Unbroken Glass

Unbroken Glass is a warm, sad, endearing and sometimes funny documentary centered on an Indian immigrant family.  Dinesh Sabu, the youngest of five children, attempts to piece together the lives of his parents that tragically died a month apart when he was just six years old.  Their deaths left the five children to raise each other and cope with the loss.  Densely packed with several themes, Sabu’s work explores the lives of his parents and the themes of loss, marriage, mental illness, acculturation, religion, and even gender roles.  With few memories of his own to rely on, Sabu must turn to interviews with his siblings and other relatives to find out who his parents really were.

We learn through the narratives that the father died of stomach cancer and the children were not prepared ahead of time for his death.  Sabu is merely informed one day when he gets home from school that his father is gone.  His mother then dies less than a month later by her own hand after battling schizophrenia through most of her adult life. Undoubtedly, the stigma of mental illness and suicide are major factors in the silence that was maintained by the family. 

The film deals with her illness, and the childrens’ experience of it; how she was available to them sometimes, and sometimes not, as she would lapse into a cold and catatonic state.  Their recollection of their parents’ marriage was as of a stormy one—their fights sometimes devolved into shouting and physical altercations.  Still, despite false accusations of infidelity from his wife, their father stayed and soldiered on.  He coped by burying himself in his work, perhaps resigning himself as her caretaker.  One of the children commented that without someone to care for them, many schizophrenics end up on the street—which may well have been the fate of their mother without their father.

It’s clear that the mother attempted to fit in to the U.S. despite her traditional Hindi upbringing– the family uncovers old photographs show her in modern American dress that would be deemed scandalous by the standards of homeland.  Sabu nicely contrasts his mother’s acculturation with his own attempt to reconnect to his family’s native culture as he prepares for a wedding in India.   Yet, despite her own admittance to medical school, the mother foregoes a professional life and marries a man that is well educated and has a future—adopting traditional Indian gender roles.

We learn that schizophrenia runs in the family and that there have been multiple suicides in his family tree that resulted from it.  This fact provokes the painful decision of whether to take on that risk by having children.  One of the sisters weighs her thoughts during the interviewing and decided that she will, in fact, take the plunge.  We are left to wonder whether any of these five or their children will succumb to the family curse.  We wonder also whether the mother’s genetic predisposition was triggered by the stress of moving to America.

This film conjures up another excellent book of the same genre:  The Lost: A Search for Six of the Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn.  In his book, Mendelsohn, a descendant of Holocaust victims, took up the challenge of learning about his great aunt, great uncle, and their four daughters to discover exactly who those six people were.   Like Sabu, Mendelsohn’s family was encased in silence about them until he discovered some letters that piqued his curiosity and he spun out a wonderful mystery book from the fragmentary bits available to him.   It seems that we often have an almost innate drive to tell the story of our blood, especially when it is tinged by tragedy or misunderstanding.  It gives meaning to the lives that are gone and helps us to come to a better understanding of ourselves.

I told a friend that the film provoked the question of what my children will say about my wife and I after we are gone.  My friend said, “Why don’t you ask them now?”  It wouldn’t do any good. That story is still in progress and while memories may be a bit clearer, you do not gain perspective until much time passes and you are able to go through all the photographs, read the letters, and visit the places they inhabited.  Because of the parent/child bond, they are unlikely to give you a candid view.   Often, our complete stories will not be able to be told until long after we are gone.

Sabu does all that in a warm, yet painful way that will provoke questions and thoughts that linger for days after.   Despite the tragedy and years of silence, one can detect an underlying tensile strength in the family.  We are on another level awed by the resiliency and resourcefulness of this family that survived a terrible tragedy. This is a surprisingly complex short film that can be viewed through several different lenses.

Taking on the Regulatory State

One of the front pages stories in this Sunday’s New York Times concerned the feelings of dread among employees in the federal bureaucracy.   The arrival of Donald Trump has “spread anxiety, frustration, fear and resistance” among the federal workforce.   Last week, the press reported that EPA employees were showing up to work in tears.

I don’t mean to be unsympathetic, and I certainly don’t want to convey any schadenfreude over someone that worries about job loss, but my immediate reaction was, “now you know how the rest of us have felt –more or less constantly---over the past 8 or 9 years.”  The uncontrolled Bureaucratic State was partly to blame for our anxiety and fear. Under Obama, this Bureaucratic State flourished.  The election of Donald Trump is, in part, a response to its growth.  

