As we approach the New Year it is appropriate to reflect on the first year of Barack Obama’s Presidency.  This Blogger’s differences with Obama began with the early “outing” of Reverend Wright issue.  The disconnect between Obama’s campaign rhetoric and sitting in a bigoted church for 20 years was too great to get past.  It would trump any his political views.

The day after the election, concerns about Obama’s past were made irrelevant and the issue changed to how he would govern.  Many believed that Obama would move to the center, typical of most presidents after their election.  This was not to be the case with Obama.  Instead, he is governed from the far Left, which is being reflected in his historically low poll numbers going into his first New Year in office.  The American majority is centrist, tilting towards conservative.  It has become obvious that Obama has no intention of governing for that majority, but instead will focus on remolding America in a Leftist-European manner.

Liberal columnist, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, has the good fortune to have a conservative brother, Kevin, who she allows to rant in her column once a year.  Not to worry Maureen, every family has at least one of them!  Last week Kevin included his reflections for 2009 that speaks well for what middle America thinks of the “goings-on” in this country.  Not to reinvent the wheel, I’m pleased to publish Kevin’s reflections below.

To President Obama: Thank you for saving the Republican Party and for teaching all of us that too much of anything is a bad thing.

To Bill Clinton: You did too much work on Northern Ireland for the Nobel committee.  Next time, do nothing.

To Harry and Nancy: “The Twilight Zone” once had an episode where the town got the exact opposite of what it wanted.  Farewell, Harry!

To John McCain: Thank you for your chivalry in banning Palin attack dogs – including my sister – from the campaign plane.

To Sarah Palin: Keep up the good work.  Anyone who annoys Keith Olbermann that much is a friend to all of us.

To Glenn Beck: Thanks for being the only journalist interested in stories that used to win Pulitzer Prizes.

To Al Franken: So, 250 years of Senate tradition trashed.  Stuart Smalley would have done better.

To Desirée Rogers: Get back to the gate.  Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson can’t get in.

To the Salahis: Thank you for showing us that shame has no bottom.

To Valerie Jarrett: So much for the Olympic Village in Chicago.  Whoops.

To Chris Dodd: The only thing lower than your polls is your mortgage interest rate.

To Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mike Mullen: The military should be more interested in the men and women who serve than in celebrating diversity.

To the Democratic Senators: Go last next time; the bribes are much bigger.

To Sheldon Whitehouse: You, senator, are an idiot.

To Dick Cheney: You, sir, are a patriot.  Thanks for firing back.

To President Bush: Thank you for your dignity.  Did you really start the plague in the 14th century?  Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

To Hillary: Who knew how much you would be missed?

To Al Gore: A global warming conference in the middle of a Copenhagen blizzard is not a good visual.

To Max Baucus, Eliot Spitzer and John Edwards: Party on, dudes.

To John Ensign, Mark Sanford and David Vitter: Don’t party on, dudes.

“For the want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for the want of a shoe the horse was lost; and for the want of a horse the rider was lost, being overtaken and slain by the enemy, all for the want of care about a horseshoe nail.”  —  Benjamin Franklin

 Now, more than ever, society must rely on real economic growth to make the pie larger and allow us to choose how to divide the pie.  In the hot policy areas – global warming, health care, unemployment, alternate energy, retirement security, national security, adequate food – all solutions depend upon our ability to grow the economy.

 The private sector, especially in the last 30 years, has demonstrated its nearly unlimited ability to create value.  The contrast between productivity growth in the competitive sectors (ag, manufacturing, distribution, communications, mining, transportation, media, banking, IT, services) and the others (government, social services, utilities, education, health care) is instructive.  About 60% of the economy delivers 3-5% annual productivity improvements, while the other 40% is stuck at 0-1%.

 The slow growth sectors are all in areas where market failure is the rule – sometimes because services are natural public goods and sometimes due to natural monopolies, externalities, or unequal information.  In each case, there is a key role to be played by the government in shaping these industries to pursue continuous improvement as happens naturally in other sectors.

 Unfortunately, our political system does not produce “philosopher kings” who cooperate to find optimal solutions.  In a two-party democratic system, the best that can be hoped for is that the two parties will define contrasting, yet centrist policies and employ politicians who can seek re-election by solving some problems rather than merely demonizing the other side.

 The gerrymandering of Indiana congressional, senate and representative districts every 10 years encourages a polarized political environment.  The party in power draws districts to maximize their representation by creating as many 55-60% safe districts as possible, while consolidating their opponents into as few 80-90% majority districts as possible.

 This process results in extreme left and extreme right candidates winning nearly all races.  Centrist candidates have no chance in stacked districts.  Centrist voters have no influence in stacked districts.  The political parties attract extremist candidates.  They attract extremist supporters.  Only in a small minority of districts do voters have a choice between two qualified centrist candidates who mainly differ by a modest degree on the political spectrum. 

 The Indiana Senate’s Republican Caucus, Secretary of State Todd Rokita and Carmel representative Mike Delph have floated various proposals to turn redistricting over to some form of non-partisan commission, required to take advantage of the computer software which can define boundaries to maximize the compactness of each district, without considering socio-economic, religious, racial or political factors. 

 A visual example of the current skewed districts versus neutral districts is shown at http://bolson.org/dist/IN/.

 Members of both political parties should be able to see that the skillful use of gerrymandering today is a recipe for failure.  Even California voters are now seeing that structures that lead to polarization can bankrupt a state.  Indiana voters who care about the future should pursue this “good government” initiative.

President George W. Bush was a terrible president – arguably the worst ever.  That said, he did one thing that I really liked: he greatly increased the American production of natural gas – which is why its price has fallen by half of late.  Why then have the price of oil and gasoline stayed so ridiculously high when the cost of natural gas has fallen?
Usually, pricing is based on fundamentals – that is: supply and demand (see my upcoming blog on that).  I am not an oil-industry-insider, but I am a student of Economics (my second degree is in Economics) and I do talk regularly with several investment professionals who know a thing or two about this.

In the case of natural gas, supply means drilling, storage and distribution pipelines.    Demand for gas depends primarily on energy generation, winter heating for buildings, chemical processing (uses gas as a feedstock).

In the case of oil, supply depends also on drilling, storage and distribution.  It also depends on refining too – which is presently the most constrained part of the petroleum supply chain.  Demand for oil depends on absolutely everything in the economy.  There is no sector that is not in some way touched by oil.  Oil is for the 20th and 21st centuries what coal was for the 18th, and 19th – that is: oil is everything.  We have also seen that the price of oil (much more than natural gas) is responsive to very small fluctuations in supply and sometimes demand (notice that prices bounces around with every hurricane in the gulf of Mexico, every bombing in Iraq, every refinery fire and the economic indicators – which hint at future demand).

Notice that physical supply of oil has kept pace with physical demand for oil at all times during the recent past and present.  No one has ever waited in line for rationed gasoline in this decade like we did in the 1970s.  To my mind, supply and demand fundamentals dictate a (recession) price of $25 per barrel of light sweet crude oil and an average US price of $1.00/gallon for 87 octane gasoline and a recovery (long term) price of $30 to $35 per barrel of oil and about $1.60 per gallon of gasoline.  If we invested in a few more strategically placed refineries and tank farms, we should be able to collapse the long term price of gasoline down to about $1.30 per gallon for gasoline.

Presently oil demand also depends on speculation.  Depending on who you talk to, speculation may represent a larger demand than physical demand and it most certainly represents a larger portion of the price.  Various investors began crowding into the market beginning in 2007, seeking a safe place to park their money while the economy imploded.  This just further drove up the price, and further contributed to economic ruin.

The Democrats, who are usually considered the more progressive party blocked the Republicans’ reforms that were intended to reduce price of oil.  They were actually good reforms – which may be part of why the Republicans are presently blocking so many of the Democrats’ initiatives.

Wouldn’t it be a good idea to package together several effective oil reforms including both those favored by the left and those favored by the right?

REFORM 1 (for the right):  All areas of the country should be made available for oil exploration and drilling.  Environmental regulations should be relaxed if a case can be made that not too much harm will result and it is needed to make the project practical.  Polar bears are cute and loveable, and I realize some may die because of increased drilling, but I will pick peoples’ needs any day over animals’ needs.
·    Benefit 1 – Energy, which petroleum can be used to create, is a key input for our economy, particularly transportation, manufacturing and farming.  Petroleum derived products such as pharmaceutical drugs, plastics, (synthetic) rubber, lubricants, fertilizers etc., are essential to our modern way of life.  All other things equal, more petroleum supply means that we can produce more goods and services.
·    Benefit 2 – it would increase domestic supply by a significant amount (depending on how much is drilled how soon)

·    Benefit 3 – it would improve our military preparedness.  The military consumes astronomical amounts of fuel and lubricants.
·    Benefit 4 – it would increase supply in the entire global market by some small amount – a psychological boost.  Possibly, it might be enough to restrain future price growth in some small way.

