Month: August 2018

Hisham Matar’s writing is like finely spun silk: so fragile that it’s breathtaking to follow his words as they connect one to the next, laying bare the vulnerabilities of the human heart; so powerful that its tensile strength not only carries the unbearable burdens of human cruelty and history, it threads a way forward over the chasms of despair—like an Andean rope bridge from one cliff to the next.

The Return: Fathers, Sons & The Land In Between is prompted by his first trip to Libya in 33 years, in the wake of Muammar Qaddafi’s overthrow during the “Arab Spring”. His father, Jaballa Matar, was a prominent opposition leader, forced into exile with his family in 1979, kidnapped by the Egyptian secret police a decade later, and disappeared into Abu Salim, Libya’s most notorious prison, where, in all probability (his body has not been found), he was among the 1,270 political prisoners slaughtered there by the regime on June 29, 1996.

The Return is an intimate book. Matar writes about his friendships at boarding school in England, his dreams in exile in Cairo, his conversations with his uncle Mahmoud in Libya, his discovery that his father, as a young man, had (like Hisham) written fiction.

In its intimacy, The Return ranges far and wide across Libyan history and politics. Matar describes his negotiations with key Libyan government officials, including Seif-el-Islam Qaddafi, the dictator’s son, over the unknown fate of his father. He writes about his grandfather Hamed, born around 1880 in Ottoman Libya, a resistance fighter under Omar al-Mukhtar against the Italians, and a survivor of the genocidal tactics Italy used against what was then called Cyrenaica.

And, like many men separated too early from their fathers, he meditates deeply on the meaning of that intimate relationship:

“The country that separates fathers and sons has disoriented many travelers. It is very easy to get lost here. Telemachus, Edgar, Hamlet, and countless other sons, their private dramas ticking away in the silent hours, have sailed so far out into the uncertain distance between past and present that they seem adrift. They are men, like all men, who have come into the world through another man, a sponsor, opening the gate and, if they are lucky, doing so gently perhaps with a reassuring smile and and an encouraging nudge on the shoulder…. To be a man is to be part of this chain of gratitude and remembering, of blame and forgetting, of surrender and rebellion, until a son’s gaze is made so wounded and keen that, on looking back, he sees nothing but shadows. With every passing day the father journeys further into his night, deeper into the fog, leaving behind remnants of himself and the monumental yet obvious fact, at once frustrating and merciful—for how else is the son to continue living if he must not also forget—that no matter how hard we try we can never entirely know our fathers.” (pp. 51-52)

Crossposted at: https:/masscommons.wordpress.com

As a tool to obstruct justice, the presidential pardon power is highly overrated. The main advantage a president (or anyone else) has when he’s been involved in a criminal conspiracy is that the best witnesses against him are his coconspirators, and they can’t tell what they know without implicating themselves. Because of this, it’s important that witnesses can rely on their Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination: “No person…shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” The way that right is legally interpreted, anyone who has been pardoned for a crime can no longer incriminate themselves and therefore can no longer refuse to answer questions with impunity.

If President Trump were to preemptively pardon Michael Cohen for every possible crime he may have committed (in much the same way that President Gerald Ford retroactively pardoned Nixon for unspecified crimes), then Cohen would be compelled to answer all the special counsel’s questions or face fresh charges if he did not. Trump would have to issue pardon after pardon after pardon to keep witnesses quiet, and that would be such a blatant obstruction of justice that even the Republicans in Congress could not ignore it.

It might be more effective to dangle the promise of a pardon. Paul Manafort, for example, might be willing to go through two humiliating, expensive and doomed trials rather than cooperate with federal investigators just so long as he believes his convictions will be wiped away by presidential fiat at the end of the process. But that’s a big gamble and it’s doubtful that this hope alone explains Manafort’s behavior. It’s probably more important that he owes nearly twenty million dollars to a Russian oligarch who is believed to have connections to the Russian mafia. He’d probably testify against Trump in a heartbeat if it didn’t require him to also testify against Kremlin allies and murderous gangsters.

And, what good would it really do for the president if he pardoned Manafort after his trials? Manafort would immediately lose his right against self-incrimination and would have to sing or face new charges. Trump is better off if people like Cohen, Manafort and Roger Stone are fighting charges than if they are free from them, but that assumes that they won’t cooperate.

As far as we know, none of those three are presently cooperating, although Cohen at least seems eager to take that step. Once any one of them goes over to Mueller’s team, the jig is effectively up, and that’s why we see desperation like this today:

..This is a terrible situation and Attorney General Jeff Sessions should stop this Rigged Witch Hunt right now, before it continues to stain our country any further. Bob Mueller is totally conflicted, and his 17 Angry Democrats that are doing his dirty work are a disgrace to USA!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 1, 2018

The only way pardons can work is in tandem with the clock on the investigation running out. If there in no investigation left after Manafort’s trials conclude, then no one will call a pardoned Manafort in and force him to testify.

Trump needs the investigation to end and he needs it to end very soon.

It’s not clear why he would ask Jeff Sessions to take that step since Sessions has recused himself from all matters related to the Russia investigation. Trump should have addressed this request to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein who actually has the power to fulfill it.

