To Have and To Have Not

Like Curt Schilling before him, Tim Thomas the stellar goal tender for the Boston Bruins is a Boston hero. Like Curt Schilling he is a multimillionaire. As Mitt Romney would say, neither pro athlete has to apologize for his wealth because they earned it.
One may argue even if the free market is willing to pay Schilling $8 million and Thomas $6 million neither is a heart surgeon, and there's something out of whack here, but that is semi free market, monopoly twisted capitalism. Neither broke any laws pulling in their millions.
But Tim Thomas, like Schilling before him, is angry. He's angry because that socialist in the White House wants to give money to the undeserving and because Obama thinks government can and should do some good whereas Tim Thomas thinks government already does too much and wants to take some of his money and give it away to the undeserving.
Now, you might ask, why should anyone care what Tim Thomas or Curt Schiling think about politics or economics or financial fairness. They are professional athletes and we do not watch them because we are interested in their philosophy of economy.
Thomas refused to go to the White House to meet Obama because of his sense of outrage.
He joins the angry rich.
There may have been a time when the rich were smug.
There was probably a time when the rich felt themselves fortunate, chosen even, but they lived their lives of leisure and indulgence with smiles, cognizant of their own good fortune.
Here, in America, the rich are the angry ones.
I got mine fair and square and I want to keep it. Nobody gave me anything. I had to fight for everything I got and I didn't ask anyone for help.
Of course, in the case of professional athletes, there was a lot of infrastructure, from the roads to the stadium to the stadium itself, to the support for college programs where they were nurtured, to the public access to airways which supported the vast sums of wealth made available for their success.
But these angry rich see themselves as living off the grid, above the grid. They owe nothing to anyone, because they had to work hard.
I hear this from doctors not infrequently.
I worked hard in smelly organic chemistry labs for years in college and medical school while my classmates partied.
Of course, those labs, those schools were supported by government grants and the opportunity to work hard at Harvard or NYU or Vanderbilt was supported by their parents, so the coaching that made them good was given them by others, whether family or community.
But these guys are still angry and entitled.
Talk about an entitlement program. Talk about a sense of you owed it to me.
Well, then, you are talking about Republicans.

Coddling the Bully

A coworker today told me she didn't like the Republican candidates, each for a different reason--Gingrich is clearly mentally unstable; Romney is a Cylon robot; Ron Paul is an anarchist; Ron Santori is a demagogue. But she doesn't like Obama either because he's ineffective and has accomplished nothing.

I tried to think of what to say: Well, he is ineffective because of anything he has failed to do, or because of anything he has done? Or is he a failure because the Republicans in Congress have been successful in making the government fail? The Republicans say, we are going to make this man fail, the fate of the country be damned. So is that his fault?

But that is not a line which is memorable or even works.

What can you say to a crowd which watches a playground bully, like Mitch McConnell, walk up and start pounding on the fat kid and the crowd says, "Well, the fat kid should have done more" ?

Blame the victim.

Mitch McConnell says right on camera his highest priority is preventing the re election of President Obama. Not jobs. Not repairing the economy. Not protection of the nation from terrorism. Defeat Obama. That's all that matters.

And there's a majority of Republicans in the House of Representatives who feel the same way. And there's 51 senators who feel the same way.

So the intransigence of the Congress is a reason to turn Obama out of office.

The last Democratic president, the Republicans impeached for marital infidelity, and the Republicans who led the charge were Newt Gingrich, who even as he inveighed indignantly against this moral reprobate in the White House was carrying on with a woman dozens of years his junior, behind the back of his wife. And Henry Hyde, same thing. He had an affair when he was just Clinton's age, behind his wife's back, but oh, that, he said, was just a "youthful indiscretion." Wink. Wink.

But all this is is just fine.

Is this a great country or what?

Until we get our own heads on straight, how can we hope for a leader who has half a chance of succeeding?

