Politics – Page 23 – education and deconstruction.com

The Passion of Ayn Rand

The Book of the Week is “The Passion of Ayn Rand, A Biography” by Barbara Branden, published in 1986.

Born in St. Petersburg in February 1905, Ayn (rhymes with “mine”) Rand, whose father was a chemist, spent her early childhood in a cultured, Jewish family in Petrograd. After graduating from high school in the Crimea, when the family was poverty-stricken and starving due to the Bolshevik Revolution, Rand taught literacy to Red Army soldiers.

In the early 1920’s, the Russian government evilly schemed to allow “former bourgeoisie” such as Rand’s family to work in cooperatives until it felt sufficient assets were accumulated, at which time it stole those assets by force. Its attitude was: “… workers and peasants were extolled as the highest types of humanity, and intellectuals, unless they employed their intelligence in selfless service to the state, were denounced as parasitical.”

Rand was headstrong in her desire to flee to America and never return to Russia. She eventually got her wish in the mid-1920’s, thanks to her mother’s distant relatives in Chicago. After overcoming numerous obstacles, she lived with her Orthodox-Jewish relatives, and later, struck out on her own in Los Angeles. She was driven to become a writer and let nothing stand in her way.

Rand eventually wrote what became a very famous novel– Atlas Shrugged— whose theme was that if intellectuals are the ones “…who make civilization possible– Why have they never recognized their own power? Why have they never challenged their torturers and expropriators? … it is the victims, the men of virtue and ability, who make the triumph of evil possible by…” being too nice to their oppressors.

Rand thought that the American government, with its anti-trust stance, was persecuting industrialists. She thought the latter deserved to enjoy every last penny of the fruits of their labor because they were the economic engine of the nation.

In rebelling against her former country’s socialist economic system under its Communist political system, Rand thought workers were becoming too powerful, and she denounced them as parasitical. She dogmatically advocated an extreme version of “survival of the fittest” or Libertarianism.

However, when government becomes an accomplice to its donors’ activities that involve excessive greed, conflicts of interest and unfair economic advantages– society becomes economically unbalanced as wealth becomes too concentrated in a tiny percentage of the population; this situation foments class resentment. For additional information on this situation, see this blog’s posts:

Wikinomics / Courting Justice

What’s the Matter With Kansas

Street Without A Name

Sons of Wichita

Outsider in the White House

Crossing the River

Burned Bridge, and

Forty Autumns.

Whittaker Chambers wrote in his negative review of Atlas Shrugged, “Miss Rand calls in a Big Brother of her own… She plumps for a technocratic elite… And in reality too, by contrast with fiction, this can only head into a dictatorship…”

Rand formulated the theory of Objectivism, whose purely capitalist-free-market-oriented, rational thinking completely rejected religion. Yet she never did explain– in her lucrative lectures to big-name, elitist, politically liberal (ironically!) American colleges, how that squared with her total rejection of godless Communism / Socialism.

Incidentally, the main character of the novel itself– whose cult of personality persuades intellectuals from all walks of life to go on strike– says, “Force and mind are opposites, morality ends where a gun begins… It is only in retaliation that force may be used and only against the man who starts its use.”

Along these lines, gun-control advocates in the United States have been too nice for too long. Except for short periods, whenever there’s been a proposal to:

curb the bearing of arms (not even all arms, just the most destructive ones–that are overkill for hunting or local law enforcement), or

enact stricter background checks on the granting of gun permits or licenses,

the opposition has repeatedly, through propaganda and money, convinced enough significantly powerful people that:

no stricter background checks should be done, and

no firearms should be banned pursuant to the Second Amendment of the Constitution.

Sources with more information include this blog’s posts:

A Good Fight

Undercover, and

Savage Spawn.

If America wants to return to “normal” (have pre-COVID gatherings of a large number of people in one place), it needs to put ILLEGAL-gun control at the top of the agenda.

Anyway, read the book to learn of Rand’s biographer’s relationship to Rand, a wealth of additional details on Rand and how she acquired her wealth, the romantic subplot in the soap opera of her life, and much more on her theories, writings and lectures.

Lost On Planet China

The Book of the Week is “Lost on Planet China, The Strange and True Story of One Man’s Attempt to Understand the World’s Most Mystifying Nation” by J. Maarten Troost, published in 2008.

SIDENOTE: Just as there is hyper-awareness among foreigners of the opaque, dreadfully polluted air in China’s urban areas, there is hyper-awareness of the oppressive COVID political ideology SPOUTED 24/7 BY HYPOCRITES in the United States. The masking and “six-feet apart” rules are simply minor inconveniences piled on by ruling authorities to give the appearance that there are actions ordinary Americans can take to stop the spread of the disease.

