The W Legacy . . .the Reagan Legacy and Presidential Legacies, in General

There is a story that, after the inauguration of John Kennedy on January 20, 1961, Dwight Eisenhower and his wife, Mamie, thanked the White Staff, got into their old station-wagon (stuffed with suitcases and souvenirs) and drove home to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. I like the idea of the old general and his wife just driving home.

However, legacies are more complex. I'll give away my plot here:

• Reagan didn't plan for a successor; I don't think he cared, but Daddy Bush was there to pick up the opportunity.
• Clinton thought he would go on in power forever, in one form or another.
• Baby Bush didn't plan for a successor; he didn't care, either.
• Obama came into office thinking he, too, would go on forever; we'll see how he changes when he realizes he won't.

I like Baby Bush for the villain of this particular blog, but you'll have to read

down to find out how and why.

Ike left Richard Nixon in the wings, but between the stuffed ballot boxes in Illinois and Nixon deciding to lose, rather than make a fuss,there was JFK . . .and then the assassination and LBJ's disastrous application of legislative prowess to the executive branch . . .and then Nixon's return, disgrace and resignation, leaving Gerald Ford . . .and then the un-Republican Carter . . .and un-Carter Reagan and his VP, H.W. "Daddy" Bush . . .then the un-Bush Clinton elected because of Perot's third-party candidacy . . .and "Baby" Bush . . .and Obama.

I'm reminded of H.L. Mencken's statement: The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are.

However, all of this is a digression. Today I am contemplating legacy in terms of staff and leadership. In Biblical terms:

• Ike begat Dick and Dick begat Ford.
• JFK begat LBJ.
• Reagan begat Daddy Bush and Daddy Bush (with an interruption) begat Baby Bush.

The discontinuities here are Carter, Reagan, Clinton and Obama.

Legacies take several forms:

v The received legacy – talent that occupies the upper echelons of an administration

o The non-political appointments of the preceding administrations which are held over. Federal judicial appointments are the clearest example, but there are many.

o The pool of talent of the incoming party, from which political appointments will be made. For example, Dick Cheney was chief of staff for Ford, Secretary of Defense for H.W. (during the 1st Gulf War) before he was BabyBush's Vice President.

v The bequeathed legacy – what is left behind as an administration exits the Executive Branch

o The political talent that is permitted to develop and is bequeathed to future administrations.

o The non-political appointments which are made. Again, judicial appointments and inspectors-general are good examples.

o The identity that the administration and party leave in popular opinion when that administration departs. These days, this is called “branding.” BabyBush's bloated budgets and erratic leadership bequeathed no coherent branding. The Anointed Won's brand is "Change we can believe in," if you can continue to believe it.

o The issues that are dealt with – resolved or kicked far enough down the road that the subsequent administration does not have to confront them, if they choose not to. Examples of this type are difficult to recall.

o The issues that it fails to deal with, which are then passed on to the next administration. Iraq and Iran are two of many examples. Social Security is another.

. . . continued here. . .

The Untold Story of Geo.H.W.Bush and Ronald Reagan

While it is difficult not to guffaw at this story . . .and to dismiss it as gossip . . .what I am describing was a fundamental dynamic of 12 years of American history - the eight years of the Reagan Presidency and highly formative of the subsequent four years of H.W.'s Presidency. Surely, too, W's impressions of the presidency were affected by his father's experiences.

Geo. H.W.Bush was the son of a senator. He went to Phillips Exeter and Yale. He gave heroic service as a pilot in WWII. He campaigned for the GOP nomination in 1980 and lost to Ronald Reagan. Reagan invited him to be the vice-presidential nominee.

And, they never talked to one another again.

Geo. H.W.Bush was the first Vice President to occupy the new V.P. Residence on Naval Observatory Hill in Georgetown. For eight years, his one sworn duty was to call the White House to see if Ronnie were still breathing . . .and his duties were done.

