The Case for a Presiding President in Russia

On December 31, 2010, a Russian judge sentenced Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Russian tycoon who had been imprisoned in 2003 after defying Vladimir Putin, to an additional six years in prison. According to The New York Times, "It was a politically tinged decision that undermined President Dmitri Medvodev."[1] Leonid Goman of the Right Cause Party in Russia agreed. "It was obviously a political, not a judicial, decision." He went on to say that in general terms, "corruption is endemic, government power is often abused and senior politicians are rarely, if ever, held accountable for misdeeds."[2]  Clearly, Prime Minister Putin was still very much in control in Russia.  His message was that wealthy businessmen should not interfere in Russian politics. What a contrast to American politics, especially after the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United case!  Khodorkovsky was at one time the richest person in Russia, having been one of the oligarchs who bought government assets at bargain prices after the fall of the USSR, but he financed opposition parties in a political system that was anything but democratic.

Analysis is at "The Case for a Presiding President in Russia."

1. Clifford Levy, "Russia Extends Prison Sentence of Tycoon 6 Years,” The New York Times, December 31, 2010, p. A1.
2. Ibid. 

Glimpsing behind the Curtain: Vice President Lyndon Johnson and the Kennedy Assassination

Robert Ross interviewed Lyndon Johnson’s mistress, Madeleine Duncan Brown what Ross titled, “The Clint Murchison Meeting in Dallas November 21, 1963.” The interview took place sometime before her death on June 22, 2002. The content is revealing, and she comes across as very credible as it is obvious she still had feelings even then for the late president. She also had a credible motive for opening up to the American people. So in watching the interview, I did not view it as just another conspiracy theory; I paid attention. Sometimes the truth finally emerges in plain sight, rather than through complicated theories as in Oliver Stone’s film, JFK (1991). The most revealing facts to emerge from the interview are that Jack Ruby, who killed Oswald just two days after the assassination, had been at the meeting at Murchison’s mansion on the night before the assassination, and that LBJ told Madeleine while leaving Murchison’s house after the meeting, “After tomorrow, those SOB’s will never embarrass me again.” That the official narrative from the Warren Commission would still carry weight as the default account at least in the first two decades of the next century astounded me. At the very least, all of Madeleine’s knowledge of the players should have caused at least a tremor when the interview was made public. The status quo has that much inertia. Even so, the American public can gleam from Brown’s account just how different the reality of the power-brokers in (and outside of) the U.S. Government can be from what the public knows. Unfortunately, the patina or gloss even of acting can have incredible staying-power even in the face of the facts revealed. Members of the political elite and their companions may want to protect their legacies in old age, or want the freedom of conscience that comes from the impunity that can only come with death. The resulting piecemeal facts must justify themselves, however, whereas the long-standing official version often has the benefits of not only protective power and entrenchment that comes with having been the default for so long, but also a coherent (i.e., contrived) narrative. 

The full essay is at "On President Lyndon Johnson: The Man."

A Star Is Born

The film, A Star Is Born (2018), has the narrative structure chiefly of two intersecting character arcs. They are multi-level in the sense that both interior emotional states and exterior vocational popularity change for both Jackson and Ally. Each of them must deal with feelings of insecurity at some point and both are singers. The antagonist is interesting as well, as it is a character that plays a small but decisive role in how the narrative ends.

The full essay is at "A Star Is Born."

Eight Good Behaviors of Managers: Googled by Google

In early 2009 at Google, "statisticians . . . embarked on a plan code-named Project Oxygen. The 'people analytics' teams at the company produced what might be called the Eight Habits of Highly Effective Google Managers. 'My first reaction was, that’s it?' says Laszlo Bock, Google’s vice president . . .  for human resources. 'The starting point was that our best managers have teams that perform better, are retained better, are happier — they do everything better,' Mr. Bock says. 'So the biggest controllable factor that we could see was the quality of the manager, and how they sort of made things happen. The question we then asked was: What if every manager was that good? And then you start saying: Well, what makes them that good? And how do you do it?' He tells the story of one manager whose employees seemed to despise him. He was driving them too hard. They found him bossy, arrogant, political, secretive. They wanted to quit his team. 'He’s brilliant, but he did everything wrong when it came to leading a team,' Mr. Bock recalls. Because of that heavy hand, this manager was denied a promotion he wanted, and was told that his style was the reason. But Google gave him one-on-one coaching — the company has coaches on staff, rather than hiring from the outside. Six months later, team members were grudgingly acknowledging in surveys that the manager had improved." (1)

The full essay is at "Good Behaviors of Managers."

