This week the Republican establishment continued consolidating behind Donald Trump: Paul Ryan and John McCain are the latest converts. But the endorsement that caught my eye came from Bernie Marcus, the billionaire Home Depot co-founder and former Jeb Bush donor. In this year when Trump sometimes seems to be the only thing to write about, […]
Health Care Costs: The US Could Pay Less and Get More
I did a bit of Google research to get the facts. It’s not hard, anybody can do it. For perspective I looked at what we pay for defense, how much we spend private pay healthcare, and how much gets burned up by admin costs. Here’s what I found:
US Military Budget= about $700 Billion (includes certain extra appropriations for combat expenses)
US Private Sector Healthcare Administration (@ 19% of $2.1 Trillion)= $400 Billion (that’s the paperwork and CEO pay, not the nurse/Doctor part)
To get the scale of this number, note that the healthcare industry’s admin costs exceed the total bill for military payroll, or military procurement, or the total budget of any one of the four branches of the armed services. That’s a lot of freaking paper shuffling!
For the big picture let’s use the entire US economy as context:
- The US Military is 3.5% of the US Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
- The US Healthcare Industry is 17.1% or about 5X the above defense spending.
- All Federal, all State and all Local taxes add up to 24.8% of GDP.
Even with all of its top-heavy “government” inefficiency, we have the best military in the world . Our healthcare rank is mediocre, around 37th, despite an army of expensive private sector executive administrative “talent.”
If you add the 17.1% for health to today’s 24.8% for all other taxes, you get 41.9%, or about what the countries with top ranking “free” government healthcare pay in taxes as a percent of GDP.
Friends, there is no free lunch; if our taxes don’t pay for your healthcare, you the consumer pay for it directly … plus a 19% vigorish for the corporate suits!
Don’t trust me, Google it and do the math yourself. Next read this editorial from the NY Times: Health Care Myths (click)
The “Silent” Minority
Disaffected, Angry and Fearful
Since Donald J. Trump became a serious contender for the GOP nomination there have been many writers and a few academic studies that have sought to profile those who follow and support him. We know a whole lot about what they don’t have in common: they aren’t all Republican, nor churched, nor old, nor male, nor poor. They are likely to be white or latino, working class, and socially conservative. They tend to be from authoritarian families. Their assessments are binary: winner/loser, truth/lie, good/bad, friend/foe. (I’ve listed reference links for these demographics at the end of this essay.)
A viral email dating to 2012, right after President Obama was re-elected, contains angry sentiments that we’ve heard echoed by Trump and the people who support him. Various versions exist reflecting embellishments added as it was forwarded from person to person. Though it has been falsely attributed to a US Marine Corps Vet, or to Franklin Graham, Billy Graham’s son, the actual source is unknown.
The American Dream Ended … (Snopes.com version)
“The American Dream ended last night in Ohio.
The second term of Barack Obama will be the final nail in the coffin for the legacy of the white Christian males who discovered, explored, pioneered, settled and developed the greatest Republic in the history of mankind.
A coalition of Blacks, Latinos, feminists, gays, government workers, union members, environmental extremists, the media, Hollywood, uninformed young people, the forever needy, the chronically unemployed, illegal aliens, and other fellow travelers has ended Norman Rockwell’s America.
The US Constitution has been replaced with Saul Alinsky’s ‘Rules for Radicals’ and Chicago shyster David Axelrod, along with international socialist George Soros, will be pulling the strings on their black puppet to bring us into the New World Order.
The Republicans ran two candidates who couldn’t even win their own home states, while circus clown Chris Christie helped Obama over the top with a glowing ‘post-Sandy’ tribute that elevated the phony ‘Commander-in Chief’ to Mother Teresa status.
People like me are now completely politically irrelevant; I will never again comment on or concern myself with the aforementioned Republican coalition, which has surrendered our culture, our heritage and our traditions without a shot being fired.
You will never again outvote the people who gave Obama four more years. It will take individual acts of defiance and massive displays of civil disobedience to get back the rights we have allowed them to take away. It will take zealots, not moderates; zealots who will never ‘reach across the aisle’ to RINOs, to right this ship and restore our beloved Country to it’s former status.
Those who come after us will have to risk ‘their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor’ to bring back the Republic that this generation has timidly frittered away due to white guilt and political correctness.
My wife and I will now put our anti-ACLU Nativity Scene on display, and start wishing everyone a “Merry Christmas”. And enjoy the rest of our lives in our 50’s-throwback Village of (Redacted) Lakes, here in (Redacted) Harbor.
Atlas has Shrugged, and John Galt has left the building.”
Knowing that I collect and study them, a conservative friend receives many such viral messages and forwards the most provocative ones. In March of 2016, three-plus years after it was originally posted, it was still in circulation In this instance my friend noted that it expressed the feelings of many people he knows. The broad scope of the response to Trump suggests that he is right about that. Many of Trump’s applause lines evoke the emotions expressed in this piece.
Viral emails get forwarded exactly because they express a feeling that the sender likes and wants to share widely. Although the original writer remains anonymous, the forwarder is known to his correspondents. When this happens countless times over a several year period it demonstrates that lots of people endorsed the sentiments. It doesn’t seem to matter that the content isn’t logical, and doesn’t pass the sniff test for factual basis.
