Coffee heat rising

Ethics

When Giving Goes Awry

by

Baker at Man vs. Debt hit the gong at several blog carnivals this week with his rumination on the various excuses not to give money to charities. While the article is well written and I respect the passion with which his readers respond, the enthusiasm for giving away hard-earned wages escapes me.

I rarely donate cash to any charities or churches. There’s a reason for that: charitable giving warped my father’s psychology, influencing his entire life for the not-necessarily-better, and it permanently alienated his two older brothers from each other. Effectively, it destroyed his mother and his family. Because of his experiences, he would never allow my mother to teach me religion or to drag me to church, and he would not permit her or himself to donate to anything.

At the turn of the twentieth century, my grandmother inherited a substantial sum from her father, who had accumulated a small fortune in freighting buffalo hides out of Oklahoma to market in Texas. By the time my father came on the scene, rather late in her life, she was pretty well set: she owned two houses and a commercial property in Fort Worth, and she had money in the bank.

My father was a change-of-life baby: the youngest of his two brothers was 18 years older than he. At the time he was born, his father ran off, abandoning the middle-aged wife to care for the new baby herself. Her two other sons were, by this point, out of the house and launched on their own lives. One became a ranch hand, running cattle in west Texas; the other went to work at a Fort Worth dairy. Both men had their own families, with all the concerns that entails.

Over the next decade or so, my grandmother became engaged with an alternative Christian church that since then has evolved into the mainstream. Neither brother paid much attention to what was going on, although my father realized something was awry by the time he was about ten years old. She was quietly giving money to this church: large amounts of money. The church was gratefully accepting it and offering exactly nothing in return.

The two older brothers learned about this only after it was way too late. They found out when the county seized their mother’s home for unpaid taxes. She couldn’t pay her property taxes, because she had no money. She was flat broke, having given every penny of her fortune to the church.

Did this make her a better person? No. Did it contribute to her personal happiness? Obviously not. Did it make her holy in the eyes of God? Maybe. God didn’t do much to keep a roof over her head, though. Nor did He prevent creditors and the government from taking away what little she had left. She lost both houses and the gas station, and everything she had ever had was gone. There was no help for her from any direction. She died in desperate penury, without a word from the worthies of the church that had taken all her money.

My cattleman uncle blamed his brother, my other uncle, for this state of affairs. He felt that his brother should have been keeping an eye on their mother, since he was the one who stayed in Fort Worth. The two men fought, and after that they never spoke to each other again.

My father was a little boy, but he was old enough to understand that his home was gone, his mother was reduced to poverty, and a substantial inheritance that should have supported her and all three of her sons had evaporated into the coffers of a church. He determined that he would earn back the entire amount that she had lost.

And he did. By the time he reached his goal, forty years later, the dollar amount wasn’t very much, and because he wasn’t an educated man, he didn’t understand that to match the buying power of what she lost, he would have had to save over seven times as much. But that didn’t matter: in his mind he’d regained her losses. As soon as he reached his goal, he retired, imagining he would be set for life.

To do it, he

• dropped out of school in the 11th grade;
• lied about his age to join the navy;
• worked like an animal all his life;
• spent ten grim years of his life, my mother’s life, and my life in a godforsaken outpost in the Arabian desert;
• pinched every penny that came his way;
• based his marriage and his entire life on the accumulation of savings;
• lived a miser’s life right up until the time he died.

To say he was a frugal man is to understate. Saving money became an obsession, and he focused all of our lives on it. Because he didn’t really understand money well, he made some serious mistakes, topmost among them investing all he had in insurance securities, which during the 1950s were returning at a rate of 30 percent. He didn’t realize a) that investments should be diversified, and b) no investment that was earning that much could possibly last long. When the bottom fell out of the insurance securities market, he lost almost everything—just as he stood at the verge of making his goal.

He did eventually earn the lost savings back, but this fiasco added another ten years of hard labor to his financial plan, and it pinched his personality even more than it was already pinched. Overall, he fared pretty well, considering that he had no education and only the opportunities he managed to wrest from life by main force. He kept us in the middle class, and he left about a hundred thousand dollars to his wife, my son, and me.

But his character was changed by his mother’s charity: warped and crabbed. And he was effectively left alone as a teenager, his two brothers spun off like asteroids in deep space. What remained of his family fell apart, and he spent his entire life trying to put what he thought was his birthright back together.

And that’s why I don’t give to churches.

