Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton
In a fit of governmental economy and limelight avoidance, King County in Washington State has gone to mail balloting exclusively. For this election day, Tuesday, November 3, 2009, Vicki and I have already mailed in our ballots. We waited for the televised debates for Seattle City Mayor and King County Executive to be held, considered that we then knew enough, and submitted our ballots.
Waiting for Election Day is Different Now
An odd peculiarity of mailing in our ballots is, now that we’ve voted, it doesn’t matter what happens between our mailing and the official end of voting on November 3 (although ballots with acceptable postmarks will continue to be accepted and processed). What’s missing beside the ceremony of voting is the ceremony of knowing what the results are. We have to wait. We are lame-duck voters and there is no value in paying attention to the still-continuing campaigns for the various contested seats.
What’s not missing is the continued arrival of robocalls telling us how important our votes are and what scoundrels the opponents are. There is also no letup in the delivered mail pieces that continue the bickering. I assume this is all targeted to the large undecided numbers that are sufficient to sway the election one way or the other. A just-arrived attack piece was surprising to me and I almost wanted to reconsider a vote already cast. Anti-candidate material tends to lower my stock in the attacker, not the victim. In this particular case, I rationalized that the attack piece was appropriate.
Stamping out the Party Line
The current election is the first one under a spanking new primary and election approach. All of the positions up for election are supposed to be non-partisan. However, there are certainly party endorsements, and the Governor, a Democrat, has made her preferences known in the election for Seattle Mayor and King County Executive.
The way the new system works here, until overturned by a court appeal as had our previous efforts at electoral reform, is that when there are fewer than three candidates at the primary election, they automatically advance to the general election. If there are three or more candidates, the top two at the primary advance to the general election. There is no party registration in Washington State, and any primary voter selects among all of the candidates. This led to the incumbent Seattle Mayor failing to advance to the general election, the final contest being between two candidates who have never held public office. As a referendum on the mayor, this does say something.
This system can lead to a general election where the two candidates are aligned with the same political party. That happened in one district here.
Reconsider This!
As part of our shared Western-States distrust in government, we have an initiative and referendum system that is designed to hamstring government as much as we want. Fortunately, the legislature does have the power to declare a fiscal emergency and ignore some of the contradictory stuff that gets passed this way until it can be thrown out in the courts.
This election, we have an example of a way that the people can preempt the legislator without throwing the rascals out. It is possible to petition that a passed legislative act be submitted to the voters for approval. In the past legislature, a comprehensive civil union law was passed that provides all of the benefits accorded to married folks to civil unions among unmarried seniors, gays, lesbians, and other flavors. This grants everything that civil law can grant short of calling it marriage. The legislation is quite extensive in terms of all of the various laws that are adjusted.
Referendum R-71 to have the electorate affirm (or disapprove) this legislation was placed on the ballot by petition. Although it is in the nature of this kind of referendum that it follow the wording of the law, so a yes vote will affirm the law, an no vote will repeal it. The petitioners were interested in the repeal, but unlike Proposition 8 in California, it takes a win by the No Votes to accomplish that. It will be close.
An interesting sidelight is that people in favor of the legislation demanded that the names of the petitioners be released to the public, with the clear intent of outing the signers of the petition as bigots. This request and the refusal of authorities to comply has made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court which has issued a stay on the release of the names. I didn’t need R-71; I am happy to vote to affirm it. However, I am not at all keen about releasing the names of petition signers. To do this in the name of freedom-of-information is an indirect assault on the secrecy of the ballot, considering the chilling effect it can have on the petitioning for referendums and initiatives on controversial matters. We do not have to account for how and why we vote a particular way on some measure, and it is frightening that we would have to do so as signers of petitions. And the automatic presumption that the signers are bigots and they are to be hounded is itself a despicable act. I’m against it.
