TILTING AT WINDMILLS
Peters, Charles
TILTING AT WINDMILLS When we think about the foreigners who export addictive substances to this country, we picture a bunch of swarthy thugs with dark gloves and wonder why they do...
...One of my fondest delusions during the early eighties was that this magazine had had something to do with the thendeclining number of law students...
...W iting in line at the post office can be exasperating...
...police department is that 800 of its 3,950 officers become eligible to retire this year...
...What are you going to say you have found...
...The Texas dean, Mark Yudof, explains: "Students turn on `L.A...
...There's still time to sign up for the "Innovative Billing" seminar to be held at Paradise Island, the Bahamas, on the 19th and 20th of this month...
...As of April 8, the Washington Bullets had a home record of 28 wins and 9 losses...
...It is the home game in professional basketball...
...YFou,re an archeologist doing a dig near City Hall in New York...
...If a policeman has spent 20 years patrolling the mean streets of Anacostia, he might deserve not retirement but assignment to a softer job...
...Most of them have come from somewhere else and most serve only a few years on Metro because it's low on the Post's totem pole...
...If you aren't convinced that executive salaries have gotten out of hand, ponder the recent headline in the business section of The Washington Post: "Average Thrift CEO paid $250,000...
...At the time we're making this legislative repair, we ought to fix another loophole that was left in the reform bill...
...facilities should be investigated...
...And it turns out, he's not the only one...
...So instead of having to stand in line, you can go out for a walk, or pick up your dry cleaning...
...Since everything costs more, why are they there...
...In 1940, while the Battle of Britain was raging, Kennedy advised a luncheon meeting of 50 top Hollywood producers to stop making anti-Nazi pictures or "using the film medium to promote or show sympathy to the cause of the `democracies' versus the `dictators...
...You find some foundation stones, a builder's trench, and the brick and plaster rubble of an 18th century building...
...This is false and has been false for the 25 years I've heard and read similar observations made by hundreds of Chancellor's colleagues in the press...
...I ve got good news for all my friends at the bar...
...He added still another on February 3...
...In fact, we should do this where real estate prices are high in the rest of the world...
...I was thinking of this again in early April, when one of the network news programs did a segment on our base at Guantanamo Bay...
...Sixty percent of the entire force is eligible to retire by 1992...
...Name two sports in which fixed contests are an accepted tradition...
...On February 2, he got another $1,000...
...Incompetent teachers—Are these the rotten apples that are spoiling our system?Unfireables populate public classrooms" read the banner headline across the front pages of the Charleston (West Virginia) Sunday Gazette-Mail's Outlook section on April 2. I congratulate the Gazette-Mail for taking on an issue that most editors seem unaware of, even though the large number of marginal talents who have invaded the classroom since 1970—when the women's movement began discouraging women from following traditional female career paths—is a critical national problem that must be faced if we are going to have any chance of giving a good education to those who can't attend private schools...
...They require visiting teams to take the earliest scheduled flight on game day, which in turn often demands a 6 a.m...
...This would permit him to enjoy a perpetual tax savings of about $126,000 per year...
...They were not investigated by U.S...
...After all, the subject is not something frivolous, like how to give the client better service...
...In Thailand, the local contractor could choose which of the 183 guards he hired to protect U.S...
...But the great majority have already spent a substantial amount of time in offices or riding around in cars in safe neighborhoods...
...Such a story did in fact appear early last month...
...It permitted people who had mortgages of more than a million dollars to continue carrying mortgage debt at whatever level it was in October 1987...
...Among congressmen who seem least likely to vote to ban cigarette advertising, Dan Schaefer of Colorado stands out...
...That that explanation won't work is proved by the performance of the D.C...
...Some people think that the District of Columbia's government is bad because it is black...
...The Washington Post's Metro section doesn't know Washington, an indignant reader recently pointed out in a letter to the editor of the Post, citing, among a large assortment of examples of the section's ignorance of local geography, a story criticizing D.C...
...On January 11 he received a $1,000 honorarium from the Tobacco Institute...
...TILTING AT WINDMILLS When we think about the foreigners who export addictive substances to this country, we picture a bunch of swarthy thugs with dark gloves and wonder why they do such terrible things...
...Why not sell it to the Japanese government, which professes such grave concern about our deficit, and then lease back only the space we absolutely need to carry on essential diplomatic functions...
