Joyce Appleby: Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination
Niall Ferguson: The House of Rothschild: Money's Prophets, 1798-1848
Jonathan Israel: The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477-1806
Jerry Z. Muller: The Mind and the Market : Capitalism in Modern European Thought
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.”
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Inflation will be increasing.
Maybe I’m a little sensitive in some way that most people aren’t.
When the U.S. orders a local government of a foreign country to seize a Russian oligarich’s yacht or jet it doesn’t seem right to me.
When our country was founded, we created a navy to protect American ships in the Mediterranean that were being captured by pirates. Now we are the pirates.
In the case of the capture of jet planes the legal excuse is our existing military export laws. The plane was built a decade ago and re-sold several times.
I have no idea, nor do I care, about the legal basis for this crude behavior. It seems to violate every core idea of the international maritime laws and laws of air space.
It seems reckless. Russia has already denied entry to a list of U.S. government officials in retaliation. Russia and her allies could do much more harm.
I find it hard to imagine that any American who owns a ship, a yacht, an airplane or a piece of property that could be confiscated by a foreign country will go to sleep in comfort tonight.
Am I the only person who thinks that this sort of behavior on an international scale is contrary to core American ideals? The potential revenge consequences of this policy are incredibly stupid.
So much ignorance in the reporting of two San Francisco recall elections locally and nationally. I just had to write this blog quickly. This home of Nancy Pelosi has had two successful recalls in three months and all the media I see gets it completely wrong.
Why me? What is my special insight?
More than five years ago I figured out that only a modest part of San Francisco was crazy woke, but that part of the electorate was most active, aggressive and was well organized because of the strong local unions and the most powerful Democrat Party West of the Mississippi.
The local San Francisco Democrat Party elects more statewide offices with its small population than Los Angeles with a population six times greater. Six times greater and one third the elected statewide offices.
Up until 1965, San Francisco had Republican mayors, state representatives and members of Congress. That hasn’t been true since then, since the end of the hereditary elite that I have written about in earlier blogs.
Three of the great leaders of the Democrat Party were San Franciscans and built the local party into the Statewide mega-machine. Pat Brown, Dianne Feinstein and Willie Brown. The other great power was Jesse Unruh from Southern California.
What I figured out, with 45 years in local politics, was that a major part of the San Francisco electorate was Asian with conservative pro-police and pro-business values. The Chinese had been co-opted into a strong voting group in the Democrat Party by Rose Pak who used the Democrat corruption to decisively help her voters.
The Chinese of Rose Pak along with a large Filipino group, Vietnamese and other South Asian settlers in San Francisco constituted a large near majority. This large population had common values: they believed in the value of education, they supported the police and they were all part of the small business working population.
My idea was to start running city propositions that supported the police. Based on these propositions I would raise money for this new pan-Asian group, find and reward the good community organizers and build a new conservative political machine.
I had to get the support of the police union leaders. I tried for two years and failed. I even went to the only honest politician in San Francisco, Quentin Kopp, who wouldn’t help me at the time because of his ties to the Democrat Party machine.
Those efforts five years ago are how I know why San Francisco was able to organize two recall elections and voted to recall three School Board members and a District Attorney.
The Asian voting community was appalled by the School Board that had ruined the schools, with the student population dropping from 85,000 students in 1970 when I was involved to 43,000 today. Many students moved to private schools and many white families moved to suburban schools. The number of classrooms and teachers remained the same and the administration expanded. The key mover in the recall was the School Boards elimination of the historic college prep high school (Lowell) because it had become 75% Asian.
The Asian community also voted to recall the openly communist District Attorney because he failed to stop the 10-fold increase in auto break-ins which affected nearly every Asian family in the City. He allowed the open public robbery of every small retail business and the consequent closing of many chain stores that served the Asian community. He was also openly at war with the local police.
THAT is the story of the San Francisco recall elections.
That thud you heard while driving was the sound of having hit and driven over the American Golden Goose.
American industry has been getting a greater share of our GDP every year from overseas sales. That was our Golden Goose. The incredible wealth of the San Francisco Bay Area is from the vast penetration of American tech all over the world and the resulting revenues from the Internet, phone apps and software.
Just think for a moment of being a business person in some midsize country in Southeast Asia, the Middle-East or Latin America.
Let’s be an ad agency in Jakarta, a retail mall in Turkey or a floral distributor in Peru. You want a new business program for your office computers and a good graphics program. You want to find a retail food shop for your mall and you want to rent to a retail shop in the space next door. You need an internationally respected audit firm.
Until Spring of 2022 the choice was easy.
Then many U.S. woke companies abandoned their businesses in Russia: Microsoft, Adobe, McDonalds, Starbucks and Deloitte. Totally abandoned, no service no updates; abandoned.
Now you have to be concerned that your country’s government might fall on the wrong side of U.S. foreign policy like Russia did. Other countries in the world have relied on American companies but so far have not been treated as badly as Russia, except for China, Iran, India, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela.
From now on you will go to an Indian or Chinese firm first. Both India and China will soon be offering direct competition for all big American tech firms. For international retail brands you will go to Brazilian or South Korean companies. For auditing you will find a Singaporian firm.
Say goodbye to American business growth overseas. America has killed or seriously wounded its great commercial global future.
America had a great monopolistic advantage after WWII, especially in airlines and communications. The advantage lasted 75 years. It has been thrown away, by a shortsighted government.
The brilliant Ruth Wisse wants me to apologize, so I do. I apologize for my whole family past and present; I apologize to all Americans who love America.
Ruth points out in several articles that a large swath of Jewish immigrants, beginning around 1890, came to the United States with fervent communist ideas. That is understandable since they came from tyrannical worlds and could see no other political solution to their miserable pogrom-dominated lives. The problem is that this tidal wave of immigration to New York grew to the millions; concentrated in a new world ghetto, this cluster of Jews never learned why America was a better alternative to communism. They never really assimilated to their new political paradise.
