It’s a big week for diversity in the Republican Party. On Monday, Ben Carson announced that he is running for president. And then Carly Fiorina announced that she would too. Reince Priebus must be so happy. Now we will have a black and a white woman to stand on the debate stage with all the white guys. It will be the Republican Party’s way of showing they not only allow African Americans and women in their party — they also allow them to run for president! There’s just this one small problem with that: neither of these token candidates have any actual experience in government.

Because I am a Californian, I want to focus on the strange candidate who is Carly Fiorina. Here main claim to fame is that she is rich. She got rich by being a very bad CEO for Hewlett-Packard. But we must give credit where it’s due. She was given the job because she had clawed her way to the top the way most people do in business: by being exceptionally ruthless and amoral. None of that turned out to be of much help in running HP. The truth is that rock star CEOs are almost all about myth. Running a company is nothing magical — HP had problems and it continues to have problems. I don’t think Fiorina should be disqualified from being president because she managed HP badly. I think she should be disqualified for other reasons.

Republicans (and to a large extent, Americans in general) think that governing is easy. Anyone can do it. It’s just common sense! So why is it exactly that people like Sam Brownback do such a bad job of governing their states? Recently, the state of California got a good opportunity to test whether governing is something that just anyone could do. We let Arnold Schwarzenegger — regardless what you think of him, a smart guy — be governor. And he was terrible. So we elected lifelong politician Jerry Brown. And he got the state in order. Skill and experience matter.

But Republicans refuse to believe this. And so they continue to push candidates who don’t know anything about governing. Thus Fiorina can run for president without anyone thinking that it is strange. But it is strange — especially after 2010. That was when she ran for Senator in California against Barbara Boxer. Fiorina lost that election by 10 percentage points. Again, that was in 2010 — the best year for Republicans ever. The previous time that Boxer had run during an off year, she won by the same amount against the uninspiring Matt Fong.

My memory of the race was that most people in California knew Fiorina’s record and they weren’t impressed. It is also the case that she did not line up with Californians on social issues. I think by that time, most of the state was embarrassed about the anti-gay Proposition 8, but Fiorina was an outspoken supporter of it. She was also anti-choice (although against personhood laws). And she was basically a global warming denialist. All these things hurt her in the eyes of Californians. But they are doubtless helpful in her quest for the Republican presidential nomination. And this may be why Meg Whitman isn’t running for president. In addition to her full-time job of bringing down HP, she’s pro-choice and that would never fly running for president as a Republican.

It is widely thought that Fiorina is really running for vice-president — like John Edwards in 2004. But again, she has no experience. Other than being a woman who is willing to recite the same tired Republican talking points, what does she have to offer? Not much.

Edmund Tylney was the Master of the Revels for Queen Elizabeth. Basically, he was the state censor; he made sure that the theaters weren’t showing plays that were going to start uprisings. As a result, he made a lot of money. All the plays had to be funneled through him. And one can say he did a pretty good job because there weren’t any revolutions during his life. Now you might wonder just what qualified Tylney for the job. And the answer is: nothing. He was well connected. Like most people at that time, he got rich by having the crown dictate it. We don’t have a crown here in the United States, but nothing else has changed.

As you may have heard, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke is now going to be a senior adviser at Pacific Investment Management Co (Pimco). And this is following on the heals of his becoming a senior adviser at Citadel LLC. He is also a Distinguished Fellow at the Brookings Institution. I don’t know if he is still a professor at Princeton. All these impressive titles don’t seem to require much work. Most people can only manage one job because, you know, they are expected to actually work. Color me skeptical, but Bernanke works more or less the same way that Edmund Tylney worked.

No one has a problem with Bernanke’s blog at Brookings — where he posts as much an article a week. (I hope he isn’t taxing his heart!) Actually, people have been fairly happy about it. No less than Paul Krugman likes what he’s reading. But as Matt O’Brien noted, the gigs at Pimco and Citadel are a different matter, “Bernanke hasn’t disclosed the terms of his compensation, but it’s safe to say that if hedge funders are willing to pay him $200,000 just to dispense his wisdom over dinner, they’d be willing to pay him a lot more to do so on a regular basis.”

