Dana Blankenhorn

It’s All Biden’s Fault

I have a friend who is mad as hell at Joe Biden right now.

There’s a job waiting for him overseas. He’s fully vaccinated. But he can’t prove it to his new employer’s satisfaction. Even if the host country lets him in, he’ll have to be in quarantine for 2 weeks, at great expense, before he can start work.

How can this be, he asks? Why hasn’t the President mandated vaccine passports?

We all overestimate what a President can do. The media treats him as magic, the final authority, the one person responsible for everything.

But the President’s powers are severely circumscribed. Especially in this case.

There is no national medical database. There’s no federal control over health insurance. Under the McCarran-Ferguson Act , passed in 1945, health insurance is a state function. Even the decision upholding the Affordable Care Act held that states didn’t have to take its Medicaid expansion. Many still don’t.

Atlanta Politics: Still All About Race

For the first time since I moved here 40 years ago Atlanta finally succeeded over the last four years.

It attracted a huge Microsoft development. It built parks. Its population grew.

The reaction by the city’s leaders has been panic.

The reason? Developers moved in near the coming Microsoft offices and built housing for upper-income people who might work there. The white gentrification of the west side, starting at Georgia Tech, has accelerated. Until recently this was the heart of the ghetto, and of the Atlanta machine’s political strength.

The response has been two-fold. First, Atlanta isn’t really fighting Republicans’ efforts to extract Buckhead, with 20% of the city’s population and 40% of its tax base, from the city. Buckhead is nearly all-white. They will complain, but they will let it go.

Persistence vs. Passion

What America teaches me is that persistence, the lean of the majority, overcomes the passion of a minority.

Read any newspaper from the 1850s. Many northerners had sympathy for the South. In the South, Union sympathizers had to either keep quiet or pretend toward Confederate sympathy to survive. We all know how that turned out.

But the same thing happened in the 1890s, and the 1930s. Populists were always more passionate than progressives. Those opposing FDR were always louder than his supporters. Majorities are slow to move, and for those passionate on the majority side it’s frustrating.

The best lesson from my life was the 1960s. Those opposed to Vietnam were far more passionate than the “silent majority” who saw it as a Cold War activity. The War side won. It kept on winning for a generation. Pundits came to assume it would always be that way. Most still do.

I’ve tried to explain the back-and-forth in terms of what business needs. Cash crops like cotton represented the highest value of the 1840s. Railroads replaced them. Then utilities replaced the railroads, manufacturing replaced utilities, and resources replaced manufacturing.

Throughout my working life, technology has been rising. It now dominates. Politics is leaning toward what technology needs. That means immigration and education. It means climate activism and social equality. Clouds can leverage a single great mind to the value offered by thousands of mediocre ones.

Slaves of the News Cycle

The most common mistake consumers of news make is being a slave to the news cycle.

It’s true on every beat. Business, technology, entertainment, sports, and politics. You focus on what’s happening right now and you miss the longer term trend. It’s the longer term trend that will make you, that will make your career, and that will make history.

When it comes to business and finance, my current beat, the dumbest thing you can do is to obsess over the day-by-day changes in the stock market. Traders are paid big bucks to follow the daily gyrations. They will get in ahead of you on any move. They’ve got you outgunned.

But the daily moves tend to even out. What you want to find are companies that are market leaders, in trends that last for years, with bosses who understand that long term. Just accumulate them. Let time work for you. Then, sell on your schedule, when you need the money, preferably on a day when the market is rising.

Moore’s Law of Politics

There is no Moore’s Law of Politics. Quite the opposite.

As I have sought to explain in my continuing rewrites of my Moore’s Lore book  the values of our youth are taken into age. Longer lives mean obsolete beliefs bedevil democracy.

My own views were shaped by this generational delay. I believed that Democrats had a real shot in 2004, because we were a full generation removed from 1968. In fact, the 1960s dominated that campaign. So it was that when Barack Obama won, a man born in the 1960s I thought, well we won’t have Vietnam to kick around anymore. Again, I was wrong. The 2016 campaign was fought over the same old ground.

There are still voters who remember the 1970s, even the 1960s. I am one of them. But we’re finally a minority. While half the electorate was still over 50 in 2020 the median voter still had no memory of the Moon Landing.

Peace is also unknown to the average American voter. Most us of us grew up in the era of resources, of wars for oil, or the Cold War.

A Few Words on Afghanistan

I’m not a foreign policy expert. But this much I do know.

The greatest threat to life on Earth is the War of All Against All. 

If the world doesn’t unite against the common enemy of climate change, human life will be impossible on this planet within the lifetime of your grandchildren.

It’s already becoming intolerable. The east sides of our continents are flooding. The west sides are burning. COVID-19 is accelerating the change, pushing people away from mass transit, pushing them into further-off suburbs. We wait hours in our cars for take-out.

Afghanistan wasn’t even a war for resources. Afghanistan was purely a war for power over people. For 20 years America was told to believe we could make Afghanistan “free” through military force.

We couldn’t. We can’t. No one can. That’s a job for the Afghans. Liberation is an internal process. You liberate yourself, and only then can you liberate your neighbors.

