I like to eat at BJ’s. At the counter, old men gather every morning to drink coffee and talk about the weather. The waitresses know my name, what I order, and how I like my hash browns. Sometimes the owner stops by my table to say hello. Their pies are homemade.
Further down the street are all the icons of American fast food, with their familiar signs, impersonal service and boring food. Nobody can beat their prices, because their food is prepared in bulk, frozen solid, shipped around the country in big trucks, and served by kids earning minimum wage. Instead of seeing familiar community faces behind downtown counters, people who know your name and your mother’s, whose kids play ball with your kids, Americans sit in cars, order through loudspeakers, and get chemically enhanced, over-salted machine-made “food”.
People talk a lot about the importance of small business, and then get a burger at McDonald’s and go shopping at Wal-Mart. These ugly big box stores and the fatty food purveyors are often blamed for killing local downtown businesses. But it’s not their fault.
Over the past 40 years, the aggregated choices of American consumers have forced thousands of diners, hardware stores, independent pharmacies, and Mom-and-Pop groceries to close up.
Why? Price has something to do with it, but less than most people think. For 2 fresh eggs done the way I want them, 2 pieces of the kind of toast I like with jelly, hash browns, endless coffee, and a piece of pie, I paid $7.42 at BJ’s. At the local McDonald’s a large coffee with no refill, large fries, and a piece of their formerly frozen pie cost $4.47. They don’t serve bread or eggs, but you can get a thin gristly burger on a squishy roll, and come out a bit ahead.
Or so it seems. But the savings we think we get from these giant corporations are illusory. The website of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance offers an eye-popping list of scientific studies over the past decade to show how big box development actually costs American taxpayers and communities billions of dollars (www.newrules.org/retail/key-studies-walmart-and-bigbox-retail#1). The destruction of small businesses by giant chains means reduced property tax revenues. The opening of a new Wal-Mart on Chicago’s west side in 2006 caused about one-fourth of businesses within 4 miles to close, some Loyola University researchers found. Away from big metropolitan areas, big boxes in larger towns cause the loss of businesses in surrounding smaller towns.
Taxpayers often fund the construction of big box stores through tax rebates and provision of infrastructure services. Over the past two decades, communities in the St. Louis region have spent $5 billion to fund the construction of big box stores and shopping malls. But the combination of lost businesses and increased costs for roads and other infrastructure for big box stores can mean that this “commercial development” never pays anything back. In Barnstable, Massachusetts, increased costs to local government were greater than new tax revenues, and fast-food restaurants were the most costly kind of development. Smaller retail stores, in contrast, produced a net plus in tax revenue vs. cost. Because Wal-Mart in California pays 30% less than other retail stores, taxpayers there pay nearly $100 million extra dollars a year to provide various forms of public assistance to Wal-Mart workers, who fall below the poverty line.
In hard times, corporate America has a cold heart. Although their charitable giving may seem impressive because of the size of their firms, small businesses give significantly more to local charities per employee than giant corporations. During the last Depression, American families facing hard times were carried by their local shopowners, their neighbors, sometimes for years. Community solidarity spread the few resources around, so the maximum number of people could survive unprecedented economic hardship. Try getting a meal at Burger King on credit.
We can’t blame politicians, the media, or corporate executives for the decline of American small business. Every time we imagine we’ll save a few cents by driving past our neighbor’s store or restaurant to some big box on the strip, we make a decision about the economic future of our community. We send money out of our communities to distant corporate headquarters. We get inferior service and inferior products. We discourage local entrepreneurs and create more unskilled minimum-wage jobs.
The lesson for all of us is that we do better for ourselves and our communities if we patronize small businesses and use local tax dollars to encourage local entrepreneurs, not big boxes.
Buy local. Eat local. Patronize your neighbors. We’ll have more knowledge and control over what we consume. Our economy and our bodies will be healthier.
In BJ’s or the Three-Legged Dog coffee shop or other local restaurants, I see familiar faces. Instead of convenience and speed, I get friendliness.
So, how about that crazy weather? And Marie, please bring me another piece of your peach pie.
Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, January 17, 2012
Monday, January 16, 2012
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Who is Rick Santorum?
Rick Santorum has been running for President for a year now, but most Americans don’t know much about him, except that he is a Christian conservative. He put enormous energy into Iowa, speaking before hundreds of small audiences, but languishing in the polls. When Iowans and the rest of America discovered what better known and better funded Republican candidates were offering, Santorum suddenly leaped into national prominence. He describes himself as one of the most conservative senators in Pennsylvania's history. As a public service, I offer an outline of what he means.
Santorum’s working life has overwhelmingly been in Washington. After getting a law degree, he ran for the House in Pennsylvania in 1990 at age 32. In 1994 he won a Senate seat, which he retained in 2000. In 2006, he lost badly to Bob Casey. Since then he has served on the boards of directors of Pennsylvania companies whose fortunes he promoted while in Congress, earning hundreds of thousands of dollars annually for part-time work.
Extreme positions on social issues have shaped Santorum’s political identity. He opposes abortions even in cases of rape or incest, and favors prosecuting doctors who perform them. He opposes contraception, recently telling ABC’s Jake Tapper that he disagreed with the 1965 Supreme Court decision in Griswold vs. Connecticut, which struck down that state’s ban on contraception: “I have never questioned that the state has a right to do that. The state has the right to pass whatever statues they have.”
Santorum signed a pledge crafted by Personhood USA, which believes that the IUD, the morning-after pill, and the birth control bill should be banned. In October he said, “One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country. It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”
Santorum is also noted for his stance on homosexuality, which he recently compared to polygamy, bestiality and sex with children.
Santorum opposes virtually all forms of union activity. On his website he advocates cutting funding for the National Labor Relations Board. In the Fox News-Google presidential debate, he said he didn’t believe local, state or federal government workers “should be involved in unions.” He added, “And I would actually support a bill that says that we should not have public employee unions for the purposes of wages and benefits to be negotiated.”