My knee-jerk reaction when I first read American Dream Ended was to characterize the writer as a defeated white supremacist bigot. It’s easy to make that casual assessment, but not likely to contribute anything to solving the social problem. Since beliefs are primarily influenced by social environment and not by facts, it’s foolish to ignore and marginalize those who hold what we deem to be such ignoble sentiments.
On reflection, I realize that I have friends who don’t speak of such feelings in polite company, but actually harbor them in secret and feel frustrated, angry and ashamed. It’s understandable that they might look back wistfully and see the less enlightened 50’s as a time when they could be themselves. As it is they must watch their words.
Trump’s public appearances attract like-minded people. Trump doesn’t shame them for politically incorrect sentiments or behavior, and in words and actions he evokes the emotions encourages followers to let loose. Polite society is shocked and scornful but Trumpists, having found their tribe, simply don’t care. Indeed, the more criticism Trump draws, the more loyal and fired-up they become.
Like The Rest of Us, Only More So?
To some degree most of us share deep dissatisfaction with the present political climate and the legislative stagnation and gridlock that seems to grow ever worse. Few of us have escaped the economic consequences of the 2007 Great Recession. Though we disagree on the causes and remedies, all of us recognize the social problems of poverty and diminishing economic mobility. Trumpists are much like the rest of us except that in venting the pent-up rage, they blame all the wrong people, and look for a ruthless strong leader to fix it, make it great again.
Norman Rockwell’s America, wasn’t as idyllic as some people remember it. With few exceptions his paintings remind us of what we aspire to, America at its best, not the unsentimental reality of the street. Most of the “rights” Trumpists feel they have lost, weren’t ever rights, and Trump can’t deliver on his implied promise to Make America Great Again for his followers because that perfected America never existed – at least not for the 99 percent.
Anger at Being Left Out
It’s not patriotic or socially acceptable to be angry at America. Yet for many shirt-sleeve workers the American system hasn’t been working for a long time, and they have lived with smoldering rage they couldn’t express openly. Conservative writer David Brooks described them as: “ … a coalition of the dispossessed. They have suffered lost jobs, lost wages, lost dreams. The American system is not working for them, so naturally they are looking for something else.” And there’s another kind of alienation that’s more social in nature, the mainstream of society disrespects and shames them for their “ignorance.”
To muster our empathy, let’s imagine walking in their shoes. How frightening it must be to jobless with no prospects. How shameful it feels to fail in supporting your family even though you desperately want to work. How humiliating to have no marketable skills. How depressing to have permanently lost your retirement nest-egg or your home in a market downturn that others have mostly recovered from.
If you’re self-employed, how frustrating to experience your independent small business burdened by fees and taxes when it’s hard to even meet payroll. How enraging to be fettered and delayed by unhurried civil servants secure in their recession-proof jobs.
Although the discontent has been rising for decades, established leadership is reactive rather than creative. For the prosperous, the good life is secure and it’s instinctive to stifle change that could be disruptive.
The establishment is inherently risk-averse and defensive. Neither posture supports visionary thinking. They fail to see the threats and opportunities coming until it is far too late to adapt. We see the pattern play out daily in the Opinion section of the Wall Street Journal. When you are happy with the way things are, it’s hard to embrace change or to recognize any need for it. Enter Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.
Case in Point: The GOP Establishment
The GOP successfully built their base from a coalition of evangelicals and several flavors of populists. But in most policy matters the establishment “business suits” were acting contrary to the interests of the “shirt-sleeves” that made up 70% of that base. Now, thanks to Trump, it’s coming unglued and the shirt-sleeve Republicans (and Democrats) are awakening to how the suits have been ignoring them. Bernie Sanders addresses the ignored needs, while Trump blatantly exploits the fears and emotions that the GOP panders to with more nuance.
One of the consistent failings of the GOP has been the failure to see big challenges coming. That is the essential nature of establishment conservatism. “Don’t fix what works,” might well be the slogan of the GOP establishment. GOP ideals (Free markets, small government, low taxes, deregulation, and a disbelief in central social planning) all come from the instinct that nobody is smart enough and pure enough of character to engineer a better future. Centrally controlled economies fail. There are no historical successes. Conservatives prefer to allow events to run their course unfettered except by the invisible hand of Darwinian efficiency. The industrious will prosper, the lazy and incompetent will suffer the deserved consequences, and society will be the stronger in the end. It’s a hands-off no safety net philosophy that is fiercely individualistic and reactive. Big forward-looking ideas, at least for organizing American society, are not sought or valued.
Laissez-faire economic philosophy looks impartial and reasonable for those whose fortunes have prospered – the top of the food chain. But unfortunately not everyone, and certainly not a solid majority of the people, feel that they have prospered economically or otherwise. Fearing the popular appeal of the big idea politics of the left the GOP has reacted by opportunistically crafting positions that attract groups of single-issue voters: evangelicals, gun enthusiasts, right-to-lifers, and militarists. This last includes people whose livelihoods depend on maintaining and equipping our large military. Loyalty to the GOP is rooted in an emotional appeal to an instinctive fear or personal belief. It’s reactive, not visionary.
This aggregation of individual issues is not a natural union of like minds it’s a circling of wagons for collective strength. The GOP establishment doesn’t have the votes to prevail on its own. “My enemy’s enemy is my friend,” seems to be the unifying glue. For years the leaders piloted the GOP on a course that protected the interests of the fortunate and successful, shielding wealth. They used rigid party discipline and policy to uphold the collage of single interest postures that bound the other two-thirds of the base together.
