Isaac Laquedem

The leading purpose of the federal economic stimulus contracts is . . . Hanford?

Today's Whimperer carried a chart of  figures, taken from www.recovery.gov (the federal government's website that tracks where the federal economic stimulus money is going), showing where the economic stimulus dollars have gone so far.  About 1.13% of the money dispensed so far has gone to Oregon.  This is $1.8 billion, of which $1.7 billion was grants, $122 million was contracts, and $27 million was loans.  The table also showed how many jobs were created by the money in each category.  In Oregon, each job created by grants cost $187,000; each job created by contracts cost $224,000; each job created by loans cost $3.8 million.  It's reasonable enough that contracting jobs cost more, because contracts typically involve purchasing materials as well as labor. It's reasonable also that the loan jobs cost much more, because the borrower is supposed to pay the money back with interest.

I noted two oddities: as I said, Oregon jobs created by grants cost $187,000 per job; the national average was $230,000 per job, or about 20% more than Oregon's average.  We may have lower labor costs than the average grant recipient (California, a high-cost state, got more than its proportionate share of the loot).  Oddly, the national average for contract jobs is $582,000, more than 2-1/2 times the cost of Oregon's contract jobs.

How can this be?

I think I have the answer, which I gleaned from digging around the government's website.  It lists the top ten contracts, the top ten grants, and the top ten loans.  The largest contract to date -- $1.4 billion -- went to a coompany that's decommissioning two federally-owned nuclear reactors and cleaning up the contamination at the Savannah River nuclear facility, owned by the Department of Energy.  The second-, third-, sixth-, and ninth-largest contracts, totaling $2.35 billion, are also to clean up the government's radioactive messes. (Nos. 2, 6, and 9 are for Hanford.) That's $3.75 billion out of the $18 billion contracted so far, or more than a fifth of the contract dollars.  The labor for these dangerous projects is likely high-cost.

I'm delighted to see the government pick up after itself; however, I can't help thinking that a significant chunk of the funds being classified as stimulus funds are for projects such as these that the federal government would be doing anyway.

Which union leader should Portland honor first? Not Mr. Chavez

I'm no fan of renaming a street after Cesar Chavez, the late United Farm Workers union leader, who had nothing to do with Portland or transportation.  Our prominent highways are named after buildings (the Stadium Freeway), geography (Canyon Road, Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway, Interstate Avenue), pioneers (Powell Boulevard), and transportation people (Baldock Freeway, Banfield Freeway, Barbur Boulevard). 

It did occur to me that our area should recognize a union leader, but one with some connection to our city's history.  The west coast offers a perfect candidate in the person of Harry Bridges (1901-1990), an Australian immigrant who became the first president of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, and was active in union affairs in ports up and down the west coast.  I heard him speak here in the 1970s to a hall filled with rambunctiously reverential union members. 

Eventually we'll build a new span across the Columbia between Portland and Vancouver.  It will doubtless be named after a politician or highway engineer, no telling who.  If the old spans are allowed to remain in place to serve local traffic, and I hope that they are, they could easily be renamed the Harry Bridges, a fitting way to remember a leader of the waterfront.

Lewis Libby is 217 times finer than Paris Hilton, and his joy is unconfined

The observation is going around (brought to me by Mrs. Laquedem) that Paris Hilton spent more time in jail for violating probation on her misdemeanor conviction than L. Lewis Libby will on his felony convictions.  On a risk-reward, or rather risk-punishment analysis, this makes sense; Mr. Libby and his failing memory are less dangerous to his neighbors than Miss Hilton and her Bentley convertible are to hers.

Mr. Libby was sentenced to 30 months in prison, from which President Bush has excused him, so his having to do without actual prison time isn't the fault of the judicial system.  For that reason, it's not fair to compare his sentence with hers.  Even after the President's commutation of his sentence, Mr. Libby is still subject to a fine of $250,000, which is 217 times the fine of $1,150 imposed on Miss Hilton.

