Opinion-Columns.com

A Hard Day For Managed News

In the same Friday edition of the Washington Post that detailed President Bush’s prime time news conference  there were a couple of unfortunate cats let quietly out of the bag.  Ann Tyson detailed the Pentagon response to the recent court opinion requiring the release of photos of caskets coming home from Iraq. Elsewhere, Carol Leonnig talks up Erik Saar’s book about how, when he was a translator for the Army at Guantanamo, he witnessed ‘staged interrogations’ run for the benefit of visiting congressional delegations.

The Ivory-Billed woodpecker seen in Arkansas wasn’t the only creature returning from extinct to endangered, as managed news came unmanaged. Much to the chagrin of an administration that put all its chips on black last night and spun the wheel. Like they say, timing is everything.

The president’s been on a losing streak of late, with a majority of voters opposed to his Social Security proposal, no matter that he’s been flying from managed town meeting to managed town meeting. This is a management president, graduate of a management school. It must be difficult for him to watch Tom DeLay and John Bolton come unmanaged in the same week.  Adding all those heretofore photographically withheld caskets and getting caught rigging congressional visits to Guantanamo doesn’t help either.

Of course we knew in the abstract that when the nation suffers over 1,500 deaths in a war there must be caskets coming home somehow. Most administrations would have honored those losses rather than blacking them out. Losing a son or daughter, it would be a comfort to have an official at least meet the plane, perhaps your Senator or Representative, every once in a while the president himself. A photograph for your local newspaper wouldn't be amiss, something to slip into the family bible, a record of sorts to ease the agony.

1,500 kids spread across a hundred Senators and 435 Representatives shouldn’t be too heavy a congressional load to carry.

The Pentagon said it’s not going to lift the ban on media coverage of returning casualties. It says that ban is intended to "ensure privacy and respect is given to the families who have lost their loved ones." That’s according to Col. Gary Keck, a Defense Department spokesman who somehow didn't choke on the words. The more ashamed we are of our wars, the more we try to protect families who give their kids. I grew up during WWII, when we grieved but we grieved together. Privacy wasn’t needed, respect for the work at hand was needed and the nation gave it in spades.

If you get a chance, catch 60 Minutes on Sunday night when they interview Sgt. Saar about his book, “Inside the Wire.” According to Saar, for the benefit of congressional delegations and other VIP hostings at the prison, interrogators would grab someone who had already proven himself to be cooperative and re-interrogate as if it was for real. In one ‘demonstration,’ interrogations occurred in conversational tones and cooperation was rewarded  with ice cream.  Ice cream! I guess that works better than stripping them naked and using the threat of dogs, at least in front of witnesses.

In any case, Saar says that little of value was learned at Guantanamo. What is being learned, at terrorist prisons and entry points for war dead, is that management must assume that those being managed are less capable than those in charge. 

As Wall Street unravels and faith in government falls to all-time lows, it may be long past time to reassess our attitudes about managing or being managed.

It may even be possible that unmanaged directness in manner or speech, without subtlety or evasion, like the Ivory-Billed woodpecker, may be brought back from the edge of business and political extinction.

Will the Real Alan Greenspan Please Stand Up?

Maybe he’s getting senile or possibly scared shitless of his legacy or maybe even confused, as many of we old-timers are, about how we came so quickly from the land of millions to the land of billions.  Billions have become the small-change of American society. 

But I no longer recognize Alan Greenspan except by his over-sized glasses and grumpy look. 

The man who helped Bill Clinton engineer the first federal surpluses in memory, almost overnight became the man who cheered as Bush gave it all away to the rich and bankrupted us as a nation.  The man who agreed as Clinton paid down the national debt only recently agreed with President Bush's plan to quadruple it.  The only thing recognizable in Alan is that the man who failed to see the dotcom bubble still fails to see the real estate bubble.   That at least is somewhat reassuring. 

