STP–The Canaries in the Coal Mine

Back in 2014, when we first moved to Red Wing, we joined the local YMCA. It’s a fairly nice facility for a small town and it seemed to be welcoming. That was typical of my experience with Minnesota Twin Cities (YMCA of the North) organizations. I had been a downtown St. Paul YMCA member, transferred to the Roseville facility, since we moved to Minnesota in 1996 and, as of 2013, my Medicare health insurance Silver Sneakers benefit began to pay for my membership. So, it seemed logical to transfer my membership to my new residence. The paperwork went smoothly and in late November we began to enjoy our new facility . . . for about a month. In late December, the Red Wing YMCA quietly announced (louder for those of us who were effected) that it would no longer accept Silver Sneakers payments and even acknowledged that it was the only YMCA in the state to make that move.

At least in our situation, the only real benefit to the Red Wing YMCA was the swimming pool. We have a small gym in our basement, complete with an excellent treadmill, stationary bicycle, weights, and resistance bands. We have no reason to leave our home for those things, which I discovered by transferring my Silver Sneakers membership to the local Anytime Fitness where I used it a couple of times and let it lapse.

For a bit, I attempted to carry on a dialog with the Y’s management (Tom Burke, Martha Harris, and Mike Melstad) and a member of the board (Barb Haley) who all claimed to have a solid, demonstrable financial reason for the Silver Sneakers decision, but were all completely unable or unwilling to produce any of it. I suspect when they learned I have a background in manufacturing accounting, ROI justification, and quality management they decided to keep their “secret calculations” secret. I was supposed to believe they’d done a thorough financial analysis which had provided justification for their decision. I am rarely inclined to trust any kind of management decision logic, based on my long history with incompetent, lazy, uninformed, overpaid, and mostly-useless management types.

This past December, the Red Wing YMCA management decided to re-evaluate and reverse their Silver Sneakers decision. They were pretty quiet about it, but I lucked into the inspiration to ask on January 1, 2023 and discovered they’d be allowing Silver Sneakers compensation starting the next day. While I was either getting registered, watching my wife get re-enrolled, or watching a half-dozen other old farts get signed up under the new policy, I heard the same pool-schedule spiel fed to each of us: the best time to swim and to avoid crowds was between 2PM and 4PM. So, I’ve been taking advantage of my new membership fairly regularly for the last 3 weeks. Yesterday, I showed for for my routine and discovered, thanks to a tiny sign printed on the door to the pool (after changing and showering) that the pool hours would be limited 4:15 to 8:30PM. I wasn’t the only surprised bait-and-switch victim, as there were two other new members in the dressing room who were at least as pissed as me.

I thought about bitching about yet another snow-job experience from the Red Wing YMCA, but I decided it is no longer worth it to me. Mrs. Day and I have been discussing the pros and cons of staying in Red Wing and Minnesota for the last couple of winters and I’m just going to put the local YMCA in the “cons” category and let someone else worry about it. “Fixing” systems, organizations, and processes was my career for 50+ years. I’m retired and don’t care enough to fix much of anything now.

This all reminded me of a conversation I had with the Washburn quality manager in 1991, during my 30-day moment of unhappy employment with that company. I wrote about this in a 2015 essay titled “Quality in A Disposable World” after a similar conversation with a Red Wing Southeast Technical College instructor. In that essay, I wrote, “Like a lot of small business people, my instructor was under the delusion that customers will naturally complain if they are disappointed with service or product quality. Many larger companies are equally happy to pretend that they are getting 100% ‘compliance’ from dissatisfied customers. The fact is that most customers simply log their dissatisfaction and tell themselves they will remember to never buy that particular company’s product or service again. Most company executives are perfectly happy with that outcome.”

