A hero at risk

Why has Warren Buffet risked his reputation for wisdom and objectivity to defend Goldman Sachs and Moody’s? Those who have admired Buffet’s support for the estate tax and opposition to the unfairness of the payroll tax, both of which are against his own self-interest, are puzzled by his unqualified defense of Goldman and Moody’s, which at first blush seems to be motivated by a desire to protect his own pocketbook.

I got to know Warren forty years ago when he was good enough to put money in the Washington Monthly at a crucial time in its struggle for survival. I have never met a smarter man, nor one capable of a higher degree of objectivity. So I suspect somewhere in that great brain is the knowledge of what’s wrong with Goldman and Moody’s. I also suspect that his not speaking out is motivated not by a concern for his personal wealth but by a concern for the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway. He too struggled early on, developing a fierce loyalty to the investors who showed faith in him. That loyalty has never wavered. Unfortunately, I fear it has now led to a defense of the indefensible and risks a permanent stain on his reputation.

Wall Street’s rinse and repeat

If you are the kind of person who despairs of any real change ever happening, your conviction will definitely not be shaken by this recent headline in the Wall Street Journal: “Perks Keep Rising on Wall Street.” Additional support for cynicism comes from another Journal story: it says that Citigroup, Bank of America, and Deutsche Bank are still juggling their books to conceal debt in their quarterly financial reports to the public. You would think that this practice, first exposed in the Enron scandal, would long ago have been abandoned by respectable companies. But they’re still at it.

Psst! Got any Motrin?

If you remember Johnson & Johnson’s prompt and public recall of Tylenol when a handful of bottles were found to have been poisoned, you will weep at what the firm is reported to have done when it recently learned that defective Motrin was being sold. Instead of informing the FDA and announcing a public recall, it hired contractors to try to quietly buy up the product in stores around the country, even instructing the contractors never to mention the word “recall.” The firm’s McNeil subsidiary finally announced a recall after one of its contractors accidentally dropped his instruction sheet on a pharmacy’s floor, resulting in a tip to the FDA.

Massey’s canaries

“We’d be marked men” if we complained about safety problems, a miner at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch Mine recently told a congressional committee. He describes a fear that haunts many miners: blowing the whistle could cost a man his job, and with it the ability to support his family.

Still several miners and family members found the courage to tell the committee, in the words of the Charleston Gazette’s Ken Ward Jr., of a culture that “put production ahead of safety and where violations were corrected only after company guards warned that inspectors were on their way underground.”

Crossed-fingers management

A few issues ago I noted the tendency of White Houses to devote little or no attention to the vast bureaucracy underneath, crossing their fingers and hoping any disaster down below can be avoided on their watch. The fiasco with the Mineral Management Services is the latest example of the danger of inattention at the top.

One reason that White Houses tend to avoid bureaucratic oversight is that the task seems impossible, but it is not. In 1939, Franklin Roosevelt moved the Bureau of the Budget, now called the Office of Management and Budget, under the direct control of the White House, and expanded its role, not just to oversee the finances of the various government agencies but to monitor the performance of their missions. Unfortunately, the eyes-and-ears function has often been downplayed by subsequent administrations. I’ve seen little indication that OMB Director Peter Orszag or Obama himself understand its importance. The OMB is now too small to carry out the eyes-and-ears function. Many factors, including an infinitely curious president, go into effective oversight of the bureaucracy. But simply doubling the size of the OMB—which means hiring only 500 more employees, assuming those employees have the skills of good reporters—would be a major step forward.

Boys on the plane

There is some good news. I was, for example, delighted to hear from Brian Stelter of the New York Times that press flights have been sharply curtailed in the last few months, a victim of cost cutting by news organizations that are struggling to stay profitable.

Stelter is talking about the chartered planes that used to fly much of the White House press corps on trips taken by the president. I could never understand why all this journalistic talent was needed to cover every presidential trip. It seemed to me that beyond five or six competent reporters little incremental value was supplied by each additional journalist. In fact, the only good I could see is that the fellows seemed to enjoy the liberal beverage service and the excellent meals that were provided on these flights, which, while paid for by the media owners, were arranged by a White House staff eager to curry favor among the reporters who cover the president.

Maybe seventeen accounts of the
president’s walk with Bo are enough

Indeed, it makes no sense for the White House press corps to be so big. Why waste all that talent on the same stories every day? Why not put most of them out digging for the facts that could prevent disasters like the oil spill in the Gulf? We see dozens of stories making essentially the same points about an Obama press conference, yet no one visits the mines six months after the Sago disaster to see if reforms have been instituted that could prevent another disaster at Upper Big Branch. And, to the best of my knowledge, after Obama announced his approval of offshore drilling in deep water, no reporter looked into whether the drilling could be done safely or if the minerals agency was making sure that it would be done safely.

