For Lewis Mumford

This is for Lewis Mumford.....(look him up)

An interesting read and critical to our survival as a species...that's right, where we live and how we live is becoming a critical choice due to the ravages of global climate change AND peak oil.

We cannot keep running to the suburbs in the conventional sense.  The 40 mile one way commute, which is expanding around the Bay Area to a full hour and one half one way, is simply not sustainable.  The congestion of the future is a one way ticket to disaster.  Moreover, fleeing the cities and moving further and further into the countryside is a recipe for disaster!

We need to follow the instincts of this article.  In Sacramento the downtown is seeing a real revitalization, as millenials move downtown and rennonvate aging residential communities with supporting amenities (small businesses and restaurants that are alive with young professionals who love living downtown).  We live in Campus Commons, an older development that was an alternative to the suburan sprawl of the 70s and 80s and is amazing in its continuing revitalization....it is close to everything and is built to encourage interactions and socialization.  And we are seeing younger people moving in and again, reaching out to each other in a quest for community.  Why live in the suburbs when downtown is becoming more the place to be!

Suburbs have often become expensive traps, where people spend hours commuting to work from, living in the house for  a minimum of time, and for sure isolating themselves from everyone in the neighborhood.  These expensive traps  exist surrounding Sacramento right now, with inhabitants painfully becoming aware of the loneliness of life in a huge house, with a pool and nobody to share it with.  Drive a new suburb sometimes, look at all the houses which are closed off by fences from one another, empty fortresses of lonliness.  And all of them, hopelessly expensive...People are not there because they are driving back and forth to work everyday....100 plus miles one way...

Community has always been the strentgth of mankind.  And the era of suburbs has shown itself to be a failure of simply being human.

It all started going bad when we all built fences around our houses.

The young people and us old baby boomers are figuring it out finally.

Let us hope it is not too late.  We need to 1. Move closer in to downtown; revitalize as we go.  2.  Demand efficient and usable public transportation.  3.  Demand more efficient cars that are supported by a smart transportation grid.  4.  Demand a smarter and more inclusive wireless network (and more accessible to everyone).  5.  And finally, demand an end to the pure automobile driven commuter economy....and become human again....

Another WE TOLD YOU SO!

Ok, we told you so....we told you so..who gets hurt in this abomination of a budget?  You do, the aging white  middle class who had voted Democratic in the past but bought a bill of goods from a person who made his reputation through reality T.V. as a CHARLATAN! 

And YOU VOTED FOR HIM! 

And then you get all huffy, write nasty posts, argue incessantly when your friends, and we are your friends believe it or not, tell you that you GOT SCREWED!  We are your friends because we tell you like it is:  how could you trust Trump who lies all the time?  Here are the two ways you scewed up!

1.  The decline in manufacturing jobs is not a simple thing.  A large part of it is technology advancements that can replace assembly line workers.  A large part is the corporate leadership who ruthlessly outsourced millions of jobs for pure profit with absolutely NO LOYALTY to the working force who made them rich (and one of the...one of them is Donald J. Trump)..

2.  And You...we...have benefited from the outsourcing and cheap labor costs everytime we order from Amazon or go into a Wal-Mart, Penneys, you name it.  Hardly anythiing is made in the U.S.A. I always cringe when I put on a hat that or put together patio furniture (just happened YESTERDAY) that says "Made in Vietnam".

We reap the benefits of the global economy in the ridiculous low prices for electronic, clothing and yes even automobiles. 

Good union jobs, with  benefits and pensions are dwindling because the corporate class, of whom Donald J. Trump is a leader, have benefited from this attack on labor.  Beware of "right to work" laws, that emasculate unions, driving wages and benefits down, and ultimately jobs go overseas.  Now they are attacking the service sector, and public employess, for their benefits as well; in a blood slaughter of human labor dignity!

It is NOT a simple "Make America Great Again" thing.  It is complex and you need to know who your friends are.

