The Point of View Waltz

Back in 1971, Harry Nilsson wrote the concept album called “The Point,” which was later made into an endearing animated special that I recall seeing in elementary school. While much of the material isn’t particularly relevant to business topics (the album and the film are about equality, tolerance, and finding value in people who are different from you – a very enlightened viewpoint by 1971 standards) – I will still pull out the occasional reference, since many of them are timeless. One of the songs on the album was called “The Point of View Waltz” (often shortened to the P.O.V. Waltz), and I always wind up thinking about it when something comes up in the news that depends entirely on how you look at it – as does the call made yesterday for a change in the depreciation rules for private and company jets…

Much like a business, our government has only two ways of improving cash flow: bring in more revenue or eliminate spending. In the case of a national government, revenue is mostly generated through taxes – it’s occasionally possible to raise some money by selling off assets, but unless you can somehow obtain new assets for less than your sale price, this will have limited possibilities. Reducing spending generally means that someone who has been getting government funding won’t be – and in a republic, that someone will most often be whoever has the weakest representation in Congress. Traditionally, Democrats have attempted to fix cash-flow problems by raising taxes (but only on people outside of their core power base) while Republicans have attempted to cut services provided by the government (again, focusing on those services that don’t go to their political base), but both parties have tried to avoid mentioning that they get most of their support from the wealthy and powerful…

In the current case, the President is suggesting that private jets be moved from the five-year depreciation to the 7-year depreciation category – effectively, that the people who own private jet aircraft should have to pay more taxes on them. Doing so would generate an additional $3 billion dollars over the next ten years – which sounds very impressive, especially considering that anyone rich enough to use a private jet in the first place can probably afford the increase in costs. However, when you consider that the President is trying to eliminate $4 trillion worth of Federal deficit, this comes to less than one-tenth of one percent of the total. It’s a good start – $3 billion is enough to do a lot of worth-while things, even in 2011 dollars – but for the Democrats to present this as a major step forward (or a major blow to the greedy rich) is just as disingenuous as the Republicans presenting this as a major hardship being visited upon people who already carry the bulk of the tax burden in this country…

The truth is that none of our national problems are going to be solved by political grandstanding, let alone with stupid accounting tricks, which is all this particular measure actually is. Even if you lined up a dozen more new taxes just as big as this one, you’d only cover about 1% of the deficit, and you’ve already got people from the private jet industry complaining about being “singled out” by the Federal government and how unfair this is. Meanwhile, our national debt is growing and our economy is tanking while our political leaders stand around and posture with tax raises and tax cuts that they know will serve no purpose beyond appealing to their own party’s power base. How you regard the situation, as with how you regard this particular tax initiative, depends mostly on your point of view – but from where I’m sitting, none of this is particularly reassuring…

Defending Your Right to Bigotry

One of the ongoing problems with life in these United States is that while our Constitution guarantees several of our most fundamental human rights – notably free speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion – the right to be treated decently, the right to live your life as you see fit and not be constantly called unpleasant names by bigots, and the right to be left the heck alone by evangelicals who call themselves “Christians” are not guaranteed under the Constitution. As a result, an apparently increasing number of people who understand political power, financial power, religious conservatism and fundamental, and advertising – but apparently have no grasp whatsoever of the complex concept of tolerance – keep using their wealth, power, and First Amendment rights to free speech to spew hate about anyone of whom they don’t approve. I wrote about it last December , and I’ve also questioned whether religious speech that confers commercial advantages on the broadcaster should be considered protected on the Main blog , but there’s a situation going on in Florida these days that makes me question if our entire nation hasn’t started Racing to the Bottom…

