TILTING WINDMILLS
TILTING AT WINDMILLS The "Corrections" box continues to be the most fascinating feature in The New York Times. Consider this example: "An article last Sunday about women who received...
...Contrast those figures with 1977, when the bottom 40 percent earned more than twice as much as the top 1 percent...
...Like the air traffic controllers, most federal employees were either adequately or excessively compensated, but for a different reason: because the standard by which their pay was determined involved comparing real jobs in the private sector with federal job descriptions, many of which exaggerated the importance of the civil service position and glorified its duties...
...Imagine the dramatic scenes that were played out between the appearance of the original story and the correction...
...I am, of course, not unmindful that an incidental consequence might be to improve the Monthly's modest circulation...
...As your kids pack up their Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle lunchboxes, your faith in the public schools must be fortified by this announcement from the San Jose Mercury News: "Volunteers are sought to tutor Santa Clara County Office of Education employees in reading, writing, mathematics, and English...
...I was once on a television panel show that briefly dealt with the conventional wisdom that federal employees were underpaid...
...After admitting that there are "at least some women who can do this combat job as well as men," the general continued: "So it's the law that's preventing us from doing this, and I find comfort in that...
...The result is that we are rapidly returning to the days of the exploited working class...
...I chatted with the president and the first lady...
...Our colleagues in the press have not known whether to believe us when we publish articles like James Bennet's and Harry Crosby's in this issue...
...Certainly, O'Rourke deserves an easier path through purgatory for his sense of humor alone...
...Certainly not the independent testing you would assume...
...In his book Speaking Out, Larry Speakes describes reporters literally begging for invitations to White House social events for themselves or their bosses...
...I have long suspected that the decline in quality of this most visible function of government has been even more a factor in the decline of faith in public institutions than Watergate and the other sexy scandals, especially for those over 40 who remember the good old days...
...It is supposed to evaluate sunscreen products, granting a seal of approval to those that are safe...
...It was like being Cinderella at the prince's ball...
...Because they can afford Federal Express, which does for about 13 dollars what special delivery mail used to do for 13 cents, or a proxy stander-in-line, the affluent class that runs and staffs our major media may lack the motivation to reform the bureaucracy...
...James Fallows and I agree on practically everything, but I thought he was a tad too kind to P. J. O'Rourke in last month's review of O'Rourke's new book...
...If you doubted that our proposal to tax the churches would yield significant revenue, ponder the news that the income of the Mormon church is $4.7 billion a year...
...Consider this example: "An article last Sunday about women who received cosmetic makeovers in Macy's window misstated the marital status of Joseph M. Lerner, who accompanied Joyce Roman...
...The scene as an applicant enters the one on K Street in downtown Washington was described recently in The Washington Post: "The line snakes nearly to the door and only three clerks are on duty, one of mediocre talent and two who are even less skilled...
...We repeatedly bemoaned the trend as it grew worse in the seventies...
...And they don't even realize that they should know...
...Now along comes Thomas Geoghegan with a moving call for us to once again embrace the unions...
...The friend said, "You have to understand, she's never been in the government...
...I also think that his critics are right about how the rest of us should think about blacks and other minorities, or at least those of them who are being deprived of a fair chance in life...
...Roman were absolutely innocent, but if his spouse fell even a fraction of a millimeter below sainthood, one shudders to think about the domestic cross-examination to which he must have been subjected...
...I could have been more forthcoming, but I frankly was not going to be the first person to step up and do that...
...The other journalists interviewed in the survey seemed to feel that somehow knowledge of the inside would corrupt them...
...The 1988 income of that top 1 percent was almost as large as the combined income of all the people in the bottom 40 percent...
...How did the executives justify the bonuses...
...So long as others who knew the details as much as I—who knew more than I—were keeping their silence on this, I was going to keep my silence...
...I thought of it as purely social, like any other social evening...
...S peaking of our friends the doctors, the Department of Health and Human Services has at last acted to limit physicians' widespread practice of referring their Medicare and Medicaid patients to clinics and other health care facilities in which the physicians themselves have a financial interest and from which they will profit...
...Top postal executives were rewarded with nearly $20 billion in bonuses between 1988 and 1990, when the post office not only was not making a profit, but was losing more than $1.4 billion...
...It recently offered to settle for just 3 percent of the amount owed...
...T understand how even conscientious government employees feel about telling Congress truths that could embarrass their superiors, you should dwell for a while on this statement by Alan D. Fiers, who recently pled guilty to withholding information from Congress about the Iran-contra affair...
