#107 An Impossible Dream (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

Bobby Dylan sang, in "Talking World War Three Blues," that "we're all havin' that same dream."  Dylan was talking about being the last person left on earth after the final war.  Management's dream is that execs can screw off and their low paid employees will take up the slack for them.  It's a dream because it doesn't make a lick of sense and, on the rare occasion that it appears to be working, it won't last. Like a good night's sleep, this pipedream comes to an end way too soon.  The simple fact is that corporate motivation is directed top down and when the leadership's flow of activity, energy, and ideas stops flowing, the business is heading for bad times. 

While it's possible to convince people to work harder than their bosses for a short time, it only makes sense that the people receiving the most benefit should do the most work.  When that isn't true, there better be a clear, available, and direct chain of succession or the most productive people will look for other opportunities or put their energies into more interesting activities.  In business, survival of the fittest often looks like rats leaving sinking ships.  There is no low-level fix to inactive management, so anyone with the skills to be somewhere else is likely to start shipping resumes when it becomes obvious that management isn't on a temporary vacation. 

For everyone else, the company becomes a place where the goals are incredibly simple.  If the execs aren't working, they have no effective way to know that no one else is working.  "Looking busy" isn't a difficult task in an organization that has minimal management.  On the rare occasion that management is in the vicinity of activity, it only takes a little ass-kissing and random motion to convince inactive management that something is being done.  It may not be work, but it looks like work to someone who isn't familiar with functional activity.  If you've been employed, you've experienced this traditional American phenomenon.  Most large companies generate much more random activity than directed, functional work.  Unfortunately, way too many small and mid-sized companies sink themselves imitating dysfunctional Misfortune 500 disaster zones. 

As consumers I think we've come to expect lethargy and incompetence from the management of companies with which we do business.  My home town recently acquired a new grocery chain, ALDI, that specializes in low cost, no-name-brand, bulk stock groceries.  The store doesn't accept credit cards or personal checks.  ALDI stores don't even provide free grocery bags, plastic costs 10¢ and paper is 5¢.  The result is that most items in the store cost a fraction of our local "bulk" grocery's prices.  Even more dramatic, though, is the difference between the two store's management styles. 

Recently, I was standing in a long line of ALDI shoppers waiting for my chance to pay money and escape the store.  One of the folks in front of me "discovered" (regardless of dozens of signs all around the store) that his credit card and checkbook weren't going to be accepted at the checkout counter.  The line came to a halt while he meandered toward the ATM.  A light came on next to the register and I began to consider pushing my cart to the side and leaving.  I'm not a great fan of standing in line.  Apparently, the light was a request from the checker for backup.  In a few seconds a manager appeared and opened a second checkout line.  Big surprise, management doing work!

An even bigger surprise was yet to come.  Not only did the manager know how to work the register, he was a lightening fast checker and the folks who'd moved to his line (including me) practically ran through the line with their groceries.  Our local ALDI's checkers are famous for being efficient, but this guy was easily twice as fast as his employees. 

At the other end of the management equation is the Cub Foods management; the other bulk grocery in our neighborhood.  I have never seen Cub's managers run checkout and I'd be amazed if they are capable of doing anything that technical.  I have seen Cub's managers watch, disapprovingly, as their employees struggle with moronic customers and malfunctioning equipment.  They didn't lift a finger to improve the situation, but they do take every opportunity to work on their Scrooge facial expressions.  As a result, the Cub store is consistently filthy, disorganized, and the general attitude of its employees could be summed up with the word "disinterested." 

To take the inactive manager motif to the extreme, you could look to our current Commander in Thief.  G.W. Bush is the laziest, most uninvolved President the nation has seen since Reagan or Eisenhower.  In his first year of office, one of the most catastrophic in the nation's history, GeeWiz was on vacation more often than he was "working."  However, when he's working he's mostly on vacation.  The status of the current executive summaries is something slightly less sophisticated than a series of "where's Waldo" illustrations.  Whether Bush is intellectually incapacitated is unknown, because he's so lazy that his capabilities are completely untested.  Bush has tossed his responsibilities off on a variety of subordinates, none of whom are equipped (technically, ethically, intellectually, or psychologically) to handle the job.  As a result, the nation's national security experienced it's worst failure since WWII and the worst ever failure to protect civilians.  The economy has stumbled from a booming, energetic, and creative high to a malaise nearly equal to the mess that Reagan's corrupt mishandling created for the early Clinton years.  And, maybe worst of all, the nation is practically perfectly polarized; unequalled since the years leading to the Civil War.  We have two, nearly equally populated sides that absolutely, totally hate each other.  Bush and the Neocons have turned the country so completely against itself that we ought to rename ourselves the Disconnected States. 

Typical of what happens when a corporation is experiencing this kind of failure of leadership, many of the nation's best and brightest are contemplating jumping ship.  Fortunately for the world, this happened when Hitler's Germany was misled by a similarly lazy, incompetent, and uninvolved "leader."  Without an intelligent, moral, and aware top executive, the marching morons took charge and drove Germany in so many foolish directions that the nation's energy was misspent far more quickly than it would have been if there had been executive planning and guidance behind the mischief.  Lucky for us.  If Germany had retained its best and brightest, they would have had the atomic bomb years before us and their missile program would have been capable of delivering that bomb to our continent. 

Bush's amoral 30% majority is a similar crowd.  They are mostly out for themselves, taking on an occasional distraction like school vouchers, abortion, and pointless wars against third world nations.  They're uneducated, unscientific, uncreative, and selfish.  In the end, the Bushies will dissipate our national resources, international respect and power, and convince many of the most intelligent and talented citizens that America's time has come and that it's time to move to a more hospitable and dynamic country. 

Uninvolved leadership always self-destructs.  You'd think the free market advocates would be a little concerned about this fact.

#106 The Rat is Disgusted (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

The more I know about what's likely to happen in this coming election, the more disgusted I become. 

Americans have the lowest science and math test scores in the industrialized world and we're demonstrating our incapacity in our political system. 

For example, the folks in charge of the current pitiful excuse for the US government failed to protect the American public in the most incompetent mismanagement of national security in the history of the nation.  Bush and CRAP were so busy packing their pockets and "reforming" the tax code to benefit the scumbags they represent that they were totally surprised by the fact that there are people out there who would love to do major damage to this country.  There were intelligence warnings flying in all directions and the Bushies ignored their job because they were all geared up to rape and pillage the economy, the public education system, and wipe out the middle class. 

The military was equally busy double-dipping, saluting itself, and wasting time and resources and, when it was finally called upon to protect American citizens.  Our military, especially the Air Farce, was so incredibly impotent that the task fell to the passengers of a hijacked airplane to commit suicide to protect Washington DC.  That same military drones failed to put an end to the Taliban in Afghanistan, to find Osama bin Laden, or to make a reasonable effort to secure the nation's boarders from terrorists.  If these folks had been in charge of a corporation's internal security, they would have been fired, blacklisted, and publicly humiliated in the national media.  Being government deadbeats in a nation of sheep, they have distracted the public eye by pretending an invasion of a tiny, starving third world dictatorship has something to do with national security.  That tactic would only work in a country where the public eye is connected to a very tiny public brain. 

After failing miserably at the job they were assigned, Bush and CRAP have dismantled the Constitution and Bill of Rights as quickly as possible.  The very freedoms they pledged to protect are the first freedoms they chose to eliminate.  In the interests of "national security," the folks who couldn't protect a goat from a poodle are turning the United States into a replica of the old Soviet Union.  

With this background, the average American Joe and Joan are telling pollsters that they are going to vote for Bush and CRAP because they think Bush will better protect the country from terrorists.  This is the same logic that says "fight fire with fire."  If you think setting your bedroom on fire to slow down a kitchen fire is a smart tactic, then you are the kind of voter the Republicans are hoping to see at the polls; really dumb voters. 

They are offering us a nancy-boy, cheerleading frat brat who hid behind his daddy's skirts to evade the draft, was overcome by fear at having to fly office flowers in the rich kids' branch of the National Guard.  A twerp so cowardly that he went AWOL to keep from having to flunk a physical because he couldn't disguise the layer of coke dust powdering his nose.  The little feller is totally incapable of providing a strong national security.  Impossibly unlikely.  But dumbass Americans who can't do basic math or comprehend simple logic are unlikely to figure this one out before the rest of the world is unable to tell us from the other bad guys. 

Yeah, I'm disgusted.  This is a pitiful time to be an American.  We're too dumb to breathe and there is no sign that we're likely to get smarter in the next few generations.  I suppose that means we're about to suffocate.

