A Good Pig or Ethics of the Market By Ed Parker
See this guy is passing by a farm yard when he sees this pig with a wooden leg. So he asks the farmer, "Hey, how come this pig has a wooden leg? And the farmer says, "Well son, this here pig ain’t no ordinary pig. He saved my daughter from being ran over by the tractor, pulled her out of the way, liked to got ran over himself. Saved my wife when the house caught fire, dragged her to safety through the smoke and flames. Saved me too, that time I had a heart attack, ran all the way into town to get the doctor. Ya see son, this here pig is a kind pig, a noble pig, a brave pig and a hero, smart as a whip too. Just wouldn't be right to eat a pig like that all at once."
I’ve spent a lot of time waiting, waiting for someone, for approval, a counteroffer, a deal, waiting - listening to jokes like, “The Pig with a Wooden Leg.” Union Stewards tell such stories to fill the void, working on you, trying to soften you up. Telling meaningful stories, stories with a message, a moral, taking care to explain why the pig had a wooden leg: who cut it off, who ate it, going on at some length about trust, loyalty. There’s a talent to waiting. It’s all about learning to deal with the tension, the pause before the punch line. You learn to talk of small things, more interesting things: basketball, the “Cats” getting to the Final Four, fishing trips, the best way to make biscuits, leaning away from work and shop politics, though not entirely, never entirely. It’s hard on people who want to get things done, people with things on their mind, other things that desperately need doing.
Engineers hate grievance hearings the most, I think. They struggle with the logic of it, fidgeting impatiently, talking of duty, responsibility, things they should be doing, useful things. The engineer wants to get to the issue, never getting that it’s not about the issue, at least not about the facts, not as he knows them. Managements facts are cold lifeless things, no one cares about management’s facts, not on the shop floor. The shop floor is about opinions and beliefs, history and stories, about personalities: about the Good Pig, it’s why engineers suffer so in grievance hearings.
There’s no shop floor in a mine, not in the traditional sense, still it exists in those times and places where employees come together, in the cages, on the man trains, in the shower rooms, change rooms, break rooms, cool rooms, lunchrooms, places where they shoot the shit. It’ exists in that state of mind reminiscent of high school, has that pathos and drama, everything is personal there, no slight forgotten, or forgiven. Old grudges are kept alive there 'til retirement and death, told and re-told as the real story behind the Good Pig’s wooden leg. The union lives there, in that passing confluence of opinion and attitude, playing to the unseen audience of the membership in grievance hearings, parading the Good Pig - beating the drum. Reputations are made there, elections won and lost. Sometimes the union leadership forgets that, thinking they’re pulling instead of being pushed. They say every employee has the right to grieve, to be heard, it's what unions are all about. The union leadership forgets that at times, forgets who they serve, getting wrapped up in their sense of importance. No one gives a damn about facts.
It is important to remember who you’re speaking to in a grievance hearing, how you’re coming across. Labor Relations people are spoken of on the shop floor, in management meetings, and judged harshly by all. It takes a special person to do this kind of work, listening to problems no one really wants to solve. You have to believe in what you’re doing, that what you’re doing is right, and in industrial justice. You have to keep in mind that industrial justice lives in doing the right thing, following the contract - being fair, being reasonable. Arbitrators look for that.
Pete’s a Union Steward and former Raise Miner turned Battery Motorman. Tall and thin and proudly Hispanic with a great black mustache that covers his lower lip, most of his chin, wears expensive ostrich skin cowboy boots, drives a red pickup truck about ten feet high, keeps a half can of snoose between cheek and gum, spits into an empty Pepsi can. A pretty normal guy, a nice guy, quiet by nature, probably helps his wife around the house. Ah, but in a grievance, he’s a slayer of dragons. He waits, smiling, talking of issues with no importance, waiting for an opening, the smallest crack of an opportunity, and then he is on you with obfuscating innuendo, with tearful wheedling, fiery demands, and indignant, flaring eyes, soulful eyes. It’s the dance of denial and Pete’s the matador, the great seducer of corporate America, defender of the good pig, the humble pig, the terribly wronged and abused pig. That’s what Pete’s doing now, setting me straight about Martha. He knows I don’t like having to do this. He knows I like Martha, not that it matters. The grievance isn’t about right or wrong, not anymore, or even about Martha. It’s about the graceful kill, the sword through the heart as the cape drops to the sand, bowing to the crowd, victorious. We have done this before, I carry the scars.
Martha has cleaned the offices at the mine for the past twenty-six years, a warm, smiling, square looking woman; every one's mom. She comes from an old mining family, related to half the county, the rest she knows, or knows of - everyone knows Martha, everyone loves her. She always manages a sympathetic, interested look when miners, young and old line up to tell her their troubles, and for the cookies, the brownies and tamales she brings to work every Monday. Well OK, if not Monday, then Tuesday, usually Tuesday, Mondays being difficult for her, which is why we’re gathered here today.
“She’s been a dedicated employee, a hard worker and loyal. A mother with five children, for God’s sake, four, by the way are working here, one being a supervisor, but that’s not her fault. The other three are union members in good standing, two are Stewards.” Pete’s hunched forward across the table, not quite standing, not quite sitting down, like a runner waiting for the gun. “Ramon, her husband, you remember Ramon? Sure you do, Eddy. He can’t work, what with his back. Unloading those timbers by himself, trying to get a little more footage before the end of shift. Doing too much, always doing more than he had to, now he can’t do nothing at all, being all broke down and disabled, totally disabled. When you gonna retire him, give him his disability, Eddy? When you gonna schedule that hearing? Let him have his disability?” His hands are on the table holding it down, his eyes narrowed, squinting. He sighs, overcome by the callousness of it all, of me, especially me. “Now, now you want to fire his wife?” He shakes his head slowly, speaking softly under his breath in Spanish, of saints and blessings, doubtless. Turns his back on the bull, the cape barely moves, silence falls on the arena. He sighs deeply; his eyes full of sorrow. I know what is coming and refuse to accommodate him. I am a tired old bull with too much pain from the barbs in my back. I sigh, waiting for the long, narrow blade behind the cape.
“She could be your mother. You have a mother, don’ya, Eddy? OK, maybe not. You’re a cold piece of work, you know that, Eddy. How do you live with yourself? She’s a twenty-six year employee, Eddy, twenty-six long years, hard years. Employee of the Month, three times. She’s given her best years to the company, doing a good job, day in day out. How many times have you come to work sick, Martha?”
Martha looks surprised, not knowing what to say, glancing down at her hands. Pete clears his throat, picking up his diatribe in mid-sentence.
“Ah, she takes pride in her work, yes pride in her work, however humble. Now she needs the company’s help, a little understanding, a second chance, Eddy?” He has that ‘let’s be reasonable’ look, a slight wrinkling of the forehead, eyebrows squeezed together. I've been told he practices it in the change room mirror, gets a lot of laughs. He has others, outrage, innocence, outrage, being my favorite.
It’s coming. I feel it coming, hell, I can see it coming, starting to feel resentful. I really hate the Joint Union Management Committee, or JUMC. I sat through all the meetings, never raising my hand. I was never fond of horse shit, and the JUMC is horse shit. Not that the idea is wrong, we should work with the unions. We all need our jobs. I just hated the packaging, the hoopla, the Madison Ave lying bullshit. Why can’t we just be straight with them? Tell them we have to make this work, cut costs, improve productivity, whatever it takes to keep the mine open. The price of copper is down. Everyone knows the price of copper, knows the price is down. We live and breathe the price of copper. The JUMC meetings are about the contrivances of consultants, the hand holding, the endless kumbaya, and like glazed donuts; after about the second or third, they just make your teeth hurt.
“We’re all in this together, Eddy, all on the same team. You’ve heard of JUMC, haven’t ya, Eddy? You go to the meetings. We’re partners here, Eddy.” And there it is, the JUMC blade through the heart, he briefly looks ashamed, but only briefly, biting back a half smile. The JUMC crack comes after three hours of reviewing Martha’s attendance file, re-arguing every absence for the last twenty-six years, getting nowhere, not that it matters. We both know there’s going to be a deal and this, this is politics and theatre. Pete’s up for re-election.
I squeeze my eyebrows together, wrinkle my forehead and gently sigh, the sigh of the wronged, the misunderstood, the long suffering, and wait patiently, politely for him to finish. Knowing he’s a showman, knowing there is no need to speak, to rebut. He’s a good guy, only saying what he has to say, except for that JUMC stuff. No, this is theater, the accusing looks, the concerned, sad, watery eyes. I’ve done it before myself, once or twice. Martha will be crying in a moment. I hate that. Then Pete will ask for a caucus. Then we’ll wait. Soon George, the President of the largest Local, the one representing the miners, will take the Mine Manager aside. After a few minutes they’ll wave me and Pete over.
