Category Archives: Presidental Election

Baseball Poetry Presidental Election

Danny DeVito’s “THE RATINGS GAME” and the October Surprise Debate

October 2, 2016 – 9:20 am

Sunday, October 2, 2016

“THE RATINGS GAME” – Danny DeVito’s Minor Masterpiece and the Donald Trump Surprise Debate of October 25

One of my colleagues at CSULB, Charles Webb, has written a score of poems that seem likely to become pedagogical models of “Stand Up Poetry,” a mode he has promoted in several influential anthologies. Webb, however, is not the person who coined the term. Inspired by the title of Edward Field’s collection of poem, “Stand Up, Friend, With Me,” Gerald Locklin and Charles Stetler applied the term to a post-Beat, “reader-friendly” kind of poem that emphasized humor and popular culture. Among Webb’s best known poems is a paean to “low culture” art in which Webb bemoans (in a straight man fashion) his inability to recall the important signifiers of canonical literature and culture, and instead cackles with self-satisfied pleasure as he recalls the art that truly matters to him, which features nothing other than low, gross humor. On the surface, Webb’s rhetoric is beguiling; upon re-reading, one discovers its flaw in leaning too heavily on inductive logic. Nevertheless, it is a charming example of Webb at his best.

The narrator of Webb’s poem is a fringe-niche consumer of mass industrial culture. His protestations of a preference for low culture are dourly undermined by his acknowledgement of the social expectations of his imagined persona as a cultivated individual. While analysis of Webb’s poem calls for taking this ambiguous tension into consideration, the allegiance to low culture that the poem accentuates is at the heart of any media-based target audience. As ripe as that subject might be for comic display within popular culture, few efforts have been truly successful. One exception is Danny DeVito’s “The Ratings Game,” which came out in 1984. It is a minor masterpiece in its satire of corporate culture’s manipulation of the status quo.

The protagonist of “The Ratings Game” is an amateur auteur in the fullest sense of the term. Vic DeSalvo, played by Danny DeVito in his first directorial effort, is a successful businessman who yearns for cultural status, but is rebuffed by the Hollywood crowd. Undeterred by his initial failures, DeSalvo manages to get his cartoon show a slot on a nationally syndicated broadcast schedule. I haven’t seen this movie, which was a cable television project, for over 30 years, and yet I recall with a smile on my face — as wide as that of Webb’s narrator — the moment in which Established Power smirks at Underlings: “Congratulations,” the network executive says to DeSalvo, “your show will premiere on October 10, (pause) the first night of the World Series.”

To put it mildly, DeSalvo knows he is doomed. With bottomed-out ratings, his show will not likely make it to the second month, let alone a second season. DeSalvo won’t give up without a fight, however, especially after his fiancé, Francine (played by Rhea Pearlman), reveals how “ratings” are actually determined. As the victim of sexist politics in the office, she has no qualms about getting revenge, and they set about plotting to humble a system stacked against them.

I mention “The Ratings Game” (which has finally been released on DVD) because the current schedule of debates between presidential candidates includes an evening featuring the alternative choices of Jill Stein and Gary Johnson. The Free and Equal Commission has organized a debate to which all prominent candidates have been invited. The likelihood of Trump and Clinton both showing up for this debate and thereby according minor party candidates an appearance of being on an equal footing is about the same odds as the Chicago Cubs asking me to pitch the first game of the upcoming playoffs.

However, as I wrote this post, Trump’s habitually asymmetrical strategy gave me pause: might not Trump show up? It would be a couple of hours of free publicity in which he could harangue Jill Stein as the “real” Hillary Clinton, the “alternative” who represents the socialist agenda that lurks behind Clinton’s policy-driven campaign. Next to Johnson, of course, Trump would seem like a foreign policy maven, a wonk ne plus ultra. What’s to lose? Well, I suppose that Fox Sports would resent any distraction from one of its crown jewels, but the White House is at stake, and that requires sacrifices from all interested parties, doesn’t it?

By now, of course, you’ve guessed what Trump’s misfortune would be in choosing this “alternative” debate as a surprise outlet for his fulminations. Yes, this debate is scheduled for the first night of the 2016 World Series (October 25). Good luck, Ms. Stein. I can’t wait to see the Cubs finally begin to break the longest drought in American sports.

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Ecology Ground Level Conditions Presidental Election

The Governance of Drought

August 16, 2016 – 1:06 pm

Tuesday, August 16, 2016

The Governance of Drought: California, the Illusion of Plenitude, and the Presidential Election

The University of California, Davis maintains a website on which one can track the levels of water in California’s reservoir system. You can reach the most pertinent graph by scrolling down and noticing a rectangle on the right hand side marked “Reservoir Conditions.”

http://drought.ucdavis.edu
http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cdecapp/resapp/getResGraphsMain.action

To say the portion of each reservoir’s rectangle that was filled in with blue was on the low side, back in February, 2016, is to understate the emergency that California faced after five years of harrowing drought. February itself had not brought predicted rains; instead, record heat had punished Southern California, and it appeared as if further rationing might be in store. For the record, here are reservoir levels on February 18: Shasta was only at 57% of capacity; Lake Oroville at 49 percent of capacity; Folsom at 64 percent of capacity, and Trinity at 33% of capacity. These levels, as a whole, were a full 25 percent below the historical average.

