Things can only get….

When Michael Cimino directed Heaven’s Gate in 1980, did he know Howard the Duck was just around the corner with Gigli still to be green-lighted two decades later?

When the Philadelphia Athletics lost 117 games (out of 153) in 1916, could they have imagined that a slightly longer season and Casey Stengel’s 1962 Mets losing 120 (out of 160) would drop them down a line in the baseball loser record books?

In 1978 when Henry Ford II threw Chrysler’s future savior and automotive industry guru Lee Iacocca out of Ford Motors, could he suspect that John Sculley would come along to throw founder and future world-changer Steve Jobs out of Apple Computer in 1985?

And when the Boston Red Sox owner Harry Frazee traded Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees in early 1920 for $100,000 in production money for the ill-fated musical No, No, Nanette, did he know that there would be….no wait, there actually never was a worse trade that that one (other than the $24 for Manhattan deal that predated).

So when George W. Bush, interviewed in connection with the 2013 opening of his presidential library, declared that “I did what I did and ultimately history will judge,” did he have some inside information that the current occupant would trounce his younger brother and end up making history the easiest grader in…well…history? https://www.politico.com/story/2013/04/george-w-bush-usa-today-interview-presidential-library-090417

So, at this point, in the midst of the second worst pandemic this country has ever experienced (and you know the rest of the depressing story of the past three plus years), with Lennon and McCartney’s Getting Better from 1967 not particularly resonating, maybe it’s Howard Jones circa 1985 who sounds more on point.

And do you feel scared? I do. But I won’t stop and falter. And if we threw it all away? Things can only get better. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa………

Things Can Only Get Better - Howard Jones

Cost Cuts Have Arrived

When I opined about “Cost Cuts” in sports many years ago—see tab below—I had no idea we would perhaps get there so soon. In fact, the first season of the Esports Simulation Football League actually was during 2013. https://simulationfl.net/

There it was yesterday, on my television set, as Season 15 got underway, fictional teams and fictional fans with real people behind controllers. A presentation ostensibly not just for the participants but for other viewers hungry for sports. I didn’t stay long—I don’t even like live football with real players and fans (and collisions and CTE of course). But with all of the hassle and expense of attending a live game, now coupled with pandemic impossibility and fan-free basketball and baseball, is this how it’s going to be?

Undercover Queen

The pandemic has us all watching a little more television than we used to. When I’m not catching up on missed episodes of Barnaby Jones and Cannon from the 1970s, I have made some time to check in with the always oblivious chief executives and always suffering employees of Undercover Boss. In that first February 2010 episode, in the throes of unprecedented economic turbulence, the head of Waste Management, Inc. went into the field to see what it was really like to work at the company. Ten seasons, more than one hundred episodes and a couple of Emmy Awards later, we have the answers—-it sucks to work at Waste Management and everywhere else. But if you’re lucky enough to be one of the employees asked to train the undercover executive taking a turn at the drive-through window or the assembly line, you get to tell him or her up close and personal of your student loan debt, disabled daughter, failing kidneys, drug-dependent father, two other jobs, and loyalty to the company. The upshot? You’ll probably get the student loan paid off, forty thousand dollars to boot, and an opportunity to share tears with someone whose annual income is likely a few hundred times greater than yours. So who am I to worry about the other thousands of employees not getting any help from the newly enlightened and benevolent head honchos?

Earlier today I was soaking up the 2013 rerun revelations of the CEO of Donatos Pizza of Columbus, Ohio when my wife strolled by. “I hate that show,” she told me with no hesitation. “They lift up four people an episode and everyone else gets to rot forever. Reminds me so much of Queen For A Day.”

