Elizabeth Bernstein of the WSJ weighs in on best practices for divorcing parents as to how to minimize harm to the children. It's a tough topic, mainly because it gets off on the wrong foot. The subject is analogous to one of best ways to cope with the sundry baneful health affects of overeating. The best advice is not to over eat. But, for some reason, the establishment advice to people suffering in their relationships--which is every person alive to one extent or another--is to split up. (That's what you're supposed to do before the marriage, not after it.) The technical questions concern minimizing the collateral damage.
The divorce of parents has been blamed for children's behavior problems, poor grades in school and even trouble in their own romantic relationships as adults. One study says the intensity of conflict between parents is one of the best predictors of how kids will do after a divorce.
That's much too ambiguous and modest a statement of the copiously documented facts that (1) divorce smashes children's hearts, (2) consequently increases the probability of smashing their lives (3) and society (4) in the future (5) as well as in the present. Not to worry. Individual rights (liberal style) and all that. Noman refers anyone interested in the details to the work of Pat Fagan at the Family Research Council.
Cutting edge techniques discussed include encounter groups for 2nd through 5th graders, parenting plans, prepared scripts to questions and mission statements.
It may include a "short story" explaining to the children why the marriage ended—"We loved each other very much in the beginning and hoped we could make a life together that would last forever, but we were wrong. You had no fault in this. While we will have different households, we think we will do a better job at being parents"—and a "mission statement" describing how they hope to behave.
"This gives kids the freedom to love both parents," Ms. Aronsohn says.
All of this strikes John Mulcahy of Philadelphia as a bunch of hooey: Get Real on Divorce's Damage to Kids. He impresses Noman as a man more firmly rooted in reality than the sundry experts Bernstein approvingly cites.
As a child of divorce, I found this almost laughable. If divorced parents were capable of cooperating like this, they would still be married. Living in a post-divorce atmosphere of civility and respect would send a clear message to the children, not that they are loved, but that their reasonable and accommodating parents apparently couldn't be bothered to put as much hard work into saving their family...
So, please, if we have to have divorce (and I'm not saying we do), let's keep it messy—for the children.
Though you didn't ask, Noman would like to share what he does whenever the stress of living with Nowife and the No-children get to him as it inevitably does. We're all just people, and people have their bad moments. Moreover, life is a perpetual challenge, which is the nature of contingent being. When the four corners of Noman's mind close in on the center with the messages that "Nowife is not doing this or that," "No-whoever doesn't appreciate me" or whatever nonsense, Noman turns to God and begs Him to show Noman where he is wrong. If this relationship is from God--which Noman ardently believed before entering marriage, always has, still does, and prays he always will--then surely these voices are not. God has proven happy to oblige, and usually does so in short order.
The problem it seems is entering marriage with the mindset to continue life as an individual who chooses to behave communally in this or that way, contractually so to speak. That might be easy to fathom regarding your spouse who, after all, is just another adult like you. But, children put that perspective to the lie. Once a third person is born into the world by virtue of shared agency, it becomes abundantly clear to those with figurative eyes to see that family is not (and never really was) an individual enterprise. In potency, even if not consciously in act, marriage is always about us, not me.
Noman often finds that peace, love, harmony and happiness flow from accepting metaphysical reality as it is, according to the nature of the thing at hand, in this case marriage. They never come from forcing his will onto reality. At the end of the day, that final, dispositive, sundering imposition of individual will in a family context is what hurts the children, not the incivility with which the ubermensch conducts himself in the abyss after acting like a god. Before the split is the time to act for the children's sake. They deserve as much.
Since the President drew attention yet again last night to his vision of the authentic American character, Noman thought he'd spend a moment examining the visage. President Obama said:
In fact, this larger notion that the only thing we can do to restore prosperity is just dismantle government, refund everyone’s money, let everyone write their own rules, and tell everyone they’re on their own – that’s not who we are. That’s not the story of America.
Yes, we are rugged individualists. Yes, we are strong and self-reliant. And it has been the drive and initiative of our workers and entrepreneurs that has made this economy the engine and envy of the world.
But there has always been another thread running throughout our history – a belief that we are all connected; and that there are some things we can only do together, as a nation...
No single individual built America on their own. We built it together. We have been, and always will be, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all; a nation with responsibilities to ourselves and with responsibilities to one another. Members of Congress, it is time for us to meet our responsibilities.
So cough up the dough, homey!
Note that the President began his Demosthenian peroration by flailing at a straw man.
Nobody wants to dismantle government. Many people want it to function within well-defined limits as it's drawn up in the Constitution.
Nobody wants to refund everyone's money. Many people resent as a usurpation the fact that the federal government should have laid claim to it in the first place, and put itself in the position to decide whether to refund it to the people who earned it, or bestow it upon others whom politicians deem more worthy.
Nobody is suggesting that everyone should write their own rules. Most people believe we should all play by the same rules, but fewer of them, and don't like leaving them up to the vagaries of political influence and back room dealing. They resent the imposition of massive, all-comprehensive super rules on the populace by single-party fiat. And they don't trust politicians who shackle the nation with rules that please only denizens of DC soirees, ivory towers, Midtown conference rooms, big city union halls and hostile foreign capitols.
No one wants to tell everyone that they're on their own, which would be an ontological error as well as a mis-depiction of social reality. Many people simply believe that the beneficiaries of one's charity should be a matter of personal choice, not that of DC politicos.
