Are we great? Are you proud?

Life in America, 2026

A friend who lives in subsidized, rent-controlled housing tells me that crippled elderly residents in her building who had been receiving $200/month in food stamp benefits (SNAP) have now seen their monthly benefits cut down to $24/month. How would anyone buy groceries to last an entire month—what could you buy?—with $24?

On the other hand, there is plenty of money in Washington to be spent on erasing dignity and history and replacing it with glaring white and gold and monuments to vanity. The travesty of the new decor in the Oval Office wasn’t enough, even with the expensive fiasco of the reflecting pool “renovation” and subsequent damage, which was preceded by the outright destruction of the East Wing of the White House. Now it is the turn of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, its grey granite to be painted white. Whatever we are told it is going to cost, we can be pretty sure the eventual price will be a multiple of the first number announced. The gift plane from Qatar? That “free” plane? How much are we taxpayers now on the hook for?

And now a certain member of the Cabinet wants how much more money to pursue a war that we were told was “won” after the first week? Ninety billion more, not ninety million more. He must need a few bucks to test soldiers' testosterone levels, too, since that's one of his big priorities. I mean, gender-affirming care like that costs money, too.

But elderly, disabled people living in poverty—why should our taxes to go helping fellow Americans in need, when so many wealthy individuals and corporations have not yet reached the trillionaire level? If the poor were deserving, they wouldn’t be poor, would they? It’s all a matter of priorities and values, isn’t it? Each of us shows our priorities and values by which politicians and policies we support.

Want more? How about this? There is plenty of money for tracking down law-abiding, tax-paying immigrants and slapping them into tax-sucking private prisons. But not enough money, the Department of Homeland Security thinks. They want a lot more. 

And the ARCH???!!! There is no way I can add anything to that without profanity, so I’ll stop.

Oh, wait! I forgot data centers! You think you can keep them out of your community? You think local control means anything to the current administration? Read this. 

And How About Those Tariffs?

There are emails I don’t read but delete as soon as I see the subject heading. One such group are the messages offering me tens of thousands of dollars to use in my business. No, not loans, just “quick cash!” I’m lucky but also hard-working, and neither desperate nor stupid.

It turns out (I heard this ghastly story on NPR while in my car, the only time I listen to radio news) that there is a whole new “industry” offering quick cash to small business owners who don’t have time to wait for approval on a bank loan or don’t qualify for a bank loan because they have no track record. I put “industry” in scare quotes because predatory financial schemes like this are exactly that: predatory rather than industrious. The people create nothing for others but poverty, and such mob-like operations should be seen as outright criminal, but at present they are within the letter of the law. 

I repeat: The money offered is not technically considered a loan—for whatever bizarre, legal labyrinthine rationalization that provided that loophole—and so there is no limit to the interest that can be charged or how often payments are demanded. 

Not technically loans, they are called Merchant Cash Advances, and they function for businesses similar to the way “payday” loans function for individuals. You need money now! Today! You don’t have it! You’re desperate! Here it is, yours for the taking!

How does this relate to tariffs?

Many small businesses import products or parts from overseas, and tariffs on these goods must be paid at the port of entry before the goods are released to the business owner, so what can you do if you have orders to fill and need to get your hands on the products to deliver orders to your customers? In one instance, three cash advances totaling $950,000 somehow turned into a debt of $1.2 million. Read the full story for yourself. It’s the nightmare behind today’s tariffs, the horror story no one wants to admit being sucked into.

Now, the $64,000 Question (though with inflation, the dollar amount needs to be multiplied): 

Which of the above is the worst story? 

Letter to Michigan Governor, May 2026

Michigan: Too Beautiful to Lose!

If you agree with the sentiments expressed in this letter, feel free to borrow my language to write your own letter to our Michigan governor. 

Dear Governor Whitmer:

Your tenure as governor has generally meant good news, in sharp contrast to the national scene. Now, however, I am appalled and alarmed and angry to read of your support for giant data centers in Michigan. You are said to be “pushing” for them, wanting our state to “lead” in building them, because, you say, the question is "not if but when" they will be built. My question is, where and why?

