Pro Commerce

Jewish Community Organizations Fail

San Francisco State University is in a financial crisis.  The number of students applying and entering has dropped significantly in this century but the school has been unable to demand more money from the State or to cut expenses sufficiently.

I blame the Jews. I’m being facetious.  Not Jews but the Jewish community organizations.

In the mid 1990s I got many reports that anti-Jewish activity on the SFSU campus was rampant.  I went out to take a look. Jew hate was everywhere. Murals, posters and notice boards.  I was told by my friends on the faculty that all Jews on the faculty were leaving because the general environment was so anti-Jew.

One of my trips out to the campus was to help a faculty member who was trying to get Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese diplomat, recognized for his efforts to save Jews in WWII by getting them to Japan. No interest on this campus.

I reported this campus Jew hate widely and broadly to the Jewish community organizations and the Jewish press.  

None paid attention because the major Jewish organizations were left-wing. The anti-Jew sentiment was all coming from black and Arab lefty organizations.

Now Jew hate has exploded on college campuses and once again the lefty Jewish Community organizations are dragging their collective feet because the Jew hate comes from the Left.San Francisco State University has had a particularly precipitous decline in enrollment for two decades.  Jews, as individuals, don’t go there as students or as faculty.

I am ashamed to admit it but my worthless BA degree is from a year spent at SFSU 60+ years ago.

Power vs God, the Wokie View

About fifty years ago I did a small survey and found that there were four categories of primary universal action as viewed by Americans. About 50% of adults viewed some (1) sort of god as the prime mover, 20% saw (2) power as the prime mover, 25% saw (3) money as the prime mover and 5% had other categories.  

Under God I found many people who viewed science as the prime mover, what historically was called the clockmaker version of prime mover or math as the scientific universal structure.

Now 50 years later the ratio has gone to 45% some sort of god, while 25% now see power as the prime mover.  Many of these people are ‘wokies’ and have some ‘colonialism’ as the model of primary universal action. The philosophic model for this group, even if they don’t know it, is Michel Foucault. Marxism is the meta model of money as prime mover.

These categories seem to remain fairly stable over long periods of time. The (4) ‘other’ category is not growing.

In the other category are many Asian and traditional versions of multiple prime movers. The Greek and Roman pantheon are multiple movers. So is the Indian universe. The Chinese Dao and Confucious are multiple prime movers as are the Japanese Buddhism and Shinto.  

In the modern world anthropology sees different cultures as having many different societal multiple prime movers.

I personally see humans as driven by a wide variety of ideas, metaphors, stories and images as prime movers of our species.

I don’t see much change in the future.  These categories appear stable over long periods of time.  The ‘wokies’ will be with us indefinitely. The wokies who see colonization as a prime force may add the Chinese in Tibet and Xinjiang (Uyghurs); and Moslems in much of Africa to their current hate list (Columbus, America and Israel.)

Spontaneous Commerce

When Airbnb was first started in San Francisco, I had three friends who immediately got into the business.

Does that mean anything to you?

One was a game developer, no surprise.  He bought three condos and rented them out. 

The second was a salaryman who bought five houses in New Orleans with the intention of moving there to rent them out. 

The third was a psychotherapist who rented out her city apartment for $5,000 a month and stayed at her country farmhouse.

The interesting thing about this event was that two of these emerging entrepreneurs were not the kind of person one expects to start a business.  It says to me that America is a land of millions of potential entrepreneurs who will start a business if they are given the slightest genuine opportunity. This is truly America. Commerce is deeply American.

The first and third were almost immediately put out of business by the rules San Francisco put in place to make Airbnb unworkable. The first friend soon moved to Los Angeles.  The second was soon put out of business by the city government of New Orleans that made Airbnb unworkable.

The CEO of Airbnb is Brian Chesky.  He and his founding partner were both graduates of the Rhode Island School of Design. Neither one had any idea of how politics works. Both immediately conceded to the laws and regulations that the San Francisco government put in place.  Terrible laws that destroyed two-thirds of all the operating BnB rentals in operation.  The anti-business regulations were copied everywhere Airbnb went. The same horrible regulations nearly destroyed similar vacation rental businesses that had been operating for decades, worldwide.

Three lessons from this: 

1. Americans are deeply disposed to starting businesses; no matter who they are. Its American.
2. Government with trivial and irrelevant regulations is the greatest destroyer of business on the planet.

