Irrelevant to the content of the article, but worth pointing out that this project is funded by the proceeds of crimes committed at Drexel Burnham in the 80s. Michael Milken and his brother Lowell undoubtedly do good through their philanthrophy, but the cynic in me suspects that it is primarily an attempt to rehabilate their image and is treated as a business expense. Maybe it doesn't matter if you do good for the wrong reasons though.
Drexel was shut down by order of one certain ambitious NY Assistant AG by the name of Rudy Giuliani. The indictment? Criminal prosecution for statutory civil offences of two counts of failure to file stock transfer forms that by the letter of the law impose a fin e. Sentence: 12 years in federal. Appealed and won. Key witnesses for the prosecution included the convicted fraudster Ivan Boesky. RICO was the act abused to overnight shutter the single most critical liquidity provider to the savings and loans industry. American Thrifts to almost the last were bankrupted instantly. Cost to the taxpayer for the bailout? Cheap at four trillion.
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.
Regarding Giuliani and his handling of the case, you make a good point. The politicization of law enforcement is something we should all be concerned about.
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.
> Maybe it doesn't matter if you do good for the wrong reasons though.
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)
I live in Santa Monica and often walk past the Lowell Milken Family Foundation (which is close to the posh downtown). I always kind of smile and think about the story of how the Milken Family completely reinvented itself. Michael Milken, for context, was paid the highest yearly salary in the history of the world (~250M in one of his highest years if I remember correctly). He served 2 years in prison, his fine was 600M and the guy is still a billionaire (he also got pardoned by Trump in 2020). He's a self-admitted crook and liar[1].
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."
> Is that okay now that he is donating money to cancer research?
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.
As a sibling comment points out, there is always a tradeoff between forgiveness and commitment, forgive too much and you incentivize people to take advantage of you (why not? You always forgive in the end), but forgive too little and you incentivize people to go all-in once they make one initial mistake.
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.
No, because one of those options incentivizes people to do whatever it takes to get to the top, ethics and harm be damned, then once they get there to turn over a new leaf and be canonized as a saint while reclining on a pile of ill-gotten gains.
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.
I'm literally asking - genuinely asking - what a solution in the middleground would look like.
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.
>> Better to get all of them and a few more than let a single one go free…?
> 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.
>How many lives were destroyed (or at least harmed) by hustling junk bonds?
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?).
>This seems a bit disingenuous, as they have, by definition, a very high risk of defaulting
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".
Okay, maybe we're just speaking past each other. My point is pretty simple, and you're right that I should not have brought up victimless crimes, etc.
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?
I came here to say pretty much the same thing. Thanks for putting it so well. Not all strategic use of ill-gotten wealth is "philanthropic" (= motivated by the love of humanity).
> How many lives were destroyed (or at least harmed) by hustling junk bonds?
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.
Gosh this makes me want to re-listen to some Capitol Steps parodies, like their 1992 classic "Mike Milken".
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.
> How many lives were destroyed (or at least harmed) by hustling junk bonds?
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.
> At some point punishment has to end and you move forward in life. The justice system would be a lot more fair if this was applied equally.
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.
Since this is a matter of ill-gotten gains, reparations instead of punishment should be in order.
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.
> it doesn't matter if you do good for the wrong reasons though
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.)
Seems morally consistent. We were the bad guys in Vietnam and this is an article about a soldier who went above and beyond in extreme situations to further our rampage.
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.)
I'm not religious, but a particular legend has stuck with me:
> 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!”
This reminds me of Jeremiah Denton, a POW in that same war who was interviewed on TV to explain that the prisoners were being treated humanely. As he gave the verbal answers his captors expected, he blinked his eyes in Morse Code:
> It made me think how so few of us in each country really wanted to fight these wars.
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.
Thank you for the thoughtful comment. I certainly didn't mean to make a false equivalence, only to mention that most people in either land didn't want this war.
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.
> It made me think how so few of us in each country really wanted to fight these wars.
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.
