View From a Height

Ward of the State U - V

I was preparing for an exam when this happened, so I haven't gotten round to it until now.

Ward Churchill has resigned as chairman of the Ethic Studies Department at CU. This is not, of course, an end, but a beginning. Almost any professor will confirm that being a department chairman is more of an administrative nightmare than an honor. It may sound impressive to civilians, but nobody inside the academy really covets the title. Therefore, the university faculty can't be allowed to pretend that this is actually a sacrifice of any sort.

In the course of resigning, he released a statement that is as dishonest as his original essay was malicious.

In 1996 Madeleine Albright, then Ambassador to the UN and soon to be U.S. Secretary of State, did not dispute that 500,000 Iraqi children had died as a result of economic sanctions, but stated on national television that "we" had decided it was "worth the cost." I mourn the victims of the September 11 attacks, just as I mourn the deaths of those Iraqi children, the more than 3 million people killed in the war in Indochina, those who died in the U.S. invasions of Grenada, Panama and elsewhere in Central America, the victims of the transatlantic slave trade, and the indigenous peoples still subjected to genocidal policies. If we respond with callous disregard to the deaths of others, we can only expect equal callousness to American deaths.

...

It is not disputed that the Pentagon was a military target, or that a CIA office was situated in the World Trade Center. Following the logic by which U.S. Defense Department spokespersons have consistently sought to justify target selection in places like Baghdad, this placement of an element of the American "command and control infrastructure" in an ostensibly civilian facility converted the Trade Center itself into a "legitimate" target. Again following U.S. military doctrine, as announced in briefing after briefing, those who did not work for the CIA but were nonetheless killed in the attack amounted to no more than "collateral damage." If the U.S. public is prepared to accept these "standards" when the are routinely applied to other people, they should be not be surprised when the same standards are applied to them.

...

These points are clearly stated and documented in my book, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens, which recently won Honorary Mention for the Gustavus Myer Human Rights Award. for best writing on human rights. Some people will, of course, disagree with my analysis, but it presents questions that must be addressed in academic and public debate if we are to find a real solution to the violence that pervades today's world. The gross distortions of what I actually said can only be viewed as an attempt to distract the public from the real issues at hand and to further stifle freedom of speech and academic debate in this country.

Don't buy the book, but go ahead and read the whole thing. On an empty stomach.

Gillette, RIP

I don't have anything against P&G, but its acquisition of Gillette looks to me like a stunning betrayal of Gillette's history.

And this may seem frivolous in the face of such larger issues, but Gillette has a great history and a unique culture, and over time, it will get swept into the dustbin. King Gillette, an amazing larger than life character who more than 100 years ago invented the modern safety razor and what could arguably be considered the business model of the modern age (how many businesses operate on a "razor blade" replenishment model?), will fade even further into history.

Gillette had run into trouble before and managed its way out of it. Its heroic CEO Colman Mockler was profiled in Good to Great:

While it might be a stretch to compare the 11 Level 5 CEOs in our research to Lincoln, they did display the same kind of duality. Take Colman M. Mockler, CEO of Gillette from 1975 to 1991. Mockler, who faced down three takeover attempts, was a reserved and gracious man with a gentle, almost patrician manner. Despite epic battles with the raiders—he took on Ronald Perelman twice and the former Coniston Partners once—he never lost his shy, courteous style. At the height of the crisis, he maintained a calm business-as-usual demeanor, dispensing first with ongoing business before turning to the takeover.

And yet, those who mistook Mockler’s outward modesty as a sign of inner weakness found themselves beaten in the end. In one proxy battle, Mockler and other senior executives together called thousands of investors, one by one, to win their votes. Mockler simply would not give in. He chose to fight for the future greatness of Gillette even though he could have pocketed millions by flipping his stock.

Consider the consequences had Mockler capitulated. If a share-flipper had accepted the full 44% price premium offered by Perelman, and then invested those shares in the general market for ten years, he still would have come out 64% behind a shareholder who stayed with Mockler and Gillette. If Mockler had given in, none of us would likely be shaving with Sensor, Lady Sensor, or the Mach III—and hundreds of millions of people would have a more painful battle with daily stubble.

Certainly, the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) has speculated on the difficulty of aligning management and shareholder interests:

While some say Mr. Kilts, 56 years old, deserves every penny for turning Gillette around and adding billions in shareholder value, his big payday after just four years is spotlighting some longstanding issues about CEO pay in general: Are top executives sometimes motivated to do mergers, at least in part, by personal gain? And is it right for the top people to walk away with megamillions while thousands lose their jobs in post-merger downsizing? P&G and Gillette have said 6,000 jobs are likely to be cut in the combined company.

I'm not sure there's a right answer here. A substantial part of Larry Ellison's pitch to shareholders was that management was failing them by refusing to sell Peoplesoft to him. It doesn't have to be one or the other, but it does mean that there's no automatic right answer.

I think the problem was more lack of commitment than outright greed. Kilts had done this before at Nabisco, revitalizing the brand and then selling it to Phillip Morris. And he never moved his family to Gillette headquarters in Boston. Kilts had also brought a large group of managers from Nabisco over with him to Gillette. He may have known how to make Gillette's culture work, but I doubt he really saw anything special in the place.

When Does "Warning About" Become "Rooting Against?"

The self-styled "Progressives," continue to live in the past. Someone should renew their subscription; they've obviously been reduced to pulling out the cardboard boxes with the old newspapers and love beads...

by Peter Grose, Special to the New York Times (9/4/1967: p. 2)

WASHINGTON, Sept. 3-- United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam's presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting.

According to reports from Saigon, 83 per cent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong.

The size of the popular vote and the inability of the Vietcong to destroy the election machinery were the two salient facts in a preliminary assessment of the national election based on the incomplete returns reaching here. . .

A successful election has long been seen as the keystone in President Johnson's policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in South Vietnam.

If these guys are this heavily invested in this story line, they're certainly not leaving any doubt about their policy. And for those of you who've forgotten how well it worked out the last time, I refer you to that decade of American triumph, the 70s. You know, first time tragedy, second time farce, and all that.

Fortunately, there's an antidote to this sort of simplisme - actual scholarship. Brought to you by Mack Owens of No Left Turns. It's a review of Lewis Sorley's A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam.

The defenders of the conventional wisdom will reply that Mr. Sorley’s argument is refuted by the fact that South Vietnam did fall to the North Vietnamese communists. They will repeat the claim that the South Vietnamese lacked the leadership, skill, character, and endurance of their adversaries. Mr. Sorley acknowledges the shortcomings of the South Vietnamese and agrees that the US would have had to provide continued air, naval, and intelligence support. But, he contends, the real cause of US defeat was that the Nixon administration and Congress threw away the successes achieved by US and South Vietnamese arms.

