Pro Commerce

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.

For the Record

When Republicans controlled the Presidency and Congress we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the end of the Civil War.

I tried to get the nation to celebrate the 100th and 150th anniversary of the Civil War and the 14th Amendment but nothing happened because Democrats controlled both the Presidency and Congress.  Sorry folks I contacted Black leaders (many of whom I knew personally) and the D.C. government; no response. 

Its a fact.

This image is the 50th Anniversary parade with veterans of both sides of the Civil War.

The Real Nakba and Colonialism

Somehow the world needs a good lesson in Middle Eastern history.  Palestinians and a million other misinformed people think that when the newly founded state of Israel was forced to fight off five well-established and well-armed Arab enemy nations, that the Arabs living in the new state of Israel were driven out.

Absolutely false.  The resident Arabs were told to leave by the ruling Muslims and the attacking Arab nations. About half left both the new Israel and the United Nations created Palestine.   A small number left out of fear of local terrorism which at the time was decades old.  The new State of Israel always permitted them to return.  This Arab exodus is referred to as the Nakba.

The real Nakba occurred over the next decade.

More than twice as many Jews, close to 850,000, were driven out of Arab lands with their possessions and wealth confiscated.  Most were settled in Israel with no compensation or support from any Arabs or international bodies.

The comparable misinformation about the history of the region has to do with settlement and the absurd term ‘colonialism.’  One hundred fifty years ago when Jews first began the modern settlement in Israel, there were about equal numbers of Jews and Arabs in the small area that became Palestine, under the rule of the Turkish Empire. The Jews had been there since Roman times. The Arabs had been wandering desert tribes with temporary settlements in the area. The Jews lived in small ancient towns. The Arabs were wandering tribal traders attracted to the area by the Jews creation of new jobs.

Jews had been settled in the entire Middle East for millenia.  Jews had well-established communities  in Persia, especially in Isfahan, and were long settled in Babylon the center of the Middle East, eight hundred years before Mohammed was born in the 6th century.  Islam is recent.  Jews are very ancient.

None of this is contested by decent people who have access to myriad documents and artifacts from the area.

Our Constitution Fails on Factions

The issue of factions is discussed by James Madison in Federalist Papers 10.  It will take you ten minutes to read.  Worth every minute. Madison covers this critical issue completely and brilliantly. He presented the issue early in the Constitutional Convention and it shaped the form of our government.

There is no way to summarize what Madison says; he is as concise as I could be.  Factions are groups of people whose interest is homogeneous but contrary to the interests of the nation’s survival if they become the majority.  Madison considers a religious faction as a great potential danger but sees how commonly religious factions splinter.

Today we have three religions agglomerated and very stable.  (1) The human-caused global warming apocalypse is religious and forty years old.  I was among the founders who recognized it as becoming a religion.  (2) The Marxist class warfare turned into racial and sexual oppression is neo-religious; (One hundred seventy years old.)  (3) The union value of anti-merit is not religious but deeply held, nearly religious, (Over four hundred years old.)  All together, these three form modern wokism, a gigantic faction in control of hundreds of American institutions, and important agencies. Not the majority of Americans but nearly.

So how has Madison’s designed Constitution fared in this giant faction era?  I think very poorly.  This gigantic faction of hostility to commerce to individual liberty to the First Amendment and to merit has survived in America. It has grown rapidly over the last twenty years.

The first Constitutional failure was in having Congressional elections every two years.  This was intended to keep factions from growing rapidly by refreshing the legislature.   The woke faction has grown from the election of 2006 to today; nine elections. In the election of 2016 several government agencies spied on a Presidential candidate during the campaign period, led by the woke faction. 

The two legislatures have not had either the ability to recognize the faction’s control of a vast number of government agencies and no ability to control the gigantic government if they recognized the faction control. A total failure of the Constitution.

By the 2020 general election one of the two political parties, the one representing the hostile faction, fraudulently intervened in the voting process in several states to elect the faction’s candidate for president.  No Constitutional recourse existed. During the previous two centuries since the Constitution was installed, there were many states controlled by corrupt local bosses and the only Constitutional protection of elections was the large number of states and the post-Constitution Electoral College.

The only Constitutional protection that has existed to protect the majority from a malicious and aggressive faction has been the Supreme Court, which has slowly intervened in several hostile faction actions.  It has not been able to stop the corrupt legal warfare waged in courts below the Federal level.

Just as the Constitution failed to avoid a civil war in 1860, where a faction favoring human slavery grew to massive size in a geographic area, captured one political party and seceded. Today the Constitution seems less able to cope.  The Constitution did not anticipate a political party aligned with one faction, a national government  with millions of employees aligned with the faction and the public conversation (media) controlled by the faction.

The only structural suggestion I have ever made is for a lottery legislature.  This would weaken the political parties but would not stop the take over of the government agencies, academia or the mass media. 

We are in a Luddite Era

The reason I can see what is happening in society is because I have a class analysis.  I call it Social Thought but it is not far from standard class analysis.  

The academic world had transformed class analysis from a Marxist version to a racist one over the past 35 years because there was no working class in America and no hereditary upper class either.  

So what is happening is that we have a large group of wokies running our universities, government, media, many major corporations and our educational system.  To them the oppressors are whites, Jews, Indians, police, corporations, and Asians. The oppressed are blacks, Arabs, Spanish and Portuguese speakers, native Americans, heavy drug users, and criminals.

What is interesting to me, is the synthesis of the religion of Human-Caused Global Warming Apocalypse with the Marxist Oppressive Racism. We call this combination ‘Woke.’

To this has been added Jew Hate, the most ancient and enduring human persuasion.

What I realized is that these three groups of hysterics all fit together.  People inside this hysteria want the world, the modern world, to stop. To stop right now.  

This is Luddism, the same old imagery of throwing a wooden boot into the giant programmed weaving machine.

What pulled it all together for me was the recent public addition of Jew Hate.  

The hereditary elites of America, England, Europe, Russia, and many other nations have always harbored a strong Jew Hate.  The reason is clear to me now.  The hereditary elites have always, always wanted to stop social change because it is a threat to their domination and status.  Jews, for thousands of years, have been a primary source of social change and innovation.

