I have not submitted my resume to Obama\u2019s transition team. I like what I\u2019m doing and don\u2019t want to work in Washington. But the administration could still create the post most likely to tempt me: the Cabinet position of Secretary of History. The Secretary would protect American History from the abuse, misuse and ignorance rampant in the private and public sectors. Sort of a Historical Protection Agency (HPA), rather like the EPA.<\/p>\n
Take the most pressing current example: Wall Street and Washington denizens who claim that the current financial crisis is unprecedented and requires unimagined rape of the taxpayers purse to avoid fiscal Armageddon. In such cases the Secretary of History would issue a press release containing a historical quote such as the following with the underlined words having been changed to make sure that the reader knows which supposedly unprecedented current situation has already happened:<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Congress presiding over the dying months of the Bush administration<\/span> will, we hope, end the fatuous secrecy staining the record of the Troubled Asset Relief Program<\/span>. In very act of its birth the TARP<\/span> was struck dumb by the President. For five months it dispensed hundreds of b<\/span>illions of dollars of public money to banks and Wall Street<\/span> without giving, either to the public or even to Congress itself, a grain of information about the identity of the objects of its bounty.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n It is easy to see how HPA would revitalize the press, nourish academia and, eventually, improve the quality of government. For instance, reporters will know that finding actual versions of the underlined words will put current actions of Congress into historical perspective. More sensible members of the media will consult their local university\u2019s history department, raising the academic\u2019s stock in trade. The media will understand why, when Hoover threw money at banks and financiers, it failed to halt the economic slide which followed the Crash of 29.<\/p>\n Undoubtedly Internet wizards would find the actual source of the quotes and the changed words (Bush\/Hoover, TARP\/RFC millions\/billions and Wall Street\/railroads)<\/em> from an article in the January 1933 issue of Harper\u2019s Magazine, \u201cInside the R.F.C.: An adventure in secrecy.\u201d Author John T. Flynn documents how the Hoover administration\u2019s Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) directors came from the same business groups implicated in causing the financial crash. He traces how the public was often completely misled as to the eventual recipient of the federal funds.<\/p>\n Most telling, he shows how much of the money supposedly helping railroads to operate was used to pay their bonded indebtedness, held by Wall Street and the likes of J.P. Morgan & Company.\u00a0 Given such a historical perspective, one can\u2019t help but ask about former Vice President Dan Quayle and former Bush Treasury Secretary John Snow, both senior executives of Cerberus, a private capital company. \u00a0They used massive leverage to purchase Chrysler and a big chunk of GMAC and may well be hoping for similar treatment in the waning days of the Bush administration.<\/p>\n President Hoover, through his representative Eugene Meyer, urged the RFC to provide so much funding to banks that \u201cit would burn a hole in their pockets\u201d and eventually \u201cthey would begin to lend it out.\u201d The article then states: \u201cThe futility of this plan must now be apparent to everyone.\u201d Sound familiar? By providing such historical context, the HPA will enable the press and voters to ask pointed questions of elected officials. If they had bothered to get a historical perspective, Congresspersons on both sides of the aisle might not have repeated all the RFC\u2019s mistakes and been more judicious in their self-congratulatory comments at the signing ceremony for the first bailout bill.<\/p>\n On another historical note, at the time of the Great Depression, the U.S. was the world\u2019s largest creditor nation. It is now the largest debtor nation, which might make a bit of a difference.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, rather than a Secretary of History, Congress will more likely go on creating more and more czars, which\u2014as we know only by ignoring the history of drug czars and education czars etc.\u2014always solves the problem in Washington. This will undoubtedly lead to the need for a \u201cCzar czar\u201d to oversee all the other czars and make sure they keep the world safe for wealth.\u00a0 No one is more qualified for the position, based on name, family connections (grandmother to Paris Hilton) and housekeeping skill (\u201cWhen I get divorced, I always keep the house\u201d) than ZsaZsa Gabor herself, along with her well known catchphrase guaranteed to reassure our elected officials: \u201cDarling\u2026it\u2019s simple\u201d.<\/p>\n As a further note, Ms. Gabor\u2019s vintage VW ads on YouTube show sterling leadership on energy matters.<\/em><\/p>\n http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=WdJ9m2RotJQ&NR=1<\/a><\/p>\n The Harpers article containing the quotes can be found at:<\/p>\n http:\/\/www.harpers.org\/archive\/1933\/01\/0018414<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have not submitted my resume to Obama\u2019s transition team. I like what I\u2019m doing and don\u2019t want to work in Washington. But the administration could still create the post most likely to tempt me: the Cabinet position of Secretary … Continue reading