Archives for July 2019

Day 913 Sunday July 7, 2019

484 Days until the 2020 election and 562 days until the Inauguration

What if the American Experiment in Democracy is Over?

I pose this question quite seriously.

What if the American Experiment in western liberal Democracy is Over?

Let us look at the evidence that may suggest that it has already happened, that it is over and all that is going on now is the pounding of the last few nails in the coffin?

There is the world as we wish it to be and there is the world as it is. Joseph Campbell wrote that civilization is founded on myth, on some sort of belief system. What if the belief system has changed that underpins our civilization?
I’m not sure we are there yet, but … I dunno.

I’m going to scrap together various bits of evidence, evidence of something, and then ask the question posed to Mr. Natural*, “What does it all mean?”
*Mr. Natural is a graphic comic character created by R. Crumb. Mr. Natural has a long beard and sports an ankle length hair shirt and is bald. He seems to get annoyed when people ask him what it means and typically responded, “It don’t mean shit.” (In case you were wondering.)
Or the answer given in “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” which is “42.”
Are we at a point where we will look back at all these bits and say, “Why didn’t we see this coming?”
There are those Eureka moments in people’s lives when they’ve been looking at all the pieces and trying to make sense of it, when all of a sudden it all falls into place. Two of my favorites are Watson and Crick asking “What if the valence of one of the atoms is not what we’ve been told?” and it wasn’t and then the whole DNA molecule fell in place. The other is the separating of the UNIX fork and exec system calls into those two now well known calls instead of making it a single call. The merits of which were immediately understood after it was done but not before. (Obviously, this doesn’t have to be explained further because everyone knows the story.)

One of the things I’m good at doing is taking in diverse inputs and stitching them together in some sort of semblance of order. It’s taken we a long time to realize that there are things that I see that seem obvious to me, but aren’t at all obvious to others.

When dealing with a problem, especially behavior problems, it is hard to know what to do, at first. Sometimes you have to let the problem or condition sit in your lap for awhile. You need to pick it up and examine it, put it down and think about it. This process may go on for a long time. Eventually, one hopes to reach a conclusion, a new understanding, and perhaps see things in a different way.

Recently, a friend of mine from elementary school has asked me some questions about the current political, social, and economic situation. She has very extreme conservative views, However, her questions and reply comments seem to be thoughtful and genuine. It has caused me to state my beliefs without malice or ad hominem. That has been an interesting exercise and it continues.
Another friend of mine whom I worked with a Fannie Mae has sent me an article by Robert Reich that looks at the difference between China and the U.S. economically for the last forty some odd years.
Thirdly, are my own comments and observations on the state of our country: the political and social landscape; the economic conditions of people, companies, the government; the mythos that has bound us together as a nation.

What if I put all those threads together? Where are we? What if the conservative hopes and dreams are realized? What happens to the country that we have known? What if China becomes the dominant economy in the world? What if the influence of the Chinese becomes such that nations side with China and not the U.S.?

Here are some data points:
The U.S. has been going into debt more and more. This is recognized as unsustainable.
The U.S. has invested in wars. China has invested in projects around the world that have increased it’s economic influence.
In 1978 China was an agrarian society, they have transformed themselves into an economic powerhouse, lifting million out of poverty. Since 1980 the middle class in the United States has not had a raise, has seen their economic opportunity decline, and they have gone further in debt. Many have slide into poverty. The Chinese have been growing at 9% a year. The U.S. has only seen growth in the rich and corporations.
Corporations, many of which were founded in the U.S., have moved their headquarters to mailboxes in tax-free islands or similar principalities. Corporations have also moved operations to places that allow them to pay the lowest possible wages. Corporations in the U.S. and the west in general, have as a objective to increase shareholder value. The other unspoken thing is that CEOs do whatever they can to increase stock price because much of their pay is tied to that price. That and their ability to get paid astronomical salaries. The disparity between a CEO and an entry level employee has grown wider and wider over the last four decades.
In China, as Reich points out, the purpose of corporations is different. The purpose is to increase the influence of China Maybe, I’m not stating that well, but it’s not to increase shareholder value or pay their CEOs an ungodly amount. I’d say it’s more about expanding their influence in whatever area they are pursuing. Is the economy controlled in China? Yes. What does that mean? It seems that this means government officials visit your company and ask what your numbers are going to be for the quarter. Then they ask that you either increase them a bit or push some of the sales/profit into the next, because the objective of these officials is to keep the growth of their area and hence the country as a whole in a consistent growth pattern. How is this different from a western company where the boss asks his sales team to push out a sale to the next quarter?
However, the fundamental difference is Chinese companies owe loyalty to China, while western companies have no such overall objective. Well, theoretically companies in the west serve at the pleasure of the political entity in which they are operating, but the reality is that big international corporations move to wherever the conditions are best. This means lowest taxes, cheapest labor, etc.
There is a myth that by helping companies they will help the economy and in turn help everyone, but this is not true, as President Obama learned after bailing out the banks from the mess left to him by his predecessor. (ie the banks didn’t loan money to the average person and thus didn’t really help stem the tide of the problem they created. True, they saved themselves – and pocketed a bunch of money in the process. But actually help the average person? Forget it. Just like they didn’t help after the stock market crash of ’29; they tightened credit in ’32, which led to the Great Depression. They blamed it on the stock market, but that isn’t really true.