Fortunately, March brought enough substantial rainfall that the reservoirs returned to adequate levels to draw upon during this summer. The aquifers of the Central Valley, however, remain seriously depleted, and complete recovery is unlikely at any time in the foreseeable future. As is well known, the reservoirs depend to a great extent not upon direct rainfall, but upon the flow of water from snowmelt in the mountains. It wasn’t until the first couple days of May, therefore, that the largest reservoirs topped off at the highest levels in quite some time:
Shasta Reservoir was at 93 percent of capacity;
Lake Oroville was at 96 percent of capacity;
Folsom Lake was at 86 percent of capacity;
Trinity Lake was at only 58 percent of capacity, however.

In the three and a half months since that high water mark, these four reservoirs have been drained at a fairly steady rate. As of midnight, August 15, here are the capacity levels of the above quartet:
Shasta: 73%
Lake Oroville – 58%
Folsom Lake – 39%
Trinity – 45%

As one can see, Lake Oroville has had its contents put to work at a rate that bespeaks an unwarranted confidence in the winter to come; or should I say, the winters to come. It is unlikely that the storms we will have this coming winter will be even half as generous as the past winter. How is it then that Lake Oroville can plummet with so little concern about replenishment?

(I would insert an “update” note into this post, at 2:41 p.m. The Los Angeles Times, about a half-hour after I posted this blog entry, published an article by Matt Stevens about the lifting of water restrictions: http://fw.to/mh5PFyZ)

I would note that a trio of much smaller reservoirs further south along the Sierra Nevada, and more directly in line with the Central Valley’s pipelines, remains at more or less the same levels as they achieved in late spring, so obviously they are being held in reserve, should the ferocity of the drought prove to be planning a counter-attack on this illusion of plenitude during the coming winter.

In devouring the water at Lake Oroville this summer, one wonders if the people in charge realize that we still have at least two and a half months to go before we get the first storms of the 2016-2017 rainy season. That is, of course, if such storms actually show up. The past five years might be simply a foretaste of a challenging century in this nation’s most populous state.

One question relevant to the current presidential campaign involves these reservoirs, in fact. Hillary Clinton has spoken of an unprecedented investment in the nation’s infrastructure. Water is the crucial component of the Western half of the United States, and if Clinton wants to increase confidence in her ability to manage the coming water crisis, then it would behoove her to post some specific agenda plans on her website. I understand why it is unlikely that she (or VP nominee Kaine) will campaign much in person in California. That does not excuse not having already met with Governor Brown and other governors of the Western states and not having that dialogue’s outcome posted for public comment.

This leads me to today’s suggestion. What is needed at this point is not more debates between the presidential candidates, but a public meeting, at least three hours in length, at which each presidential candidate is in charge of a group of governors (no less than three, no more than five) discussing a major environmental issue and the direction that regulations should move in. It is time for the water levels of the reservoirs that are on display at the UC Davis website to stop being treated like polls of candidate preferences. First up, and then down, and let’s hope they rise again. Let the reality of ground level conditions be addressed in a thoughtful manner by those who aspire to determine the quality of our lives and of the environments we leave to our progeny. No more vague proposals about infrastructure, in other words!

Though I doubt that my suggestion will be enacted, I would suggest that if such a publicly broadcast meeting did take place, people would see that Hillary Clinton is the most qualified presidential candidate to be at a conference table in a meeting with oil company executives who want to increase fracking, alongside environmental representatives who are sitting to the other side of Governor Brown’s elbow. This is a dialogue, based on a grasp of ecological imperatives and acquisitive economics, that the American people deserve to hear. Please, we don’t need more rallies and fund raisers, but instead deserve the chance to see actual portrayals of governance. Yes, it would be make-believe, but no more make-believe than the promises we are asked to endorse with our votes.

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Ground Level Conditions Presidental Election

Trump’s Margin of Manafort Error

August 15, 2016 – 10:40 am

Trump’s Margin of Manafort Error

According to a poll taken last week, and cited in the New York Times this morning, Donald Trump has achieved an inverse one-percent rating. This is to say that whereas the term “one percent” has by now largely conflated itself with the disparity between wealth and working people, Trump’s one percent in this instance refers to his level of support in African-American communities. If his ability to finance his own campaign in the GOP primaries indicates his exceptional ranking within American wealth holders, his inability to recognize wealth as anything but the prerogative of white people has led to his extraordinary unpopularity within even conservative factions of African-Americans voters.