To divert the attention of the base from their lack of participation in the growth of personal wealth, they systematically spread disinformation such as “trickle-down” supply side economics and the notion that lower taxes on the wealthy result in more jobs. Despite unprecedented reserves of cash in blue-chip industry, the consumer demand that actually drives commerce and jobs has been slow to recover. Reduced taxes on the wealthy enacted during the Bush years failed to bring offsetting economic growth and while the rich got richer, the nation got deeper in debt.
Rana Foroohar writing for Time (4/4/16 issue) describes how little of that protected wealth actually is engaged in producing anything real:
“Experts including Adair Turner, the former
head of financial regulation in the UK, estimate
that only about 15% of all capital flows within
America’s financial system end up making their
way into the real economy. The rest of that money
just rotates around the high-finance microcosm,
enriching the 1% as they buy and sell existing assets
to one another, bidding up their value, while
failing to invest in research, products, jobs or innovation.
C-suite executives, likewise, contribute
to the sort of “quarterly capitalism” by seeking
out Ding Doodle—style deals rather than making
long-term investments. That has begun to worryy
even some of finance’s most accomplished players.
(Warren Buffett, Larry Fink and Jamie Dimon recently
met in secret to discuss how to fix corporate
governance.)
Anti-democracy Tactics
The GOP also opportunistically gamed the system to acquire more power. The tactics include: gerrymandering of congressional districts to ensure election of GOP legislators; conservative stacking of the Federal and Supreme Court benches; killing public funding for National Public Radio; building the Fox News Propaganda machine; promotion of discriminatory voter ID laws; weakening the labor unions; and eviscerating campaign finance laws. The wealthiest GOP supporters created PACs and Super PACs to fund political advertising and elect GOP candidates. Though politically effective, these measures did nothing to help the plight of increasing numbers of less successful wage-earning individuals in their base. They became Romney’s infamous 47%.
Until Trump rallied what I’m calling the silent minority, the GOP held them spellbound with bright shiny objects like flag-pin patriotism and propaganda that said big government was the problem. The GOP raised fearful specters like socialism, health care death panels, and they vastly over-hyped the threat of weapons of mass destruction and lately the menace of terrorism and of ISIS.
The political establishment of both parties largely ignored long-time and emerging issues that have seriously hurt the silent minority. Among these are the disruption of American manufacturing by international trade agreements, the insolvency of many pension programs, the short and long-term effects of the Great Recession on the middle class, wage stagnation for four decades at least, and the chronic neglect of US infrastructure.
Looming in the future as threats are: global climate change, global scarcity of essential resources like clean water, air, and even food, loss of unskilled work to robotics and automation, and conflict arising from religious extremism. To add insult to injury, Social Security and Medicare may be unsustainable if not reinvented. Bernie Sanders preaches a vision of a better deal, and Donald Trump plays to the fear and anger. The establishment didn’t see them coming.
“Us” versus “Them” Mentality
Many of those who write or read about Trumpists are looking for affirmation that they are somehow morally flawed and different than the rest of us. We want to believe that Trump followers are an anomaly – not regular people. Media reporters have jumped on photos of a campaign worker with tattoos allegedly identifying her as a white supremacist. But the data does not support such broad stereotyping of Trumpists. There is vastly more to be learned by searching for our similarities.
Fr. Richard Rohr, OHM addressed this in one of his recent meditations:
“Our lack of human compassion is rather starkly revealed in most of the candidates we consider worthy of public office in the United States. I am not sure if this is as much a judgment on the politicians’ delusions as it is on the spiritual and human maturity of the American electorate itself. That so many who call themselves evangelical (“Gospel”) cannot see through this charade, has become an embarrassment for American Christianity. Many now see our cultural Christianity really has very little to do with Jesus. Any candidate is praised and deemed worthy of high office because we think, “He speaks his mind” (when it is actually our prejudices that he is speaking aloud). Two thousand years of Jesus’ teaching on compassion, love, forgiveness, and mercy (not to mention basic kindness and respect) are all but forgotten in a narcissistic rage. Western culture has become all about the self, and that is just way too small an agenda. The very self that Jesus said “must die” is now just about all that we think about!”
Our enemy is not “out there” somewhere, it is us. It is American Individualism run amok. We operate on the assumption that opportunity is so abundant that anyone anywhere in this country can make his or her way if they only try. When the facts contradict, we seek out or invent a distinction that defines “us” as different and better than “them.”
You can’t have a serious conversation about our times without hearing assessments like these.
A retired professional planner from Staten Island (direct quote):
RW: I’ve much to say re politics, but let’s leave it at this: Cruz is more dangerous than Trump, who just wings it. Republicans are no longer conservatives; they are right-wing reactionaries. Real conservatives are respectable establishmentarians, wary of change unless tested and proved, respectful of precedent, hesitant to engage in foreign interventions, advocates of free enterprise, not monopolies and corporate welfare, and skeptical of government social engineering attempts. They are not interventionist, pro-Israel neo-cons, supply-side, trickle-down economists with no regard for consequences, nor advocates of government prohibitions on abortion or government restrictions on voting rights. They are for individual rights, not against them. Nor are they racists. Todays Republicans are; they should not be called conservatives. (And Democrats are wimps.)”