Which states will rush to give up valuable farmland and housing space for temporary construction jobs creating a blight of energy-sucking, water-guzzling, noise-polluting, heat-emitting megabuildings empty of workers (except for a couple of guards) and full of supersized computers to facilitate storage of “data,” most of which doesn’t need to be stored and some of which shouldn’t have been collected (for government surveillance of citizens) in the first place.

Communities across our country and elsewhere have fallen for the “jobs” ploy before. It’s the reason communities say yes to the building of prisons and detention centers and why they welcome mountains of garbage and even toxic waste from other states and other countries (in our case, from Canada). It’s part of what convinces them that oil fracking and CAFOs are good ideas. “If we don’t grab those jobs, someone else will get them.” Why should the people of Michigan trade long-term health and a lifetime of higher energy, long term health problems, and permanent, irremediable degredation of our beautiful natural habitat for a few temporary jobs? Do you stand to gain personally from these losses to the people of Michiogan? If you are not profiting somehow, your support for data centers makes no sense. It doesn’t fit the person I believe you are.

You may have already received a letter very close to this from a friend of mine, who asked if she could use my words. I gave my permission readily. Now imagine how many other Michigan residents and voters feel as we do! Please don’t sell us out! Thank you for your diligent attention to this urgent matter.

"To the Moon, Alice!"

I watched with a friend. We were captivated!

 

"Why is Congress cutting funds to NASA, despite the overwhelming success of the recent Artemis II mission?" I saw that question somewhere online, but the answer I would give is not the answer given to the online question.

Why cut funding for NASA now? Precisely, I believe, because of the success of Artemis II. It is a way to punish them—out of jealousy over their success, resentment over their competence, and envy over the admiring attention they so rightly earned.

I have never been a big fan of the space program. I’ve been one of those people who thought that money would be better spent on earth. But I never thought it should be spent to murder schoolchildren and their families in foreign countries, threaten to "destroy whole civilizations," put Americans at home under surveillance and build prisons to house people “detained” without arrest warrants or trials, etc., etc. No, no! Silly, naive me! I was thinking more about the health and safety and common good of our nation as a whole. 

If, however, it comes down to a choice between fraud and corruption and unprovoked attacks on civilians (at home and abroad) vs. space exploration by brave, skilled, competent, and dedicated scientists and crews, I’ll support the latter any day. How about you?

Looking Back and Looking Ahead

In 1952, Ferrar, Straus, and Young published a book by novelist-reporter-historian William L. Shirer called Midcentury Journey. (For a while I had misremembered the title as Europe at Midcentury, as it focuses on England and the countries of the European continent, following World War II as well as up to and during that war.) True to my francophilic nature, rather than beginning at the beginning, I immediately turned to the third chapter, “The Waning Star of France,” curious to see what I would find. 

French government up to the Second World War was known as the Third Republic, which began in 1870 (after the collapse of Napoleon's Second Empire) and lasted until 1940. It was relatively stable, and the economy as late as the mid-1920s was also in decent shape, Shirer reports. Intellectual life, the arts, and literature, freedom—all were flourishing. “Men were wonderfully free, and they were free from fear,” as Shirer saw them in Paris:

If ever a great nation seemed destined to continue on its glorious and civilized course for centuries to come, France was it.

And yet, even then there were signs of approaching catastrophe that one can only appreciate today—with the benefit of hindsight.

- William L. Shirer, Midcentury Journey 

How to explain the weakness of France in the face of German aggression, and why did so many French people, not just a radical racist fringe but even conservative middle-class Frenchmen, actually see Hitler as a savior?

Part of Shirer’s answer is that there were, in fact, two Frances, a democratic, republican Left (heirs of the 1789 Revolution) and an authoritarian Right, "which looked backward with nostalgia to the ancient régime….” While democratic, republican France was supported by industrial and farm workers and people in the trades and small business, those on the authoritarian side, yearning for a return to monarchy, had support from the church and army, big business and finance. Evenly matched numerically in the population, the two sides had little common ground, and thus power tended to shift back and forth, back and forth, until fear of “Reds” in their own country (“the enemy within”) led the (formerly, I would say) “conservatives” in France to see Hitler as the lesser evil.

