh, you think you had it tough!”.
Do students imagine? Do they hear the “other” inside their head, the one who comments on moral ambiguity and increases the volume on empathy? I asked this once and the reply was “Sir, we’re not robots, you know.” One day I demanded that all phones be turned off, all music be silenced and everyone do it “old school” for one period. I was amazed how quickly I was transported to 1989, my first year of teaching. We worked and talked, not always on topic, and for those 75 minutes we emerged from zombieland and heard human voices. Maybe the students sang inside their heads and thought about the text messages they would like to compose, but at least they were with me.
I know that waves of technology will forever crash onto our emotional and intellectual beach, and teachers are cajoled into adopting technology and meeting students in their “world.” Smart boards, websites, clickers, PowerPoint, podcasts, simulations and e-mail are just a veneer over the most important part of teaching: the human connection in real time and space. If Socrates were alive today I doubt he would be impressed with our hyper-connectivity. None of this makes us critical thinkers. We are entertained rather than engaged.
Everywhere I go I hear music: in every store in every mall; in auto dealerships; in hotel lobbies and elevators; in pub washrooms; in the dentists’ office. At home though, or in the woods on a hike, or kayaking on a lake, I hear the wind and birds, even the rustle of leaves. This is because I am “old” and unplugged. I see young people skiing, biking, drinking coffee at Starbucks, eating at the food court and hanging out with friends and all of them are tethered by white wires to perpetual melodies. The world sings past them.
In my morning class a few months ago the students wandered into the room, plugged in and texting, and the few who had questions before I started the lesson yelled at me over the sound of the music in their ears. I told them to wait a minute and then took ear buds out of my bag, plugged them into my laptop and attached myself to them. Nonplussed, they continued with their question about quadratics; them listening to Cee Lo Green and me listening to Earth, Wind and Fire.
Kevin Bray lives in Aurora, Ont.
Editors Note: Having left the classroom in 1984, I cannot share Mr. Bray's experience, and like all other retired teachers can only send condolences and relief that I am not responsible for a secondary school English class today.

Education Researchers: High cost of school drop-outs...prevention starts early

By Henry M. Levin and Cecilia E. Rouse, New York Times, January 25, 2012
Henry M. Levin is a professor of economics and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Cecilia E. Rouse, a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University, was a member of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2009 to 2011.
In 1970, the United States had the world’s highest rate of high school and college graduation. Today, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, we’ve slipped to No. 21 in high school completion and No. 15 in college completion, as other countries surpassed us in the quality of their primary and secondary education.

