#220 – Dick Bernard: Target, MN Forward, and the other side of "Branding"

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Breaking news on this issue. The remainder of this post was written before this news bulletin was received.
In recent weeks Target Corporation has found itself in the national Bulls eye for corporate sponsorship of a “business as citizen” political action committee called MN Forward.
Pipsqueaks, common citizens like myself, can’t impact on such a behemoth…or can we?
I keep thinking back to a surprise snowstorm around Thanksgiving, 1983. I was enroute to Duluth, and at tiny Canyon MN, the snow on four-lane highway 53 became so heavy that I and other motorists were literally stopped in our tracks, and had to be rescued by snowmobiles.
Salvation for me was being able to stay overnight in the tiny store/gas station/home which is pictured below. The proprietors harbored myself and an over the road trucker who was, like me, stalled on the freeway. We had beds to sleep in, and a simple macaroni hotdish – under the circumstances a gourmet meal.

Canyon Standard Oil Station Spring 1984


The Canyon store had been, and continued to be a good way stop for me as I traveled from Minnesota’s Iron Range to Duluth. I’d get gas, maybe a candy bar, and engage in some conversation.
The first credit card I ever had was a Standard Oil card, and it was used exclusively for gas and oil – this was in the days before full service convenience stations. Standard Oil had my loyalty – a positive brand image. Not only did I have their card, but one of their stations had gone the extra mile to give me exceptional service.
But all was to change, probably less than a year after the Thanksgiving good deed.
I stopped by the station as I always did, and the owners told me they were no longer going to be carrying gasoline. Standard Oil higher-ups had decided they were too small, and they were taken off the distribution list for fuel products. Their only sin, best as I could tell, was their small volume. They weren’t worth the trouble. Ultimately the store closed.
When the Canyon Store stopped selling Standard Oil products, I stopped going to Standard Oil, and I never went back, even as the brand changed names as the company was bought and sold. If the sign said “Standard Oil”, wherever I was, I went to the next station down the road….
Twenty years after Standard Oil had issued me one of their credit cards, I stopped patronizing Standard Oil. Their branding had become a negative for me.
I’m not naive.
My petty amount of business would not bring Standard Oil to its knees.
Similarly, my not shopping at Target will not seem to have an impact.
But image is critical to a company like Target, or like Standard Oil in an earlier day.
You cannot rebuild a reputation simply by hoping people will forget.
I never did….

#212 – Dick Bernard: "Free Lunch"?

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Last week my wife was in conversation with a neighbor down the street. “Georgie” is a good neighbor, a nice person: one of those people you hope will be in your neighborhood.
But she’s not one to rely on if you’re in some other neighborhood. She has boundaries. In her sphere, there is only one side to any story: the one she chooses to believe.
This particular day Georgie was sharing her apocalyptic vision of January, 2011, when the twin evils of huge tax increases and “Obamacare” are to take effect. She was speaking, of course, about what she’d heard about Health Care Reform, and the pending Sunset on the Bush-era tax cuts. She, a never married retired single lady of Medicare age and moderate means who chooses her own information and associations, was horrified by the twin prospects of approaching financial Armageddon. She believed what she’d been told.
As it happened, the very next day came a forwarded e-mail from somebody in Arkansas who calls himself “Dr. Larry”. He is one of these folks who has a computer and knows how to forward stuff to a personal list. Most of what he sends is either false or wildly inaccurate, and it is always hate-Obama or hate-Democrats oriented. Sometimes I take a shot back, but it’s a waste of cyber-energy.
The “doctor’s” screed this particular day was about the evil of sunsetting the Bush tax cuts. His forward came from the anti-tax outfit founded by Grover Norquist, whose goal is, essentially, to demolish government (except for certain things like “defense”). Norquists most famous quote: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”
It could fairly be said that Norquist was a prime architect of the Bush tax-cuts, so his groups news release was extraordinarily self-serving. Of course, the name on the groups letterhead did nothing to identify who it actually represented – but that is another story.
The two pieces of information, from Georgie and Dr. Larry, caused me to look into this business of taxes from a personal perspective.
I am a very ordinary middle class type. I have also kept every tax return I have ever filed – now nearing 50 of them, all in a big box in chronological order – easy to research.
I decided to dig out my 1999 and 2009 tax returns, to see what had happened to my state and federal taxes in those years.
For all of us, personal circumstances change, and the same is true for me. But it was possible for me to establish something of an “apples to apples” comparison between 1999 and 2009.
Succinctly, my state taxes were roughly the same in the two years; my 2009 federal taxes were about two-thirds of the 1999 level. That tax cut was a heckuva deal.

