No idea...

The one on the far left is clear ('natch), the two on the right are pretty intuitive, but what the hell is the second from the left (the centre left if you will)?

People in conversation? Seems rude to the vision and mobility impaired, at least.

People making out? Also seems rude, and carries the stereotype of Paris being made for love to an absurd length.

Racial passing?

And yes, I am sitting in the reserved space despite not being at least 3 of the 4. This is where the outlets are. I will move if at any point there are more than 5 other people in the entire terminal.

Yesterday's news...

.... November 10, 1975. The pride of the American side.

 

Interfluidity: the negative unnatural rate of interest

From Interfludity:

David Andolfatto points out that US five-year real interest rates are now negative.....

When we observe negative real rates, they are often attributed to something abnormal. Perhaps it is “depression economics” which has driven interest rates underground....
I think this aberrationist view is quite wrong. I don’t think you can make sense of the last decade without understanding that the so-called real interest rate has been trying to fall through zero for years. Only tireless innovation by the men and women of Wall Street prevented negative rates long before the traumas of 2008. A deep cause of the financial crisis was a simple expectation: That lenders ought to earn a “decent” real, risk-free yield even while a variety of trends — skyrocketing incomes for the 0.1%, the professionalization of investing, leverage-induced risk aversion, China — were creating Ben Bernanke’s famous savings glut. The market response to a global savings glut ought to have been sharply negative real interest rates for low risk savers. But as a society, we resent and resist that capitalist outcome. It is well and good for markets to drive the price of undifferentiated labor asymptotically towards zero. But God forbid that “savers” not be paid for supplying a factor that turns out not to be scarce. Instead, an alphabet soup of financial innovations was conjured to transform bad lending into demand for low risk money, and thereby support its price.... There is no such thing as a “natural” anything in economics. Economic behavior is human artifact and artifice. When economists call anything “natural” — the natural rate of interest, or of unemployment — you should recall Joan Robinson’s famous quip:

The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.

... What was the “natural” real rate of interest in 2006? According to TIPS yields, 5-year real interest rates were about 2.5%. But those rates were observed under the institutional context of a structured finance boom which transformed a lot of loose lending into allegedly risk-free lending demand. Was that rate “artificial” then? Today those same rates are -1%. Is this “natural”?

Ultimately, the words are meaningless. The level of interest rates that prevails in the market will be the result of a mix of institutional choices and economic circumstances. For now, we are in a bit of a pickle, because if we are “conservative” — if we stick with familiar institutional arrangements — we end up with outcomes that are violently disagreeable to our cultural prejudices. In social terms, a negative real rate of interest means that prudence is a cost, not a virtue. Caution is a greater vice than spending what you have and hoping for the best. Savers must be punished for their thrift.

... Current spenders assume risks of future deprivation that current savers are unwilling to accept. Why shouldn’t spenders be paid to bear that burden? Transforming present resources into future wealth is uncertain and difficult work. Savers’ expectation of a positive real interest rate amounts to a demand for time travel cheaper-than-free. Why should such unreason be accommodated? The sense of entitlement carried by savers in our society would put any welfare queen to shame.
So, are negative real rates the way to go? Should we just tell savers exactly what we tell laborers? The price of the factor you supply has fallen. This is capitalism, quit whining and deal with it!
Maybe. But maybe not. In theory, a sufficiently negative rate of interest could restore a full employment, noninflationary equilibrium....
But it might not work out so well. Debt is a particular and problematic institution. If savers must pay borrowers for the privilege of carrying forward wealth, it matters in the real world whom they pay and how well those people do their jobs. Borrowers can always default, even after they have contracted loans at negative interest rates. If we try to restrict lending to only very creditworthy borrowers, we’ll find that real interest rates have to fall sharply negative to induce spending by people who would otherwise be inclined to save. If we allow more liberal credit standards, we’ll observe higher notional interest rates, but only as prelude to widespread defaults. We’ve seen that movie and it isn’t entertaining.

The post is worth reading in its entirety. Waldman goes on to suggest that "observed interest rates are a function of distributions and institutions as well as technology," and to sketch out a model in which the distribution of resources can push the real interest negative. He suggests that this is one possibility for what he believes is the long term effort of the interest rate to go negative: "in a sufficiently unequal society, the marginal saver may have vastly more wealth than is necessary to endow her own future consumption (including proximate bequests)."