It’s a typical third step grievance meeting, since JUMC, less violent perhaps, less shouting, less name calling. Now each side shows a little more give, more things get settled. Still this talk of togetherness, of cooperation feels awkward. We dance around the Good Pig, throwing little jabs like boxers, each waiting for the other to throw the first low blow. Hell, once we were warriors, now we're just whores, I see it in Pete’s eyes, see it in my own. Too much money is being spent on this JUMC thing. It feels wrong, like a scam, a hustle. Still, it’s for our future, isn't it?
The union knows there’s going to be a deal. It’s no secret Martha’s the mother-in-law of the supervisor who fired her, the cousin of the Mine Manager, the sister of the Vice President of the local, and a fine pig, a Good Pig. You could lead a parade with such a pig. Everyone wants to help her. Hell, I want to help her. Pete looks forward to the parade, to leading her on a golden chain toward the next elections.
George, the Union President, passes a can of snoose to the Mine Manager, nodding toward the old dear. The Mine Manager takes a pinch, packs his lip, grunts, and passes it back. There is a ritual to this, most of it non-verbal, the offering of the little round can, sometimes tapping the can with a forefinger and pointing. You can either take the can or raise your palm and spread your fingers, to say, 'no thanks'. I wave it away. Vile stuff, snoose, like a course, wet grade of snuff, flavored or wet down with a shot or two of Jack Daniels, or worse, Southern Comfort. We go outside and talk for ten, twenty minutes, about other things, mostly. There isn’t much to say about Martha. It’ll be a non precedent setting, final, final, no shit final, never to be spoken of again, final agreement: a twenty-eight day in-house rehabilitation program with a new attendance record. The paper work is there in a file folder on the table. No one wants to fire her. No one wants her to kill herself either, which she’s doing, drinking like that. It doesn’t work all the time, not for some problems: theft, sabotage, assaulting management, that kind of thing - unacceptable things, adversarial things. Things we’ll always go toe to toe over. Still, most things can be worked out when the Good Pig’s paraded. When the cooler heads, wiser heads, fill their lip and spit into empty Pepsi cans, speaking of other things to the clack of that pig’s damn wooden leg.
There’s a map of the mine on the wall on the mine conference room, just behind Pete. It shows the Draw level, the main drifts, the panels, grizzly raises and draw points, most of which I don’t understand, not being a miner. They must have had a meeting in here earlier about ore production, there’s numbers written all over a flip chart, notes about panels taking weight, something about the Undercut.
The Undercut is where the ore is mined, the muck. I was in an undercut for about a minute once, instantly sweating like a pig, glasses fogged over. All I could see, when I could see at all, was air swirling thick and gray in the light of my hard hat, feeling a heat, a moisture, just short of rain, like taking a steam bath in dirty clothes. I left pretty quickly. The muck goes from the Undercut down raises to the Draw level where Shoe Tappers, Chute Tappers, work in unlit panels, downsizing boulders with long arching blows of eighteen pound hammers, the pieces of rock, the ore. the muck, has to fit between the bars of the grizzly, pieces smaller than, say a basketball. The muck goes through the grizzly, down into another raise dropping sixty feet, to the Pony Set. The Pony Set fills the ore cars on the Haulage level where a DC locomotive drawing six hundred amps from a bare copper wire pulls twenty-two cars at a time to the ore dump at the hoist. Every day fifty thousand tons, tons, of muck are skipped three thousand, nine hundred feet to the surface. Underground is a different world, worth seeing, worth saving.
Across the conference room on the other wall, near George and the Mine Manager, is a picture of the mine, taken from, say ten thousand feet, showing the offices, change rooms, shops, head rigs, ore crusher, and the open pit. A little of the road and the railroad tracks going to plant can be seen. It’s a big picture, maybe four feet across in an old wooden frame, taken some time ago when the pit was small.
Strange how you remember one afternoon, maybe it was the minty smell of Pete’s snooze, smell has strange memories. I can’t for the life of me remember what started me thinking about Martha, or listening to Pete. Somehow it all comes back, so clear, so painfully clear. Changed, of course, as all things are by time and perspective, details forgotten, like a tapestry unraveling, threads frayed, dropping away, lost, still, the impression, the feeling remains. I enjoyed Labor Relations then, thinking I could do some good, and for a while I did.
The pit started when the surface collapsed above the mine. The mine is a block and cave operation and the top of it just caved in, taking some nearby buildings with it. As cave in’s go it was something of a slow sag, unspectacular except for the result. No one was hurt, though the back of the administration building hung precariously a hundred feet above its foundation. It gave a friend of mine who was working back there at the time a bit of a pause. He looked at what once was, and now was no more, and said softly, “What the hell?”
In the pit, the underground sulfide ore turned to oxide. Oxide ore must be leached, creating a new profit center, although a small one. It happened long ago, well before the trailer was blown up.
There’s a glass case under the picture and against the wall, inside are interesting pieces of copper ore, rocks bright as turquoise, pretty, but too soft to be turquoise, not really copper ore either. Martha went to the restroom; Pete’s telling me how to make tamales, starting with killing the pig. He knows I don’t eat meat, knows I’m ignoring him. We all believed a little then, trying to find answers in the middle ground, where we could. Change was slow, but real, better than the old days, better than what was to come.
Keep in mind these people have been mining, getting muck for generations. Copper mining is a way of life in eastern Arizona and everyone knows everyone, knows who can get the muck and who can't. It doesn’t stop the fighting, the bickering between management and union; nothing does, except weddings and funerals. Even then, one side leaves early, herding their wives, husbands, children toward the door, looking back over their shoulder. The other side stays late, gets drunk and fights among themselves. Both sides speak, or at least nod, when they see each other in town, having been raised to be polite. That’s part of the culture too, politeness, courtesy, honor. And like I said, most of them are related, in-laws, cousins, three times removed, you have to remember who you’re talking to, who they talk to, keeping in mind that what goes around, comes around. And there’s always that distance, that separation, management and union, salaried and hourly. Things have to be done a certain way, and done slowly.
The plant and mine are two different worlds, something like Rome and Constantinople before the fall. Feelings of alienation are stronger at the plant and there’s more separation and none of the grudging respect that comes from working underground. The ties are stronger underground. A sense of, well, not togetherness, not quite, still there is respect for a man's work underground. Underground everyone feels the feels the heat, the wet, the rough grayness of the stone, the dark. Off the main drift, off the man train, you live inside the light of your hard hat. Yellow-white as you leave the cage, it’s a tired piss yellow by the end of the shift. It doesn’t matter who you are, underground you live inside your own light.
It starts in the cages of the hoist. The orderly crowding into the cages, eighty men in mud and sweat stiffened diggers, ten deep, eight across. It’s intimate in a cage, you can feel a belt buckle pressing against your backside, a respirator pushing into your belly. You need the cooperation and consent of the man next to you to scratch your nose, no one scratches their ass. The Cager gives the bell rope a tug and the hoist drops down the shaft, slowing quickly, making you bend your knees. Then a quick up and down as the Cager signals the hoist to line up the doors. This is when it’s trying being in Labor Relations, knowing who has trouble coming to work, and why. You never ask who’s running the hoist. You don’t want to know, taking refuge in the knowledge that most are senior people and steady: one’s running for Union President. You hope it’s him, thinking he won’t screw with seventy-nine voters just to get to you.
The plant is just below the town, looking down, the mill is to the right, a tin building a quarter mile long. In the middle is the flash furnace, and the seven story high smelter with its six hundred foot stacks, behind it is the refinery, further back is the rod plant. They’re all hot, the plant’s all about heat. At twenty-one hundred degrees copper flows like water, sensitive to sudden changes in temperature, sensitive and intolerant. A little moisture in the cold dope used to cool the cauldrons of molten copper acts like an ice cube thrown into a deep fat fryer. Suddenly there is a couple tons of molten copper flying through the crane aisle. The burn marks five stories up in the smelter crane aisle bear witness to this volatility, as do the windows in the overhead cranes pock marked with copper splatter. Making copper is an art of transitions, melding heat and copper concentrate together - timing is everything.
