Happy Birthday Bill

October 18^th – that was yesterday of course.  But October 18^th, 1931 . . . that was a while ago . . . 80 years to be exact. So, yesterday, my brother William would have reached 80 years. We always joked that he was 4 years older than me . . . on his birthday.  But he never made that big number, 80, for he is now gone.  But I think about him often.  He remains the most important man in my life, since he was always forging a path for me to follow. Arguably, we had no father to do so, and Bill picked up that mantle.

When I see our grandchildren being fathered properly, I smile, because whether they are girls or boys, a father’s influence will later be cherished, as a Mother’s.  So, William, I don’t know whether you are simply forging another path for me or that perhaps your energy has just been transformed into another form. We know that energy is always conserved, neither created, nor destroyed. So, your energy remains somewhere in our universe. And your life was full of your energy. That energy spurred me on, I continue to thank you daily William. While you were a man, you were a good man. Now, I hold you fast in my own mind.

So, thanks Wiiliam for all you were and are.

Happy Birthday.

In Pursuit of Efficiency in the Private Sector

I’ve been thinking a lot about this great debate going on in our nation about Capitalism vs. Socialism, and about the ostensibly greater efficiencies achieved in having the private sector do stuff vs. the government doing that same stuff.  I should first note that the TeaBaggers and others of that ilk, who keep yelling that Obama is a Socialist really need to get a grip. I assume they keep yelling stuff like that because, well they’re just not very smart.  Most of them don’t really know what Socialism is in any meaningful sense.  Socialism basically means that the “means of production” are centrally owned, i.e., by a central government.  In only a very few countries has socialism been tried in a pure sense, e.g. the Soviet State and a few others of that ilk. Generally, they have not been notably successful. A lot of the problems seem to stem from that old Russian adage, “we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.”

In India, a mixed economic system operated. That is, India employed a “public sector” in which the government owned the plants—generally this sector had the heavy industrials within it. They had a private sector, in which the companies were privately owned, and they also had a mixed sector, in which both types of ownership existed. A number of European nations use a modified socialist model in which many types of services are government owned and operated, but the majority of commercial products and services remain private.

In the United States, we clearly use this mixed model, since  much of our infrastructure, e.g., our highways, have been built by the government, some of our health care is financed by the government, much of our education is financed by the government, and many other services are government financed, or run.  But the vast majority of economic activity in this country is privately owned and operated. Given that Obama has not made any effort to dismantle that system, it is at best inane to label him a socialist.  

In economic systems, we often employ two concepts to assess how well we are doing. One is “efficiency” and the other is “effectiveness”.  Efficiency refers to the input-output ratio, or unit cost. We measure how much labor and material cost we employ to produce a unit of output, and then we can use that measure to compare like economic entities on their relative efficiency.  We need always to be careful when employing such comparative measures to be comparing like output products. That is, we should not compare the unit cost of production of, say a Mercedes Benz sedan, with a Chrysler PT Cruiser. One is clearly a luxury vehicle, the other an annoying little knockoff of a 1939 auto design. We could of course compare two Mercedes plants, or even two plants producing PT Cruisers and measure their relative efficiency.  The Republican advocates of capitalism argue that the private sector is invariably more efficient than the public sector at doing really anything. Yet, in a number of cases, for example, health insurance, the public sector in the form of Medicare can be seen to operate at a lower cost, i.e., at a greater level of efficiency. Mainly the difference here seems to be in the form of relatively lower overhead in Medicare, because the upper levels of private insurance providers pay exorbitant salaries and bonuses to their executives relative to the government.

We can also see cost disadvantages in other forms of “privatization” of formerly government services, e.g., the military. When Shrub and his gang “privatized” parts of our military by giving very large contracts to firms such as Blackwater and Halliburton, the overall cost of providing the services increased dramatically over what they would have been if run by the government itself.  Again, the relative salary structures explain the differences.  So, although it remains arguably true that the private sector may well be more efficient at producing many types of goods and services than the government, it is not axiomatic.

