Pro Commerce

Louisiana and New Orleans

In earlier blog I pointed out that the politics of Louisiana and New Orleans are the worst in the U.S..  The anti-Bush forces were relentless in bashing President Bush for Katrina, when everyone in politics knew what a meanspirited dishonest attack that was.

Here is an update from the Saturday Wall Street Journal's Kane Webb:

"Incumbent Gov. Kathleen Blanco, a Democrat, declined to run for a second term after seeing her approval ratings fall through the floor following Hurricane Katrina two years ago. Now it appears the man she defeated four years ago on a platform of experience over youthful optimism, 36-year-old Republican Bobby Jindal, will win in a walk.

"Louisiana politics has long served up a spicy roux of rascals. Former Gov. Edwin W. Edwards is now ensconced in a federal prison. He was elected to a fourth term as governor in 1991 in a race against David Duke, the ex-Klansman and demagogue, in a campaign famous for a bumper sticker that read, "Vote for the Crook. It's Important." More recently, Rep. William Jefferson (who's under federal investigation because of some cold, hard cash found in his cold, hard freezer) and Sen. David Vitter (whose phone number turned up in an alleged madam's little black book) have been in the news.

"Sadly for Louisianans the list goes on. And it grew longer after the political bumbling in the wake of Katrina and its destruction. Gov. Blanco and Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans, aren't so much real people anymore as walking editorial cartoons. For lampooning purposes only, not to be taken seriously."

Bureaucracy

A great story of the SEC and the way a hippy, former CPA, dealt with bureaucracy.

This is from a private unpublished manuscript.

"One Monday morning in 1974, I get a phone call from a man who identifies himself at Matthew Brodsky.  I am not there at the time....

Moral responsibility for poverty

One of the distinctions that anti-commerce people make about us pro-commerce people is that we 'don't care about the poor.'

The most perverted statements I hear come from Jews when I ask why they don't support President Bush, the best friend the Jews have ever had. The response is that you can't care about the poor and vote Republican.

Absolutely untrue, wrong and insulting. I can make a statement about poverty that is very clear:

Each of us has an overwhelming moral responsibility to help people who are poor to get out of poverty.  That moral responsibility is absolute, unambiguous and perpetual.

That being said and true, then one has to deal with the question of whether there is any known way of spending money, or using government programs, to get people who are poor, out of poverty. The answer is no.  Therefore the moral responsibility exists but no action follows from it.

The 2007 Neocons are the people who in 1970 worked in the Great Society programs to alleviate poverty and found that virtually none of the programs worked, including Head Start. Unemployment wasn't reduced.  No amount of money spent on education had a positive effect.  This was overwhelmingly proved by the Bishop Foundation in Hawaii, for native Hawaiians, which spent fortunes on individual tutoring and luxury schools without showing any positive effect.  The previous blog deals with the same issue dealing with housing and poor neighborhoods. You can't change poverty with money or programs.

On a global scale, poor nations seem to get worse, the more international aid money they get. Only commerce gets nations out of poverty.

The only known way to reduce poverty, in absolute and relative terms is the expansion of commerce locally and nationally. 

That is what we morally caring and righteous pro-commerce people strive for. We know how to meet our moral obligation to care for the poor....promote commerce.

Rain mill

The combination of a rainy day in October in San Francisco and Al Gore winning a Nobel Peace Prize led me to this great invention.

The image on the right is the Phillips Rainmill™.  As rain runs down your roof, before it reaches your gutter, it turns a 3 inch diameter horizontal water wheel.  The water wheel is attached to an electric generator.  The rain falling on your roof generates electricity.

We will be able to sell the Phillips Rainmills™ at very low cost because the generation of clean green energy will mean that the producer of the Phillips Rainmills™ and the buyers will be eligible for carbon offset credits. 

The Phillips Rainmill™ operating in an area with 30 inches of rainfall per year and four 25 foot rainmill segments on the roof should generate 24 kilowatts per year.  That translates to 40 pounds of carbon saved every year with the use of green energy. Save that carbon.

