Opinion-Columns.com

Labor and Management, Mutual Destroyers

Big article in the papers today about Ford, reorganizing its relationship with suppliers to get back in the black.  Re-organizing, in this case means wrecking the fortunes and careers of a whole bunch of people Ford encouraged into cut-throat competition with one another, for its own leverage and profitability. 

Sorry guys, didn’t work. Bill Ford can explain a lot, but there's no way to sugar-coat this decision.

Bankrupt your companies, sell the house, lay off your workers so they will have to sell their houses as well.  Smaller houses perhaps, but with equal or even worse consequences.  Social engineers would put the case that Ford (and GM and Chrysler) have a responsibility to reverse the process they insisted upon, through a less destabilizing series of mergers and acquisitions that would decrease the field of players while softening the blow.

Detroit’s Big Three have never worked in any interest other than their own and in the past three decades they haven't even done that.  They will probably not any of them survive as companies, certainly not without dumping their collective pension and health plans (these were a plan?) on the taxpayer.  Automakers blindly followed America’s steel industry in the mutually-destructive and ultimately destroying, embittered relationship between Labor and Management. 

You can add to that list as your local dying or dead industry dictates, but Steel and Auto led the way.

Paradoxically, Management made its worst blunders in good times.  Within the narrow confines of periodic profitability, when cars were selling, Management was too self-interested to recognize the monster it was inviting into its corporate broom closet. And it was the broom closet. Unions were never recognized as anything other than the ungrateful grease monkeys, holding a gun to Management's head.

For its part, Labor hadn’t a lot more to ask for financially.  Wages were great, but the union bosses needed re-election and discontent was the surest way to get it.  Thus began the years of crippling focus on work-rules, retirement and health benefits.  Plenty of blame for both sides, greed instead of need for the unions and anything-to-keep-the-lines-moving on the part of Management.

During these years, the Japanese, who would soon arrive to bash Detroit’s brains out, had invited labor organizations into their board-rooms. It’s a simplification to say that the Japanese system of lifetime employment and union integration into corporate decision-making is universal or without problems. But it recognizes what we fail to see in the American confrontational paradigm, that the health and welfare of corporations is tied irrevocably and systematically to the health and welfare of its employees.  Thus one cannot possibly prosper in the long-term without the other.

The crime of the 20th century in America was not the Lindbergh kidnapping or the O.J. Simpson murder trial, but the failure of Labor and Management to integrate. 

Jobs are not special, nor are profits.  Each can be found elsewhere, relocated off shore or brought home, according to its maximum advantage and each is currently bound to rules that have no basis in human values.  That we have encouraged union leadership and corporate governance to act in short-term advantage against long-term values has proven to be an exercise in the reality of just how quickly the long-term comes upon us. 

It’s too late for American Steel and I make the case it’s too late as well for American Automakers unless something both drastic and unconpromising happens to force a detente.

Unions are at a crossroads and they are met at that four-way stop by a badly injured American business model.  What happens next and the fortunes and futures of untold millions of American families depends upon the intelligence and good-will of leaders who must unbind themselves from past grievances and past working relationships.

The prospects for that are not good.  The best hope for the beginning of an industrial renaissance is in the hands of the head of one of the last family dynasties, William Clay Ford.  He and Anna Burger, who heads up a breakaway coalition of unions should lock themselves in a room and consider the future of American industry. 
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See Taking My Country Personally on my personal web site.

There’s No Business Like No-Bid ness

The feeding frenzy has begun.  Congress has been chumming for decades and now that the water is alive with sharks, they’re alarmed and surprised and ‘absolutely shocked,’ to lift a line from Casablanca.

If you’re a fisherman, you know what ‘chumming’ is.  That’s when you throw lots of fish-bits overboard in order to attract other fish, which you are then (with any luck) able to catch.  Government contracting been pretty much an uninterrupted chum ever since 9-11 and this administration has awarded more no-bid and cost-plus contracts than any preceding holder of the keys to the national purse.  Lest I be accused of Bush-mongering, it would have been an equal-opportunity giveaway had the Democrats held those keys.

Happy Days Are Here Again and There’s No Business Like No-Bid ness are heard in the halls of a Congress giddy with money.  Democrats and Republicans stumble over one another in their eagerness to get their own guys into the swim before there’s less blood in the water. Duke, from the Doonesbury cartoon (the source of the title to this commentary) jokes to Honey that the Inspectors General are merely ‘hall monitors.’

