American education (K-12) is looking at a truly terrifying future. One of the largest (and probably the most affluent) districts in my area just announced it is planning to save 50% of custodial costs by “privatizing” the function.
The people who will be cleaning the schools next year will get substantially lower wages, much poorer benefits and won’t be enrolled in the state’s retirement program. That’s about twenty more people who will not be contributing as much to the consumer spending we are depending on to pull us out of the recession.
Savaging the janitors’ pay won’t begin to solve the district’s problems, however. Last year, declining enrollment (people are moving out of Michigan in droves, taking kids with them) and reduced state aid forced that district to cut over a million dollars from its budget.
The $600,000 it will save by getting rid of the current custodial staff isn’t really going to solve this year’s $1.5 million dollar deficit. Nor will it help much at all in dealing with next year’s projected $4.7 million shortfall.
Other districts in the area are looking forward to absolutely huge deficits next year as well. The state will likely not be able to help. At what point does this start really cutting to the bone?
If I thought a handful of districts in Michigan—that I am personally familiar with—were part of a tiny minority in this country, I wouldn’t bother writing. But they’re not. For the first time since before I was alive, before World War II, we honestly don’t have the money.
It doesn’t help that a panicked Federal Government is adding to the pressure. We’ve known for years that vast numbers of American students have been passed on to the next grade completely unable to read, write or cipher.
Now the government is leaning on school districts to do vastly more just when they have less to do it with. Look at the tiny little (one mile square) district of Central Falls in Rhode Island. It’s not only tiny, it’s also poor and under-educated.
If the suburban kids I see when I substitute teach are increasingly unmotivated—leaving assignment sheets untouched on their desks—imagine the motivation in impoverished districts where the parents don’t care at all. (Sometimes I see the grade sheets—two or three As, a few Bs, a few more Cs, and as many as ten Fs. The kids don’t care.)
Over in Rhode Island, Central Falls is one of the lowest performing districts in the state. Under new Federal standards, the district was given four choices: Shut down, become a charter school, follow special guidelines that demand much longer days and deny teachers almost all planning or lunch time (they eat with the kids). Or the district could fire them all.
So they did. (This is somehow going to motivate the kids? Long experience has taught me and a lot of other teachers that if the parents don’t care, the kids aren’t going to either.) So at the end of the year, approximately 90 teachers will be out of a job.
Can you imagine how much money that will save the district? Teachers with twenty or more years of experience (and salary increases) replaced by an entire staff starting out at the bottom salary rung! That is one real way to save the 85% of a school budget that goes into wages!
I suspect boards all over the nation are looking at Central Falls with sharp pecuniary interest. (They are already begging long-term teachers around here to please, please, please retire.) Under the new fiscal restraints, it isn’t just custodians who are expendable.
How tempted might a district facing a multi-million dollar shortfall be to “privatize” those expensive items called “teachers” as well as ancillary staff? I fear we may see a lot of interesting things in American education over the coming years.
None of them are likely to make students learn more.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
No Sanity In Sight For Health Care
Suppose you found yourself at the mercy of two care givers who had power over you. One said you needed water, but would allow you no food. The other said you needed food, but would allow you no water. Eventually you would die.
It seems to me this is precisely the situation that American health care finds itself in right now. The Democrats will give it no food; Republicans will give it no water. Unless somebody resolves something—quite soon, the entire system will die.
The Republicans will give it no “food”—they propose to leave up to 50 million Americans with no medical care at all. (That’s what being uninsured basically means—no health care at all.) As more and more voting Americans get laid off, and lose their insurance, that’s going to become a politically explosive situation. Bernanke at the Fed has just said he expects high unemployment to continue through at least 2012.
It’s also going to drag down the entire system as more and more of the uninsured are forced to become “charity” patients because untreated symptoms turn into catastrophic disease. Emergency rooms and hospitals are forced to treat these for “free”—and then pass the cost on to paying patients and their insurance companies.
Everyone loses as rates and costs keep skyrocketing. “Free” ain’t free in a hospital. That’s why you hear stories about a box of tissues costing twenty bucks—that’s how they bill you or your insurance for all those “free”/charity cases.
Democrats will give the system no “water”. They will push for nothing that will cut the horrendous (and rising) costs of our tottering system. Pile on fifty million more patients into our present system and bankruptcy will come all the faster.
But, the Republicans protest, if we insure the uninsured we will need to ration medical care in order to cut costs. To that the first answer is: show us a more vicious system of rationing than the present one where we RATION by eliminating those without insurance from the system.
There is something absolutely pernicious about refusing to give up steak in order to give a little gruel to a man on the verge of death by starvation. And that IS the attitude of many of the tea party goers who are so afraid someone may tamper with “MY Medicare” they are willing to let millions suffer and thousands die rather than have any limits imposed on themselves.
(That kind of supreme indifference to the well-being of one’s fellow man goes so far beyond the pale of charity as it is enjoined by Christianity, Judaism or Islam that it is absolutely breath-taking. And so much of the indifference is justified in the name of “religion”!)
