Supply Side Madness

And this demonstrates the huge disappointment digital economy leaders have been to all of us.  I understand they are all business types, with heavy emphasis on digital tech, stand for “progress”..

But they also are behaving like the J.P. Morgan’s of old, the “robber barons” who were the scourge of the 19th century economy.  These crooks dominated the economy until the Great Depression, that broke the public’s illusions about the “wonders” of mass production and of “the assembly line”.

Ford is a good example.  He is considered the father of the modern American automobile, but was a visceral opponent of unions.  The oil and coal industries same thing.  

The idea was then as it is not, maximize profits.  Find more profitable markets, ignore the labor that is making your riches possible, cut costs, drive up productivity; etc.etc.

And then the supply and demand cycle kicked in, the supply was huge, the demand dropped because the non union underpaid workers on the assembly line could not afford the products they were producing.

This is the same phenomenon almost 100 years later that we are seeing with Tesla  and with every other corporations  in America right now.

They have taken over the political process with the same lies they used 100 years ago, that unions were evil, that low wages were good and huge profits and salaries for themselves was the “promised land”.

Except it wasn’t.  Two products came of this:  1.  A huge division between rich and poor and concentration of wealth in a few; Depression.  2.  War.

Why war?  Really is is not difficult to see why.

War drives up demand.  It is what WWII did, ending the depression but killing 55 million in the bargain.  Then after the war, rebuilding and the growth of America’s middle class, caused a boom in consumer goods and growth of a thing called a “global economy”.  

And until about 20 years ago, this worked to spread the wealth so to speak.  And then, our business elite decided to make the whole damned mistake all over again!

The virgin economy of digital came on the stage, with its promise of democratic economic growth, spreading access to the digital economy to all.

And guess what, the robber mentality came into play once again.

Tesla , who also makes solar panels and batteries, who is the electric car guru, claims to be an environment champion, a “trust us” we know solar.

And yet, the democratization and equity spreading promise of solar panels is yet to be realized.  The CEO of Tesla is consumed with the idea of a tunnel in Southern California that will help in his commute to work, not in the selling of solar panels to the wider population.

And the demand side, is ignored for the supply side; with coming disastrous results.

Years ago, the leader of the auto workers in exasperation during negotiations shouted out, “You can continue cutting our salaries and cutting workers, you can continue making huge profits you spend our yourselves, my question is, once everyone else is broke who will buy your damned cars?”

Now its Oil, it’s the oil stupid.  We cannot produce the petroleum to run our economy anymore.  It isn’t there anymore.  Wind and solar are our only chance, coupled with yes, electric cars, buses and trains.  But this huge threat to civilization itself is ignored by the business elite.  They are deaf, dumb and blinded by greed.  

The  robber barons are consumed with cutting workforce to fight unions, who are working for equity to the digital economy.  Really they are fighting to drive demand up so the economy works.  

And what  we get are housing prices so high in the Bay Area that ordinary workers can’t live there.  So, rather than unionize and pay workers more, the idiots decide to fight the unions, cut demand to drive up supply; it’s  the same mistake that caused the Great Depression.

We did not have a paradigm template in 1929.  We could be excused as a species for being stupid.  We don’t have that luxury now.

The failure of our economy is, make  no I mistake about it, in the leadership of our economy.  And as long as they behave like Rockefeller, Henry Ford, and Morgan, we are doomed again to disaster.

True insanity I is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

Hoover Wrong Again

Victor is a member of the Hoover Institute; a cabal of right wing fools who are paid a high salary, get to live near Stanford University, all because the name sake of a hideous building (Hoover Tower) purports to be an academic research center.

In fact, it is a bastion of right wing politics.

And in this article it shows its base stupidity.

The same stupidity, actually ignorance on poor Herbert Hoover’s part, that saw the world in the paradigm of the 1920s.  This ignorance plunged the United States into a tariff ridden depression in 1929; just like Trump is doing now.

