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Cotton analysts have softened on earlier predictions that December 2009 cotton prices could reach a dollar or more, due to a market that just doesn't seem to want to move higher. USDA added to the lower price expectations on Feb. 8 when it increased estimates for world production and decreased estimates of world use for old crop cotton.
"That combination of lower use and bigger supplies increased world stocks by 2.58 million bales and bumped the world stocks-to-use ratio up to 45 percent. This indicates we don't have a lot of market support to go up," Carl Anderson, Texas A&M professor Extension specialist emeritus, said at the Ag Market Network's Feb. 12 teleconference.
At the same time, USDA increased estimated 2007-08 foreign stocks (world stocks minus U.S. stocks) by 2.28 million bales over January with nearly all of the increase coming from exporting countries. "Export nation stocks went up, foreign stocks went up and Chinese and U.S. stocks went up. Most importantly, the Chinese crop for this current season increased 1 million bales, while its use decreased by 1 million bales."
The result is decreased U.S. export market potential, according to Anderson. "We're expecting that exports will not do as well as we had hoped. They've been dragging, averaging 200,000 bales per week. We need to export 275,000 bales weekly to reach the USDA forecast of 15.7 million bales."
Lower prices in the near term may help some, according to Anderson. "March futures have already backed off some, and I think they will continue to lag. We also have a high level of certificated stocks, and that usually will hold the market down to more of a supply and demand relationship, in the neighborhood of 65 to 67 cents.
"If we lose momentum in March, producer equities are going to remain weak. With carryover climbing to 9 million bales, equities will be based on technical moves. Don't give up on your equities if you have cotton in the loan. There will be days when the market will make some good rallies."
Anderson noted that the National Cotton Council's annual cotton planting survey indicated that in early January, U.S. producers intended to plant 9.5 million acres of cotton in 2008. That would produce a 15.4-million-bale crop, assuming average yields.
"But we have to remember that planted acreage could be less than 9.5 million acres," Anderson said. "I believe it's going to be closer to 9.3 million acres, which trims the crop down to 14 million bales."
Much attention will be focused on Texas this season, where over half of U.S. cotton is expected to be grown. Since two-thirds of that crop is dryland, the state could lose significant acreage due to drought or another weather problem. "At this time, we are simply short on subsoil moisture around the Lubbock region," Anderson said. "However, all we need are a few good rains up until May. But it does leave us with a lot of volatility in the future of our market."
If U.S cotton producers make the crop they're supposed to make, foreign countries buy what they're supposed to buy, and the domestic cotton industry uses up to 5 million bales, U.S. carryover for new crop cotton could drop to 4 million bales.
"That constitutes a pipeline supply of cotton, and we should see higher prices in December 2009 futures. For 2009, we need to plant 10 million acres of cotton, provided that foreign production continues to lag use."
Softening demand, however, could be a huge wet blanket, Anderson says. "If the United States heads into a recession or slowdown, cotton goods sales will slow down considerably, which will work its way back to China and they won't need as much cotton."
On the supply side globally, "India has found new varieties and they will be increasing their production much faster than they increase their textile use. Brazil's cotton crop is off to a good start, with expected production of around 7 million bales. They use about 4 million bales, so they'll have some to export."
Anderson says growers should watch technical rallies closely. "If December 2008 futures reach 80 to 85 cents, I would consider that an excellent rally based on the supply and demand fundamentals of today. Consider buying a put option at 5 cents out of the money. At 80-cent futures, find a strike price of 75 cents at 3 cents to 3.5 cents. That would give you a floor and the top would be open.
"You can combine that strategy with selling a call 10 cents higher than the market is trading at the time. So on Feb. 11, you could have sold a 90-cent call for 1.94 cents, with a net outlay (buying the put and selling the call) of less than 2 cents. You would have a floor in the market of close to 70 cents and a ceiling of around 90 cents."
Anderson said the market seems resigned to the fact that the United States is simply going to produce more grain this year.
That could have an adverse impact on cotton yields, according to O.A. Cleveland professor emeritus, Mississippi State University. He believes that USDA's production estimate for the 2008 cotton crop might be high considering how much true cotton land could come out of production in favor of grains.
"The true cotton land has a base yield of 1,000 pounds to 1,400 pounds per acre. When farmers start thinking of soybeans at 80 bushels an acre, the risk of cotton versus soybeans, and the fertilizer price, it's a lock that much of this cotton land is going to be in beans.
"This takes down our average yield, so I come up with a crop on the lower end, as low as 14 million bales. I would take the carryover down to about 3.5 million bales.
"In the short term, the market is not going to do much. Still I remain very bullish with respect to December 2008 and December 2009 futures. I think we'll see 90-cent cotton in December 2009, but I don't know if we'll get to a dollar or not. As Yogi Berra said, 'Prediction is difficult, especially when it's about the future.' But I'm still bullish on this market once we get past the planting season."


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Jack S. Futterman Oral History
Part X- Administrative Issues
Jack's Management Philosophy
Q: Tell me about this document.
I wrote, "No job in SSA can really be done sensitively unless they have some understanding of the program's rationale." That was one reason John Trout, for instance, got into program planning, when his background was the District Office. I used to try to get everybody, who had not been exposed, a little bit of depth in program analysis. A little better understanding. And not be so easy to criticize the "stupid" people who wrote the law. But it usually went the other way; it gave them a much better understanding of how to do their work.
I tried to get them into the training programs, as well as organizing these development programs, which were essentially getting people out of their jobs so that they could put full attention on training. I think the regional programs were either six months or a year, weren't they? Do you recall? The Fellow programs were two years. It actually took those selected from the work they were doing and exposed them to substantial months of time to do actual work in different areas. And then they could go back to their own area as part of the 2-year plan. But there was always an effort to diversify their own backgrounds and experience. I just can't say much on this other than that. If you see any value in it put it in your notes. If you want to go back into it at some future date.
Q: I'll look through it. If there is something to talk about, we'll talk about it later.
Now this is kind of the key: Nobody can do a job, no matter how specialized it may be, especially if it's specialized, unless he has an understanding of the program in which they play a part. Do it with understanding; take a class on it if necessary.
Maybe you think you can take a position classification person in Personnel and move him from one Federal Personnel office to another, which is what they thought in those days. Maybe today, they may still think that way. Personnel thought it was a good idea.
Like in Charlie Wilson's time, when he was appointed Secretary of Defense, he was the head of General Motors. And I forget whether it was him or somebody at that time who said, "If you know how to run General Motors, you ought to know how to do anything." Or if you were a good executive in running one corporation and one company, you can run the other. Well, yes, there's a certain amount of skills that carry over that are useful, certainly. But if you want to be the best kind of executive that you can be for that particular organization, a deep understanding of the business is needed.
Like Bob Ball had the kind of background and the ability to become a great executive. If he had come with only an agricultural background and lacked his enormous personal background and knowledge in Social Security and in insurance, he could never have accomplished what he has. He could probe deeply. He could separate out from what experts told him the professional objective findings and advice from the subjective ones. Not that the latter had no weight, but rather where he himself was obligated to reflect his own values in the decisions to be made. Thus he used expert advice. He did not allow experts, except in areas of narrow focus to arrogate to themselves judgements which were his to make.
There were a few people, like George Friedman and others, three or four, who in the early days of health insurance, 1965, were the "experts" on certain things. For example, we needed regular updated lists of the hospitals that had met the requirements for certification, I'm talking about board-certified. Because if we didn't have them, the people in that region didn't have any health facilities to go to on the impending effective date of the Medicare program. And we needed to keep up with progress of hospital certification in the earliest days. So we said, "Well, how soon can you get us lists of which hospitals are certified now and which are not, so that we know the location we need to focus our effort?" "Well, maybe three weeks from now." "But we need it tomorrow." And you could have gotten that information from a Rolodex; assigning two people or three people to do it and you would have gotten it in a day and had it available and all that. But they were thinking in terms of writing the computer program and other technical in-house aspects--in this newly emerging field. So, if the "experts" judgements are not dissected and evaluated, we were really stuck there, because they said, "Well, we really can't do that in less than three weeks." And unless you can work with them and arrive at an acceptable solution you're stuck with their initial views.
Q: Okay.
And that was one of the things that was involved in the work of the job classifier. How could he describe allocating the right grade to a job?
Q: Unless he understood what that job really involved?
Yes. I mean, he looks at the overt actions the worker takes; he writes something, he reads something; he writes something. If he doesn't understand the difficulty of writing one piece as against another, he can't evaluate a program job, because he doesn't know. One has to have that kind of a base of knowledge to work with.
You'll also, if you examine some of these things, be able to extrapolate for yourself how I sometimes worked, particularly in making talks. Because I had three or four talks or basic speeches on a certain topic. I could always take a little from here and a little from there, like a Chinese meal, and be ready for a new kind of topic; using things over again which had application in a new area. You may see it in the way this was put together. And then again, you may not.
