Opinion-Columns.com

At Veterans Affairs, Another Hopelessly Amateur Screw-Up

This is a Congress with no sense of their routine work or collective responsibilities. If they are the ultimate result of Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America, then they should (at the very least) be sued for breach of contract. They are a wild-eyed collection of elected legislators so tied in knots over the partisanship of their every move that they’ve forgotten what the meaning of election is all about.

Not the coming election, or the fear of mid-term elections, or the panic over the next election down the calendar. Those they must breathlessly prepare for (fundraising) and finance (fundraising) and lie for (at fundraisers) and, if necessary, steal for (if the money doesn't come in). No, I mean the election that initially sent them to Washington, full of high hopes and avarice, presumably to at least minimally represent the interests of their constituents.

‘Interests’ and ‘constituents’ are bloodless descriptions of mothers with sick kids and soldiers just back from the latest war and trying to deal with their wounds, either physical or emotional.

It’s certainly an interest to provide free credit-monitoring for the vets whose personal info was lost by a careless department employee. Probably a good idea. $160 million. A lot of money for taking home a laptop full of statistics and losing it, but hey, what ya gonna do?

It ceases to be an interest and becomes just another Congressional piece of play-acting when the Department of Veterans Affairs decides to ‘cover’ the cost of their screw-up by taking the 160 mil from accounts that pay health and other benefits for the veterans they represent. Democrats protested and that line of unreasonable reasoning suddenly didn’t sound so reasonable.

Not all that surprising, as yet another sterling appointment, made by President Bush, serves (in what is a parody of service) as Secretary of Veteran’s Affairs. Bush just can't seem to do the secretary-thing right. James Nicholson, a Colorado residential building developer, is probably a nice enough guy and no doubt a big contributor. But that doesn’t mask the fact that he can’t find his ass (or his office) with both hands and, like Brownie at FEMA, read about his department’s disaster in the newspapers.

So, Rob Portman (handling the ball for the White House) came up with another sleazy scheme for covering VA’s self-inflicted wound—give to the vets by taking from

• A food-stamp program
• A farmers-assistance program
• Student loans and
• A program for those recently released from prison

Presumably, he then went to lunch. Hey Rob, way to go. Who’ll notice? It would be a shame to trim Rummy’s multi-billions, currently paying for a missile-shield that doggedly continues not to work, when you can grab it from some college kid who’s already waiting tables.

Nor does it serve any ‘interests’ to find out why the Pentagon can’t account for a trillion dollars in expenditures, when the White House can simply hose a bunch of young kids just out of prison by no longer giving them a hand. What the hell, they’ll probably just be back in the slammer anyway.

Trimming Big Agriculture’s corn subsidy might offend Cargill. Far easier to look the other way as some small farmer tries to save his heritage. His ‘interest’ isn’t as pressing as Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland ‘interests,’ so cadging a buck or two from the little guy makes sense. How many votes do small farmers constitute any more? Get on with the yard-sale and rip out the wind-breaks for more industrial corn.

Food-stamp programs oughta be done away with anyway. If the poor need food, it’s their own slack habits keep them from getting it. The entire $18 billion annual cost of feeding these bums is equal to two weeks worth of additional national debt. Somehow, when the nation desperately needs to balance its budget, the slacker-habits of Congress aren't worth a mention.

Slackerly habits, of course, are in the eyes of the beholder. In this particular case, the beholder is a Congress with its shirt-tails out, a bleary look in its collective eye and a severe dependence on tax giveaways in place of balanced-budgeting.

In short, if Congress were your uncle, you wouldn’t let him in the house.
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For more comments on Washington at work, see my personal web site.

Driver’s License, American Express and National ID

Don’t leave home without it!

That famous tag-line for American Express has become a part of the cultural history of the country. What it means for us as Americans, that our cultural history is defined by Madison Avenue ad-writers, I don’t know. But hardly anyone would equate American Express or the need of a state driver’s license (or, for that matter a Social Security card) with Nazi Germany.

Except for Edward Roybal, a Mexican-American member of the House of Representatives from California. Roybal was 70 years old in 1986, the year he threw his semantic monkey-wrench into the landmark Immigration Bill and thereby gutted it.

"We may face the danger of ending up like Nazi Germany," said Roybal, a Mexican American. "I do not say that we are going to go back to the Nazi regime, but . . . it will be the beginning of the violation of rights, and we . . . in this nation may be known by numbers."

By that handy piece of demagoguery, Roybal assured the toothlessness of carefully arranged and negotiated legislation. More to the point, he further assured that the promised ‘last amnesty’ would be revisited again in a scant twenty years, illegal immigration (mostly from Mexico) having ballooned during those years to over 12 million.

It’s an absolute laugh that Americans continue to see a National Identity Card as a huge, dark, big-brothery menace. Casually allowing their e-mails and phone calls to be monitored, unbothered by the feds tracing down their bank transactions, ready and willing to give up all kinds of information (including photo ID and, in some states, fingerprints) in order to get a driver’s license, Americans go ballistic when national ID is proposed.

