It seems that President Obama is under attack from the extreme right wing of the Republican Party and by the right wing media jockeys and a few wing nuts like Glen Beck. Debate and controversy have been an integral part of the political process since the beginning of days of the colonies on North America. What has happened in my lifetime is that the parties are so different now that the losers of the last election have become rabid foes of everything that Obama stands for. I have a feeling that a lot of the animosity toward Obama is that he is Black, has lived abroad, and has a Muslim middle name. Full stop. What the Republicans fail to realize is that if Hillary Clinton had won the nomination from the Democrats and won against McCain, much of the animosity toward Obama would have been directed at her. The white male Christian dominance of the presidency has ended. Where are the ex-Presidents in all of this? Why has George W. Bush been so silent? It would be presidential for ex-President Bush to call on the American public to return to civility in their debates over policy and politics. This could go a long way toward rehabilitating his image if he were to take the high road and call on extremists to ratchet down the hostile, nasty rhetoric. By doing so, he would not be providing support to one side or another, but he’d be calling for open and fair debate where both sides listen to each other, learn from each other and at the end of the day come together to support the ideals of our forefathers. The extremists are inflaming the public with half-truths and even downright lies. Remember the slogan “united we stand. Divided we fail”. It seems extremists are willing to destroy the country in order to save it!
Blog
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The Van Jones resignation: Do “right wing” Republicans know what they are doing?
Well, the right wingers have done it again: Acted against their own interests. That would make a difference to them if they took a long term perspective. But, they don’t. They like winning small victories. However, the end result is that they will lose the proverbial war. Right wingers (and ultra right wingers like Glen Beck) have hounded a President Obama appointee, Van Jones. Jones was in the Obama administration in a position to generate “green jobs”. The “whitee rightees” dug up statements that Van Jones had made earlier this decade in which he referred to some Republicans as “assholes”. They also found Jones’s name on a petition calling for a government inquiry into who knew what about the 9-11 attack on the Twin Towers. About three and a half centuries ago French Cardinal Richelieu once said “Give me six sentences by the most innocent of men and I will hang him with them”. Well, I guess some Republican obstructionists are using the Cardinal’s playbook on dealing with the opposition! But the whitee rightees are not thinking things through. Sure, they got a person dedicated to improving the well-being of Americans to resign from working inside the government bureaucracy. Inside the government, comments by Van Jones would have had to been restrained. He would have been silenced in a way, unable to respond to the worst statements they might make about progressive politics. Instead they put him once again on the outside of the controls of government, no longer a government bureaucrat. Now he is free to call the Republicans as he sees them, as right wing obstructionists. Political talk show hosts — guys like Beck, Savage, Reagan, and Limbaugh along with senators like Inhoff (R-Oklahoma) — are not true Republicans. They are really “REPUBLICAN’Ts, putting their own blinding hostilities against the well-being of the American people. Welcome back to an “open mike”, Van Jones. Your voice will be louder than ever.
WHO is Van Jones? [from: www.vanjones.net]
Who is Van Jones?
Van Jones is a globally recognized, award-winning pioneer in human rights and the clean energy economy. He is a 1993 graduate of the Yale Law School and an attorney.Van wrote the definitive book on “green jobs”: The Green Collar Economy. In 2008 — thanks to a low-cost, viral marketing campaign — his book became an instant New York Times bestseller. It is today being translated into six languages.
As a tireless advocate for disadvantaged people and the environment, Van helped to pass America’s first “green job training” legislation: the Green Jobs Act, which George W. Bush signed into law as a part of the 2007 Energy Bill. He is the co-founder of a number of successful non-profit organizations, including the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and Green For All.
Van is the recipient of many awards and honors, including: the Reebok International Human Rights Award; the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leader designation; the prestigious, international Ashoka Fellowship; and many more. Van was included in the Ebony Magazine “Power 150” list of most influential African Americans for 2009. In 2008, Essence magazine named him one of the 25 most inspiring/influential African Americans. TIME Magazine named him an environmental hero in 2008. In 2009, TIME named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
In March 2009, Van went to work as the special advisor for green jobs at the White House Council for Environmental Quality.