There are four principal sources of resentment that began to boil up due the explosive growth of the Bureaucratic State:

• Growth of regulations, period.  They were especially pronounced in financial services, health care and the environment.   More and more business owners were complaining that a larger proportion of their time was being unproductively consumed by trying to satisfy the whims of their local regulator rather than innovating and providing goods and services to their customers.  Worse, the regulations sometimes had the perverse effect on segments of the population that government purports to help.   For example, when the Department of Labor promulgated regulations that consolidated franchisees, making them subject to federal wage and overtime regulations, those regulations threatened the viability of the entire industry.  Franchisees are disproportionately minority and therefore, the consequence of these regulations is to threaten to deprive these entrepreneurially minded people of the opportunity to run their own businesses.

• Safety and security of these jobs vis-à-vis the private sector.  The conventional wisdom used to be that government workers were trading off income for security.   But as the power of government unions grew and politicians learned that they could compensate them with health and pension benefits that remained largely out of the public eye.  In addition, many government workers can retire 10 years or more ahead of the normal retirement age.  This unholy alliance is exactly why Illinois is insolvent.    If you measure the TOTAL adjusted compensation of a government worker and take into account all forms of compensation and risk adjust the income because a government worker has a much lower risk of pay interruption, you’d see that government has been overpaying for its labor and paying more for comparable skill than the private sector…and citizens are now figuring that out.
  
• Targeted industries.  The Obama administration initiated Operation Choke Point, under which banks that did business with certain disfavored industries were subject to additional scrutiny.  Payday lenders, e-cigarette companies, and –you guessed it—manufacturers of arms and ammo could have their liquidity crimped because banks were simply not going to open themselves up to even more headaches from regulators.  Through Operation Choke Point, denying arms to those who could not show themselves to be financially self-sufficient under Social Security, or who ended up by mistake on a no-fly list, Obama tried to curtail 2^nd Amendment rights as much as possible through regulatory action and executive orders.  Without any legislative action at all, the Obama administration waged war on certain industries by raising their costs so dramatically or so impairing their access to capital that it became uneconomical to compete.
  
• Contributor to income inequality.  Progressives have been beating their drums about pay inequality for nearly a decade now, with Thomas Piketty (Capital in the Twenty-First Century) as their intellectual standard bearer.    Income inequality is THE social and economic problem to be solved (never mind education, innovation, productivity, infrastructure, government debt) and that argument is used to justify government taking MORE resources from individuals.  But economists have established that firm size is related to income inequality---big companies pay better.  And the growth of the Regulatory State is driving consolidation in many industries.  As is often the case, Progressives are complaining about the consequences that result from enacting THEIR policies.  The Regulatory State is a contributor to the growth of income inequality.

I knew something was out of whack when the most sought after talent in corporate America ceased to be “marketing executive,” “strategist,” or “operations officer,” but rather “chief compliance officer.”  Many CEO’s intimated to me that they were considering selling their businesses because they just couldn’t afford to hire additional overhead in nonincome producing staff jobs just to comply with government regulations. The ACA was particularly painful and costly to small employers….especially companies with unions where the union contract required the employer to pick up most or all of the tab related to premium increases.   I was involved in sale of one in particular last year that was a direct consequence of these costs.   The acquiring company bought the assets and terminated each and every employee.  Likewise,  Dodd-Frank  has been devastating to community banks.  Only one new bank has been chartered nationwide since its passage and the number of community banks has been reduced by about 14% and has driven, and will continue to drive, consolidation in finance.   Small banks simply cannot afford the compliance costs.

What irks me most about the New York Times article is that the paper was blithely unconcerned about business owners and their employees during the past eight years.   From 2009 to 2014, I worked in the workout or “distressed asset” area of a regional bank.  This bank made business loans principally to small and medium sized businesses.   The four years of 2009 to 2013 were perhaps the worst I have ever seen in business.  For some manufacturers and distributors, volume drops of 20-25% were not uncommon.   Several CEO’s were reduced to tears in my presence and, understandably, some responded with anger.  Businesses that took a lifetime to build were sometimes forced to be sold, liquidated or had to make painful choices.    More than one business owner reached into his or her personal retirement funds to make a payroll.   So many of these owners worked tirelessly, endured many sleepless nights,  came up with creative alternatives,  often swallowed their pride, and demonstrated great creativity and resourcefulness to keep their businesses afloat and many of the families of their employees solvent. 

When the maelstrom hit in ’08, several economists advocated a regulatory freeze for 5 years to let the economy heal.  Business—particularly small businesses and small banks could not withstand the additional costs.  The Obama administration ignored those pleas and doubled down.   Regulations exploded under the Obama administration with the Federal Register reaching almost 97,000 pages under Obama’s aegis.    A financial institution I know quintupled the number of people in their compliance department.  It was estimated that regulations added $100 billion in annual costs to an already staggered economy that was suffering from inadequate demand.  Under the Obama administration, light bulbs, microwave ovens, and school lunches came under the federal government’s regulatory thumb. 