Sometimes judges do compare the sentences of the powerful with those of the poor.  In 1938, Richard Whitney, a former president of the New York Stock Exchange, pleaded guilty to embezzling $800,000 from the estate of his father-in-law.  (He had also embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars from the New York Stock Exchange Gratuity Fund and the New York Yacht Club.)   He was sentenced to 5 to 10 years in prison.

A few weeks later, a petty thief was convicted of stealing $40 of goods.  The sentencing judge reportedly said something along these lines: "Some people say there's one law for the rich and another for the poor.  That's not the case in this court.  Mr. Whitney was sentenced to five years for stealing $800,000.  That's $160,000 a year or $440 a day, or about $20 an hour.  You stole $40.  That's two hours' worth of Mr. Whitney's sentence and that is your sentence."

Isaac uses the Tram to compete with the Oregon Lottery

The $15 million tram is now estimated to be a $55 million tram, with the end not yet in sight.  It occurred to me to host a contest to pick the actual final cost of the Tram, with a small prize (yet to be decided) for the winner.  Although whatever prize I decide on will be less than the $millions promised by the Oregon Lottery's Megabucks Program, I am also undercutting their entry fee by a dollar.

Here are the rules, which I reserve the right to change if I should feel like it:

1.  One entry per e-mail account.  (If you have a lot of e-mail accounts, you can enter once for each of them.)

2.  Entries close by June 1 or thereabouts.  (No fair waiting for the total to be announced.)

3.  The City's final definitive cost for designing and building the tram, hard and soft costs together, is the magic number.  I'm figuring that someone at the City will announce a number within a month or two after the tram is complete.

4.  The judge's decision, no matter how irrational or whimsical, is final.

I will start this off.  I predict that the final certified cost of the tram will be $66,241,288.

Good luck!

It's not a Hanukkah tree

Two posts by Professor Bogdanski and Lars Larson, dealing with the subject of the use or non-use of  the word "Christmas" in "Christmas tree," got me thinking on the subject.  I found an illuminating history of Christmas trees at The History Channel.  I'll summarize it as follows: 

1.  The tradition of decorating houses in winter with evergreens of some sort predates Christianity.

2.  The Germans put up and decorated small Christmas trees starting in the 1600s.  Colonial Americans deplored the joyous celebration of Christmas, and did not put up and decorate trees.  The Mayflower group would have ostracized, or worse, anyone who decorated a tree to celebrate Christmas.

3.  In the 1840s, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert put up a Christmas tree in London, and English and American society followed their lead.  At about the same time, German immigrants to the United States, whose numbers were increasing, were putting up trees.

4.  (Here I've added to the research of The History Channel with some other work.)  By the 1880s or 1890s, the celebration of Christmas had become commercialized -- for example, F.W. Woolworth was importing glass ornaments for trees -- and the tree had become part of the secular and commercial celebration of Christmas in the United States.  (Commerce really should have taken hold of Hanukkah instead, because it lasts for eight days and could have been an excuse for eight times the shopping that Christmas offers.)

I am not a Christian.  I celebrate Christmas as a secular holiday.  The Christmas tree in the town square doesn't bother me, because it's secular; in America it's not a symbol with religious origins.  (Actually I rather like the idea of putting up a tree in my house to celebrate America's history of commercial enterprise.)  Calling it a "holiday tree" suggests that we aren't really sure which holiday we're celebrating.

The stolen second-hand stuff is our fault

The Oregonian's series on second-hand shops is making it clear that in the Oregonian's view, the Portland Police Bureau doesn't care much about stolen property.

It occurred to me that one reason the Police Bureau doesn't care is that the citizens and Multnomah County have -- not knowingly -- told the Police Bureau that they don't care about stolen property.  It's hard to miss that message from the county building a jail to hold petty criminals, without providing the money to operate it. 

The county commission might say that it's carrying out the will of the taxpayers, who don't (as a group) want to pay for more county services.  Jails are easy things to cut from a budget: victims of small-time crime don't fight much for the jail budget, and the jail's would-be users don't complain, either.