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Climate Change confronts Human Nature: Adapting to an “adaptation mentality”
Mickey Glantz
August 5, 2009While governments negotiate and bicker over how much greenhouse gases each one can emit, the climate warms. This warming of the global climate is now expected to surpass the relatively safe level of a 2ºC increase. This change has been projected to have major negative impacts on weather-related phenomena and on societies throughout the 21st century, and those impacts are supposed to increase in number and intensities and frequencies as the decades pass.
Discussions about adaptation measures related to climate change seem to be the rage of the day among policy makers, climate researchers, and social scientists, especially since 2007 when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to IPCC researchers working on the issue of climate change (aka global warming). Now, we hear about adaptation to cope with the causes and the impacts, guesstimates about potential ecological and societal impacts, methods to assess them, and options available.
Adaptation has several definitions, some of which conflict with one another. For example, adaptation has been used to refer both to proactive preparations and to reactive responses to climate related hazards. To most others, however, adaptation is only the recognition of the need of societies to consider climate change in future planning.
Regardless of definition, time is running out for the global community; and very few signs indicate that either the political or the social will exists to respond in a timely and effective way to change the trends that point toward increased warming of the earth’s atmosphere.
source: www.workroom.thinkprogress.org/tag/global-boiling It seems the only option available is to clean up after the impacts occur, discussions about geo-engineering the climate system notwithstanding. Therefore, adaptation to climate change can also be interpreted as recognition, even acceptance, of the belief that societies everywhere are pretty helpless in the face of a yet-to-be controlled changing climate. Societies—after millennia of struggling for the upper hand on climate—are apparently surrendering to the vagaries of the climate system.
But Americans do not see themselves as quitters. They often side with the underdog in a conflict, and they are known for their (blind) faith in technology, believing that the country’s engineering capabilities and ever-evolving modern marvels can overcome most, if not all, problems. I must admit that I shared this view of our engineering know-how; in fact, my first university degree was a BS in Metallurgical Engineering. History shows that engineers have time and time again risen to an occasion to overcome a wide range of constraints imposed on societies both by the vagaries of nature as well as by poor decision-making.
But now I believe we may have met our match, having not only created more environmental problems – air pollution, soil erosion, deforestation, desertification, etc. – but also what could prove in the end to be “The mother of all environmental problems”, that is, an environmental change that can spawn innumerable environmental and social changes across the planet: Global Warming.
Global warming is already spawning a wide range of environmental changes and hazards. In the past, we tried to outwit nature and for the most part were pretty successful (at least for a while). But the overwhelming power and constancy of change in nature always seems to eventually prevail over our attempts to control it. Today, ironically, the nature that is causing many of the problems we face is human nature. In the spirit of the 1970s Pogo cartoon, “We have met the enemy. It is us.”
Why then do I seem to be giving up on any effective attempt in the short to midterm to arrest, let alone roll back, greenhouse gas emissions? Robert Cushman Murphy once said, man “seems to be the sole insatiable predator, because, unlike lower animals, he takes his prey from motives other than personal survival.” The same may be true for our dependence on the burning of fossil fuels. Even though there are signs across the globe as to the serious impacts that will accompany a climate change of 2-4ºC, societies continue to deal with those impacts at a rate much slower than the actual changes, such as with the disappearance of Arctic sea ice, which is accelerating at rates surprising even to the scientists who have been monitoring it for decades.
At this point, researchers can only speculate about what we are doing to future climate. Is, for example, a runaway greenhouse effect a possibility, and if so, what happens to civilization and human habitability on the planet? The planet does not care which country does what reductions; it will go on fine without us and with a significantly warmer climate. The flora and fauna that evolve with the changing climate will take over. The planet cares not either way.
