Did America Stop Being Great?

We didn't stop being great,  not really, but there's a real collection of problems that are making life not so great for a lot of people.  The picture below shows a particularly important manifestation of this.  It's from this article:
http://www.eoionline.org/blog/x-marks-the-spot-where-inequality-took-root-dig-here/
article

from that article

Something significant happened in the '70s to produce that shocking and very consequential discontinuity.

several things happened all at once: ever since the reforms that followed the great depression, the people that felt they had been hurt by those reforms (they are few in number, but they're very very rich) had been trying to undermine them and the gigantic success of the economic theory that worked extremely well for almost half a century. in the mid '70s, several things happened all at once:

1. OPEC created an artificial shortage of oil¹. this created an unusual type of recession, called a supply side recession, which is accompanied by high inflation, where normal, demand side recessions have deflation or deflationary pressure. The Fed was not able to do anything to restore the oil supply, so the problem persisted and president Nixon thrashed around with ineffective policies like price controls that just made everything worse.
2. Milton Friedman won the Nobel in 1976, giving him a potent platform, despite the obvious, catastrophic failure of his ideas when implemented² in Chile³, Argentina, Brazil, Iran. Reagan embraced them wholeheartedly and began implementing them here as fast as he could: killing unions and infrastructure projects, giving away government resources (especially forests) willy nilly⁴, allowing the minimum wage to fall behind inflation, etc.  But they'd learned how important propaganda is and they used it well. Obama is the first president since then to admit some skepticism.
3. One of those ideas was that shareholder value⁵ was the only thing that mattered, and that such issues as product quality, responsible behavior in the community, how they treat employees, etc., are accurately reflected in the stock price. This is one of a collection of ideas that are collectively called the Efficient Markets Hypothesis. It is wrong, catastrophically so, but the double whammy of the Nobel and the OPEC-caused recession seemed to give it credibility.  It tended to encourage self serving or sometimes even fraudulent behavior to prop up the stock price, instead of better products and better corporate behavior.  And it tended to make the sort of people who can afford to buy influence even richer, so they chose to buy influence that reinforced the idea.
4. In 1978, the supreme court ruled⁶ that banks can charge up to whatever the interest limit is, in the state in which they are chartered no matter what the rules are where the business is being done. this immediately led to several states eliminating their usury laws and made the predatory lending business possible, as well as the only slightly less predatory credit card business.
5. availability of effective air conditioning made it practical to employ industrial and office workers in the south, so many industries moved their worker base to "right to work" states, where it was legal for businesses to obstruct union organizers. This was a long trend but the '70s marks a big transition.
6. containerized shipping made it practical to outsource manufacturing to far away places, where they have even fewer worker protections and lower wages than in the American South.
7. Free Trade agreements exacerbated the ease of outsourcing.
8. the people who were old enough to remember and understand the great depression first hand started dying off.   Policies like Glass-Steagall, the Securities Act of 1933, and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 were enormously effective and they were all weakened in the 70s through 90s.

during the 30s through 70s, we did such a good job with infrastructure that it took decades for the damage the EMH and the rest had caused to be obvious. The middle class had plenty of savings, the roads were built looking ahead to 30 years or so of growth and wear, and so forth. But now it's gone. if we actually do want to restore the things that were good about the 40s-90s, we need to unwind as much of this as we can.

There's probably not much we can do about shipping. But all of the rest are conscious choices we have made.  The most catastrophic was the election of Reagan, but we can repudiate the changes he made to union rights, to public infrastructure support, to management of public resources. 

We need to make regulations that force private corporations to be good citizens: minimum wage, union protections, environmental protection. Once one business in a market has begun cheating, they all need to, in order to compete.  We need to break that cycle.  Business groups might be able to do this but their track record is abysmal.  Regulation, unfortunately, is the only way.  If done right, it will hurt all by exactly the same amount, which means all will keep their present markets.

We need to reverse Marquette v First of Omaha somehow.   Probably the only way is a national usury law.  I'm thinking it should be flexible and adaptive.  For example, the Prime Lending Rate plus 6.  presently the prime is about 3.5%, so this would be a 9.5% cap on loan interest.  During more normal times, the prime is closer to 7% so this would be 13% cap.  If predatory lenders can't make a profit at that rate, that's a good thing: they won't be making ruinous loans.  Credit card companies are doing good business at 13% today.

Note that Donald Trump is a supporter of many of the things that have made us less great.  To the Donald, making America great again is about making Donald Trump rich at the expense of everybody else.



