​Marketing
The old adage says "build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door." It is a bedrock myth of capitalism, but many superior products are not successful and an inordinate number of mediocre or even bad products are best sellers. And then there is the phenomenon of products that seem to explode on the market.
 
Consider the pomegranate. A decade ago pomegranates were an obscure fruit that you occasionally encountered in a little corner of the produce section. It wasn't clear what you should do with it and when you cut it open it had all those red pulpy seeds to deal with. So the poor pomegranate mostly languished in the US. Then suddenly came the great pomegranate explosion. Now, capitalism would have us believe that this occurred through the invisible hand of the market and the "law" of supply and demand. So apparently millions of us woke up one morning and had to have pomegranate juice for breakfast and pomegranate shampoo and pomegranate infused everything. That invisible hand has quite a sense of humor.
 
Kale, apparently taking a page from the pomegranate folks, has seen a similar trajectory. I don't recall suddenly having a hankering for kale but there it is in my salad. At more than one dinner gathering I see roasted kale regularly among the snacks and hors d'oeuvres. A restaurant is offering a kale Caesar salad. Romaine is dead apparently. Kale is a lovely dark green but when roasted it has the texture of crumpled up newspaper. Not the attribute that what you might expect in a trendy food.
 
An historical perspective might be instructive. My wife's book group recently read a book called "Jell-O Girls" and mounted an expedition to the Jell-O Museum (now you know where all those Thanksgiving Jell-O molds her grandmother used ended up). Pearle Bixby Wait trademarked Jell-O in 1897 but sales languished. The brand was sold to Orator Francis Woodward, who devised a marketing strategy that sent armies of salesmen (ah, the good old days when men were not afraid to be selling Jell-O) door to door giving out Jell-O and cookbooks. They then went to local grocery stores and told them to expect a lot of folks to be asking for Jell-O so they better order some. Woodward coupled this with ads in magazines like the "Ladies Home Journal" and the rest is history. Jell-O became a great success and made the Woodward family very rich.
 
So it seems the key to success is not a better mousetrap or dessert but a better marketing plan. For both the pomegranate and kale the sudden upsurge in these products was accompanied by numerous articles about their health benefits, calling them superfoods and touting their virtues. Interesting that despite this sudden increase in demand there was never a shortage of pomegranates or kale. Now kale I can understand - it grows quickly, like lettuce, so you plant more to meet demand, but pomegranates? It takes at least 2-3 years for a pomegranate tree to even begin to produce fruit, so it would seem that someone had planned ahead and was expecting the surge in demand. All part of a good marketing plan.
 
But marketing does not just bring to our attention little-known products, it goes further and creates markets for products that do not exist. Think of the waffle machine that graces the breakfast counter at nearly every mid-level hotel and motel. First, enterprising hotel chains decided the way to get more customers than their competitors down the road was to offer a "free" breakfast. I put that in quotes because of course the breakfast is not free, it is paid for in your room charge. In fact, the breakfast is not only not free but you may actually be subsidizing other guests. I realized this as I was sitting and eating yogurt and a banana while a group at the next table was making their third trip for bacon and eggs and waffles. It all has to be paid for, and so those who eat less help pay for those who eat more. I'd like it better if what I didn't eat went to hungry kids.
 
But I digress. In the beginning of the free breakfast competition the food was mostly cereal and stale pastries. Enter the marketing genius with the self-service waffle machine. With the addition of this simple, low-maintenance machine hotels could (and did) advertise HOT breakfast and the rest, as they say, is history.
 
Good marketing is much more important and powerful than a good product. Remember telephones? I mean real telephones connected to what are now disparagingly called land lines. You picked up the receiver and talked to someone and, get this, they could hear you clearly with no missing words or static. Enter the cell phone. For years the words most often spoken on a cell phone were "Can you hear me? Can you hear me now?" These were phones with incredibly bad service - you often could not hear the person you were calling, there were (and are) frequent dead spots and even today the normal quality pales in comparison to a phone on a land line. This either demonstrates the power of marketing or the stupidity of the consumer - you decide.
 
