Trump represents the American Dream (and why that’s a dangerous thing)

            Trump is the American Dream. And no this isn’t a coy metaphor or piece of wordplay that only tangentially hits the point. Trump won this past election because he represents this idyllic of the all-powerful and endlessly wealthy man, and people bought it, hoping for a piece of it themselves. But the reason I can prove Trump is the American Dream is the very reason that makes it dangerous. Our American Dream, as we have come to define it, is rooted in nostalgia and retrospect.

            We look to the ‘good old times,’ ‘how things once were,’ ‘American greats Rockefeller and Carnegie.’ Our perspective is dangerously focused on recreating a past version of America that doesn’t exist anymore. And if you listen to Trump’s xenophobic remarks, it harkens back to racist roots more than a hundred years old – the same anti-immigrant rhetoric that rippled at the turn of the 20^th century. Yet outside of the politically correct liberal bastion, this old-school racism appeals to Trumps supporters. Not because his supporters are bigots (necessarily), but because that is how things once were. And in this “Great American History” that we have created in our idealized view of the American Dream, how bad could it be to go back?

            Very bad. Bad on an economic level, and worse on a social.

            The industrial America that we knew after World War II has vanished, and this idea of returning to a great American economy in the same industrial way as before is economically impossible. The middle class is shrinking by the year. The financial mobility that we covet from the Rock n Roll era is now an afterimage our nation’s eye. In truth we have less economic mobility now than the developing nation of Rwanda. And so the Lower class and Upper class continue to grow, and the chasm of immobility continues to drive itself between the tax brackets.

            In the post war economy, the US controlled more than 50% of all of the worlds industry – Europe was in shambles and East Asia hadn’t modernized in the way we know it today. We were a powerhouse of jobs and wealth. The path of the middle American was paved with an American made car and a comfortable living. Today we control single digit percentages of industry today. The industrial jobs we once produced have been replaced by robots and tech companies. And in truth we are a nation in crisis, and the threatened blue collar middle class voted for Trump as a hail mary to get back to the American Dream of yesteryear. The sad truth of the matter is that according to two economists from Harvard, we will not be able to replicate the post-war industry today. Yet our eyes are set backwards.

            Perhaps the more dangerous consequence of this backwards looking approach is the revival of old racism and sexism. We too quickly forgot that ‘colored’ water fountains existed less than 60 years ago, the same “golden” years we look back to for the American Dream. Trump’s ascendance to the presidency has revived a brand of old racism with a new, and deleterious wave of nostalgia.

            As I see it, the American Dream as we now it is dead. But we keeping looking back to before in this idealization of what was. And like sand escaping from a hand, the more your clench the faster the grains slip out. And that’s what I find so dangerous. As we nationally realize the death of the American Dream, we are going to grasp wildly, trying to protect ourselves in a fight or flight way to preserve our way of life. And we’re seeing it already with the division we have driven between ourselves in the course of this election. I say the American Dream is what drives this racism and what drives the shrinking middle class.

            We need to wake up, and begin looking towards the future like post-war Germany and post-war Japan, abandoning this old mentality that only plagues us as we struggle like a house collapsing in on itself.

Sources:

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/05/11/americas-shrinking-middle-class-a-close-look-at-changes-within-metropolitan-areas/

Narcotic Negligence: A Nation in Crisis

            Convicted in early November for three counts of criminal mistreatment of a child, Ashley Hutt and Mac McIver were sentenced for injecting their 2, 4 and 6 and year old children with heroin. Impoverished, the poor couple was without health insurance and needed to treat their underfed and diaper-rashed children with the only “medicine” they had.

Though their kids are now healthy and safe in child protective services, the sheer shock of the headline is reviving the far too downplayed opioid epidemic plaguing our nation.

            The epicenter of this narcotic crisis isn’t rooted in illegal drug trade, it rather stems a greater cultural dependence on opioids promulgated through the rising popularity of prescription painkillers. We as a country, like Ashley Hutt, use and abuse narcotics as an easy fix to dull our chronic pains.

How did we get here?

Our first mistake begins with “the war on drugs”. The damage of this movement spurred by H.W. Bush and the ‘drug czars’ is not the spike in drug-related incarceration, but in the larger blindsiding narrative. Marked with an asterisk, in reality the battle was against illegal drugs as a reaction to the crack epidemic of the 1980s. As war has been waged against illegal drugs, other narcotics could quietly burgeon outside of public scrutiny, provided it was legally packaged with an FDA seal of approval.