Democrats and Republicans glare at one another over what seems to be an unbridgeable gulf. Neither will give in. More importantly neither will acknowledge that without action on both fronts—cutting costs AND caring for the uninsured—our present system WILL collapse.
Can it be done? Are “water” and “food” mutually exclusive, like having one’s cake and eating it too? No, not at all. It’s perfectly doable. You do two things. One) you throw all Americans into ONE insurance pool. That’s spreads the risk as equitably as it possibly can be.
That means, two) a single insurer. Just one, for the whole country. Since that will be the only buyer in the entire US for all drugs and medical supplies, it will have a lot of clout when it comes to holding the line on fees and prices. That will cut costs. (Think how many people in hospitals and doctors’ offices currently draw salaries for trying to meet the different requirements of fifty or more different insurance companies, all with different rules!)
Having no more “charity” cases (that all of us with insurance pay for now) will also cut fees and costs enormously. With a “single payer”, costs will be cut, no one will be uninsured and efficiencies will be forced out of our currently grossly inefficient system.
Whatever rationing this might result in will be far less than the rationing we have now. No single payer could be more subject to fraud or more lethargic about guaranteeing the best care for the buck than what we have now.
But Republicans and Democrats go on glaring. That status quo wins again.
It seems to me this is precisely the situation that American health care finds itself in right now. The Democrats will give it no food; Republicans will give it no water. Unless somebody resolves something—quite soon, the entire system will die.
The Republicans will give it no “food”—they propose to leave up to 50 million Americans with no medical care at all. (That’s what being uninsured basically means—no health care at all.) As more and more voting Americans get laid off, and lose their insurance, that’s going to become a politically explosive situation. Bernanke at the Fed has just said he expects high unemployment to continue through at least 2012.
It’s also going to drag down the entire system as more and more of the uninsured are forced to become “charity” patients because untreated symptoms turn into catastrophic disease. Emergency rooms and hospitals are forced to treat these for “free”—and then pass the cost on to paying patients and their insurance companies.
Everyone loses as rates and costs keep skyrocketing. “Free” ain’t free in a hospital. That’s why you hear stories about a box of tissues costing twenty bucks—that’s how they bill you or your insurance for all those “free”/charity cases.
Democrats will give the system no “water”. They will push for nothing that will cut the horrendous (and rising) costs of our tottering system. Pile on fifty million more patients into our present system and bankruptcy will come all the faster.
But, the Republicans protest, if we insure the uninsured we will need to ration medical care in order to cut costs. To that the first answer is: show us a more vicious system of rationing than the present one where we RATION by eliminating those without insurance from the system.
There is something absolutely pernicious about refusing to give up steak in order to give a little gruel to a man on the verge of death by starvation. And that IS the attitude of many of the tea party goers who are so afraid someone may tamper with “MY Medicare” they are willing to let millions suffer and thousands die rather than have any limits imposed on themselves.
(That kind of supreme indifference to the well-being of one’s fellow man goes so far beyond the pale of charity as it is enjoined by Christianity, Judaism or Islam that it is absolutely breath-taking. And so much of the indifference is justified in the name of “religion”!)
Democrats and Republicans glare at one another over what seems to be an unbridgeable gulf. Neither will give in. More importantly neither will acknowledge that without action on both fronts—cutting costs AND caring for the uninsured—our present system WILL collapse.
Can it be done? Are “water” and “food” mutually exclusive, like having one’s cake and eating it too? No, not at all. It’s perfectly doable. You do two things. One) you throw all Americans into ONE insurance pool. That’s spreads the risk as equitably as it possibly can be.
That means, two) a single insurer. Just one, for the whole country. Since that will be the only buyer in the entire US for all drugs and medical supplies, it will have a lot of clout when it comes to holding the line on fees and prices. That will cut costs. (Think how many people in hospitals and doctors’ offices currently draw salaries for trying to meet the different requirements of fifty or more different insurance companies, all with different rules!)
Having no more “charity” cases (that all of us with insurance pay for now) will also cut fees and costs enormously. With a “single payer”, costs will be cut, no one will be uninsured and efficiencies will be forced out of our currently grossly inefficient system.
Whatever rationing this might result in will be far less than the rationing we have now. No single payer could be more subject to fraud or more lethargic about guaranteeing the best care for the buck than what we have now.
But Republicans and Democrats go on glaring. That status quo wins again.
Monday, February 22, 2010
Washington--A Forgotten Giant
Forty years ago, today was Washington’s Birthday. It still is—he was actually born on February 22—but now we celebrate “President’s Day” on any Monday that falls between February 15 and February 21. So the holiday will never again fall on Washington’s actual birth date.
That’s too bad. Washington deserves his own holiday—certainly if Columbus and Martin Luther King rate their own holidays! He stands preeminent among both our founding fathers and our presidents. No one will ever, no matter how great or how many Nobel Prizes or what victories or policies he or she may have pushed through, replace Washington as “first in war, first in peace and first [he should be] in the hearts of his countrymen.”
