Baldrick does archeology.

A couple of Scottish refrigerating engineers (don’t ask) tipped me off to this. Am I the last American obsessed with British television to know that Baldrick (a.k.a. Tony Robinson) has been hosting an archeology program since 1994?:

James Baldwin: Still not moderate.

The US State Department has a program to fund libraries on American history and culture in cities all over the world. When I was a Fulbright in Romania, that’s where I got almost all the books I read during my five months there. If I have a criticism of the program, it’s that they’re history book choices are awfully heavy on biography. However, I can’t fault them politically at all, because that’s where I discovered James Baldwin.

Baldwin was always one of those authors who I thought I knew all about, but had never bothered to read. When I waded through the Library of America version of his non-fiction, what just stunned me was how well he could be angry and eloquent at the same time. Thanks Ari, for leading me to this YouTube illustration of these same qualities:

Inspired by the book, I assigned The Fire Next Time for my students in 1945-Present this semester. After all, it’s only about 100 pages long. I’m not sure if it’s their fault or my fault for not introducing the book well enough, but an awful lot of them thought Baldwin was somehow moderate because he was willing to criticize the Black Muslims. But compare him to Dr. King and see him criticize King’s tactics here and try to imagine how this looked to a white audience in teh early 1960s.

I can’t wait to show this to those students when Spring Break is over and start that execellent discussion up all over again.

Gee Pat, think how well they would have done if they were free.

Pat Buchanan (via Kos):

America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.

There’s a tiny speck of truth in this.  The death rates of slaves in the United States were much lower than they were in the Caribbean or South America, but that’s cold comfort compared to all the awful things that happened to slaves while they were alive.

Starbucks workers of the world unite!

“[T]he accumulation of the skill and knowledge (scientific power) of the workers themselves is the chief form of accumulation, and infinitely more important than the accumulation – which goes hand in hand with it and merely represents it – of the existing objective conditions of this accumulated activity.”

– Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value as quoted in David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor, 1987.

I know I’m not supposed to, but I love Starbucks. They’re anti-union, and I don’t even drink coffee. Nevertheless, I just adore the fact that there are comfy chairs in every city in America where I can get a cup of tea and stay for as long as like. However, stories like this bring out the radical in me:

The new espresso machines, called Mastrena, will be manufactured in Switzerland by Thermoplan, the same company that makes Starbucks’ current machines. Officials are not disclosing the cost of switching machines…

The new machines also have a built-in mechanism to time the length of each shot, which tells baristas whether the coffee is being ground correctly. If it falls outside the ideal 18- to 23-second range, baristas can adjust the grind.

The machines have upgraded steaming wands that are adjustable, allowing baristas to decide how much steam comes out at a time.

They hold five pounds of coffee beans, up from about two pounds for the Verismo machines, so that baristas will not have to fill them as frequently. The side of the machine that faces customers has a new look, including brushed copper, light and dark woods, that can be changed depending on a store’s decor.

Starbucks regularly upgrades its Verismo machines, with the most recent upgrade at U.S. stores coming this year. The machines last an average of four to six years, but Starbucks will speed up the rate at which they are rotated out to make way for the new Mastrena machines.

I wasn’t actually looking for that Karl Marx quote after I read this, but another one from David Montgomery’s book. The first chapter of The Fall of the House of Labor is called “The manager’s brain under the workman’s cap,” after a quote from “Big Bill” Haywood and Frank Bohn. They used that to describe what a nineteenth-century factory might look like, where skilled workers were absolutely indispensable for producing the goods society wanted because of their accumulated knowledge from the job.

My understanding is that Starbucks workers are kind of in that position too. I garnered that understanding from a book I should have hated, but loved. It’s called How Starbucks Saved My Life, by Michael Gates Gill (the son of the legendary New Yorker writer Brendan Gill). Gill was a 60-something unemployed advertising man who basically applied for and got a job at a Manhattan Starbucks out of desperation (he had a tumor at the time). It’s supposed to be one of those inspiring tales of overcoming adversity, but I loved it for the parts where he described the work process at Starbucks.

To put it mildly, working at Starbucks ain’t easy and the hardest part, at least for Gill, was making drinks at “the bar”:

At the bar, you were responsible for delivering Starbucks drinks exactly right–with the correct temperature and weight of espresso and steamed milk.

