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Explainer Wanted: Why would a politician ever concede a non-blowout race until every last ballot is counted? The momentary frisson of good will can't be worth the possibility that the concession will turn out to have been a mistake--as it was for Jimmy Carter in 1980, Al Gore in 2000, and now conservative Doug Hoffman in the NY-23 congressional race. ... Hoffman will probably still lose when all the ballots are in, but his concession has already had real world consequences--it allowed Nancy Pelosi to swear in Hoffman's Democratic opponent in time to give health care reform its narrow House majority. I'm assuming the people who voted for Hoffman aren't happy with that. ... P.S.: Dick Morris claims, plausibly, that Pelosi had many Dem votes in reserve. Still, thanks to Hoffman's concession she didn't have to use them. ...
Update: Mystery Pollster answers.
One answer: They remember Ellen Sauerbrey Hoffman wants to run again next year, also counted right
I'm not convinced. You don't have to be nasty about it. Just say "Let's see how it turns out" and don't concede. ... 9:48 P.M.
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Things you thought you were getting in the auto bailout. ... Chrysler's showy electric and hybrid cars? Forget them. Now that Chrysler has your money, they're dead. ... GM's 2010 IPO? The one that was going to raise money to repay taxpayers? It's receding rapidly into the future. "It depends on how quickly we become profitable. ... I can’t promise a date," says GM Chairman Ed Whitacre. Translation: Not going to happen. ... Suckers! ... 9:40 P.M.
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Am I the only one who smells Kabuki in the reports that President Obama has dramatically rejected all the Afghan war options with which he was presented, demanding to know where the "off ramps" are? If you were about to recommend a troop increase that was unpopular, especially with your Democratic base, wouldn't you precede it with some drama like this to demonstrate that you are a) in charge, b) not being conned, and c) insistent on a withdrawal as quickly as possible? Just asking. ... 10:54 P.M.
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What's wrong with the upcoming Chevy Cruze? Production of the new compact has been delayed three months. The New York Times says the problem is "engine performance and the quietness of the Cruze's ride." AP, quoting the same GM executive, says the problem is the transmission ("No one was thrilled with where it shifted, how it shifted.") What if they're both right? ... P.S.: It's fine that GM postpones a launch for a car that's not yet up to snuff. But the NYT's Bill Vlasic is a sucker for buying the line that this sort of delay represents a dramatic "culture" shift:
In the past, G.M. rarely held back a product to add the extra touches that would improve its chances in a fiercely competitive market.
Please. GM's been peddling this line for years. See, for example, this U.S. News report:
Concerns over quality have substantially altered the way Detroit launches new models. A case in point is the line of luxury midsized cars planned for this fall by Cadillac, Buick and Oldsmobile. Transaxle problems with these front-wheel-drive C-body models caused GM to delay their introduction until at least January, and possibly spring. ''The car will have to tell us when it's ready," says Robert Burger, Cadillac's general manager. Notes a longtime industry observer: ''In the old days, that would be unheard of. They'd move the cars in the fall, whether they were right or not.''
That paragraph was published in 1983. ... 10:56 P.M.
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"CNN doesn't have a brand. It has a bland. It just got blander." -- Alert reader T. ... 11:36 P.M.
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Good News for Hyundai: It looks as if UAW workers are rejecting the proposed contract that would not-quite give Ford the same concessions the union gave GM and Chrysler. After all, Ford is still losing fewer billions than the other two were losing before the government helped them slash their debt in bankruptcy. So Ford clearly needs to be bled a bit more. The near-certain prospect that Ford will in response ship more work out of the country may not matter if you are a UAW veteran 2 years away from retirement. ... P.S.: Is Obama aide Austan Goolsbee's prediction--that saving Chrysler would cripple Ford's comeback attempt--coming true? ... [via TTAC] 5:41 P.M.
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Titans of Spin: Chickaboomer on CNN CEO Jon Klein's hypocrisy. (He used to think the 25-54 demographic segment that CNN's now losing was crucial.) ... Mediaite makes the same point--more respectfully, alas. ... P.S.: Remember what CBS veteran Bernard Goldberg said of his former colleague Klein:
"[A]t CBS news he had a reputation as the kind of guy who thought people who tell the truth do it mainly because they lack imagination.