Or was it?
The extra money from the tax cut may have made it seem, to me, that I was wealthier…but that is not the case. Because of that tax cut, my life style didn’t change. All that changed was the national debt, part of which is my responsibility.
As we all know, those tax cuts were not accompanied by spending cuts by government in the roaring years of 2001-2009. The Federal government was spending money like drunken sailors, mostly off the books for the war in Iraq, and to fund, on the national credit card, big special interest benefits – like tax cuts – that someday would have to be paid for. Norquist and company were, in effect, filling the bathtub to make it easier, now, in 2010, to drown the unsuspecting victim: the people.
If we are smart, we will let the sun set on those ill-advised tax cuts, and start paying our bills, rather than suffering the delusion that the national credit card will last long into our future.
Sorry, Georgie and Dr. Larry, the free lunch is NOT free.
We were deceived into thinking that it was possible to get something for nothing. It’s not.

#210 – Dick Bernard: A Farm Freezer, Haiti, the Oil Spill and US

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Monday, July 12, was the six month anniversary of the catastrophic earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince and area in Haiti.
That same day, I spent a few hours helping my Uncle and Aunt, out at their now-empty North Dakota farm. (They’ve lived in a nearby town for several years – an option they don’t like, but the only reasonable option they have. They are at an age, and their medical conditions are such, that they could no longer survive independently on this place where they lived as brother and sister for over 80 years. My uncle is 85, his sister, my aunt, turns 90 a week from today. Their house remains much as they left it, but they don’t live there, only frequent visits.)
One of Monday’s tasks was to empty their freezer which included frozen produce from their garden, some of it ten years old. They knew it had to be done: my uncle, in fact, brought up the idea. That produce in that freezer would never be used by anyone, including themselves. But the notion of wasting this food was reprehensible to him. He was nine years old during the worst year of the Great Depression in ND, 1934, and he knows what it is like to have nothing.
We unloaded the freezer, and put its contents on the back of his old pickup truck, and drove down to the family garden – a one acre plot, used by the family for many years. The garden is still used by the couple, but only a tiny portion of it is planted. They don’t have the energy to garden more, and even if they did, the produce would go to waste: for them, it is unusable.
During the Depression and other bygone years, there were eight people or more who depended on that garden, but the prospects of even a small crop to harvest and process for the winter were not always good. Once experienced, one tends not to forget such experiences.
Those bygone years, the normal process was to pressure cook and can the food, in sealed glass jars. There was no electricity and thus no freezer; there were no plastic bags – a product of the petroleum industry. Kids now-a-days would be hard-pressed to even imagine the planting/growing/harvesting/preserving process which people of my generation grew up with. Forced to live that way again, most of us would not survive, literally.
Down at the garden we emptied the plastic bags which had held the frozen produce of the farm: spinach, corn, beans, peas, broccoli, onions, apples, and on and on and on. Considering it was ten years worth, it really wasn’t a lot of, as my uncle would say, “wasted food”.
While he was sitting on the tail gate of the truck, opening and emptying the bags, he was lamenting the waste, here, while so many people were starving elsewhere. No, he didn’t think that frozen bag of kernel corn should be sent to Haiti; more so, the notion of waste was on his mind. He wants to help, but how? People his age get endless appeals for funds from all manner of agencies. My advice to him: throw them away unless you know the group is good. So many are simply scams.
I doubt that he – or I, for that matter – thought about the amount of electricity that had to be consumed to keep that food frozen….
Haiti, and that waste at the farm unexpectedly came together for me a little later in the day. Back at my temporary home in the local motel, I flipped on the television, and happened across a CSPAN program recorded earlier that day: a panel discussing Haiti six months after the earthquake. The program is well worth watching. It had not occurred to me till that moment that July 12 was indeed the six months anniversary of that humanitarian disaster.
Back home in the Twin Cities the next day, there were several e-mails with varying perspectives six months after the quake in Haiti. Mostly, though, Haiti is out of sight, out of mind, even for people like myself who have a great interest in Haiti.
More on our minds, currently, is the catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico: hundreds of millions of gallons of crude oil befouling the Gulf: oil which was to be used for the fuel that got me out to that North Dakota farm, and back; and which was used for to manufacture those plastic bags we had just emptied.
Mostly, for most of us, life goes on. “Don’t worry, be happy”. We’ll always have it all.
Don’t count on it.

