#69 Conservative Courage? (2002)

All Rights Reserved © 2002 Thomas W. Day

Webster's defines "conservatism" and "conservative" as "a disposition in politics to conserve what is established . . . a political philosophy based on tradition and social stability, stressing established institutions and preferring gradual development to abrupt change  . . . the tendency to prefer an existing or traditional situation to change . . . tending or disposed to maintain existing views, conditions, or institutions. . . "  Pretty depressing outlook, don't you think?  Two hundred years ago, this sort of person would be labeled a "Tory," an English-monarchy-loving, King George IX sympathizer.  If you believe that the majority of Americans are conservative, it follows that the majority of Americans are, apparently, ready to rejoin the United Kingdom. 

Most like, it's safe to assume that the majority of humans on this planet are conservative.  Personally, I can't tell conservative Republicans from conservative communist Chinese.  If you swing far enough to either political pole, you end up at the same spot.  Communism fails because government is a flawed concept.  Everybody's-business-is-my-business rightwing conservatism follows the same flaws.  In the end, the government ends up serving itself and the interests of those who provide power to the government.  When that happens, you can't tell the right from the left unless, as Pete Townsend theorized, "their beards have all grown longer overnight."  Pete was hoping for the impossible when he imagined there would be a time when we "won't get fooled again," though.  Since most of us are conservatives, we're easy to fool.

Supposedly, the opposite of a conservative in today's political jargon is a "liberal." Webster's defines that philosophy as one who is "not bound by authoritarianism. . .  [and who is] associated with ideals of individual expression, economic freedom, greater individual participation in government, and constitutional, political and administrative reforms designed to secure these objectives . . . one who is open-minded or not strict in the observance of orthodox, traditional or established forms or ways."  I'm sure these sound like terrible characteristics to most of us.  Damn revolutionaries!  Since I've always had a dictionary within reach, I've never had any problem considering myself a liberal.  Even adding "tree hugging" to the description has no effect on my identification with liberalism.  I like trees and I'm a liberal. 

Words are funny things.  In modern media-speak, words end up meaning what we are told they mean, not what they are intended to mean.  Like the marketing folks say, "image is everything."  If the media, politicos, and the rest of the conservative Powers That Be tell us being a "liberal" is a bad thing, we believe it.  It's obvious, from reading the liberal definition, why that crowd would like us to think conservative.  It's in their best interests to convince the rest of us that a conservative philosophy is good for everyone.  Because it's particularly good for the minority who are in the driver's seat.   Conservatives live to "conserve what is established," resisting change even when change is past necessary and well into damn-near-too-late-to-save-the-world.  Why the majority of us care what the ruling minority wants is something I've never understood.

Here's one theory, though.  Many Americans pretend to be conservatives, not because they want things to stay the way they are but because they don't want them getting any worse.  Now that's a courageous, but understandable, position.  Too gutless to look out the window because there might be something scary there?  The problem with this tactic is that if you're not getting better, you're always going to be getting worse.  In sports, the phrase is "the best defense is a good offense."  In politics, if the ruled class isn't trying to kick the ruling class' butt, we're all spiraling the toilet bowl.

In times of political hopelessness it's comforting, to me, to remember that less than 1% of the early American population deserves to be called members of our "founding fathers."  That's the small percentage who participated in the American Revolution.  The rest, the overwhelming 99%+ rest, were too occupied with survival, collecting wealth, or drinking homemade beer to bother themselves with independence.  The rest were conservatives.

Today's liberals have decided that too many negative connotations apply to the liberal label, so they are taking to calling themselves "progressives."  I don't think that tactic will work.  If a word, "liberal," filled with as many positive attributes as that word owns, can end up being an insult, "progressive" doesn't stand a chance.  Although I do like the truthful insinuation that the progressive opposition would be, by default, "regressive."    Regressive is a much more honest term to describe the majority of card-carrying Republican conservatives.  Often, these younger-than-me folks refer to a mythical time from their youth when citizens "took responsibility for their actions" or when the government was less intrusive in our lives. 

It's hard to imagine a more intrusive government than the mind police who forced loyalty pledges out of intellectuals and Hollywood actors, the McCarthy-Eisenhower 1950's Republicans.  But these kids aren't old enough to remember, or to have experienced, that group of terrorists.  Fortunately, either am I, but at least I was alive during that period and read about it.  Finding a positive difference in attitude or social responsibility between the Jay-Ed "I look pretty in hoop skirts" Hoover FBI and the Soviet Union's Secret Police, any time between 1948 and 1975, would be an experiment in fine detail discrimination.  I would like to believe that most Americans would be unimpressed with the responsibility accepted by the radical racists, found from coast-to-coast and board-to-boarder, who ran the country, business, and most neighborhoods all through the 20th Century.  Having experienced half of that century, I wouldn't have great difficulty in continuing this list of vicious and irresponsible conservative activities from the "good old days" for several dozen pages.  It's old and depressing news and you'd be bored.

I think you know, or ought to know, that those Good Old Days were only good for a select group of people; mostly privileged, white, and well-connected males.  In the 1950s, that group could make a kind claim to being some sort of working majority.  Today, that isn't the case.  Tomorrow, it will be even less true.  Still, conservatism marches on.

The key conservative characteristic I see that makes me want to avoid becoming one is an omnipresent fear.  Especially the fear of change.  Everyone who reads, thinks, or works knows that the only constant in this world is change.  Nothing is constant.  Change proves that nothing about the way the world works fits the conservative definition.  It's a radical fantasy.  "Existing or traditional" situations are destined to become history.  "Established institutions" become bone yards.  No matter how much we may "prefer gradual development to abrupt change," the longer human culture exists the faster changes happen.  In the first 50 years of the 20th Century, it was estimated that human knowledge doubled.  That pace was about the same as the previous 50 years.  Today, global knowledge doubles every 5 years.  By 2020, it is estimated that our knowledge base will be doubling every 72 days.  At the current rate of computer development, by 2020 we may have computers that equal human capacity.  In fact, you could reasonably expect computers to equal all human capacities in that near future.  In the face of that, does any aspect of conservative philosophy fit a practical application?

Fear of the inevitable seems to me to be the ultimate cowardice.  A political or personal philosophy based on extreme cowardice is about as doomed as any social meme yet constructed.  It's also a common thread in the history of failed cultures.  All the way back to the earliest recorded Chinese governments, history is littered with the remains of cultures who tried to stop, or reverse, progress, knowledge, and change.  I think you could draw an accurate line between the rise of conservative thinking and the fall of any particular culture in history.  It's possible that there is a social critical mass that occurs when a significant majority of a culture's members spend a significant portion of their time trying to stop the clock, instead of doing what they can to go where progress is going.  When that critical mass is breached, the culture crashes and gets replaced by the target culture that change was trying to obtain. 

Monarchies, dictatorships, communism, and other conservative politics are all attempts to put an anchor on progress.  These philosophical dead ends all try to maintain the status quo in the face of overwhelming momentum.  To do their damage, these systems have to convince a significant portion of the general population that what's good for the ruling class is good for the ruled class.  This task is a lot easier if the victims are less than brilliant.  Education is the arch enemy of conservatism, which explains why progressive universities often house so many "liberals."  Science and conservatism are at opposite poles of human activity. 

The more technically astute the general population, the less likely that culture is to be conservative.  You can see dramatic examples of that in micro-cultures within our own macro-culture.  Places where fast moving technology is originating are always more liberal than where the technology is barely used and hardly understood.  Compare the lower Midwest and the old South to central California (Silicon Valley, Santa Clara, San Francisco),  Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Washington state, for example.  The more current the technology, the more liberal the politics.  The more stagnant the culture, the more primitive the technology.  The best way to open up regressive, oppressive cultures may be to export technology to the work force.  It seems to be working for China, as god-awfully conservative as that government is, technology and change are collecting momentum faster than the conservatives can build speed bumps. 

None of this proves that some apparently technical individuals won't be conservative.  Individuals may feel that change is moving so quickly that it weakens their position in society.  Putting the brakes on change may buy a few extra moments, which is all an individual's career lasts in cultural time, of power and influence.   A conservative technologist ought to be viewed as one of the most distrusted, interest-conflicted individuals in any culture.    Never trust a man who wants to sell you a horse-drawn wagon when someone else is selling hydrogen powered rocket ships.

January, 2003

Customer Service in the 21st Century

I recently experienced some terrible customer service from my local credit union. At first, I decided to blow it off and start looking for a new credit union or bank. Since I’d come to that credit union because of awful and incompetent service from Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Charles Schwab, I decided to put a few moments of effort into registering a complaint with the credit union. Their response was encouraging, so I put a little more effort into them and they responded respectably. After resolving many of my complaints and restarting our relationship, I wrote this note to the branch manager.

Kari,

Thanks for your email, patience, and interest in my complaint. It may not sound like it, but I appreciate the attitude Affinity Plus employees take with complaints. I actually care a lot about the idea of a community credit union and have more than just money invested in Affinity.

I'm discovering that my background in manufacturing engineering, quality control and reliability assurance, and technical writing makes me an odd customer. One of the rules US companies used to know when they actually made products is that customers base their loyalty on their experience with the products and customer service. Screw up either and you are lost. In the late 80's, when we quit making our own stuff and farmed that work out to other countries, management lost sight of anything more complicated than exorbitant salaries and bonuses and buck-passing. A good rule of thumb for customer complaints is that rarely more than 1% of customers will bother to complain about poor service. Ignore that 1% and you can pretend you are shipping nearly perfect product or performing to your customer’s expectations.

