DebateGate

The ugly side of Big Labor

On July 10, three Chicago-area Alderwoods funeral homes were viciously vandalized. All were Dignity Memorial network facilities that had also been targeted for a strike by local Teamsters.

Teamsters Local 727, which represents 16 Alderwoods embalmers, drivers and funeral directors, had been negotiating with the company that owns the homes after their labor contract expired June 30. The union complained that the other side had bargained in bad faith and had "?proposed a three-year wage freeze and a company health care package that is more expensive and less comprehensive than the union's health and welfare benefits," reports the Chicago Sun-Times. And so the Teamsters targeted four funeral homes for strike.

Then ? shock! ? the funeral homes got trashed. As company spokeswoman Jessica McDunn explained, "Three of those four funeral homes were vandalized ? with vulgar profanity, broken windows, damage to the front door and damage to an associate's car."

Naturally, the union is denying any responsibility, and it wisely put the strike on hold following the incidents. "We certainly don't condone that kind of behavior," said Teamsters' spokeswoman Maggie Jenkins.


Making union protestations of innocence hard to believe were nasty fliers bearing a Teamsters banner, pictures of which have popped up all over the Internet, warning ominously: "Any family that makes arrangements with a Chicago-area Dignity Memorial funeral home during this time may encounter a labor dispute at the location."

Even assuming no union connection to the vandalism, the explicit threat to disrupt funeral services is shockingly tasteless. But such tactics are the bread and butter of unions. And it seems to have worked; on July 12, after the vandalism, both sides came to an agreement "with no changes in the health plan," reportstheChicago Tribune.

But funeral homes, like a lot of businesses, can these days ill afford those lavish, union-negotiated benefits, and they are not alone; state and local governments all over the country are groaning under the burden of unsustainable union contracts, which force higher taxes, reduced services or both.

Look at Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel: Good liberal though he is, Mr. Emanuel has been forced to lay off some 625 city employees and delay much-needed sidewalk and gutter repairs because labor leaders representing city workers wouldn't budge on work-rule changes the mayor needs to help shore up the city's coming $700 million operating shortfall.

"My duty as mayor is to protect our city's taxpayers and be their voice ? not to protect the city's payroll," Mr. Emanuel admirably proclaimed.

Much like the city of Chicago, businesses such as Alderwoods funeral homes are faced with tough decisions. They can cut services, lay off workers or go out of business. Union demands, which have piled benefit obligations for decades on both private and public institutions, have seen to it that there is no fourth alternative.

Liberals have a romantic view of Big Labor's contribution to America, which goes something like this: In the bad old days, workers were forced to labor in unsafe or unsanitary conditions for subsistence pay, until unions came along and pushed for reforms that helped make work safer and more rewarding.

There is some truth to this narrative. But there is another, darker side to Big Labor, a movement historically enthralled by Marxist thought and entwined with organized crime, where standing up for workers too often translates into hatred of business in general and an antipathy toward economic freedom.

The ruinous consequences of such a movement run amok in our society can be seen in the smashed windows of a funeral home ? and the empty coffers at City Hall.

Matt Patterson, a Rockville resident, is senior editor at the Capital Research Center and a contributor to "Proud to Be Right: Voices of the Next Conservative Generation." He can be reached at mattpattersononline.com.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-unions-20110808,0,5659136.story

The polar bear has become the poster child for the global warming movement. In May 2008, the U.S. classified the polar bear as a threatened species, the first with its survival at risk due to global warming.

British Teen Slain by Polar Bear in Norway Arctic
Published August 05, 2011 | Associated Press
 
A polar bear attacked a group of British students camping on a remote Arctic glacier as part of a high-end adventure holiday, killing a 17-year-old boy and injuring four other young people Friday before a trip member fatally shot the bear.

Two were hospitalized with severe injuries, according to the British Schools Exploring Society, the organizer of the trip.

The attack took place on the Svalbard archipelago, which is home to about 2,400 people and 3,000 polar bears and attracts well-off and hardy tourists with stunning views of snow-covered mountains, fjords and glaciers.

