To paraphrase the line from F. Scott Fitzgerald, political people aren’t like you and me, they keep their souls in blind trusts secreted in deep vaults somewhere in the Antarctic. That has always been the only way I figure out couples who are on opposite political sides. Mary Jo thinks they’re just putting on a show and laughing all the way to the bank.

That was how I felt about the relationship between Chester James Carville and Mary Joe Matalin. He worked in the Clinton White House, she in Reagan’S. I’ve known couples who couldn’t survive rooting for different sports teams. How do you go to bed at night with someone who works hard every day to destroy your boss? I always thought such people had to be soulless, but Mary Jo has a point, perhaps they’re just high level carnies soaking the rubes.

Case in point: George Thomas Conway and Kellyanne Elizabeth Conway. A week ago I wrote about Republicans For The Rule Of Law—about as bizarre a name as I’ve ever heard—and today I learned about The Lincoln Project after watching the commercial—an ironic spoff of President Ronald Wilson Reagan’s 1984 reëlecdtion campaign commercial It’s Morning In America—below. George Conway, no fan, by all accounts, of President Donald John Trump, is the first listed advisor to The Lincoln Project.

The President, however, isn’t laughing. Jessica Glenza, reporting in Trump rails at ‘loser types’ as dissident Republican ad gets under his skin for The Guardian, writes:

A political ad criticizing Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has prompted a string of name-calling, angry tweets from the president, in which he derided his critics as “loser types.”

While Twitter rants are common for the president, this series has the flavor of personal grudge. The ad, called Mourning in America, was produced by a group of anti-Trump Republicans, prominently co-founded by the husband of one of Trump’s senior advisers.

The ad riffs on former president Ronald Reagan’s classic 1984 re-election ad, Morning in America, a one-minute commercial where young Americans get married, buy a home and raise the flag.

You can watch more videos of this sort on The Lincoln Project YouTube channel.

So, who, and what are these people? Soulless psychopaths? Comedy Duos? Or, perhaps, shrewd political operatives that guarantee a steady cash flow regardless of which wing of the Pro-Pro-Business party happens to occupy the White House?

What ever they may be, these people cannot be anything like you and me.

It is time the rest of us do, too. But we won’t. The game is rigged.

We’re into a new decade. Same as the old decade. Three times over.

Some 30 years ago I think I had it right.

I wrote about where Cleveland was headed, had been headed. We were on to the ‘90s:

So what if poverty has inched and jumped ahead.

So what if people are moving out of the city steadily.

So what if the city’s infrastructure is falling apart and its human services are deplorable.

Much of downtown Cleveland supposedly came back and the some other spots did doing better.

Yes, it cost money. It always does. Tax abatements, tax exemptions, TIFs, gifts.

But what they don’t say is it is PUBLIC MONEY. Mostly for private profit.

We got three major league sports teams and the restaurants to go with them.

WAIT!

Now we got this pandemic. The sports teams are not playing. The restaurants aren’t open.

We built a city for visitors. Now, no visitors.

But Clevelanders still live here. Often unemployed or in low income, now dangerous, jobs.

What have we done? And what are we going to do again?

Where have we been? Where are we going?

We can go back to the deserved dumping of Dennis Kucinich in 1979. There’s talk he wants back.

If you believe the story put out by Fortune Magazine in the 1980s, it was a job by an Establishment “organized coup” by Cleveland’s elite. I don’t disagree. But who elected them?

It ushered in George Voinovich as mayor and likely more important, kept George Forbes as Council President.

And it followed with Michael White as mayor. In all, three decades ago. The stink is still there.

That gave us some 30-plus years of corporate control of the instruments of power here.

They set the table. Then came the dinner.

The last 15 years on cruise control. Frank Jackson riding in neutral. No hands on the wheel.

The bills have not been paid. The tab has to be immense.

The question is who will pay? Certainly, there isn’t a politician hereabout who will even contemplate a tax that hits wealth.

There isn’t one.

All taxes for sports stadiums, for example, are inequitable—all regressive sales taxes.

There isn’t likely to be any exposure of a tax that hits wealth.

Brent Larkin—what the Plain Dealer can describe as someone who has at least institutional memory—warned recently of the impact of the coronavirus pandemic might have on Cleveland.

Not pretty.

Most people don’t remember the ’60s or ’70s. Larkin reminds us of the bumper sticker about being tough, Cleveland.

The “slogan” summarized the trials and tribulations of that times: racial divisions that ended in violence. Dennis who ended in default.

Now we have the Trump Depression ravaging Cleveland.

We aren’t prepared. Not surprising.

In this Looking Back, I ask readers to take the time to review two Point Of Viəw issues—one from 1989 and what I called “The Forbes Team.” George Forbes was the power politician of that decade of a “dying city.” It is followed by a 1999 issue: “The Corruption of Civic Life” when Michael White pushed Forbes aside to become mayor.

It is ironic that in both these decades the political leadership, as it does now in the city, belong to black political leadership.

Now same as before. Elites rule. Politicians dance.

Cleveland is withering away. It takes time to dislodge a city once as wealthy as this one. The erosion, with some hiccups of progress, now faces a fate few can deter.

Cuyahoga County faces the fate it helped create for itself: DEBT. Backed by taxes, dependent on visitors.

A hotel that has to be paid for, a medical mart that needs doctoring, a convention center that lies vacant. All built on unpaid debt.

We have a delinquent mayor and a negligent county executive and legislative bodies for both mainly rubber stamps.

Woe is Cleveland. And now the county with it. Who will sell as the next savior?

Also: First—Mark Cuban says federal jobs programs needed NOW, floats possible presidential run; Second—Ryan Grim: Why Elizabeth Warren, Democrats are changing tune on MeToo and Third—SHOCK POLL: One-quarter of Dems are DONE with Biden after Tara Reade allegations.

First things first: Justin Pemberton’s documentary, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is available as a virtual theater experience through Cleveland Cinemas as part of a $12.00 five-day pass through 14 May. Got your pass? Good. Nearly thirteen years ago, presciently just before the Great Recession of 2008, Robert Reich published Supercapitalism.

Subtitled The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life, Reich’s book laid the ground work for much of what would follow in the wake of the Great Recession and the publication in 2014 of Thomas Piketty’s nearly 700-page—the executive summary runs 41 pages—opus: Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Belknap Press, publisher of the English translation (Piketty is French) writes:

What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings will transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality.

Piketty shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality–the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth–today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, Piketty says, and may do so again.

Jon Schwarz, writing in “Capital in the 21st Century”: Finally, a Movie That Tells the Story of How We Got Into This Mess for The Intercept, reviews the documentary. He ledes:

“The way the elite stays in power, and passes on their privilege to the next generation, is by shaping the way that we think.”

You may have heard this from a million rose emoji Twitter accounts. But it sounds different coming from Gillian Tett at the beginning of a new documentary, “Capital in the 21st Century,” just released online. Tett is the chair of the U.S. editorial board of the Financial Times, the salmon-colored international business newspaper read by Deutsche Bank vice presidents from London to Dubai to Singapore. (Every month FT publishes a magazine called “How to Spend It.”)

