|
|
Two Week Vacation! Happy Holidays!
I plan to take off the next two weeks. I will return Monday, January 6th. Please mark on your calendar to check your inbox then. (Email, I’ve learned, can be capricious.) When we return in January we will (may?) contend with the spectacle of a Senate trial, a trial of our democratic values, a trial of our ideals. If the Senate fails to convict (pretty much the expected result) the event itself may highlight the illness that has enveloped our nation.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
That Which Ails Us
Democracy Grief is Real by Michelle Goldberg, published in the New York Times on December 13, 2019 put into words my motivation for spending my time writing these emails. I have copied the most resonant part of her column below.
But before you read it, I want to wish my readers Happy Holidays–and a short respite from the convulsions shaking our country and our world. Yes, Happy Holidays–holidays of whatever flavor you choose, no disrespect to any tradition–as long as that tradition, in turn, respects mine.
I plan to take off the next two weeks. I will return Monday, January 6th. Please mark on your calendar to check your inbox then. (Email, I’ve learned, can be capricious.) When we return in January we will contend with the spectacle of a Senate trial, a trial of our democratic values, a trial of our ideals. If the Senate fails to convict (pretty much the expected result) the event itself may highlight the illness that has enveloped our nation.
With that, try to enjoy your holidays. Here is the part of Michelle Goldberg’s column that I found most resonant:
Obviously, this is hardly the first time that America has failed to live up to its ideals. But the ideals themselves used to be a nearly universal lodestar. The civil rights movement, and freedom movements that came after it, succeeded because the country could be shamed by the distance between its democratic promises and its reality. That is no longer true.
Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans are often incredulous seeing the party of Ronald Reagan allied with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, but the truth is, there’s no reason they should be in conflict. The enmity between America and Russia was ideological. First it was liberal democracy versus communism. Then it was liberal democracy versus authoritarian kleptocracy.
But Trump’s political movement is pro-authoritarian and pro-oligarch. It has no interest in preserving pluralism, free and fair elections or any version of the rule of law that applies to the powerful as well as the powerless. It’s contemptuous of the notion of America as a lofty idea rather than a blood-and-soil nation. Russia, which has long wanted to prove that liberal democracy is a hypocritical sham, is the natural friend of the Trumpist Republican Party, just as it’s an ally and benefactor of the far right Rassemblement National in France and the Lega Nord in Italy.
The nemeses of the Trumpist movement are liberals — in both the classical and American sense of the world — not America’s traditional geopolitical foes. This is something new in our lifetime. Despite right-wing persecution fantasies about Barack Obama, we’ve never before had a president who treats half the country like enemies, subjecting them to an unending barrage of dehumanization and hostile propaganda. Opponents in a liberal political system share at least some overlapping language. They have some shared values to orient debates. With those things gone, words lose their meaning and political exchange becomes impossible and irrelevant.
Thus we have a total breakdown in epistemological solidarity. In the impeachment committee hearings, Republicans insist with straight faces that Trump was deeply concerned about corruption in Ukraine. Republican senators like Ted Cruz of Texas, who is smart enough to know better, repeat Russian propaganda accusing Ukraine of interfering in the 2016 election. The Department of Justice’s inspector general’s report refutes years of Republican deep state conspiracy theories about an F.B.I. plot to subvert Trump’s campaign, and it makes no difference whatsoever to the promoters of those theories, who pronounce themselves totally vindicated.
To those who recognize the Trump administration’s official lies as such, the scale of dishonesty can be destabilizing. It’s a psychic tax on the population, who must parse an avalanche of untruths to understand current events. “What’s going on in the government is so extreme, that people who have no history of overwhelming psychological trauma still feel crazed by this,” said Stephanie Engel, a psychiatrist in Cambridge, Mass., who said Trump comes up “very frequently” in her sessions.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
Governance Logjam, A Path Toward Fixing It?
Remember Ralph Nader in 2000 and Ross Perot 1992? Democrats argue that Nader threw the 2000 election to George Bush. Republicans argue that Perot threw the 1992 election to Bill Clinton. Every third party candidate runs the risk, especially in a close election, of handing the election to their ideological opposite. That feared outcome locks us into our log-jammed two party system.
