Dana Blankenhorn

SBF 30 (or higher)

“White collar crime” is crime.

Robbing someone at pen point is worse than doing it at gunpoint. You’re in a position of trust. You have a fiduciary responsibility. You are supposed to have ethics, before you have the law, to guide your actions.

Break all of that and it can be murder. People die when their wealth and future is stolen. White collar thieves steal college educations, they steal retirements, they steal food from the mouths of grandbabies. They make every honest businessperson suspect.

I thought everyone felt that way until I heard Michael Lewis, author of The Big Short and other light classics, interview Harvard Business School professor Eugene Soltes on his podcast Against the Rules.” 

20th Century Blues

The 20^th Century was the bloodiest in history.

World War I. World War II. Vietnam. Afghanistan. The Gulf War.

And those are just the wars the U.S. was a direct party to.

There were lots of others. In all cases they were caused by fear. Fear of the other, or the other side. Nations battling nations for dominance like rutting goats.

There was some hope, after the Cold War, that those days were ending.

They didn’t. Russia just regrouped, and China decided they wanted to play, too.

Humanity can’t afford this. Never mind who’s right and who’s wrong. (We’re right. They’re wrong.) The waste of natural wealth, the continued abuse of fossil fuels, the climate can’t handle it.

Unless we can find a way out of the current conflict with China, our grandchildren won’t have a livable planet. There’s no Planet B.

The Limits of Senior Power

If I were around 100 years ago, I would be dead. Instead, I’m rich. (Pictured are my grandparents, May and Edmund O'Donnell, in 1918.)

It’s a demographic and economic transformation that is destroying hope for change in America and (perhaps) making us the last generation.

Until recently, people lived their first 20 years dependent on parents, the next 20 as parents, the next (if they were lucky) 20 as grandparents and anything past that dependent on the children. Most of the world still lives this way.

But starting with Social Security in 1934, and continuing through general prosperity to today, America has turned this on its head. Seniors aren’t just living to an average age of 83, we’re doing it with money. I’m just a 68-year old journalist but, thanks in large part to a wife who works in tech, I’m a millionaire. We own our house. We have enough invested to guarantee a fine retirement, God willing. There may even be something left when we’re gone.

This has changed political incentives. There’s no better example than Florida where The Villages, a huge retirement town of 150,000 (almost all of whom vote), has turned the state’s politics on its head. Add them to those already living up-and-down the state’s east, west and south coasts, and you get a huge state entirely devoted to short term thinking. Education, the environment? Fuck ‘em. We’ll be gone.

Why Adani Fell

The U.S. stock market is off to the races again, encouraged by hints that interest rates may peak soon, and that the economy continues to grow.

But under the radar, there’s a crash. It’s in Adani Group, which you can trade over the counter under the symbol ANNRY. 

A week ago, Adani was worth over $200 billion. Today it’s fighting to hold $100 billion. CEO Gautam Adani has seen his own fortune fall to $75 billion.

This tells you something. Adani is closely held.

The stocks crashed after a report from short seller Hindenburg Group charged that they were being held up by a network of offshore companies and a very thin float. What made Hindenburg suspicious was that the value of the companies rose over 800% in just a few years, on assets like coal mines, container ports, and airports. It didn’t make sense.

But there’s another lesson here, America’s dominance of the global marketplace. About 40% of the world’s stock market value is now held in the two U.S. markets – the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ. About 60% of the world’s liquidity, the capital companies require to do business, is in the U.S. That’s why the threat to cut off Chinese stocks from U.S. exchanges was so powerful. It’s why the Hindenburg report blew such a big hole in Adani’s market battleship.

Righteous War

America hasn’t fought many righteous wars.

In the 19^th century the Civil War was righteous. Everything else was conquest. The “winning of the west” was a slow motion genocide. We took the Southwest from Mexico. We took the Philippines and Puerto Rico from Spain. We teach it as democracy, as freedom. It was empire.

World War II was righteous. In retrospect, I’m glad we fought in Korea.