Santorum has promoted the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution. In 2001, Santorum sought to amend the No Child Left Behind legislation so that students should hear “competing scientific interpretations of evidence,” including “such alternative theories as intelligent design.” This provision, written with the assistance of the Discovery Institute, came to be known as the “Santorum Amendment”. In 2005, a federal court ruled that the Discovery Institute pursued religious goals, and that intelligent design was a form of creationism and not a scientific proposition.
In an interview with Rush Limbaugh this past June, he called global warming “junk science” cynically promoted by liberals out to control people’s lives. He also blames liberals for the sex abuse scandals in the Catholic church.
Santorum, like other Republican candidates, favors cutting the taxes of the rich. He wants to retain the current low tax rate on capital gains, cut corporate taxes in half, and eliminate all corporate taxes for manufacturing corporations. He supported the Bush plan to privatize Social Security and continues to support this idea for younger workers.
When he looks at the bottom of the economic ladder, Santorum’s opposition to welfare for poor people appears to shade into racist assumptions. Despite the fact that whites are the overwhelming majority of welfare recipients, Santorum said just before the Iowa caucuses, “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money. I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.”
In foreign policy, his proposals lie at the extreme end of Republican proposals. On his website, he “refuses to negotiate on any level with the terrorist state of Iran” and advocates “the authorization of targeted air strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities”, in order to “eliminate the Iranian nuclear threat immediately”. Just before the Iowa caucuses, he told NBC’s Meet the Press that if he’s elected president, he would bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, unless they were opened for international arms inspectors. He is not interested in working with countries whose policies he doesn’t like: he advocates eliminating the post of US Ambassador to Syria and cutting the US contribution to the UN in half.
Santorum may have already reached the height of his popularity. Tracking polls show him dropping in the last few days, likely to come in fifth in New Hampshire with 8% and third in South Carolina with 19%. Perhaps his political proposals came 50 years too late.
Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
January 8, 2012
Santorum’s working life has overwhelmingly been in Washington. After getting a law degree, he ran for the House in Pennsylvania in 1990 at age 32. In 1994 he won a Senate seat, which he retained in 2000. In 2006, he lost badly to Bob Casey. Since then he has served on the boards of directors of Pennsylvania companies whose fortunes he promoted while in Congress, earning hundreds of thousands of dollars annually for part-time work.
Extreme positions on social issues have shaped Santorum’s political identity. He opposes abortions even in cases of rape or incest, and favors prosecuting doctors who perform them. He opposes contraception, recently telling ABC’s Jake Tapper that he disagreed with the 1965 Supreme Court decision in Griswold vs. Connecticut, which struck down that state’s ban on contraception: “I have never questioned that the state has a right to do that. The state has the right to pass whatever statues they have.”
Santorum signed a pledge crafted by Personhood USA, which believes that the IUD, the morning-after pill, and the birth control bill should be banned. In October he said, “One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country. It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”
Santorum is also noted for his stance on homosexuality, which he recently compared to polygamy, bestiality and sex with children.
Santorum opposes virtually all forms of union activity. On his website he advocates cutting funding for the National Labor Relations Board. In the Fox News-Google presidential debate, he said he didn’t believe local, state or federal government workers “should be involved in unions.” He added, “And I would actually support a bill that says that we should not have public employee unions for the purposes of wages and benefits to be negotiated.”
Santorum has promoted the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution. In 2001, Santorum sought to amend the No Child Left Behind legislation so that students should hear “competing scientific interpretations of evidence,” including “such alternative theories as intelligent design.” This provision, written with the assistance of the Discovery Institute, came to be known as the “Santorum Amendment”. In 2005, a federal court ruled that the Discovery Institute pursued religious goals, and that intelligent design was a form of creationism and not a scientific proposition.
In an interview with Rush Limbaugh this past June, he called global warming “junk science” cynically promoted by liberals out to control people’s lives. He also blames liberals for the sex abuse scandals in the Catholic church.
Santorum, like other Republican candidates, favors cutting the taxes of the rich. He wants to retain the current low tax rate on capital gains, cut corporate taxes in half, and eliminate all corporate taxes for manufacturing corporations. He supported the Bush plan to privatize Social Security and continues to support this idea for younger workers.
When he looks at the bottom of the economic ladder, Santorum’s opposition to welfare for poor people appears to shade into racist assumptions. Despite the fact that whites are the overwhelming majority of welfare recipients, Santorum said just before the Iowa caucuses, “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money. I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.”
In foreign policy, his proposals lie at the extreme end of Republican proposals. On his website, he “refuses to negotiate on any level with the terrorist state of Iran” and advocates “the authorization of targeted air strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities”, in order to “eliminate the Iranian nuclear threat immediately”. Just before the Iowa caucuses, he told NBC’s Meet the Press that if he’s elected president, he would bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, unless they were opened for international arms inspectors. He is not interested in working with countries whose policies he doesn’t like: he advocates eliminating the post of US Ambassador to Syria and cutting the US contribution to the UN in half.
Santorum may have already reached the height of his popularity. Tracking polls show him dropping in the last few days, likely to come in fifth in New Hampshire with 8% and third in South Carolina with 19%. Perhaps his political proposals came 50 years too late.
Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
January 8, 2012
Monday, January 2, 2012
Calling All Iowa Voters
Today Iowa Republicans go to caucuses to select the first winner of the 2012 Presidential campaign. I wish you well.
I also wish you reason. Americans lend to Iowans an outsized voice in our electoral process. Your choices today will help shape 10 months of constant campaigning and then possibly 4 years of American life. This is an awesome responsibility for slightly more than 100,000 likely voters of your small rural Midwestern state.
Iowans get paid handsomely to take on this job. Ten million dollars was spent on political ads in December alone, with other millions on office rentals, meals, hotels, and travel. So we have a right to ask you to take seriously your role as national political arbiters. That means thinking about selecting a future President of the whole United States.
