Pro Commerce

Moral Quandary

I don’t know when this moral drive began, but it was after my Army basic training in 1960.

We were never trained to worry about fellow soldiers left on the battlefield, much less risk our lives to go back and get them. Yet by 1972 the United States had a full blown political movement (later) known as the MIAs. Missing in Action. The U.S. government was being forced to find all the missing soldiers in the Viet Nam War -- and bring them home.

I suspect that two forces merged to create this No XXX Left Behind. No Marine Left Behind, No Body Left Behind…etc. First was the camaraderie of the Green Berets who were the first Americans to establish a military presence in Viet Nam. The second was the stunning improvement in helicopter medivac services that started saving the lives of men who formerly would have died on the battlefield.

Now we have a national education program relying on the same morality: No Child Left Behind. As if reading poorly was the equivalent of dying on the field of battle.

So what is the moral problem? The Green River serial killer, Gary L. Ridgway, who confessed to killing 48 women around Seattle, was given a life sentence in return for his effort to identify and find all the buried bodies.

Do you see the moral problem? The No XXX Left Behind versus the Death Penalty.

We need to have the Death Penalty to use as a bargaining chip to get serial killers to tell us who they killed and where they buried them. Under the No XXX Left Behind we have a moral need to find all murder victims. We need leverage to get the murderers to reveal the victim’s location.

Gibson and vengence

Last October Gregg Easterbrook went to see two movies on the same afternoon. One was Gibson’s sado-maso Passion and the other was Kill Bill.

He went home and wrote a blog on how the hateful Jews in Hollywood created Kill Bill.

This is a connect-the-dots issue. Easterbrook was raised in a fundamentalist household, home schooled as a result. He sees Gibson’s violent movie, comes out hating Jews and seeking revenge for Jesus. He sees a movie he doesn’t like and he spews out his hatred for Jews.

This is the classic anti-Semitic act stimulated by the run-of-the-mill centuries-old German Passion Play.

It has been obvious for nearly a year that Gibson’s movie would be a vehicle for more anti-Semitism. Now I and many of my friends have to live with it.

The interesting point is that this movie inflames pentacostals, fundamentalists and Catholics. These are the religions that wallow in blood atonement. All three of these groups have their highest density in the growing Latino population.

So what forms of anti-Semitism are we going to see? First the Lefty Fundamentalists become anti-Semites out of their hatred of global commerce, now the Righty Fundamentalists become anti-Semites out of their reawakened blood atonement.

Cities and growth

This morning’s Wall Street Journal had an article on cities by David Wessel about a study of educational attainment published by Edward Glaeser of Harvard.

Turns out, all the hype by Richard Florida about city growth and the creative class was unnecessary. The same correlation is evident with the census data on the percent of the population that has college degrees. Cities that do well during economic boom periods driven by high-tech and new ideas are the same ones with better educated populations.

This understanding was pioneered a decade ago by Paul Krugman in his Geography and Trade where he showed that specialized industries remained in the same locale for generations because the locale provided the specialized skilled workers.

Put this together with a general view of the world and your best long term investment will be residential property in the eight high-tech centers of educated people. The future is based on educated workers and they will concentrate where other educated workers live. And they will need housing.

Then lay on top of all this: the United States is the fastest growing large industrial nation with the youngest population and the most favorable attitudes toward commerce. Of course there is the business cycle, catastrophes and financial crises to think of too.

Theatre these days

What is happening in theatre these days?

I’ve wondered what was happening to theatre since the mid-1960s when I stopped going to live theatre. Hippy life in San Francisco was becoming much more alive and interesting in those days and street performers were proliferating.

This is a connect-the-dots issue for me. I went to see a San Francisco group called the Devil-Ettes. A group of woman who do line dancing to popular music. In the brief dance I saw, the woman, who all wear little red horns in their hair, did a twist to 1960s music. Most of the woman were overweight by chorus line standards, but they had glittery clothes and they had big boobs that showed and swung to the music. They also had a big fan club and fan artifacts for sale.

The Devil-Ettes would be called camp except that they are more than that. They are very ordinary people, with ordinary talent being adored by ordinary fans. Camp is not the right word. Real People Theatre is a better description.

The dots to connect to the Devil-Ettes are all the reality TV shows.

Ordinary real people, pretending to be talented, are now more interesting than talented people displaying the results of their hard work and preparation. Theatre has truly moved off the stage.

Clorox, Windex and Drano

Which is a greater danger for your --- child the boogie man under the kitchen sink or the boogie man in the van with covered windows?

I regularly ask regular people this question and the answers I get are so consistently wrong that I wonder about the sanity of regular people.

Two million Americans die each year. Mostly from old age and illness. Less than 10,000 children die each year, mostly from childhood illness. Aside from disease, the biggest single cause is automobile accidents. Kids are not driving the cars and few are run over --- they are in the cars as passengers when they die.

