Employer Trouble – Most of the Book – Page 2 – education and deconstruction.com

Breaking the Ice

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The Book of the Week is “Breaking the Ice, The Black Experience in Professional Hockey” by Cecil Harris, published in 2003. This wordy, redundant volume described the experiences of African Americans who have played ice hockey in North America beginning in the twentieth century. As is well known, Canada’s national sport is ice hockey.

The first African American player in the National Hockey League (NHL) was Willie O’Ree. Originally from New Brunswick, Canada, at twenty-two years old, he played one game in January 1958, was demoted to the “minors” but then returned to play in the 1960-61 season. Professional hockey saw no African American players again until the 1974-75 season, when Mike Marson made the big leagues.

In 1978, the World Hockey Association was competing with the NHL for talent. Tony McKegney, an African-American Canadian, signed a contract with the former, to play with a team in Birmingham, Alabama. When racist white fans found out, they said they would cancel their season tickets if McKegney played. The team owner felt pressured into breaching the contract with him. The player’s agent was a crook, too. That’s another story.

Some newspaper writer in Toronto reported that McKegney was okay with his canceled contract. But the lying writer had never even spoken with him. Anyway, fortunately, McKegney was later drafted by the NHL to play with the Buffalo Sabres.

One major measure of talent is total goals scored in a season. In the winter 1973 season, McKegney scored thirty-six goals and was still a young twenty-five. Yet he was traded a bunch of times, anyway– playing on six different teams (one of them twice) by the time he turned thirty-three. It is certainly debatable whether race was a factor in those circumstances. For the 1991-1992 season, he played hockey in Italy.

Grant Fuhr helped the Edmonton Oilers win the Stanley Cup four times in the second half of the 1980’s and in 1990. He wore a plastic face covering for protective equipment– not because he was afraid of harm from opposing teams and racist fans, although that’s a justified fear. He was a goalie, so no one could see his skin color.

In March 2003, a racial slur led the coach and general manager of the Sault Ste Marie Greyhounds (Ontario League) to resign in disgrace. One black player said in essence, that hatred is taught in families where insecurity abounds, and is a sign of weakness all around.

In the 2003-04 NHL season, there were roughly six hundred players, only seventeen of whom were African American. Canadian hockey players (of any ethnicity) who are professional-hopefuls, can be chosen to live with a host family near a hockey venue to do an internship of sorts, that pays their expenses.

In the early 1990’s, one of the first black NHL players who trained in this manner, at sixteen years old, was Jarome Iginla. He also got to go to New York City to play with NHL greats in a special program, and played in a major international competition in Salt Lake City in 2002.

Read the book to learn much more about racial issues in ice hockey, the crackdown on hate speech uttered by hockey insiders, the childishness of fans (such as the throwing of chicken bones and bananas at black players), and the bygone era of hockey-fighting as sideshow entertainment.

An Ambassador in Paris

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The Book of the Week is “An Ambassador in Paris, The Reagan Years” by Evan Galbraith, published in 1987. The author was unrelated to John Kenneth Galbraith. This personal account described the job of an ambassador who represented the United States, stationed in a UN-member, industrialized country– France. He revealed the ignorance, misconceptions and prejudices even political insiders can have– his own (probably without meaning to.)

The author began his four-year stint in November 1987. He had been a lawyer and banker for 25 years prior. He possessed extensive international business experience and had lived in Paris and London for years and years. But– communication skills, tact, foreign-language fluency and knowledge of other cultures turned out to be almost useless anyway, because the ambassador had so little power. The job requires being a social butterfly– attending official lunches, dinners, receptions and cocktail parties several times a week, and then generating reports on gossip and interesting factoids. He wrote that knowledge of economics was helpful for the job, yet his writing reflected embarrassing lack of it.

At that time, the author spent hours and hours reading an overwhelming number of daily cables sent to him, consisting of reports generated by embassy personnel, of communications between foreign countries and the U.S. government (which the French were allowed to see), and the CIA’s (alleged “top secret”) interactions.

