Kavanaugh: What Have We Learned?

Five plus hours of stress, anger and posturing on the part of twenty one Senators and what have we learned?

Well, we know the work at the Ministry of Truthiness is a never-ending endeavor. After Kavanaugh provided his definition of the "devil's triangle" as a modified form of a quarters drinking game a staffer somewhere in Congress immediately set about to update the Wikipedia entry for devil's triangle to match.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/27/politics/devils-triangle-edit/index.html

We know the Republican committee members ran out the clock by committing their outrage at the "process" to the record, abrogated their responsibility to ask critical questions of the accuser to a last-minute hired gun "expert" to avoid the risk of appearing sexist then limited direct questions of Kavanaugh to obvious softballs allowing him to re-assert his innocence.

We know Kavanaugh must have learned something from Bill Clinton from all of that work on the Starr committee. Over the last few days, Kavanaugh adopted a little bit of verbal / logical jujitsu straight from the Bill Clinton handbook. He started combining a denial of assault allegations with a gee-this-is-embarrassing statement that I'm not guilty cuz shucks I was a virgin well into college. Didja catch that? Didja see what he did there? He conflated a charge of a sexual assault with sex, then denied having sex. THAT WASN'T THE ALLEGATION. Sexual assault is not limited to uninvited sex (rape). It is completely possible to sexually assault someone while remaining a virgin. It's also possible to remain a virgin while being a complete *******.

We know that Kavanaugh and many of his supporters claim to be disgusted by an "advise and consent" process that has morphed in their mind into a "defame and destroy" process. In this mind set, going forward, all of us better worry about anything we did as a teenager or college student becoming fodder for public discussion in 201x America lest the public recoil in horror at our prior "gaffes" which are present day "crimes."

Huh?

If someone is being hired to work as a carpenter or operate machinery or work as a brand manager at a Fortune 500 company, the "Kavanaugh experience" would be light years over the top and wholly inappropriate.

Kavanaugh isn't under consideration as a back-hoe operator or middle manager of a company making candy bars. He is being considered for a key job in one of the most crucial intellectual and moral functions of a government that controls nuclear weapons and sets (or used to set) the pace of the free world.

One doesn't need to hear a victim's claims of sexual abuse to discern that Kavanaugh is not Supreme Court material. He was already on the wrong side of the line based on his refusal to turn over documents related to his work in the Bush II White House and his indefensible flip flop on the merits of pursuing legal action against a sitting President.

It comes down to this.

We are hiring someone for a position requiring high-quality decision making based on logic and communication abilities. One candidate being proposed might live a STERLING life of propriety and charity NOW but has allegations from MANY indicating he spent at least six years from high school through college in a binge-drinking fog with allegations of misogynistic behavior if not actual sexual assault (and worse). In fending off accusations, the candidate actually produced a calendar from one of the years involved that DOCUMENTED his very busy itinerary of keggers. Others have produce yearbooks with handwritten entries making direct references to boorish, sexually tinged behavior.

Presumably, somewhere, there is ANOTHER candidate in waiting. That person might have identical views on regulation, antitrust, property rights, civil liberties and any other hot-button issue as candidate #1. But candidate #2 has no trail of accusers alleging assault or worse and no yearbook entries seeming to brag about drunken parties or sexual conquests.

Who's the better candidate?

Does this really require any thought?

I have no problem with someone making judgments about me NOW based upon my MORAL behavior as a teenager. I didn't know as much about politics, business, technology, the law, or human behavior then as I do now but my decision making process and moral compass then would not reflect poorly upon me now.

Is that too much to ask for a Supreme Court nominee? Or Representative or Senator? or President?

We'll find out shortly.

WTH

Trump by the Number$

A story has just been posted online by The New Yorker promising to be the first of a series of articles one might call Trump by the Number$ - a detailed analysis of the structure of some of his more notable business investments and how those characteristics have changed over time.

https://www.newyorker.com/news-desk/swamp-chronicles/where-did-donald-trump-get-200-million-dollars-to-buy-his-money-losing-scottish-golf-club

Here is the set-up paragraph in the first article's analysis of his purchase of Turnberry.

By 2014, Trump was seen by lenders as a high-risk bet because he had so many bankruptcies and so few successful projects. But, if he had used the three hundred million dollars he spent on Turnberry as a pledge, he could have surely received several hundred million in loans at a competitive rate. With, say, a billion dollars total, he could have invested in projects around the world. Instead, he chose to put nearly all of his available cash in an old, underperforming course in a remote corner of Scotland.

