Ribbon of Highway Route 2 - The Grand Detour -Jazzfest

RIBBON OF HIGHWAY

ROUTE 2

 

The Grand Detour, Phase One

The City of New Orleans

May 1 to May 5, 2013

 

 

SUCCESS

To laugh often and much;

To win the respect of intelligent people

And the affection of children;

To earn the appreciation of honest critics

And endure the betrayal of false friends;

To appreciate beauty;

To find the best in others;

To leave the world a bit better,

Whether by a healthy child,

A garden path,

Or a redeemed social condition;

To know even one life

Has breathed easier

Because you have lived.

This is to have succeeded.

            Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

It’s been over 4 months now that my motorcycles have been parked in the pole barn for the winter, and I am really getting the itch to get back in the saddle. However, with a combination of trips to Vieques and a planned trip to Europe, coupled with a record breaking cold spring that just lingers on and on, and on, it just isn’t happening.

 

No matter, I travel even if it’s not on one of my bikes. My old college roommate – actually we mostly lived near each other, rather than with each other, we met when we moved into small rooms in a condemned house, with a shared bathroom across the hall, or in his case, down the stairs, after our respective roommates had expelled us for too much partying and interference with their academic endeavors. We actually lived together in the same apartment for less than a semester because the third roommate, a rather extremely large tackle from the Michigan football team who was to share the house we had rented chose to go more upscale at the last minute and left us hanging. The two of us could not afford the rent, so Al moved in with his girlfriend and I found another rooming house. I have fond memories of that place, not the least of which was when Al’s girlfriend jumped in the shower with me to give me a kiss good bye when they were about to leave for Detroit, leaving both me and Al speechless, me grinning in the shower and Al with his mouth catching flies in the hallway. Oh well, those were the days.

 

In any event, a few years ago my old sort-of college roommate but certainly oldest friend Al convinced me that I had to join him and his high school and college buddies at Jazzfest in New Orleans. Not a tough sell because I love the French Quarter, the azaleas would be in bloom in late April before the heat and humidity becomes oppressive, and who doesn’t like live music, Louisiana cooking and partying for 4 days straight?

 

After the first sojurn it has become an annual thing. Instead of flying down this year, I rode the City of New Orleans overnight train from Chicago. Remember Arlo Guthrie singing Steve Goodman’s song of the same name, “It’ll be gone 5 hundred miles when the day is done?” If you don’t remember, find it and give it a listen, great song. The perfect way to start off Jazzfest. Get on board at Chicago’s Union Station, have dinner somewhere on the rails in Illinois, sleep to the rocking of the rails in my own compartment, wake up to breakfast in Mississippi, and arrive downtown in the Crescent City in time for lunch, all for less than a crowded airplane ride, parking and taxi from the airport, with breakfast and dinner included. Good deal! You do have to plan ahead as the sleeping compartments book up, especially around events like Jazzfest.

 

Problem: Indiana University scheduled the final exam for the class I teach the night the train left, and I could not monitor the exam and still catch the City of New Orleans. Solution: I gave out a take home final the week before, stayed just long enough to collect them and took off for Chicago. The train ride would give me the time to grade them and get the grades posted before arriving for Jazzfest. As I’m collecting the finals, I overhear two of my students discussing the last election. One says, “I didn’t recognize anybody on the ballot except my Congressperson, so I just voted for the ones with the names I liked the best.”  The other happily responded, “Oh, I didn’t know anything about most of the people I voted for, either.” “Oh my God,” I think, “These are college students. One of them is in her late thirties!” I say to them as I collect their papers, “Thank you for cancelling out my vote.” They did not understand the sarcasm. Oh, well. With that uplifting thought to end the semester, I buy a bottle of hootch for the long ride, and still arrive at Union Station in plenty of time. I am pleasantly surprised by an upscale waiting room with drinks and snacks reserved for people who book sleeping compartments. A few minutes before departure, everybody is ushered out the train tracks, shown their railroad cars, and settled into their compartments. I splurged and bought a big roomette, with a couch that folds down to become my bed, a reading chair, and my own private wet bath with shower. Not luxe, but very cool nonetheless, and tons more comfortable than eating my knees and fighting some guy for the armrest in a cramped airplane seat.

                  

I settle in, pour myself a drink and watch the industrial back yard of Chicago pass in the brown half light as the sun sets. They announce over the loudspeaker that no smoking is allowed anywhere on the train, and politely but firmly, that if you are caught smoking, the next stop will be your final destination! There will be smoke breaks at a couple of stops, I can’t remember where, it’s not important to me. I open my computer and discover no Internet wifi. Really, today? Come on Amtrak, you can do better than that! After 30 minutes or so, dinner is announced in the dining car, so I make my way back along swaying corridors and across rattling platforms between the cars to put my name in for seating. Unless you are in a group of 4, you get seated with other passengers on an as available basis, which is great because you are thrown in with complete strangers and forced to strike up a conversation, like the breakfast table at a bed and breakfast. The waitresses have all flunked out of the Ed Debevic School of Social Graces, but they are still fun in their own way. The food, well, not so much. The days of elegant freshly prepared meals on white linen with fresh flowers are long gone, it’s all microwave heat-em-ups. But, you can order spirits and wine and beer, and you quickly become friends with your fellow travelers as you share your stories. A black couple about my age heading to Greenville, Mississippi to attend a Jackson State college reunion. Years ago I drove through Greenville when I was moving to Baton Rouge. I was struck how the large plantation house there was so isolated and remote that I could immediately understand why Southern plantation owners were deathly afraid of a slave uprising inspired by the Toussaint L’Ouverture in Haiti. That was one of the first and maybe only successful slave uprisings, starting with a brutal slaughter of whites, followed by a war against an invading French army sent to put down the rebellion, and then a bloody struggle between rival black factions. Times change. No worries about a slave rebellion in Greenville today. Just a college reunion of slave descendants, sharing dinner on a train with a descendant of a family that fought for the Confederacy. This is good. At a neighboring table, a group of 3 couples heading down for their 5^th or 8th, I don’t remember but it was a lot of them, Jazzfest, already way into partying hearty, the girls wearing skin tight pants and spike heels. A quiet widow traveling alone to see her daughter in Memphis. An a American pot pourri.

When I get back to my compartment, a very gregarious porter is finishing making up my bed. Waiting for him to finish, we start up a conversation. He is formerly a Louisiana high school teacher, now a porter on Amtrak while he does research for a PHD thesis on the origins of the Basques. No surprise, he is a Basque. He tells me that modern DNA research has shown that many of us are Basques, descendants of a distinct ethnic group today and for centuries primarily centered in the Pyrenees Mountains of Spain. Nobody knows the origins of the Basques, but the consensus of speculation is somewhere in Eastern Europe. Their language is entirely unique, unrelated to any Romance language, although they can trace its existence back thousands of years. My porter proudly tells me that the Basques were the sailors and explorers of Europe, their DNA is scattered all across the Atlantic Basin, most of the sailors with Columbus were Basques, and the Acadian French, our Cajuns, have Basque blood in them. Actually, he says they are Basques, but he also contends the Irish are Basques, as are the French in Brittany. I have no trouble believing there is Basque DNA in all these various peoples, but balk at believing they are all Basque, chalking that up to a believer’s hyperbole. But what do I know? Apparently the DNA data bank compiled by the Mormons in Salt Lake City for genealogical research is the most sophisticated in the world, and you can send them a sample of yourself and they will provide you in detail your genealogical footprint. Fascinating. I think I might try it. I’d like to confirm some of the things that my own research as uncovered.

 

When he is done, I settle back for another cocktail and then read myself to sleep to the rocking of the rails. When I awake, the world has changed. This ain’t Chicago, Toto. It’s Delta country. Remote. Mile after mile of mist rising over empty green fields puddled from the rains and flanked by thick green woods, interrupted every 15 or 20 miles by a non-descript tiny country town with small single story houses with small front stoops and maybe a two pump gas station.  Pick ups, no Mercedes, in the road. No sign of urbanity, hardly of 20^th century civilization. It has an eerie other-worldly feel.

 

At the breakfast table I’m seated with a non-communicative couple from Rockford, and an itinerant young woman named Ronda who it turns out is also heading to Jazzfest. She is the living embodiment of all who wander are not lost, prototypically poor in possessions and rich in soul, she is a classical violinist withy no money determined to see the world, playing on big cruise ships plying waters in South America and Europe, now unemployed and looking for a gig with an orchestra. In the interim, she is traveling on a shoestring to Jazzfest after a visit with her parents in of all places, South Bend! Her family are farmers, not strictly Amish but close to it. She is the rebellious black sheep broken away from their suffocating rules. They heartily disapprove of everything their only daughter does, so visits are few and far between. This visit was to try to mend some of that relationship. I gather it didn’t go all that well.

 

As we pass by some dilapidated feed and grain stores, I observe how what were once vital country focal points for local farmers are now struggling. This touches a hot button in Ronda. She really launches into Monsanto. According to her, farmers are being forced to use Monsanto’s genetically modified seeds because the seeds for older traditional, local varieties are no longer available. And if you can find them and try to use them, the new pesticides like Round Up kill them off, only allowing the genetically modified strains developed by the herbicide manufacturers to survive. This rings true, as I know for a fact that traditional natural seed varieties are increasingly hard to find, and the news is been carrying a story about a farmer that was successfully sued by Monsanto for tilling fields with corn seeds taken from his last season’s field crop instead buying new seed from Monsanto. I have also been told another friend that the widespread use of Round Up has been linked to the alarming loss of honey bee colonies. The corn crop that has been sprayed by Round Up supposedly gives off some sort of vapor that affects bees flying across the huge fields of corn to gather honey. They find the pollen, but the vapor somehow disorients them so that they cannot distinguish smells and they cannot find their way back to the hive. Instead, they buzz aimlessly until they die, and the hive collapses. I don’t know if this is all accurate, but Ronda is passionately convinced, and very convincing, and has the credibility of coming from a farming family, black sheep or not.  I am no natural foods granola fanatic, I spray my fruit occasionally (gasp!) to protect against Japanese beetles and disease like black rot, but what my friends say is entirely plausible. When you consider that genetically engineered seeds combined with pesticides and patents are a highway for big corporations to gain a stranglehold on our entire food supply, it is a disturbing thought. Am I an alarmist? I don’t think so. The agricultural miracle of science has obviously been a huge boon to humanity, freeing much of the world from famine and breaking shackles that tie people to the land by permitting food production for all by fewer farmers. The manipulation of nature to develop better seed and livestock by grafting and breeding and culling has been going on for centuries. Nonetheless, this feels like we are going too far too fast. I share some of the nervousness about laboratory-developed seeds that is entirely prevalent in Europe. The long term consequences are potentially too severe when we really don’t know what the consequences may be. It just doesn’t feel good. Meanwhile, I eat my corn flakes - almost certainly made from genetically modified corn, and maybe covered in milk from hormone injected cattle.

