Monthly Archives: December 2013

A Stupid Fat Guy

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It’s probably immoral to make sport of big fat guys like New Jersey governor Chris Christie, but everyone does it. Fair or foul, it is assumed that obesity is a character flaw, an indication the person lacks self-control. For a politicians, it is an easy line of attack, but it does not seem to be a huge problem for them, no pun intended. There have been plenty fatties in politics. Christie is going to run for president and he probably will have a lot of support, despite being a morbidly obese man with an obnoxious demeanor.

He has the support of the party establishment. He is a moderate. He got a lot of votes from blacks and Hispanics. He is a fund raising machine and he has the support of the GOP governors. That’s a winning hand in a wide open field. Ted Cruz and Rand Paul have their followers, but they lack the sex appeal and resources to build on it. Plus, the donor party hates these guys as they don’t always follow orders. Christie can be relied upon to do what he is told, without trying to think on his own too much.

Of course, he has the habit of rushing over to grovel before the Left, which makes him the ideal Republican these days. Here he is coming to the defense of Mario Cuomo’s kid, which is the go to move for the GOP wimp. That means as president, he’ll make a lot of noise, but in the end will surrender to the Left in every issue. That makes him the ideal candidate for a party that exists only to defend the Democrat party. Having a a guy who reminds everyone of Ned Beatty as the GOP standard bearer makes perfect sense.

The Never Ending Madness

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Way back in the before times, I was involved in a unionization effort at the company I was with at the time. The Teamsters were trying to organize some part-time drivers and other similar sorts of labor. Most were guys working in these jobs were just doing it to pick up some extra money. It was a piece work deal. A man showed up and he was put to work on whatever was needed at the time. A small percentage tried to make a full-time job of it, but the hours were limited to 25 a week in order to discourage it.

Of course, a group of guys trying to make a career of washing cars or shuttling them to and from a location would always try hard to get more hours. When the company held the line, they contacted the union and the result was a union campaign. The Teamsters won by one vote, mostly by threatening the guys who were not interested. The result was they got a bunch of rules and new pay rates. The truly part-time wanted nothing to do with it and the original organizers were washed out one by one. It was a disaster.

It’s not hard to see something similar happening to fast food workers if they try to form a union. The companies will simply start automating the work and the result will be fewer people making slightly less, while the SEIU gets a piece of the action. Unions are not bad per se, but service worker unions prove little in the way of services to their members, while siphoning off a piece of their check. The SEIU is pretty much just a money racket for the Democratic Party, not a genuine labor movement.

The mathematics of fast food means it can never work. McDonald’s has about 25% of their costs in retail labor. That $7 meal you get in the drive through is a $1.75 in human costs. Doubling the wages does more than double the labor cost. It jacks up taxes and benefit costs. These franchises will have legal and personal costs associated with dealing with a union workforce. Since no one is buying a $10 union meal from McDonalds when they can get a $7 meal from some other option, the result will be ruinous.

Of course, what never gets mentioned is the fact that these jobs were never intended to be careers. They were originally for kids and adults looking for part-time work. The manager would make a career of it, but the front-line people were always intended to be temporary workers in a homogeneous society. That is, your kid got a job at McDonalds, working for someone who lived in the community. The franchise was locally owned, so it was like going to work for a neighbor. That was the point of franchising.

That meant a different relationship between the owners, customer and workers than we see today. Go into a McDonalds now and the staff are weird little brown people from another land. They barely speak English. The manager is just a employee from somewhere, working for a company that has twenty franchises. As the customer, you have no emotional attachment to the place, as it is run by strangers and owned by some out of town interest. The workers peasants with no better options.

It is something to watch in the coming years. Chick-fil-A relies on the old model of hiring locals needing part-time work. They pay better, but expect more. The experience is vastly better for the customer, as the people are pleasant, speak English and seem to care about doing a good job. No one talks about unions and the customers have no reason to think the workers need representation. McDonalds relies on indentured servants and illegals and their reputation has declined as a result. Which model will prevail?

Radicals: Fay Stender

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I’m reading Destructive Generation by David Horowitz and Peter Collier. It is a collection of mini-biographies of the people who made up 1960’s radicalism. It was published in 1989 so it was around when he was going public with his move out of radical politics. His Wiki entry, surprisingly, does a good job summarizing his life as a public intellectual. I say it is surprising as Wiki is populated with liberal crazies, who often assault the pages of people they deem enemies of the faith. Somehow, he has escaped their wrath.

It’s funny how White and Jewish Baby Boomers have cast these long shadows over subsequent generations, but blacks have cast no shadow. The same can be said for Hispanic activists or American Indian activists. Not only have their causes been forgotten, but the people have been forgotten in many cases. Huey Newton, Bobby Seale and George Jackson have left no imprint on black Americans. Even old warhorses like Alcee Hastings and Eleanor Holmes don’t mention them, despite having known them.

Jewish and white radicals from the 60’s and 70’s had no problem going mainstream after they had grown tired of radical politics. Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn landed in the academy, despite living a life of crime. They were the principle backers of Barak Obama’s political career. Of course, David Horowitz stayed in radical politics through the 1970’s and then changed teams. Lots of Jewish radicals made the same journey, either through neoconservatism or some other avenue.

Anyway, the first chapter is on Fay Stender. Her Wiki is here. As you can see, she was in no small part responsible for giving us prisoner rights, a madness that remains with us to this day. She also helped create the prison gang, The Black Guerilla Family. They have probably killed thousands by this point as their reason to exist is to sell drugs and control the prison system. Stender and her cult of radicals set free dozens of these psychopaths, who went onto murder innocent people once they were released.

What jumps out to me in the 60-page description of Stender’s life is just how much sex drove radical politics. Stender was mostly driven to the prison movement because she wanted to have sex with black guys. The milquetoast Jewish boys at college could not light the fire like a black street thug. Women are wired to seek out high status males, which often leads to lusting for the bad boys. Still, the Jewish obsession with blacks, particularly in this way, is something that gets ignored for obvious reasons.

The weird part of these legal radicals like Fay Stender is they seem to act from an odd combination of self-absorption and detachment. On the one hand, they did sacrifice to help these black criminals. On the other hand, they lived lives a million miles away from the results of their work. Stender and her ilk operated as if they were never going to be touched by any of this stuff. They were visitors, experimenting on the host population for personal glory among their people. It turned into a suicide mission.

Finally, the conventional wisdom is the New Left radicals were Boomers. The truth is they were not. Stender and her crowd were born in the 1930’s. In fact, all of the leading radicals of the 1960’s were born in the thirties and early forties. Generally, we think of the boomer as having been born between 1945 and 1964, with the real end point being much earlier for the “60’s generation.”  By the time of the Summer of Love, Fay Stender was a middle-aged woman. That’s something that probably bears further examination.