Second-hand stores, pawnbrokers, and other licensed lenders

One of the quirks of Oregon law is the distinction between second-hand stores and pawnbrokers.  As the Oregonian has reported, second-hand stores are subject to very little regulation and can act almost with impunity as receivers and resellers of stolen goods.  (Yes, I understand that the owners say that they don't know the goods are stolen when they buy them, but how many of us find ourselves with an extra two cases of Similac that we want to resell?)

Separately from the question of second-hand stores operating as fences, there were some stores in the area that operated as unlicensed pawnbrokers.  People would bring merchandise into the store to sell -- often a gun or something of clear value -- and the store would promise not to sell the item to anyone else for a period of two weeks or four weeks, to give the seller the exclusive chance to buy the item back, at a higher price.  In effect, the item was security for a loan, but the transaction was cast as a sale and repurchase.  The reason for this foofaraw was that the state regulates pawnbrokers and prohibits them from charging more than 36% interest.  (The statutes are here.)  But a second-hand store could buy a gun or other item for (say) $50 and sell it back to the owner two weeks later for $60 (equal to about 520% interest).

Something the city or county could consider is adopting a regulation for second-hand stores similar to ORS 726.280 and 726.285 (which you can read at the above link) that requires pawnbrokers to maintain records of what they take in pledge, to make those records available to police, and to give the police identifying information about everyone who pledges an item.  This might be limited to items that are frequently stolen for resale, but it would at least be a start on cutting down on the market for stolen property.  And it might save a few car windows from being broken.

Why the New Orleans schools superintendent needs some broken windows at home

While I was reading about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, I read a second-hand report to the effect that the superintendent of the New Orleans public schools diverted a school work crew from the task of boarding up the public schools, and had the crew go to his house and board it up, using public materials and on the public clock.  It seemed like such a traditional form of Louisiana graft that I thought I should check it out.

And I found sources for the story.  The only problem was that it related to last year's Hurricane Ivan, not to this year's Hurricane Katrina.  And the fellow who used the public employees to protect his own nest resigned in April of this year, before Katrina blew into town.

More specifically, then-Superintendent Anthony Amato said last year that he had personally paid volunteers to board up his house as Hurricane Ivan threatened New Orleans, but school district records showed that the seven workers were on the public clock.  (Scroll down to September 24, 2004 here for a little more of the story.)  He resigned in April of this year, mainly for other reasons.

I haven't seen any press coverage of how the house of Ora Watson, the interim superintendent, fared through Hurricane Katrina, and I don't know what her public image is like in the Big Easy.  I did learn that she is working on other problems of the school district, including cleaning up an overtime-abuse scandal, and I'm surmising that she's one of the few people in New Orleans whose reputation will go up if she can show off some broken windows at home.

Katrina relief: whom to blame depends on who's looking

After one of the presidential debates last year, I observed that my Democratic friends thought that John Kerry defeated George Bush, and my Republican friends believed that the President defeated Senator Kerry.

So it is with the botched recovery efforts for Hurricane Katrina: my Democratic friends blame bits of the Republican administration in Washington, ranging from Mr. Brown at FEMA up to the President himself, while my Republican friends point fingers at Kathleen Blanco, the Democratic governor of Louisiana.  The thought occurred to me when cousin Doctor Laquedem of Miami Beach, one of the few Republicans in the Laquedem family, called to report on the southeastern branch of the family, and said that Governor Blanco was clearly at fault for not calling sooner for Federal help.  I don't know who deserves more blame for the slow response, though it seems to me that first, the reason the agency is called the Federal Emergency Management Agency is because its job is to manage emergencies such as Hurricane Katrina; and second, the national government seems relatively uninterested in catastrophes that don't involve potential weapons of mass destruction.  The governor's mistake was perhaps in not asserting that al-Qaeda was involved.

Hurricane Katrina relief

With New Orleans no longer a tourist destination because of the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, here are two other places worth visiting in its stead.  This one's operated by the Red Cross and this one's operated by the Salvation Army, and both take credit card donations for the relief effort.

(Thanks to Chris Snethen for the information and links.)