The point of this article, and the larger series as it will eventually play out, is not to look at these investments as examples of how dumb Trump must be to violate well established heuristics on investing large sums of money across multiple projects to maximize leverage and reduce risk. The first article on Turnberry looks at the deal in terms of where the cash funds came from, what they expose about his true wealth and liquidity and -- under the assumption that Trump is NOT stupid -- what else could explain the investment decision.

In the case of Turnberry, the oddities pointed out about the deal are that his huge cash investment was put into a vastly over-bought, under-performing business (golf), in possibly THE most over-bought, over-supplied location (Scotland - the home of golf) after a wave of FOURTEEN other golf course purchases between 1999 and 2014. These deals involved over $400 million in cash payments.

Hmmmmmm. Multiple GOLF courses plus other real estate properties. Lots of CASH payments. Over FIFTEEN years. Including the post 2008 CRASH and contraction of credit. By an investor with a history of defaults and strategic bankruptcy filings. Depending primarily on RUSSIAN investors.

Pat, I'd like to solve the puzzle...

I-N-T-E-R-N-A-T-I-O-N-A-L
M-O-N-E-Y L-A-U-N-D-E-R-N-G.

WTH

An Abandonment of Professionalism

Every so often, it is important to step back from the minutia of the dozens of stories in the immediate news, look back over a longer period at a few BIG events and see if a common theme emerges. A few stories, documentaries and scandals over the last ten years reviewed as a set highlight a key concern about a key layer of our economy.

The Opioid Crisis

The history of business and regulatory decisions that produced the so-called "opioid crisis" has now been well explained in at least two different forums -- a New Yorker article from October 30, 2017 on the Sackler family

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/30/the-family-that-built-an-empire-of-pain

and a documentary film Do No Harm: The Opiod Epidemic

http://www.donoharmdocumentary.com/

which covers the exact same history. What any history of the problem shows is that Purdue Pharma carefully designed a promotional campaign to heavily compensate salespersons to convince doctors to prescribe oxycontin for conditions never previously deemed worthy of long-term pain medication, even when they knew within six months of launching the drug. Purdue even focused on high profile doctors to sell within the medical community to provide an added level of apparent independence in claims of the drug's safety.

The VAST majority of addicts didn't instantly (or voluntarily) change from normal middle-class, God-fearin' Muricans into scuzzy dregs of society in a day. For the VAST majority of addicts, their disaster began with a prescription from a doctor that wasn't merited in the first place or should have been curtailed without weeks or months of renewals. A doctor -- a PROFESSIONAL -- made that first disastrous decision. TENS OF THOUSANDS of doctors have made that first disastrous decision. Nearly 40,000 people DIED of opioid overdoses in 2016 alone. That doesn't reflect the tens of thousands more who are hooked and destroying their lives and the lives of those around them but just haven't managed to kill themselves yet.

Financial Meltdown of 2008

The root cause of the worldwide economic meltdown that began in 2007 then snowballed in 2008 was a world financial market that blurred national and economic boundaries with a blizzard of highly leveraged contractual bets, all based on a theory that mixing a variety of financial instruments together always reduces net risk. In America, that general problem was magnified by the "real-estate industrial complex" of banks, homebuilders, real estate agents and appraisers who combined to create a self-reinforcing spiral of mortgage fraud that dovetailed perfectly with the larger worldwide financial fraud of bundling millions of those fraudulent mortgages into collateralized debt obligations which were further combined using the same blend-rate-price-sell cycle.

Did the tens of thousands of individuals in these industries "conspire" to perpetrate this fraud? They didn't have to. Everyone faced the same reinforcing financial incentives to continue participating, a large share of those involved not only knew the math didn't add up and many likely knew they were individually committing crimes. Virtually no one in a position to know demonstrated a sense of PROFESSIONALISM to speak up to regulators or law enforcement. And there were THOUSANDS of people in a position to know the degree of fraud taking place.

The Destruction of Puerto Rico

Wall Street firms floated a $3.5 billion municipal bond issue for Puerto Rico in 2014 less than 14 months before the territory was forced to default on payments and declare bankruptcy. Why did Puerto Rico need $3.5 billion dollars in 2014 and why couldn't banks and investors see its default coming? Banks had already sponsored roughly $60 billion in bond offerings from 2008 to 2014 which produced high fees for banks and produced higher interest rates due to the risks of the ever-increasing debt load. However, investors -- perversely -- weren't waved off by the high rates as a sign of risk. Instead, they were seen as easy gains in a climate of historically low interest rates. Of course, those investors believed they could find a greater fool in time when reality hit or that someone would step in to avoid a default. The BANKS, however, realized in 2014 the jig was up and Barclays and Morgan Chase partnered on one last bond offering which

1. aimed at raising enough cash to make the next round of payments,
2. produced one final round of fees for the Barclays and Morgan Chase and
3. allowed those underwriters to exit their own positions before the final default.