Only 7 of 10 ninth graders today will get high school diplomas. A decade after the No Child Left Behind law mandated efforts to reduce the racial gap, about 80 percent of white and Asian students graduate from high school, compared with only 55 percent of blacks and Hispanics.
Like President Obama, many reformers focus their dropout prevention efforts on high schoolers; replacing large high schools with smaller learning communities where poor students can get individualized instruction from dedicated teachers has been shown to be effective. Rigorous evidence gathered over decades suggests that some of the most promising approaches need to start even earlier: preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds, who are fed and taught in small groups, followed up with home visits by teachers and with group meetings of parents; reducing class size in the early grades; and increasing teacher salaries from kindergarten through 12th grade.
These programs sound expensive — some Americans probably think that preventing 1.3 million students from dropping out of high school each year can’t be done — but in fact the costs of inaction are far greater.
High school completion is, of course, the most significant requirement for entering college. While our economic competitors are rapidly increasing graduation rates at both levels, we continue to fall behind. Educated workers are the basis of economic growth — they are especially critical as sources of innovation and productivity given the pace and nature of technological progress.
If we could reduce the current number of dropouts by just half, we would yield almost 700,000 new graduates a year, and it would more than pay for itself. Studies show that the typical high school graduate will obtain higher employment and earnings — an astonishing 50 percent to 100 percent increase in lifetime income — and will be less likely to draw on public money for health care and welfare and less likely to be involved in the criminal justice system. Further, because of the increased income, the typical graduate will contribute more in tax revenues over his lifetime than if he’d dropped out.
When the costs of investment to produce a new graduate are taken into account, there is a return of $1.45 to $3.55 for every dollar of investment, depending upon the educational intervention strategy. Under this estimate, each new graduate confers a net benefit to taxpayers of about $127,000 over the graduate’s lifetime. This is a benefit to the public of nearly $90 billion for each year of success in reducing the number of high school dropouts by 700,000 — or something close to $1 trillion after 11 years. That’s real money — and a reason both liberals and conservatives should rally behind dropout prevention as an element of economic recovery, leaving aside the ethical dimensions of educating our young people.
Some might argue that these estimates are too large, that the relationships among the time-tested interventions, high school graduation rates and adult outcomes have not been proved yet on a large scale. Those are important considerations, but the evidence cannot be denied: increased education does, indeed, improve skill levels and help individuals to lead healthier and more productive lives. And despite the high unemployment rate today, we have every reason to believe that many of these new graduates would find work — our history is filled with sustained periods of economic growth when increasing numbers of young people obtained more schooling and received large economic benefits as a result.
Of course, there are other strategies for improving educational attainment — researchers learn more every day about which are effective and which are not. But even with what we know, a failure to substantially reduce the numbers of high school dropouts is demonstrably penny-wise and pound-foolish.
Proven educational strategies to increase high school completion, like high-quality preschool, provide returns to the taxpayer that are as much as three and a half times their cost. Investing our public dollars wisely to reduce the number of high school dropouts must be a central part of any strategy to raise long-run economic growth, reduce inequality and return fiscal health to our federal, state and local governments.
Setting goals like 700,000 additional graduates, and demonstrating the investment return of $1.45 to $3.55 for every dollar invested in keeping kids in school, and positing $127,000 of graduate contribution to state coffers and an accumulative $90 billion for each year of increasing the number of graduates by 700,000, or $90 billion over eleven years....all worthy and credible figures and projections.
However, while the economy is sputtering and has been for at last the last four years, and while No Child Left Behind was always nothing more than a "teach-to-the-test" cover of the politicians' asses, and not a visionary educational approach, and while reducing the number of drop-outs, and increasing the number of graduates is and always will be a good thing to do, nevertheless:--

• learning generates much more that dollars, for both the graduate and the state
• learning generates many more options within the graduates perspective on whatever life or career situation presents itself
• learning also generates a much more demanding and imaginative culture through which, we can only hope, politicians will have to account to both more and more penetrating questions from more sources...generating a far more interactive and accountable and thereby responsible society
• learning also stimulates the imagination, if done successfully, thereby providing the essential foundation for a society and a culture seeking to shed  the "ingenuity gap" which plagues North American culture, on both sides of the border, although it is more serious in Canada..

So while the accountants and the revenue department would be happier with more graduates coughing up more cash into public coffers, that is not the reason, nor even the most important reason to propose, to advocate and to implement strategies and tactics that keep students in school longer....It may be a useful byproduct...but it is certainly not the most important reason for such a policy implementation: never was, never will be!

Let's develop a national energy program in Canada, with refining and national distribution

Barely audible in the political storm over the Northern Pipeline from Alberta to the British Columbia coast, are two voices arguing for the same thing, missing so far in the calculations of what to do with Canadian crude from the tar sands.
Their names are Gordon Laxer, a professor and former premier of Alberta, Peter Lougheed. They are both asking why Canada is not refining the crude before shipping it.
And the question bears reflection.
We know that shipping refined crude is less expensive that shipping the heavier product. We also know that Canada has the opportunity to "feed itself first" in energy, in order to bring the two halves of the country onto the same page at least on this file. The western half of Canada gets its energy from the western provinces. Ontario gets its energy, originally from the west, transported to the U.S. where it is refined and then imported back into Ontario. Quebec and the Maritimes gets most of their energy from Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.
The Prime Minister has told CBC news that he is not interested in making Canada "energy self-sufficient" preferring to let market forces play that game. Yet, at the same time, he is singing like a warbler to anyone who will listen that he wants to create jobs.
Well, by refining our own crude and making it available to all our provinces, we would do two things:
develop a model of energy self-sufficiency that demonstrated our capacity to solve our own problems, while at the same time bringing the country a little more together on this important file
and also creating thousands of Canadian jobs in both refining and  distribution that could last.
But more important to this prime minister are "market forces"...code words for letting his political base have free reign in managing the industry. The national interest plays no part in the discussion, so far as this prime minister is concerned.
Once, Conservative politicians in Canada saw a need for a national railway to link the country. Others, later conceived of the notion of a national radio network, created the CBC and provided an additional and important link across the vast terrain. Perhaps this generation of Canadian conservative political leaders could also take a page from their history books and develop a national energy program, in spite of the west's contempt for such an approach under Pierre Trudeau, who even went so far as to purchase a national energy company, PetroCanada, something the west saw then and sees today as socialism, in the mild version, and communism in the more contemptuous version.
Provincial politicians are all facing budget problems, (except of course Alberta where the energy is being recovered) and the more Canadian leadership can and does do to enhance the linkage of all provinces and territories, while at the same time reducing the impact of this recession, and evidence yesterday from CIBC that Canadian jobs are losing both stability and wage levels, as they slip further into the temporary and unskilled variety, leaving few opportunities for permanent and skilled work for Canadians.
A national energy strategy would not eliminate the market, but merely work within the market to achieve national goals as well. We do not have to today, just as we did not have to in the part, worship exclusively at the altar of "private enterprise" without developing our national interests. We can walk and chew gum at the same time.
Can Ottawa?