Naturally, there were other contributing factors. Loss of male population in World War I and the subsequent falling birthrate, decay of the bourgeoisie, a corrupt press (“venal,” Shirer calls it), widespread tax evasion at all levels of society, and failure to industrialize sufficiently all played a part in the country’s problems. What struck me most forcibly, however, was the deep division Shirer identifies in the French people, a chasm with no bridge across, because had the country been united, couldn’t they have devised solutions for the other problems? 

The troubles of France, it became evident, went back to the French Revolution of 1789, which had given birth to the nation we [Americans] came to know. There the deep fissure developed which has divided France to this day. It was an unfinished revolution in that the old order was never really liquidated or even converted, and therefore survived to combat the republican idea right up to Hitler’s entry into Paris, which it welcomed and which brought the Third Republic to an end.

These two Frances, Shirer argues, “never really fused.” 

Whether or not France is a united country today is not my concern today (although I do see divisions continuing), and it is probably obvious why Shirer’s idea of a divided country strikes me with such force: It is the divisions in the United States of America, my own country, that most deeply concern me. In one of my January posts, I wrote about avoiding difficult subjects. For me, such avoidance means ignoring crisis to pretend that life is normal, although these are not normal times. The great question of our time is, once again, whether our nation, “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” can endure into the future. And yet, and yet—.

Yet conversation across the chasm is all but impossible, because Americans, like those divided French Shirer describes, have so little common ground on which to meet that we live in different realities. 

The fissure was already deep in 1776, when a nation "conceived in liberty for all” allowed some humans to own others. A scant 85 years later came the Civil War, the war Lincoln saw as deciding the nation’s fate. That war came to an end without stitching the country seamlessly back together. The legacy of defeat is still bitter to many who never lived through it but inherited bitterness from those who could not accept the war's outcome, in much the same way that the defeated candidate for the presidency in 2020 has never been able to recognize and accept his defeat that year—and now, despite having successfully avoided military service himself and despite being elected to another term in the White House, has taken up political arms against Americans by withholding Congressionally approved funds, has sent armed forces into American cities and states that contributed to his defeat, and is now bombing foreign countries and killing civilians in the name of America. That is, these things are being done in your name and mine.

***

I wrote the foregoing back in March. Since then--just the other day, in fact--the world has seen an event that fills me with hope. Despite loud support from top officials in the current American government, autocrat Viktor Orbán was defeated for re-election as prime minister by opposition leader Péter Magyar, who ran on a strong anti-corruption platform. Read about the campaign what Magyar to build support, and how he brought down a 16-year regime that had ruled through, in addition to outright corruption, stacking key institutions with loyalists and taking over news outlets. Now the rest of Europe is eagerly welcoming Hungary back into the fold--and meanwhile, Canada is contemplating joining the European Union, no longer able to trust completely in a North American alliance. The Magyar story, though, is inspiring. It can be done! We do not have to slog through another world war and commit mass genocide before returning to sanity!

What Happened to Republican Opposition to Big Government?

Paul Revere spreading the alarm, prior to
composition of the U.S. Constitution

Federalism does not give exclusive political power to a central government but divides power between national and state governments. The United States of America was designed as a federalist system. The 20th-century Republican Party (not to be confused with the 19th-century Republican Party), and especially its right wing, used to be very strong for noninterference by the federal government. Twentieth-century Republicans were against the Feds most of the time. They were all "Don't Tread On Me!" Funny (not really), but now that they are (I don’t say “firmly”) in the seat of federal power, they have changed their tune big-time and seem more than willing to go along with a L'état c'est moi! executive.