REFORM 2 (for the left):  All commodities traders should be required to have physical capacity to receive, store and either process or consume the amount of the commodity they are trading.
·    Benefit 1 – it would get most of the speculators out of the market, thereby bringing the price down to realistic levels
·    Benefit 2 – those speculators who remain in the market would have to build tank farms, refineries etc.  More refinery and storage capacity can only help to improve price stability.   I suspect, but have no numbers to prove this: having an extra bit of capacity in the supply chain can reduce price volatility, enough to pay for the added costs of installing new capacity.
·    Benefit 3 current capacity (especially in refining) is barely adequate for present consumption.  It would greatly help our military preparedness to have increased capacity in the petroleum industry.
·    Now is the time to make this reform: prices and profits have been ridiculously high for several years.

REFORM 3 (for everyone):  No new oil-fired power plants or oil heating furnaces should be allowed in this country, excepting certain extremely rural places where there is presently no other available source of energy.  Furthermore, A small development grant should be awarded to study the feasibility of running freight trains on either hydrogen fuel cells or compressed natural gas instead of diesel.
·    Benefit 1 – it will reduce winter heating cost over the long term.  Natural gas is much more cost effective per BTU of heat for building heating applications
·    Benefit 2 – it will reduce electricity cost over the long term.  Almost every other source of fuel is more cost effective per kilowatt-hour of electricity production than oil; for example, coal, nuclear, wind, hydro, geothermal are all more cost effective than oil per kilowatt-hour.
·    Benefit 3 – Hydrogen fuel cells (that are recharged by electricity from coal or nuclear) could easily become much more efficient than diesel per ton-mile carried in terms of energy consumed and carbon dioxide released.  This makes it cheaper and greener at the same time.
·    Benefit 4 – Hydrogen fuel cell s require a fair amount of infrastructure to support cars that go everywhere – but nor for trains that are limited in where they can go.  By starting with trains, we might be able to very cheaply give hydrogen fuel cells for cars a chance to get off the ground.
·    Benefit 5 – To the extent that this causes a reduction in carbon dioxide emission, this will also make Greens happier about swallowing reform 1.
·    Benefit 6 – To the extent it reduces future demand for oil, it will help to restrain future price growth in the markets.

Many people in this country are short on time today.  Work, family and other obligations take nearly our entire time.  There is not much left for personal time to ourselves.  Not much time is left to be politically or religiously active or start a business.  For the good of the country, the good of the economy, and most of all the good of ourselves we must recover some of this time. Three areas of opportunity present themselves for recovering some of our precious time. 

WAITING: Airport delays are among the most lengthy and the most variable delays we face.  For example, the last time I flew to Chicago, the airport delays took longer than the flight itself, on both the way there and back.  Certain delays are due to security checks that don’t seem very useful, are invasive, but are also politically touchy to remove due to peoples’ fear of terrorism – (which are not to be ignored or taken lightly).  The airlines themselves are also much to blame for not having planes ready to go on time.  There have been proposals for years for a Fliers’ bill of rights that addresses airport delay due to airlines. It should be strengthened to require airlines to refund some or all of the ticket price depending on how many hours the customer has to wait.

Doctor’s offices schedule patients to maximize their profit, not to get patients in and out on time.  (For the record, I just fired my doctor for this, and her $140 tetanus shot).  A patients bill of rights similar to the proposed Fliers’ bill of rights, specifying free service if the wait is longer than X, would go a long way to solving the problem.

Phone support queues, such as when calling your credit card issuer or phone company can last an upwards of an hour.  To add insult to injury, they also like to play ads while you wait.  Lately some companies have added a feature where you can give them your account # and phone # and they will call you back at a time of your choosing instead of waiting.  It should be required of all companies to give their customers this option.  This need not be an onerous new regulation: just providing an option to leave voicemail would be acceptable.

Checkout lines at stores are ripe for reform.  In the 1990s self service check out was
introduced.  Generally these are no faster than a human cashier, because of all their error.  I believe we have all heard “*beep* please wait for cashier assistance” far too many times.  I know many people like these lines (because they can verify that the scanned price is correct) and do not advocate their removal.  I do advocate that they be made to work properly without waiting for a cashier to be called to assist every 2nd customer.  For example stores like Wal-Mart, allow their checkout lines to form 15-20 minute queues – even when most of their registers are open.  I am not sure how to solve this problem – but it has to be done.  15-20 minutes x 6 stops per family per week = 1.5-2 hours/week x 52 weeks per year = 78 to 104 hours per family per year is more than 3 or 4 entire days per family per year spent standing in line.

Several people I know have proposed some solutions to waiting:
$1 shop online – this is great if present privacy problems can be resolved.  (See my upcoming series on privacy).
$2 make waiting more productive.  This can work to the extent that you can conduct your business, worship, etc, in the checkout line.  I read in lines to improve myself and my skill-base for my career – so I am sure others could do something along these lines.
$3 Finally it was suggested that, a person could record his time spent waiting in line, multiply it by his hourly wage, and have it deducted from his bill.  Heaven help the company that delays a million dollar a year CEO for half an hour.

WORKING:  Presently, the 5 day 40 hour work week is standard.  This leaves 5 evenings and 2 weekend days to service our family and other obligations.  Good luck having any time left for yourself.  (I realize that some blue collar workers earn time and a half by working beyond this, and many white collar professionals and managers are forced to work beyond this by their company for no additional compensation.  They could certainly put in some portion of a 5th workday each week if they chose; perhaps by telecommuting.)

Lately many companies have been experimenting with flex time and the 4 day work week.  Flex time allow employees to schedule their day such that they can service all of their obligations around their work.  The 4 day work week allows the employee to work 4 10 hour days instead of 5 8hour days, thereby gaining an extra useable day on the weekend.  For many employers, this makes sense too.  Any office building operating Monday-Friday 8-5, could have all of their workforce be in at least 1 day a week together so that meetings can be scheduled, and then sign up for any other 3 days they please.  Retail and service operations would especially benefit from this too, because they could have more employees around before and after operating hours to restock shelves, clean and so on.  Likewise, a call center, hospital or a steel mill operating 24/7 with either 3 shifts or 4 turns rotating in every 8 hours could use 10 hour blocks instead to staff their operation just as well.

Employees would benefit by having a 3rd useable day off every week.

DRIVING:  There are about 300 million people in this country.  About half of us work.  Nearly all of us workers commute to our job.  Many of us have long-mileage trips.  Many of those trips take unnecessarily long to make; the average American spends ½ hour commuting, each way, to work.  If we could save some of that time, as a society we would be better off.  Families could spend more time together and people would have more time to relax.   Roughly 300,000,000 people x ½ work x 2 trips per day x ½ hour average per trip multiplies out to tell us that American spend roughly 150 million man hours are spent in a car commuting to and from work each day.

What if we could save some of that time?  25% would be roughly 37 million man hours saved per day.  To the average American, that would mean saving 15 minutes every day.  Multiply that by 250 commuting days per year and the average American would have roughly 2¼   extra full 24 hour days each year to do something other than sit in a car.  So how could we do it?

First we should establish some ground rules:  (1) whatever changes are made should not increase driving fatalities.  (2) whatever changes are made shouldn’t cost a lot of money.

There are many things that could be done.  Most commutes involve a mix of highway and city driving, so both should be addressed.  Many of the worst commutes involve long delays due to high traffic, construction or poorly designed intersections – which makes these ripe opportunities to work on.

Highway driving is an easy fix: raise the speed limit to 85mph on all highways.  Insurance companies compile a slew of statistics showing that higher speed is associated with higher fatalities.  More careful researchers note that it is the difference in speed between the many cars on the road that lead to accidents and fatalities.  So when raising the speed limit, we should also raise the minimum to 70 or 75mph .  Excepting certain collectors’ antique cars there are no cars on the road that can’t do at least 70 or 75mph.  It doesn’t cost hardly anything to do this.  Many motorists already drive at these speeds in defiance of the law, and seem quite safe doing it.  Indeed, the British Medical Journal noted in 2006 that British highway fatalities per year actually increased slightly after installing speed enforcement cameras (studied 1996-2004) to slow their drivers down -i.e. speed is not the dangerous and important factor that we are led to believe. Obviously, in severe weather, one would drive at a safe and reasonable (slower) speed – no one wants tp do 70-85mph on snow and ice.  Also, local government would have to stay on top of potholes, read: Canton, Ohio, where the potholes often seem to be more numerous than the sands by the sea, and they can appear to be large enough to float ocean-going vessels.  All other things equal, the average American motorist, could save a maximum of 8 minutes a day or 1 ½ days per year.

City driving is more difficult.  It depends very much on delays due to traffic and intersections.  1 possible reform would be to raise the speed limit on most roads that are not highways to 40 mph.  Critics argue that in certain situations involving on-street parking or older (small dense) residential neighborhoods, that 25mph makes sense.  I agree with them on this.  No one wants to run over a child or have any other kind of accident.  But everywhere else, 40 mph would make sense and make a big difference.  Enacting this reform would save the average American commuter a maximum of a third of a day per year.  It would save us even more time when running our errands.  This is not an expensive change either.  It would also help for all the cities in a given metropolitan area to cooperate in synchronizing their stoplights.  Pairs of multilane 1 way streets with timed lights have significantly reduced travel time in many cities across the nation.