We cannot know what would have happened in 2016 had Bernie Sanders run in the general election as a third party candidate. There are too many variables to know the outcome with any certainty, only endless room for speculation..
But consider this: What if a Sanders voter could have said with his/her ballot, “My first choice is Sanders, but if Sanders doesn’t win a majority then my second choice is ______, and my vote will be transferred to that candidate”? In such an election I’d be free to vote for whom I think is the best candidate without worrying that I might be throwing away my vote, inadvertently helping elect another candidate whom I might find wholly unacceptable.
The voting system that would better express a voter’s will is Ranked Choice Voting, recently adopted by popular referendum in the State of Maine. The idea has been around for a while. Cambridge, Massachusetts, for example, has used Ranked Choice Voting for the City Council and School Board elections since 1940.
Click and watch an excellent series of very short, animated youtube videos on the concept of Ranked-Choice Voting v. “First Past the Post” voting (our current method). They’re fun, thoughtful, and explanatory. Produced by CGP Grey, they’re entitled “Politics in the Animal Kingdom.”
Ideas like Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) are tossed around for years before, all of a sudden, understanding of its value spreads widely enough to drive its adoption. With hyper-polarization of our two party system producing a logjam in our governance, now might be the time to take a serious look at what Ranked Choice Voting offers.
In the State of Washington RCV is a pertinent topic. There are two bills in the current WA State legislature session (2019-20), “Local Options for Ranked-Choice Voting” HB 1722 & SB 5708. Each has bipartisan support. If these bills became law the door would open to consider Ranked-Choice Voting in Washington State both at the state level and locally.
Have a look at “Politics in the Animal Kingdom.” For more background visit FairVoteWA.org. Check out the bills. On Thursday, January 9th at 3:30P a presentation of Ranked Choice Voting to the Spokane City Council is planned. Mark your calendar. I’ll provide more details later.
Nothing good happens unless someone is setting the groundwork and planning ahead. Learning about these efforts in their early phase is important work.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
P.S. Currently most voting in Washington State is governed by state law that mandates the top two primary with a runoff general election, the system with which we are all familiar. Top two has been in place since it was ruled constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2008–four years after 60% of the voters voted for a top two primary in 2004. Both the Republican and Democratic Parties sued to block it. You can read the timeline of Washington States voting changes here. We tend to forget that the manner in which we choose our representatives is subject to change–by us, the voters.
Impeach But Don’t Send?
John Dean’s brilliant idea: Since McConnell has already announced the result of the Senate impeachment trial to Sean Hannity on Fox News, why should the House let McConnell have a Jim Crow style show trial and thereby further embolden an already out-of-control president? Why not impeach, not send to the Senate…and keep on investigating?
Check this out:
Please read. If you think it is a good idea, share widely. Perhaps if enough people are exposed to the idea and share it with their congresspeople it will gain traction.
This is not pie-in-the-sky:
(From #tribelaw on Twitter.com) Harvard law professor Lawrence Tribe, and advisor to the Dems is advocating for the this:
BREAKING NEWS: Schumer’s proposal to McConnell. If he rejects these reasonable ground rules & insists on a non-trial, the House should consider treating that as a breach of the Senate’s oath & withholding the Articles until the Senate reconsiders.
Here is the link to Schumer’s letter: https://t.co/a9zbBywFBG
And John Dean has weighed in on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/JohnWDean/status/1206374327383277568?s=03
Let’s add some signs impugning McConnell’s statement for tomorrow’s gatherings.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
P.S. Seeing Hannity and McConnell together on Fox might be worth a look (but be sure to take your blood pressure meds first): https://twitter.com/JohnWDean/status/1206374327383277568?s=03
CMR has it wrong. Tell her tomorrow
“It’s a sham,” says McMorris Rodgers. With these words she dismisses the rule of law and she dismisses the democratic values with which we all were raised. With these words she tells us not to look at the facts, facts she steadfastly refuses to consider, much less discuss. McMorris Rodgers has so sold herself to Trump that she and Dan Newhouse (R, U.S. Rep, Congressional District 4, central Washington) have already signed up to be the honorary co-chairs of the Trump 2020 campaign in the state of Washington. For McMorris Rodgers it is barely inconvenient, much less impeachable, that her President conducted a shakedown of a needy foreign government for his personal political gain. For her it’s not about the rule of law, it’s about her team winning, it’s about her personal political skin–and she has the gall to dismiss impeachment for Trump’s offense as “…a process driven by politics.”
