FRONTLINE -- THE MAN WHO KNEW -- JOHN O'NEIL (PBS - TV, September 30, 2011)

FRONTLINE – THE MAN WHO KNEW – JOHN O’NEIL (PBS – TV, September 30, 2011)

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© August 31, 2011

With the tenth anniversary of 9/11 coming up, FRONTLINE had a program titled “The Man Who Knew,” which centered on the FBI Agent, John O'Neil.  He had a passion to uncover the plot of al qaeda from the time of the first attack on the Twin Towers, and then came to lead the investigation of the USS Cole in Yemen in which seventeen American sailors died in that suicide bombing explosion. 

Miffed that O'Neil was ignoring her and her people, he was pulled off that assignment by the US Ambassador to Yemen. Consequently, the Yemen inquiry went nowhere.

Everyone should see this program for one reason, and that is how much the human weakness for jealousy, duplicity, chicanery, backstabbing, territorial imperatives, pride and stupidity play into the vulnerability of corporate society to self-implode. 

It is a moot question to ask if John O'Neil could have prevented 9/11 in which nearly 3,000 people lost their lives.  He had been shanghaied out of the FBI by then for the reasons given above. 

By the irony of circumstances, he was head of security for the Twin Towers when the plotting of Osama bin Ladin and his operatives murdered all those innocent people by flying commercial jets into the Twin Towers.  O’Neil died that day in the Twin Towers having had a premonition something was about to happen, but powerless to do anything about it.    

The best people often have sharp elbows and are more interested in results than politeness, more concerned with getting to the core issues than worrying about upsetting the status quo, more committed to doing the right thing than protecting their career or worrying about ruffling feathers.  It would appear that this described John O’Neil. 

This ego logjam doesn’t happen only in the FBI or other government agencies, but in every corporate constructed network in the world.  Incredibly, with all the electronic wonders, it would seem impossible to penetrate the old boy and old girl network, the elite who protect their own kind who have never had an original thought in their lives, not to mention true believers whose passion is directed exclusively to being on the right bandwagon come hell or high water. 

JRF 

THANKS FOR ASKING & TEASER TO REFLECTIONS ON THE BALKANS

THANKS FOR ASKING & TEASER TO REFLECTIONS ON THE BALKANS

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© August 29, 2011

THE WORD WRITTEN LARGE

A number of you have asked the status of my manuscript, A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA.  Thanks for asking.

Since July 15, I've sent out the complete manuscript to twelve reputable publishers.  Four have returned the CD diskette with a form letter.  Only Simon & Schuster has mentioned the title of the book in that reply.

I've sent proposals via email to twenty literary agents gleaned from the Internet complete with the requested information of a brief biography, novel design, and sample chapter.

Half of these literary agents have made courtesy responses.  All have complained about the sheer volume of manuscript proposals.  One complained of receiving 1,000 such proposals a month; another 100 a day. 

In a sense, this is good news.  People are going to the trouble of creating a book, not an easy process.  Moreover, they have the temerity to submit what they have written to a prospective agent if not a publisher.  It might be easier to win the lotto than to have someone read what you have written.

I told BB that were I able to have had the maturity and writing skill in the 1970's, or before the electronic media age, I might have gotten this book published.  But, alas, I was not ready.  I lacked the will to write honestly about South Africa during apartheid, and found it only as old man. 

My children may one day read what I have written, thinking every word to be true, when much of it is made up, without destroying the integrity of the effort.  Once read, I hope they don't think too poorly of their father. 

I have no regrets of having written this book, but instead thank BB for making it possible. 

No one forces anyone to write a book much less a novel, which I have found far more difficult than anything I've written in nonfiction.

THE BALKANS AND HUMANITY

On another subject, I am close to finishing my Danube River Reflections.  I have been working on little else since returning from the Balkans earlier this month.

It would make a wonderful little book, I think, with BB's pictures – she took over a thousand.  The Balkans has been a moving experience.  My wonder is why. 

Could it be that I walked in the footprints of the Romans more than 2,000 years ago, or that my feet touched the same cobblestones of St. Paul the Apostle?  I don't know. 

I am of Nordic extraction but the trauma and pain, defeat and resilience, death and resurrection of the people of this region reside in my marrow.  It often felt like a moving picture in my head, as if I had stepped into Rod Serling's Twilight Zone, and time had stopped, transported through a glass darkly to another age. 

As late as the 1990's, there were brutal wars here when men and young boys were marched out into the countryside, forced to dig their own graves, and then shot to death because they were Bosnian Muslims. 

Similar atrocities happened here in the 1940's during the Nazi occupation if you were Jewish, in the 1960's through the 1980's if you opposed the communist regime.  Alas, it happened more than a thousand years ago when the Romans, the Huns, the Turks, the Magyars, the Visigoths and the Germanic tribes plundered the land and painted the earth red with the blood of innocent people. 

You look into the eyes of these Slavic people, people who cling passionately to their beliefs be they Orthodox Christian, Catholic or Muslim, and you see God in their eyes.  So don't tell me there is no God.  God is shown in the beautiful cities that have been rebuilt over and over again after men of ill will have leveled them to the earth. 