C’mon, guys, the credit ‘industry’ already know where you bought your snow-tires, how much you paid for them and if the payment was made in a timely manner. Unseen observers of your life already know where you’ve been, what and where you eat, how many times (if ever) you visit a message-parlor. They already know how much you owe on your home, if it’s been refinanced and if you’re struggling to pay Dr. Jones for that uninsured tummy-tuck.

Fewer than 20% of Americans have ever had (or even thought of having) passports. In all other reasonably advanced societies of the world, passports are common as driver’s licenses. Because they are bulky and not something you want to lose or have stolen, most countries issue a national identity card as well. Simple, laminated photo-IDs that carry easily in pocket or purse.

What can possibly make Americans so flinchy about such a common document?

Roybal and a bunch of House Democrats pulled the ID portion of the immigration legislation in the middle of the night, asking no one and presenting the final marked-up bill a half-hour before the vote. Sound familiar? Yeah, Democrats used to do that stuff as well as Republicans.

‘Round up the usual suspects,’ Claude Rains barks in Casablanca. The usual suspects in Washington are outfits like Heritage Foundation, who (claim to) worry that legal immigrants might be penalized by incorrect information entered into a national database. It strikes me that’s like not hiring a window-washing firm, accepting work behind filthy office windows because someone’s glass might be streaked.

Not to be left out, the ACLU has several objections

• That such a program would cost $4 billion to operate (although I fail to see the connection between civil liberty and the cost of programs)
• Terrorists or illegal immigrants would find a way to get one (like they can’t get passports, driver’s licenses, credit or social security cards)
• A database of all Americans could be misused by a government determined to spy on its citizens. (Exactly what has not happened in Social Security and MediCare-MedicAid databases)

Rep James Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsonite who’s long on disdain and short on ideas, is also chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. The bill he sponsored, ‘disdained’ an ID plan, specifically stating “nothing in the legislation shall be construed to authorize . . . the establishment of a national identification card."

Wow! Shakespearean in its power. To construe or to misconstrue, that is the question.

Sensenbrenner wants a worker verification system that employers would check through the Internet. The Senate agreed on a similar tactic rather than a national ID system.

The Internet! Now there’s a vehicle that’s safe from terrorist tampering!
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More about politics in America at my opinion columns web site.

Same Old Perle Before the Same Old Swine

Men of like mind to Richard N. Perle have made many wreckages in the history of America and gone on to comfortable retirement, while lesser criminals spend their lives in prison.

It is the legacy of Perle’s particular and confrontational brand of political world-view, that we are left with the unproductive isolation of Cuba, our disastrous meddling in Vietnam and a preposterous taking of credit (in Ronald Reagan’s name) for the wheels coming off of communism in 1989.

Perle himself was deeply involved at Rumsfeld's elbow in the quite proper Afghan punishment for harboring al Qaeda, proving that even a philosophically blinded neocon can find an occasional acorn. Then he reverted to form, lost focus on Afghanistan at exactly the wrong moment and encouraged Secretary Rumsfeld to widen the military scope into the disaster that has become Iraq.

Never one to bother with hindsight, Perle wades through the smashed glass of his Iraq policy with nary a glance back or trembly lip. Now he’s at it again, having been given the bully pulpit of editorial space at the Washington Post, to what purpose one can only wonder.

In an outrageous claim of clairvoyance, he kicks right off with the statement that

“President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran knows what he wants: nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them; suppression of freedom at home and the spread of terrorism abroad; and the "shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the liberal democratic systems."

I guess ‘liberal democratic systems’ is in the eye of the beholder, when it strikes an ultra-conservative old hawk like Perle to use the phrase fronting a marching-banner to ideological war. In his own country, Perle has at least been consistent in his outright opposition to anything even remotely ‘liberal’ or distantly ‘democratic.’

Now Perle, several times discredited as impartial because of his

• financial dealings with Saudi arms dealer, Adnan Khashoggi,
• partnership in a company (Trireme) that invests in homeland security and defense-related industries and
• representation of Global Crossings, the bankrupt communications giant and defense contractor

turns his sights on the current Secretary of State.

“Condoleezza Rice has moved from the White House to Foggy Bottom, a mere mile or so away. What matters is not that she is further removed from the Oval Office; Rice's influence on the president is undiminished. It is, rather, that she is now in the midst of -- and increasingly represents -- a diplomatic establishment that is driven to accommodate its allies even when (or, it seems, especially when) such allies counsel the appeasement of our adversaries.”

Richard’s adversaries are many and their appeasments beyond count. Like monsters under Calvin’s bed, they take on heroic proportion in his vivid imagination.

As Co-Chairman of Hollinger International, a chain of some 400 newspapers, Perle admitted ‘he never understood the underlying transactions before signing off on them.’  By that bold admission, he affirms once again that he’s a big-picture man and (operationally) all hat and no cattle. In the things that go bump in the night department, his Co-Chairmanship of Morgan Crucible, which ‘designs, develops and supplies a broad range of products made from carbon, ceramic and magnetic materials,’ is inspired. Morgan harbors an ambition to all things defense-related and you can bet Dick Perle wasn’t made Co-Chairman because of his expertise in ceramics. In the introductions arena, Perle runs many, many cattle.