Halliburton heads the shark-list, as one might expect, but they’re closely followed by Shaw Group.  Lobbyist for Shaw Group is Joe Allbaugh, who used to sit as Director of FEMA. What a surprise. Halliburton’s door-opener, on the other hand,  need not even lift a phone, his connection is so well known.  And yet the contracts are let, the payoffs paid off, the baksheesh spread liberally and among much hand-wringing, no one seems to have a cure for this common-cold of government.

I have one. 

It’s very nearly self-policing.  It’s as simple as it could possibly be, uncomplicated in all aspects of its enforcement and could quickly be set in place. Congress need merely enact a law that corporate officers are singly and collectively liable for all crimes and misdemeanors committed by their companies while under government contract.

Up until now, when a Boeing or a Halliburton got caught with its hand in the till, an underling took the rap.  Corporate officers would then hold a press conference, pleading that one bad apple does not a barrel make, that the doer of the dastardly deed has been routed out and all is now back safely on the up-and-up.

Doesn’t work.  Hasn’t done a thing for cleaning up the blood in the water.

What does work is to send a Bernie Ebbers, Dennis Kozlowski  or John Rigas to the slammer.  Halliburton might not be quite so sanguine about the repeated instances of cooked books in Iraq contracting if their Dick Cheney replacement, CEO David Lesar stood to be cuffed and carted off to the pokey.  Corporate directives would soon filter their way down the food chain that the boss was damned well not going to go to jail for any sort of financial irregularity.  You think that might have an affect?  How soon?

Yeah, that soon!

I personally would rest easier if the occasionally necessary ‘no-bidness’ contract was awarded under such circumstances.  I’m double-damned sure Tom DeLay and Nancy Pelosi, Bill Frist and Harry Reid would have to support a law like that.
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For more comments on Washington at work, see my personal web site.

Insurance Coverage, Conveniently After the Fact

What a great deal. Auto insurance only if you wreck your car, life insurance only after you’re dead, fire insurance after the fire and flood insurance . . . you guessed it, after Katrina has swept you off the map.

I’d buy that.  Certainly you’d buy that.  Who would bother with expensive insurance, if they knew they could get covered anyway? 

So, that’s what is about to be proposed in the United States Congress (where anything is possible) and it has the feel-good badge of help for mostly poor victims of the horrendous hurricane damage.  You’d have to be pretty hard-hearted not to support that. 

Or would you?  A little closer look tells you the recipient of all this largesse are not who you think they are. 

The money goes directly into the pockets of mortgage holders, without bothering to pass GO, and certainly without anybody but them collecting $200.  Some $15 billion into the pockets of this or that bank, savings and loan, union savings bank or other holder of paper.  $15 bil is the starting number, the entry fee, the one they run up the flagpole to see if anyone salutes.  Then the serious business begins, the shearing of that sheep called the federal government.

Last time I had a home mortgage, my lender required natural disaster insurance that included every possibility short of war, and a life-insurance policy in his name as well.  Lots of Gulf lenders apparently overlooked that because it was costly and occasionally impossible. Now they stand to get back title to tens of thousands of properties that are either gone entirely or so badly damaged as to be beyond repair.  They want the Fed (you and me) to pick up the bill. Not only pick up the bill, they want you to think it's helping a victim. 

Time to check your pockets to see if your watch is missing.

I’m happy to lend a hand to a neighbor in need, even if his neighborhood is a thousand miles from mine.  But a business? A business in the risk industry?  A business that ignored its own risk assessment policy and now wants me to pick up their check, so they can have a free lunch? 

My old daddy used to say that the bank would loan you an umbrella if it wasn’t raining.  The Consumer Mortgage Coalition has gone old daddy one better. They loaned you an umbrella with no fabric on it (which they knew at the time) and now want your neighbors to pay for the new suit you ruined in the rain.

That’s what’s called chutzpah, which is Yiddish for unbelievable gall, insolence and/or audacity. This Consumer Mortgage Coalition that's sponsoring the crocodile-tears, doesn’t represent a single consumer.  Nary a flooded out victim do they speak for.  Not a single poor, black mom with four kids and no home left do they stand up to defend. 

Who they do stand for is a full range of large companies that originate, service and guarantee home mortgages.  There’s a whole bunch of money in the originating and servicing departments and there was a bundle as well in the guaranteeing, until Katrina.