No tribe of man could survive such adversity without the strength of belief in something bigger than the self.

I have worked and lived in Europe over the last fifty years, but have had no reference to this region or people before.  Nor have I felt the strength I felt in this region.  We are made strong by adversity not by its absence.  Suffering is necessary to reach inside us to discover our essence, which is the indomitable human spirit.  I felt it in the Balkans.  I thank God I lived long enough to experience it on the twenty-fifth anniversary of my marriage to BB.  It was a spectacular anniversary present.

Be always well,

Jim

NOT ANYWAY TO RUN A COUNTRY!

 NOT ANYWAY TO RUN A COUNTRY!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© August 23, 2011

ANNOUNCEMENT

Snopes, the watchdog for truth telling in news releases, has given a bold blue “true” to the story that General Electric is planning to move its 115-year-old x-ray division from Waukesha, Wisconsin to Beijing, China.  GE plans to invest $2 billion in this enterprise and train more than 65 engineers and create six research centers in China.  GE made a $5.1 billion profit in 2010, but paid no taxes, and employs more people overseas than it does in the United States.

To add irony to this development, President Barak Obama’s “job creation czar” is none other than Jeff Immelt, CEO and Chairman of the Board of General Electric.

THE RATIONALE AND DANCE

This is not a huge GE operation.  The Wisconsin x-ray division employs 120 people.  The justification for the move is to respond to China’s accelerating healthcare market.  GE released the statement, “As the company grows more global, it’s increasingly important for us to become close to our customers.”  This is a 50-50 joint venture based in China.

In the present dearth of jobs climate, the inclination is to knock President Obama.  Truth be told he has little control over the situation.  Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, or any other candidate currently looking to be president in the 2012 presidential election is prisoner to the global climate.  It has taken one hundred years of commission and omission to get the United States into this mess with our leaders all stick figures to the times.

President Obama says, “American workers are the greatest workers in the world.”  Perry and Romney and other presidential candidates have said the same thing.  Words!

Republicans look back with nostalgia to President Ronald Reagan, who had the good fortune to be president during a massive Department of Defense (DoD) build up, and the decline and fall of the Soviet Union, just prior to globalization on the current scale.

My own penultimate career paralleled the Reagan years but before the Internet frenzy.  I mention Reagan because much as he has been celebrated by his legions of admirers he was in the right place at the right time.  The private sector ratcheted ups its greed in those subsequent years.  I know.  I was one of the benefactors. 

Giants of the private sector, and GE among them have operated as if they were independent states.  They have had legions of lobbyists in Washington, DC who manipulated Congress and the Oval Office as extensions of their own mission plans. 

When I was director of human resources planning and development for Honeywell Europe, Ltd. in the 1980's, I worked for Honeywell’s European president, Mike Bonsignore.  Mike went on to become CEO of Honeywell International, Inc., forming a sweetheart deal with Lawrence Bossidy, CEO of AlliedSignal Corp. in 1999, adopting the Honeywell company name. 

GE then came into play.  It planned a $42 billion acquisition of Honeywell International Inc. to dominate the European marketplace.  It was blocked by The European Union in 2001. 

The corporate speak of the EU was predictable.  "A more diversified, and thus more competitive GE could somehow disadvantage other market participants.”  Truth be told, GE had a reputation of playing quick and dirty with Europe after World War Two, and that economic affront had not been forgotten.

The shooting star of Mike Bonsignore into the firmament fell quickly to earth not unlike the waxwings of Daedalus in the Greek myth.  He retired and Honeywell has been limping along ever since.

WHERE IS ANDREW JACKSON WHEN YOU NEED HIM?

Those that read me know that I have a special place in my heart for President Andrew Jackson, not because he was a perfect man, but because he was an American president that had a center, spine and didn’t do the dance fantastic with the banks or industry, Congress or special interests, but looked out for the people’s business better than any president before or since. 

Jackson, according to historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., is responsible for the imperial presidency, which was not meant to be about pomp and circumstance, but to keep special interests at bay in order to promote the common good.

His legacy has been eroded during the last hundred years with grandiose ideas from President Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson, down through FDR and to the Oval Office’s present occupant, finding it better to promote their celebrity and legacy than stay connected with the people. 

More harm than good has been done with social and corporate welfarism over the last century.  So much is made of entrepreneurism, but so little is made of worker pride, which was once endemic to America and American workers.  It is now all but gone.  Greed is the game at both poles.    

Jackson had his “spoils system” of nepotism and cronies but they came out of the bowels of the country’s common people.  Thomas Jefferson thought Jackson was a buffoon because he wasn't a polished gentleman, but he was far from a buffoon.  Truth be told Jefferson didn’t have the spine of Jackson nor his impact on history. 

Jefferson falls into the hagiocracy of presidents.  This includes Wilson, Roosevelt’s, Kennedy and Reagan.  The halo never fit well on Jackson’s head.  The exception to this trend was Harry S. Truman, who had a little of the Jackson spark.

Jackson never cared what people thought but believed passionately in his role, responsibility and in the American people, which admittedly translated into neo-Europeans.   Indians still will not handle a twenty-dollar bill because his picture is on it. 