But away for the moment from the heady topic of the selling of Richard Perle and back to his rant (italics my own):

“The president knows that the Iranians are undermining us in Iraq. He knows that the mullahs are working to sink any prospect of peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, backing Hamas and its goal of wiping Israel off the map. He knows that for years Iran has concealed and lied about its nuclear weapons program. He knows that Iran leads the world in support for terrorism. And he knows that freedom and liberty in Iran are brutally suppressed.”

That’s a lot of knowing for a president who didn’t know enough to keep a low profile with Hungarians over their failed (and U.S. ignored) 1956 uprising. But in those times Bush was a mere lad of ten, Perle a slightly older fifteen, but not yet walking the hallowed halls of Princeton. Great days were ahead of each of them and history, its mistakes or its lessons, were not then and still are not on either agenda.

Eisenhower was there though, three years into his presidency with five yet to go before warning the nation of the ‘military-industrial complex’ and the Richard Perles to come.

Toward the end of his diatribe, Perle writes thus;

In his second inaugural address, Bush said, "All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: The United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for liberty, we will stand with you."

I know it is not too late for us, not too late to give substance to Bush's words, not too late to redeem our honor.

Apparently the time has finally come when we ‘will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors,’ like we did in 1956 in Hungary or twelve years later in Czechoslovakia. ‘When you stand for liberty, we will stand with you,’ unless we don't, as demonstrated when we abandoned Iraq’s Kurds to slaughter in 1991. Somehow I don't think Richard meant to redeem a full fifty years of wayward honor.

Richard Perle is a self-seeking, war-mongering profiteering, power and money-hungry man with not even the faintest glimmer of historic reference. He has been aptly named the ‘Prince of Darkness.’

It’s a huge tribute to both freedoms, speech and press, that he is allowed the wobbly platform of Op-Ed space at the Washington Post.
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More at my personal web site about what interests me in International Affairs.

Emergency Rooms, the New Primary-Care Centers

With 48 million uninsured and a near-equal number underinsured, where are they to go when a child wakes in the night with whooping-cough or an asthma attack? Night or day, asthma, chronic earache or unending diarrhea, the local Emergency Room is the sole remaining available option. And it's becoming unavailable at an alarming rate.

“Long waits for treatment are epidemic, the reports said, with ambulances sometimes idling for hours to unload patients. Once in the ER, patients sometimes wait up to two days to be admitted to a hospital bed.”

So writes David Brown for the Washington Post, in an article that takes a look at what has been swept under the medical-services rug. 25 experts conducted a study and, as studies almost always do, in their collective wisdom they determined that

“fixing the problems is likely to cost billions of dollars and will require the leadership of a new federal agency, which Congress should create in the next two years.”

Oh lordy, save us from another federal agency. What is needed is to keep this problem as far from the clutches of Congress as possible and work, immediately, with small and innovative solutions that are hospital-based. Even a cursory look would show that

• Emergency rooms are for . . . emergencies. Duh! They are not prepared or staffed as out-patient clinics, although they are being used more and more for that purpose.
• Since the 1986 law that imposed the requirement upon emergency rooms to evaluate and stabilize all who walked in, ER admissions have ballooned at more than double the increase in population.
• ER’s lose money, big money. Because of that, hospitals regularly under-staff and make them unpleasant places to go. Non life-threatening emergencies wait hours, in a sort of grudging triage designed to discourage return visits.

Now I don’t want to knock the Institute of Medicine or the twenty-five experts they had studying emergency rooms over the past two years, but nationwide studies come up with nationwide proposals, it's the nature of the beast. Emergency rooms are not national, they are local. The ER at a big-city teaching hospital has problems, expectations and workloads that are not analogous to rural or regional hospitals.

I have, over a lifetime, come to believe that if one wants to know what’s wrong with an airline, a manufacturer, school district, courtroom, candymaker or lawn-care service, the way to find out is to sit down with the line-workers and ask. CEO’s can’t give you a clue, consultants are less than useless and legislators will unaccountably but consistently make things worse by a factor of ten.

It’s not in the rulebook of how to run two-year national studies, but if I were one of the twenty-five experts, I’d be inclined to hang out in the saloon nearest to whatever hospital had my attention. A quiet ‘what’s the matter with that joint?’ over a beer can bring a lot of useful information. But what’s learned by that method isn’t transferable.

And that’s the major thing to be learned; that hospitals and their ER’s are local in the extreme. One may have a steady stream of the poor and uninsured clogging the halls, because it’s located in a poor and uninsured neighborhood and the only other nearby hospital recently closed down. Another, close to the Interstate, may have a high proportion of head injuries and no resident neurosurgeon.

Emergency medical care in the United States is indeed on the verge of collapse. In a great many areas, it has already collapsed and unnecessary deaths are soaring. Also on the verge of collapse, is the single mother with two jobs, no health care insurance and a sick kid. Congress, besieged by unions and various lobbyists, knowing there’s no voter-pressure among the poor, can’t help but make a hash of such a situation.

One thing they might give a moment’s consideration to, in between fund-raisers, is why sixty or seventy million Americans have no options other than emergency care.
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See Taking My Country Personally on my personal web site.

Bio-Mass-Hysteria

Bring me another cup of coffee, Ethyl—I think we’re saved.

