Tilting at Windmills - brief information on various topics

Washington Monthly, May, 1999 by Charles Peters

Frostburg, Maryland, is losing 100 telemarketing jobs. Why? It seems that folks there are just too friendly. According to one official of Unite, the telemarketing firm that made the decision: "The culture and climate in Western Maryland is one of helping your neighbor and being empathetic and those sorts of things. The folks we encounter here ... do not prefer to be that type of assertive, aggressive sort of sales person."

The Pentagon has approved a $1.4 billion second phase of a contract to build 85,000 trucks for the Army. This despite the fact that, according to Newsday's Patrick J. Sloyan, "The first 8,000 trucks have been plagued by safety and mechanical defects and skyrocketing costs. A series of truck rollovers, crashes and other accidents has resulted in Army-wide speed and load limitations on all the new trucks, which cost an average of $100,000 each." Also despite the fact that the trucks' manufacturer, Stewart and Stevenson, had pleaded guilty in 1997 to defrauding the Air Force and been fined $7 million. And, finally, despite the fact that Stewart and Stevenson had never made a truck before.

Did you hear about Paula Jones' mortgage? She bought a house in Cabot, Arkansas for $152,000 but only had to pay $2100 up front. The rest of the cost was covered by a mortgage of $149,900. That's 98.6 percent of the total. There seem to be two possibilities here. One is that her banker shares the president's taste in women; the other that lending practices are becoming reckless. It would be interesting to discover whether requiring such small down payments from the buyer has become widespread. To support that suspicion, there are the advertisements offering home equity loans at 125 percent of value which we cited a few months ago. The trouble with such practices is that when real estate values shrink the bank's loan is no longer secured by the value of the real estate. One of the big things that went way wrong during Japan's recent crisis was a similar drop in real estate values, which left the banks in trouble. Similar drops also caused financial institutions to fail during the Great Depression of the early '30s and during the savings and loan scandal of the '80s.

If I were in Al Gore's Shoes, the single fact that I would find most dismaying is this: Although far more Hispanics are Democrats than are Republicans, George W. Bush leads Gore by 45 to 35 percent among Hispanic voters.

In October most of the District of Columbia's drug abusers will become eligible for treatment. But the tragedy is that this was so long coming. Last year, for example, only 9 percent of the drug abusers got treated.

Similarly, the federal government has announced that it will start measuring coal dust levels in underground mines on October 1. (If you're wondering about the significance of October 1, that's when the new fiscal year begins.) Until now, management of the dust level has been left to the coal companies and if you're from West Virginia, as I am, you know this means a lot of lying, which is exactly what the Louisville Courier-Journal found when it looked into the situation.