I actually worked, for a very short time, for a company in Chicago whose quality “policy” was to ignore the first customer complaint under the assumption that no more than 10% of the 1% would complain twice. With that set of procedures, they could claim a product failure/return rate of less than 0.05% with a 50% known defect manufacturing process. The company I’d recently left worked for years to drive our actual product failure rates below 1% during warranty (which was 3 years instead of 90 days for the Chicago company) while my new employer believed they were doing more than twice as well by ignoring customer complaints.

The difference between the two companies in other areas was substantial, too. However, my old employer relied on return customers and consistently produced a 20+% profit margin for the ten years I worked there. My new employer was, not surprisingly, happy to turn any sort of profit and usually broke even on the rare occasion the bottom line was considered. Obviously, the Chicago company had next-to-no return business and no customer loyalty. I lasted slightly less than 30 days in Chicago. They had no need for my experience and I had no interest in participating in their business “plan.”

I’ve found that the worst thing any organization can do is to ignore the few complaints they receive and create obstacles for customer feedback. I can not explain why Americans are so disinclined to complain when it might do some good, while we’re more dissatisfied with our quality of life than most 1st world nations. Regardless, any company that wants to perform at a level above its competition has to keep this psychology in mind.

Thanks for your interest and for pursuing solutions to my complaint.

Regards,

Tom Day

#68 Management by Hiding (2002)

All Rights Reserved © 2002 Thomas W. Day

Back in the decade of constantly changing management techniques, David Packard, of Hewlett-Packard, wrote a book called "The HP Way."  In this business biography, he took a bit of credit for "inventing" the "management by walking around" style.  Sam Walton gets a lot of credit for popularizing the technique, too.  If these managers actually walked around some, that's a good thing.  As for their having invented a style of management, that's bull.

In fact, this is ancient, common sense stuff.  Walking around management is the basic tactic of nearly every successful from-scratch start-up manager.  Mostly because the manager is the managee and he has to do the walking around, and do the work, to keep things moving.  Good managers keep walking around until they sell the company to someone who has a burning desire to kill or stagnate a successful business. 

Walking around management is still a popular topic of conversation, even if it doesn't get applied all that often outside of small businesses.  I found about 1,400 hits on the subject in a recent Yahoo search.  The phrase is live and well, regardless of the condition of the actual practice.  Lots of execs like to think of themselves as being a hands-on manager because even the lamest of the breed knows that anyone who isn't hands-on is useless.

However, most managers claim to be walking around when they're mostly hiding.  MBA-style managers in large companies are too busy keeping their backs to walls to do a lot of walking around. When you step onto the production floor, or anywhere where work gets accomplished, you bump into people who could use a little management assistance.  That distracts the MBAs from their primary task of promoting themselves to their equally clueless (and even more immobile) superiors, which derails the all-important promotion schedule.  The last thing a modern manager wants to do is to be useful to the people he manages.  In the never ending quest for stock bonuses and outrageously huge salaries, messing with people who do work is an unrewarding enterprise.

This immobile and distorted perspective isn't something that MBA factories have changed or created. (I'm probably not going to live long enough to see an original idea spawned in the MBA academia.)  They're not to blame for something that has been around for as long mismanagement.  In my 40-year working life, the most common work-related complaints I've heard (or produced) have been about lazy and incompetent management.  A good manager is hard to find.  Sounds like a country-western tune, doesn't it? 

It's a courage thing.  Walking around involves being seen, becoming expected to accomplish something useful, and having to take an occasional position regarding actual work and working conditions.   This would amount to an endless pile of issues and activities that are better left untouched by an ambitious exec.  Any manager, even a CEO, who does those things has courage and is about as rare as an honest politician.  Being accessible means you have to make and explain decisions, provide (or withhold) resources, and you have to manage. 

And you thought becoming a manager put an end to all the hard stuff?  Don't worry; nobody expects anything significant from management.  We're used to gutless, brainless, pointless, clueless edicts from the void.  We'd just get confused (and productive) of you did anything beyond the norm.  Sleep little exec, sleep.  Mamma will wake you when the bankruptcy court convenes. 

November 2002

#67 Science and Academia (2002)

[Yet another misread of history, government, and science. At the time I wrote this, it seemed logical to conclude that if nations with socialized medicine were devoid of creativity that the socialized medicine was the problem. How that I possess an Australian fake hip and a German heart stent, I realize that those nations are simply more conservative than the U.S. and didn’t jump into the business until their products were sorted out, unlike our medical system that leaps first and thinks later.]

All Rights Reserved © 2002 Thomas W. Day

Recently, I stumbled upon an article, by a person who I respect greatly, Dr. Richard O'Connor, calling for a different way for drugs to be developed and tested.  His motivation was, in part, due to the disclosure of the close, financial link between drug companies and a physician, Dr. Martin Keller of  Brown University, who is a recognized "expert" and is a clinician whose research is most commonly cited as the justification for an entire group of medications.

The Boston Globe found that Dr. Keller received more than a half-million dollars in "consulting fees" from the companies whose products he's "tested."  The Boston Globe reported that the doctor didn't bother to report "his relationships to these companies" to the medical journals that published the results of his clinical trials.  Personally, I'm not convinced that medical journals are more ethically bound than physicians, but I could be wrong.  This kind of conflict of interest is as common in medical research as misspelled words in a personal letter from G.W. Bush. 

Dr. O'Connor's conclusion from this un-shocking discovery is that taxpayers and patients should consider changing the way medical products are developed.  He states that he's "willing to pay a lower price and a higher tax, and let the government fund research.  Profits and healthcare are a dangerous combination."   That's probably a logical conclusion, based on a belief in government funded research and the hope that medical research is done, primarily, to benefit humanity. 

Unfortunately, that hopeful vision is probably unfounded.  If government funded medicine were capable of producing worthwhile research, Europe's various socialized medicine systems would be the source of an occasional breakthrough in medicine or technology.  If not-for-profit research were a functional idea, our own university systems would be hotbeds of creativity. 

For the last thirty years, the only purpose served by European "research" has been to provide a source of human lab rats for American biotech experiments.  Every US company does its initial product testing in Europe.  And if it weren't for US-subsidized clinical trials, European physicians would be completely deprived of evidence that they do any science at all.  Since most physicians are fond of imagining themselves to be scientists, so that would be a serious blow to the ego. 

We Americans are always being told, by our intelligenza, that European-everything is better than the mess we've made out of capitalism.  If "better" means classically, traditional, functionally unproductive, and unchanged by reality or necessity there is no question that European values rock and rule.  If anyone could beat a dead horse on the right spots (with a precision-made buggy whip) to make it do work, Europe has the experience to get the job done. 

But the fact is, government managed medicine stifles creativity and initiative.  For that matter, government managed anything can always be counted on to crush the life out of whatever is being managed.  So our only government sponsored hope might be with those shining faces and hopeful dreamers in higher education.  Well, now we're sunk for sure. 

Our own academics, secure and comfortable with tenure, pensions, and graduate students to do their grunt work, don't seem to be able to produce anything interesting without corporate sponsorship and initiative provided by royalties.  Even with those initiatives, many academics want more.  Our universities are well stocked with researchers who not only earn six-figure salaries but who also own the patent rights and corporate sponsorships to their research.  In other words, these state and private institutions are doing nothing more sophisticated than providing state funded facilities and cheap, highly educated manpower to corporations.  I think this is called "corporate welfare," but I might be minimizing the welfare aspect of the situation.

If a sociologist ever wanted to examine the effects of greed on society, our medical and university research systems would be a fine place to start.  The ineffective sugar pill control model would be Europe.  So far, the statement that democracy is an inefficient, perverted form or government, but it's the best we have so far, also applies most accurately to capitalism and research.  Which means we're not going to see any amazing breakthroughs until somebody comes up with a better system.

I hope you're not holding your breath while you wait.

Footnote: http://www.undoingdepression.com/news05.html

November 2002

#66 A Voice of Courage (2002)

All Rights Reserved © 2002 Thomas W. Day

The country lost a voice of courage this year.  Paul Wellstone, my own US Senator, died along with his wife, a daughter, and several staff members in a plan crash in northern Minnesota.  In the midst of a heated political battle for his Senate seat, Wellstone was, characteristically, attempting to attend a friend's father's funeral when his private plane went down attempting to land on a small, rural airport in heavy fog.  Minnesotans are still in mourning, some are so grief stricken you'd think they'd lost a member of their own family.

It's possible that Paul's politics seemed so radical that you might not understand how a state could elect and love such a man.  Wellstone was often called "the most liberal member of the senate."  Maybe he was.  He thought of himself as the voice of the voiceless.  A representative for the rest of us, to put Apple's unused motto to good use.  Wellstone treated his office as a calling, a sacred obligation to the people who voted for him, not just the people who donated money.  He took a lot of heat from conservatives for being "anti-business."  Looking at his voting record, it's hard to see how anyone could find that in his actions, but reality never gets between a conservative and his dogma.  Wellstone felt that corporate interests and the ruling-rich have all the representation their money can buy and that at least one elected official should represent the  other 99.99% of the population.  Out of only 100 Senators, I guess, statistically, we should have felt specially lucky to have even one guy on our side.