Say what you will, but he was a leader, not a poll reader, not a politician in the sense we have of politicians today, but a man who had his own mind, was his own authority, and was energized rather than disrupted by naysayers.  I smile to myself thinking of how he would have frustrated today's media.  It was rumored he never read a book.  I would imagine that could be extended to newspapers as well.  He was too busy doing.

But, alas, the Presidency, the power of Congress, and the voice of the people is only a whisper as the tens of thousands of lobbyists, and hundreds of talking heads gossip the day away in white noise. 

GE, Exxon, BP and scores of other international companies have their own international ambassadors, hundreds of lobbyists, and secret services with no other function than to look out for their own special interests.  Occasionally, these interests are congruent with the national interests of the United States.  Machiavelli is alive and well in the corporation.

We have gravitated to this day by erosion, apathy, dissembling, self-denial and fatigue.  Blame President Obama for the mess, or Congress, Wall Street, or the rise and dominance of corpocracy, but it changes nothing.  These are simply the current faces in our midst.  They didn't create the history.  They are only players currently on stage.  We have made this bed.  Now, we have to sleep in it. 

CORPORATE SIN 

We have no leaders because we are not interested in leadership.  We are interested in people that will support our special interests, the country be damned! 

We have no trust because we don’t trust ourselves.  In “Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leaderships and Dissonant Workers” (2000), eight long years before the real estate and financial meltdown, it was pointed out that the stock market became the arbiter of corporate destiny, and that this was myopic, short-termed, intolerable and destined to fail (p. 137). 

Workers, the book noted, had gravitated to “learned helplessness” and had become suspended in terminal adolescence.  It was shown how corporate ethics had corroded the bond of trust by a business ethic of entitlement (corporate welfarism).  You didn’t read this book?  Surprise!

Still, I can’t improve on Shakespeare.  He dealt with the same dilemma in his day.  He writes in King Lear: “That sir which serves and seeks for gain, and follows but for form, will pack when it begins to rain, and leave thee in the storm.”

The buck doesn’t stop anywhere because like the can, it is kicked constantly down the road.

*     *     *

AN OPEN LETTER TO PAUL KRUGMAN -- YOU KEEP KICKING THE WRONG CAN DOWN THE ROAD!

 AN OPEN LETTER TO PAUL KRUGMAN – YOU KEEP KICKING THE WRONG CAN DOWN THE ROAD!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© August 17, 2011

As always, on my daily walk I let the gods visit me, what I call my muses, and let them play with my conscious mind, as they will.   

After spending the past couple of weeks in the Balkans, and seeing the sights and talking to people in Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Croatia and Hungary, people seemed to coalesce despite rather than because of their leaders.  Too often they faced disappointment, so they developed a moral center and a reliable compass to chart their destiny.    

No people on this globe, Somalia and Ethiopia notwithstanding, have suffered more and resurrected themselves more often over the past 6,000 years.   

I felt their passion, strength and resolute spirit in an Orthodox Christianity or Roman Catholic faith.  Yes, they war against each other, and have had a tempestuous recent history.  Serbian war criminals, for example, are on the dock in The Hague for such conflicts.  The people still cling to their history. 

So long isolated from the rest of Europe, there is not the tourist exploitation.  I wasn’t hassled in a single shop or kiosk when purchasing an item, or overcharged.  

While the cultural roots of the Balkans have changed little, ours have changed dramatically.  It is not a Democrat or Republican problem, not a liberal or conservative solution that currently escapes us.  It is our ignorance of our basic demographic, geographic and personality profiles.  They have changed radically over the past sixty years, and yet are being ignored.

DEMOGRAPHIC PROFILE

Another stimulus package would not put Americans back to work.  Another $ trillion stimulus package would not solve the problem.  Why?

The FDR mindset is not relevant today.  FDR’s National Recovery Act (NRC) was later found unconstitutional.  The Works Project Administration (WPA), however, did turn hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers into employed workers building bridges, highways, recreational stadiums, schools, hospitals, parks and dams.  My da was a WPA employee, and glad to have the job.  He had a seventh grade education.

Demographically, in the 1920’s and 1930’s, only 10 percent of Americans had four-year high school diplomas, and 2 percent had four-year college degrees.  Examine the curriculums of high school and college courses of the 1920s and 1930s, and you can see it was no walk in the park, as it is today.

Today, demographically, nearly 90 percent of all Americans have attended high school and are likely to have some college with more than 60 percent with four-year college degrees, many of them with professional credentials such as engineering, chemistry, nursing, biology and psychology.

Were we to launch a $ trillion stimulus package for jobs, nine out of ten would lack the skills, energy, inclination or humility to perform such menial tasks typical of the 1930's.  We would have to import indentured workers from Mexico and abroad to do the manual labor. 

PERSONALITY PROFILE

It is easy to forget that we have had a sixty-year inculcation of non-consequential behavior that has created a workforce from the top to the bottom, be those employed millionaires or those living off the dole, of workers with learned helplessness and an inclination to complain rather than contribute. 