Leave it to my wife to make that connection. Queen For A Day: The Cinderella Show ran on radio, then television, for twenty years. Featuring kindly, mustached star host Jack Bailey interviewing four women vying for the crown and the granting of their index card wish for a refrigerator, dehumidifier, electric blankets, upstairs heating, clothing for fifteen siblings, a bed for a paralyzed brother---almost always amidst desperation laid bare and the tears that go with it. (And once, a vacation, for a woman who had lost her two handicapped children and both of her parents recently.) One crown, one winner, one wish granted. Chosen by an applause meter tuned to the almost exclusively female audience at Hollywood’s Moulin Rouge Dinner Theatre charged with this awesome responsibility, all funded by Anacin, Colgate Dental Cream, Old Gold Cigarettes, Ex-Lax, Hartz Mountain Cat Yummies, and countless others over the years. It hasn’t made it to classic rerun status yet but some video excerpts are all over the internet, as painful to watch now as my wife remembered.

Desperate circumstances and the promise of a savior, be it undercover or by way of a temporary robe and crown, have always made good television ratings, if not necessarily good television or good policy.

Trickling on down the road

Wow, if you haven’t taken a look at the New York Times Editorial Board’s collection of 16 pages of essays from last weekend detailing what’s wrong with America and how to right the ship, run, don’t walk, to do so now at the link at the bottom of the page. It’s a thoughtful and honest 16 pages of experts on proper taxation, civil rights, banking, labor, healthcare, and more. I would have simply recommended voting the bums out on November 3 but of course it’s not that simple. These are systemic problems decades, and in some respects, centuries in the making.

One article in particular resonated with me, calling for a wholesale revision of the duties of corporations from only stockholders to a fair mix of stockholders, employees and community. Large multi-national corporations dominate and if they can build shared prosperity into their culture everyone will truly benefit. This first article recalls prominent corporate attorney Lewis Powell’s 1971 memo written for the US Chamber of Commerce, which listed critical “threats including Ralph Nader’s campaign for consumer safety regulations, the rise of the environmental movment and the expansion of social welfare programs”, inspiring Joseph Coors to create the conservative Heritage Foundation. As a result a company like GE that had boasted in 1953 about its payments of taxes and to suppliers, employees and longterm research initiatives was touting forty years later its short-term profits, stock buybacks and employee layoffs.

The right and the truly wealthy and powerful it has always represented and cared solely about will always seek to divide “the people” over any issue they can come up with, or use cheap labels like socialist or radical in lieu of actual discussion and change to skew the message and the history away from the truth. The result is that generation after generation consistently vote against self-interest; workers and the middle class struggle; and the wealthy and powerful look more and more like the manic antagonists of a Dickens novel instead of admired leaders in search of the common good that somewhere in their psyches they just might find more rewarding.

No doubt there are flaws and problematic positions in everyone the Democratic Party has put forward in recent memory but they all share a recognition that there is something rotten in the State of Denmark on this side of the Atlantic Ocean and are committed to finding a solution. (Editor’s Note to President Trump: This writer may not be referring to the actual Scandinavian country known as Denmark.) So next time someone tells you this is nothing but class warfare, remember Lewis Powell’s words and know that it always has been, long before the trickle down was shown to be little trickle and lots of down.

Schmuck.com

Money is the bottom line, always has been. Maybe it didn’t seem that way before Reagan, before Gordon Gekko, before Milken and Boesky and Icahn and Madoff, before our current I’m a billionaire many times over president, before them all. Way back when I was younger, young even, and people were dancing in the mud and pay per view was a quarter in Times Square and not a hundred bucks for the WWE in the living room.

I have a home office. There is no coffee clutch, no elevator interaction, no lunchtime banter with associates in the park. Just the occasional overnight mail deliveryman and two other friends with home offices in different states with whom I share daily complaints via phone or email.

Many years ago, I can assure you that our whining had nothing to do with money, but it does now. For the past two plus decades, like much of the country, we have had a now rancid fascination with the stock market. All day long, the 1, 2, 3, and 4 letter symbols flash by at the bottom of our screens. (Do they move left to right or right to left?) A hypnotic perpetual motion machine that would probably serve well as an improved eye chart if the entire country’s financial future and mood were not so wrapped up in it. My two friends and I are not alone, far from it. We see the true believers at Schwab and Fidelity and we hear the conversations behind the delicatessen counter. On a good market day, I chuckle; on other days, I cringe and depart for the pizzeria next door where the talk is all cheese and Yankees baseball.