Paul's most recent outrage was, after considerable soul searching and research, voting against granting unilateral unprovoked war powers to the G.W. Bush gang.  He was pissing into the wind, since the majority of the senate did their flag-waving best to bring prosperity back to the military-industrial complex and a recession for the rest of us.  You are more likely to be remembered for being right than for joining the crowd, though.  Eugene McCarthy, another Minnesota Senator, was the only vote against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution that gave us ten years of the pointless, vicious Vietnam War.  McCarthy's courage, Nixon's impeachment and resignation, and Johnson's appendix scar may be the only remnant of those years that history bothers to record.

History is papered with the few men who took courageous, against-the-grain stands against warlords and the mindless masses.  Wellstone will be remembered as one of the few in the Senate who had a conscious to listen to, when this vote was taken.  As usual, the mob carried the motion, but truth and morality rarely enter into mob action.  (In fact, I can't think of a single moment in history when any majority was on the right side of an issue.  It's always a calibration point  to remember that less than 1% of Americans participated in the Revolutionary War.  99% of our "founding fathers" were Tories.  Most modern "conservatives" would have been proud to be called Tories.) 

History, though, appears to have a nose for the truth and an attraction to courage.  Twenty years from now, Congress' conservative cowards will be forgotten and the few who placed their position on the line to vote against this foolish war for oil will be remembered.  Paul Wellstone was one of the most courageous men in politics. 

It took him a while to admit to his conscience, since he was in a nasty campaign race for reelection, but he did the right thing in the end.  I guess those who knew Paul never had any doubt how he'd vote.  He had me guessing, though.  It's hard to know who's going to be caught up in a political stampede.  I guess I haven't been involved in Minnesota politics long enough to know how difficult it would be to panic Paul Wellstone.

It's hard to imagine Minnesota politics without Paul's presence.  For at least the last few decades, Minnesota has been a hot and cold place, Wellstone and Rod Gramms, the progressive and the ultimate regressive.  Mark Dayton put up enough of his own money to offset Gramm's corporate and right-wing attachments and Dayton's election left Minnesota with a slight tilt toward a progressive Senate position.  If Wellstone's opponent, ex-St. Paul mayor Norm Coleman, wins this election, a lot of state and national balances will be altered.  Dayton is enough of a non -entity that his position is barely able to muster neutrality.  Coleman is the ultimate Republican yes-man.   Any butt that will further his political ambition is a butt worth kissing. 

Wellstone will be missed well beyond the next few years.

November 2002

State of Software Amateurism

During the winter months, I was wrapped up in more than a couple discussions with kids who consider themselves to be computer experts (by profession, at the least) who believe that if you aren’t using the latest OS, you are a hillbilly. As of March 2014, the above chart reflects US computer OS use, per a pretty large sample survey.

The statistic that most interests me is “Other,” the 1.99% of users whose technology was, apparently, unimportant to the surveyors. On a recent trip to New Mexico, I met a surprising number of people who run their businesses on old versions of Windows: all the way back to a law office using Windows for Workgroups 3.11, a graphic artist using windows 98, a collection of small business owners who network and advertise their group on the web using tools from Windows 95, and several people still on Vista. While we were camped at Elephant Butte State Park, I met a 60’s rock star and I listened to his music recorded on a 1970’s TASCAM 80-8 1/2” reel-to-reel in a camper trailer. He gave me a copy of the soon-to-be-released CD bounced down to MP3 on a free version of studio editing software long-ago-absorbed by Adobe.

The OS-users’ pie chart chart sort of reflects my own experience, although a bit optimistically. Microsoft has been working overtime to convince WinXP users to evacuate the building since the company has ceased “support” of XP. Of course, real computer IT and user types know Microsoft is bullshitting us. Support for business XP users will continue for a while and you can tag on to that gravy train easily. Less obvious is the fact that hackers write hacks for the biggest bang for the buck. The real reason Apple’s OS X is fairly “safe” from identity thieves is that a scant 6-7% of computer users are Apple computer owners. If you really want to be hack-free, Windows for Workgroups 3.11 might be your best bet. Running MSDOS might be the closest thing to total security possible.

Soon, it won’t matter much what sort of PC computer OS you run because the majority of computer users will be tablet and phone nerds. The industry expects tablet sales to almost double desk and laptop PC sales by 2017. Mobile phones are already selling at 5X the PC rate and will approach 10X PC sales in 2017. The smart hacker is already up into your phones’ butt right now and heading for the digestive system.

The kids who run computer companies, especially the technologically inbred CEO/CFO/COO types, could care less about security, since they are in no way obligated by law for the incredible financial losses their companies are responsible for creating. While you have to marvel at the royal way these blessed-by-corruption organizations are treated, as a consumer we need to be more than a little bit suspicious of anything they tell us. The fact is, I believe, the only reason for owning any sort of computer is practical. These instruments are nearly useless as educational devices, incredibly limited as news distribution sources, and as inclined to continue the dumbing-down of our degraded and degenerating species as television. So, worrying about whether we are using the latest version of some half-baked, user-hostile bullshit software or hardware is self-destructive. If you can accomplish whatever work you need to be doing with whatever tool you have in your office, closet, classroom, or business, you are sufficiently up-to-date.

#64 A Lost Role Model (2002)

All Rights Reserved © 2002 Thomas W. Day

My grandmother died in the summer of 2002.  She was 85 years old and, if Women's Studies and MBA programs actually reflected serious scholarship of their subjects, she would be a recognized hero in both of those programs.  She and my grandfather were the two best business managers in the history of capitalism.  I know this for a collection of reasons and personal experiences.

When I last visited her, while she was sleeping and I stood on her back porch, remembering better times in that house and looking out over her large yard, I saw memories of a collection of young boys mowing that yard.  This may not seem like a big thing, but of the two dozen sons, grandsons (including me), great-grandsons, and our friends, none ever resented doing that work.  Some of us were paid for the work, some of us volunteered, and all of us did the job as well as we could.  Our motivation was that we knew we were appreciated and we were doing the job because we wanted to be doing it.  Working conditions that put teenage boys into that frame of mind is the kind of management talent that almost never exists.

My grandmother exercised that kind of skill in almost every area of her own small business.  She and my grandfather ran a flooring business, with a dozen or more employees.  Over the years, several of their employees took the experience and skills they obtained in my grandparents' employment and began their own businesses.  Many others spent the overwhelming bulk of their personal careers working for my grandparents.  The loyalty of their past and upwardly mobile employees remained in place for at least a decade after my grandparents retired from their businesses. 

They left a legacy of customer loyalty, also.  Their customers ranged from the most to the least wealthy and, if you watched my grandmother help a customer pick materials, you would not be able to tell which end of the financial spectrum the customer belonged.   She was the first class-blind person I'd known.  You could credit that attribute to her own early struggle to survive, but I think it was more than that.  She was also culture and color-blind.  Without a sign of patronizing, she treated everyone who came into her store with the same quiet, interested, helpful grace that, outside of her store, I’d only seen on English movies.  I think it was her nature rather than her conditioning that gave her this unique, ideal American quality.  Some people rise above their surroundings seemingly oblivious to the attitudes and standards of the time and place.  She was one of those people. 

As the years pass, my reasons to visit Kansas diminish.  Like much of the Midwest, the cream of my class long moved away to the coasts or the warm states.  Like electrons fleeing the Big Bang, the family is dispersed and continues to migrate away from the center.  The state is dingier, more depressed and more depressing each time I visit.  A bright spot was always my grandmother's house.  An afternoon with her, drinking coffee and watching sports and talking about her life, my life, and what we thought it all meant made the 1800 mile roundtrip a lot shorter, going both directions. 

Now, she's gone.  No one can take the place of the woman who gave me my first job, who gave me encouragement when I lost courage, who taught me the real values of education and independence, and the lady who told me to follow my heart regardless of her opinion of the direction. 

It has taken me a year to finish this piece.  I can't remember her without missing her.  My hometown is less, by more than half, my hometown without her there.  The depth of my family is reduced to a small fraction of its population without her in it.  Some people are so constant, so dependable, so make the world seem complete in their presence that in their absence the entire world is reduced.  They are irreplaceable.  My grandmother is irreplaceable.  Not just in my family, but in the world she touched.  I will never forget her and I will do what I can to make sure others know and remember what she taught me.

August 2002

#62 Surprise, Surprise! (2002)

All Rights Reserved © 2002 Thomas W. Day

I'm sure that my regular readers will be amazed to see that I'm not surprised that the press has suddenly discovered that a whole lot of executives are bottom-feeding, scum-sucking, back-stabbing, money-grubbing crooks.  The Washington Post published an article titled, "In Blossoming Scandal, Culprits Are Countless."  NewsMax.com titled their recent discovery, "How Corporate Crooks Cook the Books." 

"Well, duh," I might reply to one of the API's finest, interrupting an academic description of this amazing revelation.  But nobody's asking me, so I'll just keep Rat Ranting into the void (except for those of you who stand on the edge of the void tossing in pennies and making wishes). 

