It would be great to be born rich. Obviously, the money would be great. But let’s forget about that. You’d still be rich — or at least well off. That’s because of all of the investment and employment opportunities you would have. You would be connected — networked! That’s what it is all about. There is a wonderful quote in (for the third time today) Nicole Aschoff’s excellent, The New Prophets of Capital, “Going to State University and stalking potential employers on LinkedIn is not equivalent to going to Harvard and having a CEO for an uncle.” Right!

But let’s not limit this. If you were born here in the United States — the child of a couple of people who represent generations here, you have some advantages too. At least you have advantages over people who swim the Rio Grande and somehow survive their way through the desert. You would generally have an uncle who can at least put in a good word for you even at a crummy company. So it is better to be an American than an immigrant. Or it would be if all else were equal.

Of course, all else is not equal. Let’s face it: if you risked death swimming the Rio Grande and hiking through the desert, you are probably made of better stuff than the natural born American. And this is why immigrants are often hugely successful in this country. One of the great myths of America is that we are a nation of immigrants! And we are — in a technical sense. Even the slaves who were brought here against their will represent the ones who survived. Their descendants come from people who lived through lifetimes of torture. If there is such a thing as American exceptionalism, it is that.

But most Americans hate immigrants. I even have a friend who seems to think that he — knowing only English — is at a disadvantage for jobs compared to people who speak pretty much exclusively Spanish. It’s all kind of a whine, anyway, as he’s naturally good at languages and could pick up Spanish if he really wanted. But the main thing is that while knowing Spanish in California is certainly helpful, if you could only pick a single language to know, English is by far the best choice.

My point in bringing all this up is that I’m mostly for an open boarder. And I certainly think that the people who have risked death to get here just so they could work in the grey economy should be given green cards immediately. These are the most American people in the world! They are more American than anyone I know who was born here. They are certainly more American than Donald Trump.

Here’s a fun fact. I just wrote an article, Donald Trump Is Rich Because He Was Born Rich. That puts the best gloss of Trump that you can. There are a number of people who think that Trump’s actual wealth is only about a quarter of a billion dollars. That’s a lot, of course. But he inherited $50 million in 1974. Adjusting just for the rate of inflation, this represents — Wait for it! — a quarter billion dollars!

Trump is certainly very American — in the worst sense of the term: privileged, arrogant, and creepy. But when I say the people who risk death to get here are the ultimate Americans, I’m talking about in the good way — the way that does make America better.

Yes, the Donald Trump Piñata is a real thing. Get ’em while they last!

I’ve long been a fan of Robert Reich. But I thought he went a little off the playing field yesterday, What Happened to the Moral Center of American Capitalism? The article is in two parts. I’ll discuss them both, but note that I don’t actually disagree with the second half.

Like a lot of liberals, Reich pines for the days after World War II when CEO salaries were reasonable and social norms dictated that workers took part in increased productivity. But part of this is what I just wrote about this morning regarding Nicole Aschoff’s The New Prophets of Capital. As long as everything was fine and the US companies totally dominated the world, then sure: the capitalists were willing to spread a few crumbs around.

But even at that time, they weren’t happy about it. Remember: the Taft–Hartley Act was passed in 1947. That is probably the single most devastating law constraining union power. The reason that the business community hates unions is not about money. They can manage the money side of things. It is all about power. When they are feeling beneficent, they don’t mind giving out some raises or (Even better!) bonuses. What they don’t want is for workers to have any power — any say in the company. They don’t want them to be stakeholders.

So yes, the 1970s and 1980s, things got much worse. First with Carter and deregulation and then with Reagan and his tax cuts and declaring open season on unions. But that didn’t just happen. There was part of a long continuum. And it didn’t start in 1947 either. Throughout the Great Depression, the capitalist class did little but bitch and complain. You know how today conservatives are always on about how people don’t have jobs because they are lazy — that if they were just more “go-getters” then jobs would suddenly appear? Well, the same thing was going on during the depths of the Great Depression, even though today everyone thinks people were more understanding. Well the rich weren’t, because they never are.

So Reich is wrong to romanticize the post-war period. But he is right in the second part of his article where he talks about solutions. Because unlike Whole Foods’ John Mackey, Reich doesn’t think that companies are going to spontaneously become good guys through “conscious capitalism.” The truth is that our economy is a totally made up concept. It exists because the government exists. And if we want to do something about the extreme levels of income inequality in this country, it is going to be done through laws.

