Cheney in Wonderland

Vice President Dick Cheney was not injured in the attack near Baghram Air Base, for which Diogenes thinks we might be pleased.  The Taliban, who sent the suicide bomber,  stated that they did so exactly because Dick Cheney was there.  The attack did no damage to the base, and Cheney was never in any danger.  However a US soldier died, along with an American contractor and more then 20 Afghans.

 Mr. Cheney is in Afghanistan – and all over Asia – exactly because it would be very embarrassing for him to be in his usual place.  Washington is where the jury is out in the case of I Lewis Libby, former Chief of Staff to the VP.

Mr. Libby and Mr. Cheney were among those responsible for taking US forces out of Afghanistan at a time when we could have won the Afghan war.  As General Grant observed, winning is not about taking territory, it is about destroying the enemy’s army.

We failed to do that in Afghanistan.  We took the troops to Iraq, but also failed to destroy the enemy’s army there, and created a civil war as well. 

Another demonstration of people dying in order to float the rationale of the Right Wing Republicans.

The Paris Hilton Relief Act

Today Diogenes got an e-mail-chain-mail from his friend Andy.

Andy get these things from a Republican friend. Today’s was a poem about a farmer who is taxed to death, and then has to pay an inheritance tax… maybe you have seen it.

Tax his land, tax his bed, tax the table at which he’s fed…

The whole thing is a lie, of course. A farmer who is in poor financial health does not leave an estate large enough to pay an inheritance tax.

Diogenes does not know how you feel about inheritance taxes. Along with Bill Gates Sr and Bill Gates Jr, and Warren Buffet, Diogenes is in favor of inheritance taxes.

Let’s talk about Diogenes’ mother for a minute. Mom has quite a lot of money, by Diogenes standards, and Diogenes might inherit some of it. Diogenes is in favor of the inheritance tax. Mother, who has not a thing to lose, is very opposed to the Death Tax. She says that she has struggled (her word) for everything she has. She made most of her money from investing in Manhattan Real Estate. Make no mistake, Mom has done a great job with a building that she got a a very good price because it was losing money. She hired a PI to find the tenants who were not really living there (and were making more money per month sub-leasing than they paid in rent), and got the leases back. Then Mom did some construction so the apartments were no longer the same, and got them out of rent-stabilization. Anyway, she was very good at it and made a lot of money. The appreciation on the value of Mom’s investments has never been taxed. Not taxed to death, never taxed. She is taxed on income, but not on appreciation. Yes, Diogenes knows about the hideous New York City Real Estate Tax. The tenants pay for that, as they pay for the high cost of heating fuel.

Mother is not in the class of very wealthy, but they have this in common:

They money earned is taxed, the appreciation of wealth is not taxed.
If the Republicans succeed in abolishing the inheritance tax (now in a five year hiatus), they should name it the Paris Hilton tax relief act.

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Let’s think about this: No American farmer ever went out of business due to high taxes.
They go out of business because they cannot make a profit… the tax money is marginal to them. There are cycles of profitability in farming… sometimes they make a lot of money, sometimes they lose money. For a very long time, the big farm owners would buy up the small farms when the small farmers went bust.
In the 1930’s the Democrats put in a system of price supports that limited the profits in good years and prevented catastrophic losses. When the Republicans took control of the Congress and the White House in the 1950’s, they did not touch the farm programs. When Ronald Reagan was able to bully the Congress in the 1980’s, he did not touch those programs

When Newt Gingrich took control of the House in 1994, and Bob Dole ran the Senate, they passed the Freedom to Farm Act, supported by the biggest farm owners, who made it look like it would be a god-send to all farmers. Diogenes notes that it did not work out that way. Now the average size of US farms is much bigger than it was in 1994.  The number of farmers in the United States is much smaller than it was in 1994. The biggest 5% of farm owners control over 40% of the acres in cultivation.

They would like to make some people believe that we need to support family farmers by reducing the tax burden.  As we say here in Brooklyn, Fuggeddaboudidt!  Here in Brooklyn, we used to have a lot of farms.  There were farms in Canarsie even in the 1970’s.  It was not taxes that put them out of business, it was prosperity… the land became worth much more than the value of the farm, so the farmers took the money – quite a lot of it – and went away.

The Republicans want us to think all those tax-eating programs, the ENTITLEMENTS, those Liberal programs, that’s what’s killing the farmers. Certainly not the five trillion dollars we have spent so far on the Iraq war.