I picked up the story off of the Wisconsin Gazette website, but you can find it in other places online, too. Basically, the idea is that every year LGBT community organizers pick a day in the spring to be “Gay Day” at Disney World in Orlando, and put out notice over various Internet channels. It’s part of the local Pride Week celebration, which draws an estimated 160,000 people to the Orlando area each year, and brings something on the order of $150 million to the local economy (not counting what the participants spend at Disney World). Unfortunately, this idea creates a full-blown panic in the local conservative “Christian” organizations, who appear to be convinced that seeing gay people and same-sex couples in public will turn children who witness the event gay, and similar brain-dead bigotry. Unfortunately, the event isn’t sponsored by (or even acknowledged by) Disney, which means there’s no one the “Christian” groups can lobby to prevent it. So instead, they’ve decided to hire airplanes to pull giant banners warning people in the area about the event…

Why, exactly, this is being tolerated in the first place is a bit unclear. Certainly, there is a right to free speech involved, but if anyone tried flying giant banners saying “There are Jews at Disney World Today!” or “Warning: Islamic Groups in the Area!” they’d be sued down to their underwear and shut down by the authorities before the first tow plane left the ground. Most of these groups defend behavior like this by claiming that homosexual behavior of any kind is against their religion, but the legal precedents on that are fairly clear: you have a right to practice whatever faith you like, but not to impose it on anyone else. And as I noted last year, if you actually do believe in Christian theology, spending this kind of money to attack people of whom you do not approve when there are millions of hungry people who need food, homeless people who need shelter, and sick people who need medical care – not even in the rest of the world, but just here in the U.S. – is about as anti-Christian as you can possibly get…

In the long run, I’m really not sure what is worse – if these so-called “Christians” believe the hate they are spewing, or if they’re just doing it for political, social or financial gain. The latter is despicable; a perversion not merely of the Christian faith they are aping for their own ends but of the social and religious freedoms of the only nation on Earth that would put up with this nonsense in the first place. But the former means that this is true hate speech – people who not only believe the most preposterous nonsense because of their own fear and hatred, but are willing to attack the rights (and presumably the lives) of innocent people because of that fear and hatred. Either way, it’s truly sad to see a religion dedicated to peace, love, and universal brotherhood becoming the Accelerator in our Race to the Bottom…

Making a Federal Case Out of It

If anyone out there still doubts the truism about power corrupts, there was a report out of Polk County, Florida this week that should lay those uncertainties to rest. According to a story online from The Ledger.com website a Polk County sheriff’s deputy responded to a call from his wife saying that a local Burger King had messed up her order by driving to the restaurant while on duty, interrogating the manager and the drive-through attendant, and demanding to see their identification. Upon realizing that the Burger King in question was actually in the city of Lakeland (and therefore under the local police jurisdiction, not his), the deputy called a friend on the Lakeland PD out to the restaurant and tried to get her to proceed with the investigation. On learning the actual details, the police officer decline to get involved in what was essentially a civil matter, and bowed out. Which would have been the end of it, had the Sheriff’s Office not gotten wind of the story, upon which they suspended the deputy for two days without pay. At his pay grade, the $10 fast-food meal ended up costing him well over $300…

Now, it’s no secret that I have had my own run-ins with the Burger King organization over the years. I found it particularly amazing to have once purchased an order of “sliders” (miniature cheeseburgers) from a nearby Burger King, only to arrive home and discover that the top halves of the buns had been left off of them – a story I promised the company I’m going to keep re-telling until it stops being funny. Accordingly, I have no difficulty imagining some of the things that a Burger King location could do that would make the wife of a peace officer mad enough to call him over to arrest everyone in the place. What remains baffling to me is that anyone who has actually completed the training to become a sheriff’s deputy (let alone a 6-year veteran) would have behaved in the manner described. Even allowing for an absolutely preposterous level of arrogance, entitlement, and belief in his own power and immunity, the deputy in our story had to know that law enforcement officers are public officials, and consequently their actions are generally a matter of public record – and so are their reprimands…