Our democratic system certainly benefits from the most diverse variety of political voices, left and right, up and down, and everywhere in between. We need the lonely voices, who promote principled positions beyond the boundaries where most people stop. We even need extremists, whose vehemence closes off debate, whose arguments have flaws apparent to everyone but themselves, if only because they demonstrate to the rest of us where the line of reason and reasonableness should be drawn.
But we don’t need them in the White House. Although a small number of people in Iowa and elsewhere apparently think it would be a good idea to elect some sexual predator who doesn’t know where Libya is, or some mad bomber who has fixed on Iran as his next target, or some fiscal crank who promotes 19th-century solutions to 21st-century problems, the rest of America would not benefit from a crackpot in the Oval Office.
Some things I hear about Iowa’s likely Republican voters make me wonder how seriously you are taking your job as first voters. Recent polls show that nearly half of probable caucus-goers won’t say Mormons are Christians. Less than half think that President Obama was born in the US. And the endless surveys, which by now must have dialed up every Republican phone in Iowa, have revealed fleeting infatuations with a series of extremists and incompetents.
These serial flirtations are partially the fault of the corporate media. The media treatment of politics as a permanent Olympics can actually make us dumber, when we need to be smarter. How many articles have you seen which discuss why the gold standard, Ron Paul’s fiscal panacea, was abandoned across the world a century ago? Or about the long-term effects on your personal finances of Cain’s 9-9-9 plan? Or about what would happen to our schools and schoolchildren if the Education Department was abolished?
But the irresponsibility of the media are only an excuse, not a sufficient justification for voter ignorance. Once every four years we all have to put more effort into informing ourselves about matters larger than our personal interests. We must seek out opinions beyond our comfortable prejudices. The rest of us, who surround your vital, but small piece of American life, need you to take your task more seriously and more inclusively.
Quite a few likely caucus-goers appear to believe the story that many of us out here, perhaps half of all Americans, are stupid dupes of a European socialist agenda, whose cheerleader-in-chief has pulled off one of the greatest political hoaxes in history in order to weaken America for his radical Muslim terrorist friends.
Give us a break. That story has always been stupid, but mainly it’s insulting.
We don’t care if you put on tea parties every other day. But on this day, please look up from the electronic devices that you have programmed to keep repeating that same story. Look in any direction – you see the rest of America watching you today. What you do matters.
Find someone who can embody the best in America, who can lead by persuasion, whose vision of the ideal American includes all of us.
When you pull that lever, pull it for all of us. Be more than first. Be leaders.
Steve Hochstadt
Springbrook, WI
December 31, 2011
I also wish you reason. Americans lend to Iowans an outsized voice in our electoral process. Your choices today will help shape 10 months of constant campaigning and then possibly 4 years of American life. This is an awesome responsibility for slightly more than 100,000 likely voters of your small rural Midwestern state.
Iowans get paid handsomely to take on this job. Ten million dollars was spent on political ads in December alone, with other millions on office rentals, meals, hotels, and travel. So we have a right to ask you to take seriously your role as national political arbiters. That means thinking about selecting a future President of the whole United States.
Our democratic system certainly benefits from the most diverse variety of political voices, left and right, up and down, and everywhere in between. We need the lonely voices, who promote principled positions beyond the boundaries where most people stop. We even need extremists, whose vehemence closes off debate, whose arguments have flaws apparent to everyone but themselves, if only because they demonstrate to the rest of us where the line of reason and reasonableness should be drawn.
But we don’t need them in the White House. Although a small number of people in Iowa and elsewhere apparently think it would be a good idea to elect some sexual predator who doesn’t know where Libya is, or some mad bomber who has fixed on Iran as his next target, or some fiscal crank who promotes 19th-century solutions to 21st-century problems, the rest of America would not benefit from a crackpot in the Oval Office.
Some things I hear about Iowa’s likely Republican voters make me wonder how seriously you are taking your job as first voters. Recent polls show that nearly half of probable caucus-goers won’t say Mormons are Christians. Less than half think that President Obama was born in the US. And the endless surveys, which by now must have dialed up every Republican phone in Iowa, have revealed fleeting infatuations with a series of extremists and incompetents.
These serial flirtations are partially the fault of the corporate media. The media treatment of politics as a permanent Olympics can actually make us dumber, when we need to be smarter. How many articles have you seen which discuss why the gold standard, Ron Paul’s fiscal panacea, was abandoned across the world a century ago? Or about the long-term effects on your personal finances of Cain’s 9-9-9 plan? Or about what would happen to our schools and schoolchildren if the Education Department was abolished?
But the irresponsibility of the media are only an excuse, not a sufficient justification for voter ignorance. Once every four years we all have to put more effort into informing ourselves about matters larger than our personal interests. We must seek out opinions beyond our comfortable prejudices. The rest of us, who surround your vital, but small piece of American life, need you to take your task more seriously and more inclusively.
Quite a few likely caucus-goers appear to believe the story that many of us out here, perhaps half of all Americans, are stupid dupes of a European socialist agenda, whose cheerleader-in-chief has pulled off one of the greatest political hoaxes in history in order to weaken America for his radical Muslim terrorist friends.
Give us a break. That story has always been stupid, but mainly it’s insulting.
We don’t care if you put on tea parties every other day. But on this day, please look up from the electronic devices that you have programmed to keep repeating that same story. Look in any direction – you see the rest of America watching you today. What you do matters.
Find someone who can embody the best in America, who can lead by persuasion, whose vision of the ideal American includes all of us.
When you pull that lever, pull it for all of us. Be more than first. Be leaders.
