Fool Me Twice

Well, it's happened again.

Just about eight years ago today I was writing a little essay about the recent election of Donald Trump to be the 45th "president" of the United States. I made note of the despair turning to rage within the largely liberal/Democrat circle of people I tend to associate with, along with my own bafflement that such a thing was possible. I wrote about the many people who voted for him even though they didn't think he was qualified, the blame put on Democratic politicians for ignoring the grievances of the white working class, and my own prognosis for the next four years with Trump as "president". I ended on a somewhat cynical note by saying that it was probably necessary for Trump to make a royal mess of things in order for at least some of his followers to comprehend what a poor choice they had made.

Around four years ago today, I was looking at the Electoral College results and breathing a sigh of relief that we had made it through the four years just ended, and that we were finally rid of that incompetent egomaniac. Little did I know what was coming on January 6, 2021 and for the whole following four years of extended Trump-based drama. And now he's back. The atmosphere feels a lot like it did eight years ago—the anger, the finger-pointing, all that stuff. But for me, it feels a little different than it did then. 

This time around, Trump won the popular vote with around three million votes more than Harris, so we can't just blame the weirdness of our Electoral College system for putting him back into the White house. He made inroads among demographic groups that the Democrats want to think are firmly in their camp. A majority of voters took a look at four years of craziness and incompetence and said, "Yup, that was great, please give me some more." All I can think of to say to these people is an old aphorism: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

I have heard over and over that the economy, really meaning inflation, was a deciding factor, maybe the deciding factor. It's tempting to say that Americans care more about the price of eggs than about handing over the nuclear codes to a criminal narcissist, and I have indeed said that to a few friends and family members. To put it in perspective, this same inflation happened at the same time all over the industrialized world, but the US economy has recovered far more, and far faster, than the economies of any of its peer nations. At a macro level, things are pretty good, economy-wise.

I nonetheless understand that there are a lot of people in this country living paycheck to paycheck, for whom the sudden increase in the price of groceries (and a lot of other things) coming out of the pandemic has been a huge and genuine problem. Knowing that the US has a more favorable rate of inflation or unemployment or wage growth than Italy or Japan or Australia does not somehow get the bills paid, or shrink the size of those bills back to their pre-pandemic size.

But… Americans have incredibly short memories. So many think back to the first Trump administration with some vague sense that they were better off then. They don't consider that Trump inherited a robust economy from the Obama administration, and was able to coast on that for some distance. They seem to forget the massive economic disruption that came with the COVID-19 pandemic, the impact of which was undoubtedly amplified by Trump's mismanagement, especially early on when he tried to pretend that it wasn't even a problem. All they know is that the cost of living has gone up, and Biden, and by extension Harris, were in charge, so we should turn to Trump, who promises, "We will rapidly drive prices down." So yeah, eggs. 

This is all your fault.

And let's garnish those eggs with a generous sprinkling of magical thinking. Prices aren't going down. On the contrary, actual economists say that Trump's policies will drive an entirely new round of inflation—even as I write this, the CEOs of Wal-Mart, Auto Zone, Lowes and other mainstays of our consumer economy are talking about raising prices to compensate for coming tariffs. Some say that his policies will trigger a recession and damage the entire global economy. So for now, in mid-November 2024, let's take note of some key economic indicators:

• Annual GDP growth, Q3 2024: 2.8%
• Inflation: 2.6% for the 12 months ending October 2024
• Unemployment: 4.1% as of October 2024

If you follow these things, you know that that these are pretty decent numbers. Maybe we'll come back in a year or two and see what they look like, and how happy his constituents are.

But enough on economics. There are plenty of other things to worry about. As I watch him put his cabinet together, all I can do is shake my head. His choice of Little Marco to be Secretary of State surprised me, involving as it did someone with actual credentials for the job—I'm betting he'll either quit or be fired somewhere between six and twelve months in. Otherwise, it's been a parade of ideologues and sycophants with little to no actual qualifications for the offices for which they have been selected. Most of his nominees are just some guy he saw on Fox "News"; we might as well replace the presidential seal with one of those "As seen on TV!" logos.

Below cabinet level, Trump's plan to reinstate Schedule F is the beginning of a program to replace qualified, long-time civil servants with substantial experience and expertise in their respective fields with lackeys and toadies whose primary job skill is loyalty to Trump and willingness to unquestioningly toe the party line. All I'm going to say about that is: now there's a recipe for success.

I could go on and on. I could expound on how he's determined to make good on his promises to round up and deport illegal immigrants, roll back environmental regulation, promote fossil fuels and kill alternative energy, and continue his tax cuts that benefit only the highest-income earners. But to cut to the chase: I think it's going to be bad. It was bad last time, but it'll be much worse this time around because Trump is out for revenge and he is determined not to again make the mistake of surrounding himself with people who will say no. He'll be surrounded by people like Musk, Ramaswamy, RFK Jr. and others who'll be egging him on instead. I'm sure this sequel will also feature at least a few characters from the first movie, like Steve Bannon, or Steven Miller, the Jewish Eichmann (I get to say that as a Member of the Tribe). I can only hope that the infighting that will be produced by all of those monumental egos vying for the attention of the Ego in Chief will get in the way of them getting at least some of their program done.