As a Representative who took an oath to defend the Constitution, McMorris Rodgers is a disgrace. She is so deep in Trump’s pocket nothing will change the Nay vote on impeachment she will cast this coming Wednesday, December 18–but we dare not let her cast that vote without telling her we disapprove.
The U.S. House vote on impeachment is scheduled for Wednesday morning, December 18.
IMPEACH and REMOVE SPOKANE–
When: Tomorrow. Tuesday, December 17 at 5:30 p.m., (plan to be there 15 minutes early)
Where: Foley Federal Building, 920 W Riverside Ave, Spokane, WA 99201. This is federal property, so please do NOT bring guns, or any weapons, no drugs, alcohol, pot, etc. This is part of a national action that will include over 500 events nationwide.
Bring: Warm clothing, a flashlight,
Signs: If you have time bring a sign. My favorite messages are sober and non-partisan:
COUNTRY BEFORE PARTY
LOYALTY TO THE COUNTRY – NOT TO TRUMP
DEFEND DEMOCRACY
TRUMP IS NOT ABOVE THE LAW
If you cannot attend, please register your opinion with McMorris Rodgers’ office one more time. Here are the numbers:
Spokane Office (509) 353-2374
Colville Office (509) 684-3481
Walla Walla Office (509) 529-9358
D.C. Office (202) 225-2006
Or lodge your comment on her website at https://mcmorris.house.gov/contact/. Register for her email missives. Respond to what her staffers write. Even we despair of convincing her of anything it is worth lodging our opinions.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
Socialism v. Capitalism, What’s in the Words?
We tend to label things without defining them. Words are thrown around that drip with meaning. We talk past each other. Some use “socialism” as if it were the root of all evil, evoking images of social unrest, shortages of food and the basics of life, of totalitarian, all-controlling governments. For others “socialism” is Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the assurance of basic human security. Likewise, for some, “capitalism” is the root of all evil, the fundamental force that concentrates unimaginable wealth and power in the hands of a few, a system that fosters rampant pollution of our country and our planet. For others, “capitalism” is the nearly sacred way to harness human ingenuity in pursuit of human betterment. In that view, the less regulated and the less taxed our capitalist system is, the better to unleash its blessings for the good of humanity.
We would all do well to step away from rigid definitions and preconceptions, to defocus the words and realize the truth lies somewhere between the simple buzzwords. Few (if any) of us, Republican, Democrat, or independent, desires the extremes built up around these two words. With that in mind I offer a copy of and a link to an article that captures something of the middle ground of which the extremes have lost sight. I offer the article because so many of the people with whom I correspond have cited it as a thoughtful treatment of an issue that has become extremely polarizing.
The article is quite long, but worth the time.
From the NYTimes Sunday Review on December 7 (click to see the original article with a lot of photos at NYTimes.com):
Finland is a Capitalist Paradise
Can high taxes be good for business? You bet.
By Anu Partanen and Trevor Corson
Ms. Partanen is the author of “The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life.” Mr. Corson is an author. Dec. 7, 2019
HELSINKI, Finland — Two years ago we were living in a pleasant neighborhood in Brooklyn. We were experienced professionals, enjoying a privileged life. We’d just had a baby. She was our first, and much wanted. We were United States citizens and our future as a family should have seemed bright. But we felt deeply insecure and anxious.
Our income was trickling in unreliably from temporary gigs as independent contractors. Our access to health insurance was a constant source of anxiety, as we scrambled year after year among private employer plans, exorbitant plans for freelancers, and complicated and expensive Obamacare plans. With a child, we’d soon face overwhelming day-care costs. Never mind the bankruptcy-sized bills for education ahead, whether for housing in a good public-school district or for private-school tuition. And then there’d be college. In other words, we suffered from the same stressors that are swamping more and more of Americans, even the relatively privileged.