The power and unaccountability of the Regulatory State has grown unabated and more lawless.  Charles Murray, in his incisive book By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission  lays out just how the Regulatory State ossifies our society.  Probably the most egregious examples are the EPA, which has not only failed to comply with the law itself by failing to deliver required cost/benefit analyses, but famously polluted the Animas River in Colorado.   The CFPB was structured to be out of the reach of Congress and to be run by a single individual.   That’s per se tyranny—government completely unresponsive and unaccountable to the people.

There are certainly dedicated individuals within those regulatory bodies.  But they have had a safe, unperturbed existence and for decades were at little risk of losing their jobs.  For once, they are feeling a taste of the anxiety, frustration and fear that their brothers and sisters in the private sector have been feeling.   No U.S. president has been able to reverse the growth of the Regulatory State—not even Ronald Reagan.  By putting people in charge of these agencies that will challenge these departments to justify their existences and by forcing them to take out 2 regulations for each one they put in, the new administration is imposing a form of accountability and prioritizing that the private sector has to deal with every day.   The REINS Act (Regulations From the Executive in Need of Scrutiny), which requires “major rules” and rules that have impact of $100 million or more on the economy to be voted on by Congress.

So yes, people working in government agencies will be anxious and frustrated.  Welcome to real life, boys and girls.  The salad days for unaccountable and all powerful regulators may be over.  It would be a welcome reallocation of human capital to move some of these people back to the private sector.

We’ll see if Trump will ultimately be successful in trimming the sales of the federal bureaucracy.  No other president has been able to arrest the growth of the Bureaucratic State—not even Ronald Reagan.  

People do not give up power and influence easily.

Ask Michael Flynn.

Foreshadowing Trump--Not Brexit

Of course, many commentators and pundits caught the obvious connection between Brexit and the Trump election.  Many (wrongly, I believe) ascribed both occurrences to xenophobia.  To write both off to xenophobia is simplistic progressive narrative.  Immigration policies played a part in both instances, to be sure, but there were other factors at play here.  The foreshadowing of Trump, it turns out, was not so much Brexit as the election in Illinois. Illinois had become a solidly Democratic stronghold, the center of the donut in what I have tabbed the “Stale Donut Strategy” (take both coasts with Illinois in the middle with leadership that is in its 70’s).  Illinois had delivered on a national level for years, buttressed by liberal senator Dick Durbin and Democratic lord Mike Madigan, and anchored by a city run by the Daley clan for most of 5 decades.  Only Jane Byrne and black Democrat Harold Washington interrupted the string, and then only briefly.    Republicans were totally in disarray at all levels.   The machine put up Mike Madigan enabler, Pat Quinn.  Quinn was a don’t-rock-the-boat kind of guy, not well spoken, a standard “dems and does” kind of Democrat, not someone eager to push back at Madigan or the existing order. 

But the existing order was killing Illinois.  It continued to fruitlessly raise taxes and Quinn, Madigan and Cullerton promised even higher hikes as the state’s debt ballooned.  Illinois workers didn’t work much, got lifelong fat pensions and health care and early retirement while the rest of the state’s workers suffered.   Businesses fled along with high earners. 

Along came Bruce Rauner, a wealthy businessman who had made a fortune in private equity but had no political experience.  He financed his campaign mostly with his own money, and promised fundamental changes in the way government conducted itself in Illinois.  He was able to convince voters that the state was run entirely for the benefit of the insiders and that the taxpayer was getting fleeced (sound familiar?).  He was able to defeat the Democratic machine—the unholy alliance of Madigan, the real estate interests that fund Madigan and the army of city and state workers that feed at the trough.  Rauner continues to push hard for fundamental reform--not just tax increases.  This drama is still playing out, as Rauner is steadfastly holding the line against tax increases before structural changes are made and Mike Madigan (and his AG daughter Lisa) equally determined to hang onto power. 

This drama was played out on the national level.  Like Bruce Rauner,  Trump had no government experience and financed his campaign largely out of his own pocket.  Trump had to defeat the establishment in his own party, but, like Rauner, was up against forces with very vested interests, a well financed opponent with a deep and entrenched network.    Hillary Clinton had over two decades to put together a well-financed organization and messaging machine.  And, like Mike Madigan, she had a very reliable base of government workers that would turn out to the polls.

