Pity the poor billionaire

Pity the poor billionaire.

Okay,  I say this with sarcasm. By that, I mean, I am speaking with a touch of ridicule. The billionaire, after all, is neither poor, nor in need of pity. Billionaires are blessed in that. they are rich and they live in a country that celebrates their right to enjoy and to spend money.

We still need to give a little thought to the fact that, lately, billionaires have come under intense criticism. It is as if they are responsible for the recent poor showing of the world economy. They are blamed for the disparity in the haves and have nots. That criticism seems unfair.

The world economy is as robust as it is because of and not in spite of  billionaires. Imagine a country without billionaires. There are many to choose from. Niger, Haiti, Zimbabwe, Chad, Somalia, Yemen, are a few that come to mind, and they aren't doing so well. No, billionaires live in countries like America, Great Britain, France, Switzerland, Germany, Japan, and even China. And those economies are doing fairly well. And when they aren't, it is because the national governments who run those economies fail to balance spending and revenues.

A second criticism of billionaires is that they don't pay their fair share of taxes. According to the Citizens for Tax Justice,  "the top 1 percent of earners account for 20.3 percent of total personal income in the United States and pay 21.5 percent of all federal and state taxes. The middle 20 percent of households earn 11.6 percent of US income and pay 10.3 percent of taxes. The lowest 20 percent account for just 3.5 percent of income, and pay 2 percent of all taxes." Of course, there is Warren Buffet lamenting the fact that his secretary pays a higher percentage of her income in taxes than he does. And, there is Mitt Romney who paid only 15% of  his income in taxes. Romney points out that he also gives three million dollars in charitable donations to his church.

The tax system is screwed up. On that, everyone agrees. Now the President and the Democratic majority in the Senate want to raise 100 billion dollars in new revenue and put that burden on the backs of the billionaires who have suffered the least since the economic meltdown.

That seems like throwing the baby out with the bath water. By that I mean that wealth is created by those billionaires that are going to be punished. If we love our economy, and our babies, then we shouldn't be treating them with such contempt.

To give the President credit, he has had to walk a fine line between appeasing democratic liberals who believe in sharing the wealth evenly, and conservatives who want to truly find a way of reviving a moribund economy and putting people back to work. The President recognizes that the US economy depends on business and billionaires who will invest their capital in growing the economy and putting displaced workers back to work. To do so the Government will have to make the United States a healthy place in which to invest. Over taxation and over regulation drives business off shore. Fair taxation and proper regulation results in infr5a structure spending that drives the economy and keeps a fair playing field for everyone in which to compete.

Franklin Roosevelt is often cited for his economic strategy during the Great Depression. He taxed the rich, took over the banks and fired bank managers when he could. He passed regulation after regulation that tied the hands of capitalists. In the process, a third of the economy was out of work. And the depression lasted from 1929 until the end of the Second World War in 1945, when the American economy and American capitalism triumphed over fascist Germany and imperialistic Japan. From 1945 until 1989, the political and economic battle was between Soviet socialism and Western free enterprise. We know who won that battle. Then, came Communist China's turn. After flirting with political disaster in Tiananmen Square, the communist in charge traded political control for economic freedom. The result has become the fastest growing economy in the world.

Where does this leave the billionaire? I think it means that he or she must recognize that with wealth comes responsibility. Fairness has to be the catch word, and at least, at that, the President has it right.
The billionaire has to shoulder a fair share of the tax burden and, perhaps, even a greater part of the obligation to get the economy back up and running. Democrats by and large get it. Both Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy were from the wealthier strata of the American economy. And while Roosevelt heartily believed in taking from the rich and giving to the poor, Kennedy charted the opposite course, and in a time of falling revenues signed into law a tax cut for the wealthy that stimulated the economy. An early example of the school of trickle-down economics, whereby lower taxation yields greater wealth and fresh innovation.

There are billionaires out there deserving of praise. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have given away tens of billions of dollars for charitable purposes. But don't forget that it was capital and capitalism that made possible the wealth formation that allowed for the giving.

I say pity the poor man who can't find a job because an American business moved overseas. I say pity the poor man who finds that regulation prevents the drilling of oil or the construction of a pipe line.