Proceed with caution.

But the people have spoken. Or at least a majority of voters have spoken, and said that they want this. They didn't get the full program last time, but with so many of the guardrails gone, their chances are better this time. So give the people, the true believers, what they want. I will have to do what I can to insulate myself, my family, my friends against the worst effects of what I think is coming. Fortunately, unlike so many of his ardent supporters, I am not dependent on the kinds of programs that are most likely to disappear if their hero gets his way. I think they are in for a rude surprise and I can only hope that it will leave the whole MAGA program discredited in the long run.

We shall see. In that other thing I wrote eight years ago, I ended on the image of an addict having to hit rock bottom before finally swearing off the drug for good. That image seems just as apt now. We just might get there this time.

Coming to Terms with the Aftermath

It's been nearly two weeks since the Nov. 8 election as I write this. The liberal bubble that is my Facebook newsfeed was a landscape of despair for the first several days after the election, but that has since given way to seething anger and outrage. Needless to say (for the two or three of you who read my occasional scribblings here), the election didn't end the way I wanted or expected it to. I genuinely believed (and still do) that Clinton was the most qualified of the entire field of candidates, Democrat or Republican, but I was also conscious of the baggage she brought along for the trip, some of it real, much of it fictional. One might have thought that a substantial plurality of the electorate would have considered those failures, real and imagined, to pale in comparison to Trump's manifest lack of fitness for the presidency (in case you've forgotten, a quick look at James Fallows's Trump Time Capsule series should refresh your memory); one would have been wrong.

So here we are. We had an election and Trump won. As I write this, the latest counts show that Clinton won nearly two million more popular votes, but the Electoral College result—sadly—is what counts. Like it or not, that's the system we have and we all knew the rules going in. I don't think you can excoriate Trump before the election for saying he'll only accept the results if he wins and then say after the election that the Electoral College result is not legitimate because you don't like how the Electoral College is going to vote. I personally think that institution is an obsolete anachronism and would like to see it eliminated. That would take a constitutional amendment, which is a complicated process, but I'm holding out some hope that the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact will render an amendment unnecessary in time for the 2020 election. 

Now candidate Trump is president-elect Trump; I wince every time I hear that term. In the first few days after the election he made kind of a sobered impression. To some he was looking presidential and statesman-like; to me he just looked like the dog who finally caught the car he was chasing and now has no clue what happens next. Since then he's gone to the White House for a little "Presidency 101" from Obama, for whom it must have been a profoundly bitter experience, the professor preparing to hand over the keys to the carnival barker.

I have mixed feelings about the protests that have followed the election. I won't hesitate to condemn the violence that occurred around protests in Portland, OR; it's morally unacceptable, but also just tactically stupid. As for the peaceful protests elsewhere, those people are exercising their first amendment rights, and I understand the anger, but the fact that they are essentially protesting against the result of a free election makes me uncomfortable at some level. I tend to apply the "if the shoe were on the other foot" standard—if those were Trump supporters protesting a Clinton victory, wouldn't we be sounding warnings about "Trump's brownshirts" and worse to come? At the same time I recognize that we are facing something unprecedented here, a genuine moral crisis, which makes it harder for me to say people shouldn't be out in the streets making their feelings known, as long as they can do it in a peaceful manner. I see the value in reminding Trump and his pals that while they won the election, they did not win a popular mandate for their plans.

Ambivalence about protests at this early stage not withstanding, I accept the election results as the legitimate outcome of the system we have, stupid though it may be, but not the "now all Americans must come together behind our new president" crap I've heard from some quarters. In his acceptance speech Trump said "I will be president for all Americans". Technically that's of course true, but Trump spent the entire presidential campaign demonstrating that in practice he intends to be anything but. If he wants my support he can earn it; the last eight years of Republican obstructionism have taught me that I'm under no obligations here. The role he awarded to Steve Bannon, as one of his very first official appointments, speaks for itself as far as any claim of being "president for all Americans" goes. His appointments of Jeff Sessions and Mike Flynn are equally indicative of where this is going.

At least part of his constituency thinks it knows where it's going: back to a time when the white man ruled and everyone else knew his place. The rise in incidents of open racism following Trump's victory, many of which cite his name in one form or another, is well documented, as here or here. Trump has issued a sort of weak, half-hearted directive to his followers to "stop it", but only after he was prompted on national television, and he hasn't publicly said a word since then on the topic, even though racist incidents citing his name continue unabated. In Bannon, he's very publicly elevated to his inner circle a man who is intimately associated with the so-called "alt-right", so how can anyone take his "stop it" as anything other than an obvious ploy to establish plausible deniability? So many Trump voters deny racist inclinations and claim to be insulted to be associated with the bigotry of a few, but they've heard their candidate speak and they knew exactly who and what they were choosing when they cast their votes. If you voted for this man, you are a knowing accomplice in whatever comes next. Oh yes, I know, you were just following orders.