The proof lay in the 1972 Easter Offensive. This was the biggest offensive push of the war, greater in magnitude than either the 1968 Tet offensive or the final assault of 1975. The US provided massive air and naval support and there were inevitable failures on the part of some ARVN units, but all in all, the South Vietnamese fought well. Then, having blunted the communist thrust, they recaptured territory that had been lost to Hanoi. Finally, so effective was the eleven-day “Christmas bombing” campaign (LINEBACKER II) later that year that the British counterinsurgency expert, Sir Robert Thompson exclaimed, “you had won the war. It was over.” Three years later, despite the heroic performance of some ARVN units, South Vietnam collapsed against a much weaker, cobbled-together NVA offensive. What happened to cause this reversal?

First, the Nixon administration, in its rush to extricate the country from Vietnam, forced the government of RVN to accept a cease-fire that permitted NVA forces to remain in the south. Then in an act that still shames the United States to this day, Congress cut off military and economic assistance to South Vietnam. Finally, President Nixon resigned over Watergate and his successor, constrained by congressional action, defaulted on promises to respond with force to North Vietnamese violations of the peace terms. Mr. Sorley describes in detail the logistical and operational consequences for the ARVN of our having starved them of promised support for three years.

Please, please, please Read the Whole Thing. And then this. And then this.

This war is similar in the ways that benefit us, and entirely different in ways that benefit us.

Attention Intelligent Design Advocates

There's a reason this is funny:

Ward of the State U - IV

Ah, it gets better. It turns out that DU has access to an extended academic database, where I can limit my searches to refereed publications. There, I did find one other pre-tenure piece, bringing the total to two, I believe. Possibly three. (Note that the stated publication date on the UCTP site is 1991, making it possibly one of the sounds, reasoned arguments that earned Mr. Churchill his tenure.)

What really caught my eye, though, was "Deconstructing the Columbus myth: was the "great discoverer" Italian or Spanish, Nazi or Jew?", which made it into Social Justice, Summer 1992 v19 n2 p39(17).

The question of Columbus' possible Jewishness nonetheless remained intriguing, not because I held it to be especially important in its own right, but because I was (and am still) mystified about why any ethnic group, especially one that has suffered genocide, might be avid to lay claim either to the man or to his legacy....

For Jews, at least those who have adopted the Zionist perspective, a "unique historical suffering" under Nazism translates into fulfillment of a Biblical prophecy that they are "the chosen," entitled by virtue of the destiny of a special persecution to assume a rarefied status among -- and to consequently enjoy preferential treatment from -- the remainder of humanity. In essence, this translates into a demand that the Jewish segment of the Holocaust's victims must now be allowed to participate equally in the very system that once victimized them and to receive an equitable share of the spoils accruing from it. To this end, Zionist scholars such as Irving Louis Horowitz and Elie Weisel have labored long and mightily, defining genocide in terms exclusively related to the forms it assumed under Nazism. In their version of "truth," one must literally see smoke pouring from the chimneys of Auschwitz to apprehend that a genocide, per se, is occurring.(1) Conversely, they have coined terms such as "ethnocide" to encompass the fates inflicted upon other peoples throughout history.(2) Such semantics have served, not as tools of understanding, but as an expedient means of arbitrarily differentiating the experience of their people -- both qualitatively and quantitatively -- from that of any other. To approach things in any other fashion would, it must be admitted, tend to undercut ideas like the "moral right" of the Israeli settler state to impose itself directly atop the Palestinian Arab homeland.

This is, not to put too fine a point on it, garbage. It practically qualifies as an intellectual landfill all on its own.

There was a point in time, back when I was growing up, that certain Jews felt it necessary to try to prove Jewish connections to as many Western figures as possible. As the song says "But what kind of nut would you have to be/ To borrow a ship and put out to sea/When you don't know what's on the other side". Say what you will, it takes a special kind of courage to point your ship towards the open sea at a time when everyone else is creeping down the African coast, afraid that their ships will spontaneously combust when you get too far south. Freberg was making fun, but my guess is that we learn more from his history than from Churchill's.

As for his understanding of Jewish theology, the concept of "chosenness," and practically every event in Jewish history since 1933, he's got enough problems in his own field before venturing out into that world. I'm sure he doesn't get out much, but he might have taken in a high school version of "Fiddler on the Rez." You know, the one where Tevye looks up at God and asks, "Couldn't you choose someone else once in a while?" Chosenness isn't a virtue, it's an obligation. The hostility of the Nations is a biblical concept, and goes back just a wee bit further than even Columbus.

As for Zionism, it's an idea with many currents. But in its dominant form in the 1930s and 40s, its purpose wassn't to exempt Jews from history - we'd had quite enough of that for a few millenia, thank you very much - it was to mainstream Jews back into history.

Most Jews I know are perfectly comfortable calling Darfur a "genocide," far more comfortable than the UN is, for instance. It's the term "holocaust" that we want to preserve as evidence of a unique event. The costs of not doing so were on display in last week's London Auschwitz commemorations, as Muslim organizations variously declined to participate, objected to the whole thing, or did go based on the notion that other people died too, so it was ok to look past the Jews. Someone who's immoderately protective of ethnic identity should certainly be sensitive to others' history being stolen.

Carnival of the Capitalists

For the business blogger in you...

Someone you know may have made the cut, but please, go read someone else. There's a lot of really, really good stuff there this week.

Technology Mismatch

Is there any truth to the rumor that Mac will allow the iPod to simulate the radio experience even more realistically by hooking up with your car's GPS and fading out through underpasses & tunnels?

Ward of the State U - III

Regarding the excrable Ward Churchill, whose exploits in academic rigor and inquiry have been discussed here, and here, more people are weighing in, some in postings I didn't have time to read before writing here.

David Harsanyi brings an appropriate sense of moral outrage to the question:

The problem is, as with all tenured professors, Churchill doesn't have to answer for his actions.

That brings us to a delicate matter: How do we balance the need to protect diversity and academic freedom with the need to protect impressionable students from hate-filled ideologues?

I'm not sure that students are so delicate they need to be protected from the likes of Ward Churchill. I do wonder, though, why the university is so eager to protect Churchill.

So does Paul Campos. He posits a hypothetical response from an academia with backbone:

"To compare the victims of the 9/11 massacre to one of the chief architects of the Holocaust is both intellectually bankrupt and morally depraved. To do so in a published essay, and to repeat this opinion to the media, after being asked whether he wishes to reconsider it, calls into question the author's fitness to continue as a member of this university's faculty.