And especially the War in Iraq, which has killed a good many sons of farmers, who went into the service because they could not make a living in agriculture.

Diogenes thinks that the Republicans have been very clever with their under-the-radar campaigns by e-mail and by use of (ugh!) right-wing radio that normal people cannot listen to without a big bottle of Ibuprofen.  They have Frank Luntz and his clones, framing the debate so it’s about Mom and apple-pie and the American Way.

Diogenes hopes that a many people will adopt a skeptical approach to a lot of the stuff that shows up.

—

Diogenes does not insist that the cost of the war in Iraq is five trillion dollars.  Diogenes thinks that since we are going to have to replace 100% of all the land-based equipment owned by all of the armed services as the result of the war, this figure is closer than that of Mr Rumsfeld and Mr Gates.  You know, a trillion here, and a trillion there, pretty soon you are talking about a lot of money.

 

Strom Thurmond’s Political DNA

This week, the NY Daily News trumpeted that the fourth generation ancestor of Al Sharpton was a slave owned by a relative of the late Senator Strom Thurmond.

Diogenes believes that the very worst aspect of America is our heritage of slavery.

Enslavement of conquered people was not invented here.  Indeed, Native Americans were enslaved in the New World a hundred years before the English founded the Jamestown colony, and when the Indians were worked to death, they were replaced by others brought from Africa, where there had been a long history of enslavement.

Enslavement is such a vile crime that Diogenes, who is generally opposed to capital punishment, thinks it might be a good idea for people who hold slaves and those who trade in slaves.  Most Amrericans think that The Emancipation Proclamation ended most of the slavery in the United States.  That is not true:  It did not have any effect in slaveholding states that were not in rebellion against The United States.  The Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution ended lawful slavery in this country, and mostly, it is observed.  Please stay tuned for some examples of enslavement in the USA at the current time.

One aspect of the “peculiar institution” that was ignored for many years was the use of female slaves for sexual pleasure.  Diogenes visited Thomas Jefferson’s home, Monticello, in 1976.  It was already commonly known, at least by History geeks, that Jefferson was thought to have fathered slave children by one of his slaves, Sally Hemings.  At that time, there was no mention of Sally Hemings in the tour.  When asked, the tour guides stated that there were scurrilous rumors to that effect, but there was no evidence that it actually was the case.  A few years ago, it was demonstrated very clearly that the descendants of Sally Hemings were related to Thomas Jefferson, and many believe that they are direct descendants of the President.  The Civil War era diarist Mary Chestnut noted that every plantation had slave children that resembled the male (white) members of the household, a fact that was observed by everyone except on their own plantations.

 

Now, a genealogy service reports that Al Sharpton is the fourth generation descendant of an enslaved man who was owned by Julia Thurmond Sharpton, who was related to the one time candidate for President and full time lying hypocrite, Strom Thurmond.

Diogenes was a little boy in the 1950’s, do he does not have a memory of Thurmond’s race in 1948.  Thurmond is dead now, at long last, but for most of his very long career, he was the champion of those who intended to oppress Black people.  He was the incarnation of an evil that should never have existed, and must be erased from this country before we can actualize our country’s civic beliefs.

Thurmond was opposed to racial mixing, which was anathema to the Southern political elites.  As late as 1969, former Secretary of State Dean Rusk had to resign a professorship at the University of Georgia when his son married a black woman in Virgina.  Strom Thurmond was recorded on many occasions saying he was oppose to miscegenation ( he called it Miss- sejj –i- NAYSHUN).  Thurmond railed against the “mongrelization of the white race” until black people got the vote, and started to vote in large numbers.

Strom Thurmond was lying the whole time.  Before he ran for the Presidency in 1948, James Strom Thurmond was the father of a girl, the daughter of a black servant in the Thurmond household.  After the Senator’s death in 2005, the daughter, Essie May Washington-Williams revealed the secret of who her father was.  During his lifetime, Thurmond acknowledged his daughter, and paid for her education.  After his death, Thurmond’s immediate (white) family tried to say that it was not so, until Washington-Williams’ photograph appeared in newspapers.  The fact is, she looks astonishingly like her father, much closer in resemblance than Strom Thurmond’s legitimate son. 