#105 Losing the Passion (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

In his book, Made in Japan, one of Sony's two founders, Akio Morita, talked about the differences between major American and Japanese companies.  He discounted a lot of the "cultural differences" that were used as excuses for American mismanagement failures.  But he put most of the credit for Japan's success upon the fact that, at that time, most of Japan's great companies were still managed by their founders.  The founders provided the passion, direction, and focus that drives those successful companies.  America's similar example was our semiconductor and software powerhouses.  Folks like Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and, even, Steve Jobs are examples of founders who still provide those valuable assets to their companies.  Morita's suspicion was that, once Japan's companies were handed over to a second generation, they would be no more creative than American corporate disasters.  They'd still be large, powerful, and more-or-less productive, but they wouldn't be dynamic.

One of the great faults in American culture, however, is that many of our company founders turn into second generation impotents before they pass on their inheritance.  Far too many American company execs begin to put themselves in ivory towers before they get out of their garage space.  As soon as the company produces the smallest level of profitability American mismanagers begin to act like they are heads of state. 

That "image is everything" philosophy is partly to blame.  Banks, investors, and even customers expect to see illustrations of power from the folks with whom they do business.  Too often execs fail to realize that pretending to be powerful to impress these fools is not the same thing as actually being powerful.   Posing and pretending gets to be a habit and, pretty soon, that's the only activity the exec is engaged in.  Not long after, the reason the exec exists is erased and the company is drifting without a rudder.  If the company has developed a critical amount of momentum, useless execs may not be a fatal flaw. 

Small business needs active, participatory management.  Hell, all businesses need that kind of management.  Managers provide services to the people they manage so those people can get work done.  When managers are serving themselves, they are pointless resource-wasting energy drains without a reason to exist. 

The Best Comedy in History

#104 Trying to be Entertaining (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

When they're not scary as hell, religious people are mildly entertaining.  Scary, but entertaining.  Since they are more often scary than funny, it's always a good practice to keep your entertainment to yourself.  It has always amazed me how quickly "god's lambs" turn into Satan's vicious attack dogs when they discover that someone isn't taking their hallucinations seriously. 

Honestly, it's not that surprising.  Regardless of the usual religious rhetoric, all group hallucinations need total reinforcement.  Anyone pointing out that the king is naked is likely to be burned at the stake pretty damn quickly. 

Public Television ran a series, recently, on one of the most venal literary characters and one of fundamentalist Christianity's most revered "thinkers"; C.S. Lewis.  From a literary position, Lewis was a scumbag.  He was a friend of J. R. Tolkien, until he heard Tolkien's ideas for Lord of the Rings.  Tolkien was working on his series of books at an extremely slow pace and Lewis realized that the idea was good enough that a mediocre "children's" version of Tolkien's plot, Chronicles of Narnia, would be very popular.  He was right, but his betrayal of his friend demonstrated that his core morality was typically fundamental and fundamentally deficient. 

Outside of his general amoral personal behavior, Lewis was a very simple thinker.  His justification for the existence of an afterlife follows along the lines of other desperately hopeful and ever-fearful humans.  Simply put, Lewis argued that since an "appetite" for gods and an afterlife existed, so did the source for that appetite.  His simpleminded rationale was that hunger exists and so does food, therefore anything that humans desired was led or followed by the existence of the item of desire.  Pretty cool, huh?  Never mind that before Christianity, very few western religions assumed a life after death and almost no non-western religions included that concept.  The appetite for an afterlife isn't a universal concept among humans and a belief in benevolent gods is even less common.  Many, if not most, religions look at the harsh and brutal fact of existence and assume that, if there is a god, he's not particularly fond of humans or innocence.  Several eastern religions, who have far more followers than Christianity, have proposed the concept that life is so harsh that ending the mortal coil and ceasing to exist on any plane is the equivalent of "heaven."  Reincarnation, a life-after-death, is a punishment for a life poorly lived.

Lewis' argument was an extension of the "I think, therefore I'm right" line of psycho-babble.  Sometimes the ruling elite have way too much time on their hands.  When that happens, they begin to believe that any dumbass thought that wanders into their idle brains has "big meaning."  The beginnings of really awful moments in history are often preceded by this kind of event, when the thinker is someone who has political power.  When the thinker is a small-time academic, like Lewis, his thoughts tend to be along the lines of the current majority's group hallucination, if he wants to be thought of as "intellectual" by that powerful group. 

Real intellectuals tend to think outside of the usual mindset.  More often than not, real intellectuals disprove "common knowledge" and current fads.  For their efforts, they are often ridiculed, sometimes burned at the stake, and shunned until enough time has passed for their ideas to be absorbed into the culture.  Small-thought generators like Lewis are immediately popular among simple minds, which is the majority mentality.  Lewis and his clones don't have an original thought to offer, but they say what the majority of folks are thinking in a way that makes the majority feel less common.  Feeling is not the same as being.

#103 They've Always Relied on the Votes of Fools (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

Tennessee William's Stella always relied on "the kindness of strangers."  Republicans have always relied on the incredibly short memories, small attention spans, and the general foolishness of middle class voters.  So far, it's been a good strategy.  With the Bushies attack on the public education system, the increase in adult illiteracy, and the near complete lack of investigative journalism in major media, the future must look bright to Republican strategists.  There will be no shortage of stupid, uneducated people.

Remember six years ago, when the House and Bill Clinton were arguing about the definition of "sex?"  Leno and Letterman had a field day with almost-funny jokes on that subject.  Today, the Bushies and the world community are debating the definition of "torture" and the right wing comedians are missing in action.  So is the American press, Congress, and the American public.  That situation pretty well sums up Republican morals; sex among consenting adults is bad, institutional torture of randomly selected Arabs is good. And it works for them, because they're getting away with it and the odds are pretty good that Bush and CRAP will be re-elected in November and they'll get away with even more.  Get it?  They're relying on good old American stupidity.  Make a big deal out of nothing, ignore the really big stuff, and hope nobody is bright enough to see the contradiction.

You have to wonder what sort of moral behavior you would have seen from GWB before he was "reborn."  If he's this evil under the guidance of his god, how awful did he behave when he was on his own?  I guess, if you're an Alfred E. Newman look-alike, you have buckets of inherited cash, and your oily smirk convinces the average moron that you're a "nice guy," you can get away with treason, murder, theft, and any number of national and international crimes.  Now that's an inheritance!

The Republicans ran on a platform of conservative economic magic and they promptly put the country into a tailspin of debit spending, unemployment, and social manipulation.  In a few years, they'll be blaming all of their misdeeds on Clinton and the Democrats and the sheep who wear Republican buttons and plaster bumper stickers on their rusting pickups will be parroting that line in bars around the country.  Like Nixon said, if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes fact.  That only works if you are lying to fools, but there is no shortage of that commodity. In fact, they reproduce like rabbits and their children are usually dumber than the originals.

Does it not seem like degeneration to you when the country's leaders move from arguing whether a blow job is "sex" to arguing if stripping, humiliating, beating, physically and psychologically intimidating prisoners is "torture?"  That pack of Washington Republican neo-con wimps would break down and give up every national secret they know if they were deprived of limousine drivers.  But the Bushies and Rush and the other right wing pussies pretend that their untrained, unsupervised, scared-shitless prison guards are just enjoying college "pranks" and their pet sheep voters buy into another Big Lie.  Obviously depending on the stupidity of others is a fairly safe bet. 

One of the two last great Republican Presidents (Teddy Roosevelt was the other), Lincoln, miscalculated when he said "you can't fool all of the people all of the time."  You don't have to fool all of the people, you just have to fool the majority all of the time.  These days, you can do that.

#101 Focus is Everything (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

Most small businesses die from lack of focus.  One of the keys to business success is finding what you do well and doing it well.  Lots of small companies fail because they don't have a specialty, a skill that the company performs exceptionally.  Lots more fail because they forgot what it was that they knew how to do in a misdirected search for something different to be doing. 

For example, a company that builds a great kitchen widget decides that kitchen widgets are never going to be big dollar items, so the management wanders off in search of another widget market that provides more net profit.  The folks back in manufacturing are still cranking out kitchen widgets, but nobody's running the show.  Asking employees to care more about the company's direction than the owner's are willing to demonstrate is a logical fallacy and, pretty soon, the company's kitchen widget market starts to deteriorate.  If the execs continue to search for a brighter, shinier place to play, the employees who can find a better managed place to work will head for higher ground.  After all the talent has left, the product starts showing the effects and established customers look for a better supplier. 

Often, this collapse of corporate momentum causes the execs to start wandering around with more urgency.  They may try moving manufacturing overseas, which usually results in more competition when the overseas manufacturing company discovers they can build and market the product they were expected to produce. 

IBM tossed computer manufacturing to the Far East with this clever management technique.  Once, the only company (other than Compaq) able to build a quality personal computer, IBM decided to safe a little manufacturing money by moving all assembly to Japan.  A few years later, Sony, Toshiba, NEC, and a host of Japanese manufactures were building and selling their own computers.  IBM, however, was forced out of the market because they didn't have the manufacturing or design skills necessary to build personal computers.  They had trained their competition and, then, got their butts kicked.  Meanwhile, IBM's foolish, misdirected management was still looking for a market where their limited skills could produce a higher profit margin. 

