If I Were King

In a recent post, Republicans, Obama soften court debate, the Swamp summarized the most egregious comments by the right wing about Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the high bench:

Conservative Republicans have attacked Sotomayor over the comment, with radio’s Rush Limbaugh calling her a “reverse racist,” former Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado saying it appears to be a racist comment and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich suggesting that if a white male had said something similar, he’d have to withdraw from consideration for the court.

Are these people really as stupid as they seem? Here’s her actual comment:

I would hope that a wise Latino woman, with the richness of her experiences would, more often than not, reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.

Well, duh! The American legal system is the domain of white males. Yes, there are ethnic minorities practicing law, and some females, but that’s a recent development. Through the history of American history and English Common Law before that, most laws have been written by white male legislators and interpreted by white male jurists. The law texts have been written by white male professors, and that’s who has taught most of the courses at law school. These white males have predominantly been upper class property owners. So even a Latina or a black woman practicing law today has been steeped in a legal system that is culturally white, male, and propertied.

Anybody who brings additional perspective is likely to “more often than not” reach better decisions. Sure, there are white males that have spent time in the Peace Corps, struggled out of disadvantaged families, or overcome handicaps. They get extra points as well. As long as the members of the court are qualified (they know the law, understand the rules of logic, and can read and write the English language); the greater the diversity of background on the bench, the better justice will be served.

If I Were King I’d do exactly what Obama has done here. I’d take every opportunity to increase the diversity among federal judges. I’d probably be harder to please in some other ways (to my mind, logic trumps the letter of the law, for example) but that’s where I’d start.

Okay, there’s almost nothing there yet, but this morning the owner of A-OK Self  Storage at Freeland (South Whidbey, Washington) called. I’d had a chat with the on-site manager on Monday when I was paying the bill for our 10×10-foot storage unit, and we talked just a bit about how a small website could augment their small yellow-pages presence. On Tuesday she called back and wanted me to send some links of sample sites to the owner. From the time we got off the phone to the time the site was visible, including domain registration, DNS setup, server creation, and uploading a simple tombstone, was just over an hour. By the time the search engines get it indexed, we’ll have a real site attached to it. The royal household is big on stuff, so we always have one or two storage units, and we’ve been happy with the service here. Doubly happy now that they’re a client as well as a supplier!

Well, the Obama administration has announced that our cars are going on a severe diet. Environmentalists are elated. It seems that Detroit is as well, because the new national standards will preempt any state standards.

As we’ve noted before, Detroit should have developed much more flexible manufacturing processes long ago, they shouldn’t need a single national standard to shoot for.

Further, the politics of this move are absurd. What is the logic of a democratic government requiring manufacturers to build the products the public wants least? If the public wanted more fuel-efficient cars, it would simply buy them. Deciding that they should have more efficient cars and having the government eliminate the models they prefer so as to not tempt them, is a bizarre approach to responsibility. Another word that comes to mind is inanity.

If I Were King, I should tell them to eat cake, and to visit their favorite bakery in whatever car they choose to own, maintain, and operate.

President Obama, in his commencement speach at the University if Notre Dame yesterday, said he supported a “sensible conscience clause” for medical professionals to refuse to perform abortions, and presumably other procedures, which they found to contradict their ethical and moral beliefs.  The exact terms of such a clause weren’t stated, but despite my normal belief that the convictions of the individual should guide their own actions rather than external considerations, I have to oppose this.

That is not to say that a doctor shouldn’t be able to hang up his shingle and define his practice in any way that suits him. If a surgeon opposes abortion and decides to open a practice specializing in ophthalmology, of course he shouldn’t be expected to perform abortions. But if that surgeon went to work in a clinic that provided abortions, and then refused to perform them while drawing his salary, then that doctor should suddenly, and without ceremony or honor, find himself unemployed.

In previous invocations of this concept it has been suggested that pharmacists should be able to refuse to fill prescriptions for drugs of which they disapprove, notably the “morning after pill” abortifacients. But what if a pharmacist was of the opinion, apparently held by many otherwise-sensible persons, that ADD is not really a disorder and that treating it with drugs is wrong? Should that pharmacist be able to refuse to fill prescriptions for Ritalin or Concerta or any of the other drugs that make life with ADD manageable? The answer is no.  Federal law requires most drugs to be dispensed by pharmacists, and as such they are, in effect, a public utility and must not be able to impose their own standards on who can or can’t make use of their services.

