Stuck With the Constitution We Have

            It’s becoming increasingly obvious that our Constitution is no longer up to the job of providing for the running of the government of a large urbanized, industrial nation. The only reason it’s lasted this long is that some of its general tenets, such as the commerce clause, have been interpreted liberally enough by the courts to allow modern issues to be dealt with. Now that the Supreme Court seems hell-bent on taking the country back to 1897, we don’t even have that.

            And here comes the bad news. The alternative would probably be worse.

            To imagine what would happen if a convention were called to draw up a new Constitution, it helps to remember how the one we have was put together. To begin with, a small number of delegates (there were 41 signers) met in secret to argue, compromise, and hammer out the final document.

            They were all men, and men of means at that. They were uncommonly well-read and learned, not only by the standards of their time, but by the standards of ours. In debate their arguments, being held behind closed doors, were directed to each other, and not to any gallery. No one who went into the process came out of it with what he wanted, yet they came together at the end and approved the Constitution unanimously.

            Even then, it was a hard sell. In many state legislatures, the vote to approve was close and hard-fought. Although it was still early in the country’s history, a significant anti-government sentiment already existed and was given full voice in the debate. The most commonly voiced argument against the Constitution was that it gave the federal government too much power and would lead to tyranny, something that hasn’t happened yet.

            Looking only at the process of creation, it’s hard to believe that a constitutional convention held today would be anything but worse than the original. To satisfy notions of diversity and fairness, the delegations would have to be so large as to be nearly unworkable and so diffuse as to hopelessly dilute the power of any first-class minds present. Proceedings would be televised live and dissected on the spot by bloggers, tweeters and TV commentators. Prolonged debate, leading to some sort of compromise would be next to impossible. Any attempt to state things in general terms, allowing for elected legislatures to work out details down the road, would be shouted down by partisans on both sides.

            Almost surely there would be great pressure for more direct democracy, allowing people to vote on laws. Living in a state, California, that has just about been reduced to a smoking ruin by the initiative process, I find the prospect of replicating it at the national level more than a little frightening. Politicians making compromises, while hardly perfect, generally arrive at more nuanced and sensible solutions.

            Finally, imagine that a Constitution that actually reflected 21^st Century realities were to emerge from such a convention. A Constitution that, say, granted Congress the explicit power to regulate commerce, corporations and labor unions in the public interest and to regulate and limit the financing of political campaigns. Big money could and would spend unlimited amounts of money to defeat it in the state legislatures.

            Nope, it doesn’t look good. Fear of the alternative will probably keep the current document going for a lot longer. So make your peace with the Electoral College; make your peace with Wyoming having as many senators as California. We’re stuck with what we’ve got precisely because it could be a lot worse.

           

           

The End of Monopoly Money

            If you’re under the age of 30 this might sound unbelievable, but there was a time, well within the memory of many living Americans, when newspapers were considered a great investment and sold for top dollar.

            After the end of World War II there was a significant consolidation in the newspaper business. Big cities that had several papers when Pearl Harbor was bombed wound up, by the early 1960s, having two or in some cases, only one.

            Meanwhile the growth of the suburbs and the Sun Belt led to the creation of hugely profitable monopoly newspapers. Many a small-town daily that had a circulation of a few thousand before World War II found itself with thirty, forty, even fifty thousand readers by the 1970s. It happened all the way from Santa Rosa, California, to Naples, Florida.

            For a quarter of a century these suburban papers could do no wrong. As the shopping malls kept opening, they were the go-to place for display advertising. The classified advertising sections were a license to print money.  As one cagey veteran of the business side of newspapers put it to me, “You could have put a chimpanzee in the publisher’s office and still made 25 percent.”

            This wasn’t lost on the larger newspaper chains, which began gobbling up these suburban and monopoly papers. The business model they followed was exemplified by Gannett, best known as the publisher of USA Today.