The Washburn service manager explained to me that the company’s complaints system dealt with customers fairly ruthlessly (efficiently?). He said, “the company shipped product with a known 50% defect rate, based off of the internal random inspection data from a few years back (Since they quit inspections after a few months, product quality had probably gotten worse.). From a suspected 50% defect rate, about 1% of the company’s customers complained, expecting some sort of warranty response. If they stonewalled that first complaint, about 1% of the first 1% would come back for more abuse. No special inspection was done for warranty replacement instruments, so at least 50% of the replacements were also defective out-of-the-box. According to the manager, that 1%-of-1% routine applied to warranty replacement complaints.” So, with a known 50% defect rate, Washburn only provided some kind of warranty service (the first time) on 0.5% of shipped product.

In a similar vein, someone who was once involved in Red Wing’s city management explained how the city’s civil service bureaucracy blew off citizen comments and complaints with an acronym, "STP = same three people.”  The arrogant, simple-minded idea was that the few members of the public who contested or complained about the top-down city management decisions could be dismissed with this delusion. Red Wing is a very small town, 16,000 people and steadily shrinking (especially in average incomes), with a huge budget and a voracious appetite for insane growth through mindless annexation (41.41 square miles, so far). Minneapolis, with 425,000 residents, is contained in 57.51 square miles. Red Wing city management also has an outsized view of the “value” of city employees, based solely on what the city employees can get away with (often by ignoring the STP). Xcel’s Prairie Island Power Plants are the city’s main property tax contributor and those plants are likely to be phased out in the next decade. Eventually, that unrestrained spending will result in exorbitant local taxes and a rapid Atlantic City-style evacuation of the area by everyone who can afford to take a loss to find a more secure place to live. (Remember the rule, the first rats to leave the ship are the ones who can swim.)

Like the Washburn quality manager and the Red Wing YMCA management, the Red Wing city bureaucrats labor under the delusion that the 3 or 4 citizens who regularly comment and/or complain about the city’s services, expenses, or decisions only represent themselves. In fact, that small group is very likely representative of at least half of the local residents. They are consistently the “canaries in the coal mine.” The poor treatment they receive from the bureaucrats likely keeps the rest of the locals from voicing their opinions, until they vote with their feet and give up on the city. Red Wing’s growth has been anemic, at best, for the entire 163 year life of the city, falling far behind the national population growth and that of the state’s major cities. That failure isn’t for lack of natural resources,opportunity, or even representation in state and federal government.

Rural and Old

An interesting aspect of my McNally Smith College of Music experience was the fact that a small city, St. Paul, attracted an outsized population of rural students. I don’t think I ever heard any statistics from our marketing/recruitment department, but I would be surprised if more than 10% of our student body came from cities of more than 10,000 people. Unfortunately, the school’s recruiters went hard after a fair number of inner city victims/students and while their tastes were at least 21st Century they mostly couldn’t afford either the “education” or the business. The music business has long passed the moment when ordinary people can hope to earn a living either as a musician or a technician.

The point I’m hoping to make here, though, is that rural people fairly consistently live in the past; often a fantastic non-existent past. The kids who came into that music school were almost universally 1960-1980 music fans, what should have been their parents’ or grandparents’ music genre. Weirdly, they are not even aware of how strange that is.

Having retired to a rural small town, I’ve discovered that people from my own generation in this area are fans of their parents’ or grandparents’ music genres; mostly really old country music or 1940s and 50s pop crap like Frank Sinatra or worse. Weirdly, they are [also] not even aware of how strange that is. [Remember, retiring to some place is exactly the same as picking a place to die. Nobody with a lick of sense in my age group expects to see the next decade and that makes for very short term planning.]  I have never been around so many people my age who know almost nothing about 1960s pop music. When they play a popular song from their own youth, they play it like it is an act of either defiance or extreme hipness. There is nothing hip about 60-year-old music. I often feel like I’m surrounded by reincarnations of my parents’ generation.