Outside it can be a hundred and ten, inside the smelter it’s twenty degrees hotter, and that’s before the monsoon. The monsoon comes in late July, early August; its mugginess brings an edginess to people and thunderstorms in the afternoon. Tempers flare and people do strange things, filing strange grievances, harassment grievances: ‘my supervisor watches me’ grievances. Grievances alleging sexual harassment, of little clay penises left on lunch boxes, not to be mistaken for say, short, fat, gray snakes. No, it’s got to be little, gray, clay penises. Says, she knows a penis when she sees one. There are fewer people at the plant, but they file more grievances. Grieving gives them something to do, sitting in the cool rooms waiting to go back to work. It’s hot and you need those cool rooms and something to do as you wait.
Senior people take their vacations in the summer, maybe going back to Michigan or camping out in the White Mountains with the kids. Sensible people avoid the plant during monsoon season, increasing the concentration of the senseless and irritable, and adding to the problem. The monsoons come up sudden and violent, thunder and lightning crackling, snapping, rain so heavy it’s hard to breathe, sometimes it hails. Then, for about a half hour, the air is cool and fresh and everyone wants to just breathe. There is no such feeling after a grievance hearing where the emotional mugginess lingers well into the ride home.
Martha’s grievance hearing sticks in my mind for some reason, I don’t know why. It wasn’t always that good. A strike was narrowly averted not too many years before, shortly after a double wide trailer was blown up, some say to underscore the seriousness of their position - someone’s position. The unions said they had nothing to do with it. Though they said it was a miracle only a trailer was destroyed, given the company’s heavy handed attitude toward their employees. Employees who come to work sick, too poor to afford health care, now that the company sold the hospital. Not to mention the ones being turned out of their homes. Homes they’ve lived in since they were children, since their parents were children. Now the company wants to sell their homes, their town, turn it into some kind of resort. Sell it to the snowbirds from Chicago so they can watch the sunrise as it tints the smelter’s smokestacks with rose; see the moonlight on the tailings. Damn all snowbirds and their fat assed RV’s and trailers.
I must have heard it fifty times. Who knows who blew up the trailer, could have been anyone? The federal people gave up and left, saying anyone could have done it. After that no one cared much about who did it. Someone did it, and truthfully, anyone could have done it. A mine uses a lot of explosives, round white beads in long sausage like tubes, just needs a blasting cap. Anyone can make a bomb underground and most have, at one time or another. It’s a mining tool and commonly used. Even Shoe Tappers will use bombs to clear a jammed raise. Wrap some powder around the end of a long stick, fix a blasting cap. Tie two, maybe three sticks together end to end, if you need to get way up there, being careful not to get killed sticking your head up a raise like that. Muck can come unstuck all by itself, and there you are, dead as hell, your old lady rich, talking to some strange man, say Blondie, somebody like that or worse than that. Blondie is ok, wouldn’t do that, not to a friend. Still, men watch their wives around Blondie, he has a way with women. Anyway, powder is not that difficult to steal, people are in and out of the powder magazine all the time. The trailer was scattered across a few acres of desert and the point made.
The business was changing and the company had to change with it. That’s what was said though no one believed it. The hospital changed becoming too complicated and expensive to be ran by a mining company. And the town, the company built it back in the fifties. A nice little industrial kind of town, with schools and parks with baseball diamonds, a movie theater, stores and a bar. A place for people to live between shifts. A town with tree lined streets, Myrtles and such, lawns of Bermuda grass, all full of pollen. Those flat roofed, cinder block houses rented for forty or fifty dollars a month and kept twenty-five people busy fixing broken windows, replacing cooler pads, hauling away junked cars. Or it did until paternalism up and died. Now the company wants out of the town business, putting the houses up for sale, gradually evicting those who don't want to buy. Most stay, becoming home owners, up to their ears in debt from buying refrigerators and pickup trucks with huge tires. No one can afford a strike, but no one is pleased and more than a few are pissed off – no one cares about facts.
Anyway, the company decided to do something different, have a meeting, bring in some consultants, try to ease the tension. The price of copper was down to a few cents a pound less than it cost to make it, underscoring that it was costing too much to make it. Everyone knew we were losing money, and everyone knew a strike would kill the mine. Truthfully, some didn’t care if the mine closed or not, those with outside skills, electricians, welders, some of the mechanics. Most did though, most of the mine mechanics are big hammer mechanics, give it another tap, then hit it hard mechanics, skills not readily transferable. Most people wanted the mine to continue running, which was the whole idea behind the meetings. So the question was raised, what could we do differently to stay in business, open up those lines of communication? You know, sort of talk things over? In short, the company was in trouble, needing to cut costs and increase production and therefore, open to suggestion. Things had to change, everyone knew it, but change is always troubling. Everyone was tense, worried about their future.
At the meeting, the unions, there were seven, listened to what the company had to say, looking sympathetic and deeply moved, asking if they were still on the clock. Bringing all the union presidents and their elected entourage together at one time was gutsy. They didn’t care much for each other, liking management even less. So there we were, the unions on one side of the room, management on the other, and nothing getting done. That’s where the consultants first worked their magic, there in that divided room, convincing everyone that we needed to do this again. And strangely, everyone agreed, the Unions talking about easy money, laughing. Hey, why not?
In the beginning, the meetings weren’t so bad, we met in a little auditorium near where the Biosphere was being built. The auditorium overlooked a little valley with a Spanish style ranch house, its red tile roof showing behind some trees. It was snowing and the view, well it was worth seeing. Some one had decided holding the meetings offsite would make the unions feel more comfortable, and it did. The consultants looked pleased, having been paid in advance, offered a bonus in the unlikely event they could generate interest in more meetings. Paid some ludicrous sum, or so I heard it said, doubtless to a numbered account in an offshore bank.
Everyone was cynical at first. We speculated about the consultants, about whether or not their meeting supplies, flip charts, those big paper markers, were included in the tab, especially the tall bar stools. The consultant sat on these tall stools, one foot hooked on a rung, the other foot toe down, buttocks barely touching the seat. Ready to sprint for the flip chart, should someone have anything worthwhile to say. There was a lot of comment about the stools during the breaks, it helped break the ice. Not much was said in the meetings. Oh, there were speeches, that sort of thing, but little was said, all real progress took place during the breaks. During the meetings, if someone said something about the time, as in, “Is it time for a break?” The consultants would write down,’ time’ saying something encouraging, smiling, a trick familiar to dog trainers. The food was alright: donuts, rolls, fruit, sandwiches, that kind of thing, once we had pizza.
The pizza came after a group from the mill was introduced, saying they worked together as a team. Worse, the team was mixed, different trades from different unions working together. Now this was remarkable, and it was remarked upon, causing some red faces and lowered eyebrows. A murmur raced through the room, swelling to an ominous grumble. Someone shouted that the contracts were being violated. Other people shouted, “not so”, and “go fuck yourself” or words to that effect, actually, that may have been me. The consultants hastily called for a break, then, they called for pizza. Over pizza, tempers cooled and the subject changed.
Management thought the teamwork idea seemed promising, and it was discussed at length behind closed door with the consultants. They decided to approach the teamwork idea cautiously, the way a hunter stalks a deer, weight on the back leg, treading slowly, circling. The unions were suspicious of teamwork, alert and wary of assaults on their turf, their rice bowl. Saying, no damn team was doing their work, and productivity was not their concern, that kind of thing. The spark died and the consultants were told to back off and try something else, oneness, something like that. So they did, being sensitive to suggestion and quick to change. No one really knew where this was going, not in the beginning. Some said it was planned from the git go, but I was there and I know no one could have planned it.
More meetings were scheduled, bigger, grander, cautiously optimistic meetings, all about living in the future, being clear they didn’t expect much change now. We met in one of the local hotels, over a hundred of us, union and management. At first no one took it seriously, until we found the meetings were twelve hour long meetings, and each session, three, four days long, with five, six sessions planned over the next few months. Before we knew it we’d became professional meeting goers, passing notes, stretching out the breaks. The consultants called it ‘inventing our future.’ They said they were going to change our culture and we needed a Charter, a Vision: a ‘Who We Be, Wanna Be,’ in the future, sort of thing. No one knew what to say. Not knowing what to say, and time being money, a few executes started tossing suggestions into this awe struck vacuum, quickly followed by their closest sycophants. These shills began raising their hands jiggling in their seats, wanting to speak, needing to, like they were about to piss their pants. When called upon, they bleated out words and phrases that sounded coached, contrived, unnatural. The consultants turned facilitators, ran to their flip charts to write it all down, sometimes writing down things that not been said, sometimes before they were said. Suggestions about ground breaking departures, radical changes, couched in broken sentences and confused words, perfectly good words used poorly.
