Seeking Input on Writing

Greetings Hive Mind. 

I’m cross-posting this to my Blog, Facebook, and a couple of other locations in hopes of getting maximum coverage. Does anyone have advice or go to sources regarding tone (voice) and scoping in writing? I’ve reached this question after several hours of staring at a blank screen and trying to figure out how to even begin with what I want to say. 

Here’s my dilemma. I feel like I need to add my voice to those who are trying to shine a light on just how serious things are at this point in history but I can't figure out where to start. 

You: 

“Things? What things? Can you be more specific?” 

Me: 

Sure, absolutely. The thing that I started out trying to write about today is the erosion of democracy in the United States and the ongoing efforts of the Republican party to keep changing the rules until they can lock in minority rule. Everything we are hearing from the Congressional January 6th committee indicates that the attempt to overturn the presidential election last year was more serious and more coordinated than anyone wanted to believe at the time, and that a large number of sitting lawmakers at the state and federal level are actively trying to downplay the severity and continuing to change the rules. 

Heather Cox Richardson continues to do an admirable job of tracking and summarizing reports from the committee and various news outlets.

Letters from an American January 2, 2022

Among the things that she cited today was a piece from the New York Times Editorial Board emphasizing that January 6th last year was the beginning, not the end, of the efforts to subvert the election process.

Every Day Is Jan. 6 Now (Paywall)

You:
“Ok, it looks like you just wrote a whole paragraph about how fragile our democratic process feels right now. So what’s the issue from a writing perspective?”

Me:
Let’s start with tone. What I just wrote is a fairly dry statement that I think the United States is in imminent danger of dropping below the minimum threshold of a functioning democracy. I included a couple of references to sources who are more credible and better writers than me. That's all well and good except that this is not something about which I can be, or want to be, dispassionate. I feel like this needs to be screamed from the rooftops. I can’t for the life of me figure out why this is getting less media coverage right now than tributes to John Madden. So how does one convey via the tone of writing “HEY!!!! Pay Attention!!! This is SERIOUS!!!” without actually resorting to overuse of caps and exclamation points? I suppose this goes to the larger question of how one can argue against the lunatic fringe without becoming (or sounding like) another lunatic fringe.

Then there is the issue of scope. Let’s suppose for a moment that I was successful in conveying my sense of urgency about the future of democracy and the rule of law. If you are still with me you have now spent several minutes reading about that issue and my struggles expressing it.

This means that for that same period of time you have probably not been thinking about the state of the pandemic; variants, boosters, vax deniers, super spreader events, and what is going to happen as more and more people decide that they are bored with Covid and want it to magically disappear. Of course, these topics are not unrelated since the entire response to Covid has been politicized from the outbreak. Our ability to respond rationally has been drastically hampered by politicians who are more concerned about making sure their opponents fail than making sure their constituents live. 

The same could be said of climate and environmental issues. We are seeing increasing numbers of extreme environmental events 
2021 Western Kentucky tornado - Wikipedia, 
Colorado Wildfires: What We Know - The New York Times (Paywall),
Cold, heat, fires, hurricanes, and tornadoes: The year in weather disasters (Paywall)
but any discussion of what it would take to move the needle dies before it even gets going. The people, companies, and governments that are in a position to do anything meaningful seem to be unwilling to begin the discussion until someone can demonstrate how to make saving the world profitable.

And least we forget, right here in the good old USA (the richest country in the world) we have a huge and rapidly growing portion of our population living at or below the poverty level and cut off from goods and services that the “mainstream” (read top 25%) consider basic necessities. We have a wealth gap the like of which has not been seen since the 1920s (the runup to the Great Depression)
Wealth concentration returning to ‘levels last seen during the Roaring Twenties,’ according to new research (Paywall).
We have a policing, court, and incarceration system that is driven by profit margins and occupancy percentages. We have people who have every reason to fear the very agencies that are supposed to protect them. We have a history of deeply rooted racism and racial inequality that we can’t even talk about for fear of offending some old white guys.

So, Yeah… Scope. All of the topics above, Climate Change, Pandemic, Democracy Hanging by a Thread, Social and Economic Inequity/Injustice, are vital and need immediate attention. And yet somehow this gets less airtime than Antonio Brown taking off his pads and walking out in the middle of a football game.