Other than that? We have been involved in more coups, in more places, for worse reasons, than the British Empire ever thought of. Vietnam was not a righteous war. The Gulf War was not a righteous war. Neither was the Iraq War. Afghanistan began as a righteous mission then turned into a distinctly unrighteous war.

Americans have the blood of the world on our hands, and we deny that every day. The difference between the parties is that Republicans do it more systematically.

War of the Cubes

Large tech businesses are forcing employees into a huge hidden pay cut.

They call it “return to the office.” They’re demanding that all people who have worked from home during the pandemic return to their cubes or be fired.

Let’s look at that a moment. (Buy the book.) 

If you’re an hour from work, it takes 2 hours a day to commute. Add in gas, wear on the car. Add in an hour to get ready. Add in the cost of work clothes. Add in lunch. Maybe add in drinks after work.

Now let’s look at it from the employer’s perspective. Add in rent. Add in utilities. Or society’s perspective. Add in wear on roads and other infrastructure costs. Add in fuel.

Finally, let’s talk about hidden costs. When a tech company demands tech workers do their work in offices, what they’re saying is that all the promises they made about tech 5 years ago, that it would improve productivity by letting people work from where they are, were bullshit.

The Other Arms Race

We talk a lot about guns in the US, without doing anything about them.

But there’s another, even more dangerous arms race, going on.

It involves cars.

It’s not just that there are too many of them. They’re too damned big. Spending $60,000 for a pick-up that will never see a trailer hitch, or an SUV higher than an elephant’s eye, is stupid. Especially since these cars are sitting, unused, 90% of the time.

People buy giant cars for the same reason they buy guns. They make you feel safe. They buy as much car as they can afford, like these things are houses.

The New Class Struggle

One of the biggest stories of 2022 is the discovery of a new class struggle, happening right under our noses.

It’s the product of our technology society. It’s between those who own this society and those who “merely” manage it.

When I was focusing my work on American political history, starting in 2006 with the launch of this blog, I assumed technology would lead us toward equity.

That’s because technology runs on human capital. Talent is the gating factor to growth. Not land, not people. Talent.

What does it take to nurture talent? You have to set a wide net, because it can come from anywhere. You have to educate everyone, because anyone could be great, and anyone who’s even good provides value. You can’t care where talent comes from, the color of its skin or the way its heart works or something called “disability.” Let talent find the ability it has, and exploit that.

Let people be free and make them comfortable. That’s the best way to raise children. It’s also the route to economic growth and saving the planet.

The Enemy is Religious Nationalism

The 2022 election mostly put Trumpism into the rear-view mirror.

What it revealed was the larger political battle of this decade, between secular democracy and religious extremism.

I’m not against God. But there are two problems with religious nationalism.

First, it’s intolerant. Wherever one religion rules, its adherents outlaw any faith but their own. This is true for Hindus in India, for the Russian Orthodox, even for Buddhists in Burma. It’s true for Jews in Israel and for fundamentalist protestants in the United States.

This remains true despite every great religious teacher, from Gautama to Vishnu to Confucius, from Moses to Jesus to Mohammed, all the way to Joseph Smith, teaching first the way of tolerance. Love your neighbor. Care for the less fortunate. Seek the enlightenment of faith for yourself.

It’s the leaders of these faiths, the Popes and the Mullahs, the Rabbis, and the Brahmins, who twist it into something else. There is a reason for this. Those faiths that adhered to tolerance were, over time, wiped out by leaders of the intolerant. This is the true original sin.

Is This The End of Crypto?

I wrote about cryptocurrency a lot, late in the last decade.

I finally decided it was trash.

There’s no there, there. I can find no blockchain applications superior to what you can do in other ways. Bitcoin and Ethereum claim they’re better than other coins, but the market remains crooked and opaque.

All this came crowding in this week when FTX collapsed. FTX was the creation of a 20-something (now 30) named Sam Bankman-Fried, whom my son now calls Bank Man Fried, as in French fries.