The Middle Middle

I read somewhere that 90% of Americans consider themselves in the middle class. I wonder how this came about.

Americans don't like to talk about class but most will agree that there is the top 1%, the super rich. Then there is the 15% who are welfare cheats. That adds up to 106%, but there must be a way to make this work. Work, yes. . . .  We dropped the term "working class" decades back because it sounded so Marxist. 

There are too many criteria we could use to define the classes: income, education, diction, piety, speed on foot, etc. In what class would we put someone with a law degree from Yale who sells loosies for a living?  How would we rate a retired chicken sexer who lives under a tree down by the river?  Or an affable President who wears a diaper in the oval office?

I don't know the answers, but I want to suggest that we do have a large working class, and that the interests of that class differ somewhat from those of the shrinking middle class. 

Carrillo Strikes Again

In Friday's Press Democrat, Angela Hart reported on the race for supervisor in the fifth district of Sonoma County. The incumbent supervisor, Efren Carrillo, decided not to seek reelection after the night he was arrested in his underpants, scratching at the screened window of a frightened young woman. Carrillo was tried and acquitted, on the grounds that he was drunk at the time.

Nominally a Democrat, Carrillo represented the swanky class in a county that seldom elects Republicans. Republicans backed him with big money. Yesterday Carrillo announced his support for the swanky-class's new choice, Lynda Hopkins. Hopkins is also backed by "the same business, real estate and farming groups that previously backed Carrillo." To that list add the Chamber of  Commerce. I mention this so Republicans will know which candidate is their man.

Noreen Evans, a former state senator who called on Carrillo to resign, is the other front runner. Carrillo has attacked her vigorously, this time with his pants on. Evans has been endorsed by the Democratic Party and environmental groups.

Some Notes on Healdsburg

Access is, in a sense, controlled. To reach Healdsburg we pass through a greenbelt that separates the town from more ordinary sites and acts, almost, like a time machine. We might not know it yet, but we are about to find nostalgia.

We emerge from the greenbelt into a special stage set, a charming arts and crafts town square, from, say, upstate New York 150 years ago: bolstered by a Japanese restaurant, some of the best wineries in the world, and access to wi-fi and the New York Times. A map of the town might be called Haven. People entering this set for the first time often have the same surprised reaction, which is that this space is home.

We’ve moved beyond the reach of the urban poor. They huddle in the present in so-called blighted areas of cities about to be redeveloped by billionaires for upper middle class occupancy (paid for with tax money). 

In Healdsburg we find a miniature city without a genuine city’s problems. We’ve discovered an imaginary Golden Age where we walk into the bank and the clerks know us by name. We run into friends at the post office and the mayor at the health food market. The town is a cross between Brigadoon and an Andy Hardy movie.
The Healdsburg film set, a few miles wide, warms us. We love the rows of craftsman-style homes. The town doesn’t pretend to be the California of Old Mexico (like Sonoma) or of the much later Mediterranean villas, where the Irish wear sombreros in parades, riding palominos with silver studded saddles. The Healdsburg set is what came between those two, a forgotten immigrant era. Of course we wouldn’t want to live in the real historical town of the later 1800s. Who would? Harlan Heald, the town founder, died in his thirties like everyone else.

Healdsburg didn’t begin as an international destination. It was a grimy village where men in John Deere caps, men who sewed together their own baseballs from raccoon hides, met each morning in the same cafe, sat together at the same tables and ate the same leathery fried eggs for breakfast after breakfast.
Today many of the people in town have migrated across the green belt from San Francisco if they are white (bringing graduate degrees) or from Latin American villages if they are brown. For the white people it’s a town filled with forward-thinking progressive Democrats. We’re unsure what the Latinos believe about time travel, but they might believe that they have journeyed into a future where people have flush toilets but no voice in governance.
My most insightful friend once told me that Healdsburg is what we consider a paradise, and it is. But we’ve learned the hard way that good city planning will not make us virtuous. The basic problem is not in the roofs we erect. It’s in what lays beneath the town square. The field under the set keeps tilting. Power and money roll to one end. The foundations crumble.