This cluster of communist Jews, living in America, millions of people, never learned how attached to a horrible outmoded ideology they were. In the 1930’s they were a dominant group in the American Communist Party and its thousands of colluding front organizations. After WWII they remained aligned with communism and the Left. Even as the murders of Soviet Jews became public they never denounced communism. Even as the murderous rampages of Stalin and the Gulag become public knowledge, American Jews never publicly recanted their alliance with ultimate evil.
To this day American Jews are predominantly Lefties, unapologetically still in the same evil tradition. The prototypical left-wing Jew is Bernie Sanders.
My mother and father were extreme Lefties. My father became a rabbi to evangelize for Left Liberalism. Even though his family were Californians from the 1850s and certainly were Republicans ( one of the second generation, my grandfather’s generation, was named Abraham Lincoln Phillips). My grandfather named my father Wendell after the great Boston abolitionist.
My father became a Lefty at the U. of California and joined my mother’s New York communist clan in his 20’s. He was so Left that I joked with him that he believed Adlai Stevenson (Democrat candidate for President twice) was more important than Moses.
My mother’s family were the heirs to a Prussian sect of Judaism, Ethical Culture, that was a Leftist coven. Her brother Fred Hart was an actual Marxist. Fred made money in the stock market and was the sustaining donor of the National Guardian, a Russian communist front in the 1950s, later to become a Chinese Communist front in the 1960s. History has no record and no way of knowing that Fred provided all the Guardian’s sustaining funds from 1952 to 1972.
My mother and her brother were the first American tourists to visit China in the mid 1960s, thanks to Fred’s vital role at the Guardian. In that period I asked my mother why she wasn’t disturbed by the nightmares of Stalin, the Gulags and Mao. Her reply was the same as Lefties today: “Real communism has never been tried.”
How deep was this communism? I asked my close friend Ruth Kadish, in the mid 1990s, part of the Jewish Lefty clan, whether she had changed her mind about the guilt of Julius Rosenberg the Soviet atomic spy once the KGB files were made public. “No, you can’t trust the anti-Soviet crowd,” she replied.
I abandoned my Lefty family tradition at age 20, having learned about the American genius from reading the Federalist Papers, Democracy in America, Animal Farm and living on an Israeli Marxist kibbutz.
It is now time for me to apologize for the terrible Lefty hogwash and blind ideology that my family, a part of the disgraceful pattern of American Jewry, have spread in this great American land. I apologize to all Americans who love and appreciate America for my family's guilt.
I know the history of San Francisco because I started the first unlicensed bus tours of the City in 1972 (Third World Tours). I had to develop the spiel for the tours and train the bus drivers. So I know that San Francisco has a long history of extremist, stupid, legislation that has often resulted in positive outcomes; lucky.
Because the City has long had 500 appointed commissioners, nothing really gets done. The number of police officers was limited by charter to 1,500; meaning the police never even tried to be effective. There are dozens of more legislative stupidities which is why the beatniks then the hippies settled here and why my Briarpatch had over 600 members of new small hippie businesses in San Francisco.So what is the latest legislative stupidity? Right here: this sign is on the door of an empty restaurant and the empty grocery next door.
Our brilliant Board of Supervisors, all woke, are taxing empty retail businesses for being empty.
I can’t tell you how stupid this is. Any business person will tell you this will not lead to any more retail rentals, it will lead to more retail rental space converted to residential and office space; the lucky outcome is different..
With more than a million square feet of retail rental space empty now because the of Covid lockdown and the perpetual homelessness destroyed retail business, much of that space will be sublet for a $1 a month to artists, dancers, yoga teachers, short term-schools and temporary office space for people who are tired of working from home. The For Lease signs will still be up, maybe not on the store fronts but online.
That is great for the thousands of people who will get short-term nearly free space and for all the pedestrians who will now see life in the retail spaces.
Stupid new taxes will lead to the lucky outcome of more street life.
That is what friends and family keep telling me.
However, the new California political party Common Sense supports my position. The founders of Common Sense are known by me to be the anti-dimwit politicians of the last 50 years.
There are two reasons I call the political world ‘dimwit.’ First is my personal experience over a lifetime. The second is my own sense of hypocrisy.
Those who know me and those who are familiar with my blog know that I believe humans and other simians stop learning when they reach adulthood. For humans that is roughly age 23. Only one out of 300 persons I have met in my lifetime were able to develop new ideas and new worldviews after age 23. The rest of the people I know and knew were only able to use the worldviews they had at that age to respond to the world. That is my core definition of ‘dimwit.’ Viewing the world based on early life experience without the additional input of adulthood generally makes one 'dimwitted.’
The single most important experience that has colored my worldview in adulthood came when I was in my mid 20s, just at the beginning of adulthood. I was a campaign manager for a San Francisco Republican assemblyman. My technical position, for payroll purposes, was as a legislative assistant. That meant I spent time in Sacramento dealing with legislators and their staff. In the entire Assembly and Senate of 120 elected officials in 1964 there were only about 4 or 5 that I considered as intellectually above average. The rest were ‘dimwits.’ The 97% became elected officials because they were egocentric, arrogant, weird people.
Over the next decades I worked in politics on a regular basis and I knew hundreds more elected politicians. The ratio of 2-3% who were not dimwitted and self-serving never changed.
Now a small group of the people I knew and observed close-up, who are not ‘dimwits,’ have joined together to form a new party, the California Common Sense Party. They have been moved to form a new party based on their own experiences that resemble mine.
This is all by way of saying that a few of these hundreds of politicians are nice people and some are decent human beings. I even dated a few elected women. The two qualities of being nice and being politicians are not totally incompatible.
