Politics and Political Comments

This is an article about the controversy regarding the desire of a group who wants to build a partially religious-oriented building ("Islamic Cultural Center") in a former Burlington Coat Factory building in at 45 Park Place in Manhattan. I have to kind of merge a few things I've said before to put this item together. I mentioned in a previous article here how the decision in Citizens United v. FEC, the opinion of MSNBC's Keith Olbermann notwithstanding, it was not the end of free speech.

Well, now I have to agree with Olbermann in one of his editorials (I include a link because I'm too cheap to pay MSNBC $3.50 for a license to use it) in which he states "There is no Ground Zero Mosque" (either in the shadow of or outside of the shadow of the World Trade Center), because

• It's at least two blocks away at the closest possible distance from the "Ground Zero" site
• It's more like four blocks from any part of where people who visit the site are going, and five from the actual memorial
• The new monument at the WTC isn't even there yet so it can't be in the shadow of a non-existent building, and even if it did exist the building isn't even going to cast a shadow there
• You wouldn't even know about the place unless you are looking for it because it's on a side street, it's not obvious
• It's not a "mosque" as a place for the exclusive use of muslims, i.e. the way Mormon Churches do not admit gentiles (in Mormon terms, a gentile is a non-member of the church, or as the saying goes, "Salt Lake City is the only place where even Jews are gentiles!"). It's supposed to be a cultural center, with only the top two floors for worship, and my understanding is even non-Muslims can visit a Muslim house of worship as long as they remove their shoes, the way a non-Jew can enter a synagogue as long as they wear a head covering.
• It's impossible to see it from the WTC (or vice-versa) because there are already buildings in the area which would hide it
• Ignored is the fact that there is already a Muslim house of worship within four blocks of the WTC that has been there since before the WTC existed, since early 1970

Let me ask this, would there be even the slightest argument if there was going to be built a Catholic Church there? Not a chance, considering that there is already a Catholic Church (Church of St. Peter) closer to the WTC than this development is going to be. And "so close that the barbed wire of Ground Zero obscures its spire" as Mr. Olbermann points out, is St. Paul's Chapel, literally across the street from the WTC site. It's been there so long that George Washington attended services there.

If the site at 45 Park Place was going to have a Catholic, Episcopalian, Methodist or Lutheran Church, would there be such a row? Again, not a chance. If it was a synagogue would there be objections? Oy vey, objecting to a Jewish temple in New York City, who would hear of such a thing? I predict even the Jehovah's Witnesses could put in a Kingdom Hall in place of the existing building and nobody would complain.

But because some people who were from the Middle East attacked the World Trade Center this tars all Muslims with the same brush as if all Muslims have something to do with the incidents of 9/11. Thus the backlash against a site that would have a Muslim prayer facility is some Islamic Terror Center.

Some people are claiming this issue is not about the 1st. Amendment. But that is exactly what it is. I can bet that if the exact same proposal had been made by a group representing any other religion - possibly even a Church of Satan - we'd never have heard about it and there'd be no controversy. So the issue is over a group representing a religion that some people disagree with and their desire to build a facility including a house of worship, because they don't like that religion.

So BP has found a useful scapegoat in BP's Tony Hayward, in which he's quitting, which now gives the company a target to dump all the blame. He didn't exactly provide a sympathetic leader that could be empathized with. Instead he looked like a rich arrogant prig who was whining about how his tennis game was being interrupted because the police wanted to ask why his Porsche, parked in the tennis club parking lot, was seen leaving the scene of an accident, and there is a still-alive body moaning, stuck through the windshield.

So BP throws poor Tony under the bus, and now he can "get his life back," as he once begged. BP will pay him millions of dollars (or rather, millions of British pounds) to buy out his contract and life will go on. BP will dump all the blame for the Deepwater Horizon disaster on some misguided engineer who broke BPs unenforced safety rules (actually, they aren't just unenforced, but because following them costs the company money, following them or reporting failure to follow them would get employees retaliated against), and Tony becomes the exec who fell on his sword for the good of the company and the really good benefit of his personal pension plan.

The end result will be that BP will continue to operate its industrial sites and typically worn out, inadequately and insufficiently maintained, and rarely replaced equipment and facilities in the same shoddy and slip-shod manner, and nothing much will change.

Being an incompetent exec can be a very lucrative position. When Home Depot fired Robert Nardelli, I think his severance package was worth 9 figures. Then he goes over to Daimler-Chrysler and nearly runs that company into the ground.

The only good thing about all of this is the thought - or maybe it's a hope or prayer - that maybe BP will stay lucky and they won't have another accident. One can hope.

