We must be in the top 1% when it comes to the actual quality of life we’ve had for the last six months. All the things that normally make our home inconvenient, the isolation and encroaching nature, make it a great place to sit-out a pandemic. We are up about 70 stairs from the street and where our backyard ends, a permanent open space starts. This morning I went for a walk – I just walked out of the house, down the stairs, and off on to the trail – and I didn’t see another person (although I did see a Tesla drive by on the street while I was on the trail). It is Summertime and the Living is easy, or it should be. But I read that President Trump is trying to shutdown the Post Office to improve his chances for re-election and I am almost instantly enraged.

Last night, we sat  on our deck and had a shrimp salad with heritage tomatoes for dinner as we watched and felt the day end and the night come alive. Our life is good, and yet, when I read that the very conservative former governor of Ohio, John Kasich, is speaking longer than AOC at the Democratic Convention, I was instantly furious.

My life in quarantine is great and/but/still, behind that, under that, is a deep fear that masquerades as anger when it surfaces and acts out at the least provocation. Not so much fear for me or even the planet, which will be just fine in five million years or so, but fear for my country – which I must say, surprises me (and tickles me) a little – and even more, fear for us, earth’s people, for our home. It’s not like I wake up in the morning and say “Holy shit, the world is ending.”, I wake up and fed our cat, Precious Mae, and then go out on the back deck to greet my little cloistered world. It is hard to stand there and not be thankful to what ever process brought us together at this moment, and yet, and yet, that deep and subtle underflow of dread is there. We are destroying our home.

I’m retired and I don’t have to go to work, I don’t have to worry about my kids and school, I am here, safely feeling the season change, eating great meals. Still, the fear is there, not dormant, almost lurking, waiting for a reason to flare up into anger.

President Trump on Friday signed into law the largest rescue measure in history, a $2-trillion economic relief package to get money to many Americans as well as hospitals, businesses, and state and local governments struggling with the pandemic. Los Angeles Times March 27, 2020.

The central idea of MMT [Modern Monetary Theory] is that governments with a fiat currency system can and should print (or create with a few keystrokes in today’s digital age) as much money as they need to spend because they cannot go broke or be insolvent unless a political decision to do so is taken.

Traditional thinking says such spending would be fiscally irresponsible as the debt would balloon and inflation would skyrocket.

But according to MMT, a large government debt isn’t the precursor to collapse we have been led to believe it is, countries like the U.S. can sustain much greater deficits without cause for concern, and in fact a small deficit or surplus can be extremely harmful and cause a recession since deficit spending is what builds people’s savings. By Deborah D’Souza in Investopedia, updated May 6, 2020.

After intense wrangling, the heads of government in the European Union agreed to a €750B stimulus package. The negotiations were even more tricky than usual, though the outcome was hailed as a breakthrough. It is the first time the EU as a block will issue bonds on a huge scale to back stimulus, spreading the fiscal risk among all member countries. The Economist July 25th 2020.

The Green New Deal is all about spending huge amounts of money. Money is needed to both fight Climate Change and provide new, good, union-wage-scale jobs to currently underpaid workers. The question is where is that money going to come from. The most obvious answers are Taxes and other programs, such as Military Spending. Neither of those will be easy although using military contractors to build some of the Green New Deal infrastructure might keep their lobbyists from trying to squelch the Green New Deal spending. Another way to get money is to borrow it. However, there is a major problem with the government borrowing lots of money, in the conventional thinking, government debt, especially huge government debt, is considered one of the cardinal sins.

For years, almost my entire adult life, we’ve been told that that a large National Debt, by its self, is a problem. For as long as I remember, one of Washington’s most reliable rituals is the Republicans cutting taxes when they are in power and the Democrats raising some of the taxes again but mostly cutting programs when they come into power because everybody agrees we have to reduce the National Debt.

Modern Monetary Theory, better known as MMT, disagrees. MMT 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.  