When liberal politicians talk about closing the gap between rural and urban voters, they are either dreaming or have a plan to dumb-down urban voters. Part of the attraction to rural areas is the lack of competition, low tech job demands, and a “more simple life” (read dumber and lazier). It is, literally, impossible to make silk purses out of sows’ ears and you can’t invent an education system that will thwart the low standards, superstitions, and fears of rural parents. In the 1950s and early 60s, the federal government made a strong push toward encouraging teachers to go to less desirable communities; rural and poor urban areas. The result was improved test scores, more of those kids finding their way into higher education and professions, but the push-back was fierce. A surprising number of parents do not want their kids to live better lives than their own and a high percentage of those parents are rural.

Today, we’re going the opposite direction. Rural and red state education has become an oxymoron as teachers abandon rural schools and many are closing or shortening their hours. “Teaching to the test” has been the state of K-12 “education” since Bush II’s “No Child’s Behind Left Unmolested” and the tests are getting dumbed-down every year. The complaint that “Half of U.S. adults can’t read a book written at the 8th-grade level” does not include the fact that the 8th grade level reference point has been slipping for 40 years. The average American reads at the lowered 7th to 8th grade level, which means they might be able to read a “young adults” book if they really concentrated. These are Trump’s beloved “uneducated.” A pitiful 12% of Americans are “proficient” readers; meaning people who could be useful employees or even business owners and professionals. This is the “demanding” criteria for “proficient”: “Click to the second page of search results from a library website to identify the author of a book called Ecomyth.” The top category, Level 5 and the most literate 2% are able to “Identify from search results a book suggesting that the claims made both for and against genetically modified foods are unreliable.” Holy crap! We’re toast.

Keep in mind, these are the people, the lower 88% for whom Republican politicians are making their MAGA pitch. They couldn’t make a 1st grade classroom great, or even slightly more intelligent, if their lives depended on it. When you read for the bottom, you don’t have to work very hard to accomplish your goals.

Incentives Are Everything

A few years ago, I was asked to be part of a “This I Believe” presentation at the Unitarian Universalist Society of River Falls (WI) society. If you know me at all, you know that was a tough subject because I'm not much of a "believer." I found a few things that turned out to be more core to my belief system than I'd suspected and among that small list was "incentives." The study of economics has been pretty much a waste of air until the last few decades. For most of my life I've been in agreement with John Maynard Keynes who supposedly said, “Capitalism is the astonishing belief that the nastiest motives of the nastiest men somehow or other work for the best results in the best of all possible worlds.” Our current executive branch is consistently demonstrating that fact and the last four decades of American economics ought to be enough to put the last nail in most of capitalist theory. Market-driven capitalism tacks on a giant list of poorly designed incentives which work to damage democracy, decimate the ecology, limit personal liberty for all for a tiny percentage of wealthy and powerful bad actors, and promote illiteracy and ignorance in the general population. The mythical “free market” libertarians and traditional feudalists argue so irrationally for is just not a sustainable or just economic system.

What doesn’t work for business works just as badly for government. In our current irrational and poorly functioning “representative” system, unjustifiably powerful groups like the police, prison system employees, military, and government employees are isolated from their customers—the rest of us—by layers of union protection, political clout, and outright terrorism. When cops murder unarmed citizens, the only defense we have is the civil lawsuit. Convicting a cop of any crime, regardless of the evidence, is nearly impossible but getting a violent crime conviction requires all out magic. With that kind of insulation from responsibility and the soaring cost of police departments and their pension funds, cities are going broke trying to pay off the multitude of police misconduct lawsuits. “Dallas civil-rights lawyer Don Tittle says the increased availability of camera footage and shifting attitudes toward police are affecting cases. ’Up until recently, when it came to civil lawsuits, there were two groups that had a distinct advantage, where you had to knock them out to win. And that was doctors and cops. But with the advent of video, and the changing perception of society, I don’t think police are held in the same regard.’”¹  Suddenly the cost of maintaining abusive police officers is turning into a major city budgeting problem.