Reducing delays are the biggest improvement opportunity of all.  When I first started my previous job, my 30 mile commute took 65 minutes on average – event though it was 2/3 highway driving with a 65mph speed limit.  By leaving for work at 6AM instead of 6:55AM, I found I could reduce this time to 35 minutes.  I avoided traffic, drove 40 and 80mph instead of 25, 35 and 65mph and had more favorable stoplight cycles.  In practical terms, I saved 10½  24 hour days each year.

Herein lies a large part solution: it’s cheap and easy to change the time at which we commute.  As companies allow more flex time and telecommuting, this reduces the peak traffic densities on our road ways.  We can improve this by having governments pass ordinances that non-customer service buildings open before 7:30 or after 8:30 in order to spread out the load.

This still leaves the matter of construction delays.  Most delays form when a roadway is reduced by 1 or more lanes to be worked on.  2 innovative solutions have appeared lately, but not yet widely.  (1) do the work at night, and reopen the entire road each morning.  (2)  Rather than close down many miles of highway all at once, just close down the section that needs to be closed in order to do work and cure the cement properly.

More creative ideas yet are worth exploring.  Many professional people could telecommute to work at least 1x per week, thereby saving at least 20% of travel time.  Moving to a 4 10hour day work week would certainly save 20% of commuting time for everyone.

If all these ideas were implemented, the average American could easily save at least 1 to 2/3  of his driving time each year.  Imagine what you would do with an extra 20-40 minutes every day.

I recently heard my aunt’s parrot make a door-slamming noise and shout ‘FUCK YOU!’.  Apparently the bird had been sold to my aunt by a couple who divorced immediately after.  My aunt, who divorced too, years before she got the bird, speculates that the woman kicked the man out of the bedroom because he was a male chauvinist pig who wouldn’t help with the housework.

Decades ago, when men earned all the money in a household, and women stayed home all day, men got the idea that they didn’t need to help women with housework and child raising. Today, it is not possible in most professions for a man’s income alone to support a family. So women now work as much and as hard as men. It only makes sense that they split the child raising and housework duties evenly too. Just as employers require employees to cross train in additional skills and back up other employees, so to family members help each other out. Most men appreciate sports. We surely can understand teamwork. I fully believe in equal responsibilities and rights. But that’s where it stops.

No woman is ever going to kick me out of my bedroom or house. I pay the mortgage on that house on time every month. I put 20% of the purchase price down on that house to buy it – out of my own money. I put $25,000 of materials into renovating it (a century home) – and I did the work with my 2 bare hands.

To be fair, woe be to any man that thinks he is going to marry a rich woman and walk off with half her stuff. I would like to beat such men personally! (if one can consider them men at all).

In this country, the divorce law requires the man and the woman to split up their assets equally at the divorce, in the absence of a prenuptial agreement. Any woman I marry will sign one of these agreements renouncing her legal right, in the event of a divorce, to anything that I had before the marriage. And I don’t want her stuff either – its her stuff.

…which brings me to a reform: The law should be changed so that you don’t need to go through the ugly step of asking your beloved wife (or husband)-to-be for a prenuptial agreement. Marriage should be all about love, and not about money!

I am building up to three things here in my drive for reform, Fixing the Country,  Fixing the Economy, and Fixing Religion.

New cartoon by Trussell & Trussell on AOL’s Politics Daily. With Lou Dobbs Gone, CNN Finds the Middle.

From where I live in New Hampshire, I could hear the cannon fire and get reports from the front line. On the eve of battle, a friend who lives just across the river in Maine was visibly worried that the Maine gay marriage law would go down in defeat. Although separated by a state line, he and I share the same remarkably tolerant and civic-minded community. We know gay couples with relationships as long and meaningful as any heterosexual marriage. One mutual friend of ours rather recently lost his male partner after decades together. We saw him at a play-reading recently, and I was struck by his heavy heart. I suspect the Maine vote rejecting gay marriage deepened the sadness he still carries for the loss of his partner. It seems bizarre to me not to call what they had “marriage.” But this is only my opinion, values can be subjective, and maybe it’s time for us all to show little more respect for those with whom we disagree on the subject of gay marriage.

When asked why she voted for the repeal of the Maine gay marriage law, a voter replied, “I don’t feel that anyone has the right to redefine marriage.” There, in that simple quote, lies everything that is problematical about the gay marriage campaigns.  Read more.

by Richard Skylar
Executive Editor

The University of Alleyways presents a once-popular site with assault rifles fanned out of those who will take three checkpoints that left 166 people at the Chabad House. 500 closed circuit television cameras have since plastered the ring with 70 visiting relatives near Orlando, Fla. “She will take an arc on their response to 70 percent,” Berkowitz said.

Many young Israelis also were injured.

Inside, a single guard is talking: “The agency will not confirm if all the city around the case for Conflict Management in Gaza militant groups has learned  that our staff is at risk,” he said. It takes time of collusion between leading British and the slight increase reflects improved consumer confidence from New York-based businessman George Rohr, who served well last year.

Amtrak expects Wednesday that stolen e-mails will ask you to sing to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

He said there has been a 6.7 percent decrease in spiritual oases, hostels, and strategically located commando hubs with bird droppings.

Regarding the number of Arkansas, Senate showdown as centrist Sen. Blanche Lincoln is contextually affecting the building, set in eastern England.

Crowley said, “Police have not been leaked one e-mail since 8 p.m. EST.”

Landrieu says she said, “The police appear to appreciate what you have.”

About the Southwest East Coast and 3,000 documents containing proof of civilians and economic problems, Americans may feel their assertion that silence is to each series for their own security. Many invisible measures of police force has changed since a pact was sealed at the home for AAA’s national office in India.

Unless they decided to buy a plastic toy phone, we will still suffer from economic problems. Americans who travel by running are more financially secure than the community. They decided to suggest that she drew near the linoleum floors.

One wall was genuine.

Meanwhile, the rail system is ringed with rocket attacks.

richardskylar@gmail.com

In the previous 3 pieces, I defined and analyzed the problem in the previous 3 pieces, and suggested improvements – most of which have already succeeded in solving similar problems in other cities. The only thing unique is that Cleveland has allowed itself to fall so low. My commenter lsbnbj blames a lack of leadership for the problems. This is true. By definition, strong, wise, caring leadership would not have allowed this decline to occur.

That said, it doesn’t take brilliant leadership to follow in the path of regeneration that other cities have already established. Mostly it takes persistence, concentration and cooperation. This is something that even bureaucrats could accomplish, if they were empowered to do so. What does take leadership is in persuading people, at the beginning, to support a new system that would be much more effective in achieving its goals. This is how I would do it:

Set Goals
In the 3 previous pieces in this series, I set out what I think are necessary goals to achieve in order to revitalize Cleveland and its surrounding region:
1. Think and cooperate regionally
2. Bring in businesses and jobs
3. Bring new people into the region’s urban cores

Leadership and persuasion: how to get things started.
I know many people who think the leadership in and around Cleveland are ineffective, uncooperative, self-interested idiots – often using that or similar language to describe them. Credibility is the foundation upon which effective persuasion is built. Cleveland and the other regional urban cores need to do competently and successfully those things that are within their power to do to help themselves. I suggested things that are simple, cheap and effective: tax credits for renovation, being easy to do business with, and community-police trust building and cooperation. To the extent that these things build up the tax base, they can provide revenue for more baby-steps. An unmistakable pattern of many small successes sustained over time will build credibility. Credibility is requisite to persuasion, which is the vehicle to achieving cooperation.

If Cleveland and the other cities in the region want help, they have to change minds by showing that they are serious about fixing their problems, and will wisely apply any and all resources to effectively uplift their own city, and the region as a whole. Once Cleveland and the other cities within the region show they are serious about growth and revitalization, then they can begin to make the case that ‘if we all work together, we can grow, better, stronger, faster than we would alone’.

Right now, Akron is most ready to lead. Akron may not be the largest city in the region – but for now, it should be the face of the region. Akron convinced me to move into the city – even though I could have afforded a house almost anywhere in the region – even in the most expensive suburbs. Akron should be the leader and role model for the rest of the region until some other city in the region can do better than Akron.

Like I said in my very first piece, ‘to  be effective, the idea of reform must become a vision compelling to all. Like President Obama says we need change we can believe in. Its not enough to have some vague notion of it – a concrete plan must be made and executed. Those with an interest in reform must help set the agenda, or those who favor the current state of affairs will corrupt the agenda, and make the reforms ineffective’.

It will also take a strong, caring leader who is willing to be abused in his official capacity by many people both petty and well-intentioned. Do you know such a leader who wants to revitalize Cleveland and its surrounding communities? Ask him if he will stand for election.

Cleveland could attract decent leadership again.    Former Cleveland mayors George Voinovich (Republican) and Michael White (Democrat) both were able to make substantial headway for 2 decades straight  The North-East Ohio region has no shortage of good business leaders either – the supply of leaders is here.  Now, the region has to make sure the demand is there and make sure that demand is clearly understood by those who would want to lead us to better days.