Social Equality

Social intercourse and the suffrage.

"They suggest that we may confer political equality on the coloured people, without admitting them to social equality…. Now, sir, I submit to the gentlemen, whether these political rights, of which we are speaking, do not depend, for their preservation and right exercise, on social intercourse and equality. Not that every man, must associate with every man in the community, but I hold there must be that free and unrestrained interchange of sentiments on public questions, which can only attend a state of general equality, if we would properly prepare the mass of men to exercise political suffrage.... These separate circles or little societies which wealth or adventitious circumstances, and not our political institutions, have made distinct, have connecting links that extend the opinions thus formed by the contact of minds, from and to the extremities of the body politic, and keep up a sympathy between the whole and all its parts; and here is the foundation of the system of universal suffrage. For suffrage is only the expression of the opinions which are perpetually maturing under the influence of social intercourse and equality."--Woodward, delegate to the Pennsylvania constitutional convention, 1838.

I have argued, and continue to, that at least some of the resonance of 'social equality' in the post-bellum period as an obstacle to state intervention in civil rights came about because of it was strategically deployed by racial egalitarians who were attempting to secure rights of political and civil equality (for principled reasons, as well as the huge labor interest once slavery was abolished in ensuring that free blacks would not remain a helot class) against understandings of citizenship and belonging that remained anchored in the white male republic.

The counter, however, is that the opponents of black suffrage and civil rights in the antebellum period had their own sophisticated understanding of the importance of social equality: only under conditions of social equality and intercourse could there be the formation of sympathy with the whole, that the opinions exchanged, developed, and defended in these networks of equal intercourse incrementally structured a broad attachment of these "separate circles or little societies" with a community in formation. Absent this sympathy, it was class warfare, and universal suffrage would be simply a weapon in the hands of the property-less. And absent this sympathy, foreclosed by the lack of social intercourse on a plane of equality, the extension of the suffrage to blacks would have been creating a scenario in which electoral competition became an arena for race war.

Clearly the resonance of concerns over social equality come in part from the fact that both the advocates and opponents of black civil and political rights embraced this discourse, just as it is clearly the case that they embraced it because of its broader resonance. But by looking at the discourse from the perspective of the strategic calculus of racial egalitarians, we miss the nuanced concerns of antebellum white supremacists. And we should listen to these dead activists, however distasteful, because the specific content of these concerns--that suffrage and representative government requires a sympathy for the community, a belief in a common weal, and that these are rooted in patterns of social intercourse that are highly resilient in the face of state intervention--is one  that we need to take very seriously.

Let us now praise forgotten men

I wrote something a few days ago about the inability to find heroes in history. I don't want to suggest that I am looking for these, but when hanging out in their world there is an urge to find sympathetic persons to cheer on. 


Given my focus on suffrage, one obvious metric is whether someone supported the extension of the right to vote to all classes and races. Most come up short, with the class conservatives most likely to be taking the egalitarian position on race and vice versa. So those who defy this pattern, and defend an unambiguously egalitarian agenda, are worthy of note.


In the Pennsylvania constitutional convention of 1837-38, there were only between 5-8 members who supported both.[1] 


Earle, of Philadelphia
Clarke, of Indiana County
Dickey, of Beaver County
Farrelly, of Crawford County
Cleavinger, of Greene County
Hayhurts, of Columbia County
Purviance, of Butler County
and White, of Tioga County.


Even the beloved Thad. Stevens [2] would vote against removing the taxpayer qualification. All but Dickey and Purviance (who were Anti-Masons) were Democrats, which was the party most vigorously opposed to black suffrage, so their courage on this issue is even more notable. 


Earle is especially notable. He was a Democrat, the publisher of the Mechanics' Free Press and Reform Advocate, and would go on to be the Liberty Party's vice-presidential candidate in 1840, after losing favor with the Democrats for his stand on black suffrage. So, here's to Earle. The origins of the alliance between labor and the civil rights movement are further back in history than we usually believe, and Earle was one of the points of contact during the antebellum period.