 

God grant me the ability to worry only about the things I can do something about and not those I can do nothing about, and the wisdom to know the difference…

 

I wander to the vista-dome observation car just to take a look and ride there for a while for the last leg in Louisiana,  watching waves slapping on the shore of Lake Ponchartrain from the as we cruise into NOLA.

                              

The skies are grey, and it’s cold! For New Orleans in late April, I mean its super cold. Fifty degrees with a high of sixty-three! It’s been rainy here most of the week. I wander through the quarter seeking first, crawfish and a beer, and second, a sweatshirt! Crawfish and beer? No problem. Sweatshirt? Ha. Lots of tee shirts with I love New Orleans or lewd statements, but not a sweatshirt anywhere.

 

I stroll up my favorite alley, the Cabildo by the cathedral off Jackson Square, thourgh the Quarter to my hotel, the St. Marie until it’s time to rendez-vous with Al to go to Rock n’ Bowl.

 

 

 

 

There is no place like Rock n’ Bowl. A bowling alley at the back, up front a huge U shaped bar across a large hardwood dance floor from a raised bandstand, to one side a walk up window to get Cajun food, and in between a scattering of picnic tables for sitting and eating. Rock n’ Bowl features artists who are playing at Jazzfest, and Thursday night is zydeco night. Tonight there are three bands playing, one right after another. Pretty soon Rock n’ Bowl is mobbed with folks of all ages and colors wearing cowboys boots and hats and women in tight fitting jeans. Laissez les bon temps rouler, cher!

 

I told Ronda about this place on the train when we were comparing notes about Jazzfest, and after a while in she walks, wearing some kind of neon colored “shoes” with places for each toe that she calls Vibrams. Not exactly sympatico with boots, but no matter, she jumps right in and starts tearing up the dance floor. She may be a classical violinist, but she gets this other stuff, too. Ronda spins around with Al a bit but soon she is spending most of her time with bevy of guys who obviously know the Cajun 2 Step and the Cajun Slap Line Dance and all the other zydeco moves. I used consider myself a pretty good ballroom dancer, but this isn’t the fox trot, cha cha or rumba. My feet just can’t get the hang of it, although I try. After a while our friend Marlene and her friend from Detroit show up, and we dance some with them and all stay until the band stops before packing it in. Another Jazzfest, another night at Rock n’ Bowl, its all good!

The next day is Friday, and it’s still winter time cold and rainy, been raining pretty much all week in new Orleans. It’s supposed to be nicer Saturday, sunny and in the 70’s, so I say screw Jazzfest for the day and decide to take in the World War II museum instead.  A good  ex-Marine friend recommended it. Correct that, I don’t think there are any ex-Marines.  I don’t know why the powers that be decided to put the World War II museum in New Orleans, but it’s brilliant. I figured to a few hours there, instead its way after lunch when I leave. The museum is extraordinarily well done, with a lot of stuff detailing how the war started. It makes you realize how easily it could happen again. Scary.  There is also a lot dedicated to sacrifices required at home, from the government’s seizure of precious metals to victory gardens in the back yard in order to eat, to the rationing of virtually everything, and also to the devastation of cities worldwide that resulted. And a big emphasis on D-Day the invasion of Normandy.

 

The museum makes me realize that we Americans today have no concept of what total war - total war for survival – is like, what it requires or entails. Most of us seem to assume that we would have won World War II because we did. Most of us have no clue how close we came to losing the war, not once but many, many times. Victory was never certain, and it was a desperate thing. In1942, the smart money was all on the Axis. Three years later, Germany had no army left. Cities were in ruins. Americans had prevailed, and we were the world’s liberators. Everybody loved us! (Except the communists). That carried into 50's as Americans rebuilt and electrified the world, but just 20 years after victory in World War II, we were embroiled in the debacle of Vietnam, and the world hated us. Americans spat on and ridiculed their own soldiers, calling them baby killers and worse, the same army that had been hailed as liberators a mere generation before. Daily “body counts” threw the media into a frenzy, when the fact is all the casualties in Vietnam didn’t amount to a single D-Day. Hundreds of thousands of casualties in that campaign alone, millions killed in that war. Today, if even two soldiers are killed by an IED in Afghanistan, people go beserk. It’s a tragedy of the worst kind for those killed and maimed and for their families, you cannot and I would never diminish that, but - that’s not even one minute’s worth of casualties on D-Day. We just don’t understand what total war is. It is a lesson we forget at our peril. It’s called hubris. The bigger they are, the harder they fall.

 

Today, most people have no appreciation of either world war, which in many ways history will see as two phases of one long bloody conflict. Regardless, that’s all ancient history. The soldiers of 18 who fought in 1943 are now 88. The fiction of star wars and Lord of the Rings and special effect orcs where the good guys always win are much more exciting. Still, I was pleased to see a lot of school kids going through the museum on field trips, many with notepads for some homework assignment, and some talking with veterans posted at desks in the lobby. Maybe some of them they will learn something.

 

The two world wars, including the war to end all wars, for all the blood and sacrifices didn’t solve much of anything, finally. They ended one virulent form of totalitarianism, Nazism, but another strain just as deadly, communism, persists. The wars did change the players on the program, putting the US in the lead role. But our place as the lead dog is not guaranteed by history. We have become the target for the rest of the pack. Our rock-n-roll culture is world dominant, everywhere you go people listen to American music and watch American TV shows and wear blue jeans, and America is still the beacon of personal freedom, but that doesn’t mean the world all likes us. No way, Jose. Islamic fundamentalists hate us precisely for our freedoms, and consider us decadent. The Iranian Ayatollah Khomeni referred to the United States as The Great Satan. Venezuelan socialist dictator Hugo Chavez and his sidekick Maduro call us the “empire,” not as an affectionate term. Many would like nothing better than the “empire” to be destroyed. Of course, Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union the evil empire. There is plenty enough hatred around to get a good war going. Ultimately, another world war may be more likely than not, only next time I’m am doubtful that today’s Americans will have the mettle or the cohesiveness necessary to persevere to victory in a world at total war. I’d call that a bad bet. 9/11 only brought us together for a few months, and not Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Sandy, the massacre at Sandy Hook or the Boston Marathon bombing came close, in fact those disasters may have divided us more. Sobering. A house divided cannot stand…We desperately need to spend more of our energies bringing ourselves together, and stop the politics of division.

 

On the brighter side, after the museum, on to lunch at Lucy’s Bar for Retired Surfers in the warehouse district! Fantastic! Sassy waitresses, catfish with jalapeno cheese grits and (several) Dixie beer(s)! Doesn’t get any better. Just do it!

Saturday it’s in the low 70’s and sunny. After beignets with chicory coffee in the Quarter, Al and I catch the Canal Street trolley to the end of the line at City Park. From there, it’s a nice mile or so walk to the fair grounds gates through the streets of interesting old New Orleans neighborhoods in a carnival atmosphere. Crowds of with fellow walkers and locals hawking everything from hats to ice water to souvenir tee shirts. People are playing trumpets and trombones and violins on their porches and in their front yards. Once inside the fairgrounds, the ground is wet from all the rain, and in places it’s really muddy from the tramping of so many feet, but there are plywood ramps placed to keep you above it in the worst places and you can pick your way around most of the mudholes. The sun promises to dry it out pretty quickly. The biggest problem is trying to find a dry spot to sit on the grass, but that’s almost an even trade for the cool weather, and if you don’t mind missing whatever artist is playing, you can stick to the shows inside the tents and theatres if you want, so it’s not so bad.

 

Nuts to the mud, we’re here for the music. What can I say? Jazzfest is maybe 20% jazz, the rest is gospel, country with a dash of Louisiana hot sauce, true zydeco, pop, blues, rock and roll. There’s greats-but-nearly-over-the-hill headliners like Aaron Neville and Taj Mahal and Willie Nelson (my god, he’s 80 and still fantastic!) and Los Lobos, The Mavericks, great artists who haven’t quite made to the bigs that only some of us have heard of like the Larry Burton band, Rosie Ledet, Satan and Adam, Yvette Landry and the Red Stick Ramblers, Zigaboo Modeliste and the Meter Men and other names that fairly scream fais do-do, new super stars like The Black Keys and totally random lagniappe like the Little Willies introducing their new album with Nora Jones sitting in,  unannounced, all sprinkled across 12 different venues playing from 11 in the morning to 7 at night: take your pick. We all do, heading for different stages and linking up for lunch at the food courts that offer anything you can imagine and some things you can’t - red beans and rice with andouille sausage, crawfish pie, blackberry cobbler, crawfish etoufee, fried chicken and alligator and lots more. In between, there are parades by Krewes like the Apache Hunters Mardi Gras Indians, or the Highsteppers Brass band. I head for Kim Carson and her band, the Casualties, to listen to some local country western with a Louisiana flair, songs like, “Men, I Only Like ‘em When I’m Drinkin” and “Are you Fast Enough?” [To Handle me].

 

I am wearing a new red and white and tan tee shirt emblazoned with an American Flag and a big eagle that I bought at Shepler’s Western store in Denver. Clearly the tee shirt shouts “I love America” and I liked it for that, but mainly I just thought it was colorful and cool, perfect for an American music fest. I was walking along minding my own business and sipping a beer when some lefty pseudo sophisticate asked snidely, “What’s with all the America stuff?” It took me aback, I wasn’t intending to be controversial. In no mood for an argument to ruin my day, I ignored her and her boy friend, after all there are plenty of lefties in the music community and in a community like New Orleans, but I got to thinking, why would anybody be offended by this shirt? A few minutes later, another couple walking by gave me a thumbs up and said, “Really like your shirt!” followed a little later by, “Hey, love it, where’d you get it?” Amazing, I have never worn a shirt before that caused so much unsolicited reaction, all day long. I had unintentionally metamorphed into a walking political statement. That got me to wondering what the ratio was in this crowd of “likers” and “dislikers”, so I started keeping track of pro and con comments. The final tally was 10 to 1 in favor. That was comforting.

