Crony Capitalism

1739crony /220  words
Dec. 4. 2016

Crony Capitalism
A letter by
Harley L. Sachs

Donald Trump’s “saving” about 800  jobs at the Indianapolis Carrier plant from being exported to Mexico was a publicity stunt. He campaigned on a plan to stop exporting American jobs abroad, but in fact there were 2000 jobs in play at Carrier, not the 800. What about the rest? Bye-bye. Then, to sweeten the deal he got Carrier a seven million dollar tax break. The money “saved” for Carrier in fact will not go into the Indiana general fund.
Vice president elect Spense should be ashamed. As governor of Indiana, his deal with Carrier will deprive the state of needed tax income. What will it come out of? Schools? Infrastructure?
This is a typical Trump tactic: pay a bill with other people’s money and then take the credit. He did the same with casinos: borrowing money, then going bankrupt, selling at the loss of his creditors and making himself richer in the process. You can’t run a government that way. In one Southern state a Republican governor cut taxes and left office with the state bankrupt.
In the Carrier case the creditors who get stiffed will be Indiana taxpayers. Try floating a seven million bond issue for schools or roads to replace the Carrier giveaway. Lots of luck.

Here we Go Again

1737history/        

Here we go Again

A letter by

Harley L. Sachs

www.HarleySachs.com

Merkel’s government is going under to a right wing nationalist party. Why?

The new German political Party is anti-immigrant, why?

The immigrants are flooding Germany from Iraq and Syria. Why?

The Iraqis are fleeing a religious civil war; the Syrians are fleeing Assad’s regime. Why?

Iraq fell into a religious civil war because Bush and Cheney caused an invasion. Why?

The Iraq war was started because Shell and Cheney’s Haliburton lost their oil leases and contracts to Saddam.

The Syrian war started because Assad would not give his people a voice in government and declared them to be terrorists. So he destroyed his own country out of spite.

Merkel’s German government is about to go under. Italy will follow and maybe France. Britain is pulling out of the EU and Russia is threatening the Baltic States.

All because of oil rights.

Last time it was the assassination of a minor royal in Sarajevo which precipitated World War I, many millions of dead, and the redrawing of the map of Europe.

WW I ended with the treaty of Versailles which crippled the German economy, making way for Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist (NAZI) party. Then it was the Jews who were the scapegoats.

The new right wing German party will go after the Moslem immigrants.

Why don’t we ever learn?

Submission to New York Times magazine

LIVES

From Tent to Castle

Harley L. Sachs

www.HarleySachs.com

     She was a shop assistant with a German passport, working for a cooperative grocery in Stockholm and spoke no English. I was an American spy at the tail end of the GI Bill teaching English as a foreign language, two three months terms a year. In three years I had learned Swedish. When my number came up to be served I recognized the clerk’s accent. In the then formal Swedish way of addressing strangers in the third person, I asked, “Is the young lady Danish?”

She blushed. I was surprised. This was Sweden, after all, the land of unabashed free love. That this pretty shop assistant could blush was intriguing. I had to know more about her.

It was my job to size people up, judge their character, know them, if possible, inside and out. I immediately saw this girl, who turned out to be from North Germany but an ethnic Dane from South Schleswig, as someone special. She was, to my mind, like a bud of a rose. I saw potential. It would be exciting to see how she would blossom. I was determined to find out.

I set about to doggedly pursue her in my broke grad student fashion. The GI bill had run out. I was paid for my language classes only twice a year. I was not someone who wooed with a bunch of flowers, a bottle of wine and a dinner invitation. Instead, every day I stopped at the Konsum store, took a number, waited until she would be the next clerk to serve. I then bought a nickel chocolate bar. Every day.

 I learned her name was Ulla. 

The store crew figured it out, of course, and teased her. Ulla refused all invitations to a movie. It looked pretty hopeless, but I was determined.

While a company clerk in the US Army in Heidelberg I had learned from our cooks the secret of making pie crust. Swedish pastry selections did not include American apple pie.  I decided to bake a couple of pies and, since Ulla refused my invitations to a movie, to invite the whole Konsum crew upstairs for some real American apple pie, a pie party.

