I want to start with a story that happened when I lived in Oakland in the mid to late 1960s. My very-exwife and I lived in an old house on Lester Avenue that had been split into two apartments. The main level of the house was split in half so both entries and both main floors were at street level. The house/flats had been pretty rundown but the landlord had remodeled our half so, when we moved in, we lived in half the main floor that had been repainted and refurbished and a newly finished basement bedroom and bathroom that was under our half of the first floor and the other half’s kitchen.

The rent was cheap – $90 a month, as I recall – and it was a convenient place to live, close to Lake Merritt and close to freeway access, but it was not in an area that was considered nice at the time nor was it considered particularly safe. Anyway, after we moved in, the landlord started remodeling the other flat. Usually, he locked it each night, but, towards the end, while he was painting the second unit, he left the windows open for the paint to dry. As we were getting ready to go to bed, we heard somebody walking around upstairs. It was probably in the other unit but it was hard to tell and right above our head. We panicked and my now very-ex-wife immediately called the police.

This was in the summer of 1968, and Martin Luther King had been murdered – but Robert Kennedy hadn’t; yet – there had been riots fueled by Black rage in almost every American City but not in Oakland. What particularly surprised me was that there were riots in San Francisco which seemed much more Black friendly than Oakland which was run like a police state. I wondered why.

Back at Lester, when my very-ex-wife called the police and told them we had a burglar, the cop on the line asked “Is he in the house?” Uhh, no sir. “Then he is not a burglar lady, he is a prowler.” It was not a conversation we expected what with the prowler walking around above our heads but it is good to know the proper nomenclature. Inside the house is a burglar, outside is a prowler.

I think the cop knocked on the door before we even got off of the phone. I went upstairs – with a hairbrush in case it was a burglar and not a prowler – and the cop was waiting outside, weapon drawn. In the middle of the street was another patrol car with another cop standing behind the car with a shotgun pointing at us, me, really. I told him that we heard somebody walking around in the other half of the house and he knocked on the door yelling “police” and stepped to the side. I just stood there, in front of the door, until the cop told me to stand to the side, away from the door. Pointing at the door, he said, “That’s where he is going to shoot.” Up until then, it had never occurred to me that one result, when I knocked on a door, would be somebody shooting at me. But he – they – didn’t shoot and we went inside, found an open window, locked it, and went our separate ways, the police officer back to driving around in the dark and me, two new lessons learned, back to sleep.

As to why the riots happened where they happened, I’ve thought about it a lot and it is complicated, each city has its own particulars. Still, I think that there is a general lesson here, only a hypothesis, really. To greatly oversimplify, nasty dictatorships are stable, think the Soviet Union under Stalin or Saudi Araba under the Saudis, and democracies are stable, think Denmark or Canada, but a pretend democracy is not stable. To us white people, San Francisco talked the good talk – they had something like Safty and Respect on the side of their cars – but, to Black people, they were not what they pretended to be, they were every bit as bad as the Oakland cops. All that good talk was in service of covering up the miserable way Black people were/are really treated in San Francisco in 1968/now. The disconnect is that Black people have been told they live in a democracy with all the liberty and opportunity that implies, but the reality is that they live in an oligarchy in which they are treated as second class citizens. The problem is not reality but the difference between expectations and reality.

Biden’s current mission is to make the world focus on his $1.9 trillion plan for a coronavirus comeback. New York Times Opinion column by Gail Collins.

Watching President Joseph Biden’s Town Hall, I started to tear up. I don’t remember the question or his particular answer, but Biden just seems like such a decent guy (although a decent guy with what seems like abnormally white teeth). I’ve never seen a Trump Town Hall but I’ve seen several of his rallies – on TV, not in person – and he is a stellar entertainer, bullshiting and bantering with a smile, interacting, playing. almost dancing, with the crowd; Biden is an old-fashioned politician and doesn’t do any of those things, but he does radiate a sincerity and compassion along with a technocrat’s grasp of detail that is very effective. For me, he is most effective when he starts to ramble on about a subject that he has obviously thought about and least effective when he sinks into what seems like an over-rehearsed answer.

One thing that really impressed me about Biden is that he can see the other guy’s point of view. When asked about China aggressively terrorizing the  Uyghurs, annexing Hong Kong – which may be the wrong word, maybe suppressing is better – and threatening Taiwan, he said: “…if you know anything about Chinese history, it has always been the time when China has been victimized by the outer world is when they haven’t been unified at home. So the central… Vastly overstated. The central principle of Xi Jinping is that there must be a united tightly-controlled China.” He then went on to say “Well, there will be repercussions for China…China is trying very hard to become the world leader and…as long as they’re engaged in activity that is contrary to basic human rights, it’s going to be hard for them to do that. But it’s much more complicated. I shouldn’t try to talk China policy in 10 minutes on television.”

