Insulting People is now Standard Operating Procedure and a Danger to our Democracy

David Brooks wrote an outstanding column yesterday on what the design of democracy creates and how the current political atmosphere created by Grover Norquist, the NRA, the Tea Party, and personified by Donald Trump's authoritarian philosophic tendencies is poisoning our Democratic traditions and despite these people wrapping themselves up in the Constitution, the process they are employing to try and implement/enforce their positions has little basis in a well functioning Democracy.  So this election is evolving into a referendum on how a American Democracy should function and it is the GOP that is offering something very radical.

Link to David Brooks Column


I know RedStateVT hates the Kardashianing of America, yet he can be prone to copying Donald Trump's pattern of using partisan characture to slam individuals without showing respect for those individuals, and the acceptance of this behavior as appropriate is closely related to the popularity of the Kardashian's.  It is a focus on celebrity fandom as a cultural phenomenon, and the use of it as a political tool to trash political opponents.

So it is no surprise that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin have a mutual admiration society for each other as they both use this technique to advance their political fortunes.  And that is only one reason I detest Donald Trump.

I have detested Donald Trump for many years as a High Yield Bond Analyst.  I never had his bonds in my portfolio because I found him untrustworthy and he actively use bankruptcy remote corporate structures to rake in money for himself and then let the company go bankrupt as was his legal right.

He also trades in his name, selling it to others so he can get paid and they can attract uninformed people who think that by associating themselves with Trump, they will achieve personal benefit.  That was the business model of Trump University which failed to educate its students.  So it is no wonder that Trump says he loves the uneducated, they paid tuition to him with student loans they cannot pay back.  As President, would he forgive those loans?

And today we read in the Sports Section, that the members of a golf resort in Florida that Trump bought before it went bankrupt have a Class Action lawsuit against Donald Trump.  The Class had refundable deposits that when Trump bought the gold course assumed as part of the deal, meaning he owed the money.  Trump then proceeded to try and strong arm people into giving up their rights to a refund for pennies on a dollar by threatening them with other possible economic paths that would harm them.  Doesn't Donald Trump love golfers too?

So Chris Christie in an effort to find a job for himself after he fails to win reelection as Governor of New Jersey endorses Donald Trump and we have one bully fawning over another bully.  In the process Governor Christie called Donald Trump an honorable man.

An honorable man does not conduct business like Donald Trump conducts business.  An honorable man does not insult entire classes of people.  People deserve respect.  That is above all else what our Judaic Christian history as a democratic country is founded upon.  Respect for individual rights and a democratic process which involves negotiation to maintain a stake in government for all.

And meanwhile, there is a news article that one reason for Japan's economic malaise is the fact that the population has declined by 1 mm people over the last 5 years.  This supports my position that if Trump deports 11 mm people from the U.S., the U.S. economy will go into a recession that will last for years which will expand the fiscal deficit and ruin fixed income as an asset class for another decade, at least.  That is hardly making America Great Again.  America is great when our economy is great.

RedStateVT claims that the passage of ObamaCare violated this tradition of respect.  But ObamaCare was designed by the Heritage Foundation and implemented by a GOP Presidential Candidate in his state first, where it was successful.  So Mitch McConnell in his desire to make Obama a one term president, tries to foil Obamacare and demonizes GOP ideas on how to improve the populations health and then the GOP punditry blames Obama for poisoning the atmosphere. I have no idea what else the President could have done to make the GOP happy beyond taking the blueprint of a right wing market based Think Tank and making it happen.  My memory has faded on the political machinations of 2009/2010.

This is what GOP punditry has become;  using Falsehoods to belittle people:  the President is not an American, he is a Muslim Socialist,  an all powerful political manipulator.  He is anti-Democratic.  I could go on but if you read this far, I know I am trying your patience by trying to express my disgust for lying.

