Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Labor, reprised

This might violate some "Heloise for Bloggers" etiquette book, but I'm going to respond to comments to my last post with this post. Mostly because my responses are longer than a comment should be.

A'sB: I understand the logic behind moving the convention to Vegas instead of keeping it in Pittsburgh--Unions have to stick together. It's how they gained power. It wasn't a single union doing it's own thing. It was a single union doing it's own thing with support and sympathy efforts by other unions. Sure, that makes sense. But it doesn't reflect reality today. Like you said, Pittsburgh isn't going to get more union members until hotel-workers see some benefit to unionizing--and that's not going to happen with conferences moving to Vegas because of a lack of HERE members in Pitt.

Alektra: "Our generation doesn't see the benefits with a union...". I agree-but as usual in an inside-out sort of way.

Our generation doesn't see the benefits to unions because unions haven't figured out a way to survive in the modern economy. I mean, since Detroit started requiring it's engineers to design crappy cars that broke easily, used a ton of gas, and cost too much, how many young people have jumped into a job and said, "This is a good job, I'm going to stay here for the next 40 years"? Judging on rough union membership numbers, I think it's happened about 11 times. And most of them were teachers, not assembly-line types.

I'll take people I know as an example. (note, people I know are not a statistically valid sample of the U.S. workforce). Just a quick, off-the-top-of-my head count of some of my friends and family members (11 people) comes up with an average of 7.1 jobs per person. They range in age from 23 to 59, averaging 32.7 yrs old. That's a lot of change.

Until unions can figure out a way for a person to change jobs, and I mean from computer programmer to engineer to teacher, without "losing" their benefits, there's nothing in it for the modern workforce.

There's another issue that's come up in the last couple of days: better vs. good. Why does it seem like union debate is always about getting "better" wages, instead of "good" wages. I mean, when someone is making $6.50 an hour, it's easy to use "good" and "better" interchangeably. When a mechanic is making $36 an hour (like at Northwest), "good" has been left behind, and striving for "better" starts to look greedy to me. I'm not tossing myself into the executive/labor debate here, but the labor/labor debate.

I mean, if I'm a U AFSCME employee pulling in $30,000 a year, what incentive is there for me to support NWA mechanics pulling in twice that? Or if I'm a teacher earning less than $30,000?

My recommendation to organized labor: before your next big strike, get your priorities figured out, and hopefully they'll reflect helping the least supported in the working class, not the most.

Monday, August 29, 2005

Going down with the Ship?

So, there's more in the ongoing saga (death-throws?) of the NWA Mechanics' union.

An email came out today from a certain email system that reaches many AFSCME people (AFSCME is the state, county, municipal, and university employee union).

Here're the relevant bits:


Please forward to all who might be interested:

U of M AFSCME is organizing a picket in solidarity with the striking Northwest Airlines mechanics (members of AMFA Local 33) on Tuesday, August 30 from 11:30 to 1:30 in front of the Radisson Metrodome on Washington Ave and Harvard St.

The mechanics have been on strike for the past week, fighting massive takebacks and union busting efforts by Northwest Management. NWA is housing the replacement/scab mechanics at the Radisson Metrodome. U of M AFSCME will be picketing in front of the Radisson on Tuesday to protest union busting by Northwest, and to also protest the attacks made against our own union by the University administration in the current round of contract negotiations.

Join in solidarity with our striking brothers and sisters of AMFA Local 33.

An injury to one is an injury to all.

See you there!
AFSCME 3800
I've only got one problem with this: why should anyone in AFSCME support the NWA mechanics? "An injury to one is an injury to all"?? It seems to me that if the airline can bring in enough replacements to fill the 4,000+ positions left open by striking union members that the Union isn't really doing much good.

Instead of staging a sympathy picket-line at the hotel, how about ponying up the extra money in ticket costs to let the airline earn what it would need to pay Union wages on discount-fares.

Hmmm, I don't see that option jumping off of any negotiating strategies. Wonder why.

Sorry to keep harping on this, I just find it frustrating. The union is taking a stand that it feels is warranted, without offering any logical explaination that I've seen to justify risking losing their jobs.

How long will it be until the Mechanics start to wonder if "standing on principal" was worth losing their jobs?

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Friday, August 26, 2005

Closing down a quiet week

It's been a low-key week...especially after my Tuesday flurry.

Wednesday afternoon I had an interview for a job at a non-profit umbrella organization, and I'm still waiting to hear back--which says something. It went decently, but I think the man I interviewed with--the President--was expecting/hoping for someone older than myself.

Later that evening, two good friends were down from Pittsburgh--one for job interviews, her husband just for the ride. It was fun to see both of them Wednesday night and during the day Thursday. It was a good excuse to go to a great mexican place in the neighborhood for lunch.

Today? Not much has been going on. Just trying to wrap up some emails that I've had outstanding for a while. If I've missed you after today, send me harassment telling me that I should probably write you back.

I don't have any of my own creativity to add to the ephemeral world of blogging today, so I'll drop a couple of paragraphs from Paul Krugman's piece in today's NYTimes. It's something that most of us recognize relatively easily, but many who make the high-level decisions seem to miss.