I baked the pies and waited. The agreed time came and went. I cut a pie and had my piece, alone.  Half an hour late Ulla showed up with one of the co-workers.

After that delayed success she decided I wasn’t such a dangerous person after all. We did go to the movies with her always insisting on paying her own way, a plus for a guy who lived on two pay checks a year. That was the beginning.

We did a shakedown trip, hitchhiking to Norway and sleeping rough in a small tent, cooking over a Loma gasoline stove and getting to know each other. This was no American girl who could not live without a hot shower every day, stay in hotels and eat in nice restaurants. This was a girl who had lived through World War II in North Germany on a diet of boiled milk and potatoes in a house with no running water or plumbing. Ulla had pumped water and boiled laundry in a cauldron over a brown coal fire. She could rough it without complaint.

We were married the next year. My American and Swedish friends thought us an odd couple: a Jewish American with a graduate degree whose Polish family had been murdered and a German girl with a Lutheran background who spoke no English and whose brother had died at Stalingrad. We had a lot of points against us and we knew it.

On our honeymoon we left Stockholm on rebuilt one speed bicycles, calendar and itinerary open. Ulla had no money and I had my stash of the three thousand dollars I had put away during my three years as a contract agent. It wasn’t as crazy as it looked, for if we did go broke and get stranded I knew (but Ulla didn’t) the government would pay our fares to the United States. That failing, I had hopes of an assignment in Denmark.

We still had the language problem. We had fallen in love in Swedish and for Ulla’s father’s sake, married in German at the Stockholm synagogue after her conversion. Snubbed my my English relatives who saw Ulla as a despicable German even though she saw herself as Danish, she swore not to leave England until she learned the language.

After fifty-two days of rain in the tent in England and Scotland, we advertised for a winter layover and, because I’m an author, were offered the gatehouse of Borthwick Castle for the winter. While I wrote a bad novel in the dungeon Ulla was upstairs teaching herself English, her fifth language.

This is no Pygmalian story, for I am not her Professor Higgins or Svengali. I am her loving, devoted observer, still enchanted by that remarkable girl who once blushed in the Konsum grocery. store. We have been married fifty-six years.   

Our story, “From Tent to Castle: Memoir of a Year Long Honeymoon” is available through Amazon.com.

Write Your Story

1734tell-your-story/494 words

2545 SW Terwilliger Apt. 328

Portland, OR 97201

Tell Your Story

Harley L. Sachs

www.HardleySachs.com

“Everybody has a story.” That’s the word from Harley L Sachs, long time resident at Terwilliger Plaza in Portland. “If you don’t tell yours, nobody else will be able to.” Sachs has written his own biography in three hefty volumes and is in the process of incorporating old photographs into volume one. He used to teach memoir writing for Oasis at Meier and Frank, now Macy’s, and now is a co-leader of the Author’s Circle at the Terwilliger Plaza retirement center.

“It helps if you keep a diary or a journal,” Sachs says. He began his when he was fourteen years old and writes in it every day. “Memory is unreliable,” he says. “For instance, my bride and I set off on old bicycles from Sweden in 1960. Looking back I thought we had a kitty of $5000. When I went back to the old diary, I found that we’d had only $3000, yet we had a year long honeymoon in a Scottish castle outside Edinburgh.

“From Tent to Castle, Memoir of a Year Long Honeymoon” is just one of the adventures Sachs has written about. In the thirty years since his retirement from Michigan Technological University he has published more than one book a year.

“My rhythm is to write a novel in 90 days, writing every morning. I realize that, like Charles Dickens, some of my books are based on current social issues. Dickens wrote “Bleak House” about lawyers. I wrote “Stoprape,com” about rape in the military, “White Slave” about slaves aboard Pacific fishing boats, “”The Accidental Courier” about rare earths mined by slaves in Africa, “Dead Men Don’t Bleed” about the difficulties of being transgender in Portland, and most recently “The Seventh Paradigm” about the abuse of metadata, your loss of privacy to computer marketing systems.” His next project? Something about sex trafficking in a Portland shopping mall.

