Category: Corporatism

Mitch Daniels vulnerable on corruption?

The Advance Indiana blog (see blogroll, right) has some obsessions, and those obsessions seem to involve the corner-cutting, corporatism and downright corruption of the Republicans in power in Indianapolis — both state and local government. That would be no surprise were not the blogger himself a Republican. (Doug Masson beat me to the punch on this, but I started before lunch and his appeared between now and then.)

The blog is relentless in criticizing the Indy Mayor Greg Ballard’s administration for its subservience to the interests of billionaire sports franchise owners (here, here, here, & here — and that’s just the recent ones; but don’t think he’s just an anti-sports sissy).

Today, he hits a higher target — the Daniels administration:

I’m telling you that Daniels has some big-time scandals brewing in his administration. The Obama Justice Department can bury any presidential ambitions he may have if they so desire to investigate these various scandals. I thought Mitch was smart enough to avoid this kind of corruption in his administration when he first got elected, but my once favorable impression of him is fading with the passage of every day. I’m not surprised by [State Rep. Eric] Turner’s obvious self-dealing, and I doubt many others who’ve watched him over at the State House over the years are either. The ACS [company hired to privatize Medicaid administration] connections run deeper than [Mitch] Roob. Barnes & Thornburg’s Bob Grand and Joe Loftus have lobbied the state and the City of Indianapolis for the firm. They firm as also lobbied the state for [Daniels insider John] Bales’ Venture Real Estate. CIB President Ann Lathrop, who replaced Grand in that role, used to work at ACS with Roob and former Mayor Steve Goldsmith, who employed both of them in his administration. Lathrop now works for Crowe Horwath, which has several contracts with the City of Indianapolis. Lathrop personally inked a contract with the Ballard administration’s budget office, which Lathrop ran during the Goldsmith administration. And I could go on but you get the point. It’s just one incestuous cesspool.

“Incenstuous cesspool” almost earned this re-blog a “damn rackets” categorization, but I’m holding off on that a bit longer.

Still, I had a lot of trouble with the Medicaid privatization debacle, which put Daniels’ willful streak on display and was so patently misguided — long before he nevertheless went ahead and did it — that only two theories came to mind for why he’d do it:

  1. He cynically wanted to screw up Medicaid — a massive and virtually uncontrollable entitlement — so badly that nobody would even want to bother applying (which in essence would move the cost of caregiving “off book” by forcing family members to skip economically productive jobs to care for aging parents even more than they already do); or
  2. He or someone he likes/owes stood to profit mightily from privatization. (This was barely on my radar, frankly.)

I want to like Mitch. I want to be proud of him. I’d like to want him to become President. But don’t bet on it — whether “it” is is me wanting him to become President or him actually becoming President. I knew nothing of his youthful pot use, divorce and, now, possible corruption (or closeness to corruption) until he became one of the frontrunners (or coy draft candidates) du jour.

Expect more dirt to be unearthed — not necessarily because Advance Indiana is right, but because that’s the way political sabotage works, and it’s hard to do all Mitch has done in his life without getting at least splashed with some ugly mud along the way.

Long wars and democracy

“Long wars are antithetical to democracy.” So opens a Washington Post op-ed column by Andrew J. Bacevich. “Events of the past week — notably the Rolling Stone profile that led to Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s dismissal — hint at the toll that nearly a decade of continuous conflict has exacted on the U.S. armed forces. The fate of any one general qualifies as small beer: Wearing four stars does not signify indispensability. But indications that the military’s professional ethic is eroding, evident in the disrespect for senior civilians expressed by McChrystal and his inner circle, should set off alarms.”

General McChrystal’s Rolling Stone interview ranks right down there with Jimmy Carter’s Playboy interview in the annals of stupid decisions by public people who should have known better. He couldn’t keep them from profiling him, but he didn’t have to sit down for an interview, accompanied by  Aides full of adolescent smartassness. For his lapse in judgment, we’d owe him a great debt of gratitude — if only it would cause us to abandon the aspiration to empire.

The problem, Bacevich suggests, goes back to the abandonment of a “citizen army” (i.e., the draft) in favor of a standing army of careerists, led by outstanding high officers but (and here Bacevich barely hints — I think he understands it, but it was beyond his scope) staffed by cannon fodder — young men and women appreciably poorer and darker-skinned than the sorts of people who by and large run the government and those institutions that might hold government accountable. Men and women who, we can tell ourselves, knew what they were getting into.