Enron, WorldCom, Xerox, Tyco, Global Crossing, Sunbeam, Informix, Summit Medical, Martha Stewart, and on goes the list until everything listed on the New York Stock Exchange will be duplicated in the criminal court system.    The funniest bits in all of the make-believe outrage, come from Prince Georgie's court jesters and the education system.  Jeffrey Garten, dean of Yale University's School of Management, admitted, "Even those of us at business schools are implicated. It's not like the educational establishment sounded any warning. We were cheerleaders, too." Cheerleaders?  Right, they were teaching the crooks how to be better crooks.  If the MBA programs were sounding any warnings it would have been to the crooks they were teaching to be better crooks. 

One of George II's first acts as president was to reduce the SEC's staff by 56 securities investigators.  Who would have guessed that the stock market would be the next target for Republican leash-holders?  Bush is just following Republican tradition.  Reagan did a similar hack job on the FDIC, the folks who monitored the savings and loan mafia, and provided middleclass taxpayers with a tidy $18-billion dollar debt. 

It looks like Prince George is going for the record, though.  A senator recently stated that the money scammed from American corporations could have funded national health insurance; twice.  Good thing the House beat back Hillary's health insurance program, how would Rolls Royce have survived without the trickle-down from all that hard stolen cash?  The bad news is that RR died anyway?  You'd think trickle-down would be more effective than that. 

My theory on stock crashes and depression/recessions is simple.  When middle America loses faith in the integrity and intelligence of the ruling class, the economic house of cards collapses.  (Yes, Virginia.  We do have a ruling class in this country.) 

Contrary to the fantasies imagined and promoted by the press, the education system, and politics, it doesn't matter what the rich and powerful think of themselves.  The rich and powerful are not critical to the function or success of the country.  Just as executives have no useful function to the companies they mismanage, that same ilk is equally useless to the nation in general.  Their best practice is to stay invisible, do as little as possible, and try not to hinder progress or daily business and social function. 

I've been saying, for decades, that an instant and fatal disease that struck the upper offices of 99% of the country's government and corporations would take weeks to detect.  It might even be months before anyone discovered those offices were full of reeking bodies.  Their participation is so self-serving that they have rendered themselves unnecessary.  Executive contribution is rarely anything more than a detriment. Most execs' capabilities are limited to back-stabbing and self-enrichment, which does nothing useful for the actual function of a business. What would most likely spur the discover of a floor full of exec fatalities would be an investigation of a sudden burst of productivity.  The press would have to put a stop to that kind of activity as soon as possible. 

It appears that the ruling class has gone too far and the middle class, who control about 10% of the nation's total wealth, are finding that 10% is what props up the 90%.  It will be interesting to see what it takes, and how long it takes, how much spin-doctoring it takes, to convince the working class that the idiots at the top aren't complete fools.  Now that is a real marketing job. 

August 2002

Who’s Zoomin’ Who?

On Texas Senator and all-around screw-ball Teddy Cruz’s Facebook site, where he’d asked for comments on the ACA (“Obamacare” for the racists in the audience), a military character (current or ex) reprimanded someone who questioned why the military should have different healthcare privileges than the rest of us. He repeated the old threat, “Support our troops: stand behind them or stand in front of them.” This is the issue, isn’t it? The military, the fatal flaw in every failing or failed empire, stands apart from the nation’s citizens and insists on special privilege, unrestricted access to the nation’s treasure, and the general public’s complete obedience. The more they are given, the more they take and the more they feel they deserve. In the end, they will turn on the citizens they pretend to serve and overthrow whatever government they were created to protect. The sad fact is warriors are not citizens and they have no interest in being mere members of society. Like gangs of men throughout history, armed men without a clear purpose are a danger to society and completely antithetical to democracy.

The Greeks, Romans, British, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Germans, and ,now the United States of America have all been overrun internally by their own militarism. When the elites take over the function of the military for their own purposes, the military becomes mercenary. Mercenaries have no loyalty to any nation, political system, political ruler, or neighborhood. They probably don’t even have families, as a normal human might understand the concept.

Procreating As an Act of Selfishness

Once upon a time, it was probably necessary for people to be encouraged to reproduce. Once total human population exceeded 100,000 that was pretty much an obsolete consideration. The more we humans have learned about the way the world works, the more one-sided the whole parenthood thing has become. We’re not having kids because we want to bring children into this wonderful world. We have kids because misery loves company, especially small, cute and cuddly, innocent company. In other words, parenting is an act of pure selfishness.

Some parents are clearly more selfish than others. In traditional farming families that selfishness is apparent and relatively unabashed. Farmers had kids to save on the cost of hired hands. 1800’s American farmers were so ruthless about making their kids into farm slaves that a fair number of them ran away to work at jobs that most of us would think were a hell of a lot nastier than farm labor. Some became famous for a variety of activities: Bat and Ed Masterson, William Hickok, the Earp's, the James and Younger boys, Sam Bass, the Daltons, and a good number of the rum-runners of the Prohibition Era. Farm kids were supposed to be the local equivalent of Social Security, but most kids with good sense took the first opportunity to escape that fate.  A lot of agricultural communities took this approach so to their hearts that they created “county farms”; prisons masquerading as farms for the profit and entertainment of the local 1%. If you can’t guilt ‘em into staying on the farm, chain them to it.

Today, the excuse for bearing children is even more primitive: the biological clock bullshit. We know the chances are excellent that our children will live much less happy lives than we did. Every generation since the turn of the last century has been more unhappy, less secure, less confident, and more likely to die a miserable death than the previous generation. “Greatest Generation” bullshit aside, my parents’ generation had considerably better lives than mine has been, with job security, satisfaction, and community that my generation never experienced. My kids’ have had fewer of those things than me and their kids are moving into a society that has collapsed into corporate oligarchy, a world with vanishing natural resources and increasing ecological threat, and considerably less likelihood of survival for dozens of unavoidable causes than any time in human history. Since the Great Depression, we’ve had dozens of “mini-depressions” in my lifetime. Every “recovery” has been weaker. Every crash has been deeper and more fundamentally damaging to the social structure. The two most stated reasons for having children in this precarious world are “it will make me feel fulfilled” and “who’s going to pay for my Social Security?” Both are viciously selfish reasons.

Some of the ways the world might die are less our fault and, ideally, will cause less suffering. I don’t even care about the possible Large Hadron Collider experiment catastrophe. While it’s probably stupid to experiment with creating the end of the world just because we can, at least that would be a nearly instantaneous worldwide death. Suffering would be minimal, since we’ll all get sucked into a black hole in a matter of seconds. The idea that out of sheer laziness we’re unconcerned with the planet’s destruction by an asteroid strike doesn’t bother me, either. It might take a week or even a few months for the impact and fallout to wipe out most or all of human life, but most of us will be gone in seconds. Yeah, we could have prepared for this, instead of spending trillions on ways to kill each other for fun and profit, but it wasn’t our fault. The fact is, the universe hates order and life is the ultimate ordered energy. Entropy is the closest thing to a “god” the universe provides and entropy is all about death. So the gods want us dead, who are we to disagree?

We know humans are about to cause the Sixth Extinction. It’s hard to imagine a worse fate than to be witness to the total destruction of life on earth due to human inactivity, greed, and stupidity. I’m ok with being a victim of my generation’s greed and stupidity. I’m less ok with my kids and grandkids having to be part of that. (To be honest, I don’t care all that much about your kids’ suffering, though. That will be your responsibility.) Living through the effects of climate change are likely to be long, painful, and miserable. The future we’ve created for our kids is going to be pure torture. Stuff your happy thoughts up your ass because this is not going to be a fun ride for them.

There is a kind of insufferable optimism in the act of parenting from which I have never experienced. In 1973, the movie Soylent Green accurately depicted the fate I have fully expected to live to see since I was about ten years old. When I first saw the movie, it felt like a realization of my own dreams rather than a creation from someone else’s mind. Today, Hollywood would tack a silly happy ending on Soylent Green; like the bullshit ending of Elysium. That ain’t gonna happen. No lone hero is going to pull us out of this mess. The 1% are not going to let go of the steering wheel until we’re all well over the cliff and screaming toward our painful deaths. It’s our fault, too. Life is class warfare and anyone who isn’t fighting against the ruling elite is fighting for them. If we cared about our children, even a little, we’d be committed to this battle right now. But we don’t. We’re not that kind of animal.

#61 Old and In the Way (2002)

All Rights Reserved © 2002 Thomas W. Day

A lot of companies are really misplacing a lot of trust into HR's systems of "evaluating" employees. The state-of-the-business HR-PC term for the current boondoggle is "ranking."  Ranking has become a popular MBA-kind of thing to do, especially in the cubes of the misFortune 500-5000.  An interesting side-effect is that companies (like Ford, Microsoft, Goodyear, Conoco, and GE) are finding themselves in court, a lot, for the way ranking works in the real world. 

The theory is that if the performance of one employee is compared to other employees, management can find a true value for the output of each individual cog in the wheel.  It's a lovely theory and like most of the weirdness that comes from the minds (applied loosely) of MBAs, it's flawed.  Mostly, because it depends on the competence and fairness of the manager doing the comparing.  Talk about a system that was doomed from conception!

To apply a sports comparison, ranking is very much like valuing a player based only on his stats. Lots of players, especially in the severely screwed-up pro-sports gangland, have found that it's a lot easier to generate impressive personal stats than it is to make a useful contribution to the success of the team.  Since most team owners come from successful careers in corporate backstabbing, the stats-first players have become very rich from this economic discovery.  Players who haven't learned this lesson are coming up to speed quickly and fans are noticing the difference in their favorite teams a lot faster than the owners are catching on.  As usual, management is the last to know what's going on, if it ever figures it out.