A week ago in testimony before Congress, where he comes from time to time to mystify and mesmerize with his rhetoric, he was impatient with their failure to act.  He should understand by now  that Congress is at its least damaging when it fails to act, but he was uncharacteristically short-tempered, nailing Congress in general for putting the budget on an “unsustainable path.”  Well gee, Alan, you’re the guy who told them it was okay.

Jennifer Bayot of the Times quotes him as saying “Congress has promised more than it can continue to deliver and it must quickly make major changes in how it manages its finances, especially as it prepares to shoulder the cost of new programs like the prescription drug benefit and growing demands on Social Security and Medicare.” Change how, Alan?  Retract the tax giveaway that will cost $1.5 trillion (we just slipped again, this time from billions to trillions)?  Stop having unfunded wars?

Oh, surely not!

Alan never suggests how Congress should handle the dough more effectively, just carps at them after they followed what they thought he meant when he said what they thought they heard in between all the dry musings.  But, in his words, he leans toward cutting spending rather than raising taxes. While he’s leaning, we all look around frantically to see what could possibly be cut aside from the war we can’t get out of (now there would be a precedent, just pull out of Iraq because we can’t afford it), the Medicare costs we deliriously committed ourselves to or the money we keep sending to military suppliers for unarmored Humvees.  Talk about a conundrum; we can’t afford Social Security for folks who are living longer because of the Medicare we can’t afford.

I guess it’ll have to come out of housing for the poor or school kids lunches. Those are a couple of constituencies with no political clout.

“I fear that we may have already committed more physical resources to the baby-boom generation in its retirement years than our economy has the capacity to deliver,” said the Man from the Federal Reserve.  I think he meant financial resources rather than physical, unless he was talking about walkers, crutches, wheelchairs and hospital rooms. If he did, I can tell him where to look for the financial resources that have gone missing; just knock on Bill Gates’ door or stop by Warren Buffet’s cottage.

I don’t know what all this congressional complaint is about on Alan’s part.  The fiscally responsible Alan has been held hostage these past five years to the spendthrift Alan, who wanted too desperately to please just one more president.  It’s what happens when you stay in the job a president too far.

We Take Care of Our Own

Taking care of our own is a military tradition, the backbone of trust and the promise made before battle. You get wounded, we’ll get you out, no matter the cost. Taken prisoner?  We won’t forget. All of which has been turned on its ear in Iraq, where troops are sent into battle under-strength, without sufficient armor, their terms of duty arbitrarily extended beyond the enlistment contract and where they are made scapegoat in order to provide deniability up the chain-of-command.

That chain in this case extends to the Secretary of Defense and, above him, the president.  Iraq has become the deniable war.  Military honor and command structure is, day after day after day, taking a back seat to expedience and deniability. It’s a hell of a way to run an army and morale across the services is at bedrock bottom. So, the headline Top Army Officers Are Cleared in Abuse Cases shouldn’t come as all that much of a surprise.

The Army Inspector General’s Report essentially says “We have stuck our fingers up our ass, taken our temperature and find we are not now and have not been sick.”

Terrific. You may as well ask Enron to examine its internal financial manipulations and then rig a report that, if accepted by its board, closes all further litigation against its fraud.  Suggested title: Top Enron Officers are Cleared in Fraud Cases.

According to the IG, a colonel and a light-colonel may face criminal or disciplinary measures.  The most expendable general, Brigadier Janis Karpinski will probably draw a reprimand which will end her career.  Thus three officers who were without a doubt operating under acquiescence (if not direct orders) from above will take the heat.  Mid-level Pentagon brass (in this case the Inspector General) protects Lt. Gen. Sanchez, the Army's commander in Iraq, thereby covering the Pentagon brass above him, thereby cocooning Donald Rumsfeld and giving deniability to the military’s top man, President Bush.  Neatly accomplished if it were believable.