Truck driver retired from the USAF (paraphrase of a longer conversation):
MS: “I usually vote republican. At first I liked Trump, but lately with the stuff he’s been doing, not so much. I just don’t like Cruz and I don’t think he’d get much cooperation from congress. Hilary’s the best qualified, but I don’t trust her. And Bernie Sanders is a socialist.” [MS says he doesn’t know who he’ll vote for.]
Jeff Sharlet writing in the New York Times Magazine (4/12/16)
After the Youngstown [Trump] rally, I drove to the only bar I could find still serving food and found myself sitting across from a group of three supporters. Mike was a union electrician, Shawn a dispatcher and Jackie a nurse. “Definitely a racist,” Shawn said of Trump. That did not appeal. But who would receive his vote? “Definitely Trump.” Mike was a probably; Jackie wouldn’t say, but she seemed to be sliding toward Trump. Only the bartender, Shane, was holding firm for the Democratic Party. He couldn’t believe his friends. “Trump’s not just a racist, he’s a [expletive] psychotic racist!”
“So are half the people who walk into this [expletive] bar!” Shawn shouted back. He did not want to be racist. He did not want Trump to be racist. What he wanted, he said, was a better job, the kind of job Youngstown used to be known for.
That was what Mike wanted too. We drank another round of fireballs. Mike’s probably-Trump began inching toward certainty. Another round. Then he suddenly roused himself, rising up from the bar. “I don’t care if you’re racist!” he shouted at a room by then nearly empty but for us. “If you’ll just bring back one [expletive] steel mill!”
Shawn nodded, seriously. We drank to the dream, the steel mill they knew was not coming. It felt good, at least, to believe.
Continue reading the main story
Interviews with Trump supporters reveal a common theme: they like Trump because he’s a brash outsider – and he’s really shaking up the insiders.
Lots of people cheer Trump exactly because he blurts out what’s on his mind, or seems to. He’s obviously not scripted and handled by a team of spin professionals. He’s not part of the business-as-usual Washington establishment. He’s generated billions of dollars’ worth of earned [free] media by being unrestrained – not unlike the shock-jocks of radio. You could paper a wall with the magazine covers and political cartoons that feature him. He entertains and energizes followers by appealing to emotions instead of presenting rational ideas.
Trumps critics explain his appeal as a mainline zap to the “lizard brain” – that part of the brain that’s most primitive and wired for instinctive survival. It’s the domain of fear, hate and mob behavior. For people who feel anxious and threatened, irrational arguments, obviously unsupportable or untrue claims don’t matter. What does matter is the resonance with something instinctive deep and dark in the listener. It’s a gut level thing – bold, assertive, impudent, aggressive, powerful and confident. “Make America Great Again” translates make me feel secure and good about myself again.
At this primitive level feelings reign; and facts, logic, and sensible thought fail. Condemn this as “ignorant” at your own peril, because we all, as humans, have areas where we function on emotion and ignore (or don’t seek) the facts. It is how we are wired. Much of becoming an adult is training ourselves to temper our lizard brain instincts.
By way of example, consider the enormous attention we focus on acts of terror. The rational mind knows that our individual personal odds of falling prey to a terror event are vastly lower than suffering a home or automobile accident. Yet as a nation we spend billions on anti-terror measures and still don’t feel entirely safe. We certainly don’t dread automobile travel, or the flu season that way. The most important personal life-choices we make (who we love, what we eat, what we do for fun) seldom involve much rational thought. We actually function on an emotional level most of the time – all of us. We regard those who appear to be entirely rational as cold and alien, like Spock of Star Trek. Donald Trump knows this. But does Hillary?
Compassion not Confrontation
Most of the press and the GOP establishment wrings their hands over how to stop Trump, as if he alone and personally were the problem. In my view he’s just the latest opportunist exploiting the emotions of those we now term Trumpists. His “leadership” is more a cult of personality than a political movement. I call his followers the silent minority because they feel alienated, disrespected and repressed in a society that shames people like them. If you accept that “they” are like us only more so, then confronting them as outsiders can’t work – it only alienates them further and fuels their anger.
George Lakey, a Quaker activist, teacher, and writer asserts that practicing compassion and nonviolence is the only strategy that stands any chance of success. In his March 18, 2016 Essay How Empathy, Not Protest, can Defeat Trump and Right-wing Extremism he says,
“Donald Trump’s March 13 rally in Boca Raton, Florida, was revealing. Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank left the press corps and inserted himself into the core of the giant crowd. In that rally protesters had been screened out. Trump brought forth his usual inflammatory rhetoric, saying he might pay the legal fees of someone who sucker-punched a protester. Milbank reports, however, that the rally remained fairly tame. When Trump eventually asked, “Do we have a protester anywhere?” no one responded. Where was the drama? Milbank noted, “Trump and his advisers seem to delight in the confrontations, which fuel the crowd’s energy.”
Lakey goes on to demonstrate that angry confrontation won’t be effective. Trump crowds feed off the energy of conflict. Lakey’s low-drama strategy is not intuitive but it makes great practical sense. I recommend visiting the website, reading the essay, and also reading the reader comments and Lakey’s very illuminating responses. For real-world tactics, Lakey suggests a Swarthmore source that documents 198 nonviolent actions and reports on their use and historical effectiveness. He promises to write more in future posts and suggest a strategy.
