Running on empty

You know, I’m not unsympathetic to the thousands of employees of the US automakers, or to the employees of suppliers & vendors to the industry. I have friends who work for those companies, & I don’t want to see them hurt by this fiasco.

But you just have to draw the line somewhere, & when one of these companies can issue this recent memo to staff, & think that anyone either inside or outside the company will really believe this codswallop, well—you’ve given up all pretense of being a company run by sentient beings.

Here’s the memo, with some redactions, translations & comments:

The set of messages below might be helpful in your communication efforts.

• The current economic and financial crisis is global and across all industries, [we are] not the only company under intense pressure in this very turbulent environment.

= We're being unfairly picked on. We're only one of hundreds, maybe thousands or millions, of Fortune 1000 companies that made & continue to make boneheaded, greed-based "business" decisions. & the media's focusing on us instead of banks, insurance companies, mortgage lending, the government, etc. You never hear about THEM, do you? It’s not our fault!

• Speculation is increasing and to such an extent that it is becoming difficult to separate facts from myths

= Unfortunately, our complete idiocy is becoming common knowledge & we’re having a hard time figuring out even for ourselves what we did or only thought about doing; much less what we told the outside world.

• The media is focusing heavily on [us] and the automotive industry, for example, regarding program delays, mergers, and a number of other issues that can easily distract us from focusing on our daily work. All of us want to know more. The 'not knowing' adds a lot of stress for all of us.

= Why can’t they just keep the spotlight on the mortgage crisis or the financial institute meltdown? It’s not fair!

• There is not a lot we can say, but please rest assured that [we are] proactively addressing the situation. Our best people are exploring every possible action to stabilize our business. Many of the opportunities that our senior leadership is looking at, are still in the exploratory phase, and it would really not be appropriate to discuss these openly. Also, some of the actions involve material information, and therefore legal and financial guidelines prohibit the company from commenting, both in- and externally.

= We don’t really have any solutions or plans, but we’re working on producing the appearance of thinking about coming up with one or two.
= & don’t say anything to anyone about anything.

• As soon as actions are finalized, we will share the information directly with you

= If it’s absolutely unavoidable.

• Meanwhile, it is of the utmost importance that we remain focussed [sic] on our job and place maximum attention in conserving cash and eliminating waste.

= We certainly don’t want you to stop working like Trojans as though what you do really advances our business non-planning. & we want you to cut back on the company coffee so we can continue to fly our senior management around the world in style.

• We own [sic] [the company] our very best efforts to help the company through this crisis

= We want you to be confident in our abilities, because after all—we’re rich & you’re not, so we MUST be smarter than you.

• [We] will emerge [sic—evidently they haven’t even planned far enough ahead to know how/where/when/what they’ll emerge

= If we can persuade Congress to fork over more money to keep the company going until our retirement packages kick in.

• Your hard work and dedication is very much appreciated.

= We’re hoping that after a while, you & everyone else will forget that we said we were going to come up with solutions; & then we’ll retire, so it won’t matter.

I mean, honestly—they must really think the world is populated with nothing but rutabagas.

Driving me mad

Well, execs from the Big Three have private-jetted & limoed up to the Capitol & are holding out their gold-plated begging bowls to Congress, in search of another $25B in bail-out money (in addition to the $25B they got a few months ago to revamp their production line to build autos the public actually might want to, you know, buy) from we-the-people.

As you might imagine, this absolutely eats my lunch.

It is a mark of their arrogance that these [insert plural expletive here] have the unmitigated nerve to explain with straight faces that they deserve the next several billions because if they go belly up (which is the entirely predictable result of their business decisions & strategies for 20 years & more), thousands—maybe millions—will lose their jobs. & we can’t let that happen, can we?

Naturally, they assure us, they’re only in this pickle because of the general state of the economy, which wasn’t their fault. They’re the victims in this, just like all the other regular guys they down beers with at the local tavern.

It’s especially rich that they use the loss of tens of thousands of jobs as the major rationale for the bail-out, when they’ve been doing everything in their power over the past 30 years to screw the workers whose jobs they haven’t yet managed to off-shore.

