Unions were needed and necessary in the Robber Baron days. The Barons had the power and wherewithal to treat workers pretty much any way they wanted and they certainly did. The history of Pittsburgh is full of the fight for reasonable working hours, safety in the workplace, a living wage, meaningful benefits to ensure entire families didn’t go under if a worker was injured. 

It seemed necessary for the potency of each side to be pretty much equipotent so “bargaining” would not favor either side. In, I think, the 70s, Unions developed a lot of power they used to bully.  I recall the airline pilots demanding three pilots per aircraft. When I was at NYU in the 70s, it was the Teamsters beating up anyone trying to deliver heart valves to University Hospital. Gunshots and flat tires were heard at night. None of this was about salary or benefits; it was all about who was in charge.

Union membership in the USA is slowly but progressively decreasing. The share of U.S. workers who belong to a union has fallen since 1983, when 20.1% of American workers were union members. In 2022, 10.1% of U.S. workers were in a union, the lowest in history. So, it would seem that if and when they decide to use their strike bully pulpit, it would be a decision carefully calculated to generate a better deal than continuing bargaining. This is turning out to be a long shot.

The WGA & AMPTP (writers and actors) have been striking for almost four months now with disastrous quandaries for those in the background depending on TV and Movies for their livelihoods. The point of the strike would be to stop production of TV and movies until public outcry forced the producers to accept their demands. This is exactly what happened for a while, but there are cracks appearing in that wall.

Bill Maher has announced he’s had enough and his show is coming back.  Colbert, Fallon, Kimmell, Myers and Oliver have joined in a podcast, but they’re clearly frustrated and they’re all getting close to doing what it takes if for no other reason than to save the peripheral industries that depend on them. Jeopardy hostess Mayim Bailik famously walked off the set in May to support the writers’ strike, vowing not to return till the bargaining was settled. Last night, Thursday, 9/15/2023, she was there hosting the show without explanation. More importantly, the media producers have figured out that the fifth grader mentality of those watching network TV are more than happy to watch “reality shows” that don’t require writers or actors. So, the WGA & AMPTP are pushing a big heavy ball uphill, not a good strategy to support a strike.

Now, as of last night, we have auto workers striking the big three domestic car makers for what appear to be very high stakes: a 46% pay increases, shorter working hours and several other potential disasters for auto makers. There was never any real chance the auto makers would buy anything like this, so who was in the best position to fight a war of attrition in the auto industry?  Well-heeled auto executives that could last for many months or years or salaried workers who would get $500 a week until the fund ran out? In an industry where any Ford, Chevrolet or Chrysler is matched my hundreds of Teslas, Toyotas, Hondas, Hyundais, Subarus, Kias, Mazdas, Nissons and Volkswagens? 

The DNA of auto workers is similar to Teamsters. When they’ve done this in the past, the issue has turned from staking a meaningful worker position to virulent hatred for each other, both sides doing anything to win regardless of the unintended consequences. GM CEO Mary Barra came on CNN last night and declared that if the autoworkers get what they want, it’ll bury GM. This seemed pretty convincing to me. I’ll just bet that this has well past the point of “bargaining”. It’s now a virulent fight for what each side says is survival. The most potent side (automakers) could last long enough to literally starve the auto workers out, and the peripheral industries that depend on auto making be damned. The workers might last long enough to hand domestic car production to Japan, Korea and Germany. 

Both of these strikes have the makings of disaster for the US economy, and we haven’t seen where the possible unionization of the University of Pittsburgh is going.

DC

I received a note from a friend reminding me that simply trashing Trump will not necessarily win an election. This is a very good point that deserves some exploration.

There’s a LOT more Republican candidates appearing, too many to eviscerate in this missive, but the truly scary reality is that Trump is likely to be nominated for a lot of scary reasons. In a binary election, there must be a better deal on the table than just pointing out how bad the other side is. An alternative must be a better deal and in 2024.  So initially, before I get to Biden, it’s necessary to briefly run through a few of the likely Democratic alternatives.

1.  Kamala Harris- Possibly the worse potential POTUS in several generations. Listening to her give speeches is an exercise in forced cognizance. She generally has only a passing knowledge of what she’s talking about. It’s well known in California that shall we say, she made good use of feminine wiles to the to the top. That won’t fly in 2024.

2.  Gavin Newsome has seemingly good street cred, but Californians loathe him. As Mayor of San Francisco, then Lt .Gov., then a 2-term governor, He has avoided any responsibility for most of his failed policies. Homelessness in California has staggered the imagination and nothing credible is being done about it. Over 800,000 people left California last year, not including major corporations. 

3.  Robert F. Kennedy Jr, is a nightmare that has his father spinning like a lathe in his grave. Full of BS conspiracy theories, he’s disavowed by members of his own family. He sounds more like a red hat Republican than a democrat.

The rest of the Democratic candidates don’t really appear on the screen. The mind boggles.