Liberal gain small, better than a loss...

By Jane Taber, Globe and Mail, January 25, 2012
Although the Conservatives and NDP are still number one and number two, the Grits are creeping up – the Abacus poll has the Harper Conservatives with the support of 37 per cent of voters compared to the NDP with 28 per cent support and the Liberals at 21 per cent.

The Abacus numbers, meanwhile, are similar to those in the Angus Reid online public opinion poll, released Tuesday. It has the Conservatives at 39 per cent compared to the NDP with 28 per cent and the Liberals at 22 per cent support. Again, the Angus Reid poll shows the Liberals increasing their support at the expense of the NDP.
This new poll also shows that Mr. Rae’s personal popularity is increasing. When asked for a favourable or unfavourable impression of the major leaders, 28 per cent of respondents said they had a favourable impression of Mr. Rae. This is up from 25 per cent in December and 20 per cent in August.
Abacus:            Conservatives 37%; NDP 28%; Liberals 21%
Angus Reid:      Conservatives 39%; NDP 28%; Liberals 22%
Favourable impression for Mr. Rae: 25% up from 20 in December.
The headline to the Taber piece in the Globe and Mail reads:  "The Bob Rae Bounce: Liberals continue to gain steam"
Unfortunately, if this were really a steam engine, and it were gaining speed at this rate, people would be gladly climbing down those steps into the snow, as it crept along into the night. While it is true that in politics, a week is a long time, a month a lifetime and two years an eon, nevertheless, while the numbers are moving in the right direction, anyone calculating how to invest money in political futures, or even in party memberships would have to take a very deep breath, and a very long walk in the February snow before signing a cheque to support the Liberal Party's "steam gaining" evidence.
Harper is giving the party a smorgasbord of succulent political issues on which to chew and then to pounce on his party's policies, ideology and the apparent absence of political and professional competence of his cabinet.
The NDP is quietly enjoying its moveable feast of leadership debates, where everyone agrees with everyone else, and does it all so politely and delicately. Where is John Rodriguez and his ilk from the Ontario wing of the NDP?
However, the Liberals missed a huge opportunity to ride the national tidal wave from a Sheila Copps election as party president. That, along with the popularity and media access to Mr Rae would have been a 1-2 punch, while former Cabinet ministers were recruited for national speaking engagements, town halls and op-eds. And then, as the campaigns for leader began, the announcement of potential and confirmed candidates could have, once again, swelled both the coffers and the registry of memberships for the party.
And, co-incidentally, policy papers, positions papers and research summaries could have been flowing from both the research department and from the universities, all with the goal of an integrated policy AND leadership convention prior to the next election.
It will take at least one million more memberships to render the Liberal Party a viable player in the next election, and with barely two million Canadians in total carrying memberships in all political parties, that is a very steep hill to climb and the engine will have to generate a lot more "steam" to get to the top....many are still hoping that the party will be like the "little engine that could"....

Davos: A clarion call for "transformation" of capitalism....long overdue and needed

By Heather Scoffield, The Canadian Press, in Globe and Mail, January 25, 2012
DAVOS--The founder of the annual World Economic Forum retreat in this Alpine town, Klaus Schwab, has appealed to global movers and shakers for a “great transformation” that would challenge the basic tenets of capitalism.
Other leaders of global organizations, including Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney, have issued a joint “call to action” asking country leaders to fuel growth and jobs in a way that confronts chronically high youth unemployment, is environmentally sustainable, and also deals with inequality.