This memo is an intense situation that I was just describing when you're in the hands of a so-called "expert." Bill Hanna was our specialist on computer operations. And it's funny how the situation looks different from where you sit. When we hired him, I basically was responsible for that--it wasn't my greatest accomplishment. He talked very flexible; he became less flexible after he got the job. This is his memo to Bob Ball. And apparently, he was asked to supply an estimate to guide them in their talks with the Ways and Means Committee for a benefit increase. "It would be virtually impossible to guarantee that we could implement another benefit increase in June, to reflect in the July check." He's talking about a note of January 16 from Alvin David. And then Bob Ball wrote back, apparently to me and Alvin, on the 20th. And Bill Hanna is quite specific. He wanted to discuss the general increase in terms of activities which would have to be postponed or perhaps done less efficiently. "Looking at them in this light, that is, assuming the necessary adjustments in scheduled activity are authorized, we would, with some difficulty, be able to meet the July 3 date." And then the schedule is listed here, the schedule he proposed to follow. "And we need to know, as soon as possible, hopefully no later than March 1, so that we can implement the particular approach. We would like to know the percentage rate of the increase by April 15, to make it effective for the July 3 check."
That's not the way you tie up the people who were dealing with the Ways and Means Committee. Bill's approach was to build fences all around to protect themselves. Inevitably their position would hobble Bob Ball; by having Bob Ball tell the Congress . . .
Q: That we can't do it.
Not only that, but it makes him look terrible. "I can't do it because I'm advised by my so-and-so, I can't tell you exactly why." I don't remember what my reaction was. But Jerry Boyd was my staff member for this kind of thing. And he and I apparently had talked it over and had suggested an approach during our talks. And this is what Bob Ball followed in this case, whatever it was. I didn't document my answer to that.
Principles of Administration
I later concluded, like I later concluded in watercolors, contrary to what my teacher seemed to think, that learning the principles and the elements of watercolor painting, did not automatically make one an artist. The application of them did not automatically produce a masterpiece, because it was not a science. If it was a science, you could program it through the computers and the computers would generate an absolutely perfect masterpiece. And that was certainly not so. So it had to be that there was an art involved.
This is what I said later, when I wrote the Mexican papers, that often principles of administration go in opposite directions. And one needs to know how to blend these two and in what proportions, and it has to be relative to the time and the circumstances. It is an art. When somebody from the field would act like the Central Office was so stupid, couldn't make up its mind--one time it was asking for quality, and the next time it was asking for production. We were not stupid, he just simply did not understand the problem. In administration these changing goals were changes necessitated, not by the absolutes, but by relatives.
Well, in the art world, it's the same way, except your goals are different. You just don't use all the elements and all the principles; often they go in different directions. Like take unity in art. It's important. Your painting should have a certain unity about it; things go together; not being forced apart and harshly separated. Like color unity, they must have some common color element in it that ties it to a family. Or form, you can't have curved lines and boxes and circles; you need to have some dominance, something dominant, whether it's circles or squares or whatever. Or if it's a dominant green painting, every other color needs to be related to it in a certain way.
And so too with administration. If you say, well, the summum bonum is cost, you want to get the administrative cost down to the lowest possible, you're really in effect saying, "quality is a very subordinate thing." Like today, this is happening because of the so-called "economy in government." We are really cutting way, way down on the way the Government deals with the cases which are very difficult, like the homeless, and the poor and education and all that, when we cut funds for all these programs, we are really in effect saying by that, they are not important. And we are not cutting fraud and waste--that's an illusion. You can cut a certain amount of it, but you ought to cut that at any time, not just when there's a crunch. So when we reduce the money by seeking goals like the lowest cost government possible, or the lowest cost program possible, we are really setting that as the primary goal. In essence, you are letting other . . .
Q: We are treating it as an absolute.
That's right. And it has to be relative. And of course, there are times when you have no alternative. I mean, spending more money is out of the question. Then the whole question is, "How do we get the best quality out of what we spend?" But when both of these elements are flexible, there's no fixed relationship. You can't say, "This is absolutely all about quality." Or, you can't say, "This is absolutely all about money." But you want to know what is the best mix for your particular current situation. And it's an art that balances the relative weights of the different values that enables you to make that kind of a judgment. You have practical limits on both.
Jerry Boyd, a very able and creative person, was the head of long-range systems planning under me; he had been under Touchet and all that. He and his staff had an office, a big office where they put the long-range systems plan in diagrams around the wall. And after they had done that, I went down with Bob Ball and I said, "I was going to have a briefing by Jerry." And he did just that. It was a plan to "100 percent automate" the process. And he was my man; I was new to it. But I had to stop him; I said, "Stop right there. We're not going to attempt to automate the Social Security system 100 percent, because it's far beyond the cost that we ought to allow ourselves." The difference between 98 percent automated and 100 percent is inordinately large. Because the final 2 percent of automation would require an almost infinite amount of programming, to deal with cases you can't fully conceive; just to process automatically all kinds of possible cases that if one arises is much better done clerically, and much more cheaply. Inevitably you will have cases that can't be automated because they do not fit the models the system anticipated, in which case you can have a few clerks do them. We seek to automate as much as we feasibly can, but that goal needs to be balanced by cost and other relevant considerations like service to the public.
So complete quality, complete automation, complete this or that just are not the automatic answers; they are not, in most circumstances, wise goals, you have to make your choices in the way you balance the various values that apply.
Jack's Expertise in Administration
The whole area has improved, I'm talking now not about areas of administration where I supposedly had some expertise. I never claimed any expertise in administration. I'm not trained to be an administrator. The only thing I know is to logically look at the problem and I don't have any special techniques. In fact I have a mild bias that many who have been academically trained as a professional in fields like administration are often inhibited in their thinking by too quickly resorting to solutions that are in some book, rather than be uninhibited in the way they think the problem through and then creatively look for the best solution. I suppose one is taught as a profession if you are confronted with so and so, you have three routes, etc. Well I didn't know there were three.
Q: You found a fourth.
That's right, or a fifth. I would just logically breakdown what I thought were the possibilities, and then exclude what I thought to be not feasible, or not possible or whatever. But not within a prescribed framework, which would inhibit their full exploration. Creative solutions often emerge, I think, from that kind of an approach. Lacking academic experience in dealing with matters of administration I must rely on my ability to analyze a problem and come up with solutions. Having certain other skills helps.
If you're conditioned to think that when your problem is "A" your solutions are "B" "C" "D" or "E," you may not seriously think about all the possibilities. Doctor's automatically think if you have high blood pressure they put you on medication, but there are other possibilities. I'm not suggesting that doctors should not be prescribing medicine, but I am reiterating that if one follows too closely without thinking, you limit yourself. What I'm trying to say is don't get too automatic, too systematic, too unthinking, too complacent with the thought that the system is going furnish the answer.
Futterman's Views on Managing SSA
The way "esprit de corps" develops in an organization is by motivating people to work together to achieve the loftiest purposes of the organization. The ideal incentive to be sought to motivate the staff of an organization is that each member, whatever his or her assignment, plays an important role in a common effort to achieve a very worthwhile purpose.
I observed an example of this kind of motivation at the very beginning of my career with Social Security. I noticed, when I first came to Social Security and moved up to a position where several hundred people were under my supervision, I began to get requests from a lot of laborers to work for me. Blacks, in those days, were mostly in the laborer staff, this was a period when discrimination was rife. They asked to work for me, I think, because I was a Jew from New York City and this plus some conclusions they may have arrived at through their own observations and their own information network, they judged to mean I was more liberal then others in similar positions who came from other regions of the country in those days. But why did they want to work for Social Security? Well they wanted a job sure, they wanted a good job, any job with the Government in the late 1930's was a good job. Anybody who had a job, was well off, was happy. But they particularly wanted to work for Social Security. When I asked why most would say, "I want to work for social Security."
This kind of spirit was essential, and I alluded to it in something you've read. I said if one has to start a Social Security program, having to do so in the depths of a Depression as we did, had advantages, because highly qualified and highly motivated people were in great supply. People regarded the Social Security program as almost a religion. There was that kind of fervor to it. That kind of idealism. Wanting to do good. Wanting to make sure that old folks and children would be taken care of in their old age and not discarded before old age.
So that's my philosophy. You want to get the "troops" going in the right direction, set a good example. But also always make clear that what you are doing is not in the interest of any organization or any individual, but it is intended to advantage the well being of the people of the United State for whom that program is directed. I'd often say in training talks or discussions with interns or the like that I think that Social Security in motivating staff had a special advantage compared to other programs, to take the opposite pole, IRS, whose mission is to collect taxes. I'd often say to them, to the young interns, I think that if I was working for the IRS, I would regard my service to IRS with the same high idealism that I feel about working for Social Security. Why do I say that? I sincerely believe one can regard the function of collecting taxes as one of the highest functions of Government. Without taxes how can Government be expected to do any of the things that we all want the Government to do. To be entrusted with that job, and to do it well, is to really strengthen the sinews of the Government as a whole. One could say with conviction that about almost any program that is considered vital and necessary. The only worthy reason for a program to exist is that it serves a very worthwhile or necessary need. And such programs require money to achieve the high purposes they serve for the nation's people. And if it's a worthwhile need, and it is a government program, then it requires money. And IRS's mission of collecting taxes should be regarded as a very high, important, and essential function to make possible all that the nation's government does for its people.