            Time and again, Gannett would buy a local newspaper that had a stranglehold on its market, bring in its own people to run it, and quickly begin a steady ratcheting-up of advertising and subscription rates. Within reason, Gannett didn’t care what it paid for the paper because once it had secured the monopoly, it was no problem to set up a spreadsheet for getting the money back, and then some. During the heyday, Gannett had papers that turned a 60 percent profit.

            Perhaps this is starting to sound a bit like the housing bubble we just endured, and certainly there are similarities. Key among them was the assumption by investors that the good times, growth and profits would go on forever. Of course those things never do.

            In 1985 the small, family-owned newspaper chain I worked for (seven dailies and several weeklies) was sold to the E.W. Scripps Company. Scripps was privately owned at the time but planning on going public, and it wanted the extra newspapers on board to show investors as part of its growth strategy. I heard once that they paid more than three hundred million for the lot. Even if it was a lot less, it turned out to be too much, and today they still own only three of those papers.

            Scripps bought in at the peak of the market. Direct mail, cable TV and specialty shoppers were already starting to cut into the advertising domination, and when the internet came along a few years later, it was a new ball game. Craig’s List alone devastated the newspaper industry by showing that you could take a profit center (classified advertising) and separate it from a significant expense (covering the news). Nothing has been the same since.

            Warren Buffett, who knows a thing or two about investing, has been getting into newspapers lately, and recently bought his hometown paper, the Omaha World-Herald. I’d like to believe he’s seeing something real in the prospects of newspapers. They can probably find a way of being steadily profitable, but it’s unlikely that things will ever return to the point where they’re making monopoly money.

           

Sorely in Need of Competition

            In 1889 Houghton Mifflin published Looking Backward: 2000-1887, a novel by Edward Bellamy that looked at the Gilded Age from the perspective of more than a century hence, when enlightened socialism had replaced brute capitalism, and the world had become a kinder, gentler, more egalitarian place.

            Almost no one reads the book now, but at the time it was a sensation. The publishers couldn’t print copies fast enough. Apparently, during the time so beloved by Glenn Beck, a lot of people were thirsting for a more decent and humane alternative. By 1900 Looking Backward was the second best-selling novel in American history, trailing only Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

            It’s hard to imagine now, but back then a lot of smart people assumed capitalism wouldn’t last another century. The inequality and injustice it spawned, they reasoned, were unsustainable, and either through revolution or the democratic process, some sort of socialism would take its place.

            What got me thinking about this was a throw-away line in a recent  New Yorker essay by Nicholas Lemann, reviewing several books on economic inequality. “It’s clear in retrospect,” Lemann wrote, “that the existence of the Soviet empire was a spur to social democracy, in the United States and in Europe, because it was a serious competitor whose main selling point was generous social provision. The West had no choice but to compete.”

            Bellamy, Karl Marx and other communal utopian thinkers of the time guessed wrong about the future of capitalism at the same time they shrewdly critiqued its shortcomings and contradictions. Their mistake, in a general sense, was that they couldn’t imagine it tacking with the political winds and changing in any substantive way.

            But as Lemann pointed out, capitalism — like the shopkeeper whose competitor is selling at a lower price — had to adjust or go out of business. The great majority of business leaders never got the point, were in fact singularly clueless. But they were bailed out by the democratic process and politicians, particularly Franklin D. Roosevelt. In a just world, there would be a statue of FDR in front of the New York Stock Exchange, with an inscription on the pedestal reading, “If not for him, we wouldn’t be here now.”

            Socialism and communism are in bad repute at the moment, and as a consequence, capitalism is exhibiting the classic behavior of a monopolist. We all know what happens when a local store has no competition: It can easily become arrogant and unresponsive to its customers and employees. The customers of an economic system are the members of society at large, and like the customers of a business, they, too, benefit when there’s competition.

            In a democratic society voters disgruntled with an economic system can, like customers of a non-performing business, take their custom elsewhere. Capitalism hasn’t yet honked off its customer base to that extent, but it’s certainly heading in that direction. If it isn’t diverted from the path it’s on, the consequences for all of us could be ugly.