I can picture the greeting card personification of Mother Nature laughing at human attempts to geo-manage the planet through such hubris as “man dominating Nature” or “rugged individualism” [I can do what I want to the environment]. In the end, we are only harming ourselves, since we are only making the planet less hospitable for our success as a species. In other words, we must accept the reality that “we need Nature but Nature does not need us.” We need to foster a “mentality of adaptation” to a changing climate or we might just be the ones who are changed. As I see it, humanity could very likely at a fork in the road: one direction can take you to a sustainable future based on humans living in harmony with a variable and changing society and the other direction taking us to a very different future . . . to extinction. Let’s hope our policymakers around the globe can make the right choice!
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A message to Iran’s government from a nobody
I have been watching with interest and sadness the current political election crisis in Iran. It is a crisis the government has brought on itself and the country. It energized the students in the name of a faux-democratic election. The government had no intention to allow an opposition party to take control. So, it came up with unbelievable numbers for president Amenidijad’s alleged victory. Not only that, but the results were announced within a few hours of the polls having closed (millions of paper ballots were counted in no time at all!!!).
The country’s supreme leader Khameni sided with Amenidjad and called for crushing the opposition. He and the rest of the government are busy blocking international electronic transmissions of photos, videos and text and busy blaming everyone for the street protests, everyone but the true source of the crisis: the current Iranian regime.
I sympathize and empathize with the people in the streets, yearning for a democracy and their human and political rights. Iran’s political progress has been set back to (really, exposed as) a dictatorship. The Iranian students and other people from all walks of life who oppose the repressive government have been let out of Pandora’s Box. Maybe the people can be repressed again as in past revolts since 1979, but the government will now have exposed what it really is, a repressive oligarchy, the rule of a relatively few for the benefit of that few.
Why am I prompted to write now? I watch a young martyr die in the street in her father’s arms. Neda is her name. She is dead but I say “is her name” not “was her name” because her spirit and fight for freedom on behalf of her countrymen lives on. She was shot by a government sniper. There was a video taken of her being shot and then dying. It was a horrible image to watch but Neda to me is the symbol of the revolution that is underway.
Surely, sanctions on the Iranian government will follow and Iran will become further isolated from the community of nations. Amenidijad will continue to represent a crazed element of the government. One can only hope that he will be replaced by a more rational politician in the not so distant future.
The following phrase on the Internet sums it up: “Khameni and Amenidijad are the enemies of their people. Even the Shah of Iran did not order his police to shoot.”
Iran’s theocracy is unraveling. Stay tuned.
mickey glantz
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Who will feed China? Africa? the United States?
Revisiting the question “Who will feed China?”
(followed by “Who will feed Africa?” and by “Who will feed the US”)Michael H. Glantz
Boulder, ColoradoJune 11, 2009
Fifteen years ago Lester Brown wrote an interesting book with an intriguing title: “Who will feed China?” Brown’s concern — highly criticized as might be expected by Chinese government officials at the time — was that China’s population size coupled with increasing industrialization and affluence along with its population growth rates, when compared to the amount of land available for food production, would eventually (in the not-so-distant future) make China a major food deficit country. Making a bad situation worse were the various and numerous pollution hotspots throughout the country: air, water and land pollution. River waters have been over-exploited and heavily polluted. In many locations the air pollution from manufacturing enterprises was so thick that it blocked out the sunlight. Some lakes, ponds and streams were covered with trash. And so on. The soils have been worked for centuries, agricultural land was being converted to other uses and production levels were likely to peak. Fast forward — to 2010.