Tidy Lies

"There was something bracing about the way he did it--his passion, his humor, his intolerance of stupidity, his preference for leaving an honest mess for others to clean up rather than a tidy lie for them to admire." --Michael Lewis, of Bill James in Moneyball.

This morning I was faced with a Hobbesian choice, which is to say, a choice between the lesser of two evils.

Caught on the treadmill, I had 60 minutes to watch TV programs with men seated in TV studios talking about who is going to win the Super Bowl, or I could watch air head bimbos with great makeup talk about who is going to win the Presidential campaign or I could watch last night's Republican debate in Florida.

I went with Florida--at least there were no commercials, which are often better than the programming, but this morning even the commercials were uninspired, so I had to stick with the debate.

What was fascinating was listening to each of the four horsemen of the apocalypse inveighing on the horrible, and I mean horrible, state our country is in, and they each quoted numbers and statistics so fast it was difficult to keep up with how bogus those numbers really are.

Newt Gingrich is a particularly facile historian. Did you know we entered World War II properly? We declared war on Japan through an act of Congress--the last time we actually did go to war by an act of Congress. Now, that is the proper way to get into a war. It makes the war much more respectable, or something.

Not that Newt disagrees with the wars we waged without an act of Congress--he is all for Vietnam and the Gulf War and Iraq and Afghanistan, far as I can tell. So are all the other Republicans, save Ron Paul, but he is not really a Republican.

They all know so many things and have the numbers (which I suspect they make up as they go along) to show: 1. The economic morass was caused by Obamacare.--which actually hasn't kicked in yet. 2. The economic morass was caused by the bail out bill or by the Federal Reserve (which is a Democratic Party plot to bankrupt the nation by lending money to welfare queens) and 3. We'll be right as rain just as soon as we stop all government spending and pay down the deficit and balance the budget--but none of this will require the rich paying more taxes; in fact if the rich pay less, the country will recover even more quickly. 4. President Obama's rejecting the pipeline from Canada proves he hates American industry and workers. 5. The tourist industry in Florida would be benefited greatly by more drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. 6. Ronald Reagan was the greatest President ever because he fought for free markets and good old capitalism and limited government spending which resulted in the greatest explosion of our national debt and deficit ever seen before or since him.

No, wait, that last part wasn't mentioned. Reagan was a saint. He did all the right things for the economy.

The trouble with the tangled woof of fact is that it is so untidy.

Economics 101

As I noted last time, I admit to being untrained in economics, but that does not mean I know less about what drives our economy than professional economists. This is sadly true because of the sad nature of the dismal science, which is all conjecture and bias and precious little science.

The scientific method requires hypothesis, test (experiment), conclusion, reassessment when the next experiment gets done. The economist, whether he is the cluelss Milton Friedman or the more informed Paul Krugman, has to stop after the first step. His version of experiment, testing is, at best, a mathematical model.

Because the model involves math, it intimidates everyone but other economists, so it is often accepted as truth.

But if you want to learn something about the real economy, log on to the New York Times of 1/22/12, Sunday, and read the article "How U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work."

The central story here is how Steve Jobs suddenly decided he wanted stratch proof glass screens on his iPhone because he had carried the plastic screen iPhone in his pocket and the screen was scratched by his keys. And he wanted the change NOW. So his minions scurried off to China, where the factory had a dormitory filled with workers who were roused from sleep, given a biscuit and a cup of tea and they started churning out the new phones with the new glass screens overnight and Mr. Jobs had his glass screen iPhone.

This is supposed to demonstrate that: 1/ Chinese workers are more flexible and 2/ Diligent 3/ Skilled and 4/ Dedicated than American workers. Those Chinese workers in that factory will never be displaced by American workers. Steve Jobs loved them. His successors at Apple love them.

But the question you have to ask yourself is, how important was it that iPhone had a new glass screen overnight? If American workers had come in the next Monday, after they'd had a weekend at their kids soccer games, hunting or fishing, and they'd got those glass screens into the iPhones, say a week or two later, how much market share would iPhone and Apple have lost?

