Pro Commerce

Victory and Happiness

Charles Krauthammer makes a strong argument in the June 18th Washington Post. He says that Israel has clearly won the Intifada 2 war that the Palestinians launched against Israel four years ago. Krauthammer is right. Just as the United States won a complete victory over the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s, so Israel has totally defeated the Palestinians by the beginning of 2004.

Like the American victory over the Soviets, the Israelis can’t celebrate; it would be unseemly for such a stunning victory to be trumpeted. I had a party to celebrate America’s victory over the Soviets and I can now write a blog celebrating Israel’s victory.

From my visit a month ago I can state unequivicably that Israelis are now the happiest people I’ve ever been with. This is the first time Jews have been so happy for so long in 2,000 years.

First the magnitude of the victory, then the lessons learned.

Israel suffered a modest 4% decline in GNP and a large decline in tourism over the four years since Intifada 2 began but Israel had recovered by the spring of 2004. Israel is on the road to significant tourist growth and her GNP is on a healthy upswing, growing faster than any European country. Israel now has lowered the level of terrorism to the same that she had before Intifada 2 started. Not good, but nothing like 85 Israelis killed in one month early in Intifada 2. Israelis are looking to the future with hope and exuberance. Israel now defines the border of her state with a fence that no major nation opposes.

Israel has developed counter terrorist skills. From Haaretz: “senior IDF officers at the Central Command, the army's overall West Bank headquarters, told a high-level briefing (last week) that the total number of suicide attacks and attempted suicide attacks had plummeted by 75 percent during the first half of the year (2004), as compared with the corresponding period in 2003. No less than 58 would-be bombers were arrested during that period, and more than 100 threatened attacks were headed off”.

Israel and Jewry have completely changed the international dynamics that formerly had most UN member nations opposing Zionism. In early 2004 there was a European summit that unanimously supported Jews and opposed anti-Zionism. The UN, that formerly held an anti-Zionism conference in Durban, now is holding a conference on stopping anti-Semitism around the globe. Arafat, formerly a globe trotting underdog darling is now seen almost universally as a corrupt despot, completely dishonest and incompetent.

The Palestinian people watched their GNP drop to 60% of its pre-Intifada level, (an historically unheard of disaster) watched more than 45,000 Palestinian jobs in Israel disappear, saw the number of UN defined poverty cases rise from 20% of the Palestinian population to 80%.

No Arab nation, no nation at all, has been willing to lift a finger to help the Palestinians. The Palestinians now have no claim to any land beyond the fence that Israel is building, no diplomatic office in the U.S. and they lost their strongest ally, Saddam Hussein. Their suicide bomber weapon has become ineffective. The Palestinians have no hope. There are virtually no Palestinian supporters left in Israel. Israeli supporters of Palestine dropped from hundreds of thousands of people to hundreds. No Israeli government will have public support to negotiate with the Palestinians for a period that extends far into the future.

I call that a complete victory for Israel and a complete defeat for the Palestinians.

The lessons. Terrorism against people like the Israelis (and probably Americans) is a losing tactic because it generates solidarity and a moral righteousness on the part of the nation being attacked. The resulting vigor and global support of the victim nation are not possible to overcome for the nation launching terrorists.

The best counter tactic is to build a fence and partition off the terrorists.

The fence should be combined with killing terrorist leaders; kill as many as possible and make the goal of killing of terrorist leaders a public goal. (In the case of Saddam Hussein, holding him up to international public ridicule was effective.)

I’m happy about this historical victory and the Israelis are even happier.

What counts?

A recent discussion concerned the fact that The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books don’t count anymore. When did they stop counting, what does it mean to count and who does count?

I think the New Yorker stopped counting some time around the arrival of Tina Brown in the 1990s. It wasn’t Tina, it was that Tina marked a point in America where the haughty arrogance of the New Yorker, with a snotty overtone of “anyone intelligent is pro-Left” was finally seen as a part of tradition of opposing war against Hitler, tacit support of Stalin, benign approval of Mao, Castro and Daniel Ortega. When that assemblage was finally defeated, the New Yorker’s arrogant, Harvard modulated and elitist voice no longer mattered.

I think the New York Review of Books failed on the first new issue after September 2001 when it assumed the persona of Arundhati Roy. No one can stand that voice, a voice so shrill that it makes Noam Chomsky sound sober.

What does it mean to count? You count if other media, and the occasional public figure, respond to your strong, original and relevant articles.

Who counts today in the U.S.? The following count: the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Jerusalem Post; Commentary, the New Republic and the Weekly Standard; Fox News, Slate (online) and the Wall Street Journal.

The Journal didn’t count until the late 1990s when it started doing follow-up on the issues it raised. For example, the WSJ recently raised the issue of the UN Oil for Bribes scandal and has hung on to that story like a pit bull.

Medal of Honor

It has been a month since Congress and the Administration had a Puritan orgy of self recrimination about torture in Abu Ghraib prison. This orgy was a unifying feat since the Left, Middle and the Right expressed 180 tons of opprobrium each.

I, on the other hand, believe that it is now time to give the Congressional Medal of Honor to the geniuses who invented this torture. I still can’t believe that an American invented a torture based on putting woman’s lace panties on the head of a naked Arab male and photographing him or forming a pyramid of naked Arab males, all face down with bags over their heads and a smiling woman standing behind their behinds for a glamour photo. A Puritan society just doesn’t have interrogators with such a vivid imagination; especially a vivid sexual imagination.