Speaking of the dubious intelligence of us consumers and the power of marketing, think about the rise of Starbucks. By creating a mythology around an existing common product, using exotic names for small, medium and large, and renaming counter staff baristas they were able to triple the price of coffee. Others jumped on the bandwagon in one form or another. For example, Keurig essentially reinvented instant coffee compliments of a hundred-dollar machine instead of a teaspoon stirring in a cup. Marketing genius indeed.
 
And I cannot close without noting that what marketing has done for so many products of dubious quality  it has also done for politics. Every candidate must be the new and improved version, with a beguiling back story, product endorsements and placements, a book for sale and, if at all possible, be a TV star or other celebrity. And, as with the cell phone, we consumers seem more than willing to buy one. 
 
So instead of building a better mousetrap build a better consumer trap.  It could make you rich.
 

​Freedom by Another Name
 
The Tasmanian novelist Richard Flanagan wrote " A happy man has no past, an unhappy one nothing else."  A nice turn of a phrase; there is something to it, I'd allow.  But I would suggest a different take.  A poor man has no future while a rich one buys both the past and the future he wants.  Money can do that.  It can allow a person to reinvent their past, retrospectively making them popular in high school, turning them into war heroes, giving them previously missing friends and lovers, and converting mean-spirited greed into the braggadocio of business gurus.  And, of course, it gives the person the means to buy the future they choose, or at least the material aspects of it.
 
A meaningful future means being able to chose a path that the person desires.  This ability to chose is freedom.  The poor have limited choices while people of economic, political and social means get to chose - the best school for their children, a place to live that has little crime or pollution, a prestigious college, a career with a future, not a dead-end job, and activities such as golf or tennis that provide social and political connections.  As Seneca, the Roman Stoic philosopher, is reported to have said, "You are your choices." But you are just as surely the choices that are available to you.  If you cannot avail yourself of them, they are not choices at all.
 
It has always been thus.  Slaves had no choices; they did only what they were told; all choices were made for them.  Since emancipation there has been a steady widening of choices for African Americans but it has happened painfully slowly, with institutional constraints at every turn, from Jim Crow to mass incarceration, from segregated schools to defacto, if not dejure, segregated neighborhoods.
 
The path for women was perhaps not as onerous but was still slow and laborious.  Historically women were legally considered the chattel of their husbands; one of his possessions. Any property she might hold before her marriage became her husband's on her wedding day; she had no legal right to appear in court, to sign contracts or to do business.  And, of course, she could not vote.  After two centuries of incremental improvement women still have fewer choices than men - they are paid less for the same work, have less access to top level jobs, are underrepresented in political office and do not have complete legal control over their own bodies, usually as a result of decisions made by male-dominated organizations.  Woman still have fewer choices. Freedom still alludes them.
 
The situation for gays and lesbians is particularly interesting.  After being hidden and often reviled, with little or no discernable change for virtually forever, amazing progress has occurred in a very short period of time.  The freedom to chose marriage seemed well out of reach just a decade ago and now it is happening everywhere.  How did this happen so fast?  Probably because activists in this community cleverly turned what had been seen as a social issue into a civil rights cause.  Americans responded to the appeal to simple fairness and to the plight of the underdog. But just as important was the fact that many of the individuals in this group were not poor, were white, and had the means and connections that provided the power to effect change. 
 
But it is not just groups of people who are seen as "different" or "outsiders" whose choices are limited, it is everyone without means.  If you are poor, and increasingly even if middle class, you may not be legally prohibited from buying a house in a desirable neighborhood, but without money the effect is the same.  So you are likely to be stuck in a neighborhood with higher crime, more pollution and poorer schools, regardless of what choice you would like to make.  Fewer choices equals less freedom.
 
Money and power are inexorably entwined.  Money buys power and power begets money.  For many of those with power it is not sufficient that they have more choices and more freedom; they are intent on others having less.  Much of that power is directed at limiting the choices of people of lesser means and power.  This need manifests itself on many fronts.  Take abortion as an example. One could perhaps understand a moral aversion to the practice.  But if that was the case such people would be leading the efforts for sex education, family planning and the universal availability of every conceivable type of contraception.  Instead, what we see is a concerted effort to prohibit access to women’s health care and to suppress their ability to make their own choices.
 