And Mr. Harper heard a similar message from some of the Canadian business leaders in his roundtable meeting on Wednesday afternoon. He was told that doing business is not just about making money but is also about bolstering Canadian society, confirmed participant Monique Leroux, chief executive of Desjardins Group.
But the opening speech of the forum on Wednesday was all about status quo.
Throughout the recent bouts of financial crisis, “our market economy has proved itself,” said German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
She said Europe is inclined to work together to resolve the continent's sovereign debt crisis, but she stuck to her script and did not commit major new money for a rescue fund.
“I think we have shown in many ways that we are serious,” she insisted.
But she told the forum she did not want to make promises she couldn't keep — despite intense pressure from Canada and the rest of the world to inject large amounts into the bailout.
She did suggest Germany would play an active role in keeping the eurozone afloat, but said finding solutions would take time.
“We are no longer deluding ourselves.”
Officials said Mr. Harper kept up the pressure on Europe in a bilateral meeting with Denmark's prime minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, who holds the presidency of the European Union this year. He warned her that Europe's failure to act boldly is harming the global economy, officials said.
Is there any chance, even a miniscule one, that the combined chorus of the voices of Schwab, Leroux, Carney and Obama all singing from the same song sheet, and not only singing the same melody but also the same words, will be heard in Davos and beyond?
The words of Ms Leroux from Desjardin Group, "doing business is not just about making money, it is also about bolstering the Canadian society," sum up the plea for a different, more socially responsible kind of capitalism. And if those voices are not drowned out by the aardvarks like Harper and Manley and Flaherty and Boehner and Cantor and Romney and Gingrich, then, possibly those millions of Canadians and Americans who are living from pay cheque to pay cheque, or are actually drawing money from the state just to keep their family afloat, might possible find the bottom rung on the ladder, and start the long climb back to the middle class.
And such a dream would generate millions in tax revenue for the "state" and help to pay down the debt and the deficit, and reduce the need for radical surgery in an austerity program which both American and Canadian neo-cons would prefer, to any tax increases for their billionaire and millionaire friends.
For the Prime Minister to be in Davos taking credit for the fact that the Canadian economy did not fall into as deep a recession as some other countries, when his government did not establish the foundations, and the rules and the regulations that prevented such a deep recession is the height of presumption. And for John Manley, the former Liberal Deputy Prime Minister to be beating the drum for Harper as one of his chief cheerleaders, is nothing less than shameful. Canadian banks and lending institutions were completely separate and apart from the financial services sector for decades. And even when they were permitted to enter the insurance and investment fields, they were still governed by regulations that prevented the kind of scandalous "credit default swaps" designed by the doctoral graduates employed by the Wall Street cabal, whose executives did not understand the full implications of the instruments designed on their payroll.
Harper is riding a tiny wave of international smiles, and he rides that wave with the kind of smugness that befits the cat who has just swallowed the mouse. But like the cat, the flavour and the nourishment will not last, and neither will that wave of smiles and invitations.
Capitalism does indeed require transformation. And Schwab is right to be calling for social responsibilty as an integral part of the transformation.
And only those who are listening, and thinking through the implications of his call for transformation will ride the wave of capitalism's next chapter. I do not hear representatives from the Canadian chartered banks, the original six, singing from that same songsheet that is in the hands of Ms Leroux, where each of us could be considering taking our banking needs...to Desjardins Group....where at least the chief executive "gets" the message that has been the song of the winter of our discontent, composed and sung in the major cities around the world by the Occupy movement.
Canadian reporters covering the Davos meeting of world business leaders would do well to publish both the Schwab speech and the many and diverse reactions to his courageous and creative and timely overture to the conference he inaugurated, in the Canadian media for the next few days and give Harper's speech the backpage coverage it deserves.

A Financial Writer: Downgrade the Rating Agencies...Really!

By Philip Stevens, Financial Times, in Globe and Mail, January 19, 2012
I keep hearing people say don’t blame the rating agencies. My first reaction is why not? After due and sober reflection my considered response is why the hell not?

