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A week’s worth of thoughts…

May 19, 2009

Letter From New York
May 18, 2009

A week’s worth of thoughts…

There are, here and there, some brighter spots in the economy – a sense we might, at last, be bumping along the bottom – certainly not out of the woods but with a sense we might actually be halfway through the dark forest. Searches online for luxury goods have gone up while those for flea markets are down.

A commentator last week noted that, perhaps because of the financial crisis, few have made much about the fact Obama is African American – ethnicity of the President is less important than the handling of this great crisis. For the most part, Americans think he is doing well while, at the same time, it appears he is now engaged in the delicate balancing of National Security issues.

Obama has been forced to look at some issues differently now that he is in the White House — what to do with those folks in Guantanamo? Right wing pundits are saying this is casting a better light on Bush’s legacy. To me, it is simply another sign of the disastrous situation in which we have found ourselves as a result of the Bush idiocies. The profound failures of the last administration would have left any new President in a quandary as to how to handle them. It is not easy to undo the Gordian knot of Bush’s regime. In this delicate world we do not have the luxury of doing as Alexander did and simply using one’s sword to cut through the knotted rope.

In New York City, Swine Flu is rearing its head. A well-liked educator, Assistant Principal Mitchell Weiner, has died from the H1N1 virus [a renaming has been going on in deference to both Mexicans and the pork lobby]. Five more schools have been closed and the number of suspected cases has been growing just as the world was beginning to breathe more easily. Upstate the flu news is calmer and locally in my part of the Hudson Valley there seems to be quiet on the flu front. It is, however, not over until the fat lady sings and she hasn’t sung yet.

Spring will not settle upon the Northeast; it has been unseasonably cool and wet. An occasional day of warmth arrives only to be followed by a week of cold and damp, with spirits following the weather lead. The never-ending winter has most everyone testy and annoyed, holing up at home as opposed to venturing out into the streets. It was, at home in Hudson and Claverack, a brutally quiet day for shopkeepers on Saturday, normal business off dramatically with a walk up and down Warren Street almost as depressing as the weather – the number of empty storefronts is growing. That’s happening in Hudson and it’s happening in the city. New York real estate is suffering and rents are falling, actually so much it is encouraging people to stop fleeing to the outer boroughs, either to remain or return to Manhattan. The impossible is happening and there isn’t much joy in Mudville these days except for those who are able to take advantage of the travails of others.

Out in space a final repair journey is being made to the Hubble Telescope, an observatory that is giving us glimpses of the magical beyond of deep space. After this mission, no more will be made and when it begins to fail again, Hubble will be allowed to drift down and burn up in the atmosphere having more than served its purpose. For the scientists who have nurtured the observatory through its life, it is hard to know it will go – a bit like having a terminally ill child who may laugh and play now while all the time you know the end is approaching.

The entire Hubble adventure has been an example to what can be accomplished. Early, almost fatal flaws, were rectified, software adjusted, work done, repair missions flown. Hubble has always seemed to me to be a living example of what Browning was describing in his line: Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?

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Letter From New York May 12, 2009

May 12, 2009

Letter From New York
May 10, 2009

The economic news is not so grim; there are signs of hope. The number of jobless did not grow as fast as most expected. In certain hard hit areas of the country, real estate seems to have begun bottoming out – places like Las Vegas, Florida and Sacramento. Hope is stirring in the country though the recovery will most likely be anemic; the entire economy is beginning to change, shifting from all out spending to something different – more akin to the world of most folks’ grandparents; a life of conscious non-consumption. Saving seems to be the new cool in America. Which also is probably ecologically correct.

The banks have been going through “stress tests” and all are solvent now and all they have to do is raise just $75 billion by November. Since when did $75 billion become “just $75 billion”? Well, this is an age where we are now talking about trillions of dollars so I guess $75 billion is “just” a little compared to a trillion dollars.

We seem to have survived swine flu – there are thousands of cases but we seem to have escaped the terror of a world pandemic. The global community seems to have managed this one well, with special kudos to Mexico who did a heck of a lot better with swine flu than China did with SARS a few years back — though we have to admit the Mexican drug wars aren’t pretty. Maybe our economic downturn will depress the demand for illicit substances and therefore help. Or not.