Copyright © 2007, Patent Pending. Congratulations are in order for this brilliant environmental invention.

Quiz

The only thing I read in the Sunday paper is a column by Marilyn vos Savant. Marilyn stays current on probability issues and a few years ago published the puzzle of the three doors on a quiz show.  The answer was counter-intuitive, took me two weeks to figure out by myself.  In the contest the player states which door he will choose for the prize.  The game show host then says "before I open the door you chose, I'll let you see that one of the other two is empty, (which he does), now do you want to change your guess?"

Here's my quiz.  Given the following pairs of initials what comes next: AA, JC, AG __

Moving to new neighborhood

There are numerous studies that came out of the Moving to Opportunity experiment that was done in the mid 1990s.  Over 4200 families, living in public housing in five cities were given two opportunities to move. Nearly all the participants were single mothers with teenagers. Two thirds were black and one third were Hispanic. 

One experimental group was limited to moves to other fairly poor neighborhoods but not public housing; the second moved to significantly better neighborhoods.  A third control group stayed behind and was also followed for five years. 

The best study shows that there was a small effect of moving out of the black ghetto, but not much.  One group didn't benefit, teenage boys. When moved to better neighborhoods, teenage boys from public housing acted worse than their peers who stayed behind.  Girls did a little better in school and behavior. Mothers made modest improvements in their earning ability and big improvements in their happiness.

In general, getting out of public housing and bad, crime ridden, neighborhoods is positive, but it has little impact on reducing the factors associated with poverty, like work skills.  Very little impact other than what individuals can achieve on their own if they want to.

Slow motion train wreck

In the late 1970s, when I was a portfolio manager, I sent one of my favorite investment advisers to South Africa to evaluate the investment opportunities.  He returned with a positive investment review for the short term but predicted that apartheid would not last more than fifteen years.  He was exactly right.

Now I regularly meet well educated competent former South Africans who have left the country with no plans to return. 

I asked one of my brothers to report on his recent trip to South Africa. His report is that the government is totally incompetent.  With few possible positive changes, the direction for the country is clearly negative. 

South Africa seems to be a slow motion train wreck.  How many years before the world can see that the future of this beautiful bountiful country has disappeared?

Why we use credit cards

Americans have more credit cards and use them more than any people in the world.  Much more so than anyone else.

I was hired a few decades ago in Japan to examine the reasons so few Japanese had and used credit cards.  Answer, when young people were given cards they ran them right up to the limit, immediately.  When older people, people with children were given cards they never used them.

Japan is a cash society with minimal theft, so a credit card is meaningless.  Credit is traditionally used for a car purchase or a mortgage so the abstract idea of personal credit doesn't exist.

We fail to see that the American invention of and development of personal credit skills has had the effect of increasing our effective income, allowed us to personally borrow from our future higher earnings and smooth out irregularities in our expenses.  In general, credit cards provide a  net increase in our social well-being.

Ignore the middle-east

Sometimes I see a piece of human thought that is so extraordinary, it takes my breath away.  That is the power of Edward Luttwak's article that I read recently.

I interviewed Luttwak several years ago for my public radio program Social Thought.  He was clear and brilliant then.  This article shows Luttvak to be even more brilliant, he out does nearly everyone else on the subject.

There are four parts to Luttwak's argument.  This first is identical to mine: Arabs are uniquely incompetent, always have been always will be.  Second, they hold on to a false belief in their former glory and will be driven by that absurdity for centuries into the future.  Third, whatever the modern world does to the Arabs, generous or harsh, the Arab behavior will continue unabated in a straight line on its irrational course.

And lastly, the Arabs (and Persians) can do very little real damage (when you think in terms of previous world wars).  The Straits of Hormuz are well protected by us, Israel is highly competent and oil is going to flow no matter what.

