Economic patriotism

Outsourcing America

is not very helpful

in solving problem

Corporations can create jobs, but often choose a different path... or country

It was July 4^th weekend, and my landline phone and internet service were out cold, resulting in a cell phone call to Comcast for help.

My call was answered – by a guy in Costa Rica.

That he was unable to resolve or walk us through the steps needed to fix the problem was annoying.

But the more I thought about it, the more disgusted I became... with Corporate America.

On a weekend for celebrating patriotism, my call to Corporate America for help was answered in Costa Rica.

Predictable? Sure. That’s the way, ah-ha, they like it. Why pay workers in the USA when it’s cheaper to pay them in Costa Rica. Or India. Or the Philippines.

It’s a lust to maximize corporate profit, even at the cost of damaging the American economy.

I’m talking to you, Comcast – a company with pockets so deep, you bought NBC Universal (once upon a time the National Broadcasting Corporation) for a mere $13.8 billion, and can’t afford to pay Americans to answer the phone on a holiday weekend.

I’m sure it’s just a few jobs... at Comcast, and whatever other favorite American company you want to name. They all do it – farm out jobs. Outsource. Save money. It adds up, company by company. It’s so ubiquitous that we laugh at it, thanks to a TV show called Outsourced. It’s all about the fun and frolic at an American company’s office of outsourced phone-answerers in India. And it’s on, can you guess the network? (Insert chimes tones... dong, DONG, dong...) NBC.

I’ll concede that Comcast fuels plenty of jobs across America. In fact, my second attempt to get help the next day was answered by a man in Texas, and finally a very smart and efficient young woman came to my house that Wednesday and fixed the problem. Whatever caused my Comcast shutdown (the guy in Texas thought it had been a mistaken discontinuation of service by the company), getting the modem back up required a specific sequence of unplug and replug actions that had not been precisely given by either help desk.

It took four days to get a human being to come from Comcast and fix the phone and internet shutdown.

It’s taking Corporate America a lot longer to address a far larger problem: The gradual economic meltdown and its toll of growing unemployment.

Politicians piss and moan and do nothing about who is responsible. Republicans continually slap Obama for failed economic policies. Obama slaps back, saying Congress won’t pass his proposed actions.

“Spend, spend, spend, tax, tax, tax – that’s all the Democrats want,” the GOP insists.

Democrats concede on trimming some spending but insist on a solution that also raises taxes on the rich, the segment of America that has benefited from levies far lower than existed since the 1960s and widened the nation’s economic gap between the haves and the truly poor.

It’s a scandal, say some Republicans pointing out Census data, that all those poor folks have refrigerators and cell phones. You want to tax the rich to help them? They balk at giving an inch on tax increases, even sign a pledge to reject any tax increase.

Meanwhile, sitting on the sidelines is Corporate America. Big companies are getting bigger (while eliminating jobs), and banks bailed out by economically struggling government are getting bigger (and holding onto their/our money).

It seems like a crazy death spiral. Somewhere, there’s a tipping point, where Unemployed America can no longer afford the products of Corporate America, and they all crash together in an economic disaster of our collective making.

Who needs to step up? Everybody.

It’s time for a little patriotism:

American companies, come on down – phase out the jobs you created beyond the nation’s borders to cut back on employment within. It seemed smart when you did it. It seems unpatriotic now.

Democrats, come on down. There is unnecessary spending out there, no doubt. Find it. But don’t necessarily eliminate all of it. Redirect it to economic solutions.

Republicans, come on down. The rich need to give back. There’s no point to vast wealth when the great nation that makes it possible goes asunder.

Tea Party? I hate to say this, but so many of your issues distract from a solution – you need to shut up. Or maybe Middle America will wake up and see what you’re doing to it, folks closer to the financial abyss than they realize who will never see a tax increase for the rich but surely suffer the consequences of becoming poor.

We need to reward economic patriotism, and punish the alternative. We need to see folks in the halls of government point fingers at companies that gave away American jobs and fail to reverse course and bring them home.

Label them unpatriotic. For the most egregious, label them traitors.