Now, misrepresenting their proposed legislation as being in the interests of Katrina victims, they are looking to get well at your and my expense.  Googling “cmc membership” I was unable to get a listing of their members.  They're kinda cagey about that.  But I did get Cassidys Massage Clinic, where a three month minimum membership is required.

At least Cassidy’s promises some hope of satisfaction for their charges.
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There are lots more things that make me nuts, all of them on my personal web site.

The Honorary Degree, a Template For Patronage

If you’ve been good to Harvard or Yale or Podunk U by contributing to the Building Fund, you too may be deserving of an honorary degree.  A speech can sometimes do it, but you have to be pretty far up the food chain.  Paying for a building almost always works.

Doctor of Literature sound good to you? No problem, that particular title can be found on a sliding-scale representing the cost-benefit ratio.  No one is likely to start addressing you by the title “Dr.,” but the honor is framed to hang ostentatiously on your library wall and makes a dandy reference in “Who’s Who.”  Inescapably, it will appear in that ultimate tribute, your obituary.

I think we ought to celebrate that back-scratching relationship, time-tested and proven of mutual value in the hallowed halls of academia. We learn, once again, from the teachers.  The honorary title, a template for patronage in modern government.

As every incoming administration knows, there are ambassadorships to be filled, delegations to be headed, agencies to be directed, boards to be filled, commissions and committees to be steered, shoes to be shined and apples polished.  All by appointment.  A virtual cornucopia of legacy-hiring, patronage lists to make the eyes of the numberless and mostly unknown political suck-ups fairly shine.

Talented people don’t aspire to these positions (with the possible exception of Ambassador to England or France).  Talented people are already busy with whatever their talent has led them to do.  They may gladly drop a couple hundred thou in the Republican or Democratic tin cup, but they’re looking for business access, not a job.  No title, thanks, just answer the phone when I call.

These appointive positions every administration has drop in their lap the day after the votes have been counted are more likely to be filled by Arabian horse enthusiasts than captains of industry or specialists in terrorism.  Captains, after all, are already captaining, specialists putting in a full day specializing on their own behalf.

The patronage army must be fed and clothed and given marching orders.  More importantly, they must be kept from the levers of power and I have a scheme.

What is critically needed is an office in each of these embassies, agencies, boards and commissions that reflects the honor being done on behalf of the occupant.  Merely an office. Deep carpeting, heavy drapery across windows that view, if not the Capitol Dome, at the very least a leafy street-scene.  Highly polished mahogany, luxurious leather chairs and sofas, flags (perhaps even a personal flag, much like a coat of arms), a private bath by all means.

A wall.  A place on that wall for the obligatory picture of the occupant, making direct and unwavering eye-contact with the camera, the President’s arm thrown casually across his shoulder.  Golf clubs or shotguns are optional in the photo, depending upon one's sense of humor.  A private secretary is mandatory. He or she must be a sort of concierge to arrange lunch dates, rounds of golf, dinner invitations and the pressing correspondence attendant to these functions.

Actual interaction with the embassy, agency, board or committee is discouraged, if not outright forbidden.  Actual residence in Washington or the country of assignment is optional.  The flowers will be fresh, as will be the coffee, so long as the appointee's private secretary is given notice of ‘intent to occupy’ whenever our hero or heroine decides to pay a visit.

The actual person running the embassy, agency, board, commission or committee will be given a subordinate title, but absolute authority.  Thus we are not likely to be embarrassed by ambassadors who can’t speak the native language, blundering into whatever the diplomatic business of the moment might be. 

One can almost hear the massive sigh of relief on both sides of many oceans.

It’s an elegant solution, far cheaper than the costly errors that abound when these well-meaning bumblers are actually given authority.  An idea whose time has come. You there, you forests of patronage trees, step up and bow slightly from the waist.  The medal of office is about to be placed, with just the fleeting hint of a smile on the presidential lips, around your financially supportive necks.

Now sit back, relax and, for goodness sake, don't touch the red phone.
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For more comments on Washington at work, see my personal web site.

Looking For An Evil Capitalist

The pump-price of gasoline has edged beyond three bucks, which is what it is and might even prove to be acceptable, if it weren’t for the fact that oil companies are making record profits.

America loves a profit, but only certain profits.  We have no conflict with blue jeans, that farmer-pants phenomenon that swept the world, selling $2.50 dungarees for two hundred bucks.  Does anybody even say dungarees any more?  And we somehow seem to live with music CDs at $14.95 that don’t make any money for the artist, but pay for Malibu beach houses for record executives.