I suspect most Americans really don’t have a handle on what makes him Great, what makes him “First”. Yes, he commanded the American army in the Revolutionary War. No, he was not a Napoleonic military genius—he lost most of his battles.
But he hung in. By sheer force of character he not only hung in himself he induced a starving, badly equipped and sometimes trouser-less army to hang in with him. He did it by sheer force of character and by feeding his desperately hungry troops out of his own pocket.
He became, by sheer force of character and persistence, one of our first international celebrities. Prussia’s Frederick The Great (a real military genius) addressed Washington, “From the world’s oldest soldier to the world’s greatest soldier.”
The French government unhesitatingly, made him Commander-in-Chief of all French forces in the American hemisphere. No imaginable way could we have won the Revolution—or even hoped to have stayed in the war—without General Washington.
Then he went home to his plantation, happily. They called him back four years later to chair the Constitutional Convention of 1787. He didn’t bring the bright ideas or forge the brilliant compromises—he just sat in the Chair and made very, very certain they came to pass. All he had to do was look at you—and you became a whole lot more cooperative. Without Washington, most likely no Constitution.
He went back to his plantation—and they elected him first president under the new Constitution. Only time a man was ever elected and re-elected without an opponent. He walked into a single executive office with no cabinet, no judiciary and no rules of order.
Just as he had held the army together and held the Constitutional Convention in order, he presided over the Judiciary Act that created the Supreme Courts, the Federal Court system and the Attorney General’s office. When he left office, the Government of the United States—as we know it today—was pretty much in place. And the man in the Chair was still capable of wringing cooperation out of all sorts of people, with all sorts of points of view.
The point is—HE DID NOT HAVE TO LEAVE OFFICE. EVER. This is what makes him a giant without peer in human history. He was a victorious revolutionary, a world renowned general whose countrymen would have re-elected him for life. He probably could have become “king”, certainly like Simon Bolivar, “President for Life”.
He served two terms and went home to his plantation. Ships from all over the world sailed up the Potomac and fired their guns in salute. He would go to his little signal gun and fire a salute in return. But he was very content to be a farmer—rather than a ruler.
Shall we talk about other victorious revolutionaries? Napoleon, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, Lenin, Franco, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Henry Christophe, Cromwell, Stalin, Robespierre, Simon Bolivar , San Martin and Trotsky (who were thrown out by fellow revolutionaries), Idi Amin, Kim Il Sung, Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Mugabe—and I could go on.
Power is as hard to give up as liquor or narcotics for many people. Washington simply walked away from it—establishing the most important American tradition of them all. For this, alone, we owe a debt we cannot pay—and Washington deserves his own Day.
That’s too bad. Washington deserves his own holiday—certainly if Columbus and Martin Luther King rate their own holidays! He stands preeminent among both our founding fathers and our presidents. No one will ever, no matter how great or how many Nobel Prizes or what victories or policies he or she may have pushed through, replace Washington as “first in war, first in peace and first [he should be] in the hearts of his countrymen.”
I suspect most Americans really don’t have a handle on what makes him Great, what makes him “First”. Yes, he commanded the American army in the Revolutionary War. No, he was not a Napoleonic military genius—he lost most of his battles.
But he hung in. By sheer force of character he not only hung in himself he induced a starving, badly equipped and sometimes trouser-less army to hang in with him. He did it by sheer force of character and by feeding his desperately hungry troops out of his own pocket.
He became, by sheer force of character and persistence, one of our first international celebrities. Prussia’s Frederick The Great (a real military genius) addressed Washington, “From the world’s oldest soldier to the world’s greatest soldier.”
The French government unhesitatingly, made him Commander-in-Chief of all French forces in the American hemisphere. No imaginable way could we have won the Revolution—or even hoped to have stayed in the war—without General Washington.
Then he went home to his plantation, happily. They called him back four years later to chair the Constitutional Convention of 1787. He didn’t bring the bright ideas or forge the brilliant compromises—he just sat in the Chair and made very, very certain they came to pass. All he had to do was look at you—and you became a whole lot more cooperative. Without Washington, most likely no Constitution.
He went back to his plantation—and they elected him first president under the new Constitution. Only time a man was ever elected and re-elected without an opponent. He walked into a single executive office with no cabinet, no judiciary and no rules of order.
Just as he had held the army together and held the Constitutional Convention in order, he presided over the Judiciary Act that created the Supreme Courts, the Federal Court system and the Attorney General’s office. When he left office, the Government of the United States—as we know it today—was pretty much in place. And the man in the Chair was still capable of wringing cooperation out of all sorts of people, with all sorts of points of view.
The point is—HE DID NOT HAVE TO LEAVE OFFICE. EVER. This is what makes him a giant without peer in human history. He was a victorious revolutionary, a world renowned general whose countrymen would have re-elected him for life. He probably could have become “king”, certainly like Simon Bolivar, “President for Life”.
