The Other Shoe Drops; or One of Them

The other shoe drops, or one of them.


New Orleans mayor Nagin is not looking so dumb anymore after Houston tries to evacuate and manages mostly to create gridlock and suck all the gasoline out of the area.

I bet you dollars to doughnuts Nagin was driven to his decisions in part by intuitive awareness of how impossible it is to evacuate a major city completely. Maybe the wind will pass and lives (as in that exploding bus outside Houston) not be lost in the process of evacuation, plus looting of houses left behind by the criminals of a notably lawless city.

Not the best thinking but no excuse for FEMA officials to suck thumbs, confident that picking up the pieces was primarily a "local responsibility."

First responders, yeah right. What about the Second Responders? Who, before Bush and Karl Rove,thought no one else had any obligation???

It can't be new to anyone in America -- anyone who knows history that is -- that one of the functions of the Federal government is to handle things that the States screw up, or that are too big for local imaginations. Lots of brain trust and broader vision are needed to run a giant nation, and perhaps these aren't even the skills that a local politician needs. These folks go to Washington, get power ... and owe the rest of us as a moral obligation of repayment.

For most of our history, the Federal government has had a true intuition that it has a backstop-and/or-reform role. It's needed and it has been carried out just for that reason.

The fly in the ointment has been that the rich and capable have mixed emotions about any sense of responsibility for this function of government. I have no idea why they think they could function as well as they do if they didn't have a huge, and heavily-government-supported economy and social structure behind them, assuring the predictability of the world in which they make big money. I don't know why they can't see that most of the world is not like this, much less predictable and harder to get wealthy in without direction corruption and violence.

Most likely, to see it that way would undermine their sense of personal achievement.

But it's true. The Federal government is a huge part of the conditions that create super-wealth in this country and the passion to limit taxation represents the bad faith of many of the rich who want the benefits of this but not the bill.

Local is never enough to support any richesse but that of the local warlord -- the real kind, with guns, goons and jus primae noctis.

You want super-wealth on the American scale, you pay some taxes, buddy ... or you lose not only New Orleans but everything else that underlies your satisfying sense of personal competence.

Things fall apart.

Not that I am unsympathetic to the individuals who create these awful results, sometimes unwittingly, but it's not just the bankruptcy system that is not functioning as well as Americans expect their systems to function!

[ Technical correction: The bankruptcy system still is functioning reputably, given the messes we are charged to deal with. For another month, till the new law comes into effect, it will continue to do so. Its death thereafter is planned, statutorial and [ apparently ] will be enforced by the Department of Justice. Not dead yet, though! ]

What can we say about the airlines however?

I don't know the source of the problem. Maybe someone can illuminate. Here however is the shape of the problem:

Flying United has been a mistake for a while. Staff are under TERRIBLE stress. The useless baggage agent we had REFUSED to give her name, which sent my traveling companion ballistic. Lost luggage; a 3/4 hour delay before they told a LARGE GROUP of us what happened. Before that, there was one agent, a huge line, no information and a crowd milling in the baggage claim area.

Time frame of these observations: over a year ago. We no longer fly them because, at that time, at O'Hare, United made NO attempt to match luggage to specific flights. They consider your luggage delivered if it arrives on either the flight before or the flight after yours to the same city. So we got in about 12:30 to miss the SF rush hour; luggage didn't arrive till 2:45; after shuttling to parking we were in the heart of the rush hour.

I can't imagine that the terrorists haven't figured this out either.

Homeland Security hadn't; what else is new? Their emphasis is on deletion of the words "probable cause" from public discourse.

We've flown on American, AirTran, Midwest and several other smaller carriers with dramatically better results. Delightful in fact.

Northwest has been bad for even longer. Actually, they've been an unhappy corporation for so long that I still will occasionally use
them. It's like a dysfunctional marriage with great powers of endurance; you can get some good out of it. I had a gate agent recently, when I was close to shock after a medical emergency, who had problem-solving skills and personal kindness of the highest order.

IT'S STILL AMERICA, but a lot is wrong and I don't understand why it can't get fixed.

