Dana Blankenhorn

Monument to the Present

The media calls it the Lynching Memorial.

Its proper name is the National Memorial for Peace and Justice.  The Equal Justice Initiative built it, and an accompanying museum, on a six acre site at Centennial Hill in Montgomery, Alabama , near where I-85 meets I-65. It is just a few blocks from the first White House of the Confederacy, the Rosa Parks Museum, and the Hank Williams museum.

Call it the duality of the southern thing.

There are 313 names inscribed there, on tombstones that also bear the names of counties across the South where men were murdered during the days of Jim Crow. There are two sets of tombstones, and the museum hopes this second set will eventually be picked up by those counties, creating memorials to the dead there.

It is, without question, the most moving monument built in America since the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was opened in 1982.

Trump, Too, Shall Pass

Recently my dear heart dragged me to a wedding.

It was for the son of one of her co-workers. The groom was born here, the parents arriving from India a few years before his birth. The bride was born in China but moved here as a toddler and is a U.S. citizen.

The bride and groom grew up together. They met in high school about 15 years ago. They moved among their guests with the grace and comfort of a long-married couple, secure in themselves. Their relationship may have once been controversial, but their joy in each other buried that long-ago. They live in Boston. He is a doctor. She’s a business consultant. They came down to be with his family. Some of her relatives traveled from China to Georgia to be at the celebration, in the shadow of Stone Mountain’s Confederate carving. Some of his traveled all the way from India.

The Facebook Scandal

Facebook could disappear. 

This is the difference between Facebook and the other “Cloud Czars,” as I call them. (Picture from the excellent blog of Lisa Vanengen.)

We don’t need Facebook. Not the way we need, in the 21^st century, the information search capability of Google. Or Microsoft’s software. Or Apple’s devices. Or Amazon.Com.

Facebook, by contrast, is entirely optional. Not only is the main service optional, but so are Instagram and Messenger. We can get along very well with Snap and WeChat. The mass move can happen by word of mouse. There is a price below free, and if we don’t want to pay it we don’t have to.

This is something people like Jim Cramer don’t yet understand. This makes what is happening, or not happening, at Facebook different from what happened at Target or even Equifax. Add to that Facebook’s enormous capital budget – it’s putting $1 of every $4 it collected last year into new cloud data centers this year – and you have an existential problem.

In the Spirit of Oprah

One reason liberals were awed by the distraction of Oprah for President is that we’re up for distractions. Trump plays us like kittens. Twitter is his laser pointer.

Another reason is that Oprah is a convenient shorthand for everything that’s under assault with Trumpism. Her skill is as an aspirational leader, someone who inspires people to think positively, and sometimes to change.

Openness, decency, democracy, fairness, all the shining gifts that make peace on Earth, everything the Republican filmmaker Frank Capra preached about in his movies, everything we claimed for generations to believe, all are under unprecedented assault in 2018. They on the line because those who govern us have rejected them. They have even rejected science, so the fate of human life is also in the balance.

In this battle we say we need a hero, or a heroine, someone with Barack Obama’s rhetorical gifts, John F. Kennedy’s courage, Jimmy Carter’s compassion and Franklin Roosevelt’s gift of media manipulation.

Oh, if they came from Illinois, like Abraham Lincoln, that would be nice, too.

Oprah checks all the boxes. A self-made billionaire from the streets, a woman who has kept her own privacy while shattering the emotional walls the rest of us build, a TV star to set against the TV phony in the White House.

It’s an appealing picture. What might she say, and stand for, we ask?

She says nothing.

Instead, she holds a mirror up to our best selves. Her speech at the Golden Globes encouraged us to act as though we were her, and state our own truths.

This is what my best self would say.

Monsters Within Us

My father’s soul left his body 18 years ago, in October of 1999.

Frederick H. Blankenhorn was a World War II veteran, a small businessman, and he gave me many, many gifts.

He was incredibly intelligent. He filled my room with books. He gave me my first typewriter, the greatest gift I’ve ever gotten because my handwriting sucks.

My dad married my mom in 1951 and was still with her on the day he died. He provided for his family, first with a TV repair shop, later with a locksmith shop. He raised four kids, and none has suffered a divorce. None of us has gotten the U.S. into a war in Iraq based on lies.

My dad could be funny, he was incredibly charming to strangers, and he had a sense of adventure. He worked very hard, and made lemons out of life’s lemonade, buying the lock shop through the Small Business Administration after he fell through a false roof, breaking his once beautiful body.