5:40 P.M.
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Fisker also announces upcoming "Seppuku" two seater: Why would electric luxury car maker Fisker decide to build its new model in a UAW shop in Delaware that only recently turned out some of the least reliable cars GM made? TTAC suspects federal dirigisme. ... 5:39 P.M.
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Paranoia Strikes Tweet: [UPDATED] After learning that CNN President Jon Klein had rejoined Twitter, I decided on Monday to post a "tweet" teasing him for killing "Crossfire":
@ You axed Crossfire, sucked up to Jon Stewart + MSM! Don't you wish you had Crossfire back now? Just askng!
To be honest, this was as nasty an item as I thought I could write and not come off like a total prick. Perhaps I failed at that last task. But it was also an experiment to see if nastiness pointed criticism worked on Twitter. Maybe there could be a productive, or at least entertaining, debate.
A few hours later I checked to see if there was any response from Klein or one of his defenders. But my hostile twitter didn't show up in a search for "Jon Klein," or his twitter handle "JonKleinCNN." In fact it didn't seem to turn up in a search for any of the terms used in the item, like "MSM" or "Jon Stewart."
This morning, I did get a response from Klein, and the item briefly turned up in one of my searches, only to seemingly disappear again.** It hasn't vanished entirely--it's at least still in the list of items I've posted, and presumably in the general river of tweets that flows by everyone who "follows" me. It just doesn't turn up if you search for twitters about Jon Klein.
People tell me I shouldn't read a lot into this incident--twitter search engines are notoriously flaky--so I won't. But it did get me thinking. Why do the searches for "tweets" that mention various twitter celebrities-- Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher, and Alyssa Milano, and even CEOs like Klein--almost invariably turn up such pleasant comments? Here's a search for @Jon KleinCNN.. With one or two relatively mild exceptions, it's a tame (and lame) series of attaboys, welcome-backs, and this-is-what-he-saids. Don't a few more people have criticism of Klein, or CNN, on the weekend it hit last place in the ratings? Are twitterers that polite and deferential?
I mean, this is America. If you really opened up a line of communication where every horny 20-year old dude sitting on a couch in a basement typed 140 characters about Alyssa Milano for the world to see ... well, would you really want to see that stream of tweets? People would ... criticize her acting! They'd bring up her famous ex boyfriends. They'd say she looked bad in that dress and otherwise comment on her appearance. Perhaps approvingly! I'm keeping it clean here. But it wouldn't be pretty.
And yet it is. If you actually search for @Alyssa Milano, this is the sort of thing you get:
Last night @AlyssaMilano asked: How do you want to be remembered in this life? I ask you, my followers, how do you want to be remembered?
Haha I saw @AlyssaMilano RT'd u. She's so chill...and hot too!
: @alyssamilano describe yourself in 3 words. Describe your husband in 3 words.
<----watching a rerun of @alyssamilano in who's the boss :)
You get the idea. Something doesn't add up. Does Twitter maybe censor "curate" the search results for its celebrity Twitterers?
This thought would be too paranoid even for me, if I hadn't read Nicole LaPorte's article in The Daily Beast on how celebrity publicists have connections at Twitter HQ:
[V]irtually every publicist in Hollywood has a go-to person at Twitter—the equivalent these days of having an “in” with famed MGM publicity chiefs-cum-fixers Eddie Mannix and Howard Strickling during Hollywood’s Golden Age.
“We’ve had a relationship with Twitter for quite some time,” said one. “We have contacts at most of the sites, so that they can help us out and give us quick tech support.”
(Perhaps journalists are shown less love? Twitter did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this article.)
Hmmm. Questions:
Would it even be technically feasible to delete nasty items from searches? Having once met a top Twitter tech guy who seemed incredibly competent, I'd have to guess yes.
Why would Twitter want to sanitize celeb tweet searches? That one's easy: Celebrity Twitterers like Milano, Moore and Kutcher have been very important to Twitter's growth. They take care of Twitter. Twitter takes care of them. At least that would be the equation--a familar one to anyone who has ever tried to round up bold-faced names for a party. The job of actually weeding out hostile tweets could be delegated to the celebrity's "social media director." Or the social media director's assistant. But presumably there are also Twitter staffers whose job is celebrity troubleshooting.