He served two terms and went home to his plantation. Ships from all over the world sailed up the Potomac and fired their guns in salute. He would go to his little signal gun and fire a salute in return. But he was very content to be a farmer—rather than a ruler.
Shall we talk about other victorious revolutionaries? Napoleon, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, Lenin, Franco, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Henry Christophe, Cromwell, Stalin, Robespierre, Simon Bolivar , San Martin and Trotsky (who were thrown out by fellow revolutionaries), Idi Amin, Kim Il Sung, Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Mugabe—and I could go on.
Power is as hard to give up as liquor or narcotics for many people. Washington simply walked away from it—establishing the most important American tradition of them all. For this, alone, we owe a debt we cannot pay—and Washington deserves his own Day.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Water, Water, ... Not a Drop To Drink
This morning a blog flickered across AOL so quickly I didn’t get its name down—but I managed to print out its text. It’s news I’ve waited and hoped for ever since I spent the winter of 1973-4 in Los Angeles and its dry, dry environs.
I was raised in Michigan where there are rivers, lakes or streams every couple of miles. Water is as much a part of life as air. When I moved to LA, the first thing I found myself looking for was water. Not the ocean, but potable water. There wasn’t any in sight.
This quickly made me uneasy. I was surrounded by millions of people with no visible means of slaking their thirst. Nothing. Nada. Nowhere. What came out of the tap wasn’t drinkable so I followed the fashion of ordering in purified drinking water by the jug—mounted on a rented stand in the corner of the kitchen.
Water trucks were as common as mailpersons. Existing tap water came via pipe through the mountains from northern California or from faraway sources like the Colorado River. (What happens if an earthquake cuts those pipelines? A lot of people die.)
That’s the whole American southwest. Air so dry it chaps your lips in summer. No serious supply of fresh water anywhere. Millions and millions of human beings dependent on water that simply is not there. Water sucking lawns, parks and golf courses everywhere.
I concluded that we were setting ourselves up for a disaster that will make the Chinese and Haitian earthquakes or the Indian Ocean Tsunami look like traffic fender benders. After all, the whole southwest (and many other deserts on this planet) is dotted with the remains of past civilizations that simply dried up and blew away when the water stopped.
What’s going to happen in LA and the southwest won’t be at all historically unusual. No matter what we do, in a thousand years archaeologists will wander through the ruins of the Mt. Palomar observatory wondering what forgotten god this temple was built for. (Movie lots will probably baffle them completely.) But we don’t have to hurry the inevitable.
So much of the water that DOES get to LA—or Phoenix or San Diego, Bakersfield, Las Vegas and Santa Barbara—is wasted on growing the sort of green grass that was meant for well watered places like Kentucky and Michigan! It is distributed by sprinklers that allow much of the water intended for lawns to evaporate before it even reaches the ground! This is DESERT, guys, DESERT!
Today’s blog offered the best news I’ve heard out of southern California since Clint Eastwood rescued the western movie genre. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, in a fit of inspired sanity, is paying customers to rip up their lawns!
You can get as much as two grand if you tear out the grass and replace it with the kind of plants God meant to grow in desert and semi-desert climates, stuff that doesn’t need tons of water. Or you can put in flag stones, gravel and brick walkways.
You can even lay down synthetic turf—if you absolutely have to keep up the illusion that you really never left Ohio. For those who cannot bear to accept the fact that they actually do live in arid Southern California, there are rebates for water efficient appliances, lower pressure sprinkler nozzles and timers on those sprinklers.
This is necessary—vital—throughout the American southwest if humans are going to keep crowding in to lands meant for few people and less greenery. It won’t prevent the inevitable collapse of an overstressed water system, but it might significantly delay the evil day.
How about a slogan for the folks at the waterworks? “Rip up your lawn, Los Angelinos, the life you prolong could be your own.”
I was raised in Michigan where there are rivers, lakes or streams every couple of miles. Water is as much a part of life as air. When I moved to LA, the first thing I found myself looking for was water. Not the ocean, but potable water. There wasn’t any in sight.
This quickly made me uneasy. I was surrounded by millions of people with no visible means of slaking their thirst. Nothing. Nada. Nowhere. What came out of the tap wasn’t drinkable so I followed the fashion of ordering in purified drinking water by the jug—mounted on a rented stand in the corner of the kitchen.
Water trucks were as common as mailpersons. Existing tap water came via pipe through the mountains from northern California or from faraway sources like the Colorado River. (What happens if an earthquake cuts those pipelines? A lot of people die.)
That’s the whole American southwest. Air so dry it chaps your lips in summer. No serious supply of fresh water anywhere. Millions and millions of human beings dependent on water that simply is not there. Water sucking lawns, parks and golf courses everywhere.