Both of these candidates were businessmen that were up against history (other nonpoliticians like Jesse Ventura and Arnold Schwartzenegger  had failed) and well entrenched, well financed forces with powerful economic interests wedded to the status quo.  But the polity decided that the state was no longer serving its citizens.  Rather, the mechanisms of the state were used to empower and enrich the political class and those that feed off it.  And in both cases, the resources the State was commandeering was not nearly enough to feed it.  Both Illinois and the federal government were taxing at higher and higher levels and the deficits and debt grew larger and larger.   Yet the problems that each was entrusted to solve weren’t being solved, or worse, the wrong problems were being solved.   Pat Quinn in Illinois represented the status quo and incremental change.  So did Hillary Clinton.  Neither saw that the State was failing its citizens and both campaigned on a promise of draining more resources from private citizens to fund the State.

The citizens decided to risk a change.  They decided to shrug off the status quo and turn to businesspeople that solved real world business problems, that had to bring balance budgets, hire the right people and fire people when necessary.  Neither person got wealthy by leveraging experience in government but by doing deals in the business world.   Neither person NEEDS the job.  Both of them have promised fundamental, not just incremental changes in the way government operates.

As expected, both are being fought tooth and nail by the forces of the status quo.  Rauner has the Illinois and Chicago Democratic machine to contend with.  Trump has both liberal Democrats, establishment Republicans and the mainstream media arrayed against him.  Viewed this way, you have to ask who is “bitterly clinging” now?

Yes, Brexit preceded the Trump surprise victory, but the real foreshadowing and closer parallel was the improbable victory of Bruce Rauner in Illinois.   

The Melting Left

For over three decades, Garrison Keillor has opened his narrative of the fictitious town in Minnesota with, “It’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon.”

Week one of the Trump Administration has been anything but.

Last week I wrote about the disconnect between women marching for freedom while at the same time donning hijabs.   I have come to conclude through the election and inauguration that the Left simply does not experience cognitive dissonance, and this deficiency runs  deep.  

Watching the Democrats react to Trump was like watching the scene from Star Wars when R2D2 was zapped, spinning it around with parts flying off of it and smoke coming out. 

It all looks bizarre and incongruous to the observer and makes you wonder what historians will be writing about 50 years hence.  This is a system that is convulsing and coughing up Bureaucratic Statism like a cat coughing up a hairball.

There was the dignified look of men running around in vagina costumes.   When that is your core constituency, you’ve got problems.

Then Keith Ellison tried to galvanize opposition to Trump by vowing to “take our country back.”  I’m old enough to remember being told that the phrase “take out country back” was deemed to be coded racism.

DNC chair candidate Sally Boynton Brown said that she wanted to “shut other white people down.”  I thought the Democratic Party was the party of inclusiveness.

Dan Rather, who lost his job at CBS over putting out a false story about George Bush was railing about “fake” news.

After a publicized dustup about transgendereds in latrines, transgendereds were complaining that they were excluded from the Women’s March.  Apparently, bathroom equality does not translate into protesting equality.

Chelsea Handler,  champion of immigrant rights, refused to interview Melania Trump because Melania “can barely speak English.”  Melania, it turns out, speaks 5 languages.

The limousine burned by the post-inaugural riots turned out to belong to a Muslim immigrant. Nice work, kids.

Barack Obama is reported to be on the cusp of a $20 million book advance.  Trivia question:  Which living president said, “After a certain point, you’ve made enough money?”

Trump appears to be following the Napoleonic dictum, “Never interfere with an enemy when he’s in the process of destroying himself.”  Trump is following a simple strategy:  Let the Left be eaten by its own internal contradictions like battery acid.

Nothing symbolizes the failure of Bureaucratic Statism like Michelle Obama’s school lunch program.  Like all liberal programs, it started with the best of intentions.  Who could be opposed to better nutrition for young people and less obesity?   In practice, Michelle’s program ended up like most government programs—coercive, uniform and wasteful.    The lunches were largely inedible and tasteless and were dumped by most of the kids.  Salad with kale paste dressing, anyone?  Yum.  They had a uniform prescribed number of calories, so student athletes received the same amount as the computer geek.  And as is the case when government gets too coercive, a black market erupts.  A nice little market for illicit cheetos, skittles and snickers developed.  The program will be dismantled by the new administration.

But the Left was not the only author of insanity this week.  The Trump Administration proved that it was also up to the task of illogic.  If the Cold War with Russia was re-kindled under Obama, Trump decided to start one with Mexico.  Yes, we have numerous issues with Mexico involving the flood of illegals and drugs over the border.  And, yes, it is probably time to re-visit and re-negotiate NAFTA, but the public display between Trump and Nieto was appalling and unnecessary. Nieto cancelled his planned visit to the U.S.  And the assertion of the Trump Administration that Mexico will pay for the wall via a 20% tax on imported Mexican goods is just plain false.  Anyone that stayed awake through Economics 101 knows that, depending on elasticity of demand for those goods, it will be American consumers that pay the tax, and will pay for the wall.  Trump knows this and knows better.  American companies have intricate supply chain relationships in Mexico.  While it is true that good fences make good neighbors, the rough treatment of Mexico is bad policy and bad relationship management. 