Either way, though, it’s an effort to obstruct justice. Telling a subordinate that they should end an investigation into your possible crimes is the most obvious and indisputable effort to obstruct justice that can be conceived. That’s why FBI Director James Comey refused Trump’s request that he stop the investigation of Michael Flynn and then made sure to memorialize the conversation.

In any case, Trump cannot pardon himself out of this jam. Even without taking into account of the fact that the presidential pardon power does not extend to state-filed charges, it’s simply not possible to keep the truth from coming out by pardoning all your coconspirators.

His only chance is to somehow force the end of the investigation. Obviously he realizes this now, but he hasn’t found a way to do it that doesn’t just bolster the case against him.

They’re burying Swisher today.

After a long and remarkable life, John “Swisher” Mitchell died last week at the age of 91 in his hometown of Waterville, ME.

Before his decades-long stint as the yin to legendary Colby College men’s coach Dick Whitmore’s excitable yang, Mitchell was the smart, tough, cocky, fearless point guard who captained what was arguably the best schoolboy basketball team in Maine’s history.

In 1944—in the midst of a 67 game winning streak—Waterville High went 27-0, winning both a state and a New England championship. Their claim to the title of “best team ever” rests on that New England championship: they were, and remain to this day, the only Maine team to win a six-state New England tournament. As Waterville native Fred Stubbert recalls, “The way they beat teams; they didn’t just eke by, they killed them. They absolutely demolished them. The ball hardly ever touched the floor. They were really a team.”

So there’s been a lot of basketball talk this week in and around Waterville, and all across those parts of the internet inhabited by the tens of thousands of people whose lives were touched by John Mitchell’s wit, and competitive fire, and grace, and good humor, and kindness, and yes, his bottomless font of basketball knowledge and stories.

I have my own Swisher stories, but today I find myself thinking instead about the American Dream.

Because John Mitchell and his teammates did more than set an impossibly high standard for athletic excellence in Waterville. For those of us growing up there in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, they were living proof that the American Dream was true.

Here’s where some of the players on that 1944 team started out in life:

   
• John and his big brother Paul (who died earlier this year) grew up in Head of Falls, the city’s poorest neighborhood, literally on the wrong side of the railroad tracks that ran through town. Their mother was an immigrant who never really learned to speak English; their father was the orphaned son of immigrants.

   

• John Jabar, a fiery swingman, was also a product of that small, tightly-knit Maronite Christian community Lebanese immigrants built on the banks of the Kennebec River.

   

• Len Saulter, the team’s big, burly center, lived in the South End, raised by his mother. Growing up in a French-Canadian ghetto in a single-parent household was about as low a rung as existed on the socio-economic ladder of 1940s Yankee, Protestant-dominated Waterville.

   

• Teddy Shiro, the undersized guard who never took a shot he didn’t think was going in, was Jewish. All were born in the late 1920s, just a few short years after the Maine Ku Klux Klan (which stood for undying opposition to “Koons, Kikes & Katholics”) held its state convention just outside Waterville, complete with cross burnings and an attendance estimated at 15,000 (equaling the city’s population at the time).

And here’s where they ended up:

   
• John “Swisher” Mitchell was the long-time assistant principal at Waterville Junior High, and even longer-time assistant men’s basketball coach at Colby College.

   

• Paul Mitchell owned GHM, one of the largest insurance agencies in town, and served on numerous city boards.

   

• John Jabar founded and ran one of the city’s most successful law firms.

   

• Len Saulter ran one of the largest mills in town.

   

• Ted Shiro was a successful restauranteur and hotel operator.

They had families and owned homes. They, and many of their friends and classmates, were the first generation in their families to complete high school and go on to college. They, each in their own way, were pillars of the community—serving on boards of directors (especially the Boys’ Club which had been their second home when growing up), some getting involved in local and state politics, others playing prominent roles in the city’s business community, all taking an interest in and ownership of the city (and state, and nation) in which they’d grown up owning next to nothing.

For those of us growing up in their shadows, they were living proof that the world could change, and change for the better. That the people who’d always been in charge didn’t necessarily remain in charge. That in America, those who had nothing could become something.

We knew this in our bones because in Waterville, ME in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, half the people running our little town were descendants of people who’d been running it for the previous century and a half. But the other half were people like the Mitchells and the Jabars and the Shiros and the Saulters and the Josephs and the Rosenthals and the Careys and the Brodys and the Fortiers and the Levines and the Berniers and the Lunders and the Poiriers, all descendants of people who’d never run anything in this country, who’d been run out of whatever country they came from, and who weren’t exactly welcomed with open arms when they arrived here.

But because of their families and their churches and their temples, because of the Boys Club and the public schools and the GI Bill and FHA loans, because of their hard work and native intelligence and varied talents, because in America they had a chance to walk into an arena or onto a basketball court or into a classroom and be treated more or less like an equal, they got to prove themselves, and in doing so they improved our community in ways beyond measure.

It was a good way to grow up.

