THE DALY SHOW

Folks, Time To Choose

This is a posting over at JohnDalyLive about the economic choice you need to make for our leaders.

Conference On Global and Green Economy

I am emceeing a big event in Las Vegas November 17 and 18 at the Las Vegas Hilton.  Here’s a video to explain it all.  If you’re looking to jump start your business in this new economy and go green, this is the place to start.  You will also have a chance to network with companies from around the United States and around the world while also being a part of the International Congress of Business Professionals.  I was enticed by their strong educational programs that will train and re-train workers and executives in this new world.  I’ve written many times here that the economy went through a tectonic shift in the past two years.  Those who understand it and are educated to navigate the wreckage and the opportunities will thrive in the next few years.  I think this is one place to start.

Another Weapon of Mass Distortion. This Time About Oil

In my book, I refer to the blast emails with false news information as weapons of mass distortion.  Here’s a story on JohnDalyLive about one that seems to pop up when the price of gas goes up.  Again, if the email cannot source the information and if the writer does not identify him or herself, then you can assume it’s someone trying to influence you on just one side — or the false side — of the story.  Special thanks to my buddy Mike Maddux, the pitching coach for the Texas Rangers who gave me the heads up. 

Preparing For Economic Earthquake

Get Ready.  The ground is shifting.  In this post at JohnDalyLive, I have put together a piece that should be a guide for this new shift in our economic, political, and social landscape.  Please give me your thoughts.

Remember The Energy Package in 2006: A Look Back

Missing The Point of Atlas Shrugged

 This is a posting about a piece written by Stephen Moore in the Wall Street Journal about Ayn Rand’s classic novel Atlas Shrugged and its relevance to today’s economic crisis. Although I agree with most of what Moore says, I think he fails to mention the true meaning of Atlas. I would also encourage you to read another classic, The Great Gatsby, which has many more lessons we fail to learn.

LAS VEGAS, NV (January 12, 2009) – Stephen Moore is an economics writer for the Wall Street Journal. He’s also a frequent guest on news and business talk shows. I enjoy him and his work. This past weekend he wrote a piece January 9, 2009 called Atlas Shrugged: From Fiction To Fact in 52 Years. It was well-written. Here’s Moore’s nice description of Ayn Rand’s work that has become the Bible for libertarians.

For the uninitiated, the moral of the story is simply this: Politicians invariably respond to crises — that in most cases they themselves created — by spawning new government programs, laws and regulations. These, in turn, generate more havoc and poverty, which inspires the politicians to create more programs . . . and the downward spiral repeats itself until the productive sectors of the economy collapse under the collective weight of taxes and other burdens imposed in the name of fairness, equality and do-goodism.

Moore also makes his pitch to gather new converts.

If only “Atlas” were required reading for every member of Congress and political appointee in the Obama administration. I’m confident that we’d get out of the current financial mess a lot faster.

Not so fast, Stephen.

Like most libertarians and followers of Ayn Rand, Moore has missed the true meaning of Rand and her effect on American life in 2009.

First, Rand has already bled into the fabric of American life and business. Look at the millions of small businesses in America. Look at the number of people who work full-time and have businesses on the side. Imagine how many more enterprises will sprout as the Internet becomes a ubiquitous form of distribution and we shake off the old ways of last century’s corporate culture. Even Democrats, once known as strictly the party of unions and welfare recipients, understand the need to spur business to create jobs.

Rand, for me, is imbedded into the thinking of most Americans who haven’t even read the book.

But secondly and more importantly, libertarians and Randites fail to see the Rand-created villains that still exist today in their own ranks – namely Wesley Mooch. Mooch is a mediocre bureaucrat who becomes the nation’s economic dictator through betrayal and well-placed connections.

Who is Wesley Mooch today? He is the lobbyist and campaign donor; he’s also the corporate executive who wines, dines and lavishly entertains our elected officials behind closed doors. These are the people who have helped kill innovation today: look no further than our car companies.