AOC Only Gets 60 Seconds At Democratic Convention To Deliver Pre-Recorded Message Rachel Sandler Forbes Staff

“I only have a minute.
Sixty seconds in it.
Forced upon me, I did not choose it,
But I know that I must use it.
Give account if I abuse it.
Suffer, if I lose it.
Only a tiny little minute,
But eternity is in it.”
Dr. Benjamin E. Mays (and recited by Elijah Cummings)
Tweet by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez @AOC US House candidate, NY-14US Representative,NY-14 (BX & Queens). In a modern, moral, & wealthy society, no American should be too poor to live. % People-Funded, no lobbyist. She/her Bronx + Queens, NYC ocasiocortez.com

Replying to @AOC
You’ve got this. Remember all those poems we recited together in 2nd grade? It was prep for this moment. You’ve got this. Tweet by mjacobs @mjacobs324 Veteran elementary teacher. Uncertain about our future but inspired by former student @AOC and hopeful for Biden/Harris Joined June 2016

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez @AOC Replying to @mjacobs324
Ms. Jacobs! Is that you?! Yes, I do remember the poems we recited in second grade! You prepared me perfectly for this moment. Thank you for teaching me, encouraging my growth, and believing in me as a child.

I’ve fought alongside Senator @KamalaHarris for direct cash payments during the pandemic and for clean water as a human right. Now let’s defeat Trump and make those policies a reality, Rashida Tlaib.

[Kamala Harris] is responsive to activist and movement pressure to make climate a top priority.” Evan Weber, political director of the Sunrise Movement, applauding the partnership between Harris and AOC on Climate Legislation.

Congratulations to @KamalaHarris, who will make history as our next Vice President. She understands what it takes to stand up for working people, fight for health care for all, and take down the most corrupt administration in history. Let’s get to work and win. Congratulatory Tweet by Bernie Sanders.

Senator Kamala Harris is not my first choice for Biden’s Vice President but I think she is a good choice. She is smart, ambitious, and almost gorgeous. Most importantly, she doesn’t have a glass jaw and she should be able to easily take what ever Trump & Company are going to dish out (for the same reason as Ilhan Omar, Rashida Talib, Ayanna Pressley, and AOC are so tough; they are all smart, very agile, women of color and because of that they all grew up having to fight the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” {and President Trump & Company can certainly be described as outrageous fortune}).

As an sort of aside, people of color, especially women are almost always subtly judged to a higher standard than men, for example when Lyndon Johnson won over Barry Goldwater with 61% it was rightly reported as an “historic landslide”. When AOC beat a Wall Street and Chamber of Commerce supported competitor in this primary, with 74.6% percent of the vote, it was described as “surviving a well funded primary challenge”. End aside.

Harris is somewhat of a protégé  of Willie Brown, who, himself, is an amazing politician, having been born in the small jerkwater town of Mineola in East Texas, he ended up being arguably the most powerful person in Californian politics before he retired to become mayor of San Francisco. They dated in 1994-95 when she was an Assistant DA of Alameda County; he was 60 and she was 29. Willie Brown, I imagine, had a lot to teach Harris and Harris is proving to be an excellent student.

Harris is described as somewhat of an centrist but I do think she is to the left of Biden in both climate and racial issues still, that is hard to tell because both Biden and Harris are moving left with the Progressive tide. However, according to The Daily Beast, since January 2019, congressional records show that Harris has signed on to 18 bills Sanders introduced, while Sanders has similarly added his name on 20 pieces of legislation put forth by Harris. 

These are unusual times and everything I read says that pandemics usually lead to major changes so it should be an interesting time as well. Change does feels like it is in the air and that is thrilling but it is good to remember that “May you live in an interesting time” is a Chinese curse.

I did not want to join the crowds at crowded Lake Tahoe. Mike Moore had passed on a place recommendation, The Sierra Valley Preserve, from a photographer friend, Deborah O’Grady, who seems to have a similar esthetic to my photography. We decided to give it a try. This is the headwaters of the Feather River and, while it was great to be alone in a beautiful landscape, The Preserve promises to be much better in the Spring when there will be more water and wildlife. Still, the quiet was very welcome and the area came with the timely bonus of having been “discovered” by a black explorer, Jim Beckwourth, in 1850.

Two days before our walk, Rashida Tlaib won her primary by a landslide. According to the New York Times, she was the most vulnerable of The Squad so it was nice to see her win by 30 points. The same day, Justice Democrats backed Cory Bush, an activist from Ferguson Missouri, beat long time office holder, William Clay in her primary, and Marie Newman beat an old time anti-abortion Democrat. Newman ran on Medicare-for-all, a $15 minimum wage, and the Green New Deal as well as getting rid of ICE. Here, walking in a wilderness preserve in what is undoubtable Trump Territory, the sun is shinning and it seems very much like the Progressives are on the rise.

We saw a few Trump signs but the one that tickled us the most was the No More Bullshit on the sign above. It seems like the most unlikely slogan imaginable for a guy who is, after all, a professional bullshitter and it didn’t detract from our joy over the Progressive wavelet.