In an attempt to portray itself as engaged in fair reporting, the Times parenthetically reminds its readers of any poll’s margin of error, which it notes might improve the results to reflect African-American support of Trump as possibly being as high as two and a half or three percent. I would suggest that Times neglected to mention that there is another way that that margin of error could operate. It is just as likely the case that Trump’s support among African-American voters is only .0001. I mention that the poll’s margin of error could work the other way — in a manner subtracting from the already mouth-dropping dismal digit — because I suspect that the one percent of African-Americans who responded positively to the poll on Trump misunderstood the question. Trust me on this: give any group of one hundred people a question to answer, and at least one person will turn in a response that does not accurately reflect their actual beliefs or analysis.

But why should a poll in African-American communities matter to Trump’s supporters? He could poll zero with all communities of color and it would not in the least matter to him or to Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager. Especially to Manafort, who would probably not flinch if he went back in time and was offered a chance to massage the public image of Adolph Hitler in 1933. In fact, offered enough money, Manafort might even accept the job in 1943. Why not? Is such retrospective speculation truly an ad hominem attack? Manafort has worked for Ferdinand Marcos and Victor F. Yanukovych, and with these two character references, he most certainly qualifies for a trial hot balloon fantasy of dallying with other dictators.

It cannot be said often enough: the fear that Trump aspires to imposing a dictatorial agenda on the United States is not an outlandish case of liberal paranoia. Mr. Manafort’s association with deposed elements in the Ukraine may or may not have required him to register as a foreign agent with the United States Justice Department, but American voters need to register the threat that such an individual would pose to every amendment but the second one, should the candidate he serves be elected in November.

Whether the allegations implied by the NY Times’ article about possible links between Mr. Manafort and records of cash payments in the Ukraine are true is not really my concern here. What I want made public is the actual amount of money paid to Mr. Manafort in legally cashed checks. That Mr. Manafort would willingly work for such individuals as Ferdinand Marcos and Mr. Yanukovych is the most disturbing issue, and PDFs of the checks he cashed should be posted on-line right now. If Trump wants to wait until after the third debate to release his taxes, I’m willing to wait. Manafort’s books are surely not being audited, and I see no reason why he should not give us immediate and unconditional access to his tax returns.

It is not fun to vote out of revulsion and loathing, but this time it is unavoidable. Elections are not fun; they are not about awarding public office to someone you “like” or “want to spend time with.” In a little over a dozen weeks, American voters will decide whether Mr. Manafort will be awarded the post of Secretary of State or Secretary of Defense in February, 2017. And if you think I’m exaggerating the nature of what’s at stake here, just remember what happened in the aftermath of the 2000 election.

I don’t care what polls say about Hillary Clinton’s lead. If we don’t keep the pressure on, and remind people what will happen if Trump wins, then we will lose every social gain that has been achieved since the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., Bobby Kennedy, and Harvey Milk. If America is to be “great again,” let it be the greatness of reinforcing diversity they dreamed of.

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Presidental Election

Trump as Captain Queeg

August 9, 2016 – 5:09 pm

Tuesday, August 9, 2016

TRUMP AS CAPTAIN QUEEG

I’ve always admired a good political cartoon. As I read about Trump’s not-so-subtle hint to his followers today about taking the law into their own hands, a caption for a cartoon presented itself that I willingly offer to anyone interested in sketching the image:

In the upper right quadrant, a building with the words “Supreme Court” tucked above the pillars.

On the left side, in the background, a big banner:
TRUMP RALLY TODAY

A crowd of people are leaving, heading in the direction of the Supreme Court; several at the front are toting automatic rifles. One says to the other:

“What the use of having a second amendment, if we don’t use it?”

(The additional reference, in case anyone should miss it, is to Trump’s alleged quip to the effect that “what’s the use of having nuclear weapons, if you don’t use them?”)

Of course, this suggestion for a satiric cartoon reflects a profound crisis in American social life. It is, unfortunately, not something that has surfaced out of nowhere. One only has to remember that the Secret Service was very busy in the first two years of Barack Obama’s first term as President. It is my understanding that death threats against our President arrived on a frequent basis; nor is Trump the first high profile public person to utter snide disclaimers that are meant to provoke the susceptible. I distinctly remember someone with a high political rank saying of Obama’s campaign visit to North or South Carolina, “I cannot speak for his safety.” People who make such statements know perfectly well what they are doing, and it is not in any way intended to promote civility and respect in political discourse.

That the Presidential nominee of the Republican party would even dare to hint that political assassination might be one way to punish the democratic outcome of an election verges on outrageous behavior. It would be appropriate for the Secret Service to conduct an interview with Mr. Trump that is broadcast on live TV. He deserves to be interrogated, publicly, for eight hours, non-stop, in the same manner that Hillary Clinton recently had to endure. We’ll see how long it is before ball bearings begin to quiver in the palm of Trump’s hand.