Jews from day one have believed in education, they have known mathematics, they have been readers, writers, and traders. If there had been Nobel Prizes in 500 CE, the majority would have gone to Jews.

These all fit together.  Stop the world today.  Believe in Armageddon that is human- caused, be strongly opposed to meritocracy because it drives innovation and blame all horrors on Jews.

Another Jewish Divide

The Jewish Nation has divided many times in the past.  Part of it has always become the mainstream after a few centuries. It is happening today with a vengeance.

One of the first major divisions were the Pharisees and the Sadducees. This occurred shortly after the Maccabees won the war celebrated on Hanukkah, about 160 BCE.  It appears that the Pharisees became the mainstream as rabbinic practices were being developed, in the absence of a Temple, and the beginnings of the Talmud were underway.  The Sadducees chose a different path, rejecting the Talmud and the other written interpretations of the earlier oral books of the Torah.  Other revolting groups at the time included the Essenes and the Zealots. The Essenes practiced celibacy and died out promptly.  The Zealots still survive in tiny numbers.

The Sadducee views rejecting the Talmud tradition re-occurred with vigor in the Middle East as ‘Karaites.’  The Karaite movement grew rapidly in the 10th century and was a major movement in Judaism for seven centuries and still exists today.

The next big schism in Judaism occurred in response to Sabbatai Zevi.  Zevi saw himself and was acclaimed by others as the Messiah.  An historical wave of messianism swept the global Jewish community in 1665 until, Zevi renounced Judaism under pressure from the Turks and converted to Islam.  In response the global rabbinate distanced itself from messianic religion and distanced itself from esoteric practices for the next two centuries.

At various times Jews have been pressured by authorities to convert to Christianity and Islam.  The ones who pretended to convert often practiced Judaism covertly but were no longer accepted in the mainstream of Jewish life. A group of these so-called ‘conversos’ is still found near Sante Fe, New Mexico.

In the period of Israel’s creation, 1930-58, parts of Judaism, outside of Israel, distanced itself from the supporters of Israel but that disappeared around 1960.

Recently open hostility to Israel was adopted by the mainstream Democrat Party. Again a Jewish schism has arisen. The Reform Jews who are Democrats, along with some in the Conservative movement Democrats, are separating from mainstream Jews and Israel.  

Leading Democrats have a long history of Jew hate and anti-Israel views.  The State Department was strongly opposed to the creation of Israel. President Carter was strongly anti-Jew and wrote a book explaining his views.  The greatest hatred of Jews was found in President Obama as testified to by the Israeli ambassador, Michael Oren, and carried over directly to the administration of Joe Biden and Biden’s Senate speaker, Charles Schumer.

The schism is here, we get to live it.

Democrats Don’t Understand America

This blog will be hard for many readers to accept.  The Democrat Party as a whole does not understand the unique political nature of America.  

The best evidence is from the constitution of Japan which was created by the American State Department staff after WWII who were all Democrats.  It is modeled on the British system where the parliament (‘the Diet’ in Japan) elects the prime minister who is in charge of the executive branch of government.  In the U.S. Constitution, the head of the executive branch is elected by the entire American population. The same failure of Democrats to use the American system of government is found in the creation of the German post war government but Americans were not the only people involved.

When I was a student at the University of Chicago in the mid-1950s the authoritative text on government was by Herman Finer. The best government he recommended was the British parliament. Finer was an East European Jew; as I’ve pointed out elsewhere, Jews who came to America never appreciated the American system of government; they favored socialism and other Lefty ideas. Finer’s book on government was nearly the universal college text at the time.

The American system of government is unique because it was created de novo by a small group of very brilliant men who searched the global history of government for their ideas of governance.  The American system of a separate executive evolved from there. 

The evolution first included the creation of political parties, then the unification of the election of the president and vice president and finally the widespread use of state primary elections.

To see that the Democrat Party still doesn’t understand the uniqueness of the American system of governance, there are many pieces of current evidence.  

The Democrat Party has always had their electoral conventions controlled by big-city party bosses. When the city-boss system died out it was replaced by Superdelegates who can overrule the other ordinary convention delegates.  Very much outside the idea of American republican democracy.  

This latter development is why I refuse to call the Democrat Party the Democratic Party. It isn’t democratic.

The Democrat Party proceeded to step outside the American governmental idea with the office of President Nixon. Nixon was investigated by Congress for his spying on the opposition party.  What Nixon did had been the norm for both political parties for generations. Even before the threat of a Nixon impeachment the U.S. Senate forced Nixon’s Vice-President (Spiro Agnew) to resign and selected a likable, defeatable member of the House as his Vice-President (Gerald Ford.)  A new case of Congressional meddling in the Executive. A first in nearly 200 years.

In the past decade the Democrat Party has again stepped outside the American political norm. Aggressively. I will only mention a few of the outrages.  

In the 2016 election the Democrat Party claimed that Trump won because of Russian election interference.  A novel claim in American politics and proceeded for 4 years to promote this unsubstantiated issue.  In fact the Democrat Party used two secret Executive Branch agencies to carry out illegal espionage on the Republicans.

Then when Trump held the presidency, the House, under Democrat rule proceeded to impeach the president twice. Twice the Senate refused to support the impeachment. The second time, the President's time in office was finished, a situation not envisioned in the Constitution.  An unconscionable first time in American history.

After President Trump was defeated for his second term, the Democrats proceeded to bring a string of legal actions against him.  This act of legal warfare is unprecedented in the 233-year history of America. It will permanently discourage wealthy people and business people from seeking the Presidency.

The Democrat party had its New York office holders impose a bail fee that violated the Eighth Amendment which prohibits excessive bail. The New York bail was greater than the total U.S. Gross National Product when the 8th Amendment was passed in 1791.

The Democrat Party had the leading opposition candidate removed from the ballot in three primary states. Promptly ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

There are many more examples.  It is clear the Democrat Party doesn’t understand America, our Constitution, nor our moral foundations.

I Only Made Phone Calls

Two things its hard to give me credit for: tilapia and Kite Hill.

I’ll start with tilapia, a rather bland tasting small fish.  We have it in the U.S. because of me.  But what I did was to use my phone and my networks which are not visible to the world.  Here is how it happened.

