The Art of the Fix

Donald Trump is one smart guy.  Obviously, you don’t have that much business success by being stupid.  One of the techniques for the successful outcome of a deal is to stack as many cards in your favor as you can before the dealings begin.

            We have heard over and over again how Hillary is cramming diligently for tonight’s first debate while Donald takes a more casual approach mainly having conversations with aides and eschewing debate rehearsals.  Her strategy is predictable just because she has been in the spotlight so long and his strategy is intentional, aided and abetted by the press.

            The media has become obsessed with the term “setting the bar.”  Applied to Hillary that means she faces a “high bar” and is expected to be super informed on just about everything, ultra calm, controlled and, well, dull.

            Trump, on the other hand is mainly known as a tv personality, flamboyant, shoot-from-the-hipper who, buy his own admission, likes to be unpredictable.  So now the “media” which he pretends to loathe, is playing right into his hands by declaring he faces a “low bar.” 

            In addition, Trump is already setting up the Moderator, Lester Holt, as the potential fall guy.  (Remember Trump said Holt is a registered Democrat which he is not.)  Ironically, the media, which is now helping him by setting “the low bar” will be blamed for attacking him if he flops.

            So let’s look at the potential outcomes.   Trump’s braggadocio about not really preparing for the debates (which I do not believe for a minute) is to make him look really good if he “wins” but not so bad if he “loses.”  While Hillary has such high expectations placed on her that if she “wins” the Trump camp will say Holt was mean to Donald, it was all liberal press bias, and all she did was study a lot of briefing books did not address the needs of the American people.  If she bombs, the Trump camp can then gloat and say, see our guy is really brilliant and didn’t even need debate preparation. 

            Of course if he loses his cool and calls Hillary a “fat pig” in front of 100 million people (which I think a lot of Hillary backers are secretly hoping) then all Trump bets are off.

            One thing I can tell you for sure, I have set my own bar for the debates and it is well stocked with the ingredients for several Manhattans on the Rocks.

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Tales of the West Pacific, or, Memoirs of a Young Naval Officer

Donald Trump is completely unqualified to be Commander-in-Chief.  This conclusion is not based on talking heads, pundits, the comments of retired generals nor Clinton campaign propaganda.  It is based on personal experience.

You probably missed it because of all the pre-debate hoopla, bombing attempts and street riots, but a few weeks ago in a speech at Pensacola, Florida, Trump said:  "With Iran, when they circle our beautiful destroyers with their little boats and they make gestures at our people that they shouldn't be allowed to make, they will be shot out of the water," Trump said to loud cheers.

This is not just an example of Trumpian bombast, it clearly demonstrates exactly how little he understands about military behavior.  The headlines shouted things like “Trump would blast Iranian ships out of the water for harassing our ships.” 

What Trump does not know is that in times of “peace”—and technically we are not in a state of war with neither Iran, North Korea nor China—military forces “harass” each other on a regular basis.  It is part of the games militaries play.  I know.  Been there, done that.

When I was a destroyer officer operating in the Western Pacific in the early 60s, “harassment” was not only an every day occurrence it was part of our job description.  Every day as we cruised the South China Sea our Task Force (a carrier and four, sometimes eight, destroyers) was “harassed” by Russian Trawlers. These, the Russians claimed, were innocent “unarmed” fishing boats, but they bristled with antennas intended to intercept or sometimes jam our communications and those big funny shapes on deck covered with tarps were most probably 50 caliber guns.

They would trail along with us for days and nights and sometimes intentionally penetrate the destroyer screen requiring one of our destroyers to break the screen, turn, bear down on the trawler and it would scamper away.   Fortunately our Commander-in-Chief at the time—John F. Kennedy who was a Navy Patrol Boat commander--was not a thin-skinned, impetuous, narcissistic real estate developer and we never got orders to “shoot them out of the water.”