The big fib of the week?

“Americans don’t flinch in the face of difficult truths.” [Barak Obama] In fact, when it comes to war, the American people avert their eyes from difficult truths. Largely unaffected by events in Afghanistan and Iraq and preoccupied with problems much closer to home, they have demonstrated a fine ability to tune out war. Soldiers (and their families) are left holding the bag.

Throughout history, circumstances such as these have bred praetorianism, warriors becoming enamored with their moral superiority and impatient with the failings of those they are charged to defend. The smug disdain for high-ranking civilians casually expressed by McChrystal and his chief lieutenants — along with the conviction that “Team America,” as these officers style themselves, was bravely holding out against a sea of stupidity and corruption — suggests that the officer corps of the United States is not immune to this affliction.

In the all-volunteer Army, the military-industrial complex has found its perfect instrument. There’s no need for a frank military coup; we already have a covert military-industrial coup.

I’m no fan of conspiracy theories. No doubt there are connivers in the world, but I believe much less in the efficacy of conspiracy than of tragedy: the inexorable outworking of fatal flaws in a generally admirable protagonist; or metaphorically, the eventual expression of a fatal “genetic” flaw in every single regime in our world-gone-mutant.

Americans might do well to contemplate a famous warning issued by another frustrated commander from a much earlier age.

“We had been told, on leaving our native soil,” wrote the centurion Marcus Flavius to a cousin back in Rome, “that we were going to defend the sacred rights conferred on us by so many of our citizens [and to aid] populations in need of our assistance and our civilization.” For such a cause, he and his comrades had willingly offered to “shed our quota of blood, to sacrifice our youth and our hopes.” Yet the news from the homeland was disconcerting: The capital was seemingly rife with factions, treachery and petty politics. “Make haste,” Marcus Flavius continued, “and tell me that our fellow citizens understand us, support us and protect us as we ourselves are protecting the glory of the empire.”

“If it should be otherwise, if we should have to leave our bleached bones on these desert sands in vain, then beware of the anger of the legions!”

(Emphasis added) Thank you, Professor Bacevich. If we manage to disenthrall ourselves long enough to notice when our greatness is all gone, we won’t be able to say nobody told us.

And thank you, Washington Post. This is the kind of real conservativism that the idjits at TownHall.com will never publicize. (They’re saying things like we should “fire Obama” — as if that would solve the problem.)

Quote of the day

No, don’t expect one every day, but for now, try this:

It’s funny that we require more proof of a person’s need to become eligible to receive welfare than we require of these billionaire sports team owners when they ask for tens of millions more annually in public assistance.

HT: Advance Indiana blog.

Note, by the way, how I’ve added a new category since “corporatism” and “state capitalism,” while apt, seemed too tame.

Is Sarah Palin a fake feminist?

It should be no secret that I am not a fan of Sarah Palin, but among her defects is not patent falsity as a feminist, as Jessica Valenti’s column at the Sunday Washington Post alleges. Valenti careens around like a pinball deprecating all things Palin, but in my opinion falls short of making the case that Palin’s feminism is fake.

Pro-life feminism is something I happen to know a few things about. It captured my attention 25 years or so ago when I heard a recording of Sidney Callahan, a distinguished social psychologist, teacher, and syndicated columnist in moral psychology, state the case for it. It had a humane and compassionate angle that I found very attractive personally. (I regret that Callahan’s talk seemingly not available online; I believe I ripped it from tape to MP3 and could share it with anyone interested after checking copyright more closely.)

So I became a supporter of Feminists for Life before it had a political action committee — not a member, as I think there’s something creepy about a man saying he’s a feminist (it strikes me as being on roughly the same level as “Hey, baby! What’s your sign?” or “Want to come up and see my lithographs?”) — even though some of its positions were well to my left at the time. (I also supported the “Pro-Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians” who intuited that they were particularly vulnerable to selective abortion should a “gay gene” ever be identified.) I have received the Journals of FFL for decades as a result. Valenti can sneer at the “debated notion that first-wave feminists were antiabortion,” but I’d rather have the affirmative than the negative of that in a debate.

I now consider the support of the Susan B. Anthony list, the FFL-affiliated PAC formed years later, a reliable indicator of a bona fide pro-life candidate who is not (necessarily) wedded to the religious right. I give essentially nothing to the National Right to Life Committee or its PAC these days, but in most election cycles, I’ll pore over SBA List endorsements for candidates, almost invariably women, whose positions (and odds) seem especially good, and then I’ll support them modestly. (Public records of such giving has gotten me labeled an anti-choice fanatic by the brain-dead denizens of Journal & Courier online comboxes.)