The Shape of Things to Come

The Monday-morning (or Wednesday morning, I guess) quarterbacks have been dissecting the election results ever since the election, amidst general finger-pointing on the Democratic side. Hardcore Sanders supporters have assured me that he would have beaten Trump if he had gotten the nomination, but let's not kid ourselves. If Sanders had been the candidate of the Democrats, all we would have heard after the convention is how he's a self-proclaimed socialist, "just like Stalin or Mao or Castro", and how he's going to take away our property and nationalize private enterprises and force us all onto collective farms and set up gulags and reeducation camps and other such nonsense. Trump would have dubbed Sanders "commie Bernie" and the same people who lapped up his "crooked Hillary" line still would have voted Trump into office.

The consensus diagnosis that has now developed goes something like this: The Democratic Party used to be the party of the working man. Then it decided to focus more on college-educated professionals as its core constituency and embraced globalization as an organizing principle for society. In the meantime, white working-class men have seen their economic and social status consistently eroded, and Democrats have done nothing to help them, preferring instead to belittle them as a bunch of stupid hicks. After eight years of Obama, things haven't gotten any better for them, they're angry as hell about it and so, looking for a radical change and also just to make a point, they've voted en masse for Trump and elevated him to the presidency.

I have no doubt that this analysis explains a lot, but it's hardly the whole story, as exit poll results (reported here, among other places) show. Yes, Trump did better among whites of all ages. But he also did better than Clinton in the upper income groups, among white college-educated voters, and in the suburbs. Downwardly mobile working-class whites may be a core Trump constituency, but they clearly have no shortage of allies among what are considered to be the better-off white elites. Demagogues always have friends in high places who are looking for a way to harness and exploit the anger of the masses for their own ends.

I took out my ancient pocket calculator and tried to dig into some of the exit poll numbers a little further. A few things I noted (apologies for all the calculations that follow, I just think I should show my work before I state my conclusions):

• The most up-to-date numbers I could find on the vote (here, as of 11/17/16—may have changed by the time you read this) indicate these results in the popular vote. These are the numbers I used for the following extrapolations: 
• Trump: 61,864,015
• Clinton: 63,541,056
• Other: 7,034,595
• Total: 132,439,666.
• Of the 24,537 respondents polled, 33% said that only Trump is qualified to be president, 46% said only Clinton is, 14% said neither is. Of the last two groups, 2% and 69%, respectively, were Trump voters. Extrapolating to the total vote count of 132.4 million voters noted above, that means that (.02 x .46) + (.69 x .14) = 10.6%, or around 14 million people, voted for Trump even though they do not consider him qualified to be president.
• Asked whether Trump has the temperament to be president, 63% said no, and 20% of those respondents were Trump voters. So .20 x .63 = 12.6% of voters, or around 16.7 million, voted for Trump but don't think he has the temperament to be president.
• 39% of all respondents said that the candidate quality that mattered most was "can bring change"; this was mostly driven by Trump voters (83% of the 39%). 21% said the most important quality was "right experience", 20% said "good judgment"; these choices were mainly driven by Clinton voters (90% and 66%, respectively).

So after all that fiddling with numbers, my brilliant conclusion is that statistically speaking, Trump voters mainly just want a change, but a substantial contingent of them don't give a damn about the qualifications or temperament of the guy they've selected to bring it. That pretty much aligns with the anecdotal evidence from multiple TV, radio or print interviews of prospective Trump voters I saw/heard/read in the weeks leading up to the election, in which this or that person expressed reservations about Trump's readiness for the presidency while at the same time pledging to vote for him nonetheless. Now there's a recipe for success (not).

Trump's voters are going to get changes, but I have no doubt that those changes are not going to make many of those Trump voters happy, especially that core constituency of working-class white men. Let's ignore for a moment (but only for a moment) things like Trump's pick of Jeff Sessions to be AG, and the impact that's going to have on civil rights actions by the DOJ, since the people who will be affected were very probably not Trump voters.

Let's focus instead on things like his tax "reform" plan, which economists think will add trillions to the national debt while benefiting almost exclusively taxpayers with very high incomes. Let's consider Trump's plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), which is likely to leave millions of formerly uninsured people once again uninsured. Let's think about how much the cost of living will rise for low-income people who depend on all those Chinese imports at Walmart and elsewhere if Trump really slaps a tariff on them. Let's look at the loss of millions of export-related jobs that could occur from a Trump-incited trade war (and are not going to be replaced by an equal or larger number of new jobs mining coal and making steel). Let's ask how those who voted the whole Republican crew into office are possibly going to come out ahead if Trump signs off on Paul Ryan's plans to "reform" Medicare and Social Security.