Now for Biden. Yes, Biden has a bit of a soft brain from old age and previous brain injury. But is simply age-related cognitive dysfunction all there is? Pure and simple age-related brain dysfunction is not necessarily a debilitating disease. It mainly just slows down the process and the affected individual learns to get around it. There are a LOT of persons in their 80s that learn to get around short term memory deficits and word searching, (including the author of this missive) preserving their ability to reason adequately. 

Biden has not pulled any seriously bone headed maneuvers.  Yes, the Afghanistan debacle was a highly publicized mess, but the reality is that pulling out of that endless nightmare would never yield anything but a train wreck no matter who oversaw it. It was really time to finally do whatever it took to get out. A hard bullet to bite on but a needed and necessary chomp, no matter what CNN opined. The immigration and border control mess? A nightmare that’s been going on for decades and all the Presidents from 1950 on refused to grapple with, because there is no practical way to resolve it and virtually any maneuver was guaranteed to produce bad press. Biden didn’t separate thousands of kids from their parents and put them in cages. Sending migrants unannounced to Martha’s VInyard?

So, in a binary election where the only two choices are between a sociopathic narcissist bent on destroying our democratic process and a bumbling nabob that must work his way around the “normal” age related attributes of a shrinking brain, which is the “better” choice if there are only two? Third party?  Maybe find a party that makes a big production of… helping the homeless. Offer an alternative to voters that don’t care much about either of the major candidates. They can vote for the party that will support the homeless and feel better about it. That party won’t win the election but can throw a win to someone no one likes. Remember Ross Perot in 1992?

A binary election! Only two choices! Does everyone understand that such a situation guarantees most voters will vote for the least dangerous candidate? Sooner or later, many of the faithful will hold their noses and vote for Trump because they’re Republicans and voting for any Democrat is a sin punishable by entry into one of the inner Circles of Hell. But look around you. Is the current Republican Party your fathers party? My father’s party? Republicans are going to have to deal with a BINARY ELECTION and it isn’t going to be an easy decision. 

We’re going to have to talk about whether Republicans should vote at all. If they refuse to vote so as to avoid any culpability for putting a monster into office and witnessing our society go over the cliff shortly thereafter, they can say “can’t blame me”. But absence of blame doesn’t necessarily mean absence of liability. 

Sadly, more to come.

DC

Good news travels fast. Trump’s fourth indictment on criminal charges. Unlike what came before, the Georgia indictment is a very, very big deal. 

First of all, it’s a state, not a federal inditement, which means anyone in a Trump federal government has no jurisdiction over it, so Trump and his co-defendants couldn’t be pardoned or otherwise pampered into Trump-friendly areas outside Fulton County. Georgia law is more focused than federal statues, which is why Fulton County DA Fani Willis has spent months bringing every molecule of evidence into bedrock, making it extremely difficult if not impossible for defense lawyers to poke holes in any of it.

The easiest way to think about the Georgia inditements is that it’s an examination of lies.  Donald Trump has been lying continuously for over eight years and until January 6, 2022, he’s pretty much gotten away with it. The Georgia case is now come to a head about lying, conspiring to lie, and attempting to coerce others into lying.  Special counsel Jack Smith has brought a rather limited indictment on Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Fani Willis is bringing a case about the entire Trump conspiracy from A to Z and targeting all the co-conspirators. 

The breadth of the Georgia indictment is now centered on the very scary issue of RICO (racketeering). In addition to other criminal charges, Georgia’s racketeering statute allows prosecutors to charge conspirators with lying to government officials.  Rather than marking each discrete lie on its own, those lies can also be collected into a larger whole: a racketeering enterprise designed to alter the results of the Georgia presidential election. A very, very big deal and plenty scary for those accused. If I were facing Fani Willis in a court of law, I’d be quaking in my boots.

As I have mentioned before, I don’t believe prospective voters care much about Trump hoarding “secret” documents, although technically it is a felony. Voters, especially Trump’s true believers, care even less that he paid off a busty female to keep her mouth shut about an extramarital tryst before the election. If every such guilty politician was identified, Washington DC, would be a ghost town. The Georgia allegations are a different universe. Anyone can lie to the public in Georgia or even lie to public officials on matters outside the scope of their official duties. However, if you lie to state officials relating to their official actions, you risk prosecution and that’s exactly what Trump and his confederates allegedly did, over and over, throughout the election.

When you peruse the list of Trump’s lies, they’re incredible. His declarations aren’t merely false; they’re incandescently boneheaded. This was not a sophisticated effort to overturn the election. It was a blast of simpleminded stupidity with a ridiculously simple trail to follow. To meet federal law requirements, Jack Smith’s charges must connect Trump to a larger criminal scheme. In Georgia, Willis has only to prove that Trump willfully lied to a government official about a matter in that official’s jurisdiction. Once you prove that simpler case, you’ve laid the foundation for the larger racketeering claims that SERIOUSLY ratchets up Trump’s legal jeopardy. 

And yet these issues will ultimately be resolved not by the courts but by the electorate. Republican primary voters will be presented with an opportunity to consider the real value of his leadership and the further damage he could do if rewarded with another four years in power.

