Hell No, We Won't Go!

You never get a second chance to make a first impression. The failure of the bailout vote yesterday was a failure of leadership. Not House leadership but White House leadership. Leadership is not simply leading the charge and attacking the problem. True leadership is solving the problem. The failure of this bill after such a dramatic send up, and even an interruption of the Presidential campaign makes the crisis much more severe.

When Secretary Paulson marched up to Capitol Hill and demanded unfettered authority over the nation's economy he overplayed his hand. This isn't 9/11 and the Patriot Act. Congress is in no mood to respond to a crisis that didn't exist a week earlier by trusting the White House. This is the fundamental difference between politics and governing. Politics is easy, you can paint in broad strokes, play off your opponent, rally your supporters and be absolutely resolute. Governing is difficult, you have to reach consensus by explaining, negotiating and respecting everyone involved.

The White House did none of this.

A few weeks ago we were in good shape; the trouble in the financial markets was a correction not a crisis. What changed in such a short time? Clearly the American people don't believe that the failure of AIG among others was a surprise attack on the economy and they weren't willing to write a blank check in response. The result is a mess. As much as the Bush administration failed in the buildup to the Iraq conflict, this is a failure of a different magnitude. This is the Iraq conflict with conscription, everyone has skin in the game, and without consensus there will be Hell to pay.

Welcome to Hell. The poor launching and preparation for the rebuilding of our economy cannot be redone. Whatever the result our economic strength will be diminished. This should be an object lesson for the future president, work with and respect the other branches of government; disrespect the balance of power at your peril. You don't have to agree with the other side, you don't even have to mean it, but you do have to get things done in a crisis. If not, the well will be so poisoned that a new well will be necessary which takes time and you may come up dry in the first few attempts. There's no easy solution to this mess, so start digging.

Brother McCain and Sister Paliin

Brother McCain and Sister Palin
It's plain to see your campaign is failin'
While Wall Street is crumblin'
Your poll numbers tumblin'
You're no cure for what we're ailin'

October Surprise

October came a little early this election season. It is conventional wisdom that the party in power will stir up a crisis just in time to bolster its candidate’s standing in the polls. So now we find that Wall Street is in crisis and needs an immediate bailout. Oh and by the way that will be $700 billion please (at the bare minimum) and there’s no time for oversight and questions. The good of the country is at risk and who wants to be against the good of the country?

Sound familiar? Just think back to the Patriot Act, the War on Terror, the Occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. No need to read the fine print at risk of appearing unpatriotic. Do what we say and don’t ask any questions. After all, we have the good of the country at heart and it will all work out just fine in the end. Well we don’t know the end of that story but we certainly know it’s not going to work out fine. We can’t even be sure this crisis isn’t a distraction as the President prepares for the real October surprise in Iran.

The President has made it clear that we are at war and that this is a time of sacrifice. So as our poor and elderly shiver this winter they can do so with pride for we just can’t afford that extravagant energy assistance program. Whether its programs to educate and feed our children or support the troops as they and their families attempt to rebuild their lives when they return it’s just too expensive during a time of war.

But while they wait in line at the velvet rope of appropriations, Wall Street took the express lane right to the front. You see when they suffer we all suffer and we can’t allow that to happen. Or can we?

Well as someone running for political office is fond of saying, “Yes we can!” So Congress has another bite at the apple, another opportunity to do its job. It’s simple, just say no. Say no to the Wall Street Bailout.

But don’t stop there. Once Congress finds its courage, it can say no to the continued occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq that has cost this country $556 billion and counting according to the National Priorities Project. Say no to the war profiteers. Say no to the continued entitlement spending for the richest one percent known as the Bush tax cuts.

Congress should look at this $700 bailout request and ask itself one simple question: What would $556 billion do to bolster our economy? What did that vote to fund the occupation take away from our citizens at home? How much more will we need to spend just to recover? The amount is unknowable, but we do know this, by saying no today we can stop the bleeding (literally) and begin to rebuild. Congress can go home and say that the needs of the American people matter and open up that velvet rope. Now that would be a true October surprise.

Proud to be a Federal Airport Screener

In "Bag It", a commentary essay recently run in the New York Times, author James Bovard writes that the federal role in passenger screening should be eliminated. He frames his opposition to a federal screening workforce by mentioning a few anecdotes about screeners who have betrayed the trust of the traveling public.

I am a federal passenger screener, one of the first hired at Baltimore-Washington International airport, the first airport with a federal screening workforce. I am proud of the work I do. I consider my co-workers trustworthy individuals who take their responsibility for the safety of the traveling public very seriously. That grandmother whom Mr. Bovard says is "treated as a potential hijacker" is actually screened in the same thorough and consistent manner as each airline passenger. I am sure that her grandchildren are happy that she and every other passenger on her flight are screened by the same rigorous standards ensuring her safe arrival at her destination.