The agenda of the rich and powerful (be they individuals or corporations) is moving along nicely and it is leaving everyone else out.

If this doesn’t change we as a society, as this great experiment in democracy is finished.

484 Days until the 2020 election and 562 days until the Inauguration

Day 908 Wednesday July 3, 2019

488 Days until the 2020 election and 566 days until the Inauguration

Let’s Stand with The president!

When I was growing up a Republican five star general was President. America was number 1. We built things. We led the world. Movie stars were good looking, sophisticated, and debonaire. The outcasts and rebels in our society were cool. Scientists were respected. Everyone wanted to improve their lives. We wanted to do better, become more educated, have a nicer place to live, help one another.

Ah yes, the good old days.

The Fourth of July was a parade, and then we gathered at the old Governor’s summer retreat on Main Street where someone gave a speech. We kids never cared about the speech, because we knew as soon as that person stopped talking they’d hand out free sodas from a truck in back. Then we’d go home and get ready to go to The Pond. Great Pond it was called. We’d swim. If we were old enough and had passed the swimming test we’d go out to the float where we’d climb the ladder to the top of the float. It was a big wooden thing with white painted 55 gallon oil drums underneath to keep it high above the water. On that float was a diving board, mounted another foot or so off the float via 1 1/2” pipe with 45 degree connectors. That board sat some four or five feet above the water. High enough to do a back flip or cut away with ease. 

There was the guy who had polio as a kid. His legs were shriveled. He’d walk with his crutches to the edge of the water. He enter the water at the grassy area where the flag pole was. Casting his crutches onto the grass he’d somehow get into the water and then swim to the float. His upper chest and arms were big. He’d hoist himself up on the ladder, roll over to the diving board and get on it and shimmy out to the end. There he’d perch himself in a ball at the end of the board. Rocking slightly back and forth he’d grip the front edge of the board and his body would plummet off the end of the board and he’d enter the water head first in an upside down cannonball. The rotation of his body would continue into the water so that the water would run up his back and cause a small spout of water from his cannonball. “Ba-Loomp” It was a very distinctive sound.

That was the Fourth of July. That was the America I knew.

We’d quote the plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty, “Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free.”

Now? Now things are different. There are those who send me things or post on Facebook with a “I bet I won’t get one share” to whatever it is they think is so worthwhile, but distain others for not being patriotic enough to even repost.

They post things like “Stand with the president, who has been hard at work everyday”*

or

“We owe illegals nothing; We owe our veterans everything.”

*or as the Trump reelection campaign sent out in a questionnaire:

1. Who would you rather see fix our Nation’s shattered immigration policies?

•   President Trump
•   A MS-13 Loving Democrat

Okay, well, hum. We have an opportunity to save America, remember the good old days, stand with the president, pay our debt to our veterans and do something about our immigration policy all in one bold move cooked up by the White House. Who’s willing to repost? Who’s willing to take a stand and say, “Yeah.”

On the eve of the second night of the Democratic Debate the White House released their bold new immigration plan. Are you ready brothers and sisters? Are you with the president? 

He and his staff have decided it would be a great idea to deport the families of active duty military personnel.

I kid you not.

While a son or daughter is serving our country ICE agents will be going to their homes and rounding up the wife and kids, mom and dad and sending them back to wherever in the heck they came from.

Who’s with the president?

Come on now, don’t be shy, step up, put your name to this policy.