Steve Hochstadt
Springbrook, WI
December 31, 2011
Sunday, December 25, 2011
Merry Christmas 2011
We sit in a circle, thirteen of us, pulling little gifts out of stockings on Christmas morning. Every few moments, someone screams with delight about a wonderful, or wonderfully silly, present. A jar of homemade jam, an Adlai Stevenson campaign pin, a necklace of sparkling lights, a bag of Twizzlers. I get a pen made from spalted sycamore and a pair of gardening gloves. My daughter gives a photograph of her and her boyfriend to her grandmother.
We each fill a stocking for a family member, whose likes and dislikes, and sense of humor, we know well. My job is important: doing the stocking of my niece's fiancé Carl, as he becomes a member of the family. He gets some small tools and a plant, along with a batch of Captain America window stickers, with the motto "Peace and Justice".
After some breakfast, the presents start coming out from under the tree. My youngest niece Jane has been distributing for years, although this year she disdains the Santa hat (she is 25). She thinks ahead, so that we all keep opening until the presents are gone. Around the circle we go, one gift at a time, sharing the receiving and admiring the giving.
My sister-in-law Ann gives her husband a Vega Little Wonder banjo, the same model as her grandfather's banjo. He begins plucking it right away, giving us musical accompaniment all day.
Even as the younger members of the family send Twitter messages to each other and tell Siri in their IPhones what to do, more traditional gifts are exchanged. As always, there are many solid, ink-on-paper books: murder mysteries, political treatises, cookbooks, novels new and old. This year pottery is also a theme, with handmade bowls in rainbow colors circling the group.
Many "gifts" are donations to favorite causes: Doctors Without Borders, the Metropolitan Opera, Take Action Minnesota, OutFront Minnesota (promotes equality for people who are not heterosexual), Heifer International, Fisher House Foundation (provides housing for family of wounded soldiers during hospital treatment). This is a liberal family, which believes in equal treatment for everyone.
Ann gives her sisters and mother a book entitled "Loving Someone Who Has Dementia" to help them all deal with their father and husband, who can no longer participate in Christmas.
I get a chain saw from Liz, my wife. I don't have a truck or a riding mower, but now I own my first chain saw. I can go outside, start a gas engine, cut big things down, and make a lot of noise. I give her an antique mixing bowl. She doesn't have to do the cooking because she's a woman, while I do the manly things. But we are very happy with our gifts.
At the end of the day, we light Hanukkah candles and sing the Hebrew blessing, just as it has been sung for centuries.
There are lots of presents, certainly more than necessary, probably more than we should have bought or received. All of us have good jobs and enough money to indulge ourselves and each other. That makes us lucky this year, and any year. Lucky to have enough, lucky to be healthy, lucky to have each other every day to rely upon. The things are nice and we will wear them and read them and use them in memory of this day of family togetherness. Eventually they will break or wear out, be put in a closet or handed down to another generation. The love will be there year after year, encompassing new family members, mourning those who have left us, keeping us together.
Our traditions fit us well, even as they keep changing to fit an evolving family. We gave up the tomato aspic and chipped beef on toast. Most meals are now vegetarian. I look forward to our family Christmas all year, seeking gifts for each relative when I travel, planning with my children what to give to my wife, anticipating sitting in a circle with people I love.
Every family celebrates this holiday season in a different way. I hope that your celebration, whatever your traditions, was joyous and loving. If we respect each other's very different customs while celebrating our own, and spread the love beyond our small circle of family, perhaps the spirit of the season, which is not restricted to one religious observance, but is about universal love and charity, will spread beyond this one day.
Captain America and I wish everyone peace and justice, the greatest gifts of all.
Steve Hochstadt
Minneapolis, MN
December 25, 2011
We each fill a stocking for a family member, whose likes and dislikes, and sense of humor, we know well. My job is important: doing the stocking of my niece's fiancé Carl, as he becomes a member of the family. He gets some small tools and a plant, along with a batch of Captain America window stickers, with the motto "Peace and Justice".
After some breakfast, the presents start coming out from under the tree. My youngest niece Jane has been distributing for years, although this year she disdains the Santa hat (she is 25). She thinks ahead, so that we all keep opening until the presents are gone. Around the circle we go, one gift at a time, sharing the receiving and admiring the giving.
My sister-in-law Ann gives her husband a Vega Little Wonder banjo, the same model as her grandfather's banjo. He begins plucking it right away, giving us musical accompaniment all day.
Even as the younger members of the family send Twitter messages to each other and tell Siri in their IPhones what to do, more traditional gifts are exchanged. As always, there are many solid, ink-on-paper books: murder mysteries, political treatises, cookbooks, novels new and old. This year pottery is also a theme, with handmade bowls in rainbow colors circling the group.
Many "gifts" are donations to favorite causes: Doctors Without Borders, the Metropolitan Opera, Take Action Minnesota, OutFront Minnesota (promotes equality for people who are not heterosexual), Heifer International, Fisher House Foundation (provides housing for family of wounded soldiers during hospital treatment). This is a liberal family, which believes in equal treatment for everyone.
Ann gives her sisters and mother a book entitled "Loving Someone Who Has Dementia" to help them all deal with their father and husband, who can no longer participate in Christmas.
I get a chain saw from Liz, my wife. I don't have a truck or a riding mower, but now I own my first chain saw. I can go outside, start a gas engine, cut big things down, and make a lot of noise. I give her an antique mixing bowl. She doesn't have to do the cooking because she's a woman, while I do the manly things. But we are very happy with our gifts.
At the end of the day, we light Hanukkah candles and sing the Hebrew blessing, just as it has been sung for centuries.
There are lots of presents, certainly more than necessary, probably more than we should have bought or received. All of us have good jobs and enough money to indulge ourselves and each other. That makes us lucky this year, and any year. Lucky to have enough, lucky to be healthy, lucky to have each other every day to rely upon. The things are nice and we will wear them and read them and use them in memory of this day of family togetherness. Eventually they will break or wear out, be put in a closet or handed down to another generation. The love will be there year after year, encompassing new family members, mourning those who have left us, keeping us together.