Choice is privilege.  The more choices a person has available to them typically the more privileged they are, and the more freedom they not only have, but importantly, can exercise.
 
The country is in the midst of a great struggle, perhaps the greatest since the Civil War, and choice is fundamental to that struggle.  It is between the privileged, predominately white males, and the "others" - people of color, people of lesser means, people who are different.  Much as the Civil War was started by the southern elites - plantation slave owners - this struggle has been undertaken by the current elite of white people in positions of power in government, business, and the media. 
 
This war is being waged on many fronts: On voters, using voter suppression, gerrymandering, reductions in polling places and times, to reduce participation among non-elites; on workers by destroying unions, driving pay to starvation levels (try living on a minimum wage job, or two or three), outsourcing to minimize those getting benefits, doing away with defined benefit pension plans and creative use of bankruptcy; on students, by privatizing schools, vilifying teachers and minimizing their pay, raising tuition and fees, charging exorbitant interest on student loans and the establishment of a network of private schools and tutoring; on values, by the substitution of money for virtue, integrity and morality by the religions of prosperity, the capitulation of campaign financing to the ultra-wealthy, the maximization of shareholder value at the expense of society, the environment and ultimately our democracy and our future. Each of these efforts limit choices for groups of people and thereby reduce their freedom.
 
Be not distracted by tweets and outrageous gibberish. It is on these battlefields that freedom, choice and equality will be determined.  As Florence Reece famously asked in her song, "Which Side Are You On?' 
 

Eternity
 
At some point most people wonder what, if anything, comes after death. Is there another world, another existence? Do we have a soul or some sort of essence that remains? Entire religions are constructed around these issues with often similar conclusions. It is interesting that we are concerned about, and endlessly speculate about, worry about, what comes after death, but do not have the same interest or concern about what comes before birth. They are obviously the opposite ends of the same phenomenon, which is non-existence, oblivion. Life is just this brief interlude between the coming and the going, birth and death. Eternity, if it exists, must extend in both directions.
 
But what is eternity? Isn't it another word for infinity? And what is infinity? We tend to think of it as something that goes on forever. But to be truly infinite it has to not only go on forever but to have come from forever; it must always have existed. If that is the case, and if some essence of each person is eternal, doesn't it follow that each person must have always existed? If so, then each birth is just the entry of that individual into our conscience, observable world. We have always existed somewhere and we just happen to be here now. Later, upon our death, we will be somewhere else.
 
Probably the reason that we don't think this way has to do with the advance of medical knowledge. Before humans understood that sex begot pregnancy and babies the subject of female fertility was shrouded in mystery, myth and belief of many stripes. Gods were invoked, prayed to and damned as children were hoped for, conceived, born or lost. Rituals and superstitions were created around the process. When humans can not explain something we fall back on beliefs. That is how it has always been and still is today with death.
 
Birth, on the other hand, has been explained. Sex: sperm meets egg, pregnancy, birth, life. We now understand in precise detail, and in fact are able to replicate in the lab, where we come from, from the moment of conception. We no longer have to rely on myths or beliefs. Even the most committed right to lifers don't (yet) argue that life begins before conception (OK, there is the joke that life begins at erection but that may just be from guys with exalted egos) but if we are eternal, if our existence is infinite, doesn't it require that we existed in some form before our birth? How can we so easily jettison our existence on one side of the spectrum but so vehemently cling to it on the other? This illustrates humans’ capacity for inconsistency and our ability to hold contradictory opinions simultaneously without much effort.
 
Atheists tend to deny that there is any existence after death, while many religions contend there is. Before medical science explained the process of conception and birth there were also competing beliefs about that process. So, will science provide an answer about what happens after death? It is much harder to prove that something does not exist than that something does. Also the situation to be addressed is not parallel. Science only explains what happens prior to birth back to the point of conception. It does not nor has
it ever been asked to explain the potential for existence prior to conception. With death, however, there is no known equivalent to conception. Medical science can define death in various ways but not what comes after. And the timeframe for what might come after is, well, infinite, so it probably can never be satisfactorily explained for all time.
 
