The War of Industries

There is no question but that the higher the tariff on imported goods, the greater the impact on trade. And if one industry has a product or commodity that is in high demand on the other side of the world, the last thing that business sector wants to see is its exports to that consumer base subject to high duty-charges.

American agriculture, for example, wants low tariffs on foodstuffs so foreign buyers will consume more of their exports. Our farms are highly mechanized, with less reliance on labor than many foreign farms. We operate from scale with incredible efficiency. Foreign countries often want to protect their farmers.

But to get lower tariffs on some American exports often requires reciprocity, almost always across the board. We, likewise, have to keep our duties on such foreign nation’s exports to us reasonable as well. That’s great for agribusiness, but when American manufacturers – with inherently higher labor costs – face significantly-cheaper labor costs from their international counterparts, they really want an equalizer with a higher duty on such foreign goods. And if they don’t get those protective tariffs, well, they often are forced to take their manufactures overseas to avail themselves of that self-same lower labor cost component.

While that might be great economics for the U.S. business with overseas manufacturing capacity, that’s terrible news for the American workers who were displaced in the process. And when we hear about the flood of new manufacturing that is returning to U.S. shores, the benefits, for the most part, are enjoyed by the companies that now use robotics and automation instead of workers to implement this business strategy. Displaced workers are still… displaced.

Global trade is a reality, and it is now virtually impossible for any modern, developed country to turn against world trade, isolating itself into a lesser-trading status. If you were to take cheap manufactured goods, from China, Mexico, Bangladesh, etc., etc., out of the U.S. retail marketplace, American cost of living would soar well-beyond its increasingly unaffordable state today. So what do we do? If you can’t beat ‘em, make the process easier? Or figure out how to maintain some protective barrier to prevent wholesale displacement of too many more American workers?

It’s clear that American stock prices have risen in no insignificant part due to the flexibility given to American companies to outsource with fewer concerns about trade restrictions, but corporate wealth does not necessarily translate to better wages and working condition for average American workers.

That is precisely the issue behind the elimination of trade barriers under NAFTA (which was passed over two decades ago embracing North American trading partners) and the 17 trade agreements passed by Congress since then. Now we face the Obama Administration’s proposed (and still being negotiated) Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Agreement, which has oddly generated strong pro-business GOP support while sending warning flares from Obama’s own party. Democrats are staring at the potential of displaced American workers; Republicans are seeing a more open trading field.

The problem, it seems, is the failure of our own economy to absorb too many of those workers who have lost their jobs as a result of such expanding global treaties that tear down trade barriers. “The costs of globalization have been greater and more enduring than they expected, and government efforts to mitigate the impact on American workers have often proved insufficient.

“‘I think what we’ve learned is that U.S. labor markets aren’t as flexible and self-correcting as I think we had presumed,’ said Gordon Hanson, an economist at the University of California, San Diego. ‘The uneasiness I have about the way we’ve handled globalization is not so much globalization itself. It’s that if you don’t have the right safety net, you’re going to impose an enormous amount of hardship.’

“There is also mounting evidence that the benefits of globalization have accrued disproportionately to upper-income households, while the costs have fallen heavily on the less affluent, contributing to the rise of economic inequality.

“The Obama administration has presented the proposed agreements — one with nations that border the Pacific Ocean, the other with Europe — as, in part, a shield against globalization that would require other nations to move closer to American standards for environmental protection, worker rights and intellectual property.” New York Times, May 18^th. Forcing our trading partners to pay living wages and observe environmental concerns is part of a solution, but to many, this hardly goes far enough.

But does history suggest that there just may be less than meets the jaundiced eye? “In 2013, on the 20th anniversary of Nafta, the Congressional Research Service reviewed the research and concluded it was not that big a deal… ‘In reality, Nafta did not cause the huge job losses feared by the critics or the large economic gains predicted by supporters,’ the report concluded…

“A 2005 study by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a research group in Washington that is a strong proponent of trade deals, estimated that embracing trade had added about 7.3 percent to America’s economic output — or about $10,000 in annual income for every household in the United States.

”But the benefits are not distributed evenly. Trade increases overall prosperity by eliminating less productive jobs. In theory, the workers find new jobs. In practice, studies by Mr. Hanson and other economists show that [some rust-belt] in cities…, global competition is increasing unemployment and reducing wages.” NY Times. While some workers have obviously benefited from open trade barriers, others have been slammed into obsolescence and have simply not recovered.

