Career Memoir – education and deconstruction.com

Speaking Out

[Please note: The word “Featured” on the left side above was NOT inserted by this blogger, but apparently was inserted by WordPress, and it cannot be removed. NO post in this blog is sponsored.]

The Book of the Week is “Speaking Out, Inside the Reagan White House” by Larry Speakes with Robert Pack, published in 1988.

Born in September 1939, the author grew up in a small town in Mississippi. He suffered from impostor syndrome when he began working in the Reagan White House as deputy press secretary in early 1981. However, he gained confidence as he witnessed the gaffes committed by self-important alpha-males amid their power struggles in his rarefied workplace. There were the usual inter-agency rivalry and scapegoating when things went wrong. “State blamed the White House, the White House blamed Defense, and the CIA blamed everybody.”

As is well known, in March 1981, Reagan was shot in the chest, but survived. Immediately after the president had become incapacitated, Alexander Haig, then-secretary of state, made a major misstatement to the press, saying HE was in charge of the administration, and could act on the president’s behalf. Haig was a publicity hound, stopping for a photo opportunity whenever he could.

Speakes, pursuant to the U.S. Constitution, clarified the succession of power of the president: vice president; speaker of the House; and then president pro tempore of the senate; after that, secretary of state.

Pat Buchanan was another troublesome coworker. In March 1986, he wrote an inflammatory Op-Ed piece–unvetted by Speakes’ department– that was published in the Washington Post. That piece said if Congressional Democrats voted against the bill giving financial aid to the Contras, they were as evil as the Commies supporting Daniel Ortega, leader of Nicaragua. Additionally, Buchanan praised Oliver North after the Iran Contra scandal broke.

Reagan finally made a speech equivalent to Nixon’s “Checkers speech” when his people were forced to admit that Israel helped the United States sell weapons to Iran; a secret operation orchestrated primarily by Oliver North, John Poindexter and Robert McFarlane. The president declined to pardon them, because pardoning them would indicate they had committed a crime! He maintained they were innocent.

Another interesting factoid: During president Reagan’s eight years, approximately seventeen hundred people were provided with press passes to report on the administration.

Read the book to learn of Speakes’ experiences managing the optics of the administration, given the tenor of the times and the difficult personalities involved.

Chasing Hope

The Book of the Week is “Chasing Hope, A Reporter’s Life” by Nicholas Kristof (not to be confused with Bill Kristol!), published in 2024.

In 1959 the author was born in a lower middle-class rural area in Oregon, where boys saw violence as an admirable trait to be used to used to achieve frontier justice. Although his neighborhood was rife with alcoholism, drug addiction, domestic violence and crime, Kristof grew up in a stable, intellectual, loving home environment. That could be why, as a teenager, he chose to become a journalist who revealed the world’s ugliness– to try to reduce it.

Kristof witnessed martial law in Poland and China, and the nature of the heroin trade in Pakistan and Afghanistan. While in Congo (formerly Zaire) he heard firsthand about the atrocities and genocide in Rwanda. He wrote stories on the dictatorships and crushing oppression in North Korea, Venezuela, Turkmenistan and many other places.

After a few decades of reporting on human rights abuses, he took a break to run for office. Professionals told him to change his language, so that “gun control” became “gun safety” and “inequality” became “opportunity.” To be fair, he admitted that Portland had serious problems that were caused by Democrats because it was mostly Democrats who governed it.

But the bottom line for him was, “What matters is improving opportunities and quality of life, and that’s achieved not by waving fists and shouting slogans but by a painstaking process of following evidence, building coalitions and solving problems.”

Read the book to learn much more about Kristof’s life and global times.

Unleashed

The Book of the Week is “Unleashed” by Boris Johnson, published in 2024. This large volume was a bragfest, but it also explained the author’s opinions and his government’s policies for laypeople.

Johnson was born in 1964. “Disaster” was his favorite word. As London’s mayor starting in May 2008, he began implementing some of the same crime-fighting and environmental initiatives taken by former New York City mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg.