We should also consider the less direct impact on Trump's core supporters (and all the rest of us too). There's the environmental impact to be expected from Trump's plan to withdraw from global climate deals and destroy the EPA from within—soon we can all be living in Flint. There is the infrastructure program that I think is actually a good idea but which I also think, based on statements from Trump's guy Bannon, will be so uncoordinated and poorly thought out that it—assuming the Republican Congress will even vote for it—will probably waste a massive amount of money without delivering any real long-term benefit (and, I bet, will probably see a lot of that money siphoned off into dubious channels).

Even more generally, there are the already-apparent massive conflicts of interest that I think will make this the most scandal-plagued administration since Harding was president. And then there's the infighting within Trump's transition team that I believe is just a preview of what we will see once the Trump administration is sworn in and which will keep it more preoccupied with itself than with the good of the country.

In short, I hardly think we have grounds for optimism with a Trump administration, and I think the people who are going to get screwed over the most are the people he convinced to vote for him for the sake of "change". They have not merely cut off their metaphorical nose, they have ripped their whole head off—and mine, and my family's, and all of my friends'—to spite their face. Let none of these people complain to me a year from now that they've been negatively affected by this or that Trump administration action, because that will be a very short conversation, possibly involving a lot of yelling.

My heart tells me I should now be pushing my own solidly Democratic Massachusetts congressional delegation and all of the rest of the Democrats to fight every stupid policy the Trump White House and it's allies in the Republican-controlled Congress may cook up in any and every way possible. I should be donating to the ACLU and other such organizations. I should be out on the street demonstrating against every anti-progressive policy this administration will try to implement.

But there's also a little voice in my head that says that maybe what needs to happen here is for Trump & co. to get everything they want; let Democrats put up token, symbolic resistance but otherwise step aside and let the country have this foolish populist experiment and see it end in the disaster that I expect. It has been popular leading up to the election to draw parallels with pre-Hitler Germany. Maybe it's time to look ahead to some parallels with post-Hitler Germany, whose citizens drew certain conclusions from the self-inflicted smoking ruins of their own country and of the countries all around them, owned up to (and 70 years later continue to seek atonement for) their country's heinous crimes, and established a prosperous and relatively egalitarian society that undeniably has its problems and shortcomings, but in which even an arch-conservative leader like Merkel is perceived by many in our own country to be one of the world's remaining champions of human rights and democratic institutions.

I hate to end on a dark and cynical note, but maybe it's going to take letting the likes of Trump and Ryan and their pals fuck up the country so badly that the "government is the problem" rhetoric that has been the Republican mantra since Reagan, the stupid idea that the best way to help average people is to award the wealthiest among us an ever-larger slice of the pie, and the ridiculous notion that the best way to make the country work right is to choose an inexperienced outsider to lead it, can be thoroughly and definitively discredited. Maybe, just maybe, we can all learn something and then pick up the pieces and agree to do something a little more constructive. I don't know that that's what I truly want, because of all of the people who will be made to suffer through no fault of their own. But with a vain, ignorant and amoral man like Trump elected to the highest office in the land with the approval of nearly half of all voters, I have to wonder if the only way we're going to get out of our national addiction to stupid and short-sighted policy prescriptions is to finally hit rock bottom hard enough that we're ready to swear off the drug for good.

A Lose-Lose Proposition

So, we're back from the brink. At least for another three months, then the whole cycle of madness starts again. I am, of course, talking about the debacle that was the Republican attempt to destroy the Affordable Care Act and threatening to wreck the economy if they didn't get their way. I don't know what I can say about it that hasn't already been said by someone somewhere, but I just have to vent because keeping all that impotent rage bottled up always messes up my digestive system, which can prove embarrassing to everyone around me.

I don't know that I should expect any better of them, but I can't help but be utterly repulsed by things like John Boehner, shortly after the vote, going on some stupid radio program to babble nonsense about how Republicans fought the good fight but didn't win, then going on to say, "We did everything we could to get them to the table to negotiate… They just kept saying no. No, no, no." 

Of course the Democrats said no! Is Boehner too stupid to understand why? Actually, he probably isn't. But he clearly thinks you are. And he may be right. I went to get my hair cut today, and one of the barbers was going on and on about how bad it's going to be for everyone when the ACA kicks in fully on Jan. 1, though he wasn't able to articulate any specifics. Ironically, this is a guy who had a quadruple bypass a couple years ago and might be facing a cap on benefits and an inability to get different insurance elsewhere, were it not for the provisions of ACA that now prohibit such insurance company practices. But that's just the way we think in this country, especially if we rely on sources like Rush Limbaugh and Fox News for "information". (As an example of the latter, see this article exposing Sean Hannity's extremely misleading "reporting" on the ACA on Fox News.)

