All posts by Steve Stern

Romney, Bain Capital, and the amorality of business verses Santorum, righteousness, and the immorality of being certain

Current Affairs, Politics, Psychological Musings

Following the Republican primary has been both fascinating and scary. Fascinating because the players seem flawed to the point that the race sometimes seems like fiction. Scary because one of these guys could be the next president of the United States; unlikely, in my opinion, but possible. Of the two main players, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum, Romney seems like the best bet because – as the conventional wisdom has it – he is probably just bullshitting and would be more moderate than he is pretending to be now. Maybe….I guess.

Romney is a businessman and business is, usually, amoral. Not immoral, just amoral as in morality is not really a factor. There are exceptions when the founder has a vision of a product or service that he or she wants to get into the marketplace, but I have never heard of a business that was founded to provide jobs. A business has to make money to survive and business, done right, becomes about making money. Even Apple, under Steve Jobs, which was one of the most Vision driven companies in the marketplace, moved its production to China to make more money. It is axiomatic; the better the business is run, the more money it makes.

A business that invests or takes over other companies doesn’t even have a product, it is only about making money. A couple of months ago, The New Yorker had an article about  the Stella D’oro Biscuit Company, a Bronx bakery that was bought by a private-equity firm like Bain Capital in 2006. It makes for fascinating reading and I suggest you follow the link, but the gist of the article is that a company that had taken great pride in its product and the way it treated its workers was  destroyed after it was bought out by a company that did not share that vision.

The private equity firm, Bain Capital, founded by Mitt Romney was founded to make money. Not to hire people, not to produce a great product, only to make money. They go where they think they can make  the most money like surveillance cameras when the Chinese government spends multibillions in an effort to blanket the country with devises to watch their citizens. Bain has bought in because they think they will make a  profit. The morality of China spying on its people is not a factor, the profit is. Jobs is not a factor, according to an analysis by the Wall Street Journal, 22 percent of the companies in which Bain invested wound up either in bankruptcy or shutting their doors entirely. But Romney made money from them; apparently he is very good at making money.

I suspect that Romney would be pretty pragmatic as president. I wouldn’t like his appointments to the Supreme Court1, I wouldn’t like his Secretary of the Interior, but I doubt that he would be another George Bush the Younger attacking random countries.  Maybe a Nixon foreign or Clinton foreign policy and Bush the Elder domestic2 policy.

Rick Santorum, on the other hand, seems like a True Believer. 3 Somebody who would rather be right than President and, to misquote a former Speaker of the House, Thomas Reed, hopefully for the country, he will never be either.  Unfortunately for the country, he is and, seemingly, will be an influence. To see what kind of influence, check out this latest ad fro Santorum. Notice the subliminal flashing of Obama with  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at about the 40 second mark. The Santorum ad does its best to dehumanize Obama and when we dehumanize the other, the deranged take their cues. I think he is very scary.

1. Which is probably an understatement.

2. Or do I have to say heartland, now?

3. The True Believer is a book by San Francisco’s own Eric Hoffer on fanaticism.  

The Obama I expected and didn’t get until now

Americana, Obama, Politics

When Michele and I started working on the Obama Campaign in 2007, I was drawn to Obama by his message of change. The idea of change that he represented and promoted. During the primary, he said We can’t change the way Washington works unless we first change how Congress works. and It’s not just enough to change the players. We’ve gotta change the game.

In December of 2007 in Des Moines, he said We can’t afford to be so worried about losing the next election that we lose the battles we owe to the next generation.  The real gamble in this election is playing the same Washington game with the same Washington players and expecting a different result.  And that’s a risk we can’t take. Then he got elected and chose the same Washington players and pretty much got the same results.

But yesterday, Barack Obama nominated Dartmouth College president Jim Yong Kim to be head of the World Bank. He is Change we can believe In. Way to go Obama. And, if you have any doubts, check out his resume and video below (starting at about 2:00 for the impatient).

Ulysses S. Grant, General Order No. 11, and Judaism in America

Americana, General U.S. Grant

General Order No. 11, issued by my hero – General Ulysses S. Grant – was the most notorious anti-Semitic official order in American history: “The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders, are hereby expelled from the department within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order.”

I first read about Order #11 in Grant Moves South by Bruce Catton – maybe, twenty five years ago – and I just sort of ignored it. Ignored it as in in pretend it wasn’t there. I sort considered it a mote in Grant’s otherwise perfect veneer. I did know the root of Grant’s Order #11, but I didn’t know the aftermath except that Lincoln immediately cancelled it. That mote as well as its aftermath are the subject of an interesting article by Jonathan D. Sarna. It turns out that the story ended very differently than it started.

General Grant had a very strained relationship with his ill-tempered father, Jesse Grant, who owned a tanning company for which Ulysses Grant worked before the war when he was out of work and desperate. He hated the work and, by all accounts, he did not get along with his belligerent and overbearing father. Father Jesse was also a little bit of a operator, for lack of a better word, and – in December of 1862, twenty one, or so, months after Grant had left his employment – visited his son, now Major General Grant, hero of Fort Donaldson. Father Jesse accompanied several members of the Mack family of Cincinnati. They were Jewish clothing manufacturers trying to purchase cotton and they had formed a secret partnership with Jesse Grant. He was to get 25 percent of their profits for his work acting as their agent to “procure a permit for them to purchase cotton.”

According to an eyewitness, General Grant was upset and embarrassed at his father’s attempt to profit from his son’s new military status. He took his anger at his father out on the Macks and enlarged that to all Jews expelling them from his war zone. Once again, the Jews were being treated as a different and separate class to be discriminated against.

Even though the order was quickly cancelled,  Sarna points out that the memory of what his wife, Julia, called “that obnoxious order” continued to haunt Grant to his death….the sense that in expelling them he had failed to live up to his own high standards of behavior, and to the Constitution that he had sworn to uphold, gnawed at him. Grant apologized publicly and privately told people that he been wrong.

In this day and age – probably every day and age, actually – lots of people apologize for some stupid thing they said or did with a lame statement like If I offended you, I am sorry or I may have used the wrong wording, but my point was.… Grant apologized and changed his behavior. As president, he made more Jewish appointments than all previous presidents put together. In an effort to help the plight of the Jews of Romania, who were being terrorized by Russian pogroms, he appointed a Jewish ambassador to Romania. As president, he attended the dedication of a synagogue further legitimizing and empowering American Judaism.

Grant cultivated friendships with some of the foremost Jewish leaders of the time, inviting them to the White House and entertaining them socially. All this was during a time when much of the United States was becoming reactionary. It was a time of the Ku Klux Klan. It was a time when the Christian National Reform Association was making headway into getting a Constitutional Amendment to make the United States a Christian Nation. It was a time, much like today, when the forces trying to turn the clock back were gaining power.

Grant believed in the Constitution – took it’s deeper meaning seriously – fought to save it, and then became the first  Civil Rights president. The ONLY Civil Rights president for almost seventy-five years. Twenty three years after General Order #11, at his funeral march – witnessed by over a million people – the pallbearers included Union generals William Sherman and Phil Sheridan, Confederate generals Joseph Johnston and Simon Buckner, and Rabbi Edward Benjamin Morris Browne. The following day, the Jewish Record reported  Seldom before, has the kaddish been repeated so universally for a non-Jew as in this case. General Grant would have been proud.