"You may ask where economic growth is going, if it isn't showing up in wages. That's easy to answer: it's going to corporate profits, to rising health care costs and to a surge in the salaries and other compensation of executives. (Forbes reports that the combined compensation of the chief executives of America's 500 largest companies rose 54 percent last year.)

The bottom line, then, is that most Americans have good reason to feel unhappy about the economy, whatever Washington's favorite statistics may say. This is an economic expansion that hasn't trickled down; many people are worse off than they were a year ago. And it will take more than a revamped administration sales pitch to make people feel better."

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

I guess it's "Harangue the Times's Columnists" Week

To be fair and balanced, today I'm going to have to comment a little bit about Maureen Dowd's piece in the Times today.

It isn't factually wrong, as close as I can tell. It doesn't conflate ideological positions, nor confuse issues that are only somewhat related.

It's just not effective. Dowd has been hammering away at Bush harder, with more facts, figures, and words-from-his-own mouth for the past 5 years than just about anyone else in media. Even Krugman. That's the problem.

For the past 5 years Dowd has exposed the facts and figures, the logic and the deception driving this administrations policies and actions. And it's not doing any good.

Why? Americans are an intelligent, educated bunch of people who can sort out fact from fiction (we do it all the time with ads, right?).

The thing Dowd, and most of her political cohort haven't figured out yet is that Bush & co. aren't governing in the American Tradition of democratic-republicanism (N.B. the lower case). Dowd doesn't realize why Fox News is popular, either.

Bush & co. aren't into the whole governing by consensus thing: they don't believe in that liberal-hippie-claptrap. They govern on the basis that there are "true believers" and there are commu-liberal-hippie-terrorists who are unpatriotic and want to destroy the United States. Don't believe me? Look at how some went after Max Cleland, former Senator from Georgia.

They are justified in doing this for a couple of reasons, I think. First, is that they govern through faith alone, along Luther-Calvin-Khomenei logic. God has annointed his chosen, and there's nothing the rest of us can do to stand in their way. There are those who will be saved--true believers--and there are infidels. The second reason they do this is that it's OK to run a napalm-dropping slash-and-burn style political campaign, because true believers aren't going to be affected by such tactics. And they're not. (see below for the famous fox news poll.)

Similarly, and in contravention of commonly held beliefs, Fox News isn't trying to compete with CNN. Fox isn't in the business of news, it's in the business of reinforcing pre-concieved notions. There's a reason that Fox News viewers were less accurately informed than people who got their news from any other source (see pg 2). Because Fox doesn't really go after the news--it puts out what people want to believe: that bad guys all work together for the same goal. It doesn't matter if it's True, or Truth. It matters that people want to believe it, and it's easier to change the channel than the way someone looks at the world.

Dowd and her ideologic compatriates don't recognize that the kind of battles being waged on TV stations and in the political sphere are ones of ideas and faith and belief, not of logic or fact or reality. She (or Al Franken, or Air America) will only be "preaching to the choir" until people who disagree with Bush find a way to start putting their opposition into terms besides facts and reality, and start putting them into moral, faith and belief-based messages that people can feel in their stomachs before they have to think them through in their heads.

C'mon Maureen. It's been 5 years and Bush is still in chage. Maybe it's time for another tactic.

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

The rhetoric of disingenuity

I'm not sure what was in my breakfast this morning, but my keyboard is going to beg me never to have it again. I've been pounding away on this almost non-stop for the past four hours.

Here's the next installment with illogic, and conflation exposed.

John Tierney, columnist for the New York Times, is mixing and matching to make his point in today's Times.

He's talking about a bet he made with a guy who wrote a book about how oil prices are going to triple over the next 5 years. Apparently, this guy--Matthew Simmons--is willing to bet $5,000 that oil is going up to $200 a barrel. People have reason to believe him because he's an energy investment banker, or something like that.

Tierney takes the position that nearly without fail, human ingenuity and creativity will reduce commodity prices over time. He uses the bet between Paul Ehrlich, "The End of Affluence" and Julian Simon as his base. Simon offered the bet of $1,000 that any three comodities chosen would be cheaper at any date the challenger picked in the future. Ehrlich took up the bet, and lost it, with prices about 50% of their 1980 prices in 1990.

Tierney writes, "I realize this isn't a sure thing, because the price of oil has risen before - it quintupled in the 1970's. But then it dropped, thanks to new discoveries and technologies, validating the Cornucopians' optimism."

He closes the column with the following paragraph:
"So I figure the long-term odds are with me. And while I'm at it, I'll extend Julian's challenge and consider bets from anyone else convinced that our way of life is "unsustainable." If you think the price of oil or some other natural resource is going to soar, show me the money."

The problem I have with his argument is that the "technological innovation" that happened to bring oil prices down from their 1970s pinacle only occurred because of government intervention and imposition of CAFE standards on vehicle emissions. That and the gradual shift of consumers toward less fuel-consumptive vehicles.