With the city government budgeting systems as they exist, that problem is unsolvable. For example, the Alberquerque, NM police department is the most expensive, lawsuit-wise, department in the country and has been under federal investigation and oversight often in the last few decades, but appears to be completely impossible to rein-in. New York City, between 2010 and 2014, spent $601M dollars settling police misconduct lawsuits. In 2015, New York City paid out $228M for police misconduct lawsuits. In 2017, New York paid $302M for the same kind of crap. That city’s 2018 police department budget is $5.6B or a little more than $101k per employee (~55,000 employees). Small towns aren’t immune to this kind of idiocy, either. "In Sorrento, La., for example, a newly hired cop in 2013 slammed into another car on a highway after going on a high-speed chase to catch a separate driver who was speeding. The driver who was hit sued. It was later revealed that the officer was already one of the town's most zealous issuers of speeding tickets, hundreds of which were later thrown out in court. That incident, combined with other lawsuits against the police department serving the small town of 1,500 people, prompted the city's insurer to drop its coverage. The town disbanded its police department shortly thereafter."²

The fix for this is to change the incentives, not to shield bad cops with even more anti-democratic police state Republican stupidity like the unconstitutional and anti-democratic House bill grossly misnamed the “Protect and Serve Act.” New York City covers the cost of those lawsuits out of the general budget, shifting all of the responsibility from the cops to the taxpayer. That is an example of a mindless system with no feedback loops to reinforce decent behavior or to inhibit misconduct.  The solution is to move the cost of settling these cases to the departments that caused them. If, for example, the NYPD had to pay $302M out of its budget to settle misconduct cases, that would result in roughly 3,000 fewer employees (at that $101k/employee cost). If it is true that the cops involved in misconduct cases are “a few bad apples,” the many good apples (if that turns out to be the case) would start cleaning up the department before their own jobs are on the line.

Like I said, incentives are everything. You just have to design them to serve a better purpose.

¹ https://www.wsj.com/articles/cost-of-police-misconduct-cases-soars-in-big-u-s-cities-1437013834

² http://www.governing.com/topics/finance/gov-police-misconduct-growing-financial-issue.html

Marching for Dimes

Remember the March of Dimes? When I was a kid, practically every cash register had a little plastic box with a picture of some poor kid in leg braces or lying in a hospital bed or some other pitiful, helpless situation with Jerry Lewis somewhere in the picture with his hand out. My wife absolutely hates the idea of the March of Dimes, which was mostly an organization staffed by millionaires’ trophy wives guilting working people out of their spare change. As my wife says, “If the millionaire class stopped hoarding their fortunes and spent a little of it on medical research or eliminating poverty or improving public education, poor people wouldn’t have to chip in their ten cents to keep the trophy wives occupied.”

Likewise, the Democratic Party is running its own March of Dimes these days. While the billionaire class buries the Republicans in dark money, Democrats are reduced to asking working people for spare change. They aren’t even good at that, so most of the regional and state Democratic candidates are reduced to buying email lists to beg for money all across the country. There is no Democratic National Committee as far as any sort of national organization is concerned. The DNC’s sole purpose in 2016 was to elect Hillary Clinton President of the United States, all other campaigns be damned. As a result of hustling one of the two most disliked candidates in US history and taking a much undeserved vacation during the entire Obama presidency, the party lost more than 1,000 seats in state legislatures, governor's mansions and Congress between the 2012 and 2016 elections. The party, which had geared itself up to do exactly what it did in 2016 for 2008 when voters overwhelmingly rejected Clinton for Barak Obama, sat on its ass and did nothing to help local, state, and national candidates for 8 years. Now, there is no national Democratic Party organization and the US is close to becoming a single-party nation. There are plenty of role models to follow at the state level, all of those states are red and all of them are economically, educationally, and culturally disadvantaged. There is no example in the country of a state that has done better under Republican rule, but those Koch brothers’ servants don’t care. Their brains are washed clean.