And for companies that publicly reveal every job sent abroad, and publicly take steps to bring those jobs back: they get the tax breaks. So do the companies that invest in America and its job market.

Eventually, perhaps, we’ll all reach the other side, go shopping and buy something that wasn’t made in China.

I’d love to read about economic patriotism in my local newspaper, The Baltimore Sun, but often it arrives soaking wet or not at all. I call to complain, and reach a customer satisfaction desk in the Philippines.

Have a favorite corporate outsourcing tale, or one about a company that brought jobs back? Post it here, and share this blog with your friends.

Shake, shake, quake!

Mid-Atlantic earthquake

scores a Richter 5.8,

but may prove stronger

as oddly fun memory

'It's Obama's fault'

I can scratch this one off my bucket list: Earthquake.

A real earthquake – not those piddly 2.2-Richter giggles that used to make big news in suburban Howard County, Maryland. We’re talking shake-the-house-for-20-seconds quake, and sharing the visceral thrill with, reportedly, folks from Georgia to Ontario and as far west as Detroit and Chicago.

I did feel the earth move, once – in Tokyo four years ago, while visiting friends whose rented home seemed to rest on quake-prone ground. Tokyo jiggles and shakes a lot, and with it the back of the house with the children’s bedroom vibrated. The kids preferred sleeping with their parents up front in seeming safety, so Bonnie and I won the children’s room where I could sense ever so slightly the movement below ground.

It was hardly an earthquake, not the kind that hits Japan every now and then and really causes havoc – most recently this year’s 9.0 shocker that churned up a tsunami disaster and nuclear power nightmare and claimed close to 20,000 lives.

Bonnie attributed the subtle subterranean movement to her unsettled feeling on her first trip to Japan in the late 1990s. We’ve been back there together twice. And every time we hear the words Japan and earthquake on the news, we double-check where the latest one hit and make sure to check in with our friends spread across its islands.

A few weeks before Japan’s mega-quake, we closely followed earthquake news from another of our international stops in recent years – Christchurch, New Zealand.

It was strange seeing on TV the ruins of buildings we had driven past on our visit there in 2006, and wondering how the folks we had stayed with – a couple who ran a bed-and-breakfast in their home, and another couple we’d met in a sports bar – had fared.

According to the compendium of disasters readily found at Wikipedia, the Christchurch quake claimed 181 lives. Recently, we heard news of a rebuilding proposal for the city that would take a decade and some $2 billion to accomplish. It includes more open space, and height restrictions for new development – and likely would create a safer city in the event of future quakes.

New Zealand, like Japan, is part of the quake-prone Pacific Rim of Fire. They expect quakes and shakes, and no surprise when a volcano burps in neighboring Indonesia.

But here in America’s seemingly rock-steady mid-Atlantic, earthquakes – real earthquakes – make big news, and today’s 5.8-rater not surprisingly shifted TV news away from its third-day focus on the downfall of Libya’s dictator.

Even so, I’ve heard of no deaths being reported despite the large geographic area feeling the shock from some 3.7 miles beneath a rural Virginia region southwest of Washington, D.C. – and some 125 miles from our home between Baltimore and Annapolis.

Despite sporadic damage -- in Baltimore it was bricks falling off rowhouses, a wall collapsing on an old industrial building, and stone or cement ornamentation falling off a high church steeple -- the quake seemed mostly a matter for after-the-fact laughter and for earthquake virgins an odd, unforgettable experience.

“It’s Obama’s fault,” Tara Baldwin posted on Facebook, which was hopping with humor.

Tara, a longtime friend of our younger daughter, also offered: “Pasadena, MD, not CA.”

The jokes and fun were all over my friends’ Facebook posts – several quickly linking to a video of Carol King singing, “I Feel the Earth Move.”

Maria Stainer and family were shopping at a Walmart. “Truth be told,” she posted, “when stuff started to fall, I thought for a moment, ‘Should I get us in a crash position?’ And then I thought, ‘Run!’ The run option won out. I'm a little bummed, too. Bras were on sale for $7.”

