Easy Sunday: Presidential character.

     "I can tell you without hesitation: Being president of this country is entirely about character."
          Dialogue by Aaron Sorkin, written for President Andrew Shepherd character, "The American President," 1995

President Trump is the way he is because Americans are the way we are. 

We elected him, knowing what he was.

A majority of GOP officeholders in the House and Senate accept and enable Trump's corruption, flagrant dishonesty, presidential wars, crypto grift, cronyism, sale of pardons, shredding of alliances, midnight tweeting, Epstein coverup, and the whole Trump Era experience. GOP voters are along for the ride. A commenter wrote yesterday that he would vote for Trump "in a heartbeat -- as would millions of others. Ignorance or malevolence have nothing to do with it. . . . All Democrats have to offer is higher taxes and bigger, more intrusive and ineffectual government." 

It is a democracy and we have made our choice.

Today's guest post is by John Coster. He reflects on the damage done to America and Americans as Trump shapes our political and moral expectations. Coster studied theology at Regent College while continuing his career managing multimillion-dollar development projects for high-volume users of electricity. He tried to retire but has been pulled back into work because his expertise is so valuable during this build-out of artificial intelligence infrastructure.

I call my shorter, Sunday posts "Easy Sunday," but today's message isn't easy. It is sad and ominous. 

Guest Post by John Coster

Healthy free market capitalism and democracy, or just living in a free society relies on social contracts of trust. My high school teacher once said that “locks are designed to keep honest people honest.” I think that’s true of laws and systems to make and enforce them too. Trust is implicit to some degree. 

Trump’s biggest damage to the soul of our country isn’t just that he has normalized and even glorified cruelty, greed, lies, and contempt for the weak -- as horrible as that is. It’s that his still-high approval ratings among the GOP faithful show that he has lured a big part of our population (even supposedly people of faith) into celebrating his untrustworthiness as smart. Enforcing agreements is based on power and leverage, not mutual trust. Trickery, deceit, and gaslighting are his tools.

But he has feet of clay, and his reign will end one way or another, like that of every other lying and thieving megalomaniac in history, leaving a hollowed-out world of needless suffering that will have a long tail for generations. Or setting us up for someone as bad or worse.

I don’t know whether to blame him for leading our collective moral decay, or to regard him as a mirror of who we really are. I suspect our former allies are starting to think it’s the latter.

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Keeping your word.

"So you see I'm not naive
I just would like to believe
Ah what you tell me. . .
Just be for real"
     Frederick Knight, 1976, "Be for Real," covered by Leonard Cohen, 1992

Donald Trump would have been a bad client in my brokerage business. 

He would have been a bad merchant to have sold melons to in my youth.

He is a bad president.

I am disgusted by Trump. It isn't "derangement." It is rational and based on my experience in business. Some people are bad clients.

My disgust isn't partisan. I mostly vote for Democrats but I get along well with Republicans, and probably 60 percent of my brokerage clients were Republicans. What triggers me about Trump is his unreliability and gleeful dishonesty. He ruins relationships that took decades or centuries to build. As Mark Carney, prime minister of Canada put it, Trump's deals are signed in pencil.

I watch Trump with the mindset of my career as a financial advisor. Orders are given and received orally in that business. When a client heard my recommendation and said "yes," it became an obligation of mine to do as instructed. It is also an acknowledgement that we had settled on a course of action. It is pretty simple: We each do what we agreed to do. Business can take place quickly because of trust. A client who decided after the fact that they didn't want the deal, or lied about the deal, or made some pretext that the trade or course of action wasn't agreed to is an immediate career-ending problem for the advisor. 

In my 30-year career there were about five such client incidents. The incidents were difficult or impossible to unwind; they brought investigations, reports, and weeks of hassles. They ended relationships.

Trump ended the Obama deal with Iran, wrote then abruptly ended the North American Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico and keeps changing it based on whim, changed the tariff deal on imports from every nation, and changed the terms of alliances. And, like a bad brokerage client reneging on a trade, Trump does this with a dishonest pretext, then blames the other party. Trump claims foreign nations deserve tariffs because they all hire slave labor. He claimed Venezuela was carrying out an armed invasion. 