The Trump budget tells you right off who your friends AREN'T!  Look at the chart...health care cut, especially Medicaid....he promised he wouldn't do that.  Medicare and Social Security are next; an obsession by the wealth and privileged who want to make more and more and more and don't give a shit about you.  What is next is grandpa and grandma (YOU) won't have a place in a nursing home and the burden will fall even more on middle class families who just can't afford it...I see mercy killings exploding!  Nice end for years of sacrifice and hard work, huh????

They are trying to KILL YOU!

I have warned you all over and over that the rich HATE YOU!.  Is that class warfare?  YOU BET IT IS!

THE ONLY ADVANTAGE IS WE OUTNUMBER THEM...IN THE GREAT DEPRESSION WE SOMETIMES WENT TO VIOLENCE TO MAKE THEM REALIZE THAT THERE WERE A WHOLE LOT MORE OF US THAN THEM!

OK, now that you know that you were used and made a fool of what do you do?  What do you do for your children; for your grandchildren?

Throw the assholes out of office, and I mean Republican assholes.  Get involved in the Democratic Party and demand changes that yes redistribues income...there I said it...we need more taxes on the rich who are getting away with murder right now.  And we need to realize that WE are part of the problem, demanding cheap gasoline all the time when WE KNOW the shit is running out, but refuse to demand mass transportation before it is too late!

There is much to do, and we are going the wrong way...witness the Budget Trump!

And throw Trump out of office with extreme prejudice!

Wilson And Mistakes

If we ignore history we are doomed to repeat it.

Woodrow Wilson is a tragic American figure.  His post-WWI leadership was destroyed by two things: his health that failed him and the Republican Party that refused to share his internationalist vision.

WWI was the most destructive war in human history.  And those who were making decisions about it were in the same generational paradigm as we who are over 60, are comparing the Civil War to Vietnam.

I was 18 in 1965, a civil war veteran was 18 in 1865.  It is 2017 now which compares with 1917 .  In short, my generation is in exactly the same place as were civil war veterans and those old enough to know better in 1917.

And that generation was against ANY foreign war or any war for that matter.

Why?  Because the Civil War virtually destroyed the south and killed a generation of young men.  It was obvious in 1917 that the same thing was happening in Europe, a generation of young men were dying as the war, the SECOND modern war, ground human beings into pulp.

So, the American People, especailly Republicans (the Party of Lincoln remember) were against any modern war.  People were in positions of power who remembered, and their children had been told the stories of Vicksburg, Shilo and Gettysburg.

So when the U.S. went into the war in 1917 it was with great  temerity....there was a lot of opposition.  And the United States was very cautious to get embroiled in European politics that were as unstable as middle east politics are today.

And when the U.S. fresh troops, whose knowledge of static line warfare was far advanced from the Europeans (the lessons of the  Civil War was that small squad type manuvers rather than frontal assaults were most effective) turned the tide, all Americans wanted was to bring the troops home. 

In short, tactically the U.S. troops fought with the hard lessons learned in the Civil War.  Those lessons were observed first hand by Adoph Hitler, a corporal at the time in the German Army, and used twenty years later in France and Poland during the start of WWII; they called it Lightning War. 

After the war, Wilson (a southener) fought for a fair peace and the League of Nations, knowing full well that modern warfare had simply become too  lethal to be used anymore by mankind.  Remember the generations of Americans who were making decisions still had the taste of the Civil War and were highly against  foreign entanglements.

And Republicans, who had won the Civil War and knew the costs,  were not interested in entering the world stage, whose lack of judgement had just cost a generation of young men their lives.  So they resisted ANY actions by the United States to stabilize the world poltical system; which needed it badly.

Wilson, who was a southener had no real base to oppose this isolationism; which was the American dominant foreign policy in 1919.

So the problems of the middle east, Africa and central Europe, that had helped start WWI, were left unaddressed; and would quickly cause WWII!

And Hitler was watching, waiting for his chance to destroy the world.

And America, still remembering the horrors of the Civil War and just witnessing the horrors of WWI, froze politically and withdrew from the world stage, leaving it to the future dictators of the world.

