PSYCHOLOGY AND THE BUSINESS OF LEADING!

PSYCHOLOGY AND THE BUSINESS OF LEADING!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 29, 2008

“Emotion which does not lead to and flow out in right action is not only useless, but it weakens character, and becomes an excuse for neglect of effort.”

Tryon Edwards (1809 – 1891), American theologian

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In my long career, I have seldom seen leaders take into account the impact of the psychology of the situation on their decision making either individually or collectively.

Leaders, I have noted, base most of their decisions, on the short-term impact, or how it might play in the business or the market or the industry in which they compete. This psychology of neglect is as common in the family as it is with leaders in multi-national corporations. Leaders forget they are dealing with persons.

Alexander II, the last great tsar of Russia, was cut down while in his carriage by bomb throwers in front of a beautiful Russian Orthodox Church in St. Petersburg, which we visited when we were in Russia in 2007. In many ways, he was a kind emperor, but in many other ways he was not. He refused to allow Russia and its large peasant class to enter the Industrial Revolution other than subserviently, failing to understand the psychology of the times.

So often in my career, I have seen leaders take their workers for granted, not recognizing the changing nature of the psychology of work, and the changing nature of life itself. It is almost as if leaders are strangers to themselves, buying their own inflated regard, failing to see or understand their vulnerability, in fact, powerless beyond measure to recognize they are equally fragile and insubstantial as everyone else.

With such self-forgetting, leaders make decisions that impact the psychology of others in terms of dignity and self-respect, decisions that ultimately predict the collapse of their leadership.

No decision either small or large should be made without considering the psychological impact on the people it effects. People have their self-interest at heart. Through all the rhetoric, all the machinations of how tough times are, how we have to tighten our belts, how we have to work as a team, as a family, and all the other rot of such discourse, it always comes back to dignity and self-respect, fairness and consistency, and how I am, personally, being treated as an individual.

A company I was consulting was in deep trouble. It launched a vigorous campaign to improve quality and the delivery of its products. Forty managers and their direct supports worked seven days a week for the better part of two months to come up with a plan that turned the corner, while one-hundred and sixty workers were treated as no accounts. They weren’t interviewed, except by me, weren’t asked for their input, and treated as if they had no stake in the operation’s survival.

When the dust cleared, the product assurance manager was given a $10,000 bonus, and the other managers a letter of appreciation from the CEO, while the workers were provided with an announcement over the public address system that their jobs were secure.

The psychology of this abysmal situation could not have been worse on all levels. The company eventually failed. The workers, who were never included, never owned the problem or its correction. And although they saw their jobs disappear, it was an apparent price they were willing to pay for their bitterness of exclusion. As for the managers, many went forward like proper puppets too programmed to do otherwise, but a few left soon after the $10,000 bonus was awarded.

SIX SILENT KILLERS (1998) was written after seeing repeated evidence that a subconscious poison invades the spirit of workers when they are not treated fairly, consistently, and with dignity and respect. The moment an exception is made to protect a friend at the expense of someone else who is doing all the work is the moment this ugliness invades the human heart.

Every worker everywhere knows who is doing the work and who isn’t. Why don’t leaders know this, too?

My answer is that they are too busy covering their ass doing what they perceive as the least direct fall out. It is not a coincidence that the complainer, the operator, the devious one is more likely to keep his job than the worker when push comes to shove. The schemer as worker hides in seniority, others hide in having something on the boss, and still others play the flattering game for all it is worth. I have participated in redundancy exercises and have never seen departure from this formula.

The psychological fall out is manifested directly in the “six silent killers,” which are passive behaviors that are invisible but palpable in their impact causing more than $1 trillion in lost work every year while these same workers are on the job every day. No field of endeavor escapes this syndrome.

For the past four months, I have watched the collapse of the Tampa Bay Bucs, the National Football League team. Jeff Garcia is the quarterback who has been treated with less than dignity and respect, while showing real grit on the playing field. Imagine what he might have done if he had been treated more fairly and appreciated more thoroughly by his management.

Then there is the defensive genius of Monte Kiffin, who has chosen to leave the team in support of his son who is the new head coach for the University of Tennessee. His son has already been fired from one head-coaching university job, and now Monte is attempting to save him from another. Blood wins out as Monte has constantly turned down NFL jobs to be a head coach.

The psychological problem with the Buc’s collapse tracks precisely with Monte’s announcement of leaving the team. The incredulous would say, “No way! These are professionals!”

True, they are professionals, but a battered, beaten up team of mounting injuries to many veterans, players at an age when they should have retired by now. Along with all their physical pain, they didn’t need a psychological shock to their system much as it might be anticipated, leastwise at this time.

Defense in football is warfare. I know I played the sport. The relationship between a defensive coach and players is a close one, a very close one. Professional or not, they are having difficulty dealing with psychological abandonment, although not articulated or admitted, which this could clearly be felt to be.

You say these are men. Yes, they are, but they are also fragile, vulnerable, and frail men when it comes to the psychology that holds them intact, the same psychology with which we are all familiar.

For three months, the Monte Kiffin’s defense allowed one rushing touchdown with most games won on defense for a 9 – 3 record. In December 2008, the defense collapsed and the team lost the last four games of the season, all because the defense did not show up. In fact, the defense allowed 7 rushing touchdowns, 30 or more points and nearly 200 yards rushing per game during the month, when the first three months of the season they had held most teams to under 100 yards rushing per game.

Everyone says Monte’s announcement was a non-factor. The psychology suggests otherwise. You can build muscle on muscle and yet the human heart grows not at all. It is an emotional vessel of a finite capacity, and needs attention, needs respect, and needs understanding, something that I have not often seen in the human arena of work by its leadership.

HAVE WE BECOME A MADOFF NATION?

HAVE WE BECOME A MADOFF NATION?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 22, 2008

“The corruptions of the country are closely allied to those of the town, with no difference but what is made by another mode of thought and living.”

Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745), Irish satirist, Dean of St. Patrick’s, author of “Gulliver’s Travels”

“In recent years the finance sector accounted for 8 percent of America’s GDP (Gross Domestic Product), up from less than 5 percent a generation earlier. If that extra 3 percent was money for nothing – as it probably was – we’re talking about $400 billion a year in waste, fraud and abuse.”

Paul Krugman, 2008 Nobel Laureate in Economic, The New York Times


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A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD! BERNARD MADOFF – ARE WE FOREVER DOOMED TO MORE OF THE SAME?

Bernard Madoff is one of those nondescript people you may bump into while going to high school. You could lose him going to your student locker between classes, have no idea what happened to him, but rumor have it he married well, and then one day you see him all over television with baseball cap down over his eyes, coat collar of his jacket turned up, smirk on his face, hands stuffed in his pockets, as if not a care in the world.

This unremarkable character is alleged to have swindled his father-in-law’s charity out of $175 million and the family fortune of another $400 million, which is a drop in the bucket to the alleged $55 billion he has taken from high stakes investors, banks, philanthropies and other institutions across the globe. Most people, who have suffered these huge losses, have no idea who Bernard Madoff is much less what he looks like. Thanks to his fall from grace and television now they know.

The immediate aftermath was the suicide of Rene-Thierry, 65, who was found dead at his desk in the New York office of Access International Advisors, having cut his wrists with a box cutter. He was responsible for the loss of $1.4 billion of his clients’ money, and tens of millions of dollars of his own fortune, being virtually ruined financially along with his clients. When life is so synthetic that material wealth is the primary identifier, this action should be expected.

We have lost our moral compass and our way. We no longer feel real to ourselves, but chase synthetic arbiters as dollars or euros to seed our folly.

Look Back! We have been there before, in fact, over and over again. We are stuck in absurdity. While applauding our brilliance, we fail to see our weakness. We complain of shock, surprise, disgust, but vulnerability is native to our one-dimensional society.

Herbert Marcuse argues in “One Dimensional Society” (1964) that Western societies since WWII have moved to new forms of control in thought and education, resulting in the closing of the political universe so that opposing parties are nearly identical. He saw psychiatry in its quest to defeat unhappy consciousness desublimating depression with happy pill addictions.

He saw the ruse of closing off dialectical debate by attacking the dissenters rather than the subject at issue. One-dimensional attacks used negative thinking to defeat the logic of protest. Marcuse anticipated technological rationality and its logic of domination. This logic spawned patent optimism in face of all evidence to the contrary, crystallizing this in the one-dimensional philosophy: “technology will save us from all our sins!”

WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990) observed:

“America’s one sided one-dimensional progress has reached the alarming stage. This situation is so contradictory that it borders on insanity. We can control a soft landing of a spacecraft on distant planets, but we cannot control the polluting fumes emanating from our automobiles and factories. We propose utopian communities in gigantic space colonies, but cannot manage crime in our cities. The business community salutes the terrific growth of the pet food and cosmetic industries as signs of progress, but we cannot afford to feed the homeless or provide health care for the needy. We are among the best educated of Western nations in terms of per capita high school and college graduates – with arguably the best university system in the West – but few Americans read books, are multilingual, or are familiar with the culture or geography of other nations, much less their own. In fact, some see the American educational system as ‘killing the spirit’ of the American student to learn.”

I have been tracking this one-dimensional progress most of my life. Some 35 years ago, I wrote an essay in my journal about our vulnerability. At the time, we were experiencing the high jinx of corporate dalliance with double-digit unemployment and double-digit inflation. Corporate CEOs cackle it was not their fault, while professors and self-appointed gurus in all forms of media painted the air blue in psychobabble about the “Age of Anxiety,” “Crisis in Confidence,” “Lack of Leadership,” as if these were surprised discoveries. Listen up! We have been stuck since WWII.

One day in 2006, I happened again on this journal and decided to publish. My God, I said to myself, why can’t we see we are stuck? The book was a wake up call knowing waking up is not on our agenda.

A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007) argued:

“It is apparent in the early days of the twenty-first century that America is not unlike the 1970s when young people were forced to participate in an unpopular war; when political upheaval was in the air; when corrupt politicians who lied and deceived the electorate reached a crescendo with Watergate; when drugs were ruining lives; when morality took a holiday; when new forms of bigotry and hatred were hatching; when the automotive industry was in sharp decline, while foreign automakers were eating our lunch; when an energy crisis rocked the land with OPEC’s oil embargo; when a paranoid president hunkered down and became a law unto himself; when Congress stayed the same, missed the changes, wouldn’t face them, and left the future up for grabs.”

Why do we fail to learn from our mistakes? Why do we insist in repeating them? Why do we wear masks of confidence in the midst of chaos and collapse? Why are we stuck in history? The answer is in the words of Spanish philosopher George Santayana: “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it:“

THE SUCKING SOUND OF CORRUPTION

Remember the “Keating Five” of the Savings & Loan Scandal of the 1980s? They were alleged to be coconspirators in the Keating scandal. Charles H. Keating, Jr., a big time campaign contributor to members of Congress, took investors and depositors of the S&L’s for billions, people who felt their money was safe in a system they trusted.

Who were the “Keating Five”? Our best and brightest. I say this because we elected them to the highest public offices, and if they weren’t, shame on us!

You see the “Keating Five” were members of Congress and the United States Senate. There was Senator John McCain, the recently defeated Republican presidential candidate, and Senator John Glenn, the great American astronaut. Both men despite the scandal were reelected to the Senate. Not so the other Congressmen: Alan Cranston (D-CA), Dennis DeConcini (D-AZ) and Donald Riegle (D-MI).

Keating was chairman of the Lincoln Savings & Loan Association. He went to prison for his deeds. What happened?

No less than 747 S&L’s went belly up. The ultimate cost of the crisis was $160.1 billion, about $124.6 billion of which was directly paid for by the U.S. taxpayers. The 1990 – 1991 economic recession followed. Between 1986 and 1991, the number of new homes constructed per year dropped from 1.8 million to 1 million, the lowest rate since World War II. Tens of thousands lost their jobs, many thousands their homes, and the manufacturing industry, which was reeling from competition from Japan and South East Asia, and emerging competition from Europe, was never to recover.

All the wrenching of hands, all the pointing of fingers, all the Congressional hearings, all the calls for greater regulation and oversight, all the new laws on the books, and all of the media books produced by experts and critics detailing the S&L scandal and demanding change could now be reissued from the old tag line of “S&L Scandal” to the new tag line “Bernard Madoff Scandal,” and you wouldn’t even have to edit the content. Along with the same duplication and replication of events, accusations and declarations of resolve to correct would be the same tired formulas that nobody plans to observe much less implement. The more things change the more they remain stuck.

But why?

CORPORATE SOCIETY & THE DEVILS IS IN THE DETAILS

Management guru Peter Drucker is acclaimed as “The Man Who Invented The Corporate Society,” which, incidentally, is the title of John J. Tarrant’s 1976 biography of the Austrian-American. It is a catchy title and powerful identity, but, unfortunately more than one hundred years off the mark. Not surprisingly, The Wall Street Journal and Wall Street took the Drucker mantra as gospel into the embodiment of “corpocracy.” This is explained in SIX SILENT KILLERS (1998):

“Corporate management as corpocracy: (1) treats employees as numbers not persons; (2) supports company politics at the expense of productivity; (3) uses stealth as a measure of communication; (4) finds data collection its principle product; (5) disguises its confusion with endless meetings; (6) allows markets to drift away for its fanatical internal focus; (7) hides indecision in excessive planning; (8) fears individual initiative as you never know where it might lead; (9) lives in a box walled off from the reality of work; (10) exudes overt praise for innovation while harboring covert hostility to it.”

Corporate society is a product of the Civil War, not of Peter Drucker. The Civil War allowed the Industrial Revolution to hit its full stride, explode on all its cylinders, and drive Western society out of a 600-year stalemate as essentially an agricultural and trade culture into modernity. At what price?

From the beginning of our 12,000-year history, a “cut and control” policy has prevailed. Each age sacrificed “what was” for something new, something that was desired but at the expense of something that was lost never to be regained.

This was true of the nomadic tribes of hunters and gatherers to the establishment of farms and households where property became important, then on to the age of the arts, craftsmanship and trade to the Industrial Revolution and modernity. Progress has been a double-edged blade throughout human culture. In studying this, I wrote “Near Journey’s End? Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-Indulgent Man? (2004, unpublished). My thesis was that progress has been our most important product, but with little appreciation at what price to our small planet and ourselves.

The Civil War has its industrial footprints all over it in weapons and armaments, uniforms and supplies, transportation and logistical support. Warfare was now planned, organized, coordinated, communicated, controlled, managed, and dispatched with mechanistic efficiency.

No longer was approximation good enough. Weapons and training required a precision not previously felt necessary. Virtually everything from paperwork to armaments had to meet specifications, standardization, and measurable stipulations as to efficiency, effectiveness, relevance and performance. Canons grew more sophisticated, the repeating rifle was invented, as was the submarine, and railroads became a weapon of critical import.

Sacrificed to this new high church of standardization were individuality, idiosyncrasy, independence and singular creativity that had been endemic to the American character.

Think back! Since the Civil War (1861 – 1865), American society has moved from primarily agrarian to essentially industrial to now mainly service. Complex manufacturing moved work from small guilds of individuals working together to large groups working in factories. Small towns and villages dried up with a mass exodus to new cities penciling the landscape where the jobs were.

The nuclear family of paternal dominance, which was centered on the community church was first fragmented and then destroyed. Pastoral identity where land and nature gave people a sense of place and space was gone forever. From open space where experience was direct and identity self-evident came group identity, group norms, and then identity by numbers. The close connection between doing and being was slipping away replaced by alienation from self, from work and finally from life, as it had been known. As Marcuse argues, this process has neither been acknowledge nor resolved but explained away by an ever-growing army of explainers.

Craftsmanship gave way to machines with standardized specifications, which ensured every product produced would be precisely the same. People became a product through social engineering to be classified, categorized and controlled. People were tunneled, pummeled and channeled into a predictable mass culture through compulsory public education, a rhetorical press, and an obliging clerical hierarchy. There was no room in this scheme of things for the idiosyncratic. It was important to fit in order to belong, to be like everyone else, to think, behave, believe and value what the corporate mantra claimed important.

Paradoxically, one group escaped this conforming the longest in America, and that was the African American community. During the Great Depression more than 80 percent of African Americans were in two parent families. The African American community church was center to their lives. Crime was uncommon while community support of each other was the norm.

The Civil Rights Movement was successful in desegregating schools, in passing the voting rights act, and equal opportunity under the law, thus improving upward mobility, but at what price? African Americans were last to embrace corpocracy, and now they share the same corporate identity and angst.

From birth to death, we measure our significance on what we have as a measure of what we are. It is so ingrained in our consciousness we don’t question it. We neither question the absurdity of political polls and best selling lists, and now thousands of websites that instruct us in how to live our lives, nor do we question the morbid absurdity of celebrity worship. Think of it. Celebrities are people we don’t know, will never meet, and have no idea who they are. Politicians, CEOs, and leaders everywhere are measuring their worth in terms of their celebrity pollster appeal. We have become an empty suit society.