However, the major inconveniences for everyone– cancelling big social events, or allowing sports with no fans, and closing schools– are meant to prevent people from gathering in large numbers in one place so that they will be less likely to die in terrorist attacks or shooting sprees. Violent political unrest has become more and more likely (in America!), given the nature of the most recent presidential administration.

Americans have been made hyper-aware of the fatal, contagious viral disease of COVID through scare-tactics that were NEVER used during previous epidemics of fatal, contagious, viral diseases. Take the flu epidemic in 1957. Incidentally, at that time, there were fewer viral treatments for patients, and patients then were just as ignorant about medicine as now: Rosalind Russell, a Broadway and movie actress, wrote, “That second Auntie Mame winter [in 1957 on Broadway] I had the flu three times myself, took antibiotics like popcorn, and kept going.”

Jim Croce caught the flu during what his wife wrote in her book, was an “epidemic” that caused a serious financial loss from his concert series on college campuses in 1972. Students were loath to attend cultural events (but there were no restrictions on doing so) for fear of catching the flu.

Croce recovered in a week, but his wife DIDN’T mention that: he was tested for “the flu,” he saw a doctor, or that he reported his illness to the local government. Along these lines, in the 1970’s, an indeterminate number of people WEREN’T COUNTED in flu-epidemic statistics even though they had flu symptoms– because they weren’t tested for it, didn’t see a doctor, or didn’t report it to the local government. In 2020, the vast majority of people who felt sick got tested for COVID, which led to an immediate reporting to medical or political authorities!

Thus, for the above and other reasons, then as now, statistics on fatal, contagious viral diseases, aren’t all that accurate. A book that makes this point in general, published in 1954, that also teaches readers about how to spot bias, spurious causation, and all manner of misleading nonsense in a range of topics including politics, medicine and economics, is: “How to Lie With Statistics” by Darrell Huff. The highlights include: pp. 28, 35, 39-41, 64, 83-85, 118-119 and 131.

Anyway, the author of the above Book of the Week traveled to various provinces and regions of China around 2005– he failed to specify how many months he was there– leaving his wife and two young sons, two and four years old, in the United States. He wrote he was looking for a livable part of China for his family for a year. While there, he met up with a friend fluent in Chinese, who showed him around Beijing.

The friend taught the author where to get pirated software and pornography, and how to bargain. For, the prices of all goods and services exchanged in the country are negotiable. He also got assistance in hiring a young female translator, whose schooling had taught her only positive aspects of China’s history in recent decades. She had no clue about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

When the author remarked on the air pollution in China, various Chinese people responded to his criticism by saying Los Angeles had smog. Another cultural aspect of life in China, aside from being forced to accept the pollution, was China’s government’s legal insistence that couples have only one child in their immediate families; preferably a boy. Parents of a child of marriageable age met in the local parks to find a spouse for their one child.

The author also conveyed his (unpleasant) experiences of riding on China’s railways, and seeing “…streetlamps decorated with swastikas, a sight that always succeeded in startling me. But, in fact, in Buddhism it is a symbol for love and mercy…”

Read the book to learn: the history of China of the 1400’s, and of the author’s adventures in China proper, Hong Kong and Macau. Through the eyes of the multi-racial author– who is Canadian, Czech and Dutch– the reader might get the impression that Chinese society is sociopathic.

But, when one thinks of the two-word phrase ending in “spree” the first words that spring to mind in AMERICAN English are: shopping, spending, shooting or killing. While it is bashing China, perhaps America ought to reflect on how the rest of the world views it, and “remove the plank from ITS OWN eye” first.

Tower of Babble / The Weight of the Mustard Seed – BONUS POST

The first Bonus Book of the Week is “Tower of Babble, How the United Nations Has Fueled Global Chaos” by Dore Gold, published in 2004.

“It is telling that the United Nations could not even reach a working definition of the very thing [“aggression”] that it had been created to prevent… [and to the book’s writing] Rather than outlawing terrorism, the United Nations was finding ways of condoning it as a legitimate form of political expression.”

This was an oversimplified, disorganized book-long rant on the United Nations’ history of handling conflicts in the hotspots of the world. It is possible the author thought that high schools might use this as a textbook, or perhaps this too-cursory volume would be a quick, easy reference tool– for newly minted UN employees, foreign correspondents or foreign service officers– to be used to acquire a little context on the places to which they would be traveling to, or assigned in the future.

The author provided summaries of the UN’s role in major international hostilities and events, such as those of the Palestinians and Israelis, India and Pakistan, North Korea and South Korea, and China and Tibet, among other countries with tribes warring within, between and among; plus the Korean War, Congo in 1961, Hungary in 1956, the Suez Canal Crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Six-Day War in 1967, UN Resolution 242, the First Gulf War, the Iran-Iraq War, human rights abuses of the Kurds in the 1980’s, the Oil-For-Food Program and Kofi Annan’s various misdeeds, genocide in Rwanda, anarchy in Somalia, genocide in the Balkans, Hezbollah’s terrorist acts in Lebanon, and Hamas in connection with refugee camps in Lebanon.