I don’t expect to see too many recurrences of these events; this case is unusual if not actually unique. However, it would seem that there are at least two lessons to be learned here. First, as people in general become more connected and less patient, it’s only a matter of time before somebody who is given the wrong food (or something completely inedible – which happens sometimes) calls in people with guns who will actually use them. Being more careful with the orders won’t prevent this – crazy people with guns are going to do what they’re going to do – but it might keep the occurrences down a little if these mistakes weren’t as common. It might also help to have more security in public-contact businesses, especially those that involve cash purchases…

Second, it might be a good idea for local law enforcement to start cracking down on officers and deputies who would do something like this. Because the days when this sort of bully-boy behavior would be ignored by the public are long gone – and the days in which it was possible to cover up this sort of behavior are on their way out. If business and local government work together, it might be possible to put a lid on the worst of the crazy times in which we find ourselves living. But if they don’t, I can almost guarantee that there will be more incidents just like this one – and that more and more law enforcement agencies will find themselves racing to the bottom…

Fly the Traumatic Skies

On the face of things, the story I saw this week on the website for one of the Seattle news stations looks like just another of airlines being foolish – and I’ve already spoken to you all of my determination not to let this degenerate into the Airlines Follies blog. But once I dug down past the headline, I came to realize that the story has a bit more to it than meets the eye- and it isn’t just the company that is racing to the bottom, because at least part of their concerns are at least partly reasonable…

You can pick up the original story from the King 5 News site if you want to, but the basic scenario is that a woman who has terminal cancer is trying to fly home from Seattle to Korea to spend her few remaining weeks with her family. She and her daughter obtained all of the medical clearances saying she was healthy enough to travel that the airline required, and signed off on all of the forms required to deal with the various legal issues, but the airline still refused to let her board at the last moment, saying that the other passengers would be traumatized if she were to pass away unexpectedly during the flight. Despite being presented with multiple expert opinions that this would not happen, the airline wouldn’t budge and also started making trouble about the refund (saying that processing the refund would take longer than the woman had to live), which prevented her from just taking the money and buying passage on another carrier…

Now, the business with the refund was heartless; it was also illegal, and after this was pointed out to them by the news program, the airline relented and coughed up the money. But while it would be fun to condemn the airline for the passenger trauma concerns in the first place, we can’t – which is to say, given the current state of the U.S. legal system, we can not say with any confidence that someone on that flight wouldn’t have taken the opportunity of having a fellow passenger expire during the trip to sue the airline for vast sums of money for emotional trauma or whatever cockamamie nonsense they (and their lawyers) could dream up. We can suggest that the company should have the courage of their convictions, that they should stand up for their passengers and against frivolous lawsuits, or that if they keep attempting to avoid anything that might conceivably traumatize anyone they will not be able to continue running their business for any length of time – but the fact is, that’s not our call to make…

As I occasionally note on my other blog, Notes on a Business Page , the management of any publicly held company isn’t paid to take on all of the injustice and evil in the world; they are paid to make money for the stockholders who actually own the company. It’s possible that the airline’s stockholders would have approved of taking a gamble to get this customer home, but short of an emergency stockholder’s meeting (for which there also wasn’t time) there is no way for the management team to know that, and if the stockholders have voted against accepting legal risk for such situations in the past, then the management team was just following the directives of the people who actually own the company. We can deplore those policies, and if you care enough about this issue you could purchase stock in the airline and protest at the next stockholder’s meeting, but short of that, we can’t really say that the management team has done anything wrong…

That honor must go to all of the people who have sued over such issues in recent years, and all of the ones who read this story and thought “Payday!” and their attorneys, of course. Because the truth is that those individuals aren’t just racing to the bottom; they’re jetting there at 525 knots on four jet engines…

I Miss the Old Days…

I was saddened to hear that in the aftermath of the earthquake in Japan last week there were apparently cases of people using the occasion for a few cheap laughs. I’ not referring here to the firing of Gilbert Gottfried by AFLAC because of a few insensitive tweets; that has always been Mr. Gottfried’s style of humor, and if the idea bothers them the company shouldn’t have hired him to voice their spokesduck in the first place. No, here I am referring to some roguish jokester who apparently thought it would be funny to tell the parents of a young woman living in Japan that she had been confirmed dead in the aftermath of the disaster…

