"It is
impossible for ideas to compete in the marketplace if no forum for
their presentation is provided or available." Thomas Mann, 1896
Letter from the
President
November 6th, 2001
John Hathaway-Bates
President & Executive Director
Like
everyone else, I am watching the news every day, with everything in the way of
titles from the old “correspondents” to “experts” trying desperately to keep us all
“interested” enough to keep tuning in, and watching the advertisements
which will most probably make the TV Networks and Cable News Channels the most
profitable of our national industries for a few weeks or months of this year, just as
they did in 1991, bring us hyperbole and vetted video clips of what we are
achieving in the war upon terrorism. I am also, of course, and with far
more interest I am ashamed to admit watching the economy and the state of
business in the Pacific States of America spiral into losses as our population
becomes so engrossed in the television war that they forget that our economy
is in fact an eco-system of it’s own.
Today
the Federal Reserve reduced yet again the Prime by one half of one per cent
– reminding me of the performance of the Japanese as they wound down to 0%
with no realistic effect upon what was happening. Tomorrow Ford Motor
Company will probably lay off thousands and we shall see more bad trade
figures being touted to raise our interest to “tune in”, (more viewers,
more advertising, more profits).
The
fact is, according to what I hear, that we are doing a little “stumbling”
here, the Network and Cable News channels keep babbling about whether the
American Public will “stay interested and support” the War on Terrorism,
unless they see results quickly. What they really are asking for is more
“action movie footage” so that they can boost viewing numbers of course.
The last War on Terrorism against fundamentalist Islam took five hundred years! My relatives fought in all of them, right up to the 1600's when the Ottoman Turks were finally stopped at the gates of Vienna.
The
fact is my friends it would seem to me that we are concentrating on the wrong
things if we want to enjoy “the American way of life”. Cars, houses,
washing machines and air travel have never been cheaper in relative terms and
we should be having a heyday here. If ever there was a time for a
corporation to update it’s Information Systems it is now, just as retooling,
replacing outdated machinery and building inventory will probably never be
cheaper to achieve in the whole of the coming decade. Stocks are priced
so low everyone would make a killing on the market if everyone realized that
more people died in Los Angeles County last week of unnatural causes than have
died from the anthrax scare to date.
Now
is the time, if there ever was one, to get the things put into place that we
so desperately need to prevent a Recession. We can stop the political “grandstanding” and
do some real good here if we want to. For example, why do we not build
our economy when it is relatively cheap to do so and take
steps to keep the terrorists out? Period!
Then we could cut back a little on “foreign aid” and beef up the staff at our Embassies issuing visas. I have it on good authority that at our Embassy in the Philippines our Visa Interviewers (a total of 8 I am told) handle an average of 150 applications a day each - that is 1,000 to 1,200 applicants a day interviewed by just eight people! (The Philippines incidentally has an active fundamentalist Islamic terrorist group that kidnaps Americans regularly).
It
seems that the laws presently in place seem to be more geared to denying poor, young,
female, non-white, Eastern Asian students from gaining visas than anything else. In Europe
such a
British Citizen for example can get a Visa as a formality, even though Britain has a sizable population of
relatives to the Islamic, Taliban sympathetic, Pashtun. Germany and
France have large Muslim populations as well, just as many other European countries
do, and we basically “give” visas to their citizens just for the asking.
So in Manila 8 Interviewers at 8 hours a day handle 150 applicants a day each! – which means that even if these diligent servants of our government never go to the restroom, take a cup of coffee, have a bad hair day, or talk amongst themselves for a few minutes a day, they can devote no more than 3.2 minutes per applicant. (From the moment the applicant is called from their seat to the end of the interview)! Does that make you feel safe my friends? – it actually worries me a lot to be honest.
The truth is my friends that while we spend billions of tax dollars on paying off other governments to “like” us, and keep their hired lobbyists happy, we do not seem to have the budget allocated for our embassies to hire enough people to really interview the potential tourists we need to come in to help rebuild our travel industry after 9/11, or to keep the terrorists out in my opinion. Add to the farce that our Embassy staff in Manila get to take off both American and Philippine Holidays and you can see that their ability to actually "interview" applicants for visas becomes even more strained.
Our present immigration laws, it would appear, are not geared to security needs or keeping terrorists out of our country, they are in fact geared to prevent “poor people without substantial assets” from even vacationing in America. (We can now obviously chip the words off the Statue of Liberty right now and replace them with something that reads "send us your dictators or their families, well-heeled relatives of terrorists, or for that matter anyone with a few million dollars in the bank - we prefer the poor to stay where they are these days").
Actually, at $45 a time just to apply for a Visa in the Philippines (at 1,000+ per day) it is actually a pretty good business when you think about it! $45 for 3.2 minutes work-time is productivity at a rather amazing level for Government these days, or any business for that matter; even trial lawyers would consider $843.75 per hour pretty good income potential with a guaranteed supply of customers and no competition, and surely $45,000+ per day for eight interviewers would seem to suggest that a few more qualified interviewers could well be afforded at a time of National Emergency.
Our first line of defense against terrorism is the Visa section within our Embassies around the world - and personally I would feel a lot safer if our government was to announce a billion dollars a year to be spent on beefing up the number and quality of our interviewers who hand these non-immigration visas out, and reconsider the "automatic Visas" issue offered to some of our allies.
I hope that I will see you at lunch soon.
President & Executive Director
You can email me at john@bizforum.org
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