The Soviet Union tried to occupy Afghanistan for a decade and disappeared. We have now done it for 20 years. Our democracy is more threatened today than it has been since World War II. We could lose it. I would argue we are in the process of losing it.

What disgusts me, more than anything, is how the Washington “press corps” is pretending that we “abandoned” Afghanistan, and Joe Biden has diminished our power in leaving. Abandoned to who? Diminished for what?

When I was starting my reporting career, the very word “Afghanistanism” meant events happening so far away as to be irrelevant. If terrorists based there try to come after us again, we still have the option of killing them. But occupying territory won’t kill them. It only kills us.

China

It’s in to hate China.

Jim Cramer, confusing Karl Marx with Groucho, keeps referring to the government of Xi Jinping as “Communist China.” Its efforts to fight tech monopolies there cost him money in Didi Chuxing, China’s Uber.

China is also a great whipping boy for neocons who want to get their war on after Afghanistan fizzled. They point to its crackdown in Hong Kong and the ongoing genocide in Xinjiang. Those are terrible crimes. But are they that much worse than Shock and Awe, or the ongoing beatings of protestors by our police?

These crimes cost China more than reputation. They cost money. Chinese taxpayers are in deep doo-doo already. The Sinovac vaccine turns out to be garbage. You can see the air, which is not supposed to happen. There are floods of Biblical proportions in brand-new Chinese cities. Economic growth is slowing. The stock market is down, so wealth is down. And you can’t trust the Chinese Internet, which is a bigger spy than even Facebook.

If things were like this in America, we’d be revolting. Critics like to insist that you can’t in China, but it ain’t necessarily so. China can’t match Taiwan’s semiconductor technology, despite buying its engineers with fat bonuses. Its biological technology is nowhere. Its science publications are rife with cheating, which means its papers are rife with lies.

The Dictator’s Internet Advantage

“Credibility is the coin of the realm.”

That’s what Northwestern’s Medill School taught me, when I was getting my Master’s in Journalism back in 1978. (That's also when this picture was taken.)

This was reinforced during our school trip from Chicago to the media capital of New York. I literally sat at the feet of William Shawn, then still editor of The New Yorker. We were paraded through the offices of Time. We sat for a spell at the Top of the Week, a bar on top of Newsweek’s headquarters building. The lesson was that someday all this would be ours if we were just loyal to our employers.

I’m the last member of my graduating class still be working a beat because I didn’t believe a word of it. Credibility is a personal value, I argued. It’s not something that can be granted, like a knighthood.

But American media companies remain wedded to the idea of credibility as a corporate value. It’s why so few are international in scope. That’s because credibility, in media, is mediated. It’s a continuing negotiation among media companies, their audience, and government. It’s a balancing act.

The New Journalism Business Model

I have been telling journalists for a quarter century that they needed a new business model.

Stop worrying about advertising, I said in 1996. Think about earning commissions from your business partners.

Someone finally listened. Ric Elias runs Red Ventures, doing precisely what I said back then needed to be done.

I could point the way, but I couldn’t do it. I prefer writing stories to anything, especially running a business. I should have taken the advice of the late George Heitz, who at my first j-school lecture in 1977 said that Northwestern had a business school right around the corner.

No regrets. I’ve had a good career. But I’m proud to bursting over what Elias has done, in the Charlotte suburb of Fort Mill, SC. He has focused on consumer lifestyle brands, buying them slowly as their ad-based business models collapsed. Healthline is now Red Ventures. So is Lonely Planet. So are ZDNet and CNet, where many of my old colleagues with the Internet Press Guild still work.

Elias leaves the writers alone. Good journalism draws readers and builds communities. That’s always been its main function. The question is how to capitalize on that.

Red Ventures seeks commissions on credit cards, on services, on products sold on Amazon. The New York Times, in a dismissive piece about it, talked at length about Elias’ life story, the early days of using telemarketing, a supposed dependence on credit cards for revenue.

Know When to Sell

There’s a big difference between your nephew Billy, the Reddit investor, and the pros.

The pros know when to sell.

It’s true there are some things you Hold On to for Dear Life (HODL). These are stocks in good companies with good managements and good stories to tell. Companies like Amazon or Apple or Microsoft. This is what I’ve now learned from 10 years writing about investments, from the time the ad-based tech news business collapsed, and I got kicked off the beat.

You won’t find the winners right away. But if you’re nibbling on a few big names every month, and if you’re serious about winnowing out the non-performers once a year, the names will emerge. Sometimes, as with Google or Moderna, it seems obvious when they come public. With others, it can take time. You might find yourself selling, then buying, then selling again before you settle on something. I lost money on Apple during the 1990s, because I didn’t buy Steve Jobs’ return as I should have. Amazon didn’t pass its 1999 peak for over a decade.

The lesson of selling is especially important now, with so many young investors getting wrapped up in things like Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum.

I’ve got nothing against WallStreetBets. If you get a gang together to attack a stock (or anything else) you can make it move. Hedge funds do it all the time.