They Aren’t Going Away
The members of the Trumpist Silent Minority live among us and they aren’t really that different from us. Actually my late father harbored some of those bigoted sentiments while being outwardly politically correct. I recognize them in his stories about war experiences, and his patronizing attitude toward certain minorities, and his simplistic framing of complex social issues. Some of my fellow firefighters were like the writer of that viral American Dream email. They may be closet bigots, but they are also men who are bold and selfless when faced with danger. In other words the anxieties and feelings that draw a person to the Trump personality are not as aberrant or weird as some media would suggest.
We are all part of the American whole, and America is part of the community of humanity. We can’t build walls or hoard resources to defend ourselves from the social problems of sharing this little planet. Like it or not, we are all in it together for the duration.
Media Opinion and Analysis Considered for this Essay:
Donald Trump, American Preacher – Building a congregation for his prosperity
Who are these idiot Donald Trump supporters?
Measuring Trump Supporters for Intolerance
“Not Even My Wife Knows …” Secret Trump Supporters
We Asked 8 Trump Supporters Why …
The Befuddling Connection between Trump and His Supporters
Some of My Best Friends are Trump Supporters
The Myth of the Trump Democrat
What do Trump Supporters Think About Climate Change?
Why Economic Anxiety is Driving Working Class Voters to “Trumpism”
Don’t Be Fooled – … ‘silent majority’ doesn’t exist.
A Strange but Accurate Predictor of Whether Someone Supports Donald Trump – WaPo
Who are These Idiot Donald Trump Supporters?
The Huge Cultural Shift That’s Helping Trump Win Evangelicals
What Republicans did 15 years ago to help create Donald Trump today
Who are Donald Trump’s Supporters?
No, Not Trump, Not Ever – The New York Times
Chris Hedges: The Revenge of the Lower Classes and the Rise of American Fascism
People Who Love People
Richmond & me playing house ~
As our 3 ½ month RV trip begins to wind down, Richmond and I observed that this time we’re sharing with each other is “golden.” The days fly by! We’re happy and content to be with each other, each engaged in our own interests and pursuits, in a tiny (by American standards) space with few other diversions. We prepare meals, eat, and clean up. We work at our computers. We maintain our 5,000-steps-a-day Nordic walking stick program. We do laundry and take out the garbage. We stay connected to the people we care about. Richmond contributes to the political discourse through his research and writing (Richmond’s essays on “It’s About Vision and Fear” and “$500 million per Victim?” are two of his best). I stay involved in projects back in Newtown and Pennswood Village (writing about fracking/pipelines, coordinating with speakers, setting up future programs for the League of Women Voters, creating articles for the Pennswood Bulletin, making phone calls).
Our son Adam and his family ~
We also spend time with our son Adam and his family. Richmond is enlisted to teach our 15-year old grandson Sawyer to drive. Twenty-five years experience as a high performance driving instructor allows Richmond to stay calm and objective. Sawyer masters parallel parking in a space five feet shorter that he’ll face in the driver exam. On the highway he learns high speed Interstate merges, practiced driving in heavy, city traffic, and gets some good “seat time” behind the wheel.
Twelve-year-old Jennings designs and builds a backyard project out of shipping pallets to practice gymnastic vaults. Richmond helps him add safety padding on the edges as the finishing touch. Here in the video clip is the result (astonishing how agile he is!):
I enjoy cooking an occasional meal, transporting Sawyer, Jennings, and their friends to a “kid” movie and found Eddie the Eagle was amazingly inspiring to watch. It’s a movie that hugely acknowledges the role a mother’s love has in her son’s life. Even ferrying Jennings from track practice to his trumpet lesson was a treat.
One morning we share a little bit of the SXSW (South by South-West) festival and hear some of the live music Austin is so famous for.
We attend Where to Invade Next (a really entertaining comparison of how we do things here in American and what other countries are doing with far better results) with Adam and his family, laughing together and pondering the insights of Michael Moore’s current mockumentary,
How full Adam and Caroline’s lives are—running the school (the Griffin School is in its 20th year), their community involvements, taking care of themselves, arranging play dates, keeping track of their kids schedules. I remember all too well what our lives were like at their ages. Richmond and I were running a business. We were both involved in community activities. I ran for a seat in the U.S. Congress in 1990 (a 2-year process that took over our lives and took a huge investment of our resources). As I look back on that time I see that we were not available to our children to the degree that Adam and Caroline are with their boys (or as our daughter Laura was with her four at that age). Now, as grandparents, sharing these little slices of our adult children’s and grandchildren’s every-day lives is a privilege and a joy — and in some ways, an amend.
Malcolm, one of Adam’s closest George School classmates and now a media professional living in California, worked the SXSW Festival while we were in Austin. Seeing them together as mature adults sharing news of their families, and seeing Sawyer and Jennings with their friends is “de ja vu all over again” — the sweet cycle of life and the relationships that make life worthwhile. How important it is to have people who know us over time and who witness what’s meaningful in our lives!
Jackie’s open-heart surgery ~
During this period, my stepmother Jackie had a heart valve replaced. As everyone who has gone through a major medical intervention knows, even with the best surgeons and hospitals, surgery is not without risks and uncertainties — preparation and recovery involves the whole family. Jackie’s surgery proved complicated, and she’s experienced several set-backs during her early recovery period. Everyone from both sides of the family have pulled together to support to her and Jim! Happily, after a month in the hospital, she’s now at home again recovering.