But that’s another day’s cartoon.

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Ground Level Conditions Philosophy Presidental Election

The New Covenant of Public Mobility: Public Transportation as Beneficial Employment

August 7, 2016 – 9:58 pm

Monday, August 8, 2016

http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-metro-rail-cars-20160807-snap-story.html

If you use the above link, you will find a report in the LA Times to the effect that ridership on the Metro system has surpassed the capacity of rail cars available to carry passengers. While this is bad news for those who are making use of public transportation, it is also an encouraging sign of a shift away from automobile driving. Nevertheless, the fact remains that freeways are more jammed than ever, and it will take a radical solution to relieve this ecological catastrophe. Hence, today’s blog entry:

THE NEW COVENANT OF PUBLIC MOBILITY:
Public Transportation as Beneficial Employment

Southern California has almost seven percent of the nation’s population. This regional density cannot help but make transporting residents out of and back into their residential neighborhoods a daily, massive spasm of wasted energy. While freeway congestion in the Los Angeles metropolitan area was renown even a half century ago, those who lived here in the early 1970s can remember being on a major freeway at midnight and seeing relatively few cars. By the late 1980s, however, freeway traffic became a constantly whirling ferris wheel, and it has only intensified in the years since. As Los Angeles has become the first county in the United States to surpass the 10,000,000 mark in population, and the economy has rebounded from the Great Recession, traffic now imposes debilitating stress on every driver and passenger at every moment of the day and night.

The expansion of a rail system has done almost nothing to alleviate the cantankerous average speeds of driving on the 405, the 710, the 101, the 60, and the 10. The larger regional flow is nothing short of being even more exasperating: the drive from DTLA to downtown San Diego can take four to five hours. I am not certain that getting even a third of the people currently in cars to use some combination of rail and bus will alter and significantly reduce the congested circulation of public movement, but unless that target has a feasible plan to accompany it, the air quality, public health and the emotional well being of Southern California’s frustrated citizens are going to continue to decline.

The problem with getting people to use public transportation is that it costs people too much to use it. I do not at all mean the cost of the ticket. I am talking about time and the pressures each individual faces in maximizing the cost-income ratio of each unit of time. Let me be blunt: this article does not merely propose that public rail and bus transportation be free, but that individuals riding that transportation be paid for doing so. There is no other way that a significant number of people are going to start using non-automotive transportation unless it is in their best interests, and by that I mean their pocketbook.

In this renovation of the social covenant, each time a person who is a resident of Southern California boards a bus or a metro rail car or an Amtrack rail car in Southern California, she or he would swipe a card at the turnstile entrance, and this card registers the journey, for which the person receives a reduction in their state income tax. Given that California’s state income tax is already far below what it should be, the commitment by each person to use public transportation would quickly shift on each domestic ledger to being a rebate at the end of the year that would put the average federal tax return to shame.

In other words, time spent getting to and from work would be paid labor. One wouldn’t, of course, make as much on the bus or metro car as on the job, but it would not be idle time spent among desultory strangers.

Unless each person is recognized as someone whose time is valuable enough to be compensated for when they board a form of public transportation, then we will never reduce the insanity of automobile addiction. As for individuals who bicycle to work, such self-motivated movement would provide even greater percentages of payment.

I am perfectly aware of the effrontery of my proposal and how it will be met with scornful disbelief by those who regard public transportation as a necessary evil. Who rides buses? – Why, the poor and the disenfranchised! Why should they be paid to ride the bus? Well, yes, it’s true that they will now be paid to do something that they are already doing, and what’s the benefit in that? How would that increase ridership by those who may grouse about traffic, but all the while also enjoy showing their social status in the form of their expensive automobiles?

The benefit that the working poor receive, it should be made clear, would be only in proportion to their income. If someone is only taking home $25,000 a year, their rebate for riding public transportation is not going to be the same as someone who takes home $75,000 a year. If we want to get the well-off from behind their steering wheels, I propose an ever escalating rebate for those who make more money when they ride public transportation.

It may disappoint some friends for them to hear this, but I am not some socialist egalitarian. I believe in a performative meritocracy that is extremely imperfect, but nevertheless is the only feasible means to adjudicate any system of social rewards. I am not putting you, Ms. or Mister Executive, on the same footing as the janitor or the person who clears your dishes at the restaurant. If you board a bus, your rebate will be significantly higher. If you still choose to drive your BMW to work, fine. Those who work under you, however, have not had substantial cost of living raises for many years, and this is one of the ways to begin to redistribute the wealth of the one percent.

