Parliamentary procedure

It turns out that US Congress-slime aren’t the only lawmakers who believe that election to office entitles them to live like corporate managers & stick their constituents for their day-to-day expenses. For the past few days the Telegraph has been making bales & bales of hay about Members of Parliament whose expenses smell decidedly fishy.

The stories started out with Labour Party members’ peccadilloes, as you’d expect from the Torygraph. By way of sampling, ex-Agriculture Minister David Hogg stuck the British ratepayer for £20K/year for the past five years for “second home allowances”, which included £2,115 for clearing a moat, £646 for miscellaneous stuff around stables & £40 for piano tuning.

All of which is obviously desperately related to running the agriculture ministry.

Hazel Blears, Communities Secretary, filed for expenses on three separate properties in a year, including £5K for furniture in three months. Dunno what a “communities secretary is”, but I suppose you need furniture for when the communities come calling.

Margaret Beckett, Housing Minister, also in the three-homes club (including a “grace-&-favour” accommodation supplied rent-free by the taxpayers) hit up the good citizens of Britain for £500 for hanging baskets & potted plants.

&, one of my faves, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith expensed two pay-per-view porn movies her husband ordered up in a hotel. Well, you know—it’s hard being a ministerial spouse, all by yourself in a strange room; the taxpayers really owe you that, don’t they?

It probably really sticks in the Torygraph’s craw, but the irregularities aren’t limited to Labourites; the Conservatives are right up there at the trough, too.

Alan Duncan, millionaire MP & shadow leader, submitted claims for thousands in gardening expenses, including £598 to overhaul a ride-on lawn mower & another £41 to fix a tire on same.

David Healthcoat-Amory, MP for Wells, claimed £388 for horse manure.

Very big on gardening, these Tories.

But wait—there’s more: even the Lib-Dems got in on the pork. Andrew George hits up the ratepayers £847/month in mortgage for a £300,000 flat exclusively inhabited by his student daughter.

There’s a huge outcry now—Labour looks in danger of losing the next general election, although I don’t know whom to choose among all the parties, since they’re all equal opportunity grafters. MPs are scurrying to explain how they’ve scrupulously adhered to the letter of the expense regulations; &, besides, they didn’t have the first notion that horse manure & porn flicks aren’t really, you know, reasonable & customary.

Well, pols are pols the world over.

What’s interesting is that the Telegraph’s story is actually the result of an American reporter who cut her investigative teeth on investigating Washington state’s legislators. She’s spent the past five years pushing to get Parliamentary expenses out into the light of day. Seems they’ve benefited from rules that don’t require transparency.

With the predictable results.

It’ll be amusing to watch the fall-out. No one does umbrage-cum-pomposity like an MP. & I'll bet the senior management of failed British banks are toasting the MPs all around their gentlemen's clubs, for distracting the public from their excesses.

I guess it does all work out in the end.

Measure for Measure

Yesterday was a day of justice: journalist Roxana Saberi has been released from an Iranian prison and John Demjanjuk was deported to Germany to be tried for war crimes.

Saberi, who strings for NPR, BBC and other outlets, had been accused of spying by the Iranians. Without much of a trial she’d been sentenced to eight years. She’d been imprisoned since January. After considerable international uproar, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ordered a “careful review” of the verdict and  despite vociferous arguments from the spook and security crowd to keep her jailed, an appeals hearing reduced her sentence to a suspended two-year term and ordered her released.

She’s expected to leave the country this week.

In stirring the waters, Ahmadinejad has opened the way for more normalized discussions with the US. It’ll be interesting to see how this pays off.

In the “justice delayed is justice denied” category, the 89-year-old Demjanjuk finally got his slimy Nazi ass hauled onto a plane out of here to face charges for his actions at the Sobibor death camp. I recall the furor 30 years ago when he was first outed as “Ivan the Terrible”—all the truculence and blustering about being just a regular guy caught up in the whirlwind. And he’s just an old man who should be left in peace.

Yeah—he was an SS guard at one of the most hellish places on earth. And how many thousands of inmates had their lives cut short in the most ghastly ways possible because of him and his comrades?

This argument that age somehow mitigates crimes is completely spurious. The only thing about yesterday’s action that sticks in my craw is that it comes not only 60 years after his crimes, but 30 years after he was dug out of his working class hidey-hole.

I’m with Shakespeare’s Isabella:

O worthy prince, dishonour not your eye
By throwing it on any other object
Till you have heard me in my true complaint
And given me justice, justice, justice, justice!