Finally, Charles Krauthammer (and others) have been critical of Trump’s “America First” posture.  America First is not altogether irrational, but Trump needs to soften it to let the world know that while his citizens are his first priority, it is not America Only.

Trump is the antidote to Obamunism.    While Obama reflexively ran around the globe expressing remorse and regret for America’s sins (most famously through his apology tour), Trump made it clear that he is reversing this view, “For many decades, we’ve enriched foreign industry at the expense of American Industry, subsidized the armies of other countries while depleting our own.  The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed all across the world.”

Trump is the anti-Obama.  While Obama viewed the developing world as victims that American imperialism exploited and bullied, Trump takes the view that Americans were the ones that were used and exploited.

But true adult relationships do not involve exploitation, but rather freely negotiated exchanges.

While it is tempting to be smug about the silly implosion of the Left, some of Trump’s world views are as simplistic and adolescent as Obama’s.  We need to grow up.... and fast.

Women on the March

As near as I can tell, the Women’s March was primarily organized and attended by women (and Pajama Boy inclined men) that favor Big Government.  And most astonishingly one of the organizers of the Washington D.C. event was a Muslim woman named  Linda Sarsour, who has ties to Hamas and is also bellyaching about the number of states that have passed or are in the process of passing laws forbidding Sharia law.  A fairly large number of women were wearing hijabs in “solidarity” with Muslim women. 

I’ve often commented that the Left preternaturally cannot experience cognitive dissonance.  To expect most leftists to do so is to expect a colorblind person to see red.  You can be angry and frustrated because they cannot, but it will do you no good, because they can’t.

But this weekend’s march really does top it all.  Yes, there were several instances of ridiculousness—Madonna, the original material girls railing against capitalism and with her trashy potty mouth railing on Trump, mostly because he has a potty mouth.  But we expect that from the Entertainment Elite, just as we  have come to accept Al Gore and Leonardo DeCaprio living in their giant mansions and  jetting around in their private jets complaining about everyone else’s carbon footprint, and the economic elite in Davos sipping fine wine and eating canapes and staying in the plushest hotels fretting about income inequality. 

But the incongruity of the weekend went beyond the pale.

As I have written before, I believe that words and symbols matter and matter greatly.  Last year, after the sick sociopath, Dylan Roof, killed those churchgoers in South Carolina, the country went into a veritable frenzy over the Confederate flag, demonizing it as a symbol of racial oppression. Nikki Haley made a big deal of taking it down from the state capital.  You couldn’t even buy a Civil War board game with a Confederate flag on the cover of the box.  I understand all that.  As someone of Lithuanian decent, I have the same visceral reaction to the hammer and sickle.

The hijab is in the same league.  It is a symbol of male oppression and subjugation of women.  France has banned it.  Ataturk banned it in Turkey.   It is dehumanizing, humiliating, confining and disempowering.

Yet it was prominent in many of the photos from the Women’s March.  In fact, Muslim women were teaching American women how to wear it.  And many proudly wore hijabs with stars and stripes.

How can this be?  How can an event devoted to the promotion of women’s rights and independence countenance and celebrate the hijab, the ultimate symbol of women’s oppression? I find this completely incongruous and demands an explanation.

The celebration of the hijab at this event takes on an even more bizarre twist when you consider the controversy surrounding U.S. Chess champion Nazi Paikidze.  Most of you have probably never heard of her.  Ms. Paikidze is a beautiful young chess prodigy and has been working with a professional coach since age 6.   To achieve her level of excellence, we know that she has not had a normal life.  She has undoubtedly sacrificed and worked tirelessly to be able to compete at this level.   

FIDE (the international chess association) in its infinite wisdom decided that the women’s world championships should be held in Tehran this year.  But Iran requires women to wear a hijab at all times.  Ms. Paikidze has taken a stand and has said that if she is forced to wear a hijab, she will boycott the tournament as she sees the hijab as a symbol of oppression.  Putting aside the boneheaded decision of FIDE to permit Tehran to host the tournament, we have heard almost nothing in the press about this.  None of the women at any of the women’s marches advocated for her or took her up as a representative of women’s oppression.  I doubt if any but a small fraction of the marchers has heard of this brave woman.  Consider for a moment the awesome personal sacrifice she is undertaking to make this statement.  She is an extremely talented and accomplished young woman.  She is giving up the fruits of years of exacting labor to fight oppression.  None, I repeat none, of the women this weekend can claim to sacrifice anything close to this to battle oppression.  Instead, the hijab pathologically became part of the women’s march this weekend.