A couple of decades back, I worked for a mid-sized company that built a particular pro-audio product.  In the company's past, every time the company started to do well the CEO would want to "branch out" into another area of the industry.  Nobody in the company had any experience with actually using pro audio products, so the "branching" usually required a lot of consulting with potential customers and acquiring of engineers with expertise in the anticipated new market and products.  Lots of resources would be wasted with a predictable result; a mediocre product and the distraction from the one product we knew how to design and build.  The company ran through this cycle three times in the ten years I worked there.  Each time, the distraction drained the company's productivity and set profitability back dramatically.  Twice, the new market products were sold off to either a customer or one of the engineers who were brought in to develop the product.  Both times, the buyer built a solid position in the new market and a new business was launched at the expense of an established business. 

For the first few years in the company's growth period, these distractions did minimal harm to the overall business.  We had momentum, our competition was mostly brain-dead and dying, and the core products were very good so we didn't lose much of our base market with these distractions.  In the last decade, lots of new competition has appeared (lots of it from Asia) and the company's growth has stagnated in the last five years.  The reaction, predictably, has been to flail about looking for a richer market and a new product line.  They have a wide collection of new products that are falling flat in the market and the core products are losing ground.  It's a new world of competition, too, and the momentum appears to be shifting away from their base.  It will be interesting to see what happens in the next few years. 

Lots of strong American companies have shot themselves in the foot when they lost focus.   There isn't much an employee can do about fixing executive focus.  The best we can do for ourselves is to watch what they do, if they're looking away from the action, it's time to polish up the resume. 

#100 Falling Top Down (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

If everything is top down, we're screwed.  Our last half-dozen Presidents, from Ford to Bush II, have been, mostly, screw-offs.  Carter and Clinton were, often, relatively hard working (especially compared to the vacationing Ford, the comatose Reagan, and the AWOL Bushes), but their work ethic was often misdirected and unproductive.  Clinton, especially, found too much time to cater to his lower instincts and lost momentum, credibility, and direction from the resulting scandals.  Carter was simply too easily distracted by unimportant crap and pointless detail.  When you think about it, these "leadership" characteristics are pretty constant themes in most US businesses.

If management isn't missing, altogether, from the functions of the business, they have their tiny little heads crammed into details that don't matter, can't be positively affected by someone who isn't dealing with the problem on a day-to-day basis, and can only be made worse by the addition of a non-functional manager's participation.  Usually, management chooses to be missing.  Surrounding themselves with other managers, philosophizing about the "purpose of the business," and arranging the perks and benefits available to the ruling class seems to be the only reason most "managers" exist. 

Relate that to our national leaders' performance in the last generation of Presidents and their lackeys.   Ford performed his one and only intended function, pardoning Nixon, and returned to his old Speaker of the House habits; schmoozing with corporate executives and playing golf at every exclusive golf club on either coast.  His three years in office were a waste of time, but they set us up for the future of, especially, Republican Presidents. 

Carter worked his ass off: selecting office equipment, interviewing practically every menial White House potential hire, worrying about the color of new carpets, and rewriting hundreds of pointless government procedures.  As far as the critical functions of the Presidency, Carter forgot what he'd been elected to do.  He forgot the progressive campaign promises he made, and fully intended to keep, in his control-freak over-management of the daily, unimportant functions of his office.  The man couldn't delegate the selection of office supplies, let alone important policy research.  Four years wasn't nearly long enough for Carter to accomplish what he'd intended to do.  Forty years wouldn't have been enough either. 

Clinton was a productive executive.  He worked hard, he kept his eye on his objectives, selected competent advisors and administrators, and got a good bit of the job done; right up until his dick got hard and his brain went soft.  Even with full knowledge that he would be a target for the right wing for any indiscretion or mistake, Clinton stumbled in where almost any rational adult would have reconsidered and regrouped.  Way back in one of my 1998 Rat Rants I wrote, "Is the job of President of the United States so boring that Clinton needs this kind of distraction?"  I still don't know the answer to this question, but it appears that Americans tend to elect folks who aren't particularly interested in doing the job. 

I realize that in some ways it's irrational to look at the President of the United States as a role model for corporate execs.  The President gets paid less than the average CEO of a mid-sized corporation, for one.  But power-wise, nobody has it over the Pres.  Execs can fire people, but the President can pardon them.  If forgiving is more difficult than punishing, you can't top being able to provide a passel of "get out of jail free" cards to anyone you feel good about.  The Republicrats made a big deal out of Clinton's pardons at the end of his administration.  They seemed to have forgotten Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Bush's pardons of an incredibly large group of administration and corporate criminals.  One of those criminals is currently the Vice President, which puts a different spin on the "vice" in that title.  Or maybe that's what the Constitutional Congress meant when they created the job?

At any rate, if morals, work ethic, and performance standards are shipped top-down from the President to corporate execs, it's no wonder that so few corporate execs are productive.  If they're taking their lead from the nation's top exec, it's a wonder they ever leave the golf course.  Bush II is mostly showing how few days the President can be in the office and still get away with the illusion that he's actually doing some part of the job he was elected to do.  If there is a more unskilled, lazier, less productive exec in the country (and we know there is because this country's "leadership" never fails to hit new lows) you'd think the man would have a full-time nurse to keep his heart beating.  "Management by walking around" has been replaced by absentee ownership. 

As I said in the first sentence of this rant, we're screwed.  The only thing that's holding our economy and political system together is momentum.  And that's being scrubbed off fast.  It's hard to kill a working business, but creative execs have discovered ways to kill almost every type of business of almost every size.  The 4-year period of Bush II brought record bankruptcies of small to huge businesses in the US.  Just about every spot in the economy has been dismal and it's not just middle-class jobs that are vanishing.  The places where the jobs were vanished, too. 

At least with Bush II we knew what we were getting into.  The guy was a failure at everything he'd ever tried; from cheerleading at Harvard to flying flowers for the Texas Air National Guard to massacring the Texas K-12 education system.  His one business "success," managing a baseball team, was a total prop-job.  To mask his incompetence, he was "given" the cash for his share of the team purchase, he was given a job where his sole task was to remain immobile so that he couldn't screw up, and he was prevented from participating in the sale of the team for the same reason.  He still managed to pose for some incredibly stupid photo ops, looking confused, bored, and foolish sitting behind the dugout in complete isolation. 

While the ship is sinking, the corporate rats are trying to eat the band's instruments.  Execs are giving themselves larger and larger golden parachutes as rewards for their total failures as leaders.  Executive boards, who are supposed to protect stockholders from this sort of shenanigan, are crammed with other companies' failed executives.  The rats are guarding the cheese and the result is there's no cheese left.  I guess the "upside" will be when the economy's momentum comes to a grinding halt and we suffer a massive depression.  When home values start falling, interest rates jump, and the economy grinds to a stop (as it did in 1929), the country's complete lack of leadership might get some attention.  But I'm not holding my breath.

3rd World Identifiers

Back in the 80’s, I spent as much time as possible in Baja, Mexico. The only thing about Baja that I didn’t like was traveling the Tijuana gauntlet, where every parked car might hide a “traffic sign” serving as an ATM for one of the city’s cops.

John Oliver recently described the tactic that many American cities are using to tax their citizens and other victims in a segment called “Municipal Violations.” This story, and reality, is evidence that the United States has become a 3rd world collection of urban and state dictatorships “using fines to fund government.”

Tijuana cops had an excuse. They didn’t get paid to be cops. In fact, like bell boys in upscale New York hotels, they had to pay their sergeants for their jobs. The only income they were allowed to “earn” came from trapping white Americans on their way through the town to Ensenada or hunting for a “theater” that features 13 year old girls getting it on with donkeys. One difference between Tijuana cops and American cops is that the American cops are grossly overpaid, underworked, and largely useless. The Tijuana cops were actually pretty good when it came time for them to do their job of protecting the public.   Another difference is that the Tijuana cops understood they were shaking down the public to feed their families. American cops present a fake image of enforcing the law while they pad their pockets with stolen loot, inflated pensions, and a slacker’s work day that would embarrass one of the Bush or Koch kids.

#102 A Most Irrational Animal (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

Humans are exceptional strange animals.  We are the only animal capable of imagining that we are so special that we're going to a life after death.  And we're the only animal that is terrified of death. 

