The UMW Now More Than Ever
Bethel, Thomas N.
Tilting at Windmills function of state government is to divide the booty-to determine who gets to have a bank, run a race track, operate a liquor store, or be licensed to practice a trade or...
...only seven people in the company make more than $1 7,000 a year after taxes...
...The magazine in the rack at their side is Town and Country...
...One of our favorite themes is that the White House does not have an effective system for finding out what is going on down below in the government...
...American workers’ wages have an increasingly dim relation to productivity...
...First, it sticks to the shoe business, while its American competitors have conglomerated into toys, apparel, and other fields...
...1 hope I’m wrong, but I do not think Israel is at all likely to enter into a peace agreement satisfactory to the Arabs...
...Since there are elements of the programlike those designed to encourage investmentthat have far greater significance to business, it appears that we now have an executive class more concerned with its perks than with substance...
...During the evening I asked Liza if I could get her a drink and she ordered something I’d never tasted before: white rum and soda...
...If;yo u doubt that we are a nation of snobs, please consider this new ad for Puerto kcan rums: “Liza introduced us to white rum and soda at an Andy Warhol party...
...On the other hand, if the Israelis are fair and reasonable and negotiate in good faith, they can count absolutely on American protection from Arab aggression...
...We first met Liza Minnelli at a party Andy Warhol gave for Kis magazine Interview...
...The Court recently let the Adams Wrecking Company of Detroit get away with ignoring an EPA regulation on asbestos although even the village idiot knows by now that asbestos is a “hazardous air pollutant,” as EPA says it is...
...As we have pointed out before, the stories corporations tell Congress are often different from the stories they tell their stockholders and potential investors...
...I doubt that Israel can be certain of American intervention if it behaves unreasonably enough to invite an Arab attack...
...The Institute for Highway Safety has released a study that attributes 2,000 highway deaths a year to 16- and 17-year-old drivers who would not have been driving had it not been for driver education courses that got them on the road 10 earlier than would otherwise have been the case...
...One reason for this is that Israel feels little impetus to make concessions: the balance of military power is so tilted in Israel’s favor that it will take years for the Arabs to catch up...
...The program was headed, by the way, by G. William Miller, President Carter’s nominee for the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve Board...
...We disagree...
...This is because the average American, not just the American Jew, admires Israel...
...Now comes an article in the trade publication World Oil that says there will be more drilling this year than last...
...The business pages of the papers, the stockholders’ reports, and the trade journals are good places for finding the brighter side of the stories companies tell Congress about how this or that law is ruining them...
...I n this issue we recognize the best books on politics and government published last year...
...The distinction, it seems to me, is between the rigor with which we should judge ourselves and the mercy we owe to others...
...And if you still doubt that we’re a nation of snobs, put a magnifying glass to that picture of Carter flying home on Air Force One with Rosalynn’s head resting on his lap...
...The AP story was reprinted in the White House News Summary...
...The problem is that driver education doesn’t solve the problems of the adolescent male in America...
...It sounded interesting (Liza has a way of making everything sound interesting), so I tried one...
...Our favorite, though, is a bill that Virginia beer distributors have gotten introduced that would give each of them absolute monopoly in his area...
...Too many people at the blue-collar level have jobs where they stand around most of the day, and too many at the white-collar level spend their day in the bureaucratic equivalent of standing around: attending meetings and writing memoranda...
...Fifth, while its employees are paid relatively high wages for England, they are paid strictly according to what they produce...
...In this they may be making a fatal error...
...Tilting at Windmills function of state government is to divide the booty-to determine who gets to have a bank, run a race track, operate a liquor store, or be licensed to practice a trade or profession...
...From that moment, white rum and soda has been one of our favorite drinks...
...Israel can only lose if it forfeits that admiration...
...Remember, for example, how one oil lobbyist after another has proclaimed that unless oil prices are decontrolled there is no incentive to drill wells...
...Auletta blames the civil service and the employee unions and “the attitude that one is in public service not to serve but to grab as much as possible...
...Second, it gives its factory managers wide latitude in making decisions on everything except the design of shoes...
...We desperately need a President who’ will confront all the self-interest considerations that make the people of this country resist needed reform...
...But once he begins to bring these problems out into the open-not offering readymade solutions, but challenging his countrymen to face the problems with him and to help him determine the answers-I am convinced that a vast constituency will rise to support him...
...You remember how Carter, after cutting down on White House limousines, gave his staff salaries that were much higher than almost all of them had received before and then proceeded to give them two additional raises...
...In fact, this year should be the best drilling year since the 1950s...
...A Warhol party, the start of a friendship with Liza Minnelli, and an introduction to white rum...
...The average policeman and fireman take 55 paid days off a year in addition to weekends...
...I would also like to recognize the best magazine article...
...When Kilpatrick started to speak up for the spoils system on “Agronsky and Company” recently, Agronsky cut him off with a patronizing, “We won’t argue with you Jack,” assuming that Kilpatrick’s point would be perceived as obviously ridiculous by the audience...
...O n e of the things wrong with the federal bureaucracy is too many chiefs and too few Indians...
...Indeed, I think that pressure for such intervention would fail and would produce a tragic backlash of antiSemitism in this country...
...Fourth, because the 8 owners believe, according to Robert D. Hershey, Jr., of the Times, that “life is always happier in small plants,” its 11,800 workers are divided among 20 plants...
...The problem with this attitude, as we try to point out from time to time, is that it’s anti-democratic...
...She radiates such warmth and enthusiasm that after an hour of conversation we both felt as if we’d known her all our lives...
...The resulting unaccountability of the technocrats is at the heart of the problem of bureaucracy...
...that a government job is a right, not a privilege...
...White rum also mixes marvelously with tonic, is fantastic with orange juice, and makes a better martini than gin or vodka...
