Dana Blankenhorn

On Net Neutrality

If you have been reading this blog for any length of time, you no doubt believe that I’m a radical. A liberal. A fanatical criminal. 

In some ways this is true. On foreign policy I’m an internationalist who believes in peace. On social policy I believe people should be free to love who and what they want, and to kill themselves in any way that suits them.

This is not true in economic policy. I still consider myself a liberal here, but business was always a liberal force before the Nixon era. Progress is a business word, still often used in advertisements to denote the aims of oil companies and manufacturers, as well as tech outfits.

My economic beliefs are based on those of Adam Smith, who saw wealth inclining the wealthy toward the common good. I consider Trump and his acolytes to be Nietzscheites. (Ayn Rand is just Nietzsche in a skirt.)

More to the point, I consider them Fascists, and resent that I can’t use the word in public without being condemned.

So, when it comes to the subject of net neutrality, I’m sure you’re thinking, Dana is going to tell us that the FCC is wrong, that Democrats are right.

I’m not.

The Creative Destruction of Moore’s Law Trumps the Age of Trump.

There has always been an intimate connection between market cycles and political cycles in American politics.

The 2008 crash brought in Barack Obama, and the age we’re now living in. But like most people (including me), he thought the crash and his election meant the end of the crisis, not its beginning.

We’ve all learned better now.

One reason is that the 2008 collapse, and its quick resolution, didn’t drive home the lesson about speculation, and how man-made bubbles can cause enormous hurt when they pop, as they always do. The “Helicopter Ben” Bernanke solution of dropping money on the banks, replacing the losses, then regulating the banks’ use of the funds, only took the banks out of the equation during the next bubble.

The cycle of crisis, recovery, anti-thesis, and excess accelerated, as change does in the age of Moore’s Law. By 2016 the markets were ready for a new period of excess.

Beating Fascism in Our Time

Before this era is over there will be a global demand to “eat the rich,” at which point the Kochs, the Mercers, the little Trumps and Peter Thiel expect this nation’s intellectuals to save them from the guillotine.

The rich do have their purpose. Wealthy people supply capital for opportunities that create jobs. They stand by the banks that provide liquidity to the system. But they were amply paid for these services before they launched all-out war on the poor (and middle class), starting with Nixon, accelerating with Reagan, becoming obvious under Bush and climaxing under Trump. 

At Christmas 2017, the day of victory over these forces seems far off. The rich and their castles of money seem as impregnable as the castles of stone were for their 14^th century forebears. Everywhere you look, it seems, fascism reigns supreme. Russia has taken down America, China is “communist” only in name, the Middle East is ruled by the Saud Kings, and throughout the developing world absolute rulers of all stripes know the great powers have their back.

The world is much like it was in 1942, except that democracy and capitalism are being squeezed from above, not from the sides.

But victory is in sight.

The Fascist Decade

The biggest mistake American reporters make, whether covering politics or any other beat, is in describing the two sides of the political debate.

Liberal and conservative are two sides of the same coin, the democratic coin. Liberals will bow to conservatives, and vice versa, when the other side wins a free and fair election. This is true regardless of how different policy positions may be. Both accept the legitimacy of democracy, the rule of law. They take freedom as a given, as inalienable. They like open markets, everywhere.

This is not the case in our time. Today there are two completely sides in the political debate.  There is a democratic side that supports democracy, an open society, and free enterprise. There is a fascist side that supports dictatorship, a closed society, and enterprise controlled by a small elite in the name of the nation.

Donald Trump is a fascist. This is what makes him different from every previous American President. It’s the word the media, even today, won’t utter. Fascist.

Americans are taught in grade school that we beat fascism in World War II, that it died with Hitler and Mussolini. It didn’t.

How the Web Killed the Media

The great tragedy of our time, the tragedy that led to Trump, is content’s loss of control over its own business models.

When I began writing the weekly newsletter that became this blog, 20 years ago, the threat of this loss was a primary theme. I asked newspapers and magazines “how hungry are you?” suggesting that if they turned advertisers into business partners, and earned commissions on sales, they could prosper on this medium.