Congress doesn’t seem to know how to grapple with the underlying income inequality issues, and while it could create or stimulate jobs with massive infrastructure (we’re spending less as a percentage of GDP today than at any time since 1947), educational/training and sponsored research commitments, it has tied its own hands by proscribing raising any money anywhere that could result in higher taxes anywhere on anybody… tax policies that have failed miserably to create solid jobs. We cannot stop global competition, and even keeping barriers intact is unsustainable. We need to manage global competition and not think we can prevent any harmful changes; they will occur one way or the other. There will be winners… and losers. But a sympathetic Congress could make a difference.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it does seem counter-productive to let a Congress – with its head buried in the sand and a ball and chain around its ankles – make decisions that require flexibility and genuine understanding.

Work

Work patterns in developed countries are changing dramatically. OK, so a plumber or a surgeon cannot work primarily from home, so certain “jobs” are simply going to be hours spent at a company-designated location. But to the extent that work is information related, from software design to data analysis to creative services to marketing, the possibility of not being anchored to a desk “at the office” becomes not only possible but routine. And even for those who spend considerable time “at the office,” if it’s information that is the core of their employment, that capacity to reach workers at remote locations has also changed job expectations forever.

Concepts like “job” security seem to have been relegated to the history books. Not only are employers facing fiscal cliffs with increasing frequency – even federal and local governments go through major downsizing sweeps all the time these days – but workers are often engaged to cover a particular project to fill a gap for a specified time. These are contract workers. With massive changes in skillsets being required all the time, there is a danger in hiring “permanent” employees whose skills might no longer fit company needs in the not-too-distant future. Further, employers like having contract workers to see how they fare over a longer period even if they do want to hire “permanent” employees.

The picture isn’t so rosy for “permanent” employees either. The erosion of private sector unions leaves many, constantly looking over their shoulders at who wants their job, willing to accept some pretty abominable work realities. Remember when the Great Recession fired three employees and shift their workload to just one survivor? No pay increase, just more hours and more work for the same or even lower paycheck. We called that a massive “productivity increase.”

These changes are rather significant for the kinds of preparations we as a nation must make to deal with these realities. For contract workers, healthcare and retirement contributions just do not happen. Access to healthcare suddenly becomes mission critical, not to mention affordability. Even the Affordable Care Act is expensive, and making choices between paying off student loans from underfunded and over-priced education, eating and keeping a roof over your head, young healthy bodies often opt out of the healthcare option (despite the penalties) and simply assume that they will not ever retire. Vacations? Only between gigs or without pay, if you can afford to take a trip anyway (staycation, anyone? Another word for “unemployment”?).

The May 18^th FastCompany.com took a look at the new rules of work, as these labor pools now ply their services, and the picture is anything but pretty.

1.      NEW RULE: WORK CAN HAPPEN WHEREVER YOU ARE, ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD.

"Rush hour" is disappearing: The MTA (New York City's subway system) reports that "weekday growth was strongest outside of the traditional morning and evening rush hours" as people ditch the traditional commute to live and work differently. Co-working spaces are popping up everywhere: one estimate puts the number above 20,000—a virtual doubling in the number of co-working spaces globally since 2008. Work-from-home policies are increasingly standard among employers, and remote work is a growing trend—Automattic, the company behind Wordpress, is 100% remote, its employees scattered in bedrooms and home offices everywhere. The Remote Year initiative enables 100 remote workers to spend one month in 12 different locations across the globe. Technology may be the great enabler, but the impulse is deeply human: we want to live life on our terms in the place we are most comfortable, and we can work there, too.

2.      NEW RULE: YOU’RE ON CALL 24-7.

Time matters just as much space. The upside is working when we want to—employers are increasingly likely not to care exactly when the work is done, as long as it gets done well and on deadline. The downside is always being on call—the same screens that connect us to many aspects of our personal lives are also the means of production.

According to a 2013 survey by the American Psychological Association, "More than half of employed adults said they check work messages at least once a day over the weekend." Almost the same number also did so before or after work on weekdays and during sick days. A full 44% even do it while on vacation. Also in 2013, theAmerican Time Survey found that 34% of those employed work on an average of one weekend day every week, rising to 43% in the growing ranks of the self-employed.