Caleb turns 20 and lobbies in Washington, DC ~
Our grandson Caleb was able to attend the FCNL (Friends Committee on National Legislation) Spring Lobbying Weekend thanks to Laurie, a dear friend from our Somerville days. Sleeping on her couch in downtown DC put him close to the Capitol without having to pay for a hotel. Caleb joined 450 other young adults to petition Congress about the pending Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act.
This really important piece of legislation addresses some of the mass incarceration costs to our society that disproportionately impact young people of color (e.g., we invest $80 billion in our prison system instead of investing in mental health; $109,000/year on average per teenager incarcerated who has a 60% likelihood of returning to prison). Caleb, in preparation for a law enforcement career, is taking courses in Sociology and Criminal Justice and is able to bring a fresh perspective on how the inequities of mandatory sentencing and mass incarceration might affect his judgment in arresting and charging young people. I just finished reading Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, a black man’s conversation with his son (I highly recommend it).
Celebrating Spring ~
Bluebonnets and Indian Paintbrush
Bluebonnet is the Texas State Flower
Lupinus texensis
While we are here, Spring arrives. First pale green shoots and leaves, then sneeze-inducing oak “dander,” then TX wildflowers in abundance (bluebonnets and Indian paint brush). The weather swings from quite warm (in the 80’s) to cold (in the 30’s), sometimes in the same 24 hours as temperatures move from high noon to early morning (the coldest time of day). TX is quite windy also, and we’ve enjoyed several significant thunderstorms with driving rain in this hill-top location. Nonetheless, we’re enjoying Spring—and we plan to follow it all the way back to Pennswood!
How do we keep ourselves “safe?”
As in so many other areas of American life, we are having to re-examine what it means to create “safety” (both private notions of safety as well as public, national and international costs of prisons, law enforcement, militarism, terrorism, and “shared security”—a new notion that FCNL, American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and others have been exploring over the past 5-10 years).
As their document Shared Security states,
War has proven to be far too costly and ineffective, and a new policy would instead strive to match peaceful means with peaceful ends [to reduce suffering and advance human dignity]. . . We reject notions of national superiority and militarism [that use] violence and domination, rather than reason and cooperation. . .We recognize our own complicity. . .Never before have the fates of individuals, communities, and nations been so intertwined. And never before have our safety and well-being depended so much on the safety and well-being of others. . .To address these problems, we need to abandon failed militarized approaches. . .[with tools that] include preventative diplomacy, mediation, transitional justice and reconciliation, trauma healing, community building, and sustainable economies. . .
As President Obama said in 2009, “America will have to show our strength in the way that we end wars and prevent conflict—not just how we wage wars.”
In an excellent TED talk, President Jimmy Carter spoke about “Why I believe the mistreatment of women is the number one human rights abuse.” Another outstanding TED talk by human rights lawyer Gary Haugen is “The Hidden Reason for Poverty the World Needs to Address Now.” Could it be that many of these global, intractable challenges come down to simple human decency and dignity (the Golden Rule)—most visibly being militarism, systemic violence against women and girls, and our unwillingness to deal with the worst aspects of poverty?
Driving in a strange city—cars vs. trucks
As I get older, I see how much more difficult it is to process new information quickly. Familiar roads, suburban, and highway driving are easy, but we don’t do much driving in cities any more, and Austin is particularly challenging. Designed, I suspect, more for horse and carriage, the local streets are inadequate for the dense Austin neighborhoods. Our Ford 350 diesel truck, which pulls our huge RV effortlessly and tirelessly, requires a whole different level of vigilance with parking garages that are too low, parking spaces that are too small, and narrow, winding lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic. A couple of days after we arrived, I suggested to Richmond that we rent a small car.
Richmond found us a terrific monthly rate with Hertz that also allowed both of us to drive the car without paying an extra $15/day (talk about highway robbery!). Anyway, a few days later we discovered a “knock” in the truck motor, so when Richmond took the truck for its 100,000-mile oil change, he asked the mechanic to check it out. Two weeks later and after 25 hours of mechanic’s time to tear down the engine our Good Sam Extended Service Plan is faced with our claim for over $20,000 for a new replacement engine. They aren’t being hasty about approving it.
We are supposed to depart Austin on April 1, but it’s clear that won’t be possible. We must leave our present campsite because the park is booked solid. No surprise. You saw those Bluebonnets, and spring is prime season here. Fortunately we found space in a US Army Corps of Engineers park an hour’s drive north.
In spite of this mechanical misfortune we feel blessed: 1) we rented the car before SXSW and the TX Rodeo attendees rented everything in sight, 2) we didn’t discover this problem while we were pulling our RV, and 3) all we need (Ford dealer, tow service, insurance adjuster) is close at hand so everything is being taken care of. While the claims process is a bother, and the delayed departure is a disruption, it’s quite minor when compared to what might have been had we blown the engine while towing on the road.
Easter at Enchanted Rock
Everything is big in Texas. Consider a massive pink granite rock rising up out of the surrounding terrain 450 feet – and know that what you see is only about 1% of it. The rest lies hidden deep underground and the 644 acre State Park does not encompass the entire formation. This monadnock, the visible part of an igneous batholith, is the largest in the US and we, elders that we are, climbed it!
