The History of "The Green Thing"

The following story appears in quite few places online, and in somewhat varying forms. (A less-snarky version is sometimes attributed to a "Jim Knowles.") For many of those spreading the story, it is enlisted to ridicule young people who are trying to be "green." But the really interesting thing about it is that it shows how - and when - we shifted to our current uber-consumption economy. Check it out:

Checking out at the supermarket recently, the young cashier suggested I should bring my own bags because plastic bags weren’t good for the environment. I apologized and explained, “We didn’t have this green thing back in my earlier days“.

The clerk responded, “That’s our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment for future generations“.

She was right about one thing–our generation didn’t have the green thing in “Our” day. So what did we have back then? After some reflection and soul-searching on “Our” day, here’s what I remembered we did have….

Back then, we returned milk bottles, pop bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles repeatedly. So they really were recycled. But we didn’t have the green thing back in our day.

We walked up stairs, because we didn’t have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn’t climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks. But she was right. We didn’t have the green thing in our day.

Back then, we washed the baby’s nappies because we didn’t have the throw-away kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy gobbling machine burning up 240 volts — wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that young lady is right. We didn’t have the green thing back in our day.

Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house — not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of Wales. In the kitchen, we blended & stirred by hand because we didn’t have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used wadded up old newspapers to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap.

Back then, we didn’t fire up an engine and burn gas just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn’t need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity. But she’s right. We didn’t have the green thing back then.

We drank from a water fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull. But we didn’t have the green thing back then.

Back then, people took the bus, and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service. We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn’t need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest pizza joint.

But isn’t it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn’t have the green thing back then?

Please post this on your Facebook profile so another selfish old person who needs a lesson in conservation from a smarty-pants young person can add to this.

The age of the speaker isn't totally clear, but to cover all of the points mentioned, he or she must be pretty old. So the mistake of the young cashier was one of not knowing history. Let's check out when some of these changes happened - but all of them happened after World War II.

Glass milk bottles and pop bottles that get reused. I remember these from the 1960s. Cardboard milk containers were common by the 1970s (with the demise of the milkman that delivered), with plastic milk jugs and soda bottles a more recent thing.

Walking to the grocery store, taking the bus, kids riding bikes to school. Car-oriented suburbs first appeared in significant numbers in the 1950s, and pretty much grew like crazy up until our recent housing crash, but the most significant growth was in the 1960s. Up through the 1940s, most folks lived in cities or small towns where you could walk to things. There were no shopping malls or big-box retailers with giant parking lots.

Disposable diapers. These were invented in the late '40s, began to be commercialized in the '50s, and became more popular in the '60s.

Clothes dryers and electric blenders and mixers. More post-WWII developments. These were all very common by the 1960s.

Styrofoam packing and bubble wrap. Bubble wrap was invented in 1960, but took a few years to catch on for packaging. Both of these were common by the 1970s.

Refillable pens. Ball point pens are not refillable (but you can replace the ink cartridge), so this is probably a reference to fountain pens. Ball point pens were invented in the 1940s, and became very common by the 1960s. Disposable ball point pens were just a little bit later.

Disposable razors. This is a new one - they were introduced in 1975 (although the disposable blade had been around since 1903).

So, given when these changes occurred, what generation was responsible for them? The Baby Boomers were just being born from the late '40s through the '50s, so most of this stuff started to change when they were still kids. (Although they might have happily continued with these changes in the '70s and '80s.) People who died in the '40s and '50s could not have been too involved in these changes. It looks like the main generation driving these changes is the generation of the speaker, who must be old enough to remember pre-WWII stuff, but young enough to still be out shopping.

If we want to play the "blame the generation" game, it looks like the speaker is the loser of this one. Isn't it sad that they knew how to live with less waste, but did not help us continue to live that way? Now we need to learn "the green thing" all over again.

Why No Recent Posts?

My apologies for not posting anything for awhile - my mother had a stroke in December, and that plus my other obligations (job, family, old house) have kept me over-occupied. I hope to get some new posts up soon. (And my mother is recovering well.) Thanks.