Here in Hampton, New Hampshire, I was astonished when I first arrived in 2008, and discovered the laundramat closed down at 3 PM on Saturday, as did the barber shops and many of the stores. It was like when I was a kid in Bethesda, Maryland and everything closed down at 1 PM on Saturday and nothing was open on Sunday, which was God's day, and you were supposed to be in church and not worshiping at the palace of Mammon on Sunday.

But you know, we all managed to plan a little and to get our shopping done and that meant we played ball on Saturday and Sunday rather than shopping. I doubt we bought any less; we just planned our shopping in advance.

I could be wrong.

By the time I left Bethesda, I could have my hair cut at 7 AM, Sunday morning by the Vietnamese barber, but, you know, if he had not been open then, I would have gone in on a Monday.

Anyway, this is all a digression, I understand.

A man I know who got rich making dress shirts for executives told me about the factory he had in Arizona. He lived in Maryland, but his factory was in Arizona and ultimately, he discovered he could make the shirts at a factory in China, pay for the shirts to be shipped back to the USA and he still could get the same quality workmanship and shirt for ninety-seven cents less per shirt and when you're selling hundreds of thousands of shirts to Brooks Brothers every year, that savings becomes significant.
But when you really questionned this guy, in a friendly, non judgmental way, what became evident was what really attracted him was he owed nothing to the workers in China. When he got his shirts from China, he sent the cloth in and out came the shirts and he paid the factory owner and he had no more cares than how to get the shirts back to the USA and sell them.

He did not want to be the father of the people who made the shirts. When he complained about "regulations" in the USA, he was talking about inspections to be sure the factory didn't go up in flames, and negotiations over pensions for the workers, and taxes he paid for the workman's comensation insurance, and taxes he paid for the employer's share of worker's taxes and the money he spent on medical insurance for his workers, which any year could rise enough to wipe out any profit margin.

"I just wanted to get a shirt out of a factory," he said. "I didn't want to adopt 400 children."

For this same reason, American companies now "outsource" or contract out lots of tasks and work to people who have a contract, but are not on their payroll. You do a specific task, and I pay you a set fee and I have no more responsibity to you or for you.

This is a far cry from the man in Georgia who kept his broom factory open, making specialty brooms because he had 30 workers who had worked for him for 30 years and he felt he owed them a job. And it's a far cry from the partner in the real estate development firm who kept the firm open after he and his two partners struck it so rich on a single deal that his two partners promptly retired, but he felt he had to keep the firm open because 12 people depended on him for their jobs. His partners were living the lives of country squires in Hunt Country in Virginia, while he went in to the office every day and worried about health insurance costs for his employees.

The fact is, that sort of paternal feeling of the CEO of the company who feels he owes his workers and his country something is becoming quaint and has been rejected as sentimental.

The company is run for the guys who own it, which, even in a publicly owned company like Apple, means Steve Jobs and a few others, who make hundres of millions while the Chinese factory workers live in dormatories.

Is this right?

Wrong question. That's the way it is, under current law and under current American values.

But it reveals the big lie in what the Republicans have been saying, that it's "Regulations" that is keeping American companies from creating jobs for American workers.

Regulations have nothing to do with it. You can say, well regulations which require factory owners to deal with unions are government regulation, and regulations which require the factory not burn down or poison the workers or the river next to it are regulations and regulations which take the form of taxes are government's heavy lash. But the fact is, American factory owners are willing to bear all that to make cars in America because it's still cheaper than trying to do it in Asia, and when it stops being cheaper, those jobs will vanish.

Fact is, making a product can happen anywhere and with current modes of transport, the other side of the world is just fine--the product is as close to you as your nearest Walmart.

American jobs will have to be done here only for those things where proximity matters.

You can out source the reading of an X ray to a doctor in India--and many if not most hospitals have already done this. You go to the emergency room after a brick has fallen on your head and the CT they do there is read in India, by a radiologist who doesn't even have to be roused from bed. He's already awake because it's 3 PM in India. But the neurologist who examines you, the IV tech who starts your intravenous line, the nurse who gives you your medication, those folks cannot be in India.