Tilapia

I had a few clients in the Central Valley of California who were professional entomologists, advisors to farmers on pest control.  In general they favored alternatives to commercial pesticides.

One of them phoned me to ask if I knew of a way to control mosquitoes in rice fields?  It was a problem for his clients in the Sacramento Valley.  The fields in that area are flooded for rice cultivation by several large rivers. Rice grown in this area is one third of all the rice grown in the U.S. There are cities and towns in the area where mosquitoes are a problem during rice flooding periods.

I phoned my friend Katsu in Japan who was the head of the organic farmers in Japan and a close friend.  I put him on the board of a Third World aid group in Washington D.C. where I had influence and made a few phone calls to get him the presidency of the world organic farmers group.

Katsu told me Japanese organic farmers used a fish called tilapia, in English, to live in the rice fields and eat the mosquitoes and their larva.  

I phoned my friend the entomologist and told him and within two years all the rice growers were growing tilapia and selling them on the commercial market.

No one saw me make those two phone calls.  If you like tilapia, 'you're welcome.'

Kite Hill

The large park area next to my house in San Francisco is called Kite Hill.   In this case it was more than two phone calls that created this park.  

A neighbor called me, Felicia Ortiz, to say she wanted to create some vest-pocket parks in open lots in San Francisco.  The term ‘vest-pocket parks’ apparently came from a friend of mine Bonnie Ora Sherk. An environmental artist.

I told Mrs. Ortiz that I would help her if she was willing to be chair of a group to create the parks and the first park would be on the large open area near both of us that I had gotten down-zoned to single family homes a few years earlier.  She said ‘yes.’

I then phoned three political friends of mine.  I asked one to create a political action group to design and commission vest-pocket parks, with Mrs. Ortiz as chairperson.  The second one I asked to create a bond issue for the next election for $12 million to create vest-pocket parks. The third one I called to ask him to raise $50,000 for the bond issue and to buy the appropriate media.

We won easily and bought the land for the park.  The Park and Recreation Department takes care of our park.

Just phone calls and my network of friends.  I take credit but the evidence for my role is not visible.

Simple Livers

Harold Geneen, Coco Chanel, Peter Sellers, Tennessee Williams, Oscar Wilde, and Cole Porter lived in hotels for many years of their lives.  Harold Geneen, the CEO of International Telephone and Telegraph in the 1960s and 70s lived in many hotels and kept a complete set of clothes in each one.

I wrote a book called Simple Living Investments in 1979.  It still sells. The theme was Simple Living for non-religious or spiritual reasons. My strongest arguments for simple living were that owned objects clutter the mind and life is freer with many more ways to live if one has a simple daily practice.  

At one point I had less than 100 objects in my van and lived as a house sitter.  That is much harder to do with a spouse and children.  It makes a conventional lifestyle more difficult. But I made the point that having or accumulating money was not in conflict as long as it wasn’t used to buy objects like houses and cars that divert attention to maintenance and worrying.

I’m a pilot and a sailor.  But I never owned a plane or a sailboat. For fifty years I was an active pilot with a single-engine plane that I used as a member of a flying club and sailed as a partner in a 30-foot sloop where I paid the moorage fee and paid for repairs resulting from racing.

I was always impressed with creative people who lived in hotels for the simplicity of daily living that that made possible. 

Many prominent mathematicians seem to live with virtually no possessions, just living on friends' couches and thinking about math. There is Elon Musk who seems to own no houses but lives with friends and on the airplanes where he spends much of his time.

The subject comes up because of my friend Alex who is handsome and very bright but lives in a modest apartment with very little furniture.  Alex has plenty of money.  Many women rapidly stop dating him after they see his modest apartment.

Why Employment Law Worked

My biggest and most famous lawsuit was about employment discrimination against women and minorities; it was an immediate societal success.  I have since figured out why it succeeded. 

The case was brought in 1971 by Bob Gnaida of the law firm Public Advocates against the Bank of California.  We won and the decision demanded an aggressive program with supporting money to promote women and minorities into management at all levels, promptly.  I brought the suit after leaving the Bank of California as a Vice President. I took with me all the incriminating internal evidence.

The major banks in America signed consent decrees to the settlement and banking quickly became the most integrated industry in America.

I tried to establish similar anti-discrimination lawsuits in housing and private clubs.

In housing I carried out many ventures with my wife in trying to rent apartments in upper income neighborhoods where we were followed by black couples (friends) who tried to rent the same apartments on the same day.  They never could rent the same apartments that we could. We had overwhelming evidence of discrimination against blacks but were never able to put together a lawsuit.  No law firm and no government agency would take the many cases offered.

Unlike the banking case where I had overwhelming computer printout payroll evidence, as was true throughout banking, in the case of housing, there were countless acceptable semi-legal reasons given by landlords for their preference for white renters.

In the case of private clubs Congress amended the anti-discrimination laws to exclude private clubs with less than 200 members and included only club lunches because the rest of the private club world didn’t directly seem to involve business issues.

New York Jews Are Responsible

I’ve spent time around the world with influential people. One thing is clear and very important: They get their news from the New York Times.  Journalists, around the world, also get their news from the N.Y. Times.

The two things in the headline to this blog that need explaining: ‘Jews’ and ‘Responsible.’

Jews.  The New York Times has been on its last legs, financially, for nearly a decade. Even the most recent online readership recovery due to puzzles and games has not relieved the financial finale.  What would destroy the New York Times, in a week, would be if most New York Jews canceled their subscriptions.

Responsible.  The greatest surprise to me and nearly everyone else was the October 8th discovery that much of the world and nearly all of American academia hates Israel. 

The U.N. has always reflected this global hatred of Israel with little consequence (except for the recent UNRWA troops in Hamas.)  The United States has always stopped the U.N. calumny.  Except for Obama’s last minute expression of vitriol.

The New York Times has been consistently an Israel hater and a Jew hater.  The Jew hatred has been evident since the 1930’s when Arthur O. Sulzberger was the publisher and tried to pass for an Episcopalian. Arthur O. denied the Holocaust and was strongly anti-Israel before and after its founding.  This has continued with A.O. Sulzberger, Jr.  It can’t be missed by accident. Every Israel based reporter has written false and defamatory articles for the Times.  Every article about American Jewry, for decades, has been malicious, such as the recent coverage of Haredi education.  