In spring 1986, the author lunched with French leader Jacques Chirac. They both truly believed that president Ronald Reagan’s pet project “Star Wars” (involving extremely expensive but state-of-the-art weapons launched from outer space) was actually going to be completed and implemented (!) If the Soviets attacked with their missiles, it would be in the best interests of the U.S. to defend Europe with its high-tech weaponry.

Anyway, also in the 1980’s, about two thirds of France’s energy needs were met by nuclear power plants. It was predicted that by the 1990’s, that proportion would be nine tenths. The French believed that a nuclear arms race served as a deterrent to Soviet aggression. It might be recalled the French often conducted nuclear tests, to the consternation of many.

France’s government was a patchwork of political parties. In the early 1980’s, the Socialist party held the majority of power but there were too few voters who would elect the Socialists unless they allied with Communist representatives. So they did.

The author thought that multi-country summits were a waste of time. He suggested that two world leaders meet without a formal agenda, for one day. He rocked the boat when he complained that American officials were visiting the French embassy too often just for fun (or– for those who planning on running for higher office– to be able to say they acquired foreign policy experience). Because they were wined, dined and perhaps received luxury accommodations, they were wasting American taxpayer dollars.

Read the book to learn a lot more about the author’s cluelessness on the fact that the Soviet Union was on the way out, about France’s foreign and security policies, French history, and U.S. foreign policy.

Fatal Subtraction

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The Book of the Week is “Fatal Subtraction, How Hollywood Really Does Business” by Pierce O’Donnell and Dennis McDougal, published in 1992.

“I asked myself whether this uncanny similarity and anticompetitive market was the result of coincidence or conspiracy. Thanks to my populist tendencies and a healthy distrust of powerful institutions, I opted for the sinister explanation.”

Politics? Big Tech? Medical, legal, music, sports or oil industry?

The above quote happens to refer (in various ways) to all of the major Hollywood movie studios, just after their most lucrative years. The skyrocketing size of the home video market in the 1980’s made movie studios richer and richer, what with cable TV, VCRs and global distribution. They retained the best entertainment law firms on an ongoing basis so that whenever any powerless parties who felt wronged, tried to hire those firms to bring legal actions against them, there were conflicts of interest.

In 1988, Art Buchwald and Alain Bernheim– respectively a seasoned humorous newspaper writer and lecturer who dabbled in the movie industry, and a producer– sued Paramount Pictures Corporation for thirteen causes of action; among them, breach of contract in connection with the movie Coming to America starring Eddie Murphy. They were fortunate in that they were able to hire a big firm and could afford to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to hire topnotch attorneys to fight a years-long legal battle.

The crux of the dispute involved the boilerplate contracts almost everyone in Hollywood was compelled by their agents to sign, in order to get work. The studios engaged in cartelizing behavior, so the powerless creative personnel were at their mercy at contract-signing. Only a tiny percentage of powerful elite stars reaped a ton of money for all movies they did, regardless of financial success. The agents claimed they were getting great deals for their less powerful talent, but that was a lie. For, starting in the 1950’s, the contracts evolved pursuant to the studios’ shady accounting practices, in a way that cheated screenwriters especially.

By the dawn of the 1990’s, big-name actors were allowed to behave like prima donnas, basically enjoying excessive expense accounts and reaping outrageously generous compensation from gross movie revenues. The movie idea originators and writers received net profit participation– i.e., the crumbs after all expenses had been deducted. The studios’ definition of “profit” was topsy turvy so when it came time to pay lowly workers, they claimed their movies were losing money!

O’Donnell and his legal team argued that certain provisions in Buchwald’s and Bernheim’s contracts were unconscionable, and therefore legally unenforceable. On principle, the studios’ oligopoly was economically bad not just for his clients, but for society (See this blog’s post “Wikinomics / Courting Justice”).