If one were to ask the same question today, “who will feed China?”, the answer would be quite different. China’s economy has been booming for the past 15 years or so. The government has amassed more than a trillion dollars of US currency as a result of a chronic trade imbalance in its favor and against America. That puts it in a position to purchase food, whenever it needs to. It can buy energy resources, new technologies (such as for in-country water transfer schemes), fertilizers and whatever else it is that might be needed to increase crop yields and overall food production. But, even that might not be enough to feed China. There is a phenomenon that has been quietly taking place under the proverbial radar screen, that is, out of the purview of policy makers in most countries.The phenomenon is referred to as the “land grab”: that is, 99-year leases on hundreds of thousands of hectares (2.2 acres equal one hectare) of land in various countries including several in sub-Saharan Africa. China is acquiring the right to grow food (or biofuels, if it so chooses) in some African countries by leasing land on the “hungry continent”. The contents of the leases are not clear to the public even though the African countries do receive benefits from China in the way of new schools or hospitals and new roads, hydroelectric dams and other infrastructure. Nevertheless, land used by the Chinese means that land would not be available to Africa’s local farmers or herders.
As far as the land grab is concerned, China is not alone. South Korea has been a major lessor of land in Africa and elsewhere. Its most recent “land-lease” was a controversial one in Madagascar. It had leased 1.3 million hectares for 99 years. As a result of protests within the country, however, the president of Madagascar was deposed and the lease agreement was cancelled. Other countries involved in “land grabs” includes Saudi Arabia, Germany, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, among others.
Who will feed China? Well, at this point, it looks like sub-Saharan Africa will help to do so! That however, raises another concern; who then will feed sub-Saharan Africa?
A year after Brown’s book was published, political scientist Robert Paarlberg wrote an article in Foreign Affairs in 1996 (likely in response to the book by Brown) entitled “Who will feed Africa?” He felt that Africa was the problem of the future with regard to food security. Today, several articles raise the same concern about African food security.
ENERGY: Africa Will Have to Feed EU’s Artificial Biofuels Demand
Will Africa feed rich nations?
Rice Bowls and Dust Bowls: Africa, Not China, Faces a Food Crisis
Could GM crops help feed Africa?
How Will We Feed Africa?
Organic Farming “Could Feed Africa” Says New UN Study
WFP to Feed Up to 50 Million People in Africa [2006]
[Prince] Charles’s fantasy farming [organic] won’t feed Africa’s poor
Headlines like these continue to appear in the print and electronic media. There is no apparent “silver bullet”, that is, one solution that can resolve all causes contributing to Africa’s chronic food shortages and food insecurity. What we see going on in Africa today is a trend that has continued for decades; a lowering on the continent of its gross agricultural production. Odds are this trend is likely to continue for some time in the future with food deficits being countered by humanitarian food shipments.
There is an expression in English that “turnabout is fair play” If you do something to me, it is fair for me to do the same to you”. It’s a mild version of “an eye for an eye”. Very recently, the China Daily (April 1, 2009) printed an article entitled “Who will ‘feed’ the US?” It seems to me to be an example of “turnabout”. The article began in the following way:
The United States, the world’s most developed country, is scrambling to answer the question “Who will ‘feed’ the US?” years after it had asked the most populous developing country a similar question: “Who will feed China?”
Is it sensational to ask the richest country the same question that China faced more than 10 years ago? The reply is “No.” This time, it is not about “grain supply”, but “capital supply” and “supply of order.”… Who will be able to provide the financial support for the enormous fiscal deficit of the US government?We live in globalized world. For thousands of years, however big the “world” seemed to be to local communities, its life’s blood was based on trade or aid. Countries are now interconnected functionally in a wide variety of ways. Most countries rely on most other countries for something they need or want: capital, oil, food, labor, and so forth. China needs America among others to buy its products. The US imports goods and services its citizens require or desire. The US relies on laborers from Mexico and Central America. Similar needs are found in Europe and Japan.
In retrospect, it was likely that China would need food supplies from outside of its borders, as it industrialized and as affluence increased. Lester Brown pointed that out clearly in his 1995 book, noting a similar process for Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, each of which had limited agricultural land as they were industrializing. They each import a large percentage of their grain needs normal for an industrializing country with limited agricultural potential for expansion.