As we contemplated all this, one of us, Anu, was offered a job back in her hometown: Helsinki, Finland.
Finland, of course, is one of those Nordic countries that we hear some Americans, including President Trump, describe as unsustainable and oppressive — “socialist nanny states.” As we considered settling there, we canvassed Trevor’s family — he was raised in Arlington, Va. — and our American friends. They didn’t seem to think we’d be moving to a Soviet-style autocracy. In fact, many of them encouraged us to go. Even a venture capitalist we knew in Silicon Valley who has three children sounded envious: “I’d move to Finland in a heartbeat.”
We’ve now been living in Finland for more than a year. The difference between our lives here and in the States has been tremendous, but perhaps not in the way many Americans might imagine. What we’ve experienced is an increase in personal freedom. Our lives are just much more manageable. To be sure, our days are still full of challenges — raising a child, helping elderly parents, juggling the demands of daily logistics and work.
But in Finland, we are automatically covered, no matter what, by taxpayer-funded universal health care that equals the United States’ in quality (despite the misleading claims you hear to the contrary), all without piles of confusing paperwork or haggling over huge bills. Our child attends a fabulous, highly professional and ethnically diverse public day-care center that amazes us with its enrichment activities and professionalism. The price? About $300 a month — the maximum for public day care, because in Finland day-care fees are subsidized for all families.
And if we stay here, our daughter will be able to attend one of the world’s best K-12 education systems at no cost to us, regardless of the neighborhood we live in. College would also be tuition free. If we have another child, we will automatically get paid parental leave, funded largely through taxes, for nearly a year, which can be shared between parents. Annual paid vacations here of four, five or even six weeks are also the norm.
Compared with our life in the United States, this is fantastic. Nevertheless, to many people in America, the Finnish system may still conjure impressions of dysfunction and authoritarianism. Yet Finnish citizens report extraordinarily high levels of life satisfaction; the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development ranked them highest in the world, followed by Norwegians, Danes, Swiss and Icelanders. This year, the World Happiness Report also announced Finland to be the happiest country on earth, for the second year in a row.
But surely, many in the United States will conclude, Finnish citizens and businesses must be paying a steep price in lost freedoms, opportunity and wealth. Yes, Finland faces its own economic challenges, and Finns are notorious complainers whenever anything goes wrong. But under its current system, Finland has become one of the world’s wealthiest societies, and like the other Nordic countries, it is home to many hugely successful global companies.
In fact, a recent report by the chairman of market and investment strategy for J.P. Morgan Asset Management came to a surprising conclusion: The Nordic region is not only “just as business-friendly as the U.S.” but also better on key free-market indexes, including greater protection of private property, less impact on competition from government controls and more openness to trade and capital flows. According to the World Bank, doing business in Denmark and Norway is actually easier overall than it is in the United States.
Finland also has high levels of economic mobility across generations. A 2018 World Bank report revealed that children in Finland have a much better chance of escaping the economic class of their parents and pursuing their own success than do children in the United States.
Finally, and perhaps most shockingly, the nonpartisan watchdog group Freedom House has determined that citizens of Finland actually enjoy higher levels of personal and political freedom, and more secure political rights, than citizens of the United States.
What to make of all this? For starters, politicians in the United States might want to think twice about calling the Nordics “socialist.” From our perch, the term seems to have more currency on the other side of the Atlantic than it does here.
In the United States, Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are often demonized as dangerous radicals. In Finland, many of their policy ideas would seem normal — and not particularly socialist.
When Mr. Sanders ran for president in 2016, what surprised our Finnish friends was that the United States, a country with so much wealth and successful capitalist enterprise, had not already set up some sort of universal public health care program and access to tuition-free college. Such programs tend to be seen by Nordic people as the bare basics required for any business-friendly nation to compete in the 21st century.
So what could explain this — the weird fact that actual socialism seems so much more popular in the capitalist United States than in supposedly socialist Finland?