We are also a nation of strangers who takes the word of an expert to our own experience. We have lost something since the Civil War.

Abraham Lincoln was self-taught with no formal education, a captain in the militia during the Black Hawk War, where he never saw action. In contrast, the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, was a graduate of West Point, a decorated regiment commander in the Mexican War, and Secretary of War in President Franklin Pierce’s administration (1853 – 1857). Davis was a groomed corporate type. Lincoln was not.

Lincoln, however, read and absorbed works on military history and strategy so that historian T. Harry Williams concluded: “Lincoln stands out as a great war president, probably the greatest in our history, and a great natural strategist, a better one than any of his generals.” Lincoln was an outsider; Davis an insider.

Today, we are obsessed with being insiders. You aren’t considered intelligent unless you have a high “I.Q”; not ready for college without a superior SAT score, or graduate school without the required GRE levels.

So what do students do to boost their scores? They take courses that focus on the test, not on the learning they have acquired. Indeed, elementary and secondary education today is geared to a test score, not to learning, per se. Learning is not relevant! Blame the government that insists on classifying schools in terms of standardized test scores to determine allocation of Federal Funds. Psychometrics is a product of corpocracy.

Fifty years after the Civil War, corporate society became so embedded in the American culture that no one thereafter could remember the difference.

In the “Electronic Age,” this has grown from the sublime to the ridiculous. Even president-elect Barak Obama will not be without his BlackBerry. Nerds across America see this as good. I see it as scary. Everything is being reduced to an electronic grid.

Notice that the Secretary of Treasury and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve came up with a $700 billion bailout of the subprime real estate meltdown with no idea why it was $700 billion instead of $200 billion, or a $1 trillion. It was a number picked out of a rabbit’s hat with sophisticated algorithms of justification, reflecting the corporate sense of being trapped. Marcuse anticipated this when he said a one-dimensional society is locked in to its technological rationality with no escape. Notice, too, that those receiving billions of this bailout have not behaved as expected.

This is not all that surprising. Corporate society expects people to act like inanimate objects to be manipulated. Having killed the spirit of individuals, corpocracy has made people into empty constructs. This fits nicely into electronic algorithms, but doesn’t set too well with man’s primordial instinct to survive. As T. S. Eliot puts it:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw, Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

And elsewhere:

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

We see this shadow in television comedy. We don’t want to be reminded of the shabby equipment of the neglected self. Instead, we prefer to retreat into sexual innuendo which is not funny, but entertains a blunted mindset that fails to see the ridiculous in self- ridicule. If we do not respect ourselves, who should; if we don’t display dignity, who should we blame?

Television drama is not of human conflict but a menu of mechanistic violence for an audience that has forgotten how to feel. The corporate mind has to be shocked to attention with the display of body parts, guts and gore in heinous crime. Men with the smirk of knowing and the women with uplifting bras to give them cleavage of authenticity solve these crimes with robotic precision. No one seems to wonder about this. Hard-boiled detective stories of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler had more heart

Celebrity corrals the juvenile mind of all ages into obedience with the likes of “American Idol.” Here young people surrender the coin of dignity to corporate embarrassment. For shame, they mount a dream of passion, which might better be spent learning how to read a book and master Euclidean geometry to a more satisfying and predictable end. They seek celebrity as if corporate adoration could supplant self-approval.

There is no heart in corpocracy. So, it substitutes fame, fortune and promotion. Corporations rise, and fall, writing off their demise as a matter of business as other corporate jackals pick up the pieces to realize a return on the carcass. Nary a thought is paid to the tens of thousands of wrecked lives due to corporate indifference. Corporate speak, “We had no choice.”

For the longest time, I’ve thought the problem was a matter of leadership, and it is, but it is impossible to produce leaders out of corpocracy. It is the antithesis of leadership.

WHY CORPORATE SOCIETY CANNOT LEAD

Corpocracy produced Jefferson Davis but not Abraham Lincoln. Davis had his eye on the prize of saving his southern lifestyle (instrumental value); Lincoln had his eye on the political objective of saving the union (terminal value). Lincoln’s objective was always political, never military, per se.

The antebellum culture of the prairie produced Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln and never anyone close to them since. Without leadership, we have followed not led technological change.

After the Civil War, America had no room for individuality. The Republic had moved progressively away from individuality to systemic relevance with increasing regimentation, integration and control.

In last forty years, television has gone from Beta to VHS to DVD to HDTV, and now in February 2009 all television programming will be digital. Explosive change has become a norm, but at what expense? I claim it has left the individual behind. Newspapers and magazines, and even books are disappearing as our world revolves around an impersonal grid of bouncing electrons across a flat screen while GPS tracking devices capture our every move. George Orwell anticipated this in “1984,” seeing us being constantly watched by such devices so that privacy once enjoyed was sinking away like a fading star.

Corpocracy is not about people. It is about numbers, always numbers. Its indicators are numbers; its planning are numbers; its long and short term decisions are numbers; its calibrated priorities are numbers. Is it any wonder that corporate accountancy should be flawed; that scandals should be associated with a society that values numbers more than it values people? We have become Eliot’s “hollow men”:

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear;
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star

And elsewhere:

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to Dust.

The Civil War created the momentum, which found home schooling on the farm moving inevitably to compulsory education in the schoolhouse. Compulsory education was geared to a controlled classroom with a fixed curriculum designed to serve corporate society’s needs. This extended to uniform dress, manners, mores, and morals conducive to conforming behavior. Students were channeled into narrow roles consistent with the demands of skilled and unskilled labor. Whereas farm hands and farm owners centered on the farm, now work centered on the corporate workplace and its owners who more than likely owned workers’ dwellings as well as the company store.

THE FORGOTTEN AMERICAN

Americans have had a history of being energetic, positive, optimistic, creative, independent, individualistic and self-determining. Much of this has been lost or turned into catchy slogans and synthetic models, leaving the genuine article behind.

Think back! In the early to late nineteenth century, America produced artists, artisans, philosophers, poets, dramatists and authentic heroes.

James Fenimore Cooper wrote “The Spy” (1821) and “The Last of the Mohicans” (1826); Herman Melville wrote the greatest American novel, “Moby Dick” (1851); Walt Whitman, wrote America’s greatest poem, “Leaves of Grass” (1855); Stephen Crane, wrote America’s first great war novel, “The Red Badge of Courage” (1895); Henry David Thoreau, showed America’s independent spirit moving to the Walden woods of Concord, and wrote “Walden” (1854); Nathaniel Hawthorne, wrote “The Scarlet Letter” (1850), Ralph Waldo Emerson, arguably America’s greatest philosopher, wrote a series of essays that captured the American conscience (1841 – 1844), as well as being the leader of Transcendentalism, an intuitional religious movement; Edgar Allan Poe, wrote The Raven” (1845).

These mainly forgotten Americans had no choice but to grow from the inside out. Walt Whitman went to school until he was eleven and then did odd jobs most of his life inventing the prosody of language that came to be his poetry. Herman Melville went to sea as his Yale. Edgar Allan Poe’s brief stormy life included a short stint at college and in the military. He became the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living at the craft. Although dying at the age of 40, he managed to perfect the American short story, invent the mystery novel, and write lyrical poetry.

Henry James gave us “The American” (1877) and “The European” (1878) revealing his ambivalent allegiance. William James, Henry’s older brother, turned away from his brother’s European pique to immerse himself in Americana. He produced America’s own psychology (“The Principles of Psychology,” 1890), an American take on religion (“The Varieties of Religious Experience,” 1902) and America’s own philosophy (“Pragmatism,” 1907).

These Americans, hardly corporate types, have been much copied but seldom surpassed.

It wasn’t only the United States, but Europe was in a creative verve before corporate society took hold, a vitality that corporate society would exploit to its advantage in the twentieth century capitalizing on the inventions of the nineteenth century with technological dominance. To wit:

English chemist Humphry Davy invents the first electric light – the first arc lamp (1809) that American Thomas Edison makes practical with the carbon-filament light bulb (1879). Edison also invents the phonograph and motion picture (1877), which Eadweard Muybridge tops with the first motion picture machine (1877). Edison also discovers thermionic emission (1883), the basis of the electronic valve.

W. A. Burt, an American, invents the typewriter (1829), which Christopher Scholes makes practical with his invention (1867). Frenchmen, Barthelemy Thimonnier invents a sewing machine (1830), improved by the invention of American Elias Howe (1845), and made commercial with Isaac Singer’s sewing machine (1851). Cyrus McCormick, an American, invents the first commercially successful reaper (1831).

Englishman Michael Faraday invents an electric dynamo (1831. Henry Talbot invents photography (1834); Samuel Morse invents Morse code (1838). American Charles Goodyear invents rubber vulcanization (1839). Samuel Slocum patents the stapler (1841).

Dr. William Morton, an American, is the first to use anesthesia for tooth extraction (1846). Walter Hunt invents the safety pin (1849); Joel Houghton receives a patent for a dishwasher (1849). John Tyndall demonstrates the principles of fiber optics (1854), which 150 years later will change the world of communication.

Louis Pasteur invents pasteurization (1856). Hamilton Smith patents the rotary washing machine (1858). Jean Lenoir invents an internal combustion engine (1858). Alfred Nobel invents dynamite (1866).

Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone (1876). Nicolaus August Otto invents first practical four-stroke internal combustion engine (1876). Rudolf Diesel invents the diesel-fueled internal combustion engine (1892). James Dewar invents the Dear vacuum flask. W. L. Judson invents the zipper (1893); Lumiere Brothers invent the portable motion-picture camera.

Significant of a majority of these inventions is that they were by non-scientists, non-academics and in relative isolation with little or no access to others working on the same things, thus the replication.

Moreover, it was Thomas Edison, among others, in the late nineteenth century that took up the corporate idea of a place (Menlo Park) with several people working on inventions for which he would take full credit for more than a thousand patents. This was true of Nikola Tesla, the Croatian electrical engineer, who immigrated to America and worked for Edison at Menlo Park (see “Tesla: Man Out of Time” by Margaret Cheney). Tesla was responsible for scores of patents including alternating current (A/C), which Edison attempted to first take credit for, and when he couldn’t, attempted to sabotage.

It is no accident that one of the first things you sign over when you become an employee of Corporate America is anything you might create, invent or improve upon while so employed.

THE LOST GARDEN OF INDIVIDUALITY

We Americans are nostalgic, and when we are lost, as we are now, there is an incessant need to go back to our roots, to the garden of our beliefs, myths and invented history. We no longer embrace reality and struggle. We choose to deny them.

When corpocracy was in its infancy, a phenomenon such as American born British poet, T. S. Eliot, had the audacity to create, “The Waste Land” (1922), which captured the future in crystallized prosody. It is difficult to imagine such originality and daring today.

Instead, corruption is on our plate. It is a recipe for self-destruction. It spoils achievement with its fraudulent premise. We don’t like to see ourselves as we are, but as we would like to be seen. We chase the buck; we no longer chase the dream. For the past quarter century, the best and brightest have opted for financial engineering to electrical, chemical, and mechanical engineering, earning MBA’s to develop financial instruments to make money out of money, but produce nothing real, nothing substantial, nothing that could justify their careers. Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman puts a $400 billion price tag on this annual “waste, fraud and abuse.” The future has caught up with us, and it is not a pretty sight. We have lost our brassy boldness to self-conscious self-pity.

It is no accident that the presidency of Andrew Jackson and the “Age of Jackson” is producing a spate of books, films, articles, doctorate studies, profiles, monographs and interviews of people producing this avalanche of materials. Why, you ask, is Jackson so important now?

Jackson embodies the America left behind. He is not the plastic man in the empty suit that Garry Wills writes about in “John Wayne’s America” (1997) with the subtitle “Politics of Celebrity.” Wayne didn’t opt to fight for his country in WWII, he instead decided to play heroes on the screen while men his age sweated and died for real in that war. He became the personification of corporate man out for himself but with a swagger and a drawl. Garry Wills writes:

“He (John Wayne) embodies the American myth. The archetypal American is a displaced person – arrived from a rejected past, breaking into a glorious future, on the move, fearless himself, feared by others, a killer for cleansing the world of things that ‘need killing,’ loving but not bound down by love, rootless but carrying the center in himself, a gyroscopic direction-setter, a traveling norm.”

Reading this you can see how it reflects the one-dimensional American character.

Now, Jackson was a different sort. He rose out of the wild, fought bravely as a boy of fourteen in the American Revolution, seeing his brother murdered, seething with revenge all his life against the British, and getting his satisfaction at the “Battle of New Orleans.’

Thomas Jefferson found Jackson bizarre, uncouth, unschooled, and a danger to American society. Jackson never attended regular school, was a frontiersman and climbed the latter of success by pure grip, guts, gumption and grizzle. He never read books, and prided himself in reading people and events. He was the real deal, not a one-dimensional man like John Wayne. Jackson was the quintessential man-of-action, and decisive to a fault.

To this day, moving into 2009, the eastern United States remains a different country than Jackson’s hinterland, where he put his indelible mark. The east still looks to Europe for its grandness, society, its manners and culture, which is quite different to countrified Jacksonians. The Washington, DC beltway is a surreal cocoon of politicians and lobbyists living in a satellite world that has little in common with twenty-first Jackson country.

There was corruption in Jackson’s day. Indeed, he was so direct about his favoritism that his administration was tagged the “spoils system.” On his first inauguration as president – he had actually won the office four years before but was denied the presidency – he often went over Congress to rally the people. President Barak Obama should keep this in mind.

Dr. Fisher, is this another one of your polemics? I don’t think so. New York Times columnist and popular author Thomas Friedman shows similar concern as 2008 winds down. He writes:

“Our present crisis is not just a financial meltdown crying out for a cash injection. We are in much deeper trouble. In fact, we as a country have become General Motors as a result of our national drift. That’s why we don’t just need a bailout. We need to reboot. That is why the next few months are among the most important in U.S. history. Because of the financial crisis -- we must make certain that every bailout dollar, which we’re borrowing from our kids’ future, is spent wisely. It has to go into training teachers, educating scientists and engineers, paying for research and building the most productivity-enhancing-infrastructure-without building white elephants. . If we allow this money to be spent on pork, it will be the end of us. . . Obama needs to lead us on a journey to rediscover, rebuild and reinvent our own backyard.”

To do that, we will have to supplant our dependence on a corporate mentality that is the negative of all these positives. We need to return to the restless energy and the common drive of individualism of the past. We need to recast the nation in substantive work

ETHICS & SAVVY CAPITALISM!

ETHICS & SAVVY CAPITALISM!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 21, 2008

“Conduct (ethics) is the great profession. Behavior is the perpetual revealing of us. What a man does, tell us what he is.”

Frederick D. Huntington (1819 – 1904), American clergyman

A WRITER WRITES:

I have broken a relationship with a firm designed to help the disadvantage, as I find them unethical. My role as a venture capitalist was to lead this nonprofit start up company into servicing the community, making it a better place. Clearly, their interests and aim are not that but solely for profit.

Jim, I thought you might be able to commiserate, if not give me added perspective, on my first entry today, entitled, “You & Ethical Companies.” www.savvycapitalist.blogspot.com

Ted

* * * * *

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Ted,

I find your word “commiserate” interesting, as you should know by now I am not too good at consoling. As true as I find your blog consistent with the way you think, I fail to see the ethical implications. Permit me to explain.

You are selling here, but not explaining, justifying your angst, but not elucidating. My take on ethics is this: "It works to the advantage of self and others and does no harm."

I’m speaking now of the short Q&A content of your blog (mentioned above). While I see no problem with it, I don't quite understand your intentions or the impact you expect.

You have accused a business association of which you have been involved as being "unethical," while not explaining what you mean by ethics, as if "being ethical" is self-explanatory, which clearly it is not. Ethics is a meeting of the mind with the mind of the one who would be ethical, nothing more, nothing less.

Is ethics conduct? Is it morality?

Of course, it is both along with set standards, standards that have become dodgy in our materialistic society; otherwise we wouldn't create such characters as Ponzi, Madoff and Abramoff, not to mention (Martha) Stewart and (Governor) Blagojevich, among others. They, I would imagine in their rationalizations, attempted to self-delude themselves into thinking what "is legal" is necessarily also "ethical," when seldom is the case in my experience.

Whether it is "for profit" or "non profit," capitalistic, socialistic or communistic, the society of man has had an inordinate capacity to be unethical.

Pardon me for quoting Epictetus (c 50 - c 150 AD)here, which I do rather often because we are not improving, as a society as we acquire more electronic toys and more recreational distractions from ethical considerations.

Epictetus said nearly 2,000 years ago:

"In all the affairs of life, let it be your great care, not to hurt your mind, or offend your judgment. And this rule, if observed carefully in all your deportment will be a mighty security to your undertakings."

"Do no harm," is the way I put it, either to others or myself. I have walked away from a number of such occasions, nearly all of which I've written about. I'll share one with you now.