Sachs reveals that writing, for him, is therapy and escape, for Ulla, his wife of 56 years, is paralyzed by a stroke and in expensive 24 hour care. “Writing a book takes up your mind and blots out the troubles around you,” he says. “When you retire, you have to have something to do. For me, that’s writing books. At least I have something to show for it besides some old golf scores.”

Sachs was a freelance writer from 1957, writing trade magazine articles while living in Europe. When he and Ulla settled down to raising their three daughters, he shifted to newspaper columns. He did not publish a book until after he took early retirement. He now has 43 titles available at Amazon. He now reads his published short stories at Portland retirement centers.

“When you die, your memory dies with you,” Sachs, now 85 and in poor health,  says. “For the sake of your grandchildren and history, write your story before it’s too  late.” 

What is Capitalism?

What is Capitalism?

A column by

Harley L. Sachs

We do not have pure capitalism in this country. In reality, the United States is a mixed economy, part free enterprise capitalism and part socialism. Those who laud capitalism as the ideal state, like nirvana, consider:

In a pure state of capitalism there would be no taxes and no public services. All government does is spend tax money. If we do away with all taxes for pure capitalism, all entitlements would be done away with. That is: no social security, no medicare, no medicaid, no public k-12 schools, no tax supported universities. Everything would be privatized.

 As in some communities, there would be no tax supported fire departments. Firemen would be volunteers, and the fire equipment would be paid for by dues assessments or contributions. If you didn’t contribute to the fire fund and your house caught fire, they would let it burn down. It has happened.

Some Republicans would shut down he Department of Education, thereby doing away with Pell grants. With all k-12 schools privatized, every parent would have to pay the roughly $5000 a year costs per student. If you had four kids, that would be 20k a year If you couldn’t afford to send all your kids to school, you would have to choose which would get an education and which would not. Since as many as 50% of kids never graduate, that’s not such a problem. We are becoming a nation of high school dropouts.

       With no government to spend non-existent taxes, there would be no regulatory agencies. No minimum wage. No environmental protection. No Army, Navy, or Air Force. With free rein, a capitalist employer need not offer any benefits at all, fire people at will (as they do now), and with no minimum wage, pay a dollar a day. No health insurance, no workmen’s compensation, no unemployment insurance, no pension benefits, no paid holidays, no maternity leave. (Read WalMart) With no child labor laws you could put eight year olds back in the mines for twelve hour six day a week jobs at a dollar a day. Ah, those were the good old days. They still do it in Turkey, hiring children in sweat shops.

What about infrastructure? Sell the roads and bridges and privatize everything. Why not? Indiana sold the toll road to a foreign company. Want to make some money? Buy a bridge and charge a toll. Buy the road in front of your house and charge a toll. Only a socialist would want free use of a road. Parasites.

As for the army, well, not having any tax  income, the country could not afford to invade a foreign country like Iraq. Drones and jet fighters are expensive. Who would join the military as a volunteer for no pay?

As for police, if you need security, hire a body guard.

Without the Affordable Care Act, Medicare, and Medicaid we could revert to the old method: let the poor, sick and old die. That’s what they do: they die. Ayn Rand lives.

So you don’t like taxes, like Mr. Trump who pays as little as possible? Go for unbridled capitalism. But be careful what you wish for. 

Start, Adam!--a short story

1731startAdam/1140 words

March 24, 2016

Start, Adam!

A short story by

Harley L. Sachs

My niece Steffi used to drive a Coronado convertible that talked. It used to say things like “A door is ajar” or “A tire is low,” and even reminded you to get gas. When I bought my Honda accord, instead of voice commands like on the Coronado, the voice remarks were replaced by little lights on the dash and a peeping sound if I forgot to take out the ignition key or turn off the headlights.

Then my car insurance company insisted on having a monitor installed to track my driving habits. I discovered that they raised the rates because I had driven thirty-three miles an hour in a thirty mile zone and ran an intersection on the yellow. That was the last straw.