"Members of our faculty should keep in mind that a grant of tenure is not a guarantee of perpetual employment. Tenure protects against dismissal without cause; but professional incompetence and moral depravity are both sufficient grounds for firing tenured faculty.

And Roger Kimball brings up the Case of David Irving, which also came up in my discussion with Ms. Kent:

But the truth is that freedom of speech, like all human freedoms, thrives only when it is limited. The law recognizes this by limiting free speech--shouting "Fire!" is a crowded theater is one proverbial instance.

...

I think Shils was right. Colleges and universities are institutions dedicated to the pursuit and transmission of the truth. Because the truth is often hard to establish and only imperfectly grasped, encouraging real intellectual diversity on important issues is a salutary part of the business of liberal education. But that does not mean that anyone can say anything he likes and have it accepted as a legitimate point of view. The case of Ward Churchill dramatizes the issue. It is, I believe, analogous to the case of the Holocaust deniers.

In this last case, you really should Read The Whole Thing.

In any event, the university's Board of Regents has scheduled a meeting for the sort of action that academics do best: be appalled.

UPDATE: Ironically, just as the Ward Churchill controversy was afoot, FrontPage Mag published "The Susan Rosenberg Debate," on Hamilton's previous struggle with morality, by Jonathan Rick, a senior at Hamilton.

The WaPo Defends Its Constituency

The Washington Post today editorializes about Civil Service Reform, opposing it. In one breath, they oppose potential "politicization," and in the next breath defend the "mostly Democratic unions."

The irony must have escaped the Post editors.

They also note that

The vast majority of government managers have no experience making more sophisticated evaluations. Training managers will take an enormous amount of time and money, both of which the government is notoriously stingy about committing.

In fact, it's going to take more than that. If managers are simply handed a news system to implement, they'll see it as more paperwork to accomplish the same ends, and it won't change anything at all. Managers need to be trained to understand the system as a whole, a means of aligning systems with strategy and mission. Clearly this big picture has eluded the Post editors.

McNotice

I had an long, interesting conversation with Sandra Adams of McMad Neighbors this afternoon. Ms. Adams and I ran through some of the issues, many, many of the complaints, and a fair number of the complexities of putting a McDonald's at Krameria and Colfax. I'll need a little time to digest the whole thing, but look for a post on the subject soon.

The impression I got is that there are some valid concerns, but that they are of an extremely local nature. This doesn't make them less valid, but it does make them of less interest. Therefore, in order to gain greater interest, the group has had to exaggerate other potential impacts. And at the same time, McDonald's and the developer aren't necessarily the bad guys here - the city government and CDOT could take some simple steps to alleviate the legitimate worries altogether.

As I said, McMore to come.

Stakeholders

With the mechanics' union rank-and-file voting down concessions, including some pretty severe ones like jobs cuts, United Airlines is once again facing bankruptcy.

Oh wait, we're well past that. They're looking at liquidation. The union is claiming that it can save the airline millions of dollars without further cuts, and let's hope they're right, because everyone agrees that a strike will kill the airline once and for all. The real question is, when the local spokesmen say that mechanics are ready for that, is it the real turtle soup, or only the mock? Because now it's for all time, and not merely a lark.

Pointing that the unions (not this particular union, though) sat on United's board for years, and helped to plunder the company just as surely as any Global Crossing executive doesn't help things now. But it does raise some interesting questions about this au currant idea known as "Stakeholder Theory."

Briefly put, Stakeholder theory claims that a business has responsibilities that go outside of satisfying shareholders. Milton Friedman has argued vociferously that if you don't like what a company's doing, pass a law, or maybe strike, but that to load all the responsibilities of the world onto corporate management is to create insolvable problems. It's bad enough they're expected to make a profit when the guy next door is trying to do the same thing; burderning them with other, fairly ill-defined obligations is just going to sink the company in the long run. The employees, neighbors, suppliers, customers, generations future and past, and presumptive visiting space aliens all have the means to defend their own interests if they exist.

Nevertheless, Stakeholder Theory is now standard fare in b-schools. Hundreds of books have been written, thousands of seminars taught, millions indoctrinated, so going back probably isn't an option. And to be fair, to cite a current topic of conversation, it might not, strictly speaking, be a food chain's fault that it smells like french fries and its customers forget how to use trash cans when they walk out the door. But the company might still be considered to have an ethical obligation to mitigate some of those effects.

Now these are usually presented as management obligations. In the first place, the people teaching ethics tend to lean a little to the liberal, though not usually Leftist, side. Still, the mechanics' case suggests that this water may flow in many directions.

For the sake of argument, let's suppose that the union proposal, due in court this morning, saves cash but prevents improving internal processes. The company won't emerge from bankruptcy, and it wouldn't be any better-able to compete in the long run. The company would liquidate.

Who would be hurt? All the other employees, who have accepted cuts, for one thing. United's debt-holders, who have gone along with this long-running last act for years, hoping to get paid back. Airport business employees and owners, who would find their concourse following the mining industry. Not to mention a judge who'd have to find another case to manage. All these people would be perfectly furious with the mechanics, and rightly so. If management has an ethical obligation to consider employees and customers, unions have no less an obligation to consider other employees and downstream businesses.

In a way, this argument should be resolved by now. Margaret Thatcher and, to a lesser extent, Ronald Reagan, were both elected as a result of union intransigence that was hurting non-members. Like the people freezing to death for the greater glory of Scargill.

At the same time, maybe the union is, in a perverse way, actually aiding stakeholders. United isn't coming out of receivership any time soon. It retains its death-grip on gates it can barely use, and can't possibly be the most efficient tenant for. It's already prevented Frontier from expanding service, and reconsidering its plan for a maintenance shop here. As sinking ships go, United is taking a lot of surrounding shipping with it.

There's no way to do this calculation, of course. Once you start expanding the universe of people with claims, there's practically no end. Not to mention the fact that if shareholders have to consider everyone else, who'll be left to consider the shareholders? Which is perhaps the best reason to leave Stakeholder Theory on the shelf, for now.

Modern Management

Last week, the Bush Administration began implementing the new, non civil-service rules for the Department of Homeland Security.

The Bush administration unveiled a new personnel system for the Department of Homeland Security yesterday that will dramatically change the way workers are paid, promoted, deployed and disciplined -- and soon the White House will ask Congress to grant all federal agencies similar authority to rewrite civil service rules governing their employees.

The new system will replace the half-century-old General Schedule, with its familiar 15 pay grades and raises based on time in a job, and install a system that more directly bases pay on occupation and annual performance evaluations, officials said. The new system has taken two years to develop and will require at least four more to implement, they said....