Sad state of affairs that a radical theocracy has righted a wrong within days while the democracies of the world took decades to visit justice on a criminal.

Reading between the lines

Thank God for the King County Library System. Just as I finished The Inextinguishable Symphony and was thinking I’d have to start opening boxes to find a book I haven’t read, I got a notice that War Paint was waiting for me at my local branch.

This means I don’t have to go carton-diving for a long enough period that I can probably find something else on the library shelves or Amazon to tide me over until I move.

Moreover, it makes a really nice change from my most recent reading. Inextinguishable Symphony is Martin Goldsmith’s account of the Jüdischer Kulturbund, the organization that grew up in Germany after the Nazis began cutting Jews out of national—“Aryan”—cultural activities. The Kulturbund brought together Jewish artists, musicians, singers and lecturers and put on a rich variety of programs for Jews, who were forbidden to attend "Aryan" performances. It’s also the story of his parents, who met as musicians in the Düsseldorf chapter of the Kubu.

It’s well written and engaging, but also really depressing. For some reason I can take historical analyses of crackbrained Nazi (or Soviet or Roman or American) policies. When the story gets down to the individual human level, though, I take it personally and start having nightmares.

I was alternating Symphony with The Innovator’s Prescription, which apparently has solutions to the US healthcare mire. (Get ready—it involves you paying a whole lot more for your care.)

This tome is dire in its writing style (and I say this as someone who made her living for many years by reading dreck), but it’s all the rage at work. It’s like The Lord of the Rings in the 70s—you couldn’t be matriculated in college without one of the volumes in your backpack.

So my recent reading hasn’t been what you can call entertaining. Therefore I’m looking forward to getting the goods on those arch-rivals in the beauty business, Helena Rubenstein and Elizabeth Arden.

I find it interesting that, like Mary of Scotland and Elizabeth of England, each marshaled forces and schemed at the destruction of the other, and yet never met, even though on occasion they were in the same restaurant at the same time.

And I know I need the respite before diving into Joe Queenan's Closing Time, his memoir of growing up with an alcoholic, abusive father.

Seattle flu

A couple of weeks ago when Seattle mayor Greg Nickels announced that the city definitely has a plan for dealing with the swine flu, I thought that if their “plan” for handling an outbreak is anything like their “plan” for dealing with the snow storms of last December, we should prepare for bodies in the streets.

Now that a man in a neighboring county has died of complications from the flu—the third in the nation and the only one not in Texas—the residents of King County should think back on the days of not being able to get out of their houses (unless they had snow tires or chains), the weeks when trash wasn’t picked up and the hours and hours they spent without power.

Then they should translate that to these municipal Keystone Kops managing an unpredictable virus that has stymied the World Health Organization’s best minds.

Public health authorities aren’t releasing any details of the death, but they are conceding that there doesn’t appear any direct connection between the man and México—that he appears to have contracted the illness from others in the area. He had underlying heart problems and died from viral pneumonia.

But then, that’s how flu works—it exploits underlying conditions, digs deep to overpower the immune system and then moves on to the next host, mutating as necessary to foil any obstacles to its ability to thrive.

Well—we hope for the best, but a government that thinks it’s fine to kind of tamp down the snow and sprinkle it with sand so four-wheeled drive vehicles or those with snow chains on can drive rather than ploughing and salting so everyone can, you know, get about (except for the streets where the mayor and senior county officials live, which were indeed cleared) doesn’t inspire me with confidence.

Group dynamics

I’m obviously being charged with high crimes and misdemeanors of the karmic kind. We had an all-day departmental offsite meeting yesterday, which was putatively meant to be a project-sharing exercise amongst seven product managers and two directors.

You know: "here's what I'm working on, and here's why it's going to Save Civilization as We Know It."

The part that wasn’t subsumed by the cleverness and condescension of the World's Greatest Expert simply highlighted how difficult it appears to be for even smallish corporate departments to communicate internally, put together a reality-based strategy and execute on cohesive tactics. We departed after eight hours of presentations and earnest discussions knowing more about what each other is working on, but without any real direction for how we're supposed to be real, you know, product managers in the greater organization.

Truly, I don’t know how Mormons or Methodists would manage in an environment like this; it’s just not possible to make it through the week without drinking.

Just dicking around

If you find yourself with a few minutes on your hands at work between announcements of layoffs & could use some amusement that doesn’t require you to mute the sound on your PC, try Dickipedia.