“There’s a straightforward way for Washington to end America’s addiction to foreign oil, while reducing greenhouse gas emissions and resolving the impasse on international trade: Turn farm subsides into fuel subsides” So says Lester B. Lave and W. Michael Griffin, both of Carnegie Mellon University.

Well, I like straightforward. God knows, we’ve had little enough of it. Fire away, Les.

“One bushel of corn yields about 2.8 gallons of ethanol. Converting all U.S. corn exports to ethanol would add 4–7 billion gallons of ethanol per year to current production volumes, increasing total corn ethanol production to as much as 11 billion gallons per year. That would easily meet Congress’ new mandate that America produce 7.5 billion gallons of renewable fuels each year by 2012. U.S. annual gasoline consumption is 140 billion gallons and growing. Ethanol could lower that gasoline consumption by 300,000 to 400,000 barrels per day—the equivalent to the daily production of an Arctic National Wildlife Refuge-sized oil field. Home-grown ethanol would also help protect Americans against oil-supply shocks and could help reduce the overall U.S. trade deficit by cutting oil spending on the order of $7 to $10 billion per year.”

Unless of course, it’s all hype.

Anyone reading that prognostication by Professor Lave would think the Promised Land had been found in Iowa, behind a six-row picker. Meeting a congressional mandate is the smallest part of the misinformation—Congress has no idea what it has mandated or why or for what purpose, except that it sounded good in an election year when gas prices are driving politicians for cover.

If you’re confused about how corn, which costs about a dollar a bushel more to grow than farmers earn for it, and corn-derived ethanol which takes 29% more fossil energy to produce than it yields, are going to be a help, you haven't listened to politicians. The hype is found in Congress, the White House and the corn-lobby.

The far more inconvenient facts are along the path less travelled at Cornell and UC Berkeley.

Good old King Corn has bestowed upon us industrial agriculture, which has in its turn allowed us to fatten the world’s sickest, most antibiotic-injected and steroid-loaded beef, just to keep supermarket prices low. Taxpayers, you and I, pick up the tab for that buck-a-bushel shortage, to the tune of $4.5 billion each and every year. That $4.5 billion falls directly, without passing Go or collecting $200, to the bottom line of Cargill, Frank Perdue and the rest of the boys.

Switchgrass is the latest switcheroo coming from Washington, if you won’t buy the King Corn premise. Grows anywhere, needs nothing, conserves the soil, makes gasoline faster than you can say freedom from Saudi oil.

Except that it doesn’t.

Switchgrass is a perennial—cut the top and cart it away, the soil gets poorer and poorer. It will grow without fertilizer. Once. It can do without much water, but doesn’t thrive and, to make the quantity necessary to be worth trucking, it needs the same things other crops need. Oh, have we talked about trucking? Switchgrass, like corn, has to be trucked from where it is to where they process it (all at a fuel cost). We pay that cost, so that we can make ethanol using 50% more fossil fuel than the fuel produced.

Excuse me? Takes half again as much energy as it delivers? Sounds like a business plan to lose a little on every transaction, but make it up on volume.

Wood chips and other wood derived biomass sports a 57% energy shortfall, biodeisel from soybeans, negative 27%, using sunflower, minus 118%. Also, vehicles don’t get anywhere near the same mileage on ethanol as gasoline. Also (as if you needed another also), there’s a small matter of the gasoline road tax that will go missing, requiring you and me to come up with an annual $100 billion or so in to keep the highway infrastructure reasonably pothole-free. Thus our Congress, in its mindless enthusiasm and rush to election, has mandated 7.5 billion gallons annually of further deficit nonsense.

In the face of this, good ol’ boy Lester Lave somehow concludes

“By offering farmers a subsidy of $61 per acre for growing switchgrass on farmland that now supports corn, the nation would have a substantial supply of a renewable fuel that starts to cure our addiction to oil. We have a remarkable opportunity to promote free trade, help farmers, preserve farmland, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and make the United States less dependent on foreign oil. And the best part: It can be done without Washington spending a dime more than it already does.”

Which once again proves the age-old axiom that figures don’t lie, but liars figure.
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More environmental issues muddying the waters on my personal web site.

The Sustainable Mind

Sustainable is the word of the decade, possibly the adjective for an entire century yet to come—a buzz-word, jargon, lingo of the linguists and necessary part of every top-ten, self-help or planetary-help best seller. Necessary hyphenated headline for the hip, the in, the new-age when that term is already old-age.

Whether the word itself is sustainable is yet to be seen.

Certainly most of the nouns for which it serves as modifier are in what Dick Cheney would describe as their ‘last throes.’ Sustainable agriculture? Good luck. Pick your favorite noun, from art to zen, and ask yourself if it’s sustainable. In an increasingly distracted and throw-away world, we’ve all too often ‘moved on from that.’

If something has been lost, the thing we’ve moved on from is the sustainable mind.

My definition of a sustainable mind is one that is able or trained to reflect upon conditions, keep them in focus long enough to draw a conclusion and then defend that conclusion among various alternative possibilities. The ultimate in sustainability is to stay with the subject long enough, often over a period of decades, to shift opinion depending upon new evidence or a change in societal, economic or environmental circumstance.

Not easy. Not the stuff of sound-bites. The brain is local, the mind is not.