* * * * *

When I was 27 years old, a chemical sales engineer with Nalco Chemical Company, father of three small children, and active in my community, being Secretary of the Zoning Board of Appeals of Marion County (Indianapolis, Indiana), I was successful and ambitious.

A man with whom I was working, thirteen years older than I was, and relatively well off, said he wanted to go in business with me in the purchase of virgin land on a main thoroughfare out of Indianapolis on which I planned to build a medical-professional building.

The land cost $30,000 and was 27 acres with a railroad spur. I was not a rich man but a saver. He told me to go ahead and put the $3,000 down necessary to hold the land, and he would write a check for the balance the following Monday. I was the idea guy with my medi-pro complex, complete with architectural blueprints, and he was the venture capitalist.

Over the weekend, he got cold feet. He cried on the phone with all kinds of justification, asked me to be understanding. All I could think of as I listened was, ‘I am out of all of my savings!'

Then I thought I would go downtown to the attorney for this major builder in the area and state my situation. I did so the following Monday nervous beyond measure.

The attorney listened dutifully, then called the builder, explained who I was and my situation, and the builder said to the attorney, "Let me talk to him."

I got on the phone, and he said, "Sorry, young man, you're out of $3,000, and there's nothing I can do about it."

I'm an emotional guy, but I had had to think on my feet several times already at age 27. "Sir," I said, "can I ask you a question?"

"Yesss," he said hesitantly clearly wondering where this was going.

"You do want to sell this land?”

“Yes, of course, I do. That’s why it’s up for sale."

“I've lived in the area for five years now, sir, and that 'for sale' sign has been there for at least three years."

"So?"

"I don't think you want to take my $3,000 without justification. You want to sell the land."

"See here, young man, I've had a legal contract with you and your partner, and you have failed to live up to it."

"I'm not disputing that. You are correct. But I have a proposition to make to you."

"Such as?"

"You keep my $3,000, and I will pay you $3,000 every quarter over the next four quarters for a total of $15,000. If I don't sell your land in that time for the full amount of $30,000, you have $15,000 of my money with no obligation to return it should I fail in my quest to sell the land."

"Those are not very favorable terms to you."

"But they are, sir."

"How so?"

"I'm a salesman and they give me great incentive to sell the land."

"Put the attorney back on the line." I did. They talked. He put the phone down and shook his head.

"How old are you?" I told him. "You're not going to have any trouble in this life."

I smiled. "I am if I don't sell the land."

IT DOESN'T END HERE!

Over the next three months, I did due diligence to sell the land. Then I got a buyer who needed the land "right now" to build a plant for a foreign contract that had to be filled within the next year. My land had a rail spur, accessible to heavy equipment and truck transport, and was ideal.

He didn't negotiate a selling price, but simply said, "My firm will give you $50,000 for the land, draw up the papers with your attorneys and we'll close the deal." (For reference, that would be the equivalent in 2008 dollars of about $500,000)

Then we found there was a glitch, one that I should have noted, but hadn’t. The land was zoned "suburban industrial” (SUI), and not "urban industrial" (UI). The difference on metropolitan zoning restrictions was a matter of a stamped “S."

The builder needed to put a road through the property for ingress and egress of trucks, and the 15-foot required on either size of the road for SUI was too restricting for the plant the company intended to build.

"Get this restriction changed in the next 36 hours and you have a deal." That was impossible because the Zoning Board met only once a month. Usually, it took two or more months for changes to be made, as it had to go through the mayor and city council as well.

There was one possibility: have the “S” removed from documentation. Who would know? Give the recorder a $5,000 "bonus" – he happened to be an acquaintance, someone who liked me. Who would be the wiser?

I never told my wife, but thought about it, made a visit to my church, sat there and played tag with my mind for a long time in that empty church, and then got up from the pew a changed man. I WOULD KNOW! FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE, I WOULD ALWAYS KNOW I WAS A FRAUD.

I called the man and told him "no deal." It couldn't be changed in time, I said, and likely would not have been changed at all. Suburban industrial expansion was going in that direction. He thanked me, and that was it. But it wasn't. It prepared me for South Africa and everything else that has come down the road.

IT DIDN’T END THERE EITHER!

It was the fourth quarter, and I had already given the builder $12,000 of the $30,000 agreed to for the purchase, and was soon to give him the final $3,000 without any prospects of selling the land. Every attempt to sell it had failed.

It was December more than forty years ago, three weeks from when the final payment was due of $18,000, and I got a call. “I understand you have some land for sale. It is right near an auto dealership in which I have an interest. I live in Ocala, Florida. I’ve been up here in Kentucky buying horses, and I heard of about your property. It is just what I need. “What are you asking for it?”

In the intervening year, I had been promoted to area manager of Kentucky and was living in Anchorage, Kentucky, a suburb of Louisville, Kentucky. I’ve always hated talking on the phone, need to see people in person, so as a phone conversationalist, I’m often silent, driving the person on the other end of the line a little frantic. “You there?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“What are you asking?”

Again silence, as I had no idea what I should ask, certainly not $50,000 because it couldn’t be used for urban industrial purposes. “Well, here’s the deal,” he said, breaking the silence, “I’m willing to pay you $35,000 for it, and would like it on the books before the end of the year.”

I was euphoric. ‘He would like it on the books! I had to have it on the books!’ “Where are you now?” I asked. He was in Lexington, Kentucky. “Well, I’m right down the road as you come into Louisville.” I explained where I lived.

My home some place. Although out in the country, it was near the city, preserved to be almost antebellum in its southern ambience. I mention this because he seemed reassured when he came to the house. We completed our business within the week before Christmas.

IT STILL DIDN’T END THERE!

As mentioned earlier, I am rather high strung, and it sometimes gets in the way of my thinking. I paid off the builder, and had a nice nest egg of savings for my year of anguish. But then in February of the following year, I received a call from the builder.

“My accountant tells me you overpaid us by $3,000. A check is in the mail. Sorry about that.” He didn’t say anything else, not nice to be doing business with you or anything, just that, “A check is in the mail.”

With this surprised check of overpayment, which I think was a matter of exuberance from selling the land, I completely finished the large basement of this three story house with an elaborate study bookcases all around, fire place, and a completely finished playroom separate from the study for the children. My family had increased in the year from three to four little ones.

* * * * *

Therefore, Ted, when I think of these people that have not had a "come to Jesus meeting" like I did, I have only empathy and understanding for them. I know how easy it is to fall off the log, to consider putting one over on others, which means as Epictetus said 2,000 years ago, is to attempt to put one over on ourselves. It never works. I know. I have met that enemy and it was I.

The moment we think we are ethical and do not have the same bloodline as the unethical is the moment we move away from the human race.

My da, who stopped being educated after seven grades of Irish Parochial Catholic education, once said to me, "Don't me impressed with the wealthy. Chances are they have met the devil at one time or another and became fast friends. It is very hard but not impossible, Jimmy, to make a fortune without such contact, but so rare I can't think of anyone who has managed that in my lifetime." Nor have I in mine. But I have known people with similar experiences to mine.

Be always well,

Jim

THE RIVER OF TIME (a poem written in 1969)

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ONE AND ALL, AND TO ALL HAPPY NEW YEAR!


When you reach my stage in life, you have no idea how many more years God has allotted to you, so each day is precious. Over the years, I have received countless comments about my missives, many of them much more profound than mine. I thank you all for them. Some have been critical, even angry, many more not, but all have been appreciated.

My wonder, always, is why when someone finds reason to criticize, and then later apologize, as there is no need. I am always delighted to receive comments, and am moved by the eloquence and passion of them.

By the accident of our birth, we are on this same "River of Life" at the same time, all moving in the same inevitable direction, all equally important in the eyes of God, and no one more or less significant than the other.

* * * * *

Forty years ago (1969), back from South Africa, I wrote a novel (never published) called "The Triple Fool" (after John Donne's poem of the same name). In that novel, I wrote a poem inspired by an Ovid (43 BC - 17 AD) quote from “Metamorphoses” (6 AD). In Latin, the quote reads: "Tempus edax rerum," or "Time, the devourer of all things."

To put my poem in context, I was returning from that African country, young and successful, but disillusioned with what I had experienced with its apartheid policy of separated development of the races. Coming from Iowa, a state with very few African Americans, I had never experienced real dominance of whites over blacks. In fact, there were so few blacks in my hometown of Clinton, Iowa that I barely knew the race existed. In South Africa, the Bantu or blacks were some 14 million citizens of negligible rights dominated and subjugated by 4 million whites of Dutch and British origin. Always somewhat of a serious person, it is evident in this poem that I come by it naturally.

Incidentally, I was very much into the stream of conscience writing of James Joyce at the time, as was the novel. Moreover, the main character, Harry, often had a conversation with his books in Latin in his study. My wonder, do anyone else’s books speak to them?
JRF

* * * * *

TIME IS A RIVER

James R. Fisher, Jr.
© January 1969

Ever moving ever changing ever enchanting ever vexing

Forging through space
Climbing to mountains and sky
Cascading unto parch earth and green valleys
Growing muddy and putrefying

Ever decaying ever stinking ever polluting ever stagnating

Becoming clear lucid pure sparkling happy invigorating refreshing

Gravitating from frigidity coldness coolness to comfort warmth hotness incontinent heat

Exploding particulate matter into flotsam and jetsam

Exposing arrogance aloofness stupidity affection flippancy irrationality

Bringing peace satisfaction power convenience temporality

Surrendering solace fulfillment tranquility transcendence essence

Experimenting with fear hate envy lust greed deceit pleasure courage happiness music

Searching for valor love hope beauty charity faith kindness caring

Creating chaos by raging abandoning destroying disfiguring lying distorting scarring killing

Inundating indiscriminately presumptively

Ever singing ever praising ever soothing ever titillating ever mesmerizing ever enticing ever fantasizing ever duping ever using ever toying

Offering to play pray sport escape entertain travel dream nourish know see think feel

Making love laughter music war hate peace tomorrow

Causing growth atrophy health debility inspiration apathy discovery disillusionment

Establishing order by producing reproducing transforming transplanting transmutating transmigrating transmitting transmogrifying

Ever balancing every imbalancing ever taking ever giving

Emulsifying demulsifying foaming defoaming coagulating dispersing scaling softening corroding electroplating sequestering precipitating hurting helping killing saving losing winning hating loving bombing building destroying remaking upsetting stabilizing confusing elucidating excoriating nurturing acidizing neutralizing beginning ending coloring discoloring oxidizing reducing liquefying solidifying catabolizing fermenting

Influent to
Effluent from

Nunc fluens of time
Tota simul of eternity

Being born existing living dying
Being buried

Eon after eon after eon

Without a rhyme to or reason for
Without a known fons et origo or a fathomable terminus

With only a promised PROMISE promised

Transporting this fragile tissue hope mankind by a swift noiseless pulling mysterious gentle ceaseless subtle mighty treacherous conflicting fascinating sweeping force

With an IRRESISTBE CURRENT

Carrying all to a SEA OF LIGHT or a SEA OF DOUBT.

JRF

THE FALLACY OF REASON!

THE FALLACY OF REASON

© December 19, 2008

“We think so because other people all think so, or because, after all, we do think so; or because we were told so and think we must think so; or because we once thought so, and think we still think so; or because, having thought so, we think we will think so. “

Henry Sidgwick (1838 – 1900), English philosopher


* * * * * *


A WRITER WRITES:

Jim,

I am copying a piece I think might interest you. I think this guy does a fairly eloquent if sometimes passionate job of expressing his side of the issue, and I agree with several of his points.

My wife and I have had at least a dozen Fords over the last few decades, and they’ve all been great. They have been really good values to us.

Up until the last gas crunch, the market wanted SUVs and that’s what they built. Even after the gas crunch, I remain with the bigger vehicle because it’s a safety issue for me (safety for my wife and daughter). Engineering can optimize safety of small cars to a point, but make still matters. Even at $10 per gallon, I’ll keep them and cut somewhere else.

Alan Mulally came up through Boeing, and was actually my customer at one point. I can vouch for his savvy as a businessman, and the choice between him and a politician running any company is for me, a no-brainer. In fact, given the Senatorial appointment processes underway in New York and Illinois, I told my wife this morning, “we might as well just send SpongeBob (a local radio disc jockey of the most obnoxious kind: JRF) to Washington, DC and be done with it.

Be good.

E

E’s REFERENCE: Letter-to-the-editor from a Ford Dealer (edited with comments by me: JRF)

To the Editor:

As I watch the coverage of the fate of the US auto industry, one alarming frustrating fact hits me right between the eyes. The fate of our nation’s economic survival is in the hands of some Congressmen who are completely out of touch and act without knowledge of an industry that affects almost every person in our nation (so was the view of the horse and buggy industry when we went from it to automobiles one hundred years ago: JRF).

Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama has doomed the industry, calling it a dinosaur. No, Mr. Shelby, you are the dinosaur with ideas stuck in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s. You and the uninformed journalists and senators hold unto myths that are not relevant in today’s world.

When you say that the BIG THREE build vehicles nobody wants to buy, you must have overlooked GM outsold Toyota by about 1.2 million vehicles in the US and Ford outsold Honda by 850,000 and Nissan by 1.2 million in the US. GM was the world’s Number One automaker beating Toyota by 3,000 units.

When you claim inferior quality comes from the BIG THREE, did you realize Chevy makes the Malibu and Ford makes the Fusion, both rated over Toyota’s Camry? Consumer Report rated Ford on par with good Japanese automakers.

Did you realize BIG THREE’s gas-guzzlers include 33 mpg Malibu that beats the Accord? For ’09 Ford introduces the Hybrid Fusion whose 39 mpg is the best midsize, beating the Camry Hybrid?

When you ask how many times are we going to bail them out, you must be referring to 1980 (actually, it was 1979: JRF). The only BIG THREE bailout was Chrysler, who paid back $1 billion, plus interest (which is true: JRF).

Regarding pickups, perhaps it bothers you that 31 straight yeas Ford’s F-Series has been the best selling vehicle. Ford and GM have dominated this market, and when you see the new ’09 F-150 you’ll agree this won’t change.

Did you realize both GM and Ford offer more hybrid models than Nissan or Honda? Between 2005 and 2007, Ford has invested more than $22 billion in R&D such as Eco Boost, flex fuel, clean diesel, hybrids, plug in hybrids and hydrogen cars.

Perhaps Senator Shelby isn’t really that blind. Maybe he realizes the quality shift to American. Maybe it’s the fact that his state of Alabama has given so much to land factories (for foreign automakers) that he is more concerned about their continued growth than he is about the people of our country.

Senator Shelby’s disdain for “government subsidies” is very hypocritical. In the early ‘90s, he was the driving force behind a $253 million incentive package to Mercedes. While the bridge loan the BIG THREE is requesting will be paid back, Alabama’s $180,000 plus per job was pure incentive.

Senator Shelby, not only are you out of touch, you are a self-serving hypocrite, who is prepared to ruin our nation because of lack of knowledge and lack of due diligence in making your opinions and decisions (such hyperbole dilutes his argument: JRF).

We live in a world of free trade; world economy and we have not been able to produce products as cost effectively. While the governments of other auto producing nations subsidize their automakers, our government may be ready to force its demise.

While our automakers have paid union wages, benefits and legacy debt (average wage for BIG THREE autoworker is $55 per hour including benefits: JRF), our Asian competitors employ cheap labor (these autoworkers earn $45 including benefits in the US, hardly "cheap": JRF). We are at an extreme disadvantage in production costs (true, each car rolling off the assembly line costs on average $1,500 more than the same vehicle on an Asian assembly line in the US because of autoworker legacy costs and worker benefits: JRF).

Some point the blame to corporate management. I would like to speak of Ford Motor Company. The company has streamlined by reducing our workforce by 51,000 since 2005. Closing 17 plants and cutting expenses. Product and future product are excellent and the company is focused on one Ford. Quality and corporate management have improved light years since the nightmare of Jacques Nasser. Thank you Alan Mulally and the best auto company management team in business.

As a Ford dealer, I feel our portion of the $25 billion will never be touched and is not necessary (Ford is not asking for a bailout but a bridge loan of $9 billion that it plans not to touch unless necessary: JRF). Ford currently has $29 billion in liquidity.

The effect of a bankruptcy by GM would hurt the suppliers we all do business with. A Chapter 11 bankruptcy by any manufacturer would cost retirees their health care and retirements (not true; future retirees, yes, but not current status retirees: JRF).

Chances are GM will recover from Chapter 11 with a better business plan with much less expense (that is the plan, past history is problematical suggesting otherwise: JRF). So, who foots the bill if GM or all three go Chapter 11? All that extra health care, unemployment, loss of tax base and some forgiven debt goes back to the taxpayer, us (now who is using scare tactics; also not completely true; obviously there would be a correction of some economic discomfort, but those automotive business that would rise like a Sphinx from the ashes of the BIG THREE would be leaner, meaner, and more competitive: JRF).