My doctor diagnosed a Parkinson’s tremble in my wrists and my eyes have cataracts, so what I needed, and what is now available, is a self-driving car so I can get around. If the self driving car goes thirty-three in a thirty mile zone it’s the car’s fault, not mine.

A self drive car is the latest of the latest. I can call the car on my cell phone and it drives itself up to the door to pick me up and take me wherever I need to go. No more fear of running a red light or missing a stop sign or even speeding twenty-five in a twenty mile zone. Perfect, I thought.

We often name our tools and machines. My grandfather’s Ford was called Lizzy and my father’s computer was called Earnest because he was a Hemingway fan. My self-drive car is Adam. I don’t even need an ignition key, because Adam is programmed to respond to the sound of only my own voice. No one else can use Adam.When I approach it I say “Open, Adam and the passenger door pops open. I get in, sit down, and say “Adam, start.” The electric motor make a little sound and Adam says “Where to you want to go, Harley?”

 That’s my name, Harley. Me and my car are on a first name basis.

This is the ultimate integration of man and machine, or machine and man, whichever way you want to look at it. We are more closely attuned to one another than a cowboy who spends all day in the saddle of his horse. We understand each other, or rather, Adam understands me.

They call it AI, or artificial intelligence. Adam is learning all the time. The first day we were out for a test drive, a dog ran out into the street right in front of Adam. I thought I’d have a heart attack. Driving is complicated and dangerous. Millions of situations can come up that are not in the book. Ah, but according to the user’s manual, all the self-drive cars are learning from each other.

 When a new situation is encountered by one of them, they all learn it.  I knew the sensors looked out for stop signs and the GPS kept track of the speed zones  and intersections, but I didn’t think they were programmed for encounters with, say, a dog in the street or a little kid’s ball—generally followed by a child who runs into the traffic. By golly, they were! Before I could yell, “Adam stop!” Adam stopped and didn’t hit the dog. It was amazing. My own reflexes are too slow. I would have hit the dog. Not Adam.

Adam is one smart car.

This morning I was so eager to get out I hadn’t had breakfast, so I told Adam, “Adam take me to the nearest MacDonald’s.” Off we went.

Adam pulled up at the drive by window and stopped so I could place my order. If you aren’t chipped with and under skin debit ID tag, you have to put your card in the slot and tell them your order. . I was hungry. I ordered a milk shake. and a super size Big Mac with fries

A little bell rang and the voice at the window said “I recommend coffee and an egg McMuffin.”

“But I want a super size meal with extra fries.”

The voice out of the window took on a patronizing tone. “Harley, a super size meal is too many calories, fat, and salt for your diet. Your doctor recommends no more than coffee and an egg McMuffin.”

I didn’t expect an argument. I know my name is programmed into my credit card, so it’s no surprise that the McDonald’s window knows who I am, but I didn’t expect it would also know my medical history. It’s all there, of course, for my protection.

 If I do have a medical emergency, the EMTs will find out right away what to look for and have my whole past medical history right there. I just didn’t think the McDonald’s drive up window would notice or even care. My diet is none of their business. Their business is to sell fast foods, isn’t it? Not to be watch dog over my diet.

I get it. There’s was such a cry about obesity that the restaurants were afraid of litigation. Too much fat and salt in customer’s diets and the industry could be sued. Can’t be too careful.

I sat there a minute trying not to lose my temper. Finally I said, “Forget it. Adam, take me to Taco Bell.”

As we pulled away I thought I heard the McDonald’s window exclaim,” Taco Bell! Ugh.”

At Taco Bell, it was more of the same. The only order they would accept was decaf coffee and a breakfast burrito. No fries. I may have to go back to home made toast, with jam, no butter, and a small glass of fat free milk.

I settled for the decaf and the burrito but the coffee was too hot. It’s not a good thing to gulp hot coffee.  Started to choke and cough and my voice was, well, not my own. Adam didn’t recognize me.

“Are you OK, Harley?”

I was still rasping and coughing.

There was a pause and I heard the electric motor start up. Adam said, “Hospital.”

I protested. “No hospital. I just need to catch my breath.”