Brooklyn has an interesting history with respect to slavery.  The oldest existing structure in Brooklyn, built by Colonial-era settlers, is the Lott House.  In the last few years, remedial work on the Lott house uncovered slave quarters.  There are people named Lott living in Brooklyn now, at least one living a few blocks from the Lott house.  Historians of Brooklyn have told Diogenes that the family mostly moved from Brooklyn around 1828, when the institution of slavery was made unlawful in New York State.  Before that, there were many slaves in Brooklyn:  The first Census of the United States, in 1790, showed that Brooklyn was the city with the second-largest number of slaves in the United States (after Charleston SC).

Diogenes believes that the Minority Leader in the US Senate, Trent Lott, is the descendant of the slaveholders in Brooklyn.  There is no evidence of this, except for the coincidence of his name, but proof is not really required for this kind of publication.

Trent Lott is now in his second term as leader of the Republicans in the Senate.  A few years ago, he was supplanted as Majority Leader by Bill Frist, after some of Lott’s public statements on the subject of Strom Thurmond, actually became public.  Here’s what Senator Lott had to say about Thurmond in 2002: 

I want to say this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years either. 

What in the world was Lott talking about?  The problems of Black people having the right to vote?  Being able to earn a good living without fear of being lynched?  When he was caught – and because the speech was broadcast on C-SPAN, it is not surprising that he was caught – Lott made another statement:

My comments were not an endorsement of his positions of over 50 years ago, but of the man and his life.

Lott endorsed the man and the life of his hero, Thurmond.  One wonders if Lott still endorses the life of his hero, who stood for hypocrisy more than anything else.  In the course of looking up Trent Lott, Diogenes found an interesting fact about Lott’s youth.

In 1962, a fraternity at University of Mississippi was raided by federal marshals, who found 24 weapons.  Trent Lott was the president of that fraternity, Sigma Nu. 

Hypocrisy is a result of our history of slavery.  Not all American hypocrisy can be traced back to the institution of slavery.  But a good deal of it can be.  The efforts of Mr. Thurmond and Mr. Lott and others to keep whites in power in the South have been very successful.  There is no more institution of slavery in the United States, but so many people are attached to the ideals of the slaveholders that the USA was virtually captured by the old Confederacy between 2001 and 2007.  And on the other side, there are people who explain every vile act as the result of years of slavery and racisim.

Al Sharpton, the New York politician who never was elected to any office, and who has not lived in New York State in the last 15 years, claimed in 1987 that Tawana Brawley was abducted and repeatedly raped by Steven Pagones, an Upstate NY Assistant District Attorney.  When the governor, Mario Cuomo, asked the Attorney General, Robert Abrams to investigate the allegations, Al Sharpton also said that Abrams had masturbated over the photographs of the naked 15 year old Brawley.  As late as 2003, Sharpton insisted that he did nothing wrong in making those unsupported allegations.  He says all he did was to believe Tawana Brawley’s story. 

Diogenes thinks that both Trent Lott and Al Sharpton are the spiritual descendants of Strom Thurmond.  Both of them have the main characteristics of Thurmond:

Being absolutely wrong about serious subject,
Lying about the nature of their statements and beliefs,
Being intransigent about their lies.

 

—

Slavery is not dead in the USA.  Indeed, there still are several kinds of slaves in New York.  Diogenes sees that he has been wordier than usual, and will address this issue in the future.

 

 

The Financial SOX Scandal

Recently Diogenes listened to parts of a press conference.  Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Senator Chuck Schumer both are in agreement that requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act are too onerous for small and medium sized businesses.  They said that the SOX Act must be scaled back to avoid the loss of business and the loss of jobs that enforcement is causing.

 
Specifically, the Mayor and the Senator said that many securities registrations in the last few years are taking place on the London Stock Exchange or in other financial markets.  According to this story, the reason that various companies give for not being listed on the New York Stock Exchange, is that the Sarbanes-Oxley requirements makes life too difficult for them, and they just do not need the extra expense.

 
Diogenes would like to believe that Senator Schumer and Mayor Bloomberg are telling the exact truth.  At least, that they believe what they are saying.  Mostly, the idea that transparency in a company’s financial transactions causes inefficiency, is silly on its face.

In actual fact, there are two reasons that many companies do not want to comply with the SOX requirements.