¹   The reason OPEC did is because the US gave its whole-hearted support to Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur war.   OPEC is very dominated by Saudi Arabia.  After a second shortage in the late '70s, the US administration changed its policy to kowtow to the Saudis at every opportunity.  Reagan's point man on this policy was George HW Bush.

²   A lot of South America had been dominated by "the Chicago Boys", a group of economists who got their training under Friedman at the University of Chicago.

³   The 1973 coup in Chile was to remove (and murder) a popular and effective socialist (Allende) and replace him with a puppet that was friendly to Friedman's ideas (Pinochet) who deregulated much of Chile's business.   As usually happens when this is tried, economy quickly collapsed.   Well, they said, the only thing for it is even more freedom for business.  when the people squawked about mass unemployment and poverty wages for the few jobs there were, where before the coup they'd had good jobs and a booming economy, the leaders of the rebellion were "disappeared".  7 years later, Pinochet was soundly defeated in an election, so Pinochet rewrote the constitution to let him keep power.  Pinochet and his administration is gone now but Chile has not recovered from the damage he did.   This was the most egregious example, but Brazil, Argentina, Greece, Iran and several others were subjected to similar "experiments" in capitalism which all failed miserably.  Pretty much all of the trouble we've been having with Iran stem from our similar 1953 coup.

⁴   Lincoln had given massive tracts of land to the railroads and homesteaders.  There was a strategy behind this, about expanding infrastructure and opportunity for millions of Americans, and the country got far more in return than it gave up.  But what Reagan did was give away forests and mineral reserves to businesses who wanted despoil the land and take the profits for themselves, leaving the rest of us worse off than we were before.

⁵   Jack Welch, long time president of GE, was during his tenure a major supporter of this idea.  Since he retired, he's realized the error of his ways and has taken to calling it "the dumbest idea in the world".  http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/28/maximizing-shareholder-value-the-dumbest-idea-in-the-world/#152d2c682224.   I'm loath to use superlatives, especially when there are so many other incredibly dumb ideas to choose from, but it's possible he might be right. 

⁶   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquette_National_Bank_of_Minneapolis_v._First_of_Omaha_Service_Corp.
 

Kakistocracy

I just learned a new word.  My source is this WSJ article, but it's in wikipedia, too.  Kakistocracy is from greek: Kakistos is the superlative of Kakos (κακός), meaning bad or evil, so Kakistocracy is government by the worst.  The wikipedia article interprets that to be rule by the stupidest.  But I don't think that's right.   It's government by the worst--the most corrupt, the most willing to lie, cheat, steal, kill for their own (or whoever is paying or controlling them) self interest.

In other words, pretty much what we get when we let the big banks, big oil, big military companies, the NRA, etc., have too much power in government.  Kakistocracy, Oligarchy, and Plutocracy are not mutually exclusive...in fact, they usually go together.   If you understand Gresham's Law, it's pretty much inevitable that it happens when you fail to regulate the powerful sufficiently:   The getting of power is always a competition.  If cheating is tolerated, those who cheat will quickly gain enough advantage that those who don't cheat will either be driven out of the competition or forced to begin cheating.  So it's inevitable that those that cheat the worst have the most power.

One of our parties has been fundamentally Kakistocrat for a long time, has stacked the supreme court with pro-corruption justices, has blocked enforcement of monopoly, financial, environmental, etc., regulation, has taken us into self destructive (but good for the plutocrats) wars.   It became almost literally kakistocrat when it began following the tea party script to try to get their way by mucking up the works of government...and not really succeeding at anything but mucking up the works.  The other party has been a feckless patsy...target for the Kakistorats lies, and occasionally duplicating their destructive policies.


A few pertinent references
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/26/tattoos-incompetence-and-the-heritage-foundation
http://www.timesherald.com/article/JR/20150729/NEWS/150729821
https://www.amazon.com/Prince-Dover-Thrift-Editions/dp/0486272745

Pesterware

The first pesterware was advertising on TV.   I understand the purpose of advertising and to some extent I even embrace it.  It pays for some or all of the desired programming or at least makes it less expensive--which enables production of more.  Once in a rare while, I even see something in an ad that I want to buy.

TV advertising has crossed the line in several ways.  When they run the same ad over and over and over and over and over, I initially get bored, but before long I get irritated.  A little repetition is understandable: people miss the beginning of the show, go to the toilet during ads, etc.  I skip as many as I can with a Digital Video Recorder (or its predecessor a VCR).  But at some point it becomes so annoying that I no longer watch the channel.  SciFi and FX are both in this category for me. These guys break up the show into such short slots that I am constantly cursing them--a 90 minute movie extended to 3 hours, in 5 minute spurts,  often with substantial parts of the movie cut out.  No thanks.