Stop and imagine for a moment, just how insanely rich you would have to be to need monthly advice from a financial newspaper to figure out how to spend even a portion. Schwarz continues:

There are many other documentaries about the same subject as “Capital in the 21st Century”—i.e., the rise of the 0.1 percent and the fall of everyone else. They’re mostly a barrage of graphs and numbers that make you feel like you drank three Heinekens at lunch and want to take a nap. “Capital” doesn’t do this. Instead it just tells a story, the centuries-long story of capitalism.

That makes it unique in popular culture, particularly since it does so not in a dry monotone but often via clips from movies. The story of capitalism is the central reality of everyone’s life. But it isn’t taught in high school. It’s not on TV. That’s truly bizarre if you think about it, yet, as Tett has explained elsewhere, it’s unlikely that you will. All societies maintain what anthropologists call “social silence” about the society’s most significant subjects. As Tett puts it, what matters most “is not discussed because those topics are considered boring, irrelevant, taboo, or just unthinkable.”

On the brink of global economic collapse, there can be no better time to come to grips with how we got here and damn fears of the boring, irrelevant, taboo, or just unthinkable.

How Pemberton condenses 700 pages down to 103 minutes—the general rule is one page of text equals one minute of movie time—is beyond me, but I intend to find out. Schwarz concludes:

“There are always politicians tempted to exploit the rising inequality,” [Piketty] says. “You could see this very clearly in the world before 1914. And I’m very afraid at the beginning of the 21st century, that because we feel we cannot regulate international capitalism, we cannot properly tax billionaires and multinationals, instead we vent our anger” at other targets. The danger of misdirected rage is now even clearer than when the movie was filmed, as Congress and the Trump administration use the novel coronavirus as an excuse for “just shoveling money to rich people” via complicated but extremely lucrative tax breaks.

That’s where the story of “Capital in the 21st Century” ends. “People on the streets are starting to say, enough. Enough of the inequality, and enough of not having a story about how this ever gets better,” says journalist Paul Mason. The movie and Piketty have real but limited suggestions for this kind of story about the future. But they’ve done a huge service to everyone by helping us see how we got to where we are today, which is the first step to figuring out where we want to go next.

Enough of the the Republican and Democratic parties pretending that they are not sock puppets on the opposing hands of one master: the one percent.

Bonus No. 1: Anderson Cooper discovers coffee…

Full props to Krystall Ball and Saagar Enjeti for hammering away at Tara Reade’s accusations of rape by Joseph Robinette Biden and, nearly daily calling out members of the #MeToo movement who protested at the appointment and confirmation of now Associate Justice Brett Michael Kavanaugh and then ducked for cover when the accused was their guy.

I get the whole due process argument and I fully understand that there will be women—and girls, I’m aware of case at a school where I taught where three girls attempted to frame a teacher they didn’t like—who will lie about sexual assault, but we can’t let those outliers be cover for hypocrisy and selective investigation.

In So Far, There Is No Reason Not to Believe Tara Reade, Ted Rall writes:

Pending the miraculous discovery of ancient surveillance footage, we may never know the truth about this alleged sexual assault. Still, the issue is worth discussing. To paraphrase Richard Nixon, the American people have the right to consider the possibility that their presidential candidate may be a rapist. Tara Reade has the right to be fully heard, Joe Biden has the right to a vigorous defense, and voters have the right to decide whether or not we believe her.

What I find interesting, in part due to my own experience taking on The Los Angeles Times, is the pretzel logic that America’s political and media establishment deploys to fend off accusations against elites.

Former prosecutor Michael J. Stern wrote an op-ed for USA Today that has become Democrats’ go-to list of reasons we can be “skeptical about Tara Reade’s sexual assault claim against Biden.” It is entirely devoid of fact, logical reasoning or common sense. And it is the way that many Americans, including those employed by major media outlets, think.

It is also the reason that many victims, probably most victims, and not just of sexual crimes, don’t come forward. The system is set up, not to ask reasonable questions based on America’s constitutionally-guaranteed presumption of innocence, but to discourage legitimate victims from pursuing justice.

And therein lies the problem. Pillory claimants, if you will, after their claims have been investigated by our justice system, but we must not allow criminals to go unpunished just because we believe them over their accusers. Justice should not work that way. Rall concludes:

If your politics are slightly unconventional, according to this former prosecutor, you must be lying when you say you were raped. Or, just maybe, she supported Bernie Sanders in part because he never tried to rape her. Perhaps “the timing of her allegation” stemmed from her dismay that her rapist was about to become President of the United States. And the cheap psychological gambit that Joe “Captain America” Biden epitomizes “traditional American democracy” is so ridiculous that it merits no response.

The truth may come out and it may vindicate Joe Biden. Even so, the media will remain guilty and complicit of stupidity in the service of the rich and powerful.

That last bit is more than a little naive. The rich and powerful literally own the media. We should not be shocked when members of the club protect their fellows.

Bonus No. 1: Anti-Union Operative Warns Business of Historic Rise in Labor Activism.

Bonus No. 2: ‘A reckoning for our species’: the… prophet of the Anthropocene.

Bonus No. 3: New rule! (Watterson did it first.)

[Update at 1113—May Day protester’s epic rant about rich CEOs and Congress.]

Last year, workers around the world marched, but this year—amidst social distancing in the time of COVID-19—they’re walking. Out. Today, workers for Amazon, Whole Foods, Target, Instacart, Walmart and FedEx are telling their employers that enough is enough. They are embracing Karl Marx’s charge to unite with their fellow workers across the globe.

Workers never have more power than times when the bosses need them more than they need the bosses. We only need to examine the growth and decline of our own union movements here in the United States to see that. These workers can see how Jeff Bezos, on their backs, has profited more than $32 Billion in just a few weeks of the current pandemic. Bezos, however, is just the most egregious of many examples. Daniel Medina, writing in As Amazon, Walmart, and Others Profit Amid Coronavirus Crisis, Their Essential Workers Plan Unprecedented Strike for The Intercept, begins:

An unprecedented coalition of workers from some of America’s largest companies will strike on Friday. Workers from Amazon, Instacart, Whole Foods, Walmart, Target, and FedEx are slated to walk out on work, citing what they say is their employers’ record profits at the expense of workers’ health and safety during the coronavirus pandemic.

The employees will call out sick or walk off the job during their lunch break, according to a press release set to be published by organizers on Wednesday. In some locations, rank-and-file union members will join workers outside their warehouses and storefronts to support the demonstrations.

“We are acting in conjunction with workers at Amazon, Target, Instacart and other companies for International Worker’s Day to show solidarity with other essential workers in our struggle for better protections and benefits in the pandemic,” said Daniel Steinbrook, a Whole Foods employee and strike organizer.

The labor action comes as workers and organizers say Amazon, in particular, has not been forthcoming about the number of Covid-19 cases at its more than 175 fulfillment centers globally.

Jana Jumpp, an Indiana Amazon employee, along with her small team of fellow Amazon workers, has over the last month tallied Covid-19 cases at Amazon warehouses in the U.S. According to Jumpp, there have been at least 500 coronavirus cases in at least 125 Amazon facilities.