Persons who seek and accept work with agencies of the Federal Government owe more than 40 hours of time in return for their employment: they owe a measure of loyalty to the agency's mission, appreciation of its significance and importance in servicing the people of the nation and so on. And the administrator's task is to help the employee to appreciate and embrace this kind of motivation in doing his or her work. If you think about it, if one is not convinced in his or her mind that the employing agency makes a worthwhile contribution, then maybe he or she ought to think about conferring the benefits of his or her services elsewhere.
Relationship Between SSA & The Department
Sometime we've got to talk about my impression, however unbalanced my impression might be viewed from where I sat, about the way that the Department, at least in financial affairs, dealt with us, and the relationship we had with them, keeping in mind that we were for many years from the establishment of FSA and then DHEW up until the old BOASI became SSA (sans the Children's Bureau, Public Assistance, Vocational Rehabilitation, etc.) two levels subordinate to the Department. The first level was the Social Security Board, which wasn't manned to do very much except to help the very small Bureaus and to "coordinate" the budget submissions of the individual Bureaus. Roy Wynkoop was an exceedingly able and dedicated staff man. The then SSA-level budget staff consisted solely of about 25% of Roy's time and at most half time of an analyst and secretary. Nonetheless, Roy could get in the way and often did at times. Wynkoop was a good friend of mine and I was a good friend of his. For the most part, after I established a good relationship with him, he did not raise a hell of a lot of problems, but he used to show his muscle every once in a while. Now, if you can balance it by the views of somebody on the other side.
Q: Okay, good.
It's subjective because I'm telling it to you and it's subjective because my observations came from Social Security. It's objective in that, even if I say it for myself, I've always tried to give a balanced view and to see how the other guy might look at it. And so I think it's not just pure partisanship. I recognized the functions they had. They performed their functions. They needed sometimes to cut us down to size a little. And they had their own personalities.
Jim Kelly, DHEW Budget Officer, was a very dominating kind of a character, he related to subordinates in that way. He was quite collegial with his peers. Maybe Social Security suffered a little bit because Jim Kelly did not feel completely comfortable with me. I think he saw me as a sort of a challenge in the area he expected and usually was unchallenged. In reality I could not be much of a challenge. Jim, when he dealt with the budget officials of subordinate echelons of the Department, as I saw it, discouraged discussion of his decisions, "rulings" or instructions. He had wide latitude of action. The Secretary gave him strong support. There was little I could do in resisting where I thought that Social Security was given the short end and on the rare occasions I did raise questions. The result was predictable since Jim was the judge and the jury. He did not have to worry about questions I might raise. I may not have understood all of Jim's problems, but I think maybe he did find it a little easier to accomplish two birds with one stone--assert his dominance and also benefit from a ruling adverse to SSA because DHEW staff from the time would express their opinions that SSA was favored by the Congress and fared far better appropriation-wise than other agencies of the Department.
Q: That you were favored in some way?
Because Social Security was the pampered child and things like that. Things came easily to us. Whereas on the Welfare side, not so much on the Public Health side, but other sides, they had to fight like hell to get adequate appropriations and this was especially true for the Office of the Secretary. Historically and customarily the offices of Commissioners and Secretaries are not all that popular in the Congress and in the committees.
Q: Now Jack, another thing about this while we're on the subject. There's this sort of view that has been there for a long, long time that SSA was more independent as an operating division of whatever department we were in than most other operating divisions, that we had an unusual degree of independence. I think that was true and I think you're alluding to that now. Has that been true all along, and how far back does that go?
All the way to the beginning. I don't know whether it's still true today or to what extent. I rather suspect that it isn't. I'll tell you a few isolated things.
First off, the Social Security Administration was a descendant of the Social Security Board, and it wasn't until 1939 that we became a part of the Federal Security Agency. Around Eisenhower's time in the 1950's, it became a part of the Department of HEW. Each of those steps put us lower. With the Federal Security Agency we had then to report, the Commissioner had to report, to the Administrator. Then when the Administrator was replaced by DHEW, there were more layers. Whereas, the Social Security Board itself had a very small administrative staff mostly for broad coordination of the Bureaus. DHEW had very substantial administrative staff that appeared to think their mission was to exercise considerable oversight and control over the work of lower echelons of the Department.
We fully accepted that DHEW staff had a legitimate job to do. We were not shy about letting them know when we thought they were far exceeding their roles as the Commissioner understood them to be. So that was one factor in why Social Security may have been regarded, was regarded, as independent. We, SSA, were accustomed to taking care of ourselves, and we had strong leadership in the beginning and stronger even in the era, I think, of Ball and Futterman. In respect, I'm putting my name amongst more August people, but when Ball became sort of dominant, I became in a lesser way the strong character amongst all the Public Health guys and the Food and Drug guy, who was Bruce Cardwell at one time, and the Welfare guy. They expected strong ideas, etc., and they got them from me. I think they were always sort of watching me from behind a tree, and they respected that ability, and that's what I'm trying to say. Then when Nixon got in, they really began to try to get rid of the key players and to put their own people in, and that culminated in Bob Ball leaving. I had already retired under no pressure, and I felt no pressure. I was a career person all the way. Some very high level very politically oriented people at the Department level, several of them, said to me: "Wish the hell we had guys on our side like you and Ball." They said it in an absolutely admiring way, regretting that their side lacked leaders of equal competence. They admired the staff, and this admiration was not just for the persona of Ball or Futterman, but it extended to the way SSA, as an organization, obtained quality results from that staff. So there was a general opinion that not only were we dominant, but if you got them to really talk about it and let their hair down and not try to be critical, they would say: "You know, you have very good leadership and your staff is better somehow." Its not exactly clear why they thought so, but I always had a fleeting thought they had a grudging admiration of the skill with which SSA dealt with the demands of agents of the change in administration.
Third, insofar as the budget was concerned, I think I told you this little incident. I was not there, but it was told to me and it always remained in my mind. As the authorization for financing the Social Security program was written, in the original law it was very different than that for other agencies. How was it different? It was different in this sense. As you well know, the procedure for setting up a new agency, by law, is first to pass legislation directing that an agency be established and delineating its responsibilities, authorities, powers, etc. Then the second part is the direction as to the financing. That funds may be appropriated out of such and such. That's the usual way. Almost all other agencies of government are financed that way or used to be. There may be some new ones these days that are different. We probably did set sort of a model for some, but we were set up for an automatic authorization. The law authorized such moneys from the Trust Fund as are needed to pay benefits and the expenses of administration. On the face of it, this kind of language does not require that Social Security seek an annual appropriation from the Congress.
Long before I worked in the budget area, Senator McKellar, Herman Downey's patron saint, headed the Senate Appropriations Committee. McKellar's reputation in history undoubtedly will be that there was no more patronage-oriented Senator. I think his first name was Kenneth. And indeed, Herman Downey came out of that bailiwick. Senator McKellar was known throughout in those times as one who used his power and who could be kind of mean and ruthless. Anyway, he used to make things difficult for Altmeyer. In those days Altmeyer's office budget was peanuts compared to us in BOASI.
Q: Compared to the Bureau, you mean?
Compared to all of the Social Security Bureaus except the Commissioner's office. And if Commissioner Altmeyer wanted budget for an extra secretary, he had to go to the House and then the Senate Appropriations Committee and justify his need for an extra secretary or an extra two people here or there, and they would sweat him out. McKellar would spend more time on the 50 people or whatever that were under the direct purview of the Commissioner. They were not just his office workers, but Research and Statistics, Actuaries, and all that. There might have been 200 people if I remember right. He'd sweat them.
Q: So you mean the administrative budget for the Commissioner's office was separate from the administrative budget for the agency?
Yes, in the late 1940's and early 1950's. We didn't include in our budget the needs of the Commissioner's office. They had to fend for themselves. Theirs was a separate item on the budget, and they had their own appropriation, and they couldn't dip into our funds. Our funds were for the workload-oriented purposes and the Bureau directors and operations.
Q: Let me see if I understand this. What we now call our LAE account, or Limitation on Administrative Expenses.
Q: Which now today we have to go to the Hill every year and get an appropriation.
