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Hazzard County, Tacoma

Boss Hogg Lives!

Okay, here’s the scenario: somewhere in a town probably deep down in the rural South, the politicians decide unceremoniously to dump part of the city’s utility system. The line given to the townsfolk, is that the utility system is losing money. This issue of losses is hotly contested, but the town fathers are able to stall off an independent audit to determine if the utility is really losing money. The only daily newspaper in town is owned by basically the same group of people that run the town – they’re all good ol’ boys – so it spouts a nearly constant stream of propaganda backing up what the town fathers say.  Feeling secure, the politicians plow right ahead.  There are questions, however.

Why, you ask yourself, would anyone want to buy a utility that’s losing money? So they can take the losses themselves, instead of the city? Obviously, this is altruism’s finest hour!  But then you remember that the person buying the utility is one of the group of good ol’ boys.  Armed with this thought, you have to assume it’s a no-brainer the utility must be making money hand over fist!  Otherwise no one would want to buy it.  The good ol’ boys don’t waste money on unprofitable businesses. It’s just not done.  And cooking the books to make it show a loss is so, so easy.

The move to sell the utility doesn’t really surprise anyone because the town’s politics are dominated by the good ol’ boys, and they often make decisions like this. This is not these politicians’ first rodeo.  

Where might something like this happen?  Right off the top, most people would think of Hazzard County, Georgia, with Commissioner Boss Hogg running the show. It’s a given that everything Boss Hogg does, profits himself or his friends. That’s Just the way he rolls. Everyone accepts this, because that’s just the way business is conducted in that small fictional southern towns.  Or so TV would have us believe.

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Privatizing Click is not the answer

The whole problem with Click! Network is that their management are idiots. They never have had any idea how to compete in selling broadband access. 

Click’s always controlled the wholesale prices that the ISP’s use to set their prices. They kept the wholesale prices higher than they should have been because they were trying to milk the bandwidth for all they could – trying to wring out every little last penny. And they always followed Comcast’s pricing rather than trying something innovative – like offering discounted service for low income, handicapped and seniors. And they always lagged behind in speeds, making it hard for the ISP’s to be competitive, which has also affected revenues overall.

The issue of finances that has been hotly contested. Because there’s never been an independent audit of Click’s finances, we really don’t have any idea whether it’s making or losing money. But if management had learned their product, and taken the initiative and been more imaginative in their pricing and bandwidth offerings, it certainly would’ve helped.

Examples of Click management’s stupidity are manifold. One good example is when Comcast upgraded its network to DOCSIS 3.0, it took Click three years before they caught up. In the mean time, the Click ISP’s were stuck selling a vastly inferior product at higher prices. Do you suppose that ever affected revenues? Looking back right to the start, I can document probably a half a dozen examples of where this exact same scenario played out over and over and over. But Click management never learned from their mistakes.

The attitude of Click’s management has always been that once they offered some particular speed package – say 12 MB/s – then that’s all that people would ever want. That’s an updated version of AOL’s supreme arrogance, when their CEO famously said, “56K is all the people will ever need.” We all know what happened to AOL.

Click management never had a clue of what was coming down the pike in terms of bandwidth and applications. And so they were always way late to the party with upgrades.  Time and again, they demonstrated a profound ignorance of the market they existed in.

Their cardinal sin: they did not know their product. Not at all.

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Happy Labor Day to us all!

Picketer's being beaten by police

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In a day and age when organized labor seems largely irrelevant to many, this is an appropriate time to stop and reflect on the gains made by unions in the past 100 years.

Although no one seems to remember now, some of the most basic protections we presently enjoy – like Social Security and Unemployment Insurance – came to workers courtesy of the push from organized labor. This package also includes the 40-hour workweek, the minimum wage, overtime, the child labor laws and much more, including some very basic things like the right to join a union and the right to strike. Most of this was enacted as parts of President Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation.

But none of these rights and protections were just handed to the workers, even if they were part of Roosevelt’s New Deal. People died to obtain these protections.