            Every economic system has its flaws, but a free market, coupled with a robust social safety net has been the least flawed alternative to date. Growing inequality, coupled with a rending of the safety net, inexorably drives society toward one of two unpalatable alternatives: A dictatorship to forcibly maintain gross inequality or a revolution to replace it with something else, which could turn out to be nearly as bad in a different way. Capitalism dodged a bullet once by smoothing out some of its sharper edges. It needs to do it again, but where’s the competition to provide the motivation?

           

             

           

Cesar Chavez, Tragic Hero

            For more than two decades I’ve argued, whenever the subject comes up, that Cesar Chavez was the classic tragic hero — a man of greatness brought down by a fatal flaw. In his case the flaw was an utter lack of interest in actually running a labor union and an unwillingness to delegate the job to someone who could do it.

            It’s not an argument that endears you to people on either side of the political spectrum. Conservatives, who tend to view Chavez as the illegitimate spawn of Mao and Karl Marx, don’t buy into the greatness. Liberals, who want to believe in his saintliness, want to blame the collapse of the UFW on the growers and Republicans and excuse or absolve Chavez of any part in it.

            To me, the greatness is self-evident. With no legislative or legal structure to build upon, he organized a labor movement among people who worked in the fields and who had largely been forgotten by society. That movement succeeded, for a while anyway, beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. It was clearly the work of a visionary and uncommon man, accomplished, to be sure, with the help of many others.

            Over Memorial Day weekend I read Frank Bardacke’s Trampling Out the Vintage, a history of the UFW under Chavez. It’s a wonderful book: Thorough, fair-minded, highly readable. And it documents Chavez’ own contribution to the demise of his union in a way that will make it nearly impossible for future historians and biographers to engage in hagiography.

            It has long been clear that Chavez regarded the union as only one part of a much larger farm worker movement, and I had assumed he neglected the nuts and bolts of the union operation solely because of his focus on the larger vision. Bardacke shows that the story was more complicated.

            Chavez was a classic control freak, and because his leadership was unquestioned, that aspect of his personality did untold damage. It led to UFW administration of contracts being structured in ways that maximized union control over everything, to the point that the hiring halls couldn’t process workers fast enough to get them into the fields during the harvest, when time was of the essence. At the same time, Chavez was running the union like a small-town drugstore owner, trying to oversee and sign off on everything. At best that caused delays; at worst, things didn’t get done.

            It’s often said that nothing ruins a man like success. In one sense that was true for Chavez. Having won his initial grape contracts through a nationwide boycott, he became the classic case of the man with the hammer who sees every problem as a nail. Bardacke makes a well-documented and persuasive argument that by focusing on boycotts, rather than on organizing workers and building a democratic, sustainable union, Chavez helped sow the seeds of his own destruction.

            In the late 1970s the UFW moved its headquarters to La Paz, an isolated former county building in the hills above Tehachapi. Not only did the move distance the union leadership from the people it was serving, it spawned a culture of self-absorption, pettiness and paranoia. By the time the union was crumbling in the early 1980s, the toxic atmosphere at La Paz made the Nixon White House look like Mister Rogers’ neighborhood.

            A lot of people won’t want to hear any of this. They’ll continue to blame the growers, Republicans and the Establishment in general. But the hard fact of the American labor movement is that the bosses have always been against it, and the legislatures and courts have usually been against it. Many unions succeeded despite those circumstances; the UFW didn’t. Chavez has to own his part in the failure.

           

           

           

Speeding Up the Assembly Line

            Erle Stanley Gardner, the creator of Perry Mason, took a different approach to writing than most authors. According to published reports, it went something like this:

            He would sketch out a plot outline and list of characters, and turn the whole thing over in his head for a few days or weeks until he was ready. Then he would go into an office, armed with coffee and cigarettes, set up a Dictaphone, and dictate the entire book in an uninterrupted 24 to 48 hour stretch.