We probably should count Viet Namese soldiers and civilians killed, on both sides, and Cambodians and Laotians, and probably even victims of Khner Rouge.
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.
You may not realize how brutal, corrupt, and oppressive North Vietnam was, and well before any US involvement in their civil war, but my family does. The number of refugees from the North before 1975 and then from the whole country after 1975 is very telling (and not due to US ruining the country or other such propaganda). Vietnam only recovered after the USSR fell and they were forced to align with the west again, hence the original point about South Vietnam.
I'm not really sure that North Vietnam had opportunity of being corrupt since they didn't have much of an economy to speak of at the moment.
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.
No one is claiming South Vietnam was a well run utopia, but it's equally foolish to believe North Vietnam was much better, when it was actually a lot worse in its oppression.
Not sure it mattered much in terms of the big picture.
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.
Well, Hegdahl was somewhat stupid in at least one way: He fought on the side of the evil, genocidal, occupiers of Vietnam. Less stupid people dodged the draft or outright refused.
A brave soldier, doing right by his country, which was led into fighting villagers half way around the world in incredibly tough scenarios by asshole politicians.
The Vietnam war (or the American war as I was corrected in a bar in Hanoi) was the epitome of unintended escalation. One of the early escalators was JFK, who was simultaneously extremely wary of escalation, and is not someone who most people think of as an asshole politician. Your point has some heft but it's a simplistic take.
As a history nerd I’ve read a ton of books on the Vietnam war and pretty much this.
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 Errol Morris documentary "The Fog Of War" about Robert McNamara is amazing. Even though McNamara was in his 80s when it was filmed, his mind was still razor sharp. McNamara was highly self-reflective and was not someone to whitewash history, even his own.
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.
I have often wondered if, had the Watergate break-in not been discovered or reported, South Vietnam might yet exist, and if they would rival South Korea in their technological accomplishments.
Not really true unless your standard is Western style democracy. And I can't think of too many developing countries who went from dictatorship to full democracy while fighting an insurgency/superpower proxy war. South Korea, Taiwan were both dictatorships for decades after the fighting ended.
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.
It's true in the sense that no government in South Vietnam had sufficient domestic support to stand on its own. For that matter, none had sufficient support to stand with American aid, with coup after coup until the US left.
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.
It was rejected as trickery because the escalation in Vietnam was unfunded. Johnson knew that he had to raise taxes to continue the fight in Vietnam and implement Great Society, but he was tricked into believing that the government in South Vietnam was legitimate and would be welcomed as the true government of Vietnam with just a little help. When that turned out not to be the case, he failed to make the tradeoff explicit. Had it been explicit, the correct choice would be obvious.
isn't it also a bit of a simplistic take to think that American Presidents truly have the "Commander-in-Chief" power w.r.t. war decisions that they have on paper?
Presidents, like leaders in business or the military, realize that they don't have the current experience, situational knowledge, or training necessary to dictate details on the ground. Therefore, they dictate high-level foreign policy, political, and strategic military goals and delegate the strategic and tactical details to the military leaders who have the appropriate knowledge to carry them out. Occasionally, they get involved in specific tactical decisions, like authorizing politically sensitive actions (e.g., the Bin Laden raid).
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.
You should also include high ranking military officers, many with political ambitions, who put their own aggrandizement or telling their civilian superiors what they wanted to hear ahead of their military duties. I recommend H. R. McMaster's book Dereliction of Duty, which goes into this in great detail.
>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
> And half of the stuff we read further is probably just his legend, i.e. not true.
Do you have any evidence of this, or are you just saying this? And what stuff are you saying is untrue? None of this sounded unbelievable to me. This man is someone who helped save the lives of several other soldiers who were being tortured at the time. If you're insinuating that his efforts are all fabricated based on no evidence, then it just seems like a weird thing to insinuate imo.
And here's something from 2005 with all the same details[0]. Everything else I've found seems to tell the same story, so I'm not sure why they would all be wrong (unless you're trying to say this is all some weird conspiracy or propaganda, which doesn't seem likely).