FB…INTC…AAPL…AMZN…NFLX…

After awhile, even an amateur like me gets to know many of the companies behind the letters. I get to hear so many things about these companies that I never thought would enter my consciousness. Revenues, earnings, growth targets, P/E multiples. I even typically get a glimpse of the façade of their headquarters, often an imposing building in some suburban community that had been wheat stalks and dirt roads until the given symbol arrived in town. How did I ever get to care about a single one of them?

I learn the terminology. Earnings surprises. Double dipping. On the heels of. All-time high. Lots of stock for sale. Beat the street. Economic headwinds.

I learn the personalities and they almost seem like friends. Jim Kramer, Joe Kernen, David Faber, Ron Insana, Bob Pisani, Maria Bartiromo, Liz Claman, Sue Herrera, Michelle Cabruso Cabrera. The same guests, spaced one to three months apart, saying much the same things. The bulls who seem to be on less often when the market is tanking. The bears who are always on when the sky seems to be the limit. Occasionally, I turn proactive and switch to Bloomberg or the Wall Street report on public television. Let’s face it, it’s everywhere.

Would we rather work out the problems of the customers on the other end of the line over the next three months, do actual work that is, or hit a few keys and pray? Trouble is that our prayers have been answered only in lost dollars and lost time.

Which brings me to the real point here. Please do not think me paranoid, self-absorbed, or some mutant disciple of Jim Carrey’s Truman, but not too long ago I discovered www.schmuck.com and learned that my two friends and I are the source. Whatever we elect to do in the stock market---be it buy a hundred shares of Verizon, buy or sell an option call on IBM, flee from a virus that’s ending the world, change our portfolio allocation to more or less cash, increase our exposure to companies overseas, ignore a virus that’s creating tremendous opportunity---is carefully logged, organized, chronicled, digitized, analyzed, and broadcast. All subscribers to www.schmuck.com get instant, real-time access to our financial moves. No wonder that the market takes only minutes, sometimes just seconds, to react. When my trio of home office lonelies buy, our chosen securities are sent spiraling downward, often out of control, like a rollercoaster unhinged from its tracking. And when we opt to sell, the bandwidth explodes with buy orders as word spreads to Des Moines and Dubai.

We move markets, Steven Mnuchin, Larry Kudlow and Jerome Powell be damned.

It had gotten so bad for us that it appeared my friends and I would have to go cold turkey on the market and return to actual work. But then it hit me. There is an enormous opportunity here, a real ramp-up to roll out, or roll-out to ramp up, who knows, I’m still learning. Maybe even go public someday or private if that doesn’t work. Barron’s, CNBC, Forbes, Fortune, Bloomberg, Money, Kiplinger’s, and all the rest of you. We are available. All three of us. To give you our inclinations, our leanings, our thoughts, before we make the trades. Imagine knowing what the schmucks are going to do minutes, sometimes even hours, before they actually do it.

Imagine that.

DAYENU (It Would Have Been Enough)

Just a week after Passover 2020 ended and I’ve had some time to reflect on the familiar song chanted at the Seder table each year, celebrating what God did for the Jews in bringing them out of slavery in Egypt and into their faith and homeland. It is fifteen verses and refrains that go on for quite awhile as the hungry chant along, even hungrier by song’s conclusion. You may feel the same way as you read through the greatest hits of the self-labeled chosen one’s three plus years, anxious to get to the end. Or maybe you’d like four more years and some new verses. Celebration or dirge? I suppose it all depends on who’s singing the refrain.