Jumpp suspects that the number is much higher, but says this is what she and her team have been able to directly confirm through their sourcing, which includes screenshots of internal company texts and voicemails to employees when cases have arisen, in addition to messages received from Amazon workers on private Facebook groups. The numbers, which have not been previously reported, are the most comprehensive to this point.

At the center of the movement, and perhaps the best known name associated with today’s strike, is Christian Smalls. I firmly believe that if there is to a second socialist revolution and a return of a strong union movement, that movement will come from the rank-and-file. Medina continues:

Amazon fired Smalls on March 30, only hours after he led his colleagues at a company warehouse in Staten Island, New York, on a walkout in protest of Amazon’s response to the pandemic. Amazon said Smalls was fired for violating a company-enforced quarantine.

The firing galvanized front-line workers everywhere, who sent dozens of messages daily to Smalls asking how they too could organize work stoppages to protest their workplace conditions. Smalls joined forces with workers rights groups like Amazonians United, Target Workers Unite, Whole Worker, and the Gig Workers Collective, among others.

The coalition organized the strike over the last several weeks on Zoom calls and encrypted messaging apps like Telegram and Signal. Civil rights icon Rev. Jesse Jackson joined in on one Zoom call to briefly address the organizers, offering the full support of his Rainbow Push network. “I am with you in your struggle,” Jackson told the call’s participants.

The Intercept spoke to 20 organizers from more than half a dozen states, reflecting the widespread nature of the strike. From Whole Foods workers in Boston to Instacart gig workers in Silicon Valley to Amazon warehouse organizers in Kentucky and Michigan, their stories and demands varied but together illustrated a pattern of corporate neglect toward workers now regarded as essential—alongside doctors, nurses, and EMT workers—during the coronavirus outbreak that has forced much of the nation into home lockdown.

“All of these workers are coming together and building power,” said Vanessa Bain, an Instacart worker and co-founder of the Gig Workers Collective, which counts more than 17,000 members and advocates for gig workers’ rights. “May Day is not just a one-time symbolic action, but also about building real, vast, and broad sweeping networks of power.”

All revolutions arise, by necessity, from the imagination of a single person with the ability to articulate their vision of a better world. That has always been, and will always be, the case.

Fuck Bezos.

Bonus No. 1: Jeff Colgan and Mark Blyth discuss: The Corona Oil Shock.

Bonus No. 2: Truly an American classic… Oop Ack!

Bonus No. 3: The Wit And Wisdom Of Donald J. Trump.

Bonus No. 4: The Difficult Decision Facing Voters in the 2020 Election.

Bonus No. 5: …Warned Not to Take Sick Days—Then Six Workers… Died of Coronavirus.

Following my first visit to Japan in 1977 I became, and continue to, a Japanophile. I fell in love with the architecture, the comics, the movies, the food, the history, Bushidō, Zen; the whole package. Thanks to Aleksandra Bliszczyk and Netflix I have a window on that world during our time of social distancing that I didn’t know about until today: Samurai Gourmet.

In the time of COVID-19, the Guardian added a regular feature under the head: Stream Team: to help distract you, and to pass the time. This evening while browsing today’s postings I discovered Bliszczyk’s Samurai Gourmet: hypnotically dreamy show makes kitchens feel like Neverland with the subhead:

In this spellbinding, lovingly shot series, a recently retired man decides to eat something new every day—and captivates your senses along the way.

Bliszczyk begins:

A month into isolation I found myself hypnotized by the slowly slithering oil slicks on top of some freshly made chicken broth. I forgot about Covid-19, the friends and family I missed, and even the crusty bits on my share house stove. That unctuous soup filled my entire universe, and for a minute, I felt at peace. I also felt like I was in an episode of Netflix’s spellbindingly mundane Samurai Gourmet.

In Masayuki Kusumi’s 12-part 2017 miniseries, recently retired salaryman Takeshi Kasumi (Naoto Takenaka), the gentle 60-year-old protagonist, is troubled by his new free time. He decides to explore Tokyo on foot alone, eating something new every day.

Whenever Kasumi is challenged by a new experience, an imaginary wandering samurai appears – Kasumi’s idealised self—to show him the way. (When he is too embarrassed to drink a beer with lunch, the samurai swaggers into the restaurant and demolishes a bottle of sake. Emboldened, Kasumi orders two beers.) On his journeys of self-discovery he finds unfamiliar inner strength in the face of uncertainty and lets go of the pressures and worries of his former life, eating and doing whatever he wants.

Each 20-minute episode is a soothing lesson in optimism. In one he swoons over a takeaway bento box as his neighbour asks, “Is it really that good?” He thinks: “It’s just a plain lunch, but eating it under a clear sky makes it special.”

I watched the first two episodes—Mid-Day Beer at a Restaurant and The Demoness’s Ramen—but I’m resisting the urge to binge watch the next 10 episodes. I’m doing so because I find them, perhaps due in no small part to their 20-minutes length, meditative.

I couldn’t find a trailer with English subtitles—they do exist in the Netflix version—but I can see myself re-watching without the subtitles and just enjoying the visual and auditory wonder of Naoto Takenaka’ performance.

As an aside, while looking for the above trailer I discovered another Japanese show food Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories that I’m looking forward to watching later. Enjoy.

Bonus No. 1: The REAL Samurai Gourmet Mini Documentary.

Bonus No. 2: Discover Japanese Gastronomy Through The Solitary Gourmet Manga.

Bonus No. 3: A 14th century take on Bushidō.

President Donald John Trumps lives in a fantasy world where he’s the sheriff in town and that makes him the law because our Constitution says he gets to do what ever he wants. That is, of course a lie. For some Republicans, apparently, telling Americans to ingest or inject bleach is a line their president ought not to have crossed. Why this line is anyone’s guess, but here’s mine.

Why is this bat-shit crazy proclamation different from all the other bat-shit crazy proclamations? Three words: United States Senate. If, in November, Trump wins and Republican hold onto the senate, all is well with the master plan. If Trump loses but Republicans hold onto the senate, at least they’ll be able to hold the line the way they with President Barack Hussein Obama. But if Republicans lose the Senate, all hell breaks lose because the federal courts are everything.

Adam Gabbatt does not mention the courts or judges once in covering the rise of Republicans for the Rule of Law, but their choice of those last three words tell all. Gabbatt, in Trump v Fox News: why the president is furious at the conservative network for The Guardian, writes:

Donald Trump’s longtime close relationship with Fox News, like so many other unions in the time of lockdown, is beginning to buckle under pressure, with an increasingly sensitive president furious at the conservative media channel.

Trump has attacked the conservative channel in recent days, accusing the usually uncritical network of being “fed Democratic talking points”, with some observers suggesting his ire may have been caused in part by a string of anti-Trump ads due to run on Fox News this week.

Ads like this one:

I want Trump to win in November because I think his bat-shit crazy programs will continue to weaken the grip of the Republican right wing of the Pro-War Pro-Business party and help the party’s left wing, aka Democrats, retake the Senate. This is a short-term goal. I want the entire PWPB party made irrelevant, but that isn’t going to happen in 2020. Baby steps. This is a long march. Gabbatt continues:

Trump president continued his criticism by attacking prominent Fox News personalities including the Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, before concluding: “The people who are watching @FoxNews, in record numbers (thank you President Trump), are angry. They want an alternative now. So do I!”

