Highbrow Magazine - Bernie Madoff https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/bernie-madoff en Elections 2012: A Lollapalooza of Lies https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/1788-elections-2012-lollapalooza-lies <div class="field field-name-field-cat field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/news-features" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">News &amp; Features</a></div></div></div><span class="submitted-by">Submitted by tara on Wed, 11/14/2012 - 09:44</span><div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="og:image rdfs:seeAlso" resource="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/mediumobamaandromney%20%28NAM%29_2.jpg?itok=dlv9tW1-"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/mediumobamaandromney%20%28NAM%29_2.jpg?itok=dlv9tW1-" width="480" height="268" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>  </p> <p> Lies have been with us Homo Sapiens since back when Jesus wore sandals, as my Grandpa Ben used to say. They are as ancient as sand and rocks and caves. I can imagine Neanderthals of the Pleistocene era lying about exactly who among the hairy-backed knuckle-scrapers first figured out that roots dug up from the earth ought to be cooked prior to consumption.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Since there is no science in the matter, I would offer my subjective view that politics, money, and sex constitutes the holy trinity of untruth. And since the long and deceitful presidential election campaign is still ringing in our minds—like an especially annoying car alarm—let us consider the political arena.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Not for the first time in the history of American presidential contests, crass calumniation was at center-stage in this year’s production of the quadrennial spectacle.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Throughout the summer and autumn months, “liar” was the once seldom heard pejorative mustered by manned-up Democrats in describing Willard Mitt Romney, now twice-failed as a Republican hopeful, along with his awkward running mate, Congressman Paul Ryan. A few examples:</p> <p>  </p> <p> • “Plenty of people have pointed out what a liar Mitt Romney is,” said Brad Woodhouse, communications director of the Democratic National Committee, in an interview with <em>The Week</em> magazine.</p> <p>  </p> <p> • At a press conference aboard Air Force One, David Plouffe, senior adviser to President Barack Obama, said Mr. Romney “lie[d] to fifty million Americans,” according to the <em>Wall Street Journal</em>.</p> <p>  </p> <p> • In a September 2 appearance on CBS-Television’s “Face the Nation,” Stephanie Cutter, deputy campaign manager for Mr. Obama’s successful re-election effort, said Republicans in general “think lying is a virtue.”</p> <p>  </p> <p> • Remarkably, a Fox News contributor was permitted to indict Mr. Ryan for falsity of historic proportion when he accepted the vice-presidential nomination at last August’s Republican National Convention in Florida. “Ryan’s speech,” wrote Sally Kohn for the Fox blog, “was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech.”</p> <p>  </p> <p> Ever decorous—and mindful of the comity expected of an incumbent White House tenant—Barack Obama did not himself utter the L-word, though he came daringly close. Republicans, meanwhile, went about lying with their customary abandon. They slandered the president as, variously and sometimes all at once, Kenyan-born (Donald Trump’s meme); an apologist for Islamic terrorism (Mr. Romney himself, in accusing the president of sympathizing with Benghazi murderers); a secret homosexual (Jerome Corsi, a popular conspiracy theorist and member of the Romney campaign press corps); and a heretic of possibly Christian persuasion who, in supporting same-sex marriage, has “shaken his fist at God” (the Rev. Franklin Graham, son of Billy), thereby expediting the American apocalypse.   </p> <p>  </p> <p> <img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/mediumromneyandryan%20%28NAM%29_0.jpg" style="width: 600px; height: 335px;" /></p> <p>  </p> <p> Daniel Henninger, the <em>Wall Street Journal’s</em> deputy editorial page director and Fox News commentator, confined his shock—shock!—to use of the word “liar” by Democrats. “’Liar,’” he complained in a Journal essay, “is a potent and ugly word with a sleazy political pedigree.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Mr. Henninger added, “Explicitly calling someone a ‘liar’ is—or used to be—a serious and rare charge, in or out of politics. It is a loaded word. It crosses a line. ‘Liar’ suggests bad faith and conscious duplicity—a total, cynical falsity.”</p> <p>  </p> <p> <strong>Lying, a universal truth</strong></p> <p> Lest anyone believe that untruths are more plentiful in the United States than anywhere else, or peculiar to political stratagems, New York psychiatrist Gail Saltz makes the case for global lying as a natural element of human physiology—for better and for worse. </p> <p>  </p> <p> “Everybody lies,” wrote Dr. Saltz in a disquisition on the subject for NBCNews.com. “We start lying at around the age four to five, when children gain an awareness of the use and power of language. This first lying is not malicious, but rather to find out, or test, what can be manipulated in a child’s environment.”