A raise or promotion -- moving up in a pay range or rising to the next one -- will depend on receiving a satisfactory performance rating from a supervisor, said officials with homeland security and the Office of Personnel Management.

"We really have created a system that rewards performance, not longevity," OPM Director Kay Coles James said in a briefing for reporters. "It can truly serve as a model for the rest of the federal government."

And soon it might. The White House will propose legislation within a month to allow all agencies to restructure their personnel systems in a similar way, said Clay Johnson III, deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget.

Naturally, the government employees' unions aren't happy about this change, and its proposed extension. After all, using actual evaluations instead of a clock-punching, time-marking system for grade and pay-scale threatens the very core of the civil service.

"They are encouraging a management of coercion and intimidation," said John Gage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees. He added: "This is not a modern system. This is a step backward."

Actually, it's a quantum leap forward, the very definition of modern management, fraught with the perils and promising the rewards that business managers have been dealing with for generations:

Smaller-scale experiments with changing pay systems at the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Aviation Administration have produced mixed results. Managers at both agencies have said that it is easier to recruit talented workers at higher salaries than before, but it has also been difficult to create new pay systems that rank-and-file employees view as fair.

The current civil service system dates to the Pendleton Act of 1883, which replaced the "spoils system" of distributing jobs through political patronage with a merit-based system.

The proposed system appears to be based on an evaluation practice called the Balanced Scorecard, a means of aligning and evaluating employee and unit performance and activities with the organization's broader mission. In this sense, there's no reason why public sector organizations, or non-profit and government agencies can't apply it just as effectively as businesses. And there's absolutely no reason why it should only apply to agencies with a national security interest. The Balanced Scorecard Institute has been helping the Feddle Gummint do just that for a while now.

Initially developed in a series of Harvard Business Review articles, the Balanced Scorecard develops four sets of metrics for any organization: 1) financial, 2) customer-based, 3) internal processes, and 4) learning and growth.

Developing a balanced scorecard for an organization can be a very strenuous and time-consuming approach. It requires clear definitions of missions at all levels of the organization, and for all units. It requires a clear vision of the strategy to accomplish those missions. Established companies that may have strayed can spend months or years figuring this stuff out, all the while still having to conduct business.

Defining the measurable results is probably the next-hardest goal, and it's one that many companies have punted on, using traditional metrics like profit margin and ROA. Those measurements are derivable from public sources, so they're ones favored by analysts. And if a company is interested in pleasing analysts, those are the metrics it may focus on in the short- to mid-term.

But public information is decidedly and intentionally limited. The Balanced Scorecard approach is intended to make more sophisticated use of managerial accounting which uses internal numbers. To take an example from Jim Collins, Walgreen's measures its store performance in profit-per-customer-visit, something an outside analyst could only guess at, and even then only at a company-wide level.

According to Gallup, 60% of Fortune 500 companies now used the Balanced Scorecard in whole or in part. That number will probably grow as companies adopt it earlier in their lives.

The RMPN and the War

Arguing with the RMPN is a bizarre experience, rather like the last election's rhetoric extended forward into real time. You're never quite sure what they're getting at. For some reason, they have a bone to pick with me this morning.

It seems they don't like the fact that, as the Princess Bride would have it, "I do not think that report says what you say it says." In fact, the Duelfer Report says quite explicitly that Saddam was keeping intact his weapons programs and research teams, using the Oil-for-Food program to do so. Contemporaneous MSM accounts of the report, at the height of an election season, make this quite clear. My point in the original posting was that the Duelfer Report was being quoted as saying one thing, when it says quite another. The link above will take you to a number of contemporaneous media accounts of the Report, all confirming the plain meaning of the report.

There can be no doubt that the administration used the presumed WMD threat as a justification for the timing of the war. That no substantial quantities of WMD had been found played a large role in the election, although not one large enough to defeat the President. Nevertheless, the larger goal of democratizing Iraq, thus defeating the terrorists ideologically on a central battlefield, was always part of the plan, as the contemporaneous demonization of Paul Wolfowitz bears out.

Finally, everyone, all the time, makes policy based on what they think will happen. The prospective story that Duelfer tells, that a bought-off France, Germany, Russia, and China, would help keep Saddam on life-support until the sanctions regime was removed, and after that, would help him rebuild, including WMDs, squares with both evidence at the time, and subsequent history.

Making Numbers Lie

Our friends over at the RMPN are once again demonstrating their ability to use the subtraction, addition's tricky friend, even as their post claiming that "These Numbers Don't Lie," um, lies.

Conflict-related civilian deaths in Iraq. July 2004 to January 2005
3,274 civilians killed in total
2,041 by coalition and Iraqi security forces
1,233 by insurgents

12,657 civilians wounded in total
8,542 by coalition and Iraqi security forces
4,115 by insurgents

They draw their numbers from the BBC, quoting official Iraqi government statistics.

Except that the BBC report now states,

Today, the Iraqi Ministry of Health has issued a statement clarifying matters that were the subject of several conversations with the BBC before the report was published....

It states that those recorded as killed in military action included Iraqis killed by terrorists, not only those killed by Coalition forces or Iraqi security forces; and that those recorded as killed in military action included terrorists themselves, and Iraqi security forces.

The BBC regrets mistakes in its published and broadcast reports yesterday.

For the record. The BBC page was updated at Saturday, 29 January, 2005, 11:19 GMT, while the original RMPN posting was at January 29, 2005 07:58 AM, Mountain Time, or 14:58 GMT.

It's quite an achievement to be less reliable that the Beeb.

For the Democrats' sake, let's hope their budget calculations are little more reliable.

Hat Tip: Best Destiny.

Ward of the State U - II

Later, I had an extended discussion with Ms. Kent about academic inquiry, and the rights and responsibilities of the faculty of a university in policing itself. I should stress that during this part of the chat, Ms. Kent was emphatically not speaking as a school administrator, but as a faculty member and history professor. I'll do my best to represent her views fairly here, although this isn't a transcript.

Ms. Kent was quick to point out that she disagrees rather strenuously with Mr. Churchill's screed. As a member of an academic community, she finds it not only troubling, but extremely painful and disappointing that someone would write this kind of thing. She finds it outrageous, offensive, hurtful, and harmful. Any defense of inaction on the part of the university should not be seen as agreeing with Mr. Churchill's rant, but as a defense of the current tenure system.

The tenure system was created, Ms. Kent went on, to protect individuals who say controversial things from retribution by both outside forces, like congressmen who have called for Mr. Churchill's scalp, and the Chancellor or Board of Regents. It is, as she put it, "the First Amendment extended to the university."

