Dana Blankenhorn

Not Enough Being Right

2009-07-14T17:10:45-04:00

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 28 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

When I was younger I thought being right was important.

Surely it was better than being wrong.

I wonder now.

Being right and watching the world spin in another direction is terribly painful. Take the best known example from recent history, Jimmy Carter's "Cardigan Sweater" speech.

Republicans used that speech to reject everything Jimmy Carter believed in, validating the Nixon Thesis of Conflict and putting Ronald Reagan's smiling face on the cover of it.

The result? War, mass death, inflation, global warming, and (in time) skyrocketing prices anyway.

Kevin Mattson's "What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President" takes apart the speech, the issues, the result, and concludes that the country was wrong to ignore Carter's concerns. The Man himself has taken being right and unpopular as a badge of honor. He has spent his life out of office popularizing all sorts of unpopular causes -- Palestinians, homelessness, Africa. He doesn't mind being ignored, even vilified. He just keeps moving forward. His reward is in heaven.

That's a great Christian attitude, and perhaps in that position the only thing you can do, but it's small consolation, as I've found in my own life.

I saw the Houston oil boom ending a mile away, in the late 1970s. I railed about it privately to everyone I knew, and was roundly ignored. I finally left town on June 1, 1981 -- the approximate date the boom ended.

But it did me little good. I found myself in the middle of Birmingham, Alabama's depression, in a dead-end job I couldn't hold because I was in too much of a hurry and made too many mistakes.

Four months later I was unemployed, in a strange town, with a wife who had just made her great career move and couldn't follow me to where my work was. Not right away.

We survived that. But almost two decades later I found myself in an identical position. This newsletter was originally called "A Clue...to Internet Commerce" and the main Clue was that the boom was going bust, that we were all headed off a cliff, that the billions in valuation being claimed by the young bazillionaires was fool's gold.

I was right, of course. I can even date the end of that boom. It was my birthday, January 12, 2000, when Time Warner announced it was buying AOL.

Did this do me any good? Of course not. My income crashed like everyone else's. Once during the boom I had a six-figure income. I listed all my employers on a sheet of paper near my desk and found myself crossing them all off, one by one, over the next 18 months. I had zero income in 2002, and zero in 2003.

Being right isn't good enough.

What's true in general can also be true specifically. My emotional life has been marked by my general refusal to bend, and my inability to get others to do what I knew was right. It didn't matter at that point whether I was right in the original argument or wrong. I lost the human connections and I'm the loser for it.

I'm now watching someone else go through the same experience, and it's driving him crazy. He's regressing right into early childhood, circling his own private drain, becoming increasingly isolated from the world of people. It does me no good to tell him he's wrong, that he needs to turn around. As we all know, people have to find their own bottom. The best the rest of us can do is walk away and accelerate the decline, hoping that the fall is hard enough that a light bulb will go off in our friend's head. In time.

Often, it doesn't. I had a friend once with a terrible secret, one he wasn't even admitting to me. He finally opened up about it to someone else, found relief, but died a year later, suddenly, unexpectedly. I had another friend who was addicted to drugs and alcohol. Finally quit, got his head together. And found out weeks later that he had Stage Three colon cancer.

One thing I admire about President Obama, something many liberals detest, is that he doesn't take on fights just out of principle, and he doesn't hold out for the last concession.

I agree with his critics on the merits, that he should push for gays in the military and gay marriage, that he should stand up to the extremists in the CIA and on Wall Street. But he has seen those battles lost, and the people involved in those battles left worse off than before.

So he bides his time, calmly, working on what he needs to work on, compromising even on that when he has to, accepting that he may have just gotten half a loaf, but knowing also he can go for another bite if necessary.

It's incrementalism. But it's also successful. And if the choice is between being right and getting something important done, I'm old enough to accept the former and stop letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Pity it took me so long to learn that lesson. But now you have the chance to learn from me. Don't make my mistakes.

If the newspaper business is gonna drown put a hose in their mouth

2009-07-08T15:48:31-04:00

Newspapers have reached the desperate stage of their death spiral, the point where they're looking for government bail-outs.