I'm not a fan of H.W. He had a major role in The Bay of Pigs while he was at the CIA. I suspect that his talents were mostly mediocre and that he successes in life were rewards for reliability and family connections. However, as a pilot myself, I find his war record and his reluctance to exploit his war record for political gain to be impressive.

Regardless, my point here is:

H.W. wasn't ever invited to the White House for eight years, not even invited to the state dinner when Queen Elizabeth II visited the Reagan White House.

Imagine how you would feel, sitting up on that hill for eight years with nothing to do, as Vice President of the United States!

Also, imagine how it felt to be sitting at lunch with some Washington character and get the call that the President had just be shot . . .by the son of the man sitting across from you! Talk about wanting to bury an incident!

Reagan recovers and, still, eventually H.W. becomes President.

I think that a great deal of H.W.'s impetuousness during his single term as President stems from eight years of humiliation.

I also think that the press showed uncharacteristic gentility or altogether characteristic stupidity in failing to comment on Baby Bush's immediate appointment of Daddy's State Department press spokesperson, Margaret Tutwiler, to be ambassador to Morocco (and, later, Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs). That's how that family deals with family secrets; all the more reason to respect and sympathize with Barbara Bush - to bear five children and support that man, to live with this sort of thing and have it abetted by her son.

I don’t think the Obama Administration took over GM. I think GM took over the Obama Administration.

SO YOU’VE GOT A BLOATED, UNTRUSTWORTHY PRODUCT THAT PEOPLE AREN’T BUYING AND DON’T LIKE — WHAT’S YOUR SOLUTION? Run more advertising saying that it’s great!

I don’t think the Obama Administration took over GM. I think GM took over the Obama Administration.

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The above is from Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds - showing why he's the Big Daddy of mostly-political bloggers.

Support Democracy in Iran !!!

I do not know how to support Iranian democracy at this moment. I do know that we must - as a moral imperative, as well as a hope to avoid war soon and a nuclear confrontation sooner or later.

The anecdotal news from Iran is blood-curdling, hard to verify and likely true.

• Raped; then hanged. This article recounts a man's confession of "marrying" female protestors so that they could be executed, since the Koran forbids execution of a virgin.
• This article recounts the existence of special prisons to "break" political opposition, where the incidents in the above article took place.
  

The Obama administration should be doing a lot. The world press should be giving more attention to Iran.

Hillary Clinton should be making big noises here and there's nothing but Bubba bringing back babes from North Korea to a welcome choreographed by LA public-relations firms. The situation in Iran is reminiscent of Bubba's inaction in Bosnia while Muslim women were dying of dehydration tied to beds in Rape Motels.

The details are appalling but ineluctable, making these questions clear and obvious:

• Why all this silence?

• What does it cost us to protest these travesties?

• What does it cost our souls to fail to protest these travesties?

Economic Viet Nam

2009-2010 will see a turning point in American politics analogous to the public repudiation of the Viet Nam War. It will cross political lines and generational lines and racial lines. It's coming.

It's coming because people all over the United States know from their own personal experience that the economic news out of Washington has no correspondence to the truth, as they can see it every day of their lives. Moreover, their state and local governments confirm their own experience and deny the statements of the federal government.

The economic policies put in place by Barack Obama have not been focused on improving the living conditions of his constituents.

Obama's policies have been narrowly focused on improving the economic indicators.

The map is not the territory. That's how this situation has come to be.

Why has this situation come to be? It doesn't matter why. Whether the Obama Whitehouse has done this cynically, thinking that people can be convinced to deny what they see with their own lying eyes . . .or naively, thinking that conditions will be improved if only the indices can be brought back up . . .there's no denying that this has been done expertly.

Cash-for-Clunkers: Gross National Product is designed to be a measure of over-all wealth creation - new goods and services. New Car Sales are an increase to GNP and national wealth; used-car sales are a transfer of an old toy to a new owner and do not count. The destruction of several million working automobiles does not affect GNP. Increased prices of used cars and used car parts, due to the destruction of several million cars, are weighted by the volume of sales - so the rising prices are washed out by the destroyed cars taken off the market.