 The fact is that actual compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act makes a company more efficient, not less efficient.  Some companies take advantage of the output of their SOX audit, and use it to improve the business process.  The output of the audit is some number of pieces of paper with signatures, reflecting the process the company uses to control its business.  If a company has a successful SOX audit, and they use it to control the business process, making it more efficient each audit cycle, they can make their company more efficient and more profitable.  And in this process, they can make sure that the management of the company are aware of every way that their process can be out of control.  A company whose audit output is a boxcar full of paper is a company that is not under the control of its management.  That is just a statement of fact… The lack of control might be based on the fact that it once was a collection of smaller companies that were assembled in mergers.  It might be based on silly practices that were introduced some time between the invention of the telephone (1875) and he invention of the airplane (1902) or the invention of the digital computer (around 1945).  There are some companies whose managers absolutely do not want financial controls to be transparent:  Diogenes calls these company managers by the technical term, criminals.

 The reader is invited to recall the first man that George W Bush appointed to head the Securities Exchange Commission.  A wonderful fellow, a Brooklyn native, Harvey Pitt.  During the Bill Clinton administration, Harvey Pitt was the spokesman for the big consulting companies that audit big corporations.  In those days, Mr. Pitt said to everyone who would listen, that the people who do the audits know exactly what they are doing, and do not need any oversight from the SEC or anybody else.  It was his misfortune to have been the head of the SEC when the financial sewage plant that was Enron exploded, covering everyone with high-velocity feces.  Before he the spokesman for the audit industry trade group, Pitt was a partner in a Big 8 audit firm.  Interestingly, the article about Harvey Pitt in Wikipedia gives a lot of information, but not the fact that he was the spokeman for the blue smoke and mirrors trade association, and also does not name the Big-8 firm he worked for before that.  Diogenes thinks that it might have been one of the audit firms that had big problems after the Enron disaster.  Incidentally, Diogenes was present at the Brooklyn College commencement exercises in 2003, when the Board of Trustees of Brooklyn College awarded Harvey Pitt the President’s Medal of Distinction, soon after he had to resign in disgrace from the SEC. Senator Schumer delivered an upbeat and Brooklyn-centric address on that occasion.

Diogenes hopes that the reader is still here:  The people who are complaining about the reporting requirements are the same people who the Sarbanes Oxley Act was designed to catch.  More accurately, it was designed to allow the owners – the shareholders – to be able to see whether there is unlawful activity in the company, and to prevent the managements who are engaged in criminal acts, from pretending that the accounting systems just did not permit them to see any wrongdoing.

Diogenes has had the opportunity to talk to corporate clients about Sarbanes-Oxley audits.  Most companies are very, very conservative about SOX audits.  They choose to hire the people they know very well, to conduct these audits.  One company Diogenes knows about, hired for their SOX work the fellow who was the partner in charge of their audits who used to work for Andersen Consulting.  That is very funny:  The Andersen firm imploded after it became general knowledge that they did not have the ability or the integrity to handle the audit work they had.  Diogenes remembers that his friend Aesop coined the phrase, now a cliché, “hiring the fox to guard the hen-house,” to describe situations like this.

 Incidentally, congratulations to Mr. Pitt for starting up a successful company, Kalorama Partners, a global strategic consulting firm.  And Diogenes wishes good luck to his clients, who may need more luck than our wishes can provide.

 

In brief, there is a problem with Corporate Financial Reporting.
The problem is not that the Sarbanes Oxley requirements are too strict.  The Act assumes that every company will take responsibility for its own reporting problems.  It assumes that companies will be happy to be more transparent, because that is the way to be more competitive, and that is always in the interest of the company and its managers. The problem is that they are not enforced by the managers, they are not enforced by the shareholders.  The only enforcement is up to the SEC, who do not have anything like the staff needed for this, and for the state and local law enforcement people who have responsibility for this. 

 

–

 

Diogenes can demonstrate that there are ways to do a Sarbanes Oxley Audit in such a way as to show problems with the company’s process and structure.  That there are ways to re-arrange the process to create efficient and transparent financial reporting and controls. 

 

Diogenes is perfectly happy to acknowledge that this is not a matter that requires a superior intellect.  A sailor standing in the rigging of a sailing ship reported to the Captain that he saw the masts and sails of an enemy warship.  The Admiral of the Fleet told the Captain to ignore the sailor, because the Admiral knew there could not be an enemy warship within hundreds of miles.  The Captain wisely disobeyed the Admiral’s orders, because it did not require intellect or high rank to know where the enemy warship was.  Even an uneducated  sailor standing at the top of the mast with a spy-glass would have the correct information, and no one else would have it. 