It’s obviously in a nascent state—I mean, there’s not even a category of Business dicks. How can you claim to be the ultimate compendium of dicks without John Thain (Merrill Lynch), Rick Waggoner (GM), John Stumpf (Wells Fargo), Bernie Ebbers (WorldCom), John Rigas (Adelphia), Kenny Lay (Enron)—well, maybe you have to still be putatively alive when your entry is made.

& those are just the CEOs. The American ones.

I mean, okay—they have Rupert Murdoch there; but he’s listed as a Media dick. Which is, of course, true; but he's definitely a crossover candidate. Like the Beckhams.

A couple more cavils:

The entry on Kim Jong-il doesn’t mention that he wears shoes with major lifts in them & allegedly throws marathon banquets. It does say he has the world’s worst haircut, which is incorrect, as I work with someone who takes that title; but I’ll concede that Kim has the worst haircut of any Stalinist dictator.

I did think the factoid about him being the largest consumer of Hennessey was interesting. It might explain a lot.

How can you have Dick Cheney but not George W. in the Political dicks category? Cheney may be the organ grinder & W. the monkey, but still.

& how can you have Steve Jobs but not Steve Ballmer? Or, for that matter, Larry Ellison? Jeez—I’m back to the question about why there’s not a business category…

Not sure I agree that Pope Benedict XVI looks like a combination of Elton John & Liberace—he may dress like them, but doesn’t have John’s flair for eyewear or Lee’s blinding smile. But I’m totally behind him being in the list, both on account of the office (which is basically focused on keeping humanity no further advanced than the Inquisition) & his own inclinations (he wasn't known as John Paul II's enforcer for nothing). As the Dick entry says, “Is it a coincidence that 14-year-old Joey Ratzinger was enrolled in the Hitler Youth? No, it is not.”

Well, I could run on & on, but you should explore for yourself. God bless the Internet.

Absinthe makes the heart...

That wild and crazy guy, Richard Branson—he’s taken domestic flights to entirely new, erm, heights.

An email came through announcing that Virgin America, the US offshoot of his Virgin empire, is now offering absinthe as an in-flight drink choice. “Le Tourment Vert” authentic French absinthe”, to be precise; le tourment vert meaning “green torment.”

Absinthe is a relative of wormwood, which has been the death of many an artist or artist manqué. It’s an herbal liquor, tasting like anise, and has been banned by the US and many European countries for some time. Since the 1990s it's made a return to the marketplace.

Now here’s the thing: absinthe isn’t actually a jolly sort of spirit. Painters of the 19th and 20th centuries have given us these depictions of absinthe fans:

Degas’ “Absinthe Drinkers” aren’t really anyone you want to be sitting between on a trans-continental flight.

You could blame the visual distortion on Picasso’s Blue Period style; but you’ll notice that his “Absinthe Drinker” is as intent on her drink as Degas’ pair.

The “Absinthe and Carafe of Water” by van Gogh is the most innocuous presentation. Ironic, given that van Gogh was a heavy user of the substance.

And, lest you think that we of the 21st Century are beyond all that torment, I give you this from the Czech Republic:

Mildly amusing at a trendy club. Not something I want to see even a few rows behind me 35,000 feet over Omaha.

Virgin America evidently has many cocktail suggestions, including the “Mile High”—absinthe, lemon-lime soda and lemons, “shaken and served over ice”.

And that’s just inviting someone to puke on his seatmates.

Well—Branson’s done well so far, so maybe this’ll work out, too. But air travel these days is already torment enough; I don't see why we need to add to it.

¡Viva el pueblo!

We’re coming up on Cinco de Mayo, a holiday celebrated more widely in the US than in México. In my native California, the celebrations will have been going on for days, involving fiestas, mariachis & copious amounts of tequila y cerveza.

You may not know that Cinco de Mayo is basically a regional holiday in México, marking the defeat by forces under Ignacio Zaragoza Seguín of the invading French army at the Battle of Puebla in 1862. The victory didn’t stop the French, intent on an imperial adventure come what may. Not until 1867, when the US woke up from our own civil war & started reminding the French of the Monroe Doctrine, & adding that, gee, we have this whole army hanging around, trained, equipped & everything…did the French withdraw.

They left behind their ersatz "emperor of México", Maximilian, who had the misfortune to be an unemployed Hapsburg archduke (& possible relative of that popinjay Napoleon III), at a time when France needed a figurehead to legitimize their invasion of México. He was shot on the orders of Benito Juárez on 19 June 1867.

