Re-Nuance

In my haste to connect the Secret Service prostitution scandal to the GSA Las Vegas scandal, I did not elaborate well on the broad political implications of both.

Watching the Sunday talk shows today, guests have tended to say the GSA's spendthrift ways could or should stick to President Obama, while Secret Service philandering should not.  There's a clear distinction being made between an episode of drunken misconduct by law enforcement officers with a history of heroism and the General Services Administration, which basically acts as the federal government's "back office," issuing checks to pay the light bill and trim grass around federal office buildings.

In my earlier post, I made a leap from the two scandals to talk about the war in Wisconsin between Governor Scott Walker and public employee unions over Republican legislation that passed last year to curtail public employee collective bargaining rights, increase their pension and benefit contributions, and make payroll deductions for union dues voluntary.  I said that taxpayers and voters in Wisconsin were right to ask public employees pay more for their health and pension benefits, just as the now-infamous prostitute in Colombia was within her rights to scream about being ripped-off by that Secret Service agent who had refused to pay her fees, if for no other reason than to keep things quiet.

But if I may take myself seriously, I stand behind my original if hasty analysis.  There is a growing cultural gap between citizens and the government employees who work for them.  The GSA and Secret Service scandals should not be brushed aside as aberrations, but examined closely as symptoms of a deeply-ingrained, widespread collective dissonance.  True, it may not be correct to say the GSA party planners were maliciously and purposely boosting the tab for their Vegas convention to show taxpayers who's boss.  And it would go beyond the pale to suggest the Secret Service agents hired prostitutes for any other purpose than what they were intended for.

What caused these two entirely separate scandals to occur, shares a common but subtle root.  Government has simply grown so large and so complex that now large numbers of public employees in thankless or invisible jobs no longer perceive they hold a public trust.  For example, the belief that a GSA real estate broker should distinguish themselves from private commercial brokers doing similar work is lost.  That the government, from the local level to state and national levels, is the workplace for a startling 17% of all persons employed makes it harder for them to see their jobs as "special" in some way, let alone owed to a public trust.  As government employment has grown more commonplace, the idea of being held or holding themselves to a higher standard naturally erodes.

In fact, the vast majority of government employees see themselves as dedicated professionals, no different from their private sector counterparts doing the same kinds of work.  True, it's unfair for taxpayers to treat government employees as less deserving of their jobs, but equally true, government employees should expect to be held to the same standards of ethics and propriety as expected in the private sector.  And while the GSA and Secret Service scandals are extreme in nature and publicity, how can the public really be assured these were "isolated incidents" when the government is so vast and growing?

To sharpen matters, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has taken on the issue of public employees' cash-outs for unused sick leave and vacation benefits that had been allowed to accumulate in his state.  Commonly called "boat money" because retiring public employees find their unused leave payments sizable enough to buy boats for their retirement, Christie is wondering aloud how most ordinary private sector workers never find themselves eligible for such enormous bonuses at retirement.  Of course public employee unions defend the boat money payments because the accumulation of leave payments is a "benefit" earned under the union contracts it fought for and won on behalf of state employees.

But simple questions of fairness between private and public employment "classes" like those raised by Governors Walker and Christie will grow in importance if left unchecked, for the simple reasons states can not afford the premium packages and pay for the cash-outs without raising income and property taxes to cover their outlays.  As pressure builds in the political arena to choose between raising taxes "out of respect" for government workers' promised entitlements, or cutting taxes to spur private sector growth to escape the current recession, the lack of respect-- even contempt-- shown by the Vegas GSA party crew makes it hard for taxpayers to vote for any politician who is sympathetic for what clearly has become a special government employee "class" in American society.

When the election starts to unfold as a choice between "raising taxes on the rich," as President Obama prefers to call it, or "cutting taxes on job creators" as Mr. Romney will call it, the real class warfare going on across the country between public and private sector classes of employment won't be lost on voters.  The idea that Secret Service agents had been traveling the world toting guns and consorting with prostitutes and the GSA's pencil-pushers were attending team-building confabs over exotic buffets at lavish resorts makes it clear just who got to soak the hard-working middle class while the President goes on about making the rich "pay their fair share."

