Trump must be removed. So must his congressional enablers.

This unraveling presidency began with the Crybaby-in-Chief banging his spoon on his highchair tray to protest a photograph — a photograph — showing that his inauguration crowd the day before had been smaller than the one four years previous. Since then, this weak person’s idea of a strong person, this chest-pounding advertisement of his own gnawing insecurities, this low-rent Lear raging on his Twitter-heath has proven that the phrase malignant buffoon is not an oxymoron.

Presidents, exploiting modern communications technologies and abetted today by journalists preening as the “resistance” — like members of the French Resistance 1940-1944, minus the bravery — can set the tone of American society, which is regrettably soft wax on which presidents leave their marks. The president’s provocations — his coarsening of public discourse that lowers the threshold for acting out by people as mentally crippled as he — do not excuse the violent few. They must be punished. He must be removed.

Social causation is difficult to demonstrate, particularly between one person’s words and other persons’ deeds. However: The person voters hired in 2016 to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” stood on July 28, 2017, in front of uniformed police and urged them “please don’t be too nice” when handling suspected offenders. His hope was fulfilled for 8 minutes and 46 seconds on Minneapolis pavement.

What Daniel Patrick Moynihan termed “defining deviancy down” now defines American politics. In 2016, voters were presented an unprecedentedly unpalatable choice: Never had both major parties offered nominees with higher disapproval than approval numbers. Voters chose what they wagered would be the lesser blight. Now, however, they have watched him govern for 40 months and more than 40 percent — slightly less than the percentage that voted for him — approve of his sordid conduct.

Presidents seeking reelection bask in chants of “Four more years!” This year, however, most Americans — perhaps because they are, as the president predicted, weary from all the winning — might flinch: Four more years of this? The taste of ashes, metaphorical and now literal, dampens enthusiasm.

The nation’s downward spiral into acrimony and sporadic anarchy has had many causes much larger than the small man who is the great exacerbator of them. Most of the causes predate his presidency, and most will survive its January terminus. The measures necessary for restoration of national equilibrium are many and will be protracted far beyond his removal. One such measure must be the removal of those in Congress who, unlike the sycophantic mediocrities who cosset him in the White House, will not disappear “magically,” as Eric Trump said the coronavirus would. Voters must dispatch his congressional enablers, especially the senators who still gambol around his ankles with a canine hunger for petting.

In life’s unforgiving arithmetic, we are the sum of our choices. Congressional Republicans have made theirs for more than 1,200 days. We cannot know all the measures necessary to restore the nation’s domestic health and international standing, but we know the first step: Senate Republicans must be routed, as condign punishment for their Vichyite collaboration, leaving the Republican remnant to wonder: Was it sensible to sacrifice dignity, such as it ever was, and to shed principles, if convictions so easily jettisoned could be dignified as principles, for . . . what? Praying people should pray, and all others should hope: May I never crave anything as much as these people crave membership in the world’s most risible deliberative body.

A political party’s primary function is to bestow its imprimatur on candidates, thereby proclaiming: This is who we are. In 2016, the Republican Party gave its principal nomination to a vulgarian and then toiled to elect him. And to stock Congress with invertebrates whose unswerving abjectness has enabled his institutional vandalism, who have voiced no serious objections to his Niagara of lies, and whom T.S. Eliot anticipated:

We are the hollow men . . .

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

or rats’ feet over broken glass . . .

Those who think our unhinged president’s recent mania about a murder two decades ago that never happened represents his moral nadir have missed the lesson of his life: There is no such thing as rock bottom. So, assume that the worst is yet to come. Which implicates national security: Abroad, anti-Americanism sleeps lightly when it sleeps at all, and it is wide-awake as decent people judge our nation’s health by the character of those to whom power is entrusted. Watching, too, are indecent people in Beijing and Moscow.

Read more from George F. Will’s archive or follow him on Facebook.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/no-one-should-want-four-more-years-of-this-taste-of-ashes/2020/06/01/1a80ecf4-a425-11ea-bb20-ebf0921f3bbd_story.html?itid=ap_georgef. will

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Funneling government funding the through the Small Business Administration (SBA) is going to be an unmitigated disaster. Neither the SBA nor community banks are set up to handle this type of volume.

From speaking with some folks in the know, responsibilities for the Paycheck Protection Program are flowing through the corporate lending departments of community banks, where these bankers have been prepping their well-heeled clients for the upcoming financial support. These lenders don’t deal, for the most part, with restaurant owners and other smaller businesses, the people who need the money fast and the most.