</p> <p>  </p> <p> Pathological liars—those “compelled to lie about the small and large stuff,” according to the Saltz calculation—represent the dark side of mendacity’s moon. They are the worst of lying’s lot, for they vandalize an “unspoken agreement to treat others as we would like to be treated,” wrote Dr. Saltz.</p> <p>  </p> <p> She added, “Serious deception often makes it impossible for us to trust another person again. …If the truth only comes out once it is forced, repair of trust is far less likely.”</p> <p>  </p> <p> Todd Gitlin, a professor of sociology at Columbia University and chairman of its Ph.D. program in communications, likewise takes the universalist view of lying. But his deepest appreciation is for the American variety.</p> <p> <img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/mediummadmen.jpg" style="width: 502px; height: 104px;" /></p> <p>  </p> <p> “I don’t know if lying is any more prevalent in the U.S. than elsewhere,” he told me, “but there is certainly a hoary tradition of it here. Think of ‘tall tales,’ and ‘confidence men,’ and African American ‘toasts’ [the origin of hip-hop “boasts”).</p> <p>  </p> <p> “If we do this sort of thing more than others do, it would probably be because rugged individualism encourages Americans to think that each of [us] invents our own reality,” he said further in our conversation. “The hunger to smoke out lies comes from a Puritan tradition. The hunger to tell them comes from overconfidence that we are little gods.”  </p> <p>  </p> <p> Neither Professor Gitlin nor any other sociologist or historian or psychologist I consulted was aware of any published scholarship that compares American lies to those of other nation-states, or cultures. None. People will have their suspicions, however, about their countrymen versus The Other. I have mine; you have yours. Which constitutes prejudice, which is a whopper.  </p> <p>  </p> <p> <strong>Lying = Money (&amp; Pretty Delusions)</strong></p> <p> What would Madison Avenue do without lies?</p> <p>  </p> <p> Lies encourage necessary commerce. Here now, we enter the art of lying for money. In support of lying for money, via advertising, the advertising industry creates lovely lies at the intersection of fiction and fact—providing us inspiration of all sorts and strength in harmless delusion. Prettier lies yet affirm our appearance, our behavior, our exquisite taste, and our guilty pleasures—all monetized in the form of consumer products, many of which are unnecessary. </p> <p>  </p> <p> The most artful lies of Mad Men are nuanced. Others are sold softly, others bluntly.</p> <p>  </p> <p> <img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/mediumwoodyallen%20%28georgesBiardWiki%29.jpg" style="width: 477px; height: 600px;" /></p> <p>  </p> <p> A 17<sup>th</sup> century French dramatist by the name of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, aka Molière, is perhaps the father of the soft sell. “People can be induced to swallow anything,” he famously said, “provided it is sufficiently seasoned with praise.”</p> <p>  </p> <p> The hard sell is the territory of my friend and one-time employer Jack Avrett, the late president of the New York ad agency Avrett, Free &amp; Ginsberg.</p> <p>  </p> <p> “Tommy,” he asked me one day, “would you like to know how come I’m so damn rich?”</p> <p>  </p> <p> Indeed, said I.</p> <p>  </p> <p> “Do you have any idea how easy it is to sell Americans <em>anything</em>?”</p> <p>  </p> <p> To this, I responded, learnedly, “Well, sir, working in Mad Avenue has provided me with a fairly good education in that area.”</p> <p>  </p> <p> “Now, Tommy, there are two kinds of people in the advertising dodge: smart people, and geniuses. The smart ones know what smart people want. Geniuses know what stupid people want.</p> <p>  </p> <p> “I’m a genius,” Jack declared. “And I get an override on a whole lot of things that stupid people buy.”</p> <p>  </p> <p> <strong>Chronicles of grift</strong></p> <p> Human stupidity—naïveté, if you prefer, with a dash of avarice: such qualities clothe us all, in sizes ranging from petite to plus—is fertile ground for liars. Always was, and forever shall be, this match of mark and con. Never mind the nationality of either player. Again, we are in money territory here.</p> <p>  </p> <p>  The Scotsman Gregor MacGregor (1786-1845) was a liar of the first rank. Togged out in a military tunic of black twill with an oval-shaped scarlet breastplate, accompanied by stiff collar and epaulets of gold satin roping, he introduced himself to the royalty and lesser élite of Europe as the “Cacique of Poyais.” The tribal chief of Poyais, he explained, that being a region west of Argentina chockfull of gold nuggets sparkling in mountain streams and minerals in the plains aching to be mined. Mr. MacGregor convinced the lords and ladies to invest in lucrative developments far across the seas in Poyais. Alas, no one on the South American continent had ever heard of such a place.