Which sort of brings me back around to my original question. Does anyone have any good resources on how to scope important topics so that they are manageable and how to set a tone that will get people to take serious matters seriously?

Minimum Wage Math

 Opening #3 (Meaning I’ve thrown away two entire versions of this post)

Who would have guessed it? The history of the minimum wage in the US is a fairly dry and appalling depressing topic. I thought that by looking at previous minimum wage increases I could come up with some simple math for what a reasonable minimum wage would be now. This, of course, is silly because as I’m sure everyone else already knows the minimum wage has nothing to do with math and everything to do with politics. (Maybe a little tiny bit to do with philosophy, but it’s mostly politics.)

As usual, I have ended up writing the opening last. After throwing out a lot of numbers, and a little history I finally reached something that passes for a conclusion and I’m moving it here. My take away from all the number-crunching that follows is that the current system of trying to negotiate static increases every few years does not work. We have watched it not work for 70 years. For the minimum wage to be a viable living wage it needs to be indexed to something real. Whether that index is based on median household income, median rent, some percentage of homeownership cost, I don’t know. I could see arguments for or against any of those. I could also see an argument that the indexing needs to be done at a state or local level to account for variation in the cost of living. What we can’t keep doing is saying “ok, the minimum wage is X, let's raise it to Y and that should be good enough, now go away and don’t bother us, after all, you should be grateful you are getting anything.” All that does is leave us in a perpetual cycle of falling farther and farther behind. If we look at minimum wage from the perspective of what it is right now and talk about increases in proportion to the current level we will never reach anything resembling a living wage. 

The problem with looking at things like pay from the point of view of percentage increases is that if a job or a person starts out behind or falls behind it (the job) or they (the person) can never catch up. The minimum wage is so substandard right now that a 100% increase still would not make it a living wage in many areas. 

When Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the first minimum wage bill into law in 1938 the country was struggling to get out of a deep depression and I would imagine almost any wage looked better than nothing, even $0.25/hr. The fact that Congress increased it by 20% in 1939 shows that the politicians of the time knew that $0.25/hr was too low. The 1945 amendment increasing the minimum wage to $0.40/hr was essentially a maintenance measure and did nothing to address the low starting point. The 1949 amendment jumping from $0.40/hr to $0.75hr was another correction almost on par with the 1939 boost. The 1949 amendment took the minimum wage to a point that one could argue it was a viable living wage. If congress had included an automatic 4.6%-4.8% annual increases from then on we would now have a minimum wage in the $18-$20/hr range and the country would be a very different place. In 1949 I don’t think anyone would have believed what would happen to the cost of housing and the median income of the next 70 years. I’m guessing that even now some people (maybe even many people) would still balk at the idea of setting an annual increase of 4.8% or even 4.5%. However, if you look at the history that is exactly what we would need if we want to use percentage increases rather than indexing to the current cost of living.

I hope it is fairly well understood that in this day and age a person working 40 hours a week for minimum wage is hard-pressed to survive, let alone support a household. The current debate seems to revolve around whether someone should be able to live on a full-time minimum wage job. This was not always a question. Franklin D. Roosevelt was very clear in his stance on the minimum wage. He said, 

“In my Inaugural I laid down the simple proposition that nobody is going to starve in this country. It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.” 

He didn’t even use the term “minimum”. No business should pay less than a living wage. Seems pretty clear. Whether the minimum wage met that standard at its inception is debatable. Even in 1938 $0.25/hr was definitely on the low side. The first point of comparison I’ve found for getting a direct comparison of the minimum wage to household income or cost of living is the 1940 census. By 1940 the minimum wage had been increased to $0.30/hr. The median household income in 1940 was $1,725/year or $0.83/hr. That makes the minimum wage just over 36% of the median household income.