Rules of time

I am baffled by the nature of time in a contemporary commercial urban society.  There are two aphorisms that accurately reflect the world of time around me:

'Give a busy man the job, to get something done' and
'Work expands to fill the time available'.

So how do these two statements fit together, they seem contradictory?

I think the answer is that we have a metronome and a scheduling algorithm built into our mind.  We live our life at a particular beat, set by the general expectations of our life: we range from a 60 hour work week, two teen age kids and a spouse with a rapid time beat on one extreme to a single person in a retirement village at a slow beat on the other extreme. Those are the ranges of our metronome.

The metronome sets a key variable in the scheduling algorithm.  Once that key variable is set, the scheduling algorithm arrays all of our responsibilities in a line; the line prescribing our minute-by-minute functions is organized to solve the problem of allocating our attention to details, tactics and strategies that accomplish our goals.  The algorithm drives us and fulfills our needs.

Does that answer my question?

Yes, it does for me.  Beat and pace are what time is about.  Beat is set by the nature of our daily life and pace is the algorithm we use to get everything done. Get the right mixture and all power is in our hands.

Big change

The title of this blog is now Pro-Commerce and my photo has changed.

I lived with the pro-commerce concept and the hat for several weeks and I have concluded, in all humility that this discovery is of major significance.

'What discovery?' you may ask. The discovery that the world has been in a battle between the pro-commerce and the anti-commerce forces for thousands of years.  The battle heated up for the four hundred years from 1575 to 1975 but the anti-commerce forces peaked in 1975 and the pro-commerce forces are now in the ascent.

Jesus is not the first, but he was prominent in the early anti-commerce forces, driving the important and useful money changers from the temple steps and telling his followers to "render unto Caesar..."   For more than a millennium the Roman Catholic Church was the strongest anti-commerce force in history. The closest power comparable to The Roman Church was the Chinese Ming ruler who brought home the 320 ship Cheng Ho trading fleet that went as far as West Africa. 

The first genuine conflict the Church faced was the Protestant Reformation which pitted the anti-commerce Church forces against the burghers, traders and financiers of Holland in the world's first Democratic Republic.  From thereon, the Protestants were the Northern European traders versus the Southern European status quo seekers.

My discovery is not just the appropriateness of calling this millennia years old battle what it is and connecting reality to its own history, pro-commerce versus anti-commerce, but selecting the right word: commerce.

Most people have no idea what commerce is, yet they grasp the sense of the word.  Most people also use the term capitalism to refer to their vague notion of commerce.  Yet capitalism is a hollow word with no rigorous meaning, no connection to reality and plenty of nonsensical political baggage. 

A simple proof of the inadequacy of "capitalism" as a viable term is to ask yourself when does a flute player for a small music group, who teaches on the side, go from being a participant in commerce to being a capitalist? Is it when she joins a symphony, when she becomes the conductor, when the symphony combines with other symphonies to be a regional non-profit and she becomes the CEO and conductor, when the regional group joins a profit making New York stage company, when the New York stage company joins a Japanese and Italian company to become a multi-national traveling classic music venue? When? Capitalism is such a vague and sloppy word that it has no coherent connection to reality.

Thus to identify the historic battle between commerce and anti-commerce is significant and to call it by the right name commerce is equally important.  Join the fight and openly shout our allegiance to commerce.  We are pro-commerce.

Diversity?

You can see from my banner that I personally like diversity.  I live in San Francisco and my top reason for doing so is the diversity.  Diversity of ethnicities, diversity of geographic origins and diversity of weirdness....eclectic and original. On diversity of opinion, intelligence and insight San Francisco is desperately wanting.

The issue of diversity has finally gotten the attention of a good mind.  A superb mind for that matter: Robert Putnam a Harvard sociologist.

Putnam did a brilliant experiment.  He looked at the diversity of thousands of American communities, as measured in the 2000 Census, and asked whether an increase in diversity had consequences in any measures of social cohesion and social participation.