Back to our boogieman question. Boogie men in vans with covered windows kidnap a little over one hundred kids a year; of these, most are returned. In less than half the cases, the child is murdered. The average number of children murdered by boogie men in vans has been about 45 per year, for many decades.

On the other hand, the boogie man under the kitchen sink, sent a million kids to poison control centers last year, over 50,000 had to be hospitalized and over 500 died from ingesting household poisons (every year). The boogie-van-man killed 45 kids and the boogie-sink-man killed ten times as many.

Many, maybe most, of those 500 childhood deaths could be prevented by putting childproof caps on Clorox, Windex and Drano. Childproof caps might also be a good reminder to adults that household chemicals can be poisons.

While I’ve compared the danger of two kinds of boogie men, I don’t expect the fear of boogie-van-men to abate. The boogie man in the van is mostly a factor that is out of a parent’s control and the one under the sink is a parental creation.

Artwork

These photos are two of my art pieces. The first on the right is called Cuddling; it is the way I saw our dishes stacked one afternoon. The dishes are part of my partner’s collection of California pottery, mostly Metlox and Metlox copies.

The image on the left is of candles in the window of a strange little shop on Castro St. I call it After an Orgy. I know that few of my readers have been to sex orgies, but I can tell you that after the men are worn out the women are still looking for partners.

Great American debate

The great debates of our age are fully underway in America. Are you participating?

It is legitimate to proximate the debate in the realm of the so called neocons. The origin of the neocon perspective can be traced to The Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

The Committee began in the late 1940s with an understanding that the American-European edifice of culture was a direct descendent of the ideas of the Greek philosophers, especially Plato and Aristotle.

This understanding of social thought had migrated to a new understanding by the 1980s, when I started my national public radio program Social Thought.

Social thought by then was a full-blown field, described in my Encyclopedia Britannica entry of 1996. That entry describes social thought as the discipline concerned with “the strong relationship between ideas, concepts and metaphors and the institutions directly associated with them.”

The three great subjects of contemporary American debate are: (1) How should America conduct itself as the uni-polar global power for the rest of our lives; (2) What is the nature of cultural differences and what are the possibilities of our understanding other cultures; and (3) What is the nature and meaning of democracy.

At this point my contribution to each of the debates concerns the nature of commerce. Over the coming year, I will discuss my perspective on commerce and the three great debates of our era.

To me, an understanding of commerce is a central element in each of these debates. Commerce, like science and technology, has many universal qualities that are empirical. Industrial commerce has brought America to this elevate position at this juncture in history. Commerce seems to me to be culturally dependent and commerce has definite affinities for democracy.

Commerce is currently dogged by the metaphor of the Invisible Hand. The ideology of the market has an inherent godlike moral attribute. The invisible hand is a moral hand of stability, quiescence, prosperity and judicial impartiality.

Commerce does not have these qualities. Commerce is not moral. Commerce is not stable when viewed from a status quo perspective.

Commerce does thrive in populations with some specific behavioral attributes, like openness and meritocracy and is stifled in other populations by autocrats and anti-Semites.

Hummers and xenons

What do Hummers and xenon headlights have in common?

In both cases, the body politic is saying: “no.”

Hummer sales in the past year dropped from 2,602 sold in January 2003 to 1,897 sold in January 2004. ‘This ain’t no hot car’ this is a gas guzzling military vehicle on city streets. Ordinary people know that their neighbors will, almost universally, think poorly of them for buying a Hummer. Social pressure is stopping the Hummer.

I desperately wondered why social pressure didn’t stop the explosion of SUVs in the early 1990’s. The gas-guzzling human-killing potential was obvious from the first day. But there was no meaningful opposition.

I don’t know why there was no opposition. I only know that the SUV movement grew fast enough that family people started buying their own SUVs in defense against the early adopters (read early socio-pathic predators).

Now we all know that presence of SUVs on the highways kills roughly 4,000 extra people a year. Our highway fatalities should be under 38,000 if we had stayed with the 1980s safety trends; instead traffic deaths are 44,000.

So Hummers are being stopped now that we know: what we see is true. Hummers bring traffic death and atmospheric destruction.

What about xenon headlights? I don’t know the details of headlight construction, but I do know that a blue xenon headlight is painful for me and for most of the people I know, of all ages.

Xenon headlights became increasingly common a few years ago and then peaked in popularity. I tried to use my brights to alert xenon drivers that their lights were offensive. However, using my brights in the city is futile.

What happened, I learned from my country and suburban friends, is that country and suburban people used their bright lights to blind xenon users. When I drive in the country, on dark two lane roads, I never see cars coming at me with xenons. In this case, social pressure against early adapters (read “sociopathic predators”) has sent the message out. No xenon headlights.

The body politic was slow to say it, but now it can be said: “No benefits for you that come at my expense.”

Gay couples for commerce

How do the Gods of Commerce feel about gay marriage?