(They were actually joined today by Ron Gittelfinger, president of the UAW, who is also acting like he's on Queen for a Day. He prates about how the current state of affairs isn't the automakers' or unions' fault for living in the cloud cuckooland of the past, but just that darn economy. You just have to wonder if any of these buffoons are stupid enough to believe what they're saying, or just hope that we are.)

Pelosi has been making noises like giving them what they want, although at today’s hearings senators on both sides of the aisle at least discomfited the heterotrophs in the $6K suits.

I really hope Congress draws the line at handing out our cash like Monopoly money to every Fortune 1000 company that shows up at their door with a sad story & crocodile tears. & in this case if they can’t refrain from acting like Crazy Uncle Louie, at least make sure there’s a whole yarn-factory-load of strings attached. No, not strings—I want enough bleedin’ steel cable wrapped around these companies to cover Africa with a T-1 network.

What strings you ask? Like specifying a REALISTIC business plan for cost-cutting & retooling to make cars people want to buy & drive. (= cut out the gas guzzlers; shut down Hummer; stop fighting the dreaded mileage requirements) & then FOLLOWING the plan.

A basic requirement is that top management is out (without huge severance deals—the CEO of Chrysler got a severance package of $210MM when he left Home Depot a few years ago—what the hell does he know about belt-tightening, or even restraint?) & be replaced with people who aren't tied to the current way of doing things.

Management salaries go down (as part of that cost-cutting thing) & bonuses are strictly tied to actual, you know, performance. Their propensity for international travel booked & rebooked at the last minute goes, because they’d be introduced to the joys of video conferencing. These guys don’t seem to have joined the late 20th Century—their tech mentality is as outdated as the cars they produce

Oh—& their assets are on the line as collateral. If they don't perform, we the people get to take over the assets & start selling them off. There's no WAY we should give any of them money without securing the loan; they haven't shown themselves capable of managing their money (or, more accurately, their stakeholders’)—why would we think they'll do better with ours?

I'm acutely aware that there are indeed millions directly & indirectly affected by the Big Three’s problems. It's not just their employees, but their suppliers, & the suppliers of raw materials; it's dealers; it's people who clean the dealerships & supply them with coffee & pencils...

But why should it be that if you're HUGE & act like complete idiots over a period of YEARS we'll bail you out, but if you're a small business & you blow it, you're on your own? If one auto company gets so much as a nickel, not one bloody person with a V or a C in their title gets a raise or a bonus for the next 18 months, & after that, only if there's progress. They have absolutely no incentive whatsoever to change what they're doing.

Flushing my tax dollars down after what they've already lost is only going to delay the inevitable. If they're going to keep on screwing up, it's better to get it over with—a clean kill instead of the painful, wasting illness they’ve been carrying for decades.

Blast from the past

So, I'm a real sucker for Christmas (holiday, if you prefer) craft fairs (or, if you're in the UK, fayres). Actually, I really love craft fairs, full stop; but Christmas ones are kind of like Courvoisier VSOP—you take the good & distill it down to the fabulous.

& by "fabulous", I don't necessarily mean "high quality". It's just that you see such a range of stuff & have real opportunities for picturing what a house would look like with some quantity of the items installed.

I'm big on picturing the mise en scene.

So one fair was at the Woodinville Community Center. Woodinville is home to several wineries & presents itself rather self-consciously as faux Napa. The crafts were all Christmas ornaments (no tschatschkes for Hanukkah here), & the place was utterly crammed with them. With all the women (this appears to be an activity for the XX-chromosome set exclusively), some already in Santa sweaters, milling through the very narrow passages, I was feeling a bit claustrophobic & I whizzed through in less than the time it took me to check out the 7 Cedars casino last week.

The other fair was at Blaine Memorial Methodist Church, which turns out to be a predominantly Japanese congregation. The neighborhood is old & working class, narrow streets with little houses lining them.

I got there about 15 minutes before the advertised opening, to find the church lot filled, middle-aged men directing traffic, & cars parked on both sides of streets radiating out from the church (leaving but a single lane for traffic). There was a queue of about 150 people waiting already.

I joined them & realized that there were very few hakujin there, & I was the only redhead.

