The Leading Indicators

by Gregg Easterbrook

  The last thing a corporation wants is for anyone to read the disclaimers. Many disclaimers are in all-caps six-point type to discourage reading. In disclaimers, warranties and similar quasilegal documents, all-caps does not mean “this is the important part.” All-caps means this is the part they want to make sure you can’t read. The first line of most disclaimers might as well say, PLEASE DO NOT READ BEFORE SIGNING.

  Before Tom was fired from the pushcart job, Kevin had wandered by. He and Tom got to talking and later went out for a beer. Margo understood that Kevin had been living the dismissal-to-dismissal lifestyle, and Tom felt sympathy; but in retrospect, she wished Tom hadn’t given Kevin his cell number. When Kevin was tossed from an SRO, tumbling even further down the breakwater of life, he showed up at Tom and Margo’s apartment, asking for a few nights on the couch. A few nights became a few weeks. Margo was far from happy regarding this, especially with teen daughters in the same small space.

  “My first wife, Donna, didn’t fantasize about anything; mainly she tried to think of ways we could keep the house,” Kevin said. Margo winced. Kevin had already told her this many times.

  “It must have been hard for you when she got sick,” Margo said. She looked intently at the papers on the table, trying to send the message that she was busy.

  “We should have given up and sold the house sooner,” Kevin said. “That way she could have gotten the operation while there was still time.”

  “You didn’t know.” Many, many times. Kevin talked about himself almost exclusively, and Kevin’s life entailed events that soap-opera scriptwriters would have rejected as clichéd.

  “Before they would do the operation, the hospital insisted we sign the house over to them. I waited too long. I should have just signed it over. When I finally tried, they knew the foreclosure had already started. They told me to find a cosigner! Who was I supposed to get, the pope?”

  “You mustn’t reproach yourself. You did everything you could.”

  “She talks to me sometimes,” Kevin said. “I mean, I’m not crazy. But I believe Donna can see me and is trying to guide my life. I hear her whisper to me about what the baby would have been like. Which lotto numbers to play. That kind of thing.”

  “I am sure she was a remarkable person.”

  “My second wife, Gigi, she did think about fucking all the time. Just not with me.”

  “She was a foolish woman, then.”

  “Hey, thanks Mrs. H. You’re stand-up. You know that?”

  “Donna wants you to get back on your feet,” Margo said. “Donna wants you to get a job and find your own place.”

  “Between the debt to Donna’s hospice and the alimony to Gigi, I’m stuck behind the eight ball. Even when I’m working, most of the paycheck is garnished. That’s how me and Tom got to be friends. We’d both lost houses and were both headed down the toilet financially. Gave us something in common.”

  These were not agreeable words for Margo to hear. She saw Kevin as someone her generous husband had encountered by chance and generously offered to assist on a temporary basis. Tom told her, “I meet a man in need, how can I not act?” A narrative like that worked for Margo as an explanation of Tom extending his hand. That narrative involved a good deed, a mitzvah. But there was no sign of Kevin getting on his feet. And the notion of Tom and Kevin becoming friends with commonality alarmed Margo deeply.

  “Tom will bounce back soon,” she said.

  “Oh, he will! He’s got the degree, that way of talking, of pretending he’s interested in what you are saying. I guess in college you get a lot of experience acting nice to people you can’t stand. That’s a valuable life skill.”

  “I’m sure you would have done well in college, Kevin. You have practical intelligence.”

  “Tom is my inspiration. I wish I had his way to stay calm and talk calm.” Kevin wasn’t sure what to call poise, and didn’t have much experience with it. “When they laid us off at the drop-ship facility, I wanted to ram a broom up that corporate guy’s ass. I know I shouldn’t of screamed that I would cut the brake lines on his car. But that was no cause to arrest me, nobody thought I really meant it. Man, I was steamed. I’d been there two years and not one day of severance. I still don’t understand how they got away with giving us nothing.”

  “They put the firm’s assets under a new name in a spinoff corporation headquartered in the Caymans, then had the old firm declared bankrupt, voiding debts to bondholders and obligations to workers. One week prior, they issued $80 million in bonuses to top management,” Margo said.