Commerce has no moral agenda. Commerce it has two interests in the matter. First it wants a social mechanism that raises highly productive individuals. There is no evidence from cross-cultural studies that any particular form of family is better at raising children. Examples of different childrearing strategies abound; they extend from polygamy to Kibbutzim to aged grandmothers.

Second, individuals have lives outside their work life, including childhood, illness, sleep, leisure and old age. More time is spent outside work than in it. Therefore commerce is interested in any positive social forces that contribute to making the non-work time more valuable for the work output. If sex, family structure, religion, therapy, drugs, education or anything else makes people more commercially productive then commerce supports it. The same goes for marriage --- gay, straight or upside-down. If it works, bravo.

Where's my paycheck?

The San Francisco Chronicle had a story about the state administrator who stepped in to run the bankrupt Oakland Schools. He, Randy Ward, required everyone who usually gets a check automatically deposited to a bank account to go into an actual school to pick up the paycheck. One hundred twenty out of 7,729 checks didn’t get picked up and more than half of these appear to be phony people collecting paychecks.

I just love this tool for finding bureaucratic corruption.

Could be astounding

It jumped out at me because I’m a statistician. The article is by Emily Eakin in the Saturday 14th NYTimes talking about a forthcoming book by Dalton Conley, a sociologist and director of the Center for Advanced Social Science Research at New York University. The book apparently says that differences in individual success in life has less to do with family than with individual differences within families. Conley uses 1990 census data.

Without having heard about Conley’s research we would assume from everything in popular culture that a’s will do much better in life than d’s.

My reading of the Eakin article is that c’s do better in life than b’s. Something quite astounding.

If this is true in America then America is the most meritocratic society in the history of the planet and well deserving of our great wealth.

While we are on the subject of chi-square tests, the first Surgeon General’s report on smoking and health had a chi-square test that showed urban non-smokers had higher lung cancer rates than rural smokers. That table was never shown again because, as a statistics TA, I sent my simple chi-square test to the local S.F. Chronicle science reporter who wrote it up. The subsequent Surgeons General’s reports had statisticians on their review boards and kept that data quashed.

Ganesh?

We all know that China matters a great deal more to the world than all of Europe put together. But we forget that India matters too.

Numbers tell the story I want to tell. India's GDP is almost $650 billion and growing at a possible 8% this year. China's is $1.5 trillion and growing slightly faster.

China's economic output is ahead of France and England and slightly behind Germany at $1.9 trillion. Europe is not growing. When Europe grows it grows at a rate of a few percentage points.

A simple bankers rule of thumb is that a 7% compound rate of growth doubles the original money in ten years. Variations on this mean that a10% rate doubles the money in seven years. 3.5% doubles in twenty years.

The dollar measure of GDP has some error in it because the Euro is overweighted right now and so is the Chinese Reminbi.

At current economic growth rates, population giant, India will pass most of the European nations in total economic output in less than fifteen years. That is soon on an historic scale.

India won't catch up with China's economic output at current rates but will be close behind. Both countries have similar population sizes, with India on the way to pass China's population of over a billion people.

"At current rates" is the issue I want to address. Which country, China or India, has a better economic engine of growth?

An anecdote will help. I taught a business class to former Indian military officers in Lucknow. The core mission, the school instructed me, was to teach the students that improvement was possible and desireable.

The basic premise of Indian culture is that the world proceeds in cycles always returning, wonderfully, to the point of origin before beginning the cycle over.

That is clearly not what industrial societies believe.

The god of improvement in India is a god that was re-introduced by the British over one hundred thirty years ago: Ganesh, the human-elephant god.

What I saw in India were two societies. The Indians who worshipped Ganesh, including a large group of ethnic Gujuratis, and all the rest. The Ganeshians were about 150 million people; middleclass. They hide their wealth from everyone else; a wise and practical policy.

The big advantage that China has over India is the vast overseas Chinese network that provides massive amounts of capital to China. The advantage India has over China is her deeply democratic background. Commerce thrives on the open, decentralized values of democracy.

Both countries have a similar problems. Industrial commerce requires meritocracy and trust. Both countries accept meritocracy based on mandarin test scores. Unfortunately that is not how commerce works. Dumb, mean and rude people can have greater merit in the world of commerce. Meritocracy will be difficult in both countries. China rewards family lineages and tongs over merit. India rewards cousins and caste over merit.

How either society will deal with the merit problem is not clear to me. Neither has an apparent advantage.

Both countries have the same problem of trust. Ask a question that requires a direct and honest answer. "Does this video system work on the American TV standards?" Most Indians will give you any answer that will create the least dissonance, unless you are a member of their family. Most Chinese will give you the answer that will sell the product, unless you are a member of their family. Neither system works well with industrial commerce.

So my answer to the question of which society will do better comes down to the extent to which either society can solve the problems of merit and trust. I would guess it will be done by incorporating top managers from outside and slowly learning over many decades. The Indians seem to do well incorporating Americans and Israelis into their industry. The Chinese seem to do well working with Japanese.

My wildest guess would be that India will have a slight advantage over the next thirty years. Look out for India.