Baby boomers inaugurated the spoiled brat genre of workers suspended in terminal adolescent with hardly an adult among them.  Subsequent generations -- called Yuppie or X or Y or whatever generations  -- have reified immaturity into a national work habit.  We see this juvenile behavior everyday in Congress, and yet act surprised.

This personality profile is so endemic to our society that it is not noticed, as it is hard to separate what is observed from one’s own behavior.   

We have become a cosmetic culture of not only superficial persona dedicated to instant gratification, but with a predilection to instant and simplistic resolution of our problems.  Consequently, often the problems we solve are not the problems we face.

An army of attractive talking heads, academics, intellectuals, actors and actresses, pundits and problem solvers parade across our consciousness numbing our minds from awareness of the damage done. 

So mesmerizing is this constant barrage that we unconsciously come to mimic the play by creating our own theatre of numbness on Facebook, Linkin, and other Internet outlets, giving them the collective euphemistic tag of social connection, when they are neither social nor connecting in a face-to-face context, but substitutes to conflict management and confrontation engagement.   

We use the remote to change channels on our televisions.  Now, remote has become characteristic of our personality. 

In the 1920’s and 1930’s, there were few if any remedial institutions such as community colleges.  If you didn’t get it the first time, there were few chances for reruns.  Now life is nothing but reruns.  Community colleges have become essentially fifth year high schools designed to prepare students for college when high school failed the assignment.

After WWII, someone came up with the idea that everyone should have access to a college education irrespective of their interest in ideas, much less reading books, attending lectures, taking tests or sitting on their behinds for four or more years. 

Many people like to do things.  They like to see how things work, and to use their hands and minds to work out the mysteries of mechanical things.  Failing to give craftsmanship its due, we see sixty years later that we don’t have enough plumbers, pipe fitters, electricians and technicians, carpenters and bricklayers, landscapers and tailors, bakers and cooks. 

The dignity of work has been prostituted into the idea that only moving symbols around constitute work of real value.  We are now stuck with the results of that preoccupation.  Many, like me, have to hire the simplest job to be done because of a lack of skill. 

GEOGRAPHIC PROFILE

In the 1920’s and 1930’s, we were still basically an agrarian society with four out of five workers in farming or allied to farming in some tangential way.  WWII gave rise to the United States becoming a manufacturing society, but even then we applauded ourselves for making things quickly and cheaply.  Little did we know that would haunt us come the 1960’s and 1970’s.  We manufactured what we liked, and let the world know they could take it or leave it.  Hubris and vanity drove manufacturing, and ultimately over the cliff.

The war saw a shift from the farm into the city with women moving from the home into the factory.  The United States, untouched by devastation, took advantage of the situation continuing to produce at the maddening pace in peacetime that it had developed during the war, as the world was its willing customer. 

Like many of my generation, coming of age during WWII, I was the first in my family to receive a college education.  Moreover, I reaped the advantages of the times, soaring in my career, but always as an outsider.  The frenzy never made sense to me, or the drive to keep up with the Joneses.  Nor did I embrace the compare and compete formula of excess that became our national mantra. 

My humble roots have always been my anchors as an executive, living in such diverse places as Europe and South Africa, working in South America and across the United States.  I witnessed our geographic profile changing first hand with a foot in the past and one in the future. 

People of the right and left, liberal and conservative are finally coming down to earth after a sixty-year hiatus.  It may not be registering too strongly, but there is a growing sense we have been duped, not by invasions of Huns, Romans, Nazis and Soviets, as in the case of the people of the Balkans, but by our passivity and self-conscious abdication of responsibility to manage change.  We looked to others to do it for us.

It is starting to permeate our consciousness that rhetoric is not reality and that excess is a terminal disease.  The Tea Party is an expression of frustration.  It is not the answer but should be understood not to be the problem.  It is a clumsy attempt to leave our social lethargy behind, and should not be faulted for that.

THE QUANDARY OF THE UNEMPLOYED AND THE 99-WEEKERS

Since unemployment won’t end anytime soon, there has to be more thoughtful approaches as to how to get 90 to 95 percent of those currently on the unemployment roles to do some kind of work for the benefits accrued of up to $250 per week for 99-weeks.  I suspect that this would be better for the country and for the 99-weekers as well.  They could be: 

(1) Babysitters for working mothers.

(2) Janitors for schools, churches, office complexes, factories, and warehouses.

(3) Night watchmen and security guards for public and private buildings.

(4) Dishwashers and clean-up people for restaurants and school cafeterias.

(5) Maids for hospitals, schools, churches, motels, hotels, and homes of invalids.

(6) Gardeners and lawn maintenance workers for schools, churches, and public properties.

(7) Reading of books at schools, libraries, and public offices.

(8) Companions for invalids by reading and listening and socializing with them.

(9) Picking up trash along streets and roads, and interstate roadways.

(10)Driving people from place to place.

99-weekers have to pay taxes on their earnings.  There might be some formula devised to reduce these taxes as an incentive to do these jobs.  This is not a definitive list of possibilities, but a beginning.  True, worker compensation is something that workers pay into, but unlikely to the tune of $18,000 or more for most. 