Yes, this book could be a starting point. However, it takes years to get a well-rounded education in geopolitics. Readings in modern international history should include, if possible, numerous personal accounts of each of the major stakeholders in the conflicts.

In the too-long introduction (which should have been included in the book-at-large), the author argued that the United States was justified in punishing Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in 2003. He wrote, “… the UN’s failures mean that in some situations the U.S. is compelled to protect world order by itself, or within more limited coalitions outside of the UN.” For arguments against the war, see this blog’s posts:

From Jailer to Jailed

Second Chance

Halliburton’s Army

The Good Fight

The Greatest Story Ever Sold

Fire-Breathing Liberal

Sleeping With the Devil

Talking Back

Waiting For An Ordinary Day

and the post below.

The second Bonus Book of the Week is “The Weight of the Mustard Seed, The Intimate Story of an Iraqi General and His Family During Thirty Years of Tyranny” by Wendell Steavenson, published in 2009. This slim volume contained a rambling, disorganized collection of descriptions of a patriarch and his family, his colleagues, and a “where are they now” epilogue.

The patriarch, Kamel Sachet, had a successful military career largely similar to hundreds of other Muslim Iraqi men born just after WWII– until their lives and those of their families were turned upside down or cut short by Saddam Hussein’s regime, which began in 1979.

The ruling Baath Party favored funding education and economic diversification to reduce total dependency on oil revenues, and was not averse to Western cultural influences.

Nevertheless, according to the author, with the increasing governmental crackdown on dissidents through the years, the Iraqis chose to either drown their sorrows with alcohol or become more religious. The women stopped wearing makeup, and covered up their bodies with clothing; the men prayed five times a day and memorized passages of the Koran.

Tribal or religious leaders were replaced by political (Baath) leaders. Traditionally, from the cradle to the grave, Iraqis were told what to think, how to behave, how to live. For the most part, they were not independent thinkers.

The Sachet family, which had nine children, took solace in the tenets of Islam. The head of the elementary school where the wife taught told her that she needed to be an active Baath Party member, or she would be fired. So she began to attend the mandatory weekly meetings and paid her financial dues.

The author interviewed a major in the military (a doctor, really) in the army medical corps who had met Mr. Sachet, a then-lieutenant colonel in a military prison in 1983, during the Iran-Iraq war.

The doctor was in a military prison perhaps because he was a Shia from the shrine of Kerbala. He was fortunate in that his friends in high places got him released after he signed a statement confessing to a few misdemeanors, including “… having improper relations with the nurses at Rashid hospital…” Sachet was there because he refused to join the Baath Party.

The two were both released after some months of torture and humiliation. The former was forced to witness six executions of soldiers accused of desertion. The accused each got thirty bullets to the head.

By spring 2006, there was anarchy in Iraq, as the Americans, Kurds, Sunna and Shia were loath to lead the country: “… everyone had a gun and every political leader, sheikh and neighborhood don had an army / bodyguard / militia.”

Read the book to learn of the personal stories of the victims.

Outsider in the White House

The Book of the Week is “Outsider in the White House” by Bernie Sanders with Huck Gutman, published in 1997, with an afterword added in 2016. This was a combination bragfest / rant of a political-career memoir.

In 1981, Sanders was elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont. He was a member of the Independent party. The then-board of aldermen (equivalent to a city council) consisted of eight Democrats, three Republicans, and one Citizen Party member. They outvoted him at every opportunity. Nonetheless, he was able to get rid of sweetheart contracts, and establish:

competitive bidding;
a Little League;
a tree-planting initiative on city streets;
a summer concert series;
a Progressive Coalition that helped get board-of-aldermen candidates elected, who would help him. [In 1982, three of six Wards of Burlington won their elections. But the Coalition never did get a majority on the board];
community-oriented entities (such as the Burlington Women’s Council, and a Youth Office that included a Teen Center, to implement local initiatives such as Operation Snow Shovel); and music and cultural events.

Sanders improved city services in law enforcement, firefighting and sanitation. He secured programs for TRULY affordable housing (unlike in New York City). Although he was the mayor of a city, he delved into the foreign-policy issue of then-president Ronald Reagan’s wasting of taxpayer dollars in Latin America. For, those dollars could have been better spent taking care of U.S. citizens in his city.

In 1988, Sanders ran as an Independent candidate from Vermont for the U.S. House of Representatives, against a Republican and a Democrat. He nostalgically reminisced that they ran “… civil, issue-oriented campaigns. The debates were respectful and there was no negative advertising, no desire to ‘destroy’ the other person.”