  She remembered the options traders she once worked with, who considered that sort of thing perfectly normal—pilfer from investors and labor, place the proceeds into the pockets of insiders. Bernard Madoff wasn’t some weird exception—rather, a man who took common Wall Street practices a tad too far. Enron’s bogus accounting caused $63 billion of other people’s money to vanish, while Enron executives rolled in wealth and political influence. Jeffrey Skilling, the former Enron president convicted of securities fraud, was arguing on appeal that systematic lying for personal gain does not constitute fraud because it is normal procedure in the corporate world. The sophisticated investor should expect to be lied to! After elite money firms AIG, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch were exposed in 2008 as wood-paneled con jobs, no one from these organizations went to jail. The banker or corporate executive who lies to the public while lining his pockets knows he may someday be caught and embarrassed, but also knows there never will be any criminal consequences, and he’ll keep the funds he stole. The scandal is not what corporations do in violation of law. The scandal is what they do legally.

  “They sure screwed the average guy,” Kevin said of his old employer. Margo couldn’t think of any useful reply. Wall Street cheers when corporations lay off workers and shift to offshore tax havens, as this drives up profit. People didn’t realize Ronald Reagan had been wise when he said, “Never confuse Wall Street with the economy.”

  “When I got that job in the air-bag factory, I figured I was set,” Kevin continued. Many, many times. “The way people drive, air bags will always be needed, right? But they closed the plant. Now the air bags are made in Bhutan.”

  “You’re not supposed to question market forces,” Margo said.

  “Some dad puts his daughter into a car and tells her, ‘Don’t worry, kid, if there’s ever a crash, the air bag from Bhutan will save you. It’s got cutting-edge Bhutanese technology.’”

  As they talked, Kevin nosed around the kitchen, trying to do so unobtrusively, looking for something to drink. Margo had forbidden him to bring alcohol into the apartment—the girls, after all. He went out to drink many nights: she’d told him if he came in obviously drunk again, he would be back on the street, no discussion. A drunken stranger in an apartment home to two teen girls—Margo shuddered. Kevin shied away from Caroline and Megan, knowing the mother grizzly was near. What distressed Margo was placing the girls in the same close environment as a failed person, one who represented the life choices she wanted her girls to have nothing to do with.

  “Every day the business section of the newspaper disturbs me,” Margo said. Avoiding friends from her former social circle, because she wanted to avoid discussion of money problems, Margo found herself having conversations with Kevin, and that was another bad sign. “Maytag closed its factories in Illinois. Russell Stover closed one of its chocolate factories—we’ve even outsourced the candy. Now there are no longer any television sets or typewriters made in the United States.”

  “People still use typewriters?”

  “Jobs are disappearing left and right, yet every year there are more waterfront developments with trendy restaurants,” Margo said. She knew the statistics about rising top-tier income and net worth—the same economic forces that made iPhones and DVRs affordable were concentrating wealth at the top. Once those forces smiled on Margo’s family; now they were turned against her. It was nothing personal.

  Back wh
en Margo dined in the trendy restaurants, she didn’t stop to think that average people were losing jobs to make her lifestyle happen. Now it seemed to her like the economy had become a food chain with nothing at the bottom. So should imports be banned, forcing everyone to buy products that cost more? If factory productivity improvements were barred by law, there would be more jobs for steelworkers and autoworkers, but the country’s standard of living would decline. That would hit average people a lot harder than it would hit the top 1 percent.

  Kevin found Tom’s vodka but left it alone after a hard glance from Margo. He took some Ritz crackers and began putting grape jelly on them.

  “The jobs going to China,” he said, “you don’t think the Chinese planned it that way, do you? They know they can’t beat our military. They know their movies will never be as popular as ours. They know they will never even get near our pizza. They know that if you want to eat a pizza, watch a movie and hit something with a bomb, the United States will always be the only game in town. USA! USA! So they put on this big smile and say, sure, we’ll do your manufacturing for you at half the price. Our CEOs agree, that way they can pump up their stock options, then quit just before the prosecutors arrive. Our politicians agree, that way the lobbyists keep giving them campaign contributions. One day the Chinese government will call up our government and say, ‘So sorry, but we now have you by the’—how do you say ‘balls’ in Chinese?”