From the garden, back to the garden


The farm garden, before an acre, presently only a small plot.

#209 – Richard Bigelow: Thoughts on Attitudes towards Immigration and Immigrants

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Mr. Bigelow lives in border country Texas and grew up in rural Colorado. He responds, here, to one of those ubiquitous basically anti-immigrant – if you’re not “white like me” rants that whiz around the internet – anonymous hate speech.
“Yes, I have some different thoughts on immigration than those in the letter you sent. My thinking is in process and I don’t purport to have very many answers to the many difficult issues involved but I am happy to share some of my thoughts.
As you know, I am a middle class, white, mostly Anglo-Saxon, protestant, male, born in the United States of America. That makes me part of the most powerful group of people to ever walk the planet. I love my country and believe we have done and continue to do more good in the world than any other nation. Our laws and system of justice while not perfect are the best the world has to offer. I am a proud citizen of the USA. That said, I believe that there are some major problems at home and in the world that we as a great and powerful nation have a human, moral and Christian obligation to address. Poverty and racism are two of those problems that are core in the immigration debate.
One doesn’t have to go back too far in history to realize we are all immigrants maybe including even the “Native American” population. Being part of the English immigrant group that became the dominant group way before I was born it is easy to understand some of the ethnocentric feeling articulated in [the internet] letter. However, as a teen I became aware of the melting pot myth. As you know there were not many minority families in [my Colorado home town]. My first Black and Hispanic friends were from [a nearby larger city] and not only did they not want to melt but would not have been allowed had they wanted. They were considered by much of the dominant culture as inferior and were treated differently. In my first minorities class in college we talked about the tossed salad analogy as opposed to the melting pot. This allows for a wonderful multi cultural society where we live together with many common issues but maintain and even celebrate the differences. This idea continues to guide me in my life journey. I can and sometimes do celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, Cinco De Mayo, Kwanzaa, Passover, even tried to fast during Ramadan one year (that sucked). I love to dance the Chicken Dance in Fredericksburg, visit China Town in S.F, little Italy in New York and Boston. Anyway you get the idea.
In spite of my pride in the USA I believe we have a lot to answer for. We have allowed those immigrants who look and sound kind of like us to assimilate while exploiting the Black, Brown, and Yellow “immigrates”. I don’t think I need to rehash civil rights stuff here or the history of how we provoked a war with Mexico so we could lay claim to land from Colorado to California. Nor should I have to review the immoral treatment of Japanese and German Americans during WWII. I also hope that most people are aware of how many of us have in the past and continue to encourage and even help bring workers here illegally so we can build our own wealth and that of our great nation by paying meager wages and limited benefits.
I have chosen to live in an area close to the border where I am a minority. When I go to a store and no one speaks English and those ethnocentric thoughts begin to kick in, I only have to remember that many of these families have been right here since before the Pilgrims made it to New England. You would be hard pressed to find a more patriotic group of people ready to serve this great nation than among the Mexican/American community here.
I think you know that [my wife] is from here but I am not sure you know she is a descendant of the Solis family, part of a big Spanish land grant from the 1500’s that was on both sides of the river. Her grandparents only spoke Spanish and she only spoke Spanish when she started 1st grade. Her well meaning Anglo teachers punished her when she spoke Spanish even at recess and when asking to go to the bathroom. She learned her lessons well, lived in Houston for 10 years and is much more urbane than me. With my last name and her light complexion people think she is Anglo. My red neck friends in Abilene would try telling her Mexican jokes. I cut them off if I saw it coming but didn’t always see it coming. She only smiled but in her heart she is really not sure that she is not some how inferior and she still feels guilty speaking Spanish even though she uses it everyday in her work with veterans. It breaks my heart.