The minimum wage hit its highest point in comparison to median household income in 1950. The amendment of 1949 went into effect in January of 1950 raising the minimum wage from $0.40/hr to $0.75/hr. The Median Household income reported in the 1950 census was $2990 or $1.44/hr. So the 1950 correction made the minimum wage 52.17% of the Median Household income. In 1950 the median rent was $42/month. That’s roughly ⅓ (32.3%) of a full-time minimum wage income for a month. The Median home value was $7,400. Roughly 4.75 times a full-time minimum wage income for a year. I think a strong case can be made that this constituted a living wage. No one was going to get rich on $0.75/hr, but you could pay the rent and eat.

Contrast that with 2010 (the last year for which we have census data). In 2009 the US minimum wage went up to $7.25/hr (where it still sits today ). The Median Household Income in 2010 was $49,445. This was actually down more than $5,000 from 2000 due to the 2008 subprime mortgage crash and resulting recession. This jumped the minimum wage all the way up to 30.5% of Median income which was a huge recovery from 2000 when it had been down to an all time low of 19.47%. In 2010 the median rent was reported as $901/month. That is almost 72% of a full-time minimum wage income for a month. The median home value was $221,800. That is roughly 14.7 times a full-time minimum wage income for a year.

Absent 2020 census data, I resorted to Wikipedia. Per Wikipedia, the 2020 Median Household income is $78,500. The minimum wage was still $7.25/hr, so working a minimum wage job 40 hours a week would have earned you $15,080 for the year. That puts us at a new all time low of 19.21% of the 2020 Median Household income. To reach the 52.17% threshold of 1950 the 2020 minimum wage would need to be $19.69/hr. (Just under $41,000/year). 

So how did we go from minimum wage being 52.17% of household median income in 1950 to 19.21% in 2020? 

The basic history of minimum wage amendments is relatively easy to track down. The department of labor has a good summary.

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/minimum-wage/history

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/minimum-wage/history/chart

Since its inception in 1938 the federal minimum wage law has been amended eleven times. The amendments have come at inconsistent intervals and have had wildly variable impacts. For instance, the 1961 amendment had more provisions dealing with expanding who the minimum wage covered than increasing the amount. Seven of the amendments included increases that were phased in over 2 to 4 year periods. Because of these variables, it is hard to talk about a “typical” increase. The overall trajectory is one of steady decline barely slowed by amendments that are long overdue and inadequate to make up for time and inflation. The best method I have come up with for looking at the historical movement has been to consider the entire increase for a given amendment amortized as if it had taken effect evenly across the time from the final increase of the previous amendment to the full roll out of the current amendment. 

Consider the examples of the 1977 and 1989 amendments.

• The 1977 amendment increased the minimum wage from $2.30 in January 1976 to $3.35 in January 1981. The overall increase was $1.05 over a period of 5.01 years. Starting at $2.30 this would be achieved with an annual increase of 7.80%. This was the largest increase in terms of annual percentage since the 1949 amendment.
• The 1989 amendment increased the minimum wage from $3.35 in January 1981 to $4.25 in April 1991. The overall increase was $0.90 over a period of 10.25 years. Starting at $3.35 this would be achieved with an annual increase of 2.35%. This was the smallest increase ever in terms of annual percentage.

Using this method we get the annual increases in the table above ranging from 2.35% to 20%. If we apply the same method over the 70.8 year history of the minimum wage from the time of its inception in 1938 to the last increase in 2009 we end up with an overall average annual increase of 4.87%. 

If we apply those percentages to the current interval since the last increase in July of 2009 (call it 12 years to make calculations easier) we see potential minimum wages ranging from $9.58/hr using the 1989 amendment to $64.64/hr using the 1939 amendment. If we apply the 4.87% average increase to that 12 year gap the minimum wage in July 2021 would be $12.83/hr.

Does this mean that if we increase the minimum wage to $12.83/hr this summer and implement annual increases of 4.87% everything is fixed? No, not really. This is where the inadequacy of the increases over the last 70 years come into play. If the 4.87% increase had been applied consistently since 2009 the minimum wage in 2020 would have been $12.23/hr. That’s still only 32.41% of the median household income (from Wikipedia), nowhere near the 52.17% standard set in 1950. What would we have to do to reach 52.17%? If we accept the Wikipedia estimate of $78,500/year as the median household income in 2020 the minimum wage would need to have been $19.69/hr in 2020. To go from $0.75/hr in 1950 to $19.69/hr in 2020 would have required annual increases of 4.78%.

