March/April 2012 | Washington Monthly

It is now well known that Apple’s Chinese suppliers have employees who work twelve hours a day, seven days a week, and are housed in dorms with, according to the New York Times, as many as twenty people crowded into a three-room apartment. Banners on the factory walls warn: “Work hard on the job today or work hard to find a job tomorrow.” In light of all this, it is difficult to understand why Steve Jobs has been so lionized.

And I still can’t figure out why Mark Zuckerberg is treated with any respect. There is considerable evidence that Facebook was based on a stolen idea. As for Zuckerberg’s pious assertion that Facebook’s purpose is to “accomplish a social mission,” he is of course absolutely correct. It was founded to serve the snobbery of Harvard students. I concede that it has grown to play a role in enabling friends to reconnect and keep in touch and in serving good causes as well as bad ones. For far too many of Facebook’s users, however, it has turned friendship into a numbers game. Furthermore, its success is partly based on exploiting the self-absorption that has become one of the more unattractive features of modern life.

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The Bain con

Charles Peters — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 17:19:15 +0000

One of the most common tactics employed by defense and other contractors is called “lowballing.” They win government contracts by making the lowest bid and then, once the work has begun and it is too late for the government to change contractors, they suddenly discover additional “unforeseen” costs that result in their having to raise prices, often well above the highest bid made by their competitors.

It turns out that Mitt Romney’s firm, Bain Capital, practiced a clever variation on this con when bidding for companies it wished to acquire. Bain lodged the highest bids, and then, after winning exclusive rights to negotiate, would suddenly find “all sorts of warts, bruises and faults with the company being [acquired],” writes William D. Cohan, a Wall Street veteran and columnist for Bloomberg News. “Soon enough,” he adds, “that near-final Bain bid … would begin to fall, often significantly,” and the company would have to “accept the lower price,” or begin seeking a best bidder all over again.

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Goldman Sachs is our compass

Charles Peters — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 17:18:46 +0000

Similar to my qualms about Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, I am puzzled that the Human Rights Campaign appears to believe that the cause of gay marriage gains moral authority from its endorsement by Lloyd Blankfein.

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Some things never change

Charles Peters — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 17:17:36 +0000

If you’re comforted by stories showing that, in some respects at least, the good old days are still with us, then you’ll appreciate the latest news out of West Virginia. A 2012 candidate for sheriff in Lincoln County has, according to the Charleston Gazette, only recently emerged from prison after pleading guilty to vote-buying charges in 2005. He would replace the current sheriff, who, the Gazette also reports, has agreed to plead guilty to charges that he “manipulated absentee votes.”

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One SWAT too many

Charles Peters — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 17:16:26 +0000

In another story from my hometown paper, the Gazette reports that a SWAT team from the Kanawha County Sheriff’s Office has been found innocent of wrongdoing after its members managed to fire seven bullets into a hostage taker—even though he had released his hostages, they had only negotiated for two hours, and, by the way, he had not fired at them. None of this sounds exactly blameless to me. But more importantly, what on earth is the Kanawha County Sheriff’s Office doing with a SWAT team in the first place?

And did you know that some local police departments now have their own drones? This is homeland security gone mad.

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There’s something about Marco

Charles Peters — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 17:15:50 +0000

If you’re a Democrat, worry about Marco Rubio. He seems destined to be the Republican vice presidential candidate, and he has the potential to change the political equation in the Republicans’ favor, as Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama did for the Democrats in 1976 and 2008. In 1976, Carter actually carried the majority of southern states—which Democrats had not done for years before or anytime thereafter—by appealing to southern pride, just as Obama got an unusually high percentage of African Americans to vote in 2008 because he made them proud. Rubio is attractive enough to have similar potential with Hispanic voters.

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Did the Kennedys buy West Virginia?

Charles Peters — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 17:14:02 +0000

In defense of my home state, I should explain that not every election can be bought. Electoral hanky-panky flourishes when voters are indifferent, not when they care. And even the most well-heeled candidate does not always win. Consider that when Jay Rockefeller, who was not exactly underfunded, first ran for governor he was soundly defeated because he had opposed strip mining and thereby aroused the anger not only of the strip mine owners, but all the workers who saw their jobs at risk.

In 1960, the Kennedys did offer extraordinarily generous contributions to the local organizations whose support they sought. One county leader, when asked by a Kennedy man how much his organization needed, answered “35” by which he meant $3,500. A few days later he was handed a briefcase with $35,000. He later confided, however, that he would have had to be for Kennedy anyway because his wife and daughter would have disowned him if he hadn’t. People like his wife and daughter had seen their concerns about Kennedy’s Catholicism overcome by the story of his wartime heroism, his endorsement by Franklin Roosevelt Jr., whose father they still worshipped, and the personal magnetism radiated by the candidate as he campaigned all over the state. As one who was there, I remain amazed at how the crowds grew in size and in enthusiasm from the first day to May 10th, when Kennedy won by a far greater margin than money possibly could have bought.

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Jodi and Michelle

Charles Peters — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 17:13:51 +0000

When Michelle Obama recently seemed to perceive Jodi Kantor’s new book The Obamas as another portrayal of her as an “angry black woman,” media observers were practically unanimous in defending Kantor and saying that the book did not so characterize the first lady. Yet, I could not help but notice that after David Brooks had joined the media chorus while interviewing Kantor at a Washington event, he then asked her about the times Mrs. Obama had been “fierce,” and Kantor did not dispute the word. There may be a distinction between fierce and angry, but it is certainly subtle.

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Ravitch vs. Rhee

Charles Peters — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 17:12:40 +0000

The counterattack led by Diane Ravitch on the movement to improve teacher quality has gained considerable steam, yet it is based on a totally false premise that because the overall efficacy of education is dependent on many factors, including the students’ family life and environment, teacher quality alone isn’t worth all the fuss reformers have been making.

But proof that teacher quality alone does make a very considerable difference comes from a recent study that tracked 2.5 million students over twenty years. Even while taking full account of environmental factors, the study concludes that good teachers, in the words of New York Times reporter Annie Lowrey, “have a wide-ranging, lasting positive effect on those students’ lives beyond academics, including lower teenage-pregnancy rates and greater college matriculation and adult earnings.”

This is not to say that factors other than teaching don’t have an influence on the lives of the students. That’s why I applaud an effort by the American Federation of Teachers to take on all these factors in McDowell County, West Virginia. Even though the AFT may be motivated by a desire to score a point against Michelle Rhee, most of us reformers feel it is right to go after the environmental factors. The unions are only wrong in trying to downplay the importance of teacher quality. In West Virginia, it is a major problem. The state was recently awarded a D+ by the National Council on Teacher Quality. The council found that West Virginia not only awarded tenure “virtually automatically” and that its teachers were “almost impossible to fire,” but that it had no way to determine if a teacher has “mastered the subject.”

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