I can certainly see a case for professional standards being maintained by physicians.  To say “I do not believe in abortion after the first trimester and therefore decline to seek the training to perform procedures to handle later cases” seems completely reasonable.  But, If I Were King, it would most certainly not be acceptable for someone to take a position that required certain work and then to refuse to perform it.

The car companies are up against the wall. They have to figure out how to make money in the third millennium, and at least a couple of them have to figure this out right smartly. On Thursday of this week UPS delivered notices to 789 Chrysler dealers letting them know they weren’t going to be part of the solution, the next day FedEx carried similar news to about 1100 GM dealers. Chrysler’s bankruptcy means they can make their terminations stick; GM will have a little more trouble if they stay out of bankruptcy, but that probably won’t change much. Even with strong state franchise laws, when the manufacturer wants to close a dealership they eventually will.

But why? I have my doubts about the economy of eliminating brands, but at least there was some cost saving when Chrysler no longer had to pay to produce ad campaigns for both Dodge and Plymouth, and they may have saved a couple of dozen salaries by eliminating the design effort to make a Plymouth look a little different than a Dodge. But how much can an auto manufacturer save by eliminating a dealer?

Every dealer has to have the special tools designed for specific repairs, but the dealers pay for those.

When I think of recent business successes, two names that come immediately to mind are Amazon and Netflix. Both are thriving from the “long tail” approach, a concept first identified by Wired’s Chris Anderson which means a strategy of focusing on a thousand products that sell a few units a month instead of a few products that sell a thousand each. The company that can provide you with any of ten thousand movies profitably will probably be your source for more common flicks, even if you have a Blockbuster ten minutes away.

Dell has built a huge business building one computer at a time. Yes, they’re under pressure during the current downturn, but Packard Bell doesn’t exist at all.

Yes, it’s possible that a large dealer will be more profitable than five smaller ones, but that’s the dealers’ problem, not the manufacturers. GM isn’t paying the rent on those four extra showrooms, although they probably had a lot of say in what they look like and pushed the dealers to build them. Chrysler does shell out for advertising for every dealer, but that’s all “co-op” in which the dealer pays for the ads and is reimbursed, based on their purchases, so other than processing the extra paperwork, there’s no difference.

And that, I suspect, is the crux of the matter. During a period when IT advances have made it vastly less expensive to sell small-volume products through small-volume dealers, Detroit was oblivious.

Murray Motors, the Chrysler and Dodge dealer in my home town got one of the notices on Thursday after 66 years.  When the economy recovers, will long-time Dodge owners drive an hour and a half to look at new cars, and commit to that same drive for ongoing service, or will they take a look at what the Ford and Toyota dealers have on offer?

Fashioning a marketing organization that fits the current marketplace may be challenging, but it will work a lot better than just lopping off the less-profitable parts of their tail. Chrysler and GM are making a stupid mistake. If I Were King, or even if I weren’t, they need to remember that stupidity is a capital crime on this planet.

Congress is turning its attention to abuses by credit card issuers (i.e., banks) and taking steps to reign in the most egregious of these. Most notably, Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) drafted H.R. 627, the Credit Cardholders Bill of Rights Act of 2009 with an effective date of twelve months after enactment or 30 June 2010. Apparently the Federal Reserve Board needs five months to draft rules to implement the act, which should take any reasonable group of people an afternoon – even if the group included attorneys. And the banks claim that they need time to make changes to their systems.  Stuff and nonsense! If I Were King, I’d allow 30 days, becuase I’d be a very generous and lenient monarch.

I’d allow certain exceptions, of course. Any card issuer could be granted additional time to comply if their IT staff (and here I’m talking about programmers, not the suits who wouldn’t know a variable from an array or define “third normal form”) would come to the throne room and explain why they couldn’t have these changes coded by the weekend.

Okay, it is unseemly for companies struggling to survive in the current environment to be spending a fortune on fancy retreats and corporate jets to fly executives to them. This would be an excellent time for management to actually look at the costs and benefits of using chauffeured cars and executive jets. From the outside, it seems likely that these expenses have gotten out of line, so it’s important that those in charge actually run the numbers.

Is it absurd to pay tens of millions of dollars for jets, and ongoing staff costs for pilots and limo drivers? Probably not, at least in the general case. If an executive is making phone calls during his drive to work, something that may well be illegal soon if he’s driving the car, the company very well may come out ahead to send a car around every morning. Anybody who has dealt with commercial air travel recently knows what a huge chunk of time is involved in flying anywhere, and how unlikely it is that the time spent can be used for much of anything other than opening the airline peanuts. At a certain level, it may be economically sound to spend the money and protect the executives’ time.

