So here in Washington state, we have a new civil rights law. This is pretty basic; it adds “sexual orientation” to the state law banning discrimination in housing, employment, insurance, and credit.

The opponents of this are massing their forces. Tim Eyman, a noted anti-tax crusader in this state who runs lots of citizen initiatives, immediately filed two measures to fight on this issue. The first is a referendum; it would force a vote on the specific law that was just passed and signed, and needs just over 110,000 signatures by June 10th or so to make it to the ballot. The second is an initiative; it needs 225,000 signatures by July 7th to make it to the ballot.

Eyman wouldn’t say much about it other than to say that he thinks voters should be able to decide this issue for themselves (as opposed to their elected officials), and that “I do not believe a majority of voters are in favor of preferential treatment based on what group they belong to.”

This sets the tone of his campaign. It’s not about “letting the voters decide”; it’s about “special rights” or preferential treatment.

Let’s think, for a moment, about what this “special” treatment is. Basically, it’s this- if you run a business, say a restaurant, you can’t refuse to serve someone simply because they’re black. Or female. Or, now thanks to this law, gay. You can’t deny someone the ability to rent an apartment in your building, you can’t refuse to hire them (with some exceptions for religious organizations).

Since when did the ability to get a job, or eat at a restaurant, or rent a place to live become a “special” right?

Eyman’s web site gives another clue. He calls this law the “Accept-me-or-else-I?ll-sue-you or the Be-nice-to-me-or-else-I?ll-have-you-arrested” approach.

This is something I see all the time from anti-gay-rights people, and it puzzles me. Nobody is saying you have to “accept” gay people; you don’t have to be buddies with them, you don’t have to hang out with them. You don’t even have to talk to them. You can maintain the belief that homosexuality is a horrible, nasty sin, and that it’s wrong and immoral and bad for society and all that.

Of course, this is a bit silly, but it’s certainly your right to believe that stuff. You can believe similar things about blacks, whites, women, whatever.

What people *should* accept is that there are gay people. Being gay is legal. I can’t understand why people can’t even seem to accept that gays exist. But whatever.

This law doesn’t force you to give them special rights; it only forces you to treat gays like everyone else. (Which, as I recall from my days in Sunday School at Hope Lutheran Church in Enumclaw, was something that Jesus seemed to be in favor of- treating everyone with kindness, dignity, and respect. But I digress.)

The key to this campaign is simple- those, like me, in favor of this law, must do a good job of pointing out that this isn’t “special” rights. It’s merely an insistence on basic human rights.

Wanna hate fags? Go right ahead- but legally, you have to treat them like anyone else when it comes to those areas outlined above. That’s not demanding a special right; it’s just demanding that they not be turned out of their homes, or denied a job, or denied insurance, simply because they’re gay.

This is a Buddhist issue, and a Christian issue. It amazes me that so many so-called “Christian” groups are against this; if anything, the people following the man who said things like “Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven.” Or the biggie- “Do to others as you would have them do to you. ”

If Christians would like gays to treat them with kindness, dignity, and respect; if Christians would like to be able to rent a place to live or buy insurance without fear of being denied for being Christian (or straight); if Christians want to be able to keep a job and not be fired for being a straight Christian, then they should be supporting this bill.

My fellow Buddhists should be in favor of this as well. What better way to recognize and respect the Buddhahood that is within all of us than by accepting, caring about, and having compassion for our fellow humans?

So my dad sent me a copy of an article that appeared in the New York Times, about Russ Chew, the head of the FAA’s Air Traffic Operations. (Unfortunately, the article doesn’t appear for free anywhere online, and I can’t repost it all without violating copyright, so I can’t give you a link to it.)

It got me thinking, so I wrote this. Hope you enjoy it.

Interesting article. Chew was indeed well-received by the union when he first came in, although a lot of people pointed out (correctly) that hiring someone from the airline industry to “run the FAA like a business” is like hiring a blind man to be an umpire- it’s not as though the airline industry has exhibited a flair for business, given the number of bankruptcies and such.

Carr was really, truly pissed off when Chew carried Blakey’s water at the press conference. Up until that point, it seemed as though Chew took more of an old-school, professional approach to running the FAA, instead of a partisan approach.