 

That also caused me to pay closer attention to the  tee shirts other festies were wearing. Some of my favorites: “Its not a party until the sausage comes out” and,  “Open your mind and your ass will follow.”

 

I finished the day rocking with people half my age to Fleetwood Mac, with Stevie Nicks belting out “Yesterday’s  Gone”, what a song of tragedy and hope. I stood no more than 12 feet from Mick Fleetwood as he played the most amazing drum solo I have ever seen or heard. Every now and again he would stop and seem to go into a trance and shout “Are you still with me?” to which of course the crowd screamed its assent and he would start ripping away again. The music was so loud and the base so intense that the ground vibrated under my feet and my ribs collided with my heart beat to the point I seriously worried for a bit whether the music might be doing damage to my aging cardio system! Hey, dude, I didn’t even have any mind altering substances to help transport me back to the beat of my generation. Far out.

 

The Jazzfest party doesn’t end when the fairgrounds close. No way, man, this is New Orleans. We took a cab to dinner at a restaurant favored by locals called Eleven Seventy Nine, very good, restaurants don’t survive long in New Orleans unless they are very good, then back to the Quarter, I wandered through the drunken revelry on Bourbon Street and stumbled across a jazz bar called Fritzel’s. Tiny, intimate, just hard wood benches and a long bar, but crowded with jazz lovers from all over the world. Great place. Shut it down and stumbled back to the Hotel St. Marie to call it a night and do it all over again the next day. Man, what a party!

 

 

Sunday morning, for breakfast I walk to another New Orleans iconic restaurant, Mother’s. Standing in line, you order whatever you want at the counter, pay cash only, grab your café au lait and then find a table, display your number and wait until its delivered. You will not go away hungry. Sunday morning, I read the funnies in the Times Picayune. They have all my favorites, Beetle Bailey, Hagar, Filbert, Dagwood, Peanuts, For Better or For Worse, Hi and Lois, Prince Valiant (my god, I can’t believe he is still in the funnies!), Doonesbury, Zits, BC, Pickles, Garfield, the Wizard of Id. Having finished a glorious repast and completed my literary ablutions (like the proverbial ostrich deliberately ignoring the front page), it’s back out to the fairgrounds for another afternoon of Jazzfest. I finish the day at the back of the Acura main stage, sweating contentedly against a fence at the very back of the crowd listening to the music I can barely hear coming from the distant Acura main stage across a sea of swaying people punctuated by colorful flags floating above it all in the breeze, used as rallying points, LSU in purple and gold and others more creative such as “Save the Tatas.” New Orleans is such a kaleidoscope of values all mixing together and moving in hidden currents like tides changing in a vast bay. Just like America. Somehow it works. As the crowd constantly passes by me going in both directions at once, I am amazed by how many people bring 3 and 5 year olds to these events, mostly riding on dad’s shoulders. Somebody next to me is shooting big bubbles from a bubble gun and everybody is laughing as one of the high riding 4 year olds tries to catch them without falling off. There is hope, isn’t there? A fine end to a great few days.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

:-)

 

 

 

 

 

ESSAYS FROM THE HEARTLAND NUMBER 3 - CHERRY WINE

ESSAYS FROM THE HEARTLAND

NUMBER THREE

CHERRY WINE

July 1, 2013

Most people don’t know when cherries are ripen. That’s because most people today live in cities and don’t have any idea how any food arrives at their plate - it just comes pre-wrapped in plastic at the local supermarket. When cherries are ripe depends a little on the variety of cherry, but it’s basically late June or early July.  For my tart pie cherries it’s around July 1.

Most people also don’t know that you can make a great wine from tart cherries, because they think that the only good wines come from grapes, and that wine made with anything else is inferior, all like that second-grade apple stuff that you drink in high school or college because it’s cheap and girls like it better than beer. If they are really sophisticated and have vacationed in Door County or Northern Michigan, they know that you can make cherry wine, but they think it’s all that sweet desserty stuff. When it comes down to it, most city folks don’t know a lot about food except what’s on a menu.

You can make a dry cherry wine made from tart cherries that is a fantastic complement to a warm afternoon picnic laid out over lush green grass beneath blue skies and billowy white clouds. And most girls do like it a lot better than beer, so it works pretty well for those candy is dandy moves, too.

You can just go out and buy several flats of cherries, but that’s cheating. If that’s what you do, all you are is a mixologist. To be a true wine maker, you have to grow your own fruit. That starts with planting the tree. The planting-the-tree part is the easiest – sticking the tree in the hole, watering and getting your fingers in the dirt to pat it down around the trunk - it’s earthy, fun, doesn’t take a long time, and the small effort has no relationship to that required by what follows - sort of like screwing.  After planting the tree in that hole comes the long wait for fruit to bear, just like waiting for the baby to drop only longer. It can take a very long time depending on the tree variety. Then, just like with babies, the real work begins.

Before you can make the wine, naturally you have to pick the cherries. But that doesn’t just happen. First, every spring you pray that you don’t get an early frost. There is not a lot more frustrating than getting all excited about a tree covered with blossoms, anticipating a great crop, and then having a deep freeze that kills off all the blooms. That tree won’t be worth anything except shade until the next spring rolls around. Kind of like a miscarriage, but of course not nearly so devastating. The freeze watch does give you a lot more respect for Mother Nature, completely unpredictable yet wholly determinative of what you get. Farmers have to go through this weather roulette every year. It’s enough to make your religious. Of course, city folks don’t really understand this either, because all they’ve ever seen is tv coverage of water misters in the Florida orange groves. Besides, everybody knows all fruit comes from California (or Mexico) where they don’t have winter, anyway.

Assuming you get by the frost, you next have to decide whether to spray the trees, or not. After a couple of years of reduced or blighted yields, I decided to spray my cherry trees. Natural food types shudder at the idea of spraying fruit trees. Most of them have never tried to grow fruit, or watched an entire year’s crop sicken and die because of something  that could have been easily prevented with a biodegradable spray. Those same types won’t want to eat a cherry that has blemishes on it because it looks gross. I look at spraying like inoculating your children against disease, and I put the no-spray ideologues in the same category as parents who won’t have their kids inoculated against polio or whooping cough because it involves injecting some nasty unnatural chemical or live pox into their bodies. Just talk to them after their kid gets polio.

There is nothing fun about spraying fruit trees. You pick a nice sunny day, because if it rains after you spray all the stuff washes off and you have to do it over again. This means it will be hot outside while you are spraying. The warnings on the label would have you covered in a chemical warfare suit while you spray, but a) I don’t have one, b) it gets too damn hot inside all that impermeable rubber , and c) the suit would likely make me trip, fall off the ladder and break my neck. So the warnings are about as useful as “Caution – Hot” on your coffee cup lid. Fruit free spray has a “perfume” to it, kind of like the odor added to natural gas in your house so that you know it’s around. Fruit tree spray smell has the same degree of wonderfulness as the flavoring they put in laxatives to make it go down better. When the wind blows the fruit spray back into your face and all over your hair, not only do you feel it,  but you smell it. That’s when you think, “This stuff isn’t healthy for bugs and fungi, so it’s can’t be real healthy for me. Maybe I should have worn that chemical warfare suit.” Too late. Spraying with your eyes closed while you hold your breath to avoid inhaling the spray blowback isn’t an OSHA-approved process for working on a ladder, and I haven’t yet figured out how to control those gusts of wind on spraying day, so I just accept it as part of the process and take a good shower afterward.

So you’ve planted the tree, waited for the blossoms, made it through the frost, and sprayed, or not. Finally, several weeks later comes the picking. You see, you do have to pick the cherries. If you wait for them to just fall off the tree they won’t be good, and the birds will get most of them first. Picking is pretty good exercise, hauling ladders around the tree and yourself up and down the ladder, practicing your balance trying not to fall off while stretching to reach that choice cluster just out of reach, and then carrying the baskets full of the cherries. Picking is pretty time consuming but not exactly mind bending, which gives you lots of time to think. And because your task is picking cherries, naturally you tend to consider cherries, and apply those thoughts to the task at hand. Which turns out to be quite instructive about growing things, and therefore, people, because people (at least most of them) are living things, and most lessons about growing  living things apply to people as all living things have an awful lot of things in common. All connected as part of the mystic cosmos and all that. Learning something about life from cherry picking is another one of the things that city folks just don’t get because they rarely deal with living things, except for other people (and people are remarkably myopic about people), or occasionally a shih itzu (which is an unnatural dog living in an unnatural environment), so you really can’t blame city folk for their ignorance and the fact that they have to learn most of what they know about living things from books -  if only they would quit trying to impose their lack of wisdom about the living world on the rest of us! Even though they may not understand their true nuances, city folks still use many of the pearls of wisdom that have come from eons of picking cherries, such as “cherry picking” – looking at all those cherries hanging there and picking only the best, ignoring the rest; or “popping a cherry” - well, you understand the derivation when you gently squeeze a bright juicy cherry and the pit pops out. Hey, I’m just sayin…

When you’re  picking, you want the best, most healthy cherries in your basket. Just like kids. You notice that younger trees produce far less fruit than those that are a few years more mature. A cherry tree that has been producing for few years produces buckets more fruit than one that is just beginning. Demonstrably, this is clearly one of the things that city folk don’t understand, as they are constantly listening to their children rather than the other way around. Is this a mixed metaphor? Whatever. On the other hand, you also notice that the small amount of fruit that the younger tree does produce is generally more consistently healthy. This is because the fruit is more scattered, less abundant and not so crowded in clusters, so that if one cherry catches a fungus, it does not spread quickly to its neighbors. Crowded conditions spread disease, more space slows it. The younger trees with less fruit act like an isolation ward in a hospital. When there is more space between the cherries, and fewer clusters, molds and fungi  can’t spread so fast. That’s the same reason there is more time for kids to grow up in the country. Childhood can last longer because there’s more space and the fungi of adulthood just doesn’t spread so fast. In a city a kid that catches a trend spreads it to others much more quickly and pretty soon everybody is getting nose rings or blowing dope or having rainbow parties. It’s also why you need that fruit spray to innoculate your older more mature trees that have so many more cherries on them.