It is my guess that this may be the most successful form of interrogation ever used against Arabs. It was a peacenik’s dream of painless coercion. Congratulations again to the geniuses who invented this brilliant form of interrogation.

Note for Historians

An historian in the future may want to know whether the public was aware of the hate campaign that the Lefty Fundamentalists at the New York Times were directing at the new leading public intellectual, David Brooks.

I noticed it and am letting my thousands of readers know about it. Joyce Maynard, on June 23rd, reviewing Brooks’ latest book: On Paradise Drive -- How we live now… goes out of her way to be a real smart ass. She smarmily commends Brooks’ book, a little, then tries to knife him in the belly with a favorable comparison to Michael Moore, the leading village idiot of our era.

I noticed and now we noticed this piece of N.Y. Times venom. Lefty hate seems just as hysterical on the east side of Manhattan as it is here in San Francisco. Thanks to Joyce Maynard, I’m buying extra copies of Paradise Drive to give to friends. To my delight, Brooks is such a brilliant writer that every Lefty Fundamentalist friend to whom I have given his early book, Bobo’s in Paradise, loved it.

After I first wrote this blog and two days after Maynard’s slime job, Brooks wrote a piece on Michael Moore. June 26th. Moore seems to provide absurdities for his critics to use, without his even knowing it.

Progressive Movement Part 3 of 3

This is part 3 of a 3 part series on the Progressive Movement from the 1892 Peoples Party Convention to the 2003 election of Gov. Schwarzenegger. You can click here for Part 1 or Part 2.

There are two ways to show the connection between the People’s Party of 1892, which became the Progressive movement of 1910 that elected Gov. Johnson, and the 2003 recall of Gray Davis which resulted in the elevation of Arnold Schwarzenegger to governor.

One is to show that the issues and platforms were the same. That I have done in the previous blogs.

The second, and most convincing, is to show that the same kind of people voted the same way in the elections connected to each period. The people were not physically the same, but they lived in the same counties. There is a geographic continuity which wise people understand is the basis for deep rooted political conviction. New York City and Upper New York State have rigidly voted the same patterns (opposite) for over 200 years.

The large counties in California that went in a big way for Schwarzenegger for governor in 2003 were: Orange, San Diego, Riverside and San Bernardino. (Southern California) Lesser counties with strong support were San Luis Obispo and Fresno. Los Angeles County gave Schwarzenegger a large number of votes, but came in below the statewide average level of support.

The same counties went for Governor Johnson in 1910. The same counties. San Diego was a major Johnson county as were Riverside and Los Angeles.

Supporting the People’s Party presidential candidate, Weaver, in 1892 were the same counties (except that Riverside doesn’t seem to have existed). Orange, San Diego, San Luis Obispo were strongly for Weaver as were Los Angeles and Fresno.

Summary:
For 120 years the same counties have constituted the base for the Progressive movement. The same counties that supported the Peoples Party candidate for president in 1892 elected Arnold Schwarzenegger governor.

Most writers and international observers who have visited California have commented on the very heartland of America quality they find in Southern California. Historically it has voting patterns in common with Kansas and Texas where the Progressive movement started.

Progressive Movement Part 2 of 3

This is a three part series on the Progressive Movement from 1892 to the election of Governor Schwarenegger in 2003. Part 1 is National, this part is California and part 3 is the statistical evidence.

The anecdotal irony: When the California progressives, who organized themselves in 1907 as the Lincoln-Roosevelt League, decided on a choice for governor in the 1910 election, they settled on the best known and respected progressive leader, Harris Weinstock (later of the California Weinstock department store chain). Weinstock deferred to his first choice, Hiram Johnson, the celebrity crusading San Francisco prosecutor who had put Boss Abe Ruef in prison a few years earlier. Johnson said he required his wife Minnie McNeal’s approval. Minnie hated Sacramento, but finally agreed to let her husband run for governor when it was argued she would end up in Washington D.C. with Hiram as senator. (And she did). Johnson ran for governor as a Progressive and won easily. Johnson did not carry San Francisco where the railroad interests he crusaded against were headquartered.

Nearly 100 years later, the incumbent governor, Gray Davis, was ousted in a grass roots recall election, only months after assuming office. The obvious grass-roots reform choice was the former mayor of Los Angeles, Richard Riordan, who was prominent and highly regarded as a progressive. Riordan was the man who had been cheated out of the governorship in a manipulated election by the incumbent, Gray Davis. Riordan was asked to run for governor, but like Weinstock, he deferred to his choice, celebrity Arnold Schwarzenegger. Schwarzenegger, like Hiram Johnson, said he needed his wife Maria Schriver’s approval. Maria, like Millie, hated Sacramento, but was finally convinced she wouldn’t have to live there. Arnold ran in an open field of candidates and won by a large plurality.

Both campaigns, Johnson’s and Schwarzenegger’s, were driven by a dissident group with Republican Party leanings. Both reform movements had the goal to overthrow the corrupt California government.

In Johnson’s day the worst corruption was the monopoly railroad interests, just as had been the case with the People’s Party in 1892. In Schwarzenegger’s day the corruption was rampant from multiple interests, including unions, who had been bribing the Democratic machine starting with Boss Jessie Unruh in 1964, then for twenty five years with Boss Willie Brown and ending with John Burton/Gray Davis. The utility regulatory body, created 100 years earlier by Johnson, had caused an energy disaster. Schwarzenegger, like Hiram Johnson, did not carry San Francisco where Boss Willie Brown, a leader of the corrupt Democratic machine, had become mayor.