Does Mr. Bovard seriously suggest that we should return to the pre-September 11 standards? Private screeners are hired by for-profit firms that must find a balance between safety while pleasing their shareholders and those approving their lucrative contracts. Some private firms are even lobbying Congress to eliminate the U.S. ownership requirement for screening firms. Make no mistake about it the profit motive is the primary reason firms wish to enter this arena.

Federal screeners are not subject to the pressures of the profit motive. We answer to our own shareholders: the American citizen and taxpayer. Not a day goes by when a passenger doesn't thank me for keeping the skies safe. Not a day goes by when I don't hear a parent explaining to a child that I am keeping bad things from being on their flight. I have never heard a passenger complain that I am screening as a federal employee. I am proud to serve my country in this way and to wear the uniform of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).

I find it unlikely that Mr. Bovard, who is known for his writings against government waste, would find himself motivated to write such a column by similar anecdotes about private screeners or other private employees in the airline industry. If he wants to write about government waste, he should examine the private contractors hired to assess and hire screeners. He should examine the private contractors hired to conduct recertification testing on screeners. He should examine the private contractors hired to manage our human resources.

On the issue of opting-out, a system by which airports have the opportunity to petition the TSA to replace their federal screeners with private contractors, Rep. Carolyn Maloney (NY) has introduced legislation to eliminate the opt-out provision in the law establishing TSA.

I am a federal passenger screener. I am proud to serve my country. I will fight on the front lines of the war on terrorism to keep air travel safe for the good our country and, yes, the economy. My co-workers are dedicated to providing not just safe airline travel but the assurance that we are professionals dedicated to serving our country and keeping the flying public safe. Mr. Bovard does a great disservice to the 46,000-plus civil servants who each day take on the enormous task or providing security to the traveling public. We have nothing to apologize for and we intend to continue to serving our country.

August, 2004

The Dandelion

What does a dandelion know about rejection
Its beauty is evident its color strong
Yet by nature’s laws it’s
An uninvited guest to the lawn

So it feels the scorn
It feels the shame
It’s not a flower at all
They call it an ugly name

Weed they say an invader in the field
One of our greatest fears
How can they grow so fast
Is all the dandelion hears

Its colors fade
The wilting feeling of rejection
The stifling suffocation
Of utter dejection

So the dandelion fades
It knows it must change
It appears to die
The metamorphosis is strange

The color bleeds away
The petals turn to powder
It’s time to fly but will be back
In greater numbers and prouder

April, 2007

Jerry Falwell Changed my Life

Jerry Falwell changed my life. During the mid to late 1970's my family turned to a charismatic Christian church in Northern Virginia for support after my father abandoned us. The support was unconditional and the church became a central port of our daily lives. Conversion to their brand of Christianity soon followed and by 1978 I found myself at Oral Roberts University pursuing a career in the ministry. 

By 1979 all that changed. You see my family had committee a sin that thanks to Jerry Falwell could no longer be overlooked. We were Democrats. In fact as people of faith we loved Jimmy Carter and considered him a true man of God. Suddenly we were ostracized, a project in fact. I was bombarded with political literature from my church while I was away at school, my mother was counseled and prodded to change and my brother who was 12 at the time was pressured. A retired Lieutenant Colonel who ministered to fatherless boys demanded that my brother defend a woman's right to choose and we were summarily dismissed from his ministry. Suddenly Christianity required a political affiliation above all else and the church that meant so much to us now shunned us.

It took me nine years to find my way back. While attending the Cornerstone Festival sponsored by Jesus People USA I discovered Evangelicals for Social Acton. Its leader Ron Sider lamented the partisan box the religious right had created and encouraged a consistent ethic of life, opposing the death penalty, practicing pacifism and not demonizing women who make difficult choices. With months I found the labor movement, considering it a more relevant force than the church as defined by the religious right.

It's a shame that Jerry Falwell taught the church to shun the likes of me, but in a sense it led me to a truly relevant movement that impacts the daily lives of workers and their families around the world. I'm sure as followers of Falwell and Bush read this they expect a difficult afterlife for me. But I'm changing the world in this life and isn't that what the Great Commission is all about?

May, 2007

My Regrets are Pecking at my Window Again

My regrets are pecking at my window again. It's really just a bluebird but there's no happiness here. He pecks and pecks and I try to decipher the message. It's got to be SOS. Am I desperate or just depressed? Pathetic or pathological? I don't know the answer; I only know that it's another day on the compound. As I walk through my ramshackle house weaving through the hallways avoiding the soft spots in the floor I feel the dull roar of despondency. It seems my hearing is going but is that a ringing or just the crickets? Who the hell knows? Who the hell cares?