With little interest from these corporate lending departments, this massive loan demand is then being pushed to the people who work the branches, where they are rightly staffed at skeletal levels to prevent the spread of the virus. These people don’t have the authority to lend or the software applications to process such loans. One business owner visited a local community bank after being put on hold for three hours at Bank of America. There was nothing the community banker could do.

These loans should be distributed by institutions that distribute cash in volume – the payroll companies and credit and debit card companies. Fill out forms online and direct deposit the cash.

To show how difficult the SBA and community banking situation is, one president of a community bank on CNBC said they gave out the first SBA loan on Friday, mentioning they gave one loan. When asked about how many applied for loans, he said, 2,000. Hard to believe that a bank president could be that excited about giving one loan.

Written on April 5.

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http://www.examiner.com/article/pressure-builds-for-ceos-at-highly-valued-companies

Pressure builds for CEOs at highly valued companies

Last week, the highly-regarded business software maker Anaplan held its annual conference in San Francisco, drawing an enthusiastic crowd of 1,500 analysts and customers. These events are normally an occasion for the company’s CEO to make new product announcements, chat with some big names in the tech industry, and otherwise highlight a bright future for the coming year. But this gathering was different in one key respect: Anaplan’s CEO had left the company barely three weeks before.

In a sign of the turmoil affecting many high-flying business enterprise technology companies these days, Anaplan’s CEO – Frederic Laluyaux – was not in attendance because he had departed Anaplan after three years. A volatile stock market and reduced venture funding are forcing many tech company board members and investors to become less fond of unfettered growth and more interested in profits, sharply increasing pressure on the executive at the top.

As Anaplan board member Ravi Mohan was quoted last month following Laluyaux’s departure, “Now, it’s profitable sustained growth, and we’re building a company that reflects that.”

In the wake of Laluyaux’s absence last week, a host of Anaplan executives, including CFO James Budge (who joined the company merely five months ago) presented an upbeat picture. Budge said the company had added more customers in the last four months than in any other cycle and that business had doubled year-over-year. And he pointedly told the audience, “We expect to be profitable in 2017.”

Anaplan’s robust spreadsheet technology for business received another boost when they announced last week that the company would add predictive analytics to their platform. This was greeted positively by Telus, the large Canadian national telecommunications company. “We’re trying to help anticipate the customer journey at Telus,” said Petto Chan, the company’s manager of business analysis. “So this is pretty exciting.”

A number of Anaplan’s other high profile customers were in attendance, including executives from Kellogg Company, Deloitte, Splunk, and DocuSign. The presence of DocuSign’s current CEO – Keith Krach – on the San Francisco stage with Anaplan last week added an ironic note. Last year, Krach announced his intention to step away from DocuSign but he still remains in the post after the company’s top choice for his successor abruptly pulled out.

Like Anaplan, DocuSign, the e-signing and document powerhouse, has a valuation well over a billion dollars and is also one of many technology companies rumored to be on track to go public. But the pressure to become a publicly-traded company (and thus reap a potentially enormous financial return for investors), could be leading many firms down an equally difficult path.

Just a few blocks from Anaplan’s conference in San Francisco last week, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs heard several panels of speakers describe the growing shareholder activist movement which has placed the tech company CEOs under even greater scrutiny. According to a recent Moody’s report, over a third of shareholder activism cases today involve tech firms, more than any other industry segment.

Since 2013, a host of big-name technology companies have been the target of shareholder actions, seeking greater distribution of profits from cash-rich firms (Apple) to a board seat (Yahoo). This is leading some tech companies to begin re-thinking their strategy to become public.

“There’s a little bit of fatigue you are starting to hear about technology companies thinking about going public,” said Bill Anderson, a senior managing director for Evercore, an investment banking advisory firm.

Anderson spoke at an event in San Francisco last week organized by The Mergermarket Group. According to Ed Mullane, sector editor for technology and media, he reached out to several companies who had been dealing with shareholder activists, but could not get any CEOs to participate.

“Some of these (activist) attacks are very personal,” said Anderson, highlighting the issues that CEOs of public companies face when presented with shareholder demands. But the reality is that many activists, such as the high-profile ValueAct Capital, have become increasingly savvy about leveraging institutional investors and what they might want.

“Activists are now very much in tune with how institutional investors think,” said Kenton King, a partner with the New York-based law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.