While not being felled by a pandemic, the Taliban/Al Qaeda/whoever fundamentalist Muslim group seems to be taking over more of Pakistan – a country with nuclear arms. I am more worried about this than I was a pandemic. Imagine what suicide bombers could do with a mini-nuke strapped around themselves. Doesn’t comfort me when I fall asleep.

As I write this Mother’s Day is coming to a close; walking the streets of New York there were a seemingly never ending series of placards outside restaurants offering Mother Day brunches though none of the restaurants looked overflowing – another sign of the carefulness of our new age. It was during this week that Elizabeth Edwards released her book RESILIANCE, depicting both her courageous battle against cancer and her reactions to her husband’s infidelity. Based on the reviews of the book, it will be a long time to forgiveness. While John Edwards is looking like a cad, Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s Prime Minister, who is probably a genuine cad, is being applauded in his country for his dalliances. His wife excoriated him in public while that public thought, apparently, it was quite wonderful that their 70 something PM was capable of bedding a number of women other than his wife, including, apparently, an eighteen year old who delights in calling him “daddy.” Europeans and Americans are far apart in the way they view infidelity. We have a puritanical view and Europeans shrug their shoulders or delight in it. Mitterrand’s mistress and his daughter from that liaison attended his funeral and stood near his family during the services. Such a thing would not happen in America.

Perhaps in the future of STAR TREK. A new film in the franchise seems to have rebooted it and brought excitement back to the forty-year-old phenomenon. I will be seeing it this week and am eager for the new take on the franchise, a mythic story which has given us an opportunity to dream of a future that could be better, where we have mastered our earthbound demons and are now concentrating on facing the process of integrating ourselves not with those who are truly different yet somehow like us.

We have a long way to go here on earth. Two little boys killed themselves this past week because they were taunted by their peers who called them “fags” and “gays” which they might have grown up to be – or not. We won’t know because the pain they were in resulted in their ending that pain in the most final way. It is my hope that we can move beyond that kind of behavior before we begin to travel the star lanes to other worlds.

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Unintended Consequences LFNY May 4, 2009

May 4, 2009

Letter From New York
May 2, 2009

Unintended Consequences…

Letter From New York
May 2, 2009

Unintended Consequences…

For the last several years, I have consulted several of the companies in the LEI Group. For the last year I have been working on the distribution side, starting out with launching Internet TV channels. After that, I became the Utility Player doing everything from negotiating agreements to…whatever needed to be done. On Friday, the Great Recession claimed that part of the Enterprises Group – all the others are just fine but Distribution found itself caught up in a “perfect storm” of events and went under. Other companies in the Group are fine; distribution only has gone.

After the announcement, I spent the day phoning people who were in business with the company letting them know what was happening, listening to both dismay and concern and some anger. Gratifyingly, everyone was concerned for my well being, which was okay as I have had another company take me on as a consultant to develop a New Media Strategy. However, as I said good-bye to the people from that group with whom I have worked, I found myself feeling sad and depressed. It was a Chapter 7 Bankruptcy, which meant the company was being liquidated. Between the phone calls and the good-byes, it was one of the most draining days of my life.

What surprised me was the depth of the “survivor’s guilt” I felt. All of a sudden people were on the street and I was not – and I felt guilty. I felt something profound and unexpected. Grateful and, yes, a bit ashamed – how did I get to be the lucky one?

This was an unintended consequence of the bankruptcy – my sense of dislocation in the universe and the pain of having to make those phone calls, all of them difficult. At best people were inconvenienced and at worst, lost money – a couple were very significant amounts. In one company there is a young man who thinks he may have ruined his career by doing a deal with LPD, which has cost his employers a small fortune.

What I realize is that this is being repeated daily across the United States and the world. It is just not the people who lose their jobs who are affected; it is also those who remain. It is the people at other companies who work with the companies that disappear.