Read the book to learn every last detail of the case.

Politics of Conscience

The Book of the Week is “Politics of Conscience, A Biography of Margaret Chase Smith” by Patricia Ward Wallace, published in 1995.

The author wrote,

“Or perhaps it was that after four years, the nation had witnessed his unseemly bullying, insulting, and humiliating tactics for too long…”

of Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI). In the spring of 1954, the U.S. Army held hearings in order to give McCarthy a taste of his own medicine.

Senator Margaret Chase Smith (R-ME) took over her deceased husband’s U.S. Senate seat when he died, and was reelected in 1940. She received special treatment from Bangor Daily News columnist May Craig, in that Craig was assigned specifically to favorably cover Smith, but hardly ever, any other politician.

Smith was best known– aside from her gender, along with six other senators– for issuing a “Declaration of Conscience” in June 1950, that took McCarthy to task (even though she and he were both Republicans) for his dictatorial methods in rooting out accused Communists.

After Smith delivered an accompanying speech on the Senate floor, her group took no follow-up actions, ingenuously thinking that that one act of protestation would convince the rest of the government and ordinary Americans that McCarthy was violating people’s civil rights in capitalizing on Cold War hysteria. He retaliated against her, (as politicians of his ilk will) by pressuring senate-committee-leaders to deny her membership and assignments she wanted.

In 1952, the book U.S.A. Confidential was published. It was full of lies and smears against all parties who were automatically treated as guilty of associating with Communists (many through only the most tenuous of connections), or who were automatically Communists by virtue of a simple accusation (by their enemies, of course) against them, whether unfounded or not.

Smith sued the book’s authors and publisher for libel, as several of the book’s pages mentioned her. The defendants used every possible tactic to delay litigation, but finally agreed to settle the case in autumn 1956. It was a hollow victory for Smith.

In the 1950’s, some members of the United States government galvanized citizens to turn their fears of nuclear war into hatred of one enemy: the former Soviet Union. Nowadays, fears and hatreds are scattered between or among all kinds of groups, absent the threat of nuclear war.

One way American governmental authorities are again attempting to galvanize the people against one enemy is to direct it against a disease, through controlling the population in various ways.

And yes, the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 is soon to arrive, bringing with it threats to national security. But the government has known this anniversary would arrive, for the last twenty years; the most recent administration, for the last eight months. Just a thought.

Read the book to learn much more about Smith’s career, life and times.

L.A. Justice – BONUS POST

The Bonus Book of the Week is “L.A. Justice, Lessons from the Firestorm” by Robert Vernon, published in 1993.

In 1954, the author joined the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). Through the decades of his career, he watched the LAPD become corrupted by the worst aspects of human nature. By the early 1990’s, the department had scrapped the civil service system in favor of using patronage in awarding promotions. This necessitated pleasing local politicians. Always a bad idea.

So at the tail end of April 1992, when the verdict was announced in the Rodney King legal case, law enforcement was unprepared for the rioting that broke out in South-Central Los Angeles.

The author, lately named assistant chief of police of Los Angeles, bragged about helping start a community program in 1990– successful at the book’s writing. It was called “Operation Cul-de-Sac” and involved transforming a high-crime neighborhood into a gated community. It was implemented in about seven hundred households in South Central Los Angeles. The author wrote, “… changing behavior must begin by influencing a belief system.”

The program must have done so, as it created support networks of families and friends, significantly reduced crime, and significantly increased school attendance.

Unfortunately, despite its success, the program was not to last much longer. The reason? It was funded by the LAPD– not special-interest political groups in the community. So local politicians were left out of the loop– unable to hand out patronage jobs.

Read the book to learn of all kinds of other frustrations suffered by the author in his experiences with the LAPD.

Life Inside the Bubble / Losing America – BONUS POST

The first Bonus Book of the Week is “Life Inside the Bubble, Why A Top-Ranked Secret Service Agent Walked Away From It All” by Dan Bongino, published in 2013.