The British Schools Exploring Society is affiliated with Britain's Royal Geographic Society and has run expeditions for young people to remote and challenging corners of the globe for at least 75 years.
Expedition members were spending three to five weeks in the Arctic, and had each paid 2,000 pounds (US$3,300) to 3,000 pounds (US$4,900) to join the trip, designed to mix science experiments with adventure.

Participants were hunting for Arctic fossils and taking part in environmental experiments, including a project to install hydro and solar power systems. The group also was clearing beaches of tidal debris.
Before heading to the Arctic, youngsters had been urged to raise their fitness levels to cope with the challenging terrain, and to prepare for a diet of freeze-dried meals.

The campers were in a group of 80 people, most of them between 16 and 23, the British Schools Exploring Society said. Many posed Wednesday for a final photo together before splitting into smaller groups to head out to more remote parts of the Arctic.

On Friday morning, some of the youths were camping on Spitsbergen Island, the largest in the Svalbard archipelago, and a place where researchers say there is not much food available for polar bears during the summer.

The bears, which can grow to around 10 feet (3 meters) and weigh up to 1,200 pounds (550 kilograms), are the world's largest non-aquatic predators. Although they don't usually hunt humans, they can attack nearly anything if they are hungry.

With their broad paws and claws as long as two inches (5.1 centimeters), polar bears are extremely dangerous and visitors to Svalbard are advised always to be armed, avoid confrontation and store smelly food securely.

The bear attacked a group of 13 people in the early morning, leaving them with moderate to severe wounds that included head injuries, officials said. One of the campers shot the bear, said Liv Asta Oedegaard, a spokeswoman for the Svalbard governor's office.

The injured were evacuated by helicopter to Tromsoe, the nearest city on the Norwegian mainland.
"With great sadness the British Schools Exploring Society confirms the tragic death this morning of one of the members of its expedition in Svalbard," said Edward Watson, chairman of the British Schools Exploring Society. He named the teen as Horatio Chapple, who hoped to study medicine.

"By all accounts, he would have made an excellent doctor," Watson said, adding that his thoughts were with the family.

The parents of the dead teenager have been informed and the names of the dead and injured would be released once Norwegian authorities had concluded investigations, he said.

The attack happened about 25 miles (40 kilometers) outside Svlabard's capital, Longyearbyen, the main tourist hub with a population of about 2,000.

Visitors are urged to carry high-powered rifles whenever venturing outside Longyearbyen. Polar bear safety brochures advise campers against setting up their tents in areas where bears roam.

Oedegaard said campers normally lay a tripwire around tents before they go to sleep. An emergency flare is triggered if an animal crosses the wire. It was unclear whether the British campers' wire had worked properly, she said.

"It is not unusual to camp here, but it is necessary to carry weapons," she said.

In a July 27 posting on the society's website, expedition member Marcus Wright wrote that the group had encountered polar bears shortly after arriving in Longyearbyen.

"I think we must have all dreamed of polar bears because the next day we were eagerly waiting for the ice floes to break up so we could move on to base camp," Wright wrote in his blog posting.
Wright wrote that the group had spotted a polar bear across a fjord, and also another bear floating on some ice. "This time we were lucky enough to borrow a kind Norwegian guide's telescope to see it properly," he wrote.

Other postings detailed that the group had been trained in using bear flares to protect their camps, and also received rifle training.

Kjersti Noraas, a Svalbard tourism coordinator, said around 30,000 tourists visit the islands every year and although most choose to go on guided tours, "quite a few come to camp in the wilderness."
The last fatal polar bear attack in Svalbard occurred in 1995, when two people were killed in separate incidents, according to Magnus Andersen, a researcher at the Norwegian Polar Institute.
He said an average of three bears a year were killed from 1993 to 2004 in encounters with humans.
Andersen called Friday's attack the most serious he'd seen.
 

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/08/05/polar-bear-kills-one-injures-four-on-british-expedition-to-arctic/#ixzz1USJ9Eh2q

British Scientists Have Secretly Created More Than 150 Human-Animal Hybrids
Robert Johnson    | Jul. 23, 2011, 7:41 AM | 9,504 | 27

For the past three years, British scientists have secretly created more than 150 human-animal hybrid embryos.