In other words, the 2014 bond issue was a carefully crafted getaway plan hatched by armies of PROFESSIONALS at two banks who created the disaster in the first place by violating their fiduciary obligations to the Puerto Rican government and investors but were in a position to orchestrate one last charade to preserve liquidity as they unwound their exposure while trapping a last round of investors. Puerto Rico was already crippled before any hurricane ever hit the island in 2017.

Public Conclusions About a Non-Indictment

James Comey spent a year drafting his memoir of his career in the FBI and firing by Trump for refusing to publicly declare Trump as outside the scope of the Russia investigation. Despite a year of effort, Comey was unable to square known standards of behavior in the FBI regarding:

• not commenting on investigations in progress
• not commenting on investigations concluding with no recommendation of indictment

with his choices to:

• comment on the Hillary Clinton email server phase I investigation
• comment at its phase 1 conclusion what he did find, didn't find and how Clinton failed to meet his standards while declining to recommend indictment
• comment when RE-OPENING the investigation based on a sexting case which itself had nothing to do with Clinton
• comment again after finding nothing

In two weeks of media appearances touting his book, Comey repeatedly expressed regret that he was put in a situation where he and his beloved FBI were put in a situation of having to choose between least-worst alternatives during a presidential campaign but still seems clueless that all of those alternatives came about because he failed to act according to the well documented standards of his own profession.

Trump's Private Physician

If one can believe Harold Bornstein, a former bodyguard of Trump the private citizen and fellow toughie showed up at his office last week and didn't ask for a full COPY of Trump's records, they TOOK all of Trump's actual medical records. Not only any records that might have been filed under "Trump, Donald J" but also records filed under other aliases he has used over the years. (What might those be? Dennison, David? Barron, John? Coyote, Wile E.?) Under New York State law, doctors must retain medical records for 6 years. Patients are allowed to view and obtain COPIES but they are not allowed to remove materials from the original doctor's records.

Bornstein not only violated his regulatory obligations by giving his copies to Trump's associates but it sounds like he allowed them to rifle through ALL of his files to find OTHER files under Trump aliases to remove those as well. Of course, these offenses are nothing compared to the offense of allowing a patient to dictate their own letter of medical condition during a run for President. No one with a brain believed Bornstein wrote the letter when it was published but it wasn't written for people with a brain. It was written for idiot voters whose only concern during the campaign was Trump's physical health and might have been swayed to vote for him after hearing he would "unequivocally be the healthiest individual elected to the presidency." The potentially illegal seizure of Trump's records was triggered in the first place by the doctor publicly confirming Trump uses Propecia to counteract hair-loss. Does this sound like a PROFESSIONAL doctor to you?

---

The Wikipedia definition of a profession is

A profession is a vocation founded upon specialized educational training, the purpose of which is to supply disinterested objective counsel and service to others, for a direct and definite compensation, wholly apart from expectation of other business gain.

It's easy to blame what seems to be going on in America (and the world more generally) on a very small number of greedy, craven individuals managing to lie their way into positions of government power to tilt the rules in favor of the "uber-haves." It takes only slightly more effort to expand the blame game to the small margin of swing voters who are ignorant enough to be taken in by the disinformation spewed out by the corrupt forces in positions of power.

However, it seems many of the systemic problems we face are more process driven and involve a much larger sliver of the population holding professional positions in the areas of finance, law enforcement, media, science, etc. who appear to have retreated almost entirely from those professional obligations. We will always have crooks wanting to get into government. We will always have crooks getting into positions of power in corporations. We will always have idiot voters who can be easily duped to swing elections in favor of politicians who could not care less about those idiot voters.

That's why these professional roles are so critical to society. People in these roles have specialized education and they are typically well compensated. That means they should have enough financial stability to avoid being dependent on one bad client who demands they do the wrong thing to maintain their livelihood or professional standing. In reality, large numbers of these professionals are CONSISTENTLY failing to understand their duties are not just to the client in front of them but the rest of us relying on them to exercise sound judgment for the betterment of everyone.