After the war the paradigm was heavily influenced by the disaster that was WWI.  

The war had begun like all European squabbles, a local dispute that led to an assassination and then dragged related monarchs into a localized war.  These wars usually resolved themselves in short order, more ritual than violence.

But America’s Civil War had happened about 50 years earlier.  And it taught the practitioners of war new techniques: rapid fired weapons, artillery and even airplanes.

The Civil War, the first “modern” war was won by attacking civilians and destroying the capacity of the enemy to make war.  Sherman’s “March to the Sea” that was really a practice of “total war” destroyed the south’s civilian capacity to make war.  It ended with mass casualties and a level of violence not seen in mankind’s history.

And that was what first Germany and then other European nations practiced for 1914 to 1918.  The war was almost won at first in the old way, a glorious offensive that out maneuvered the enemy, with minimal casualties, then a brokered peace.  Unfortunately for the youth of Europe, that quick end did not happen, and the artillery and machine guns took over, reducing the war to a killing machine.  

And entire generation of young men died in that war.  Cities and towns were attacked more and more; killing the enemy meant killing ALL the enemy, including women and children.  

Only the entry of the United States, who used the budding technology of the next war, tanks and airplanes, maneuvered around the trenches that had chewed up a generation and defeated the Germans.

What fed this human calamity was a paradigm shift that nobody could see in warfare (except for the state of Georgia that had endured Sherman’s war crimes in 1864).  This total war and attacked on civilians was a key factor in the new paradigm of warfare that killed 55 million twenty years later.

And Victor doesn’t see any of it.  He is still stuck in that paradigm of 1914; he sees nationalism as a manifestation of democracy somehow.  He doesn’t even notice the danger of modern warfare, that this time, holds the real threat of the end of mankind.

But he sits in the phallic  Symbol of Hoover Tower and writes his nonsense, paid well and ignored by a University that should know better.  

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Sometimes Politics has to stand aside.  That happened this afternoon when we watched “John McCain For Whom The Bell Tolls” an  HBO Documentary.

The politics don’t matter, they really don’t.  The leadership does and the service does.  At the end of the day, and that is where McCain is now, that is what counts.  Character does count.

McCain admits over and over again that he made mistakes, that he is human, that he made errors in judgement; etc etc.  He was no saint, but he admitted it.

And he is dying of the same disease that took Ted Kennedy.

I remember the day after Kennedy died.  I was on the putting green at Gold Hills and one of my right wing Republican Friends said cruelly about Kennedy, “They shot the wrong Kennedy many years ago”.

Now there were two Kennedys who were shot dead, but the only one who wasn’t shot was Senator Ted Kennedy.

I told the perpetrator of hate what I thought of him and his lack of humanity and  reminded him that my wife had died of cancer and left.  I didn’t play golf that day.

I did, in my friend’s defense, receive a profuse apology for his stupid statement.  I would like to think he grew a little that day.

But partisan politics is why the statement was made.  And sometimes politics clouds our humanity and our feelings for one another. And politics is an means to the true end: the public interest.

Democracies are messy and clumsy in getting to the public interest.  Often they can be so cumbersome they never get there.  But the alternative, authoritarian fascism is so harmful to the public interest that it simply cannot be allowed.

We are in a very dark place right now.  President Trump has the knack of turning people against one another like no other politician save McCarthy in the 1950s.  And McCarthy did not have access to immediate media, social media and the rest.

And the country is groaning in agony of division and hate.  And the public interest is harder and harder to define.

  And McCain is dying in Arizona with the same cancer that killed Ted Kennedy.

And Ted Kennedy made mistakes; he was involved in a fatal car accident that killed a woman and led to the basic end of his political career.  And we all watched in sorrow as two brothers before him were buried in Arlington, victims of assassination.

I read the review of the HBO documentary about John McCain.  Several reviewers were unkind to the man even now in a political way.  It is as if making more political points even now on a man who is definitely down, who was an American hero by any stretch of the imagination, somehow what, makes you what, superior?