We removed the Commissioner's office as a special budget item. Remember in the '60's, the early '60's, this was when Bobby Byrd was very dominant on the Appropriations Committee. Senator Robert Byrd from West Virginia. Today he's benign, but in those days he was hell on wheels for anything on welfare. He was politicizing that. He was taking advantage of popular cynicism, etc., and he was promoting himself by being hard as nails on the District of Columbia welfare. They were a whipping boy in those days, as they are now, off and on. And Bobby Byrd was hell on wheels. When Bob Ball became Commissioner, Welfare was still under Commissioner Winston. I think she was in charge of Welfare at that time, and he was in charge of Social Security, I mean BOASI, and they were combined and they were one. He found himself on the Hill testifying 95 percent of the time defending Welfare. Now he was always very, very interested in welfare, but in those days, and I qualify that and say those days, his core interest was Social Security, the insurance program. Today I'm not in intimate daily contact with him. I can only judge the general appearance. I would say in the last 10 years or so I think he's become more centered on health, although he still retains his very high ranking as preeminent Social Security (Insurance) guru. I used that word just now; it came out of the blue. I don't hear anybody calling him the guru, but it does convey his top standing as an expert on Social Security today. He is getting long in the tooth in terms of the expanding group of specialists in the field, but he still retains that. More and more, he's also looked to as the guy on health programs, insurance.
But to the point, I still hadn't made it. That was McKellar. He was always picking on Altmeyer. That was my understanding, I was not there. Some of this I would get years later from Downey and some from Roy Wynkoop as we talked about things of the past. My impression was one time McKellar started out to make a mischievous point. He said: "Mr. Altmeyer, why do you bother to come before us? You don't have to come, the legislation does not specify it" And Mr. Altmeyer, I don't know what his motivation was, but he may probably have thought: "I don't have to come, but I'd better." It would be quite different if I asserted that he did not have to come, but that's my quick reading of that. "But sir," he said, "we feel that we must be accountable for our actions. We want to be held accountable, and therefore, we want to come to the Congress and have the Congress review us." So it was sort of a voluntary thing. I think I answered your point. I don't know how many people had knowledge of that, but it was always there. It probably conditioned people's attitudes even though they couldn't point to that as having any bearing on it. That's my quick reaction to your question.
SSA As Part of Government
As I indicated in other matters, my view of Social Security's function embraced not only focusing on the objectives with respect to the public, but also that we have a larger role; everybody in Government shares a mutual responsibility to help achieve the goals and objectives of other agencies of the Government to the extent they reasonably can without significant cost to the programs for which they work. If we, SSA, have unique resources we should make them available, whether it be income records, employment data, coded employee information or district offices that span the country and reach out to the people, if we can do so in ways not inconsistent with the interest the Agency. If it does not detract from the accomplishment of our own mission, we have an obligation to try to work out ways, consistent with restraints upon us, to enable other agencies to have use of such unique assets to facilitate the achievement of those agencies' governmental objectives. We are all parts of one and the same Government. We must cooperate with each other in all reasonable ways. And that includes sharing the expertise we have. If we, because we are a larger organization, or because we are more enterprising, have expertise in labor relations and equal employment, and there are small agencies, or other agencies who lack it, small agencies who did not have the kind of staffing that permit them to have it, we could help them out. We do not go out selling it. If we see a way we might be of some help we could, assuming always that it would not detract from our main function, providing assistance. We, of course, should retain and exercise the right to decide whether, how much, when, what kind, etc., of help will be provided. We must always keep in mind that our first and primary obligation is to the Social Security program.
Q: Can you think of other examples where we actually did that?
Well, I'm sure there are numerous examples. The examples when we worked with the Department of Agriculture so that we made available, subject to their consent, a selection of beneficiaries, that would enable them to do research about the diets of the aged, or about their needs. We geographically and industrially coded the employer's application Form SS-4. Those geographic and industrial codes were utilized in order to be able to classify by selected geographical units and industry the earnings data that employers regularly reported, so our researchers would know the extent of the distribution by industry and location of employment.
Q: And we used that for our internal research?
We used it for research and statistics and our legislative planning, the staffs did. But basically, it was decided from the beginning that it would be stupid for SSA to produce data without taking the extra steps so that the data could be very useful to other agencies and to business and industry.
Q: And I think it's true over the years that our data has been one of the most important sources for a lot of research.
That's right, oh absolutely. Marketing data, breakdowns of income by region and the like, were used. Our data indicated what level the income was reaching and it provided immeasurably important data for business people, marketers. And this was issued, we did this I'm sure, in conjunction with the Department of Labor, that particular kind of thing. But SSA operations, beneficiary rolls, earning and income data, even employees, often provided uniquely fertile possibilities for important research in medicine, aging, etc. I did it, for instance, on a much smaller scale, in the Woodlawn area. I'd let it be known that we would consider cooperating in health-related research, subject to the conditions that: (1) each individual potential participant would be able to decide whether or not he/she wanted to participate, and that decision would be with the benefit of their own physician's advice; and (2) that the project would be structured so that some medical goodies would go to the employees, e.g.-- a though examination by a cardiologist, screening tests for glaucoma, diabetes, etc.--it would not be just something that they volunteered for and got little personally in return. We wanted some benefit for each person who participated; namely, that in the screening for the study, participants would be able to learn about or check some aspect of their health. The project not infrequently uncovered poor health conditions previously not known to the participant, such as glaucoma, as my Executive Officer discovered, or serious heart disease as another good friend discovered, that neither was aware of.
I recall very clearly a study in the years when there was very little known about what kind of fats were causing cardiac problems. And I was told that there was only one laboratory in the country that could then reliably do the work that would identify what was the content of the blood fat in terms of lipids. Which was then beginning to be an area that medical research was beginning to look into. And they wanted to do a test with our kind of a population, which was fairly representative of the total population. Of course, the Baltimore employees were diverse, almost all ages, from 16, 18 and going up to retirement ages. And black, white, brown, whatever, including people who came to Baltimore from various parts of the country. It was a good cross section--better by far from most that the researchers could get any place else. What we, SSA, got out of it was that (1) the satisfaction in participating in a meaningful health research project; and (2) that every person who entered the study would get an examination by a cardiologist; a thorough examination by a cardiologist, knowing that some might discover they have a serious heart condition and (3) the final group participating in the actual research, who did so with the consent of their own physicians, could benefit from the research on several drugs.
Q: And so we pooled a sample of people from our earnings record data?
Not earnings data, no. This was of employees at Woodlawn.
Q: Oh, I'm sorry. Okay.
Because we had a population of 17,000, or whatever. We did a lot of things like that for the people at Woodlawn, and they loved it. I didn't mind that. But it was always with their consent; nobody said they had to participate or anything like that. And usually, like the one I'm just referring to, before they were enrolled in a group that took a certain kind of medicine and all that, it was with the consent of their own physicians. Otherwise, they would not be selected. So they had the benefit of contributing to the advancement of medicine. At the same time, they learned a lot about an aspect of health of special interest to them. In the process they also benefited from a free evaluation by a cardiologist.
There were variations of this around the country. And Social Security as a totality, the assets of our organization, the assets of our information that we possessed, the assets of our staffing, the expertise were made available in various ways. The point to draw from what I have said without wanting to overemphasize it, we did not participate in these efforts grudgingly but we were open and willing. Unless of course it was contra-indicated by our own needs to apply our energies someplace else, we were more than willing to cooperate.
Relationship Between Field & Central Office
One of the things that would happen, for good reasons, especially in a large agency with a big field organization, the head people seeking to build up the confidence, the sense of importance, of the field organization by warmly praising each contribution by field staff members participating in some meeting or conference at central office. Not infrequently the "praise" not only is given for the good and insightful contributions they are in a positions to make, but also to the routine and mediocre or even less. When this approach is not taken with due restraint, a downside results: an unreal and inflated value by some of their own perceptivity. This is the first time I have mentioned this. I'm sure, just as you're nodding your head, many observers would agree with what I'm saying. You may find an attitude developing in the field sometimes, not all over, not everyone, but enough to be palpable, to identify, and it's fashionable: "Those pinheads back in Central Office, they don't know what the hell they're doing." Well, as a pinhead who worked in Central Office, who knew far better many times after I got the information that what they were arguing against or what they thought was only a Central office thing, was far better thought-through and based on a lot more data, than they knew.
This was an indulgence that the Central Office indulged in. It was brought home to me on many occasions, very clearly when we had a big meeting in Baltimore of all the top regional people, a national conference in Baltimore. Oscar Pogge or Bob Ball, or whoever, would praise the importance of the regions and their contributions and what they did. It wasn't always justified. The natural result is when you do that, it cheapens the currency. When you give praise when it's not due, you cheapen the currency and you may reap unintended consequences. And I'm saying that executives often are aware of that, they try to control it; keep it within decent bounds. But sometimes a field person, and this goes all the way up to the regional heads, act like they are as important and knowledgeable as the head of the organization. And if you are mature, you should say, "Well, he's trying to be nice to us and all that; I'm not really that good, and I should be humble." But no, it sometimes goes the other way with some individuals.