This is our Easter family outing, huffing and puffing up the trail and over the glittering granite. We were glad for our daily 2.5 mile walks as training. See more photos here: (more photos)
We return to Austin stopping along the way for an Easter Dinner of TX Bar-B-Q ribs at the famous Salt Lick Barbecue. Even with our hungry teens, we couldn’t polish off all of the 5 lb slab we ordered. This is a place where hundreds of folks like us gather around outdoor picnic tables and feast on ribs, sausage, dill pickles, German-style slaw, and potato salad. All cash, no reservations, no frills. Just great food that worth a wait in line.
We’ve loved being here–and we’re looking forward to returning home! Come and visit us!
$500,000,000 per victim?
We can expect a lot of people to be more hawkish in the wake of terror attacks, most of them old men who never wore the uniform. I thought you’d enjoy this item:
The whole article can be found here: http://thinkbynumbers.org/government-spending/false-sense-of-insecurity/
Terrorism is a reality of life in a radicalized world. Even if we completely locked down society it can’t be prevented. Consider the French resistance in Nazi occupied France. With informers everywhere, a massive troop presence, and a disarmed populace, small resistance groups continued to function.
ISIS does not restrict itself to military targets and easily finds soft targets to exploit. When we respond with actions that expend large sums, commit our military, and suspend our own freedoms we accomplish more for the enemy than they could ever hope for by his own relatively weak powers.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I still like my decade old idea of pay-as-you-go combat financed by a surcharge percentage added on everybody’s taxes, with mandatory national service for all citizens. It would make hawks weigh the costs politically and economically.
Suck it up, America. Accept that we live in a world of dangerous ideologies both abroad and here at home. And war is not the answer. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan should have been learning opportunities. Combat is expensive and doesn’t have much favorable impact on extremist ideas.
SXSW Austin, TX
There must be hundreds of bands here this week. A local charity features about 16 of them in breakfast concerts at the Four Seasons Hotel. It’s a neat way to get an overview in a couple of hours. Here is a sample from the University of Texas radio station KUTX:
(Note: This link was valid on 3/19/16, but may be taken down by KUTX at any time.) For more music here is a playlist of what KUTX has up for streaming on their website. To play it with your computer, change the “.txt” file extension to “.m3u” after downloading it.
“The Donald” Exercise in Web Propaganda
Viral email messages, a stealth tool in political motivation, abound during political campaigns. I collect them as samples of propaganda because they are so blatant that they make good examples when I want to talk about critical thinking. The same propaganda techniques are widely used in popular media, especially MSN and Fox News — they are just more nuanced.
So in this post I wanted to deconstruct a viral email that is circulating among conservatives. 
I have redacted the email names but othewise what you see is what I pulled from my gmail inbox.
Click the image to view the actual PDF file. I have added notes which you can point to and read and I’ve highlighted certain words and phrases that triggered my skepticism.
My aim is to show readers how easy it is to spot inauthentic information, and deliberate dis-information if you train your eye.
The first thing you will notice about the item is the very large font and the use of red type. The sender uses all-caps in the subject and the phrase “a must read”. So from the outset, there’s lots of hype; and that’s often a signal that it’s not credible. The body text repeats both the words and the emphasis and tells us that the author is a very important, educated, and credible source … at least if you are a fan of conservative opinion. But the adjectives are too over blown and the sender’s evident need to promote the author triggers my skepticism.
Reading further, the use of common clichés leads me to suspect that this writing is not the work of a high profile PhD affiliated with a scholarly think-tank like Heritage Foundation. The overuse of absolutes like “all”, and “never” begs credibility as well.
The further down the page you get, the more the language sounds like a rant. The writer uses certain phrases as if they were well accepted and shared by the reader. Among like-minded people already wedded to his point of view, those phrases would have special meaning. For insiders the language is familiar and evokes a belief, for outsiders it sounds oddly dogmatic. The “us” versus “them” mindset pervades the piece. It smacks of conspiracy paranoia.
After reading it through I noted that there were no actual facts or verifiable examples to support the writer’s assertions or speculation. It could not have been authored by Bennett or anyone else of his education and experience. Sure enough, a quick web search revealed that Snopes had discredited the item long ago. The PDF has live links to fact checking commentary. Bennett did not write it, and actually contradicted it in an interview. But most of you probably guessed that it was bogus without fact-checking or even finishing the article.
Read about Skepticism Triggers here (click).
It’s about Vision and Fear
I’ve been pondering the motivations of voters who rally around each of the candidates, as have most of the wonks in Washington. 
An article in the NY Times examined the things candidates talk about in the debates and presents a chart to illustrate the relative frequency each topic gets discussed. Take a moment and click on this link so you can see the whole graphic: Which Issues Each Party Debates, or Ignores.
If you were asked to place the issues on the chart without seeing the article, I suspect you could replicate it by making the left side “visionary” issues and the right side “fearful” issues. I suppose I should not be surprised. Those who ardently believe that government should be smaller and do less, find it hard to come up with positive ideas for action that will muster voter support. Fear is powerful substitute for vision.
The GOP has incited fear very effectively to manipulate elections. Newt Gingrich at the January 24, 2015 Conservative Freedom Summit set the stage for the present campaign with a veritable catalog of fear triggers the GOP could use.