New York Jews just march on as if it didn’t matter. 

But it does.  The New York Times has been the fertile soil for global Israel hatred. New York Jews could have stopped it.

I am Guilty Too

The civil rights movement failed.  That is why the wokies say America is racist.

I was on both sides in 1964.  

On the one hand, I was made president of the San Francisco organization that was created to save Lowell High School, the merit-based high school that the school board wanted to make open to all students.  We won that battle and then had to fight it again,70 years later, in 2022.  I still believe that merit is a core ingredient in the structure of America. All three of my children later went to Lowell.

On the other hand I played a significant role in the design and implementation of school busing in San Francisco, the first city outside the South to have court-mandated busing. I vividly remember making a presentation to the parents at Hoover Jr. High on the busing plans for their school.  I have never faced an audience with so much hatred in my life.  Parents couldn’t stand the idea of busing for racial integration.

Busing was a total failure.  Half the population of public school children left the public schools.  From 80,000 enrolled in 1964 to 40,000 by 1984.  Parents with school age children moved out of San Francisco or enrolled their kids in private schools.  The black school children did not improve their test scores.  Nationally school busing was a failure.

Add to that failure, the generous Civil Rights payments to blacks from 1965 for the next two decades did little to change the status of the general black community.  Since it provoked the destruction of the black family, it degraded the status of blacks and brought on the greatest expansion of black crime in the 20th Century. The second failure.

I also brought the first and most successful employment discrimination lawsuit on behalf of minorities and women in 1971.  This had positive benefits for all groups but ended up having two perverse effects.

It was not appreciated by any groups, though the reality was impressive.  The results were viewed as failures partly because the homeless population grew rapidly, made up largely of black men, who became very visible. Leading to the growth of the perverse DEI (Diversity, equity, and inclusion) of today.

It also brought women into the higher ranks of business, successfully.  Which had the perverse effect of raising the income of married couples which in turn dramatically increased the price of housing in America. An increase in prices that today is a major barrier to home ownership by everyone in their 20’s, 30’s and 40’s.

Multiple failures and I was there at the start. These failures have resulted in the ‘wokies’ of modern life who have tried to create more equal outcomes in life for blacks, primarily, due to the failures of the past five decades of government programs.

The Future of a Random Legislature

In 1978 I wrote an article proposing that legislative bodies be created by random selection like juries.  My friend ‘Chick’ Callenbach then offered to write a book with me on the subject.  It was called A Citizen Legislature. Published in 1981, it became part of every political science course on the planet. The original model was a Greek legislature called the Boule. Then in the late 1980s it almost became a reality when the proposal nearly became law in British Columbia, losing by only one vote.

Now America is nearly at the point of a civil war, I can see that a random legislature will become a viable choice in the discussions in the near future to resolve our close call with the precipice of democratic failure.

Would a random legislature resolve our current problem?  

That is a separate question.  My prediction that the random legislature will become a subject of discussion is an answer to a different question.  ‘Would it resolve the divergence of the American Republic?’ is not the same question.

The answer depends on my analysis of the current problem.  If my analysis is correct it would resolve our current nightmare.  

My diagnosis is that our current schism is caused by the rise to power of labor unions and labor union values.  Labor unions emerged as the only coherent power after the ruling hereditary elite dissolved in the 1960-65 period. The evidence of this thesis is the  emergence of ‘wokism’ in the U.S and Israel at the same time. And the total union control of the California body politic where unions are the strongest in the country.

With a random legislature, labor unions would not dominate the selected bodies.  There would be union members, of course, but they would be less than 7% of the citizens and would have very little direct influence.

There you have it.  My solution and my analysis.

Global News Reading Failure

I have a wide circle of friends in Japan and I read several English language Japanese newspapers.  I also have friends in many other countries and follow the press in four of them..

Each country has its own political spectrum.  The American spectrum is from Hate Trump to Love Trump.  Almost everyone in the world thinks America is predominantly on the Hate Trump side of the spectrum, if they have any opinion about American politics.  Russian and Chinese citizens do not hold this view.

Of course, in reality, American politics is divided four ways.  Half of adult citizens don’t vote. Among the remaining half the percentage is 25% love Trump 10% are in the middle and 15% hate Trump.

Why does the world have such an incorrect Hate Trump view of American politics?

Because the American newspaper that shapes global opinion is the New York Times.  Most of the world has no idea, and I can say this for certainty about Japan, that the New York Times is 100% in the Hate Trump column and has been for a decade. The New York Times also hates Israel and has for 45 years. It has hated Jews for 80 years. 

 The New York Times is the spokes medium for the ‘Woke’ world.  Most of the world doesn’t take the Times seriously for two of its three main Woke theses.  The readers of the world do not think there are more than two genders and they doubt that America has a systemic hostility based on race.  From reading the Times articles about the multiple black elected officials the readers would guess that blacks hold more elective offices in America than are found on the entire continent of Africa.  A quick search of Google would confirm that view.  

The NYTimes view that has global concurrence is the human caused global climate Armageddon.  This is not held by Chinese, Russian, Indian or African populations.

Is this NYTimes global opinion monopoly likely to change?  Only if it is replaced by some global Chinese medium or some new trusted Internet medium.  Both are unlikely.

Fixing San Francisco

Now I’m ready to fix San Francisco.  A Japanese friend is arriving with her family and because I can’t handle guests right now I didn’t invite them to stay with me. But then I looked up the hotel they chose.  I told them to cancel the hotel and stay with me.

The hotel they found is the BEI Wyndham that rates itself a 4 star.  In fact it is at most a 1- star in a civic center neighborhood with a large and drug addled homeless population like most of downtown San Francisco. Dangerous. It also adds a $30 resort fee for each day and never mentions the fee. No resort features, not even night stands or a desk in the room. No good restaurants within five blocks. 

My mind immediately went to Sodom and Gomorrah which God destroyed because the citizens mistreated visitors.  San Francisco is Sodom and Gomorrah for sure.

So how do we fix San Francisco?