While, again, Ms. Kent was speaking as a professor, the university administration does share her views:

Although Churchill has been tenured since 1991, CU spokeswoman Pauline Hale said, "We view this issue more as an issue of freedom of speech, than of tenure."

As for tenure, she added, rules established by the Board of Regents allow for a tenured professor's firing only for the following offenses: demonstrable professional incompetence, neglect of duty, insubordination, conviction of a felony or any offense involving moral turpitude, or sexual harassment or other conduct that falls below minimum standards of professional integrity.

Ms. Kent also proposed that, as contemporary writing, Mr. Churchill's tirade could be used as a classroom text to promote discussion on the war directly, or on the Limits of Dissent, the title of the Hamilton College forum he'll be on a panel at.

Although the discussion was long, my point was fairly direct: faculty inaction would be an case of an institution supported, nurtured, and respected by a society, refusing to defend that society but instead attacking it. I do not believe the issue is one of hurtfulness or offensiveness - nobody has the right not to be offended. (I note with relief that CU has no speech code targeting hate speech.) This is a case of someone not criticizing the US in order to improve it but making common cause with its enemies, and were he to "win" the argument, it would result in the defeat of that society, and the murder of many, many of its members.

Moreover, there's plenty of writing that can be used to provoke thought, starting with Socrates, and I'd add that the punishment I'm proposing falls a little short of what was expected of him. In fact, having Mr. Churchill pack his bags and head for well-earned obscurity wouldn't keep someone from using his "text" in a class. Nothing says that a case study has to have a happy ending for its participants.

This is, quite clearly, a violation of the university's principles and its mission, and it seems to be most appropriate for a faculty congress, if such a thing exists, to hear the unrepentant Mr. Churchill out, and then give him 30 minutes to clear out his desk. If there are no current rules permitting that punishment, they should be adopted and enforced. Ms. Kent agreed that the question was one of how far a university faculty would go in governing itself. I would add now that if an organization effectively insulates itself from any form of outside governance, its members really have no choice but to govern themselves.

The fact is that universities make these sorts of judgments all the time. I described incidents on other campuses where newspapers had been stolen, conservative or religious organizations denied funding for ideological reasons, the abuse of sexual harassment rules, and so on. I got the impression that Ms. Kent was largely unaware of these incidents. This implies that there may be enough people of goodwill, even liberals, who are simply not aware of how bad things have gotten. That's a hopeful sign.

A less hopeful sign was her reaction to ROTC. "Twenty years ago, when I first entered academia, I wouldn't have been able to make the case [for it]. But by being around it, I see where both I and other students have learned so much from having it on campus, that I'm glad that it's here." Fair enough, if you look at ROTC as another extracurricular, albeit one with an attitude. And it's certainly refreshing to see ideological diversity extended to something that must look pretty conservative.

But the reason for having ROTC on campus is that it trains officers in a military sworn to defend this country. It's really as simple as that.

Just like telling a enemy of the country that his services are no longer required.

Ward of the State U

By now, everyone knows about the University of Colorado's Ward Churchill and the atrocious screed he wrote after September 11, essentially accusing the entire country of being "little Eichmanns." Today, the Rocky Mountain News's Charlie Brennan wrote puff-piece intended to portray this, um, iconoclast, as a brave, lonely warrior, worthy of admiration and sympathy.

So, people are mad at Ward Churchill. What else is new?

For a man who has weathered anonymous death threats telephoned to his home, the latest turmoil is comparatively tame.

...

Churchill, chairman of the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Colorado, is at the center of controversy - again. This time it's students at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., upset about his scheduled appearance there next week.

They are disturbed by an essay Churchill wrote in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks suggesting they were justified.

In an essay written the day after the attacks, Some People Push Back: On the Justice Of Roosting Chickens, he said America was merely reaping what it had sown through a long history of violent domination and assault upon indigenous people.

...

Among those spitting mad is Debra Burlingame of Westchester, N.Y., sister of a pilot who died on Sept. 11. She said the CU professor's remarks are "beyond the pale."

To find himself outside the mainstream is not a novel experience for Churchill; this is the same man who, in an interview last year, said "it may be that more 9/11s are necessary."

Notice how Churchill is "outside the mainstream," "weathered anonymous death threats," and "suggests" that American citizens deserve to have a little jet fuel with their morning coffee. Notice, too how his opponents are "spitting mad" and "disturbed." As though death threats were all that uncommon. Basketball coaches, reporters, even bloggers I know personally have received them.

Brennan also is curiously uninterested in Churchill's academic credentials. It turns out that Churchill has no PhD. According to Susan Kent, Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at Colorado, this is unusual, but not unprecedented. The "terminal degree," or the degree required for tenure, is determined by the academic organization that the professor's department is affiliated with. So, for instance, MESA determines if professors in Middle East Studies should be expected to have PhDs. In certain departments, such as Music, PhDs are not expected.

She was unsure of the specific requirements at the time that Churchill received his tenure (1997), for a professor in the Communications Department. However, the conversation did proceed as though an exception was made in his case. This was done because Mr. Churchill had an "exceptional" record of peer-reviews publication.

A search of the Academic Search Premier database reveals that since 1986, Mr, Churchill has published 25 academic articles. Only 3 of those were published before 1997, with 4 more occurring that year. This hardly seems like an astonishing output for a full professor, especially given that the majority are quite short, including a 2-page book review and a 2-page discussion in Progressive attacking the FBI.

Mr. Brennan was at the Greeley Presidential rally I attended, and had to be talked down by Mike Littwin from saying that the invocation called President Bush "appointed by God," and was way too eager to take my joke about the lead-in music (endlessly replayed) as being from Apollo 13as factual.

Apparently, some facts are more important than others.

UPDATE: According to today's Rocky, Churchill received tenure in 1991, at which point he had exactly two publications, one of which was the aforementioned hit-piece on the FBI.

He had also published a book. One of the requirements for tenure is, according to Ms. Kent, usually something like a book and substantial progress towards another book. And indeed, Mr. Churchill did indeed find something called "Common Courage Press" to publishe books in 1992, 1993, and 1994. Neither his first publisher, South End Press, nor his second look much like an academic press to me.

I should also add, in fairness to Ms. Kent, that she did not hold her current position in 1997, and is not in the Communications Department which Mr. Churchill was infesting at the time. She wasn't even at CU in 1991. Therefore, I didn't think it appropriate to ask her to defend the university's tenure grant.

Cross-Posted at Oh, That Liberal Media.

The Succession Struggle is Underway

Who will succeed Hinderaker at Powerline?

Your Tax Dollars at Work

Ward Churchill, a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, wrote this (among other things) after the September 11, 2001 attacks:

It states: "The most that can honestly be said of those involved on Sept. 11 is that they finally responded in kind to some of what this country has dispensed to their people as a matter of course."