Another way they irritate me is by putting a bug, splash or crawl over the screen.    A typical example:  a news program will show some video with a banner over it: KWTF BREAKING NEWS!!!  and the critical thing will be hidden by the banner.  Sometimes they get the banner out of the way, but rarely.  A bug or bottom of screen crawl would have been better.  (why do they put it away from the bottom, ever?  Back in the days of rounded screens, the bottom was a moving target, so I understand why they moved it up then.  But since the '70s, screens have been relatively rectangular and technology has eliminated sync and size issues completely.  But they're still doing this.)   Recently a few channels have been putting a moving bug in the corner, occasionally with an accompanying noise, often loud enough to obscure the programming.  Sheesh.

Once upon a time, the government put a limit to advertising on the airwaves: 16 minutes per hour.  This is no longer the case but many channels still stick to it.

Computer pesterware has never had such a limitation.  Virtually all browsers have a popup blocker and virtually all users have it enabled.  So websites have implemented their own popups.  The best of them do things in a way that don't interfere and have a little X in the upper right to dismiss them.  But many of them can't be dismissed without giving the offender some of your personal data.  I boycott such sites.   I also run an ad blocker.  Many advertisers have figured out how to detect that the blocker is running and a few badger you about it.

In my view, unintrusive advertising is acceptable.   If it prevents the content I wanted from being accessed, it is intrusive.  If it keeps badgering me, even after I have attempted to dismiss it, it is intrusive.  If it makes spurious noises or flashes, it is intrusive.  If it takes more than two seconds to figure out how to dismiss it, it is intrusive.  If it consumes consequential amounts of network bandwidth, or any other resource on my computer, it is worse than intrusive.

Advertising doesn't have to be pesterware.  But when it is, we need to stop it.

Stevens and the West

For some reason, surprisingly many of the early explorers of the American west were named Stevens or Stephens.  It's probably just a coincidence.  Here's a partial list

Elisha Stephens (1804-1877) was one of the leaders of the Stephens/Murphy/Townsend party.  He seems to have been the one to have discovered Donner pass in 1844 and led the group of 50 to what is now the western part of Santa Clara county without any deaths--in fact two babies were born in route.  John C Fremont would put it on a map the following year, claiming to have discovered it, resulting in the incompetent Donner party attempting it in Nov 1846, losing 39 of 87 in the process.   Stephens would settle on the Arroyo de San Jose de Copertino, so named by the De Anza party, which had camped there in March of 1776.  Other settlers would rename the creek in Stephens honor (but misspelling it) and today, the biggest two streets in Cupertino are Stevens Creek Blvd and De Anza Blvd, which cross at Cupertino Corner.  Frustrated with how crowded Cupertino was becoming, he sold his land and moved to the area that would become Bakersfield in 1861.

John Frank Stevens (1853-1943) was a surveyor and engineer hired by James J Hill to plan and develop the route for the Great Northern Railroad, which he did with extraordinary skill.  Stevens Pass, which he discovered, is named for him.  He later would plan the route of the Panama canal and for a little while headed the whole project.

Isaac Stevens (1818-1862) (no relation) was the first governor of Washinton Territory from 1853-1857.  He was the one who chose Olympia as the Territorial Capital.  He forced the local native tribes all over the territory to sign restrictive treaties, leading to quite a bit of conflict but earning him good support from the White settlers at the time.  He was killed in action fighting for the Union in the Battle of Chanitilly in 1862.  Stevens County, WA, Lake Stevens, WA, and Fort Stevens, OR, were all named for him, along with numerous schools and streets, a county in Minnesota, and more.

John Lloyd Stephens (1805-1852) was an explorer of Central America.  He and his friend Frederick Catherwood rediscovered the ruins of the Mayan civilization in the 1840s and were the first to realize this was a great civilization that had disappeared for hundreds of years.  He was also the chief engineer of the Panama railroad, which was instrumental in building the Canal 60 years later.

John H Stevens (1820-1900) the first resident of Minneapolis west of the river.

James B Stephens (1806-1889) one of the earliest settlers of Portland, OR.

Third Parties

Many people are looking at the fiasco that the Republican Party has become and are thinking that it is likely to die.  I certainly agree that it probably should die, but the circumstances do not at all resemble the one time such a thing happened before, and I don't quite see how they can get there.

