Review: American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps and the Marriage of Money and Power by Andrea Bernstein

I am no fan of the Trumps.  Nor do I approve of many of the financial shenanigans engaged by him, his company, and his family.  But the problem lies primarily with the loopholes created by legislators at the behest of the rich so they can avoid taxes and get richer all the while sucking at the public teat through government contracts. Trump himself has acknowledged publicly in one of the debates that he used money to purchase influence and garner favor. The Fact is that politicians love power and want to keep it.  To do that they need lots of money and people like Trump were there to fulfill their wishes.  At a price.  

 

"Consultants" hire themselves out to help get politicians elected.  Then get hired to work in the government they helped elect.  Then leave that government and create lobbying firms to sell the influence and connections they now possess thanks to their time in that government.

 

One of the advantages to owning a casino is how easy it is to launder money and get unregistered loans.  His father bailed him out when Trump was close to insolvency and unable to make a bond payment by walking into one of Trump's casinos in Atlantic City and purchasing $3.5 million worth of chips and then just walking out effectively giving his son a free loan. Clearly, following the refusal of American banks to loan him more money following a string of bankruptcies in which they lost millions, the Russian oligarchs stepped in to fill the void.

 

Given what Trump said during the debates, i.e., how he gave money to both parties in order to garner favor and influence, I should not have been surprised with the close political relationships between the Kushner family and the Democrats, especially Bill Clinton, but I certainly was with their connection to Benjamin Netanyahu. Perhaps the Jewish connection and appreciation for Israel stemmed from the horrific experience of their family under the Nazis. (The failure of Trump to denounce the anti-Semitism of his more radical followers is the more surprising given the Kushners' Jewishness and the conversion of Ivanka to Judaism.)

 

Trump benefited from the Bloomberg policy of seeking foreign investment for New York.  Bloomberg actively solicited money from overseas, proclaiming that the city needed them to help pay taxes and fund schools and police. The Trumps took advantage of this policy, and so did the Russians, who invested heavily in Trump projects, often buying condos and apartments in his buildings for millions of dollars in cash.  It was a marvelous way to laundry money and curry favor with the future president. More than 50% of these units were occupied less than two months out of the year. A less beneficial impact was a doubling of rental costs in the city.

 

Ultimately, this is a very depressing book. The clear lesson is that if you have money, you can flaunt the laws;  if you have money you inherited, you can create an image for yourself that may be completely at odds with who you are; that if you have money, the rules that apply to everyone else don't apply to you; and, if you have money, you can buy influence among politicians who then build loopholes for you to drive your trucks through. One wonders what the net effect of the Trump presidency will be. One danger will be, as a reviewer in the Washington Post noted, " cottage industry of Trump biographers and researchers has uncovered so many examples of deceptive, fraudulent and mean-spirited behavior by the president and his family that one succumbs to outrage fatigue."

 

Review: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou

 Listened to this as an audio book and I found all sorts of excuses to do things so I could continue listening (my wife loved it because most of that work involved cleaning.) As almost everyone knows Elizabth Holmes had dropped out of Stanford so she could get rich.  She had an idea for a device that would revolutionize blood testing, a nifty idea.  Unfortunately it never worked but she insisted in public it did and fraudulently manipulated the data behind the scenes to prevent investors from recognizing that.  When VP Biden visited the Theranos lab in 2015 he was presented with rows of machines.  The Problem was they were all fake.

 She persuaded numerous well-known people to sit on the board and invest. As a young, attractive woman, perhaps that influenced the older men who jumped on board. (Henry Kissinger and George Schultz were among them. Ironically, Schultz, who got his grandson a job at Theranos, refused to believe him when the grandson reported the "place was rotten.") I don't know. Then again, I always wondered about John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin who seemed to offer little except a nice face. The media fell for it, too. Adoring profiles appeared in numerous magazines that did not do their homework. CEOs at Safeway and Walgreens were not immune to her spell.

 

I found this quote from the NY Times review particularly apt: "Swathed in her own reality distortion field, she dressed in black turtlenecks to emulate her idol Jobs and preached that the Theranos device was “the most important thing humanity has ever built.” Employees were discouraged from questioning this cultish orthodoxy by her “ruthlessness” and her “culture of fear.” Secrecy was obsessive. Labs and doors were equipped with fingerprint scanners.