“Hospital.”

“Godammit, Adam, I don’t need a hospital. Just take me home.” I think I added an expletive.

Adam is not programmed for expletives.

“Watch your language.”

“Don’t give me an argument Adam. I’m OK. Just take me home.”

Didn’t help. Adam drove up to the emergency room and would not open the door until the EMTs came to get me out. Of course, they couldn’t get Adam to open the door. It's programmed for my voice.

I called the self-drive dealer and asked for a technician. It’s a busy day. It may take a couple of hours. In the meantime, “HELP!” 

Chipped

1730chipped/ 1410 words

Jan. 30, 2016

Chipped

A short story

My troubles began when I inherited money from my aunt. Suddenly it was possible for me to replace my aging Ford with the latest model of a Lexus hybrid. It had everything, including back-up video what showed what was behind me when I shifted into reverse, a self-parking feature, and GPS.

The World Wide insurance company would give me a special rate if I let them use the built-in GPS to monitor my driving habits. I guess we all think we are better than average drivers, just as we think we are middle class, but aren’t. The Lexus had used up most of my aunt’s money, so I agreed. Anything that saves a little money is good when you are a so-called adjunct instructor.

Adjunct instructor means no benefits and being paid on a piecework basis like someone in a textile sweatshop, paid per button hole. To survive I teach courses in five local colleges, rushing from one to another, a course here, another there, but generally the same thing: what they used to call remedial or bonehead English for kids who think they are college material but read and write at the sixth grade level. Tenure? Forget about it. Tenure went out with the Reagan budget cuts for the department of education.

Even so, I can see that even being a gypsy instructor of bonehead English is a fading profession, if you could call it that. They are developing an on line do it at home on your own time English course. Kids write their homework assignments on screen, send them to the cloud professor which not only checks for grammar and spelling but compares what they write with everything else everyone else writes. Big daddy in the cloud knows.  One instance of plagiarism and you lose your tuition deposit. No appeals. No second chances. Sucker. When Big Daddy in the Cloud kicked in, how would I find work at all?

In the meantime I was really enjoying the Lexus, zipping smoothly from campus to campus and burning hardly any gas even though gasoline has dropped below a buck a gallon. Ah, technology!

Then at the end of the first month I got a bill. According to my GPS driving record, World Insurance said I had been speeding, forty-one in a thirty mile zone. I was just keeping up with the traffic. Nobody drives thirty in a thirty mile zone, or fifty-five on the freeway. If you don’t keep up, you may be rear ended or cause an accident when someone cuts around you to pass. Maybe when the self-driving cars come out with sensors that evaluate all the traffic around you keeping up with the traffic may be a valid excuse for speeding. Not yet.

So World Insurance jacked up my special bargain rate. Seems I had also rolled slowly through stop signs without actually coming to a dead stop. More points off. Considering all the mistakes or violations I had allegedly made, I would not have passed a driving test. I told them I wanted to cancel the insurance and disconnect the GPS spy, but  there was something sinister in the fine print of the policy. No cancellations permitted, no refunds. Only World Insurance could release me, but they would not. I was stuck. But that wasn’t all.

Those rats at World Insurance turned over my driving records to all the little towns where I was teaching: Beaverton, Forest Grove, Gresham… even Sandy where I had made a wrong turn. They all gave me tickets.

They weren’t cheap. Imagine $185 for not coming to a complete, dead stop. I had even been ticketed for going through an intersection on a yellow. The light had changed from green just as I entered the intersection. Too bad, Charlie. Another two hundred bucks. All because I was ratted out by my GPS!

If I didn’t pay, what then?

Thanks to the GPS, the traffic tickers for one month were more than I was making as an adjunct. I decided to park the car and take public transportation, but it was too late. I had missed paying the ticket in Sandy and would you believe? They gave me thirty days in jail. That hit me during school vacation, so I didn’t lose my jobs.