Why is this man smiling?

I month ago I wrote a blog that said this man had a reason to smile and recommended that he take a victory lap.

You can click here to see him doing just what I recommended.

Silver gay lining

Just when I thought San Francisco was lost to the world of commerce because we have driven out nearly every major corporation founded in this city, and passed local ordinances that business people find odious, the new gay marriage scene may be a silver linning.

The gay marriage scene could bring 50-90,000 gays to San Francisco over the next few years. Sure we have over 150,000 gays living here now. More will be better.

Better for business and better for everything else about life.
(1) I live in the Castro District. It is safer here than anywhere else in America. So San Francisco will just get safer.

(2) The gay community has created the only first class institution in San Francisco, the symphony. Gay support has made Michael Tilson Thomas possible. Gays have helped improve the ballet and the Opera too.

(3) The gay community is harder working, more creative and more generous than any community (other than Jews).

The gay community will bring more small, innovative and creative businesses to San Francisco and we desperately need them. The gay community will work comfortably and immaginatively with the large number of Asians who are here. It all seems good for business to me.

A footnote. Those readers who know my distinction between trade, industry and clientric forms of business (in my Gods of Commerce) will recognize that gays are a perfect fit for the clientric business form.

More on Gay San Francisco

San Francisco may be doing the right thing. I suggested in an earlier Janet-Justin blog that we are entering a new era of Culture Wars.

Well, thanks to mayor Gavin Newsom, I might be right on the battle front. I like this kind of action. I was on the frontlines of the beat scene, the beatnik scene and deeply into the hippy, radical 70s world (I was a decorated officer in those campaigns).

San Francisco is forcing the gay marriage issue on the whole country, in a way that moderate Massachusetts could never do.

This might mean that Gavin is propelled to the national Democratic limelight at a time when the party really has nothing to lose. We'll see how the Democratic planners for the "Boston tea party" convention use mayor Gavin.

Stanton Street

I love commerce but there are many non-commercial wonders that are worthwhile mentioning. One is the great emotional reward I get from passing a street I lived on nearly forty years ago. I organized the neighbors to plant trees on the entire block and to put the electrical wires underground. The photo on the right is what the street looks like now, in the winter with many of the trees barren.

Gay Valentines Day in S.F.

Entrance to City Hall on Van Ness. Couples getting married. In wedding clothes, tuxes and white dresses.

Stretching around Van Ness at noon.
Around the block to Polk St.

What went wrong with Ginger?

Ginger was the code name given to a secret device that many corporate celebrities announced would change the world. Steven Jobs and John Doerr both said it.

I’ve ridden one, now called a Segway, and I agree with the corporate celebrities. It is a wonderful and highly useful device.

But Segway is about to go out of business. What went wrong?

One large thing went wrong. Engineering.

No, not the engineering of the Segway device. The engineering mentality of the creator, Dean Kamen and his friends. The best, most useful, brilliant device in the world can be put on the market and it may not be a successful product just because it is available. Great engineering won’t make a product successful.

The core of marketing is Phillips’ 1st Law: It is hard, nearly impossible, to change human behavior.

Yes, people will buy a better mousetrap. That is because their behavior doesn’t have to change ... they are already using mousetraps.

Phillips’ 2nd Law is: No business can afford to educate customers.

Kamen was a very logical engineer. He offered the Segway at a good price on Amazon, no distributors to waste time with, and got some serious organizations like the US Post Office and several police departments to try out the Segway. He also hired lobbyists to get every major city to permit Segways on sidewalks. (Perverse San Francisco did the opposite and banned them on sidewalks.)

Kaman and Segway have failed, or nearly failed. Someone will buy the company and re-introduce a variation of the product.

I have advised several businesses whose new products are widely used in the world.

This is what I would have done to make the Segway a success.

Forget hype. The market you want discounts hype 100%.

Distribute the first few hundred machines to athletic groups, like college polo teams or soccer teams and pay them to develop games with the device.

Offer a few hundred more, around the country, to some bicycle clubs, skate boarders, extreme sports stars and surfers. Let the young, adventurous people in our society, who are not behavior bound, find new, useful and most importantly, fun, roles for the Segway.

Once some useful, fun roles and models are visible, then I would set up a distribution network that parallels the new Segway usage patterns. If snowboarders are the first people to love the Segway and use it, then use the snowboard distribution channels.

Hypothetically you would go to snowboard shops set up retail outlets, and in the same location, create rental companies so people can try out the Segway before they buy. Definitely create repair shops, in the same location, so people know that the device can be repaired quickly and locally.

With this marketing plan, Segway would succeed very rapidly. No engineering mind, just an open commercial mind.

Comcast bid

How does a company with $18 billion in revenues offer to buy a company with $27 billion? That is exactly the revenue ratio,2 to 3, of these two companies. Disney is 50% larger than Comcast in revenue and nearly 100% larger than Comcast in number of employees.