The USA is now understood to be profoundly dishonest and unreliable in its relations with others.  

I remember how important trust was in my youthful melon business. I would deliver melons to Mr. Blunt, the owner-operator of Blunt's Ranch Market. I would tell him that I could bring him an amount of ripe melons from the next day's picking. He would say how many he could use, and to bring them. That set in motion mutual obligations. It meant he would not reject my load when I showed up the next day, having just bought some other melons from some deal that came available. It meant that I would not sell my day's picking of melons to someone else, leaving him short of melons. We had a relationship of trust. Trust was lubrication. Trust was a shock absorber.

Americans elected Trump with their eyes open. Even siloed consumers of conservative news had heard that Trump stiffed vendors. They heard him brag that he didn't pay taxes because he was smart. They had heard about his bankruptcies. My Republican friends who voted for Trump said: He's a scoundrel, but he is our scoundrel. Trump represented change, the end of rules, courtesies, and norms of trade and diplomacy, replacing them with an equilibrium set with the ongoing push and pull of power. Each individual, each business, each country grabs what it can. Trump was what America just enough Americans thought it needed: a sharp businessman.

Mr. Blunt treated me honorably. When he told me to bring melons, I brought the melons and he bought them. Ninety-nine point nine percent of my brokerage clients treated our verbal agreements honestly.

Trump is the very, very bad apple client.  He is the client who novices are warned about. Bad apples get a reputation. In the long run, they get the very worst deals possible because people realize they are snakes. 

Bad apples lose relationships of mutual benefit, but are not friendless. They find fellow-snakes. 

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Can a White, Jewish politician connect with Black voters? Yes.

U.S. Senator Jon Ossoff at Elizabeth Baptist Church:

"I address the political and moral crisis that we face this moment."

The clip is seven minutes long. Take a moment to see the future: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OE1_bJNH_Gs  

I think America is at a turning point. We have passed the moment of "peak Trump." Americans, Republicans included, recognize that Trump's open corruption is dangerous and morally wrong. We are better than that. I don't expect voters to seek a pious Jimmy Carter, but I think Americans are ready for some hand-washing, some sign that the venality and crudeness of Trump and his crowd of billionaires and flatterers should not become the new normal. 

Trump is a flamboyant anti-hero. He is the professional wrestling "heel." He is Tony Soprano. He is Walter White. He is fascinating, but he is not good at governing and he doesn't inspire confidence. Americans think the country is on the wrong track. 

Maybe it is as simple as his time being up. Public tastes oscillate. He has had 10 years on center stage, and we are tiring of his schtick, and his corruption is indefensible, even for people who like that he closed the borders. I see signs of it, even among Republicans. A percentage of them are willing to be not-Trump, without daring to opposeTrump. They want distance, even if they dare not say it directly. 

Ossoff is probing that ground where the swing voters are, the people who swung to Trump in 2024 and now don't like what they see. Some of the critique is economic: It's the economy, stupid. But it is also a matter of character. 

A Democratic politician needs to be able to inspire Black voters without estranging White ones. A Jewish politician needs to be able to carry his identity comfortably without estranging Christians. I think Ossoff pulls this off.

A candidate for the U.S. Senate talks about state issues and what he has done for his state. A presidential candidate talks about the character of a nation, its purpose and destiny. Ossoff looks like a serious man in a serious role. 

Meanwhile, Trump looks petty and vindictive, lashing out at Canada, renaming Lake Ontario, tweeting insults, starting trade wars, trying to manipulate beef prices, messing with elections.  Republican voters might ignore his character if he were doing a great job with the economy and keeping us out of war, thinking that it takes a corrupt man to lead in a corrupt world, but he cannot hide inflation and the mess he has made of our war with Iran.  Americans have given an anti-hero president a chance, and they are ready for something new.

Jon Ossoff is the real thing, and the timing looks about right for him. 

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Health care reform: A better idea

      "On our current track, health care is anticipated to consume 20 percent of our GDP at about $7 trillion annually. Cost containment is key to making the system affordable, and many options would provide relief while at same time enhancing the quality of health care delivery."