This slim, prophetic volume explained how the author came to choose a career in law enforcement, received a political education, and became a cynic about politics.

The author began his 1970’s childhood in Smithtown in Long Island, New York, but his parents divorced when he was nine years old. He, his mother and two younger brothers moved to Queens, and suffered financial hardships. To add insult to injury, his mother’s boyfriend was a mean drunk.

By the mid-1990’s, the author had become a cadet in the New York City Police Department. In summer 1999, he began training to be a Secret Service agent. Training took six months, first in Georgia, and then Maryland. During his law-enforcement career, he witnessed intelligence and investigative failures, due to “…internal and external politics, election cycles,…” inter-agency rivalry, laziness, incompetence, and hubris.

The author, an adrenaline junkie, enjoyed the constant busy-ness and challenge of devising a plan to keep government workers safe in high-threat, unpredictable and chaotic environments– such as at crowded transportation hubs, outside, and at speaking-venues.

Read the book to learn the causes of three major cluster screw-ups of the Obama administration, why the author quit his federal job, and the consequences (hint: more and more terrorist attacks and shooting sprees) the nation faces, if it does not streamline (eliminate redundancies which result in wasted work, inefficiencies and delayed investigations) its law-enforcement agencies and get them to cooperate with each other, and pass ILLEGAL-gun control legislation! It can only help, as statistics on black-market weaponry tend to be incomplete at best, as they are from the black market.

PLUS– Make it illegal for the criminally insane and violent felons to acquire firearms through very thorough background checks for all gun-license applicants. Over time, this will minimize the dangers to the general population, which shouldn’t have to fear getting shot at, in their day-to-day existence.

The second Bonus Book of the Week is “Losing America, Confronting A Reckless and Arrogant Presidency” by Senator Robert C. Byrd, published in 2004.

“Clearly, an administration so obsessed with ‘winning’ and ‘control’ will stoop low, such tactics are truly underhanded and vicious, and they deserve condemnation from us all… The reach of secrecy, manipulation and misinformation lengthens almost weekly.”

This slim, prophetic volume explained the author’s views on the actions and behaviors of a particular presidential administration, which wasn’t all that different from another, more recent one. In Byrd’s fifty-year career (beginning with president Eisenhower’s), he thought George W. Bush’s came the closest to resembling a dictatorship.

As is well known, president Bush, through bullying Congress (by smearing everyone as “unpatriotic” unless they did his will) sent U.S. troops to Iraq in March 2003; beginning a war that resulted in countless, needless deaths and ruined lives.

Bush’s henchmen were even sneaky about repeatedly requesting funding for the war. They omitted estimated war costs in the annual budget, and instead, spent most of the previous round of funding so that they could declare that the troops required emergency funding. This necessitated a supplemental appropriations bill, which allowed them to: a) cut short the time period for Congressional debate by forcing an almost immediate vote, and b) evade having to be specific about costs and consequences of allocating more taxpayer dollars to the war.

The numerous bad actors in the administration got away with the above because the decades-long political cycle in which the opposing forces of:

ethics,

and greed and power-hunger,

was still favoring greed and power-hunger among too many American government workers.

Sadly, only a small number of Senators was sufficiently courageous to hurt their reelection chances by speaking out against the administration: the author, Tom Daschle, Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, Paul Wellstone, Ted Kennedy, Carl Levin, Patrick Leahy, Jim Jeffords and Paul Sarbanes, and perhaps a few others.

Most of the above individuals are now retired or dead. So the most recent decade has seen a dearth of this kind of politician: who will propose the unpopular, but right thing to do. Fortunately, communications methods are evolving such that, even if the voices of the moral minority are drowned out by propaganda, there is ample opportunity for the public to tell the government its honest opinions so the government can reform itself to become more democratic again. And the (still democratic, for now) government better listen, or it will end up like the Romanovs, Louis XVI and his wife, or the Ceausescus.