 My cell mate  wasn’t Bubbe the sodomist, just a dead beat who hadn’t paid child support. The jail wasn’t as bad as they put it in crime novels, and I figured at least I was saving on my grocery bill. Then I found out I had to pay motel rates for room and board for my time in the jail.  I was given two years probation after my release, but I had to pay the salary of the PO, the Parole Officer, plus administrative costs. If I didn’t pay? I shudder to think about it.

The kicker was, when I was released, a condition was that I was to be chipped. In the old days someone on parole or probation might have a GPS ankle bracelet. Ah, but one felon had taken off his bracelet and put it on his dog. He let the dog go in Forest Park and then laughed when the cops went nuts trying to locate him, except it was the dog. Back in the slammer, as they call it. An imbedded chip solved that problem.

What I didn’t know, but found out, was that the tiny chip under the skin of my right wrist wasn’t just a locator.  Besides being a built in GPS, it was loaded with my medical records and bank account.

The technician who inserted it, which wasn’t more painful than a flu shot, was proud. “You don’t have to worry about paying those traffic fines any more,” he said, like he had just invented the light bulb. “They are automatically deducted from your bank account. And you hardly need cash or a  credit card anymore. Just pass your wrist under the reader at the checkout and the bill is withdrawn from our account. Nobody can steal your identity.”

Not that anybody would want to steal mine, a known jail bird.. “What if they cut off my arm and use it for the embedded ID?”

That got him. “Maybe we should have the chip under the skin of your scalp. Then they’d have to chop off your head. At that point, the chip would report that you were dead and your accounts would be closed”

“Lucky me.”

I left the Sandy jail a free man. When I flagged down the bus back to Gresham  I just passed my wrist under the reader and the fare was deducted from my account, not that there was much left in it. Same on the Max in Gresham.

They’ve taken away all the ticket machines and ATMs. Nobody needs cash any more. I don’t need to carry my ID in a wallet someone might steal.

Just as I feared, bonehead English is being replaced by Professor Cloud. I am not even an adjunct any more. I sold the Lexus, the only way I could get out of the World Insurance contract. As an unemployed person, my SNAP food allotment is remotely programmed into my chip. The reader at Fred Meyer grocery just deducts what I have spent. I no longer have to show a picture ID anywhere. I am the ID.

I’m a free man. Of course, it is illusory. The International Metadata megabase knows where I am all the time, what I eat, where I go, what I read at the library. Everything.

I  have one surviving old high school buddy, Fred.. He lives in Cuba now.  He sent me a letter, a real letter. It was in one of those envelopes of something synthetic you can’t even tear, and sealed so you can’t open it without destroying it. His letter was sandwiched in aluminum foil. It’s tamper proof.

Fred said he had his chip surgically removed and embedded in a fish. So far as NSA and the government watchers are concerned, he’s swimming somewhere in the south Atlantic. Fred says he doesn’t phone, text, email, or use a computer. He doesn’t have a phone.  Hand written snail mail letters are the last secure means of communication.

Fred says he is getting used to a diet of rice and beans. Cuba needs English teachers The rum is good, the music great,  and the girls willing. I think I’ll join him. 

C hange One Word of fhe 2nd Amendment

1730toarms!/209 words

January 7, 2016

Change One Word

A letter by

Harley L. Sachs

Everyone knows the Second Amendment, the right to keep and bear arms. What if we change one word? Change “right” to “Responsibility” and what do you get? You get every citizen required to be armed.

There is precedent for this. In Israel every citizen, with some exceptions, male and female, is required to serve in the IDF. In Switzerland every able-bodied male must serve in the Home Guard and keep his rifle at home with ammunition. When I registered for the draft I had to carry my registration card at all times.

Of course, we cannot have sexual discrimination in the USA, so every eighteen year old, male or female citizen would have to register for the militia as provided for in the second amendment.

Result: every able-bodied male or female US citizen at eighteen would be issued an assault rifle, and trained to use it. I wonder how the NRA and gun lovers will feel when every Afro-American, every Hispanic, every Muslim citizen of the United State would be required to be in the militia and issued an assault rifle. The gun makers will get richer and the NRA will be pleased. With an armed militia, no terrorist would dare attack.

It’s only one word to change.