We are faced with a similar situation in the United States right now.  We have elected a potential dictator in Donald Trump. Right now we are faced with a fledgling Constitutional Crisis and Trump struggles to "control" the raging controversy about Russian interference in our election.  And Republicans, ironically, are saying do nothing; that it is all political, ignore it; JUST like they did in 1919.

In a sense their lack of historical judgement is about to cause the same kind of disaster that we endured in 1939!

And the consequences of that were the births of four dictatorships that nearly reduced the entire globe to ashes (Stalin, Mussollini, Tojo and Hitler). 

Right now the dictator who has ALREADY manipulated our political system, is waiting as his surrogate, Donald J. Trump, struggles to carry of the greatest con on the century.

The true tragedy of history is when we ignore it, we repeat it...The true tragedies of history happen when good people know there is a danger and do nothing.

We are going the wrong way!

We have made two huge mistakes in our tortured history of health care:  1.  We decided during WWII that employers, flush with cash from the war, should provide benefits rather than install a socialized medicine model.  So we now have an employer benefit model of medical insurance.  The consequences vastly outweigh the benefits of this error.  Employers immediately became adversaries with workers over health care of all things, constantly negotiating lower and lower benefits relative to costs, to protect profits and sometimes to stay solvent.  As time wore on, benefits were often what prompted strikes not pay.

  Meanwhile in the rest of the world, employers did not have the cash to even consider paying benefits for health care:  their economies were in ruin .  So all over the globe "industrialized" nations were forced to adopt various forms of single payor or socialized medicine, at low level of coverage (only basic services could be afforded). 

Meanwhile America's economy boomed, making the poison pill of health benefits grow and grow; and lure insurance companies of all things (they were invented for fire, theft and life insurance) into the market of health care.

And, science meanwhile was making huge inroads into vaccines, polio for example,  eradicating diseases that had kept the life expenctancy rate to about 48 years.    The drug companies grew quickly, riding the wave of one "wonder drug" after another, rising prices as they went, making a multi-billion dollar industry.

Suddenly medicine, that had NEVER been a major "industry" in America became one: with insurance companies, hospitals, doctors and drug companies making much more money than ever before.

And then, in the 80s, when the rest of the world had rebuilt from WWII (we always under estimate how important that is), their more efficient and less costly single payer/socialized medicine began outperforming the American market based model.  No longer was America the  economic power house of the world and had to compete with Japan for example, and Germany (whose economies had been flattened) in manufacturing: and they did so with single payer/socialized medical benefits.

And that resulted in a huge advantage labor cost wise. 

Americans stopped buying American because labor costs were passed along by American manufacturers that included increasing health care benefits costs. 

2.  We allowed lobbyists of the health care monster that we created to have access to our legislatures, and they have basically bought them.  The Public Interest, as presented in the Preamble to the Constitution ("provide for the genereal WELFARE") has been distorted into "free markets that drove America's rise to economic power will work miraculously to drive down health care costs". 

Meanwhile, thanks to the medicines and medical care, and in spite of an American lifestyle of self abuse through over consumption (do you know anyone who is under weight?), the life expectancy rose to the mid-eighties.  (Which ironically is lower than other single payer/socialized medicine systems).

And we are stuck arguing about a vital issue in the wrong terms.  We argue that health care is not a right (the Constitution basically SAYS it is a right) but a privilege that is STILL anchored to employment.

So, according to conservatives, if you are not employed, you are not "earning" your health care. Conservatives have tied their very political theory to this;  and that transfers into the sick are lazy and brought it upon themselves so "tough luck". 

And liberals, aware that it was their party that was in power when this whole mis-step happened (the New Deal screwed up and should have installed Medicare for all in 1946), now push for the solution that the economically strapped Europeans did years ago.  And vital to making this work is tax and spend, which opens them up to fatal politcal attack.   

Coupled with an increasing aged and ill population (fat, ill and very expensive) and you have the perfect storm.

The solution is complex (Trump finally stated that) and dangerous politically.  It has paralyzed our political process.  Americans are being told the choice is stark, economical health care must basically be rationed or it won't work.  And part of that is true.   But then solution makers go to the extremes, declaring that our political liberty is economic liberty for insurance and pharmaceutical companies. 