I concluded that we were setting ourselves up for a disaster that will make the Chinese and Haitian earthquakes or the Indian Ocean Tsunami look like traffic fender benders. After all, the whole southwest (and many other deserts on this planet) is dotted with the remains of past civilizations that simply dried up and blew away when the water stopped.
What’s going to happen in LA and the southwest won’t be at all historically unusual. No matter what we do, in a thousand years archaeologists will wander through the ruins of the Mt. Palomar observatory wondering what forgotten god this temple was built for. (Movie lots will probably baffle them completely.) But we don’t have to hurry the inevitable.
So much of the water that DOES get to LA—or Phoenix or San Diego, Bakersfield, Las Vegas and Santa Barbara—is wasted on growing the sort of green grass that was meant for well watered places like Kentucky and Michigan! It is distributed by sprinklers that allow much of the water intended for lawns to evaporate before it even reaches the ground! This is DESERT, guys, DESERT!
Today’s blog offered the best news I’ve heard out of southern California since Clint Eastwood rescued the western movie genre. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, in a fit of inspired sanity, is paying customers to rip up their lawns!
You can get as much as two grand if you tear out the grass and replace it with the kind of plants God meant to grow in desert and semi-desert climates, stuff that doesn’t need tons of water. Or you can put in flag stones, gravel and brick walkways.
You can even lay down synthetic turf—if you absolutely have to keep up the illusion that you really never left Ohio. For those who cannot bear to accept the fact that they actually do live in arid Southern California, there are rebates for water efficient appliances, lower pressure sprinkler nozzles and timers on those sprinklers.
This is necessary—vital—throughout the American southwest if humans are going to keep crowding in to lands meant for few people and less greenery. It won’t prevent the inevitable collapse of an overstressed water system, but it might significantly delay the evil day.
How about a slogan for the folks at the waterworks? “Rip up your lawn, Los Angelinos, the life you prolong could be your own.”
Saturday, February 20, 2010
The Unemployed--The Invisible Ones
Several million Americans are surviving on Unemployment Insurance; they are listed. Thousands more are registered with State employment agencies for news of job openings; they are listed. Thousands/millions (?) more have been reduced to part time status; they are the estimated under-employed. Then there are many, many more who have run out of benefits and given up looking; no one quite knows their number.
In the past few weeks I’ve run into a new class of under/unemployed who aren’t included in the 9.7% unemployment figures—the forcibly retired. They certainly aren’t listed when anybody counts the casualties of this recession.
Let me offer two examples. My casualty insurance agent technically represented one company, but he owns his own office building and hired his own staff. I’ve known him for over thirty years and been with him as a client for many of those years. He’s in his early sixties.
A year or two ago I kidded him about retiring. Very sincerely he replied, “Next year I’ll have two kids in college, one just starting. I can’t afford to retire!” Early this year the company he has represented for decades cut back.
They closed the local offices, forced “early retirement” to the people old enough to be vested and left us with an eight hundred number in Detroit. My friend’s building is empty (who’s renting business space in this economic climate?); whether he wanted it or not, he is retired.
Who else realizes that his pension pays a lot less college tuition, books and fees than his income from running a full time agency did? He was in good health; he enjoyed what he did—he is definitely among the unlisted unemployed, a real casualty of the recession. What can he do around here?
Then there is the lady at our bank. She’s been there about as long as we’ve been banking there. She, too, has to be about sixty. She’s in excellent health, enjoys her work, and makes an excellent job of it. She’s single, divorced, completely dependent upon her own resources.
She has been for years our go-to banker. Any problems, we called her. She’d make phone calls, check her computer files and come with any answer we needed—or be able to refer us to precisely the person who could help us. She even got some banking charges reversed for us.
The other day my wife stopped to see her, and our favorite banker told her that next week is her last week. Her bank got bought out by a larger, eastern bank. (Too many “irrationally exuberant” loans, as Alan Greenspan might have put it.)
The big thing about combining two companies or banks is all the duplicate people you can lay off. The logical thing was to look at her and say, “She’s been here long enough for her pension to vest; we can call her retired without having to pay for unemployment insurance.”
The first of March—she’s gone. We are certainly going to miss her—but nobody asked us. I don’t think anybody asked her, either. She’s on no list in any labor department—but she’s as unemployed as any guy who once worked in a now closed factory.
That’s just two people in my limited circle of acquaintances in a small town in western Michigan. With all of the business retrenchment, consolidation and take-overs that have gone on during this economic down turn, I scarcely believe they are unique.
I suspect there are a whole lot of them—tens, hundreds of thousands, possibly more—a whole category of the unemployed, the underemployed, certainly those with greatly reduced incomes that do not show up on anybody’s list.
They are, I suspect, in permanently reduced circumstances. No matter how booming the long delayed job recovery, these folk are unlikely ever to find employment that earns what they made when they were fully and happily employed.
They will not be contributing significantly to the consumer buying boom we are all depending on to lift us out of this mess. That could be bad news—for all of us.