In the older model, Congress (the “board of directors” of the federal government) set the priorities, budget, and so forth for the agency. It wasn’t up to the FAA’s leaders to say “so-and-so gets paid too much” or set spending priorities; that was Congress’s job. The FAA’s job was to do as professional a job as possible with the resources that Congress chose to give to the agency.

The problem with this is that Congress isn’t made up of aviation professionals; it’s made up of a lot of nitwits, along with a lot of people whose heart is in the right place but who just aren’t subject matter experts enough to do a decent job running the FAA.

How can some Congressman from the Bronx be expected to vote on, and make an informed decision on, whether or not to shift a planned radar site from Redmond to Heber, Utah? How can a Senator from Florida, who mainly focuses on senior citizen issues, make a good choice about what display system to use in smaller TRACONS? How do they know what the controllers need?

Unfortunately, the system we have now is even worse. Instead of being politically neutral aviation professionals who just do the best job providing services as possible while Congress charts the course, the FAA’s leaders in Blakey- and now Chew- are playing a more active, partisan role.

Blakey is totally a Republican toady. She got her job through the cronyism that has had some pretty negative consequences in America lately; her outside job experience was running a PR firm… whose clients were (surprise surprise) Republican or big business interests.

In the partisan model, instead of merely taking what Congress gives and doing the best job possible with it, Blakey has tried to steer the course.

In years past, funding for the FAA has been a combination of money from the Aviation Trust Fund and money from the general fund. This is because the policy of the USA was that the NAS (National Aviation System) was an asset of the United States; the owners are the American people, and they (the people) directly and indirectly receive benefits from the NAS.

In the new model, Blakey has aggressively tried to implement Republican ideology into the mix. Rather than seeing the NAS as something that benefits all Americans, it’s seen as more of a commercial “service provider” and the “customers” are the airlines.

(As an air traffic controller for 15 years, I’ve always believed my “customers” were not the for-profit airlines, but the people on the planes and on the ground beneath the planes; I didn’t sell them services, I regulated the airlines and provide safety.)

So Blakey has set up the agency and moved it more and more towards a user-fee-funded operation. She wants to implement the idea that government shouldn’t be in the business of many things that have previously been thought of as typical government services.

This is a classic battle between “big government” and “small government” forces. The extremes were seen earlier in places like Great Britain, where the government used to own entire industries- like the coal industry, which had massive upheavals when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher privatized the mines and got the government out of the coal business.

The reason I believe this system is worse is that it has really created a lot of dissention in the agency. Rather than being focussed on the main thing we provide- safety to the people- the FAA is now being used as a political tool to implement whatever ideology the politically appointed leader of the FAA wants to support.

This is, of course, not new; to a lesser extent, it went on under previous FAA Administrator Jane Garvey, who implemented some of Bill Clinton’s pro-labor, pro-cooperation policies in regards to unions and labor-management relations.

The difference (in my opinion) is that with Blakey, it’s about a not-well-hidden ideology of “small government”. The Republicans pulling these strings are a collection of known government-haters who, in my opinion, can’t get what they want through an open, honest debate. Instead, they have set out to “starve the beast” of government by sabotaging it through financial problems. (This is a real political strategy, first formed and
talked about by Reagan Administration officials.)

With Clinton and Garvey, the reason they did what they did was because they honestly thought it was the best way to make the FAA as good as it could be. Working in cooperation with its unions, it would be more efficient and giving workers more say in how things ran (since, after all, they are the closest to the operations and can see how things work) would allow cutbacks in mid-level managers, who are expensive.

With Bush and Blakey, the reason they are doing what they’re doing isn’t for the good of the FAA; it’s because they want to KILL the FAA, or at least the FAA as we know it. They don’t think it’s a safety regulator; they think of it as an impediment to the airlines making money, and they want to make it into a tool for those airlines to have higher profits- preferably getting it out of the government in the process.

This battle of ideologies unfortunately affects people like Russ Chew. He was hired to come in and do a good job running the operations; instead, he had to choose sides and join a political battle.

Personally, I think he’s a bit nuts; you’d have to pay me a LOT more to get me to take his job.

