Bumbed

Robert Reich posted this story on Facebook today:

"Leaving New York City yesterday bound for California on one of the last flights out of JFK before the airport closed, a flight attendant told me I was lucky to already have my ticket because the airlines had just jacked up ticket prices to $4,000 in light of the impending storm.

As a result, the flight I was on was oversold by 47 extra passengers. So the flight attendants offered money to passengers who volunteered to switch their tickets to the next flight out of NYC, whenever that might be. The first offer of $200 wasn't enough to get 47 volunteers; only a bid of $400 did the trick.

If the 47 extra passengers had each paid $4,000 to get onto the plane at the last minute, and the 47 who gave up their seats for them received only $400 in return the trade would have been "rational" in narrow market terms. The seats were "worth" $4,000 to those who bought them, and receiving $400 was "worth" it to those who gave them up.

But the transaction was also deeply exploitative. The airline netted a huge profit because of the impending storm.

I couldn't help think this was a miniature version of the America we'll have if Mitt Romney is elected president."


I'm curious as to the supposed rationale for the sudden price hike (or exploitative price gauging?). I wonder if there is one, other than that there are now people prepared to pay that much?

Is it right to charge someone dying of thirst all their worldly goods for a glass of water? (Of course, that's what we do in for-profit health care). But right and wrong have no place in a shareholder value-based model.

An open letter to telvision journalists

The media has an increasingly important role in our democracy; and it's falling down on the job.

For whatever the reason, and there are many, politicians, the people from whom we choose those will represent us in government, have learned that they will almost never be held to account for what they say and do. This is where the our media has failed us, having been hijacked by a quest ratings and a fascination with political celebrity.

Here are some symptoms: not determinedly and relentlessly confronting politicians to explain changes in their position for fear that these often mendacious, self serving individuals won't grace that anchor with their vaulted company in the future; using politicians as if they were experts to comment on other politician's statements and positions - they are seldom expert and never unbiased; filling the time with often irrelevant or unsubstantiated drivel, such as in-depth analysis of body language and 'default expressions'.

One reason for the decline in journalistic standards is the rise in power of the anchor - who need not be a good journalist, a function of the increasing shift from the written to the visual transmission of news and analysis. Another is structural; particularly influential politicians know they have considerable bargaining power, they are few (or one) while news outlets wanting to be first with a story, are many. That means politicians can set the terms of the engagement. 

Why would any serious-minded network entertain for a second the notion of devoting any air time to cover Donald Trump, an unprincipled, self-serving, self-promoting individual who in most countries would be ignored as a rather shameful carnival sideshow? Margret Thatcher knew that it wasn't necessary to give air time, 'the oxygen of publicity' to anyone with an axe to grind; and she not so quietly suggested so to the media. But our media shouldn't need any prompting. Covering the IRA is journalistically defensible; covering Mr. Trump and other relentless 'birthers' and nonsense peddlers is not.   

Time to market matters; too quick and quality suffers. That's why Jon Stewart does a better job as a journalist, albeit one with a comic take, than CNN. He and his team don't react in the moment with vacuous and generally fact free commentary; he takes a day to do his research.  And the results is a much more informed and insightful assessment of current affairs. 

What if?

I was reminded today that both presidential candidates agreed in their last debate that Al Quaeda's top leadership had been effectively wiped out, all bar one killed (I assume) in drone strikes; the exception being Osama Bin Laden who met his end in a less impersonal fashion. Which led me to wonder about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

Both were embarked upon in order to eliminate Al Quaeda. But if the candidates are to be believed (and why wouldn't one), the same end could have been achieved much more cheaply, and more importantly, with no loss of American lives and with far fewer civilian casualties (or "collateral damage"), using drone strikes.

Not only would the national debt not be the problem it is today, but we might now have far more support in the Arab Spring by not having fuelled a groundswell of anti-American sentiment that has helped propel the Muslim Brotherhood to increasing prominence. We might have spent a small fraction of the $1.283 trillion the Congressional Research Service reports the wars to have cost on things like airport security, intelligence gathering, (not to mention other things, such as  Medicare and Medicaid, PEL grants, basic research, and infrastructure).  And before the macro-economists out there point out that military spending is an economic stimulus, ask yourself if the middle class is better off than it was before the wars were started 10 years ago.

And, again, 4,803 men and women from the US¹ and its coalition partners who died in Iraq², and 3,189 men and women from the US³ and its coalition partners who died in Afghanistan⁴ would all still be alive today. Not to mention the huge number (49,768) of our service men and women who were wounded in action.

Idle speculation, certainly, as we can't turn back the clock, but perhaps something for all the arm chair hawks, bravely rattling their sabres, to think about before  'volunteering' their fellow citizens into harms way? 

¹ of which 4,422 were American; source DOD
² Source CNN
³ of which 2,135 were American; source DOD
⁴ Source CNN

Freedom of choice

Some might suggest that being threatened by your employer to vote a certain way is not an infringement of civil liberty. You are, after all, free to vote as you wish, just as you are free seek employment elsewhere, more specifically in a firm whose chief executive shares your political views. (Try asking that question in your interview).

Anyway, it's a secret ballot and, theoretically at least, you can't be fired for refusing to tell your employer how you voted even if he were to draw the conclusion that you must not have voted as 'instructed' since if you had you'd have freely fessed up.

Of course, you could always lie. After all, integrity and scruples are clearly not in high demand in a company in which you are blackmailed on the way to the ballot box, while your employer cashes your vote at his bank.   

Some might also suggest that these employers are simply exercising their first amendment rights to free speech.

That said, I find this deeply troubling.

Maybe Fox News will do one of its customary week-long indignant exposés on it?

You have to hand it to Gov. Romney

... and President Obama has done just that.

What to make of the debates? All in all, a  serious strategic misjudgement by the Obama campaign team, and one that hands the election to Romney.

For the first debate, Obama was ill-prepared. He hadn't any response to Romeny's shift to a moderate centrist position, something that was entirely predictable given Romney's earlier shift to the right needed to get the nomination, and his previous moderate position required to get himself elected governor. Obama's lack of preparation showed in his inability to carefully but politely point out the shifts in Romney's position. That, something the media has failed to do, has been Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's lonely crusade.  

In the second Obama did better, challenging Romney on some of his inconsistencies.  But the in the third, Obama was again caught completely off guard. Given that the electorate broadly,  and undecided voters in particular, are likely to be those who don't take an on-going interest in politics, much less foreign relations, Romeny's objectives were not going to be to 'win', score points, and differentiate himself from the President, but rather to close the gap. Romeny needed only appear knowledgeable, and without having to articulate it, let the underlying logic of his position simply be that already developed by the President. Again, the Obama team underestimated Mitt Romney. 

All in all, Romney's team completely out manoeuvred the Obama team in the debates; and that might well make him an effective president. One might not like what he does (if we actually knew what that will be), but this episode suggests that what ever he decides to do when he gets into office, he will be more effective in getting Congress to do his bidding that Obama has been.

The next four years and a Romney presidency will be 'interesting'. Clearly, Romney is an ambitious pragmatist rather than a man of principle and conviction when it comes to politics. One can only hope that when finally confronted with the realities of the responsibilities of office, he will 'do the right thing' (if we only knew that he knows what that is).