President Obama clearly doesn't understand these many other people--a vast majority of Americans, Noman suspects. But, he's right that this figment of his imagination is not who we are; what he described is truly not the American story.
Of course we're all connected. But, there are connections of blood, of faith, of locale, of preference, of task, etc. And, they're not all the same, equally urgent, personally important or morally compelling.
They do not all exert the same claims on the human heart, or pocketbook no matter how strenuously President Obama implies that they do.
Noman, for one, resents his continually smuggling that amorphous mass of people inhabiting the country (or world)--be they here as terrorists, antagonists, illegal aliens or people who do not share the same lofty view of Noman as the President insists Noman must have of them--into the inner precincts of the human heart which are reserved for family, faith, comrades and country.
Connections between people attempting any difficult task--mountain climbing, or living, for instance--are intricate and need to be adjusted at a level close to the connected and their connection, not on the faraway blackboards of social tinkerers.
The President's adversaries understand the human responsibility to catch a falling person, to carry more than one's weight for the sake of humanity, decency, for love of God or country, or simply because it's the right thing to do.
Moreover, they understand that we're all subject to the same harsh death sentence if we don't develop this sense of duty towards one another. Most of us learn it from our religion, not our government.
What many cannot understand is the mentality of people who approach the climb with an attitude of expectation that someone else will carry them. That person, not the perplexed onlooker, is the socially unacceptable one.
S/he converts her problem--living, climbing--into everyone else's problem. By the same token, this person is not likely to be looking out to help others as they are simply too preoccupied enlisting others to help them.
No society filled with such people, or dedicated to creating more of them, or geared towards redistributing resources to their maintenance can long survive. It will go broke from the dispiriting affects, bad blood, and material drag that their posture foists onto everyone else, the overall system.
For the sake of illustration, America was introduced to one such person last year. Zeituni Onyango, better known as President Obama's (formerly) illegal alien auntie.
Zeituni caused quite a stir by asserting with six-shooters-a-blazing her beliefs that:
because she was here (illegally at the time), it was America's obligation to make her a citizen;
the system which provides her (admittedly substandard) housing and income took advantage of her rather than the other way around;
heaven is paying her bills--overlooking the agency of Massachusetts taxpayers;
this is a nice country in which you can do whatever you want when you are here;
it's a free country for which, and to which, she owes nothing;
America is owned by Almighty God and that if it's going to preach Jesus Christ it's job is to help people, help the poor, help other countries and take care of women;
America had to give her her right;
she's not the President's obligation; and
she's able to scam the system by luck and God's miracle.
Zeituni is the kind of person that gives God talk a bad name and turns people off to Christian charity, not to mention government.
While she verbally disclaimed that America owed her anything, her actions and attitude belie her words.
Zeituni is correct that this is a God-blessed, "God-owned" country, though a number of her nephew's most ardent supporters would vigorously deny it.
What makes America great is the freedom, the opportunity to make a life for oneself and one's loved ones that doesn't ultimately depend on what party you affiliate with, what family or neighborhood you are born to, who your father is, which tribe's blood fills your veins, what schools you went to, whose ring you kiss or who you run to for protection.
It is a perversion to think that what makes America great is simply the wealth its political-economy engenders, that one has a right to it merely because it is there and one stands in proximity to it and, moreover, that one is entitlted to have others provide it to you.
The appended clip is long, and shorter versions of it abound on YouTube. But, all of it is instructive, and Noman marvels at the turn her interview takes at minute 7, and especially at minute 8 of the clip.
This is one cagey woman, a free rider in economic terms. What would be the moral term? A selfish person?
Note the confused family understandings. On the one hand, she claims special status as President Obama's African Auntie. On the other, she is not the obligation of her rich nephew.
Rather, she is the obligation of the amorphous citizenry of the state to which she immigrated illegally, was told to leave, and whose immigration laws she flaunted for years until her nephew was elected President and an immigration judge reversed his own prior ruling.
This is mirrored by the President's perspective that it is government, the collective organ of power, which bears the responsibility for taking care of everyone's poor relations, or even those just down on their luck, not the wealthy and privileged nephews of the world.
By virtue of whose justice or which rationality is this the case? Because the President's view better corresponds to human nature? Because it's the American way? Because Christian charity compels strangers to bear burdens that people shuck off of themselves and onto others, but fails to oblige blood relations to care for their kin?
Beyond inviting her to inaugurations, the President is far too cagey himself to let Zeituni scam him the way she does others. Better to foist her off onto the taxpayers of Massachusetts and deliver a speech about our collective responsibilities as one nation under God.
Such are the advantages of developing a social conscience in lieu of a moral one.
Noman understands that Zeituni Onynanga may drive Barack Obama as crazy as she did most of the people who witnessed her performance and glimpsed into her narrow, self-obsessed heart. She is undoubtedly an embarrassment to him and to his politics, and he may simply want nothing to do with her.
But, if that is his prerogative when she is his auntie, why is it not the prerogative of bystanders to whom she is simply a crushing burden. Those people have to get on with their lives, too.
Why do the nation's responsibilities to itself and among its members oblige others, and not kin, people closer to her, or President Obama in the instant case? When did it become the American way for people not to take care of their own, or to expand that sphere of belonging to humanity at large?
To care for everyone is to care for no one in particular, which is convenient once you've parlayed mau-mau politics into fabulous wealth like the President has. What about for the rest of us?
Since the President insists on preaching liberal pieties and on continually menacing the nation's financial stability in order to fund them, there are a few things Noman would like to know of this oracle, this liberal messiah.
