Tilting at Windmills.

Royal Credentialism * Rebates for the Rich * Blockbuster Legal Fees Dangerous Police Games * Jackie's Cynicism

FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE--I suspect mostly the latter--the expense account rip-off has become an American tradition. It is so embedded in our culture that few people seem embarrassed about participating in it. Southwest Airlines magazine recently revealed how an airline had once used an expense-account ripoff to its own profit. In 1973, Southwest's then-bigger competitor, Braniff, cut the fare for the Dallas-to-Houston trip to $13. Southwest countered with an offer of the same fare or a bottle of liquor for those who paid the full fare. Business travellers quickly saw the wisdom of taking the booze and letting their companies pay the full fare. The promotion was so successful that for the two months it was in effect, Southwest became the state's largest distributor of Chivas scotch, Crown Royal whiskey, and Smirnoff vodka.

WHY DOES PAUL O'NEILL WANT to protect tax cheats? He opposes a crackdown on tax havens like those in the Caribbean supported by--get this--seven former IRS commissioners from the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Clinton administrations.

"BLOCKBUSTER SETTLES SUIT ON Late Fees" was the headline in the business section of The New York Times. Blockbuster was acknowledging that it should not have charged late fees that cost much more than the movies' original rental price. I thought, "That's nice, a little triumph for the consumer." But when I read the rest of the story, I realized that the consumers aren't the real winners. The only cash beneficiaries are the lawyers. They'll get up to $9.25 million in fees.

IN HIS REVIEW IN THE NEW York Times of Bruce J. Schulman's The Seventies, George Packer dismisses as "a kind of reductio ad absurdum" Schulman's assertion that Jackie Kennedy's decision to marry Aristotle Onassis "signaled the end of the optimistic, liberal 1960s" At first I nodded my head in agreement with Packer, but the more I thought about it and let my mind go back to the time of the marriage--October 1968--the more I thought Schulman, even if guilty of overstatement, could still be on to something. One thing I'm practically certain of is that the marriage cost Hubert Humphrey the election and put Richard Nixon in the White House. Although the country was ultimately more forgiving of Jackie's second marriage, at the time it seemed a shockingly cynical betrayal of the idealism of Camelot. If the leading lady was cynical enough to marry a rich old man who was infamous for his highly devious, if not downright crooked, business practices, what did that say about Camelot?

It took the wind out of the sails of a good number of those who had been devoted followers of Robert and John Kennedy. If it hadn't happened, I'm convinced that the emotion aroused by the assassination of Robert Kennedy would have helped Humphrey in the same way that similar feelings about John Kennedy's murder helped Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

Of course, poor Hubert's candidacy was unfairly sabotaged in other ways. Gene McCarthy was too late and too tepid in supporting Humphrey that fall. And the infamous alliance between Anna Chennault and Richard Nixon resulted in the South Vietnamese torpedoing the Paris peace talks on the eve of the election, which, as a blow to optimism and hope, had an effect not unlike the Onassis wedding. And you have to remember that after the Kennedy and King assassinations that same year, optimism and hope were definitely not in excess supply.

ON THE WHOLE, THE COUNTRY has become more meritocratic, but money still makes a difference. For example, at Duke University, just 15 percent of the students come from families earning less than $50,000 a year, even though such families make up half of the nation, according to Jonathan Kaufman of The Wall Street Journal. Nationally, he points out, college students "spend more than $600 a month on non-academic discretionary items such as eating out, movies, clothes, and CDs" How many families can come up with that much, which amounts to $5,400 in a nine-month academic year, in addition to tuition, room, board, and books? In higher education today, it's not a matter of keeping up with the Joneses, it's keeping up with the kids with credit cards.

BUREAUCRATS TEND TO RESIST or evade assessments of their performance. Sometimes, of course, they are simply afraid of the truth. If their program isn't accomplishing much, maybe it can be dispensed with. Certainly their hopes of getting larger budgets, which allow for promotions and bigger salaries, would be diminished. Sometimes they find ways of cooking the books to give the impression that things are better than they are. Thus, the D.C. Department of Public Works claimed that it had moved more than 8,000 abandoned vehicles last year. The actual total was 4,225. What accounts for the difference? The department counted not only cars towed from the streets, but also cars transferred from one impoundment lot to another, a process it controlled and could carry out as often as needed to make its numbers look good.

The Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District avoids bad news about the disease-causing organisms in its effluent by testing between 3 and 4 a.m., when most people are asleep and not flushing their toilets. Lucent Technologies recently demonstrated that this kind of chicanery is not confined to the public sector. Under tremendous pressure from their boss, Richard McGinn, Lucent's sales staff managed to come within $100 million of the CEO's revenue goal of $6 billion for the fourth quarter of 2000. According to The Wall Street Journal, they not only offered discounts and "other incentives certain to eat into future sales," but also "booked sales for goods that were shipped merely to distribution channels" The truth is that Lucent was not just $100 million but $1.2 billion short.