Sic semper imperis.

Cinco de Mayo isn’t actually México’s independence day—that’s 16 September, when a criollo priest rallied the Mexicans to drive the Spaniards out in 1810. It’s kind of like the Fourth of July in the US—there wasn’t a major military victory, but the very act of declaring that enough is enough is the point at which a nation grows out of a colony.

Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla inspired his countrymen with “el grito de Dolores” (“Cry of Dolores). This was something along the lines of, “Long live Our Lady of Guadalupe, death to bad government & death to the Spaniards!” The Battle of Guanjuato followed a few days later, the war was on & the Spanish didn’t actually acknowledge México’s independence until 1821.

But back to the celebration at hand. It’s really a occasion to revel in the heritage of the Mexican immigrants to this country. I don’t remember it as a kid in LA, but by the 80s it was big time.

Eric Felten has written about an alternative to margaritas for the holiday. I have to say that the Michelada sounds like a ruination of beer. Notwithstanding the fact that I have yet to have a margarita in Metro Seattle that hasn’t been utterly vile, I’m definitely not trying the Michelada.

I might go for just one shot of reposado, to drink to the death to bad government. That’s always something worthy of toasting.

¡Viva la Revolución!

Vox populi

A couple of weeks ago Citigroup held its annual meeting. Last year their security people banned shareholders from bringing in fruit for fear they’d chuck it at execs and; board members. This April—forget the customary metal detector, the ban extended to all food and water bottles.

So stockholders were limited to slinging words, which they did vigorously and at length.

Well—Citi’s stock value has dropped 85%, and stockholders have had a good seven years of experience vilifying corporate boards since Enron paved the way for excess, chicanery and arrogance.

Citi’s board members were so shamed or fearful that they refused to identify themselves to the people they allegedly represent within the corporation. Jellyweases™ in $6K suits. (A Jellywease is someone with the ethics of a weasel on the spine of a jellyfish.)

The four departing board members were ushered out to the roar of, “Thank God they’re gone!” Shareholders did approve the four Citi-nominated replacements as well as re-electing the rest of the directors.

There’s a proposal afoot that would require the company to nominate two candidates for each director’s slot since, as one shareholder pointed out, “It’s a non-election, basically. We know who’s going to win.”

This same person pointed out that it’s ludicrous that a board full of CEOs past and present determine the corporation’s executive compensation, while the stockholders don’t.

And there’s the rub: that whole incestuous inbreeding of the same stock again and again, all serving on each other’s boards and approving whatever executive management proposes. This has gone on for decades and resulted in our current morass.

Citi’s CEO, Vikram Pandit (one of the highest-paid CEOs in America--$38.2M in 2008, while the company reported a $32.1B loss), assured the assembly that the corporation plans on paying back federal bailout funds.

Well, yeah—those funds come with restrictions on executive pay. Can’t have that, now, can we?

It remains to be seen whether this public rage venting will become a trend, but we can hope.

I’m still behind my proposal to revive public stoning for corporate executives and their political panderers. Saves fruit, releases fury, clears out the corporate gene pool. Totally win-win.

Arise, ye prisoners of starvation

Today is May Day, International Workers’ Day. Back in the bad old days, we’d be treated to massive, mandatory displays of Soviet military might, all those legions of Red Army soldiers goose-stepping through Red Square before Lenin’s Tomb, followed by tanks & mobile rocket launchers.

We’re talking macho central in a grim, socialist kind of way. But reliable, something you could count on long after Santa had disappointed you in that matter of the Wilson Hammer 6 that never showed up under the tree.

Celebrating the value of the work force has been going on for a while. It’s a strong enough statement that both Adolf Hitler & Pius XII took steps to co-opt it. In the 30s Hitler staged Nazi parades that out-glitzed the workers’. When his thugs weren’t beating them with clubs & truncheons.

& to counteract the godless communists, the Pope cooked up a saint’s day in 1955: Saint Joseph the Worker. (That would be Joseph the carpenter, husband of Mary the mother of Jesus.)

This is also the Celtic celebration of Beltane—the welcoming in of Summer. (It’s the calendar opposition to Samhain, the basis for Halloween.)

& there’s a bunch of stuff about maypoles, drinking & fertility bits, although I haven’t seen much of that lately.

Whatever—whether you’re into maypoles, missiles or mead, take the occasion to think kindly about workers of all sorts.

Unless they’re employees of hedge funds or investment banks.