Becoming Franz Kafka

The other day I realized that I was becoming a bit like Franz Kafka. I know that sounds disturbing. Franz Kafka, after all, wrote The Metamorphosis, a story about a human being turning into a bug. Gregor Samsa wakes up one day to find that he has changed into a giant insect. He can's observe the change directly, but notices that things around him look differently. The change is readily evident to Gregor's sister and to his parents and their reaction to him is how he realizes that the change has happened. Eventually, Gregor accepts that his family would be better off without him and so he starvesw himself to death. That is a bit of literary realism, Kafka would do the same while in a ssanitorium suffering from tuberculosis.

I don't think that there is any danger of that happening in my case, but I do realize that I am becoming different in a way that I didn't anticipate. My change is the subtle one that takes place with the accompanying passage of time. The hair becomes a little thinner, the stomach paunchier, skin paler, teeth longer, eyes weaker. This change is evident every time that I look in the mirror, but it is also evident in the way others look at me.

We type cast people by the way they look. The young are foolish and immature. The old foolish and irrelevant. And somewhere in between extremely young and extremely old, the change begins.

You will realize that the metamorphosis has begun when others start calling you "sir" or "madam", when they hold the door open for you, step back and let you enter first, or, at the grocery store, offer to carry a single bag of groceries out to your car. Then there is the "senior discount" on coffee at McDonalds or tickets at the theater. My local university has a program that seniors can take classes for free. Now that's great, but you have to wonder if they are offering those free classes to help in the fight against pre-Alzheimer's.

At this point you feel like your ready to be put out to pasture. Not that I mind saving money, that I enjoy. It is just society's idea that your useful time has expired. Why not accept the change, turn into that horrible creature, and fly off?

There is another way that I felt Franz Kafkaesque. That is, that I am writing these articles only for my own pleasure. No one will ever read them, or, if they do, then they will realize that I have gone over the edge like Franz's character in his story.

I

Bah Humbug

Everything will change, ...if not today, then tomorrow, ...if not tomorrow, then the day after that.

"Bah Humbug",  said Ebenezzer Scrooge. Christmas is just another day for picking the pockets of employers and getting another day off without any work.

I keep thinking that everyone else is going to "get it". By that I mean each and everyone of them, you know who they are, will wake up Christmas morning and understand that life is beautiful and meant to be enjoyed. Yet, Christmas never comes. Everyone around me continues to look at the world personally. What is in it for me?

I have decided, finally, that the world is not going to change for me, that the one who needs to do the waking up is me.

Merry Christmas everyone, it's a beautiful world.

Did I Learn Anything Last Week

Osama bin Laden was killed on Sunday by a special operations unit of  U.S. Navy SEALs. The killing took place at 1:30 in the morning. Four Chinook helicopters flew into Abbottabad a military town and home to three Pakistani regiments. Abbotabad is not in the rugged border area where bin Laden was thought to be hiding, but a mere 30 miles from Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan. The mansion where Osama bin Laden and his family was hiding out was the largest in town and 10 minutes by foot from a major Pakistani military post.

The Navy SEALs were done with their task in under an hour. A local resident unknowingly tweeted the event as it occurred. The soldiers went from room to room searching for their target. The President and his National Security Team watched the events in real time. The SEALs located their target and uttered the words the President waited to hear, "Geronimo ekia," or Osama bin Ladin enemy killed in action. Three other males were killed in the action including bin Laden's adult son and one woman who was caught in the crossfire. The others in the compound were escorted to safety and released to the Pakistani authorities.

Osama Bin Laden was killed in a hail of bullets. Osama bin Laden, if he were asked, would probably claim to be a martyr, suffering death for his religion. Most Americans simply viewed bin Laden as a coward. For what is holy and right in using innocent men and women in airplanes to kill other innocent men and women in buildings?

America's spontaneous reaction to news of bin Laden's death was to celebrate. First, it began outside the White House as hundreds and then thousands of young college students gathered to hear the news. They came from nearby George Washington and Georgetown Universities. Their collective voices joined in song and prayer. On 9/11 they were but children. They have not known of life without airliners as bombs, suicide bombs, underwear bombers, and constant security checks.Will a post-Osama world be different?