What is clear from the examples above is that no country can remain a proverbial island in the 21st century. Countries are finding that they must interact with and need each other in a variety of not-so-obvious as well as obvious ways, politically, economically and culturally. In other words they each need to be fed in some way — with food, water, energy, imports or exports, or humanitarian assistance. In coming years political leaders will have to adapt to a new world order and a new world culture, one that requires considerable reflection before action, compassion before self interest, and improvisation before retreat.
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“End Run Wars” are not only for the weak, OR Know your enemies before you act!
Mickey Glantz in Tokyo
22 May 2009
“End Run Wars” are not only for the weak, OR Know your enemies before you act!
When I was in graduate school back in the second half of the 1960s, the heart of the Cold War rivalry between the USA and the USSR, I took several classes on conflict. The conflicts that captured my attention were hot conflicts, wars particularly, and especially revolutionary wars. Such wars at that time were being carried out by political, cultural or ideological groups wanting to gain independence from the control of a larger hegemon whom they felt did not care for the well being of the people they claimed to represent.
At that time certain books were fairly prominent, but at least to a graduate student the writings of his or her professor took on an added value (such as higher grades for citing their works in an essay exam in addition to the value of the usable information within the books). One title that I recall that had a lasting influence on me apparently was a book by Dr. Robert Strausz-Hupe entitled “Protracted Conflict”. I recently perused the book in order to see if more than the title was still relevant to an enhanced understanding of today’s post Cold War conflicts. Many of the writings before 2000 seem to be lost among young researchers today as they were written “in the last century” and there is a feeling (I suffer from it too) that if the publication was not done after the turn of the millennium than there must be better, more current and more relevant stuff written today. Of course this is a dumb assumption, given that by now we are likely to be reading the latest book’s summaries of summaries of original works. In other words, as a result of this process we are highly likely to be losing information, as each summarizer is like a filter that sifts out what he or she feels is relevant for access by future readers.
The truth is that I did not re-read “Protracted Conflict” closely but I felt it did not really have a lot of direct relevance to an improved understanding of today’s conflicts, like the ones in Iraq and in Afghanistan. So, I went to the Internet to search for a definition of a concept I heard somewhere in those Dark Ages of graduate school. The concept — an end run war — has been popping into my mind of late, and I am not sure why. So today, in a Tokyo Starbuck’s I could not find commentary on end run wars. So, now I have to wing it (lest I be forced, oh no!!! to go to a gasp, real library and do old-fashioned search).
As I recall the concept of an end run war, it was a war started by a weaker power who perceived that the stronger power was involved in some sort of quagmire — political, financial, military — and that it would be a good time to attack in order to gain some long sought after gain. That is what I recall as being an end run war. While perhaps successful at the outset, over time the weaker power tends to show up as just that, weaker, and the early gains on the battlefield are reversed as the major power regains its focus and rallies to pushback, if not overrun, the weaker power that attacked it.
Fast forward now to the present: Looking back at the origins of the Bush invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the attempt to topple Saddam Hussein from power, one could argue that the US-Iraq war was an end run war precipitated by a strong power in the belief that the weaker power would collapse. All signs looked that way as US troops (or the troops of the so-called “coalition of the willing”) made their way so quickly to Baghdad with little military opposition. It appeared and was presented to the public that Hussein’s army had collapsed in short order. Of course, that led to the premature disastrous and embarrassing ‘photo-opportunity’ by President Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” staged event on a US carrier. And then the real war began. The infusion of foreign fighters joining Al-Queda, local dissidents, abandoned army and police members, rivaling ethnic groups caused a military backlash against the allies that converted what seemed like a quick-victory end run war and into a 6-year nightmare for the US President, his administration, the Republican Party (and fellow-traveling Democrats) and the American and Iraqi people.