Also fortunately– it may take some years– young, up and coming talented politicians will eventually behave similarly to the great ones who came before them.

Anyway, read the book to learn more about Byrd’s distress at the Bush administration’s activities, how history has shown what such activities lead to, and how the Senator tried to stop them.

Fighting For Common Ground – BONUS POST

PLEASE READ THE POST BELOW THIS ONE, AS BUGGY SOFTWARE PUBLISHED IT OUT OF CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER.

The Bonus Book of the Week is “Fighting For Common Ground, How We Can Fix the Stalemate in Congress” by Olympia Snowe, published in 2013.

Born in Augusta, Maine in 1947, the author was of Greek extraction. In the mid-1970’s, when she ran as a Republican for the state Senate in Maine, she rode a bicycle around to personally knock on doors to get votes. In the mid-1980’s, the NIH was still (!) providing federal funds for medical research only on men. In 1987, the Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Health and the Environment acknowledged this abomination. Finally in 1993, the author and others pushed through legislation that created an office of the NIH that conducted research on women, that spurred additional research on women at other organizations.

The author wrote that in the early 2000’s, Karl Rove proposed an evil plan involving five issues, with the goal of keeping the Republicans in power indefinitely. In George W. Bush’s second term, the Republicans pushed for and got a federal education mandate, but the other four initiatives were never fully implemented (fortunately): a Christian agenda, privatization of Social Security and healthcare accounts, and some immigration reform.

The author spent a large portion of this book lamenting about how gridlocked Congress has become due to the hostility between America’s two major political parties. Republicans had traditionally believed in maintaining a balanced budget, but that went out the window with the uncontrolled deficit spending in the George W. Bush years.

In early August 2011, Congress members went on their summer recess, shirking a boatload of important business. As a result, America’s national debt rating was downgraded by Standard and Poor’s for the first time in history.

Read the book to learn about the author’s recommendations on how to change the Senate’s protocol and rules in order to improve its functioning, civility and ability to compromise to achieve consensus.

A Fighting Chance – BONUS POST

The death toll is rising among all kinds of Americans in connection with illegally acquired firearms. See ENDNOTE at the bottom of this post.

And now, a non sequitur: The Bonus Book of the Week is “A Fighting Chance” by Elizabeth Warren, published in 2014.

Born in 1949, Warren spent her childhood in Oklahoma, but later lived in Texas, and various cities on the Eastern Seaboard.

In a rare achievement for a female of her generation, she earned a law degree. With her daughter, she wrote a book about how Americans’ spending habits changed between 1971 and 2001. After meticulous research and numerical analyses, the authors explained why Americans are actually getting poorer with every generation. The answer is that even with accounting for inflation– wages haven’t risen in value; and housing, healthcare and education costs have soared.

Warren was appointed to a task force that investigated the big-bank bailout of 2008. She thought of the task force’s mission as bipartisan, but early on, Congressman Jeb Hensarling (R.-TX), had an us-versus-them mentality and wanted to make sure the Republicans on the task force got the same resources that the Democrats did in their investigation.

The task force hired expert auditors to check and re-check whether taxpayers got their money’s worth, since taxpayers were the ones fronting the money. But for the task forces’ calling the financial institutions’ bluff on their claims, taxpayers would have been financially punished even worse.

Warren wrote that it was fortunate that in 2011 the media helped publicize the lies of the big financial institutions (the credit unions and community banks weren’t to blame) in the mortgage and foreclosure scandals– because regulators were, out of willful ignorance or incompetence, not doing their jobs.

Warren recounted her stressful experiences running for a U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts in the 2012 election. Here is a parody that sums it up:

ELECTION BLUES

sung to the tune of “Electric Blue” with apologies to Icehouse.

If I had a chance

to run for office like you,

are you gonna hate from the start,

smear and lie with your crew?