 

Look no further than the president’s war against “sanctuary cities” and his sending National Guard troops into cities with democratically elected Democratic mayors, against the wishes of both city mayors and state governors, even where Republican governors say the troops aren’t needed. Without search warrants, without probable cause, ICE troops—and make no mistake, they are definitely “troops,” too—are seizing individuals off the streets, out of their homes, from school and store parking lots, even from courthouses where they, the individuals seized, were showing up for court appointments in the legal pursuance of their paths to citizenship. The people thus abducted are not arrested, only “detained,” without lawyers, without court dates, in prison-like facilities often far from their homes (there is one in Baldwin, Michigan), where visits from family members are difficult when not impossible.  

 

It doesn’t stop with the deployment of the National Guard and with ICE seizures, either. Many states with reasonable questions about the role of so-called Artificial Intelligence are looking for ways to control that genie before it is completely out of the bottle (too late?), and now the president is raging against state attempts at control and has signed an order to override and invalidate states’ laws controlling AI. It's an issue that is only going to get larger, state by state, with big companies angling for land for huge data centers, e.g., 280 acres in Wayne County’s Van Buren Township; 172 acres in Ionia County’s Lyon Township; 250 acres in  Saline Township south of Ann Arbor; and more.

Water, energy, noise and light pollution are the immediate concerns as data centers “flock” to Michigan communities (and what protection do these communities have from billionaire-owned corporations backed by federal executive power?), but that doesn’t even begin to address the large possibility that these data centers constitute the largest financial investment bubble our country has ever seen. If you didn’t follow the link to watch this podcast in my recent Books in Northport post, please follow and watch and listen now. You don’t have to go through my blog. Here is the direct link. Know what’s at stake before you take a position, please, but don't wait to find out what's at stake!

 

Finally (and I say “finally” only because I’m stopping today with this item, not because it exhausts the list), the right-wing Heritage Foundation is now targeting ranked-choice voting as something to be shot down. The idea of increasing voter choice has been gaining momentum in Michigan through a petition drive, but eliminating ranked-choice voting is among the priorities for the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a wish list of policies with the overall goal of taking power from individual voters and from states and handing it to a federal government with strong right-wing goals.  

 

(Was our federal system designed with states as incubators, so-called “laboratories of democracy,” or is that only myth? It's the rationale I've always heard for the limited independence of state governments. I found an interesting article online that argues against states as laboratories for democracy, but the argument seems to be that it is third-party groups within states that shake things up, not the state governments themselves, so how strong an argument is that? After all, those third-party groups are working through the state governments. What do you think?)

 

Washington is not dictating every single state law (yet), so when does the current administration think it’s okay for states to take an initiative? Banning abortion or restricting voting rights on a state-by-state basis seem permissible to Heritage-Washington. (I can only wish those vitally concerned with the lives of zygotes had at least equal concern for the lives of air-breathing children and adults.) Otherwise? The Great Father in Washington will decide for you. 

Are you on board with that? What kind of freedom is possible without community control and with state power overpowered?

Veterans Day

My father, WWII

 

With his sister and their father

It isn’t all Ayn Rand’s fault. (Only part of it is.)

As always, this is how I see it. If you see it differently, let me know.

 

Rand’s view

 

The part that brands taxation for government social programs as thievery or sees worker protections as outrageous interference with ownership or views union bargaining as blackmail—all that you can pin on Ayn Rand. Her fictional villains were those who would be called liberals in today’s culture: What liberals see as progressive taxation she saw as stealing from productive members of society for the benefit of the lazy and undeserving.

 

 

What she didn’t see

 

Look a little closer, though. Her heroes are gifted, rebellious, independent capitalists who ask no favors or anyone! The cronyism and pay-to-play bootlicking demanded by the current administration in Washington is the behavior of her villains, not her heroes! 

 

She thought free market capitalists would be different. She was wrong.

 

 

Her background

 

Born Alissa Rosenbaum, the woman who reinvented herself as Ayn Rand was 12 years old when the Russian revolution exploded in St. Petersburg. Her family fled to the Crimea. Her father lost his business. She saw firsthand the sins of communism, and from those early impressions she extrapolated the evils to anything that smacked to her of what she called collectivism. Under Bolshevik collectivism, she saw cheating and corruption and a class of political elites lining their pockets while grinding down poor, hard-working citizens.