What gospel is this? By what authority does he preach it? Noman is amazed at his teaching because it has no authority--moral or otherwise--to back it up. Yet Barack boldly proclaims it, angrily even, to be the one authentic interpretation of America's history, character and responsibilities.
Is this chutzpah, cojones, or what?
Noman hopes that readers will forgive the gratuitous observation that besides kinship and blood, Zeituni Onyanga and President Obama share a belief system, an entitlement mentality. They are equally selfish people despite obvious differences in their accomplishments.
The widespread, and wider-spreading, belief that somebody, somewhere owes me something is the reason America is going broke despite producing $14 trillion of product and collecting $3.5 trillion of taxes annually.
It only adds insult to injury that fiery-talking politicians and their corrupt cronies prosper while the nation and people suffer. Meanwhile, the decreasingly mighty middle class in whose name the wise and all-knowing Oz professes to bestow Presidential blessings grits its teeth and patiently awaits election day.
Postscript: though not directly on point, the following news hit yesterday's wire: Obama's Uncle Quietly Released from Jail. Noman hasn't had this many laughs at a politician's family since Billy Carter urinated in tall grass in front of visiting foreign dignitaries.
The President unveiled his jobs plan this evening, the gist of which was that he wants Congress to spend $450 billion over the coming year on teachers, construction workers, the unemployed and sundry other Democratic constituencies. He stressed that Democrats and Republicans have done this before, and so they should do it again. Now. (NOW?)
The fact that America is now $5 trillion deeper in debt than the day Nancy Pelosi moved into the Speaker's chair is not relevant. Neither is the fact that the country now owes 100% of GDP unlike ever before except after WW II. Context doesn't matter.
He erected the usual straw men: the super wealthy who don't pay their fair share in taxes (he even invoked Warren Buffet's plea to be taxed more. He failed, however, to mention the 42% of people in the country who pay no taxes, and faithfully vote Democrat); opposition party members who want to trade off safety and throw people to the wolves in order to drive the economy; those who would have had us living in the stone ages by impeding former government gifts to mankind; generally, politically-driven, ideological monsters who don't buy into his schemes without question.
People are suffering, you see. And to the President and his party, the leap is automatic. The government must spend money and increase taxes on boogie men, now, period. And, when people suffer in the future as they inevitably will given the uncertaintly of the human condition as temporal beings in need of continuous material sustenance, when this government grab fails to stimulate anything but outsized balances in cronies' and charlatans' bank accounts, the solution will be for the government to spend more, no questions asked. Because people are suffering, you see.
The President's repeated call to get this passed now underscores his petulance and recalls everyone of his legislative initiatives from the original stimulus to ObamaCare to Financial Reform. The rush to approve expenditures and impose regulation is always palpable with him. Just once, Noman would like to hear him counsel caution and prudence in order to ensure that things get done right, and that only the right things get done. But, that would defeat the real purpose of redistributing the earnings of those who made right choices to those who didn't. At least this time, as opposed to last, the money will be redistributed right away. Then again, the next election is right around the corner this time.
Among things that caught Noman's attention was the President's assertion (by rhetorical question) that children can't learn without constructing brand new state-of-the-art facilities. What about books and a lumpy chair? What about all of the computer software that enables children to become math wizards in the comfort of their homes? What about parents sitting with their children to read rather than watch TV? He cited Abe Lincoln elsewhere in his stump speech. Didn't Abe Lincoln receive his early education by candlelight in a log cabin? Does the federal government really need to spend tens-to-hundreds of billions of dollars on this to ensure that it gets done? To the President's mind, is there anything people can accomplish on their own without depending on the federal government to provide it to them?
The President's speech was followed by the announcement of a credible threat to national security. Noman doesn't doubt that bad people want to do bad things to American on the decennial anniversary of 9/11. The timing of the announcement conveniently shifted attention, however, from the President's solemn promise to give us the rest of his super-duper comprehensive plan in a couple of weeks, after another vacation perhaps, and presumably after his latest unassailable blessing to America is passed without question. Overall, Noman was reminded of nothing so much as President Clinton's release of photos and intelligence of Osama Bin Laden after his August 1999 grand jury testimony (and perjurious equivocations: "It depends on what you mean by is"), and his stony flight to Martha's Vineyard with Hilary during which he allegedly confessed to her for the first time that, despite public assurances to the contrary, he had indeed had sexual relations with "that woman."
Noman expects the House to rebuff the President's low, short jobs plan--which is undoubtedly the President's hope as it will give him cover to blame others for his failures--and focus attention on a growth, not maintenance-for-some, agenda. But, it's crass of Noman to suggest that the President is playing politics as he's assured us repeatedly that only the bad guys in the other party do that. Republicans outlined their proposals for getting the government out of the way of job creation three months ago at the linked website.
The spin after last night's Republican debate at the Reagan library is about a two-man race. Governors Romney and Perry are jockeying to become the front runner in this very feisty Republican pack. Noman thinks that a narrow focus on political handicapping is a mistake that will cause observers to miss the forest for the trees. What's emerging are the necessary conversations about the party's first principles and enduring themes--e.g., isolationism v. engagement; expulsion v. path to citizenship; federal v. state v. parental control--and the forging of party unity, which will be necessary to remove President Obama from the White House and spare the country any further depredations from his party and confederates.