I know, you've watched the Discovery Channel and you've seen terrified prey fleeing predators, so you think all animals are afraid of death.  That might be an interesting theory if those same animals didn't give in so quickly once they're captured.  When a deer gets snagged by a lion, the deer usually quits fighting and waits for the end to come.  I've interpreted that not as a fear of death but of pain.  Once the pain is in process, the animal wants death to end the misery as quickly as possible.  Humans, on the other hand, seem to be considerably less afraid of pain than of death.  We'll submit ourselves to all kinds of pain to stave off even a few seconds of life before death.

The exceptions to this rule of humanity are martyrs.  Martyrs are either confident that their faith is correct and that they've been "on the side of God," or that their cause is right and they are willing to sacrifice their lives to improve the lot of those that live after their deaths.  The majority of humans may pretend to some kind of faith in a life after death, a benevolent god, or the cause of king and country, but they know better.  Deep inside, they know once they are dead, they're dead. 

With industrial age medicine, we have provided ourselves a way to prolong life and pain in exchange for putting off death.  Since the first medicine men appeared, humans have tried to hang on to a few more moments of life even if those moments are full of pain and suffering and incapacity.  We're not doing this to prevent our loved ones from suffering.  Our suffering and disability makes life much harder for them.  We're not hanging on to life so that we can take advantage of the opportunity to rectify the wrongs we've done when we were young and vital.  Most folks simply return to their old life without even thanking the doctors and nurses who gave them the additional time.  This is a purely selfish and faithless act and, as such, it's interesting.

The majority of educated humans do not actively participate in religious activities.  Churches are finding themselves mostly loaded with low-brow fools who desperately want someone to tell them what to do next.  That's a pretty ideal market for what churches have to sell, but it does limit the intellectual future of those organizations.  Today's religious "expert" is the intellectual equivalent of the ordinary layperson of 200 years ago.  A business or a country would be panicked at this kind of brain-drain, but religions have always catered to a baser audience so they, mostly, don't notice the loss of intellect.  Certain sects are probably discovering that it is easier to find dumb kids to molest, but, otherwise, the majority of their patrons are the same dumb, unquestioning folks they have always been. 

All this beings us back to the point of today's rant; the human fear of death.  It ought to be obvious that anyone who is afraid of death is a person who understands the finality of that event.  A "true believer" would look forward to leaving this existence and moving to the promised land.  The rest of us know that dead is dead and that spirituality is just an exercise in socializing a relatively unsocial animal.  Spirituality has mostly been unsuccessful exercise, based on human history at a macro or micro level.  Simply entering a hospital is an act of unfaithfulness.  Submitting yourself to major surgery is downright atheist. 

I don't have a disagreement with atheists.  All available evidence points to the fact that the universe is not designed to promote life and that there are no gods hidden in the ether to protect us from obsolescence.  I do question the sanity and honesty of folks who act faithlessly and pose among the faithful.  You either know that this is life your one and only shot at existence or you believe you're going to heaven to enjoy 22 virgin white grapes (or salamanders or human females) for eternity.  Having it both ways is an act of disbelief and, you'd think, that would be a major sin in the eyes of most gods.

The Good Old Socialist Days

The three old douchebags I got stuck with earlier this week made me think back to those “good old days” they remember so well as being full of capitalism, freedom, religion, and unrestrained racism. Being older than any of them, I actually remember some of those days. Those days were definitely dominated by the old, but they were not good. The good parts of the 1950’s were all inspired by the rampant socialism left over from the revolt against the 1% my grandparents’ generation had waged after those inbred morons (the 1%, not my grandparents) crashed the stock market in 1929, destroyed the economy in their efforts to save their own wealth, and tried to turn the country into a corporatist/fascist state like their hero nation, Germany. Roosevelt’s legacy was continued by Truman and Eisenhower and until Nixon and his thugs came along it looked like the US might remain prosperous indefinitely. Socialism was at the core of that middle class prosperity.

For instance, in my hometown, Dodge City, Kansas, the city owned the utilities (except for the telephone company), a hospital was co-owned and operated by the city and the Methodist Church, and one of our two radio stations was publicly owned. We had a country club with a  fancy swimming pool and a golf course on the eastern “rich side of town,” but the poor side of town had a great public swimming pool on the edge of Wright Park (a park donated by Bob Wright of Wright and Rath General Store infamy from Dodge City’s rowdy days) and the west side of town had the American Legion’s club with a sand green golf course and another fine swimming pool. The city also maintained a zoo, a miniature golf course, a performance gazebo, and a small carnival area in Wright Park, where families spent a lot of picnic weekends and adults used the park for company and organization parties. The park was, in fact, a show place for the city; all paid for with taxes and maintained by city workers. A lot of the park construction was from the 1930’s and the work was done by Roosevelt’s Conservation Corps. The city also owned a “civic center” where concerts, sporting events, conventions, and other large events took place; all without naming the building after some corrupt corporation. (Today, that same building is named the United Wireless Arena).

Although John Kennedy and Congress lowered the top income tax rate from 90% to 75% in 1961, there weren’t a lot of obviously rich people in town, but there were a lot of very comfortable people. In fact, the most wealthy people were, as usual, old money folks who hid in their mini-mansions on the east side of town near the country club and hung out with other old money people. It was generally recognized as tasteless to flaunt your money and my step-grandparents knew a lot of the rich folks through their flooring business. As a Servicemaster company, and a part-time employee, we did some repair and remodeling work in their homes. Mostly, they spent more money for the same things as real people, although they spent more for similar services and products.

The big difference between then and now is obvious in both the town’s appearance and the economy. Downtown Dodge is dead. Even a promotional photo like the one at left can’t hide the fact that the core of the city is a ghost town. The old hotel, once a showpiece of the city, is a shabby collection of city government offices. All of the old department store buildings are empty or they host a collection of second-hand stores (a sure sign of a dead town). There is a middle class, but it is a very precarious existence with debt, income, and emergency money all on a knife-edge. The slightest adverse breeze could blow it all down, as it did in 2007.

Today, the town’s tax and income base is primarily made up of residential property taxes, sales taxes, and traffic fines. The parks are in shambles, Walmart is the primary retail game in town, the public schools are in the same kind of condition Kansas schools all suffer, and the wingnut press has done a fine job of turning lower income whites against lower income Hispanics and African Americans.

#99 Special Interests and Growth (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

Every time an area experiences an economic boom, property taxes rise.  Why is that?  Isn’t it  logical to expect the growth to pay for itself?  If the growth is really a good thing for everyone who lives in an area, you would think that would be reflected in lower taxes, not higher.  The addition of buildings to undeveloped land increases the value of the land and should return higher income to the county and state.  Farm land earns a lower tax rate than developed land.  But it never seems to work this way.  Why?  Maybe it’s because disguised special interests are calling the shots and diverting the costs of growth to people who shouldn’t have to pay it.

In the case of public funds and area growth, special interests abound.  Everyone who gains from an increase in the tax base is a special interest.  The obvious special interests, and rightly so, are developers, contractors, and real estate salespeople.  This group has a lot to gain from conning the public into paying for their investments. They would love to spread the cost of schools, roads, utilities, and other public services over the entire taxpaying population.  If those costs were borne by the people who reap the most benefit, the cost of housing would limit their profit margins and slow growth considerably.  They can always be counted on to contribute funding for a bond issue’s advertising. 

But these easy targets aren’t the only people who gain disproportionately from growth.  The two elements of greed, power and money, can help identify those who will gain from growth and, even, overpopulation.  Government officials can expect open paths to promotion, increased income, and larger “empires” through population growth.  It’s pretty obvious that a mayor of a 10,000 population town is going to make a lot less than Randy ("I can't remember who my date was") Kelly.  Kelly probably has more bodyguards than many towns have employees.  Empires are built on employees.  Salaries are based on the number of people supervised and complexity of the managed facilities.  This may also be where a big part of this exponential cost of growth comes from, too.  Large cities are not as efficient as small cities.  Large cities have more employees per taxpayer, more expense per employee, and some expenses that a small town wouldn’t even consider.  If this is what growth brings, who needs it?

If you expect government officials to present an unbiased opinion of the value of growth to the average citizen, you probably wouldn’t be skeptical of Mike Tyson’s intention toward your daughter.  Growth simply presents too much to gain for people whose income and power is based on taxation and population.  You can’t expect people to resist the temptation to look for only the upside of an issue that will dramatically and positively effect their pocketbooks. 

The rule in solving crime is “follow the money.”  This rule applies to finding the special interests who might commit the crime of destroying a community for the sake of growth.  Using this formula, it is clear that it will be difficult to accept a local newspaper as an unbiased source of information, also.  School system administrators are going to be in line for salary increases relative to the size of the schools they administer, also.  Even the police department may be pro-growth for the same reasons, although the officer on the beat will have to deal with more crime and more corruption, the department administrators will make more money and gain more power. 