</p> <p>  </p> <p> <img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/mediumclareboothluce%20%28wiki%29.jpg" style="width: 600px; height: 726px;" /></p> <p>  </p> <p> Victor Lustig (1890-1947) was a multilingual cosmopolite born in what was once known as the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He began his career in lying as inventor of the so-called money-box scheme. He would demonstrate the amazing capability of a small photographic crank box of his making, stuffed with stacks of currency-sized paper. An exterior top mount of thick glass snugged an American $100 note. A hand crank operated on the side. As Herr Lustig turned the crank, a duplicate greenback was ever so slowly copied. (A genuine greenback, of course, that lay upon the stack of blanks.) All the while, Herr Lustig lamented the key shortcoming of his magical device: It took several hours to produce a bill. But, sensing huge profits in exchange for a relatively small investment of time, buyers snatched up money-boxes as fast as Herr Lustig could assemble the flimsy things—minus the genuine currency, of course. The price for a money-box was often as high as $30,000.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Carlo Pietro Giovanni Guglielmo Tebaldo Ponzi (1882-1949)—aka Charles Ponzi, aka Charles Ponei, aka Charles P. Bianchi—fled poverty in Italy as a teenager, arriving in Boston in 1903 with the equivalent of two dollars in his pocket. His get-rich-quick impulse was excited by newspaper accounts of a small-time Brooklyn swindler named William F. Miller. Mr. Ponzi perfected Mr. Miller’s scheme, thus introducing an early incarnation of arbitrage, one that is not so different than today’s Wall Street contrivance. He raised loads of cash from naïve, stupid, greedy investors in New England during the 1920s, on the basis of a most attractive lie: a 50 percent profit within 90 days. The funds raised bought discounted postal reply coupons in Europe for redemption at face value in the U.S. and Canada. For a time, the formula worked: One mark realized a fast-shuffle profit by way of “investment” money ponied up by a successor mark, and so on and so forth until the unsustainable arrangement collapsed, by which time Mr. Ponzi would become either Mr. Ponei or Mr. Bianchi.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Bernard Lawrence “Bernie” Madoff was born in New York City in 1938, the son of a housewife and plumber. He will die in a federal penitentiary, situated in a desolate stretch of rural Minnesota, well before the end of his century-and-a-half prison sentence, imposed in 2009 when he was found guilty committing the largest financial fraud in world history. A student of Mr. Ponzi’s slick lies, Mr. Madoff made off with an estimated $65 billion—much of it bilked from endowment funds that provided operating principal for Jewish charities and educational institutions, on whose boards he sat.</p> <p>  </p> <p> <strong>The loving pretense</strong></p> <p> Sex! In the lying context, there is something known the “rule of three,” as applied to the sexually coy and the sexually boastful, in accordance with respective gender. It works like this: attach a multiple of three to the number of sexual partners claimed by women; divide by three the number of conquests alleged by men.</p> <p>  </p> <p> “Everybody lies about sex,” asserted comedian Janeane Garofalo. This truism earned sustained laughter from studio audience members during a June 2011 taping of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher.” The remark was made in defense of former New York Congressman Anthony Weiner, whose email account earlier in that year posted self-made photos of his aroused gonads bursting beneath his tightie-whities.</p> <p>  </p> <p> The science fiction writer Robert Heinlein (1907-1988) said precisely the same, in his book “Time Enough for Love.” In fact, says filmmaker/comedian Woody Allen, “Without lies, there would be no sex.”</p> <p>  </p> <p> The late Jim Morrison (1943-1971), lead singer of The Doors, was known among his women friends and brief acquaintances by the none-too-subtle nicknames “Mr. Mojo Risin’” and “Lizard King.” Mr. Morrison was also an aphorist. His studied conclusion, the result of numerous trysts: “Most people love you for who you pretend to be. To keep their love, you keep pretending—performing.”</p> <p> Mr. Morrison added, “You get to love your pretense. It’s true. We’re locked in an image, an act.”</p> <p>  </p> <p> <img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/mediumjohnquincyadams%20%28wiki%29.jpg" style="width: 600px; height: 545px;" /></p> <p>  </p> <p> <strong>Lies, aka Civility, aka Art, aka Truth</strong></p> <p> “Of course I lie to people,” once said the colorful and charitable Denis Charles Pratt, aka Quentin Crisp (1908-1999), the British author, actor, nude model, and raconteur of proudly effeminate tendency. “But I lie altruistically—for our mutual good. The lie is the basic building block of good manners. That may seem mildly shocking to a moralist—but then, what isn’t?”