I dream of Martha

I know, I’ve been AWOL. It isn’t writer’s block. As originally stated above: “I have more opinions than opportunities to express them, so I created this blog.” But I’m finding the current state of things so confusing I don’t even know my own opinion on most issues.

So let me tell you about this dream I had last night. I was selected by the president of the club where I play golf to take Martha Stewart on a tour of the course. For some reason we made this tour at night, and it looked more like the foothills of the Rockies than my actual course. I suspect this was my subconscious describing the way the course typically plays for me.

We were on foot and I had to carry a lot of Martha’s stuff, which made it a long hike. Since it was dark, Martha didn’t really seem overly impressed with the vistas, but we happened to come up behind the 11th green just at sunrise and it was spectacular.

We went up to the clubhouse to have breakfast. Martha asked me to open the big book she had me lugging along, which was a detailed profile of every person she had ever met. She was sure she’d been to this club before and dined with a man named Fred. I was able to find the profile, and Fred turned out to be this guy I used to work with when I lived in Ohio. He had morphed from a 280 pound, bearded, tattooed, member of the United Steel Worker's Union, into a pink and green bedecked, boat-shoe wearing, über-clubbie.

At this point, Fred showed up for the meal, which had turned into a dinner with lots of wine. Martha then suggested that I come home with her because the book was too heavy for her to carry. I got nervous. (I know where this part of the dream came from. Dinah Shore had a thing for a guy for whom I used to work, and she was always calling his hotel room late at night asking him to come to her room to “help her” with something. Very creepy.)

Anyway, when I hesitated, Fred jumped in and offered his assistance, which seemed to be just fine with Martha.

They left together. I went out and played 18 with Bernie Kozar.

St. Barack and the dragon

The dragon is Congress and we are the Princess. If BHO can’t get the Parliament of Whores ("Democrats are the party of government activism, the party that says government can make you richer, smarter, taller and get the chickweed out of your lawn. Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work, and they get elected and prove it.") under control, and soon, they may just ruin his Presidency before he even gets a chance to show us what he can do.

Why does he continue to play Obambi with them? Americans hold Congress in lower esteem than even the reviled GWB. What could make better political sense than using his considerable political capital to take them on and break them of their belief that the U.S. Treasury is their own personal slush fund?

Good Lord, even Maureen Dowd is starting to comment on the bountiful portions of pork they ladled into the current budget, and on BHO’s unwillingness to stop them despite his campaign promise to end this practice. The earmarks may represent a small portion of the budget, but they are a powerful symbol of Washington’s arrogance and waste.

Watching the Congressional budget hearings yesterday and listening to the ignorance that oozed from nearly every question our legislators asked made me cringe. These people are truly fools.
If he stomps on them now he’ll be a hero to millions – including to many of his critics on the right. If he doesn’t, he’ll be a prisoner to Pelosi and Reid for four years and will be building his Presidential Library by 2012.

Nationalize now

The United States should nationalize the banks receiving TARP funds now. Our goal should be to return the banks to financial health and sell them back to private owners as quickly as possible. Here is the rationale:

We already given many of them more money than they are worth; accepting anything less than complete ownership is less of a good deal than the government and its citizens could get by going straight to the stock market. That would be unacceptable to Warren Buffet, and there is no reason the taxpayers should accept it either. It’s been done before in the case of the savings & loans, and it has worked. There’s nothing “un-American” about it.

Upon nationalization, total compensation should be capped immediately for all employees at no more than $500,000 per year.

Many people (most of them bankers) argue that this would be counter-productive. “The most talented will flee. Who will be left to return the banks to health?” Or, “This is the time our economy most needs this talent,” they whine.

Well, let’s deconstruct those arguments. To where will they flee? There appears to be a limited number of jobs open in finance at the moment, but no doubt some will find alternatives, perhaps at a private bank or a partnership that has taken no government money, and at which losing financial strategies and phony profits are not rewarded.

But more importantly, why would anyone think for even one moment that the people who got us in this mess are the most likely people to get us out of it? “OK, Sabathia, you gave up 12 runs in the first inning, now by God, it’s your responsibility to go back out there and pitch a shut-out the rest of the way so we have a fighting chance to win this game!”