Executive turnover in technology firms like Anaplan and more active shareholder involvement are trends that will likely remain in place for a while. “The activist movement is here to stay,” said King, even as tech companies grapple with the tough decision to remain private or not and the revolving CEO door continues to spin.

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As Hurricane Sandy struck, Governor Chris Christy understood immediately what was needed: cash and lots of it.

Safety, potable water, food, communications gear, gas and shelter would all be needed, not just for a day or two, but for weeks, possibly months. To ensure a steady supply of those necessities, BIG BUCKS were called for.

Christie, along with the help of President Obama (a Republican and a Democrat working together, hard to believe), was able to get money flowing quickly.

In times of crisis, goodwill is a necessity, but money soon needs to follow to get the most basic needs and support that goodwill and avoid an economic death spiral –  A.K.A. Katrina.

Thinking of the economy as a bucket of water may be the best way to grasp how money and the economy work.

Growth comes from excess water flowing over the edge of that bucket and into our hands so we can save, invest and spend. If that bucket becomes half full, it needs to be refilled quickly. That bucket is not going to magically refill itself. Wait on a rainy day? Too risky.

The Great Depression is the example of not refilling the bucket. Herbert Hoover chose high tariffs and live within your means. Hoover took water out of the bucket. He didn’t refill it.

Turn to 2008 and the Great Recession. The US government learned from past mistakes and added massive amounts of water to the bucket. The 2009 budget was USD 1.4 trillion in deficit. A BIG number. That money flowed into the economy.

The move quickly refilled the bucket and avoided a Great Depression. The economy collapsed some 30% in the Great Depression. In the Great Recession, it collapsed about 9% in late 2008. Quite a difference.

The budget deficit is now below USD 600m, heading down, the economy is growing (albeit too slowly in Bergen County) and job growth is finally kicking into gear.

The difference between the 1930s and a few years ago? Congress moved to refill the bucket. What was Congressman Garrett’s response? Like Hoover’s: live within your means. While noble, it is a pure fantasy approach. Belt tighening doesn’t work in times of stress. People need help and they need it fast.

It’s time to send a representative for the 5th District to Washington that understands creative  solutions are needed for tough problems. Scott Garrett has proven he is not that person. Maybe Roy Cho can be that person.

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Democratic House of Representatives hopeful Roy Cho pulled together some of New Jersey’s biggest political power players at the Ridgewood Women’s Club last week. Former  Senator Bill Bradley, who has kept a low profile on political matters, led the charge. Senator Robert Menendez also provided a push.

The Democrats, after years of trying, found a candidate in Cho to take on six time Republican incumbent Scott Garrett. In the past, the Democrats had a tough time convincing candidates to take on the ultra conservative candidate for the 5th District. Former New York Giant Harry Carson had been pushed in the past, but was a no go.

For those who don’t closely follow the actions of Garrett, his decisions can be highly controversial. This is when he can be heard making decisions. He keeps a very low profile.

Garrett was the only New Jersey representative in Washington to vote against receiving federal aid to help rebuild the state following Hurricane Sandy. Republican Governor Chris Christie was fully on board for the aid. The twelve-year congressman was nowhere to be found.

This thinking is a bit perplexing considering New Jersey is one of the highest net payers of taxes to Washington – paying more versus what the state gets back. It’s pretty reasonable to conclude that the state has the right to ask for support when plenty of New Jersey dollars have gone to support other states in need. Garrett thought differently.

The upcoming vote can be seen as a decision on whether “Just Say No” politics is worth supporting.

Garrett has been a just-say-no politician with the district having gone nowhere economically for much of his tenure – small businesses continue to struggle and housing prices have changed little over the past half decade.

Just over the Hudson, in New York City, the economy is booming. It’s booming in other areas of the country as well. With a highly educated workforce, areas such as San Francisco and Silicon Valley, housing prices have doubled over the past five years or so. New York City and areas such as Williamsburg, Brooklyn, an area once left for dead, are roaring economically.

Why can’t that be the case in this area of Bergen County? This is one of the most highly educated areas of the country. Why can’t this district have the type of growth in the 70s, 80s and 90s?

Maybe the key to success is we have to become a “Just Say Yes” district.

Growth in this area has long been dependent upon access to New York City and the migration of the workforce to the suburbs. New York is currently packed with twenty- and thirty-somethings and new generations of immigrants, both groups paying exorbitant rents, looking for more space.