Government insistence on controls like CAFE standards have waned even as US dependence on foreign oil has increased. This means our domestic consumption of oil is soaring. Flat out. SOARING.

Next problem with his oil-argument. Oil prices were at rock-bottom prices in the early 1990s for a few reasons, not the least of them being an ultra-stable, and very pro-US OPEC cartel as a result of US intervention to keep Kuwait a "free" kingdom. The U.S. doesn't have such positive relations around the world today, and part of that shows in OPEC.

There is one other significant factor why oil prices were so low in the early 1990s, and several why they are high today and likely to stay there. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. It had been tetering for a while, but demand for oil from many former Soviet countries collapsed for a couple years while they got their governments and economies sorted out. The only other US-competative economy in the world simply disappeared. This meant oil desperately needed to find markets--but they didn't exist, so a barrel of oil became really cheap.

Fast forward 12 years and the situation is different. The CIS countries are getting back on their feet, as are countries of Eastern Europe. This means an increase in oil demand from the "same old players" as I like to think of them. But these economies really aren't a big deal in the scheme of world oil prices. But I can think of two that are: China and India.

China has 1.2 billion people. That's 4 times the population of the US, in roughly the same amount of space. You'd think this means that public transportation in China is phenomenal and that no one has a car (or space to put it). You'd be right, but only on the first and last parts. Public transit in China is great, and there is just about no room for more cars. BUT the government decided about a decade ago that China was going to become a car-ownership societey, like the U.S. This means cars. Lots of cars. And lots of cars mean lots of oil. That's to say nothing of China's growing electricity consumption as people buy things like refridgerators, microwaves, air conditioners and computers for the first time.

Then there's India. A country with a larger middle-class than the U.S. population. A country where becoming an engineer is not a ticket to some pocket-protector nerd-utopia, but a real mechanism for improving your life. And it's paying off in places like Bangalore, where US companies are outsourcing back-office work, and computer programming to. This means more wealth, and more wealth leads to higher energy demands. Higher energy demands mean higher oil prices, and higher oil prices mean, well...

...higher oil prices. Just what Tierney isn't going to happen, and what he's claiming will be overcome by ingenuity.

Sure it will. Any time there is a big enough sticking point, there comes to be a lot of money to be made to solve it, work around it, or blow through it. That's why we have a steam engine, telegraph, and electricity. But how long did it take for any one of these to become widely used? How much did implementing the new infrastructure cost?

In the case of cars and oil consumption: how many years will it take car manufactorers to produce cars that are either A. fuel-efficient, or B. run on something more renewable than oil? What is the lag-time between invention and outcome? What happens to oil prices in the mean time?

And then there's the issue of whether or not our "way of life is sustainable." None of the arguments in Tierney's piece even attempt to address that issue, and bringing it up at the tail end of the article is disingenuous. There is room for an intelligent debate about whether our society is following a sustainable path--whether our accounting and economic models accurately reflect the cost of finite resources, whether we invest sufficiently in the next generation, whether we should place greater emphasis in social accounting on equity.

Simply putting on written-word strut making a backhanded assertion that our way of life is sustainable, and challengnig anyone who disagrees to "Bring it on." Adds nothing, and is beneath the tenor of a NY Times columnist.

Want a job with the gub'ment?

Start looking soon.

I'm absolutely convinced that except for the highest levels of government, the only hard part about the work is actually getting the job. Here's an example from this morning.

I recieved an email from a woman I know pointing me to a new job posted with the US Agency for International Development. In case you didn't check out the job posting, it's 8 pages long. Most of it is generic job-posting language that has the informative quality of a radio-interview conducted in sign language. Burried in it is the pertinent info:

"Applicants are responsible for submitting form OF-612" l
"Applicants that [sic] submit their application by email without an electronic signiture must send a fax or scanned copy of their signiture in order for their application to be considered for this position."

Just in case you haven't experienced the joy of applying for government jobs, the OF-612 collects exactly the same info as a resume, except it can't be saved. SO, if the position requires you to fill out an OF-612, it means you have to spend 35 or 40 minutes EVERY TIME to apply for that one job.

I might be in special circumstances here, but the idea of faxing or mailing in something that is identical to the documentation that could be automatically submitted via email or an online-application process is ludicrous. Not because it's harder, or requires more equipment, or labor to process--which it does.

My problem is that faxing and mailing things is both time-consuming, and in the case of faxes--expensive. Why? Because like many in "my generation" I don't have access to a "real" or "land" phone. I have a cell phone. My roommates all have cell phones. So it doesn't make sense for us to spend an extra 30 bucks a month on a "real" phone, when we're already covered there. So I have to send faxes from the local pharmacy. Not bad in itself, but they charge $1 per page. Every page. And when almost all job applications to the Hill have to be faxed (so they can sort them out from the hundreds of daily-traffic emails they get a day), we're already talking about $12 a week in fax bills.

Wouldn't it be cheaper to install a phone line for a couple months and then discontinue service after I got a job? Not when there's an installation fee. And even if it was, that's not the point.

