Hero

The cable and network news have been describing the military personnel killed in Chattanooga as “heroes.”  Meanwhile, Donald Trump has been saying that John McCain is not a hero.  So what is a hero?

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a “hero” as “a person, typically a man, who is admired or idealized for courage, outstanding achievements, or noble qualities. “  That leaves open the question of what degree of courage, achievement, or nobility qualifies someone to be characterized as a hero.

In the Chattanooga case, it seems that to be a military recruiter has not required a high degree of any of those qualities, compared with serving in combat overseas.  If dozens or hundreds of recruiters are slain in the future, then much more courage will be required to serve as a recruiter.  If that were the case, then serving as a recruiter would be heroic in the same way that going to Afghanistan or any other war zone would be heroic.  I think that to say everyone who goes into a combat zone is a hero, debases the word.  Clearly, everyone who is awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor is a hero.  You can keep going down the list of medals, but the further down you go and keep calling the recipient a hero, the more you debase the use of the word to describe those who won the highest medals.  You have to come up with some superlative beyond hero for them.

John McCain may fall somewhere in that gray region below Congressional Medal of Honor, but I think any pilot or crewman who flies into heavy anti-aircraft fire probably deserves the appellation of hero.  The idea of going into great danger despite one’s fear is what makes the act heroic to me.  Again, there could be debate about what “great danger” is.  Does it mean almost certain death, or only some risk of death?  If very few planes were shot down over North Vietnam, that would make McCain’s act less heroic, but I think he went on a pretty risky mission.  In addition, his refusal to leave the POW prison before his colleagues was heroic in its nobility.

Again, describing as heroes the slain Marines in Chattanooga, who were shot while going about routine tasks, tends to lower the respect the term gives to people such as McCain and those who won the Congressional Medal of Honor.  People use the term loosely because most of them have no interest in or respect for service in the military.  They would not serve, and tend to think those who do serve are somewhat foolish or stupid; they are people who could not get a real job in the civilian world.  This contempt for the military started with Vietnam, maybe with Korea, and has diminished today, but still exists in the background.  People tend to be over complementary of the military to offset the slight contempt they have in the backs of their minds.  Maybe because I am a Vietnam veteran who came home to contempt, I misjudge this feeling, but I tend to see the overuse of hero to describe anyone killed as evidence of continuing contempt for real heroism.

In 9/11 for example, all of the first responders seem to be called heroes, but obviously some were more heroic than others.  The failure to discriminate between the real heroes and the almost heroes tends to discredit the term.  It is the same attitude that today means everybody who competes in some event gets a blue ribbon; it’s why we have grade inflation.  But there are differences.  Some heroic people are more instrumental in defeating the enemy; some heroes save more lives than others.  Failure to recognize that results are important has consequences that may come back to haunt the US someday.

Bob Hormats on Greece

I had not seen Bob Hormats on TV for years. When I was on the Brazil desk, he was a deputy assistant secretary working in the State Department economic bureau. Today he was on Bloomberg, which said he is now at Kissinger, where he is working on Greece. He said the Greek deal was worth it to keep ball rolling; it was better for Greece. Greece will need some concessions. from the EU, perhaps to prolong the payment period. When his interviewer asked him about Piketty's comment that Germany should not pressure Greece because Germany never repaid it WW II debts, Hormats said it was not relevant, just ancient history.

Regarding the Iran nuclear deal, he said that no perfect Iranian deal was possible, but this deal accomplished many U.S. objectives.  He said he had heard that Iran was going to send a trade delegation to the US in September. 

His Bloomberg interviewer was not great; she was enthusiastic, but not too well prepared.

Zero Interest Rates Are Welfare for the Rich

Recently the stock market seems to move in the opposite direction from the news.  If the economic news is good, the market goes down, and if the news is good, the market goes up.  This seems to be mainly because the market is looking at what the Federal Reserve is going to do.  If the economy does well, the Fed says it will raise rates, if the economy stays weak, interest rates may remain near zero.  Everyone seems to think that one reason the market is doing so well, hitting new all time highs, is because of the low Fed interest rates.

I think the Fed has meant well in keeping interest rates low, it has had the perverse effect of accelerating income inequality.  The main beneficiaries of zero interest rates are the wealthy.  For every poor or middle class person who buys a $100,000 house with a low mortgage rate, some billionaire has made hundreds of millions more in the stock market or in real estate or other investments that require many millions to play.  Low rates have disproportionately benefited the wealthy.  The Fed justifies this by saying that if had not done it, the economy would have fallen apart, possibly dragging us into a real depression.  This is partly true.  Interest rates are basically the only weapon the Fed has to stabilize the economy, but Congress and the administration have other weapons.  

Congress did pass Dodd-Frank adding regulations on the wildly irresponsible bankers who brought on the 2008 financial crisis, but it did almost nothing for the average citizen.  It's understandable, if some poor guy on main street goes bankrupt because his house was foreclosed, it's no big deal; it happens everyday.  But if Lehman Brothers goes bankrupt it's a very big deal, and everybody says it threatens the existence of America.  But there could be another, bottom-up approach.  Let the big guys accept the consequences of their malfeasance, and create a safety net for the people at the bottom.  It would have been more difficult, but it would have been fairer.  

The upshot is that the Fed, doing it's job to sustain the US economy, has greatly aggravated income inequality in America.  I think the Fed chairmen have been well intentioned, but it looks bad for Jews.  The Jewish chairman who ran the Fed, Greenspan, Bernanke, and now Yellen have taken actions which have enormously benefited their Jewish colleagues who make up a huge contingent of the financial community.  The US has intentionally or unintentionally pursued a racist solution to the great recession.  Barney Frank is Jewish, and Janet Yellen's deputy, Stanley Fischer, is an Israeli citizen.  Of course, the Fed took action to respond to the crisis, while the Gentiles in Congress did little or nothing.  Gentiles Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner did take action, and got some Gentiles in Congress to support them.  But everything was directed at propping up the wealthy bankers at the expense of the common man.  

Ironically, it's another Jew, Paul Krugman, in the New York Times who has most vocally espoused more robust fiscal measures by the Congress and administration to help the common man.  Like me, he is still ranting years later, that the US should have gone into debt to undertake more ambitious infrastructure projects.  In that case the common man would have benefited from the fact that the US could borrow money for these projects at ridiculously low rates, like the Wall Street tycoons were doing to fatten their own wallets.   

James Comey and Anne Applebaum on the Holocaust

As he stated in his Washington Post op-ed, FBI Director Comey was sincere about sending all FBI officers to the Holocaust Museum to see how bureaucracies can run amok.  It alerts FBI officers to the evil that they are helping to stop, and alerts them not to be sucked into the banality of evil, of accepting evil orders unquestioningly. But he unwittingly pointed out the dangers in carelessly accusing innocent parties of complicity in that evil.  He buys into a way of thinking that Jews have encouraged, that anyone living within 100 or 200 miles of anything connected to the Holocaust is tainted and should die or at least go to prison for years and years. 

By this standard, almost all Poles are complicit, and Comey named them as “murderers and accomplices for Germany.”  His doing so elicited a protest from the Polish government, a Jewish columnist (married to the speaker of the Polish parliament), and an apology from American Ambassador Steve Mull.  The Washington Post columnist, Anne Applebaum, wrote that the Germans destroyed the Polish government, and introduced “the power of fear,   the danger of lawlessness and the horror that was made possible by a specific form of German state terror in the years between 1939 and 1945 – a terror that convinced many people to do things that they knew were terribly, terribly wrong.”