The Daily Mail gleaned an exclusive look at the figures which show 155 "admixed" embryos with human and animal genes have been concocted since the 2008 Human Fertilization Embryology Act.

This legalised the creation of a variety of hybrids, including an animal egg fertilised by a human sperm; ?cybrids?, in which a human nucleus is implanted into an animal cell; and ?chimeras?, in which human cells are mixed with animal embryos.

Conducted at King's College London, Newcastle University, and Warwick University, scientists say the experiments can be used to produce embryonic stem cells that treat a host of illnesses.

Regardless of the benefits, British politician Lord Alton told Parliament: "I argued ... against the creation of human- animal hybrids as a matter of principle. None of the scientists who appeared before us could give us any justification in terms of treatment. Ethically it can never be justifiable ? it discredits us as a country. It is dabbling in the grotesque. At every stage the justification from scientists has been: if only you allow us to do this, we will find cures for every illness known to mankind. This is emotional blackmail."

Pro-life groups are aghast as the revelation comes just days after public concerns over a Planet of the Apes type scenario becoming a reality.

Research is currently suspended due to lack of funding, but scientists believe the work will recommence in the future.


Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/scientists-creating-human-animal-hybrid-embryos-2011-7#ixzz1T7OoQCkN

Sunday, Jul. 10, 2011
Driven off the Road by M.B.A.s
By Rana Foroohar
Bob Lutz, the former Vice Chairman of General Motors, is the most famous also-ran in the auto business. In the course of his 47-year rampage through the industry, he's been within swiping range of the brass ring at Ford, BMW, Chrysler and, most recently, GM, but he's never landed the top gig. It's because he "made the cars too well," he says. It might also have something to do with the fact that Maximum Bob, who could double as a character on Mad Men, is less an ?minence grise than a pithy self-promoter who has a tendency to go off corporate message. That said, his new book, Car Guys vs. Bean Counters: The Battle for the Soul of American Business, has a message worth hearing. To get the U.S. economy growing again, Lutz says, we need to fire the M.B.A.s and let engineers run the show.

Lutz's main argument is that companies, shareholders and consumers are best served by product-driven executives. In his book, Lutz wisecracks his way through the 1960s design- and technology-led glory days at GM to the late-1970s takeover by gangs of M.B.A.s. Executives, once largely developed from engineering, began emerging from finance. The results ranged from the sobering (managers signing off on inferior products because customers "had no choice") to the hilarious (Cadillac ashtrays that wouldn't open because of corporate mandates that they be designed to function at -40?F). It's pretty easy to imagine Car Guy Lutz removing his mirrored shades and shouting to the cowering line manager, "Well, customers in North Dakota will be happy. Too bad nobody else will!" (See five destructive myths about the U.S. economy.)

The auto industry is actually a terrific proxy for a trend toward short-term, myopically balance-sheet-driven management that has infected American business. In the first half of the 20th century, industrial giants like Ford, General Electric, AT&T and many others were extremely consumer-focused. They spent most of their time and money using new technologies to create the best possible products and services, regardless of development cost. The idea was, if you build it better, the customers will come. And they did.

The pendulum began to swing in the postwar era, when Harvard Business School grad Robert McNamara and his "whiz kids" became famous for using mathematical modeling, game theory and complex statistical analysis for the Army Air Corps, doing things like improving fuel-transport times and scheduling more-efficient bombing raids. McNamara, who later became president of Ford, brought extreme number crunching to the business world, and soon the idea that "if you can measure it, you can manage it" took hold ? and no wonder. By the late 1970s, M.B.A.s were flourishing, and engineers were relegated to the geek back rooms. (See why you should still go to college.)

This is not to say that the Whiz Kidding of American business yielded no positives; things like the hyperefficient FedEx logistical hubs and the entire consulting industry were born out of it. But ultimately, moving numbers around can do only so much. Over the long haul, you've got to invent or improve real products and services to grow.

In the U.S., the growth of the financial industry has only exacerbated the trend toward balance-sheet-driven management. Companies everywhere, but particularly in the U.S., where the banking sector wields the most power, are under tremendous short-term pressure to make their quarterly numbers. This often leads to planning that's reactive rather than smart: force the highest-paid engineers to retire, even if they are the best, and reduce payroll costs across all divisions rather than invest in the ones that are pushing the New New Thing through the pipeline. (See the 20 best- and worst-paid college majors.)