In the past few weeks I’ve run into a new class of under/unemployed who aren’t included in the 9.7% unemployment figures—the forcibly retired. They certainly aren’t listed when anybody counts the casualties of this recession.
Let me offer two examples. My casualty insurance agent technically represented one company, but he owns his own office building and hired his own staff. I’ve known him for over thirty years and been with him as a client for many of those years. He’s in his early sixties.
A year or two ago I kidded him about retiring. Very sincerely he replied, “Next year I’ll have two kids in college, one just starting. I can’t afford to retire!” Early this year the company he has represented for decades cut back.
They closed the local offices, forced “early retirement” to the people old enough to be vested and left us with an eight hundred number in Detroit. My friend’s building is empty (who’s renting business space in this economic climate?); whether he wanted it or not, he is retired.
Who else realizes that his pension pays a lot less college tuition, books and fees than his income from running a full time agency did? He was in good health; he enjoyed what he did—he is definitely among the unlisted unemployed, a real casualty of the recession. What can he do around here?
Then there is the lady at our bank. She’s been there about as long as we’ve been banking there. She, too, has to be about sixty. She’s in excellent health, enjoys her work, and makes an excellent job of it. She’s single, divorced, completely dependent upon her own resources.
She has been for years our go-to banker. Any problems, we called her. She’d make phone calls, check her computer files and come with any answer we needed—or be able to refer us to precisely the person who could help us. She even got some banking charges reversed for us.
The other day my wife stopped to see her, and our favorite banker told her that next week is her last week. Her bank got bought out by a larger, eastern bank. (Too many “irrationally exuberant” loans, as Alan Greenspan might have put it.)
The big thing about combining two companies or banks is all the duplicate people you can lay off. The logical thing was to look at her and say, “She’s been here long enough for her pension to vest; we can call her retired without having to pay for unemployment insurance.”
The first of March—she’s gone. We are certainly going to miss her—but nobody asked us. I don’t think anybody asked her, either. She’s on no list in any labor department—but she’s as unemployed as any guy who once worked in a now closed factory.
That’s just two people in my limited circle of acquaintances in a small town in western Michigan. With all of the business retrenchment, consolidation and take-overs that have gone on during this economic down turn, I scarcely believe they are unique.
I suspect there are a whole lot of them—tens, hundreds of thousands, possibly more—a whole category of the unemployed, the underemployed, certainly those with greatly reduced incomes that do not show up on anybody’s list.
They are, I suspect, in permanently reduced circumstances. No matter how booming the long delayed job recovery, these folk are unlikely ever to find employment that earns what they made when they were fully and happily employed.
They will not be contributing significantly to the consumer buying boom we are all depending on to lift us out of this mess. That could be bad news—for all of us.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Iraq--A War is a War is a War
They’re going to rename the Iraq War. Defense Secretary Gates insists this sends a “strong message” about what the war is all about. (I wish we’d known what it was all about back in 2003, don’t you?) Instead of calling it “Operation Iraqi Freedom” (did you remember it was ever called that? I did not.), we’re going to call it “Operation New Dawn”.
This will make everything all better again? Is this like renaming the “Garbage Man” and calling him a “Sanitary Engineer”? Or is it like what the legislature did in Michigan? They felt it was unfair for kids to graduate from four year state colleges in Michigan and have to compete with “university” graduates from places like the University of Michigan or Harvard.
They renamed every government supported educational institution in the state a “university” by legislative fiat. Who cares if it gives a graduate degree or not? Who cares if it has various schools representing different disciplines? By law it’s a university.
See the awesome power in something so simple as a name change? By merely rearranging the name, you can make Podunk College the full equivalent of Harvard, Yale or Princeton. Podunk University has a truly powerful ring to it, hasn’t it?
Ask any garbage man how much richer his life is now that he is a Sanitary Engineer. Merde’. That’s what he hauled before; that’s what he’s still hauling today. Our invasion of Iraq was a masterpiece of confusion under the old name; it remains as much so today.
Name it what you will, but a rose is a rose is a rose—and a skunk cabbage is a skunk cabbage is a skunk cabbage. Legislate all you wish, you don’t change the smell or the behavior of anything. I really don’t know what Gates or anyone else was thinking.
All I CAN conclude is that candor has not replaced idiocy, hypocrisy, self delusion or fantasy in this administration. Bush or Obama, the beat goes on. Whether the administration considers a New Dawn to be an upgrade from Iraqi Freedom or a downgrade doesn’t matter a fig.
The new mission doesn’t matter. We didn’t know what we were getting into originally and we go right on limping because of all the times we shot ourselves in the foot. We didn’t send in enough troops to secure the place—or Saddam’s arsenals, and those munitions are blowing people up today. Yes, there are still nasty explosions in Iraq.
We were promised—by an administration that seemed to have no idea what a little ordinance can do to an oil field or a pipeline—that the war would pay for itself out of Iraqi oil revenues. By saying so out loud, Bush convinced the entire Muslim world we were merely after Iraq’s oil.