The second type of measure is effectiveness. By “effectiveness” is meant the relative achievement of the main purpose of an activity.  For example, an immunization program might be measured on the extent to which it limits or eliminates the incidence and prevalence of specific diseases, e.g. measles.  Measures of effectiveness are not always so relatively straightforward, because the presumed cause and effect relationships are not always so clear.  In education, for example, the “No Child Left behind” program  has been translated into an increasingly simplistic model in which teachers are viewed as the sole determinant of our children’s education achievement as measured by standardized achievement tests.  The entire program is aimed at test gains, and so the educational system itself is slowly being redesigned into a model in which we teach kids how to take the standardized tests.  There are many obvious things wrong with such an enterprise. First, “education” should be as much about critical thinking skills as test-taking skills, but our current approach largely ignores this issue.  Second, our teachers are but one element in the learning process. Kids’ status on entering school, their home environment, their parental interest and oversight, are all equal factors in determining how well and how much kids actually learn. Teacher skills are but one factor.

On effectiveness measurement, because we have become intellectually lazy, we mostly choose not to do the hard work of forging usable and theoretically defensible measures. We tend toward the lowest possible denominator, often electing to measure that which is easily measurable rather than that which is important.

In many private enterprises, we used to compete on two bases, efficiency and effectiveness.  Efficiency is relatively straightforward—unit cost.  Effectiveness would be more complex and used to include the functional performance of the item, as well as its reliability over time, i.e., its “quality”. For example, my McIntosh stereo system (made in New York and not related to Apple-crap) that I purchased in 1968 still produces superb music  and has experienced no “hiccups” over its 40+ years of performance.  Compare that system with most of today’s electronics which are dead within three years.

It would be interesting to compare relative effectiveness of services produced both by the private sector and the public sector. For example, we could compare the provision of services by Blackwater as against similar services by the US military. Many would argue that, not only is Blackwater (now Xe) more expensive, i.e., less efficient, but that they are less effective at what they do—ergo, it would be better overall were the US military (the Government) to provide these services directly.

Over time, I would argue that the private sector has changed the nature of its game dramatically in terms of efficiency and effectiveness. Beginning in the early part of the 20^th century, one could see the private sector, in pursuit of efficiency gains, trying to reduce its unit cost of production so as to become more efficient and, therefore, more competitive. Thus we saw a shift in production from the North to the South because of the low labor cost in the South.  That shift never really stopped as our business executives, always in pursuit of higher profits kept moving the locus of production in the direction of lower labor costs, eventually moving their enterprise production plants to other countries.  Over time, less and less of our commercial production of goods and services is carried out within the United States—which explains in part our unemployment dilemma.  If we do not produce anything here, why would we need a labor force?  When, for example, housing collapsed, that was the last bastion of employment, leading to the continued high unemployment rates, despite the theoretic end of the recession.  There are no jobs because our productive capacity has been moved out of the country in order to gain low unit costs of production.

I would also argue that over the last 20-30 years, not only has our executive workforce been focused on efficiency, it has largely eliminated the other measure—effectiveness. In pursuit of greater profits, efficiency has replaced all other measures. Seemingly, we no longer compete on quality.

Now, if that be true, I am wondering whether we still have one more shift needed in pursuit of greater efficiency.  Why not begin “offshoring” our executive class? Since they represent the last really large pool of cost to reduce, we should think about ridding our companies of that executive staffing and moving those functions to India, China, et al. Think of the savings we could achieve and think of how happy that would make our stockholders.  We could shift all boards of directors, all senior executives—say the top three tiers of every US Company. Wouldn’t that be great?

Another great example of “Be Careful What You Wish For, Guys.”

Just thinking . . .

Our First Naive President

If St. Ronald gave us a first brush with an intellectually challenged president, we can say with confidence that George W. Bush was our first truly stupid president. Unquestionably, Ric Perry would make Shrub fade into the background of stupidheadland, since Perry seems to be intent on demonstrating that Bush wasn’t so bad after all.

In olden times, Republicans might have had scary guys as President, for example,  Richard Milhouse Nixon, but they never seemed terminally stupid. Now, for whatever reasons, Republicans seem to prefer their candidates either really stupid, really crazy, or both (see Michelle Bachman).

But Democrats have come up with an entirely new category -- naivete. Who would have ever considered a naïve president? Well, it would seem in President Obama, we have our very first naïve president.

Naïveté or naïve can be defined as:
Lacking worldly experience and understanding, especially, a. simple and guileless; artless as in a child with a naive charm; or perhaps, b. Unsuspecting or credulous.