It's interesting to note that the one area of the U.S. economy that's adding jobs and increasing productivity and wealth is also the one that is the most relentlessly product- and consumer-focused: Silicon Valley. The company off Highway 101 that best illustrates this point is, of course, Apple. The only time Apple ever lost the plot was when it put the M.B.A.s in charge. As long as college dropout Steve Jobs is in the driver's seat, customers (and shareholders) are happy. The reason is clearly the one Lutz puts forward in his book: "Shoemakers should be run by shoe guys, and software firms by software guys."

Meanwhile, despite all the post-financial-crisis soul searching within the business community about the value of an M.B.A., schools are still churning them out. There are, and will be for the foreseeable future, a lot more bean counters than engineers in this country. But the same may soon be true in China, where the state plans to open 40 new graduate schools of business in the next few years. As Lutz puts it, "That's the best news I've heard in years."

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Zombie Americans have forgotten why 4th of July is a holiday!!!

The American Spectator

THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE

The Rebirth of Nations

By Roger Scruton from the June 2011 issue

The True Finn Party in Finland has broken through the left-liberal consensus to take second place in the polls, reminding voters that Finland is not just a geographical area but a country defined by language, culture, and history, a country that has been defended at great cost against the Soviet desire to absorb it and which is now, thanks to the European Union, being robbed of its savings in order to replenish the pockets of Mediterranean kleptocrats. Finns have revealed that they don't like being manipulated by political elites outside the country. They want to show the world that Finland is not just a quaint survival, defined by a weird language and a romantic folklore, but a real and self-governing nation-state, whose resources belong to its citizens, and whose citizens wish to claim their ancestral territory as their own.

A comparable feeling has made itself manifest in France, with growing support for the Front National of Jean-Marie Le Pen, and for Le Pen's dynamic daughter, who is now likely to lead the party to positions of power and influence across the country (see Joseph A. Harriss, p. 54). The Dutch have rallied to the cause of Geert Wilders, whose outspoken attacks on Islam and calls to restrict immigration have brought a new spirit of national defiance to the politics of the Netherlands. Belgium is unable to form a government, on account of the nationalist aspirations of its Flemish majority, while in Italy the Lega Nord is pressing for a redefinition of the Italian settlement, one that will acknowledge the distinction between the law-abiding north and the Mafia-ridden south of the country.

All across Europe the nations are beginning to boil with frustration, at a political straitjacket that prevents them from asserting their ancient rights. The causes of this are many, but two in particular stand out: immigration and the European Union. The two are connected, since it is the EU's non-negotiable insistence on the free movement of labor that has prevented the nation-states from exerting meaningful control over their borders. At a time when unemployment in Britain stands at more than 2 million, more than a million immigrants from Eastern Europe have come to take what jobs there are. It is impossible that such a situation should endure without strong sentiments of national entitlement among the indigenous people, and our governing elites are struggling hard to prevent those sentiments from emerging into the light of day.

Equally provocative, however, has been the debt crisis within the European Union. At a time when the people of Britain are being told that they must face cuts to public services that will cause widespread hardship, they are also being told that taxpayers must contribute 4 billion pounds -- roughly 200 pounds each -- to pay for the extravagance of Portuguese politicians, who have been lining their pockets and robbing their people in the traditional way, and relying on the euro to protect them. The subtle economic arguments with which this move is justified fail to persuade people that they are not being robbed. And it is one appeal of the nationalist parties elsewhere in Europe that they honestly declare that the people are being robbed, in order to subsidize the lifestyle of elites who have no historical connection with them, and that when people are being robbed they have a right to defend themselves.

JUST WHERE ALL this is going it is hard to know. One thing is certain, however: nationalist sentiments are once more prominent in the cultural landscape of Europe. And they are the more prominent for the attempt by the Eurocrats to forbid them. I doubt that this situation was foreseen by those who first set the European process in motion. It seemed reasonable, even imperative, in 1950 to bring the nations of Europe together, in a way that would prevent the wars that had twice almost destroyed the continent. And because conflicts breed radicalism, the new Europe was conceived as a comprehensive plan -- one that would eliminate the sources of European conflict, and place cooperation rather than rivalry at the heart of the continental order.