One of the more common use of initiatives is the constant attempt to throttle government spending by denying the ability to raise taxes except in very difficult ways. These are often passed concurrent with other initiatives that require additional spending for something people want, usually more bigger better highways in support of an unrepentent suburban lifestyle. It would appear that the public is tiring of this game, since the tax-restriction measures haven’t been doing very well and at the local and regional level, Seattle voters seem quite willing to tax themselves for initiatives that are important to them. This election will let us know if that is a sustained traintrend despite the current economic difficulties.
The Institution of Reconsideration Reconsiderations Reconsidered
One problem with initiatives is the constant reconsideration of legislative action and of previously-approved initiatives. There’s seemingly no bound on the number of times one can go to the polls to stop something that has been approved and re-affirmed any number of times before. This happened with the Seattle Monorail Project where the voters had to constantly reapprove that which they’d approved before, over the same entrenched objectors. The nay-sayers finally prevailed, and I confess the Monorail Project authority did break faith with the public in what allowed for its undoing. In some sense, that was a victory for this process, but I fear it is simply institutionalized and we are unable to deal with major development issues because of it.
In many ways, the Seattle City Council and Mayor elections are a referendum on the now-funded and approved tunnel project for replacing the decrepit Alaskan Way Viaduct running above the Seattle waterfront area. It is true that, when a preference poll was placed on the ballot, the voters indicated that they wanted a less-expensive non-tunnel solution and there were State funds in hand for that. That was before the economy tanked last year. Now we have an agreed tunnel replacement for the viaduct, and funds are committed for this too. There are complicated arrangements between the State, with its responsibility for the tunnel as part of a State arterial highway, and the City and its responsibilities for surface and breakwater improvements related to the seismic vulnerability of the area.
We are, of course, nervous about the prospects of this project costing far more than the allowances provided for it, and that was made an election issue. Here the Governor also stepped in, endorsing the candidate who favors getting on with it and making it work, not going into our pattern of never-decided decisions that have needed infrastructure development impeded at every turn.
From my perspective, the nervous opposition is too strident and pays no heed to the strides made, within Washington State, in having major transportation projects come in on time and under budget, with the right scrutiny for intervening when a project seems headed off the rails.
Since it is the issue that some campaigner have staked their election on, I have obliged them. No one who is negative about the current tunnel project has my vote.
This is a lengthy analysis with much to consider. Here is the worrisome bit about the current approach [with all emphasis mine]:
“That chance [of bad assets recovering value] can be assessed, of course, only by doing what any reasonable private investor would do: due diligence, meaning a close inspection of the loan tapes. On the face of it, such inspections will reveal a very high proportion of missing documentation, inflated appraisals, and other evidence of fraud. (In late 2007 the ratings agency Fitch conducted this exercise on a small sample of loan files, and found indications of misrepresentation or fraud present in practically every one.) The reasonable inference would be that many more of the loans will default. Geithner's plan to guarantee these so-called assets, therefore, is almost sure to overstate their value; it is only a way of delaying the ultimate public recognition of loss, while keeping the perpetrators afloat.
“Delay is not innocuous. When a bank's insolvency is ignored, the incentives for normal prudent banking collapse. Management has nothing to lose. It may take big new risks, in volatile markets like commodities, in the hope of salvation before the regulators close in. Or it may loot the institution -- nomenklatura privatization, as the Russians would say -- through unjustified bonuses, dividends, and options. It will never fully disclose the extent of insolvency on its own.
“The most likely scenario, should the Geithner plan go through, is a combination of looting, fraud, and a renewed speculation in volatile commodity markets such as oil. Ultimately the losses fall on the public anyway, since deposits are largely insured. … ”
There is a part that reflects my own experience, begun in early 2008 well before the year-end crash but not sufficient to endure it unscathed:
“A brief reflection on this history and present circumstances drives a plain conclusion: the full restoration of private credit will take a long time. It will follow, not precede, the restoration of sound private household finances. There is no way the project of resurrecting the economy by stuffing the banks with cash will work. Effective policy can only work the other way around.”