Our second misstep: In the early 90s powerful opioids were scarcely prescribed, only available to cancer and end-of-life pain management. Big pharmaceutical companies realized cancer and end-of-life patients represented a very small portion of a larger target demographic. They changed their marketing strategies, appealing to a broader audience and spending billions marketing directly to doctors to increase prescription numbers – a choice supported by the FDA, and a decision worth $400 billion dollars annually for pharma.

 Our third miscalculation: The most routine surgeries with quick recovery time like wisdom teeth removal or something as simple as a bad back have become targets for painkiller prescriptions. This has led to an exponentially increasing demand for OxyContin and Vicodin consequently the price of prescription painkillers to cost a fraction of heroin. More so it has established painkillers as the panacea to all our problems.

            Combined, over a few decades we created a culture attune to illegal drugs but completely blind to the potential dangers of prescription drugs, while fueling a legal and inexpensive system that annually fills more than 250 million Schedule I prescriptions for nearly 70% of the US population. While not all patients are addicts, we nevertheless have created a culture that dangerously supports opioid dependence.

Like a hydra gaining heads, this national addiction has grown more dangerous and more multifaceted by the year. It’s no longer a simple issue beyond the 30,000 annual opioid related death, but one of child endangerment, suicide rates and increased heroin abuse. Yet we remain frighteningly numb to a crisis in fever pitch.

            Adults are no longer the only victims of opioids, as a new study by JAMA Pediatrics has accounted for a doubling of opioid related poisonings of children from ages 1 to 14 over the past decade, reaching more than 13,000 last year. The prevalence of Vicodin, Percocet, OxyContin among others, has promoted the accidental hospitalization and death of our nation’s youth. Narcotics now account for more childhood accidents than do traffic collisions.

             Beyond accidental overdoses, the readily available compounds have seen suicides rates double over the past decade in the 14 to 24 age ranges, with triple to quadrupled rates among Caucasians. Whether a consequence of addictive behavior or a lethal drug in easy access, the effect is astonishing.

            Ultimately the addictive behaviors and cravings produced by these drugs often lead to the abuse of harder drugs like heroin. Today, 75% of heroin users say they began by abusing prescription drugs. And in the end it goes to show that our dependence on narcotics isn’t one determined by legality, but an umbrella of addiction and a culture obsessed.

This epidemic poses a problem without a clear solution. Despite their dangerous potential, these opioid drugs serve an important medical purpose for our sickest individuals. Though outright ban would halt the drug flow, it would disservice a significant portion of our most infirm population.

To find any solution we must understand this is an issue of culture, and not the chemicals. Change begins with reversing our need to prescribe a painkiller for any and all maladies; a reformulation within pharmaceutical ethics to cease marketing them as cure-alls; the government to taking ownership of our war on drugs, notwithstanding the legality of the abused substance.

Fighting Bad Energy with Good Energy

            President-elect Donald Trump has declared many policy changes to begin within in first hundred days of his administration, even going so far as to create a ‘contract’ with the American people which he shared via social media – his premier platform. With his selection of Myron Ebell – a prominent climate-change-denier - Trump’s influence is already being felt, even before the January inauguration. A New York Times report cites Mr. Ebell’s opinions on the EPA’s regulatory impact:

In the interview in Paris last year, he said he hoped whoever was elected president would “undo the E.P.A. power plant regs and some of the other regs that are very harmful to our economy.”

            The hard-lined stance on de-regulating one of our most important regulatory agencies prompts massive actions on a state level to keep our nation moving in the 21^st century towards healthy energy policies. While on a federal we may shift towards lax regulation, states can still move towards more green and renewable sources, exceeding the bare national requirements. There is no better state to model after than Washington.

            Presently, Washington State receives nearly 70% of its energy from renewable sources, producing energy from a myriad of different technologies, rather than a single source. Hydroelectricity is the prevailing source (accounting for nearly 30% of our entire nation’s hydroelectric power). But wind power also accounts for nearly 10% of the state’s production. Recent investments in biomass and tidal sources have led to a burgeoning of new energy sectors beyond the traditional solar/wind approach of most renewable sources. And although nuclear is not considered a renewable source, it is a green energy in the mind of most environmental sciences – Washington claims home to the only nuclear power for more than 500 miles.