For America to have come to a point where working in the public sector (or in jobs entirely dependent on government contracts) is the preferred way to support a family and live a middle class standard of living should be of broad concern.  Let's hope the scandals will spur a serious discourse on how to re-balance and re-nuance the nation's political and economic interests.  As further scandals unfold and it becomes clear the "isolated incidents" were neither isolated nor incidental, the idea that agencies merely need to "clean house" will falter in favor, I hope, of a serious examination of the growing gap, not between rich and poor, but between public have-mores and private have-lesses.

For my $47

Is it time to scream like a Colombian hooker?

Just thinking that a $47 dispute over a Colombian prostitute's fees unleashed a scandal on the US Secret Service (that will easily cost taxpayers millions to investigate and punish the guilty) makes you wonder, where was that cheap bastard when the Government Services Agency needed him counting pennies back in Las Vegas?

The GSA is under fire for spending lavishly (~$850,000) on a 300-employee morale-building event it put on at a posh resort in Las Vegas in 2010.  If only they had been guided in planning this circus by that parsimonious Secret Service agent, a certain mind reader hired to entertain the GSA bureaucrats might have been shorted her reported $3,100 fee and called the cops-- as apparently did a certain "working girl" in Cartagena after being shorted $47 for services rendered just before President Obama was due to there arrive for the Summit of the Americas.

On first glance there's no relation between these two scandals.  Mischief by officers in Cartagena sworn  to protect the US president and cavorting by once-faceless bureaucrats in Las Vegas have little in common except for the supreme embarrassment these incidents have caused.

But there is a common thread-- albeit thin and threadlike-- that in the public mind connects the vapid stupidity shown by these incidents:  When did public employees get so friggin arrogant?

The US economy is still in its worst rut since the Great Depression while the federal budget (annual deficits, national debt, unfunded obligations) have all mushroomed radically.  The shift of economic power from private sector productivity to public payrolls in the past decade is terrifying to most people who wake up each morning and go to work just to pay for local, state, and federal government employees-- not including so-called private sector jobs like defense contractors and road construction companies entirely dependent on state and federal spending.

In the last few years you can feel the tilt and almost see the US map tipping like a giant table-top towards Washington DC, where all the hard-earned money from across the country slides rapidly across into a giant hole.

In Wisconsin a kind of civil war is unfolding between the private and public employment sectors that began when their new governor and elected legislature decided to tilt the scales back in the direction of non-government workers by having the audacity to ask public employees to pay a larger share of their pension and health insurance premiums.  Governor Scott Walker's sense of fairness was deemed so offensive to public employee unions, they launched a recall campaign against him and several legislators-- a fight Walker is sure to win, thanks in no small part to the GSA spectacle of glowing contempt shown for the public that pays its way.

The Wisconsin saga is emblematic of the public's disgust with a deepening haves versus have-nots chasm between those who work to pay for government expenditures and those who live off the taxpayer at a higher standard of living with fewer worries.

Put another way, when us ordinary citizens no longer can receive simple fairness, say an extra $47 for spending the night getting screwed by our government, they will fight back like the hooker in Cartagena and unleash much more than a giant scandal.

Those magnifcent flying machines

I stood on the banks of the Potomac River this morning to take my last glimpse at one of America's least-appreciated, most astounding technological achievements-- the Space Shuttle Orbiter Discovery, in a low-altitude flyover of the nation's capital before it came to rest, "wheel stop," at the Dulles Airport wing of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.

The decision to scuttle the shuttle fleet was made following the Columbia spaceflight tragedy in 2003.  Columbia, laden with precursor research experiments of the kind that would be performed on the International Space Station, was returning home to Kennedy Space Center from its long-duration space mission when a crack on the leading edge of its left wing permitted the hot plasma flows from re-encountering Earth's atmosphere to travel rapid-fire through its wing and under-belly, incinerating its internal systems and causing the orbiter to break violently apart over Texas.