Our traditions fit us well, even as they keep changing to fit an evolving family. We gave up the tomato aspic and chipped beef on toast. Most meals are now vegetarian. I look forward to our family Christmas all year, seeking gifts for each relative when I travel, planning with my children what to give to my wife, anticipating sitting in a circle with people I love.
Every family celebrates this holiday season in a different way. I hope that your celebration, whatever your traditions, was joyous and loving. If we respect each other's very different customs while celebrating our own, and spread the love beyond our small circle of family, perhaps the spirit of the season, which is not restricted to one religious observance, but is about universal love and charity, will spread beyond this one day.
Captain America and I wish everyone peace and justice, the greatest gifts of all.
Steve Hochstadt
Minneapolis, MN
December 25, 2011
Monday, December 19, 2011
Someone is Watching You
People say that Santa knows who’s been naughty or nice. I’m not so sure.
I don’t think there’s any rhyme or reason to the goodies that Santa gives out. Lately it seems that the least deserving people, the people who already had a lot and then made a lot more while screwing up the economy for the rest of us, have been getting the biggest Christmas bonuses.
Maybe it’s best that Santa doesn’t know so much about us. Even jolly old St. Nick might be seduced by such knowledge, withholding gifts from some people and playing favorites with others, taking bribes, making threats. Pretty soon the North Pole would be overrun with lobbyists, pursuing their own special interests. The elves might break into political parties: Better Goodies for the Good versus the North Pole Equality Party. Lobbyists plus parties mean corruption.
Any systematic peeking into our daily behavior, combined with collecting data about our personal beliefs and desires, would threaten our freedom. We must always be vigilant that government does not spy on us, as it did so broadly in the 1960s, and as the Patriot Act continues to allow today. But we are worrying about the wrong snoopers. Right now we are being spied upon on a grand scale unimaginable a few years ago. Not by the government, but by the real Big Brother, Big Brother Computing.
Facebook collects information about what its 800 million members are doing on their computers, even when they are not on Facebook. The “like” and “recommend” buttons on countless other websites act like little cameras, even if you don’t click on them, recording what you do and sending that information back to Facebook Central.
Until they were caught doing it about a year ago, Facebook collected information from everyone this way, whether they were a member of Facebook or not. Facebook stopped only when this became public knowledge, saying it was a “bug”. That’s for sure – it was a like a billion bugged phones all over the world, listening in on people’s lives.
Actually the “bugs” of Big Brother Computing are far more sophisticated than the little devices that spies put on each other’s phones. I discovered that the first time I tried to use Windows Media Player (WMP), after the newest version of Microsoft’s operating system was installed on my computer. Microsoft recommended that I “Make Windows Media Player the default program for playing media, automatically download usage rights and media information to update your media files, and send usage data from the Player to Microsoft.”
Here is what that means, according to Microsoft’s own “Privacy Statement”. Under the guise of bringing “you the performance, power and convenience you desire in your personal computing,” WMP records “what you play and how often you play it,” among lots of other personal information. Then information from WMP “may be combined with information obtained through other Microsoft Services.” It is all shared among Microsoft’s “subsidiaries and affiliates”, and stored and processed in “any country in which Microsoft or its affiliates, subsidiaries, or service providers maintain facilities.” Your personal information, collected each time you get online, is spread all over the world. Your computer becomes an extension of the Microsoft Empire. It sends them information about what you do and they put information that they create on your computer.
Facebook is even more clever: it not only knows what you do, but what you look like. Facebook has become adept at recognizing faces. If you post a photograph to your page, Facebook will compare the faces on it to its vast storehouse of data, enabling it to “suggest” identities for the people it recognizes. Depending on what the photographs show, Facebook might well know if you’ve been naughty or nice.
The volume of data that Facebook and Microsoft collect would have been unthinkable before recent advances in computer technology. Unprecedented numbers of computers all over the world rummage through gazillions of data bits at unprecedented speed to figure out what you are playing, who is in your photographs, what you have bought, whom you correspond with.
Google might be the world’s spymaster. Google also has +1 buttons that watch our internet activities. Through its “free” gmail program, Google reads the content of your emails, looking for keywords that it can link to ads which will be displayed on your screen. Through photographs of every street, through control of millions of gmail accounts, through YouTube, and through the new services that are constantly being offered, Google can put together in one dossier your name, address, phone numbers, email traffic, and video watching. Google Health will store all of your medical records, prescriptions, and test results in one convenient place. Convenient for you and convenient for them.
Google and the others are just trying to make money. They use your information to sell you goods more efficiently, or they sell the information to others. They promise not to abuse your privacy. But they already have. “Bugs” in their systems, inadvertent releases of data, the possibility of hacking, and most dangerous of all, their greed, have made privacy a thing of the past.
So you better be good.
Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, December 20, 2011
I don’t think there’s any rhyme or reason to the goodies that Santa gives out. Lately it seems that the least deserving people, the people who already had a lot and then made a lot more while screwing up the economy for the rest of us, have been getting the biggest Christmas bonuses.
Maybe it’s best that Santa doesn’t know so much about us. Even jolly old St. Nick might be seduced by such knowledge, withholding gifts from some people and playing favorites with others, taking bribes, making threats. Pretty soon the North Pole would be overrun with lobbyists, pursuing their own special interests. The elves might break into political parties: Better Goodies for the Good versus the North Pole Equality Party. Lobbyists plus parties mean corruption.
Any systematic peeking into our daily behavior, combined with collecting data about our personal beliefs and desires, would threaten our freedom. We must always be vigilant that government does not spy on us, as it did so broadly in the 1960s, and as the Patriot Act continues to allow today. But we are worrying about the wrong snoopers. Right now we are being spied upon on a grand scale unimaginable a few years ago. Not by the government, but by the real Big Brother, Big Brother Computing.
Facebook collects information about what its 800 million members are doing on their computers, even when they are not on Facebook. The “like” and “recommend” buttons on countless other websites act like little cameras, even if you don’t click on them, recording what you do and sending that information back to Facebook Central.