Bloomberg Takes a Hatchet to Nurses

I was disappointed to see Bloomberg run the following article that superficially looks like objective reporting, but actually is designed to get people mad at nurses working for the State of California. I am sorry, but going after nurses that work in prisons and mental hospitals - especially for something that is not their fault - is just low.

Here is the article, with my comments inserted in [italics in square brackets]:

Million-Dollar Nurses Show California’s Struggle to Cut Payroll

By Michael B. Marois - Dec 16, 2011

California (BCAX) has paid Lina Manglicmot $1.5 million since 2005, an average of $253,530 a year, to work as a prison nurse in the agricultural town of Soledad. [Yes, that is a lot of money. But she is working in a prison. In Soledad. For those unfamiliar with it, Soledad is a small, depressed agricultural/prison community. It is not in the worst part of California, but it is definitely not the best part. The nearest city of significant size is Salinas, a large, depressed agricultural community.]

Manglicmot is one of 42 state nurses who each made more than $1 million in those six years [Why six years? Because it adds up to $1 million?], mostly by tapping overtime [You can “tap” overtime, sort of like tapping a keg? I thought you had to “work” for it.], according to payroll data compiled by Bloomberg News. Together, those nurses collected $47.5 million. In 2008, Manglicmot was paid $331,346, including $211,257 in overtime. [That is a lot of overtime. Why does she work so much overtime? Are they understaffed?]

The extra pay that allows some nurses to triple their regular compensation underscores a broader trend in California, where government workers are paid more than in other states for similar duties [and where it costs more to live than most other states] and civil-service job protections hamper efforts to close budget gaps. [The dysfunction of the legislature has hampered it far more.] Governor Jerry Brown said this week that revenue will fall short of expectations, triggering $1 billion in cuts to school busing, libraries and care for children, the elderly and the disabled, among other programs. [Lina caused that? Bad Lina.]

“California taxpayers should be outraged,” said Lanny Ebenstein, an economics lecturer at the University of California at Santa Barbara and president of the California Center for Public Policy, a research institution critical of public-sector compensation. [It is good that they acknowledge he has an agenda.] “Taxpayers should insist that this is no longer acceptable because what government does is important and it’s important that government run effectively.”

California is home to city managers whose compensation is higher than the governor’s, prison doctors who make more than counterparts elsewhere, Los Angeles firefighters who collect twice the national mean and state workers who reaped $1.7 billion more than their regular salaries last year, from overtime and unused vacation pay to physical-fitness incentives. [Yes, there is too much overtime paid. But much of that is the result of measures designed to look like they save money when they really don’t, like blanket hiring freezes and furloughs.]

Above National Average

Public nurses make far more in California than they do in New York or Texas. Their pay also places them well above the $67,720 national average for registered nurses, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics.

The highest-paid nurse in New York last year earned $186,909 working in a prison north of Manhattan, according to payroll data from the state comptroller’s office. Seventy-five nurses in California made more than that in 2010, and the top earner was paid $269,810, including $179,800 in overtime. [California probably has more nurses than New York. And again, why is so much overtime needed?]

The director of nursing for the Texas prison system makes $165,000 a year, while rank-and-file registered nurses are paid $68,000 to $72,000, said Owen Murray, vice president of offender health services for the University of Texas Medical Branch. The state’s prison nurses aren’t unionized, and overtime payouts to the penal system’s health-care staff are limited, Murray said. [The Texas penal system is a good example for us to follow?]

‘No Way Possible’

“There might be some overtime opportunities, but it would never be more than a handful of hours in a pay period,” Murray said. “So there is no way possible, even at time-and-a-half, that you would reach the ranges that you are talking about in California.”

An array of union-sought laws and regulations keeps nurses’ pay high in California. A rule limits mandatory overtime, yet doesn’t control how much extra time employees can work voluntarily. California must offer extra hours to state employees first, even when officials estimate that a temporary nurse would be cheaper. The state isn’t allowed to hire new prison nurses to fill in for the 10 percent who are on long-term sick leave. [That is a lot of nurses on long-term sick leave. Maybe because they had to work too much overtime in bad conditions.]

