R.P. Barr

Let’s take the “con” out of the economy

During this good-will-to-men holiday season, I would like to take issue with the Republican trolls who require salary concessions of unionized auto workers as a condition of the bailout.  When people used to say this was the greatest country on earth, they meant that it was a place where ability, skills and intelligence counted, where salaries for working people were the best in the world.  Yet, here we are with elected representatives of the people insisting that factory workers accept pay cuts to qualify their employers for government loans while banking executives receiving taxpayer money are allowed to keep their salaries, bonuses and perks.  Bear in mind that the banking executives are largely responsible for not only the banking crisis, but for the auto crisis as well.

Obviously, the CEOs of American industry haven’t learned the lesson that an economy based on consumer spending cannot survive if consumers can’t afford to spend.  Driving down wages in order to compete with overseas producers, and moving production facilities overseas to make things to sell back home are not sustainable plans.

 It’s a sort of reverse Ponzi scheme.  In a Ponzi, one builds a pyramid higher and ever higher in order to take as much as possible before the inevitable collapse.  In the downward price/wage spiral, one shovels out the foundation to take as much profit as possible before the supported structure collapses. 

 I understand how the MBAs who are caught up in the madness of maximizing each quarter’s profits can outsmart themselves.  Government, however, is supposed to take the long view and protect the next generation.  We don’t expect politicians to see the future, but we can expect them to recognize greed and stupidity.  Well, maybe that’s too much, too.  That’s why we have career government experts in every possible field, to watch over the rest of us and prevent overreachers from getting carried away.

 The public should rise up when our watchdogs are underfunded or politicized.  We don’t, in large part because we don’t like oversight of our own affairs, and when corporate con men ask only to be allowed to run their own businesses without interference, we sympathize.  

Meanwhile, have you every watched the wild life documentaries that show a herd of a hundred zebras being stalked by one or two lions?  When the lions attack, the herd runs away and abandon the hapless zebra who was caught to be eaten.  Everytime, I shake my head in wonder.  Better him than me seems to be the attitude.  If the mass of zebras would only turn round on the lions they could stop the depredation.  By running away, the zebras are giving the lions permission to come again.

 If we want to stop the lions in business suits from eating our neighbors, we have to collectively turn on the predators and stomp them into irrevelavance. 

First, bring back the Customs duties that have been cut over the years, but this time use them to cover the difference between the wages paid the workers who make the products and the wages paid here for the same work.  Let manufacturers raise salaries in the third world or bring the jobs home.  Next, make health insurance similar to Social Security, i.e. every employer pays a percentage of wages into the insurance pool.  Like the uninsured motorists fee charged uninsured drivers in my state, do the same with health insurance charges to all employers.  Eliminate the benefit of stacking part-time employees into full time jobs.

My credit union did not suffer like the banks because it does not sell its mortgages to other institutions.  It is careful about who it lends to because it knows that it has to service and hold the loans it makes.  That should be the law for all lenders.  A company that makes its money by finding borrowers and then selling the loans does not have an incentive to be conservative. 

 Next, do away with insurance for bank loans, it only fosters recklessness.  Retail businesses calculate “shrinkage” or theft, into their profit calculation.  Let banks calculate in a percentage of their loans that will turn bad, and then work to keep that number down.  Put the effort at reducing losses on the front end where the borrowers are instead of at the back end where bookkeepers can only react to events.

 High wages benefit the economy and society.  Medical insurance for all would prevent the primary reason for personal bankruptcy.  That should be the mantra for the new administration.

When shoes fly

Although I try not to comment on subjects that get a lot of attention in the press anyway, I have to say that I am glad that Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi threw his shoes at President Bush.  Saddam Hussein was an evil man, but even he did not kill a million Iraqis, and he did not start a war with the U.S.  The shoe throwing was an appropriate symbolic act.  That said, I am also glad that Bush dodged the shoes.  If he had been hit, the emphasis would have shifted from the insult to the injury.