I don’t know what you are doing but I am looking at ways to save. If I am looking for credit, it is for something that is secured, inexpensive, and protects me from having to dig into my nest egg. And the use of credit is essentially for a bridge that allows my continued saving to create a cushion against unexpected expenses such as automobile maintenance, health problems, and rising costs of insurance, utilities, and current rents. I am not keen to spend cash on anything inessential. If I have discretionary funds, they are to be saved.
For this next worrisome part, some disclosure: We are working at living entirely on Social Security benefits, the payments from an annuity, and the limited earnings of our two small businesses. Those earnings, along with seriously-curtailed spending, are indispensible in improving and building a financial cushion outside of my 401k which is too devalued to touch, especially because withdrawals are taxed and subject to withholding (the appropriate payback for allowing the contributions and their appreciation to be untaxed, but economically terrible if touched now). Here is my worst nightmare, since any reduction in benefits (Medicare or Social Security) would put us on the street. And, hey, do you really want me competing for your job, which I would do cheaper and smarter although certainly not faster?
“ … We should offset the violent drop in the wealth of the elderly population as a whole. The squeeze on the elderly has been little noted so far, but it hits in three separate ways: through the fall in the stock market; through the collapse of home values; and through the drop in interest rates, which reduces interest income on accumulated cash. For an increasing number of the elderly, Social Security and Medicare wealth are all they have.
“That means that the entitlement reformers have it backward: instead of cutting Social Security benefits, we should increase them, especially for those at the bottom of the benefit scale. Indeed, in this crisis, precisely because it is universal and efficient, Social Security is an economic recovery ace in the hole. Increasing benefits is a simple, direct, progressive, and highly efficient way to prevent poverty and sustain purchasing power for this vulnerable population. I would also argue for lowering the age of eligibility for Medicare to (say) fifty-five, to permit workers to retire earlier and to free firms from the burden of managing health plans for older workers.”
It is interesting that the European Union resistance to stimulus of financial institutions is reported to be because their social-welfare systems are actually providing softer responses and security for the public and workers during the economic retrenchment. In particular, instead of lay-offs, there are work reduction strategies in which the social system compensates for the wage reductions. Galbraith continues,
“This suggestion is meant, in part, to call attention to the madness of talk about Social Security and Medicare cuts. The prospect of future cuts in this modest but vital source of retirement security can only prompt worried prime-age workers to spend less and save more today. And that will make the present economic crisis deeper. In reality, there is no Social Security "financing problem" at all. There is a health care problem, but that can be dealt with only by deciding what health services to provide, and how to pay for them, for the whole population. It cannot be dealt with, responsibly or ethically, by cutting care for the old.”
I obviously have a self-interest that finds reassurance in these statements. There is much more to the analysis and I encourage thoughtful reading of the entire piece. It may be necessary to read it more than once to overcome ones initial rejecting reactions, to the extent those are aroused.
Meanwhile, two bits from the concluding passages:
“ … The government must take control of insolvent banks, however large, and get on with the business of reorganizing, re-regulating, decapitating, and recapitalizing them. Depositors should be insured fully to prevent runs, and private risk capital (common and preferred equity and subordinated debt) should take the first loss. Effective compensation limits should be enforced -- it is a good thing that they will encourage those at the top to retire. As Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut correctly stated in the brouhaha following the discovery that Senate Democrats had put tough limits into the recovery bill, there are many competent replacements for those who leave.
“Ultimately the big banks can be resold as smaller private institutions, run on a scale that permits prudent credit assessment and risk management by people close enough to their client communities to foster an effective revival, among other things, of household credit and of independent small business -- another lost hallmark of the 1950s. No one should imagine that the swaggering, bank-driven world of high finance and credit bubbles should be made to reappear. Big banks should be run largely by men and women with the long-term perspective, outlook, and temperament of middle managers, and not by the transient, self-regarding plutocrats who run them now.”