Now the obvious question becomes one of paying for this. Someone has to foot the bill, and it is high time for California to stop being the tax trough for the federal government, which makes daily stops to feed at our economy but provides proportionately little support for our infrastructure. If this nation wishes to run on individual cars operated by gasoline, then the cost of gasoline in the rest of the country must go up. Public health in Southern California is not a local issue. If we are to improve the health of seven percent of the nation’s population, it is going to take a national investment, and it begins with a radical and yes – hostile takeover – of ideological self-identity. Our sense of income entitlement must be transformed if the flow of public life is to become sustainable for the rest of this century in this crucial corridor of cultural production. We move; we are moved: the boundaries between public transportation and privatized income must be intermingled. It is time for the populace of Southern California to stop playing by house rules of consumer individuality, and to demand an equity stake in the very manner in which we engage in the commerce of public economics and cultural development.

This is an improvised manifesto, and it is meant to start a conversation, not to be some definitive solution. I would be more than happy to hear about other, even more radical proposals that might shift the balance of environmental and economic power.

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Presidental Election

Maureen Dowd’s version of my “Berlin Bunker” post

August 7, 2016 – 11:25 am

Sunday, August 7, 2016

Two days ago, I posted an entry entitled “Trump Towers as the Berlin Bunker of 2016.” My piece on Donald Trump’s notable levels of mental distress ends with the following assessment:

In the end, anyone so deluded as to rank himself above Dwight D. Eisenhower is in such serious psychological trouble that it can only be categorized as a death spiral of psychotic fantasy. When — not if, but when — Trump loses, he should be immediately put under a suicide watch. One must have compassion even for those who exploit the prejudice of others to whip up fear and loathing. Let us hope that he seeks professional psychological help in 2017, instead of turning Trump Towers into a parody of Hitler in his Berlin bunker. (posted August 5, 2016, 3:23 p.m.)

It would appear that I am not the only commentator on the presidential election who is concerned about the psychological stability of Donald Trump. The final two paragraphs of Maureen Dowd’s latest column (dated August 6) would suggest that she seconds my conclusion. See her article, “Crazy About the Presidency,” which can be found on-line, as well as in the print edition (Sunday, August 7) of the New York Times on page SR1.

For a complementary satire on Trump’s lack of global perspicacity, see Nicholas Kristof’s recent piece on an imagined dialogue between a C.I.A officer and Mr. Trump, published on August 4th. For the real thing, in terms of what such a C.I.A. employee might be thinking, I recommend Michael Morell’s op-ed, “I Ran the C.I.A. Now I’m Endorsing Hillary Clinton,” which appeared the day after Kristof’s piece. I doubt the sequence of Kristof followed by Morell is a coincidence.

As with Meg Whitman’s endorsement of Clinton, Morell’s affirmation only serves to underline how truly atrocious a candidate Mr. Trump is. Would Morell (or Meg Whitman) come out this way if someone as qualified as Mitt Romney were running again? I would never vote for Romney, but no one would say that he is utterly unqualified to run for President. Morell would not be publicly endorsing Clinton, had Romney launched yet another run for the White House and secured the GOP nomination.

Republicans who scorned Romney as a potential candidate in 2016 must now rue their haughty judgment. Romney would have made cheesecake out of Trump in the primaries if he had run this year instead of in 2012, and my guess is that he would be running ahead of Clinton in the polls right now. Clinton is very fortunate that Romney underestimated the determination of Obama’s supporters, however, and didn’t realize that even those of us who were dismayed by his tepid performance in reacting to the unemployment crisis of 2009-20011 were going to vote for him again. He would have been her most formidable opponent, and his decision to run in 2012 may well have cost the GOP the White House for the rest of this decade.

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Ground Level Conditions Presidental Election

The President-Elect and the Inflationary Crisis of 2018

August 6, 2016 – 3:29 pm

Saturday, August 6, 2016

President-Elect HILLARY CLINTON AND THE INFLATIONARY CRISIS OF 2018

The presidential election dial has been set to the volume level of “monotony,” and it is only early August. The thought of having to endure another three months of political posturing is more than cruel and unusual punishment. Does anyone really need a debate at this point between Trump and Clinton? During the GOP primary debates, the entire nation saw how Trump treated political opponents, and most of the nation should be able to vouch for how well Hillary Clinton held her own in debating Barack Obama, who has gone on to become a fairly popular president. Is anything to be gained from Trump’s attempt to impose a vitriolic conversation onto prime time?

My anguish is genuine. This election seems like an animal afflicted with a terminal disease. Please, I beg of the electorate, euthanize this election’s interminable, pointless campaigning. Hold the vote now. Declare a state of national emergency in which everyone gets two days off. On the first day, everyone should sit down and think about their vote, and then the next day vote.

With sanity restored, those who voted for Clinton can quietly celebrate and those who preferred someone else (which is, in fact, the majority of people who regard themselves as Republicans) can begin to figure out how to move forward from here. For the most part, in fact, the “historical” aspect of Clinton’s election will soon fade from the public sphere, and will primarily surface within the more private, domestic evolution of feminist history as it continues to affect the Millennials and their daughters and sons.