Like an ember this spirit of hope rose into the air. It lit at the site of the World Trade Center in New York the site where two planes crashed into buildings killing almost three thousand innocent souls. By this time, the President had spoken and news reporters were confirming the death of bin Laden. The joyous celebration spread from campus to campus and city to city across the United States.

Earlier in the day, before I heard the good news of Osama's demise, my son asked me if I learned anything this week. He, of course, was talking about something completely different, but the question stuck. Do we learn anything from this?

I learned that the President is one hell of a good speaker. Other politicians came on later and spoke, but none spoke with the authority or demeanor of our President. The ancient Romans would use the term "gravitas" to describe Obama's ability to connect with the public. Obama takes seriously his responsibilities, but handles the criticism he receives with good humor. This is a rare gift.

I learned that terrorists can run from justice, they can even hide for a while, but you can't hide forever. Goodness and justice triumph in the end, for that is the dominant nature of mankind. What has happened in Tunisia, Egypt, and now Libya, revolutions in which bin Laden shared no part, demonstrate the power of good people everywhere to make a difference. The reality of life is that we seek a better life.

And even then one wonders at the logic of Osama Bin Laden. His religion was one of  intolerance. Moreover, toleration was a crime punishable by death.

I have heard Osama bin laden described by some of his family and friends as a good Muslim. Like many other good Muslims, Christians, and Jew, I struggle with this. For how can a good Muslim believe that God justifies the purposeful death of  innocents in any struggle.Yet, this is the teaching in many, though thankfully not all, of the madrasas in the Muslim world.This I will never understand.

If one truly and rightly dates the war on terror, it began not on September 11, but on September 9, 2001. It was on that date that bin Laden carried out the assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud, Lion of Peshawar and the leader of the Northern Alliance. Bin Laden did this in typical fashion though the use of two suicide bombers posing as reporters.

At the time, Massoud and the Northern Alliance were waging their own struggle against the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. Massoud was a former engineering student and commander of the struggle against the Soviet intervntion in Afghanistan.  "It is our conviction", he said, that,  "and we believe that both men and women are created by the Almighty. Both have equal rights. Women can pursue an education, women can pursue a career, and women can play a role in society -- just like men." On the contrary the Taliban and bin Laden subjected the women of Afghanistan to virtual house arrest and denied them any opportunity for education and meaningful employment.

I learned that friends will be with you not only in times of difficulty, but also in times of triumph. The people who matter, our friends spoke out and hailed the death of Osama Bin Laden as a triumph for freedom loving people in the world. And as President Obama note our fight against terrorism is not based on religion, race, or ethnicity. Our fight is based on principles, those of justice for all. All of Western Europe celebrated the death of Osama. Israel hailed the death of Osama a a great victory. Turkey, Jordan, and other responsible states congratulated the United States and the President.

I learned that recriminations come quickly. For immediately Pakistan was questioned for its role in "hiding" Osama bin Laden in plain site. How quickly we forget that Pakistan has lost more citizens in the war against terror than have we. In 2007, Benazir Bhutto a former prime-minister was assassinated for her views on human rights.During the war on terror, Pakistan has committed more troops, suffered more casualties, and paid a higher price in terms of its economy than the United States.

I learned that the world changes by a matter of degrees. Al Jazeera, the voice of the Arab world, carries a front page story quoting President Obama as saying the world is safer without Osama. At the same time, Al Jazeera in a banner headline implores the Syrian government to find and release its reporter Dorthy Parvez.America may have its faults, but it remains the best hope for a safer and freer world.

I have learned that Americans, as the President noted, pull together in times of trouble and triumph. I only hope that this national celebration of the end of evil that Osama bin Laden represented will give us some respite. For evil does not die with the death of one man.

Did I learn anything last week? Time will tell. Will there be retaliation by those of Al Queda who believe in continuing an unholy and unjust war on civilization? Will partisan politics bring us back to querulous bickering over public policy? Will this era of good feeling evaporates? Time will tell, but, for now, the President expresses the thoughts of all Americans when he simply says, "We can all agree this is a good day for America." .