However, another branch of science may provide some clues.  One of the bedrock principles of physics is the theory of relativity with its famous equation E = mc2.  That equation tells us that "energy equals mass times the speed of light squared." meaning that energy (E) and mass (m) are interchangeable; they are different forms of the same thing.  Nothing is ever gained or lost but only changes form.  Our physical self's, our bodies, are mass and it is energy that animates us.  We consume food for fuel and burn that to produce energy and mass.  The mass is our bodies getting bigger as when children grow and adults gain weight.  At death we return that mass to energy through incineration (cremation) or decomposition (burial). In the state of Washington bodies can now be composted making literal the phrase "pushing up daisies".  If indeed the essence of people is eternal, then prior to bodies having mass, before birth, they would exist as energy or other forms of mass like those daisies. So the next time you pick daisies you might be gathering a future human in your hand.​
 
 
 
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Equal pay for equal work is an issue discussed almost exclusively related to the pay for women vs. men in the same job. That makes sense given the long history of discrimination against women in compensation, employment and educational opportunities. Despite improvements in recent years the problems continue, to the detriment of women and our society.  

However, there is another perhaps even more fundamental aspect of "equal pay." That is the relative compensation level of different jobs. Specifically, how they are valued and who establishes the relative pay levels.  
Consider a small thought experiment. Assume you were looking for a job and the following positions were available. Assume you are well qualified for each of these jobs and they were offered to you. Which would you chose?
Job                                                       Salary*
Refuse/Recyclable Collector            $38,920
Airline Pilot                                         $161,280
Farm worker                                        $27,840
Librarian                                              $28,170
Wall Street worker                            $422,500
Child Care Worker                              $23,760
Fine Artist                                            $57,520
* Salaries from US Dept. of Labor database
 
I am willing to wager that not many of you selected Refuse Collector or Farm Worker. I'll also bet that even those who thought that being a librarian would be a good job were put off by the low salary.
So do the experiment again but this time with a change in the salaries.
 Job                                                      Salary*
Refuse/Recyclable Collector            $59,055
Airline Pilot                                         $59,055
Farm worker                                       $59,055
Librarian                                              $59,055
Wall Street worker                            $59,055
Child Care worker                             $59,055
Fine Artist                                           $59,055
* Average US salary from US Dept. of Labor
 
Did your selection change when all the jobs pay the same? Did this new equality have a liberating effect? Did you decide to be an artist or to care for children once salary was not a factor?  

All this is a way of asking, why do different jobs pay what they do and who decided those relative compensation levels? Capitalists, especially economists, would tell us that the "invisible hand" of the market determines prices for goods and wage levels. If that were true one would expect that the least desirable jobs would be the hardest to fill and therefore would pay the most. Therefore, working in a farm field in the burning sun would pay much more that sitting in a comfortable office on Wall Street. Perhaps the invisible hand is not so invisible and has strings attached to it. 

Wages are not established by simple supply and demand but by power. It is not a coincidence that jobs that are most likely filled by the traditionally disenfranchised usually have low wages. Jobs historically seen as "women's" work or for minorities, such as child care or librarian or farm worker have the lowest wages. The fact is that low wage jobs correlate with disenfranchised groups, including women, Blacks, and immigrants. It’s about power. 

Why do we accept as "normal" that the hardest jobs pay the least? There is a long cultural and political history that has acclimated us to this situation. For many centuries there was some elite and powerful group that ran things while most of the people were peasants or serfs or slaves, and there often was little to distinguish those categories. Most people were tied to the land and were completely under the control of a lord of one kind or another - political, religious or military. People were not free to move to the next fiefdom to get a better deal. They labored, were flogged and lived at the whim of the lord and master.  

In Europe it was the rise of first the age of exploration and exploitation and later the industrial revolution that gave rise to a meaningful middle class of traders and merchants, creating a group with independence, increasing wealth and power. While many prospered, they continued the system within their new "capitalist" domain. They used the cheapest labor possible, including slavery whenever feasible, to maximize their profits. They normalized the exploitation of workers in the new commercial realm, continuing the tradition that the least desirable work received the least compensation.  

The entire history of labor has been that the powerful pay as low wages as possible. The only break from this was the rise of unions, which were instrumental in creating blue collar jobs that paid middle class wages. Workers fought and died in strikes and were killed by owner wars in mines, railroads, mills and fields to gain living wages and safer working conditions. It was unions that got child labor outlawed, an eight-hour work day, and most other workplace improvements.  