While it is hard to generalize about such a large group of people, I believe that most of the documented and undocumented immigrants are here because they already have family here and or they are unable to support themselves adequately in their home country. I think that the reason we don’t have a big problem on the Canadian border is that their economy is good, they look and sound more like the dominant culture and I am told it is not too hard to get a work visa especially if one has a needed skill. I understand it is very difficult and time consuming to get a work visa in the US if one is from Mexico or Central America and especially if one doesn’t have a professional credential. Again my ethnocentric self thinks “good, we have enough problems with out importing a bunch more poor unskilled laborers that will further stress ‘our’ economy“. However, there is data that suggests that if the undocumented were able to earn a fair wage and pay taxes it might actually help the economy. Also my Human and Christian ethics kick in and I am reminded that God put the river there but we made it a border. If I couldn’t feed my family on the other side I would try to cross anyway I could. I do not want to tear down the Statue of Liberty or besmirch the Ellis Island folks [a suggestion in the letter to which he responds]. But there are other stories equally compelling.
There are no easy answers to the immigration questions. We have made great progress in the civil rights arena in my lifetime but racism is still alive and well. Ethnocentric pride in ones country can be a close cousin to racism. One need only to read all the anger and hate on the internet as people post regarding anything Obama does or on the new Arizona law. People who think there are easy answers like tougher laws, fences, or militarizing the border are at best naive at worst racist. I would like to see policies developed with love of neighbor as the guiding light, and more money spent on improving the economy in other countries even if we have to sacrifice more. To whom a lot is given a lot is expected. There is something wrong in a nation who spends more on a cup of designer coffee than some workers make in a day, or where we spend more on pet care than the GNP of some nations. I am not sure open borders is the right thing but I am not sure that it is not. I do think we need some kind of amnesty although I am not yet sure what it should look like. I believe in the ideal of one world with equality for all but I’m not naive enough to think we will get there any time soon. However, I never thought I would see a woman or black president. I am now hopeful I will see a woman.
　
On the subject of the Arizona Law I would think every American, liberal or conservative should be worried. I don’t want to live in a society where I or anyone else has to carry papers. Even under current law when we leave our home heading north we have to go through check points about 60 miles from the border. They are multi million dollar facilities with all kinds of electronic equipment and usually dozens of border patrol agents on duty. I must turn off my cell phone, wait in line, usually less than 5 minutes, they sometimes check my undercarriage with a mirror, and frequently have dogs who sniff the outside of my car. They usually only ask “are you a US citizen” and wave me through. [My wife] gets even less hassle because she is so pale and I’m so swarthy. Sometimes they ask “where are you going today”. Now I can either tell them, lie to them or say what I would like to say which is, “none of your xxx business” but then I would be there awhile so I lie to them. The woman agents seem to like to hear “I am headed to Dallas to visit my grand-kids”. Minor hassle for me but I assure you that some of my dark skinned heavy accented brothers and sisters have much more hassle including the dog inside and some times even pat downs. I don’t like it and I damn sure don’t want to empower or require the local or state police to do the same stuff. To those who say “they are only enforcing the law” I would remind them the this great nation was founded by a bunch of law breakers (as in tea party).
Unjust laws need to be challenged.
Everyone must find his or her own ethic and act accordingly. I am not always sure what to do but I pray about it a lot. For now I plan to continue offering food and shelter to those headed north with or with out papers when I can. I would help them get through the check points if I could but I don’t know how without getting arrested. I will pay them the same with or without papers to cut my grass etc. so they can eat. I will support my sister-in-law, with my tax dollars, who takes care of badly damaged babies who were lucky enough to take advantage of the law that lets them become a citizen because the mother crossed for delivery. I will not report the husband of friend who is spending 3 years in prison at tax payers expense who was formerly making a living for his family by day labor and who will be deported when he is released and then be back with his family within a week. I will support and applaud my friend who teaches ESL [English as a Second Language] to the undocumented children of fishermen from Central America and takes them to UIL competitions where they usually excel. I will continue to travel to Rio Bravo (30 miles into Mexico) as part of my church mission to help at a deaf school even though travel is kind of risky right now with the cartel wars.
I know you like to read / I recommend the following:
Manana (don’t know how to make the ~ over the n) by Justo Gonzales the Methodist Clergy, Cuban born, who I think is still on faculty at the International Seminary in Atlanta.
The Great River by Paul Hogan (a History of the Rio Grande but reads like a novel)
Rain of Gold by Victor Villa Senor (again with the ~ on the n another story of immigration not via Ellis Island)
Thanks for letting me share some of my thoughts. Reasonable people should reason together.”
My love to all / Dick