For the second time, Noman was delighted at the mix-it-up, convincingly argued divergent opinions, and underlying agreement among the pack despite differences. Major themes surfaced last night that will help the Republican standard bearer, and party, to shake the influence of a political culture and media that overwhelmingly favor the opposition. More important than picking an electable candidate is for the Republican party to find its voice, its nerve and its resolve to stand down the big governement-media-education consensus anathema to its core beliefs in personal rather than collective protagonism.
Newt Gingrich got the biggest whoop of the night out of Noman for his call to the debators to hold together on what unites them rather than let left-leaning reporters provoke them into attacking each other. He engendered the same response when snapping back at questioners at the first debate for asking gotcha questions. Newt is so far ahead of the mouthpieces filtering events into the mainstream media in ways amenable to the socialist faith that it's worth watching as well as listening to him. He doesn't take crap from lefties. He won't be President. But, I'm glad he's there to protect the junior statesmen from traps he fell into 15 years ago. Perhaps he'll run for the Senate where he belongs, or be appointed to the federal bench where he can wax philosophic and pick apart the presumptions of liberal Lilliputians.
Michelle Bachmann has got a strong core and Noman hopes that there's a seat for her at the table. She's got the family and parental issues at heart, and she's a practical brawler. She doesn't seem to mind mixing it up with lefties. If she does, she's at least willing to put aside her distaste for the process and get on with the work that needs to be done. And, she's indefatigable, a firebrand. Her warning that executive orders won't make ObamaCare go away were a necessary wake-up call. This woman can unite anyone to her cause not ill disposed to her for her looks, or innate conservatism. Noman sees her as a Vice-president.
Rick Santorum. What can one say? He's obviously a sterling man with strong convictions about America's role as a force for good at home and abroad. He is exactly right that the the sorriest legacy of statism is the devastation of human capital attending the process of state-induced dependency, and that the best way to help the poor is to lift them up to help themselves. (Perhaps he will add in the future that they will best help themselves by learning to to help yet others.) He will make a spectacular Secretary of Health and Human Services where he can be a necessary disinfectant for the travesties and perversions fostered by Kathlene Sibelius. Noman wishes he would take off the hair shirt, however, or whatever it is causing him to wince as he speaks.
Ron Paul. There's a man who knows what he thinks, and thinks pretty clearly about things. It was great of him to defend his compassion despite approving policy choices contrary to liberal pieties and certitudes. It was necessary rejoinder to put the statist questioners back on their heels and examining their own prejudices. He strikes Noman as being whiney, simplistic and a little feeble. He's also a loose cannon, and a necessary additive to this year's policy discussions. A man like Paul would stand no chance in a national election were it not for the fact that he possesses nearly polar-opposite convictions and inclinations to President Obama's evidently destructive ones. Where could a man like him fit in the new Republican Administration? Senator Paul?
John Huntsman is not trustworthy. Anyone who thinks climate science is settled and that anyone who questions is it out of bounds doesn't deserve serious consideration as a conservative standard bearer. He might want to refer to yesterday's WSJ article on cosmic rays.
Herman Cain is refreshingly, can-do direct, an American gem. Secretary of Commerce? IRS Commissioner? Noman is willing to go for it, and would love to see Cain turned loose on some bureaucracy with free reign, a carving knife and marching orders. Then, he'd like to see it again. 9-9-9 sounds good to Noman.
Rick Perry took a questioner-engineered beating last night and he stood his ground pretty well. He's an attractive personality, even if a little too black-hat looking, like a guy who should be named Bart. He didn't flinch from Brian Williams' question regarding capital punishment, or follow-up sneer (insinuated) to the audience's cheers at William's mere mention of the practice. In Perry's view, Americans, and Texans especially, understand the notion of justice and would prefer to show mercy to victims rather than victimizers. That's fair enough for a governor to say. Williams and ilk might like to preen about the moral superiority of sparing 100 murderers to protect one man wrongly condemned. But, after 50 years of coddling the perpetrators of bestial acts and reaping a harvest of ever more and greater depravities, William's preening looks like rationalization to Americans who have borne the destabilizing, culturally deconstructive scourge of letting the guilty off lightly while socially and legally shifting the burden of evil onto victims. The audience was fed up with it, and let Williams know it with applause and cheers in defiance of liberal orthodoxy. And, if their moral sense has been eclipsed by cynicism, it is largely the fault of an anti-American left that decades ago chose chaos and destabilization as primary tactics to achieve cultural upheaval and foment practical revolution.
Mitt Romney doesn't convince Noman. It's simply not enough for the Republican standard bearer to have business experience. Whether right or wrong, he seemed bellicose when talking about turning off the magnet to illegal immigration and to building a fence. It's was the most heated emission escaping the cool of his veneer to date, and there was something revealing about it. Moreover, his type of slice-and-dice business experience has much more in common with President Obama's Wall Street pals than it does with Sarah Palin-like small businessmen and -women who actually work at something in an ownership capacity to earn a living. His view from the perch of Bain Capital was that abstract, quant-driven focus that minimizes the human stakes involved in decisions and fixates on numeric indicators. There's a place for him in the Administration. It's just not at the top. Secretary of Treasury?
Noman hopes that this pack gels in its opposition to human degradation that passes under the guise of liberal compassion, and locks arms to support one another in the face of a media that overwhelmingly (unanimously?) favors and supports the President they must unseat. So far, so good. Noman, for one, will keep watching.
Tuesday's WSJ featured a revealing interview with "Obama's Aussie," Andrew Liveris, Dow Chemical's CEO. "In June, President Barack Obama named him co-chairman of the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership, a government program to encourage development of job-creating technologies."
