No Polity, No Tomatoes

Posted on March 28, 2008
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Kudos to Keith Eckel, the owner of Fred W. Eckel Sons Farms at Clarks Summit, Pa., for holding a press conference to explain why he will no longer be growing tomatoes.

The Eckel farm has been Pennsylvania’s largest tomato grower, producing about 125 truckloads for East Coast markets. But Keith Eckel says he can no longer take the risk of planting tomatoes if he can’t be assured of a labor force to pick them. He attributes his planting qualms – true also for his pumpkin crop – to the failure of Congress to pass immigration reform, including “a viable guest worker program” for agriculture.

Personally, we’d include the Bush Administration and its fervid Republican backers when it comes to assigning blame for the immigration stalemate. But the larger point is that the inability of Washington to come together on key issues – like immigration reform, alternative fuels and global warming – is going to start costing Americans in all sorts of unexpected ways, starting, very possibly, with the price of tomatoes and pumpkins.

Our polity is becoming fractured by raucous partisan debates without much connection to the reality of what goes on in homes, factories or fields. We’re not well-versed on immigration reform, but policies that don’t provide a predictable, fairly treated labor force for work that Americans don’t want to do are bankrupt. Hounding workers and building walls and electronic fences isn’t the answer.

(We also know of a candy maker who’s going out of production because he can’t afford the rising cost of corn syrup due to the diversion of corn to ethanol production. Yet how many of us have yet driven a car powered by ethanol, or are likely to anytime soon? Who can yet say what the new fuel will be, or when it will be widely available? We started talking about this, remember, in the 1970s.)

This political season probably isn’t the time to expect much change. But it’s also the beginning of a planting season, and the consequences of not acting fairly and intelligently there are becoming clear and costly. How much more prompting, how many more heartfelt press conferences, do we need to come together around policies appropriate for our future?

Food Banks Running Low

Posted on March 20, 2008
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We’re in a systemic economic crisis that, so far, is being soft-pedaled by the Bush Administration. The administration likely feels that to maintain confidence, you need to talk confidently. But, as another indicator, look what’s happening at America’s soup kitchens, which depend on food banks for the needy.

The Wall Street Journal, bless it, has a story today deftly headed, “A Run on Banks: Food Charities Feel the Pinch.” It reports that food banks are coming under increasing pressure both from folks who are pinched trying to pay mortgages or survive other personal economic trials and food prices, which have been rising. More people needing soup-kitchen food and less of it available are further indicators of the increasing tightness of these times.

“There is a nascent crisis buidling,” the WSJ quotes Chris Barrett, a professor at Cornell University who studies food-assistance programs. “Demand for food-bank assistance is climbing rapidly when the resources are falling in dramatic terms because the dollars just don’t go as far.”

Here’s another role for government that apparently has been neglected: coordinating elements of the “safety net” so it doesn’t become too frayed. Ironically, but fortunately, some big corporations are stepping up to help. “Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., already a large food donor,” says The Journal, “delivered a tractor trailer of food to a food bank in each state in December. Yet in many cases, food banks say they are forced to buy from brokers.”

Here’s what it looks like up close: Michelle Brunetti-Williford, a middle-class homeowner interviewed by The Journal at the Prodisee Pantry in Spanish Fort, Ala., says her family’s “economic stability slipped when the housing crisis made it impossible to sell their home – even after dropping the price by $100,000 – so they could move into something more affordable. Rising gas and food prices began to sap their income.

“I’ve always been fortunate enough that we always had a beautiful home and a nice car. Now this economy is stripping away even the small things.” The Journal adds, sadly, that Mrs. Brunetti-Williford “and her husband couldn’t afford a $32 school field trip for one of their two young daughters.”

It’s all interconnected. But who has been making the connections on behalf of ordinary Americans as banking and other key financial markets have gone largely unregulated since the 1980s? That’s a rhetorical question, of course, but nonetheless very pertinent. Some food commodities, like corn, The Journal notes, “are being turned into alternative fuels and others are going overseas as the weak dollar makes U.S. exports more palatable to other countries.”

When you denigrate government, who fills government’s rightful and needed role? With coordination lacking, the American polity could be coming apart. Even if it holds together, the lessons of a near-collapse are worth learning and practicing: government really matters.

Government Makes a Mistaken Delivery

Posted on March 2, 2008
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Sometimes (it seems to happen fairly regularly, unfortunately) you get the feeling that government is too important to be left to the people running government. A recent case in point: the $30,000 in tax refunds the Harrisburg, Pa., School District sent to Harrisburg residents that averaged $1.94 each.

The school district acknowledged it made an error in the original billings, as pointed out by the Pennsylvania Department of Education. Yet neither the Education Department nor the School District could come up with a way – if it even occurred to them to try – to avoid the expense of sending out checks that were a pittance to their recipients. How about crediting the overage to the next tax bill? It might have been in a different year, but couldn’t the bookkeeping have been carried forward? Anything to avoid government seeming as inept as it did with the special mailing.

For people to have confidence that government can be relied upon to act in their best interests – not to mention its own – officials need to think relationally and act wisely – not lick stamps that don’t need to be licked to the exasperation of the folks who receive the mailing.

Comcast’s Paid ‘Citizenry’

Posted on March 2, 2008
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Comcast merits some kind of prize for being bereft of public relations capacity. Any company that gets itself associated with headlines that it hired people to pack a Federal Communications Commission hearing room deserves such notoriety, hands down.

The big Philadelphia-based cable-TV provider acknowledged that it paid “some people to arrive early and hold places in the queue for local Clomcast employees” who wanted to attend an F.C.C. hearing on network neutrality at the Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Mass.

A Comcast spokeswoman said the paid attendees were only holding seats for Comcast employees who wanted to attend. Yet some of the “placeholders” didn’t leave; one news story included a photo of two of them sleeping, apparently hired from the street.

The hearing was held to consider complaints by activist groups that Comcast is trying to stifle competition by blocking rival video-on-demand services on its cable system. The company says the groups excel at packing hearings in their own right. So they may. A monopoly company generates those kinds of feelings.

But corporate folly reaches new heights when the monopoly – Comcast – associates itself with fascist tactics. It was virtually assured that paying to fill hearing seats would be spotted, yet Comcast decided that was a valid public relations ploy. How misguided can you get?

For this Comcast customer, it’s truly ironical that Comcast got such well-publicized egg on its face. Rather than attend to workaday public relations, in a challenging situation Comcast chose a grossly mistaken tactic. What would be a workaday gesture toward, say, its subscribers? Well, during all the time viewers have been hearing about the changeover next year to high-definition TV, and wondering how it might affect them, Comcast hasn’t troubled to send an HD advisory – at least to this household – along with its ever-increasing bills. There is, it turns out, no effect on cable-TV subscribers, but couldn’t Comcast have advised us of that? Such a gesture would have been legitimate public relations, but helpful gestures apparently aren’t in Comcast’s playbook.

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