Of course, we played the game as well.  You see in those days—over 50 years ago—we did not have GPS, computer algorithms, satellite tracking and all the sophisticated stuff we have today, so in order to learn where the Ruskie submarines were operating we had to go out and find them.  Over the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean we deployed what were called Anti-Submarine-Warfare (ASW) “Hunter Killer Groups.”  Our ships, with their squadrons of ASW aircraft were trying, 24 hours a day, seven days a week to locate Russian subs.  When we found one, and we often did, we would track them on sonar for days, and to show how tough we were, we would sometimes fire clusters of hand grenades which would explode under water to show them we could hit them if we really wanted to. Of course, we never acknowledged that they had very efficient torpedoes which were quite capable of inflicting calamity on us.  We knew that they knew, and they knew that we knew the game we were playing.

Here’s a true episode that shows how the “harassment” game is nothing new.   At one point my ASW group was tasked to show the Reds that we could operate on their doorstep in the North Pacific in the middle of winter.  If you have never been at sea in the North Pacific in the winter, consider yourself lucky.  It is perhaps the worst experience I had in two years at sea.  The weather was often clear and beautiful, but 24 hours a day, constant, huge ground swells lurched the ship up and down, back and forth sometime 45 degrees port and starboard, fore and aft.  Everything on the ship had to be lashed down.

But we were “harassing” the Russians by operating in their territory and I’m sure they got a big kick out of it.  Every day they would send out a squadron of Badger aircraft that would spend a half hour circling or ships at about 100 feet.  They would actually fly near the bridge of our ship and tip their wings at us as if to say, “You poor bastards, we don’t even send our own ships out with seas like this.”  We would wave back at their pilots. We never fired a shot at the Russian aircraft and they never bombed us.  We understood the “harassment” game rules.

A breach of the “harassment” game would be even more dangerous today than ever.  Once in the South China Sea we were tracking “an unidentified contact” which was code for “we know it is not a U.S. Sub.”  The cat and mouse tracking game had gone on all day and into the night and about two a.m. there was a bang and the entire ship shuddered.  We had hit the conning tower of the Russian sub.  Fifty years ago we did not have satellite cell phones, the Internet nor 24 hour cable news which would have whipped the incident into a frenzy,  and no one ever new of our collision with a Russian sub while we were “harassing” it.  It was intentionally hushed up—by both sides--so as not to cause an international incident which cold have had disastrous consequences.

You see, unlike Donald Trump, even junior destroyer officers of my generation understood that “harassment” is part of the game, and the worst thing to do is to take the first shot and the blame for starting a full scale war.  Harassment is intended to get under your adversary’s skin and provoke a stupid, impulsive reaction something which Trump appears to be prone to.

Take another look at the quote from Trump’s speech:  "With Iran, when they circle our beautiful destroyers with their little boats and they make gestures at our people that they shouldn't be allowed to make, they will be shot out of the water.” 

 

Forget the goofy contrast between our “beautiful” destroyers and their “little boats.” He said that the Iranian sailors evidently made “gestures at our people they shouldn’t be allowed to make” which according to Trump, would be justification for shooting them out of the water.  Presumably Trump means if some Iranian little boats come too close to our war ships and their sailors give us the finger, that justifies sinking their boats and starting another shooting war.

Jesus and Hillary and God

If Jesus Christ descended from heaven today, placed a halo on Hillary Clinton’s head and declared, “This is my sister, with whom I am well pleased,” those who detested her yesterday would still detest her tomorrow.

I have never seen this kind of hatred.  The intensity is beyond belief.  No matter what she does, the right wing Republicans will find some way to twist it into yet another example she is untrustworthy and concoct another weird conspiracy theory.  The latest example is Hillary’s pneumonia.

And yes, Republicans, your party is sexist whether you will ever admit it or not.  Just imagine if the exact same pneumonia incident happened to Donald Trump, or any other male Republican politician for that matter.  You would hear things like “Wow, what a guy!”  “Hey, he wanted to tough it out and go to the ceremony to show his respect for those who died on 9/11!”  “A real patriot, putting honoring the country before himself!”  “Great example of leadership!”

Instead, Hillary is slammed for “withholding information” about her health.  The Trumpundits are all grumbling and saying “Well, if she had just been honest and come out on Friday about her pneumonia.!”  Has anyone among you ever gone to work not feeling well without making a big deal of it?  I went to a sales presentation once with a 101 degree fever!

