The Culprits Show No Remorse

            John Ford’s classic western Stagecoach is set in the Southwestern territories in the 1880s, but in at least one respect it is a reflection of the year it was made, 1939. The villain was a banker.

            He was one of nine people on that fateful coach, and he was trying to make off with most of the bank’s deposits. In one of the film’s most memorable moments, he makes a disparaging remark about the prostitute, played by Claire Trevor, prompting John Wayne to respond with one of his signature lines:

            “Back where I come from, mister, a man doesn’t talk like that to a … lady.”

            It’s a telling sign of those times that a banker was considered less socially respectable than a lady of the evening, but given the pain that Wall Street and the banks had recently inflicted on the American public, the sentiment was entirely understandable.

            That sentiment is belatedly bubbling to the surface again in the Occupy Wall Street protests, and the wonder is that it’s taken this long. There is no dispute that bad behavior and shoddy business practices by banks and investment firms have been primary contributors to the current economic misery. What surprises me is the lack of humility and contrition from the people in that sector. Far from acknowledging that remedial action is necessary, they are defiantly demanding that they be left alone to do it again. If I didn’t know better, I’d think they were closet Marxists, trying to ignite a revolution.

            Anger and resentment are no substitute for good policy, but they can be a catalyst for developing it. The Wall Street protests at least recognize the corrupting influences of corporate wealth on public policy even if, for now, they propose no concrete measures to deal with the problems.

            Contrast that to the Tea Party, which shares very little ideologically with the Occupy Wall Street crowd other than a bilious dislike of the bailouts and guarantees the federal government offered corporations and financial institutions in 2008-09. The Tea Party, however, continues to support Republican candidates who oppose all meaningful attempts to regulate the industries that got us into this mess.

            As far as I can tell, the Tea Party position amounts to letting business do whatever it wants, then doing nothing, governmentally speaking, when the reckless behavior of big business precipitates a crisis. I guess the idea is that the Invisible Hand of the free market will take care of the problem, though believing that calls for a greater leap of faith than any religion requires of its adherents. The recent bailouts may not be defensible from the standpoint of justice, but hoping that, left alone, something good would have risen from the ashes would have been playing Russian roulette with the country’s future.

            Just about any business, left unwatched, will begin to slide down the slippery slope of dangerous, unethical or dishonest practice in the pursuit of near-term profit. Public opinion can be a partial counterweight, but laws and enforcement are a more consistent mitigating factor.

            Back in the 1930s most of the financial wizards at least had enough humility and awareness to realize that they had forfeited, for the time being, the expectation of having their way. A president and Congress of the same party wouldn’t have listened to the money men anyway, and those politicians passed laws and regulations that led to three quarters of a century of financial stability and prosperity. I’d like to believe that historians looking back on us in 75 years will be able to say the same, but I lack the Tea Party ability to make that leap of faith.

           

           

When Your Life Has Problems

            If you grew up with a father around the house, chances are you’ll go to the grave with several of the old man’s sayings rattling around in your head. Two have been bubbling up to the surface this past week:

            “When you own a car, you own trouble.”

            “If your car has problems, your life has problems.”

            Did I mention that Dad used to sell Chevrolets? Back in the good old days, when they were great cars? Good cars or no, wisdom born of long experience had taught him that no machine is utterly reliable and the greater your reliance upon it, the greater your difficulty when, inevitably, it lets you down.

            Last Saturday night, I went out to pick up a pizza, and on the way home the car started badly misbehaving, lurching along with sporadic power. By the time it coasted into the garage, it was clear that it was done for the weekend and would have to be towed Monday morning.

            Once in the hands of my excellent mechanic, the car went through a four-day repair process, as follows:

            Monday: Sit in the queue with the other Monday-morning limp-ins, behind the cars that had service appointments that day.

            Tuesday: Up on the rack for diagnosis, which determines that a new fuel pump is needed. Part ordered for Wednesday morning delivery.

