Isaac Laquedem

Alternate headline: Secretary of State doesn't know where Ukraine is, asks NPR reporter to help

I think it's a plausible explanation of this odd story, unless Secretary Pompeo is better at geopolitics than Secretary DeVos is at education.  In the unlikely event that Mr. Pompeo reads this blog, here's a clue:

 

 

 

The Trump Administration kicks a bad banker out on his assets, and high time, too

Eleven years ago this week - in fact, during the first days of the Obama administration -  I offered a Laquedem Plan for how the federal government should deal with the bankers whose carelessness, fecklessness, and recklessness threatened to bring down the banking system and, with it, the nation's economy.  I proposed that the government should buy up the bad assets of the major banks and then make the bad bankers leave their sinecures and work for the banks with the bad loans that they had created - the "Kick the bad bankers out on their assets" plan.

A year and a half later I went farther, and proposed that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation should treat the bad bankers the same way that life insurance companies treat those with serious and chronic health problems: declare them to be uninsurable, or, more exactly, declare that any bank that engaged any of the bad bankers to be an officer or director would not be eligible for FDIC insurance.  The FDIC, I thought, should start a "no-fly" list of its own to protect our nation's financial institutions.  As far as I know it didn't happen under the Obama administration.

You may recall the interchange between Senator Elizabeth Warren and John Stumpf, then the chief executive officer of Wells Fargo, when he was testifying before (read:  haled before) a Senate committee about his bank's having created millions of fake bank accounts and issued millions of bogus credit cards so that account representatives and mid-level officers could meet their sales targets.  Mr. Stumpf lost the debate and shortly afterward, retired -- very gently and lucratively -- from Wells Fargo.  That was about all that happened to him . . . until this week.  Much as I disagree with President Trump, I was delighted to read today that the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has obtained Mr. Stumpf's agreement to pay $17.5 million to the Treasury and to never, ever work in any financial institution again - think of him as the Pete Rose of the banking world.

My delight in the OCC's expelling Mr. Stumpf from civilized financial society is tempered, however, by the fact that he got in trouble not for running his bank into the ground but for using unsavory methods to make $billions for the shareholders.  I suppose that makes him a good bad banker.  For its next expulsions the OCC should select the bankers who lost billions - the bad bad bankers.

How much does the impeachment cost the taxpayers? About the same as two presidential golf weekends

Various circulating memes peg the cost to the government for impeaching President Trump to be around $40 million.  Those numbers are demonstrably false.  The actual cost through December 2019 was about $3 million to $4 million.  (The cited costs include what witnesses spent on lawyers, which the government does not pay for, but excludes the overtime wages for security at the Capitol, so the actual number may be less.)  The marginal cost for extra security, staff overtime at Congress, and so forth from December to the trial itself might be another $3 million, putting the government's total expenditures on impeachment at $6 million to $7 million above what Congress would have spent anyway. 

That's a lot of money, until you put it into perspective.  The president who told us that he expected to be so busy that he would have no time to play golf has left the White House to golf, mainly at his own resorts, more than 100 times during his presidency.  Through November 2019 he spent 223 days of his presidency -- about one day out of five -- at a golf resort.  Each of his golf trips away from Washington to one of his resorts costs the government about $3 million.

In other words, President Trump could pay for the entire federal cost of the impeachment and trial simply by skipping golf for two weekends.  Fore!

The 2020 election: The Laquedem Plan To Grant Victory to Both Candidates

Three years of Donald Trump as our president have demonstrated that he enjoys the pomp of the presidency, doesn't want to work very hard, and has only a few fixed political principles.  (He might express those principles as "Taxes are bad!  Twitter is good!  Immigrants I'm not married to are bad!")  We as Americans are conflicted: we berate our presidents (not just Mr. Trump) when they too readily enjoy the perquisites of the office, and we don't like it when they're too fancy, but we also complain when they aren't fancy enough for our taste.

America needs a different president.  What, then, shall we do with the current one?  In 2016 we tried to show our preference for the other candidate by giving her 3,000,000 more votes, but Mr. Trump won anyway.  I suggest that we take advantage of his tastes and two recent events to provide victory to both President Trump and whomever the Democrats may nominate, while at the same  time bolstering the American economy and giving the gossip magazines a ready source of Kardashian-free material.  The two recent events are that Henry, Duke of Sussex, commonly (and no longer royally) known as Prince Harry, and his wife will live in Canada much of the year, and that the prince celebrated his 35th birthday on September 15, 2019.  Constitutional scholars will see where I'm going.

To accomplish the Laquedem Plan, we will need to enact one statute and make one revision to the constitution.  The statutory change is to create a ceremonial position (call it "Pooh-Bah"), to be filled by appointment from among those persons who are either past presidents of the United States or descended from a king or queen who at one time ruled over a portion of what is now the United States, meaning that the Pooh-Bah could be a member of the royal house of Great Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Spain, France, and Hawaii.  The constitutional change is to allow the Pooh-Bah to grant lifetime titles of nobility to persons who have held federal elective office on the condition that the ennobled recipients give up their right to hold any further elective office.

Prince Harry is available and looking for a job.  Imagine him as Pooh-Bah.  He has had years of training for a post that he's unlikely to ever fill in his own country.  He'll be local.  He's photogenic and popular.  His wife can act.  He's the ideal candidate.

What will Pooh-Bah Harry do?  I suggest that he starts by granting a title to Donald Trump.  "Earl of Jersey" is already taken, and "Earl of New Jersey" sounds parvenu.  I propose "Baron Trump of Florida" as being fitting.  There would be no duties and he could golf as much as he wishes.  The appointment would come with a coat of arms suitable to be mounted over a hotel entrance, and would even include a Chinese trademark registration.  He can have all the pomp and flattery that any nobleman would wish.  In the meantime the rest of the country can get back to business under the direction of a president better suited to do the actual work of governing.