Iraqi militants learned fast that oil fields/pipelines are the easiest things in the world to blow up (we could have figured that out by reading the official postwar study of the affects of strategic bombing during World War II). As a result, we got zip.
And now the Chinese and the French are moving into those oil fields and can be expected to clean up big time. Do you suppose they see it as a “New Dawn”? I would imagine. We spent our blood and money and won’t be getting a dime or a drop back.
For us that’s scarcely a new dawn, just a slightly darker night. We demand that Tiger Woods call a philanderer a philanderer, no euphemisms, please. But we try to make a whole war go away by just coining a new name for it.
Was that another “boom” I heard coming from Iraq? It must have been the new dawn coming up like thunder. The new name certainly sends a strong message—that we haven’t stopped fooling ourselves yet.
This will make everything all better again? Is this like renaming the “Garbage Man” and calling him a “Sanitary Engineer”? Or is it like what the legislature did in Michigan? They felt it was unfair for kids to graduate from four year state colleges in Michigan and have to compete with “university” graduates from places like the University of Michigan or Harvard.
They renamed every government supported educational institution in the state a “university” by legislative fiat. Who cares if it gives a graduate degree or not? Who cares if it has various schools representing different disciplines? By law it’s a university.
See the awesome power in something so simple as a name change? By merely rearranging the name, you can make Podunk College the full equivalent of Harvard, Yale or Princeton. Podunk University has a truly powerful ring to it, hasn’t it?
Ask any garbage man how much richer his life is now that he is a Sanitary Engineer. Merde’. That’s what he hauled before; that’s what he’s still hauling today. Our invasion of Iraq was a masterpiece of confusion under the old name; it remains as much so today.
Name it what you will, but a rose is a rose is a rose—and a skunk cabbage is a skunk cabbage is a skunk cabbage. Legislate all you wish, you don’t change the smell or the behavior of anything. I really don’t know what Gates or anyone else was thinking.
All I CAN conclude is that candor has not replaced idiocy, hypocrisy, self delusion or fantasy in this administration. Bush or Obama, the beat goes on. Whether the administration considers a New Dawn to be an upgrade from Iraqi Freedom or a downgrade doesn’t matter a fig.
The new mission doesn’t matter. We didn’t know what we were getting into originally and we go right on limping because of all the times we shot ourselves in the foot. We didn’t send in enough troops to secure the place—or Saddam’s arsenals, and those munitions are blowing people up today. Yes, there are still nasty explosions in Iraq.
We were promised—by an administration that seemed to have no idea what a little ordinance can do to an oil field or a pipeline—that the war would pay for itself out of Iraqi oil revenues. By saying so out loud, Bush convinced the entire Muslim world we were merely after Iraq’s oil.
Iraqi militants learned fast that oil fields/pipelines are the easiest things in the world to blow up (we could have figured that out by reading the official postwar study of the affects of strategic bombing during World War II). As a result, we got zip.
And now the Chinese and the French are moving into those oil fields and can be expected to clean up big time. Do you suppose they see it as a “New Dawn”? I would imagine. We spent our blood and money and won’t be getting a dime or a drop back.
For us that’s scarcely a new dawn, just a slightly darker night. We demand that Tiger Woods call a philanderer a philanderer, no euphemisms, please. But we try to make a whole war go away by just coining a new name for it.
Was that another “boom” I heard coming from Iraq? It must have been the new dawn coming up like thunder. The new name certainly sends a strong message—that we haven’t stopped fooling ourselves yet.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Job Loss--No One's In Charge
In the hue and cry over lost jobs—especially those that have departed for foreign parts—one very real problem is being overlooked. It’s a problem that the United States faced before, and it took us the better part of a century to get a handle on it the first time.
True, a lot of the difficulty with jobs going overseas and major corporate misbehavior is greed, desire to avoid taxes political ineptitude, etc. But there is a significant factor that is merely a consequence of continued growth, almost an evolutionary thing.
Let’s look at the first time we faced this situation. Back when the Constitution was written, in 1787, the United States had almost no industry whatsoever. The largest business in the country may well have been no bigger than a general store or an independent hardware store.
It never crossed anyone’s mind that there might EVER be a need for federal interference with or regulation of a business behavior. About all the Constitution says about regulating business is that no state may charge tariffs or tolls on goods from another state. Any regulation of business itself was left to the state it was in. That worked for a few years.
Then Jefferson embargoed goods from France and England, and we were forced to build our own factories. Shortly after that someone invented something called a railroad and it became possible to ship goods from a business in one state to outlets in a dozen others.
The railroads themselves quickly became too big for any one state to control. How could the state of Indiana, for instance, exercise effective control over the behavior of a railroad that originated in New York and ran through it to Illinois? It couldn’t.
American business entered a period of more than half-a-century in which literally no one exercised any control over its behavior. (Nelson Rockefeller was once asked if his grandfather, Standard Oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, ever broke any laws.