...But what does the rest of the world think of us when it reads "the United States exported a record $4.15 billion worth of tobacco and tobacco products last year, including 118.5 billion cigarettes...
...Today each precinct has a deputy chief, four captains, and around 20 lieutenants...
...She has installed machines at two of the city's branch offices that give out tickets telling you what number you are in line and estimating how long you'll have to wait...
...for the New York Knicks, 32-5 and 15-21...
...The fix is put on by the owners who want to attract crowds to their home arenas with the lure of victory...
...We own property in Tokyo, including an embassy, which is now worth $5 billion...
...While the practice is especially outrageous in the case of the incompetently run savings and loans, overcompensation of its top echelons is characteristic of American business today...
...One reason for these salaries is that the boards of directors that confer them often consist of the CEO's friends and lackeys—and of CEOs from other companies who hope that they will be the beneficiaries of similar largesse and so don't want to break the great chain of favors that binds together the bigshots who serve on one another's boards...
...He could make more money that way, enjoying all the raises given the fulltime judges...
...And it would accomplish both these ends without affecting the incentive the deduction provides for lower- and middleincome housing...
...ambulance drivers for getting lost, accompanied by the Post's map showing the supposedly correct route that would, in fact, have taken any driver who followed it straight into a dense wood...
...If a wealthy homeowner had a mortgage of $8 million, he can refinance it and still have the $8 million ceiling...
...No doubt they are personally selected by Fidel, who also insists that they exchange their dollars for pesos when they leave the base...
...This geographical innocence is part of a larger problem of embarrassing ignorance about Washington that has been characteristic of the Post's Metro reporters over the years...
...These descriptions, written by government employees themselves, are designed to get the highest possible salary...
...The same home/away contrast holds true for every team in the NBA...
...Another problem for the D.C...
...The textbook is Beyond the Billable Hour: An Anthology of Alternative Billing Methods...
...They got into the business of hiring foreign nationals because they were cheaper, and often more temperamentally suited to domestic service than Americans...
...R onald Kessler's new book, Moscow Station, while marred by an obvious tilt in favor of its FBI sources, is nevertheless a devastating portrait of CIA and Foreign Service incompetence and selfindulgence at our most sensitive diplomatic post...
...Charles Peters...
...In fact, far more is involved...
...That's why Dolores Martinez, the manager of lobby operations for the New York post office, is my heroine of the month...
...Incredibly enough, even in the absence of such friends, lackeys, and fellow CEOs, boards seem to have a natural tendency to fill dull moments at meetings with motions to increase the chief's salary...
...security officers...
...That way he gets both the secrets and the hard currency...
...In the words of our contributing editor, Leonard Reed, "They endow the average file clerk with responsibilities before which a Harvard MBA would quail...
...Not long ago we wrote about a federal judge, who, like most of his colleagues who had stepped down from full-time duty on the bench, had chosen "senior judge" status instead of retirement...
...One reason the District of Columbia police force finds crime prevention so nettlesome is that in 1968 it had one captain and five lieutenants per precinct...
...This, mind you, is after just 20 years of service...
...The savings in manpower as well as real estate could be substantial...
...Still worried about the deficit...
...Metro system...
...A. Scott Berg's new biography of Samuel Goldwyn offers further evidence for the concern they felt...
...This may turn out to be the first bar association meeting at which the members spend more time in the seminar than at the beach...
...S. embassies abroad have hired hundreds of foreign nationals for security posts and other jobs without background checks, heightening the risk of espionage and terrorism" In Egypt, 204 guards were not investigated...
...Someone will say old George deserves a raise and the other members mindlessly nod their heads...
...At the University of Texas Law School, 1989 applications are 17 percent above 1988 and 30 percent above 1987...
...If these fellows had been reading The Washington Monthly, they would have known that the comparison on which the 22 percent figure is based is between real jobs in the private sector and job descriptions in the civil service...
...in Algeria, 94...
...In Moscow, according to Kessler, "the Americans wooed the Soviets to drive them to the ballet, cut their hair, fix their radios, and even answer their phones at the' embassy switchboard" A frightened would-be defector would have to talk first with a Soviet before he could plead for help from an American...
...In Washington, we have an upscale grocery store called Sutton Place Gourmet that always seems to be jammed with well dressed young people carrying briefcases...