(Is Jon Klein such a celebrity? You might not think so--though he's listed as one. In this paranoid theory he might qualify under a Bigwigs-at-Media-Companies-Who-Might-Buy-Twitter-One Day loophole.)
It woudn't even be all that sinister--certainly less sinister than, say, the typical roped-off VIP section at a party. Web sites police comment sections all the time, after all. Alyssa Milano does talk with ordinary people on Twitter, and her twitstream or whatever you call it--which she seems to write herself--is quite informative on a fairly wide range of topics. When Obama threw out the first pitch at the All Star game, Milano's twitters gave a better account of where it landed than the Fox telecast, which had a bad camera angle..
On the other hand, if Twitter sanitized searches, that would make the site a more fake and less democratic place than it initially appears to be. Here we thought we were meeting bigshots in a virtual public square, and really it was maniuplated like the Truman Show.
Is my paranoid suspicion right? Anyone with answers--including people at Twitter--can tweet a response to @kausmickey or email me at Mickey underscore Kaus at MSN dot com.
Update: Responses on Twitter from Milano
Interesting. cc: @ RT @: Does Twitter protect celebrities? (via @) about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck
and from Twitter CEO Evan WIlliams
@Alyssa_Milano I think that guy has a pretty dire outlook on humans. :) about 1 hour ago from web in reply to Alyssa_Milano
Oracular! A non non-denial denial non-denial ...
Update II: Gawker ... a cartoon ...
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**--An earlier anti-Klein tweet that I myself deleted does turn up on one site's search of "Jon Klein." 1:28 A.M.
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The Curve Has To Want to Bend: Like Steven Pearlstein, Robert Samuelson more or less assumes the purpose of a "public option" is to control costs (as opposed to providing the security of a guaranteed fall-back plan). In an Un-Samuelsonesque fashion, he also assumes that there is some solution that will control costs in a manner agreeable to patients.
It's not insurers that cause high health costs; they're simply the middlemen. It's the fragmented delivery system and open-ended reimbursement. Would strict regulation of doctors, hospitals and patients under a single-payer system provide control? Or would genuine competition among health plans over price and quality work better?
That's the debate we need, but in truth, doctors, hospitals and patients don't want to be limited, whether by government or markets. Congress reflects public opinion. Fearing a real debate, we fake it.
a) Maybe none of these options--single payer, competition among health plans--will significantly lower costs, and we'll simply have to pay the increasing bill. Just a thought. b) If, as Samuelson says, "doctors, hospitals and patients don't want to be limited," it sounds like the debate over our system of "open-ended reimbursement" isn't a "debate we need." It's a debate we've had. Samuelson's side lost. Nobody wants to bend the curve.
Maybe it won't be bent. 8:38 P.M.
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Give Him a Fifth Chance! After completely misreading the zeitgeist and-- in a series of self-servingly ostentatious steps ("storytelling," emo)--leading his network into a ditch, is CNN's Jon Klein really going to keep his job? He doesn't seem even to be "embattled." ... 8:34 P.M.
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The Federalist Capers: A federalism compromise on the "public option" always seemed more promising to me than a "trigger" based compromise. But I'd been viewing the issue through a welfare-reform prism, in which states would either be in or out as discrete statewide units. Josh Marshall points out that the virtue of Harry Reid's plan is it allows states to join a single nationwide federal plan rather than set up their own plans. That lets you create a big--or big enough--pool of insured. It's like letting states opt out of (or in to) Medicare. ... That said, the federalist approach still offers a giant menu of possible compromises, from 1 to 50. You can have opt-out, opt-in, opt-in with a numerical limit, opt-out with incentives not to opt-out, opt-in with incentives to opt-in if regional distribution isn't achieved, even opt-out with a trigger that offers the incentives only if too few states stay "in." ... Update: Sam Stein has more. ...
P.S.: Note also that the federalist solution means at least one "juice" vote in every state legislature, as health insurance lobbyists seek to use campaign contributions to bribe gain access and thereby influence the "opt out" or "opt in" vote. Another source of federalism's appeal! And bipartisan appeal at that. ... 8:34 P.M.