May 1st was a Red Letter Day in American history; Chrysler declared bankruptcy. As carefully orchestrated as it is, it is a moment in American history that will not be forgotten and which will, in years to come, be considered a marking point in our nation. The old industrial base of the United States has eroded and is falling in on itself. There have been a thousand steps to this moment and the history of American industry is written in those steps. The industrial base of the country, the manufacturing base, has become lost in another era. It has worn down and been overtaken by others in other countries. Interestingly, the same cycle seems to be happening with them – Toyota, Honda, Nissan are all reeling. The system that made them successful is now threatening them also.

Out of this will come a new world economic order and it will not be based on industrial prowess but intellectual power.

One of the reasons India could be the winner in the race with China is that they know how to manipulate the digital world well. China, recognizing that is racing to catch up. The U.S.? As a result of 9/11 we’re keeping the best and the brightest out of the U.S. and pushing them toward other countries. Ahhh…

It is all complicated and it is all about the future. It is being created right now, in the midst of this economic crisis. The future will be about the new technologies, about green technologies, about nanotechnology. It is all about that — a new world is coming upon us and we had better get used to it. The past, as Pinter said, is a foreign country – they do things differently there.

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Letter From New York: April 23 2009 Pride Goeth Before the Fall

April 23, 2009

April 15th stands out in all American minds as the dreaded day when tax returns are due. However, the 15th of April is a notable day for other anniversaries and events. It is the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s death, of Leonardo DaVinci’s birth, and the sinking of Titanic.

The loss of Titanic has become legend, at the bottom is a true story – Titanic was a real ship, it carried real people, it struck an iceberg, it sank. The real story has become larger than itself, a story upon which much meaning is applied, inspiring books, films, a musical, catch phrases – “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic” and has become an allegory for heading blissfully, arrogantly, determinedly without caution into catastrophe, sailing without enough lifeboats for all. Wealth meant celebrity in 1912 and Titanic was chock-a-block with millionaires. Their presence aboard gave it a luster it has never lost. The richest man in the world, John Jacob Astor, was not saved by his fortune. Molly Brown, a Denver doyenne, created a legend that night and has been immortalized as The Unsinkable Molly Brown.

On board was a cross section of the western world at the time – the rich, the middle class and the poor who hoped for more. It was sailing from the old world to the new; it was the height of the technology of the time.

Like so many things in life that end badly there are a surfeit of “what ifs” and “if onlys”.

What if the men on watch had had binoculars? If only the watertight compartments had gone one deck higher, if the nearby ship, the Californian, hadn’t sent its radio operator to bed just before the SOS signals began to be sent, if the men on their deck had paid heed to the rockets flaring into the night. What if the ship had not tried to avoid the iceberg – a head on collision would have saved Titanic from sinking. What if the last iceberg warnings had actually reached the bridge? If only attention had been paid…to so many things.

It is a story of bravery and selflessness and selfishness and bad behavior. It was men and women first, though first class men had a better survival rate than women and children in steerage. When John Jacob Astor asked to join his young, pregnant wife in a lifeboat, he was turned down and stepped back like a gentleman. His body was recovered some days later. Ida Straus stayed with her husband, Isidore, who was a department store tycoon. J. Bruce Ismay, Chairman of the White Star Line, owner of Titanic, stepped into a lifeboat and a lifetime of shame.

Its loss has been the backdrop for many films, most notably TITANIC in 1997, a blockbuster of immense dimension. There seem to be an endless number of websites devoted to Titanic – it is a story that has burned itself into the Western collective consciousness as a story of meaning with lessons to be learned. Proud and confident in technology and the inevitability of progress, the ship sailed and each one of those things suffered as a result of its loss.

It is a story that will not be forgotten, nor should it be. It is a reflection of things that result when man thinks he is in control of events. Not so different from the flaws that propelled us recklessly into this economic mess – pride, feeling nothing could bring down the colossus, shoddy workmanship.

Yes, shoddy workmanship. It is likely that Titanic sank because the steel of its hull was made with too much slag and was brittle; its rivets were not good, not the best metal and not done by the best hands and so popped as the iceberg glanced the ship. The parallel to our economic crisis is that lack of attention to details are important things when push comes to shove – or iceberg meets metal.