3.      NEW RULE: YOU GO FROM GIG TO GIG, PROJECT TO PROJECT.

Last year, and the freelancer marketplace Elance-oDesk estimated that there are 53 million freelancers in the U.S., which represents 34% of the workforce. No wonder the polite question to ask these days is not "Where do you work?" but "What are you working on?"… All freelancers share a focus on getting gigs, which are the new unit of work, but surveys find that around half of freelancers feel lucky and liberated, while the other half are seriously stressed, wishing they could find full-time work.

4.      NEW RULE: FOR BETTER OR WORSE THE LINE BETWEEN WORK AND LIFE IS ALMOST ENTIRELY DISAPPEARING.

Companies are obsessed with work-life balance, says André Spicer of the City University Business School in London—"but the more people talk about it, the less it seems to actually exist. The realities of contemporary work involve a complete blurring of work and life. We try to establish barriers but they are constantly knocked down."

Take the constant search for new income streams: when platforms like Airbnb and Uber enabled the monetization of "slack" resources, many people suddenly had themselves working overtime as landlords or drivers. Time with friends is replaced by networking. Social media updates, once entirely personal, are now an extension of your CV, another way to constantly be selling yourself.

5.      NEW RULE: YOU WORK BECAUSE YOU’RE "PASSIONATE" ABOUT A "MOVEMENT" OR A "CAUSE"—YOU HAVE TO "LOVE WHAT YOU DO".

Don’t ever say you "just need a job"—"the unofficial work mantra for our time," wrote Miya Tokemitsu in a widely discussed article, is "Do What You Love." Employers looking to harness or answer the "passion" of workers are increasingly branding themselves as movements and causes, anything but a boring old company that makes widgets.

The problem with "Do What You Love," says Tokemitsu, is that "it leads not to salvation, but to the devaluation of actual work . . . Its real achievement is making workers believe their labor serves the self and not the marketplace." Instead of enabling the good life, work gobbles it up entirely.

Self-actualization, says Carl Cederström of the Stockholm Business School, "is not necessarily something we want, but something that we’re required to do." When so many of us are in the persuasion business—persuasion workers now account for some 30% of U.S. GDP, estimated economist Gerry Antioch in 2013—it’s no surprise that we have to start by persuading ourselves of the life-or-death importance of what we’re doing.

Sound familiar? Feels wrong, but it is what it is? Feeling a fit trapped? Disconnected? Stressed and concerned? Wary about your future and the future of your family, if you can even think about affording a family these days? Make you understand how easy prey you are for politicians with cute slogans but absolutely zero in workable solutions to make this even slightly better.

I’m Peter Dekom, and that American slather at the thought of simple solution-slogans but lack the willpower to elect politicians to make some hard choices seems to suggest that we deserve what we’ve got.

Polarizing Paragons of Pay

From university presidents and major college sports coaches – even at public institutions – to athletes and those at the top of huge corporations, the levels of compensation – fully adjusted for inflation – are vast multiples of practices just a couple of decades ago. This growing disparity of compensation leads to other anomalies across the board. Like the cost of entertainment, from professional sporting events, to high profile Broadway shows, to housing in and around key cities and the price of a solid education.

Things we used to take for granted, like the ability to retire, are also eroding both because to increase profitability corporate America has increasingly elected to downsize benefits and by reason of the soaring cost of just about everything. “Lots of companies have been phasing out pension plans. Social Security and Medicare are proving extremely expensive to maintain as people live longer and health costs rise. And retirement accounts, like 401Ks, which are the supposed alternative, are only helping some people: 45% of working-age households don't have them. Across the U.S., near-retirement households have an average of $12,000 in retirement savings, while working-age households have just $3,000, according to the National Institute on Retirement Security. Which isn't much for 20 years of vacations with the grandkids, even with Social Security thrown in.

Increasing numbers of people aren't sure they'll be able to retire. Last year, 43% of Americans were "not too" or "not at all" confident of having enough money, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute, up from 27% in 1995. And the young are particularly skeptical. Only one in five millennials think they'll be able to claim Social Security when the time comes, a Gallup poll found. One quarter think they'll have to work in their senior years—and it's very likely that they're right.” FastCompany.com, May 18^th. Save money! In this economy? With student loans, high housing costs and soaring food prices?s

That the average 800 square foot home in San Francisco these days costs $1 million (try New York City, Washington, D.C., Seattle, Los Angeles, etc. to see where rents and home prices have settled) or NBA, NHL, NFL, MLB seats anywhere near the action are in the hundred plus dollar range tells you what is really going on in this country. The rising cost of getting a “life-preparing” education has crushed the economics of too many young graduates stepping into the work world, while the scions of the mega-rich have access to full and proper educational opportunities at the best universities with no comparable burdens.