Before you, Mr. And Mrs. Journalist continue to misinform the American public (investigative journalist, a dying breed as newspapers and trade journals are also dying, have had an exemplary history of informing, not misinforming: JRF) and turn them against one of the great industries that helped build this nation (but which has been coasting for forty years: JRF), I must ask you one question: before you (Congressmen and Congress women) vote to end health care and retirement benefits for one million retirees (not true, there is no intention in any bill proposed to do this: JRF), eliminate 2.5 million of our nation’s jobs (if Congress and the president wanted to preserve these jobs against the reality of the times, it couldn’t: JRF), lose the technology that will lead us in the future (it is not technology that has failed but those who control that technology who have; how will that change: JRF), I ask this question, have you driven a Ford lately?

Ford Dealer



DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

E,

President-elect Barak Obama might wish he were a chicken farmer after a month in the White House. His campaign slogan was correct, this is a transformational age of change. The only problem is what we know and expect we want to remain the same; what effects everyone else we want to see changed.

I sense the passion of this writer to whom you refer, but not the logic of his argument. He is angry, emotional, and collects his facts to cajole and scare the reader who likely does not have the same access to his data, although it is readily available.

We are creatures of impulse, emotions and of actions based on these emotions rather than reason. Reason is a late development. Most of us in fact get along admirably well in our daily life without it.

Now, when it comes to the automobile, which is a little like the Catholic Church in Galileo’s time seeing the earth as the center of the universe, the BIG THREE see themselves as the center of American industry and business, when this is a fallacy of reason. Detroit is a dying manufacturing state, and the car industry there is dying with it.

William Saroyan once wrote a short story (“My Name is Ahab”) about a boy who believed because he was American he could drive an automobile. It was natural to a five-year-old as it was in his genes. Most American men have such a love affair with these machines that it is impossible for flesh and blood women to compete. Most women give up and play second fiddle to steel, glass and plastic. Alas, the automobile is a phallic symbol and the bigger it is the more virile the driver of it feels himself to be. It is, of course, a myth like size in all myths has proven, yet myths persist another fallacy of reason.

The automotive industry is, in fact, a dinosaur. By that I mean its greatest days are behind not ahead of it. Mass transit, or some form of conveyance is going to replace these billions of little steel buckets puffing away across the globe.

I drive a 2000 Taurus. BB drives a 2004 Toyota Camry. She will be getting a new one in 2009. We have not had one problem with any of our Toyotas since returning to the States from Brussels in 1989. We take all our trips in BB’s Camry, the last trip to Minnesota in September 2008, driving over 3,600 miles and getting, on average, 35 mpg, but sometimes paying $4 per gallon and never less than $3.74.

Neither of us is what you could call “in love with cars,” as we have always purchased them in terms of economics and durability. We are, however, both pack rats and record keepers of virtually everything we do. Toyota, over the years or since the late 1980s, has lived up to its reputation with never a problem during that period.

I was out and about today listening to NPR radio. A GM tool and die maker was being interviewed. He was a credit to himself, a credit to his company, a credit to his coworkers, whom he described as honorable and conscientious workers, and a credit to his industry. When the interviewer thanked him for the interview, he answered, "I have been honored."

Now, that is an impossible situation to assault and yet I will. You see this fine man is not the problem. It is the system. He is in a dying system, and even if it corrects itself, its glory days are behind it.

Yes, Ford makes quality cars. In 1990, I made a trip to the International Headquarters of Ford in Dearborn, Michigan for Honeywell. I spent the day interviewing executives, union officials, workers, security personnel, and my counterpart, a man who is something of a legend in the discipline of organization development (OD).

My report of that trip was long and comprehensive. I sent Ford's OD consultant a copy to which he was stunned, writing. "You never took notes. Did you have a recorder?"

I replied with a short note: "No, I didn't take notes, but yes, I had a recorder. It was my brain. It needed no accessory equipment." I never heard from him again.

This is not the first time, incidentally, that a person after the fact wondered if I was doing something surreptitiously. I have trained myself since a salesman early in my career to take extensive notes after a call. At that point, I think I have close to verbatim total recall, yes, as if I had a recorder. I have my mother’s memory.

This OD psychologist went across the globe where Ford made and sold cars, gave infomercials, collected psychometrics, and promoted "The Ford's Resurrection." Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and other publications carried the story of Ford's revival after a recession in the mid-1980s. I mentioned in my 1990 report that rising from the dead was apparently a common occurrence at Ford.

All the signs were up for Ford, then, but one, which has haunted the company since, trust.

It is that terrible word, TRUST. Once trust is broken, in a marriage, in a friendship, by a car manufacturer, or by an investment broker, it takes a long time to get that trust back, and it is never the same trust again. The hubris of the BIG THREE killed that trust a long time ago, and they continue to pay for it to this day.

No question, the BIG THREE make quality automobiles, but with the same rationale that you use, which I can understand: SAFETY. My own daughter drives one of those SUV's that costs as much as some homes, and gets about 8 mpg, and she likes the protection of the tank, too, just like you do.

I respect your view, and hers as well, but SUVs, too, are dinosaurs.

On the BBC news tonight, a reporter interviewed a Chrysler worker, who was not so nice as the young man mentioned earlier that NPR interviewed. This Chrysler worker is to be laid off a month or through January 2009 as Chrysler is shutting down production.

This worker was complaining about having a family, putting food on the table, and being able to survive without a full paycheck. Asked how much he will receive, he said, "Only 80 percent of my regular paycheck."

At $55/hr (including benefits) reduced by 20 percent he will only be receiving $44/hr or $528 a day, or $2,640 per week, or $10,560 (including benefits) to make ends meet during his month of forced leisure. Remember, some hourly workers make as much as $74/hr (including benefits).

I'm sorry. This guy doesn't have a clue as to what is going on around him in this recession. If that BBC audience actually understood the extent of this worker's sacrifice, the shock might have produced more anger than sympathy.

Besides, the argument about how many more units the BIG THREE have sold compared to these foreign car manufacturers, well, the BIG THREE have been in business in this country for a hundred years. Asian car producers have been in business here since the 1970s. Come on now!

No, I think this man who esteems the Ford CEO Mulally so flatteringly is thinking mush, even more so when he attempts to defend the industry.

Automakers went to sleep at the switch and now suffers unintended consequences, consequences that will not go away. There is good reason to have serious doubt that a bailout would not be mismanaged as the automotive industry has not led but followed trends for forty years. It has ignored its own technology when it could produce a vehicle getting 80 mpg. I have no more faith in CEO Mulally, fine a man as he might be, than any of the others, as the aerospace industry in which he worked for Boeing has fallen prey to similar pitfalls.

The marketing scheme of car manufacturers has been like two adolescents out gaming each other. One wants to please and profit from the pleasing the other loves the suspense created by changing its pleasure.

NPR radio told of a car dealership that loaded its lot with hybrids when gas was $4/gal. Now that gasoline is closer to $1.60/gal, it has to eat the steel, as no one wants to buy hybrids. Guess what? The dealer has paid for all of these hybrids. Detroit is not out a dime.

Irrational truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors. This comes to mind as I ponder this "letter-to-the-editor." I confess to having little sympathy and much anger for the lack of leadership in this industry. In fact, I’ve written several books on what I am saying here, commencing with WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS in 1990. I feel a bit like Nostradamus, and it is not a comfortable feeling at all.

And yes, there will be a correction, a necessary correction, and many of those auto dealers will become showrooms for other businesses, many of those still existing manufacturing plants will close and become eyesores to match those already in the graveyard of changing times.

We went through similar trauma when the automobile replaced the horse and buggy. For thousands of years horses had been the way to go; automobiles have been so but for a hundred years. Whether buggies or royal coaches, whether pulling trolleys in the cities, or plows on the farms, people identified with horses with a record of success and, yes, emotionally, too.

Think of all the people who supplied horses with harnesses, saddles, horseshoes, buggies, and oats as well. All the industries allied to horses dried up with the automobile. There was no compassionate government then to step in and assuage their economic demise. Who would have thought a hundred years later the automobile industry would experience a similar crisis.

Society is moving on, and away from Detroit, away from little steel buggies. Sorry, but I don't see it any other way.

Be always well,

Jim

BIG THREE AUTOMAKERS IN THE AGE OF THE SURREAL!

BIG THREE AUTOMAKERS IN THE AGE OF THE SURREAL!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 18, 2008

“While Detroit’s Big Three are laying off thousands of workers, Toyota is hiring thousands of workers right here in America, where a substantial share of all our Toyotas are manufactured. Will (a bailout) save Detroit or Michigan? No. Detroit and Michigan have followed classic liberal politics of treating businesses as prey, rather than as assets. They have helped kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. So have the unions. So have managements that have gone along to get along. A bailout of Detroit’s BIG THREE would be only the latest in postponements of reality.”

Thomas Sowell, Creators Syndicate columnist, The Tampa Tribune, December 18, 2008

* * * * * *

Charles Wilson, CEO of General Motors in the 1950s was prophetic when he said, “As GM goes so goes America.” He meant it in a positive light. After fifty years of dodging reality and falling comfortably into a surreal existence, the American culture has followed the lead of Detroit and GM, and has gotten fat, sassy and indolent.

In an effort to control everything, it has come to control nothing. It is no accident that Robert McNamara, one of the boy geniuses of Detroit during the 1950 – 1960s, was the architect of the Vietnam War, and we know where that got us.

We also know that Walter Reuther made the United Auto Workers (UAW) a major force not only in the auto industry but also in the Democratic Party in the mid 20th century. He treated the auto industry as prey and fought for major concessions to the BIG THREE automakers, while conceding total control of work to these automobile manufacturers.

The UAW model became that of all unions from truck drivers to teachers, from sod carriers to steel workers. The cry was for concessions and entitlements seldom associated with competencies or results.

The pioneers gave birth to countless industries from the late 19th to the early 20th century. This included auto making, radio and telephone communications, public education, railroad building, steel production, coal mining, and vehicular commerce. These forgers into the new century were more often than not autodidactic, self-taught entrepreneurs. They struggled creatively with a changing world brought about by moving from an agrarian to a modern industrial society. By the 1950s, that paradigm was already fading. America commenced the process of coasting on the momentum of the past.

You don't agree? The original science and technological breakthroughs of today's "Electronic Age" were all a product of this earlier period. The late 19th and early 20th century was the most creative period in man's history.

Even the wake up call of the successful launching of the satellite, Sputnik, by the Soviet Union in 1957, or the surge from the East of Total Quality Management of Japan in the 1960s, which cut deeply into manufacturing markets the US thought it owned, failed to get our attention.

That is, until Tom Brokaw of NBCTV chaired an hour-long program in 1980, “Japan Can, Why Can’t We?” American industrial technologists who American industry had rejected were doing miracles in Japan. Suddenly, these obscure men of science and industry -- W. Edwards Deming, J. M. Juran, and Peter Drucker –- were famous and in demand.

Each wake up call was like gnats biting at our ankles, no real threat, just an irritation. We prided ourselves in being an optimistic “can do” society, buying our slogans and catch phrases as reality. It was inconceivable for us to consider that we were a totally reactive society too self-indulgent to see the signs or to anticipate the consequences of inaction in an ever-changing world. We had lost our moral compass and our way.

Reality was no longer inescapable, as it was no longer relevant. We became a nation of apologists from the demands of work to the relevance of education, from the rigors of life to the inevitability of death, from the polarizing influences of the religious right to the atheistic left, from the high achieving elitists to the dumbing down to the lowest common denominator.

It became an anathema to stand out, or to challenge the system. Comfort was giving way to complacency, and independence to courterdependence on the workplace or government for our total well being.

We forgot that to be an individual meant to struggle, to endure pain, to embrace failure so that we might succeed, to take risks and to accept their consequences. It became much more important to fit in than to stand out. We have suffered mightily for this indulgence.

Such apologist as psychologist Nathaniel Branden claimed our malaise was a problem of self-esteem; others pointed out to the disowned self; still others continued the word game with such language as anomie, self-estrangement, alienation, and disassociation. American society became less about doing and more about explaining why we weren’t doing.

Progressive education became a playground of compassionate promotion without learning, as we didn’t want to injure the delicate psyches of our children. Teachers became essentially room monitors while the little lads and lasses were called “Robins” and “Blue Jays” to differentiate the learners from the non-learners.

We couldn’t suggest some kids were very bright and others were not. That was forbidden. If teachers criticized a child, disciplined a child, held a child back for being a non-learner, all hell would break forth for that teacher. So, teachers quit teaching and settled in to being room monitors.

The cry became everyone should be entitled to a college education whether everyone wanted one or not. Meanwhile, we lacked plumbers, pipe fitters, lathe operators, electricians, toolmakers, carpenters and builders, gardeners and landscapers, farmers and farm workers.

Somewhere along the way reality became a bypass as we are not all college material, and if we are not all college material, something must be wrong with us, when nothing is wrong with us at all. We simply have differing talents, interests and capabilities. We don’t have to create an army of one or the other, but a complement of both. That is what enriches society as it is ever changing.

When I was in college, my freshman class of more than 3,000 was reduced to 2,700 by the end of the first semester, and by graduation less than 1,000 of my original classmates were there to graduate. Being a student of a land grant university, every high school graduate was entitled to admission to a state university.

Many found that they didn’t like the atmosphere of college, the self-reliance imposed, the demands of the course work, or, indeed, the sacrifices of typical youthful insouciance. Education was a job in which you didn't get paid. That rankled those who felt life owed them a living.

If you flunked a course, then, you couldn’t take it over to erase the grade. You couldn’t substitute a core requirement for some non-college course, as is the case today, in order to preserve your chances of staying in school and ultimately graduating.

When you graduated then, the degree meant that you could teach, work as an engineer, chemist, accountant, or administrator because you had acquired the basic skills of those respective disciplines. Your employer didn’t have to conduct remedial programs in reading, writing and arithmetic, much less in the disciplines of your degree. For example, as a management & organization development psychologist, I have had engineering superviors tell me engineering graduates couldn't do engineering. Why? Because they were poor readers and writers.

Today, if you can’t read, no problem. If you can’t do simple calculations, no problem! If you can’t write, no problem!

In the surreal world of college education, these competencies are too often irrelevant. You simply have to behave, not provoke your professors, and take substitute courses that are less challenging in these disciplines, all of which are available in droves.

Then too, you can major in feminine studies, or ethnic studies, or some other politically correct major to acquire a meaningless degree. The quest is to become a college graduate, not be educated. Chances are once you have graduated you’ll never read a book or challenge your mind again. If this seems absurd, more than 50 percent of high school graduates are in some form of college, and less than 10 percent claim to book readers.

At the beginning of the 20th century, only about 10 percent of Americans graduated from high school. The curriculum was called “classical,” because it included four years of math, four years of English, four years of language (usually two years of German and two years of French), chemistry, biology, geology, four years of history, four years of literature (separate from English, covering European Literature), and practical skills training such as mechanics, etiquette and social decorum. It was a liberal arts education easily the equivalent of a college degree if not more so today.

The United States of America built its society on this core group of high school educated, and those that went on to college to embrace an even more challenging curriculum. Less than 5 percent of Americans were college degreed at the time of the Great Depression. My uncle Leonard was one of them.

I have written about him in the past. He had to drop out of high school in his freshman year to help support the family when his mother died. He was fourteen. It was 1914. Once WWI was over, he returned to school, now in Iowa City, Iowa where the University of Iowa was located. He completed four years of classical high education, and four years of college simultaneously in order to be eligible for graduate school.

One day his second year German professor at Iowa told him he was the poorest student he had ever had, not knowing he was taking first year German at the same time. My uncle went on to acquire Ph.D.’s in economics and psychology in 1929, just as the Great Crash on Wall Street occurred. He became the model of my life, and whenever I have thought I had it tough, I’ve always thought of him and his struggle.

My uncle was typical of his generation who were builders of the "American Century." Most of them came of age in the first quarter of the 20th century, with the second quarter of that century producing the "lost generation," the third quarter producing the "beat generation," and the last quarter of the 20th century producing the hippies, "x" and "y" generations, allowing American society to more or less coast to its present predicament in the 21st century.

I will close as I began with a quote from Thomas Sowell’s article:

“Can’t do math or science after they (today’s students) are in college? Denounce those courses for their rigidity and insensitivity, and create softer courses that the student can pass to get their degrees. Once they are out in the real world, people with diplomas and degrees – but with no real education – can hit a wall. But by then the day of reckoning has been postponed for 15 or more years. Of course, the reckoning can last the rest of their lives.”

WHAT ARE YOU LIKE ON THE INSIDE?

WHAT ARE YOU LIKE ON THE INSIDE?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 17, 2008

“Either we have an immortal soul, or we have not. If we have not, we are beasts; the first and wisest of beasts it may be; but still beasts. We only differ in degree and not in kind; just as the elephant differs from the slug. But by the concession of the materialists, we are not of the same kind as beasts; and this also we say from our own consciousness. Therefore, methinks, it must be the possession of a soul within us that makes the difference.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 – 1834), English poet and critic



A WRITER WRITES:

Hello Jim,

The Wizard of Oz parodied our cultural need for external verification and validation. As oft watched or read as that story has been, we still don't get the end.

