I have to admit that there are some things about life I just can’t resolve. Like why milk cartons are still impossible to open; how the streets in Boston work; and why lifelong Democrats voted for Ronald Reagan. For the last item many of our “greatest generation” did so unabashedly. They felt some kinship with him, sort of like when hippies felt kinship with other people with long hair (insert ear piercings, tats). Must be a tribal thing.
It’s about to happen all over again. Romney is poised to be our next salesman-in-chief. Such is the power of the “look”, the chameleon-like adaptation to any situation and the power of the success story. I believe that there is another story driving his rise to power that is a bit more cynical and scary. This story involves us as co-conspirators in the bubble of the 90′s that setup the crash of the 2000′s.
In the 90′s I watched from the front lines as money poured into companies from funds organized and managed by venture capitalists. Romney’s Bain Capital Ventures was a good example of such fund management firms and took full advantage of these freewheeling times to generate profit. There is a dark side to this time that seems to be dissipating in the fog of history. It involves cronyism, predatory fees and short term, anti-innovation attitudes. For the innovators operating at the time, companies like Bain were known as vulture capitalists. Instead of eventual success in the marketplace at some point in the future, investment by these guys WAS often the big payoff. Company founders who accepted diminished roles in their own companies did so with the implicit acceptance that their new investors were buying them out and that any remaining share they had in the company would return future wealth when the VC’s flipped the company to another buyer or an IPO. Since 95% of those companies were sold to another company you could calculate the payoff as a percentage of sales.
american vulture pics on Sodahead
One of the services the vulture capitalists brought to the new company was the ability to put on a good show. Presenting a company that had no sales, profits or sometimes even products as a viable operation worthy of investors required some powerful smoke and mirrors. Key personnel of a company went on a well orchestrated roadshow as part of the overall campaign. It was all about sales and convincing other investors to buy more of the company or back the liquidation of the company in an initial public offering. It was important to talk the talk, look the look and be riding the crest of a trend to have success on a road show. It is an understatement to say that there was a lot of winking and nodding going on between money managers, VCs, journalists and other interested parties. I believe all of this sounds familiar to the Republican presidential campaign. It’s a sort of victory lap for the 90′s with the promise of returning to those high-flying times. Forget the meltdown of the 2000′s. Since we were all partaking in the fruits of this scheme, we found no problem with it as long as it was working.
I’ve talked to enough founders to know that they hated what became of their company after the vulture capitalists came in with their “management team” of highly paid friends and cronies. Hated how the product they were so passionate about was subsumed to the around the clock activity of raising money. Disliked being outvoted at their own board meetings by other cronies placed on the board by the VC’s. And in the end vowed to never do it again.
But really, apply this smoke and mirrors campaign to the takeover of our government. Not the bloody or bloodless coup d’tat we all expected once upon a time. But a sort of corporate takeover with an un-precedented surge of cronies invading every department with a budget. Imaging the Cabinet populated by board members whose sole motivation is finding the best way to cash out. Rod Blagojevich selling a senate seat or a night in the Lincoln bedroom as payback for a contribution will be so charmingly Democratic by comparison. Mitt believes he is only one sparkling smile away from pulling it off. The eternal optimism of the salesman. He also believes that he can change his position from news cycle to new cycle and count on the public’s reputed short term memory weakness to be all things to all people. How’s that for cynicism?
There is hope. One way to diffuse the distortion field any great salesman projects is by attaching some negative adjective to them that is graphic and concise. For Mitt it’s all about “Mitt is a Vulture Capitalist.” Bring on a few of the company founders Bain wronged in the past. Publish a scorecard of the 10-percent of companies that prospered under Bain leadership and the amount of fees extracted from all companies, successful and failed, for the privilege of having Bain involved. The math will be surprisingly easy. Spread the word.
Don’t let them change the national symbol from American Eagle to American Vulture.