</p> <p>  </p> <p> Mr. Crisp lived out his latter years in a tiny apartment with giant insects on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, at the time a dicey residential option—especially so for a man who paraded daily through its streets with hair pinned up in a bun and dyed in violet to complement his mascara, long painted fingernails, and a peacock feather bouncing atop a jauntily-placed fedora.</p> <p>  </p> <p> His contemporary was Clare Booth Luce (1903-1987), playwright turned political light—a Franklin Roosevelt liberal who converted to conservatism, first the mild brand of Dwight Eisenhower, who appointed her ambassador to Italy in 1952, and finally the more strident stuff of Ronald Reagan. Ms. Luce was something of a journalist, but far better remembered for her magazine fiction and stage plays, the latter of which earned a place in the pantheon of Broadway.</p> <p>  </p> <p> “Lying increases the creative faculties,” she once told a reporter for the <em>New York Herald-Tribune</em>. “Lying increases the creative faculties, expands the ego, and lessens the friction of social contacts.”</p> <p>  </p> <p> Ms. Luce was on to one of the ironies of philosophical realization: lying and truthing could not exist, one without the other.</p> <p>  </p> <p> The movie version of Ernest Hemingway’s “Islands in the Stream,” as in the novel, ends with a deathbed scene in which George C. Scott in the role of hero Thomas Hudson says in last breath, “I know now, there’s no one thing that’s true. It’s all true.”</p> <p>  </p> <p> I blush as I quote a line of dialogue from “Drown All the Dogs,” a novel of mine published here and abroad in 1994: “Every lie is a truth somewhere in time.”</p> <p>  </p> <p> <strong>Back in the day</strong></p> <p> Should lies of the blessedly ended presidential campaign of 2011-12 linger shockingly in mind, consider the pungency of yore:</p> <p>  </p> <p> • John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were opposing candidates in the campaigns of 1796 and 1800. In the first square-off, the victorious Mr. Adams claimed that Mr. Jefferson was a “coward” for his failure to take up arms during the revolutionary war, and Adams-friendly newspapers insisted that Mr. Jefferson was a champion of open marriage and prostitution. In the second race, a victorious Mr. Jefferson’s aides said President Adams had secretly sent a ship to England to retrieve a pair of mistresses, that Mr. Adams was plotting to abolish the newly minted Constitution to become “king of America.”</p> <p>  </p> <p> • During the election campaign of 1828, challenger Andrew Jackson’s partisans referred to President John Quincy Adams (son of the aforementioned Adams) as a “pimp,” in service to the czar of Russia during Mr. Adams’ earlier post as ambassador to the imperial court at St. Petersburg, and his wife as “born to bastardy.” Loyalists to President Adams, meanwhile, said Mr. Jackson, hero of the Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812, engaged in cannibalism when his troops were stranded in swamplands.</p> <p>  </p> <p> • John C. Frémont (1813-1890) was the first presidential candidate of the new anti-slavery Republican Party and also tarred as a cannibal. Prior to a political career, Mr. Frémont was a highly decorated military officer and adventurer in the western states. His presidential bid in 1856 was scuttled when Democrat stalwarts allied with Franklin Pierce claimed that in 1848 Mr. Frémont consumed human flesh in the windswept San Juan mountains of Colorado.</p> <p>  </p> <p> • The Republican Party’s second presidential candidate, in the election of 1860, was Abraham Lincoln, an unhandsome man with unusually long arms. Newspaper cartoonists called him “the ape man.”</p> <p>  </p> <p> • In 1876, the Democratic candidate Samuel Tilden was called a “syphilis-plagued drunkard” by those rallied to the Republican candidacy of Rutherford B. Hayes. The Tilden side said Mr. Hayes had shot his mother with a pistol and stolen money from dead soldiers on Civil War battlefields.</p> <p>  </p> <p> <strong>Author Bio:</strong></p> <p> <em>Thomas Adcock, a </em>Highbrow Magazine <em>contributor, is a journalist and author based in New York City.</em></p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/lying" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">lying</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/politicians-are-liars" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">politicians are liars</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/lying-america" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">lying in america</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/clare-booth-luce" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">clare booth luce</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/woody-allen" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Woody Allen</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/jim-morrison" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">jim morrison</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/mitt-romney" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mitt Romney</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/paul-ryan" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Paul