My education was interrupted by lack of funds (and probably interest) and resumed after I had been working for seven or eight years and began to rise in management ranks. (How embarrassing, I hope there are no pictures of me on the company ladder.)

To my amazement, I felt learning was so much easier. It turned out, it wasn't learning but earning grades that was much easier. I mentioned this to one of the professors with whom I had developed a good rapport. Sort of complaining about spending so much money to get a degree while rehashing things I had already learned in the field. True to academia, he pointed out that the degree would legitimize my experience. Ten years later and deja vu in an MBA program.

A long path to make the same point you did. And to reinforce the Wizard of Oz. Even when the knowledge and talent are in you, there to be experienced by anyone willing to take the time to see it, people distrust their own perception and request the legitimizing document.

Now, PhDs are different in terms of depth. I have worked with PhDs and greatly appreciated that type of knowledge. It is very important to discovery and innovation in a particular field.

My preference for true creativity is the person with broad knowledge to medium depths that can bring together varied concepts to create new thought and challenge paradigms. Thanks for being that guy.

Michael


DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Your journey and your geography give me an indication of what you are like in the inside. It is common knowledge that I refer to my wife, Betty, as “Beautiful Betty.” It is because her insides match the beauty of her outsides. When you arrive at that junction, you can never be anyone else’s person, ever, but your own.

Be always well,

Jim

COUTH, CULTURE AND CORRUPTION!

COUTH, CULTURE AND CORRUPTION

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 17, 2008

“Corrupt influence is itself the perennial spring of all prodigality, and of all disorder; it loads us more than millions of debt, takes away vigor from our arms, wisdom from our councils, and every shadow of authority and credit from the most venerable parts of our constitutions.”

Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797), English statesmen



MY GERMAN FRIEND WRITES:

Referring to Henry Ward Beecher:

Why don't we have people wise like him anymore in politics and economy?
Why are we corrupted by greed for money?

Manfred

Note: Manfred was referencing to this quote from my introduction to, "I'm a Fisherologist":

“Ideas are cosmopolitan. They have the liberty of the world. You have no right to take the sword and cross the bounds of other nations, and enforce on them laws or institutions they are unwilling to receive. But there is no limit to the sphere of ideas. Your thoughts and feeling, the whole world lies open to them, and you have the right to send them into my latitude, and to give them sweep around the earth, to the mind of every human being.”

Henry Ward Beecher (1813 – 1887), American clergyman

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Manfred,

Incidentally, Henry Ward Beecher was the younger brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote UNCLE TOM'S CABIN (1852). The other title to this book was LIFE AMONG THE LOWLY.

When President Abraham Lincoln greeted the author at the White House after the start of the Civil War, the six-four Lincoln said to the barely five-foot author, "So you're the little lady responsible for this war."

She was, indeed, by writing this polemical novel of slavery that alerted the nation, mainly the North, to the dire circumstances under which blacks suffered in the South.

I have become increasingly aware of this "nature versus nurture" debate, as I've gotten older. Harriet Beecher Stowe's father was the Reverend Lyman Beecher, a Calvinistic Divine. I have concluded that genetics are crucial but of little consequence if not mobilized by passion and action.

Mrs. Stowe came from a fundamentally righteous home so morality and civic conscience were in her sociobiology (genes). It should therefore come as no surprise that her brother, Henry Ward Beecher, would become a clergyman.

Remarkably, and I know you didn't ask for all this information, a slave escaped to Canada, and wrote a book a few years before the publication of UNCLE TOM'S CABIN, which contained many of the same themes. I find it highly unlikely that Mrs. Stowe was not aware of this work. I think it more likely she knew of this book and read it.

If you have not had an opportunity to read UNCLE TOM'S CABIN, I should forewarn you that it is a sentimental novel of gothic proportions with loads of quotations from the Scripture.

Regarding your point about money and corruption, as I have said elsewhere, I don't think money, per se, is the corrupter -- Freud called money "filthy lucre" -- but the implications of power, status, prestige, respect, security, and social prominence with which money is identified. Herein, lies the conundrum.

Several years ago in a television episode of Rod Serling's "Twilight Zone," a couple happened on a great deal of money, and thought they had achieved all the things mentioned above. Money was the answer to their prayers and they expected to be showered with happiness. Quite the opposite was to be their experience.

The only problem is that they lacked the required social amenity of couth and culture, and were dismally disappointed.

You can't buy couth or culture. You have to either be born into it, or earn it by a passion for it. The nouveau riche know this only too well, as do lottery winners.

Sudden wealth can destroy happiness without the concomitant preparation. It has often caused great trauma in families in the loss of identity and sense of place, as many lucky lottery winners can attest. These winners have encountered jealousy and envy among their own kind, and rejection by those with whom they would seek new identity: a lose-lose proposition. Sad.

More difficult to explain is that of Bernard Madoff, and his Ponzi scheme, bilking the so-called sophisticated community of bankers and investors of $50 billion.

One commentator claims "connections" and "reputation" greased the skids for him, as Madoff had been no less than chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange.

Think of how many times we have ourselves been duped in small ways by not making the person with the information pass through our screen of skepticism. A Nobel Laureate in Physics, for example, may know squad little about life, but he says this or that and we think, "He has a point," when he has no point at all. This goes triple for celebrities, especially the screen film star type because they play a thinker in a film they are one.

I know of someone bilked out of $27,000 in cash by a guy who had a yacht and was supposed "to be rich," and if he was rich, "well, obviously, he could make others rich, too, right?" Wrong, dead wrong to the tune of $27,000.

Madoff was in the social register (Blue Book) and launched his schemes with relative impunity. In fact, the Security & Exchange Commission investigated him in 2004, and came up empty. You can imagine how thorough was the investigation of someone so prominent.

Then I thought of Sir Edmund Hillary when asked why he climbed Mount Everest. He answered, "Because it's there." Maybe, just maybe Madoff did it because he could, not for the money, not for the prestige -- he's infamous now -- but for the excitement, for the feeling of being alive!

Geed is complicated and corruption even more so. People with everything often appear to feel as if having nothing at all. They have lost the pleasure of a morning sunrise or an evening sunset, the moist spank of an ocean breeze against the face like an after shave lotion, the delight of encountering the unsure footsteps of a child with a smile as broad as Sunday, waddling uncertainly across the mall floor towards you, a stranger, and greeting you as if family.

When you lose that, when all life is about more, you are dead inside, and should be pitied not damned.

Merry Christmas!

Always be well,

Jim

I'M A FISHEROLOGIST!

I’M A FISHEROLOGIST!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 16, 2008

“Ideas are cosmopolitan. They have the liberty of the world. You have no right to take the sword and cross the bounds of other nations, and enforce on them laws or institutions they are unwilling to receive. But there is no limit to the sphere of ideas. Your thoughts and feeling, the whole world lies open to them, and you have the right to send them into my latitutde, and to give them sweep around the earth, to the mind of every human being.”

Henry Ward Beecher (1813 – 1887), American clergyman



A READER WRITES:

A reader of my blog (www.fisherofideas.com) writes, "I am a psychologist, and you don't write like a psychologist. My brother-in-law is a psychiatrist, and he says you don't write like a psychiatrist. My next-door-neighbor is a professor of sociology at the university here, and he says you don't write like a sociologist. One of my favorite professors was an anthropologist, and he says you don't write like an anthropologist. My minister who majored in theology and philosophy at university says you don't write like a theologian or philosopher, and adds that your 'fragments of a philosophy' are just that, fragments. So, how do you explain yourself?"



DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Easy, I answered, I'm a Fisherologist.

The good doctor could have mentioned that I write on statistics and I'm not a statistician. I have on occasion written on the loopholes in mathematics, which are not unlike the loopholes in literature. I am not a mathematician nor am I a professor of literature. In fact, I am not an intellectual or member of the intelligentsia.

But I am a doctor of philosophy, a Ph.D., which the training is meant to imply I have a love of learning, not earning, learning! And yes, learning for learning's sake.

So, I write from the perspective of my training, experience, reading, reflection, wandering and pondering the lessons life has taught me and continues to teach me.

I confess I do write on all the subjects the good doctor mentioned but from a Fisherologist perspective. Additionally, I write on ecology, history, science, urbanology, demographics, engineering, chemistry, religion, mental health, and medicine, to name a few.

Am I qualified to do this? Of course I am. This is the age of the amateur as it was 500 years ago, when priests put aside their priestly duties, and lawyers their adjudication aside to develop what we now call "science."

I am still a living, breathing, thinking man and have a right to my views on this as of everything.

My intentions, often stated (repeatedly in A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD), are not to create consensus views. I make no claim to expertise but do state emphatically that I am a critic, sometimes provocatively, and critical examiner of ideas that cross my mind.

My objective in so doing is to stimulate more relevant and appropriate thoughts in the reader regarding the subject I am discussing. In many cases, the reader's mind might tear off in a totally different direction to what I am saying. Often, that has happened to me, so I know something of this hiccup syndrome, and fully approve.

In either case, I am satisfied with the reader.

When people attempt to define you, and there have been far less with me than with a more public and popular figure, they do so to get a bead on you, identify with you, or nullify or neutralize you so they can dispense with you.

A publisher of some of my stuff calls me "a fisher of men." I have been called worse. Whatever it is I think you’ll admit the inclination tells us a lot about ourselves.

WHO MADE THEM KING?

WHO MADE THEM KING?

James R. Fisher, Jr.
© December 16, 2008

“One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings is, that nature disapproves it; otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind, an ass in place of a lion.”

Thomas Paine (1737 – 1809), English-American political writer

“Kings wish to be absolute, and they are sometimes told that their best way to become so is to make themselves beloved by the people. This maxim is doubtless a very admirable one, and in some respects true; by unhappily it is laughed at in court.”

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1778), Swiss philosopher



FORMER COURTHOUSE TIGER WRITES:

Jim,
Did you write this? (See attached) Merry Christmas.
Phil


DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Dear Phil,

No, I did not. I’ve attached the article to this that you sent to me because in humor and fun, in tongue and cheek, and in the spirit of Christmas, it points out the obsequious side of our executive led culture, while showing the bountiful retreat into rationality when the walls are falling in on it, the floor collapsing, roof caving in, and yes, as Chicken Little might say, “There are reports that the sky is falling, too.”

None of this of course is true. Depending on who is reporting, the BIG THREE American automakers have 400,000 workers, 230,000 of whom work in the United States making on average $55 per hour in wages and benefits, or $440 per day, $2,200 per week, $114,400 per year. In fairness, foreign automakers in the United States pay on average $45 per hour in wages and benefits, or $360 per day, $1,800 per week, $93,600 per year.

This is pretty good for relatively unskilled workers with high school diplomas against professional people with anywhere from four to eight to twelve years of university or higher education.

These workers don’t have any college loans to pay off, whereas most of these college graduates have loans from $50,000 to $250,000 or more with interest. They will have to spend many years paying on these loans, while they attempt to settle down into professional life, have a family and live in a reasonably comfortable lifestyle. A case could be made that this is a huge sacrifice is time, hard study, surrendering a good part of their youth to prepare for a professional future.

Phil, you were one of the ideal types of my youth, an excellent student, a fine athlete, the youngest sibling of three boys, a good son of two hard working blue-collar employed parents, and one of the original COURTHOUSE TIGERS from the neighborhood.

You used your athleticism to become a Niles Kinnick Scholar at the University of Iowa, and your brains to earn a degree in chemical engineering, and spent your entire career with Dupont. I don’t mean to embarrass you but there was no certainty to your livelihood right out of high school as there has been for many autoworkers for more than half a century.

I don’t imagine you would receive full pay and benefits if you weren't working, as is the case with UAW workers. Imagine making the same amount, sometimes for months, if a line went down for retooling and you were forced to sit it out at home earning as much as if you were working.

When I was a boy, I would spend a month in the summer in Detroit at my uncle’s home including two weeks at Higgins Lake where he had a summer cottage. I would play baseball with kids whose parents, brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, girlfriends and boyfriends worked on assembly lines in one of the BIG THREE automaker plants.

My uncle was head of the Department of Finance & Commerce at the University of Detroit, a Jesuit university, with two Ph.D.’s (economics and psychology) from the University of Iowa. His home was modest compared to these autoworkers’ homes. In fact, fifty years ago, automakers made a better living than medical doctors with only high school diplomas.

Ironically, executive compensation fifty years ago was a modest 25 to 30 times that of these workers, not 1,000 or more times that it is today. In a strange way, while being totally legal if not ethical, as United Auto Workers (UAW) union were successfully negotiating lucrative contracts for autoworkers, senior management at the BIG THREE started a trend that many other industries picked up, treating themselves as if kings of American commerce, and rightly entitled to a law and compensation unto its own.

Charles Wilson, CEO of GM those many years ago, was confident and most likely right when he said, “As GM goes so goes the America.” He saw himself as king of American Industry, and he challenged anyone to think otherwise.

Fifty years later, it is a different world, but old myths and habits die slowly if at all. The automotive industry is no longer king. It is one of the ironies of American society that we keep building for what was “king” in the past and failing to look ahead to the future. What do I mean by that?

We keep building these massive highways and byways, cementing over some of the riches soil in all the world, soil that is bountiful in what it can deliver in food and sustenance for a world that is starving now, and will be in desperate straits fifty years from now. That is so because we refuse to look ahead. We are always building and developing looking through our rearview mirror.

The world of the future is going to be one massive city with little pockets of land like hot houses furnishing our food.

The industry that we so love, and no one loves automobiles more than Americans, is our libido machine. Early in the twentieth century it became our private place to do lascivious things when no one was watching. But that, too, is dying as the virility of the Americans is suffering a hang over from which it is difficult to see it rallying from its dying libido.

Stated another way, we’re doing everything possible to make our lives more stressful, more anxious, and more impotent through substance dependent, treating leisure as another form of work, and working ourselves to death to find that money tree on the hill. What we call entertainment is vicarious. We watch reality shows as if we are watching ourselves; the same goes for professional sport, or other activities that distance us from ourselves and our own minds, bodies and souls. It is as if we have become superfluous to ourselves. You only have to watch television or surf the Internet to find the proof.

Nobody made the BIG THREE king. They assumed the role and nobody challenged it. This is not unlike how the whole monarchy idea got off the ground a few millennia ago. Since nobody challenged them, they became the model for all industry, the system, if you well, and this remains so to this day.

For their assumptions to hold water, however, auto making must remain the central wheel turning our economy with all other industries only its spokes. Is that true? I don’t think so. We are not primarily a manufacturing society. Even today, as it was from our beginning, our chief exports are agricultural, livestock products, and raw materials, not finished goods.

As the world becomes one massive city, massive transport will be the way to get around, not millions or billions of little gas guzzling machines. The world can’t afford it, but the world will continue to deal with global pollution at the edges as long as it can, and leave these gas guzzlers at the core with ornamental reengineering. That is Machine Age thinking, and it hasn’t left us.

The two scenarios you sent me (see attached) showing how CEOs of the BIG THREE acted before Congress, and what they would have like to have said are all MACHINE AGE dribble. Either way, they show evidence of looking through that rearview mirror.

Do I oppose a bailout of the automotive industry? What do you think? Will I lose sleep if the BIG THREE tank? I’ll let you decide. Am I worried about the autoworkers who have existed in arrested development suspended in permanent adolescence for fifty years? Yes, I am.

They have been programmed in learned helplessness and for that I am deeply concerned. They didn’t fight the system that betrayed them because they were never taught to be self-reliant. They let the system lullaby them to sleep with a pacifier, and now they are paying for it. It is a system’s problem, and the system, which Detroit unwittingly has been its architect, is what is wrong with America today.

Most Americans, I believe, have little idea much less interest in what is going in the rest of the world. Tens of thousands of mainly African children and their parents are suffering preventable blindness because the water that is the substance of their lives is polluted. It is infested with an insect that once it gets into the body kills the sight of its host. These innocent people without safe drinking and bathing water, with the only source to water the fly infested river, are largely if not completely off our radar.

So what is my point? We have created a society of learned helplessness, of counter dependence on those who employ us for our total well being, who only see our own reflection in the water and not the terrible things that happen to those far from us who drink from a similar stream, but it kills, maims or cover their body in sores.

MOTHER NATURE is constantly correcting the excesses of man despite man’s resistance to such corrections. The auto industry is going to become a shell industry not because the BIG THREE executives are bad people, which they are not, not because the American autoworkers working for the BIG THREE are bad people, again which they are not.

Notwithstanding hybrid and fully electrical non-polluting automobiles, individual automobiles will one day be museum antiques. The world is too small a planet for billions and billions of automobiles. The earth has too little surface to construct the required highways and byways. We will eventually run out of space. It won’t happen in my lifetime, but it will. It is inevitable, as the world becomes a single city.

Will anyone pay attention to what I say here? Of course not. Dr. Fisher is just an old foggy whose feet have never touched the ground.