...All this helps explain why I want to open up the civil service to a lot more short-term appointments, so that more citizens will get inside the bureaucracy, as I was fortunate enough to do for seven years, and have the chance to learn how government really works—and then let their friends, and perhaps even their fellow reporters, in on the secrets...
...Here's the defense offered to The Pittsburgh Press, which broke the story, by Frank Brennan, a postal service spokesman in Washington: "Hey, we saved $800 million off a projected $1.6 billion loss...
...He introduced me as `one of our finest reporters.' .. . When it was over, my captain escorted me out with compliments on my looks and charisma...
...If you want to know why the incidence of childhood diseases like measles has risen dramatically in recent years, it is because the Reagan-Bush "do anything for the rich and as little as you can get away with for the poor" administrations have failed to provide adequate funding for immunization programs...
...My fellow panelists raised their eyebrows in polite disbelief—my friend Eleanor Clift had that alarmed "Is Charlie going to embarrass himself...
...Jessica Lee may not be coopted, but I have seen many of her colleagues who, although they tend to be more sophisticated and guarded in describing the experience, have been subtly seduced by it...
...One clue to the answer was supplied by the testimony of General Merrill A. McPeak before a Senate committee considering legislation that will permit women to fly in combat...
...The article helps explain why the affluent can remain unruffled by such problems: The story is about a "stand-in-line-for-a-fee" service...
...He is a close friend, not her fianc...
...The general concluded by conceding that his view "doesn't make much sense...
...Over the years, this has presented a considerable problem for the Monthly...
...Clarence Thomas says blacks should stop thinking of themselves as victims and start feeling responsible for their lives...
...This may be why they run so few articles on the subject...
...But in his opposition to "rich bashing" he is on the wrong side of what I believe will be the most important fairness issue of the nineties: the need to take back from the rich what they stole from the rest of us in the eighties...
...But they deserved no sympathy for their claims that they were underpaid...
...Special delivery became so unspecial that Federal Express found a ready market for its alternative...
...Surely you have seen the latest damning statistic: In the period between 1977 and 1988, the income of the top 1 percent rose 122 percent...
...They said, "Who cares what you say, we're going to do more...
...I found a sizzling hot Bob Mackie, but I decided I'd put it on ice for some truly social occasion...
...If you doubt me, consider this July 17 report from the Associated Press: "The American Medical Association has announced plans to publish single-topic medical reports sponsored by drug companies...
...But performance began to decline in the late sixties, while costs escalated...
...Those who can afford it can pay to avoid the frustration bureaucracy inflicts on the average man...
...Charles Peters...
...In the early eighties, one part of the problem began to diminish when unions, partly as an act of enlightenment and partly as a result of their reduced power in the Reagan era, moderated their wage demands...
...At 6 a.m...
...Her reply: "I'm not really sure that [Bush] gets anything out of it...
...But what do the "evaluations" consist of...
...Austin time on the morning after the 1954 elections, in which Democrats gained control of the Senate, Paley's private line rang in his New York City apartment...
...In other words, the manufacturers can control the tests and thus the results...
...In case you missed Jessica Lee's memo to her colleagues about her experience as a social guest of the president and Mrs...
...His critics say blacks are victims and that society should help them...
...But in his forthcoming book about LBJ, Joseph Califano tells this story, which was told to him by William Paley, the chairman of CBS: "[F]or years, Johnson had pestered [Paley] to designate the Johnsons' Austin TV station a mandatory buy for advertisers who purchased network time...
...S oon after this magazine was founded in 1969, American industry began to lose the competitiveness race as both workers and managers were given pay increases without regard to increases in productivity...
...Unfortunately, the restrictions proposed by HHS are typical of the Bush administration's modest approach to the re-regulation desperately needed after the extreme laxity of the Reagan era: If the physicians own less than 40 percent of the business, they can still refer patients to it...
...I'm not so sure about the unions, for the reasons Paul Glastris gives in his review of Geoghegan's book in this issue, but I am sure that, to the extent the emotion of the book summons us once again to the cause of the working class, it is profoundly right...
...Today 66 percent of them are earning in private employment the same as or less than they were paid as air traffic controllers...
...To sample some even phonier regulation, take a good look at the Skin Cancer Foundation...
...But it appears to be getting stiff competition these days from the passport office...
...Paley had refused...
...Managers, on the other hand, grew greedier and greedier, paying themselves ever more extravagant salaries and bonuses, often with only an inverse relationship to productivity...
...This, I can confidently assure you, will produce an explosive growth in enterprises in which a doctor's share will be 39.999999 percent...
