Tag Archives: Reagan

Carter, Reagan, the Bushes, Clinton & Obama on Mandela

Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela

“I realized they could take everything away from me except my mind and my heart. Those things I would have to give them. And I decided not to give them away.” Nelson Mandela, to Bill Clinton.

“During my lifetime I have dedicated my life to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal for which I hope to live for and to see realized. But, My Lord, if it needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.” Nelson Mandela, on trial in 1964.

Pres. Carter

Pres. Carter

Pres G H W Bush

Pres G H W Bush

Pres. Clinton

Pres. Clinton

Pres. G. W. Bush

Pres. G. W. Bush

Pres. Obama

Pres. Obama

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Outsourcing – A Communist Plot? Remember Khrushchev?

Image of DEC VAX chip, showing Cryllic inscription "When you care enough to steal the best."

CVAX ... When you care enough to steal the very best

Mark Landler and Edward Wong, covering Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping’s trip to the US, in the New York Times, Feb 14, With Edge, U.S. Greets China’s Heir Apparent, wrote,

“On the list of American concerns, Mr. Biden said, were China’s artificially depressed currency and conditions imposed by the Chinese that require foreign companies to turn over technology in return for doing business in China. He raised the issue of jailed Chinese dissidents and … Syria”

In Inflaming Trademark Dispute, Second City in China Halts Sales of the iPad, published in the NY Times, Feb. 14, 2012, Michael Wines wrote:

“The authorities in a second Chinese city have begun seizing iPads from local retailers in an escalating trademark dispute between Apple and Proview Technology. … The seizures follow a ruling in December in which a court in Shenzhen dismissed Apple’s contention that it owned the iPad name in China. … Proview has also made a filing with the General Administration of Customs in China putting Apple on notice that the company could seek to block the export of iPads, should Proview’s ownership claims be upheld. … the seizures and the filing are warnings by Proview of the havoc it could wreak unless Apple agrees to pay a large fee to settle the trademark fight. … Paradoxically, China’s intellectual property laws are so sweeping that they allow the government to ban the worldwide sale of any made-in-China product that is found to violate a Chinese patent, trademark or other protection.”

Remember back during the cold war, when Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev said “Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you.” ( various quotes by Kruschev).

And later when the American computer company DEC, in response to reverse engineering of VAX computers by Soviet computer scientists inscribed, in Russian,“CVAX, … When you care enough to steal the very best” on the CVAX microprocessors. (Links: TRAILING EDGE.com, CNET, FSU.edu.)

Suppose Khrushchev had called John Kennedy, on the occasion of John Glenn’s orbit in the Friendship 7, February 20, 1962,  here, or Leonid Brezhnev had called Richard Nixon, after Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins returned from the moon in Apollo 11, July 24, 1969, Apollo 11, or Mikhail Gorbachev had answered Ronald Reagan’s call to “tear down this wall,” and said

“Mister President, I have business proposition for you: Let us to build your consumer goods. We have factories with skilled laborers. Our workers are like children, so eager to please. (Ok, they are children.) We can more or less match your quality control. We can deliver on time. And we do this for pennies on the dollar – pennie!

“All we ask is you give us designs for the products, and computer software source code for computers and telecommunications de-wices we assemble. It will be great Soviet / American partnership.”

Presidents Kennedy, Nixon, and Reagan would have said

“Give you our designs? Our software? That’s our intellectual property? Are you nuts? That would be crazy!”

Premiers Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev might have answered,

“But our labor costs are much lower than yours. We have workers in factories, happy workers in the ‘Worker’s Paradise.’ Why. workers in our factories in Siberia work 7 days a week. And for little more than food and water. Go on strike? Never! (If they did we would shoot them.) You won’t have to pay them union scale or retirement benefits.”

Presidents Kennedy, Nixon, and Reagan would still have said

“Give you our designs? Our software? Our intellectual property? So you can use children and slave labor to build our consumer goods? That would destroy our middle class. That would be nuts.”