So, we’re selective about our evil capitalists.

The current rage among consumers, a wave of anger that thunders (as all waves of anger do) against the seawall of the United States Congress, has two primary villains; (A) that bloodsucking group of domestic oil companies and (B) the credit-card industry sharks, circling in the bloody waters of circumstance. 

So, we’re gonna get ‘em, gonna call out a congressional investigation or maybe two, perhaps six if all the committees that would like to investigate are allowed to do so.  Down with profiteering, so long as it isn’t the kind of profiteering we care nothing about, like farmers’ pants, Iraq war goods and services or the psychic cost of keeping Paris Hilton on everyone’s horizon.

Now I’m not a fan of the oil companies, not on their payroll and I think they operate as unconscionably as most other huge American business enterprises. No more, no less. And I think the credit-card industry is in serious need of federal oversight, not because they gouge us (which they do), but because they gouge us in unfair proportion among the poor.  Very Dickensian, those credit-card moguls, throwing the poor into the streets and bringing the wrath of the poorhouse to defenseless widows and fatherless children. 

But Congress is going to have a major problem investigating, because Congress is the instrument that has allowed Big Oil its monopoly over pricing.  It is also the instrument of newly stiffened bankruptcy laws that inordinately protect credit-card issuers at the expense of consumers. 

How did that happen?

Well, it happened to the benefit of the oil industry behind Dick Cheney’s famously closed doors, the doors that ushered in what later became known as the Energy Bill. "It's not a bill for today or necessarily tomorrow -- it's for the future," said Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Pete V. Domenici from New Mexico. Is that clear to you?  Does it even make sense as a sentence?  But Pete got away with that muddle of words at the signing ceremony about six weeks ago. A chief sponsor of the bill, Pete didn’t specify whose future the bill enhanced, but being from New Mexico, we can guess.

As for the credit-card industry, just five months ago Congress passed the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act.  Don’t you just love that name?  Senator Grassley sponsored this to protect consumers by crunching low-income working people, single mothers, minorities and the elderly, meanwhile removing a safety net for those who have lost their jobs or face crushing medical bills.

Grassley saw fit to keep you and I and his fellow Iowans from using (or in his mind, abusing) bankruptcy courts, but didn’t see any reason to keep credit-card companies from charging 36% per month on past due accounts.  If it wasn’t for that usury, we probably wouldn’t go bankrupt as often and wouldn't have needed the legislation.

So, the necessary thing is to first identify the Evil Capitalists, so they can be brought to justice.  It’s our primary mission, prioritized above all others.

Without that, we are destined to flounder around from crisis to crisis, trying to pin the tail on various and always-changing evil-capitalist donkeys. We need a one-size-fits-all donkey, someone who is on the payroll of all these evildoers, who time after time after time sells us down the road of their own short-term gain, who has until now been immune to punishment and sees fit to put themselves above us all.

I nominate the Congress.
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For more comments on Washington at work, see my personal web site.

The Image of Greatness Is Not Greatness

I don’t know if stunned is the proper word, because I’ve become a little too cynical for stunned, but certainly I’m amazed at how this administration regularly talks about their image and controlling their image and polishing their image, as though it meant something substantive.

This president has just discovered poverty as if it were some secret being kept from him, which, now that I think about it, might not be all that far from correct.  Remember his Dad, nonplussed by bar-codes in the super-market?  It makes on wonder if we can really afford presidents who have lived their lives in the bubble.

John Stuart Mill, a nineteenth century philosopher and economist, said  “Men are men before they are lawyers, or physicians, or merchants, or manufacturers; and if you make them capable and sensible men, they will make themselves capable and sensible lawyers or physicians.” It becomes painfully obvious that a man or an institution or a business based on the image of capability and dedicated to the image of sensibility, will leave us nothing more than smoke and mirrors.  For the real thing we must go elsewhere.

The question is where does one go when government has failed?

I think we go where we have gone before in earlier times of financial or spiritual collapse, to each other.  Those who believe in this government tighten their lips, turn to each other for comfort and wait for the bad times to pass.  Those who don’t believe or who did and no longer do, turn to each other with raised eyebrows and hunker down to wait for an opportunity at the polls.  We commiserate with our kind, compare notes with those who agree with us, preach to our own choirs and compare our individual sacred images.

Images?