How else should we characterize our current Democratic President? Somehow, he keeps thinking, "if I give them something nice, then perhaps they’ll play nice." Then they kick him in the nuts. Presidents such as Lyndon Johnson would smile just before he hit his opponents across the forehead with his ever-handy 2 x 4. Then, having gotten their attention, he would help them up, smile and tell them how things were.

Barack Obama, after having been kicked in the nuts, smiles, gets himself up and then asks what else he can do to help his opponents. Jon Stewart showed an interesting clip of a talk by The NRA’s chief sociopath, Wayne LaPierre. His talk took place after the Feds gave up some more goodies to the gun lobby. But, not appeased, Mr. laPierre instead spoke about how the President was trying to sucker them into believing he would play nice, but he was really all about taking their guns away and imposing his own nightmarish police state on all the nice gunners in the country. Talk about paranoia.

But the NRA rant was really just one small part of the larger republican strategy whereby they will never "play nice", regardless of what our president says or does. And our president doesn’t seem to get that. He keeps thinking that he is dealing with rational people who have the good of the country at heart and so will act accordingly. Instead, he has the equivalent of terrorists who no longer care whether their actions damage the country -- they don’t care Barack!! They might as well have dynamite strapped to their middle.
But our president keeps on, thinking, or maybe just pretending, that good will is just around the corner.

I guess this first term has been instructive to our president, and to the nation in general. It is now clear to one and all that republicans who created that house of cards and then brought it down, now wish to return to their glory days of the George W. Bush era, when War was on, and corporations could do anything they wished. Or maybe they just wish to return us all to that late great era when robber barons roamed the earth and we had just two classes the very rich and everyone else.

So, President Naïve, maybe it’s time to awaken to our real world. We need help. Republicans are out and about trying desperately to crush everything that is/was good about this nation. Wake up, man, and smell the roses, before they’re all dead. And, by the way, how about this? So long as the republicans plan to say no to anything and everything you say or propose, then why not begin saying and proposing what you really think is right? Quit trying to play nice. Perhaps they (and we) might grow to respect you more.

In Celebration of Chutzpah

Chutzpah: Leo Rosten in The Joys of Yiddish defines chutzpah as "gall, brazen nerve, effrontery, incredible 'guts,' presumption plus arrogance such as no other word and no other language can do justice to." In this sense, chutzpah expresses both strong disapproval and a grudging admiration. In the same work, Rosten also defined the term as "that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan."

So, that's you Brian, Mr. too-big-to-fail Bank of America. Five bucks a month for a debit card? You little shit!

So, Bryan baby, I suppose this $5 per month fee is your way of saying thanks to the American people for saving your ass?? I’m not sure I quite get your message. I assume it’s something like,

“Well people, the government keeps strangling us with regulations and now we can’t even charge companies fees for these damned debit cards. We’re losing so much money here that I personally will not be able to afford the fourth home I purchased in the Bahamas.  And don’t even mention my sailboat.  So look people, I understand your pain, with no job and all that crap. I get it. Really, I do.  But, you have to be reasonable. Unless I charge you the five bucks per month, I just won’t be able to support the Hummer I was going to buy my kid. So, take it or leave it people. I need the dough. Oh, and speaking of dough, if you’re having trouble scraping up the dough to buy bread (hahaha, get it . . . dough . . . bread??) I suggest a nice cake instead.”

So, here’s my suggestion to you Brian, baby. I think the government should take away your gambling license.  See, instead of you taking all of our money and pissing it away on gambling, something you’re obviously not very good at by the way, we think you should go back into the banking business. What’s that? Well, it’s something like this. See, people take their cash and place it in your care. You charge them a small fee for handling it, and then, if they leave it with you long enough, you invest it in actual loans—you know, like when people want to buy a car or a house, or maybe start a small business?? Remember those kinds of loans?  And you also provide people with a thing called a checking account and you can charge them another small fee for that.

But that’s it Brian. You can’t do anything else. Oh, and one more thing, Brian. We’re not going to let you operate in more than one state—so pick your state carefully. Yeah, no more global banking shit. That’s for smart people, not people like you Brian.