One of the consistent outcomes of ranking is that older, more experienced, sometimes more expensive employees seem to rank lower than their younger coworkers.  You might suspect that this is a sign that management is trying to weed out older and more experienced talent, but I suspect you'd be over-estimating the management's cleverness.  Mostly, this seems to be a symptom of management's unfamiliarity with how teams work. Not being team players, it shouldn't be surprising that MBAs don't know much about being contributing members of a team. 

I think the real reason many older employees are getting low ratings is that they've either failed to adapt to the new idiotic rules or don't feel compelled to do so, for personal reasons.  The most valuable team contributors, like their sports counterparts, make everyone around them better.  If a group is really going to shine brighter than the sum of its individual points of light, something has to happen to focus the electrons.  That "something" is usually an internal leader and almost never management.  It's possible that a team-oriented player could come from youth, but it doesn't seem to happen all that often.  Usually, it's experience that creates teamwork and experience isn't usually a characteristic of youth.  So, in MBA-think's usual anti-wisdom, ranking is cutting the guts out of the thing it's trying to optimize. 

It's also true that management, in its eternal battle to take credit where credit isn't due and turn silk purses into sows' ears, is snatching defeat from the mouth of victory.  The only companies that can afford stupid practices like ranking are those who have resources to waste.  In other words, companies that were successful in the past.  In paring away the company's experience and history, companies are setting themselves up for failure and inefficiency.  What ranking might accomplish, in the long run, will be to provide start-up companies with experienced, talented, team-oriented employees who may be specially equipped and motivated to do damage to past employers. 

We can only hope.

July 2002

What Are Conservatives For?

There are a couple of ways that questions could be asked and answered. Today, I think US conservatives do not stand for anything. They want to “bring back” religion into politics and education, two places where religion has historically been a catastrophic disaster. US pseudo-conservatives would like to relive the 1950s, with absolutely no guilt about racism, sexism, intolerance, and the prosperity of the 1950s without the 90% upper income tax rate, the low national debt, the general lack of recreational wars, the nasty hard work of manufacturing and low cost universal education, and, most of all, without the threat of stagnation and being overtaken by the future. That doesn’t even qualify as a delusion. That sort of mindless wistfulness is purely insanity.

That’s not the question I want to answer, though. I’m more interested in the purpose of conservatives. And there is a purpose. To put it simply, the “larger animal,” as Robert Pirsig put it in Lila; an Inquiry Into Morals, needs and craves stability; the status quo.The higher animal is, in Pirsig’s terms, society. In our current society, corporations are an animal even higher in the food chain than government, what most sociologists might consider to be the driving force in societies.

In most ways, conservatives are the forgotten parking brake of society. Anyone with a lick of sense knows that “the only constant in nature is change.” However, a basic character of all animals is a fear of change. Humans are more animal than most. The majority of humans are conservative and terrified of change. Well over 50% of us are confirmed conservatives in most of our attitudes; probably closer to 90%, in fact.

The reason for this panic reaction to on-going change is the desire to prevent things from going from bad to worse. This is a solid, well-founded fear. However, when we are actually not undergoing the stress of bad times, the conservative fear change because it will alter the status, power, and wealth of the ruling elite; exactly the group who will (as they always do) bring on bad times with their extravagance, greed, corruption, incompetence, and arrogance.

Good times are exactly the moment when a nation should be doing basic maintenance, just like a well-run business (at least as rare as well-run countries). Instead of allowing ourselves to be distracted with toys, mindless entertainment, and other useless bullshit, we ought to be taking our spare moments and using them for the future good. We ought to be doing the things that need doing to keep the good times rolling.

The problem with poor insight is that we easily forget the purpose of things. In the same way too many US citizens have forgotten the militia obligation in their precious second amendment (“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”), humans quickly forget the “bad to worse” purpose of trying to hold back change and delude themselves into believing that all change is bad: quite naturally, since change is naturally resisted under all conditions.

Too many US citizens calling themselves “conservative” are considerably less than that. Since they actually imagine they can turn back the clock on change they are better identified as “pseudo-conservatives.” Only idiots imagine they have any control of time and even bigger fools imagine that using terrorist tactics will convince people who are not terrified of change to become as timid as pseudo-conservatives regarding obvious issues with obvious conclusions. The problem they miss comprehending is that working from a base point of fear will not make you brave, but it will make you do cowardly things:

• http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/05/guns-bullying-open-carry-women-moms-texas
• http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2013/03/28/1791361/men-with-loaded-rifles-intimidate-moms-gathered-at-gun-safety-rally/
• http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/31/religion-terrorism_n_944143.html
• http://www.forwardprogressives.com/glenn-beck-now-receiving-threats-right-wing/
• http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2014/06/30/325489913/meet-the-newest-american-running-mate-the-rifle
• http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/6048778/Armed-men-seen-outside-Barack-Obama-event.html

While conservatives often portray themselves as being brave individuals, they are pack-following, timid old ladies in character. The breakdown of a recent poll of US citizens’ opinion on marijuana legalization is illustrative. The big opponents of change (legalization) are women, the 45-and-older crowd, and Republicans. The strongest opponents to legalization are old Republican women, the world’s most conservative (as in “timid”) group. Nobody is more risk adverse than conservative women, especially old women. Oddly, even the conservative groups put the known risk of (in this order) alcohol (69% to 15%), tobacco, and sugar above marijuana, but they do not advocate regulating or outlawing those products because that would mean incurring dreaded change.

For me, all of this has resulted in a mild improvement in my regard of actual conservatives. On the rare occasion I have the opportunity to talk with someone who is knowledgeable, insightful, and honestly concerned that the changes made in society will bring us closer to some real (not imagined) bad consequences, I listen. Too many conservatives typify John Stuart Mill’s analysis, “Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative.” In the simplified eye of modern corporate media, all Democrats are liberals (or “lib-tards” to the not-so-bright Teabaggers). Any reading of modern or historic American politics would deny that assumption. There are stupid people wearing red or blue hats and neither have the qualities required to be called “liberal.” They are simply afraid of changes in different areas of society. They are both, to some extent, worried that change will make things worse than they imagine they already are and neither have the imagination to consider how bad things will get if change doesn’t occur.

#60 Marketing? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Marketing (2002)

All Rights Reserved © 2002 Thomas W. Day

The Internet economy died when marketing gurus decided that website ads were ineffective. How they made that decision is about as logical as all of the rest of marketing decisions.

Take, for instance, television advertising. Nothing costs more than television advertising, except government. How does a company know its advertising dollar produces income? The Nielsen Media Research rating system. How do the Nielsen ratings determine a program is "popular?" The criteria for a Nielsen'er "watching" a program is that the folks with the Nielsen monitors have left their TVs on a program for at least 5 minutes. Those five minutes don't have to be five minutes of advertising, either. Just any old five minutes will do.  They don't even have to be in the room for those five minutes.  If you turn on the tube, head for the bathroom, and leave the People Meter on that channel for five minutes, up go the ratings.  This isn't a major sample, either.  5,000 television households with "People Meters" plus less complete data collected from 20,000 additional homes makes the rating decision for a nation of 280 million people. 

Pretty scientific, don't you think?

The ABC attempt to buy Letterman to replace their evening news is based on the idea that people will go to bed, leaving their boob tubes on ABC (and Letterman, who certainly bores me to sleep), and wake up to Diane Sawyer.  Bingo, they catch five minutes of "viewing time" before the viewer throws his shoe at the tube and money is made.  That's all it takes to collect rating points. 

What would you spend for the science behind that kind of advertising clout? Personally, I'd rather have a website ad. I'm not convinced that website ads work, either.  I'm not convinced that any ads work at all.  If they do, I'm specially discouraged with my fellow man (or men), since the majority of television ads target the boys-to-men crowd, between the ages of 15 and 35.  If the crap I see on the tube actually convinced guys to buy stuff . . . I guess we're morons. 

Moving off of that depressing thought process, I'll admit that, obviously, ads do something. Otherwise, George Bush II wouldn't be in office. Still, marketing gurus seem to think that the 18-35 year old male is especially stupid, vulnerable to advertising, in other words. I guess it's possible that 18-35 year old males elected Bush. I have to say that's a disturbing thought.  On several levels. 

The only marketing rule I sort of trust is that any positive publicity is Good; free publicity is Really Good.

Television ads, at their best, don't seem to amount to much more than Not Bad.  Good simply can't apply to ad space that costs $500,000 per minute.   Word-of-mouth is Very Good, because it's free and it has credibility.  Paid media ads, again, barely crawl up to Not Bad because modern media has absolutely no credibility (somewhere under used car salesmen) and it's expensive.  Even newspapers have managed to sell off their credibility as unbiased information sources in the pursuit of immediate cash.  The best we can say about the "traditional media" is that they are well paid corporate prostitutes.  I'll leave the worst for the imaginations of my friends and readers. 

So, with that understanding in mind, why does anyone with good sense spend serious money on advertising?  Some of these products are so awful that if it weren't for new suckers they wouldn't have any customers at all.  Most advertisers depend, completely, on the concept that "there's a sucker born every millisecond" (modified to account for overpopulation) and the core corporate belief that "no one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public."   Those idiotic Mentos ads are the biggest waste of resources since the Vietnam War or proof positive that humans are direct-controlled by the idiot box. 