Man. I’m feeling lazy, plus it’s late, so here’s a quick hits blog entry.

The Twelveth Man… in 1984, the Seattle Seahawks retired the jersey number 12 in honor of their fans. They said the fans were like the “12th Man”; at one point, the NFL even instituted a (fairly stupid) rule that penalized a home team if their fans made so much noise that opposing quarterbacks couldn’t be heard by their teammates. This happened regularly in the Kingdome which was, after all, a great big box. Made of concrete.

Packed with 70,000 screaming lunatics, it was pretty loud.

Anyway, in the past few years the 12th Man theme has been touted more and more here in Seattle, with someone picked to raise a big flag with the number “12″ on it prior to games, and so forth.

Unfortunately, Texas A&M University has a trademark on the 12th Man theme, or so they claim. So, in keeping with this great tradition, they’re suing the Hawks to get them to stop using the theme. Oh, and I’m sure the replica jerseys with the number “12″ on them, selling for 70 bucks a whack, have nothing to do with it.

I think A&M might have some problems down the road, though. Paul Allen has more money than God (but not more than Bill Gates) and is perfectly willing to fight things out in court. I hope that A&M loses their trademark; the whole “12th man” theme is something that’s been in football for a long time, and doesn’t belong to a single entity.

Islamic thinkers… Let’s face it, some in the Islamic world just haven’t really clued in to how freedom works. A Danish newspaper published cartoon images of the Prophet Muhammed, and now some people are upset. So what are they doing?

Why, threatening Danes with death, of course.

As much as I think Bush’s policies in Iraq have been pretty stupid, the fact is that the Islamic world seriously lags the rest of the world in terms of understanding how freedom works. They’re stuck a few hundred years behind everyone else, and I fear that it’s going to take a super-serious shock to their culture and tearing it down before they can rebuild.

Unfortunately, that might well take a massive World War to accomplish, and given that there’s lots more nuclear bombs in the world than there were the last couple of times we fought massive scale wars on this planet, we could be in for some seriously hard times.

Too much from a little hubbub over cartoons? Maybe, but read the article and try and grasp the thinking behind the Islamic types who’re so upset. Sure, in America we have idiots like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, but most of us just ignore them.

NSA Spying from my back yard… Well, not literally. But the NSA has a listening post outside of Yakima, Washington, which is about a two-hour drive from my hometown. This post sits in the middle of the Yakima Training Center, which is basically a big area for the Army to run around and train their guys on how to shoot artillery, drive tanks, fly helicopters, etc.

(Some images and web pages about the post: image 1, image two, image three, image four.

It’s hard to find much info on the listening post because, well, it’s secret. But ironically, you can fly a plane right over the top of it at certain times if the Army isn’t shooting any guns. (They shoot a LOT, though, so much of the time- most of the time- it’s closed to aviation, for good reason.)

In my job at the FAA, I got an interesting call from someone over there one time. He must have been new. I was working the military liason desk and the firing range was cold, meaning no shooting, so the airspace was open for anyone to fly over. This guy calls up and says “this is Sargeant So-and-so from the security at Yakima Firing Range, and we demand to know who that airplane was so we can detain the pilot.”

I say “umm… okay, who are you again?”

Basically, the guy didn’t understand a few things. First of all, it’s not restricted airspace all the time; planes can and do fly over. Secondly, believe it or not, the FAA doesn’t track everyone flying around; in fact, most of the little, general aviation airplanes in the air across the nation, we don’t talk to or know who they are.

This dude thought that it was 100% closed, 100% of the time, and he was basically ready to take a Hummer out, track down the pilot, and (he hoped) shoot the guy for resisting arrest. Fortunately, a more experienced person was there, and at one point in this increasingly weird phone conversation I heard the experienced guy come in and say “who the fuck are you talking to?” The guy briefly explained, the experienced guy said “give me the fuckin’ phone”, he comes on, apologizes, and basically asks me to forget the whole call. Fat chance.

