Here are the topics for this blog: a community college graduation; our British cousins; those daring young bicycle boys; world instability.

Watertown, Sooth Dakota. For this small town (5th largest in the state), in a very Republican state, this was just another community college graduation ceremony, one similar to many others to be held across the US this May. Except that this graduation commencement address was very special: it was to be delivered by President Barack Obama. Oh, yes, this was a town were the president's approval rating was about "as low as you can go."
     “This is definitely not his president,” said {resident] Laurie Brandriet Keller, gesturing to her husband. “I’m amazed how excited he’s been these last few days.” Another resident said she sometimes wondered if the president "was even Christian," wanting to take prayer out of everything, and all. After being honored by his presence, though, some residents were seen to shed a tear or two.
     Such is the power of high office.You may recall that even die-hard Lincoln-haters were moved as his train wound its way along a serpentine route, some 1,700 miles from the nation's capital to Springfield, IL.

British elections are a different breed of cat. One major difference between our systems is that in the United Kingdom (1) you do not have to live in the area you represent (**) and (2) your political party can "assign" you to run in a particular constituency. **In the US, the Constitution requires that  members of the US House be a resident of only their state. However, as a matter of long standing tradition members are expected to live in their district and the gerrymandering of districts has caused some members to move about. Similarly, the Constitution requires each senator to live in her/his state. Traditionally, though, a senator is usually a fairly long-time resident of the state, else the pejorative label "carpetbagger" may be thrown about. Some considered both Robert Kennedy and Hillary Clinton to be carpetbaggers, given their less-than long-standing connection of New York.

Our British cousins. The following is a recent column by Marc Champion in the Bloomberg News. While David Cameron's Conservative Party won an outright majority, Champion goes on to explain that things may not be all that they seem.

     [I]f Britain had an election system based on proportional representation, one that took account of all votes cast and not just those of the winners in each constituency, the people’s message would look a little different.

     To begin, Prime Minister David Cameron and the Conservatives won with less than 37 percent of the popular vote — one of the lowest bases of support for the winning party in the history of British elections. That tally is beginning to look like the norm now that more small parties are gaining significant vote shares. Labour was six percentage points behind. So the opinion polls, the last of which collectively predicted a 34 percent to 33 percent victory for the Tories, were significantly wrong. They weren’t egregiously, embarrassingly wrong, however, until they tried to translate the popular vote into a forecast of seats.

     Were it not for the debacle north of the border, which saw swings as high as 35 percent from Labour to the Scottish National Party, the gap between the two main contenders would have been narrower. And given that, on economic policy, the SNP are more Labour than Labour and simply took over many of the party’s voters, Britain arguably chose Cameron’s message of economic security over Miliband’s pitch of fairness and redistribution by a margin of about four percentage points.

     What else did Britons say? Clearly Scots said they want a stronger and more definitively Scottish voice at Westminster. Not all Scots, mind you. The SNP appears to have won about half the popular vote, while gaining 56 of 59 possible seats due to the peculiarities of the first-past-the-post system. The party’s surge in popularity is certainly due to its success in staging an independence referendum last year, which sparked new pride and interest in politics among Scots. But Thursday’s SNP sweep is not a mandate for independence, or even for a quick repeat of last year’s referendum.

     The rising tide of SNP yellow does demonstrate how much stronger leftist sentiment is in Scotland than England. That makes a powerful argument for regional devolution and for giving the Scottish national parliament more responsibility for setting tax rates to go with their increased rights on spending. Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP’s canny leader, understands this — which is why, for now, she’s soft-pedaling the implications for independence, her fundamental goal. Instead, she’s hammering away at austerity with the gusto of Greece’s Syriza party, as if Britain had no deficit problem, because it isn’t her problem.

     This is also why I suspect Sturgeon and the SNP aren’t too unhappy that the Conservatives won. The SNP can remain a protest party at Westminster, and a governing party at home — a good position for a separatist party to be in.

     And what about Europe? This election was not decided on the question of whether Britain should remain in the European Union. That was almost invisible as an election campaign issue, in part because Cameron has promised a separate referendum but also because the EU never tops the list of voter concerns.

Orville and Wilbur. David McCullough's newest book, The Wright Brothers, is now available. In his  interview with Charlie Rose, McCullough gently disclaimed being an "historian;" rather, he referred to himself as merely a writer. 

     Indeed, he noted that if Wilbur (1867-1912) had lived as long as Orville (1871-1948), they might have lived just down the street, so to speak, and, as a young boy, he might have been able to talk with them about this marvelous invention of theirs. Orville, after all, lived long enough to see multi-engine, intercontinental airplanes, guided missiles, television, and much more.

Stability? Long dormant volcanoes, the earliest Atlantic storm, a huge number of tornadoes. All seem to be indicators of change. Amongst nations? There, too?

Leon Trotsky is not often invoked as a management guru, but a line frequently attributed to him would surely resonate with many business leaders today. “You may not be interested in war,” the Bolshevik revolutionary is said to have warned, “but war is interested in you.” War, or at least geopolitics, is figuring more and more prominently in the thinking and fortunes of large businesses.
Of course, multinational companies such as Shell and GE have long cultivated an expertise in geopolitics. But the intensity of concern over global instability is much higher now than in any recent period.

More than a few huge multinational businesses are hiring former diplomats, spymasters, and military leaders, all with an eye on the worldwide economic instability they see. After the demise of the USSR, the commonly held thought was that the world would become more economically integrated and nations would move towards democracy. Alas, that was not the case and, as the accompanying chart illustrates, the world's new found economic connectivity and growth have produced quite uneven results.