                      Bruce Van Zee, M.D. 

I requested guest posts from people with knowledge and experience in healthcare delivery. 

Yesterday I posted the first response. Today I post another.

Bruce Van Zee is a retired nephrologist. He lives in Medford, Oregon and calls himself a "Never Trumper." He began sharing his thoughts during this second Trump term in his new blog on Substack.

Guest Post by Bruce Van Zee, M.D.

I read the yesterday's guest post by Mark Knudsen, and dashed off a comment. I wanted to add to the discussion of what we might do to fix health care in the USA. Other developed countries have worked out a way to have access to healthcare for citizens. We know it can be done because it is being done. 

Rather than reiterate what I have posted on health care in the past, I will leave links to several of the posts at the end of this comment. I agree with Peter that the system Mark described could well improve the chaos and dysfunction that now permeates our system, but it is complicated and still has too many moving parts, I think. Currently, our providers ---hospitals and physicians -- are inundated with regulations, forms, requests, and criteria from a host of payers. They must hire large numbers of clerical people to deal with all the players, each taking a bite out of the health care dollar that ideally would be going to care. It is no wonder the American hodgepodge system is twice as expensive than all other Western developed countries and delivers worse population-level outcomes. To add insult to injury, it still doesn't provide universal access, even in Oregon, which has a robust Medicaid system, the Oregon Health Plan. 

Imagine if our federal highway interstate system had been built by individual entrepreneurs to their own specifications for signage, asphalt, maintenance, and so forth. And with a toll booth every 25 miles or so. I'm a believer in free enterprise and capitalism; government should not be involved in selling cars or TV's. But neither should for-profit businesses, private equity, and publicly held companies be major players in health care. Shareholder goals are not the same as what patients need. When Obamacare was being debated, we almost got a Medicare option for all. If that had happened, our problem might be considerably improved. Medicare runs with a 4 percent overhead. Private insurance and for profit companies are above 20 percent. Denials and prior authorization are not significant issues with traditional Medicare because they are only based on scientific evidence of benefit, not the conflict of interest in profit vs. care that for-profit companies face. Former Governor John Kitzhaber's program more than a decade ago for Oregon Medicaid was rational. Care was ranked: A special health commission ranked hundreds of medical conditions and treatments based on clinical effectiveness and public values. That is a much more appropriate way to manage costs than denial of care based on profitability. 

Bottom line: my vote is for a Medicare-for-all option. The obstacle in doing this is, of course, the monied interests that are immense, all taking a bite of the $15.5 trillion being spent on our dysfunctional health care system. And those players give enormous amounts of money to the lawmaker's campaigns to make sure the system doesn't change. It will take a grassroots effort to convince legislators to offer a Medicare-for-all option. The beauty of the option is that you don't have to do anything with the for-profit companies; they will be unable to profit as they have been as folks begin to realize the hassle-free value of traditional Medicare. The costs of the increased Medicare system will require higher corporate and high-income taxes, but businesses would be relieved of the burden of employee health insurance.  

I have been posting my own thoughts on healthcare at my Substack site: https://bvzcvz.substack.com. 

Here are links to specific articles:  

Can we afford medicare for all?

Traditional Medicare vs Medicare Advantage?

U.S. healthcare costs and outcomes: a primer

The dangers of for-profit healthcare

Mega-corporations are a threat to American values 

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Health Care Reform: Here's an idea.

"Medicare for all" is easy to communicate. 

People are familiar with it, and most people getting Medicare like it. It has political viability as an idea because it sounds like such a simple, clear solution.

Just do it.

But there are questions and problems. How to pay for it? How to transition to it? What about current institutions, including insurance carriers? What about people who like what they have now, and consider Medicare a downgrade? And what about people who want less government, not more government?

I asked people who work in health care for their best suggestion on how to structure a reformed health care system. The first person to respond in writing is Mark Knudsen, a near-classmate in college, graduating a year after me. Knudsen went to business school and then had a long career in administration of health care for providers and insurers. He administered hospital and clinical services at the Shriners Hospital for Children and Cascade Health Solutions. He also negotiated health care contracts with employers.  He is retired and lives in the Portland, Oregon area.

