DOGE Team Interview

No matter what you think of President Trump and Elon Musk, you owe it to yourself to view last week's interview of Elon Musk and his DOGE team by Bret Baier on Special Report, his daily evening news show on Fox News. Here is a link to the interview that was broadcast in two segments. Even if you just listen to the first 15 minutes, you will find it to be a real eye opening on Musk and his team. 

Here is just one example of what you will find. The Small Business administration has given out about $300,000,000 in loans to children under the age of 11. One loan for $100,000 even went to a nine-month- old infant. In addition, it has given out another $300,000,000 to people over the age of 120. Obviously, the government could not protect itself from fraudsters who steal the Social Security numbers of newborns, or deceased seniors and use them to steal money that could have been used for legitimate purposes. 

It is not that the government officials who approved these loans were corrupt, but the systems and procedures they used were antiquated and inefficient. If the Small Business administration's computers had been able to check the birthdates available on Social Security computers, the fraud could not have happened. Of course, these loans will never be paid back. When the infant enters adulthood, it will find a major blot on its credit rating.

These SBA loans are just a small part of what the DOGE team has found in just a couple of months. Musk claims that he hopes to eliminate a Trillion dollars 0f waste and fraud, and he has assembled what appears to be an extremely competent team. If they can reduce fraud, and eliminate wasteful spending, they will perform a great service. Just the other day, a Wall Street Journal investigation revealed that the Federal government had been regularly sending Medicaid reimbursements to more than one state for individuals who had moved. 

The interview also provided an insight into the type of people Musk has on his DOGE team. They are not nineteen-year-old whiz kids but experienced and talented business leaders and technocrats. One was the founder of AIR BNB, and another had taken leave from  five thriving businesses he owned in Texas to serve.  

It will be a shame if many refuse to watch this interview because they dislike Trump or Musk, or because it appeared on deplorable Fox News. As far as the latter is concerned, these people should be aware that Bret Baier has carved out a niche for himself on "Special Report." It occupies the 6:00 pm time slot and comes closer to the iconic news shows of the past than any other. Unlike the opinion shows on Fox and other cable news networks, it strives to be fair and balanced. It has become, for good reason, the highest rated news show on TV. Since the beginning of the year the Prime Minister of England, Emanuel Macron of France, and Ukraine's Zelensky have all been interviewed by Baier on Special Report. 

The interview with Musk and his Doge team is perhaps the best of the lot. It is worth 15 minutes of your time. Click on the link above or watch the video below.

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Ukraine: Stop the Killing

                                           

 

Even the most inveterate Trump hater should at least be able to give the President some credit for wanting to stop the killing in Ukraine. I know they distrust anything he says, and fear that he will strike a bad deal with Russia, but the older I get, the more I think that putting an end to the killing and ravages of war transcends all other considerations. 

As the saying goes, “War is Hell” but many commentators on both sides seem to regard it as a game that can be won or lost. However, would any of these pundits be willing to participate on an actual battlefield? It is always the young men on both sides who will bear the burden and face the horror.

A couple of years ago I read and posted on Lawrence Kirby’s Stories from the Pacific, a book about his experience as a young Marine in World War II. I was told about this book by my brother-in-law Richard Gardella who knew Larry Kirby briefly before the former Marine died at the age of 99 in a Senior residence. The stories in Kirby’s book are a real eye opener and at times extremely heart rending. 

In one especially moving chapter he describes one incident that took place while fighting in the jungle of the island of Guam. He was on a scouting mission when suddenly he came upon a young Japanese soldier about 20 feet away. Their eyes met in stunned silence but after a brief pause the Japanese hurled a grenade and Kirby rushed him and opened fire. Kirby was wounded by the grenade shrapnel, but the Japanese soldier was dead. Kirby never forgot that tragic experience. Years later he wrote this poem.

I met a youthful enemy 

My fear reflected in his eye

I loathed him not, nor did he me

But we must fight and one must die.

No longer boys but not yet men

Just sad young soldiers sick with fright

Flag and face our difference then

One’s timeless sleep would come that night

Panic grew with every breath

I had to kill, I had to try.

Why do I seek a stranger’s death?

With vain despair I wondered why?

I could be his friend, not foe

Such wish was true, not foolish whim.

The brave, young lad will never know.

With tragic skill I murdered him.

Long years have passed since when he fell

My heart still aches, no sense of pride.

Though I seem here I live in hell.