On the other hand, 80% of Americans get medical insurance benefits, their employer pays health insurance for them.  And herein lies part of the solution.  This has to stop (that's right stop) and the benefits paid must be paid directly in salary to the workers (and mandated by he way for a time, you just can't cut the benefit because companies will take the difference)....then taxes have to be increased for a lifetime (that's right even tax social securiity some) to run a single payer system in the entire United States. 

The wellness provisions of the ACA and the required coverages need to be continued but wellness even more stressed; our aging just has to be healthier or none of this will work:  diabetes from over weight is an epidemic right now and is simply caused by a high carb and sugar (beer) diet.

And none of this is possible in any kind of free market system....it simply has to been enforced through common government action and oversight. 

Yes taxes must increase and rather than get rid of the ACA we need to gear it to  include the "public option" with private insurance for those who want more and better coverage....Austrailia's model is worth looking at).

And we probably won't come close, because we have built a monster that now, if the ACA is actually gutted, will bankrupt us all.

Again....the Reckoning..our politcal system is broken so bad by those on the right who feel economic liberty  includes punishing the sick for being sick and on the left, who feel economic liberty means a socialized medical system that in effectively punishes the health care providers for treating the sick. 

We need to copy Austrailia!!!!

HEALTH CARE IS IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST

So we sit and watch a breakdown of will, of political suicide, of failure in the face of “health care reform”. Once again the Republicans have thrown themselves on their swords for ideological purity

Really? Really over health care reform?

17% of the American people, who were able to pay attention, supported the Republican repeal and replace plan of Obama Care.

It is the Affordable Care Act by the way.

And it is a hodgepodge of half laws that desperately needs reform and tweaking.

Every other law of this magnitude has been tweaked and adjusted.

And now, we hear, from the President, the irresponsible “we will have to wait until it implodes, and it WILL implode”...

What irresponsibility! What smug irresponsibility.

If the law implodes, or if the hit piece the Republicans attempted to shove down our throats passes, millions will lose and thousands will die. But the bill was pulled and the Republicans now wait for the law to fail....

And most of them will be people who voted for Trump! And many Republicans depend on Obama Care for their health care!

Look, a single payer plan that put pressure on insurance companies to compete is essential AND a mandatory tax or premium is necessary as well…I would prefer a tax just like Medicare.

We need to copy Sweden or Australia or Canada or Germany.

We need to compromise but realize that using private insurance to run health care is unmanageable and impossible.

It just is. And the loser will be the insurance companies. But a hybrid where single payer covers the basics with supplemental insurance if you want more coverage is what

Australia does; as do many other countries.

The answer to this mess is right there in front of us…we have several templates from which to choose.

We don’t need to reinvent the wheel. We don’t need to make health care reform a life or death matter; believe it not Canada even has a socialized system and still has a free political system and a robust capitalist economy.

It is just that health care is NOT compatible with the free market mind set because health care is in the PUBLIC interest.

How so? Well just bring up infectious diseases for a second. Polio eradication was in the public interest. Measles eradication was in the public interest. We all accept cholorinated water that ended death by dysentary with no loss of freedom.

We all allow the government to lace our drinking water with chemicals that we pay for through taxes that is the single most important advancement in public health history, leading to a dramatic increase in lifetime expectancy.

And none of us, save the real wackos say a peep about this…not a peep.

Yet we are losing our freedom to drink non processed water. We have given up our right to basically shit ourselves to death.

Think I am exaggerating. Go ahead. LOOK IT UP.

Immunizations and chlorinated water are the single largest advancement in public health in history resulting in billions of lives being saved, and it was socialized as hell, single payer and government led.

Go ahead, find me a privatized water treatment plant….

Health Care is NOT the hill to die on. But we just saw a political party nail itself because they can’t get off of the losing proposition that public health is in the public interest.

