My Amazon Review of Marie Yovanovitch's "Lessons from the Edge: A Memoir"

 

In Service to America

 

After reading Marie Yovanovitch’s memoir my respect for America’s foreign service officers has only grown. Most of the officers do not serve in glamourous capitals like London and Paris, but in out-of-the-way places where many are both corrupt and dangerous. Yovanovitch was no exception where aside from serving in London where she attended a ball at Buckingham Palace, she served in Somalia and as ambassador to Kyrgyzstan, Armenia and, of course, Ukraine. I also learned that most officers are not engaged in high policy, but rather are engaged in making sure the American embassy works on a day-to-day basis. In Mogadishu, for example, Yovanovitch made sure there was sufficient gasoline for the embassy’s vehicles, no easy task.

 

Yovanovitch is most famous for being fired by Donald Trump as our ambassador to Ukraine in April 2019 where she was a pawn in Rudy Giuliani’s intrigues to get dirt on Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. Giuliani was working hand-in-glove with the corrupt Ukrainian prosecutor Yuri Lutsenko. Several of the Ukrainian oligarchs wanted to get rid of Yovanovitch because she was supporting the anti-corruption forces in Ukraine. One of her duties as ambassador was to support anti-corruption and pro-democracy efforts in Ukraine. As a result, corrupt politician in America and Ukraine had a common interest in removing her.

 

Her removal made her a star witness in Trump’s first impeachment trial. It was here where America got to know her. Needless to say, her testimony was a showstopper. What the public did not know at the time was that her 90-year-old mother died, and she cracked a tooth leading to root canal surgery.

 

From her memoir we learn about her family who fled both Nazi and Communist tyranny and ended up in rural Connecticut via Canada where her father taught at a boarding school. We also learned that her then 88-year-old mother was with her in Ukraine while she was ambassador. She never married and the only hint of a romantic attachment she gives out was when she dated a marine guard in Mogadishu.

 

She did very well for a self-proclaimed introvert who had to attend numerous public functions and deal with various heads of state and foreign ministers. She also had to balance American interests with American values. In her view short-term interests many times prevailed over our values. Simply put it is very difficult to trust corrupt dictators who would betray us to the next higher bidder.

 

Mari Yovanovitch has written an important book describing her life as a foreign service officer and an ambassador and the lessons she learned from being on the edge and part of history. We need more people like her.

For the full Amazon URL see: In Service to America (amazon.com)

 

Political Risk comes to Manhattan Real Estate

To paraphrase Exodus 1:8, now there arose a new mayor over New York who knew not Michael Bloomberg or Rudy Giuliani. With the reactionary Bill de Blasio becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee for mayor and the odds-on favorite to win the general election in November, the 20 years of progress New York City has made threatens to become undone. Simply put de Blasio is throwback to the truly horrible mayors New York had prior to 1993. Think "bungling" Bob Wagner, the limousine liberal John Lindsay, the hapless Abe Beame and de Blasio's idol, David Dinkins. The last, of course, served as Mayor during the nadir of New York City's modern history. What all of these past mayors had in common was that they turned the city's fisc over to the public employee unions and they let crime run riot. By 1990 most informed opinion believed that the purpose of city government was to manage decline, not to create the thriving city that New York is today.

To New Yorkers of today and for that matter the real estate investors of today, that history is only dimly recollected at best. Instead of rewarding success, de Blasio seeks to punish it with high taxes. Instead of building  on the school reforms of the past decade, de Blasio wants to turn the schools back over to the unions. Instead of managing the budget, de Blasio will reward his union backers with pay raises unrelated to productivity. Instead driving down the crime rate to make New York the safest big city in America, de Blasio would end the very successful stop, question and frisk policy of the Bloomberg Administration. Of course the initial victims will be the people of color that now support de Blasio.

What all this means is that real estate investors who now take New York's well run government for granted will have to price in higher taxes and a diminution of services. Given the heady values of Manhattan real estate all the risk appears on the downside. The same goes for the big office REITs with a Manhattan focus, Vornado, SL Green and Boston Properties. The only hope is that Republican Joe Lhota pulls off an upset.