Working at a regional level should increase the amount of demand (more highly-educated voters in the suburbs who will vote in favor of leaders who will bring success). As a community, our region can do a lot to attract good leaders, by making the leadership jobs satisfying and effective. By satisfying I mean having appropriate power without any unnecessary administrative restrictions – that is no restriction except for meaningful oversight, clear objectives and clear responsibilities that do not compete with or overlap other people’s responsibility and vice-versa. In short, we have to convince potential leaders that there is a prospect of success if they come here. Think about it: no one wants to be fired from running Cleveland – you can get any lower than that. It would also help if we set up the leadership jobs to be competitively (but not extravagantly) paid.

Planning and Execution: how to finish it.
A simple referendum should be held once enough people are persuaded that there is a realistic chance of success. The ballot measure should read:

TITLE 1:   CREATE A NEW LOCAL GOVERNMENT STRUCTURE (NLGS) that merges the counties of North East Ohio and their cities and their suburbs and empowers it with the revenues and powers of the merged jurisdictions for the purpose of accomplishing Titles 2 and 3.

• The counties to be included are Cuyahoga, Summit, Lake, Mahoning, Trumbull, Stark, Wayne, Portage, Geauga, Medina and Lorain.
• The NLGS should include an elected legislative power, and an elected executive power.
• The legislative power should include 1 representative from each county (11 total) and 9 more at-large representatives, all elected by popular vote. The legislature would legislate on those matters that can not be handled administratively. The legislature would have powers of subpoena in matters within their jurisdiction and a staff of whatever experts and clerical workers they may need.
• The NLGS will measure their own progress using these measures of success: Measure #1-a: The net number of full-time jobs created within the area of the NLGS that pay at least $15/hour. Measure #1-b: the net number of full-time jobs created within the area of the NLGS that pay at least $25/hour. Measure #2: the % population growth each year within the area of the NLGS. Measure #3: cost per resident to run the NLGS (the budget should be balanced within any 4 year period, although not necessarily in individual years). Measure #4: the net square footage of newly renovated buildings in current use.  These results will be verified annually by an independent auditor.

TITLE 2:   CREATE A BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT AUTHORITY with broad administrative powers to bring in businesses and jobs, by being an easy place in which to do business, building on existing strengths and turning weaknesses into strengths, etc. This Authority will be required to improve all gains 2 years out of any 3 year period. This would report to the executive. The legislature will establish a committee to oversee this Authority generally.

TITLE 3:  CREATE A RESIDENTIAL DEVELOPMENT AUTHORITY with broad administrative powers to bring people into this region, especially the cities, by making the cities nice places to live in both actuality and perception. This Authority will be required to improve all gains 2 years out of any 3 year period. This would report to the executive. The legislature will establish a committee to oversee this Authority generally.

TITLE 4:   ALL EXISTING LOCAL BODIES THAT PERFORM THESE SAME RESPONSIBILITIES AS THOSE CREATED IN TITLES 1-3 WILL BE ABOLISHED.

TITLE 5:   THE NLGS WILL BE ELECTED EVERY 4 YEARS, to coincide with the US presidential election. No one may serve more than 3 terms in the NLGS regardless of capacity or capability. No one may stand for election who has been convicted of any kind of corruption, or who has been found to be incompetent in his NLGS role, or who has served in a previous NLGS term that did not meet its numerical objectives. Pay for NLGS executive, legislature and Development Authorities members will be competitive with cities of similar size and challenges, but not extravagant. Pay will be 1/3 base pay, 1/3 current-performance bonus and 1/3 deferred-performance bonus over a 5 year period, where the deferred pay depends on the performance in the year preceding the bonus payment.

TITLE 6:  ESCAPE CLAUSE: in 16 years time, the voters should have the opportunity, to dissolve the new governing structure, by a 2/3 majority vote, and revert to the previous system of governance.

So, what say?  Lets start turning this region around.

Stephen Erickson, of centermovement.org , has provided an analysis of the recently passed House Healthcare Bill that is spot on.  He discusses the bill in the context of President Obama’s three objectives for the “reform” legislation ; coverage for every American, controlling health costs and the requirement that the legislation must be deficit-neutral. His argument is straightforward and compelling.

READ MORE

When President Barack Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on February 17, 2009, among other things he declared that … 

”while we need to do everything in the short term to get our economy moving again, we must recognize that having inherited a trillion dollar deficit, we need to begin restoring fiscal discipline and taming our exploding deficits over the long term.” 

But when do we actually begin this process? Since January, we have seen a ballooning of government spending, the stimulus package, health care “reform” and numerous banking and corporate bailouts. Our government, which forecasted 10-year budget deficits of $7 trillion in January, now tells us it is likely more on the order of $9 trillion. The federal deficit for fiscal year 2009 is now estimated at a jaw dropping $1.42 trillion, the highest level since World War II.  October’s deficit is estimated at $177.4 billion. Left unchecked, deficit spending and increasing national debt will stifle further economic growth and prosperity. 

Deficit spending matters.  Here’s why. READ MORE

I recommend that you first see Part 1 and Part 2 of this series

In Part 1 I established we need to solve this on a regional basis. In part 2 I established that people will come to this region if and only if there are good jobs to be had here. That said, the above are necessary, but not sufficient conditions for growth. There also has to be reason to live in the cities not just the suburbs. Once again, the urban cores must build on their strengths and turn their weaknesses into strengths.

Build On Those Strengths We Have:
The cost of living is extremely cheap and my salary is very average compared to the rest of the country. Counting the cost of housing, utilities, transport, goods, groceries, services, schooling, taxes, and so on, I can live better out here, on an engineer’s salary, than a plant-manager, on his salary, on one of the coasts. For example, in 2008, my company wanted to transfer me to a small rural town in New England. I thoroughly investigated the local prices for the goods and services I consume. I calculated that my company would have had to triple my salary for me to maintain the same standard of living – mostly due to higher cost of housing and heating – and there were really dumb, dull people out there and nothing to do.

The region has a wealth of many higher education institutions: Cleveland State, Case Western, U of Akron, Hiram, Walsh, Kent State Tri-C, John Carroll and many other niche and low-end schools. Other than the business school at Case and technical programs at Case and U of Akron, none of these are big-name programs. We need to make sure that we are getting as many of our citizens into school as we can. Akron made a first (bad) attempt at this with the attempt to privatize the water/sewer department to fund scholarships with many restrictions. What we need to do is learn the lessons of the first failure and try a more direct plan. If cities want to be nice and give something away then they should just do it, in a plain way without complicated, politically unpopular schemes that trade a good for a harm.

Sports are the second greatest asset this region has. Everyone knows the Cleveland Browns, Indians and Cavaliers. Fewer people know about the Akron Aeros. I think they deliver the best value of any sports arena experience in N.E. Ohio. The region also has many smaller sports: roller derby, hockey, soccer, all the usual high-school sports that any place has. While we’re at it, I think we should get some Lucha Libre events up here too sometime.  Sports are one of the few things to do in the region other than work.

We have more high-brow culture than most of us can afford to see on a regular basis. Notice it is nearly all in Cleveland: Severance Hall, Playhouse Square the Cleveland Museum of Art and all the other museums near University Circle; honorable mentions for the Akron Art Museum and the Canton Symphony.  I just went to hear Malcom Gladwell speak at EJ Thomas Hall 11/12.  Some of the suburbs such as Cleveland Heights, Rocky River, Cuyahoga Falls have a small amount of attractions to contribute to the solution. As far as I am aware, there is nothing at all going on in, Wooster, Medina, Youngstown or Warren or any of their surrounding burgs or burbs.

The region has a wonderful Midwest Aesthetic: There is a delicious visual mix of Beaux Arts, Art-Deco, Craftsman, and various revival styles of architecture. It is attractive and well-executed work set in a background of gritty industrial grime (apparently I am not the only person who likes the industrial look). The large and gracious Metroparks are the perfect foil for this. I have had more fun at Hardesty Park in Akron than I have space here to retell. We need to preserve the good things we have and build buildings that look good with the classics.   Think of the Goodyear Polymer Center at U of Akron – it is thoroughly modern, yet it looks good near to the much older buildings in its vicinity.  Contrast that to the recent addition to the Akron Art Museum or the Peter Lewis Center at Case Western, both of which are fine buildings in a vacuum, but don’t look right when inserted into the rest of their city.

There is something honest and real in these cities: sophistication without as much pretension and image-polishing as in the suburbs. I love the diverse neighborhoods: not all 1 race, ethnicity, mix of white and blue collar; with down-to-earth people. In my neighborhood, I have met some bright, fun, interesting people, that I made friends with. Yet it’s also a big enough place that I can be an anonymous citizen and don’t have to worry about all of my neighbors being constantly up in my business. I can go out and choose the friends that suit me, and I can keep everybody else at arms length.

Certain neighborhoods in these cities are very charming and viable:

• the Northwest 1/2 of Akron + Goodyear Heights
• University Circle, Tremont and Ohio City in Cleveland,
• Harter Heights and that ill-defined enclave north of downtown in Canton.

Any renaissance in these cities has to build on or near to these areas of things good and right (think of the revival in Akron’s Highland Square neighborhood)… Most of the rest of the region’s urban neighborhoods are in trouble…

Notice how much I am talking about Akron in this post.  Akron is lightyears ahead of the rest of the region’s cities in becoming a desireable place to live.  Akron is well into the process I am describing and can and should be the role model for the rest of the region’s cities.