It's good that the Secret Service wrestled the thrower to the ground before he could get his socks off.  The incident could have gotten ugly—or smelly.

Do you wonder, like me, what sort of shoes he threw?  When one throws shoes at the head of the most powerful nation in the world, one should not throw discount store shoes.  The shoes in the back of your closet are for maybe a police chief or school principal.  A president deserves designer shoes.  Not new necessarily--I think shoes that are broken in would possess more ballistic  accuracy.  A wild throw shows disrespect.

Has anyone commented on the thrower’s arm?  Both tosses were dead on.  If Bush had not ducked, he would have been beaned for sure.  Did the thrower practice to get that good?  What did he tell his neighbors when they saw him practicing in the backyard?

“Hey, Muntadhar, why are you throwing your shoes at bottles on my fence?” 

“A thousand pardons for disturbing you, but I have to go to a press conference tomorrow and it is so hard to get the American president’s attention.” 

“But, won’t the president regard your shoes as an insult?” 

“He is an American.  They hold shoes in high regard.  That’s why they drive everywhere, to avoid even using their shoes.”

“Truly a very strange people, Allah be praised for His mysteries.”

Official investigations: Walsh, Anthony and Madoff

After 26 years, the murder of Adam Walsh has been declared solved.  The killer died in prison about 20 years ago, so there will be no trial.   The six-year-old’s kidnapping inspired the boy’s father, John Walsh to crusade for crime victims, which led him to a new career hosting “America’s Most Wanted.”  According to Walsh, early suspicion fell on him and his wife, but a police photographer tried to point the investigation toward a stranger abduction only to be fired for his efforts.  He then pursued the case on his own, even into his later retirement.

 This week also saw the discovery of the remains of three-year-old Caylee Anthony in an area that private citizens pointed out to the police months ago.  The reason that the police give for not searching there sooner is that it was covered by water.   When I worked in New York, I saw divers go into the river to look for bodies, probably covered by a lot more water than the wooded area in Florida.  On the other hand, Florida swampy areas are known to be the homes of poisonous snakes and aligators.  One would think that Florida law enforcement would have figured out how to deal with swamp searches by now.

 A third story had to do with a $50 billion swindle that government investigators in Security and Exchange Commission were told about several times in the past decade, but apparently overlooked.

 What these stories have in common is incompetence by law enforcement and persistent pursuit of justice by private citizens.  The primary virtue of law enforcement in the United States is that everywhere else, it is worse.  Well, almost everywhere else. 

 Stories like these have always popped up from time to time and have been a staple of Hollywood at least since the 1930’s (remember 1934’s The Thin Man?), and maybe before that.  Perhaps it is a misperception, but I believe that the quality of police and federal law enforcement peaked some years ago and has deteriorated since then.

It could be budgetary issues, or that the demand for more personnel has led to a lowering of standards, or more rules that restrict investigations, or higher expectations by the public and media hounds howling for results.  I don’t know.  But, based on my reading of the news, I think standards have fallen.  (Note that I am not talking about corruption, I think those levels have stayed about the same.)

When I speak of more rules, I am not talking about Miranda and other rights.  One of the best things to happen to law enforcement was the Miranda decision because it prevents a lot of short cutting and leads to better results.  Allowing unrestricted wire taps and detentions lead to laziness and scapegoating. No, what I’m talking about are workplace rules that restrict overtime, informal contact between agencies, and put officers and investigators under second-guessing, politicized management.  In my own former agency, we once had enormous freedom to operate, and the old timers would tell stories about following hunches to catch bad guys.  Then, supervisors were restricted to their offices to manage reams of reports, some officers abused their freedom and instead of freeing up the supervisors to watch for untoward activities, the agency simply imposed restrictions to limit initiative which didn’t help anyone except the bad guys.