In electing a proud policy wonk, in fact, let’s cut to the chase. President-elect Hillary Clinton will face an unusual situation: she will be the first Democrat to be elected President in the past sixty years to have a fairly good economy in place on her inauguration day. Note that I didn’t say it was a “solid” or “vibrant” economy, but compare the economy of the past four years with the following Presidential terms:

1972-1976 – Presidents Nixon and Ford — Does no one except me and academic economists remember the WIN buttons of 1975? “Whip Inflation Now.” The recession of 1974 was the first economic punch in the gut of young baby boomers, and little did we realize how harder future punches were too get.

1980 – 1988 – The Recession of 1982 ended up with unemployment topping 12 percent. If anyone doubts that Reagan was born with a golden voice and an ability to make any critic look unpatriotic, then consider how easily he won reelection with a dismal economy squeezing every working person’s kitchen table. The savings and loan crisis in 1987-1988 just about torpedoed his vice-president’s candidacy, but negative campaigning won the day for the first President Bush.

1988-1992 – The first Bush presidency ended with an economy that was reeling so badly that Bill Clinton should have won much more handily than he did.

2000-2008 – When the second President Bush left office, he would have been thrilled if the economy of the country had only been as dismal as it was back in 1992, under his father’s administration.

All of this is to say that Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama all took office when the nation had experienced some degree of recession in the previous four years, ranging from a significant economic contraction to one so grave that it verged on catastrophe for the wealthy, and was an outright catastrophe for working people.

In contrast, President-elect Hillary Clinton will be called upon to manage a different kind of crisis, and I am puzzled as to why no one has yet brought this up. Jimmy Carter ended up serving as President for only one term in large part because the rampant inflation of the late 1970s was even more debilitating than the recession under President Ford. How will Hillary Clinton manage to help workers, whose wages have long been held down, gain a greater share of economic prosperity without initiating another round of inflation? In answering that question, she will need to remember the consequences of inflation on the baby boomer generation, a huge swath of which will be in peril of seeing their retirement years sink into the morass of ignominious poverty. Pay raises for working people are long overdue, but if the minimum age becomes $15 an hour, how will those on the fixed incomes of social security ever survive the inevitable inflation to follow?

These are questions that President-Elect Hillary Clinton needs to answer as soon as possible, if she wants to overcome the distrust that many people have of her, including those who intend to vote for her. I await her immediate response.

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Ground Level Conditions Presidental Election

Trump Towers as the Berlin Bunker of 2016

August 5, 2016 – 3:23 pm

Friday, August 5, 2016

Trump Towers as the Berlin Bunker of 2016

Earlier today, I posted on the theme of “President-Elect Hillary Clinton,” in part because I believe that it’s important to speak out loud the reality that we must bring to pass, if this planet is to have even the slightest chance of playing host to human civilization for another century. While it is true that my personal political inclination is the left of Bernie Sanders, I intend to vote for Hillary Clinton in November, and I hope that anyone who wavers on making a similar commitment takes serious note of what is happening in her opponent’s campaign.

New Jersey governor Chris Christie, for instance, recently rebuked his party’s nominee for his disgraceful attacks on a Gold Star family. Now mind you: Chris Christie is the politician Trump appointed to be the head of the official Presidential Transition Team, which each candidate has in place to help accelerate the process of establishing a new administration. It’s hard to top something like Trump’s own hand-picked, most trusted assistant publicly telling him off, but there are still 100 odd days to go til Election Day, and I do mean “odd days.” My rule of thumb for judging anyone who runs for public office has always been very simple: If you can’t run a campaign, you won’t be able to run the office you’re on the ballot for.

I predict that Trump’s campaign will go down as the most ignominiously managed one in the entire history of the United States. I doubt it will be any consolation to his supporters that someone has to finish last in any ranking, whether it be in an athletic competition or in the political arena; and I would rush to remind them that their support of Trump does not mean they are equivalent losers. On the other hand, I ask them to reconsider their vote before they cast it in November, and thereby spare themselves the shame of having to lie twenty years from now about supporting him on Election Day, 2016.

In particular, Trump’s advocates should take a long, hard look at how he has bragged that he received over 14,000,000 votes in the primaries, “more than Dwight D. Eisenhower received, and he won World War II.”
How can any person in the electorate not tremble and quail at the unfathomable ego of Donald Trump? Let’s rephrase it slightly so that its full import is heard: “Eisenhower won World War II,” he says,” and I got more votes in the primaries than he did.” The implication is easy to detect, and if it’s not, go get a huge cup of very strong coffee.

Do those of you who support Trump not understand his megalomania? Donald Trump is not worthy of driving Eisenhower’s jeep! Is there anyone who believes that we would have won World War II with Trump in charge of the Normandy Invasion? Pleeeaazzzzzeee…. there is no laugh track that matches this preposterous absurdity.