            Wednesday: Fuel pump installed and scheduled servicing added to the tab. Car would be ready for pickup at the end of the day, except that the fuel filter that came with the pump was the wrong model. New filter ordered for Thursday morning delivery. Car remains in shop.

            Meanwhile, on her way home Wednesday afternoon, Linda notices that temperature gauge shows engine heat rising dangerously. With much starting and stopping, she gets it to another mechanic just before closing.

            This takes our family of three drivers down to one functioning vehicle: Our son’s 1990 Ford Ranger, recently bought through Craig’s List (how did we ever live without Craig’s List?) from Raoul in Fremont. We say prayers for Raoul.

            Thursday: My car finally sprung from shop at great expense, though not unreasonable considering amount of work done. Linda’s car diagnosed with bad circuit board, which they are able to replace, leaving us with full complement of cars at 5 p.m. — first time in five days. Ford Ranger still running like a champ, though we choose to ignore ominous rattle and say additional prayers for Raoul.

            All in all, it was a week of vehicular scheduling mayhem, greatly elevating my consciousness about how much my life depends on ready access to a car. The three of us work three different places at different but overlapping times, and our house is far enough off the beaten track that getting to basic services without a car is arduous. Depending on my work situation, I sometimes have to do a lot of driving around to appointments and doing tasks for clients; mercifully, this week I didn’t. Still, at a time like this, I find myself entertaining fantasies about moving to New York City, where you can get around without a car, and if the subway breaks down, it’s the city’s problem, not mine.

            And, to keep it all in perspective, at the end of this car-challenged week, nobody had died, gone bankrupt or missed work, and we were reminded how lucky we are to own three cars. If this is the worst thing that happens to us this month, it will still be a pretty good month. And if nothing else, it was good to think about Dad again.

           

           

             

The Hidden Rise in the Cost of Living

            If you were a typical American family 75 years ago, in 1936, you may or may not have had a telephone. If you did, the chances are that you were on a party line in order to save money.

            You may or may not have had an automobile. Most people were a walk or short bus ride from work back then. But if you did have an automobile, you probably had only one for the family and used it sparingly.

            You probably had a radio, but once you bought it — probably on the installment plan — it hardly cost you anything. Once you plugged it in, you got the stations you were going to get, and you didn’t have to pay for cable or premium channels.

            Today, of course, the average family has several cell phones in addition to the land line most still keep. The monthly cost of watching television, factoring in cable, premium channels and Netflix, can easily exceed $100. And that family will have at least two cars, often making long daily commutes. Since those cars are mostly computerized, they cost the earth to repair.

            Add to that the cost of buying and maintaining washers, dryers, dishwashers and solar panels, as well as having computers, printers, and other gadgets, and you have to conclude that the basic cost of living has gotten higher as society has become more technologically advanced.

            That rise in the bottom line of living costs is something rarely discussed, but it’s a key part of the ongoing squeeze of the middle class. Not only have wages been stagnant, jobs less secure, health benefits less generous; the dollars people do make have to cover far more things now considered essential.

            It’s a factor that makes cost-of-living comparisons a squishy business. A standard like the Consumer Price Index can give us a sense of what a dollar will buy in gasoline, groceries and rent compared to years past, but how do you factor in all the other stuff that sucks money out of our wallets?

            A friend of mine likes to say that the computer companies are the new drug pushers. They get us hooked on their product so we can’t live without it, he says, then once we’re enslaved, we have to constantly spend more money on software, upgrades and new models. And really, it’s not just the computer companies. It’s all the firms that produce technological products. I still fish with the same fly rod I bought in 1984, but I’m on my fifth cell phone since 2005 and am probably not unusual in that regard.

            In 1956, British Prime Minister Anthony Eden said the advanced western nations were faced with a crisis of rising expectations. But it’s really turned into a crisis of rising necessities. If you don’t have a cell phone or a computer, it’s tough to get a job, so how do you cut those things out of your budget? It’s analogous to the government problem of being bled by the cost of paying for health care as it gets better, more complicated and more expensive each year.