I've got CNN running in the background while I'm working on my computer and the CEO of BP is being raked over the coals for BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. (I don't think anyone expected the name to be literal, i.e. Gulf Oil.) One thing pointed out, which sounds bad, is that the number of safety violations is orders of magnitude larger for BP over competitors like Conoco Phillips or Exxon. One example was one company had 1 safety violation and another had 8, while BP had over 150 violations.

Now, number of violations doesn't mean anything; it's how serious they are that counts. A restaurant getting a violation for using a plastic cutting board instead of a wooden one, for having not enough fire extinguishers, and leaving dishes soaking in hot soapy water instead of washing them immediately, is no where near as serious as a restaurant being cited with a single violation for having an infestation of rats or roaches.

But I suspect that you don't get written up for safety violations unless you've got really egregious conduct. I am not sure, but I suspect that in most industries where there are temporary violations which aren't really serious, if the inspectors know the people involved will make corrections, they often let things slide over serious writeups. So when you are receiving anywhere from a factor of twenty to 100 times as many writeups for safety violations over your competitors, you're obviously doing something wrong.

I was working for a contractor to the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) who collected safety reports, and I got to hear a real juicy story. One of the things that are shipped by rail are containers on flat cars/trailers on flat cars (COFC/TOFC). Either shipping containers or truck trailers (without the wheel assembly), placed on a flatbed car, and secured by pins, one on each corner. The term "pin" may be misleading; these aren't like cotter pins, they're rectangular steel rods, about the thickness of a two-by-four and maybe a foot long. It slides through a slot in the container/trailer into a socket in the flatcar.

One inspector called up the office, and asked if it was acceptable to secure a COFC with only three pins? It wasn't recommended, but in a pinch it would work. What about two pins? Not good, but if they're diagonal from each other, it will provide some protection. Across from each other on the same side is too likely to fail because it can shift.

How about one pin? Oh no, completely unacceptable. So the guy tells him, "Well, I've got news for you; we've got COFCs of trash being shipped with no pins at all! They're only hanging on by gravity." This is hilarious: any significant incident; sudden braking, a tip a little too far, and the load may shift, maybe dangerously, or falling off the train.

Well, the shipper is in New Jersey, so the FRA sends someone up there to see what's happening. The guy drives up in a G-car (a pool vehicle with US Government license plates). The people there think he's either with the DEA or the FBI, and proceed to beat the crap out of him! He's trying to explain that he's only there to try to keep them safe.

So later another call comes in about these containers, and the supervisor says, you want to investigate it, you send one of your own people, I'm not going to have another one of my people attacked.

So someone gets a great idea: make this expensive for them. Don't flag the shipment at the shipping yard - they'll just fix that load and won't bother to keep things secured properly - watch for the car to be transferred to the delivery railroad, then stop the car and order it frozen in place until the safety issue is rectified. This means the entire train is taken out of service until the load is properly secured. With the crew and the train doing nothing but sit until someone comes out with securing pins. The railroad is going to charge the shipper for all this cost, so you can bet that future loads do get secured properly.

But the fact remains when you get 160 or so writeups of violations vs. 1 or 8 for your competitors tells me that something is wrong, really wrong.

A number of people are apparently in outrage over the decision of the U.S. Supreme court in Citizens United v. FEC which basically said that unions and corporations may directly contribute money over the support of elections (and probably over ballot issues, I haven't read the decision).

I do not understand what the furor over this issue is. I'll give my own take on the issue, and point out a number of fundamental flaws in some people's reasoning over this and other issues, including why corporations (what the law calls a "legal fiction") would, of necessity, need to be granted rights under the law similar to individuals. Why there has to be separate existence from owners and managers, limited liability and, in this case, the ability to openly make public comments including ads for and against candidates and ballot issues.

Full disclosure: I am the management of three corporations and the member-manager of an LLC. I don't express opinions through the companies I associate with, I always express my opinions in my own name.

Someone posted a clip to YouTube of MSNBC's Keith Olbermann comparing this decision to - and declaring it worse than - Chief Justice Taney's decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford* which basically said negroes were not human beings and did not have any rights. This is also stupid, although, again, I haven't watched all of his clip yet. It sort of reminds me of the comment - I think it was on the TV show Sports Night - in which it is ridiculous when someone (white) compares their particular struggle or campaign to Rosa Parks' refusal to be shoved to the back of the bus, and the Montgomery, Alabama Bus Boycott that ensued. Apparently nobody (or rather, anybody who is complaining about this issue) is thinking.

