The Republican Moral Eunuchs and the Magnificent 13

Yesterday the House approved a resolution of disapproval on President Trump's "national emergency" to fund his border wall by a vote of 245-182. Simply put Trump usurped the power of Congress by declaring his intention to spend $5.6 billion that was previously rejected by the Congress. 182 Republicans voted against the resolution that had President Obama done a similar thing not only would they have voted for the resolution they would have immediately started impeachment proceedings. To my mind these Republicans are moral eunuchs and deserve to be defeated in the 2020 election. They failed to uphold their oaths office to support and defend the Constitution, especially Article I which gives Congress the power of the purse.

However, standing up intense pressure from the White House and Leader  Kevin McCarthy 13 Republican Representatives voted for the resolution. I call them the magnificent 13.  They are libertarian Justin Amash (MI), Brian Fitzpatrick (PA), Mike Gallagher (WI), Jaime Herrera Beutler (WA), former CIA agent Will Hurd (TX), Dusty Johnson (SD), Thomas Massie (KY),former leadership member Cathy McMorris Rodgers (WA), Francis Rooney (FL),
veteran member Jim Sensenbrenner (WI), rising star Elise Stefanik NY), veteran member Fred Upton (MI) and former leadership member Greg Walden (OR). These magnificent 13 members ought to be complimented and financially supported in future elections.

Let's hope the Republican members of the Senate have more backbone than their House counterparts and vote to support the resolution of disapproval when they vote in a few weeks.

My Amazon Review of Laurence Leamer's "Mar-A-Lago: Inside the Gates of Power at Donald Trump's Presidential Palace"

The Sun King

Writer and Palm Beach resident Laurence Leamer has written a very breezy and gossipy history of Donald Trump’s involvement with Mar-a-Lago and through that he confirms pretty much all we know about Donald Trump. He starts with Trump’s enchantment with the Mar-a Lago estate that was formerly owned by the heiress, Marjorie Merriweather Post. Trump buys the asset for about $10 million dollars with only $300,000 of his own money. Not bad for an asset that has been much improved could now be worth $500 million.

Trump’s entrance on to the Palm Beach scene shakes that the then very stuffy community to its very foundations. He doesn’t play by the rules, sues the town many times over zoning issues and he ultimately gets his way. Where Trump does some real good he breaks the anti-Semitism of that insular community with the aid of his Jewish lawyer Paul Rampell. By the way it was Rampell’s idea to convert the estate to a club.

Leamer has obviously walked the halls of Mar-a-Lago where he has keen sense for detail and Trump’s obsession with gold. He has talked with many members and employees who tell tales of Trump’s mercurial temper, especially with his employees. To call him mean and rotten would be an understatement. But make no mistake, Trump is the Sun King of Mar-a-Lago.

Trump’s affair and later marriage to Marla Maples is a highlight of this book. Here Leamer notes that Trump did whatever he could to prevent being known that Maples had sex with one his body guards on the beach. After Maples there is, of course, Melania and their 2005 wedding was the highlight of the social season and Trump paid for it by selling the photography rights.

We also encounter the National Enquirer and Trump’s buddy Christopher Ruddy of the rightwing website Newsmax.  Leamer’s thesis is that the Donald Trump we see today was honed in the hothouse of Palm Springs. Leamer’s book isn’t great history, but it is a fun read.

For the full Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R3O7R1E3QLZYZ8/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

The Real Losers in NYC’s Amazon Loss

Much has been written about Amazon pulling the plug on its planned HQ2 in New York City and with that about 25,000 high paying jobs (See my thoughts at https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2019/02/amazon-to-new-york-drop-dead.html). The millennial socialist Congresswoman Alexandra Ocaisio-Cortez whooped it up when Amazon made its announcement.

But who were the real losers? The losers are the very millennials she pretends to represent. Why? Although Amazon would have hired people from all over the country a decent chunk of them would come from current and recent graduates of the City University of New York (CUNY). For those of you who don’t know CUNY is a vast system of 275,000 students that includes 11 senior colleges. Most of the students are first in their family to go to college, immigrants and children of immigrants. They are real strivers trying to better themselves. As an aside Amazon would have offered opportunity for the graduates of the Bronx High School of Science and Stuyvesant, two great specialized high schools, the opportunity to work in NYC upon college graduation instead of moving on to Silicon Valley, Austin or Boston. Another real loss for the city.

A few friends of mine have argued that Amazon would not hire CUNY graduates. Nothing can be further from the truth. Google, Amazon and Facebook are already hiring CUNY graduates and if the Amazon deal went through they would have hired a boatload more.

I know from experience when I helped set up the Financial Leadership Program at Baruch College (a CUNY school) in 2006 to prepare students for Wall Street careers. The naysayers said Wall Street would never hire Baruch graduates for front office positions. Today, 13 years later there are Baruch grads all over Wall Street at such firms as JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and in several private equity shops.  With the impetus coming from Amazon CUNY’s beachhead position with the major tech firms would have dramatically expanded.