Now, I was going to make a point. Take the situation where we have new legislation that suddenly makes 2,000,000 people eligible immediately on July 1st for benefits. We're not equipped to handle 2,000,000 people right away, are we? So we need to do several things. The first thing we need to do is review what we're doing. And if we were placing emphasis at a time we were not so busy on employees to improve the quality of our service to the public because the workload was down and time was available, we need to review whether the insistence on higher quality should continue with that kind of an emphasis when we're confronted with sudden backlogs of 2,000,000. We need to know how to shift gears. When we had more time than we needed to carry the load, we properly should make sure that the work we handled was the best quality we could produce, because we had time to do it. On the other hand, to deny the payment of benefits, to withhold it, longer than it was absolutely required, is to deprive people of the benefits they're due. And you might say, "Well, we can do it. What's the big deal, two months, three months?" The big deal is that a person who died within the month never got it while he was alive. We need to have a plan that we can defend against retreating somewhat from the emphasis on quality. And cutting a corner here or there and instituting rough things like, "all right, we accept an error of two percent in this category, because what we're going to do is pay 10 percent more people earlier than we would otherwise." So when you make the cost-benefit evaluation in general terms, you say, "Sure. I'd rather pay the 10 percent earlier than worry about a quantifiable error of a certain degree on two percent.
So, what's the point of this story? The point of this story is related to the general story that we were talking about the superficiality, sometimes, of field people, alleging ignorance on the part of Central Office is this: Sometimes when field staff are brought in for training, for maybe a change in emphasis of service or something like that, somebody from the field would say, "Well, why don't you guys make up your mind? In May you demand quality, and in July you ask us to cut some corners to increase production. Why are you so inconsistent? Just tell us what you want." Well, what we wanted in May was more of an emphasis on quality, and what we want now is more of an emphasis on quantity, and in each case the emphasis was appropriate for the particular situation at the time. That was arrogance on their part that they would not see this. They just assumed that these characters from Central Office were pinheads. I'm not trying to defend Central Office Staff of all parts of the organization, but they need to understand and respect one another's functions, limitations, strengths--and reinforce and compliment one another. By and large, Central Office people in Social Security have done a good job, as have the staff in the field. And people who come from the field to work in Central Office often remark that they begin to see the things that they didn't understand before.
Misc. Topics in Career Civil Service
Q: I do want to pick up where we left off, but there are a couple of things I want to talk about . . .
I don't know whether I showed you this, but it was a recent letter, from Ian Paris. You may know Ian Paris. Read it to yourself, it's just a short letter. And it was just a recent thing.
Q: You have several copies of this, can I take one?
Ian didn't get a lot of my attention or anything like that. He was in one of the programs that I had set up, the 2-year college thing, postgraduate work. And after he finished that, I gave him an opportunity to work in my immediate office. I've had done that with people like John Trout, for instance. It was not an original idea with me, one of the Assistant Secretaries of HEW did that. He was an entirely different kind of a person than I am. But I offered it to John Trout, and I offered it to Ian, to be sort of a gopher and take on certain personal tasks that I wanted them to pursue personally until I could work through certain ideas and I could better define and shape a major project that I would then assign to a component in the Office of Administration. I assigned some projects to Ian. And I worked with him; it was a concept for an executive replacement program, pointing out the problems that we were going to have and proposing methods to overcome them. I remember something he said then. And he did not, as he indicates in this letter, have a reputation of "sucking up." I don't like anybody to "suck up" to me. But I remember he did say something like: The two months or so he spent with me, he learned as much here as he learned in the postgraduate two years. I don't say these things; I run across them. Bill Mitchell, went on the same thing.
Q: I should borrow this and make a copy of it for your files.
Did you read it?
Q: Yeah.
Bill Mitchell had every reason to not be very partial to me. Because it might have seemed to him that Bob Ball and me, were just not team players. We frequently pressed him to approve or reopen decisions that he, or others at higher levels had made, when we at BOASI thought that new considerations that arose provided good reason to reverse that decision. As a matter of fact, there was a saying, and I think it probably originated with Bob, but we would say, "Well, Bill Mitchell's going to turn this down. But that's not going to stop us." Mitchell's dead now so I don't mind saying this. He was, in my view, a man of great rectitude; he played by rules rigidly applied. Sometimes playing by "strict rules" forecloses matters prematurely that should be kept open. Now that didn't mean we went behind his back. It meant we kept returning to him, when we thought there was good reason to, to reopen the issue. And it was an expression of a very honorable philosophy. Because Bob and I were straight-arrows too.
And this involved a piece of operating wisdom that I had acquired way back: some people have reputations at work for being "operators," real operators, getting things done by bending and twisting the regulations or the rules. In my definition, they are not operators. In my definition, an operator is someone who knows how to use the rules and overcome the obstacles, that's an operator. Anybody could say, "Oh well, they won't catch me." They may catch you or they might not, but that's immaterial. To me, an operator meant somebody who sticks to the game within the "Marquis of Queensbury rules," and accomplished things, overcoming problems in ways that are legitimate.
Recovering Misc. Trust Fund Income
Q: All right Jack, we have talked a lot about your philosophy of management, and the principles of management. Can you give me some specific examples of issues you dealt with during this period?
I mention small things as well as big. Even today, at least when Bob Myers was still Actuary, the Trustees Report would always report, and I guess that they are still doing it today, on monies recovered by the Trust Funds from the sale of waste paper and things like that. Well that was Futterman's idea. I was in Fiscal at the time, new to Fiscal, and Wendell Bearden, who worked for me, kept talking about the "miscellaneous funds of the Treasury." And I asked what that is. And that was a fund to which any monies that we collected, or found on our property, would be accounted for and transferred to the Treasury's Miscellaneous Fund. Now what went in there? I had a list of things. All of the punch cards the Joe Fay and his crowd where producing and then throwing away after use in operations--because in the build-up process you kept the Master Card, but you had a lot of other cards, detail cards, that went into the building up of life-time earning records, and ledger sheets, and employer reports--we had all kinds and vast amounts of waste paper. We sold that paper for waste paper. High rag content paper. Now in terms of the total SSA expenses it was almost nothing. But we used to recover, as I recall, in the old days, a couple of hundred thousand dollars just from that one thing. We would collect money on telephones on our property, you know, public telephones and those things were historically deposited to the Treasury. We sold cabinets that we beat up and used up, or typewriters or whatever. Trust Fund money had paid for these items, but nonetheless the money, under the regulations, went to the Treasury and so on down the line.
So I thought in our role of protecting the Trust Funds, we should challenge this, and not be deterred by the fact that there were regulations going back to 1880 requiring us to do it. I was told, "Well you can't get it changed unless you go to the Comptroller General." And so I said, "Okay go to the Comptroller General's Office." They went up and down the Comptroller General's Office only to learn that the Comptroller General's staff were without power to make any change in the regulation. We finally were advised that the only way was to get the Comptroller General to render a "decision" reversing the regulation. I wrote a letter. I wrote several such letters in different connections. But in this connection I wrote a letter to the Comptroller General. I don't remember whether it went out under my signature or not, but I wrote it. And in effect it said, after listing each of the many sources of miscellaneous income, something like maybe a hundred and some odd individual items, "The regulation originating in the 1880s requires all monies, all such monies, to be deposited to the Treasury Miscellaneous Fund. Since Social Security was not enacted until 1935 this may account for the failure to recognize that the source of the assets was not the U.S. Treasury's General Fund, but the Social Security Trust Fund." And so I said, "Will you therefore, since all of these, and I described each of these, were bought by the Trust Fund, would you be constrained to object to the deposit of such recovered funds to the Trust Fund instead of the U.S. Treasury's Miscellaneous Funds?" And lo and behold, despite all the many unsuccessful attempts to work it out with the staff of the General Accounting Office and predictions of failure, the Comptroller said, "In respect to items such and so, I would not be constrained to object." So we were able to get almost all that money deposited into the Trust Fund.
Travel Procedures
A similar thing comes to mind as I am saying it, very early on in my tenure as a Financial Management Officer, ( I had come from the Division of Accounting Operations) and you know my background, I was a college graduate and all of that. I was a bright guy, but I didn't have any real background for this kind of work. I just applied common sense. I didn't just go along with the crowd or accept ways of handling matters because that's the way it always has been done.
My position required me to go to Washington a lot, by the B&O Railroad. They had little electric trains that we would take out of Camden Yards. And the way it worked in those days, was you went to the Travel Office and they issued a Travel Office authorization for each trip.
Q: For fifty cents or a dollar and a half or something.