It makes you a spiteful ignorant fool.

Look, the WE  is more important than the ME.  McCain got that.  He fought in an unpopular war,  but for which he convinced  the government later in life, to recognize Vietnam as a country in spite of the politics.   He worked to recognize a country that had tortured him for years.

 He ran for President twice and supported yet another unpopular war, but came to make comments about the fact that it was unwarranted.  He admitted that he was human and made mistakes.

And  he lost  to the first African American elected President.  He famously did not condemn the Confederate Flag, doing what he admitted later was the wrong thing, he did the politically expedient thing; and it didn’t work.  But he apologized for it.  He apologized!  And he also famously took the mike from  deluded woman who claimed Obama was an “Arab” and commented that he was a good man and he would not stoop to that level to get elected; and he didn’t.

Trump stooped to that level with his Birther crap.

He was a hard right conservative in many things.  But that right was not racial, it was political and economic.  He truly believed  in personal liberty unfettered by government.

That of course in my political view is wrong, because again the WE  is more important than the WE.  I sometimes think John knows that in his bones as well.

And McCain agreed with me there, valuing friendship and bipartisan effort as “the regular order”.  The regular order is a government that works for the public good.

Finally, my memory of this American Hero will always be his walking to the podium to cast the deciding vote to destroy the law that was his biggest political rival’s accomplishment.  He could have voted yes and wiped out Obama’s Health Care Bill, the ACA….but he didn’t.

 He put his hand in the air and gave the thumbs down sign.  And that vote saved millions of people’s health care.  And he voted that way not because he agrees with government sponsored health care; he doesn’t.  He voted that way because the public interest was at odds with the proposal,  he knew it, and the power in the Senate had gone around the regular order to get something that would hurt a lot of people.

And all the politics be damned.  For McCain  the country counted first.

And I will stand and salute the man and his honor with that one McCain like demonstration, that one thumbs down movement was his high point.  And he voted that way because it was not in the “regular order”.

That, my fellow citizens in the We not the Me; the regular order is working together for the common good.

And Senator McCain did that more than the other, much more in his life for Whom the Bells Toll.

Your Dishwasher Is Killing Your Grandchildren!

Currently California, that ‘leads’ the United States in renewal electricity energy production, uses about 75  percent coal and natural gas to produce our electricity.  The rest comes from renewables.  A tiny fraction is from solar.

Solar is the least expensive and easiest renewable electricity source but has one big drawback...it is basically free because the sun’s energy is free.

Corporations can’t figure out how to ration it.  They can’t figure out how to turn a profit.

If you are a solar panel owner, you know your electric company moves heaven and earth to charge you for the problems your putting electricity back into the grid causes...leaving out that basically this is a ruse since power lines can run in two directions and the real costs were paid a long time ago.  But many California cities are their own power company, providing electricity to their customers and running the police departments with the revenue.

We have starved cities and counties to death with our Prop 13s and our tax cuts, blaming government for everything and approaching revenue like its killing our souls (the recent 12 cent gas tax that is desperately needed for highway repair and mass transit development).

But we continue as idiots ignoring the FACT that right now over 70% of our electricity is produced by sources that are running out fast.

And sources that can be used to power automobiles, trains and buses are going into your air conditioner!

But it will never run out right?

WRONG!

Put up the solar panels, insist on wind power and tell your idiot conservative friends to SHUT UP...when they complain about bird deaths that allegedly happened from wind power (sound diversion keeps the birds away).

The FACT is greedy and morally bankrupt cities and corporations are quietly fighting solar and wind rather than investing public dollars in them instead of fighting them.  Many  small cities (like Redding, ,CA) own vast areas of public land that could easily hold solar arrays but refuse to invest the money (our money by the way) in solar arrays.

What is wrong with this picture.  We are right now killing our grandchildren right now every time you run your dishwasher.

Trump is no Truman!