As a manager, I fired anyone who lied to me and it happened 3 times in my 15 years as a manager.  Lying is a fireable offense and I acted upon it.  I would not like to say that I will not vote for a lier, but since all politicians shade the truth, we are left trying to pick out the least offensive individual in that regard.  But the GOP has become so anti-Democratic, that none of them can be trusted with anything. 7 debates and I don't know what any of them would do to reform health care except return us to the hell that was health insurance before ObamaCare.  And they want to balance the budget; how will that happen?  They want to create a War budget for the Middle East and the Ukraine, and sub-Saharan Africa, and Libya and the South China Sea and ......, but cut taxes, not raise taxes to pay for it.  And will all this conflict play out in the valuation of global wealth?

If you read this far, thank you for reading.  This election is trying my soul and I get so agitated that I need to vent.  I hope other Democratic voters exist in sufficient number to protect our Democracy.

The GOP is truly insane now from a policy standpoint.

Sunday Musings 1/31/16

As I thought about my budget for February, I realized it was a Leap Year, which means we get one more day of news about this wacky Presidential election which has the possibility of having very unusual outcomes, particularly if certain GOP candidates become President.

One thing we know for sure, the next President will not be an atheist. 51% of voters will never vote for an atheist.  We rank lower than Communists, Socialists, and any number of other measures as being unworthy of being elected President.  Frank Bruni wasn't commenting on that survey, but he did note something similar.

"It’s impossible to know the genuineness of someone’s faith. That’s among the reasons we shouldn’t grant it center stage."

"Religion was integral to our country’s founding. It’s central to our understanding of the liberty that each of us deserves. But so are the principles that we don’t enshrine any one creed or submit anyone — including those running for office — to religious litmus tests."

Link to Bruni's GOP Holy War

God help us if the Tea Party gets elected to the White House.  They really want to dismantle the government and run it like a business.  That is what brought us lead in Flint, Michigan's water supply and that is why our infrastructure is falling apart.  You cannot replace every bridge, pipe, tunnel, sewage treatment facility in the country when it breaks down.  Replacement needs to be methodical.

And the NIH, the National Institute of Health, helps keep us healthy in ways that are very unknown to the public.  I was out to dinner with the son of a friend of ours who is going to Business School and wanted to thank those who helped put him in a position to be accepted and get a scholarship to boot.  One of his friends is in a combined MD/PhD program.  It is very hard to get into these because not only is it competitive but very smart people want to be part of it because the work is the leading edge of medical research.  And it has been funded by the NIH since the 1930's.  These students get free tuition and a small living allowance because they are becoming both Medical Dr's and scientific researchers.  The NIH created and has continued the Program because Dr's tend to focus on the here and now and see only the patients issues.  Scientists tend to function in their Ivory Tower focusing on theory.  Someone needs to bridge that divide and it is this small number of Dr Scientists who are trained by NIH funding who perform that role.  There is no profit in much of the research.  The profit comes when these guys/gals figure something out and then the Pharmacy companies try to find the drug.  If the NIH is disbanded as some Tea Party types would like to do, this program will disappear and progress on many aspects of understanding the science of disease will be retarded.

My new friend is studying infectious disease.  His current focus is drug resistant TB, but what he learns will be useful for fighting all drug resistant infectious disease.  How is that not a critical role for the government to try and provide some level of safety to its citizens?

I spent a portion of last night watching Eric Clapton's 70th Birthday show.  He played Crossroads, which was originally written by Robert Johnson in the 20's and then became a signature song for Cream in the 60's.  And I mused, how many other song writers from that era still have their music being played 100 years later with attribution to their greatness.  Other than Irving Berlin, and people like Mozart, Beethoven, etc, not very many.  So when Eric Clapton calls Robert Johnson the most important Blues Singer ever, he is really making an understatement of greatness.  I miss my records, I  had two Robert Johnson recordings, but you have to downsize and you cannot keep everything.

Why Flint, Michigan's Water is Important, Politically

There is lead in Flint, Michigan's water because local GOP officials, of all races, focused on cutting costs without thinking through other issues that needed thinking through. This was not environmental racism, although that may exist in certain places and may have existed in some individual's responses to information as it came to light, but it is not part of the defining moment here.