WSJ: Your prescription for more Singapore- or German-style government intervention and subsidies for investment may offend some of your customers and shareholders who have different political views. Is that a concern?
Mr. Liveris: I did not ask for subsidies. I asked for incentives. What's the difference? That's a recognition that companies and countries work together to say: What can I be good at?
When Germany after World War II rebuilt its economy, it became an engineering nation, and it preserved its engineering excellence, for example, through incentivizing trade schools. Sure, there were rebates for employers for training programs.
I'm not worried about the effect of my views on Dow Chemical if they're fully explained. All I do is point out that it's not a level playing field, that other countries offer these subsidies and tax incentives and are attracting investment.
Let's not be living in a fantasy world; that is happening. We do subsidize defense, we do subsidize parts of agriculture. So why are we afraid of the conversation when it comes to manufacturing?
Should we incentivize certain sectors for the national interest? It may well be the answer is "no." But at least let's not walk away from the topic. We need to open up our eyes and understand why so many other countries are taking our jobs.
Let Noman briefly take a crack at explaining the the fear of starting a conversation about subsidizing manufacturing or any industry. First, there is the economic dictum rooted in human nature that capital will flow to where it earns its highest return commensurate with acceptable risk. Government intervention into the spontaneous capital allocation process is often wasteful and always inefficient. It preserves established prerogatives rather than stimulates the search for prerogative-yielding new industries--the only real protection for "our jobs."
Once government begins tipping the scales in favor or one industry, sector or another, the skids are greased for government corruption, a shifting of business's priorities away from operating and towards lobbying, and sapped economic vitality. It also sets in motion a dynamic whereby the government needs to confiscate the property and wealth of its citizens--in the present (taxes) or in the future (debt)--in order to garner the resources it has redistributed. Enough already!
It is the seeming inability of government and business actors to grasp those natural realities that makes Ron Paul's simplicity so appealing to debate watchers. What a breath of fresh air. Shift away from the fatal conceit that planners, politicians and their pals can do a better job of picking winners and tilting scales than the spontaneous, instantaneous decisions of people whose self and familial interests are at stake.
Mr. Liveris's is yet another Dow 30 chieftain's voice exhorting executives to overlook what the government is up to with the economy and to just play ball. "What we're seeing in Washington today is dysfunctionality. And the output of that is lack of confidence. I think everyone is culpable for that, not one part of government. Please, let's tone down the rhetoric and get our sleeves up and go to work." Yes, can't we just get along, and MoveOn? Prior to the Republican's recapture of the House in 2010, there was no dysfunctionality in the predations of government on the American economy or its citizens. Is Mr. Liveris auguring for a return to that blissful state of affairs? Or, is he suggesting that the party whose hegemony over the disastrous economic agenda since 2006, which caused the landslide electoral reaction of 2010, doesn't shoulder a greater obligation to relent in its insistence and cede ground?
Andrew Liveris appears to be another of President Obama's corporate fig leafs meant to cover up the nudity of his corporatist economic vision. Who would of thought that in fifty short years the Democratic party would become the foremost champion for the notion that what's good for Dow Chemical, or GE, is good for America?
It was a tough week to start one's tenure at the helm of America's flagship corporation. But, Jeffrey Immelt took charge on September 7, 2001 of GE, General Electric, the Dow Jones 30 behemoth that purports to "bring good things to life." He succeeded legendary CEO Jack Welch just days before the twin towers fell.
In the heyday of the imperial CEO, none wielded more clout, cast a bigger shadow, threw a larger wake or garnered more accolades than Jack Welch. Dubbed "Neutron Jack" for his propensity to eliminate people while leaving the buildings in tact, Welch forcibly pushed GE and led corporate America out of the low-growth era of organizational loyalty and trust into the ever-plasticizing hyper-growth mutations of the technological revolution. He is celebrated for engineering a cultural shift that enabled America's giant corporations to play nimbly on the international field of commerce in a period of great flux.
Famous for dismissing considerations extraneous to financial ones (e.g., cash, ROI), and for his vitality index (annually eliminating the bottom-ranked 10% of employees), Welch made his stockholders and employees rich and they loved him for it. It was said of GE employees that the bullet was fired the day they were hired; it was just a matter of when it would catch up to them. Yet, they stayed to be slain, to die wealthy and to have played for the Yankees of business.
Ironically, Welch was a long-time GE employee who slit the gizzard of the paternalistic institution that nurtured him, in a way impossible to fathom in a Richard Hackborn or Lew Platt at HP. (They reached outside the company for their torpedo, Carly Fiorina.) When he tired of his wife of 30 years, he dumped her with only slightly less ceremony than he did GE lifers. His second wife, an M&A lawyer lasted 14 years. His third, Suzy Wetlaufer, began an affair with him while serving as Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Business Review and writing a piece about him for the magazine. They co-wrote his book "Winning" in 2005.
It's a fitting title, as Welch's tenure in the limelight of corporate America marked a decided shift to a Philistine view of governance and management that financial victory by any means necessary was the only strategic goal worth pursuing. Welch's legacy is complex, and he must be given his due for reforming entitlement expectations in big corporations. On the other hand, his machinations legitimized the bonus mentality among executives who felt entitled to fete at the trough of redundancy savings. At the end of the day, he stood for nothing more so than the proposition that people were expendable, profitably eliminable; it was numbers and things you could count and touch that really mattered in business. The subjective dimension of work might take precedence over its objective dimension in Papal encyclicals. But, at Jack Welch's GE and on Wall Street, they knew better.