Young people, as they always do, represent the most graphic evidence of where society is headed and they are multi-takers of the first order. Raised with iPods plugged in and the other ear to a cell-phone, doing homework (or any kind of stationary work) while simultaneously watching TV, listening to music and text-messaging, they are the new edition of the human animal.

It’s not an accident that society no longer hears, except in the short bursts of sound-bites. Not surprising that war is insupportable unless quickly won. Drowning in information, unable to listen in the constancy of messages, we've moved on. America (and maybe the world) lost interest in Iraq. Who really cares for the Abramoff story and which congressman may or may not be connected to his chain of legislation by payoff. President as liar, it’s old news. Tell me something new. Today is a blizzard of events that buries yesterday.

Over half the humans that have ever been born on this planet are alive today. 95% of everything created by human hands has been created in the past 100 years.

Turn off the iPod and the TV to reflect on that for a moment. Those realities mirror the overwhelming expanse of numberless stars that so excited our imaginations as kids on a summer night, gazing into infinity.

Reflecting on the recent (for it is recent) loss of the sustainable mind, who is there to reach for in explanation but Darwin? The evolutionary pace of the animal world, which includes our species, is relentless but it is slow. A thousand years to learn a skill, a million to seek the refuge of a cave, two million to come back out again to agriculture.

Yet the lightning eyewink of two hundred years has thrust us from a life on horseback into and through ever shorter ages; agricultural, industrial, flight, space, computers and the wizardry of the time-payment plan. Technology may have run right over the top of our ability to cope with it—or even recognize ourselves as trampled.

From writers, artists and musicians to lawyers, scientists and hedge-fund managers, we embrace the solitude of abandoned beaches in the Caribbean and mountain cabins. Never too far away from a good restaurant, mind you and close to satellite-access to the Internet, if possible, but places where the mind can linger for a moment or a week or a month. Our nostalgia for ‘life in the slow-lane’ may not predate air conditioning or antibiotics, but it pants at our feet like a friendly dog.

There are those who hunger for Walden Pond and those who are unexpressed without a motorcycle, a second career, a third wife and the mad desire to hang-glide if they can work that into a ballooning vacation. Like many, I want some of each. Like others, I wonder at the race to more income than can be reasonably spent.

The sustainable mind makes us wonder, the unsustainable makes us want—or so I have come to think.

Nothing wrong with wanting. It’s made of us a wondrous society and (until recently) the envy of the world, the place most think of when ‘opportunity’ of any kind or dimension comes up in conversation. But, just as ‘high-tech’ has come to value the benefit of a balancing ‘high-touch,’ it may be that ‘wanting’ needs the symmetry of reflection, the hammock-time out of the busyness of business. Enough sustained mind to settle in on and establish the price we are willing to pay for wanting.

I am fond of saying you can have anything, but you cannot have everything. The first and foremost anything I would hope to have, is a sustainable mind. From that, all else comes.
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Real Estate Prices and Martin Luther King, Jr.

What Martin Luther King, Jr. was unable to completely accomplish during the Civil Rights Marches of the sixties is happening now, in cities where segregation was most problematic. The strange thing is that inner-city blacks are now coalescing on the other side of the issue. Their complaint? Whites buying them out of black ghettoes at big prices.

Unintended consequences have turned the housing boom (or bubble) into a de-segregator. I wonder what King would have thought of that?

When I was a kid in 40’s and 50’s Evanston, Illinois, the city boasted the outstanding amenity of being home to Northwestern University, which kept it from being a mere bedroom suburb of Chicago. It also had a ‘black belt,’ which had nothing to do with karate and much to do with who was allowed to live where. The balconies of its many movie theatres were reserved for blacks and, although restaurants were not officially segregated, a well dressed black family could wait a very long time to be served.

Evanston Township High School was integrated, as were a most of the grade schools, but the (all white) Swimming Team practiced at the YMCA (also ‘restricted’) because white parents had repeatedly turned down referendums to build a high school pool. Not hard to draw a conclusion from that, yet Evanston seemed a racially uncomplicated city, at least to my young, growing-up self.

So, here we are, sixty years later and Seattle and Portland, Oregon are in the news. Their crime is not segregation this time, but desegregation. Blaine Harden’s WaPo article quotes Charles Ford, five years older than I am and a self-described Portland black activist; "The heart of the black community is gone. There ain't no center anymore."

Well, of course there is. But it’s not the center Charlie Ford knew and loved and, from what he seems to be saying, one of the things he loved was its blackness, its more or less exclusive and comfortable blackness.

Charlie has a point. The pleasures of place revolve around inherent comforts, whether we be black, white, Asian, Hispanic or Muslim and that has a lot to do with the ease of association, food, backstory and lifestyle.

It’s not chic to talk about what Charlie Ford brings up, but it’s very real and I don’t quite know how we get over it or if getting over it is even a useful mind-set. King didn't want us to get over it, he preferred that we get on with it and set about the business of valuing one another.

Speaking for myself, I haven’t a single black friend and I can’t go looking for black friends any more appropriately than I can any other color. I can only have a friend and, if he is black, I am fortunate in that additional dimension. I have two Muslim friends, both Iranians. Thus I know, personally, the very people we threaten to bomb. I don't know, at least not personally, the friends Charlie Ford is losing within his neighborhood.