What's Wrong With This Picture? Millions of real people are affected by the higher price of used cars and used-car repair. Everyone is affected by the debt and interest payments on $3 billion in subsidies for new car purchases.

Stimulus/Porkulus Package: The money provided in this bill has been poorly accounted for and disbursements have been timed and focused to manipulate various economic indices and to reward political allies of President Obama.

What's Wrong With This Picture? The management of publicly-held stock companies have a duty to their shareholders to maximize shareholder value. After seeing how these appropriations are being disbursed and how GM/Chrysler dealerships with Republican affiliations were closed as part of the bankruptcies of these companies, no further lessons are necessary. No commercial interests will oppose Barack Obama.

When Obama stands before the cameras has says x, he believes it . . .while virtually all of his viewers know that what he says is the not the truth.

Soon, this is what you will see:

• politicians becoming frantic, desperate tap-dancing-magicians - attempting to be all things to all people until they can figure out what will keep them in office
• the public, as voters, becoming angry and nihilistic
• the public, as consumers, continuing to be too scared to support an economic recovery.

UPDATE: A few days after this posting, the Washington Post picked up on it: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/11/AR2009081100988.html?hpid=topnews

Icky Old Stuff - How Younger Voters Tune Out ObamaCare

What do voters under 40 make of the fracas over ObamaCare?

Does anyone over-40 remember what they thought of Social Security when they were younger? No, they don't. They never thought about it. Never. Social Security and Old Age were things that would never happen to them. Young folks still think that Old Age will never happen to them.

If anyone were driving the run-away bus that is the Republican Party, someone would be sparing some effort to educate younger voters. Younger voters have more to lose. Younger voters can be swayed by this issue, if they understand it. In a 50.1% electoral world, one would be wise to remain mindful of younger voters:

• Old age will happen to them.
• The younger they are, the more broken will be the system that they inherit.
• Young voters have more to lose, not less - financially and politically.
  
• Freedom and liberty issues will fall more heavily upon the young - required this and forbidden that. They will not be spared the life-style mandates that are embodied in the 1,300 pages of law.

But . . .nobody is driving the run-away bus.

Fake Statistics for a Spectacular Recovery - Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain

Aug 1, 2009 - headline:
U.S. Recession Worst Since Great Depression, Revised Data Show courtesy of Drudge and Bloomberg.

Behind the curtain and nearly un-reported was this boring July 31 news release from the Bureau of Economic Analysis at the Dept. of Commerce:

NATIONAL INCOME AND PRODUCT ACCOUNTS

GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT:  SECOND QUARTER 2009 (ADVANCE ESTIMATE)

COMPREHENSIVE REVISION:  1929 THROUGH FIRST QUARTER 2009

REVISED - All the economic data from the last 80 years has been revised; that's why the Recession was/is worse than previous reported (components re-weighted, in geekspeak). Gee, why? No answer. Gee, why now? No answer.

Permit me to make a cynical conjecture:

• All the data have been revised and their components re-weighted so that the likely path of this 2009-2012 recovery will appear more dramatic for the election purposes of the Democratic Party.
• The Bush-bits will be shown as worse than before and the Obama-bits will then resemble nothing so much as the Obamassiah himself - transcendent.
  
• The first step was to make the recession look worse.

Now the only thing that can go wrong is for the recovery to take an unexpected course . . . which is not all that unlikely.

The tip for this blog item came from economic analysis by Steven Hansen: http://seekingalpha.com/article/153061-the-great-recession-continues . Thanks to him.

Iran and Israel . . .Hot Air and Physics

Israel is facing the promise of annihilation from the ruling government of Iran.

Two Israeli governments have permitted themselves to be dithered (if that verb can be used in the passive voice) for at least two years by two US governments = nothing that anyone, anywhere, should be proud of.

The election protests in Iran have met with appalling repression and have given vain hope that military force will be unnecessary. More likely to be the case is that military force will make Iranian government reform more possible and more likely in the disorganization that will follow the Israeli strike.