Sadly for Putnam and happily for us, Putnam found a negative relationship.  The more diverse a community the less cohesion and community participation. Putnam didn't like that result, so fortunately for us, he spent two years rechecking his data and testing every other possible explanation for the data results.  The finding still stands.

Putnam's findings are in an obscure journal (Scandanavian Political Studies) and the article is extra long; but it is thorough, reliable and fascinating.

The findings don't bother me, nor am I surprised.  The results coincide with my forty years experience as a community organizer. The benefit of commerce is that it provides the platform for diversity to thrive and for diverse people to associate together. They don't have to like each other and they don't have to have common political values.

Diverse people sell to each other, a great variety of ethnic restaurants is an example and so is the wide range of ethnic retail stores. Business environments are where diversity of ethnic peoples work together comfortably. Diversity provides market breadth in every dimension, financially, technologically, esthetically and nearly every other way.

Three cheers for Putnam for giving us the straight facts and four cheers for commerce for thriving on diversity and keeping more of it coming.

The market is ready

The market is ready for three products and we are waiting for them to arrive:

1. A cell phone that connects to the Internet, uses voice over the Internet wherever it is feasible, looks much like the Iphone and has many of the Iphone's useful features, has good battery life (or back-ups), can be used on any network for a month or more with good credit including internationally and has good coverage, like we find in Japan and Israel.

2. The newspaper replacement on the computer.  The Sony Reader will replace the newspaper, book and magazine when it is in color, has Iphone-like screen interaction and can download by wi-fi or other radio system. 

3. The car that is hybrid and plug-in rechargeable.  The car should go 50 miles on a two hour charge.

Vigilantism

I went to see the Jodie Foster movie, Brave One, after the Wall Street Journal writer Kyle Smith (9/28 pp W11) pointed out how PC the movie is with Jodie's victim fiance an Indian-Brit doctor, the purps are three mostly-white tattooed hoodies and Jody is a Lesbian.

But all of that PC worked out fine because it moved the issues of the movie to a different dimension.

Jodie carries out a personal revenge which would never work as a movie.  But the ending brings a black man onto the scene to join Jody with his vengeance and what we get is vigilantism.

To me the point of the movie is that revenge, personal or tribal of the Arab or Appalachian (Hatfields and McCoys) type is a significantly lower form of justice than vigilantism.

Vigilantism requires that the victim or the victim's relatives gather supporters among the broader non-family community.  To do this requires convincing other people of the justice of the particular case.

Admittedly vigilantism is not the higher form of justice that our criminal justice system is designed to mete out.  But vigilantism is definitely superior to personal or tribal revenge and we should appreciate that. 

Maybe that is one reason developed nations seek multi-national forces in international military operations.

I might also note that our criminal justice system recognizes the importance of a speedy trial, a borrowing from vigilantism. Our justice system also has a possible draw-back. Vigilantism often takes account of 'prior history of crimes' which is usually excluded evidence in our criminal justice jury system.

Dead and appreciated

The American Planning Association has rated North Beach as one of the ten great neighborhoods in America.

I know North Beach.  I've lived there, I know the politics and for 30 years I have been a North Beach coffee habitue.

Unfortunately, the sentimental forces, so appreciated by the Sentimental APA, have made sure that North Beach is dead.  Dead and probably gone.  There is not one single "good" restaurant in the area, though a dozen have opened and failed. (I happen to like Rose Pistola these days but it is not in the top 25 S.F. restaurants.)  The food business is tourist oriented; actually pizza oriented. 

Ordinary tourists tend to avoid North Beach, most of the time, because it is desolate to their eyes.  Not a single store they recognize in about ten blocks. No Kinkos, no Verizon, no Gap, no Starbucks...nothing friendly and familiar.  Most tourists in North Beach are from Europe, ones with an academic and sentimental perspective.