In 1993, the Clinton administration tried to do something about this problem with the Government Performance and Results Act, which required federal agencies to measure their performance against specific annual performance goals. But more than 40 percent of government managers do not appear to use performance information, according to a recent study by the General Accounting Office. This means that large parts of the government are not being managed for results. It is hard to see how performance can be improved if the managers aren't trying to find out what works and what doesn't.

INCIDENTALLY, THE MILWAUKEE Journal-Sentinel, to which I'm indebted for the "testing while they're not flushing" story, reports that the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage district has a PR budget of more than $1 million. This is the tip of a bureaucratic iceberg. Immense amounts of public funds are spent on PR. The last time we looked, the Pentagon had 1,592 employees working full-time on public relations. Of course, Linda Tripp's departure did subtract one, but her $90,000-plus salary suggests just how much of our money is spent on these employees.

MORTON KONDRACKE RECENTLY wrote a moving piece about his wife's struggle with Parkinson's disease. In it, he lamented the under-funding of research for a cure, noting how little Parkinson's research gets compared to HIV/AIDS. A beloved member of the Monthly family is a victim of Parkinson's, so we understand how friends and relatives of people devastated by one disease resent money devoted to chicer ailments and how this begets a ghoulish competition to see whose loved ones are going to be saved and whose will be allowed to die. One can't help thinking that if we could escape the tax-cutters and devote our surpluses to meeting real needs instead of further fattening the wallets of the wealthy, it would be more likely that we would be able to fund all our legitimate research needs--or at least come a lot closer to that goal than we are today.

MY WIFE RECENTLY PAID THE full amount of a bill from a creditcard company. The reaction from the company was to respond: "We want to make sure we aren't losing your business. Were you simply making a payment, or was there another reason for your decision--such as an offer from another credit-card company?"

Are Americans so credit-card happy that a customer who pays in full is a source of consternation? Or is it that the credit-card companies so enjoy collecting interest on the balance due that they don't want you to pay it off each month?

FOR AFFICIONADOS OF THE culture of the subcontinent, and for all who are amused by the silliness of credentialism, I offer, courtesy of Slate's Tim Noah, this statement of King Dipendra's qualifications from Rising Nepal, a state-owned daily, after he shot his family members and himself, and lay in a coma as king for a day:

"His Majesty the King received his primary school education from Kanti Ishwori Shishu Vidhyalya, Kathmandu. Having passed the Class 3 district-level examinations in the first division, His Majesty the King joined Budhanilkantha High School and passed the School Leaving Certificate Examinations in the First division. Then, His Majesty the King completed `O' and `A' levels from Eton College of the United Kingdom.

"After returning from the United Kingdom, His Majesty the King studied BA at Tri-Chandra College and passed in the first division. His Majesty the King joined the Tribhuvan University and studied Geography at the Masters' Level and also passed in the first division with distinction...."

This guy has to be the best qualified mass murderer in history.

SEVENTY-FOUR OF RONALD Reagan's appointees were confirmed in the first hundred days of his administration. For George W. Bush, the figure was 32. At first this seems shocking, but you also need to know that in the same period Reagan had nominated 138 candidates while Bush nominated only 79. Still the confirmation process is too slow, with multiple and lengthy forms to be filled out, asking questions like what countries you have traveled to in the last 15 years, with FBI agents following up with queries about whether you and your relatives ever associated with members of the Communist Party. The extensive FBI investigation given every nominee may make sense for those in highly sensitive national security positions, but for most nominees, most of the inquiries seem irrelevant to what they will be doing in the Department of Labor or the Department of Agriculture. And I must say, that my many doubts and suspicions about Bush's nominees do not include the fear that they are closet Marxist-Leninists.

IF YOU'VE EVER BEEN ARRESTED --I was once, for demonstrating against apartheid outside the South African Embassy--you know how hard it is to balance yourself with your hands cuffed behind your back. It's hard to climb the steep steps into the paddy wagon and, once inside with the vehicle moving, hard to keep from falling to your side or off your seat at sudden stops or turns. Now we learn from The Philadelphia Inquirer's Nancy Phillips and Rose Ciotta that the Philadelphia police have developed a game involving fast driving with sudden stops and turns, deliberately designed to give prisoners a hard time. The assumption behind this game is that every arrestee is guilty and deserves a rough ride. Not only is the assumption dubious but the game has inflicted punishment that is cruel. Twenty people have been injured; two suffered permanent paralysis.

From my teens when my hometown police chief proudly showed me bloody clothing that he described as "coming from niggers" that he and his subordinates had beaten, I knew cops could be sadistic. Over the years, the evidence has mounted, most recently in an article in this magazine and in a series in The Washington Post about the abuses of the Prince George's County, Maryland police. Decent cops do exist but we need far more of them. Police departments need to get rid of the bad guys and replace them with good guys. That will take courage--and money. Here, as in education, we see that the problem is that the Democrats just don't have the courage to take on the public employee unions, and the Republicans don't have the generosity and public spirit to pay the salaries that are needed.