The general trend in this country is a deep and steady decline in the standard of living for average Americans, a decimation of upward social mobility and a clear destruction of hope for a better future for most of us. Pay at the top is simply out-of-control, much higher in this country than in the rest of the developed world. Tens of millions to hundreds of millions each to CEOs all over this nation.

“From 1978 to 2013, CEO compensation, inflation-adjusted, increased 937 percent, a rise more than double stock market growth and substantially greater than the painfully slow 10.2 percent growth in a typical worker’s compensation over the same period… The CEO-to-worker compensation ratio was 20-to-1 in 1965 and 29.9-to-1 in 1978, grew to 122.6-to-1 in 1995, peaked at 383.4-to-1 in 2000, and was 295.9-to-1 in 2013, far higher than it was in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s.” Economic Policy Institute, June 12, 2014.

You would have thought that financial restraint laws passed as a result of the recent Great Recession would have stemmed this unsustainable and polarizing trend. Not really, and if anything, the situation has worsened. “It’s been five years since the Dodd-Frank law required that companies let investors vote on their executive pay practices. The idea, lawmakers said, was to give shareholders a chance to sound off when compensation plans are not in their best interests.

“But has putting these matters to a vote done anything to rein in executive pay? Not a chance. Since these votes started being tallied, [already outrageously high] C.E.O. pay has risen on average 12 percent annually… There are several reasons ‘say on pay,’ as it is known, has had little impact on executive compensation. One may be that the votes are not binding…

“[Yet the majority of shareholders just let it happen. The] median shareholder support for pay practices at the 500 largest companies was 95 percent of the shares voted, according to a ranking compiled by the Shareholder Forum, an independent creator of programs to help investors make sound decisions. The vote ranking, based on data from Equilar, a compensation analysis company in Redwood City, Calif., shows that overall support has risen from 93.8 percent in 2011.

“This apparent satisfaction with pay may be a result of the rising stock market. Shareholder dissent, when it does crop up, typically occurs at companies that have awarded lush compensation even as their performance has lagged. Investors watching their shares go up are less likely to be outraged by a sizable bonus or stock grant.

“Still, among the most generous companies, shareholders’ discontent is percolating. Last year, 15.9 percent of the shares voted at the 100 top-paying companies were nays, compared with 15.4 percent in 2013. And among the companies whose votes have occurred so far in 2015, the dissent figure has increased to 18.4 percent…

“The company receiving the largest dissent — 54 percent — was Oracle. Its shareholders have long complained about how much the board pays Lawrence J. Ellison, its founder. Second on the dissent list was David M. Zaslav [pictured above], chief executive at Discovery Communications and the highest-paid C.E.O. in the nation. He received compensation worth $156 million last year, a 368 percent increase over 2013… At last year’s annual meeting, when investors had information on Mr. Zaslav’s compensation for 2013, 41 percent of the voted shares rejected Discovery’s pay practices.

“Another case in point: David T. Hamamoto, chief executive of Northstar Realty Finance, a real estate investment company. Some 39 percent of the votes cast at the company’s 2014 annual meeting were against its executive pay, but Mr. Hamamoto’s $60 million package for last year was an increase of 227 percent over 2013.

“Then there’s Leonard Schleifer, the chief executive of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, a biopharmaceutical company…He received $42 million in compensation last year, a 15 percent increase; 38 percent of the votes cast at the 2014 shareholders’ meeting disapproved of the company’s pay practices.” New York Times, May 16^th. The list goes on and on and on and on. Les Mooves (CBS), $58 million, Marrisa Mayer (Yahoo), $42 million, Steven Mollenkopf (Qualcomm), $61 million, Philippe Dauman (Viacom), $44 million, etc., etc., etc.