Kester had shown me how to make sure a thermometer was always in the mug in which you steamed the milk.

“It should be between 160 and 180–never more,” he said. He had always instructed me in how to clean out the mugs, to keep the milk fresh. Then he had given me different tests when we had a few moments without Guests…

Each drink was still a big challenge. There seemed to be so much to remember. And since I had never been much interested in cooking, I was also not much good at being exact–like with temperatures and stuff like that.

You’d think the Mastrena machine would have been a godsend for Gill, and it probably would have been if it had appeared in Starbucks when he first got there. But what about now? Gill has presumably mastered the drink-making process. [He still works at Starbucks. I saw him on a recruiting poster there just yesterday.] If that Mastrena machine eliminates even some of these skills there will be less reason for Starbucks to keep people like him around who are good at making drinks. At the very least, they could try to lower his wages since he can be more easily replaced now than before. I understand that Starbucks began to automate the drink-making process years ago, but they were doing great financially. These days, the stock is tanking and when stocks tank labor costs are always at the top of the list for chopping.

American factories at the turn of the last century worked this way even when times were good. As Montgomery writes of the American steel industry during this era, they wanted to:

“cut the taproot of nineteenth century workers’ power by dispossessing the craftsmen of their accumulated skill and power.”

I realize that baristas and steelworkers have little in common, but, as Karl Marx suggested, their skills have been or are vastly under-appreciated. Automation might be better for steel buyers and coffee drinkers, but who is going to take care of the skilled workers? I hear the IWW is interested in helping.

I’m trendy! I’m trendy!

From the NYT article I expect everyone in academia will be talking about today:

IT is not necessary for a student studying multivariable calculus, medieval literature or Roman archaeology to know that the professor behind the podium shoots pool, has donned a bunny costume or can’t get enough of Chaka Khan.

Yet professors of all ranks and disciplines are revealing such information on public, national platforms: blogs, Web pages, social networking sites, even campus television.

OK, maybe I’m not quite that trendy:

These days, the clues are usually digital and are broad invitations to get to know the person behind the Ph.D. It is not uncommon for professors’ Web pages to include lists of the books they would take to a deserted island, links to their favorite songs from bygone eras, blog posts about their children, entries “written” by their dogs and vacation photographs.

I plead guilty to the favorite songs from a bygone part, but I am a history professor. However, when I start posting essays “written” by our cats, please remind me that it’s time to retire. I gotta keep a little dignity, you know.

Fluoride or just poverty?

From the Real Time Economics blog at the WSJ:

A new paper from Columbia University School of Public Health economists Sherry Glied and Matthew Neidell finds that children that grew up in communities with fluoridated water earn about 2% more than children who don’t.

Different communities began fluoridating their water at different times – for example, St. Louis got started on its fluoridation program in 1953 but Kansas City didn’t get on board until 1983. Other than a tendency water districts serving larger populations to embrace fluoridation earlier, “the decision to fluoridate follows little systematic pattern,” say the economists. That meant that it created a good natural experiment to see how better teeth affect people’s income.

Digging deeper, the economists found that the effect is concentrated among women, who earn 4% more if they grew up with fluoridated water. Women from low-income families, who presumably would have less access to dental care than their better-off counterparts, saw the biggest gains from fluoridation.

But what if fluoride doesn’t actually help teeth (or maybe something even worse)?:

Gordon Wood is half right.

This morning, Ralph sent me to this review of Gordon Wood’s new book of essays, The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History. Since I’m always looking for good books for my historiography class, I read it with great scrutiny.

According to Wood (as filtered through the reviewer):

“The result of all this postmodern history, with its talk of ‘deconstruction,’ ‘decentering,’ ‘textuality,’ and ‘essentialism,’ has been to make academic history writing almost as esoteric and inward directed as the writing of literary scholars. This is too bad, since history is an endeavor that needs a wide readership to justify itself.” As watchers of the bestseller lists are well aware, “popular historians who have no academic appointment, such as David McCullough, Walter Isaacson, Ron Chernow, Thomas Fleming, and Stacy Schiff, have successfully moved in to fill the void left by the academic historians preoccupied by issues of race, gender, and multiculturalism.”