If he would have just obsessed on Hillary and the election,

it would have been enough,

If he would have just sabotaged the Affordable Care Act,

it would have been enough,

If he would have just been a very stable genius,

it would have been enough,

If he would have just played golf two hundred days of his presidency,

it would have been enough,

If he would have just blown the budget on a Mexican wall,

it would have been enough,

If he would have just revoked clean water and flood prevention regulations and opened most of the country’s coastline to oil drilling,

it would have been enough,

If he would have just had the MyPillow guy at the White House during the pandemic to urge prayer,

it would have been enough,

If he would have just labeled the failure of Democrats to applaud his State of the Union as an act of treason,

it would have been enough,

If he would have just embraced Norway while referencing other shithole countries,

it would have been enough,

If he would have just mused about injecting disinfectant to combat coronavirus,

it would have been enough,

If he would have just coined derogatory middle school nicknames for his opponents,

it would have been enough,

If he would have just admired the Chinese leader for becoming president for life and thought that might be something for America to consider,

it would have been enough,

If he would have just hired Stephen Miller, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, William Barr, Tom Price, John Bolton, Betsy DeVos, Scott Pruitt, Ryan Zinke, Rudy Guiliani, Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Kellyanne Conway, Kayleigh McEnany, Sebastian Gorka, Peter Navarro, and Kirstjen Nielsen,

it would have been enough,

If he would have just signed a massive tax giveaway to the nation’s wealthiest,

it would have been enough,

If he would have just instructed White House staff to ignore subpoenas from the United States House of Representatives,

it would have been enough,

If he would have just thrown the paper towel rolls in Puerto Rico,

it would have been enough,

If he would have just praised Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, Rodrigo Duterte,

it would have been enough,

If he would have just labeled the Mueller Report as a witch hunt,

it would have been enough,

If he would have just separated families and caged children,

it would have been enough,

If he would have just mocked Christine Blasey Ford and lauded Brett Kavanaugh,

it would have been enough,

If he had just canceled the White House subscriptions to the New York Times and Washington Post,

it would have been enough,

If he would have just labeled his impeachment another witch hunt,

it would have been enough,

If he would have just used his not-for-profit charitable foundation for his election campaign,

it would have been enough,

If he would have just taken no responsibility at all for the coronavirus pandemic,

it would have been enough,

If he would have just suggested an electrified moat filled with alligators along the southern border with Mexico and shooting migrants in the legs,

it would have been enough,

If he would have just shut down the federal government for five weeks,

it would have been enough,

If he would have just condemned Colin Kaepernick for taking a knee for social justice and alluded to the good people on both sides at Charlottesville,

it would have been enough,

If he would have just added five trillion dollars to the national debt,

it would have been enough,

If he would have just pardoned Arizona’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio and the US Army’s Michael Chase Behenna,

it would have been enough,

If he would have just switched from despising North Korea’s Rocket Man to befriending him to despising him again,

it would have been enough,

If he would have just unnerved and alienated NATO and the United Nations,

it would have been enough,

If he would have just known more than the generals and the doctors,

it would have been enough,

If he would have just skewed the federal courts for the next generation or two,

it would have been enough,

If he would have just questioned the late Senator John McCain’s heroism,

it would have been enough,

If he would have just divided America along racial and economic lines while managing to unite Denmark against an American takeover of Greenland,

it would have been enough,

If he would have just given the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Russ Limbaugh,

it would have been enough,

If he would have just sought to defund Planned Parenthood,

it would have been enough,

If he would have just dismissed anyone not named Hannity or Dobbs as Fake News,

it would have been enough,

If he would have just fired Sally Yates, James Comey, Andrew McCabe,

it would have been enough,

If he would have just encouraged fracking, vitiated the EPA, dropped out of the Paris Accord, and denied climate change,

it would have been enough,

If he would have just blamed everything going wrong on his predecessor,

it would have been enough,

If he would have just rolled back common sense gun control restrictions,

it would have been enough,

If he would have just made a mockery of the Constitution,

it would have been enough,

If he would have just told the truth once in a blue moon,

that….would have been too much.