Dateline April 1, 2013 – President Obama shocked the nation today by declaring the Simpson-Bowles Report (SB) as the framework for an aggressive initiative to get the country on track again. Leveraging his surprising landslide in the last election he said that he “decided to go all in” on a bold move that the country had been too politically weak to take. “This is the time to really get things done,” said the president, “we’re not running again, I have plenty of political capital to spend and I believe it’s the right thing to do.” He further went on to admit that he was prepared to walk the many third rails that pepper the SB Report but believed that it was time to try trickle down pain instead of the trickle down wealth that has failed in the past. “We can’t spend our way out of most of our problems; we’ve seen how far stimuli will go; and so much corruption and bureaucracy is institutionalized and cronyism is inbred that only bold action can change.”
The reaction to his speech was immediate. The stock markets soared adding 3-percent to the wealth of the country. Ratings agencies who had been so skeptical of the will of government in the recent past indicated that they were poised to raise the ratings back to triple-A status. Polls indicated that the public, who had been suffered conspiracy theory fatigue in the past election were immediate in their clamor for facts on how this bold action would REALLY affect them.
President Obama also introduced a new plan to encourage entrepreneurship. Focusing on the creation of products, additional government funds will be available to underwrite entrepreneur zones and government supported technology research. Money to support this initiative will come directly from the TSA and FEMA budgets, two departments he plans to close immediately.
Hey guys give France a break! What’s the deal? We have our share of mimes and accordion players so it’s not like our culture is so pure. I don’t understand it. What France are Mittens, Ricky and Newt talking about. Sure the French can seem a little eccentric at times. But do you think they look at Youtube videos of Americans at play and admire our sophistication? I suppose they are about as socialist as a country can get with their weeks of vacation, family friendly maternity leave, public health care and other worker entitlements. They do seem to err on the “side” of the people most of the time in public policy matters. That doesn’t sound bad. But this brouhaha is not new. I was prepared by British friends years ago to be treated poorly on the continent. But the truth is the country I visited was beautiful, culturally rich, friendly and very patient with my high school French. But that was outside the city. The city was a different matter. Paris is a lot like New York. Don’t make eye contact, or order the wrong thing in a restaurant. The French don’t even bother to use euphemisms when they call you an idiot.
When I think about American culture I rarely think about the coasts as leaders. Or even New York. These places often lead trends, but cultural development is tectonic. Of all the places I’ve visited, the most culturally developed and civilized is Chicago. I traveled there many times in the past 40 years. Stayed for extended periods, visited suburbs, shopped and ate and listened to music in many venues. Like France, I was expecting a Democratic (similarly socialist) stronghold ruled by the warlord Richard Daley. But what I saw then and continue to see is a true multi-layered society where people of all races and origins have a chance at the economic ladder. People seem to take more pride in their jobs. Even in service jobs where civility is often the exception. People there coexist. Eye contact is allowed. Sure there are examples of baseness and lack of civility but they are the exceptions and don’t disprove the rule.
As a country we’re very parochial. We have some illusion of exceptionalism even though the scorecard when it comes to healthcare, education and many other entitlements shows otherwise. Tests of students find that a large percentage do not know much about the history of our nation or Chicago for that matter. Or even what is meant by the word Civics. But Culture is much more than standings or the headline of the moment. Culture is defined as the stage of civilization that is represented by the behaviors and beliefs of the people. So my question is: What is American culture? Where are we on the great arc of human civilization? I’d like to think it’s closer to Chicago than it is to Washington or even San Francisco or New York, Boston . . . .
Chicago is the place that molded our current president. It must amaze him how persistently disrespectful and base his new colleagues are in Washington. Anything but collegial. Of course he surrounds himself with Chicagoans to buffer the incoming invective. Obama, child of Chicago, is here too soon. He is supposed to emerge out of the relative chaos and uncertainty that we are still living through. He was destined to be a movement leader. A position where he would be battle tested and groomed to lead the country. He has compassion, intelligence and even temperament but is learning leadership on the job. That’s very inefficient and precarious.
What more should we expect? It is a reminder how young we are as a nation. So hold tight, there’s still danger ahead.
Need to shake some cobwebs off the old synapses? Try out Ilium, you’ll be glad you did.