Yes. Plus the process was expensive. You would go to the Travel Office and they would authorize you to go to Washington and return. And then you went down to the railroad station and there would be a line of government people each having to go through a tedious manual process with the B&O Ticket Agent to convert the form authorizing the RR ticket into an actual ticket from Baltimore to Washington and return. And I thought it was expensive in time and it was unnecessary. I can understand why the procedure was originally set up that way. You always have to think when you ask for a change, what were the original concept and reasons for the procedure, and then try to present the request for change in terms that you are not asking for change to the original purpose, but to retain the concept and apply it in a new way which has all of the safeguards that the procedure was originally designed to achieve. So I wrote another proposal, and my staff went up and down on that unsuccessfully trying to get the required process changed. This was when I was at a fairly low grade level. I was a GS-12 when I went into that job and my staff was even lower. But they were doing this kind of dealing all along. That is what happens a lot of times at staff levels lower down in the organization: it's often very difficult for staff at such levels be effective in persuading their bosses to change regulations that have been long followed and too often the result was, "No. General Accounting Office Regulations so and so requires us to do so and so." And they were unable to get the change.
So I wrote another letter to the Comptroller General. I didn't write all that many; but at that one stage being new to the job I focused on some of the things that I could grab a hold of. This was a relatively small branch, Financial Management Branch, although I also had Payroll Staff at that time under my wing, and the Travel Staff. And I said, in effect, "We would like to be able to buy blocks of tickets to Baltimore/Washington. We understand the desire to be sure that these tickets that we would buy in a block are not used without proper authorization and accounting. What we would propose instead, is to establish a register in which we would list each of the tickets in the block and account for each and every one of them." So if SSA staff needed a ticket they would go to the Travel Office to pick up a ticket, not an authorization form. In a matter of a moment, you know, and we would record their name, where they went etc. And make sure that they had proper authority. The Comptroller General said, "Yes." Permitting us to set up an approved method of handling travel arrangements despite existing regulations that in specific terms did not permit it. We in effect were getting the GAO to change without changing. A lot of times they did not change the regulation, they would let it stand as it was, but they would say that they would not be constrained to object to the alternative method we proposed.
Training Programs
Let me read this because it'll help me recall more of the details. This is about the training programs I implemented. This apparently sketches out what I undertook. It was fairly comprehensive. "SSA's system of programs of career development, geared to several levels of SSA needs. All the major parts of the system are now in operation, and it has reached the stage of maturity to which I can report on it as a well-integrated system."
We didn't have any significant training programs at Social Security when I started. I mean, each bureau zealously guarded its own training. At the SSA level we had inherited, from the very early days, a skeleton staff of trainers who really had lost their function. But they were still around in different places.
"The system is multifaceted. It's not a single mechanism or course of development for all employees. It's not geared to a narrow selection of employee types, nor is it designed to fit individuals into some predetermined molds."
Now that was something that I personally emphasized as important. I thought we should maximize the merit principal in our activities to the extent feasible: that SSA was/is a merit organization, that every job that opened up should be available, up for grabs to the best person at that time, whatever the reason, he was the best person. There was a train of thought in the bureau, McKenna was one that represented that, that you pick out very promising individuals and you train them with a guaranteed end-result to the employee. And as a matter of fact, he operated that way to a large extent, because in the absence of SSA-level training programs and policies he was free to follow his own views. Nor did I attempt to inhibit, within the framework of other things, his doing that. And of course, he did that before the SSA level programs were launched. And was able to continue to do so in training programs over which he continued to have authority. To his great credit, Hugh McKenna was a strong proponent of training and well-informed about developments in that field.
Why did I object to that particular approach? I thought that was sort of a "Prince of Wales" approach. It moved the incentive away from all others. The designated Prince of Wales does not have a particular incentive to give of his very best after he has been designated. He can relax because he's got an assured guaranteed contract, in effect. And that's not an incentive calculated to make him break his back. I was going to say something less, but since this is going to be possibly for history, you get that point. Now the other point is, it's a disincentive to all the large number of others who might have been strong candidates for this position in question but were not selected for the program. Unless you're on that designated highway that is going through with all the lights green in this direction, you may lay back; you may say, "what's the use? You know, I'm not one of the favorites who were picked out when they were younger, much younger, and then buzz through the middle of the organization."
Now we produced some pretty good people the Prince of Wales way. I'm not saying that it's not effective on occasion. But we don't have any measure of its ineffectiveness; how much of a damper did it put on everybody else? That was one reason why I did not like "Prince of Wales" programs which were very much in the vogue in the government as a whole, and in private industry, and by and large in Social Security. I chose to design the programs in a way that offered training opportunities to quality candidates without any guaranteed promotion at the end. I reasoned that if they started with outstanding potential, worked hard, and profited from their training opportunities, they would be outstanding candidates for promotion on merit and not merely by credentials. At the same time, this approach enabled all others to contend on their merits. The "door was open" until selection time and the choice would be on the realities at that time. I doubt if I had not included that kind of a thing in the SSA level training, and not discussed it with Bob Ball, he might not have seen anything wrong in the standard approach; it would have seemed very usual. But that was my thinking. It illustrates the strong views I have on some matters, like some of the things we discussed the other day: annual reporting and staggering the delivery of checks and things like that.
Q: Yeah, that's a good one; that's helpful.
"The (training) system is a multi-faceted one, not a single mechanism. The range is a wide range of programs: from broad-gauge developmental experience of the Executive Development Program to very specialized academic programs such as the Financial Management Intern Program. A second major emphasis is on work experience, rather than on classroom training. Classroom and academic training are, of course, an important part, but primarily as a supplement to on-the-job training. All of the major programs in SSA's career-development system such as, the Executive Development Program, the Management Intern Program, rely primarily on rotational work experience. Third, the system is very flexible, both in the programs it offers and the specific activities available for employees, both within the specific programs and those who occasionally attend training courses or even in college."
For instance, while he was in the Executive Development Program, one of Sid Leibovitz's assignments was in a BDOO Regional Office, where he evaluated a wide variety of managerial styles in district offices. Another fellow, Lew Dykes, he was a fellow at the top program, Lew Dykes started in one of the lowest jobs in the organization, a CAF-1, I think. He worked his way up as a supply person. And he got into printing because he ran the BOASI (SSA) mimeograph machine and the function grew and he grew along with it. He became a very able printing officer, and continued to grow with the organization. Academically, he was weak. But a bright young fellow, and he got along well with people. So his individualized training program took him outside of Social Security. He didn't have the need to be particularly knowledgeable of the substance of the Social Security program. His SSA job was to manage the printing of a large volume and a variety of documents or whatever. So many of his training assignments were with the Army Publications Division in the Office of the Adjutant General.
"In effect, a wide range of experience and training courses available make it possible for each participant in the program to have a development plan that is tailor-made for him. For the employees who are not in formal development programs, hundreds of courses, seminars, and other activities are available." (That's for other people within SSA; it's a short-term thing.) "Fourth, our career-development programs are not rigid, management-imposed packages of training. Each employee in the development program has a strong voice in planning his own development activity." A paper on the executive development program gives a little report on that. Placement orientation programs; the Management Intern Program; the different ones, and other opportunities. The most widely used of these courses was the Civil Service Commission's Executive Seminar at King's Point. And we also used to have staff training at Williamsburg; New York; Berkeley, California.
Q: Yes, that's a good document for me to have.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Contact: Jerry Horn, 540-785-4733
Washington, DC- Fr. Frank Pavone, National Director of Priests for Life, responded today to the announcement that Judge George Greer will receive the "Special Justice Award" tomorrow in Florida.
"On the night before Terri Schiavo died, I said to the national media that Judge Greer was a murderer. I repeat that today. I use the word not in its legal meaning but in its moral meaning, that is, a deliberate action or series of actions that intentionally kill an innocent person. Terri was not dying until she stopped receiving food and water. Once deprived of that sustenance, she died. It does not require any legal or medical expertise to recognize that as murder. Nobody who has lost the basic capability to understand that should be honored.
"Whatever judgment, furthermore, is made on Judge Greer's legal authority to do what he did, no Court has the moral authority to directly and deliberately take innocent life, and those ordered to carry out such decisions are morally obliged to resist them by conscientious objection. Pope John Paul II made that teaching clear in his encyclical letter "The Gospel of Life.""
Other religious leaders, including Cardinal Renato Martino, President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace at the Vatican, have described this tragedy in similar terms, as have countless Americans.
For more information, see www.priestsforlife.org


text:
Reviewed by Sophia M. (age 8)
I like this book because it?s funny. Minnie and Moo Go Dancing is funny because Minnie and Moo wore underwear on top of a dress and took off the bras. It reminds me of when I wore a dress. My favorite part is when Minnie gave the sunset a ?10.? The Minnie and Moo series is funny because each book is funny in one way. I like this book because I like farms. Because my Grand-Pappa had a farm I?m reminded of farms.
I recommend this book for kids who like funny books. If you like frogs you will like this book! You will like the other stories of Minnie and Moo. You will also like Minnie and Moo and the Potato from Planet X and Minnie and Moo ? Will You Be My Valentine? If you like funny books? You have to read this book!