1. Adam Bryant, "Google's Quest to Build a Better Boss," The New York Times, March 12, 2011.

Savage Beatings in a Government's Toolkit: A Case of Pathology Writ Large

The psychology of someone acting on behalf of or in line with a government in beating another person who has not done or said anything personally against the beater is perplexing. The transmission of anger towards what a group stands for onto a particular human being who may be just walking has not been uncommon in human rights lore; even so, the component of strong emotion in the beating itself is bizarre; it may evince a pathology affecting some people when they think about, or engage in, the political domain. So considering violence against the nonviolent as a government tool that depends on the pathology is also problematic.

The full essay is at "Savage Political Beatings: Pathology Writ Large."

Getting More For Doing Less: Bank Board Directors

Executive compensation is an art rather than a science. It is not as if numbers are fed into a computer and the correct compensation pops out. More discretion is involved than meets the eye. “Since the financial crisis,” The New York Times reported in 2013, “compensation for the directors of [America’s] biggest banks has continued to rise even as the banks themselves, facing difficult markets and regulatory pressures, are reining in bonuses and pay.” [1] Just five years after the financial crisis, it is interesting how the banks' respective managements decided to spend the TARP money from Congress and even more money from the Federal Reserve Bank. Also of note, board and upper management compensations seemed to be going in different directions in spite of both being presumably tied to the same firm performance. Even a performance-incentive approach tied to firm-performance can accommodate a lot of latitude, such that banks differ in how much they pay their respective boards. The discretion permits inside collusion and even outlandish demands by "celebrity" members whose advice does not necessarily come up to celebrity status. 

The full essay is at "Bank Boards Getting More for Doing Less."

1. Susanne Craig, “At Banks, Board Pay Soars Amid Cutbacks,” The New York Times, April 1, 2013.

Christianity and the Non-Affiliated in America: A Changing Mix

The 2018 General Social Survey found the proportions of Roman Catholics, Evangelical Christians, and people not affiliated with any institutional religion to each being within the margin of error around 23 percent of the American population. To be sure, to claim no institutional religion does not necessarily mean not being religious, or at least spiritual. Where the heart is concerned, religious institutions, or organizations, do not monopolize religious or spiritual sensibilities or sensitivities. In fact, I contend that a spiritual or even religious instinct exists in humans that can differ among individuals in salience or force. To be sure, people in whom the instinct is pressing may tend to belong to religious organizations, but this is not to say that the latter are necessary for feeling and manifesting the instinct. This is particularly true, I submit, where programmed worship is unwittingly formulated in a way that actually interrupts or thwarts outright the experience of transcendence, whether in sustained prayer, worship, communion, or meditation.

The full essay is at "Christianity and the Non-Affiliated in America."

Too Big To Fail: The U.S. Is Still at Risk

On March 20, 2013, more than two years after the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation had become law, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke made it clear that the problem of too-big-to-fail banks had not been solved. “Too Big To Fail is not solved and gone,” he said in a press conference. “It’s still here.”[1] That is, providing an orderly liquidation process for bankrupt banks would be insufficient in keeping the U.S. economy free of vulnerability from even one of the biggest banks taking down the financial sector merely by going bankrupt. Congress should not have missed or minimized this point while working on the Dodd-Frank Act. The self-interested power of Wall Street in Washington and the need of campaign funds in Congress coalesced to dilute the law in spite of the detriment to the public good.

The full essay is at "Too Big to Fail."

1. Mark Gongloff, “Ben Bernanke: ‘I Agree With ElizabethWarren100 Percent’ On Too Big To Fail,” The Huffington Post, March 20, 2013.