To my mind, charity begins at home. If I give any money away, it’s to my son, who has returned the favor by growing into a decent man. By keeping myself off the public dole, I save the taxpayer a great deal of money.  And let us bear in mind that what I do to keep myself off the dole—mostly teaching—is itself a form of charity: I educate young people for a small fraction of what anyone with comparable skills doing a comparable amount of work with comparable management responsibility would earn in business. She who gives away her time, energy, and skill for the public good donates something worth a great deal more than cash.

. . . to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Ethical? Charging what the (charitable) market will bear…

by

Middle of last week, along came the following announcement in the community college e-mail:

Kewl, eh? For ten bucks you get an artsy-craftsy bowl (potential Christmas present!), a light meal, and some general socializing. And you donate to a good cause.

I asked La Maya and Kathy if they’d like to drop by this thing by way of entertaining ourselves and picking up a lunch. Kathy couldn’t get away from work, and La M had other things to do. But, said she, the local paper reported that this event was happening at AJs’ stores, too. She gathered the one in our part of town was hosting it on Saturday. She was busy, but Kathy thought she could make the endless drive from the hinterlands where she lives to the central part of the city.

So during the week when I was in the vicinity of that AJ’s store I checked, and yea verily: Bowls for Charity on Saturday.

Fortunately, Kathy changed her mind at the last minute. But that notwithstanding, yesterday morning I drove down to the store to check out the bowls.

A cluster of society wives was buzzing around the table where a bunch of young volunteers were peddling the nonprofit’s wares. As one of the women selected an unexceptional bowl, the amateur saleslady said, “That’ll be twelve dollars!”

Oh? And BTW, not a cauldron of soup nor a loaf of bread to be seen…

“So,” said I, “these bowls are $10 at the community colleges but $12 here?”

The young girl behind the table looked puzzled—and young, very young. She was probably a high-school kid. She had no idea.

Annoying. The presumption that just because you happen to shop at AJ’s—or because you would choose to go to that site after you read about the event in the newspaper—you therefore can be charged more for less: that’s annoying.

It’s every bit as annoying as the presumption that just because I wear a pair of Costco jeans into the local Saks, I can’t afford to shop there.

Is it unethical? I don’t know. Vaguely, I feel it could be. Why, I couldn’t say. It just feels like a gentle rip-off.

People on food stamps shop at AJ’s, believe it or not. One afternoon, before the Department of Economic Security started issuing debit cards in place of paper food stamps, I saw a man roll an entire cart full of healthy, nonjunk food up to a cash register and pay for it with food stamps. Should he have to donate an extra two bucks for charity (and not get the soup or the bread) just because he chooses to spend his dole at a store that stocks more real food than junk food?

If all you want is to pick up a handmade bowl or two, for twelve bucks you’d do better to wait for the next street fair. Or visit the excellent artists’ and crafters’ consignment shop directly across the street from that AJ’s.

If you want to donate to a worthy cause? Frankly, I think you’d do better to send money directly.

So, what cause would your purchase or donation support? Paz de Cristo is one of the most venerable soup kitchens in Phoenix’s suburban East Valley. Year in and year out, it has distributed hot meals to the poor, every single evening of the year.

It’s the offspring of St. Timothy’s Catholic Church, which for as many years in and out has supported it generously. Along about last August, in the depths of the worst recession this country has seen since the Great Depression, rel=”nofollow”St. Timothy’s decided to drop that support, abruptly cutting $300,000 in funding and throwing the charity to the mercy of private donors.

No indication of any wrongdoing on the part of Paz de Cristo was offered as an excuse for this moment of Christian charity. Instead, the church said that tithes had dropped off so sharply (could this mean something?) that it would no longer support the soup kitchen.

Hmm. What would Jesus do?

Google grabs authors’ works

by
Wrote it

The other day, what should I come across but the entire text of my book, The Essential Feature, online and available for free through Google Books.

This book is not out of copyright. Though I don’t earn much on it—just a couple hundred bucks a year—it does represent my labor and, given that I’m about to be unemployed, I do happen to need the money. Evidently Google did unto me as it has done unto untold numbers of other authors who absurdly imagine they should be paid for their product: checked the work out of a library and stole every word of it.

Google has entered into a settlement in a lawsuit over this theft. After looking into it, I decided it’s best to do nothing, rather than to agree to the settlement’s terms. If you enter into the agreement, you may (or may not) receive some pittance as a share of the profit Google reaps by selling your works. However, you lose all future rights to any further claims against Google for its future profits on or future infringement of your copyright. So it doesn’t look like an especially advantageous arrangement. Nor does it appear to be worth the sheer hassle factor involved in trying to enter a claim.

