Isaac Laquedem

Why all college athletic departments are failures

In the last few years there have been calls -- not only by lawyers -- to reduce the number of law schools in America, because too many law school graduates can't find jobs as lawyers.  Here's an example from 2009, by Professor Stephen Bainbridge of UCLA.  Law schools that can't place a large portion of their graduates -- at least half to two-thirds -- at a law firm, with government, or in a judicial clerkship are scorned as being failures.

So:  why is it that a law school that places only (say) 50% of its graduates in law jobs is a failure, but a football program that places only 5% of its graduates in football jobs is a success?   Maybe it's because only 1.7% of NCAA college football seniors even get drafted by an NFL team, a remarkably dismal placement record that would get any non-athletic department laughed off campus.

Why Britishers wear poppies on November 11

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
      Between the crosses, row on row,
   That mark our place; and in the sky
   The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
   Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
         In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
   The torch; be yours to hold it high.
   If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
         In Flanders fields.

-- John McCrae (1872-1918)

"Peace Department" would be the really Orwellian name

The last time the United States was attacked by another nation was in 1941.  A purist might include the Iranian takeover of the United States embassy in Teheran as a second time.  Since the end of the Second World War, we have invaded or attacked Cambodia, Laos, Grenada, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Iraq (twice), Iran, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Libya, and Lebanon.  I'm sure I'm forgetting a few.

We used to have an honestly-named Department of War.  In 1947 it was renamed the Department of the Army and put under the aegis of the newly-created Department of Defense.  In the last 20 years we've been doing a lot of war and not very much defense.  It's time to change the name back to the unOrwellian War Department.

First District voters identify three major candidates, or six, but not four

From time to time during the First District primary, I chided the Oregonian for anointing four of the thirteen candidates as the "major candidates," based apparently on their fundraising ability or their support for the $4 billion Columbia River Crossing project.  The Portland Tribune and Pacific University, by contrast, identified six of the thirteen candidates as major candidates, which the Oregonian later picked up on, only to backslide and later say that the 8-person Democratic race included only three candidates, period.

So how did the Whimperer do in identifying the major candidates?  Not so well, actually, if you look at the election results as one group rather than in two separate party groups.  Here's the current tally, which is unofficial but unlikely to change much:

Suzanne Bonamici        48,404    37.7%
Rob Cornilles                39,500    30.7%
Brad Avakian                16,415    12.8%
Jim Greenfield                 6,222      4.8%
Brad Witt                         5,870      4.6%
Lisa Michaels                  5,597      4.4%
Pavel Goberman             1,629      1.3%  
Dan Strite                        1,176      0.9%
Write-in votes                     961     0.7%
Dominic Hammon                889     0.7%
D.R. Delgado-Morgan         831     0.6%
Todd Lee Ritter                   632     0.5%
Saba Ahmed                      231     0.2%
Robert E. Lettin                    91     0.1%

Surprise!  I thought Brad Witt was the most engaging candidate in the race, and the Whimperer identified him as one of the four major candidates, but he finished behind Jim Greenfield and barely ahead of Lisa Michaels.  Judging by the election results, there were either three major candidates, or six, but not four.

Clackamas County's voters do the right thing on urban renewal

Voters in Clackamas County faced two competing urban renewal measures on today's ballot.  Measure 3-386, proposed by citizen petitioners, would require a countywide vote before a new urban renewal area (URA) could be established or an existing URA significantly changed.  Measure 3-388, proposed by the county commission, would also require a vote, but only from voters within the proposed URA. Both measures are passing;  at this writing 3-386 is passing by a wider margin than 3-388 and will be the one to take effect.

The voters made the right decision.  As I wrote on October 18, (and picked up by Professor Bogdanski the next day -- thank you, Jack) because a URA has the effect of transferring future property tax dollars from entire taxing districts to construct improvements in only a portion of those districts, it's fair to allow everyone who's being asked to subsidize the proposed URA to vote on it, as Measure 3-386 does.  Allowing URAs to be formed with the approval of only the recipients(as Measure 3-388 would have allowed) without concern for the opinions of those who would have to bear the cost is, in a modest way, rather like allowing the price of military equipment to be set by a panel composed entirely of defense contractors.

The new and improved protest movement: Preoccupy Wall Street

The Occupy Wall Street movement has attracted some public attention but hasn't really done anything to achieve its goals.  (Actually, it's not clear to me what its goals are, or even if it has any particular goals.)  Its activities seem designed to get the attention of local government but not to have much effect on the people and institutions it's complaining about.