1. We find a leader of the Asian Community and have them select a new mayor and a group of supervisors.  The Asian Community has already organized a special election to replace a communist district attorney and an idiot school board. They won easily.
2. We vote on a ballot initiative to put 5 city-wide supervisors on the 9 member Board of Supervisors. The current board is elected by district and has been since 1978.  We have a bunch of totally incompetent people that never have the City as a whole as a concern.

All of this will take about five years.  Once the quiescent city leaders see that this is a path to decency they will support it.  

The negative is that the City will have a well-run government.  The weak governments of the past 175 years has meant San Francisco has been one of the most creative and vital cities in the world and most recently created the Beatniks, the Hippies and the Gay community. That global source of innovation may be lost.  

The alternative is Sodom and Gomorrah, which I can no longer countenance.

Reply to Letter From Alex

Alex, is a good friend of mine who lives in Canada. He sent me an article from the NYTtimes on the Japanese stock market. Many people send me Times articles knowing I can’t read the paper because it’s Jew hate is so deeply offensive. 

After my recent month in Tokyo I bought a Japanese ETF that reflects the whole Japanese market.  

Some mistakes in the Times article.  Tourism has not returned from China, which is the largest source of all tourism and tourist spending. That will be a great infusion when it comes.  Mostly affects department stores and hotels.

Warren Buffett bragging on the Japanese stock market is right about Japan and wrong about the trading companies he bought stock in; which is something he can't understand. The biggest trading company was my client. Trading companies can never return a net on sales much over 2-3%. But they will grow with international trade.

The China boogie man will disappear with a Trump reelection.  China is not being aggressive, we are.

Japan is strong, healthy and solving the stagnant population issue.  All good signs.  They are not nuts about 'woke' in any way.  More women are coming into the labor market; working lives are getting longer and the Japanese are not stupid about CO2 and oil.  

A well-educated, honest, hard-working population is always a good bet.  None of the rampant American crime, Trump derangement syndrome, or divisive 'woke' culture.  The Japanese are happy, optimistic and enjoying the best of modernity.  The Covid did not hit them seriously; they are inherently clean, willing to wear masks (still 90% are masking in public) and still on good trading terms with India, China, Russia and most of the Middle East.

YoMama

Do you know ‘the dozens’?

In the mid 1950s, as an undergrad at the U. of Chicago,  I had two black friends. One rich one poor. The rich one was the son of a taxi cab company owner who taught me about ‘the dozens’ and the other was an anti-racism activist who was supported by the students at Roosevelt College.

The rich one told me about a common black practice of men facing off against each other, before an audience, to master trading insults.  Most started with ‘Yo mama.’.  

One was “Yo mama is so fat when huggin’ her you have to take a piece of chalk in your hand to mark where you began.” He told me many of these.  The dozens seem to have come from Ghana.

One ‘Yo mama’ had become a jazz classic ascribed to Hoagy Carmichael, Huggin and Chalkin.

He also told me about cursing contests.  The object was to curse as long as possible without repeating.  The one I remember was ‘You ain’t nothing but a lying dillydapper, your heart pumps shit and you breathe through your asshole….. 

I later learned that my grandfather Henry J. Phillips had been a famous cursor in San Francisco Union Square in the period after WWI. He had once cursed for 30 minutes without repeating.  He had a dental office on Union Square.

The poor friend took me with him to a white barbershop on 63rd where he asked for a haircut.  The barber called the police.  It was my job to be present to keep the police from beating up my friend on the way to the police car and to bail him out.  The knowledge that this fellow was a friend of mine led to the most successful and important employment discrimination lawsuit in American history. Described in two blogs. Here and here.

Understanding America

I look at my fellow Jews who are Lefty and very close to being self-hating Jews.  Their love of the Democrat party is shocking now that it is obvious that the Left wants Jews dead.  Academia hates Jews as does the NYTimes and the other mainstream media.  Hollywood and the power elite want us dead and want the Palestinians to wipe us out.

As Ruth Wisse points out, the vast European Jewish immigration beginning in 1885 are Lefties and have been The Left since they arrived.  These people never understood where they landed nor did they try.  They lived firmly in the ignorant socialist communist world that they came from. No one ever tried to help them open their eyes and see where they had landed.

The 20th century passed these sad settlers by.  It wasn’t an American Constitutional Republic that elected Hitler and followed Stalin in the slaughter of Jewish children and their feeble protectors.  It was a strong central government that continued the pogroms of Europe.

America had two things that Jews failed to appreciate.  A government deliberately designed to be weak and grass roots. A Constitution that deliberately created a divided government run by a multitude of weak states.  And a set of Amendments designed to protect individuals and minorities.  

That is all anyone needs to know to understand and appreciate America.  Since the Jews have arrived, most of them have been part of the political movement to thwart these historic Constitutional powers.  Jews were fanatic supporters of FDR in his desire to erase Supreme Court power, to weaken state governments and the ceaseless drive of the Democrats to shackle industry, support unions and control every aspect of American life.  

America did have an hereditary elite that was anti-Jew, but Jews never noticed when, uniquely on the planet, the hereditary elite disappeared in America at the end of the 1950s.  Jews still haven’t noticed.

America did not have laws regulating Jews’ clothing or the businesses Jews could enter.  It did restrict Jews from Harvard and the elite schools but that was not like Europe where they were vastly circumscribed in every domain. 

Now the big question.  Why didn’t Jews realize that America was the great haven for them?  Jews who came before 1885 did see this and they saw that the hereditary elites were weak outside New England.  They moved everywhere else in America as my great-grandfather did.  But the mass later arrivals never left New York, never left socialism, communism and labor unions.  To this day, they have been cloistered Ghetto Jews who never left the Lefty ghetto of New York.

I Was Wrong

A few blogs back I attributed a large part of the current employment dump in high-tech to widespread understanding, from Elon Musk’s example, that more than half of tech employees are a waste.  I was wrong.  Musk found a commercial truth but his fellow tech managers are not smart enough to appreciate his discovery.

What is going on, and has been for half a year, is the consequence of the most ignorant idiotic government foreign action I’ve ever seen.  The Biden government directed American companies to stop doing business in Russia.  Many complied.  Far too many.  The U.S. government has no such power and even one company could have held up such a directive in courts for many years.

So now those American tech giants who pulled out of Russia have been slaughtered.  Microsoft, Adobe, Salesforce and a dozen others.  