Now we have a new president, He has inherited the falling out of the worst outcomes of what was to have been a successful end run war. While the war effort in Iraq winds down and the US government tries to put a happy face on it as it prepares to leave in the next couple years, that smiley face will begin to frown as the US troops are not sent home to American soil but into harm’s way in Afghanistan to fight the growing number of Taliban who in the last few months have spilled into neighboring parts of Pakistan. The region is in turmoil with Iran emerging as a regional superpower, Iraq unstable and a war in Afghanistan that is increasingly intractable.
It seems that end run wars regardless of whether weak attack strong or strong attacks weak, victory is not so assured for the perpetrators. Wars as we now are reminded are often easier to start than to finish. The escalating engagement in Afghanistan will be no different.
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Things you can do with a shoe on a rainy day
Mickey Glantz
1) You can show displeasure with political leaders or with anyone else. For example, just about everyone in the world watched an Iraqi news reporter throw his shoes at President Bush during a Baghdad press conference. Videos of the incident are all over the Internet, eg, U-tube.Shoe used as a political projectile, an act of protest in some cultures ^
President Bush managed to dodge two shoes. The press conference continued, as the shoeless shoe-tosser was dragged out of the room and to a jail cell.
Another form of protest using a shoe was the striking of the statue of Saddam Hussein with a shoe. This took place following Saddam’s defeat by the “coalition of the willing”.
Yet another use of the shoe-as-protest occurred in the United Nations General Assembly in October 1960 when Soviet Union’ leader, Nikita Khrushchev, took off his shoe and banged it on the table top in protest of comments made about Soviet imperialism in Eastern Europe.
So, one thing you can do with your shoes is to show displeasure with leaders or policies you do not agree with.2) I attended an undergraduate university commencement exercise this month (May, 2009), the first one since June 1961 which was when I got my BS degree at the University of Pennsylvania. Honestly, I only recall a few mental memory clips or episodes from that graduation but I do remember it as a positive event in my life.
At this graduation, it was great to look out at members of the graduating class dressed in their regalia, watching beaming faces as they receive their diplomas.
I had the honor to give a short keynote talk to the 250 or so grads and another 750 or so families and friends. I was not sure what they would want to hear, as they entered that morning the last few minutes of their undergraduate education. I chose not to talk of my lifelong accomplishments, or about topics related to my research. Instead, I decided to talk about some things I had learned during the 48 years from my graduation to near-retirement. My talk was titled “ 9 things I know now that I wish I knew when I was graduating”. The reason for this theme was to give the graduates some tips about their future jobs — not words of wisdom but words of ordinary knowledge.
During the reception that followed the graduation ceremony, one of the graduating seniors told me that she had wanted to take notes from my talk but did not have any paper to write on. So, she decided to take notes on the bottom of her shoe. I was surprised and amazed that she took the effort to do so. I was so amazed in fact that I gave her the paper copy of my talk. The writings on her shoe made me think of another use of a shoe.
3) A third thing you can do with a shoe on a rainy day was inspired by the graduating student’s innovative use of her shoe. You can write a political message of displeasure about a policy on the sole of the shoe of your choice and toss it to a politician.Most likely, the person tossing the shoe to the politician would be arrested, as happened in Iraq (Note: the Iraqi who tossed his shoes at Bush got a 2-year prison sentence; many have protested this sentence. Some even claimed that the reporter was a good person with bad aim at his target — a ‘bad’ president). Actually, there have been other incidents involving tossed shoes and politicians, as noted in the following news account:
“New Delhi: Following today’s shoe tossing incident, which seems inspired by the infamous incident involving Bush when he was in Iraq, the journalist was detained.” A large crowd gathered at the Tughlak road police station on Tuesday after hearing news that a Sikh journalist from a Hindi daily, Jarnail Singh, had been taken to the police station after he had been detained.”