People like former governor Jerry Brown are the exceptions. Jerry is smart, the son of a standard politician, and he has learned to camouflage himself and pass for an ordinary politician.
Seeing this tragic fact of American democracy led me to propose that elected legislators be replaced by a random selection of ordinary people, the Greek style of selection called ‘sortition.’ I wrote a book called A Citizen Legislature at the end of the 1970’s. (My co-author was Chick Callenbach.)
One great mind on the political scene, William F. Buckley Jr, once said that the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone book could do a better job of governing than any group of Harvard officials. Concurring with this, decades later, was Norman Podhoretz.
My second reason for this view of pervasive politician dimwittedness is my sense of hypocrisy. How can we see the Congress of 2018 spend two years impeaching President Trump on the claim that his election in 2016 was based on fraud brought on by Russian election interference, then denying any possibility of Biden election corruption by a new Congress in 2021 and 2022? That is hypocrisy. I see the same hypocrisy daily on the political scene. Gross hypocrisy equals dimwittedness.
Should my readers wonder how ‘dimwitted’ people can raise money and perennially get reelected? The answer is that political people operate in a separate tribal system. Most of America is based on a merit system of independent ordinary people. The political system is not; it is tribal.
The Kennedy family seems to thrive over generations, as does the Bush family. Political machines are tribal in San Francisco, New York, Chicago and most other cities. Nancy Pelosi’s power comes from the money connections created by her father, Thomas D’Alessandro, a powerful politician and former mayor of Baltimore.
I do not apologize for calling politicians ‘dimwits.’ To fix the problem we need to randomly select our governing class from among ordinary citizens.
In the first battle of merit vs woke, merit won. That was the real battle described in the last blog, the recall of the San Francisco School Board members.
The School Board was 100% woke; changing the names of 44 schools such as Lincoln and Washington because the historic figures were not woke. The Board wanted to paint over an historic mural of George Washington’s life. The school finances were a total mess because of anti-merit incompetence of the board members. Lastly, the Board wanted to turn the century-old college prep school into an ordinary high school because the proportion of Asians was too high.
The electorate of San Francisco voted unambiguously to recall the Board. San Francisco is a heavily Democrat city with a union-run Party machine. But Asian Americans are a meritocratic citizenry and they made their voices heard clearly with 3/4ths of the voters rejecting the wokie School Board.
This may be the beginning of the end for the woke media and the Democrat establishment. America is one of the unique nations on the earth that is meritocratic. In a direct confrontation between the wokies who are tribal, racist, elitist with union values on the School Board versus the American values shown in the recall, American values won.
I did nothing in the School Board recall election in San Francisco last week. But I dealt with the same issue in 1961.
The two most powerful political groups in San Francisco, today, are the Chinese Americans who were organized in the 1980s by the late Rose Pak; they elected the mayor before the current mayor. And the Lowell High School Alumni.
Lowell was an issue for both groups in this election. The recalled School Board members destroyed Lowell as a college prep school which had existed for over a century.
I helped organize the Lowell Alumni in 1961 when a new Lowell building was constructed and the appointed school board chose to eliminate it as a college prep school. I say “I;” my role was to help Ruth Kadish, the most powerful person in the public school system(photo on the right). Two years later she made me president of her powerful SCOPE, Service Committee on Public Education.
We had no trouble in 1961, getting the alumni to write tens of thousands of letters to the School Board and the mayor, George Christopher. The alumni are both powerful and made up of dozens of prominent citizens. Today the alumni are heavily Asian Americans. The school is over 50% Asian and has been for half a century.
One addendum; the Lefty press mentions the $2 million raised for the recall as 'shocking.' That is a trivial number for people who are not innumerate. For a billionaire, of which there are many in San Francisco, a $1 million political donation is the same as a $1.00 donation to a person with $1,000 in his pocket.
I am most recently disturbed by new regulations that require Venmo and Zelle to report to the IRS all transactions over $600 and require my crypto bank to report all transactions over $10,000.
I am an ordinary American citizen who has never been to prison, never been convicted of a crime, served in the Army and paid over a million dollars in taxes (property, sales, income, excise and many other kinds of taxes.) So what right does the U.S. government have to observe ordinary activities of my daily life? None. The ‘tyrannical’ bastards.
Tyranny is here in America. Tyranny is the best descriptor, it is generally defined as:
American tyranny started for me in the early 1960’s when DDT was a banned chemical. Universally banned. I found hair lice on a partner and tried to buy 10% DDT powder. Banned. It was the most effective treatment for hair lice. Today every public school in America has a hair lice problem because of this over wrought ban. Mosquito-borne diseases in Africa continue out of control after 60 years because of the ban. Bans don’t need to be total.
Then lead was universally banned. It was banned from paint and the most effective hull paint for boats that worked against barnacles was included in the ban. Bans don’t need to be total.
By the end of the 20th century the most effective anti-cramp pills used by millions of dancers was banned. Then in the early 21st century an acid reduction pill for indigestion was banned with millions of users after decades of use.
The FDIC, a government agency created to insure banks and to keep banks stable, banned banks from opening bank accounts for businesses that were stigmatized. That included marijuana businesses, companies lending money to blacks (pay-day lenders), firearms companies and a dozen others.
There seems to be no end to the government bans on personal living arrangements. We were forbidden to buy incandescent light bulbs (2007.) The government banned moth balls we used to protect our wool sweaters. Banned natural gas hook-ups to all new homes in California eliminating gas stoves, gas furnaces for homes, gas hot water heaters and gas clothes dryers.
People working for private U.S. corporations were to be fired unless they got mandatory vaccinations. On this outrage, the U.S. Supreme Court intervened to stop enforcement.
When we get a better word, I will use it. Until then, ‘American Tyranny’ is in full force.