Oh. He was also a monster.

The Price Must Be Paid

On the same day that he achieved his greatest triumph, Barry Lynn got fired.

Lynn was a scholar for the New America Institute, a Clinton-era think tank meant to stand against conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation. There, Lynn developed a strong case against monopolies and their control over politics.

Monopolies, by their nature, see their first job as maintaining their own status, and the monopoly “rents” they obtain from consumers as a result. AT&T is a great example of such a monopoly. They create a whole raft of political front groups, which chime in whenever the company starts making political demands, on a state or federal level, even before courts. The original name for this site was based on my support of a 2005 book by Bruce Kushnick detailing this. 

Here is what I have learned since then.

All business trends toward monopoly. We have known this for over a century. This is because monopolists create efficiency. Standard Oil lowered costs and made oil production “cleaner” than it had been in the Wild West Days of the industry, the late 1860s, when drillers filled old whiskey barrels with the product, loaded up horse-drawn carriages, and whipped those poor horses down mud to small refiners. By contrast, the Standard delivered product efficiently, via pipeline, to large refineries and delivery systems that could invest in creating many different products from it, then ship the results around the world.

How Google Must Take Responsibility

If I could blame any single company for the mess America finds itself in today it would be Google.

Don’t be evil? All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. When you gain great power, you also gain grave responsibility. You can be evil by doing nothing, just as the people who watched Kitty Genovese be murdered in 1964 became evil by doing nothing. Just as the good Germans who watched Hitler’s rise and did nothing became evil by doing nothing, or the southerners who stood by while generations were lynched became evil by doing nothing. It’s a stain that does not wash out.

In this case, evil is at the heart of Google’s business model, and that of Internet advertising generally, which has become divorced from the content it sits beside.

This is something I’ve covered before, but briefly Google eliminated the advantage publishers previously got from aggregating audiences.

The Second Debate

The second debate in the race to control heaven, between the Virgin Mary and Satan, was getting off to a rocky start.

For Mary.

“Why am I not 50 points ahead of you?”

“Because I’m smart,” retorted the Prince of Darkness. “Every angel wants to be like me. They want to have my freedom. They want to have my wealth. They are tired of reporting to some feudal lord on high, and eating the same stale, tasteless wafers.”

“The wafers are not stale. They’re the body and blood of…”

The Downside of Tech’s Dominance

Back when I was at Rice, 40 years ago, oil was a fairly benign political force. Or so it seemed to me, lost in my studies, surrounded by oil money, which was rapidly building the huge Texas Medical Center before my very eyes.

We know different now. We know how power corrupts every industry, and how absolute power corrupts absolutely. We saw that with George W. Bush, the spoiled son of an oilman, installed in power by a Supreme Court created through political action, unelected by the people. Since then we’ve seen Iraq, we’ve seen Katrina, we’ve seen the Great Recession. We’re seeing climate change, threatening the whole human race.

Worse, we’ve seen D.C. vs. Heller, idiots thinking Thomas Jefferson wants them to own AR-15s as some natural right. We’ve seen Citizens United, billionaires who think they have an absolute right to control us with their dollars, simply because they have them. These last injuries will abide. They are examples of how the oil industry, which took political power only to be left alone in the 1960s, eventually abused it to the detriment of the whole world.

Just as railroads pushed farmers and working people too far in the 19^th century, and utilities collapsed the economy in the 1920s, just as manufacturers used political power to go to Vietnam in the 1960s, so oil eventually became a noisome element in the national political equation, and was overthrown by technology in 2008.

Defending Crooks in the Financial Press

I wrote a piece about health care recently, for a financial site, and had it thrown back in my face.  You can read it, but I won’t get paid a penny if you do.

This is not the first time this happened. It happened in 2011. Back then I was calling IBM’s hiring of Virginia Rometty as CEO an historic mistake. 

Back then shares in IBM were selling for about $180/share. It’s now below $140, and the company has almost entirely missed the most profound tech story of the decade, the cloud-and-device revolution. They still claim a place in the cloud, but it’s a small place, and a precarious one. Meanwhile, even companies like Adobe have zoomed past them in market cap. Apple could now buy IBM about five times over.

Before continuing, let me add that there's nothing dishonest about what IBM did. I'd just seen this movie before, nice marketing people following entrepreneurs and leading the company onto the rocks, because technology is about innovation, and it can only be run effectively by innovators.