The IG report stipulates that the dereliction happened at brigade level and below. And that, my friends, is the biggest load of horse-manure ever foisted off on the American public and made to smell like rose petals. Given the extent of the conduct it is just not credible. 

Rogue officers exist in the military without doubt, as do rogue enlisted men and women. Things go wrong right and left under battle conditions, but we’re not talking about battle conditions. What went wrong as chronicled at Abu Ghraib, went wrong institutionally and worldwide when prisoners were held and abused in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo and no one doubts for a moment many other undisclosed locations. To suggest that this organized contempt for international law regarding prisoners was not sanctioned is beyond comprehension.

John Ashcroft, the Attorney General, was busily defining torture and what he thought could be gotten away with.  Alberto Gonzales, counsel to the president, weighed in with his opinions in memo form. Why would the counsel to the president become involved in defining what was and was not criminal by a few rogue officers at or below brigade level? Legal counsel to the president smells like and looks like and feels like something afoot considerably above brigade level. Why is it that no top government or Pentagon official expressed shock and outrage when the cat got out of the bag?  Their reactions were uniformly to run for deniability and if you're not part of the crime you don't need deniability.

Colin Powell looked stricken, but Powell was always pretty much out of the loop and he was watching his beloved Army get its reputation shellacked.

I’ve been in the army, at precisely the grunt level where most of the heat is being taken and I declare with absolute certainty that this kind of substantive abuse, particularly across a worldwide penal complex, is impossible without complicity all or most of the way up the chain of command. The Army has not yet officially announced the results of their investigation, but they briefed senior members of the Senate Armed Services Committee.  That’s what’s called a will this thing fly? briefing before going on record.  If not too much shit hits the fan in committee, we'll go with it. You can bet there’s huge pressure on the committee to accept this ludicrous piece of investigative smoke so Rummy, Alberto Gonzales, the discredited Ashcroft and Paul Wolfowitz can get on with the business of deniability, for themselves as well as their president.

The military has been enormously damaged by this steam-rollering on the part of Donald Rumsfeld. It will not recover itself by issuing a report no one believes to be anything but a palliative, rather than a self-examination of how one misunderstanding led to so many others.  The military misunderstood the limits of constitutional civilian control, allowing Rumsfeld an unprecedented degree of civilian contempt for the senior officers across all services. It allowed itself to be bamboozled into a war for which it was ill prepared, allowing Rumsfeld and Cheney to literally waltz it off its feet.

Now those chickens have come home to roost and the stakes are such that yet another stumbling performance is being staged by the Inspector General.  All we can hope is that John Warner, chairman of the armed Services Committee, isn’t going to buy it.

The Essence of Being American

The choicest or most essential or most vital part of some idea or experience defines essence and if America is an idea then Woody Norris is as much its essence as anyone.

I like the thought of America as an idea far better than its more usual worldwide definition as super-power, leader of the free world or any of the other misrepresentations. It’s the idea of America that inspired centuries of immigration. Streets paved with gold is an idea, certainly no reality, as is unlimited opportunity and the right to be whatever and whoever you desire. The American reality is often harsh, sometimes unfair, occasionally wrongheaded but the idea of America is what carries us through the lumps and bumps.

So then, who is this Woody Norris I have chosen as my representative?

Woody’s given name is Elwood Norris and he’s an inventor. What better choice for iconography in the matter of this country than an inventor. Franklin, Fulton, Jefferson, Whitney and Morse come immediately to mind and yet the very core of our speciality as a nation, it seems to me, springs from the minds of the lesser-knowns. That’s not meant to be a put-down to Woody, but he’s hardly of rock-star fame. A few highlights of his career from NewsMax bring into focus this 2005 winner of the so-called Oscar for Inventors, the $500,000 annual Lemelson-MIT Prize, the largest single cash award for invention in the United States.