“But wait”, I hear you say. “I thought you said that the average increase over the entire history of the minimum wage was 4.87% and that if we applied that up to 2021 we would only be at $12.83?”

Yes, you heard right. Welcome to the joys of compound returns and the relative impact of starting value and compounding periods. 

• Scenario A) Starting in 1938 at $0.25, increasing by 4.87% annually gets us to $7.25 in 2009 and $12.23 in 2020. ($12.83 in 2021)
• Scenario B) Starting in 1950 at $0.75, increasing at 4.78% annually gets us to $11.78 in 2009 and $19.69 in 2020. ($20.63 in 2021)

This is also why I refer to the 1949 amendment as a correction. The annualized increase in 1949 was 15.91%. I don’t think even the FDR or Truman administrations would have suggested that the minimum wage needed to go up that much every year. It needed a large boost to get to a viable level from which it could have been maintained. The fact that it was not maintained is the failure of the subsequent administrations.

But where does that leave us? As I was writing this when I reached this point I had thrown out a lot of numbers, and a little history and offered no opinion about what I think the minimum wage should be. This is what led me to the conclusion that piecemeal increases will continue to be ineffective and that given the seeming unwillingness to institute a standard annual increase, we need to find a way to make the minimum wage reflect the realities of what it costs to live.

When I first started looking over the history of the amendments it seemed fairly clear that the minimum wage has rarely had any champions in Washington. Since the end of the Truman administration even at times that Democrats have controlled both houses of congress and the white house, they have been unable or unwilling to maintain the minimum wage at anything close to the 1950 level. The Carter administration made some headway in the late 70s, but not nearly enough to make up for the losses in the 50s and 60s let alone offset the impending disaster of the Reagan years.

I have not done any real research on whether there have been other attempts at amendments that have failed. I'm sure there are stories to be found.

Was the 1996 amendment (the only one ever passed by a Republican congress) a ploy to push Bob Dole ahead of Clinton in the '96 presidential election?

When Democrats regained control of the house and senate in 1986 did they pass an amendment that Reagan vetoed? Was there a threat or promise of a veto that Democrats chose not to challenge?

The biggest question though is: What are congressional Democrats and the Biden administration going to do right now? By every standard I can find the current minimum wage is the worst it has been since its inception. There is no guarantee that Democrats will be able to retain control of the house and senate in 2022. Given that, it is crucial that they act decisively while they can.

Privilege from the inside. Part The Last of a multi-part series.

Part Last

In which Darrin gives up on the original outline and just tries to wrap this up.

If you have been reading this series from the beginning you may remember that part 7 was supposed to be

“In which Darrin realizes that the existence of racial and gender privilege is so obvious and so ubiquitous that he is dumbstruck and ashamed that it took him so long to clue in.”.

When I started working on this series I set out to write it from the point of view of my own experience and steer clear of anything that might seem like commentary or judgment of other peoples' actions or beliefs. I’ve realized that I just can’t do it. I can’t maintain that approach and tone. In the time since I published Part 6 over a year ago, I have been unable to get more than a few lines written without getting sidetracked by one appalling event after another. With the proliferation of increasingly overt racism and violence against BIPoC and those who try to support them, I can’t find that non-judgemental voice. 

I remain torn because I know from personal experience how hard it is to get past the knee jerk defensive reaction. My whole objective was to try to show, as gently as possible, the kinds of advantages that I, as a white man, took for granted most of my life and hope that those realizations would ring true for others and encourage them to think about their own situations. I never expected to convince or convert throngs. At best I was hoping that I might encourage a few people to consider that it isn't too late to examine our viewpoints and that we must keep evolving.

Image via Ryan D. Wheelz

I hope that we are reaching a point that we can stop debating whether White Privilege or Male Privilege exists. I hope it is becoming too obvious to ignore. After watching an armed mob of white men occupy the Michigan capitol with no consequences while unarmed protestors nationwide are met with overwhelming (and far too often lethal) force I really can’t believe that anyone really buys the notion that White people and BIPoC are treated the same in this country. White Privilege exists. White Privilege has been central to the United States throughout its existence. We can’t change that. We can’t make our history anything other than what it is. The ONLY thing we can do is acknowledge reality and start working to change it.