Behind Corporate Loopholes: Wealth and Power

A company in the U.S. wants a tax loophole to apply. Starbucks, for example, wanted to be able to use the manufacturing deduction by stretching manufacturing to include the roasting of coffee beans. So in 2004 the company hired Michael Evans, a lobbyist at K&L Gates who had just a year before worked as a top lawyer on the U.S. Senate Finance Committee, which writes tax law. Evans was able to urge his former colleagues in the Senate to expand the definition of manufacturing to include roasting in a clause added to a 243-page tax bill called the American Jobs Creation Act.  As you might imagine, Starbucks was not the only company to get a tax break written into that law. By 2013, the manufacturing deduction had saved Starbucks $88 million that the company would otherwise have had to pay in corporate income tax. In 2012, corporate tax breaks and loopholes added $150 billion in lost revenue for the federal government, increasing the budget deficit by that amount.[1] Three lessons can be gleamed from the hidden corporate loopholes.

The full essay is at "Behind Corporate Loopholes." 

1 Ben Hallman and Chris Kirkham, “As Obama Confronts Corporate Tax Reform, Past Lessons Suggest Lobbyists Will Fight For Loopholes,” The Huffington Post, February 15, 2013.

Regulating Wall Street after a Financial Crisis

On Columbus Day 2011, The New York Times observed that the regulations known as the Volcker rule, “intended to limit trading when the bank's money is at risk, a sweet spot for banks, is seen as a centerpiece of the sprawling financial overhaul of the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010. In anticipation, the nation's biggest banks, like Goldman Sachs and Bank of America, have already shut down their stand-alone proprietary trading desks.”[1] Even so, the long and tortuous route by which any regulation is written was leaving its own mark in the sense that promising loopholes were finding their way into the rule. In other words, the regulated would have a disproportionate influence on the writing of the regulations. This conflict of interest is dangerous from the standpoint of not being vulnerable to another financial crisis in which the greed on Wall Street knows no bounds. 

The full essay is at "Regulating Wall Street after a Financial Crisis."

Morgan Stanley: Systemic Mistrust or Bad Financials after the Financial Crisis?

"Morgan Stanley by any measure is a safe and solid investment bank. Except for one: The amount of trust people have in the whole financial and political system. It's just about zero,” according to Jesse Eisinger of The New York Times in October 2011.[1] Even as there is undoubtedly an element of hyperbole in his conclusion—for zero trust in the financial system and governments would occasion far greater problems than the world faced at the time of Eisinger’s report—his broader point that bankers would be held accountable one way or the other for not having learned their lesson on derivatives (and risk more generally) is valid. The subtext is that even though banks like Morgan Stanley were in actuality in solid financial shape, they deserved the negative repercussions from the systemic skepticism that the banks themselves brought about by virtually ignoring risk analysis in preference to a run of profits and (not coincidentally) bonuses.

The full essay is at "Morgan Stanley after the Financial Crisis."

1. Jesse Eisinger, “Between the Lines, Wall St. Banks Face a Deficit of Trust,” The New York Times, October 12, 2011. 

The Fire in Notre Dame Cathedral during Holy Week: Divine Retribution?

Just in terms of how the business and political elites reacted to the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, the want of a distinctly religious explanation reflected the hegemony of the secular culture in the E.U. at the time. How the incident, which occurred on April 15, 2019, might fit into an established religious narrative was largely ignored, at least by the media reporting on the fire and its aftermath. Instead, the focus was on the impact on French politics and the donations being made to repair the damage. In particular, the matter of billionaires donating a hundred or two hundred euros fueled a debate on the morality of giving so much when giving to the poor could ease economic inequality, rather than on the religious legitimacy of being rich even with the good use in rebuilding a cathedral. The media at least was silent on the question of whether God had exacted divine retribution against the Roman Catholic Church for having pedophile priests and high-ranked clerics covering them up to safeguard the reputation of the universal Church. That the fire occurred during Holy Week makes the lack of any application of the faith narratives particularly striking, for what if a fire in a gem of the Roman Catholic Church during Holy Week was aimed at getting the attention of the clergy and laity?