Woody makes me grin because his two most recent inventions both attend to things that interest me, flying and noise. In the noise department I’ve often wished for some sort of hand-held terminator device that I could point at boom-boxes or those ubiquitous speakers that increasingly blare from store fronts or make conversation difficult in restaurants. My invention would merely wreck the innards in a surreptitious wisp of smoke and bring blessed silence, Woody’s is far more sophisticated and useful. Norris invented a focused beam of sound waves, sort of like focusing a beam of light. Known as HyperSonic Sound, it generates ultrasonic (above the range of human hearing) sound waves, which can be focused in a tight beam rather than spreading out in all directions. Passing through the air, they generate lower frequency sounds that people can hear, so by merely stepping into the beam, listeners hear sound someone standing a foot or more away can't detect.

"It's going to quiet everything down," Norris said. "If you don't want to be bothered by it, you step to one side and you don't hear it." Thank you Woody, we may at last be able to have some control over drowning in noise.

Norris’s second current invention (he has hundreds patented) is flight for we who merely want to fly with no more training than driving a car. Actually a motorcycle in this case, but at the cost of about two full-dressed Harleys.

A licensed pilot, Woody began working on his AirScooter helicopter project out of frustration with ultralight airplanes. Although these small, low-flying aircraft generally don't require regular pilots' licenses, Norris says they are risky and still require too much training.

He hired engineers to help create an ultralight helicopter weighing less than 300 lbs. with counter-rotating blades that neutralize the gyroscopic effect that necessitates tail rotors in conventional copters. Norris says a novice with little or no flying experience can learn to fly in an hour or so. He expects his single-passenger, ultralight helicopter will become commercially available sometime before year's end for $47,000 apiece.

Those ideas and others have earned Norris 47 U.S. patents over four decades in fields including engineering and medicine - not bad for a guy who started taking apart radios at age 8 but never earned a college degree. "I'm interested in everything," he told The Associated Press in a recent interview. But he’s no Edison he says. "That guy used to work and not sleep. I'm the laziest inventor you ever met. My inventing is in my head - I don't have to be in the lab working and sweating."

Lest you think Woody’s a dreamer, his American Technology Corp., which he founded in 1980 is working on commercial applications with automobile companies, supermarket chains, museums, airports, NASA and the Department of Defense. In cars, his sound technology could allow parents to listen to their favorite music in the front seats while kids in back choose their own. A supermarket promoting a sale on cereal could project a sales pitch to shoppers in the cereal aisle, which makes me wonder about the distraction of wondering from beam to beam, but we’ll see. It’s got to be an improvement..

Woody’s going to use his Lemelson-MIT prize to establish a foundation to help struggling independent inventors. "I spent much of my life dying for somebody to help me even file for a patent or make a prototype," he said. "I understand that."

That’s an American attitude in the best and most generous sense of the term, the sort of thing that has made us the holding pond for every brain-drained society in the world. What says more about American values than that the top guy, in the flush of recognition and celebration, thinks about his competitors on the lower rungs of invention’s ladder?

Just gotta make you smile.

Dissent and My Right to It

My earliest political memories are of my old daddy’s raging against FDR.  Daddy was a conservative in the days when that term didn’t carry quite such a big stick and was about actually conserving things.  I grew up with that familial heritage and am to this day conservative in the ways that I have always defined it.  That definition has been hijacked to a very large degree and I hardly recognize those who espouse conservatism today.

At some distance, as I live now in Europe, I am appalled at what I read and see of dissent as our president tours America with his ‘town hall’ style meetings on Social Security reform. Even The American Conservative magazine is upset and ran a very-worth-the-reading article nearly eighteen months ago titled Free-Speech Zone, The Administration Quarantines Dissent.  In it they chase down a number of fascinating threads that produce a fabric of intimidation. We didn't used to be (since McCarthy) much interested in being intimidated by our government and I hope that still holds true.