First of all Truman was no Trump.  Truman reigned in MacArthur  who stupidly was attempting to invade China.  Good ole Dugout Doug decided on his own that goading China into a war was a good idea in 1950, advancing toward the Chinese Korean border.  This also coordinated with the “lost China” crowd, Republicans who decided that the only way to stop the New Deal was to subvert it through criticisms of foreign policy.

Their constant call for a “get tough” and win back China disregarded the nationalism of the Chinese, was racist from the start, and almost got us into a land war in Asia (which we were trapped into with Vietnam).  

The reasons for this were simple, nothing else worked for the Republican Party that had not only caused the Great Depression but left the country totally unprepared for WWII.  

China warned us several times, then allowed our troops to advanced up the valleys toward China while the Chinese infantry took the high ground, causing one of the worst defeats in United States Army history.

The survivors of that stupidity were able to escape, preserving enough presence to fight the Korean War to a final stalemate that persists today.  Truman fired MacArthur who was scheming to run for President in 1952, as a Republican of course.  

The disaster that he led destroyed his political career.

And Truman had the fortitude and integrity to take a very unpopular stance which preserved the President as Commander in Chief.  MacArthur was a renegade and had to be stopped.  Truman fired him.

Truman also integrated the Armed Services, quite an accomplishment for a man from Missouri, a border state with strong connections to the KKK.

There is absolutely no comparison between Truman and Trump.

Truman was, for the time, a mainstream Democrat, a New Dealer who was selected by an ailing Roosevelt to continue his policies; which he did.  The country may have appeared to be tied fo the New Deal, but the REAL reason for Eisenhower’s election was the disaster of the the Korean War.

People were tired of war.  Many WWII vets had joined the reserves after the war, where a few years into an enlistment and found themselves back on the front lines; with growing families at home.

A long conflict was the LAST thing they would tolerate. 

That was why the Democrats lost in 1952, the same reason they lost in 1968; stuck in an unpopular and costly war.  

Truman was no populist...but he was a great President because he continued the policies of one of the greatest Presidents of all time.

Trump?  He is a shadow of a leader and does not deserve to be mentioned in the same article with Truman.

Fifty Years Ago

Fifty years ago.  I remember being in the Tube Room at the ATO House at Stanford where we all were watching the vote returns for the California 1968 Presidential Primary.

Robert Kennedy had campaigned in the Sac Joaquin Valley the previous week and several of my fraternity brothers had driven to see him. I was going to go, but something came up.

My best friend went.  He related that he was literally overcome with the charisma of Kennedy.  He said that he felt he had just seen the next President.

We both were Juniors and were entering our Senior year.  For all of us this meant our deferments were over and the “green” awaited us.   At the time 200 plus bodies were being sent back home from Vietnam.  Mortality for 21 year olds was a real possibility, or Canada or whatever.  It was not a good time to be young in America.

Dr. King has been assassinated a few weeks before, rupturing our integrated fraternity for reasons I have previously disclosed, splitting the country into riots and exposing the true nature of white supremacy.

It was already a very bad time, when someone ran to the podium just as we were leaving the Tube Room and announced that RFK had been shot.

We sat in stunned silence.  At first the reports were the wounds were not fatal, but by morning Kennedy was gone.

Again, it happened again!  The echoes of JFK’s assassination roared in our ears.    Many of us who were in college had been motivated by JFK’s ask not challenge.  Many of us made our career decisions, to serve our country, in many different ways based on that challenge.  I did, my best friend did...

And now RFK was gone.  And Nixon and Humphrey stood as instant favorites for the Presidency; the position that held the future of the Vietnam War in their hands.

There was no doubt that both would not stop the war.  Nixon said he would; we all knew he was a liar.  Humphrey said the same things, so had LBJ.

A wave of gloom swept over the campus, as anti-war demonstrations got more violent and widespread.

And the negativity and cynicism that is Trump grew in our hearts.