It will be very difficult to change direction until the forces encouraging this retreat from professionalism are identified and corrected. The fish doesn't always rot from the head down.

WTH

Another Grifter Exits the Scene

Two of the most common memes so far in the press coverage of the exit of Gary Cohn from his position as Director of the National Economic Council in the Trump (mis)Administration boil down to:

• there goes the last adult in the room
• a man of principle finally had enough after the "trade war" announcement

Uh huh.

If there is any takeaway to be had from his departure, it is that it epitomizes the grifter dynamic that pervades every "organization" Trump has ever operated. Anyone willing to associate with Trump as a private citizen, Presidential candidate or actual President either

a) lacks any intellectual honesty or hint of ethics
b) has their own agenda they seek to forward in the absence of any competent control exerted by Trump

Here are some questions to ponder.

After the public belittling inflicted on Jeff Sessions, do you really think he is sticking around to "serve the President" and properly manage the Department of Justice? Or could it be he wants to retain his position to continue rolling back civil rights by abandoning needed Federal supervision of state problems with police brutality, voting rights, etc.? Or could it be because he wants to continue pushing failed 30-year old get-tough-on-drug laws against USERS rather than going after doctors and pharmaceutical makers making billions off getting people hooked on opioids before they turn to street criminals for the final dose of cheap heroin that kills them?

Multiple staffers have been accused of inappropriate spending on business travel, personal travel disguised as business travel, excessive spending on office decorations and furniture, etc. Have any resigned in recognition of their impropriety? Or have they they all stayed on, clinging to the reins of their department to continue steering it into intellectual ditches via extreme policies, zero enforcement of regulations or leaving leadership positions vacant without nominations for replacements? Where do you think Scott Pruit can get a better chance at rolling back environment progress by DECADES?

Gary Cohn is publicly reported to be a Democrat but signed up to provide the semblance of middle-of-the-road economic thought to an administration led by someone who watches Alex Jones for insight. He provided that cover of sanity "serving" a President who spooked the markets twice with threats of government shutdowns and a President who wondered out loud about whether the United States should reneg on some of its public debt. He held his position even after trying to subliminally leak his disgust at the President's failure to unequivocally condemn racist, anti-Semitic Nazi demonstrators in North Carolina. What does Gary think he "accomplished" during his brief tenure? He supposedly somehow helped craft and push a tax deal estimated to add $1.4 trillion to the debt in 10 years that

• doesn't fund roads and infrastructures
• doesn't improve funding for schools
• doesn't eliminate loopholes for hedge fund operators
• provides $1xxx level reductions in taxes for low-income workers
• provides six-figure and up savings for the top 1%

I suspect Gary figured he did all he could do for Gary and his half-percenter friends back at Goldman Sachs and decided to get out before getting invited to a meeting with Trump where Trump makes another decision that puts Cohn on the subpoena list like everyone else.

That's not the last exasperated adult leaving the political equivalent of Romper Room. That's not a man of principals disappointed he couldn't do more and finally quitting in reaction to one final bridge-too-far policy decision.

That's the behavior of a grifter smart enough to exit the scene with his ill-gotten-booty after successfully conning the dupe. The dupe in this case is not his boss. The dupe is the American public that voted the boss in, turning the entire Executive branch into an unparalleled collection of gypsies, tramps and thieves.

WTH

Is This Child Abuse?

For the umpteenth time, it happened again. A crazed shooter loaded with guns and ammunition sought out an environment concentrating large numbers of people in a small space with relatively few avenues for escape and mowed people down like a real-life arcade game.

There are many things about these scenarios no one can predict or prevent. There are some things that cannot be predicted in the particular but CAN be predicted in the aggregate to drive changes that could reduce the likelihood of similar shootings in the future that American society completely fails to acknowledge which is shameful.

But there's one aspect of these incidents that strikes me as completely predictable and completely avoidable but happens EVERY time in the aftermath and could be cementing further harm to survivors -- the post-event, on-site obligatory interviews with stunned children being asked to look into the TV camera and describe what they saw and heard.

Tell us about the gunshots. Can you describe seeing the killer in the hall? What was it like when you were playing dead next to your dying friend?

Are these interviews helping ANYONE?

In every case, the killer is either in custody or dead, so no details are needed to identify someone at large still posing a threat.

It's pretty obvious most witnesses to this type of event will be in shock, no one needs to see footage of someone staring numbly into the camera to confirm the horror of what transpired.

When there are five, ten, twenty or fifty plus bodies on the ground, it would seem obvious law enforcement doesn't need much eyewitness testimony to obtain a conviction of a killer that survives and little is learned about motive at the scene of the crime.