Now here's the flashback: I went straight to the days when I used to babysit for our friends the Dyos, parents Sansei who ran a landscape architecture business. (They lived in the house where the Greene Brothers of early 20th Century craftsman architecture fame resided. It wasn't nearly as impressive as the houses they built for clients. But it had a huge back yard they used for the plants & equipment for their business.)

If the night out was a Saturday, I stayed over & went with them to their church in Little Tokyo, where I'd be the only non-Asian. Mrs. Dyo would introduce me with a completely straight face as, "this is my daughter by my first marriage."

The Dyos also used to host a mochi making party the weekend between Christmas & New Year's in that capacious back yard. The Japanese-American community in the Greater LA area would be there to make the traditional rice cakes (which I never learned to like) for the coming year. There'd be huge towers of rice steaming over wood-burning stoves (each family brought their own rice for processing). The men would stoke the fires & also run these, well, rice smashing hopper jobbers that ground the cooked rice into a steaming paste for being made into the cakes.

This mechanization was a break with tradition, of course. The traditional way was to have two men with wooden mallets the size of sledgehammers rhythmically pound the rice on a wooden stand with a depression in it; after each blow a woman with really fast reflexes would reach in & sort of turn the blob of rice around for an even pounding.

I know that because one year they actually did a few batches that way; but modernity was winning out over custom.

Anyhow, when the blob was the right consistency, a man would rush it over to long, paper-covered tables sprinkled with cornstarch. Women gathered around the tables gossiping & shaping the rice into little round flat cakes with pat-pat-pats. Every once in a while they would insert a center of bean curd & wrap the rice around it. But those hands just flew, along with the conversation & the laughter.

Lunch was soup: you picked out noodles from a pot, put them in a bowl with chicken pieces & seaweed & then covered it all with broth ladled out from huge vats. Man, that was wonderful soup, although at the time I wasn't sure about the seaweed.

(About 10 years ago I was lunching with colleagues at a Japanese restaurant on a miserable, cold, wet day in Fairfax, huddled over a bowl of udon. In the midst of yapping about the project we were working on I suddenly looked down at the soup & proclaimed, "When I was ten years old I'd never have believed I'd be saying this, but this soup needs more seaweed.")

The Dyos moved out of the Greene house in the 70s, & it's now a nursing home. Mr. Dyo died shortly thereafter of an unexpected heart attack & I'm afraid to stop by their house when I visit Pasadena because I don't want to find that my mother-by-her-first-marriage is also gone.

All this came back to me standing in that queue, listening to the banter going on around me. I wonder if there's a mochi-making tradition around here?

Oh—the fair? Eh—well, I spent about 20 minutes going through it & didn’t buy anything. (Although I did agonize a bit over some gift boxes that were really interesting.) But we’re really early in the holiday fair season, so there will be opportunities aplenty.

Another coffee, please

It occurs to me that I forgot to mention an incident at one of my employer's espresso bars here: I ordered a decaf espresso and the barista gave me that eye-rolling, "why bother?" look as he set it up alongside the six double- and triple-shot cappuccinos he had working.

You know—I've had decaffeinated coffee in both France and Italy and never got stick from the waiters. Seattlites should really dial back on the attitude.

I'll drink to that

Rather interesting story in the WSJ, on the coffee industry’s growing attention to the decaffeinated line. Apparently they’re trying to “perk up the $2 billion decaf business.”

Seattle—maybe all of Washington state—is definitely a caffeinated kind of place. There are hundreds of coffee shops, anywhere there are people. (In another post I mention Forks, WA, population 3195, with four espresso shacks visible from the main drag, driving through at the legal speed limit, or maybe a little over.) I really love the drive-through concept, but I’m sure I’m about the only person in the average business day who wants decaf.

My employer hires an espresso vendor for the opening hour of its new employee orientation sessions. When I went through the orientation, it was going along swiftly, with the barista lining up the various cups and rhythmically grinding and brewing the espressos, the hazelnut-vanilla cappuccinos, the double-shot lattes.

Then I asked for a decaf skinny latte, and everything slowed like the check-writers in those MasterCard (or maybe it’s Visa) commercials. She had to haul out a little (really little) stash of already-ground decaf and it completely broke her rhythm.