Travis Kalanick, the founder and CEO of Uber, didn’t start his business until he got a Statewide license to run a limousine business which served as a short-term protection against the politically connected and ferocious taxi cab bastards.

    3. Political skills are vital to innovation in business.  Otherwise governments will destroy you.

Google and Me

I understood Google more than a decade before it existed.  Better than it understands itself today.

In 1986 I published a book titled Marketing Without Advertising, based on a course I taught for eight years in my Noren Small Business Institute. It became the third largest selling marketing book in English over the next two decades and sold a 6th edition.

In Chapter One I disparage advertising and promote LISTing, which is what Google is. Google didn’t arrive for more than ten years.  Advertising doesn’t work except for tourists and very young people who lack networks to recommend products and services.  The research on advertising is vast and accurate. As my co-author, Raspberry, used to say: ‘Advertising is poop on the sidewalk that you almost step on.’

Today the internet provides some customer recommendations and warnings which is a modest help but seldom reliable.  Even Amazon is not honest in its recommendations. Listings include all forms of notice about the location and nature of the business.  It includes college alumni lists of current locations, telephone books, almost any reference that a potential customer will use to find the type of business or service he/she is looking for. That is precisely what Google is.  Google is a listing not advertising. It is at least 100 times more powerful than advertising.

When I first saw it used by my clients it was very powerful and effective. I knew then that Google would be far more important than advertising. It was destined to consume 80% of all global advertising.  I bought stock in Google immediately and my shares increased by more than ten times.  Thank you Google.

Jew Hate in America

I’ve lived with Jew hate for several parts of my life.

I was in an El Paso elementary school from 1946 to 1949.  The Mexican kids would follow me home from school and throw rocks at me whenever the Dominican traveling priests came to Juarez to denounce Jews.  Fortunately I was a fast runner.  

The Roman Catholic hatred of Jews abated when Pope John XXIII called Vatican Council II.  The current Pope Francis has brought it back.

My closest friend in 1953-55 was David Stern, in Seattle, whose mother was national president of the American Jewish Committee. That AJC, at that time, was anti-Israel because the members wanted to assimilate and they believed Israel, as a Jewish state, would make assimilation difficult. My father, a reform rabbi, had been in Israel in the pre-State days helping on the Dead Sea scrolls and loved Israel.

I had no personal difficulty with Jew hate, other than the Mexicans, ever again.

I knew about the hereditary-class Jew hate, but it had no effect on me. It brushed up against me in 1967 when I became a bank officer and then the youngest Vice President in American banking at the Bank of California.  The Bank was the home of the hereditary class in 1960s banking but hadn’t always been because my paternal family were proud customers, and board members in the 1870’s to 1900. The bank expected me to join one of the elite private clubs in San Francisco.  The bank didn’t know that a Phillips could be a Jew. Jews were excluded from the top clubs until 1970.  Jews had been forced, sixty years earlier, to take over the Bohemian Club and start the Concordia Club.  I could have joined the University Club where I used the squash courts but never bothered to join.

All my life Spain has hated Jews, the same country that drove my patrilineal ancestors to Holland four hundred years ago, still hates Israel and prizes ham as its top meat.  Ireland has hated Jews and Israel.  The hatred of Jews began when Germany became a belligerent in 1938 and the Irish love the rantings of Hitler to this day. 

I dealt with Jew hate in the mid 1990’s when blacks at San Francisco State University were openly expressing it painting Jew hate murals and attacking Jews on the faculty.  Nearly all of whom left within five years.  Jew hate on campus has never abated.  Largely from blacks thanks to the Black Muslims.  Arabs have since found a home at S.F. State.

I haven’t had to deal with media Jew hate since I stopped reading the NewYork Times in the early 1970s.

A whole new self-hatred of Jews began in the late 1990s’ with the Anti-Defamation League when Lefty Jew hate was beginning and the ADL could only see the non-existent Jew hate in the politics of the Conservative leaders.  The ADL is a bastion of Jew hate to this day, along with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Real home grown American Jew hate exploded sometime in the late 2010’s.  My son calls it “Leftyism on Steroids.”  Which it is.

Spontaneous Commerce

When Airbnb was first started in San Francisco, I had three friends who immediately got into the business.

Does that mean anything to you?

One was a game developer, no surprise.  He bought three condos and rented them out. 

The second was a salaryman who bought five houses in New Orleans with the intention of moving there to rent them out.  