Nelson, himself a governor and a Vice President, thought for a moment. “No,” he said, “grampa didn’t BREAK any laws—but they sure made a lot of laws BECAUSE of him.” John D. enforced his oil monopoly with, among other things, sticks of dynamite applied none to gingerly to a competitor’s stocks of crude oil.
“Commodore” Vanderbilt created his monopoly over ferry boats in New York harbor by dynamiting any competitor who wouldn’t sell out to him. He pretty much ran his railroads the same way, making the famous comment, “My God, John, you don’t think you can run a railroad according to laws of the State of New York, do you?” He didn’t bother.
Banker Pierpont Morgan could contemptuously dismiss a presidential complaint by suggesting, “You send your man (the Secretary of Treasury) to see my man (his personal secretary), and they can work it out.” He saw a president as merely an equal, if that.)
It took decades of creating commissions (like that Interstate Commerce Commission—which for years was completely powerless), passing laws, and finally stocking the Supreme Court with men who thought it might be okay for the Federal Government to exercise some control over business and banking. It was a long, bitter political fight.
Finally, it took the collapse of the markets in 1929, and a loss of half the national product over the next four years, to give Washington real powers of regulation over business coast to coast. But business has continued to grow. Now it doesn’t just run through Indiana unregulated, it spans foreign continents with no state or national power having the jurisdiction to make it behave.
It can send jobs where it likes, where they are cheapest; it can move its plants to places that have the lowest tax rates—across oceans. Once again, we have “railroads”, “banks” and “oil monopolies” too big and too wide spread for any one governmental entity to control them.
No one tax code applies, no set of regulations. They can be a law unto themselves.
So how do we get them back under control? The United Nations? A single World Government? An absolutely appalling thought. But come up with another one that works. Until then, just hope some Commodore Vanderbilt isn’t mad at the ferry you happen to be riding. At the very least, he might ship your job to China.
True, a lot of the difficulty with jobs going overseas and major corporate misbehavior is greed, desire to avoid taxes political ineptitude, etc. But there is a significant factor that is merely a consequence of continued growth, almost an evolutionary thing.
Let’s look at the first time we faced this situation. Back when the Constitution was written, in 1787, the United States had almost no industry whatsoever. The largest business in the country may well have been no bigger than a general store or an independent hardware store.
It never crossed anyone’s mind that there might EVER be a need for federal interference with or regulation of a business behavior. About all the Constitution says about regulating business is that no state may charge tariffs or tolls on goods from another state. Any regulation of business itself was left to the state it was in. That worked for a few years.
Then Jefferson embargoed goods from France and England, and we were forced to build our own factories. Shortly after that someone invented something called a railroad and it became possible to ship goods from a business in one state to outlets in a dozen others.
The railroads themselves quickly became too big for any one state to control. How could the state of Indiana, for instance, exercise effective control over the behavior of a railroad that originated in New York and ran through it to Illinois? It couldn’t.
American business entered a period of more than half-a-century in which literally no one exercised any control over its behavior. (Nelson Rockefeller was once asked if his grandfather, Standard Oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, ever broke any laws.
Nelson, himself a governor and a Vice President, thought for a moment. “No,” he said, “grampa didn’t BREAK any laws—but they sure made a lot of laws BECAUSE of him.” John D. enforced his oil monopoly with, among other things, sticks of dynamite applied none to gingerly to a competitor’s stocks of crude oil.
“Commodore” Vanderbilt created his monopoly over ferry boats in New York harbor by dynamiting any competitor who wouldn’t sell out to him. He pretty much ran his railroads the same way, making the famous comment, “My God, John, you don’t think you can run a railroad according to laws of the State of New York, do you?” He didn’t bother.
Banker Pierpont Morgan could contemptuously dismiss a presidential complaint by suggesting, “You send your man (the Secretary of Treasury) to see my man (his personal secretary), and they can work it out.” He saw a president as merely an equal, if that.)
It took decades of creating commissions (like that Interstate Commerce Commission—which for years was completely powerless), passing laws, and finally stocking the Supreme Court with men who thought it might be okay for the Federal Government to exercise some control over business and banking. It was a long, bitter political fight.
Finally, it took the collapse of the markets in 1929, and a loss of half the national product over the next four years, to give Washington real powers of regulation over business coast to coast. But business has continued to grow. Now it doesn’t just run through Indiana unregulated, it spans foreign continents with no state or national power having the jurisdiction to make it behave.
It can send jobs where it likes, where they are cheapest; it can move its plants to places that have the lowest tax rates—across oceans. Once again, we have “railroads”, “banks” and “oil monopolies” too big and too wide spread for any one governmental entity to control them.
No one tax code applies, no set of regulations. They can be a law unto themselves.
So how do we get them back under control? The United Nations? A single World Government? An absolutely appalling thought. But come up with another one that works. Until then, just hope some Commodore Vanderbilt isn’t mad at the ferry you happen to be riding. At the very least, he might ship your job to China.
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