My officemate thinks nothing of drinking seven-shot lattes on his way in to work. On Monday he announced he was cutting out caffeine, and drank green tea throughout the day.

By Wednesday he had a Starbuck’s cup on his desk. He tried to pass it off as tea, but finally admitted he’d been desperate to hunt down a coffee shop on the way in to work.

(As an aside, I have to tell you about coffee in the UK. First of all, Brits are in love with instant powdered coffee; even the ones who’ve traveled to the Continent or the US don’t seem to find anything wrong with drinking it, or paying to drink it at restaurants. And decaf is pretty much an anomaly. In grocery stores, if the five-shelf space for coffee is three feet wide, one shelf only will be allocated to anything not instant. There will be a couple of packages of real beans, a few jars of decaffeinated instant and possibly two brands of decaf real coffee—but not beans.)

I love Illy—it’s best of the canned espresso coffees available generally (superior to Melitta or Lavazza), but trying to find their decaf version around this area is like trying to find tiramisu at a Weight Watchers meeting.

Anyhow, it’ll be interesting to see how these new strains of beans do in the marketplace. I’m betting that Seattle will not be a huge revenue generator, but I’ll certainly do my part.

So, is it April Fool's?

Okay, so here’s the consequence of emasculating the basic tenets of journalism: that story that made the rounds (I saw it in at least three places, including two mainstream broadsheet sites), about how McCain’s aides dissed Palin’s stupidity—turns out to have been a hoax. An obvious, “will-you-idiots-pay-attention-I’m-having-you-on” hoax.

What are the basic tenets, you ask? Why, how about: you don’t run with a story until it’s been confirmed by two independent sources—besides the one you got it from originally? Or: if statements are attributed to known persons (e.g., McCain aides), you pick up the phone & call to verify?

No, in this blow-dried journalist-as-celebrity, gotta-get-something-anything-up-on-the-site age, even MSNBC & New Republic published (apparently with straight faces) the codswallop about Palin not knowing that Africa is a, you know, continent.

I don’t really find it surprising. Ever since every TV report started including the shot of the reporter earnestly asking a question of a story source, I knew we were headed to hell.

The slide to Fox News was entirely predictable.

The Internet, while opening up the field to diverse viewpoints, hasn’t done a lot for improving the quality of reports. Instead of mainstream news inspiring the bloggers to better things, the blogosphere has dragged down the established media.

Well, while I’m sorry to see that the LA Times was one of the suckers, I have to say it’s not a huge surprise—after all the Tribune Co.’s budget cuts ripped the heart out of news rooms around the country, no one should find it astounding that dubious “facts” slipped through the system.

But none of those old guys manning the slot at the paper where I used to work would have let anything as egregious as that “Africa’s a continent?” crap into print.

God rest their blue-penciling souls.

Split Bonds

Well, not that I particularly give a toss, but there may be those among my loyal following who are interested in this WSJ story on the disconnect between the James Bond of the novels & the films.

I feel about this the way I feel about reading Peggy Noonan: I politely ingest it, note that it’s a load of hooey & move on.

But you may be grateful for the diversion.

Remembering Veterans Day

I think it’s entirely fitting that Veterans Day comes so close to elections. It’s good to keep in mind that the one is tied inexorably to the other.

On Tuesday a colleague and I were chatting and the subject arose of the kind of trickery that was being reported about the polling: likely Obama supporters being told that, due to long lines, Democrats were being asked to vote on Wednesday; or that you’d be arrested if you showed up to vote and had outstanding traffic tickets; etc. (There may have been counter tactics used against Republicans; but if so I haven’t heard of them. Whereas my office mate received two separate emails from ’Pub friends advising him to vote on Wednesday.)

Leaving aside what a perversion this sort of thing is of the ideals on which this country was founded (do we see Jefferson sanctioning such chicanery even in his fight with Adams? Would that pragmatist Franklin have advocated skullduggery in the pursuit of utopia?), it utterly profanes the sacrifices made by generations of Americans to safeguard government of the people, by the people and for the people.