Crossposted at: https:/masscommons.wordpress.com

It was easily the strangest and most appealing labor-management dispute of the year. In the summer of 2014, hundreds of Market Basket employees went on strike, thousands walked daily picket lines, and millions of customers boycotted the company’s supermarkets…all in an ultimately successful attempt to force the board of directors to reverse its decision to fire beloved CEO Arthur T. Demoulas. Adding spice to the stew of labor-management-vendor-customer-community relations stirred up by the protests, it was Demoulas’ cousin, Arthur S., who led the charge to fire him, and who ultimately resolved the dispute by selling his side of the family’s controlling shares of the company to Arthur T.

Business school professor Daniel Korschun and veteran journalist Grant Welker combine their skills in We Are Market Basket: The Story Of The Unlikely Grassroots Movement That Saved A Beloved Business to produce a brisk, engaging, insightful and thought-provoking recounting of how the Demoulas family (beginning with grandparents Athanasios and Efrosine) built a multi-billion dollar company that occupied a unique position in the communities it served and built a “clear, unique, and adaptable” corporate culture that inspired and guided the actions of its managers and workers (“associates”) as they fought for control of the company to which many had devoted much of their lives. (p. 42)

Here are some of the things I want to remember from We Are Market Basket:

Clear, unique, and adaptable: “Business scholars find that the cultures that contribute most to performance share three characteristics: members agree on objectives, the culture is distinctive compared with those of other organizations, and the culture encourages adaptability in the face of challenges. In other words, the best cultures are clear, unique, and adaptable. (p. 42)

The “four fundamental pillars” of Market Basket’s corporate culture: “service to the community, a feeling of family, empowerment, and originality—that is, valuing innovation over imitation. What makes Market Basket’s culture powerful is not only that the pillars are clear, unique, and adaptable but that the pillars work together. The sense of community purpose motivates people to commit to the family, and the culture of empowerment encourages people to be resourceful in helping the Market Basket family. The pillars of the Market Basket culture are at the heart of why the 2014 protest took flight and how it became successful.” (p. 42)

Cutting out the heart: The Market Basket protest was led by nine senior managers, all of whom had been with the company for decades. The fact that Market Basket workers didn’t have a union actually gave them extra flexibility and power in this struggle. Under US labor laws, senior managers can’t be part of a union. In this case, senior managers, store directors, stockers, cashiers and baggers all saw their interests aligned with Arthur T. Demoulas and his management style; and they were able to act together as one.

One of the first and most important strategic decisions they made was that only the warehouse workers would go on strike. Market Basket’s central warehouse supplies roughly half the items its stores sell. Very few warehouse workers crossed the picket line and outsiders hired to break the strike didn’t know the company’s systems and culture. The result was stores started running out of essential items (produce, meat, store brand foods) almost immediately and had near-empty shelves for the duration of the six-week struggle. It also meant that store associates didn’t have to risk their jobs.

Enlisting the public: Market Basket used social media and large rallies to build public support, but their most powerful tool was the relationships they’d built with their customers over the years. They used those relationships to explain the protest and encourage customers to join the boycott of Market Basket for the duration of the struggle. For customers who had no other option (e.g., Market Basket’s three stores in Haverhill, MA are the only supermarkets in the working-class city of 60,000), associates continued to offer the excellent service the company has always prided itself on.

Customer support proved critical as roughly 2 million shoppers joined the boycott, crippling the company’s cash flow. (By one estimate, Market Basket was hemorrhaging $10 million/day.) Senior manager Steve Paulenka summed it up this way: “The customers are the locomotive pulling this whole thing right now. They have shut this company down and they are not coming back until we come back and we are not coming back until our boss comes back.” (p. 147)

Shareholders don’t own the company: The Market Basket campaign is proof that, at least sometimes, the “stakeholder” theory of corporations holds true. The “stakeholder” theory is that corporations exist for the benefit of multiple interests—their customers, their workers, the communities they serve, the products they produce…and their shareholders. The “shareholder” theory (most famously articulated by Milton Friedman) is that companies exist solely for the benefit of their shareholders. In the summer of 2014, Market Basket’s managers, workers, customers, vendors and communities fought the company’s shareholders for control of the company…and won.

Crossposted at: https:/masscommons.wordpress.com

Welcome back, music lovers. This week is one devoted to obscuroid artists from roughly the 1980s who seemed like they should have had a hit single or two, but never quite managed. Perhaps they were too acquired of a taste. I am not aware of any pop band that can come up with quite the lyrics this one managed to create back in the day.

I’ll recycle on that Neon Vincent has posted before as a start. Shriekback was a band I became familiar with thanks to their Oil And Gold album, and especially the video for Nemesis. I may add the video for that later, but let’s try something a bit mellower first – what may be the first Zen pop song

Gunning for the Buddha was off 1986’s Big Night Music LP. The video itself is enjoyable. Staging it as a live performance was a nice touch. The whole album was wonderful. But it never really caught on. That said, they’re still around, and still making music and occasionally touring. If they ever get back to the US and I’m even remotely near enough, I’d love to see them. If not, I’ll gladly settle for anything new they’d like to release. Here’s a taste:

And they maintain an active website.