Yes, images.  We understand our world by image, even as we denigrate the image-makers.  We have an idea of ourselves, we Americans and what else is an idea of ourselves but an image?  Our American image is that of power and justice, opportunity and equality, faith and patience.  Those are precisely the mental pictures of our elemental nature that are so shattered when reality intrudes with photographs of Abu Ghraib or the SuperDome and we automatically react by unrealistic support or unrealistic blame, depending on our image of American leadership.

It’s complicated stuff, these reactions by gut instead of intellect.  We write commentaries like this out of intellect but they are inspired by gut.  I am tempted to say there is no intellect without gut, but I haven’t thought that one out very well (intellect) and so my concern is that it will be disproved in a thousand ways (gut).  Today we’re at a turning point in American politics, that tipping of balance between approval and disapproval, when an elected government loses the support of the majority. 

There are two possible remedies to that situation.  One is to change the substance of political direction and the other is to change the image.  This government has apparently chosen the latter and who can really blame them?  It’s a faster fix and time is not on their side.  And yet . . . and yet, history will prove again, as it always does . . .

. . . the image of greatness is not Greatness.
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More about politics in America at my personal web site.

Flushing Our Gulf Toilet

An interesting point of view a couple days ago from Donna Yowell.  Donna is the executive director of something called the Mississippi Urban Forest Council.  I checked out their web site and they have a slick little brochure there, even though the print is a mite too small for me.  They talk about the benefits of membership, the importance of trees and a bunch of other undeniable benefits to preferring trees over parking lots. 

But Donna is on the wrong scent when she talks about what Katrina did to her trees.  Specifically, she’s talking about Mississippi’s Clower-Thornton Nature Trail, which she toured recently.  “Every tree is brown, every leaf blown off," she says and Hurricane Katrina “has turned it into a toxic waste site overnight.”

Well, I don’t want to split hairs, Donna, but blaming Katrina for turning your favorite hiking trail into a toxic wasteland is sort of like blaming your toilet for the human waste that it’s designed to get rid of.  Hurricanes are nasty creatures when it comes to the man-made structures they come in contact with.  But they are also cleansers of the land they fall upon, flushing away what doesn’t belong and renewing the natural environment. They've been doing that for a good long time, an original and way early example of 'intelligent design.' Before people.  Before people even thought about being people.

The toxic stew that pollutes New Orleans, that we are this minute pumping into Lake Pontchartrain so it’ll be around a while in case we need it later, has no more to do with hurricanes than Walt Disney has to do with reality. We’re currently paying a monstrous price for decades of neglect, generations of not taking seriously all those nasty problems from industrial farming to the various ‘holding ponds’ that no longer held for chemical plants and refineries. 

Katrina pulled the chain.  What flushed was our doing.

There’s a panic on right now to ‘do something’ because we are not standers-by when the big challenge comes our way.  That’s more than understandable,  Toxic New Orleans must be pumped somewhere and both Pontchartrain and the Gulf are equally miserable decisions. 

Well, maybe not equally. Pontchartrain is probably the best of bad choices because it can be monitored closely over the nest twenty years and perhaps be brought back.  If we care enough.  Lake Erie was written off as a chemical soup and came back to be a fishing paradise, so there’s hope for Pontchartrain.

The Gulf is another matter, its ‘dead zone’ having expanded every year for the past thirty or so, virtually extinguishing the Gulf coast fishery.  Essentially, the Gulf is an inland sea, a closed bucket, like the Mediterranean and the lessons are much the same.  Surrounding countries flushing into the communal cesspool have pretty much destroyed the fishery; the Med over millennia and the Gulf over a few centuries.

Congress plans to examine the question soon.

Well, that cheers me considerably.  Way back in July, the Congress listened to a bunch of the world’s best climate researchers and, get this, a bipartisan group of Senators said they saw the need to take quick action.  Quick action.  They all said it, Democrats standing side by side to Republicans and saying it, “Quick action.” 

But they also said they were ‘struggling’ to reach a consensus on what to do.  I can understand that it's a struggle whether to keep on cashing those big campaign-finance checks from Big Oil and Big Farming and Big Chemical or just give it up.  Maybe lease a cabin on Walden Pond and take turns waiting for the voice of Henry Thoreau to give them a tip . . . or a backbone . . . or some ethics . . . whatever.

So, don’t hold your breath.  My guess is that we’ll keep on keepin’ on until the next disaster, which . . . what was that sound? . . . was that hurricane Rita, sneakin’ up on Houston?