text:
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — A grand jury investigating whether other laws were broken in connection with the rape of a 16-year-old girl last year charged a woman with theft Wednesday after uncovering evidence of alleged crimes unrelated to the rape.
Hannah Rhinaman, 20, was accused of stealing equipment from Steubenville schools and selling the property, Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine said.
"It's not unusual when you have a significant investigation to come across things that you did not anticipate finding," he said in a phone interview.
Wednesday's charges are separate from those filed earlier this month against Rhinaman's father, William Rhinaman, the schools' technology director. Those charges relate to the rape investigation.
It did not appear that Hannah Rhinaman has an attorney. Her home phone was not working Wednesday. A lawyer who represented her on unrelated traffic charges last month said he was not representing her, but would if appointed. An arraignment Friday was possible, DeWine said.
DeWine announced the grand jury March 17, the day a judge convicted two Steubenville High School football players of raping the West Virginia girl after an alcohol-fueled party following a football scrimmage the previous August. The two are serving sentences in juvenile detention.
In April, investigators searched the high school and the local school board offices.
A chief issue before the grand jury has been whether adults such as coaches or teachers were aware of the rape but failed to report it as required by state law. The panel met three days this week and will convene again Nov. 18, DeWine said.
Wednesday's indictment against Hannah Rhinaman, of Mingo Junction near Steubenville, includes one count of theft and 2 counts of receiving stolen property stemming from alleged crimes last year.
She worked briefly for the school system last year as a $7.70 per hour contract employee, helping set up the technology department's computer labs and updating software, Mike McVey, the Steubenville schools superintendent, said in a statement. He promised full cooperation.
William Rhinaman, also of Mingo Junction, has pleaded not guilty to charges of tampering with evidence, obstructing justice, obstructing official business and perjury.
Technology played an important role in the rape case. Photos of the girl taken the night of the rape were introduced at trial, as were numerous texts sent back and forth by students, including the victim and one of the attackers. An infamous YouTube video filmed by a student who had witnessed the rape featured a student not involved in the attack as he mocked the girl.
Hacker activists later used social media unsuccessfully to put pressure on authorities to charge other football players.
Andrew Welsh-Huggins can be reached on Twitter at https://twitter.com/awhcolumbus.


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John HufnagelFree Agent
Offensive Coordinator
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News | Stats | Stat vs. Team | Targets | Injury | Depth Chart | Roster
|Giants | Hufnagel leaves team
Tue, 02 Jan 2007 06:51:22 -0800
Michael Eisen, of Giants.com, reports New York Giants head coach Tom Coughlin revealed demoted offensive coordinator John Hufnagel has left the team. "We worked together on last week and then John felt it was best for him to move on," Coughlin said.
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|Giants | Gilbride will call plays for team
Tue, 26 Dec 2006 16:34:33 -0800
New York Giants head coach Tom Coughlin has demoted offensive coordinator John Hufnagel and given the primary play-calling duties to quarterbacks coach Kevin Gilbride.
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|Giants | Coughlin moves Hufnagel to booth
Sun, 13 Aug 2006 09:15:21 -0700
Mike Garafolo, of the Newark Star-Ledger, reports New York Giants head coach Tom Coughlin has moved offensive coordinator John Hufnagel upstairs to the booth. Quarterbacks coach Kevin Gilbride will move down to the sideline and will now relay the calls from Hufnagel to QB Eli Manning. Coughlin said, "I always felt that the play caller in the booth had an opportunity to see the entire field. I felt like John would do a good job from up above. And I also felt it would give Kevin a better opportunity to communicate eyeball-to-eyeball with Eli, a guy that he spends untold number of hours with in the classroom and on the field."
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|Giants | Hufnagel Named Offensive Coordinator
Thu, 05 Feb 2004 10:38:08 -0800
The New York Giants have announced the team has hired John Hufnagel as the team's offensive coordinator, according to Giants head coach Tom Coughlin. Hufnagel, a veteran coach who has been in professional football for more than 30 years, spent the 2003 season as the quarterbacks coach for the Super Bowl champion New England Patriots.
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Eggplant! Mmmmmmmmmm...
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Joined: 03 Nov 2005
Posts: 34
Posted: Mon Nov 14, 2005 2:01 am
Post subject: Eggplant! Mmmmmmmmmm...
My mom had a huge garden this past summer. She grew a lot of everything! Corn, peppers, tomatoes (a ridiculous quantity of those), lettuce, melons of all kinds cucumbers, and eggplant. I love eggplant, and so does she! We have tons of it now! So much, that we don't know what to do with it all. Besides the obvious Eggplant Parmigiana, which I just had a plate of (the best I've ever had I think: home cooking + home grown = delicious), what are some other good ways to prepare eggplant? My experience with the vegetable is that is absorbs A LOT of oil for some reason. If it doesn't get enough in the cooking process, it can be quite gross. And that's no fun. Although I've stirfried it a few times, and that seems to work out ok, as long as its not overcooked.
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Joined: 20 Nov 2005
Posts: 4
Posted: Mon Nov 28, 2005 6:07 am
Post subject: Eggplant
My method for cooking eggplant that does not contain tons of oil is to slice the eggplant, brush lightly with olive oil, and put under the broiler or on the stovetop grill until browned. That does a great job without all the excess oil.
From there, I can do many things with it, one of which, if I've sliced it lengthwise, is to lay on a little marinara sauce, a slice of mozzarella, some fresh basil and roll up a thin, cooked Italian sausage. Put in a casserole, cover with more sauce & cheese, and bake covered at 350 F for about 3o min. or until sauce starts bubbling. Remove cover and continue to slightly brown for a few more minutes.
I like this method of cooking my eggplant, since I have to watch my carb intake as I'm diabetic. With all the added ingredients, it's neither greasy or bland.
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Joined: 03 Dec 2005
Posts: 1
Location: Long Island, NY
Posted: Sat Dec 03, 2005 2:56 pm
Post subject: Eggplant Parm Pie
A great alternative to regular eggplant parm is to make what my family calls eggplant parm pie.
We make the fried or baked eggplant depending on your preference. Then stretch pizza dough to line a springform pan, you have to stretch it enough to be able to fold the excess over the top. We than layer the eggplant, sauce, and cheese inside the lined springform pan starting with the eggplant so that the bottom does not get soggy from the sauce. Once you have made filled the rest of the pan, pull the excess dough over the top. Bake in a 350-375 degree oven until the dough has lightly browned. Undo the pan and place the whole pie on a plate, cut like a pie and serve.
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Joined: 08 Oct 2006
Posts: 42
Location: Massachusetts
Posted: Sun Feb 25, 2007 4:02 am
Post subject: Baba Ganoush
Another nice way to prepare eggplant is to make a spread called Baba Ganoush, which is good with pita bread (like hommus).
Cut the stem end off, pierce in a few places with a knife or fork and bake the whole eggplant until soft. Depending on the size it could take half hour to 45 minutes.
It'll collapse a bit. Then scoop out the inside, and put in a blender with olive oil, lemon juice, salt. I like to add tomatoes. You can add cooked chickpeas to thicken it up if you like.
Another good recipe is mousakka, which is a cassarole made with white sauce, cooked ground lamb and eggplant. Let's see if I can remember the recipe...(It's a Greek dish, and you might find better instructions if you look around)
Lets say for a 9x9 pan, you need to make 1-1/2 cup white sauce (melt butter in a pan, add flour to make a paste, and slowly add milk until it is a thick white gravy). Crumbled feta cheese can be added.
Let the sauce cool, then whisk in two eggs. Add a bit of cinnamon and nutmeg to the sauce.
Saute a pound of ground lamb with onion and garlic (can probably use beef as well) til cooked.
Oil the 9x9 pan and line the bottom with eggplant strips cut long-wise that have been lightly brushed with oil (olive). I like to keep the skin on, especially if they are right from the garden. Sprinkle on some oregano. Pour in half the white sause/egg mixture. Add the cooked lamb on top, and pour the rest of the sauce on.
Bake in a 350 oven, uncovered, for about 45 mins. The top should get kind of browned, and the 'plant should be soft.
Eggplant also carmelizes nicely if you bake it on a low heat for a long time
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Recipe Diva
Joined: 20 Feb 2007
Posts: 4
Location: Philly
Posted: Mon Feb 26, 2007 1:38 pm
Post subject: Greek Meatballs
Use ground meat garlic seasoning to taste. Use your imagination and whatever you like and add paprika good amount. Add saute eggplant. make into meatballs. Bake in homemade tomato sauce. Before it is almost done top with munster cheese.
Use your imagination. What cooking is about. Trying things.
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Joined: 07 Sep 2006
Posts: 77
Posted: Tue Feb 27, 2007 4:04 am
Post subject: Re: Baba Ganoush
Lintballoon wrote:
Another nice way to prepare eggplant is to make a spread called Baba Ganoush, which is good with pita bread (like hommus).