Assuming she was examined by her doctor and that her doctor is competent, the pneumonia was not life threatening and it was, indeed, important for Hillary to attend the New York City ceremony.  She was, at the time of 9/11, a Senator from New York.  But of course when it came out she had pneumonia on Friday, “She lied!” screamed the Republicans.  (It has become a knee-jerk reaction for them.)

Now for the absurd conspiracy theory:  After she left her daughter’s apartment waving to the crowd, the dopey wing of Trump supporters circulated a story, complete with side-by-side photos of Hillary claiming she had an exact look-a-like to stand in for her so the Democrats could hide her real condition.  That’s so dumb it is not even worth further comment.

If you are in any way curious as to why Hillary is so despised, one theory traces it back to a William Safire column in the NYT, January 8, 1996, where he called her a “congenital liar.”  Although a lot of what Conservative columnist Safire wrote has been discredited since, the handle stuck and has been used by the right to vilify her any chance they get for the last 20 years.

As I said at the beginning, I don’t think even Jesus Christ could help her.  But perhaps this story about God and the farmer might help explain why people hate her.  It is attributed to Sally Quinn, Washington Post contributor and wife of the newspaper’s legendary editor Ben Bradlee in a New Yorker article by Henry Louis Gates, February 26, 1996.

There’s this farmer whose crops always fail.  One year, he’s wiped out by a blizzard, and the next year there’s a rainstorm, and the next year there’s a drought, and so on every year, year after year.   Finally, he’s completely bankrupt—he’s lost everything.

He says, “Why, Lord? Why, why me?” And God says, “I don’t know. There’s just something about you that pisses me off.”

It’s not transparency and truth that’s Hillary’s problem, she just pisses people off.   Probably because she’s a tough, smart, talented, experienced, successful woman, something the Republican old white men just can’t stand.

Essay: On breaking my neck

Last Wednesday night, I broke my neck.  Yes, you read that correctly.

About 10 p.m., while walking across the bedroom, I attempted to pick up my cat from between my feet.  I immediately discovered that forward motion while bending over to reach for something between your feet activates the law of physics about bodies in motion and the law of gravity resulting in a precipitous lurch forward combined with downward motion causing sudden head contact with the hard wood floor and a broken neck. (Not to mention a banged-up forehead.)

That is a rather long and elaborate way of saying I did a really, really dumb thing.

Being a typical male, I refused, of course, to go to the Emergency Room despite my wife’s insistence that I should.  However the next morning my neck pain was above ten on the Richter Scale so I finally listened to my wife and let her drive me to the ER on Amelia Island.  Fortunately at 7:00 a.m. there was no one else and I was seen rather quickly.

The ER doctor informed me the CT scan showed the vertebrae at the base of my skull was fractured in two places and that I would be given an ambulance ride to the Baptist Medical Center ER in downtown Jacksonville.  The neurosurgeon there would decide whether I would need surgery or not.  So after four and a half hours in the local ER—involving a 15 minute CT scan and four hours and 15 minutes of waiting for results, assessment and the ambulance’s arrival--I was whisked off to Jacksonville.

I must admit the downtown ER was a disappointment.  I had seen a couple episodes of ER on tv and expected doctors and nurses frantically running down the hall yelling things like, “Hit him with the defibrillator quick!”  “Get more morphine!” “Stay with me… stay with me!” and the loud speaker booming, “Dr. Whizbangsky needed in surgery, stat!”

Of course, I could not see anything except the ceiling since I was flat on my back with my neck in a monstrous restraint, but I did not hear anything like that.  It was actually pretty quiet.

In the ambulance I had this vision of arriving with the  lights flashing and then  being wheeled at high speed down the hallway, the lights blurring above me and the paramedics shouting, “Hurry up, call the neurosurgeon, we got a guy here with a broken neck!”   Instead I was quietly rolled up against a wall and after ten minutes someone arrived and asked for my name, date of birth and what insurance did I have.  Then she said, “Take him to room 42.” That was it.  What a letdown. I thought ERs in downtown big cities were supposed to be exciting.  So much for the credibility of tv shows.