“San Francisco has definitely become third-world.” The problem with saying that is that 93% of the people who live here have no idea what the third world is.
San Francisco has 850,000 residents. Of this 50,000 came here after living in a third-world country (Mexico, Guatemala, Vietnam, Philippines, India etc.) Possibly 5,000 San Franciscans have visited a third-world country (not just a coastal resort in Mexico.)
I’ve spent weeks and months in all parts of India, West Africa, including Senegal, Mali and Cameroon. I’ve also spent weeks in Cuba, Guatemala, Laos, Malaysia and many other genuine third-world countries.
I know what the term ‘third-world' means.
It means I regularly see human waste on the sidewalks including poop and vomit (and discarded IV needles.) Every corner smells like pee. When shabbily dressed people walk into Peet’s coffee shop, the smell drives me out. Graffiti is everywhere. People on the street stop to beg if I am eating outside. Small temporary squalid living quarters are regularly popping up on the sidewalk. Beggars are lying around on sidewalks nearly everywhere that there is sidewalk traffic. Streets are rarely repaired and driving around San Francisco is like driving on an unpaved mountain road. Deranged people are screaming and yelling in shopping areas.
That is San Francisco today; it is not the City I have lived in for most of my life. It is city life I see in third-world countries. The situation here gets worse every year.
There has been recent discussion in literary circles about the change in public attitudes toward General Robert E. Lee. Statues of Lee have been removed in many parts of the South along with the names of streets of many of his generals. This is a big change from the elevation of Lee and the Confederacy to a high status as the ‘Lost Cause.’
Who am I to comment on this issue? Done, I am not an historian and I have made no special study of the Civil War.
I am a unique individual who applied my own intelligence to the facts and debate about the Civil War and came to conclusions very different from my fellow Americans. In the middle of 1962 I tried to get major figures in the Republican Party to call for a celebration of the Centenary of the Emancipation Declaration for the Fall when President Lincoln wrote it and for January 1st 1963, the 100th anniversary of its implementation.
At the time I was a functionary in the Republican Party, having worked on local San Francisco campaigns and for Richard Nixon’s campaign for California Governor.
Again in 2012 I called on National leaders and Congress to declare a celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Declaration. This time as an expert legal witness for three Black civil rights organizations. I got two prominent black clergy on the West Coast to sign letters of support.
At neither time did I get any support from any other people in my campaign. A giant ‘nothing.’
Before my first appeal for a celebration I had come to my own conclusions about the Civil War. First, the South was much richer than the North with its vast exports before the War. Second, General Lee and General Jackson were above average generals but Lee’s other generals were petty and mediocre. General McClellan was a bumbling Union leader. Third, the North became a mighty industrial force because of the supply demands of the Civil War, especially the need for railroads.
I also concluded that the South had won the war because nearly all Americans believed in the honor and dignity of the Confederacy as tumpeted by the ‘Lost Cause’ storyline and the movie Gone With the Wind. Most Americans accepted the exaggerated storyline about ‘scalawags’ and ‘carpetbaggers.’ None of it was good history.
This is a good place to point out that in many wars the military losers were effectively the winners. WWI is a good example. The Allies forced a peace treaty on the Axis powers but the Axis came back to physically destroy France and Great Britain and tens of millions of civilians.
The Israelis in 1947 won their own state militarily but still have no peace after 70 years with the Palestinian hostility and three unrelenting neighboring countries.
The U.S. won the Vietnam War militarily and had a peace treaty in 1973 but lost the peace a year later because of American domestic opposition.
Other wars in Iraq, Korea, Afghanistan and the Cold War with the USSR have no military peace decades later. The same is true for the war between India and Pakistan.
Military victories in the past 175 years have had questionable outcomes.
This is continued from the last blog. It is about the second Japanese documentary film that dealt with dolphin killing at Taiji, Japan.
In the mid-1970s I heard from a friend that there were rumors of an annual Japanese dolphin slaughter. I have gone to Japan every year since 1970 so I added the source of rumor to my travel plans. I easily found Japanese who told me where the dolphin hunting was being done. I took a few trains to the small fishing village in the Southern end of a peninsula on the main Island of Honshu not far from Kyoto. I spent a few days in Taiji and was invited to a town dinner festival. Everyone in town was there including a dozen children running wild.
I talked to men at the fishing coop and visited the dolphin memorial statue. I was generously entertained by several families and had a wonderful time.
I saw the harbor where six hundred dolphins were killed annually after being herded into a cove and saw photos of the slaughter.
Having seen the racial prejudice of Americans toward the Japanese in the anti-whaling movement and personally being offended by the arrogance of one culture attacking the eating habits of another culture, I was particularly worried how Americans would react to news about the dolphin killing. Americans love dolphins even more than whales.
I met with a few Japanese governmental officials and explained how important it was to keep stories about the Taiji dolphin harvest from being covered in Japanese media. They understood and concurred.
When I returned to San Francisco I wrote an article about the Taiji dolphin harvest. I consciously pulled at the heart strings of my fellow environmentalists by describing the close-knit fishing cooperative and the religious ceremonies dedicated to the souls of the dead dolphins. I wrote about the ancient ritual of a traditional people.
The leading environmental weekly spread my article, with photos, on the whole two middle pages.
It appears that this article was widely read and forestalled American outrage over the dolphin harvest for the next thirty years. That was the subject of the Japanese documentary.
By the year 2003, a new generation of American environmentalists arrived and made the Taiji dolphin hunt a popular subject of outrage including a film that won an Oscar.
Two Japanese documentary filmmakers emailed me while I was in Tokyo in the early 2000s. I met with them at my favorite coffee shop in Shibuya where there are some private rooms upstairs for business meetings. I was interviewed for one film for my role in stopping the American anti-whaling movement. The other was my role in postponing the American anti-Japanese campaign against Japanese dolphin killing. Both filmmakers had discovered my role from Japanese sources.