Beginning in June 2016, after 52% of the UK’s 17.4 million population voted in favor of Brexit, heated discussions were had by everyone, including Lord Chief Justice, Master of the Rolls, and President of the Queen’s Bench Division. In 2019, Johnson was elected UK prime minister, and he became the nation’s biggest Brexit booster. The nation’s moneyed classes, and those who were pro-immigrant, wanted to remain in the EU.

The EU leadership in Brussels controlled many aspects of the economies of member-countries because it set the terms and conditions on trade unions, customs fees, currencies, factories, distribution of goods, national-border policies, etc. Johnson felt the UK was hamstrung by all the petty rules. He claimed that Canada was able to export its goods to EU’s markets absent the regulations to which the UK was subject.

In April 2020, when the prime minister ended up in the intensive care unit with a bad case of COVID, “Outside in the corridors of the hospital, though I never saw them, were representatives of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry, despatched by Donald Trump to revive me with drugs not licensed or approved in the UK.”

The COVID pandemic in 2020 was a game-changer. Johnson contended that because the UK was no longer a member of the EU, certain forward-looking, skilled members of his administration were able to secure a vaccination program that was more widespread and implemented sooner than EU members’ programs. Harm done to the UK’s people and its economy was therefore significantly less than that done to comparable countries.

Nevertheless, the line graph of COVID deaths followed a largely similar pattern for each nation where COVID’s effects on the population was tracked– regardless of the actions leaders took. Sweden’s policies on quarantining were optional, while China’s were draconian, but both of their graphs showed two peaks during which the death toll went up and down during the course of the pandemic.

Another political issue shared by all major governments of the world, is immigration. Johnson heard how Australia supposedly deterred uninvited people fleeing their homelands, from arriving on its shores. Its federal immigration agency transported those people– to have their asylum claims processed to– not the nicest destination, to put it mildly, 4,500 miles to the island of Nauru. Perhaps the U.S. could look into such a policy, given that it too, is overwhelmed with asylum-seekers who have arrived on its soil illegally.

Read the book to learn much more about Johnson’s political life and times.

The Face Laughs – BONUS POST

The Bonus Book of the Week is “The Face Laughs While the Brain Cries, The Education of A Doctor” by Stephen L. Hauser, published in 2023.

Born at the dawn of the 1950’s, the author grew up mostly in Bayside, a section of Queens in New York City. He began conducting medical research in the 1970’s, when knowledge and resources were extremely limited. His first drug-study involved 58 multiple-sclerosis patients selected from two hospitals in Boston. He got to know every patient personally.

Around 2010, the author was a small cog in the wheel of a much, much more extensive multiple-sclerosis-drug study that involved 2,500 patients affiliated with more than 300 hospitals on 5 continents. There were data galore from MRI’s, test results from clinicians and blood and spinal fluid, and integrity- monitoring of the whole extravaganza. Nine million pages of information.

Read the book to learn much, much more about the doctor’s experiences with his medical research and the U.S.’s drug-approval process.

ENDNOTE: The author recounted a few medical cases of people who had lost their minds. They turned out to have brain damage from multiple sclerosis.

Regardless of the cause of the inability of the patients to do their jobs– they couldn’t do their jobs competently. When such workers are responsible for leading a sprawling entity, where people’s lives or livelihoods hang in the balance, there can be extracurricular activity because no one is minding the store.

Two particular cautionary tales in the United States come to mind in connection therewith. It is true, no one person, not even the top leader is entirely to blame when things go wrong, but they get blamed because one thing leads to another, due to their impaired brain function.

Authors of personal accounts have documented how Ronald Reagan had reduced brain function in his second term as U.S. president; among them, George Shultz and Lesley Stahl. Peggy Noonan claimed Reagan had a hearing aid that was only sometimes on, so he was blissfully unaware of a lot of events he should have known about. The head of the CIA, Bill Casey was dying of a brain tumor. One subordinate of his, Oliver North, went rogue– played a large role in secretly selling weapons to the Iranians, with the help of Israel and Saudi Arabia!

The other instance involved Bill Paley, who was head of the international corporation, CBS, into the 1980’s. He would come into board meetings with a walker and two nurses by his side. Due to extensive memory loss, he was clueless as to what was going on. Since he wasn’t truly running the company anymore, a rogue department at CBS, having zero experience, decided to try to make movies. That division generated disastrous losses that resulted in layoffs in unrelated departments, causing trauma for all stakeholders associated with CBS.