The architects of the plan, who were for the most part Christian Democrats, had little else in common apart from a belief in European civilization and a distrust of the nation-state. The ?minence grise, Jean Monnet, was a transnational bureaucrat, inspired by the vision of a united Europe in which war would be a thing of the past. His close collaborator Walter Hallstein was an academic German technocrat, who believed in international jurisdiction as the natural successor to the laws of the nation-states. Monnet and Hallstein were joined by Altiero Spinelli, a romantic communist who advocated a United States of Europe legitimized by a democratically elected European Parliament. Such people were not isolated enthusiasts, but part of a broad movement among the postwar political class. They chose popular leaders like Konrad Adenauer, Robert Schuman, and Alcide De Gasperi as the spokesmen for their ideas, and proposed the European Coal and Steel Community (the Schuman Plan) as their initial goal -- believing that the larger project would acquire legitimacy if it could first be understood and accepted in this circumscribed form. At the same time the long-term goal was kept secret, on the justified understanding that, if the people got wind of it, they would make sure it never happened.

When the first instruments of European cooperation were being devised, the continent was divided by the Iron Curtain, with half of Germany and all of the Slavonic countries under Soviet occupation and fascist regimes installed in Portugal and Spain. France was in constant turmoil, with a Communist Party commanding the support of more than a third of its electorate; the free remnant of Europe was critically dependent upon the Atlantic alliance, and the marks of occupation and defeat were (except in Great Britain and the Iberian peninsula) everywhere apparent. Only radical measures, it seemed, could restore the continent to political and economic health, and those measures must replace the old antagonisms with a new spirit of friendship.

As a result, European integration was conceived in one-dimensional terms, as a process of ever-increasing unity under a centralized structure of command. Each increase in central power was to be matched by a diminution of national power. Every summit, every directive, and every click of the ratchet has since carried within itself this specific equation. The political process in Europe has therefore acquired a direction. It is not a direction that the people of Europe have chosen, and every time they are given the right to vote on it they reject it -- hence everything is done to ensure that they never have the chance to vote on it. The process is moving always toward centralization, top-down control, dictatorship by unelected bureaucrats and judges, cancellation of laws passed by elected parliaments, constitutional treaties framed without any input whatsoever from the people -- in short, the process is moving always toward imperial government. And only one thing stands opposed to this result, and that is the national sentiments of the European people.

For this very reason national sentiments have been demonized. Speak up for Jeanne d'Arc and le pays r?el, for the "sceptred isle" and St. George, for Lemmenk?inen's gloomy forests and the "true Finns" who roam in them, and you will be called a fascist, a racist, and an extremist. There is a liturgy of denunciation here that is repeated all across Europe by a ruling elite that trembles in the face of ordinary loyalties. But the fact is that national sentiment is, for most ordinary Europeans, the only motive that will justify sacrifice in the public cause. Insofar as people do not vote to line their own pockets, it is because they also vote to protect a shared identity from the predations of those who do not belong to it, and who are attempting to pillage an inheritance to which they are not entitled.

WHAT WE ARE NOW seeing in Europe is that yesterday's radical visions cannot translate into today's political needs. The imperial project has entered into conflict with the only source of sentiment upon which it could conceivably draw for its legitimacy. The nation-states are not equally stable, equally democratic, equally free, or equally obedient to the rule of law. But they are all that we have. They alone inspire the loyalty and obedience of the European people, and without them there is no way that the machinery of the Union can act. By replacing national accountability with distant bureaucracy, that machinery has left people disarmed and bewildered in the face of the current crisis. The euro, invented and imposed without any proof that the people of the "eurozone" had any desire for it, was immediately understood, by the kleptocrats of the Mediterranean, as a way of enlarging the national debt, and transferring it to the hard-working Germans. And the people of Greece, Spain, and Portugal agreed, since nobody alerted them to the cost -- the national cost -- that will be paid, once the eurozone breaks up, as surely it must.