You can pick up the Associated Press story off of the Toronto Star website if you want to, but the basic idea is that someone posted a message on a Google site set up for the purpose of tracking loved ones who might have been in the affected area, saying that the woman in question had been confirmed dead. It became clear that this was incorrect when the woman managed to get a text message through to her parents using a satellite phone a day or so later, and it became clear that this was a deliberate hoax (not just an informational error) when it was determined that the name signed to the “medical” report was not that of any doctor who had ever worked at the facility where the “death” supposedly occurred, and no one has been able to identify who actually posted that entry in the first place…

Now, I realize that modern-day trolls are not, for the most part, truly descendants of the hacker culture of the last century. I used to run with a group of hackers, back when the Internet was still just a gleam in DARPA’s eye and most computer exchanges were done over telephone lines using 300-baud modems and bulletin-board systems, and I can tell you that not only would we never have considered such a hoax, we wouldn’t have tolerated anyone who did. We might have attempted humor by listing Julius Caesar, Richard M. Nixon, Pope Pius IX or the AFLAC Duck among the departed, or political commentary by making entries for Wisconsin’s Public Employees’ Union or Governor Walker’s career (depending on our party affiliation), but causing somebody’s parents such a moment of heartbreak and grief isn’t just unfunny, it’s also cruel, callous and stupid – and those are just the adjectives I can print…

There was a time when being a hacker meant something; when we aspired to be the knights of the Information Superhighway, defenders of the defenseless, the conscience and the whistle-blowers of a nation (and, one day, the world). We knew it wasn’t really true, of course; just as we knew that the majority of us really were zit-faced nerds playing video games in our parents’ basements who had never had girlfriends. But it was something to believe in; something that made us more than just a bunch of poorly-socialized technology geeks with a penchant for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and vintage Mountain Dew. The interconnection of all of humanity has done some wonderful things for our world, bringing people together and creating friendships and communities where once there was only quiet desperation and loneliness, but it has also given that tiny number of truly monstrous human beings the chance to vent their spleen, hatred and cruelty onto innocent people in a time of crisis…

It makes me sad for my species, sometimes. And if this behavior is ever accepted – indeed, if it is ever greeted with anything less than a murderous rage – then our Race to the Bottom has achieved a new speed record…

The Human Factor

Every once in a while you’ll hear someone talking about how all of the new security we’ve been seeing since 9/11 is just window dressing; not only are the borders still as open and the ports (air and sea) just as vulnerable as ever, but the actual TSA security, which manages to defy multiple Amendments from the Bill of Rights, manners and (frequently) sanity is accomplishing nothing. Now, I’m as security-minded as the next guy, and more patriotic than most; I want to be as sure as possible that no one is going to slip a bomb onto the next airplane I ride on, and I’m perfectly okay with whatever our government decides to do to anyone who does. Nevertheless, you have to wonder if the pessimists are correct when you hear stories like this one from the CBS affiliate station in Boston …

If you don’t want to hit the link, the story is pretty straightforward: TSA agents testing the security procedures in Charlotte managed to get a package onto a Jet Blue flight to Boston by the time-honored method of slipping a $100 bill to the agent at the front counter. Yes, you heard that correctly; for a measly $100 an otherwise sane adult was willing to place a package containing who knows what onto an airliner. I’m not sure if I’m more appalled as a consumer (I expect better from the private sector!) as a reasonably ethical human being (how could ANYONE risk over a hundred human lives in such an idiotic and reckless fashion for mere personal gain?) or as a business teacher (you risked a life sentence for $100? Really? You’re okay with being paid the equivalent of $2 a year for the next fifty years? Assuming they don’t just execute you for being a terrorist or an idiot?) Nor do I find assurances by the TSA or the airline that all packages going aboard are screened for explosives in any way reassuring; the desk agent was willing and able to commit forgery, perjury, and accept a bribe that put over a hundred people in mortal danger – do you expect me to have any faith in his or her adherence to safety protocol?