Millennials, coming from all over the country to participate in the growth of the city, will, at some point, have kids and buy bigger houses.

But these groups will only come if the commute time is reasonable, which, currently, is not the case. It only has been getting worse. The current infrastructure needs to be greatly expanded and, in some cases, rebuilt. Investments need to be made.

The just-say-no mentality, which sometimes afflicts our governor as well as Garrett, came into play when Christie put a halt to plans to build a new tunnel into the city. Now, as the population grows and the New Jersey economy stagnates, and residents are forced to go into the city to find good paying jobs, the commute is getting longer and longer.

The Hoboken train schedule is a clear example of how stagnant and pervasive the just-say-no mentality is – it has changed little over the past forty years.

Today, trains run the same schedule as when people worked 9 to 5. Few work 9 to 5 anymore. People work 9 to 6 if they’re lucky. There are few express trains after 6:00. That’s pretty silly.

The younger generation flocks to the magnificently rebuilt waterfront (an example of very successful massive investment) of New Jersey and have to sprint to catch the last train at 1:00 am. In the city, subways run safely 24 hours a day. Quality of life is important to the younger folks.

These are a few examples of a much longer list that can be compiled to improve the economy in this area.

Making these changes requires investment and to make investments, leadership is needed that can say “yes”. Garrett has proven he is unable to say “yes”.

Predicting how well Roy Cho will perform in Congress is a tough call. But he did show a willingness to listen in Ridgewood last week. This is one important trait that our current representative does not have.

The 5th District needs someone that can “Just Say Yes”.

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http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000299282#.

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Hello Tim,

Thanks for picking up the tab for dinner the other day. Obviously, you can easily afford it.  After all, Apple is the only company that made more money than I did last year. HaHa.

Boy that Netflix! I had no idea that PBS didn’t have a monopoly on black & whites.

Tim, I just want to thank you for the  great company you helped build: the years of work, the long hours. Waking up early each day to do that rigorous workout to get ready to create, to market, to manage; it is truly humbling.

My morning routine consists of drinking a cup of dark, black coffee to get rid of the edge left over from that extra martini. Haha. Tim, people underestimate how funny I can be.

But, as I mentioned at dinner, as an esteemed member of the New York investment community, my job is to get as many billions of cash into my pockets as quickly as possible, and, of course, with as little effort. God bless this country.

I know it took you 10 years to build up this cash, but if I don’t get my money in 10 weeks, I’ll be pissed. After all, I’ve owned my Apple shares for months now. Tim, time is money.

As discussed, I plan to do this in a highly professional way. Unlike that chump Michael Dell who started a PC price war just to buy his company on the cheap. That little punk. Man, I get too excited sometimes.

Well, back to Apple and its hefty cash position.

Tim, as you well know, Apple has had a lot of success with its iPod and then its iPod as a phone. Now you have made a bigger iPod and call it an iPad. Utterly brilliant. So little effort and so much  profit. Tim, I wish I could have come up with such an idea, but that would have taken way too much of my time and energy,  when I can simply nag you for a few months and get a lot of cash.

Actually, when I come to think of it, Tim, I have a similar strategy, but instead of selling a small, cute product, I give a speech. The same speech, over and over again, for some 30 years. And these idiot professional investors are still willing to pay me to give that same speech. This is like the way you sell those iPods.

My shtick is I bash corporate management. The popular jock becomes the head of a company because he’s a nice guy and doesn’t burn any bridges. And then, from that niceness, he drives the company into the ground.

And the speech works. The audience howls. The popular jocks in the audience don’t even realize it is them I’m making fun of. Well, that’s Corporate America for you.

Tim, this is my demand. Take that USD 150bn and give it to me as one of your shareholders and I will never compare you to that guy who used to run the company. What’s his name? Oh! that Bill Gates guy.

Also, send me one of those bigger iPod thingies. I have trouble reading on the small screen. As you probably noticed at our dinner, I’m no kid anymore.

Your cherished friend as long as I get my hands on that USD 150bn,

Carl

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Scott Garrett, the 5th District of New Jersey member of the House of Representatives (and locale of my home-sweet-home), was quick to let his opinions known of Janet Yellen, the likely new head of the Federal Reserve:

“For far too long the Federal Reserve’s reckless easy-money policy has supplied a constant sugar high to our capital markets.  The Fed’s dangerous game of financial roulette has created unsustainable market bubbles, distorted the healthy function of our capital markets, and served to support the president’s reckless spending.”  