If the federal government wants to hire qualified, energetic, motivated people, it can't set up a system in which they either A. can't afford to apply for the positions because the government can't figure out how to use the systems it already has in place, B. they take 6 months to complete a hire for an entry level position--by which time their top 25 choices of candidate have taken other opportunities in other cities and aren't likely to move back to DC just to get a $26,000 a year job, and C. when getting a security clearance to do any interesting work takes upwards of a year of waiting in complete limbo, because the government is paying people to call every past roommate, every hotel you've stayed at in a foreign country, and making sure your GPA reported really was 3.4 and not 3.397.

I recognize that I'm just voicing the frustration that has been levelled at bureaucracy for dozens of generations around the globe. But it seems to me that at some point bureaucracies should figure out that while in some ways they hold things together, in just as many ways they make sure the system doesn't work--and then find a way to fix it.

Guess I'm just a silly idealist. Time to go send a $3 fax, just so a place can have my signiture.

Evangelism is Dead

At least on TV.

How do I know? Pat Robertson. To get a fuller picture of what he said, check out this article in the NY Times. In case you want the short version, the headline says it all:

Televangelist Calls for Assassination of Chavez


I'm not one to shy away from direct rhetoric, or a clear course of action being proposed by anyone in a position to do it. But this crosses so many lines as to be almost a farce.

Any of you lawyers out there know off-hand what the penalty for threatening someone--especially the head of a foreign government--with death? But even that isn't the point.

Robertson is supposed to be a man of God. Not just of God, but of Jesus. I'm not particularly strident in my faith, nor am I a devout church-goer. I haven't memorized the bible. But I have read most of it once or twice. And nowhere in the bible do I remember Jesus calling out for the death (or even maiming, or inflicting of pain) on anyone. In fact, if I remember, he was the crazy guy wandering the desert who said the greatest commandment was to, "love your neighbor as yourself" and to an enemy, "turn the other cheeck."

I don't remember Jesus talking about the Scribes, or even the Romans like this, "''We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability," but aparently it's OK for Pat Roberston to suggest we do these things. In case there was any doubt, Robertson clarified that this really wasn't a religious statement, but a political one, "''We don't need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator."

For those of you who are willing to put aside strongly-held religious convictions in order to achieve political ends, a quick history refresher on how good the U.S. is at picking winning sides when we overthrow governments:
Iran 1953: The U.S. overthrew/assassinated a democratically elected prime minister, Mosadeq, and replaced him with the Royal Shah. That lasted approximately 26 years until the Grand Ayatollah Khomenei came on the scene, and we ended up with American hostages held in Iran for 444 days. Oh, who still calls us the "great satan?" It's not Britain.

Chile, September 11, 1973: The U.S. backs a coup of democratically elected Salvador Allende in Chile. Chile, which, up until 1973 was the second longest functioning constitutional democracy in the western hemisphere (after the U.S.). We aided in the installation of a friendly guy by the name of Pinochet (Spit!) who rounded up and executed, or dropped in the ocean from several miles in the air, people who disagreed with a coup.

For the sake of time and space I'll simply mention our great endeavors in: Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama.

But let's not forget our biggest achievement in backing the wrong horse in other countries' domestic power-struggles: Vietnam. People my age don't "know" about Vietnam except through movies, news footage and books. But people Pat Robertson's age certainly remember it, and just how great the U.S. throughout that time.

This is my request: since Mr. Robertson seems to have lost touch with the religious convictions (I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt) that gained him prominence, and since he is clearly exhibiting poor personal and political judgment, I request that Mr. Robertson seclude himself on a mountain somewhere. Where there are no phones, cellphones, computers, internet, tv, or radio. For about 2 months. Maybe 2 years would be better. Yes, I'll request a 2 year retreat. Of peace, and quiet, and reflection.

Saturday, August 20, 2005

Labor, Strikes, and the death of Unions

It's all coming together now, and it's all thanks to Northwest Airlines.

I grew up in Minnesota--home to Northwest Airlines. Today marks the beginning of a strike by Northwest Union Mechanics and other ground-crew type positions. The airline (along with its competitors) has been having profitability problems for a while now--it has lost billions of dollars since 2000. Recognizing that something isn't working, it's been reducing costs through elimination of the vital in-flight peanuts and the less vital in-flight meals. Northwest has been in negotiations with it's pilots' union, flight attendents' union, and mechanics unions for a long time to reduce wages in order to keep the company out of bankruptcy.

It worked with the pilots and flight attendants. They've accepted significant pay-cuts in order to help maintain their jobs. This morning's news shows that the talks with the Mechanic's union were somewhat less productive.

I'm not unsympathetic to the position of most unions and their workers; they are in the business of getting the best deal they can for their members. OK. I'm generally unsympathetic to board-rooms of businesses that gouge both employees and customers to drive up executive bonuses.

I'm guessing Northwest has a typically over-large bonus/golden parachute system for it's executives. But that doesn't mean that I'm going to give the mechanic's union a skate on this one either. And there are a lot of reasons for this.