  “I have a feeling we are going to find out.”

  When Margo lived in a beautiful house and drank expensive Cabernets, she and her friends would sit discussing what a disgrace it was that government and churches did not do more for those whose luck was hard. Especially the churches, which claimed to exist for the purpose of extending a hand. All denominations of all faiths spend far more on themselves than on the needy. As her own fortunes declined, Margo was doing something she never would have considered when she lived well: allowing a hard-luck victim to share her home. She realized that before, she didn’t notice people like Kevin. Her eyes passed over without her seeing them. Now it was as if they glowed.

  “Anyway, don’t worry about Tom,” Kevin said. “That pharmaceutical start-up he worked at, how was he supposed to know they had been testing the medicine on African orphans?”

  “Last night Tom called himself ‘a loser in life’s contest.’”

  “No way. I’ve known a lot bigger losers than Tom,” Kevin replied cheerfully.

  Margo wanted to cry—both to hear these words and because she was having this conversation with Kevin. He continued, “Besides, Tom is hardworking, good-looking, law-abiding and well educated. There should be at least another ten years where there are still jobs for people like that.”

  This whole line of discussion had to stop, but Margo was too well mannered to just tell Kevin to shut up. “When the jobs are gone,” she said, “what happens next, the robots take over?”

  “I’m guessing clones,” Kevin said. “Robots sound expensive. Clones could have sex and reproduce for free. Regular humanity would become expendable. That’s pretty much where trends are headed already anyway.”

  Margo thought about that and said, “My worry is Western civilization ends when a runaway cloning experiment inadvertently creates thousands of Kardashian sisters.”

  Kevin brightened, saying, “That sounds great!”

  To Margo’s relief, the key turned. Tom entered, wearing the uniform of a package-delivery service. He looked tired and seemed winded. “Sorry, need to catch my breath,” he said. “Those stairs.”

  “I called the super about the elevator,” Margo said. Then, thinking about him winded, said, “You know, Tom, you haven’t had a physical in years.” She bit her tongue the moment she said this.

  “We don’t have health insurance—why waste money for a doctor to tell me I was young once and am not anymore? Believe me, I know the sweetness of youth is gone.”

  Tom seemed to age just by saying this. To Margo, he had always appeared boyish, even when he put on a monochrome business suit and left for meetings. In the last three years he had changed to graying, by appearances skipping middle age entirely.

  “If you wait until you’re about to die, then you can go to the emergency room free,” Kevin said in a chipper way, as if this were “news you can use.”

  “The president is pushing a reform bill,” Margo said.

  “Years will pass before the new bill takes effect,” Kevin replied. “Till then, same old same old. Lots of people depend on waiting till they get sick, so they can get treated free in the emergency room. That’s how it works.”

  “Listen to him, he knows,” Tom said, slightly darkly.

  “If you’re just trying to stay healthy, doctors and hospitals are allowed to turn you away,” Kevin said. “If you’re bleeding or having a heart attack, law says the hospital must treat you. So guys on construction crews, nannies whose last names the householders don’t even know—instead of getting low-cost treatment while a condition is preventable, they wait till it’s a crisis, then head to the emergency room.”

  “He knows,” Tom repeated.

  “Check it out, once you’ve got an emergency, cost is no object.” Kevin began to sound like the host of a middle-of-the-night talk-radio show airing only in his head.

  He proceeded: “If you’re lucky, you get a helicopter ride. I did once. Had this temperature of a hundred and three, knew if I went to any doctor’s office I’d be turned away. So I called 911 and said I’d just come back from a National Geographic expedition in Africa and thought I was exposed to Ebola. They sent a helicopter, a red one like in a disaster movie. It was really cool. If I ever owned a helicopter I would definitely want red. I’d want everyone to see me, I’d be like—yo, here I am in my helicopter, how’s it feel to be on the ground? These cops came first and marked a landing area with flares to guide the chopper in. I felt important. That ride musta cost five grand. Not sure who paid—it wasn’t me. The American medical system will spend twenty thousand dollars fixing what could have been prevented for twenty bucks. But if you only need generic tetracycline for your upper respiratory, they won’t give you bus fare.”