James Buchanan was the last Whig to be elected president, in 1856.  He was an ineffectual compromise leader, and he interfered with the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case to get a decision which made just about everybody extremely angry.  The abolition vs slavery tensions were high and Buchanan and his party fanned the flames.  The Republicans, supporting abolition and union, were able to capture a lot of the liberals who had been Whigs, and there were a total of four major candidates for President in 1860.   Lincoln won the most votes, at 39.8%, and John Bell, the nominee of what was left of the Whigs, who now called themselves the "Constitutional Union Party", got 12.6% of the votes. The Democrats were split into southern and northern, who got 18.1% and 29.5% respectively.  Lincoln's famous nemesis, Stephen Douglas, represented the Northern Ds.  Had the D's remained united, their candidate would have won the election, but the issue that divided them was the central one of the campaign.

The relevant points of this history for the present election are two:  Both parties, the Whigs and the Democrats, were irredeemably divided.    This meant that it was possible to win with a plurality without having a majority.  (Demographics also meant that the second place party in votes, the Northern Democrats, received the fewest Electors, winning just one state.)  This sort of four way split is entirely possible in the 2016 election.   The second point was that the moribund party, the liberal Whigs, had a natural, popular and progressive successor, the Republicans, who effectively replaced them.  This has no parallel in the present election.  The heirs of the name (but none of the policies) of the Republican party are split into 2 groups: Trump enthusiasts and "Establishment" Republicans.  Neither group is going to move wholesale to a party or candidate that is not fundamentally whackadoodle conservative.  Trump's voters are unlikely to abandon him for anyone, and the establishment is faced with putting up a more acceptable candidate, who will be more conservative than Trump but not as hated as Cruz, or bowing to the inevitable and voting for Trump.

The more rational conservative alternative is the Libertarian candidate, Ron Johnson, who is benefiting greatly by the madness that has gripped the Republican Party. 

The real third party proposals are all coming from the left.   Bernie earned nearly as many delegates in the primaries and caucuses as Hillary and many of his fans are not quitting, saying they will vote for him or Green candidate Jill Stein.  Bernie himself seems to be signalling that he will support Hillary, saying that he will work his heart out to prevent Trump from winning, but still holding out for platform planks.

So it looks like we will have 5 "real" candidates:
Donald Trump
Hillary Clinton
Ron Johnson
Jill Stein
An Establishment Republican to be named later.

If the Rs name a credible person for this last role, that person and Trump will split about 48% of the votes, and Johnson will get 1-3%.  If they do not, Trump will get under 40% and Johnson will get 8-10%.

Many people will write in Bernie, but I don't think his name will be on any state ballots, so his votes will be well under 1%.  He'll work for Clinton, but how enthusiastic he will be and how many of his voters will vote for her depends upon what happens in the next few weeks.  The Bernie Bros are remarkably intransigent and while they may be right on the issues, it will be a disaster if they split non-wingnut vote.  If they move wholeheartedly to Stein, she'll get about 10% of the votes and Hillary will get about 40%.

So there's a scenario where it's a close race between Trump and Hillary: if the Rs stay with Trump and too many progressives go to Stein.

This is dangerous.  It is possible that the progressive agenda will survive a Trump victory, in a sort of Kropotinist way (i.e., Trump will make things so bad that the progressives win next time), but it's important to realize that Trump is an authoritarian who doesn't believe in civil discourse and the rule of law, and is likely to employ repressive measures to exterminate potential rival groups.  If he wins, the next election may be a one candidate referendum, or it may be during World War III.

So: if you live in a state which is either hard blue or hard red: California, Connecticut, Idaho, Utah, Alabama, etc., go ahead and vote your heart.  I wish I could do the same thing...I'd vote for Bernie or Jill in a flash.  The electoral college gives you that option.  But Washington is too close to being a swing state.  Even though Hillary is at best my third choice, I must vote for the candidate that is most likely to defeat Trump.

So what does this have to do with third parties?  The only way a third party can win if it is replacing an existing party all at once.  Nobody is suggesting that the Ds are moribund, and while the Rs are doing a wonderful job of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory in this election, only the Trumpsters are likely to form a new party--and they are now running the old one.  We can hope that Trump's success will split the conservatives and shine light on the complete moral and intellectual bankruptcy of today's Republican party and their corporate masters, but I won't hold my breath.

Trump the Troll, part III

Trump has been telling us that the judge in his Trump University fraud case, Gonzalo Curiel, is a Mexican and thereby should not be allowed to judge his case.  He points out how the judge has repeatedly ruled against him and that he's building a wall to keep Mexicans out. He won't quite be explicit why that would somehow disqualify him, but he's insistent.

This is obviously racist but it's something much worse.  It's an attempt to intimidate the judge and tamper with the jury pool.