Mechanics at Northwest earn $36.39 an hour, according to the New York Times article. I'm not sure how many hours they work a year, but assuming 40 hours a week, 2 weeks vacation, and no overtime, that comes out to $72,780 a year. I've known a few Northwest Mechanics, and I know they tend to get their fare share of overtime.

Unions started to ensure that their workers weren't getting exploited by the "captains of industry." I can see that, agree with it, and support it. Unions have been really good at doing this. So good in fact, that the wages paid Northwest Mechanics is about twice the average income in the United States.

If this was a strike being taken on issues of exploitation I'd be behind it. If it was undertaken because of unfair labor or wage practices within the company or within the industry, I'd be supportive. But it seems to me that the mechanics union is striking out of spite. Out of a short-sighted assumption that what they are doing is good for them and good for those around them.

It's not.

This is why.

Northwest airlines is in a lot of trouble. Maybe it's because of a "post-September 11th-slump" in travel; maybe it's because of rising oil prices, or higher gate fees at airports. Maybe it's because of increased costs due to security practices. And just maybe it's because the airlines continue to hire and pay executives who may or may not be particularly good at what they're managing.

But paying a mechanic a minimum of $73,000 a year to fix and maintain plains certainly will go a long way to eroding profitability. I don't begrudge the mechanics their salary if the company is staying afloat. But Northwest (and the rest of the industry) isn't. So labor and management need to figure out a new way to run the company. Whether the union likes it or not, lower wages are an almost inevitable part of that.

What really gets me going on this, though, is how many other jobs in Minnesota (and I'm guessing Detroit and Memphis, though I have no knowledge of those regions) are tied in one way or another to Northwest. I'm not talking about the obvious jobs of people who work at the MSP airport (which is probably 70% NWA), but people who work at Cargill, 3M, General Mills, Medtronic, Honeywell, Boston Scientific, Best Buy, and Target. All corporations who employ a huge number of people, many of whom frequently travel for business. If Minneapolis lost easy air-connection to the rest of the country, I'm guessing many of those companies would consider moving many, if not all, of their positions to new locations.

Let's not forget the international angle. Minnesota has some of the best connections with China, Japan, and Korea of any state in the U.S. Not because we have a particularly large asian-american population, but because we have excellent transportation. As an example, I could leave my home in suburban St. Paul, and 17 hours later be checked into my hotel in Tokyo relaxing on a bed and watching CNN international. Tack on 4 hours and I could be sitting at a restaurant in Hong Kong trying to let my body sort out what time it is. It's even faster on the way back to the states--it takes as long to fly Beijing to Minneapolis as it does to drive Bozeman to Minneapolis.

This might sound like a long time, but I say from experience, not having to transfer airports, or having to do so as little as possible, makes international travel a great deal easier. It can reduce travel-time from 24-30 hours down to the 15-17 I'm talking about.

So, for NWA mechanics to strike over their unwillingness to take a pay-cut to preserve their jobs, albeit at a lower wage, is not only short-sighted, but it's also selfish. It's actions and attitudes like this that are eroding support for Unions throughout the country. These are not the same kind of issues as those that cuased the Pullman strikes in the 1890s.

If mechanics have a problem with their wages, or how their wages compare to exec's wages, find ways to bring it to public (and stockholder) attention. Find ways to show how the company is being mismanaged. I'll be 100% behind these efforts. But don't play Russian roullette with the economy of an entire state just because you're not willing to give up a little bit of what most Americans don't even have.

(This will probably be even more striking to my international readers, and trust me, the irony of "protecting" workers who make in 3 hours what the average Chinese makes in a month is not lost on me.)

Thursday, August 18, 2005

"Democracy Accomplished"

Chinahand News Service, Washington--"The Iraqi process of democratization is a complete success" declared President Bush, flanked by portraits of George Washington, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Richard Nixon from the White House's Portrait Room this morning at 9:15 Eastern time.

The announcement comes after recent state department analysis that shows Iraqis are participating in their fledgling democratic process at levels far above pre-war predictions.

"It is a testament to the universality of democracy that Iraqis are using every available method to participate in the formation of their own constitution, through their own process," said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

When asked what activities were included in "participation" Rice said, "All the activities we see in the news every day."

Asked by a reporter, "So you're telling us that everything from voting to setting off bombs is included in this study?" Rice responded, "It isn't up to the United States to impose our values or our form of democracy on Iraqis. This is an Iraqi process and we need to support that process."

President Bush concluded his speech, "As long as Iraqis only wage their particular form of democracy on other Iraqis the United States will stand firmly behind them."

Monday, August 15, 2005

The Chinese are Coming!

I didn't expect it to happen quite yet, but Chicken Little has made her presence known to a wondering and uncertain America. And her message is clear, "The Chinese are coming, and they're bringing down our market!"

At least that's what I get out of this BBC story from today. It's about Congressional testimony on the reason for the growing number of Chinese companies making bids on U.S. companies, and what the expected result these will have on the U.S. economy.

According to the chairman of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC), "I fear the Wall Street crowd that brought us the hi-tech bubble is now fast creating a new China bubble."