People of your stature, with a direct line to power, could look at our problems more compellingly, in my view, if you would take into account how drastically we have changed in terms of demographic, geographic and personality profiles.  The American mind of the times has little to do with the FDR model, or even the Reagan model come to think of it.

*     *     *

WHAT A CRAZY DAY! TUESDAY, AUGUST 16, 2011

WHAT A CRAZY DAY! TUESDAY, AUGUST 16, 2011

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© August 17, 2011

Forty years ago, as wont is my way, I sat at my desk and wrote an essay, more or less for my own edification, titled “Time Out for Sanity!”  It was eventually published as a book in 2007 as, "A Look Back to See Ahead.” 

Again, I suspect I did it for my own sanity.  I thought of that essay and that book as I woke up early this morning and munched on the illogical play of yesterday.

*     *     *

The Sarkozy-Merkel plan for “closer euro zone integration” called for more austerity of citizens, and greater pressure on the banks, as if there wasn't enough austerity or pressure already.  I am not an economist, but I read the published report and thought, this is madness. 

Europe is already at the incineration stage.    Not surprising, Wall Street was not impressed as stocks fell after a three-day rally.  One writer said, it was like pouring gasoline on an out-of-control fire.  In my lexicon, it is a non-plan plan.

*     *     *

President Obama must not be able to identify with President Truman’s dictum that “the buck stops here,” as he’s on the road again, traveling through Minnesota and Iowa, two states with relatively low unemployment and healthy economies compared to elsewhere across the country.  It is not reassuring to picture the president traveling across the farm belt on a campaign bus while the economy continues to tank.

An Iowan confronted the president as he went through the line of the crowd separated by bales of hay.  He asked his president why people in Obama administration called Tea Party enthusiasts, terrorists.  Obama said it was untrue, but implied they were acting irresponsibly when it came to the debt ceiling debate. 

It is like 2007 and deja vu with the president touring the Midwest in a bus like a campaigner, not in fact the President of the United States.  Who is manning the store in DC?  Or does this tell us the president doesn’t actually run the country?

*     *     *

Texas Governor Rick Perry announced his entry into the presidential race the same day as the Iowa Straw Poll was taking place, an event that some campaigners have spent the last five years cultivating a following. 

Perry isn’t penalized for this affront for only a week later polls show him to be leading Republican candidates with 26% to Romney’s 16%, and Michele Bachmann’s 14%, who, incidentally, won the Iowa Straw Poll.

Perry’s impertinence took a bizarre turn when he told an Iowa audience that if the Obama administration printed more money before the 2012 election it would be “almost treason” to do so.  If this were not insolent enough, the governor added that he didn’t know how Iowans would react to this, but he knew how ugly Texans would get. 

I cannot imagine a person being president with no more civility than that.

*     *     *

I shed tears when I see the names of our men and women lost in Afghanistan and Iraq, as their pictures, names, rank, age, and hometown are presented on the News Hour on PBS when their deaths are confirmed.  

Then the Department of Defense announces it is considering cutting the entitlements and benefits of veterans to bring down defense costs.  Currently, veterans, after completing twenty years of military service, are entitled to 50 percent of their pay in retirement for the best three years of service. 

DoD wants this benefit reduced claiming it will save $ billions.  To my mind, it is a slap in the face of young men and women who make the sacrifice to serve their country in a voluntary military.  Don’t these DoD people have any idea of the psychological as well as economic impact that such consideration has on the military and their families? 

It reminded me of the private sector that does what is easiest by letting go those who can least afford to fight the action in redundancy exercises. 

*     *     *

Multi-billionaire Warren Buffett, who must feel he has not been in the limelight enough lately, came on Charlie Rose’s show (August 16, 2011) after writing an op-ed piece in the New York Times titled “QUIT CODDLING US SUPER RICH." 

Buffett, worth more than $50 billion, heads up “Patriotic Millionaires,” which has the premise that those making $1 million or more should pay more taxes, and those making $10 million or more should pay even more taxes. 

It sounds magnanimous and enticing, but is simplistic and can actually be counterproductive.  Like everyone else, millionaires are not a homogeneous group nor are their circumstances precisely the same.  It proves you don’t necessarily have to be intelligent to be rich. 

*     *     *

Segueing on this same subject, the economist on The News Hour (PBS), stood outside the David Letterman Show in New York City and showed New Yorkers three pie charts.  One showed an equal distribution between the poor (20%), the middle class (20%), the upper middle class (20%), the rich (20%) and the super rich (20%).  The second chart showed these percentages skewed considerably with the relatively well off (30-40%) dominating the pie chart.  The third chart showed the rich took up 80% of the chart with everyone else skewed into the remaining 20%.

The economist asked passersby to identify the chart that represented the United States.  Most chose the middle one, which was Sweden.  The US was the third one. 

On the News Hour, a statistician confirmed this.  He said, “80 percent of America’s wealth is controlled by the top 20 percent.”  More dramatic, “the top one-tenth of one percent received a ten percent increase in their wealth in 2010.”

The statistician compared the American economic pie to African dictators of the most callous kind. 