But alas it will take longer; thanks to the misguided efforts of the so-called tribunes of the people. It is a real crime to steal the hopes and dreams of so many young people and those who led the charge against Amazon should be severely punished at the ballot box.

My Amazon Review of Roger McNamee's "Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe"

Move Fast and Break Things

Roger McNamee, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and part-time rock musician who hangs out with Bono, has levelled an indictment against Facebook. As an early investor in Facebook McNamee has seen the company from the inside as it moved fast to become a mega-cap colossus that is now playing a major part in breaking our democracy. He mentored Mark Zuckerberg and helped broker Sheryl Sandberg’s move from Google to Facebook. And as he notes he has not had meaningful contact with them for several years. Perhaps he is not telling us something about his relationships with them.

Simply put Facebook is in the business of manipulating its users through artificial intelligence to spend more and more time on the website thereby generating huge advertising dollars. Facebook then sells its user data to advertisers, some of whom were Russian cutouts seeking to elect Donald Trump.

To McNamee the worst aspect of social media in general and Facebook in particular is that it makes it far too easy for people to silo themselves into groups with similar interests and beliefs. When that happens political polarization occurs where people only hear what they want to hear in a self-reinforcing mechanism. Because Facebook is almost frictionless it easily conveys misinformation that the silo-heads believe to be true. To paraphrase Mark Twain from a much earlier era, “a lie races half way around the world before the truth puts its shoes on.”

Aside from being a venture capitalist and a musician, McNamee is a political junkie of the liberal democratic variety. His use of the term “neo-liberal” is a “tell.” Over the past few years he has spent quite a bit of time with the California congressional delegation, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He also briefed both House and Senate panels ahead of Zuckerberg’s testimony.

McNamee’s solution to the problems is stricter antitrust enforcement. He wails against the Chicago School of antitrust regulation. He would also prefer a subscription model a la Netflix to the current advertising model. Both are good ideas.

Where I would differ with McNamee is his view that the internet was all wonderful until the technological revolution of wider bandwidth, cloud computing and smart phones came along that enabled social media. Perhaps he conveniently forgets that the early internet was built on porn and the secure payment processing system that came with it.

In the interests of full disclosure I do not have a Facebook account, but I do have Twitter and LinkedIn accounts, use Google a lot, and check my smart phone way too often. I too am addicted.

The full Amazon URL appears at: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3KOO1E8M4OD9R?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp

Amazon to New York: Drop Dead*

Amazon pulled the plug on its commitment to build its HQ2 in the Long Island City neighborhood of New York City. Although city residents broadly supported the project, there was a very vocal local opposition with Alexandra Ocasio Cortez one of the leaders. It takes a lot of gall to say No to 25000 clean high paying jobs, but NYC did just that. Too bad.

By jerking Amazon around the city sent a message that it simply doesn’t care about jobs. Trust me the economic after shocks are going to be nontrivial.

* With apologies to the New York Daily News for its famous 1975 headline “Ford to New York: Drop Dead”

Amy Klobuchar: A Unifying Democrat

Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar declared her candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination yesterday in the snowy bitter cold of the upper Midwest. What impressed me most about her speech was the following statement: "E pluribus unum. Out of many one. It is more than a motto. It is the North Star of our democracy. It is the North Star of this effort." After watching the Democratic Party gorge itself on the disunity of identity politics, Klobuchar offers us breath of fresh air rising above the pettiness of our politics today.

I don't know how far her candidacy will go, but from her Senate career we know that she is a work horse, not a show horse and we know she knows how to get things done. She was the only senator to come out of the Kavanaugh hearing with an enhanced reputation. I would hope that the Democratic primary electorate takes her very seriously, because in my opinion she and her unifying vision has the best shot at defeating Trump.

My Amazon Review of Jon Ward's "Camelot's End: Kennedy vs. Carter and the Fight that Broke the Democratic Party"

Collision Course

Journalist Jon Ward tells the story of how and why the Democratic Party cracked up in the late 1970s through the lens of the Carter-Kennedy fight for the 1980 presidential nomination. The peanut farmer from Georgia and the son of privilege from Massachusetts were on a collision course that began in the early 1970s. Each had an intense dislike of the other at first site.

Ward argues that Kennedy Camelot era ended with the first political defeat of a Kennedy in 1980. Here I beg to differ. Camelot died when Kennedy drove his car off a bridge in 1970 in Chappaquiddick, Massachusetts killing Mary Jo Kopechne.  As an aside although Ward is technically correct in placing Kopechne from Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania but she, in fact, grew up in the suburban New Jersey town of Berkeley Heights since infancy.