Let's replay what happened here. In a nutshell: Obama put his Affordable Care Act before Congress. Congress approved it. Obama signed it into law. The Supreme Court confirmed it, with a few exceptions. A minority of House Republicans, egged on by the idiot Senator Ted Cruz, demanded that the ACA be defunded before the House would approve a continuing resolution on the budget and approve an increase in the debt ceiling. Boehner, fearing that it would cost him his job as Speaker if he did, refused to let the CR come to a vote, even though it was clear that enough Republicans would vote with the Democrats to pass it without any problem. The Democrats, following the principle that one should not negotiate with terrorists, refused to budge, and Boehner & Co. ultimately had to back down. So what do the Republicans have to show for this whole circus?

Well, they got a couple of very small face-saving concessions, like a requirement that the Department of Health and Human Services report to Congress on procedures to verify income of people who would get subsidies for health insurance. There was a guarantee to pay back pay to federal employees who were forced to work without pay while the government was partially shut down. Oh, and some pork. Who doesn't like pork? The Republicans can be glad they got anything, since at some point they themselves apparently didn't even know what they wanted any more, as illustrated by Representative Marlin Stutzman (R-Ind., with Tea Party backing), who famously told the Washington Examiner, “We’re not going to be disrespected… We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.”

And what did the rest of us get? Well, we eventually got the government reopened. Also, according to Standard & Poors we got a reduction in GDP equivalent to around a $24 billion cost to the US economy—exactly the sort of thing we need right now. Remember when Boehner said this?

“Helping Americans get back to work is our number one priority, and we’re going to do everything we can to help create jobs and to boost our economy."

That was back in May, 2011. It's good to know that Boehner's job creation plan includes temporarily putting thousands of people out of work, threatening all the small businesses that depend on their patronage, creating the threat of a global financial crisis, and generally shoring up international investors' faith in US Treasury Bonds by demonstrating to the rest of the world that our government is capable of financial management on par with the governments of Greece or Cypress. It's a novel strategy. Good work, John.

Why didn't you just smack him with that thing while you had the chance?

What Was, What Is, What Will Be—Part One

I was cleaning out my shed recently, going through piles of things that have been pushed from one corner to the other for years, until I finally got tired of tripping over them. I wasn't conscious of how long some of that stuff had been piling up until I started emptying out a box full of odds and ends and found a copy of the Boston Globe from August 22, 2001, before I even lived in my current house. I imagine this box came from some obscure corner of the garage in the old house and got tossed into the moving van at the last minute, then was tossed into some equally obscure corner of the new house and just sort of shifted around over the years without anyone ever looking to see what's in it. I'm bad about that sort of thing. I'm not a hoarder, but I am kind of an accumulator.

That paper looked like it had never even been read, curiously enough. The edges were a bit ragged, like they had been gradually harvested by mice for nesting material, but all of the sections were still there, just as they had been delivered over a decade ago.

I enjoy looking at old newspapers, seeing what the important stories of the day were years ago, thinking about what was happening in my own life at the time. This one from late August 2001 was an interesting find for a lot of reasons. It represented a time of major changes for me personally, and imminent changes for the country as a whole. Glancing at the date on that front page, I found myself immediately lost in contemplation of the events that had transpired in the year leading up to the date of that paper.

In August of 2000, I returned to the US after more than a decade living the expatriate life in Germany, along with My Favorite Wife and two young kids. It was the height of the dot-com boom and I was taking a job with an Internet consulting company in Boston. I'll call it XYZ Corp. XYZ provided soup-to-nuts Internet strategy and technology consulting. They had a whole list of top-tier Fortune 500 clients as well as a bunch of fairly well-known dot-coms, and a huge wad of venture capital funding, and it looked like a pretty reasonable proposition at the time I signed on. They offered me a decent salary, plus a relocation allowance that more than covered the cost of moving my family and all of our accumulated stuff across the Atlantic.

From the first day I was at XYZ though, I began having second thoughts. I had interesting projects with good clients. I had colleagues whom I found to be extremely creative and competent in their respective areas, whether it was visual design, technology implementation, business strategy development or whatever. But at the same time, I couldn't help but notice that there didn't seem to be any grown-ups in charge of all these smart and capable people.

Not to blow my own horn too loudly, but at the time I joined XYZ I had undergraduate and graduate business degrees and twelve years of pretty solid work experience under my belt, a third of it in a Big Eight consultancy (back in ancient times when there was such a thing…) and the rest in an international bank. I had run a department of 12–15 people and managed million-dollar budgets and project teams that were distributed across the globe. I had connections with peers in major corporations throughout the country and the world. I had to develop budgets and manage to them, hire and motivate staff and interact with people at fairly high levels of the company. I don't think I was even conscious of how much business experience I had accumulated until I worked at XYZ and observed how the company was being run.

