Pro Commerce

Unions Seriously Harm

One important lesson from the Palisades fire is that rich people or people who form their own fire district can hire a private fire fighting company.  A real estate developer in Palisades did just that and saved his entire shopping mall.

Now that everyone knows that urban entities like Los Angeles County and the California State government are incompetent at the most fundamental government functions, private companies will take on the relevant work.  Rich people and rich populations will hire them in the future.  Equity be damned.

How does that one example matter so much? 
We will now see hundreds of private firefighting businesses created to be alternatives to the politically controlled standard municipal fire departments and water supplies. People who can afford private government functions will no longer tolerate low quality public service to them.

The same has been increasingly true in education.  Parents have always paid for parochial schools in hopes of getting better or safer education for their children and they have paid for private schools in hopes of better education.  Homeschooling is an alternative for those who can’t afford private schools.  The public schools are controlled, nearly everywhere, by unions which make good education impossible with firing provisions and promotions that are irrational.

Most people don’t know how unions have seriously harmed fire and police departments.  Fire departments are three times too large.  They were never cut back when the causes of home fires were reduced due to safer bedding, the decline in smoking and better home-building electric and gas codes.  Making public fire departments far too expensive.

Put two and two together: unions in schools, fire departments, police and other government services and their control of urban governments have made urban government services inadequate and incompetent.  

People with money will create their own private government services.

Ann Landers and Israel

Longtime readers know my view of my own Judaism.  We Jews are the chosen people. Chosen to help humankind be ‘better.’  Jews are hated because they have been able to read, write, and do math for 3,000 years and virtually nobody else can or could.  They have also been good at commerce, globally. And yes, those skills have included most Jewish women.

Israel’s role today is to continue the roles Jews have played in society for millennia.  To improve medicine, technology, food and day to day life. Israel is the moral leader in its military behavior and in countless social issues.  Menachim Begin was the true founder of the country, a moral giant.  Bibi Netanyahu is one of the greatest men in human history, an incomparable leader for all time.

So what does this have to do with Ann Landers?  Ann’s real name was Esther Lederer and her sister (Dear Abby) was Esther Phillips.  Both Jews which is the point of this blog.

I started reading Ann’s column when she started in the Chicago Sun Times and I started at the University of Chicago in Fall 1955. 

The total readership of Ann and Abby reached two thirds of the adult population of America for several decades.  The advice they gave concerned all aspects of daily moral life. To put it simply, America’s moral life for an important part of the 20th century came from two Jewish women.  That, to me, is the work of the ‘chosen people.’

Another Jewish moral advisor was Ruth Westheimer, Dr. Ruth. She was a powerful moral teacher to Americans for two decades, reaching audiences nearly as large as Dear Ann and Dear Abby at times. Her focus had more sexuality in it.

The demand of ‘the chosen people’ is to be moral leaders for all time.  Not an enviable burden.

I Was There

I was there at the beginning of the Beatnik movement, the hippie movement, and the Whole Earth Catalog.

The Beats were mostly in New York and San Francisco.  I went to the U. of Chicago, in the geographic middle, in August of 1955 and was in the male dormitories in 1957 for six months. For reasons I still don’t understand, I was a widely known radical organizer with a sweatshirt, blue jeans, disheveled hair and a full beard. The Beats were visible in the youth population of the time.  As they traveled from Coast to Coast they stopped in Chicago at the University where I got them dorm rooms to stay in.  I knew about a dozen of the Beats at the time.  An article in Time magazine in 1959 said I was one of the Beats.

When I returned to San Francisco in 1960 to go to grad school at U.C. Berkeley in economics, my wife, Helen, and I lived in San Francisco on Broadway a few blocks from North Beach. The Beat scene was centered around City Lights bookstore owned by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. There were five other Beat businesses.  The most important was a small restaurant at approximately 575 Pacific Ave. that had a monk’s bowl of rice and meat and some veggies. Across the street at the Columbus Tower was a street level window with a few seats that had a chrome Italian espresso machine, the first I ever had in the U.S. In the next block North on Columbus was a second-hand bookstore, a bar on what is now Jack Kerouac Alley and City Lights. In the next block of Grant across Broadway was The Saloon where heavy beatnik drinkers hung out.

In 1963 Salli Rasberry arrived with her boyfriend. They went immediately to North Beach where the Beats had created a jazz and comedy scene. Raz, whom I didn’t meet for seven years,  moved to Masonic Boulevard in the Haight-Ashbury. Jazz was the overlap of the two youth cultures. Both smoked pot. The Beats had speed which was sold to students and truckers.  Raz and her bunch, later called hippies, soon got LSD from the gang around Stanford that got it from psych researchers.

The Beats were a little older than Raz and her bunch; most were in their mid to late 20’s.  The Beats wore d ark clothes and had long hair.  Their view of the world was summarized perfectly in Ginsberg’s poem, Howl. Grim, rejectionist and hopeless.

Raz and her crowd were also rejectionist about the stultifying society around us, but they were ecstatic, joyful, optimistic, and full of color and vitality. Their clothes were rainbow-exciting, their music loud and wild. They intended to change everything.  Starting with food, sex, and living arrangements.

North Beach was the primary overlap of Beats and hippies.  On a personal basis they met at a house off Kings Mountain on the road over the top, from Palo Alto to Pescadero.  It was a fairly large primitive house just a mile west of SkyLonda coffee shop. That was where Hippies, the Rainbow Bus, Kesey, the Beats, and the outlaw gang of Hell's Angels bikers hung out.  I went there twice with Portola Institute (the core of the Whole Earth Catalog) friends to hang out.

I was well known in the hippie crowd as the banker at Bank of America from 1964 to 1966 and later as VP of the Bank of California who invited all the hippie movers and shakers to a Japanese lunch on Fridays from 1967 to 1970. When the first Trips festival was organized by the Beats and Stewart Brand in January 1966 at the Longshoreman's Hall, Stewart asked me to handle the ticket sales and money collection at the door.

I collected the money for an hour, but the whole scene was too exciting and too many of my friends were there, so I asked the one person I trusted, Bill Graham, to take over the door for me.

I finally met Rasberry officially in Spring 1971 at the Demise Party of the Whole Earth Catalog. We had met many times but that night we sat on a bale of hay talking from 3 am till sunrise at 7am and became lifelong friends.

This is a good place to point out to the historians of the future that the political Left never was connected to the hippie movement.  Hippies joined all the parades of the anti-Vietnam era for the dancing and music.  I know because I knew the Lefty organizers.  I started the Graduate Student Union at U.C. Berkeley and Mario Savio was my Treasurer in 1963. He became famous in 1964.  

Tom Hayden used my living room in San Francisco to try and organize the East Coast media to cover a hippie be-in in Golden Gate Park.  I was opposed to any official publicity and stopped it.

Abbie Hoffman was a colleague who helped me put on a fundraiser for some forgotten cause but he pulled out when stoned and paranoid. I handled the gate myself and returned the money to anyone who wanted it.