From: Gary S. Gevisser
Sent: Friday, March 02, 2007 11:51 PM PT
To: Dr. John K. Pollard Jr.
Cc: rest; JRK@class-action-law.com
Subject: RE: Another Epstein behind a pen. This guy makes a lot of sense.

For the first time in G-d only knows how long you make perfect sense.

Please explain the term “democratic system”.

You may not know that in addition to keeping track of the commodity trades of Joseph Seigal who was probably second only to the DAAC in terms of volume trades I also “performed audits” on the extraordinarily well oiled Chicago “machine” and the surprising thing to me was that anyone would even bother in hiring our firm just so that someone like myself would “confirm” there were dead people collecting paychecks.

At some point all the fancy footwork, all the confusing English, all the DAAC guys and gals who write such utter nonsense for DAAC controlled publications will all be long dead and buried.

The problem and the solution is that the youngsters today are getting the information much faster than a Commanding Officer knows how to ask for more money to get the kids to shoot the wrong targets.

It would be fine if the DAAC allocated the world’s resources efficiently, but they don’t because they cant because to allocate efficiently means someone has to produce efficiently otherwise the world’s limited and precious resources run out.

Do you really understand the word, “invest”?

Why is it that you have so much trouble connecting all the articles you send?

Just go back to that idiot Herb Meyer who of course is only an idiot because he thought he had the whole world fooled, apart from me, or is it just that no one else cares as much about doing the right thing and the smart thing which is also the right thing and just be smart or keep quiet.

[Word count 279]

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From: John K. Pollard Jr. [mailto:jkpjkp@alum.mit.edu]
Sent: Friday, March 02, 2007 2:22 PM
To: Gary S. Gevisser
Subject: Another Epstein behind a pen. This guy makes a lot of sense.

The point being that rampant corruption, even DAAC style, is perfectly acceptable, even desirable in a democratic system, if the governed are happy with the results.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL - ONLINE

Till the End of Time

By JOSEPH EPSTEIN
March 2, 2007; Page A10

CHICAGO -- When I was a boy, my father, the late political philosopher, Maurice Aristotle Machiavelli Montesquieu de Tocqueville Epstein, took me aside to explain that in the Chicago aldermanic races of the day, candidates were spending as much as a quarter of a million dollars to acquire jobs that would pay them an annual salary of $15,000. "Think about this, son, and let me know what you conclude," he said, walking off with a sly smile. He was of the peripatetic school of philosophy, my father.

Callow youth though I might be, I was not entirely a numbskull, and, under my father's tutelage, I came quickly enough to understand that appearance and reality are not always congruent. And perhaps nowhere is the distance between the two greater than in Chicago politics, where idealism, it does not go too far to say, is the first sign of encroaching insanity. Which partly explains why Richard M. Daley, after a term in office marked by heavy, nearly relentless scandal, now enters his sixth term as mayor of the City of Chicago, having won Tuesday by acquiring a resounding 71% of the vote.

To be denied election Mr. Daley would have to have been proven to have ties to al Qaeda or to have been caught copping quarters from the poor box at Holy Name Cathedral. In Chicago a certain amount of scandal -- scores of people have been charged and convicted in a patronage scheme, for example -- is taken as business as usual. To worry too much about it is to be thought squeamish, if not indecently delicate.

Mr. Daley has by Chicago standards been a great mayor, possibly the greatest the city has known. With this new term, he shall also be the mayor longest in office. The reason for both -- his greatness and his longevity in the job -- is that he keeps the machine oiled, the joint running, the tax base low, the town prosperous. Is everybody happy?

Not a lengthy period is required for cities, even magnificent cities, to fall apart. In his novel "Life and Fate," the Russian writer Vasily Grossman notes: "Man never understands that the cities he has built are not an integral part of Nature. If he wants to defend his culture from wolves and snowstorms, if he wants to save it from being strangled by weeds, he must keep his broom, spade, and rifle always at hand. If he goes to sleep, if he thinks about something else for a year or two, then everything's lost. The wolves come out of the forest, the thistles spread and everything is buried under dust and snow."

Chicagoans understand this better than most. In the interregnum between the two Daleys, père et fils, that is in the years between 1976 and 1989, when Chicago was without a Daley as mayor, the wolves were out, snows clogged the pavement, thistles rolled down crime-ridden sad streets, dust was everywhere, that old decline-and-fall feeling was in the air. Rich Daley put an end to that: The city he has governed has become a vibrant place, culturally booming, buildings and civic works shooting up all over, without obvious racial tension, a place in which the talented young are eager to live.

In this past election, Mr. Daley had no real competition, apart from a few disgruntled aldermen and local hacks. For a time there was talk of Jesse Jackson, Jr., the congressman and son of the altogether too ubiquitous clergyman, taking a shot at running for mayor. Being mayor of Chicago is a greater launching pad for an ambitious young politician than is being a backbencher in the House of Representatives. But Mr. Jackson realized that Mr. Daley, even carrying the freight of scandal within his government, couldn't be beaten.

More is entailed in Mr. Daley's success than, a la Mussolini, a matter of making the railroads run on time. Mr. Daley is not theoretician of government but a problem solver, and a tenacious one. His tenacity is immensely aided by his lack of personal ambition -- ambition, that is, to be anything more than mayor of the City of Chicago. The great administrators -- and Rich Daley, I believe, qualifies here -- are those men and women who have no desire to be elsewhere: The best academic deans do not dream of being president of Harvard, the best husbands do not dream of sleeping with Nicole Kidman, the best mayors do not dream of going on to the Senate and up the greasy pole from there. They are anchored, happy in their work, committed to the job at hand in perpetuity.

Mr. Daley will be 65 next month. The job of mayor appears to be his for as long as he can get to the office in the morning. My own expectation is that as mayor of Chicago, as an older Englishman might say of a recently purchased overcoat, he will see me out.

Mr. Epstein is the author, most recently, of "Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy's Guide" (HarperCollins, 2006).