Am I alone in hearing echoes of Mullah Omar in the fundamentalist rants of Rick Sanc(timonium)? Saying Kennedy’s position that he would never be under the thumb of the Vatican made Ricky want to throw up. Maybe a sleep over with Ahmadinejad and a heart-to-hear talk of secularism might be enlightening to him. While Rick is often lauded for speaking directly, I hear coded messages being transmitted that clearly support a full return to the patriarchal society of previous generations. It’s a particularly cruel season because the middle class has been decimated by plutocratic plundering. Fewer of them will be educated, fewer opportunities exist for women and minorities who made it to the middle class plateau and the aspiration that is the American Dream is replaced by discussions of survival. It’s the perfect time for a fundamentalist revolutionary to stir up suppressed petty bigotry against others with different standings and beliefs. Electing a bi-racial intellectual with a distinctly afro-eastern name who achieved everything he has by working within the system and is righting the sinking ship of state without support was way too much. Gotta get it back out of the hands of those people.
Problem is, to put the situation in March Madness terms, Ricky-boy is peaking too soon. He’s got the juices flowing alright but they’ll be dried up by November. Remember the Tea Party. That misbegotten group of self-contradictions is a foot note, a so-called silent majority. Sort of like the Occupy movement.
I miss the political cartoon. One image of Sanctorum ascending into heaven on Inauguration Day might be enough to put him into context and put an end to his ego trip.
Visit: Political Cartoons and here for more.
It seems that the only way to filter the noise that seeps into our media of the poison from zealots, theocrats and ideologues is to not buy the products of the companies that sponsor them. It’s true that local advertising is more quirky but there are some major brands that I’m sure would just love to hear from you when you object to the content of a show they sponsor. My first case in point is Rush Limbaugh. I’m not so dedicated that I can sit through a show or more and write down the advertisers so I found a list supposedly up-to-date as of March 2, 2012 on topplebush.com. To their credit Sleep Train just pulled their advertising. The advertisers list includes:
Quicken Loans(800-251-9080)Select Comfort Sleep Number Beds(e-mail – investorrelations@selectcomfort.com)Century 21(web contact form)LegalZoom(web contact form)ProFlowers(web contact form)Carbonite, Inc.(e-mail - carbonite@mailnj.custhelp.com)- Oreck (web contact form)
- Autozone (e-mail – investor.relations@autozone.com)
Citrix Online(e-mail – info@citrixonline.com)- American Forces Network
- eHarmony (e-mail – media@eharmony.com)
There is a myth out in the countryside that there exist people of such brilliance that they are capable of cracking the code that is a computer program or website and stealing the secrets or private information stored therein. These magical people know the inner workings of the code so well that they can virtually make it tell them passwords, account numbers or even to go on and destroy itself. The myth goes on to say that no matter what we do, there will always be a hacker just ahead of us ready to break through any clever defenses.
Of course this is all bull. In fact tenacity is more important than cleverness in gaining access to systems and squeezing the data from them. This became very clear to me as I finished reading Kevin Mitnick’s excellant biography Ghost In The Wires, My Life As The World’s Most Wanted Hacker. In the book Mr. Mitnick describes the lengths he went to collect the information that he would eventually use to get into the systems of his targets. These methods included dumpster diving for computer printout lists of phone numbers, directories and network schematics; telephone tricks where he would impersonate a staff member from trusted partner or from the target company or plain old sticky note reading on the receptionist’s monitor.
The tactics were all pure social engineering. Bad habits, trusting attitudes, lack of protocols and other reasons all played into the hands of intuitive and diligent operatives like Mr. Mitnick. In the end it’s a tradeoff. How much inconvenience are we willing to tolerate for true security? Banks have calculated the risk and determined that double authentication (identifying oneself twice before being allowed entry) is enough inconvenience. They will cover anything stolen beyond that point. Government agencies use a variety of smartcards (credit card like devices that have a different code each day embedded on the magnetic strip), double authentication (two or more people with authorization codes) or physical keys to engage before the missile fires, retinal scans and keypad codes.
Imagine, as an example, if the company receptionist only had half of the password to open their computer at the start of the day or to awaken it from sleep mode. The other half was provided directly or as needed by phone by an administrator from IT. That simple act would have defeated many of Mr. Mitnick’s break-ins. Granted he could have monitored that phone line waiting for the call and have previously gathered the first half from the receptionist, but it is possible to make his job so difficult that the plunder, even for the bragging rights he said he was after, did no match the time and tenacity to steal it.
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