I take a walk outside. The five acre hill is my backyard. The shed is full and broken down. I think of the day I wandered outside and notice the word STAY in big bold letters faded into the wood. It appeared as if written with disappearing paint only to appear when prompted by some unseen force. What did it mean and was it meant for me? As I contemplate these things I feel profound.

You see I'm living in the tradition of the great Bukowski, who was inspired by the great Fante. Real life lived the hard way by real people. No one can really write poetry in comfort. No one can make great literature in plenty. Need and desperation that fuels the beast. Alcohol pumps up the volume. Like a fuel additive it increases the octane.
Every day I awake knowing one thing. I'm still here and today may be the break I've been waiting for. Or it may be my last.

Somehow I've gotten used to it. I'm no longer dreaming of poetic suicides, like Virginia Woolf or Sylvia Plath. Make a statement! I should have lived but I was too good for this world and the world hated me for it. So I'll go out in a flourish in a way you won't be able to get out of your mind. Love me or hate me, pity me or admire me, you will not ever forget me.
But for now I am forgotten. Brilliance laced with laziness produces delusion. It will happen and I will work hard to make it happen (when I feel like it).

I take my daily accounting of my worries, the bills, the cut off notices like so many dominoes falling artfully but falling none the less. The bill collectors call, yes the bell tolls for me (six times until the voice mail kicks in). It's afternoon so I can now drink. Such self control! I sit on the front porch with my book and a bottle. I look down at my neighbors, one of whom I'll write about some day but not today.

What a sight. An unemployed man sitting on his front porch drinking straight from the bottle reading Fante while listening to Miles Davis. I'm always on stage yet the audience never appears. The urge to perform, the urge to frame myself so perfectly in the tragic pose compels me. I'm hiding in plain site. I'm here and I'm going to survive and if I don't I won't. Right now all that matters is that I made it through another day. Fought off the desire to write while it eats me alive.

Someday I'll write it all down and you'll thank me.

October, 2007

TSA's Personnel Policy Needs to be Grounded

In a Dec. 7, 2004, op-ed column, "Training Daze at TSA," I wrote about my experience as a screener at Baltimore-Washington International Airport, now BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport. I described the difficult working conditions there and the Transportation Security Administration's failure to meet its obligation to provide ongoing training for its workers.
The day after my column appeared, I was given a trainer who supervised me one-on-one and criticized my every minor misstep. I was told that if I wasn't perfect on recertification testing, I would be terminated. The recertification process is grueling, but I passed.

A few days later, I received a letter from the TSA giving me 10 days to resolve a $1,200 tax lien problem I had with Maryland that dated to the early 1990s. I hadn't even known about the problem, because Maryland places such liens as a matter of course without informing the taxpayer.Although I quickly made arrangements for payment of the lien, which turned out to be partially in error, the TSA terminated me anyway for neglecting the issue in the first place. A manager told me I was considered a bribery risk.

When Congress created the TSA, it also created a huge loophole in how the agency can deal with its employees. Section 110 of the Aviation and Transportation Security Act says:
"Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the Under Secretary of Transportation for Security may employ, appoint, discipline, terminate and fix the compensation, terms and conditions of employment of Federal service for such a number of individuals as the Under Secretary determines to be necessary to carry out the screening functions."
In other words, in the name of management flexibility, TSA employees must go without collective bargaining and other standard workplace protections.

Each of the country's airports now is managed by a TSA director who has almost total autonomy. So, instead of a national standard, the TSA has hundreds of standards. The result is a workforce with low morale, a high rate of workplace injuries and record attrition. TSA workers at BWI and elsewhere can even have their leave restricted by management for the sin of taking leave at times that the management may find inconvenient.

According to recent testimony before Congress by the Government Accountability Office's director of homeland security and justice issues, the TSA has an annual attrition rate of 23 percent among full-time workers and more than 50 percent among part-time workers. The TSA's answer to that glaring problem has been to ask Congress for $10 million to address attrition.
But more money won't solve the TSA's management shortcomings, not when any TSA worker who stands up against workplace discrimination can face retaliation. In 2004, for example, I was given a two-year reprimand -- meaning no bonuses, no transfers and no promotions -- for making public a letter I wrote to management about workplace discrimination. And I had to wait about a year, until December 2005, for the TSA disciplinary review board to issue a decision on my termination over the lien. The board found that I had been wrongly terminated, and I was reinstated -- but not until March 20.

If the TSA needs certain flexibilities to accomplish its mission, it should be asked to explain how basic workplace protections such as collective bargaining interfere with that mission. No government agency should be unaccountable for its treatment of employees. But until Congress fulfills its oversight responsibility and holds the TSA accountable, all of us will be a little more vulnerable.