Trust me, I’ve seen it. I’ve met many of these elected officials and business leaders who are nice guys but cannot intelligently, let alone intellectually, converse on issues that affect our way of life and business. Yet, they set policy; policy that’s based on who pays them – not on what’s good for America.

(Look at TV news – especially cable news. People like Ann Coulter are always on air because she offers “good television,” not because she has intelligent insight and information.)

While we try to figure out whom to give bailout money to, we forget that most politicians in both parties have gotten sweetheart deals from big business on mortgages, land deals, and campaign donations. The secret wiretappings of Gov. Blago are the norm, not the exception. Does Duke Cunningham ring a bell? You can add others still in Congress like Rangel, Dodd, and Frank.

And this won’t stop. Why? It makes too much sense (and cents) for big business to curry favor with politicians who are making laws. Laws can and will be tweaked to benefit the donor. It’s a small investment that can return millions. But it also creates an unfair advantage to small businesses that don’t have the clout, money, or access.

And this is where Moore and the Randites look silly. Their ranks are loaded with Wesley Mooches and they don’t even know it. I love to hear corporate bigwigs scream about how high our taxes are in America. Yet, they fail to mention the give-backs the politicians bestow on them. With those give-backs included, the U.S. has one of the lowest net corporate tax rates, according to many analysts. And then we scream about other nations stopping free trade.

And what’s even more amazing is the number of people who are small business people who will take to the Rand pulpit and defend these give-backs that will never reach them.

If Ayn Rand were alive today, she’d be asking for the abolishment of all forms of campaign contribution. Politicians don’t need it. They have the internet and other forms of mass communication to inform and educate the masses. But it’s much easier to line their pockets with money from donors and large media companies who reap profits from those donors in the form of campaign advertising.

Wake up, Randites and libertarians. You’ve been invaded by Mooches. And you have yourselves to blame because you’ve gotten lazy and rested on the original interpretation of Atlas.

I’m sure libertarians have just placed their version of a fatwa on me. This is blasphemy to them. But libertarians, like staunch liberals and conservatives, fall in love with their philosophies; they stop thinking and evolving. Think back on the famous adage of “No new taxes.” It sounds good and it’s well-founded economic theory – only if you include spending cuts.

Ayn Rand was an anti-Communist who woke us up to the pitfalls of Socialism. It’s no different than what Marx did in the 1800s; he woke us up to the pitfalls of capitalism. Both thinkers – and many others like Darwin and Keynes – transformed society; how we live and how we do business.

America is an evolving, reactive society. We don’t follow one philosophy. We’re a melting pot of thought. What makes us exceptional is our ability to form new forward thinking through social and business experimentation.

Ayn Rand is a major part of that American progress. So is Marx — whether we like it or not. (If Marx were alive today, we’d be listening to him on TV and one of the things he’d be upset about is the portrayal of his theories by the totalitarians in Soviet Russia and Red China in the last century.) But Keynes and Darwin are also strongly embedded in our thinking. Many others, too.

Should you read Atlas? Absolutely. It’s a great work. It is one of my five most influential books in American history. (A literary note: read Alan Greenspan’s autobiography. He was a Rand disciple and spent a lot of time with her in the 1950s and 1960s and he offers some interesting insight into Rand.)

But Atlas is not the Bible as most libertarians think. It has its flaws.

My problem with Atlas is its homage to one man – John Galt – who has the answers while being persecuted and tortured by the enemies of society. In the end of the novel, he is exalted as the messiah to America who will deliver us to true capitalism. This is trite and one dimensional.

Galt is the creation of a Russian writer; surely an anti-Communist, but also a Russian. Russia loves their strong-armed, rugged, individual leaders – not intellectuals or sacrificing servants. The line of dictators and despots starts from Peter The Great, Catherine The Great, through the czars, Lenin, and ending today with Putin. Can you make a literary connection between Galt and Putin? Sure, they’re both bringing order back to society that have been ravaged by their enemies.

