This is not an installation by Barbara Kruger | You don't want real estate developers negotiating with Iran...

"I shop therefore I am," Barbara Kruger, 1987.
Manipulating the medium of advertising, Barbara Kruger is a conceptual artist known for her use of words, color, and typefaces to comment on American consumerism and mass market culture.

Below is the headline from a New York Times Magazine, "Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff and the Profitable Business of Peace," about how Trump uses his son in law and other real estate guys instead of diplomats.  

It's definitely a sign of the rot in the American military being extended to the entire Government ("U.S. Capabilities Are Showing Signs Of Rot," Atlantic).

The irony is it could be one of Kruger's artworks.

I joke that my experience dealing with real estate developers in DC (and here in Salt Lake too), is that the more interactions I had, the more I became an intellectual Marxist, poking at the contradictions between capital and community.  Planning the Capitalist City is a worthwhile read.

There are great developers, some who don't do bad things while doing good work, others that do some bad things while doing good work ("Chris Donatelli, a DC real estate developer, dead at 58") and others who are not great at all and their work diminishes the architectural integrity of a community with contributions to community development at best being neutral and at worst, negative.

Real Estate Developers are the last people I'd want negotiating with Iran or revitalizing the Gaza Strip or negotiating with Putin.  Steve Witkoff's firm describes itself as half developer, half investor (financier). See "How The Witkoff Group Built South Florida’s New Breed Of Private Clubs," Forbes and "NYC’s top deals: The Witkoff Group sells One High Line condo for $10.5M," The Real Deal.

Still not good enough.

I used to joke that we didn't need to send soldiers to Afghanistan, but people with PhDs in anthropology.  In this case, we need to send diplomats who understand nuance to negotiate with other countries.

Although the "good developers" understand the more they invest upfront in explaining their project to the community, compromising when necessary, hopefully yielding improvements as a result, the faster they are likely to get approvals and permits on the back end.

Dealing isn't just dealing.  

And Trump's Art of the Deal was built on the premise of dealing from a position of strength when the counterparty is weak.  Trump loses his a** when the counterparty is equal or stronger.

So maybe developers who are good at that--and there are very few--have it within them to become "diplomats."  

As another example, I used to refer to one female real estate attorney as the velvet fist--she was so smooth, but didn't give up anything considered crucial to a project.  Etc.

Pulte Homes is building single-family homes and townhouses in Seven Hills, Ohio. Photo: John Benson, Cleveland Plain Dealer

And speaking of rot, I wouldn't pick a subdivision housing developer to run the nation's intelligence coordination agency ("Trump taps housing regulator Pulte to be acting director of national intelligence," Associated Press). 

Pulte Homes started in Detroit's suburbs but now they build across the country.

It turns out Bill Pulte isn't even part of the family business, he was kicked out ("Housing Official Who Attacked Democrats Invokes a Disputed Family Legacy," New York Times).

Austerity versus rot: Government capacity

The austerity neoliberal policy introduced into the US by Ronald Reagan took a long while to show serious repercussions.  I argued that impact of reducing government workers and capacity didn't show so much because the US had overinvested in capacity previously.

The failure of FEMA in dealing with the post-Katrina aftermath in New Orleans under George W. Bush was to me, the first glaring example of the impact of austerity.  Although this was accentuated by the agency having poor leadership as well.  (Since then FEMA has performed badly under Republican administrations, specifically Trump, "A Post-Katrina Law Guards FEMA Resources. Why Hasn’t It Stopped Noem?," New York Times.)

Writing in The Atlantic, "U.S. Capabilities Are Showing Signs of Rot," military historian Phillips O'Brien makes the point that firing capable officials, and installing ideologically acceptable but less skilled people in their place creates "Rot."  And that Rot is now very apparent in the US military, as shown by the performance in the current War against Iran.

Also in DHS under Noem, ICE ("Leaked Documents Show a Border Patrol Remade in the Image of Gregory Bovino," American Prospect), and the FBI, "How Kash Patel Wrecked FBI’s Ability to Stop an Espionage Attack," New Republic, among others. Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence during war time is another example of rot.  Richard Grenell at the Kennedy Center, most of the Secretaries in the Cabinet, etc.

The first Trump Administration's response to covid is another example of rot.  This rot has been deepened by appointing anti-medicine people in high positions at the FDA and CDC, and with RFK Jr.--who believes his voice dysphonia was caused by the flu vaccine--the Secretary of HHS!

WRT to war, sure the US and Israel can pummel Iran at will, but expending million dollar missiles to shoot down $50,000 drones is a cost-benefit ratio that is unsustainable.  Trump, who treats Ukraine like s***, has reached out to them for technical advice on dealing with drones.  In effect, Ukraine has provided more aid in dollar value to the US than Trump's Administration has provided to Ukraine as it fights Russia's invasion of the country.  (Fortunately, the US still shares intelligence with Iran.  But in general it does everything in its power to promote Russia.)

From the article:

On multiple occasions after President Trump launched a massive air campaign against Iran this past weekend, retaliatory attacks by simply constructed Iranian drones have penetrated American defenses with serious results. For example, at least six U.S. soldiers died, and others were wounded, in an Iranian strike Sunday on a command facility in Kuwait. CNN reported that the Americans received no warning of the incoming drone. According to CBS News, the fortifications around the facility protected it from car bombs but not from a direct overhead strike. “We basically had no drone defeat capability,” an unnamed military official told the network.

... When a complex system starts to decay, the first signs are usually subtle. In the third century, after the Roman empire had reached its geographic maximum, literacy began to decline across Roman society. Education levels fell not only among soldiers, but among officers, aristocrats, and even emperors. The Roman army still looked formidable for years afterward. It had good equipment and could march well. Yet it was no longer as advanced relative to Rome’s enemies as it had once been. It fought as hard as ever, but less effectively.

... The U.S. military’s supremacy over foreign rivals is built on intensive training and the manipulation of advanced technology. By contrast, Hegseth has been stressing lethality and a warrior ethos instead of learning and reflection, to the point of blocking U.S. military personnel from taking courses at the most elite American universities. Yet the events of the past week underscore how shows of force alone may not defeat even militarily inferior enemies.

In Bahrain, a lone Iranian drone penetrated the headquarters of the U.S. Fifth Fleet, which oversees 2.5 million square miles of the world’s oceans. The incoming weapon destroyed an AN/TPS-59 radar unit intended to provide 360-degree air surveillance for U.S. forces. In a moment, Iranian equipment that cost perhaps $30,000 devastated a piece of U.S. military hardware estimated to be worth tens of millions of dollars.

Another term for this is "capital shallowing" or disinvestment.  It's the opposite of "capital deepening" or investing ("Capital shallowing: the effect of disinvestment on government functioning").

Brand America 2025

During the first Trump Administration, I wrote to Simon Anholt, the author of Brand America: Mother of All Brands, stating that Trump's brand for America was:

Can't Do.  Won't Do. You Do.  Fuck You.

It will get worse this go around.

An interesting story in the Financial Times, "What makes the US truly exceptional: Are American pathologies the necessary price of economic dynamism?."  From the article:

It is the best of countries, it is the worst of countries, or at least of the high-income ones. The US stands out for its prosperity and its brutality. 

This is how I have felt about it since I visited in 1966 and lived there throughout the 1970s. The sustained prosperity of the US is astounding. A few western countries have even higher real incomes per head: Switzerland is one. But real GDP per head in the larger high-income countries is below the US average. 

... Not surprisingly, the US economy also remains far more innovative than other large high-income economies. Just look at its leading companies. These are not only far more valuable than those in Europe, but far more concentrated in the digital economy... 

... The US then is an economic powerhouse, so much so that it has persistently run a large deficit in its capital account. Donald Trump protests. Yet this is a powerful vote of confidence. 

... So, how can such an economic marvel also be “the worst of countries”? Well, its homicide rate of 6.8 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2021 was almost six times as high as that of the UK and 30 times that of Japan. 

... More broadly, what does US prosperity mean when combined with such potent indicators of low welfare? These outcomes are the result of high inequality, poor personal choices and crazy social ones. Some 400mn guns are apparently in circulation. This surely is insane. 

... Then there is a related question, which is whether the relatively high inequality of the US and the insecurity of those in the bottom and middle of the income distribution inevitably lead to what I called “pluto-populism” in 2006: the political marriage of the ultra-rich, seeking deregulation and low taxes, with the insecure and angry middle and lower middle, seeking people to blame for what is going wrong for them. If so, what made the US dynamic, at least in this age of deindustrialisation and unbridled finance, led to the rise of Trump and so to a shift to a dangerous new demagogic autocracy. A big question for non-Americans, notably Europeans, is whether these pathologies are the necessary price of economic dynamism? Logically, it is not clear why an innovative economy cannot be combined with a more harmonious and healthier society. Denmark would suggest so. One might hope that the scale of the US market, its relatively light regulation, the quality of its science and its attractions to high-quality immigrants are the explanations. But there is this lingering fear that the technologically dynamic society Draghi and other Europeans now seek might require the rugged, nay dog-eats-dog, individualism of the US. It is a sobering possibility.

FWIW, I don't think pathology is necessary to economic dynamism.  We have a super conflicting element in American society, rank individualism ("Toward the Land of Self-Defeat," New York Times) versus a more communitarian approach.

But individualism is the side for people who want it all, don't want to share, don't believe in mutually beneficial outcomes.  And too much has changed in the economy, from neoliberalism to financialization, a winner take all economy, oligopoly, and the belief by Republicans that taxes are bad.

This extends to the social sphere by denying the value of the safety net, government action of any kind, building the wealth of of the nation by investing in people, etc.

It was pointed out that Reagan's plan was a form of austerity comparable to that of UK's Tories.  For a couple decades, because the US had previously overinvested in government and public goods, that could be withstanded.

It ended with the multiple failures of the Bush Administration.

It's amazing that the Trump posse is so focused on the destruction of America, not building its public investment ("Capital shallowing: the effect of disinvestment on government functioning").

We're in for it.

Capital shallowing: the effect of disinvestment on government functioning

Is a term that I am sad to say that I haven't come across.  (Although I have seen the term "capital deepening" applied to the increased income of neighborhoods as demographics change and the neighborhood becomes more attractive at the scale of the metropolitan residential landscape.)

It has so much explanatory power.

It's used in a Financial Times article about the National Health Service in Britain, how with decreased funding and investment, the amount of capital to support each worker, and each facility, declines in systematic ways that often reduce the ability to provide proper care ("NHS capital investment cuts leave England’s hospitals crumbling").

The article argues that while the facilities are declining and the waitlists lengthening, care is still okay.

In the basement pharmacy at St Mary’s Hospital in London, part of the world-renowned Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, senior pharmacist Michele Garwood has placed plastic trays beneath the ceiling in an attempt to protect her stock of medicines from regular flooding. 

Elsewhere, on Albert ward, one of five lavatories has been out of use for three months after a hole opened up in the floor, exposing it to the car park below, and rotted floor joists in patient bays, temporarily taped over, represent a constant trip hazard. 

We “still provide the best care we can” but some patients are so horrified by their surroundings that they discharge themselves, said matron Marta Calvo Hernandez. St Mary’s is one example of how a longstanding lack of capital spending is being felt across the NHS. The service is struggling with an accumulated maintenance backlog estimated to be worth more than £10bn, the highest since records began. 

Stephen Rocks, an economist with the Health Foundation, a research organisation, said there had been “a very sustained under-investment in capital” over the austerity years of the 2010s, which had “left the NHS with insufficient capital investment to deliver the care patients need”.  

Rocks suggested this was part of the reason that a growth in staffing levels in the health service did not seem to have translated into a corresponding increase in activity. “We’ve seen a ‘capital shallowing’, with less capital per worker, and that does have a very direct read across to productivity,” he said. 

As a term, apparently it was coined in development economics, making the point that as countries grow in population, there is less money invested in per capita ("Population Pressures, Saving, and Investment in the Third World: Some Puzzles," Economic Development and Cultural Change, 1988).

I wish I had known this concept earlier, because it explains points I've made in various areas.

First, the impact of neoliberal induced disinvestment in government--the US could "slide" for a long time with denigration and disinvestment in government because in the decades before it overinvested. 

But the failures with FEMA and disaster response after Hurricane Katrina and under Trump with Puerto Rico and Houston are a good example.  But I don't know if the failure of the Army Corps of Engineers and levees was about capital shallowing or just politics, failure to adequately address risk, budget shortfalls, etc.

And the failure of the Trump Administration to properly respond to covid.  And the serious problems of the US public health infrastructure to respond to covid after decades of declining budgets ("COVID-19 and Underinvestment in the Public Health Infrastructure of the United States," Milbank Quarterly, 2020).

Of course, the Conservative Party austerity agenda in the UK for the last ten years has had the same kind of debilitating effect ("Austerity urbanism in England: the 'regressive redistribution' of local government services and the impact on the poor and marginalised," Environment and Planning A, 2017).  With covid, policing, transit, health care as mentioned above, care for the aging, defunding of local government, parks, libraries, etc.

Second, with the tax cutting fervor in growing places like Utah--"let's share the benefits of growth"--when growth imposes more costs, not fewer, and by cutting taxes you have less revenue to invest, or a capital shallowing ("A Robust Economy, State of Utah press release).

A third example would be the impact on local governments of declining budgets.  This has been particularly pronounced in Toronto, where the previous mayor refused to raise taxes beyond the inflation rate, even though costs increased at a greater percentage than inflation, with serious negative impact on the quality of municipal services ("Brutal performance art criticism of Toronto's Mayor, John Tory, and his "austerity" agenda").

It can be difficult to separate the effects of neoliberalism, say with the water quality failures in the UK ("Water companies are playing dirty over sewage. That’s why 20 million of us are taking them to court" Guardian) from capital shallowing--the budget of the UK Department of Environment is only £11.47 million FOR THE ENTIRE COUNTRY--and capital shallowing.  

I think they are mutually reinforcing, especially when it comes to "advanced economies" as opposed to developing economies for which the concept was coined.

PBS Independent Lens: Represent, Season 22, episode 2

Independent Lens is one of the documentary programs on PBS, like American Experience.  Programs also repeat on the PBS World channel, which many PBS stations broadcast on one of their additional digital channels (if they haven't sold them off, like Howard University did with WHUT).  Sadly, neither WETA in Virginia nor Maryland Public Television carry PBS World. 

"Represent" follows three women running for political office in the Midwest.  It's an important program because it demonstrates that politics is more than national government--the House, Senate, and President in Washington.    

The original broadcast was Monday night, but it is rebroadcast throughout the week on some PBS Stations, as well as PBS World, and it is also available online.

Bryn Bird ran as a Democrat for Trustee on the township board in Granville, Ohio.  Myya Jones ran for Mayor of Detroit at the age of 22, in 2017 while she was still a student at Michigan State University.  Korean-American Julie Cho ran for Illinois House of Representatives as a conservative Republican in a district in Evanston, which borders Chicago, is in heavily Democratic Cook County, and is the home of Northwestern University.

Bryn Bird is seen in this production still from the new documentary campaigning at a community event in front of the Granville Inn.

Bryn Bird, who got a graduate degree in public policy at GWU, worked in politics for a number of years on farming issues, but went back to work on her family farm, won ("PBS to air documentary on female politicians featuring Granville's Bryn Bird," Newark Advocate).  The others did not.

Jones was not on the ballot, because she hadn't been registered to vote in Detroit, and she continued her campaign as a write in ("Myya Jones, Detroit's millennial mayoral candidate, now running as a write-in," Metro Times).  The top two candidates, the incumbent Mike Duggan, and Coleman Young II, son of the former mayor, garnered 94% of the vote.

Julie Cho has since created a nonprofit called Fairer America, focused on supporting minorities with conservative views, and she continues doing health care consulting. Myya Jones ran for Michigan House of Representatives the next year and lost as well.  Now she works for Google.

The documentary focuses on their campaigns, but since Bird won, also shows some of the meetings and activities she's been involved in since taking position as Trustee.  

You'd maybe think that pedestrian issues wouldn't be an issue in a rural area, but one of the items she's working on is providing pedestrian access to a local elementary school.  A neighboring farm owner agreed to provide an easement for a walkway to the school, but the process is still underway.

DC Ward primary election races remind me of my thought that the city needs either more wards or two councilmembers per ward

DC is the nation's only city-state, except that it's not a state.

Although in this case, Congress still has oversight, but for the most part except in areas of policy where political points can be scored, it's benign.  Except for the restriction on the city's ability to tax non-residents, which even prevents the city from taxing professional athletes.

What this means in practical terms is that a State Legislature doesn't control what the city can do, often at the benefit of exurban and rural areas, and the city keeps all of its income and sales tax revenues, thereby having a more balanced set of revenue streams, compared to most other local jurisdictions which are reliant on property taxes.

There are city-states in other countries such as Mexico City and Paris, which are national capitals, and Hamburg in Germany which is an urban state, but not a national capital.

In those cases, these states are no different than other states/departments in the rest of the country.

Generally a city-state is predominately urban, so it doesn't have bifurcated policy and representation divvied up, often in unfair ways, between cities, suburbs, and rural areas.

The Metropolitan Studies Center at Brookings Institution argues that "metropolitan areas" should be the primary way to organize the country at the sub-federal scale, and city-states are one of the best expressions of this idea ("Metropolitan Revolution book review," 2013).

DC is about 60 square miles (1/3 of that is federal land), with more than 700,000 residents.  While it has more residents than some states, it doesn't have voting representation in Congress.

It has an elected mayor and an elected City Council with 13 members -- 4 at large members, a Chairman elected at large, and 8 members each representing a ward.  (And an elected "state" school board which has limited oversight of actual schools.)

By comparison in a typical state, you have a lot more opportunity for holding elected office including seats on local town, city, and county councils, judges and prosecutors, school boards, state representatives and senators, statewide officials like Governor, and federal Representatives and Senators.

The set of Post articles on the primary elections in Ward 2 ("The eight Democratic hopefuls running for Ward 2"), Ward 4 ("In Ward 4 council race, incumbent Brandon T. Todd faces a progressive challenger"), Ward 7 ("Vincent Gray in Ward 7 D.C. Council race faces a long list of challengers"), and Ward 8 ("article to come") where this year even incumbents are facing a fair number of opponents, a number of which whom are worthy of consideration, makes me think of the lost opportunities in having such a restricted number of political representatives.

It could be worth having more Councilmembers, as a way to make politics somewhat more competitive, to provide more opportunities for minority party representation such as Green, Working Families, Socialist Alternative (like in Seattle and Minneapolis) or even Republican.

(Note that many commentators lament that DC lacks political competition.  That's true.  But what they mean is that there aren't Republicans holding office.  But that's not really DC's fault.  The Republican Party has changed and because the city is pretty progressive politically, that doesn't fit with the kinds of Republicans that tend to run these days, who are more out of the wack job side, which is less appealing to urban residents.)

Making DC Council bigger.  The past entry, "Continued musing on restructuring DC's City Council (mostly)" (2013) lists a number of transformational measures for DC City Council and elections.

Summary recommendations

1. Increase the number of wards [or]
2. Increase the number of councilmembers
3. Move the legislature to part-time service and reduced pay
4. Reduce the size of councilmember staff
5. Increase the research capacity of local government
6. Institute term limits for elected officials.
7. Change the date of the primary election to extend the electioneering period.
8. Institute ranked choice voting for local elected officials.
9. Institute additional campaign finance limits for local elections.
10. Create an elected public advocate/ombudsperson.
11. Reconstitute a school board with oversight over pre-K to 12 public education, traditional and charter schools.
12. Build civic capacity and infrastructure.

Such changes are even more relevant today because at the time it was written, DC's population was about 620,000.  Now it's 706,000.  So each ward councilmember today represents 88,000+ residents, when before it was 77,000.

Council districts will be redrawn after this year's Census.  As population has increased in the western side of the city, those districts will shrink in size, while eastern districts will continue to expand westward.

Statehood proposal.  The proposed "Constitution for the State of New Columbia" created in 2016 proposes a 21 member House of Delegates.   It basically proposes a structure comparable to that in my 2013 piece.  8 Legislative districts each with two members, one elected in each two year election cycle, with 4 at large members, two elected in each cycle, and a Speaker of the House elected at large.

There's something to be said for having a unicameral legislature in a small place like DC. But in the current form with 13 members,i t's too easy to pass legislation when you only need 7 votes.

More councilmembers per ward.  One problem with monopoly representation within a ward is that it allows the Councilmember to control much of the political discourse and activity within a ward. 

That's why I suggest that each ward have two councilmembers, each serving a four year term, with a two year overlap. This allows for intra-ward competition and polycentric politics.

If DC went to this format, then I'd recommend an increase in the number of at-large representatives too, from two per election cycle to three for a total of six.

That could be as many 23 Councilmembers including the Chair who generally only votes where there is a tie, which is a lot, but instead of 7 votes you'd need 12 to pass major legislation, and that would be a good thing. Salaries could be reduced some to save a bit of money, which would of course be redirected to having more Council staff.

More wards? As the city increases in population, shrinking the population of wards by adding to the number could help keep wards more intimate and accessible.

An alternative would be to still have monopoly representation within wards, but to have say 11 or 13 Wards instead of 8.

By adding one more at large representative to each election cycle simultaneously, that would be a Council size of 18 with 11 wards and 20 with 13 wards.

In an 11 ward structure, each Councilmember would represent about 64,000 residents; a 13 ward structure, 54,000 residents.


Ranked choice voting.  So many candidates in the ward primary elections is an argument for ranked choice voting ("D.C. Council?s Ward 2 election is a great argument for ranked choice voting," Post).

It's more complicated, but it allows people to indicate first, second, third, etc. choices, and as candidates are eliminated, a more diverse set of candidates can be elected--note that it's possible, not probable.

DC is most likely to elect Democrats to elected office, but the fact is that the candidates vary considerably in terms of their progressiveness, ethics- ness, raceness, etc.

So the ability to rank candidates would help more progressive candidates get elected when a typical election has multiple "good" candidates running and just one "bad" candidate, and the bad candidate has a built in advantage because his/her supporters don't split their votes.

Peirce County, Washington used ranked choice voting for a couple of elections, but it was repealed in 2009.  This diagram is from the Tacoma News-Tribune circa 2008 and is used with permission.  San Francisco started using ranked choice for local elections in 2005.

Civic infrastructure improvements will be the subject of a separate entry.

Memorial Day musing | Repositioning failure as success: pandemic; urban revitalization; voter suppression

Seeing this tweet from President Trump:

Remember this, every Governor who has sky high approval on their handling of the Coronavirus, and I am happy for them all, could in no way have gotten those numbers, or had that success, without me and the Federal Governments help. From Ventilators to Testing, we made it happen!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 12, 2020

Today's Front Page of the New York Times is the start of an article consisting of 1,000 names of people who've died from the coronavirus.

Reminded me of my reaction to an op-ed ("The seeds of the H Street ‘miracle’") in the Washington Post, where the DC chapter of LISC made out that the revitalization of H Street NE was in large part the result of the efforts of the H Street Community Development Corporation, a LISC affiliate.

It wasn't.

-- "The community development approach and the revitalization of DC's H Street corridor: congruent or oppositional approaches?," 2013

Post riot cleanup of the 800 block of H Street NE, note the Kay Jewelers sign, Alexander Lmanian photo

The commercial district languished for two decades while "being revitalization" (and almost 40 years since the 1968 riots), because the organizing principle of the H Street CDC was that the only value in the neighborhood was the opportunity to assemble and redevelop land that was close to Downtown and Capitol Hill.

HSCDC didn't see value in urbanism, urban design, and the historic qualities of the neighborhood.

Most of the urban renewal projects they and the city undertook had a distinct suburban character which seriously diminished the ability of the area to revive on city appropriate terms.

Eventually, the market righted itself despite the CDC, and it was supplanted by for profit actors.


Photo of rowhouses on the 1100 block of 8th Street NE by Elise Bernard.

(I joke that my involvement in urban revitalization was a form of "blowback" against the H Street CDC.  I was spurred to figure out why, despite upwards of $150 million in projects and new development and proximity to Union Station, Downtown, and the US Capitol and Capitol Hill, the neighborhood still languished.)

Similarly, the Federal Government's response to coronavirus has been a disaster.

The only thing that has separated the US from the UK in its similarly disastrous response--if the US had the rate of death of the UK, instead of about 100,000 deaths at this point, we'd have about 185,000--is the ability of states to act independently of the federal government.

By contrast, local and regional authorities in "England" lack this capability (Scotland, Wales, and Northern Island have devolved powers and do act independently on many dimensions).

So Trump taking credit for the independent action of states really takes the cake.

Of course, this is like the Republican Party taking credit for the end of slavery--this happened 155 years ago--in an attempt to whitewash all the negative things it does today, such as voter suppression targeting the African-American community ("America’s Relentless Suppression of Black Voters," The New Republic).

Vice President @JoeBiden ‘s latest quote is both pathetic & hurtful. Challenging millions on their blackness is condescending. The GOP was started to oppose slavery. I have the right to think and vote for myself along with all other Americans, including black Americans. pic.twitter.com/RRURX1eMbY

— John James (@JohnJamesMI) May 22, 2020

Although yes, Joe Biden ("Joe Biden's 'white kids' gaffe, and why his slip-ups matter," Washington Post) is hardly the best possible herald the Democratic Party can put up against Donald Trump, in general, or for African Americans ("Black Americans are in an abusive relationship with the Democratic party," Guardian).

That being said, Biden and Trump are in no way equivalent. It does matter who gets elected, as the families of the 100,000 dead from the coronavirus can attest.

Instagram image by @davefromcalif

See "Trump goes golfing again after renewing feuds with Columbia over coronavirus study — and Jeff Sessions," New York Daily News.

How far has Brand America fallen? The US as a failed state | Las Vegas gets big coronavirus test donation from the United Arab Emirates

I few months back I joked with a co-author of the book Brand America, that the new Brand America under President Trump is "Can't Do. Won't Do. You Do. F*** You."

-- "It's Official.  Brand America is Tanking," Forbes

I see that Nevada is boosting its covid19 testing capacity because of a donation of 200,000 testing kits from the United Arab Emirates ("Las Vegas needed help testing for coronavirus. Then a crown prince stepped in," Los Angeles Times; "After the end of the world: the eerie silence of the Las Vegas Strip," Guardian; "Effects of coronavirus fear hit Las Vegas economy hard," Las Vegas Review-Journal). From the article:

One of the largest mass coronavirus testing sites in Nevada has opened in Las Vegas, a move that puts the city one step closer to reopening its economy. And it might not have been possible without the donation of more than 200,000 test kits, worth as much as $20 million, from the United Arab Emirates.

Within weeks of the coronavirus reaching Las Vegas, members of the public were clamoring to be tested, and hospitals and laboratories were running out of supplies. Nasal swabs were so difficult to come by that some clinics closed, and state officials called on the federal government for help.

AP photo of an empty Las Vegas Strip in March 2020 

Help did arrive in Las Vegas. Supply chains eased, allowing hospitals to buy more tests, and aid trickled in from Washington.

But the intervention that changed the state’s fortunes was a large donation from Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates, according to members of Nevada’s COVID-19 Response, Relief and Recovery Task Force, a group of business leaders supporting the state’s recovery.

Jim Murren, the former chief executive of MGM, who chairs the task force, said this week that the gift was the result of discussions with G42, an Emirati artificial intelligence and cloud-computing company. Although talks initially centered on how to bring back concerts and sports events to Las Vegas during the epidemic, Murren said his counterparts in the United Arab Emirates quickly realized Nevada didn’t have enough test supplies to help stem the spread of the disease.

Las Vegas Strip in 2017.  Photo: Atlantic City Press. 

At the time, the state could only manage to test hundreds, not thousands, of people daily. Those who did get tested endured lengthy wait times for results as their samples were shipped out of state to private labs in California or Arizona that could take as long as two weeks to deliver an answer. By the time state health officials learned someone had tested positive, it was too late to prevent them from spreading the virus. ... 

Nevada has received money and supplies from the Federal Emergency Management Agency but nothing that approaches the scale or the speed of the United Arab Emirates’ donation. [emphasis added] According to state health officials, FEMA has equipped Nevada with 26,000 testing swabs and 25,600 testing transport components. More supplies are on the way, officials said, but the shipments haven’t arrived.

For Murren and others on the task force, the United Arab Emirates’ gift is a sign of the relationships Vegas business leaders have cultivated overseas. But public health experts, who praised the donation, said it was also an indictment of the U.S. government’s halting response. [emphasis added] 

It made me think of "the song" "The Americans" from 1973. I didn't realize originally it was an on air editorial by newscaster Gordon Sinclair from CFRB radio in Toronto.

Instead, I was familiar with the "spoken word" 45 record version by Byron MacGregor, a newscaster at CKLW-AM radio. Back then, "CK" a high-power radio station based in Windsor, Ontario, focused on serving the American market for listeners and advertisers. It was definitely the #1 station in "Detroit."

The record focused on how much the US helps others and gets derided in response.



Obviously, that's the attitude that President Trump has, which has led to his America First agenda. 

Still, it's incredibly damning that the federal government's failure to take the lead in coronavirus testing is so severe that some states are turning to foreign countries for help.

Maybe Gordon Sinclair would think it's an example of the US finally getting back the kind of help it has given to so many others.

Instead I see it as an example of the USA as a "failed state" ("We Are Living in a Failed State," The Atlantic)."  From the LAT:

The Emirati donation “is reflective of the failure of the federal government to step up to its responsibility to make sure that in a time of scarcity every community gets the resources they need to respond to this pandemic,” said Jeffrey Levi, a professor of health policy at George Washington University.

One of the points made in "The Americans" is that at that time only the US made airplanes capable of long distance flights. These days, we have the Boeing 737MAX debacle that includes not just the airplane manufacturer but the failed oversight from its regulator, the Federal Aviation Administration.

Another was that the US aid and expertise rebuilt foreign railways in India, France, and Germany. Now, the passenger railroad system in the US is the worst of any major developed nation.

Of course, the UAE isn't a fully benevolent actor either. According to the LAT:

In addition to offering humanitarian relief, the United Arab Emirates has a financial interest in seeing Vegas come back to life. Dubai World, the state-controlled investment vehicle of Dubai, owns half of the sprawling CityCenter complex, which when it opened in 2009 on the Strip was the largest and most expensive private development in the city.

You get what you pay for.  WRT Las Vegas, too it's somewhat ironic. Las Vegas casino operator Sheldon Adelson is a strong investor in President Trump and the Republican Party for support of reduced taxes and an ultraconservative approach to Israel and the Mideast.

The tax cuts favoring the wealthy put hundreds of millions of dollars in Adelson's pocket, which was a pretty good return on his investment in Republican election campaigns, which he continued in both the 2018 and 2020 election cycles ("Sheldon Adelson to donate $100m to Trump and Republicans," Guardian).

Now the financial losses in Las Vegas at the Sands, owned by Adelson, and other casinos because of federal government failures to respond properly to the pandemic has cost all of that and more ("Las Vegas Sands Posts Loss Amid Coronavirus Shutdown," Wall Street Journal). From the article:

Casino operator Las Vegas Sands Corp. reported a 51% drop in revenue, with Las Vegas shut down in response to the coronavirus pandemic and reopened casinos in Macau struggling to recover.

On Wednesday, Sands posted $1.78 billion in net revenue for the three months ended March 31, down from $3.6 billion at year earlier. The company had a net loss of $51 million for the quarter, compared with $744 million in net income a year earlier.

Things are way worse in the US than I can imagine

(Except for the UK.

They're likely to have more deaths per capita than the US, for the same reasons, an inept government pretty much unfocused. "How did Britain get its coronavirus response so wrong," Guardian)

I've mentioned Simon Anholt's book Brand America: The Mother of All Brands, co-authored with Jeremy Hildreth. More recently, I was joking with him that the new Brand America is:

Can't do.  Won't do.  You do.  F*** you.

This article by Simon appeared even before he became president: "Is Trump tarnishing the American brand?," Guardian. It's much worse now.

First you have the June cover story by George Packer in The Atlantic, "We are living in a failed state."

From the article:

When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.

The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly—not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message.

Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state. With no national plan—no coherent instructions at all—families, schools, and offices were left to decide on their own whether to shut down and take shelter. When test kits, masks, gowns, and ventilators were found to be in desperately short supply, governors pleaded for them from the White House, which stalled, then called on private enterprise, which couldn’t deliver. States and cities were forced into bidding wars that left them prey to price gouging and corporate profiteering. Civilians took out their sewing machines to try to keep ill-equipped hospital workers healthy and their patients alive. Russia, Taiwan, and the United Nations sent humanitarian aid to the world’s richest power—a beggar nation in utter chaos. ...

Despite countless examples around the U.S. of individual courage and sacrifice, the failure is national. And it should force a question that most Americans have never had to ask: Do we trust our leaders and one another enough to summon a collective response to a mortal threat? Are we still capable of self-government?

An anti-Trump protester at a rally in Sacramento on April 20. Josh Edelson, AFP.

Second, economist Jeffrey Sachs calling the Trump Administration's response to the pandemic "shambolic"  ("Jeffrey Sachs on the Catastrophic American Response to the Coronavirus," New Yorker). 

From the article:

There are many aspects of any major crisis that are similar in character, in that they require governments to assess the situation with sophistication, to identify options, to come up with strategies, and to implement them. Crisis management has a lot of common points. The nature of the crisis could be geopolitical. It could be a climate-related shock or a disease.

I would say the core issues are the capacity of political leaders and their inner team, and the capacity of the institutions of governance—agencies, departments, and ministries—to be able to process information in a timely way and to be able to harness expert advice and evidence in a timely way. We live in a complicated world. If you try to wing it, as Trump does, you end up with more than forty thousand deaths. If you want to solve a problem, you have to be systematic about it, and know whom to turn to and how to listen and amass evidence. For politicians, that doesn’t necessarily come naturally, and for our President it doesn’t come at all.

Third, economist Joseph Stiglitz avers that the catastrophic response by the Trump Administration is leading us to another Great Depression ("Top economist: US coronavirus response is like 'third world' country," Guardian).

Fourth, incredibly disturbing interview with psychiatrist Bandy Lee, about the potential for serious violence on the part of Trump and his supporters ("Yale psychiatrist Bandy Lee: Lockdown protesters resemble “child soldiers” and “urban gangs”," Salon).

---

Notes

1. Sweden's touted response of no stay at home orders has led to a much higher per capita death rate than neighboring countries ("The Grim Truth About the “Swedish Model”," Project Syndicate).

2. Fox News is starting to backtrack on hydroxycloroquine, which doesn't seem to be having the effect that was touted.

3. President Trump says Georgia Governor Brian Kemp is moving too fast on reversing restrictions ("Georgia’s reopening plan gets thrown a curve as Trump criticizes Kemp," Atlanta Journal-Constitution), after Trump spent the weekend promoting protests around the country against stay at home orders--conveniently in states run by Democratic Governors.

Time waits for no one and it won't wait for Catherine Pugh, Mayor of Baltimore

Yesterday, it was announced that the FBI executed a search warrant on the house of Catherine Pugh, Mayor of Baltimore, because of her sale of "Healthy Holly" children's books to organizations where she either was a board member or who had business before the government agencies over which she had oversight ("FBI Raids Baltimore City Hall and Mayor Catherine Pugh's Homes," New York Times).

I first wondered whether or not there was a "Healthy Holly" book on how to act in the presence of police.

Anyway, this morning I thought about this in terms of this Rolling Stones song.  She can put it off, but she's going to have to resign.

And I've had bronchitis before, I was very sick, but fully lucid... "Pugh Attorney: She Is Not Lucid Enough To Decide Whether To Resign," WBAL-radio).

The most important change that could result from the soliciting business charges against DC Councilmember Evans: Ending Councilmember "jobs" being considered part-time

The media are full of stories about how DC Councilman Jack Evans solicited consulting jobs using his DC Council email account ("D.C. Council privately meets with member Jack Evans amid federal probe," Washington Post).  There are calls for censure, him being stripped of his chairmanship of the Finance Committee and membership on other Council committees, etc.

Yes, what Councilman Evans did was wrong, corrupt, a misuse of his office, etc.

But it's but a baby step from the reality that DC Councilmember "jobs" are considered "part-time" and many of the Councilmembers have "outside work" which can significantly increase their income:

-- "Jack Evans 2015 pitch to Manatt," Washington Post, 2019
-- Fewer D.C. Council members report outside income," Washington Post, 2014
-- "Jim Graham fails in bid to challenge ethics ruling," Washington Post, 2013
-- "David Catania's Double Dipping," The FightBack, 2010
-- "Anita Bonds to quit job with D.C. contractor Fort Myer Construction," Washington Business Journal, 2013

Many DC Councilmembers in the past and present have work affiliations with companies that do work for DC, etc., or lobbying positions for law firms and lobbying organizations, etc.

It's unseemly and borders on corruption at the very least.

Past blog entries:

-- "The system of corruption: when you don't understand "systems", of corruption or anything else, you don't understand outcomes," 2010
-- "The highly paid DC City Council and governance and voting systems," 2011
-- "First order change vs. second order change and DC politics," 2010
-- "Umm, it's the system," 2011
-- "The Growth Machine and public graft," 2010
-- "More on DC ethics and corruption: intrinsic vs. extrinsic behavior," 2011
-- "Local corruption, I want to believe* vs. reality," 2011

BUT IT'S LEGAL.

IF COUNCILMEMBER EVANS WOULD HAVE JUST SENT THAT EMAIL FROM HIS PRIVATE EMAIL IT WOULD HAVE BEEN PERFECTLY LEGAL.

I've written various posts suggesting various reforms in how DC is governed and structured. This post has the master list of items:

-- "Incremental piecemeal fixes to DC politics and governance mostly don't help," 2013

WRT Councilmembers, I say either cut their salary in half so that it is really a part time job, or make the job officially full-time, to eliminate these kinds of conflicts of interest.

I'd rather eliminate the conflicts of interest.

DC Councilmembers currently make $133,144 per year ("Who earns the biggest D.C. paychecks? Check out our 2017 searchable database;," Washington Business Journal).  I'd do fine with that were it my income,

BUT ...

I'd rather we bump of the salary by say $25,000 and term the job "full time" and bar all outside work.

Note that the Mayor, Attorney General, and the Chairman of the City Council positions are all considered full-time positions and bar outside entanglements ("Pay Raise Proposed For D.C. Mayor, Council Chairman And Attorney General," WAMU/NPR)

What California Governor Jerry Brown has learned

The San Francisco Chronicle conducted a long interview with Gov. Brown at the end of his second stint as Governor, which was leavened after his serving two terms as Mayor of Oakland, California and one as State Attorney General.

Some great points:

1. Some problems can't be solved.  But he said focusing on some issues dear to the Democratic left, such as making housing more affordable and narrowing wealth inequality, would have been a waste of his time and political capital.

“Now, you can always find people who talk about the cost of housing, the gap between the rich and the poor, but this is true in Sydney, Australia. It’s true in London, it’s true all over the world,” Brown said. “Those are challenges people ought to address, but I’d say just looking back at the time I was there, either these things were not as salient as the problems I dealt with, or they weren’t as high a priority as the ones I dealt with.”

It’s always a matter of picking and choosing, of deciding both what needs to be done and what can be done with a governor’s limited resources of time, money and clout, Brown said. And those choices are always going to leave someone upset.

“Not only can’t you make them all happy, but you can’t solve all problems — otherwise, you’d be dead,” Brown said. “As long as you’re alive, you’ve got new issues for tomorrow and next week and next year.”


2. Protesting to preserve privileges.  But eight years as mayor of Oakland starting in 1999 tempered many of those early views. They also showed him how politics worked at the ground level, which shaped many of his views as governor.

“In Oakland, I would see people show up at City Council and protest almost any project, even relatively low height limits that they thought affected the character of the neighborhood,” Brown said. “So, great resistance to change, usually argued in terms of grand environmental or quality-of-life issues that I thought were patently misguided, ill-founded and distorted.”


3. Not all problems deserve to be addressed by laws. In 2011, the governor shocked legislators, including many of his fellow Democrats, when he vetoed a bill that would have required helmets for skiers and snowboarders under 18.

The Legislature was usurping the role of parents, he said in his veto message, adding, “Not every human problem deserves a law.”


4. Legislatures don't solve problems, they write and pass legislation.  Attempting to change that legislative culture wasn’t one of his most successful efforts, Brown admitted.

“The Legislature exists, in their minds, to produce more laws,” he said. “They don’t exist to solve problems, they exist to make laws. Now, they’d like to solve some problems along the way, but the essential functioning of a legislature is lawmaking.” ...

Brown didn’t excuse himself from abetting the wave of legislation, admitting that he often signed bills while shaking his head.

“We have more lawmaking than in any time in human history,” the governor said. “Many of the laws are stupid. Many of them are not warranted. But in order to get along with the Legislature, you’ve got to sign bills that aren’t needed. And you even have to sign bills that you’d prefer not even to have.”

=======
As much as I criticize community development organizations, one of the things Gov. Brown did that hurt revitalization was the elimination of local redevelopment corporations. He did this because they were financed through tax increment financing processes, which diverted revenue from the state, not just other local government entities like schools, and this was at the peak of the Great Financial Crisis, when the State government faced massive revenue shortfalls.

-- "Jerry Brown calls redevelopment agencies futile," SF Chronicle
-- "California bill would bring back redevelopment agencies," San Jose Mercury News

Quote of the day: Federal Government Shutdown

From the Guardian column "With government shutdown, Republicans reap what they sow":

During previous shutdowns, calm heads ultimately prevailed: people who cared about good government, or at least worried about the polls that pointed to widespread public disgust. But this is now Donald Trump’s Washington and there are no calm heads to be found.During previous shutdowns, calm heads ultimately prevailed: people who cared about good government, or at least worried about the polls that pointed to widespread public disgust. But this is now Donald Trump’s Washington and there are no calm heads to be found.

====
In any case, it seems unbelievable that Congress is incapable of doing one of the only things they are mandated to do, which is to pass an annual budget for government operations.

Still, while I concede the idea of a "swamp" as it relates to lobbying, especially in favor of the interests of capital, the reality is that "Washington" isn't created in or by "Washington" but by the electoral choices they make when voting who to represent them in their House Districts and as their state's Senators.

DC government.  Because DC is a federal district, local government gets mixed up in the crosshairs of shutdown.  With the last shutdown, DC carved out its locally-generated monies and made the argument that spending local monies shouldn't be held hostage to the federal budget, and it continued to operate and function.  Mayor Bowser is taking the same course this time ("'DC is open' If Federal Government Shuts Down, Mayor Says," NBC4).

DC also plans to step in and maintain NPS properties that will go unmaintained during the shutdown.  From the article:

If the government shuts down, crews with the D.C. Department of Public Works (DPW) will pick up trash from 126 federal properties in the city, including the National Mall, Pennsylvania Avenue and Dupont Circle. If it snows, the same crews will clear roads the National Park Service usually would clear.

"People from across the nation and around the world come to visit our nation's capitol, and we take great pride in our city and want to ensure it looks clean and its best, regardless of what's happening at the federal level," DPW director Christopher Shorter said.

The work will cost an estimated $100,000 per week. D.C. could request reimbursement from the federal government for costs incurred during the shutdown, or could include these costs in federal payment budget requests.

Federal shutdowns and national parks.  In the past I've written about the impact of the shutdown of national parks on local economies, but this time, Republicans aimed to allow parks to be open to the public but without staff ("What Does the Government Shutdown Mean for National Parks and Park Visitors?," National Parks Conservation Association). T

hey're doing this because parks shutdowns seemed to generate the most negative reaction on the part of communities and the electorate (along with cutbacks of TSA personnel at airports).

According to the US Travel Association ("Shutdown Would Cost U.S. Travel Economy At Least $185M per Day"), a federal government shutdown would cost the U.S. travel sector at least $185 million per day in economic output due to lost activity and affect 530,000 travel-related jobs due to temporary layoffs, reduced wages and fewer hours worked.


Protest: Locals complain about the Grand Canyon National Park closure which is costing the community in lost tourism.  Image via the Daily Mail.

In those parts of the country with federal parks and public lands that are key elements of local tourism, there are more specific and hard felt effects on local economies from shutdowns.

This is why for some time I have argued that local and state parks and tourism planning needs to include contingency planning for federal shutdowns, and state and federal budget cutbacks ("Federal shutdown as another example of why local jurisdictions should have more robust contingency and master planning processes" and "Contingency planning in parks planning: Montgomery County Maryland edition").

According to the NPS report Effects of the October 2013 Government Shutdown on National Park Service Visitor Spending in Gateway Communities:

• A 7.88 million decline in overall NPS October visitation resulting in a loss of $414 million NPS visitor spending within gateway communities across the country;
• Gateway communities near forty five parks experienced a loss of more than $2 million in NPS related October visitor spending;
• Five states experienced a decline of over $20 million in NPS October visitor spending;
• Each dollar of funding for the 14 parks opened with state funding before the end of the shutdown generated an estimated $10 in visitor spending.

It turns out that the National Park Service does allow states to step in and pay for operation of facilities during shutdowns ("Feds will let states pay to reopen national parks," Associated Press).

But it's best to plan ahead and have those agreements in place before a shutdown, not once a shutdown is underway.  Which is what DC is doing in terms of committing to providing trash pick up and snow clearance.

More national politics...

It's relevant to local urbanism in that how the federal government is led, organized, and managed impacts state and local government.

WRT people touting Oprah as President after her speech at the Golden Globes, Toronto Star columnist Heather Mallick explains why this is a bad idea ("'President Oprah' proves the US hasn't learned its lesson").  From the article:

People I read and respect are actually saying of an Oprah candidacy, “Hmmm, it’s an idea.” That’s what a toddler thinks before she swallows a disc battery. I’m ashamed for them. Canadians don’t like ostentation, but Americans do grovel before the rich and gaudy.

Despite Winfrey’s on-air skills, her genuine acting talent, and her rags-to-riches life story, she is a huckster much like Trump, albeit one with emotional intelligence and great personal charm. Her show was lowbrow, daft, and often dangerous, displaying Jenny McCarthy and her antivaccination campaign and handing out free cars to a studio audience that was later stunned to discover the gift was taxable. ...

Winfrey’s speech was a blast of feeling. She would make a splendid preacher but that is not what the U.S. needs.

It needs an intelligent, highly educated, understated president who understands both the general and specific nature of governing and who will redesign tax rates to lessen inequality.

She or he must know how to cope with or even fight climate change, manage immigration chaos, restore and expand medical care, fund pharmacare, find $4.6 trillion to repair decayed infrastructure, mandate paid family leave, restore women’s health funding, apologize to the nations Trump insulted, appoint judges and hire government workers and make thousands of other repairs that chat-show hosts won’t have dreamed of because they’re boring and meticulous.

Trump is an idiot regarded by his base as a fountain of common sense. He sends out daily threats along with messages of fragility, incoherence and hate. His staff is now desperately figuring out how to please him by waging a teeny nuclear war on North Korea.

Winfrey, on the other hand, is a positive thinker mistaken for a sage. She would offer the U.S. a vast surge of emotion rather than thoughts, and a motley collection of crackpot theories. The main difference between her and Trump is that she is a nicer person. 

Words need to be followed by action: DC statehood edition

The Washington Post reports ("Can a change of titles make DC seem more stately? Ask Gov. Bowser.") on legislation put forth by DC Councilmember David Grosso on changing the names of the Mayor -- to Governor -- the City Council -- to the Legislative Assembly -- and Councilmembers -- to Representatives -- to have in place a better nomenclature to help make the argument that DC should be a state.

I've argued for a long long long time that "if you want to be a state, start acting like it, by being exemplary in all that you do in terms of governance and legislating."

We can call a Councilmember a Representative, but the city still mixes up capital budgeting in the annual appropriations process and Councilmembers take pride in cutting capital projects to fund current projects.

We waste hundreds of millions of dollars on constructing new buildings that aren't necessary or make poor use of existing facilities.

Or in not creating more innovative buildings and programs to serve the public better.

We claim we want to be "the most sustainable city in the US," but I find it hard to identify any programs (except one, by a semi-independent agency, see "How DC Water Is Using Recycled Sewage " Fortune Magazine) that function at the level of national best practice, let alone best practice on a global scale.

Instead we take great pride in slowly adopting programs that have been in place elsewhere for decades or more.

Among others, we still have serious issues with contracting ("D.C. Council report: Bowser administration favored top donor in contracting," Washington Post; and "How an Underperforming Company Won a Lucrative Energy Contract," Washington City Paper), electioneering ethics ("Council member Todd gets minor fine for many campaign finance violations," Post) and misuse of position ("Behind the DC school lottery scandal: A 'crisis in confidence '," Post).

Just because Illinois is being run into the ground ("Illinois' budget mess shackling growth," Bloomington Pantagraph) doesn't make DC a great candidate for statehood.

Statehood is both a right within the context of the United States and a privilege.  Territories had to meet conditions to become states, and that included sound governance.

Etc.

======
A couple past entries on reforming local governance:

-- "Ideal Mayoral/City Council candidate campaign agenda: Getting Our City's S*** Together, 2012
-- "Incremental piecemeal fixes to DC politics and governance mostly don't help, 2013
-- "Outline for a proposed Ward-focused (DC) Councilmember campaign platform and agenda, 2015

Unpacking President Trump and "The Art of the Deal": he's great when the other party needs him more than he needs them, not so great when the stakes are different

There has been much analysis of the Trump Administration/ Speaker Ryan's "failure to repeal and replace" what is called Obamacare but is formally termed the Affordable Care Act.  There are lots of reasons for the failure:

- that the Republicans demonized the program when it was mostly a conservative approach based on an old Republican think tank paper and "Romneycare" in Massachusetts
- so they weren't left with a good "Republican" alternative when it was already pretty Republican...
- the intransigence of the Freedom Caucus (somewhat comparable to UKIP in the Brexit debate)
- the lack of policy heft on the part of Paul Ryan (Paul Krugman has written for years that the image of Mr. Ryan as someone with intellectual policy cred is fatuous--he's just an anti-taxer with some books)
- the problem of setting artificially constrained deadlines
etc.

But I was thinking about this yesterday morning and all the talk and perception of what a great deal maker Donald Trump was/is as a "businessman," and it occurred to me that his experience is mostly what we would think of as a bottom feeder dealing with distressed assets or situations where the other party needs Trump so much more than Trump needs him/her.

In short, Trump's deal making "prowess" is all about being the more powerful party in asymmetric situations.

That's why he's associated with all kinds of wacky projects and assets, with some exceptions here and there, like the redo of the Old Post Office in DC as a hotel, or the Mar a Lago golf course in Palm Beach.

Trump's experience in dealing with equally powerful parties is very limited, and in the vast majority of the situations where he's been in that situation, he hasn't done particularly well.

There was a letter to the editor in the New York Times yesterday which made a similar point:

President Trump knows how to make a deal with those who want to make a deal with him.  He doesn't know how to make a deal with those who don't want to make a deal with him.  That's the difference between business and politics.
-- James Sutton, Des Moines

Although as I wrote above, it's more than the difference between business and politics, it's about asymmetric versus symmetric power positions.

Four years of "New Order"

When I am depressed I listen to music from New Order, maybe the Smiths, Psychedelic Furs, etc., music from my college years.

After the election results last night, I expect I will be listening to this type of music for a long, long time.

Because winning the election is based on "winning states" rather than the total national vote, even though Hillary Clinton seems to have won more total votes, Trump wins the election.  So this is another instance of Republicans winning the presidential election without winning the popular vote.

Trump seems to have run the table, winning every state that was said to be in play, and more states as well.

And in those states, the Democratic candidate for Senate lost, so the Republicans control the House as expected, the Senate, not expected, the Presidency, and soon, the Supreme Court.

But again, to emphasize the closeness of the vote in many states, the Republican incumbent Senator Kelly Ayotte, appears to be winning over Democratic candidate Jeanne Hassan, the sitting Governor, by fewer than 2,000 votes ("New Hampshire U.S. Senate Results: Kelly Ayotte Leads," New York Times).  (Although the other Senate races, such as in North Carolina, Missouri, and Wisconsin were nowhere near as close.)

Graphic from the Detroit Free Press, 2016 Presidential Election


A comment on Frank Bruni's column in today's New York Times, "Donald Trump's shocking success," is pretty apt:




The nation's cities as an archipelago.  After the 2004 election, Dan Savage, editor of The Stranger, Seattle's alternative free weekly newspaper, wrote a screed about the results, focusing on the cities and coasts versus the nation's interior.

I reprinted that piece, "The Urban Archipelago," in its entirety in a blog I aimed to do last decade, focused on creating an urban-focused agenda for the presidential elections--at least in the primaries, the idea was to have a candidate run on a pro-city agenda to put the agenda "out there."

Since the article doesn't seem to be available on The Stranger's website anymore that's a good thing I have it available, but the reality is that I am today, filled with despair..

An urban political agenda.  After the Obama election win in 2008, I wrote a couple of pieces about how all the people in DC asking what would the new president do for the city were asking the wrong question, that they needed to know what they wanted, that "Chance favors the prepared city" and a prepared city is defined by having the vision, capacity, leadership, and plans in place to take advantage of opportunities as they presented.

For example, I don't think DC's quest for statehood will be going anywhere, despite yesterday's vote in favor of it in our local election.  Attaining statehood was predicated on Democratic Party control of the President and Senate.

-- "How will Obama relate to the District?"
-- "Stimulus plan: feeding at the trough or investing in our future"
-- "Chance continues to favor the prepared road builders"

It's funny because I was thinking about this recently, assessing the Obama Presidency in terms of an urban agenda and considering what the Administration was up against, they did focus attention and energy on urban issues, with support for transit, the Promise Neighborhood initiative, various environmental measures, even came out with a report recently on the value of cities,smart growth, etc.

Sure it wasn't up to the level of an urban policy proposed many years ago by the Black Commentator, "Wanted: A Plan for Cities to Save Themselves," but it is much more than will ever be proffered in the next four years by a Republican, anti-city government.

The good of the country?  Maybe the grotesque place we are in will motivate some Republican leaders to act for the good of the country.  But I don't think such selflessness is within them.  It's all about ideology and putting that ideology, and an anti-government agenda forward.

Since I believe that government is not a bad thing, but ultimately represents the expression of "the people" and the structural support-foundation supporting societal relations, an anti-government focus frays and ultimately destroys the fabric of society.  That is the Republican legacy in the US, even before Trump, which that legacy enabled.

Sure, Trump talked about putting money into infrastructure--roads, bridges, ports, transit presumably.

Likelihood of economic recession significantly increases.  But I see no positive opportunities for regular people in a Trump presidency and Republican control of Congress.  Most of the pundits predict, were Trump to carry out his proposed agenda:

- trade wars
- building a wall along the southern border with Mexico
- deporting immigrants
- no attention paid to global warming
- succor to Russia
- some sort of involvement in the Mideast
- not to mention huge tax cuts for the super wealthy (and continued special treatment for real estate development)

in the face of a weak global economy that the US and the world face a long term recession.  Trade wars helped stoke the Great Depression and World War II, so it is hard to not see much of a way forward.

-- Henry Blodget's take

We already see that a version of that agenda isn't working out in Kansas at the state level.  And in fact despite the fact that the state went for Trump, decisively, more Democrats got elected to the State Legislature, as part of a concerted campaign aimed at changing the state's turn to an extreme right agenda ("Democrats make gains in Kansas Legislature," Wichita Eagle).

It is hard to believe, but in terms of Democratic voting at a state-by-state scale, this election's result are worse than those from 2000.


How can I depict that I am in mourning?  The election results remind me of the unprecedented Life magazine cover after the assassination of President Kennedy, when they printed the logotype of the magazine in the mourning color of black, instead of the normal red color.

The election results, showing more votes for Clinton than Trump, but such a bifurcation when looked at state by state or county by county, make the need for an urban agenda and an even better "ground game" that much more important.

The results communicate how state politics is shaped to favor rural and business interests at the expense of cities, and how this structure ported to the way Congressional districts are drawn, ends up shaping national politics.

Those transit votes.  The Detroit area vote, which requires a simple majority, is close and may not pass.  But the Wake County, North Carolina referendum did pass.  Both votes are in states that chose Trump.

The SF area vote, which requires a two-thirds majority, may not pass.  The LA area vote, also requiring a two-thirds majority, looks to pass--an advantage of being focused on one county only, while the SF Bay area vote covers three separate jurisdictions.  The Puget Sound vote appears likely to pass.

It will be interesting to see what kind of agenda on transit comes from President Trump.  It is infrastructure, and he sees the value in infrastructure.  After all, it's the underpinning of successful real estate development.

That urban agenda takes a hit in Kentucky.  Speaking of the "urban agenda," Jim Gray, Mayor of Lexington, Kentucky, ran against Rand Paul for Senate and got trounced ("Rand Paul defeats Jim Gray to keep his Senate seat," Lexington Herald-Leader).  Before taking up politics full-time, Jim Gray helped build his "family" construction firm into a major firm active nationally and overseas.