What's making American workers lose out to Chinese workers is a lot bigger than any set of government regulations. The Republicans are just looking for a scapegoat which will benefit their own election ambitions, and they've found it in "The Government."

Creating jobs here at home will take more thought than a few clever slogans. We've got to figure out what we can do here that those Chinese workers in the factory dormatories cannot do faster and more cheaply. We'll be happy to have what those Chinese factories can give us, but we have to figure out what they cannot do for us and we can do those jobs here.

Envy

I was a science major in college, so I never got much beyond the introductory courses in economics.

I did, however, have lots of courses in anthropology, and some in psychology, and I can still read.

I've been reading Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson on economics and politics.

What these authors demonstrate, to my mind convincingly, is the very fact the distribution of wealth has become so extreme is a bad thing.

Those who control wealth or those who think they may one day control wealth will say there is no harm in a small percentage of people getting control of most of the wealth in the country, just as long as the pie keeps getting bigger so the small slice left to the "bottom 80%" is actually only relatively small--it is still so big it keeps that bottom 80% happy.

If the American economy is big enough, the poorest among us are still much richer than people in Africa and South America and most of Asia. The poor still have big color TV's, computers, automobiles, if not houses, then warm and dry apartments, entertainment, vacations and, this argument runs, even our poorest would be considered rich in Africa, Brazil, Asia.

The argument is, don't envy the American rich, their wealth does not make you poorer, or hurt you in any way. In fact, the argument goes, their wealth is good for you.

In fact, what Hacker and Pierson demonstrate is neither of these things are true. As the rich have got richer, the poor have got poorer, and in fact not just the poor have got poorer but people who were not poor in the 1950's, 1960's, 1970's have become relatively poorer.

I realize there are all sorts of statistics out there, but this fits my own personal experience. When I lived in a very asymmetric society--Washington, DC, even though I made more money than I do living in New Hampshire I felt poorer, and in fact was poorer in some very measurable ways.

The presence of rich people diminished my life.

How?

I had to compete with a group of much richer people when I went to buy a house. I was barely able to afford a three bedroom house in Washington, a very small three bedroom, with few amenities, because the competition for housing in the WDC area was made intense by rich people who would buy smaller houses, crush them and build McMansions. Gentrification became mansionification.

Money for the rich was simply less valuable than it was for me.

When the small ranch house next door was bought, crushed and a huge McMansion erected, my own house looked like a carriage house, and when I tried to sell, many buyers drove up and passed us buy and many buyers told us they could simply not get around the dwarfing effect of the house next door. Our house, assessed at $850,000 sold for $650,000, in no small part, and in reasonably direct measure, because of the power of the rich guy to diminish the value of what I owned.

The rich simply have the power to bid up prices, to blow away competition.

This is the essence of what Trusts used to do in the days of the robber barons--get control of a market, and ruin their competitors.

Moving to New Hampshire, I find there are rich people here, but not as many, and so my house is much bigger, and I can compete for restaurant meals and other goods and services because there are not enough rich people to out compete me. I feel wealthier, even though I am actually making less money.

People abbreviate this as "a lower cost of living." What that means is, you don't just feel wealthier in a society where incomes are more evenly distributed and there is no heavy weight of rich people tipping the boat over, you are actually safer and more wealthy.

The rich constitute a weight which threatens to capsize the whole boat.

If we taxed the rich at rates which were more prevalent in the 1950's, it's not that we could take what we got from the rich and make individual poor people middle class--those numbers do not add up. But what we could do is make it more difficult for the rich to simply bid up life for the middle class. We could use the money to educate, train and employ the middle class and help more of them to make the leap up to the next level.

The one percent are not irrelevant to the middle class. They are keeping the other 99% down. They may live in walled off, gated communities, but their influence seeps out and contaminates the whole pie.

Money is power and when you allow 1% to have too much power, the whole body politic is poisoned.