In the case of the financial industry there was a case to be made that letting AIG and Citigroup fail would cost more than propping them up. In the case of the auto industry there's a case to be made that we'll at least get the money back.

There is no such case to be made for newspapers.

What they're looking for is a "tweak" to the copyright laws that would bar linking to copyrighted material without consent. What they're seeking is the destruction of the Internet.

The same argument holds for the idea that content should be exclusive to its source for 24 hours. If you can't link to it, content does not exist. I'm amazed people like Connie Schultz manage to breathe they're so stupid.

The Internet is based on links. Content you can't Google does not exist. We have learned this before with the news industry when it tried to hide its content behind paid firewalls and registration systems.

It didn't work.

The industry now knows it needs links. It just wants to extract monopoly rents for them. Hey, I want a pony.

Any Senator or Congressman who stands up for this nonsense needs to be slapped down, hard. Can you imagine the cost of this to schools, to libraries, to universities? Can you imagine the bureaucratic cost of tracking this free money? And I guarantee it will go only to a few politically-connected news barons, people like Rupert Murdoch and Carlos Slim.

The journalism business has always been about churn. Outlets come, outlets go. There is never really a vacuum of coverage, except perhaps for brief periods. As in Houston when I worked there, in the late 1970s, and a small collection of oil-connected millionaires owned every media outlet so good stories couldn't get out.

Such vacuums are harder to maintain today. People can get the story who are from out of town. Freelancers can get the story themselves and flog it on their own sites, or on any site willing to pay them.

The idea that we're trying to protect poor, poor individual writers is absolutely bogus. Writers and line editors have never made much money, never made even a portion of what they were worth. The money always went to the top of the pyramid.

The problem with newspapers is not the Internet. The problem with newspapers was owners who thought the market should give them a 30% return on equity every year, so they starved the businesses of resources needed to maintain market and mind share, with predictable results.

Every major American city has a host of minor publications -- business papers, entertainment papers, neighborhood papers. Each one has a staff of some sort. Each one has a news hole, and a news budget. The idea that the erstwhile monopolists should be subsidized by the rest of the Internet, and that the Internet should be blown up if that's not done, is absolutely monstrous.

Hey, The Washington Post had to can Dan Froomkin last week. What a shame, he did good work.

And this week he's still working, just for The Huffington Post.

Which reminds me of a song, "Boom, Like That," originally written about the McDonald's hamburger chain by the great Mark Knopfler:

competition?
send ‘em south
if they’re gonna drown
put a hose in their mouth
do not pass go
go straight to hell
i smell that
meat hook smell

And through the magic of the Internets, here's the video:

The Lies of the Peachtree Road Race

2009-07-05T09:50:37-04:00

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 27 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

One of the most interesting aspects of running the Peachtree Road Race is the politics.

Traditionally these are conservative politics. You have your preachers by the side of the road, one this year with a big sign reading "God Loves -- God Hates." You have your "pro-life" shirts. And this year I even saw one woman with an Obama hat.

But mainly it's anti-government stuff. "Government is taxing us to death," was the message of one onlooker in Buckhead. "Government or freedom" was the message of another.

These are assumptions deeply ingrained in Southern history. They have resonated since before the Civil War. They are the majority view throughout the region.

And they are wrong. Dead wrong.

Start with the first. Americans are taxed less than people in other countries. We are taxed less than people in China, for instance, where there are heavy sales taxes. Especially when you consider how much the citizens of both countries make -- taxes in China are a heavy burden.

But the difference is transparency. In China, after a meal at Pizza Hut, we were given three long strips of paper, which our tour guide promptly got to work on. They were scratch-off lottery tickets, he explained. They were also tax receipts. To encourage compliance with tax laws, China has merchants give these to customers are receipts. The scratch-off game encourages them to ask for them. And the empty books show how much sales taxes are owed on.

It's not a perfect system. Many small businesses evade taxes, passing the savings on to the customer, taking only cash. It acts as a subsidy of small businesses by large ones. But small businesses also know that, at any moment, the government can sweep in and close them down, on the basis of incomplete tax receipt books.

