The answer is I hang out with the right people: the people at our local community college district, Foothill-De Anza.

The truth is that has long been the key to my professional success. My pending appointment to the Obama Administration is just the latest example.

That's one reason why community college, and Foothill-De Anza in particular, is a path I recommend without hesitation to others, especially to stressed-out students, displaced workers and/or unemployed folks who may be feeling the pressure or heartbreak associated with deeply troubling personal concerns. In these difficult times many wonder, for example, how they can possibly keep their heads above water, or get ahead, or how they can they live satisfying, independent lives and be truly happy in our highly-competitive world where self-esteem is too often dictated by the thick and thin envelopes sent by collegiate admissions officers, or by where you attended college or, in other cases, more like my own experience, where financial hardship and associated difficulties made career-building attendance at college either impossible or a distant secondary consideration to what was an almost daily fight for economic survival.

Fortunately, I found my answers to those questions many years ago at our local community college district. And the remarkable thing is, three decades later, it is my service to that very same community college district, my attempt to give back, that has instead rewarded me with something I could never have ever imagined: a chance to contribute to the administration of someone I greatly admire, President Obama, in a position where there are just two people between me and the president. In other words, here is what I have discovered: if you want to participate at the highest levels of our national government, sure, it helps if you can attend Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Brown or one of the other more traditional conduits to national leadership. But what my experience demonstrates is that you can also get there right from where you are, wherever you are, via your local community college.

Here's how it happened to/for me:

Thirty three years ago, when I first entered Foothill College as a freshman I had barely graduated high school, having mostly dropped out in order to work in a variety of often depressing, low-paying jobs as a result of economic problems in our single-parent home, where we often relied on welfare and food stamps. Attending Foothill College part-time while working fulltime I encountered a phalanx of gifted and dedicated educators who illuminated a path for me from the drug store clerk I was to the professional writer, broadcaster and journalist I became. At Foothill, I met great humanitarians disguised as bookish professors, people such as Irv Roth, Herm Scheiding, Truman Cross, Bill Tinsley, and Bob Pierce, each of whom took a personal interest in my development, inspired me, prodded me and celebrated my every small success. They were my coaches and my cheerleaders, teaching me everything from punctuality to punctuation. They jumped into my life with a passion that is common in community college instructors, a passion to help students grow and turn knowledge into personal power. They had only one common request: when you make it, they would say, when you make something of your life and yourself and of this education, please live up to your responsibility to come back and give back and do what you can to make sure that what we offered you remains available to others. Armed with their support, I enjoyed many successes in my chosen profession, helping to create new public radio programming (public radio's "Marketplace"), editing a variety of publications, working for prestigious news networks, and writing hundreds of articles on assignment, including many from foreign locales.

In 2003, nearly thirty years after I graduated from Foothill, many of those same professors and other community leaders led a campaign that made me the first graduate of Foothill College to ever serve on the Foothill-De Anza Community College District Governing Board of Trustees, which oversees Foothill and De Anza Colleges, two exceptional community colleges that provide an unparalleled education to more than 45,000 students. At the time, I had an idea I wanted to pursue, a public policy idea based on my desire to involve our system of higher education more deeply in the collaborative production of free public domain learning materials. Once elected to the board, I found ready partners eager to work toward that goal, with our progress on that issue and others like it helping to more firmly distinguish our community college district as a national leader. And now, I find myself once again being lifted up by the Foothill-De Anza Community College District, this time in the person of its former Chancellor, Dr. Martha Kanter, to whom I will report, who last week was confirmed as President Obama's Under Secretary of Education, which makes her the highest ranking federal official responsible for post secondary education.

We live in difficult times. It is easy for people to become discouraged or worse. But the story I want to share at this momentous time in my life is the story of how I found my way, both as a student many years ago and more recently through service. It was a path that led me first to professional success and now, decades later, to a presidential appointment in the most significant federal administration of my lifetime. What's more, it was a path I could feel good about, one where the educational opportunities extended to me did not come at the expense of denying opportunities to anyone else.

Here in California, our community colleges are now threatened by severe budget cuts. But they remain one of the few avenues to upward mobility open to everyone without regard to who your parents were, where you came from, what you did before, or how much money you have. It's a route that if taken more often will lead to a prosperity that is more widely shared. It was, for me, the most important turn in the road.