Before Hiram Johnson got to Sacramento, the legislators who ran with him as a Progressive, had already crafted the legislation that made Governor Johnson famous. California promptly got the initiative, the referendum, civil service, expanded conservation, and the open primary. The Progressive legislators also created three interesting laws. One created a recall provision for elected officials. Another law created a regulatory body to control railroad and all utility company tariffs, the Public Utility Commission. The third created a Workers Compensation system.

One hundred years later, grass-roots reform candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger became a candidate because the 100 year old recall law had been used to oust the former governor, Davis. The three most blatant failings of incumbent governor Davis were his electoral corruption as demonstrated in the California Primary which was no longer open, his out of control Public Utility Commission which nearly destroyed the gas and electric utilities of the State and the out of control Workers Compensation system that was driving thousands of businesses out of California. Note, the recall, the open primary, the utility commission and Workers Comp were all created by the 1910 Progressives. Corruption had ruined each of these.

Once in office, Schwarzenegger promptly wrote and passed a major overhaul of the Workers Compensation system, re-created the Open primary and announced his intention to reform the Public Utility Commission.

Progressive Movement Part 1 of 3

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is riding the wave of progressivism. He is a master surfer. You will love some of the ironic touches.

This is a three-part blog describing the history of the progressive movement. First I’ll report the national history, then California and finally the numbers that prove the connection between the 1892 Peoples Party, the California Progressives and Governor Schwarzenegger in 2003.

The progressive movement was the outgrowth of the baby boom that followed the Civil War. By the mid-1880’s when the leading edge of the baby boom was 20 years old, the first signs were imminent in the form of the Farmers Alliance. Hundreds of thousands of farmers in the central and southern United States began forming coops to buy their supplies cheaply with low-interest credit and to sell their produce at high rates. Many successfully ran for office. Their three nemeses were the railroad monopolies, the high costs they faced from local retail jobbers and the terrible corruption of local politics they experienced. The greatest strength of the Alliance was in Texas and Kansas where they elected entire legislative bodies.

By 1892 the whole baby boom movement was so strong that a convention was held to form a new party, create a platform and run a candidate for president. The party was called The People’s Party, a coalition of the Farmers Alliance, urban radicals and the main labor unions of the day. (See photo) Their candidate was James Weaver. Weaver won 22 votes in the Electoral College, carrying four states and getting more than 9% of the popular vote. (The actual vote total is unknown; corrupt ballot boxes were extensive in the Democratic South). I will discuss the Weaver vote in California, in a separate blog, to show the connection to the progressive Schwarzenegger uprising in 2003.

The Peoples Party platform became the progressive movement’s platform over the next decade and much of it became federal law by 1920.

The major force that brought the Peoples Party platform into Federal law was the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, who borrowed nearly the entire party platform including demands for anti-trust regulation, expanded conservation, a major banking overhaul, progressive income tax, creation of a civil service, implementation of initiatives/referendum and railroad regulation.

While the progressive movement disappeared from sight in the eyes of most American historians, it was a grass roots vision of democracy that was revitalized in 1910 in California with the election of Governor Hiram Johnson and a complete legislative body along with him. Wisconsin already had a progressive governor and then Senator, Bob Lafollette. Two years later, in 1912, the movement became national again when Theodore Roosevelt formed a new progressive party to run for president with Hiram Johnson as his vice-president.

Kerry yes-Bush no

The abortion debate long ago shifted to euphemisms. It became Pro-Choice and Pro-Life.

The same thing happened to the campaign I helped start to ban human genetic engineering. One side developed the euphemism: Support stem cell research the other side is still Ban human genetic engineering. We're still early in this debate.

John Kerry has come out four-square in favor of stem cell research. Read on to see what he really means.

The problem is, Kerry has the vote that counts on this. He could have stem cell research if he weren’t being disingenuous.

The Senators who oppose human genetic engineering have 58 votes to pass a bill banning human genetic engineering in the U.S. The opposition, which includes Kerry and H. Clinton, are demanding that this issue be a 60-40 vote for passage of the ban. They have a solid vote against cloture and they will use it.

The problem is that few people object to stem cell research, certainly not President Bush. The scientific issue is that human stem cells are fertilized eggs that can be grown into living human beings. They can become genetically engineered humans (the Nazi ideal). That is what must be banned. If the people who focus on stem cell research would agree to ban the growing of stem cells into human beings, then they could have all the U.S. funded stem cell research they want. The reality is that they don’t just want stem cells, they want unrestricted use of stem cells including for the purpose of human genetic engineering.

Before you read on, you should know that there is pure hype about Alzheimer’s. Alzheimer’s is irrelevant because all the stem cell research done so far shows no benefits of injecting stem cells into the brain. Research continues in Britain with stem cells but no one is wasting more time on Alzheimer’s. The underlying technical issue of getting new genetic information into any living body cell has been a failure for more than 15 years. Those failures are on much more critical diseases such as fatal childhood defects known to be genetic (Alzheimer’s is not a mono-genetic disease).

To recap. 58 out of 100 U.S. Senators would vote to have stem cell research expanded if they could be sure that the research won’t lead to human genetic engineering. 42 Senators, including John Kerry won’t agree to that specific ban on the use of stem cells to create engineered humans. So it is Kerry and 41 other senators who are in fact blocking the expansion of stem cell research. Kerry could vote for the ban. Bush has already endorsed the ban in his eighth month in office.