As a Congressman in the 1990’s, Sanders attempted to legislate raising minimum wage, and blocking the elimination of a subsidy for home heating for the poor. He actually sponsored legislation to:

help dairy farmers in his state;
block a raise in pay (compliments of American taxpayers) given to the Lockheed-Martin board of directors and CEO;
create more affordable housing; and
stop insurance-company discrimination against the poor.

In 1996, Sanders wrote that Republican leaders went hog-wild in bashing: gays, immigrants, affirmative action, abortion and welfare. On that last issue, they made serious cutbacks which resulted in savings that were STILL less than an increase in military spending of about $60 billion over a six year period.

Sanders considers himself a socialist. His political philosophy toward economics seems to harken back to a 1940’s term that ought to be used more often–a label given to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.: “NCL” or Non-Communist Left. Sanders wrote not one word about his views on any Soviet dictator. There was no indication whatsoever that he espoused the political system of Communism.

Schlesinger summed up NCL thusly: “The welfare state, I observed, did not at all mean direct government control over the economy. It was perfectly compatible with the free market. It meant simply the establishment of basic national standards of living for all citizens… The electoral process offered the means by which noncapitalists– farmers, workers, intellectuals, minorities– could invoke the state to defend themselves against capitalist exploitation.” Such process “… brought about a relative redistribution of wealth that defeated Marx’s prediction of the immiseration of the poor…” which leads to class resentments that boil over into violence when dissatisfaction reaches critical mass.

Read the book to learn more about Sanders’ political career. The following parody sums up Sanders’ description of the American political culture of the 1990’s and early 2000’s, just as the original theme song from the TV show “All in the Family” fondly recollects American popular culture of the 1930’s and 1940’s.

THOSE WERE THE DAYS

sung to the tune of “Those Were the Days” with apologies to the Estate of Gene Raskin.

Boy, the way Bill Clinton played.

Bills for war, tax cuts and trade.

Guys like Bush, they had it made.

Those were the days.

And you were told what you were then.

The Apprentice, Idol, Seinfeld, and Friends: made us long for a man like Ronald Reagan a-gain.

GOP smeared the welfare state.

Social media squelched real debate.

Gee, our online lives ran great.

Those were the days.

Bad News – BONUS POST

“What are we to make of all this? Even today, anyone relating the known events … must painstakingly and correctly hedge them with weighty disclaimers, because the story seems to reek of conspiracy theory.”

The author wrote the above in reference to the “white van incident” on the day of 9/11.

The Bonus Book of the Week is “Bad News, The Decline of Reporting, the Business of News, and the Danger to Us All” by Tom Fenton, published in 2005.

This is a book-long rant on how journalism has become profit-seeking entertainment. As is well known, nowadays, media moguls are the ones who judge whether every attention whore’s idiot-box or Web utterance is “news” or not.

The decline in the educational value of news has been a gradual process. The Postwar Era through the 1980’s saw America make a large investment in newsgathering around the world.

An indication of America’s popular-culture bent is the fact that, in the history of television, the shows that had the absolute highest annual ratings-figure on five occasions included only “The Cosby Show,” “All in the Family” and “60 Minutes.” The third show– a news-magazine that provided in-depth coverage of scandals which hurt ordinary Americans, had a run of 22 years as one of the top ten-rated programs.

The author believes that American politicians have subscribed to a recipe for disaster– excessive deregulation (including in the media industry) that has led to unbridled greed, and ultimately, financial scandals and crashes. America saw its share of those between the end of the 1990’s into the single-digit 2000’s.

Such politically-generated turmoil has killed journalism by allowing media companies to become monstrously large oligopolies that tow the line of one political party or the other in the pursuit of money, in the United States. The cost-cutting among media-company owners has caused the field of journalism to regress to a time before commercial aviation (!) For, there are few or no journalists stationed outside the United States, gathering stories that would keep viewers, listeners and readers informed; perhaps improve the quality of their lives, or even save lives.

There occurred some poetic justice when large corporations in the entertainment business such as General Electric, Disney and Viacom lost money as a result of 9/11. The author contended that experienced journalists used to gather information internationally that allowed them and the government to connect foreign-policy dots to minimize unrest plus give indications of terrorist threats, and minimize economic instability in the world.

The author also argued that well-informed viewers could change history for the better, but credited them with more power than they actually have. Indirectly, yes, their viewing habits could lead to the boosting of ratings of shows that would help them vote for a better electorate.

However, viewers aren’t likely to stop using the idiot box or the Web to get a clue as to what’s going on in the world– and, in order to acquire some context, suddenly start reading the personal accounts of old-school journalists who sincerely tried to be fair and objective– unless they have done so as a lifelong habit. They have obviously, passively accepted the fact that their knowledge sources have become tabloid garbage.

Some readers might say that keeping track of international affairs is the job of foreign service officers, not of journalists. Diplomats from the United States are highly compensated and live in palaces full of servants (even in Third World countries, generously financially aided by American taxpayers) in exchange for their round-the-clock vigilance of developing, sometimes life-threatening situations, on-location. They’re supposed to keep Americans safe. The author pointed out, though, that journalists used to be an extra source of intelligence. Not anymore.

