Latest Polls - September 27, 2015

I will preface this post with the following statement: "We the people would be much better off if the Presidential election process was greatly reduced in length. The current process lasting much more than one year is theater at best and is a great waste of time and money that results in the paralysis of work towards solving the problems of our country, which are massive and many."

And with that aside, here are the latest charts from Huffington Post Pollster:

I'll let the numbers speak for themselves. After all, it's just theater.

What Kind of Leader is Carly Fiorina?

Like many other Americans (some 27 million) I watched the second Republican Presidential debate. Carly Fiorina received a great deal of coverage for her replies to Donald Trump as well as her methodical and businesslike responses. Afterward she saw a rise in her poll numbers. So what kind of leader is Carly Fiorina?

One answer to that question lies in the proceedings of the Deleware trial of Hewlett vs. HP. The son's of one of HP's founders, who sat on the board of HP, attempted to block the acquisition of Compaq which Fiorina pushed through HP. Fiorina noticed that Deutsche Bank (DB) had voted to oppose the acquisition and also had an investment banking relationship with HP. series of calls and a voicemail came out in which Firoina instructed her CFO to "bring Deutsche Bank over the line" and in which she mentioned the possibility of "doing something extraordinary" if the vote went the wrong way.¹

She next told DB that the vote "was of great importance to their ongoing relationship." The result was that DB switched its 17 million votes in favor of the merger which ultimately passed by less than 2% with the DB switch accounting for the two percent margin. Fiorina maintained that she was misinterpreted and she intended to place no undue pressure on DB. The consensus of opinion did not agree with that characterization.

And perhaps some would want a President that strong-arms other countries into agreement in the same manner she strong-armed DB into agreeing to the merger with Compaq. Fiorina continues to maintain that that merger was a positive one for HP, despite many in the business community (certainly including Donald Trump) who think that the merger was a bad one for HP. Certainly she has never been willing to consider the possibility of an error in pushing the merger.

I would much rather have a leader that works towards compromise with other nations. In certain cases, for example, dealing with totalitarianism or a crazed leader, no compromise is possible. But we are trying to move beyond strong-arm tactics and using war as a go-to for getting what we want. I think Carly Fiorina's record shows she has not.

^{1. Money For Nothing How CEOs and Boards are Bankrupting America. John Gillespie and David Zweig. 2011, First Free Press, New York.↩}

Corporate Personhood: Just Speech, or Full Citizenship?

I am going to start this post off with a caveat: I am not an attorney, so anything I say has no basis in legal theory or practice. Nevertheless, our country was formed by individuals, not attorneys, for the people, nor for attorneys.

I am not particularly in agreement with the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United that corporations, being citizens, have free speech rights. But it seems to me that if corporations have the rights of citizens they should also have the responsibilities of citizens. A human citizen has the right to free speech, but if that free speech causes harm, through slander or incitement to riot, he is then subject to civil and criminal penalties, if applicable. The same should be true of corporations. If a corporation has the right to speak on political matters, for example, that corporation should be subject to civil and criminal penalties for engaging in civil or criminal behavior.

The problem, or course, is that you can't send the corporation to jail like you can a human citizen. As a result, our justice department seems to be enamored with assessing monetary penalties for criminal behavior, which the corporation simple plans for and pays as a cost of doing business and which does not act as a deterrent to future bad behavior. Only if the bad behavior results in real damage to the bottom line, say by a user boycott or a drop in sales, does corporate behavior change. It used to be that corporate executives were held accountable. More than 1000 Savings and Loan executive went to jail as a result of the S&L crisis, but no executives have been jailed as a result of the 2008 Bank Crisis, and probably none ever will. The monetary penalties from the 2008 Crisis were nothing compared to the incentives that caused the banks to engage in the behavior that caused the crisis, so we are primed for it to occur again.

Right now we are watching the unfolding story of Volkswagen. In both the U.S. and Germany it has come to light that Volkswagen deliberately programmed software controls to fake compliance with emissions limits during testing but to cut out and not comply during normal driving. The President of Volkswagen just made a statement about the company not tolerating such behavior. Obviously it did tolerate that behavior, because it did program its vehicles to perform in that fashion. This is reminiscent of the cigarette companies knowing about the dangers of cigarette smoking or Johnson & Johnson knowingly marketing Risperdal which caused gynecomastia in males. As long as there is economic incentive to engage in immoral and or illegal behavior some corporations and businesses will do so.

The simple answer is corporate jail. A corporation that breaks the law should be jailed for a period of time, during which it could not engage in business. We have the concept of probation and parole, where individuals are restricted in their rights, instead of incarceration. A corporation could enter probation, where its behavior was scrutinized and any resumption of illegal behavior would result in the full penalty, corporate incarceration, or legal loss of charter, be applied.

No doubt the reaction will be: What about the jobs lost? What about the economic damage? Well, we deal with the same issues when a human citizen breaks the law. Corporations are "bigger citizens" in the sense that their behavior are larger. Well, that's the point. When corporations break the law, the impacts are bigger. Therefore, it is important that their behavior stay legal.

I Voted For Ronald Reagan

A long time ago, right here on this planet, I was a college freshman. Coming back from class, I clustered around the TV set with my room mate to witness the spectacle of burned out helicopters in the Iranian desert. The first thought that came to my mind was: "Is that how weak my country has become?" I was a college senior, and it had been an eventful four years. An ongoing energy crisis had shaken the country, leading to a recession, gas lines, and stagflation. Two different years, my school had canceled classes, something that had never happened since its founding in 1842, and we had nearly been sent home, because the coal supply to run the University power plant ran so low.

It seemed to be a shaky time in American History, and I came from a family of New Deal Democrats. I chose to break with family tradition, and voted for Reagan. Now, looking back, I can see that I made a grave error.

Reagan's pronouncement: "Government isn't the solution, it is the problem" is how it is remembered. But the correct quote is "In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem, government IS the problem." And he was referring to a specific economic crisis that occurred at one point in time. But Reagan was a front man for a movement that practiced complete free market economics, the Chicago school. And that WAS the problem.

The Chicago School can be summed up by one name, Milton Freedman, and by one principle, absolute deregulation. Freedman defected from New Deal Keynesian economics, which believed that in the absence of government regulation businesses would practice predatory capitalism. He convinced Ronald Reagan, who put those practices into place and help start the long stint of deregulation that lead to the 2008 financial crisis.

I voted for Ronald Reagan, because I thought he would make our country strong. It is ironic, since in his westerns, the people of the lawless towns were preyed upon until a strong man on a white horse rode in to bring some law and order. Yet Reagan rode into Washington to remove the law and order. It was a clear case of mistaking a flawed system, a government with problems, and discarding it for a worse solution.

And has anything changed? Seven years after the financial crisis, our economy is still considered too fragile to allow normal economic practices to take place. The Federal Reserve continues to keep interest rates at zero to keep the economy on life support. The EU is doing the same, because they are still suffering from the excess debt that was sold to them by an American financial system that is no longer of making real, valued products, only paper instruments like collateralized debt obligations.

And we Americans delude ourselves into thinking we are free, that we live in a free nation. Since ten percent of the population owns ninety percent of the wealth, and the vast majority must work to pay their debts, we are hardly a nation of freemen.