Now that the day of reckoning is approaching, people all across the continent sense the need to prepare themselves for hard times. In a crisis people "take stock," which means that they retreat to the primary source of their social identity, and prepare to defend it. They do not do this consciously. But they do it nevertheless, and the futile attempt by the comfortable elites to denounce the "extremism" of the people whose inheritance they have stolen merely exacerbates the reaction. But the situation is not a happy one. Not only are there nations like the Flemish and the English that have no nation-state of their own. The half-century of peace and prosperity has fed upon the European cultural inheritance without renewing it. The constitutional treaties and transnational courts of the Eurocrats have made a point of granting no favors to the Christian faith, and the spirit of multiculturalism has ensured that national cultures receive no subsidies either from national governments or from the European Union. A "cult of the minority" has been imposed from above.

This cult is painfully apparent in England, where I am writing. English schools that refuse to celebrate Christmas will nevertheless insist on a day devoted to Diwali and another to Eid; "diversity" is the theme of our official festivals, and the Arts Council of England even refuses to support the English Music Festival, on account of the offensive word English in its title. At the same time, here as elsewhere in Europe, people no longer accept the cult. All across Europe "multiculturalism" is being rejected, both by ordinary people and by many of their elected representatives. For, while multiculturalism has done nothing to reconcile immigrant communities to their new surroundings, it has destroyed the frail remnants of national cultures that survived the Second World War.

This is one reason why people who stand up for their national identity can so easily be made to look like "extremists." You don't look like an extremist if you express your national sentiment in the idiom of a P?guy, an Orwell, a Lampedusa, or a Sibelius. But when you have no national icons besides the flag and the football team you find it difficult to display the most important aspect of national sentiment, which is that it is an invocation of peace, and not a cry of war. That is why culture matters, and why its loss, in times of crisis, is a loss to the whole community, and not just to the educated minority who are aware of the fact. 

Roger Scruton is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. His latest book is The Uses of Pessimism (Oxford University Press).

http://spectator.org/archives/2011/06/23/the-rebirth-of-nations

America's WASP rot

By Henry Allen, Published: June 17

I know why America is falling into a cataclysm of debt and can't get out.

I know because I've seen the cataclysm before on a smaller but no less poignant scale while growing up in New England. A Boston friend calls it WASP rot: a squalor of doom and debt that prompts the best sort of people to spit sarcasms at each other during cocktail hour, to weep and rage the way Congress is doing as the debt limit looms on Aug. 2.

Of course, losing a summer house isn't losing a war or America defaulting on its debts. Yet to me, at least, the feeling is oddly the same. I worry that America is becoming a character in a story by John Cheever or F. Scott Fitzgerald.

My ancestors arrived early in North America, founded towns, fought at Bunker Hill, built railroads and cornered markets. But that day was long done when I was growing up. We were not unusual - in so many families, the money had been made, the money had been spent.

What made these families exceptional, the way America is exceptional, is that they believed that standards had to be maintained at all costs, a moral obligation, even though there never seemed to be much difference between the material and the moral. Houses in the right neighborhoods, alumni donations and keeping one's word all seemed to have the same value.

As John Kennedy said in 1961, quoting John Winthrop's speech to the Puritans aboard the Arbella: "We must always consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill - the eyes of all people are upon us." To maintain the city, he'd say later, we had to "pay any price, bear any burden."

If the trust fund played out or Aunt Cornelia turned out to be broke when she died, the rotting WASPs believed they had no choice but to bear the burden of borrowing to maintain their place in the world.

There was nothing wildly luxurious in their spending, no polo ponies or pearls, just the obligatory private schools, Bloody Mary brunches at the Inn, station wagons with yachting flags, silver wedding presents, lots of dogs, the whiskey. They borrowed from banks and relatives to keep the city shining. They borrowed against their houses. They sold Aunt Cornelia's breakfront. They ignored bills and they despaired.

Imagine a cocktail hour.

"I hate living like this," says a wife - we'll call her Martha. She rattles the ice in her glass.

"Do we have any choice?" asks her husband - we'll call him George. "Do you really want to pull Ted out of Dartmouth? Do you want to move into an apartment?"

"I could get a job," Martha says. "I could manage a bookstore, like when you met me. It's odd - we were poorer then, but we seemed so much richer."