I probably could go on, but suffice that I know whereof I speak when I say that Valenti is either consciously lying or fabricating factoids when she alleges that pro-life feminism is a cynical ploy adopted only after “protesters realized that screaming ‘Murderer!’ at women wasn’t winning hearts and minds.”

But, of course, Palin isn’t a feminist — not in the slightest. What she calls “the emerging conservative feminist identity” isn’t the product of a political movement or a fight for social justice.

It isn’t a structural analysis of patriarchal norms, power dynamics or systemic inequities. It’s an empty rallying call to other women who are as disdainful of or apathetic to women’s rights as Palin herself: women who want to make abortion and emergency contraception illegal and who fight same-sex marriage rights. As Kate Harding wrote on Jezebel.com: “What comes next? ‘Phyllis Schlafly feminism?’ ‘Patriarchal feminism?’ ‘He-Man Woman Hater Feminism?'”

So let it be clear: Valenti considers abortion (and “emergency contraception,” but I repeat myself) and same-sex marriage among the sina qua non of feminism. That marks her as a “radical feminist” or something close.

In radical feminism, if you’re not tying “power dynamic or systemic inequities” to “patriarchal norms” — if, for instance, you tie them in the slightest to such phenomena as the Chamber-of-Commerce types pushing to get women into the marketplace in the early 20th century in order to suppress wages, or the prudent self-protection rendered more urgent by no-fault divorce and its effective abolition of marriage — you’re a fake feminist. I’m all in favor of words having somewhat precise meanings if possible, but as a few of my links to Wikepedia in this posting demonstrate, “feminism” as of today can follow a lot of different adjectives.

“So God made man; in the image of God He made him; male and female He made them.” Human equality does not require identity of aptitudes and roles (though it is dangerous, if not outright wrong, to apply generalizations to specific people). A gifted athlete is no more or less fully human that a gifted scholar. A layman is no more or less human than a pastor or priest. Men and women are of equal dignity even if they are measurably different — and not different merely in the matter of some plumbing that only matters on special occasions.

Feminists for Life essentially embraces a form of what apparently is known today as difference feminism, or cultural feminism or new feminism. I have a little trouble getting worked up over the label, or holding myself out as expert in the taxonomy of feminism. But having followed them all these years, I know that the proper valuing of women for the common good is a bona fide concern of Feminists for Life.

So is Sarah Palin a fake feminist? Well, she’s to the right of many SBA-endorsed politicians. And I’m ready to believe that just about anything about her is fake. But I draw the line at credulously falling for an empty screed like Jessica Valenti’s column.

A City the Devil Built

If the Devil created an anti-city, a place where people would feel least human, Atlanta would surely be that place ….

So William Howard Kunstler opens his blog this week, but not so much to excoriate Atlanta as to introduce it as, ironically, the site of the 18th Congress of the New Urbanism. The blog is a pretty good 30,000-foot view of what’s most endearing about Kunstler’s thought. If you want an overview with spoken words and pictures, check here.

Or rummage through your own wetware if you’ve ever walked Boston’s Freedom Trail or Beacon Hill, or gawked at the dense cheek-by jowl homes of New York’s Greenwich Village, or ambled through Charleston’s Battery neighborhood, smelling the linseed oil of summer painting, or strolled, sweating, under the Live Oaks of Savannah’s old streets near the River (out in “Garden of Good and Evil” territory). There’s something human about those places, and it’s not just nostalgia — though nostalgia plays its part.

The New Urbanists, in my conviction, are advocating something — the only thing I know of — that makes sense for urban living, as opposed to the urban-suburban auto treadmill, waiting for the Oil Fairy to make peak oil go away. It needn’t be rank imitation of the places I just named, but they’ve got the scale right.

As my friend, Practicing Human, wrote this morning:

[W]e would be doing well to ask about consumption of energy resources on a micro-, meso- and macro-scale.  Managing our energy diet towards a sustainable rate means more than just changing our light bulbs.  We can think creatively about building and community design.  And we can adjust national priorities, which always proves to be incredibly difficult.

America is a country working foremost in a consumptive paradigm.  Until we can think differently about standards of living, then we are going to recreate the same problems.  But I think a different economic paradigm is still very far removed as it requires a significant leap in economic, political, and sociological thinking.