Until they were caught doing it about a year ago, Facebook collected information from everyone this way, whether they were a member of Facebook or not. Facebook stopped only when this became public knowledge, saying it was a “bug”. That’s for sure – it was a like a billion bugged phones all over the world, listening in on people’s lives.
Actually the “bugs” of Big Brother Computing are far more sophisticated than the little devices that spies put on each other’s phones. I discovered that the first time I tried to use Windows Media Player (WMP), after the newest version of Microsoft’s operating system was installed on my computer. Microsoft recommended that I “Make Windows Media Player the default program for playing media, automatically download usage rights and media information to update your media files, and send usage data from the Player to Microsoft.”
Here is what that means, according to Microsoft’s own “Privacy Statement”. Under the guise of bringing “you the performance, power and convenience you desire in your personal computing,” WMP records “what you play and how often you play it,” among lots of other personal information. Then information from WMP “may be combined with information obtained through other Microsoft Services.” It is all shared among Microsoft’s “subsidiaries and affiliates”, and stored and processed in “any country in which Microsoft or its affiliates, subsidiaries, or service providers maintain facilities.” Your personal information, collected each time you get online, is spread all over the world. Your computer becomes an extension of the Microsoft Empire. It sends them information about what you do and they put information that they create on your computer.
Facebook is even more clever: it not only knows what you do, but what you look like. Facebook has become adept at recognizing faces. If you post a photograph to your page, Facebook will compare the faces on it to its vast storehouse of data, enabling it to “suggest” identities for the people it recognizes. Depending on what the photographs show, Facebook might well know if you’ve been naughty or nice.
The volume of data that Facebook and Microsoft collect would have been unthinkable before recent advances in computer technology. Unprecedented numbers of computers all over the world rummage through gazillions of data bits at unprecedented speed to figure out what you are playing, who is in your photographs, what you have bought, whom you correspond with.
Google might be the world’s spymaster. Google also has +1 buttons that watch our internet activities. Through its “free” gmail program, Google reads the content of your emails, looking for keywords that it can link to ads which will be displayed on your screen. Through photographs of every street, through control of millions of gmail accounts, through YouTube, and through the new services that are constantly being offered, Google can put together in one dossier your name, address, phone numbers, email traffic, and video watching. Google Health will store all of your medical records, prescriptions, and test results in one convenient place. Convenient for you and convenient for them.
Google and the others are just trying to make money. They use your information to sell you goods more efficiently, or they sell the information to others. They promise not to abuse your privacy. But they already have. “Bugs” in their systems, inadvertent releases of data, the possibility of hacking, and most dangerous of all, their greed, have made privacy a thing of the past.
So you better be good.
Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, December 20, 2011
Monday, December 12, 2011
Who’s the Scrooge?
I have two friends whose families are going through hard times. Unemployment, illness, and new babies are individually a challenge to any family. Together they can strain a family’s financial and psychological resources past the breaking point.
My friends take their work seriously and consistently put in their best efforts. They do not need lessons in how to work. They need some real help. They could use a safety net.
The economic safety net, to catch families who encounter problems beyond their resources and then to bounce them back on their feet, is a modern invention. European monarchies created property systems to provide cheap labor to wealthy landowners and political systems to protect the rich, in which the poor had no voice. So millions moved to the New World.
American democracy was designed to promote more fairness: “All men are created equal.” But the political democracy of the Founders was not enough. All men and women were not born with equal chances. In 19th-century America, riches and poverty were considered judgments of God and thus the poor were undeserving. Slavery, prejudice against ethnic minorities, child labor in factories, and systematic discrimination against women were all pieces of the more general rigging of the American economic and social system in favor of the rich, against the poor. The minority who escaped poverty proved that the majority deserved it.
In the 20th century, Americans changed our laws to create an economic and social safety net. Social Security and unemployment insurance in the 1930s, and Medicare in the 1960s were elements of an evolving structure, which offered public help to those without resources. The safety net represents an American consensus that the poor deserve systematic public assistance, not just individual charity. This expression of social solidarity is a statement about American values.
Lately prominent political voices argue that we must take apart the safety net. The calls to flatten the income tax, to eliminate welfare payments, and to repeal regulation of industry are about going back to an earlier America, where the rich and powerful could use their advantages without hindrance. Behind these destructive policies lurk the uncharitable beliefs about the poor that all modern nations have left behind: the poor are lazy and shiftless, don’t know the meaning of work, have frivolous ambitions, depend on handouts, will never amount to anything.
These political leaders don’t like the newly compassionate America. They disdain people who have less than they do. They think the riches of our nation belong to them and their well-connected friends. They offer nothing to my friends.
I admire the way my friends keep going, keep smiling, and keep working. Their burdens are neither kept secret nor broadcast in public. They are shouldered, not avoided or passed onto others.
Are their burdens my burdens, too? I can choose my answer. Are they our burdens? We choose our answer together. Those answers are signs of our friendship, our compassion, and our values.
If we take care of our family members, we do no extraordinary thing. We do what Americans rightly expect family to mean in a good society.
If we take on our friends’ burdens, offer some help, even if not much, we do a less common thing. Americans place a high value on such offers, and offer praise to those who give.
What about a stranger’s burden? What about all those people you haven’t met and never will, who suffer more than you know, who happen to have no relatives or friends with the resources to help? Outside of the drug store, the Salvation Army volunteer rings a bell: “Won’t you give a few coins to help people you don’t know?” Our religions powerfully demand that we help those in need near and far, that we not tailor our compassion to our self-interest.
What kind of family member one is, what kind of friend one is, and what kind of society we are all come from our answers to these questions. If our state, the only organization to which we all belong, in which we all have an equal vote, is not compassionate, if it caters to those with wealth and power, but does not care for those with too little, then how can we pose as an exceptional nation? Among wealthy nations we would be exceptionally hard-hearted.