There I was alone in this small room staring at the ceiling and listening to CNN on the wall tv.  With the exception of a nurse taking a blood sample and someone coming in to say I might receive a customer service survey in a week or so, nothing happened.  Then after three hours the nurse came in and said the surgeon saw the CT scan and said I could sit up 45 degrees and put on a smaller neck brace which was great news since my back was hurting worse than the neck after several hours lying flat on the uncomfortable gurney.

“How soon will the surgeon get here?” I asked.

“Oh, could take a couple hours,” the nurse replied and left

By now, of course, I realized my broken neck was not much of an emergency.

Finally, the surgeon’s assistant came in, told me the fracture was “stable” (whatever that means) and I could go home.   After another hour getting instructions on applying ice packs, the medications I would have to take, and how to wear the neck brace, they extracted the IV from my arm, the discharge papers were processed and I was allowed to leave.

That was it. Poof!  Breaking your neck and going to the Emergency Room is really not very exciting.  Painful, yes, boring, yes, exciting, no.  I suggest you do all you can to avoid it.

I’m sure you have heard the stories about the dog and the homework and the butler and the murder.   So now if somebody asks me, “How did you break your neck?” I’ll reply, “The cat did it!”

The heavy duty model:  Ideal for ambulance ride and designed for minimal comfort.

 

 Soft collar model:  Sometimes called the "turtleneck."  Comfortable and can be used while sleeping.

The Sport Model: Ideal for daily use.  Inspired by masks worn by baseball catchers and hockey gollies.

My stand on the issues

Now that the Presidential Race is entering the exciting final phase, all 35 of my supporters have been urging me to declare my policies so voters will know exactly where I stand on the issues.

As I see it, our biggest problem is to eliminate the so-called ”gridlock” in Washington.  Basically, that means getting rid of Republicans.  Since Obama was elected, Republican have steadfastly refused to participate in the governing process and have been the obstinate “party-of-no” obstructionists for the last seven and a half years.  In addition to defeating Republican congresspeople, I propose another measure that applies to both parties--impose term limits on all members of Congress so they can’t stick around long enough to become corrupt, lazy and power drunk.

I would also reinstate the draft.  That would mean a lot more Americans will have a stake in the military adventures conjured up by our politicians.  If the sons and daughters of the well-to do Americans and politicians were obligated to do military service perhaps we would be a little more thoughtful about pulling the trigger.  The politicos in Washington  would not  get off the hook for sending kids off to get killed for stupid reasons. It would also show how phony those “patriots”are who strut around Wal-Mart in camos and play with assault rifles on the weekend but  never wore a real uniform.

It's time for us to eliminate the electoral college.  Most people have no ideas what it is nor how it works and if we were  a real democracy we would strictly adhere to a one-person-one-vote system so the elected President truly reflects the will of the majority of people.  While we are on election reform I would introduce a bill that Congressional districts would be drawn by independent non-partisan commissions so the Republicans could not rig them in their favor.

Healthcare for all Americans should be a right and not a commodity.  My plan would establish a single payer Medicare system for all Americans and get the private insurers out of the health insurance business.  From personal experience I can assure you the private insurers could not care less about your health.  They just want to make money.  If ALL the premiums now paid by employers, individuals with private insurance and Medicare participants were paid into a single payer system it could easily be paid for.  Of course, the private insurers and drug companies would not reap enormous profits and bilk the American people with astronomical  drug and medical procedure prices.

While we are talking about social benefits, Social Security in my program works just fine.  The Republican line about running out of funding is scare talk and the idea of privatizing it is madness.  The depletion of funds over the years has been because both parties in Congress have pulled money out of the Social Security Trust Fund for other stuff and patched  it up with IOUs (read debt).  My policy is that Congress would never, never, ever, be able to take money from the Social Security fund for any other reason and that the current individual 6.2 per cent payroll tax would not have a salary cap.  Now, the tax is paid up to $118,500 meaning the really wealthy stop contributing to the fund on anything they make above that.  Why? They can certainly afford to continue  paying the 6.2 per cent without any hardship.