Damn! So soon?
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See Taking My Country Personally on my personal web site.

Republicans at the Wailing Wall

It’s a sight for sore eyes, all these conservative Republicans having given so much away in the past five years instead of conserving that they’re bickering over how to pay for Katrina.

I’ve got an entirely new concept for you, guys and gals.  It’s called taxes.

Taxes are not something you merely cut for the benefit of the rich, they are a source of income.  Surprised?  I’ll bet you all thought that income was the big dough all those foreigners were sending us every month to prop up Iraq and the tax cuts.

Wrongo! That’s called the deficit.  Repeat after me, “That’s called the deficit.” Good.

The White House Budget Director, a guy by the name of Joshua Bolton, had a meeting the other day to try to stop a stampede.  The Congressional Republicans were milling restlessly out there on the congressional range, pawing at the ground and snorting, for a change. The whiff of predators was in the air.  Mid term elections sneakin' up behind them, back on the home turf. Too few cowboys and too many Indians circling their grazing lands.  Bolton’s eyes were narrowed, squinting into the sun, doin' the John-Wayne thing.  He knew a single gunshot, the roar of just one major Republican gun going off and the whole herd was headed off the range.

The shot was muffled, but it came from the Republican best hope in 2008, John McCain.   “Very entertaining,” he was heard to say as he left the Bolten's meeting, “I haven’t heard any specifics from the administration.”

The guys who are in trouble back home include Montana’s Conrad Burns.  He’s the one with the silly looking hat and a suit on.  “At least give us some idea” (how to cover the cost), he wailed. Ideas are a scarce commodity in the Senate. “We owe that to the American taxpayer.”  Translate that to mean you White-House guys owe that to me, who’s about to get his ass beat back home and who loyally voted for every giveaway the White House pitched.  There wasn’t a slow-ball pitch in the fiscal giveaway game Burns didn’t swing at.

Good old Tom Feeney, the same guy who was willing to pay any low wage the market would bear in Louisiana now said that he and other ‘fiscal conservatives’ are feeling a ‘genuine concern that could easily turn into frustration and anger.’  Well Tom, those are the fruits of all that conservation you conservatives have been doing.  You pissed away three billion and now you’re feeling a little genuine concern.  Mostly concerned, I would bet, on keeping your cushy seat in Congress and leading the low-wage-crusade. 

I’m betting that you and Burns, along with Rick Santorum are going to get your butts beat.  This country is finally really angry.  And when the country gets finally really angry, they tend to go after the cats that were too fat to chase an ordinary barn-mouse.  You see, we like our cats to go after the barn-mice.  It’s what we hire all you guys with funny hats and capped teeth to do for us.  When you don’t, there’s always another cat on the prowl, hungry and available.

Budget critic, fiscal hawk and worried economist Stephen Roach at Morgan Stanley thinks the hundreds of billions in debt at a time when personal savings are at an all-time low is more than merely improvident. “It will come back to haunt us,” he says. 

So, this animal-metaphor laden commentary has cows ready to stampede and cats lashing their tails, hawks circling, but it’s a message that’s slow to register in the Oval Office.  We have installed a drugstore cowboy there, a transplant from very proper Connecticut to ol-boy Texas and he doesn’t even ride a horse, much less know about cattle stampedes and barn-cats.

Nor does he understand that taxes must be raised and future cuts recinded, the cuts already made not be declared permanent.  The country is ready.  The country is willing.

The lesson is too late to learn.  The treasury, just like the well, has gone dry.
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More about politics in America at my personal web site.

Our Constitution, Kicking Up Its Heels

There’s just so much talk these days about what can or can’t be done interpreting the Constitution, that it’s as if we had no say at all beyond good old Tom Jefferson’s brilliant mind.

But let’s face it, Tom lived in a thinly populated, agrarian society.  There wasn’t an actual census taken until 1790, but the best guess is that our fledgling country fledged out at about 2.5 million.  White folks, landed folks, but less than 1% of today’s population, in a time of horse-travel and virtually no consciousness of the rest of the world  That world was also horse-traveling as best it could.  Is a nation that isolated supposed to contain all the societal genes necessary for modern life in this complicated and crowded world?  Did I say virtually?  That word had a far different meaning in Tom’s day.

Virtual, derived from 14th century medieval Latin, now has as its 3rd meaning in the Encarta World Dictionary, “COMPUTING generated by computer: simulated by a computer for reasons of economics, convenience, or performance.”