[1] There were two votes on whether the suffrage should not differentiate between blacks and white: on the first, 8 voted against differentiation who also voted for the removal of the tax qualification, while only 5 did so on the second. 
[2] I love Thaddeus Stevens. And so should you. Not only was he a near constant vanguard advocate of far-reaching racial equality, he was accordingly "slandered" as Austin Stoneman, the Radical Republican leader (with a mulatto consort) in Birth of a Nation. His biographer describes him as "The Great Commoner, savior of free public education in Pennsylvania, national Republican leader in the struggles against slavery in the United States and intrepid mainstay of the attempt to secure racial justice for the freedmen during Reconstruction, the only member of the House of Representatives ever to have been known, as the 'dictator' of Congress." (Trefousse, Hans L. Thaddeus Stevens: Nineteenth-Century Egalitarian (1997) , p.xi). Personally, my favorite slander of Stevens came during his early career, as an Anti-Masonic delegate to the state constitutional convention of 1837-38: "the great unhinged of Adams county."

Cale and Warnes....

Empty bottles.

I've had a soft spot for Warnes entirely as a result of Famous Blue Raincoat. Knowing that she does Cale as well as Cohen carries her even further along in my esteem.

Paris, 1939

Enchanting? Yes..., but:

The woman who owned the flat had left for the south of France before the Second World War and never returned. But when she died recently aged 91, experts were tasked with drawing up an inventory of her possessions and homed in on the flat near the Trinité church in Paris between the Pigalle red light district and Opera.

For 70 years the apartment had been left untouched, the rent dutifully paid. How does one continue to pay the rent for a place to which they must certainly know they will never return? Estate manager, presumably, responsible for their investments and diligently paying the bills as they arrive?

They dance to the beat of a different drum.[1]

What I found most interesting was not the million dollar Boldini, but rather the scene itself: walking into 1930s upper class Paris, the Mickey Mouse, the stuffed Ostrich, the smell of decay.

[1] They don't march. For that matter, do they dance to a drum's beat at all?

The only time I'll ever link to Bobby Jindal's webpage

Delegate Grymes, Louisiana State Constitutional Convention 1845:

"we may have an irruption of the inhabitants of Central Asia, of Affghanistan, and of the Hindoos; and if they cut down and fell our forests, without attempting to regulate our institutions, we will be fortunate indeed" (p.69)

Grymes is arguing against residence requirements for naturalized citizens before they can be eligible to be elected to public office. So, I link to Bobby Jindal, his official state site and his Wikipedia page. I disagree with Jindal on a range of issues (somewhere between 'every damn thing' and 'good lord, what is this man's problem'), but his election shuts up Grymes. (Yes, I know that death did that a long time ago, but this is the problem with living in the history.) Jindal was raised Hindu, converted to Catholicism, and is the first Indian-American governor in the United States. And it brings me a totally un-warranted pleasure to think that Voorhies would be aghast.

Reading the constitutional convention debates is fascinating; but with history being another country and all that jazz, I find it hard to be a partisan. That is, while it is very easy to find yourself repulsed by certain delegates (such as Grymes), and there is a definite attraction to other delegates, it is difficult to maintain these feelings across issue areas. This is largely because the ones defending (or even advancing) black suffrage are often the ones trying to impose restrictions on foreigners, or on poor whites. The lines of belonging parameterize the commitment to principle. There are some exceptions: Wisconsin in 1846 seems to be remarkable in that the people trying to expand the suffrage to blacks also want immigrant voting and are at the very least not rolling back white voting and are often loudly defending the unqualified right of the governed to vote, with at least some suggestions that this might include women. But generally, and to me surprisingly, finding heroes in the past is at least as difficult as finding them in the present--although villains abound in both.

Odious distinctions, solidarity forever

I suspect that the old language of the Democratic Party, the party of Jefferson and Jackson, the language of equal rights, against odious distinctions, still resonates:

"It taxes one class for the support of another, and what is worse, taxes the poor for the sake of the rich. It thus produces that inequality, which is the bane of republics; for it is in fact the influence of the few, or, in other worse, aristocracy. Now, though no just government will interfere, by sumptuary laws, to restrain the acquisition of wealth, and thereby prevent inequality, so neither will any just government, by fostering particular interests, at the expense of others, promote inequality. This is the opposite, and the worst extreme of sumptuary laws. Nor is the inequality which is produced by the interference of the law, by any means as harmless as that which results from different dispositions, and different capacities in human beings. Whilst the one may act as a salutary stimulus to industry, and its worst consequences are continually neutralized by the alienation and division of property, the other, by creating distrust in the government, produces despair, and depresses industry; and the dread of retributive justice, which always accompanies wealth unjustly acquired, so far from giving rise to division of property, inevitably leads to concentration and primogeniture,--to legal safeguards, corporations, charters, monopolies, and privileged orders." -- Report of the Committee on Agriculture, on the memorial of the Delegates of the United Agricultural Societies of sundry counties in the state of Virginia, February 2, 1821, p.55-56. 