There are two blogs, one on each documentary.
This first on whales. (an earlier blog is here)
It all began in my role on the board of Point Foundation, the foundation based on the revenue from the Last Whole Earth Catalog. A fellow board member encouraged me to grant funds to Joan McIntryre, an anti-whaling activist. She lived in Bolinas, North of San Francisco. She named her organization Project Jonah.
Two years later I met her in Japan and was surprised to find she disliked Japanese people. I can find no record of her since then. I heard she married a native Polynesian around that time after writing a successful anti-whaling book.
That meeting with Joan in Japan led to a conversation at a party in San Francisco with a Harvard biologist. I asked her about the issue of whaling populations. She made a quote I’ll never forget. ‘If there were any problems with the endangered data my Jewish friends at Harvard would have known about it.’
I’m a Jew and a statistician. So I took the challenge. I spent a few days in the library and made several discoveries. There are about 38 species of whales of which four were declared endangered by the International Whaling Commission. One of the endangered species was the Sei whale, primarily hunted by Inuit and Canadian native tribes. None were hunted by whaling countries. Many of the remaining species had female populations over 500,000.
I then wrote an article for the Co-Evolution Quarterly, a leading environmental magazine, titled “The Anti-Whaling Movement is Racist Against Japanese.” I argued that several Scandinavian nations and the USSR were whaling nations but completely ignored by the anti-whaling movement. There were no pickets at the Bolshoi Ballet.
A few months later, I pointed out the article to my friend Jerry Brown who is an environmentalist and was then governor of California. He called a meeting in his office with all the leading environmentalists and asked them if my article was accurate. If it was, he told them to call off their campaign.
That was pretty much the end of the American anti-whaling movement.
My role in that was the subject of the Japanese documentary a quarter-century later.
In 1971 Federal Judge Robert F. Peckham directed a settlement between Bank of California and a class of women and minorities that agreed to six of the top 18 bank members of management being women and 6 be black and other minorities within five years with funds set aside for special training.
The agreement was signed by other major California banks, Savings and Loans, Fireman’s Fund Insurance Co. and several major New York banks. The agreement was supervised by the Federal Court of Northern California.
How did this class action lawsuit come about? The suit was put together by Michael Phillips ( me), a former Vice President of the Bank of California and brought by Robert Gnaizda, a lead attorney with Public Advocates.
The origin of the case goes back to a visit from a black bank loan examiner to Mr. Phillips office in San Francisco. The bank employee had lunch with several other loan examiners at the Jonathan Club in Los Angeles while they were working as a team in downtown Los Angeles. They agreed to get together after work for basketball at the Club where the bank was a member. When the group arrived they were told the courts were not available. When the white loan officers returned without the black officer they were told that blacks were only allowed in the Jonathan Club for lunch.
Upon returning to the San Francisco loan examiners headquarters the group told their manager about the discrimination they had faced. After a week with no action by the department manager, the white officers complained openly. The embarrassed black officer felt compelled to do something. He went to Mr. Phillips to describe the situation. Mr. Phillips had been known as a pro-black activist at the U. of Chicago and had friends in common with the black employee who was from Chicago.
Mr. Phillips wrote a brief polite note to the bank President calling attention to the disgruntlement in the Loan Examiner’s department. The bank President was on vacation. The note went to the bank Executive Vice President, John Schutt, who was acting Bank president at the time. Mr. Schutt was coincidentally president of the Jonathan Club. He ordered that Mr. Phillips be fired.
Mr. Phillips, as a vice president, could not be fired. But he agreed to a generous severance package and left after a month.
Mr. Phillips, after months of searching, found Mr. Gnaizda at the newly opened office of Public Advocates. Mr. Phillips also found suitable class action plaintiffs and with his detailed insider knowledge of the bank prepared a case for employment discrimination,. which was brought to Northern California Federal Court. The facts of discrimination were overwhelming and the case was promptly settled. (Photo of Gnaizda on right)
The Bank was angry that the case had been brought and had enjoyed favorable publicity for the plaintiffs. The Bank agreed to the extraordinary employment settlement on the condition that Mr. Phillips received no compensation. Phillips agreed.
The Bank of California class action settlement and the many other financial co-signers of the suit made this the biggest primary case in employment discrimination law in the United States.
Nothing says more about San Francisco than this photo. A residential apartment building in our Castro neighborhood has converted five garage spaces at ground level into small apartments.
First, San Francisco has such an aversion to automobiles that new buildings, and old ones in this case, are not required to have parking spaces for tenants. The hostility to cars is in the local Planning Department DNA. The building is three blocks from the local underground. A recent building with 90 units was put on the market with million dollar apartments and zero parking spaces. Bicycles, scooters and electric skateboards are the preferred modes of transport. Leaving old people to use Uber.
Second, rental space is at a premium. I haven’t seen the inside of these garages since they had cars. They are about 200 square feet, which would rent as studios for $1,500 a month unfurnished with modest kitchen and bathroom. The only windows are the ones you see in front.
Right now San Francisco is still a techie hub with new arrivals renting beds in buildings that are converted for them with a common bathroom, kitchen and a common computer workstation room. The techies all expect to become billionaires.
Ranked Choice voting is where each ballot position allows individual voters multiple choices of candidates, usually up to five.
There is nothing ‘democratic’ about this method. It means that in situations where a secondary candidate is running in opposition to the most popular candidate, in a close race, the opposition will win. Nothing ‘democratic’ in that. People who vote for the losers get five votes more than people who vote for the winner.
In four cases I’ve witnessed the opposition candidate has won in the ranked choice run-off. Two elections in San Francisco, the loser won; in one an outright unqualified communist won for District Attorney, in Oakland an incompetent boob won for mayor against a qualified candidate and in New York a ding bat won the Mayor’s race but the election board simply ignored the ranked choice tabulation and gave it to the largest vote getter.