The years leading up to the New Deal – particularly the 20’s and 30’s – were a bloody, bitter time for workers. Strikes – where people died for their union beliefs – were commonplace.

Back in those days, the typical scenario was that the workers would go on strike or get locked out, and then the employers would hire scabs, and detectives (like the Pinkerton’s or the notorious Baldwin-Felts Agencies) to “protect” the scabs. Then the war was on.

The strikers were most often cast as “Commies” or communist-dominated in propaganda put out by the employers – the “Red Menace” was a very common theme. The Chamber of Commerce and other civic organizations usually backed the employers. Often, local citizen groups, augmented (or supplanted) by the hired detectives and backed by the local governments formed “posses” and took on the strikers in open warfare – all in the name of “civic virtue” (cleaning out the Red’s). Occasionally the National Guard even got into the act.

Good examples of this sort of open labor warfare include The Ludlow Massacre (1914), The Battle of Matewan (part of the West Virginia Coal Wars – 1920), the Battle of Blair Mountain (1921), The Herrin Massacre (1922), The Columbine Mine Massacre (1927), The Auto-Lite Strike of 1934, The Minneapolis Teamsters Strike (1934) and the 1934 West Coat Maritime Strike (which evolved into the West Coast General Strike of 1934).

Hundreds and hundreds of workers died in those years, fighting for even the most basic of protections.

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This is how democracy dies

A liberal’s long journey away from Barack Obama and the Democratic party

  By Michael Pellegrini

About seven and a half years ago following the 2008 elections, I wrote a blog post titled America: Disgraced then reborn.     I absolutely gushed about how happy I was at the election of Barack Obama. I was dead certain he would right all the wrongs caused by eight years of George Bush, and particularly, that he would make good on his pledge to end all our wars.

To me, implicit in that promise was ending the phony war on terror. A “war” that was nothing but a happy contrivance of the Bush administration.

Looking back to September 2001, George Bush was nine months into what was shaping up to be an uninspired, lackluster, one-term presidency. Then 9/11 happened.

Speaking unscripted in a press conference on September 16, 2001, President Bush said, “This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while. And the American people must be patient. I’m going to be patient…”

Bush’s advisers craftily seized the opportunity and came up with an absolutely brilliant idea: everyone knows a country will rally behind their leaders in wartime. So rather than simply finding the 9/11 perpetrators and bringing them to justice, instead, they made Bush’s war official and decided to declare a generalized “war on terror.”   This also facilitated other plans they had.

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America’s war against Islam

From a Muslim perspective, this whole “war on terror” has to look a whole lot like a “war on Muslims.”

We’ve invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. Innocent civilian deaths in the Iraq war – and that’s just innocent civilian deaths by themselves – run overall between an estimated 110,000 to over 600,000 lives. Can there be many people over there who haven’t lost a friend or relative to the Iraq war?

Life under Saddam Hussein was actually pretty pleasant for a majority of Iraqis. He was a secular Muslim. The Shia Muslim minority was terribly oppressed. But the Sunni majority had the good life.

We come in and topple Saddam, fire all the Ba’ath party members from the army and civil service positions, kill as many as 600,000 innocent people, install an unpopular puppet government, torture people, lock up people for years and years in Guantanamo without filing any charges or giving them any due process, steal their oil, plunder their economy. Is that the way you make friends and influence people?

To the Iraqis we must come across as a bunch of Nazis.

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Are you ready for the oligarchy?

The thing that disturbs me the most about this methanol/LNG mess is not the methanol or LNG per se.   Rather it’s that these issues bring home the hard, cold fact that while we were sleeping, there’s been a coup.   Our city’s been taken over by hostile forces. Tacoma and the United States are both well on their way to becoming oligarchies.

When people talk about the country becoming an oligarchy on the national level, it’s hard to grasp.   We still have our homes and jobs, the same programs are on TV. We’re going on a vacation to Yellowstone next year. Cousin Steve just got married and the wedding was fantastic!   On and on. In almost every ordinary way, things are the same now as they were 5-10 years ago.