It’s easy to understand. I advised several Internet highfliers, with no revenue, to buy some giant companies with billions in solid revenue. None did. If they had succeeded, some companies with 40 geek employees would be running companies with tens of thousands of white collar employees long after their Internet idea had evaporated.

The secret is the stock multiple. All financial instruments are priced at a multiple of their payouts (or potential payouts) to their owner. A bond that pays out $45 per year for three years would be priced at $1,000, a multiple of 22. A stock that pays dividends of $45 per year per share might have a price of $2,000 for a multiple of 45.5. The multiple is a measure of the risk of the investment and the expected future payouts.

What happened with Comcast, the smaller company, is that its multiple was much larger. Comcast, with revenues of $18 had a stock value of $70 billion, a multiple of market value to revenue of 3.9, while Disney, at the time of the Comcast bid had revenue of $27 billion and a stock market value of $50 billion, a multiple of only 1.85. (I use revenue in these multiple calculations because their actual payouts are less descriptive of the company than the revenue)

The presumption in the buyout by Comcast is that the combined company will be valued by the market at some multiple closer to Comcast’s than to Disney’s. If the Comcast multiple of 3.9 is used, the market value of the combined company would be $175 billion. If the combined company were valued at the Disney multiple it would be roughly half: $83 billion. Some part of that difference in valuation is what Comcast is willing to pay Disney shareholders to sell out to Comcast.

Three days after Comcast made its offer, the stock market has made the deal much less appealing to both parties. The price of Comcast fell and Disney rose. Comcast now has a lower multiple of 3.7 while Disney has a higher multiple of 2.1. The difference in the multiple value of the combined company is no longer so great: $166 billion at Comcast’s new stock price compared to $95 billion at Disney’s new multiple value. The three days since the Comcast offer was made has changed the relative price of each companies stock and taken $21 billion off of the potential difference in valuation of the combined companies.

At this point, Disney could turn around and offer to buy Comcast (with borrowed money) or join with another company to buy Comcast. Disney shareholders are making money right now and betting on a non-Comcast outcome; Comcast holders are losing.

More connect the dots

Samantha Power is a professor at the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard and author, last year, of "A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide.

Power wrote an entire book to show that U.S. leaders were aware of the horrors as they were occurring against Armenians, Jews, Cambodians, Iraqi Kurds, Rwandan Tutsis, and Bosnians during the past century, Power argued that much human suffering could have been alleviated through a greater effort by the U.S.

Professor Power was much acclaimed for her book and traveled widely to promote it.

Amnesty International is in the Power boat. Amnesty has identified and exclaimed against torture and genocide in nation after nation for more than thirty years.

President Carter was noted for his strong advocacy of human rights during his administration. Many say he went provocatively overboard on this issue.

Yet, you can Google for hours and never find Samantha Power, Amnesty International nor Jimmy Carter ever taking a public stand in favor of the U.S. action in Iraq. Carter was opposed to it and was given a Nobel Peace prize for his opposition.

You can’t Google a peep, or a mea culpa, out of any of these human rights advocates as bodies are dug from mass graves in Iraq.

You certainly don’t hear any of them demanding military action to overthrow the tyrannical and murderous regime in North Korea.

I don’t understand it. Peaceniks against genocide. These are not the friends to have when you are about to be the victim of genocide.

Copy Pixar

The following article appeared in today’s (2/10/04) Wall Street Journal. It is rare that I find business writing that makes all the points that Salli Rasberry and I make in our Marketing Without Advertising (Nolo Press).

Price’s point number 2 is one we don’t make in our book. I make this recommendation in dealing with all my clients. There are many sources of capital that don’t require you to go public.

By DAVID A. PRICE

"What a difference a decade makes. Ten years ago, a small company called Pixar was selling animation software and turning out animated commercials for Listerine and Lifesavers. The Walt Disney Co., which was financing a Pixar film for theatrical release, had all but dictated the terms of the deal. And in late 1993, Disney had ordered Pixar to shut down production of the film on account of story problems.

"Today, Pixar Animation Studios is king of the hill, critically and commercially. When CEO Steve Jobs ended contract talks with Disney last month, the press focused on how Disney would cope: Pixar's films make up around 45% of the operating income from Disney's film operations.

"Pixar's own story holds nuggets for other companies. Most firms depend on adding value through intellect and creativity. Firms hoping to become the Pixars of their own industries could learn a thing or two from them:

"1. Small things, done well, can lead to big things. Pixar's early short films in the 1980s, painstakingly crafted, had no immediate commercial value except to promote the company's production tools. But they would serve as the calling cards that led to the first Disney deal and "Toy Story."

"2. Location, location, location. Pixar's leadership values the serendipity that results from having employees accessible to one another and interacting under one roof. While other technology companies -- and animation studios -- outsource work to distant locales, Pixar has done the opposite. It brings together top people from far and wide and houses them in a single building, a faux-19th-century structure laid out to promote casual interchange.