Sorry, folks, but parts of Rand smack of Fascism. Still, that doesn’t remove the lessons we Americans have derived from Atlas.

My suggestion is to also read The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. (It’s shorter reading.) This is still the greatest American novel. It was written in 1925 and its lessons still ring true.

Like Gatsby’s 1920s parties, we just lived in “orgiastic” times. Now the party is over with plenty of hang-over headaches. Some of our high and mighty have had Gatsby like endings – dead and motionless in the bottom of a swimming pool.

Gatsby’s gangsters are no different than today’s. Meyer Wolfsheim is the 1920s version of Bernie Madoff. Gatsby says Wolfsheim “fixed the 1919 World Series.” The laudatory tone of Gatsby’s description of Wolfsheim is similar to the pre-crisis belief that someone with money must be a good person. No one dared question Madoff’s incomprehensible returns: he’s rich. I’ll let you decide if stealing $50 billion equates to fixing the 1919 World Series.

(Another literary note: Wolfsheim is the dramatic creation of Arnold Rothstein, the gambler who really set the Black Sox scandal into motion. Read the book Eight Men Out or see the film.)

Gatsby even foresees the environmental crises that will occur decades later. He takes the famous Hawthorne poem, Evangeline, in the 1800s that extols “a forest primeval” and turns it into “This is the valley of ashes” in Gatsby. Fitzgerald laments that all those trees the first Dutch sailors saw in America are gone.

What’s amazing about Gatsby is that it was written in the 1920s – before the Depression. Yet, Fitzgerald saw that coming, too. Rand, on the other hand, wrote about the effects of Communism decades after 1917.

Like Gatsby, we Americans “are borne back ceaselessly into the past” to our detriment. Gatsby thought he could go back into the past and find love with Daisy. We Americans constantly think we can find that fountain of youth or the financial model that will make us all wealthy. The truth is we age and the economy has cycles.

We also believe we can find that one philosophy – like the 1950s Biblical lessons of Atlas – to find utopia. But society changes along with our technology and our thinking. The lessons of the 1950s don’t entirely apply today.

We fail to learn the lessons of Gatsby — until it’s too late. We’re “like boats against the currents”. We struggle, survive, and then thrive through traumas like Steinbeck’s 1930s Grapes of Wrath and the upheavals of today.

The Reality of Economic and Social Collapse

This is a posting about what some call the impending collapse of the American and eventually the world economic system — that seems more feasible everyday. Please read the piece by Dmitry Orlov, an engineer whose research and observations of the Soviet collapse show similarities to a collapse here in the United States. I’ll offer my take. Give me yours.

LAS VEGAS, NV (December 3, 2008) – My recent columns here, Mumbai Implications and the Age of American Survivalist and It’s Time For Bunker Mentality, brought some email response from some good friends in Wisconsin.

Bill, an old-time friend, writes.

So I read his piece and Geoff’s “holy crap” is warranted. I hope you’ll re-read my pieces and read Dmitry’s here. Post your comments below.

From here in this posting, I will offer my assessment of Dmitry Orlov’s piece. But first, a reminder.

Predicting the future is a no-win situation. Maybe I’m too influenced by the Black Swan theory, but there are random events that happen and change the course of history. Being able to decipher and explain history and its events, years after, is one thing. However, predicting it as it unfolds is another. There are things that will happen over the next year or two we never saw coming; they’re random events. There will also be things that happen that seem random at first and then make sense only afterwards.

There are three possible events. The first would be the discovery or the harnessing of a cheaper energy source. The second is the financial rescue of the United States by the Peoples Republic of China. Trust me; China needs our economy to keep their society running smoothly with more than one billion people. I’ve heard this from a number of sources I respect. The third is the stimulus package might actually work and transform America – as costly down the road as it might be.