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Items I twittered, or wished I had:
Best News of the Week: According to RiShawn Biddle, Obama and his Education Secretary Arne Duncan really are using the leverage provided by federal stimulus money to force states to allow more charter schools. The teachers' unions "feel betrayed." Hope that's not just for show. ... P.S.: This unashamedly pro-Obama article runs in ... The American Spectator. ... P.P.S.: Biddle also says the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has helped create a "counterweight" to the NEA and AFT. Won't make up for Vista! But it's a start. ... P.P.P.S.: If there are well over a million students in charter schools now, and the federal government is pushing them to grow like Topsy, at what point does a vicious circle set in, with public schools losing their even moderately motivated students, causing them to decline even further, causing even more students to leave, etc.? Not that this public school death spiral would be such a bad thing. We should just be prepared for it. The way we should have been prepared for GM. ... 11:27 P.M.
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Neiman Marcus is stealing The Atlantic's business model ... OK, to really emulate The Atlantic you'd have to throw in David Axelrod, and maybe sub Marc Ambinder for Nora Ephron. ... And then sell the thing to ExxonMobil. ... 11:26 P.M.
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51 is the Wussiest Number: Ryan Lizza reports that, in the White House debate over whether to bail out Chrysler, Obama asked his advisers, "What do you think the percentage likelihood is that , if we give this deal a chance, it will succeed?" Then-auto czarito Steven Rattner answered, "Fifty-one percent." ... What do you think the percentage likelihood is that Rattner's answer was sincere? I hope, for his sake, it's close to zero. There was substantially less than a 51% chance the Chrysler bailout would succeed (if "success" means a viable company). There still is. ... Not being a sophisticated investment banker, I would translate Rattner's answer as: "I know you'd like to approve this deal, and I'm not one to buck the tide, so I'll give you the minimum necessary reassurance, while covering my ass as much as possible (in the 80% likelihood that it fails)." ... P.S.: Lizza's piece is generally encouraging--the country could be in worse hands. But it's vaguely discouraging if for Obama and his brain trust the issue actually turned on whether or not the deal would succeed, which seems a less sophisticated question than whether or not it was worth trying to soften the blow to the Midwest by postponing Chrysler's inevitable failure. Could the whole debate have been Kabuki? ... 11:25 P.M.
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Where's Crossfire When You Need It? Jon Klein's Triumph! CNN now in 4th place, losing to FOX, MSNBC, and itself (HLN)! Somewhere Tucker Carlson is smiling. ... 11:24 P.M.
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Chooch On the Horizon? What happens to Chrysler if FIAT, its putative savior, fails to acquire Opel from GM this week? Was FIAT counting on Opel to fill some of the obvious gaps--mid-sized cars and larger--in Chrysler's weak lineup? The best U.S. car GM makes--the Camry-fightin' Chevy Malibu--started as an Opel design, remember. ... 2:07 A.M.
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Product placement is everywhere these days. ... 12:18 A.M.
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Is there a campaign to tarnish poor Anderson Cooper? First this negativity in the LAT. ("Cooper's ratings have been in sharp decline ...") Today, a suspiciously similar item in the New York Post's Page 6 ("ratings have plunged") that cherrypicks Cooper's worst days. TV Newser has a less excited take, noting
Year-to-date, Cooper is flat in the ratings. In 2008, AC360 averaged 1,194,000 Total Viewers. Year-to-date 2009, he's averaging 1,199,000 (through May 3). ...
It is true that AC360 is shedding viewers from its Larry King Live lead-in ...
Still, flat is not so good! If Cooper falls further, how does Visionary CNN Chief Jonathan Klein not fall with him? ... P.S.: If Klein has done anything at the network, aside from promoting Cooper, keeping his own name in the papers, and sneeringly spinning CNN's declining numbers, I forget what it was. Oh right: He's skillfully positioned CNN as the boring, nonpartisan network in an exciting, partisan time. ... 12:12 A.M.