First, about the judge.  Curiel was born in a suburb of Chicago, just across the state line in Indiana, and has a solid record as a judge.  He was involved in several cases against Mexican drug cartels and was repeatedly threatened, at least one time that the FBI took pretty seriously and put him under protection for a while.  His parents were from Mexico but he's shown no evidence at all of judicial bias or impropriety, and is by any reasonable standard something of a hero.

It occurs to me that the fraud case may be the explanation of Trump's inexplicable run.  Trump knows virtually nothing about politics or the obligations of the office he's running for, and shows no real interest in it, other than wanting to have it.  But he's a gifted pitchman and is able to get lots of naifs to eat up his every word.   Nearly every day he says something that would end the career of any ordinary politician. But Trump is a TV star and has his name on a lot of real estate, which apparently is sufficient for a lot of voters.

It was probably a little over a year ago that it became obvious to Trump that the government's case that he'd committed fraud was pretty solid and that he was facing dozens or even hundreds of counts of fraud, each one of which could earn him up to a year in prison.  He turns 70 next week and and is unlikely to be out of prison until he's well into his 80s.   His only real chance is to undermine the process somehow--intimidate the judge or contaminate the jury pool or something.  Maybe he can get a mistrial.  But an ordinary hyper-rich person trying to screw with the judiciary in this way would not go over well and would probably earn him extra prison time.   But by an interesting coincidence, more than a dozen people had declared that they were running for the republican  presidential nomination.  What if Donald joined them and made a lot of noise, especially horrible things about Mexican immigrants.  What better pulpit to do things that would trigger a mistrial?

I doubt he ever thought his candidacy would get as far as it has.  He knows he doesn't have the aptitude to be president and has said there are lots of parts of the job that he doesn't want to do.  Since he was self funding and got a lot of free media, he knew he could stay in until the convention when his anti-Curiel schtick would be most effective, but he wouldn't have to actually run in the national.  So he set about submarining his candidacy by saying horrible things.  Bizarrely, his fans loved it.  Maybe he could actually win.  Then, they couldn't try him before impeaching him first, and he could make a deal with his VP to pardon him as soon as he left office, which would end the case.  It's not quite clear how Judge Curiel is going to be able to try one of the candidates during the election.

This is obviously speculation...I have no evidence.  But it fits the facts at hand.

The Third Commandment

Pennsylvania Representative Brian Sims observes that: "On the list of things that actually stop shootings in this country, I'm going to put Prayer somewhere down around pencil shavings and Ovaltine."  He later apologized to Ovaltine.  I think he's still giving prayer too much credit.

A lot of people think that Prayer does no harm, and it might do good.  God, after all, might be listening.  Of course if he believed that gun violence was something worth doing something about and had the power to do something, why would he need the prayer?  Is He such a jerk that he'll let thousands of innocents die each year and won't do anything about it unless we pray even more?

But of course it does do harm.   The idea that God responds to your prayers is an example of a gambling fallacy known as the hot-hand fallacy.  If your prayer works once or twice, a lot of people think that "luck is on their side", when really, it was something else...possibly random chance.  But it really discredits the hard work you might have put in to develop your skill at shooting the basketball, and it especially discredits the hard work your opponent did.  Perhaps most dangerous is that it might suck you into believing that the one-armed bandit is on your side.  Nearly all gambling is designed so that whether you win or lose is completely unrelated to how it went last time, and outfits like the Nevada Gaming Commission work hard to make sure this is really the case.  (Billiards and horse racing are exceptions, and to some extent counting cards in blackjack, but such exceptions are rare).

Moses understood this.  He gave us the third commandment, about not taking the Lord's name in vain.  This has nothing to do with offensive language.  If you think God might actually damn someone because you asked, if you think the reason you scored the touchdown or won the roulette roll is that you been praying for it, then you've implicitly decided that God is playing favorites and that you've been picked.  You are taking the Lord's name--and your whole relationship with Him--in vain.  The next step is thinking that prayer gives you special privileges: that because you pray a lot, it's ok to shoot other people, for example, or it's ok to not put in your fair share of the payment at dinner.

Prayer gives a lot of people solace.  If you spend some time, at the end of the day for example, thinking about your goals and what you've done towards or against them that day, it's potentially productive.  It doesn't matter if the abstraction you're talking to in your mind is God or a dead ancestor or something else, what matters is that you're thinking about this stuff, and trying to make yourself better.  Belief in yourself is helpful.  Believing that God might step in against shootings or to help you win the game or that promotion is taking the Lord's name in vain.