April, 2006

Training Daze at the TSA

Recent news coverage regarding the new pat-down procedure used by passenger screeners of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) focuses on two primary issues: the embarrassment of passengers who feel uncomfortable going through the procedure in public and reports of screeners performing the procedure inconsistently. I am a federal security screener at Baltimore-Washington International Airport, and I face the frustrations experienced by the traveling public daily.

But the media reports leave out one important element: training. It's not surprising that travelers face apparently inconsistent searches by passenger screeners when you consider the TSA's negligence in complying with the congressional mandate that screeners receive three hours of training each week. We are subjected to recertification testing, and screeners are dismissed if they fail a computer test on TSA policies. We are also subjected to testing on pat-downs by Lockheed Martin Corp. workers as a condition of keeping our jobs. But it seems that the only time training is taken seriously is before this testing.

Before each shift, screeners attend a briefing, which is goes down in the books as training time. In my case, on C Pier at BWI, 25 to 30 screeners attend a briefing in a room that measures 12 by 14 feet; most are standing and at least 10 of us have to listen from outside the door. Many trainers seem unprepared for questions and appear to have no training experience. Some are downright belligerent. Recently, when a screener complained that a new procedure for detecting trace amounts of explosives put him at risk, he was told that he took the job knowing that it involved risks and that if we didn't follow each procedure to the letter, we could be terminated without notice. Eventually the trainer burst into tears at screeners' continued questioning. That is an extreme case, though. Typically we are told that trainers are simply reading the briefing materials when they answer our questions, indicating to me that they don't understand the information themselves.

The TSA will not allow screeners time off from their checkpoints for training because many airports are severely understaffed. The agency did not plan properly for the loss, a little over a year ago, of nearly half its screening workforce to the task of inspecting checked baggage. Moreover, although our federal security director recently was awarded a $20,000 bonus, the TSA apparently lost its training rooms at BWI because it was unable to pay rent on them. Even the rooms where we take our breaks, which also serve as training rooms, may soon be lost. At the TSA's headquarters, meanwhile, workers enjoy the use of a private gym, so apparently money isn't scarce everywhere.

The new personnel system has caused an attrition rate of more than 20 percent this year, according to sources inside the agency. Who would want a job in which you are told you have to be perfect every time or people may die? Who would want a job in which passengers can be belligerent and at times may physically assault screeners, while management appears to be primarily concerned with passengers' customer service experience?

We are not covered by most laws that protect the federal workforce. We are not permitted collective bargaining rights, although the Transportation Security Administration is officially neutral on private screeners' having such rights. This leaves screeners vulnerable to cronyism, favoritism and arbitrary disciplinary actions -- just the sort of abuses the civil service system was created to prevent. Incredibly, the TSA's parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, is considering a similar personnel system.

The problem is not a lack of technology, although technology should be improved when possible. The problem is not a federalized workforce. The problem is the personnel system. President Bush opposed the creation of the TSA until a provision was written into the law creating an experimental "merit"-based performance system. I am not aware of any screener who has received a merit raise in the agency's brief history.

It is time for Congress to step up and take its oversight role seriously. A full investigation of the new personnel system should be conducted. Screeners should be permitted to provide testimony without fear of retribution. Are they receiving adequate training? Is the new personnel system meeting the expectations of Congress?
The next time you feel that a pat-down is intrusive or that a screener seems frustrated or even unprofessional, let the supervisor know. But also let Congress know that it is time to provide real oversight.

The writer is a federal security screener working at Baltimore-Washington International Airport and president of Local 1 of the American Federation of Government Employees.

December, 2004

Washington Cats

A young man waiting by the window for his father

Roller Derby was all the rage in 1973

I was going to see the Washington Cats!

As time passed I waited

There was to be no Washington Cats

Go to bed implored the boy's mother

I'm waiting for my father I cried

How ridiculous to go to bed

The Washington Cats are in town

My father is taking me

Isn't he?

As I write this 33 years later

I'm still waiting

I still feel alone

The Washington Cats long went away

So did my father

That night I was to go see the Washington Cats

I saw my future instead

I'm still waiting

I'm still alone

March, 2006

Dear Reader

Welcome to my blog, the Joe Kenehan Bukowski Blog. Those who know me will understand the title. Joe Kenehan is an amalgam of lively characters while Charles Bukowski was an amalgam of lively experiences. 

In this blog I will post, I hope interesting and provocative essays about the state of the world and the state of my world through the eyes of a dyed in the wool trade unionist with a mixture of evangelicalism, narcissism and gruff. Along the way, I'll post poetry, short stories, film and book reviews and the occasional riff without category. I hope you will be drawn to read and comment as I will be drawn to write.

So, I'll begin with previous writings and musings as we see together what develops. I hope you find it compelling. If not, as the great Leonard Cohen said; "Dear Reader, please forgive me if I have wasted your time."