At the moment, the timing comes down to physics:

• when Iranian bomb deployment becomes inevitable
• heat and humidity that affect the fuel/bomb/missile loads of the Israeli aircraft.

This has been an immense ugliness since Jimmy Carter failed to support the Shah and failed to support the frail democratic government that replaced the Shah - shades of Kerensky and Lenin's October Revolution that has made democracy impossible in Russia ever since.

There was a bizarre disinterest from both of W's Secretaries of State - Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice - in supporting pro-American demonstrations in Iran. Colin Powell replied to a question about his lack of interest thusly, "I don't think we should involve ourselves in a family dispute in Iran." Much, much better to let them develop nuclear weapons, rape and murder democratic demonstrators and put Israel in the inevitable position of contesting its annihilation.

All a matter of hot air and physics.

Cash for Clunkers . . . Will they do better with your appendix?

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Update - July 31 - AP reports that Cash For Clunkers program suspended because the number of rebates unprocessed in the system is unknown. USA Today spins the same story that the program is suspended until the $1 billion appropriation can be increased to $4 billion.
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Original Post -

The federal Cash For Clunkers program began July 1, but the regulations weren't ready for another three weeks. The program ends when the $1 billion is gone, so it's first come/first served. But the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration hasn't paid out any money yet because they can't get their "on-line" system to work.

Dealers are fronting the money in order to not lose sales. In the Twin Cities, not one dealer has been paid by the government. Not one. Dealers can't be sure when they'll be paid or if they'll be paid. What a great country!

Gee, aren't you glad it isn't your appendix that's waiting.

Congressman John Conyers. . . James Madison . . . and for some strange reason . . . . . .The Treasure of Sierra Madre .

July 29, 2009 - Congressman John Conyers (D-Michigan)*: “I love these members, they get up and say, ‘Read the bill. What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?”

February 27, 1788 - James Madison (later, fourth President of the United States) in Federalist Paper #62: "It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows what the law is today can guess what it will be tomorrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule which is little known, and less fixed?"


Dobbs: 'If you're the police where are your badges?'
Gold Hat: 'Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges! I don't have to show you any stinkin' badges!'

*from Wikipedia entry for John Conyers:

He is married to Monica Conyers, who is former President Pro-Tempore of the Detroit City Council and the subject of an ongoing FBI investigation into political corruption in the city, and who has pled guilty to conspiring to commit bribery.

I thank www.amusedcynic.com for this contrast of Conyers and Madison.

ObamaCare = Cap & Trade = Letting Your 8-Year-Old Take the Family Car

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Update - Life immitating this blog: Sheriff's Office releases video of Congress managing health care.

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Original Post -

Don't be naive!!!

• Letting "the government" regulate something does not convene the best and the brightest to govern in Socratic fashion.
• Letting "the government" regulate something is turning some unknown 30-year-old lawyer loose to concatenate sonorous phrases, subject only to
• demands from legislators and lobbyists
• demands from the White House
• empire building by career bureaucrats
  
• screw the consequences; the 30-year-old lawyer will be elsewhere by the time there are consequences (judicial reviews, prison sentences, citizen protests).
  
• See my May 26, 2009, post, below, entitled "Two Fuses linked all the nastiest bits of the 2008 Economic Collapse" for a good example.
  

In 1972, I was in the corporate headquarters of Norton Simon, Inc., then owner of Hunt Foods, Wesson Oil, Canada Dry, McCall Pattern/Publishing (and soon: Max Factor, Halston, Avis). Nixon - see how his then-speechwriter thinks about all this - imposed wage and price controls. Some 30-year-old lawyer was writing what became thousands of pages of regulations that sounded great and every single case I handled went between the cracks of the regulations. There were criminal penalties for violating regulations that had never been previously applied or litigated; no one knew what they meant, but I could go to jail for doing it wrong.