On that cruel day I also died. *

Lawrence Kirby believed that soldiers did not like to talk about their experiences mainly because no one would believe how horrible war could be for the young men who actually fought. He wrote, 

"The ultimate desecration of the human spirit is the conscious activity of cruel inhumanity, predicated and justified—at least in the minds of those who sent us—as noble and patriotic duty, a privilege and responsibility accepted willingly by only the brave, offering their lives in this crusade and, further, willing to kill other equally brave and misguided young men in the cause of patriotism and in the name of duty…. (53)

My war ended with Iwo Jima. I was one of the very lucky few to survive the terrible bloodshed. It was my last campaign, thank God. The killing, the screaming, the torn bodies, the shattered limbs the suffering—it had become too much to handle! There were times when I thought I would welcome death. Ending the terror seemed more important than living." (56)

It seems to me that all Americans should unite behind the President in his efforts to stop the killing. I don't believe it will be as easy as the President initially thought, but it would certainly help if, on this one issue, he had the support of a united America.   

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*Lawrence F. Kirby: Stories from the Pacific. P. 102

Irish Heritage

    

On St. Patrick's Day I repeat an earlier post on our debt to the Irish.                                          

Practically everyone must know that the great migration of the Irish to America took place after the terrible potato famine of the mid-nineteenth century. However, even before that disaster the Irish had been the subject of persecution going back to the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century when King Henry VIII seized control of the English church. 

The Irish were longtime enemies of the English and when Henry, who considered himself King of Ireland as well as England, attacked their thousand-year-old faith the enmity only grew worse. Later, Henry’s daughter Elizabeth tried unsuccessfully to subdue the Irish Catholics throughout her reign. After the Puritan revolution in England in the mid-seventeenth century, Oliver Cromwell brutally suppressed Irish resistance. By the end of the century William and Mary, after driving Mary’s Catholic father James from the English throne, delivered another devastating blow to the Irish at the battle of the Boyne.

The almost perpetual Irish resistance led the English and their Protestant friends in Ireland to pass penal laws that had the effect of depriving most Irish Catholics of all their rights including the right to their own confiscated properties. 

Many Irish left their homeland for good in the century before the great famine. They were sometimes called the “wild geese” and many of them made a name for themselves in Europe. In the nineteenth century the ruling family in Serbia was the Obrenovich family, heirs no doubt of some Irish O’Brien. Years ago, Ed Obradovich played linebacker for the Chicago Bears. His family must have come from central Europe but there must have been a Brady ancestor. I recall meeting a Polish American priest whose name, Okonski, must have derived from O’Conner. John Konecny, a long ago squash buddy, looked as Irish as Paddy's pig.

When the Irish came to America, they didn’t starve because of the availability of jobs and land. Nevertheless, despite separation of Church and State in America, the Irish were still objects of prejudice and discrimination primarily because of their Catholicism. I recall an American historian saying that the most long lasting and abiding prejudice in America was directed not against Jews or Blacks but against Catholics. That assertion may be disputed by some but the KKK was so called because its hatred was directed against Koons, Kikes, and Katholics.

Just because national or ethnic groups have been victimized by prejudice and discrimination does not mean that they themselves cannot practice such behavior when given the opportunity. Growing up in New York City in the 40s and 50s I vividly recall that only Irish need apply for membership in the City’s Transit Workers Union. I have never forgotten the resentment of my mother-in-law when her Italian parents were told by an Irish priest that they did not belong in predominately Irish St. John’s church and that they should attend the Italian church in town. 

Still, the success of the Irish in America means that we all are in their debt. I would just like to give a few personal examples. I was born and raised in the Woodside section of Queens, a neighborhood after WW2 made up largely of the descendants of Irish and Italian immigrants. My best friend was my cousin Pete whose father’s ancestry was Irish and German. Pete’s father, my Uncle Pete, was a New York City policeman who always seemed all Irish to me, and so did my cousin even though his mother was Italian. My next best friend was Dermot (Dermie) Woods whose family was very Irish. Both of Dermie’s older brothers had served in the Navy during the war.

St. Mary Help of Christians, my parochial elementary school, matched the ethnic make up of Woodside. There were some Italian kids in my class, but the majority was Irish. I still remember Richie Moylan, John Regan, Tom Fay, Charley Dunphy, and top student Pat Ryan who would go on to become a Jesuit priest and get a doctorate from Harvard in Islamic studies. His father was a saloon keeper. 

Most of the nuns were of Irish ancestry. They were of the order of St. Dominic and their formidable black and white habits helped them keep almost perfect order in classes sometimes numbering over 50 students. Only years later did I come to find out that many of them were barely out of their teens and still attending college.

It seemed natural for me to follow cousin Pete to Power Memorial high school in Manhattan. Power was a Catholic school for boys run by the Irish Christian Brothers whose most famous graduate would be Lou Alcindor, who would later call himself Kareem Abdul Jabbar. I still remember some of the Irish brothers with great affection and respect. There was Brother Hehir, my first home room teacher, a saintly innocent old man who was the butt of innumerable pranks and jokes by us “dirty little stinkers.” No one fooled around with wise old Brother Gleason, however. He was the Latin teacher with a passionate love of ancient Rome. Only years later did I discover that it was the Irish who had saved Western Civilization during the Dark Ages when monks in the mold of Brother Gleason preserved and later revived the lore and wisdom of antiquity. Finally, I remember Brother Conefrey who ran our honors class and exposed us modern barbarians to the wonders of English literature. 