Ryan</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/obama" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Obama</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/bernie-madoff" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Bernie Madoff</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/john-quincy-adams" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">john quincy adams</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/2012-elections" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">2012 elections</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Thomas Adcock</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-pop field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Popular:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">not popular</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-photographer field-type-text field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Photographer:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">New America Media</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-bot field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Bottom Slider:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Out Slider</div></div></div> Wed, 14 Nov 2012 14:44:44 +0000 tara 1913 at https://www.highbrowmagazine.com https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/1788-elections-2012-lollapalooza-lies#comments Why Mitt Romney Means ‘Business’ https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/1182-why-mitt-romney-means-business <div class="field field-name-field-cat field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/news-features" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">News &amp; Features</a></div></div></div><span class="submitted-by">Submitted by tara on Wed, 05/23/2012 - 19:41</span><div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="og:image rdfs:seeAlso" resource="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/3mediummittromney.jpg?itok=YHuoaI6-"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/3mediummittromney.jpg?itok=YHuoaI6-" width="480" height="321" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>  </p> <p> Willard Mitt Romney has emerged as the most winsome debutante of this season’s corporate cotillion, a quadrennial bash sponsored by Wall Street tycoons, right-wing entrepreneurs, K Street lobbyists, golfers, and industrial polluters. Every four years since 1928, the big bucks boys of amalgamated power rally around some beau of the ball who agrees to insist that business acumen is the paramount qualification for election to the office of president.  </p> <p>  </p> <p> Herbert Hoover, the country’s first actual CEO sent to the White House, got the ball rolling back in ’28. Later would come H. Ross Perot, the Texarkana whizbang who promised in ’92 to “tinker under the hood” of America’s economic engine. And who can forget Harvard School of Business alumnus George W. Bush in 2000 (again in 2004), the failed oil magnate who said he was “gonna run this country like a business?”</p> <p>  </p> <p> It is useful to remember that Hoover’s rigid economic theories brought on the Great Depression of the 1930s. And that  Perot finally let up on the cracker barrel encomiums to Main Street capitalism, shortly before hosting a black-tie farewell ball, where he danced with his wife to the Patsy Cline ballad, “I’m Crazy.” Or that Mr. Bush’s principal accomplishments—tax relief for fellow millionaires, abandonment of the last shreds of restraint on Wall Street’s penchant for innovative swindles, and dubious foreign wars charged to the nation’s credit card--were the chief causes of what Princeton University economist Paul Krugman terms the “Lesser Depression,” which he further suggests is hardly over.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Indeed, all should be useful remembrance. But the American sense of history is historically shallow, and a large chunk of the electorate, if not the majority, seems permanently suckered by the political idée fixe of amalgamated corporate interest: men grown fabulously rich from private sector commerce are, ipso facto, greatly wise in matters of statecraft.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Never mind that decades of evidence belie the Wise Man meme--as recently demonstrated by disgraced one-time Goldman Sachs CEO Jon Corzine and JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. This Wall Street duo share Democratic Party affiliations and the evaporation of billions of dollars. Never mind. Amalgamated power may always count on nearly half the presidential vote, at a minimum, and hedges the bet by sweetening coffers on both sides of the aisle.