But union membership has plummeted in one of the most successful anti-worker campaigns imaginable. As a result, workers’ wages have been stagnant while incomes for the already wealthy have soared. As the Pew Research Center reported " today’s real average wage (that is, the wage after accounting for inflation) has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago. And what wage gains there have been have mostly flowed to the highest-paid tier of workers."  

Economists profess to be perplexed that despite low unemployment wage growth has continued to be negligible. They obviously have not been paying attention to the successful campaign to eliminate most worker bargaining power. Today only about 10% of private sector workers are unionized. This has been coupled with actions including right to work laws (also known as a right to poverty), no poaching agreements, elimination of class action lawsuits through forced arbitration and legislation, removal of the check off provision to fund unions, and the use of temps, contractors and undocumented workers to assure employees have no clout and work in fear of losing their jobs. In most industries workers have little say or leverage over their wages. Executives remind us that they have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize returns for stockholders. Having no moral or societal responsibility means that they can pay workers as little as possible. In face of this onslaught it is no surprise that wages are stagnant.  

Perhaps we should use the free market that economists and capitalists are so fond of lecturing us about to address this situation. Wages for jobs should be determined by a reverse auction, meaning that the low bid is the "winner." For many low paying jobs that is in effect what is happening already but let’s do it for all jobs, starting with CEO's and bankers.  

The CEO of Wal-Mart was paid more than $28 million in 2018. I would bid to do that job for $10 million as long as I get to keep the corporate jet. Would you do it for $6 million? Maybe someone else would do it for $250,000. Remember those Wall Street workers noted above making a half million a year? I bet someone would do that job for $100,000, maybe less.  

Now I know some will immediately say what about the qualifications needed for these elite positions? Research has consistently shown unmanaged index funds outperform virtually every stock market trader and fund over five or more years. And CEO's? Studies indicate that in ninety percent of the cases CEO's have virtually no impact on company profits or stock performance. The general economy drives most business success or failure. Truth is that pretty much anyone is "qualified" to do these jobs. Let the bidding begin.
 
What about those less desirable jobs like farm worker or garbage collector. With many more desirable jobs available for everyone to bid on these jobs will see fewer applications/bidders and they can bid higher pay rates.  
​
Utilizing these market forces will foster much greater income equality. Those once elite positions reserved for Harvard and MIT grads will now be available to a much larger pool of candidates, driving pay down, while formally low wage jobs will have substantially higher pay resulting in much greater income equality. Income equality fosters political equality and political equality is the basis for viable democracies. What am I bid for real democracy?
 
 

​Inequality - god, money and power

In the beginning humans were hunter gatherers characterized by a high degree of gender, structural and economic equality. Scientists tell us that there were no designated leaders, genders operated on an equal footing and there were no rich or poor - everyone shared the available food and resources.  Then came, with what we term with a surprising lack of irony, civilization.
 
So called civilization developed from an agrarian base i.e. the cultivation of food crops which supported settled communities of hundreds and then thousands of people living in close proximity.  Large numbers of people required some kind of organizing structure resulting in a hierarchy and inherent in a hierarchy is inequality and a differential in power.  Those at the top of the hierarchy have more power than those below. Early community hierarchies were dominated by individuals in two primary roles - warriors or priests.  Because of the physical differences between males and females men dominated the warrior or soldier class.  This probably began the unequal status of women that persists to this day.  It is less clear why men came to dominate the religious role although it may have resulted from collusion with the warriors but the result seems to have been similar.
 
The common characteristic of these two groups was that they required support from the rest of society since they had neither the time not inclination to grow their own food, hunt, etc.  This need coupled with the position of power they occupied led to the first requirement of governance be it religious or civil - taxes.  Called by many names tribute, plunder, tithes or the current favorite user fees the general population had to fund the livelihood of individuals in positions of authority.  Thus began the intersection of god (religion), economics (wealth) and government (political power).
 