California paid the overtime as the state grappled with more than $100 billion in budget shortfalls since 2008, forcing it to cut spending by 16 percent. The six-year period in which the 42 nurses collected $24.6 million in overtime coincided with the recession that damaged housing markets and curbed tax revenue in California and elsewhere. [No, it does not coincide. The recession started in 2008, not 2005.]

$98.7 Million in Overtime

Last year, the state’s nurses were paid a total of $98.7 million in overtime at one-and-a-half times their normal hourly wage -- an average of $17,692 each. [If a few are getting a lot of overtime, then this shows that most are getting little or none. If you have one person making $1 million and nine people making nothing, the average income is $100,000.] Since 2005, California has paid more than $424 million in overtime for nurses, data obtained from Controller John Chiang shows. [Again, why 2005?]

Most of the overtime is concentrated in prisons and mental- health hospitals, where 83 percent of the more than 6,000 nurses for those two agencies collected extra pay in 2010, according to the data.

Union officials say they have urged the state corrections and mental health departments to consider more efficient scheduling, which they say would reduce overtime.

“We actually have looked at this and tried very hard to get them to understand that mandatory and even voluntary overtime is not the way to go,” said Nancy Lyerla, former chairwoman of the bargaining unit for prison nurses at the Service Employees International Union Local 1000, the largest union of state employees in California. “It’s very expensive. We recognize that and have had lengthy discussions with them about that.”

State officials have taken some steps to curb overtime.

Looking For Fixes

Clark Kelso, the court appointed receiver put in charge of California’s prison health system after inmates filed a legal challenge to the quality of care, sent a management team to prisons with especially high overtime and sick-leave totals to examine the reasons and find fixes, said his spokeswoman, Nancy Kincaid. Kelso has sought lower costs from companies that offer temporary contract nurses to the state, she said. [Kelso is a federally appointed receiver, not a state official.]

Critics such as Ebenstein don’t understand how much the agency has worked to improve prison medical care efficiencies since 2006, Kelso said in a statement.

‘Examples of Mismanagement’

“We have been tackling these examples of mismanagement,” he said. “Over the last several years, we have improved medical care significantly while saving taxpayers more than $400 million. There is still more to do. We focus every effort on improving the system through increased efficiency and reduced costs.”

For example, the department has hired more nurse assistants and licensed vocation nurses to handle duties such as medication management and round-the-clock suicide watches, Kincaid said. In the past, that duty has fallen on the registered nursing staff, boosting overtime costs.

Before 2009, California law allowed personal-leave hours to be counted as time worked in calculating overtime. [This is probably why they go back six years, to 2005. If they just used more recent data, the numbers would be much smaller.] A state audit in 2009 found a worker at the Sonoma Developmental Center who was paid for 160 hours of overtime in a single month, even though the employee took 167 hours of leave during that period.

That rule has since been changed, so that only approved leave and not sick leave can be calculated toward overtime and only if the employee is ordered to work the extra hours. [So why cite to the older data that inflates the numbers?]

While the day-to-day causes of overtime vary, such as when a prison is locked down and a nurse already on duty must remain past her regularly scheduled shift, prison health-care executives are limited by state law in their ability to use contract nurses to cover for employees who are ill or on vacation.

Long-Term Leave

Labor laws also prohibit the state from hiring a new civil- service nurse to fill in for those on long-term leave. [Hiring freezes imposed by governors are likely a bigger problem, but it has not mentioned those.]

“The constitution says that if a civil servant can do the job, we must hire or use a civil servant and not an outside contract,” Kincaid said. “So we’re required to offer the overtime to staff before we can go outside to fill it.” [But statewide hiring freezes mean they cannot hire new nurses, but instead must pay overtime.]

Kincaid said the agency tries to anticipate what staffing level is needed for a given shift based on inmate population and the severity of medical issues. It schedules extra employees in anticipation that the ratio may change because of patient needs or workers who call in sick.

Not Enough

That’s often not enough, she said. During two hunger strikes by inmates throughout the state’s prison system in July and September of this year, nurses had to work an extra 7,000 hours of overtime to ensure proper medical care, Kincaid said. [Ah, there is a lot of overtime because there is a lot of work.] Three-day-a-month furloughs in 2009 through 2011 also thinned the staff, requiring more overtime, she said. [Yes, the furloughs designed to cut costs actually increased costs in some areas. Why so little attention to this fact?]