Another thing to remember when reading Dmitry is that he witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union. This may seem pompous, but the Soviet system is not similar to the American system. And Russians are not similar to Americans. I truly believe the American people will not allow a collapse of our system. Our principles and beliefs will be fought for as our Founding Fathers did in 1776 and as Lincoln did at the start of the Civil War.

Dmitry also has a distrust of our politicians and our political system. Who wouldn’t? But I think in times of crisis, we Americans rise to the occasion. We’re much better at reacting rather than planning for catastrophe. The fact that Republicans and Democrats are dropping most of their ideological stands to support President-elect Obama is one good sign.

Dmitry also has a silly notion of forming a Collapse Party. He calls it whimsical, but he says the platforms of this party are being followed. This is a minor point of contention for me, but I think it shows a naïveté of the American political psyche. We’re serious when it counts.

Does this mean I’m disagreeing with my previous posts and Dmitry? No. What he predicts and what I hint at are realities – as awful as they may seem. But let’s not get caught up in who’s right about predictions. Who wants to stand on the scrap heap of America and gladly say, “I told you so.”

What Dmitry and I echo are warnings. Be prepared to live with far less wealth and luxury. Take care of those you love. Think about hunkering down with elderly parents or younger children.

Dimitry’s posting is called The Five Stages of Collapse which was an article and a speech he gave in November, 2008. In a nutshell, here is his theory about how we’re trying fruitlessly to avert this crisis.

Dmitry believes no effort by government and the financial industry can change this.

Dmitry says no. So what will the first signs of collapse look like?

Despite Dmitry’s apparent doom and gloom, he offers solutions for the future.

I have forwarded Dmitry’s piece to John to get his take. Until then, let’s hear yours.

Georgia-Russia Conflict: America Roars with Toothless Gums

This is a posting about my reflections on Russia’s invasion of Georgia and how to look at it from various angles. 

LAS VEGAS, NV (August 13, 2008) – Either Putin’s brilliant or the Bush government is out to lunch. It’s actually both.

Stratfor was the first to pinpoint it for me. You need a subscription to their reports, but let me give you a quick synopsis of what I had been thinking and some of what Stratfor reported a few days after Georgia’s invasion of South Ossetia and then Russia’s retaliatory invasion of Georgia.

This was a colossal mistake by Georgia. They invaded South Ossetia to stop some of the cross border bombings – something that had been happening for a while. Why would they send in troops now?

The quick and massive response makes one think that Russia had covertly orchestrated this all along, coaxing Georgia into a fight. Worse, U.S. intelligence and diplomats failed to either dissuade Georgia or failed to see the Russians hanging on the border ready to pounce.

To countries in Eastern Europe we look like a toothless tiger. We roar and then show our gums. We’re bogged down in the Middle East; our economy is dragging in part because we can’t control energy costs; and the world is growing so dramatically that it’s too big for us to baby-sit.

So, why would we try to attract these countries that border on Russia and invite them into NATO with the assurance of defending them – and then fail to not only defend them, but to warn them or to even counsel them?

In some circles, these governments could actually think America might be working in concert with Russia; a bit far-fetched and better suited for an espionage thriller, but not out of the realm of possibility.

More likely, the answer is that America is an energy weakling. Energy is the Holy Grail in this new century. Russia, Venezuela, and the Middle East have it; America doesn’t. Putin has brilliantly converted petro-dollars into regional power.

I posted an article I wrote from Russia six years ago.  I met a young Russian sailor Andre and how he made ends meet in post-Soviet Russia.

Andre is a Russian sailor. He makes one hundred dollars a month to support three boys and his wife in a small apartment. To survive, he is part of the new underground Moscow economy. Two days a week, he drives around Moscow picking up people who need a ride. A traveler simply sticks out a thumb, a driver stops, you negotiate a fee, and you get to your destination. No taxi authority is necessary.

I would bet that Andre, if still in the Russian Navy, is getting along much better thanks to the petro-dollars. Plus, his military colleagues are better trained – as we heard in Georgia.