Here he lays out some concrete ideas that while unimaginable now, are great and necessary:

Then he goes on to talk about campaign finance reform. I’m all for that, but I think there is a bit of a chicken and egg problem here. The truth is that we wouldn’t need campaign finance law if we had relative economic equality. If the richest person in the world had a total net worth of $10 million, then she simply couldn’t distort the political system that much. (There are rumors that Donald Trump may only be worth about a quarter billion dollars, which means he is in no position to finance his own campaign.) So ultimately, we don’t need a constitutional amendment. We need people to show up to vote for candidates that are going do tangible good regarding inequality. And those policies are listed above in the bit of Reich’s article that I quoted.

I’m only about halfway through Nicole Aschoff’s excellent The New Prophets of Capital, but her argument is so clear that I want to talk about it briefly. She deals with four case studies in the book: Sheryl Sandberg, John Mackey, Oprah Winfrey, and Bill Gates. The fundamental idea with all of them is that the problems that capitalism creates can be fixed by capitalism itself. It is not at all surprising that they are all Americans because this is very typical of our “can do” attitude. We always think that we can tinker with a system. We are, after all, the only country on the planet that had a revolution that didn’t revolutionize anything.

Sandberg is the Facebook COO and the author of Lean In, where she argues that women will gain more equality by having more of them on corporate boards and in corner offices. And how will they do that? Well, Sandberg has an example of when she was really pregnant, walking a long way from her car to her office at Google (where she worked at the time). She had an epiphany, “There should be close parking for pregnant women!” So she marched into the CEO’s office and demanded it and ever since, Google has had special parking for pregnant women. Hooray!

It’s funny and sad that Sandberg thinks that really pregnant women need shorter walks to their offices and not, maybe, time off. But that is exactly the point from my perspective. It’s like the television anchor who says, “I’ve never been told what stories to do!” Of course not! The network would never allow someone who didn’t self-censor to be the television anchor. And Google would never allow a normal woman to be a high ranking executive. Of course, Aschoff destroys this notion in a different way by noting that Yahoo!’s female CEO, Marissa Mayer, cut thousands of jobs and eliminated flex time, which is especially helpful to women. Allowing woman who are just like the very worst men to rise to the top will not change a damned thing.

Similarly, John Mackey is the co-founder and co-CEO of Whole Foods. And he thinks that we can just fix capitalism by corporations being more responsible and less greedy. That’s so obviously a fairy tale that it should come as no shock to you that Mackey is a libertarian. But the truth is that Whole Foods is, on the whole, a lot better a company than I had been led to believe. That’s one of the great things about Aschoff’s work: she goes out of her way to show that these people aren’t frauds. But here’s the critical matter: Whole Foods is not the first company to treat its workers and customers well. IBM, for example, did the same thing in the 1950s and 1960s. But IBM is not such a great company to work for now. What happened? Competition.

As long as a company is riding high, it can afford to pay its workers well and invest in do-gooder projects. But the moment that profits start to slide, all of that will be pushed aside. And that’s for one reason: profit is what these companies are about. It trumps all. But when a company is at the top of the market, it isn’t so clear. Everyone focuses on the good things they do and not all the money they are making. It is like John Mackey highly publicized salary of $1 per year. All that means is that Whole Foods is his baby and he loves running it. Oh, and he has $100 million net worth, so he doesn’t need a salary.

None of these are bad people. But I very much see myself as a young man in them. There is something incredibly self-serving about it all. What each and every one of them is saying (I already know a great deal about Oprah Winfrey and Bill Gates) is that if only everyone were more like them, then all the world’s problems would be fixed. It’s not enough that they are ridiculously wealthy having never worked that hard. It isn’t enough that people bow down to them as great oracles of business wisdom. They must be seen as messiahs! They have brought the Word to the masses and the Word is themselves.

When I was a kid, Esphyr Slobodkina’s book, Caps for Sale terrified me. It involved this guy who I now understand was a cap peddler who wore many caps on his head at the same time. I thought he was Satan. I have no idea why I thought that. I was a strange kid. Anyway, I now wish that I were that peddler, because I would love to tip a hundred caps to SV Dáte who wrote the best article I’ve read in ages, The One Easy Way Donald Trump Could Have Been Even Richer: Doing Nothing.