The third was a psychotherapist who rented out her city apartment for $5,000 a month and stayed at her country farmhouse.

The interesting thing about this event was that two of these emerging entrepreneurs were not the kind of person one expects to start a business.  It says to me that America is a land of millions of potential entrepreneurs who will start a business if they are given the slightest genuine opportunity. This is truly America. Commerce is deeply American.

The first and third were almost immediately put out of business by the rules San Francisco put in place to make Airbnb unworkable. The first soon moved to Los Angeles.  The second was soon put out of business by the city government of New Orleans that made Airbnb unworkable.

The CEO of Airbnb is Brian Chesky.  He and his founding partner were both graduates of the Rhode Island School of Design. Neither one had any idea of how politics works. Both immediately conceded to the laws and regulations that the San Francisco government put in place.  Terrible laws that destroyed two-thirds of all the operating BnB rentals in operation.  The anti-business regulations were copied everywhere Airbnb went. The same horrible regulations nearly destroyed similar vacation rental businesses that had been operating for decades, worldwide.

Three lessons from this: 

1. Americans are deeply disposed to starting businesses; no matter who they are. Its American.
2. Government with trivial and irrelevant regulations is the greatest destroyer of business on the planet.

Travis Kalanick, the founder and CEO of Uber, didn’t start his business until he got a Statewide license to run a limousine business which served as a short-term protection against the politically connected and ferocious taxi cab bastards.

    3.Political skills are vital to innovation in business.  Otherwise governments will destroy you.

One Man Is Now What Matters

You should know this name by now: Robby Starbuck.

One person with the power of the modern social media, the visual media, and the right idea can now have new political power never before imagined.

Robby Starbuck, understands America’s core values, primarily because his parents escaped from Cuba.  He realized that the ‘woke movement’ to replace the business value of merit with ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ ‘DEI’ is a very unAmerican idea.  

Merit is a core value of America that has slowly surfaced over the 250 years of our history.  Merit has been at war with America's union values of seniority and equality. The triumph of merit over union values emerged at the end of the 1950s as the modern world of commerce triumphed over the domestic hereditary elite (see many earlier blogs). 

Robby saw the situation. He realized that many corporate Leviathans were suffocating their employees with DEI in house re-education programs; corporations whose customers abhor the woke ideas of DEI.

Robby, with a Hollywood background in film and a list of over 70 music videos, has made Internet videos showing the DEI programs at Tractor Supply, John Deere, Harley-Davidson, Jack Daniel's and put these videos on social media where they were picked up and viewed in the millions. Each of the companies promptly publicly announced the end of their DEI programs.  My favorite result were two videos, one showing an empty Harley-Davidson repair station at the greatest motorcycle rally in Sturgis, S.D. and another with a motorcyclist shooting his Harley to death.

The true power of one man with the right idea, the video graphic skills, and modern social media, is that giant Lowe’s and behemoth Ford both backed down and ended their DEI with just the threat that Robby was making a video of their compulsory DEI programs. That is the incredible power of one man.

It just tickles my fancy that the greatest farce in American media, the New York Times says Robby’s “Attacks aren’t working” while the Wall Street Journal calls him a “One man power house destroying DEI.”

Envy of the Rich is the Core of the American Left

I have to tell you that I neither have envy for the rich, including the really rich, nor do I think they have political power.   The core thinking of the Left is the idea that the distance between the rich and poor is unjust.  

I have personally never had that view.  Early on it was for one reason; later in my life I added another reason.

The first reason I don’t envy the rich is that I made choices in my life to make me as free and powerful as any human.  So I never had any reason to envy the rich or the very rich.  I became a simple liver, meaning I learned to live on the minimum expense, so that I could provide for all my desires with little effort.  I am also an American surrounded by boundless abundance.

I had salaried jobs until I was 30 but I was always my own boss and used my time to accomplish whatever were my own goals and fantasies.  I can see that someone who thinks of earning money for stability and market rewards can envy those who appear to have no worries about stability and market rewards, nea ‘the rich.’ A fulltime job can be the shackles that create envy. An IRA, pension or a mortgage can create envy of the ‘rich.’

I had that stability and access to nearly all market rewards with simple living. I even wrote a book called Simple Living; Investments for Old Age for those who worry about stability in later life.

I have one child and one grandchild who have adopted my views of life and gather unto themselves all the skills and attributes that make them free and functional in the world. That includes having many friends, because your friends are your true wealth.