 

Again, She thought capitalists would be different. She was wrong.

 

 

Russia’s background

 

Russia, become the U.S.S.R., now Russia again – it’s a big, sprawling country, and top-heavy bureaucracy was not invented by Bolsheviks. Autocratic czars relied on a far-reaching network of bureaucrats to carry out their will. People’s representatives in government? Forget it! 

 

 

The American story has been different

 

Americans set up a different kind of government, based from the beginning on representation. The “people,” of course, were originally only white, property-owning males, but other groups gradually gained suffrage. But Americans also have a long history of being taken in by and being fearful of extremes. That is, we as a people tend to see the world in either/or terms, and politically this comes down to the (false) dilemma of completely unregulated free market capitalism vs. toiling for the state under a red flag. 

 

Two things have saved us over the years from the absurdity of either of the dismal extremes: 

 

First, we have had, historically, a strong two-party system.

 

Second, the two parties have, until very recently, worked together to reach legislative compromises and actually get things done. 

 

Because Americans are stuck in either/or thinking and because we have had two strong parties, government power has alternated between the two parties, and because of back-and-forth swings in power and because, generally speaking, civility reigned in Congress, bipartisanship worked.

 

 

Where we are now

 

The current president, however, said when on the campaign trail that if people voted for him, “You’ll never have to vote again.” Those in his party in Congress have acquiesced to his Cabinet nominations, however inappropriate or unqualified the nominees (until the most recent and most outrageously inappropriate, a man even Republicans could not stomach), and they have done everything to exclude and block Democrats, including withholding funds already appropriated to various agencies and programs.

  

Now there is the government shutdown, the longest in U.S. history. Senator Chuck Schumer, minority leader, on Friday, November 7, said the Democrats would vote to end the shutdown if Republicans would agree to a one-year extension of expiring ACA tax credits, without which many middle-class working Americans could see their monthly health insurance costs rise to unaffordable levels. Republicans say no, we open the government back up first, and then we negotiate. So, believe Mike Johnson? Why? Is he credible? Truthful? 

 

Republicans do not want to work with Democrats. They do not want bipartisanship. They want everything their way (which is the Project 2025 way), with no input from the other side of the aisle. Although Republicans are in pro forma session right now, and although they have earlier this year sworn in two other people while in pro forma session, they still refuse to swear in the Congresswoman-elect Adelita Grijalva from Arizona. And as the president urges Republicans in Congress to get rid of the filibuster, he tells them there is no need to worry about future Democratic control because by getting rid of the filibuster, Republicans could pass legislation that would guarantee they would “never lose the midterms and we will never lose a general election” again.

 

What Republicans want is one-party rule. 

 

 

Drawing the wrong conclusion

 

Ayn Rand can be forgiven for believing at age 12 that free market capitalists would be all for freedom in general and not for cheating and greed and corruption, and young people in general can be forgiven for falling temporarily under the spell of her "romantic realism, with heroes larger than life and her villains considerably smaller and smarmier. Most young people want to believe in heroes, whether they are Superman, Spiderman, or John Galt. 

 

But for those willing to look dispassionately at American history, “experience has shown” (to quote from the Declaration of Independence) that completely unregulated, unrestrained capitalism is as destructive of life as collectivism, and a corporate “Big Brother” is every bit as much of an overpowering steamroller as a governmental “Big Brother.” Who wants to be enslaved by either one? 

 

What threatens us at this juncture in our history is an unholy alliance of the two--unbridled capitalism enabled and rewarded by a would-be autocrat at the head of the federal government, a head backed by “representatives” doing the bidding not of the people who elected them but that of corporate interests willing to offer big rewards for the legislation and contracts they want. 

 

All along, it wasn’t collectivism that was the problem. It was unchecked, one-party rule. If you vote Republican, is this really what you want? Think hard!