I happen to like Keith Olbermann, I've caught some of his comments from time-to-time and in some cases I've agreed with points he's made. But on this one he's clearly wrong.

I've decided to answer some of Olbermann's comments, now that I have listened to his ranting, and, to some extent, relatively stupid and ill-informed opinions. Basically he sees this as the destruction of democracy, that literally every politican will be bought by corporations and prostituted to them for whatever purposes the corporations want, and that we can expect to see things like social programs wither on the vine. He also thinks it will eventually destroy unions as corporations will be able to outspend them and have their influence neutered. Only problem he's blind to is that much of what he's complaining about is already in effect; we already have politicians beholden to well-monied lobbying groups.

He seems to think that now that corporations can directly contribute toward election campaigns that it will open the floodgates for them to buy every election. Ignoring the fact that they could already do this indirectly (via front groups and astroturfing), it would be too expensive to do so. Lobbying right now is much, much cheaper than trying to pay for the election of a politician. Besides that, they don't need 24-hour 7-day-a-week ownwership of a politician, they only need him or her when they want to defeat a bill or get one passed. And lobbying for that, now, is already possible, very effective, and orders of magnitude cheaper than trying to outright "buy" an election. As the saying goes, why buy a cow when you can buy milk at the store when you need it?

Let's not forget that individuals go to the polls (corporations can't vote), and if some politician was too insensitive to his constituents' needs, he won't stay in office long no matter who is covering his bills.

Olbermann also seems to be of the same general groups of people who claim to support free speech but, objects when it's free speech by someone either he doesn't like or doesn't like their opinion. Like the general Christian population who wants to go to their church on Sunday, but finds detestable, various "cults" like Jehovah's Witnesses, or small and unimportant churches that they disagree with, or are mad because the government can't support their pet religious project - like putting the 10 commandments in courthouses, or allowing prayer in schools - but are so relieved that some other "unacceptable" religion can't put their society-destroying "Spawn of Satan" ideas in public schools.

I'd love to see how many parents who support prayer in schools would approve if the prayer was lead by a child member of a local Wiccan coven, or some odd group who prayed to "Wotan, Thor and Isis, we ask you to destroy, expunge and revoke the name of their God, and wipe the scourge of Christian religion from the face of the earth, to smite the heathen Jew and worthless Muslim, that the One True and Only Real Church of Your Beneficence be revived! Amen!"

Olbermann also ignores one very important fact that for large organizations, it's cheaper to have public pensions than to have to provide them yourself, this is why the 401(K) was invented; corporations could no longer afford to offer expensive defined benefit pensions, and thus cheaper defined contribution pensions had to be developed. And you have to have something, if there were no public pensions companies would have to offer something of their own or they'd lose good employees to companies that did offer them, or they'd have to pay more to get people.

Olbermann doesn't speak about Health Care directly in his rant, but I'll toss it in as a side point. The whole "health care" crisis was spawned by government intervention and people think more government intervention will stop it. Back in World War II, wages were frozen so companies couldn't offer more money to attract employees, but fringe benefits were not limited, so companies could offer health insurance. The problem is not in getting insurance, it's the government rules that keep other potential providers from forming, that restrict how you can buy it, or limit what you can choose to buy, and that "lock" the insurance to the employer. If an individual decides to buy insurance themselves, they have to pay for it out of their own pocket with after-tax money; their employer can full or partially subsidize their health coverage, and if they pay premiums it reduces their taxable income, because paying for employer-supplied health insurance can be done with pre-tax dollars. The government didn't develop health care as a forced offering of employers, private employers chose to offer it themselves as a means to attract top talent.

He's also ignoring that, with the increase in jobs requiring serious technical skills, employees are no longer replaceable cogs that are substitutable with anyone else. When you're running an assembly line with low- to semi-skilled employees management can easily treat people as commodities; when you have highly-skilled technical professionals, not so much.

Olbermann's comments also ignore the fact that for large, bureaucratic organizations, labor unions allow them to act as barriers to entry of competitors, because the threat of unionization scare off some smaller companies. Wal-Mart isn't able to stave off unions because it's very smart or very crooked; it's only able to do so because historically, unions haven't targeted (no pun intended) the retail sector much. I strongly suspect Wal-Mart's truck drivers are either independent contractors or are union members in the same percentage as the rest of the trucking industry.

There can be other benefits. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) has specifically gotten it to be illegal for its employees to strike. They can quit if they want but they can't strike. The employees voted in favor of it, because in place of being able to strike, if there is a workplace dispute, the transit authority must submit to and comply with the terms of mediation of the dispute.

