April 14, 2010--I Know Nothing

TV's Hogan's Heroes is one of my favorite guilty pleasures.

You must have seen it. Set during World War Two, Colonel Hogan, an American airman, is assigned (yes, assigned) to a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany; and with his merry band of confederates wrecks havoc on the Nazi war effort. Mainly by sabotaging supply trains, helping high-value actual prisoners to escape, and aiding and abetting the German underground.

They accomplish all of this as a result of Hogan's creativity and audacity; but they are greatly helped by the fact that the prison's commandant is a vain fool and the principal guard, the bumbling and adorable Sergeant Schultz, is more interested in the food and other goodies the heroes slip him than keeping a close eye on their activities.

In fact, he knows exactly what they are up to but opts not to report them because this would cut off his snacks and get him in trouble with the Gestapo. So he looks the other way.

When Colonel Clink, the aptly-named commandant, does ask him what is going on, Schultz always says, "I know nothing. I know nothing!"

Schultz's now-famous response could serve as the name for the times in which we are now living: The I-Know-Nothing Era.

In his Sunday New York Times column, Frank Rich did a masterful job of describing our times in these Schultzian terms. (Linked below.)

He begins by quoting from Alan Greenspan's recent testimony on Capital Hill when he was pressed about his role in not noticing that the economy, which he was responsible for monitoring and guiding, was ballooning out of control. The former Chairman of the Federal Reserve said, "I was right 70 percent of the time, but I was wrong 30 percent of the time." Quite a confession from the legendary Oracle, and one of Ayn Rand's disciples, who was attempting to claim he was an innocent bystander when all the hanky-panky was going on.

Rich wryly adds, "If the captain of the Titanic followed the Greenspan model, he too could claim he was on course 70 percent of the time."

He goes on to enumerate a too-long list of other leaders in various fields who looked the other way in an attempt to avoid responsibility. It is a very bipartisan list of knowing nothing. And long enough to generate scripts for another TV sitcom, or tragedy.

We have Greenspan's successor, Ben Bernanke, who was an intimate part of the problem which he is now largely responsible for solving. But he too, like Big Al, has yet to recognize much less take real responsibility for the economic collapse that occurred on his watch. Ditto for our current Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, who was up to his hips, while the head of the New York Fed, when all the fun and games were getting underway. He as well now says he knew nothing much.

And let us not forget or exempt Robert Rubin, who when Bill Clinton's Secretary of the Treasury, presided over the final deregulations of financial institutions begun during the Reagan years that almost everyone blames for encouraging the shenanigans that occurred then and continues daily on Wall Street and within the ironically-named investment banks. And then after returning to the private sector, while chair of the Citibank board, Rubin also looked the other way when his bank got itself deeper and deeper into the skeevy business of sub-prime mortgages and their derivatives.

In his testimony last week, Rubin said that at Citi he did not have any "significant operational responsibilities." For someone with nothing much to do, he sure did all right when it came to compensation--he thus far has netted at least $100 million for doing nothing.

And knowing nothing.

Read Michael Lewis' The Big Short if you want the inside story of those under-regulated times and/or want to get sick to your stomach and/or are thinking about joining the Tea Party. In regard to the latter, maybe, after reading Lewis, you will have more reasons to do so. Things were and are that bad.

But my favorite Schultz Defense is the one still being perpetrated by Dick Cheney and his lapdog Rudy Giuliani--that under George Bush, they delusionally continue to say, there were no acts of domestic terrorism, while under Obama there have been. Yes, like the underwear bomber a few months ago whose attempt literally fizzled while, as I seem to recall, on September 11, 2001, unless Bush was inaugurated on September 12th, Bush and Cheney had been co-presidents for nearly eight months when there was that act of terroristic barbarism.

Or am I the one who is confused? I forget, was Bill Clinton still president?

But when Dick or Rudy says, "I know nothing," I believe them--they indeed do know nothing.