To me, it looked our management was engaged in some kind of race to the bottom, in which the objective was to see who could shovel the most cash out the window before it all ran out. Crazy amounts of money were spent on stocking the kitchens on every floor of every building, from which employees could help themselves to unlimited quantities of cereal, soft drinks, cookies and other treats. There were pool tables and foosball tables and other toys. People who had been with the company for half a year had piles of company-branded clothing and trinkets. Food was ordered in for every lunch meeting, of which there were plenty. The building I worked in, which had been remodeled from industrial space at a cost of millions of dollars, was home to hundreds of office chairs, none of which had cost less than around $800. People flew at the drop of a hat all over the country for pointless meetings, staying in the finest hotels and eating in classy restaurants. Nobody seemed to notice that projects were staffed with way more people than could have possibly been profitable. Nobody seemed to know or care what a budget was. Clearly this was going to end in tears.

That's not to say that XYZ was necessarily run substantially differently than a lot of the "hot" companies of the time. I never really accepted the concept that seemed to be prevalent at some of the major dot-coms, namely, that giving things away is somehow a promising business model. I kept hearing phrases like, "It's about the eyeballs, man!", meaning that people looking at your web page would somehow translate into a large and constant stream of cash into your pocket, through some magic that nobody ever really satisfactorily explained to me. The epitome of this kind of thinking for me was a company called Kozmo.com that operated in some larger US cities, from which you could order things like CDs or snacks and they would deliver it to you for free; I didn't see how a service that would cart a pack of gum halfway across New York City for free could possibly be making money, unless maybe they were charging you $10 for that pack of gum that was making its way to your door without any delivery charge. Hearing about this crazy scheme left me scratching my head and thinking that maybe the Internet joyride was approaching some kind of climax.

Of course, there was plenty of funny business going on throughout the economy back then; it wasn't confined to dot-com start-ups. I remember one meeting we had with representatives of Enron who were trying to sell some new technology service to one of our clients. I subsequently advised our client that what the Enron guys were peddling looked to me like some very expensive vaporware that could not possibly deliver the level of service they claimed it would, given the underlying technical infrastructure they described to me. Little did I know at the time that this was not some anomaly, but rather the way the whole company worked. It was not long after that that Enron spectacularly imploded.

It was fun while it lasted!

So end in tears it did. The first tears came in the spring of 2001, when a number of my coworkers came in one day to be met by security guards who stood over them while they packed up their personal stuff in a waiting cardboard box and then escorted them out the door, never to return. Following the exit of our now unwanted colleagues there was a company-wide meeting in which one of the company founders announced to the remainder of the now somewhat disoriented staff that we had to do an unavoidable "reduction in force" (RIF) in order to get leaner and be competitive, but the rest of us had nothing to worry about; we had been suffering a bit from the loss of clientele from the dot-com sector, but we still had lots of big projects with major clients from more traditional industries and this would shield us from the recent "downturn in the market", and so forth and so on blah blah blah. Later that day the same guy came to chat with the project team I was working with and asked a few of us if we wanted to join him in XYZ's VIP box in what was then the Fleet Center to watch the Bruins play hockey. I politely declined, thinking there is clearly a problem of priorities here and I don't really care to be part of that. I was reminded of the old saying that a fish stinks from the head down.

I think there were six or seven RIFs (or mass firings, as I preferred to call them) that followed in the ensuing months. The second one was somewhat less traumatic than the first, though not by much. By the fourth or fifth one a combination of resignation and gallows humor was the order of the day, and nobody seemed particularly surprised to come to work one day to learn that his number was finally up. People just sent a last farewell email with their private contact info, gathered up a few things and left. By then the company had long since dispensed with the whole security guard thing.

The first people to go were mostly the younger ones with the prominently displayed, ridiculously elaborate tattoos and the geek-as-fashion-icon horn-rimmed glasses. One could feel the median age and experience level of the company drifting steadily upward as the hipness quotient declined somewhat. But even if you were one of the older and more experienced consultants, if your latest project came to an end and you didn't have a new one to start on, i.e., you were "on the bench" in consultant-speak, the chance that you would be out the door fairly soon was high.

I would like to think that it was due to the indispensable quality of my own skills and experience, although I'm sure sheer dumb luck played a major role as well, but for whatever reason I somehow managed to hang on until the bitter end. That came when XYZ finally threw in the towel and declared bankruptcy in August of 2011. Even then I was actively engaged on a project for one of our remaining clients. It was entirely unclear what was going to happen next. I probably never got around to reading that August 22, 2001 edition of the Globe because I just had other things on my mind at the time, one of them being the fact that as my one year anniversary at XYZ approached, it was clear that there was not going to be a two-year anniversary.

But just like in the movies, when it looked like the situation had reached its most desperate, help arrived to save us. In this case the movie was Seven Samurai. Or more like Seven Sararimen, I guess.

We have come to save your company.