This was the new technology, how we were going to change our culture, save our jobs, words used incorrectly, and badly over used. Words like: technology, accountable, integrity, stand, everything being a stand. It led to phrases like: “What is giving being in the present reality?” “Managing the existence of conversation with and inside of integrity.” “Handling breakdowns from a future given approach.” And, “Unmingling a commingled reality,” my personal favorite. There were many more, most of them I can’t remember, repression, I suppose. I found myself alphabetizing them, cross referencing them, just to keep from going completely stupid. The idea of using language in such a manner as to disconnect biases and prejudices from issues was intellectually interesting when it wasn’t insulting.
I remember staring at the flip charts taped to the ballroom walls, awed to be part of such insanity, trying to make sense of our Charter, and Mission Statement, our Vision of the future, unable to take it seriously. It was, well, surreal. Yes, surreal. Reading it brought no sense of clarity, no sense of completeness, I just couldn’t get it. Maybe, it was the phrasing, the way everything was carefully worded in the present tense, “We are. . . . We be. . . stated positively, as if it were true. All about: union/management partnership, team based organization, employee involvement, and breakthrough results. None of which the Union would have sat still for, had it been said in plain English. There were one or two, “We wills, for some reason. All of it ending with, “This is our stand.” Written like that, few took it seriously, thinking it no more than say, a thinly disguised ploy to get us to think about things differently, which of course it was.
Shortly after it was printed in the company paper, Don lost his election. All the union presidents lost their elections. People thought they were crazy, not having been properly greased for such an intrusion. Pete slipped through this firestorm, though I don’t know how. This was a year or more before Martha’s grievance.
After the laughing and crying died down, things turned ominous, our decision makers actually went for it, the Charter and Mission and Vision thing. Another consulting group was found in California, radical and militant, friends of the first, I suspect, a spin off of a defunct seventies self-help group, the one with the long meetings, marathon meeting, break-less meetings. The one that wouldn’t let their attendee’s use the restroom. Said it forces you to prioritize, builds commitment, character. Some of my friends went to those meeting back then, back in the seventies, went willingly for some reason, coming back full of insight and awkward sounding words, sounding hysterically pleased with the experience. Gradually admitting it was expensive, and difficult, finally that they had been stripped emotionally naked and exposed to the chicken yard mercy of all the other sick bastards present. Told that they were not taking responsibility for themselves that they would have to go to more meetings, many more meetings to make any progress, offered a discount if they brought a friend. I'm pretty sure this was the same bunch.
The next round of meetings was like that, kind of a cross between an AAA meeting and an encounter group. No one ever told a miner that they couldn’t go to the restroom to pee, not twice. They'd pee on your foot. This round was all about taking responsibility which sounds good until you realized the vehicle being used to accomplish it was public self immolation. A spilling of the guts in front of bosses, subordinates, and co-workers, egged on by sadists, who didn’t have to work there day after day. One poor woman volunteered that she had been raped as a child. She was told to take responsibility for it. It was one of the few meetings I missed, which was good, because I would have handled it badly. The Company kept it quiet, settling the suit out of court.
No one had to go to the meetings, but everyone went, all thirty five hundred employees, three and four hundred at a time. The hourly employees were paid overtime, us management types got to keep our jobs. The meetings were voluntary, as in, no one had to work there, but it paid the bills and kept the kids fed. Perhaps it was the evangelical third degree approach that angered me, or possibly the fact that it was degrading, and just plain insulting. When called on in those meetings, I’d stand up, politely decline, and sit back down. I was a representative of management, the people who hired these jokers. So maybe I deserved it. How could I stand up and say this is all a fraud? Besides there was the off chance it would work. The company was spending millions on this madness, saying our future depended upon it. Cognitive dissidence, yes, there was that, and several other related ethical, moral and philosophic maladies - loyalty took a beating.
The financial books were opened early in the next negotiations with the unions. Even the newly elected union leadership could see that it looked bleak, that something had to be done to save our jobs, our way of life, though there was rumored to be two sets of books. Truthfully, the mine was marginal and we needed to borrow money, a lot of money, a couple of hundred million dollars, difficult, given the company’s junk bond credit rating. It was important to woo Wall Street into upgrading our credit rating, which was the real reason behind JUMC, though I didn’t realize it at the time, and damned if it didn’t work. Cost and production figures were squeezed and fine tuned until we saw progress. Anything that looked like progress was applauded. The self serving nature of our progress reports was obvious, but not so obvious as to render it incapable of being ignored, anything can be ignored if it’s for a good cause.
With the JUMC and the new culture technology working, things took off. Attitudes were changing, gradually, but changing, as people bought into the idea that all this malarkey was working. It was becoming easier to work with the unions. Everyone was infused with, or at least tinged with being in responsibility, being in integrity, and so forth. Cost savings were shared and high performance teams introduced. More teams were in training to be high performance teams using this new technology, many in areas where it made no sense at all, not that it mattered. It was novel, interesting, and people wanted to believe, needed to believe. Productivity went up, costs went down. And as luck would have it, the price of copper soared. Suddenly we were making money, lots of money, millions and millions in profits. We were a money making machine. We made the Wall Street Journal and the trade magazines for our innovative JUMC approach, our fifteen year labor agreement, our culture of change technology. There were tours by the bus load, people coming from all over the world to gaze and wonder. Companies wanted our people technology, our how the hell did we pull it off technology, our secrets. Our credit rating improved and we got our loans.
I avoided talking about JUMC in grievances, and as for our new technology - it was tempting, I mean, I wanted to; I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. The phrasing bothered me and the logic hurt my head. Still, I heard a lot about unmingling our co-mingled past and futures, from people like Pete, and hated it, though I tried to make it work, knowing it was all hype.
“Why you acting like this, Eddy, firing people? We’re partners, ain’t we Eddy?” Pete started saying things like that after the second or third JUMC meeting, about the same time we had Martha's grievance. He said it in a joking manner at first, gradually becoming serious, waiting for my answer. I was out of step and hearing about it from both the unions and significant members of management. I’d used the idea of taking responsibility in disciplinary hearings long before it was popular and meant it. It was an old idea with some actual merit. Maybe I was guilty of parading the JUMC, the Good Pig, although I didn’t ask anyone to confess their sins in front of a few hundred fellow employees. We needed to work together.
And damned if we didn’t start reading parts of our company manifesto in public, declaring that our unionized employees added value and afforded the company a major competitive edge, which wasn’t true, but Wall Street liked it and the unions liked it. Everyone forgot that adding a competitive edge was never the Unions job. Unions are there to keep management from acting like little gods and ass holes. A few management types spoke up truthfully, receiving poor performance reviews and getting passed over for promotions for their honesty. Some badly twisted mind, or minds, it was doubtless a team effort, put together a happiness squad of former union officials, calling them Organizational Development (OD). These inquisitors searched out the few who bothered to tell the truth, calling them nonbelievers, and road blocks, ratting them out to top management. No one liked them, but that didn't matter either. We were a team based organization, and everyone had to be part of a team. OD attended all the team meetings where everyone spoke of how well we were doing, how well we were working together. And some small part of it was true, indeed a good deal of it was true, or could have been true, if things had been different. Most people wanted it to be true, or many did, and others, management by and large, struggled to gag it down. Still, there was a vague, but growing suspicion on the shop floor that something was just not right.
By then our stock was up to eight dollars and change, a big improvement over the four dollars a share back when the trailer was blown up. Ah, but it came at a cost. Our managers’ eyes were beginning to twitch, always glancing behind to see if anyone was watching them, listening to them when they talked on the phone. They were being worked to death, threatened and bullied to do more. Middle management drones like me received little one-on-one’s, ending with winks and hints to shut up and go along. It came out on the ride home, making car pooling an exercise in primal scream therapy, alternating with cursing in a monotone. I began to suffer more and more from cognitive dissidence, and depression, repeating myself, staring blankly in meetings, behavior that didn’t stand out or call attention to itself having sadly to have become the norm.
It wasn’t long after Martha’s grievance hearing that the JUMC dream was sold for over three times the asking price of our stock, bought by a bunch of silly Aussie bastards from down under. The CEO said it was just too good of a deal to turn down. Said it was in the best interest of the stockholders, something like that, like he had just stumbled across the idea. He and the rest of management, top management, were rich now, very, very rich, millionaires. Trouble was no one wanted to bust ass anymore. It all paid the same to a Shoe Tapper with nothing to believe in, no one to believe in. The Good Pig was cooked; JUMC coming undone like a Ponzi scheme after the principals are arrested. The union was angry, the shop floor was angry, everyone feeling betrayed and used. Long before the dream was sold, people were tired of the buzz words, the hoopla, the well intended charade, now, they were angry. The future had been badly overdone, over sold.
