Pero Che, say it ain’t So-derbergh

Posted on January 3, 2009 by Jorge Costales

The film director of the Ocean’s movie series thinks profits are a bad thing. What’s next, ‘Spielberg denounces move away from realism!’ Jeez, no wonder Andy looked upset.

For those interested in seeing the truth about the Cuban regime exposed, let us give thanks to the likes of Mary Anastasia O’Grady, who wrote recently in her regular column about the Americas in the Wall Street Journal:

Putting aside for a moment the hilarity of Mr. Soderbergh’s personal revulsion with profits, the “methodology” that he suggests is debatable is otherwise known as murder. Che had a “homicidal idea of justice,” Alvaro Vargas Llosa explained in The New Republic in 2005, after researching his life. In his April 1967 “Message to the Tricontinental,” Che spoke these words: “hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective and cold-blooded killing machine.”The results of Che’s utopian agenda aren’t much to admire either. As author Paul Berman explained in 2004 in Slate, “The cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time. Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster.”

The miserable Argentine was killed in 1967 in the Bolivian Andes while trying to spread revolution in South America. But his vision of how to govern lives on in the Cuba of today. It is a slave plantation, where a handful of wealthy white men impose their “morality” on the masses, most of whom are black and who suffer unspeakable privation with zero civil liberties.

There is something rich about the supposedly hip, countercultural Hollywood elite making common cause with Cuba’s privileged establishment in 2008. Its victims — artists, musicians, human-rights activists, journalists, bloggers, writers, poets and others deprived of freedom of conscience — would seem to deserve solidarity from their brethren living in freedom. Instead, the ever-so avant-garde Soderberghs side with the politburo.

Ms O’Grady can be thanked at O’Grady@wsj.com.

Fortunately, she is not alone. Please read Carlos Eire — an excerpt:

Che has four different sorts of admirers: communists, anti-Americans, the poor, and the affluent. That he should be loved by the first three groups is no mystery: Anti-Americans and communists love Che because he is one of their own. The poor desperately need to believe in some redemption from their misery, even in a messianic figure. But why do the affluent need Saint Che? The answer is as simple as it is awful: because of bigotry.

Let’s face it: If Che’s affluent admirers really believed in his cause, they would move to Cuba, or become revolutionaries in their own country. But they don’t, and that says a lot about them.

Saint Che allows white North Americans and Europeans to apply a horribly unacceptable standard of leadership to Latinos that they would never accept for themselves. Through their idolization, these admirers express their feelings of superiority while they delude themselves into thinking that they are in solidarity with the poor. Affluent Latin Americans who love Che, such as Benicio del Toro, the actor who portrays him and praises him are not racists, of course. But they are “useful idiots,” as Lenin liked to say.

Any way you look at it, those who idolize Che are to be pitied or feared.

All articles referenced are copied in full at end of post.

————————————————————————————–
Hollywood Celebrates Che Guevara–But it makes no films about the Cuban resistance movement

DECEMBER 29, 2008

By MARY ANASTASIA O’GRADY

Hollywood hotshot Benicio Del Toro is not a stand-up comic, but he seemed to be playing one earlier this month when he said he found the role of Cuban Revolution hero Ernesto Guevara, in the new film “Che,” like Jesus Christ.

“Only Jesus would turn the other cheek. Che wouldn’t,” Mr. Del Toro explained. Right. And Bernie Madoff is Mother Teresa, only she wasn’t into fraud.

With next month marking the 50th anniversary of the Castro dictatorship, it’s no surprise that the film industry is trying to cash in by celebrating pop-culture icon Guevara. As one of Fidel Castro’s lieutenants in the Sierra Maestra and a Castro enforcer in the years following the rebel victory, his name is synonymous with the Cuban Revolution.

Interesting films are hard to come by these days and “Che” is a good example of the problem. Rebel glamour sells T-shirts and coffee mugs so why not another airbrushed rerun of Guevara’s life? Or, more precisely, some mythical version of it, sanitized for the mass market. Meanwhile the real marvel of the past 50 years in Cuba — the steady stream of heroic nonconformists who have risked all in their aspiration to think, speak and act freely — remains the untold epic of our time.

If Mr. Del Toro’s “Christ” comment is foolish, it’s nothing compared to film director Steven Soderbergh’s explanation of why we should care about Che. Bad things happen in society when “you make profit the point of everything,” the movie director told Politico.com. Che’s “dream of a classless society, a society that isn’t built on the profit motive, is still relevant. The arguments still going on are about his methodology.”

Putting aside for a moment the hilarity of Mr. Soderbergh’s personal revulsion with profits, the “methodology” that he suggests is debatable is otherwise known as murder. Che had a “homicidal idea of justice,” Alvaro Vargas Llosa explained in The New Republic in 2005, after researching his life. In his April 1967 “Message to the Tricontinental,” Che spoke these words: “hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective and cold-blooded killing machine.”

The results of Che’s utopian agenda aren’t much to admire either. As author Paul Berman explained in 2004 in Slate, “The cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time. Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster.”

The miserable Argentine was killed in 1967 in the Bolivian Andes while trying to spread revolution in South America. But his vision of how to govern lives on in the Cuba of today. It is a slave plantation, where a handful of wealthy white men impose their “morality” on the masses, most of whom are black and who suffer unspeakable privation with zero civil liberties.

There is something rich about the supposedly hip, countercultural Hollywood elite making common cause with Cuba’s privileged establishment in 2008. Its victims — artists, musicians, human-rights activists, journalists, bloggers, writers, poets and others deprived of freedom of conscience — would seem to deserve solidarity from their brethren living in freedom. Instead, the ever-so avant-garde Soderberghs side with the politburo.

The Cuban regime loves its apologists. They give cover and deflect international criticism while at home the regime brutalizes its people. Reports from the island are that since Raúl took over from Fidel in 2006, the repression has gotten worse.

Oswaldo Payá, leader of the Varela Project, which collected more than 11,000 signatures calling for free elections and civil liberties in 2002, says that in recent months there has been a crackdown, “with a fierce persecution against Varela Project activists, other members of the opposition, and the ongoing scandal of not freeing the prisoners of conscience.”

Among Castro’s captives is Oscar Elias Biscet, an Afro-Cuban doctor who is renowned for his commitment to peaceful resistance and is serving a 25-year sentence. Fifty-eight journalists, writers and democracy advocates rounded up in March 2003 also languish in Fidel’s deplorable jails. The total number of political prisoners is not known but is undoubtedly much higher.

State security and rapid-response brigades — aka thugs paid to rough up dissidents — have been fully employed this year. But, despite the terror and the threat of imprisonment, the Cuban spirit still struggles for freedom.

At least five resistance publications now circulate in eastern Cuba. Thirty-two-year-old blogger Yoani Sánchez has been warned to keep quiet, but she still chronicles the ridiculousness of Che economics, giving a voice to ordinary Cubans who live lives of desperation. The Ladies in White — wives, sisters and mothers of prisoners of conscience — still walk quietly in Havana on Sundays. Rock bands mock the old dictator.

This is the wonder of the revolution: Fifty years of state terror hasn’t silenced the resistance. Maybe one day Hollywood will make a film about it.

Write to O’Grady@wsj.com
————————————————————————————-
Unmasking Che the Idol

December 22, 2008

National Book Award winner Carlos Eire, whom I had the pleasure of meeting and later the honor of having as my podcast guest, has an op-ed in Spanish in El Diario La Presa, La nostalgia del Che. Here’s the article translated into English:

Che the Idol

For those of us who lived through the Cuban Revolution there are two Ches: the real one we knew, and the false idol venerated by millions on earth.

The real Che was a hypocrite who lived very comfortably in a mansion while he preached revolution and imprisoned, tortured, and murdered thousands of my fellow countrymen. Some of his victims were my relatives. This Che dismissed human rights as “archaic bourgeois details.” He also herded tens of thousands of Cubans into concentration camps. To top it all off, he didn’t really help the poor and oppressed: instead he impoverished everyone, and set himself up as lord of all.

Che the idol is a totally different man: a noble crusader for justice, a sensitive idealist, even a martyr and saint. Ironically, Che the idol generates lots of cash for capitalists who imprint his image on all sorts of merchandise or make films about him.

How did Che the killer become Saint Che?

Because lies are often more attractive than the truth. We human beings have an innate need for heroes, prophets, and saviors, and since genuine ones are in short supply, we eagerly embrace those constructed for us.

Che has four different sorts of admirers: communists, anti-Americans, the poor, and the affluent. That he should be loved by the first three groups is no mystery: Anti-Americans and communists love Che because he is one of their own. The poor desperately need to believe in some redemption from their misery, even in a messianic figure. But why do the affluent need Saint Che? The answer is as simple as it is awful: because of bigotry.

Let’s face it: If Che’s affluent admirers really believed in his cause, they would move to Cuba, or become revolutionaries in their own country. But they don’t, and that says a lot about them.

Saint Che allows white North Americans and Europeans to apply a horribly unacceptable standard of leadership to Latinos that they would never accept for themselves. Through their idolization, these admirers express their feelings of superiority while they delude themselves into thinking that they are in solidarity with the poor. Affluent Latin Americans who love Che, such as Benicio del Toro, the actor who portrays him and praises him are not racists, of course. But they are “useful idiots,” as Lenin liked to say.