This spring, Democrats had practically nothing to do with the money they stashed during the 2016 debacle and at three House seats were up for grabs: Kansas, Georgia, and Montana. The DNC did what it does best, ignored those campaigns until the March of Democratic Dimes managed to point out the weakness of the Republican opponents in those races. Still, the DNC didn’t raise a finger to help the last vestiges of Democratic progressive candidates fight millions of Koch dollars. I suppose the DNC is hanging on to its cash in case Hillary or another Clinton wants to run in 2020?

Dropping the Bar Further than Ever

Minnesota’s second congressional district, my new home town, elected a character right out of America’s worst nightmares and history: Jason Lewis. Our old representative, John Kline, wasn’t much better, but he at least pretended to be a local representative rather than the corporate shill he has been since 2003. Kline mouthed the Republican code words for racism, economic inequality, corporate rights over human rights, and the usual litany of bullshit Republicans have spewed since Nixon. Lewis doesn’t bother.

Jason Lewis thought the US was mistaken in actively deciding to banish slavery. In his steaming pile of gibbering monkey drivel, Power Divided is Power Checked: The Argument for States' Rights, Lewis wrote “In fact, if you really want to be quite frank about it, how does somebody else owning a slave affect me? It doesn’t. If I don’t think it is right, I won’t own one, and people always say ‘well if you don’t want to marry somebody of the same sex, you don’t have to, but why tell somebody else they can’t. Uh, you know if you don’t want to own a slave, don’t. But don’t tell other people they can’t.” So, Minnesota’s proud Union heritage has been blasted into history by electing a quasi-modern pro-slavery half-wit. Yeah, he’s anti-civil rights, too, but that’s just a given for what passes for “modern” Republicans.

Not surprisingly, Lewis has an elevated opinion of his own sex. Lewis called women “simply ignorant of the important issues in life” and “non-thinking” during one of many mentally-deficient moments on his hate-jock radio show. Of course, if you can tolerate his bullshit book for even a few pages, you’d discover that Lewis is the poster boy for historical delusion and technological incompetence. You might even be tempted to call him “non-thinking.”

Most hilariously, he has referred to himself as John Galt-like, which is pretty amazing. This child of the idle upper-class a couple of party animal degrees: a master's degree in political science (University of Colorado at Denver) and a BA in education/business (University of Northern Iowa). With that background, he’s barely equipped to manage a Dollar Store. Galt was, at least, a fictional character who had some ability to create and utilize technology. Lewis needs help identifying his microphone in a radio studio. Like most of the pseudo-conservative nut jobs in the Republican Party, Lewis will demonstrate his job killing skills in Washington, but his nitwit voters will blame his incompetence and laziness on Democrats.

Minnesota foisted one idiot, Michelle Bachmann, on the US political scene, which made the state a world-wide laughing stock. Here we go again.

#165 What do We Deserve?

All Rights Reserved © 2006 Thomas W. Day

"We get the government we deserve." I think that may be one of the least obvious, most true statements about government of any type, any size, and at any time in history. The best periods of government in American history all occurred during brief times when the public was so disappointed by the performance of the usual suspects that they rose from their lethargy and took back power for those who should never be allowed to possess it. In geopolitical time, those high points barely warrant a blink of an eye compared to the eons of droning, corrupt, self-serving governments that have cursed humanity since the first caveman decided to tell other cavemen who was boss.

Looking at politics under the lens of "what does the public deserve" does, maybe, a disservice to places like Mexico and most of South and Central America, most of Africa, the Arab nations, most of Asia and East Europe. At the core, obviously, many parents in those countries raised or failed to raise the little rat bastards who torture, destroy, and terrorize those countries. If their offspring turn out to be the knife that kills the parent, it's tough to generate a lot of sympathy for the "victim." You grew it, you own it.