The neighborhood is actually dangerous after 10pm.  Gangs from San Jose and the East Bay patronize the clubs on Broadway.  Even 40-50 police on duty and clearing the street of cars, does little to stem the fighting and danger. A dead zone for business is a live zone for gangs.

North Beach is embalmed, certainly resting in its coffin for the rest of my life.  It is like visiting Lenin's tomb.  I visited Lenin's tomb, you may want to too.

Footnote: Marshall Kilduff said the same thing I did, only better.

Shrinking market

Those of us who are pro-commerce get to watch the slow and painful death of the failed anti-commerce Left.  I happen to view the spectacle with some pleasure. There is a new pleasure for us.

We have seen the anti-Jewish and virulently Leftist San Francisco Chronicle lose circulation at an astounding rate, from a Bay Area maximum of 350K to under 100K today, less than 35K readers in San Francisco.  The paper, according to BusinessWeek is losing $1 million a month.

The mean-spirited Lefty LA Times was sold-off twice in the past five years after closing its Orange County branch for lack of reader interest and big circulation losses.

We saw the Lefty imitation of thriving conservative talk radio, Air America, blow through tens of millions of dollars and fail in less than a year.

We saw Fox News devastate Lefty CNN.

Now we learn that the fount of Lefty worship is close to bankruptcy, likely to be bought out or go under in less than two years.

The N.Y. Times is going under for one or both of two reasons.  First nepotism.  The Times is being run by the fourth generation of the Sulzberger family a complete incompetent. (The family hasn't been Jewish for two generations.) I rail against the tragedy of nepotism all the time.

The second reason is the rapidly shrinking Lefty market.  The New York Times practices opinionated-reporting which makes sure only Leftie's can read the paper without screaming. The Lefty market is shrinking rapidly as it dies off, suffers dementia and moves to France.

Goodbye Lefty world. You may have been idealists early in the 20th Century, but you were blind to the genocidal consequences of your ideas the rest of the century.  I can't bid you farewell, you don't deserve it.

Pro-commerce

I am now using two terms that, when Googled, are new and new in my form of usage.  Pro commerce and second voice.

Pro-commerce is obvious but what is not obvious is that I am standing on a mountain top shouting that I am pro-commerce.  Few others, maybe none, are calling themselves pro-commerce.  I'm not left or right, I'm not automatically on one side of free trade or gay marriage arguments.  I am pro commerce. Many others are pro commerce and it is time to be proud of who we are. We need caps, t-shirts and bumper stickers everywhere. Proclaim 'pro-commerce' to the world.

The world has had people who are openly anti-commerce for thousands of years.  Jesus was adamantly anti-commerce and so was Mohamed. The Catholic Church was anti-commerce and still is; the socialists, the communists and the Left are anti-commerce.

The world has not had strong, public, verbal and adamant pro commerce spokespeople before.  It is time for us to be heard.

The second voice, is the voice that was never fully heard before the 1980s. We heard pro-free market, anti-totalitarianism, we heard pro status quo and we heard Milton Friedman on free choice. 

The second voice is new.  The second voice is the coherent explication of the benefits of commerce.  The second voice is pro commerce.  The second voice loves meritocracy, decentralized markets and global trade.  Commerce is the human cornucopia.

Now there are two meaningful sides to contemporary life: pro commerce and anti-commerce.  The fact that anti-commerce is losing every debate, every trial, every empirical test needs to be shouted from the roof tops.  We who are pro commerce are the second voice.

Split the airline companies

Since I wrote Gods of Commerce in the early 1990s I have pointed out that many corporations are mixtures to two different kinds of commerce.

There are three kinds of commerce: Trade, industry and clientry. The object of trade is to make each sale and have enough profit to stay in business for the next sale.  Think your local flower or local coffee shop.

The object of industry is to reduce costs.  Usually that means changing customer behavior, such as creating isles and restricted checkout stands and exits in department stores or achieving economies of scale and lowering prices.  Think Starbucks and McDonald's.