Any way you look at it, those who idolize Che are to be pitied or feared.

As Paul Berman said a few years ago when another movie sainting Che came out, “The cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time.”

Fausta Wertz also blogs at faustasblog.com.
——————————————————————————-

Posted in Cuba | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

La Descarga Deportiva

Posted on January 2, 2009 by Jorge Costales

For a good sports talk show which focuses heavily on local sports, I highly recommend La Descarga Deportiva–weeknights at 6pm on AM radio 670. Frequently the introductory banter between the regular callers and the hosts–Jerry del Castillo and Pepe Campos, El Decano de los Deportes and El Chamby, respectively–are enough to make me laugh. Unfortunately, while bilingual, it’s mostly Spanish.
Here’s a recent exchange I heard on the program:

Caller: I used to be down on the Marlins owner, Loria. But no more.
Host [Jerry del Castillo]: Glad to hear it.
Caller: I wish him a great 2009.
Host: [Suspiciously] Care to explain the shift?
Caller: I figure if he has a great year, the Marlins will trade him.

Posted in Sports | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

The Problem With Unions

Posted on January 2, 2009 by Jorge Costales

From a macro-level by Richard Posner:

Current union hostility to immigrant workers is consistent with the unions’ former hostility to blacks and women–which is to say, to workers willing to work for a wage below the union wage. And by raising labor costs, unions accelerate the substitution of capital for labor, further depressing the demand for labor and hence average wages. Union workers, in effect, exploit nonunion workers, as well as reducing the overall efficiency of the economy. The United Auto Workers has done its part to place the Detroit auto industry on the road to ruin.

From a micro-level by Pajamas Media:

One afternoon I was helping oversee the plant while upper management was off site. The workers brought an RV into the loading yard with a female “entertainer” who danced for them and then “entertained” them in the RV. With no other management around, I went to labor relations for assistance. As a twenty-five-year-old woman, I was not about to try to break up a crowd of fifty rowdy men. The labor relations rep pulled out the work rules and asked me which of the rules the men were breaking. I read through the rules and none applied directly, of course. Who wrote work rules to cover prostitutes at lunch? The only “legal” cause I had was an unauthorized vehicle and person and that blame did not fall on the union workers who were being “entertained” but on the security guards at the gate. Not one person suffered any consequence.

All articles referenced are copied in full at end of post.

—————————————————————————-
Can the United Auto Workers Survive? Posner

One of the reasons for the insolvency of the Detroit automakers (General Motors, Chrysler–and Ford, which appears to be insolvent too, despite its denials) is that their workers are paid higher wages, and receive much more generous benefits paid for by their employer, than the workers employed at the automobile plants, mainly in the South, owned by Toyota, Honda, and other foreign manufacturers. The total wage and benefit bill for the Detroit automakers is about $55 per hour, compared to $45 for workers in the foreign-owned plants, and the difference is plausibly ascribed to the fact that the Detroit automakers are unionized and the “foreign transplants” not. (The comparison excludes retiree benefits, a very large cost of the Detroit companies, but not an hourly labor cost.) This difference may seem small, considering that labor is only about 10 percent of the cost of making a car, but many of the workers at the companies that supply parts to the automakers (and the parts represent about 60 percent of the total cost of manufacturing the vehicle) are also represented by the United Auto Workers. Anyway, since the foreign transplants have other competitive advantages over the Detroit automakers, the latter can hardly afford to have even slightly higher labor costs.

When the auto bailout bill was being debated in Congress in November (ultimately it was voted down), Senator Corker said that he would support the bill if it conditioned the bailout on the Detroit automakers’ reducing their workers’ wages and benefits (to which the union would have to agree) to the level at the foreign-owned plants, as well as conform work rules to the work rules in those plants. The significance of the work rules must not be underestimated. As is common in unionized firms, the United Auto Workers has successfully negotiated not only for wages and benefits for the workers they represent but also for rules governing what tasks the workers can and cannot perform, how many workers must be assigned to a particular task, the order in which workers are to be laid off (usually it is in reverse order of seniority, because older workers tend to be stronger supporters of unionization than younger ones because the latter have better alternative employment prospects and so don’t worry as much about job security) in the event of a reduction in demand for the firm’s products, methods of discipline, and so forth. These work rules, collectively “featherbedding,” make it difficult for a firm to optimize its use of labor, and, like the higher wages and benefits that unions obtain, add to the firm’s labor costs relative to those of its nonunion competitors. A December 16 blog by Rand Simberg, http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/detroits-downturn-its-the-productivity-stupid/, presents a shocking picture of how work rules impair productivity at automobile plants at which the workers are represented by the United Auto Workers.

The goal of unions is to redistribute wealth from the owners and managers of firms, and from workers willing to work for very low wages, to the unionized workers and the union’s officers. Unions do this by organizing (or threatening) strikes that impose costs on employers. For employers are rationally willing to avoid those costs at a cost (provided it is smaller) of higher wages and benefits and restrictive work rules. Because the added cost to the employer of a unionized work force is a marginal cost (a cost that varies with the output of the firm), unionization results in reduced output by the unionized firm and, in consequence, benefits nonunionized competitors. Unless those competitors are too few or too small to be able to expand output at a cost no higher than the cost to the unionized firms, unionization will gradually drive the unionized firms out of business.

Unions, in other words, are worker cartels. Workers threaten to withhold their labor unless paid more than a competitive wage (including benefits and work rules), but unless their union is able to organize all the major competitors in a market, the cartel will be eroded by the entry of nonunionized firms, which by virtue of not being unionized will have lower labor costs. The parallel to producer cartels is exact–workers are producers.

We are seeing this process of erosion of labor monopolies at work in the automobile industry. The market share of the Detroit automakers has shrunk steadily relative to that of the foreign “transplants” and with it the number of unionized auto workers–they are fewer by a third or more than they were in 1970. If the Detroit automakers will be forced to liquidate unless they can bring their labor costs down to the level of the foreign transplants, the UAW will be out of business either because the Detroit automakers liquidate or because, as a result of union concessions, the workers will no longer be getting anything in exchange for the dues they pay the union.

I don’t think there’s much to be said on behalf of unions, at least under current economic conditions. The redistribution of wealth that they bring about is not only fragile, for the reason just suggested, but also capricious, as it is an accident whether conditions in a particular industry are favorable or unfavorable to unionization. By driving up employers’ costs, unions cause prices to increase, which harms consumers, who are not on average any better off than unionized workers are. Unions push hard for minimum wage laws and for tariffs, both being devices for reducing competition from workers, here or abroad, willing to work for lower wages. Current union hostility to immigrant workers is of a piece with the unions’ former hostility to blacks and women–which is to say, to workers willing to work for a wage below the union wage. And by raising labor costs, unions accelerate the substitution of capital for labor, further depressing the demand for labor and hence average wages. Union workers, in effect, exploit nonunion workers, as well as reducing the overall efficiency of the economy. The United Auto Workers has done its part to place the Detroit auto industry on the road to ruin.

There is also a long history of union corruption (though not in the UAW). And some union activity (though again not that of the UAW) is extortionate: the union and the employer tacitly agree that as long as the employer gives the workers a wage increase slightly above the union dues, the union will leave the employer alone.

There may be, I grant, cases in which unionization reduces an employer’s labor costs. If there is deep mutual antipathy between workers and employers, perhaps breaking out in violence–with strikebreakers beating up strikers and strikers beating up scabs and sit-down strikers destroying company property–there may be benefits from interposing an organization independent of the employer between employer and workers, and from creating (as the National Labor Relations Act has done) a civilized mode of resolving labor disputes. But in cases in which union organization is mutually beneficial, the employer will invite the union to organize its workers. I am sure the Detroit automakers would very much like to disinvite the United Auto Workers.

Unions do provide some services that are valuable to employers, such as grievance procedures that check arbitrary actions by supervisory employees; and union-negotiated protection of senior workers can benefit their employer by encouraging them to share their know-how with new workers, without having to fear that by doing so they will be sharing themselves out of a job. But these are measures that an employer who thinks they will reduce his labor costs can take without the presence of a union.

Micky Kaus, another blogger who is an expert on the automobile industry, attributes much of the problem with the UAW to the procedures that govern labor relations in unionized plants. “The problem…is the American adversarial labor-management negotiating system, in which reasonable people doing what the system tells them they should do wind up producing undesirable results. Just as negotiating over work assignments means factories adjust too slowly to generate continuous efficiency improvements (which often involve constantly changing work assignments) negotiating ponderous 3 year contracts (in which Gettelfinger [the UAW’s president] must extract every possible concession to please the members who elected him) means contracts adjust too slowly to save the companies from failure if market conditions change…[T[he $14 wage scale for new hires [to which the UAW agreed several years ago] hasn’t had an impact because nobody new is being hired by the UAW’s employers, who are shrinking, not growing. The obvious alternative to cutting the pay of nonexistent future workers would be to cut the pay of existing current workers–but they are the people the system tells Gettelfinger he needs to please.” http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/kausfiles/ (Dec. 26, 2008).