"3. Stay closely held until you hit your stride. Easier said than done, certainly, but look at Pixar's case. The company struggled financially for nine years through various business models before releasing "Toy Story." Fortunately, it had a sole owner in the person of Steve Jobs, who'd bought it in 1986 from George Lucas. It's doubtful that public shareholders or a VC-dominated board would have had the patience of Jobs.

"4. Make technology the servant, not the master. Disney and other studios are turning away from traditional animation, on the theory that Pixar's success is due to its 3D look. This is cargo-cult thinking. The storytelling skill embedded in Pixar's films has driven its success, not the technology. Those who doubt the power of 2D animation, when combined with great writing, need only look at the audience numbers for a crudely drawn series called "The Simpsons." And Harry Potter reminds us that even the lowest-tech medium, ink on paper, will find a mass audience if the story is there. Technology is a powerful means to the right end, but it's the end that counts."

Mr. Price is the author of "Love and Hate in Jamestown" (Knopf, 2003), a history of the Virginia Company.

Connect the dots

Do newspaper readers make a connection between white collar outsourcing and American school test scores?

I have occasionally hired people on the bottom end of the labor-skills scale. That is where you will find the people who never learned to read, write on a computer or speak understandable English. That is where people who didn’t graduate from high school end up, as well as people who graduated but can’t read or speak clearly.

Connect the dots folks. If we are turning out hundreds of thousands of students, annually, who can’t read, type on a computer or speak English clearly, then you can figure out that there aren’t enough competent workers in America on the bottom of the labor scale to supply the demand for low skill white collar work.

It is simple logic that leads a corporation to outsource work to English speaking, college educated workers in India, Singapore and Manila.

There is a moral point too. I have friends in India who I care about much more than I care about the two lazy bums who live down the street from me and collect unemployment and SSI. Just because my neighbors are Americans I see no reason to create jobs for them.

Please help me understand why the Indians I care about shouldn’t get jobs that they can do much better than my neighbors?

Daughters

My daughters have had an influence on my cooking. I learned to leave a cube of butter on the table at room temperature. That way I use it as flavor on occasion. I also keep a quart of buttermilk in the fridge because it is vital in making many soups taste much better.

I recently added two tools to the cooking armamentarium. One is a fine cheese grater. Fine slivers of hard cheese, like peccorino. The cheese ends up resembling a cloud. The other is a table top knife sharpener. I love sharp knives and get all the knives sharpened professionally. This table model keeps them very sharp.

This leads to another subject: taste. Taste is obviously relative. The highly refined taste of a chef at Nobu has no greater standing in a democratic society than the taste of a manager of the local Wendy’s. The fact that the food reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle, Michael Bauer, is partial to restaurants that serve pomme frites and bifstek (burger and fries) doesn’t make him less of a food critic. You just need to know his tastes.

However, my mind doesn’t work that way. I’m convinced that some people can taste far more varieties of flavor than others. Worse yet, that people with very sensitive taste buds lose their sensitivity the more alcohol they drink.

Forty years ago, when I was foolish, I tested the prevailing view that San Francisco bagels were crap compared to New York authentic bagels. I flew in a box of Zabar’s bagels for an 11am Sunday brunch with 40 people. In a double blind test, San francisco bagels versus New York, no one could tell the difference.

The real taste test I wanted to do these days would make me an outcast. A friend, Katrina, made me do the test in a rudimentary way. We, Katrina and I, had a dozen people, double blind, taste five different food categories in groups of three different tastes, before and after having one drink of booze.

Thank god the test was sloppy. If I could state unequivocally that having a glass of wine before dinner would turn your judgment of a poor dinner into a good one or an average one into a great one ---- I’d have no friends. Nearly everyone demands the right to enjoy a glass of wine and comment knowledgably about the food they proceed to eat. Most even claim the wine enhances the food.

If you want to be an outcast do the test correctly. You need about 30 people. Use only three different types of food (four different ground up veggies, four ground up fruits and four different ground up crackers) but be sure to have four different flavors in each food category. I only had three flavors so the guests could eliminate one and make a good guess at the remaining two.

Please don’t tell me the results. From my own inadequate test, I could see that some people have much greater sensitivity to flavors, but even they lose sensitivity with booze.

Dennis Kucinich

Nobody seems to take Dennis Kucinich any more seriously than they take Al Sharpton. He usually gets under 2% of the vote but he got 8% in the Washington State caucuses yesterday.

Adolph Hitler spelled out his intentions in writing and then carried them out. I just read Kucinich’s writings and believe he is no less a lunatic threat than Hitler. It’s just that we don’t expect him to get anywhere.

Another way to look at Kucinich’s writings is as the repository of all Lefty Fundamentalist ideas. (Or what passes for ideas.)

Kucinich’s basic premise is that we are a nation catastrophically gripped by fear. This fear seems to me to be much like the fear that gripped the hippies and anti-Vietnam politicos in the 1960s and 1970s. Fear of food poisoning (we had to go organic) fear of eco cataclysm that would end the world almost any day, fear of population growth that was going to starve us to death and fear of the U.S. government that targeted pot smokers with death sentences.