I have characterized the ‘deplorables”  of my generation as some  disgruntled Vietnam Vets, old retirees now, who long ago realized their government was corrupt and lied to them.  The war protestors already were saying that; and had mysteriously “flipped” into anti-tax conservatives taking out their anger over the war on schools and mental health hospitals.  In future years Vietnam Vets would go so far as to throw their medals back in Washington D.C., something that had never happened before in American history.  Anti-government fatigue crystallized into right wing fanaticism.

And that cynicism persisted up to and through the 2016 election.  Once people lose faith in their government it is easy for demagogues to twist that anger into getting themselves into power.

WWI vets in Germany fueled the fascist Nazi growth and helped Hitler take over the country.  Their beef was that the Treaty of Versailles unfairly blamed Germany for WWI and the reparations that ruined Germany’s economy and led to a worldwide depression, fueled Hitler’s rise to power.

The cynicism and anger against the Vietnam War, the repressed history that eventually proved the American government lied to its citizens, fueled everything from the war protests, the civil rights riots and the tax revolt that elected a right winger, Reagan , to power.

Fascism, incredibly, that Roosevelt had rallied the nation against, began to rise in America of all places!

And even the election of a African American could  not stop it, as Vietnam era baby boomers, vets and protestors, made cynical by the lies the government, reacted in a backlash and elected a Hitler ‘want to be’ as President.

The moderation of American Politics that had characterized  political discourse in the country since the Civil War, broke into armed camps of right and left.  

With the Cold War over, the anger crystallized into delegitimization of government period, local and state politics deteriorated into stark conflict, winner take all, and even voter suppression as white supremacy again built in power.

The result is the politics of today, as the Republican Party is all white; white fascism as its base now; and the Democratic Party is diverse with people of color as its base.  The lines are driven to the ground through flags of extremism.

This division is reminiscent of the divisions in American in 1859, when the Whig Party broke into pieces and the modern Republican Party was born, sparking a Civil War between the abolitionism Republican Party and the Slavery Democratic Party.

Is that possible today?  You bet it is.  As long as the anger and mistrust continues to be fueled by that damned war and baby boomers can still vote, the cynicism continues from the now right wing Vietnam Vet and unlikely hippie to the anti-war leftist hippie who gave up on democracy a long time ago.

Many of my hippie friends converted to right wing fascism a long time ago, joining those on the left who both hate what’s left of American democracy.

That leaves the rest of us, the young and those of us who know better, who know that fascism is the enemy, that government is still necessary  and needs to be reformed not discarded; who have read about the Weimar Republican and know the dangers of fascism and remember the warnings that Roosevelt made many years ago: that fascism was the end of times if it was allowed to live.

I have always mourned more than celebrated my country.  The sins of America are original and historical ranging from the most brutal slavery in history to the genocide of an entire race of people; Native Americans.

But it also the home of the most democratic experiment in democratic decision making in the history of man; the experiment in classic liberalism that has lasted the longest of any since Greece.

And it is in real trouble; led by a “Make America Great Again” movement that is fascist to its core.

The Economic Reckoning

It won’t work....it won’t work...it will cause a disaster.

I didn’t do Facebook back in 2005-06 when Bush, flush with actually  winning the Presidency, he lost the election in 2000 but the electoral racist college gave the Presidency to him, along with a right wing Supreme Court;   I wrote the same words in letters to the editor.

I only took a couple economics classes at Stanford and CSU Sacramento, but studied political economy in depth otherwise.  And mega economics (nation state level economic decisions) is rife with examples of the folly of what our good ole Republican Party just did.

First of all, an economic stimulus law in a growth spurt economy is nuts.  It will lead to inflation quickly.  Protectionist laws on top of that is the same recipe for disaster that we endured in 1929.  

The conventional wisdom of the 1920s and before, was that government should not interfere with the economy, with the notable exception of President Theodore Roosevelt’s efforts to break up monopolies (a Republican by the way).

Otherwise Republicans AND Democrats had a hands off policy so income taxes, which were not started until 1916, were not viewed as consequential to the national economy.  