There is some truth to that. I am an idealist who thinks man is capable of so much good, so much love, and so much neighborly kindness. But he fears the future, and always has. He looks for security when that is one of the most foolish notions of all because there is none. We all die, everyone, the good, the bad, and the ugly. There is wisdom, however, in insecurity because it is like removing a giant shroud from the mind. If we could only learn to trust ourselves, there would be little opportunity for us to be duped.

Imagine the Ponzi scheme of Bernard Madoff, a guy who once was chairman of the NASDAQ. He is alleged to have duped banks across the globe, insurance companies, trust funds of such brilliant notables as Nobel Laureate Ellie Wiesel, Mortimer Zuckerman, owner of the New York Daily News, and US News & World Report, and Steven Spielberg – heavyweights! – and thousands of small investors of their life’s savings to the tune of $50 billion.

You know that old saw: “When it is too good to be true, it probably is.” The New York Securities & Exchange Commission, among others, which had invested Madoff earlier in this century – claim “not my error” – for failing to shut him down.

The Ponzi scheme is a pyramid scheme that is used in many industries. The idea if that you profit by getting others to invest in selling your product. It is not about selling anything but getting people into the works and leveraging them for your profit. Well, with Madoff apparently, he got people to invest in his scheme, and while not making a profit on their investments, kept them quiet by paying them dividends out of the new investors. MOTHER NATURE stepped in with this giant recession and, suddenly, he was found standing naked as the economic tide went out.

Again, fear is the culprit fueled by greed (something for nothing). We want to be rich because we think being rich is important, that people who are rich are different. They are different: they have more money. In every other way, they are the same as all of us. This current Ponzi scheme is another indicator that the rich and famous are not necessarily smart

Elsewhere I’ve written that we have a leaderless society and dissident workers (see CORPORATE SIN 2000) because the system is broke and we have become broken with it. This is not because we are bad people, but because we are inattentive. The difference between leading and following is in degree, not nature. For leaders to lead they must be complete followers; for followers to follow they must be complete leaders. They are not mutually exclusive roles, but rather interdependent functions founded on trust.

British statesman, Sir William Temple (1628 – 1699) once said:

“I have long thought, that the different ability of men, which we call wisdom, or prudence for the conduct of public affairs or private life, grow directly out of that little grain of good sense which they bring with them into the world; and that the defect of it in men comes from some want in their conception or birth.”

It is hard to improve upon that although it was said 400 years ago, yet another reason why I wrote A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD.

Finally, I am proud of you as a friend, as a fellow Clinton, Iowa boy, who grew to be a fine man IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE. I know many others of your stock who have fought the good fight, live the good life, and looked with humor at those who crave celebrity status. It is people such as you that preserve the sanity of an otherwise insane world. Merry Christmas!
Always be well,

Jim

SEE THE ATTACHED!

At Witz' End: What Auto CEOs Should Have Said

Did it occur to anyone else that those oh-so-painful auto CEO/government hearings should have been the other way around?

Instead of the heads of America's three remaining automakers groveling, begging and enduring live public floggings trying to sell their case for government loans to get them past the global economic crisis and credit freeze that government greed, corruption and incompetence has created, shouldn't they have been vein-popping outraged and angry? Shouldn't they have pointed accusatory fingers at that sorry collection of arrogant, auto-ignorant Senators and Congressmen who got them into this mess and demanded their assistance?

Shouldn't they have looked those pompous public-trough pinheads straight in the face and demanded to know why investment firms, banks and big insurance get hundreds of billions of taxpayer bailout dollars no questions asked while what's left of America's once-mighty manufacturing muscle begs for loans totaling 1/28 of that initial $700 billion Wall Street bailout? Where were the public humiliation hearings and newly viable business plans for those guys?

(post continues after the jump)

Here is what I'll bet those long-suffering auto CEOs wanted to say, but couldn't:

"You ignorant morons! How dare you accuse us of building cars nobody wants? We sold 8.5 million vehicles in the US last year and millions more around the world. GM still handily outsells Toyota here, Ford outsells Honda and Nissan, and Chrysler sells more than Nissan and Hyundai combined. H ow many of our new cars have you driven lately? How many quality surveys and plant productivity reports have you reviewed? Have you bothered to check your own EPA's fuel economy ratings?

"Have you paid any attention in the last several years as we've turned our companies upside down, closed dozens of plants, shed hundreds of thousands of hard-working people who did nothing to deserve it, canceled slow-selling models and spent billions of hard-earned dollars redesigning the rest? Are you idiots even aware that we renegotiated our union contracts last year to make our US labor and health-care costs fully competitive by 2010?

"Would you recognize a good business plan if one smacked you upside the head? Have any of you ever run a business, made a business decision or even held a real job? Is there any more dysfunctional organization on the planet, any that more desperately needs a new business plan, than the US Congress? Let's compare our public approval ratings to yours .

"You scold us for using private aircraft? We run global companies flying people, parts and equipment all over the world every day. We use private planes for security and productivity and cost savings over commercial alternatives. If it were not cost effective, we would not do it, and we've been doing a lot less of it lately. Tell us, Ms. Pelosi, how much does that big private 757-200 of yours cost taxpayers to fly you home and back between your tough 3-day weeks?

"For decades, your national energy policy has been summed up by two words: 'cheap gas.' Now you want to punish us for building the big, capable, comfortable vehicles Americans wanted to take advantage of that policy...and for not building millions more smaller, more fuel-efficient cars that, until recently, almost no one wanted, and that we can't make a buck on if we build them here thanks to the high business costs you've imposed upon us through the years.

"You have blocked every avenue of domestic e xploration and construction that could lead to eventual energy independence, preferring instead to pump hundreds of billions of dollars overseas to purchase the energy Americans need, much of it from countries that are not our friends. You have piled billions of dollars of unrecoverable costs on us with excessive taxation, overkill regulation and relentless litigation that our off-shore competitors do not have to bear. Then you have rolled out the red carpet to predatory, low-cost foreign competitors who come here to take our market and pump hundreds of millions more dollars out of this country.

"Is there any other country fortunate enough to have an automotive industry that does not support, protect and nourish it in every possible way? We are the only nation on earth too blind and stupid to recognize and treasure the enormous economic and national security advantages of having its own healthy, prosperous auto industry and manufacturing base.

"Now you have passed an enormously expensive new regulation requiring 40 percent higher corporate average fuel economy in hopes of someday reducing the less than 0.2 percent of global human-sourced CO2 attributable to US light vehicles. That will cost us an estimated $100 billion, and even if you believe that is really worth doing at such a cost, where are we going to get that kind of money? Talk about unfunded mandates!

"With recent resizings and restructurings and our new labor contracts, we were well on our ways to full financial competitiveness and profitability. We could have survived and the sudden $4 gas explosion - not our fault - that shifted buyer demand overnight from larger, more profitable vehicles to small unprofitable ones. We have millions of highly desirable, much more fuel-efficient small cars and engines in the pipeline for 2010 and beyond.

"Then came your mortgage meltdown and fast-frozen credit crisis, which no one in this credit-driven business can survive un aided for long: not us, not our suppliers, not our many thousands of independent dealers, not even our most cash-rich foreign competitors. They, too, are asking their governments for assistance. Will they get it? Of course! No other nation will stand idly by and watch its auto industry die.

"There was no end of election rhetoric about creating new jobs. How about saving several million of the ones we have? Can any of you begin to understand how this industry is a huge, fragile, interdependent house of cards? If GM should fail, or declare Chapter 11, so will most of its 3,690 suppliers, beginning with the 2,000 in the US that operate 4,550 facilities in 46 states. Since most also supply key components to everyone else, that will bring down all of us, including US transplant production. Don't believe us? Ask Toyota .

"Vehicle assembly, engine, transmission and parts plants nationwide will shut down. Have you seen a plant town whose plant has died? It's a jobless ghos t to wn whose out-of-work residents, including owners and employees of the small businesses that depended on plant workers' incomes, can't afford to move because their homes – like their hopes and dreams – are worthless. How many of those communities will be in your states and districts? US dealers of all brands, with no new cars, credit or credit-worthy customers, will drop like flies. Without once lucrative auto advertising, many media will shrink and some will die? The predicted initial loss of 3 million jobs will be just the beginning. Can you spell depression?

"Yes, we have lost a lot of market share. Where did you think all those millions of cars and trucks our foreign competitors import and assemble here in taxpayer-subsidized plants in cheap-labor states would be sold, and out of whose hides did you think they would come?

"Yes, we have made mistakes, some bad products and bad business decisions in the past. And so has every one of our competitors. We are entir ely d ifferent companies today with new leadership and new priorities. We have wide varieties of high quality, high fuel efficiency, highly desirable new products that Americans, as they get to know them, absolutely do want to buy. Why continue to punish us, and the millions of incredibly dedicated, hard-working people at all levels who still depend on us to feed their families, for the sins of our predecessors?

"Why punish the entire country and millions in other countries as well? If you can think of any good reason, we would like to hear it. And don't come back at us with your usual name-calling, finger-pointing, blame-shifting, uninformed opinions, decades-old perceptions and self-serving, grandstanding rhetoric. We have offered our business plans and all the facts behind how we got here and why we need and deserve to survive and prosper for the good of this country and every citizen in it.

"You know full well that this life-threatening position you have put us in to is entirely your fault, not ours, and that our future viability depends completely on you. We're anxiously awaiting your business plan for guiding this country out of the economic morass you have created, beginning with the bridge loans we desperately need."

Award-winning automotive writer Gary Witzenburg has been writing about automobiles, auto people and the auto industry for 21 years. A former auto engineer, race driver and advanced technology vehicle development manager, his work has appeared in a wide variety of national magazines including The Robb Report, Playboy, Popular Mechanics, Car and Driver, Road & Track, Motor Trend, Autoweek and Automobile Quarterly and has authored eight automotive books. He is currently contributing regularly to Kelley Blue Book (www.kbb.com), AutoMedia.com< /A>, W ard's Auto World and Motor Trend's Truck Trend and is a North American Car and Truck of the Year juror

VIOLENCE & VIABILITY! FURTHER CONVERSATIONS WITH READERS

FUTHER CONVERSATIONS WITH READERS

VIOLENCE & VIABILITY

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 13, 2008

“The violence done us by others is often less painful than that which we do to ourselves.”

Francois Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1630 – 1680), French Courtier and Moralist



GERMAN FRIEND WRITES:

Jim,

It was not at all my intention to accuse anybody of crimes in the past. Finger pointing doesn’t do any good and cannot take away ones own defaults. I only wanted to explain that slavery was nothing special around the world at a certain historic period, whereas the Red Indian situation is specific to the Americas.

And also this issue is not an exclusive US one, because the conquest of South and Latin America caused similar interference with the natives there.

Looking back to the past with resentment or with shame respectively is to no avail. What counts is the reaction in the present time and looking into the future! And that's not easy at all.

What a coincidence:

In the news this morning there was a report on an exhibition in the city of Bremen of “The world of Sitting Bull." Ernie LaPointe, the last surviving great-grandson of Sitting Bull, spoke about his great-grandfather's legacy and the ways in which Sitting Bull's life has been distorted and mythologized in official histories.

Take care and never mind (reference my error mentioned below),

Manfred

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Manfred,

I don't mean to extend this chatter on this subject, but in my book (never published) NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND, I excoriate the Roman Catholic Church and the Catholic missionaries of Spain. I go on in that book to show what mainly Spanish missionaries did to North and South America during the Spanish Conquest and Exploitation period that followed.

It was horrendous and ludicrous to the extreme. Killing cultures and superimposing Christianity on them was so unbelievable I could hardly fathom it, and me being of Christian heritage.

That is interesting about Sitting Bull. The interesting thing about all cultures, the American Indian culture no exception, is that virtually everything that man is and man does is mythologized, as if necessary to make it live in the future. The Story of Jesus, which is apropos this time of year, has been proven by scholars to be largely mythology. That does not diminish from the Life of Jesus, but is representative of what “Sitting Bull” has endured.

We Americans are part and parcel of a violent society. In Tampa here, alone, we have more murders per year than Japan, which has roughly the same population as the United States.

The United States has always been violent from its inception or colonizing period until the present. We have more guns than people -- "the right to bear arms" being in the Constitution -- with an indigenous mistrust of authority.

We even have in our Constitution, and the Federal Papers that we have a right to overthrow our government if it impinges on our rights to "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness."

We are also frequently driven to create seditious acts that keep us in toll. It was true in the Civil War, WWI, WWII, and most recently with the Patriotic Act since 9/11, where our privacy has essentially been taken from us. Soon we will have as many cameras watching us as watch the Brits in England.

Incidentally, I got a lot of hate mail from my substantial email address book when I came out early for Barak Obama, and then wrote what was wrong with the United States, and what needed fixing. I was called "not worthy to be called DOCTOR," and "not patriotic," and "why don't you go somewhere else where pinkos like you live," and on and on.

Americans don't like to think about their sins, or their violence -- we have more murders in the United States per population than anywhere else in the world -- and how much Americans love war. Peter Gay, the European, who wrote about the era between Queen Victoria and Sigmund Freud, speaking of Europe, called it "pleasure wars." Well, the shoe fits Americans, too.

It is interesting to me that the two most warring like nations, the two nations that seem to get the most pleasure out of war are the United States and Russia. We make -- both societies -- good soldiers because we like to kill each other daily on our streets and byways. Sad.

My wonder is what is to happen to the Soviet Union’s arsenal of atomic and nuclear weapons in the era of eclectic terrorist groups throughout the planet. Dirty nuclear bombs could do terrible damage to civilization and morality far worse than 9/11.

Will Obama change the dialogue? I don't know but I think he brings forth the possibility with a rare intelligence and ability to articulate his ideas. I think he is the best writer as Commander-in-Chief since Jefferson. Articulation often seems the problem of American authority, that is to say, the president doesn't say what he means, and doesn't mean what he does. Obama may be able to correct that.

The world can no longer tolerate a self-indulgent, narcissistic society that consumes a quarter of the fossil fuel, and hordes other resources to maintain its lifestyle. I will not be around for it but I think the so-called "rainbow coalition" of multi-race, multi-religion, multi-lingual, and multi-culture is good for the United States. I have no problem whatsoever with the fact that everybody doesn't speak English. It is a nice feeling to be in the center of the world when you're at the supermarket.

With all its sins, the United States is a vibrant, resilient and dynamic society with a heart and soul and human constitution that is a measure of its possibility. It must stop beating itself on the chest, however, saying such things as the US is "the lone superpower" and the American presidency is "the most powerful office in the world."

It would be nice to see my country hunker down to the fact that it can't even meet the needs of a few thousand people when a disaster such as Hurricane Katrina suddenly falls upon it.

Thank you, as always, for your stimulating views.

Be always well,

Jim
-----------------

PREVIOUSLY: I misspoke regarding the disposition of the migration and resettling of the American Indians in President Andrew Jackson’s administration. I said “North East” when of course it was the Pacific North West.
JRF

MANFRED,

Correction -- President Jackson drove the American Indians to the PACIFIC NORTH WEST with “The Trail of Tears.” I was trying to get this out as we were leaving the house for a get together of BB's school people. Sorry.
Be always well,
Jim

COVERSATIONS WITH READERS!

CONVERSATIONS WITH READERS

REFERENCE: THE DAJA VU ARTICLE -- A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD!


James R. Fisher, Jr.
© December 10, 2008

“Our best conjectures as to the true spring of actions themselves are all we know from history. That Caesar was murdered by twenty-four conspirators, I doubt not, but I very much doubt whether their love of liberty was the sole cause.”

Lord Philip Dormer Stanhope Chesterfield (1694 – 1773), English orator and wit


A WRITER FROM GERMANY WRITES

These extreme examples you write about in your piece (Deja Vu: A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD) make people here in Europe doubt that capitalism is a good economic system, which leads to bizarre socialistic approaches (however also not desirable).

Manfred


DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Manfred,

First of all, I corrected one sentence in this missive, which I must confess was written in the early hours of the morning. It follows:

"The Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) with all its razzle-dazzle electronic sophistication and layers on layers of corpocracy couldn't get to the victims of Hurricane Katrina but reporters could. The hype of US superpower status was brought down as Katrina stuck a pin in FEMA’s ballooned hubris."

That one sentence indicates how tenuous power is of even a superpower. FEMA had all the horses but was pushing the wagon with them rather than pulling it with emergency aid to these tens of thousand helpless New Orleans citizens, who were without food, water or adequate shelter.

Regarding your point, in the twentieth century territory was the key to national power. The key today is the leveraging capital. Debtor and creditor nations are in a spinning merry go round going nowhere, as the holders of debt can’t let the debtor nations go under because they, too, will suffer the same fate.

That is the US’s trump card. Meanwhile, the real economy twirls away from the financial economy. It gives you the feeling no one is at the helm, and if they are they’re drunk in confusion.