Acknowledging that White Privilege exists is not saying that we have not worked hard.
Acknowledging that White Privilege exists is not saying that things have always been easy.
Acknowledging that White Privilege exists is acknowledging that if we are white, and particularly if we are white men in the United States, then whatever we have achieved would have been much harder (if not impossible) if we had tried to do it as black people (particularly as women of color).
Furthermore, acknowledging that White Privilege exists is acknowledging that we can’t fundamentally understand what it means to be on the other side.

I am white. Like "fish-belly" white. Like "translucent" white. I know a whole bunch of black people. I can NEVER pretend to know the kind of racism they deal with every freakin' day of their lives.

- Jim Tompkins MacLaine

I think it is fairly well established at this point that discussing White Privilege is not comfortable. It can be a hard pill to swallow. It took me, personally, 20 years to choke it down. BUT... Some very smart people have put a great deal of work into getting past the defensive reaction and trying to show how to move on to something productive. This is another reason I don’t feel the need to finish my version of understanding white privilege. What I have been trying to do has already been done, and done better than I am capable of. Don’t take my word for any of it. Go to reputable historians who have done the research and have the sources and citations to back it up. Here are just a few examples of white and black authors talking about this very topic.

Robin DiAngelo

White Fragility  (Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism)

Heather Cox Richardson

Letters from an American
How the South Won the Civil War: (Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America)
Wounded Knee (Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre)

Ibram X. Kendi

How to Be an Antiracist

Carol Anderson

White Rage

privilege

[priv-uh-lij, priv-lij]

1. a right, immunity, or benefit enjoyed only by a person beyond the advantages of most:
2. a special right, immunity, or exemption granted to persons in authority or office to free them from certain obligations or liabilities:
3. a grant to an individual, corporation, etc., of a special right or immunity, under certain conditions.
4. the principle or condition of enjoying special rights or immunities.

The Case Against Donald J Trump

The United States has, far and away, the largest COVID-19 outbreak in the world, now accounting for over a quarter of all confirmed cases globally. As of 4/11/2020 the US had exceeded 20,000 deaths from COVID-19 surpassing both Spain and Italy. The US death toll is now over 23,000 and rising. The vast majority of those deaths were entirely preventable. Those deaths are on the heads of Trump and all the lackeys who enabled him to delay an effective response.

Anyone with the least knowledge of history will tell you that the way to deal with an epidemic or pandemic is to identify it early and contain it before it gets established. The way the coronavirus outbreak in South Korea was handled proves that it was containable.

While I am not any kind of a fan of Bush the Younger, even he was able to see that "If we wait for a pandemic to appear, it will be too late to prepare. And one day many lives could be needlessly lost because we failed to act today."

In 2005 after reading an advance copy of John M. Barry's "The Great Influenza" about the 1918 Spanish Influenza pandemic George W. Bush set out to spend $7 billion building out his pandemic preparedness plan.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/george-bush-2005-wait-pandemic-late-prepare/story?id=69979013

Not only did Trump fail to act, he actively dismantled the work done by the previous two administrations to try to prepare for the pandemic that they believed was inevitable.

The Trump administration disbanded The Global Health Security and Biodefense unit of the NSC in May 2018.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/05/10/top-white-house-official-in-charge-of-pandemic-response-exits-abruptly/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/nsc-pandemic-office-trump-closed/2020/03/13/a70de09c-6491-11ea-acca-80c22bbee96f_story.html

The USAID PREDICT program arose from the efforts Bush started and Obama continued. Over a 10 year period it identified some 1,200 viruses with the potential to cause human disease and pandemics, including over 160 novel coronaviruses. In 2019 the Trump administration defunded it. PREDICT ceased fieldwork in September of 2019.  

https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-04-02/coronavirus-trump-pandemic-program-viruses-detection

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/25/health/predict-usaid-viruses.html

Starting in January 2020 (if not earlier) Trump and other members of his administration have consistently misrepresented the severity of the coronavirus and the outlook for its spread in the US. Trump has wasted precious time arguing about reporting methodology and trying to downplay the numbers out of concern that the truth would make him look bad.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/11/politics/fact-check-trump-administration-coronavirus-28-dishonest/index.html

Trump’s dismantling of the institutions intended to combat this exact type of threat and his failure to act once the outbreak was in progress make him culpable for the thousands of deaths that we have already seen and the thousands still to come.