I'm guessing that the answer to my question is that people spending really big money on advertising don't have good sense. In the last two decades, marketing folks have done a bang-up job of avoiding quality control and accounting scrutiny.  Execs don't want those budgets examined closely because that's where the really cool corporate perks are hidden.  Hanging out with media goofs, spending buckets of money on fluff and happenstance,  engaging in activities that can't be quantified or even identified is the kind of life that people become execs to live.  I'd do it, if I weren't busy cleaning my toenails and restringing my guitar.

If all that hasn't convinced you, here's my real, most incontrovertible evidence that marketers are brain damaged.  It took 32 years for a car manufacturer to realize that Ides of March's hit, "Vehicle" was custom made to be a car ad.  Sylvester Stallone (for his seriously awful movie Lock Out) even discovered the song a dozen years before the marketing experts.  If that's not embarrassing, what is?  Case closed.

June 2002

#59 We da People (2002)

All Rights Reserved © 2002 Thomas W. Day

I had the interesting pleasure of seeing Minnesota's rapping, wrassling, acting, and  Governor, Jesse Ventura, live and in person and doing his morning radio show this past Friday morning.  I'm not a big believer in the charisma thing and I wouldn't have given a lot of credibility to anyone who tried to tell me that Jesse had a piece of that action, but he does.  In fact, he's down- right nearly- likeable in person.  Who'da thunk?

But that's not the point of this Rant.  Before Governor Ventura started his radio show, Jesse took some questions from his audience of Musictech College and Minnesota Academy of Recording Arts students.  One of the more strident questioners was a young woman who was upset that she couldn't afford to pay her private college tuition and her apartment rent on the income she made from her two part-time jobs.  She was convinced that Jesse owed her an explanation of why "the government" didn't provide her with low income housing assistance.  Jesse tried to make the best of the question by explaining how she would appreciate her education that much more because she'd earned it.  He explained how he'd tried to redirect higher education funding to direct student loans and grants, but was shot down by the Minnesota legislature who left the education system in charge of that money.  He did his usual bit on how citizens shouldn't expect the government to make every personal decision as painless as possible.  It was obvious that she wasn't happy with his answers.

I've seen that reaction a lot, when people want "the government" to pay for something they want to do; or something they did that turned out to have unexpected personal costs.  This afternoon, while I was cutting next winter's firewood and thinking about my own work/education history, it struck me why that expectation is especially irritating to, what's becoming, a minority of citizens. 

Because the government (especially the federal government) is so out of control and so deep into our personal lives, too many Americans are beginning to think of that institution as a free-standing entity.  It's not.  Even in places where the government is a vicious monster that exists solely for the purpose of mangling the lives of its citizens, that government only exists at the will of the public.  It might take an incredible act of will to end government's existence, but that government still stands because its citizens allow it to stand.  In our case, we Americans are the government without any great effort on our part.  We may be too lazy to exercise our responsibilities in that capacity, but the enemy we've met is still us. 

When someone insists on getting something from "the government," they're really insisting on getting it from each of us.  Individually.  Me, in particular. 

When Enron's execs ask their boy, Gee Wiz Bush, to hand them a few billion dollars worth of federally protected oil fields, they're asking for that handout from you and me.  Especially me.  I have a particular resentment for any money taken from me to give to the rich.  At the other end of the spectrum, the pico-economic level, when a single mother expects the government to subsidize her decision to become a parent, she's asking for that help from you and me.  Just like the rich folks. 

We approaching the tip of the pendulum where the people insisting on being helped outnumber the people being asked to provide that help.  We've passed the point where the people providing assistance out-vote the people getting assistance.  Today, the majority of folks in ballot booths are performing the act of voting themselves rich.

I had a strange and personal experience with this mindset, about twenty-five years ago.  A high school friend, who I hadn't heard from in nearly a decade, had spent his first out-of-Dodge years playing professional baseball.  He'd done a couple of years playing college ball, a couple of years in the minors, three years in "the Big Show," and a couple more years in the minor leagues before deciding he'd thrown enough baseballs for a lifetime.  Then, he picked a nice ivy league college and spent the next few years getting a Masters in Psychology.  Once he finished with college, he discovered he'd spent his baseball wad and a bunch more.  He was in debt and was beginning an career that might not pay much more than the interest on that debt until he was established; or discovered he wasn't a good listener and chose another occupation.  So, he did what any logical modern American would do; he wrote to every person he'd ever known and asked us to help pay off his debts and finance his new practice.  Since he was trying to get rid of his debt, he wasn't asking for loans, he was asking for no-strings-attached handouts.

At the time, I was supporting a wife and two kids on $2.88 an hour.  My empathy for a guy who had a college degree and had earned the American League's minimum wage was very limited.  I found that everyone I knew, who this guy had contacted, was at least as offended by the ex-pitcher's pitch.  Nobody found the time to mail him the spare change they'd stored in their couch pillows.

This past Friday, I found myself regurgitating the same old resentment for being told that I had an obligation to pay for someone else's personal choices.  In 2002, Americans are so lame that we expect to be subsidized for private school expenses?   What's next?  Even with my ability to wildly exaggerate every idiotic situation, I can't think of anything more extravagant (or wimpy) than that.

About 100 years ago, my grandparents bagged their belongings on a cargo ship, signed in at Ellis Island, transferred their stuff to a Santa Fe train, and were dumped in eastern Kansas where they were given the freedom to build a subsistence farm and a community; or starve.  Today, immigrants sue for welfare benefits, regardless of their legal status and kids believe they have an inalienable right to the comforts of middle-class while indulging themselves in whatever strange pursuit that might attract their momentary interest or fantasy.  Wow!  You've come a long way, babies. 

The next time some fantasy-player, nouveau-conservative babbles about how Reagan overwhelmed the evil-empire of Communism by burying the country in military-industrial debt, I promise to lose my lunch.  We didn't beat our socialist enemies, we became them.  Thanks for nothing, Ronnie.

April 2002

#58 Rats and Ships

All Rights Reserved © 2002 Thomas W. Day

It's been a while since I've Ranted.  It's been an eventful year for all of us, me included.  Eleven days before the media decided that "the world changed" for many Americans, I changed my own world, for good or bad.  On August 31, I quit the best paying, most secure, least challenging job I've ever had. 

After thirty-five years of continuous employment, I became unemployed at the end of August.  On purpose.  Go figure. 

Less than a half-month later, a bit of the country was in flames and all of it was, officially, in a recession.  I'm not sure if it's better or worse to be unemployed during a recession.  But, so far, it certainly feels better to be unemployed and happy than it did to be employed and miserable.  And that is something it took me 40 years to learn.  I may be a Rat, but I clearly don't know how to work a maze and there's a lesson in here, somewhere, but I'm not bright enough to uncover it.

In times of political crisis it's usually a good idea to be as politically correct as possible.  Keep your head down.  Stay in the middle of the pack.  Don't make waves.  All of these are valuable clichés that my father did his best to instill in me; and he failed.  I don't know why.  I'm probably not smart enough to listen to good advice.

So here goes.  I'm about to stick my foot into a trash can, once again.

Something that really grates on my frayed nerves is the phrase the media keeps repeating, "everything changed on September 11."  Or "the world changed" on that date.  Every time I hear or read those phrases, I want to puke.  Or go find a news writer and beat the snot out of him/her. They're a bunch of spoiled and gutless wimps, so they'd be easy to beat up, which is an appealing aspect of the second option.  I'm old and need defenseless targets.

Nothing about the world "changed" on September 11th, 2001, except that the nightmare that most of the world has lived for the last forty years finally came to us; Americans.  Nothing about September 11th topped the kind of terror the 20th Century stuck to Vietnamese, Koreans, Argentineans, South Africans, or many of the residents of eastern Europe, Africa, South America, Asia, and Indonesia.  It's been a pretty awful several hundred years for a lot of the world. 

In our country, the media has never been lazier than it is today.  Mostly, because our "fee press" is owned by major corporations who have no interest in freedom, democracy, progress, justice, or anything else that might lessen their stranglehold on the world economy. 

If it weren't for the internet, there wouldn't be any useful information at all.  That's the way of democracy, though.  Something usually comes along to keep us from destroying ourselves.  When one voice of truth gets bought out, another takes its place.

For me, damn little changed on September 11th.  It's just more of the same, nasty stuff.   Any idiot who lived through the 1970s and 80s ought to have some grasp on how the 3rd (and most of the 1st) world thinks of us.  We're the country who set up strawman dictatorships all over the world, governments who tortured and enslaved their own populations to make the world safe for our corporations to exploit everyone's natural resources.  We knocked down democratically elected governments and assisted in the assassination of the leaders of those governments, when they weren't friendly to corporate interests.  Even when those corporations were multi-nationals who were behaving damned unfriendly to our own working population.

In the late 1950s, we picked a backwards Third World nation as a safe place to "make a stand" against communism and practiced every sort of terrorism known to history on that country's population.  In the 1960s, we dropped napalm and phosphorus bombs on rice paddies and straw hut villages, for Christ's sake!  We used untested chemicals to indiscriminately defoliate that country to make it easier to find and kill the population.  On the basis of that war, alone, we're the Twentieth Century's most careless polluter and the damage we did to our own citizens is still being discounted and suppressed.