The object of clientry is to maintain a lifetime relationship with the customer.  Think lawyer, doctor and graphic designer.

Airline companies are industrial companies when it comes to airplanes. They seek economies of scale in volume, speed and capacity.  But airlines also try to gain the loyalty of customers.  In striving for loyalty they are clientric.

Industrial management and clientric management are different.

I have been recommending for years that airlines be split into the airplanes in one company and the customer contact in another.  Air Canada did just that last year.  Now United is thinking of spinning off its Mileage Plus business. 

Good start in the right direction.

Hey, United management....wouldn't you like to know the theory behind the numbers you are seeing?

Summer of lost love

Three people I trust, and who lived in hippie times, went to the Summer of Love 40th Anniversary festival in San Francisco.  All three reported the same thing.

The audience included many original hippies, dressed as hippies.  The music wasn't very good to contemporary ears and the political rants were as stupid as ever.  The audience didn't listen to the rants this year, just as they didn't listen 40 years ago.

The big change was that this year the people in attendance were an audience.  Forty years ago the people were an optimistic, up-beat community.  Big difference.

I wish I knew

I read an article by James Lewis that connects Ahmadinejad's UN speech to the traditional Shia apocalyptic warning. Ahmadinejad is saying that Iran intends to destroy everything it can, even willingly sacrificing itself. (Lewis calls him Ahmadi-Nejad).

I wish I knew who the James Lewis is who wrote this article.  Does he know Persian? As that great teacher of relativism, Stanley Fish, has correctly pointed out, it matters who says what and what authority they have (author of: Is there a Text in this Class?).

If a Persian scholar says what Lewis is saying it should set off nuclear alarm bells in every room in the world.

UAW settlement

The recent UAW GM pension and medical care settlement is not a fore runner of other medical care settlements except for the expected Ford and Chrysler follow on.

What happened is that UAW has agreed to have GM cover the currently known actuarial costs of the retirees medical care, over a decade. If the earnings are insufficient, GM will contribute more, if the medical costs rise too fast the UAW will be responsible for cutting back services.

Seems reasonable to me and is a credit to the UAW's ability to understand the nature of international automobile competition.

Evil

Sometimes evil is so painful and horrifying to confront that the passing of time will not help.  I wrote this blog more than a month ago in hopes that the passage of time would diminish some of the shock of confronting evil.  It hasn't.

I'm talking about the resurrection of Mother Jones Magazine with a cover article on the Rotenberg Educational Center in Canton Mass.  The evil is not the Rotenberg Center which is a god-sent tool for offering compassion; the evil is Mother Jones Magazine. 

Mother Jones herself was in the thrall of evil, the extreme Left of her day, but she could not have known the millions of humans who would be tortured by other people who held her beliefs.  The writers, readers, editors and publishers of Mother Jones Magazine do know the consequences of their blind and vicious ideas. They refuse to accept their personal responsibility.

But nothing available to humans, other than direct personal torture, can expose the evil of Lefty thinking more effectively than to read the comments appended to the online article.  We have the evil of Lefty thought hiding under the pretense of human care and sympathy. Mother Jones' writer claims that the treatments used by the Rotenberg Center (to treat the suffering out-of-control young people in their care) are 'torture,' 'inhuman' and every other epithet the outraged Lefty can summon from their angry sandbox minds. 

Standing in direct contrast are the comments from the anguished parents of young people who are or were out-of-control and comments from the young people who made some modicum of progress from their time at the Rotenberg facilities. Read it to have your heart torn to shreds. The evil of the Left is nowhere more transparent than in the pain of the parents, relatives, teachers and out-of-control children themselves.

There can be no evil greater than the person who stands in the way of a good Samaritan who is doing everything possible within the known world to help save another human.  Even the person who caused the evil in the first place, if there were such a person, is less evil than the person who blocks the saving efforts.

Mother Jones Magazine, in attacking the Rotenberg Center is pure Lefty evil incarnate.