A socialist revolution was attempted once in Finland. But that was more than a hundred years ago. Finland was in the process of industrializing when the Russian empire collapsed and Finland gained independence. Finnish urban and rural workers and tenant farmers, fed up with their miserable working conditions, rose up in rebellion. The response from Finland’s capitalists, conservative landowners and members of the middle and upper class was swift and violent. Civil war broke out and mass murder followed. After months of fighting, the capitalists and conservatives crushed the socialist uprising. More than 35,000 people lay dead. Traumatized and impoverished, Finns spent decades trying to recover and rebuild.
So what became of socialism in Finland after that? According to a prominent Finnish political historian, Pauli Kettunen of the University of Helsinki, after the civil war Finnish employers promoted the ideal of “an independent freeholder farmer and his individual will to work” and successfully used this idea of heroic individualism to weaken worker unions. Although socialists returned to playing a role in Finnish politics, during the first half of the 20th century, Finland prevented socialism from becoming a revolutionary force — and did so in a way that sounds downright American.
Finland fell into another bloody conflict as it fought off, at great cost, the Communist Soviet Union next door during World War II. After the war, worker unions gained strength, bringing back socialist sympathies as the country entered a more industrial and international era. This is when Finnish history took an unexpected turn.
Finnish employers had become painfully aware of the threats socialism continued to pose to capitalism. They also found themselves under increasing pressure from politicians representing the needs of workers. Wanting to avoid further conflicts, and to protect their private property and new industries, Finnish capitalists changed tactics. Instead of exploiting workers and trying to keep them down, after World War II, Finland’s capitalists cooperated with government to map out long-term strategies and discussed these plans with unions to get workers onboard.
More astonishingly, Finnish capitalists also realized that it would be in their own long-term interests to accept steep progressive tax hikes. The taxes would help pay for new government programs to keep workers healthy and productive — and this would build a more beneficial labor market. These programs became the universal taxpayer-funded services of Finland today, including public health care, public day care and education, paid parental leaves, unemployment insurance and the like.
If these moves by Finnish capitalists sound hard to imagine, it’s because people in the United States have been peddled a myth that universal government programs like these can’t coexist with profitable private-sector businesses and robust economic growth. As if to reinforce the impossibility of such synergies, last fall the Trump administration released a peculiar report arguing that “socialism” had negatively affected Nordic living standards.
However, a 2006 study by the Finnish researchers Markus Jantti, Juho Saari and Juhana Vartiainen demonstrates the opposite. First, throughout the 20th century Finland remained — and remains to this day — a country and an economy committed to markets, private businesses and capitalism.
Even more intriguing, these scholars demonstrate that Finland’s capitalist growth and dynamism have been helped, not hurt, by the nation’s commitment to providing generous and universal public services that support basic human well-being. These services have buffered and absorbed the risks and dislocations caused by capitalist innovation.
The other Nordic countries have been practicing this form of capitalism even longer than Finland, with even more success. As early as the 1930s, according to Pauli Kettunen, employers across the Nordic region watched the disaster of the Great Depression unfold. For enough of them the lesson was clear: The smart choice was to compromise and pursue the Nordic approach to capitalism.
The Nordic countries are all different from one another, and all have their faults, foibles, unique histories and civic disagreements. Contentious battles between strong unions and employers help keep the system in balance. Often it gets messy: Just this week, the Finnish prime minister resigned amid a labor dispute.
But the Nordic nations as a whole, including a majority of their business elites, have arrived at a simple formula: Capitalism works better if employees get paid decent wages and are supported by high-quality, democratically accountable public services that enable everyone to live healthy, dignified lives and to enjoy real equality of opportunity for themselves and their children. For us, that has meant an increase in our personal freedoms and our political rights — not the other way around.
Yes, this requires capitalists and corporations to pay fairer wages and more taxes than their American counterparts currently do. Nordic citizens generally pay more taxes, too. And yes, this might sound scandalous in the United States, where business leaders and economists perpetually warn that tax increases would slow growth and reduce incentives to invest.
Here’s the funny thing, though: Over the past 50 years, if you had invested in a basket of Nordic equities, you would have earned a higher annual real return than the American stock market during the same half-century, according to global equities data published by Credit Suisse.
