Dana Blankenhorn

The Common Good

Without an overwhelming victory for democracy on November 3, I’ll be glad to die.

Trump is the ultimate expression of a basic misperception, that private goods matter more than the public goods, that national well-being matters more than global well-being, that fences and borders can isolate and separate us.

This is especially true when it comes to the environment.

My children face a bleak future unless current climate trends are reversed. But the U.S. can’t change it alone. Every country must do its part.

The ice caps’ disappearance means many cities around the world are doomed. New Orleans is doomed. Miami is doomed. New York City is doomed. So are Calcutta, Mumbai, Shanghai, and Kuala Lumpur. Sea level rise means these places will soon be underwater.

Meanwhile, the methane of the Siberian tundra is bubbling to the surface. Fires in the Amazon and West mean the Earth can no longer breathe. The “habitable” part of the U.S. will be cut by two-thirds within 50 years. The oceans are warming so that, along with overfishing, all that’s left will be jellyfish.

In past bouts of global warming, when the ice caps disappeared, nature adjusted. Cooling trends returned and nature came back. With man-made global warming, there’s no natural reversal. It takes 80 grams of energy to melt a gram of ice. Once the ice is melted, 80 grams of energy take its temperature to 112.

The Great Panic of 2020

The 2020 campaign isn’t marked by much movement in the polls.

Joe Biden has been ahead all year by anywhere from 5-10 points. The margin has been increasing, as Trump has acted like every suburban housewife’s abusive ex-.

Yet to read Lefty Twitter, you would be certain Trump is going to be President this time next year.

Uh, no. My guess is he won’t even be alive. When he realizes he’s going to be held to account, I suspect, he’ll take the coward’s way out.

Trump wants to steal the election, and is threatening a coup, because he knows he has lost.

The Tides of History

Ignore the polls that claim there’s a close election going on. Use your own intuition. You can feel the tide under your feet.

2020 has been a shit show. The idea that no one has changed their political views as a result is crazy. Yet that’s what everyone in Washington thinks, including those whose job (or hobby) it is to analyze elections.

Truth is there’s a tsunami out there.

History is made by people who create these tides. Great men (and women) are those who ride them. Villains are those who defy them.

Defending Facebook

Let’s start with something that should seem obvious.

Facebook is no longer a social network. It’s the global telecommunications company.

It became this by offering free services on a global scale. This came about thanks to its investment in cloud, beginning early in the last decade. While AT&T sat on its assets, along with all the companies once known as PTTs (Postal, Telegraph and Telephone services), Facebook put $1 billion/quarter and up into a network of cloud data centers.

Facebook did it the same way Amazon did, with cash flow. It made its services free, like Google.

Creating Demand

Right now, the biggest problem for the U.S. economy is a lack of demand.

We didn’t go on vacation. We didn’t go out to restaurants. We’re not getting on planes, or trains. We’re not even using our automobiles much.

This service sector of the economy, where today’s unemployed were working before the pandemic, has been crushed. It remains crushed. It will remain crushed until the pandemic is over.

The only solution offered has been to subsidize spending. That subsidy ended in September. Trump’s people stole the money, and the Fed pumped trillions into Wall Street investors who didn’t need it. The result is the greatest transfer of wealth in history, from the poor and the middle class to the wealthy and, indeed, to the ultra-wealthy.

Trump-ism and the Overton Window

Here’s something I never wanted to write, and something it will pain you to read.

Donald Trump is the most consequential President of our lifetime.

He has done far more than Hillary Clinton ever could, ever would, or ever thought of.

Yes, it’s all terrible stuff. Consequential doesn’t mean good. It means significant. Adolf Hitler “won” Time Magazine’s “Man of the Year” multiple times. That doesn’t mean he was good, or that Time liked him. But when it comes to the history of the 20^th century, he was consequential.

Like Hitler, Trump is doing truly terrible things. Constantly. There’s not enough time to list it all.

The Virus Wins Again

As I write this, Democrats are tearing their hair out, fearing Trump is going to steal the election, the country, and we’re all gonna die.

Well, we do die. But Trump is going to fail. No matter what he does, Trump is going to fail.

I know this because I know his opponent, and his opponent can’t fail.

His opponent is the virus.

The virus doesn’t do politics. The virus doesn’t care what you think about it. The virus only cares about whether it can find new hosts and reproduce. The virus may not even be alive, according to many scientists. It’s just a strand of RNA.

The Class War

The stock market is evidence of a sick economy. (Picture from Hedgeye via Twitter.) 

The fact that it’s up shouldn’t surprise anyone who has watched the Fed rain cash on the Hamptons like there’s no tomorrow.

Money with nowhere good to go will flood the richest cropland. The Cloud Czars – Apple, Microsoft, Amazon.Com, Alphabet and Facebook– didn’t need all this financial rain. Their growth rates and profit increases are good, but they don’t justify price to earnings ratios of 33, 35, 151, 30 and 32. When markets do that, it’s called a bubble. The Cloud Czars are tulips.

Meanwhile 12% of Americans are unemployed. This underestimates the pain, which is grossly uneven.

The 1944 Game

Where are we in terms of confronting the Trump Crisis, the great political challenge of our lives?

In terms of my parents’ generation I’d say we’re in 1944. In terms of their ancestors, it’s 1864.

We’ve passed the turning point. The death of George Floyd, the botched response to COVID-19, and the Administration’s response combined to help us turn a corner, as when the graph of the Georgia pandemic peaks at a great height and seems to turn. They were D-Day.

But we haven’t won yet. And we’re exhausted now, just as we were then.

My family is especially pessimistic. They see Trump controlling the agenda, they see his acolytes running police and the military, they fear the 2020 election won’t happen. These are reasonable fears.

But we had similar fears back in the day, easy to see by just looking at what people were doing at the time.

Movie goers remember 1944 for Going My Way,” with Bing Crosby,  or Meet Me in St. Louis, with Judy Garland, movies where the war had little or no role. It’s also remembered as the year of Bogie and Bacall, in To Have or Have Not.  Film noir, created mostly by German emigres, was rising even as the war ground on.

Good Trouble

My Congressman died last week.

John Lewis wasn’t built to be an executive. He was a legislator, the conscience of his time. He absorbed the blows and lived to become an icon.

John Lewis believed in “Good Trouble.” He practiced it, for longer than any other American, 60 years. In time, that’s the distance between Thomas Jefferson’s election and that of Abraham Lincoln. It’s the distance between Theodore Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. From lunch counters, to city streets, to the U.S. Capitol, John Lewis never let up.

Good trouble means pushing people in power to do more, being a pest even to your allies. It means confronting evil, standing for what’s right. It means being unafraid, in the way Gandhi was unafraid, in the way Dr. King was unafraid.

In the way John Lewis was unafraid. Whenever I met him, he was gracious, wise, and conscious of his life’s meaning. He always humbled me.

But John Lewis was no plaster saint. When he wanted something, he could be ruthless. This is told in a story I witnessed. While it didn’t make his obituaries, it was featured in that of the man whose career he ruined, Julian Bond.