Let me explain. At some point senior XYZ management must have realized that if they were going to keep the party going, they were going to have to find some new dupes investors. Somehow they managed to get a major Japanese industrial company (I'll call them J Corp.) to take a minority stake in XYZ to the tune of an eight-figure investment. As XYZ went belly-up, J Corp. bought out the remaining assets of XYZ and founded a new, wholly owned subsidiary which I shall call Phoenix (because it rose from the ashes of XYZ… get it? Clever, huh?). So along with a little more than a hundred of what had been 800 employees in XYZ's Boston office at the time I joined, now I was a happy, or at least relieved, employee of Phoenix.

To be continued (whenever I get around to it)…

Out of Gas

I'm glad that election day is nearly upon us. I'd really like to get this thing over with. I can't take the suspense much longer. Or the campaign advertisements. My mind was made up long ago, so let's just get to it. I don't need another couple of weeks to figure out who should get my vote.

I'm sort of amazed that in the presidential race there are still supposedly large numbers of undecided voters out there. I don't see what there is at this point that anyone thinks he or she is going to learn about either candidate that we don't all know already. Interesting that the second presidential debate was built around undecided voters questioning the candidates directly.

I thought the range of topics covered by the questions was reasonable. Except for the one to Romney about how he is different from George W. Bush, they were the kinds of topics I would have expected. One question, though, really irritated me. It was this one: "Your energy secretary, Steven Chu, has now been on record three times stating it's not policy of his department to help lower gas prices. Do you agree with Secretary Chu that this is not the job of the Energy Department?" It irritated me because it is symptomatic of an attitude toward energy use that shows that nearly forty years after the oil shock of 1973, we Americans still haven't learned a whole lot about energy policy. Our notion of energy policy still comes down to the price of a gallon of gas.

It's symptomatic of this foolishness that as the vital signs of his presidential campaign were growing fainter and fainter, Newt Gingrich decided to focus it on gas prices. Elect me, he said, and I will bring the price of gas down to $2.50 per gallon. I guess that's your proof that Gingrich is a historian and not an economist.

The Fool On His Errand

The honest, and proper, answer to that question would be this: "Yes, I agree with Secretary Chu. The price of gasoline is determined by supply and demand in the world market for petroleum. There is little that the president or the Department of Energy can do in the short run to influence either. In the longer term, we can pursue policies that encourage exploration and technological innovation that can increase the supply. If demand remains stable, that may bring prices down, but not necessarily, because as we extract oil from ever more difficult-to-reach sources, the cost of extracting that petroleum continues to rise, as does the environmental impact.

But we know that demand will not remain stable. As our own economy continues to recover, we know from history that domestic demand will rise. We also need to consider that the combined population of India and China is now about 2.6 billion people out of the world's total of around seven billion, and as those countries continue on a path of rapid development, we know that world petroleum demand is going to steadily increase, keeping pace with, and probably outpacing supply. Moreover, we know that the extraction, transport, refining and consumption of petroleum all take an enormous toll on our environment. And I should also note that a not inconsiderable part of our national defense budget is attributable to the need to ensure that Persian Gulf oil continues to flow unhindered to our shores.

With all this in mind, I believe it should be the policy of US government to raise gas prices, not to lower them. We should impose taxes that reflect the real cost of our continued dependance on oil as an energy source. That will give our citizens an incentive to conserve and our manufacturers of automobiles and home heating equipment an incentive to improve the efficiency of their products. That would be a much more market-oriented approach than trying to directly mandate efficiency standards such as we do with the CAFE standards for automobile gas mileage. Other industrialized countries follow this approach; gasoline taxes in France, Germany or Japan mean that consumers there pay significantly more for a gallon of gas than we do, but their per-capita petroleum consumption is also around half of our own, and nobody who has visited any of those places would seriously claim that their standard of living is lower than ours.

I understand that for some lower-income Americans, who have no alternative to driving in order to get to their jobs or to care for their families, any increase in the price of gasoline does represent a genuine hardship, and we need to address that. We can do so indirectly by using some of those increased tax revenues to make smart investments in public transportation where it makes sense to do so, and some of them to provide commuter mileage tax credits or other subsidies to lower-income Americans for whom public transportation is still not a realistic option.

Whatever happens, we need to recognize that focusing our national energy policy on keeping down the price of a gallon of gas is not the right answer for our country. We need to develop creative, market-driven policies to reduce our dependence on petroleum, especially petroleum that comes from some of the most politically unstable places on the planet, but also petroleum that is extracted in ways that represent a huge risk to the environment. It may be a very long time before we can fully wean ourselves from our dependence on petroleum as an energy source, but we need to start that process, and recognize that it is not a problem we can drill our way out of."

That's the answer I wanted to hear from Obama, but I didn't get it. At least in his answer, Obama did make a case for developing alternative energy sources along with the more traditional ones. Romney sort of paid lip service to that, but in the end, he also said, "I'll get America and North America energy-independent. I'll do it by more drilling, more permits and licenses. We're going to bring that pipeline in from Canada. How in the world the president said no to that pipeline, I will never know. This is about bringing good jobs back for the middle class of America, and that's what I'm going to do."