 
 From the fall of the Berlin Wall to the financial collapse, globalization recast the postwar economic order: middle-class incomes surged in emerging markets and fell in industrialized nations. (Lakner and Milanovic, "Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession," World Bank, Dec. 2013) (Annotations by James Plunkett)

Thank you for reading. Enjoy the week ahead.

Vacation hiatus. I'll be out of town for a bit, but I will be back on Tuesday, June 2nd.

Here are the topics for this blog: more torture?; small venues; the latter day Eugene V. Debs; the less well-to-do; public discourse; Skokie revisited.

Our sordid torture story. In discussing the US's use of torture following 9/11, Michael Tomasky says,

"There exist four mechanisms in our democracy by which the state can be compelled to live up to what we call, rather farcically ..., 'our ideals.' There is the will of the people; the resolve of the political class; the courage of the media; and the authority of the courts. With regard to our torture regime, all four failed, and failed completely....Cheney is a figure of horror and ridicule these days (although by no means to everyone...But can we honestly say that back in 2002, 2003, 2004, he wasn’t carrying out the people’s will? We get the government we deserve, de Tocqueville said. And in the Bush-Cheney regime, we got exactly that."

On the List (OTL).  Check out this site, scroll to the bottom and see if there is a OTL in your's  or a near-by town. My wife stumbled across this and we have enjoyed these small venue shows. For a year's subscription, you can attend various performances in your area; you can subscribe for 2 or 4 tickets. Then you check the site to see what's available for the coming week, send an email request, get confirmation, show up at the door, and check in -- all in/all done. (Tuesday seems a good day for checking here in Denver).  Since joining we have thoroughly enjoyed quite a few small venue performances, more than enough to redeem our subscription price.
     Our last foray was a play (April 30th) at Aurora's Vintage Theater, a nicely performed two-actor play, "Six dance lessons in 6 nights." Innovation is a key element for small venue production and this past performance was no exception. Without a curtain what do you do between scene changes? In "Six dance.......," the actors were shown short vignettes of the dance of the night on the back wall. Our attention was focused on their dance, not much bothered by the minimal moving of stage props.

Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT) You have got to show at least a little love for the iconic US senator who resembles a wispy, unkempt Einstein  -- who just last Thursday declared his candidacy for president! Within 24 hours, the Sanders campaign reportedly raised $1.5M, with a very modest average donation of $43.54. True, this was more than the late George Wallace's long ago claim to a $5 average, but politics has become more expensive.
     Senator Sanders is the first Democrat to challenge Hillary Clinton for the party's 2016 nomination. He promises to be controversial, unorthodox, and slightly contrarian, a self-declared Democratic-Socialist. His candidacy calls to mind Frank Sferra (a dear, deceased colleague). He and I agreed that had the late senator Barbara Jordan (D, TX) been able to run for the presidency, we would have taken a year's leave to work for her campaign. Frank would have loved Bernie and, who knows, I'm now retired. (Senator Jordan's health kept her out of the race.)

Sunday morning at Goodwill. After breakfasting at a favorite local eatery, we strolled across the street to my wife's "favorite" store in downtown Denver, the Goodwill store on (just barely) South Broadway. It is easy to see that the crowd is most definitely not "up-scale," just shoppers in search of a bargain, be it a good looking, near-new item of clothing or an appealing decorative nicknack for the wall or coffee table. There are always searchers in the medium-sized book and record/cd section. No one looks hurried or crazed, just people browsing for that something that catches their eye.

Thous shalt not...... Jeff Jacoby's opinion piece in the Boston Globe points out, as have others, that an increasing amount of social discourse is being rendered "off limits," so "politically incorrect" that discussion of many problems is effectively  strangled. The African American mayor of Baltimore was soundly castigated in multiple media outlets for referring to rioters in her city as "thugs." One critic, certainly not a linguist, immediately declared "thug" to be the new N-word. The mayor, of course, quickly backtracked with profuse apologies to all.
     What you do, not just say, can blow up in your face, too. In NYC, two well known hoteliers, long time supporters of gay rights, invited guests to a dinner and foreign policy discussion with Senator Ted Cruz, known to prefer traditional marriage. Result: they were roundly pilloried by the media, their hotels boycotted, and both ended up offering abject apologies for their collective poor judgment.
     He noted, "The ruthless determination not just to silence opposing points of view, but to humiliate and crush even allies willing to hear an opposing point of view, violates every liberal principle of tolerance, reason, and dialogue in the public sphere...Speech codes and 'trigger warnings' are deployed to enforce a spurious — but expanding — right not to be offended or disturbed." [emphasis added]
     Imagine what derision might have befallen the Founding Fathers as they first began to speak out against British policies! Good Lord, the king a tyrant? 

The Skoie Test. For those reading about the recent dust-up in Garland, TX, and the proliferating calls for "political correctness," it may be well to remember the past. In 1977, the National Socialist Party wanted to organize a pro-Nazi march in Skokie, IL, home to a large number of holocaust-survivors. The town passed ordinances effectively prohibiting the march. In the end, the Supreme Court overruled lower court injunctions prohibiting the march. There was no march: some 20 Nazi-marchers milled about, shouted down by hundreds of Skokie residents and friends. Free speech prevailed, but no one was listening to the hate speech of the local Nazi-followers.
     Ms. Geller's provocative anti-Islamic meeting in Garland would have amounted to little more than "preaching to the choir." It succeeded in provoking two misguided radical Islamists. They are now dead and she can move on. It should be noted that the Dutch far-right party suspended (expelled) its former leader and avid anti-Islamist, who was to be a featured speaker at the TX meeting.

Thanks for reading! Enjoy the week ahead.