The unions strongly supported the Democrats in the last election and are looking for payback. I do think that there are good economic reasons for keeping the Detroit automakers out of bankruptcy until the current depression hits bottom and a recovery begins–until then the shock to the economy would be too great (see my post of November 16)–and that will keep the UAW alive for a while. But if it resists making substantial concessions to the automakers, hoping that the President and Congress will force the automakers’ bondholders to make the necessary concessions or that the taxpayer will be forced to subsidize the automakers indefinitely, the union will be playing a game of chicken that may end in its destruction rather than merely in its continued shrinkage as the industry shrinks. The auto bailout is deeply unpopular with the public and the UAW’s stubbornness may reinforce the impression that unions are dinosaurs slouching toward extinction.
————————————————————————————-
Detroit’s Downturn: It’s the Productivity, Stupid

There has been a lot of finger-pointing about who has put the American auto industry in a ditch, sending it hat in hand to the taxpayers’ ostensible representatives in Washington. There seems to be a broad consensus that Detroit’s problems were caused by inept and arrogant management, unimaginative car design, poor quality — though this has improved somewhat over the past couple of decades — and overpaid union workers. While there is less agreement on how much to weigh each of these factors, only the latter is attributed to the UAW. There also seems to be some dispute over what their compensation actually is, but most agree that it’s uncompetitive with the foreign transplants, largely in the south, though Honda builds cars in Ohio. Of course, the fact that the non-union companies are in the south has resulted in predictable accusations that southern Republicans are playing politics and trying to destroy the union to the benefit of their home-state companies — ignoring the fact that General Motors has a plant in Tennessee, the home state of the most prominent bailout opponent, Senator Bob Corker.

The UAW is seen to have been the winner of the current round because, while the Senate Republicans held up the Congressional bailout to them (though it should be noted that their votes weren’t necessary to pass it — only to provide political cover to the Democrats, who had sufficient Republican votes to push it through), the White House capitulated and seems on the brink of offering them the money anyway.

But almost all of the discussion, when it comes to UAW culpability, has been on wages. The even larger issue, though, is the elephant in the room that seemingly no one discusses, even when given a political opportunity. For instance, I saw a “debate” on Fox News recently in which the Democrat defending the union said that it was partly management’s fault because of the poor quality of the cars, and the Republican failed to respond. And it’s not like people are unaware of it, at least people familiar with the industry. The issue isn’t wages — though those are a problem — so much as work rules. UAW work rules, which have evolved over the many decades since the passage of the Wagner Act, are the biggest reason that General Motors is uncompetitive with its non-union American counterparts.

What are work rules? They are agreements negotiated in the contract between management and the union covering how the employees are to be classified, how many breaks they get, how much time off they get, who can do which jobs, how discipline is to be enforced, etc. The goal of the rules is not to enhance productivity or production quality. It is to provide opportunities for featherbedding, increase numbers of (overpaid) jobs for union workers, and minimize how much they have to actually work. This is important because it’s at least in theory possible that the industry could be making money even at current wages, if they could be provided with the flexibility to increase worker productivity. When you blame management for the quality and cost problems in the auto industry, first consider stories like this:

As a former supervisor of UAW workers at a GM facility, I will say that poor management and union malpractice made the Detroit Three uncompetitive long before the government sent in their arsonists.

To put it bluntly, the UAW takes the hard-earned money of the best workers and spends it defending the very worst workers while tying up the industry with thousands of pages of work rules that make it impossible to be competitive. And the spineless management often makes short-sighted decisions to satisfy the union and maximize immediate benefits over long-term sustainability.

The strength of the union and the weakness of management made it impossible to conduct business properly at any level. …

I supervised a loading dock and 21 UAW workers who worked approximately five hours per day for eight hours’ pay. They could easily load one-third more rail cars and still maintain their union-negotiated break times, but when I tried to make them increase production ever so slightly they sabotaged my ability to make even the current production levels by hiding stock, calling in sick, feigning equipment problems, and even once, as a show of force, used a fork lift truck and pallets and racks to create a car part prison where they trapped me while I was conducting inventory. The reaction of upper management to my request to boost production was that I should “not be naive.”

One afternoon I was helping oversee the plant while upper management was off site. The workers brought an RV into the loading yard with a female “entertainer” who danced for them and then “entertained” them in the RV. With no other management around, I went to labor relations for assistance. As a twenty-five-year-old woman, I was not about to try to break up a crowd of fifty rowdy men. The labor relations rep pulled out the work rules and asked me which of the rules the men were breaking. I read through the rules and none applied directly, of course. Who wrote work rules to cover prostitutes at lunch? The only “legal” cause I had was an unauthorized vehicle and person and that blame did not fall on the union workers who were being “entertained” but on the security guards at the gate. Not one person suffered any consequence.

Another employee in the plant urinated on the feet of his supervisor as a protest to discipline. He was, of course, fired … that is until the union negotiated and got his job back.

These are anecdotes, but there are too many of them, not just from her, but from many, to be merely anecdotal.

I grew up in Flint and my father was a GM executive. During college, I worked summers on the factory floors of AC Spark Plug and Fisher Body. As an (involuntary) member of the union, I could certainly see the benefits. At the age of twenty, I had one of the best jobs of my life for a few weeks.

Why?

Union rules.

I was in theory responsible for keeping parts flowing through the entire plant. They ran on little slidewalks, like you walk on in airports, far above the floor. There were gates to divert them to the proper lines, and tables where they would congregate and fill when lines were down, like reservoirs with dams. There was a robot that I could command to pull pallets off a rack and replenish the tables. And, as one might imagine, there were lots of things that could go wrong.

A breaker might trip on the robot. A gate might jam, causing the reservoir to fill and the parts line to be depleted, making the workers below unable to complete the assembly of an oil filter. And when these things happened, what was I supposed to do? If a breaker tripped, I was supposed to put in a repair ticket for an electrician. If a gate jammed, I was supposed to put in a ticket for a pipefitter — it may even have been a special subclassification for an assembly-line upper-level pipefitter. If a belt jammed, I was supposed to requisition a machinist, any of whom might be busy on other jobs. Or outside, taking a nap in their van. While waiting for them to arrive, assembly lines, perhaps even the entire plant, would be shut down, costing thousands of dollars a minute with workers sitting around unable to assemble the product.

I was an engineering student who had been tearing down and putting cars back together my whole life. I knew how to turn on a breaker. I knew how to unjam a pneumatic gate. The supervisor and I had an implicit agreement. I would ignore the rules and keep the plant running, and he would let me do whatever I wanted up on the catwalk, by myself. Most of the time I read or studied or even napped, while working sixteen-hour shifts at double time, but keeping one eye on all of the mirrors that showed progress or problems on the parts flow. When something went wrong, I fixed it, instead of putting in the repair ticket. Only once, when I napped a little too long and a line dried up, the supervisor came up and woke me. I still fixed the problem much faster than it would have been fixed had we waited for the skilled tradesman to show up, and he had no problem. As I said, it was a great job and all because of union rules.

But as someone interested in business and free markets, I could also see that this could not go on, when the foreign competition was becoming very appealing. When something can’t go on, eventually it doesn’t. That’s where we are today.

And the rules don’t just affect productivity — they affect quality as well. When you can’t discipline employees for being absent without leave, when you have to bring in unfamiliar workers to fill in for them, when you’re missing half your plant during hunting season — yes, the stories about avoiding buying cars built on Monday or Friday in the fall are true — you can’t expect to put out a quality product, regardless of how well or poorly designed it is. You particularly can’t expect to do so when the union rules put all responsibility for quality and production on management, but give them no authority to manage the workers and provide the workers with no incentive to build a quality product if they lack the personal pride to do so. Volumes have been written about Japanese management style and worker teams and consensus, but even if GM/Ford/Chrysler management had wanted to do so, there was no chance of it with the UAW mindset. And as sometime auto industry (and union) observer Mickey Kaus has pointed out, this was not just an unintended consequence of work rules — it was the goal.

I’m not unsympathetic to the workers. As noted above, I was one. It’s a terrible, mind-numbing job. The reason that I was up in that loft was that I spent the first couple of weeks on the line, where I watched a woman assembling filter after filter, like an automaton, and wondered how she did it for hours. My job was to load the parts on the line from a bin to feed her efforts, and I quickly figured out I could just put the parts on one at a time at the same rate she built it and work continually, but that if I quickly filled it all the way to the back — like the beginning of the checkout roller in a grocery line — I had about forty-five seconds before I had to do it again and could read a couple of pages of a book. The supervisor observed me and shortly after I was promoted upstairs.

Yes, I can understand why they want to get paid a lot to do that kind of work. I wouldn’t do it for less. Right now, I wouldn’t even do it for what they make. But there are a lot of people in this country that do exactly that kind of work or worse, and get paid a lot less — a lot less even than the non-unionized auto workers in the south. And because I didn’t like what I was getting paid for what I was doing, I sought better work and pay, by improving myself and getting an education. Ultimately, while there are some people who may not be capable of that, I suspect that many of them are not as discontented as I would be to perform a repetitious job each day. And because people who could do other, more interesting, more challenging, even more productive things were making so much easy money in the shop, I suspect that over the years both Michigan and the nation has lost a lot of productivity by not providing them with incentives to go out and do them, rather than being a shop rat all their lives.

