Financial topics

[John]

But there's another issue that we've raised in the past. When one of
these people in the Administration, or on Wall Street or in a state
agency says something that's an obvious lie, and takes action on it,
then the obvious question is whether they know it's a lie, or whether
they're too stupid to know how stupid they are.

In the case of the NY Times, in the cases of judges in divorce court,
in the case of analysts on CNBC, in the case of the Administration,
it's clear that they must know that they're lying.

Saying that they're too stupid to know how stupid they are is
letting them off the hook.

[Higgenbotham]

Crystal Mangum

Crystal Gail Mangum (born July 18, 1978) is a woman from Durham, North Carolina, who is best known for making false allegations of rape against lacrosse players in the Duke lacrosse case. The fact that Mangum was an African-American woman, while the accused were all white men, created extensive media interest and academic debate about race, gender and the politicization of the justice system.

In November 2013, she was found guilty of second-degree murder related to a fatal attack on her boyfriend, and was sentenced to 14 to 18 years in prison.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Mangum

[John]

Crystal Mangum

Crystal Gail Mangum (born July 18, 1978) is a woman from Durham, North Carolina, who is best known for making false allegations of rape against lacrosse players in the Duke lacrosse case. The fact that Mangum was an African-American woman, while the accused were all white men, created extensive media interest and academic debate about race, gender and the politicization of the justice system.

In November 2013, she was found guilty of second-degree murder related to a fatal attack on her boyfriend, and was sentenced to 14 to 18 years in prison.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Mangum

She can put the conviction on her resume, and that would
make her even more qualified to work for a state agency.

[Higgenbotham]

Saying that they're too stupid to know how stupid
they are is letting them off the hook.

In 2000 I was sent out to a facility to investigate and write a report. I told the feminist Nazi manager that the facility was a public health risk, in my words an "accident waiting to happen" and sent her a memo. An accident did happen in 2003 and again in 2006. In 2011 the new governor fired her.

Firing her for her actions (whether out of stupidity or not) wasn't sufficient in my view. She should be in prison.

My assessment is that she was stupid. Really she was as thick as a brick and I saw plenty of evidence of it. But that's not an excuse.

As evidence of how stupid she was, I was talking to her about the case and had a tape recorder with a red light on in my shirt pocket to make sure she could see it. She saw it and asked if I was recording her and I said yes, do you not want to continue? She opted to continue. That was pure stupidity because by giving me the green light to continue she had granted permission for all the previous recording I did where the tape recorder had been in my pants pocket.

[Higgenbotham]

A few words about the tape recording.

I was tape recording in 2000 because I believed a collapse was coming and there would be consequences for wrongdoing, that people really would go to prison. If there weren't tapes and records, staff would be thrown under the bus and end up in prison.

There's no reason to be tape recording anybody today. The system is shot. Anybody who tape records individuals today to cover themselves is wasting their time.

I was wasting my time too, unknowingly, but did learn a lot about how the system really operates at the higher levels.

What I say today is, "These are not smart people. Clever - yes. Smart - no." They did learn a lot from dealing with me. One thing they learned for example is to create internal policies saying no tape recorders are allowed on the premises.

It was around the year 2000 that tape recorders became about the size of a credit card and could be interfaced to computers for download of lengthy conversations with good clarity. It took them awhile to catch up to that reality.

The people who run the US today are sort of like the Huns in my experience.

[John]

There's a certain personality type that one sees every day these days:
A person who believes he's the smartest one in the room, in every
room, and who therefore makes bad decisions, but then doubles down on
the bad decisions, because he can't admit to any mistake, sometimes
resulting in disaster. Obama is in that category, but so are a lot of
other people.

The woman who let you record did so because she was the smartest one
in the room, and knew that she could outsmart you even if you recorded
her conversations. As you say, she was too stupid to know how stupid
she was.

[Higgenbotham]

The woman who let you record did so because she was the smartest one
in the room, and knew that she could outsmart you even if you recorded
her conversations. As you say, she was too stupid to know how stupid
she was.

When she was fired I heard she couldn't believe it. She was called over to another state office building, fired, and told she couldn't go back into her office to collect her things. I was told she considered filing a lawsuit. For her to even consider filing a lawsuit shows how distorted her view was. She should have been concerned about winding up in prison.

In the year 2000, she thought she was untouchable. In some sense she was right because it took a collapse and a change in politics over 11 years time before she was finally discharged.

This was a person who ran a state agency in the 7 most populous counties of the state for 25 years. She had several hundred people under her and reported to the head of the agency who reported to the governor. She was basically the number two person in the agency.

At one time I had figured she was 36 when she got the job.

One day, after apparently talking to the lawyers about the tape recording, she mentioned it and broke down and cried.

[Higgenbotham]

About why I started taping to begin with.

I got a new Boomer manager. We would have conversations in his office and every time we had one he would lie about it. He would say something like I told you not to do X Y and Z (something I had done after supposedly being told not to). This guy knew he was lying. So I started taping him.

I was thrilled when I found out I could tape a 1 hour conversation, download it to my computer and it was as clear as a bell.

One day I was in his office with the door closed and he was lying about our previous conversation again. He'd been lying about it for days.

I pulled out a 27 page transcript of the conversation and held it in front of him. I told him to stop lying about the conversation. He said, well, I didn't record it. I said I did and I'm recording this one too.

He was gone within a few months, as soon as he could find another job, which was a job as a high school teacher, by the way.

[Higgenbotham]

The whole tape recording thing was kind of odd.

Once the lying Boomer managers found out they had been recorded they sort of froze. They had a lot to think about, like trying to remember what they said to who, or how long they had been recorded. The conservative assumption one would be forced to make is that it had been going on a long time.

What I invariably found was that once a certain Boomer manager found out in a private conversation with me that they had been recorded, they didn't breathe a word of it. The Boomer manager who quit apparently never said a word to anybody. Two or three of my coworkers knew I had a tape recorder and kept it a secret. Their concern was whether I was recording them. I said, no, I never record staff.

The thing got loose to the agency lawyers when I put some transcripts out of the drive, including the one where the recorder was in my shirt pocket. At that point, the director apparently got called over to the state capital and the lawyers and the governor said how the hell could this have been going on for years and you didn't tell us? Apparently that was why she broke down and cried.

After that the union reps had a private meeting with me and asked me to take the transcripts off the drive and to no longer record. It was all very hush-hush.

I wondered if someone was going to break into my residence and steal my computer. They probably figured I had a backup and a camera.

[Higgenbotham]

Another odd thing about the tape recording.

A certain manager who worked in the state capital pulled me aside one day and asked me how I was doing it - what equipment to buy and so on. How to set the equipment up and whether a transcript could be automatically generated from software or whether it was necessary to transcribe by hand.