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September 1999 - Volume 31 Issue 8

Marxist Medicine... Bankrupt in Bushland... Permanent Temps... Two Sleepy Pilots... Litigious Jurists...

Federal judges thought they were being underpaid. What did they do? Exactly what most Americans do when they have a grievance. They sued.

Where did they sue? In federal court. Hmmm. Doesn't that raise just a tiny bit of a conflict of interest issue? Well, if it does, it didn't bother U.S. District Judge John Garrett Penn who ruled resoundingly this summer in favor of his brethren on the bench: "This Court concludes that history, precedent, and the law can lead to only one result" -- pay raises for us all.

The Washington Times is a very conservative paper that seldom acknowledges even the possibility of something good resulting from a federal expenditure. So I was delighted by a story by Kristan Trugman of the Times that attributes a rise in drunken driving arrests to an increase in federal funding. It seems that an increase in federal funds has permitted police departments to provide overtime pay for officers conducting roadblocks and other procedures designed to catch drunken drivers. The federal funds for this purpose rose from $165 million in 1997 to $226 million in 1998. The result was that the number of drunken driving arrests jumped from 14,890 in 1997 to 17,572 in 1998. I hope the editors of the Times and other conservatives will ponder those facts. Automatic opposition to federal expenditures really doesn't make much sense.

If you, like us, favor a national health care plan similar to the Canadian system, you will be pleased by the concluding paragraph of a recent article about HMOs in the Journal of the American Medical Association. After declaring the "experiment with market medicine ... a failure," it continues:

"The drive for profit is compromising the quality of care, the number of uninsured persons is increasing, those with insurance are increasingly dissatisfied, bureaucracy is proliferating, and costs are again rapidly escalating. We believe national health insurance deserves a second look."

Long ago -- in fact in a 1973 article by James Fallows -- this magazine's position was proclaimed in the headline "Better Red Than Dead." But we never expected that the AMA would agree that the market is not good medicine.

If you have reservations on Delta Airlines, don't count on them being honored. In the first three months of this year, Delta bumped 8,144 passengers. The next worst airline bumped only 1,938.

Speaking of the airlines, did you see the Associated Press report about sleeping on American Airlines? We're not talking about passengers peacefully dozing. We're talking about pilots. "When I woke up, I looked over at the captain. He was sound asleep," one co-pilot wrote in a report to his union. The next time you're flying at night say a silent prayer for the automatic pilot. He may be your only hope.

Another flaw in our system of health care was revealed in a recent report by June Brown, the Inspector General of HHS. It finds "major deficiencies" in our current system of hospital oversight. These deficiencies are not just matters of careless paperwork. They involve negligence that results in injury or death for patients. In just one state -- New York -- in just one year -- 1984 -- hospital negligence was found by Harvard researchers to have caused 6,895 deaths and 27,179 injuries.

Eighty percent of U.S. hospitals are overseen by the Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO). This group is funded by the hospitals and is thus unlikely to be excessively zealous in seeking out facts that could embarrass the folks who put up the money. Indeed, the HHS report finds that the JCAHO surveys, which are conducted every three years, are "unlikely to detect substandard patterns of care or individual practitioners with questionable skills." "They are foxes guarding the chicken coop," Janet Bass of the Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals observed to The Washington Post.

Hospitals are informed in advance of visits by most JCAHO surveyors and given plenty of time to clean up their act for the inspection. Even the five percent of surveys that JCAHO classifies as "unannounced" involve advance notice of 24 to 48 hours.

You've probably never heard of Neelam Tiruchelvam. But he was a good man. In Sri Lanka, he was the leading force for reason in the bitter ethnic conflict between the Tamil and Sinhalese. "He represented," said one admirer, "the essence of peace, sanity, good will -- all the abiding human values." He was assassinated. There should be a special circle in hell reserved for those who kill peacemakers. Joining them should be all the zealots who torpedo efforts to peacefully resolve religious and ethnic conflict in the Middle East, Northern Ireland, Rwanda, and the rest of the world.

I admire Suzannah Lessard's review of Blanche Wiesen Cooke's second volume of her biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, especially its insight into the relationship between Eleanor's lesbianism and her husband's philandering. My only regret is that neither Lessard nor Cooke seems to understand the significance of Lorena Hickock's bluntly candid reports on how the WPA was doing in the field. This gave the Roosevelts essential information for governing. Few other White Houses have understood how important it is to know what programs are really accomplishing and how they could be made better. Hickock was not just Eleanor Roosevelt's lover. She was a great pioneer in the art of making government work.

When Jeffrey Toobin suggested in The New Yorker this summer that Bill Clinton might run for the senate from Arkansas in 2002, it was big news to much of the media. Which just goes to show why they shouldn't miss a single issue of The Washington Monthly. Here's what we said in April 1997: "If Bill Clinton can't succeed himself, why does he continue to behave like a politician running for office? My guess is that it is because he does plan to run again. Not for president, but for the Senate. In 2002 against the Republican Tim Hutchinson, who last fall won the Arkansas seat held for many years by David Pryor, a Democrat who retired."

