Isaac Laquedem

Dinner with Robespierre, and others

You may have heard these two observations of America:

I do not know if the people of the United States would vote for superior men if they ran for office, but there can be no doubt that such men do not run.

            And

The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.

Those are not quotations of today.  They come from the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), who traveled around the United States in the 1830s and compiled his observations into the famous book, “Democracy in America,” published in 1835, which we all were supposed to have read in high school. 

To understand de Tocqueville, consider where he came from.  He was born only 12 years after the Reign of Terror.  The French revolution was not the stuff of history but an event that still echoed.

The French revolutionaries of 1789 liked to think that they were inspired by the American revolution of 1776.  There’s an important difference in what happened after each Revolution.  After a short-lived weak confederation, the 13 states organized a new federal government, and our basic government structure has stayed the same since.

Not so the French.  They went from the revolution of 1789 to the republic and the reign of terror of 1792, had a civil war and a counterrevolution, were displaced by Napoleon in 1799, restored the monarchy in 1814, pushed out Napoleon, got him back, pushed him out again, and got the king back – all in less than 50 years.

One of the classic "what if" questions is "If you could invite anyone in history to a dinner party, who would you ask?"

For one of my historical dinner parties I would invite the people who set de Tocqueville on his way.  The first is the person who brought about the end of the French monarchy, Maximilien Robespierre (1758-1794).

Robespierre was a young lawyer, barely 30 when he led the French Convention to abolish the monarchy and not yet 35 when he persuaded the Convention to execute Louis XVI in January 1793.  He had a vision of the ideal Republic.  He prepared the very liberal constitution of 1793, but never implemented it.  He led the French toward his goal – until they saw that he was ordering the deaths of anyone who stood in his way.  Seeing their own danger, the Convention organized against him.  In July 1794 he left France the same way that King Louis had departed, head first.

Imagine that you could hear de Tocqueville interview Robespierre.  If Robespierre could rewrite history, would he have pushed Louis XVI to the guillotine?  Would he have executed hundreds of his political enemies?   Or would he listen to de Tocqueville’s recounting of American success and understand that he could have brought about the same result for France?

Every case has two sides.  If we dine with Robespierre, we will invite Louis XVI.  You may know him for marrying Marie Antoinette and how they met their end.  There’s much more to his story.

Louis XVI succeeded his father in 1775.  Louis began his reign as a reformer.  He tried to abolish serfdom.  He tried to get rid of the land tax and the labor tax.  He tried to foster religious tolerance.  On the spectrum of French kings he was a liberal and a reformer.  He supported the American revolution, but the resulting national debt combined with bad grain harvests led to the lower and middle classes becoming as unhappy with him as the aristocracy had been.  He made all sides angry.

He could not stave off the French revolution in 1789, he was arrested and deposed in 1792, and he went to the guillotine in January 1793.

We can imagine De Tocqueville, after a glass or two of a fine Bordeaux, encouraging Louis and Robespierre to argue about whether Louis could have avoided the revolution and execution.  Would Louis have gone into exile to save the lives of himself and his family?  Or would he, like a sea captain, “go down with the ship”?

I’d invite a fourth person to join us, one you’ve likely never heard of other than as the namesake of a station on the Paris Metro.  His name is Chretien Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes (1721-1794).  Why him?

The French Convention included many lawyers.  Malesherbes was one of them.  Malesherbes offered to defend Louis XVI at his trial, knowing that by defending the unpopular king he was risking his own life as a very visible royalist.  He was right - fifteen months after Louis XVI went to the guillotine, Malesherbes died the same way, together with his daughter, his granddaughter, and their husbands.  Did Malesherbes regret dying for his belief in the principle that every accused person is entitled to a defense?

I wouldn't pose the question myself, but I'd encourage Alexis de Tocqueville to ask Malesherbes, as I expect he would; de Tocqueville was his great-grandson.