Later, in Singapore, I got to know a guy who had handled the same work for another major corporation. He confided his company's point of view toward the same wage and price controls: utter contempt. "We shipped off the paperwork and forgot it. The dumb bastards were buried in exceptions and never dug their way out." I had to give high points for bravado, given the penalties provided in the law.

I wasn't born when Roosevelt set up the Interstate Commerce Commission, with the assurance that every trucker would receive documented rights to carry whatever commodities he was currently carrying; no one would lose anything. No one lost their past, but the future became an expensive mess. When my employer had to ship bridge-beams to somewhere in the Mid-West and the trucker didn't have interstate rights to carry bridge-beams - which were separate rights from structural steel or a hundred other varieties of steel - the bridge construction waited while we called around for an available trucker with the right trailer and the right rights. We had to pay the published rate (the government set rates for every commodity) and "fees."

Welcome to Cap & Trade {Waxman-Markey} carbon rights. Initially, it will be a mad grab for as much as everyone (everyone on the inside) can grab. And, then, everything that could be grabbed will be auctioned to the highest bidder - creating money out of a new commodity (the right to pollute) and punishing the chumps who aren't in on the game. Twenty years ago, the Federal Communications Commission declared that cable-television rights were a local monopoly owned by each city, township, whatever . . .and those cable monopolies were auctioned off faster than the speed of light while those transactions never quite saw the light of day - who paid what to whom and whose brother-in-law owned what - and why everybody's local politicians wore grins? Remember how cable-television was expensive and sucked until competition was permitted?

Welcome to ObamaCare, where you can't have more of this or less of that unless five criteria have been met retroactive to the year preceding the onset of the condition or the five-doctor governing board has agreed to an exception. The Secretary of Health and Human Services will issue guidelines to determining the sex of a patient. There's no end; the 1,000 page bill is just the beginning.

Don't forget that these 30-year-olds and their typists make mistakes. EconomicsofContempt.blogspot.com has a nifty item about new banking regulations that include compulsory bankruptcy for the largest financial institutions in the US - compulsory - and theorizes that this is a mistake. Ooops.

There is no way things get better or easier or cheaper when you impose government adminstration - because there is no incentive to improve and no alternative to compliance. The powers of government are wisely used only sparingly because every use is an opportunity for corruption and stagnation.

This is no way to maintain the integrity of your body or your life or your family. This is no way to maintain the growth and opportunity that has made the United States the leader of the world in freedom and innovation and quality of life.

The Voodoo Trifecta of Nonsense- - - Memetics, Hermeneutics & Semiotics !!!

Many years ago, I issued a fatwa on Umberto Eco for his intellectual depravity in The Name of the Rose and in Foucault’s Pendulum. Umberto Baby is a professor of semiotics. Those books looked at history and speculated exquisitely on what events might mean without ever providing a definitive insight or resolution. It was the intellectual equivalent of sexual awakening without sexual satisfaction. The fatwa remains outstanding.

In the exquisite debris about “structures of knowledge,” there ineluctably stands the principle known as The Fallacy of the Stolen Principle. When someone uses a principle to deny that same principle, a swindle is afoot. Specifically, when someone says, “There’s no such thing as truth,” it is reasonable to note that if the statement is true – or could be true – then the statement is false. The statement is “stealing” the concept of truth in order to deny that truth exists. Similarly, when someone (my favorite villain is the relatively-dead post-modernist Jacques Derrida) says that all meaning is relative to culture (or cuisine or couture), he/she/it is stealing the concept of an absolute in order to assert that everything is relative.

However, assaults on meaning and drastic surgery in education have resulted in a general public that does not learn primarily through the Aristotelian/Thomistic system of logic – through principle, induction and deduction. The general means of learning in western culture have become simple, inane repetition by electronic media. This is actually a degeneration of western culture into the older tribal habits of other parts of the world and of pre-Enlightenment Europe. The scarcity of American math and science students is partially accounted for by this re-primitivization of American education and culture.