It simply makes no sense for the hijab to be part of an event advocating women’s rights.  The hijab symbolizes just the opposite.  Ms. Paikidze understands that and is willing to make a huge personal sacrifice to drive that point home.  Donning the hijab at a women’s march  is precisely the opposite of what was symbolically done in the 60’s at these kinds of rallies--- bra burning.

So something else must be going on here.

Here is one counter-intuitive explanation.   A large number of the women that marched this weekend don’t want to advance women’s rights or freedoms at all.  Either consciously or subconsciously they want to put themselves in a position of being dependent.  

The other cause that they hew to consistently is Big Government.  Big Government doesn’t expand freedoms.  It takes them away.  It restricts them.  And it makes you dependent on it.  That the women at this march are simultaneously embracing Big Government and embracing the hijab says something about them.  These women would shriek at me and deny it, but I believe that a number of them, perhaps most that participated in the march, are not inclined to embrace their own empowerment at all but secretly have an affinity for dependence. 

It’s easier. You don’t have to make choices.  And making decisions is hard and uncertain.  

You see, the women that are achievers, the truly independent women, the women that value their freedom, abilities and self-respect reject dependence (including the dependence of Big Government) and symbols of oppression….like Ms. Paikidze.  They don’t embrace them.

Because independence and accountability ARE scary things.  You might not make it.  It’s hard.  You fail and fail often.  It’s exhausting.  Ayn Rand was always puzzled by her sister and held her in contempt because her sister liked Communism.  It turned out that her sister LIKED standing in line all day talking to her friends and waiting for her allotment of bread.  It was, to her, a fine way to spend one’s day. 

I called a woman last night that I admire greatly.  She is a business owner of a small business and has been through all the ups and downs of business ownership and has worked long and hard to make her business prosper and to provide a living for the families of her employees.  She has never married and has no man to fall back on—a quintessential independent woman.  I asked her if she had attended the women’s march.

Her flat answer, “NO!! I work.  I have a job.  I have no time for that.”

The achieving women are not out marching.  They are out doing.

When the women marchers and N.O.W. organize something to support Paikidze, I’ll be there.

Comings and Goings

Well, the torch has passed.  The Obama era has come to an end.  Obama closed out his tenure in Obama style,  taking inexplicably hard left ideological actions in the closing weeks of his presidency.  He refrained from using the U.S. veto at the anti-Israel  U.N. for the first time.  He ended the “wet foot, dry foot” preference for Cuban immigrants, thus ironically codifying  a type of Fugitive Slave Act toward freedom seeking Cubans.  Most egregiously, he commuted the prison sentences of FALN terrorist Oscar Lopez  Rivera and traitor Chelsea Manning.  The commutations were particularly galling because Manning and Rivera intended to inflict great harm to the United States and in another era would have seen a hangman’s noose or a firing squad.   I could have even understood the commutation of fellow Democrat Rod Blagojevich, as a favor for a fellow Democrat, but the commutations of Rivera and Manning were a finger in the eye of America, and their crimes were on the scale of Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s.  Manning’s was an especially nasty affront.  I do not see what Obama gained from it, other than a simultaneous poke at the U.S. military and a genuflection to his LGBT supporters. 

Those actions were some goodbye kiss from Obama.

But Obama will quickly fade into history and yesterday Donald Trump was sworn in and delivered quite an inaugural address.  It is being amply covered by other pundits so I will briefly discuss what I liked and didn’t like about its message.

What I liked.

• ·         America First.  While it was somewhat extreme in its nationalism, he clearly contrasted himself with Obama, who fancied himself as a “citizen of the world.”  We are, and always have been, existing in a world of competing systems.   We hire a president to represent OUR interests and to show the world that American values—individualism, democracy, liberty, human rights, entrepreneurial, can-do spirit are a better way, not the Obamunism message of “whatever works.”    A CEO of an organization must promote the interests and values of that organization, whether it is a corporation, a university or a polity.  Trump understands that.  He was so nationalistic, that I commented, “Liberals wanted to remove Andrew Jackson from the $20 bill, so we put him in the White House instead.   