"I am concerned and I am frustrated because I don't know what the alternatives are," said Norman Rice, who in the 1990s was Seattle's first and only black mayor. "It clearly isn't racist; it's economics. The real question you have to ask yourself is: Is this good or bad?"

I think it’s probably good, Norman. I have a hunch there’s an inverse proportion between mixed-race friendships and age. My gut tells me whites half my age have twice the exposure to friends of other races or ethnic backgrounds and those half their age, twice again. It’s possible that was what King hoped for as well. We have got it (or some of it, more of it every year) by the unintended consequence of an inner-city housing bubble.

At the end of Blaine Harden’s article,

Charlie Ford takes a reporter on a tour of his gentrified neighborhood and discovers a not-so-handsome house for $400,000, a price that astonishes him, especially because the house was considerably smaller than his own. "When I see prices like that, I wonder who . . . of my race can continue to live here," he said.

Ford began ruminating about the price -- and the profit -- he might be able to get for his house, which he has owned since 1968 and which sits on a fine corner lot near a fixed-up city park. "I have said I would never sell," Ford said. "But who can resist these prices?"

Harden’s piece points out, “as white gentrification accelerates in Portland and Seattle, where the percentage of black residents was already the lowest among the nation's largest cities, it is erasing the only historically black neighborhoods these cities have ever had.”

That’s the nature of cities, as Chicago’s Pilsen loses its Czechs and its ethnic areas become less Danish and Italian and Chinese, more Hispanic and (dare I say it?) even white. Pilsen was a section of Chicago named specifically after the famous brewery city of Pilsen, in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The only historically Czech neighborhood in the city and it is now lost as well.

I can easily imagine Evanston becoming a better city for the loss of its ‘black belt.’

Let me know how it works out for you, Charlie, if you elect to cash in.
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See Taking My Country Personally on my personal web site.

You and I Should Be ‘Stuck’ Like This

After the Enron Trial, Defense Firm Is Stuck With the Tab.

That’s Carrie Johnson’s Washington Post headline and it makes me chuckle as I drift down through the article, for a couple of reasons. First, it’s kind of a jolt to be led to believe that Jeff Skilling’s lawyers won’t get paid, only to find they have already cashed in to the tune of $40 million and are merely whining about more.

We are a more society.

Johnson’s opener,

“To the list of employees, investors and businesses who suffered financial misfortune in Enron Corp.'s demise, add this one: the law firm defending former chief executive Jeffrey K. Skilling.”

Oh, be still my heart, for their financial misfortune.

Anatole France famously said,

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”

I don’t know a whole lot about Anatole, but I absolutely love that quote. He was so piercingly correct in that startling observation that they named a country after him and threw in a Nobel Prize.

In a shameless example of journalistic hand-wringing, Johnson reports that

“Even before the trial began in January, Skilling's team of more than 20 lawyers, paralegals and support staff burned through those funds, leaving the law firm holding the bag for "multiple tens of millions" of dollars in unpaid fees and expenses racked up during the four-month trial, Skilling's lead defense lawyer said.”

Burned through is an interesting term, given that Skilling was found guilty. But guilty (for a rich man) is a long way from behind bars. Which may give you some idea of why we have prisons that are clogged with the recipients of France’s ‘majestic equality.’

If you have forty mil to shove across the desk at some avaricious and well-connected law firm, you’re damned unlikely to be shuffled off to Sing-Sing in anything this side of natural death from old age, before the appeal process eventually runs out. Thus, the problem is not one for The Firm, but for Skilling—where to come up with more. In our more society, without a constant flow of more, The Firm won’t even file a motion.

A look at the numbers is simply astounding. The Firm’s claims are (so far as we know) for twenty employees. Let’s be rash and make some assumptions; 1 partner, 2 associates, 5 paralegals, 11 support staff and a partridge-in-a-pear-tree.

• Partner @ $500/hr.
• Associates @ $200/hr
• Paralegals @ $100/hr
• Support staff (secretaries, typists, etc.) @ $75/hr

In order to get an hourly number, let's assume they all worked full-time, which is admittedly an error factor, because partners seldom work full time on a single client.

Anyway, the hourly number is (including the partridge), $2,300. Weekly, that’s $92,000 and at a steady march downfield toward the goal-line, The Firm doesn’t run out of funds for 435 weeks. I know there’s nothing in there for phone-calls and power-lunches, but 435 weeks is eight years and four months.

The Firm claims rates almost double these, but that's window-dressing. Law firms kill to get high-profile clients like Skilling, although they hope not to bobble the ball and get them sent to prison. Deals are always made on rates.

Ooooooookaay. Now if I read this correctly, the additional $25 million being whined about is supposed to have been incinerated in the four-month trial, which called some 56 witnesses and “some of the most sophisticated business deals ever to make their way into a courtroom.” Uh-huh, fourteen million a month, $446,428.57 per witness.

Which is a lot of money to say,

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, my client denies that fact and disremembers that detail, one of many in his complicated and stressful career.”

That single and oft-repeated statement would likely have been as effective (and certainly more memorable to a jury already drowning in detail) than what, by its excruciatingly detailed rebuttal, came off as the nit-picking and grabbing-at-straws of a guilty man.