            A century ago, in a rapidly urbanized and industrialized nation, Henry Ford saw a similar problem. He possessed a great ability to produce automobiles in large numbers, but he also realized he had to grow the market for his product. One of his answers, considered radical at the time, was to raise the pay of his workers so they could afford to buy a car. Is anyone applying that kind of thinking today to the high cost of living in modern times?

           

           

When Democrats Built Dams

            Seeking another term as president in 1948, Harry Truman was making a tour of America’s farm belt. At one stop he was told that a local farmer, a lifelong Democrat, had decided to vote Republican after four years of record-high farm prices.

            “What’s the matter with that fella?” Truman replied. “Can’t he stand a little prosperity?”

            Something similar seems to be happening in American politics today. Granted, there hasn’t been a lot of prosperity going around lately, but in a tough economy, one party, the Democrats, is generally pushing for policies more beneficial to consumers and the middle class, while the Republicans are acting as if the solution to what ails us is to give the keys to the vault to the businesses largely responsible for the mess.

            And while it’s far too early to tell, there’s a chance that the Republican party could get enough people to vote against their own economic interest and elect its candidate for president.

            The phenomenon of people voting against their economic interests is one of the great puzzlers of American politics. Part of it has to do with the fact that there’s a substantial bloc of voters who are utterly nonideological and willing to try the other side if things aren’t going well — regardless of what the other side proposes.

            Part of the difficulty, I think, is that the Democratic Party has, in the last half-century, gotten away from its core focus on jobs and housing. That has enabled Republicans to paint it as the party of gay rights, minority special pleadings, entitlements, and environmental elitism.

            If there’s a metaphor for this, it would be the party’s change from building dams to opposing them. Nobody outside China and Africa is building dams any more (environmental laws make that nearly impossible), but when Democrats were building dams, they were a much more popular party.

            One of the first programs of the New Deal was the Tennessee Valley Authority, which built a series of dams in the south and brought electrification to a region that literally had been living in the Dark Ages.

            In addition to the TVA, the Roosevelt administration built numerous other large dams, including Fort Peck, Montana, Shasta near Redding CA, and Grand Coulee on the Columbia River. Each of those projects provided thousands of jobs, turned the local communities into boomtowns, and created substantial benefits from cheap hydro power to flood control.

            Unless you were a fish, how could you complain?

            Eventually, of course, the fish got a voice through environmental legislation, and while that’s a good thing, it’s a hard sell to someone whose livelihood depends on building a dam. If you’re looking at several years of steady employment working a bulldozer, with good wages and overtime, it makes no sense at all to scrap or delay the project to protect some three-inch-long endangered fish. You can’t win an environmental argument with that person.

            The fact that dams aren’t being built any more is a reflection of increased awareness resulting in increased complexity. The entire TVA was completed without a single environmental impact report (as we know it, at least) being filed, and that’s one of the reasons it could be done so quickly and effectively. Businesses complain about regulation, but it affects government as well. Part of the problem with President Obama’s stimulus package was that there were few shovel-ready projects environmentally approved and good to go.

            We’re paying a price for listening to our better angels. I don’t know what the answer is, but I do know that when Democrats could just go out and build a dam, they were winning a lot more elections.

           

More Than the Residue of Design

            Watching football this past weekend I was once again reminded of the importance of luck in sports — and in life as well.

            Playing in Philadelphia, against a highly favored team, our 49ers came from 20 points behind in the second half to win the game 24-23. There was a lot of skill and grit involved in their doing that, but some spectacular luck as well. In the fourth quarter alone the Philadelphia kicker missed two field goals inside the 40-yard line, which, as far as I’m concerned, is one more than a professional kicker should miss from that range in an entire season.