Trump did not give a specific reason for his upset, but it could be linked to a critical advert a group of anti-Trump Republicans are running on Fox News this week. Republicans for the Rule of Law, a group opposed to the president, paid for an ad spot during Fox & Friends—one of Trump’s favorite shows—which highlights his response to the coronavirus.

So far, the group has posted dozens of videos going back to 21 March 2018, but these five—along with the one above—have set the president to tweeting.

In their channel description, the group writes:

The first responsibility of government is, as the Constitution says, “to provide for the common defense.” President Trump has now rightly compared the coronavirus pandemic to a war. But he was still minimizing the threat as recently as three days ago.

In a crisis, there are three rules that must be followed when communicating with the public: Be first. Be right. Be credible. President Trump has often been first but he has seldom been right and he has never been credible. In early February, 72% of Republicans agreed that coronavirus was a serious threat. Today, that number is 40%. President Trump bears responsibility misleading his supporters.

Accurate and timely information is America’s most potent defense against the pandemic we now face. The 60% of Republicans who have been misled by the president’s self-serving coronavirus lies are our families, our friends, and our neighbors. We urge them, and all Americans, to get their coronavirus information from the CDC and other reliable sources. This isn’t about politics. It’s about saving hundreds of thousands of American lives.

They should have thought about that back in Cleveland when they made Donald John Trump their guy.

Bonus No. 1: .This is how death works…

Some fifteen or so years ago I had the pleasure of helping a mentor and dear friend assemble and create a family cookbook. The project took only a week or so to complete, but the end result was a labor of love the spanned more than a century of family meals shared at holidays and ordinary dinners that were nonetheless special just because.

The recipes were at times nearly indecipherable with pinches and handfuls galore, but we worked out all the details and the result was shared with children and cousins across the country. My generation is perhaps the last—for now, I can imagine lock-down recipes being share 50 years from now—to have family foods and recipes and dinners. I remember my grandmother’s New England Pot diners and my mother’s tomato sauce, my grandfather’s air-scrambled eggs and my father’s toasted cheese sandwiches. My own PB&J soup made with Ritz crackers was also a specialty.

Ralph Nader—famous for consumer advocacy and fighting both big government and big business—has his own food memories. Nader, in The Uplifting Magic of Mother’s Day in These Perilous Days, writes:

As Mother’s Day approaches, the celebration of our Mothers is overshadowed by the mounting Covid-19 casualties. Donald Trump is incapable and unwilling to provide the leadership needed to deal with the deadly pandemic attacking our communities. While we cannot afford to slow efforts to challenge the President and our Members of Congress, it is important to take a bit of time and reflect on what our parents, and in particular our mothers, have done and continue to do for their families.

I describe this sentiment in the Ralph Nader and Family Cookbook about nutritious food and its relation to our upbringings.

My mother and father and their four children—two girls and two boys—all ate the same food. There was peace and time for family discussions at the dinner table. To my mother, meals provided a daily occasion for education, for finding out what was on our minds, for recounting the traditions of food, culture, and kinship in Lebanon, where she and my father were born. At the dinner table, my mother would ask us what we had learned from our teachers each day at school. Small talk and gossip were not high on her agenda, though she knew those had their place, too.

Our mother cooked her nutritious and delicious recipes from scratch. There were no processed foods on our table. We were expected to eat everything on our plates.

She believed keeping it simple and everything in moderation were two good guiding principles for our dinner table. It allowed her to efficiently prepare food. Holidays and birthdays featured more elaborate entrees from Mother’s busy kitchen. One family favorite is called sheikh al-mahshi (the ‘king’ of stuffed food), a baked eggplant stuffed with minced lamb, pine nuts, and onions, garnished with tomatoes and served on long-grain rice with a tossed salad. Every Friday we had baked fish with tarator sauce, reflective of a Christian tradition in Lebanon.

Mother did not believe in regular snacks between meals, but occasionally, she liked to surprise us with some labneh with olive oil, tucked inside whole wheat pita bread, to take to school.

Sometime in the 1970s, having seemingly run out of criticism of my consumer protection work, the Wall Street Journal astonishingly devoted an entire editorial to how puritanical my mother was, forcing chickpea snacks on us instead of, presumably, candy. The Journal was particularly incensed at my mother quietly scraping the sugary frosting off birthday cakes once we had blown out the candles—a practice that had become a family joke. Mother reacted with amusement. Cakes had plenty of sweetness, she would say, without loading up on frosting that was pure sugar.

She knew that meals were about much more than food. For Mother, the family table was a mosaic of sights, scents, and tastes, of talking, teaching, and teasing, of health, culture, stimulation, and delight. For Dad, it was a time to ask us challenging questions to sharpen our minds and our independent thinking. Such as: Do the great leaders make the changes in history or do they reflect the rising pressures from people at any given time? Is it better to buy from a local family-owned business than from a large chain store? When can a revolution be called a success? What were you taught in school that you found out not to be true?

A major inspiration for The Ralph Nader and Family Cookbook is to celebrate my parents. Another stems from people always asking me what I eat, prompted in part by my work on food safety laws. Also, the growing popularity of Arab cuisine, backed by the scientific research into its exceptional nutrition, has broadened the audience and market for what was once seen as an exotic menu.

Diet is viewed by both consumers and physicians as more and more significant in an individual’s weight, energy level, and overall health. Medical schools, which traditionally haven’t featured nutrition very prominently in their curricula, are now more systematically focusing on diet.

As is reflected in the recipes chosen for this book, we were mostly raised on Arab cuisine—more specifically the food of the people who lived in the mountains of Lebanon. Today’s nutritionists have pronounced this Mediterranean diet to be just about the healthiest diet in the world. It is heavy with varieties of vegetables, fruits, grains, nuts, spices, and lean (but not too much red) meat, mostly lamb.

The recipes are healthy and are reasonably low in fat, salt, and sugar (the latter given leeway in the desserts). The dishes are easy to prepare, with a few exceptions and their ingredients are relatively inexpensive. For sure, much of our upbringing happened in our comfortable kitchen—tucked between two pantries at our family table. That is why the recipes in this book evoke memories of their broader contexts and celebrate our good fortune in having such wonderful parents.

I’m definitely going to make the tarator Sauce.

Bonus No. 1: Save America, Throw the Landlords Under the Bus.

Bonus No. 2: A Response to Selgin’s Reaction to My Brief Letter to Jerome Powell…

Bonus No. 3: …the nation begs for hope: thus I have written a book about myself.

THIS IS WHAT I WANT…

‘I struck a nerve’: the US comedian whose rant against Covid-19 bailouts went viral.

THIS IS WHAT I GET:

‘I struck a nerve’: the US comedian whose rant against Covid-19 bailouts went viral.‘I struck a nerve’: the US comedian whose rant against Covid-19 bailouts went viral.

Two years ago Matt Taibbi took a risk. Sort of. He kept his day job at Rolling Stone Magazine with its steady paycheck to begin a voyage of exploration that would take him back to the roots of his craft to see if it were possible in the 21st century to make a living as an itinerant storyteller and he serialized a book—How to Deal Drugs and Not Get Caught—online.