We've proven at this point that such real-time eyewitness accounts have done NOTHING to soften the hearts much less change the minds of people who refuse to consider changes in regulations that might eliminate some of the paths between a mentally ill person and murderous immortality.

So what's the point of these interviews, besides providing footage for "disaster porn" video montages that are repeated over and over and over and over again as part of an offensive journalistic meme of "you are there" faux compassion?

It's one thing for a victim to be interviewed by a professional immediately after a crime or traumatic event so the professional can do their job to investigate, etc. It's another thing entirely for a victim to be recorded immediately after a horrific event, being prompted for explicit details then having that video repeated ad nauseam as part of a permanent public history of the event. That doesn't help "healing" in the community, it acts as a multi-media bookmark capable of putting that victim back in that EXACT place of maximum psychological trauma to relive for the rest of their life.

Victims can still choose to remember these types of events as they choose and deal with the aftermath at their own pace in their own time. Putting them in front of a public camera and beaming their reactions worldwide at a point of maximum vulnerability seems like cruel, crude, destructive, emotional voyeurism. The victims in their shock may not think about that in the moment. Reporters, producers back at the station and everyone else watching sure as hell should know better. We've certainly had enough practice.

WTH

The Best People: Take MCVXIV

A story from the upcoming March issue of The Atlantic just posted online at

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/03/paul-manafort-american-hustler/550925/

is chock full of new insights into how uniquely flawed Manafort was known to be and how perfectly his unquestioned acceptance into the inner circle of the Trump campaign reflects the complete ineptitude of Trump and his entire campaign and Administration staff. Reading the entire story is highly recommended but perhaps the key takeaway from the story is this set of snippets from the very first section of the story. They set up how a perfectly corrupt, unstable person managed to meld his way into a Presidential campaign of the worst candidate seen in our history.

The clinic permitted Paul Manafort one 10-minute call each day. And each day, he would use it to ring his wife from Arizona, his voice often soaked in tears. "Apparently he sobs daily," his daughter Andrea, then 29, texted a friend. During the spring of 2015, Manafort’s life had tipped into a deep trough. A few months earlier, he had intimated to his other daughter, Jessica, that suicide was a possibility. He would "be gone forever," she texted Andrea.

(snip)

Money, which had always flowed freely to Manafort and which he’d spent more freely still, soon became a problem. After the revolution, Manafort cadged some business from former minions of the ousted president, the ones who hadn’t needed to run for their lives. But he complained about unpaid bills and, at age 66, scoured the world (Hungary, Uganda, Kenya) for fresh clients, hustling without any apparent luck. Andrea noted her father’s "tight cash flow state," texting Jessica, "He is suddenly extremely cheap." His change in spending habits was dampening her wedding plans. For her "wedding weekend kick off" party, he suggested scaling back the menu to hot dogs and eliminated a line item for ice.

(snip)

But after the exposure of his infidelity, his wife had begun to confess simmering marital issues to her daughters. Manafort had committed to couples therapy but, the texts reveal, that hadn’t prevented him from continuing his affair. Because he clumsily obscured his infidelity—and because his mistress posted about their travels on Instagram—his family caught him again, six months later. He entered the clinic in Arizona soon after, according to Andrea’s texts. "My dad," she wrote, "is in the middle of a massive emotional breakdown."

It would be IMPOSSIBLE for Vladmir Putin to dream of a more perfectly compromised character to step in and play a part in his global battle of Kompromat against the West and the United States.

Financial troubles? Check.

International legal troubles? Check.

A trail of legal documents left behind regarding a country now controlled by Russia? Check.

Infidelity / sex scandals? Check.

And given Putin's role in destabilizing Ukraine, he would be in a perfect position to know of Manafort's particular financial and ethical plight and -- once seen accepted into the role of key adviser to a Presidential candidate -- know how to leverage it.

Only Trump and the wave of revulsion around his campaign that kept all mainstream political professionals away could produce the perfect situation for someone already so compromised to waltz right into the inner circle and further magnify the polluted thinking already in Trump's stunted brain.

The story makes clear that Manafort made a name for himself in Washington DC for ignoring normal rules for decorum in fund raising, financial management with off-shore banks, etc. And Manafort had another characteristic unique to him... Absolutely no common sense about avoiding the limelight. "The imperative to shy away from unnecessary attention," as the author puts it.

Yup. Sounds like a Trump staffer to me.

WTH