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Monday, May 25, 2009
Buried Lede of the Day: From the tenth graf of a May 7 WSJ article on furniture retailer Design Within Reach:
Just getting people into stores can be difficult at a time when self-indulgent shopping has lost its allure, says Jim Taylor, vice-chairman of Harrison Group, a market research firm. Dr. Taylor has just completed a consumer study for American Express Publishing that suggests the wealthy no longer really enjoy shopping. What's more, their new, less-materialistic lifestyles are "a lot of fun," he says. "Our happiness scales are up this year for the first time in years." [E.A.]
Is that really true? If so, a big deal, no? ... And why? Perspective? Lower status anxiety? Lower Iraq anxiety? Obama? The power of schadenfreude? ... It's a thumbsuckers' playpen. ... 2:07 A.M.
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Ben Sheffner illustrates Nick Denton's possibly-tragic misunderstanding of American libel law. ... But is linking to Gawker's libel itself libelous, even if the purpose of the link is to show how libelous it is? [What about linking to Sheffner's linking?--ed That's OK under the Two Degrees of Libel rule, which I just made up] ... 2:05 A.M.
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Ezra Klein warns that if nothing is done to control the cost of health care, in 20 years we'll be spending 26.7% of our GDP on it. Is that all? I was thinking the figure would be much higher. ... P.S.: I suppose it depends on what we get for 26.7% of GDP. But if expensive medical advances added a year or two to my life, I'd be happy to fork over a quarter of my income. Wouldn't you? ... P.P.S.: The Obamist Party Line on universal health care--that we have to scare everyone into thinking we need it to control costs--has always seemed ill-advised, given that we've never been able to control health care costs before. And it plays into conservative arguments that liberals really want to meddle in medical decisions and ultimately deny treatment. Now it turns out the O.P.L. health cost scare stats aren't really even that scary. ... Why don't Democrats instead push to provide everyone with health care using the argument that ... everyone needs health care? ... Just a thought. ... 2:03 A.M.
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Monday, April 27, 2009
One of Robert Reich's answers to The Economist makes the strategy behind the proposed card check ("Employee Free Choice") bill clearer in a way I hadn't completely understood before (though I should have):
DIA: You have said that America needs unions "to restore prosperity to the middle class". But traditional union bastions like manufacturing are disappearing; the cost of pensions and health care are rising; more and more jobs are freelance, and more and more businesses are non-union. Have we seen the end of unions in America? If not, what form will they take in the future?
Mr Reich: We'll see more unionisation in the personal service sector of the economy -- especially in big-box retailers, restaurant chains, major hotels, and hospitals. Jobs in this sector don't compete with lower-cost imports. And because they require that people do them, they're not easily supplanted by computerised machines. Most of these jobs pay very low wages and offer minimal benefits. Unions would help give these workers the bargaining leverage they need. [E.A.]
OK, so the idea is to target unskilled workers who do work that can't be outsourced, and who work for large institutions. Questions:
a) Is this an admission that traditional power of unions--to go on strike--is no longer a very effective weapon? So unions have to rely on corporate campaigns--which work best against big, respectable institutions--and mandatory arbitration? A union card no longer becomes a way to engage in a (sometimes risky) "economic contest" with management through walkouts and picketing. It's a ticket that lets you summon a federal mediator who will raise your wage, whether or not your union has any strike power. Labor must think these chain retailers are sitting ducks. After all, why not sign the card and get the government to award you a raise?
b) Are there really enough workers in these service jobs to "rebuild the middle class," even if they all get 50% raises?
c) How is Obama going to "bend the curve" of health care costs downwards if all the hospitals get unionized?
d) If these non-outsourceable low skilled jobs are the key to raising incomes at the bottom, how does it make sense to allow a continued "insourcing" of unskilled illegal immigrants to bid down wages in these jobs (which happens even if the immigrants work for competing small-box service providers)? The retail jobs don't compete with cheaper foreign workers--until the cheaper foreign workers come here. Does Robert Reich really think the Democrats proposed legalization plan will stop the future flow of the undocumented unskilled (as opposed to establishing a precedent that will attract more of them)? Are American labor leaders that naive? Or is the idea that once the nontradable chain retail sector is organized, unions will reverse their current support for legalization and become restrictionists?
e) It sounds as if the "big box" middle-class-rebuilding strategy is based on a model of the economy in which the main activity is consuming (and providing services to people who are in the process of consuming) things that are produced elsewhere. But doesn't Obama talk about a future economy based less on private consumption--in which Best Buy, Cheesecake Factory and the Ritz Carlton have a much smaller role? I sense a contradiction.
f) Of course, if unions do for Best Buy what they did for Chrysler, they'll shrink the sector quite effectively. But they won't rebuild the middle class. ...