</p> <p>  </p> <p> <img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/mediumjamiedimon.jpg" style="width: 600px; height: 450px; " /></p> <p>  </p> <p>  </p> <p> And never mind the clear, common sense of a University of Denver political scientist,  quoted  in an article  in <em><a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2011/03/01/should-government-be-run-like-a-business/">Forbes Magazine</a></em>:</p> <p>  </p> <p> “To say that governments should be run like businesses is to reveal ignorance about what either governments or businesses are,” said Professor Seth Masket. “Businesses exist to turn a profit. They provide goods and services to others only insofar as it is profitable to do so, and they will set prices in a way that ends up prohibiting a significant sector of the population from obtaining those goods and services. …Governments, conversely, provide <em>public</em> goods and services—things that we have determined are people’s <em>right</em> to possess. This is inherently an unprofitable enterprise. Apple would not last long if it had to provide every American with an iPad.”</p> <p>  </p> <p> To which the Harvard graduate and political blogger Matthew Yglesias added, “[A] state is fundamentally an ethical enterprise aimed at promoting human welfare. A business isn’t like that.” Yglesias, who is undoubtedly familiar with Jonathan Swift’s social satire, suggested that Washington might solve the federal deficit problem in a businesslike way by getting rid of old people.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Be that as it may, now comes Mitt Romney, openly and/or secretly supported by ultra-rich, anonymous super PAC types, whose gushing wallets were liberated by last year’s Supreme Court decision in the matter of <em>Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission</em>. The proud founder of Bain Capital, a buy-out operation, offers us the old voodoo-that-you-do-so-well.</p> <p>  </p> <p> “I worked at one company, Bain, for 25 years,” says Romney, constantly. (YouTube counts some 168,000 hits on that particular line.) “I’m a businessman who understands the real economy.”</p> <p>  </p> <p> Only when pressed does Romney speak of his tenure as Massachusetts’ governor, from 2003-07. Although he describes his single-term gubernatorial stewardship as “severely conservative,” Romney’s signature policy accomplishment is seen by many of his Republican co-religionists as the work of a wild-eyed liberal. Namely, the creation of mandated universal health insurance for all Bay Staters, under a corporate system that provided a template for the national Affordable Care Act, signed into law by President Obama in March 2010. If elected president, Romney promises to kill the scheme he derides as “Obamacare,” right after he cuts off federal funding for Planned Parenthood, rescinds all instances of Obama “apologizing for America” during his trips abroad, and reverses the incumbent president’s attempts to make America a “less Christian nation.”</p> <p>  </p> <p> <img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/MediumObamaPhoto_0.jpg" style="width: 500px; height: 334px; " /></p> <p>  </p> <p> Romney asks that we focus not on his time in the Massachusetts statehouse, but rather his counting house years at Bain Capital. The latter, he insists, more than qualifies Mitt Romney for White House tenancy.</p> <p>  </p> <p> In a recently published article, this is how the <em>Los <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2011/dec/03/nation/la-na-romney-bain-20111204">Angeles Times</a></em> focused on Romney’s quarter-century at the helm of Bain Capital: “Romney and his team…maximized returns by firing workers, seeking government subsidies, and flipping companies quickly for large profits. Bain investors gained even when companies slid into bankruptcy.”</p> <p>  </p> <p> Another of Romney’s constantly mentioned bona fides is jobs he “helped create,” as he carefully puts it. Sometimes it’s “thousands of jobs,” sometimes it’s “tens of thousands of jobs,” and often it’s “almost a hundred thousand jobs,” and lately it’s been “well over 100,000 jobs.” Whatever. During the G.O.P. primary season, Romney found it especially illustrative to declare, expansively, “I started Staples, for gosh sakes.” (Perhaps the inflated remark was a rhetorical foreshadowing of what Romney said of the auto industry’s recovery, by way of the federal rescue he opposed, “I’ll take a lot of credit.”)</p> <p>  </p> <p> In truth, according to research by <em>Boston Globe</em> editors Michael Kranish and Scott Helman for their book, <em><a href="http://www.boston.com/news/politics/specials/the_real_romney/">The Real Romney</a></em>, two men named Leo Kahn and Thomas Stemberg founded Staples. Early on, Messrs. Kahn and Stemberg pitched a growth plan for Staples to Bessemer Venture Partners. Bessemer, in turn, approached Bain to proffer the shared risk of investing in a young company. Romney rejected Bessemer’s invitation—three times—but was eventually pressured by his partners at Bain to kick in a modest $650,000, with increments over a few years adding up to a total investment of $2.5 million. In the venture capital universe, a few million dollars of loans with many strings attached does not earn an investor the tag “big whale.”</p> <p>  </p> <p> Romney sat on the Staples board for a short time, according to the book, but was absent from meetings more often than he was present. As soon as the company went public, Romney dumped Bain’s share and was out, and that was that.</p> <p>  </p> <p> In his own 2004 autobiography, <em>Turnaround</em>, Romney said of his time with companies that Bain either acquired or financed, Staples included, “I never actually ran one of our investments; that was left to management.”