So those are a few reasons why, if anything, large corporations might want to increase the prevalence of labor unions; since they are already bureaucratic, handling the extra bureaucracy of a labor union is no big deal; for smaller competitors it might be a crippling factor that makes it impossible for them to become a challenge to the competitor that fears a smaller and more nimble one.

And now for the rest of my article challenging some issues being raised.

First I'll discuss the issue of "corporate personhood" in which a corporation is given a number of the same rights as individuals. To sue and be sued; to hold title to property in its own name; and to have separate existence from the individuals who are its stockholders, employees and managers.

A corporation is simply a collection of individuals united for a common purpose with limited liability for their actions. If we are to have things like stores that sell goods cheaply or produce expensive developments like new computers and drugs, there has to be a way for people to invest in those organizations. People buy shares of stock and can potentially receive dividends from the corporation's profits, if any. They are not personally liable for the corporation's debts or other liabilities. This allows people to make investments in promising enterprises without being liable if management screws up, and it allows those enterprises to obtain capital for less cost than if the only method for growing a business was to borrow money. It also means if the business fails, its managers are not personally liable for its debts.

If you run a small business under your own name, and you mess up, you're on the hook for its debts; if you use a corporation (or the new sister entity of the corporation, the Limited Liability Company), you're not liable for any of its debts unless you signed a personal guarantee. I personally point out that nobody should ever run a business larger than a lemonade stand under their own name or ever go into a partnership, always use an entity to protect against liability.

We can use the same analogy for a labor union, the only difference is it has one customer (the employer of its members for each particular job site), and its (supposed) purpose, to provide for the betterment of the working conditions of its members, through collective bargaining, worker representation, and the power to organize and support a strike if necessary. That unions sometimes get involved in shady or corrupt activities is a function of those involved, not of the entity of a labor union in particular.

Now, the end result is that many of the protections and rights that individuals have would have to transfer to such entities as corporations (and labor unions) if it was to be able to exist, or if the public in general were to benefit from what a corporation could do vs. the lesser ability of fully-burdened individuals carrying personal liability. A corporation has to be able to sue if it is to enforce its contracts; it has to be able to be sued if it owes someone money either by result of a contract breach or because it injured someone. It has to have separate existence from its stockholders and managers or nobody could take on the liability of any large, expensive or complicated process. Also, if it wasn't a separate entity, you'd have to sue all of the stockholders, which could be thousands of people. It would make lawsuits against corporations harder and more expensive.

All that the Supreme Court has done is recognized that a group of people operating as a corporation, or as a labor union, should have the same right to offer opinions in the political process as those same collection of individuals would be able to do as the same group of people if they were not operating under the name of a legal fiction.

All that a corporation has ever had to do in the past was to hire a PR firm - or use inhouse staff - to start a fake grassroots campaign ("astroturfing") to support or oppose the candidate or issue of their choice. Perfectly legal before, and the only difference now is that they can do so openly under their own name instead of through hidden front groups. Read my prior article about how the president of A.T. Massey Coal Company spent $3 million through a front group to get a member of the West Virginia Supreme Court removed and replaced with one who would (and did) set aside a verdict against it for its misconduct in bankrupting one of its competitors.

Apparently, for some reason, it bothers people that large organizations - corporations and labor unions - will now be able to legally do openly what before they could still legally do as long as they did so in stealth mode. I don't understand why openness and transparency are to be feared over secrecy behind unidentified or unidentifiable front groups. Corporations and other entities could already do these things, now they can simply do them publicly under their own name instead of hiding behind someone else.
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* The case name was actually a misspelling; John Sanford was Dred Scott's owner; the original court misspelled his name as Sandford.

Yet another pundit comes in to weigh in on Sarah Palin's unmarried daughter and her boyfriend having a fight over who gets custody of their child. Daughter wanted a private hearing; boyfriend wanted a public one. Boyfriend's lawyer wins on this issue.

So the pundit on MSNBC makes a pronouncement how it's a terrible thing that the child has to be put through all of this, essentially that it's going to be traumatized, or at least that's the impression that I get that she was making.

The child is one year old.

Hello? Is anyone thinking here? A one-year-old child isn't aware of its environment except it is hungry, thirsty and needs a change after having soiled its diapers. The child probably isn't even going to be taken to court unless whoever has it right now can't find a babysitter. If you want to argue that a six- or seven-year-old has to hear about this, that would be one thing; they'd be aware of things happening. A one-year-old is going to be spending the vast majority of its time sleeping, except when it wakes up at 2 A.M. and wants breakfast.

I wonder where they get these people from, Idiots-R-Us?