The Incredibly Stupid One
lowellmilkencenter.org
lowellmilkencenter.org
There was an interesting discussion around this yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32094798 (TikTok'er doing random acts of kindness for clout upset someone he used for his videos)
> A philanthropist once came to Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi to complain that he felt he was giving charity without sincerity. “Without sincerity? Nonsense!” replied the Rebbe. “There is plenty of sincerity. Perhaps you are not sincere in giving charity, but the poor are very sincere in receiving your charity. Even if you don't mean it, they do!”
[source](https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/1885183/jewis...)
How many lives were destroyed (or at least harmed) by hustling junk bonds? Is that okay now that he is donating money to cancer research? Forbes and CNN certainly think so[2] (even in 2004, for that matter). William K. Black put it well: "the best way to rob a bank is to own one."
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220428215122/https://www.nytim...
[2] https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2004...
I completely agree, but if I am reading your statement right, our conclusions are 180 degrees apart. It seems you are saying it is unfair that some people are forgiven and others aren't and that Milken is getting unjustly punished.
My take is there are hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people who served more than 2 years for petty offenses, things like selling dime bags of weed. Their convictions follow them for life and make future gainful employment extremely difficult. Yet a highly educated, white collar guy can steal hundreds of millions and serve two years in a luxury prison, and then coast the rest of his life on his ill-gotten gains. That is no justice at all, and I don't feel the least bit sorry for hoping that Milken's reputation never recovers.
The process of: do crime - get rich - do minor prison time and pay a minor fine - spend 10% of your remaining riches to rehabilitate your image - be a rich and respected person
That process should not be possible. As long as you are sitting on money gotten through crime, you shouldn't get respectability back. If you do want to turn over a new leaf, start giving back.
I'm not familiar with the context of what Michael Milken did (although he's famous enough I know the name), but your (rhetorical?) question sounds very strange to me.
An omniscient and omnipotent being that knew the right amount of junk bonds to issue could probably answer how many lives were destroyed or harmed by creating the wrong amount.
But when a question like that is asked, you're asking human beings, not God, and it sounds rhetorical, which means that the answer is supposed to be obvious, I think.
If you were asking about milk with melamine in it, then I would understand what you meant. But junk bonds aren't inherently useless or defective.
It's rhetorical: the answer is, given how much money he made, a lot.
> But junk bonds aren't inherently useless or defective
This seems a bit disingenuous, as they have, by definition, a very high risk of defaulting. He also manipulated stocks[1], which, again, is technically a victimless crime (but is it really?).
I'm aware junk bonds have a relatively high expected risk of default and I'm not being disingenuous.
Please assume that I'm sincere, as it's required by the HN guidelines, and also, I am.
I didn't say anything is a victimless crime or say victimless crimes are ok (or acts that have victims are always wrong). So let's not go on that tangent for now. Or talk about details about Milken, which are beyond the scope of my previous comment.
So: I infer you think high risk loans are bad, like poisoned milk. I don't have a problem with that concept, really. But there must be a threshold, right? And I have never heard of anyone seriously putting that threshold precisely at the word "junk". As far as I know, "junk" is a term of art, that is opposed to "investment grade".
I'm just trying to say: here's some rich guy that did bad stuff, went to jail, and received the equivalent of a slap on the wrist, essentially rebranded his image, and is now back at the adults' table as a philanthropist, even though his wealth is funded by his past illegal/unethical endeavors. And to make things more bizarre, everyone is totally playing along. Isn't that kind of funny?
Zero? What evidence do you have otherwise? None of his crimes were related to the issuance of high yield bonds. It's not like penny stocks being pushed from a boiler room...he helped create a market for higher risk, higher yield bonds. Historically, they have done pretty well in a portfolio.
If someone was an asshole, but has decided to stop being an asshole and try out "being a nice person" instead — then your choice, as an onlooker, is between either encouraging them in their new take on life; or pushing back due to their past actions. Through your actions, you can choose to live in a society where "turning over a new leaf" like that is either incentivized, such that more assholes become not-assholes... or disincentivized, such that the assholes' takeaway will be "damned if you do, damned if you don't", and they'll likely not bother, and keep being assholes.
Clearly, one of those options is better for the public good than the other.
Most sociopaths won't get to the top, though. They'll just do the first half where they hurt people, then lose it all. You can watch them on twitter now, hawking crypto and MLM.
The purpose of the sentence that has bothered you is just to stake out the other side of the spectrum from where we are now. That's all. Please argue against the best possible interpretation of comments on this site.
> I'm genuinely asking...
Your questions are not serious. You are not genuinely asking. If you want interlocutors to engage with your questions with anything other than dismissiveness, try asking questions that are not prime facie dismissive.