Has the Great American Experiment ever faced a greater challenge?

When asked what form of government we had ended up with Benjamin Franklin is famously quoted as responding "A Republic, if you can keep it."

As far back as Plato there has been a fear that Democracies or Republics will naturally devolve toward demagogues and tyrants. A representative republic on the scale proposed for the new United States of America was a radical notion even without the expansion that would follow.

Now, as we stand with an unstable narcissist in the White House elected on a platform of racism, hatred and outright lies, it seems like the worst fears of the framers have come to pass. Every new piece of information that surfaces about this presidency highlights Trump's unfitness for the office he holds.
See the WaPo excerpt from “A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America"

The framers of the constitution were well aware of the historical tendencies of republics and tried to build in safeguards to protect the country they envisioned. Those safeguards have steadily eroded and are in jeopardy of collapsing entirely.

It has been over 230 years since the Constitution of the United States was ratified, and with the possible exception of the American Civil war in the 1860s I don't think we have ever been closer to seeing the Great Experiment Fail.

I don't know what it will take for the Great Experiment to survive this chapter. The mechanisms exist in the constitution to reclaim the government from the Oligarchs, but that requires winning elections. Democracy has always been predicated on the notion of an informed, engaged voting population.
Currently it appears that the elections in the Unites States are being won through manipulation of a highly malleable voter base. Professor Jonathan Metzl recently examined aspects of this in interviews with Boston University Today "Are White Americans Harming Themselves by Backing GOP Policies?" and the Tennessee Star "Vanderbilt Professor Says Racial Prejudice Keeps Rural Tennesseans From Embracing Obamacare".

In terms of the legitimacy of elections themselves it is hard to tell whether things are getting better or worse. With recent court decisions overturning heavily gerrymandered districting in Michigan and North Carolina it seems like there is progress on that front, but at the same time direct hacking of voting systems is on the rise. See Page 7 of the Worldwide Threat Assessment

The bottom line is that if we want to keep our Republic we will have to singularly and collectively commit to building voting coalitions that can defeat the bought and paid for servants of the oligarchs by large enough margins to make it impossible to steal the elections.

A Shortage of Outrage

I would not have thought it was possible but I’m finding that I am running an outrage deficit. There are so many utterly appalling situations in our country right now that I can’t process it all. As angry as I am I can’t track everything at once. As I look at any given situation and try to determine how to respond I know I am losing track of several others that are just as, if not more, pressing.

I think a big part of my problem is that I don’t know what to do about any of the most critical issues.
I know that nothing I say will matter. Best case 40-50 people might see this blog. Most of them are already the choir.
I am exhausted from battling a non-stop series of archetypally first world problems in my own life. It makes the prospect of trying to face the big issues crushing.
No amount of money that I can bring to bear will move the needle. (Admittedly I have not emptied my financial resources to prove this.)
But the biggest problem is that I just don’t know where to start. I don’t know what has to be the highest priority.

How do you pick between children being separated from their parents and held in cages and the US standing aside to allow ethnic cleansing of our allies? Both are horrifying. Both need immediate action. People are dying faster in one, the other has been allowed to persist longer and is closer to home. In both cases there is a point at which if it is not addressed it will be too late. In both cases it is already too late for far too many people.

This does not even begin to get in to things like police being called for a wellness check by a concerned neighbor and responding by shooting the resident they are supposed to be checking on, in her own home, through the window. This is just the most recent in a seemingly endless saga of violence by police and toward police in an increasingly antagonistic and polarized relationship between the police and the public.