Will the fear of a global depression bring some sanity to the table? Not likely. Third World Countries still fight for territory while being subjugated to debtor nations’ capital, sitting on some of the riches resources in the world, especially in Africa and South America. Sad.

I don't know where it will all end. I do wonder if we are in for an "L" shaped recession, which means a protracted bottom and not a “U”, or "V" shaped one, which is much shorter. The longest recession in the United States in recent times (since May 1937) was sixteen months (July 1981 to November 1982), and already the current recession is 12 months and counting.

No question the US economic meltdown and recession has created the domino effect of a world recession and meltdown. We shall see with the Barak Obama presidency if he can put his finger in the dike and stop it. The expectations are so surreal for his presidency they seem biblical. My wonder is if a dash of courage along with hope is in his construction. I voted for him and pray God blesses his presidency for all our sakes.

Be always well,

Jim


A CHICAGOAN WRITES:

Just got done reading this latest mini-missive and it's too bad this can't be published! You've got some great quotes in there and hit the nail right on the head!

I, as a peon individual, am so tired of the lack of moral leadership in both the corporate and political arena, that I have resigned to live my life out as I should and to hell with all of them. I will not stoop to their rationalism.

They will pay the ultimate price, maybe not in this life, but on their Judgment Day. If you can't count on the leadership, then the only thing you can do is watch out for yourself. But there is a danger there, too, of rationalizing your behavior and actions. So the individual must also be forewarned. I have learned lessons from these leaders and will not sacrifice my integrity.

After decades of indulgence and wanton disregard for values, we are paying the price. My father was right - life is not a bowl full of cherries; it can be hard, especially when it comes to doing the right thing when everything and everybody is doing the opposite. But the Good News is that with the right attitude you can make great cherry mash!

Hope you and Betty have a very Merry Christmas. And thanks for letting me expound. I know I'm not as eloquent as you, but at least this little bit allows me to vent!

Marlene


DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Dear Marlene,

First of all, you’re not a peon. None of us are. Neither are any of us superior nor inferior to anyone else. We all have the power of the vote.

Someone told me the other day he is so disgusted he doesn’t vote. I come to find out he’s not in a registered voter. Now I find that stupid.

Imagine all the bloodshed African Americans have spilled over the last century to register to vote. Indeed, women didn’t acquire the vote until after WWI. So, I hope we agree you are an important person and your views are important.

Your father, too, was right. Struggle is important to life and learning as well as earning a living. I know he was a self-made man who came from Germany and made his way here, as did your mother. We are all leaders or no one is. Your parents knew the wisdom of this phrase, and practiced its truth.

In a strange way, your generation, the baby boomer generation, has exhausted its indulgence, and now the consequences of that waste is coming for collection. Ultimately, we pay for all our sins one way or another.

Many of us of the Great Depression generation didn’t have parents who come soften our movement into life. Nor could they provide the support should we fall on our face. They came of age during the Great War (WWI), and many, like my parents, were working class poor, who seldom made it financially from paycheck to paycheck.

It was the nature of the times. I’ve often thanked God that I was born when I was because I am a Taurus, and the Taurus has been known to seek pleasure to struggle, and comfort to conflict. The irony is that I was a gifted athlete but not a gifted student. Athletics came natural but I had to work for grades in school. Now, in my senior years, I benefit from the discipline of athletics and the cumulative affect of livelong learning.

I mention this for reason. The new generation born after 1990 and now moving towards adulthood is not enamored of what they see, hear or experience. Let’s call them the “skeptical generation.” They are more pessimistic than their baby boomer parents whom they see as bankrupt, morally, emotionally, psychologically and financially. They have seen what living the lie will do to people.

The "skeptical generation" may chase the buck but not as materialists like their parents, but in the recognition their security cannot be trusted to anyone else. They have had it with the hype, rhetoric and rosy picture that society paints for them. They're not buying it or buying into it. They believe they have no choice but to be on their own.

The “skeptical generation” is a throwback to the Great Depression generation, but in strikingly different ways: for one, there are many more of them; for another, they're not as gullible; and for yet another, they are more self-aware, sophisticated, and better educated.

This means they have to compete hard for everything: for a quality education, satisfying employment, and financial and emotional security. Also, worthy of note, they are as likely to be nonwhite as white and non-Christian as Christian.

When I went to college, I was the first in my family and one of the first in my extended family. Now, practically all my grandchildren (13) are grammar school or high school scholars, and some college graduates with stiller academic records. They face the future with the DNA of a warped Great Depression child, me.

I sense with the "skeptical generation" there will be a moral revival, and a new dedication to serving others rather than being self-serving. Additionally, I think there will be a religious revival in all its many forms. I am not only encouraged by this generation of the 1990s I think it will find winning through cooperation more appealing than wining through intimidation as did baby boomers.

I’ve told my grandchildren they are not to flaunt their gifts but to use them be they brains, athleticism, wealth, political or business clout, or religious devotion. I also told them nothing is more important than kindness. We all die and if we can show a little kindness to others along the way than we are wealthy beyond measure. I think the “skeptical generation” of the 1990s gets it!

Good hearing from you and thank you for your views.

Always be well,

Jim.


ANOTHER CHICAGOAN WRITES:

Hello Jim,

Your piece stirs some thoughts, as usual. Having been a bit more preoccupied in my pursuit of a livelihood, I read your recent blogs and resisted the urge to comment. This last one, though, inspired me.

First, in defense of my home state, I’ll offer additional facts. Since statehood in 1818, eight Illinois governors have had legal troubles with the last five of those being indicted.

We had a good stretch from 1921 to 1965 when none were caught in wrongdoing. (I choose my words carefully.)

Stratton was acquitted of income tax evasion. Kerner and Walker were both guilty of things (mis) done after leaving office. Ryan and Blagojevich are recent enough and do not need retelling. None has served more than a year and a half in jail - yet.

This is what public service has become. Can you make a good speech? Can you be sincere enough to blind people to the lies behind your promises? Are you easy on the eyes? You know, four years of your mug on TV has to be palatable. Will you feed me, educate my children, and keep me safe?

The low expectations we have for leaders to promise and not produce has given us the leadership we deserve.

Selfishness dominates our decisions over whom we choose and what we believe. And, as a result, the lower end of “leadership talent” gravitates to local and state government.

This stratification of managerial talent between industry and government is exacerbated by the gross differences in compensation. The public “servant” manages billion dollar budgets, yet is paid a fraction of a CEO with similar accountability.

The rise to each top requires similar traits. And, the separation comes at the dues paying stage. City councilman, small town mayor, and state representative are a bit easier than the day-to-day grind it out climb in business. So, with less talent, the politician has to find other ways to game the system.

Campaign funds are lucrative, but still not CEO-level comp. In their climb to positions of power, they’ve convinced themselves that they deserve a bigger slice of pie. The mistake is in assuming that stealing taxpayers’ money is wrong, but selling taxpayers’ trust is okay.

Think of the animosity Congress shows corporate executives. The CEOs are not necessarily smarter. They did work harder to get where they are. And, during that climb they convinced themselves that multi-million dollar compensation has been earned and is deserved. Even when the pie is shrinking, they believe their slice should remain the same size. To ensure this, the number of laborers with whom the pie must be shared is reduced.

The UAW sought to prevent this with its job bank, which requires idled workers to be paid. And even the politicians, champions of the working class that they are, railed against this practice.

They’re all feeding at the same trough. It’s just that the politicians are kind of getting seconds. Retribution feels good.

I think of this in respect to what you have written on leadership and why it has much more meaning than anything Jack Welch and others have written. The guys who get to write those books are the ones who were lucky enough to be in charge during good economic times. (Who would read Wagoner’s book?)

They justify their approach to leadership by pointing to rising revenues and stock prices. One would be hard pressed to screw up a company in the 90s. So, firing the bottom ten percent becomes the mantra of management. And, creating a scarcity mentality to pit people against each other replaces teamwork and collaboration.

Larry Bossidy’s book title “Execution” becomes a double entendre. Your discourse has much more staying power, as it is not reliant on an up economy for justification. It is reliant on the human experience.

Michael


DR. FISHER RESPONDS

There is a common theme in all three of these responses. It is that the system doesn’t work. One sees capitalism is worn out but socialism is not a step up. Another feels moral authority is missing in leadership. And you, Michael, are fed up with it all especially leadership. As usual, you stimulate thought.

All three themes are implied or are consistent with my peripatetic philosophy. Let us look at this more closely.

Marx, Engel and Hegel launched an intellectual campaign against capitalism and the oligarchy of capitalists of the nineteenth century. Marx, especially, did not foresee people such as us – working intellectual capitalists -- rising from the labor class of producers to have a substantive role in capitalistic society.
Marx saw the manpower struggle clearly between producers (workers) and capitalists (owners) and in black and white terms.

It never dawned on him that one day there would be a well-educated working middleclass. He instead identified the bourgeoisie merchant class as “dirty capitalists” and painted them in the most pejorative terms.

Peter Gay wrote a five-volume study of this class, “The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud." The titles of these volumes give a clue to what they cover: Vol. I: Education of the Senses (1984); Vol. II: The Tender Passion (1986); Vol. III (1993): The Cultivation of Hatred: Vol. IV: The Naked Heart (1995); Vol. V: Pleasure Wars (1998).

Gay has also written many other books including “Savage Reprisals” (2002). He uses the work of novelists to identify the cultural shift of the 19th century with three savage novels: Bleak House, Madame Bovary, and Buddenbrooks.

Peter Gay is a rumpled historian of great erudition who attempts to make sense of “Empire” and its decline, coupled with the depths of hysteria that followed with the birth of modernity. With Mother Queen gone, people found themselves, alone, with the "self." Amazingly, or perhaps not so, society has yet to find a comfort level with being adult.

The books chart a curious course from the reign of Queen Victoria (1837 – 1901), and the movement from royalty to the property class (bourgeois or middleclass or capitalism), and with it the rise of hysteria and turmoil that became endemic to modern society. For this, he focuses on Sigmund Freud and his talking cures (1882 – 1939). It is a very human study.

Freud was born in 1856 and Queen Victoria 1819, both becoming bookends to the period between the zenith of British influence and its decline as the world grew beyond royalty and empire to fend for itself.

Why mention it here? Change is the constant including that of leadership. And according to one historian, Paul Kennedy (The Rise & Fall of the Great Powers: 1500 to 2000), the United States has a lot in common with good old Britannica in falling on its own petard.

My German friend is correct. Capitalism created an oligarchy of haves but a middleclass of property owners as well, but unhappily, a larger class of have-nots. No matter what the ideology, 20 percent or less of the constituency of any society control 80 percent or more of the wealth.

Socialism, mainly in the form of communism, has attempted to redistribute wealth, but it has failed. It, too, created an oligarchy of the wealthy, unhappily, no middleclass, but a most dependent working class of have-nots.

China now is attempting to bridge the two ideologies (communism and capitalism) into a working system, but it has no room for human rights, and uses draconian methods to create a middleclass and control its people, while tens of millions of Chinese live as if still in the 18th century.

It was no less than Plato who saw democracy a bad idea and that a philosopher king was the answer. I would suggest we give philosophers everything but power.
So, where does that leave us?

Well, we no longer have the Victorian Empire of unashamed colonialism as practiced in 19th and 20th century Africa, where even the smallest of European nations (Belgium, Holland, and Denmark) took large chunks of the African continent as their own booty.

Small wonder that African nations today refuse the demands of the United States to oust Robert Mugabe from Zimbabwe. African nations have never lost the bad taste of colonialism, and so as terrible a tyrant as Mugabe and disastrous as the Zimbabwe economy, they understand his hatred of the West.


HOW DID WE GET FROM THERE TO HERE?

I hope you will indulge me a bit as I would like to put this discussion in the perspective of the cumulative patterns identified as ideal types through the centuries.

You may recall I wrote a series of 33 articles (COLD SHOWERS) in a Q&A format in the 1990s. In one of those pieces, I traced the dominant discipline from the 15th through the 20th century. Surprisingly, but yet seemingly true, one discipline has historical stood out in each of these centuries.


THE EXPLORER – 15TH Century

It was the EXPLORER in the 15th century led by Vasco de Gama, Hernando Cortez, Ponce de Leon, Christopher Columbus and Ferdinand Magellan. These explorers expanded the horizons of Europeans to embrace the globe. These adventures introduced trade, and cultural exchange along with giving rise to exploitation and indoctrination of natives of these lands to European ways.

THE THEOLOGIANS – 16TH Century

It was THEOLOGIANS in the 16th century emerging from the “Dark Ages” that proceeded after the Fall of Rome in the 10th century to preserve culture on the one hand and to spread it on the other.

The Roman Catholic Church, which emerged most powerfully from Rome’s demise with its monks keeping language, the arts, and science alive by copying works of scholars past, including sacred scripture (See “How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization" – 2005 –Thomas E. Wood, Jr.).

By the 16th century, the Reformation led by Martin Luther, John Calvin, and John Knox among others challenged Catholicism. A Counter Reformation was led by Thomas More and Desiderius Erasmus. The Catholic Church survived but not as the power it once was.

The explorers of the earlier century introduced Christianity to the natives. This now became a wholesale business with missionaries duping natives into becoming Christian, while destroying their indigenous cultures indiscriminately.

In Europe, Protestantism was flourishing. A property class was rising as well with the Protestant work ethic. Property now, not royal titles, separated the haves from the have-nots. The haves in Calvinism were called “the Elected.” Capitalism was secure.


THE PILGRIMS OF THE NEW WORLD – 17TH Century

It was the PILGRIMS who led the way in the 17th century venturing into the “New World” to enjoy “freedom and equality of religious expression.”

They brought their independent spirit, vigor, self-reliance, ingenuity and capitalism verve with them.

While Plymouth Rock in North America was being settled by these pilgrims, the Cape of Good Hope in Southern Africa was being established by first, the Dutch (from the Dutch East India Trading Company) and later by the British.

A European white society was being established on the American continent, and a similar society on the continent of Africa. These two pilgrimages would change the history of both continents, all because of the stamina, determination and will of a handful of deeply religious European Christians.


THE LAWYERS – 18TH Century

LAWYERS proved dominant, as the social order became a society of laws rather than of men in the 18th century.

The “Divine Right of Kings” and monarchy was challenged first by the American Revolution followed closely by the French Revolution. “Empire” was losing its hold.

Americans revolted against King George III of Great Britain (1776) and the French against King Louis XVI in France (1789). Constitutional law in these rebellions put no man above the law while giving permanent rights to the people.

The American Revolution produced Founding Fathers with a deep appreciation of constitutional law, writing a Declaration of Independence and a Bill of Rights that holds firmly to this day. France, however, punished the monarchy with its French Revolution and “Reign of Terror.” This nullified somewhat its ability to establish a stable constitutional government, which reverberates to this day.


THE ENGINEER – 19TH Century

ENGINEERS led the way in the 19th century with the Industrial Revolution.

The American Civil War became a war of industrial power, and the first fully mechanized war with armored ships and repeat rifles produced in factories.

ENGINEERS also cut a swath through the Americas to construct the Panama Canal joining the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, while across the globe; ENGINEERS cut a course from the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea at the lip of Egypt.

There were also such feats of construction as the Eiffel Tower in Paris, Empire State Building in New York City, Transcontinental Railroad across the United States and the Orient Express across Europe, among other feats of engineering.

ENGINEERS also were responsible for an explosion of inventions including the steamboat, the internal combustion engine, the electric light bulb, the radio, the telegraph, the telephone, the airplanes and automobiles, none of which would reach true commercial level products for another century.


THE MANAGER – 20TH Century

Nineteenth century guilds, or small groups of skilled craftsmen working together with workers and owners as one, gave way in the 20th century to large complexes called “factories.”

The creative energy of the 19th century was now being put to practical use. To do so, work, the workplace and workers were organized into factories. It was a terrible shock to the social fabric of an agrarian society.

Farmers and farm workers were forced to leave the countryside to seek employment in cities for better paying jobs. At the beginning of the 20th century, nearly four in five workers derived their livelihood from farming or farm support. At the end of the 20th century, it was two in one hundred.

Cities swelled as these factories were organized into assembly lines. Small tool and die operations consolidated into such companies as Ford and General Motors. These factories with constant conveyors humming took product pieces along an assembly line adding piece to piece until the final product was assembled, which was often an automobile or some appliance.

Workers on farms often had little formal education. Now, a requirement of factory employment was to have the ability to read and write and do simple arithmetic calculations. That gave birth to compulsory public education.

Besides teaching the “three R’s,” these public schools taught discipline, obedience, punctuality, conduct, politeness and submission to authority. Alvin Toffler does a good job in explaining this transition in “Future Shock” (1970).

As throughout history, war accelerated this mechanization as armies always looked for a military advantage in weaponry. “Machine Age Thinking” became a dominant factor of the 20th century, a warring century, and a direct influence on all aspects of the infrastructure of society.

Universities became quasi factories producing hordes of college graduates. The arts, family life, and even religion took on bland, pragmatic, factory functionality, as did education from primary school on.