He doesn't describe a simple solution, nor a government-run one. He says to get employers out of the system. His idea is hard to describe and it would be a much harder one to build a political movement around. (Hillary Clinton's 1994 solution was mocked and dismissed as too complicated -- its fatal flaw.)  I don't dismiss this idea as wrong; only as politically impossible. But I pay attention to it because Knudsen had a career dealing with the issues and problems of providing and paying for health care, and I don't dismiss the thoughts of people with knowledge and experience in complicated matters. 

Guest Post by Mark Knudsen

Proposal for Health Care Reform

Advocates of health care reform face two problems. First, it is too easy to opt out of paying for services and secondly, there are too many unaligned interests in the health care market unlike other commercial markets. The proposal below defines the health care market as medical, dental, mental and drug services and providers.

The first step is to require all people in the United States to enroll in a healthcare payment program or demonstrate that one has sufficient liquid assets to pay for services that can be attachable by a healthcare provider.

Employers, state and federal governments, providers, patients, drug companies, and insurance companies are currently involved in the marketplace. Each has different and conflicting interests. Of those involved, the employer has the no legitimate interest in health care. Eliminating the deductibility of health care expenses and rewarding companies who increase employee pay for the loss of this benefit would be the next step.

The third step would be to create independent consumer consortiums which would negotiate directly with insurance companies for benefit packages and premiums. Costs would become more apparent to potential patients, and patient needs more apparent to insurance companies.

Insurance companies would retain their care delivery contracts with providers. By being in direct conversation with subscribers, the insurance companies can more effectively pressure hospitals, physicians, drug companies, and other providers to meet changing consumer demands and to minimize expenses. Insurance companies who fail will become less competitive and lose subscribers. Providers would be more effective in negotiating their reimbursement levels given their knowledge of their patients and their needs.

State and federal governments would be the primary payer for indigent and special needs populations. They could enter into agreements with insurance companies to administer these programs or contract directly with delivery systems or specialty clinics. State and Federal government certification and licensure programs would be the only quality assurance standards for delivery providers. The federal government would be the reinsurer for extraordinarily expensive cases and for experimental efforts that show promise for a wide swath the American public. For example, the Federal Government would have reimbursed providers for Tommy John’s surgery in 1974, not the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Medical expenses incurred by a taxpayer are now an itemized deduction on Schedule A. Under this proposal, medical expenses would be an adjustment to adjusted gross income on a personal 1040.

Like any proposal, the devil is in the details. The transition period would be complicated and involved but removing the employer from direct involvement in the health care marketplace should make reform easier.

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Melons, grapes, and puncture vine

It isn't all politics, all the time, everywhere.

Part Two: grapes

(I wrote about melons on Saturday, and I will get to my noxious puncture vine weed problem soon. If reading about the vineyard bores you, skip this post.)

I am putting up netting to protect my crop from birds.

Last year I got my first harvest in the new vineyard. The Pinot Noir grapes are the first of my three varieties to blossom and the first to be ripe enough for harvest. We picked on October 6 last year. There was no bird loss.

The Malbecs were next to pick, scheduled about 10 days later. There was a huge crop waiting, so huge I had to "drop fruit," in preparation for the harvest, which is to say remove about 40 percent of the grape clusters to try to concentrate the vines' energy onto fewer grapes. I had a valuable crop on deck. I posted a photo of the grape clusters remaining to be picked, along with the dropped fruit lying on the ground below.

Then, three days before the planned harvest on October 17, when the Malbecs would have been at peak, birds wiped me out. I headlined the blog post of October 16  reporting the loss with lyrics from "Monday, Monday" by the Mamas and the Papas: "Monday morning couldn't guarantee that Monday evening you would still be here with me." Starlings swooped in and ate the entire crop in two days. Every grape.

Heartbreaking.