The Feds are interested

I got a report today that William Donaldson, chair of the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) knows about the work I’ve been doing with PG&E on reporting executive compensation. He is considering the idea for national implementation. One of his staff will be in San Francisco next week to discuss the program.

My idea was to have a separate audit of executive compensation with a simplified, but comprehensive report form.

PG&E is submitting such a report next week to the California Public Utilities Commission and I will post a copy for my blog readers.

Improvements in the PG&E report are needed. The auditor should read all corporate board minutes relating to compensation and write a certified statement that all forms of compensation have been included in the audit report.

Problem in S.F.?

The number of street people that I see on Market Street, when I walk to North Beach in the morning, is way up. The highest number in two years.

But that is not the point of this blog. There were a high number of loonies, people acting out, this morning. This seems like a warning of imminent social danger. (See the blog on the current hysteria)

The last time I saw this phenomenon was in the week before Mayor George Moscone was murdered by Dan White. That was a time when the city was distressed from daily newspaper reports about increasing numbers of deaths at Jonestown.

More on Moore

I've overheard two conversations where the name Michael Moore was used as an adjective.

"He gave a Michael Moore answer..." and "It was just a Michael Moore way to behave."

In both cases the term Michael Moore was pejorative. It seems to mean something stupid, sloppy and fanatic. It could become a verb. “She got Michael Moored when she went to Nashville.”

UN - 4th Reich

I've said a few times that the level and persistence of anti-Semitism at the UN is so high that the organization should be called the 4th Reich.

Kofi Annan introduced Anne Bayefsky at a recent UN conference on anti-Semitism. This is what the brave woman had to say including her condemnation of Kofi. I put it on my own website so it is accessible.

Dr. Phil and Werner

Dr. Phil is today’s Werner Erhard.

Erhard started Est in 1974 to teach hippies how to be responsible. His themes were: be on time, keep your word and expect others to keep their word. You create your own reality. If you behave well your life will go exactly as you plan it.

Dr. Phil, and his predecessor, Dr. Laura, are teaching a similar lesson today to vastly larger audiences. Werner was more extreme than Dr. Phil, because Dr. Phil doesn't believe that people are 100% the consequence of their previous behavior. That thesis required Werner to teach a belief in reincarnation to explain why some people were born with disabilities.

Dr. Phil and Dr. Laura also teach by their own actions that you should be very candid and direct in your speech. Both include a little humor and chuckle with their direct statements to the public they counsel. "You are completely wrong in your behavior and you know it" Dr. Phil will say with a smile.

Why did hippies need to be taught responsibility and why do Americans today need to be taught this lesson in responsibility and candor?

I don't have the answer, but I'm thinking about it.

Michael Moore

I had already written a blog on Michael Moore. Mine was on the borderline of intemperate. Then I read the Christopher Hitchens attack on Moore in Slate. I don’t need to add to Hitchens. Moore is a contemptable human being. Hitchens says what I was going to say in a brief format: “(…this is the guy who thought it so clever and amusing to catch Charlton Heston, in Bowling for Columbine, at the onset of his senile dementia.) Such courage.”

Moore’s politics doesn’t bother me. As Hitchens points out, Moore doesn’t have any politics, not recognizable politics anyway, just naive teenage venom. The kind that speaks directly to celebrity brains in Cannes and Hollywood.

I was never a fan of Heston. I’m still offended by the Columbine-Heston piece of hit cinematography. My favorite analogy is to say of a bad person that he has the morals of a rabid pit bull. That would be a step up for Michael Moore.

Hysteria on the left

The lefties I meet are getting angrier and angrier. Their hatred of "Bush" is growing steadily. Their hearts seem filled with hate, overwhelming hate.

I've figured out what is going on.

To understand my point you need two pieces of history. The first history comes from Paul Boyer's Salem Possessed. Boyer shows that the trials and execution of innocent young women in Salem was the result of Salem being outside the circuit court system of Boston. Had there been an official court system that covered Salem, the witch trials would have stopped immediately. The absence of an institution (official court) was the cause of the hysterical Salem behavior.

The second part of history begins in 1980. Americans became certain that young children were being kidnapped on a large scale (in the 100,000s) and that the managers of day care centers were believed to be widely involved in sexually abusing children in satanic rituals. The satanic ritual abuse the public believed in was always based on the authoritative testimony of children. The phrase "children don't lie" became a national truth.

Over 200 adults were sent to prison during this period. It was a period of hysteria, during which the back yard of the McMartin Pre-school was backhoed to look for the underground room where children, who were only in school for one hour a day, claimed satanic sexual abuse had taken place.

I was removed from the hysterical realm by my wife of the time who was a lawyer and knew several of the accused satanic abusers and got to know the network of falsely accused victims.

The hysteria died off slowly in the late 1990's helped by the publication of a powerful article by Prof. Frederick Crewes in the prestigious New York Review of Books on the absurdity of the recovered memory related to satanic sexual abuse. A leading journalist, who published many articles on actual trials that helped change opinion, was Debbie Nathan. There are several websites covering this hysteria, this is a good one.

Of course the hysteria is not over, as evidenced by people who think the Friedman's were guilty in the documentary Capturing the Friedmans.

I lived inside the hysteria with full awareness of its presence. It was incredible. Nobody, I mean nobody, including my parents and brothers could listen to factual information that contradicted the hysteria. No facts could penetrate. No love could penetrate it. Nothing could penetrate it except personal knowledge and familial tie to someone falsely accused and fighting for their life.