</p> <p>  </p> <p> <a href="http://blogs.detroitnews.com/politics/2012/01/14/venture-capital-or-leveraged-asset-pawn-shop/">Mako Yamakura</a>, a financial blogger for the <em>Detroit News</em>, characterized Bain Capital as a “corporate pawnbroker” in his column of January 14, 2012. He also codified Bain’s tried-and-true formula: “They take all the assets of a company in a tight cash-flow, then leverage 70-plus percent of the company in order to realize their closed investment goal…[and] bonuses on the backs of thousands of workers who had no choice but to accept the leveraged buyout.”</p> <p>  </p> <p> The term “leveraged buyout” is not known to be part of the typical pawnbroker’s vocabulary, certainly not the cigar-chomping sort portrayed in film noir. But it could be said that there is a fundamental similarity in management pattern between pawnbrokers and Bain Capital.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Average Joes go to pawnshops for loans on everything from costume jewelry to cars. These are their assets. Pawnbrokers collateralized them in return for loans tendered at a fraction of fair asset value. To redeem the pawned item, in accordance with contractual loan periods, financially strapped customers must pony up the standard vigorish, which is to say a monthly interest rate of 20 percent--or 240 percent a year, all perfectly legal since there are no more usury statutes. If Average Joe fails to make good on the loan, the pawnbroker then takes ownership of the collateral and sells the asset at practically full value, with attendant recoup of his small loan outlay. Either way, the pawnbroker makes a handsome profit. One man’s 240 percent vigorish is another man’s million-dollar bonus for engineering a leveraged buyout. Only the respective grade of cigars may differ.</p> <p>  </p> <p> When Romney talks of the “real economy,” the subtext is as deep into the American bone as the Wise Man gag. Business is efficiently upstanding, so it goes; government is slipshod and corrupt.</p> <p>  </p> <p> <img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/mediumalbertstanley.jpg" style="width: 574px; height: 383px; " /></p> <p>  </p> <p> “I’m always surprised to hear people tout the efficiency of the private sector,” Professor Masket  was quoted further in the <em>Forbes</em> article. “There’s a great deal of inefficiency, of course. How many CEOs end up hiring dim, unqualified brothers-in-law, or grandkids taking time off college? That’s not considered a big deal as long as it doesn’t noticeably hurt the bottom line. If a member of Congress does that, it becomes a major scandal.”</p> <p>  </p> <p> He added, “This isn’t to say that government is a paragon of efficiency and thrift…but there’s a whole subfield in journalism and several citizen activist groups devoted to rooting out waste in the public sector. There’s not much interest in rooting out waste in the private sector, unless a business is seen as misusing public money.”</p> <p>  </p> <p> The list of corporate honchos duly incarcerated is far too long for this article. But a partial count would include Albert Stanley, CEO of Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown &amp; Root, locked up for bribing Nigerian officials in a deal for natural gas exploration; Thomas Joseph Petters, serving a 50-year federal sentence for turning Petters Group Worldwide into a $3.65 billion Ponzi scam; Sholam Weiss, serving an 845-year sentence for bilking customers of National Heritage Life Insurance Company out of $500 million; and Danny Pang, the CEO of Private Management Equity Group who died behind bars while serving time as a Ponzi artist, soon after his ex-stripper wife, Janie Louise Pang, was murdered upon serving him with divorce papers.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Unmentioned in the foregoing are the marquee felonious tycoons Bernie Madoff, Joseph P. Nacchio, Richard Scrushy, Dennis Kozlowski—and Bush’s dear friend from Enron, the late Kenneth “Kenny Boy” Lay.</p> <p>  </p> <p> There is a cozy, unseemly public-private collusion underlying America’s counterintuitive notion about the likes of Herbert Hoover, H. Ross Perot, George W. Bush, and now Mitt Romney, the latest cheerleader for the conflation of private business and public governance. It is this: political candidates’ dependence on corporate cash.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Simon Johnson, the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, spoke of such collusion in the context of the recently revealed loss of $3 billion (and counting) in trading losses at JP Morgan Chase, due to what CEO <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/halahtouryalai/2012/05/22/jpmorgan-employees-sue-jamie-dimon-ina-drew-over-losses/">Jamie Dimon</a> said in a press conference was a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/14/business/dimon-says-jpmorgan-made-an-egregious-mistake.html">“stupid”</a> investment risk that “never should have happened.” It nevertheless did, due to what Dimon’s public relations staff suggested was the boss’s trust in a subordinate executive who quickly resigned. That would be Ina R. Drew, the nation’s highest-paid female investment banker; last year, she hauled in $14 million of salary and bonuses, according to <em>The New York Times.