The technically correct vote counting is done by starting the way a democratic race usually is counted. The candidates are arrayed from the candidate getting the most votes down to the candidate getting the least votes.
Then ranked choice comes into play. The candidate at the bottom of the array is struck off and the people who voted for him/her get another four votes. The loser’s voters' votes go to the other candidates they voted for. The same is done with the votes of the people who voted for the other losers. They get four more votes. In Oakland there were 14 rounds of votes reallocated.
When any candidate in the array gets over 50% of the total votes he/she is declared the winner.
As you can see, the most popular candidate only gets the one vote of his voters. The losers' supporters all get four more votes. That is why a candidate who is running as an outsider/opposition can get his/her supporters voting four times. Giving the outsider/opposition a good chance to cross the 50% finish line first.
I’ve run four winning major political campaigns, regular- style voting, and taught campaign management to large groups of other campaign managers.
This is how I would win a ranked choice campaign.
First identify the candidates who are clearly running in opposition. Secondly identify the candidates who will clearly be at the bottom of the ticket but friendly. Even solicit friends to run in this category of definite losers. Get four certain losers if you can.
In your campaign run with yourself as the top choice and suggest four losers as your preferred running mates. Change the order of your four losers in different campaign media. Your object is to get your own voters to be on the list of votes among the losing candidates.
Summary: Run your campaign with an array of four suggested allies so your supporters get extra four votes when the loser's votes are tabulated. Make sure to change the order of the four names so as to keep them among the clear losers. That way your own supporters will get up to four more votes and one of them will always be for you.
What am I referring to? The New York Times and the entire American establishment media.
There is already a place in Hell called the NYTimes Gallery based on the Jew-phobic owners, the Sulzbergers’, complete unwillingness to publish voluminous and accurate data about the Holocaust while it was happening.
Now the NYTimes and the entire American Democrat establishment media failed to report an August 23 vote of contempt for President Joe Biden by the British Parliament.
If you are an historian writing about American history this was an act of great importance in the 400 years of British-American relations. You could not find it mentioned in the farcical ‘newspaper of record’ (the NYTimes) nor any other major American Democrat media.
This was not a light matter. President Joe Biden told the Brits that he would protect allied personnel during the American troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. It was a lie and warranted a vote of contempt.
The strain on American and all allied relations will not be forgotten for decades but the event that caused it was never reported to the American public in a way that the incompetence of the American elected leader could be understood or addressed.
I am old and have lived a long, enjoyable and wonderful life. In my declining years I have lived to see much of America become a third-world shit hole governed and ruled by an incompetent malicious swarm of anti-American fools.
The rise of the Wokies is somewhat of a surprise. They now have millions of ordinary Americans as followers yet their positions are down right stupid. How could a person of ordinary intelligence consider America a country of extensive racism when Satya Nardella is CEO of Microsoft, Arvind Krisna is CEO of IBM and Sundar Pichai is CEO of Google? All dark skinned and born in India.
Or the self-announced racist oppression of millionaire blacks like Oprah Winfrey, LeBron James and Meghan Markle.
It is in small part due to the wokie control of the New York media establishment and American academia, but the largest part is due to the wokie control of the major social media, Facebook and YouTube. The wokies have eliminated all forms of rebuttal to the wokie stupidity with their cancel culture.
It is no exaggeration to say that the intelligent voices in the anti-wokie world are far more intelligent than the leading wokie advocates. The wokies have no equivalent to Thomas Sowell, Victor Davis Hansen, Niall Ferguson, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Glenn Loury or Shelby Steele.
We anti-wokies need to stop the wokie censorship and we will win every argument, every discussion and every academic inquiry. We will put an end to wokie stupidity and hysteria.
How to do that is my next subject of intense thought.
The whole ‘wokie movement’ is just angry unhappy people without any substantive thought holding them together. They see that most poor people and homeless are black and they can’t admit to themselves that it has to do with out of control black criminality, lack of education and dysfunctional families. They see great income disparities and they are envious; they blame our society, despite the same pattern which exists all over the world.
The genuine problems of our society are monumental; they were created by the Left. Therefore the Left can not see them.
These are real, deep and intractable problems throughout 21st Century America. The Left can not acknowledge these horrors because they are the creation of the Left. The Left can only raise a trivial and ignorant platform of answers: ‘wokieism.’ Blame America itself for the Left’s 90 year reign of human tragedy and the creation of an historic calamity.
Aside from anthropologists, virtually no one knows what ‘culture’ is. I didn’t know, after a decade of global travel, until I was in my 30s, what ‘culture’ is.
‘Culture’ is the entire world that surrounds each person, including language, posture, worldview and all the implements of daily life. Like a fish to the body of water it inhabits, we are each so immersed in our culture we don’t know it exists. Each culture is bounded by language, sometimes geography and usually by kinship. Some people, like myself, followers of Sapir-Whorf believe that different cultures are so different from each other that genuine mutual understanding is not possible (The Sapir-Whorf thesis has been written out of textbook anthropology.) When we deal with a different culture we can only see the parts of the other culture that are part of our own.
I’ve spent fifty years visiting and traveling in Japan, and every year I find some new Japanese behavior that I had never seen before. It is unique to their culture and invisible to me. For example when the Japanese see a rainbow they see two different core blues and have different names for each. We don’t see them. Look at a ‘rainbow’ flag. One stripe is blue, not two.
The concept of ‘cultural appropriation’ is somewhere between ignorant and absurd. A girl in Boston putting Japanese fabric over herself has nothing to do with a Japanese kimono which takes a Japanese a half hour each day to put on and another half hour to care for including stitching together and taking apart, sometimes daily.