…
“… What is required are careful, sustained planning, consistent policy, and the recognition now that there are no quick fixes, no easy return to "normal," no going back to a world run by bankers -- and no alternative to taking the long view.
“A paradox of the long view is that the time to embrace it is right now. We need to start down that path before disastrous policy errors, including fatal banker bailouts and cuts in Social Security and Medicare, are put into effect. It is therefore especially important that thought and learning move quickly. Does the Geithner team, forged and trained in normal times, have the range and the flexibility required? If not, everything finally will depend, as it did with Roosevelt, on the imagination and character of President Obama.”
I adopted the term Golden Geek to describe my having achieved my 50-years Golden Anniversary as a software developer in May, 2008.
In May, 1958, I was already 19 years old. By the next Golden Geek anniversary I will be a septuagenarian, someone in the 8th decade of their life, after turning 70 this week.
This is an exciting occasion and probably the most exciting birthday I can remember (assuming that as a youngster there was considerable now-forgotten excitement too).
In honor of that I am taking the next few days to indulge some simple pleasures, watch a movie on the IMAX screen, visit an art museum, and write about some of my favorite but neglected topics. Before I do that, I want to reflect on what I notice, looking back from this week.
If I had a troublesome year, it was after my 39th birthday. By my 40th I had calmed down and I recall being excited and oddly moved on the eve of that birthday. Intervening birthdays were not that distinctive as attainments of an age except for the 65th, spent dining in a marvelous sidewalk dining room on the Via Venito in Rome. The age itself didn’t strike me as particularly special, unless you count little blessing such as eligibility for Medicare.
I do count little blessings. I am pleased and satisfied with small pleasures at this stage of my life. I can worry about outliving our savings, being incapacitated in some way, and the new little physical and stamina limitations that show up from time to time. Yet, on balance, life is satisfying. I feel settled.
And then there is the constancy of my vocation as a computer and software technologist, my interest in the computing sciences, and the never-ending fascination with computing as a personal activity. I have had ups and downs in my enthusiasm, yet I find that the current period is one of excitement and accomplishment.
Today I am charting for myself some future anniversaries:
Emerald Geek after 55 years
Diamond Geek after 60
Sapphire Geek at 65
Platinum Geek at 70
Around Platinum time, I will become a nonagenarian and I do suspect my capacities and interests will have been exhausted as far as computing goes. I relish the idea of becoming a centenarian, but I think I will just keep the Platinum Geek title, emeritus.
Speaking of ups-and-downs, there was no little source of excitement at the front of my birthday week thanks to the inauguration of the 44th President of the United States on January 20. I think this has been the most exciting and engaging election campaign and inauguration of my life. That had me look back at all of the presidential campaigns that I remember, preceding my first eligibility to vote in one, 1960, at the then-minimum age of 21:
1948 Truman Campaign. In the third grade, about to move to Kankakee, Illinois for almost two years, I remember parts of this campaign. I listened to a radio broadcast of the whistle-stop campaign that might be said to have turned it for him. On the local broadcast when his train came through Tacoma, Washington, I remember someone calling out the by-then slogan, “Give ‘Em Hell, Harry,” and his response. I remember opponent Thomas Dewey but it didn’t sink in that he was Governor of New York State until I lived there. I don’t remember any election before 1948 -- World War II and playing soldier was more memorable, although I do recall my grandmother weeping when Roosevelt’s death was announced.
1952 Eisenhower Election. I remember the contest between Stevenson and Eisenhower and even fretting about it as a school student. My oddest recollection is dreaming about Eisenhower on election night and waking up in the morning satisfied that it would be all right if he won. I remember watching the inauguration on television and marveling that Eisenhower wore a top hat. I do remember the use of Univac to predict the election although I can’t say how that might have triggered my later interest in computers. (It is interesting that we now appare do this quite differently, with considerable reliance on analysts to interpret early election-returns data.)