Turn Our Weaknesses into Strengths – Consider Them Opportunities to Improve:
To bring in people, they have to want to live here. Things that drive people away include blight, bad schools, crime, and lack of urban shopping venues and things to do.

The blight in this area is endemic and possibly terminal. Urban decay took hold in the cities in the 1960s-80s as jobs and people went away, and began metastasizing into the suburbs as fast as it could (half of the region now looks worse than the set of Sanford and Son). In Part 2: How to Bring in Businesses and Jobs , I suggested allowing businesses that move into unoccupied buildings to deduct renovation costs from their city, state and county taxes, provided they don’t impair the historical architecture of the building(s). I think citizens should be offered the same deal for their housing.

No one wants their kids to go to bad schools. They won’t live in a place with bad schools – which is why the urban cores continue to hemorrhage residents. There was a time, up until the 1960s when Cleveland City Schools were among the very best in the country. Since then, the population decline in Cleveland has tracked the decline of its schools.

If the #1 priority is to think regionally, and the #2 priority is to create, or import jobs, then priority #3 has to be fixing the schools. They need money and they need it now.  Charities such as the Cleveland Foundation, and Army of Believers give the schools needed support – but much more is still needed.  Where else can the money come from?

There is a lost generation of people who got a poor education and need remedial education and vocational training so they can get a decent job. No matter how many good jobs are created, we need to get people qualified to do the work. We need an effective approach here: realize that we are talking about many of the same people who don’t claim the Earned Income Tax Credit and other assistance they are eligible for. It will require some new thought and magnanimity in our hearts. Hidden behind our egalitarian values in this country is a reluctance to help people, especially poor people, who tend to be, most often, black people. In some ways, our country still doesn’t serve their kind here. Somebody needs to get poor people going – who can do it? This is just one more argument for cooperating regionally.

The crime in this region is too high and well documented. The Anthony Sowell saga should be a spur to increase  focus on crime-fighting, crime-prevention, and building up neighborhoods so that residents develop an intolerance for crime. Part of that will take care of itself as the region gets more people into reasonable jobs. Recall that (former community organizer, and now President) Barack Obama wrote in ‘The Audacity of Hope’ that drug dealing is mostly ‘a minimum wage affair’… so the jobs don’t have to be great they just have to be a notch above retail and restaurant jobs.  The flip side of that coin is that we need to do policing in a low key, way that isn’t going to alienate people. Traffic cameras and things such as traffic that interfere with gainfully employed people getting to work should be eliminated.  Things like that discourage me from wanting to stay here more than crime.

The urban cores need shopping venues inside the city limits.  It doesn’t matter whether that comes in the form of redeveloping the Rolling Acres Mall in Akron or getting more downtown shops open (a much better location, but then parking becomes an issue).  Each city in the region needs to do this.  As it stands now, I do my grocery, hardware and other routine shopping at chain stores in the burbs – because that is where the stores are. A couple times a year I make my high end purchases in Columbus (where things cost even less than North East Ohio) when I go to see my old college buddies. We need to have urban stores that are cost competitive with, and have as good a selection as other places.  Note to city planners: think of the tax revenues new retailers would generate.

Somewhere between high-expense high-brow culture and high-expense low-brow sports, the entire region needs to have fun and affordable things to go do year round. Cleveland does not offer value for young middle class people. I realize there are no end of (mostly art) festivals May-September. I love these festivals, and also the occasional neighborhood block party. But for the other 7 months of the year, when the weather is too nasty to have festivals and block parties, people need fun and affordable things to do – something more than just bowling and movies. What could we do here? Tell me.  I’m stumped.

Re-brand the Region and its Cities Around all their Strengths and improvements:
When people think of Cleveland and the rest of North-east Ohio, they think of bad weather, bad schools, bad neighborhoods, and bad jobs. They know many of our good jobs went to humid, insect-infested states far south of us decades ago. That is why they are living there, making jokes at our expense instead of living here. That is why our cost of living is so low – most people don’t want to be here.

So after we cooperate regionally, bring in jobs and business, and make the region’s urban cores nice places to live, we won’t be done yet. We also need to improve our image. Once we have finished the hard work of renewing ourselves, we need to let the rest of the country know. Instead of the ‘Mistake on the Lake’, we could become ‘Cleverland’.

About Me: I’m creative, bold and irreverent. I love liberty. I’m smart, and sometimes suave; but sometimes not. I have 2 technical degrees, and my Six-Sigma Black Belt. Hablo Español e tambem estou aprendendo Portugues. I’m an engineer, and where there’s an engineer there’s a way.

I have 2 goals for this blog:

1. I am looking to change minds, including, sometimes, my own.
2. I am looking to make a lasting measurable positive impact in this world – beyond what I can do in a job.

I see good ideas across the political spectrum from far right to far left and everywhere in between. Occasionally I will suggest some of my own ideas too.

I like many things:

• spending time with friends, family and my cat,
• building, modifying and repairing things, and most especially, renovating my house…,
• The Cavs, and the Cavs Dance Team ,
• writing,
• art,
• I like action, comedy and historical/documentary movies such as: Shrek, Batman, Godfather, Terminator, Monty Python, The Fog of War, Stalingrad (1993 version), Michael Moore’s movies, and also Pretty Woman.

I love music. Some of my favorite artists are:

• Miles Davis,
• Sex Mob,
• Joshua Redman,
• John Coltrane,
• Charles Mingus,
• Sonny Rollins,
• Thelonious Monk,
• Scott Joplin,
• Dirty Dozen Brass Band,
• Bob Seeger,
• Bob Dylan,
• Nirvana,
• Megadeth,
• Michelle Branch,
• RL Burnside,
• Lee Dorsey,
• Ray Charles
• BB King,
• Barry White,
• Spearhead,
• Snoop Dogg,
• Notorious BIG,
• ZRo,
• Nappy Roots,
• JayZ,
• Alicia Keys,
• Shakira, (her classics – when she had meaning and sang in Spanish)
• Mana,
• Thalia,
• Eddie Palmieri,
• Victor Manuelle,
• Manu Chao ,
• Mayito Rivera
• Julieta Venegas,
• Prokofiev,
• Gershwin,
• Mozart,
• Stravinsky
• many, many more

My heroes include:

• Ghandi,
• Simon Bolivar,
• Martin Luther King Jr,
• James Madison,
• Thomas Jefferson,
• Ben Franklin,
• Mikhail Gorbachev,
• Russ Feingold,
• That unknown guy who stood in front of the tanks in the 1989 Tiannenmen Square protest…
• Omar Vizquel,
• Shaun Rogers,
• LeBron James
• Zydrunas Ilgauskas
• The Dalai Lama

I love to read. Right now, I’m reading: The APICS Certified Supply Chain Professional Training Module 2 Building Competitive Operations Planning and Logistics.  My all-time favorites include:

• Josephine Tey The Daughter of Time,
• Genrich Altshuller The Innovation Algorithm,
• Peter Drucker The Practice of Management,
• J.R.R. Tolkien’s books,
• Bill Watterson’s ‘Calvin and Hobbes’ books,
• Scott Adams’ ‘Dilbert’ Books,
• Gary Larson’s ‘Farside’ books,
• Dave Barry’s books of his humor columns,
• Paul Kennedy The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers,
• Dan Brown The Davinci Code,
• Maxmin and Zubhoff The Support Economy,
• Georgy Polya, How To Solve It,
• AJP Taylor’s books.

I also follow the news and views at the great sites below. Notice I have included news-sources ranging from deep-left-field to the far-right-fringe and everywhere in between. I am a firm believer that the free-market of ideas will help the best ideas win out, and I want to hear what everyone has to say before I make up my mind.

• Alex Jones Infowars
• American Civil Liberties Union
• Ars Technica – Law and Disorder section
• Better Business Bureau
• Bloomberg – exclusive coverage
• British Broadcasting Corporation
• Business Week
• Cleveland Plain Dealer
• Chrisitian Science Monitor – opinion page
• Consumer World Blog
• The Consumerist
• Declassified Blog
• Electronic Frontier Foundation
• El Sol de Mexico
• Electronic Privacy Information Center
• Google News
• Human Rights Watch
• Jornal do Brasil
• Jurist Forum
• Main Justice
• Manchester Guardian – US coverage
• Michael Geist’s Blog
• National Association of Manufacturers
• National Public Radio
• The New Republic
• New Scientist
• The Newspaper.com
• Propublica.org
• Raw Story.com
• Reform the PATRIOT ACT .org
• Rustwire
• Smart Money.com
• Transparency International
• Urbanophile.com
• Washington Post
• Yahoo Sports

I recommend that you first see Part I of this series in my previous post …

Retain, grow and attract businesses:
To grow again, Cleveland and the other cities in its region need to provide opportunity. This opportunity needs to come in the form of business and jobs. The cites in North-East Ohio need to work together to provide the right conditions to grow, retain and attract businesses.