1:10 A.M.
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Another illustration of the 27th Law of Journalism, which says: When a reporter gives an example of something that is supposed to be funny it won't be funny. Even if the story is about someone who is usually funny. From The Week's discussion of Twitter:
The English comedian Stephen Fry keeps his nearly 200,000 followers amused with such wry tweets as this one, sent while stuck in an elevator: “Hell’s teeth. We could be here for hours. Arse, poo, and widdle.”
So wry! ...1:08 A.M.
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Memo to the visionary Jon Klein: Several people have told me they found the recent TV confrontations between Lawrence O'Donnell and Pat Buchanan to be compelling and illuminating viewing. Here's an idea: Why not make these confrontations a regular feature of CNN? You could have Buchanan "on the right," and someone like O'Donnell "on the left"! To spice it up, you could let them each invite maybe one guest a night to help them defend their side. Make a whole half-hour show of it. Appointment TV! Perfectly suited to the new ideological cable environment in which nonpartisan CNN is losing out. ... P.S.: I'm trying to come up with a name for this new show. Maybe "Cross Currents"? .. "Shootout"? ... "Ready, Aim, Fire"? ... "Fire When Ready"? ... I just know there's a good one along those lines! Help me out here. ... 12:58 A.M.
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The bipartisan "comprehensive immigration reform" plan that today's Democratic establishment would like you to ignore. .. 12:51 A.M.
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Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Enjoy your daily print newspaper. It's later than you think. ... 1:02 A.M.
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Magical Moment: One seemingly sure sign Obama is actually, really not going left, at least on economic policy: Robert Kuttner isn't sucking up!** Instead he's frankly anguished about the incoming economic team. ... P.S.: OK, there's a small, vestigial suck-up at the end. ...
**--For Kuttner's 1992 flattery of president-elect Clinton, click here, search for "epic." ...12:47 A.M.
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Monday, December 29, 2008
Fire Fire Mickey Kaus. They're falling down on the job. ... No wonder I still have this gig.
Update: They've been spurred into action, arguing
It's true that unions are poor vehicles for equitable distribution of wealth. They have also failed to cure cancer, and they haven't done anything to stop Russian aggression in post-communist Europe.
Now it's obvious unions are "poor vehicles for equitable distribution of wealth." Please tell it to Kevin Drum (and Paul Krugman). ... 7:26 P.M.
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Life in the Left Cocoon: Promoting the Southern, corporate, anti-UAW agenda, Kevin Drum says he's "open" to "good-faith efforts to address reform" of "mushrooming work rules." But he's still for greater unionization:
Conservatives flatly oppose anything that gives labor any additional bargaining power, full stop, and that doesn't leave much room for compromise. So unions it is. Especially in the service sector, they're pretty much the only idea on the table for seriously addressing low-end wage growth, and that means I'm for 'em. [E.A.]
The only idea on the table? How about restoring economic growth and creating a tight labor market, giving all workers (not just the unionized) greater bargaining leverage? That's the traditional Clintonite formula, no? To that you could add border control to ensure that competition from unskilled immigrants doesn't undermine leverage among lower-wage workers..... Drum goes on the cite Ezra Klein for the proposition that:
the last great leap forward for unions was during World War II, and the last great expansion of the American middle class followed in its aftermath. In contrast, the most recent expansions -- which have largely occurred in the absence of unions -- have benefited America's rich. [E.A.]
Huh? The biggest recent expansion, during the '90s, a) benefitted Americans at all levels, but especially average workers and b) occurred largely while union power was ebbing. The Clintonite formula worked. Maybe it can't be achieved again. Maybe it's flawed because (sorry!) the rich got richer too in the Clinton years. Maybe a return to Carter-era union power will be better still! But those are arguments Dems like Drum and Klein won't even deign to make as long as they keep reassuring each other that they not only have the best ideas around but the only ideas around. ...