In both of the above instances, there would have been a lot less trouble had the leader been removed when his incompetence due to reduced brain function became evident. Hint: the 25th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution can be invoked when a president is deemed sufficiently cognitively impaired to warrant his removal.

What’s Left Unsaid

The Book of the Week is “What’s Left Unsaid, My Life at the Center of Power, Politics, and Crisis” by Melissa DeRosa, published in 2023.

Born in the early 1980’s in Rochester in New York State, DeRosa worked in New York State politics. By April 2017, she had achieved a high-level job in governor Andrew Cuomo’s administration.

The author wrote that the federal government under president Trump handled the 2020 COVID pandemic in a way reminiscent of the movie, The Hunger Games, pitting states against one another for scarce medical supplies.

In mid-April 2020, the president declared that lifting the COVID lockdown in different areas of life nationwide, would rest on his authority. But conditions varied widely nationwide. Governors in seven northeastern states banded together to invoke the Tenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution which allows state governments jurisdiction over local law enforcement in the event of a public health emergency. Trump reversed himself in short order.

In late April 2020, DeRosa had a falling out with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. He was more worried about: voter-polling results (opinions) on COVID policies in swing states (that indicated whether his father-in-law was winning the then-presidential race!) than statistical medical data used to take actions to minimize the death rate.

According to the author, Cuomo’s people didn’t pick their battles with the media. They tried to fight them all– over every word in their every communication, making them appear contentious and petty. By May 2020, the collective mood of the nation was downright hostile over the COVID situation. The media took out its anger on Cuomo’s personnel.

As is well known, Cuomo became the victim of various acts of mean, nasty political retaliation. “Suddenly, you had a bizarre coalition calling for the governor’s resignation: Democratic Socialist AOC on the same side as MAGA Elise Stefanik in Congress, locking arms with the Democratic and Republican extremists in the state legislature.”

Read the book to learn about DeRosa’s experiences as a close Cuomo adviser in one crisis after another.

ENDNOTE: In order for public officials to achieve effective leadership of the United States: Numerous, diverse people must take years to analyze contemporary political issues while considering historical perspectives in order to understand how to make the necessary compromises required for workable solutions.

The top leader of the country has no time to do so after he or she has been elected. So, the public servants who accomplish the most to improve the lives of the highest number of people, are those who not only possess sufficient maturity and social skills, but those who have specific proposals that have been shown to work long-term, at-the-ready, before they get elected.

Not those who play well with the political machine, the media and their donors.

tokyo junkie [sic]

The Book of the Week is “tokyo junkie [sic], 60 Years of Bright Lights and Back Alleys… and Baseball” by Robert Whiting, published in 2021.

Whiting was born at the dawn of the 1940’s in northern California. In January 1962, while in the U.S. Air Force, he was assigned to Fuchu Air Base in a Tokyo suburb. He fell in love with Tokyo and the culture of its people, despite its sexism, pervasive sex trade, hatred of foreigners, and government censoring of its media.

Tokyo was undergoing a makeover to prepare for its debut as the venue of the 1964 Olympics. During the Vietnam Era, American college campuses exploded in protest against the war. The Japanese government supported the war. By 1969, Japanese students were protesting, too.

Over the course of decades, the author witnessed how the city changed from a war-ravaged backwater to an economic powerhouse. After WWII, the U.S. maintained a military presence in Japan, and nursed it back to economic health. This process was reflected in Japan’s education system, which mandated rigorous, nerve-racking entrance exams, which had a decidedly capitalist bent.

Another aspect of Japanese culture that showed its emulation of the United States, was the popularity of its professional baseball. However, the Japanese put their own twist on it. They allowed a few Americans to play on their teams, but criticized them for doing too well or too poorly. Too much competition would make the opposing team feel bad, but a player yielding too much to an opposing team, would be told to do better for his own team. Cooperation and sacrificing for one’s own team were key aspects of play.