 

The media was completely bamboozled and fawned all over her.  All sorts of evidence was there from employees who were quitting in droves, but they were never interviewed. The old geezers on the board had even been warned by relatives who worked at the company to no avail. The old guys were so enamored of this pretty thing with nice legs that they abandoned their fiduciary responsibility and really should have been held responsible for the disaster.  David Boies doesn't escape condemnation either.  The esteemed lawyer who charged $1000 per hour had a stake in the company, violating all sorts of ethical tenets, sued anyone who might say something negative about the company, harassing them with private detectives and threats.*

 

Holmes and her erstwhile boyfriend, ex COO of Theranos, Ramesh Balwani, are now under indictment facing decades of imprisonment if found guilty. As further evidence of her cold manipulative personality, detractors cite her becoming pregnant just before the trial was to begin (resulting in a postponement) as a calculated move to garner sympathy.  The story is not over and several podcasts (The Dropout and Bad Blood: the Final Chapter) are reporting on the trial.

 

Society functions well only when there exists a level of trust. We want (and need) to assume that people are not fooling us. It's OK to be moderately skeptical but actions like Holmes's raise the skepticism bar to an impossible level that will eventually stifle progress.

 

*see https://isb.idaho.gov/blog/theranos-and-the-tale-of-the-disappearing-board-of-directors/ for more.

Review: Under Pressure: Living Life and Avoiding Death on a Nuclear Submarine by Richard Humphreys

 Seeking adventure, Humphreys tried to join the French Foreign Legion, but was turned away because he was too young and couldn't get his parents' permission. When he got a little older the Navy seemed a good alternative and the submarine force, as an elite, even more attractive.  This is a skeptical and clear-eyed look at the process of becoming a submariner and what it was like to live and work in a submarine.

 After some rather harrowing training, he discovered that leaving port in a submarine during rough seas (the best time to remain hidden), leads to rather extreme sea-sickness and given the fetid air the boat soon filled with everyone's previous meal. Life on board was boring, claustrophobic, all-consuming, and nerve-wracking, all at the same time. Amusingly, one of the most frequent questions asked by visitors to the boat, was "Where are the windows? How do you know where you are going?"

 

Circadian rhythms get completely discombobulated with watches on a 4-on, 8-off cycle, no natural light (high intensity lights are on all the time), no sunrise or sunset and never knowing whether it's morning or night except by the clock. That leads to instability and being thrown together with people you may not like, for months at a time, becomes another source of tension.

 

Humphreys finishes the book with a meditation on MAD. As he says earlier on, one misstep and its WW III that no one wins. If you have any interest at all in what it's like to be an ordinary seaman on a nuclear sub, then this is the book for you.  Expect some claustrophobia. 

Review: HHhH by Laurence binnet

 I have always been fascinated and simultaneously repelled by Heydrich and his ilk.  Having read several biographies of the monster, I bought this one. 

The antithesis of a straight narrative biography, I discovered it to be quite appealing and interesting, not just in his reflections on Heydrich, but the literature, culture, and historical milieu surrounding the man. The conceit is an unnamed novelist obsessed with researching Heydrich in hopes of writing about his murder as a thriller. He decides instead to provide a running commentary on what he finds rather than invent scenes and dialogue.

"Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich",  ("Hhhm is literally translated as "Himmler's brain is called Heydrich".)  My background in German would idiomatically translate it differently: "Heydrich was Himmler's brain." The most dangerous man in Hitler's cabinet, Reinhard Heydrich was known as the "Butcher of Prague." Assassinated by some British trained Czech agents, German vengeance was swift and terrible.  A town was chosen at random (seemingly, but who knows) and its inhabitants killed and the town completely leveled. 

There are trenchant comments and quotes throughout: Daladier, former defense minister of the Popular Front, invokes questions of national defense not to prevent Hitler carving up Czechoslovakia but to backtrack on the forty-hour week—one of the principal gains of the Popular Front. At this level of political stupidity, betrayal becomes almost a work of art....Hitler and Mussolini have already left. Chamberlain yawns ostentatiously, while Daladier tries and fails to hide his agitation behind a façade of embarrassed haughtiness. When the Czechs, crushed, ask if their government is expected to make some kind of declaration in response to this news, it is perhaps shame that removes his ability to speak. (If only it had choked him—him and all the others!) It is therefore left to his colleague to speak, and he does so with such casual arrogance that the Czech foreign minister says afterward, in a laconic remark that all my countrymen should ponder:

As the SD extends its web, Heydrich will discover that he has an unusual gift for bureaucracy, the most important quality for the management of a good spy network. His motto could be: Files! Files! Always more files! In every color. On every subject. Heydrich gets a taste for it very quickly. Information, manipulation, blackmail, and spying become his drugs.