Standard & Poor’s has put the agencies back into the headlines by downgrading a slew of euro zone governments and robbing France of its cherished triple-A rating. There is something unsettling about S&P’s eagerness to grab the headlines. A cynic might see the theatrical nature of its pronouncements as a rather vulgar marketing tool. Moody’s and Fitch seem a lot quieter.
This time, though, S&P had wisdom to impart. Its serried ranks of economists, analysts and financial wizards were offering startling insights. Fiscal retrenchment, they intoned, would not alone repair the public finances of euro zone countries. The weak economies needed growth in order to revive flagging tax revenues. Wow! Who would have thought it? Perhaps S&P is hunting a Nobel Prize.

I suppose it would be unkind to recall at this point that the rating agencies have been in the vanguard of those telling politicians to pile austerity on austerity, and threatening an instant downgrade for anyone that dared even think about Keynes’s paradox of thrift.
S&P, after all, has also offered us a second searing revelation: the threat to sovereign solvency is not simply a reflection of the deficits and debts of individual states. No. There is also a problem of European governance. The process is cumbersome. The 17 euro zone states struggle to take quick, decisive action.
No one who has watched Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and the rest stumble from summit to Brussels summit for the best part of two years could possibly have guessed that the effort to reconcile domestic politics with euro zone economics had thrown up the odd snag. Could they?
I don’t share Mr. Sarkozy’s paranoia about Anglo-Saxon conspiracies to insult France and wreck the single currency. Doesn’t Fitch, anyway, have a French connection? French ministers do themselves few favours when they suggest they would be quite happy with a dud rating if only Britain was also relegated. No, the question is why, after their ill-starred role in bringing the financial house down, does anyone still take the agencies even faintly seriously?
Mr. Sarkozy is author of his own embarrassment. He treated a triple-A rating as an emblem of national virility. His presidency, he is said to have confided, would be “dead” if France were downgraded. All this bestowed on S&P an authority out of all proportion to its worth.
These are the same organizations that stamped triple-A on the billions upon billions of dollars in junk credit that brought us the financial crash. It must have been coincidental that the banks bundling up this debt were a fast-growing source of business for the agencies. What was it one S&P employee said in a private e-mail when journalists asked awkward questions back in 2007? “We sound like the Nixon White House.” Given what happened next, the former U.S. president might have considered that something of a slur.
While Mr. Sarkozy kept a sullen silence, Mario Monti offered a grown-up response to the downgrades. The Italian prime minister said he could scarcely welcome a triple-B rating. As for S&P’s diagnosis of Italy’s economic challenges, though, it was no more than a rehash of his own publicly stated views.
The irony is that on the separate question hanging over the euro zone’s capacity to come up with credible answers to the crisis, S&P may well have got it wrong. Again.
Only a fool would say that the euro zone has found a route out of the sovereign debt minefields. There are plenty of potential explosions ahead, not least the possibility of a disorderly Greek default. But it is striking that in the wake of the downgrades, borrowing rates have fallen slightly. S&P has missed a discernible shift in the political dynamic of the crisis. What seemed a few months ago well beyond the collective will of governments now begins to look at least possible.
Ms. Merkel has found political space. Hard-line opponents of any bailout have fought themselves to exhaustion. Berlin is ready to countenance a boost to the firepower of the new European Stability Mechanism. Ms. Merkel can never call on the European Central Bank to act as a lender of last resort to governments, but she seems content with the ECB’s strategy of indirect support through the banking system. German officials also talk about changing the political psychology of the crisis by offering light at the end of the austerity tunnel.
This reflects the progress toward a fiscal compact between the 17 euro zone states. Next week’s European Union summit is expected to endorse a new treaty to turn the compact into law. The entrenchment of fiscal rectitude across the euro zone weakens critics who argue Germany is bailing out feckless southern Europeans.
The speed with which Mr. Monti has set about reform in Italy has had something of the same effect. Italy now has a serious government with things to say about economic policy. Mr. Monti gets a hearing in Berlin. It would be a stretch to say that this adds up yet to the beginning of a virtuous cycle in the politics of the crisis. But governments may be breaking out of the vicious one in which they have been trapped.
As for S&P, perhaps we should not be overly punitive. After all, all the other villains of the crash have got away scot-free. The second thing I keep hearing, though, is that we must still take the agencies seriously because they remain embedded in the global financial system. Shouldn’t we just downgrade them? Junk would do.
Copyright The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved.