The full essay is at "The Fire at Notre Dame Cathedral."

Disenfranchising an Electorate: Using Legal Language on Referendums

Popular sovereignty, the ultimate sovereignty of a people as a whole, is typically exercised by an electorate at the ballot box. Such sovereignty is above that of governments (i.e., governmental sovereignty), which might come as a surprise given how little voters actually decide. Typically, the will of the people is limited to filling public offices by selecting among candidates or write-ins. In the last few decades of the twentieth century, California effectively expanded the power of popular sovereignty by adding a number of referendum questions to the ballots, but even those questions have not come close to covering the full spectrum of major policy issues, which are typically left to the office-holders: the agents of the People. Even though the popular sovereign (i.e., the direct will of the people) can make mistakes—such as requiring a 2/3 legislative majority to pass a tax increase in California—the expansion from merely filling public offices to actually making basic public policy decisions is from a democratic perspective a good thing. The key is to go broad enough that judgement rather than technical expertise or specialized knowledge is used. This effectively franchises at least the vast majority of an electorate as nearly everyone is capable of making a judgement among competing values, whereas a small percentage of people are highly educated in any given society—even in advanced industrial states. The problem, it seems to me, lies in how the policy questions on a ballot are written. In particular, they must be written in such a way that they are understandable to the typical voter. Writing a question, whether on policy, law, or a constitutional amendment, in legalize circumvents the expansion in popular sovereignty. Such an approach defies common sense itself, and yet it the Florida legislature did just that in 2012, placing the Florida electorate in a nearly-impossible position as the popular sovereign. Perhaps the legislators knew that the incomprehensible legalize would effectively safeguard their existing power.

The full essay is at "Florida Disenfranchised Its Electorate."

Misconceptions of the E.U. Budget

Could it be that at least some of the British voters who were in favor of secession from the E.U. held misconceptions of the federal budget? If so, perhaps the antagonism was unduly harsh in the referendum.  

The full essay is at "Misconceptions of the E.U. Budget."

Inconvenient Truths

When I was a post-doctoral student, I sat in on a course on German films during World War II. The instructor was an 80 year-old German man whose parents had been forced into sending him to a Hitler Youth camp. I asked him once whether he had seen Hitler in person, and, if so, did he look like how the documentaries have him pictured. Having the respect for knowledge that should be expected from a scholar, he told me that he had indeed seen Hitler in person. The brutal Nazi dictator was authentically smiling during his visit to the Hitler youth.  I was surprised, as I had been brought up with the image of the grizzled grins and terse glares.  To be sure, the victor’s history fits the horrendous crimes committed, but at the cost of objectivity, which any historian should value. The subjective historical portrayal and the German professor’s honest answer led me to wonder what Hitler was really like as a person. Even the epitaph of monster does not fit with the notion of the banality of evil visible at the Eichmann trial in 1961. Eichmann had been responsible for making the trains run on time to the concentration camps.

About a decade after my conversations with the German professor, I met a 92 year-old American veteran of World War II.  Did the American people know of the holocaust? I asked. Only after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, he answered. Before the U.S. went to war, the European war was something far away. When the U.S. was at war in Europe and Asia, Jewish leaders in Europe asked President Roosevelt to bomb the train tracks that were carrying the cattle-cars to the ovens. Roosevelt, the veteran said, told the Jews that he didn’t have time for that. “Wow, that’s a story!” I said in astonishment. One of the veteran’s daughters asked him how he knew this. “It was common knowledge at the time,” he replied. I had not even known that the American public knew of the gas chambers before the liberation of the camps. Even if Roosevelt wanted to be focused on military objectives because achieving them would mean winning the war, that he felt he didn’t have time to thwart the Nazis from transporting human beings to ovens astonishes me. I asked the veteran if the very language, cattle-cars to ovens applied to human beings shocked Americans during the war. He replied that “surprised” is not the right word for it. He did not characterize how he and other Americans had taken the news, which I found interesting.

The full essay is at "Inconvenient Truths."