“Harford County EMS robocall informed me several hours late that ‘A’ earthquake visited us today. Thank God it was not a greater grammatical challenge,” wrote my photographer friend Edwin Remsberg. “I have to wonder if anyone in county government could figure out how to pronounce ‘tsunami.’

“Amazing how chatty and nice everybody was from about 2:00 until 2:20 this afternoon,” posted Baltimore humorist pal Dave Belz, who added later:

“Things that will need re-doing in Baltimore because of today's quake: sutures in the ERs; edging by housepainters; pizza slices; eyeliner; tattoos; haircuts; putts...”

For its pure simplicity and joy, there was veteran news pal Steve Auerweck’s succinct: “WHEE!!!”

The quake hit about 1:51 p.m.

I was on the couch, and felt a little dizzy – wondering if it was my second aftershock from a morning dose of anesthesia for an endoscopic exam. I got up and found it was not me shaking. It was the house. It jiggled and creaked and rumbled like a giant truck was going past. And the shake was like the shockwave felt when a stately oak tree was taken down – the trunk grounding with a boom! Except the house kept on shaking, for close to 20 long seconds.

Neighbors emerged, and converged to share the moment.

Our heads were shaking, too – in amazement.

In the neighboring back yard, water in the round, above-ground swimming pool rippled in concentric circles.

A few minutes later, I felt another vibration, perhaps a tiny aftershock, and looked outside. The water pattern had switched to little waves.

Bonnie was driving home from the store when it hit. She said the station wagon felt like it had a flat tire “and then it just stopped.”

She had no idea there had been an earthquake.

That’s a shame.

It is so much nicer, after all, when you feel the earth move together.

Movie Review: Super 8

Elle Fanning and Joel Courtney, working on a film within the film in a scene from 'Super 8' -- which opens June 10.

Spielberg

produces

a new E.T.

Awesome homage

to horror, SF films...

even some of his own

What will you be doing this summer? Chances are, you will be seeing the movie “Super 8” – a Steven Spielberg production whose young characters embark on their summer vacation set on making their own movie.

Not hard to guess, from the teaser ads that have begun airing on television, things go horribly haywire, and a tad less than two hours later you’ll have been exposed to Spielberg spins and homage on a wide range of science fiction, horror and coming-of-age flicks, and even his own classics “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “E.T.: The Extraterrestrial.”

And it works, almost totally.

Almost? Well, take a cast dominated by a bunch of barely-teens and some of it is bound to be a bit over the top. But hey, they’re kids, and I’ll even forgive director J.J. Abrams for the one with the tendency toward projectile vomiting in particularly frightful moments.

The plot opens with the aftermath of a funeral for the mother of young Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney), crushed in a tragic steel mill accident – which only interrupts the planning of his boy pals on putting together a Super 8 zombie movie.

A TV newscast gives away the time frame, with the 1979 near-disaster at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. But nukes, otherwise, have nothing on this unfolding tale.

Here, in the fictional small town of Lillian, Ohio, the boys – with a winsome, slightly more mature Alice (Elle Fanning) surprising them by agreeing to play a role – head out late at night to shoot a scene at the local rail station. Their little drama, in which Alice stuns the boys with her acting ability, is overtaken by a much larger event as an Air Force secret cargo train smashes into a pickup truck driven onto the tracks by their school’s science teacher, and derails and explodes.

The camera, dropped as they flee in terror, keeps on recording and – this is, after all, 1979 – the film comes back from the processing lab a few days later with an image that helps unravel some of the ensuing bizarre deaths, disappearances and disruptions to the normal course of events.

There are predictable elements, like conflict between the single fathers of Joe and Alice – the former being the town’s deputy sheriff, the latter a mill worker with a drinking problem whose shift was being worked by the mother when she was killed. But a bigger conflict develops between Deputy Dad and an Air Force colonel caught up in a whole lot of Area 51, space alien autopsy stuff.

Enter the monster, stage left... right... up... down. Sort of a cross between the insect-like critter in “Alien” and a “Transformers” construct, it has the eyeball appeal of E.T. And really, he, she or it just wants to go home.

Getting it there, well, that was a lot of fun.