"We didn't have money, but we did have a future," says George. "Freshen up that drink for you?"

The conversation usually goes this way: proposals for impossible cuts in spending are met by equally impossible refusals to make them. Slash Medicare? Stop saving oppressed foreigners from tyranny? Raise taxes? The rock and the hard place. It's a question of standards.

"We have to face the facts," says Martha.

"I'm so goddam sick of the facts," says George.

"If your brother would come to his senses, we could sell Seely's Cove," Martha says, referring to a summer house with porches and a mossy roof and photo albums from the days when men wore neckties as they sailed.

"We have to sell it or put a new roof on it, but Buell is happy just to let it molder," George says. "He says keeping it in the family is a matter of principle."

"You could call Tom about getting another loan from the bank."

"We're at the point where we're just using loans to pay off other loans."

This is what the American government is doing, too. Whether the problem is summer places or wars, sailboats or health care, the despair and folly feel the same. So does the decline in power and prestige, and the poignant denial of decline, prompted by the fear that if we don't live and spend a certain way we'll cease to be us - we'll lose our place in the world.

Cheever writes: "Where had they lost their competence, their freedom, their greatness? Why should these good and gentle people . . . seem like the figures in a tragedy?"

It's WASP rot. They drop out of the country club. The drinking eases the pain. They don't pull Ted out of college; he quits and says he wants to be a chef. The daughter ends up living with a jazz musician who beats her.

It's as if they, and the United States, have lost their luck.

As for America, magical ideas float through the media: Sell the gold in Fort Knox. Sell the federal government's land to the Chinese. Maybe the Wampanoag Indians could turn the city upon a hill into a casino resort.

The troops may come home, not because of casualties or futility but because they cost too much. We might have to impoverish the old and ignore the poor and sick, not on the principle that we're creating welfare dependency but because they cost too much. How sad. How vulgar.

I know the ending of George and Martha's story, but I won't depress you with it. I have no idea what will happen to America. It's impossible to imagine Americans starving to death or the Chinese owning Yellowstone. Next thing, we'd be tossing the bodies of veterans into common graves, though this has already happened at Arlington National Cemetery.

Well-trained in situations like this, I try not to think about it, the goddam facts of it all. Freshen up that drink for you?

Henry Allen, who won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2000, was a Post editor and reporter for 39 years.

? The Washington Post Company

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/americas-wasp-rot/2011/06/16/AGjXNVZH_story_1.html

STOCKTON, CA - Kenneth Wright does not have a criminal record and he had no reason to believe a S.W.A.T team would be breaking down his door at 6 a.m. on Tuesday.

"I look out of my window and I see 15 police officers," Wright said.

Wright came downstairs in his boxer shorts as the officers team barged through his front door. Wright said an officer grabbed him by the neck and led him outside on his front lawn.

"He had his knee on my back and I had no idea why they were there," Wright said.

According to Wright, officers also woke his three young children ages 3, 7, and 11, and put them in a Stockton police patrol car with him. Officers then searched his house.

As it turned out, the person law enforcement was looking for was not there - Wright's estranged wife.

"They put me in handcuffs in that hot patrol car for six hours, traumatizing my kids," Wright said.

Wright said he later went to the mayor and Stockton Police Department, but the City of Stockton had nothing to do with Wright's search warrant.

The U.S. Department of Education issued the search and called in the S.W.A.T for his wife's defaulted student loans.

"They busted down my door for this," Wright said. "It wasn't even me."

According to the Department of Education's Office of the Inspector General, the case can't be discussed publicly until it is closed, but a spokesperson did confirm that the department did issue the search warrant at Wright's home.

The Office of the Inspector General has a law enforcement branch of federal agents that carry out search warrants and investigations.

Stockton Police Department said it was asked by federal agents to provide one officer and one patrol car just for a police presence when carrying out the search warrant.

Stockton police did not participate in breaking Wright's door, handcuffing him, or searching his home.

"All I want is an apology for me and my kids and for them to get me a new door," Wright said.

News10/KXTV

http://www.news10.net/news/article/141072/2/Dept-of-Education-breaks-down-Stockton-mans-door