Although I'm on the outskirts of the group against which Occupy Wall Street is protesting, I like to see protests done right -- call it an artistic sensibility if you wish.  In that vein, I'd like to propose a change in approach.

The problem with occupying Wall Street is that Wall Street, in the sense against which Occupy Wall Street is protesting, is a concept -- a network of people and relationships -- and not a physical place.  Yet all they are doing is occupying the physical place.  Instead of occupying Wall Street, they should preoccupy Wall Street.

Preoccupy Wall Street?  Yes!   The PWS movement, as yet unstaffed (I'm inventing it, not joining it), will take as its mission to distract from its tasks those parts of the financial world that got us into this mess, and the senators and representatives who stood by and enabled it, by preoccupying them with responding to the citizens whose lives they've upended.  Here are some ways that the PWS movement can preoccupy Wall Street:

1.    Call up Phil Gramm at UBS AG and ask him if he still thinks that the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act was a good idea.  (That's the act that legitimized incest between banks and investment banks.)  If your senator or representative was in office in 1999 and voted for Gramm-Leach-Bliley, call him or her and ask the same question.

2.    Leave a message for your favorite bank president, asking if he or she favors deregulating deposit insurance and letting the marketplace set the rates for deposit insurance so that bad banks have to pay more or go without deposit insurance.

3.   Buy a large supply of old Zimbabwean bank notes (the ones that have denominations as high as $100,000,000,000,000 because of hyperinflation and economic collapse).  Then pick a day and hire every bike messenger in lower Manhattan to deliver them to the offices of investment bankers, one at a time throughout the day.

4.    Call your least favorite bank and ask what rate it will charge you to lend you money to speculate in the stock market.  Then ask if that's the same rate it would have offered MF Global before it collapsed on Hallowe'en.  (Trick or treat!)

5.    Send a note to the offices of some of the 61 members of the House Committee on Financial Services, and ask them if they'll forswear contributions from officers and directors of the institutions they regulate until the mess has been cleaned up and banks have stopped going under.  Its members include Michael Capuano and Brad Miller, about whom I've written before.  You can even ask Michelle Bachmann what she thinks -- she's a member also! 

6.    Participants away from Washington and New York can visit the district offices of the nearest members of the Committee, and explain their feelings on their elected representatives accepting gifts from the culprits.

7.    Get a thousand or two people together at Wall Street (or its functional equivalent) and have everyone place cell phone calls at the same time, right before the stock market opens.  See if everyone can get through.

Many other ways exist to creatively annoy Wall Street that don't require a tent and a portable toilet, and that will get attention of the industry and its regulators more effectively.  Don't occupy Wall Street -- preoccupy it!

Portland has a Dimon in the rough

A helicopter is hovering over the Hilton Hotel downtown, where Jamie Dimon, head of JPMorgan Chase, is speaking now to a group of businesspeople, financiers, and golfing types.  I can't tell whether it's a news helicopter whose passengers are hoping to film scenes of protest, or a private conveyance poised to remove Mr. Dimon from the crowd of unticketed Portlanders outside the hotel awaiting their chance to tell him their views on financial deregulation.

Why bankers should support ObamaCare: they're already covered!

My banker friends are mostly Republican, conservative, and strong supporters of free markets.  Consistent with their principles, those I've talked with are skeptical about mandatory national health insurance and, as a group, opposed to ObamaCare.  This is a delicious irony, because banks are among the few artificial persons who already have ObamaCare, or what amounts to the same thing: mandatory insurance coupled with regular physical examinations, prescriptions, and even surgical coverage.

I'm referring, of course, to our system of federal and state regulation of banks, which contains all the major elements that Republicans fear in ObamaCare.  Consider:

1.  Banks are required to purchase insurance from the federal government to protect their depositors.

2.  Banks must obtain and pay for annual examinations into the condition of their health, and don't have a choice of providers.

3.  The government may mandate that banks in poor health change their lifestyle by replacing their officers and directors, abstaining from making loans secured by non-nutritive collateral, and strengthening their physical condition with capital-raising exercises.

4.   The government can even order ailing banks to submit to surgery and have pieces cut off and discarded or sold.

As banks are people too (see the Supreme Court's recent Citizens United decision), and have enjoyed ObamaCare since the 1930s, their executives should acknowledge that other people might want the same benefits.  While my analogy between banking regulation and ObamaCare isn't perfect, it's pretty good.  Isn't the FDIC a glorified death panel?  Washington Mutual would say so.