Give opportunity to make money by being easy to do business with:
To do this, we need to make it easy for businesses to make money, by making it easy for them to locate and operate here. Remember when Progressive was a growing young company and Peter Lewis wanted to build his corporate HQ in downtown Cleveland? City officials dithered away the opportunity – and all those offices and jobs are now scattered around in the already-affluent suburbs, and Cleveland allowed itself to slide that much further down the drain.

Build on existing strengths:
We have a unique set of strengths and weaknesses that should determine what businesses choose to be here: low property values and a mix of low-skill/low-wage labor and high-wage-highly-skilled labor. We have a vibrant corps of highly educated white collar professionals in the accounting, finance, legal, R&D, engineering, bio/medical, hi-tech and precision manufacturing  sectors. We have a strong base of highly trained blue collar workers.

The greater Cleveland area should build upon its location at the nexus of rail, road, air and water routes. Did anyone pay attention in American History class? Much of Cleveland/Akron’s rise 100-150 years ago was fueled this way; example: by the Ohio and Erie Canal, the railroads, and shipping iron ore from Minnesota to Pittsburgh for steel making.

Basic Research and Design should be fostered , and innovations rolled out to business. Case Western Reserve, University of Akron are both leaders in developing technology and new businesses around technology.   Business Week makes the case for increasing Federal Research funding to many public and private institutions to do additional basic research that may not pay immediate dividend These schools and their cities should be fighting tooth and nail for a big piece of the pie.

COSE and Team NEO help get startups going and bring in existing businesses from elsewhere.  I see the Plain Dealer reports they are trying to get a Japanese waste-to-energy company to locate its North American headquarters, manufacturing and distribution here. We need to be reading about some new attempt every day, and a success story every month or so.  If the region could grow a couple home-made mid-cap companies and bring a few large-caps’ North American or divisional HQs and some new plants to its urban cores… we would be rolling again.

Turn weaknesses into strengths:
We have a lot of low-skill / low wage people, who need to upgrade their skills and education so they can aspire to something more than ringing a register in their career. As anyone who has ever played Sim City knows, education is the key to attracting the kinds of businesses that create real opportunities for people. We need to put a decade-long plan into effect that will educate and train as many of those low-wage/low-skill people as are willing. There are a lot of people that slipped through the cracks in the public school systems, that need a second chance to get a good education. The city should subsidize RTA/bus fares for low-income residents to get to work and school. If money allows, the city should also partner with businesses to give a small voucher for education of low-income workers who maintain a high grade point average and high job attendance.

All older cities have many additional problems. Many abandoned sites remain unused despite demand for land in nearby suburbs because of fear of environmental problems and litigation. Now is the time to go to the government and request a waiver of environmental liability (for past on-site sins ) from the EPA for any company that moves its operations into a currently unoccupied urban building.

Older buildings also have many other issues:
· higher insurance costs for older buildings with more ornate architecture,
· building code violations (example: obsolete wiring),
· facility layout issues (example: load-bearing columns or walls in the way of planned production lines and material movement paths, obsolete shipping/receiving docks and equipment),
· communication issues (only copper phone line is installed),
To address these issues, the city, county and state should allow all businesses that renovate an existing unoccupied structure to deduct the cost of renovation from their tax, every year going forward, until the entire cost of renovation is recouped by the business. In addition, businesses should be offered a tax exempt first quarter following every year that they remain onsite in their renovated location. It’s not like the government would lose any money – this would apply to new businesses that move into unoccupied buildings. And whether the business pays taxes or not, the workers do. Charities should be enlisted to the maximum extent permitted by law to help match company renovation, retraining and re-education dollars.

Where are all of the bleeding-heart liberals that want to spend money on cities? Where are all of the hardcore pro-business conservatives that want to grow our economy? These are things that many people could agree should be done.

Finally, we have to eliminate corruption. For several years, there have been ongoing investigations and allegations of corruption and scandal in Cuyahoga county. It’s not acceptable to business or citizens. Corruption should be allowed zero tolerance. I hope the recently passed Cuyahoga County Issue 6 (2009) is an effective  beginning to this.

Maintain what we already have:
Cleveland and its surrounding towns and suburbs host the headquarters of many large and leading companies, including 28 Fortune 1000 companies. Also many other large companies have significant local operations and offices. It should be the full-time job of every public official in the region to keep their costs low, and make it easy for them to do business here. We need to keep what we have and help them grow here.

Grow, attract, dominate and diversify:
Cities grow when their businesses grow.  Cleveland was bigger than Los Angeles well into the 1920s, and bigger than Atlanta until the 1990s… What happened? Manufacturing and heavy industry declined in the northern states, taking Cleveland and its surrounding region steadily down with it. Media, electronics, manufacturing and trade boomed, bringing Los Angeles up. Atlanta attracted many companies to relocate there. Notice how diverse both their economies are. Much of the manufacturing that remains in the USA has moved south and west to get away from unions. Guess where Rubbermaid went to? It got bought by a company in Atlanta.

It will be difficult to undo the decline of heavy industry and consumer manufacturing in this country (see my upcoming blog on the economy), contrary to what Jeffrey Immelt said about wanting to see manufacturing be 20% of US jobs. Its never too a bad idea to try to maintain what you have already got. And its never too late to grow into whatever is becoming the Next Big Thing. I see the region has gotten into services, healthcare and precision/aerospace manufacturing in a big way – just like most every other city in the midwest. Its good to be on the bandwagon too. We also need to lead in some things, the way L.A. led in media, entertainment and oil after Standard Oil was broken up.  It has been decades since Cleveland dominated oil and Akron dominated rubber, and the region still hasn’t found other industries to dominate.

We are also starting to get into biotech and green business. Green is a young enough field that we could be among the leaders. When I say green, I don’t mean renovating an existing business to be green for its own sake. I mean we should be working on building and selling green products and services to businesses and consumers that allow them to do more with less- i.e. we should lead in those green products that add quantifiable dollar value to the customer. Such products include fuel cells for generating electricity off of waste heat (and many others such as Rolls Royce) we could be doing fuel efficiency products (such as Timken’s fuel-efficient bearings) or alternative power sources. How about wind power? Wind is nearly cost -competitive with coal and nuclear.  We have many companies that supply components to turbine manufacturers.  But the turbine manufacturers aren’t here. It might make sense to one or more of them to locate a plant near all these suppliers.  Wind power is golden opportunity to get something going.  Lets do it.

Click to see On Fixing Cleveland – Part 3: How to Attract People to the Region’s Urban Cores?

Why fix Cleveland? I live in the region and I have a personal interest in it. I can tell you that it was once a great city; of over 900,000 people. It has beautiful architecture, sports, lots of museums and other cultural institutions.   It has all the makings of a wonderful place to live.   Since 1950, Cleveland has imploded to barely 400,000 people. Now it is known as ‘the mistake on the lake’. If you can fix Cleveland you can fix any city, because Cleveland has nearly all the problems that any city faces. Even if we only partially fix it, it is worth doing for its own sake. Also any lessons learned can then be rolled out to other struggling cities across the country.   What does it take to bring Cleveland back?

1. Think in terms of the larger metropolitan region, not just what is inside the city limits. The whole region needs to recognize what can be gained by fixing its urban centers and what will be lost if it doesn’t.
2. Bring in more jobs, by making it a more attractive place for businesses to do business.  This is the old ‘if you build it they will come approach.’  It works; look at Plano, Texas.
3. Bring in more people by reducing crime, improving schools, and cleaning up areas of urban blight.  If people are already moving here for a job, they just might choose to live in the city instead of the suburbs if the city is nice enough.
4. Rebuild its image.  Most people think of crime, poverty, de-industrialization and decay when they think of Cleveland.  Cleveland needs to rebrand around the service, hi-tech, bio/medical and other indutries that have come in to replace steel, oil and other heavy industries in the previous half a century.  Cleveland needs to talk about its low cost cost of living relative to its middle-income level.  Cleveland needs to get the word out that its orchestra, its art museum, its playhouse, aren’t just as good as every other city – it needs to make it known that they are world class, and outclass those of many other American cities like Boston or Pittsburgh.

The larger metropolitan region is a great place to live. I consider the area to include all the towns and suburbs along the I-77: Cleveland, Akron, Canton and their suburbs and also, further out, Medina, Wooster, Youngstown and Warren and their suburbs. Individually, all of these cities, including Cleveland itself, are a bunch of nothing-little-places. Together, they are a multi-county region of about 4 million people within a maximum of 40 miles of either Cleveland or Akron. There is a lot of gain to fixing the greater Cleveland area.

1. It would help many people who live in poverty and lack access to good jobs, education and so on
2. It could make a lot of money for the businesses involved
3. It would provide good jobs for the people working at those businesses (hopefully some of those people could be the people in bullet 1)
4. It would help the surrounding suburbs and towns.
5. Many people would want to live there – not just young handy people like me.

Some of the neighbors are in terrible shape, for example East Cleveland. It should be declared a federal disaster area and annexed. Assuming Cleveland gets fixed at some point in future, I would not be surprised if some of the other places around it would still see economic value in still being independent. A friend of mine suggests that, ultimately, Cleveland and Cuyahoga County should merge. How? Scenario 1: In 1970, Indianapolis, its county and most of the other suburbs and towns in the county merged into a ‘Unigov’  structure. Scenario 2: Columbus Oh was able to annex its neighbors by requiring annexation in exchange for city water and sewer services. Cleveland could insist on this in upcoming contracts. Notice that Columbus and Indianapolis are both thriving. We can all win together. In the next decades, as continuing sprawl connects the urban cores into a continuous blurb, it would be a good move to join them all together into 1 entity Why would anyone who went to all the trouble of moving to the suburbs want to be annexed?