At a prison drug-treatment center in California’s central valley, 160 miles north of Los Angeles, nurse Milacris Andres has been paid more overtime than regular pay in each of the past six years, payroll data show. [Corcoran. That is probably one of the least attractive places to work and live in California. Again, why six years?] In all, she has collected almost $700,000 in overtime pay since 2005, boosting her income during that time to $1.24 million. Through Kincaid, Manglicmot and Andres declined to comment.

“I have never heard of a nurse making that kind of money,” said Lorry Schoenly, a Philadelphia-based prison health-care risk and quality of care consultant. “I’m shocked that they would have any openings left. [There are probably not any openings, due to hiring freezes. If there are openings, it is probably because the work sucks, but requires real training, so the market is setting the price.] California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation may benefit from a fresh look at their staffing patterns and hiring practices.” [That is probably true. Shrinking the prison population would help reduce staffing costs, but that is never mentioned.]

Nurse Overtime Triples

Overtime pay at the Department of Corrections has declined by 27 percent to $475 million last year since reaching a high of $648.5 million in calendar year 2007, payroll data show. [So why do they keep going back to 2005?] Overtime for nurses more than tripled since 2005, to $54 million last year.

At the Department of Mental Health, also operating under federal oversight, overtime costs have soared about 75 percent to almost $100 million last year, from $56.6 million in 2005, payroll data show. Overtime pay for nurses in the agency more than doubled during that period to $41.2 million.

Maria Theresa Sicad was paid $227,014 last year as a nurse at the state mental-health hospital in Napa, even though her base pay was $86,427. Since 2005, she’s been paid $823,905 in overtime pay. Through agency spokeswoman Beth Willon, Sicad declined to comment.

The agency has been understaffed for years partly because of the difficulty of recruiting nurses in some rural locations, said the agency’s acting chief deputy director, Kathy Gaither. [Ah, market forces. Qualified nurses don’t want to move to the sticks to work long hours with crazy people.] Another factor that taxes the staff is federal oversight of the mental-health department, which requires nurses to spend many hours documenting patient care, she said.

Accumulating Overtime

Labor contracts for the nurses require that overtime be offered first to volunteers, so the agency doesn’t have a choice in which employees work the extra hours. That allows some workers to accumulate large quantities of overtime hours. [There is a problem with a few making a lot more than others? We should close the pay gap?] The agency can’t assign mandatory overtime until there are no more volunteers willing to take the hours. [Why is it bad that the nurses who want to and can work overtime do it? Why would it be better to force those who don’t want to work overtime to do it?]

California has made efforts to curb its payroll costs, include a hiring freeze ordered by the governor in February. [If you have a hiring freeze, and the amount of work doesn’t decrease, the existing workers have to work overtime. This is a big part of the problem, not a solution.] According to the controller’s office, the number of full-time employees of the state payroll has shrunk to 201,408 in October from 205,635 when Brown took office in January. [Yes. If the workforce shrinks, but the amount of work doesn’t, the remaining workers have to do more work.]

He and the state legislature passed a plan to ease crowding in prisons by shifting responsibility for thousands of criminals from state control to county jails and local probation.

The Department of Mental Health recently announced an overhaul that includes ways to make staff-to-patient ratios more flexible and technology and documentation improvements that will move nurses from paperwork duty back to direct patient care, Gaither said.

‘Each Patient’s Need’

“Because we are returning more staff back to the unit, we are able to make improvements in how staff are employed and at lower costs,” she said. “It’s really looking at each patient’s need and staffing based on those needs rather than doing a one size fits all.”

At least 15 states have privatized prison health-care to curb costs. Corizon, Inc., a Tennessee company that provides private healthcare to more than 400,000 inmates in 31 states, keeps a pool of temporary nurses on its payroll to fill in when an additional worker is needed.

Those nurses are paid regular hours instead of overtime wages and are not offered full-time benefits, helping to keep costs down, said Rich Hallworth, Corizon’s chief executive officer. [Saving money by not giving health benefits to nurses – quite ironic.]