Is William Baxter (1929-1998) the culprit behind today's shortage of baby formula? History and economics say "yes"

On May 12 Heather Cox Richardson published this incisive essay, one of her "Letters from an American" series.  She starts her essay with a short discussion of the involvement of members of the Trump administration in the planning of the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and then moves into a report from the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis.  The committee's name doesn't describe its full ambit, which is to look into anything related to the federal government's response to the pandemic, including waste and fraud.  Professor Richardson then describes Tyson Foods pushing Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue, and through him Vice President Pence and President Trump, to keep meatpacking workers on the job.  As she reports, "Industry leaders wrote a proposed executive order for Trump to issue, declaring a meat shortage and invoking the Defense Production Act to ensure that the plants continued to operate.  Less than a week later, Trump issued a similar executive order." 

Professor Richardson then ties the consolidation of meat production into the hands of a few gigantic businesses to the shortage of infant formula in the United States that resulted when one producer, Abbott, recalled its production from one factory after test samples were found to be contaminated, and describes the situation as the "larger problem of the consolidation of food production."

The "larger problem of the consolidation of food production" that Professor Richardson describes is significant, but it's only one facet of the very large problem of the consolidation of American and transnational industries in general, which started in the early years of the Reagan Administration.  Having successfully broken up American Telephone & Telegraph on antitrust grounds, the Reagan Administration and its chief antitrust enforcer, William Baxter, declared victory and went home, leaving the rest of American industry to merge and consolidate as it wished on the modest condition of paying a small toll to the government pursuant to the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act of 1976, but unfettered by Section 2 of the Sherman Act of 1890.  Benign neglect remained the policy of the enforcers (the "enablers"?) until 1998 when the Clinton Administration sought to fracture Microsoft - a case that the government won at trial and then ignominiously settled in the second year of the Bush (43) administration.

Since then antitrust enforcement in the context of corporate mergers has ceased to play an important part in corporate America.  By 2017 business professors Gustavo Grullon, Yelena Larkin, and Roni Michaely could write that market concentration as measured by the Herfindahl-Hirschman index (the one the Justice Department uses, when it's on the job) "has systematically increased in over 75% of U.S. industries, and the average increase in concentration levels has reached 90%" measured since about 2000. They also found that in real-dollar terms the average and median size of public corporations ("the largest players in the economy," they wrote) had tripled.  As they demurely put it, "Profit margins and shareholders' wealth gains have increased in proportion to the increase in industry concentration... Increased profit margins are mainly driven by wider operating margins rather than higher operational efficiency."

Translation: as the big got bigger, they used their concentrated market power not to be more efficient, nor to innovate, but to charge higher prices and make more money.  Food production is just one of the industries where the increase in concentration has brought new opportunities for the poor to subsidize the rich.

Are you better off than you were four years ago (IV)?

https://www.vox.com/2018/10/3/17928698/brett-kavanaugh-blackout-drinking-alcohol 

An unexpected surprise at MOD Pizza

Even better than having a stable genius . . .

T.T. "Saki" Tzantarmas (1936-2017), the New Copper Penny, and the American Dream

The unlikely life of Theodosios T. Tzantarmas began in 1936 in Thessaloniki, the second-largest city in Greece and one with a lively reputation for challenging the government: it was the locus of the original Young Turks, who started the revolution that ultimately overthrew the Ottoman Empire.  Not everyone born in Thessaloniki becomes a revolutionary, but neither does everyone born there become a boxer, a pipefitter, a tavern owner, and a thorn in the side of city government.  In his 81 years, T.T. Tzantarmas, known as "Saki," did all of those things.

Most of his Portland friends knew Saki Tzantarmas, who died in Portland on July 20, as the owner of the New Copper Penny Bar & Grill, a rambling establishment devoted to drinking, betting, and celebration that until last year dominated the interchange of Interstate 205 and Foster Road.  Even people who never stepped inside recognized its sign as a Portland landmark, with its copper-colored profile of Abraham Lincoln in the style of a one-cent piece. Why a penny and not a dollar?  Mr. Tzantarmas came to this country, he said, without a dollar -- but he did have five pennies in his pocket.

By 1960 he had made his way to Portland, where he was working as a pipefitter, and the stories began.  He told friends that he had boxed professionally, and an image from 1965 shows Saki with noted Mexican welterweight Gaspar Ortega - but his boxing record at boxrec.com identifies him in just one match, with Don Marshall at the Portland Armory, which he lost in a technical knockout.