Sadly, the economic crisis is hurting the good guy developers along with the bad. Kunstler again:

I heard a lot of stories during the meeting in Atlanta last week but one really stood out. It was about the money and revealed a lot about what is going on in our banking system these days. A New Urbanist developer had gotten a small project going for a traditional neighborhood. Despite the global financial [crisis], the developer was able to meet the payments of his commercial loan.  But the FDIC sent bank examiners around America and they told the small regional banks that if they had more than twenty percent of their loans in commercial real estate (CRE) they would be put out of business. The banks were ordered to reduce their loads of CRE by calling in the loans and liquidating the assets. Ironically, the banks only called in their “performing” loans, the ones that were being regularly paid off, because they were ignoring and even concealing the ones that weren’t being paid.

The developer in question had his loan called in when the FDIC descended on his bank. He couldn’t pay off the $3 million in one lump, of course. The FDIC’s agents are going to seize and sell off his project if he can’t get it refinanced in short order.  He can’t get it refinanced because there is now such a shortage of capital in the banking system that no one can get a loan for anything. Also, since it is now well-known that the bank failed, the vultures are circling above his project hoping to buy it for a discount, so even the few private investors who have money won’t throw him a lifeline. By the way, the FDIC agents told him they are doing this because they now expect that virtually all commercial real estate loans in the USA will fail in the months ahead. Pretty scary story, huh?  And he was one of the good guys.

I suppose it was a tragic thing that the New Urbanists made themselves hostage to the same banking system that was behind suburban sprawl …

I have no great overarching point, but if people will read Kunstler, we are likelier to make the paradigm jump we need.

Paradigm Busters

My crystal ball has never worked very well, but the part of me that longs, that aches, for something better than our Ponzi-scheme economy refuses to give up on dreams of a humane future.

This sort of thing – rumored for weeks – could be it:

PITTSBURGH – The United Steelworkers (USW) and MONDRAGON Internacional, S.A. today announced a framework agreement for collaboration in establishing MONDRAGON cooperatives in the manufacturing sector within the United States and Canada.  The USW and MONDRAGON will work to establish manufacturing cooperatives that adapt collective bargaining principles to the MONDRAGON worker ownership model of “one worker, one vote.”

“We see today’s agreement as a historic first step towards making union co-ops a viable business model that can create good jobs, empower workers, and support communities in the United States and Canada,” said USW International President Leo W. Gerard.  “Too often we have seen Wall Street hollow out companies by draining their cash and assets and hollowing out communities by shedding jobs and shuttering plants. We need a new business model that invests in workers and invests in communities.”

Josu Ugarte, President of MONDGRAGON Internacional added: “What we are announcing today represents a historic first – combining the world’s largest industrial worker cooperative with one of the world’s most progressive and forward-thinking manufacturing unions to work together so that our combined know-how and complimentary visions can transform manufacturing practices in North America.”

Highlighting the differences between Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) and union co-ops, Gerard said, “We have lots of experience with ESOPs, but have found that it doesn’t take long for the Wall Street types to push workers aside and take back control.  We see Mondragon’s cooperative model with ‘one worker, one vote’ ownership as a means to re-empower workers and make business accountable to Main Street instead of Wall Street.”

Both the USW and MONDRAGON emphasized the shared values that will drive this collaboration.  Mr. Ugarte commented, “We feel inspired to take this step based on our common set of values with the Steelworkers who have proved time and again that the future belongs to those who connect vision and values to people and put all three first. We are excited about working with Mondragon because of our shared values, that work should empower workers and sustain families and communities,” Gerard added.

In the coming months, the USW and MONDRAGON will seek opportunities to implement this union co-op hybrid approach by sharing the common values put forward by the USW and MONDGRAGON and by operating in similar manufacturing segments in which both the USW and MONDRAGON already participate.

…

About MONDRAGON:

The MONDRAGON Corporation mission is to produce and sell goods and provide services and distribution using democratic methods in its organizational structure and distributing the assets generated for the benefit of its members and the community, as a measure of solidarity.  MONDRAGON began its activities in 1956 in the Basque town of Mondragon by a rural village priest with a transformative vision who believed in the values of worker collaboration and working hard to reach for and realize the common good.