An interesting choice of comments from a member of the House whose constituency largely consists of men and women who work in the financial district. What period of time is the House member referring to as having “reckless easy-money policy”?

The Fed is one of the great experiments in US history. Prior to the formation of the central bank in 1913, economic cycles were short in duration, with violent swings between growth and contraction. It was simply too hard for people to keep jobs and save for a large middle class to form.

After World War II, the US became the clear economic leader around the globe and introduced a stable currency to go along with an empowered Fed. The US economy – and those of many democratic countries – took off: the middle class exploded in size. Democracy and capitalism flourished.

During this time, economic expansions began lasting  longer – four to five years in the 1950s and 60s, with the peaks and valleys becoming less extreme. By the 1980s and 90s, economic expansions lasted seven to eights years. The improvement in economic performance was greatly aided by the Fed.

The Fed is a great example of how educated people – with degrees from high school, college, masters programs and throw in Phds – lead to a nation doing better things.

Janet Yellen’s background exemplifies this pursuit of excellence to improve  herself and her country. The knowledge she has gained from her hard work has allowed her to play an important role in our country’s success.

Should blame be placed on the Fed for reckless easy-money policy as the cause for the economic underperformance of the US economy? Please. Mr. Garrett take a good look in the mirror.

The Federal Reserve has been very active and responsive to the meltdown of the US and global financial market. Mr Garrett. Your response? A government shutdown, perhaps.

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Stories of great human interest that unfolded during World War II have come my way in the last six months.

These books came to the attention of friends and relatives following the success of the New York Times Bestseller Unbroken and were referred to me. I think they’re worth referring to you.

Lost in Shangri-La and Operation Mincemeat are both great reads with softer, albeit very important, story lines than Laura Hilldebrand’s writings on Louie Zamperini.

For those who have yet to read Unbroken, it’s a must read. Her quick, shorter sentence style moves the reader through the many tough parts of Zamperini’s epic struggle for survival during the war.

Both Lost in Shangri-La and Operation Mincemeat are non-fiction adventures. Mitchell Zuckoff’s Lost in Shangri-La follows a group of soldiers and nurses stationed in Dutch New Guinea, a massive island with impenetrable forests, from late Spring into the Summer of 1945, as the war comes to an end.

While flying over a mountain range and looking down into a valley, US pilots discover an entire civilization untouched by the outside world – tribes that are a throw back to prehistoric times.

Excited by their finding, they hurry back to the American base and the pilots start shuttling groups of GIs and nurses over the valley. However, a pilot is called away for other duties and a newbie steps up. While attempting to gain altitude to exit one of the valleys, the pilot miscalculates his ascent and crashes into the mountain side. The survivors then have to engage the inhabitants and find a way to get back to the base, which is hundreds of miles away and no roads to be found. Helicopters were not ready for such rescue missions. This book is a great read about the survivors and how those back at the base would get them out of the valley.

Operation Mincemeat by Ben Macintyre is also an upbeat read of how clever deception by the English intelligence services helped the allies land in Italy with great success and build a second front in Europe.

The book was on the New York Times Bestsellers list, so I may be the last one to learn about this treasure. Malcom Gladwell called it, “Brilliant and absurdly entertaining.” Who is to argue with Gladwell? It’s a fun and well-written journey.

After starting off a bit too Downton Abbey-ish for my liking (aristocratic elite, the incestuousness of participants coming from a few educational institutions, Oh! Ho-hum), I asked myself if this is going to be 300-plus pages of patting the back of the British upper crust. But Macintyre’s book isn’t anything like that and turns into a great story telling yarn of influencing a very thorough German intelligence to shift troops away from Italy and toward Greece.

British intelligence decides to have a dead man’s body float ashore on the Mediterranean coast line. The dead man has a folder containing details of false Allied invasion plans strapped to his body.

Macintyre covers all the details of finding a body to use, to having it float ashore on the Spanish coast so that it would fall into the hands of German spies, to finding ways to ensure that the ink on the documentation located on the dead man’s body would not run. The details were amazing.

Operation Mincemeat provides great insight into how espionage and story telling about espionage would develop as World War II ended was replaced by the Cold War.

Ian Fleming is also part of the deception.

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Dish and the many options available to the video satellite provider – or lack thereof. Published on Dealreporter on 21 August.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/4e0b97de-0b4a-11e3-bffc-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2dRyl5zrw

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