When growth is a good thing, the gain is spread around equally and it is in everyone’s interest to promote it.  When growth is a bad thing, the majority of people who are asked to pay for it don’t gain proportionally to their investment; or they lose with no voice in that investment, which is what Amendment I was intended to stop.  When taxes must be raised to subsidize growth, that growth isn’t paying for itself.  The people who are reaping the largest rewards are paying only a small portion of the total investment.  When the growth produces more government jobs, it isn’t really doing the community a favor.  Someone will have to produce something real to pay for those government jobs.  When the major investors in the area don’t live in the area, the lion’s share of the benefits don’t return to the community that has paid for those resources.  Putting profits into national and international corporations’ won’t return a reasonable payback, on a long term basis.  It isn’t selfish to expect a fair return on your tax investment.  If the local government hasn’t done a good job with its funding in the past, nothing about new funding will change the people who spend it.  If you won’t get that return-on-investment, don’t spend the money. 

One way to estimate which side of an issue is not looking out for your best interests is to look at the quality of the flyers you receive.  The better they look, the better that side of the cause is financed, and you know good causes aren’t often well financed.  Money seems to flow downhill, ethically speaking, and grassroots movements don’t get much of it.  The best way to determine where your interests stand is to get involved.  Find out how your money is spent.  Learn to read budgets and force government officials to make those budgets available to taxpayers.  There is no reason why cities and states can’t follow the Clinton administration’s lead in making complete budgets available in electronic format.  That would minimize the cost of publishing these documents and allow the public to assist in analyzing the cost of government.  The more we know, the better we can run our country, cities, and neighborhoods.  If we care, the people who work for us in government will care.  If we don’t, we deserve the government we get.

September 2004

Shootin’ for Fun

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of having lunch surrounded by gun fanatics. No matter what these characters have to say for themselves and their “constitutional rights” to own an armory, there is a pretty good chance that most American gun owners are either dangerous neighbors or crazy scared. Maybe both. Jim Jefferies pretty much wraps up all of the rational reasons society should be get worried about gun owners. He blows off the “bullshit arguments and lies” that are the cornerstone and marketing plan of the NRA and its friends. Not one of these guys was man enough to admit that the whole reason they didn’t like gun laws or any attempt to design a sane society their whole defense was “Fuck off, I like guns.” In fact, they were pretty damn defensive about both their sanity and the sanctity of our mostly fucked up Constitution.
There is, though, one good reason a huge number of Americans want to have a gun: Yep, men in particular want to be sure they have a handy exit plan, just in case, as Jim said, “From time to time, we all get sad. One day you’re happy, the next you’re sad.” We don’t buy guns for protection from much of anything except depression. Since we’ve abandoned all hope of having a national health care system, especially mental health, that doesn’t bankrupt anyone who doesn’t have a few million in the trust fund, we gotta have guns.
If a manufacturer had balls enough to design a gun for the current gun owner market, it would be a very purpose-built device. For white people (men, mostly) it would look like the pistol at left. The cylinder is solely for the purposes of playing Russian roulette, since most of us only need one bullet. White people commit 75 suicides for every 15 homicides per million people. Black people are different, thanks to the NRA and our half-hearted police state. 150 black people are murdered by guns for every 27 who take themselves out (I’d imagine mostly middle class black people have the same issues as their white neighbors.). The self-defense statistics are so small they are not worth considering. The people who own guns for self-defense are so rationally-and-mathematically-challenged they should be carefully placed in padded rooms and heavily medicated.

The “in defense of freedom” argument is the most bullshit of all gun nut arguments. Yeah, right, you pussies own guns “in case the government became a bunch of cunts and you all could fight back.” The Revolutionary War was the one and only instance in American history where that actually happened. Sure, there are lots of instances of superstitious nuts going Waco on local police over silly shit like their right to have sex with children or defending their take on when and how the Great Kahuna is going to haul all of his/her children up to the Great Rock Candy Mountain. Careful examination of those situations would reveal that the government might have been less than A-Team’ish in their efforts, but the “bunch of cunts” group has been consistently on the other side of the wall.  In the most recent case, the wad of deranged crackers defending a fellow racist, millionaire cracker’s right to decimate public land for profit and greed, my point was made painfully well. Since 1776, there hasn’t been a single instance of patriots gearing up and heading off to protect fellow citizens who have been deprived of their rights. In fact, in my experience the gun owners have been pretty consistent in their support of the government when it comes to violating voting rights, petitioning for the right to work in safe and fair conditions, protecting the environment, or promoting any “civil rights” that don’t make the 1% richer. If modern white gun owners were tossed back to Revolutionary War times, they would all be Tories.

Nothing Changes, Nothing to See Here

Forty-three years ago, in 1972, Democratic Presidential nominee George McGovern selected Thomas Francis Eagleton to be his vice-presidential partner. By August, McGovern had abandoned Eagleton because of his history of depression treatment. Supposedly, a poll found that 77% of prospective Democratic voters said "Eagleton's medical record would not affect their vote." I’d find that hard to believe, but Americans wanted to imagine themselves to be more civilized than they do today. Eagleton returned to the Senate, won two more elections, and retired after a weird blackmailing affair with a niece, a local lawyer, and the Scientology organization. Eagleton was a key player in the Senate's foreign relations, intelligence, defense, education, health care, and environmental legislation. He was an important Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act sponsor. He and Frank Church sponsored the amendment that halted the bombing in Cambodia and effectively ended American involvement in the Vietnam War. Still, to most conservative Americans (the majority of Americans), Eagleton was the “crazy McGovern VP.”

The Greek father of medicine, modern or otherwise, Hippocrates described “melancholia” as a disease with both mental and physical aspects. "fears and despondencies, if they last a long time"¹ as the earliest and not yet improved upon description of depression. Freud discovered or pronounced nothing new about depression and not much of value has come about since. So, a couple thousand years of avoidance and denial has led us to where we are today with a minimum of 7% of the US population suffering from a well known, totally misunderstood mental disease that offers largely unsuccessful therapies and the joy of social stigma. The modern approach is to bury the patient in side-effect-laden but ineffective and dangerous drugs (“Why Are More than One in Ten Americans at Risk for Suicide?”). While these drugs are barely or rarely as effective as placebos,  they are a big money-maker for the dope peddlers. In 2013, the dope dealers made $11B on antidepressants alone. No wonder these assholes are spending so much money fighting marijuana legalization. They are just fighting off the competition.

Since 1974 a lot of noise has been made about improvements in mental healthcare but there is no reality behind that noise. The stigma that existed 100 years ago remains, largely, unchanged today. In 2013, 41,149 US citizens committed suicide. Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death for Americans.  And that is with the unmentioned understanding that suicides are dramatically underreported due to . . . yep, the stigma of mental illness. Even the survivors are unable to admit their loved one was ill. As an illustration of that national reality-avoidance, no accurate national suicide attempt statistics are kept. However, in 2013 494,169 people were hospitalized for “self-harm behavior.” There is a sexual component to US suicides, too. Men are 4 times more likely to kill themselves, but women try to kill themselves 3 times as often. You could argue that women are more likely to make a “cry for help,” but you could also argue that men are just more mechanically competent in their attempts. Men are a lot more inclined to use guns for this purpose and firearms account for 51.4% suicide deaths.

The first requirement to fixing a problem is to admit you have a problem. The only admission allowed to mental illness is suicide or at least a fairly serious attempt, which in 1-out-of-12 examples doesn’t do much to fix the problem for the person making that admission. The effectiveness of further attempts is depressingly high. The medical profession ridicules poorly executed attempts as “a cry for help.” If that were true, it’s pretty obvious that crying for help in the direction of American medicine is misguided. You might as well ask a tiger to care for a baby lamb. If US doctors don’t see a dollar sign swirling around your head, they’re not interested.

Outside of the drug profits, all of this self-destruction is socially expensive, too. The estimated US suicide death expense was more than $44 billion in 2010. Even the failures are far from cheap, costing about $2 billion for medical care plus $4.3 billion in lost wages and productivity and other costs. In a so-called capitalist society, you’d think the shear expense of suicide—successful and unsuccessful—would make us do something about all of this self-destruction. Don’t get me wrong. We’re not the worst, most suicidal, country in the world. In fact, we’re #30 behind such wonderful places as Greenland (#1), Lithuania, South Korea, Kazakhstan, Croatia, Russia, Poland, and South Africa. Also, we’re slightly less self-destructive than Japan, Belgium, Finland, Austria, and France. The top ten suicidal countries have some pretty amazing rates of self-destruction from 83/100,000 down to 20/100,000. From there on, though, the next 50 slowly decline in self-annihilation from 20/100,000 to 10/100,000. The USofA is pretty much in the same territory as Bulgaria, Germany, Sweden, Czech Republic, Cuba, Romania, and the UK. Apparently, political and economy systems are disconnected from suicide rates. Neither capitalism, monarchies, fascism, communism, socialism, dictatorships, democracies, anarchy, order, rich, poor, middle class, rural, urban, suburban, and every other description I can use with which to describe a society seems to produce relatively the same rate of self-hate.