“Sometime overtime is required,” he said. “But when we do, what we try to make sure is that the number they are working isn’t excessive. It’s a patient quality care issue. If you are working a 24-hour shift how attentive can you be?”

To contact the reporter on this story: Michael Marois in Sacramento at mmarois@bloomberg.net;

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jeffrey Taylor at Jtaylor48@bloomberg.net.

®2011 BLOOMBERG L.P. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

The False Promise of Tax Cuts

Let's look at the idea that tax cuts will help the economy recover. Let's go to Small Town USA. Small Town, like the rest of the US, has been suffering from the economic slump. Because they are in California, they get most of their income from property taxes and sales taxes.

Property values took a dive, so property tax revenues are down. Sales at the ten small local stores and one big-box store are down, so sales tax revenues are down, too. Small Town is looking at about a 10% budget deficit, so they decide to do a 10% across-the-board cut in spending.

Small Town lays off one of ten teachers, one of ten police officers, one of ten firefighters, one of ten maintenance workers, one of ten library staff and one of ten office staff. Because of the slump, one of the ten small stores goes out of business, putting three employees out of work. Business at the big-box store and the local factory is slow, too, so they each lay off ten people. So now you have six public employees and 23 private employees out of work.

Following the idea that tax cuts are good for the economy, the City Council of Small Town decides to enact an additional 10% tax cut, divided between property and sales taxes. Accordingly, Small Town lays off another six employees, so there are 12 public and 23 private employees out of work. But wait, shouldn't the tax cut result in more jobs?

Let's look. The small store that closed gets about a $1000 annual property tax break, but no benefit from the reduced sales taxes. Is $1000 and lower sales taxes likely to allow them to open up again? Not likely. The other nine stores get the $1000 annual property tax saving, and about $200 per month in lower sales taxes (assuming that the stores, not the customers, get the tax savings). Are any of those stores likely to hire additional help? Not just from the tax savings - it is not enough. Besides, business is still slow. It might delay them going out of business for a little bit, but that is about all.

The big store gets about a $50,000 annual property tax break, and a $10,000 monthly sales tax (again, assuming the store gets to keep that). That is enough to hire back a few employees, but business is still slow, and they don't need more employees. Besides, the money question is decided in Large Headquarters City, not Small Town. The big store headquarters happily keeps the proceeds of the tax break. When pressed by the City Council why they are not hiring, the big store agrees to hire back two laid off employees.

The local factory gets about a $50,000 annual property tax break, but no significant benefit from the sales tax break, as the bulk of their purchases and sales are made at wholesale. That would be enough to hire back one employee, but business is still bad, and they are worried that they may have to lay off even more employees, so they do not hire anyone.

But there are still 33 more people out of work than before (12 public plus 23 private minus 2 rehired private), and those 33 people (and their families) are not spending money. Since Small Town is not big, having those 33 people and their families not spending more than the minimum to survive makes a difference. Sales at the nine remaining small stores and the big-box store go down, further reducing sales tax revenue. One more small store goes out of business, laying off two employees. Big box store lays off the two rehired employees and three more. Now there are 40 people out of work.

Notice which direction things are going? Tax cuts are not a way out of recession

(For those interested, here are my assumptions: 1) the stores are open 20 days per month, and the pre-cut sales tax rate is 10%. 2) the small stores pay $10,000 per year in property tax before the tax cut, and they do about $1000 a day of business. 3) the big store pays $500,000 per year in property tax, and does about $50,000 per day of business. 4) the factory pays $500,000 per year in property tax.)

Getting Away With Murder (and More)

When I was a kid, my parents would watch a TV show called Murder, She Wrote, starring Angela Lansbury as a mystery writer. She would just happen to be somewhere when a murder occurred, and would help the (usually clueless) local police solve the crime. I figured if she came to my town, I would either leave or kick her out, because someone was going to get killed. Every week, wherever she was, someone would get murdered, and she would be close enough to get involved.

In the real world, this would not happen. If every week you were near to a murder, the police would be hauling you in for some serious questioning. You would be in tabloid headlines ("Murder Magnet!") and people would avoid you like the plague. Unless, of course, you are near the top of the social elite, like Larry Summers.