That's not the politics of bitter envy. That's simply what happens.

It's not so obvious in rural areas, like New Hampshire, where even poor people have land which makes them feel protected from others around them. It's more obvious to city people, like New Yorkers, who seem the limousines pull up the clubs and restaurants and they see when even 1% of the population wants something, that means you are crowded out. Even more so for living space, and space to recreate. The buildings which line Central Park have no middle class people. Only rich people look out over Park vistas.

We get so accustomed to the idea that, "Well, that is not for people like me," we do not even see any more that things don't have to be that way.

Shoreline property on Lake Winnipesaukee no longer belongs to middle class people, who owned small bungalows. They have all been moved out and displaced by the one percenters. And one of the biggest compounds along the lake belongs to Mitt Romney.

There is no Jones Beach, at Lake Winnipesaukee, no major public beach. The lake has become, for the most part, the property of the rich.

Along the Seacoast, there is public ownership. Hampton has three public beaches, and although private rich homes loom above the beach at Plaice Cove, the beach is open to the hoi polloi.

This is, to put it bluntly, a good thing. But as economic power is ineluctably translated into political power, one can see the movement toward a Lake Winnipesaukee effect may yet, years hence, grip the seacoast.

James Baldwin once observed that slavery harmed not just the enslaved, but it hurt the masters as well. That was a very keen insight. Those who dominate, who have to spend the energy and the malevolent force to dominant others become meaner, unhappier people.

We ought to consider taking the benevolent action of saving the rich and powerful from themselves, by taxing them down to size.

Democrat Nation: Where is Our Don Draper?

Okay, citizens, we need to think.

Republicans have, it must be admitted, outclassed Democrats for years when it comes to selling ideas.

Romney is confronted with the fact he pays only 15% income tax when the average nurse or police officer pays 20%.

"I will not apologize for being successful," he says.

That's a sure fire applause line. Who would want a fellow citizen to apologize for his own, hard won success?

A lot of politics is about saying outrageous things and making them sound reasonable and correct.

So how do we point out the problems with this line?

"It's not your success in making money you should apologize for...it's your unwillingness to allow others to have a chance to be successful."

No, you haven' t shown how his success prevents others from achieving success.

How about, "You mean, you don't have to apologize for bribing the referees?"

That's closer.

Or maybe, "So you refuse to tax billionaires, and you refuse to apologize for that?"

Or, "So, if the game is rigged, the losers are guilty of envy?"

Or, "So, if the casino has rigged the games, the losers are guilty of envy, if they complain?"

I don't know. We need to work on this.

Other things which need to be answered:

The estate tax is the death tax.

Regulations are the government's way of torpedoing our economy. If it weren't for the government, the economy would be going gang busters.

What we need is a Don Draper of our own. We need a bunch of Democrats sitting around a table at a nightclub, a drinking bourbon, thinking up a good ad campaign.

I open the floor to the public. Let me hear from you.

We need some help here in New Hampshire.

Al Sharpton Finds Redemption in Blueberry Pie

Al Sharpton has redeemed himself.

Whatever sins he has committed in the past, however much he has offended by being a blow hard, an exploiter, a self promoter, however much you may have disliked him in the past, go on line and find his "Blueberry Pie," commercial.
Finally, a Democrat who can actually communicate.
He tells the tale of kids being caught with blueberry pie all over their faces and proclaiming their innocence to their indignant mother, who cooked the pie. "Oh, no, it wasn't us!"
You have to see it for yourself. If I were smarter, I'd figure out how to do a link to it.
But it's just right--to pick up the pie motif. The American pie, which the Republicans and their rich patrons have eaten and they claim they had nothing to do with the way the pie got consumed.

Oh, wait, I may have done it. Try clicking on this link:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=uisC1zHcxLk

Every Democrat should be wearing a T shirt or a sweat shirt with the Republican Pie chart (see above) to keep that image in the eyes of every citizen, red and blue.

It is, as Mitt Romney would say, the politics of bitter envy. And it works for us.