The union officials who had supported working with the company were voted out of office. People who promised they would never agree to anything were nominated and voted into office, carried in on a tide of spite and anger, people proven to be too stupid to be influenced by threats or reason. And, as they say, everything changed, Pete wasn’t a Union Steward any more, Martha retired early, the Mine Manager was sent into exile. Now grievance hearings were hostile before a word was said, no deals, no agreements. The price of copper that had kept us going now was going south. You could hear the sucking flush as the Good Pig swirled round and round, sinking into legend, into martyrdom.
The new company, BHP, wanted us to live up to our promises, being slow to realize that our promises had been made in the passion of courtship, passion which had cooled with the dawn. Let the buyer beware, and so forth. They didn’t though; soon the new owners were angry and developing a taste for pork. Back at the home office, 'down under,' the new company’s stockholders were pissed off; stock prices were falling, heads rolling. It wasn’t long before the new company needed to economize, deciding to downsize, starting with us. When the early out packages were announced, I grabbed mine and walked out of the meeting to pack and be on my way by the end of shift. Truthfully I felt bad about it, running off like a coward, but I had had enough. I just couldn’t stand being there anymore, finding it hard to think, very hard. It’s strange suddenly coming face to face with limitations you didn’t know you had. Not long after I left, the plant closed; the mine flooded, and it was over.
All that’s left now is a mountain of white sand. Over the years, three quarters of a billion tons of muck had been skipped to the surface from that mine, each ton producing just twelve pounds of copper. The rest is this pile of sand behind the mill, or where the mill was before they tore it down. The sand is white, sterile, lifeless; finer than beach sand. I can’t say what chemicals might remain behind there, traces of arsenic, I suppose, not enough to get upset about. The mine was located on the backside of Mt Lemon, a forty-five mile drive from Tucson, Arizona, now it’s gone. The town the company built for the workers back in the fifties is still there, though the hospital closed. The plant below the town: the mill, refinery, smelter, railroad, maintenance buildings are gone, even the smokestacks are gone. And the thirty-five hundred people who had worked there, most of them are gone as well. All because some greedy bastards killed the Good Pig, killed it and ate it all at once.
We all swim in a sea of self-interest, some swimming further out than others. The corporate world knows this, being born of institutionalized greed, greed that reaches down to the shop floor, and the faintest whiff of opportunity. When opportunity fails for lack of substance and profits fall short of expectations, all promises are off, the best of intentions quickly forgotten. There is nothing colder than a negative earnings statement in a quarterly report. In our JUMC meetings we had talked of stakeholders, one of our buzzwords. One such stakeholder was the livelihood of our employees, their families, our way of life. In reality there is no stakeholder, except the stockholder, the amorphous stockholder who lives in abstract numbers and doesn’t give a damn about Good Pigs. When people become numbers, abstract symbols in someone’s program, honesty, integrity, and ethics become inspiring, yet deceitfully self-serving buzz words. No good intention, no promise will stand in the face of economic reality when the quarterly report makes bacon of all Good Pigs.
letters to the editor
Letter to the editor submitted 2/13/07:
Next year we pick which rich politician will run this country like they owned it. Half the senate is in the race, more have their paws out. This presidential election is like going to the dog pound. Will it be that wise old white female or that frisky black male? It is hard to think over all the barking. The dogs we have now are useless, neither Bush nor Chaney is safe with a gun and they canât track for spit. Must be former circus dogs given their dirty tricks, spins, and lies. Maybe we should just pick a known skunk for president so we wonât be disappointed.
Some say we broke Iraq, now we have to stay and keep breaking it, brilliant. Isnât it time our leaders learned to behave in a china shop.
There was some congressman on c-span saying global warming is just a theory. So is gravity. Try jumping off a cliff. We picked these idiots. To the fiscally responsible compassionate Republicans, I ask, why did you spend my tax surplus on a war? What have you done with the constitution? Wouldnât elections cost less if candidates had something worthwhile to sell?
Letter to the editor submitted 12/28/06, printed 12/31/06 added to and increased by my more unprintable comments.
It is this use and over use of the term, war that is the problem. We must stop using it so idly. I mean there is this war on terrorism, war on Iraq, war on poverty, on drugs, on ignorance; frankly we will never win any of them. They are not winnable. The war on Vietnam was not winnable. If a war can not be won it should be called something else, stupid, possibly. World War I and II were wars. A war is so terrible it can not be lost. In a war that can not be lost the whole country is mobilized, everything is put on the line, everything is taxed, everyone fights, and no one makes an unfair profit from it. If we are unwilling to commit everything, it is not a war. While we are at it, a war should not be so easy to get into; lies and warmongering should not be enough. We should learn something from this waste in Iraq. For that matter, we should learn something from the Chinese. They know about winning. It is time to go home, George. Ask Rove to throw a spin on it, say we won, declare victory and start packing. END
Well, ok, some didn't get the part about, "We should learn something from the Chinese." Pick up just about anything you own. Turn it upside down. Chances are it says made in China on the bottom. Power and influence tend to come from those who control the means of production. China controls the production of our stuff. China loans us money to buy what they make. That is power. That is capitalism 101. Add to this the common sense not to insult people and you have a winner. You don't have to attack other countries. You don't have to fire a shot. All it takes to be a winner is power and influence properly applied. Winning means achieving a favorable outcome: getting what you want. The Chinese know how to do this, Bush doesn't.
Bush is dragging his feet concerning Iraq; he knows he blew it and can't bring himself to admit it. That's about as positive as I can get regarding Bush's motivation. Were I a bit more pessimistic, I would say the man is an incompetent airhead. It would not be difficult to make a case for criminal conduct. Off hand, I feel confident in calling him a petty criminal in the field of mass murder, much like Suddam without Saddam's stabilizing influence. How crazy is that? How do we hold a twit like Bush accountable for his screw ups? It would make no sense to throw him in prison. Well, it would give me a certain fleeting sense of satisfaction. I am trying to work on that. Unfortunately Bush is not the only one who has exploited the passion of a country to justify violence. Apparently it is easy to do. It has been done often enough in our history; Vietnam and the Spanish-American war come to mind. I don't doubt that terrorist were behind 9/11, but why invade Iraq over it? The battleship Maine blew up because of a bad boiler. How many of our Spanish cousins died for that bit of opportune mechanical failure? LBJ knew within five hours that the Tonkin Gulf incident simply never happened, but hey, that would mean correcting a mistake, admitting a mistake. It isn't about the numbers who die though fifty one thousand died in the four days of fighting at Gettysburg, no one counted the wounded. We had to win that war and we had to lose it. The civil war was anything but civil as all wars are to widows and those lesser, sorry conflicts to which we are prone. And I hear this unspeakable fool say he will not talk to or treat with unworthy foes. Oh my sorrow.
I know it may sound crazy, but I am beginning to think Bush really is caught up in a black and white reality. He is not a bad man. He is much worse. He is incompetent, lacking the ability to separate his interests from the interests of the country. It doesn't get any worse. Ford has been getting a lot to attaboys for pardoning Nixon. People say that pardon allowed a wounded nation to begin to heal. I don't know, but I think it was about them that I began to seriously doubt authority. It happened slowly, over many years, but I have come to have deep skeptism for the interests of those in leadership positions.
It seems we just hanged Saddam. Which of his faults were improved by his extinction? I had quite forgotten him there in his cell. What God is as blood thirsty as those who pray to it?
The question comes down to, how can we know when we are being manipulated by our leaders? Bush's justification for invading Iraq sounded phony, but the bulk of congress managed to ignore the obvious as they leaped on the neo-con band wagon. None of them should be allowed to hold further public office. That might make them think next time. Of course it will never happen. Let's try another approach. What if our country had to act as if it were at war once it was declared we were in one? We must learn to use war sparingly.
For example, take the war on terrorism. Say terrorists do something terrible, whatever they do is unlikely to be as bad as doing nothing about Global Warming, yet no one has suggested declaring war on Global Warming. More's the pity. Global Warming is a war we really can not afford to lose. Unfortunately we must first suffer, then blame. It is easier to do nothing. It is always easier to do nothing, old habits being hard to break and we will have to break quite a few. No one does anything different willingly.
November 9 2006, The Democrats are in charge of the House and Senate, Rumsfeld is fired, Gates is in his place. Bush has started saying what he thinks the public wants to hear. There is no doubt he is angry, very angry, not an arrogant smirk in sight. The political game has become subtle and it is anyone's call as to whether he is up to it. I am curious myself. I think Nancy Pelosi is better at this subtle thing than Bush. I am so excited.