I can't say I specifically disagree with the guy on fundamentals; The Chinese economy, while representing enormous opportunity for U.S. private investment, and with great possibility for improved productive capacity (hence profits), is not anywhere near the same type of system as U.S., European, or "Asian Tiger" economies. The rule of law in China is haphazard at best, business accounting procedures are neither standardized nor compliant with U.S. accounting norms; and lastly, Chinese Banks carry a bad-debt load that look palatable only when compared with China's neighbor North Korea.


My problem with the statement made by the chair of the USCC is that he seems to be crossing his arguments. He's afraid of pouring U.S. stock market capital into the Chinese market, but he cites recent attempts by Chinese firms to buy out U.S. competitors as examples. Now, I'm no market expert, but it seems to me that what we've been witnessing in the past several months is an effort by the Chinese markets to infuse the U.S. markets with cash. That seems like something we want--I mean, either we have Chinese pumping money into our stock market and improving our economy, or we have them buying our government debt and encouraging a new generation of "Tax and spend" government. (Where have I heard that before?)


It also seems inconsistent for someone representing a politically conservative point of view, as the USCC's publications indicate it does, to be warning Americans of the potential evils of the market and stopping just short of recommending Congressional intervention in U.S. investment in China.


Why don't we see these types of recommendations coming from the President's council of Economic Advisers when considering the large and growing debt-burden the average American deals with. Why don't we hear these kinds of arguments when Congress is considering approving an increase in the Federal Debt limit of several hundred billion dollars?


It seems that USCC isn't trying to protect American interests vis a vis China. It looks much more like the chairman is trying to instill a fear of China in Washington's decision makers, without giving them adequate background or rationale to make their own decisions on the matter.


Who was it that wrote about governing through fear?


(Under) Employment?

What's up in the District?


Had a good weekend this weekend, staying up late discussing the world with my roommates--actually, I think I put most of them to sleep, but I'll take what I can get. Saturday was a housewarming party for a houseful of HHH grads on the northwestern part of town. It was a fun get-together, even if the heat outside and large number of bodies inside made it a little bit warmer than most would have preferred.


Other than that, a fairly uneventful last week. We are minus-1 roommate this week because she's in Michigan presenting at a conference, but we gain another short-term roommate tonight. I hope we don't scare her too much.


Musing of the moment


I've been wondering about a couple things recently: affirmative action and local vs. national politics. I'm getting kind of bored with both of them right now, and will throw out something that I've given much less thought, but jumped into my head this morning:


Employment vs. a Job


Employ: 1 a : to make use of (someone or something inactive) <employ a pen for sketching> b : to use (as time) advantageously c (1) : to use or engage the services of


Job: something that has to be done


The world has too many people doing jobs and not enough people who are employed. My first sense of this came when I saw the difficulties many of my students were having finding jobs in China. Many of these young people are incredibly intelligent, hard working, and have a much better grasp of the way the world works than most of their American counterparts (myself included). Unfortunately, they live in an economic system that has yet to fully grasp the value of those attributes, so instead of finding employment, they found (or settled for) jobs.


Before any of you start pulling up a soap box to talk about the evils of socialism, or the problems of "socialism with Chinese characteristics," let me say that in the U.S. we often have the same problem. A friend of mine finished college fluent in three languages, and spent two years after graduation teaching in Europe. When she got back to the U.S. she looked for employment for a while, but had to settle for a "job" as a nanny because it was the best job she could find.


Another friend of mine is an extremely intelligent and talented woman who finished college in 3 years and who now has a master's degree. She didn't manage to get into a PhD program right after finishing her masters', so began looking for employment. What did she find? A job at a bookstore. Not managing it, just working there. She spent a long time at that bookstore, and is now moving with her husband to pursue her doctorate.


Some of you may know I spent a few months waiting tables at a Japanese restaurant in Minneapolis. It was the first (and likely only) time I'll ever be a server, but if there was a more overqualified serving staff in the city I'd be shocked. There were only about 10 servers or so, but 2 were getting PhDs, and 3 pursuing masters.


I guess I'm just trying to say that our economic structure is getting out of whack. When you need a bachelor's degree to earn a job that a high-school summer-temp can do, it means people are underemployed--whether economists say so or not. When I have to have a masters degree and five years of experience just to qualify for a job that requires limited-to-no critical thinking ability or knowledge of any of the skills or techniques earned in graduate school, what are we training our population for?


I have no problem working hard in a job, or even working hard to find a job. Quite the contrary--if a job doesn't need me to work hard at it, I'm not the right person for that job. At the same time I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that a job will, at least in some way, justify the extra years of education and investment I've made since finishing high school 8 years ago.


Call me crazy.

Thursday, August 11, 2005

Stir-fry and Stomping

Not to suggest there isn't enough going on around town these days, but I thought Thursday was a good day to mention some of the excitement happening here.

Most of the week my responsible house mates have been busy keeping the government and the economy running. I, on the other hand, have been sending out more resumes and meeting having conversations with more people.