Ethan Frome

If you dig deep enough and you will find a story. And this search for a story will reveal a moment that is life altering. It is a moment where the the heavens above tilt one way or the other, and the course of the stars change for good or bad, and one's life is moved from happiness to desperation and misery, or, the other way around. A good storyteller who properly tells the story, will reveal that there exist other moments, other events, and other decisions that play a part in that final moment.

Edith Wharton, through the literary device of the flashback, uses an unnamed narrator to tell the story of Ethan Frome, a strikingly tall man with a powerful look despite his lameness, a man who now looks as if he was "dead and in hell." In what happened twenty-four years before, lies the story - a young man whose dreams were dashed by the decisions of those around him, and, ultimately, by his own choice.

Laid up in the small New England town of Starkfield for the winter, the narrator sets out to learn the mysterious story. When a violent snowstorm forces the narrator into an overnight stay at the Frome household, the narrator is told the story by Ethan himself.

Flashback - Ethan is walking through snowy Starkfield at midnight. In the basement lights of a village church, Ethan catches sight of a young girl in a cherry-colored scarf. She is his wife’s cousin, Mattie Silver, who has been living with the Fromes for over a year, helping to take care of the house and Ethan's sickly and bitter wife Zeena.

When the dance lets out, Ethan catches up with Mattie to walk her home. A sense of thrill is apparent between Ethan and Mattie, which, when the two arrive home, is also apparent to the sickly Zeena. Without a word to Zeena and with thoughts only of Mattie, Ethan goes to bed.

Ethan 's opportunity to be alone with Mattie comes the next day when his wife announces that she has decided to seek treatment for her illness in a neighboring town, and will spend the night there with relatives. Ethan is excited  and goes into town to make a lumber sale, but hurries home to Mattie in time for supper.

The evening meal between the two is a scene of non-verbalized thoughts; as well as, the unspoken presence of Zeena, symbolized by a favorite pickle dish which falls to the floor and shatters. Ethan fails in his courage to express his inner thoughts and the two separately go to bed. The next day Zeena returns and informs Ethan that her health is failing quickly and that she plans to hire someone to replace Mattie.

Spurred on by Zeena's resolve to remove Mattie from the house,  Ethan goes to the kitchen and kisses Mattie passionately. He tells Mattie of Zeena’s plans, but the moment is interrupted by Zeena herself. That evening, Ethan contemplates his choices. Unable to prevent Mattie's dismissal, Ethan contemplates eloping with Mattie, and even begins to draft a letter of farewell to Zeena. But considering his financial situation, Ethan realizes that his dream is unreal.

At breakfast the next day, Zeena announces plans for Mattie’s departure and the arrival of the new hired girl. Later, Ethan steals into town with a plan to collect an advance on a recently delivered lumber load, and thereby pay for his and Mattie's escape. But, on the way,  Ethan encounters a neighbor's wife who praises him for his patience in caring for the ailing Zeena. Her words touch his conscience and he returns to the farm..

Against Zeena’s wishes, Ethan decides to drive Mattie to the railroad station himself. Ethan takes a roundabout route and ends up stopping at the top of the village hill. There they agree to fulfill a sledding adventure they once proposed but had never undertaken. After the first run prompts Mattie suggests a second, but with a different purpose. Together, they will run the sled into the elm tree at the foot of the hill, and end their last moments together. Ethan rejects her idea initially, but is won over. Together, they lock themselves in a final embrace headed down the hill toward the big elm. After the collision, Ethan languidly reached out to touch Mattie's hair and feel her face. In the darkness that enveloped them, he saw her weakly open her eyes and say his name.

Twenty years forward and the narrator enters the Frome's kitchen where two frail and aging women bicker. The drone of their querulous chatter stops as the narrator enters; Frome, glancing about at the poor condition of the room, apologizes for the cold. Then, he introduces the narrator to the two women - the first a tall bony figure, with pale opaque eyes revealing nothing and reflecting nothing, as his wife, "Mis' Frome", and to the second seated, paralyzed woman in the chair by the fire, with eyes that had a dark-witch like stare, as —"Miss Mattie Silver".

Edith Wharton likely based her story of Ethan Frome on an incident that she had heard about early in her life. In 1904 a sledding accident involving four girls and one boy occurred on Courthouse Hill in Lennox, Massachusettes. One of the girls was killed when the sled struck a lamppost.