National treasure Mark Thoma is a bit concerned about this situation, Ben Bernanke’s Bad Example. It isn’t just about the optics. But they are bad enough. In the next year, Bernanke is likely to make as much as his combined net worth to this point. This is cashing out big time. But Thoma is concerned that with Fed board members coming in for short periods of time and then cashing out, single presidents will get to pack the Fed with their own members, reducing the institution’s independence.

I’m not sure that it matters. As it is, the government appointed members of the board only slightly outnumber the voting members of the banking community. As corrupt as was the patronage of Elizebethan England or Great Depression Chicago, at least people complained about it. Now the basis of our entire finance system is a patronage scam and everyone thinks it is great. Or they don’t think about it at all because they are too busy looking for a job because the Fed has decided that high unemployment is far better than a tiny amount of inflation.

Dean Baker had the ultimate reaction to the news that Ben Bernanke was going to get a couple of patronage jobs, The Man Who Completely Missed the Housing Bubble and Was Convinced Financial Disruption Would Be Restricted to the Subprime Market Deserves Two Seven-Figure Sinecures? He wrote:

I talk about this all the time. There are the “right” kind of people and the “wrong” kind of people. The “wrong” kind of people are held to impossible standards and given endless lectures about how if they only acted more like the rich, they too would be rich. The “right” kind of people are never allowed to fail, and when they are rarely called out on their misbehavior, it is brushed aside as a minor thing, “Boys will be boys!” Clearly, Ben Bernanke is the “right” kind of person. Nothing too good can ever happen to him. And nothing bad will ever be allowed to happen to him. I’m sure that Edmund Tylney would have heartily agreed.

Yesterday, I wrote, Sam Harris’ Limited Tribalism. In it, I knocked him for starting the course of injustice at the attacks on 9/11 — as though there were no history before that. Any reasonable person should understand that the people who attacked us — rightly or wrongly — thought their attacks were justified by earlier actions. Similarly, the United States always dated the Cold War back to the Soviet takeover of East Berlin. But the Soviet Union dated it back pretty much to the beginning of its own existence. The same thing goes on in the Israel-Palestine conflict. This isn’t to say that one starting time is more valid than another. But the starting time determines who the heroes and villains are.

As a result, I was very pleased to see that last week, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote, The Clock Didn’t Start With the Riots. Obviously it didn’t. But just as obviously, those who claim that it did are trying to define a narrative. To take an extreme example, I’m sure that throughout the German establishment in the late 1930s, people referred to the Jewish resistance as a bunch of terrorists. And just like now, the establishment wants to claim that while the African American community may have some grievances, this violence is unacceptable. Of course, when the violence was being acted on the African American community day after day, the establishment didn’t care enough to make grand pronouncements about how violence is never acceptable.

The following cartoon featuring Martin Luther King Jr has been making its way around the internet. It is from the time when he was doing all the work that people now whitewash into inoffensiveness so that even Republicans can celebrate him. It features a reporter talking to King, who says, “I plan to lead another non-violent march tomorrow.” Around them is a city on flame. What’s even more interesting is that someone at the time wrote on it, “How can you, a minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ, be such a deceitful hypocrite. You’re not fooling anyone but yourself in your nauseating talk about non-violence.” There is more, but you get the idea.

When I look at the history of African Americans, I see a continuum. It is much the same as the treatment of the poor generally, in that it shows how the power elite manage to constantly adapt to threats they see. But for black citizens, it is at a much worse level. First there was slavery. Almost immediately after its abolition, other means of control were established — most notably Jim Crow laws. After the civil rights victories of the 1950s and 1960s, the power elite again adapted in the form of economic segregation, the “war on drugs,” and the continued assault on voter rights. But these don’t lead on the evening news. In fact, they are never even mentioned.

My older sister — who doesn’t pay attention to politics — asked me why people were rioting in Baltimore. She had heard about that and that it was based on the police killing some kid. But she asked, “Don’t they see that this is counterproductive?” That’s the way most people look at it. Of course, the protests were going on for more than a week before there was any violence. It just didn’t get the kind of blanket coverage that is necessary for it to become big news.

The main thing is that the protests — peaceful and not — are based on a longer view of history. America generally has the memory of a scorpion. If someone hits us, we have no memory of doing anything to have caused that — because we have no memory at all. But we need to develop a memory. Because lacking a memory just allows the power elite to continue to oppress us. We don’t treat the African American community in Baltimore bad because of the way it sometimes acts out; it sometimes acts out because we treat it badly.