The auto workers and I grew up in a golden era that it was unrealistic to think could continue. They were so well paid and unproductive, not because the market valued their labor at their wages and their product at its prices, but because they had a foot on the throat of the industry management, thanks to the imposition of the government via the Wagner Act and the NLRB. When each contract came up for renewal, they could single out one company, use the strike funds accumulated from workers at all the companies, and literally threaten to kill it. The next strike, they could do the same to the next one, continually imposing new rules, benefits, and restrictions that strangled the entire industry slowly instead of cleanly killing one company at a time. Remember that too when you blame management for all the problems.

Some have claimed that the only goal of the Republicans was to break the union. Well, if that — or at least breaking the work rules — wasn’t one of the goals, it should be, because there is no saving this industry without doing so in some form. After all, the union played a major role in breaking it. If we could do so, the Wagner Act, a relic of the Depression and New Deal, should be repealed or at least revised as well. Unfortunately, with the party and mindset that passed it over seventy years ago once again in power in Washington, they seem much more likely to dramatically worsen it and spread the infection to the rest of American industry.
———————————————————————

Tagged , | Leave a comment

Inauguration Journal – Day 1

Posted on January 2, 2009 by Jorge Costales

Anthony Atwood’s Inauguration Journal – Day 1

FRIDAY 02 – JAN09: This is the three-week journal of my experiences as a Navy Reservist sent to Washington, DC, on temporary active duty in support of the Presidential Inauguration, January 2 through January 23.

Friday morning, January 2nd, sunny and mild. A busy morning. My flight to Washington was at noon and there were many loose ends. Christmas and New Year’s were just over. There were Xmas lights in the bougainvilleas outside. I left them up.

I got to Miami International Airport at mid-morning. The Sky Caps at the curb helped me with my gear. I traveled heavy: a sea bag, garment bag with newly dry cleaned uniforms, a Little Martin traveling guitar slung over my shoulder, and a laptop. The time was favorable; I stopped in for a minute at the Armed Forces Servicemen’s Center off the main concourse. A USO-like lounge for military people passing through. A clean well-lighted place with coffee, Danish and racks to fall out on; it is the labor of love of some great local retired military, and a blessing for the military traveler.

Time and I marched on, passenger screening was smooth. My three seat row of travelers include two ladies; a young nursing student returning to Connecticut. A widow returning to Fairfax. I dozed in the middle seat and when we began out descent into the Washington area said a rosary, counting it off on my fingers. They work as well as beads. When it was complete I opened my eyes just in time to see out the window the Washington’s Monument and the stately buildings of the mall. We landed at National Airport that minute. As soon as we touched down my cell phone went off. It was Mr. Allan McElhiney, an elderly WWII Navy veteran and Ft Lauderdale historian. He told me his pal, retired Colonel Leo Gray, a Tuskegee Airman was going to the Inauguration and would be contacting me. If you don’t know who the Tuskegee Airmen were, just click here.

Arriving at Ronald Reagan National Airport: a cold crisp 36 degrees. Sunny. I picked up my rental car. I got to our lodgings in Arlington before nightfall. It is an extended-stay place a bit like a self-service hotel. The Navy contracted a block of rooms. They are two-bedroom apartments, furnished. Wonderful accommodations, practically the best I’ve ever had, and certainly they beat one sandbagged dugout that comes to memory. My roommate is already onboard. He is a Chief Journalist in the Reserve, a photographer’s mate. In normal life he is a teacher also, from Clearwater, FL. Tomorrow morning we are to report in blues to the Washington Navy Yard across the river. I walked around and got a haircut. Others are filtering in to quarters, a dozen are scheduled altogether. A Chief Yeoman from Los Angeles, she also a teacher. A lady Chief Master at Arms (a Navy cop) from Virginia Beach has driven in. We have three vehicles and plan to caravan. Eleven arrive. The others are all Chief Petty Officers (senior Navy non-coms). I am a Chief Warrant Officer (a junior commissioned officer, the only one) so have some nominal responsibility. I pass the word we will meet in the lobby at “O’dark hundred,” 6:30 am, and go from there.

There seemed a bit of hopeful expectancy at the airport and on the streets on the way in, and all of us Navy people are just delighted and amazed to be part of this, and keenly aware of the singular nature of it all. The rooms have cable, we watch a scary movie “I Am Legend.” Deplorable. And so to bed.

Tagged | Leave a comment

Book Reading Resolution – 20,000 TLA per Week

Posted on January 1, 2009 by Jorge Costales

TLA – total lateral area of a book.

In a recent WSJ article, Karl Rove disclosed that President Bush had read 95 books in 2006, 51 books in 2007 and 40 books in 2008. I was amazed by the discipline which those numbers reveal.

This is not meant as a partisan defense of Bush, i.e. maybe he’s not as dumb as you think. While I think intelligent people can look at Bush and see a failed presidency, those who look at him and see an actual idiot, low IQ, are just an example of people who allow their partisan views to affect their judgment.

Getting back to the reading. That type of commitment to reading can be inspirational. Whatever one may think of the person who holds that office, it is difficult to justify that our own lives and jobs are busier than that of the Presidency. Along those same lines, one of my partially read/listened to books from last year was The Reagan Diaries, revealed a similar type of discipline in keeping a diary throughout his White House tenure which greatly impressed historian Douglas Brinkley.

The article includes another interesting idea, measuring the reading by the book’s ‘Total Lateral Area’ [TLA]. That makes a lot of sense. While the number of words is the best standard, rarely is that an easily available figure. Whenever I’ve considered making a book a week commitment in the past, I’ve always figured I’d weasel-out with some Oprah-lite nonsense just to make my numbers at some point, i.e. week 2. TLA seems like a good way to avoid that type of skewing which smaller books encourage–we’re all about incentives here at 2TG.

Let’s use 2 books I read this year as an example:

1776 by David McCullough
11.0″ tall
X 6.5″ wide
X 1.0 text size – 1.0 for standard 11 pt font found in most hardcover books.
X 296.0 reading pages – meant to exclude footnotes and index
—————
TLA = 20,807
===============

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
8.25″ tall
X 6.5″ wide
X 1.0 text size
X 270.0 reading pages
—————
TLA = 12,251
===============

Article referenced is copied in full at end of post.

—————————————————————————-
Bush Is a Book Lover – A glimpse of what the president has been reading

DECEMBER 26, 2008

By KARL ROVE

With only five days left, my lead is insurmountable. The competition can’t catch up. And for the third year in a row, I’ll triumph. In second place will be the president of the United States. Our contest is not about sports or politics. It’s about books.

It all started on New Year’s Eve in 2005. President Bush asked what my New Year’s resolutions were. I told him that as a regular reader who’d gotten out of the habit, my goal was to read a book a week in 2006. Three days later, we were in the Oval Office when he fixed me in his sights and said, “I’m on my second. Where are you?” Mr. Bush had turned my resolution into a contest.

By coincidence, we were both reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals.” The president jumped to a slim early lead and remained ahead until March, when I moved decisively in front. The competition soon spun out of control. We kept track not just of books read, but also the number of pages and later the combined size of each book’s pages — its “Total Lateral Area.”

Download Opinion Journal’s widget and link to the most important editorials and op-eds of the day from your blog or Web page.

We recommended volumes to each other (for example, he encouraged me to read a Mao biography; I suggested a book on Reconstruction’s unhappy end). We discussed the books and wrote thank-you notes to some authors.

At year’s end, I defeated the president, 110 books to 95. My trophy looks suspiciously like those given out at junior bowling finals. The president lamely insisted he’d lost because he’d been busy as Leader of the Free World.

Mr. Bush’s 2006 reading list shows his literary tastes. The nonfiction ran from biographies of Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, Babe Ruth, King Leopold, William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, LBJ and Genghis Khan to Andrew Roberts’s “A History of the English Speaking Peoples Since 1900,” James L. Swanson’s “Manhunt,” and Nathaniel Philbrick’s “Mayflower.” Besides eight Travis McGee novels by John D. MacDonald, Mr. Bush tackled Michael Crichton’s “Next,” Vince Flynn’s “Executive Power,” Stephen Hunter’s “Point of Impact,” and Albert Camus’s “The Stranger,” among others.
About Karl Rove

Karl Rove served as Senior Advisor to President George W. Bush from 2000–2007 and Deputy Chief of Staff from 2004–2007. At the White House he oversaw the Offices of Strategic Initiatives, Political Affairs, Public Liaison, and Intergovernmental Affairs and was Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, coordinating the White House policy making process.

Before Karl became known as “The Architect” of President Bush’s 2000 and 2004 campaigns, he was president of Karl Rove + Company, an Austin-based public affairs firm that worked for Republican candidates, nonpartisan causes, and nonprofit groups. His clients included over 75 Republican U.S. Senate, Congressional and gubernatorial candidates in 24 states, as well as the Moderate Party of Sweden.

Karl writes a weekly op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, is a Newsweek columnist and is now writing a book to be published by Simon & Schuster. Email the author at Karl@Rove.com or visit him on the web at Rove.com.

Fifty-eight of the books he read that year were nonfiction. Nearly half of his 2006 reading was history and biography, with another eight volumes on current events (mostly the Mideast) and six on sports.

To my surprise, the president demanded a rematch in 2007. Though the overall pace slowed, he once more came in second in our two-man race, reading 51 books to my 76. His list was particularly wide-ranging that year, from history (“The Great Upheaval” and “Khrushchev’s Cold War”), biographical (Dean Acheson and Andrew Mellon), and current affairs (including “Rogue Regime” and “The Shia Revival”). He read one book meant for young adults, his daughter Jenna’s excellent “Ana’s Story.”