The first bolded passage is the old mantra of the Democracy, the one that tied the working class to the southern planter. This resonates still, but its target is the poor. The idea that public policy is structured to tax the poor and distribute to the rich, while making occasional appearances, remains largely unformulated at the level of popular discourse these days.

I think that in the second bolded passage we find the central disconnect between those who believe the massive increase in inequality in recent decades is a problem, and those who believe that is a reflection of talent, however obtained, hard work, and luck. The passage suggests that inequality is not in itself problematic, but rather that it is inequality ill-gotten, achieved as a result of courtier leverage.

This brings to mind Elizabeth Warren's claim that "no on in this country got rich on their own." Warren's claim is about a broader understanding of the communal basis for individual success, and for a broader understanding of success. But much of what is animating popular support for Occupy Wall Street seems to be somewhat more narrow, and at the same time, something more politically tractable: that a sliver of people in this country got rich by taking, by having given to them, by appropriating from the damned rest of us, and that this appropriation was enabled and in some cases directly and deliberately accomplished by government action. And that, empowered by the state through the discriminatory policies of the conservative nanny state-- through the distribution of tax policy, trade policy, our largely hidden and poorly coordinated industrial policy--a privileged class has been erected, one that will be able to use its power to further entrench itself, to  wrap the commonwealth more tightly in its web.

I prefer the broadness of Warren's critique, its unwavering answer to the apologists of inequality who eulogize hard work, talent, brilliance. But I prefer the cut, the anger, the barely contained hatred of the latter. Inequality is not a very good motivator for political action. Theft from the public good, profiteering at the expense of the community, and odious distinctions between classes, especially those that distribute from the poor to pay for the luxury of the rich, have been wonderful motivators throughout American history, and I suspect they remain today.

So, raise the banner high and repeat the old mantra: They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn....

Science fiction in Virginia...

.... or, an early chapter in the rise of Skynet.

From the Virginia State Constitutional Convention of 1829-1830:

"But I am told that Universal Suffrage, (I am no advocate for Universal Suffrage,) or more correctly General Suffrage, was the invention of the age of the Lord Protector Cromwell--that it sprung up for the first time, during the Commonwealth of England. It is called novel doctrine. Were it so, that would not prove it false. Steamboats are a novel invention, and many other useful arts are comparative novelties. The new race of men which modern science has created and made, is a new invention. I mean the wooden, brazen and iron men, which neither eat, drink, sleep, nor get tired; which are adults without being infants, full grown men as soon as born. These new men, these novelties, are likely to be a very useful race; for when inspired by steam, they are as rational as our black population. England has two hundred millions of them, and these United States have more than ten million of them. They are all revolutionists and will as certainly revolutionize the world as ever did the art of printing, or any conquering invader." --Delegate Campbell, p.388 

"Inspired by steam." The fantastic conquerings of human ingenuity, and of course, the so-deeply ingrained that it is almost background white supremacy.

Homeward bound....

... one night on the deep.

I seem to only ever post about music and movies these days. The original goal of the blog was to provide an outlet for dissertation research. More of that later.

But for now I want to think of Lord Franklin.

The grotesque images delighted me as a child. The knowledge that my suspicions were right, that despite the implicit assurances otherwise, the damned cold could kill you, and worse, could preserve your body as a horrifying reminder of your miserable demise, has led to a preference for fire over ice, a preference that has no real rational basis but that I won't dismiss as mere sentiment. From what I've tasted of desire..., and all that. (Also, this. Or, the opening sentence from this. My childhood had a theme.)

And then there was this:


As I understand it, this was the version of the song that inspired "Bob Dylan's Dream." I prefer this. When I first heard it I believed it to be sung by an old man. I also preferred that. But I'm okay with any song from a second album entitled "Second Album." Gets to the point. 