That is what we are in today. The deep hatred of "Bush" is hysteria, the same kind that I lived through once before.

By the end of the 1980's, those of us outside the hysteria understood the cause of it. The absence of government certified day care for children and the absence of government programs to help working women care for their children. The absence of a trusted childcare institution left working women with deep distress and anxiety about the safety of their children. The missing government institution that could have dispelled this fear was the cause of the hysteria, just as the missing courts in Salem were the cause of that hysteria.

What about the hate "Bush" hysteria today, where does that come from?

The hate "Bush" hysteria comes from the absence of a Howard Dean presidential campaign. If Howard Dean, or someone like him, were running for president, the millions of people on the left who are inside this hysteria would have the necessary institution to vent their anxiety and fears.

Our society must find a way for these millions of people to have a voice to represent them.

I have no idea how this hysteria will manifest itself and act out in the public arena. I know that it will.

One possibility for acting out this hysteria is the abandonment of the Democrats in favor of a mass movement to Ralph Nader. Its not impossible. I saw a similar thing happen in the mayoral race in San Francisco last year.

Apostasy

My father was adamant that I should never interfere with a “working man.” He meant not crossing in front of a worker carrying bricks or pushing a wheelbarrow. I knew that his views were part and parcel of his lefty pro-union worldview.

I had to review this worldview the other day when I passed a typical smelly, nearly toothless, 40 year-old, 5’10” black street person who was sleeping in the doorway of a business at Market near 6th. A Latino, who spoke no English, was trying to clean up the area and the bum was yelling at him in a confrontational way.

Driven by my father’s views, I stopped and intervened for the workingman who was cleaning the area. I was aggressive towards the non-working inconsiderate bum. I drove the bum off, after a little physical effort, and continued on my walk.

I asked myself whether my father’s worldview, that led to this contretemps, was my view. I considered my apostasy seriously for a week.

I concluded that the part of my father’s view that honors physical work over idleness, recreation and pomp is proper. I accept it. The honor labor view developed over the past several centuries in defiance of social classes, aristocracy and elitism. It is an inherently American and democratic value. This view is also the reasons that many societies that completely disdain physical work (much of Arabia, much of India, Spanish Latin America and large parts of West Africa), will take centuries to be productive industrial societies.

I reject the part of my father’s lefty worldview that believes support of physical workers means support of labor unions. (My father was unwilling to cross picket lines.)

The triumph of labor unions in Europe, Israel and other parts of the world has not been a positive outcome. Unions have created a larger and more prosperous middle class membership for physical laborers. On the other hand they have always supported bureaucracy, opposed meritocracy, opposed hard work and striven for a decrease in the amount of work that employees do. Nice but not necessarily a positive value for commerce or the general good of society.

Coops are dead

I don’t think anyone has yet announced the death of coops. I’ll do that right now. Coops are dead. Consumer coops, producer coops, employee coops and supplier coops. All dead or dying.

The issue that prompts this has been my reading of Lawrence Goodwyn’s Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America from Oxford University Press in 1976.

I suffer for my blog readers. The book was unmerciful. Nearly 900 pages, poorly written, filled with trivial details and the author’s ideology about the long-term demise of democracy and poor farmers. The ideology was distracting.

The movement that I know of as the Peoples Party first convened in 1892. It was later called the Republican Progressive Party in Teddy Roosevelt’s run for president and gained power in many states in the 1910’s. In California the Progressive Party elected Hiram Johnson and introduced the initiative, recall, referendum, civil service, the open ballot and much more. I’ll write about that subject later as I’m researching the origins of the grass roots Schwarznegger phenomenon.

Goodwyn attributes the entire creation of the Peoples Party to its main constituency, the Farmers Alliance. The Alliance gained members by advocating the use of supplier coops to sell farm crops at higher prices and buyer coops to get essentials, food, clothes etc. for the farmers at lower prices. Hundreds of thousands of farmers joined the movement from 1886 to 1894. The Alliance was separate and competitive with the Grange and much bigger.

The Alliance coops all failed, rather quickly. The prices of cotton, corn and wheat have dropped steadily from the Civil War until today. Nothing could have stopped that. Sears & Roebuck stepped in to sell farm families goods at lower prices in the 1890’s via a catalog and industrial style shipping techniques. Goodwyn doesn’t mention that.

What is relevant, as I read the book, is the realization that I have dealt with over 100 coops out of the several thousand businesses I’ve worked with. I’ve worked with coop auto repair shops, bookstores, insurance companies, savings banks, farms, food wholesalers, restaurants, truckers, farmers markets, ice creameries, some carpentry shops, many grocery stores ... etc. A few have survived, very few. Survival at all has always depended on the ideological commitment of the core workers and plenty of free labor. In Sweden, and other parts of Europe, the coops, I’ve worked with, are subsidized by the government.

What’s wrong with coops? Nothing.

They just happen to be a lesser form of management than the traditional stock, partnership or sole proprietor form. Good people can make coops work. But not for long and not in a volatile market. Group decision making can be excellent, but a single focal point leader is ultimately the source of long term survival.

That is my point. Coops do much better in stable markets like grocery retailers or food suppliers. Simple products, little credit and stable sales. They don’t do well anywhere else.

In addition, as coops get large, they enter the new commercial market that has become important since 1980: the market of businesses that get bought and sold. A coop is hard to buy or sell, it is hard to use as collateral for a loan. Of course many coop insurance companies, food supplier coops, and savings banks have changed their structure so they can be sold as standard equity corporations. That is still the end of the coop.