I would assume that the shoe tosser would expect repercussions from his or her action. So, one can assume that he or she had weighed the benefits against the costs of the toss. Nevertheless, once the commotion died down following the actual shoe toss, it is very possible that the person to whom the shoe was tossed would sit down in the office and read the shoe’s message. That way he would find out why the shoe had been tossed in the first place. The message on the sole of the shoe would eventually be leaked to the news media worldwide.
This seems like a win-win situation for all involved. The tosser of the shoe gets jail time and the tossee gets a bit humiliated. Though not very pleasant, this type of shoe-tossing could become a legitimate way to protest a politician or bad policy.
To my knowledge no shoe tosser to date has had the foresight to write messages to the person to whom he or she has tossed a shoe out of protest. But politicians are not to be outsmarted and soon they would make sure that glass barriers are in place to protect them from shoes.
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Who to Audit? Mickey Glantz or WorldCom?
IN LIGHT OF THE CURRENT FINANCIAL CRISIS AND ONGOING CORRUPTION IN FINANCIAL CIRCLES, I THOUGHT IT MIGHT BE INTERESTING TO REVISIT AN EDITORIAL I WROTE SOME YEARS AGO WHEN I WAS GOING TO BE AUDITED AND THE NOW DEFUNCT WORLDCOM WAS NOT. PERHAPS, INSTEAD OF AUDITING MICKEY GLANTZ IN 2002, THEY SHOULD HAVE KEPT THEIR EYES ON BERNIE MADOFF!!!
About ten years ago, I got a dreaded letter in the mail. It was from the Internal Revenue Service. They wanted to audit a tax return of a few years earlier. Why they picked me I will never know. The auditor said that it was some sort of random check. It was a command performance, that I must be there when they tell me to show up. In fact, my job requires that I travel a lot and apparently the IRS, at least then, allowed only one postponement. If I did not comply with a second date for the audit, I was told I would be delinquent and subject to whatever the IRS was questioning.
After several sleepless nights, I asked my accountant to re-check my tax return and to come with me to the audit, which was not in Boulder where I live but near Denver. I drove the accountant to the audit. We sat in a waiting area and had the “opportunity” to listen to a taxpayer being raked over the coals by an auditor in one of the Dilbert-like cubicles that serves as their offices. “Mr. Glantz,” I heard the receptionist say, “the auditor will see you now.” Showtime!
I recall walking into the office and spotting on the wall a certificate of appreciation to the auditor signed by President Reagan. The auditor appeared to be less than 30 years old. On his desk was a copy of a hunting magazine. There I was, on the opposite side of the desk, a tree-hugging liberal and supporter of animal rights. I had a feeling I was in for a bad time. I had brought some articles in which I had been quoted or that I had written for conservative magazines in order to show that I was “used” by the two ends of the political spectrum. He seemed somewhat impressed.
I presented my itemized lists of deductible items — books, travel, unreimbursed work expenses, and so on. They were hand-written and recorded on yellow legal paper. Then the fun began. “Why did you count item X as a work expense? Where did you stay when you were in such and such a foreign city?” Most of the conversation now is nothing but a blur. I do, however, recall a couple of questions that have stuck with me. In fact, I refer to them at parties if ever the IRS becomes a topic of conversation.
Running his finger down the hand-written lists, he came across an item marked “book.” He asked, “you have a book listed here on March 3 (three years earlier), what was the name of the book and its author?” I said that if it was on my itemized list it was work-related, probably an environment or climate book. He continued down the column and said “Here is a book for $22.43. What was the book, and who was its author?” I gave the same answer as before.After about two hours of this Q&A, he summed up the meeting noting that he had found some discrepancies in favor of the IRS and that he had found even bigger errors in my favor. He suggested we forget them, and just as I was about to agree (just to get out of there), the accountant said we would file for the $167 dollars owed to me.
Now, get the picture: I was about to get back money from the IRS following an audit. I was told that only a few percent of audits get anything back and that over 80% of those audited have to pay something additional. I had survived my first and only audit … so far.