Tough love, I know, but it comes back to haunt us. Much of the world's misery is generated by American robber baron corporations that use US military power and the threat of that power to manipulate foreign governments, smaller nations' natural resources, and the world's monetary system. We grew it, now we own it. Those corporations have grown beyond the boundaries of the United States and show no more loyalty to our flag than they do the flags of the countries they've invaded in the past. Should that really be surprising to anyone? In 1968, Chicago discovered that cops on the take don't take orders. Throughout the 1960s until today, we should have learned that a CIA/FBI on the take is equally insensitive to management. Now, we're beginning to see that corporations that manipulate, to their financial and power advantage, all of the worst aspects of our culture are insensitive to the culture that they supposedly serve. Well, duh. You lay down with dogs, you get up with fleas.

Which brings us to our present dilemma. Our government, from local to federal is a contaminated, corrupt mess. The bits that aren't owned and operated by international corporations are owned and operated by local gangsters. Even the smallest cities are poorly managed by special interests that don't care one whit about the safety, security, financial stability, or future of the communities they pretend to serve. And we, apparently, love them for it.

My hometown, Dodge City, Kansas, once hired a City Manager from some damned place because he had magical business credentials and could, supposedly, bring new business to that dying community. Within a couple of years, he attracted a collection of packing plants and associated service vendors for that industry, which drew a few thousand illegal laborers to the town, driving wages into the dust, ruining neighborhoods, and decimating the town's already weak education system. After the City Manager's "work was done," he promptly left town with yet another credit to his resume. The town has yet to, and probably will never, recover.

My current home, Little Canada, Minnesota, presents less opportunity for industry, being a fully-developed bedroom suburb of St. Paul. That hasn't slowed up the march of political opportunism, though. Like most eastern cities, we have a supremely expensive, astoundingly unproductive city government. With too many employees doing too little work, all hired or appointed by a crony-system that is old, well-entrenched, and regularly re-elected by local voters. For some reason, the majority of voters like the current system, even though they don't know anything about how it operates. We're a mirror of national politics, which does nothing to explain either local or national politics.

In a fit of irrational community loyalty, my wife ran for City Council in the last election. She campaigned by going door-to-door, talking to our neighbors, engaging in the local televised debate, and taking every opportunity to talk about how our little city's quality of life could be improved. She campaigned on city efficiency, managing the city's resources and development, opening the city's financial decisions to public examination, protecting our small group of lakes and waterways, She placed campaign signs on our neighbors' lawns, with local businesses, and handed out fliers until she felt she'd contacted everyone who might care about the community and vote that concern.

Her opponents controlled the debate, placed their campaign signs, illegally, on public property, in front of a few bars and liquor stores and their own homes, took the local vote for granted and, correctly, assumed that the voters would be as uninvolved, uninformed, and dysfunctional as they had been in the past. One of the incumbents had been seriously ill with disabling cancer and died soon after the election, before taking office. Our little city's experiment in democracy ran aground almost immediately, as the existing office holders disingenuously praised the deceased council member's dedication to the city's welfare (something I never witnessed in dozens of council meetings I observed over the years). While waving that distracting flag with one hand, they worked quickly to subvert democratic principle so they could appoint another of their cronies to the council. Public comment was discounted, logic and fairness ignored, and it appears that we'll continue down the corrupt path our city has trod in the past, because that's what conservatives do.

The problem is normal people don't want to associate with the kind of people who work in government, run for , political office, or own the people who squat in those jobs. One trip to a city council meeting is enough to keep the typical citizen from venturing into that boring, degenerate environment for years. A short conversation with a city manager, a council member, state legislator, or governor will drive most of us into an hour-long hand washing frenzy. Government and business share this quality, the closer you get to the top, the scummier your associations become. At some point, freedom and liberty have to be defended by those who expect the rewards of those precious qualities. If we don't take back our governments from the scumbags who will use it against us, we'll deserve the government we get.

December 2006