Tariffs were THE major tax source of the government prior to and including the 1920s.

And nobody understood the corrosive effects these protectionist taxes had not only on the global economy (they did not believe such a thing existed) but on the national economy (which nobody understood nor wrote about). It truly was a very different time.

So tariffs were high, since the income tax was so low, it hardly mattered.  Remember too the American Defense industry was virtually non-existent in the 1920s.  

 The world was repulsed by the losses of WWI, so all countries virtually dismantled their militaries.  This meant government spending was practically non-existent.

The air mail wing of the U.S. Postal Office was one of the major spenders of the federal tax dollar...that was it!  

There was no social security, no Medicare, no Air Force, no dam system or TVA.

None of it.  And the accepted notion was high tariffs, since the income tax was seen as a small contributor to government spending, was the main source of the paltry federal government revenue.  Many states spent more than the federal government.    

But, and this a a big exception, there was debt that has accumulated from WWI that had to be paid off.  But America was practically a no federal revenue country, so the debt hung around the neck of the country from 1919, when WWI ended, to 1929.  It was serviced by borrowing from federal banks (there were such things) and by tariffs that began a to irritate and damage recovering economies in Europe and importantly Japan.  Neither source of revenue were even close to paying off what wasn’t even called anything...the concept of a national debt was non-existent.  The federal government actually had balanced the budget every year with the notable exception of WWI.  

That caused tariffs to be radically raised to pay off this debt that many didn’t even understand.  But balancing the debt was something they knew, so they jacked up tariffs to prohibitive levels.  

Because of these tariffs, Japan to feed its economy turned away from the United States and began to attack China.  The real reason for this was to gain access to oil reserves in Northern China to fuel Japan’s growth.  Japan virtually stopped trading with the United States, as did many other nations.  The wheat agricultural industry, that had boomed during WWI because wheat fields in Russia were cut off by the war, was killed by these high tariffs, as countries raised up their taxes on imported wheat to offset the high tariffs the United States was charging.  

This started a precursor of the Great Depression in the farming industry (a big part in those days of America’s economy) and a wheat depression that began in the early 20s.

This warning light in the economy was totally ignored.  Everyone was too busy making fortunes in a Wall Street totally unregulated casino like gambling system, that made millionaires out of middle class fools, who bet on the cum all the time.

And the United States hardly noticed, as it reveled in post war recovery, with absolutely no ability to regulate or even watch the national economy.  It simply was not done.

And then, 1929 happened.  Suddenly the huge economic bubble that had been funded by gambling and wholesale borrowing on collateral that didn’t exist burst.  The high tariffs that had virtually totally funded the government had damaged the recovering economies of Europe and Asia and led to unrest and anger; especially in Germany.  And the debt of WWI still was not paid off. It was an anchor around the neck of the country’s real economic growth.  

So two things happened at once:  1.  Global economic depression 2. The rise of Fascism in Germany, Spain, Japan and Italy.  

And the United States had ten years earlier, in its “Make America Great Again” (they called it America First) retreated into isolationism by not joining the League of Nations and crippled other countries with its high tariffs. 

This was economic isolationism that was a major cause of WWII.  

And the bubble burst.  The deficit spending both private and public that had been driving the false affluence of the 1920s stopped on a dime; plunging the United States and the world into a Great Depression that lasted over 10 years.

Only the spending and mobilization of the most destructive war in human history changed the economic disaster of the 20s.

And we are doing it again...High tariffs and cuts in government spending that has always led to Depression (not Recession) in not only the United States but in the world.

So we are now embarked on the same self destructive path we entered in 1929.

Get your coffee cans out, put your money into it, cause its coming!  

And add to that the inevitable run out of gas and oil, caused by simply using it all up too fast, and you have the perfect storm of an economic/politically and social storm called fascism.  We are living on borrowed time.

Once again that human disaster stalks us all.  The reckoning.....