Every business man on the planet looked at the American high-tech obsequiousness to a senile president and said ‘Am I going to buy high-tech software from a company that will not service me in the future if the American government is hostile to my government?’  The answer from any intelligent businessman anywhere in the world was ‘Hell no’.  Screw American high-tech, I’ll find a company somewhere else.

The American Democrat administration didn’t just do this stupid thing.  It banned Russia from using the global banking system SWIFT controlled by the U.S. which makes the dollar the universal planetary currency.

Now, the 100 nations on the planet, who are anti-American, are looking for ways to make the Yuan a major trading currency.  They will succeed and it will raise interest rates in the U.S., reduce American exports dramatically and cause a recession.  Maybe a long one. Good going, you Democrat anti-commerce idiots.

Why We Are Divided

What had to be gone first, what was in place already and what was new that brought this division about?

Over fifteen million Americans served in the military in WWII.  College graduates usually became officers.  It was a source of civil behavior and meritocracy.  The rest of society accepted civility as a military necessity.

When the war was over the civility that had been needed and created after the end of the American Civil War with civic groups, dissolved. Membership in the Masons, Odd Fellows, Kiwanis, Lions, scouts and others shrank to insignificance.

More importantly, the meritocratic military officers entered the labor force and rose to the top ranks of the fifty major corporations; they formed hundreds more corporations and displaced the source of power for the American hereditary elite. By 1960 the hereditary elite was so disrupted and displaced that it no longer published the Black Book of membership (actually red) and the debutante balls sponsored by local hereditary elites were replaced with non-profit sponsors.  

America entered a period of rapid corporate expansion, globalization and technological innovation.

The absence of the hereditary elite left the second most powerful institution in control in urban areas: labor unions. Labor unions came quickly to control the politics of every metropolitan area to this day.  Unions are seniority-oriented, very rule based and are deeply anti-meritocratic.

Two other lesser institutions gained power and prominence after the fall of the hereditary elite and civic organizations.  Academia which had been Marxist for most of the 20th century took over the intellectual world and the media. 

Prison values took over fashion in pants to the knees and rap which uniquely had performers being murdered wantonly. Big bands and rock groups had never been homicidal.

All of this allowed a long simmering division in America to become visible and important as populations moved; white families left bused school cities for the suburbs and young Lefties moved to urban centers after college.

Then came the most powerful force to hit the vulnerable United States and Israel, the new social media on the Internet.  The self-fulfilling mirror.

The extraordinary impact of the Internet is not obvious.  The Internet and social media allowed individuals to expand their personal and political worldview to prominence and full blown significance.  Millions of people who played little or no role in prior civic life or politics all of a sudden had a vehicle to publish and voice their opinions in a semi public way and find allies to align with.

Voila, we had a divided America and a similar Israel where hatred could be expressed openly and civil behavior was drastically diminished.

A whole new phenomenon where individuals expanded their opinion persona and found sympathizers among strangers.

Welcome to divided America. Welcome to angry Americans.

 

Let Me Try

One of my longtime readers objected to a statement a few blogs back where I called the Democrat Party the ‘party of hate.’  I apologized for using such intemperate language, and explained what drove me to it. 
There is no excuse. My explanation was that it is my reaction to the rising and very dangerous Jew Hate in my beloved country, America. And that Jew Hate has found a comfortable home among Democrats, journalists, academics and other lefties.

I am now in Tokyo, where I see none of the recriminations and political venom that is out of control in America.  Maybe I can think about the reasons for this period of terrible anguish at home.  Anguish that is tearing families apart.

It is very worthwhile mentioning, as I did in the last blog, that I’m reading Bibi’s autobiography.  A brilliant book where the subject is his brother, Joni, who was murdered leading the first great airplane terrorist recovery, Entebbe, and then the subject shifts to his wife Sara.  An autobiography in reflection.  I might try it myself.

The whole point of bringing up Bibi is that the Israeli press and the Labor Left hate Bibi with the same malice and venom of the American press and the Democrat Party towards decent honest Republicans.  

I personally knew Richard Nixon, I knew several cabinet members of Ronald Reagan’s.  So I felt personally the endless mindless attacks on them.  And now for seven years I’ve watched with absolute horror the outrageous lies, hatred and constitutionally illegal villainy poured on Donald Trump and his family.  So where does this daily national bile come from?

While the toxic spleen may have boiled over for Bibi and Trump, it has been with us for half a century. The Left hated Nixon and Senator McCarthy from 1950.  It has only grown since then.

Unlike Jew hate, there is no social opprobrium.  Lefties feel free to pour out their acrimony with little or no restraint in public.  They are even self-righteous on many occasions.

What is it and why has it metastasized?

Two disappearances are central to what has happened.  

• The Army and the draft that went with it.  I was in the Army. We all got along even in peacetime and we accommodated each other despite wild differences in social class, politics and background.
• Civic organizations evaporated. We lost the Odd Fellows, the Lions, the Masonic Order, Kiwanis and a dozen others. These organizations created civility.  The Army satisfied the civility role and may have been the reason for their disappearance.

Religions promptly split along political lines in the 1960s.  Reform Jews, Methodists, Presbyterians, Unitarians on the left and Baptists and Evangelicals on the conservative side.

• Unions took over nearly every city as I’ve explained before with the collapse of the hereditary elite and union values of anti-meritocracy triumphed in the public square.
• Prison values took over the fashion world.
• Importantly the long-standing Marxist suzerainty of academia took over the intellectual world and the media. 
• Finally the Internet plays a role but not for the popular reason that it gives individuals a public outlet. The Internet gave each participant a place to vent and curate their political views among allies and potential converts.

There you have it.  

Six institutional forces that divided America with a venom that we have not seen since the 1850s Democrat-Republican divide.

Japan never got the divisions because it never lost its hereditary elite.  Israel got the divisive illness  because it had a monstrously powerful labor and socialist overlord. 

I’ve got it. I think I’ve got it. I will summarize in the next blog.

Looking Disaster in the Eye: The Good Side

It is readily apparent that America without oil and gas energy will be forced to reduce its living standards.  I ignore the race and gender wars provoked by the ‘woke’ and the absurd anti-merit elements of the woke agenda because Americans will survive the turmoil of the first two and will never accept the anti-merit propositions.