SEN. PAUL WELLSTONE TRIED TO amend Bush's education bill to require that the reading and math tests not be implemented until Congress increases Title I funding for low-income school districts from the current $8.6 billion to $24.7 billion. Under the Bush budget, the funding will only go up $1.6 billion for the coming fiscal year.

Wellstone's amendment was defeated with a number of liberals like Edward Kennedy joining the GOP in knocking it down. They may have been justified on grounds of political realism, but Wellstone was making an important point. It's not fair to test schools that aren't receiving their fair share of financing. How can they be expected to compete with rich schools? Yet me story of this amendment was barely reported, I found it only in The Washington Times, which seemed primarily interested in pointing out that the Democrats were split on the issue.

IT NOW APPEARS THAT THE White House is prepared to reverse its stupid halt of negotiations with North Korea. The credit seems to belong to Donald Gregg, Bush Sr.'s ambassador to South Korea, who wrote a persuasive memo on the subject that father passed on to son. You may recall how ineptly the administration handled this matter in its early days. First, Secretary of State Colin Powell announced that the Bush administration was going "to pick up where President Clinton and his administration left off" in talking to the North Koreans. Then, the next day, W. told South Korean President Kim Dae Jong, who was visiting the White House and who was eager for the negotiations to resume, that that wasn't going to happen any time soon, cleverly managing to repudiate a top subordinate and a respected ally at the same time.

AFTER I RETIRED IN early May, I went on vacation. When I returned, I found in the mail the June issue of this magazine, the first edited by my successor, Paul Glastris. I liked all the articles, most of them a lot. Indeed, I had only one complaint. I didn't like the total negativity, of the cover headline: "Not Even Superman Can Save Urban Schools." Matthew Miller's cover article acknowledged that the situation in some urban school systems was getting better. When I confided this one concern to a staff member, he laughed and said, "That's just what Paul thought. He tried to change the headline, but it was too late." I was delighted. Any doubt that I hadn't turned the magazine over to a soulmate was eliminated.

YOU MAY RECALL THAT I URGED that any tax rebate be based on what people had paid in the form of payroll tax. If you wonder why, consider this: "Almost half of those Americans in the bottom 60 percent of income earners--more than 32 million individuals and families--will receive no rebates" under the Bush bill, according to The Washington Post's Glen Kessler. Practically all of those people who were working would have paid payroll taxes and would have received a rebate based on the payroll tax. And if the rebate had been limited to lower-income people, it would have avoided the insanity, of their getting nothing while, as Kessler notes, "virtually everyone in the top 20 percent of tax payers will ... receive a rebate."

I CAN'T HELP GETTING angry over the collapse of efforts to get health care for everyone. Our goals seem to grow more modest every year. Matthew Miller, the same fellow who wrote that great urban school piece in our June issue, also has a newspaper column in which he recently pointed out that back in 1992, Bush Sr.'s health plan proposed to cover 30 million of the 34 million uninsured Americans. Today his son proposes to cover only 6 million of the now 43 million uninsured.

THE FAILURE OF HMOs AND hospitals to tell the government and, through it, other health organizations about disciplinary actions they have taken against incompetent doctors, long a concern of this magazine, recently made the front page of The New York Times. The occasion was a report by the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, which found that in the last decade, 60 percent of hospitals, and a whopping 84 percent of HMOs, did not report a single "adverse action" against any of their doctors. HMOs, according to the IG, "have little incentive to devote many resources to quality assessment and improvement." Another factor, according to Margaret O'Kane, the head of an accreditation agency: "Health plans are very nervous about reporting to the data bank because they are afraid of being sued by doctors."

As for the hospitals, some of them will even hire or retain on their staffs doctors who have had serious disciplinary problems. New York Methodist Hospital, according to another Times story, kept one physician on staff even though he had performed three unnecessary hysterectomies, two without conducting a physical examination of the patient before surgery. Why was the doctor retained in the face of this evidence? We don't know for sure, but consider that in just one year, his practice "generated $1.62 million in charges, placing him in the top 10 percent of all doctors who admitted patients at the hospital that year."

YOU MAY HAVE HEARD ABOUT Jay Harris, the publisher of The San Jose Mercury-News, who resigned in protest against the threat to his paper's editorial quality from its parent company's insistence on maintaining a 20-percent annual growth in profit. I admire his stand. It's not that I think profit growth is bad. Indeed, it can produce income to make a paper better. But when it threatens to diminish quality, it threatens the very thing that may have attracted readers and gained their loyalty. We need more media owners who are willing to forgo profit for the sake of quality, owners who are prouder of the good they are doing than of the money they are making. Here at the Monthly, we were blessed by having such backers when we started, and by a staff that has been equally indifferent to money. This is not easy. Among other things, it requires better-paid spouses. But it does confer a glorious immunity against having to do anything you're ashamed of--like taking cigarette ads--in the pursuit of profit. You can write what you believe, and that, I assure you, feels very good.