At the heart of much of this we have a nominal Chief Executive who seems to swing between being utterly immoral, greed driven, and self-serving on the one hand and totally unhinged on the other. The avenues available to deal with this lunatic are too slow to help those who are endangered by his orders and are dependent on rules of law that seem to be increasingly meaningless. As Trump becomes more and more blatant about his belief that he is above the law I have to wonder if there are any federal law enforcement agencies that aren’t compromised. The FBI, DEA, ICE, CBP, and USMS all report to DOJ or DHS, both of which are firmly under the White House thumb. So even if the House of Representative were to start issuing contempt of Congress citations who is going to enforce them? As far as I can tell the House of Representatives has one Sergeant at Arms who has one deputy. While they can place an individual in custody if they are on the premises it seems unlikely that they are going to go out of the building to find and arrest individuals held in contempt (e.g. for non-compliance with a subpoena).

There is unquestionably sufficient evidence for the House to pass articles of Impeachment, but to what end? Trump has already stated that he considers the impeachment investigation unconstitutional and invalid. There is no reason to believe that he would acknowledge the validity of a Senate trial even if it happened.
I see no reason to believe that McConnell would not block the reading, debate and vote on any articles of impeachment just like he has blocked so many things.
For that matter, if we reach the 2020 election, if the votes are counted and reported accurately, and if it turns out that Trump has lost is there any reason to believe that he will accept that result and leave office?

I have not even touched on the fact that we are rapidly running out of time to try to slow and reverse the damage we have done to the one and only habitable planet we have access to. Which could ultimately (and sooner than we used to think) render how we treat each other moot.

Does it seem like this post is chaotic and all over the map? Welcome to what I am trying to process. This is the whole point. In a situation like this how do you pick a starting point and make any headway?

The United States of America was founded on high ideals. Historically we have fallen short of those ideals, time and again, but at least it seemed like we were trying to do better and be better. Now we have a very vocal part of the population arguing that we need to abandon those ideals and become, in essence, an isolationist theocracy.
The Great American Experiment is hanging in the balance. We have failed to stop a cheap huckster from assuming the highest office in our country. We have failed to stop the sale of our democracy to the highest bidder. We have given power to self serving demagogues who are patently unfit to hold it.
Fixing this situation will not be easy if it is even possible.

I don’t know how to start. I don’t know how to move the needle. I’m not sure I believe that slow and steady wins this time. I would very much like to hear from anyone who has any idea what to do first.

A Totally Unscientific Survey

If we have talked in person any time in the last couple of years you have probably already heard this. If you have not heard it I would be very interested to hear your reactions. If you have heard it I would be interested to hear if you have ever mentioned it to anyone else and what reactions you have gotten.

The Survey goes like this.

If you had a choice right now as President of the United States between Richard Nixon circa 1974 and Donald Trump circa now who would you choose?
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Think about your answer a moment.
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Scroll down for the follow-up question.
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If your answer was Richard Nixon here is the follow-up question...
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Who or what will happen in 45 years that could make you nostalgic for Donald Trump?

In case you are wondering... No, I don't think this is funny. When I first thought of it months ago it wasn't funny and it has become increasingly less funny as the Trump debacle continues.

The remarkable thing is that in one regard Trump continues to be the Wizard of Oz. Just by being himself he has re-written the history of those who preceded him. When compared to Trump he has given
George W. Bush a Brain
Bill Clinton respectability and family values
George H. W. Bush a Soul
Dick Nixon Integrity

If we allow this man to continue defining reality as he goes along it is just a matter of time before we are going to be told it is time to celebrate Hitler as a misunderstood patriot.

Don't underestimate Wait Staff and Bartenders

I just saw a social media post that alluded to republicans trying to use Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez having worked as a bartender and waitress as a negative. I don’t have a specific quote or publication in which this happened, so I’m not going to address that directly. Instead I want to talk about why we should not be so quick to dismiss these jobs and the people who hold them.

 First and foremost, to quote Carol Burnett, “A job’s a job.” This, of course, can be said of any job. Not every job is going to be your dream job. Not every job is going to be on the path to your dream job. Not every job is going to make full use of your experience or education.
 Sometimes a job is just a way to pay the rent and buy groceries while you are working on getting those other things lined up. Service industry jobs can be particularly well suited to this because they tend to have schedules with enough flexibility to work around hunting for your dream job, or training, or going to school, or surviving a period in which your dream job is not paying enough to live on.