One more important point. In China, and Japan, the price is you pay is inclusive of tax. If the bill says 100 yuan or 700 yen, that's what you pay. This is not true in America, and it drives visitors batty. The bill says $7, but it's actually $7.56, or $7.49, or maybe even $7.70, depending on the sales tax rate where you are. And if this is a restaurant check, you're supposed to add 15% to pay for the waiter, because the shop owner doesn't even pay them. So you might throw down $9 on that $7 bill.

The actual process by which taxes are paid is the same in both countries. The shop owner totals his receipts and pays the government a percentage. But the method is different. In China the tax is a scratch-off game for the customer and built into the price you pay. In America the tax is a burden that's added-on after you think you know the price.

The intent is obvious. You're supposed to resent the American tax. It's supposed to remind you of the burden government imposes on its citizens. Yet sales taxes are the most popular taxes among conservatives. They oppose property taxes and income taxes -- any sort of progressive taxation. Yet every Georgia conservative, faced with a problem or a deficit, reaches directly for an increase in sales tax. A penny here, a half-penny there, it's all good.

Why? Two reasons. Sales taxes are regressive, falling hardest on the poor. And sales taxes are tacked on top of the bill, so they make an anti-political point.

It's nonsense, which brings me to the second sign. "Government or Freedom."

This may be the biggest lie Americans tell one another. The sign is designed to render a choice. You can have government or you can have freedom. But the opposite of government is not freedom.

The opposite of government is anarchy.

Anarchy is the absence of government, the only absence of government.

In the Wild West, which conservatives revere as the hallmark of limited government, people outside the cities carried guns and protected their own. They did this because they were forced to. They did this because to go without protection meant you were subject to the rule of ranchers and robbers, who might take all your property or just burn you out for your land.

In town, the first thing sheriffs like Wyatt Earp did was take your guns away, because you weren't supposed to need them. You were protected in town. And the great goal of the ranchers was always statehood, and an extension of government into their lands, because government meant protection, and in a democracy it meant they had a say in that protection, not only through the ballot but through participation on juries.

Somalia has no government. Parts of Mexico have no government. And in that vacuum all kinds of oppression swoop in. Religious oppression. Oppression by criminal gangs. The law becomes that of the gun, as it was in the Wild West.

This is where anti-government zealots should be sent. Take away their property -- because government's first role is in protecting property -- and drop them into Tijuana or Mogadishu. Let them enjoy their freedom there.

In fact, history shows that this nonsense about "government=tyranny" and "taxes=tyranny" is a cover story. Limited government favors the wealthy. Wealthy people can protect themselves from poor people. They can hire their own armed men. They can, in effect, create governments under their exclusive control.

And this is what they have done throughout the history of the South. It is the wealthy who have controlled state legislatures here, under the cry of "limited government." It is the wealthy who have been, in effect, the law, owning the poor and controlling the rest under cover of "taxation is slavery."

This has been good for the wealthy, but only in the short term. It was good to be a feudal lord before the Civil War. Or it seemed good. But the rich then were missing the opportunities for trade and industry, missing the chance to become truly wealthy and powerful, so that the government of the people eventually rolled over them.

It was good to be a local despot during the days of segregation. Or it seemed good. But the fortunes made on southern land were always paltry to those made elsewhere, and gradually the South was colonized by people with northern money and northern ways, until the contradiction between segregation and real human values became too obvious, and was swept away.

Again, it is good to be a Republican in today's south. Or it seems good. But the fortunes made in this era on real estate are fortunes built on sand, and right now the sand is running out of the hourglass. For a generation, throughout the south, wealth has been based on control of government, the extension of highways into the exurbs and the passing off of necessary costs to those who were stuck in the cul de sacs when development moved onward.

Real wealth lies in cities, where you can actually go around a block, where there are choices on which route to take, and where government builds the infrastructure necessary for you to build real wealth, by building up instead of outward. Trade happens in cities, not in exurbs, and even exurban factories depend for their existence on government to extend infrastructure and organize government.

So it is time to call the politics of the Peachtree Road Race what it has always been. A lie. A convenient lie for those whose wealth gives them power. But a lie nonetheless.

The choice is not between government and non-government. The choice is between government controlled by the people and government controlled by the few. The oligarchs have been overthrown in the national government, and the time has come to overthrow them in the South.

Prosperity demands it.