Since 90% of stocks are owned by 10% of the American population, we seem to have an insider’s club where those at the top take care of their own. The fact that these staggering rates of pay ripple through every aspect of the economy, making life and affordability that much more difficult for everyone else – folks who don’t get to vote on executive pay are left out with no power to change anything – doesn’t seem to matter… to anyone who could make a difference. While Europe has nothing like the extent and levels of pay we have here in the U.S., the European Union (with separate rules in the UK) is considering serious requirements on what executives can be paid in public companies. Nothing like that could ever pass the existing Congress, and there is no one seriously talking about such laws.

But as both parties speak about “income inequality,” what exactly are they proposing to fix it? Precious little is being discussed about the anomalies at the top. Instead, each party is promising false hope to the masses that they will make more money. Each party seems to acknowledge that the bulk of the new jobs that have dropped the unemployment rates are really low-pay, low-advancement opportunities. All we really have is abstract promises of “better” without the remotest viable path to that goal on either party’s platform.

  I’m Peter Dekom, and until enough Americans get angry at these absurd practices, nothing will change!

Who Are We?

Back in the days when Bush “W” cronies, Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney, argued that the United States must be and remain the world’s policeman, even before 9/11/01. The priority: our military and the ability of the President of the United States to deploy such forces instantly. It was a policy that was built over the Cold War decades and even after the fall of the Soviet Union. Cheney, himself a child of the military industrial complex (as head of Halliburton), argued for an ancient Roman concept (a Caesar appointed from the Senate to rule dictatorily during times of crisis) – the “unitary executive” – able to move an iron hammer at the drop of a hat.

After 9/11, Cheney, having enlisted a gullible president, had to manufacture a war – hence a WMD ruse to invade Iraq – to get Congress to reverse the restrictions they imposed on a post-Vietnam-War-debacle presidency to contain precisely the kind of rapid-deployment flexibility he envisioned. If Congress felt the threat great enough, he correctly reasoned, they would gladly cede power back to the president to deal with it. The Iraq invasion produced the necessary document. The PATRIOT Act. And Congress was tripping all over itself to pass appropriations bills to support the war. Ka-ching.

The military industrial complex was cheering. Over the years, these companies had strategically placed military contractors all over the United States… in key Congressional voting districts. They knew that this war would send their stocks skyrocketing, and with Cheney’s philosophy ruling the roost, they couldn’t loose. Congress was feeding at their trough, and they were hooked.

Apparently, our elected leadership chose completely to ignore the parting words, uttered in his farewell presidential speech on January 17, 1961, of Republican Dwight David Eisenhower… a president who rose to being a five star general during World War II: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.” Sorry, Mr. President, your worst fears have defined American policy for a very, very long time.

So Republicans broke from the advice of their esteemed, exceptionally militarily-experienced president, and gnawed fiercely at the forbidden fruit. Military budgets, which feed those local constituencies, have become sacrosanct, even as our general infrastructure continues to fall apart, education becomes morbidly expensive for lack of government support and job-creating government supported scientific research vaporizes.

We’ve employed waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques, spied on ourselves and our allies under the guise of national security, invaded countries and deployed murderous “contractors” to do our dirty work and become a perceived “bully/king of the hill.” We have become a government based on secrecy. ISIS is a reaction to the instability we created in Iraq by substituting a Shiite government for a Sunni dictator: ISIS arose to protect the deposed Sunnis, now victims of the new Shiite powers in the region. They just went a bit overboard!

After trillions of dollars and way too many casualties, we failed to get the governments and stabilities we promised in both Iraq and Afghanistan. In both venues, violence and instability only escalated. We only have failure and new horrific consequences to deal with. As the global bully/king of the hill, we are always going to be a primary target for insurgencies trying to prove their machismo on the global stage. Likewise, because of the level of our surveillance capacities and ultra-sophisticated military technology, whenever there is a global challenge, somebody always wants us to lend our support. We are often the only game in town because of that taxpayer-supported massive military… still greater than the military budgets of the next 10 largest military powers combined.

The battle over the relative cost of our military budget versus the rest of the government programs continues to be a hot button debate… all the time. Strangely, the Democrats seem to have become Eisenhower Republicans, and the Republicans have become the “spend, spend, spend” Democrats on this facet of government. “Key Democrats on [May 14^th] said they opposed Republican efforts to circumvent broad, congressionally mandated cuts in military spending as lawmakers considered the annual Pentagon budget.