As a final side-note, Trump’s ignorance of basic mathematical ratios is rather disturbing. There are many more people in the United States now than in 1952. Of course you might well get more total votes, but did you get more votes in proportion to the number of eligible voters, Mr. Trump. His boast is like a movie company saying that “our new film had a bigger box office than The Sound of Music.” The obvious problem is that not only are there more people in the United States available to attend a movie theater in 2016, but they also pay more for a ticket. Of course the ticket gross will be larger for your movie, one would say to a contemporary movie producer. It doesn’t mean your movie is better than one that premiered 50 years ago. Such basic use of information seems to be beyond Trump’s ability to make relevant comparisons.

I am, of course, not the only one to point this discrepancy out, but in the flurry of daily sound-bites, we must not let the most provocative comments lose their importance in the defamiliarization sweepstakes. Trump’s grandiosity needs continual puncturing, given that he has proven capable of an insidious degree of instantaneous political triage.

For additional information on Donald Trump’s comparison of himself with General and President Dwight D. Eisenhower, see:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-most-votes-reagan-eisenhower_us_577d5f52e4b01edea78c4336

In the end, anyone so deluded as to rank himself above Dwight D. Eisenhower is in such serious psychological trouble that it can only be categorized as a death spiral of psychotic fantasy. When — not if, but when — Trump loses, he should be immediately put under a suicide watch. One must have compassion even for those who exploit the prejudice of others to whip up fear and loathing. Let us hope that he seeks professional psychological help in 2017, instead of turning Trump Towers into a parody of Hitler in his Berlin bunker.

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Ground Level Conditions Presidental Election

President-Elect Hillary Clinton: You’ll Soon Get Used to Saying It

August 5, 2016 – 2:34 pm

President-Elect Hillary Clinton: You’ll Soon Get Used to Saying it

Back in the summer and fall of 1992, my first wife. Cathay Gleeson, and I worked very hard for the election of Bill Clinton. Cathay was a two-decade active union member of the CWA (Communication Workers of America) through her job as line maintenance specialist for GTE (which is now known as Verizon), and I was a typesetter at a major weekly newspaper for the music industry. I distinctly remember the moment when we began to smell victory: Bill Clinton scheduled a rally in Orange County in the campaign’s closing weeks, and that was the crucial hint about how the election would turn out. Nobody who is worried about winning an election wastes time in the opponent’s heartland.

Labor Day is the traditional start of the final sprint to Election Day, but Clinton had not repeated Michael Dukakis’s mistake, in 1988, of believing he could coast on favorable poll numbers and kick back and relax after the Democratic convention. Rather, Clinton had hit the road with VP-nominee Al Gore the morning after the convention, and they were going full speed by Labor Day. The sign that things were going well is that they did not merely hold an event in Los Angeles, but took the fight directly to the ideological reservoir of the GOP in California. I remember that Cathay and I did not, in fact, get into the standing-room only rally, and that after waiting for a couple of hours, we left the parking lot somewhat disappointed not to have seen Clinton. We heard later that he had come out and briefly addressed those who couldn’t get in.

Despite the enormous proclivity that Donald Trump has for self-inflicted dismemberment, it is too early to get over-confident about the upcoming election; three months in politics is the academic equivalent of two full semesters, and any dean of a college or chair of a department knows how quickly things can change from September to June. Nevertheless the news that Meg Whitman has decided to support Hillary Clinton and to help raise money for her has to be regarded as at least the equivalent of Bill Clinton holding a rally in Orange County. The words “President-Elect Hillary Clinton” already simmer with a tantalizing degree of palpable anticipation.

For Democratic liberals, however, Ms. Whitman’s declaration of support is an additional dollop of sobering news. How likely is Hillary Clinton to be at all liberal in her economic policies if she has actively sought the support of a Republican such as Ms. Whitman? The supporters of Bernie Sanders had better get used to Clinton’s policy choices, though. If Bill Clinton was the best Republican president of the 20th century (as some in the Democratic party labeled him by the end of his second term), then Hillary Clinton seems destined to secure her husband’s legacy even more so than Barack Obama’s.

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Ground Level Conditions Presidental Election

Hillary Clinton’s Nomination

July 28, 2016 – 5:59 pm

A Glass Ceiling Breaking, or a Generation’s Windshield Smash-Up

(The Forecast)
…. the sound of Hillary Clinton breaking the Glass Ceiling is echoed by the tape loop of another sound of artery-severing, splintering glass: impoverished baby boomers still hearing in their heads the horrible crashing noise of their lives going through the Windshield of the Great Recession.

(The Larger Weather Map)

Tonight, the Democratic National Convention will feature Hillary Clinton’s acceptance speech of her nomination to be the next President of the United States. As she was no doubt going through a final rehearsal for that speech in Philadelphia, an infinitely more ordinary citizen (which is to say, the author of this blog) was going about yet another day, during his so-called summer off from teaching, of trying to find an affordable place for his mother to live at, as she descends into the mists of cognitive disability.