Cut the stem end off, pierce in a few places with a knife or fork and bake the whole eggplant until soft. Depending on the size it could take half hour to 45 minutes.
The easiest way to make Baba Ganoush is as follows:
Roast the eggplant over an open flame. I just use a stove burner. Keep turning it, hold it directly in th flame and let the skin char a bit.
Wrap the eggplant in that sticky Glad wrap stuff, twisting each end tightly.
Microwave the wrapped eggplant until it is soft and smooshy.
Cut one end off the wrapped eggplant and squeeze the insides out into your food processor. You can dunk it in ice water if it is too hot to handle.
Process with some tahini, olive oil and garlic cloves until smooth and creamy.
Enjoy! The whole process just takes a few minutes. You get the lightly smoky flavor in a fraction of the time and cleanup is a breeze.
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Joined: 08 Mar 2007
Posts: 3
Location: Sunny Sydney, Australia
Posted: Thu Mar 08, 2007 12:10 pm
Post subject: My asian eggplant
I try to avoid all the oil too (but I do love the texture when cooked in as much oil as it wants!). I peel stripes into big eggplant and then cut into big chunks, toss in the tiniest amount of oil and roast in a hot oven for about 30mins, depends how big your chunks are. When they are soft and tender (they tend to just look dry but they are actuall squishy inside) then i cook them in this delish asian sauce:
For two big eggplant:
1 knob of ginger, finely chopped/minced
2 fat garlic cloves, smashed
1/3 cup soy
1/3 chinese cooking wine
1tbs rice vinegar
1tbs sugar
2 tbs chilli bean sauce (sub hoisin + chilli sauce if you don't have any)
splash of peanut oil
couple of drops sesame oil.
Fry th ginger and garlic in peanut oil until fragrant, mix rest of sauce ingredients and add to pan, bring to a simmer and stir. You just want the sugar to dissolve and the whole thing to reduce a little and go a bit syruppy. Add the eggplant and stir to coat and heat through.
Sprinkle with finely sliced green onion/spring onion/shallots/whatever you like to call them and slices of fresh red chilli if you like it hot. Serve with rice. This will serve four people as part of a chinese meal with one or two other dishes or two people with just rice.
Chinese cooking has loads of eggplant recipes. Try stuffing thick slices with that minced fish paste you get at asian grocers and deep frying them or braise with pork belly in black bean sauce.
I find roasting eggplant works great for all eggplant recipes that ask me to fry them first.
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Joined: 23 Oct 2005
Posts: 9
Location: australia
Posted: Mon May 28, 2007 10:07 am
Post subject: for in sandwiches
My local deli has a great chef who will tell you how to do anything you want to know. She puts egg plant into what she calls a vego sanger with other roasted vegies. it is yummy. It is not greasy at all and can be kept in the fridge as a filling for days. You simly slice the egg plant on a mandolin as thin as you can and then dry fry it on a hot plate. no oil at all. it kind of sticks a bit but you just scrape at it and flick it over. After it is cooked you can add a tiny bit of oil to keep it if you feel the need or just eat it in bread. it takes only minutes to cook like this. if you have a non stick pan that would help but we just use a very smooth hot plate.
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Posted: Sun Nov 30, 2008 6:32 pm
Post subject:
There's a filipino dish called tortang talong (eggplant fritter) that just uses eggplant, eggs, salt, pepper, and butter. What you do is roast the eggplant over an open fire for a bit, turning it frequently to keep it even. You can do the same job in your oven's broiler. Experience is your best guide to when it's done, but the eggplant will collapse, and the finished product when you eat it will taste fully cooked. When done roasting, take the eggplants off the fire and let them cool for a bit. While waiting, grab an egg and beat it into a bowl, adding salt and pepper to taste. When the eggplant is cool, skin it. Lay it into the bowl with the egg, and gently press on it with a fork. The goal is to mash it into a flat shape while keeping the eggplant in one piece. Turn the eggplant over in the beaten egg to coat both sides. Put a small pan on the stove on medium heat, lightly grease the bottom with either butter or oil. When it's hot, lay the eggplant into the pan, cooking it until the egg just begins to brown. Turn it over and repeat on the other side. When done, serve over rice and a little soy sauce.
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Joined: 26 Dec 2008
Posts: 2
Location: England
Posted: Fri Dec 26, 2008 5:01 pm
Post subject: A middle eastern recipe
Hello, I'm a newbie around here. Thanks for the site and forum.
Another way to enjoy your eggplant is as follows:
1-2 cloves of garlic (depending on personal taste- I like a lot)
Carton of plain yoghurt.
Plus some green salad and maybe some pitta bread.
Slice the eggplant and brush with oil, then roastor grill it. Meanwhile crush the garlic, and mix it into the yoghurt. When the eggplant is done, serve it with the yoghurt as a dressing, and the salad on the side with the warm pitta bread.
Nice for a light lunch. The piquancy of the yoghurt mixes well with the pungency of the garlic.
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Joined: 16 Sep 2009
Posts: 58
Location: Illinois
Posted: Fri Sep 18, 2009 3:32 am
Post subject: roasted eggplant..
Easy yet my favorite cuisine for eggplant. First is roast eggplant on flame or roasted grilled until darken(take note don't roast too much). Then cut it into dice and small. Then serve it together with any types of vinegar in a small dessert plate with chili peppers and sprinkle the black pepper.
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Joined: 23 Oct 2009
Posts: 1
Posted: Fri Oct 23, 2009 3:28 pm
Post subject:
Thank you all for these. I particluarly like the looks of the eggplant parm pie. More recipes to try!
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I do. I'm one of those people who falls in love with newborns instantly—they make my uterus ache. Every time I visit a friend in the hospital who's just given birth, I am transported back to August 29, 2009, the day my son was born. I love the newborn stage—they're so innocent and precious, and so dependent on you for everything. I don't think I've met a newborn baby I haven't fallen head over heels in love with the minute I met him/her. I'm going to steal a friend's term for this unconditional love and adoration: baby goggles.
But I have friends who feel quite differently about this. In fact, most of my friends polled said they thought at least one of their kids was pretty ugly when it was born. One friend said he thought his daughter looked like an old man—"Benjamin Button" was how he put it, and his wife referred to the same daughter as "Yoda." (Personally, I thought she was adorable from the start, and she's even cuter now.)
My friend Julie had this hilarious story to share: "I was told C-section babies come out looking perfect. So I was surprised when [my son] came out looking exactly like my father-in-law. It really freaked me out. So much so that I think it may be the reason I pumped instead of nursing him for 10 months. Every time I put him on my boob I saw my father-in-law…kidding. (Sort of.) But it didn't take long for him to turn beautiful…" And he is gorgeous, like a little blonde, blue-eyed surfer boy (from two brown-haired, brown-eyed parents).
Another friend said, "I have never seen an ugly puppy, but I have definitely met ugly babies." The general consensus among my friends was that most newborns are wrinkly and gross. One friend said his daughter looked like she "got involved in a bar fight and lost." But, as he put it, "She did get cuter with every passing day, and it was not long before I thought, before I knew, that she was truly beautiful in every way."
Admittedly I have baby bias—I thought Preston was the cutest baby in the world, from the minute he came out (via C-section). As a newborn he was precious and perfect. Literally perfect. I can't really describe the infatuation other than to say, I didn't think a cuter more amazing newborn had ever existed. I would (and still do) stare at him while he's eating or watching TV, like he's a work of art, studying every inch of his face—the eyes, the mouth, the ears, the nose—in awe of what we've created. Sometimes I still can't believe we made something so perfect, I have to pinch myself. He's not only beautiful on the outside, he is so sweet and funny and good-natured, even when he's being difficult and rebellious (which is much more frequently now that he's almost two).
But I'll be honest, looking back at some old photos of him recently, around the time he was four-to-six months old, he wasn't as cute as I remembered. He had such a round chubby face, big head and long body (still does), but he's grown into his looks now as a toddler. At the time I still thought he was total perfection, but now I see he had an awkward stage. The photo I posted of him on my very first Parenting Post blog—um, what was I thinking? That doesn't even look like him. In the one above he's only four weeks old…I mean, is that not a cute newborn baby?
Have you ever looked at your kid and thought he or she was not cute? Have you ever met a friend's kid and thought it was ugly? Would you tell them if they asked? Or do you have baby goggles on like me?
I am relentless with posting photos of Preston on Facebook—friend me (Sarah Preston Gorenstein) if you want to see more! Or follow me on Twitter @thecosmomom, and I'll follow you back. And for more personal updates from Momville, go to www.thecosmomom.com.


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Prof. Dr. Selçuk COŞKUN
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Faculty of Engineering
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Faculty of Economic and Administrative Sciences
Member (Professor Representative)
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