Tilting at Windmills - News Briefs

Washington Monthly, Dec, 2000 by Charles Peters

AS PART OF OUR EFFORT TO KEEP you informed about trends among the rich and famous, we have several developments to report. First, the number of personal cooks has grown from roughly 1,000 to at least 100,000 in just the last decade according to the United States Personal Chef Association.

Then there's the full-page ad Mercedes-Benz Manhattan ran in The New York Times showing three chic teenage gifts and headlined: "If their Daddies could buy them CLKs, so could yours." The ad continues, "At Mercedes-Benz Manhattan, your Daddy will be surprised at how affordable a new or pre-owned CLK can be, and how easy it would be for him to prove that you're still your Daddy's little girl."

But my favorite comes from Beverly Hills where the new rage is having your eyebrows plucked in a fancy pink salon by a professional eyebrow plucker. Anastasia Soare, dubbed "the leading architect of the arch" by The Wall Street Journal's Lisa Bannon, plucks up to 70 pairs a day at $40 a pair. If you're into cheap chic, her rival, Valerie Sarnelle, will do you for $35.

What's the appeal of being plucked? "It's like when you're a kid and you hear about sex," explains one of Anatasia Soare's customers. "You can't imagine how great it will be until you've tried it."

WHEN AN ACCOUNTING FIRM audits a corporation, the firm is supposed to provide an objective appraisal of the corporation's financial health. But in recent years accounting firms have been selling other services to their corporate clients. How can they be trusted to be objective in their audits if they are also trying to hustle the client to buy other services? SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt Jr. thinks they can't and is proposing to prohibit the practice. The accounting industry is outraged and is lobbying hard against the proposal. We agree with Levitt. But we would go further. There is still a problem in having a corporation choose its own auditors. That in itself tempts auditing firms to try to please the corporation with a favorable audit. We believe the auditors should be selected by an independent third party.

IF THE NEW HOUSES IN YOUR neighborhood seem bigger than yours, it's not an optical illusion. The average American home is 50 percent larger than it was 30 years ago. Curiously, the size of the average American family has declined by 20 percent in the same period. But, hey, we all need room for our personal chef, not to mention the three cars.

IN 1972, THE BUFFALO CREEK dam in West Virginia collapsed and the flood that resulted killed 125 people and destroyed 500 homes. The dam had been constructed by the Pittston Coal Company to handle slurry, which is a thick mix of water and waste particles removed when the coal is processed. As had long been the custom of coal companies, little attention was paid to safety and the dam failed. But, as a result of the disaster, Congress passed the 1977 Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act that was supposed to take care of the problem.

But it hasn't done the job. "At least 45 dams in southern West Virginia, eastern Kentucky and Virginia have a `high' potential to break into nearby underground mines," according to the Charleston Gazette's Ken Ward Jr. In October more than 200 million gallons of slurry broke through the roof of an underground mine beneath a dam owned by the A.T. Massey Coal Company and flowed into tributaries of the Big Sandy River forcing several towns to find alternate sources of drinking water.

What appears to have happened is that the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration had inspected these dams, told the coal companies about the dangerous ones, and required the companies to submit plans to fix the dams. But plans were submitted for less than half of the dams listed as top priority. And MSHA seems to have failed to take any other action until the latest break occurred.

The moral is that legislation doesn't mean a thing unless it is enforced. This emphasizes a point I have tried as a former legislator and executive branch employee to make to my colleagues in the press: Legislation is simply make-believe until it is implemented. The implementation is the reality. So you can't cover government by staying in Washington after policy is formulated; you have to go out in the field to see how it is turned into action.

THE FAA's FAILURE TO ENFORCE its rules addressing pilot fatigue is another example of the gap between the intention of policy and the reality of implementation. For more than a decade, the National Transportation Safety Board has listed pilot fatigue among the top 10 of airline safety problems. The FAA has rules that are supposed to make sure that planes are not flown by exhausted crew. But "those rules have never been enforced [by the FAA] since their inception," American vice chairman Bob Barker recently told Eric Malnic of the Los Angeles Times. One result of the non-enforcement was the 1999 Little Rock crash. That crew had been on duty for 13 1/2 hours when the pilot made a tragic decision to land in Little Rock at 10:40 p.m. despite strong winds and heavy rains.