Greenland, for some reason, is a standout with 1-in-4 Greenlanders attempting to kill themselves every year and with the world’s highest rate of self-destruction. Greenland’s streets are decorate with signs advertising suicide prevention hot lines, “The call is free. No one is alone. Don't be alone with your dark thoughts. Call." So far, that tactic has been ineffective. People, especially teenagers call the hot line and discover that they are, in fact, alone. We are all alone in ourselves. I suspect that, once they hear the usual perfunctory “we are all in this together” drivel they are even more inspired to put an end to their misery.

In the last couple of decades, I’ve lost three friends to suicide. For a while, back in the 80’s, it seemed like everyone I knew was contemplating—out loud—suicide and taking a shot at it. Supposedly, suicide is “catching” and I’ll admit that knowing people who have checked out for a variety of non-medical motivations makes considering the option a little easier. Malcolm Gladwell calls that a “contagious idea.” That’s possible, but I doubt nearby suicides are the cause of following events.

The fact that the sacrifice needed for any hope of a cure for depression is to suffer the slings and arrows of exposure, stigma, ridicule, followed by even more isolation looks more suspiciously causal to me. Asking for help when the brain doing the asking is the source of the disease is not much different than requiring a cancer victim to administer his own radiation therapy. That is, of course, unacceptable. Because if we admit we need help, we’re weak. If we can’t fix ourselves, all by ourselves, we’re just like that “crazy McGovern VP.” Americans can forgive drunks, drug addicts, cowards, liars, criminals, draft evaders, traitors, National Guard A.O.W.L. rich kids on a bender, complete idiots, greedy bastards, adulterers, and every sort of low life. But our society is incapable of forgiving people for mental illness. In fact, we’re going backwards. The general distain for a “mental illness defense” is evidence that our societal tolerance and compassion for the mentally ill is going backward. Texas and Florida appear to revel in executing the mentally ill and a few other states are showing signs of jealousy.

I don’t think any of this bodes well for any honest attempt at attempting to contain our suicide epidemic. And, if we were capable of honesty, it’s pretty obvious that any physical disease, product, or activity that caused this kind of death, destruction, and expense would be front page news and Fox Views and the other panic generators would be freaking out.

¹ Hippocrates, Aphorisms, Section 6.23

#98 Redneck Conservatives

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

[This is another old rant, pre-Rat, in fact.  The original piece was published in the Orange County Register, in 1986.  I discovered it in a fit of hard disk sterilization and it seemed appropriate to this year just as it did during the Reagan years in SoCal.]

The onslaught of "redneck" conservatism is prompting me to write this.  A combination of the micro-minded (I apologize for the Communist metric term.) state representatives Dornan, Ferguson, and their supporters, the comments of the Contra Costa County District Attorney (DeBeer, L.A. Times, 6/22/86), the insidious attack on free speech that the Meese commission's blackmail represents, and our pitifully confused president's defense of his awful court selections have overwhelmed me.  I am under personal pressure to defend the "real" standards that America represents.  Standards that were expressed and well documented by the "real" Founding Fathers; not Reagan's contra imitations.

First, I want to establish two definitions. 

The Right often applies the descriptive terms "Bolshevik", "commy", "red", "pinko", and (when they are feeling sociable) "socialist" to any opinion and opinion-holder on the liberal side of George Patton.  When this scale of analogy is applied to themselves (as in "Nazi", "fascist", etc.) the right wing acts like they have been horribly wounded.  Tough.  If you can't take it, don't dish it out.  On an unnecessarily civilized scale you good ole boys are practicing vicious forms of argumentum ad hominem (personal slander) and ignorantiam (ignorance).  If you can't be restrained to argument by the logical rules of debate, don't expect your opponents to be so shackled. 

The second defiled word that I want to reclaim is "conservative".  The present political definition of "conservative" is a fundamentalist, anti-human rights, supporter of the loudest, most macho posturing demagogue (unless the "conservative" is that demagogue, then he simply supports himself).  Webster's has a more satisfying definition; "a cautious or discreet person...tending to maintain existing views, conditions, or institutions...marked by or relating to traditional norms of taste, elegance, style, or manners."  I believe that definition applies to many of the people that the right opposes and few of the politicians they support.  Especially the last section; "elegance, style, or manners" are in short supply from the far right.  Take a look at the Times picture of Dornan and Ferguson (Hayden, L.A. Times, 6/24/86) for examples. 

I think any intelligent reader of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, Jefferson, Paine, Washington, Whitman, or Thoreau would be forced to link Tom Hayden's positions closer to a true "American" stance than the rantings of Bobby Dornan or the posturing of Guilt Ferguson.  The difference between the quality of Dornan's "a liar . . . a coward . . . and a traitor" (or Dornan's ranting at a closed door, "I am a member of Congress!") and Hayden's "My country, let me right the wrongs" should shed some light on the subject.  These two "conservative" politicians remind me of another phony patriot's heroism.  Anybody ask where "Rambo" was during the Vietnam period?  He wasn't hiding behind twenty layers of officers and enlisted men, but he was safely in a foreign country exposing his chest at a girl's school.  It doesn't take courage to assume a right-wing stance. 

This country is full of simple people, who will follow the man who tells them they are "number one".  They will follow him off the tallest cliff top.  Hitler didn't go against the popular grain.  Dornan and Ferguson know where the prevailing winds blow.  They know the cost of fighting the crowd (They may not have a motive, though.).  History contains a long list of men without morals and/or wisdom who followed the chanting of the masses.  It does not present them well.

I can't give a retired general much credit for patriotism.  Possibly radical protectionism, but not patriotism.  Scores of these profiteers parade their self-claimed heroism after short twenty-year careers of poor quality middle-management while having their every whim catered to by enlisted boys.  Then, using the guise of "sacrificing servant", they double-dip into the public coffers with civil service careers or political ambitions; paid for by the companies whose over-run, pitifully-designed products their mis-managing allowed into the cynical military industrial simplex.

Military men are military men.  They aren't about ideology and it doesn't matter which side they are on.  For them, the struggle between right and wrong is reduced to tactics and firepower.  If our imagined invaders leave anybody in place, it will be the middle-to-upper military management.  It would not be cost-effective to replace them, since they won't need re-training or expensive additional linguistic education.  If they are left in place (or slightly re-sorted) they will carry on as before with a few new phrases to shout at their fool soldiers.

During a recent conversation about the real or imagined threat presented by Nicaragua, Cuba, and the Soviet Union, I began contemplating what changes would occur from such an invasion.  The most radical right-winger's scenario goes along these lines: The far-right often uses examples of what sets us apart and above the "communists".  Freedom of speech and press is often example numero ono.  I've noticed that "conservative" politicians seem to be in the forefront of censorship's fan club.  I suspect that they are merely honestly interested in their own comments and would be strongly in favor of shutting the rest of us up.  Freedom of religion is close to every rightist's heart.  Especially those fundamentalist types who offer the rest of us the freedom to join their religion or find somewhere else to live.  And we can take our radical, pornographic, or un-nationalistic free press with us!  Their interpretation of these freedoms seems to closely resemble the freedom another Mr. Christian offered Captain Bligh. 

I could be missing something, but this all seems suspicious.  It has been often noted that government officials are most interested in limiting access to documents that chronicle their foul-ups and criminal actions.  I suspect that the government officials in the Kremlin who are responsible for the notorious communist press repression are the same kind of people that are interested in that sort of authority in our own government.  In fact, I suspect that, if the Russians could have non-violently overthrown our political system, they would employ the same people just to simplify the language difficulties that a new government would face.  Walt Kelly and Pogo might be even righter (no pun) than ever with "We have seen the enemy, and he is us."

From sometime in 1986

#97 Management Perks and Necessity (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

From the working class employee’s perspective, "upper management" is the portion of the company that has no purpose.  The higher-ups attend every party-time trade show, personal improvement seminar, and marginally work-qualified travel junket the company can afford.  They often attend events the company can’t afford.  In many organizations, a "need/not needed" formula can be applied to the company’s positions: “the people who are required to do work are necessary, the people who are are not are expendable.”  Using this formula, you may find that most of your company’s executive branch is expendable. 

For example, assembly personnel are logically required to be at their work stations on time, every day, for the whole day.  They have to be in place because they are part of a  process that allows for no surplus staffing.  Many executive positions are allowed total freedom of  arrival and departure.  They don’t have to be in place because the company will function just as well without them.  Their absence is often an improvement in the workplace.  Using my formula, these executives are expendable and the assembly personnel are not. 