Fair enough. 

But how can we seriously ascribe an 18th century interpretation to a word that had not substantively changed its meaning in the 400 years previous to Jefferson, now that we find ourselves computering?  Not only computering, but shaving our morning face in Los Angeles and putting an evening smile on it in Paris?  Instantly communicating across oceans and continents, not by written word but by miraculously disassembled and reassembled zeros and ones, sent off in multiple directions to be brought together at the touch of a key.  A key?  Not Franklin’s key, for sure.

We are demonstrably no longer Jefferson’s America.  Yet we have failed in these past 229 years to uncover another national human treasure even close to his intellect. And here we sit . . . trembling lest we disturb those hallowed words that he and others as fiery as he and as argumentative as he, fashioned in a time the likes of which this country, and possibly the world will not see again.

It’s serious stuff and we take it seriously.  But we have never taken it as a frozen philosophy, as unchangeable fact, as inarguable truth.  Our courts redefine it on a continuing basis, thrashing the nuance out among the best legal minds we can muster and we live with it, die with it, but most of all and to our everlasting credit we change it as the times redefine the very essence of words.

Jefferson’s understanding of the word virtual, “being something in effect even if not in reality or not conforming to the generally accepted definition of the term” is not Bill Gates’ or Steve Jobs’ “simulated by a computer for reasons of economics, convenience, or performance.”

Supreme Court Justices do not give us law.  That’s the job, imperfectly accomplished, by State and Congressional legislature.  But they interpret those laws and must decide whether laws describing automobiles and nuclear arms and our very rights in an almost irrationally complicated world, can be made to mesh with the gears of our Founders’ minds.

It’s a formidable work, but it’s a work constantly in progress.
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See Taking My Country Personally on my personal web site.

Hurricane Dissemble Makes Landfall at 9pm

Picking up on the second part of president Bush’s historic dissemble from Jackson Square on Thursday, he said “the federal government will undertake a close partnership with the states of Louisiana and Mississippi, the city of New Orleans and other Gulf coast cities, so they can rebuild in a sensible, well-planned way.”

Sorry, George, but sensible and well planned are not achieved by any of the objectives mentioned earlier in your speech.  Sensible and well planned have only (arguably) been achieved at the World Trade Center site in New York after four years and actual construction hasn’t even been started there. 

In four years you’ll be history.  So, don’t kid us about sensible and well-planned when you’re due-date for this bill of achievement is next year’s mid-term election.

Proposing ‘an urban forty acres and a mule,’ our president mandated Congress to create and pass an Urban Homesteading Act. 

Not applicable nor available to impoverished Detroit, the economically depressed Cabrini Green section of Chicago, the slum ghettos of Los Angeles, New York, Houston or St. Louis, this proposed legislation reflects the president’s newly opened eyes on the Gulf coast.  An epiphany, reflecting the twelve days after Katrina and the visit of the three wise-men, Bush the unconcerned, Bush the contrite and Bush the budget-buster to the rescue.

“The work that has begun in the Gulf coast region will be one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen. When that job is done, all Americans will have something to be very proud of.” Except, of course, those living in impoverished Detroit, the economically depressed Cabrini Green section of Chicago, the slum ghettos of Los Angeles, New York, Houston or St. Louis. 

“Our cities must have clear and up-to-date plans for responding to natural disasters and disease outbreaks or a terrorist attack, for evacuating large numbers of people in an emergency, and for providing the food and water and security they would need.”

Correct me if I'm wrong.  I guess I had mistakenly believed the $10 billion or so we had spent on the Department of Homeland Security was supposed to have already taken care of those needs.  I was obviously in error.  That money was all allocated for the fuck-up leading to the actual getting-ready-for the preparation to possibly have in place such an organization at some future date.

“Congress is preparing an investigation, and I will work with members of both parties to make sure this effort is thorough.”  Laughable, George, on the face of it.  Take that one back to the speech-writers.   Not even the poor souls living in impoverished Detroit, the economically depressed Cabrini Green section of Chicago, the slum ghettos of Los Angeles, New York, Houston or St. Louis would be cheered by your investigation of yourself. 

Finally, or at least close enough to finally that our eyes were mostly glazed-over, he wrapped his administration's five-year environmental policy in these fatuous words: “Americans have never left our destiny to the whims of nature, and we will not start now.”

Case closed.
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A bunch more environmental issues muddying the waters on my personal web site.