Kucinich hates commerce. He believes we have a hopeless healthcare system because of HMOs. That NAFTA and the WTO are ruining the world by enriching multinational corporations. He promises to break up (nationalize) large farms so small farms can replace them. Honest, I’m not making this up.

Kucinich says we passed the Patriot Act out of sheer fear. The Patriot Act targets labor unions, the mainstay of wealth and productivity in the United States.

Kucinich demands that we have full social security retirement benefits for people aged 65. What is he talking about? The age of full retirement moves up slowly over the coming decades because of the large number of people entering the system. He wants more progressive taxation on SSI so the retirement age won’t move up. (That would make the tax revenue far more volatile than it is already and make needy people more dependent on the prosperity of rich people.)

Kucinich wants the Federal government to spend much more on education, health, environmental protection and clean energy, homeless and the world.

Kucinich wants the U.N. (the global hate-Jews organization) to vastly expand its hunger, disease and clean water programs with the U.S. paying for the expanded U.N. He also opposed U.S. intervention in Iraq and wants immediate insertion of U.N. peacekeepers with oil money going to the U.N. and Iraq being turned into a socialist state. I’m not kidding. It turns out that the 9/11 attackers were criminals and must be dealt with by the U.N. and these men only intended and only continue to plan to “injure Americans.”

Kucinich seems to have anti-corporate attitudes that fit the Communist Manifesto of 1848. His small farm policies fit the peak of small farming in 1890. His U.N ideas match the organizational founding in 1946. His nostalgia for the good old union days relates to the peak of unions in 1953. His foreign policy is circa anti-war Gene McCarthy and Jane Fonda in 1968.

In line with the 1960s and 1970s, Kucinich wants pot legal and users of all other drugs in rehab. Really.

This man, Dennis Kucinich, is actually running for office in 2004. Lefty Fundamentalism appears to me to be a little toy garbage truck picking up debris that has washed ashore from sunken ships over the past 150 years. Not a single new or interesting idea in the whole seaweed porridge.

Where's the butter?

What’s happening to butter? Check the location of the butter on your local grocery shelves. The layout of a grocery store is a model of our minds. We think of rodents in two different ways. Some are family gerbils and their food is in the pet section. Others are damn mice and rats and their food is in the poison section with household cleansers.

Butter has traditionally been a dairy product, delivered by the milkman along with milk, eggs and sometimes cheeses. In the three grocery stores I have visited in three different cities, I’ve found the butter migrating to new parts of the grocery --- away from the dairy.

Most recently I found butter, as expected with margarine and butter substitutes, but on the opposite side of the store from milk. The milk was near the yogurts and not too far from the eggs. The butter was with the sliced meats and sandwich fixin’s.

What is happening at your stores?

San Francisco anti-Semites

In several blogs I have pointed out that San Francisco is the most anti-Semitic city in America. This is because of the large number of Lefty Fundamentalists and the small number of influential and out-of-the-closet Jews. The latest evidence is last weeks' labor panel discussion on the Middle East. Raging uncontrollable hatred of Jews, right here in San Francisco.

Wardrobe Malfunction

I think this event will be seen as the beginning of the New Culture Wars. The reaction to the Janet - Justin event has been much greater than I would have expected.

We seem to entering an era of New Culture Wars. This is not so surprising. We have been in a century long battle of Commerce against Tribalism. Commerce is open, diverse, technological, urban and democratic. Tribalism isn’t. The outside battle comes inside.

The single great 20th /21st Century War, that began with WWI, entered a new phase after 1947. The United States found itself fighting the external war internally. We Americans had emerged from the anti-Nazi WWII and found ourselves inside a vast global milieu of socialism. All educated people knew for certain, in 1947, that we would rapidly establish a socialist government to nationalize our major industries, strengthen unions and provide a comprehensive social security infrastructure. The Brits and much of Europe went in that pre-ordained socialist direction. The U.S., home of genuine lovers of commerce, began an internal battle against the external socialist enemy. Communists, proto-communists and neo-communists were all dragged into a dispute about their right to full membership in a commercial-democratic American society.

Out of that fight, that took place over a forty year period, emerged our modern language of market economics, free market democracy and commercial triumphalism.

It’s happening again. Externally we are fighting tribal forces who hate Commerce. The tribal forces are organized into tribal units, with tribal values. They hate women in short skirts and women in bathing suits. They hate the diversity of urban life, the casual friendships, urban licentiousness and worst of all they hate the vast open vistas of ambiguity and uncertainty that penetrate everyday Commercial life.

So we will be fighting these same battles within our society over the next several decades. These will be the New Culture Wars.

Porn is already secure thanks to the technology of the home video camera. Gays are already out of the closet. God and traditional religion are dead, long live “a higher power.” Many realms of cultural debate remain.