For those who see the nation as a community that looks out for one-another aided by government, big ideas and grand visions abound. Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist, is widely faulted for espousing issues and ideas that are unworkable and might wreck the economy if attempted. Hillary Clinton is accused of being too pragmatic, and practicing the tepid politics of the possible.
Trump’s authoritarian anti-establishment posturing plays to fears and resentments under a banner of “Make America Great Again,” an undefined goal that calls forth the sentiment that the establishment has disregarded and disrespected Americans with 1950’s values and sensibilities. It’s not so much a vision as a retro-fantasy about how things were once better.
In a commentary in today’s NY Times Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson argue that Hillary actually is visionary.
Mrs. Clinton has put forth an ambitious and broadly popular policy agenda: family and medical leave, continued financial reform, improvements in the Affordable Care Act, investments in infrastructure and scientific research, measures to tackle global warming and improve air and water quality, and so on.
But voters and pundits alike complain that she’s a cold-eyed realist who hasn’t articulated what George H. W. Bush once wistfully referred to as “the vision thing.” Instead, it’s Bernie Sanders who has been cast as the visionary in the Democratic contest, an idealist brimming with inspiring (if often unrealistic) proposals.
The bulk of the article makes the historical case for government’s role in out national prosperity and individual well-being. It’s more about how the current political discourse ignores the facts of our past. In effect it implies that Hillary actually has the key to making America great, but keeps it hidden.
Our nation badly needs a dialogue that reminds Americans why a capable government is essential and how much we are paying for its erosion. Mrs. Clinton understands this, but she may have neither the opportunity nor the inclination to say it.
I think the authors are on to something.
The 2016 Stump Speeches
Most of what we read and hear about the presidential race is sound bites and wonkish analysis of what the candidates are saying. In doing research for an essay, I discovered an excellent series of articles that present what the candidates are saying in the context of their personal history and what they have said in the past. I recommend it:
The Next “Big Short”
As I left the Tropic Cinema yesterday (1/24/16) after being spellbound by The Big Short I was awash in mixed emotions. The 
overall feeling was a profound sense of hopelessness. But mixed with it was a sense of vindication because my own assessment of how the real estate bubble happened was confirmed by the film.
I can’t honestly say that I saw it coming, at least not on my own. I happened to read an article about a couple of MIT guys who were predicting the crash and how their predictions were being dismissed by the real estate professionals. What those guys said made sense to me and squared with my own experience of booms and busts in commercial real estate.
My morose mood came from the sense that the collective self-deception and willful blindness that created the 2007-8 economic crisis was not cured by the ensuing bust. People continue to game the system. Eight years later the perpetrators are sharing a bonus pool that exceeds by a factor of two the total earnings of all those who work at or below the minimum wage. While the prosecution of drug dealers and petty thieves occupies most of the workload of prosecutors across the nation, the guys who erased about 6 trillion dollars of private assets haven’t missed a beat, or a meal, it would seem.
I see another one coming. Not housing this time but fossil energy. I earnestly hope that in eight more years I am not feeling angry about “The Big Short 2” describing how the energy industry savaged the land, water, and air before needing to be bailed out by the very taxpayers they steam-rolled.
Drilling companies are going bankrupt at an alarming rate. Twenty-six went belly up in 2015, up from five and six in the 
preceding two years. Even mammoth Exxon’s drilling business is losing money. Why? Because the supply of fossil energy far exceeds the demand. The price of oil dropped below $30 a barrel. The price of natural gas will stay low for the foreseeable future. While we like the prospect of gasoline being under $2 a gallon, we know that global warming not only happening but it’s happening at an alarming rate. There won’t be a big resurgence of demand for fossil fuels without disastrous consequences.
But the energy industry doesn’t see it coming. The agencies that rate their stocks and bonds don’t seem to see it coming either. The great juggernaut lumbers on. Pennsylvania’s state government, has been working overtime to expedite the development of 30,000 miles of pipeline infrastructure to collect shale gas and deliver it to Philadelphia for processing into liquid natural gas (LNG). There are 9,000 fracked shale gas wells of which less than half are connected to collector pipelines. There are 16,000 more approved permits awaiting drilling.
Everybody in this voracious industry wants to make a killing before the music stops, and there are unwary banks and investors who will put up the money. As “The Big Short” so cleverly depicted with the housing boom, the various players will use guile and craft to shift the ultimate risk to others until the bubble bursts.
What then? Ordinary people (Donald Trump’s ‘losers’) will be left with farms and forests scarred by well pads, collector right of ways, pipelines, compressor stations, LNG refineries, all fallen into disrepair and abandonment because their owners are bankrupt or missing in action. They’ll be taxed to fund the sealing of leaking and dangerous orphaned wells. They’ll be experiencing first-hand the recently documented health impacts of methane and dozens of toxins brought to the aquifer and the air by the reckless large-scale perforation of the Earth’s surface.
As we see in The Big Short, there will be some guys and gals, a lot smarter than me, who also see it coming. They will short fossil energy at the right moment and become wealthy overnight.
For my part I have spoken at hearings of the PA Governor’s Task Force and the Delaware River Basin Commission. In the two minutes they allotted me I do little more that say “heads up” and point to the danger. Perhaps this is what each of us must do — just what little we can do — the next right thing. And pray that with Divine Assistance that little bit along with many others’ small but earnest efforts will eventually suffice. God Save America.
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