Great things happen at community colleges. They can happen to you, too. Trust me. I know.

"Heist," the documentary film project supported by ReelChanges.org about the calamity on Wall Street, co-produced by HBO vets Donald Goldmacher and Frances Causey, pulled in $30,000 today from a single donor! That makes "Heist" the most successful project in the short history of our start-up non-profit organization, the Center for Media Change, Inc.

(CMC) develops new business models that preserve the role of a viable professional independent press in our democracy. We created CMC last year because democracy cannot survive without an adequately supported independent and free press. We also think it best if the next, post-Internet business models for the news media are more dependent on the general public for support rather than giant corporations as has been the pattern up til now, because big corporations often have a hidden or at least undisclosed agenda that influences, some might even say pollutes, the content of mass media.

What a thrill it is to see our new ReelChanges model really working! And to see members of the public coming together with professional journalists to create the high-quality investigative reporting we so desperately need, especially now. What we are talking about here is really the very lifeblood of our democracy. Congratulations to Donald and Frances, as well, for showing others how an idea presented in the right way to the right people at the right time can find the support it takes to make high quality journalism happen. Now would be a great time for reelchanges supporters to add their contributions to this valuable project, which you can do here. No amount is too small. (Btw, another ReelChanges.org project, Gen Silent by Stud Maddux, brought in totally respectable $1500 this week, also worth checking out. It casts a spotlight on the real world suffering caused by bigotry against gays).

We can create a new, more socially responsible way to finance professional high-quality news media in this country. We are a better people than our news media currently reflects. But to show the world the real America we real Americans will have to hold up the mirror ourselves. Please visit ReelChanges.org today and join us in making sure this necessary history happens.

I was saddened today to see the esteemed Mr. Guardino blast President Obama's proposal to reform the tax code that rewards U.S. companies for moving jobs overseas by eliminating the tax deduction they currently receive for those expenses. It's a somewhat complicated issue (see below). But President Obama estimates that making this change will generate $60 billion for the federal treasury over the next nine years. Guardino's oppositional response was captured by the San Jose Mercury News:

"This is a $60 billion hit on American employers that their foreign competitors won't feel," said Carl Guardino, CEO of the business-oriented Silicon Valley Leadership Group, referring to one of the president's proposals.

Here is the problem with that logic. By definition, every tax imposed on any consumer or business here in the United States is a tax that "foreign competitors won't feel." Different countries tax different things at different rates. They are not uniform. Should we set our sales tax or income tax rates based on what our trading partners charge, even though many of them are not even democracies?

The more pertinent question is: what do firms based in the United States get in exchange for their tax dollars?

For starters, they get immediate access to the world's largest market. But more importantly, and this is the key, they also get protection against the sudden confiscation of their profits and property by a stable, constitutional democracy that operates under the rule of law (unlike most of the rest of the world, see: China, Russia, Venezuela, etc.). Asking U.S. companies to pay taxes on the profits they generate in foreign markets seems a fair price to pay in return for this substantial protection, which history has time and again demonstrated has enormous value.

But President Obama's proposal does not even go that far. He is NOT asking U.S. companies to pay taxes on their foreign earnings. He merely seeks to change the tax code so that U.S. companies cannot take a tax deduction for costs related to foreign operations if they are not paying U.S. taxes on profits from those operations. As reforms go this one is relatively minor. And, ironically, it's also actually in line with the way most of our major trading partners operate. I have seen no evidence, for example, that China or Russia or any other countries grant domestic tax credits to companies that make investments in factories in the United States. (On the other hand, I don't read Chinese or Russian so I can't examine their tax codes, if anyone out there can, please let me know and confirm or refute).

That is why it so disappointing to see business leaders hyperventilate over the reforms President Obama has just proposed. Consider the circumstances:

Our economy is experiencing the worst downturn in a generation. The crisis was created, in large measure, by powerful corporations that turned our legislative bodies into obedient lapdogs when they should have been watchdogs protecting the public interest. In each case, corporate interests pursued their own very narrow goals at the expense of the rest of us. With congressional blessings financed by special interests, financial services firms pushed sub prime loans and predatory credit cards, while energy interests slowed down the development of renewable, and in particular, decentralized, forms of energy generation. In the process, our economy has literally crumbled, fallen apart, not because Americans won't work hard, but because special corporate interests looking out only for themselves got their way.