Another thing you learn is counter intuitive. You notice that some of the best, fastest ripening and healthiest berries are on the lowest branches on the outside of the tree, where it’s easiest to pick.  “Why is that?” you wonder. Well, at least I wondered. Two reasons. On the outside of the tree, there is more sunshine and less shade. The sun is like diet for the fruit, more sun makes the fruit ripen faster and better. And molds and fungi like shade and moisture. Its damper and shadier on the inside of the tree canopy, so those on the outside are less susceptible. The other thing is that birds don’t go after that low hanging fruit so much, because they might become dinner while getting their dinner: barn cats and such. The higher you go in the tree, the more you find cherries that are ruined by pesky birds that take a piece and leave the rest with a wound that invites bacteria and molds and fungi to come on in. It follows that if you want your fruit to be healthier, you don’t just let the tree grow any which way of its own accord. You have to “cultivate it,” which in this case means pruning some of the branches to reduce the canopy and let more sun reach the cherries in the interior. Have you ever noticed how kids that never get pruned because their parents don’t want to stunt their creative instincts, tend to be a pain in the ass? Like cherry trees that aren’t pruned properly, the fruit does not turn out as consistently good.

Another thing: the cherries which are the deepest red aren’t the best. From pictures in the books, you would think they should be, but when you closely inspect real ones, the deep redness usually comes from a wound or worm festering deep inside the cherry. The deep red is more like internal bleeding. The brighter red cherries are better.

Cherries pass from white to creamy white to bright red to deep red pretty quickly, so you have to be Johnny on the spot to pick them around July 1, whether or not it’s convenient. You want good cherry wine, you need good cherries, which means you have to be around when the cherries ripen. A week  before and they are not ready. A week later and it’s too late. Growing things is not about your convenience. You have to adapt your schedule to the thing that’s growing. No way around it.

So now you have the basket of cherries. Everybody has their own recipe, but this is how I make my dry cherry wine. Take 6 pounds of cherries, cull them to keep only the best, and rinse them. No need to pit them. For every 6 pounds of cherries, boil 6 pounds of mild honey in 7.5 quarts of water. Put the washed cherries into a large nylon straining bag into a cleaned and sanitized fermenter, and crush all the berries with your hands. Lick your fingers. J Pour the hot water over the crushed cherries. Add two teaspoons of yeast nutrient and ¼ teaspoon of wine tannin. Wait till the water cools and add 2 crushed Camden tablets. Put the lid on the fermenter. Let it sit overnight, and then add one teaspoon of pectic enzyme. Wait 24 hours and add one packet of Montrachet or other wine yeast. Put the cover back on and if possible, fit it with an airlock. As it ferments, it’s gonna foam, so be prepared for a lot of foam. Stir once or twice daily. After two weeks, take out the bags of now sickly white looking cherries. Don’t squeeze the bag, that just introduces detritus into your wine. Rack the wine into a glass corboy, right to the shoulder to minimize exposure to oxygen. Bung it and fit it with an airlock. Keep the corboy in a dark place or under something to keep light away from the wine. Rack it twice more over the next few months. A year later, bottle it. Drink it slightly chilled. Hmmm hmmm good. You can’t buy this at the local liquor store. If you can find a place to buy it, don’t bitch at $20+ per bottle. A lot of work goes into making a decent bottle of wine from scratch. Just like kids…

Essays from the Heartland - Number 2 - Universal Healthcare

Essays from the Heartland

Number 2

Universal Health Care

“Who is against universal health care?” Nobody. Being against universal health care is like being against Mom and apple pie - maybe worse, because a lot of dieters won’t eat pie of any kind, and some poeple don’t like their Moms (not me, I love pie and my Mom!). Being against good quality health care for people who need it but can’t afford it is close to being for racism. It just isn’t done.

Now change the question slightly: “Who wants to pay for everybody else’s health care?” Hmmm, not many hands go up. Darn few, in fact. Take away those who have their hands up who can’t pay, and the raised palms begin to resemble scattered weeds in a freshly mowed lawn.

The key question about universal health care is not who wants it, but how to pay for it.

Obamacare expands coverage by fiat, and proposes to pay for it by limiting both treatment and fees through federal regulations, passing costs off to the states, imposing mandatory participation, and levying more taxes. It is a Commodore Perry “damn the torpedoes” ideological approach based on the conviction that all persons should have access to the same level of health care, costs be damned. Unfortunately, Obamacare costs more, lots more, than the existing system.

Aside from cost, there are many other problems with this “solution.” First, history teaches that a highly regulated system almost invariably benefits most those with influence, those with access and money, i.e. the providers and the rich, and rarely ends by benefitting those of more modest means, i.e. Jack and Jill average patient. Many predict that the combined factors of influence, regulation and cost will ultimately result in a bifurcated health care system, with gold plated health care for the very privileged, and bargain basement healthcare for everybody else. Another problem is that there are not enough doctors to go around to meet the demand of the newly enfranchised, and medical schools cannot produce them fast enough. It takes something like 30 years to produce a new one.  That’s called a bottleneck.

And then there is the unintended consequence, something Obama and I-didn’t-read-it Pelosi didn’t count on. A simple management principle that they never learned because they have never run anything is that people trump rules, every time. That truism is the basic premise of every comedy based on military life, the most regulated existence there is outside of prison, from Red Buttons to Sergeant Bilko to Stripes. Only Obamacare is not a comedy. Obamacare relies on a set of brand new taxes to raise revenue to offset its costs. Increased taxes and tax incentives both change behavior in significant ways. The new taxes will change the behavior of those taxed. Behavior will change to avoid those taxes, and those changes in behavior will also have unintended and unforeseen consequences. For example, one of the key “enhanced revenue” measures to pay for Obamacare is the new tax levied on employers for those who do not have employer provided health insurance. A recent survey of retail and wholesale companies that offer medical insurance to their employees showed that a whopping 67% plan to change their “hiring strategy” in response to Obamacare. Exhibit A of this change in strategy is the “29er”. Obamacare mandates that everybody who works 30 hours or more per week must be covered beginning in 2014, and starts measuring hours worked in 2013. The obvious 29er strategy is to keep hours worked below the magic 30 hour threshold. That in itself will have major unforeseen consequences, even though it would be difficult for large employers to adopt en masse. However, there is already a mutation of this strategy that is quite ingenious and works for large and small employers alike: competitors have started to share employees. A burger flipper works 20 hours at Joe’s Burger Bar, then the rest of the week reports across the street to Burger King to do the same job; next week, repeat. Both employers get their 40 hours of work per week and avoid the costs of Obamacare. Pretty ingenious! Bet they didn’t think of that one at 1900 Pennsylvania Avenue! Pretty soon the managers will figure out that they can do even better by having that same employee work 25 hours at both places. The employers will get 50 hours of work, escape paying 10 hours of overtime, and will not pay health coverage. Hey, if they do this for 4 employees, they can even eliminate a 5^th job entirely! A 20% cut in labor costs, no overtime, no health insurance, wow, maybe we can all get back to a $3 hamburger. Of course, each burger flipper will have to work 10 more hours per week, make no overtime and get no health coverage. Life sucks for you, buddy. Great solution, huh? No problem, the Department of Labor or the new bureaucrat Obamacare Nazis or, more likely, both can fix that with more regulations. Great.

And so it goes. Rock, paper, scissors. Regulation, reaction, more regulation. There has to be a better way.

The US health care system is not all wonderful and does need change. It leaves a lot of people out. It’s a mess. A little due diligence reviewing articles over the last decade will provide you with inexhaustible reading to put you to sleep at night, documenting all the limitations and problems with the US health care system. However, quality is not one of them. US health care is still the solution of choice for people around the world who can afford the best. They come here, not “there.” The problems with the US healthcare system boil down to two things: cost and access. These are the two things that virtually everybody can agree on. Another point of nearly universal agreement is that patients, the health care consumers, want to preserve their doctor-patient relationship. Patients don’t want either some distant government bureaucrat or an impersonal insurance company functionary determining what their treatment can be from a menu of approved treatments and formularies. Patients want their doctors to work this out in consultation with them.

While there is definitely a need for government intervention to unravel this Gordian knot, before turning it into a government-run health care system we should contemplate the fact that government itself created a lot of these problems with all of its regulated programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. How much time does the average doctor spend just filling out forms rather than treating patients? I am not suggesting that these are bad programs or that they should be dismantled. Not at all. To the contrary, overall access to medical care is much better than the situation prevailing before these programs were enacted. That doesn’t mean more of the same is the right solution for the problems that they helped create. A government run health care system is the model that Obamacare emulates, but they are not so wonderful. Love the European model? So how come so many Europeans have lousy teeth? Love the Canadian model? So how come so many Canadians try to come to the United States for treatment because their number hasn’t come up for the treatment they need? How come Canada was losing doctors emigrating to the United States where they could practice medicine without the government telling them whom they could treat and when and how much they could charge? Government can make things better, not with the suffocating hug of bureaucracy but by enacting the right incentives to point the free market in the right direction.

There is another rule of management applicable to regulation of health care: the KISS principle. For 99% of Washingtonians who have never run anything and 100% of the Supreme Court (believe me, they have never taught the KISS principle at either Harvard or Yale Law School), that means Keep It Simple, Stupid. Observe an application. Lee Kuan Yew, the first Prime Minister of Singapore, faced a thorny problem of too many cars in too little space. Pollution, congestion, all those bad things. As far as I know, Singapore does not have a Department of Transportation with overlapping authority with several other agencies, each of which has reams of regulations and legions of bureaucrats to write, interpret, research and enforce them in order to solve the problem of traffic congestion. Instead, Singapore enacted two measures; 1) they limited the number of cars in the country, and before you can get a license plate for a new car, you have to turn in the old car and its license plate; and, 2) to drive in certain parts of the city at certain times, you have to have a special plate allowing you to do so, and a certain number of those are reserved for taxis. Problem solved. You don’t see any junkers spewing black smoke into the environment in Singapore. Traffic jams are minimal. No new bureaucracy. Their equivalent of the Department of Motor Vehicles just issues license plates the same old way, and the police continue enforcing the traffic laws. A smaller percentage of the population can own cars, which created a groundswell for reliable, safe and clean public transportation. Meanwhile, they let the market sort out who has cars and who can drive them downtown during rush hour.