In more exciting news, it's been another week of culinary masterpieces in the Hump-house. Monday was the house's inaugural experience with shake and bake--excellent. As if that wasn't enough, our Cook also made chocolate cake. Definitely a great way to start the week. Tuesday was an interesting Italian sausage stirfry, straight from Texas--also very good. It wasn't the food that was the story on Tuesday, though. We had an experiment with a rice cooker.

Have you ever seen what happens when the rice and water go straight into a rice cooker, instead of into the pot? We have. As it turns out the bottom of a rice cooker isn't water proof. Thankfully so. If it had been water-tight, the chef probably wouldn't have noticed the missing pot, and would have probably fried the cooker. I can say that rice-cookers do make an odd sound the day after being water-logged.

Wednesday found us scrounging through the cupboards, and rummaging in the fridge looking for enough food to cook without having to make a trip to the store. Luckily we found enough odds and ends to pull together some reasonably tasty Mexican burritos.

The Neighbor Saga

There's something of a soap-opera unfolding here in our very own building. Fairly amazing since there are only two groups of tenants in our unit. Group 1: 5 young people, recently finished with graduate school, living in the upper 3 floors of a very nice building. Group 2: A Vietnamese family consisting of at least a husband-wife-daughter trio, but presumably a brother/cousin and grandparents--it's hard to tell for sure though.

To catch everyone up, this saga started within hours of arrival in DC on July 1. We had a 30 foot moving truck wedged into a parking-area for about 6 cars for a couple of hours as we unloaded it and got ourselves moved in. About 3 hours into this (5 hour) process, one of the neighbors arrives home and wants to park his car. Unfortunately our truck was in the space so we asked if he'd mind parking on the street for a couple of hours until we finished. This apparently was a major problem as he put up a fuss, but ultimately complied, since the truck wouldn't have fit anywhere if his car was also in the space.

We thought his attitude was a little irritating, but we are in DC, not Minneapolis; We can't expect people to be "nice" all the time.

Fast forward about 3 hours. It's now 9:15 pm on a Friday night. We were moving some boxes around and trying to get some furniture arranged so we'd have a place to eat dinner. All of the sudden there is this weird pounding from downstairs. Thinking the neighbors were hanging a picture or something we thought nothing of it. Except it continued. For about 10 minutes. Maybe 6 or 7 minutes in we realized what it was; the neighbors were banging on the ceiling because, apparently, we were being too loud. At 9:15 on Friday.

Lets just say that didn't sit particularly well with any of us. But again, we sort of ignored it, as we weren't doing anything to be disruptive and they do, after all, live in the
basement.

Now jump ahead to last weekend. Remember the day when I got a bottle of beer dropped on me? Well, I left it out of the telling earlier, but downstair's Mrs. came up at about 9:30 on Friday night to tell us we were being too loud. We were "jumping up and down" too much, and making a lot of noise.

All 4 of us. All 4 of us that were
sitting down. On a thick rug. And playing cards. We weren't yelling, shouting, jumping, dancing, or even playing slap jack. It took us a while to figure out what had roused enough ire in this poor woman to come upstairs and dress-down the unruly neighbors: walking across the floor to the bathroom.

That's right. Apparently it is too great a disruption for our downstairs neighbors if we walk from one side of our home to the other after their bedtime.

Anyway, I'm sure there will be more excitement coming from our interactions with our friendly new neighbors, so I wanted to let everyone in on the backstory.

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

The Lost Boys (and Girls)

A couple of intriguing articles in the past two days. The first one is about the "gold collar" generation: 18-25 year olds who spend a lot of money on what I like to call "crap". $250 dollar jeans, $300 sunglasses, yada yada.

The second one is about how most high schoolers would prefer their schools offered them more academically rigorous options.

So, younger Americans are seeking ways to get smarter, and their older brothers and sisters are just frittering their lives away in their parents' basements?

I don't think so.

I don't think it's any different thant the phenomena that has been occuring in society for hundreds of years; some people know that what they want is a long-term goal, and others are far happier living in the moment. The difference is a cultural shift.

People aren't getting married and starting families at 22 or 23 any more. We're doing it at 30 and 35. Combine this with parents who are OK with their kids hanging out in the basement, working go-nowhere jobs, and we have exactly what the first article is talking about.

In fact, I'm willing to push it one more. It's not a question of whether or not young people today are worried about "getting their pensions" like the first article suggests, or are "trying to get jobs" like the second one implies. It's far more about the priorities and standards modelled around them.

A good theatre/actor/investor/lawyer will put in enormous hours researching, preparing, practicing and rehearsing to ensure the "big day" goes well. The thing is, for those who are successful, most of us only ever see the "main event". That's all we're interested in. We don't want to hear about the movie-star who spent years working crappy jobs and missing call-backs before getting a break. We're not interested in finding out how many years a successful lawyer spent bent over a desk in a library at 1 in the morning, or how many years she spent as an assoc. for a slave-driving partner before she finally broke through on her own.

All many of us cares about is "the moment". When success is obvious, and visible, and incontrivertible. Some of us aspire to that success, but we miss the work that went in, and assume that if we emulate style we'll be a success.