President Obama has been in office for less than six months. He deserves our support at least as much as President Bush did in the early days of his administration. President Obama is trying to restore fairness and equity to a tax code, widely viewed as unfair, that has contributed to the steady erosion of our national industrial and productive base and capacity. Making the reforms that are needed will require sacrifices from many sectors of our society, including respected local corporations that properly and legally took advantage of a tax loophole that helped them but hurt the rest of us, and harmed our national economic interests. What's more, President Obama has pledged to use at least some of the money generated by closing this loophole to strengthen the research and development tax credits made available to many of these same companies.

It would be wonderful to see the respected members of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group competing not only to see who can reward their CEO's more lavishly, but also to see who among them will emerge as the most responsible corporate leaders, willing and ready to work with the President to restore a viable productive economic base here in the United States and willing to support the changes in our tax code that make that more likely.

Or, if they like, they can move their corporate headquarters to China, Russia or Europe, and take their chances.

Woohoo!

ReelChanges.org is a project of the Center for Media Change, Inc., (CMC) the non-profit organization I created last year to experiment with new business models for journalism. We also sponsor CMC president David Cohn's www.spot.us project.

On April 19, CBS aired a "60 Minutes" segment on "cold fusion," a process that proponents claim could solve the world's energy problems. The script stated that "['60 Minutes'] asked the American Physical Society, the top physics organization in America, to recommend an independent scientist. They gave us Rob Duncan, vice chancellor of research at the University of Missouri and an expert in measuring energy." That statement is false.

None of the American Physical Society's (APS) authorized spokespersons, including the president, president-elect, executive officer, director of public affairs, head of media relations and press secretary, provided CBS with the names of any experts. APS has learned that "60 Minutes" did receive a long list of names - that included Rob Duncan's - from University of Minnesota Professor Allen Goldman, who states unequivocally that he never claimed to be acting in the name of APS.

APS does not, as an organization, endorse particular experiments or their results. That can only be done through publication in peer-reviewed journals, and by independent replication by other researchers. The APS does not endorse the cold fusion experiments featured in the April 19 "60 Minutes" news program. Any suggestion by the CBS journalists to the contrary is misleading and false.

The American Physical Society is the leading professional organization of physicists, representing over 46,000 physicists in academia and industry in the United States and internationally. APS has offices in College Park, MD (Headquarters), Ridge, NY, and Washington, D.C.

More: the link to the cold fusion segment stopped working a few hours before the entire show was pulled. On the other hand, at the moment the site still features a printed transcript of the segment here. Interestingly, the printed transcript has been edited to remove the "false statement" cited above by the APS.

What on earth is going on?

Addendum: Just as mysteriously as it vanished, the video report reappeared on the CBS 60 Minutes site a few moments ago. CBS edited the video in the same way they edited the transcript, removing the one sentence that was contested by the American Physical Society. Here is the new version...:

Watch CBS Videos Online

The dust up over cold fusion research was one of most controversial topics I ever covered. As I reported at the time, I was appalled and mystified by the vicious smears and character assassination aimed at scientists working on the experiments, attacks that should have no place whatsoever in science -- or media. There was a rush to halt federal funding and what appeared to me to be a public smear campaign against virtually anyone involved, including some very well respected scientists. It may not have been coordinated but it was certainly a gang attack. I never saw anything like it. I took risks with my own career by continuing to report on the subject long after most others stopped. More than one editor told me I was making a mistake by not dropping it and one cited it as a reason for dropping my longstanding and well-read column. But I was fascinated by the subject and persisted.

Now, twenty years later, 60 Minutes comes along with an extensively reported piece that says my earliest reports basically had it right, as did those of Wired writer Charles Platt, who was virtually the only other "mainstream" journalist to continue to follow the story after the initial interest died down.

You'd think I'd be breaking out the champagne. But instead I keep thinking about my old source, Dr. Eugene Mallove, who kept this story alive when others wanted to kill it only to himself die under mysterious circumstances. What a pity Gene did not live to see this day.