...Who turned out to be more persuasive than The Washington Monthly...
...Why don't we limit the mortgage to $250,000, or if you want to be kind to your upper-middle-class friends, $500,000...
...If you can't afford a Rolls, you can still feel like you belong in one by buying Grey Poupon instead of French's...
...For the Atlanta Hawks, the comparable figures were 28-8 and 16-21...
...On the road, they had won only 9 and lost 26...
...person and that we must be ever alert to the resulting proclivity to turn whatever he or she is doing into a news story...
...When I was working for John Kennedy in the 1960 campaign, I encountered quite a few voters who disliked his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, so much for his appeasement during the early stages of World War II that they would not even consider voting for his son...
...There were pictures showing Cubans who work at the base flowing through the gates each morning...
...Or why don't we limit the interest that can be deducted in one year to, say, $20,000...
...But, you ask, isn't it just that home crowds are more supportive...
...While I would not for a minute suggest that my cynicism about the story's origin is justified in this particular case, I have long ago concluded that the average New Yorker is a born P.R...
...Call it "a homeless shelter from the 1700s" and you're sure to get a front-page story in the Metropolitan section of The New York limes...
...Does it make any sense to pay them not to work when they are needed to patrol the streets...
...The rich got richer and the poor got poorer...
...The judge we were describing has done no judicial work at all for years...
...Most of them are healthy and still young...
...Another kind of ignorance about Washington was illustrated by John Chancellor, who recently told "NBC Nightly News" viewers that federal employees earn 22 percent less than their counterparts in the private sector...
...My friend, Walter Shapiro, has found the explanation...
...According to The Wall Street Journal, 48 of the 277 senior judges do no judicial work...
...In Argentina, 71 guards, who were hired by a local contractor, were investigated solely by him...
...As I have often pointed out, in scores of smaller countries such as Mali and Mauritania it would make sense for us to use the Canadian or Australian or British embassies to take care of our business while we did the same for them in other countries...
...Law' and they see they can make a tremendous living, get good cases, have a good sex life, and eat good meals...
...Usually, the home team has the night off before the game, whereas the visitors may have played consecutive nights not only in different cities but in different time zones...
...wake-up call to get to the airport on time...
...It would also make the rich less able to dodge taxes...
...The income of the top fifth rose by 11 percent, while that of the bottom fifth declined by 6.1 percent...
...But the downward trend has been reversed...
...Also, they could be hidden in budgets Congress didn't see, could spare the Americans the embarrassment of including servants, plumbers, and drivers in their own diplomatic class, and most important, could translate for the American Foreign Service officers, who traditionally have been reluctant, to say the least, to learn the host country's language...
...Of course it would be better still if you would be served promptly and not have to wait at all...
...Fortunately, George Bush is proposing a cut in the capital gains tax to help those poor souls stuck at the bottom...
...The Soviets, of course, never hired Americans to work in their embassy in Washington...
...Any of these steps would help reduce the deficit...
...Law" Throughout the nation, 22 percent more students took the Law School Admission Test in 1988 than in 1987...
...The truth we all suspected about the Reagan years is now official...
...Okay, wrestling is one, but what's the other...
...But the Americans were used to this sort of thing—they did it at posts around the world...
...They employed Soviet nationals for lower-level tasks around the embassy...
...Your grants need renewing and a bit of publicity could help...
...Washington is awash in new million-dollar houses...
...The turning point was 1978, the year in which the number of people at the bottom rank, the GS-ls, were finally outnumbered by those at the top, the GS-18s...
...Only the Soviets supplied by UPDK, a state agency controlled by the KGB," Kessler adds, "could work in foreign embassies in Moscow" I was thinking of this when I saw a recent dispatch from the Associated Press that began: "U...
...Here's another way to reduce it...
...This is about the heart of the matter—how to get more money from him...
...Could this have anything to do with the fact that residential real estate is one of the few tax shelters remaining after tax reform and that tax reform put a million-dollar cap on mortgage debt, for which interest could be deducted...
...Sixty-two percent of its employees are black and it is generally recognized as the best transportation system in the country...
...Such top-heaviness of course is typical of the federal civil service as well...
...Fancy food is the least expensive way of establishing your social class by proving your good taste...
...L.A...
...Sometimes we won't even have to lease back...
Vol. 21 • May 1989 • No. 4