A few simple rules, and let the magic of the free market work it out. Oh, but health care is different, it’s much more complicated. Baloney. The hidden hand of the free market has solved much more difficult distribution problems than this. The free market always functions better than a command-and-control regulated economy. That’s not just Adam Smith’s theory, it was pretty conclusively proved in the 50 year competition between the Communist Block and the Western Democracies following World War II. What a laboratory. Ravaged Europe divided down the middle between the capitalist West and the socialist paradise of the East, Taiwan-South-Korea-Singapore-Japan vs. China and North Korea, Chile before and after Allende and Pinochet, the comparisons go on but the result is always the same: the performance of a free market destroys state-directed rivals. Want wonderful medical care? Go to Russia. Right.

There are (were?) other solutions in the works right here in the US. Drs. Fisher and McClellan, and Mr. Shortell have written glowingly about Accountable Care Organizations. There are something on the order of 320 “ACO’s” operating in the US on the principle that the health provider can keep savings he/she/it generates only if he/she/it can demonstrate resulting improvements in the quality of the health care provided. There is another management principle applicable here, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Insurance company records are used to track, and document the medical results of the innovations in less expensive health care techniques, such as home health care monitoring and use of smart phones instead of doctor office visits. ACOs are loudly criticized by others as a loony leftist boondoggle. I don’t know the merits, that’s not the point. It’s an interesting idea actually being tested in real markets to incent health care savings without a new bureaucracy while preventing erosion of the quality of health care service.

Another less “scientific” measure is something that almost every business was beginning to adopt in response to rising health care costs before Obamacare was adopted: increased co-pays and deductibles. The idea here is simple: the group insurance system had forcibly divorced patients from the cost of their own health care. Instead of the patient making choices as to how to spend his or her health care dollar, the incentives were to use up your health plan deductible and then go for everything possible that the health care provider offered as a possible treatment because “the insurance company will pay for it.” Why not? I have paid my premium and my deductible, and I want to get better. You have probably seen or heard television or radio ads by dentists and chiropractors urging people to come see them in December before their annual limit expires - it’s the same thing, unbridled costs because there is no disincentive to the consumer. By increasing the co-pays, employers were trying to incent their employees be engaged in their own health care decisions and to make choices based on individual costs and benefits that directly affected them. Yes, there are problems with this approach, not the least of which that it does not address the need for increased access to health care by the unemployed. But tell me: would you rather pay 10-20% more for your prescriptions and have the choice of whether to go with a generic, or be ordered to take the generic and pay a $3,900 payroll tax to Uncle Sam? Be able to make an appointment with a doctor of your choosing and pay $25 for the visit, or wait several (more?) months for a no-cost appointment with a doctor assigned to you?

These two examples are potential partial solutions do not require a bureaucracy. They didn’t even require government intervention. They do not require taxes that bankrupt the economy. I am sure there are many more ideas in play whose effectiveness can only be proved by the real test of the free market.

And here is an interesting question to ponder. We are told again and again that the US spends more on just about everything, including healthcare, than other industrialized countries. In fact, the United States in 2006 spent almost 16% of its GDP (Gross Domestic Product) on health care. That’s 16% of the largest economy in the world. France spent only about 11%, Canada 10% and the UK, Australia and Sweden all hovered between 8% and 9%. So how come Obamacare,  which is supposed to make things all better by making us just like them, is costing us still more money?

This may be at least partially explained because Obamacare is not health insurance. Its health care coverage. We have been conditioned to think of health coverage as insurance because that is the way it has been handled for years, and Obamacare involves “insurance pools” and “insurance exchanges” and in theory still relies on private insurance companies. However, the essential nature of insurance is a true pooling of risk: we all pay something into the pot, but only those who actually get sick draw down benefits. Some do not get sick, and their contributions go to cover the large health costs of the unfortunates who do really get sick. Fundamental to all of this is that some health problems are not covered, and everybody must pay. Non-coverage makes the overall plan affordable, and everybody pays to pool the risk of what is covered. These are the “exclusions” in the health insurance policy, and the “donut hole” in Medicare, and they are there for one simple reason: covering everything is way too expensive. Obamacare removes all kinds of limits on what is covered, including such things as pre-existing conditions. There is no risk in coverage of a pre-existing condition: it is a certainty. It’s pre-existing. Government run health plans today, as exemplified by those offered in state universities and in states such as California, cover virtually everything, including “procedures” that private health plans virtually all excluded as “personal choice.” Oh my, think of that! Yes, that procedure is medically available, but we are not going to pay for it because the condition that is to be addressed is not life threatening. If you want to have it done, pay for it yourself. What Obamacare purports to deliver is more coverage of conditions for more people. With most people covered for most things, the insurance risk based on health conditions moves closer and closer to zero. Where is the risk? With no risk, everything is covered, so costs must go up. What is left for spreading the risk is timing: do you get sick now or later, as either way you are covered.

So Obamacare hits the US health care system with a double whammy: it drastically increases what is covered at the same time it dumps millions of more covered people into the system. More covered people plus more covered procedures equals higher costs. One of Obamacare’s solutions to this problem is also the most controversial aspect of the program: mandatory participation.  For the most part, this is aimed at younger people. Typically, the older the pool of participants, the more illness there is to cover, and so the higher the insurance premiums must be for all participants. From an actuarial perspective, Obamacare’s impulse to require everybody to participate is theoretically sound as it forces younger people to participate who generally don’t need coverage immediately, and who often have made a very rational personal choice by waiting until they are older to seek coverage.  Supporters of mandatory participation accuse the young opt-outs of “gaming the system” by doing this, but that is not necessarily accurate if they would pay an appropriate premium when they do enter the healthcare market. Their premiums should be adjusted for their age and the shorter period over which their premiums can be collected and banked when they do choose to participate. It is like life insurance, the later you wait to buy the policy, the more expensive are the monthlies. The delayed participation of the younger population may force participation costs higher in the short term because a pool biased toward older people does not have the benefit of drawing on premiums from healthy younger people, but that is not the same thing as gaming the system, that is a just a timing imbalance between  income and expenses.

However, the impact of these new participants is greater than their simple numbers. Most of the newly covered are below the “poverty line” and/or unemployed, or if they are employed, are at the beginning of their careers when they make the least, and so they are functionally unable to pay their own freight. The triple whammy of their inability to pay shoots a huge hole in the actuarial justification for their inclusion. They become a burden, not an asset to the health care system. This problem also arises with respect to the costs to be passed on to the States. Does anybody seriously believe that California will be able to pay additional costs to health care? It is already bankrupt. What moron can put that in the budget as a source of funds for Obamacare?

More covered people plus a lower percentage actually contributing to the cost equals higher premiums for those who actually pay. Your “fair share” just went up.

We are told we must wait for years and then we will see the “real cost savings” resulting from Obamacare. How many times has a government program cost less over time? Uhh, let me count…Can you think of one? I can’t. The promise of lower ultimate costs depends on health cost savings to be derived from broader early treatment of illness and disease. But who guarantees that a person with coverage will actually seek early intervention treatment? There is a direct corollary between higher education and higher incomes, and we have universal free education through secondary school, but that has not stopped an alarming high school drop out rate. People simply do not always do “what is good for them.” So what’s next, mandatory annual check-ups for all the mandatory participants? And if they don’t follow the prescribed treatment, forcible treatment? Do it, it’s good for you!

What is certain is that the mandatory participation policy restricts freedom. Forcing somebody to do anything is an infringement of their freedom of choice. Obamacare forces people to participate in (read, fund) a health program on the basis of a theoretical reduction of costs for older persons’ medical care by having younger people receive preventive care. Government should not be able to force me to spend my assets in a required way “for my own good.” If we are to preserve a free society, we must be willing to let people suffer the consequences of their own bad decisions. An individual should be allowed to make and then be accountable for his or her own decisions. If the social policy is instead to protect everybody from the consequences of their bad decisions, that policy both encourages bad decisions by removing the adverse consequence to that individual and makes the rest of us shoulder the consequence by paying for it. That is not insurance. That is just bad policy. Some of us may remember Aesop’s fable of the grasshopper who fiddled all day and the ants who worked all day, and the consequences to the grasshopper when winter came. That is the way our society has been organized since the dawn of Greek civilization, and I can sleep with that. If a person chooses not to purchase health insurance and wanders into the emergency room later in life in bad health that theoretically could have been prevented or improved by earlier intervention, well, whose fault is that?

What Obamacare delivers is more coverage, more cost and fewer payers. Something has to give somewhere. The most obvious place for more money is higher taxes on those who can pay. The most inevitable place to reduce expense is restrictions on treatment, or medical service rationing. Neither is desirable. In a youth oriented society, with a higher and higher percentage of young people coming from broken homes, where parents are increasingly absent from the rearing of their own children, and where “old folks” are increasingly regarded as more of a burden than an asset, where rationing will hit hardest is pretty obvious, too: the elderly. They are the ones who cost so much to take care of and they have already lived their “useful” life. Of course, they are also the ones who paid into the system for all of their working lives. Is cutting the coverage to the ants more morally justified than denying it to the grasshopper?