Others claim it’s un-American to limit what someone can earn, after all, C.C. Sabathia is making $20 million a year for throwing a baseball every few days. But that’s a bogus argument, too. The Yankees aren’t taking government funding, and the bankers can’t throw the cheese 100 mph. Athletes, actors and entrepreneurs deserve whatever they can get because they live or die by their personal performances, and they assume a massive amount of risk. When they get old, make mistakes, or just become unpopular, the millions disappear and they have to start looking for a spot on “Dancing with the Stars” – or worse, a real job.

There are also a couple of really good reasons to do this. For millions of Americans the current financial bailout looks like more of the same old business of the rich being taken care of at the expense of taxpaying, regular folk. (Perhaps because it’s true?) If we are all going to pull together to bring the country back to its former glory, everyone has to feel like they are getting a fair shake, and that no one – especially the rich and privileged – are getting a free ride.

The blame for this mess is so broad and diffused that there aren’t going to be any big trials; nobody is going to go to jail (other than the Madoff-types who are just common criminals writ large). But the country needs catharsis.

At least we can start by hacking away at the bloated, unreasonable compensation structure that has strangled accountability and meritocratic governance in American business for the past 30 years. Anyone who has ever worked in a Fortune 500 company and gotten to know a few of the actual people who cling to these positions knows these little Emperor-wannabees are mostly naked, and in some cases, eunuchs.

Seeing the management class, which has been a big winner in good times and a pretty-big winner in bad times, put on an equal footing with the working women and men of this country can only help promote the common good and democratic ideals.

Finally, the only people who really believe that there will be a shortage of talented people available to run these organizations for such chump-change are the people now making the stupid money. Less than 1% of the population earns more than $500k per year, and some of them are Chris Rock, Beyonce and Peyton Manning. There will be a deep bench to pick from and competent people will be lined up to do the hard work required.

Does anyone honestly think the new group could do a worse job than the lot in place now?

George Washington

It would be impossible to do justice to George Washington in 300 words, but today is his 277th birthday and it would be worse to let the day pass without note. It's an understatement to say he was a remarkable man, and yet he has always seemed to me to be seriously under-appreciated in the country he, more than anyone, founded.

He was reduced early on to a stereotype -- the little boy who cut down the cherry tree and could not tell a lie; then the adult who stood in row boats and wore wooden teeth. Even the spectacularly unglamorous Adams has had his day in the sun in recent years, while this physically impressive, morally righteous, courageous, charismatic leader remains the least dimensionalized of our founders. There should be a great movie made about him.

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I'll be traveling for a few days. Play nice everyone.

Obama so far

President Obama has been is office one month today. On the one hand it seems completely unfair to judge him after such a short time period. But on the other, let’s be honest, we judge everybody pretty much all the time – can’t help it – it’s what people do. Having posed the question, I shall answer it as well, based on three main areas.

The Team: By-and-large he has appointed high quality people and he did it very quickly compared to previous administrations, but I remain disappointed that Geithner and Daschle made it through the ethical screen. But, hey, it’s Washington. Grade: B

The Plan. The economic recovery legislation could end up an A or an F; only time will tell. He deserves credit for getting it done quickly, but way too much control was given to the Pelosi-Reid crowd, and it smells to me more like a pork barrel than a focused economic tool. (Does anyone think a mag-lev train running between Disneyland and Las Vegas is critical economic priority?) It’s an enormous amount of money, but I fear it isn’t enough, or the right kind of stuff, to really make a difference. I also believe the big banks should be nationalized and dozens of senior people should be fired. The mortgage relief plan is hard to like. As Dennis Miller said on Leno last night, “We gotta help the helpless, but the clueless – I don’t give a rat’s ass about.” I hope with all my heart I’m wrong on this package, but…Grade: D.

Politics. Here again, I’ve been disappointed. He should have been tougher on Congress and on the bankers. Our problems were caused by too many people to make it possible to ever point an accurate finger of blame. But it would do a lot for the general morale to fire a few millionaire business-criminals and to publically humiliate a few political hacks. A little demagoguery isn’t so bad if it is used strategically.