My mother's best friend died yesterday.

Unexpected heart attack in a vigorous woman of 65. Actually, a very sweet woman, active, helpful. How do we do without these people?

I wonder if I'm just being too emotional [ again ], but this seems to reflect on the more objective question of the day yesterday -- how evil is the Department of Justice, really?

Wrong-headed enthusiasm for prosecution is by no means a DOJ specialty. Sometimes it's just a risk that comes with prosecutorial territory.

Just because it's systemic, and encouraged by the Social Misperception of the Month -- do I really get to call it evil?

Yeah, I do. It's powered by a social theory that ungoverned competition makes us better -- us being those that survive the competition, of course; and most of the competitors usually do survive. Anyway, we're so shocked when they don't! No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!

Looking at my profession from the eye of this hurricane, I think I see the intention to destroy my profession, to employ market forces and the litigation powers of the Sovereign to create another perfect storm (think: 9/11; think Iraq; think Katrina; think consumer bankruptcy lawyers trying, like sheep, to learn the new law while their government prepares to prosecute them for failures, intentional or not).

Intentions, aside -- retooling is expensive. How many times have I done it in the last few years, every time someone better paid than me decided that reform was necessary.

This is what I do for a living. Can I afford to be reformed again?

Good, sweet people die every day. Sometimes you don't realize what pain you caused them before you hear the news. And then it all looks small in comparison.

My profession is looking thin, very thin, anorexic in comparison with the mortality we all share.

I'm a consumer bankruptcy attorney who spoke recently at a training session for the local bankruptcy bar.

I volunteered, realizing for the last few months that I had to learn the new law, the [ laughably so-called ] Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 signed into law in April and effective on October 17.

Let me simply say, it's a poorly-drafted a statute as can be imagined. Not that it isn't full of detail, deadlines and demands but, after 8 years in Congress before passage, no one [ apparently ] tried very hard to make it either easy or elegant or effective to use.

Any writer could accurately deduce from this that Congress held in contempt the poor and financially inept whom they regulate in this law, and also the lawyers of the inept, whom they regulated [ arguably ] worse.

* * *

Like the good soldier I am, I prepared for my speech by focusing on the nuts and bolts that people will have to know to make the law work. Can't complain about the results if you don't put in the work to learn how the new system functions. Etc. I put in the time.

Like the good citizen I am, I assumed fundamentally good intentions from Congress. Oh those Congresspersons, and the credit card companies for which they stand, despise me and people like me, but they have their reasons. It's a democracy and people-like-me lost this battle. In a democracy, you are required to respect the views of others, at least up to the point you know they are powered more by malice [ in the medieval Latin sense of malizia, which is bad faith in the existentialist sense ].

Some other presenters though tackled the even more offensive parts, the actual restrictions on consumer bankruptcy attorneys.

I'd avoided reading those; I don't like to be told what to do. I was working up to it.

Imagine my surprise when I found that the Department of Justice, although fully aware that the changes may force debtor attorneys out of business on purely economic grounds [ the changes in required practice being that expensive to implement ] ... said that the Department of Justice is enthusiastic about suing the attorneys to establish, by litigation, the interpretations of the more poorly written, ambiguous clauses.

In case non-lawyers [ or persons accustomed to getting regular paychecks either for that matter ] miss the nuance -- when you regularly get poorly paid by poor people and then get sued by the Department of Justice too, you must defend yourself against its regularly-paid lawyers at your own expense and it can ruin you.

On top of that, DOJ is toying with the idea that one of the less-well-written phrases in the new law restricts the content of the legal advice that can be given to poor people-- a gag rule. There is a exception for advisers to the wealthy-and financially-inept. When assisting the wealthy, you can discuss any and all strategies with them but some strategies must be concealed from the poor ....

To be fair, this isn't a done deal yet. I believe the Speaker brought it up as a form of argument called "in terrorem" -- that is, to create by fear a result [ in this case, a gag rule ] that cannot be compelled by the law.

If you believe in America, now would be a good time to be afraid [ as if New Orleans wasn't warning enough ].