There are, in fact, many areas in which the federal government needs to spend more money. One is education. The Washington Post recently reported an encouraging trend: The percentage of children aged three to four enrolled in preschool programs rose from 45 to 48 percent. That still means that 52 percent of children aren't getting this experience. Since there is so much research showing how important the early years are to the development of a child's mind, that truly is a national disgrace.

"More than one-fourth of the D.C. police officers who are supposed to be on the street spend more than half of their shift killing time in D.C. Superior Court," reports Jim Keary of The Washington Times. Like many truths about local government, this is truer in the District but still true in many other jurisdictions.

"They sleep, they eat, but mostly they hang around waiting to testify at a trial that almost never comes," Keary continues. "And taxpayers get an $8.4 million tab for the officers' services."

This is all due to chaotic court schedules that are the result of the effort of clerks to serve the convenience of lawyers and judges, with considerably less regard for jurors, justice, and the taxpayer.

I applaud Jim Keary for this article. I've been trying to get someone here to write it for years. The problem is that good writers, whether liberal or conservative, tend to look at criminal justice in terms of its most dramatic manifestation -- the death penalty. Next comes police brutality. Almost no one writes about the main problem, which is incredible inefficiency and incompetence.

If your broker goes broke, what happens to the money you have invested with him? Supposedly if he's reputable it's insured by the Securities Investor Protection Corp., a non-profit corporation funded by brokers. But don't assume the SIPC is like the FDIC, which insures bank deposits. The FDIC is a federal agency, the SIPC is not. If your bank fails, you're sure of getting back all your deposit up to $100,000. The SIPC also promises to repay cash up to $100,000 but it is not federally guaranteed. The SIPC further promises to repay the value of stocks and bonds up to $500,000. But that doesn't insure you against loss in the value of your stocks and bonds while they're in the broker's hands. If their market value declines 50 percent, you only get the remaining 50 percent, not what you originally paid. And are you sure to get that? The SIPC's assets at the end of last year were a bit more than $1 billion. Could that cover a default by just one financial giant? Say a Merrill Lynch or Fidelity? The total amount of investors' money held by Fidelity is roughly $800 billion. The Magellan Fund alone has $94 billion.

Did Bob Bennett give Bob Woodward information about private conversations with the president, which appeared in Woodward's latest book, Shadow? That could violate attorney-client privilege. It's hard to see who else could have been the source. At one point, Woodward describes a walk Clinton and Bennett took on the White House grounds in which they discussed the president's sexual behavior and says "Perhaps the intimacy of the walk ... led to the candid discussion." Does that sound like anyone else was with them?

Bennett is not the first Washington lawyer to play the big shot insider by revealing client confidences. In his biography of the late Edward Bennett Williams, Evan Thomas notes: "Williams was sometimes indiscreet, using his clients' foibles and misadventures as fodder for story-telling." Williams, in fact, was suspected of having been a Woodward source for All the President's Men. During the period 1972-73 covered by the book, Williams was both an attorney for The Washington Post and was a close pal of Ben Bradlee's. Plus, through his role as an attorney for parties involved in the Watergate scandal, he was aware of information that could and did appear in All the President's Men.

"I don't remember debates," says George W. Bush. He's talking about 1968, the year he graduated from Yale. He must be the only person living in New Haven that year who does not. The campus was alive with debate about Vietnam, about whether and how to escape the draft or go to jail, about whether to work for Bobby or Gene. The year began with the Tet offensive in Vietnam, then came McCarthy's victory over LBJ in New Hampshire, followed by Robert Kennedy's entrance into the presidential race and LBJ's withdrawal. All of those events involved the Vietnam issue. Bush is either lying or else he was brain dead during a critical period of the history of his generation and of his country.

Remember how Bill Clinton boasted about his program to put 100,000 new police officers on the street? He was so eloquent that in your mind's eye you actually saw the cops walking their beats, protecting little children and corner stores from criminals. But the fact is that even by September 30, 2000, the administration will be able to deploy only 59,765 new officers, according to a report by Michael Bromwich, the Justice Department's Inspector General.

The number of temps has almost tripled since 1990. Many of these workers are not really temporary -- in fact most have been in their jobs for more than six months -- but they are called that so their bosses can avoid providing health insurance, sick leave, and other benefits. Reputable companies like IBM are enthusiastic participants in this racket. Karen Ford just celebrated her sixth anniversary at IBM's Chicago office. She works a 40-hour week as a receptionist, but according to The Chicago Tribune's Merrill Goozner, to whom I'm indebted for this item, "The company does not pay for her health insurance and provides no retirement benefits." She is paid by Manpower, Inc. which has a contract to provide temps to IBM and many other companies.

Some folks are wising up to this con. In May, reports Goozner, "a panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that Microsoft's permatemps were in fact common-law employees of Microsoft and not employees of the temporary agency that cut their paychecks. That would make them eligible for all regular Microsoft benefits." Bill Gates, of course, has appealed the ruling.