Just as we have been sold the lie that only a CEO earning $20 million a year can run a company, so have we been sold the falsity that only a law firm combusting its way through tens of millions can represent a client.

The stupidity, clumsiness, prevarication and greed of men like Skilling, Lay, Bernie Ebbers and John Rigas proves the former. Off the wall record billings by high profile law firms, who lose cases and get their clients sent to jail, proves the latter.

The small man who knows he is right, pitted against a rich man (or even medium corporation), is soon aware of the truism that justice prevails no further than the distance to the end of a wallet. It has become a commodity, like all others. The law may be equal for rich and poor, but we have made access to law a matter for the rich alone.

It's a small but significant solace that thieves are still thieves and occasionally they go to jail.

“For O'Melveny (The Firm), the work is not yet done. Several members of the trial team, with help from Washington-based former acting solicitor general and O'Melveny partner Walter Dellinger, now are gearing up for an appeal.

"We've just got to keep fighting a good fight," said Petrocelli.”

And as they say at partners meetings, you can take that to the bank.
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See Taking My Country Personally on my personal web site.

An Exciting Example of Assertive Action

"God help me, before I assert again!" The Washington Post has just fallen all over itself, praising the most environmentally abusive administration since—since?—well, since no other, because none in our history has done so much to deface, destroy, defame and deregulate this nation’s ecological laws.

In what they call ‘an exciting example of assertive action,’ the Post continues to gush,

“What's impressive is not just the designation itself but the fine print of President Bush's order. Despite tenacious pressure from regional fisheries managers, Mr. Bush decided not to permit any commercial fishing in the area. The small amount that goes on now will be phased out; a coalition of private donors will buy out the fishing permits of the eight fishermen who currently work those waters. What's more, in a happy surprise, Mr. Bush used his power under the National Antiquities Act to designate national monuments, not the more cumbersome federal marine sanctuaries law. As a result the plan goes into effect immediately, bypassing months of additional bureaucratic wrangling.”

Months of bureaucratic wrangling hardly suits the timeline for the November mid-terms.

In another ‘happy surprise,’ designating the area a National Monument avoids any Congressional actions that might illuminate just how much George bought and how little he paid. In the payment department, he bravely stomped all over eight native Hawaiian fishermen whose catch was in serious decline. The man's just full of happy surprises, according to WaPo.

“Bring ‘em on.”

In the buying area, he got to affix his name to the largest protected marine area in the world and scrape the mud off his environmental shoes at the same time. Some sycophant in the Congress (before the Republicans lose control of it) is bound to suggest the area be named for Bush. Pardon me while I vomit.

Not to be outdone in the editorial feeding frenzy, the New York Times effused, (my parentheticals)

“An unfamiliar but highly appealing (gag) side of President Bush showed itself at the White House yesterday. It was Mr. Bush the compassionate conservationist (choke), friend of green sea turtles, seabirds and Hawaiian monk seals (oh, come now), savior of coral reefs and spiny lobsters, creator (read that co-opter) of the largest ocean sanctuary on the planet.”

I have a long-time acquaintance who is both cheap and grumpy about his cheapness, to the point that it embarrasses all who know him. He’s rich, to boot, which doesn’t make the whole scene any more appealing. Once every year or two, he’ll take his wife to dinner and a movie and she out-gushes both the Washington Post and the New York Times combined, raving over how generous he is. There should be a word for that characteristic he shares with his president. In the absence of one, I will coin such a term.

Disingenuous already exists, a delightful and accurate word that means ‘not straightforward or candid; giving a false appearance of frankness.' My term is disingenerous and my personal definition is ‘not generous; buying the appearance of generosity, only when the price is low enough to be meaningless.’

There is no oil in the area of the Bush designation. He wouldn’t know a Monk seal if it swam into his bathtub, but he knows a cheap legacy when he sees one and that is the most sickening aspect of his opportunism. The Times prostrates itself, raving that the designation is

“an act of wilderness preservation that, acre for acre, instantly put him into the same league as the conservation-minded presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.”

In some ways, Mr. Bush's decision was supremely easy — the end of commercial fishing will affect only eight fishermen. But even so, the mind reels a little at what Mr. Bush has done. The Northwestern Hawaiian Islands are a vast place few Americans have ever visited or ever will. But they are being protected anyway — not for divers, fishermen or cruise ships, but for their own sake, for science and forever. Mr. Bush made exemplary use of presidential power yesterday. We hope he does more of it.”

Yep, the mind reels all right. In a single Karl-Rove instant, the most destructive, undoing, privatizing president in the nation’s history has been voted a place on Mount Rushmore, compliments of the New York Times and Washington Post.