I am busy this week putting up netting to try to make sure that doesn't happen this year. I am using a black plastic mesh netting, with 3/4-inch holes, on rolls shaped three feet by 3,000 feet. My nephew and I unroll the spool of netting on each side of the row, surrounding the hanging grapes. The unspooling goes quickly. The problem comes from the need to close up the net by clipping the two sides together at the top and bottom. If there are big gaps, birds will find their way to the ripe fruit. This part is slow.

The black plastic does not photograph well, but it is visible.

I am doing it with these clips to make the connection, the same kind we see for closing bags of food:

Like a lot of farm field work, the job isn't complicated, but it is tedious and repetitive, which turns it into hard work. My nephew and I reach in, grab the net from the other side of the row, pull the two sides together, and clip them. We place a clip about every three or four feet, top and bottom. The top is an easier job because the farm worker (me) stands upright. Clipping the bottom requires the worker (my nephew) to crouch down. Crouching is not hard. Repeatedly getting up from the crouch is hard, at least for me, so I assign that job to him.

My theory and hope is that my pumice soil will produce unusually good wine grapes. In the extraordinarily fine-grained pumice, the capillary roots of the grape plant access elements of the soil not available in heavier soils. There are rare deposits of pumice soil at Mt. Etna in Italy and the volcanic island of Santorini in the Mediterranean. Wines from those two places are considered excellent and unusual by the people who taste and evaluate wines. Mount Mazama blew a small deposit of pumice soil into about a square mile at the base of the Table Rocks, a deposit that is just out of reach of the floods of the Rogue River, so the deep deposit is still there after 7,200 years. 

The grapes are worth protecting, and that is my task for this week. Southern Oregon's pioneer vineyard and winery, Valley View Vineyards, provided the bird netting. They are monitoring my grapes, and the owners tell me the grapes look good and are very marketable, and therefore worth this effort. The grape canopy is vigorous — too good, if anything — because the soil readily pulls up moisture and grape nutrients. I have done only perfunctory irrigation. All three of my varieties survived an April frost that hurt most vineyards around the region. That was unfortunate timing since Southern Oregon just got rated the country's best wine-growing region. We are that niche, undiscovered place that wine aficionados seek out in the effort to find hidden gems.

Valley View Vineyards' nets saved me about $8,000 in new net purchases. I have 39,000 linear feet of grape rows, with netting required on both sides, almost 80,000 feet of net. 

Starlings in November on a nearby tree. Famous for their swooping flock murmurations. Infamous for their damage to crops.

Apparently distressed bird recordings on loudspeakers work to keep Valley View Vineyard's own Applegate vineyard free of bird predation. I had such an infestation of starlings last year that I decided I needed to use nets, the gold standard of crop protection.

The premise in the wine-grape industry is that the money one spends to make great grapes is an investment in great grapes. Through art, science, and expertise, those grapes get made into very high-quality wine, which then readily sells at a premium price because people notice the higher quality. 

That's the intention. Lots could go wrong. It is farming. 

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Canada says no.

"These boots are made for walkin'
And that's just what they'll do"
     Lee Hazlewood, "These Boots are Made for Walkin'", made popular by Nancy Sinatra, 1965

President Trump is picking a fight with Canada. He taunts them. He says that Canada wants the advantages of being the 51st state without actually being one.

Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney said,"No deal is better than a bad deal."

He had his negotiators walk out of the negotiations.

Click: YouTube

Then, in clear, mature, reasonable language he explained to Canadians and the world why the tariff negotiations ended. The contrast between Mark Carney and Donald Trump is profound. What is happening in America that we would pick a Donald Trump in a world that produces leaders like Mark Carney?

Sandford Borins is a college classmate. He is Canadian. Borins is Professor of Public Management Emeritus at the University of Toronto. In retirement he and his wife Beth Herst wrote Public Representations: Screen Stories, Narrative, and the Public Sphere, 

Guest Post by Sanford Borins

Resisting Trump’s Imperialism

While the U.S. and Canada accuse each other of making last-minute demands that led to the collapse of their recent trade negotiations, I want to step back to consider the Trump administration's actions in an historical context.