Wharton heard about the story from another of the girls who became her friend later in life. As tragic events go, it was the death of the girl that was long remembered. It remained for Edith Wharton to give the event a story that would live on. And while the story of Ethan Frome is fictitious, the characters and events are real enough that they resonate with readers even today.

To Kill a Mockingbird

The longer I live, the more I learn, that if one looks hard enough, there is a connection to anything and everyone.

Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, first published in 1960, it became an instant success and won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. It became successful, because like so few other books, it novelized a subject that America desperately wanted to talk about, but, for which America could not find the words. Uncle Tom's Cabin and Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn are but two earlier examples of America's frustration of dealing with the touchy subject of race in America. In Harper Lee's case, the subject was the highly inflammatory subject, to Southerners and many Northerners, of black men and white women.For Harper, the events of her novelized story followed the events that occurred near her hometown in 1936, when she was 10 years old. To the American nation, the events also recalled the misjustice that befell the "Scotsboro Boys", over an alleged gang rape of two white girls by nine black teenagers on the Southern Railroad freight run from Chattanooga to Memphis on March 25, 1931. I repeat the word"boys" because that was the vernacular of the day, just as Mark Twain used the word "nigger" in Huck Finn.

For two decades following the arrest of the nine black  teenagers for a crime they never committed, , "the struggle for justice of the 'Scottsboro Boys,'  made celebrities out of nobodies, launched and ended careers, wasted lives and produced heroes, opened southern juries to blacks, exacerbated sectional strife, and divided America's political views."

This was surely fresh in the minds of America when Harper Lee brought out her novel about a lone white lawyer struggling to ensure justice in a bigoted southern town.The book was quickly made into a movie two years later. It starred Gregory Peck in the role of Atticus Finch the lawyer. The reaction was even greater than the book. Wikipedia summarizes the awards:

The American Film Institute named Atticus Finch the greatest movie hero of the 20th century. Additionally, the AFI ranked the movie second on their 100 Years... 100 Cheers list, behind It's a Wonderful Life. The film was ranked number 34 on AFI's list of the 100 greatest movies of all time, but moved up to number 25 on the 10th Anniversary list. In June 2008, the AFI revealed its "Ten top Ten"—the best ten films in ten "classic" American film genres—after polling over 1,500 people from the creative community. To Kill a Mockingbird was acknowledged as the best film in the courtroom drama genre.

 I could say that my connection to the film is my own childhood which paralleled that of Scout, the six-year-old narrator who grew up in a segregated south and observed the injustice of racial discrimination. I could say that as a lawyer, when I was older and practicing law, that I too took on cases that were never popular or politically correct. No, that is not the connection which intrigues me.

Instead, it is Harper Lee's sense of history as a framework in which all stories begin. Chapter One, page one. Harper Lee as Scout explains that the story begins not with the trial. Rather, it begins much earlier.

I said if he wanted to take a broad view of the thing, it really began with Andrew jackson. If General Jackson hadn't run the Creeks up the creek, Simon Finch (the progenitor of the Atticus Finch line) would never have paddled up the Alabama and where would we be if he hadn't? ...

 It was customary for t6he men in the family to remain on Simon's homestead, Finch's Landing, and make their living from cotton. The place was self-sufficient: modest in comparison with the empires around it, the Landing nevertheless produced everything required to sustain life, except ice, wheat flour, and articles of clothing, supplied by river-boats from Mobile.

The only thing Scout, a.k.a. Harper Lee, neglects to mention is that the land that produced the cotton was the product of slave labor of those black men and women that Atticus would later champion.

My grandfather was born in Alabama in the 1888. Before him, his grandfather, my great great grandfather, came to Alabama from Georgia and farmed the cotton in central Alabama not far from the Tallapposa River. The Alabama River of which Harper Lee speaks is formed by the Tallapoosa and Coosa rivers, which unite about six miles above Montgomery, the capital of Alabama. Once upon a time Montgomery was the capital of the Confederate States of America. My great grandfather was a doctor and his brother a lawyer, both in Montgomery.  But I do not know if they took on the challenges of injustice that Atticus Finch willingly took on.