Titanic’s story is a lesson, an allegory for what we do wrong – and the courage shown when things go badly.

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Letter From New York Easter Sunday 2009

April 12, 2009

Letter From New York
April 12, 2009

Easter Sunday

It is Easter Weekend. I am at the cottage, and winter will not pull its icicle claws from us – it is unseasonably cold. A fire burns in my Franklin stove. There is a lament in the streets that spring will not really happen. We, here in the Hudson Valley, have been teased by spring yet it will not burst upon us. It is still winter cold.

Tonight, returning from a day of errands, the sunset was of the kind that inspired the Hudson school of painters. Grey clouds were bordered with magenta light and it was magical. Nature isn’t giving us warmth but it is giving us beauty.

It is Easter. It is Passover. These are profound holidays for those who live in the Judeo-Christian tradition. I find myself acknowledging them if no longer quite a part of them. It is now been a long time since I have been a practicing Catholic, which is my heritage. I gave that up a long time ago. I have flirted with a few other faith groups and have never been able to quite settle in comfortably with any of them. I appreciate the Episcopalian tradition; it is a religion that was born out of a need to justify divorce and murder. It should be forgiving. But even there I have never quite found a match.

That he lived – of that I have no doubt. That he changed the world – of that I have no doubt. Today much of the world will celebrate his Resurrection – his return from the dead after a horrific death. Out of this event came one of the greatest religious movements the world has ever seen. Christ died and was resurrected and this man god Jesus has become one of the central pillars of civilization.

Yet I wonder what Jesus would think of the way he has been used over the centuries. This was a man of peace. Granted he was testy with the moneychangers in the temple but he didn’t kill any of them. He was a man of peace and love from all the accounts of his life that have been written, from the sanctioned writings to the Apocryphal Gospels that didn’t make it into the “Bible.” This was a man who forgave and asked people to simply go and sin no more. Yet I am in the middle of a Holy Season and I am brutally aware of how much warfare has occurred due to individuals and nations claiming Jesus Christ as theirs. Empires were built on the concept of “Christianization.” Other wars were fought by other nations justified by their religion. Christianity and almost every other religion have been used to justify war, death, cruelty.

This is not what I think Jesus was expecting when he offered himself up to die on the cross. He was not a person who wanted earthly power and yet many of those who have followed him since then have been focused on having earthly power and used the controlling power of religion to attain it. While Europe was living its Dark Ages, Islam was preserving the best of our past. We would be missing much of Greek and Roman civilization were it not for the Muslims; they preserved and valued what the Christian West rejected – the thoughts of anyone who had come before them.

It seems most religions become seduced by the earthly power that can be derived from controlling souls. As we celebrate Easter and Passover the world is full of examples of religious fury and religious peace. In Italy earthquake survivors celebrate amidst the ruins, an Afghan woman, an official who supported women’s rights, was gunned down in the streets of her town, Pope Benedict XVI calls for world reconciliation, the Real IRA in Belfast is calling for the death of an official because he is working for peace.

“Father, forgive them; they know not what they do,” was said by Christ on the cross. I think now the words were for that moment and all the moments to come when his teachings would be bastardized.

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Professionally young in Cloud Koo Koo Land March 31, 2009

April 5, 2009

A long time ago, in the primordial soup that was my youth, I played a character in THE BIRDS, authored by Aristophanes and translated from the original Greek by a classmate of mine, Jeff La Count, who had a mastery of ancient languages even in high school. He created a simple and wonderful adaptation of Aristophanes’ play.

The first line of the play, which I spoke as the character of Euelpides, was: here we are, ready and willing to go to the birds – and we can’t even find the way! He and his comrade, Pisthetairos, were looking for “the birds.” If they could find the mythical kingdom of the Birds all rules of life could be overturned. Ultimately finding The Birds, they created a place called Cloud-koo-koo-land, where all the normal rules were abrogated and new ones created, ultimately upending the reign of the Gods.

Interpreted in the 20th Century it could have been a Laurel and Hardy vehicle.