• ·         Excoriating Washington.  His best line, “What truly matters is not which party controls the government, but whether our government is controlled by the people,”   He bashed Washington tor enriching itself while the rest of America suffered.  Indeed, following the mortgage crisis, the only districts to see gains in housing prices for a long time were in the D.C. area.  And the hottest job in America remains Chief Compliance Officer.  He made both Democrats and establishment Republican squirm throughout his remarks.  Although Trump nominally ran as a Republican, it is unclear which party will be the opposition party.

What I didn’t like.

• Liberty?    Absent from his speech were the words “liberty” or “Constitution.”  Obama rarely invoked the term “individual liberty” and repeatedly stretched the edges of our Constitutional form of government by governing with his pen and phone.  It astounded me that he somehow was able to get deals done with Castro and the mullahs in Iran but not his own countrymen in the opposition party.   I wanted to hear from Trump how he will return the nation to one that values individual liberty above all.  I wanted to hear how the Constitution is a sacred document.  I did not hear that.
  
•  Extreme protectionism.  Trump raises some valid points on trade, especially with China.  China has abused us for years.  The Chinese hacked OPM.  They have begun to militarize the South China Sea.  They have enabled North Korea.  They have manipulated their currency.  They routinely steal our intellectual property.  They cheat on trading deals by shipping through other nations.  And yet they want to keep selling us stuff and have access to our markets while denying us the same.  Trump is entirely correct that our entire relationship with China needs to be re-evaluated.   Yet I was supportive of TPP (even Hillary walked from it).   Automation represents a greater threat to manufacturing jobs than foreign competition.  More jobs are being created “behind the glass” that require computer and other technical skills.  The reality is that China has “stolen” a lot of bad jobs.  Both Trump and Obama (and Bush) fail to address the harder issue—our  K-12 public education system that has failed to educate and provide skills for a 21^st century workforce.  Our community college system also needs to be strengthened and supported.   This means confronting unions, providing choices, and thinking innovatively and longer term.  Browbeating, trade wars, and punitive tariffs are not the path to wealth creation any more than excessive taxes and regulation have been.

 So my assessment of Trump is (and has been) mixed.  Some things I cheer.  Some make me swell with pride.  Some make me cringe.  But it’s clear that a large portion of the American electorate believe we need a break with the status quo.  Trump is that.

                                                        

Meet the New Boss

As inauguration day approaches, much is being said and written about our divided country, and the fissures have qualitatively and quantitatively widened over the past decade.   The vitriol seems to be getting worse over time and this is the first time in my memory that people protested after the election results were in.  Generally, the American way of protesting is THROUGH the ballot box.   There are lots of explanations for our political divide—gerrymandered “safe” districts, social media that excludes conversations with people that have opposing views, the news media transformation into advocacy rather than reporting.  Finally, there is an economic explanation.  People of radically different classes, cultures, races and religion get along better when everyone is relatively prosperous and our economy has not delivered.

What can we do about this?  I have a one proposed partial answer.  Stop bullying—of all kinds.  The trouble with bullying is that bullying begets bullying.

In America, the political Left has become very adept at bullying in all its forms.  Bullying takes on various forms, through words and actions.   Sometimes bullying is explicit.  Sometimes it’s explicit.  It is coercive, and not borne out of a voluntary exchange.  It is most often accompanied by a threat and is marked by mocking, disparagement and name calling.  Social media has made it much worse---it’s an easy way to publicly bully someone and show public scorn without much repercussion. 

• ·     Barack Obama.   Barack Obama is a bully par excellence.   He has successfully employed bullying tactics throughout his eight years as president.   Because he rarely raises his voice or displays emotion, on the surface it doesn’t look like bullying, but it is bullying nonetheless.  How do we know?  He employs the language of bullying often.  “I have a pen and a phone,” is perhaps his most infamous quote.  Quotes like “If they bring a knife, we bring a gun,”and “I want you to get in their face,” is not the language of negotiation, middle ground and consensus, but of bullying. Much of his administration has involved bullying—imposing his will through executive orders and regulatory agencies rather than through negotiation and agreement.  His most egregious acts of bullying have come through the regulatory agencies.  Using operation Choke Point, he directed the bank leaned on bank regulators to come down hard on banks that loaned money to industries that were out of favor with him.  Rather than let the market decide what it wanted, the Obama administration targeted certain industries for harassment or extermination—coal, Payday lenders, electronic cigarettes to name a few.  Without legislating, without consensus, without even a hearing, he was able to punish certain industries and they have little recourse but to knuckle under.  That’s bullying. Barack Obama may be one of the most skilled bullies in our time.  He does it with panache and flair, but he doesn’t intend for this to be an exchange.  Obama has used the language and tactics of bullying often, and like an expert bully, mostly through surrogates.
  