October 21, 2006, Well here is another letter the newspaper rejected. I suspect they had cause. Still, I am starting to get an attitude about it. Actually, after a moments reflection, I find I really don't care. Everyone one has an opinion and all opinions are foolish.
For the last five years this Republican president, supported by a Republican dominated congress has run amok. We are in debt to countries we should not be in debt to. Which countries? The ones thaty have taken our jobs of course. Our reputation as a proponent of the rule of law is in tatters: secret prisons, torture and wiretapping, holding people in prisons without trial. Our constitution has been undermined to increase the power of the executive branch. We have invaded and occupied a country that could do us no harm. The muslim world thinks we are out to get them and maybe we are. Who knows what our team of, "get tough" idiots will do next. Will we invade Iran, or North Korea? Who knows. Bush, Chaney and Rumsfeld are like of pack of dogs running wild. The whole sorry business should be investigated, but we know why it happened, why disasters like these continue to happen. The problem stems from a lack of oversight by congress, which in turn suffers from a bad case of party politics. The greater the majority of the party in power, the greater the likelihood that we the people will go unrepresented.
Congress has been adding ear mark special interest projects onto every bill they pass for companies that support their fund raising efforts. Political power should not be bought and sold to special interest groups, but they are, hand over fist. The oil companies run the energy dept. the drug companies run our drug policy. The rich own the newspapers, the radio and television stations, now they are going after the internet. Where is the FCC? Who cares? The FCC has become a rubber stamp for wealthy corperate interest and worse than useless to the public. Internet neutrality must be maintained for free speech to be meaningful, which isn't likely, but it is all we have left to voice our concerns. Just once congress should be concerned with doing the right thing for this country instead of supporting the party line. What happened to doing the right thing for Anerica? Bring back the ethics committee; conserve our constitution, our freedom. If congress cared about doing the right thing it wouldn't matter who wins in November. The problem is that power corrupts and the power of party politics corrupts absolutely. I voted for Maria Cantwell dispite her voting for the war in Irag. Go to her website and read what she had to say about the war. She sounded like a cheer leader for Bush. Compare that with Patty Murray's position on the war. She lays it all out, sadly she still voted for Bush's war, but at least she thought about it. I think Maria will improve with experience, but then I wait up for Santa too. Anyway, I hope and so, I vote.
Tomorrow the votes are counted. In Washington we vote by mail which takes a certain amount of excitment out of the process. I volunteered to help get out the vote, calling people, leaving messages. It felt odd. If these people have been paying attention they would need nothing from me, the issue3s are clear. It really is about Iraq. It is about arrogance and incompetence. Those who know that will not need me reminding them to vote, or how. The vote will count those who have been paying attention. I hope it will be enough, but I am not optimistic. The first lesson I learned as a child, the first I can remember, is that people do what they want and then make up reasons to support their decision. Perhaps it just defines my understanding of people, of me? It seems a bit cynical, true, but cynical. It is the nature of delusion, it is human nature. Even those results I approve of are a product of this delusion, it should make me humble.
Until Bush, I had always held that it was the bad guys that tortured people in secret prisons, who invaded other countries to âliberateâ them, that it was the bad guys who lied, cheated and used fear to control people. Bad guys like the communists, the Russians, Chinese, Viet Cong, Nazis Germany, the Japanese army of world war two, now it is us and I am deeply ashamed, We are the axis of evil today to most of the people in the world. Bush declared a war on terrorists, and then become one, usurping our freedom in the name of security. I would far rather be free and insecure than give up those rights I have always known as an American, like the right to a trial, to hear the evidence, all the evidence against me. To those who say we must do everything it takes to fight these terrorists, to be safe at any cost, that the ends justify the means, I say it does matter how the game is played. We are what we do, and what our government does in our name. Water boarding is torture, George. It is not ok. America must stand for something. Each day Bush comes up with some new way to embarrass me. Where did this fool grow up? Has he no values? I may have disagreed with his daddy, but I respected him. We were right to invade Afghanistan to punish the Taliban who harbored those who attacked us, but there was no reason to invade Iraq. It is becoming increasingly clear in my mind that the atrocities committed by our soldiers in that prison in Iraq were condoned by our leadership. These are the alternative procedures that Bush is urging congress to accept. I am frankly disgusted. We must uphold those values we tell our children, that it matters how you play the game. We must listen carefully to what these people; the Bush administration, are saying and stand up to them by voting into office those who will represent our values and vote out those who have not.
Letter to the Editor, March something 2006
In the name of freedom, the US Army killed an entire family and it was not the first time. We really have to stop doing this.
Eleven killed, including women and children, as US forces search for two suspected insurgents using air and land assets. The roof of the house was blown off, three autos and two cows destroyed. How are we supposed to win this war on terrorist when we act like terrorists? If terrorism is wrong, then we need to stop doing it and get out of that poor miserable country. We canât blow up a family in the name of democracy and expect democracy to have a good image in peoples mind. What are we thinking? And Bush is beating the same drum against Iran, using the same rhetoric he used against Iraq. He was wrong then and has not gotten any wiser. The man and his policies, all of them, are an embarrassment, if we canât censure him or impeach him, could we just convince him and his gang to shut up. I have voted Republican in the past, but never again, not for President not for dogcatcher. Our young people are being killed, our reputation is shot, and we are in hock, how many Trillions? Now we kill entire families to catch suspected terrorists. Are we nuts? Whose America is this?
I have put the letters I have written to the editor here in no real order *
October 21, 2006
For the last five years this Republican president, supported by a Republican dominated congress has run amok. We are in debt to countries we should not be in debt to. Our jobs have gone to these same countries. Our reputation as a proponent of the rule of law is in tatters. Our constitution has been undermined by the executive branch. We have invaded and occupied a country that could do us no harm. The whole sorry business should be investigated, but we know why it happened. The problem stems from a lack of oversight by congress, which in turn suffers from a bad case of party politics. The greater the majority of the party in power, the greater the likelihood that we the people go unrepresented. Political power should not be bought and sold to special interest groups. Corporate America has bought the newspapers, the radio and television stations, now it going after the internet. Where is the FCC? Internet neutrality must be maintained for free speech to be meaningful. Just once congress should be concerned with doing the right thing for this country instead of supporting the party line. Bring back the ethics committee; conserve our constitution, our freedom.
September 17, 2006
There is no doubt that losing the war in Iraq will cost America dearly. Far too much has been wagered in this war, too many lives, the credibility of America, the values we hold dearly: honesty, fair play, truth, our rights as free Americans, the financial future of thee next few generations of Americans, all wagered against the personal power, pride, and profits of the very few. Given the stakes involved it would seem reasonable that this wager should have been carefully made. It clearly was not. That the reason(s) for the war were contrived is beyond doubt. We were not in any imminent danger, Iraq was contained, and therefore, the use of force simply could not, and can not, be justified. The use of military force against terrorism is inappropriate because there is nothing to apply military force against, except individuals. A war only ends with some one negotiating, some one winning, some one losing, something, but here is nothing to win in a war on terrorism, unless we intend to kill them all, everyone related to them, everyone angered by such killing and resentful of their loss. All we have created in Iraq is hatred toward America. If you take the position that safety is worth the loss of personal freedom then the Iraqis are worse off now than when we invaded, for no one is safe there now. If it is better to lose your life than your liberty, how can the debasement of our constitution and the dilution of our individual rights by our own government be tolerated? Staying the course in Iraq accomplishes only one goal, it allows our president to avoid taking responsibility for having started it. How many people will have to die to protect that foolâs pride? Bush should be impeached. His entire administration should be impeached, and then the lot of them jailed for illegal and immoral acts against the American and Iraqi people, as well as criminal incompetence. There is no doubt we will lose this gambit into Iraq, it is only a matter of when.
What concept keeps a government from subverting the interests of those it governs? It isnât democracy, freedom or liberty, those are its benefits. It isnât the military, congress, the executive branch or the judicial, those are its concerns. It isnât the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, thatâs what it protects. The concept that protects us, that gives us our security as a free people is that of transparency in our social institutions and government. Freedom of speech is useless without knowing what to oppose, what to support. An authoritarian regime always clouds what they do by denying information to the public. They stifle whistle blowers, throw journalists in jail, classify everything embarrassing or compromising as secret and stonewall difficult inquires citing security needs. How can you agree, disagree, support or oppose what a government does if it keeps secrets that the public should know? It starts with our local government (where is the Zehm videotape) and extends to the Whitehouse (Iraq). We cannot rely upon our city council, our congress or the courts to fend off special interests, greed and corruption. We must have transparency into government decisions and then pay attention to what they do in our name.