I am thinking of this because we are in the process of finding our way out of our own Cloud-koo-koo-land. Just as we the country responded to the horror of World War I with the party called the Roaring ‘20’s, we responded to 9/11 with the irrational exuberance of the last years. We took all the normal rules of finance and abrogated them with new ones that made no sense and ultimately that brought us down. Cloud-koo-koo-land can’t last forever…

This train of thought was reinforced standing in line for a newspaper while surrounded by the magazines that feed off our addiction to celebrity. There are such a staggering number that in many newsstands it is almost impossible to find a news magazine; they’ve been relegated to the back rows. One “Special Issue” magazine recently was a paean to celebrity beauty, a detailed scrutiny of the evolution of physical charms among male and female celebrities. More than one nose looked rather different between now and then. Standing there, looking at this catalog of physical charms, it crossed my mind that most of these people are practicing the art of being professionally young, a quality that has been ascribed to our nation, another aspect of the Cloud-koo-koo-land we have been inhabiting.

We are a country that has been playing perpetually youthful, as we have been moving into our middle age. Youth and youthfulness are attributes we have ascribed to ourselves; it has been our trademark since our founding. Young, brash, overcoming all odds, rising to the occasion, winning World Wars, first to the moon, leading the world in our productivity and our enthusiasm, populated by youthful, exuberant individuals who can defy age and time.

May be relentless youthfulness is not the best thing we have to offer anymore. Perhaps we gained some wisdom in our youth and can call upon that now as we work to take our place in this new, strange world in which we find ourselves – the world of The Great Recession, insurgencies, wars, travails and troubles.

Perhaps the thing to do now is to acknowledge we’re getting a bit longer in the tooth and that all the energy used to stay professionally young might better be spent in just being professional. We have had a grand party but perhaps now it’s time to do the Twelve Step meeting thing and figure out how to live in sobriety.

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Letter From New York 01 11 09

January 13, 2009

Letter From New York
January 11, 2009

It is a Sunday evening; as the sun set last night snow began to fall. When I woke this morning, there was a foot in the circular drive of the house. It had been my intention to go into the city and meet some friends but as soon as I opened the door I knew it wasn’t going to be my day to go to the city.

So I curled up in the cottage, read magazines, talked to friends and family, had a fire in the stove, listened to music, did paperwork, spent time with myself. On Tuesday I have to go out to Los Angeles, something that came together on Friday and so it felt good to be able to spend some unexpected time with myself in my home.

Out there in the world, it is not a pretty place. Both Hamas and Israel are rejecting the cries for ceasefire so the dying goes on. Particularly difficult to see are the photos of children hurt, frightened, scared to death by forces they didn’t create but which are shaping their lives going forward. All around the world protests and counter protests are being staged. Support Gaza! Support Israel! Supporting either side isn’t getting the killing stopped. What is particularly troubling is the charge that Hamas is using innocent civilians as human shields. Israel says it is near to achieving its goals in Gaza. However the offensive will continue. Why? May be because Hamas is lobbing bigger rockets into Israel. None of this, of course, is doing much to resolve the underlying issues but it is doing a good job of making sure they don’t soon get resolved.

While Gaza suffers, Hollywood gathers to award the Golden Globes. It’s the official beginning of the march to The Oscars. No matter what the shape the world is in, we continue to celebrate the work done in movies and on television. The Oscars were a constant during the Great Depression and will be a constant through whatever it is we end up calling this crisis.

The ripples continue from the Madoff affair, people constantly performing exegesis on the events, attempting to understand how a fraud of this dimension could have gone undetected, especially by his own sons – who seem to have little to say about the matter. Meanwhile, it has now become apparent that it will take years to unravel the mystery of the affair. Meanwhile, Mr. Madoff is working out a defense. Insanity is being floated; it hasn’t resonated well so far. We’ll see if they actually use it.
In one of the rare instances of sane behavior on the part of the Bush Administration, we discovered this weekend that they denied the Israelis high tech bombs so they could attack the Iranian nuclear facilities. It was a rare instance of restraint on their part, for which I am grateful – one of the few things from this Administration for which I am grateful.