            Either field goal would have won the game for Philadelphia but didn’t. Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers once said that luck is the residue of design, but please tell me what design makes a pro kicker go wide right from short range twice in one game. How do you design an opposing kicker’s yips?

            Coaches in all sports are volatile people, and no wonder. Whatever they say for public consumption, they have to know in their hearts that a lot of the outcome is outside their control. By every measure except the numbers on the scoreboard, Philadelphia outplayed San Francisco on Sunday and still lost. In addition to the missed field goals, there was a Philadelphia fumble late in the game. The loose ball could have bounced out of bounds or into the hands of a Philadelphia player. Instead, it went right to a 49er, who scooped it up to seal the game.

            Beyond the bounce-of-the-ball type of luck, there’s the whole question of personnel luck. In 1979 the Dallas Cowboys had a chance to draft Joe Montana. He was at the top of their list when their turn came late in the second round, but they decided they were set at quarterback and went for another player. Bill Walsh of the 49ers drafted Montana, and working together, they both went on to the Hall of Fame.

            If Montana had gone to Dallas, or if he had suffered a career-ending injury in his early years, how different would things have been? My guess is that Walsh would have ended up in the same league as Marty Schottenheimer, a good coach and a consistent winner who ended his career without a championship. Unless, of course, he got lucky and found himself another Montana in a future draft.

            And what if Montana hadn’t been lucky in his teammates? It’s customary among sportswriters and commentators to hold it against a quarterback if he doesn’t “win the big one.” There’s probably no argument in sports more wrongheaded. Quarterbacks don’t win championships, though they make a major contribution, but teams do.

            Show me a team that won a Super Bowl, and I’ll show you a team that almost certainly had a Hall of Fame-bound defensive player. Montana played for teams that had Ronnie Lott and Fred Dean on the defensive side of the ball. His Hall-of-Fame successor Steve Young ran up the best passing-efficiency numbers in the history of the game but won only one Super Bowl, in 1995. Anybody remember the name of the defensive player who joined San Francisco for that one season only? It was Deion Sanders, and he was inducted into the Hall of Fame earlier this year.

            As it goes for football (and other sports), so it goes for war and life. Whenever Napoleon was reviewing officers for promotion, there was one question he always asked his generals about the candidate: “Is he lucky?”

            Napoleon knew.

           

Thinking Outside the Box on Medicare

            My friend John and I got together for coffee recently and figured out how to Save Medicare. Everybody exhale.

            Unlike Congressman Paul Ryan, we began with the premise that the promise of Medicare (it will take care of you from 65 to the grave) needs to be kept. The question, then, is how to do that in a sustainable, cost-effective way. We (oh, all right, John, it was your idea) decided to approach that by consolidating government services and greatly reducing the profit motive. By now you’ve probably figured we’re not Republicans.

            Still, it’s hard to argue with the notion that private enterprise run riot bears a fair portion of the blame for the high cost of health care. The Medicare prescription-drug law passed a few years ago, for instance, forbids the federal government to use its buying power to bargain with drug companies for lower prices. A lot of people think government is inefficient, but mandating inefficiency and higher costs to the taxpayer is something that makes no sense unless you look at the federal government as a welfare provider to large corporations.

            By contrast the Veterans Administration hospital system requires the government to use its bargaining power with drug companies and results in significantly lower prices. Which raises the logical question as to why Medicare doesn’t follow the VA model of having government provide the services directly, rather than reimbursing a huge number of privately owned hospitals, clinics and medical practices with a wide range of treatment policies and billing practices.

            Suppose for a moment that Medicare were run like the VA, with regional hospitals and clinics focusing on its target patient population. Some provision could be made for contracting out services in sparsely populated areas, but that shouldn’t be too hard to work out.

            The advantages, in concept, would be considerable. The facilities could be run by a core of experienced doctors, with interns and younger residents doing much of the work, perhaps in exchange for a break on the cost of their medical education. With one billing system, one patient-records system, and one proscribed-treatment system (subject to physician review), the savings should be significant. The quality of medical care, owing to a focus of concentration, should be pretty good. In the event it turned out not to be, people could complain to their Congress member and have more hope of relief than they would if they complained to an HMO.