P.S.: Klein also argues;
The countries with the world's highest growth rates -- the Nordic economies -- also have some of the world's highest rates of unionization. Denmark, Sweden, and Finland all approach 80 percent.
There's an argument that in countries with 70-80-90 percent unionization, unions have to be more responsible--union leaders know that any inflationary wage increases are going to be paid for by their own members (who are essentially everyone), and they know that any declines in productivity will hurt their own members (essentially everyone). Not only do they have an incentive to be reasonable, but they have the power to keep their own membership--say, those unions that could get bigger-than-average increases by striking--in check. But we aren't going to get 80% unionization. We're going to get 20-25% or 30% unionization, with unions that are powerful enough to cut good deals for themselves (and impose resulting price increases on everyone else), but not so large that they have to take everyone's interests into account. ... (This is point made by Mancur Olson and noted by Robert M. Kaus a year before Klein was born. Yikes.) ... 4:06 P.M.
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They Said It Couldn't Be Done! How to Make Caroline Kennedy More Boring: Caroline Kennedy's ragging of NYT reporters, for which she's now being pilloried, is of course one of her better recent moments:
NC: Could you, for the sake of storytelling, could you tell us a little bit about that moment, like, where you were, what you said to him about your decision, how that played out?
CK: Have you guys ever thought about writing for, like, a woman’s magazine or something? (Laughter)
DH: What do you have against women’s magazines?
CK: Nothing at all, but I thought you were the crack political team here.
Kennedy's bristling at the embarrassing, sentimentalizing conventions of journalism (at Newsweek the question was always "what were you eating") and isn't afraid to invoke some undiplomatic truths (i.e. women's magazine's often run softball crap). Either she'll keep it up--in which case maybe there's something to the idea that she has the virtues of an independent outsider--or, more likely, she'll become even more safely platitudinous. ... 3:19 P.M.
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The Aribtrariness of Wagner Act Redistribution: Richard Posner makes an essential point usually overlooked by those on the left who instinctively support unionism in the hope that it will achieve some sort of just redistribution of income:
The redistribution of wealth that they bring about is not only fragile ...[snip] ...but also capricious, as it is an accident whether conditions in a particular industry are favorable or unfavorable to unionization. [E.A.]
Or, as Robert M. Kaus put it in very small type in 1983:
The "economic power" that the Wagner Act gives unions is determined by all sorts of factors that have nothing to do with the moral basis of a union's cause. Workers who work in a single location, for example,are easier to organize than workers who are geographically dispersed, even though the latter may work in sweatshops and the former in comfortable, lighted factories. Some industries are extremely vulnerable to strikes--industries that deal in perishable goods, for example, or industries (e.g. Broadway theaters) where you can set up a picket line that will intercept a lot of customers. In other industries, advances in technology have weakened the power of strikes, as petroleum and chemical workers discovered when they walked out and found that skeleton crews of supervisors could run computer-controlled refineries for a long time. Did the chemical workers deserve to be paid less simply because their industries had become more strike-proof?
This arbitrariness is not just a trivial side effect of the collective bargaining system. A truism within the labor movement holds that "the workers who need the unions the most don't get them." .... The answer of labor leaders to this dilemma is simple: more unions. .... But even if the law required unions in every workplace, there is no reason to think wage inequalities would shrink in any systematic fashion. Sol C. Chaikin, president of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, often complains about the "two-tier labor force" in the United States--but he is complaining about a disparity that exists within the ranks of organized labor. ... The Wagner Act gave Chaikin's union the power to strike. Unfortunately, fate did not give it any of the chance attributes that might enable it to use strikes to boost wages dramatically above their market levels. [E.A.]
If you organized the operators of drawbridges going into Manhattan, under the Wagner Act your union will be able to extract quite a premium by striking. If you organize fast food workers, not so much. I've never understood why leftish idealists ever bought into the idea that this is distributive justice. ... 1:12 A.M.