“As the House began voting on amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act, members debated whether to dedicate about $39 billion to go into a fund insulated from the across-the-board spending cuts known as sequestration, which took effect in 2013. That fund, the Overseas Contingency Operations account, is intended to be used for emergency military operations.

“Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leader, said Republicans were willing to let nonmilitary spending bear the brunt of the cuts… ‘Republicans are trying to use war funding as a virtual slush fund for one part of the budget while letting the ax fall on everything else, leaving priorities essential to the strength of our country — the veterans’ budget, infrastructure, education, innovation — grievously underfunded,’ she said. ‘The Republican defense authorization bill is not only disingenuous, it is dangerous.’” New York Times, May 14^th.

Indeed, to support all of these military priorities, to protect our “king of the hill” (read: primary global target) status, we have adopted some pretty ugly habits, characteristics that these new enemies use to recruit their “soldiers” and invite sympathizers to apply “lone wolf” attacks against us and our allies. We are making their recruiting efforts way too easy, and in a strange way, we are becoming an un-transparent, undemocratic and highly economically polarized nation as a result. Even our struggles to deal with electronic surveillance that is completely out of control suggest who and what we have become. The PATRIOT Act turned out to be deeply un-American.

“Secrecy has always been traditional and accepted in wartime, but traditional wars have an end. Under two administrations now, as the United States has remained on a permanent war footing against Al Qaeda and its splintering, morphing progeny, tensions over fighting battles in the shadows have steadily escalated. If this is a forever war, can a democracy wage it in secret?

“[In early May], the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, suggested that it could not… In a unanimous ruling that roiled the political debate in Congress over the phone records program, a three-judge panel said that the existing program was illegal… The heart of the ruling was the principle of self-government: A program of that magnitude cannot be created in secret and without public debate.” Charlie Savage writing for the May 14^th New York Times.

We mount drone strikes without oversight. The Surveillance Courts operate behind closed doors. Whistle blowers are treated as traitors. Cheney’s dream has placed too much control in the hands of the executive branch, and the current Congress seems to have great difficulty trying to embrace reasonable controls over the inherent massive potential for abuse of power.

“Last year, a different three-judge panel on the Second Circuit ruled that the Obama administration had to make public Justice Department memos about the scope and limits of the executive branch’s claimed power to target and kill an American citizen deemed a terrorist.

“In Congress, Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee pushed last year to declassify a 500-page summary of its investigation into the C.I.A. torture program, even as executive branch officials warned that its publication would endanger Americans’ lives.

“Individual leakers have also taken matters into their own hands with two bulk leaks of hundreds of thousands of secret government documents… The leakers were the Army private now known as Chelsea Manning, who is serving a 35-year military prison sentence, and the former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, who has been charged under the Espionage Act and whose disclosures included the bulk phone program that the appeals court found to be illegal.” Savage. Think of what would have continued without those whistleblowers.

Who are we? What and whom do we care about? What are our priorities? What is that massive military protecting anyway? Can we even get back to an open, democratic and transparent government that, while protecting its own people, can actually act in the best interests of the country as a whole? Or is this government hopelessly deadlocked, hell-bent on remaining a global cop, hated by so much of the rest of the world as a result (except when it is accepted as a necessary evil) and willing to allow our own quality of life to continue to deteriorate and encumber our future into stagnation? I’m not advocating that we become isolationist in our actions, just that we balance those aspirations with a re-prioritization of our needs here at home, engaging with global partners to shoulder the burdens we seem to have taken on alone in the recent past.

I’m Peter Dekom, and if we keep moving in this direction, the immutable patterns of history will reward us with a continuous unraveling of all we hold dear.

Crash – A Proverbially Reactive Congress

Even without gridlock, our Congress prevents almost nothing bad and seldom solves any currently relevant problem. But when it does move ever-so-slightly, it often goes through a “let’s find a political opponent to blame, even though our dealing with this earlier could have prevented it” moment. Like cutting the Department of State’s security budget and then lambasting a rising presidential candidate for not preventing Benghazi.

Or… Beholden to the big check-writers under the Citizens United decision, knowing that environmental regulations will slam King Coal and the Frackers hard, sometimes they prefer to rely on God-answers, providing a gut-but-not-remotely-scientifically-accurate explanation (fires, floods, drought and hurricanes are purely acts of nature for which man has no responsibility). Bad for business often justifies some pretty horrific practices. But almost always, big movements come from big headlines.

