Wednesday, June 27, 2018

Independence Day 2018

One week, seven days, a quarter of a moon cycle, and we will celebrate the publication of the Declaration of Independence on its 242nd anniversary. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness, ..."

Among these: Notice that the Founding Fathers did not limit our unalienable rights to these three, among these, there are others not mentioned.

Among these rights, I would add the right to raise one's children, that children will not be taken from their parents without a compelling interest of the state in their behalf, namely that their life or welfare is endangered.

The furor over the policy of the president, his attorney general, and the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security to separate children from their parents who have been detained at our borders caused President Trump to issue an executive order a week ago to stop the practice.

A week later, confusion abounds has to how and if that policy has been implemented. Children remain separated from their parents and despite the assurances of government that they have all the details in hand, U.S. government agencies and officials seem confounded as to how they will reunite these families. They don't seem to know who belongs with whom and even where everyone is.

Reports emerge that border security (ICE: Immigration and Customs Enforcement) do not have the facilities for the detention of families. But they were well prepared for the separation of families.

Government officials, from the low-level routine to the highest levels, say they are struggling to deal with the logistics of reuniting children with parents. Yet they were well-prepared for the separation.

Sorry, but I'm not buying it. We are the nation that put men on the moon. We are the nation that developed vaccines for polio and smallpox and eradicated these diseases from our continent, even the world. We are the nation that invented semiconductors and silicon chips and set off the computer revolution. There is nothing we can't do if we put our minds to it. Yay, America! Trump glories in it.

Oh wait, but we can't figure out after a week how to get 2,300 children back to their parents.

I'm not buying it.


Remember this moment? For the first time, I'm proud of my country ...

She was pilloried for the statement. And I'm expecting the same because now, for the very first time in my life, I am ashamed of my country.

It isn't only the cruel, inhumane, and barbaric policy that Donald Trump and his minions, among them Jeff Sessions and Kirstjen Nielson, have implemented. It isn't only the number of people who are defending the indefensible violation of human rights by the United States of America. It is the justifications that are being offered as if anything could defend this.

Logic and reason do not support the policy of separation because military personnel die in battle nor that first responders sometimes pay that price as well.

One might as well say that sometimes people die in automobile accidents and their children are now orphans and that justifies deliberate orphan-making actions when that does not need to take place.

Shameful.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Alexander de Toqueville visited America and then published his conclusions on what he found. Among them was this very cogent observation: America is great because America is good; if America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.

We are no longer good. Drop the pretense, the world is not buying it.

#MAGA. What a joke. We have ceased to be great and, frankly, I don't see how we'll ever get back.

Sunday, June 24, 2018

Social Security Explained

No, the money is not there. It never was and that was by design. Only the most foolish would collect an excess and lock actual cash in a vault. Or worse, buy gold, which is a risky investment that often fails to provide an adequate return on investment.

By law, when Social Security taxes were increased in excess of benefit payments for the purpose of building a surplus for the years when those born between 1946 and 1964 (popularly known as the Baby Boom generation) would retire and their benefit payments would exceed projected tax revenues, the excess or surplus in funds was invested in U.S. Treasury securities: bonds, t-bills, etc.

I thought then and still believe now that a unique opportunity was missed. The surplus could not be invested in the stock market, the traditional vehicle for the greatest growth over time, because it was too large. We would have achieved backdoor socialism, whereby the federal government would come into ownership and control of all publicly traded companies.

That was not acceptable then and most of us would not welcome that now.

But the surplus could have been invested in roads, bridges, railway infrastructure that would generate revenue via tolls. It could have been used to fund homeownership for low-income and middle-income families, mortgages that would generate revenue via the interest rates. These would be investments that even now would be generating revenue for Americans' main retirement plan rather than be drains.

The opportunity was lost. It will not come again.

Thus, we have reached the point where the Boomers are retiring and beginning to claim their social security, as did their parents before them and their grandparents before them.