Praise for last State of the Union Address by Obama in election year

By Konrad Yakabuski, Globe and Mail, January 25, 2012
“Washington should stop subsidizing millionaires,” Mr. Obama said. “You can call this class warfare all you want. But asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary in taxes? Most Americans would call that common sense.”

The speech – which included proposals to revitalize U.S. manufacturing, help distressed homeowners and invest more in green energy, infrastructure and job training – laid out the themes of Mr. Obama’s re-election pitch against a Republican opposition hostile to government intervention, income redistribution and tax increases.
“We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by,” the President said, “or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.”...
“When I get tax breaks I don’t need and the country can’t afford, it either adds to the deficit or somebody else has to make up the difference – like a senior on a fixed income, or a student trying to get through school, or a family trying to make ends meet,” the President said. “That’s not right.”

The cornerstone of Mr. Obama’s “fair shot” proposals – which recall Mr. Roosevelt’s New Deal and the Fair Deal of Mr. Truman – is the so-called Buffet Rule that would set a minimum 30-per-cent tax rate for millionaires. The idea was inspired by billionaire Warren Buffett, who lamented that he paid a lower effective tax rate than his secretary.
Immediately following the speech, former Bush Press Secretary, Ari Fleisher, said on CNN that he did not like the speech because it consisted mainly of "spending other people's money" although he patronizingly gave Obama credit for capturing and taking out  Osama bin Laden. It was nothing of the kind, and Mr. Fleisher knows better. His words are another example of the king of political rhetoric that plagues the U.S. political bowel obstruction, generated by his Republican friends.
Balancing the budget, reducing the debt and deficit and growing the American economy will happen, according to economists of both "left" and "right" colourations, if a balanced approach of spending cuts and tax increases on the wealthy.
Warren Buffet, himself, has called for a higher rate of tax on millionaires and billionaires. His secretary, who pays approximately 30% in taxes was seated in the gallery with Michelle Obama, the President's wife. Capital gains taxes on investments run, on average, around 15% for the most wealthy in America, whereas those rates were between 25 and 30% under Ronald Reagan in the 1980's. Also sitting with Mrs. Obama was another woman, previously out of work, who with the help of a partnership between Siemens corporation and a community college, has retrained and is back in the workforce, demonstrating a model the president believes could apply in all 50 states.
While the theme of "taxing the rich" was certainly present, front and centre in the speech, so was the president's commitment to take action with or without the support of what has become an obstructionist congress. Also clearly evident was:

• the White House commitment to generate jobs in new and clean energy,
• to generate jobs in repairing crumbling infrastructure, 
• to confront the immigration nightmare that sends graduates home following university, 
• to stop tax breaks for companies that ship jobs out of America
• to reward companies who create jobs at home through tax breaks and incentives
• to provide tax and other incentives for small business entrepreneurs to grow new businesses
• to level the playing field for all Americans by making rules to prevent another Wall Street fiasco
• to continue to renew America's reputation among world countries and leaders
• to lower the interest rate on student loans to make college more affordable for all 
• to maintain a strong military while cutting $500 million from the defence budget
• to create a special unit in the Attorney General's office to examine critically how and why the housing crisis occurred and to prevent its recurrence 
• to continue prosecuting other countries when the "trade" playing field is not level
• to challenge Congress to take one half of the money released by withdrawal from Iraq and pay down the debt/deficit and take the other half and generate infrastructure projects and thereby jobs 
• to require full disclosure of all chemicals used in "fracking" of natural gas
• to require all secondary school students to remain in school until graduation or their eighteenth birthday

And, running for more than an hour, and having republican speechwriter, Peggy Noonan, call it boring for that, the speech provided those who want to move America forward and further into recovery, initiatives on so many fronts that the speech has to be seen as comprehensive, (and not "small bore," as David Brooks dubbed it on PBS), imaginative, courageous and "presidential" in the context of what has become his do-nothing, obstruct on everything Republican political opponents, who seek through their obstruction, to "make Obama a one-term president" in the words of the Senate majority leader.
The U.S., North America and the global chaos need both the experience and the imagination and the steady, but firm hand, of President Obama for the next four years, and Americans can be proud of their President, as the rest of the world is grateful.