A glutton for punishment, Mr. Bush insisted on another rematch in 2008. But it will be a three-peat for me: as of today, his total is 40 volumes to my 64. His reading this year included a heavy dose of history — including David Halberstam’s “The Coldest Winter,” Rick Atkinson’s “Day of Battle,” Hugh Thomas’s “Spanish Civil War,” Stephen W. Sears’s “Gettysburg” and David King’s “Vienna 1814.” There’s also plenty of biography — including U.S. Grant’s “Personal Memoirs”; Jon Meacham’s “American Lion”; James M. McPherson’s “Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief” and Jacobo Timerman’s “Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number.”

Each year, the president also read the Bible from cover to cover, along with a daily devotional.

The reading competition reveals Mr. Bush’s focus on goals. It’s not about winning. A good-natured competition helps keep him centered and makes possible a clear mind and a high level of energy. He reads instead of watching TV. He reads on Air Force One and to relax and because he’s curious. He reads about the tasks at hand, often picking volumes because of the relevance to his challenges. And he’s right: I’ve won because he has a real job with enormous responsibilities.

In the 35 years I’ve known George W. Bush, he’s always had a book nearby. He plays up being a good ol’ boy from Midland, Texas, but he was a history major at Yale and graduated from Harvard Business School. You don’t make it through either unless you are a reader.

There is a myth perpetuated by Bush critics that he would rather burn a book than read one. Like so many caricatures of the past eight years, this one is not only wrong, but also the opposite of the truth and evidence that bitterness can devour a small-minded critic. Mr. Bush loves books, learns from them, and is intellectually engaged by them.

For two terms in the White House, Mr. Bush has been in the arena, keeping America safe and facing down enormous challenges, all the while acting with dignity. And when on Jan. 20 he flies from Washington to Texas one last time, he will do so as he arrived — with friends and a book nearby.

Mr. Rove is the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.
———————————————————————

Posted in Books & Reading | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Cuba and Red Herrings

Posted on December 31, 2008 by Jorge Costales

The Miami-based ‘Freedom from Writers Hoping to Utter Provocative Thoughts about Cuba to coincide with a Castro Death or Something’ [FWHUPTCCDS] organization met recently in my living room. We are exhausted. What with the typical academics, editorial writers and Northeastern and farm-belt US congresspeople, the deluge of the annual ‘Spontaneous Reexamination of Cuba Policy’ [SPOCP] is off to a clearly hopeful start this year, given a Democrat coming into the White House.

We at ‘FWHUPTCCDS’ are committed to clear thinking on Cuba issues, i.e. exposing over-aged dilettantes. So we will breakdown what passes for tired comedy among our members. Let’s look closely at just a portion of today’s LA Times editorial on US Cuba policy and see if you can spot the same red herrings we did:

Since that New Year’s night in 1959, 10 U.S. presidents have tried to overthrow, undermine or cajole Castro, to no avail. Covert operations, including President Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs invasion, failed to dislodge the communist government. A Cold War standoff with Russia over missile bases on the island brought the superpowers to the brink of nuclear war, but it didn’t budge Castro. Diplomatic isolation didn’t work. And a trade embargo to protest the expropriation of U.S. property, prevent the export of revolution and press for democracy and human rights has been utterly ineffectual. Rather, it has provided cover for the Cuban government’s own deficiencies and served as a pretext for repression.

While it is true that 10 US presidents would have liked to have seen Castro lose power in Cuba, I assume they also would have liked to have cured cancer and brought economic development to the Appalachian region near the White House. In terms of actual deeds to oppose the regime, there was one aborted attempt in 1961 and numerous much discussed and never executed other plans in intelligence circles. But nothing since 1961 has involved troops, which is what the US does when it is serious about the need to effect change, i.e. Grenada and Panama.

Therefore, to suggest that the Castro regime has withstood 50 years of concerted efforts to remove them from power is false. We understand that it is not as sexy to write the Castro regime has withstood 3 years of concerted efforts and 47 years of mostly passive resistance. US policy has mainly sought to create incentives to moderate behavior by denying them the benefit of trading directly with the US [the misnamed embargo]. The fact that the Castro government has chosen to allow the quality of life in Cuba to disintegrate below 3rd world standards rather than moderate their behavior, says more about the Castro regime than US efforts.

The best and most repeated red herring. The Cuban trade embargo been ‘utterly ineffectual.’ If you define success as removing Castro from power, then it has failed. But only then. Here’s what’s odd about that sentence in the LA Times editorial; in the first part we are given the actual purpose behind the embargo–‘to protest the expropriation of U.S. property, [attempt to] prevent the export of revolution and press for democracy and human rights.’ ‘Protest, attempt to prevent and press’ are what countries do when they would like to see change, but have not fully committed to seeing that change through other means [military] due to many other practical considerations.

As such, the trade embargo has always achieved its limited purpose, to provide economic incentives–direct trade and tourism–in order to moderate behavior. If the incentives prove to be ineffectual because the targeted parties are willing to allow suffering to an unanticipated degree or for internal political maneuvering, then it is unfortunate but not a reason to reward their obstinacy. The reason for retaining the policy is the same for having adopted it in the first place; it is a low-cost, low-risk approach to a belligerent neighboring gnat.

Here’s the tricky part, the part used to leave us at FWHUPTCCDS incredulous. Some people see the standoff and blame the US. We know better by know. Cuba is merely a conduit for anti-Americanism in this debate. If the critics of the US policies actually cared about Cuba’s cruel regime, they would not celebrate their cultural icons as they often have in the past and still do–the editorial evens mentions Che as a conquering hero, not the executioner. But like we said, it used to leave us incredulous. We know the game now. So we don’t get really offended anymore, we just reach for the closest shoe to properly dispose of the latest blattarria. Or better yet, bring in the great GK Chesterton reflecting on another, but not unrelated, struggle:

There are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.

In the other struggle which Chesterton is referring to, there is also much suffering which is not understood. We are called to help those suffering while retaining our truths, else we would not be worth saving. In the case of the train-wreck of a country which is Cuba, my birthplace, but not my country, the ‘dull heresies’ all point at my adopted country. I disagree. When I look at Cuba, what I see still standing is the evil of men like Castro and political philosophies which exclude God, like Communism.

Those who wish to change the US policy towards Cuba–like our loyal reader Jose Garcia–would argue, don’t focus on the regime, focus on the people who have had to suffer its failures. Fair point. I am open to that argument. I may even try to formulate it myself, because my problem is the arguments which favor lifting the embargo always seem to come attached to the red herrings noted above. I consider those arguments to be intellectually lazy and more reflective of their anti-Americanism than their hopes for Cuba.

An argument for lifting the embargo that I could consider would start with these stipulations:

  • The Castro regime’s willingness to not allow it’s citizens basic political and economic freedoms is a failure of that government, not US policy.
  • The real effect of the US economic embargo towards Cuba should have been to cause their economy to operate in a slightly more inefficient manner, the cost associated with obtaining US products indirectly through 3rd parties.
  • Cuba’s economic failures are consistent with all centrally planned economies.
  • In lieu of a normally functioning economy–which allows countries to negotiate and pay for products–Cuba’s consistent economic failures have led to a barter system using it’s own citizens, be they military or medical personnel.
  • Cuba today maintains a 3rd world standard of living for its people only because its citizens are subsidized by the family members of those fortunate enough to have escaped it.
  • The US will now consider lifting the embargo not because of it’s failure, but because in highlighting the economic failures and moral intransigence of the Castro regimes, it has succeeded beyond all expectations, or even hopes.

Now let’s talk.

Just another day on the Cuba dilettantes watch.

Article referenced is copied in full at end of post.

——————————————————————
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-cuba31-2008dec31,0,7611439.story
From the Los Angeles Times Editorial
A new approach to Cuba
Evolving views of the local population and 50 years of failed U.S. policy suggest change is long overdue.

December 31, 2008

Fifty years ago, Ernesto “Che” Guevara led a column of war-steeled rebels into Havana as Fidel Castro took the city of Santiago at the other end of the island and declared a Cuban revolution. This one, Castro said, would not be like Cuba’s 1898 independence from Spain, “when the Americans came and took over.”

Since that New Year’s night in 1959, 10 U.S. presidents have tried to overthrow, undermine or cajole Castro, to no avail. Covert operations, including President Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs invasion, failed to dislodge the communist government. A Cold War standoff with Russia over missile bases on the island brought the superpowers to the brink of nuclear war, but it didn’t budge Castro. Diplomatic isolation didn’t work. And a trade embargo to protest the expropriation of U.S. property, prevent the export of revolution and press for democracy and human rights has been utterly ineffectual. Rather, it has provided cover for the Cuban government’s own deficiencies and served as a pretext for repression.

Fifty years of failure is too long. The incoming Obama administration should move quickly to embark on a rapprochement with Cuba and bring an end to punitive policies, especially the economic embargo. The United Nations condemns it, the European Union is trading with Cuba, and Latin America is urging the United States to allow Cuba back into the fold. This policy change will take time and political will, but it is in our national interest and, ultimately, in Cuba’s.