            If we acknowledge that the rising cost of health care has to be dealt with by making substantive changes, why not this one? Like the other ideas, it wouldn’t be perfect, but it incorporates the advantages mentioned above along with transparency. With one system dealing with health care for the elderly, we could get a pretty good handle on what it really costs. From what I’ve been able to understand about the Ryan proposal, one of its glaring weaknesses is that it doesn’t account for the cost of treating people whose primary coverage has run out.

            In the current political climate, suggesting a greater role for government is a tough sell. It shouldn’t automatically be so. Having a single layer of administration and accountability is common-sense management, and there’s no way to get that degree of  simplicity through the multitude of private services out there.

            The original sin of Medicare was keeping treatment in the hands of the private sector. That allowed people to keep the doctor they had, but at considerable and increasingly unaffordable cost. I like my doctor a lot, but between keeping him and keeping Medicare, I know which way I’d go.

           

The Amateur Hour in Your Home Town

                  Once upon a time there was a show on radio (and briefly on TV) called Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour. It was the American Idol of its time, only with less hype and a smaller payout. For years it provided a brief moment of fame to assorted singers, dancers, and musicians of the type who played melodies on whisky bottles. A small handful of performers went on to amount to something in the entertainment world, but most were Three Day Wonders.

                  If you live anywhere outside the top dozen media markets in the United States, chances are you’re being regularly exposed these days to the hometown version of the Amateur Hour. It takes the form of the local newspaper. Battered, bruised and deprived of the business model that served them for 150 years, local papers have increasingly taken to using cheap local talent to fill their news and opinion pages on a freelance basis.

                  Before moving on with that idea, let it be said that 20, 30, 40 years ago, when local papers were thriving monopolies, most of them weren’t that great. And in many cases, family-owned papers were among the worst for the simple reason that it had been several generations since anybody in charge knew what they were doing.

                  Whatever their quality issues, most of those papers at least tried to cover the public’s business professionally. They sent reporters to water boards, zoning boards and city council meetings. Occasionally those reporters would see something that didn’t make sense, ask some questions, write a story, and generate a public response. Even when that happened rarely, it could make at least some public officials behave a bit better than they otherwise might have.

                  About 25 years ago, in response to a slow decline in circulation numbers, newspaper consultants began to advise their clients that they needed to reconnect with the communities in which they published. Part of the strategy was to open up the opinion pages to more local commentary by members of the community.

                  How could anybody argue with that? In theory you can’t — at least if you profess to believe in democratic principles. The problem, as with Marxism, is making an idea that sounds lovely actually work in the real world. What happened all too often was that people whose letters to the editor used to get cut in half ended up with their own columns. Much of the remaining space was taken up by self-serving and not terribly interesting pleadings by local organizations. Editors, at least the more perceptive of them, learned the hard way that the talent reservoir in even an affluent and educated community is not very deep.

                  About 10 years ago, as the Internet steamroller began to flatten local papers, many tried to compensate for the loss of advertising revenue by cutting back on staff reporters and using more freelance stories. (One paper in Southern California went so far as to outsource its reporting to India, having writers in that country cover a City Council meeting by picking up the community television’s internet feed.)

                  There is only one thing to be said for this approach: It fills a lot of space on a low budget. There’s plenty to be said against it. Regrettably often, freelancers don’t have the training to ask the right questions; they aren’t able to stick with an area of coverage long enough to really understand it; they’re not in constant contact with more experienced editors from whom they could absorb some knowledge (assuming any such editors are left at the local paper); and since they’re being paid next to nothing, they are apt to cover the stories they want to cover, rather than what the community needs covered. It’s a system geared not toward providing journalism, but toward creating the illusion of journalism.