Understand that Social Security is not an investment. You hold nothing, no bond, no stock, no asset, no I.O.U. signed and legally enforceable in a court. Social Security is a wealth transfer program for those who are working to those who used to work but no longer do.

There is nothing wrong with that. Social Security is a promise, a promise from one generation to another, that we will support you in your old age in return for a promise that future generations will do the same for us. Facilitating and enforcing this generational promise is the federal government.

It has worked since its inception. It will continue working, except for the avarice of the uber-wealthy, whose drive to hoover up all the wealth of middle-income and low-income families boggle the imagination.

It is the political class, now the servile instruments of the uber-wealthy, who seek to finance an unsustainable tax cut by eliminating the generational promise of Social Security.


This meme is beginning to make its way across social media. While they have voted to cut benefits, almost totally Medicare and Medicaid, the Social Security cut is only $4 billion, they are not stealing anything. There is nothing to steal.

They voted to begin a slowdown in the reduction of the fund balance, so small as to be almost unnoticeable. But now is the time to remember the fable of the camel's nose. Start small, so small no one will notice or, if they do, how could they object?

If the cut becomes law, it will only be the beginning. As for Medicare, the cut will gut the program and hasten the crisis when we will either give up on health insurance or go to a single-payer system. (My money is on the latter.)

There is a difference between cash and bookkeeping. The $2.9 trillion surplus is actually only a bookkeeping entry: how much more has been collected in Social Security taxes than has been paid out. There is nothing to steal. But if Congress votes and the President agrees to wipe out the balance with a bookkeeping entry, that is huge.

The generational promise is gone.

Thursday, June 14, 2018

Heart of Darkness

Author: Joseph Conrad.  Year of Publication: 1899.

Heart of Darkness chronicles the tale of Marlow, the narrator of the story, who recalls for a few seamen a time of his life when, as a young man, he went to the Belgian Congo to captain a riverboat for the company in charge of trade in the colony.

Yes, a colony, the infamous colony of King Leopold II of Belgium, the Congo Free State. To understand this book, you must understand the background which Conrad did not have to explain to his contemporary audience.

Africa resisted colonization until the last decades of the 1800s, mainly because its interior was full of people to resist and exotic diseases that killed Europeans in less than a year. While European countries gained a toehold on coastal cities, they could not penetrate the continent with success until two things happened: military technology advanced to produce automatic weapons, guns that did not need reloading but could deliver a spray of bullets to mow down advancing Africans armed with only clubs, spears, and arrows; medical advancements that discovered drugs like quinine that could provide protection against disease.

Outnumbered 2 to 1, 3 to 1, maybe even 10 to 1, European armies were able to defeat native armies and establish colonial control.

Europe foresaw what they could do. By this time, they had colonized the western hemisphere and experienced the numerous revolutions that freed the continents of North and South America, not to mention several islands in the Caribbean, from their control. I refer not only to the U.S. revolution, but the Haitian revolution and the many revolutions driven by Simon Bolivar.

They had established hegemony in Asia including the domination of China. As land is limited upon the Earth, only one great opportunity was left: Africa. Technology delivered it into their hands and the scramble was on.

That is what it was known as--the Scramble for Africa. It culminated in the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, where the European powers split the continent among themselves to avoid warfare over territory and boundaries.

Unlike the British, French, German, Portuguese, and other European governments, which ruled their colonies through the auspices of their officials, the Congo Free State, that part of Africa given to Belgium, was taken by its King, Leopold II, as his personal fiefdom and colony.

Originally, the King scoured the territory for ivory as the quickest way to score profits. That is the period in which Marlow takes up a job, goes to the Congo, works his way upriver, and later recounts his experiences.

But by the time his readers were devouring his words, Leopold had established rubber plantations as a better way to maximize his wealth aggrandizement from the colony. His rapacity and brutal treatment of Africans were infamous across Europe. Fail to meet production goals and hands were cut off. There are photographs surviving from this time in which piles of hands can be seen. Rebel and worse treatments were handed out.