Massive flooding from a failed levee, a bridge collapse on an Interstate… or a great big train wreck with lots of fatalities. “In 2008, the Democrat-controlled Congress and the Bush White House were at odds over an Amtrak bill. Democrats wanted to double Amtrak’s budget. The Bush administration wanted to zero it out. A reauthorization bill had languished for years and funding was static.

“Then in September, a commuter passenger rail train collided with a freight train in Los Angeles killing 25 people and injuring dozens. Suddenly, Congress did what it does best: React… Instantly, passing a bill addressing rail safety needs became a priority. With the added urgency, Congress attached the stalled Amtrak reauthorization bill to a separate rail safety measure and it cleared Congress within weeks. President George W. Bush, who had once threatened to veto the Amtrak bill, signed it with little fanfare… That bill expired in 2013, and Congress still needs to pass a new one.” Washington Post, May 12^th.

Republican policy has wanted the federal government out of the railroad business. They want passenger-focused Amtrak spun-off into a completely private structure with no government ownership. So Amtrak has become a hot potato. Railroads, once private in the United States, fell on hard times, as cars and trucks sucked both passengers and freight away from our rail system. And while the needs of World War II provided rail transportation a brief respite, the decline of our private rail system resumed shortly after that war.

“In 1946, there remained 45 percent fewer passenger trains than in 1929, and the decline quickened despite railroad optimism. Passengers disappeared and so did trains. Few trains generated profits; most produced losses. Broad-based passenger rail deficits appeared as early as 1948 and by the mid-1950s railroads claimed aggregate annual losses on passenger services of more than $700 million (almost $5 billion in 2005 dollars when adjusted for inflation)… By 1965, only 10,000 rail passenger cars were in operation, 85 percent fewer than in 1929. Passenger service was provided on only 75,000 miles (120,000 km) of track, a stark decline. The 1960s also saw the end of railway post office revenues, which had helped some of the remaining trains break even.” Wikipedia.

After a serious of railroad bankruptcies, with some transportation horribles looming, “In 1970, Congress passed, and President Richard Nixon signed into law, the Rail Passenger Service Act. Proponents of the bill, led by the National Association of Railroad Passengers (NARP), sought government funding to assure the continuation of passenger trains. They conceived the National Railroad Passenger Corporation (NRPC), a hybrid public-private entity that would receive taxpayer funding and assume operation of intercity passenger trains. The original working brand name for NRPC was Railpax, but shortly before the company started operating it was changed to Amtrak.” Wikipeda. 

Amtrak cut passenger service where it was no longer economically justified, picked up where “deferred maintenance” left substandard equipment and facilities, and generally improved rail service… with federal subsidies along the way. They worked with rail companies that remained private, and the system evolved into the present day. But a hostile Congress has pushed back against spending money to repair the Amtrak system.

A little quiver along the way, which never made it through the full Congress, may ramp-up now that eight people were killed and over 200 injured on a massive Amtrak passenger train derailment in the Philadelphia area on May 12^th. It was the same stretch of tracks where, 71 years ago (September 6, 1943), 79 other people were killed, 117 injured, as passengers on a speeding train.

For Amtrak, available resources, not enough to upgrade the full system, were diverted to fill the void:  “Federal regulators on [May 16^th] ordered Amtrak to expand use of a speed-control system long in effect for southbound trains near the crash site to northbound trains in the same area. The agency also ordered the company to examine all curves along the Northeast Corridor and determine if more can be done to improve safety, and to increase speed limit signs along the route.

“Railroad Administration spokesman Kevin Thompson said [on May 17^th] the automatic train control system is now fully operational on the northbound tracks. Trains going through that section of track will be governed by the system, which alerts engineers to slow down when their trains go too fast and automatically applies the brakes if the train continues to speed.” AOL.com, May 17^th.

Now Congress gets to address the bigger funding issues, a matter started but not yet finished. The House, in a rare show of bipartisanship, passed a reauthorization to fund bill in March. It didn’t include a big funding boost like in 2008, but there is one notable provision: “The profitable Northeast Corridor could reinvest in its own battered infrastructure rather than have to subsidize other routes around the country that don’t make money.