Update: Comment: "For Dylan to have been inspired by Martin Carthy’s version (which appeared on Carthy’s Second Album – I also like the title – in 1966),  he would have had to have heard it Live by 1963 at the latest as that’s when “Bob Dylan’s Dream” appeared on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan). This is very possible. All Music guide lists many versions, mostly British and Irish." Yes. But Carthy was playing this prior to 1966, and it seems likely that Dylan learned the song from Carthy when they met in London in December 1962. Or, from Paul Clayton, who had recorded the song for his 1957 album Whaling and Sailing Songs: From the Days of Moby Dick. This is all from Wikipedia though, so hardly definitive.

Bezzlin'

John Quiggin has a post about the bezzle, JK Galbraith's[1] idea of the amount of undetected corporate at any given point. 

As a boom continues, and everyone does well, people realise they can siphon off money and use it to make even more money. If they are threatened with detection, the original amount stolen can be returned to the till, and thye are still ahead. But, in a crisis, this can’t be done and, in any case, outside accountants are all over the books. So, embezzlers are caught and the bezzle shrinks. It stays small in the early stages of recovery when most decisions are being made by the cautious types who survived the crisis. But as the boom continues, hungrier and less-risk averse types come to the fore and the bezzle begins to grow again.

The key point about the bezzle is that on the way down it is very much like a bank run. As I see it, the key thing about fraud is what I'll call the oversight timeline. If you are managing someone else's money, at some point they are going to come for it, and knowing how and when they do this is crucial to successful thieving. For instance, a particularly ideal situation for thieving is where you are given a a sum of money to invest, and where the principal (you are the agent) will only ever draw a portion that is lower than the rate of return. As long as they are never planning on drawing more, or, god forbid, moving it to a different money manager, then thieving is pretty easy. You just skim the difference. 


The problem is that these people often have children, and these children have an expectation that they will be able to get the money, and--greedy little buggers--they probably have an expectation  of how much there should be, given a knowledge of how much was given to you to invest and what a reasonable rate of return should have been over this period. This is where the oversight timeline comes into play. If you know that the investor is going to die in 10 years, then you just need to make sure that when 10 years has come and gone you have returned enough of the money to go unnoticed. That is, you need to either get higher returns using the money you siphoned off than the account you were managing, so that you can return a portion while still having made a profit, or you need to have found another principal from where you can transfer funds. The latter starts to look a lot like a Ponzi scheme, juggling your theft between multiple victims.  There is another option, of course. As long as your timeline for success is shorter than theirs, you can just take the money and run. If your "success" involves you getting mixed up in a particular social milieu, having a status in a particular circle, becoming a pillar of the community, then your timeline is almost certainly going to be longer than the oversight timeline. If you want to be an Austro-Hungarian opera house, taking the money and running is not a realistic option.


But key to not getting caught, in all cases, is a knowledge of the oversight timeline: you need to have a good idea when someone is going to look at your books so that you can decide whether you juggle (possible as long as only one set of books is examined at any given time), gamble (which has the added risk that even if you are on average above the amount needed, knowing where you will be when the time has run out is much more difficult to predict), or run. We can rank these option by risk.

1. Juggling
2. Gambling
3. Running

Running is relatively risk free, at least from the perspective of getting out of the country and to a place from where you can't be extradited. You only have one timeline to manage, and as long as your own is shorter than that you are fine. Gambling is risky, because you can't be sure you'll win. But at least you still are only managing one timeline. Juggling requires several oversight timelines to manage. The risk of one coming in early is multiplied. This, of course, is one of the more irritating things about death. We can see it coming in some cases, but in other situations it can really muck up the game plan.


But the uncertainty of the timeline is not the only problem. For the non-running option, you need to be able to secure a higher rate of return through private investments, which usually requires a boom and is tough (but not impossible) in a crisis, or you need to be able to access cash relatively quickly, either by taking from other clients or borrowing against your own assets. That is, you need a boom and/or liquidity. The problem with financial crises is that everything seizes up. Not only is the oversight timeline often dramatically and suddenly shortened (in a crisis, all of a sudden everyone wants detailed financial statements), but your ability to generate sufficient private returns to cover your theft is significantly reduced as correlations approach 1 and liquidity is greatly reduced as banks are less likely to lend you money and as your other clients start being more over-bearing in their oversight, etc.