#205 – Dick Bernard: The Looming Twin Cities Nurses Strike: Apparently Settled

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Overnight came a bulletin from the Minnesota Nurses Association, announcing a tentative agreement between Twin Cities Nurses and the Hospitals which employ them. The vote is next week, on the same day the strike was to begin. It is very good news, for everyone involved.
Having spent a long career as a teachers union representative in a state with the right to strike, my career included plenty of time dealing with, especially, ‘deaths door’ and extremely tense mediations to hopefully settle a contract in lieu of a strike, I “know the drill” – the public posturing, the reality faced by both the union and the management as they get closer to a strike. What the public has to chew on is usually “the tip of the iceberg”.
Among many items to deal with, both sides know well the multiple grim realities of walkouts. I know the Minnesota Nurses Association is a first-class union. The management team, whoever it was, knew it was time to settle, and did, to their credit as well. Oftimes, people on one side or the other get stuck in ideological cement, and the results are not pretty.
Until I read the news release, I really wasn’t positive which hospitals were facing a possible strike. Turned out one of them was Park Nicollet Methodist, which is the place I visited the patient on Wednesday (recounted towards the end of yesterday’s blog post . There was not a single indication, there, that labor and management were bracing for a work stoppage in a conflict over contract terms.
I would suspect that the tension is not over, nor will it be over after the expected ratification of terms and conditions next week. Both sides will be faced with ongoing hard work and difficult decisions.
Nonetheless, congratulations are in order!

#202 – Dick Bernard: Why Are We a Ship Full of Fools?

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Thursday afternoon a friend stopped by to visit. He’d been to a wake at a nearby mortuary, paying respects to a long-time colleague who, he said, had few friends and almost no family. A kindly gesture.
We visited.
Jim is a fairly recent retiree from a career position in state government. I suppose somebody could call him a “bureaucrat”; some others wouldn’t even elevate him to that hated status. But he’s had a career inside the state system and he knows it very well. He also knows local politics, having been an elected city council member in his suburban community.
Our state like many others is grappling with huge budget issues. Recently the legislature (Democrat) avoided a special session showdown with our Governor (Republican-and-running-for-2012-GOP Presidential-nomination) by, as Jim put it, putting off catastrophic decisions until 2011. Either taxes must be raised, or draconian cuts made in needed services (meaning also, of course, cuts in personnel and/or their wages and benefits which in turn hurts the economy). But our formerly (ten years or more ago, I’d say, when negotiating differences meant something) responsible state government has again succumbed to political reality – getting elected in November.
Earlier in the day my wife had been to the hospital to visit our friend Annette who’d been “fired” from her job in early December. I put “fired” in quotes, because she was simply let go under the guise of being “fired”: She qualified immediately for unemployment, with no contest whatsoever from her former employer. She has not actively sought a job as she needed the surgery to work. She could not get the surgery until she qualified for a certain stop-gap insurance to cover the bill, which in turn she couldn’t qualify for until a month after her eligibility for another insurance plan (one she could not afford) ran out. (Yes, it is complicated, but it’s how I remember the scenario).
Thursday night I watched the news, part of which was the failure, once again, to get an extension of unemployment benefits through the U.S. Senate. The vote was to allow an up-or-down vote and avoid a filibuster. The senators call it “invoking cloture”. It takes 60 votes for cloture, in a 100 member Senate. Fifty-seven Democrats voted aye; forty Republicans and one Democrat voted nay, and the motion failed. There are so many issues, and filibusters are diversions that cannot be afforded. The politicians have their issue: “that’ll show those shiftless and lazy dolts who are feeding at the public trough – go out and get a job” (even if there’s no job to get). Jobs are the reason the stimulus is needed in the first place. (The excuse used by senators – and it is only an excuse – is that this will increase the deficit; they all know its actual effect will be the opposite, which is why the Republicans want it to fail. I wrote about this multiplier effect one year ago on this blog.)
The Republican strategy is the same as it has been from Day One of the Obama Presidency: make him fail, and in failure, enhance the prospect for Republican success in November. That 60-vote cloture rule is one of their main tools.
Blocking legislation is a good short-term political strategy…and we are fools to bite, but many of us are – at least that’s the Republican calculus to win in November.
That night we had a house guest while I watched the national news. He was one of our grandsons, whose Dad was working his second job.
His Dad is one of those who was laid off from a corporate job last March, and has taken a temporary job – “no more than a year” – with lower wages than he was earning, with the State of Minnesota*. His job seems to be intake phone calls from fellow-unemployed persons, including occasional ones contemplating suicide because they can’t find work. He is the first point of contact with the State, and he is to help them navigate the maze to possible assistance on their particular problem. It is hard work.
When the axe falls, as it will, on our state in January, his job will almost certainly be history. So will, likely, the usual possibility that even a temporary state job might lead to something more permanent. He has to work two jobs to survive, which cuts into his opportunity to seek other employment….
And we continue on, cruising on this Ship of Fools, justifying our short-sightedness and selfishness.
At some point, our ship will sink; it’s now rapidly taking on water. We seem not to care.
* – Subsequent to this post, I visited with my son-in-law: he’s one of 400 doing this job, and he receives over 100 phone calls per day. There is no down time.
A directly related post, by Paul Krugman in Monday’s New York Times, is here.
A followup post at this blog and on this topic is #203, here.