What I find most troubling is the hollow promise of allowing First Amendment dissent and then cordoning it off, out of sight and presumably out of mind, in secure zones. Secure against whom? These secure zones are so secure that even the press is not allowed access to the protesters, rounded up and penned off like cattle. Secret Service agent Brian Marr explained to National Public Radio, “These individuals may be so involved with trying to shout their support or non-support that inadvertently they may walk out into the motorcade route and be injured. And that is really the reason why we set these places up, so we can make sure that they have the right of free speech, but, two, we want to be sure that they are able to go home at the end of the evening and not be injured in any way.”

Yeah, that's the reason, Brian.

Essentially, thepurpose behind public protest of this type is twofold; to show our president our individual disapproval and to demonstrate to that evening’s TV audience that such a protest exists. It’s allowed everywhere in American society, from the Michael Jackson trial to the steps of Congress. It’s aggravated every president since we’ve had presidents, but not this one. 

The ACLU, along with several other organizations, is suing the Secret Service for what it charges is a pattern-and-practice of suppressing protesters at Bush events in Arizona, California, Connecticut, Michigan, New Jersey, New Mexico, Texas, and elsewhere. An ACLU spokesman said of the protesters, “The individuals we are talking about didn’t pose a security threat; they posed a political threat.” In a May 2003 terrorist advisory, the Homeland Security Department warned local law enforcement agencies to keep an eye on anyone who “expressed dislike of attitudes and decisions of the U.S. government.”

Excuse me? Keep an eye?  On my old daddy? 

Since a controversial Ashcroft 2002 memo, the FBI’s approach towards protesters establishes its “belief that dissident speech and association should be prevented because they were incipient steps towards the possible ultimate commission of act which might be criminal,” according to a Senate report. Prevent dissident (free) speech because it is an incipient step towards a possible commission of what might be criminal. That’s pretty much of a stretch. My dictionary defines incipient as ‘only partly in existence’ so we now have the FBI formulating policy on possibilities that are only partly in existence and might be criminal.

That kind of policy would have wrapped up Al Capone in an eyewink, but we are not Al Capone, we are a 62-year-old man holding up a sign, “War is good business. Invest your sons.” That is a heartfelt message from a man who's old enough to understand what's at stake and  involved enough to show up and make a statement. But he was not seen by his president or the press and that's wrong.

So, here I am guys.  Anyone who reads this blog or my associated writing site knows damned well that my opinions often express dislike of attitudes and decisions of the U.S. government.  And I guess it’s no secret, because my blog was quoted earlier in the week on CNN for a  comment on Tom DeLay and they mentioned me by name as well as the country in which I live.

I’m waiting for the knock on the door, as Vaclav Havel waited in this same country sixteen short years ago.

The Row Over Roe

Charles Krauthammer is one of my favorite conservative columnists and his Judicial Insanity piece in the Washington Post takes a fairly balanced look at Tom DeLay and others' recent foaming at the mouth concerning judicial activism.  Until the sixth paragraph, when he finally gets down to Roe vs Wade.  He's still balanced, but I think he's wrong.

He asks “What other advanced democracy would radically legalize abortion by judicial decree rather than by democratic will expressed through legislatures or referendums?”

Well Charles, one answer to that is that it’s always been the duty of the courts to represent those who are unable to get a fair hearing by other means.  Legislatures for the most part control access to referendums.  Abortion legislation has been unrelentingly stopped dead in the male dominated state and federal legislatures by male dominated religious institutions. There is not even a particle of doubt that if men bore children this legislative access to abortion would have been law for centuries.

Thus approximately 160 million American women have been essentially disenfranchised on this issue.

Krauthammer quotes Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s comment that Roe vs Wade “halted a political process that was moving in a reform direction and thereby, I believe, prolonged divisiveness and deferred stable settlement of the issue.” She is probably right, but reform was moving at a glacial pace and meanwhile the rich were getting their abortions in foreign countries and the less rich were maimed and/or dying in back-alley butcher shops.

