Chaos and Corruption

Government is not a for-profit business, so perhaps it’s understandable that businesspersons with no experience in public service are confused about their goals in high public offices. Their goals are to serve the people—equally—and to do all they can for the common good. 

The new semi-official Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) headed by multi-billionaire Elon Musk seems especially confused. During the orgy of mass firings of federal employees in many agencies, serving the American people has taken a back seat to cutting costs. The firings are being done so sloppily that many employees have had to be quickly rehired including those responsible for the safety of nuclear weapons. And clearly, no attention has been paid to identifying individuals with critical skills or those with the wisdom of deep experience.

Surely all of us favor efficiency and cutting unnecessary costs. Just as surely, an organization as large as the federal government will have some fat that can be trimmed without diminishing services. What’s needed is a steak knife to trim any fat around the edges without slicing off pieces of the steak itself. But Mr. Musk has taken an axe to the meat of our government: dedicated public servants who do the essential daily work, typically for lower pay than in comparable private-sector jobs. 

A few weeks ago, Musk strutted on a stage waving a chainsaw and gleefully grinning about the tens of thousands of people who have had their jobs cut—stable, productive careers wiped out in the cause of spending less. Talk about being out of touch with the people. It’s no wonder that Musk’s car company, Tesla, is seeing sharply declining sales, dropping stock value, and buyers’ remorse by many current owners (see photo of a Tesla bumper). 

Musk isn’t the only Billionaire Boys Club member in the Trump Administration who is out of touch. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said on a podcast last week that average Americans wouldn’t complain if they didn’t get their Social Security for a month. Really? Millions of Americans depend on their monthly check for necessities like food and rent. Secretary Lutnick is living in a different reality. 

The reality that the wealthy cherish is lower taxes on their wealth and fewer regulations on their businesses. The rush to cut government costs will inevitably lead to fewer services and regulations. With climate change posing the most dangerous—and costly—threat to life as we’ve known it, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) must be at full strength, but its new chief, Lee Zeldin, boasted last month in the Wall Street Journal of “driving a dagger through the heart” of climate regulations and has pledged to cut funding by two-thirds. Funding is also endangered for veterans’ services, medical research, education support, public health, National Parks, and other efforts for the common good. 

It's no secret that the cost-cutting binge is partly intended to justify extending the 2017 Republican tax cuts, mostly for the rich, that will expire this year. Here’s a tip: watch which jobs are cut at the IRS. The Biden Administration hired new employees specifically to audit high-income and corporate tax returns which are typically difficult to audit and often hide significant taxable income. 

Rather than cutting services to the people, let’s elect to Congress people who will raise taxes on high incomes to reduce the wealth gap between the rich and the rest. In the 1960s, the 400 richest Americans paid 56 percent of their income in taxes. Today, for the first time in our history, billionaires pay a lower effective tax rate (23% in 2018) than the working class. Congresspersons who vote to make the rich richer are either lining their own pockets, those of their wealthy donors, or both. That is corruption.

                       Anniversaries: The New Yorker and SNL

 

Two American cultural icons celebrate impressive anniversaries this spring. Congratulations to The New Yorker magazine on its one hundredth year of publication and to Saturday Night Live on fifty years of lively and timely TV comedy.

Widely considered the best English language magazine, The New Yorker was founded in 1925 by Harold Ross, a Colorado native and journalist in the Mark Twain tradition. (Its first cover, pictured, featured a 19^th century dandy.) Ross envisioned a weekly humor magazine like Britain’s popular Punch, featuring “gaiety, wit, and satire,” though these were scarce in early issues. So were sales. Failure was in the cards.

What saved the magazine was sending a respected journalist to Dayton, Tennessee, to cover the Scopes “monkey trial.” The elegant article about an event of intense national interest was a hit, followed shortly by a sparkling society piece, “Why We Go to Cabarets—A Post-Debutante Explains.” Sales soared. Ross hired E. B. White, who, for nearly six decades, wrote essays and short commentaries for the magazine in addition to editing Strunk and White’s Elements of Style (familiar to millions of college students) and writing a series of popular children’s books including Charlotte’s Web. White eventually won a Pulitzer and a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and his stepson Roger Angell became the magazine’s fiction editor and award-winning sportswriter. His pen made baseball high drama.

As Ross began publishing short fiction by John Updike and other top American writers, the magazine’s literary reputation grew, balanced by its famous cartoons. Nonfiction and global coverage expanded with World War II including Mollie Panter-Downes’s vivid reports from London during the Blitz and John Hersey’s account of Lt. John F. Kennedy’s PT boat heroics and Hersey’s horrific Hiroshima, published in a single issue and later as a book. Rachel Carson’s 1962 Silent Spring, which energized the environmental movement, was serialized.