By the start of the war in Afghanistan in 2002, “American news organizations had so depleted the ranks of hard news reporters over the years that they suddenly had to send out whatever lifestyle, fashion, and gossip types they could muster on a moment’s notice– plus, of course a few Big Names who knew far more about grandstanding than they did about Afghanistan.”

Read the book to learn more details of this disturbing situation.

A Life In Our Times

The Book of the Week is “A Life in Our Times, Memoirs” by John Kenneth Galbraith, published in 1981.

Born in 1908 in southern Ontario, Canada, the author grew up on a farm and ranch. One of four children, he was of Scottish extraction. In spring 1934, he got a high-paying job as an economist with the U.S. government’s Agricultural Adjustment Administration, having completed his PhD at the University of California at Berkeley. He wrote, “I was not a citizen, but it is not certain that one was even asked about such details in those civilized days.” However, he did have to verify with the Postmaster General that he was a Democrat.

Also in 1934, when the author became a professor at Harvard, he was appointed an admissions officer. He was told that all (very nearly all white male, at that time) applicants to the college who had attended the nation’s elite private boarding schools (Groton, St. Paul’s, St. Mark’s, Middlesex, Exeter and Andover) were automatically accepted. Students from other private schools were possibilities; public schools, less so, and Jews were subjected to a quota, regardless of their pedigree. Radcliffe College– Harvard’s female counterpart, had inferior offerings in all ways (housing, food, academics, etc.).

John Maynard Keynes helped originate a prominent school of thought in economics in the Depression era. He believed the country could deficit-spend its way out of a financial hole, and of course, military spending soared at the start of WWII. Government officials have one chance (there are no do-overs) in any given administration to try to foster or maintain a good economy and claim credit for doing so. The extremely complex United States economy is a topic area that is very propaganda-dependent.

However, human nature plays the biggest role in the wealth of a nation. The author propagandized that Americans who survived the Great Depression feared there would be another, so during and after WWII, they saved their money for a rainy day. Thus, one factor driving the economy might have been the behavioral economics of citizens, regardless of government policy.

In 1940, the author was a lobbyist for the Farm Bureau in Chicago, setting minimum prices for corn, cotton, wheat and other crops. He also had a hand in shaping policy at the National Defense Advisory Commission in Washington, D.C. “No one worried about the environmental effects; industry and jobs in those uncomplicated days [1930’s and 1940’s] were an absolute good.” In 1942, amid much governmental infighting over price controls on agricultural products, the Senate lied with statistics to minimize financial harm to farmers. There was also mandatory rationing of everyday consumer products.

The author eventually became an American citizen and a high government official, so he was able to gain access to a large amount of horse’s mouth archive-documentation, which he meticulously sifted through in writing this book.

In spring 1945, the author, fluent in German, interrogated Albert Speer– one of the first Nazis to shrewdly get legal immunity from punishment for snitching on his countrymen in naming names of war criminals. United States government officials were also trying to find out how much harm the Air Force did to the German economy and its war capabilities.

The answer was– not very much. The overall reason was that the Germans didn’t make war as well as they should’ve, so they lost the war more as a function of their weaknesses, not as a function of the Allies’ strengths. The author listed the major factors:

America and England competently executed talent recruitment and deployment of both men and women in their very productive war mobilization efforts;

The overconfident Germans allowed only men to help;

The Germans put more effort into mobilizing their propaganda machine than their war machine after they initially stockpiled weaponry to kick off the war– they didn’t want their economy to slow down;

The emotional impacts of the incidents at Dunkirk and Pearl Harbor spurred the Allies to action;

The Germans again accelerated the making of war weaponry in 1944– too late; and

The United States’ fighter bombers did disable some German oil and railroad installations, but not many ball-bearing and aircraft factories.

In spring 1961, the author was nominated as U.S. ambassador to India. A whopping 106 security-clearance informants gossiped about the author to the U.S. secret service to help him get the job. President JFK had just suffered the embarrassing Bay of Pigs fiasco.

When the author learned that the CIA had secret plans to send money and publish propaganda in newspapers and magazines in order to get voters to favor non-Communist candidates in India’s upcoming elections, he shared his concerns with the president and other top American officials. They listened, as they couldn’t afford to fail at any more adolescent-boy spy games, at least for the near future.

In the author’s day, aside from his having cozy contacts in high places, his friendliness and honesty with the press, and his writing well-argued, readable memos went a long way toward getting the government to act pursuant to his recommendations.

In 1967, the author published a book in which he wrote– inexplicably– that the motivations of captains of industry did not (!) include the pursuit of money but only “… the desire for peer approval, the identification with the goals of the organization, and the desire to adjust these toward one’s own.” He asserted that these motivations were common to socialist organizations, too. It must be remembered that the author was originally from Canada; he gave lectures on his ideas in Britain, and the book was sold in the USSR, Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia and Germany.