Let me not quote an article from some left wing hippy tree hugging fake news outlet, let me quote The Military Times:

“The federal government is rolling back protections that have held off deportations for non-citizen service members, their families and veterans, according to a top immigration lawyer.

Memos are circulating among Homeland Security and Defense Department personnel, as well as lawyers who handle service member immigration issues, announcing the end of a handful of policies that have allowed thousands of people to stay in the U.S. while they sort out their resident status.”

Here’s the link to the full story:

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2019/06/28/new-trump-policies-could-end-in-deporations-for-some-active-duty-troops/

Is this the America you grew up in?

Is this what you are proud to support?

488 Days until the 2020 election and 566 days until the Inauguration

PS Happy Fourth Eve!

Day 907 Tuesday July 2, 2019

489 Days until the 2020 election and 567 days until the Inauguration

The End of Civilization as We Know It

The above sentence was the last line of a Mad Magazine take off on The Daily News, which they called The Daily Dirt. The Daily News was (and is?) a New York City sensationalist newspaper reporting things like alien abductions and starlet’s bare skin. In the Mad Magazine take off there was a brief article on the front page at the bottom of one column that noted that Russia and the U.S. had started a nuclear was and that this was “the end of civilization” (article continued at the top of the next column for one line) “as we know it.”

A buddy of mine who was on one of my tours to the Mayan area in Guatemala told me his grandparents grew up in Germany when Hitler was coming to power, He said, “They knew he was crazy, but when they decided to do something it was too late.”

The Ed Sullivan Show* had a comic on who said he was a school teacher in NYC. One of the things he bemoaned was how “Kids today, you can’t …” Can’t mark them wrong for an answer like this to the question, “Why did the Roman Empire fall?” Answer “The Roman Empire fell because of carelessness.”

*The Ed Sullivan Show was a variety show. Mr. Sullivan introduced America to all sorts of comics, jugglers, musical acts, and vaudevillians. His show followed Walt Disney’s “Wonderful World of Color” on Sunday nights. To get on Ed Sullivan was to signal you had made it. The Beatles were introduced to America via Ed Sullivan, as was Elvis Presley a generation before. Although Mr. Presley hip gyrations were considered very salacious and stirred much consternation in conservative religious parts of the country. Jimi Hendrix did not play on Ed Sullivan as he was considered too whatever to do so.

I am here to tell you that the end of the American way of life is at hand unless we do something. 

Call me what you want, but the evidence is there. You may want to pooh pooh it, but do so at your own and my peril. Once it is gone we will not get it back. We will be relegated to the dustbin of history, and this proud experiment will have come to an end. 

You may think I’m being overly dramatic. I have a tendency to be so. But, consider the evidence. (I know – facts, so passé. )

Since 1980 the middle class has not made any economic progress, while the rich have become richer.

The middle class has been asked to pay more, make less, and has gone in debt more. It is now to the point that a large number of Americans live at or below the poverty line, struggling til the next paycheck, working two and three jobs, and going ever deeper in debt. 

Meanwhile the gap between rich and the rest is growing. The gap between the rich and the super-rich is also growing. Statistics and phrases like “three people in the United States own more that the bottom 30%” are common comparisons.

What happened? What is happening? What can we do?

I’m not sure of the answer to the third question, unfortunately, but I can outline some of the root causes of the first two.

First and foremost we have allowed ourselves to be lulled into a stupor by idiotic and fearful ideas: be they economic, religious, social, or political. These ideas have been pushed by various people and groups with in some cases hidden agendas, in others they are straight up in your face wacky, but they are believed!

Take for instance Ran and Ron Paul. They push an economic idea that came out of Austria. It has at its core the idea that you can turn an economy around by diddling with various rates. What do most Nobel prize winning mainstream economists say to this? Bull shit. But they persist and they have enough catchy little phrases and quips that people like that they hang around.

Or if you want another example take Reagan’s “Trickle down economics.” Well, it’s been 39 years since he started saying that how’s it working out for you? This has been debunked so many ways… It’s basically an excuse to enrich the rich. It’s worked pretty good for them but how many pool boys, yachts, and lawn technicians do they need? (In the case of Betsy De Vos I think the yacht count is five. Not enough to really restart the economy.)

Or what about the Trump tax cut? The effect of that was to deplete the treasury, put the nation in more debt at the rate of $1,000,000,000,000.00 per year and enrich the rich. This was magically supposed to trickle down to the rest of us but it didn’t. Companies were going to reinvest in America, but they didn’t. They bought back their stock, and like the bank bailout, they gave themselves huge bonuses without helping those that really needed the help.