Today, with approximately 100,000 cooperative members in over 260 cooperative enterprises present in more than forty countries; MONDRAGON Corporation is committed to the creation of greater social wealth through customer satisfaction, job creation, technological and business development, continuous improvement, the promotion of education, and respect for the environment.   In 2008, MONDRAGON Corporation reached annual sales of more than sixteen billion euros with its own cooperative university, cooperative bank, and cooperative social security mutual and is ranked as the top Basque business group, the seventh largest in Spain, and the world’s largest industrial workers cooperative.

About the USW:

The USW is North America’s largest industrial union representing 1.2 million active and retired members in a diverse range of industries.

Here’s the Ocholphobist – a guy who’s experienced at making beautiful objects with his hands, but who seldom writes on such things any more – weighing and balancing the workers’ cooperative model:

I recently spoke with an old Catholic Worker friend of mine who told me of a talk given recently in which he heard that Mondragón is worried that an EU style bailout of Spain along the lines of what happened in Greece would actually hurt the cooperatives (Mondragón is not the only one) in Spain. Large financiers generally do not like cooperatives like Mondragón because they do not run with the sort of debt load and constant large debt shifting that a typical corporation does, and the debt they have tends to be decentralized – spread out over a number of smaller financial institutions (note that one of the “four areas of activity” Mondragón is engaged in is finance – this is common among worker cooperatives in Europe — just as many communities and groups of workers in America have local credit unions and many large corporations have their own finance divisions) . And these EU bailouts, like the American bailouts, buttress large finance, with the de facto result that midsize, small, and micro finance options are left in a less competitive position than they would be were there no bailouts, or less centralized bailouts.
The labor movement in the U.S. has little leverage against corporations and its impotence is increasingly pathetic. Often in the American context, when a union does manage to maintain some real power it uses it in as corrupt and abusive a manner (often abusive toward their own, these days) as corportatist power brokers do. But usually American unions are in the business of losing what power they have had so this is less and less a concern. It seems to me that if there is to be any future in workers organizing for their own protection and aid in the United States it will primarily be along the lines of models such as the one Mondragón provides. But I rather doubt that will happen beyond a few small scale efforts and the occasional lipservice. Worker cooperatives do not really fit into the destructive plutocratic order in which we find ourselves today.
It should be noted that in most worker cooperatives (I daresay nearly all of them that last for more than a few years) there is not a utopian vision of financial egalitarianism. There is still a meritocracy at play, arguably more so than in current corporatist models. A worker (or a small worker owned business seeking membership in the cooperative) is not guaranteed to be vested in the cooperative, but must earn it over years and invest himself or herself in a manner which shows to others competence and seriousness and follows well established protocols, with a system in place to curb abuses and address complaints. One will see in a worker cooperative, however, more money staying within the communities where the cooperative is found, and nothing like the radical disparity between the wages of workers and the salaries of executives such as we see in most U.S. corporations, in which execs are paid for their skills in social networking and an ability to manipulate government and lying to the public with that perfected air of banality we routinely see from our suits.
All that said, the ethos of Mondragón Corp has undergone something of a change since EU integration and taken something of a more EU character. The EU is a sly dog. Within the EU constitution there is a mandate which requires the EU to follow the principle of subsidiarity, but as we see with the recent bailout of Greece (along with a host of other moves), the EU is often the furthest thing from an institution which follows the principle of subsidiarity. There is the possibility of a convenient use of subsidiarity rhetoric whilst actually following centralized, top-down, corporo-statist models. It is quite conceivable that cooperatives could be formed which, on paper, look like cooperatives, but which actually function more like corporations.
It is now not uncommon for American Orthodox to argue how neo-con, paleo-con, or libertarian political and/or economic orders are somehow in keeping with Orthodoxy. I suppose an Orthodox embracing subsidiarity would simply be another act in that circus. The chief fault of subsidiarity, as I see it, is that the notion is too vague to be of serious use when applied to any macro-economic vision. One finds both Leftists and those on the Right espousing the ‘true’ version of subsidiarity. Subsidiarity works best as a flexible guiding model in particular micro-economic environments, a part of an economic order with a wide array of labor structures, such as we see with Mondragón Corp in the context of Spain. I have a friend who says he would never fly Distributivist Air, were there such a company. I am not sure that a well run worker cooperative airline would be any less safe than the typical corporate airline, but I have worked for a family owned business of which the thought of the coworkers I had at said business owning that business sends shivers down my spine. Another business I once worked for did go for a varient of the subsidiarity model, and is now in dire straights with half of the staff let go, instead of being sold to a friend of mine who could have actually kept the business thriving, seeing as how he had run it successfully for some years. The original owner, instead of selling to my friend, decided to follow a hasty subsidiarity minded scheme presented by an employee with many ideals and little actual experience in the business and now, out of desperation, the company mimics corporate stores more than it ever did. I suppose that in business, as in most of life, there is a charism to doing things well and any economic order can get in the way of a given charism at a given time.
I was unaware of this book until the Ochlophobist linked it. It’s on my wish list now. And here’s more about Mondragon (in a Wikipedia article that the Wikipedia poobahs would like to see rewritten for greater objectivity).