Read the book to learn about the author’s additional dealings with India in connection with Pakistan and China; his prescient and depressing prognostications on Laos and Vietnam, to which the government failed to listen; his views on LBJ’s War on Poverty; and much more about how times have changed, and how they have stayed the same.

Mount Pleasant

The Book of the Week is “Mount Pleasant, My Journey From Creating A Billion-Dollar Company to Teaching at A Struggling Public High School” by Steve Poizner, published in 2010.

In 2002, after helping to manage two successful tech startups and participating in the rigorous White House Fellowship program (in which participants are actually consulted by the American president), the 45 year-old author volunteered to teach at an inner-city public high school in San Jose, California. Only one out of tens of schools agreed to let him try.

The ethnic makeup of the students was ten percent Caucasian, and the rest, Hispanic and Asian. The school– located in a high-crime, gang-ridden area– was dilapidated, and resources were woefully inadequate. The author wrote, “Could anyone at Mount Pleasant stop long enough to reflect on the sad state of affairs when fear coexists so closely with learning?”

The author spent his own personal money to purchase supplies for school projects, hire writing-tutors and rent a bus to take his students on field trips for his one-section American Government class for the 2003 spring semester. Through his contacts, he was able to bring in guest speakers too. Other teachers were not similarly supplied. But he admitted that, although he was able to give his students more real-world learning, he lacked the experience to customize his teaching for each of the thirty-odd students in his class. He couldn’t change their lives as easily as a teacher who’d had years of dealing with dozens of students daily.

The author was an enthusiastic advocate for the charter-school movement in California. His reasoning went: charter schools– which are privately funded and in some cases, partially publicly funded– have the money to address the problems posed by schools’ lack of resources, and make schools affordable for parents. However, charter schools in the United States have been around for decades now, and they have failed to show themselves as a significantly better overall alternative to private and public schools.

The author explained that in California, the charter-school lobby consisted of three factions, one of which was comprised of foundations of ultra-wealthy Americans. Their infighting has led to schools of uneven quality.

One would think, if charter schools were superior, they would have replaced all other kinds of schools by now. Perhaps they haven’t because parents who believe in education will make the necessary sacrifices to give their kids the best opportunities. Other parents won’t, no matter what they are offered. In modern times, in the United States, if it’s important to the parents, they will make the time and effort, as there is ample opportunity to do so. If not, they will make excuses.

The author did concede that “… teachers are in the ultimate position to know what works and what doesn’t for the state’s students” yet educrats who aren’t in a classroom (some of whom have never taught a day in their lives) and software-makers are currently in charge of America’s education policies. Unless a significant number of better schools replace worse ones, (which is another one of those problems that, with enough political backing and funding, can be solved!) the education scene in the United States will remain as embattled, uneven and unfair as ever. As is well known, practically all privileged parents send their kids to private schools, as did the author.

Read the book to learn the specific skill the author really pushed his students to learn, his work history, and the takeaway on his teaching experience.

Message in A Black Hole – BONUS POST

Message in A Black Hole
sung to the tune of “Message in A Bottle” with apologies to The Police.
A song Trump is singing now.

Just a castaway, but I don’t want to concede, oh.
With more votes, I’ll get back in the lead, oh.
More lawyers than anyone could bear.
I haven’t any shame so I don’t care, oh.
I’ll send an SOS to the world.
I’ll send an SOS to the world.
I hope electors get my
I hope electors get my
I hope electors get my message in a black hole, yeah.
Message in a black hole, yeah.
Years have passed since I’ve won the globe
but I resist liberals’ every probe.
I hope my supporters can keep me in power.
I can win again and
I can break those Dems.
I’ll send an SOS to the world.
I’ll send an SOS to the world.
I hope electors get my
I hope electors get my
I hope electors get my message in a black hole.
Message in a black hole.
Oh, message in a black hole, yeah.
Oh, message in a black hole, yeah.
Rallied this morning.
You know what I saw.
Lots and lots of ballots in states that I adore.
Seems I’m in love with being loved.
Lots and lots of lawyers.
I can’t stand being snubbed.
I’ll send an SOS to the world.
I’ll send an SOS to the world.
I hope electors get my
I hope electors get my
I hope electors get my message in a black hole, yeah.
Message in a black hole, yeah.
Oh, message in a black hole, oh.
Oh, message in a black hole.
Sending out an SOS.
Sending out an SOS.
Sending out an SOS…

In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz

The Book of the Week is “In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz, Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu’s Congo” by Michaela Wong, published in 2001.