Let’s move on to how religious quacks have inserted themselves into the political process and sowed seeds to undo our democracy. Where to start? 

How about that pastor who, like many fundamentalists want to bring about the apocalypse and part of that requires moving the capital of Israel to Jerusalem, which Trump has done. So what if it pisses off a bunch of folks living there? When Jesus descends to lift us all up …

Or what about the pastors who prey (not pray, prey) upon the innocent telling them to send money to them instead of spending it on medicine to fight the cancer the people have that is destroying their bodies?   

Or what about Jerry Fallwell Jr.? It turns out that the son of the man who started Liberty University, a rather strange place full of “Christian values” and wacky ideas that generates a lot of money for the Fallwell family, seems to have supported Trump for president over Ted Cruz (who kicked off his bid at Liberty and is the son of a pastor), not because he deeply believed in Trump’s values but because he was being and is still being blackmailed. It has to do with a pool boy in Miami, some photos Michael Cohen had (and claims to still have one), questionable business loans, jets, money, sex … you know … the usual.

Then there are the folks who believe it is their duty to force other people to do things with their bodies that they don’t want to do, that can lead them to death, a living hell, poverty and a miserable existence. They call themselves pro-life, but once again that’s crap, because forcing a woman into an unwanted pregnancy and making her bring it to term results in many women dying from unsafe abortions and/or bringing a child into the world that they don’t want and will force them into a life of economic disadvantage. There is evidence to suggest that the downturn in crime in the early 1990s was the result to the legalization of abortions in 1973. That is to say that there weren’t as many unwanted children roaming America in the early 90s when they would have come of age and hence lower crime rates. (This has been disputed but all the chest thumping Rudy Guliani’s and chiefs of police have never offered a better provable explanation.)

Let’s move onto the social and political spheres.

In the book “Democracy in Chains” by Barb MacClean the review in google starts with this sentence, “An explosive expose of the right’s relentless campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatize public education, and change the Constitution.” This has been an ongoing campaign funded by the Koch brothers and their allies for decades and we are watching it play out in real time before our very eyes. Betsy DeVos is Secretary of Education. She had never been to a public school as a student, teacher or administrator. She has carried out a failed charter school effort in Detroit. She has been working relentlessly to siphon money away from public schools and into charter schools, notably Christian charter schools. She is doing whatever she can to weaken public education in this country. Plus, she’s not very bright.

The right has hidden their motives behind patriotic slogans and economic “freedom” messaging, but in private correspondence they reveal their true motives. There is a belief and many regular folks are adopting this attitude that: taxation is theft (or socialism and that’s bad), and under the guise of “freedom” it’s “every man for himself” or “I got mine you get yours.” The attitude is pervasive now. What is always striking about these folks is the way they harken back to “the way it used to be”, “ the good old days” etc. What they conveniently forget is that some of the things they attribute their success to are the very things they are dead set against now. Either that or they forget that the good old days weren’t that good. Take for instance clean air. In the 1970s major cities’ skylines were obscured by a haze of smog. Now, many want to do away with the EPA. Rivers had so much sludge in them that they caught on fire. Now, we’re letting coal companies push their waste into the rivers we cleaned up. 

The rich who are orchestrating this are incensed at the idea of paying taxes, especially property taxes. They see it as stealing. Howls of socialism are rampant. They like to forget that capitalism unchecked is just as dangerous as other economic ideas when taken to an extreme. Well, maybe they know, but don’t care.

Now, the Trump Administration led by a man who knows little and has no interest in learning, is attacking scientists who are trying to let people know basic facts about the condition of the Earth. In the Department of Agriculture he is trying to dismantle many of the scientific agencies that led the world in basic research about our food, and water. In two weeks they will all be fired (or have to move to Kansas where there isn’t even a building for them to work in.) Yup, don’t want to know stuff that might make him look bad.

We used to be the nation that solved problems. Now we are leading the world in stupidity and ignorance. 

I don’t know what to do other than to point out what is happening.

Let’s not be like my buddy’s Prussian grandparents who saw it coming but acted too late.

489 Days until the 2020 election and 567 days until the Inauguration

The end of civilization as we know it and the end of our democracy is at hand.

PS A total eclipse of the sun.