We don’t know where to draw the line on exposure to porn (clearly not at the Super Bowl), we don’t know how civil gay rights are. We don’t know how to draw the line about the public use of drugs. We have yet to discuss human genetic engineering. The battles are just beginning.

In the end we will have a better understanding of the morality that a democratic commercial society needs.

Corporate Social Responsibility

“What happened to the Socially Responsible Investment movement?” a friend asked recently. Since I was in the movement from nearly the beginning I can give some of the answers.

Today, many funds, some money market accounts and a few organizations claim to be part of the socially responsible investment movement. Some of the originals still exist --- Pax and Calvert Funds. But the movement is long dead and past the stage of rigor mortis.

As a board member of Point Foundation (WholeEarthCatalog money) I convened all the corporate social responsibility activists in the country for a gathering and planning session in 1971 in Inverness CA. (Several got their start with Ralph Nader organizations.)

I also traveled to New York, as treasurer of the Glide Foundation (Glide Memorial Methodist Church) to talk major foundation executives into using some of their investment portfolios to support their donor programs. Many came close to laughing at me while I was still in their office.

I funded several of the leading Corporate Social Responsibility organizations and kept my finger on the pulse of the movement for several decades.

Two things went wrong. First the definition of social responsibility went wild. Initially the concerns were gender and racial diversity as well as environmental responsibility. Within a few years corporations were being judged on production of war materiel, connections to the tobacco industry, then investment and connection to South Africa and the Philippines (remember Marcos). From there on the list got longer: animal testing, renewable energy, renewable resources, labeling of products, fire safety of children’s clothes, charitable giving, toxic product disposal and most recently overseas sweat shops.

Since no organization or group of organizations can keep track of actual corporate behavior in this wide range of issues, everyone just started faking it. Today it is just a feel good message. “We are warm and fuzzy socially responsible investors”, mostly putting their money in government bonds, a few internet companies and affordable housing REITs.

The second thing that went wrong is that no viable organization grew up to coordinate socially responsible investment policy and take public credit for policy successes in investment practices. Without successes to show the validity of the idea, the movement had nowhere to go.

The best counter example to this is Environmental Defense which sends me a regular newsletter showing the success of their programs and the validity of their existence.

I will confess. Within two years of helping start the movement, I decided that corporations were not moral organizations and shouldn't be. The way to influence corporate behavior needed to be much more direct than through withholding investment. Even voting proxies struck me as ineffective.

Goodbye Rev. Al

The Tuesday primary in South Carolina was a wonderful testament to the good political sense of black Americans and the tragic absence of leadership among blacks.

The Tawana Brawley candidate from New York, a disgraceful representative of any group of people, got less than 12% of the vote in the densest black district. That should be an undiluted message to every black in the rest of America that stupidity is not a voting requirement. 88% of black voters in South Carolina said, ”this dim light bulb, Rev. Sharpton, doesn’t speak for me.”

Now is the time for black ministers to act like leaders. Black voters in South Carolina have led the way. It’s time for black ministers around the country to show respect for blacks in the Republican Party who have succeeded in America without using the Sharpton racist tactics.

The message to black leaders all over America should be: supporting blacks who do well in America (including black Republicans) and being an independent voting group is better for blacks than being slaves to the Democratic Party.

Whisper the secret victory

This blog is an Internet whisper. Americans all over the country have voted decisively on one issue.

The print press is afraid of embarrassing itself in the sacred halls of lefty fundamentalist journalism: Columbia University. The press is afraid of never getting a future good journalism award. Otherwise, some paper would have a headline: Anti-war activists soundly rejected by America. Howard Dean is the new Jane Fonda. Dean was forthright and obsessive about his anti-Iraq war stance and denounced all the other candidates for their weak or pro-war stances. Americans didn’t like what he said. They rejected him.

Dean should have done well. He’s running in the Democratic Party, which is the home of nearly all, 90%, of the anti-war activists and he was the unambiguous champion of the anti-war cause. Dean didn’t even get one third of the vote anywhere. His party is half the country and he got under 30% of the vote everywhere. That translates to less than 15% of the American voters; less than one out of seven people voted against the Iraq war when given a chance. Dean was a one issue candidate. A pure litmus test.

The past nine primaries are a clear message to our troops, to the Baathist suicide–bombing Iraqis and to European lefties. There is no substantial American opposition to our war of liberation and regime change in Iraq. Except in the streets of San Francisco.

MoveOff guys

Was I prescient about the Super Bowl? In my blog of January 25th I compared the proposed MoveOn ad, that CBS refused to air, to a “streaker” suggesting that the ad had parallels to a streaker: simply seeking attention for offensiveness.

The Super Bowl did me one better. There was a streaker and the TV audience never saw him because the cameras ignored him. CBS exercised the same policy that applied to MoveOn.

As we all know now, MTV succeeded in creating a similar offensive act for the football watching audience, and MTV management is probably going to pay some penalties for it in the future. MoveOn was lucky.