Which brings us to Jeffrey Immelt, a disciple of Jack's even if not his equal at the je ne sais quoi of being a CEO, or guru. GE's stock price is down 60% since he took over, even though GE has been one of the most profitable companies in America over that period of time. It's been a tough decade. But, one can't help suspect that it's Immelt's business model that is the problem. Welch was ferocious in his determination to "fix it, close it, or sell it," anything to be #1 or #2 in whatever business was at issue, and to dispel the curse of mediocrity. Immelt's business model seems to be to hook GE's lips up to the udders of government and to suck the taxpayers dry while jockeying in his capacity as a crony capitalist to lobby for tax breaks. It's very profitable; it's just not very forward-looking, or growth-oriented. That is, unless, one considers the government to be the primary driver of growth in the future. Immelt's proximity to President Obama, and his bully pulpit as jobs czar, make it appear that he has placed his shareholder's chips on that assumption. Noman's guess, and the market's apparently, is that he is wrong. Personally, Noman considers Immelt's big government, big corporation fixed-at-the-hip posture to be corporatist abomination, a betrayal of the American spirit and a threat to the middle class.
GE Capital jumped into the mortgage market with both feet, and was forced in 2008 to pose as a bank in order to get Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson to throw the company a lifeline. GE suffered a near-death experience during Immelt's watch--it's stock price plummeted into the $5/share range--when liquidity froze and his essentially industrial company suffered the same plight as the big banks. Immelt's hat is back on, but his hand is still out.
In July, he lectured the Chamber of Commerce on behalf of the Administration that is picking its pocket and shackling its members. "The people who are part of the business sector, the people in this room, have got to stop complaining about government and get some action underway," he told the group. "There's no excuse today for lack of leadership. The truth is we all need to be part of the solution." Such words coming from a man with cozy political relations scream "I've figured out how to get mine; now shut up, get in line, and figure out how to get yours." Presumably, that's his idea of leadership. His exhortations reduce the stature of corporate chieftains rather than lift the President's credibility, or establish his pro-business bona fides. Whether Jeffrey Immelt is Barcak Obama's useful idiot, or vice-versa, Noman isn't sure. But, he doesn't expect this to turn out well for business given the admonition widely attributed to Thomas Jefferson that a government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.
In Noman's opinion, neither Jack Welch nor Jeff Immelt have brought good things to life. It must have been hard for Immelt to become an executive in Jack Welch's laboratory, a place with no fixed moorings or limits save the imperative to conquer at the expense of any and every principle or scruple. Jeff's just got a different way of going about it than Jack did. As for economic inspiration and a jobs agenda, Noman prefers looking to GE's former corporate spokesman, Ronald Reagan. It is said that President Reagan's years working on behalf of GE converted him from a Hollywood liberal into a free market advocate of limited government. Jeff Immelt would do well to review the Gipper's experience rather than exploit his past association with the company in order to divert attention from what GE has become during his decade-long reign. A proud legacy is a sad thing to waste.
WSJ Europe editorial page writer, Anne Jolis reports on developing research into cosmic rays and natural explanations for the earth's temperature fluctuations. The results are unsurprising. Cosmic Rays 1 - Climate Science 0.
Through several more years of "careful, quantitative measurement" at CERN, Mr. Kirkby predicts he and his team will "definitively answer the question of whether or not cosmic rays have a climatically significant effect on clouds." His old ally Mr. Svensmark feels he's already answered that question, and he guesses that CERN's initial results "could have been achieved eight to 10 years ago, if the project had been approved and financed."
The biggest milestone in last month's publication may be not the content but the source, which will be a lot harder to ignore than Mr. Svensmark and his small Danish institute.
Any regrets, now that CERN's particle accelerator is spinning without him? "No. It's been both a blessing and the opposite," says Mr. Svensmark. "I had this field more or less to myself for years—that would never have happened in other areas of science, such as particle physics. But this has been something that most climate scientists would not be associated with. I remember another researcher saying to me years ago that the only thing he could say about cosmic rays and climate was it that it was a really bad career move."
On that point, Mr. Kirkby—whose organization is controlled by not one but 20 governments—really does not want to discuss politics at all: "I'm an experimental particle physicist, okay? That somehow nature may have decided to connect the high-energy physics of the cosmos with the earth's atmosphere—that's what nature may have done, not what I've done."
How many billions of dollars, or is it trillions, will have been spent on a convenient theory of man-made climate change that prospers population controllers and economic statists while menacing basic human freedoms such as the rights to procreate and to better one's lot economically?
It's comforting to know that regardless of the twists and turns of political fate, it is what nature does, not what men think they do, that will trump.
The Wall Street Journal described a week in the life of our beleaguered economy a couple of weeks back, which nicely revelaed a snapshot of our federal government's unremitting assault on the private sector. It's quite a picture: taxes on the horizon, with Warren Buffet even pandering to pay more; Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's domination of the mortgage market to continue (with taxpayers picking up the tab for multi-trilliion dollar mistakes, of course); the Justice Department initiates an investigation into Standard & Poor's--alone among the three major ratings agencies--less than two weeks after S&P downgraded U.S. Debt (S&P's President, Deven Sharma, was subsequently forced to resign); Exxon is denied routine oil lease extensions after a huge find in the Gulf of Mexico; U.S. regulators publicly alarm markets about European banks and contagion; and the President gears up to announce more stimulus initiatives after Labor Day.