Over time people have been told or coerced to believe in the divine right of kings, in politics that requires leaders and followers, in dictators of the proletariat, in "representative" democracies and the mechanisms of governance. As Voltaire put it "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."  Now we mostly believe in the economy, not the real economy where people grow or build things, just the money part, we believe in greed. Increasingly people don't go to school to be educated, they go to school so they can make money. They don't work to accomplish something, to create something, they work simply to get money and so they can spend it and spend ever more of it.  Today's economy is predicated on the requirement that it always expand, that we always need more. As a result we increasingly use up the world that we live in, we dig it up, pump it up, plow it up. To get more, we poison the land, the water and the air until it no longer sustains us, all to get something that we don't really need that we don't really like and that we don't care about. But it's a marker, a symbol that we exist. I consume therefore I am.


The money is the power and the power is the money. It is the power that arises from the money after all that makes us feel good that gives us that rush. The intersection of economic and political power was recently evidenced by the Supreme Court decision that money is speech.  Those with the money are the ones who can be heard in politics as they are in the economy. With that power comes the tyranny of the belief that rich people deserve their wealth and are ordained to wield great power.  They have in effect been divinely bequeathed wealth and power and through that wealth and power can function as a god on earth.  This is the divine right of capitalists.
 
Economic inequality begets political inequality and political inequality is the very antithesis of democracy.  As Gandhi said about democracy it is "clearly an impossibility so long as the wide gulf between the rich and the hungry masses persists," As we despair of the great political divide in our country it might serve us well to address our growing economic inequality for unless we do a viable democracy and a commonality of purpose are impossible.

Government Shutdown

The government shutdown has brought new meaning to President Kennedy's words "Ask not what your government can do for you, ask what you can do for your government." This is a time when we are all called upon to put that admonishment into practice. While many people are picking up trash and helping at National Parks there is much more we can and should do. Here are some options that you might consider.

The IRS was already short staffed and now is completely unable to conduct audits. Here is a place where the market economy can come to the rescue. Sign on the Audit a Billionaire program. You can select a billionaire of your choosing and conduct your own audit of their tax filings. Full subpoena powers will be provided. And to provide the appropriate market incentives auditors will get a finder’s fee of 20% of taxes and fees that are found to be owed. Hurry; this program is filling up fast.

Volunteer to be a TSA screener at your local airport. Give those unpaid workers a break and speed travelers through the security checkpoints. Notice: anyone who has been the target of a "Me Too Moment" will not be allowed to conduct pat downs or full body searches. Volunteer just 5 days and get first pick at the confiscated items storage bins.

We all know that the government shutdown is about the border wall, so step up and Buy a Brick for the Border Wall. Each brick can be individually inscribed with a name or phrase of your choosing and will be placed in the sector of the wall that you designate. Please note that certain words and phrases are not acceptable, including climate change, happy holidays, crybaby, liar and others too numerous to mention here. The cost of a brick varies. Bricks higher on the wall will cost more.  However, those at the top with the razor wire on them are available at discounted rates. Lobbyists can buy bricks to show their support for the President starting at $5 million.

Speaking of lobbyists, they too are having a hard time during the shutdown. With so few people in Washington these days some have been forced to buy their own lunch since there is no one to take out and schmooze on a business expense account. So, join our Take a Lobbyist to Lunch initiative. Pick your industry - oil and gas, mining, big pharma, tech giants or that all-time favorite the NRA, which is running a special guns and buns lunch buffet.

This is a time to step up and help your fellow man. FDA food inspectors have been furloughed and this poses a serious health risk, especially to our most vulnerable citizens. I refer of course to the residents of the White House. Volunteer food tasters are urgently needed to taste all the food that is to be served to the 2-year-old who lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The food is very good, but remember 2 years olds are subject to erratic behavior and temper tantrums. No spanking is allowed.

Government workers can go dumpster diving or haunt food pantries so they have no excuse for being hungry but the animals confined to the National Zoo and other federal facilities are not so fortune. We therefore urge you to support the GoFundMe initiative to feed animals at the National Zoo. Be generous; elephants eat a lot.