Why would the wealthy in Nordic countries go along with this? Some Nordic capitalists actually believe in equality of opportunity and recognize the value of a society that invests in all of its people. But there is a more prosaic reason, too: Paying taxes is a convenient way for capitalists to outsource to the government the work of keeping workers healthy and educated.
While companies in the United States struggle to administer health plans and to find workers who are sufficiently educated, Nordic societies have demanded that their governments provide high-quality public services for all citizens. This liberates businesses to focus on what they do best: business. It’s convenient for everyone else, too. All Finnish residents, including manual laborers, legal immigrants, well-paid managers and wealthy families, benefit hugely from the same Finnish single-payer health care system and world-class public schools.
There’s a big lesson here: When capitalists perceive government as a logistical ally rather than an ideological foe and when all citizens have a stake in high-quality public institutions, it’s amazing how well government can get things done.
Ultimately, when we mislabel what goes on in Nordic nations as socialism, we blind ourselves to what the Nordic region really is: a laboratory where capitalists invest in long-term stability and human flourishing while maintaining healthy profits.
Capitalists in the United States have taken a different path. They’ve slashed taxes, weakened government, crushed unions and privatized essential services in the pursuit of excess profits. All of this leaves workers painfully vulnerable to capitalism’s dynamic disruptions. Even well-positioned Americans now struggle under debilitating pressures, and a majority inhabit a treacherous Wild West where poverty, homelessness, medical bankruptcy, addiction and incarceration can be just a bit of bad luck away. Americans are told that this is freedom and that it is the most heroic way to live. It’s the same message Finns were fed a century ago.
If these titans of industry are serious about finding a more sustainable approach, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. They can simply consult their Nordic counterparts. If they do, they might realize that the success of Nordic capitalism is not due to businesses doing more to help communities. In a way, it’s the opposite: Nordic capitalists do less. What Nordic businesses do is focus on business — including good-faith negotiations with their unions — while letting citizens vote for politicians who use government to deliver a set of robust universal public services.
This, in fact, may be closer to what a majority of people in the United States actually want, at least according to a poll released by the Pew Research Center this year. Respondents said that the American government should spend more on health care and education, for example, to improve the quality of life for future generations.
But the poll also revealed that Americans feel deeply pessimistic about the nation’s future and fear that worse political conflict is coming. Some military analysts and historians agree and put the odds of a civil war breaking out in the United States frighteningly high.
Right now might be an opportune moment for American capitalists to pause and ask themselves what kind of long-term cost-benefit calculation makes the most sense. Business leaders focused on the long game could do a lot worse than starting with a fact-finding trip to Finland.
Here in Helsinki, our family is facing our second Nordic winter and the notorious darkness it brings. Our Finnish friends keep asking how we handled the first one and whether we can survive another. Our answer is always the same. As we push our 2-year-old daughter in her stroller through the dismal, icy streets to her wonderful, affordable day-care center or to our friendly, professional and completely free pediatric health center, before heading to work in an innovative economy where a vast majority of people have a decent quality of life, the winter doesn’t matter one bit. It can actually make you happy.
Recall these ideas the next time you hear “capitalism” or “socialism” thrown around without careful definition. Ask what the speaker really means by the word. Listen carefully.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
P.S. I’ve copied the definitions of socialism and capitalism found in my electronic dictionary and pasted them below. Definitions are important. Please note that even in the dictionary the term socialism might mean different things to different people. Republican polemicists using the word socialism tend to mean something like Soviet state communism, whereas Democrats usually mean social democracy.
Similarly, polemicists on the left tend to use “capitalism” as the absolute of private ownership for profit.
The truth is we exist in a blended system and the actual argument is over the mix of the blend.
Socialism: a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.
• policy or practice based on the political and economic theory of socialism.
• (in Marxist theory) a transitional social state between the overthrow of capitalism and the realization of Communism.
The term “socialism” has been used to describe positions as far apart as anarchism, Soviet state communism, and social democracy; however, it necessarily implies an opposition to the untrammeled workings of the economic market.The socialist parties that have arisen in most European countries from the late 19th century have generally tended toward social democracy.
Capitalism: an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.