#198 – Dick Bernard: The President, BP, and Energy Policy

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I clicked on “publish” on #197 – Taking Responsibility and went to watch President Obama speak to the nation from the Oval Office Tuesday night.
The speech is short, well worth watching.
As I anticipated in #197, the instant analysis – and criticism – began immediately after the lights went down in the Oval Office.
I watched the speech on my favorite news outlet, and the fancy highly paid version of “armchair quarterbacks” or “sidewalk superintendents” weighed in immediately, slicing and dicing the Presidents every word and gesture and inflection.
I lasted about ten minutes, and left to do other things. There are better ways to spend ones time than listen to talking heads talk.
Then this morning the slicing and dicing continued on-line.
And I’m just paying attention to what President Obama’s “friends” are saying. I can imagine how his enemies are spinning this.
No doubt the President and his advisors were well aware going in that this would be a no-win kind of evening for him.
Everyone has their own particular grievance or expectation. Almost nobody truly believes that it is their problem to solve, or at minimum, most folks don’t consider themselves to have any clout beyond complaining to their friends and disciples.
My own interpretation of his brief, calm, direct remarks was, to borrow a suddenly publicly utterable word: “foks, if you want something to happen long-term, get off your collective a*sses and get to work. I can’t do it by myself.”
He wasn’t talking to his opposition: he knows they’re in it to have him fail, for their own political advantage.
He was talking to the tens of millions of us who said, a year and a half ago, that we wanted to be part of “Change we can believe in”. And the work has to be done locally and state by state, with local lawmakers, and state and national elected representatives we send to Washington.
Without our active involvement – and carping about a speech is not active involvement – our nation will continue the slide on the slippery slope to at best irrelevancy and at worst oblivion.
We cannot survive, living in the manner to which we have become accustomed, relying on the ever more elusive fossil fuels, found in ever more dangerous places, that we’ve gorged ourselves on over the last century.
I believe that most people, including those who hate Obama, know that we’re in a major crisis; that without major change we’re doomed.
Now is the time for us to act in our own self interest and help our nation change its far too long accepted self-destructive course.
President Obama advocated, last night, for moving away from our addiction to fossil fuels, and said it was possible, much like new-President John Kennedy said, years ago, that we could land a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s.
I had just turned 21 when Kennedy made his “man on the moon” speech in May, 1961, and nobody believed him, but the goal was attained with an outpouring of national will, July 20, 1969*. Granted, Kennedy had fear – of Sputnik, and the Soviet Unions nuclear adventures – in his corner then; but our crisis. now, is even greater.
Change can happen with energy policy in this decade as well IF we work to make it so. We can’t wait.
* – I notice the YouTube link invites a re-direct to the BP channel – something I had heard about. Ah, the information age….