I agree. Deconstruction make for dull reading. That’s why I have so much trouble picking books for my historiography class that students will actually read.

So far, so good. But then the review gets to this (again, the words are mostly Wood’s):

But the present “should not be the criterion for what we find in the past. Our perceptions and explanations of the past should not be directly shaped by the issues and problems of our own time. The best and most serious historians have come to know that, even when their original impulse to write history came from a pressing present problem. . . .To be able to see the participants of the past in [a] comprehensive way, to see them in the context of their own time, to describe their blindness and folly with sympathy, to recognize the extent to which they were caught up in changing circumstances over which they had little control, and to realize the degree to which they created results they never intended — to know all this about the past and to be able to relate it without anachronistic distortion to our present is what is meant by having a historical sense.”

Unfortunately, it’s all that deconstruction stuff that Wood doesn’t like which explains why this objective is impossible. Authors can no more escape their own era than they can change the color of their skin, and making believe one can is really the worst sort of hubris. Just because the study of history as a text makes for dull reading doesn’t mean we can just skip it.

So I guess I’ll just have to keep looking for other books to assign.

Anybody remember Glass-Steagall?

Update: Greetings “Glass Steagall” searchers. I wrote this post in order to be a little bit more helpful to you in your quest for information.

Since Bear Stearns is likely not the last investment bank that will be in need of a bailout, I think now is a good time to revisit what got us into this whole mess in the first place. That would be the repeal of the Glass Steagall Act in 1999. I got this link from a crazy Daily Kos diary that I forgot to bookmark. The source is PBS Frontline so I trust it more than that anyways:

In 1933, Senator Carter Glass (D-Va.) and Congressman Henry Steagall (D-Ala.) introduce the historic legislation that bears their name, seeking to limit the conflicts of interest created when commercial banks are permitted to underwrite stocks or bonds. In the early part of the century, individual investors were seriously hurt by banks whose overriding interest was promoting stocks of interest and benefit to the banks, rather than to individual investors. The new law bans commercial banks from underwriting securities, forcing banks to choose between being a simple lender or an underwriter (brokerage). The act also establishes the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), insuring bank deposits, and strengthens the Federal Reserve’s control over credit.

Did Bear Stearns do any commercial banking? I don’t think so, but Citibank does:

At a dinner in Washington in February 1998, Sandy Weill of Travelers invites Citicorp’s John Reed to his hotel room at the Park Hyatt and proposes a merger. In March, Weill and Reed meet again, and at the end of two days of talks, Reed tells Weill, “Let’s do it, partner!”

On April 6, 1998, Weill and Reed announce a $70 billion stock swap merging Travelers (which owned the investment house Salomon Smith Barney) and Citicorp (the parent of Citibank), to create Citigroup Inc., the world’s largest financial services company, in what was the biggest corporate merger in history.

The transaction would have to work around regulations in the Glass-Steagall and Bank Holding Company acts governing the industry, which were implemented precisely to prevent this type of company: a combination of insurance underwriting, securities underwriting, and commercial banking. The merger effectively gives regulators and lawmakers three options: end these restrictions, scuttle the deal, or force the merged company to cut back on its consumer offerings by divesting any business that fails to comply with the law.

Weill meets with Alan Greenspan and other Federal Reserve officials before the announcement to sound them out on the merger, and later tells the Washington Post that Greenspan had indicated a “positive response.” In their proposal, Weill and Reed are careful to structure the merger so that it conforms to the precedents set by the Fed in its interpretations of Glass-Steagall and the Bank Holding Company Act….

Following the merger announcement on April 6, 1998, Weill immediately plunges into a public-relations and lobbying campaign for the repeal of Glass-Steagall and passage of new financial services legislation (what becomes the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999). One week before the Citibank-Travelers deal was announced, Congress had shelved its latest effort to repeal Glass-Steagall. Weill cranks up a new effort to revive bill.