The stand-in for fictional Lillian, Ohio, was filming site Weirton, W. Va., which is now on my future travel itinerary. Be nice to see what’s left of the place after all those explosions, not including the lone f-bomb that, along with plenty of action, may account for the movie’s PG-13 rating.

Movie review: 'Sing Your Song'

Harry Belafonte, with historian Taylor Branch, enjoy Q&A session after screening of documentary film Sing Your Song. (Photo by Alison Harbaugh, courtesy of the Maryland Film Festival)

Belafonte, movingly,

tallies life’s bananas

Documentary film on legendary performer

brings lyrical ending to Md. Film Festival

On the screen, Nelson Mandela is stepping off a plane in his first visit to the United States when he recognizes a face in the crowd on the tarmac below. He walks over and embraces the man, who recalls Mandela’s greeting: “Hey, Harry boy.”

In the front row of Baltimore’s Charles Theater Sunday night, Harry Belafonte was smiling at his own recollection – and remembering.

It was magic, courtesy of the 2011 Maryland Film Festival and Belafonte himself in bringing the stunning new documentary on his life to Baltimore as this year’s closing event. And in lining up early for the sold-out show (my wife Bonnie’s insistence), we found seats one row behind and four seats away from him.

It was difficult at times to turn my eyes toward the screen when I could see the reflection of its light in Belafonte’s right eye, the occasional smile, or look of intensity at the passing of his 84 years – from his birth in New York, abandonment by his father and being sent by his mother to be raised by relatives in Jamaica, to a life in the forefront of America’s civil and human rights movements.

I knew little of his life story, yet Belafonte has always been part of my own life. Growing up in the 1950s, his was perhaps the first real black face I can remember from television. And there he was again, up on the big theater screen – singing on the Ed Sullivan Show, and in a prime-time Revlon-sponsored special.

His music is part of this nation’s collective memory, like the “Banana Boat Song” (all right, call it “Day-O”). But what was not part of my memory was the uproar over his 1960s TV appearance with British singer Petula Clark, because she was touching his arm. Or his touring the country, including the South, in a show with the popular white dancers Marge and Gower Champion and enduring the frequent humiliations bestowed on traveling African-Americans at hotels, restaurants and restrooms.

The focus of “Sing Your Song” is far less on Belafonte the performer, as on his use of the forum provided by his celebrity to address social ills here and across the world – work he is continuing through outreach to young people today.

Interviewed after the screening by Baltimore historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Taylor Branch, Belafonte said he “grieved” for others whose celebrity led to tragic downfalls, and that having to choose between time spent with family and being away for art and activism was “not an easy road to walk.”

Sometimes, the road meant inspiring civil rights marchers in Alabama or Mississippi. Later, it was protesting war or Apartheid, or seeking ways to address famine killing uncountable thousands in Ethiopia (think the song “We Are the World”).

There are moments in which he is questioning the civil rights views of presidential candidate John F. Kennedy, trying to influence the racial awareness of Bobby Kennedy, and of helping and befriending Martin Luther King Jr. And, curiously, there was his role in Barack Obama becoming... anything. Belafonte was among a group of celebrities whose support helped fund scholarships for Kenyan students to come study in America... one of them the young Barack Obama who fathered our current president.

Not that Belafonte is expressing satisfaction these days with the younger Obama who, he said Sunday night, he hopes will find his moral center. “I am waiting for Barack Obama’s moral sense to be awakened.”

Still, Belafonte saw a parallel between the spark of hope ignited in young people by Obama’s campaign theme of “Yes, We Can,” and that of the spirit underlying the civil rights movement’s “We Shall Overcome” some two generations ago.

He prefers taking an optimistic view of the slow march of time, with a patient observation that “history moves at its own pace.... In that measure, there are ebbs and tides, highs and lows.”

“I think,” he said, “I still live in a time of hope and progress.”

Taking a few questions from the audience, Belafonte was asked whether there was anything in his life that he would change.

“Yes, I would rather have been a Rockefeller.”

After the laughter and his admission of being facetious, Belafonte had a better answer: “You cannot look at the whole journey as anything but a blessing.”