Krauthammer makes an interesting point in comparing Roe, which he judges to be interference by the courts, to Brown vs Board of Education, which he considers an entirely proper, even glorious end to Jim Crow.  “But Brown was different,” he writes. “The race cases were cases of a disenfranchised citizenry. The representative branches of government were legitimately superseded because they were not representative. Millions of blacks could not vote. Millions of blacks could not participate in civic life.  The courts had to act to end this aberration and injustice, and, to their glory, they did.”

Charles, you’ve just made the case for Roe.

There are more ways to be disenfranchised than not being able to vote. To be female and because you are female to be stopped time and again at the gates of the church and the portals of our legislative assemblies is to be disenfranchised in the most accurate and penetrating definition of the word.

No man would stand for such abuse and no woman should have to, not ever again.

The Day the Lights Went Out

I read some years ago that we could be crippled as a nation by detonation of a nuclear bomb in the sub-stratosphere, not all that far up. The electro-magnetic disturbance would effectively put us out of action and I have worried since that time, not so much about nuclear attack, but about our increasing dependency on computers.

Now comes Senator Jon Kyl, not exactly a household name, but the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is no small job.  A name has been put to this disturbance, electro-magnetic pulse, or EMP.  Senator Kyl suggests in an editorial that it doesn’t take much sophistication to chunk a nuclear device a couple miles up into the air, which is all it would take.  Scud missiles are cheap, readily available and capable. Any old rusted-out tramp steamer would suffice as a platform and international waters would be close enough. El Qaeda owns a bunch of such vessels.

Pretty scary.

So, okay, you say. Damned inconvenient and you remember the last northeast power outage and the way it screwed everything up for a week or so. Not this time, baby. An EMP event at this stage of our preparedness would put us out of power for a matter of years, if not permanently. And here we’ve been going along with Tom Ridge making us take our shoes off at airports and thinking it meant something.

The short list of life without electricity:

• Panic as we wait for news.  No radio, no TV, no way for government to communicate.
• After a week, most all food and medicines are gone because they come by truck, trucks run on gas and gas is pumped by electricity. Run out the tank, then leave your car by the side of the road.
• All commerce stops for the same reasons. No work to go to even if you could get there.
• Water stops flowing. Toilets don’t flush, no shower in the morning, no bottled water to drink.
• By the end of the first week, we've all stopped being in this together and anarchy takes over as the hungry and thirsty roam the streets breaking into whatever can be broken into, taking what they want, including what you have.
• Tens of thousands begin to die, turning to hundreds of thousands, turning to millions.  Disease ravages the starving and everyone is starving.
• Suddenly our quiet suburban neighborhood has become Blade Runner.
• There is no contact with anyone not in walking distance and it’s not safe to walk. Husbands away on business never return.
• The strong begin to kill the weak.

Society depends upon its support structure and we’re a long way from horse-and-buggy days.  In the scant century since those times we have become entirely dependent upon third-party sources for every form of sustenance, transport, communication, commerce and entertainment. Think about that.  Every source!  We have no garden, no well, no horse nor even a stove to heat or cook with wood.  We are no longer conversant with even the basic skills of survival

As Kyl points out in his editorial, the Sept 11th Commission said that our greatest failure was that of imagination.  We couldn’t conceive of someone flying aircraft into our tall buildings. 

That failure pales by our current reluctance to face both the consequence and the necessary preventive actions to recover in the event of an EMP attack.

Bolton Might be Bright or He Might Just be Nuts

I don’t know John Bolton, but I know his type and that he probably has a very high IQ, thinks himself right when he’s thought something through and is aggressive, perhaps too aggressive making it happen.  It’s also possible that he’s merely an out-of-control egomaniac.  There’s something undeniably strange about brown hair and a white moustache.

Conclusion; brilliant CEO material, disastrous as a diplomat.