The essay maintains that the people killed inside the Pentagon were "military targets."

"As for those in the World Trade Center," the essay said, "well, really, let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break."

The essay goes on to describe the victims as "little Eichmanns," referring to Adolph Eichmann, who executed Adolph Hitler's plan to exterminate Jews during World War II.

He also goes on to claim that the US has "killed 500,000 children to impose its will on other countries," a number whose source was apparently neither given nor asked for.

When CU comes back to the state for more money, or want to raise tuition, someone should ask why this guy's still on the payroll.

Words Mean Things

The folks over at the RMPN are having a grand old time rounding up folks who think Wayne Allard has better things to do that protect marriage as we know it.

Now, everyone's entitled to their priorities. Rep. Boyd (D-Lakewood) wants to eviscerate the free exercise clause of the First Amendment, for instance. So if the self-styled "progressives" want to play litigator, arguing budget when they don't have the social issues, and social issues when they don't have the budget, that's their business.

But words mean things, and it says a lot about their world-view that the only reason they can imagine that someone would oppose gay marriage is "hate." There's a vast online literature documenting the healthy debate on the right (as opposed to the monolithic approval of the Left) over this issue. I don't believe I've ever seen anything approaching hatred of gays be even hinted at in, say, National Review Online's Corner.

It's a straw man, designed to cow opponents into explaining themselves, or better yet, silence. Opposing gay marriage doesn't mean I hate gays, any more than opposing affirmative action means I hate blacks. Like so much the Left has done over the years to debase the currency of language, this posturing is designed to mark out more and more space and unfit for debate. They might admire what that approach has done for the political culture of Europe, but I don't.

Ooops

Clay's got the text of a letter concerning what at least is carelessness and at worst borders on criminal neglect. Honestly though, it makes your eyes roll more than anything else.

I remember watching a tape years ago of a British reporter interviewing some government flunky at the site of a particularly dangerous piece of highway. Naturally the flunky was denying there was any problem at all. And naturally, on tape, a car went off the road behind him as he was speaking.

That's kind of like using boxes of sensitive information that have been lying around to demonstrate how vulnerable our sensitive information is to theft...

Blogs in the Classroom

When will we see the first class taught using a blog as source material? I think I've found a candidate.

Michele Leder is a financial reporter who likes finding things in footnotes, where companies hide - or try to hide - the really scary stuff. She posts once a day to her blog, Footnoted, about some juicy tidbit she's found in some company's 10-K or 10-Q. Her book, Financial Fine Print: Uncovering a Company's True Value, looks like a very accessable discussion of what companies will do not to disappoint the analysts.

So instead of an accounting text that the professor ignores and that I may never open after I graduate, but that I still have to pay $40 for, how about making the book required reading, and using the blog-postings as the basis for in-class discussion.

Obviously, professors have a tremendous financial incentive to publish their own case-studies, and then to update them every year or so. But how much more fun it would be to look at live examples rather than ones already under glass.

More Steel

Sometimes you win on long-term contracts, sometimes you lose. California's Grey Davis lost big time. US steel producers, who've been enjoying a very good year, may be insulated from suddenly rising iron ore and coking coal prices.

North American steelmakers have stronger relationships and longer-term contracts with their suppliers and are expected to be less affected. Still, the effect of higher raw materials could be felt by steel consumers world-wide. Steel prices were expected to remain near current high levels for the first half of the year, then taper off in the second.

"What this is going to do is push up selling prices [for steel]," says Chuck Bradford, a New York-based steel analyst with Bradford Research/Soleil Inc.

Well, maybe. But with profits strong, it may also be a chance to weed out some of the weaker producers, and a market-share opportunity for US steel producers. After all, "[i]n some ways, the price run-up is a delayed reaction to high steel prices."

The Bush Doctrine

I like the Bush Doctrine. I think it is a clear statement of our country's BHAG (big, hairy, audacious goal), that both clarifies and inspires, without requiring the slavish obsessiveness of the Carter Administration.

That said, I have to agree with Charles Kesler that optimism must also include a stomach for hard work.

I'd also add that democracy is not only hard to get up and running, it can also run down pretty easily. Just because we can add a country to the Democracies List doesn't mean it'll necessarily stay there. Allende in Chile, Chavez in Venezuela, Lula in Brazil, the decidedly unfree nature of the EU Constitution, the impending return of Ortega in Nicaragua, even successes like the Orange Revolution and Georgia, show how people can, over time, choose security over freedom.

When there's only one democratic choice, every election becomes a referendum on the very existence of the next election. So the democratic choice holds together by fear of the consequences of losing, instead of splitting or reforming itself as it ought to be free to do.

Reversing these reverses isn't cheap, either, since the dictator usually comes to power with a solid, if minority base of support, imbued with the fervor of the converted. In the case of Germany and Japan, it took WWII and a lengthy and comprehensive occupation. So along with worrying about pushing the front forward, we also have to be very worried about defections.

Asymmetric Warfare

Next Tuesday night, Israeli Israeli Brigadier General Natke Nir will speak at the Denver JCC on "The Imperative of Morality in the IDF."

We can expect peace sometime after the first public address by a Palestinian leader on "The Imperative of Morality in the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade."

The Budget Battles

The legislative Democrats are signaling an increasing willingness to go it alone on TABOR. Their goal is to take the high-water mark of state spending, as use that as the baseline for future spending caps. The Republicans are, I fear, on the verge of making the Bush I mistake - being accused of intransigence while letting the other side roll up the table.

Last year, the Democrats opposed any effort to link Amendment 23 with TABOR, dooming Republican efforts to deal with both in resolving the budget crisis. The Democrats then ran a campaign accusing the Republicans of ignoring the problem.

After winning control of the legislature, the Democrats again vowed to be bipartisan, and again have stiffed any effort to weaken their sop to their parent company. And again, they are arguing that the Republicans simply want to deny them a legislative victory that would help them in 2006. As a result, the Republicans can easily end up looking obstructionist for merely holding the Democrats to their word.

At the same time, Sue Windels is proposing bill after bill that would weaken school accountability, underming charter schools, and eliminate testing as a metric for school performance. The Republicans, as part of their strategy to get Amendment 23 back on the table, need to link these sets of actions - it's a return to entitlement without accountability.

The problem with threatening a separate ballot measure is the Constitution's requirement that any referendum only address a single issue - a requirement that the State Supreme Court has rigorously enforced when it comes to conservative propositions. Thus, if the Democrats only want to deal with TABOR in their way, they can pass that through the legislature on a majority vote and send it to the voters this fall. Any Republican attempt to link the two would need to be on separate ballot measures, both needing signatures to get to a vote.