“Amtrak has long been a controversial issue on Capitol Hill, with many Republicans wanting the federal government out of the railroad business and pushing to privatize it. Then-GOP presidential candidate John McCain voted against the aforementioned Amtrak bill in 2008. Mitt Romney targeted it as a place to cut in 2012. Meanwhile many Democrats point overseas to Japan and Germany and argue the United States has fallen behind by not investing in rail.” The Post.

We will now see if Congress follows its usual pattern of reactive legislation. Maybe they’ll call it human error and see no reason to act because the train was traveling at twice the authorized speed… Forget that we live in a technologically-advanced world where even that can be prevented (and will, at least on that route with first-rate equipment. Oh well…

I’m Peter Dekom, and that the government doesn’t remotely do the jobs that we elected them for, that Congress cannot seem to make a meaningful decision, well, we as the voting public are simply letting them get away with this level of reactive legislating!

Another Road, Another Can

Tornadoes have slammed into several mid-country states, major tropical storms have percolated off the South Atlantic Coast, flooding and drought have stepped up their pace. Yet Congress is unable to address anything but band aid legislation to upgrade and expand our most basic infrastructure. Sure we have pledges of not shutting down the country from the Republican-dominated Congress, but the legislation that trickles through remains polarized, inadequate and short-term. And while the renewal of the Patriot Act and the review of the Iran nuclear treaty are sexy headline-grabbers, nothing impacts Americans in their day-to-day lives more than infrastructure.

A levee breach, a bridge or dam failure and our daily commute can have profound effects on everything we do… from economic competitiveness to survival. Evidence of this failure to provide what needs to be done comes with the pending expiration of the current federal surface transportation bill, one that addresses America’s transportation basics. In the past six years, Congress has been unable to accomplish much more than limping extensions of our inadequate federal highway program… there have been 32 such extensions during that time line.

Whether we have serious needs or not – from a public educational system that continues to deteriorate year-after-year, just as the rest of the world spends more on their students, to pulling back federal research dollars from sectors that used to be the big job-creators in a technologically-competitive world – the Congressional mandate these days is a combination of social conservatism, impeded immigration reform, austerity regardless of the consequences, and maintaining loopholes, inadequate financial and environmental regulation and low taxes for the rich. But even Democrats have been loath to vote to spend the needed cash.
Despite heavy lobbying from the Department of Transportation, armed with tons of photographs, statistics and hard engineering facts, the legislative needle barely moves.

A seemingly impotent Obama administration has grappled with a bill that at least minimally addresses what everyone knows: our streets and highways are deeply inadequate for current demand and in substantial disrepair. “To be fair, the White House sent a six-year, $478 billion highway bill to the Hill at the end of March, to be paid for with repatriation taxes, collecting money U.S.-based companies hold overseas, but that requires movement on another big lift: tax reform.

“Which, despite DOT’s best efforts — including a social media campaign and a bus tour — has always been the hold up. It’s a true bipartisan failing, with Republicans and Democrats alike unwilling to make unpopular choices (like raising the federal gasoline tax for the first time since 1993) to pay for roads and bridges.” The Washington Post, May 7^th.

So we remain a reactive nation. Waiting until a bridge collapsed and kills the drivers and passengers in the car that get crushed. Doing little until a levee breaks as a hurricane hits (with massive loss of life and property along the way) costing billions in emergency relief plus then allocating money for repairs. It always costs more not to spend that money… and almost always sooner than we think.

Democratic rhetoric on the subject is as expected: “‘Now this is kind of a joke that there’s not even a bill, and we are 26 days away,’ said Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), at a congressional hearing on the issue [in the first week of May]… or this: ‘I have to say, I’ve been a senator now for 18 months, and my frustration with our approach to infrastructure as a nation just grows with every day,’ said Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.).” The Post. But even the GOP knows a big fix is needed, it’s not an issue that a bill carefully crafted by the DOT that will solve the problem. It is a question of national priorities, tax reform and other nasties that Congress is unwilling to address. No one knows where the money will come from.

And so our lives continue to deteriorate. We read naked job statistics – unemployment is down to 5.4% the BLS tells us – but the pay levels and advancement opportunities remain horrible, and there are lots of folks who have slipped out of the labor pool through no fault of their own. We seem to have great difficulty dealing with unpleasant facts, so we spin and announce ineffective slogan-based solutions as if these choices would make the bad man stop. We just do not do well with truth, but we are great at kicking the can down the road.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I remember when America was “can do” long before there was “can kick.”