RobertSidney
Wrote it

Why bother to write? If someone can come and take your work and profit on it with no more than a polite “screw you very much,” what is the point in existing as a professional writer?

The answer to that, my friends, is “none.” Those of us who enjoy reading books and magazines written on the professional level—as opposed to self-published tomes from amateurs and hobbyists—can say goodbye to that little pleasure. And say hello to another stage in the dumbing-down of America. All you young wannabe writers: shelve that dream and get yourself an MBA.

If you went into a grocery store and stole a head of lettuce or a package of steak, you would be arrested and prosecuted. Same if you went into, say, the Boston Store and lifted a few additions to your wardrobe. Retailers don’t put up with theft. But because the product is words, apparently it’s OK to steal.

Wrote it

Peter Osnos, writing for The Atlantic, concedes that the settlement “provides payment now and procedures for the future that assure the rights of those who create material to benefit from the use of it.” But, he adds,

. . . the accord also—in the view of its critics, led by the Justice Department—gives Google far too much of a role in determining the digital fate of an enormous trove of books; in effect, an immediate virtual monopoly and too much of an advantage going forward. In the year since the agreement was announced, the image of Google as the happy face of all matters digital has turned into something less appealing: a dominant corporate enterprise that has used its collective brilliance in technology and marketing to suppress competition while it prospers as others do not.

So much for “do no harm,” eh?

Packaged it; contributed to it

Meanwhile, the legal wrangling continues. The Department of Justice recently challenged the settlement in view of its significant antitrust implications. As DOJ notes in its filing,

“First, through collective action, the Proposed Settlement appears to give book publishers the power to restrict price competition. Second, as a result of the Proposed Settlement, other digital distributors may be effectively precluded from competing with Google in the sale of digital library products and other derivative products to come.”

Contributed to it

Among other things, anyone who does not opt out of the settlement loses their right to derivative uses of their work. This is  not inconsiderable. The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, for example, is a spinoff from a magazine article. Because the author of the original piece of journalism retained his copyright in the article, he shared in the profits of the enormously successful book and musical that derived from the first work.

Also at issue are the millions of so-called “orphan works” whose copyright holders no longer exercise their rights. Under the settlement, Google obtains ownership of those rights.

Patent lawyer Gene Quinn eloquently puts the point on this pencil:

To force all those who do not opt out to lose those rights, both with respect to digital distribution and with respect to derivative works is unconscionable. A settlement like this would strip rights away from copyright owners simply because they do not participate in the case or settlement. That would be an enormous taking and redistribution of property rights to a private corporation on an unprecedented level… Make no mistake, the rights are owned and they would be lost through massive redistribution to benefit Google.

Yeah. Like he said!

Jobs we’re glad we don’t have

by

The neighborhood awoke to the sight of the Little Colorado flowing down the gutter on my side of the street. During the night the water main broke where it connects with Other Daughter and the Son-in-Law’s plumbing system, turning their nicely desert-landscaped yard into a swamp. As we scribble, the City is digging up the kids’ yard with a backhoe. The water is off for all the houses up and down the street and will be for another couple hours.

Fortunately, I happened to notice this an hour or so before the City showed up, allowing time to draw out and filter a few gallons of water. The tap water is full of dirt, but the Brita seems to have screened out the visible particulates. I boiled a couple of gallons so as to refill the dog’s water dish and have a little drinking water. Now I’ll have to replace the filters on the Brita and the refrigerator and run the Brita jug through the dishwasher. {sigh} Ain’t life ruff.

The City’s guys showed up pretty quickly. Other Daughter said they’d noticed the mess when they got up around 8:00 a.m., and the workers were here within 90 minutes or so. And if you think your life is ruff, just consider what it would be like to spend the day after Christmas shoveling water-laden gravel aside and excavating an unhappy resident’s yard. Several times…. The guy who came to my door to report that they were turning off the water said they’d just come from another burst main and would go to a third one directly after this.

It rained so hard last night, a couple of times I thought it was hailing. It was still pouring when I went to sleep around 10:00 or 10:30. So the rock and soil those guys are shoveling is waterlogged to the tenth power. Augh! what a way to make a buck.

One of the things I can’t grasp is the niggling resentment of the union wages autoworkers and other laborers have managed, over decades, to put in place, and the insistence that these folks’ wages should be pushed DOWN rather than that workers competing with them in other countries and in right-to-work (for peanuts) states here should be paid a fair rate. Tradesmen and skilled laborers keep this country running,IMHOone heck of a lot better than the billionaire financiers who put us in our present pickle, than the pretty faces on television and movie screens, than the chemically enhanced athletes that amuse us by chasing a ball around a field, and than Congressional representatives who just voted themselves a raise in their six-figure salaries.