 

Diogenes thinks that if Mayor Bloomberg and Senator Schumer would climb up the rigging, they would see the ship in the distance, and that if they do not, it does not matter if they are three times as smart as Diogenes.

Scooter and Dick vs The Truth

Diogenes has been thinking about the Libby trial and the part it plays in shining a light on the Bush administration. Today, a juror was dismissed before they went back in to deliberate. The prosecutor wanted an alternate sent in, which would require that the jury begin deliberations again, and Libby’s lawyers wanted to go on with 11 jurors. Eleven it is.

Scooter Libby is accused of lying to the FBI and to the Grand Jury about the part he played in exposing Valerie Plame. Libby says he did not remember that Dick Cheney told him that Valerie Plame was married to Joe Wilson, whose article about the yellow cake uranium ore annoyed Mr. Cheney. How annoyed was the Vice President? He cut out the article from the NY Times, and put it under the glass on his desk.

Mr. Libby, a lawyer who is famous for his ability to memorize his opponent’s legal filings and his own, says that he has a notoriously bad memory. Libby says that he did not think anything about Wilson or Plame, although he did see that cut out article on the Vice President’s desk. Libby told many people about Plame’s other name. All of the reporters who testified about Libby, must have been lying, especially the one from the New York Times who went to jail for 90 days to avoid testifying aobut Libby. Unwisely, Libby also gave the information out to that well-known Democrat Party operative Ari Fleischer. All of the reporters who testified about Libby, must have been lying. Fleischer prbably testified agains Libby because Fleischer has always been jealous of Libby’s hair. And Cathy Martin, the Republican appointee who was the VP’s press officer, I suppose we should just ignore her altogether.

It is all part of the same cloth. By and large, everything that Dick Cheney has to say, is a lie. Remember the debate with John Edwards in 2004. Mr. Cheney said with the greatest of solemnity, that he had never met Edwards until that very evening. I would have believed it if I did not know that the Vice President sometimes presides over the Senate. There is a videotape of a public event where Mr. Cheney, on a podium, introduced Mr. Edwards, next to him, to the audience.

It would be instructive, Diogenes thinks, to look carefully at the story of Cheney shooting his friend Whittington. The story Cheney gives is that he just did not see Whitington, and shot him in the face. Whittington was hit in the face, and in the chest. The birdshot that hit Whittington in the chest, had to be removed from the area near his heart. Diogenes is not a doctor, and has no special knowledge of firearms. Even a cursory knowledge of anatomy indicates that this is probably not true. The area near the heart is surounded by the ribcage, which is difficult to penetrate. Digenenes thinks that if the birdshot penetrated the ribs, it should also have penetrated the bones in Whittington’s head. Diogenes would like to actually look closely at Whittington, to see if there are a lot of very serious puctire wounds in his head. Diogenes thinks that the whole story was a set-up to get media coverage. The big story on the news when that story came up, was about some lie that was being exposed in Iraq. The wall to wall coverage of Cheney shooting his friend, drove the Iraq stories right off the air.

Once upon a time, Diogenes was a reporter in a medium sized midwestern city. Got to talk to Commisionner Stack, and asked some pointed questions about something that would have been scandalous. The commissioner said something very, very stupid, with the tape rolling. It was hysterical, and Diogenes got a lot of very nice attention when he aired that clip on the air. After I got off the air, I got a phone call from a friend who hear d it. He asked me what question I was going to ask, before Stack made the verbgal slip. I realized then, that I had been fooled. When I saw the Story of Whittington, I got the same feeling, except that it was not just me, it was everybody being fooled.

Diogenes read with considerable interest last week, the closing argument of Libby’s lawyer Ted Wells. Diogenes got all choked up learning that Wells told the jury to send Libby back to Wells’ care. Diogenes suggests to the court that when Libby is sentenced, they should send Wells to the same prison, so he can keep protecting Libby.

Hello world!

Diogenes is always looking for a completely honest person – frequently in the world of politics.  It is possible that there is such a person, but it is not likely.  However, in looking for this person, we find a lot of politicians and others who are good people, who intend to make the world a better  place.  There are also some people who are in the business to make a fortune at public expense, and are willing to hurt a lot of people in order to generate a persona gain.  Diogenes hopes that those people will develop a painful medical condition, maybe the gout, and decide to spend more time with their families.  Or maybe spend some time with other similar individuals, in a prison.