The Voodoo Trifecta of Non-sense actually has something to contribute to this re-primitivized, media-saturated cultural phenomenon because the question remains how to educate – or, at least, motivate – people who are inured of reason?

The answer is, obviously, voodoo! You get witch-doctors to conjure the images and associations that will motivate the enormous numbers of people who do not know how to think analytically or synthetically.

How else do you account for the election on a platform of hope and change with no specifics? How else do you account for the legislature passing precedent-shattering laws while admitting that no one has read them? How else do you account for the White House spending $500,000/week on media management?

If the Republicans think they have a prayer to win in 2010 or 2012, they better begin with understanding this process. See a prior blog entry entitled “Defining Failure Before the Next Election.”

I can even recommend a witchdoctor: me.

Robert McNamara (1916-2009) A lifetime of failure – his and ours.

Robert McNamara failed at Ford, failed at Defense and failed at the World Bank. Such a life of consistent, high-profile failure says a lot about the world in which he failed. His credentials and intellect were universally respected in his day, but were inadequate. Why were they – and he – so universally acclaimed in the midst of manifest failure? Who was kidding whom?

In a few paragraphs, one cannot do comprehensive justice to the compelling failings of Robert McNamara. He “rationalized” Ford, leaving it rigid and unprepared for changes in labor, technology, consumer taste and competition. He “rationalized” as Secretary of Defense, using a Wagnerian hellish brew of ignorance and power to kill millions and accomplish nothing. He rationalized the lending program at the World Bank, supporting old political structures and creating destructive economic structures to the extent that the World Bank – 30 years later – still privately regrets what was done and still acts to atone for the misery inflicted on hundreds of millions.

Robert McNamara was a failure as a man mostly because he either ignored or could not see the futility of his ideas and actions. Robert McNamara was also a failure of his time – that his approach was lauded and his failures unseen or ignored for nearly his entire lifetime by the politicians and press. The fruit of his life was extraordinary evil.

My opinion is that McNamara was granted exceptional trust and power precisely because the world was changing rapidly. Neither politicians nor press could get a firm intellectual grasp on what was happening. They gave the whole over to Robert McNamara – “the numbers man” - in blind, primitive hope that he understood what they could not. The political, intellectual and moral failings of everyone involved were immense.

None of the above addresses the irony that the political left now blames McNamara when he was of the left, promoted and supported by the left. The political left now makes mighty noises about McNamara so that no one looks behind the curtain – at the responsibility and guilt that the left desperately hopes to deflect and avoid.

Even George W. Bush was the Democrats' Fault !!!

Ann Richards was a straight-talking, admitted ex-drunk who won the Texas Governorship in 1990. You cannot imagine a more likeable and liked governor. Even the Republicans had affection for her. Her magazine cover on the Harley was preceded by another cover where she took off a cowboy hat to reveal her hair done up in the shape of her hat.

She is famous for her opinions:

• Poor George, he can't help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.
• I've always said that in politics, your enemies can't hurt you, but your friends will kill you.
• I believe in recovery, and I believe that as a role model I have the responsibility to let young people know that you can make a mistake and come back from it.
• I have always had the feeling I could do anything and my dad told me I could. I was in college before I found out he might be wrong.

I lived in Texas at the time and I thought Ann Richards could be trusted even when I didn't agree with her because she had her own integrity. She was great!

And, then, she vetoed a law permitting the licensed concealed carry of handguns. She believed it was a bad idea. Texans were incensed and unforgiving. She lost her bid for re-election . . .to George W. Bush. No one knew W. No one liked W. No one believed W. was even a Texan. All folks knew was that W. was not Ann Richards, who vetoed the concealed carry bill.

If Ann had signed the concealed-carry bill, George W. Bush would have stayed on his ranch. Instead we had eight years of the most intellectually lazy president in our history. There have been dumber presidents, but none more disinclined to think about his responsibilities.