It is ironic that the public defenders of Christmas have waged a war on the moral value of public compassion, have offered so little to those with little, except condescension. They expound theories to prove that those who have much deserve it all, that their good fortune is our collective salvation, and the rest should just work harder. For them, a “bleeding heart” is a weakness.
If your family has run into hard times, if your unemployment insurance has run out, if your baby does not have health insurance, if there’s never quite enough food on the table, the defenders of Christmas have a message for you.
From the Mitt Romney family, the Newt Gingrich family, the John Boehner family, and all their friends, the warmest Christmas wishes for a happy holidays. They made it, and so can you. As a token of their own values, they’ll make sure that Santa leaves a mop under your tree.
Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, December 13, 2011
My friends take their work seriously and consistently put in their best efforts. They do not need lessons in how to work. They need some real help. They could use a safety net.
The economic safety net, to catch families who encounter problems beyond their resources and then to bounce them back on their feet, is a modern invention. European monarchies created property systems to provide cheap labor to wealthy landowners and political systems to protect the rich, in which the poor had no voice. So millions moved to the New World.
American democracy was designed to promote more fairness: “All men are created equal.” But the political democracy of the Founders was not enough. All men and women were not born with equal chances. In 19th-century America, riches and poverty were considered judgments of God and thus the poor were undeserving. Slavery, prejudice against ethnic minorities, child labor in factories, and systematic discrimination against women were all pieces of the more general rigging of the American economic and social system in favor of the rich, against the poor. The minority who escaped poverty proved that the majority deserved it.
In the 20th century, Americans changed our laws to create an economic and social safety net. Social Security and unemployment insurance in the 1930s, and Medicare in the 1960s were elements of an evolving structure, which offered public help to those without resources. The safety net represents an American consensus that the poor deserve systematic public assistance, not just individual charity. This expression of social solidarity is a statement about American values.
Lately prominent political voices argue that we must take apart the safety net. The calls to flatten the income tax, to eliminate welfare payments, and to repeal regulation of industry are about going back to an earlier America, where the rich and powerful could use their advantages without hindrance. Behind these destructive policies lurk the uncharitable beliefs about the poor that all modern nations have left behind: the poor are lazy and shiftless, don’t know the meaning of work, have frivolous ambitions, depend on handouts, will never amount to anything.
These political leaders don’t like the newly compassionate America. They disdain people who have less than they do. They think the riches of our nation belong to them and their well-connected friends. They offer nothing to my friends.
I admire the way my friends keep going, keep smiling, and keep working. Their burdens are neither kept secret nor broadcast in public. They are shouldered, not avoided or passed onto others.
Are their burdens my burdens, too? I can choose my answer. Are they our burdens? We choose our answer together. Those answers are signs of our friendship, our compassion, and our values.
If we take care of our family members, we do no extraordinary thing. We do what Americans rightly expect family to mean in a good society.
If we take on our friends’ burdens, offer some help, even if not much, we do a less common thing. Americans place a high value on such offers, and offer praise to those who give.
What about a stranger’s burden? What about all those people you haven’t met and never will, who suffer more than you know, who happen to have no relatives or friends with the resources to help? Outside of the drug store, the Salvation Army volunteer rings a bell: “Won’t you give a few coins to help people you don’t know?” Our religions powerfully demand that we help those in need near and far, that we not tailor our compassion to our self-interest.
What kind of family member one is, what kind of friend one is, and what kind of society we are all come from our answers to these questions. If our state, the only organization to which we all belong, in which we all have an equal vote, is not compassionate, if it caters to those with wealth and power, but does not care for those with too little, then how can we pose as an exceptional nation? Among wealthy nations we would be exceptionally hard-hearted.
It is ironic that the public defenders of Christmas have waged a war on the moral value of public compassion, have offered so little to those with little, except condescension. They expound theories to prove that those who have much deserve it all, that their good fortune is our collective salvation, and the rest should just work harder. For them, a “bleeding heart” is a weakness.
If your family has run into hard times, if your unemployment insurance has run out, if your baby does not have health insurance, if there’s never quite enough food on the table, the defenders of Christmas have a message for you.
From the Mitt Romney family, the Newt Gingrich family, the John Boehner family, and all their friends, the warmest Christmas wishes for a happy holidays. They made it, and so can you. As a token of their own values, they’ll make sure that Santa leaves a mop under your tree.
Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, December 13, 2011
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Herman Cain is No More
Herman Cain is no longer a candidate for President. First accusations of serial harassment of women. Then a 13-year affair, involving travel and money and midnight phone calls concealed from his wife. Cain’s claims that people are out to get him, from the left or from the right, convinced nobody. He got himself.
But Herman Cain was never a viable candidate. Even if he had been a model husband, Cain should never have been discussed seriously as a possible President.
Herman Cain worked himself up from poverty to enormous wealth, he was hired by a national organization to lobby their interests, and he became a popular spokesman for conservative causes. Those successes are admirable, but not sufficient qualifications to be President.
An American President must understand business and the economy. The most immediate issues facing our nation right now are macro-economic: increasing poverty and inequality; persistent unemployment; an unwieldy tax system; uncertainties about investing; global competition; a housing crisis. No simple plan will be sufficient to deal with the complex, interrelated issues of our changing world economy.
Cain never showed any ability to oversee a national economy. The utter simplicity of Cain’s “9-9-9” economic plan attracted a lot of attention. But he didn’t understand his own plan. When he talked in October with MSNBC’s Chuck Todd about it, Cain produced nonsense. He said about a family of 4 with an income of $50,000, “Today under the current system, they will pay over $10,000 in taxes assuming standard deductions and standard exemptions.”
In fact, using those assumptions, such a family would pay under $800 in income taxes, and about $3800 in payroll taxes, under normal circumstances. Since the SS withholding tax rate has been temporarily lowered from 6.2% to 4.2%, that family’s payroll taxes would be only $2800. Under Cain’s plan, their federal taxes would be $4500, and their sales tax payments would be additional thousands. This is exactly what economists of the left and right have agreed: most people would pay more taxes and rich people much less.