Even given the very low standard of morality regarding the people of Africa that all Europe held at the time, Leopold's cruelty was so aberrant that heavy pressure from the other European powers forced the Belgium government to wrest control of the colony away from Leopold in 1908.

Now let us come back to the novella. It is short, only 38,700 words by the best estimates. That is enough.

The atmosphere is bleak. At the outset, the sky and water are described as one sheet of steel gray, so like one another that the observers cannot tell where one ends and the other begins. Dusk is falling as they wait for the tide to turn and run out. (This is a time of sails, not motors, and timing the tide for departure from port was essential.)

Themes of death and darkness are established as the words go on. Even in a city supposedly full of bright opportunities, Marlow describes it as a whitened sepulchre, that is a dark tomb that is painted over to distract the eye from its contents.

Everything that happens comes to a meaningless or purposelessness. On the journey to Africa, we find a French warship firing off cannons into the land. Why? We do not know. But battleship bombardments fail in effectiveness even in our day, so we can appreciate the continuing gloom of uselessness of effort that Conrad describes.

This is a psychological story, driven by the author looking deep into our souls, through his narrator, to see what is there.

Marlow begins the inquiry early when, before taking his listeners to Africa, he asks whether the experience of exploring a new land, such as penetrating into Africa, is any different whenever it happens? He asks if the Romans, invading Britain, did not have the same experience? Weren't the peoples of the island just the same, just as primitive, just as savage, and wouldn't they have resisted the Romans the same as the Congolese resisted their invaders? Abandon their river homes, flee inland, wear down the invading force?

He arrives in the Congo. He encounters three individuals of interest, the third of whom I will describe last although Marlow finds him first.

The manager: the man placed in charge of managing all the stations and bringing out the ivory. He is a man without feeling, a man who only looks after the profit, who sees the natives as a pool of labor not quite human, to be exploited as one would put an ox to a yoke to plow a field.

The scenes of death that are described are stunning. The grove of trees, where Marlow goes to escape the heat and finds natives, beaten or worked beyond the capacity of the human body to recover, lay dying. The clink of chains that bind together a group of men, fastened around their necks, as they are driven up the road with heavy burdens that they carry. The savage beating of a man, who accidentally set a fire that burned up a hut full of cheap goods for trade (calico and bolts of cloth), and the abandonment of that man to let him lie and die.

But we have not yet approached the heart, the residing place of darkness that Conrad is taking us to.

The second person is Kurtz, the man with high connections, the man who didn't have to go to Africa but did. He was slated for greatness, at the moment only an agent in the wood, but soon to take over the manager's position before going back to Europe to rise high in the Company.

Everyone knew of Kurtz, some admired his work with the natives but most scorned it.

Kurtz, who came to the colony with the high motive of civilizing the savages. (Now today, we would find that attitude objectionable, but at the time, it was seen as altruistic and noble.)

But dark rumors about Kurtz disturbed Marlow and tension is built as the story moves on: is he true to this ideal or what is he really doing?

Spoiler Alert! Stop reading now if you intend to read the book.





We find that Kurtz has been participating in unspeakable rites with the natives in the dark of night. He has not traded for ivory although he has sent down the river more ivory than all the other agents combined. No, he does not trade; he goes raiding for it. In other words, he steals it.

In those dark, midnight rituals, we find that Kurtz, who has a charismatic personality that finds expression in his voice, is allowing ... encouraging ... compelling the natives to pay him homage as a god.

In Kurtz, we find the heart of darkness and the message of Conrad. European colonizers, so superior in their smugness of civilization, are no better than these African people. The wilderness does that. Stripped of the structure of civilized society, those customs and laws built up over centuries, put into the wild, one must look into one's soul to find what is there ... if anything.

In the emptiness of Kurtz, who had nothing to resist becoming savage in his own way, Conrad accuses his society: Everything you imagine them to be--you are no better.