The United States’ Cuba policy has long been determined by exiles who fled the revolution and settled into a powerful political bloc in Florida. But in the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama won Florida without the support of Cuban American hard-liners, freeing himself from restraints that encumbered his Democratic and Republican predecessors. Obama has promised to lift restrictions on family travel and cash remittances to Cuba — an important first step. We’d like to see him go further, to resume the people-to-people or “purposeful travel” allowed in President Clinton’s first term and to push Congress to lift the travel ban and repeal the 1996 Helms-Burton law prohibiting trade with Cuba. The premise of the trade embargo was that strangling the Cuban economy would cause a popular uprising and regime change. But even at its most vulnerable, after the collapse of the Soviet bloc that had subsidized the island, the Cuban government didn’t fall.

When Fidel Castro finally did step down this year, it was to hand the reins of power to his younger brother, Raul. This was hardly the democratic transition the international community had hoped to see. Many people throughout the world admire Cuba’s defiance of the United States, and the revolution has brought gains in health and education, but Cuba remains a one-party state without fundamental rights of expression and assembly, and individual freedoms. Its economy is broken; generations have lost faith in the revolution and, lacking prospects, want to join the larger world. Though still in the shadow of the bearded comandante, Raul Castro is more pragmatic than his brother about the need for a well-functioning economy, and he has publicly urged workers to increase efficiency and productivity. Like many countries, Cuba was hurting from high oil and food prices earlier this year, and three hurricanes struck the island in the fall, causing billions of dollars in damage. The subsequent global economic crash and falling oil prices potentially limit the aid that Cuba’s main patron, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, can offer. There may be an opening here for economic reforms.

The United States already exports about $700 million worth of food to Cuba annually under a 2000 law allowing agricultural trade for humanitarian reasons. Obama should use his presidential prerogatives to expand this, as well as dispatching officials to talk, as they have in the past, about issues of immigration and security. As part of any discussions, the U.S. government must press for human rights reforms, along with freedom for about 200 political prisoners in Cuban jails. (And yes, explore the prisoner trade Raul Castro has proposed in recent days.) But human rights no longer can be an obstacle to talk and trade with Cuba. The United States does business with many regimes with checkered human rights records, from Egypt to Russia to China, which is officially a communist state.

Peaceful change in Cuba, 90 miles from Florida, is in the interest of the United States. We think communication, travel and trade are excellent ways to push for reform of the one-party state. Tourists carrying books and ideas serve as ambassadors for democracy. Manufactured goods speak for the creativity of an open economy. The Cuban people are highly educated after a 50-year revolution, and extremely resourceful after half a century of economic hardship. Their aspirations are fertile ground for change.
——————————————————————————-

Posted in Cuba | Leave a comment

Accounting For Failure of Nerve

Posted on December 30, 2008 by Jorge Costales

I had an earlier post which described the criticism of the US mark to market accounting rules and the hopes that the controlling US regulatory bodies [SEC and FASB] would amend those rules. As described in the Washington Post article, in effect the the US bodies blinked but didn’t break, but the EU decided to double-down on the blink, just in case. It is a good example of how easily an international consensus can break down.

On Oct. 8, the leaders of France, Germany, Italy, Britain and the European Commission met in Paris to discuss the worldwide economic crisis. They issued a statement saying they were working together “within the European Union and with our international partners” to ensure the safety and stability of the worldwide banking system. But buried within the statement was a sentence warning that European banks should not face a competitive disadvantage with U.S. banks “in terms of accounting rules and their interpretation.” The leaders added ominously: “This issue must be resolved by the end of the month.”

At issue is an accounting standard known as fair value, or mark to market, in which companies disclose how much an asset could fetch on the open market. With the values of assets plummeting, banks were suddenly stuck with paper losses on assets they could no longer sell. With some critics saying the provision was forcing banks to take large write-downs, the SEC and FASB issued guidance in late September that companies could use their own internal models for assigning a value to assets — in essence, a nod to the principles-based international rules.

But European officials smelled a rat. Under rare circumstances, U.S. companies are permitted to reclassify assets they were actively seeking to trade into long-term “loans,” using an accounting rule that was considered weaker than the international equivalent. The international rules did not permit such transfers, and European officials feared that the new guidance was handing the Americans a competitive advantage.

To clarify, once an asset can be reclassified as a loan, that eliminates the need to continuously find the [lower] market value, which is the problem in a market with falling prices. As such, if the implication of the EU / IASB position is true, the SEC / FASB did not need to weaken the mark to market rule, it just opened a back door. Here is a lengthy defense of FASB’s position in and about the Financial Crisis.

Speaking of back doors. One Citizen Speaking has an interesting and detailed post about the issue, along with a rather graphic depiction of Euro and Dollar relations and who is getting the worse end of the deal. Puns intended.

Article referenced is copied in full at end of post.

—————————————————————————————
Accounting Standards Wilt Under Pressure

By Glenn Kessler – Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 27, 2008; A01

World leaders have vowed to help prevent future financial meltdowns by creating international accounting standards so all companies would play by the same rules, but the effort has instead been mired in loopholes and political pressures.

In October, largely hidden from public view, the International Accounting Standards Board changed the rules so European banks could make their balance sheets look better. The action let the banks rewrite history, picking and choosing among their problem investments to essentially claim that some had been on a different set of books before the financial crisis started.

The results were dramatic. Deutsche Bank shifted $32 billion of troubled assets, turning a $970 million quarterly pretax loss into $120 million profit. And the securities markets were fooled, bidding Deutsche Bank’s shares up nearly 19 percent on Oct. 30, the day it made the startling announcement that it had turned an unexpected profit.

The change has had dramatic consequences within the cloistered world of accounting, shattering the credibility of the IASB — the very body whose rules have been adopted by 113 countries and is supposed to become the global standard-setter, including for the United States, within a few years.

Sir David Tweedie, chairman of the IASB, acknowledged that the body needs more protection from political manipulation before it can claim that it has become the global gold standard.

Tweedie said he nearly resigned over the rule change demanded by European politicians. “I was so frustrated by the whole thing,” he said. “All the time when we are trying to build a global accounting system, and we are pretty close to it, and then suddenly out of left field this thing appears. It’s just absolutely exasperating.”

U.S. standards have been set by the Financial Accounting Standards Board since 1973. “Right now, there is no credibility,” said Robert Denham, chairman of the Financial Accounting Foundation, which oversees the FASB. “If we are going to have global accounting standards, my view is that is not going to work if the IASB is going to be jerked around by the European Commission. That is the very real risk that is posed by the EC coercion and the IASB’s response.”

The episode exposes how small, incremental changes in arcane accounting rules can affect billions of dollars in market value and corporate profitability. In turn, the money at risk raises the political stakes, as desperate companies begin to lobby political leaders to insist on changes that normally would come about only after a careful discussion and evaluation by experts.

For years, there has been a disconnect between U.S. and international accounting rules. With the history of corporate litigation in the United States, U.S. standards tend to be exact and explicit, making it easier for companies to defend themselves in court.

International rules rely on broad principles, giving companies greater leeway to make their own judgments. An extensive review of international accounting standards published last month by Moody’s Investors Service found significant differences between two French companies on one key issue — even though they used the same accounting firm.

Nevertheless, more than 110 countries have already adopted international rules since the IASB was established in 2001, with Japan, South Korea, India and Canada soon to make the switch. Tweedie expects that 150 countries will have adopted IASB rules within the next three years. The Securities and Exchange Commission on Nov. 14 adopted a plan to have all U.S. companies prepare their statements using international standards for fiscal years ending after Dec. 15, 2016. More than 100 of the largest companies would be permitted to adopt the rules as soon as next year.

But the financial crisis demonstrated how vulnerable the fledgling system is to political pressure.

On Oct. 8, the leaders of France, Germany, Italy, Britain and the European Commission met in Paris to discuss the worldwide economic crisis. They issued a statement saying they were working together “within the European Union and with our international partners” to ensure the safety and stability of the worldwide banking system. But buried within the statement was a sentence warning that European banks should not face a competitive disadvantage with U.S. banks “in terms of accounting rules and their interpretation.” The leaders added ominously: “This issue must be resolved by the end of the month.”

At issue is an accounting standard known as fair value, or mark to market, in which companies disclose how much an asset could fetch on the open market. With the values of assets plummeting, banks were suddenly stuck with paper losses on assets they could no longer sell. With some critics saying the provision was forcing banks to take large write-downs, the SEC and FASB issued guidance in late September that companies could use their own internal models for assigning a value to assets — in essence, a nod to the principles-based international rules.

But European officials smelled a rat. Under rare circumstances, U.S. companies are permitted to reclassify assets they were actively seeking to trade into long-term “loans,” using an accounting rule that was considered weaker than the international equivalent. The international rules did not permit such transfers, and European officials feared that the new guidance was handing the Americans a competitive advantage.

Shortly after the European leaders’ statement, Commissioner Charlie McCreevy of the European Commission, who was in charge of the European Union internal market, signaled he would introduce legal changes, overriding the international rules. McCreevy decided to exploit a loophole in the system — that all accounting rules must be adopted as legislation by the E.U. So McCreevy was going to force the changes on the IASB by threatening to remove — or carve out — the existing regulation, leaving nothing in its place.

“We made it clear what the IASB should accept,” said Oliver Drewes, a spokesman for McCreevy. “There is always the right, and threat and the pressure, that one could go for a carve-out for European companies.”