It's Good to Be White

It's good to be white because you can decide that structural racism is a myth or that racism no longer exists. You can't afford to do that if you're not white.

Hemingway and Fitzgerald

Once Ernest Hemingway and Fitzgerald were walking along a sidewalk in Manhattan, and Fitzgerald said, "The rich are different from you and me."  And Hemingway replied, "Yes, they have more money."

And there are other differences. In a recent AMA report, it turns out that the rich live longer than the poor. The top 1% lives nearly 15 years longer, on average, than the bottom 1%. This gap has been widening. It might seem a little unfair--that the rich get an extra 15 years of life--but remember that in this country nearly all people are born equal (approximately).

Kasich and Strangulation

This morning I woke to hear John Kasich, an American man running for President, telling the TV world that we have a problem: government regulations are strangling small businesses. I've been hearing that claim for 80 years. Why aren't businesses strangled yet? Then I suddenly remembered when the strangling took place. It's not hard to say. It's always happening right now for the first time.

Hillary v. Bernie

Many independent voters always vote for Democrats. (The great majority of independents are not swing voters; they support one party or the other nearly all the time.) Independents who support Democrats--Bernie Sanders is such a voter--are a large enough group to constitute America's third party. The time is coming, maybe, when Independents outnumber Republicans in California. The Democrats need their votes and in California let independents vote in primaries and help select the Democratic candidates. (The Republicans reject Independent voters, which helps explain a lot.)

The Democratic contest between Hillary and Bernie is proving hot, so we need to be careful. There's a lot of angry BS in the air, and some friendships may be at stake. I say, look at what people actually care about. Some consider the most important thing is to elect a woman President. Some consider it most important to elect an outsider lefty as President. Those are understandable human goals we can accept. Let's not make fantastic claims. Let's not claim that Bernie is a woman or that Hillary is a lefty.

Do You Like America's Foreign Policy?

Do you like America's foreign policy? How we are doing in the Middle East? In how many nations should we have military bases? (My guess is we currently have bases in about 90 countries.) What is it like to have armed drones uncertainly watching your streets?

If you like our foreign policy, which we have maintained for about ten Presidential terms, then Hillary Clinton is your man. She's more hawkish than President Obama, but she won't change things much. She'll give us more of the same.

Panama Papers and Bernie

Amy Goodman is excited these days by the release of the Panama Papers. About 1.5 million papers were leaked to a German newspaper by an unknown source in Panama. What these papers show, I think, is that many famous world leaders and their surrogates have sent their riches in secret to Panama to avoid taxes.

Goodman also played a tape of Bernie Sanders speaking in 2011, when a treaty with Panama was passed to set all this tax evasion up. Sanders pointed out that the hidden purpose of the Panama treaty was to legalize tax fraud. He voted against it. Here's the thing. Sanders might have good judgment. He also voted against the Iraq war. What Sanders does not have is the backing of the Democratic establishment and its treaty writers.  
 
 

Noreen Evans v. The Sonoma Alliance

In the last supervisorial election we saw, in the election of James Gore, a victory for Republican business interests. They defeated Deb Fudge, a long time progressive leader in the county, by moving in a young business Democrat and funding his campaign. The result tipped the five-member board of supervisors to the right. But then one of the three-member business majority was arrested for prowling after a young woman at night in his underpants. That prowler's open seat is now up for grabs.

Once again the Republicans have brought in an unknown person to run against a progressive stalwart, Noreen Evans. The newcomer, who claims not be political, has already raised $90,000. She's backed by our local oligarchy, the Sonoma County Alliance, and their helpers (James Gore, John Sawyer, Lisa Schaffner). Republican business interests intend to win back the empty office with this unknown young woman, a business owner, and retain their 3-2 business majority on the Sonoma County Board. Their strategy may be simple, but it works. They have mastered how to confuse voters, and money talks, as clarity walks.