And they would have been right.

So how exactly are the Chinese communists different from the Soviet communists?

We wouldn’t outsource to the Soviet Union. Why are we outsourcing to China?

Reagan's Beliefs, America's Folly

Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko

Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko in the film "Wall St."

Cynicism is fashionable.  But Gordon Gekko Was Wrong! Greed is Not Good!

Presidents, whether Republican or Democratic, always speak about Service, and when talking about wars,  they speak of Sacrifice, and The Ultimate Sacrifice.  Many approach their role from that perspective as well. George H. W. Bush, for example, approached politics from the traditional Conservative perspective of service. He also tried to spur volunteerism – the 1000 points of light.

But Reagan believed in Hoover’s fallacy, in the rugged individualist riding off into the sunset.  What he didn’t understand is that those iconoclastic rugged individualists ride horses descended from wild beasts tamed thousands of years ago. Their horseshoes are made by blacksmiths. Their guns are made in factories. Their boots, clothes, and other gear are made in other workshops or factories. These rugged individualist, giants as they might be, stand on the shoulders of others.

You don’t teach kids to swim by pushing them off a pier. They don’t  need flotation devices in 15 cm of water, either. What they need is someone to show them how, in waist deep water, and to say, “This is how it’s done. Why don’t you try? And don’t worry, I’ll make sure you don’t drown.”

The code of the Good Samaritan was simple: “Help when help is needed.”

Indeed, this is the common thread of 3000 years of human moral thinking, beginning with Abraham, Moses and Jesus in the West; Confucius and the Budda in the East. Continue reading

Southwest Airlines and The Federal Aviation Administration

From the Houston Chronicle, Inspector blasts FAA for Southwest relationship“Southwest Airlines exerted undue influence within the Federal Aviation Administration, creating an atmosphere that let the carrier fly aircraft after cracks had been discovered in a jet’s fuselage, inspectors told a House panel.”

And from the Washington Post, FAA Derailed Safety Alarms, “They also said the FAA had gone from aggressively regulating airlines to treating them like customers or clients. Lawmakers and outside safety experts have expressed similar worries about regulators’ coziness with the carriers.”

I won’t fly if in order to get on a plane and be confident that it will take off, fly, and land, I’ll have to go to the airport and inspect the plane. Forget the fact that I’m not qualified; it’s inefficient for every passenger, or even one out of 10,000, to go to the airport, review the maintenance records, and study the planes. But isn’t that’s why we have an FAA? Isn’t that why we have a government?

Isn’t it the role of government to provide police and defensive forces to protect law abiding citizens from thieves, scoundrels and external threats; from invaders and from thugs who would point a gun at me and say ‘your money or your life’? That doesn’t mean I don’t have the right to self-defense; it means that I have the right to expect that the police and the courts will protect my rights, including my right to self-defense.

Take that one step further. If I can count on the government to protect me against a thug who will steal my money at gunpoint, then I should be able to count on the government to protect me from someone who, in Woody Guthrie’s words, will ‘rob me with a fountain pen’ by pouring toxic wastes into the air we breathe and rivers we drink from and swim in, or perhaps by ignoring airplane maintenance regulations.

This doesn’t make me a liberal or a conservative, but it sure doesn’t make me a Bush Cheney McCain Republican. It might make me a John Warner Republican, but they pushed him out of the Party. I guess it makes me a liberal because it leads me to believe that the government has the obligation to inspect and regulate airplanes, taxis, roads, cars, and to make sure that we have clean air, clean water, and healthy food, and to educate our children and to do the kinds of things that Edwards was talking about on the stump.

When you believe, as Reagan put it, that “the scariest sentence is ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help’” you’re saying we don’t want foxes guarding the henhouse, we don’t want anyone guarding the henhouse, in fact we’re going to sell the wood, the chickens will stay put.