Advertising is just a means to an end. Newspapers sell space for ads, and ads start readers down a sales funnel. Sales are what the buyers of advertisements want. If online publishers could deliver sales, I thought, they would earn all their business partners’ marketing budget.

I saw even then how the Internet could deliver a store’s entire experience, from advertising, through marketing and sales, through the transaction to service and support. It was the publishing opportunity of a lifetime.

No One Took It

Too Much Cash

The current danger to the U.S. economy can be summed up in three words.

Too much cash.

A healthy economy has a balance of good investment ideas on the one hand, and cash seeking investment on the other hand, along with enough demand to soak up new supplies resulting from that investment. Right now, there’s just too much cash sitting around. And the Republican Party, which should know better, is anxious to create tons more with a tax “reform” bill which, its advocates say, will take trillions of dollars of demand out of the economy and put trillions of dollars into the hands of investors.

This is supposed to boost the recovery. Uh, no.

It’s easy to see how we have too much cash. Google parent Alphabet, for instance, has $100 billion of cash on its books, and Apple has $250 billion. Advocates of a tax cut insist that allowing repatriation of these funds, when held offshore, will deliver cash to investors, who will then invest it.

There’s no assurance of that. Why assume investors will find places for excess cash when the geniuses at Google can’t?

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 Coming Crash, and The Way Out

To read the people on my Twitter feed, 2017 has been the worst year ever.

If someone you love has been killed by a drone, or a cop, if their home was flooded by Harvey or Irma, if your community was destroyed by Maria, if your life was ruined by the California wildfires, then, yes, this has been a horrible, terrible, no good and very, very bad year.

But despite Trump, despite everything, this has been (so far) a pretty good year. For the economy. That matters. A lot. When you have a job and money in your pocket, you’re going to forgive a lot of bullshit, and focus on other things.

Winning on the Second Amendment

I had a revelation recently.

Liberals have been dealing with the Second Amendment all wrong.

Instead of arguing around the margins of what kinds of guns people can have under the law, it’s time for some Constitutional Originalism.

James Madison didn’t write the Second Amendment, and the first Congress did not approve it, so that people could shoot their fellow citizens from hiding, or so that an armed minority could overthrow a government they didn’t like. These are technologies that did not exist in 1789. In 1789 only 4% of the people had guns, and most couldn’t shoot straight.

The Second Amendment is a militia amendment. It demands that all gun owners hold themselves available for the state’s business. A big part of that business was catching, or killing, runaway slaves.

A bigger part of that business was serving as an armed force when called upon. That’s how it was used almost immediately upon its adoption. During the Whiskey Rebellion, an armed protest against alcohol taxes by Pennsylvania distillers (and their customers) was put down by 13,000 militia men under the direct command of the President of the United States, in the first decade of the Republic.

Don’t Trust Anyone Over 40

Ken Burns’ epic The Vietnam War  brings up key questions about relativity, about the nature of time and how we react to it.

For the Vietnamese he interviewed, Vietnam is ancient history. It is practically the American Revolution. Vietnam today is one of the planet’s younger countries, with a median age of 31. Most people there have no memory of the war, or of its aftermath. The nation they know is capitalist, a nation of hustlers, everyone looking for the next new taste, the next social trend, or the next buck.

For Americans, Vietnam is not ancient history. Far from it. The Vietnam War is still being fought here. It is still being lost here. The 2016 campaign featured three candidates who both came of age during that conflict. Millions are still punching hippies. Millions remain hippies.

Vietnam was the dominant event in every Baby Boomer’s life. I only saw it on TV, but it still haunts me. The median American’s age is near 38, but that is held down by immigrants. The median voter is 45, their worldview shaped by Ronald Reagan and the reaction against Vietnam protestors. 

The reason for this is that we live a lot longer than we did. In the year 1900, most people had no memories of the Civil War. Those were buried in the Spanish-American conflict and books like Red Badge of Courage which came out in 1895. By the time of World War II, that same progressive era was seen in a gauzy nostalgia, in movies like Meet Me in St. Louis.  The violence and discord had been stripped away, and all that was left was the idea that this was “a simpler time.”