Before we condemn Russia, let’s look at the situation through their eyes.

First, Russia was told by the previous two American presidents that we would not try to enlarge NATO with former Soviet Republics. We reneged on that.

Second, we want to put missiles in the region that can strike Russia.

Third, we helped Kosovo secede from Serbia, a Russian ally, despite Russia’s efforts to allow Kosovo to remain autonomous within Serbia.

Fourth, we arm and train Georgia soldiers. Think of Georgia as Cuba; we wouldn’t allow that.

Fifth, historically Russia has been threatened in the past. When you look at all the moves the West made, it’s easy for Russians to think that their country could be choked off economically. I don’t think the Russian reaction was any different than the French reaction to us before Sarkozy; they weren’t upset we went into Iraq, they’re upset that our way or life may diminish or eliminate French culture.

Sixth, the Russians invaded a small country to make a point – not to build a new empire. And, as The Art of War explains, they attacked when they were strong; the Russian economy is in relatively good shape and their coffers with petro-dollars is very strong at least in the short term.

I’m not defending any of Russia’s or Putin’s moves. In the long run, this could hurt Russia – especially if other energy sources are found. We won’t know for years if Putin erred. Certainly he made the right move in the eyes of most Russians. As an outsider, I believe he has, first and foremost, the Russian people’s backs.

The Bush Administration is a different story. They miscalculated again. Or, they failed to have a clear-thinking, forward looking policy.

We need Russia for a number of things. The first is their oil that will heat and keep Europe going. Second, we need Russia to reign in Iran so that oil will continue to flow and cost less. (Notice the oil theme.) Third, Russia wants to be a power again, but they’re not going to take over the world.

Go back and read my piece and see my impressions of the Russian people. They don’t want the disgrace they endured as the Berlin Wall and Communism fell. They have a history they’re proud of. More importantly, they want to achieve economically. And, as we’ve proven, they don’t trust us.

Maybe Obama and Johnny Mac are re-thinking their desire to be Bush’s successor.

Golf, Sports Reflect Changing World

This is a column I wrote for LasVegasGolf.com about Paddy Harrington’s PGA win and the future moves of American athletes like LeBron James and Kobe Bryant. Sports are big business. And big business is changing drastically as the world economy grows into the Information Age. If you’re a sports fan, you need to realize that our games are no longer an escape, but they may be escaping from America. Read it at this link.

Silly Season

This is a posting that warns you what to avoid and how to endure the campaign wackiness known as the Silly Season.  You can also read this at Vegas Community Online.

LAS VEGAS, NV (July 16, 2008) – We’re now in the Silly Season.

Political consultant/analyst Michael Murphy Sunday on Meet the Press coined the phrase. It’s the time before the political conventions and the announcements of the Vice Presidential candidates.

He’s right. No one’s paying attention to the real issues. Instead, the candidates, their staffs, and the media act like school children waving their hands to get the teacher’s attention.

As a result, the media and the pundits are picking over every little word that is spoken or written. What nonsense about Jesse Jackson. The Reverend Jackson doesn’t like Obama talking about responsibility when he himself has shirked responsibility by fathering babies out of wedlock.

The New Yorker inspired frenzy with the satirical front cover also fails to mention cogent issues. Instead, the editors are poking fun at the right-wing nut-cases (that’s redundant many times) who seem to think Obama is working for Osama, Saddam, and a resurrected version of the 1960s Black Panthers.

The best response to the New Yorker cover was, again, from Jon Stewart on the Daily Show. He said Obama should have responded that he’s not upset about the cartoon depicting him as a Muslim because only crazed Muslims respond angrily to cartoons. Brilliant.

Granted, this is high brow humor. You can say that the majority of the people in America are too stupid to understand the joke. It’s hard to argue against that. However, I think most people are also too busy dealing with the economy to be thinking about the cleverness of an insider magazine.