The fundamental problem with Obamacare is not that people want to deny access to health care to other people. It is the extraordinarily high cost of universal health care and making people pay for other people’s health care. The only solutions that Obamacare uses to close the cost gap are higher taxes through the wildly unpopular mandatory participation, employer tax penalties, and federal regulations. Are those the only solutions available? No. Instead, why not address some of the structural aspects of the US health care system that contribute to its high costs, or that might produce more revenue? Why not have a serious conversation to address:

• Tort reform; unless you have been living under a rock in the desert, you are aware of the extremely high costs of medical malpractice liability insurance, and malpractice liability that is actually driving doctors to abandon practices in certain regions of then country. Most doctors try to help their patients. Their oath is first to do no harm. Should doctors and hospitals be liable for huge damage awards when they make mistakes in good faith?  The American Trial Lawyers Association is a powerful opponent of tort reform, but are you aware that less than 50% of very tort dollar actually gets to the tort victim? Instead of our current tort lawsuit system, what about a no-fault patient’s compensation system modeled after the well established and generally successful worker’s compensation system that prevails all across the country? What about immunity or capped damages for pharmaceutical companies that have their drugs approved by the FDA, require warnings to patients of risks and benefits, and monitor closely for unintended side effects, simultaneously mandating that the lion’s share of saved liability dollars got o reducing the prices of drugs to patients? Isn’t that a better solution than taxing device medical device manufacturers for successful innovations?
• Illegal immigrants; unless you have been living under the same rock, you know that there are somewhere between 10 and 12 million illegal immigrants living in our country. There have been numerous studies showing the enormous financial burden these people place on our country’s infrastructure, including our health car system, a burden for which they do not pay their “fair share” because they are underground. Addressing this issue would both reduce costs, and increase revenues by bringing them “above ground.”
• For-profit hospitals and institutions: I am all for profits, but I am uncomfortable with profits based on patient care. It seems to me profits for health care may create the wrong incentives, and results, colliding with what should be the primary objective of a hospital, the patient’s welfare.
• The shortage of medical professionals: In the 1960’s, the ABA and the AMA were both concerned about their respective professions being “socialized” – exactly what is happening today with medicine. In the era when civil rights issues were paramount, the concern regarding legal services was pretty much the same as the concern regarding health care today, that they were available only to the rich and there was inadequate access for the poor. The response of the legal profession was to create more lawyers, to accredit more law schools, to create posts such as the Public Defender’s Office, and to invent new legal service jobs, such as paralegals. I don’t know of anybody today who complains that there are not enough lawyers or that nobody has access to legal services. On the other hand, the medical profession continued, and continues today, restrictive policies with respect to the number of medical schools and the number of doctors who graduate each year. Nursing schools, physical therapy and physician assistant programs are all notoriously difficult to get into. Why do you think Aruba now has a medical school? General practitioners are a shrinking percentage of doctors as more gravitate toward specialties. Why not consider the solutions that the legal profession adopted 50 years ago? As more and more lawyers were unleashed on the country, the less “desirable” niches gradually became filled. If anything, the US now has a glut of lawyers. It costs less today to write a will or form a  corporation than it did 40 years ago – incredible, but true. Instead of regulations as to when people can receive what medical treatments from whom, a better solution would be to address structural factors to create more medical practitioners, and allow competition to reduce the costs of their services as it does for every other service offered in the US economy. Instead of mandatory participation in government run health care, why not consider tax incentives or even mandates requiring each state to produce a certain number of doctors and nurses per unit of population? Let the states figure out the best way to achieve that objective. Tap existing but unused reservoirs of trained medical personnel. While riding on a shuttle to Midway Airport in Chicago recently, I was talking with the bus driver, who was a twenty year veteran of the Navy. I was shocked to learn that the medical profession does not recognize the experience of medical corpsmen in the military services as adequate qualification for a veteran to become a nurse. Are you kidding me? Change that. Rather than family ties, change our immigration laws to give preference to those who have medical training.

“Who wants to pay for everybody else’s health care?” The answer doesn’t matter. Politics is who gets what. Despite all of the rancor about Obamacare, we do have a national consensus on four points regarding health care: 1) those who have it like the quality of their health care, 2) good health care should be more broadly available, 3) our health care should cost less, and 4) health care should be rooted in the doctor-patient relationship. Obamacare addresses only one of these, and adversely affects all the other 3. It is a lousy “solution.” However, President Obama may have done us all a favor by focusing our attention on the problems with our health care system, if only our leaders (and I use the term advisedly) would sit down and hammer out a real solution. Starting from those four points of agreement, intelligent people working together should be able to do better. Much better.

www.rixcafeamericain.blogspot.com

Essays From the Heartland: Number 1 - Elections Have Consequences

ESSAYS FROM THE HEARTLAND

NUMBER ONE

ELECTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES

or
10 THINGS THAT WILL HAPPEN

AS A DIRECT RESULT OF

OBAMA’S 2012 RE-ELECTION

November 13, 2012 and February 28, 2013

There is nothing inevitable about the course of history. World power does not march inexorably from East to West, the end of the American century is not certain, and the Marxist dialectic is not a natural law. Anybody who thinks otherwise has not studied history. However, events do have consequences, and we can predict some consequences as more probable than not, and such predictions are of course more accurate the shorter the horizon. Several things may not be as certain as night follows day, but they are almost certain to happen as a direct result of the re-election of Barrack Obama as President of the United States and the Democratic control of the Senate. I began writing this the week following O’Bama’s re-election  and nothing that I thought then seems less likely 3 months later – quite the contrary. I invite you to critically examine my analysis, and refute any of these predictions.

1.     Obamacare will go into effect, and will fundamentally change the structure of health care in the United States:

a.      Last year, the US Supreme Court declined to declare Obamacare unconstitutional. The last best chance to prevent the enactment of Obamacare died on November 6, 2012. It will begin to go fully into effect in 2013. The winners in Obamacare are those people who did not have access to healthcare before Obamacare. The losers are everybody else.

b.     The fundamental premise of Obamacare is to bring more medical care to more people in lower income groups. Obamacare is designed to neutralize the advantage in access to goods and services that derives from higher income and wealth, in favor of “redistributing” that access to people who have less income and wealth. However, there will not be a radical increase in hospitals, doctors or nurses. This inevitably means that people and resources will be stretched to serve more people. It is a simple mathematical equation: the same supply divided by more demand equals less healthcare for each person so that more people can get some healthcare. As doctor shortages begin to appear, appointments to see the doctor will be more difficult to make, and you will have to wait longer. Appointments will be pushed further down the healthcare chain to nurses and physician’s assistants.

c.      This is exactly why the law includes a 15 person panel to determine what services will be provide under Obamacare to what persons. Whether or not you wish to call them a “death panel,” their indisputable purpose is the rationing of available health care. It is inescapable that this requires judgments on the value of medical services to different groups of people. This is triage on steroids. There have already been reports that there will be “age limits” on such things as joint replacements. In this competition, older people who are already consigned to a kind of limbo at the end of their lifespan will lose to younger people who still have more “value.”

d.     Obamacare will destroy the system of employer provided health insurance. Businesses with 50 or more employees must provide healthcare under this law: the number of companies with 49 employees will increase dramatically, throwing more people who would previously have had employer provided healthcare into the public healthcare system. (In the 1980’s, Italy enacted a law that companies of 50 or more had to hire as their next employee a disabled person selected by the government; predictably, the number of 49-person Italian companies skyrocketed.) Larger businesses either have to provide healthcare or pay a fine: the $2,000 fine is much less expensive per person than the current cost of providing healthcare insurance, and the cost of healthcare has been the fastest rising cost of doing business for years. In a price competitive environment where overhead and operating costs make the difference between profit and loss, which includes most businesses, more and more companies will elect the more predictable and less expensive path, drop healthcare and force their employees into the public healthcare system. With comprehensive control and administration, legal ownership becomes irrelevant, because ownership is really the right to use and control. The government will have “market power pricing” through Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare to control both what services are offered (by what services the government will pay for) and what their prices will be (by how much the government will pay for the services), with little if any effective competition from the private sector. When you control both delivery of services and the price of services, there is no need to be the owner or employer of the service delivery system – in fact, it is preferable if you do not, because then you also have a fall-guy to blame for poor delivery of services.

e.      The average quality of healthcare in the United States for those who had healthcare before Obamacare will tend to decline. This is always the effect of dilution. It has never been otherwise. When you “democratize” something, the standards never rise, they always decline to the lowest common denominator. Obamacare itself requires cuts in Medicare and reductions in Medicare reimbursements. With cuts in reimbursements, more doctors will resist accepting Medicare schedules, and therefore, Medicare patients. With more governmental control of pricing, average incomes of doctors and nurses will also likely decline. I am no expert on running a medical business, but the only way I can see this not happening is if there are enough new patients who previously were not paying at all but who will now pay at government mandated rates to offset those that previously were paying higher than the government mandated rates but who are now forced into government rate-set programs. And if that does not happen by itself, physician incomes will likely be reduced by government fiat. There are already proposals being floated in Congress to attack this only area of high cost in medical care that Obamacare has not addressed. As this happens, fewer highly qualified people will elect to shoulder the sacrifices of decades of education and training necessary to be a physician, and those that do will likely retire earlier; and/or, the standards of admission to the medical profession will be loosened to meet the demand, and the average quality of a physician will decline. On way doctors can try to protect their incomes from the pressures of increased numbers of patients with government-controlled fees is to increase the use of  “below physician level staff” to see and treat patients, allowing the physicians to charge higher fees as specialists. This will result in fewer general practitioners (already in short supply) and patients seeing nurses and physician’s assistants rather than physicians.

f.      Although the average level of care for those who had healthcare before Obamacare will decline, the cost of that healthcare will increase. Many of those on Medicare will forego treatments that are no longer covered. The CBO has already projected that the average cost for a family of 4 for a private healthcare premium under Obamacare will exceed $20,000. Hardly anybody can pay that. This will force more and more people onto the government run plan – which is really the objective of Obamacare, to have one universal healthcare system run by the government – and steadily reduce the pool of people available to be insured by the private sector. No pool, no insurance: the essence of insurance is pooling. The not-very-much-talked about limit on incomes for executives of health insurance providers of $500,000 per year should give you a clue of what Obamacare truly intends.

g.     Obamacare will reduce the incomes of lower income employees. Under Obamacare, coverage is mandated for all employees who work 30 hours or more per week. Conversely, coverage is not required for employees who work 29 hours per week. To avoid the costs of Obamacare, employers will adjust their workforce by reducing the number of employees who work 30 hours per week, which will mean that many employees who are now working 40 or more hours per week will be frozen at 29 hours per week, nominally a 25% cut in income. This will begin happening with a vengeance in late 2013 before the 30 hour rule becomes effective in 2014.  It is already happening in the food and retail sales sectors.

h.     The ultra-rich will not be affected. While the middle class and the upper middle class will find health care harder to get and probably not as good, those who have the resources will still demand the highest quality medical care, and there will be plenty of countries that will gladly capitalize on this opportunity. Medical centers of excellence will arise outside the United States in the Caribbean Basin (the Caymans, the  Bahamas, etc.), where people with money can go to obtain the medial care they want without government interference. The trend that began with things like exotic cancer cures or “experimental” surgeries to cure diabetes in places like Mexico, and the training of doctors in secondary medical schools in places like Aruba, will accelerate. Those extra-US health care centers will become very, very prosperous.

i.       Medical innovation in the US will tend to reduce. A government run healthcare system will target the “obscene profits” of pharmaceutical companies. The price of Pfizer’s stock has already fallen dramatically. Without Obamacare, the average time to bring a new drug to market has doubled from 6 years to 12 years, and now costs $1.2 billion (Source: Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America). Lower drug prices mean lower profits, and lower profits mean less R&D, and less R&D means fewer new drugs being brought to market. Obamacare imposes a tax on medical device manufacturers (hip and knee implants, for example), and the Obama administration has openly threatened the medical device manufacturers if they try to pass the tax along to consumers in price increases. If they can’t pass the price along, they will make less in profits, lower profits mean less R&D, and less R&D means less fewer innovations in medical devices.