Are you spying somewhere behind my lines?
I just cringe with every wrong that you do me.
You get away with it, too.
Election blues.

No privacy. I need to raise money.

Tell me what can I do?

Election blues.

Oh, you dealt me a low blow.

Voters believed it was true.

Oh, I would give anything just to defeat you.

Are you spying somewhere behind my lines?
I just cringe with every wrong that you do me.
You get away with it, too.
Election blues.

At great expense,

traveling all over as I’m briefed on issues.

Election blues.

I can sense, sense that the media

are plugging for you.

Election blues.

I’m so tense, I need to get votes.

Tell me, what can I do?

Election blues.

ENDNOTE: Warren told an anecdote in which she met with a religious minister to pray for victims of gun violence (after the fact!), instead of suggesting a way to prevent it. Her areas of expertise are obviously law, economics and finance, but it appeared that she was told not to talk about “gun control” because her mouth had gotten her in trouble on another issue earlier in her campaign.

It seems America’s current leaders think GUN CONTROL is a dirty phrase, pandora’s box, not worth fighting for, or for some, it is too lucrative to even mention.

As is well known, Third World countries (!) have black markets in firearms. The United States likes to think it is more civilized than them. But in recent decades, that point has become more debatable.

In the second half of the 1970’s, the nation suffered both psychological and physical “malaise” of various kinds. Forty years or so ago, even though there was no political lockdown imposed to try to stop the spread of severe flu– there was intense political pressure put on president Gerald Ford to do something. So a swine flu vaccine was developed in 1976. There were also two (!) assassination attempts via firearms on president Ford.

Then, in March 1981, president Ronald Reagan was shot by someone who had acquired a gun illegally. Fortunately, he survived to turn the country around psychologically. No one wants shootings to ever happen again. But the ones involving illegally acquired guns are a reasonably preventable occurrence!

Further, Americans’ First-Amendment right to peaceably assemble has been severely restricted as an alleged COVID prevention measure. It is also obvious that keeping large numbers of people from gathering in one place, makes deaths from gun violence less likely. The fact that professional athletes, some politicians and VIPs have had their right to assemble restored with no disease-prevention measures, shows that keeping people apart was not actually a disease-prevention measure.

It seems America’s leaders should pass federal legislation on ILLEGAL-gun control, in order to restore the rights of ordinary Americans to peaceably assemble, as assembly is a Constitutional (federal) matter. If they have the courage. One last thing– a question for the ages: After all he’s been through, how can Steve Scalise live with himself?

My Story

“I don’t think unnecessary suffering builds character at all. It doesn’t make you a better person, it makes you a bitter person; and anyone who walks around claiming it’s good for you is kidding himself and trying to kid the nation.”

The above was said by someone who favored student loans subsidized by the government, as she needed to borrow money to get her education. She felt no one should have to experience extreme hardships by working around the clock for an education. Unlike females, males of her generation could take advantage of the G.I. Bill. And not all those males were sent overseas to fight in a war.

The Book of the Week is “Ferraro, My Story” by Geraldine Ferraro With Linda Bird Francke, published in 1985.

Born in Newburgh, New York in the mid-1930’s, Ferraro became an only child after her family suffered a few tragic deaths before she was born. Her father died when she was eight. Thereafter, she and her mother moved to the South Bronx.

Ferraro was an assistant district attorney in Queens county in New York City for four years, then completed almost three terms as a member of the U.S. Congress. Her political career got a big boost when she was nominated as the first female vice-presidential candidate in America in 1984.

Unsurprisingly, she was subjected to vicious: ethnic slurs, anti-abortion sentiments and sexism. Notwithstanding, at the Democrat Convention in July in San Francisco, via acclamation, almost four thousand delegates yelled “aye” to nominate Ferraro.

Two weeks (yes, that late!) into her candidacy, Ferraro got mud slung at her from all directions. Her political enemies persecuted her and her family for four months straight– right up until election day. Tens of newspaper reporters went on a “fishing expedition” into her husband’s financial affairs, going back years and years, desperate to find any dirt they possibly could.