Which makes him exactly the wrong choice for the UN ambassadorial job to which he has been nominated by the president.  This is not a creative position, doesn’t require the ability to weigh and consider options, has no need for policy formation and it’s not a job where you win by coming down hard.  It’s an advocacy job, a pipe-smoker’s role, building (dare I say it?) coalitions and supporting positions advanced primarily by the State Department. Bolton is a proven disaster and a bully as an advocate.

It’s the unspooling of the tightly held evidence concerning his near-manic interactions with subordinates that make him the clear choice for not being chosen. Timing is everything and a single tick of the clock proved one click too many, changing Ohio Republican Sen. George Voinovich's mind, opening a trickle of dissention within the committee that threatened to become a torrent.  Chairman Richard Luger knows a trickle when he sees it and thus the committee adjourned for three weeks to 'seek out additional testimony.' Three days would have meant trouble, three weeks means it’s over.

Whether or not Bolton suffers from it, I suggest that government is not a comfortable place for intellect. The whole setting is wrong. It’s an arena far more suited to ego and the cult of personality, yet bathed constantly in the requirement of consensus.  It's a dealmaker’s environment and this requirement is the antithesis of intellect.  To exercise intellectual capacity is to weigh issues one against another and make choices from positions based upon facts at hand.  Government turns intellectual brandy into the watered wine of political compromise. It's supposed to.  It was designed that way.

Back a couple of decades Lee Iacocca, the CEO who revived a bankrupt Chrysler Corporation was a hot prospect for president.  Knowing himself well enough to turn away from what was likely to have been a successful run, Iacocca claimed that political compromise was too far from the autocracy he was used to (and needed) in running a corporation. Government is the largest of corporations, yet it runs on consensus, a sort of sputtering on five out of eight cylinders that is its frustration as well as salvation.

Not a place for John Bolton, who’s been called a serial-abuser by former State Department intelligence chief Carl W. Ford, Jr.. Bolton has operated within government for decades but the system has found him out in this recent foray beyond his pay-grade.

It’s government sputtering along in its majestic commonality that sunk the Bolton nomination, because I’m going to stick my neck out and declare it dead in committee.  Like Tom DeLay, Bolton attracted flies long enough for hounds to follow a smell that was not yet a stench.  That extra tick of the clock.  And it’s the flies that save us all. 

Aggressive intellect is the stuff of revolution and anarchy, not representative government.  The democratic process discourages aggressive intellectuals and when they venture above the pay-grade supporting their talent, they’re stamped out like a bug on the pavement. Henry Kissinger didn't work after Nixon.

The founders, perhaps the finest congregation of intellectuals ever gathered, delivered to their new nation a governmental construct that denied government by intellectual.  Jefferson was against it, advocating authority by an ‘intellectual aristocracy,’ but he lost out to populism.

Undoubtedly wise.  We are muddlers, we Americans, and at our best and least dangerous while muddling.

Closing Time

I lift my glass to the awful truth
Which you can’t reveal to the ears of youth
Except to say it isn’t worth a dime
And the whole dam place goes crazy twice
And it’s once for the Devil and it’s once for Christ
But the boss don’t like these dizzy heights
We’re busted in the blinding lights
Of closing time
                                             Leonard Cohen

In the days of the Robber Barons like Andrew Carnegie, John Jacob Astor and John D. Rockefeller, their annual incomes were as individually outrageous as are those of today’s hired guns, the asset-grabbing CEO’s.  There is a difference though.  Carnegie and his like were owners. They were the guys who put together consortiums and their financial decisions were made and shaped in the image of their egos. Just as they had marble busts chiseled to outlive themselves, so they were committed to the long-term research, development and financing of their business interests; Carnegie at U.S. Steel, Astor (originally) in the fur trade and Rockefeller at Standard Oil.

There were strengths in that sort of commitment and great crimes against humanity as well.  My old daddy used to say that behind every major fortune was a crime. The old crimes were mostly of coercion; company stores, script and child labor. We have forgiven those early offenders, but Carnegie had to build a library in nearly every community in America as penance.