#197 – Dick Bernard: Taking Responsibility

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In an hour or so President Obama will deliver an address that will be closely watched world-wide. Afterwards, as he and his advisors know, every word (or lack of same), expression, inflection, will be analyzed and isolated to suit the purposes of endless numbers of observers, who will then cast judgment, positive or negative, on what he says or doesn’t say. This is how the game is played.
I’ll watch the address. That’s about it.
I choose to focus, rather, on some random events, starting with an e-mail from a friend about 9 this morning. This friend is in international business, an exporter of USA and Canadian food and feed grains and seeds. He said: “To be honest business is just terrible. I do not see how the world can avoid a double dip recession as consumption is down in all areas with inventories not moving as anticipated.”
My friend is an astute veteran international business man. What he observes is not some abstract thing. It’s where he lives, literally.
What he said this morning ties in, I think, with what the President faces tonight when the camera rolls at the White House.
From May 31 through June 7 we were on the road to a family wedding in Colorado. By the time we left on our trip, the President had accepted responsibility for taking care of the oil spill. When we got back, one of the first film clips we saw on evening news was of Elizabeth Cheney asserting on one of the Sunday newsmaker programs that since this thing happened on Obama’s watch, it was his responsibility. There was not any acknowledgment that her Daddy, the former vice-president who’s been silent as stone on this issue, might share some responsibility. Their behavior reminds me of something I once heard from an ordinary person: “Mom taught me never to apologize“.
President Obama did what we expect of him: take on our responsibility. The Cheney’s, on the other hand, did what we too often expect of ourselves: nothing.
Every now and then on our trip out west (we were two couples in a Prius) we talked about whether or not this 2500 miles was a frivolous trip. Even at a pretty amazing 40mpg, we wondered, should we be doing this.
Occasionally we’d ask business people about their business, and in each instance, business was down: fewer people travelling; those people spending less.
During the past week, we’ve now begun to hear the expected refrain from the British, whose pensions are in many ways depending on the economic health of the mega-corporation, BP. “Make the corporation responsible and it’s going to damage all of us“, so goes the refrain. I think it was yesterday that Haley Barbour, the political genius who’s Governor of Mississippi, seemed to begin to make the case that drilling ought to resume, regardless of what had just happened. After all, the saw goes, people need jobs. “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead”.
And so it goes. Personally, I’m inclined to be moved by my friends comment earlier in this post. If we can afford to do so – and most of us can – I think now is a time to put money into the economy so as to help allay a darker and deeper recession. Sure, make choices of where you spend that money, but best to put some of the treasure in the money bin into circulation. I won’t buy a bushel of my friends soybean seed, but the money multiplier does work. And we’re the base for this.
I’m glad we made our trip. So is my son and granddaughter and daughter-in-law. So are the motels we stayed in. So is the girl from Russia who waited on us at a restaurant in Wall SD.
President Obama will be on stage tonight. But everyone of us, in the wings, has our own important and constructive part to play.
For those interested, here’s a link to the White House, related to the Presidents address.

#194 – Dick Bernard: Thoughts on "illegals", "Mexicans" et al.

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Four of us hit the road from the Twin Cities to Denver early tomorrow morning.
We will look like pretty typical older people, and unless we do something crazy, will probably make the trip out and back without attracting any attention whatsoever, even on Memorial Day when the police are thick as flies in a farmyard.
Not so routine today or other times is the travel of somebody who looks different than me, and I’m guessing that there’s considerable nervousness these days for people with a browner complexion down in Arizona, especially.
A couple of days ago I was in the local post office in our suburb. At a counter were a couple of young brown-skinned guys speaking Spanish, talking about some form or other that one was filling out. They seemed pretty normal to me. Did they have papers?!
A week or so earlier I had been in North Dakota visiting relatives (see the May 28 post). In the Fargo Forum was a front page article about a carload of illegals who had been arrested at a neighboring town. They, in fact, did not have papers. They were reporting to work for some farmer who was planting a very labor intensive crop. He couldn’t find locals who would do the work and he contracted with someone in Oregon to provide workers who were supposed to be legals. Not so, it turned out. Ironically, he was, as one would say legally, “aiding and abetting”, as was the contractor in Oregon, but neither of them were culpable. Only the workers without papers were in trouble. Somehow the farmer had to find some kind of labor to put in his crop. That was his penalty. I wonder if he’s succeeded.
This mornings e-mails brought a commentary which helped to explain the insanity we seem to be living under in this country. It came from a Rhode Island newspaper, reprinted in an Arizona paper, and it is very interesting, about the contrast between Canada (much tougher on immigration, it turns out) and the U.S. (much less effective and less humane in dealing with the problem.)
Succinctly, if I read the column correctly, there were active attempts as far back as the mid-1980s to change U.S. immigration law to deal with some very real problems. A law was passed, but a crucial part was pulled from the bill by someone, probably in the U.S. Senate. The portion pulled apparently was a provision that held employers responsible for making sure their hires were legals. Employer responsibility was a bit too difficult to swallow. Rather they take their chances with occasionally losing cheap labor, than to share responsibility with that same cheap labor for their sins.
I’ve seen lots of “Mexicans” working at various occupations here in the Twin Cities. By and large they do very good work. Since I only see their work, I don’t know if they’re legal or not. They are contributors to this society, rather than drags on us.
They, and others, like the Haitians in the Rhode Island column, for the most part come to our country to make a menial living – but more than in their own country – and send lots of money home to their families. Their crime is only wanting a tiny share of our great wealth, and then share it with their families back home – much like our immigrant ancestors of older days.
We don’t much like to share, except on our own terms.
I’ll end up in Denver on Wednesday.
It was in Denver a number of years ago that I had a conversation with my son, then manager of a local restaurant near a university.
Tom’s crew was by and large Spanish-speaking, with only minimal English. He thought they had the proper papers, but one never knows for sure.
He mentioned that what they sometimes lacked in promptness they more than made up in quality of work, including finding somebody to fill in for them when they were gone. They were, it was clear, his most reliable employees.
Were they “Legals”? I’m not so sure.
Immigration Law plays much better as a political issue than as an object of true reform.
Until politicians cannot play politics with the issue, the issue will remain….