ACRONYM TO FOLLOW

Five years ago I noticed that marketers had created a day for everything and I wrote an aspirational poem ACRONYM TO FOLLOW which appears below. Today as I look back at the poem, I note what a disparate collection of celebrations share April 2, 2020 for today is simultaneously NATIONAL FERRET DAY, NATIONAL PEANUT BUTTER AND JELLY DAY, NATIONAL RECONCILIATION DAY, WORLD AUTISM AWARENESS DAY, and NATIONAL BURRITO DAY.

Finally

Our Day has come

There’s a Day for everything

For doughnuts, siblings, eight track tapes

Grilled cheese, daughters and sons to work

Encouragement, Alzheimer’s

Coffee, math, chewing gum

Blasphemy, yo-yos

And now finally

One for us

Truly a Day to celebrate

National

Don’t Shoot An Unarmed Brother

Doctor King Not Seeing Progress

George Orwell Laughing

It Is So About the Money

Enough Is Never Enough

Can You Spare A Dime

Or More Time

Freedom Isn’t Free

But It Is Complicated

Day

Acronym to follow

Priorities

When my son endured several heartbreaking major surgeries and I had some pretty major surgery myself almost fifteen years ago I was brought to tears by the almost universal brilliance, dedication, passion, courage, and love shown us by hospital doctors, nurses and staffers. When my father and mother went through a rough end of life I felt the same way about so many of their caretakers. That's one big reason I've found this cruel argument that this most wealthy of countries could not afford healthcare for all of its people and proper allocation of monies for medical personnel and medical research almost impossible to listen to. If we take nothing else away from this horrible moment in our history, let us remember and hereafter prioritize those selfless individuals who spend their lives caring for us when we've fallen.

Manhattan As Bar Graph

HISTORY HAS ITS EYES ON US

Finally saw HAMILTON Wednesday, long overdue, just remarkable, everything I’ve expected in the two years since my 2017 post below and my increasing familiarity with the incredible music and lyrics. As even casual students of history know, the American Dream was forged in fighting, others and ourselves, but it’s a dream so worth coming together to save. This is a year for us to embrace inclusion, celebrate truth, think about what real courage is, banish the bully and hail the humble among us, redefine winning, and remember that we are the victims of our failing to do so. As Lin-Manuel Miranda’s George Washington powerfully sings:

…..And even now I lie awake knowing history has its eyes on me….let me tell you what I wish I’d known, when I was young and dreamed of glory, you have no control, who lives, who dies, who tells your story, I know that we can win, I know that greatness lies in you, but remember from here on in, history has its eyes on you……  

My Obituary

A NY Times obit last year for a world-class journalist highlighted his SAT scores. Yes, he did score a perfect 800 on each of the math and verbal……..but still.

(Note to Wife: No SATs, basketball shooting percentages, GPAs, or credit scores please.)

Unsocial Media

It was supposed to bring us closer together but may have driven us irreparably apart. It was supposed to be a great time-saving tool but may have wasted eternity. It was supposed to further democratize everything, including the arts, but may end up doing the opposite. Like everything else it seems, it’s become about money—-taking it, making it, spending it, investing it, gambling it away. And here I am, writing on social media thoughts previously expressed only to my wife over morning coffee. I know I will never personally get the hang of this thing in any event, not while it’s all about selling.

This morning’s example. I had true joy seeing a LinkedIn note for Kareem Abdul Jabbar’s BLACK PATRIOTS on the History Channel. Kareem’s a hero to me in every sense of the word. The series will focus on how “African Americans played an integral role in the fight for our country’s independence”. Terrific, exciting, important. All the more reason for my disappointment on seeing one of the “comments” from someone else in his “network”: I HELP CEO’S GET SUPERIOR VALUATIONS AND SALES TEAMS GET MORE APPOINTMENTS, LARGER DEALS & SHORTER SALES CYCLES

Too bad folks don’t always treat social media as if they were actually in the room. Can you imagine a get-together for the premiere of Kareem’s new project? The anticipation prior and the appreciation after at the Q&A until one man who just can’t help himself rises up and tells Kareem in a booming voice “I help CEOs get better…..”