So, that’s all for now Brian. Oh, and one more thing. If you ever stray off the reservation again, we’re going to put handcuffs around your wrists and place you in a small jail cell for a really long time.

Ta ta Brian. Have a nice weekend.

Colleges as the Minor Leagues

Reading the Observer this morning about how the University of North Carolina is taking a fresh look at its academic offerings, especially those preferred by its “student-athletes” brings me to a sense of sadness and wonder—wonder that we can go on playing this game of “Let’s Pretend” regarding athletics and money in this country.

I began thinking about this subject a long time ago. When I attended university, we used to refer to one of the schools in our conference as a “football factory”.  The term was intended to denigrate their academic program, which we thought had lost out to their athletic programs.  Then, over time, the Olympics started to come into focus, especially the notion that the games were somehow pure, i.e., the athletes had not yet been tainted by money—they were all “amateur athletes.”  The more I paid attention, the clearer it became that Olympic athletes were really “amateur” in name only. Most were sponsored by some group or another and the ones that weren’t had commercial sponsors who paid them one way or another. When professional basketball invaded the Olympics, I conceded that the amateur athletics notion had just been buried for good.

 Then over time, one college after another got stung by its own stupidity and greed. Money began to dominate college athletics.  The TV rights to games alone made the “amateur” notion of collegiate competition a joke.  So, why would we continue to play “Let’s Pretend”?  Well, apparently nobody is willing to stand up and state the obvious—college “student-athletes’ are paid minor league athletic employees. Unlike baseball, where the major league teams own their own minor league franchises to train their upcoming athletes, in football and basketball (the so-called “revenue sports”) colleges provide the minor leagues.  A recent controversy regarding the true nature of college athletes (are they paid employees?)  has been brought into the daylight via an article in the Atlantic by Taylor Branch—“The Shame of College Sports” –The Atlantic, October 2011.  The true controversy is whether we should consider college athletes as paid employees of the university, in which case they would be entitled to workmen’s compensation when they become injured.  Apparently, the powers that be do not want that, because it would leave them liable. The NCAA “Let’s Pretend” they’re just student-athletes allows everyone to escape such liability.

But the potential damage even goes beyond that done to the athletes themselves. The college academic programs are also damaged, as when we used to refer to that “football factory”.  Real students who graduate from the “football factories” of the country are not treated as seriously as they should. See, even “football factories” have serious academic study programs and real students. If the “student-athletes” manage to trash their school’s academic standing because they are joke students, many real students are thereby potentially damaged.

So, why not just admit the truth—college football and basketball NCAA conferences are the true minor leagues of the NBA and the NFL. The participating athletes are minor league professional athletes—paid employees. Whether they go to classes is largely irrelevant. Maybe we even need to go the extra mile and declare that these athletes don’t actually have to attend academic classes, since they are not real students.

Now the problem with such an approach is that it may punish the real student-athletes, i.e., the students who happen to be both gifted academics and gifted athletes.  Surely we are clever enough to manage such a reality so as to not harm the real student-athletes.

And while we are on the subject of truth in athletics, why don’t we deal with the taboo subject of “performance-enhancing drugs”? Talk about “Let’s Pretend”.  We demand that athletes meet higher and higher performance standards, and then we wonder and are “shocked . . . shocked” when we find that high performing athletes actually cheat by injecting themselves with various Illegal substances in order to become better at their game.  But in the end, who really cares if Lance Armstrong used illegal drugs to gain his mastery over the field of bikers?  If professional athletes wish to screw up their bodies in exchange for gaining mastery (and a great deal of money) why not let them? Nobody is forcing them to choose that path to glory.

The GOP as a Cult

In a recent article in truthOut (http://www.truth-out.org/goodbye-all-reflections-gop-operative-who-left-cult/1314907779) a recent defector (retiree) from the ranks of the GOP Mike Lofgren, a former professional republican staff member wrote:

" A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner. A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media.”

Mr. Lofgren includes in his article a quote from John P. Judis, an editor at the New Republic, “Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority. It is the party of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but also of the government shutdown in 1995 and the impeachment trial of 1999. If there is an earlier American precedent for today's Republican Party, it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to and who later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery."