The author noted one positive behavior pattern the Japanese were taught from birth. That was– maintaining the highest respect for other people’s property, and for public property. Their “lost and found” returned personal items to their owners (even cash, without a penny missing!) as a matter of the right thing to do. Tokyo is one of the cleanest cities in the world because the people feel a collective sense of ownership of their streets, so they don’t “foul their own nest.” Ironically, their politicians are notoriously corrupt.

Read the book to learn much, much more on the author’s take on how Japanese culture changed following major historical events such as Olympics, financial ruin, earthquakes, tsunamis, and globalization.

Confessions of A Wall Street Analyst

The Book of the Week is “Confessions of a Wall Street Analyst, A True Story of Inside Information and Corruption in the Stock Market” By Dan Reingold with Jennifer Reingold, published in 2006.

The author happened to become a telecommunications-industry stock analyst, hopping from one big-name investment bank to another. This, at the start of about two decades of an excessively deregulated, gravy train of greed on Wall Street: the early 1990’s. He described his job as requiring lots of reading and writing, and as having long, long hours. He got to travel around the world to meet his contacts, and gossip with industry competitors. The compensation he collected for doing so was obscene.

The U.S. government had just acted on a wave of anti-trust sentiment, so competitors were scrambling to game the situation. Telephones were going wireless, while their service providers were merging like crazy.

The author detailed the changes in the industry, including how it became corrupted by the usual suspects– greedy Wall Street workers. These included analysts and the departments that trade securities on behalf of their clients and their employers’ compliance departments who looked the other way on the LAWS against analysts’ getting inside information from the said departments.

For example, if the banking arm told an analyst that a certain company was a takeover target before information in connection therewith was publicly disclosed, the analyst could write a report recommending that his employer’s clients (which ranged from huge pension funds to little investors and everyone in between) buy its stock. That is one kind of insider trading.

In the mid to late 1990’s, the author witnessed various episodes in which one particular analyst at a competing big-name investment bank was manipulating the system. There was circumstantial evidence that he was receiving inside information on the stocks he was touting. Later on, one telecommunications company turned out to be not just “cooking the books” but scorching them. The resulting mess turned out to be the largest accounting-fraud scandal to that date.

These and other Wall Street shenanigans (that were bunched together in the course of a decade!) resulted in the usual harm to society and more excessive wealth for the wealthy; more specifically:

The perpetrators (the offending workers and their employers) got a “slap on the wrist” in the form of chump-change fines from regulators, while collecting excessively large fees for servicing the merger transactions and advising their clients on what to trade when– while admitting no wrongdoing;
The mergers resulted in massive layoffs of working-class people;
Taxpayers paid for the salaries of the regulators who bragged about how great they were in catching and punishing the few white-collar criminals they did nab; and
Unsurprisingly, the author retired before he got nabbed but he claimed his employment contract contained no pay-for-performance provision with regard to his employer’s investment-banking revenues.

Anyway, read the book to learn a boatload more about Wall Street’s goings-on in telecommunications from the 1990’s into the single-digit 2000’s, and the author’s career.

My American Dream

The Book of the Week is “My American Dream, My True Story As An Undocumented Immigrant Who Became A Wall Street Executive” by Julissa Arce, published in 2016.

The author was born in 1983 in Taxco, Mexico. In 1994, she moved with her parents to San Antonio, Texas on a tourist visa. Because she was going to school (a private one) she was actually living in the U.S. illegally. Her parents (who were legal immigrants) didn’t understand the implications of such a situation. They simply wanted her to get a good education. Americans’ tax dollars weren’t even paying for it.

The upshot, though, was that Arce never got a Social Security Number, and couldn’t get any kinds of government or financial services: healthcare, a driver’s license, a bank account, or financial aid when she applied to go to college.

By living in the United States, Arce’s foreign status became her single biggest life-problem, especially when she was in her late teens. That problem led to others. If she moved back to Mexico, she most likely would be unable to return to the United States for at least ten years, unless laws changed.

Arce needed to earn “off the books” money to support her family, and pay her mother’s medical bills. On top of that, she had a drunk, abusive father. She was accepted to a college at the last minute, based on academic and student-participatory merit, and thanks to a new Texas state law. As is well known, many students are accepted to schools based on “legacy” or alumni-bribery practices, or on athletic rather than academic merits.