Speaking of the economy, here’s another example of the silly season. Phil Gramm, the former Senator, said America is going through a “mental recession” and we’re a bunch of whiners. That cost him his gig with the Mac camp. Now you understand why Gramm could only win an election in George Bush’s Texas.

Here’s the truth. Gramm was right one out of three times – which is only a good average for a baseball hitters and politicians. First, there is not a recession …technically. We haven’t had two consecutive quarters of negative growth. Second, he’s wrong that this down-turn is mental. It’s real; just look at gas and food prices. That’s not to say some irrational fear hasn’t caused some volatility in commodities and stocks.

But Gramm is right about the whining. We’re not getting our clocks cleaned by India and China because of unfair trade practices. No, we’re being taken to the cleaners because we lack the education of Chinese and Indian workers who will work for less.

Here are the issues no one is really talking about yet – that should be talked about: taxes and the wars. And here is the reality on both.

John McCain says he won’t raise taxes. If you speak to any respected economist –and I have – then you will know that taxes are going up in 2009. And it doesn’t matter who is president. You can’t deny the math. We have an incredible deficit that is growing because we’re fighting two wars. The reason we’ve been able to fund the war and our debt is investors from China and Dubai. We could be beholden to them. They are the creditors and we are the debtors. Granted, they will probably not hurt their biggest customer, but they have started to gain a foothold into our economy.

Unless we want more economic power to leave us, then we need to own more of our country. And that means paying taxes and reducing our debt. Sure, reducing taxes stimulates growth. But we’re facing a looming Social Security and Medicare nightmare that we have not addressed.

Meanwhile, Obama says he will work to bring the troops home in 16 months. He has softened this stance over the past week. (More on flip-flopping later.) It won’t happen. We have no idea what the situation on the ground in Iraq will be 16 months into the new Administration. The chances of democracy, and therefore stability, flourishing there are as probable as Tiger winning the British Open this year.

Furthermore, we’re in Iraq to protect the oil. If you think we only went into Iraq to overthrow a dictator because he was ruthless to his people, then why haven’t we invaded The Sudan to defend Darfur? The main reason we’re in Iraq is to keep our economy flowing.

Let me be clear before the right-wing whackos (again that redundancy) call me a liberal shill. Oil wasn’t the only reason we’re in Iraq. We needed the intelligence. By starting a war, we were able to gather the world’s jihadist nuts (another redundancy) into one place to bring them out of the shadows. The effort has succeeded in many ways. However, it’s a rather cruel way to do it – especially if you’re an Iraqi citizen. Many of your countrymen are sacrificed to root-out the bad guys.

Back to the main point. Unless we come up with an alternative to oil to run our cars, our homes, and our businesses in the next year or two then we’ll definitely have troops in Iraq for a long time.

Let’s calm down over flip-flopping. Both candidates will look like a mackerel pulled from the Atlantic during the silly season. Obama is running to the center. McCain, oddly enough, has to run to the right to gather the core of the GOP. As a result, both candidates will say what it takes to please the majority of voters. The candidate who is the most artful at articulating the nuances will eventually gather steam after Labor Day.

How do you combat this?

My first suggestion is FactCheck.org. This is a non-partisan, non-profit website I highly recommend. They take apart both sides. The Washington Post has a blog called The Fact Checker which is also very good. However, if you think it might be too liberal (which it isn’t) then stick with FactCheck.org. These are both free.

Another suggestion: start thinking globally. One site to research is Stratfor. Their intelligence is fairly reliable, based on my experience. The editors and writers look at issues through a geopolitical framework; where a country sits geographically will help determine how the country responds politically, economically, and militarily. Stratfor is a subscription service.

So is The Economist. I think it’s the best news magazine in the world. It’s London-based, so it has a partial European view of the world. So, Americans will get a slightly different angle on stories. But more importantly, The Economist looks at things economically.

Stratfor and The Economist are good checks on the mainstream media here. They won’t necessarily contradict the reporting stateside, but merely fill in the gaps.