The New Yorker had matured into what the current editor calls “a blend of humor, art, deep reporting, criticism, poetry, and fiction [with a devotion to] accuracy and clarity.” Famed for its legendary fact-checking, they called me twice to verify facts before publishing a letter to the editor I wrote about education. In our age of mis- and dis- information, The New Yorker is a trusted source of truths. 

Not a trusted source of truths but a reliable source of laughs is Saturday Night Live. Created in 1975 to replace Johnny Carson reruns in NBC’s Saturday night slot, SNL was the brainchild of producer Lorne Michaels, who made key decisions in the beginning: rotating hosts every week, hiring comedian Chevy Chase to report news in a satirical “Weekend Update” segment, and broadcasting live—a risky choice.

Michaels, who is still the producer, had an eye for comic talent, hiring little-known cast members able to have fun with society’s foibles and changing the cast as society changed. For those of us who watched from the beginning, Gilda Radner, John Belushi, Dan Ackroyd, and the rest were beyond funny. They were hilarious like nothing seen on the tube before. A recurring sketch, “The Coneheads,” had Ackroyd,  Jane Curtin, and Laraine Newman as bald, pointy-headed aliens trying to pass as humans. Asked where they were from, Curtain always replied in a rapid monotone, “We are from France.”

Over fifty years, SNL’s changing cast has included dozens of stars who have shaped comedy on TV and beyond: Belushi and Ackroyd in The Blues Brothers; Tina Fey’s impersonation of clueless VP candidate Sarah Palin saying, “I can see Russia from my house;” frequent host Steve Martin’s satirical “What I Want for Christmas.” What I want for Saturdays is for SNL to continue for years to come.

                 

                Eisenhower vs. the Con Man

During World War II, General Eisenhower commanded the Allied Forces in Europe, successfully managing the largest military campaign in history. After the war, he was a strong supporter of the United Nations and was the first NATO Supreme Commander, uniting the Western democracies against the Soviet Union and its satellite states. In 1952, Eisenhower chose to run for president as a Republican to block Ohio Republican Senator Robert Taft from being nominated. Taft favored an isolationist foreign policy and opposed NATO, but Eisenhower knew firsthand how essential close ties to America’s allies were. Ike won the nomination and was elected in a landslide.

Eisenhower’s managerial skill was rooted partly in his practice of choosing expert staff members whose views often differed from his own, giving him a wider range of well-thought-out options. Eisenhower had no use for “yes men.” Contrast this with the current president surrounding himself with “loyalists,” defined as those who won’t question their leader’s judgment. Narrowing his options is unwise at best but fits his 2016 declaration that the system is rigged and “I alone can fix it.”

Eisenhower had seen in the ruins of Germany the result of believing that kind of thinking and said, “Never let yourself be persuaded that any one Great Man, any one leader, is necessary to the salvation of America. When America consists of one leader and 158 million followers, it will no longer be America.” Let’s not be conned into going down that road.

The Con Man was right about one thing: the system is rigged. It favors the rich, the white, men, and the well-educated. So what, exactly, did he do in his first four-year term to unrig the system to benefit ordinary Americans? Did he help make post-high school education more accessible and more affordable? No. Did he support equal rights for women, including equal pay for equal work? No. Did he insist that politicians guarantee equal voting rights to all eligible citizens? No. Did he make childcare and healthcare more accessible and more affordable.? No.

Instead, he approved large Republican tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporations. Not only did he fail to “fix” the system for most Americans, his tax cuts made it worse, adding about $2 trillion to government debt. He tried but failed to cut Medicare and Medicaid and tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act which would have caused 24 million Americans to lose their health insurance. The only “fixing” he did mostly benefitted wealthy people like himself. And the President’s biggest con was to convince followers that he won the 2020 election despite no evidence whatsoever.

On the foreign policy front, Eisenhower was a good diplomat who would be spinning in his grave at Trump’s con job that Ukraine President Zelensky is a “dictator” who started the war on his own country. Zelensky was democratically elected long before we saw Putin’s Russian troops invade. Putin is a war criminal who wants to build a new Russian empire. 

Two weeks ago, the U.S., Russia, Belarus, and North Korea voted against a U.N. resolution condemning Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. Embarrassing. Are dictatorships the club we want to join? In a meeting last week, Trump and Vice-president Vance bullied and insulted Zelensky for not being “grateful” for U.S. help. Trump and Vance should be grateful that Zelinsky is a hero leading Ukraine’s remarkable fight for democracy against a dangerous dictator who murders political opponents and has interfered with U.S. elections. It was the most humiliating day in the history of American diplomacy. 

The late Senator John McCain knew why we should stand with the Western democracies: “A strong E.U., a strong NATO, and a true strategic partnership between them is profoundly in our interest.”