After many more hardships, the author got a job in the real world. She initially omitted the inconvenient fact that fake identity papers would allow her to work at the job only until she got caught for having a fraudulent Social Security Number. It appears that both her employer and the IRS turned a blind eye to her situation, as the former was able to pay her less than it would a non-foreign employee. BUT her employer was still withholding taxes from her paycheck. So why should her employer fire her? She was a model worker. She had to be– she was under the constant threat of deportation. She had to try harder than everyone else to please everyone.

Fortunately, several people in Arce’s life gave her good advice:

get the best education she could;
always strive do be the best at whatever she did– regardless of what it was;
be persistent;
associate with the appropriate people;
be professional at all times; and
continually socially network.

Arce was actually a shameless social climber, but she also showed she was a team player– unselfish with her time and talents. When the author achieved the pinnacle of what she perceived to be success, she wrote, “I felt normal– just another drunk Wall Street analyst on Stone Street on a Friday night.” And yet, she realized she still wasn’t truly happy.

Read the book to learn much, much more about Arce’s life experiences, and additional (true!!!) information (not emotionally-charged political propaganda) about immigrants in America.

Nerves of Steel

The Book of the Week is “Nerves of Steel, How I Followed My Dreams, Earned My Wings, and Faced My Greatest Challenge” by Tammie Jo Shults, published in 2019.

The author, born at the dawn of the 1960’s, grew up in New Mexico and Colorado. For two years, military men in the recruitment offices of the Air Force and Navy told her she wasn’t allowed to become a pilot in their services because she was female. That was a lie. In March 1985, she was (finally!) inducted into the Navy, due to her chance meetings with honest men. She graduated near the top of her training class. Of course.

Shults was passionate about and good at, piloting aircraft, but she had to endure numerous indignities and conditions perpetrated by her bosses that were even more life-threatening than they should have been, because she was female. She was cool under fire, and her Christian faith saw her through those stressful and traumatic times of her life. Strangely, a religious quote in her book indicated she believed her God is a male!

Anyway, after her Navy service, she transferred her super flying skills to a job fighting wildfires in California. In the mid-1990’s, she learned to fly a piston-engine plane (different from the military aircraft she had been flying). She engaged in surveillance missions to alert firefighters and others on the ground to situations that were more dangerous than usual; dispensed red mud to put out the fires; and spread fertilizer so as to facilitate the growth of new vegetation.

The third leg of the author’s piloting career involved getting a job at a commercial airline. The GI Bill paid for her training in a 737 jet. Compensation and benefits for women in the military and pilots’ union are equivalent to the mens’, but in some quarters, women are still treated as second-class citizens by men who don’t like “girls” to invade their fraternity.

Infuriatingly for American women, Congress is still one such place where there are a bunch of powerful men, so even if a female were to be elected president, those men would automatically smear her, and vote against everything she did.

As is well known, presidents have had to make serious compromises in civil-rights legislation in order to further their own mandates. Attitudes are very, very difficult to change, as almost every facet of American life began with a bunch of white alpha males:

the Founding Fathers;
Wall Street;
the military and law enforcement;
professional sports;
science and technology;
business and industry;
most of the licensed professions, etc.,

except for areas involving family, household chores and jobs in the arts and entertainment.

So it should not have been surprising that the author encountered yet more gender discrimination with her new employer– in the late 1990’s. Read the book to learn much, much more about Shults’ ordeals and triumphs that show that America is making slow, slow progress in workplace gender equality. Unfortunately, not fast enough for politics. Not yet.

As is well known, in the 1960’s, there were impatient civil-rights activists who believed that resorting to violence would facilitate the enactment of equality-legislation. After the American Civil War to date, white males have threatened and resorted to violence in order to hinder the enactment of equality-legislation.

Not to worry. There is still plenty of time for progressive historical events this election season. Currently, it’s like the start of the fourth quarter of football games, but fans, like voters, need only check the last five minutes of the games to see the winners. Turning off the idiot box for the next month will prevent a lot of emotional trouble. There’s no need to despair, as there might just be a quarterback such as Tom Brady who will step in late in the game. Thank goodness for the last minute. If it weren’t for the last minute, nothing would ever get done.