An unpublished Letter to the Editor regarding little known weapons and their deadly use: the two liter plastic soda pop bottle. And no, this has nothing to do with trying to board an airplane. It is a local thing, a Spokane thing.
To the untrained eye, a two liter plastic soda pop bottle might not appear to be the assault weapon of choice, had it not been for Officer Karl Thompson, I would have missed its sinister utility entirely. Doubtless he was trained, if not particularly skilled in the ancient urban martial art of Whackado and Tazer too. But, whatever? Maybe if the bottle was frozen, frozen and tied to a six foot rope, I might have grasped its significance. I might well have appreciated the more subtle but deadly intent of this weapon had I walked a mile in Officer Thompsonâs jackboots, but jackboots worry me. But prosecutor Steve Tucker was in the know; all it took was a hint for him to bury the case. My goodness another wild eyed long hair, on drugs was he? Wait, wait, I got it, off his drugs, was he? Good thing Officer Thompson got him in time. Anyway, a harmless man is dead and all he wanted was a Snickers bar, maybe a soda. And six more cops joined this feeding frenzy, six. Some people like the use of force far too much, relying on it instead of common sense, or compassion.
Insensitivity breeds insensitivity and we all become more brutal. There is a terrible temptation for those with power to use that power, history proves this to be true. We must be constantly on guard not to allow weak and easily influenced fools to have positions of power.
After 9/11 we wanted to lash out at some thing, some one. Many of our political leaders jumbed on that desire and used it for their own purposes. They cobbled together "reasons" for invading Iraq and now we can't just leave because we broke it, now we own the breakage. So it just gets worse. We have dropped bombs on families in Iraqi homes because we thought insurgents might be hiding inside their house. Am I the only one who thinks this is crazy? Now our young men have lined up men, women and children and shot them because they proably supported the insurgents. They were close by and our young warriors were frustrated by this stupid war, by the pointlessness of it. I don't blame the soldiers. I blame our leaders who sent them there. Nothing good can come from hatred. Our Leaders have acted in a very dangerous, reckless fashion and they must bear the responsiblity for their actions. The question is, how could they? Nothing and no one can make this terrrible mistake right, but we can end it.
War on terrorism? August 2006
Given that it has been clearly proven that a war on terrorism increases terrorism, one might ask why countries like the United States and Israel continue to engage in it? Habit comes to mind. I can think of no other reason. Ok, one, politics. We the people demand that something tangible be done to teach these terrorist a lesson. We want our government to get tough, give them a good shaking, shock and awe their asses. So we sally forth, killing a few people, or a lot of people, and wonder why the survivors hate us. Terrorism is a police matter, a social matter; there is nothing to war against. Armies require other armies, enemy armies, to do their best work. Armies like to destroy things, big things, and are poorly equipped to deal with small groups and individuals. An army is not set up to deal with revenge, hatred, honor, religious convictions and so forth. Israel should know this considering what the Jews have gone through in the past. Common sense tells us that people resent being invaded and having their country, their home, their families blown up. So why do our leaders do it? Because it make them look like they are doing something, even if it is wrong. Protect us, we scream. Protect us from these crazy people who want to blow us up. Blow them up. People who strap on explosives, people who are willing to die to kill a few of us who did them no harm, these people can not be reasoned with. There is no need to talk with them, to try to understand them. They just got up one morning and said, Today let us blow ourselves up to terrorize these people we know nothing about. All things have a beginning. To stop hatred, you must know how it started. All people want to be heard, all people want justice. The voice of the mob is also a democratic voice, though sometimes crazy. Still, it should be listened to, and even sometimes, obeyed, when their leaders fail them. Peace does not come from the barrel of a gun, only annihilation can be found there, but that is what we are bring on us.
I do not trust those well meaning people of good intentions who tell me not to concern myself, that everything is just dandy in government. I believe in finding truth through trianglation. I want three sources, minimum and I prefer to hear for myself, see for myself. It is not that I think everyone has their own point of view, I know they have their own point of view and it usually isn't mine. You have to ask yourself why someone would spend two hundred thousand bucks to get a forty thousand dollar a year job or a few million for job thaat pays a little over a hundred thousand. And as for the presidency.....Someone is certainly trying to protect their interests and I will bet those interests are not mine.
Whether a plane falling out of the sky, a van filled with explosives, or in a back pack, or strapped to a young womanâs breasts, a bomb is a bomb. Tell me it matters whose death begets or begot whose, and who survived the artillery shell, the rocket, the âintelligentâ bomb or whose children died? Whose God started this fight; this war, this holy terror? War is terror. All war is about justifying terror and terrifying the just. Didnât God, if there is a God, declare peace long ago? In all fairness, in all truth, there will be war as long as we tolerate war, as long as we tolerate terror, and the murdering idiots who justify and support them. It is time to stop this insanity in the middle east. It is time to bring our troops home, somethings are just too broken to fix.
Why do we celebrate the Fourth of July? Is it a love of fireworks, a picnic in the park, a day off from work? Is it a celebration of being free of George? I mean the first King George, George the Third. Freedom means to be secure in our rights as individuals, secure in the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution, which means secure from our government. These rights are under attack by the Bush administration in the name of security, the War on Terror, of secrecy. The Bush administration can do anything it wants in the name of security. It is not why we went into Iraq, but it is why we are staying, though the Iraqis want us to leave, though our own troops want us to leave. Our freedom and democracy is being eroded in the name of freedom and democracy. How ironic? The list of self-evident truths that America used to stand for has grown smaller. Our one great protection is our ability to hold our government accountable. Freedom of the press means nothing without whistleblowers, without people willing to shine a light into the darkness in which the truth is held captive. We are gagging on secrecy, on security. What price have we paid for this security? We know we can not kill everyone who wants to attack us. We cannot lock them all up, or torture them until they have a change of heart. Israel should have proven that by now, if nothing else. Is it possible that any state formed in the name of a particular religion must fail? It certainly fails anyone in that state who is not of that particular religion, but that is another issue.
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There is a strong tendency to protect our own. It makes sense on a personal level. It is a problem when a government, or a governmental agency, military, fire, police, tax assessor, what ever, try to protect one of their own. The Bush administration is filled with such sentiment, but then, they have a lot of mistakes to cover up. People know that when the Bush administration makes a mistake it will try to hide it, or spin it. If all else fails, they will push the blame as far down the ladder as possible and call it an isolated incident. On a local level we have the same tendency. There is the sixteen year old girl whose picture was taken having sex with a fireman. What part of, sheâs not an adult is confusing here? Then there is the question of how many police officers it takes to subdue a mentally disabled man with no prior history of violence who was not doing anything wrong. Seven, using two tazors and a baton. Sorry, wrong answer, thatâs how many it takes to kill him. Confidence in a government administration, at any level, can not long endure in the dark. 6/5/06
A letter to the editor. May 2006
My grandparents busted through a roadblock of gun toting vigilantes determined to keep them out of California. My grandparents were from Oklahoma. People go where the work is. Sometimes the work goes where the people will work for less: China, places like that. China built a wall four thousand miles long to keep people out. It didnât work. We have people in Washington D.C. passing laws restricting legal immigration and a million employers happy to hire anyone willing to work. Thatâs how capitalism works in a democracy, hypocritically. We are all guilty. We say what we want to hear, and then do what is convenient and beneficial for our purposes. It works, it doesnât work very well, but it got a lot of people elected and even more rich. Personally, I am tired of being lied to by people trying to justify screwing me for their own benefit, so I donât shop at Walmart and I donât vote Republican. I canât say it does much good, but I feel better about not doing more. Itâs like being against the war in Iraq, but for regime change, Maria. Everyone take a spin.
I suppose I should have added that I don't know how to solve the immigration problem or even if it really is a problem. I don't know what to do about the price of gas either. I do think that people who do think they have the solution to either or both issues are full of crap. But they won't let you say crap in a letter to the editor. I didn't say that I was talking about Senator Maria Cantwell. She thinks the war in Iraq is, actually I am not sure, but she is for regime change. I think she has gotten used to being lied to. I could never be a politician. To me a wrong thing is a wrong thing and war is a wrong thing. I resent being lied to, also. Give the rich a tax cut to stimulate the economy. That's when I knew Bush was up to no good. Actually, it was the first election. He must be the first President appointed by the Supreme court. What have they done to my America?