2.     Taxes will increase: A central plank in the Democrat platform is to raise taxes to reduce deficit spending – although they refer to it as revenue enhancement, not taxes. Republicans bluster that they will stand firm against raising taxes on anybody, but the history of past government shutdown standoffs teaches that they will likely cave rather than risk the political consequences of being blamed for the “fiscal cliff.” The Republican “solution” is pure sophistry: they claim they will not raise tax rates, but they will close loopholes and reduce credits and deductions. Either way, more money will be transferred from private individuals to the government, and that is a tax increase. Regardless, the Republicans have already lost the battle against tax increases. As part of the “fiscal cliff” compromise, the “Bush tax cuts” have ended for higher income earners, and taxes on dividends and capital gains (“passive income”) have been increased. The “holiday” on payroll tax deductions was allowed to expire on December 31, 2012, and all wage earners have already been hit with a 2% increase in their payroll tax deductions. On average that works out to a $960 increase on every wage earner in the country, or $1,920 on a two income family. The Obamacare “mandate” (which Justice Roberts characterized as a tax) of 2.5% on an individual’s AGI if they decline to buy insurance is estimated at an average cost of $3,400. Obamacare also increases the Medicare payroll tax on those making more than $200,000/year (or couples at $250,000), the new excise tax on medical device manufacturers and another one on indoor tanning salons, among many other limitations on deductions such as a higher threshold for medical expense deductions and new caps on various kinds of tax reduction devices such as HSA’s. The states also have budget deficits they need to close. The total tax burden consists of sales taxes, real estate taxes, income taxes, and fees on everything from license plates to tolls to park admissions that are not called taxes. If the recessionary environment continues, there will be pressures to increase all of these sources of revenue from those who are still paying. Already, 50% of the adults in this country do not pay federal income taxes. The pressure will only increase on the remaining taxpayers as more people go on unemployment, disability, government retirement pensions, and social security. The Republican Governor, House and Senate of Virginia just passed the biggest increase in taxes that state’s history. Close to home, the new Governor of Indiana was elected on a platform of enacting a 10% state income tax cut to spur growth, but members of the legislature from both parties have declined to move on that pledge because they fear the looming costs of Obamacare that will hit later in the year. In the fight over sequestration, Obama has threatened – of course, you guessed it - higher taxes. Plainly, it is as certain as certain can be that taxes will increase over the next 4 years. This is not a good thing. Ever since the Great Depression, it has pretty much been Gospel that raising taxes in a recession is a very, very bad idea, because it will further depress the economy. Raising taxes will have the same effect on a barely growing economy that is teetering on a “double dip” recession.

3.     Government spending and deficits will not be reduced: It is well known that deficits under Obama are already three times what they were under George Bush – and this is before Obamacare hits. There are no proposals from the Obama administration to reduce government spending in the next four years – none, nada, zilch. Instead, they propose to move toward a more balanced budget by increasing taxation. This administration is an unapologetic devotee of Keynesian economics, believing that the way out of a recession is government spending to stimulate the economy. It has been tried twice in the past four years, and the economy is still lethargic, to be kind, with the slowest recovery from recession in history. (Growth is currently projected at 2.55 maximum for 2013, before considering the impact of the payroll tax hikes, which many predict will shave ½% off that already anemic projected number – and that is if nothing goes wrong and all goes well!) The administration is discussing the need for a third “economic stimulus” through “quantitative easing”, which is basically just newspeak for printing more money. Either way, deeper recession or a third quantitative easing, it means greater government spending and larger deficits. In 2011, Standard and Poors lowered the rating of the United States debt for the first time in history, from AAA to AA+. The other two major credit ratings agencies, Moody’s and Fitch, have recently all but promised that they will also reduce the US credit rating in 2013 due to out of control deficits. This problem is not limited to the federal government. California is a financial basket case, and other states like Illinois and New York are not far behind. Does anybody really believe that these states, all Democrat strongholds, will be allowed to go bankrupt and default on their pension and other obligations? And to prevent that, where will they- where must they - turn for help? The only place possible is the federal government, which will use tax dollars collected from residents of other states to bail out our profligate cousins. If you believe spending, taxes OR deficits will be reduced in the next 4 years, you probably also believe in the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy.

4.     The value of the dollar will decline, and inflation will increase: Do deficits matter? Aren’t we only borrowing from ourselves? Surprisingly, among economists there is not a consensus as to whether government deficits do, or do not matter. There is a school of thought that increasing the supply of money, including credit – which definitely is happening, that is what quantitative easing is – increases prices, i.e. is inflationary. Vietnam-era deficits were certainly blamed for increasing inflation. While there are those who contend that deficits do not cause inflation, I don’t know anybody who argues that printing more money reduces inflation: that result would certainly be counter-intuitive. Lay people have an instinctive belief that you can’t go on spending without paying your debts forever. But let me ask you this: if deficits don’t matter, why doesn’t the government just print whatever it needs? For that matter, why collect taxes at all, why not just print more money? It’s because deficits do matter at least when they begin to impact your credit rating or the perceived value of your currency. If you have any doubt about whether over the long term huge government deficits matter, please consider what is happening in Greece. Without getting into the arcanery of when deficits may be good, and regardless of whether you agree that Obama’s polices cause inflation (I come down on the side that they do), two things are clear: 1) those policies are going to continue without change, because they are Keynesians; and, 2) you can’t just run the printing presses forever because that will eventually affect the perceived value of the currency and our credit rating. Paper money has no intrinsic value. Its only value is in its perceived value as a medium of exchange (that is why some people still argue for a gold standard). If countries or people lose their belief in a currency as a medium of exchange because it’s all just “worthless paper money,” the economy is in deep, deep trouble. So far, the Federal Reserve has (almost miraculously, in my view) suppressed raging inflation in face of printing bucket-loads of money through very low interest rates, and because most of the money that has printed has round tripped without stopping at Go, without ever hitting the economy in the form of individual spending, and is sitting in bank accounts of the banks and of large corporations (and to a much lesser degree, individuals) hoarding money. Despite this, inflation is increasing, and the Fed is also now talking about increasing the interest rates. The Fed has said that it will increase interest rates only when the unemployment rate falls to 6.5% and the economy is growing at 2.5%, which they say will mean the US economy is safely out of danger from falling back into recession. However, a counter school is pressing for raising interest rates sooner, fearing that 4.5 years and more of artificially low interest rates will lead to uncontrolled (read raging) inflation. The consensus is that the Fed will not raise interest rates any time soon, which is a major reason why the stock markets are hitting all time highs. The fear is what happens when the inflation lid begins to come off. But, is the lid already coming off? Yes. Although our government says that inflation as measured by the CPI is running at less than 2%, for you and me that is a completely specious number because the CPI excludes food prices and energy. It would be nice if we could really run our household budgets without worrying about food and gasoline prices, wouldn’t it? The reality is that both food prices and energy prices are increasing much, much faster than 2%. Gasoline costs us double (or more) what it did 4 years ago. As I write this, the average price of gasoline at the pump is back up to $3.80/gallon, and moving higher. Have you tried to get out of McDonalds for less than $8.00 lately? Four years ago, you do it for around $5. Massive increases in the wholesale costs of food have not fully worked their way into the weekly grocery bill in part because retailers do not want to be the first to pass on increases and lose market share – but it is happening. I trust my own experience at the check out counter more than Labor Department statistics, which report food inflation from flat to 5% per year, at an average of about 1.6% per year. I want to know where they are shopping! Instead, let’s compare prices on individual food items as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics year-over-year from 2010 to 2011: hamburger up 11.1%; butter up 27%; coffee up 16%; potatoes up 7.1%; lettuce up 5%; chicken up 4.3%; milk up 2%.  This was when the economy was anemic, supposedly growing at about 2%. The simple fact is that our money is buying less: that is inflation. Hotel rates are projected to increase this year by 3-9%. Coffee, corn, steel and many other commodities are ready trading at record highs. Some are predicting a 10% increase in the cost of clothing in 2013 because of the record high price of cotton. That is inflation. The reality is that the government cannot indefinitely control inflation except by putting us back into recession, which they are going to avoid like the plague. And if the Fed adds fuel to the inflation fire by increasing interest rates, what will happen to the stock market? That is the next nightmare. The market recently dropped 3 figures just on rumors of an increase in the Fed rates. And amidst all of this comes the administration’s proposed hike in the minimum wage by over 24%! ($1.75/$7.25). This alone is inflationary, but perhaps not greatly so – but the unappreciated impact on the economy are escalator clauses in union contracts that require an adjustment of union pay scales in response to an increase in the minimum wage. That will be hugely inflationary. One thing for certain if the increase in the minimum wage passes, and right now it seems sentiment is in favor of that happening – many of those 29 hour a week jobs will become 0 hour a week jobs. In addition, over the past 10 years, the strength of the dollar against the major world’s currencies has dropped a median of 24% (exactly that amount against the Chinese yuan, where so many Americans buy products through Wal-Mart). Over the past 5 years, that figure is only negative 3%, buoyed by increased value against the Indian rupee (!), the Mexican peso and the troubled Euro. When the dollar drops against foreign currencies, our dollar can buy less of their goods and services – so domestic inflation and a dropping international exchange rate is sort of a double whammy. It is a virtual certainty that our currency will continue to lose value. But not to worry, for now at least you can still go to Mexico and drown your troubles in cheap tequila! It has always been true – always – that the longer the cure to economic woes is delayed, the more difficult the recovery becomes. Inflation is coming, like a freight train. The only questions are how fast and how high, and it could get just plain scary.

5.     The economy will hardly grow, and unemployment will remain high: Even the most aggressive prognosticators are projecting growth only in the 2% range. Any world upset could reduce that rate. Increased taxes will tend to reduce that rate. That kind of economic growth cannot generate jobs fast enough to significantly reduce the unemployment rate. Touted increases in jobs created each month have not been large enough to cover the net increase in new people entering the workforce each month. The true unemployment situation is much worse than the +/- 8% “unemployment rate” that is reported each month.  The reported unemployment rate excludes those who have stopped looking for work (dropped out of the job seeking market because they cannot find a job). It does not include retirees who would like to (need to) keep working as “unemployed.” It does not include those who have taken part time jobs as “unemployed.” It does not include those who have taken any job, despite having had and/or being qualified for a much better paying job, the so-called under-employed, as “unemployed.” This will not change until the economy begins growing again at about twice its current rate. That is just not going to happen any time soon. See points 2 and 3 above.