Starving the Soul

"We are mistakenly led to believe that the world is as secular as it appears to our eighteenth-century Enlightenment eyes. As a result of this secular philosophy, the divine is met only in our profound social problems and in our personal psychological and physical illnesses. . . .As long as we leave care of the soul out of our daily lives we will suffer the loneliness of living in a dead, cold, unrelated world. We can "improve" ourselves to the maximum, and yet we will still feel the alienation inherent in a divided existence. We will continue to exploit nature and our capacity to invent new things, but both will continue to overpower us, if we do not approach them with enough depth and imagination."

This is from Care of the Soul, by Thomas Moore. This observation most eloquently explains the despair and isolation that are all around us. It applies equally to our politics and our arts and our most intimate encounters.

I commend this insight to you for consideration.

How W's State Department Sabotaged W's War in Iraq

Prior to George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, the #3 at State - Marc Grossman - and the #2 at Defense - Paul Wolfowitz - went to Turkey, to secure permission to move US troops through Turkey into northern Iraq.

The short story is Turkey said, "No."

Don't be mis-led.

The long story is that Marc Grossman purposefully mis-handled the negotiations in order to get a "no" - in order to make the war impossible. The top guys at State were making their own policy decision, to oppose and undermine the President. Isn't that special!

Paul Grossman served seven years as a diplomat in Turkey - three in Adana as consul (where he married a Turk) and four in Ankara as ambassador. He knew very well that, in Turkey, the military is a fourth branch of government. Yet, Grossman excluded the military from consulations and argued for his superior knowledge of the country against suggestions/objections put forth by the Defense Department that the Turkish military should be consulted.

Hurriyet, Turkey's highest circulation daily newspaper, reported the results in the paper of December 4, 2002: 8:30 pm Foreign Minister says okay; 11:15 pm Turkish General Staff says we made no such decision; 12:30am Foreign Ministry spokesman says Turkey has not agreed. As one 3-star general told me, "Ankara is boiling."

Marc Grossman risked creating a military coup in order to sow the confusion and discord that flowed copiously from his actions. He played a three-cushion billiard shot and pulled it off.

At that time the new religous Ak Party government had been in power for only 18 days. The leader of the party, Tayyip Erdoğan, had previously been mayor of Istanbul and had no experience in national government. The new government was caught unprepared.

The new Turkish government haggled. The party leaders came to Washington. They were eventually offered incentives worth more than $2 billion.

The party leader, Tayyip Erdoğan, decided to be clever. He announced that the Parliament must decide "yes" or "no" so that he could distance himself from the approval if events called for such a tactic. Nothing in Turkish law or government practice called for a Parliamentary vote. Further, Erdoğan announced that he would not enforce party discipline - that each representative could vote as he chose. Erdogan never imagined that the vote would be "no."

And the vote was "no." The Foreign Secretary, who had initially said "yes" had voted "no." So, Turkey was stuck with a decision no one wanted.

The US went ahead with the invasion anyway.

The Turks lost $2 billion in aid. The Turks lost long-term strategic importance, since the US now had bases in Iraq and other countries beyond Turkey. And, very important, the Kurds who supported US troops, The Peshmerga, became folk heroes in the American press. This undermined important Turkish diplomatic positions concerning the Kurdish terrorists, the PKK, and Kurdish efforts to create their own country from territory now party of Iran, Iraq and Turkey.

Without a doubt, this was all engineered by Marc Grossman. Would Marc Grossman have acted without consulting his Secretary of State, Colin Powell. I don't think so.

There are important lessons here for how Washington really works and how the Turkish government made a mess through lack of astute leadership . . .as well as how this particular set of decisions came to be made.

How Ronald Reagan is Partially to Blame for Our Aesthetic Famine

Ronald Reagan is guilty in this matter only to the extent that he did not intercede in the aftermath of the 1979 Supreme Court decision known as the Thor Power Tool decision. The court case dealt with the valuation of inventories for tax purposes. It was applied to book publishers which had, by long practice and tradition, been given special treatment.