More good news you may have missed

Another piece of good news, for me at least, also comes from the Times. Buried on the back page in the fourth paragraph of a story about “hospitalists,” a new specialty that advises patients on how to cut costs, are two facts I hadn’t known: there is a provision in the new health care bill that penalizes hospitals for avoidable readmissions of patients. Such readmissions now, according to the story’s author, Jane Gross, are the costliest mistakes for the government and the taxpayer and they are now occurring in one in five patients, gobbling up $17.4 billion of Medicare’s $102.6 billion budget.

Obama’s obsession

Jonathan Alter’s new book about Obama is mostly reassuring about the president. Alter describes a man just as intelligent, unflappable, and dedicated to the public interest as those of us who voted for him believed him to be. Two seemingly minor details, however, aroused my anxiety. One is that by limiting, at the White House counsel’s advice, his use of his BlackBerry to communication with only twenty-five or thirty people, he lost touch with the hundreds of people to whom he had been reaching out for advice and information. The other is his tendency to be a “control freak.” One of his friends told Alter that “on a scale of one to ten, with ten being obsessive control, the president was an eight or nine.”

Neither of these qualities were part of our most effective modern president’s character. Far from it; Franklin Roosevelt didn’t hesitate to delegate. If he was obsessive about anything, it was broadening his sources of information, not only using the Budget Bureau for that purpose, but repeatedly enlisting outside the chain-of-command sources of information.

Watching the watchers

Delegating and broadening a president’s sources of information should be inseparable. When Obama delegated the task of reforming the minerals agency to Ken Salazar, he should have followed up, not only by asking Salazar to report periodically on his progress, but by having OMB or other sources keep him informed about whether reform was actually being carried out.

Unfit to print I

The New York Times has not done itself proud with two recent political stories. Its recent exposure of Richard Blumenthal’s past misrepresentation of his military service, featuring one that occurred in 2008, buried the fact that Blumenthal had also repeatedly—and most recently this year—told the truth about his service. Blumenthal is not a cuddly fellow. Indeed, he can reek of pomposity and self-importance. By most accounts, however, he has been an outstanding attorney general. At very least the Times should have given equal prominence to the occasions on which he told the truth.

Unfit to print II

Another front-page article in the Times, this time about the Colorado Democratic Senate race, drove me even further around the bend. The reporter, Jeff Zeleny, did not state even one fact in incumbent Senator Michael Bennet’s favor, while heaping attention and praise on his opponent. Bennet is not some hack. As head of the Denver public schools he performed with distinction, displaying intelligence and courage (see Katherine Boo’s long article about him in the New Yorker from a few years ago). I’ve known and respected him for years. His brother James, now editor of the Atlantic, worked here in the early 1990s and became a close friend. So I may be prejudiced in Bennet’s favor, but the Times story was prejudiced against him. And, alas, the Times’ circulation is considerably larger than mine.

You’ll also enjoy the article on unfair yacht taxes

I hate to pick on the Times—it is, after all, a great paper, on which I and the entire country depend every day. But another front-page story aroused, if not my anger, at least my curiosity. The headline was “A Test Parents Fear and Loathe in Private Schools.” Why the front page for an article concerning only a tiny percentage of the American population, the Manhattan elite, a group that is already covered extensively by the Times style section? This was actually the second recent front-page article of concern only to student and parents at the Brearleys, Spences, and Daltons. A few weeks ago, similar space was afforded an account of the growth of the Brownie scout movement among girls attending exclusive East Side schools.

Peggy pegs it

Poor Obama. I’m sure when that BP well exploded in April he thought, “I can’t bail out another corporation: I have to make clear that this is BP’s responsibility.” In retrospect, of course, it looks like Peggy Noonan is right when she says, “The original sin in my view is that as soon as the oil rig accident happened the president tried to maintain distance between the gusher and his presidency … When your most creative thoughts in the middle of a disaster revolve around protecting your position, you are summoning trouble.”

To be sure, Obama may have been at least partly motivated by a purer thought than Noonan credits him with, namely a proper desire to hold BP accountable. But I’m sure he must also have contemplated the certain prospect that, if he had immediately seized control of the response to the disaster, the Republicans would have screamed socialism.

He’s not Rod

Unlike most of my colleagues in the media, I fail to see any criminal intent—or indeed Chicago-style politics—in Obama’s attempt to avoid divisive primaries by exploring other opportunities for public service with potential candidates against incumbent Democratic senators. This is in no way the kind of corruption Blagojevich displayed in seeking personal profit from the sale of a public office.