Even the book,s working title was toxic: In Why I’m Serializing a Book on Substack he explained:

To begin with—how else would we publish it?

Even the book’s original title, How to Deal Drugs and Not Get Caught, nearly sent my lawyer into anaphylaxis. It’s a book that, in the pre-Internet age, would almost certainly have been censored. I frankly can’t find a publisher who isn’t afraid of it.

Vaguely in the tradition of books like The Anarchist’s Cookbook, this is material whose mere publication is subversive, and just reading it feels illegal.

Erring on the side of not getting jammed up with the Feds, Taibbi changed the title to…

The Business Secrets of Drug Dealing: Adventures of the Unidentified Black Male tells the story of Huey Carmichael, a hyper-observant, politically-minded, but humorously pragmatic dealer who spends a lifetime compiling rules for how a person like him successfully a) makes money and b) avoids prison in modern America.

It is fiction, based on truth. A collaboration, I wrote it in conjunction with a real-life ex-drug dealer whose byline will be, “Anonymous.”

You should read—and seriously consider subscribing to—Taibbi’s work, but this passage in his the post caught my attention:

Different generations get their information from different sources. That’s because different communications genres fall in and out of style, often depending on more or less random historical factors.

For instance, in the mid-2000s, as the so-called “mainstream media” lost the confidence of many Americans, outlets like The Daily Show gained steam.

If the news media couldn’t be trusted to tell the truth about something as simple as whether or not Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction, maybe it was safer and easier to trust a comedy show. Audiences could at least easily decide for themselves whether Jon Stewart was funny or not on a given night.

What comedy did in the age of Bush and the WMD fiasco, storytelling is likely to achieve in the age of “fake news.”

As news reporting becomes more politicized, more negativistic, less trustworthy, and generally more of a headache to digest, people increasingly are going to turn to narrative as a source of information.

They’ve been doing it already for years.

Whether it was Serial helping jump-start the age of the podcast, or docu-series like Making a Murderer or serialized dramas like OJ: Made in America captivating the country during their runs, we’ve seen audiences flock to narrative treatments of real-world phenomena as sources of information.

Audiences seem to want the immediacy of periodical media, mixed with the storytelling techniques of Hollywood.

These changes, combined with the fact that a weird and fascinating story I couldn’t figure out how to tell except as fiction fell in my lap, were what prompted me to revive an old idea, the serialized novel – only repurposed for the Internet, via Substack.

He’s right of course. For a very long time I’ve characterized Taibbi as the heir to one of my heroes, Hunter S. Thompson, and not just because he inherited Thompson’s post on the national desk of Rolling Stone. Now, with this latest effort, I have to think that Taibbi may be after the legacy of a much earlier writer: Charles Dickens.

Dickens, of course, serialized his works, but he was also, in his Victorian way, an advocate for the poor and the marginalized in his society—although the record indicates that he would have won no personal awards for enlightenment—and that he played no small role in incremental improvement in the attitudes and actions to improve the treatment of the disadvantaged in his society.

As a journalist I admire Taibbi and applaud his experiment—I did subscribe, after all—and look forward to his further success.

Bonus No. 1: What’s the deal with the coronavirus tracing app?
                     Cassandra the Information Technology Wobbegong explains.

Earth Day is my holiday. This day is my holiday because I remember where I was on that first day 50 years ago. I was a high school freshman at Warren High School in Barlow Ohio, sitting at the rear left lab table with Don Ritenour, JoAnne Greenwalt and Debbie Smith in Max Smith’s Earth Science class deep in a discussion of how we would celebrate this Earth Day thing.

Twenty years later I would leave Harcourt Brace Jovanovich as editor of Aftermarket Business and become editor of the municipal edition of Recycling Today—launched by publisher Dick Foster in time for the 20th anniversary of Earth Day—at GIE Publications. Today, as evidenced by Michael Moore’s latest film, we’ve blown a 50 year lead and left our descendants right and truly fucked.

Moore talks about the film in an interview with Stephen Colbert A Late Show With Stephen Colbert and describes the film this way:

Michael Moore presents Planet of the Humans, a documentary that dares to say what no one else will this Earth Day—that we are losing the battle to stop climate change on planet earth because we are following leaders who have taken us down the wrong road—selling out the green movement to wealthy interests and corporate America. This film is the wake-up call to the reality we are afraid to face: that in the midst of a human-caused extinction event, the environmental movement’s answer is to push for techno-fixes and band-aids. It’s too little, too late.

Removed from the debate is the only thing that MIGHT save us: getting a grip on our out-of-control human presence and consumption. Why is this not THE issue? Because that would be bad for profits, bad for business. Have we environmentalists fallen for illusions, “green” illusions, that are anything but green, because we’re scared that this is the end—and we’ve pinned all our hopes on biomass, wind turbines, and electric cars?

No amount of batteries are going to save us, warns director Jeff Gibbs (lifelong environmentalist and co-producer of “Fahrenheit 9/11” and “Bowling for Columbine”). This urgent, must-see movie, a full-frontal assault on our sacred cows, is guaranteed to generate anger, debate, and, hopefully, a willingness to see our survival in a new way—before it’s too late.

I’m looking forward to watching the film, but for now, I’m moving on to Ralph Nader’s take on Earth Day and how a toddler’s rage at the bad black man has not only slowed but actually reversed major gains from the past 50 years. Nader, in Stopping Trump’s Demonic Reversals of the Long-term Benefits of the First Earth Day April 22, 1970, writes:

Earth Day, April 22, 1970 was the most consequential demonstration of civic energy in modern American history. Engaging nearly 20 million Americans participating in about 13,000 local events, this first Earth Day changed corporate and government policies through popular demands for clean air, water, soil and food.

Senator Gaylord Nelson launched Earth Day, having tired of Congressional inaction and the power of the corporate pollution lobby. Earth Day quickly became a grassroots educational and action-driven week of activities that aroused the country.

Even reactionary President Nixon quickly planted a tree on the White House South lawn in recognition of the public support for environmentalism after he saw the huge turnouts at rallies and marches.

Imagine the environmental threats fifty years ago. Cities were choking with motor vehicle and factory pollution. Los Angeles was smog-land. Air pollution caused respiratory disease and stung your eyes. The Cuyahoga river near Cleveland, slick with oil, would catch on fire. Birmingham, Alabama’s steel mills turned the air into a brownish haze.

I spoke at several large rallies on the first Earth Day and during “Earth Week” alongside environmental leaders, including the great David Brower and dynamic Professor Barry Commoner. The energy at the gatherings made indentured politicians nervous. Eleven thousand schools, colleges, and universities hosted events focusing on local deadly poison hotspots and challenging state capitols and the Congress.

Mass media coverage was spectacular. All the TV networks, the covers of Time and Newsweek (a big deal then) and the popular daytime TV talk shows (Phil Donahue, Merv Griffin and Mike Douglas)—national and local media provided saturation coverage coast to coast.

There was a huge rally on the Mall in Washington, DC, which was very visible to a wary Nixon in the White House and lawmakers in Congress. Hearing the rumble of the people supported by scientists and health specialists, Nixon and members of Congress knew they had to enact environmental protections.