I’m not interested in why business works this way, it just does and every company generates its own reasons for executive existence.  “They were there first,” is as good an explanation as you are likely to get.  What I am interested in is the few managers who actually want to make a contribution and don’t know what that contribution should be.  So, if you believe you “deserve” your big office, your tiny work load, and your out-of-proportion salary, find something else to read.  The rest of this article is going to continue to insult you and question your value to your company, the economy, and world ecology.  If you want to make an important contribution to your company and employees as a member of what Peter Drucker calls “the management class,” please read on and I hope to repay your effort.  You are a rare bird who needs help to avoid extinction. 

A simple perspective every manager should take is, “What services do I manager provide to the people who work for me?  Do those services justify my existence to them and to my own managers or customers?  How do I add value to those services so I can continue to justify my existence and increase my value in the future?”  The answers to those questions will return an answer to the next question, “What am I worth to my customers?”  You can replace “customers,” with employees, supervisors, other departments, and the end users of your product or service.  In most companies, the customer is the enemy; no matter where he comes from.  In a well run company, customers come from every direction. 

In the usual organization, the only real customer inside of the organization is the CEO, owner, or Big Cheese.  If Cheese has lost that critical bit of perspective, the company will exist soley to provide for his gratification and only the foolish dedication of a middle manager or two will drag out the company's painful death.  If Cheese has at least some grasp on reality, he or she will give some direction to the people who do the work and that will contribute enough to the company direction to prevent bankruptcy.  If your name is Cheese and your style falls in these two categories, either you go away or your company will; it’s only a matter of time.  If Cheese is one of those rare birds who recognizes and promotes the company’s real customers, the problem becomes a matter of pursuing excellence with some real hope of achieving it. 

How do you know if your company is mismanaged?  If you are the mismanager, you probably don't have any way to know, because your employees won't be honest with you and you aren't likely to be honest with yourself.  But positive answers to the following questions are a good sign that your company is troubled:

• Is there more than one corporate vice-president? (If the country only needs one, and no one knows what he does, why do companies need more?) 

• Are the executives more inclined to play golf/tennis/etc. than to do work? 

• Does the company tend to have "jeans days" when the execs are on business trips? 

• Do people act cautious when you're around?

• Get resources, protect from other managers and customers, play politics?

• Do unsigned memos about “dysfunctional companies” appear on your desk? 

The most important thing to remember about managing is "power corrupts."  If you know that your position is corrupting you and you attempt to limit that effect, you have a shot at doing something positive in your position.  If you pretend that it can't happen to you and ignore your power abuses, you will drift into uselessness; eventually becoming a person the company can do without.   

September 2004

#96 Hairy Jealousy (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

The older I get the more I notice idiotic little things popping up in my psyche.  Thirty years ago, I watched “suits” march off to work and marveled at how robot-like they seemed.  While I was not exactly a freak, I was confident in my safe distance from the average working man.  I had hair over my shoulders.  I wore sandals to work.  I played guitar and wrote stories and read science fiction.  I was cool.  Thirty years later, I was a minor league suit.  Monday through Friday, I wore a tie and shoes that are less comfortable and more socially acceptable. 

More than the tie and dumb shoes, I think a sign of my sellout is that I sometimes caught myself thinking another man’s long hair is “unprofessional.”  You know the guys I’m talking about.  The lawyer with a ponytail.  The computer programmer doing a Jim Morrison imitation.  The dreadlocked engineer.  It only passes through my mind for a moment before I snuffed it out, but it irritated me that it was there, ever. 

I admit that a lot of  the origin for the thought comes from my work environment.  I’m was an engineer in a medical devices company.  There is probably no more stodgy, uncreative, mindlessly, conservative business in the world than those companies producing products for doctors.  No one with half a talent world ever work for an established medical devices or drug company, because those places are so stifling that ideas slip out of their hands like a bar of buttered, wet soap.  In a medical products company, “unprofessional” means anything from not being properly dressed to discussing screwed-up  products out loud.  You can stumble into more “career limiting mistakes” in that business than you can on a battlefield.  People are judged by microscopic social errors and inane business traditions and surviving every workday is a painful test.  So we get really critical of diddly, unimportant things.

But that isn’t what the hair thing is about.  Long hair is a completely different “professionalism” issue.  Being successful and letting your hair grow flaunts male modesty.  It’s a way of saying, loudly, “I don’t give a damn what you think. I don ‘t have to kiss anyone’s ass.  I’m talented enough, or rich enough, that don’t need this job.” 

Men don’t mind brilliant or rich men who conform, like the rest of us, to robot-ness.  But it really annoys us to have our own menial, gutless, slave status thrown back in our faces.  Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Ross Perot, Arnold Swartzenegger, and the majority of rich, famous guys respect this ritual.  They wear uncomfortable, geeky looking clothes.  They cut their hair so short that their ears protrude from their heads like microwave antenna.  While we might resent their wealth, we never have to resent their freedom.  For some of these guys, the richer they get the more enslaved they look. 

That’s comforting, from a sick, pack animal kind of logic.  That’s the way it should be, as far as the herd is concerned.  Don’t show off your wealth and your freedom, pick one and keep the other hidden from our view.  We can deal with a long haired dude flipping burgers or pushing a broom.  A pony tail and a Mercedes is too much of a blow to our pride.  Success and freedom are so far out of the reach of the average working stiff.  We don’t want to think about what we’ve given up to be useful corporate fodder.  So keep your hair under your hat if you don’t want to be called “unprofessional.”  Like you’d care.

September 2004

Boomers Are?

Last night sucked. 

I’m taking a woodworking class in Winona and the “class” has turned out to be a woodshop free-for-all. Nothing wrong with that, although I’d have appreciated a little more instruction and structure. Most of the “students” are 50+ year-olds who have taken the “class” a dozen times for the access to the tools and are building a variety of furniture bits for their homes. Considering how far I’m driving for this class, I’m not learning nearly as much as I’d hoped. I suppose that’s how education is supposed to work.

The class starts at 5PM and ends at 9PM with a break at 7-7:30. Last night during the break I had to listen to a trio of crackers (including the instructor) jabber about how much they hoped someone would assassinate President Obama and the current Pope. Obviously Faux News drones, but not the kind of people I’m used to being around by a long shot.

And that’s for a reason. My tolerance for stupid has vanished in the last decade. I don’t do well with superstition/religion, racism, cowards, chicken hawks, or ignorant crackers who think the United States is a territory of the Israeli nation. Honestly, I don’t even know where to begin debating with them. Their knowledge base is so limited, perverse, and arrogant that they barely seem human to me. A couple of short conversations with those people and I start thinking about my dream retirement home in the side of a Montana mountain. It’s not all that comfy, but I would never have to worry about visitors and the ones who make it past the “trespassers will be shot sign” will discover that I’m not kidding with that warning. When I move into that abandoned mine shaft and set up house, do not come visiting.

To be fair, these three old white guys are somewhat likeable, if you can keep their minds focused on work. They are moderately helpful, moderately-skilled carpenters. One of them is a "retired" 62-year-old rich legacy "farmer" (He leases the land he inherited and lives in the city in a mansion.), who is mostly trying to prove how hip he is by playing with the school’s state-sponsored tools while complaining about having to pay taxes for stuff. He’s a southern boy who considers himself to be hip because he likes old black blues musicians, but he hates President Obama and black people in general. He’s convinced he’s going to “heaven” because he’s "reborn" and really gets testy when I mention the camel through "the eye of a needle" thing. He contributes $22/month to some crippled vets thing and a larger pile to his politically-based church and that’s his guarantee to an eternal life at the right hand of one god or another.

The instructor is just a simple, small-town, working-class racist. He thinks he’s hiding his racism behind a political ideology, but his take on the US Constitution is so demented that he couldn’t out-debate a smart ten-year-old in a fairly managed civics discussion. He’s pissed off about Obamacare/Romneycare because he thinks his state-provided health insurance has been degraded by the ACA. Like many of the folks who are on the public dole, pretending to be “public servants,” he’s against all parts of the government except the ones that provide him with a comfortable, secure middle-class life.

The third leg of this unstable stool is a religious nutbag who is convinced the Apocalypse is coming “because gays.” Yeah, that sentence doesn’t make sense, but either does anything this doofus says. Like too many Boomer males, this idiot is pissed off that the world doesn’t have to bow to his perverse version of Christianity and that people can’t be made to behave in a manner that doesn’t make him uncomfortable. People like this have convinced me that everyone who “doesn’t like Obama” is a racist and everyone who freaks out about gays is in the closet. Everyone.

A good bit of the break-time conversation was about how much better off the world would be if someone assassinated President Obama and the current Pope. Then, they got into a heated, ignorant discussion about how far off-base Pope Francis is getting and my comment that “he’s awfully Christian, isn’t he?” went right over/under their heads. The crazy third leg went off on gays and lesbians and the Apocalypse and the loony rich guy started babbling about being reborn as the only path to heaven, regardless of his wealth, greed, and general uselessness to humanity and nature. The instructor just muttered about how much he hated Obama and barely kept “niggar” out of his ranting. (Fuck you and your “n-word” bullshit. We all know what you assholes want to be saying, and don’t, because you think it proves you are civilized.)