Boxing was not Saki's future, though he retained the fighter's stance and build the rest of his life.  A few years after his boxing match he bought a rundown tavern, which he named the Copper Penny.  When the business was forced to relocate in 1973, he moved the tavern to Southeast Foster Road just east of 92nd Avenue, renaming it the New Copper Penny.

Saki himself lived a life of contradictions.  Expressive verbally, he disliked writing.  Elegant in dress when he wished -- he could make a purple tie look impressively masculine -- he could also appear in the New Copper Penny looking like a patron who was about to be thrown out, instead of as the owner who even in his late 70s could still do the throwing.  Thrifty in business -- some might say tightfisted -- he was personally generous to friends and family, quietly helping friends in need.  Even his family name carried its own puzzle: nominally Greek, it might have derived from the Italian surname Zantani, or from a similar Turkish name.

As he expanded his business onto the entire block on Foster Road, he built the contradictions of his own life story into the New Copper Penny.  The oldest part of the business was a clean plain room with a concrete floor, stark like the Greece of his youth.  A middle section contained the off-track betting parlor and video poker machines, a nod to the practicalities of running a tavern in Oregon.  And a dilapidated passage with fraying carpet led to the elegant Pantheon Room (pictured here), a classically-decorated banquet hall, with Greek pillars lining the walls, reminiscent of the ancient glory of his homeland.

Under pressure from the Portland Development Commission to get out of the way of gentrification, Saki sold the New Copper Penny site, and the tavern, club, and banquet hall closed last year to make way for apartments.

An old story tells of the man who came to this country with nothing, started a business, became a success, and sent his son to college to become an accountant.  After graduating, the son examined the father's books and told his father that he couldn't tell from the books what the father's profit was.  The father said, "I came to this country with five dollars.  Take five dollars out of the till.  Everything else you see is the profit."  When Willamette Week interviewed Saki Tzantarmas in 2014, he pulled five copper pennies out of his pocket and showed them to the reporter.  The five coins were what he had brought to America sixty years ago.  Everything else -- his family, his friends, his property, and his story -- was the profit that he shared with the city that he adopted.  It would be a fitting memorial to T.T. Tzantarmas if, somewhere in the foundation of the monolith that is replacing the New Copper Penny, the developer would embed five copper pennies.

 

Snacks for the Bundy band? Only if the feds say they're nutritious

If the government is going to let people bring food to the Bundy band while it occupies the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, it should allow in only meals that comply with federal guidelines.  I'd like to imagine the occupiers eagerly opening the boxes that their supporters bring, only to discover that each package has a sticker that says "Approved by Michelle Obama."  Would they eat them? Would they starve?  It would be fun to find out.

Safeway offers rye bread for the unorthodox

At least, that's what I make of Safeway marketing an Oroweat product described as "Jewish rye bread" with a sticker that suggests using it to make sandwiches of ham and cheese.  Gastronomically it's a fine idea, but theologically it leaves something to be desired.

How do you keep a Belgian from dehydrating? Not with water, according to the European Union

When I first saw this story a few months ago, I mistakenly thought it was a bit of British whimsy, cooked up by the people who brought us Monty Python and Bertram Wilberforce Wooster as a way to poke fun at their Continental counterparts.

It's real.  The European Union has banned marketers of bottled water from claiming that their product (water) can fight off dehydration (lack of water).  Great Britain's government doesn't like the EU edict, but can't stop it from going into effect in their nation.

The water that the English appreciate most may not be the overpriced stuff that comes in plastic bottles, but the 20 miles of the English Channel that still separate them from their daffy European neighbors. 

It doesn't take an Einstein to know how to make a proper bagel

I'd like to propose that our next attorney general take a few moments from investigating fraud and corruption, supervising charities, and advising state bureaux to submit an amendment to the Oregon Unlawful Trade Practices Act that would prohibit a grocer or restaurant from passing off as a bagel any bread item that has not been first boiled and then baked.