And notice that line about "America and North America". I'm not sure what the difference is in Romney's mind. Romney likes to talk about North American energy, which is apparently Romnese for "energy from sources that are in North America but not in the US". That oil that's somehow going to usher in a new era of mass consumption is in Canada, not the US. In Romney's mind that may be "our" oil, but in reality that oil is going to go wherever it brings the best price. That may be to refineries in New Jersey or Texas or California. It may also be to customers in Shanghai or Mumbai. That's just how markets work.

For a guy who likes to go on and on about his successful career in business, market economics somehow doesn't seem to be Romney's strong suit. You'd think he'd really know better than to point out that at the beginning of Obama's term, gas was selling for less than $2 per gallon. "It's because the economy was in the toilet!", I found myself screaming at the TV (I'm not normally one for screaming at the TV—that function is normally performed by My Favorite Wife, when she watches the German national team in some soccer match). So there's that old supply-and-demand thing again. I'm glad that Obama made exactly the same point (though he didn't use the word "toilet").



When he moves a few more inches to the left, I pounce!

Romney's peculiar notions about economics, and mathematics, are also apparent in his tax proposals. I was glad to see Obama being a little more articulate this time around in dissecting Romney's plans for mending the budget. For my money, neither candidate has put a credible plan on the table. But Romney's plans to substantially reduce tax rates, vastly increase defense spending and pay for it all by closing some as-yet unspecified loopholes is simply insulting; it's Romney's "read my lips, no new taxes" moment. Don't take my word for it, ask the Tax Policy Center.


Hey Dad! Kind of reminds you of your tax policy, doesn't it?

The one area in which Romney sort of scored a point or two in my book was during the discussion of the attack on the consulate in Beghazi. The undignified yes-I-did-no-you-didn't exchange regarding whether and when Obama uttered the magic words "act of terror" that was clarified in Obama's favor by narrator Candy Crowley made Romney look a little ridiculous, but it doesn't change the fact that a lot of very confused and contradictory information was (and continues to be) disseminated about what happened. Sure, Obama did use those words in his Rose Garden statement the day after the attack, but in his statement he also connected "efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others" to "this type of senseless violence", i.e., he was putting events in Benghazi in the same category as riots that resulted from the insulting (and just plain stupid) film about the prophet Mohammed that had appeared on the Internet shortly before (something I commented on ranted about previously).
 

Did so! Did not! Did so! Did not! Did… Moooommmmmm!

But the real issue, that of whether this attack on the Benghazi consulate could/should have been foreseen and prevented, still does not have any satisfactory answer from Obama. I find it sort of curious that Romney chose not to drill down on that, but instead preferred to split hairs over whether or not the president called it an "act of terror". I also reject his assertion that "this calls into question the president's whole policy in the Middle East"; to conflate this potentially preventable tragedy with what is happening in Syria or Iran, as Romney went on to do, is just incoherent and stupid.

It's too bad that with so much at stake in this election, the most memorable thing from this debate seems to be the "binders full of women" quote. Apart from the awkward peculiarity of the expression itself, it turns out to be yet another application of the Romney/Ryan facts-don't-matter approach. The source of the binder (not "binders") in question, the non-partisan group MassGAP, has made it clear that it was not Romney who reached out to them to recruit potential candidates; on the contrary, MassGAP provided the information to all of the gubernatorial candidates prior to the election.

Tonight's Bedtime Story: Mitt and the Terrible, Horrible,
No Good,Very Bad Debate

So now we're down to one last presidential debate. I'll be glad when that's behind us. It's all about foreign policy. I hope that the niveau of the discussion is going to rise above, "I got Bin Laden!" "You always apologize for America!"

Meanwhile, let's check in on what the VP candidates have been up to while their bosses have been duking it out on stage. It turns out that Joe Biden can read babies' minds! He demonstrated this neat trick recently at a campaign rally.

Paul Ryan is staying fit on the campaign trail! Apparently these pictures published in Time Magazine were actually shot some time ago, but I find them immensely inspiring. Congressman Ryan's own little Rocky montage!


Wants To Be Vice President—Doesn't Know How To Operate A Hat

The congressman is also apparently feeling himself drawn back to his fictional working class roots (we previously reported). He recently turned up at a St. Vincent De Paul Society soup kitchen in Youngstown, OH with his family and photographers in tow and proceeded to waste everyone's time with an unwanted and unneeded demonstration of his dishwashing prowess. Apparently the only lasting effect of this little stunt is that some of the organization's donors have pulled their funding because it is supposed to be strictly apolitical. Gee, Paul! I'll bet there are a lot of poor people in Youngstown who are grateful for your terrific charity work!

Dishwatergate Conspirators