1. If the problems in the cities were fixed, the question becomes ‘why not?’
2. If merger is a key way to bring resources to bear on fixing the problems, again, the question becomes ‘why not?’
3. Pride – it’s nice to live in the same city as all the businesses, museums, culture, restaurants, sports, and so on that you patronize.
4. OPPORTUNITY.   Regional integration has to provide a greater opportunity for everybody than what we currently have living factionally.

Coming up next I’ll be blog about creating OPPORTUNITY here for business and people: · Part 2: How to Bring Businesses and Jobs In? · Part 3: How to Bring People In?

I set down and read the news every few days – and almost every time, I see some new atrocity:

• A Serial Killer in Cleveland Operated for About 3 Years
• A Soldier Kills 7 in a Texas Rampage
• Another Al Quaeda Beheading
• ‘Bush Advisor Said President Has Legal Power to Torture Children‘
• A Lawyer Committed $700 Million Fraud ‘More Brazen than Madoff
• Companies use contracts to force unconscionably bad fees and service onto their customers
• The police are, too often, in-effective to stop these things or, occasionally, are actively part of the problem

I believe there is something wrong with people. I feel that many other peoples’ values are not the same as mine. For the record, I am not religious; I am guided entirely by a strong sense of ethics. I wonder if most other people in this world are guided by anything at all, after I read things like the above every few days.These kind of atrocities are not limited to the Western World:

• Darfur continues to undergo genocide.  It has been happening there for half a decade now.
• Burma has been repressing its people and forbidding democracy  for several decades now

Honestly, regarding international issues, there are enough people living in stable, at least, partially-free and democratic states, that we could bring more pressure to bear diplomatically. Certain countries, such as Burma, would be very vulnerable to UN-led military action. It is the 20th anniversary of the fall of Communism in Europe – lets get something going.

Right now, what do we do about the atrocities that continue to occur within our midst? How do we effectively and affordably end such atrocities?

People are not inherently good or evil, although the possibility for both exists within us.   Some people do tend more strongly towards 1 or the other.   I think some people’s hearts incline them towards murder, theft, embezzlement, cruel-and-unusual business practices, etc.

I would guess that some kid who hurts animals is going to have a harder time becoming a responsible loving adult than your average choir boy.  How do we, within in the bounds of personal liberty, privacy and so on, bring these people back from the abyss? I think one part of this is treating each other with love (see my previous post on Love).

What do you think? Can humanity save itself? I especially want to hear from some religious people. What does Jesus say? How about Allah …what does Allah say? What does Buddha say? And  what does Hinduism say? I want to hear from everybody.

Most of us will agree that businesses exist to make a profit. Most of us will also agree that businesses exist because they provide something that a consumer wants to pay for. This model works great for a consumer going to a store to buy an item he can pay cash for 1 time – such as a drill. There are many stores that sell drills, many brands of drills, and many consumers. No particular group can take advantage of any other, and market forces work very well to provide value to the consumer and profit to the businesses.

What happens when a service is purchased for some period of time, such as a bank account, or a cellular phone subscription? Here, the market is more limited in 2 ways.

1. the number of sellers are very limited in number and in difference in product offering.
2. the businesses have vast and mighty contracts that give them a level of advantage over the little people not seen since the days of Landlords and Serfs in Europe.

These 2 limitations of the market conspire to make the deals provided by what I will call the Consumer-Contract Industries extremely bad for the consumer. Here are a few examples:

1. Lawyersandsettlements.com writes about ‘ridiculous cellphone early termination fees’
2. MSN Money writes that ‘banks have declared war on you’, levying higher and more frequent credit card fees.
3. USA today writes that banks most frequently hit young and low income customers with excessive fees.
4. The Consumerist reports a bank manipulated one woman’s account, causing over $5000 in  fees.
5. Bankrate.com finds banking fees continue to climb
6. Arbitration is often required in settling these cases. Business Week reports that the arbitrators almost always rule in favor of the business.

When this country was founded, businesses were generally small, excepting government monopolies, such as the British East India Company – which were generally despised. If you didn’t like a certain business, excepting monopolies, you could easily fire them and do business with someone else. Presently, many private companies have attained size and power comparable to large 18th century government monopolies. They protect their position by lobbying the government, and by generally adopting extremely similar business practices, so that the consumer has no meaningful choice. In his book ‘The Dilbert Principle’, cartoonist Scott Adams playfully calls this structure of business a ‘Confuseopoly’. According to the Better Business Bureau, Cell Phone providers, and banks were both in the top 3 most complained about industries in 2008. Predatory contracts and fee schedules as well as a Confuseopoly business structure are the norm in both industries. Certain unethical recruiting firms also abuse their customers like this by making them sign a contract requiring them to pay fees for service and leaving the new company before X date (even though they already made money from the hiring company).

In this country today, we have far too many bright people creating clever business models that make a lot of money for themselves without delivering much value to customers. Contracts allow these businesses to do this.  All businesses need to deliver fair value – otherwise Capital C Capitalism loses its main advantage over Capital C Communism. And I don’t think many people really would want to feel the heavy hand of Communism, with its absence of individual freedoms and opportunities for advancement… So let’s reform the contract law instead.

We need to do something now and do it right. Recall the reforms of Imperial Russia. Every time the serfs would ask for freedom and land, the government gave them the shell of each. Finally they had the Communist Revolution. Let’s enact meaningful reform now, before the anger level builds that far. Let’s begin by supporting Obama’s Office of Consumer Protection and then follow up with reform to the contract law with these key reforms:

1. Contracts should be short and written in plain language.
2. Contracts should offer a month by month term at substantially the same pricing as the long term contract.
3. If a business is no longer in position to provide the agreed service, for whatever reason, for a period of more than 10 days, the consumer should have the option to either obtain a refund or to cancel the contract with no penalty fee.
4. Businesses should not be allowed to force the consumer to purchase proprietary hardware or software that is inoperable with a competitor’s service, or to make a customer’s data un-transferable to any competing service if/when the customer leaves.
5. Businesses should have to honor anything an employee of theirs tells a customer, even if it is wrong. Employees should have to record and provide a transcript of all customer service transactions in written form.
6. The consumer should have to agree to every service that is charged a fee for, each time, before that service is performed.
7. Fees, and pricing etc. should be fair and proportional to the value of the service provided.  i.e. a $39 overdraft fee on a $4 ATM purchase that goes uncovered a few days  should not be allowed, but a fee based on an interest rate of prime + a few percent would be quite fair (in this example, the fee would be about 1 cent).
8. Businesses should not be allowed to play with the transaction type, timing, order, etc. to increase the amount of fees.   Fees should be based on the actual work done.   The charge should be reasonable and fair to both business and consumer.
9. Customarily free services, such as a second checked bag on an airplane, or a dish of sour cream with your baked potato, should not be allowed fees.
10. The consumer should always have the right to challenge the contract in court, without being forced into an arbitration mediated by some unabashedly pro-business arbitrator such as the NAF.   If the court finds the fees or any other part of the contract to be unfair or excessive, the business should have to refund all affected consumers within 30 days – even if this forces the business into insolvency.  All the consumers should also have the option of picking a different business at that time to meet their needs, without any cancellation penalty.

In the meanwhile, PC World has posted a guide on how to defend yourself against many kinds of unfair fees

I recommend that you first see Part I of this series in my previous post …

I personally believe in non-violence, and don’t own any guns at all. I can also see why others feel it is important to have them. I can understand that concerns for security, safety and freedom motivate  both gun rights and gun control proponents. What I can’t understand is that we continue to avoid finding a reasonable solution that is acceptable to most people.

After some thought, I believe that all the interpretations of the second amendment, that I covered in Part I, offer value to Society. So often compromise was intended by our founding fathers, which, I think, is why this amendment was written as it was, including all 3 clauses. Then as now, there were many different groups of stakeholders, who each needed to be satisfied.

Now as was then, compromise can serve us well. Interpretations 1 and 2 while well-argued and well-intentioned, are too extreme for my taste. The 1st, Well Regulated Militia, approach would deny guns to everyone except the military and police. That is very scary to me. The 2nd, Right to Bear Arms Shall Not Be Infringed, position would allow anyone to have anything he was willing and able to buy, borrow or steal. Theoretically, if Bill Gates wanted to buy a nuclear arsenal he could have as many such weapons as he could afford. This interpretation also scares me.

I think a more reasonable approach is to accept that all 3 clauses have importance – that is why they were included in the amendment in the first place. I believe Interpretation 3 ‘The Security of a Free State’ could be the basis of a thoughtful and balanced compromise, and then we could work in the best insights from the other two interpretations.