Obama has also spent too much effort scaring the public in an effort to build support for his economic plans. Given the state of things I don’t believe many needed it; they know things are bad. We need the President to be the guy who inspires us to believe we can overcome these problems and be great again. Grade: C-

Overall: C- , but this student shows promise and there is a long way to go before school lets out.
Let’s hear your grade, but please, no “Incompletes.” If you aren’t willing to stick your neck out just go watch TV.

You could not make this up

[From the New York Times, Wednesday, February 18, 2009]

Upstate Man Charged With Beheading His Estranged Wife

A man who founded a Muslim-American television station to help fight Muslim stereotypes is to appear on Wednesday in a suburban Buffalo court on charges that he decapitated his wife last week.

[full story here]

The First Heroes

I’m reading a book called The First Heroes, which is about the Doolittle raid on Japan in the early months of WWII. I’ve know the basic story since I was a kid, but like any good book, the real soul of the story is contained in the details, and The First Heroes delivers.

Here’s the basic story. In April 1942, eighty men, all volunteers, flew 16 B-25’s off of the USS Hornet over 650 miles of Pacific Ocean to successfully bomb Tokyo and a few other Japanese cities. It was the first American victory of any kind, coming four months after Pearle Harbor and a string of Japanese military successes against us.

All the men were told they were volunteering for an exceptionally dangerous mission, and were given several opportunities to back out as they learned more details. None did. Very briefly, here is what they had to deal with.

First of all, no one had every taken off from an aircraft carrier in a B-25 (or anything remotely like it) until these guys did it in the middle of a raging storm, from a deck less that half as long as the normal runway length used by that plane.

The storm produced 60 foot swells. As each plane took off the deck was aimed downhill, so that the pilots stared directly into the ocean as they gained speed. But the Navy deck crewed planned each launch precisely so that half way down the deck it began to pitch up by 30º and reached its peak as each bomber got to the end, thus aiding lift. All 16 launched successfully.

Unfortunately, the Navy task force had been detected and they launched several hundred miles earlier than called for in the original plan. This was a big problem for several reasons. They were supposed to fly to Japan, and then continue another 600 miles to free China (as opposed to the much closer Japanese occupied China). The pilots knew before leaving the carrier that it was problematic that they would have enough fuel to make it; the extra distance dictated by the early launch meant that they would almost certainly have to ditch in occupied China, or into the sea. They all took off anyway.

The original plan called for arriving over Tokyo at dawn, but the new schedule put them there at high noon, with no fighter escort, and with half their normal defensive weapons removed to make room for extra fuel tanks. (They did put broomsticks in the ball turrets to simulate machine gun barrels.)

It was perfect weather over Japan. Every plane dropped its bombs and most hit their target. The Japanese were taken completely by surprise, and while there was heavy antiaircraft fire and Zeros rose to meet the B-25’s, somehow none were shot down.

Then they had a bit of luck when the winds shifted in their favor, which gave them renewed hope that they could reach free China. But instead of having a radio beacon to home in on (confusion over the International dateline had it turned off) they continued to rely on dead-reckoning via the stars and their homemade, hand drawn maps. Their trip was more like those made by 16th century explorers than by modern navigators.

So on they flew for more than 12 hours to the China coast, then south to avoid occupied territory, until their fuel began to run out. Unfortunately, the early take off change brought them to this point of their flight in the middle of the night, and in the midst of another major storm.
Of the 16 bombers, one landed safely, wheels-down in Russia. That’s a whole other story. Three essentially crash-landed on beaches or just off shore. Because of the heavy cloud cover, the other 12 planes could find no safe landing options and took the only option open to them – they jumped out.

Among all the crewmen in those planes, only Colonel Doolittle had every parachuted before, and he broke both ankles upon landing. But as the giants Billys (as they called the B-25’s) began to cough, sputter and lose altitude, the crews put on the chutes and jumped into the black void. They had no idea what was below them – river, ocean, mountain, Japanese army camp? They just jumped.

I’m having a hard time getting these images out of my head. For one thing, they keep raising uncomfortable questions like, “would I have ever had the courage to do what these men, whose average age was probably around 24, did?”

For another, I can’t help but to contrast the selflessness and bravery of these average Americans, who were the first heroes of the War, with the character displayed by the business and political leadership of our country these days. How did things change so much, and can we ever return to those values?