1960 Nixon-Kennedy Election. This was the first election in which I could vote. I voted for Richard Nixon yet I was not dissatisfied when Kennedy won. I don’t recall his inauguration (unless he wore a top hat too). My admiration grew as the Kennedy administration progressed. I remember the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis (and how quiet the streets of New York City became as we worried over what could happen any moment). I remember exactly where I was on November 22, 1963 when Kennedy’s assassination was reported. It was at 1290 Avenue of the Americas in what was then the new Sperry Rand building. Others brought word of the shooting around the office; I was struck by my Catholic coworkers leaving the office to walk over to St. Patrick’s cathedral to pray for our fallen President. I remember asking Mike O’Grady to light a candle for me too.
1964 Lyndon Johnson Election. This was an easy election for me (and most of us, based on the results). The odd part for me was that my wife Bobbi and I had just moved from Manhattan to Mineola on Long Island. As recent newcomers to Nassau County, we could not vote for that better-known carpet-bagger, Robert Kennedy, to be a U.S. Senator from New York. There was a new rule that permitted residents of a State to vote in the Presidential race regardless of recent moves, although Bobbi and I had to attest to each-other’s literacy before we could complete the special ballot that was available for that purpose. Of course there were far more peculiar voting laws in other parts of the country. We knew that and were surprised just the same.
1968 Richard Nixon Election. Yes, I voted for him a second time. This time I was rewarded for my error by his winning. Actually, I never felt badly about Nixon, but I got to learn where I differed with his policies and approach. For me, it was about the Supreme Court. Other matters (though not Watergate) were more complex but the long-term import of Supreme Court appointments struck me as a big deal. I was single at this time in my life and I recall how excited my girl friend was to see Nixon campaign at King of Prussia Mall near Valley Forge in Pennsylvania. I thought she was going to jump into the limousine with him, or crawl up on the roof. She and I are still in touch (and politically and socially extremely far apart), so I should send her the pictures that I have from that event. This was the last time I voted for the Republican Party’s presidential candidate. Whenever I am in a room where “All the President’s Men” is showing, I have to sit down and watch again, even though it always turns out the same.
In the run-up to the Nixon election, I also remember where I was when Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed and then when Bobby Kennedy was also assassinated: ANSI standards-committee meetings, both times. I had been at a meal with Martin Luther King when I was a college freshman. I didn’t appreciate who he was at the time, although some students from New York City were completely excited about having him on campus and in the Dabney House dining room. Vice President Nixon came to campus around the same time, in the aftermath of the Sputnik upset, addressing the students assembled on the football field. That was a bigger event, but I remember that closer appearance of King far more, including its lasting reminder of how clueless I was, at 18, of issues of race and civil rights in our society. That’s more significant to me than my skipping all of Feynman’s “Physics X” lectures, something my wife Vicki will not let me forget though.
1976 Jimmy Carter Election. I don’t feel righteous about not voting for Nixon in 1972. The peculiar events of his near-impeachment, resignation, and the presidency of Gerald Ford was too much drama as I was pre-occupied in my first career at Xerox Corporation in Rochester, New York. When Jimmy Carter came through the Rochester Midtown Mall, I was in a group of well-wishers waiting to greet his passage. I remember that he was walking with Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who I had come to admire. When I had an opportunity to shake candidate Carter’s hand, I was flustered, dropped a flyer on the floor, and jammed my palm against his fingers rather than giving him a simple hand-shake. I always wondered if I had hurt his little finger and can be embarrassed about it, even now. (Not quite 20 years later, I had occasion to write to President Carter. I did not mention this incident.)
1980 Ronald Reagan Election. In this election, I actively campaigned for, and voted for, candidate John Anderson. I encountered a lot of recriminations for that from Democrat friends, but that is what I did. The oddest experience was manning a campaign table at a July 4th event in Penfield, New York, where I was living then. That was the first time I ran into binary thinking and the “if you’re not for it, your against it.” This time it was about abortion and Anderson’s support for Roe vs. Wade. In this context, if he wasn’t for banning abortion, he was promoting abortion, and that was that. For me there is a great difference between what we make illegal and how we deal with complicated moral choices that individuals may face. And, as a male, I had the feeling that it was not my business to legislate something so intimate and serious for women. That perspective has not changed for me.