Today we have two major scandals related to “cooking the accounts.” Enron did it one way and WorldCom did it another. The former used a clever way to hide their lie, whereas the latter apparently manipulated their numbers so as to look profitable. But the methods of accounting they used were obviously phony and (it has been said) would have been spotted in the first few weeks of Accounting 101 at any college.
The point I want to make is that the IRS scrutinized me at the $8- and $22-dollar level, while they were unable to detect an obvious misplacement of $3.6 billion.
There is hope and solution in the offing, however. The new young auditors, like the one that scrutinized every meager amount on my list of deductions a decade ago, should be given the task of reviewing these multi-billion dollar corporations, and the IRS accountants in charge of monitoring and scrutinizing the WorldComs and Tycos and Xeroxes of today should be sent to the minor league to audit the hand-written lists of deductions of everyday, hard-working Americans. Maybe, this way, those hard-working laborers would finally get a break on their taxes. -
“A rose by any other name is still a rose”. Similarly, the Republic of Macedonia by any other name is still the Republic of Macedonia
Michael Glantz
I have been trying to organize a meeting in Macedonia. Not in Greece’s northern region of Macedonia but the other Macedonia. The UN officially calls the other Macedonia “FYR Macedonia”, or the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Those inside the Republic of Macedonia (e.g., the ‘other’ Macedonia) hate the use of the modifier “FYR” and to tell the truth I can’t blame them.
To someone not so interested in the politics of naming a new country, I find the conflict bordering on ridiculous over the name of the other Macedonia. More than 140 countries recognize the country as the Republic of Macedonia including many European countries and four of the five members of the UN Security Council. Many cities around the globe use the same name, even cities like Athens, Georgia and Athens, Ohio in the USA hijacked the use of the name of Athens, Greece. I assume that Greece never protested the use of Athens by the US states of Georgia or Ohio.
But let’s assume that the use of such modifiers as FYR was a commonly accepted practice around the globe. The United States of America would be called the FBC America (the Former British Colony of the United States). Germany would be the FPE Germany (the Former Prussian Empire of Germany). The Republic of Mali in West Africa would be referred to as the FFWAC of Mali (the Former French West African Colony of Mali). And then we’d need to reconsider the names of the republics of the Former Soviet Union (FSU). So, FSU then become the modifier for all of the newly independent states: the FSU of Kazakhstan; the FSU of Uzbekistan; the FSU of Azerbaijan, and so forth. Seems silly doesn’t it? Almost all countries would have to modify their names adding “the Former Something in front of the ‘new’ name of the country, out of deference to an earlier name in their history.
Greece apparently did not oppose the name “Republic of Macedonia” when the republic was a part of Yugoslavia. Why now? I was talking to a psychiatrist friend of mine recently about my trip to Macedonia and reluctance to accept the newly independent country as anything other than the Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia. He told me that the controversy over the name reminded him of Sigmund Freud’s 1917 concept of “narcissism over small differences”. This concept refers to the belief that individuals that are very similar to each other engage in conflicts that are more violent than those between individuals who have little in common. Most recently, Greece proposed that Macedonia be called the Republic of Northern Macedonia, but, alas, there is no such place as Southern Macedonia. Macedonians are Macedonians wherever they live. That may be the problem for Greece, worried about a possible call from the Republic of Macedonia, its independent neighbor to the north, to reunite its citizens with those Macedonians in northern Greece. Agreeing that the Republic can continue to use the name it has used since 1945 as a part of Yugoslavia would be a great gesture on the part of Greece. It would enable the Republic of Macedonia to join the European Union which if nothing else would allow Macedonians to travel freely in Europe without going through the onerous and humiliating task of filling out visa forms to enter several of its neighboring countries.
Don’t you think it is time for Greece to get over it and accept Macedonia for the independent Republic that it is, and move on to deal with much more serious issues? I do.
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-Dr. Michael Glantz