I don’t know what the new guys in town have in mind, but it ain't libraries. Guys like ‘Chainsaw’ Al Dunlap earned his nickname by restructuring companies, selling off non-core business, firing staff then moving on. Stockholder value is everything in the business of clear-cutting corporations, corporate purpose don't mean a thing and hired guns are the weapon of choice.  Even Wal-Mart, that discounter we all love to hate hasn’t sold itself down the river as have so many American icons, bought, merged, repackaged, sold off in pieces and disparaged, all in the name of short-term profit. It’s small wonder GM trembles among carmakers.  The great wonder is that we have any corporate power left in a business world we have so mismanaged.

Three other ‘new guys’ made headlines this past week as Viacom sneaked it’s compensation disclosure under the door at the SEC . . . after the Friday market closed.  Viacom, which took such a bath last year that it lost 18% of it’s total share value, paid its top three executives $160 million for doing the damage.  Hewlett Packard paid  Carly Fiorina $43 mil to please stop ignoring her CEO duties and just go away.  So there’s a payday in doing good as a CEO, but the really major dough is paid for fucking up or chainsawing the body into disposable parts.  Today’s Harvard Business School graduate has been given, at great educational cost, a chop-shop mentality.  Where are those Mafia Dons when we can really use them as tenured professors?

It’s a pretty good bet that Dunlap, Redstone, Freston and Moonves (the Viacom three) won’t build any community libraries.  One doubts they will build anything, because the riches they’ve accumulated (stolen?) aren’t something they’ll boast much about except in golf foursomes.  Carnegie wanted his name known.

Redstone, Freston and Moonves wanted theirs slipped under the door at closing time.

Doesn’t Cost All That Much to Influence Your Senator or Representative

“A lobbyist is a person who’s supposed to help a politician
make up his mind . . . not only help him, but pay him”
                                                   Will Rogers

It’s stunning how cheap influence comes in Washington. Lockheed Martin came up with $39 million last year to lock down $94 billion in contracts which, if my math is correct is about a dollar for every $2,500.  Talk about return on investment. Not to take away from Lockheed, which is a fine company until and unless we learn otherwise as we did with giant Boeing. But the fact still is that influence is cheap.

I wrote a piece some time back about where the money mostly goes and how we might slow it down, but small business and state government are in on this as well. The US Chamber of Commerce coughed up $193 million and 1,400 local governments sidled up to the trough to the tune of about $35 million. That’s chump-change for corporations doing billions.  And if you wonder why your Congressman or Senator isn’t driving a Ferrari, it’s because most of that dough goes to Political Action Committees (PACS) where your hardworking congress made it legal to contribute in a legislator's name when straight-out bribes got a little iffy.

They get political action all right.  That’s how the recently overhauled and banker-friendly bankruptcy legislation got passed without further regulating credit card issuers who bankrupt the marginal with 36% late-payment fees.  The marginal just got further marginalized and are now on the brink of paying what the mafia considers juice loans on their credit cards.

There’s a certain nostalgia in writing this piece, as it brings to memory another called PAC Formed for Americans to Buy Back Government, the thrust of which was to suggest we citizens get together and pay for the government we need and can’t get. Tax deductible. Perhaps we might be able to outbid the NRA and in agreement with 63% of the voters, return some safety to our neighborhoods.

While I am amazed at how cheap our legislators can be bought, I’m not against lobbying per se.  The theory is right on and inseparable from good government, it’s merely the money that I both decry and disparage---one shouldn’t buy an elected representative, but it’s embarrassing to buy them so cheap. No, lobbying is essential, for no man can know the intricacies of the CIA as well as the CTA (Chicago Transit Authority) and to mix them up prior to a vote on spending might substantially improve Chicago’s public transportation without making even a dent in the CIA modus operandi.

Hmmm, come to think of it, maybe pay-as-you-go lobbying isn’t such a good idea after all.