He added, “I would not change anything. Changing anything would mean I would not meet some of the people I have met.”

He saw the experiences of his life as a chain of moments of circumstance, and its course as set by his decisions responding to them. “It has been a remarkable journey, and I am so blessed that it came my way.”

The film -- produced by a team including younger daughter Gina Belafonte, and directed by Susanne Rostock – has been purchased by HBO. Film festival director Jed Dietz said the cable giant’s plans complicated efforts to bring “Sing Your Song” to Baltimore, but any problems were overcome through the local connection of historian Branch and cooperative push by Belafonte himself.

He said he had initial misgivings about the film project, “concerned that my fame would get in the way of the message.” But he was assured otherwise by his daughter – and the film that resulted is enthralling.

Belafonte noted that the documentary footage was culled from some 800 hours of film, and said he hopes that talks with HBO may lead to more exploration of that “treasure trove” for a series giving wider berth to some of the rich story lines.

He left by a back alley door, accompanied by a small group including his wife Pamela, Branch and festival director Jed Dietz – but Bonnie and I managed to talk our way through the same exit route. And it gave me a chance to ask Belafonte a question I had been pondering in the flicker from the screen and its reflection in his eye: “They say that people, in dying, see their life flash before their eyes, but what is it like to watch your life flash by for two hours on a movie screen?”

“It helps me remember,” he said.

And was he watching from a first-person point of view, or third-person as does the audience?

“I watch from many points of view,” he said.

Not least of them, judging from his remarks in the theater, was the philosophical point of view of a man who seems to have learned from and grown with every moment of his 84 years.

Pothole procession for ex-mayor

Schaefer’s last ride

through his beloved city

likely a little bumpy

In the end, he moves to suburbia

William Donald Schaefer, the do-it-now Baltimore mayor and Maryland governor, didn’t have to wait for a grave for a little posthumous gymnastics. He must have been rolling over in the hearse during a final ride around his beloved city.

Call it the Grand Pothole Tour of Baltimore.

Schaefer hated potholes, trash, abandoned cars – the annoyances and detritus that herald neglect and urban decay. Media folks and pols who observed Schaefer during his nearly half a century in public office wrote in recent days of his sometimes crazed demands to fix what he saw was broken.

As mayor for 15 years, Schaefer would observe problems on rides through the city and send “blue notes” to department heads pointing out what they needed to address immediately, if not sooner. By one account I read, Schaefer blue-noted an abandoned car that he wanted towed off the street – but didn’t divulge the location. Supposedly, several hundred abandoned cars were hauled away in the ensuing days.

It doesn’t take a Grand Tour to find potholes around town these days, amid a seemingly constant stream of utility and road work ripping up streets and patching the resulting wounds – rarely with an even surface.

Over the last few months, the city has spent millions of dollars repaving portions of the key arteries of Pratt and Light streets for use in early September as the course of Baltimore’s first grand prix Indy-car race.

Even the bright new concrete seems to have repaved patches now.

Maybe it was inevitably a losing battle to make the city a better place. It took a tireless leader, with a singular devotion to the job. That’s one of the attributes that made Schaefer a rarity among politicians.

Schaefer died on April 18 at a retirement community nursing facility, at 89. His health had been in a downward spiral in recent months.

Tour begins at home

After lying in state for several hours Monday at the State House in Annapolis, Schaefer was driven north to Baltimore for the Grand Tour, beginning outside the westside rowhouse where the bachelor mayor had lived with his aging mother until her death in 1983 – and long after most white neighbors had fled the area. He owned the house until 1998, retreating there at times even when he was governor and ostensibly living in Government House, Maryland’s official gubernatorial residence.

Trouble was, home – on Edgewood Street – was where his heart resided.

I caught up with Monday’s memorial motorcade at Harborplace, where in 2009 Schaefer made what was likely his last major public appearance– for the dedication of his statue near the edge of the landmark tourist destination that three decades ago became the foundation for his vision of an urban renaissance.

About 200 people, including statue sculptor Rodney Carroll, waited there for the procession’s anticipated late afternoon arrival, and then the crowd doubled in size as the gathering attracted attention and the motorcade, led by nearly two dozen police motorcycles, passed by on the way to a stop at nearby Federal Hill Park.