Checking in With the Mother Ship

Jonathan Sabin of Mangled Cat is in town this week, and we had a chance to get together at the company store last night, and chew over his new HP Tablet PC, business in general, and Howard Schultz's creation, in particular.

Jonathan has completely drunk the KoolAid Latte for the place, but it's hard to argue with him on objective grounds. As part of their training, Starbucks employees each get a copy of Pour Your Heart Into It, and Schultz makes a point of stopping by to autograph every copy. Starbucks really hit its stride when he took over, so there's a question as to whether or not it qualifies as Good to Great, or just great, but if you're looking for a case study to do on your own, there are worse places to start.

American Banks Enter China

Merrill Lynch is going to enter the market for underwriting Chinese securities, it reported today.
Man, Walter Wriston dies and everyone forgets everything his Big Latin American Misadventure taught him. Let's just hope they're going in with their eyes open.

But many say there is no need to rush into the market, citing the difficulty in finding the right partner, regulations precluding majority control, and the pace of regulatory changes in China's fast-evolving securities markets.

Under existing regulations, foreign banks must work with a Chinese partner to do business in the country. Chinese rules allow foreign firms to own as much as 33% of securities joint ventures, and permit underwriting -- but not trading -- of domestic securities. In other parts of China's financial sector, such as the asset-management business, foreign firms can own up to 49% of a venture.

Add to that opaque financial and unreliable economic numbers, cozy loans from banks to state-owned businesses (a la South Korea), and an increasingly untenable currency situation. Sure, the Chinese boom is likely to go on for a while. A few serious financial reverses won't alter the long-term trend there, any more than they did here, 150 years ago. But that's no reason to set yourself up.

Still, if Merrill has learned something, and has the guts to stand up to its domestic partners (so to speak) and demand better reporting, it could help to encourage better standards on the part of Chinese businesses. Or, they could end up lending their good name and respectability to enterprises doomed to destroy market capital on an untold scale.

Meaningless Numbers

When even the professor gets sucked into a meme, you know it's powerful. It's a shame it's also meaningless.

Consumer confidence rose again last month. Now, while I'd rather have people cheerful than depressed (financially or emotionally), this is one of the less useful numbers around.

As our securities analysis professor said, "never trust anything that anyone tells you." We ran a correlation between the consumer confidence numbers and economic performance, leading, trailing, and side-by-side, and we got "pretty close to irrelevant" as our answer.

While it makes intuitive sense that a confident consumer is our best customer, in fact, consumer confidence has a lot less to do with objective national or personal economics, and a lot more to do with the news you're getting. Freed from the frenzy of a national election, not only is MSM reporting probably less tilted, but people's perceptions of it are probably less biased, too.

This isn't bad news, but it isn't really good news, either. It's just no news.

Tu B'Shevat

Today is the Jewish holiday of Tu B'Shevat, or literally, "The 15th of Shevat." It marks the legal New Year for Trees. Jews aren't allowed to harvest the fruit of new trees until the trees are 4 years old, so this is the milestone for counting a tree's age.

Over the years, Tu B'Shevat has been associated with the Zionist movement (especially with the JNF's famous blue boxes for planting trees in Israel), and with the environmental movement.

Recently, we've developed a pleasant, cheerful custom of the Tu B'Shevat seder, a festive meal loaded with mystical overtones. There's no set liturgy for it. There's nothing particularly halachic about it. It can feature different groupings of fruits and nuts, different mixtures of red and white wine (or grape juice, for that matter). I would argue than in a religion that has an authentic ritual for everything, part of the Tu B'Shevat seder's popularity comes from its freedom to invent.

Nokia, the Official Cell Phone of Blue America

OK, that's a little harsh, but these comments from Nokia CEO Jorma Ollila show a couple of things.

Nokia's chief executive, Jorma Ollila, said in a rare television interview that the world is living in "an era of selfishness" very different from his childhood days in a small town in central Finland, when family values were of prime importance.

"Put in a nicer way, it is an era of individualism. This is a very self-centered period, which also has plenty of good features too because, when understood correctly, it can help you live independently and stand on one's own two feet," Ollila, 54, said in a candid interview broadcast on state-run YLE television.

Speaking with Finnish philosopher Esa Saarinen, a personal friend, Ollila said he thinks people are more concerned about individual rights than taking responsibility for their actions and trying to have a positive influence on society.

"What I'm worried about is that if this disintegration of values continues and develops further, we'll get a conservative counter-reaction precisely like what has actually happened in the USA," he said.

"This ultraconservatism, coupled with the elements of the church ... which, as we well know, has also supported the current (U.S.) administration, is a powerful counter-reaction to a longtime vacuum of values in society," Ollila said.

Later on in the interview, Ollila talks about the importance of his company being an "educartional establishment," which means that not only do the employees learn, but that the organization's implicit knowledge improves, too. It's a key insight, and part of what's made Ollila such a successful CEO.

No, what this interview shows is that any leader, even a CEO, especially a CEO, is only as good as the information he gets. Ollila gets gobs and gobs of market research data on the US, and yet clearly understands so little about our culture and how we see ourselves. He clearly gets his political news from the European MSM (or whatever the Finnish acronym is), who very quickly adopted the Americans-as-religion-obsessed-reactionaries meme.

"The church," as such doesn't exist in the United States. Perhaps Ollila is viewing religion through the European experience of established churches? In fact, religion in America has adapted quite well to individualism, paralleling business success.

The marketplace of religion in America never resembled AT&T as The Telephone Company. It may have, centuries ago, resembled post-breakup AT&T and the regional Baby Bells. Bur if Ollila wants a good analogy, it's the telecom market of today, with competing companies offering competing versions of competing technologies. Ironic, that.

Steel Steal?

So, this catches my eye in the earnings reports (hey, you, wake up, this gets interesting).

U.S. Steel Corp., the first major domestic steelmaker to report earnings, swung to a fourth-quarter profit of $462 million from a year-earlier loss, helped by strong demand, particularly in its tubular business.

The company posted net income of $3.55 a share, its fourth straight quarterly profit after four quarters of losses in 2003, before a pricing boom lifted the steel industry's profits and share prices.

U.S. Steel, the country's largest steelmaker, had a loss of $22 million, or 26 cents a share, a year earlier. Fourth-quarter revenue surged 47% to $3.93 billion.

The company was able to make a $255 Million pension contribution, and will have about $1 Billion in the bank for foreign acquisitions. It's not just rising prices, either, as shipments were up 14% over last year. The company seems to be running as somewhat leaner operation, as SG&A and per-unit cost of production have fallen. US Steel has lagged behind Nucor for years, but may have actually caught it this quarter, and may pass it in cash on hand.