Dealing with non-Americans (or the many subsets of American in the U.S.) is always a troublesome area because nearly no one knows what culture is and how intractable cultural differences are. My best example of this is native Americans. Five tribes in Washington own casinos and have significant wealth as a result. Not one of these tribes uses their money the way standard American culture proscribes. None of the tribes have paved streets, street lights for night time, they still have washing machines and motorcycles on the front porch or front yard. Definitely nothing resembling suburbs. A few tribes spend their money getting medical training for tribal members, others spend their money on their own retirement facilities.
One of the most stunning cultural blindnesses is the presence of street people (‘homeless’) in the U.S. and their absence in Japan. In Japan there are homeless people, people who don’t want to be part of the society; many who couldn’t be if they wanted to. They live in secluded parts of the big parks with water and bathrooms but out of sight of everyone. In the U.S. and other Puritan countries we allow the homeless to mingle with us, daily, because we view them as temporarily out-of-sorts; all are considered potentially productive members of society who are victims of some abuse, childhood abuse, medical troubles or addiction. Just given the right help, support and inducements, they will be productive members of society. That is the Puritanical view; the Christian Protestant deep cultural view we live in. That deeply felt belief is part of our culture. Irrational and wrong, but not subject to examination or debate.
There are many similar deeply felt worldviews that are part of our culture in addition to words, images, conceptions that are not subject to examination or even comprehension.
In all my thousands of blogs, when I use the term ‘culture’ that is what I mean.
In the previous blog post I introduced Boku Haram, a Northern Nigerian rebel group that wants to stop modernization. I explained that their pleas represent the desires of a billion tribal people around the world.
In this blog I want to connect the goals of Boku Haram to the ‘Wokie Movement’ in the United States.
‘Boku Haram’ is Pidgin for ‘Books evil.’ A rejection of modernization by tribal people.
How is that closely related to the ‘Wokie Movement?’ Let's begin with the Wokie view of education.
My granddaughter in the Los Angeles public school system has been taught about the Human Caused Global Apocalypse since kindergarten. It is taught as unquestionable scientific truth. Now the whole California education system mandates teaching
Flowing from this anti-modern education, the major California universities and state colleges no longer use educational achievement tests as a measure of educational proficiency.
The Wokie Movement further demands that the large differential in wealth and income in most of the world be dramatically reduced because the presumed meritocracy that created income and wealth differentials is the result of oppressive white supremacy. Nothing could be more tribal than this Wokie view. Tribal peoples the world over prohibit major differences in wealth except for the single local tribal leader.
Tribal societies create cohesion within tribes by emphasizing the deep familial bonds and the dangers outside the tribe. The Wokie Movement emphasizes racial, gender and ethnic differences to strengthen tribal cohesion and hatred of outside white male supremacy. The combination is a source of group cohesion. Hatred of police is a particular danger at the top of the list of tribal victimologies.
The phrase ‘Boku Haram’ is Pidgin English that is being used in the Northern part of Nigeria to self-describe a guerrilla movement organized to stop the modernization of the area. Boku is ‘book’ and Haram is ‘unkosher,’ really ‘not Halal.’ The area involved in Northern Nigeria was the Bornu Empire between Mali and Cameroon. I’ve been to both sides of the area, but never in it.
Don’t bother reading the Internet about the subject. Wrong as usual. The Bornu area had for centuries been influenced by the Muslim Berber traders along the Sahel border, but being illiterate, the locals considered a one inch square torn out of a Quran as an Islamic talisman. They have little idea what Islam is. The Boku Haram only claimed to be Muslim after getting money and arms from ISIS.
The main tribe in the area is Kanuri, but there are dozens of languages and many trading tribes that pass through the area constantly.
In 1962 I was hired to read all the books and manuscripts on Africa pre-1850 and record the economic activity. My research is the core data for the subsequent economic histories of Africa. Based on that, I can say the Fulani tribe passes through the Bornu area regularly and has for centuries.
Interestingly, the Boku Haram are notorious for kidnapping entire schools of young girls. This is discussed below about the innocence of girls.
The widespread African objection to modernization is stigmatized with the word ‘corruption.’ The same word is used globally by tribal people referring to modernization. Which is the subject of this blog.
Unless you’ve spent years travelling in tribal areas of the world, you would be surprised to learn that most of the tribal world, about one billion people, use the term ‘corruption’ to describe the modernization they hold in contempt. The modern world is disfavored when compared to their tribal world. Just look at the way Arab Palestinians live or native American tribal people live and you will understand that they don’t want modernization. They usually reject it with the term ‘corruption.’ It corrupts their tribal way of life.
I tried to form a global organization, in the 1990s, to educate the world that most tribal peoples don’t want modernization and want to be left alone. Tribal people like trucks, buses and some of our artifacts that they can buy in local open markets like pens, jewelry, t-shirts, music playing devices and some medicines. But the rest of our way of life is alien. While so many people are tribal and anti-modernization, I couldn’t find enough fellow modern people to create any organization at all. I just wanted the modernizers of the world to know that tribal people don’t want to be modernized.
We moderns do something very strange that we don’t see ourselves. We protect our young girls from knowing the actual way bribery and illegal political payments function in our world. I know that I never explained it to my two daughters, but I let my son learn it on his own. The police hassled him because he was an early skateboarder. The Boku Haram try to save young school girls from the education system. In both cases we want girls to remain innocent.
Of course there are many things women know about our society that men don’t.
The shielding of women from the reality of bribery and illegal political payments explains the near 100% of single women who vote for the Democrats. The Democrats pretend to be self- righteous and innocent. Of course modern bribery is not a single party issue. All elected officials get rich on modest salaries. But single women seem to be much more blind to the Lefty nonsense than their counterparts who are married and don’t vote Democrat.