•  Academia.   Academia has become a fertile ground for bullying.  Rather than an environment that fosters the free exchange of ideas that are respectfully heard, American universities have been transformed into factories of indoctrination of ideas of the Left.   Opposing thought or contrary ideas are routinely shouted down or otherwise ridiculed or marginalized.  The poster child for this was Asra Nomani, a Muslim and a former Georgetown (a Catholic institution) professor that supported Trump.  She was savaged in social media by C. Christine Fair who compared Trump to Adolph Hitler, called Nomani various names, including a “slut,” and so far there have been no consequences.   Various conservative speakers such as Condi Rice, Milo Yiannopolis, Ben Shapiro and David Horowitz have been shouted down and heckled.  Even at my alma mater, The University of Chicago, Sean Spicer was heckled by students.   Not allowing another voice to be heard by an implicit threat of violence or shouting down is bullying, pure and simple.
  
•  Disrupters— Bullies of the disruptive type are straight out of the Saul Alinsky playbook.  Their goal is to disrupt day to day activities or to attempt to provoke a confrontation.  Black Lives Matter is very adept at this.   They don’t simply protest.  They distrupt and stand nose to nose with law enforcement officers to try to get them to throw the first punch.   An activist group at the University of Chicago employed this very successfully.  They disrupted numerous events—graduations, lectures, conferences, and reunions to attempt to persuade the university to build, underwrite and support a trauma center at the hospital.  This activist group did not turn to wealthy donors or otherwise turn to political representatives or otherwise show any initiative in that regard.  Instead they continued to bully, terrorize and disrupt day to day university activities tirelessly until they got their way.  It worked.  The university buckled.  They got their trauma center through gangster tactics worthy of the mob in NY in the 1960’s.
  
•  Entertainment--Entertainment is yet another, more subtle vehicle for bullies.  Although not as effective or threatening as the other forms, entertainers have begun to use this method with some regularity.  Mike Pence was subject to this form when he attended Hamilton.  He was subjected to derision by the crowd and an unwelcome lecture by one of the cast members. Colin Kaepernick has done the same by drawing attention to himself and making a public spectacle of kneeling during the national anthem.  Meryl Streep politically vomited at the Golden Globe Awards.  I had my own experience at a Ladysmith Black Mambazo concert in which I was subjected to left wing political rants disguised as song.   These events are all a form of bullying.  If you have attended an event in person, you have paid for a ticket.  You are in your chair.  You are captive.  You are powerless to mount a counterargument.   You have signed up for entertainment and instead you get a commercial and lectured.  Your only choices are to sit and listen to the rant or leave.  Of course those inflicting this form of bullying on you wrap themselves in a free speech argument. But the show, lecture or concert is neither the time nor the place for a lecture.  They are stealing time from you and forcing you to listen to their preaching, frequently when you have paid for something else.  It is bullying and abusive. 

The Left has gotten so very expert and proficient at this, that you don’t even know you’re being bullied much of the time.   So now along comes Donald Trump.  Middle America grew so tired of being bullied and coerced that it went out and hired its own counter-bully.  Trump is a reputed counterpuncher that has the ability to bully right back and in a very blunt and coarse way.  Jim Acosta recently felt the sting as he attempted to bully Donald Trump at Trump’s press conference this week and Trump showed that he is not going to genuflect to the MSM in the way that other Republicans have in the past.

But we are a democratic republic.   If we are to come together as a people, the bullying must stop. 

Sadly, Trump so far looks like someone that may not improve this state of affairs.  Even before coming into office, his attempt to secure greater manufacturing employment in the U.S., laudable as it is, has relied primarily on threats and coercion.   He has threatened companies with a punitive tariff if they move operations abroad.  He made implicit threats to Boeing over Air Force One and Lockheed over the F-35 to get price reductions.  The correct position is to create a favorable tax and regulatory environment and a skilled and educated workforce that makes these companies WANT to stay. But if Trump engages in bullying (rather than counterpunching), he will be no better than Obama, and his thin mandate (to the extent he has one) will flame out quickly.  It’s one thing to hit back--as he did with Jim Acosta and Meryl Streep. It’s yet another to issue threats to people and companies.

For companies and individuals who run them, threatening them with a regulator or with taxes or by publicly shaming them into submission are just different tactics used to bully them into certain behaviors.  If Trump continues to do this, corporate America will be humming Won’t Get Fooled Again, “Meet the new boss.  Same as the old boss.”

First lady elect Melania Trump has picked cyberbullying as her cause.  Perhaps she should broaden her push and lobby against bullying generally.  If we want to unify as a nation, bullying of all types needs to be tamped down.  She will be doing this country a great service if she whispers that into her husband’s ear each night.