The need to preserve the Freedom within the Free State makes a sensible basis. The trouble is it is much harder now to accomplish this. Also keep in mind that the present strength of our military is in communications, mobility, coordination and logistics as much as weapons. A bunch of exceptionally-well armed citizens, with the same weapons as the army, could not defeat it because of the difference in skills, support and coordination. It would play out very similarly to the 2 wars against Iraq, where the US army was able to win easily. Now that the military is equipped with Predator drones, they could just take out the thinkers and leaders of any protest long before anyone got armed or organized. (By the way I hear the government is recording the GPS coordinates of everyone’s house in the upcoming census).

So now we have a standing army of such strength that a well armed citizenry is not a sure means to check the government. So what we need is, in addition to gun rights, another additional check on the government and we needed it 9 years ago. What should that be? What would be an effective, politically moderate and non-violent check?  At a minimum, it should involve all Americans owning and practicing with their guns – instead of just the far-right.

Once one allows that there is a public good to be had in keeping the capital P people armed, then you can allow that certain individuals, may be denied guns, by due process of law. For example, I can’t think of any reason why a convicted violent-criminal would need a gun ownership right. Requiring safety precautions for storage of guns and ammunition, certainly does not interfere with the right to check the government, as long as the government has no ability to prevent the gun owner from taking the arms and ammunition out of storage. It certainly should not interfere with pistols, shotguns and hunting rifles and so on that are kept in the home or on the person for purposes of sport or self defense.

Also, requiring large caliber weapons with explosive ordinance and or high rates of fire to be kept only at gun clubs, would certainly go a long way towards satisfying gun control advocates, without taking too much away from everyone else. I wouldn’t imagine most people would want such weapons and ordinance in their house with their family – even though they might want to access it at a shooting range. It might also be reasonable to require gun stores and ranges to provide an extensive anonymous, accredited course of training, safety and ethics to anyone who buys a gun. Such training would also be an effective waiting requirement. Finally it might be useful to revoke operating licenses for those gun ranges and stores who’s guns and/or customers are found to be frequently involved in crimes.

Once one allows for the possibility of safety requirements for guns, then one also allows for ownership of much heavier weapons than current law permits. If one can safely store and use an artillery piece and its ammunition (only) at a properly accredited gun range, then there is no reason it should not be allowed. Perhaps the government should even fund some portion of this and/or donate old surplus equipment.

“I won’t try to psychoanalyze the “naysayers,” I’d just urge them to take a good hard look in the mirror.”

By PAUL KRUGMAN
O.K., folks, this is it. It’s the defining moment for health care reform.

Krugman PhD

Past efforts to give Americans what citizens of every other advanced nation already have — guaranteed access to essential care — have ended not with a bang, but with a whimper, usually dying in committee without ever making it to a vote.

But this time, broadly similar health-care bills have made it through multiple committees in both houses of Congress. And on Thursday, Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, unveiled the legislation that she will send to the House floor, where it will almost surely pass. It’s not a perfect bill, by a long shot, but it’s a much stronger bill than almost anyone expected to emerge even a few weeks ago. And it would lead to near-universal coverage.

As a result, everyone in the political class — by which I mean politicians, people in the news media, and so on, basically whoever is in a position to influence the final stage of this legislative marathon — now has to make a choice. The seemingly impossible dream of fundamental health reform is just a few steps away from becoming reality, and each player has to decide whether he or she is going to help it across the finish line or stand in its way.

For conservatives, of course, it’s an easy decision: They don’t want Americans to have universal coverage, and they don’t want President Obama to succeed.

For progressives, it’s a slightly more difficult decision: They want universal care, and they want the president to succeed — but the proposed legislation falls far short of their ideal. There are still some reform advocates who won’t accept anything short of a full transition to Medicare for all as opposed to a hybrid, compromise system that relies heavily on private insurers. And even those who have reconciled themselves to the political realities are disappointed that the bill doesn’t include a “strong” public option, with payment rates linked to those set by Medicare.

But the bill does include a “medium-strength” public option, in which the public plan would negotiate payment rates — defying the predictions of pundits who have repeatedly declared any kind of public-option plan dead. It also includes more generous subsidies than expected, making it easier for lower-income families to afford coverage. And according to Congressional Budget Office estimates, almost everyone — 96 percent of legal residents too young to receive Medicare — would get health insurance.

So should progressives get behind this plan? Yes. And they probably will.

The people who really have to make up their minds, then, are those in between, the self-proclaimed centrists.

Read more:

Related Story:

Path clears for House to OK compromise health bill

They may not like it, but many House liberals look ready to accept a compromise health care bill, putting Democratic leaders well on the way to delivering on President Barack Obama’s call for overhaul.
Full story @:

The Second Amendment to the Constitution, written in1791 reads: ‘A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed’.  I am aware of no other sentence that is so controversial, and so open to interpretation as this one. I will briefly present all the interesting interpretations that I am aware of.

INTERPRETATION 1 – A Well Regulated Militia: many people read the first clause as being the most important. They believe that purpose of guns was solely for the military. They do not believe that citizens have a right to have weapons outside of military or police service.

The believers in this position make 3 very practical points:

1. No society, free, or otherwise, wants gang-bangers, white-supremacists, radicals, cults, environmental extremists, etc. to be armed at all.
2. The storage of arms and ammunition inevitably leads to accidents ranging from un-knowing toddlers shooting each other with their parents’ guns to accidents at defunct Soviet-era military ammo dumps blowing up entire neighboring small towns in Eastern Europe every few years.
3. Few things are as devastating as the loss of a friend or a loved one, most especially to a senseless gun-related accident or homicide. No one wants to suffer this loss or to die this way himself.

INTERPRETATION 2 – The Right To Bear Arms Shall Not Be Infringed: Some say, the clauses are just preamble and that the final clause can and should stand alone and say it all. This interpretation argues that any citizen should be able to own any arms and ammunition that he can acquire for himself, without any restriction on type, firepower, or registration requirement.

The believers in this position also raise some very important points:

1. It is in plain writing, and the courts have upheld this view, with, occasionally, various exceptions for public safety, etc – such as banning sawed off shotguns – but never banning the right to some kind of a gun.
2. This country has an important tradition of bearing small arms for hunting, skeet shooting and other sporting uses.
3. This country has an important tradition of private citizenry owning military style weapons too. Recall that the opening battles of our revolution (Lexington and Concord) were fought when the British army tried to seize the colonists’ privately owned cannons. In the civil war, many well-armed private citizens and militia companies joined both the Union and Confederate armies, bringing their own muskets, artillery and so on. By the standards of 1861, these citizens were armed to the teeth with the latest and greatest weaponry.
4. In more recent times, it is important to have weapons to avoid being a victim of crime. Justice Scalia noted this in striking down the Washington DC handgun ban when he spoke of the usefulness of having a handgun ‘in one hand while the other hand dials 9-1-1.’
5. The nation needs a robust defense, against external foes, as provided by a citizenry that knows how to use guns, and has immediate unfettered access to them at all times. Recall Admiral Yammamato said before World War II ‘the US cannot be successfully invaded; there would be a rifle behind every blade of grass’. This was especially important, pre-1940, when this country maintained an extremely small standing army.

INTERPRETATION 3 – … The Security of a Free State…: Read the amendment starting at the second clause: ‘being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.’ Recall in the 4th amendment the language about the right of the people to be ‘…secure in their person, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures …’. They didn’t mean ‘security’ the way we mean security today as being in-your-face, pat-you-down ‘Homeland Security’. They meant security in the sense of being ‘unmolested by __’ This interpretation of the language is talking about the preservation of democracy and freedom from any excessive accumulation of power by any individual, group or our government. This interpretation intends gun ownership to be both a right that protects both the individual and the state.

The believers in this position also raise some very important points:

1. When reading the Constitution and amendments as a whole, notice the placement of the 2nd amendment. The Constitution provides a specific architecture and ground rules for operation of the country and its government. The 1st 10 amendments, called the Bill of Rights, are intended as limitations on the government in the interest of preserving individual liberty for both the majority and the minorities. (The Constitution could only receive enough votes to be enacted on condition that the Bill of Rights be passed at the next available opportunity.) These amendments provide freedom of speech, press, assembly and religion (1st), right to bear arms (2nd), freedom from having soldiers quartered in your home (3rd) freedom from unreasonable search and seizure (4th), right to not be forced to testify against one’s self (5th) the right to a fair and speedy trial (6th) and so on… Read this way, one could claim that it is the Freedom and Justice for the citizens living in the State itself that is being protected by the amendment.
2. This is what the Federalist Papers were talking about when they talked about curbing mobs’ power and checks and balances among the various parts of the government. This interpretation agrees with Thomas Jefferson’s assertion that we should have a revolution every few generations to preserve our freedom over time. This is not an incitement to revolt or violence; rather this is a method of making sure people have options. Being well-armed, but not without limit, gives the Capital P People options to check the government if it is needed to be done.
3. Maintaining a ridiculously small standing army and a large and ready militia of broad composition was a means of achieving security in both senses: security from foreign powers, and security from being molested by ___. To make this work, a well armed citizenry was of paramount importance. They contend that this clause ties the whole amendment together and makes it work.

Did I miss any important interpretation or argument?  What do you think?

In my next post I will try to take the best of the above points to suggest a compromise that a center-based majority could live with.