America will not grow. America will learn to live at a zero growth rate. Simple living will be a pervasive choice.

I have long supported the simple living life model and wrote a book Simple Living Investments for Old Age. Of course I had simple living as a voluntary choice, not as a failure of the economic system.

From my vantage point, a simple living America will be more relaxed, will have many more small businesses, be far happier and we will have more artistic people.  America’s vigor will be channeled into new creative outlets.  The Briarpatch was a vital and exciting world.  Part of the hippy domain that I would be happy to relive.

The benefits for the world would be magnificent. One-third of the world lives in a tribal environment and that part does not want modern commerce.  They are happy with tribal life and don’t want the ever plundering modern encroachment on their lives.  That part of the world has already enjoyed the better food supplies and the improved health of the past half century.  Tribal peoples, the world over will be happy to live their tribal lives.

Looking Disaster in the Eye: The Bad Side

There are many ways to put this but the simplest and clearest for all my readers who have never left the U.S, for those who probably never will and for the few who will leave the U.S. but will not visit the two thirds of the world that is never seen by tourists: what Americans are doing to ourselves and what Americans want other humans to do to themselves is unacceptable.

We want the two thirds of the world that is poor, without cars and without a surfeit of food to suffer. We want them to live with what they have now or to live with less.  

That is what ‘woke America’ and ‘woke Europe’  is asking of the world.  ‘You poor people of the world are to live without oil, natural gas and live in societies that disdain merit.  Whatever you have now you should have less of it.’  

Don’t worry too much about us Americans.  We are already rich and live with an abundant surplus of everything.  

Despite what the ‘woke Americans’ say about the barriers to women and blacks in America, the 200 American women billionaires own more money than all the people in the poorest 50 countries in the world earn in a year and the 10 wealthiest black Americans own more than all the people in Liberia earn in a year.

 

Joel Kotkin Again

Kotkin has again come through with the most brilliant and clear statement about our current state of world affairs.

The Ukraine has made three new world alliances visible.

Here is the final sentence in his dire but vital prediction:

“Until the West wakes up from its self-referential slumbers, the tide of history may turn out less friendly to Ukraine’s loyal friends than to those who either abet aggression or maintain a steady indifference.”

City of Anarchy

There is no leading anarchist theorist that I can refer to.  I know many of the anarchist writers, a few of whom wrote in the post-Civil War period.  Anarchy theory has always assumed that small groups of people, size of the groups is seldom specified, will self-organize and that a government structure, whether kingship or democracy will not be needed.

The most salient attribute of an anarchist society is the absence of a police or military.

Most public functions in an anarchist society are locally self-organized like fire brigades, water supplies, roads and sewers.  Some anarchist models have private enterprise organizations and others are more kibbutz-like.

No anarchist has seen anything like what we have today.  An entire city with all the traditional city services and functions but no functional government.  San Francisco, a leader in most other areas, is now the first truly anarchist city on a scale of 800,000 people.

The city government doesn’t work.  Taxes are collected and salaries to 33,000 city employees are paid as are the pensions of retired employees.  But virtually no one works. Streets are rarely repaired, a few fire stations, very few, respond to fire calls but there are three times as many fire personnel as are needed. Most importantly the police, which operate at one-third of the standard street patrol staffing level, seldom carry out police functions because the police know that the courts and District Attorney will not prosecute most arrests. A small proportion of crimes are reported, and they only result in filing a paper on an internet form.

Pretty amazing.  Crime is up, especially minor crimes. Anarchy works fairly well.  Few people complain.  Crime is a nuisance that results in complaining but most people live with it.

In a large established prosperous city where most life is established and functioning, anarchy works.

(Footnote to the photo: I created and promoted the first 'painted ladies' postcard for my Third World Tours.)

Israel Today

No one who follows this blog will fail to know that I am a strong supporter of Israel and consider Bibi one of the greatest leaders in all of Jewish history.  World history for that matter.

I lived in Israel in 1958-9 when Israel was a Kibbutz socialist heaven.  It was the heaven American Lefty-Jews still romanticize. 

Bibi has been a leader who changed Israel into the most successful nation driven by modern commerce and the most successful innovative nation on the planet.

The 60% of American Jews who vote Democrat and long for the lost socialist nation of Israel, are drifting away from support of Israel. The proportion of such Democrat Jews is growing.

First to understand why this drift is happening it helps to read Israeli news.

Sarah Rinder (Mosaic 1/23/2023) has found a way to demonstrate the distance that separates these American Jews from Israel.  Here is some contemporary popular Israeli music.  Compare it to American pop music and rap.

This music references the horror of living with Arabs who kill your fellow Israelis every day, every month and every year. Here is what Rinder says about the music and the singer:

“It raises the question of whether Ben-Ari’s biblicism and Jewish allusions are charming embellishments or so central to his work that they cannot be disentangled from it. But merely to ask this question is to acknowledge that Israeli society’s shared cultural touchstones appear to be growing more and more Jewish, and traditional lines between the secular and religious populations are fading, particularly in the realms of music and art.”

Unless and until Israel can move the Gaza and West Bank Arabs out of Israel, the division between Israel and American Lefty-Reform Jews will continue to grow.

My own naive solution to the Israeli-Arab problem is to pay some Arab nations to take the West Bank and Gaza Arabs who are ready to leave (those between 13 and 25 years old).   We could start with an offer of $1 billion to take 4,000 of these Arabs.  Plenty of Arab countries are corrupt enough to want the money.  

Once the process begins, most members of the U.S. Congress and most European nations will see this as a solution and it should catch on.

I Think I’ve Got It

The question that has been bothering me is: ’Why could I buy a big house in San Francisco on one salary in 1964 at age 26 and my kids couldn’t at the same age and my grandkids certainly can’t?’

In the simplest case the wife of one kid came from a working class large family where getting a college degree was sold as a way to succeed. The degree was necessary for the license in her field but her earnings have never come close to covering the interest on the college loan even after 23 years.  There is no insight needed in that case.  College loans have drastically altered lives.

College tuition has risen at a far greater rate than other costs for 50 years; due both to the lack of international competition, and the total absence of any institutional efficiency.  Out of control college costs are the result of government subsidy and regulation.