One portion of our nation's political discourse is based on the idea that any one of us could one-day be rich. So it's bad to tax rich people. The problem is, most Americans don't think of themselves as getting rich through hard work. Hard work is what you do to hold steady, or make headway little by little until, one day, you achieve "comfortable". Instead, I think most Americans think getting rich comes from winning the lottery--or Joe Millionare.

I don't want this to be a rambling political statement, so I'll just say it like this: until as a society we recognize that being successful (however one defines it) is more important than looking successful, we're going to have a lot of vagabond-ish "gold collar" people running around.

Monday, August 08, 2005

Procrastination vs Perfectionism

I realize it's been a while since my last post. Not because there haven't been things going on, or getting my dander up, but because I've been making the mistake of drafting the posts in a word-processing program. When I do that, I re-read things, think them through a few times, and decide I really shouldn't post whatever it is I wrote. That's why I made myself a new rule: posts can only be written in my web browser. No Word/Open Office for me.

So what's been happening? A weekend full of hilarity, or perhaps just mayhem.

Friday was a good day, with several of my house mates and another HHHer from town deciding that going to a bar to celebrate the end of the week would have been too expensive. Instead we held a happy-hour at the apartment and had a few cold and tasty beverages from our own cellars. The highlight of the evening (for everyone but me) came when we were cleaning up, and our guest decided to pick up a bottle next to me. When she bent over to grab it, she managed to "forget" there was a full bottle in her arms. Lets just say by the time she managed to pick up the bottle she reached for, she had an empty bottle, and my clothes were beer-flavored. I can just hear the "hou-gai's" coming.

Saturday a troop of us decided to venture into high society and eat at a swanky restaurant in town, Cafe Promenade. It was a phenomenal meal made almost affordable for me by the fact that one week every summer many of the nicer restaurants in town create their own "set menu" 3 or 5 course meal, sort of like a daily special, for $30. (Entrees at most sit down places in DC run in the $15 range). I can't normally justify spending 30 dollars on dinner, but Saturday's meal was absolutely phenomenal. Salad, filet mignon, and a chocolate desert cake that were all spectacular.

Yesterday was a doosey as well, since I went with one of the guys to play ultimate frisbee with his co-workers from last summer. I need to spend some more time running, otherwise I'm not going to be able to keep up with the youngsters out there.

Here's wishing that you are having a good start to your week, and that no one empties a beer bottle on you.

Friday, August 05, 2005

Discussion or Diminution

I saw this in a friend's blog today and it struck me as sounding terrifyingly antiquated.

"The only way in which one human being can properly attempt to influence another is by encouraging him to think for himself, instead of endeavoring to instill ready-made opinions into his head."


Antiquated not because it is out of date, but because it seems so foreign to our "modern, American" sensibilities. Sensibilities formed by watching TV and reading Newsweek. Where our perceptions of what is entertaining are based on the current reality TV show. The terrifying part isn't the statement or the idea, it's that it actually sounds old-fashioned.


Last night I was talking with a friend about the CAFTA debate. Better said, the lack of a debate. I recognize that there is a growing consensus surrounding the value of free trade, open markets, and most of the peripheral benefits. That doesn't mean CAFTA was a good idea, just because someone said it's free trade. I mean, what were the provisions?


More succinctly, and quoting from one of the great politicians of our time, "Who wins, who loses, and who decides?"


Who opposed CAFTA? I'm assuming the AFL-CIO did, along with most other unions. But why? Has anyone heard any concrete explanation of the opposition? Facts or figures about the consequences to U.S. jobs or industry? Consequences or benefits to Central American workers, businesses, or families? No where did any of this come out.


Both sides of most debates seem to expect us to simply accept ready-made opinions into our head. If you're liberal, Al Franken is supposedly your guru. Conservative? Follow Rush's lead. Evangelical? Billy Graham. Why isn't there discussion. Don't tell me what to think, tell me where you stand and why. If you're particularly bold tell me how you got to where you're standing.


"I don't have time to follow all of those issues." "Policy is too complicated for me to follow." Wrong. The number of Americans who can keep track of 6 different reality shows, or memorize stats on about 60 different baseball players, hundreds of football players, and keep track of scores in 12 basketball games from last night at the same time are more than smart enough to decide if "loosing 1200 jobs" is more or less significant than "improving the well-being of 3 million people in developing countries". (those are just made up for illustration).


When journalists don't demand that our civic and business leaders engage us on a level that allows us to make informed decisions, we are left in a country where, simply put, Superbowl commercials are more important than healthcare and Fear Factor takes priority over Fallujah. As long as we allow this to continue, we are in big trouble.

Tuesday, August 02, 2005

Snow Crash?

For those of you who haven't had the priviledge of reading Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash yet, here's a sneak preview from the Washington Post. No, it's not a story about the book or the author. It's a piece about Al Gore's new tv/internet project that is aiming to "turn traditional television on its head" by bringing together professionally produced tv programming (regular, everyday types of tv) along with amatuer work, submitted by people from all over the place. We're getting to it now: the age where information truly is the primary commodity, and whoever controls access to it the most has the most power. Just a heads up.