</em></p> <p>  </p> <p> In a recently aired interview on PBS Television, Simon told host Bill Moyers, “A huge part of our fiscal problems today, and in the future, are due to these risks within the financial system that are allowed because the people running the biggest banks hand out massive campaign contributions across the political spectrum.</p> <p>  </p> <p> “Chase and other huge banks have been using their enormous wealth for years to, in effect, buy off our politicians and regulators,” said Simon, nowadays a professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “Chase just had to pay almost three-quarters of a billion dollars in settlements and surrendered fees to settle one case alone, that of bribery and corruption in Jefferson County, Alabama.”</p> <p>  </p> <p> Further on the topic of Chase, and Dimon, whose salary and bonus last year amounted to $23 million, Simon said, “It’s also paid out billions of dollars to settle other cases of perjury, forgery, fraud and sale of unregistered securities. And these charges were for actions that took place while Dimon was the CEO.”</p> <p>  </p> <p> On the day the <em>Times</em> broke the news of a stupid risk that never should have happened, readers might have been surprised to learn, deep into the article, that Dimon has a seat on the New York Federal Reserve, the agency responsible for warding banks off stupid risks that should never happen. At this writing, Dimon retains his seat.</p> <p>  </p> <p> “Why does Mr. Dimon, a very busy man, take time out of his day to be on the board of the New York Fed?”  Simon asked in the PBS interview. “He is getting something from this. It’s a trade, just like everything else on Wall Street.”</p> <p>  </p> <p> Jamie Dimon is the banker ballyhooed by President Obama as the best and brightest of the ilk. The presidency could do no worse were straight-up pawnbrokers to form one of those hush-hush super PACs to launch the candidacies of their own favorite sons.</p> <p>  </p> <p> <strong>Author Bio:</strong></p> <p> <em>Thomas Adcock, a</em> Highbrow Magazine contributor, <em>is an independent journalist and novelist based in New York City.</em></p> <p>  </p> <p> <em><strong>Photos: Mitt Romney (Creative Commons, Flickr); President Obama (Whitehouse.gov); Albert Stanley (AP).</strong></em></p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/mitt-romney" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mitt Romney</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/gop" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">GOP</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/republicans" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Republicans</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/presidential-elections" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">presidential elections</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/2012-elections" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">2012 elections</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/president-obama" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">President Obama</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/obamacare" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Obamacare</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/bain-capital" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Bain Capital</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/staples" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Staples</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/jamie-dimon" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jamie Dimon</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/business-acumen" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">business acumen</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/halliburton" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Halliburton</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/bernie-madoff" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Bernie Madoff</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/wall-street" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Wall Street</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Thomas Adcock</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-pop field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Popular:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">not popular</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-photographer field-type-text field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Photographer:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Creative Commons, Flickr</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-bot field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Bottom Slider:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Out Slider</div></div></div> Wed, 23 May 2012 23:41:25 +0000 tara 1016 at https://www.highbrowmagazine.com https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/1182-why-mitt-romney-means-business#comments