And we had a President who planned to collect and imprison Americans for disagreeing with his "right" to carry on this national terrorism.  As usual, this didn't even shake up most of the freedom loving citizens of the U.S.  That President was re-elected so he could finish his damage to the Constitution and that Third World country.  Fortunately, for freedom and democracy, bits of history's best written Constitution brought Nixon down.  That and his own arrogance and stupidity.

So,  I'm supposed to have had my innocence damaged by September 11th?  I haven't felt innocent since 1968, when Chicago's finest went gonzo on American kids who mistook the Constitution's guarantee of free speech as some sort of protection on the streets of Chicago.  I need a spell checker to type "innocence," that concept is so foreign to my world view.

The folks who are in charge of setting the world right make me nervous, too.  If it doesn't bother you that our conservative, religious nutballs are supposed to make the world safe from their conservative religious whackos, I'll be jittery for you. It's one out-of-control system against another.  A true holy war, in every sense of the historical term. 

This may be "America, the land of the free," but there have been people working to change that for more than 200 years.  That crowd is back in charge.  I've lived through Eisenhower and Nixon and their mouthpiece, Joe McCarthy.  I suffered with Nixon and Spiro, Ronny and George the First.  I hope to survive our current corporate stooge, George II.  But I don't have to like it. 

So far, I don't have to be quiet about it.

January 2002

#57 Enron Blues (2002)

All Rights Reserved © 2002 Thomas W. Day

In the same mournful vein that the media has used to describe the "death of innocence" on September 11th, we're now learning that many Americans may be losing confidence in the stock market because of the fall of Enron.  I'm sure that my readers were just as surprised to learn that some executives may be incompetent, greedy, unethical, and seedier than G.W. Bush.  It's new news to me, for sure.

One of the Rat Rants I really regret not writing was the inspiration I had, at the beginning of the Bush II Administration.  GW's crew began government "reorganization" by laying off 56 SEC investigators and accountants.  I thought, "here we go again."  Reagan started his eight years of carpet bagging by sandbagging the FDIC field force, laying the groundwork for the eighteen trillion dollar S&L rip-off.  George I stumbled around looking for a bright, shiny object to distract us from Neil Bush's involvement in Silverado S&L and he found Iraq and Desert Storm.  The Clinton years gave us a little break from government intrigue.  Now, we're back to business as usual.

I will always wonder at the logic of a country that hates a President who does a good job for the nation, while boinking an intern or two, and loves a President who is impotent, but puts the shaft to us all.  Darwin was wrong, "survival of the species" is not a primal drive.  Personally, I don't care where the President stuffs his cigars, as long as I don’t get stuck with a share of a multi-trillion dollar debt.  I guess I'm morally-challenged, but I'd rather he screw one or two Americans rather than doing it to us collectively.

Seriously, though, how can anyone be surprised at the lack of ethics in executives?  How could anyone expect anything else?  The executive offices of the Misfortune 500 is nothing more sophisticated than a collection of wolf packs, with an occasional shark when there's enough water to support truly amoral behavior.

Enron is the tip of the ice planet.  The SEC doesn't have a small percentage of the resources or motivation necessary to investigate large corporations.  Investment brokers and market analysists have their fingers in the pie so deeply that they take breaks to keep breathing.  If you believe that a Board of Directors offers some protection from executives cleaning out the company piggybank, it's a wonder you haven't pulled all your teeth, put them under a pillow, and called that a "retirement plan."  Directors are just other companies' executives, spreading the wealth among the wealthy.  There is too much to gain and too little to lose for executives in modern corporations, so don't expect enlightenment or revolution from that well fed 1%.

Money and stock investments are acts of extreme faith.  Each time we accept scraps of paper for our weeks of drudgery, we're cooperating in a fantasy of faith.  When we ship those scraps of paper to a New York Stock Exchange broker to swap our money for shares in a company, we've stepped into the realm of the Twilight Zone.   But as long as we all believe in the same fantasy, the system, mostly, works.  The aspect of those fantasies that presses reality to the breaking point is the hope that the ruling class will act in our, and its own, best interest.  When we start to notice that the ruling class is inbred, short-sighted, greedy, and stupid, an economic depression happens almost the moment a critical mass faces reality.

Modern management and economics is working hard to bring us to terms with the real world.  Management, as usual, isn't doing this intentionally, but it's happening as a byproduct of the usual mismanagement incompetence.  Modern management has the tools and the incentives to completely upset the economic apple cart.  They don't have the good sense to realize that they're sitting in the cart with the rest of us apples.

The nearly universal practice of giving execs buckets of short-term stock options (or stock, outright) for practically any minor success is one of the things that is going to tear the economic playhouse down.  This practice isn't even a well intentioned concept gone wrong.  It is a stupid, lazy, ineffective way to motivate execs to do their jobs half-competently.  Extravagant salaries and more perks than royalty ever dreamed of aren't enough to motivate back-stabbing, ineffective corporate zombies.  Fear of prison and poverty would do better.

Enron demonstrated what a little Mafia-style, money-laundering accounting could do to a stock value; and to executive off-shore bank accounts.  Companies that don't actually produce a product have limited opportunities for gang-banging the stock holders.  Companies that do produce products have a wide collection of modern quality management tools to abuse plus the usual suspects in accounting manipulation.  Modern executives' basic compensation packages are the equivalent of a bank stuffed with unmarked bills in an unlocked safe.  Modern execs make Bonnie and Clyde look like petty shoplifters.

The very tools that moved Japan into the position of product quality leadership, in the 1970s, are providing executives with the ability to scam stockholders and skate around the SEC.  The same tools revived American manufacturing in the 1990s.  The design principles in TQM (Total Quality Management) gave us the ability to design products to precise criteria.  With moderately competent engineers and a reasonably alert quality assurance system, a company can plan, design, produce, and predict products' to exacting specifications; including MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) specs. 

I

n many industries (medical devices, computers, transportation, and energy, for examples), one or two breakthrough products can light a fire under a stock price.  The failure of those same products, at a time further into the product lifetime, will douse that fire and put out the sparks of future successes.  The short-term planning aspect of executive stock option incentives practically begs for abuses of this sort.  With only the very unlikely threat of a whistle-blower tossing a monkey wrench into the money machine, executives are encouraged to take advantage of the short term at the expense of the long term. 

It's not particularly difficult to build an amazing product that doesn't work as advertised, is unreliable, and costs more to build than the selling price.  Fooling the media, regulatory agencies, and the general public is so easy that I suspect P.T. Barnum didn't account for population increases, because 21st Century suckers are born a lot more often than every minute.  Reliability is, mostly, a reputation statistic.  A CEO who is willing to sacrifice a company's reputation for millions of dollars in options can afford to squander a company's good will.  After all, he won't be around to worry about rebuilding the reputation. 

Accounting is pretty much a shell game.  Enron has shown us just a few of the dozens of ways that accountants can hide negative cash flow.  Stick around.  We're going to learn that a lot more companies possess this kind of management creativity.

January 2002

#57 Lighting Dark Days (2001)

All Rights Reserved © 2001 Thomas W. Day

I suspect that most of my readers would like to think that I'd have the good sense and taste to stay away from writing a Rat Rant about the awful September 11 catastrophe in New York and what it has done to democracy and common sense. I wish it were true. Good sense and taste may be qualities that I was born without.

The nation suffered a senseless loss of innocent life and that's being disrespected by a loud outpouring of nationalism disguised as, and mistaken for, patriotism. Politicians and citizens are proving themselves to be completely unaware of the positive things this nation stands for, in their desire to return to the days of believing that we're immune to the dangers of this world. All the while, fools and cowards are pretending to be patriotic in wishing for that pathetic fantasy.

"The world has changed," they rant. "The rules are different." And so on.

Citizens are offering up their basic rights, the things that make the United States the unusual place that it is, in exchange for an illusion of cocoon-like safety. Politicians are offering an unlimited collection of new laws that will take away precious freedom, replacing individual rights and responsibility with a more powerful, less responsible government. There appears to be a wholesale rush to outlaw the very things the terrorists dislike the most about the United States. In Minnesota, we have a state senator who is pushing an amendment requiring the Cold War's pledge to the flag in schools. She claims that the practice of idolatry and fearful submission to ritual will teach children how to be an American.

I, obviously, have my doubts. I grew up in the age when chanting the pledge was common and required in K-12 public schools and some universities. I remember, in the heart of the Cold War, how few of us paid attention to the words we were forced to speak. I remember the joy that some teachers demonstrated when they found some reason to punish those of us who improperly idolized the flag. I, mostly, remember that this practice had nothing to do with the things we should have been learning about our nation's history and the foundations of our freedoms. I remember that the most "patriotic" educators didn't seem to know much about American history, the concepts contained in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, or the "founding fathers" they so often referred to but could not name. In my formal education, those important factors were so abandoned that I had to learn them on my own, outside of school and through fortunate accidents.

The words and concepts that we all need to repeat and understand are considerably more complex and valuable than the obedience chant contained in The Pledge. In my heart I believe that our somewhat flawed Constitution of the United States and our nearly perfect Bill of Rights are the words we all need to learn and understand. Through more than two hundred years of being right and, sometimes, very wrong, this country has been guided by the moral concepts expressed in those few words. Without the Bill of Rights, we would have degenerated into a stagnant monarchy or a degenerate theocratic dictatorship at any one of the mildly difficult times during the last 200 years. Without the Constitution, our government would have been indistinguishable from those of the rest of the world. We may yet give up that identity.