Has it worked?  Absolutely. 

I have traveled the world, lived in Japan and Israel when I wanted to, known hundreds, maybe thousands of important and influential people, accomplished major world-changing feats including creating the first worldwide currency, Mastercard, and woke up every day free to fulfill every wish and desire and be wildly joyous.  Never envying anyone.

The second discovery: political power does not come from being rich. Not at all. I learned this from being in politics for much of my life.  Many rich people try to buy political influence.  Nearly all fail.  Many have run for political office spending vast fortunes and gotten nowhere.  The only people who wield political power and political influence are those who deeply know politics.  Having money is irrelevant; I am serious.  For money objectives there are monied counter-objectives.  Knowing and understanding how politics works is the ultimate tool to influence politics. Willie Brown, who was poor as a young man and is a simple liver as an old man, has molded political power in California and nationally at a level few others have ever achieved or conceived.   Willie used money but it was not his own money.

Bill Gates’ global foundation is a farce.  It has accomplished nothing in any domain with Croesus levels of spending.  I know because I traveled the world examining Foreign Do Good Investments and found the ratio of good projects to harmful projects to be 1 to 30.  Free market practices did orders of magnitude more good than aid grants. And a fraction of the harm.

Summary

Envy of the rich comes from two sources.  People who don’t know how to live free with the abundance around them.  The fallacious belief that wealth is somehow connected to power. Political power is political understanding.

One caveat.  I would love to have my own private jet for travel. There is a little envy about that.  I’ve been a private pilot since my early 20's so I know that the time involved in flying any plane is great and requires a paid pilot. I now pay for business class and fly on the commercial 30-50 seat planes when I can.

Civil War Problem

I agree with many people that we have the right emotional conditions for a civil war.

Personally, there are many times in the past 5 years I would have gone out with a rifle and pistol to shoot the ‘woke’ media and government people.

Elon Musk and others are right; we have been ripe for a civil war for many years.

I didn’t go out and shoot people because I could never find the right person or place to shoot that would start the civil war.

The actual American Civil War had a geographic point of origin.

“The war began on April 12, 1861, when the Confederacy bombarded Fort Sumter in South Carolina.” 

The public attitudes were geographically divided into many Northern and nearly all Southern states.  No such distinct geographic division exists today between the ‘woke’ and the anti-woke. Even the core of cities versus the rest of the nation is a poor division of ‘woke’ and anti-woke.

At one time I was tempted to call on my fellow patriots to meet at the newest federal government building on Mission St. in San Francisco and begin shooting anyone who went in or out.  But that would have killed many of my own compatriots.  It wouldn’t have worked.

The new civil war can not begin until most people on each side are geographically separated.

Who Can You Trust?

The Internet has changed our world in the most fundamental fashion.  We no longer have trust in any of the large cacophony of information that we receive. The most authoritative sources are widely distrusted.  My son calls this the ‘collapse of narrative.’

How can you trust anything when contradictory information is just a click away and virtually every institution has offered unreliable information at some recent moment?   You can’t.

I want to offer my own approach.  You have to have yours too.

First off, I trust no information I get.  I even doubt some of the things I see with my own eyes in the solid world around me.  What appears solid may not be; what appears safe may not be like trying to run across one side of a freeway with few cars on it.  I have no trust in any government source, or news media or professional association. Any argument by authority is almost always rejected; such as ‘scientists find,’ or ‘the Dental Association says.’

So how do I get a sense that any particular information is reliable? 

I trust some people because they either can-not make false statements or are leery of making statements that they are not certain of.  In the first group are nearly all Japanese, 120 million of them. They can obfuscate but they can not lie.

Who Can You Trust?

I trust data where I can see the original source, where it has not been modified, where I know the collection methodology and where I can do the calculations myself, such as the average, the variance and the sequence over time.  I have been a statistician since I taught it in university.

The same applies to all documents.  I learned at the U. of Chicago to always read the original document or to be leery if it is not available.

I trust some people who are public figures or writers if they have been totally reliable over long periods of time.

We have now reached the end of my trusted sources.  Sadly, it is a new world with a complete absence of authority, anywhere.  

Neither Wikipedia nor Google search is authoritative. In both I’ve seen pieces that were factually very wrong based on my personal experience.  In the case of Wikipedia I’ve corrected major errors and included reliable reference sources only to see my corrections disappear a day or two later.