Various dictators have looted the Belgian colony alternately known as “Zaire” and “Congo” in recent centuries. The late 1800’s saw light-skinned people enslaving the dark-skinned to try to enrich themselves by poaching, harvesting, mining or drilling for the colony’s ivory, rubber, timber, cocoa, diamonds, gold, copper, cobalt, uranium and oil on behalf of King Leopold II of Belgium. However, many died of malaria, typhoid or sleeping sickness.

Belgium was still greedy even after Congo, still racked by unrest, declared its independence in 1960. The Soviets wanted a piece of the action, sending troops in to pretend to quell the violence. The United Nations troops entered, throwing soldiers with good intentions, after bad. For the next thirty years, what did change was that the United States and other countries wasted an inconceivably large amount of money supporting the lavish lifestyles of the Congolese dictator and his family and friends, until the CIA discreetly decided it was time for the dictator to go.

In late September 1960, Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga (Mobutu, for short) came to power. That translates to “the all powerful warrior who goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake.” He ran the nation’s one political party, called “Movement for the Revolution.” He had the charisma, and lack of academic-smarts but plethora of street-smarts of the late American president Ronald Reagan.

However, Mobutu used divide and conquer in his palace politics– telling naive individuals that others were slandering them behind their backs. They believed him. He also assigned the same tasks to subordinates who hated each other without telling the others of the duplicated project-teams. When they learned that the boss had favorites other than them, petty jealousies arose. The hostilities between Mobutu’s underlings kept them busy fighting among themselves, and kept him in power.

Mobutu held rallies all the time. He created jobs galore for his people, in the rubber and cocoa industries. Foreigners who had previously been running operations that exploited Congo’s resources, fled the country. The new native Congolese who were given businesses to run, had no clue how to run them. When the economy crashed, Mobutu, his family, his cronies and his private army had no worries, because their real estate in Brussels, Paris and South Africa, and their Swiss bank accounts remained safe.

In the mid 1980’s, the journalists and diplomats in Kinshasa could spot the Congolese elites by their SUVs and mobile phones from Telecel. Congolese peasants, in order to eat, were forced to grow vegetable gardens throughout the city.

In the 1990’s, desirous of a better life, native Congolese were able to obtain student visas that allowed them to secretly become low-level restaurant or construction workers, or drivers in Brussels. They fled their native country rather than collectively revolt in order to fight for it, having adopted the pessimistic attitude of every man for himself. They had seen with their own eyes that “… politics is a game played by conmen and hypocrites.”

Congo’s cycle of dictatorship had yet to be broken due to the education system, which didn’t teach Congolese history. The younger generation knew nothing of how their recent leaders had come to power. “Knowing nothing about the past of course, frees a population from any sense of blame for the present. How convenient was all this forgetting…”

May 1997 was crunch time similar to that in 1986 in the Philippines and Haiti. In Kinshasa, Tutsi youths were shot in the streets, Japanese journalists sought photo opportunities, journalists of other nationalities and Belgian tourists sought haven in the Hotel InterContinental.

Read the book to learn much more about the history of Congo and its one nuclear reactor, Mobutu, the Congolese people in the 1990’s– rich and famous, poor and unknown, their black markets, their Mutual Benefit Society, their religions, corruption at their airport and with the IMF and World Bank, and about the lingering colonialist nostalgia of Belgium and France.

Do No Harm / Since Yesterday – BONUS POST

The first Bonus Book of the Week is “Do No Harm, Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery” by Henry Marsh, originally published in 2014. In this personal account, the author– a British brain surgeon– described his horribly depressing career. He recounted how he removed brain tumors from, and clipped aneurysms of, his most memorable patients through the decades. Even when a tumor was benign, it would keep growing and inevitably kill the patient unless taken out. Even when a large aneurysm had yet to burst, there was a chance (incalculable, as every patient is different) that it would burst in the patient’s lifetime.

Metaphorically speaking, some people would say that the outgoing president of the United States is a tumor in the nation’s brain. The author wrote, “You can never know for certain from a brain scan exactly how a tumor will behave until you start to remove it. It might be hard or soft, dry or bloody…” Prior to diagnosis, the most common symptom patients experience is headaches– which are uncharacteristic for them in daily life.

In order for a brain surgeon to acquire experience, he needs to actually practice on real patients, and make mistakes. Even when the surgeon does everything right in treating the patient, something could go wrong, anyway. In addition to stressing over his patients, the author had to deal with bureaucracies. But regardless of the healthcare system an industrialized country has (government-run, commercial, or a combination thereof), it’s comprised of: “… government targets, self-serving politicians, tabloid headlines, scandals, deadlines, civil servants, clinical cock-ups, financial crises, patient press-groups, trade unions, litigation, complaints and self-important doctors…”

Read the book to learn of the author’s trials and tribulations in treating patients not only in Britain, but also in Kiev.

The second Bonus Book of the Week is “Since Yesterday, The 1930’s in America, September 3, 1929 – September 3, 1939” by Frederick Lewis Allen, originally published in 1939.