Give the auto workers—and your city’s workers and your kids’ teachers—a raise, and make upper-level management and Congress take a pay cut. Now that would stimulate the economy!

And if you’re not in a job where the public begrudges what you’re paid for the privilege of shoveling mud, be glad of it.

Unbundled! Qwest strikes again

by

So, I’m reading my Qwest bill and notice some long-distance calls to Austin, where I know exactly no one. I also want to find out what they want me to do with the useless modem the Filipinos sent and to cancel the $3.99/month roadside assistance plan that recently proved to be ludicrously useless. After dialing the customer service number printed on the bill, I again make the acquaintance of Qwest’s damnable robot, which eventually puts me through to one “Josh.”

Amazingly, this “Josh” speaks English. Yea, verily: he’s a native speaker. In the course of probably 40 minutes spent gabbing and wasting time on hold, I learn he grew up in Las Vegas and presently is living in Logan, Utah, where he works in Qworst’s call center to support his lifestyle as a ski bum.

The Josh brushes me off about the unidentifiable long-distance calls but agrees to discontinue the laughable roadside assistance disservice. Along the way, he remarks that he can save me money on the phone bill. Figuring he wants to sell me something (he does, but not till later), I rise to this bait. How, I ask, does he propose to do this?

“Well,” says he, “I see you have DSL, cell phone, and a land line. I can bundle them together, and it will save you $10 a month.”

“They are bundled,” say I.

“No, they’re not,” says he.

“The only reason I got the DSL was because Qwest sent an ad touting its cut-rate bundling. I called your company and specifically ordered the bundled service, and I was told that was what I got.”

“Look at your bill,” says the Josh. “If it doesn’t say ‘bundled service’ on the front page, then you don’t have bundled service.”

“The bill is unintelligible,” I observe. “None of it makes any sense at all. It is a document designed to confuse the customer.”

The Josh does not deny this. He proceeds to do the bundling thing, and now magically my bill drops by ten bucks a month. Not wanting this lucre to burn a hole in my pocket, he suggests I upgrade my cell phone service. I say I never use the cell phone and the only reason I got it is that pay phones have pretty much disappeared and I have to drive an aging car across a freeway to get to work; the cell is only for emergencies and I don’t need an upgrade. He then proposes I get their TV service. I say I don’t watch TV.

He is incredulous.

“You don’t watch television?” he squawks.

“No.”

“Never?”

“Never.” This is a slight exaggeration, but the Josh need not know it.

Discouraged, he now suggests I replace the old, perfectly functional modem with the new one, which I haven’t yet shipped back to Qworst. I say I’m not looking forward to fiddling with a CD and the connection, which invariably gets screwed up, and I can’t afford to be offline over the weekend because I have to do a blog carnival.

“What’s a blog?” the Josh inquires.

Beginning to suspect the man smokes something that doesn’t have nicotine in it, I ask him if he’s serious. He insists he doesn’t know what a blog is. I try to define blogging in one sentence.

He says for nine bucks, they’ll send a service guy over to install the modem. I say “sold!”

Now—get this!—he tells me I must immediately ship the free modem the Filipino staffer has ordered back to Qworst, so that the service dude can replace it with another modem, which will cost me $100. But lucky me! Qworst will be sending me a $50 rebate coupon!

Oh, thank you, honored phone company!

Not until I get off the phone do I realize that the Josh has figured out, during the course of conversation, that the modem in the box is the same kind of modem the service person will install, that at one point he subtly backpedaled to maneuver me into letting him replace it with one I have to pay for, and that the Josh probably gets paid by the amount of junk he can sell to the customer.

So here’s what we have:

In August 2006 I ordered what was presented to me as a bundled set of services. This “bundling” never happened. The result was that for the past two full years I have been overcharged $10 a month for a service that was misrepresented to me. That adds up to a $240 overcharge. More recently, I was made to jump through an hour’s worth of hoops while two marginally English-speaking technicians tried to figure out, over the telephone from their stations half-a-globe away, what was wrong with my DSL connection. Their assessment was wrong. Incorrectly thinking my modem was on the fritz (in fact, Qworst’s serviceapparentlywas down, something the company had not bothered to share with its men and women in Manila), they sent me a new modem, telling me it would be free of charge providing I shipped the old one back. This device is a newer model. A stateside Qworst customer service person smoothly switches out this free modem for an identical one, to the tune of $100, promising a $50 rebate. So, all told I’m out $290 in fraudulent and questionable charges.