I have always loved the positive-sum romantic idea of cooperation and coops. It just turns out that the reality of commerce trumps romantic notions.

Save the trees

One of my brothers is developing a large 68-acre parcel for multi-family dwellings. He did an interesting thing to protect the existing trees on the site during the grading and infrastructure phase. The tree roots are surrounded by fencing. The fence has a sign on it listing the appraised value of each tree. Most trees cost more that $15,000.

If no trees are damaged during the 1st construction phase there is a $100,000 bonus paid to the contractor.

Three cheers for prison

My friend Dee Marquart has a blog that mentions the cost of a prisoner in California. She discusses punishment verse rehabilitation. I don’t care about either, its up to the felon. Personal responsibility is the issue and there is no training for it.

Dee has a number $31,000 per year. I don't know the exact numbers, but $31,000 a year to keep a felon off the street seems cheap to me. I make no distinction in this as it relates to the type of crime; that subject only obscures the issue. The total cost of law enforcement, the criminal part of the judicial system and the direct functional costs to society from crime are very high. Each year that a felon is kept from being involved in crime can be weighed against the social cost of crime.

While a drop in crime seldom leads to a drop in the social costs of police and courts, such costs do come down in the long run. Japan, Israel and other low crime societies have very low costs for police and criminal justice and they should be the basis for comparison.

If the felon goes straight when he gets out of prison, it is most likely because of the effects of aging ... just plain sociology of aging. If he is easily caught for a new crime, which is usually the case because parolees are immediate suspects, so much the better. Recidivism is high, but recidivists are usually caught quickly before they run up new social costs for their crime.

Keeping 100,000 felons off the street for one year in California is certainly worth $3 billion in the amount of crime the felons don't get to commit.

The numbers work out just for murder alone. If the life of each person murdered is $3 million (based on 9/11 payouts) and the trial for murder costs several $ million, it is obvious that just from murderers (non-family killings) kept off the street we get an economic bonus.

The Brooks divide

My friends, family, and readers know what I have been saying for quite a while: the emotional political divide that many of us feel is not visible in the polling data for the United States. The Red state/Blue state division, the simple love Bush/hate Bush divide, is media hyperbole with no survey data to back it up. No single question you can ask in an interview will give you results that clearly divide Americans into any category such as Red/Blue state, high/low income, much/little education or any other demographic.

David Brooks, the leading public intellectual of our era, has identified the problem. The division is within the category of education. Among the educated class there is a clear divide between professionals and managers. You can read Brooks column today in the New York Times and see if you agree with him.

I think we are fortunate. From WWI to WWII the leading public intellectual in America was John Dewey. Dewey lost his public standing at the beginning of WWII because he, like most of his readers, didn’t care what the Germans were doing to the Jews; Dewey et al, were totally opposed to any military action by the U.S.

Dewey was a philosopher of education and a terrible writer. David Brooks is a sociologist and an exquisite writer. We are fortunate to live when Brooks is in the ascent.

The French are nasty

My brother and his wife just returned from Europe and report that as usual the Germans were nicer to them than the Swiss. The surprise is that the Swiss were nicer, for the first time in decades, than the French.

As soon as the French recognized an American accent, they turned their backs. Rudeness was the French game.

Silly children. Americans certainly don't treat French visitors that way.

The French treated me that way when I was a travelling teenager in 1959. The Russians in Moscow treated me that way in 1983 just after President Reagan designated them the Evil Empire.

My friend Alex, who grew up in French Canada, says this is always the case for the French. The French are currently upset as the evidence grows that they are steadily becoming more insignificant in the world. The future prospects for the French are grim.

Sounds like the French have much in common with the Arab world -- long-term declining prospects. Will the French be sending suicide bombers to New York?

Free while they last

I have fifteen copies of my latest book, Commerce, left from the first wave of mailings to public intellectuals for review. The next printing will have quotes on the cover. The last fifteen copies of the first printing are available to readers of this blog. Email me at: [email protected] with your mailing address.

My hero and the historian who showed the connection between Adam Smith and the founding fathers of America, Joyce Appleby, Emerita Professor of History UCLA , said the following: "Michael Phillips has written that rare book - a crisp, brief, enlightening look about the vexed subject of Commerce. You can read it in the twinkling of an eye and come away wiser for the effort."

The book is described on Amazon and a discussion is on an adjacent blog.

Daniel Ortega

I missed a demonstration in San Francisco that attacked President Reagan for his role in Central America.

Who can these demonstrators be?

* Didn't they notice that the very same Daniel Ortega that President Reagan believed would fail to be elected if Ortega permitted elections, was defeated when Reagan's wish was granted.
(You can enlarge the Nicaragua image by clicking on it.)

Ortega not only lost the the first free election after the U.S. backed Contras overthrew him but he lost two subsequent elections by even larger majorities as people realized how bad his regime had been. Thank you President Reagan.

* Don't these demonstrators notice that without financial backing from the U.S.S.R the "peoples revolutionary movement" in Guatamala has disappeared. Ironic isn't it?

In Seattle for MA degree

My youngest daughter is the curator of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture at the University of Washington in Seattle. I came up for the ceremony where she is getting her masters degree in Museology. The field is thirty years old and the Burke Museum has been a leading institution in the field since the beginning.