Tweedie said the rulemaking body had only four days to act before McCreevy pushed through a change in the law, even though accounting changes of this magnitude would normally take months to achieve.

Unlike the U.S. board, the international board has no regulator like the SEC to help shield it from political pressure. So the IASB was at the mercy of the European Commission.

“There had been pressure on him, I suspect, from some of the European leaders,” Tweedie said, referring to McCreevy. “It was quite clear it was going to be pushed through and that would have been a disaster. We were faced with this hole being blown in the European accounting, and we just wanted to step in and control it.”

But the IASB bowed to demands to let the firms backdate the accounting shift to the beginning of July — something not permitted under U.S. rules.

In a recent report, Moody’s wrote that the backdating provision could distort a bank’s earnings and capital position, since “it allows managements to ‘cherry-pick’ selected assets” and “distort their economic reality,” making it more — not less — difficult to compare global bank performance.

“The measure does not make much sense in the first place,” said J.F. Tremblay, a Moody’s vice president. “But the fact that a board can be influenced like that is not good news.”
———————————————————–

Posted in Business & Economics | Tagged | Leave a comment

Recap of 2008 Boxing news

Posted on December 29, 2008 by Jorge Costales

Miami Herald boxing article by Santos Perez

————————————————————————————-
Pacquiao headlines up-and-down 2008

Posted on Mon, Dec. 29, 2008

BY SANTOS A. PEREZ

Out with old and in with the new. Boxing might have found a fresh crossover attraction in 2008.

And the sport desperately needs it.

Manny Pacquiao’s victories over Juan Manuel Marquez, David Diaz earlier in the year and his signature performance against Oscar De La Hoya four weeks ago finally could provide a needed fresh personality to generate appeal beyond boxing’s hard-core fans.

Taking advantage of the attention common of De La Hoya fights, Pacquiao stopped the sport’s most popular fighter in eight rounds. The native of the Philippines perhaps ushered in a new era and finally cut the emotional chord with De La Hoya.

TURNING THE PAGE

For the past 10 years, De La Hoya, 35, attracted casual followers. The fight against Pacquiao generated 1.25 million pay-per-view buys, but De La Hoya’s performance could finally signal the end of a prosperous career.

Based on Pacquiao’s three significant victories, most boxing experts and fans considered him the sport’s best pound-for-pound fighter at the end of the year.

But Welsh native Joe Calzaghe could pose an argument after his victories against two future Hall of Famers.

Calzaghe recovered from a first-round knockdown and outworked Bernard Hopkins for a split-decision victory April 19. Calzaghe also was dropped in the first round against Roy Jones Jr. but eventually scored a lopsided decision seven months later.

Like De La Hoya, Jones, 39, now seems better suited for life outside the ring. Against Calzaghe, the Pensacola native far from resembled the fighter who was recognized as boxing’s best a decade ago.

Hopkins, 43, recovered from the loss against Calzaghe and scored a convincing decision over previously unbeaten Kelly Pavlik on Oct. 18.

Pavlik, 26, has youth and power to dominate the middleweight class and the humble personality to gain crossover appeal like Pacquiao. Pavlik plans to return to the 160-pound division in 2009 after fighting Hopkins at 170 pounds.

Floyd Mayweather Jr. may have capitalized on additional ring popularity following his victory over De La Hoya in May 2007 and appearance on the ABC series Dancing With the Stars. But Mayweather, considered boxing’s best fighter before Pacquiao, surprisingly retired in June.

Boxing provided its share of thrilling bouts in 2008, headed by the third consecutive title fight between Israel Vazquez and Rafael Marquez on March 1. The super bantamweights fought at a furious and bloody pace for 12 rounds before Vazquez won the rubber match with a tight split decision.

Antonio Margarito and Miguel Cotto waged an exciting welterweight title match July 26. Margarito withstood a busier Cotto in the early and middle rounds, countered with solid power shots and eventually finished his previously unbeaten opponent in 11 rounds.

Since its creation in the 1980s, the cruiserweight division was known as one of boxing’s least attractive weight classes, serving as a steppingstone for future heavyweight champion Evander Holyfield.

But on Dec. 13, Tomasz Adamek and Steve Cunningham made the cruiserweights matter with an admirable test of will and aggression during their 12-round title fight. Adamek scored three knockdowns, but Cunningham’s boxing skills kept the fight close. Adamek’s knockdowns proved sufficient in dethroning Cunningham with a split decision.

The heavyweight class continued to lack appeal in the United States. Ukraine’s Wladimir Klitschko, who won three bouts in 2008, dominates with two of the four major sanctioning body titles.

Klitschko’s brother, Vitali, returned from a four-absence and captured a separate heavyweight belt with a ninth-round technical knockout over Samuel Peter.

LOCAL TALENT

Promoters Felix Zabala Jr., Seminole Warriors Boxing and Henry Rivalta kept the local boxing calendar busy throughout the year.

Despite being the aggressor for most of the fight, Miami resident Glen Johnson lost a disputed decision against defending light-heavyweight champion Chad Dawson on April 12.

Yuriorkis Gamboa, a Miami resident and 2004 Olympic gold medalist representing his native Cuba, has won his first 12 professional bouts, including five in 2008. Gamboa has stopped 10 of his 12 opponents and could fight for a featherweight title next year.

Posted in Sports | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Fans of New York Sports Teams

Posted on December 28, 2008 by Jorge Costales


Not all ignorant and alcoholic sports fans are fans of New York sports teams, some ignorant and alcoholic sports fans change their allegiances upon leaving New York. [In some cases the switch in allegiances is motivated by purely sporting concerns, but a large majority of the switches are apparently based on faulty reasoning as to the requirements for receiving welfare benefits in their new communities, according to a new Harvard study]. As such, ignorant and alcoholic New York sports fans–otherwise known as ‘the most knowledgeable sports fans in the world’ by commentators who live amongst them and fear the abuse which ignorant and alcoholic sports fans are proud of dishing out–represent a materially significant subset of ignorant and alcoholic sports fans, but not the complete universe.


This little known fact–most facts are little known by ignorant and alcoholic New York sports fans, in effect, that characteristic is the key to their sporting allegiance DNA–is essential to fully enjoy the misery which ignorant and alcoholic New York sports fans are currently undergoing.

Like the demon Pazuzu leaving Regan MacNeil for Father Damien Karras; the weak, timid, under-performing, over-rated, testosterone deficient, male-model effete-like, sorry excuse for a ‘heart’ which inhabited the Chokeapalooza festival of a team otherwise known as the 2007 and 2008 New York Mets has landed squarely in the upper torso cavity of the 2008 New York Jets.


The job of executioner in the last World Series game played at Yankee Stadium and the three most recent New York sports teams collapses have been Miami-based professional teams. The sports gods are rewarding us in recognition for having provided shelter to ignorant and alcoholic New York sports fans for such a long period of time in our sports complexes.

Bad news, good news

While we will not be the beneficiary of their glorious misfortune much longer–the departure of Isiah Thomas was a Nostradamus-like signal as the the end of the New York sporting equivalent of the Rapture–their next collapse, scheduled for 2010, will be even more crushing than the last 3 combined, so spoketh Zarathustra on the WFAN recently:

man muß noch Chaos in sich haben, um einen tanzenden [David] Stern gebären zu können.

The term ‘ignorant and alcoholic’ was used eight times in the body of this post. I state this because ignorant and alcoholic New York sports fans will be tempted to say that it was ‘like a hundred times, man.’ Learning to count will not affect your collective manhood. Realizing how much time you spend in the company of other men in ‘snuggle’ weather, creating emotional ties to those men and desperately seeking to touch each other immediately after a team success, might however.

All Isiah Thomas insults referenced are copied in full at end of post.

——————————————————————
Isiah Thomas = Worst Pro Sports Executive Ever?

By Bill Simmons
Page 2

… let’s discuss the Knicks.

They had Manhattan buzzing as recently as two months ago. That’s the way it works in New York. They make the classic panic trade for Marbury, look good for a week in January and naturally everyone starts thinking about the Lakers in June.

You can guess where I stand. Right after Isiah Thomas was hired last December, I predicted in The Magazine that he would run the team into the ground. This franchise was already headed nowhere — no cap space, no All-Stars, little hope. It was a situation thatcried for patience. Whomever took over for the Artist Formerly Known As Scott Layden needed to blow everything up, create cap room and start over. In other words, the Danny Ainge Approach — clean house, make some panic trades, ignore the cap — couldn’t possibly work here.

The Jerry West Approach seemed like a much better plan. Take your time. Stockpile assets. Only deal from strength. Think four years instead of four months. And most importantly, don’t panic.

Isiah? He panicked.

Unable to wait even three weeks after moving into his new office, Isiah pulled a Jim Fassel and pushed his chips to the middle of the table, dealing his few tradeable assets (two coveted Europeans, two first-rounders and cash) for Marbury and Penny Hardaway — two more ghastly contracts — in the process, blowing his long-term cap flexibility to smithereens and insuring that the 2006 Knicks would look exactly like the 2004 Knicks.

Trish
Let’s face it, every one of us would keep Trish around.
Seduced by Steph’s pedigree and anxious for a change — any change — New York fans embraced the trade. It was like the current Bachelor becoming enamored with Trish, the trashy, conniving, homewrecking model who looks stunning in a cocktail dress. You can have a million warning signs, you can even have a friend planted in the house telling you this girl is sleaze … and you still can’t help picking her for the Final Six. Just to see what happens.