The 60 Minutes report concludes with a heart-breaking interview with Dr. Martin Flieschmann, one of the two scientists, along with Stanley Pons, whose work on cold fusion in 1989 sparked the controversy that destroyed their careers. The 60 Minutes reporter asks Flieschmann how he felt knowing that there have now been many successful subsequent peer-reviewed replications of his work, including most recently by the U.S. Department of Defense, scientists in Israel and an independent verification obtained by CBS. But Flieschmann could only muster a weak smile and sad laugh, focusing instead on the lost opportunity of the last twenty years. Indeed.

Personally, I never understood why there was such a rush to shut down the research. And I still don't. Even if the cold fusion claims don't pan out, wouldn't it be a good idea to spend more money on basic research in the field of materials sciences, including to further investigate this reported phenomena, when materials sciences are so essential to the development of a variety of alternative energy technologies?

Excerpt:

"Reelchanges.org, a showcase created to raise production money online for filmmakers' works in progress, has teamed up with Maryland Public Television (MPT) to test whether "crowdfunding" will work for public TV documentaries.

With help from a Corporation for Public Broadcasting grant, MPT has fine-tuned its pitch for donations backing its documentary Intrepid Journal: From WWII to 9-11, about the not-so-smooth sailing of a World War II aircraft carrier that recently underwent a major restoration as a naval museum docked in Manhattan.

Two additional MPT productions -- on Chesapeake Bay water quality and on the military service of African-Americans -- also will be featured on the site in a tryout backed last year with a $45,000 grant from CPB's Public Media Innovation Fund.

Working on the project with MPT are consultant Jim Russell, longtime top producer of public radio's Marketplace, and the radio program's original editor, Hal Plotkin, who founded ReelChanges.org last year."

You can read the rest here.

I've had the privilege and honor of working closely with her for the last six years as a member of her Board of Trustees, as her board president and also as her partner in our work to advance the cause of Open Education Resources.

I spent more than two decades, before I joined the FHDA board, writing about entrepreneurial leaders for a variety of newspapers, magazines and websites. In that capacity, I met, interviewed, and profiled the leadership teams at practically every major firm in Silicon Valley, from Cisco to Yahoo! I studied hundreds of CEOs and wrote extensively about their philosophies and abilities. Here is my conclusion: Dr. Kanter is the single most effective organizational leader I have ever encountered. She has a uniquely effective leadership style. One example: I don't think I have ever seen her tell anyone what to do. At least not that I can recall. Instead, she often leads by asking questions. And typically, what emerges as those questions are answered is a collaborative team effort that is far more effective than any top-down leader could ever manage. It is really something to behold and from her I have learned much. Her team always knows not only what they are doing, but why. Her style also helps attract the very best team members, people who have helped our efforts at Foothill-De Anza primarily because they simply want to work with her. I've also marveled at her ability to handle tough situations, to stand her ground when the cause requires it, no matter the pressure, and her ability to find ways to win, on behalf of the students she fights for, that routinely turn opponents into supporters.

I salute President Obama and Secretary Duncan for this outstanding decision and I thank them from the bottom of my heart. I am certain that history will record this appointment as a defining moment for their administration. And like everyone who knows Dr. Kanter well, I will do everything in my power to help.

Here is a copy of the poem by Langston Hughes that I sent Martha when she called me last night to tell me the announcement would be made today:

Let America Be America Again by Langston Hughes

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home--
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay--
Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!

Go Martha, go!

In thinking about how to make the editorial model more "dynamic," Cohn circled around one idea: pitching to the public, rather than to publishers.

"Traditionally .001 percent of the population gets to set the news agenda, and they were called editors. They were the ones with freelance budgets, they could hire people and tell them what was important to cover.

"What I'm trying to do is increase the number of people who set the editorial agenda," Cohn says.

What a pleasure it is to work with David. Most experts think professional journalism is hitting a brick wall. But like me, David also sees what's happening as a hurdle that will leave us in a better place when we get over it in the only way we can, by building deeper and more authentic relationships between journalists, readers and the communities we cover. It's a tough path. And some days it feels like a bar-room brawl. But it is pretty terrific to look over my shoulder from time to time and see David standing there, slugging away.