And to finally accept that will NOT turn you into a raging liberal

HOW DO I KNOW THAT? BECAUSE EVERYONE OF YOU WHO TURNS 65 GOES THROUGH THIS METAMORPHOSIS THAT SUDDENLY ACCEPTS A SINGLE PAYER SYSTEM WITH SUPPLEMENT IF YOU WISH AND FINALLY RELAXES YOU ABOUT HEALTH CARE FOR THE FIRST TIME IN YOUR LIFE.

HEALTH CARE IS A PUBLIC RIGHT!

Populism and the Electoral Fix

Populism or Fix?

In one of my Constitutional history courses I remember the Professor asking us what one thing in the Constitution most threatened freedom and democracy.  Most picked the various references to slavery, some the 10th Amendment; etc. He then astounded us all by naming the Electoral College! 

And then he proceeded to present the followng argument.  This was in 1974. 

This  is why those who ignore history are fated to repeat mistakes over and over again.  The electoral college was part of a compromise to entice the slave states to join the union; part of the 3/5 compromise.  Because the south had fewer people, even in 1789, the states were reluctant to join a union that already was showing signs of not agreeing with slavery.  So a deal was struck to count each owned slave as 3/5 of a man for representative purposes AND for electoral college purposes.  The result?  The south dominated the Presidency really until the Civil War. One main reason for the Civil War is not just that Lincoln was anti-slavery but he was from the NORTH! 

The truth is one man (women  couldn't vote then) one vote was NEVER part of our Constitution for slavery's benefit.  And that slavery system was the most brutal in human history!

This "compromise" of dubuous worth, was smashed with the Civil War.  But the electoral college, that should have been overturned by the 13th Amendment, was left in (probably to give something to the south).  This was the mistake that could imperil us all!

The result today is an critical  imbalance between smaller populated states and larger populated states.  The winner take all aspect is critical here, along with the minimum electors for example for Wyoming, whose electors  stand for a few people while in California an elector stands for thousands.  So once again we have elected a President who did not win the "popular vote"; what other vote is there? 

And this will become a norm in the future.  The electoral college once again is in a sense being used by white supremacy to continue its sick hegemony in the United States.

In response to the dangers of populism the writers of the Constitution at first proposed to only allow members of state legislatures to vote for President (this method nearly was made part of the Constitution- it continues in the case of neither candidate getting a majority, the House picks the President, the Senate the Vice President...there is an anachronism for you!)  , since the popular vote is too subject to populist whim: interesing since this  system benefited a populist candidate! 

And we are not going to get over it, because this has been planned for years by Republicans, who realized long ago that the population was getting more diverse, especially in urban states, and they do not stand a chance if it wasn't for the electoral college. 

It was just reported that in California BOTH houses of the legislature have a 2/3 majority of Democrats versus a dwindling Republican minority.  This massive imbalance of power is a direct result of a Republican Party who nationally is now governed by a white supremacist who is the opposite of diversity.

In a diverse state, which is the procursor of where the United States is going, the ONLY way for the white minority to prevail is to cheat democracy.  If you don't think it works, look at Apartheid in South Africa, that for years continued a white small minority in power with electoral gimmicks and tricks.  That resulted in decades of repression and near civil war. 

Finally, the 2016 turnout was the lowest on record, which again is a product of voter suppression laws and a deliberate strategy by the Republican  party to rig the thing using low turnout and target "battleground states" to get the magic 270 electoral votes.

It worked, but your candidate now has the problem of NO mandate!  And we are in for it!

The gravest threat to our freedom is the electoral college!!!!!  My professor was a prophet!

It's Called Public Administration

It’s called Public Administration.  And it’s called urbanization and suburb development.  

And what these concepts have done is change the way American’s live. 

“The City in History” by Lewis Mumford, written in 1961, is a work that describes in wonderful literate detail, the development of our urban and suburban lifestyles.

It’s an old book but one of the best I’ve ever read to describe the development of the way we live today in America and in fact, around the world.  I read it long ago when I was getting a Masters in Public Administration.  

Essential to his discussion is the fact that urban and suburban planning by professionals  is essential to life as we know it.