Pay Lots

I didn't know much about Payless and its second Chapter 11 bankruptcy, costing 18,000 jobs. But how did I know a year ago that if I searched "Payless", "hedge fund" and "special dividend" I'd be pointed in the direction of $400M in special dividends to the hedge fund acquirers from 2012 to 2017 that may have saddled the company with just too much debt? And it's more than Payless and hedge fund behavior generally---it's this moronic default to a "socialist" label whenever one seeks to improve a bit on the the "capitalism" we have (which in its winner take all and vulture form has resulted in pretty high levels of inequality, injustice and insecurity). I applaud those socially responsible folks out there who are gamely trying to redefine corporate fiduciary duty from whatever most rewards shareholders to including labor and the planet in the discussion. We should support them in 2020 and beyond. And today the Times has a very good follow-up article on the company.

The Music 1966-70

Don't remember much about middle school, or junior high school as it was then called, other than beautiful girls, unsmiling teachers, bellbottom bans, hall passes, terrible lunchroom food, the "moratorium" to end the Vietnam War in 9th grade, and just how incredibly good I knew the music was. Otis Redding's "(Sittin' On) the Dock of the Bay" was one of the best, ever----what a tragic loss.

(The Prescient) Too Much Time on My Hands by Styx

"....Now I'm a jet fuel genius, I can solve the world's problems without even trying, I've got dozens of friends, and the fun never ends, That is as long as I'm buying, Is it any wonder I'm not the President, Is it any wonder I'm null and void..."

I was going to write a parody of this terrific 70s song and video we all know from Styx when I realized there's no need and it would be too easy. Remarkably, you simply have to change the word "time" to "crime" and most of the lyrics work well enough as is. Give it a watch and listen.

Today's Art World

I confess to knowing little more about the art world other than that the Mona Lisa was by Leonard da Vinci and that every few years someone goes to prison for massive fraud. I do have some very talented artist friends who work very hard and cannot figure out why the world we live in celebrated at Miami’s Art Basel this past December as one man sold a duct-taped banana for $120,000 and another man subsequently ate it. So it is with this artistic ignorance, great spirit and high hopes that I've decided to offer my collection of car wash photos for sale to the highest bidder.

Sportsmanship

When one of the hosts....called the Knicks a public trust, Dolan vehemently disagreed. "The Knicks are not owned by the public," he said. "They are owned by the shareholders of the company, of which I am the majority shareholder, so no."

The analogies between the trillion-dollar sports industry (billionaire owners, millionaire players and underappreciated schmuck fans like me) and the modern economy (mega-corporations, millionaire executives and underappreciated workers/taxpayers) are pretty obvious.

So yes, James Dolan, we do understand. There is no longer any public trust.

[Read the full article in the March 12, 2019 New York Times linked below.]

Past Presidential Transgressions

Like many of my peers, I'm getting rid of stuff. Found this April 1, 1957 article from The Springfield (MA) Daily News which had been lying in an old cedar chest. How different the stories of President Eisenhower's transgressions were from what we've become familiar with.

The Arts

Other Books By Donald J. Trump

THE ART OF THE HEEL

THE ART OF THE MEAL

THE ART OF THE STEAL

THE ART OF THE KNEEL

THE ART OF THE PEEL

THE ART OF THE FEEL

Together

"...We pledge allegiance All our lives To the magic colors Red, blue and white But we all must be given The liberty that we defend For with justice not for all men History will repeat again It's time we learned This world was made for all men..."

Thank you, Stevie, for Black Man on Songs in the Key of Life, one of the best, sadly more poignant than ever, especially if we add "and women" to that last. Paul Krugman had a column in the Times August 5, 2019 stating what's been obvious to him, to me and to anyone paying attention the past few thousand years. All this division, strife and hatred is profitable to those few who would feel threatened by a society coming together for the benefit of many. Voices are building to change that in the next generation, in the next election, and we all ought to be listening carefully to them.