Some of you have probably noticed that network TV spots are quickly filling up with “reality series” because that don’t require writing or even actors. Most are so bad they aren’t watchable, even if there weren’t ten commercials every ten minutes. If you’re a network TV watcher, you already suspect the powers-that-be are in this war to kill the writers and actors- decimate them so when they do come back, and they eventually will, they will have  lost enough to never try it again. The “late night” shows are probably stone dead in their hoary crypts for the foreseeable future, as, unfortunately are all the jobs and livelihoods surrounding them.

So, if you’re a TV watcher, that leaves the exploding programming on cable, especially You Tube which offers a wide variety of interesting stuff. Personally, I peruse “You Tube” for opinion and documentaries. Accordingly, I stumbled onto a guy offering his opinion that turned out to be incredibly interesting and prescient. I highly recommend you look this guy up. He is Dr. Victor Davis Hanson with tons of academic associations including Stanford. You can easily look him up:

https://www.hoover.org/profiles/victor-davis-hanson

He did what amounts to a “video podcast” you can also easily find it here

A bit more about Dr. Hanson directly, but for now, in this lecture, he outlines what’s happening politically and culturally using California as a microcosm for where the rest of American cities are headed and it’s plenty scary. Interestingly, what he’s saying is virtually word for word for what a close friend in Los Angeles has been telling me for years. I’ll spare you a word-for-word. You can hear it for yourselves when you have a few moments.

So I dug a little deeper to find out that Dr. Hanson’s politics are mostly diametrically opposed to mine, even though much of what he says on some subjects makes clear sense. When you start looking into him, and especially his associations, you find most of his diatribe wails against the “Hard Left”. In itself, that’s OK. The “hard anything” is deserving of its share of criticism. 

But it comes out that Hansen is definitely an apologist for Trump, having written a book “The Case for Donald Trump” in 2019. This was written before Trump and most of his minions lost their respective elections in 2020, and the “Big Lie”, the power grab in Georgia and the Coup attempt in January 6, 2021. Now when he’s asked about his 2019 book, he deftly changes the subject from “an extremely successful president” to not so much the president himself but the reasoning behind those who elected him. Dr. Hanson conveniently neglects a lot of embarrassing facts concerning Donald Trump, but be that as it may, he’s a great read and I highly recommend him.

I did pick up on some on a couple of his very interesting opinions I’ll outline for you:

1.  Hanson predicted the demise of affirmative action. It’s hard to argue there is a cohort of non-white victims.  If there were, it’s necessary to create the premise of white privilege, supremacy, and rage that would be integral to race-based reverse discrimination. More than a dozen ethnicities earn more per capita than do whites. Asians have been subject to coerced internment, immigration restrictions and zoning exclusions. Yet on average they do better than whites economically and enjoy lower suicide rates and longer life expectancies. The arguments for affirmative action never explained why Asians and other minorities who faced discrimination outperformed the majority white population. As a result, affirmative action ended up discriminating against Asians on the premise they were too successful!

2. “Diversity” is an illusion created by those using the concept to create “equity (or equality). The groundswell for “diversity” began abruptly at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences in 2016 when it was noted that Since 1929, only 6.2 percent of minority actors and directors received Oscar nods. No black actors nominated in 2016.

But diversity can be interpreted many ways by many interpreters. In a perfect world, diversity might mean including or involving people from a range of different social and ethnic backgrounds. However, some define diversity in it’s more exclusive sense, more like “equity”, providing the same to all, managing circumstances to allocate the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome. 

A perfect example- Blacks make up about 12 percent of the general population. Diversity might be accurately defined as then about 12% of all TV commercials should contain black actors. Next time you choose to watch network TV, keep a pen and paper nearby and note any of the hundreds of commercials that DON’T contain a person of color. It’s somewhere between 5 and 0%. That isn’t diversity. It’s enforced congruence. 

One could easily argue that populations of African-Americans are already diverse. Blacks make up about 12 percent of the general population. In many southern cities, blacks make up 50 to 70% of their population.  In 2020 nearly 10,000 blacks, mostly young males, were murdered, the vast majority by other blacks. Recently an unarmed 29-year-old African American, Tyre Nichols, was brutally beaten to death by five Black Memphis police officers. They were charged with murder. Both the victimizers and victim were Black. The Memphis police chief is Black. The assistant police chief is Black. Nearly 60 percent of the police force is Black. The white population of Memphis is about 25 percent.

3.  In a very recent interview, Hanson hit on a very painful note. He happened, as did I, to be watching President Biden giving an ad hoc speech at the edge of the Maui fire disaster a couple of days ago. It was plainly obvious to both of us that Biden STRUGGLED to make himself understood, stumbling over simple sentences, repeating himself and halting over the reading. It was embarrassing and frightening as we wonder where these lapses might lead over the next five years. 

At any rate, although Dr. Hanson and I differ greatly on some things and you may or may not, he has some very topical and interesting opinions and I highly recommend him as a read (or watch).