Weill and Reed have to act quickly for both business and political reasons. Fears that the necessary regulatory changes would not happen in time had caused the share prices of both companies to fall. The House Republican leadership indicates that it wants to enact the measure in the current session of Congress. While the Clinton administration generally supported Glass-Steagall “modernization,” but there are concerns that mid-term elections in the fall could bring in Democrats less sympathetic to changing the laws…

[Oct. Nov. 1999] After 12 attempts in 25 years, Congress finally repeals Glass-Steagall, rewarding financial companies for more than 20 years and $300 million worth of lobbying efforts. Supporters hail the change as the long-overdue demise of a Depression-era relic.

The FDIC is still on the hook to insure Citibank’s deposits, yet they went and invested their depositors’ money in all kinds of weird sub-prime mortgage bonds (that they themselves structured) and that have been going down the tubes for months now. The same is mostly true for every other major American bank. As the NYT explained on Friday:

Traditionally regulators have helped commercial banks in financial panics, but not investment banks, which do not hold customer deposits. But the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, the Depression-era law that separated investment banks and commercial banks, led to consolidation within the financial industry that has made such distinctions harder to make.

Even more than Bear Stearns, Citibank is too big to fail. Since 1999 Citibank privatized their profits but will eventually get their losses socialized thanks to a law which they got passed that made risky speculation practically inevitable.

The Glass-Steagall repeal was the worse domestic policy decision that the Clinton Administration ever made, and that’s saying something. Furthermore, it’s only going to get worse from here going forward.

WWI veterans are passing from the scene.

The New York Times has a wonderful story on its blog The Lede, about the passing of the last WWI veterans around the world.  My favorite part though, deals with wars earlier than that:

The “lasts” of America’s earlier wars attracted quite a spotlight in their time, and not a little controversy. Such large crowds descended on City Hall in New York to see Hiram Cronk, the longest-lived veteran of the War of 1812, lying in state in May 1905 that 150 police officers had to be called to the scene to keep order, The New York Times reported. The last documented Civil War veteran on the Union side died in 1956 at the age of 106; on the Confederate side, at least a dozen names were put forward as candidates, but many questions were raised about their claims. All were gone by March 1959 except for Walter Williams, whose claimed age (117) and military service were debunked by newspapers later that year; he died in December. The men believed to be the last American veterans of the Spanish-American War died in the late 1980’s.

My grandfather was a World War I veteran. It’s strange to think of any of his conteporaries still being alive, but that’s what happens if you can make it to anything close to age 109.

Are Depression-era schedules returning to Chrysler?

This kind of story just scares me to death:

Chrysler plans to halt virtually all operations for two weeks in July as part of its effort to cut costs and return to profitability.

Summer shutdowns are longstanding traditions in the auto industry so plants can be retooled for the new model year, but they primarily involve only hourly workers. Chrysler told its salaried employees Thursday that, except for those who keep working in “business-critical activities,” they must use vacation time during the shutdown.

In past years, Chrysler has staggered its shutdowns throughout the summer. This will be the first shutdown since Chrysler became a private company, under the equity firm Cerberus Capital Management. The company, which is the fourth-largest seller of vehicles in the United States behind the other Detroit carmakers and Toyota, has about 70,000 employees.

“As a private company, we all need to think like owners and do our part to accelerate Chrysler’s recovery and transformation,” Chrysler’s chief executive, Robert L. Nardelli, told employees in an e-mail message.

The reason this scares me to death is that it reminds me way too much of the great Depression. I’ve noticed that most textbooks that cover the Depression tend to stress the number of unemployed there were at any given time. They never mention the number of under-employed. Over on our Wal-Mart blog, I often stress that Wal-Mart defines someone who works as few as 34 hours/week is considered full time by that company. [Of course, part-time workers get even fewer hours than that.] But you can’t shut-down a Wal-Mart.

You can and do, however, shut down a factory when you have too much inventory. This happened all teh time during the Depression. Even before the Depression, the tendency in factories was to take orders and run full, then shut down for extended periods of time to save on costs. Employers would know their old employees would be available when they started up again because they never had anywhere else to go.

The fact that Chrysler used to spread out the lay-offs, but now wants to force them all at the same time suggests to me that 1) They’re so desperate that they don’t care about employee morale and 2) They expect they’re employees to be waiting for them when their factories go back on line too.

If they still can’t sell cars, look for longer shut-downs in the future. And if this practice starts spreading to other industries, look for longer lines at soup kitchens everywhere.