My favorite discussion concerned the death of President Reagan. I have sided with the Milton Friedman people who consider Reagan to be the marker in a major change of direction for America. America, since Reagan, has been moving towards a celebration of commerce and away from the previous direction that viewed the world as a zero sum game and tried to reallocate existing resources into a moralistic traditional value system.

I think that more people in America are approaching my views about the triumph of commerce and modernity. More people are doing so at the same time they are dropping the lingering small town moralism that Reagan carried with him.

I've also found discussions about my simple living values and the nature of commerce to be invigorating. Commerce has no particular bias toward consumption of goods (as anyone who has invested in and made money in the world of private colleges knows). Consumption of services, art and communication are just as favored by commerce as is consumption of realia.

New word: realia

There is a new word that comes from the teaching profession: realia.
Realia describes the part of the world that we perceive with the five senses of touch, sight, sound, smell and taste. What is excluded is imagination.

Realia is connected to reality, but is interesting because it evolved to help teachers focus on the five senses as opposed to reading, describing and explaining.

Growing foot traffic

I can't explain it. The foot traffic in downtown San Francisco is growing. On Sunday evening the 30th of May the foot traffic on this corner (4th and Market) was greater than at the height of Christmas season. This evening, at 6:30 on a Tuesday, it was surprisingly heavy.

Several forces are clearly at work. One, this corner is important because it is one block away from the Mission garage and the Sony Metreon building, a regional destination hub. Two it is the gateway from the Mission garage, Bart and S.F. Muni system to the downtown shopping area.

The third reason is speculative. I keep finding evidence that tens of thousands of people from Fresno to Carmichael have apartments in San Francisco to use as a holiday shopping retreat. San Francisco is being hollowed out of worker residents and filled with regional shoppers.

My favorite protestor

Standing in the middle of an anti-GMO protest is my favorite protestor. He looks Asian, is always well dressed and carries a sign that has seven lines of latin characters. Some of the lines are English words. The rest are nonsense combinations of letters. While others around him are protesting GMOs at a BioTech conference, my hero is protesting NGJIGHEN and BIILEIGJHNEONO two serious problems that most people fail to comprehend.

This gentleman is the real heir to San Francisco’s 1870s hero Emperor Norton.

Changed my mind on GMO

I took a photo of the anti-GMO demonstration here in San Francisco. The demonstration is against the BioTechnology conference that is in the Moscone Center. There were not many demonstrators at the time I took the photo this morning.

Readers know I change my mind and publicly admit it. Back in the early 1990s I was on both sides. I was the founder of the Project to Label Gene Altered Food (it was 1991, years before the terms GM and GMO evolved) and I attended the BioTech conference in 1992 to argue against GM food.

Today, I am still on both sides. The opposite sides. I am satisfied that my original position in favor of labeling GM food has been achieved. The USDA organic label now means the food is not GM. I also have been in the movement long enough, thirteen years, to be comfortable with the safety of GM food. There have been enough crops and enough quantities of GM food consumed to identity gross problems. There aren’t any gross problems. Problems may still occur in the future, but that is no longer a reason to sidetrack an entire industry.

On the other hand, biotech people still don’t understand the moral wrong involved in genetic modification of the human germline. That is a moral outrage that must be stopped and I am still working on it. The anti-GMO debate drains resources from the real issue of human germline engineering and attracts lunatic lefties whose presence in any debate clouds the issue.

Neo Hamas in San Francisco

I neglected to mention, in the previous blog about the nazi protestors at the Israel in the Park event, that there were several ominous groups of 15-18 year olds who looked quite tough. These boys portend a potential danger in the future.

It is impossible for most Americans to comprehend that the Black and Brown gangs in our cities, killing each other and an occasional innocent bystander are the same kind of kids who form Hamas and Al Aksa. I suspect that with enough social support, the Arab teens I saw yesterday among the nazi rallyers could become dangerous in the future.

Israel in the Ball Park

A great celebration of Israel this afternoon in SBC ball park. I can't estimate the number of people, something over 15,000. They were scattered all over the park, mostly in the outfield where the booths were. A bright sunny day, great music and a happy convivial crowd. Lots of food, lots of Israeli t-shirts and kids everywhere.

The nazi demonstrators out in front with PLO flags were small in number, probably out numbered by the S.F. police. The throngs going into the ball park ignored them, even though the nazis were loud, chanting something offensive that I can't remember.

Is my analogy of Palestinian supporters to nazis defensible? The Nazis wanted racial purity, vast expansion of their land and death to the Jews and homosexuals. Sounds like pro-Palestinians to me.

The Peace Movement?

As usual, I write about one of the many movements I participated in, but now find to be wrong. I organized, was arrested and carried out illegal acts for the peace movement. Now I apologize for my wrong ideas and bad behavior.

I propose this as a book called the Dark History of the Peace Movement. Books and PhD theses are getting picked-up from my blogs. Help yourself.

Many people feel comfortable saying that they believe in peace. Such people, including many of my friends and relatives, say they believe in the ultimate rationale of a peaceful settlement in nearly every conflict. Such peace supporters are usually referring to civil wars and international conflicts.

It is universally accepted by ordinary people in America, Japan and Europe that the idea of peace and peaceful resolution of national and international conflict is a respectable idea.

It isn't a respectable idea. History is replete with examples that are contrary to the notion of a peace movement. In fact, there is virtually no evidence to support such the untenable idea of a peace movement. The function of this proposed book is to dispel the irrational idea of a viable peace movement or force its proponents to defend their position.