Cell phoners are fined $100 plus $45 in court costs if they call while driving in Brooklyn, Ohio. "Things have gotten a little out of hand, don't you think?" the Cleveland suburb's Mayor John Coyne told Dirk Johnson of The New York Times. "Pull off the road if you want to use an electric shaver, if you want to put on lipstick, if you want to use a cell phone. But if you're driving, for goodness' sakes, then keep two hands on the wheel."

For this alone Mayor Coyne has immediately been enshrined in The Washington Monthly's Hall of Fame. But he is also noteworthy for several other reasons: In 1966, Brooklyn was the first town in the country to require seat belts. Was Coyne around way back then? You bet! He's been mayor for more than 50 years.

Bill Mauldin, the brilliant World War II cartoonist, once drew a beautiful mountain vista with a sign posted in front that read "For Officers Only." The lot of the enlisted man is somewhat improved today but the brass still saves the best for itself. Recently, the Navy was caught secretly diverting $5.6 million from its readiness budget to pay for improvements on three Admirals' residences, bringing to $10.4 million the total amount it had spent in upgrading the Admirals' homes in the last seven years. That's $3.4 million per house just on repairs, points out Rowan Scarborough of The Washington Times, "enough to buy a palatial residence in the Washington area's most exclusive neighborhoods."

The money was not taken from the Navy's housing budget, where it might have revealed an embarrassing contrast between expenditures on housing for officers and enlisted men. Instead it was siphoned from the Operation and Maintenance budget which is supposed to pay not for palatial residences but for such essentials as fuel and spare parts to keep our military in fighting shape.

The Republican view of the census may change soon. Traditionally, Republicans have voted against attempts to make sure everyone is counted in the census. Their view seems to be that the more people, the more Democrats there are likely to be. But once they absorb the news that George W. Bush is way ahead of Gore in polls of Hispanic voters, I predict that the GOP will quickly become the party of inclusion. I can just see Trent Lott solemnly intoning, "We can't deny these splendid fellows the opportunity to be counted."

Back to those cell phones for a minute. Their manufacturers say, according to The New York Times, "the issue should be the driver, not the telephone." Doesn't that remind you of the National Rifle Association and the firearms industry, who have long contended the problem isn't the guns but the people using them? The answer is, of course, that if people don't have the gun or the phone, however much they might like to fire or dial, they can't.

The ultimate answer to the problem is to prohibit the use of cell phones in moving cars and provide every car with a speakerphone that can only reach emergency frequencies, so that drivers can call for police and medical assistance or a tow truck but not gossip, argue, or otherwise distract themselves.

A growing problem in the insurance business is the use of fraudulent medical reports by supposedly respectable companies like State Farm. In order to protect themselves from inflated claims, the companies have taken to seeking "independent" medical evaluations from groups whose dedication to low-balling sometimes, or even often, exceeds honest bounds. In one case a federal judge characterized the medical review company selected by State Farm as "a completely bogus operation," according to Edward Walsh of The Washington Post.

The stock market analysts who appear regularly on CNBC and the other financial news shows have become the nation's new all-purpose gurus. The day the giant Florida verdict against the tobacco companies was announced, did reporters consult lawyers about the decision? Of course not. "Verdict against Big Tobacco will not hold up, analysts say," is the headline The Washington Times put on a story that ran not in the paper's business section but in the front of the paper as part of the national news. The first two experts quoted were Jonathan Fell of Merrill Lynch and David Adelman of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter.

"Toothless tiger" is what I suspected the National Gambling Impact Study Commission to be. But it did somewhat better, first recommending a tax on state lotteries and casinos to finance efforts to deal with gambling addiction and then repudiating misleading advertising for state lotteries. The former is surely right. Those who profit from gambling should pay for the treatment of the addiction they encourage. The latter, as regular readers know, has been one of the outrages that drives me 'round the bend. How could the people of this country come to accept the immorality of a state's luring people, especially the poor, into gambling with ads that disgracefully exaggerate the possibility of winning!

There are other disturbing aspects about the fantastic growth of the gambling industry in recent years. One is that we seem to be assuaging our guilt about our treatment of Native Americans by letting them corrupt the rest of us with their casinos. There's something bizarre about the $2.5 billion annual take of the Mashantucket Pequot tribe's casino in Connecticut. The tribe has just 500 members.

A fact that could derail the gambling industry was noted by commission member Richard Leone in a recent appearance on Ben Wattenberg's television show on PBS. Gambling debts are legally unenforceable in the great majority of states, including New York and California. So tell your friends who have made fools of themselves in Atlantic City that they may not have to pay up after all. Just check your state law and cross your fingers that Donald Trump doesn't employ hit men.

One of the classic devices of the lazy reporter who needs an average man quote for a story about life in the city is the cab driver interview. But as we all know, Manhattan has become so upscale that a cup of tea can cost $3 and a Central Park West apartment can go for $7.5 million. Where does a reporter go now for his average man interview? For The Washington Post's Michael Powell the answer was simple: the limousine driver.

~Charles Peters