Nevertheless, Ferraro stuck to the political issues of the day. She lamented, “So often in Congress, those who would vote against abortion funding for the poor would also be the first to cut back funds for aid to children, nutrition programs, even prenatal programs for poor mothers who want to have healthy children.”

In October 1984, the TV audience for Ferraro’s first debate against vice president George H.W. Bush numbered approximately eighty million viewers. Those were the good old days, when the nation was enjoying relative peace and recovering from a serious recession.

Americans had a feel-good president, so they were passive about maintaining their civil rights. Many felt no need to actively push for political change, which can be achieved via five major methods: litigation, voting, non-violent protesting (including corresponding with politicians), running for office oneself, and violence. The first four of those five require hard work and incredible patience to get results. The fifth is immediate, but exacts the heaviest price of all.

Currently, some might say that certain protest-planners are instigating violence in order to bring back Constitutional scholars, civil right attorneys, public defenders and legal-aid type people, whose numbers have diminished considerably in recent decades. However, there are none so dangerous as those who have read their history and have the power and resources to repeat the evil they’ve read about.

Sadly, there must be some evolutionary advantage to the predisposition for nastiness, else it would have been eliminated from the human gene pool generations ago. Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his book “The Gulag Archipelago” wrote, “… a human being hesitates and bobs back and forth between good and evil all his life… But when through the density of evil actions, the result either of their extreme degree or of the absoluteness of power, he suddenly crosses that threshold, he has left humanity behind, and without, perhaps, the possibility of return.”

A major ingredient in the mix of tyranny includes dishonesty. During a dispute between Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman, in an interview, McCarthy said of Hellman, “…every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’ ”

On that note, here is a relevant parody about various dishonest parties, sung to the tune of “Miami, 2017” with apologies to Billy Joel. Strangely enough, Joel thought a blackout (the July 1977 one in New York City) was a major historical event.

AMERICA, 2020

I’ve seen the LIES go out on Broadway.

I saw the United States laid low.

And life went on beyond Stockholm.

The Swedish government was mature and wise,

and Sweden recovered long ago.

Jews held a funeral out in Brooklyn.

Their religious freedom received a blow.

Trump made governors king.

With a selfish power thing,

we couldn’t go on with our normal life flow.

I’ve seen the LIES go out from “experts.”

I saw the mighty nation cowed.

Leaders were awaiting this opportunity.

They used the virus to strike.

They said nothing was allowed.

They crashed the economy in most places,

used “scorched earth” tactics with sour grapes.

The victims were everywhere, but the government didn’t care.

The palace intrigue was like the Nixon tapes.

I’ve seen the LIES go out from the TV.

I’ve watched the masks and “six feet apart” every day.

The medical supplies were waiting for all those patients.

So much misallocation.

All Americans are the ones who pay.

They sent a stimulus to the people,

and made it seem so generous.

They pushed the fiscal cliff, saying, what the hell’s the dif?

And threw everyone under the bus.

You know those LIES are nothing new for us; soon to be many lies ago.

Now we all live on social media. And politics is all we know.

There are not many who’ll forget this. They say America’s in decline.

So– remind the world about, the way the LIES went out to keep the memory alive…

Anyway, read Ferraro’s book to learn more about her vice-presidential campaign and her life.

One last thing:

Thomas Sydenham advised, “The arrival of a good clown exercises more beneficial influence upon the health of a town than of twenty jackasses laden with drugs.”

King of the Club

The Book of the Week is “King of the Club” by Charles Gasparino, published in 2007.

The subject of this book “… was suffering from the downside of loyalty; he spent so much time surrounding himself with people he could trust that he forgot he also needed smart people who could get a job done in times of crisis, and he was now facing… the greatest crisis of his career.”