This isn’t really a security thing, so hopefully I didn’t just blow my security clearance; it’s hardly a secret that they’re going to pay attention to airplanes flying over. To be honest, if it’s supposed to be a secret, they ought to just restrict the airspace 24 hours a day; it’d make life easier for the controllers in the area, who have to answer questions all the time whether the guns are going or not.

No comment on this, really- I just think it’s interesting. The reason, BTW, that the NSA has a post here is that relatively nearby is the main relay station for the COMSAT/Intelsat/Inmarsat system. That’s the satellites that relay all kinds of communication; they sit in geostationary orbit. The relay station, which is commercial in nature, is in Brewster, Washington. (Why it’s not futher south, where presumably they’d have a better line of sight, I don’t know.)

Happy New Year!…One of the things I like about living in my location is that I’m just 4 or 5 blocks away from Seattle’s “International District”, which in most other cities is known as “Chinatown”. Here, we have not just Chinese, but the ID was also home to Japanese, Fillipinos, Koreans, you name it- and there’s still quite a bit of diversity there. Heck, even I lived there for a while, and I’m a pasty white guy.

Unfortunately, it was raining like a cow pissing on a flat rock on Sunday, which was Chinese New Year, so I didn’t attend any of the festivities. I should have gone anyway, but it was a curl up at home kind of day.

That’s it for now… I’m taking the cheap way out, I know.

I work for the federal government. To be more precise, I am an enroute air traffic controller, working for the Federal Aviation Administration, which is under the Department of Transportation, which of course is run by the Secretary of Transportation, who reports directly to the President.

But to say “I work for the government” is something that we don’t always think about. In reality, when we (those of us who do work for the feds) say that, we’re saying something else:

“I work for the American people.”

This isn’t super noble or anything. The sacrifices that, say, a member of the military makes are typically much greater than those made by a civilian federal employee like me. I am paid, and paid pretty dang well, for what I do. I have a fairly unique job, though; it’s not like you can dial up a temporary staffing agency and order up an air traffic controller.

It took me 3.5 years of training full time- that’s a 40 hour week- to learn my craft. Of the people who initially took the civil service test to get hired as a controller, only 5 to 10% were offered a position; of those that took it, only about 55% passed the FAA’s screen that they do at their academy in Oklahoma City.

Of those, almost half washed out of the training program to be an enroute controller, although many went on to become successful controllers at a smaller, less demanding (or perhaps more correctly, a differently demanding) airport tower facility. Call it about two-thirds of the screen graduates making it through training somewhere.

So out of an initial 1,000 people, that’s maybe 75 that were offered a job; maybe 50 accepted. Of those, 27 passed the screen, and of those, maybe 18 made it through training somewhere and around 9 made it through in a bigger, busy enroute facility or top-level terminal radar facility.

And it takes 3 to 5 years to do all that.

So yeah, controllers make some pretty good money. We have early retirement, too; I can retire as early as age 47, after 25 years of service as a controller. Why? Well, as you’ve all heard, it can be pretty stressful.

If the guy running the fryer at McDonald’s screws up, they throw away the fries and do up another batch.

If a teacher messes up, they can reissue the test or go back and reteach the material.

If the mechanic screws up, they can take the car back in and work on it some more.

If a doctor screws up, she might kill the patient.

If an air traffic controller screws up, it could turn a few hundred people into a thin pink mist at 35,000 feet.

So again- yeah, I make a good salary. I’m not going to apologize for it; you shouldn’t want me to.

This all is heading somewhere, trust me.

My union, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA), is in the midst of contract negotiations with the FAA. The FAA has proposed a deep (~30%) pay cut for new hires, and what they call a pay “freeze” for me and other currently employed controllers.

Their “freeze” would definitely be a cut for me, though; I’d lose several types of premium pay differential, like extra pay for doing on-the-job training (which entails letting a controller trainee work live traffic, the instructor teaching and monitoring the situation at all times, and the instructor is responsible for whatever happens- definitely stressful when you put your career into the hands of some clueless newbie). I’d lose a cost of living adjustment. I’d also stop getting the annual inflation increases that federal employees get, so I’d continually lose money to inflation; and I’d also stop getting raises for length of service. My experience would no longer count for anything.

So yes, it’d be a cut.