            These sorts of infrastructure by no means appear overnight, but they have created the least expensive energy market in the country and one of the cleanest, while not hampering jobs. Washington is rated the 5^th highest for petroleum refining potential (the amount of infrastructure existing for petroleum manufacturing), yet the state is not dependent on oil or natural gas sources. While not all state economies can directly match Washington, the effect on petroleum industries is not as severe as conservatives might infer from a green switchover.

            The beauty of Washington’s green energy is its state driven mentality – the changes experienced over the past decade were largely implemented during the Bush presidency, a time when gas prices were at a national low, and our environmental regulations were considerably tamer than today. Yet at a state level, Washington has been able to achieve a prosperous energy sector – independent of a Presidential mandate. Other states should look to the past decade of legislation in Washington, as we venture into a new presidency that is looking to de-emphasize the way we treat our environment. After all, we all share only one planet – best we can do is treat it well.

Sources:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/12/science/myron-ebell-trump-epa.html?_r=0

http://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=WA

            

The Sound of Silence: A lack of regulation in 21st century media mergers

What does it mean when the most pro-business candidate in the past 50 years slanders the most recent billion dollar merger? There isn’t a clear answer. In the wake of billion dollar mergers in the past decade, the recent $85.4 billion Time Warner-AT&T merger has set a new standard for business consolidation. But the very fact Donald Trump has voiced concern raises more than one red flag.

 Donald J. Trump has already condemned the deal. Campaigning in Gettysburg, Pa., on Saturday, Mr. Trump said he would block it if he were president, “because it’s too much concentration of power in the hands of too few.”

In some ways this sort of media conglomeration has been seen before, take Comcast’s $30 billion takeover of NBCUniversal or Verizon’s acquisitions of Yahoo and Huffington Post. But in spite of this growing trend in media company deals, this is one we haven’t seen before. The scope at which Time Warner-AT&T will operate exceeds the current regulatory functionality of our government.

Some have cited the $800,000 fine that Comcast received in 2012 as a harbinger of a monopolization in the cable market. Skeptics claimed it would be the first of many lawsuits launched towards the perennially disliked cable company (just look at their annual approval ratings, only Time Warner lies lower). But instead the FCC and FTC have remained remarkably silent over the past four years.

The fright of the merger is not the trail of scandals Time Warner and AT&T have behind them, but the disturbing lack of our regulatory agencies in enforcing the very policies. To many economists, the announcement of the merger came as a left field shock, mostly because the deal resembles that of classical vertical integration pioneered by Rockefeller in the late 19^th century. And it was Rockefeller and Carnegie’s vast fortunes that prompted the regulation overhaul of the early 20^th century. Yet we seem to be careening back on that path, even with the power of hindsight. 

While the distinction of vertical integration isn’t as clear as Rockefeller’s deliberate monopoly over every step of oil refinement, with the Time Warner-AT&T merger, it is very plain to see that the wireless market of AT&T doesn’t overlap with the cable platform of Time Warner. But combined, the new conglomerate can essentially control – top to bottom – all of the media services the average American requires. This is what distinguishes this merger from other mergers.

Unlike the Comcast-NBC merger which by dollars is the closest comparison, Comcast didn’t seize control of another media platform, but rather one entertainment company, and one television station (and its sister companies). But this deal consolidates a different sort of power, and looms to dominate our telecommunications market.

Most startling is the lack of teeth from the DoJ and our regulatory commissions. These sorts of mergers are never made public without vetting from the Judicial and Executive branches. Months, if not years, were spent analyzing this deal, and yet our laws and our regulators found no major issues.

In the wake of the worst financial meltdown since the Great-Depression, and with the consternation of even Trump, we should seriously reconsider our country’s regulatory policy as big business gets bigger and bigger, with fewer and fewer competitors.

Sources:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/07/business/media/media-merger-success-comcast-and-nbcuniversal-say-yes.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/23/business/dealbook/regulatory-microscope-lies-ahead-for-att-and-time-warner.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/23/business/dealbook/att-agrees-to-buy-time-warner-for-more-than-80-billion.html

http://www.theacsi.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=149&catid=&Itemid=214&c=all&sort=Y2014