  “He knows what he’s talking about,” Tom said.

  Suddenly Tom became Kevin’s sidekick on the radio show: “Forcing people to wait until routine conditions become emergencies creates patients who need expensive procedures. The hospital companies and the specialists benefit.” Tom seemed to have given the issue some thought. As he spoke, Margo realized Tom had been talking about the health-care legislation debate quite a bit, while following the details closely.

  “Janitors can’t get a bottle of Advil, cleaning ladies can’t get a mammogram,” Kevin said. “But a heart-lung transplant? Decade on life support? No problem!” It was as though they could hear rock music swelling up—nearly time to go to commercial. Kevin continued with brio. “If everybody had access to some regular doc for regular care, there would be less suffering, but spending would go down. Not as many emergencies sent to specialists. That would be bad news for the big medical companies. Why do you think they’re fighting reform?”

  A good talk-radio spiel, Kevin knew from listening to the kinds of hosts who come on after midnight, always builds up to a conspiracy driven by money.

  “I refuse to be so cynical as to believe doctors don’t want to keep people well,” Margo said.

  We’ve got Margo on line one. Hello, Margo, you’re on Kevin’s Korner. “Sure, some people say the docs are honest. But open your eyes. Think about it from the point of view of Big Pharma and the surgeons. Big Pharma has CEOs who expect bonuses for sitting in a chair. The surgeons expect a new Mercedes every year. From their perspective, ideally nobody would have health insurance. Then everybody would be dying of something, and business would be great!”

  Tom slapped his hand on the table and said, “Change the subject!” There was silence in the apartment.

  Chapter 8

  July 2009

  Unemployment: 9.3 perc
ent.

  Home foreclosures hit all-time high.

  500,000 Afghans and Iraqis dead in U.S. retaliation for 3,000 American deaths.

  “Sixteen up! Repeating order sixteen is up!”

  Order 16, the starters for a four-top—deep-fried mozzarella, blue-cheese sliders, batter-coated buffalo wings and potato skins baked with bacon and cheddar—had been at the window for a good ninety seconds, which was too long. Up orders were supposed to depart for the table within sixty seconds. That way they’d be sizzling when placed before the customer, who in any case was in a hurry to eat. People complained if food did not begin arriving a few minutes after they gave their selections.

  Though the chain’s TV ads depicted smiling multicultural friends laughing through a leisurely repast without a care in the world, waitresses were supposed to do everything in their power to speed the turnover of tables. Take orders quickly, bring food and drink quickly, clear plates and present checks quickly. During dinner, the average table was thirty-one minutes from seating to departure; during lunch, twenty-three minutes. And waitstaff was to push, push, push those 1,500-calorie desserts, since fifty cents’ worth of sugar, butter and chocolate could be sold for $7.95 as long as the concoction was huge, which connotes value. True value in an era of national obesity would be a tasty small dessert that salved the sweet tooth but contained reasonable calories. That’s not how the contemporary American restaurant customer thinks. Value is a gigantic dish, the sort that causes busboys to ask, “Are you still working on that?”

  The buffalo wings were listed on the menu not just as buffalo wings but as Xtreme Buffalo Wing Explosion. The sliders were listed as Bacon Blue Blast Bonanza Sliders. Staff weren’t supposed to call the dishes by their commons names, rather, always to use the promotional names—not to say “I need an order of sliders,” rather “I need an order of Bacon Blue Blast Bonanza Sliders.” Using the long names slowed down what was intended to be a rapid process. The directive to say the long names came from a marketing executive at corporate headquarters who’d written a memo declaring everything in the chain’s facilities, even napkins and cocktail sticks, should be branded. Modern executives often were more concerned with pushing the brand than pushing the product, which didn’t necessarily say much for the product.