It seems to me that anyone with even a shred of objectivity left cannot but be dismayed watching the cast of characters who currently pose as actual or potential leaders in the GOP, including most especially the people acting as candidates for the highest office in the Land.  It seems equally clear that republicans in general now are more than simply opposed to Obama policies and program proposals. They oppose almost as a religious experience.  They oppose as the Islamic extremist with dynamite strapped to his middle opposes as he detonates himself in a marketplace of innocent people. They seem no longer to care what results from their opposition.  And that makes them truly dangerous to the future of our republic.

When I observed that New Yorkers, seeking to replace the idiotic Anthony  Weiner as their Congressman, voted for a conservative republican instead of his democratic challenger, I gasped. What could they be thinking, I wondered? You are voting to install yet another person to oppose any ideas of our president to minimize the economic damage done to our country by, guess who, conservative republicans? Really . . . you really imagine that you are sending a smart message to our president? A message to be sure, but the message is, “well we’re just a bunch of ignorant, low-information voters who are unhappy, so we’re installing another of the idiots who got us into this mess . . . as a way of telling you we want someone to get us out of this mess . . . that we’re helping to keep us in . . .” Yeah, that’ll surely work to invigorate the president.  Nothing like making his work harder as a way of hoping he can work smarter.

So this coming election in 2012 may well settle both our economic future, and our future as a democratic society.   It is hard to be hopeful, when visions of America as Iran keep appearing in the rear view mirror.

The GOP Anti-Enlightenment

It is one the world’s true wonders that current republican candidates can be so wrong on so many issues, and how they label our president with the worst of their own faulty positions.  Their main smear against Obama is that he just wants to do “more of the same thing”, which has not worked, and will not work in the future. 

On that point, it is hard to label Obama as a “more of the same thing” kind of guy, since, aside from rescuing the banks, he actually hasn’t done much on the economic front.  Some of the things he says he wants to do—spending on infrastructure for example, are hotly resisted by all of the candidates.  In fact, it seems not to matter what Obama wants to do—republicans have said No to everything.  They do so want him to be a one-term president.

So, what is their prescription?

Repeal “Obamacare” – now there’s a big job creator. Take away health care from the 40+ million who have none, thereby further reducing their spendable income. Yeah, that’s a winner. The main fear of republicans about “Obamacare” of course, is that it threatens one of their core financial supporters, the health insurance industry.

Roll back all regulations – they talk of an ‘explosion” of regulations, “smothering” American job creators. In fact, the near absence of regulations is what got us into the current financial mess to begin with. Their most current bitch was about some proposed EPA regulations on emissions, which Obama just killed. But the fact is, our skies were cleaned up with no obvious deleterious effects on employment some 40 years ago. Republicans are simply lying about it. What we need is to reinvigorate EPA, not kill it. Bush almost succeeded in killing it, and in fact killing all regulations. That worked out real well, huh?

Cut more taxes on corporations, especially on profits earned overseas—oh yeah, that’ll create more jobs, huh?  The main net effect of further cutting corporate taxes, already at a low point, is to fatten the profits flowing to the wealthiest Americans. No new jobs are created by these tax cuts, but they do exacerbate the already perilously high and climbing national debt.

Substitute the Bible for the Constitution – sounds far fetched, except that one of the core constituencies of current republicans is the country’s Christian Taliban.  They are a scary bunch who want to gut public education and replace secular law with religious law (e.g., Sharia). Current candidates cherish this bunch of ignorant miscreants.

Get rid of what remains of the Nation’s Middle Class – this is one of the most baffling of their platform planks. They seem bent on killing the Middle Class, which is the group that made America great, while it was still great. Republicans seem intent on destroying that class and its institutions, including unions, public schooling, Medicare, Social Security and the minimum wage.  They seem not to realize that, if we lose the Middle Class (a serious possibility) we lose much of America.

Talk about repeating the same thing over and over, while expecting different results (one definition of insanity). That platform more or less describes the course charted for America by George W. Bush. I believe we are in the middle of Great Depression II mainly because of those republican policies held so dear by the current crop of candidates.  If Obama hasn’t yet even begun the job of solving the enormous problems of our Nation, willed to him by republicans, it is because republicans continue to resist solutions.  Some of them, Bachman for example, wish to return the Nation to the 18^th century, without the enlightenment part, of course.  Call her crazy.