And yes, there’s something about Marbury’s game. He always makes you feel like his team has a puncher’s chance, that he can catch fire at any moment, maybe even take over an entire game, win a series by himself, carry you a couple of rounds. Even though it hasn’t happened yet. And may never will. But that potential gets people talking about the team. Gets the arena buzzing before games. Gets people calling into the Fan. Gets those blue No. 3 “MARBURY” jerseys moving out of the Pro Shop like hotcakes.

With all this commotion, it was easy to forget that, if this was a Texas Hold ‘Em Tournament, Isiah had just gone “all-in” after two hands. Knicks fans happily chugged the Kool-Aid, conveniently ignoring the fact that their GM just mortgaged the next 3-4 years for someone who …

A. Hadn’t won a single playoff series.
B. Was playing for his fourth team in eight years.
C. Monopolizes the ball.
D. Didn’t get along in New Jersey with one of the best players on the Knicks (Keith Van Horn), which meant there needed to be a second trade.
E. Only played unselfishly last season (when he was gunning for a contract extension).
F. Ditched a once-in-a-lifetime situation in Minnesota with KG.

Seems like a pretty big gamble just to sell some tickets and make the back page of the Post, right?

Again, New Yorkers didn’t care. Back in January, I remember discussing the deal with my Knicks fan friends, spelling out exactly what had happened, then listening to them respond with the same thing: I don’t care, I’m just happy they’re interesting again. It was like watching a buddy who hadn’t gotten lucky for a few months suddenly fall in love with a stripper.

They felt differerently after Isiah hired Lenny Wilkens — apparently Red Holzman was the second choice — then gave Van Horn away for Thomas and Mohammed, a classic “I’ll give you a quarter for two dimes” trade. This had evolved into a soft, rudderless team built around a shoot-first point guard, flanked by mediocre defenders and guys who couldn’t rebound or contend shots. I’m not even sure they run any plays. When Lenny holds up one finger, I think he’s signalling that he needs to pee.

Anyway, the inevitable losing streak followed, along with the questions about Isiah and Marbury, as well as the birth of a new face: The Isiah Thomas “If I Look Angry Enough When I’m Watching This Blowout Loss, Maybe People Will Forget That I Brought Most Of These Guys In” Face. Well, you did.

Hey, we know about Isiah, who burned bridges in Detroit and Toronto, bankrupted the CBA and failed miserably with a talented Indiana team. Pretty cut and dry. But what about Marbury? How do you explain last year’s remarkable season in Phoenix, when he reached his ceiling as a player and seemed poised to finish his career with the Suns? How could someone fall from “Franchise Player” to “Trading Block” in less than seven months? Could he ever regain the magic?

That’s why, with the obvious exception of KG, Marbury was the most interesting player in Round One. Nobody knew what to expect. As Pierce and the C’s proved last spring, the right player and the right crowd can be a pretty dangerous combination in Round One. You never know.

Stephon Marbury, Jason Kidd
What do you suppose Phoenix thinks of the Kidd-for-Marbury trade now?
Alas, the Nets looked better than ever. And the Knicks looked downright dreadful. Especially Marbury. He spent the first half of Game 2 launching jumpers, rarely driving to the basket or getting his teammates involved. In the second half, with the game slipping away, he started penetrating and setting up Kurt Thomas and Shandon Anderson — yikes — who predictably couldn’t hit anything. When he tried to take over the game again, it was too late. It was a kooky performance, one of those games that reminded people why he’s been traded multiple times. Even the TNT announcers were calling him out.

Back at MSG for Game 3, Marbury pulled the same schizo routine, displaying little of the toughness he showed in that Spurs series last spring. And yet the Knicks kept hanging around; you could sense the fans clamoring for Marbury to take over the game. Never happened. He missed two threes in the final minutes that would have brought the house down. And that was that. On Sunday, the Nets arrive at MSG with brooms.

Here’s the kicker: Thanks to Isiah, this same Knicks team will return intact next season. And the year after that. They don’t have any choice. Everyone makes big money. The only tradeable commodity on the team is Marbury, heading into his ninth year, and he isn’t going anywhere. So Knick fans will spend two more seasons being tantalized by a potential superstar, someone who should be one of the better players in the league, but he isn’t, and there really isn’t a definable reason why.

Did Isiah screw the Knicks for the foreseeable future? I think so. It’s a not-quite-a-playoff-team led by a not-quite-a-superstar, with no real way of turning things around in the next three years, and the wrong guy calling the shots to boot. Not exactly a recipe for success. Then again, you could say the same thing about the Celtics.

In fact, I think I just did.

Bill Simmons is a columnist for Page 2 and ESPN The Magazine, as well as one of the writers for “Jimmy Kimmel Live” on ABC
————————————————————————-

Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Not another frigging Dwarf!

Posted on December 27, 2008 by Jorge Costales

I love CS Lewis’ writing. The Screwtape Letters drove home in an unforgettable way how the battle for our souls consists of a series constant and seemingly inconsequential decisions, i.e. when to call your Mom. Mere Christianity is a very readable philosophical case for God. I was aware that he had a friendship with JRR Tolkien. I always imagined them trading notes on Narnia and the Lord of the Rings.

I came across a neat blog post on the relationships between 10 classic authors. There are some things in life that when you hear of them, you immediately believe because you can’t imagine who would have thought of it otherwise:

C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were good friends since they first met at Oxford and belonged to the Inklings group together. But they hated one another’s books. When Tolkien was writing a new character for Lord of the Rings and tried to describe the character to Lewis, Lewis famously responded, “Not another frigging dwarf!” Except, you know, he actually swore. But this is a family blog.

All articles referenced are copied in full at end of post.
——————————————————————
Relationships Between 10 Classic Authors

Posted by Stacy in Book & Lit on December 29, 2008 at 8:12 pm

Lots of people know about the relationship between fantasy writers C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, but who know Bram Stoker stole Oscar Wilde’s true love out from under his nose? I didn’t, at least, so I think these relationships between classic authors are terribly interesting. I included Lewis and Tolkien for those who didn’t know about their friendship. There are a lot more where this came from – I might make this a two-parter.

1. Bram Stoker was a frequent guest at Oscar Wilde’s parents’ house. Oscar’s mom, Lady Jane, was a poet who liked to keep literary company. Bram found himself in Lady Jane’s circle, and eventually met Florence Balcombe, who had previously been Lady Jane’s daughter-in-law to be. Yep, Florence was once engaged to Oscar Wilde. At least, by some accounts. Other accounts say they dated seriously and Oscar merely wanted to marry her. At any rate, Florence ended up marrying Bram Stoker instead. When Oscar heard she was engaged, he wrote her a letter and said that he was leaving Ireland and would never come back. He mostly stayed true to his word – he only came back twice for a brief visits.

2. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were good friends since they first met at Oxford and belonged to the Inklings group together. But they hated one another’s books. When Tolkien was writing a new character for Lord of the Rings and tried to describe the character to Lewis, Lewis famously responded, “Not another frigging dwarf!” Except, you know, he actually swore. But this is a family blog.

3. Louisa May Alcott loved Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Really loved them. Like Alcott, they were residents of Concord, Massachusetts, so she had friendships with both. She and Thoreau used to exchange ideas and he would play his flute for her. The Emerson infatuation may have started when Ralph Waldo gave her the book Goethe’s Correspondence with a Child, which involves a young girl in love with a horny old poet. You can see why Louisa may have been flattered and sort of started stalking him – she would leave flowers on his doorstep, write him love letters but never send them, and sit outside of his window and sing him songs in German. He was married and had a daughter just six years younger than Louisa and never returned her affections.

4. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway were just three years apart in age. They met at the Dingo Bar in Paris in 1925, when Hemingway was 25 and Fitzgerald was 28. The Great Gatsby had just been published and looked to be a big hit; Hemingway, on the other hand, was a relatively unknown author. They were close friends for a while – Fitzgerald was notoriously insecure about himself in almost every aspect, and when his wife once insulted the size of his manhood, Fitz actually dropped trou and asked Hemingway if everything looked normal to him. Hemingway assured his friend that things appeared to be up to par. But the friendship quickly deteriorated. As Fitzgerald’s career fell and he descended further into alcoholism, Hemingway’s work started picking up. Hemingway started making fun of Fitzgerald to newspapers and magazines, to the point that Fitzgerald actually pleaded with his old friend to stop. The reason for the sudden cold shoulder? Hemingway was said to have been disgusted by Fitzgerald’s alcoholism, because he would make huge public scenes and embarrass himself and everyone around him when he was drunk.

5. And, speaking of Hemingway, he was also once very good friends with Gertrude Stein. He met her in Paris as well, at the introduction of their mutual friend, writer Sherwood Anderson (Anderson also introduced Hemingway to Ezra Pound). She reminded him of his mother both physically and otherwise. He even openly used Gertrude to try to work out some of his issues with his mother. She ended up introducing him to bullfighting, Spain, and prose. He used her as his sounding board and would completely rewrite something at her suggestion. He even made her the Godmother of his first son, Jack.
———————————————————–

Posted in Books & Reading | Tagged , , | Leave a comment