Within three years Congress produced sweeping, unsurpassed, landmark laws such as the Clean Air Act, Clear Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act. New laws also created the EPA, OSHA, and the White House Council on Environmental Quality. New environmental groups (Greenpeace, Public Citizen, Friends of the Earth, NRDC, and EDF) joined the earlier organizations such as the Sierra Club to strengthen the civic bedrock for environmental advocacy and watchdogging.

Out of Earth Day came many of the young authors, filmmakers, and leaders of the next half century of environmental action. They included Denis Hayes, lead coordinator of Earth Day 1970, David Zwick of Clean Water Action, Professor Paul Erlich, Selma Rubin, and Dr. Brent Blackwelder. Later the environmental justice movement stressed that poor communities are exposed to the most lethal dumping grounds and deadly emissions.

Although, constantly obstructed by corporate polluters, the air and water did become cleaner. There is far less lead in most, not all human bodies (note Flint, Michigan), and far less asbestos in your lungs. Both substances are banned from most consumer product uses.

Adam Rome, a University of Buffalo environmental historian, documented what happened on and after the first Earth Day in his book The Genius of Earth Day. He said the intensity of local organizers is largely missing from climate and environmental activism today.

Anybody doubting this observation should take note of how dangerous Donald and a supine Congress are failing to protect our environment. Trump is viciously unraveling the established protections to flood your families with more mercury, soot, coal ash, cancerous pesticides, dirtier drinking water and toxic workplaces. What Trump calls “deregulation” is increasing death, disease, and property damage in America by taking the federal cops off the corporate poison beat.

Dumb, disgraceful Donald still sneers at the oncoming climate catastrophe, calling it a hoax. His arrogant ignorance is scuttling federal programs and scientific research on climate, destroying restrictions on greenhouse gases produced by the fossil fuel giants, and inviting them to further exploit federal wilderness lands and offshore areas. Despite the massive oil flooding of the Gulf by B.P Oil company 10 years ago, disgraceful Trump is loosening restrictions on drillers imposed after the Deep Water Horizon disaster. The consequences for the fishing and tourist industry once again could be devastating.

The omnicidal Republican’s controlling the Senate support Trump’s reckless agenda regardless of the environmental harm done to their own families. The Democrats, controlling the House complain about gridlock. Unfortunately, with few exceptions, they are not racing to again impeach Trump, or demand his resignation, if only to rid the nation of his chaotic scapegoating, and the ego-maniacal, self-contradicting, colossal mismanagement regarding the corona-virus crisis. It is time to stop the further preventable loss of life caused by Trump’s fibbing, flailing and daily failures to process reliable information and lead.

Trump’s resignation should be the grassroots focus of today’s Earth Day and become everyday’s popular demand for the sake of American lives and health.

That would be nice, but would make little difference. Not enough students took Mr. Smith’s Earth Science Class. Too many people think the Earth is flat, their one true religion is real and that anything that threatens their gawd given right to drive their ATV through the woods or bounce their twin-merc-powered boat across the water is a hoax.

It’s not nice to fuck with Mother Nature.

Also today:

(1) Trump campaign’s DEVASTATING ad hits Pelosi’s ‘let them eat cake’ moment.… (2) Don’t Worry, Everything Will Get Back to “Normal.”… (3) In Conversation with Anand Giridharadas: Can the Oligarchy Survive Coronavirus?… (4) What’s unique about the American party system and how the left can beat it.… (5) The previous 23 episodes of the Jacobin Magazine Stay At Home series…… and finally, Ryan for Ryan: (6) Ryan Grim—Biden’s decline means we could have Dick Cheney 2.0. and Dear Joe Biden, Here’s Why You Should Pick Warren as Your Running Mate.

And Now This…

Bonus No. 1: AND WE SAY: MEA CULPA, MEA CULPA, MEA CULPA…

Bonus No. 2: We Don’t Need Progressives but We Really Do.

Bonus No. 3: THE NECESSITY FOR US TO LET GO OF THE OLD…

Bonus No. 4: As Africa Drowns in Garbage, the Plastic Business Keeps Booming.

Bonus No. 5: INSIGHT, COURAGE, ENDURANCE, A GOOD LITANY…

Bonus No. 6: Some… Not Aware of Millionaire Tax Break Before Voting on CARES Act.

Of the dozens (hundreds) of books I’ve read over the years on getting things done, none has been more influential in my life that Charles Hobbs’ Time Power and no single thought in that book has meant more to me than the pernicious concept of the urgent triviality. An urgent triviality is a task that yaps for our attention like a barking dog.

And yaps so loudly that we drop all else to make the noise go away. But when we do so, we discover that an hour, a day, a week, a life, has passed and nothing of value was accomplished. Urgent is the enemy of the vital, the important and the desirable. Urgent trivialities are what keep us from our task.

In the eighth desideratum—Come Back To Your Task—of his Living An Examined Life: Wisdom For The Second Half Of The Journey James Hollis begins:

Plato argued that we are born “knowing,” but the abrasions of daily life wear it away. … Once, while reading an ancient Chinese text,I came across the image of “the man who lives in the House of Self-Collection.” The image hit me with the shock of recognition, for I so often think on the corrosive costs of daily life, the multiple claims upon us and the commitments legitimate and imposed, which only the metaphor of unraveling can summarize. p. 39

Hollis’ corrosive costs of daily life are just another name for Hobbs’ urgent trivialities.

Jung observed that in virtually every case he attended, the person knew from the beginning what his or her task was. The presenting neurosis, the blockage, the obstacles that obscure the task are only the surface distractions from the implicit intimidation of really knowing what it right for us. But something within always does know what is right for us and what is wrong. We know as children, and what we know then gets overruled by the powers and principalities of the world and the need to fit in somehow. p. 39

I have found that only by following the lessons from Time Power am I able to maintain focus on what I consider Vital and Important (the Desirables tend to take care of themselves). When I ignore those lessons, lost time results. Hollis continues:

Jung nailed it: “A psychoneurosis must be understood, ultimately, as the suffering of a soul which has not yet discovered its meaning.” Notice that he does not rule out suffering, for suffering, the medieval adage had it, “is the fastest horse to completion.”

Often the flight from suffering leads to a trivialized life, a distracted life, an anesthetized life. The clear implication of Jung’s position is that working one’s way through to meaning… can lead one through the valley of the shadow. p. 40

The simple adage: no pain, no gain, applies here. If work didn’t require effort and concentration we wouldn’t call it work, we’d call it play.

Each one of those moments of postponement, rationalization and deflection was when we turned our backs on our own soul.

What then is our task? Two things: individuation and overcoming the specific obstacles the fates have placed on our path. p. 40

The wallpaper (Does anyone else even bother with wallpaper anymore?) on my laptop is a picture of me walking with Buster and the message:

EXCELLENCE is not an “aspiration.”
Execllence is… THE NEXT FIVE MINUTES.

“If I want to achieve Excellence, I can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less than Excellence work. The first 99.9 percent of getting from here to there is the determination to move forward and not compromise, no matter what set of road blocks I, or those around me, erect.” —Tom Peters.