Sounds different from the myths of populism,  right?  We live with a mythological vision of American life that is still stuck in the 19th century.  We continue to wish to find a place back on the farm in an agrarian setting where “rugged individualists” are the heroes. “The Waltons” always comes up as an example of this yearning for the "simple life".   

Our movies, our television dramas, still resort to this convention; that we are happiest with the simple life, on a farm, independent of others with our faithful (God always is involved) family.

Problem is this bucolic vision was just that; a vision.  Even in the frontier, we had to gather together into villages and towns for survival.  The problems of septic cleanliness itself, required village and town development; treated water is the single biggest reason for live expectancy.  

In short, you lived alone in the mythological single family farm, you usually died early and often.  Being down river from a farm means drinking fouled water; and you die.  

Only in banding together was there a chance to survive and a chance to have a decent life.  Only in finding a way to keep from getting cholera could you survive in the 1800s.  

And we have been doing that for hundreds of years.

The fact is in the United States urbanization is the norm.  The vast majority of people live in urban settings with all the hierarchy and infrastructure that is necessary for a healthy lifestyle.

And that means, in sharp contrast to the myths of the rugged individualist, planning and government is a given.  Government bureaucracy is necessary for life itself.  

What we have today, with the phenomenon of the Tea Party, Trump, and modern conservatism is a mythological problem.  A political movement, populist and often delusional, is trying to push us into a reality that is impossible to achieve.  We cannot survive without the bureaucracy they hate so much!

It screams at us to be angry because our government doesn’t work to put us back in the ideal small, agrarian community, where men were men and women were (well slaves).

And there are guns (in the 1800s gun ownership was far below what it is today; ordinary people simply could not afford them) and there was the ideal of the rugged individual and true “freedom”.  

And a gun culture in an urban setting results in a killing field, making areas of cities so dangerous that even the police won’t go into them; a nightmare.

Fact?   Well, the fact is that the bucolic agrarian life never existed in the first place.  The first thing the white Europeans did when they colonized the “New World” was build a fort; that’s right,  a fort.  

And the next thing they did is die in great numbers because the infrastructure they needed to live was back in England.  Only the Indians, who rescued more than one colony, showed  the colonists (who would soon became their killers), how to survive in the hostile New World.

And towns and villages is how they survived, where the WE not the ME was essential to survival.  The towns and villages, soon to become cities, were the way the West was conquered, NOT the small farms.  

Lewis Mumford and other writers of public administration teach professionals how to administer urban and suburban entities.  There is a skill set that provides the government that allows business to prosper, children to grow, and public safety to exist.  It is a skill set.  You need experts to make it work!

Today with the renewal of populism in Trump and the right wing Tea Party types, we see a call to renounce professionals, experts it you will, as somehow part of an elite or establishment that represses freedom.

Fact is it  is exactly the opposite.  Freedom is NOT Free!  It requires planning, safety and infrastructure that allows at the most base level, water that is safe to drink so we all don’t die of dysentery; public safety that fights fire and yes, stops the bad buys from stealing your house.   

Trump constantly tries to persuade  us to mis-trust experts.  

It is no accident that he is a real estate developer.  

Real estate developers have to deal with government regulations all the time.  And often they do everything they can to cut corners to make more money.  Trump is renowned for this.  And sometimes buildings fall down and burn down because of code violations.  And we as home buyers want and need legal protections when we buy a home.  

So there is a tension between public administrators and developers like Trump.  There is a tension between the pubic interest to have safe housing and charlatans who try to rip us off.  

Urban planning and regulations are there are will stay there no matter how much we wish for a return to the “good old days”.  

Trump’s populism is self serving, he is fooling a whole lot of people with a promised reality that is simply not possible.  The elite is NOT the problem.  Our idealism is the problem; it lives is an unreal place.  We NEED experts to help us navigate an increasingly complex urban infrastructure.  

“The City in History” is a great read.  It proves again and again that we NEED professionals to build and maintain urban and suburban centers that are safe and healthy.

Without them, in Trump’s world, we will have chaos!