Cain’s “9-9-9” plan would represent a radical change in our economic system. No more deductions for mortgages, no more exemptions for children, and an unprecedented federal sales tax would fundamentally shift economic policy. Cain never demonstrated that he had any idea what his plan really means. “9-9-9” is not a serious policy; it is an advertising gimmick with untried ideas, a marketing slogan for the brand “Cain”.
If Cain at least looked like he had something to say about the economy, he couldn’t even maintain that pretense when the subject went beyond the US borders. He worried about China developing a nuclear capability, when they have had the bomb since 1964; he couldn’t figure out what to say about the Libyan revolution when interviewed at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, and then a couple of days later, talked about the Taliban in Libya; at the so-called national security debate among the Republican candidates, Cain said nothing about foreign policy that a high school student couldn’t have said.
How did this happen? How could someone so unqualified to lead our country become a front-runner, even for a day, among Republican Presidential candidates? Cain could talk the ideological talk of the right wing. After years of giving motivational speeches for the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity, he could say the correct phrases and repeat the correct slogans. He just needed a script, prepared and paid for by others, that he could deliver with enthusiasm, in exchange for a lot of money.
Is that enough to be President? Are the simple ideas that Herman Cain has been offering over the past few months so impressive that anyone who can say them deserves to be President?
We have seen this all before. Sarah Palin made an enormous splash as a national candidate, because she too made an attractive spokeswoman for sound-bite versions of conservative ideas. She could speak the average person’s language. Then it turned out that she couldn’t speak any other language. She didn’t know anything about Russia, which she could see from her porch, much less about Africa, China, or the euro. She didn’t read and didn’t care. She figured, as Cain did, that a couple of months of tutoring by some “experts” would give her everything she needed to know, in case she was faced with a revolution in multiple Arab countries, the possible bankruptcy of European nations, or a nuclear Iran.
Palin and Cain are not foolish. They recognized that the elemental ideas of the Tea Party supporters could be exploited by slick slogans and political gimmicks. And like the other right-wing favorites, Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann, that’s all they had.
The rest of us deserve more than self-promoters and their gimmicks. We need serious candidates.
Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, December 6, 2011
But Herman Cain was never a viable candidate. Even if he had been a model husband, Cain should never have been discussed seriously as a possible President.
Herman Cain worked himself up from poverty to enormous wealth, he was hired by a national organization to lobby their interests, and he became a popular spokesman for conservative causes. Those successes are admirable, but not sufficient qualifications to be President.
An American President must understand business and the economy. The most immediate issues facing our nation right now are macro-economic: increasing poverty and inequality; persistent unemployment; an unwieldy tax system; uncertainties about investing; global competition; a housing crisis. No simple plan will be sufficient to deal with the complex, interrelated issues of our changing world economy.
Cain never showed any ability to oversee a national economy. The utter simplicity of Cain’s “9-9-9” economic plan attracted a lot of attention. But he didn’t understand his own plan. When he talked in October with MSNBC’s Chuck Todd about it, Cain produced nonsense. He said about a family of 4 with an income of $50,000, “Today under the current system, they will pay over $10,000 in taxes assuming standard deductions and standard exemptions.”
In fact, using those assumptions, such a family would pay under $800 in income taxes, and about $3800 in payroll taxes, under normal circumstances. Since the SS withholding tax rate has been temporarily lowered from 6.2% to 4.2%, that family’s payroll taxes would be only $2800. Under Cain’s plan, their federal taxes would be $4500, and their sales tax payments would be additional thousands. This is exactly what economists of the left and right have agreed: most people would pay more taxes and rich people much less.
Cain’s “9-9-9” plan would represent a radical change in our economic system. No more deductions for mortgages, no more exemptions for children, and an unprecedented federal sales tax would fundamentally shift economic policy. Cain never demonstrated that he had any idea what his plan really means. “9-9-9” is not a serious policy; it is an advertising gimmick with untried ideas, a marketing slogan for the brand “Cain”.
If Cain at least looked like he had something to say about the economy, he couldn’t even maintain that pretense when the subject went beyond the US borders. He worried about China developing a nuclear capability, when they have had the bomb since 1964; he couldn’t figure out what to say about the Libyan revolution when interviewed at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, and then a couple of days later, talked about the Taliban in Libya; at the so-called national security debate among the Republican candidates, Cain said nothing about foreign policy that a high school student couldn’t have said.
How did this happen? How could someone so unqualified to lead our country become a front-runner, even for a day, among Republican Presidential candidates? Cain could talk the ideological talk of the right wing. After years of giving motivational speeches for the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity, he could say the correct phrases and repeat the correct slogans. He just needed a script, prepared and paid for by others, that he could deliver with enthusiasm, in exchange for a lot of money.
Is that enough to be President? Are the simple ideas that Herman Cain has been offering over the past few months so impressive that anyone who can say them deserves to be President?
We have seen this all before. Sarah Palin made an enormous splash as a national candidate, because she too made an attractive spokeswoman for sound-bite versions of conservative ideas. She could speak the average person’s language. Then it turned out that she couldn’t speak any other language. She didn’t know anything about Russia, which she could see from her porch, much less about Africa, China, or the euro. She didn’t read and didn’t care. She figured, as Cain did, that a couple of months of tutoring by some “experts” would give her everything she needed to know, in case she was faced with a revolution in multiple Arab countries, the possible bankruptcy of European nations, or a nuclear Iran.
Palin and Cain are not foolish. They recognized that the elemental ideas of the Tea Party supporters could be exploited by slick slogans and political gimmicks. And like the other right-wing favorites, Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann, that’s all they had.
The rest of us deserve more than self-promoters and their gimmicks. We need serious candidates.
Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, December 6, 2011
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