Charming, eh?

If there was any question whether the robot voice expresses the disdain with which this corporation’s leadership views the Great Unwashed, interaction with Qworst’s live voices quickly dispels that.

Good ole boys

by

Yesterday The New York Times ran a front-page feature highlighting one of Our Beloved City’s most intractable foibles: raw sexism. The Phoenix Country Club, we are told, persists in its immemorial custom of barring women from the part of the institution where business is conducted.

A Little History

The Phoenix Country Club was for many years the only golf course in the city and the only exclusive club for the elite. The city was run by this elite, which for some time called itself the Phoenix Forty. Any business that got done was done by or through the Phoenix Forty. Over time, of course, the Forty expanded; it established Valley Forward, an ancillary group designed to mentor and bring up a new generation of city fathers, and COMPAS, an arts group founded to irrigate a very arid cultural desert. Anyone who was anyone-that is, anyone who wanted to make money in business or the professions-had to do business with these men.

And a Little Today

Such business generally took place in an informal setting, often on the golf course and often at a small watering hole inside the Phoenix Country Club called the Men’s Grill. If you had the right connections and the right anatomical equipment, you, too, could do business in one the most wildly booming cities in the nation. But only if you had the key to the executive washroom.

These facts still hold true, even though the city now has more than one stupidly expensive private club and more golf courses per capita than anyplace in the world. The real business of this city takes place at the Phoenix Country Club. And no girls are allowed.

That’s right. Women are not permitted to set a dainty little foot inside the Men’s Grill, despite years of campaigning to make ambition an equal-opportunity enterprise.

Why Does It Matter

Understand: business does not take place in the PCC’s dining room, a white-linen-tablecloth establishment that, last time I was there, remained as untouched by the concept of “cuisine” as the rest of the place was by the concept of equitable treatment. Food was plain and dreary, service was just OK, and the place still isn’t open for afternoon drinks. There was a dank little hole in the basement where girls could gather, and I have been there to meet with budding groups of would-be female movers and shakers. But no one in power ever stuck his nose in that room, and so little ever came of those groups. That is because the adage about selecting a mentor is true: you don’t want a mentor who is like you; you want a mentor who is in power. For this reason, business and professional women in my generation sought out established men as mentors, not other striving women.

Historically, women have not been the only target of discrimination at the Phoenix Country Club. To this day, it’s a rare dusky face you’ll see in those precincts. And when I was young, Jews were strictly verboten. In the mid-1960s-that’s how late this was happening-a friend whose parents had a membership used to invite our Jewish pal to spend days at the pool, as much as a gesture of rebellion as of friendship. Not until years later were the strictures against Jews and blacks lifted.

Those against women, however, have never been removed. If I wished to associate with the Phoenix Country Club set-and were I in business or politics I would have to-I could pay many thousands of dollars a year to buy and maintain a membership, but I would not be permitted to enter the locus of power. When men walked on the moon for the first time, women members were not allowed into this site or into a similar den at the Arizona Club to watch the historic event on the clubs’ television sets.

When people have objected to these policies, the elite members have shown themselves to be exactly the kind of pigs one would expect. Proving that boys will always be boys, they went after one member who challenged their habits, Logan Van Sittert, and “hooted and hollered at him and called his wife a whore.” Women who have protested the blatant discrimination have seen their names and telephone numbers listed on a Web site titled “Femi Nazis here in Phoenix.” One recalcitrant member, who owns one of the stunningly expensive historic homes on the golf course, looked up to find club members “hopping off their carts” to pee on her pecan tree.

Why, one asks, would anyone want to have anything to do with such morons? Because these morons run the city and to a large extent they run the state. You obtain Power (and the money that comes with it) by rubbing shoulders with Power: part of building a heavy-hitting career in this state is seeing and being seen by the people who are already in power.

And Why We Should Never Forget…

This “custom” is a vestige of a time when women, blacks, Latinos, and Jews were barred from full citizenship in our country. Today we tend to forget the fact that equal access to business, the professions, and the seats of power is a very recent phenomenon. And it is something that should not be forgotten.

Young women in particular need to bear in mind just how new and how precarious their rights as full, adult human beings really are. Let us remember that the the movers and shakers behind the political party currently in power desire, with all their hearts and allegedly religious souls, to limit all women’s right to decide what to do with their bodies-part and parcel of the control that until recently barred women from unfettered participation in business, the professions, and politics.

To insist that all Americans have full access to America’s opportunities and be free to enjoy them to the extent of their abilities is not “feminazism.” It’s common decency.