Before Thor Power Tool, publishers showed the printing expenses of a new book in the year it was printed, even though the books might sell over a twenty-year period. This reduced the taxable current profits and, therefore, current taxes. It was a special priviledge given to publishing, in the interest of public education,

And then, with Thor Power Tool, the IRS took the priviledge away. The publishers now had to re-calculate their income and tax according to the new rules on their entire 20-years of accumulated inventory. Afterward, the new rule would bump up annual income and tax, but the spike in income and taxes on the entire inventory in that first year was like a tidal wave.

More books were destroyed by that IRS action than any other event in human history. Millions of books were pulped or burned to avoid the taxes.

The choice of paying taxes or destroying books also motivated the corporate consolidation of American book publishing, the take-over of book publishers by entertainment conglomerates and the eventual preponderance of non-US ownership of those conglomerates. The IRS publishes statistics for 2002 - US book-publishing is 63% foreign-owned, US film-and-video is 64% foreign-owned.

And the price of books sky-rocketed. One of my favorite books is The Embassy Letters, by Mary Wortley Montagu. She was the wife of the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Sultan. Her book describes the overland voyage from London to Istanbul in 1716. Her book has been in print for almost 400 years, as a colorful description of daily life at that time. I watched the price of the Modern Library hardback go from $4.95 to $13.95 - the price of paying both the back taxes on the inventory and the new corporate overhead.

If only Ronnie and the guys around him had intervened on the application of Thor Power Tool to publishing, our cultural landscape would likely be far deeper and richer than it is today.

Two fuses linked all the nastiest bits of the 2008 Economic Collapse

Seven years before, in 2001, with the genuine concern and hypocritical posturing that followed the Enron collapse, a law was passed in Congress known as Sarbanes-Oxley that required that securities (bonds, stocks, other fiduciary instruments) be valued at current market prices on a corporation's balance sheet. The valuations had to be current; the standard of what is current was made the current day's price. This was to prevent the vastly overstated valuations that had supported Enron, prior to its collapse.

That was the first fuse.

The PBGC - Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation - is a quasi-government agency, set up to prevent other past scandals. At some point, PBGC required that the securities held by pension plans must be insured by private insurance before PBGC would guarantee the pension plan. The meant that all sorts of bonds had to be insured with companies like AIG. Premiums were paid on even municipal and state bonds, which have extremely low default history as they are guaranteed by tax revenues.

Sounds great - protect pension benefits with insurance . . .by law. This was the second fuse.

The Economic Collapse of 2008 was not every one's fault, but almost. There is plenty of blame to spread around . . .but this is how it happened.

Insurers like AIG faced their own collapse, due to their guarantee of mortgage-backed securities that were rated by the rating agencies from wonderland. When those insurers defaulted, their insurance on an entire range of securities vanished overnight.

By law, the trustees of pension funds across America were required to eliminate that entire range of securities immediately because the securities were uninsured. All kinds of bonds and other securities were dumped on the market for sale at the same time. There were nowhere near enough buyers because all of the guaranteed pension plans were selling simultaneously and were forbidden to hold or buy.

Banks and other financial institutions saw the market prices of their capital reserves (held in securities) fall to near-zero - overnight. Prior to Sarbanes-Oxley, the banks would have held their securities and waited for the market to recover but in 2008 they were required to value their reserves at that day's market prices.

In a single day, pension plans liquidated huge volumes of securities because the law required them to do it and the banks were required to value their capital at the near-zero prices that resulted. Immediately other laws governing bank capitalization - passed to protect depositors - mandated closure and government take-over of the banks. All of this happened together, within 24 hours.

The Economic Collapse of 2008 was a government-mandated financial panic - mandated by the laws and regulations mentioned above.

The Economic Collapse of 2008 had many contributing factors but these two fuses set it off.

These fuses were laid by Congress, with noble intentions, 20/20 hindsight and appalling ignorance. Risk is inherent in life. Risk cannot be eliminated by law; risk can only be hidden and/or displaced.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_economic_crisis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark-to-market

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_scandal

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pension_Benefit_Guaranty_Corporation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes-Oxley_Act