What is the modern issue of bribery and illegal payments in politics? It is not a single thing, nor is it the same everywhere. When I returned to San Francisco, coming home from the University of Chicago, my car was stopped by a traffic policeman. I did what I learned to do in Chicago., I put a $20 bill in my wallet as I handed it to him. He handed it back and said, ‘We don’t do that here.’
In San Francisco your property taxes are related to the amount of bribery you pay to the tax authorities, your business permit is totally dependent on who you hire to get your permits and permits for repairs or construction are tied to what group does the work. Chinese-Americans do the electrical work; I even saw a permit delivered to the door for a Chinese electrical contractor I was using. Irish do carpentry and construction, Mexicans do roofing and ‘other’ Asians do plumbing. Pick the wrong group and a permit can take months or years.
I know Joe Donahoe who virtually lives at City Hall and represents the building trades. Joe is the ‘bagman’ who makes permitting quick for his clients.
I was in politics in the 1960s when Nixon was defeated for President by Kennedy. We people in Republican politics all knew that Kennedy’s team wouldn’t have won except for ballot fraud in Chicago that intentionally overrode downstate voting and the same was true in Texas for upstate voting. That was why Johnson, the Senator from Texas, was selected as Kennedy’s VP that election.
Nixon knew that the voting fraud could not be publicly exposed and reverse the election so he let the issue pass. Trump in 2020 was naive about the issue.
During Reconstruction the North ignored all the Southern state presidential votes because anti-black corruption was endemic.
Our language has examples of voting fraud by big city machines and political autocrats. That was the job of New York’s Tammany Hall, of Chicago’s Daley Machine, Lousiana’s Earl Long, California’s Jesse Unruh and dozens of others before them.
Keeping women ignorant of how our society works is really a reflection of the patrilineal political world. (Except for Nancy Pelosi who learned about bribery from her father.) What is surprising is that it is never truly understood nor discussed by ordinary men or women.
Why is this particular innocence of value to society?
I am reminded of a story told to me by my close friend Margo St. James, founder of the hookers union Coyote. When Margo first arrived in San Francisco, a true naif, a country girl from the most northwestern city in America, Bellingham, Washington, she started a house cleaning business. One or more of her cleaning girls must have turned a trick and Margo was arrested as a ‘prostitute.’ In her trial before a judge she exclaimed she had never had sex for money and she didn’t know any ‘johns.’ The judge ruled she was a prostitute because no ordinary woman would know the term ‘john.’
Is that the kind of innocence we are trying to provide to girls?
As usual I found material online that is far from complete and I need to add my own experience to the collection. The material I found on Ron Boise the sculptor was here and here.
In late 1963 I bought five sculptures I saw in a North Beach gallery. The Vorpal Gallery (from “the Vorpal Blade went snicker snack” Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky) was owned by Muldoon Elder. We became close friends and remained so for many decades.
The five sculptures were one foot high on a wooden base. They were on my mantle at three different homes. My children grew up with them. I finally sold them back to Muldoon in the late 1980s for a little more than I paid for them. Interestingly, at the many parties I had at my homes, the women visitors liked the sculptures and a few men were offended.
In early 1964 the San Francisco police raided Muldoon’s gallery and seized much of the Ron Boise sculpture as obscene. The trial was a few months later.
My first function was to talk Muldoon out of hiring the lawyer he asked to represent him, Fay Stender, a political radical who would have generated opposition just for her role in the case. I got him to use Marshall Kause at the ACLU who brought in the trial lawyer who won the case, Ephraim Margolin. Ephraim became a lifelong friend of mine.
For three months I ran a campaign of coffee clutches and neighborhood talks among San Francisco wealthy art patrons, because I believed, at the time, that public sentiment would influence the jury outcome.
The trial had several significant features:
While the jury came back with a unanimous verdict in Ron’s favor, our own poll of the jurors revealed that one woman, from a small town in Texas, was the sole hold out for six hours.
Muldoon is known widely as the gallery owner who was the main seller of M.C. Escher prints in the U.S. His business grew rapidly with a gallery in New York and Southern California. Escher, who lived in Holland was very restrictive in his sale of prints. Muldoon solved that problem by enlisting every good-looking woman he could entice to fly to Holland to buy as many prints as Escher would sell. Muldoon sent a long string of women to Holland to build a very large collection for retail sale.
There are two kinds of money in politics. One is the kind of money spent on expensive law firms in Washington DC that is directed at lobbying. The other is money spent on campaigning. The former generally works and the latter doesn’t.
My closest life-long friend, Bobby G. believed that the moneyed class has disproportionate power in politics. He changed his mind the year before he died. I finally convinced him he was wrong, thanks to Tom Steyer and Mike Bloomberg.
Steyer and Bloomberg spent $2 billion in the past couple of years and got exactly nothing from their vast expenditures. Nothing. Not even 1% of any vote.
As a good researcher, I always included the name Joe Bowler in every political poll I did. Joe always got between 5 and 10% of the votes in any poll. Joe was my placebo on every list of candidates. Joe, an imaginary candidate, far out performed Steyer and Bloomberg and their billions of dollars. Before Steyer and Bloomberg there were countless other candidates who far outspent their opponents and still lost badly. That kind of campaign money is not persuasive to voters, maybe counter-productive.
This is not to say that money spent on lobbying isn’t effective. It often is. You can get favorable legislation and influential candidates for only $10s of millions with the right D.C. law firms. The California wine industry and the American milk industry prove this point. As I’ve explained in earlier blogs, D.C. law firms hire popular retired members of Congress who can walk onto the floor of Congress and persuade their former colleagues on many issues. These deep insiders know and understand the real nature of politics.
Google and Amazon spend hundreds of millions of dollars on campaigns and get very little. They spend tens of millions on lobbying and get a great deal.
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