Before you let out a gasp, and reference the 50 percent of Americans who pay no taxes, chances are you are in this 80 percent “somewhere.”  Look it up!

Fifty (50) percent of Americans pay no taxes because they don’t make much money!  Has anyone thought of that?  The idea to get such people to pay taxes when they are living like Third World citizens in the richest country in the world should give pause.

*     *     *

Then there was a man hanging on in a cell phone tower some sixty feet from the ground, being talked down by a negotiator, at the point when I left him, unsuccessfully.  The twenty-four-year-old young man had been so situated since last Thursday, or five days without food or water.  I pray he survives because I don’t know how he has survived to this point. 

Why is he up there?  I don’t know, but his irrationality or emotional difficulty had lots of company Tuesday, August 16, 2011.

*     *     *

THE INCOMPREHENSIBLE "X" FACTOR -- AN EXCHANGE

THE INCOMPREHENIBLE “X” FACTOR – AN EXCHANGE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© August 14, 2011

REFERENCE:

The reader here is a former managing editor of an international journal that has published essays of mine on leadership, or more precisely leaderless leadership and dissonant workers.  To his credit, he had the courage to publish me when I left no one off the hook 

As the dust clears, and it becomes more apparent where we are, I can better understand why he published me, but also why I failed to connect.  Given the reputation of being provocatively in your face, it is now apparent I wasn’t in the reader’s face enough.

*     *     *

A READER WRITES:

The American people, the media and politicians are still way too in love with movie one-liners and the notion that they have anything to do with leadership and wisdom.

The "missing story" is not a story but a snappy put down or challenge – also known as the buck stops here!  That is what Harry S. Truman said.  He went on, “They claimed I was giving them hell and I was just telling the truth.  If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen.” 

My distant cousin Theodore Roosevelt put it this way, "Walk softly and carry a big stick!"

Harry and TR were both great leaders who also made some pretty big mistakes. They did lots more than just draft and give one-liners. I wonder who among our current leader wannabes would continue giving a speech and waving to the crowd after being shot, or would fire someone of the stature of MacArthur in the middle of a war

But this is not 1908, nor 1951.

We wanted new leadership but still feel more comfortable with someone who "acts" like a leader in a movie - this is life and we are messing up more, faster than ever before - we still want/need new leadership but still cannot actually embrace it because it requires us to do hard work as well.

Ever hopeful still - grin...

*     *     *

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

The current climate on the political right as well as left is puerile.  It is as if few in responsible positions have emotional maturity beyond eleven or twelve year old six graders. 

It is interesting that you mention President Truman.  We have been making a retreat from him ever since, on the right as well as the left.  Truman, who only had a high school education, was a failed businessman, and benefited from Kansas City, Missouri’s Tom Pendergast political machine, turned out to be his own man in the oval office.  Imagine that?

He not only fired a military leader who defied his political authority, but brought WWII to a dramatic conclusion by dropping the atomic bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.  Consider this, as vice president, he was not even privy to the existence of the bomb until after April 12, 1945, when FDR died, and he was elevated to the presidency.  Four months later, the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan.

Truman was 24 when Theodore Roosevelt was making a name for himself in 1908.  He would go on to distinguish himself on the Western Front of Europe in WWI, and start his slow climb to prominence.

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I mention this because the brightest of our young people today, my granddaughter among them, doesn’t like history, and would rather read novels of vampires.  Indeed, my four-year-old granddaughter and her twin six-year-old sisters knew immediately when they saw the t-shirt we brought back from Romania came from the land of Transylvania and Dracula. 

Myth and fantasy, or a retreat from reality, has tainted the most celebrated of our leaders. 

Ronald Wilson Reagan, born in 1911, growing up in the jazz age and the roaring twenties, eventually finding his role in Hollywood, often attributed fictitious celluloid characters of the big screen to flesh and blood identities in his off handed stories. 

Hollywood has increasingly found its way into political leadership in recent years.  Meanwhile, there is little chance today of an academic the likes of Woodrow Wilson to scale the heights to the presidency. 

You might think President Barak Obama the exception.  Look at how he has come under fire, not only because of the state of the economy, but because he is unable to project or articulate the fantasy world we all prefer to embrace.  He is the only adult in the room for he doesn’t know how to act otherwise, and is criticized for this because we want him to reify our fantasyland and this is foreign to his nature.

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THE GENESIS OF JUVENILITY

When I was a boy in the early 1940’s, and we chose up sides, you weren’t picked if you weren’t any good.  You watched, or did something else. 

In school, we knew who was smart, who was lazy and who was dumb, and so did those so identified, and it was accepted if not liked that well.

It wasn’t cool to bully anyone because there was always someone else that could knock your socks off.

When we failed a course, or weren’t promoted to the next grade, parents may have wailed, “foul,” but they had no redress.  Teachers prevailed as the school superintendent backed them.  There was no taking the course over to erase a grade.

If you didn’t keep your powder dry, cheated, or misbehaved, you could be expelled, permanently.  That school was out of bounds for you, and if you wanted to continue your education it would have to be somewhere else. 

In kindergarten, first and second grade, you were awarded merits and distinction for excellence or the basis of performance with everyone else passively accepting the outcome.  You didn’t get awarded with something for nothing, that is, so as to protect your delicate psyche from permanent damage.