 On top of this (here is where the soap box really comes out) DO NOT underestimate the skills that can be learned in a “Service Industry” job.

 Let’s start with the obvious; Customer Service and people skills. You are in direct contact with your customers on a constant basis. They are not faceless, nameless statistics. They are people who have gone through their day so far, had good experiences and bad, and are now ready for something to eat and drink and probably a little social time. As a server you have a few seconds as you approach and greet a table to get a read on those customers. Are they feeling gregarious? Do they want you to be conversational? Are they looking to get some food with minimal interaction? Do they want you to be formal or casual? Are they having a good day, a bad day, or just a day. You have to be aware if your establishment is busy that they have been waiting and may be a little frustrated or at the very least really ready to get started.

 Next major skill; workflow and time management. As a server you are constantly in motion from the dining room to the pass (where food comes out from the kitchen) to the dish room with occasional side trips to the kitchen, the walk-in, the bathrooms, the dumpster. The busier you are the more important it is to combine tasks and avoid wasted trips or low productivity trips. At one restaurant where I worked “Full hands in, Full hands out” was a mantra. It meant if you are heading in to the dish area/pass there is almost certainly something you can take in with you. If you are heading out of the pass there is almost certainly something that needs to go to the dining room.
 There is also a huge element of prioritizing tasks based on urgency but also factoring in impact and timeline. The thing that will generally take the longest is the time from when you enter a customer’s order to when food starts coming up. With few exceptions once you have an order in hand you want to get that entered in the system so that the kitchen can be working on it while you are doing other things. But there are exceptions to this and figuring out when something is so pressing that you need to sacrifice some optimization to move a task to the top of the queue is another skill that you hone over time. e.g. A customer is out of their beverage and they have food so hot they can't continue their meal without a refill.

 Teamwork. Remember “Full hand in, Full hands out”? Those things won’t always be for your tables. As you are headed for the kitchen can you grab some dishes off a table at a neighboring station? Can you help someone bus an empty table so it can be turned? On the way out can you run some food to another table? Does someone need a hand taking drink refills to another table? Does the bar need a bucket of ice? Are you watching out for the servers around you to have a feel if someone is getting in the weeds (industry term for being slammed) and might need a hand? Are you building a culture among the staff where people watch out for each other and pitch in? In a restaurant, as in so many other places, teamwork can make or break you.

 For bartenders you have all of that and add in several more things. A bartender is expected to have an encyclopedic knowledge of drink recipes. Even in places that have a drink menu that is generally to let patrons know about house specialties or drinks out of the ordinary. Everyone assumes that any ‘standard’ drink is available whether it is on a menu or not.
 If you are working a bar connected to a restaurant you have to balance serving your patrons directly with getting drinks ready for the wait staff to pick up. You have even more possibility of customers who want to be chatty. You are sometimes expected to be an amateur psychologist. In some states as a bartender or a server you are expected to be a human breathalyzer. In Tennessee, for example, it is illegal to serve alcohol to an intoxicated person. A restaurant or bar and the staff in it can be held liable for the actions of someone who gets intoxicated there. It doesn’t matter if a patron has eight drinks at some other bar and then comes to your restaurant and orders one. If you serve that person alcohol and they get in an accident you can be held partially responsible. So with every drink order you as a server have to decide if the customer should be cut off. (And let me tell you, that is never a fun conversation, when you tell someone that you are not getting them another drink).

 Now bring this back around to people who scoff at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for having worked as a server and bartender. Here you have someone who graduated cum laude from Boston University with a major in international relations and economics. I’m not familiar with the types of jobs someone with that background generally goes for, but I have to assume that the reason AOC was working as a bartender and waitress as that it was the best option available for her to take care of herself and her family. In the course of doing that she worked in a job that brought her in direct contact with a large number of people from the area she now represents in Congress. I would imagine that she had ample opportunity to hear directly and indirectly what people care about, what is important to them, and translated that into how they would like to be represented.

 AOC was quoted recently saying of Congress, “Our job is to serve, not to rule”. In theory the members of congress are supposed to be the voice of the people. Who better then to represent the people than someone who has spent real time listening to them?