            Considering how many copies his books sold, you can’t argue with success, but having read a couple of those books, I’d have to say that if you didn’t know how they were written, you might have guessed. Even by the lightweight standards of the mystery novel, they are pretty Spartan. True, the story rushes along and keeps you turning pages, but not so well that you don’t notice the lack of description, character and atmosphere.

            Compare Gardner to a couple of his contemporaries, such as Raymond Chandler or Earl Derr Biggers, author of the Charlie Chan novels, and you can tell the difference. If not for the success of Perry Mason on TV, I suspect that only a handful of genre scholars would be reading Gardner today.

            It is true that there have been a handful of good authors who could be brilliant in a hurry. Charles Dickens — channeling God, the Creative Spirit, or whatever you want to call it — supposedly dashed off his manuscripts in such a state of inspired frenzy that each page of foolscap flew to the floor as quickly as he wrote it.

            On the other hand was Joseph Conrad, who found writing such hard and painful work that his wife just about had to drag him out of bed and push him to the desk each morning.

            Most writers fall somewhere in between those poles, but I would argue, based on experience and observation, that most writers derive considerable benefit from reflection and revision, two qualities that are the bedrock of style and consistency.

            It used to be that publishing-house editors caught mistakes and helped an author improve style, organization and consistency; no more. It’s mostly on the author now, and almost every book published has several eye-popping mistakes as a result. Revision, particularly after setting a piece aside for a while and viewing it again with a fresh eye, is what winnows out the clichés, redundancies, and flabby prose.

            These reflections were inspired by a recent story in the Times, reporting that authors of genre books (mystery, romance, science fiction) are increasingly being pressured, by the demands of e-publication, to do more than one book a year to satisfy insatiable demand from readers who have no concept of patience.

That may not seem like a lot to some people, and certainly many authors have done it. In the 1930s and 40s, John Dickson Carr pounded out two or three mysteries a year, and he did it with typewriters. He also wrote in an era where detective technology was considerably less than now and hardly any research was necessary.  A book a year is a lot of work, and considering how much sloppy writing and how many mistakes, large and small, creep into the ones written at that rate, it’s hard to see how speeding up the production line will improve or even maintain quality. It will simply turn every author into Erle Stanley Gardner. Haul out the Dictaphone and bring in the coffee and cigarettes.

A Job That Got No Respect

            It took a while for the penny to drop, but after working at the newspaper for a couple of years I finally figured out who the most important employee was. Not the editor; not the business manager; not the office manager who processed payroll and did our checks.

            No, it was the switchboard operator.

            The epiphany occurred when Jeanie Ewers, the extremely competent operator at the time I got hired, was promoted to a better-paying position in the business department, and a series of short-lived successors were hired to follow her. In hindsight, we should have raised Jeanie’s salary to what the editor was making and given her the switchboard job for life.

            Nothing makes you appreciate a job well done as much as seeing it subsequently done badly. That’s when you realize how demanding the job really is and what’s missing in the performance of it.

            When the city hall reporter is getting calls at deadline that were intended for the society desk or the classified ad department; when messages from missed calls have names so badly misspelled that you can’t figure out who they were from; when the call-back number for a school district official takes you to an escort service instead, it’s a problem.

            And when all those things happen several times a day, it’s not happenstance; it’s not coincidence; it’s a bottom-line issue for the whole business.

            In addition to those obvious mistakes were the more subtle ones that strained tempers and wasted countless hours of time. A complaint call that goes to the wrong editor wastes that editor’s time by interrupting him or her twice — once to take the call, and again to repeat the information to the editor it was intended for. A newsroom call put through to a reporter furiously trying to complete a story five minutes before deadline — when three other reporters were done with their work and sitting around — interrupts the reporter, can cause the paper to be late to press, and all but guarantees that the caller will be given short shrift. A good switchboard operator has an understanding of the business, combined with good powers of observation so nearly every call goes to the right person on the first try.