If you don't know Larry Summers, as a high official in the Clinton administration, he was part of a unified effort (also including Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin) to quash Brooksley Born's efforts to regulate derivatives markets. (For a short summary, check out: http://articles.businessinsider.com/2009-10-21/wall_street/30087500_1_brooksley-derivatives-market-stock-market.)

He also was instrumental in the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, enacted in the wake of the last great stock market crash, and designed to keep banks from getting too big, too powerful, and too speculative. (This is an interesting account: http://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/05/business/congress-passes-wide-ranging-bill-easing-bank-laws.html.)

By most accounts, these were two major factors that allowed for and exacerbated the 2008 crash and our current recession.

Larry Summers was also a supporter of Enron, willing to lean on California on Enron's behalf. (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2008/11/12/larry-summers-and-enron.html.)

After Clinton left office, Summers became president of Harvard. His tenure there was marred by accusations of racism, sexism, and conflicts of interest, a faculty no-confidence vote, and huge investment losses. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers#President_of_Harvard.)

So what happens to Summers next? Does he slink off into obscurity somewhere? No, he is chosen to be Director of Obama's National Economic Council.

And this is not unique to Obama - there is also Gen. William Boykin, who played significant roles in the failed Iranian hostage rescue attempt, the Waco tear-gas-attack-turned-firebombing, and the "Black Hawk Down" fiasco in Mogadishu, only to be made Deputy Undersecretary of Defense under Bush and get his fingers into the Abu Ghraib torture scandal.

Summers, Boykin, and others at the top levels of American society have been relieved of the burden of having to do a good job. No matter how badly they perform, they continue to be rewarded, and even given higher positions.

The same is true in American business, with top executives being rewarded with "golden parachutes" of millions of dollars when they have failed dismally. Alan Fishman got close to $20 million for running the failing Washington Mutual for 17 days. Leo Apotheker got over $7 million in severance, plus a $2.4 million "bonus," after unsuccessfully heading HP for all of 11 months. Peter Darbee got a $35 million severance from Pacific Gas & Electric despite an expensive failed ballot initiative and a fatal gas pipeline explosion and fire. There are numerous other examples of executives getting obscene payouts for utter failure.

It must be great to be at this Angela Lansbury level - no matter how many dead bodies you leave in your wake, they still want you back, and will even promote you. So how do you get up to this level, where you can get paid huge amounts and get offered ever-higher positions despite spectacular and repeated failure?

The classic American answer is that you do it through hard work and determination. We love those rags-to-riches stories, like Steve Jobs and Oprah Winfrey. And yeah, hard work and determination help. But the best way is to know someone already at the top, who can pull you up.

Let's look at the new Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg. She is likely a smart and hard-working person. But she got to her exalted position in large part because one of her professors at Harvard took her under his wing, and helped promote her. That professor? Larry Summers. (Check it out here: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/07/11/110711fa_fact_auletta?currentPage=all)

There were and are undoubtedly other students out there who are as smart and hard-working as Sandberg. But if they did not get to hang with Larry Summers (maybe they were at Northeast Texas Community College or Cal State Bakersfield instead of Harvard) their odds of getting to the top 1% are not so good.

In the real world that most of us live in, failure has serious consequences - we lose our jobs, and perhaps our ability to earn a living. For those lucky enough to get to the very top, despite the huge impacts that their failures have - people dying, thousands losing their jobs, multi-billion dollar costs - they get to walk away with payouts that most of us would associate with winning the lottery. And they get another plum job. And, perhaps most galling of all, they get to choose - like Larry Summers chose Sheryl Sandberg - who gets a shot at getting to the top next.

So maybe Murder, She Wrote was not so unrealistic after all. After all, reality looks even worse. Not only can some (but only a few) people get away with murder (figurative or literal, your choice), they get rewarded for it, and can set up their friends and toadies to be rewarded for it as well. Eat your heart out, Angela Lansbury.