 Law enforcement needs an overhaul.  Training and periodic retraining needs to be more rigorous to correct or weed out bad apples.  Supervisors need to be in the field supervising.  Politicians who lean on enforcement agencies for specific outcomes to cases need to be prosecuted, fired and sent to jail.  And, finally, putting responsibility in the hands of the people in the front lines must be seen as a good thing.  Just make sure that you have really good personnel to put in the front lines.  The people on the top need to stop looking at numbers and start looking at faces, shaking hands instead of wagging fingers, and listening to the people who do the work instead of reading distilled summaries.

Late Review

Although Bowling for Columbine was released 6 years ago, I only saw it last week.  Since it is now on television, maybe its current again.  Maybe not.  The reason that I didn’t see it earlier is that I don’t like Michael Moore.  His heart may be in the right place, but his films lose focus and fly in a dozen directions. Columbine is no exception.  As a film, it sucks.  As a polemic, it’s pointless.

 He begins by wanting to ban guns because guns kill people.  It’s a valid point to argue.  He paints lurid pictures of the tragedy of Comumbine and of the 6-year-old girl who was gunned down in his home town by a classmate.  Children killing children is a terrible reflection on society.  People in Europe and Japan do not murder each other like that.

 Then, the argument falls apart.  Canadians have lots of guns and still don’t murder each other at anything approaching the same rate that we in the U.S. do.  So, guns alone are not the problem.  He asks gun advocates why this is.  They don’t know, and Moore has the satisfaction of making them appear foolish.  If he had asked gun opponents the same question, they would not have looked any better.  Moore, himself, doesn’t have a clue.

When someone suggests that our frontier past has left a residual acceptance of violence, he quickly goes back to Europe for clips of Nazis marching and of Japanese soldiers shooting prisoners.  See, these folks have violent pasts, too.

The point that he misses is that his examples of non-U.S. violence are all committed by the military.  However atrocious, it is sanctioined government violence.  To find rampant violence by private citizens, he would have had to go back to the French Revolution or other times when the governments of long established societies broke down.  The frontier tradition is about people acting individually because the government and its agents of order were a long way off.  

For the other thing that Moore missed, he didn’t look at a map.  Europe and Japan are approximately on the same latitude with Canada.  Worldwide, folks in northern climes are less violent than those in more temperate zones.  I remember a newspaper cartoon that I saw in Riga that compared the three Baltic countries, north to south.  Estonia, near Finland, was represented by a husband and wife in traditional dress with the wife holding a rolling pin and the husband with a lump on his head.  Latvia was represented by a similar couple, but the husband had two lumps.  Lithuania in the south was also represented by a couple in traditional costume, but the wife’s skillet had produced three lumps on the husband’s skull.  This was how the people in that part of the world viewed themselves.

 I went through Army basic training in August in South Carolina.  The drill instructors took pains to watch for conflicts and came down hard on those who even argued because the sergeants and officers knew from experience that hot weather was associated with more fights and other disruptive behavior among recruits.

At least one of the interviewees suggested that our heterogenious population held the key, but Moore’s liberal biases wouldn’t let him entertain that notion.  Yet, there may be something there.  Communities with a strong sense of kinship are usually less violent.  I’ve lived in cities where I didn’t even know my neighbors.  We didn’t shoot or even shout at each other, but there wasn’t a sense of support either.

 I have had handguns in my house since my children were in single digits.  They’re grown now and none of my weapons has ever been fired at a human being, not accidentally, not on purpose.  I was not a perfect father, and my kids had the normal range of behavior and emotional problems growing up, but nobody thought of my guns as the answer.

 In short, Moore was right that there is something wrong with a society in which children shoot children.  Then, he tried to blame the death of a 6-year-old girl  in Flint, Michigan on an aging Charlton Heston.  Disgraceful.  Moore gives college drop-outs a bad name.

 In lieu of communities where neighbors look after each other--Amish-style—we need to create programs that pay more attention to the needs of youth and the deficiencies of parents.   Intervention must occur long before a troubled person even thinks of picking up a gun or other weapon.  Government agencies from schools to police to social services must form a seamless network to anticipate and prevent problems.  Since we can’t do that and cut taxes, too, we need to accept that a certain number of lives will continue to be cut short by violence.