Monastery Iona*

For some reason that still remains unclear to me I went to college at Fordham University, a famed Jesuit school in the Bronx. The Jesuits had been founded in the sixteenth century by Ignatius of Loyola, a young soldier from the Basque country in what is now northwestern Spain, but the Jesuit fathers at Fordham seemed to be largely of Irish ancestry. Nevertheless, in 1957 they taught and revered an old curriculum based on a model devised during the Renaissance. We studied Western philosophy, theology, history (eight credits in medieval history were required), rhetoric, literature, and language under scholars named O’ Sullivan, O’Callaghan, Mc Nally, Walsh and Clark. 

Three cheers for the Irish on St. Patrick’s Day. 

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* Iona photo courtesy of David Orme.

I Lose My Job

Many people today are worried about losing their jobs, especially those with government jobs. In his recent speech to Congress, President Trump read a long list of wasteful and unnecessary spending on the part of the federal government and promised significant cuts. Even state and local government employees are worried since the loss of Federal grants might cause them to lose their jobs.

I know from experience that it is a hard thing to lose your job. Back in 1972 I lost my job as an Assistant Professor of History at a small Catholic college in Connecticut. The college had only come into existence ten years earlier as an experiment in Catholic higher education. It was to be run entirely by lay people although the local bishop would still head the Board of Directors. In addition, there would be no dorms, and the students would all be commuters or day hops. 

Initially, the school flourished as students and parents took advantage of the low cost. Also, during the Vietnam war many young men enrolled to avoid the draft. However, by 1972 the war was winding down and enrollment was dropping. As a result, administration decided to cut costs by trimming the faculty and did so by declining to grant tenure to anyone eligible that year.

Seven of us were denied tenure that year. Tenure is an unfamiliar concept to most people. For academics, it meant that once you receive tenure, it was almost impossible to lose your position thereafter. You have a job for life. In effect, the seven years I had been teaching there were a probationary period. 

I did have some paranoia about my dismissal. I thought that the administration had decided to terminate seven people just to get rid of me since I was the elected head of the faculty association. In academe it was not called a union, but it had some resemblance although there was no collective bargaining. I had also been overwhelmingly elected to the Faculty Senate during the years of student unrest that accompanied the increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam. 

Looking back now, I can see that while administrators might have been glad to see me go, I did not have a strong case for tenure. I was not a popular teacher since I had a reputation of being a hard grader. As an academic, it took seven years for me to complete my doctoral dissertation, and I had no publications to my credit. Coincidentally, I received my doctorate on the same day my tenure appeal was denied. 

So, in the Spring of 1972, I was thirty-three years old and out of a job. Complicating things was the fact that my wife and I had five small children ranging in age from 8 to 2. We had bought a small house in Fairfield with help from my father who provided the $2000 down payment. We lived from paycheck to paycheck and had only meager savings. Teaching jobs were nonexistent in the area, and we did not want to relocate our family.

I had to find work out of academe, but my doctorate made me virtually unemployable. Prospective employers would only laugh and say that someone with your education would not be happy or useful working for them. Eventually, the only employers interested in me were insurance companies always on the lookout for new agents who basically worked on a commission basis. No sales meant no pay. 

At that time, most academics looked down their noses at people engaged in business. Today, practically everyone goes to college to study business, but back in 1972 the business department at our school had only a few majors. Just as today, people in higher education tended to frown on those who worked for profit. Insurance agents were regarded as the lowest of the low in the business world, maybe just a notch above used car salesmen.

Nevertheless, I had no choice. I interviewed with a couple of companies but one seemed to have a novel approach. It was then among the leaders in the nascent mutual fund industry and offered low-cost life insurance as a supplement to mutual fund investing. I did fail their aptitude test that showed that I was an academic with no aptitude for sales. The office manager, whose contempt for academics matched mine for salesmen, informed me that he would not be able to take me on, but when I asked if I could borrow the study materials he had given me, he admired my persistence and immediately changed his mind. It was no skin off his nose since it was a commission only job. So, I became a salesman, a peddler of life insurance and mutual funds.

Needless to say, it was extremely difficult. Most new agents flunked out in weeks or months. The aptitude analysis was correct, but it only measured what I was and not what I could become. Only with the help and unflagging support of my wife, who went back to nursing, was I able to survive the first year and develop the knowledge, skills, and experience needed for success in this very competitive field. As the years went by, successful sales agents would morph into financial planners no longer dependent on commissions. Over the next 35 years I was able to build a very successful financial planning practice with hundreds of contented clients. 

In my case, losing my job was one of the best things that ever happened to me and my family.

 

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