Imagine that. An industry that was being taken to a chop shop itself a few years ago is now ready to buy up foreign competitors. I'm sure this isn't news to industry followers, but for people like me, it's going to mean a whole new paradigm shift. While my parents had to shake their heads at a crumbling empire, I got used to seeing the dead mills in and around Johnstown, PA. (I had a weekly commute from DC to there for a brief time.)

Now, I'm going to have to get used to thinking of the US steel industry as profitable.

Party of Reason - I

Concerning the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment:

While Colorado's new progressive majority seeks to avoid contentious social wedge issues, in the interest of getting important bipartisan fiscal work done, the national Congress freely indulges.

And just like last year, it's our own local Talibs leading the way --
...
And once again, the madrasa right plays their hateful fiddle while Rome burns. Allard himself is willing to devote all his energy to this crusade, a mere week and a half after telling America that the federal government figures it's just going to default on trillions it owes us...

And just like that, the RMPN shows it understands neither the meaning of "majority," nor the word "avoid," nor the stakes in the War on Islamic Radicalism, nor the definition of "default." (It would trivialize the argument to point out the lack of parallel construction in the last paragraph.)

A referendum banning gay marriage placed on the ballot here would pass handily, as it did in 11 other states last fall. So far Sue Windel has proposed dismantling school accountability and cutting back charter schools, while Rep. Boyd wants to require all hospitals to endorse abortion for rape victims. The Taliban didn't ban gay marriage - they simply banned gays. To the best of my knowledge, no dates at Mile High or Coors Field have been reserved for the executions. And a government, like a company, may continue to have debt forever without defaulting on any of it.

At the risk of being a little too apt, I'd suggest that Messrs. Gordon and Romanoff, and Mesdames Fitz-Gerald and Madden be very careful whom they climb into bed with.

What is Your Name?

Am I the only one who hears the new TurboTax commercial and is surprised when the next question isn't "What is your quest?"

More Trouble for GM

Won't American car companies ever learn? Heaven is a place where the English are the Police, the Italians are the cooks, and the Germans are the mechanics. Hell is a place where the Germans are the police, the English are the cooks, and the Italians are the mechanics.

There may have been some American-Italian car partnerships that succeded, but I can't remember them. Chrysler spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build a few hundred specialty cars with Maserati back in the 80s. Now, GM is trying desperately to find a way out of its money-hemorrhaging deal with Fiat (the WSJ has a superb article, but you need a subscription).

The problem is a $2 Billion put option that Fiat holds - over GM's head - as part of the price of the 20% acquisition. Both companies have gotten killed in Europe:

According to the Journal:

The negotiations are coming to a head as GM, which paid $2.4 billion for a since-diluted 20% stake in Fiat's car unit in 2000, faces a possible cut in its credit rating. In its core market of North America, GM has been losing market share and been forced to cut production amid increased competition from Asian rivals such as Toyota Motor Corp. and Nissan Motor Co. If GM is forced to pay a hefty settlement to wriggle out of the put option -- or worse, has to acquire the Italian auto maker and its $10 billion in debt -- it could weigh heavily on an already burdened balance sheet...

When Mr. Wagoner negotiated the Fiat tie-up he also agreed to another clause -- the put. The agreement, which is valid between 2005 and 2010, gives Fiat the right to force GM to buy out all of the Italian company's car unit at a price to be negotiated. Fiat had insisted on including the put option as an insurance policy should its alliance with GM go awry, something which neither company considered likely.

Now, puts between companies aren't normal, but they're not unusual, either. Sometimes they can be added when one company is selling a division to another. When one Canadian telecom sold a division to another, it included puts, to be followed by calls. At other times, they're included to limit risk.

But GM might have been expected to smell a rat here. If "neither company considered [failure] likely," then Fiat shouldn't have insisted on it. Instead, they cheerfully went along, and are now looking at the unappealing possibility of litigating in the famously arbitrary Italian courts, a home field advantage for Fiat if ever there was one. Now, Fiat is using the put to hold up GM for cash it needs, while GM is trying to avoid shredding its balance sheet beyond recognition.

Things may have improved since Luigi Barzini wrote The Italians, but if you were GM, how eager would you be to test that thesis? And don't you wish that GM's CFO had a blog?

Carnival of the Capitalists

It's up, and...it's Good!

Keeping the Troops in Line

While it appears that Tsar Romanoff has been able to strike a deal over TABOR that formally puts Amendment 23 on the ballot, the Senate has been a tougher nut to crack. Some of us think that this may be a matter of a more pragmatic majority leader Ken Gordon trying to keep Senate Duchess Joan FitzGerald in line, which may be a problem for the Dems throughout the next two years.

On this one issue, taxes, Gordon and FitzGerald have similar Colorado Union of Taxpayers ratings, but Gordon's go much further back. From '93, when he was in the House, he had been very low, but consistently in the double-digits. Both he at FitzGerald entered the Senate with the Democratic takeover there in the 2000 elections.

Gordon's ratings dropped to 0 and 5 for the next two years, somewhat reflective of the overall shift to the left, and dealing a not-so-subtle rebuke to the idea that power and responsibility go together. These were FitzGerald's first years in the legislature, and she voted with 7% and 9% ratings.

After 2002 when the Republicans retook the Senate, their ratings jumped up to the mid-to-high 20s, and yes, there were plenty of Senators who had lower ratings than that. Gordon appears to have learned his lesson, which is that extremism in the cause of taxation is no virtue, while FitzGerald seems to see her President status as a chance to ram through her vision.

Gordon was the one, you'll remember, who floated the idea of offering Republicans a symbolic olive-branch of committee vice-chairmanships. FitzGerald's rhetoric has been more strident since before the election, and as Senate President, it's hard to imagine that she hasn't been involved at some level in coming up with the majority position over there.

United Out of Bankruptcy?

From flying to United. The Rocky is reporting typically optimistic comments from United CEO Glenn Tilton that the airline will be out of receivership by the fall. Where have we heard this before?

Nobody wants United to die - there are too many jobs at stake locally - but the airline's been operating in backruptcy for over 2 years. Labor and management reached sweet deals which drove up the industry standard and have helped contribute to the airlines' recent malaise. But merely undoing those contracts won't solve the problem.

United has both a customer service and a cultural problem. I have never encountered the kind of rudeness that I have at a United ticket counter. United doesn't seem to have a culture of improvement that the smaller airlines have. I don't think it'll be able to overhaul its outdated hub system, destined to become more outdated as the FAA permits point-to-point flying rather than forcing prescribed routes.