> Please argue against the best possible interpretation of comments on this site.
I am.
Abrahamic religions solve this by imagining an entity capable of deciphering all of your intentions perfectly and delegating the task of granting forgiveness to it, but this perfect oracle is obviously not realizable in practice. Even the communities that worshipped this entity fervently had to contend with the Prisoner's Dilemma nature of the problem of forgiveness frequently, and they solved it no better than others. It's a really difficult problem.
Perhaps better worded as "attempt to solve this", as clearly it's not working for them in practise. ;)
Growing up in the late 90s there were a few ways that I absorbed the pop-culture view of what had come recently. Old books collecting Erma Bombeck and Art Buchwald columns, plus old Doonesbury comics, plus a few Capitol Steps CDs, helped fill in some of the gaps for me in ways that I don't think newspapers or other sources really provided.
I think most people would struggle to name anyone. Milken is probably the most important person in modern finance, he was the JP Morgan of our era, no-one really comes close. And the impact for both companies and lenders was hugely positive, he organised financing for companies that would have gone bankrupt otherwise, he swept away the monopolistic finance that was emerging from the 70s (ofc, in the early 80s there was a very active attempt to stop Milken by the big banks, anti-semitism being a component of this). Private equity exists because of Milken, direct lending, offshoots of infra/real estate, he changed securities law, he increased management accountability (which was crippling economic growth), he increased the efficiency of corporate capital structures (also crippling growth), on and on. There are definitely innovations that were as important (securitization being one) but in terms of individual impact...no-one comes close (and he stopped working three decades ago...he is still that important, three decades later).
Milken certainly broke securities laws...improper disclosure of 13D/Gs, inaccurate commission disclosure, trades made for non-economic reasons, and (what he wasn't convicted for) improper separation between his personal deals and customer deals. A lot of the other stuff though was a combination of wrong and what almost everyone else was doing (and it took changes in regulation, a lot of these problems continued into the 90s because rules didn't change, Milken going to jail changed nothing).
Btw, all of the things he was actually charged for were supposedly harms against customers...but how many customers were unhappy with the business they did?
It is also worth saying that I don't think anyone who is actually familiar with Milken can think he did it for the money either. The guy basically didn't leave his desk, didn't take holidays, and lived in the same house that he lived in when he wasn't a billionaire.
Of course Milken was just a selfish criminal with powerful friends, and Hegdahl was fighting for a principle (even if that principle was to create a firebreak out of Korean, Vietnamese and Cambodian corpses to protect the world from Communism.)
My take on this is that no, it doesn't. Philanthropy is useful regardless of the source.
But it also absolves you of no guilt, and the shitty things you did in the past are still shitty, and you shouldn't expect people to like you any more just because you're donating to charity. (Although maybe people who know you personally can judge better whether you've improved.)
You have to look at the chain of causation.
Edited extraneous adjectives and sp
Oh and Lowell Milken, Mike's brother, was charged before anyone else by Giuliani in a overt and well documented hostage manipulation. Lowell never held operational executive office sufficient to have any involvement with the affair and his indictment was dropped. I should probably also note that Mike infamously never spent money on lifestyle and had to be brute forced into upgrading dress and toupee. Anyone on the street as successful as Mike and not spending money will have accumulated substantial wealth even if you don't count the Rodeo drive era. Much of which wealth went into settling civil suits.
Edit2: Giuliani's correct job title at the time
You're quite right that the charges were dropped against Lowell in return for a guilty plea from his brother. However, if Stewart's account in Den of Thieves is to be believed, then Lowell was intimately involved in the affair.
– ––– •–• – ••– •–• •
T O R T U R E
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremiah_Denton
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_code
Epilog: A few years ago, someone gave me a Fourth of July T-shirt. Made in Vietnam.
It made me think how so few of us in each country really wanted to fight these wars.
Well, counterpoint: it really shows how China’s ascent has made for strange bedfellows.
I don't know about that, I do think it shows that the lives lost to fight 'American Imperialism' were mostly a waste, as Vietnam today is largely indistinguishable from if South Vietnam had won/continued. There's no US bases there I suppose, but USSR did have bases after the war. They also lost hundreds of thousands afterwards as boat people.
Then, all the forests wiped out with Agent Orange, and the long-lasting dioxin contamination. I have not seen any accounting of species driven to extinction by this treatment. Probably many were not even catalogued first.
Oh, it's not even remotely similar.
However, I remember some bad facts about South Vietnam either, such as US placing puppet top government officials there who were firebrand catholic, in a buddhist country, and who tried to hinder buddhism to the extent where the country was on the brink of civil war, and which also contributed to North having so many willing agents in the South.