Postscript: While this is the accepted meaning of the novel, I have to wonder if Conrad himself understood it. The third character, which I have saved to the last, is the accountant. He dresses every day in a starched white collar, dazzling white linen shirt, snow white pants. It is not easy maintaining this standard. As Marlow recounts his tale decades in the future (so he has had time to evaluate each personality and decide upon it), this is the only one he admires. Reason? because the man maintained his standards. He was able to preserve his principles despite the degenerating influence of the environment.

BUT! the text also tells us that he was only able to do so by coercing a native woman into the necessary laundry practices. She was unwilling, but he made her do it. I hope you join me in recoiling at that. I would rather dress in rags than forcing anyone into labor that they do not want to do.

Second postscript: I took up this book because a colleague mentioned it. In the disturbing suicide of Anthony Boudain, it comes out that this was one of his favorite books. I leave this comment right here. Make of this fact what you will.

Summit in Singapore

Or maybe the Singapore Summit. Either way, it sounds like a great movie title.

The Kim-Trump summit. The Trump-Kim summit. The way those two names rattle together, it makes me wonder why all the pundits praising or condemning the meeting between the two leaders are missing on the great punning opportunity.

The Trumpkin summit. Wait, wasn't that the name of a dwarf in Narnia?

To borrow a Trumpian phrase, it was a big nothing-burger. They met, they talked, they ate; Trump showed off 'The Beast,' his presidential limo (this phrase did not originate with him), maybe in the hope that Kim Jong-Un would swap three nukes for it on the spot?

At the end, they issued a joint statement that said they would continue to talk, at least their staffs would.

Trump canceled U.S. participation in training exercises (can we stop calling them war games?) with South Korea's military, but that was a move he was planning to make anyway with the excuse of saving money. Well, yes, he does have a need to find DOD budget to fund his military parade. So he gave nothing away; he only tried to make it look like it was a concession to North Korea.

Given the history of both men to shake hands on an agreement and disavow it soon afterward with the claim that it did not mean what everyone took it to mean, the summit would not have done much regardless of what deal was made.

The real hope for progress is that all the issues have opened for discussion and negotiation. As I think over the past failures of the 6-way talks with North Korea, the ones that included Russia, China, Japan, and South Korea, it was the limitation of the talks to telling North Korea to stop developing nuclear weapons or we would hurt them. We did, but they kept on.

None of the other issues were brought up. In March 2017, in the midst of the fire-and-fury and American-dotard exchange, when many were thinking that war would be the only way to resolve the situation, I advocated for renewing the talks. I was scorched by social media that the talks have not worked. I replied that we needed to think about what the other side needed and maybe offering an end to the war would be a good incentive.

No one thought it a good idea, but that is where we have progressed and that is a good thing. Has no one noticed that for all the threats, North Korea did not and has not fired a missile test toward the U.S. mainland, Hawaii, or even Guam?

The country is not led by a madman. He is a brutal dictator, he has murdered rivals to secure power, but he is not insane.

He has a need to secure his regime and that is what he wants. He realizes that, for him to achieve that, he needs to reduce the threat of war on the peninsula and to improve his country's economy.

If we keep those needs in mind, we have a chance to move ahead and make a huge reduction in the tension between the parties involved: both Koreas, Japan, and the U.S., which has the treaty obligations to defend both Japan and South Korea.

I am not naive and I am no Pollyanna, but I am optimistic that we could achieve a breakthrough in the coming years.

Postscript: the real wild card in this is China. North Korea depends upon China in most ways, yet resists its influence. How far can Kim Jong-Un go given China's goals in the region? They have backed him because North Korea is a useful check on American power and influence in the region. the last thing China will accept is a complete rapprochement between the U.S., its allies, and North Korea. Reunification is out of the question.

China's purpose is to use their economic power and developing military power to push the United States out of the eastern Pacific, maybe, in their most optimistic dreams, all the way across the Pacific back to our western shores.

Will China support or sabotage talks to reduce tensions, formally end the war, and relieve sanctions in a return for denuclearization of the Korean peninsula?