By the end of the two World Wars, society had established itself as the personification of the factory mentality and morality, which was essentially amoral. You didn’t live life you packaged life like a product. Spontaneity and gaiety went out of the system after WWI.

To compensate for this loss of spirituality after WWII, sexuality became a factory replacement for love with the reproductive act the complete focus of attention. Love was locked out, leaving the natural to be regimented, measured, probed, timed and quantified as to the pleasure derived. Virility became a factory product according to the Playboy philosopher.

Rising out of this mechanization were MANAGERS. They are totally a product of the 20th century, and rose out of industrialization, war, logistics, and the need for some control of work, the workplace and workers.

Workers were no longer identified by their given name, but by a number. Society became "a number" society, a statistical society, and a society that reduced people, places and things to algorithms, something that could be reduced to mathematics without necessarily involving direct contact with persons.

Likewise, MANAGERS dominated the “Machine of State,” and became the critical factor in two victorious World Wars. It was the planning, training, producing, controlling, disseminating, and logistical supporting that made MANAGERS prominent in those wars, especially WWII.

The United States was totally unprepared for WWII, but a year into that war the US was producing more planes, tanks, ships and guns than all the Allies or the Axis Powers combined. MANAGERS got the credit for that, and they took that momentum with them into the post-WWII period with gusto (see David Halberstam's "The Next Century," 1991).

War became the measure of peace and societal stability. No nation did this better than the United States with its abundant natural resources and supported by its vibrant middleclass of workers who were all the things a system of factory education could hope for. MANAGERS’ won these two World Wars and the Cold War, and they have never let us forget it.


THE PROFESSIONAL? – 21st Century

Each preceding dominant discipline left the center stage of its century reluctantly but inevitably, but not the management class.

It holds on desperately today when it is anachronistic as a class and atavistic as a function.

This is the computer age and everything managers did before computers can do better now, plus they give workers a sense of freedom and creativity even if it is contrived.

The management class from mid-20th century on has become avarice to the extreme: (1) cavalier style of indiscriminately increasing levels of management for no good reason; (2) treating information with workers “on a need to know basis”; (3) running companies as if owners and as if with its own money; (4) treating PROFESSIONALS as second class contributors by subjugating them to Managing by Objectives (MBOs) which have never worked, and Performance Appraisals (PA) which insults their intelligence with subjective evaluations for puny merit increases, while SENIOR MANAGERS award themselves lavish bonuses even while tanking the company, no performance appraisal for them.

This was a 20th century phenomenon still widely practiced in the 21st.

Moreover, from three levels of management typical during the late 1930s to the conclusion of WWII in 1945, the management class set out to justify its pay and perks by the increasing the number of people reporting to it irrespective of what was produced. By the 1980s, these three-levels of management had ballooned to twelve.

With World Competition, mainly, from Japan and South East Asia, management started to be paired down these levels after 1980. Paradoxically, while corporate levels were shrinking, executive pay was soaring.

Executive compensation in the 1940s was 10 to 50 times production workers. By the year 2000, this had escalated to as high as 1,000 – 1,500 times production workers, as Boards of Directors literally wrote blank checks to MANAGERS.

Justification for this compensation was based on the rationale when a company went from millions to billions in sales and profits; they assumed it was their leadership and management acumen that caused it.

Conveniently forgotten were the economic climate, supply and demand status, and other vicissitudes of the marketplace. However, when these positive factors turned into negatives, they didn’t cut their pay or benefits because they wrote the checks.

This was all possible as long as the Dow Jones Industrials masked reality.

But as recent events have proven they were playing at leadership and being executives as if it were a film script written by Hollywood where they could appear on television or before a Congressional Committee and make like executives and all would understand. It was right out of the book of “The Divine Right of Kings.”

Meanwhile, wages of workers who produce the products of such profitability have stagnated or declined over recent decades, while the pay of CEOs and senior management have soared.

Millions of jobs are being lost forever. The rhetoric is “in a global economy jobs go where workers work cheap.” That is not entirely true if at all. The drag of obsolete factories and equipment, and product lines not consistent with the times are a bigger factor, and that is MANAGERS’ responsibility. Show me in the world where workers are more productive than Americans. It is MANAGERS of other countries who are superior to American management. American workers suffer for this shortfall.

Outdated product lines and poorly skilled workers are a MANAGER issue. Long ago this was taken out of the hands of workers when they lost control of what they did.

Another cliché: “if it isn’t broken don’t fix it!” This thinking is one of the biggest reasons jobs have gone elsewhere. It is when it isn't broken that you have the luxury to find ways of making it better, more relevant, or even scrapping it before not after it is obsolete.

MANAGERS are good at planning but it is always an exercise "planning for planning sake." Future relevance never comes up.

MANAGERS have been reactive. They have not anticipated change and American workers and work have suffered for this inclination. It is when something isn’t broken that you study its relevance, relative entropy, and possible replacement.

There is an obvious reason for the behavior of MANAGERS. They play to the stockholders and their "return on investment," instead to the stakeholders and "return on the individual."

MANAGERS pride themselves on thinking beyond the horizon. Actually, they have never been known to think beyond what is under their feet, as in the case of the glory days of WWI and WWII and the Cold War.

It was my view those many years ago that the 21st century would bring PROFESSIONALS to the fore. I am not so sure at this point. They have been timid, risk weary, passive, self-indulgence, narcissistic, materialistic, superfluous, and no threat even to feeble leadership.

PROFESSIONALS can give the good talk; write the provocative book, but they are not willing to put their money where their mouth is. They have anywhere from four to eight years of higher education with more product knowledge and general knowledge than their bosses, or their bosses’ bosses, yet they allow themselves to lose their jobs to reengineering, redundancy exercises, reorganization, realignment, or to mergers, buyouts, or hostile takeovers. Whatever the shock, they retreat like willing lambs.

Management can be incompetent, misinformed and misdirected, and they sit pat, carrying out instructions they know are going nowhere because position power as corrupt and anachronistic as it might be, is still the power.

Management pays the mortgage, they talk themselves into believing, so they can’t allow themselves to think of confronting management for fear they may lose that merit increase, that promised promotion, or that perk of a private parking space. They prostitute themselves and don’t know it or don't want to know it. Sorry, but that is the way it is today.

Throughout it all, they go meekly to the unemployment line when made redundant like obedient passive soldiers. They are salaried employees and think they are part of management, which is a lark. They would not think of the embarrassment of a picket line like the hourly workers. Truth be told, they look down on these workers when they should be looking up to them. Hourly workers have courage; they stand their ground.

The other day 300 employees of a plant here in Florida were given their walking papers with three days notice to clear out. The company had no plans to pay them their rightful severance pay or pay that they were due, or to give them the six-weeks notice that is the law of Florida.

What did these workers do?

They camped out, and refused to leave the building for days! That’s right, they camped out, got on television, and now management is trying to finds someway out of this public relations snafu. How many PROFESSIONALS would do that?

PROFESSIONALS lick their wounds by killing their minds, bodies and spirits with drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, gambling or promiscuity, or they retreat into nervous breakdowns, take it out on their mates and children, or just give up and give out and die, and as Kafka would say, “they have done nothing wrong!”

PROFESSIONALS have become their own worst enemy. They won’t allow themselves to see the real enemy before their eyes: “the system” they won’t change is destroying them.

I wrote in “The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain” (1995):

“Professional have no choice but to go against the grain, for nothing changes until they do. The game of charades with empowerment continues because it is safe. It changes nothing and cost those in power even less. Workers absorb the costs. Not until the worker, alone realizes it is up to him to put his house in order, will change occur. Ventilation won’t do it nor will pointing fingers. The worker must get off the dime and take charge of work, which is the only way to take charge of life. The call is to workers everywhere. They have invested heavily in their education, only to find a disappointing ‘return on investment.’ Angry and confused, they suffer downsizing, redundancy exercises, and conglomerate takeovers like fatalists. Those employed wonder ‘when the other shoe will fall.’ Never have workers been more distrustful of the ‘the system.’ Ironically, they are the system.”

A lesson can be learned from the past.

In the late 1920s and 1930s, workers fought to form unions to get a fair days pay for a fair days work. They wanted to work only eight hour days, five days a week, and not ten or twelve hours a day for the same pay, and six or seven days. They wanted health insurance, retirement benefits, safe and healthy working conditions, and respect on the job.

Workers died for these basic desires; many others were blackballed; still others were beat up, but they stayed the course, and workers across the world have benefited for their courage, especially PROFESSIONALS.

What went wrong with this scenario is that management was willing to give workers everything, but control of their work, something workers had always enjoyed.
Management thus duped unions, and so it has been ever sense. Management has given elaborate pay concessions, including being paid when lines are shut down, or simply laid off. If workers had retained control of work, management could never have played so fancy free with their lives and livelihood.

Unions, organizationally, are mirror images of the management with which they bargain. They have given workers in a sense the golden goose, but killed worker identity with what they do. This is where dignity lies, where work is love made visible, where you don’t work for a paycheck, alone, but for serving others by what you do. I had a bricklayer point to a building one-day, and say, “That’s my building. I built it,” and he did.

This explanation is not helpful in your current situation, but I know you understand what I am attempting to say. I suspect management, which cannot lead, doesn’t know how to follow, will continue, “as is” as long as it can.

Leadership has become totally a reactive function rather than an anticipatory one; managing the crises it creates. I have tried to read some of the management books currently on the bestseller list, and those by academics that aren’t. They are all written as if management and leadership are one, and that we shall be locked in to this functional hybrid forever. I hope not.

Be always well,

Jim

DEJA VU: A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD!

DÉJÀ VU: A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD: Our Chronic Culture Viewed from the 1970s

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 10, 2008

“Experience is the shroud of illusion.”

J. De Finod (cc 1875), American author


Yesterday, Tuesday, December 9, 2008, the CEOs of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, executives that came away with millions of dollars in salary and stock options, architects of tens of millions of bankrupt home owners, appeared again before a Congressional Hearing. Four executives from these two firms claimed no guilt, no responsibility, and no regrets for what has happened in the subprime meltdown. It was not their fault. They acted as astute businessmen. No learning here.

In the 1970s, a similar meltdown was nobody's fault.

The CEOs of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, too, have been appearing before Congress with their hands out with the "penalty of delay" gimmick as their sales strategy. They must have $15 billion by Christmas, or the Tooth Fairy will die, and Detroit and the nation will see 2 million workers lose their jobs. And it will be all the fault of Congress if it happens, not theirs!

A similar bailout was given to Chryler in the 1970s, when, incidentally, the technology for 80mpg automobiles were on the drawing boards, but that would not be good for Detroit that preferred to build gas-guzzling SUV tanks and trucks. Nor were 80mpg vehicles high on the wish list of the oil industry. No interest in learning there.

The Governor of Illinois was indicted yesterday for attempting to sell President-elect Barak Obama's Illinois US Senate seat to the highest bidder. This wasn't the first, second, or third time an Illinois governor was indicted, but the fourth, many of whom have had long stays in prison for corruption and malfeasance. Little learning here.

The country is in its worst recession since -- yes, the 1970s -- with the prospects of double digit unemployment and double digit inflation. Recessions and economic bubbles have been common since The Great Depression: 1937, 1945, 1948, 1953, 1957, 1960, 1969, 1973, 1980, 1981, 1990, 2001, 2007, which now continues.

Can the world stave off another Great Depression? One wonders as so little learning seems to be evident, despite all the Nobel Laureates in economics in the United States.

The learned ones from our established think tanks, universities, and gurus in newspapers, magazines, radio, television and the Internet, along with talking heads rushing about the country for high speaking fees fill the air with their claptrap providing further evidence of a pandemic of runaway anxiety.

I just completed John Dos Passos' monumental novel of 1352 pages titled "USA," which was written about the early twentieth century. I first read it forty years ago when I was programmed by my masters into thinking they had answers and people like me need only behave and trust them.

"USA" was a novel and I read as fiction. How was I to know that I would work and travel the world and see many of the things Dos Passos wrote about, not in the early twentieth century, but the late twentieth century. I sensed in this experience that we are stuck on a dime and can't get off it, repeating the same snafus over and over again, only with different people and different names.

Dos Passos wrote about the divided stream between the rich and the poor, the self-indulgent and the righteous, the powerful and the powerless, and was called "the poet against the world." Imagine that?

I find that label amusing since he was writing the truth of that world as he saw it, a world that lived deeply in its own illusion, a world not unlike our own. That of course was part of the reason for WWII with the mad German corporal setting the table.

Much talk is made of the feeble response of the government to Katrina, but power has always proven pusillanimous when the unexpected is introduced. Hitler never talked in code but in bold terms of what he was about and the world was powerless. Why? Because he changed the whole game and the world was still playing as if it were the nineteenth century. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)with all its razzle dazzle electronic sophistication and layers on layers of corpocracy couldn't get to victims of Hurrican Katrina, but reporters could. The hype of US superpower status was brought down as Katrina stuck a pin in its ballooned hubris. No learning here.

Two senseless world wars, yes, and many equally senseless smaller wars, wars that historians now ponder if at all necessary. It is estimated that between 50 and 100 million people died in twentieth century wars. Some believe these estimates are low. It is one of the reasons Germany and Russia have been unable to grow their populations with the zero or below zero birth rate of ethnic Germans and Russians .

Dos Passos was writing out of what he saw and experienced, "out of the land," traveling throughout the United States, and a greater part of the world during the first quarter of the twentieth century. He was a merchant seaman, an ambulance driver and soldier in WWI, and ultimately a great writer.

Most readers know who Hemingway was, Faulkner and Steinbeck, Fitzgerald and Joyce, all writers out of that period, but not Dos Passos. He never reached their celebrity.

It might be because he was a serious writer of social commentary. He certainly didn't practice the macho he-man esthetics of Hemingway or the romance of self-destruction of Fitzgerald. Dos Passos was peripatetic, a wanderer, observer and reporter not as an academic, although he graduated from Harvard. Hemingway was a high school graduate and Fitzgerald a Princeton drop out. These writers wanted to belong; Dos Passos preferred the psychological detachment of the perpetual outsider.

You that read me know I am a kindred spirit of that perspective. That is why I wrote A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD, indeed, that is why I write all my books.

Colin Wilson wrote in "The Outsider" (1956) something about truth that seems to hold little interest today. We would apparently prefer to be stuck, to create crisis, and then manage ourselves out of them; to become literate but not educated and certainly not intellectual; to describe our problems rather than solve them; to never grow up with the mindset and gamesmanship of sixth graders, and expect to suffer nothing untowards for the insociance.

We burn the candle at both ends and wonder why the middle won't hold the flame. We are optimist and treat pessimism as if a terminal disease, and not the wake up call to reality that it is. The world is a horrific place for 5 billion of the six and half billion souls on this planet. That is pessimism.

In the first go around, The CEOs of GM, Ford and Chrysler flew to Washington, DC in separate private jets to acquire a $30 billion bailout or rescue package. It became one of the monumental public relations snafus of recent times. Then they compounded this extragance by the opposite extreme. They each drove hybrid vehicles the 500 miles from Detroit for yet another Congressional Committee appearance. It strikes me as incredulous to the absurd. Have they never heard of Sartre's "The Absurd"? Well, they personify it.

People, listen up! These are our leaders today. The indicted governor of Illinois is not the first that has demonstrated such arrogance. "You can't touch me. I'm a law unto myself. I have constitutional authority to govern as I see fit. Citizens, take note!" No learning here.

We have created a corporate class that has run not only the United States, but the world into the ground or the current state of affairs. The Governor of Illinois is quick to point out he's involved in no Watergate! If the alleged charges prove true, he belongs to the same fraternity.

Watergate is a benchmark. President Nixon personifies the corporate class, but he didn't create it. Post WWII did that. Corpocracy gradually came to believe it was untouchable, a law unto itself, that it could give itself extravagant stock options and bonuses and golden parachutes and no one would be the wiser. It became insensitive to public opinion, or even opinions within its own ranks. An executive in risk management warned the Fannie Mae CEO that subprime loans were toxic and was fired! Trust me, I know about messengers being killed in corpocracy.

It is all in A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD, and it has not changed anything. It didn't change for John Dos Passos, and it certainly won't change for James R. Fisher, Jr.

Colin Wilson writes in "The Outsider":

"The problem for the civilization is the adoption of a religious attitude that can be assimilated as objectively as the headlines of last Sunday's newspaper. But the problem for the individual always will be the opposite of this, the conscious striving not to limit the amount of experience seen and touched; the intolerable struggle to expose the sensitive areas of being to what may possibly hurt them; the attempt to see as a whole, although the instinct of self-preservation fights against the pain of the internal widening, and all the impulses of spiritual laziness build into waves of sleep with every new effort. The individual begins that long effort as an OUTSIDER, he may finish it as a saint."

Be always well,

Jim

PS I'm glad people and businesses are not afraid to say CHRISTMAS this year, even though I know it is an economic and not a spiritual motive. So, MERRY CHRISTMAS to you all!