The thinking, say aides, is to pressure Republicans to pass these proposals or look indifferent to high unemployment. So even as he proposes to reduce deficits far into the future in ways that will depend on decisions by future Congresses, the President will fight to increase spending immediately. Americans may conclude they've heard this cognitive dissonance before.
None of these stories by themselves—or even a week of them—is enough to undermine a recovery. But the cascade of such stories day after day—about new regulations, new prosecutions or fines against business, new obstacles to investment, more spending and higher taxes—contributes to the larger lack of business and consumer confidence.
It's impossible to quantify the impact of such policies on lost GDP or lost job creation, but everyone in the real economy understands how such signals work. The great tragedy of the Obama nonrecovery is that this Administration still doesn't realize the damage it is doing.
The gist of the matter? "Day after day brings headlines of another legislative, regulatory or enforcement action that gives CEOs and investors reason to hunker down, retain as much cash as possible and ride out whatever storms are ahead." Individuals behave the same way, in their several capacities as small business owners, consumers, lenders, borrowers, etc. That's how people behave when confronted with overreach and predation, even by well-intentioned or all-knowing government actors.
Incompetence aside, Noman is concerned about something darker in these vignettes. The S&P investigation especially smacks of Administration payback and smash mouth politics. It's not economically healthy for the agencies that determine the credit-worthiness of institutions (whether done capably or ineptly) to labor under the sword of Damocles knowing that if they perform their function in ways unpleasing to power, heads will roll. It reminds Noman of Lord Acton's dictum that absolute power corrupts absolutely. When the government's response to a capital market rebuke is to make it harder for the capital markets to function credibly, we have reached the point of absolute corruption.
This is the second Chicago-style retaliation from DC in recent months, the other being GE CEO, and Obama jobs czar, Jeffrey Immelt's announcement that GE would be closing a Wisconsin X-ray factory and moving it to Bejing. There are credible business reasons for doing so. But, it's a galling move from the man the President has entrusted to seed his Administration with ideas for bringing tomorrow's jobs back to the U.S. The timing was also horribly suspect. This move came after the government of Wisconsin bravely stood up to public employee labor unions and corrupt Democrats--despite the President's personal ministrations on behalf of the status quo--in order to reign in the State's budget deficits, and to achieve all of the salutary economic benefits flowing from that virtuous act.
This inability to discern limits, and fury to punish enemies, is especially dangerous when coupled to economically suicidal ideas. President Clinton also played hardball, Democratic style. But, his crew was feckless compared to the Obama Administration. Does the reader recall former Miss Arkansas, Ms. Elizabeth Ward Grayson, who had the misfortune of succumbing to then Governor Clinton's amorous advances, and the even greater misfortune to be audited by the IRS shortly after confessing to the tryst.
This is child's play compared to the shackling of the U.S. economy presently underway, and the narrowly political calculus of power and its uses guiding action in DC. Remember all this when the President unveils his jobs plan for the nation this week.
William McGurn writes on President Obama's conundrum of having to deliver a big job speech without having anything to say. Noman expects nothing more than the usual bloviating about investments (spending), railing at those too selfish to pay their fair share (taxes), exhortations to rise above partisanship (as he pursue partisanship), etc. Noman would be shocked were the President to do anything but posture, cajole, lecture and protest he's the only adult in DC. He doesn't seem to have much imagination. He just keeps lining up for the snap and calling the off-tackle dive that worked so well for Democrats when Nancy Pelosi controlled the House. His economic nostrums are hackneyed and stale, which is why the economy doesn't hum for his administration. Yet, he keeps running the same play, and blaming the fans for not cheering.
McGurn comments on the fading spell of the President's words as the Toto of economic reality pulls aside the curtain to reveal the charlatan pulling the levers.
In music there's a saying about a performance that was "too small for the house." That's becoming true of the president. There was a day when Mr. Obama's taste for the marvelous—a campaign address in Berlin, the faux presidential seal, the Greek columns that surrounded him during his speech accepting the Democratic nomination—all seemed to herald something exciting and historic.Even inside the Beltway, however, substance ultimately tells. Three years into his presidency, the grander the stage the smaller Mr. Obama comes across.
Noman confesses that he finds the President's frequent perorations on matters of consequence to be a major disappointment, a study in fraud that the country can ill afford. There is only one thing he could say tomorrow to lift the economy's spirits: that the government will get out of the economy-managing business, quit nudging, quit redistributing, quit angling for a VAT tax, quit trying to expand the size and scope of government, quit trying to capture every revenue spigot and turn it towards DC and state capitols, quit trying to micro-manage the economic endeavors of spontaneous actors, and that his Administration is turning the nation's economic protagonism back over to the millions of private actors in whose hands the initiative rightly belongs, and growth depends. Don't count on it.
Noman had occasion recently, as he has on several occasions over the years, to recount a homily he once heard about the so-called miracle of the loaves and the fishes. (The gospels actually recount two separate such miracles.) The miracle, said Dr. Eduardo Ulloa, should be referred to rather as the miraclesof the loaves and fishes, because Jesus performed a different miracle every time his disciples reached into the bags for a new fish and loaf.
He could have arranged matters by creating a mountain of fish and another of loaves so that everyone in the hungry crowd could see that there was plenty for everyone. He didn't. Instead he mediated his miracles through the 5,000 (7,000) acts of faith it took to keep reaching into the bag, and equal number it took for people in the crowd to hope and wait for the impossible.