There was an unwritten mentoring process in which older boys and girls looked after younger boys and girls with a modicum of respect shown on both sides of the exchange.

There was no six-week Standard Achievement (SAT) review course that you could take to achieve a higher score and ranking with a better chance to get into your favorite college.  High school grades were an index of what you could likely do at the college level, and were accepted as such.

There also was no six-week Graduate Record Examination (GRE) review course that you could take to achieve a higher score and a better chance of getting into graduate school.  Your college record was an index of the possibility of your filling a slot in graduate school.

The irony is that students then had more of a voice in their education before educators came up with the student-centered learning. 

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Trudeau’s Doonesbury today hits the nail on the head.  The cartoon is about the results of a test, measuring student learning in terms of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills. 

The results show no gains after two years suggesting students spend far more time socializing than studying.  “C’mon dean,” the executive administrator says, “that’s why they come!  We give them good grades and a degree, their parents are happy too!  Who cares if they can’t reason?”  The dean answers, “Uh, employers?”

Not to be outdone, Dilbert by Scott Adams looks at the problem from a work perspective. 

Dilbert asks if he could work at home two days a week, saying, “I can be twice as productive and happier at the same time.” 

The boss admits in Adams famed fashion, “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but you’re part of an elaborate science experiment to see how much frustration it takes to kill employees.” 

Then, the boss adds the rationale for this declaration.  “Why else would the company make you commute for two house a day just to sit in a tiny box?” 

Dilbert complains, “Other people work from home?”  The boss answers, “Are you referring to the control group?”

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We have had sixty-year-long cultural drag that has been like an elephant on our backs.  This finds us continually throwing clinkers in the works to frustrate our progress as reason has taken a holiday. 

That notwithstanding, we still believe we can find a leader, someone capable of pulling us miraculously out of this mess without first embracing reason and reality.  It is why the cycle continues, as we remain victims of circular logic with no inclination or will to manage an escape.

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Feminine advocate Gloria Steinem, now 77 and still beautiful, said it took a hundred years to get where women are today, and it will take another hundred years to get where they should be.  It is not only true of feminism but everything.  Cultural shortsightedness is endemic to every age and is always reluctant to let go of the status quo. 

We have spoon fed and promoted self-esteem psychology and self-indulgent behavior to three generations of children.  This has represented a frantic retreat from pain and failure and reality, and now pain and failure and reality are staring us in the face.  Small wonder we fail to recognize or deal with the fact. 

We have unwittingly groomed leaderless leadership and dissonant behavior into our constituency.  Now nine out of every ten people know nothing else.  Your point precisely. 

It is my view that this is unlikely to change whether President Barak Obama is reelected or not.  It will only change when we quit being squealing infants in grown up bodies if we don’t get our way.  I don’t hold much hope for us changing in the immediate future, which includes the 2012 presidential election, all the rhetoric to the contrary.

Be always well, good friend,

Jim

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THAT INCOMPREHENSIBLE "X" FACTOR

THAT INCOMPREHENSIBLE  “X” FACTOR

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© August 14, 2011

Charlie Rose had Arnold Palmer on his television show for the hour the other day (PBS, August 4, 2011).  Palmer will soon be 82.  He had a conversation with Rose, accompanying him through his home, rich in memorabilia of a long and successful career with mementos on display of his many close relationships with people he called his “buddies.”  This included Hall of Fame golfer, Jack Nicklaus, and president, Dwight David Eisenhower.  Nicklaus won a record setting eighteen major golf tournaments, while Palmer won eight.

Rose asked Palmer if he thought Tiger Woods, who has won fourteen major PGA tournaments would equal or surpass his friend.  Palmer rubbed his chin, furrowed his brow, and hesitated with a twinkle in his eyes. 

They had been discussing the “x” factor, that incomprehensible component that champions possess, if tentatively, that separates them from the pack, that has far less to do with raw talent, and much more to do with hard work, passion, sacrifice and an indomitable spirit to win.

Once that spirit is broken, that sense of invincibility, chances of regaining it, Palmer and Rose agreed by mirroring smiles, is between remote and never.   

Those thoughts occurred to me as I was reading Drew Westen’s piece from the New York Times.  Westen  had been a guest on the Charlie Rose Show recently, and cut up pretty badly by Fareed Zakaria of the Times, and Jonathan Chait of The New Republic (see blog: “Conceit on Display – The Charlie Rose Show,” August 11, 2011). 

Westen writes in his piece, “There was a story the American people were waiting to hear, and needed to hear, from their new president, but he didn’t tell it.  And in the ensuing months he continued not to tell it, no matter how outrageous the slings and arrows his opponents threw at him.” 

Westen is a psychologist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia with clearly a political orientation.  While reading his piece, an article I didn’t think deserved the kind of abuse that he suffered from Zakaria, Chait and Rose, I thought what must have gone through the mind of the new president. 