This has been the week in which Forbes did a study of the effects upon billionaires, giving us a look at twenty-five of them who have been ravaged by the crash. Some of them are barely millionaires any more. There is one man who has in the last nine months lost twenty-five BILLION dollars. Losses all around are staggering.

It is winter and I am warm and cozy in the cottage. Europe has been living under the threat of freezing because of a gas dispute between Ukraine and Russia. Pictures from eastern Europe showed people shivering on trains that weren’t being heated to save fuel. A deal was done between Ukraine and Russia that resolved the problem; it began to, not surprisingly, unravel almost immediately. The EU is scrambling to save the deal – one fifth of its natural gas flows through the Ukrainian pipeline and temperatures are dropping.

What I am seeing at the end of this cozy Sunday in the cottage is that the world is in a very hard place and it seems that the issues may be insurmountable. However, we are human and in the human heart beats hope and hope is what we need right now.

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Hello world!

January 4, 2009

Letter From New York
January 4, 2009

Come Tuesday evening, 12th Night, the Holiday Season will come to a close and whether or not we leave our trees up longer, the world will expect us to ramp back up into our everyday selves and manage what it is we do on a day to day basis.  I don’t know anyone who is sorry to see 2008 slip into the wake of time.  However, knowing what we’re facing as a world and as a country, I am not facing 2009 with unadulterated excitement.

Sitting at my computer, perusing stories from around the world, gathered neatly together by the home pages of some of my favorite sites, I found it not comforting that the world didn’t take a pause from its violent ways for the Holidays.  The violence in the Gaza strip is particularly disheartening – it could be the birthing of a whole new Intifada, a word that means “shaking off” in Arabic and one that has taken on rebellion as its meaning.  To me, far and away when I hear the word, I now know we are in for trouble and that many will die. While I have been writing this, Israeli troops and Hamas forces have engaged on the ground in Gaza, deepening the crisis there.

I have written before of the duality of our race, capable of such generosity and at the same time capable of such horrible deeds.  The past year has revealed us in all those ways – and the horrible didn’t include just acts of physical violence.  The Madoff Affair is the pinnacle of the mountain of greed that shadowed us for the last decade or more.  Mumbai reminded us that terrorism is everywhere and can be very focused in its victims – westerners, Jews living in India, the wealthy.  The work of the Mumbai terrorists was on a par with what we expect from our elite Navy Seals in terms of organization, speed, and ability to strike without warning.

After almost six long years, the U.S. is slowly beginning to hand over control of Iraq’s cities to the Iraqis. Forward Operating Base Callahan has now reverted to its pre-war name:  Sha’ab Market.  Allah willing it will again be a market.  The slow departure from Iraq has begun, quietly, with relatively little fanfare here, hopefully an orderly pullout that will allow Iraq to transition to a functioning country.  God willing.  Yet while violence as a whole is down, a female suicide bomber killed dozens of worshipers at the Kadhimiyah shrine, a holy place to Shiites on Sunday.

People that I know are not eager to return to work as they are frightened of the scene to which they will return.  Economic news is grim and for the last ten days reality has been held at bay by the warm glow of holiday spirits.  Now the sobering future is upon us.  The Governors of many our 50 states are petitioning President Elect Obama for a trillion dollars in state aid, to help get the state and national economies moving.  We are becoming inured to the word trillion.  Senator Everett Dirksen, of the mid 20th Century, once said: A billion here, a billion there and soon you’re talking real money.  We are in sight of the day when someone will say, a trillion here, a trillion there…

As we depart the Holiday season and move into the inevitable future, everyone who has a job is grateful and those who do not are hopeful that an Obama administration will be able to handle the financial tsunami that is engulfing us. Gradually, over the last year, most of us have come to think of America at the brink of something bad and are looking for someone to lead us back. On Saturday as I did errands, I heard the weekly radio address from President Bush and the counterpoint from President Elect Obama.  What struck me were not the words they said but the tenor of the voices speaking, President Bush sounded exhausted, as beaten down as some of his fellow countrymen.  Obama sounded alive, confident, hopeful, focused – all the things we are desperately going to need in the next months and years.

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