The Trading Game

The Book of the Week is “The Trading Game, A Confession” by Gary Stevenson, published in 2024. This blogger highly encourages the reader to peruse the entire “Wall Street” and Economics categories of this blog in order to gain a better understanding of financial matters and economics.

In March 2007, the 1987-born author began working on the Fixed Income Trading Floor at the Short Term Interest Rates Trading Desk in the Foreign Exchange section of Citibank in its London branch. He had grown up in a tough, poor neighborhood in East London. He beat the odds for someone of his demographic group, considering the fierce competition in both getting accepted to a prestigious university and getting a job in currency trading.

Stevenson nurtured an aspiration to make lots of money. Fortunately, his talent and hard work in mathematics allowed him to score high on standardized exams. He attended the London School of Economics where he rubbed shoulders with mostly male, wealthy elitists whose fathers gave them a leg up in life, and whose futures were almost guaranteed to be bright. At school, when he won a game involving hypothetical securities trading, Stevenson’s life turned around. For, he won an internship which turned into a career.

After a few lucky breaks and bold moves on his part, the author was just hitting his stride in work-experience when he happened to be at the right place at the right time to earn extremely large financial gains from a triple-whammy disaster. In March of 2011, about twenty thousand people died in Japan due to an earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown of three power plants. Amidst the resulting financial turmoil and previous turmoil of the 2008 worldwide financial crises, Stevenson made a percentage of the millions upon millions of dollars he earned in currency trading for Citibank.

Stevenson alone in his department had been correct in gaming the situation. Everyone else had been wrong and they lost money. Nevertheless, he was still emotionally troubled. He bore two major similarities with Alan Turing– another genius: social dysfunctionality, and indifference to how he looked and what he wore.

Stevenson was one of the proverbial three kinds of people (geniuses in the minority)– the kind who knew what was happening and made things happen. The vast majority account for the other two kinds of people– brainwashed, unwashed masses who watched what was happening, and then still wondered what happened.

In the early 2010’s, the author came to the realization that there would NEVER be economic recovery of any financially-struggling countries in the European Union while the Swiss National Bank kept interest rates at or below zero. The other traders in his department optimistically kept repeating that interest rates HAD to rise sooner or later, because they had bet wrong.

But, the tiny percentage of the super-wealthy, super-powerful people of the world sought to maintain the then-status quo, because it made THEM even richer, and the poor, poorer, as the cliche goes. The income inequality of the world would eventually result in a slave-based economy (as existed in ancient times) all over again.

Read the book to learn much more of Stevenson’s personal and professional life, and his times. As is well known, the United States is one of the major economic superpowers of the world, and its politics are part and parcel of that. Here’s a little ditty on its momentary political situation.

LET THE BEST TEAM WIN

sung to the tune of “Let the River Run” with apologies to Carly Simon, BMG Gold Songs C’est Music and Tcf Music Pub Inc.

[Spoken: We’re all on edge,
waiting for the savior,
gaping with alarm
at the immature behavior.]

Let the best team win.
Let’s all peaceFULly watch the changes.
Come the new, new Washington.

Brilliant ideas rise.
The media lies, about, and smears them.
And celebs get themselves in your face.

It’s asking for the taking,
blaming, deep-faking.
Oh, Americans are aching.
We’re all on edge,
waiting for the savior,
gaping with alarm
at the immature behavior.

Through the hate and all.
It’s who we are:
Place a trail of desire
on the White House lawn.

It’s asking for the taking.
Just hold on now.
Democratic convention will be a show
you’ve never even seen in political history.

Oh, Americans are aching.
We’re all on edge,
waiting for the savior,
gaping with alarm
at the immature behavior.

It’s asking for the taking,
blaming, deep-faking.
Oh, Americans are aching.
We’re all on edge,
waiting for the savior,
gaping with alarm
at the immature behavior.

Let the best team win.
Let’s all peaceFULly watch the changes [watch the changes]
Come the new, new Washington.