Assertive (inclined to the bold and confident, aggressively self-assured) action is this president’s long suit. Among the prior Bush assertions,

• Victory in Afghanistan (then a mysterious loss of interest)
• Weapons and relationships that did not exist in Iraq, in order to take us to the war of his choice
• The worthlessness of global efforts to curb air and water pollution
• A critical and immediate need to stop taxing the rich
• A similarly high priority to cut back programs for the poor
• "We do not torture" (famous, along with "Bring 'em on.").
• A love of God that somehow misinterprets all His better instincts
• Victories where there are none, progress through regression and a conservatism of waste through deficit spending

Karl Rove is as much a political genius as the NYT and WaPo are dupes and suckers. Unfettered by any worry over indictment, Karl is likely to pull-off or outright steal another Republican victory in November. The country, behind the strong leadership and editorial insight of The New York Times and The Washington Post, those paragons of the public trust, will once again be delivered.

Signed, sealed and delivered.
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More environmental issues muddying the waters on my personal web site.

Teddy Kennedy’s Suicide Squeeze

Who knew Teddy had it in him? He doesn’t play anymore, but the old war-horse managed the game that took wind-farming off his Cape Cod horizon, The synergy that prompted Kennedy’s brilliant suicide squeeze to win the series caught everyone with their gloves up—who would have known?

That’s what makes great politicians. That willingness to achieve your personal goals by draping them in the American Flag. It's a Kennedy tradition. Who says Camelot is dead?

Backing up to Teddy’s ‘view’ of wind energy, back in February he got Rep Don Young from the neighboring state of Alaska (isn’t that close to Massachusetts?) to tie up the proposed energy project by--get this—claiming it screwed up shipboard radar.

“Public opposition to wind farms on the Cape claims to be based mainly on worries that they will spoil seascapes and have detrimental effects on birds, marine animals, and their habitats. Other groups (does that mean non-public opposition?) have expressed concerns about the potential impact on sailors and important commercial fisheries.”

A proposed Navy sonar base off North Carolina that makes dolphins crazy and causes whales to beach themselves is a ‘no problem’ to the Defense Department, but according to Kari Lydersen’s article in the Washington Post

“that project and at least 11 others have been halted by the DOD as it studies whether the projects could interfere with military radar.”

“The Defense Department study was put in the 2006 Defense Authorization Act -- inserted, say wind farm developers, by senators who want to block Cape Wind.”

From ship radar to military radar to any kind of radar at all is a short hop for those defense guys and now the FAA is in the game. Possible hazzards to military radar in Wisconsin, North Dakota, South Dakota and Illinois, all of which received "proposed hazard" letters from the Federal Aviation Administration saying the projects must be halted pending the Defense Department study. Anyone got an idea of how high this is on Rummy's to do list these days?

Nice job, Teddy.

Kennedy, who claims to be an environmentalist, until projects like Cape Wind get to close to various ‘Kennedy compounds,’ has (by his own personal and stupid willfulness) shot down at least a dozen such projects nation-wide. This, as he trumpets his environmental sensitivity on his web site;

“Senator Kennedy has been a vocal advocate for environmental concerns throughout his career in the Senate. He has worked to protect natural resources, and to develop alternative energy sources. His approach to environmental issues is wide-ranging, from encouraging the study of the Outer Intercontinental Shelf to supporting efforts to reduce vehicle emissions to working vigorously to prevent drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He has pushed to maintain high environmental standards, even as the Bush Administration has sought to undermine longstanding regulations.”

Horsefeathers.

The Kennedy-Young bunt has virtually stopped dead in their tracks, various environmentally sensitive wind-turbine projects across the country, for the sole purpose of furthering a Kennedy ‘not in my back-yard’ mind set. The WaPo article points out;

“The FAA has received more than 4,100 wind turbine applications so far this year, compared with about 4,300 in 2005 and 1,982 in 2004. An offshore wind farm of as many as 170 turbines is planned in the Gulf of Mexico off South Padre Island, Tex. The $2 billion project will generate enough electricity for 125,000 homes. At meetings in Madison, Wis., and Toledo this month, industry and government officials will discuss an offshore wind farm in the Great Lakes.”

They can discuss until Teddy Kennedy’s cows come home, but the FAA can’t be gotten around.

“Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) said the Defense Department study could have a chilling effect on the development of wind power nationwide. A June 2 letter to the Defense Department signed by Durbin and five other Midwestern senators said, "Since much of the nation is in radar line of sight, this interim policy has a sweeping effect." It noted that multiple wind farms are already operating in the radar line of sight of military and Homeland Security installations, "without any problems that we are aware of."

Mark Jacobson of Invenergy LLC, the company developing the Forward Wind Energy Center in central Wisconsin, points to the Horse Hollow Wind Energy Center near Dyess Air Force Base in Abilene, Tex.

"There are half a dozen Air Force sites that have wind projects next to them," he said. "There seems to be little consistency in how they're identifying whether a project is impacting a radar site or not. It's a wide net being cast out to stop any project in its tracks until this study is complete, and there's no clear deadline being adhered to for the study."

Teddy is joined in his criticism of Cape Wind, by Sen. John W. Warner, Republican from Virginia, so you can see it’s a genuine bi-partisan problem. These senators, who don’t give a rat's ass about whale beaching and the problems of other water-mammals that are sensitive to sonar, said Cape Wind will hurt views, tourism and migratory birds. We can’t have that.

Note #1; whales are migratory as well, the largest mammals on the planet.

Note #2; Senator Warner (along with Teddy) has a home on Cape Cod. But hey, we’re all in this together, right?
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More environmental issues muddying the waters on my personal web site.