I should also point out that this is a plot element from a movie that was, unfortunately, released the same week as the 9/11 outrages: two minor criminals are able to get tickets for themselves and a hostage out of the country simply by offering the desk agent several large bills. They’re also carrying an atomic bomb with them in the mistaken belief that it’s really a case full of diamonds, but that’s not point; 9/11 itself proved that you don’t need to get a bomb onto a plane to destroy it – or to kill several thousand people on the ground at the same time. My point here is that as long as the people working for the airlines and TSA remain fallible human beings there will always be some chance of this happening – and if these individuals are underpaid and overworked (or even believe that they are) they will be able to justify such misdeeds in their own mind for long enough to cause another set of catastrophes…

Of course, this time there was a happy ending; this time the mysterious package was just a test article and the sender was an undercover TSA agent. But as long as our entire airline security system is based on everyone who works at every airport doing the right thing regardless of temptation, resentment, or personal feelings, then it’s only a matter of time before this sort of outrage happens for real – and another airline destination joins us on our Race to the Bottom…

You Keep Using That Word…

There’s a famous joke that occurs in the classic movie “The Princess Bride,” where the leader of the bad guys keeps saying the word “Inconceivable!” with regard to their enemies catching up with them, climbing up the cliffs, and so on. Finally, one of his henchmen responds in consternation “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” This was essentially my reaction to one of the most recent pronouncements from a pretender to leadership of the Tea Party Movement this past week; I’m just worried about what will happen if more people start making the same malapropos…

You can find the story on TPM here if you want to, but I’ve cross-checked the story on some other sources, and it appears to be correct in the particulars. On Wednesday of this week, Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips put out a list of what he called “Liberal Hate Groups” – in other words, groups that he and his followers (assuming he has followers) believe hate them and their values and possibly America into the bargain. It’s a direct reaction to the Southern Poverty Law Center (number 4 on Mr. Phillips’ list) declaring some of the hard-line conservative religious/political groups like the Family Research Council and the American Family Association onto its list of Hate Groups because of their opposition to same-sex marriage and the abolition of the military “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy, along with more basic civil rights. Other groups named in the same fatwa include the NAACP, the Department of Homeland Security, the ACLU, and the SEIU, all for the same general sort of refusal to adhere to a conservative Christian Euro-centric cultural view of the U.S. It would be even funnier if it wasn’t so clear that the Tea Party Nation has no idea of what a hate group actually is…

Now, in fairness to everyone, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list includes groups like the KKK, and having a political organization whose goals you agree with end up a list like that would certainly anger most people. But calling them a hate group because they take exception to organized (and well-funded) groups trying to deny millions of people basic civil rights is a little silly, and putting DHS on the list because it supports the current Presidential administration is asinine unless Mr. Phillips actually wants Federal agencies to declare open rebellion against a lawfully-elected government. The ACLU is just as stupid; the only rationale given is that the ACLU hates America (according to the Tea Party, anyway) and is therefore a hate group. By the time you get to the end of the list, it’s clear that whoever came up with this spew has both the intelligence and the manners of a spoiled child. The problem is, they’re also the nominal leadership for a group that numbers somewhere between five and thirty million people – and they don’t appear to be kidding…

It would be nice to end the year on an up note, and maybe sometime in the future I will, but for the moment, I read this sort of thing and a cold wind goes up my back. Because when those in power (any kind of power, I don’t care!) start calling their enemies “un-patriotic” and demanding that they be disenfranchised, imprisoned, or destroyed outright, I recall the lessons of history and what happened the last time a national government was co-opted by such people (reference Germany, 1930 to 1945, if you didn’t catch it), and I worry for the future of this Republic. In five hours or so it’s going to be 2011 – let’s all be careful out there…