At the heart of all this fear is the fact that we Americans (Canada included--Mexico probably not) are practically universally hated by the rest of the world. Even by our "friends." There are good and stupid reasons for that hatred. An acquaintance, a slightly-redneck, ex-Desert Storm trooper, voiced his defense for riding a noisy, gas-guzzling, 180 mph crotch-rocketing motorcycle on the public streets. He wrote that the war in Iraq was about defending our American "right to be excessive" and that he was damned well going to freely exercise that "right."

The Right to be Excessive is a big part of our national character. Our dinky 5% of the world's population is chewing up something like 85% of the world's natural resources. Our main gripe about the Koto global warming accord was that we're arrogant enough to argue that we ought to be able to exchange our right to continue polluting the world's air in exchange for paying a few third world countries to remain non-industrialized. In that way, we could "trade" our current level of pollution for their current level of clean air; and keep doing what we've been doing without restriction.

We attempted to "manage" Mid-Eastern radicalism and Muslim isolationism by pitting Iraq against Iran and supplying weapons to both sides to fuel that diversion. When Saddam and Iraq got bored with Iran's primitive capabilities and decided to do a little freelancing against Kuwait, we squashed that ambition without a thought for how our presence would be perceived in an area that has never been particularly pro-American. September 11 is a reflection of that Mid-Eastern perception.

In our better moments, we believe that spreading the word about our form of socialized-capitalism will improve the world. We want to encourage the backward folk of the world to liberalize their economic and social systems to provide rights and opportunity for all men and women (women's rights are a particular sticking point with Mid-Easterners and most fundamentalists). In our more common moments, we want to maintain free markets for our products and access to everyone's natural resources for our comfort and entertainment. Neither of these motivations makes us a lot of friends in foreign government and religion.

The drive for and necessity of American access to foreign oil is at the heart of our presence in North Africa and southern Asia. We're not promoting democracy and human rights nearly as much as we're keeping our pipes in their oil fields. Kuwait was a totalitarian theocratic monarchy and we "defended" their right to remain as oppressive as they liked, as long as we got their oil output.

Our recent economic lesson has appeared to escaped much notice. The airlines stopped using burning petroleum to ferry the rich, frivolous, and timid across the country, after September 11, and the price of fuel for the rest of us dropped from $1.80 a gallon to $1.15; and continued falling until all the war activity drove it back up to $1.50 at the time of this Rant. Why this doesn't bother the average American, I can't imagine. So let me say it another way and maybe you'll get it: The small number of citizens who can afford to fly on gas guzzling airlines are subsidized by the rest of us, to the tune of increasing fuel costs by more than 50%. The media, the government, and executives are whining about how their fear of flying is stagnating the nation's economy, because they've enjoyed this luxury at the expense of the rest of us and it really bothers them that toy has been ruined. But what we ought to notice is how much the use of that toy has cost all of us. And we ought to do something about it.

That something is to take advantage of a war-time economy and put some resources into changing the way we effect the rest of the world. The technology to change from oil-based engine systems to hydrogen-based systems is practically in our hands. A variety of manufacturers and airlines have experimented with hydrogen-powered jet engines and they work. They, also, don't make effective flying bombs, since hydrogen does not have the explosive and incendiary capability of jet fuel. Hydrogen engines don't contribute to global warming, air pollution, or excessive use of non-renewable resources. With the kind of effort we put into fooling around in Cold War space, we could eliminate our need for foreign oil in a decade.

If we want to truly honor the loss and sacrifice of September 11, 2001, we will end our dependence on foreign oil, especially Mideastern oil, and we will change the way humans generate energy and use resources. The Islamic radicals think this is a holy war. We could make it one by playing this game on a different board. We could do something truly holy and act to preserve this world, our country, and to create a new energy economy that doesn't rely on propping up corrupt and vicious oil dictatorships, monarchies, theocracies, and international corporations.

Subversion, via the Rat hole.

We could do it. We could put ourselves in a position where we don't need the oil producing cartel. They sure as hell need us, because their system hasn't created anything more complex than castles in the sand in the last thousand years. If we really want to create a democratic and representative world, the first step will be to only do business with those who are democratic and representative.

That's a good rule in business, too: only do business with folks you like and who like you. What we middle class, United States citizens need to do is to direct our government to put us in a position where we don't have to do business with people who hate us. Even more, we should be picking the folks with whom we're taking to bed.

There are more than two ways to react to a threat. We can march mindlessly off to war, or we can shut the enemy out of the world economic game. Without us providing their food and materials, most of the oil producing countries are incapable of making their own light bulbs (I would include most of Texas and all of Alaska in that group.). One of those options would be a death blow to the enemy's economic base. The spillover from a traditional war will just make more enemies and put us further in oil debt.

Quote for the week: "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong." Abraham Lincoln

October, 2001

#56 Voting Lies (2001)

All Rights Reserved © 2001 Thomas W. Day

The 2000 election was full of little lessons.  I hope you, my fellow Rats, learned a couple of them.  If not, that's what I'm here for, your personal cultural and political education service.

From the political commentators to high school teachers, I keep hearing people chant how the results in this election prove that "every vote counts."  Maybe I'm math-inhibited, but it seems to me that this election proved the opposite is true.   First, somewhere between 1 and 1,500 votes in Florida will offset almost a million votes nationally.  The electoral college was put in place to make sure that individual votes wouldn't count for much.  That slimy bullet-stopper, Alex Hamilton, insisted on the electoral college as a barrier between the ruling class and the rest of us.  This election demonstrated that "principle" very clearly.  A handful of rich, retired people will decide for the rest of us who gets to bumble his way through four years of the Presidency.  And they'll do that the good old fashioned way, by choosing a group of political hacks to vote for the minority of citizens who voted in the general election.  King George would have been happy with this system.

If anything will teach kids that voting is a waste of time and thought, this election will  be remembered for decades.  If anything will keep the rest of us occupied doing something productive instead of wasting time at the voting booths, again, it's this election.  That's not the right lesson to take from a stolen election, but it's one that is likely to override all other lessons. 

Second, in Y2k the election system has shown itself to be amazingly corrupt and incompetent.  Mostly incompetent.  In Florida, the "hand count" is mostly a process of finding ways to toss out ballots.  Especially mail-in ballots.  The only kind of mail-in voter who would jump through all of the hoops that are required to submit a valid ballot, is the kind of person who is either a fanatic or someone who doesn't have anything else to do for a three or four days, while away from home.  We're talking rich retired people, vacationing at any of the places those people vacation or volunteers in the armed forces. In other words, either the idle rich or the unemployable.  Not the crowd the rest of us want making national decisions.  The recount was stifled by a tiny group of radical right winger terrorists who scared the volunteer recounters into quitting before the job was half-done.  So much for a federally monitored fair election.

If the voter made it to the polls, she was faced with a document that was laid out to impress those guys who hide pictures inside of a collection of colored dots.  Using punch cards, which, in Y2k, don't exist anywhere else in the world except on ballots because of their known mechanical and accuracy problems, and stone tablets, each state tried to confuse as many people as possible so yet another election would be decided by random chance.  Voters fought their way through a gauntlet of public service drones to be faced with pages of unimportant local government decisions and an array of obsolete document styles.

And if our hapless citizen went to the polls with a conscience and more than twelve braincells firing, she had to contend with the media professionals and "educators" chanting "don't throw your vote away."  Which means, "don't think before you vote, just vote."  There are as many as a dozen sets of candidates running for the President's office in each election.  While the Demolicans don't represent anyone but the people best represented, regardless of politics, the rich and powerful, the other candidates are us.  And, no, they're not the enemy.  If you can find a meaningful difference between Bush and Gore, you have a lively imagination.  But you can definitely see a real difference between Buchanan, Nader, whoever the Libertarians ran this year, and the rest of the non-Republicrats who tilted at this political windmill yet one more time. 

Americans' sick fascination with sports must have bled into politics.  The root of this argument comes from gambling, Vegas politics, and most gambling is sports gambling.  Anytime you bet on the loser, you lose.  Any vote not cast for the winner is a wasted bet . . . vote.   Here's how those people vote: they read the odds, the polls, and vote the way the polls (bookies) tell them the other people who are equally civically-disabled are going to vote.  Don't you wish these people were around in 1776?  We'd still be wearing powered wigs and worrying about the queen's health.

Actually, that same crowd was the majority in 1776, in 1812, in 1941, and they're still here, today.  There will never be a shortage of foolish and conservative cowards in the world.  They reproduce faster than rabbits and just as thoughtfully.

Of course, this simplified republic of the rich is good for . . . the rich.  The NY Times reported that fewer than 600 people contributed $90,000,000 of Bush's initial $100,000,000 campaign treasure chest.  More recently, it was reported that the top 100 political contributors have contributed $1,000,000,000 in the last ten years.  Think that tiny group of "super patriots" is expecting something in return?  If you decide the lesson in this rant is that voting is hopeless and democracy is a lost cause, you're missing the point.  The point is the system is a mess and it will stay that way as long as the majority voters stay uninformed, apathetic, and impotent.  If we want to hang on to our democracy, the only way to do that is to offset the power of money with the power of the majority will.  The place to start is at the polls, every election, every time we're given the opportunity to voice our will and opinions. 

August 2001