Background:

Flint, Michigan, a city of near 100,000, went bankrupt and was taken over administratively by the state, which has a GOP governor, who was a big time businessman.  He had to figure out a way to fix Flint's finances, while minimizing the cost to Michigan taxpayers who are not residents of Flint or part of its local economy.  So, one thing the new local administration did was switch from Detroit's water so the local river water because Detroit, also in state administration for poor financial management, was charging Flint a lot for sharing Detroit's water.

Danger of Sole Focus on Cost

What should have happened?  After deciding that the Flint river was an option, experts should have been consulted as to whether the water was safe to drink.  Apparently, water can be safe to drink but if chemicals are not added to it to protect the water pipes, the water pipes can corrode from stuff in the water from past pollution and the water pipes release stuff, including lead, into the water flowing through the pipe.  There are water experts who know that this type of analysis is standard operating procedure in well run water departments.

It is easy to see why costs were a focus, but you see in today's GOP a distrust of expertise, if such expertise thwarts a political goal.  And cutting costs so you can cut government revenues is the overriding policy of today's GOP at all levels of government.  But when you cut the cost of things that protect the public's safety, you lose the support of the public.  That is why our doomed to failure goal of zero terrorist events is unofficial policy.   Politicians of every political persuasion practice a policy of trying to achieve 100% protection against terrorism because people want to be safe.

Well, fire response, policing, national defense are no more important to the population than environmental safety.  That is the good fact that we see in both the voting population's response to Flint and the GOP governor's acknowledgment that he failed the people of Flint.  It means that the GOP, despite numerous Presidential candidate's pledging to shut down the EPA, will face a political uproar if the Democrats paint accurately just what the EPA does to protect the population and what will happen if there is no more EPA.  There will be degradation of the water and air in the country because pollution costs business nothing and the cost is spread across society; and preventing pollution costs business because they put the cost raises prices and reduces volumes, lower profits, but protecting society in ways which allow other businesses to sell products and satisfy social goods.

Why the Environment is Important

1st, lead has been removed from paint because lead is very dangerous to the development of the brain in children.  It reduces their IQ and if they ingest enough, they become so mentally disabled  they become retarded and wards of the state.  So there is a cost that local governments must pay if they try to cut costs protecting the environment.  Traditionally, lead has not been widely ingested, so, unfortunately, Flint is a major experiment in what happens to a population of all ages if there is wide spread consumption of lead in volume.

2nd,  if there was no EPA, paper companies and other industry would be dumping stuff into the water.  That is why the Flint river is polluted to begin with, the auto industry was dumping stuff into the river for decades before the Clean Water Act and the EPA forced them to stop.  But they didn't force them to clean up the sediment in the river which still has all that bad stuff in it.


Why is Flint so Important?

Society pretty much takes for granted our current state of relatively clean water and air.  Society is not divided about the need for clean drinking water and clean air.  This is where the GOP governor's response is so important, if local GOP leaders start to acknowledge the environment is important, then GOP leaders in places where the rise is sea level is going to effect communities are going to have to develop some policy position on global warming other than denial or "it is too late and too costly to do anything about it".   Society  is very divided about green house gases, and this is where leadership is needed.   Local leaders are going to have educate the population and do something to motivate a change in GOP national policy on Global Warming.

We can only hope that the Democrat's figure out a way to message all this, with a focus on costs and not on environmental racism.  Not everything is racism, people of all races are effected by the environment.

The Tea Party Was Alive and Well 100 years ago

Ken Burn's Prohibition was rerun over the past two weeks and I watched it more completely this time.  I was struck by the similarity between the Prohibitionists and the Tea Party today.  Both were/are dominated by religious rural white people who believe in the moral superiority of their position to what the people on the other side believe.

Prohibition failed for several big reasons which include exceptions were made for religious reasons allowing Catholics and Jews to have wine made and economic reasons, farmers had to be allowed to utilize their excess apples to made hard cider.  Also, alcoholic products were allowed to be deemed as medicinal.  Domestic production to satisfy this legal demand was allowed.  Also, the U.S. is not an island excluded from the influence of what other countries allow and what the free market system will do to create a profit.  Alcohol was manufactured in other countries and smuggled into the U.S.