...All the foundation does is review test results submitted by the manufacturers...
...Speaking of people who ignore the Monthly's wisdom, the American Medical Association is even more cavalier than our fellow journalists...
...A picture caption misstated their relationship...
...Johnson said to the CBS chairman, `you are talking to the next majority leader of the United States Senate, and I want that station to be a mandatory buy!' Paley acceded to Johnson's request...
...The Washington Post's media watchdog, Howard Kurtz, asked Lee if she thought the experience might affect her coverage of the White House...
...The reports would include articles rejected by the Journal of the American Medical Association and its specialty journals, transcripts of symposiums, and articles from other journals that a drug company might want to send to a larger audience...
...Post Office was a symbol of how government could work...
...The rigorous standards used in evaluating the performance of these executives are suggested by the fact that, of all those who could have gotten bonuses, 97 percent received them...
...Anyone who knows me knows I spent hours looking for the right dress...
...Lerner and Ms...
...TILTING AT WINDMILLS The "Corrections" box continues to be the most fascinating feature in The New York Times...
...So many packages were lost, delayed, or destroyed that demand for a more efficient alternative led to the founding and subsequent flourishing of the United Parcel Service...
...It did deliver the mail—two or three times a day during the thirties and forties—and it remained reasonably efficient throughout the fifties, still charging only three cents for first-class letters...
...Take Sharon Pratt Dixon, the new mayor of Washington...
...New readers have a similar problem, unless they're current or former government employees—in which case they either hate us for revealing the confidence games of their trade or love us because they are idealists who believe the games should be exposed...
...She is obviously an intelligent person, so I asked a mutual friend why our message hadn't registered...
...I am indebted to "one acerbic economist," quoted by Michael Schrage of the the Los Angeles Times, for his observation about the American economy in the eighties: "We had a $200 billion industrial policy for shopping mall construction...
...Another example of tough regulation comes from the West Virginia Department of Energy, which had assessed fines of $120,000 for environmental violations on a big mining contractor...
...Another reason, I am convinced, is that they don't know how to reform the bureaucracy, because so few journalists have served in it and acquired firsthand knowledge of how and why things go wrong and of who and what should be blamed...
...After we published "Doctored Results" [Alexander Kippen, October 1990], revealing how AMA publications are exploited by the drug companies, the doctors didn't say, "We're sorry, we're going to do better...
...Why do men drive women crazy...
...In recent years the post office has been the league leader in at least two categories: long lines and indifferent clerks...
...What this means is that institutional loyalties and identifications are more important to the executive branch employee than loyalty to the people of the United States, as represented by the people they have elected to Congress...
...He is married, not a widower...
...Lyndon Johnson always maintained he had nothing to do with his family's Austin TV station...
...That our president is all heart has never been better demonstrated than by this June 22 headline in The New York Times: "Plan to Give Vaccines to Children Is Delayed for One Year by Bush...
...A recent study sponsored by The Joan Shorenstein Barone Center at Harvard found only me arguing that experience working in the executive branch is a desirable qualification for journalists who plan to cover government...
...That means it'll be a good two hours, he correctly estimated...
...I am confident that Mr...
...McPeak went on to say that it was his "old-fashioned" preference to have men do the fighting rather than women, even when the women were more qualified...
...I think Thomas is right about the way blacks should think about themselves...
...look—as I tried to explain that the usual view was wrong...
...But if, like the average journalist, the new reader hasn't been inside the government, he has to wonder whether our departures from the conventional wisdom are fantasy or the real inside skinny...
...As we have pointed out, society is stacking the deck against the workers in everything from federal taxes to real estate assessments to military service...
...But there have been few signs since then that she understood what we were trying to tell her...
...Self-pity does no one any good, but the rest of us should feel, if not pity, then empathy, for those who deserve our help...
...Last fall, we addressed an article about the District of Columbia's personnel problems directly to her [see Scott Shuger, "Memo to the New Mayor," November 1990...
...Bush, here's an excerpt from the USA Today White House correspondent's report: "Going to a state dinner at the White House is unbelievably seductive...
...She doesn't know if you're dead right or dead wrong...
...For roughly half my life, the U.S...
...S peaking of unions, I sympathize with those PATCO workers who were fired by Reagan in 1981, because some of them, especially those serving at the busiest airports, were dangerously overworked at peak periods and because I think that, after five years or so, they had been punished enough for striking and should have been given a chance to get their jobs back...
...I wore a long, slinky black dress with silver accessories...
Vol. 23 • September 1991 • No. 9