The author is very good at describing the give and take of the 1980 campaign. He is especially good at describing the famous Roger Mudd interview of Kennedy where Kennedy couldn’t explain why was challenging the president of his own party and stuttered throughout most of the interview. I have my own experience with Kennedy in 1980 at a rally in Los Angeles. After Kennedy finished speaking he asked for questions and he just happened to call on. With all of the TV lights on me I asked him what he proposed to do about increasing capital formation. It was not a question he expected from this very liberal audience. After hemming and hawing he brought up the Republican sponsored 10-5-3 depreciation program. Kennedy blew it.

My main quibble of the book is that Ward defines the Kennedy-Carter clash in breaking the Democratic Party. To me that was a proxy war for the real problem. Simply put under the weight of stagflation followed by very high inflation, the Democratic nostrums stopped working coupled with the appearance the Democratic Party became the party of retreat abroad opened the way for the candidacy of Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s sunny optimism became the antidote for the failed Democratic policies of the 1970s.

I enjoyed reading Ward’s book. It brought back many memories and he put us in the room where the Carter and Kennedy strategies were made in the face of a very fluid political environment.   

For the full amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R39KFZF48WUKFD/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

   

My Amazon Review of Jonathan Conlin's "Mr Five Percent: The Many Lives of Calouste Gulbenkian, The World's Richest Man"

Historian Jonathan Conlin has unfortunately written a very dull biography, at least to this reader, of Calouste Gulbenkian (1869-1955) who was perhaps the founding father of the Middle Eastern oil industry. Coming from an upper-middle class Armenian trading family in the Ottoman Empire and operating out London and Paris, Gulbenkian became one of the major conductors of the global oil industry orchestra.

His friendship with Henri Deterding of Royal Dutch enabled him to meet all of the major players in the industry and helped bring about the merger with Shell. He became known as an “honest broker” and with his knowledge of the region he created what was initially known as the Turkish Petroleum Company which later became Iraq Petroleum. Now get this his partners were Standard Oil of New Jersey/Socony Mobil(now Exxon), Anglo-Iranian Oil (now BP), Compagnie Francaise des Petroles (successor to Deutsche Bank after WWI and now Total) and Royal Dutch/Shell. The four corporate partners each owned 23.75% of Iraq Petroleum and Gulbenkian owned the remaining 5%.

Gulbenkian then authored the famous “Red Line Agreement”  which along with its “self-denial clause” meant that all the parties to agreement would have to conduct their business through Iraq Petroleum (1928). Inside the Red Line were the yet to be discovered oil fields of Saudi Arabia. Thus with the exception of Kuwait, which was outside of the Red Line, Gulbenkian had a claim on 5% of all of the oil discovered in the Middle East. It made him one of the richest people in the world.

Gulbenkian was also involved in oil deals in Venezuela, Mexico, Indonesia and Russia. It is a great story, but somehow it doesn’t leap off the pages.

Conlin discusses Gulbenkian’s giant art collection came into being, some of which was directly obtained from Joseph Stalin. His family was highly dysfunctional to say the least and the 1915 Turkish massacre of Armenians did not seem to affect him. He lived in London and Paris where he had large estates, but he slept in luxury hotels. Along the way he held multiple passports which kept him safe for a while in WWII Paris, before moving on to Lisbon.

As I said from the outset, there is a great story here, but the writing is too dry for my taste.

The full Amazon URL appears at:  https://www.amazon.com/review/R2TY1UJTJWH7WW/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of Karina Longworth's "Seduction: Sex Lies and Stardom in Howard Hughes' Hollywood"

Casting Couch

Film historian Karina Longworth could have written a terrific book. Unfortunately she fails with “Seduction” on the life of Howard Hughes and the many women he had relationships with in Hollywood. I think she is a frustrated neo-Marxian Feminist academic (I repeat myself) in that she uses such jargon as heteronormative, commodification and patriarchy. Hughes’ directed three great movies “Hells Angels,” which introduced the world to Jean Harlow, “Scarface” and “The Outlaw” where Jane Russell showed off her physical attributes.

Longworth recounts Hughes’ affairs with Katherine Hepburn, Ava Gardner, Bette Davis and Ginger Rogers among the many. Although Hughes was certainly in a position of power, all of these relationships were consensual. Hughes also had a retinue of people on his payroll who were responsible for scouting “talent” for him. He certainly was an insatiable cad, but he also was a romantic.

For example when he was courting Katherine Hepburn he landed his biplane on golf course where she was practicing on. Even the very wealthy and prominent Katherine Hepburn could not resist such an entreaty. In fact Hepburn stood up to him like none of the others. Perhaps it came from her strong ego reinforced by her patrician background.

Longworth discusses the movies made by Hughes’ women and tries to find deep social significance in them. To me most of those movies were entertainment and were not designed to enforce the mores of the day on an unsuspecting public. If Longworth lightened up a bit, she could have written a much better book.

For the full Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R2S7OXF1G4LS7Y/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv