Via Talking Points Memo, Ted Cruz: “I Stand With Kim Davis.” Davis, of course, is the woman now sitting in jail for refusing to do her job of issuing any marriage licenses because she is offended by the idea of same sex marriage. Cruz and Mike Huckabee are coming down in the same place on this one. Davis is supposedly a Christian martyr. Cruz said, “Today, judicial lawlessness crossed into judicial tyranny.” It’s pretty boilerplate stuff coming from a “Constitutional” conservative. They love to throw around the word “tyranny” because it was in the Declaration of Independence. But the way they use it makes it meaningless. It’s just a word they use whenever the government does anything they don’t agree with.

Cruz made an analogy between Davis and San Francisco Major Ed Lee (for the sanctuary city) and President Obama (for immigration law enforcement). These are false analogies, but I don’t feel like going into them right now. The main thing is that this is being made out like a religious freedom issue. And of course that’s the way they are going to play this. But as German Lopez noted, the government actually offered to accommodate her by letting her pass the job on to a willing subordinate. But she refused.

I heard her husband on NPR earlier talking about how “the gays” want their rights recognized, but they don’t want to recognize the rights of Christians. Well, here we have it. Davis didn’t need to be involved with this. But she won’t be satisfied unless she is actually able to stop same sex couples from exercising their secular rights to marriage. It’s all about bigotry. And this could not be more clear. When last I wrote about this, I noted how strange it was that Christians like Davis didn’t just say, “Sure the government can ‘marry’ whomever they want, but God doesn’t accept those marriages!” But Davis isn’t standing up for God’s word; she’s standing up for her cultural privilege.

I’m not a legal scholar, but I do know a bit about drug law. For a very long time, drug users of various kinds of been making the argument that the use of this or that banned substance is part of their religious practice. And the courts have always said the same thing, “Nice try!” Similarly, people could say, “My religion forbids me from allowing African Americans to eat at my diner.” Or they could say, “My religion forbids me from paying income taxes.” It doesn’t matter; your religion could say anything at all. And that is why the courts have decided that you still have to follow the law.

Kim Davis is doing a great service to same sex marriage. In a different article, German Lopez wrote, Republican Candidates to Kentucky Clerk: Follow the Law and Marry Same-Sex Couples. Admittedly, the three candidates he highlights are on the less-crazy side of the crazy party. But still: Davis isn’t fooling anyone. She’s just making a big deal out of her religion and most people see it for what it is: narcissism. Most people I’ve talked to find it exhausting. Their response is, “Oh, just do your job!” It doesn’t matter whether they are for or against same sex marriage, they understand that the issue has been settled and Kim Davis is just an annoyance.

Meanwhile, if God exists, he, she, or it approves of this:

There is a Polish legend called the Nazi gold train. Supposedly, at the end of World War II, some Nazis filled up three train cars with gold and other valuables and then hid it in a tunnel under the Owl Mountains in southwest Poland. It is said to contain 300 tons of treasure. The reason I bring it up is because there are two treasure hunters who claim that they have found it. This is despite the fact that there is no actual historical record of it, and when Poland was under communist rule, the government did a lot of work trying to find it.

But who cares? Well, for one: an employer of mine. I’ve been working on a project that relates to this. But it puts me in a difficult position because I just ain’t buying it. Just check out the story here. Recently, someone who was supposedly involved in burying the train died. That was 70 years ago, so we are talking someone really old. And on his death bed, he revealed where the train was hidden. So these two treasure hunters went out and used ground penetrating radar and discovered a train. But that’s as much as we know at this point.

More recently, the two men — Andreas Richter and Piotr Koper — came forward. Maybe they think this is the real thing — or at least that the train must contain something of value. They offered the location of the train to the Polish government for a 10% cut. Of course, I’m even skeptical of this. It is a way of getting the Polish government to pay the bill for a speculative dig. Is the probability good or bad? It doesn’t matter to these guys. Even if there is just a 1% chance, it’s worth it to them!

It’s also interesting that the location of this train is not consistent with the local legend. The train was supposed to be in a tunnel. Instead, it was found simply buried under ground near a rail line. That doesn’t encourage me. On the other hand, maybe the reason no one has ever found the train is because the legend got it wrong. But that’s not the only issue. Maybe this is a train that the Nazis buried for other reasons. Or it is just a train that crashed and got buried in the course of the war. I find it fascinating, but not really from the treasure angle. Treasure never much interests me — just the stories that go along with it.

I really wonder about this dying Nazi too. Why didn’t he go to the Polish government and collect the prize? This is my guess: he didn’t think it had gold in it. He was involved in burying a train. He’s an old man. A couple of treasure hunters heard something about this guy talking about a buried train. So they go to him and get the information. No one has reported that the guy said there was gobs of treasure to be found. All we know is that he provided the location of a buried train.

One thing I am pretty sure of: this train doesn’t contain the amount of treasure of legend. If it had 300 tons of gold, that would be worth roughly $15 billion. I doubt that legends tend to make treasure troves smaller over time. So I’m skeptical. But the best thing for me is that it is a huge treasure find — because it means more (paid) work. That kind of treasure I am interested in.

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.