Which is why financial crises are usually associated with a significant number of prosecutions: fewer people can keep the game running given the conjunction of shortened oversight timelines, decreased returns, and less liquidity. So, why have there been so few this time? Quiggin offers up a few possibilities: 

1. There wasn’t any crime going on in the banking sector this time around....2. Regulators and prosecutors are complicit in the game and are letting financial criminals go free....3. The scale of legal, privately profitable but socially destructive, financial activity is so massive that, even post-meltdown, it’s impossible to detect embezzlement against the general background of dubious financial manipulation.4. The bailout was so comprehensive that the bezzle just kept on growing.

The first I think is nonsense, not because I have any particular animosity but because there is always crime going on in every economic sector. But it does raise the question of the appropriate baseline. On the one hand, we would like to see a perfect correlation between prosecutions and actual fraud. But this isn't going to happen, and while it should inform policy debates about enforcement, it shouldn't necessarily inform a debate about why there are fewer prosecutions this time around. So we use the "last time around" baseline. Why are we seeing fewer prosecutions relative to other financial crises? I assume that any distribution of propensity for fraud among individuals hasn't changed. Again, not because of animosity so much as my priors all point me to thinking that (1) these things are remarkably stable over time, and (2) if anything the financial sector has been recruiting more people willing to take these kinds of risk. So let's assume it's the same. In that case, the incentives or the enforcement must have changed.


Quiggin's 2 and 3 look at enforcement, either complicity or capacity. I also wonder if there was a change in incentives. Not that there was no crime in the banking sector, but relative to other booms there was less. Why? Possibly because the ability to generate a sufficient rate of return to avoid the juggling or the running options (the most risky and the most costly) was too low, given a decade of weak growth. In that case, there may have been less fraud this time around (and accordingly fewer prosecutions) because there was less opportunity to delude yourself into thinking you could get away with it. The likely gains from gambling were smaller, the risks of juggling remained high, leaving running as the best option. But the costs of running were always the highest, and it's not clear that these would have gone down in the last decade.


I have no idea whether any of this is true. Certainly I'm not sure that it's the case that the ability to generate higher than needed returns (gambling) was reduced over the last decade. And my priors and prejudices all point me toward thinking that Quiggin's 2 and 4 are especially important, and that 3 is at least somewhat likely. But I wanted to suggest that there might also have been an ironic reduction in actual fraud based on the lackluster decade that preceded.


[1] Galbraith has only become more enjoyable as we have entered into the age of text and instance messages. I retrospectively see him as cracking even more jokes than he did when  alive.

Ana-ana

Something that we do not sufficiently utilize in English is the 'ana,' as in the anabaptists, the anarchists, and the perfect 'anamour' of Gainsbourg.

Powerpoints to peace.

There are fragments that perfectly capture the problem. Here is one:

The problem, of course, being the incoherent but surprising success (at shaping policy) of anti-Muslim ideology. Which rogue organization, funded by dirty money certainly, do you think is responsible for this graph? Follow the link to find out. Also, while the graph may be perfect in one sense (as a fragment to be read), Andrew Gelman lists a number of reasons why it is a truly terrible graph apart from its unabashed chauvinism: the incoherence of the x-axis, the absurdity of the linear slope, the beginning point of 1400 BC. I don't know why there is a big star on the right. Certainly don't know why it dominates visually over the crescents. 

Daughters of Mother Jones

On September 17, 1989, 98 miners and one minister conducted a peaceful takeover of the Pittston Moss 3 Coal Preparation Plant.The Pittston strike was one of the most brutal and hard-fought of the last three decades. The sit-in was part of a 10 month strike that pitted the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) versus the Pittston Coal Company. Arguably the most militant strike of the past half-century, the UMWA engaged in a variety of actions, ranging from the nonviolent takeover to militant women’s organizing to violence....
The Pittston strike finally ended on February 20, 1990. It was nearly a total success. Miners again received their benefits. Pittston had to pay $10 million toward the health care of the miners who had retired before 1974. The mines could stay open with extended shifts, but the amount miners had to work was limited by the agreement. The UMWA got the fines against them dropped (which had included $13,000 a day against individual union officials and a total of $64 million against the union) in exchange for 10,000 hours of community service, which spread among the members, wasn’t too bad.

Worth reading in its entirety. Brings to mind Salt of the Earth. Let's code Verizon as a success. Other than this and Pittstown, what are the labor victories of the last twenty years?