This is to be a history book. The book begins with the historic event recorded in song, of a peaceful Christmas on the front lines in WWI where the soldiers got out of their trenches, traded food, drink and song. The historic event is used as evidence that soldiers, ordinary people, don't want to go to war.

History needs to be revealed to the readers. The soldiers were killing each other the day after Christmas and for two more years without respite. There were few desertions in WWI, and certainly no more after this Christmas event than before. War is not driven by anger or interpersonal feelings. Soldiers die for their comrades but not out of hate or anger.

To fully discredit the peace movement it is important to look at the two classic examples of peace activists and review their history. The most famous and the most undeserving example of a peace activist is Mohandas Gandhi. Gandhi is cited as the perfect example of a founder of the modern peace movement who led his people to political independence using non-violent peace tactics.

A review of Indian history reveals a different story. India in Gandhi’s 1930s was a nation with hundreds of millions of people who could have driven the few thousands of British out of the country simply by holding hands and marching them into the Indian Ocean. The problem was that Indians were bereft of organizational skills and had no competence as warriors. There was no alternative to non-violence.

Worse than that. When WWII began, Gandhi went to England and threatened to support Hitler unless Britain agreed to give India independence after the war. His threat was militarily pathetic, but England was desperate to withdraw troops from India. In any case, Britain wanted to use the few good soldiers in the Indian Army, the Sikhs.

After independence was granted, non-violence was completely forgotten as India and Pakistan went to war with each other. Two incompetent armies killing each other; one, presumably, the army of a great non-violent nation.

The second classic example of purported successful non-violence is Martin Luther King Jr. and the marches to end Jim Crow in the American South.

M. L. King Jr. was successful and his movement was non-violent. The historical trouble with this story is: the driving force in King’s movement was the moral force of the thousands of Blacks who had served in the U.S. military in WWII. The complete integration of the U.S. military on Southern bases created incessant political friction. The fact that King was fully cognizant of this military service moral issue led him to put WWII veterans, in uniform, at the front of all his marches.

Add two other factors. One judicial. The U.S. Supreme Court had ordered desegregation of all public education before the anti-Jim Crow movement got underway. School desegregation was slowly being carried out by federal marshals in the South, independent of King. Courts were regularly ruling that interstate commerce could not be segregated and this was also being carried out independent of King.

Second, President J.F. Kennedy, who showed no interest in supporting M. L. King Jr., was assassinated and the Vice President who succeeded him, a Texan committed to racial integration, had been the most powerful legislator in decades. The new president, L.B. Johnson, used sympathy for the assassination of Kennedy to push legislation ending Jim Crow, especially at the polls and in the work place. Again, an action independent of King.

As in India, after the anti-Jim Crow movement had publicly succeeded, non-violence was forgotten or discredited. The U.S. faced five years of violent annual urban summer rioting by blacks killing mostly each other and destroying their own neighborhoods.

The next points of historic evidence that should shame any proper pacifist were the outcomes of Buddhist pacifism. Both Tibet and Sri Lanka have been Buddhist nations for a millennium. Neither has fared well in the world. Tibet was over run by the Chinese in the 1950s and the Buddhist government was replaced. Sri Lanka faced a long and violent civil war from a minority population of Tamils. In neither case did pacifism protect the population from conquest by an invader or civil war.

One recent historic case is a direct discreditation of pacifism, but isn’t widely known. A group of Americans, under David Hartsough, worked in the predominantly Albanian city of Pristina, capital of Kosovo, for five years in the mid 1990s to create the largest base of citizens trained in non-violent tactics anywhere in history. Better than 60% of the population of 400,000 people were directly involved in non-violent training and created their own independent Albanian education, university and health system to support their communal non-violent peace involvement.

When the Serbian army invaded the country and city in 1999 they drove the entire population into the next country, Macedonia, where the Kosovar Albanians remained until American and NATO bombing raids in Belgrade forced the Serbian Army to leave Kosovo.

Thanks directly to several months of bombing, the Kosovars were able to return to their homes.

The final example brings the weight of great minds and a century of debate to the issue of a non-violent peace movement. Beginning in the late 1880s European Jews began to slowly buy land in the Palestinian part of the Ottoman Turkish Empire. From the beginning the Jewish community around the world discussed the necessity of peaceful community relations with the indigenous Arab population. The great Martin Buber led the debate in favor of a non-violent peace movement. Buber was supported in this global debate by hundreds of important and prominent thinkers, including Albert Einstein.

The peak of the peace movement was reached in the summer of 1999 when 100,000 Israelis were members of Peace Now. Peace Now was able to muster many hundreds of thousands of supporters in the U.S. and Europe.

The strongest redoubt of non-violent pacifism was Hebrew University in Jerusalem, which had advocated Martin Buber’s ideas for over 75 years.

Things changed by 2003, when Peace Now had virtually no members and was barely able to produce 2,000 demonstrators in Israel. After a lethal explosion in the cafeteria, Hebrew University had only one remaining professor willing to publicly support a peace movement.

The Israeli population which was over 80% in support of the peace movement in 1999, was by 2003 in total support of walling off Palestinians and of refusing to negotiate any form of peace treaty. An amazing reversal occurred in three years, after a century of active global debate on the issue of a non-violent peace movement in the Middle East.

The authors of A Dark History of the Peace Movement may want to leave out this last Israeli section. Many lay pacifists and most activists in the movement are anti-Israel to the point of often being anti-Semitic.

This last section, which would incorporate most important thinkers on the matter and the longest history of debate on the subject, would directly offend many pacifists.