“To hear angry Republicans and angry Democrats talking, one would have supposed the contest was between a tyrant determined to destroy private property, ambition, the Constitution, democracy, and civilization itself; and a dupe of Wall Street who would introduce a fascist dictatorship.” Such was the nature of the 1936 presidential election in America.

Clearly, propagandizing hasn’t changed in ninety years. Presidents want to have it both ways: they take credit for all positive economic news, and blame their predecessors for all negative economic news.

At the dawn of the 1930’s when the economy went south, Americans held very strong opinions about their political preferences, heavily influenced by the propaganda they read in newspapers and magazines. Not much has changed, except that now they can force their opinions on the world at the speed of light. Immediately they think they’re experts from watching the idiot box and/or reading the Web; the attitude is, “I’m not an attorney, not a doctor, and not an economist, but I play one on social media, because I can, and because I’m right.”

Other similarities between the Depression Era and recent times include:

Golf was a popular businessman’s game.

Fans of professional sports worshipped their star players, like in baseball, tennis, and golf– Babe Ruth, Bill Tilden, Bobby Jones, etc.

Automation due to new technologies (such as steam, gasoline and electric power, inventions and farm machinery) and urbanization were eliminating jobs in industry, agriculture, and textiles more than offshoring ever would.

Listeners worshipped a pundit on the radio– Father Coughlin– a hate-spewing demagogue from the Detroit suburb of Royal Oak (but he broadcast on only one station, not a national network, so he became nationally known only in his later years in the 1930’s).

All players in the banking industry were financially interdependent so when the system collapsed, they all fell like dominoes. Then-president Hoover established the Reconstruction Finance Corporation in order to bail out only his corporate cronies, as he didn’t believe in stimulus money for individuals.

In summer 1932, Howard Scott and his inscrutable theory of Technocracy was a fad. The author wrote, “Yet in the meantime it had offered an object-lesson in the readiness of the American people for a new messiah and a new credo” just as “Wikinomics” (see the post in this blog) was supposed to be the next big thing.

The political agenda behind COVID has forced Americans to relax online similar to the way the Depression brought on: the five-day (rather than six-day) workweek, construction of sports and recreational areas of all kinds, and provision for transportation to get to them.

Beginning in late 1936 into 1937, in the Midwestern and Northeastern United States, a bunch of rivers overflowed their banks due to humans’ misuse of land; in the third week of September 1938, 682 people died in an unexpected hurricane that destroyed regions unprepared for flooding, in New England and Mid-Atlantic states.

Between 1931 and 1936, there were actually more people leaving the U.S. than coming in, for various reasons, and the U.S. birth rate was slowing.

Ultra-rich Americans who refused to face inconvenient facts were the ones who hated FDR when he was elected president.

Proposals distorted in propaganda that played out in the Depression Era, whose outcomes are yet to be seen in recent times, included:

In the 1930’s, in order to allow men to keep their dignity, the government put them to work instead of giving them handouts. In their first few years of existence, FDR’s alphabet soup of mostly federal (rather than state or local level) jobs and programs was nonpartisan. However, eventually, the Democrats provided maximum funding as election day approached. On the whole, the financial relief worked well, except in Pennsylvania, where there was gross misuse of funds.

FDR’s policies sought to mitigate environmental damage done by people, and prevent future natural disasters with his introduction of the Civilian Conservation Corps, Public Works Administration, and his signing of the Taylor Grazing Act into law. These kinds of measures simply require political backing and money– the sooner a sufficient amount of both are thrown at them, the sooner the problems will be solved!

In February 1938, FDR floated a proposal to make seventy years the mandatory retirement age of all federal judges– including U.S. Supreme Court justices– and increase the number of justices from nine to fifteen. That unpopular proposal hurt FDR’s reputation.

In 1935, FDR introduced economic change to the country by instituting the Social Security system, financial assistance only for Americans 65 and older. In 1965, LBJ introduced economic change to the country by instituting the Medicare and Medicaid systems, healthcare funding for only those Americans who are poor and / or 65 and older.

In the future, the United States government might be introducing a better overall system of healthcare funding for all Americans of all ages and income levels (which is obviously much more complex than any system that has ever been created before in this country, so it’s not going to be perfect the first time around). In order to pay for the improved system, the government will likely have to raise taxes on the rich.

Along these lines, economics 101 says a nation’s economy is strongest when it has a healthy, well-educated workforce.

Whether deliberately or not, the political agenda revolving around COVID has rewarded education-software makers by closing schools across the country. So ironically, by allowing the software makers to get richer (because, presumably, their higher taxes will be paying for the improved healthcare-funding system), the software makers are dictating education policy. So in the long run, the nation will have a healthy, poorly educated workforce!

Anyway, read the book to learn much more about the tenor of the times in 1930’s America, culturally, politically and economically.