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Sunday, December 28, 2008
Two year-end TV roundups--by Tom Shales and by Inside Cable News. One of these guys is paid an incredible amount of money. And one of them phones in a list of usual suspects. ... P.S.: From the other one:
Unlike NBC’s very public axe wielding, CNN’s cuts came about suddenly as a bunch of on the air talent lost their jobs. Most notable loss; CNN veteran Miles O’Brien. CNN has yet to publicly account for all this talent loss, which flied in the face of the public posturing done by Jonathan Klein regarding how his network was in the money.
Jonathan Klein, dissembling? We're shocked. ... 7:00 P.M.
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Friday, December 26, 2008
Don't Blame Gettelfinger: Rand Simberg's anti-UAW-work-rule post was better than mine. He has horror stories, including his own--noting that there are too many floating around for them to be "merely anecdotal." (Another bit of confirming evidence: The union firms went broke! Non-anecdotally broke.) Simberg makes a point that's especially relevant now that the UAW is arguing that labor is only "10% of the cost of the vehicle."
And the rules don’t just affect productivity — they affect quality as well. When you can’t discipline employees for being absent without leave, when you have to bring in unfamiliar workers to fill in for them, when you’re missing half your plant during hunting season — yes, the stories about avoiding buying cars built on Monday or Friday in the fall are true — you can’t expect to put out a quality product, regardless of how well or poorly designed it is. You particularly can’t expect to do so when the union rules put all responsibility for quality and production on management, but give them no authority to manage the workers and provide the workers with no incentive to build a quality product if they lack the personal pride to do so. [E.A.]
Labor may only be 10% of the cost of the vehicle, but it's still going to be a vehicle nobody wants to buy if it's poorly made. ... Note: The UAW does make some high quality cars, especially at the NUMMI joint venture with Toyota in San Jose, where they threw out the UAW work rule book. Why couldn't GM successfully spread the NUMMI system to all its other plants? Ask the UAW. ...
P.S,: Here's a Business Week profile of the UAW president Ron Gettelfinger. Seems like a reasonable guy! But that's the point. Gettelfinger isn't the problem--I suspect, for example, that the UAW leadership knows pretty well what the problems are in its factories. The problem is the system, the American adversarial labor-management negotiating system, in which reasonable people doing what the system tells them they should do wind up producing undesirable results. Just as negotiating over work assignments means factories adjust too slowly to generate continuous efficiency improvements (which often involve constantly changing work assignments) negotiating ponderous 3 year contracts (in which Gettelfinger must extract every possible concession to please the members who elected him) means contracts adjust too slowly to save the companies from failure if market conditions change. From Business Week:
[T]here is a pragmatic Ron Gettelfinger as well. Three years ago, the automakers were in trouble, and he knew that without concessions there would be no jobs for his members to report to. When Detroit came looking for givebacks, Gettelfinger ultimately agreed to a contract that set back starting factory wages 30 years: New hires will begin at $14 an hour—half the wage for veterans and a pay scale not seen since the '70s. Plus, he has watched the Big Three cut some 80,000 jobs since 2005.
That also brings up a key criticism from Detroit's executives. Gettelfinger made those key concessions starting in 2005, but not until Ford and GM were reeling toward massive losses. The union has never given enough to get the companies ahead of the curve. "It's always a day late and a dollar short," says one former GM executive. [E.A.]
See also this interview, pointing out that the $14 wage scale for new hires hasn't had an impact because nobody new is being hired by the UAW's employers, who are shrinking, not growing. The obvious alternative to cutting the pay of nonexistent future workers would be to cut the pay of existing current workers--but they are the people the system tells Gettelfinger he needs to please. ...
Fifteen years ago, at the start of the last Democratic president's administration. incoming Labor Secretary Robert Reich famously said "The jury is still out on whether the traditional union is necessary for the new workplace." Tactfully put. This fall, if not earlier, the jury came back. 5:19 P.M.
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What's Worse Than Camelot? Cuomolot! I should say that I'd certainly prefer Caroline Kennedy to at least one candidate for Hillary Clinton's seat. That candidate would be Andrew Cuomo. Caroline may be boring but she does not seem evil! (For some links on why I think Cuomo is a thuggish irresponsible opportunist, click here. I also had some unpleasant dealings with his self-promotion machine at HUD, when they were busy hyping and distorting some homeless statistics in order to get his name in the paper.) ... These are not the only two people in New York state, however. ... 4:30 P.M.
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