Oddly enough, Linda and I watched a film last night that struck more closely home than I anticipated. Redwood Highway stars Shirley Knight as a grandmother who undertakes a 60 mile walk to her granddaughter’s wedding. In the course of her journey, we get glimpses of the oncoming dissolution of her mental faculties, but her hallucinations also show the depth of love she still feels for her dead husband, who was an enlisted sailor when they first met. All in all, it was not a film that I want my mother to see right now. It would simply make her feel too sad. I would recommend it, though, as an independent film more than worth the viewing.

My mother’s situation is rather complex, with both things to be grateful for and things that are worrisome. Like my father, my mother is a World War II veteran, and she is therefore eligible for support from the VA. About two years ago, I initiated her application for this assistance, and the money she receives is very helpful. It is not enough, though, to supplement her social security to the point where she can afford the kind of care she requires. It’s a very tough challenge at this point, and I am scheduled to visit Rowentree Gardens, a place run by the Quakers in Stanton, California, which might possibly work out.

In the meantime, I am all too aware of how little has been said at the DNC about the oncoming crisis of baby boomers growing old. The attention paid to the young is in striking contrast to the silence about the baby boom generation, which suffered from a one-two punch of unemployment and pension devastation not seen since the Great Depression. Unfortunately, both Michelle Obama and Bernie Sanders seemed utterly oblivious to the one-sidedness of their “visions” for the consequences of this election:

“In this election and every election, it is about who will have the power to shape our children for the next four or eight years of their lives.”
First Lady Michelle Obama on her support for Hillary Clinton

“This election is about, and must be about, the needs of the American people and the kind of future we create for our children and our grandchildren.”
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders

Do not the needs of the American people include the generation born between 1946 and 1954? “This election is about ending the 40 year decline of the American middle class,” said Senator Bernie Sanders, in addressing the Democratic National Convention on July 25, 2016. That decline fell most heavily on the millions of workers born between 1946 and 1954. After working very hard for decade after decade, this segment of Americans found itself not only unemployed and too old to find a new job during the Great Recession, but also found that its retirement pensions had been totally gutted. Obama threw this generation of workers under the bus, but it will get even worse if Paul Ryan and Company get empowered by a Republican in the White House. If Trump is elected President, this unfortunate generation will find itself crushed under the heel of a contemptuous and ungrateful ruling class that will cackle with delight at their plight. Anyone between the age of 62 and 70 who votes for Trump is voting for an absolutely miserable end of life experience.

But it is not just the GOP that is the problem. It must be pointed out that Sanders left unanswered one important question when he cited a “40 year decline of the American middle class”: Which party held the White House for 20 of those years. Here’s the roll call — Jimmy Carter (4 years); Bill Clinton (8 years); Barack Obama (8 years). So doesn’t the Democratic party deserve at least some of the “credit” for this decline? If the Sanders faction remains insidiously contumacious, it is in large part because the Democratic party wants to pretend that it did not acquiesce in this decline. In point of fact, it actively collaborated with those economic forces that accelerated this decline. To believe that the spouse of Bill Clinton is going to reverse the very decline that Bill Clinton himself helped organize and enforce is living in a hemisphere of massive denial.

All of this is to say that the sound of Hillary Clinton breaking the Glass Ceiling is echoed by the tape loop of another sound of breaking glass: impoverished baby boomers still hearing in their heads the horrible crashing noise of their lives going through the Windshield of the Great Recession.

It’s possible — unlikely, but still possible — that Hillary Clinton will prove to be a better President than her spouse or Barack Obama. The latter, in fact, said that she was more qualified and prepared to take on the rigors of the Oval Office than either Bill or himself. It’s possible that Hillary Rodham Clinton will be remembered as one of the ten most important and effective presidents in our nation’s history. It’s possible that Baby Boomers floundering at minimum wage jobs at the age of 67 will be offered more than the starvation pension of social security. For the sake of the young people, as well as the Baby Boomers who are their grandparents, aunts, and uncles, I hope that the possibility of political redemption for the Democratic party ripens into actuality.

Finally, it must be said that it was a childish fantasy on the part of the Sanders’ faction to reinforce the GOP’s mantra of “Lock her up.” What were these pathetic, petulant brats thinking? Any voter self-categorized as independent who was watching the convention would have to wonder about the possible truthfulness of Trump’s egregious distortions. “Gee, if even Democrats are chanting ‘Lock her up,’ maybe Trump is right.” In yet another election that might be decided by less a thousand votes, the supporters of Sanders really ought to stop living with the make-believe that their candidate was robbed of the nomination. Sanders lost, and by a much larger margin than Hillary Clinton did to Obama in 2008. To those who still keeping fanning the embers of “Feel the Bern,” I say, start organizing for 2024, when your generation had better have someone ready to step up to the plate.

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