The interesting part of the crazy guys' dialog was when the rich asshole started ranting about how Obama wasn’t taking the ISIS “threat” seriously and the religious nut joined in with insane talk about nuking ISIS. The rich guy pretended to be questioning modern patriotism and asked if any of us thought US citizens would “pitch in” against a common enemy, like we did in WWII. I’d checked out, by then, but I should have said, “Nope. No way the 1% would allow a 90% top tax rate to pay for a war. Rich people mostly take from society. They get pissed off when they are asked to contribute more than voluntary tips to the servant class.”

I drove my 60 miles back home last night thinking, “this is a waste of my time.” I hauled the bits of my project back with me, thinking I’ll finish it up on my own equipment. I’m still waffling on deciding if I’ve had enough of this or if there is more I could learn for my money. One thing is for sure, there are way too many people like this from my generation and if people under 40 don’t vote like no American generation their ages have ever voted, they and we are all fucked.

#95 Going Postal, a Rational Response (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

If you talk at any length to those of us who works for a large company, you’ll eventually hear some comment about “going postal.”  When you dig a little ways into why they might use this language, you’ll find that they may not be kidding.  Even more to the point, it probably makes sense to consider that line of thinking.

The U.S. Post Office, for instance, is not much different from the worst-case major corporation.  The working class is stressed, strained, and maligned by a management class that is unskilled, unsympathetic, and rarely available or useful. Post Office employees often complain about working under conditions where they are treated as not much more than a part of the machinery.  Management considers their employees' lives to be of no more importance than the junk mail they sort and deliver.  People are hired and fired and reassigned for the strangest, most irrational reasons imaginable.  People are put into situations where they snap.  When they do, they sometimes come to work heavily armed.  They “go postal.”

Using the classic Western model for heroism, the lone gunman who finds protection from injustice by blasting his way through the bad guys, going postal may not be an irrational response.  We are surrounded by a barrage of major powers that don’t care about justice.  The workplace is just the first in a long line of conflicts where we are helpless to put things right.  From the IRS to the welfare system to chain stores where we return defective products to minimum wage workers who could care less if we “have a nice day,” we are powerless to find a fair deal.  If Bruce, Arnold, Sylvester, and the other muscle guys can shoot their way out of impossible situations, why can’t the rest of us? 

Let’s face it, there is nobody out there protecting the ordinary citizen. The people who are supposed to be protecting us are just in it for the power and money.  We’re like Joseph Heller’s man in the street crying “Help, police!” hoping someone will step up to save us from the police, lawyers, employers, government, and our violent neighbors.  But we’re alone against those hazards.  No can or will help us fight those battles.

The Dilbert^© cartoon constantly illustrates what life in corporate America is like.  A mindless herd of marching management morons make decisions that destroy the companies we depend on.  MBA pinheads who know more buzzwords than an Air Force general, but who don’t meet that same low common sense standard, decide what we do and when we do it for the majority of our waking hours. 

That’s no small portion of life, either.  Someone estimated that, out of a 30 year working career, most of us get 1 1/2 years away from the job before retirement.  You work until you're mentally dead, you retire, you die.  What a life!  If anything puts the phrase “wage slave” into context, that ought to do it. 

If we screw up and step over one of the thousands of boundaries that define the margins between legal and illegal, the penalties often make the Spanish Inquisition look like the good old days.  We are under threat of imprisonment or poverty for more causes than Sam Clements ever imagined back in the 1800’s when he analyzed the English penal system and found a few hundred capital crimes.  We have crime in the streets, in business, and in government.  We have redefined capital crimes in the twentieth century.  Unless you are a case-hardened criminal, going jail isn’t just “paying your debt to society.”  In the U.S., when you go to jail you might as well be dead.  You can get hung, gassed, or injected through a direct sentence.  You can get any of those things, indirectly, as part of a minimal sentence in our over-crowded prison system.

With the exception of Tim Allen and one other guy whose name escapes me, jail time is pretty much the end of any hope for a normal life in this country.  Rehabilitation is a concept that only applies to white collar prisons.  The rest of us are tossed to the wolves.  So the only honorable way out, when backed into a wall, may be going postal on the folks who built the wall, put you against it, and laugh at your predicament when they escort you to the door.

September 2004

#94 Exit Interviews, Why Bother? (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

It seems like every company is doing exit interviews these days.  Supposedly, the reason is to learn why employees are leaving, to slow the turnover.  Exit interviews are about as likely to accomplish that task as Congress is to reform campaign finance.  The problem is that the people gathering the information don’t know what to do with it and the people who need the information don’t want it.

The simple fact is that ex-employees are not going to burn bridges in today’s competitive job market.  Even if the exiting employee doesn’t expect to ever return to the company, he still may want a good reference.  Telling the straight truth about ex-bosses, past projects and products isn’t going to make friends and it isn’t going to accomplish anything.  Most likely, it won’t do anything at all.

Most company’s Human Resources departments are so insular and isolated from every other department in the company, that the results of exit interviews die in the employee’s personnel folder.  HR departments are the most resented, bureaucratic, unresponsive area of many companies.  Middle managers avoid contact with their HR representatives at all costs.  Upper management has organized its HR departments to confound communication, not enhance it.  HR managers are extremely successful at this assignment.  With all these obstacles, is it any wonder that exit interviews are regarded as nothing more than a mindless hurdle on the way to the last paycheck? 

The first HR department, at Ford Motor Company, was managed by a processional goon, Harry Bennett.   The original purpose seemed to be to find the optimum methods to abuse employees.  Today, they are a lot more subtle than their predecessors, but the function is not significantly different. 

August 2004

#93 WHAT THE HELL GOOD IS PUTTIN' ALL THE JUNK IN SPACE? (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

[This is a fantasy short-story I wrote some time ago, during the end of the Reagan years.  I decided to dump it into the Rat Rants because I didn't know what else to do with it.]

The Russians and the Americans decide, in a fit of teamwork, to "utilize the resources of our two great nations" and split the cost of a manned space station and giant radio telescope.  The Star Wars program is scrapped as part of the deal.  Since the government never gives up funds it has managed to tax out of the public, the funds are spent on the space station.  The space station gets finished and the two nations have more tax money to spend.  They spend it on a space manufacturing facility.  The two nations' research and development industries have been working a lot on space and a little on consumer/industrial products.  They are working smarter and at an elevated technical base after closing their mil-industrial facilities and moving the really valuable engineers to more productive tasks.

The Russians and the Americans are once again the world leaders in technology.  They move all polluting manufacturing tasks off-planet.

The Japanese want part of the economic pie.  The Americans and Russians are wealthy enough to buy great toys and the Japanese want to build great toys.  The Japanese are not afraid of the Russians and not controlled by American regulations.  The Japanese begin SALT XIII negotiations with the Chinese and Koreans.  With Japan in the lead (barely), the Eastern block begins work on a space bridge, with facilities in the center of the span for zero gravity manufacturing.  The bridge is complete in 6 years.  The bridge is profitable in 10.  The Eastern block makes great toys for the Americans and Russians. 

The American consumer market is very wealthy and can afford to share the wealth.  The Russian consumer market is about as profitable as the American market was during the 1960's.  Many developing countries test the new Russian market for consumer products.  The Russians and Americans have perfected space habitats and are considering terraforming experiments on a twin planet in Alpha Centauri.

The West Germans and East Germans get united because the Russians have their eyes on the sky and don't pay attention to terrestrial boarder shifts.  The Germans collaborate with the Swiss to "keep technology in the hands of artisans who are concerned with workmanship."  They make tremendous gains in superconductor and particle force theory and develop a superconductor-based generator that powers a drive that harnesses the anti-mass characteristics of the atom.  They are commercially competing with the Eastern block for the 50 year East/West reunion. 

The Eastern block has made ownership of space habitats a cost-effective, consumer product.  Thousands of families move into the asteroid belt to work and live in the non-national manufacturing facilities. 

The "Keep Terra Clean" movement restores natural balance to the earth's environment and life forms.  Thousands of acres of rain forest are re-planted.  The atmosphere of the earth becomes controlled and the ozone is re-designed to be 100.000000001% efficient.  The oxygen generated by the system is sold to the space colonies.   The rare gases, metals, minerals, and chemical combinations are sparingly parceled out to the colonies.  This trade finances a cottage industry based, high-technology, back to nature life-style economy throughout the earth.

The Americans and Russians are somewhere out there.

You want to know why all the space junk is floating around the planet?  That's why we did it!