Here he was a man who had beat the odds by being the first president of color, a long shot with no discernible executive experience, but a professorial background where his ideas and opinions were unlikely to be challenged, a man who was riding the Camelot chariot created by John and Jacqueline Kennedy, only to forget the “x” factor that deposited him into the presidential suite. 

Barak Obama did everything right as a campaigner, and began doing everything wrong as a president.  It would seem with hindsight that he or someone in his immediate circle of advisers told him that this was his moment in history to do what no other president had done in one hundred years.  It was his moment to put through a national health insurance program to cover everyone whether they liked it or not. 

The healthcare program had been given a push as far back as Wilson, some attention by FDR, Truman and even Nixon.  But it reached a bureaucratic crescendo during the Clinton Administration as Hillary Clinton headed a taskforce that created a weighty and cumbersome tome that couldn’t get out of committee. 

With both houses of Congress in his pocket during his first months in office, President Obama did the impossible.  He got healthcare legislation through Congress, which he signed into law.  Some say he did this at the expense of a sick economy, rising unemployment, soaring national debt, and an even weaker global economy that was now an unavoidable factor in America’s national economy. 

When the world of Tiger Woods crashed to earth with the crumbling of his vehicle on his estate with the added symbolic nuance of a golf club taken to his windows, it would seem his “x” factor disintegrated as well.  Obviously, something has crippled him as he most recently missed the cut at the PGA Championship.

One wonders if President Obama’s failure to take care of jobs, first, will be his “Waterloo.”  Could it be that his dalliance with the siren of history is not unlike the siren of the flesh that seemingly sullied the “x” factor of Tiger Woods? 

Time will tell.  You can beat up on the messenger, as Westen clearly has been, spend a $ billion in a reelection campaign, and still not regain the “x” factor.  Success is tenuous, and continuing success is unlikely without it.   

A word to the wise, this “x” factor doesn’t apply only to great athletes and great leaders, but to us all. 

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CONCEIT ON DISPLAY -- THE CHARLIE ROSE SHOW

CONCEIT ON DISPLAY – THE CHARLIE ROSE SHOW

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© August 11, 2011

I wrote a missive on my blog (July 4, 2011):  RETREAT FROM ADULTHOOD – Part Three – What Happened to Civility?  I cringed today when I watched the Charlie Rose Show, as I saw civility dashed to emotional shards by the flippant remarks of one of the celebrated intellectuals of our times.

Guest on the Charlie Rose Show were Fareed Zakaria of Time magazine in his $1,000 suit, Jonathan Chait of the New Republic with his permanent pout against the backdrop of a Bloomberg logo, a sponsor of the Rose show, and a smiling Drew Westen of Emory University with a head so big it filled the entire screen with his Cheshire cat grin 

The subject, of course, was once again the economy, the stimulus package, President Obama’s leadership, jobs, and most remarkably of all, the hagiographic profiling of Obama first two years by Zakaria and Chait.  They claimed Obama’s first two years as president were extraordinarily successful.

Westen differed quite distinctly with them on this.  Worse yet, he detailed how President George Bush was more effective and decisive in the same period of his administration with a divided Congress.

At that point, it got elitist ugly. 

Zakaria and Chait purred in harmony, while Rose smiled in obsequious abeyance to their every expression, especially to silver tongue Zakaria, wallowing in the honey of his words.  Rose smiled with delight at Zakaria’s brilliance, noting he studied law at Duke under one of the pontificator’s references.   

Waxing cheerful with the self-conscious mask of good fellowship, Westen disdained that it was two against one in the discussion, not unlike Obama and the Congress.  Actually, it was three against one. 

Every time Westen spoke the camera would turn to Rose showing the host pointing a nervous finger as if it would dial down the Emory professor’s chilling remarks, remarks chilling to the other three on the topic.

Zakaria was composed, Chait dismissive, as Westen detailed how a larger stimulus package could have passed Congress.  He argued that Majority Senate Leader Reid could have succeeded with the $1.3 trillion stimulus package if “he had kept calling for a call vote in the Senate until he reached the 60 votes required.”   He added, “Reid made a call vote three times.  He should not have stopped.”

It was then that Zakaria dropped his cool and let his frustrations show.  He sounded like the Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, who had just had an underling openly question his infallibility. 

Very demurely, yet cruelly scathing, Zakaria said in reply to Westen’s hypothesis, “We have a professor (here) who has never run for dog catcher advising one of the most skillful politicians in the country on how he should have handle it (the stimulus).”

Westen, to his credit, took the psychic blow with much more grace than I thought possible. 

Dr. Westen, professor in the psychology and psychiatric department of Emory University in Atlanta, deserved at the very least a modicum of adult behavior and the civility of colleagues in a public forum, especially one rumored so unflappable as Zakaria.

I sat in front of the television for some time with the pause button freeze framing the end of the program, and thought, Professor Westen was talking like the man-on-the-street, the guy who has a lot of pent up anxiety, the fellow who hasn’t found work for two years with a degreed education, a person who is too angry to find words to express his angst, but hopes to find intellectual civility among talking heads when he hears problems that concern him discussed on such shows as the Charlie Rose Show.   

There is a crack in our society, and it is not at the bottom, but at the top.  God help us if we can endure this fault line and still survive. 

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