As applied to the United States, the term oligarchy is an abstract; it’s intangible. Because of the overt normalcy, it’s really hard to come to terms with. “Yeah, America is an oligarchy, you say? Hey did you catch last night’s Mariners game?”

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What can Port of Tacoma do to become more competitive with the Canadian ports?

To recap, Vancouver has a slight edge in certain factors like the cost of transiting terminals, they have more large super-post-Panamax cranes, they have slightly better rail delivery rates through state-subsidized Canadian National Rail, slightly better productivity, and they get a break of about $100 per container on Harbor Maintenance Tax.  And they have massive plans for expansion.

One of the most obvious things we can do to improve our competitive position is to improve our productivity, and having modern, state of the art equipment would make it a lot easier.  The slight edge Vancouver enjoys in productivity could easily be attributed to the fact that they’ve spent a lot of money upgrading their cranes and yard equipment.

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Port Metro Vancouver or Port of Tacoma? Who’s got the edge?

 

 

 

 

According to a report prepared for Port Metro Vancouver (PMV), their Container Traffic Forecast (which again, I encourage everyone to read), they predict that West Coast container volumes will increase between 3.4% and 5.7% per year through 2030.  Based on that, they’re forecasting their share of the traffic will provide increases for PMV from 3.51 million TEUs in 2014 to 7.02 million TEUs in 2030.

According to the report, they believe they will capture the lion’s share of this work because:

“…Vancouver is considered to have a better competitive position than its immediate competitors – Prince Rupert, Seattle, and Tacoma – based on a review of the following criteria:

  • Physical capability of the terminals;
  • Planned development of capacity;
  • Productivity of the terminals;
  • Cost of transiting the terminals;
  • Delivered costs to Central Canada and the US Midwest;
  • Intermodal capacity;
  • Import/export balances;
  • Suitability as a regional hub; and
  • Existing customer base.

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Port of Tacoma – moving boldly into the future, or sliding into oblivion?

 

I read a really good book recently, on the evolution of container shipping:  The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, by Marc Levinson.   It’s a great book.  Anyone interested in understanding the Port of Tacoma and/or the shipping business should read it.

One of the things that struck me was how quickly the shipping world transitioned from “breakbulk” cargo to containers.  Breakbulk was where everything was all shipped individually, or more recently, on pallets. It’s the same basic system that’s been used for hundreds of years. A breakbulk ship might take a week or more to unload, as everything was taken off piece by piece. But put the same amount of cargo in containers and the ship could be unloaded in just hours.   The cost savings from containerization were enormous. In the mid-50’s, the world was breakbulk; by the start of the 70’s, container shipping was big business.

It wasn’t an easy transition at all; the push to containerize was very contentious with many, diverse elements of the industry including the unions fighting it.  The ports as a whole were very skeptical – transitioning to working containers was quite an expensive proposition because of the specialized equipment necessary.

A few forward-looking ports including Tacoma decided to take the plunge, investing heavily in container cranes and handling equipment.  Many other ports did not, believing breakbulk would prevail.

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An open letter to the Tacoma City Council and Port Commissioners

 

Self determination is really important to Americans. That is after all, why we fought the Revolutionary War — so the American people could decide their own fate, not King George and the English aristocracy.

Well it’s obvious some people in Tacoma have forgotten that.

Most elected leaders in this democracy would err on the side of the democratic process. If a sufficient number of citizens were riled up about any particular issue to qualify an initiative for an election, the leaders would typically champion that as our democracy at work, and then abide by the results. That is what a democracy is all about. Rule for the people, of the people and by the people.

Except in Tacoma. In Tacoma, when the common people have the sheer effrontery to challenge the supreme wisdom of their elected leaders, the leaders go to court and file massive lawsuits to beat and club and force the people into submission.

The lawsuit brought jointly by the Port of Tacoma, the The Chamber of Commerce, the EDB and now the City of Tacoma against the Save Tacoma Water organizers unmasks the dictatorial, authoritarian style of our current elected leaders.

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