I am not having much luck get one of my letters accepted by the Spokesman review. It is probably something I am doing wrong. It doesn't make much difference. It would be nice to think that I have something important to say, but I don't. It is important that I say it, whether anyone reads it or not. I am baffled by politics, local and national. People do not think or ask questions. Most people go for the easy answers and don't look very deeply. Iraq was a mistake from the conception. There is no such thing as a friendly invasion. Tax cuts for the very rich. Aside from being unfair there is a whole industry dedicated to finding tax loopholes for the rich thats SOL. Then there is the idea that idealogy is more important than common sense. Christian morality is the rule by rules which were made to be broken.
update letter was in the SR 6/8/06 found out the age of consent in WAshington is sixteen. Sixteen. The fireman wasn't preoscuted because the girl was sixteen and there was no photos because they were erased. no photos, no crime.
Hereâs one they ignored
One I am still working on.
If the opposite of âcut and runâ is âstay and payâ, at eight billon a day how much longer can we afford to be in Iraq? If we must, âstay the courseâ I want someone besides Chaney and Rumsfeld at the helm of the good ship Lollipop. They havenât got it right in four years, thereâs no reason to think anything will change while they are in charge. These two jokers have been pulling each other up by the jockstrap for over thirty years, isnât it time we got rid of them?
It all starts with the best of intentions that go so terribly wrong. For example this noble and patriotic sentiment: April 2006
I have to say right now, right up front, that our system of government has worked fairly well over the last two hundred odd years. The question we face as a country is simply this: can we continue to rely on pure luck to find the right people at the right time to lead this country into its most difficult hours. I for one say no, no, and a thousand times, nope. The leadership of the free world is too important to leave to chance. We need a sure fire solution, one we can depend upon to be there when we need it. As luck would have it there is an answer, yes sir-e Bob . We have the right stuff and the means of keeping a goodly supply close to hand, fresh from brush cutting holding pens in Texas. I am talking cloning here. Letâs clone our current gang of idiots: GW Bush, that Dick Chaney fellow, and Donnie whatâs-his-face, C. Rice, the ugly cousin of that pretty girl on Now. Clone them and let them run loose across the outback of Texas until our country faces a challenge where true incompetence is required. Then we just round them up, give them neck ties and panty hose. Then itâs yippy-ki-hayde dody; the four stooges are off to war.
The question that continues to plague me is, what does it take to be thought incompetent in the Bush Administration? It seems any screw up can be denied. We started a war for no reason. That should be a biggie. I canât think of a bigger mistake. Bush said he was given bad intelligence, though he said it needed doing anyway. He was re-elected. George Tenet got a medal for giving Bush the bad intelligence that Bush wanted. Wolfowitz was made President of the World Bank. What could we be thinking? The rich create reality for the poor and prosper by such deception, while the poor must struggle to live in it. Why on earth do American drugs cost less in Canada? Isnât it because our government allows it and the Canadian government does not. Our interests have been sold out to support corporate greed and we are told this is a good thing. Now they are after Social Security. Bush wants to make Social Security secure by making it unworkable. All we need is a slogan, a big lie: Clean Air Act, Patriot Act, Democracy, Freedom. Social Security will go the same way as affordable health care, clean air and water, the separation of church and state. The Bush administration exists only through deception, denial and distraction. What really worries me is the possibility that all politicians are about the same; the Bushâs and the Delayâs simply being a tad more disgusting than the rest. Perhaps in tolerating this crowd we have proven that we donât deserve anything better, that the Great Experiment has gone aground on the shoals of ignorance. The great sadness is that what they do lessens our quality of life and drags the rest of us through the mud of history. For a brief moment in time, America was truly great, but now I fear for our Constitution. I am afraid of the morally Right, the fundamentalist true believer, these people will destroy America. The intolerant religious fundamentalist, the true believer in whatever faith, are my terrorist, be they Christian or Moslem.
Bush points to 9/11 and says we are at war and authorized the NSA to wiretap Americans even though there was a legal method available that was just as quick. The difference being that the legal method required requesting the wiretap of a judge within seventy-two hours. His illegal use of power allows the NSA to wiretap anyone, you, me, anyone. He says it is not being used in this manner, but his administration is based upon deception and denial. How do we know who he is spying upon? When will congress grow a backbone and address this illegal use of presidential power? When will some reporter, some member of congress, someone, anyone, ask him why he thinks security is more dear to Americans than freedom? Are we really a nation of cowards? What does freedom mean if not freedom from being spied upon by our own government? Torture, illegal searches, what does America stand for anymore? If we are not willing to stand up for our rights, for the constitution, for separation of power, we donât deserve them. Remember, a war on terror is forever. Forever, and we but foolish mortals, what do we know of forever? If you buy the presidentâs argument that congress gave him special powers to, âfight the war on terrorism,â and given that the threat from terrorists will never go away, when does the presidentâs special powers expire? When do we suck it up and demand security without loss of freedom. We use the term, âWarâ too freely. There has been a, War on poverty, a War on drugs, and maybe a few Wars I missed, but the last War that congress declared was on December 8, 1941. Bush is not the first president to take advantage of a threat to expand the power of the executive branch. Lincoln, Truman, Nixon and Johnson come to mind, there may have been others, but Bush is the most secretive, the most devious, and the most authoritarian. Each of previous conflicts had an enemy, a beginning and end. Terrorism is a type of behavior. It is not an enemy that can be fought and destroyed. The Oklahoma City bombing was terrorism. There will always be crazy people who want to kill and destroy those who offend them. They are not worth giving up our freedom over. We must protect our constitution from all threats, especially from within.
I enlisted as a young man, served my country in a war that need never have been fought and was honorably discharged a little worse for wear, but in one piece. I have no regrets for having served. I regret that our political leaders used my service and the service of so many others so poorly. It took ten years to extract us from that mess. Today we are again involved in a war that should never have been fought with no end in sight. Once again our political leaders have used the service of so many, poorly. A war can be lost, but it can not be won. There are no winners in a war, only survivors. War is not a game. Any politician who sends our young people off to fight in any war that could have been avoided should be thrown out of office. Dissent is not simply a right; it is a duty in the face of incompetent, lying leadership. It is time to just say, no. This war was conceived in deception, no good can come from it, and there will never be a better time than now to end it. Truth, is not about politics, it is what politicians owe each of us.
p class="MsoNormal" style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; TEXT-INDENT: 0.5in">Life, if there is any intelligence to this design, it is beyond me. I have to admit, I am not in the design business. Some would say I am not big on intelligence either. Truthfully, the best I can do is to ask a few questions like, “What intelligence would create starvation? Why, just for fun?” Anyone who seriously thinks there is some intelligent design behind this world has to conclude that such intelligence, by definition, is amoral. What great designer would feel a need for malaria, or aids, or the bird flu, or all the really gross stuff that I can’t spell, in their design? I mean, is old age the best an intelligent designer could come up with? Or why does every generation have to be born so terribly ignorant? You would think that with all that dna, a little could be spared for a common memory, some innate aversion to hatred, war, something like that. War. What great genius decided we needed that one, or greed, or self interest, or all the other words for politics? If there is a God who created this world, could such a God be anything other than insane?
Is it a lesson then, all this pain and suffering? If it is, the poor must be the most learned of people and the rich abysmally ignorant of all life’s little lessons. The poor suffer the most pain. They see their children go hungry, some watch their children die of hunger. It happens quite frequently; as if there is something, something, yet unlearned there. Surely, if pain and suffering were meant to teach, to instruct, the poor have learned enough. The rich, isolated from all that money can buy suffer little. You might think that the rich would want to trade with the poor to learn something about life, but no. Maybe they think they can pick it up from TV? If there is some intelligent design behind what I see on the 6: o clock news it passes my understanding, for which I am grateful.
Intellectually, the intelligent design concept has only two conclusions. You could say it is simply beyond your understanding or you could say there is intelligence to the design of life because your religious belief requires that there be one. You will have to say one or the other, but I don’t. My religion has no creator theory because it doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter. Because it doesn’t matter, I don’t have to waste my time justifying why an intelligent designer would want children to starve to death or die of any one the thousand horrible diseases that infest this design. It doesn’t demand that I ask, Is this the best you could came up with, oh great intelligent designer? No, ultimately you have to either say, if there was intelligence to it, it is way past human understanding, much like calculus is beyond the comprehension of even the smartest goldfish. Perhaps goldfish have no need for calculus? Anyway, being beyond our comprehension makes it pretty useless as a theory. Or you can take it all on faith and try to justify all this crap.
December 29, 2006 in social/political commentary | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)