The key sentence there, and the part that I often repeated to my students is that The first 99.9 percent of getting from here to there is the determination to move forward and not compromise. Learning to say no. Learning to say I’m busy. Learning to post a Do-Not-Disturb sign, not for others but for yourself, is vital.

Individuation is a religious summons, the flight from which leads to pathologies
of all sorts—distorted relationships, anesthetizing or distracting behaviors that lead to a narrowing path, or a chronic disease, the cure to which is never found in medications, new relationships or new pursuits. As long as one is running from one’s own soul, no achievement, no compromise, no accommodation will satisfy. Individuation is in fact service, but service to what?

Cue Dylan…

When I was writing my book What Matters Most, the first thing that came to my mind, apart from the conventional answers of family, friends and good work, was that one’s life not be governed by fear.

Looking back on our lives we may, we may recognize many critical choices were driven by fears—fear of disappointing others, fear of embarrassment, fear of loss of family consensus and so on. And often such fears made decisions for us, often to be unraveled over years of conflict, depression, anger and further dithering. p. 40-41

To continue my barking-dog motif, we know that dogs bark because they perceive a threat and want to warn their pack. When I find myself talking with someone who is angry, and barking loudly, about the world around them, I like to ask them, “What are you afraid of?” Hollis asks a similar question:

Therapists have only one plan, with many variations of course—namely, the challenge to live with the reality of one’s own soul. How many times have I asked: “What do you think has produced this discord within you? Do you think your psyche is trying to tell you something by withdrawing its approval and support of where ego consciousness invests its energies? These provocative questions are rhetorical tools to turn a person back on his or her own resources. p. 41

To answer the question often means realizing that what we fear is fear.

Coming back to our task also means that we have to show up as are, adding our small but critically important piece to the mysterious puzzle of life. And we have to do it in the face of whatever obstacles the fates, the whimsical gods or pernicious people in our histories have brought us. In other words, the meaning of our life will be direct function of the degree to which we became more nearly ourselves, showed up as best we could in the face of the difficulties that life presented. p. 42

We only have what we have. To steal a line from former Defense Secretary, and all-around waste of human genome, Donald Henry Rumsfeld: …you live with the person you are, not the person you might want or wish to be at a later time.

While fate is often harsh and delimiting, most of us lack this excuse. We forget our task, our responsibility to our talents, to our interests and to our unique perspectives on the world because it is easier to do so. We forget, simply forget. Yet something in us remembers and protests. So we dismiss the protests, the troubling dream, the fear that awakens us at three in the morning. We run from ourselves to places of security, of comfort, to the fantasy of fitting in. p. 42

Hollis concludes:

We have made enough excuses in our lives, offered enough rationalizations and evinced enough evasions, but something inside persists, shows up, troubles sleep and asks more of us—and sooner or later we all have an appointment with our soul. Whether we show up, remember the divine task, remains to be seen. p. 43

Genius is doing the work. Now!

Bonus No. 1: Why Did Democrats Nominate Donna Shalala…?

Bonus No. 2: …Someone who had a worse response… than Boris Johnson?

Bonus No. 3: The Moral Calculus of Voting for Biden to Defeat Trump—or Not.

During the ’90s I read Eliyahu M. Goldratt’s business novel: The Goal as part of an article I wrote on business books for a corporate newsletter to which I was a regular contributor. I read and reviewed a dozen or so books for the piecve, but Goldratt’s classic on bottlenecks and his theory of constraints is the only one I remember more than a quarter century later.

The central message of the novel is that any operation is only as productive as its narrowest point. When I was a teacher I once applied the theory to a student who suffered from what was called school avoidance. This was no Peggy Ann McKay The student could take 45 minutes getting from the their parent’s car to the door of the school. The whole process, and the student’s levels of anxiety, was painful to watch. In remembering The Goal I once asked both the school’s psychologist and the social worker, what they thought the student’s choke point was and I watched as a light bulb went off over her head: “That’s it!” She told me how she had struggled to describe the student’s reactions and she said that walking into the school was like being choked for them.

In the seventh desideratum of his Living An Examined Life James Hollis writes about choke points that have become so severe as to stop all flow. Hollis, in Vow To Get Unstuck, writes:

I propose to dialogue with the unconscious world (an impossibility from the perspective of limited consciousness), to track the invisible energies that course through the venues of the visible. To that end, two principles:

It’s not about what it’s about.

What you see is a compensation for what you don’t see.

The first principle tells us that the place of stuckness is not about what it appears to be about. So what then is it about? For example, a common resolve, so easily frustrated, is the desire to lose weight, exercise more or practice other self-improvement behaviors. But why do these intentions get set so easily aside? p. 34

A month ago I would have most likely nodded my head here an kept reading. Having read Jason Fung’s The Obesity Code, however, I find myself far less amicable to a psychological explanation for the frustration—at least as regards weight loss—that I now understand to be chemical/hormonal, and I read this following paragraph with more than a little skepticism.

Much of eating, to choose one example is driven by invisible agendas, the nutritive needs of the psyche, the hungers of the flesh and spirit. The more concrete the need, the more easily understood. The more abstract, the more elusive. If food were just about food, then we could measure amounts and count the calories rather easily. But food in animated matter. And matter derives from the Mater. What feeds our needs more deeply? We project onto the raw material of food our emotional and social needs, far in addition to nutritional needs of the organism. Food becomes love, continuity, ready presence. No matter how miserable the day, we can come home, open the fridge, and “lights on and welcome home!” p. 34-35

I think this is a clear case of if the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail. The diet/weight loss industry in the United States is huge, I mean really, really ginormous—we’re talking Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy big—well, OK, maybe not that big, but the weight-loss industry in the United States last year racked in nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars in sales. And if Dr. Jason Fung is right (and I think he is) then the whole paying-to-get-thinner scheme is bollocks because the solution is free.

So how difficult it then becomes to regulate by will alone these metaphor-carrying, symbol-embodying substances. We think it’s about food alone, sustenance alone, but it is about all that missing in your life—and why should we let go of our available anodyne, our treatment plan. p. 35

Especially when the treatment plan is worthless. Forget food and weight. Hollis’ broader discussion—pun intended—does have efficacy. We have to identify our choke point, the stoppage that has us stuck and unable to make a change that we know we need to make. To do that we must first unclog the clog.

So we have to analyze what the stuck place is really about. Also we need to recognize that what we are readily able to identify, the behavior, for example, is only what is visible, while it is the invisible mechanism that runs our lives. p. 35

But, how do we do that? Hollis gets to the nut of the matter:

In the end, there are two existential threats to our survival and wellbeing: the fear of overwhelmment and the fear of abandonment. In the encounter with the former, we are reminded or our relative powerlessness in a large and potentially invasive world. p. 36

and…

Similarly, the opposite existential threat, abandonment, means the person is driven to achievement in order to attain the reassuring accolades of the other, or transfers the need for nurturance, constancy or reassurance to some promising surrogate yet estranges the other through coercive behaviors. … This need to connect to, to hold fast to and fixate the other is one of our most common patterns in reacting to change, discontinuity and ambiguity.