The "failure mode" which destroyed Columbia and her crew of seven dedicated astronauts had caught NASA by surprise.  While a theory of her potential demise did, in fact, circulate briefly among engineers at mission control in Houston upon examining videotapes that showed icy chunks of foam from its giant external fuel tank striking the leading edge of the orbiter wing, a high-level review afterwards concluded that even if NASA had acted on the information, few practical options existed to save the crew.

Few practical options existed, too, for saving the program.  That same review drew the conclusion that flying the space shuttles beyond 2010 or thereabouts was, ultimately begging further death.  The space shuttle, the panel pointed out, had never achieved status as a truly operational system.  Because each flight was so system-specific and unique, despite repetitive success, each mission was an experimental flight, costing an average of $500 million apiece.  Moreover, the sheer complexity of the shuttle systems had aged in 30+ years unevenly and unpredictably, perhaps exceeding NASA engineers' ability to analyze and maintain them much longer.

But what a miracle it was.  Just thinking about the number of successful missions, set against the statistically stratospheric odds of disaster-- millions of inspections and opportunities for human error on every flight-- flying the space shuttle was an epic engineering and managerial feat of the highest order.  For persons who witnessed the entire shuttle program, from its inception in the 1970s until today's landing of the 747 carrier aircraft at Dulles will not see another orchestration of imagination, skill, guts and talent of this magnitude ever again.

The People's Court

Last I checked, the US is not a third-world country. One of the first things to go on the road to serfdom is our ability to uphold the rule of law, which now teeters perilously over the abyss of mob rule in the Trayvon Martin tragedy.

It’s time for George Zimmerman to clear his name.

Yes, you heard me.  After many weeks observing the aftermath of the shooting in Sanford, Fla., I believe the only way to learn the truth of what happened on Feb. 26 is for Mr. Zimmerman to be charged with manslaughter and defend himself vigorously in a court of law.

That police authorities took Mr. Zimmerman’s claim of self-defense at face-value and chose not to charge him with a crime is what lays at the heart of protest marches and public calls for “justice.”  Until either the police or Mr. Zimmerman is challenged to appear in a court of law, the mobs will grow on both sides, leading exactly to nowhere.

For Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, putting the police on trial is far better than learning what really happened.  As far as they are concerned, they’ll stand on young Trayvon Martin’s corpse shaking their fists for as long as possible and deep-down do not want the truth of what occurred to ruin their political moment.

Had Mr. Zimmerman been arrested the night of the incident, the odds are quite good that he would have been cleared by our system of jurisprudence of wrongdoing a month ago and Messrs. Sharpton and Jackson would not be on our televisions baiting the mob to hang Mr. Zimmerman in the court of public opinion.

Inasmuch as this sad event has grown out of proportion and become a national media feeding frenzy, saying that Mr. Zimmerman should face charges now would seem to be giving into the mob.  Many people who support the police and their decision to not charge Mr. Zimmerman have grown so rigid in the public opinion battle that they appear to not trust that the court system would render a fair verdict, either—that is, no more than Messrs. Sharpton and Jackson.

With passions this pitched, the two opposite sides have become indistinguishable.  Both are attempting to conduct the trial of Zimmerman v. Martin in the public square.  But that's what the courts are for.  And if, as I have heard from Florida, the courts cannot be trusted with Mr. Zimmerman's fate, perhaps we have no system left at all.  Once a society as large and diverse as ours no longer abides by community norms such as the right to trial under the rule of law, it has few steps left to go before it careens into the abyss where civil unrest turns to civic collapse.

Under our system, the only way to end this spectacle and get all the combatants back on the same page of the US Constitution is the trial of Mr. Zimmerman.  If Mr. Zimmerman’s eventual acquittal on self-defense grounds results in putting the police (or various statutes) involved on trial, too, so be it.  At least the venue for ascertaining the truth will be one established to do so, not based on heresay and public opinion polls.

What every citizen should want is that justice be served, not wrestled for by mobs in the town square.  That Mr. Zimmerman must face charges and defend himself in court in order for society to repair itself is a small sacrifice, but nonetheless befitting a man who so proudly has served his fellow citizens as the captain of his neighborhood watch.