What most pleased me, however, is that President Biden seems to be a committed member of The Friends of MMT. To refresh your memory, MMT or Modern Monetary Theory, or Modern Money Theory says that a large National Debt is not a problem if it is not inflationary. They point out that Japan has been running a huge National Debt for years without inflation. They also point out that with all the increase in the money supply during the Obama Administration, conventical economics says that we should have rampant inflation by now, but we haven’t. We haven’t even had any inflation with the additional Debt brought on by Trump’s massive tax cuts for the wealthy. Actually, because we haven’t any inflation and a little inflation is considered good, to induce inflation, the Federal Reserve has even dropped the interest rate to a hyper-low 1/4 of a percent. (to quote myself from a post on MMT from about a year ago). In the Town Hall, President Biden said “This is the first time in my career, and as you can tell I’m over 30. The first time in my career that there is a consensus among economists left, right, and center and including the IMF and in Europe that the overwhelming consensus is, in order to grow the economy a year, two, three, and four down the line, we can’t spend too much. Now is the time we should be spending, now is the time to go big.”

With the economy on the skids because of Covid-19 and Global Climate Change roaring towards us, we are going to need to spend money, lots of money, to survive and it is nice to know that President Joseph Biden knows that.

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George Washington turned an army of ragtag troops into an unstoppable force that defeated the British & secured America’s independence. As President, he oversaw the creation of our Constitution & showed the world what it looks like to govern by the people and for the people. Nikki Haley @NikkiHaley Former U.S. Ambassador to the UN. 116th Governor of South Carolina. @ClemsonUniv Tiger. Proud American.

It’s President’s Day and, this year, it seems like a big deal. Every day, the yardage that Trump takes up in our National Psyches shrinks a little, but the sense of the character of the President does matter is not going to go away for a while. When I saw the above obligatory Presidential Day Tweet, above, by Nikki Haley, my first thought was I don’t think Washington really won any battles, certainly not any head-to-head pitched battles, but he had a sterling character.

Britain was the empire and we were the insurgents, the only way to win, in that situation, is to NOT go head-to-head in battle. We ambushed them, we struck at their back from behind trees, and we did a lot of running away. The famous painting above, Washington Crossing the Deleware, shows Washington crossing the Deleware River to sneak up on British contractors on Christmas Eve. Attacking the Hessian mercenaries while they were in their beds on Christmas Eve is not something we would consider honorable if the Taliban did it in Afghanistan. While Washington was far from the first guerilla warrior – although he was probably the first to go into battle in powder blue breaches – he perfected it and brought it into the modern, Western, world. The British, of course, thought it was barbaric – just like we think the Taliban is barbaric – and refused to stoop to their level.

As an aside, both Generals Grant and Sherman worried that the Confederate secessionists would turn to guerilla warfare because that would be the only way they could beat the much stronger Union Army, I suspect that the Southern Aristocracy, like their British forefathers, thought they were above such barbaric killing and preferred to continue to wage a conventional war they couldn’t win. End aside.

I think it is wonderfully ironic that General George Washington, The Father of Our Country, was also the Father of Modern Guerilla Warfare. This President’s Day it is good to remember that George Washington is not great because he built an unstoppable force, he is great because of his groundbreaking act of walking away from the Presidency after two terms. Nobody had ever done that before.

A Belated Happy President’s Day to you.

“This case is much worse than someone who falsely shouts fire in a crowded theater. It’s more like a case where the town fire chief, who’s paid to put out fires, sends a mob not to yell fire in a crowded theater, but to actually set the theater on fire.” lead House impeachment manager Jamie Raskin (D-MD)

When a coup attempt goes unpunished it becomes a training exercise. 𝕊𝕦𝕟𝕕𝕒𝕖 𝔾𝕦𝕣𝕝 @Sundae_Gurl 𝕊𝕠𝕗𝕥 𝕥𝕨𝕖𝕖𝕥𝕤 𝕒𝕟𝕕 𝕒 𝕟𝕚𝕔𝕖 𝕤𝕖𝕥 𝕠𝕗 𝕡𝕦𝕟𝕤. 𝕀 𝕝𝕚𝕜𝕖 𝕥𝕠 𝕔𝕠𝕠𝕜 𝕞𝕪 𝕗𝕒𝕞𝕚𝕝𝕪 𝕒𝕟𝕕 𝕡𝕖𝕥𝕤. 𝕎𝕒𝕤𝕙𝕚𝕟𝕘𝕥𝕠𝕟, 𝔻ℂ

“I told the Members of the Senate who were in the Democratic caucus that I was a free man first, an American second, a Senator third, and a Democrat fourth, in that order”; President Lyndon Johnson at a Fundraising Dinner in New Orleans October 09, 1964.

“I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters,” Presidential campaigner Donald Trump in Iowa on Sunday, January 24, 2016.