This past year, 2008, marked the first full year of implementation of the policy and its associated programs under the leadership of the very able (brilliant, actually) Dr. Judy Baker, who is emerging as one of the most significant leaders in the international movement for Open Education Resources.

Among the highlights of her presentation was the news that at De Anza College in Cupertino students saved nearly $90,000 (a conservative estimate) in the very first quarter in the first classes where these free materials are being used. Even better, nearly 1,000 faculty members at twelve other community college districts have indicated they also want to follow Foothill-De Anza's lead on this, which is practical now that our college district has organized an international consortium of community colleges, with more than 80 member institutions, to begin collaboratively developing and improving more free public domain learning materials.

We are now on track toward the goal I set last year: substituting free public domain learning materials for commercial textbooks in 1/2 of the top 25 community college classes in California over the next ten years, which will save students more than $1 billion dollars. Money that would go right back into their pockets while also providing them with free, high-quality textbooks they can print or not print, as they like, and also keep rather than be forced to sell back to their college bookstores. Exciting stuff. Here is a link to the powerpoint presentation Dr. Baker made to our board, which highlights the progress over the past year.

This project is pretty significant for community college students, of course, and for our economy in general, which needs to see more students succeed more quickly and at lower cost. But I also believe this progress illustrates how we can use innovative new approaches to improve the delivery of many other types of government services and in the process, rebuild critical public support for our most vital public institutions, including our schools.

Most of the talking heads attribute the current credit crisis to the housing bubble, the sub-prime loan mess and the securitization of debt of dubious value. But those are effects, not causes. I keep waiting for someone to point out that all three are symptoms of something else: the 1980 repeal of the federal law that restrained usury. The repeal of federal protections against usury created the economically poisonous illusion that investors can readily and reliably obtain high double-digit annual returns, legally, simply by purchasing commoditized debt obligations. Over the next 20 years, the financial services industry chased that illusion like a junkie after a fix, coming up with financial instruments that grew increasingly deranged. But what started it all was the repeal of the usury laws. That lit the fuse. I'm astonished that I am yet to hear a single T.V commentator connect those dots, which are practically sitting on top of one another.

A related observation: legal or illegal, usury does not work, at least not as a practical economic theory. It just doesn't work. Not over time. It's like making a horse carry 1000 pounds. The horse dies. And dead horses don't pay their bills. There we are.

So what happened is that usury was made legal, and then it got securitized.

My modest proposal:

Make usury illegal again.

Reinstate federal protections against usury or develop new protections that set practical and fair limits on the amount of interest banks and other lenders can charge on items like mortgages and credit cards. If investors know the most they can legally make on debt obligations is in the single-digit neighborhood, there would be no incentive to create toxic pools of debt like those that have clogged up our financial system.

What's happening now, though, is the Obama administration is pouring more money into banks that still seek to practice usury. There is, however, no amount of federal money that is ever going to make usury a winning formula. So all that federal money will continue to go right down the drain. President Obama, Democrats in Congress: please bring back usury laws. Bringing back the usury laws is a critical part of the regulatory medicine required to restore stability and sanity to our banking and financial services sector.

Excerpt:

Spot.Us first solicits ideas for investigative stories, then uses an approach called "crowdfunding" to send a reporter out. "We distribute the cost of hiring a journalist across a lot of different people," says David Cohn, the 26-year-old founder of the not-for-profit firm. "Content will then be given away to local news organizations or sold for unique publishing rights to recoup the costs."...

Opinions are divided on whether Spot.Us and its film documentary counterpart, Reelchanges, will invigorate public participation or merely undermine editorial instinct. Others worry that crowdfunding could skewer coverage to suit those with the most to spend. As a safeguard, both Spot and Reelchanges say they will ensure that no contributor gives more than 20% of a story's cost.

Hal Plotkin, the founder of Reelchanges, notes that: "Our revenue is increasing whilst everybody else's is decreasing for the simple reason that we're going to our customers, asking them what they want and then asking them for a small amount to help create it. It's not rocket science - it's how every other business works." But, Plotnik [sigh] says bleakly: "The media is so full of authoritarians, they would rather go out of business than share power with a community at large that could help revive their economic model."

Spot.us and Reelchanges.org are projects of the Center for Media Change, Inc.

The Guardian is the most popular website in the United Kingdom.