One interesting tidbit I did not know was that Heydrich was a reserve officer in the Luftwaffe. He had hopes of downing an enemy plane, but once, even after becoming head of the SD, he flew his Messerschmidt 109 with a group of German fighters over the eastern front. Sighting a Yak, he assumed it would be an easy kill and swooped down only to discover that while the Yak was slower, it was extremely maneuverable and the Yak pilot led him directly over a Russian anti-aircraft battery.  He was shot down and there were many nervous Germans hoping he was either dead or would make his way back to their lines.  He knew too much. When he did return two days later, he had earned an Iron Cross, but Hitler forbade him from ever flying any combat missions again.

Heydrich was assassinated (it took him a few days to die, of sepsis, not the actual attempt) just a day before he was to leave for Germany to be reassigned France. Whether the assassination accomplished anything other than his death and the deaths of thousands of people in retribution, is for ethicists to ponder.

Review: Checkmate in Berlin: The Cold War Showdown That Shaped the Modern World by Giles Milton

 Flies, flies, and more flies and they were all fat. The city had no cats, dogs, or birds.  They had all been eaten by the starving inhabitants. Such was the way one  British observer described the city upon entering Berlin. It was a scene straight out of Hieronymous Bosch with destruction on a massive scale, dead bodies everywhere, and anything that had survived ripped off, literally, by Soviet troops who had arrived first to cart everything east. Fanatical Nazis, following Hitler's final orders to destroy everything,  had done their work well, too.

The Soviets were a problem from the beginning, never willing to compromise, and dismantling everything they could lay their hands on to be shipped back to Russia.  There was conflict between Lucius Clay, the brilliant logistician who had never experienced combat, but who kept the troops supplied with what they needed, and Frank Hawley, general in charge of the American sector of Berlin who didn't trust the Russians.  Clay knew they had to figure out a way to get along with the Soviets.  He also realized the importance of resurrecting German industry rather than destroying it.  It was the only way to keep people fed, not to mention it was important for U.S. industry as a consumer of U.S. goods.

The Russians were, then as now, masters of misinformation and sowing mistrust among the allies, deviously spreading lies about each other and other falsities. Those who were surprised by Russian manipulation of American social media during recent elections should not have been.  They have many decades of experience. They revealed their distaste for fair play in one anecdote. All the allied leaders were invited to a boar hunt, an invitation that was accepted by all with pleasure.  They were surprised when the Russians arrived with submachine guns instead of rifles. When the boars came out of the woods, the Russians opened up with a fusillade that had all everyone else hitting the ground to avoid bullets that were flying everywhere. When the shooting stopped a mass of dead boar lay in front of them having been slaughtered by the massive firepower. That was emblematic of Russian tactics. 

That first winter was the coldest on record, and the suffering of Germans and refugees was terrible. Meanwhile, the winners were living in splendor and unimaginable comfort. They requisitioned beautiful mansions, had access to the riches of the PX, and had plenty of servants.  The Black Market made many rich, and virtually anything could be had for a few cigarettes which had become the de facto currency. The disparity between the conquerors and the people was a worry to some as they feared that unless the allies could get German industry and society back on its feet that Communism, which on its face lacked the same disparities, would become more appealing. The Allies won a stunning election victory in the first election as the allies merely posted signs reminding Germans of the vicious reprisals taken by the Russians.  But people can be fickle and tend to follow food rather than politics, so providing sustenance became a priority.

Ironies abound.  The Soviets themselves should have realized how people can come together to survive sieges; they had their own Leningrad and Stalingrad examples before them. Had Stalin not unleashed the fury of Russian troops to wreck havoc on Berliners by Russian troops, they might have been far less fearful of Soviet domination. Traffic between East and West Berlin remained open during the airlift, which was instituted in 1948 ( a magnificent logistical feat) , the catch being that Westerners crossing the checkpoints had to register with the Soviet authorities thus placing them under Soviet control. So even though they could get food on the Eastern side, few people crossed to risk Soviet control. Electricity was a huge problem.  80% of electricity generators were in the Eastern sector, so that was severely rationed in the West.  Since water had to be pumped from deep wells, it had to be rationed as well. 

One high placed U.S. official remarked of the crisis, "One wrong foot now, and it's World War III."  I could write a lot more.  Loved this book.