That's the way Jesus works in life, especially in matters of money and capital. He gives us what we need when we need it, not when we want to see it. He asks for our cooperation through repeated acts of practical faith. We must have a plan (e.g., to reach into the bag) and execute it. He does the rest.
He also asks for our gratitude, which is why it's good to develop that virtue with people on earth. Then, we'll have the proper character dispositions towards our Father in heaven.
The Liberal state, in the worthy desire to exorcise greed, poverty, and unhappiness, has given birth to a a radical view of the world: that it is the responsibility of the State to protect anyone who may claim to be powerless. But what check is upon these champions? And what inducement do they possess to refrain, since to refrain is to diminish their power and, so, their livelihoods? Is it not evident that to be accused before the bureaucrats of OSHA, Equal Opportunity Commission, FDA, Consumer Safety Board, and so on, is to be found guilty, for the organization's first and only responsibility is to grow, and, in contrast to the free market, it is not the populace, but the government which characterizes failure and success, and that all government programs must not only expand after success, but expand after failure, in order 'to bring about eventual success.' Note that all this hocus-pocus is taking place with the money actually earned by hardworking individuals.
Mamet has stated the problem clearly. Regardless of what the Left is trying to achieve, or the purity of its naive intentions--at least in his eyes--a Leviathan has been created that will either be brought to heel and put on a strict diet, or will become our master. It lacks a dynamic whereby to rectify itself.
The ever-growing legion of pampered governmental bureaucrats is pretty clear on the concept, as are their enabling protectors in media, academe and the professions. However, as recent events in Wisconsin and other states evince, "hardworking individuals" who foot the bill for this scam are catching on quickly. Media demonization of supposedly nefarious tea party bigots--boogie, boogie, boogie--doesn't play well in most of America, even if it does stoke the flames of ignorant prejudice among the putatively well-informed abroad, i.e., CNN viewers.
Noman wonders if there is any reason why the federal government shouldn't be constitutionally limited to 10% of annual national wealth creation (by whatever measure) and have severe limitations placed on its capacity to borrow. That way, the necessary condition for the government to grow would be for the people's wealth to grow, and the government class could not prosper by siphoning the economic vitality from the people's wallets. There would be no more Democratic party constituents getting fat on the lamb while the people eat figurative cake, or worse.
David Mamet, the very leftish Pulitzer Prize winning author of "Glengarry Glen Ross," has written about the failure of ideas he held to be sacrosanct throughout his life, until now. It is entitled "The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture," and is an expansion of an article published in the Village Voice just before Bear Stearn's meltdown and the fateful election of '08: "Why I am No Longer A 'Brain-Dead Liberal'" Mamet writes: "The struggle of the Left to rationalize its positions is an intolerable Sisyphean burden. I speak as a reformed Liberal."
He conversed with his first conservative at the age of 60, his rabbi. One thing led to another, and eventually Hayek's "Fatal Conceit" led to the watershed insight. He saw that every decision had opposing costs requiring a tradeoff, and realized that his left-liberal (politically correct) crusades had, by the law of unintended consequences, imposed crushing unrecognized costs and affected unwitting unanticipated devastation on society, including on the intended beneficiaries of his morally superior concerns.
Noman is enjoying Mamet and intends to share periodic snippets from the book, i.e., "The Right and the Left ... differ not about programs, but about goals--the goal of the Left is a Government-run country and that of the Right the freedom of the individual from Government. These goals are difficult to reconcile, as the Left cannot be brought either to actually state its intentions, nor to honestly evaluate the results of its actions."
Here's another difference: the means necessary to achieve their respective goals. The Left needs the Right's money--individual's and families' money--lots of it today, more of it tomorrow, and all of it eventually to purchase its goal. The Right just needs the Left to pledge fealty to the country whether they like everything about it or not; behave civilly and stop protecting people who don't; consent to a legal regime ordered in principle towards equality of opportunity; stop attacking the people's religious devotion to the Juedo-Christian God they don't like; and generally, leave the Right alone without picking its pockets so that people can build lives, relations, churches, communities, careers and projects according to their own lights, and not some Washington paladin's.
The Left might hystericize about conservatives in the bedroom and Big Brother on its ovaries simply because the Right insists that people bear responsibility for their personal behavior, and doesn't morally equate bringing one's child to term with killing it, or indulging in protected recreational sex with eschewing it. But it takes a Barack Obama, Kathleen Sebelius and their Liberal ilk to compel contrary-minded citizens to perform, fund or insure practices they consider morally repugnant, socially barbaric and politically indefensible. The left tolerates no human imperfectability save the debilitating sexual or licentious vices that people are especially attached to, and which the Right knows people do best to control and resist, personally, publicly and socially.
Another quote from Mamet: "Consider the congruent phenomenon of the response to the inevitable failure of Government Programs. These Good Ideas--the Great Society, the War on Poverty, etc.--as above, upon inevitable failure, spawn increased governmental programs to "complete" their "work"--their failure being, inevitable again, ascribed to underfunding."
Noman marvels that American's elected Good-Ideas-Leftists in 2006 and 2008, when so many ideas and so much evidence abounded as to open the eyes of even as trenchant a Leftist as Mamet. The result is that we now brave the onset of twin social calamities: (1) the ultimate Good-Idea boondoggle--Obamacare, and (2) the ultimate underfunding panacea, a federal Value Added Tax, or VAT.
Can you wait for the the President's upcoming Battle Royale to impose the ultimate economic depressant--the VAT--on the people, in the names of fairness, balance and sharing of course?