Even if a straight cost/benefit analysis doesn’t pencil out for the jets in terms of executive salaries saved, it’s entirely possible that the CEO’s job simply can’t be done without them. In the case of the CEO, each company only has one. If it is important that the CEO spend time in the field, and make public appearances, it’s quite possible that adding the time for commercial air travel will simply result in more days worked than there are in a year.

We don’t know the numbers and the tradeoffs. It’s not our job, it’s the job of the managers in each company. Do we really believe that the requisite analysis is consistently done? No, we don’t, and we thing this is an area that needs to be monitored by the directors. On the other hand, we’re pretty sure the news media and the federal government aren’t equipped to do this analysis either. It definitely isn’t a good sign when the country’s CEO starts lecturing corporate CEOs on the point, not when he has a bigger retinue than any titan of industry, and his executive jet is a 747 known as Air Force One.

Not a day goes by that we don’t see more than one tirade in the media about bonuses paid to corporate executives. Yesterday saw #44 displaying a bit of pique on the subject, a theme he had used frequently during the campaign. It’s an easy hook to hang a politician’s hat on, but it’s wrong.

First, compensation policies are contracts. If the government is providing funds to a company, there’s no reason why it can’t require, as one of the terms of such funding, that the corporation not enter into any contract that pays certain bonuses. On the other hand, it’s absolutely wrong for the government to expect or demand that a business break those contracts that it has already entered into. Certainly bonuses aren’t spelled out as concretely as some other terms of employment, but they are still part of the bargain struck when one person surrenders his productive hours and energies in exchange for monetary return. How congresscritters who are so reluctant to let a bankruptcy court adjust the interest rate of a mortgage can expect corporations to suddenly abandon their commitments is quite beyond reason. (Congresscritters often are beyond all human understanding, of course.)

Second, over the years we have seen thousands of cases in which businesses made decisions based on monomaniacal devotion to the current quarter’s returns, and millions of words have been written deploring this. The very businesses that are being assaulted most vociferously during this recession are the ones that were paying huge bonuses to those who had been motivated only by inflating the current results. If these businesses are paying out bonuses based on 2008 returns, during which they all lost their shirts, then the basis for those bonuses must have changed. This is progress, not something for which businesses should be excoriated.

Assume I’m including our normal royal commitment to the teaching of logic in these comments.

Boeing today announced it’s fourth-quarter results, a loss of $56 million, and plans to lay off a total of 10,000 employees. At the same time, they said the costs of the Machinists strike came to $1.2 billion in the quarter, and that engineering difficulty on the 747-8 program consumed another $685 million. Absent those two factors, the company would have had a profit of over $1.8 billion.

With the company sitting on a huge order backlog, with further delays of the Dreamliner program certain to lead to penalties and cancellations, coming off a quarter in which their inability to efficiently get enough work done cost a staggering amount of cash, their response is to cut the work force?

Boeing is a big company and there have always been some silly things on the fringes. It wasn’t called The Lazy B for no reason. But they used to do pretty well with basic logic. (They used to do a better job of figuring out how to build airplanes, too.) It seems Boeing is no longer an airplane manufacturer that makes money, it’s a financial empire that happens to make some airplanes. They’ve lost the fire in their bellies to make great products in staggering quantities and replaced it with a great love of counting beans.

Full disclosure: We spent six months working in Finance at corporate headquarters (the 2-25 Building on Marginal Way, Seattle) almost twenty years ago, making presentation graphics for cost accountants. The idea was to clearly identify the which activities cost money and which made money, a function that apparently is no longer present.

They’ve taken their eyes off the ball, and the communities where Boeing does business will pay dearly for it. Which we predicted when they moved headquarters to Chicago; by the time the real pain comes, all the executives will have moved to the Windy City where they won’t have to see anything but the numbers on their reports.

George Bush is gone, but tens of thousands of photographs remain. In the case of a modern head of state, these photographs are carefully orchestrated, but for the moments that the cameras are present, and from the angles where shooters are allowed, there is still a range of events and expressions to capture.

In his Zoom column in yesterday’s New York Times, Errol Morris interviewed the photo editors of the three main wire services that have covered the Bush White House. Each of the three selected their top picks from those eight years and discussed them with Morris. I found it fascinating and would suggest that anyone who shoots people, in any context, would be well-rewarded by taking ten minutes to read this piece.

The three editors were Vincent Amalvy (Agence France-Presse), Santiago Lyon (The Associated Press) and Jim Bourg (Reuters).

If I Were King, I probably wouldn’t have much chance to be behind the camera, but as I am not king, I enjoyed this immensely.