What Does Occupy Want? Part 2 - They Still Want Back What Was Stolen, And Not Just The Dream

While riding in the carpool I was subjected to Ronn Owens on KGO radio criticizing the Occupy movement for not having clear short-term demands, such as calling for specific legislation, or backing a specific presidential candidate.

This is a classic misleading argument - change the other side's position into something that is easier to attack than its real position. Owens is right that Occupy is not asking Congress to pass a bill - but that is because the goal of the Occupy movement is much broader. It is after a fundamental shift in our society's values, to refocus on human needs instead of accommodating corporate greed. Our elected government needs to be a part of that systematic change, so while passing a bill might be good (if it helps people instead of corporations), it is only a little piece of what is needed, a small step in the right direction.

The erosion of human values for the benefit of corporate interests has gone on for years, and is embodied in numerous laws enacted over the last 30-odd years. But those laws are not the disease - they are just a few of the symptoms. The disease is deeper, and more pervasive. So passing a bill or two, no matter how good, won't do it. Repairing the damage will be a longer term, ongoing process. Symbolic gestures are not enough - we need real change.

Changing some laws is part of the process, but how those laws are changed is important. It cannot be a corporate-whore Congress and President grudgingly giving in to a list of demands forced on them by public protest. Congress and the President must be on board, acting willingly and positively to treat our current corporate parasite infestation. If they did that, then passing some bills would be a sign that we might be on the road to recovery.

If Congress and the President took the following steps, I would take it as a positive sign that they are heading in the right direction. This is just my list of things that would relieve some of the symptoms of our malaise. It is not the cure, or the whole treatment, but even so it should make us feel better.

1) Enforce the the anti-trust laws. This would help keep businesses from becoming "too big to fail."

2) Undo the recent changes to bankruptcy that make it easier for corporations to duck out of labor agreements, and that make it harder for people to get relief from credit card debt.

3) Encourage the production of food that is healthy for us to eat, rather than encouraging the industrialization of the food industry. Heavy pesticide use, high fructose corn syrup, and genetically modified crops benefit big agribusiness at the expense of the small family farmer and those of us that eat (last I checked that was everyone).

4) Bring back something like the Glass-Steagall Act (enacted after the last big crash caused by banks getting out of control) that kept banks from becoming too big and engaging in overly speculative practices.

5) Require banks and other mortgage lenders to hold the loans they make, instead of foisting them off on others. Lending practices would suddenly become a lot more conservative - no "liar loans" and other speculative products, and lenders would not want to push people into loans they could not afford.

6) If we won't do #5, then we need effective regulation of derivatives markets (where the mortgages end up after being sliced and diced), which was quashed by the Clinton administration. The meltdown of the derivatives markets based on crappy mortgages was a major cause of our current financial crisis.

7) Stop the vilification of public employees and their pensions. They don't make that much money, and they did not cause our current problems. Wall Street hates the California public employees pension system since it has billions of dollars that Wall Street wants and it demands good corporate behavior.

8) Undo some of the recent limitations on class actions that prevent the thousands of people ripped off by corporations for $5 or $50 or even $500 at a time from having any effective recourse. You can't get a lawyer to help you sue a big corporation for $500.

9) Rein in corporate tax shelters. GE and other big multinationals can avail themselves of tax schemes that allow them to legally pay little or no tax on billions of dollars of income. You and I can't do that.

10) Make health care and higher education accessible and affordable. This should be a no-brainer, and would provide far more benefit to Americans (and our economy) than two wars, and at a lower cost. But no, we chose the wars instead. Something is seriously wrong here.

There are more, but that is a start. Occupy has not specifically asked for these things, but these steps would show that our society is moving in the right direction. Ronn Owens asked for legislation, so here is a sampling. But it is not enough.

New Name

Yes, this blog has a new name. I am no longer running for California Attorney General, so it seemed a bit weird to still have that as the name of my blog. I thought of just starting a new blog, but I wanted to keep the content from my campaign blog. So, a new name.

Why "Hinged?" I like the idea of a hinge - things on opposite sides may move in opposite directions, but they are still connected. And it is the opposite of unhinged. I thought of calling it "Hinge of the World," but decided that might be a bit pretentious. Anyway, it is time to take a fresh swing at things.

Thanks for reading.