6.      Constitutional rights under the 2^nd Amendment will probably erode: The movement to limit the right of US citizens to keep and bear arms took a hit when the US Supreme Court ruled a scant few years ago that yes, that is what the 2nd Amendment protects. But, a renewed assault on the 2nd Amendment was virtually guaranteed by the slaying of 26 school children in Newton, Connecticut by a deranged whack job, coupled with the return of Congressman Gabrielle Giffords to Congress (shot in the head in Tucson in 2011). In the infamous words of Rahm Emmanuel, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Heeding his advice and leading the charge, Obama issued 23 Executive Orders and has proposed other gun ownership controls. The apparent target of this renewed effort is “assault weapons.” Ms. Giffords has started a new organization “to raise money to fight gun-rights groups” and do something about “weapons designed for the battlefield” on our streets. No less than the Vice President of the United States has opined during a televise interview that home shotgun is adequate for self-defense, so there is no need for citizens to have an assault weapon. Mayor Bloomberg of New York is funding pro-gun control advertisements in 20 markets including Tucson, Roanoke, Denver, Milwaukee and Washington DC, calling for a ban on guns that have certain cosmetic features and high-capacity magazines. Governor Cuomo has already signed legislation in New York State that bans military-style semi-automatic firearms and magazines that hold more than 7 bullets. Ironically, no assault weapon was used at Newton or Tucson. Those killings were accomplished with pistols. Further, automatic weapons (which include “assault rifles”) have been regulate since 1934.  And, anybody who knows anything about firearms recognizes that a shotgun is probably a better weapon choice for close quarters mass mayhem than an assault weapon. Regardless of which side of the “gun debate” you are on, these are all facts. It is also a fact that there is now an enormous effort underway to additionally restrict and limit the availability of guns to American citizens. How it will all turn out is open to question, because there are already Constitutional challenges to these measures making their way through the courts, a future President could roll back (or ad to) the Executive Orders, and many states have already passed or have legislation pending to invalidate any similar federal laws or regulations. However, history teaches that in a power struggle between the federal governments and the state governments, the federal government is likely to prevail.

7.     Organized labor will have increasing influence: Considering that organized labor represents a smaller and smaller proportion of the population, and considering that more and more states are enacting “right to work” legislation, that directly hits unions in their pocket books, this prediction is down right weird. However, it is fair to say that the heavily unionized urban populations of New York, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles and similar large cities provided Obama his margin of victory. Unions spent hundreds of millions of dollars electing Democrats at the state and federal level in 2012 (over 91% of union political contributions went to Democrats), and its payback time. Especially after they lost the fight (and the recall, and the court battle) in Wisconsin stripping public sector employees of certain bargaining rights, and several more states have passed Right to Work legislation, I would expect the unions to resume trying to push through “card check”, eliminating the secret ballot, and for that mater, elections, in union organizing campaigns. Pro-business forces seemed to win a victory when the Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously invalidated as un-Constitutional President Obama’s recess attempt to pack the National Labor Relations Board with pro-union activists, but the NLRB has (amazingly) chosen to simply ignore that ruling pending appeal and conduct “business as usual.” Regardless of how that turns out, Obama will eventually get some more pro-union members appointed to the NLRB.  The bare knuckles gutter fights over union power at the state level will continue, but at least at the federal level, the unions have the edge – at least until the next election.

8.     American military power will decline: Already, 48% of the American people think the US is weaker than it was 4 years ago; 24% think we are stronger, which leaves 28% in the duh category. Stating it differently, 67% of those who have an opinion think the US is weaker now than it was 4 years ago: that’s called consensus. Regardless, in the next 4 years, US military power will get weaker (still?). Our current policies will accelerate this trend. During and since the Clinton Presidency, the Democrat Party has consistently (tried to) cut the budget of the American military to pay for social programs. That is also part of their 2013 agenda. In the age old debate between guns and butter, the Democrats are opting for butter. The new Secretary of State is John Kerry, the new Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel: need I say more? The Navy has the fewest ships in service than it has had in decades, it has already cancelled the deployment of the aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman to the Persian Gulf and the carrier Abraham Lincoln sits next to it at the Naval Station in Norfolk instead of beginning its past due scheduled 4 year overhaul and refueling, sequestration cuts will hit the Defense Department budget hard, Obama has reversed the decades old US military doctrine of being prepared to fight war on two fronts, and Obama famously “whispered” to the Russian President that he would be able to be more “flexible” in arms control negotiations (read, US reductions in force) after the election. In fact, within the first day after the election, Obama personally contacted the United Nations to urge fast commencement of arms control treaty talks. Obama is implementing a pullout of Iraq and a draw down in Afghanistan, based on a domestic political timetable regardless of the situation on the ground over there. The mullahs in Iran have to be very happy. This and Hagel, too? Allah Akbar!  Patton famously said, “There is no substitute for victory.” Did we win? I must have missed it. In the past 6 months, 3 of our acknowledged very best generals have stepped down, one in “disgrace” over an extra-marital affair, one to take care of his ailing wife, and the most recent for unspecified reasons. What’s really going on here? It is impossible to compare defense budgets for a clue as to where we are headed as our federal government under this administration has not passed or adopted a budget in years, but what actually is being spent can provide that clue. In his 2010 Nuclear Posture Review, President Obama stated that nuclear reductions under the 2010 New Start Treaty depended on a modernized nuclear infrastructure, and specific funding targets were established to modernize and replace the nuclear triad over the next 10 years. Going into the third year, that funding is already $770 million short of what was promised. Senator Corker says, “It’s likely that additional cutbacks will appear in the fiscal year 2014 budget request. Indeed, virtually all nuclear-modernization programs are now delayed by at least two years, or in the case of a new ICBM, have yet to be announced.” Military power is not an absolute thing: it is a relative thing, in comparison to our rivals. While the US is reducing is navy and is not modernizing its nuclear force, and it’s acknowledged best-of-the-best generals are disappearing, North Korea and Iran are collaborating in their race to develop ICBMs - and so far nothing we have done has deterred them. China is steadily building its military along with its growing economy, and making increasingly noisy claims to islands owned variously by Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam. The news today is full of stories about Chinese cyber attacks against the US, and the lack of US response. Russia has also been flexing its muscles: they invaded Georgia (during the Bush administration) and stole two provinces, and they are still there. The list can go on. Relatively speaking, the US is not a strong as it was just a few years ago. I don’t see any indication of anything reversing that trend.

9.     American influence in the Middle East will continue to decline correspondingly with the increase in power of fundamentalist Islamists: The Obama administration Middle Eastern policy has been characterized by distancing the US from Israel, courting the surrounding Islamic states, and reducing military commitments to the region. This will continue. How is it working so far? Syria is in the midst of a civil war. Hamas and Israel are shooting at each other, Israel is again threatening to invade the Gaza Strip and Hamas is trying to bring in Egypt.  Hamas is the dominant ruling faction in the Gaza Strip, is supported by Iran, and has reportedly been emboldened by the rise of the supposedly “moderate” Islamic Brotherhood in Egypt, which replaced Mubarak as the governing faction there. Facts: Hamas is designated by the United States as Foreign Terrorist Organization; Hamas was founded in 1987 and according to its founding charter is a branch of the Islamic Brotherhood; the Brotherhood was founded in 1928 by an admirer and supporter of Adolf Hitler, and actively supported the Nazis in World War II; and, all the founders of Al Qaeda, including Osama bin Laden, were members of the Islamic Brotherhood. Moderates? Compared to what? The Islamic Brotherhood President of Egypt, Mohammed Morsi recently called on the US to release the “Blind Sheik” who was the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing, issued the fatwah that justified jihad against the US and inspired Osama Bin Laden. Whatever the Egyptian Brotherhood ultimately turns out to be, Mubarak and his predecessor, Sadat, both clearly supported the US. Sadat was assassinated after making peace with Israel, and under his successor, Mubarak, it was clear that Egypt was not going to war with Israel. This is no longer so. On September 11, 2012 there were riots directed at the US Embassy in Cairo (and in Yemen and other places in the region, as well). Speaking of Al Qaeda, the US consulate in Benghazi was attacked by an Al Qaeda affiliate, was burned and the American ambassador and three other Americans were murdered; nobody has been forthcoming about what really happened in Libya, but now arms from Libya have turned up in the hands of Al Qaeda insurgents in Mali. Since the assassination of Osama bin Laden, relations with Pakistan appear to be at an all time low. Meanwhile, during the Obama administration Turkey’s secular government has tilted toward an Islamic state, is no longer working closely with Israel, and is taking a more assertive role with regard to Syria. Even where the US stands with respect to Israel no longer clear. Recently Israel’s status as an “ally” has been openly questioned. The US has put itself between the proverbial rock and a hard place: if it backs Israel, any progress from Obama’s overtures to the Islamic states will be trashed; if it does not back Israel, US relations with Israel will be trashed. There really is no middle ground. Given history, straddling the fence is a move toward Hamas. The US has attempted to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons through sanctions through the UN, but is opposed in that effort by both Russia and China. The US has announced a pull out from both Iraq and Afghanistan without having achieved stability or even a secure clearly pro-Western government in either country. During the past four years, the Obama administration took a hands-off approach to protestors in Iran, declined to put “boots on the ground” in Libya, and has not taken an open position on the civil war in Syria other than “Assad should go.” God knows what is actually going on behind the scenes. However, it seems clear that the position of the US has not improved over the past 4 years and that these policies are likely to continue for the next four years. Couple that with a (documented) perception that Obama is a weak President, with the undeniable reality of declining US military power, with the withdrawal of US forces from the region, and with a continuing weak American economy, and the only reasonable conclusion can be that the waning of American influence in the Middle East will accelerate.

10.  The American standard of living will decline: Higher inflation, reduced quality of health care, and a slow growth economy. QED.

During the 2008 election, Barrack Obama promised to “fundamentally transform” America. Welcome to the dawning of the new America.

I think I have depressed myself…