Our whole society has faced the same problem, not just the population in the bottom seven out of ten deciles. Aside from the college loan issue there are two reasons for the decline in living resources in 50 years. 

First the genuine explosive growth of the economy has occurred after 1960 when the hereditary elite class was replaced with meritocracy.  

The elite class had previously maintained a strong control over the excessive and restrictive  functions of government.

Second, American style democracy got out of control once the restraint of the elite was displaced by union power. Unions, in every urban area, replaced the elites in America in the 1960s.  Union power is the triumph of medieval values where seniority and wage equality triumph over merit and all other modern-commercial values including hard work, personal initiative and innovation.

American style democracy turns out to be a failure in times of rapid commercial economic growth when it is combined with union government control. Suggested originally by Milton Friedman.

I saw the transition when I worked in the California legislature as a campaign manager and legislative aide in 1964. Legislators were always atypical people.  Not too bright, very tribal in their values which gave immense power to the Democrat Party. They are small-minded people determined to get re-elected by passing as many laws, often frivolous and impactful on daily life, as possible. I saw Jesse Unruh use union money and the Democrat Party to take personal control of the California government.  He later handed it off to Willie Brown.

For the past sixty years legislators have passed 500 bills annually on the state level and the same numbers on the federal level.  This has made the successful functioning of commerce nearly impossible.  

It has promoted large business over small business because economies of scale can cover the costs of dealing with overwhelming government bureaucracy.

I have worked as a consultant with a vast number and array of businesses.  I have watched their productivity stifled every day in every way by incredible and obsessive control of commerce by out-of-control government.

The extraordinary power of modern commerce to produce wealth for everyone has been negated, totally, by 60 years of ponderous growth of government regulation.

That is why my grandchildren may have technological miracles in their lives without the ability to buy a house on one person’s income.

Solution

There is a solution that I don’t expect to see in my lifetime: sortition. My book A Citizen Legislature in 1985 (with Chick Callenbach) explains how randomly selected people can serve a three-year term in a legislature and provide a truly democratic governance.  Such citizens would never increase the number of laws that would constrain them.

Uncle Dick and Carol

Dick was married to my father’s sister. Carol was a San Francisco supervisor.

Uncle Dick had his own advertising agency and hired me to work when I was in college.  It lasted a week. One job he gave me was to write radio copy for a Japanese restaurant.  Part of the copy I wrote was “Savor the cloying aroma of the succulent sukiyaki.”  Dick fired me for that sentence and he was right.  Dick didn’t live long enough to read my best selling book, 25 years later, Marketing Without Advertising. (Co-author was Salli Rasberry.)

Fifteen years after I was fired, Dick and I were still on good terms.  By then I was a well known hippie business leader and Dick was tight with the San Francisco police crowd.  I ran into him at Sansome and Bush around lunch.  Dan White had recently murdered Mayor George Moscone and Harvey Milk, both friends of mine.  Dick asked what punishment I thought White would get and I said ‘The electric chair.’  Dick said “No,” the deal had already been worked out by the DA. Joe Freitas and White’s defense lawyer, Doug Schmidt, agreed to an 8 year sentence.  Dick probably got the insight from his friend Doug Schmidt. The sentence turned out to be 7 years and White got out after 5 years. (photo George Moscone)

The trial was in late May. I was dating Carol at the time, One of six women I was dating then. Carol was a supervisor.  She had gone to the University of Chicago, which we had in common, she was very bright and lots of fun.  As a supervisor Carol carried a pistol on her all the time, on the right front of her belt. Sexy from my point of view. She drove a pick-up truck and usually wore pants with a belt.

We had a date the day before the Dan White trial started and I told her what Dick had told me.  She immediately told DA Frietas and the judge she wanted to testify.  Which she did.  

She testified that on his way out of City Hall, after killing Harvey, he went into Carol’s office to kill her. She hid under her desk.  Like most people, even with a gun in her waist, she hid and he left.

Frietas lost his reelection later that year.

I’ve never told that story in print.  Most of it can not be found anywhere else.

On my blogs I’ve told what Margo St. James told me. She repeated what Dan White’s two close police buddies told her.  They had coffee near City Hall with Dan before he went to crawl in a window in the basement of City Hall. He came by to talk to them after the murders and told them what he had done. He asked what he ‘should do next.’  They told him to go to the nearby St. Mary's Cathedral and confess to a priest and then call their friendly police detective.  (photo Harvey Milk)

The context, that we all knew at the time, was that the police were furious at the Mayor for appointing Charlie Gain as police chief. Gain was a reformer and an outsider in a very inbred police force. To keep from being murdered by other cops,  he never carried a gun and had all press conferences in front of a U.S. flag, a California flag and the San Francisco Flag.

You now know more of this specific history than anyone else alive.  There is one more silent piece no one knows.  On the night before Mayor Moscone was shot, my close friend Bob Gnaizda visited him to make sure he didn’t reappoint Dan White to the Board of Supervisors because the legal court order to integrate blacks into the hierarchy of the police department still had to be voted on by the Board and White was sure to vote against it. Bob told me about that visit only two years ago, shortly before he died.

Big Inflation Ahead

The current annualized inflation of 8% is going to continue to rise.

I identified the Biden-caused oil/gas price rise as the primary cause of the current global inflation which will undergird about eight years of inflation as the consequences play out in steel, cement and fertilizer. The price rise will work its way through the economy with a ratchet effect in wages.

Now we see the Phillips curve kick in.  The Phillips curve isn’t me, it was William Phillips who showed a statistical correlation between rising labor scarcity and rising inflation.

We currently have a very historically low unemployment rate which is labor scarcity.  This will begin kicking in to the inflation scenario.  The labor scarcity is due to three primary factors.  

• The first and most important is that many workers dropped out of the labor force during Covid-19 when they decided that the service industry was too precarious and sought training and opportunities in other fields.  
• The second was a sheer drop out of the labor force with the realization that the American work standard is too intense for comfort and easier living was a reasonable goal. 
• Third is the close income competition created by government largess that means middle-income workers saw that non-workers were earning nearly as much and decided to join the non-workers on the dole.

Inflation will be increasing.

Victor Davis Hanson

Brilliant paper on America's decline by Victor Davis Hanson.