Red Tories | Front Porch Republic

I haven’t decided yet whether I like The American Conservative enough to renew my subscription, but the June issue is excellent, and I’d recommend that you pick it up before the next issue rolls around.

The feature article of the June issue is “Shattered Society,” an essay by Brittish philosopher and politics wonk Phillip Blond, who styles himself a “Red Tory.” The subhead is “Liberalism, Right and Left,  has made lonely serfs of us all,” and asks “Does the Red Tory tradition offer a remedy?”

The article is powerful. The responses (e.g., Daniel McCarthy, Nicholas Capalidi) are provocative. Like Daniel Larison at Front Porch Republic, I thought Capaldi’s response was badly misguided. I even though it was condescending psychobabble, probably a calculated hatchet-job commissioned by corporate interests. That’s why I blog while Daniel Larison blogs and can actually get a job writing professionally. He insinutes the same sort of thing but does it more nicely.

Porn on my mind

I have pornography on the mind lately.

You might say “tell us something surprising” or “aren’t you a little old for that?” But that would miss the point of why I have it on the mind. One obituary and a news mailing from my Law School did it to me.

Until just a few years ago, my hometown still had an independent bookstore and magazine stand downtown, City News. It was mostly magazines, frankly, and about 15% of it, as I recall, was pornography. One of the brothers who owned it until it finally closed died May 11.

City News and I had some history together. As a young adolescent, I was keenly interested in the — ahem! — “adult” material they had, and they were lax about underage browsers (this was before the brothers owned it). As a professional working half a block away decades later, I resented the pornography, but I realized that City News probably wasn’t viable without it. And I see that the brother who died, of complications of ALS, was pretty darned smart (Duke, magna cum laud) and had a pretty admirable life that I didn’t know about.

As I mused aloud on this, my wife reminded me that as a journalism major, she interviewed the female owner of a similar news stand in Peoria. Asking about the porn (which as I recall was “harder” by the standards of that day than what City News ever carried), she got the answer “I have a disabled son who is very costly to raise. Without pornography, the store dies and I’m out of work.”

Even Barnes & Noble and Borders have a small stash of what today qualifies as soft core, prudently wrapped in plastic bags.

I write this from a Marriott Hotel in L.A. Marriott is under Mormon ownership, as I recall. There was no Gideon Bible for my morning devotions, but I could have viewed pornography on the TV had I wished. I know offhand of no exceptions to “pay-per-view” porn in major hotel chains. The market apparently demands it.

I thought of this, too, as I saw a photo of my law school classmate, Scott Flanders, arm-in-arm with the Dean, with the caption declaring that he is CEO at Playboy. Scott was a libertarian-type conservative. Perhaps he still is. How wide the gulf between cultural conservatives and others of the “conservative” label!

Porn is everywhere. Yesterday before leaving for L.A., I attended a Daybreak Rotary meeting to receive a grant check for Matrix Lifeline, a pregnancy resource center I’ve been affiliated with for nearly three decades. Another grant recipient was the PEERS Project in Lafayette. It and all similar programs are losing their federal funding (elections have consequences). Mike Boston, the leader in Lafayette, trying to convey what they’re up against, said “just watch MTV for seven minutes if you can stomach it. No, just three minutes is enough.”

My wife just told me, as she leafed through an L.A. travel guide, that there’s a Porno Hall of Fame on Santa Monica Boulevard not too far from where we sit.

I hate it. We have lost all sense of shame seemliness. Some things are meant to be kept in private. Time was, not long ago, that the Dean of a good law school would have hesitated to be photographed with the CEO or a porn empire. Time was that a news stand could have survived without trafficking in porn.

I don’t accept market demand as an excuse. There are some things the market should not provide, demand be damned. And there are some trades less honorable than ditch-digging, even if they’re more remunerative.

Brother Jim, requiescat in pacem. I can’t really approve of the choice you made, but your Judge knows exactly how to factor in the spirit of the age.