> In 1963, the Ngô family's grip on power became unstuck during the Buddhist crisis, during which the nation's Buddhist majority rose up against the pro-Catholic regime. Nhu tried to break the Buddhists' opposition by using the Special Forces in raids on prominent Buddhist temples that left hundreds dead, and framing the regular army for it.
Don't make a false equivalence. The Vietnamese were occupied by foreigners and did indeed - on the whole - want to struggle and fight for liberation from the US. As for people in the US - they were sent off to fight for geopolitical advantages of the ruling elite, for rubber supply security etc.
Of course as you point out, once forced into it, the Vietnamese people really had little choice but to defend their home.
It reminds me a bit of another war going on right now.
The North had plenty of highly placed spies in the South. Both sides were running espionage operations throughout the war.
And the North had a “fighting while talking” strategy which meant if they made advances on the battlefield they exploited them during negotiations and when they took loses they just delayed until better opportunities arose.
You would not expect the CEO of a large multi-national company to manage all of the details of every department within their company. When you combine all 5 of the armed forces together, it's far more complex than any company on earth, and managing the military is not the President's only responsibility.
The President's direction of the military is also bound, to some degree, by the Legislative and Judicial branches of the government. For example, they can't declare war on a country unilaterally. But those restrictions, while important, are not particularly constraintaining at a day-to-day level. The President has wide latitude to direct the military as they see fit. That includings projecting military power as deterrents against hostile foreign powers or engaging in short-term, small-scale offensive operations abroad.
So, no, Presidents aren't going to the front lines and directing troops like kings of old. That went out of fashion around the time of Napoleon. But good business leaders don't micromanage their workers and departmental details, either. They realize, hopefully, that doing so would do more harm than good.
The peak of the Southern government was '71-72, prior to the Easter Offensive by the North. The Tet Offensive had destroyed the Viet Cong in the South (needed to be entirely back filled by the Northern troops), so at that point the RVN had full control over much of the South. The fighting had died down to the point that work on social programs like land reform, actually install competent provincial leaders, etc had an opportunity to improve the life of the average citizens in the countryside (the major cities saw little violence over the war with the exception of Tet and a few other attacks).
RVN wasn't a democracy by Western standards, but it was a government that could at least provide security, development and work towards building up the country.
When the Eastern Offensive happened, the US was limited to air power (all troops had left by ‘73 but the drawdowns started in ‘69), and the ARVN made a good showing at the battle of An Loc. They were capable of being an effective fighting force but needed US support to counter the USSR and Chinese support the North was getting.
After '72, Congress cut off all aid, Nixon was in no position to force things otherwise (i.e. Watergate) and the writing was on the wall since the South didn't even have enough gasoline for their military vehicles.
The South was a corrupt government with plenty of nepotism and stealing of US funds, but if you visit Vietnam today you’d realize not much has changed on that end.
Imagine if instead of being red-baited into escalating the conflict in Vietnam, LBJ had directed the money to his Great Society programs. Generational poverty would have been drastically reduced, more people would be educated, there would be less crime, and we would have more and better science. There would be less government suspicion, enabling the federal government to attract more top tier talent, leading to a more effective government. That's the real travesty. Even if South Vietnam got a supported non-communist government, it wouldn't have gotten the financial and technological support that South Korea got from Japan, so chasil's vision would not have happened.
And LBJ did offer a Great Society funding scheme to the North and it was rejected as “trickery”.
There is a great book on LBJ’s decision to escalate - I can’t remember the title, but it’s 300 pages long and only covers a few months in ‘65 when the decision to escalate was made.
People like to think the decision was made in a vacuum but it was influenced by everything going on at the time and geopolitical risk going forward.
LBJ made a decision (there were members of the inner circle who wanted to pull out) based on what he knew at the time. It turned out to be the wrong one.
The documentary covers various phases of McNamara's career, including his contribution to the Tokyo firebombing raids in WWII, and a short bit about his work at Ford Motor Company between the wars, but the Vietnam war part was the biggest section.
And right about now we are witnessing another. Against an opponent with nukes.
>Rather than give up information to his captors, Douglas pretended to be an illiterate fool.
> Using the nursery rhyme “Old McDonald Had a Farm” as a mnemonic device, he memorized over 250 prisoners’ names.
> His global impact came when he confronted the Vietnamese at the Paris Peace Talks in 1970. The information Douglas provided, including the locations and horrible conditions of the prison camps, as well as the torture practices used by the Vietnamese
>Exposing the Vietnamese this way led them to keep POWs alive until the war was over, saving hundreds of prisoners.