Minutes later, the hearse and its escort of motorcycles, limousine and SUVs bearing dignitaries turned onto the brick promenade by the statue, and was surrounded by the throng that ranged from homeless people to former Schaefer aides in city and state government.

Some eyed the flag-draped casket, or touched the back of the hearse. Others carried treasured keepsakes, one woman with a certificate of merit he had given her for government service. A former aide pulled out an old Schaefer election T-shirt from her pocketbook – a souvenir now a few sizes too small to wear.

There was spontaneous applause, and three booms of cannon fire from the topsail schooner Pride of Baltimore 2 – the city and state goodwill ship. The original Pride, championed and commissioned by Mayor Schaefer, was launched in 1977. It was lost in the Atlantic in 1986, along with four of its 12 crew members. Federal Hill overlooks its memorial.

From Harborplace, the motorcade moved along to another key Schaefer landmark – Baltimore’s National Aquarium. As mayor, he pushed for its creation – and when its scheduled completion was delayed by several weeks, Schaefer famously took a dip in its seal pool. The stunt brought Baltimore worldwide publicity.

Along the circular drive outside the aquarium, hundreds more spectators – and dozens of its employees – had gathered to cheer Schaefer. One of them held up a cut-out photo of Schaefer, in the classic image of him wearing a Victorian-style bathing suit and straw-hat boater, and holding an inflated blowup Donald Duck. The near-lifesize cut-out was marked on the back as having been displayed at the aquarium’s grand opening.

The procession continued through Little Italy and Fells Point, and ended at City Hall where Schaefer again was honored by lying in state until 9 p.m. Tuesday – and as the final hour neared, a city parking control agent was ticketing cars at expired meters nearby. Evidently, when you visit City Hall – even after 7 p.m., to pay final respects to a former mayor – you have to cough up $2 an hour at curbside.

His funeral takes place Wednesday.

Hilda who?

The memorial procession did not pass Club Hippo – a gay nightspot where, I’ve heard, Schaefer received a raucous greeting as he passed by during a parade down Charles Street years ago.

Some in the gay community felt that Schaefer, too, was gay and they wanted him out of the closet.

For many years, there’s been speculation about the sex life of Schaefer – a bachelor who steadfastly lived with mother and never married. But that’s apparently all you get on the subject: Speculation.

A political biography by former Baltimore Sun reporter C. Fraser Smith noted that, as a young man, Schaefer frequented the city’s adult entertainment district known as The Block.

There’s been talk that his most serious attraction was to Mary Arabian, who became his law partner and later the first female judge on the old city Municipal Court.

And later, there was Hilda Mae Snoops, a divorced mother of three, nurse and retired health care analyst for the federal Health Care Financing Administration. She was a longtime friend, and became something more as his close companion. She was at times described as his girlfriend. And in the absence of a First Lady of Maryland during Schaefer’s eight-year run as governor, she was given a title as the state’s “Official Hostess.”

Of course, the press referred to her privately as “Snoopy.”

Eventually, she talked Schaefer into purchasing a townhouse adjoining her home in a northeastern Anne Arundel County community.

But as for how close their relationship, who knows? Who even cares?

More importantly, in an era when scandals are all too frequent, there was none when it came to William Donald Schaefer. Whatever his style (if there was any style at all),, he was never caught in a tawdry situation – unlike so many celebrities and office-holding hypocrites, both Democrat and Republican.

Name your favorite: Democrat Eliot Spitzer, the New York governor with a peccadillo for pricy prostitutes; President Clinton and the knee-padded intern; Robert Bauman, the Republican Maryland congressman and married father of four whose closet life included a 16-year-old male prostitute; presidential candidate and marital cheater John Edwards.

The list could be, to borrow a Trumpian adjective, huge.

Schaefer, whatever the relationship, was devoted to public life, his city, and Snoops – who died in 1999.

According to his wish, Schaefer will be interred at Dulaney Valley Memorial Gardens next to Snoops – oddly enough, outside the city limits.