1992 Bill Clinton Election. I didn’t follow this election all that closely, but I had the sense that it was Clinton’s to win. I had moved to Sunnyvale, California, and my at-last arrival in Silicon Valley. I had the strange experience of noticing how Democrats and Republicans seemed to be living out the roles of their stereotypes, something that I had not witnessed in Upstate New York with its fascinating Liberal and Conservative cross-endorsements. (Checking into the Rochester-area campaigning during the 2004 election, it seemed true to say that as California goes, the nation eventually goes. I guess it is a soap-opera-becomes-life thing.) As a California newcomer, I managed to pick every winner on my ballot except for a school-district election where I had no clue about the candidates. It was also a pleasure to vote for Barbara Boxer becoming the second woman Senator from California, along with my being able to vote for Clinton, confident in his election.
2008 Barack Obama Election. The Clinton impeachment effort and all of the divisiveness preceding it was appalling to me. The 2000 and 2004 elections, and the growing red-state, blue-state divisiveness in our civil discourse was one of the most discouraging periods I have ever witnessed. I associate the nastiness going all the way back to the Willie Horton business. I realize that historically there have been truly terrible election campaigns; it is useful for me to remember how much Thomas Jefferson was vilified as a candidate. But this was in my world and time and I didn’t like it. I was also not that keen about the Democrat demonization of the Republican, as well as vice versa. Now back in Washington State and living in Seattle, I live in a district so blue that the only Republican candidates are terrible stereotypes of extremes, so I dare not even use them as a protest vote against the equally self-satirizing and virtually unopposed incumbent.
That all changed this year (except for the local district, which thrived in the Democratic wave of victory). As far as I am concerned, the Democratic presidential contenders were remarkable in conducting civil campaigns and debating at a sportsmanlike level. I understand that it wasn’t all roses, but it was light-years better than what we had come to cynically expect. The determination of Obama-Biden in taking that to the general election is remarkable, as was the generally honorable approach of Senator McCain. I was excited about Sarah Palin’s candidacy but not about her becoming the Vice President. Although Vicki and I supported John Edwards until his withdrawal, and I felt that Edwards had also set a very strong example for others, Obama’s campaign was increasingly impressive. I knew I would support either him or Senator Clinton as the candidate. It was thrilling to see the Obama momentum build beyond clinching the nomination and moving through the election to the transition. What I wanted most was to be able to go to sleep election night knowing that I would wake up to a decisive result. To know the outcome the moment polls closed here on the West Coast was a welcome delight, as has every new moment leading up through the beginning of the Obama-Biden administration this week. I know for certain that I had never wept at an inauguration before. (This time, my score-card at the State and local level was mixed, although I had no doubt that Washington State Governor Gregoire would be re-elected that night.)
There you have it, my geek version of a Forrest Gump journey through life. I credit the recent increased sense of engagement not only to my advancing years but to the blossoming technological connections that bring public participation to us in the amazing ways that we have seen in the latest campaign season.
I have no idea what the future will bring. Every time I see a presidential motorcade or see President Obama in the open in public, I am apprehensive. We’ve been taught that by an accumulation of tragedies. Somehow the greatest fear is that our leader won’t be the real deal. Then as we begin to realize that we have been blessed by a powerful leader who speaks to the best in us, there is the fear that we will be denied the benefit of his full terms. I look forward to that apprehension being displaced by how we join together in continuing the story that is the promise of America.
With all of the challenges that we face, I am hopeful. And I look forward to what the next years bring as I march on toward Platinum Geekness as far as I am permitted to proceed in this life.
[update 2009-01-23T22:09Z: I forgot to put categories on this post. That gave me the excuse I need to correct some typos. I supposed when typos originate with the author, they should be writos? gaffos? slippos?]