Canada evolved slowly from being a group of British colonies to nationhood. An act of the British Parliament, the British North America Act, united four eastern provinces (New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Quebec, and Ontario) to establish Canada in 1867. Other British colonies joined later, most recently Newfoundland and Labrador in 1949. Initially, Canada didn’t have its own foreign policy and its highest court was in London. Canadian sovereignty developed gradually, and Canadians retain the distasteful memory of having been a colony.

 
Following the signing of NAFTA in 1994, the U.S., Canada, and Mexico became what then Prime Minister Jean Chretien called “the three amigos.” This was a period of free trade and increased economic integration, most notably in automobile production. Each partner respected the others’sovereignty. Canada participated wholeheartedly and suffered many casualties in the war in Afghanistan but took a pass on Iraq. Unlike the U.S., Canada and Mexico have always maintained warm diplomatic and economic relations with Cuba.

Been There, Done That

Canadians see the second Trump administration’s approach to its relationship with Canada as a desire to return Canada to the status of a colony and a negation of “the three amigos” era. President Trump’s juvenile “51st state” rhetoric and gaslighting and taunting of Canadian leaders poison the atmosphere but are not the essential problem. Our critical concern is the Trump administration's attempt to thwart Canada’s economic development and sovereignty, in effect to turn it into a vassal state. This is of a piece with other Trump administration initiatives to dominate the western hemisphere, such as the attempt to seize Greenland, the takeover of the Venezuelan Government, and the blockade of Cuba.

Why Canada Walked

There are several components of this imperialist approach, and they all appear to have come together in the recent negotiations. The Trump administration wants to weaken or destroy some Canadian industries, most notably automobile assembly, auto parts, and steel, all of which currently sell much of their output to the U.S., by implementing prohibitive tariffs. It hopes that dismantling Canadian manufacturing will increase manufacturing jobs in the U.S.

In resources such as oil, gas, potash, and critical minerals the Trump administration wants the U.S. to be the sole purchaser of Canadian output – the introductory economics term is “monopsony.” Hence the willingness of the Trump administration not to tariff Canadian energy producers, its desire to build the Keystone XL oil pipeline, and its demand that Canada not make agreements to sell these products to other countries. Clearly the Trump administration wants cheap, guaranteed supply.

 
These two approaches represent classic imperialism, in which the colony produces raw materials for the metropole and the metropole sells finished goods back to the colony. Late in the negotiations, the Trump administration introduced demands that Canada drop requirements that U.S. streaming platforms such as Netflix and Amazon Prime promote Canadian (including French-language) content to users in Canada and requirements for bilingual packaging of products sold in Canada. These demands represent an attack on Canadian cultural sovereignty and are particularly tone-deaf on the eve of an election in Quebec.

Defense is a third aspect of the would-be imperialist relationship. The U.S. wants substantial Canadian participation in its vision of North American defense and also wants to make sure that Canada buys American weaponry. Increasingly, Canada sees the Trump administration as an unreliable military partner. The flashpoint now is whether Canada will complete a major order of F35 fighter aircraft, which the Trump administration has been demanding. In his statement the morning after Canada walked away from the trade negotiations, Prime Minister Carney made it clear that the concessions the Trump administration was asking for amount to an unacceptable incursion on Canadian sovereignty, in effect an attempt to establish a new imperial relationship.

The Empire Strikes Back?

Carney has announced that Canada will put in place a program of support for Canadian producers who will be hurt by the additional U.S. tariffs that just went into effect and will also impose counter-tariffs on September 8, the day after Labor Day. In some instances, the counter-tariffs are a logical response to the U.S. tariffs. For example, both the U.S. and Canada produce steel. If U.S. tariffs make it impossible for Canadian steel producers to sell in the U.S., not imposing counter-tariffs would allow U.S. steel producers to continue to sell in Canada. The counter-tariffs level the playing field for Canadian steel producers selling in Canada. The slight delay in implementing counter-tariffs permits additional negotiation, if both sides are so inclined.

Trump’s typical response to opposition is social media taunts and escalating threats. The taunts have already started. The threats are likely to come soon.



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