...It is Ken Auletta’s “More for Less” in the August 1, 1977, issue of The New Yorker...
...John Cramer, the civil service columnist, says there is a Navy Finance Center where there is one supervisor for every 1.5 employees...
...Charles Peters...
...Politicians-with the exception of aging ethnic ward-heelers in Boston and Chicago, about whom we are condescendingly indulgent-are all bad...
...It would be made up of people who are sick of all the dirty little secrets that have made them join in perpetuating a featherbedded country they are increasingly ashamed of, people whose fear of seeking new solutions may be great but is nonetheless exceeded by their certainty that the old answers provided by big government, big business, and big unions simply have not worked...
...The pro-abortion people ignore the rigor and the antis the mercy...
...o n Monday, January 23, The New York Times ran the Marlboro cowboy ad in its sports section, thus placing a pitch that makes smoking seem romantic and manly in the part of the paper that is read most avidly by young people...
...One reason for our continuing inflation is the fact that total employee compensation has been rising at the rate of eight per cent per year, while productivity has been plodding along at an average two-percent increase...
...But too few people have an interest in changing the system because too many profit by it...
...Not bad for one evening...
...Today the city has 2,000 more policemen than it had in 1961, and they are working one million fewer hours per year...
...Several years ago, we published an article by Suzannah Lessard called “America the Featherbedded...
...Auletta tells the story of the bureaucracy of New York City and its march to disaster...
...Facing his problems, which for some reason no one appears to want to do, might save the rest of us...
...Have you noticed in the news accounts of business reaction to the administration’s taxreform plan, the item that has drawn the most complaints is the crack-down on the three-martini lunch...
...Third, it is family-owned, with no obligation to pay out large dividends, and reinvests the bulk of its profits in the business...
...And the reason for lower figures in the last four years was not, in the words of William Dudley, publisher of World Oil, “politically inspired interference in the form of a myriad of new federal rules, regulations, restrictions, and taxes,” but simply the availability of rigs and related equipment, because “virtually all equipment able to work has been working...
...Well Ed Koch, the new mayor of New York, is following the President’s example...
...He has cut back on the limousines and, according to Ken Auletta, writing this time in The New York Daily News, “rewarded more than two dozen aides with salary hikes ranging from 29 per cent to 140 per cent...
...What amazed us about her was that the personality she projects on stage is not an act at all...
...The problem remains, and becomes more critical as our industries and government become less efficient...
...There is a similar problem in the matter of escalating health costs...
...Then my wife tried one...
...Many liberals think productivity is just a right-wing catchword used to justify exploitation of the workers by the kind of people who belong to the National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce...
...Between 1961 and 1975, while the consumer price index was increasing 11 1 per cent, the city’s labor costs rose 312 per cent...
...It’s simply Liza...
...Isn’t the real reason for the anger in the pro- and anti-abortion debate that both sides have weaknesses in their positions...
...Finally, there are not scores of featherbedded executives making high salaries...
...Almost all of the members of the leadership class who could do something about it belong to generous health insurance programs that pay whatever doctors and hospitals charge, So our leaders have no personal stake in holding down costs...
...This disgusting, morally indefensible act is unremarkable only because the Times and other leading newspapers and magazines do the same sort of thing all the time . . . . In the vast coverage of the Marston case, only our Nicholas Lemann and The Washington Star’s Jack Germond, Jules Witcover, and James Kilpatrick have shown the slightest awareness that a case can be made for political appointments...
...And the Israelis are certain that, even if the Arabs do achieve superiority in arms, the United States, because of the power of American Jews, would be sure to come to Israel’s rescue...
...As I was reading an article about the company in The New York Times, I made note of the factors that I would guess have made it a success...
...Somebody leaked the report to the AP, which sent out a story on it...
...It has 100 per cent more employees in its public school system and only ten per cent more students...
...These sentiments may be familiar to regular readers of this maghzine, but to have them presented in such persuasive and well-documented form to an audience as large as The New Yorker’s is a great step forward for all of us who share Auletta’s views...
...Here, for example, is how it found out that a $140-million program started last June to encourage businesses to hire unemployed Vietnam veterans has so far produced only 60 jobs: the General Accounting Office did a report on the program’s failure...
...We aren’t going to have the basic ihanges we need to eliminate featherbedding or to reform our tax laws and our pension and health care systems until we have a President who is willing t,o risk the anger of the groups that will be offended by having their dirty little secrets exposed...
...This shows how firm a grip the civil service mentality has on this country...
...Surely abortion is seldom the right moral choice for the person making it, but surely it is a choice that a humane society must sometimes understand and condone...
...that one’s benefits flow from the union and that ‘the city,’ not the taxpayers foot the bill...
...For exahple, Maureen Connelly, Koch’s press secretary, jumped from $23,000 to $47,000...
...One of the ironies of the present Supreme Court is that its toughness in law enforcement against individual criminals is matched only by its tenderness toward corporate defendants...
...And that’s the real reason they don’t...
...The Virginia assembly is currently tom over whether optometrists should be permitted to administer eyedrops, as only opthalmologists are allowed to do now...
...It puts excessive faith in technocrats chosen on merit rather than officials who are either elected by the people or who have participated in politics by helping others get elected...
...Between the ages of 15 and 25, he commits 80 per cent of the violent crime and 80 per cent of the vehicular homicides...
...Certainly in the halls of the state legislatures these are the issues that usually produce the most spirited battles...
...T h e C. & J. Clark Company, the manufacturer of Wallabees and Desert Boots, is a successful business in a country, England, where taxation is high and productivity low...
...It’s ironic that almost everyone is aware of that problem and almost no one is aware of its roots in the “merit” principle...
Vol. 10 • March 1978 • No. 1