#189 – Dick Bernard: Goldman-Sachs et al, Gaming the System

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Tuesday, April 27, Goldman-Sachs testified at the U.S. Senate about their part in the mortgage meltdown. The media is awash with details about this. The long and short is that Goldman-Sachs defense appears to be that they did nothing wrong, they were simply following the rules of the game. They probably have a strong case. On the other hand, I suppose the defendants at Nuremburg, My Lai, Abu Ghraib also thought they had a strong case…just following orders. For Goldman-Sachs and the others, they were simply loyal and productive soldiers in the financial marketplace.
It’s odd how this issue gets “spun”: This morning at coffee four old guys (my age) took the table next to me. One of them I know reasonably well, the others I see occasionally. Their first topic was yesterday’s hearing where one Senator or another swore several times, using the “s–tty” word, and wasn’t that terrible? Of course, this profanity is among the most common and inoffensive of the swear words, known and used by almost everyone over the age of 10 these days, certainly by the guys at that table, so there isn’t much of a moral dimension to it.
Not mentioned was that all the Senators were doing was repeating the precise language of a Goldman-Sachs internal memo commenting on the quality (“s–tty”) of the mortgage investments they were selling, and simultaneously betting on the failure of those same investments. They couldn’t lose.
And, of course, the rules they had followed were the very same rules that they had lobbied successfully to pass through Congress in the high-flying days of rampant deregulation in the 1990s and early 2000s. Not mentioned was that these catastrophic rules legalized financial instruments that virtually nobody, including company executives, understood EXCEPT to the extent that their use could possibly make the company (and others) a ton of money.
If you can make assault with a deadly weapon legal, and resulting death a misdemeanor, so be it. That’s how the game is played. Those with the Money and the Power use their money and power to enhance their own status; in the competition of American life, the junior high school football B-squad (“we the people”) are up against the current Super Bowl champions. The outcome is never in doubt. The Rubes lose.
The table conversation went on: the illegals in Arizona – Obamas fault; how about some environmentalists swimming out to that horrible oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico and protesting there? It was all light banter, from some otherwise upstanding citizens of an upscale suburb in a prosperous metropolitan area. There was not a single clue, at that table, of any responsibility. Everything was about rights.
“We, the people” vastly outnumber those slick Goldman-Sachs zillionaires who sat at the Hearing Table in Washington, and that is something of a problem for the Powerful.
There are antidotes to this, liberally used, and used very effectively: make Money the mother’s milk of getting elected; make sure the rules level the playing field to the extent that corporations are people, citizens, just like the rest of us. Get the victims, like those four guys at the table next to me this morning, lobbying in behalf of Big Business and Free Enterprise and the goodness of obscene Individual Wealth. Most importantly, convince those who feel they are powerless that they truly have no power. “That’s just how it is.” This happens in countries with dictators, and it happens in the Third World, and it as assuredly happens here.
Back when the mortgage meltdown was becoming obvious – 2007 – I remember getting an e-mail from someone of my general station in life, living in a modest house, etc.
The thrust of the e-mail, probably from some talking points somewhere, was that the mortgage meltdown was the fault of the irresponsible poor people who bought houses they couldn’t afford. Nowhere was there mention of the alternate reality: that these same poor people were part of the engine making Wall Street richer and richer and richer, they were the “rubes”…and then everything collapsed. It was the rubes fault.
On and on we go. Where we stop, we all should now know…but denial is alive and very, very well.