            Considering the cost of these problems in terms of lost ads, missed stories, and wasted productivity, I concluded the paper should be hiring college graduates for that position and paying them executive salaries. Instead, they hired high school graduates and paid a hiccup above the minimum wage. In many cases, they didn’t even get what they paid for.

            For all the prattle we hear about the efficiency of free markets, there are a lot of places where businesses are myopic about their own best interests. This is a classic example of what I would refer to as a silent loss. The boss can see the salary of the switchboard operator on the balance sheet, but there’s no line on that sheet to quantify the wasted time, lost productivity, and missed business caused by underpaying the operator and absorbing the ensuing havoc.

            Once the people at a business get an idea in their heads as to the worth of a job, it’s almost impossible to change that thinking. If you think only a Harvard MBA can run the company, you’ll overpay for that degree and pass on some better candidates who may have lesser credentials but higher competence. If you think anybody can run the switchboard, you’ll underpay for that job and suffer consequences you don’t even realize. It’s a subtle form of disrespect that comes back to bite the disrespecter.

           

           

           

Tragedy With Two Morals

            Several miles from my house is a stretch of road I drive about once a week. At one point along the route there’s a stop sign where you really wouldn’t expect one, at an intersection with a small feeder street that carries very little traffic.

            There’s a story behind that.

            Back in the late 1980s there was no stop sign at the intersection, but there was a crosswalk across the main road. On a fine May evening, well before sunset, a pedestrian in that crosswalk was struck and killed by a car.

            Our newspaper reported the story, and if memory serves, the pedestrian was a child, which added to the sense of shock. The driver failed a sobriety test, was arrested, and subsequently did a stint behind bars. It was one of those random, senseless tragedies that leaves you shaking your head at the sheer awful cussedness of things.

            Then came the aftermath. People who lived in the area felt the need to do something, which is a common reaction in such cases. Almost overnight petitions were circulated and presented to the county, asking for a stop sign where the fatality occurred.

            County public works staff emphatically recommended against the stop sign, arguing that by every standard of traffic analysis known to man, there was no rationale for one at that location. I was writing editorials at the time, and went out to the scene at the time of day when the pedestrian was killed to see for myself.

            Approaching that intersection from the same direction as the driver, I noticed that the sun was behind me and the visibility approaching the intersection was excellent. There was no reason a driver going the speed limit, or even ten miles over, should have had any difficulty seeing a pedestrian and stopping.

            A sober driver, that is.

            For a day or so I thought of writing an editorial opposing the stop sign, but finally dropped the idea. If you’re going to anger people who are grieving and emotionally aroused, it had better be over something more important than a traffic sign. Apparently feeling the same way, the county Board of Supervisors unanimously approved the sign, and there it is a quarter-century later.

            To the best of my knowledge no other pedestrian has been injured or killed in that crosswalk since the stop sign was put up, but then, to the best of my knowledge no one had been injured or killed in that crosswalk before the fatality that led to the installation of the stop sign. If you want to believe that the stop sign has made any positive difference, you pretty much have to take it as an article of faith.

            Two morals can be drawn from this story. The first is that in the wake of tragedy people feel an overpowering emotional urge to do something, often unaccompanied by any realistic and analytical appraisal of the effectiveness of that something. The problem was a drunk driver. We’ve tried Prohibition and that didn’t work, and the police can’t catch all the drunk drivers, so let’s put up a stop sign. I have my doubts.

            Second, this illustrates the contradictions of democracy. An elected government can’t always be run like a business because it also has to be responsive to the desires of the people, who aren’t always thinking of the bottom line. The neighbors who agitated for that stop sign weren’t doing any cost-benefit analysis, but I believe they were sincere in believing a stop sign would help, and they convinced the elected board. I still don’t think the stop sign is necessary, but I’m grateful to be living in a country where the people can demand and get one.