For the more adventurous now is your opportunity to take over Coast Guard's search and rescue duties. Here is your chance to jump out of a helicopter or be on board a boat speeding through 30 foot waves. Normally you would have to pay tens of thousands of dollars for extreme sport experiences of this caliber. Just bring your own wetsuit and get started today. The drowning victims you save will thank you. For the truly brave ask about the availability of a special assignment to search for an adult in Washington

Those with experience organizing protest rallies and strikes can help by making "Will Work for Pay" signs for government workers experiencing forced labor without compensation. We value diversity so multicolored signs are preferred.
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Let me thank you in advance for all you do to support efforts to keep basic government services available to the public (that would be you). While we do appreciate your efforts maybe next time you should vote
 
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​Air Conditioning
 
I blame air conditioning.
 
When considering the technological innovations that have significantly impacted on our national and our personal way of life we usually mention the telephone, radio, TV and the internet or perhaps the automobile and the airplane. But in many essential ways air conditioning transformed the nation in profound ways facilitating dramatic demographic shifts, contributing to widespread environmental damage and fostering fundamental social and political changes.


How did air conditioning affect these changes? It was air conditioning that made much of the southern United States truly habitable for the first time. From the oppressive heat and humidity of the southeast along the Atlantic and Gulf Coast to the burning deserts of the Southwest air conditioning made work and daily living not just tolerable but increasingly desirable.


From the 1920's and into the 1970's African Americans fled North in large numbers to escape Jim Crow oppression and the lack of educational and job opportunities. This was the famous Great Migration where an estimated 6 million people left the South. Less attention has been paid to migration of even larger numbers of mostly whites to the South that has occurred more recently.  Prior to the availability of air conditioning the population of Florida was less than one million (1920).  By 1950 it had barely exceeded 2.5 million but by 1990 it was 13 million.  Today it is 21 million.  Such growth would have been impossible without air conditioning.  Arizona and Texas experienced similar explosive growth.  Despite oil money it is unlikely that hot, humid Huston would be on the verge of becoming the nation's third largest city without ubiquitous "refrigerated air".
 
Retirees and others went south for the milder winter weather but air conditioning also allowed businesses to operate in the South spurring job growth in banking, auto production and many other Industries. This version of white flight made the South richer and whiter. This and the Civil Rights Movement drove a complete political realignment. Richard Nixon's southern strategy, continued by Reagan, converted the south from solidly Democratic in the New Deal era to solidly Republican for the last 50 years. The large growth in population fueled rising political power since the south experienced a commensurate increase in Congressional representation. The effective use of this political power at the state and national level coupled with gerrymandering and voter suppression has created a political landscape that is disproportionately dominated by white conservatives.
 
This was perhaps the largest and most rapid demographic and political change in US history. The explosive population growth in places like Texas, Arizona and Southern California also fueled immigration. Labor especially, cheap labor, was needed in the fields to feed the growing population and to build houses, care for yards and kids and numerous other jobs.
 
Air conditionings impact was not limited to the South. It was air conditioning along with the elevator that made possible glass and steel skyscrapers with windows that never open and high-rise apartments and condos where people live in comfort regardless of the weather and the surroundings.


And the environmental devastation? Most directly air conditioning requires a lot of power which translates to burning fossil fuels, diverting rivers, building dams and power plants to generate electricity. In addition, all that cooling generates a lot of heat.  Stand outside in the exhaust of a window air conditioner and feel the heat.  Multiply that times all the air conditioners large and small and you can understand how they contribute to the warming micro-climates in cities.  Secondarily, all those people need places to live and work and shop so, for example, Florida is mostly bulldozed and paved. Water is diverted from the Everglades and cars and roads sprawl. In the West water drives everything. Rivers are bottled up and water piped to homes, businesses and the mega-industrial farms. The landscape is fundamentally altered and the climate changed. Aquifers are pumped dry, rivers are merely irrigation ditches and drought and wildfires spread uncontrollably.
 
All this is a self reinforcing cycle.  The continuing population growth in the warmer parts of the country results in more building, more businesses, more transportation - cars, trucks, trains and planes - more air conditioning and more heat which in turns needs more air conditioning, more power, more everything.  And as the climate warms more of the country needs air conditioning.  Today nearly 90 per cent of US households rely on air conditioning.
 
Most of the country has experienced a long hot summer.  Our air conditioners have been working overtime to make it all tolerable and at the same time adding to the heat.  The cure is also the disease.