I started writing about the Super Bowl, but I’m already bored with it. I didn’t really have a dog in the fight, although I am an AFC guy, and I was, at first, mildly rooting for Kansas City. Still, another win by Tom Brady is not a very big story anymore, anywhere (except Tampa Bay). I do want to say that, between the flyover, the plethora of flags, football in general, and the famously pro-Trump Tom Brady, I expected the ads to be more to the Right but the guys hawking stuff are politically neutral and they seem to think the sweet spot is very much to the left of Nationalism and Racism.

Watching the Impeachment, I’m not sure that optimism reflects reality. It is hard to watch the Impeachment and not be scared, for me, at least. Scared that the Insurrectionist mob is going to win next time – and there will be a next time unless a lot of people are put in prison – scared that we are seeing the beginning of the end of American Democracy, scared that, as obvious as Trump’s involvement is to me, he is going to waltz free, scared that the Republican Senators, all of who took an oath to protect the Constitution, don’t really give a shit about the Constitution or the country. As an aside, the fact that I care so much, somewhat surprises me. End aside.

I think that there is a lot of anger in the land and very little willingness to admit the other side even has any opinions worth considering. I know that I’ve already taken a side, I think like everybody else, and, of course, I like to think that my side is right. I like to think that my side is the long arc bending towards a moral universe, even if that journey is somewhat haphazard and wobbly. But, I suspect, we all feel that way, even Josh Hawley, and that is why most Republican Senators will vote for acquittal.

While I hope that they don’t, while I hope that the Republican Senators were close enough to the action and becoming politically distant enough to go after Trump, I don’t think the Senate is the primary target here. The primary target is the electorate, especially the moderate Republican electorate, and there is an expectation that proving Trump instigated his followers to take over the government in order to “stop the steal” is and will alienate more people than it will convert. Part of the reason for that is because the Democrats, and Congressman Jamie Raskin in particular, put on a good case – to my eyes, anyway – and part of it is that the nationalistic, populous, side of the Party is becoming more emboldened, going after conventional conservatives like Representative Liz Chaney – in a sort of Reign of Terror phase of the Revolution – because they are not faithful enough to Trump. Hopefully, that will drive the moderates from the Republican Party. If so, the Impeachment will be a success.

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Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple. Barry Switzer, University of Oklahoma and Dallas Cowboys coach, as quoted in the Chicago Tribune in 1986.

Reading about some of the reactions to the Donald Trump instigated insurrection I was struck by how different it was for people of color than it was for the White Representatives. It brought home how privileged my life has been. I was born on third base and for most of my life, I thought I had gotten there on my own. As a teenager and into my twenties, I had a series of summer jobs as a Union Carpenter. In those days, you could become a Union member if you had a job offer and there were no Union carpenters available to fill the position. The job I was offered was grunt work, nailing off plywood floors in a large apartment complex. This was before the days of nail guns and the job only paid apprentice wages but it was a good job for a seventeen-year-old.

I went to the local and applied for a Union card, they told me to come back on a Thursday night membership meeting. At the meeting, three of us were voted in. I don’t remember saying anything, we just stood in front of the assembled members, facing away from them so we couldn’t see the voting, and got voted in. There were no Black applicants or members, there were no Mexicans or Asians, just three White guys trying to get in an all-white guy Union club (which we all three did).

Now, thinking back on that initiation, I suspect – more than suspect, really – the process was designed to keep Black and other minority guys out of what we called “The Trades” although Black guys could become Laborers. It never occurred to me that I was able to get in because I am White. In the Army, when I ended up in the Command and Control Platoon in Korea while the Black soldiers were in the Generator or the Launcher Platoons, I thought it was because of my brains and my outstanding work. I thought it was just a coincidence that there were no Black soldiers in Command and Control (but there were a couple of stupid White guys).

When Sam Berland and I started our own business, we took the numbers for our first project to a banker we knew from our days of being in management at Shapell Industries. The banker was White and we talked about the deal over lunch. A lunch between a couple of friends, with much in common, having a friendly discussion over a couple of drinks.

Looking back on it, none of these successes would have happened if I had been Black. I want to add, probably defensily, that I am a Liberal, I’ve been a Liberal for as long as I can remember being anything, and I grew up believing that everybody should have equal rights and I have tried to act that way. Still, I didn’t see the sea of privilege I was swimming in. I thought my breaks were because of me as an outstanding individual not because I am an average White Male.

The opposite of being an average White Male, like me, is being an extraordinary Woman of Color like Rashida Tlaib. Where I can fit in, they always stand out. I have never thought somebody was trying to kill me for what I am. Although, as an aside, I once thought somebody was going to kill me for something I had done. The threat lasted about three days and was very scary. I was distracted from everything else going on in my life. End aside. I can not imagine what it must be like for the women of the Squad who are threatened almost every day. Let me leave you with an example.