People often ask me where I get my story ideas. I tell them it is mostly cartoons (which is true). Perhaps as a result, it would not occur to me to do what Dáte did. We all know that money makes money. And since Donald Trump was born rich, Dáte decided to look at how rich he would be now if he had just floated along: put his money in a regular investment vehicle. In this case, he chose an indexed mutual fund. These are funds designed to do roughly as well as the market itself. His results: if Trump had just put his 1974 inheritance into an index fund, he would now have $3 billion; if he had put his $200 million estimated fortune in 1982 into an index fund, he would not have $8 billion.

He added that if Trump had given War­ren Buf­fett his money to invest, Trump would now be worth almost $70 billion. But most of the rest of the article is about how much Trump is actually worth. Most recently, Trump has claimed that he is worth ten billion dollars. But that number is certainly not true. And it is possible that he is only really worth something like hundreds of millions of dollars. It doesn’t really matter. The main thing is that he hasn’t done any better than a simple computer algorithm in terms of managing his money.

At Vox, Dylan Matthews looked into the question a bit more deeply.
Even after taking into account all of the costs associated with a mutual fund (fees and taxes), it turns out that Trump currently has (based on the most liberal estimates) just about the same amount of money that he would have had. And I think the title of his article says all that need be said, “Donald Trump isn’t rich because he’s a great investor. He’s rich because his dad was rich.”

That, my friends, is the story of modern America. Meritocracy? American exceptionalism? It’s all rubbish. Donald Trump is the perfect symbol of America.

I’ve been away, meeting with an editor of mine. She is a very colorful character — and one of the best storytellers ever — and brilliant. She’s even a life coach of sorts for me, because she is the one who rushes in while I cower in the corner. But over the past couple of years, she has really gotten into listening to conservative hate radio. In fact, as I was having coffee with her yesterday morning, Rush Limbaugh was playing on the radio. She is aware that I am not a conservative. But as with most extreme conservatives, there are a number of things we agree about. But I’m not not going to discuss those here.

She related to me her concern — which I have seen floating around conservative media — that Obama wants to start a race war. And she presented him as this major Machiavellian character, determined to destroy the United States. Now this is clearly nonsense. The one thing I’ve never understood about this theory is why the most powerful man in the world would want to destroy it. If these people were saying that Obama would change the Constitution and become president forever, that would make a bit of sense. And indeed, I do hear that mixed in with the conservative ranting: the very same people will claim that Obama wants to destroy America and to become its dictator.

It isn’t surprising that none of it makes sense. It isn’t about reason. In my editor’s case, as I said, we are talking about a prodigious intellect — one of the most remarkable people that I’ve ever known. But none of us is perfect. And conservative broadcasting has hocked into something inside her. Part of it is a fairly common paranoia that comes from area and time. I’ve known a lot of people from the late 1960s Berkeley scene who mix a kind of liberalism — Can’t we all just get along? — with a profound distrust for authority.

But in her case, she’s done a lot of work with police and generally has a high opinion of them. In fact, when I sent my first book to her to consider for publication, her main complaint was that I had been so nasty (and inaccurate, she incorrectly claimed) in my depictions of the police. But in our conversation about race wars and Obama declaring martial law, she claimed that she was for small government — just things like police, fire, military. And this is the kind of nonsense that really blows my mind. This is the same old, “The government shouldn’t waste money on public libraries, but it should hire millions of cops and army men!” Well, in the history of the world it is the military and cops who governments used to oppress their people — not public libraries.

But the whole thing reminded me so much of Paul Bibeau’s recent article, What If They NEVER Come For Our Guns? I wrote about it at the time, Oath Keepers As Protectors of the Power Elite. The conceit of Paul’s article was that an Oath Keeper was starting to have doubts that Obama was coming for our guns. After all, it’s almost seven years now. What’s he going to do, wait until 19 January 2017 just to confuse us all?

I know that my editor (who I won’t name — and I have several) would be able to come up with justifications for all these obvious inconsistencies. And she will be able to justify her beliefs in a year and half when there has been no race war and we have a new president. As I said, she’s really smart. And even I can fill in most of the gaps. For example: Obama could destroy America becoming dictator, because then America wouldn’t be America anymore. Blah, blah, blah. But really, I think the takeaway here is that people like Rush Limbaugh present the appearance of informed commentary. So my editor accepts it as such — and effectively turns her mind off.

It is literally a Brave New World.