And now we come to infrastructure.  All my opponents agree we need to do something about that.  It would be a great benefit to the country—roads, bridges, airports, trains, etc—and employ many thousands of people, but how do we pay for it?  Easy.  The federal excise tax on gasoline has not been raised for over 20 years.  When gasoline prices went up to $4.00 per gallon to insure oil company profits, people still paid it, so to take a bigger tax chunk to benefit the country—and maybe reduce oil company profits a little bit—seems like a good idea to me.

And finally, I would eliminate tax exempt status for churches.  That would not be a burden to individual tax payers and would contribute more  money to benefit the country as a whole.  Anyone who thinks churches do not engage in political activity is either stupid or delusional.   You have probably heard of the so-called “mega churches” whose pastors live in multimillion dollar homes and have private jets.

So, there you have my concrete proposals to Make American Sane Again.  I hope Alf and I can count on your vote.

Note:  Regarding how I feel about immigration, see my deportation story below.

My deportation story

Donald Trump’s intention to send illegal immigrants back to their home country and let them reenter America after going through proper procedures sends a chill up my spine.  Why?  Because it happened to me.

One morning in 1973 I was summoned to the downtown Milan Police Headquarters--police in Italy are a national government agency--and was told, “Mr. Raser, you have 24 hours to leave the country.”  Unless that has happened to you, you have no idea what goes through your mind as well as your body in a moment like that.   I felt like I was going to get sick and faint.

Years before, when I entered Italy I was a journalist for American publications and my government-issued press credentials were essentially my green card.  I was legal.  I then left journalism and became the Creative Director for a wholly owned American marketing company in Milan.  Legally, however, it was an Italian company so I paid Italian taxes and was subject to all Italian labor laws. 

I worked there for several years without any problem, however in the early 70’s the Communist Party (which was, and still is, a legitimate political party in Italy) began campaigning against foreigners who were taking Italian jobs.  Does that sound familiar?

The law requiring “undocumented foreigners” to leave the country and return with the proper authorizations had been on the books for years but was rarely enforced.  In fact, when enforced, you could drive to Switzerland, go to the Italian Consulate, get the permit and drive home.  But now, under intense political pressure from the Communists, the Christian Democrat government began enforcing it to the letter, which meant unauthorized foreign workers must return “to their country of origin” to get the permit.  Does that also sound familiar?

“But I’ve been here for several years,” I pleaded to the official, “I am married to an Italian citizen and have two small children who were born here?  I just can’t drop everything and leave.”

“Fine, we will give you 72 hours but you are illegal and must leave or you will be arrested.”

In effect, I was deported.  Fortunately, the company I worked for managed incentive travel, so with our travel agency partners I quickly obtained an airline ticket for a reasonable price.  Also, my parents lived just outside New York City so I had a place to stay and, of course, New York has a very large Italian Consulate.

You cannot imagine the anxiety you endure in a situation like that.  Would I get the proper permit?  How long would it take?  Would I get back into Italy even if I got the permit?

I went to the Italian Consulate and it took well over an hour, with visits to several different offices, but I managed to get a permit visa to return to Italy and stay.  Still, I wasn’t absolutely sure it was going to be enough to get me back in since, at the Consulate, they told me this was a new enforcement of the existing Italian immigration laws and I was the first case they had to handle. 

I did return and lived a total of 12 years in Italy, but the horrible memory of that event has never left me. Fortunately, my extremely emotional and frightening ordeal worked out well,  but there were stories at the time of people who had lived many years in Italy and had to return to New Zealand or South Africa to get a return permit stamp in their passports and were refused reentry.

I know just how devastating it will be for Mexican immigrants who have lived here for years, never broken the law, paid taxes, had and raised children, when they are summoned by Trump’s Deportation Task Force and told they must leave and returned legally.  I have been through it.

Trumps’ immigration plan, in addition to being unwieldy, probably unworkable and extremely expensive, lacks any kind of humanity.   For undocumented immigrants who have lived here many years, not broken any laws, paid taxes and either brought in young children or had them here, ICE could easily set up review boards, and work in conjunction with local Mexican Consulates to establish legal residency status, not citizenship.  This could be done without individuals and families living with the threat of instant deportation. 

I never asked for nor wanted Italian citizenship, only to be able to peacefully live there, work and raise my children.  I believe that’s all the undocumented aliens living here are asking as well.