Since, according to Harper Lee, Southerners are all about ancestors, mine came to Alabama before Simon Finch, I feel a little more regal in my heritage than she has a right to. I say this because Tallapoosa River land was the frontier before Alabama River land. Atticus Finch went to Montgomery to read law as did my great grandfather's brother. My great grandfather went to Montgomery to study medicine.

I digress, a problem of which my children frequently complain. The salient point that I am trying to make is that the Finches, like my own family, dispossessed the Creeks of Alabama in order to make a living raising cotton on the backs of slave labor. Now that is a burden to carry. And it is understandable that Harper Lee mentions the Creek Indians in only one sentence and the slave labor that raised the cotton not at all.

Each of us has to live our lives. Our moral standards are set early in life. The effect we have on others is how we act, not in the history of our fathers, or their fathers before them. And so Atticus Finch's principled stand against justice marks a turning point in the relationship of blacks and whites. Even Gregory Peck as Atticus learned from others. His lesson was is less of a legal one, than the human need to respect others regardless of color.

Color is not merely black and white. It is red and yellow and all shades in between. Alabama and much of the Southeastern United States was once inhabited by Indian tribes. For that matter, all of America was inhabited by Indians prior to the arrival of the first Europeans at Jamestown. The succeeding generations of all those who have gone before must not forget the past. But we must also remember to act like Atticus Finch in a time of crisis. Do the right thing.

My grandfather moved on from Alabama many years ago. Even then I know that I have relatives still living on the land once possessed by the Creek Indians. The cotton farms are gone, even if after the Civil War free black men and women picked the cotton that supplied the means of life to the new owners of the land. Guilt is something that is born by all of us.

Charlie Chaplin's Birthday

April 16 is Charlie Chaplin's 122nd birthday, but I would rather write about his wife Oona O'Neill Chaplin and her relationship with her father Eugene O'Neill. As you read on you can also watch Google's tribute to Charlie on his birthday.



Oona, Lady Chaplin was the daughter of Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwright Eugene O'Neill and writer Agnes Boulton, and the wife of British actor, director and producer Charlie Chaplin.

Eugene O'Neill was the author of Long Days Journey into the Night, the semi-autobiographical story of his own depression and alcoholism. Eugene and Agnes had two children Shane and Oona. Oona was born in 1925 while her parents were living in Bermuda, during a period of heavy drinking by her father. In 1929, dad left mom for another actress. Oona rarely saw her father after that.

Agnes Boulton wrote of O'Neill in her autobiography, Part of a Long Story (1953): "He never seemed to be what is called drunk, but there would be some sudden and rather dreadful outbursts of violence, and others of bitter nastiness and malevolence when he appeared more like a madman than anything else."

Oona decides to pursue acting instead of attending Vassar College. At age 17, she meets 53 year old Charlie Chaplin. Father Eugene O'Neill refuses to give Oona his consent to marry Chaplin and disinherits Oona continuing to ignore her for the rest of his life. Oona and Charlie wed and live happily thereafter, having 8 children over a marriage that spans 35 years.

Eugene O'Neill is a turd who obviously can't come to terms with his own life. He goes on drinking binges and speaks of suicide. When sober, he writes prodigiously. He projects his own insecurities and failures onto his children. Oona's older half-brother, Eugene O'Neill Jr., was the son of a woman to whom papa O'Neill had reneged on a promise to marry before attaining success as a writer. This younger O'Neill, like father, suffered from alcoholism then, unlike father, committed suicide in 1950 at the age of 40. Oona's brother Shane became a heroin addict. He moved into the family home in Bermuda, where he supported himself by selling off the furnishings. Father also disinherits him before the other son commits suicide by jumping out of a window years later.

Oona finds happiness with Charlie Chaplin despite the age difference and despite Charlie's fading success in movies as "talkies" replace the silent film. The couple eventually moves to Switzerland because of Charlie's tax problems and the label of communist sympathizer by the US government. Oona renounces her US citizenship in protest.

In 1981 when Oona saw Jack Nicholson film Reds, where he portrayed her distant father, she wrote him a letter saying, "Thanks to you, I now can love my father". Nicholson remarked that "that is the best compliment I ever got".

After Charlie Chaplin's death in 1977, Oona fought her own unsuccessful battle with alcoholism. She died in Switzerland of pancreatic cancer in 1991.