It is for this reason that fundamentalisms of all kinds, in all corners of the world, respond to the changers in our time, the deconstruction of presumed fixities, with so much militancy and even violence. Those same troubled souls would not insist on the medicine practiced millennia ago were they to visit the ER of their hospitals tonight, yet they insist on tribal agrarian, and parochial dogmas ratified by tradition in their tribal histories, will all of their primitive rules and prejudices. p. 36

We all think that our particular reality is the reality and that all other understandings are pathological. Changing that misconception is a beginning.

So, we begin to get a picture of why it is so difficult to get unstuck. The stuckness in not about what it is about, and what we are able to see is usually only a surface manifestation of what we don’t see. What we don’t see is the way in which this sensitive organism we are mobilizes its defenses, its projections and its fixations on objects, behaviors, images, practices, codes, institutions and dogmas precisely because they seem to offer some relief from the archaic anxiety to which we all are subjected.

None of us is free of addictive patterns—by this I mean reflexive anxiety management systems. Frankly, we have to have these systems, but they can come to manage us rather than the other way around. That is when the cost of the addiction accumulates. Reflexive means that our response is automatic, not reasoned, not nuanced nor differentiated, and replete with rationalizations assembled in advanced to defend the behavior the moment it is questioned. Anxiety is ubiquitous and drives the human animal, so it is understandable why we would develop our protective techniques. Through repetition, these protections get locked in and become systems that take on a life of their own, becoming the titular governors of our separate kingdoms. It is typically these management systems that we vow to replace or transcend, but this also explains why they are so resistant to our wills. To replace the systems will mean we either replace them with other systems, perhaps even more pervasive and costly, or stand naked before our two greatest threats overwhelmment and abandonment.

Accordingly, we either have to make peace with our stuckness and move on as best we can or risk the activation of the archaic anxiety that pools in the historic basement for all of us. p. 37

I’m all for the former over the latter.

Bonus No. 1: Chasing Sales During …Pandemic, States Declare Lotteries “Essential.”

Bonus No. 2: The Week: Can Biden win over Sanders supporters?

Bonus No. 3: Attempting to bake bread on a narrowboat.

Bonus No. 4: The Dig: Fear City with Kim Phillips-Fein.

I have a theory. Government officials who care more about appearance than performance fled Washington because they don’t want to be seen wearing protective masks. They should all learn a lesson from Ohio’s Republican Governor Richard Michael DeWine. I don’t like DeWine on principle, but the man is doing a bang-on job during this crisis.

The same, however, cannot be said for the rascals and cowards, from both parties, who have run home after giving their corporate and Wall Street masters a more than $4 trillion gift under the guise of saving the economy. Congress lied to us on this topic in 2008 and the members are lying to us again in 2020. (Matt Taibbi has a few choice words on this topic in his The Trickle-Up Bailout.) Meanwhile, Ralph Nader has more than few choice words of his own for our elected poltroons. Nader, in Cowardly Congress Chooses to be AWOL: Shouldn’t Our Elected Representatives be on the Job Providing Essential Services?, writes:

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic a careening, confused President is fibbing, flailing, breaking laws, and mishandling money. As the domino effect of this crisis mounts, the public is asking: “Where is the Congress?” Our Senators and Representatives have been home since March 20 and won’t be back until May 4th, not on the job inside the Capitol. Shameful!

Worse, some lawmakers want a remote Congress so they can remain AWOL and pretend to deal with the many crises remotely.

Why? Fear of the pandemic? Escaping rollcall responsibility? No matter that Congress can follow all the CDC guidelines and more for personal protection. No matter that millions of essential workers – some a few blocks from Congress, bravely go to work to perform their critical duties. Healthcare, transit, grocery, police, maintenance and sanitation workers, many executive branch civil servants and others are faithfully on the job.

Congress should be working harder than ever—6 days a week, not its usual 2 1/2 days. Congress should be monitoring the spending of trillions of dollars it approved for recovery, and passing improved rescue legislation that puts the people first. Congress should also be anticipating and preventing the ugly greed of commercial lobbyists who will cravenly push for more giveaways for their fat-cat big-business clients. The devil is in the details and in the fine print of new and upcoming bills. Scams, gouging, waste, and corruption are exploding already in a corporate crime wave while the President pulls the federal cops off their beats.

Thirteen million people will lose their health insurance between March and July of this year. Over 25 percent unemployment is bringing untold fear, dread, and deprivations to millions of families. Where are the indispensable 535 lawmakers? Back at home ignoring their duties.

Small businesses and family farms, lacking the reserves and political privileges of big business, are suddenly experiencing a deadly free fall in sales with slow arrivals of temporary federal assistance. Many will face ruin and bankruptcy. Lifetimes of work smashed.

Trump has encouraged the EPA to stop enforcing violations of prohibited pollution laws. Trump’s FDA announced that it was suspending inspections of foreign plant exporters of food and drugs to the U.S. The President is even threatening the existence of our post offices.

Where is the Congress? It’s halls and committee rooms are empty!

With knowing criminal intent, the Trumpsters are running the life and health saving Federal agencies into the ground. Under Trump’s puppet Andrew Wheeler, the EPA has become the environmental pollution agency. OSHA has been turned upside down. Trump is even weakening nursing home safety regulations in our pandemic. Scientists and other civil servants are being muzzled or pushed out.

Where is Congress? It is looking for how it can push button constitutional duties from perches back home. Can Congress truly believe that it can run our national legislature from home? There is no substitute for members of Congress convening in real time in the nation’s capital. Article 1, Section 7 of the Constitution requires a quorum to conduct Congressional lawmaking. The full Senate voted in person in March to pass the $2.2 trillion relief/bailout package.

Now, Congress agrees another large assistance law is needed. It has to be preceded by hard work, the best ideas, public hearings, tight drafting, and intense deliberation over long days.

So far Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is on the job, is resisting remote voting. Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell said he agrees, but he led the flight out of Congress back to Kentucky a month ago.

Many of these pampered politicians, comfortable at home in their safe gerrymandered districts, drawing their regular salaries and benefits while watching or reading the stories of courageous workers risking their lives daily for pittances, will go down in history as cowards. Historians will not treat them kindly.

Meanwhile these so-called guardians of our crucial constitutional separation of powers are having a mock video hearing to try to show Congress can go online. This is indefensible when we have a Constitution-breaking monarchical president who says: “I have an Article 2 where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”

Sovereign people—give your Senators and Representatives, who have fled Washington and are back home, a galvanizing piece of your mind. Just pick up the phone and dial your member or the Congressional switchboard (202-224-3141) and make your needs known. Remind them that if they don’t get back to work, you’ll remember in November.

For me, those calls will go to senators Sherrod Campbell Brown and Robert Jones Portman along with Representative (and Republican carpetbagger) Anthony Easy Gonzalez.

Bonus No. 1: This piece on Walter Newsome is a vital, must-read story for Election 2020—
                     ‘I ain’t voting till black lives matter:’ …radical strategy mean for 2020?

Bonus No. 2: Dylan Thomas reads “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.”

Bonus No. 3: Liberals’ Wishful Thinking about Joe Biden.

Bonus No. 4: Calvin—All the more reason I should do it now!