In comparison, despite the lies of the FAA about NATCA’s proposal, the fact is that we’d be perfectly happy with status quo. NATCA has already said we’d accept the exact same deal on pay that we have now. We asked for more, of course, in the beginning of negotiations; that’s how negotiations work. But the reality is we’d happily take the deal we have right now. It’s fair, it’s not too much or too little.

In Congress, Senators Obama, Lautenberg, Inouye, and my own state’s Patty Murray have introduced a bill that would clarify the negotiation process. Right now, the FAA believes that they can negotiate “in good faith”; if/when we hit an impasse, they would transmit their last/best proposal to Congress, along with the union’s objections; if Congress doesn’t act in 60 days, the FAA could simply implement whatever they wanted.

The Obama bill would add another step- binding arbitration with the Federal Services Impass Panel. This would entail just what it sounds like- the FAA and NATCA would go in front of an arbitrator, explain their side of the story, and then the arbitrator would decide what to implement.

The FAA is, predictably, having a kitty over this idea. They can’t stand the fact that the endpoint of negotiations might be a fair, neutral arbitration; they claim that to pass this bill would “change the dynamic of the negotiations”. Well, they’re right on that one; they’d have to actually negotiate in good faith, instead of just counting on Congress to be too busy to deal with the contract and therefore allowing the agency to implement whatever they wanted.

The FAA has put on a full-court press to try and stop this bill. Interestingly enough, they’re going to Congress to ask the legislature to not pass the bill, but they have two different approaches; here’s a link to their briefing sheets on the issue. Pages 1 and 2 are the sheets they’re giving to Democrats. Page 3 is the sheet they’re giving to Republicans.

As you can see, they really hate the idea of the bill passing and them having to face neutral arbitration. Their three main talking points for Republicans? 1) Oppose any bill that would change things. 2) Decline hearings on any such bill, or on the issue at all. 3) If the contract does wind up coming to Congress, they want Congress to do nothing and let the FAA’s proposal through unchanged.

Folks, this is simply outrageous. Not only are they afraid to let their proposal go to neutral arbitration, but they don’t even want Congress to have hearings on the bill. They’re afraid to talk about it. And if (when) they declare impasse, they don’t even want Congress to do what the law calls for and review the contract- they simply want Congress to ignore it so they can implement.

John Carr is the national president of NATCA, and a hell of a good guy. He summed this up pretty well when he said:

At the risk of waxing both sentimental and patriotic, I volunteered to serve my country in the United States Navy thirty years ago because I believe in our democracy and our values as a nation. In the United States we are not afraid to debate the issues. We are not afraid to make sure that there is a full and public discussion of subjects that are important to us. We can handle dissention, and we can handle a fair defeat in a democratic process. That is what makes this nation great. NATCA does not expect an arbitrator to agree with us on every issue, we just ask for a fair hearing. We don’t know if the Obama bill will pass, but we would like every member of Congress to at least support a fair process for thousands of aviation safety professionals.

We hope they will, and we will try to convince them to, but there are no guarantees. We understand that the agency is putting their side of the story forward, and we fully expect them to, and we further fully expect both sides to get a fair hearing on the merits of their positions. But to ask the majority party to insure that the bill is denied even a fair hearing is fundamentally undemocratic, and says more about the FAA’s motives than they were probably planning to let on.

You’ve got to ask yourself what the FAA is afraid of. Why are they worried about going to an arbitrator? Why don’t they want Congress to even investigate the issues? Why are they so eager to do this?

I’ll tell you why- because they’re trying to jam an anti-labor, anti-worker contract down our throats. Because while at the facility level, for the most part, labor and management can get along, at the upper levels the pay and benefits that controllers get really rankle the bigwigs. Because they want to slash pay and contract out air traffic control to the highest bidder, rather than keeping it as a safety-related function of the government.

You can help. Go to www.flyussafe.com, read about the issues, and send an email to your Congresscritter and Senators. If you would call them, that’d really rock. Tell them what you think. If they’re a Republican, appeal to their sense of fair play and point out that if the FAA has nothing to fear, Congress should pass the Obama bill. Even though it’s by a Democrat.

I have to say that I love my job, but lately I’m ashamed to work for my agency.