I mean, once you start subverting the voting process by misdirection, how far away are you from Zimbabwe or Burma?

On and off the battle field, at home and in foreign fields, men and women have for more than 200 years willingly gone into harm’s way in defense of something that transcends race, religion, politics or gender. That something would be the form of government established by those upstart former colonists in 1787.

As you may know, every uniformed service member takes an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States—not a President, not a state, but the figurative Pentateuch of all laws that evolved from it. Tell me, Ozymandias, where else the law is valued so highly as here?

(Or it was before the soon-to-be Ancien Régime took a scythe to the Bill of Rights and made us international outlaws.)

And these hundreds of thousands of Americans—natives, immigrants, urban, rural, north-south, bi-coastal, draftees or volunteers—put their lives on the line to defend those principles of that “more perfect union”.

Veterans Day is when we nominally honor those who chose to walk this path—to be the instruments of policy. In reality, though, we don’t do a whole hell of a lot of honoring, outside of the DC-Arlington National Cemetery area. Lord knows, we certainly don’t pay much attention to them the rest of the year, either.

I contrast this to the annual ceremony in the UK known as Remembrance Sunday. This is the Sunday nearest 11 November, the day the armistice went into effect ending hostilities on the Western Front in 1918. The 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. Today is the 90th anniversary of that cease fire.

There are observances around the country on the 11th and two minutes of silence at 1100; church bells are muffled for the memorial peals. And there is a very moving ceremony at the Cenotaph, in Whitehall on the Sunday. The Royals, leaders of government, Commonwealth representatives—all lay wreaths at the empty tomb dedicated to all who gave their lives in the service of Britain.

(The thought occurred to me, as I was having my bag searched and I noticed snipers posted on the roofs and in the windows nearby, that this was probably the ideal time to knock over a liquor store if one were so inclined, as every copper in Southeast England was concentrated in a three-block radius of the Cenotaph. My mind works that way.)

Then there’s a march-by of veterans, starting with those from World War I—remarkably sharp in their movements, being men who still take pride in what they accomplished—and followed by those from successive conflicts. I have to say that after WWII, the quality of the marching deteriorates, but it’s still an extremely impressive parade.

But then the Brits know very well that, whatever the current state of their society, it would be infinitely more miserable were it not for the men and women represented by those marchers. They take it very seriously indeed, as well they should.

So here’s your chance to think about this relationship—last week you exercised the fundamental right of our American society to vote for leaders from President to municipal judges (an exercise that millions in the world can only dream of). Whether your guys won or not, you were equal with everyone else at every precinct across the land in your ability to choose for yourself which crack-brained policies to support.

Just remember that in addition to the Founding Fathers' foresight and confidence in the inherent ability of engaged citizens to contribute to the common good by participating in the democratic process, we also owe our Constitutional liberties and duties to the veterans—living and dead—who defended those rights with vigor and stalwart devotion.

Reality bites (fashion division)

I saw this frisnic in the WSJ & thought for sure it was a hoax on Sarah Palin. You’ll recall that when the press found out about her $150,000+ shopping spree at Neiman and elsewhere for a runningmate-class wardrobe, she vowed she had no say in the matter and really she only spent $35,000 on six outfits (apparently not realizing that that amounts to nearly six large per “outfit”, which is still more than many families of four spend on clothing in a year) and she certainly wouldn’t hold onto these snooty, non-Joe-the-plumber duds once the election was over; she’d sell them on eBay and return to her “favorite” consignment store (can there be more than one?) in Anchorage…

So I thought—well, here we go. That’s one of her aides getting advice on just this tactic. They’ll get the gouge and then make a big public play about her shedding those un-plebian gladrags and gettin’ back to bein’ just folks.

Well, but no—looks like this is a legit question and response to the shifting economic landscape we’re facing. (In the same edition, there was also this story about the new “self-denial” amongst the conspicuous consumption crowd. So it must be a trend.)

Besides, what was I thinking? Palin doesn’t read the Journal. Too many long words and not enough celebrity pix.

OP PS

I forgot to mention: I've not seen a single Starbuck's in the 430 miles I've logged since crossing the Puget Sound.

That alone is worth 50 bonus points.