State sabotage

I still think that if Obama can survive his current unpopularity, the health care bill could turn out to be a major step forward in the history of this country and a feather in the president’s cap. Unfortunately, implementation of the bill requires cooperation from states, many of which are controlled by Republicans who can still sabotage it. Twenty states are suing to overturn the bill on constitutional grounds, and twenty, including many of the same culprits who are suing, have already refused to establish pools to help the hard to insure. And, most daunting of all, the most crucial element in health reform, the exchanges that can bring about real competition among insurers, have to be approved by state legislatures.

At least Glenn Beck isn’t yet on the staff

Any good student of journalism has to worry about Rupert Murdoch’s impact on the Wall Street Journal. So far there is little evidence that the news section has been corrupted. But a four-color headline taking up two-thirds of the front page of a recent special section gave me the willies. The headline read “How to Fight the IRS.”

Strengthen financial reform

I worry that the prolonged domination of the media by the Gulf disaster is resulting in too little attention to financial reform. Media sunshine is desperately needed to keep Wall Street lobbyists from weakening reform. Indeed, the proposals of both the Senate and the House bills need strengthening rather than weakening. Those sophisticated in the ways of Wall Street say the prohibition against proprietary trading by banks can be evaded by hiding it under the guise of other kinds of trading. Why not take care of that problem by prohibiting all trading by banks—it is risky and does little good for the economy as a whole. My friend and financial guru, Joe Nocera of the New York Times, says he would permit such trading only when it is conducted on public exchanges. Joe recommends prohibition of the collateralized debt obligations that turned out to be a major factor in the Wall Street meltdown of 2008. As for the consumer protection agency, he points out in his column that banks with assets under $10 billion are exempt. They just happen to account for 98 percent of the nation’s banks.

Government: fix, don’t nix

Even liberals are now waking up to the danger of the United States becoming another Greece—a country where the public sector is consuming far too much of the nation’s economy. What worries me is that the awakening will encourage blind anti-governmentism that cuts all programs without regard to their merit. Some can be cut, but many functions of government are crucial, demanding improvement, not elimination. Cuts can be made in salaries and pensions, which have in many cases become too generous. On average, government employees now make more than those in the private sector and usually have far better pensions. Automatic raises coupled with tenure have often resulted in civil servants making more than either their specific role or their ability merits. Pensions are often overly generous, in that they can be earned too early, as low as age thirty-eight in law enforcement agencies and fifty-five in other jobs in federal, and many state and local, governments. Fraudulent disability retirements have long been a scandal in police and fire departments. And pension padding is an art form that frequently involves concentrating overtime in the last few years of an employee’s tenure.

Another common problem in government bureaucracies is layering. There is an almost automatic tendency for a chief to hire a deputy and for his deputy to want his subordinates to become sub-chiefs who hire more deputies who want more subordinates, all of whom not only cost more money but make getting anything done require so many approvals that bureaucratic paralysis threatens.

Dropping the drop sides

One government agency that is reforming is the Consumer Product Safety Commission. After successive commissions first downplayed the danger that drop-side cribs would injure and even kill infants, and subsequently conducted only partially successful efforts to recall the defective cribs, the CPSC’s new chairwoman, Inez Tenenbaum, is making it illegal to sell the cribs and prohibiting their use in public facilities such as day care centers and hotels.

Way to go, Morning Joe

The hosts of Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, are giving their guests time to talk. This is news because most talk show hosts insist on interrupting the guest before he can get in a second sentence, sometimes even before he finishes the first. This has produced an entire generation of television guests who learned to tweet even before tweeting was invented.

Beginning with the McLaughlin Group in the early 1980s, guest interruption quickly became standard practice. The guest’s survival came to depend on mastery of the one-liner. Developing a thought of the slightest complexity was impossible. So bless Joe and Mika for showing that civilized discourse is still possible on the tube.

Increase your knowledge, hold off on college

Here is some advice that applies especially to people whose families can’t afford to pay for college: you don’t have to go immediately from high school to college. I come from a generation that profited immensely from a delay in going to college—we were serving in the military during World War II and found the delay produced greater maturity and greater seriousness about learning. Practically everyone who taught during this period speaks of it as the time when their classes were most exciting because their students were so much readier to learn, and so much more capable of thinking for themselves and not just parroting back what teachers or textbooks said. Incidentally, working in a paid job or serving in the military before going to college could make higher education much more affordable.

At long last

As a native West Virginian, I’ve long wanted one of our public officials to do what Senator Robert Byrd has just done—issue a statement that, as summarized by the Charleston Gazette’s Ken Ward Jr., calls for a “reconsideration for West Virginia’s relationship with coal mining, saying the industry cannot be allowed to dominate the state’s politics while causing needless death and environmental damage.”