But this overlap of legal and illegal led to a dominance in many places of the power of the illegal profits and what was involved in the maintenance of that cash flow.  Gang warfare and the Mob grew in stature as a direct result of this.

The consequences of all this were varied, but not least of all, the wealth and power of these gangs/Mob almost certainly led to their dominance of various unions and the importation of drugs, which fostered both domestic demand and foreign production, with all the commiserate problems for lawful society in the countries where illegal drugs are produced today.

There is also a book out now on Prohibition and the book review today credits the author with identifying two critical result of Prohibition.  The 1st is how the enforcers of the Volstead Act targeted immigrant and black communities at a time when those communities were growing in number at a faster rate than the "Dry" communities were.  And that enforcement was both selective, fed corruption in the policing, and in some parts of the country a tool of racists policy enforcement.  The 2nd is how the actual law enforcement led to birth of big government.  Federal police powers grew, wire tapping was developed, jail construction was expanded and directly fed the belief that the Federal Government could develop solutions for other problems of society, such as poverty, protecting labor, and controlling racism.  The 3rd result was that the complete horror of crime, corruption, uneven enforcement, and loss of tax revenue from sin taxes generated widespread support for ending Prohibition.

What are the lessons for today?  Well, it is too soon to know how the Tea Party will play out, what success they will have in the 2016 election and which policies they might further implement that inflame widespread tolerance of newly illegal things.  But we can see the lessons in some states legalizing pot, while other states do not.  We have already seen the consequences of uneven health insurance while requiring hospitals to provide health services to the uninsured and now the uneven application of the solution.  And one can only wonder what the country will look like if there is an actual effort to find and deport 11 million undocumented immigrants.

What Prohibition should teach everyone is that if a policy over reaches and there is widespread disagreement with a policy, there will be political turmoil, reactions to that turmoil, and consequences of that turmoil.

That is why policies that are implemented are best if there is support for those policies in both political parties and those solutions to problems implemented uniformly by both political parties, recognizing that at the state level regional differences will result in certain differences being tolerated.

Why Foreign Aid Should be a Conservative Priority

It has always struck me that one of the constants of rural conservative anti-Washington beliefs has been foreign aid is wasted tax payer money and should be ended.

Yet, looking at the Year in Review pictures of 2015's events I was struck by the widespread sourcing of refugees on the move: Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Sudan, Libya, Somalia, Central African Republic, miscellaneous other African countries, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Jamaica and no doubt I am missing some other significant sources.

Of course, what made America great is the movement of people in search of a better life and American welcoming them.  As the grandchild of 3 people born in Europe, 2 who migrated here as adults, I am very welcoming of anyone so courageous as to be willing to learn a new language and start over at the bottom in a new society with the belief that life here will be superior to life in the old country.

But as Europe has found out, there is a limit to how many people even a large society can absorb, and I know conservatives types will see a smaller number than I do as what that limit should be, but it cannot be zero unless the developed world uses diplomacy and foreign aid to help these source countries preserve a hope of economic opportunity in a peaceful setting.  If you don't have that, people will migrate from chaos to a rules based society.  That, after all, is the original purpose of religion.  Religion is how leaders 5000 years ago developed rules for society.  When there are no rules, chaos reigns and people want to live in a rules based society.  It is in our basic metaphoric DNA.

So, if you are a conservative person, and you want less rather than more human migration, you should be supporting more diplomacy and more foreign aid because that is how you will reduce human migration.  I realize, foreign aid can be wasted by corruption and that is why you cannot have an open check book for foreign aid; but borders cannot control millions of people who want to migrate with humane processes that respect the human condition if there is chaos where those people originate.

So, preventing chaos everywhere in this world should be a goal of developed world diplomacy and foreign aid.  That should be a basic tenant of any set of political beliefs.