Sounds familiar. It was actually “Richard Grasso and the Survival of the New York Stock Exchange.” When he was fifteen years old, Grasso began trading stocks in an account held in his mother’s name, getting stock tips from his drug-store-owner-employer.

The author was rather vague about Grasso’s two years of military service which allegedly began in the mid 1960’s, spent: “…in Fort Meade, Maryland, though he did make periodic trips to Vietnam.” Apparently, Grasso’s eyesight was good enough to get him drafted by the U.S. Army, but not good enough to get him hired by the New York City Police Department, his first-choice employer after the military.

Grasso therefore began work as a back-office Wall-Street clerk at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in early 1968. The author failed to mention whether Grasso was told to put his stocks in a blind trust, or whether his new employer had a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

Grasso meteorically moved up through the ranks. He was innovative in executing new marketing initiatives for the exchange. He also poached companies that were listed on either the American Stock Exchange or the NASDAQ– that provided fierce competition to the NYSE. All three were stock markets of corporate entities that wanted to sell their shares far and wide. But the companies could be listed in only one place. Grasso convinced them that the NYSE was the best place to list.

By 1980, Grasso controlled NYSE listings, its trading floor and almost all its trading operations. In the mid-1980’s, the chair of NASDAQ, Bernie Madoff, claimed his market’s trading was more fair for investors because it executed trades electronically, thus multiple players were interacting continuously while setting impartial prices. The argument went that electronic trading made the market more “efficient”– as no buyers or sellers had significantly better pricing information than others on which to trade, theoretically.

In 1990, Grasso stepped up to the second-most powerful position at the NYSE. He was in charge of the exchange listees and, at the same time, in charge of regulating them. He did the legwork of bringing new business to the exchange. His boss, the chairman, did the public relations work of delivering speeches globally and persuading the federal government to keep conditions favorable for the exchange.

Several of the NYSE’s board of directors were Wall Street executives who passively continued to keep the status quo– lavishly rewarding Grasso monetarily for his undivided attention to lavishly lining their pockets year after year when times were good.

There was honor among thieves, as Grasso’s henchmen turned a blind eye to the various forms of illegal activity that allowed them to make obscene amounts of money on the trading floor. Until there wasn’t honor among thieves– as conditions changed.

From a not-for-profit-organization-legal-standpoint, most of the parties and individuals involved were engaging in various highly unethical activities, at best; conflicts of interest abounded as participants in the exchange network cooperated in a way that maximized profits for everyone until, as usual, some individuals got too greedy.

Being head of the New York Stock Exchange is not unlike leading the U.S. government. The marriage of politics and commerce is always fraught with conflicts of interest. Some are avoidable. It’s a shame that politics in particular tends to attract dishonest attention whores with hubris syndrome whose ethics are in the basement. Of course, they usually use the “everybody does it” excuse and change the subject if they can.

But there ought to be equal justice under the law for any of the accused– after an investigation of where the evidence leads— with NO jumping to conclusions, assumptions or biases prior to a thorough review of all evidence, if any. Along these lines, one would do well to ignore the superlative-laden, repetitive, sensationalist drivel emanating from the teleprompter box, um, er– idiot box.

Anyway, starting in the late 1990’s, unbridled greed led to a bunch of scandals. There was Long Term Capital Management, Enron, WorldCom, the dot-com crash, various major SEC violations committed by big-name brokerages; not to mention 9/11’s impact on the financial markets. All on Grasso’s watch. Yet, his pay kept soaring, anyway. It wasn’t pay-for-performance anymore.

Finally, Grasso got the same treatment, figuratively speaking, as other major historical figures. One week he was flying high and the next, kicked to the curb. Grasso was suffering from a bad case of hubris syndrome. In early September 2003, herd mentality / groupthink seized the board; jealousy (possibly subconscious) of his pay package reached critical mass.

Read the book to learn of the usual occurrences in such a situation (investigation, litigation, political machination and myth propagation) that led to the changing of more things, and more of same.