Easy Sunday: Slash, Burn, and Run

Do you remember "Chainsaw Al" Dunlap?

In the 1990s he was a famous CEO at Scott Paper and appliance-maker Sunbeam. A few days after taking over at Sunbeam, he unsheathed his stock in trade: He fired most of the company's senior management, and announced 6,000 layoffs, about half of the firm's work force.  Sunbeam's stock soared. Then it crashed.

John Coster's guest post on Trump, who sold Americans that he was a turnaround CEO for a failing country, brought back memories of "Chainsaw Al."

Some of the most valuable assets of a company or a country are built up over generations. It is a reputation for integrity, reliability, and fair dealing. It is expertise within the employees. It is trust.

Coster had a long career managing multimillion-dollar development projects for high-volume users of electricity. He recently retired -- or is trying to. Amid the rush to build data hubs on Earth and in space, large technology companies keep trying to lure him back to work. They need his expertise.

Guest Post by John Coster

Your post Saturday quoting The Wall Street Journal got me thinking about how Trump, the “Turn-around CEO,” weaseled his way into power with the tacit endorsement of the business elite where he operates with a kind of corporate-valuation mindset. In this model, the CEO and his executive team drive up market valuation by slashing costs that produce short-term earnings that cause the market to react favorably for a few quarters. The CEO gets rewarded on earnings and market cap (or higher valuation for a sale) even if the long-term impact on the business is net-negative. Or worse, some of these companies just disappear, or get absorbed into something unrecognizable. The market understands these guys and plays the game.

Trump convinced enough people (think of the voters as the "Board of Directors") that the country was in his words “a disaster”; undervalued if you will, and only he could “turn it around.” And he promised to do it with swift, decisive and merciless action on trade, taxes, immigration, slashing environmental regulations, and entitlements – and especially all that social-equity malarky. Enough of the “The Board” liked what they heard and hired him – again.

 
Just like a typical “Turn-Around CEO,” he began doing what he said with little pushback from those who could if they had the courage. In this second re-hire, the assets he’s been stripping are not just financial; they are non-monetizable things like reputation, trust, and good-will, the loss of which is hard to restore. He is insulting our allies. He is threatening invasions. He treats trading partners like enemies. Ultimately the burden is on the well-being of the people who put their trust in him, and the likely irreparable damage to our admittedly imperfect, but working systems of government that will be impacted for generations to come. Like corporate raiders, he is impoverishing everything he is overseeing -- with the single goal of enriching himself and his insatiable ego.

And now the venerable WSJ notices.

 

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Things fall apart

The Wall Street Journal admitted in an editorial this morning what I wrote about earlier this week.

Trump TACO-ed on Iran. He chickened out.

Trump has a glass jaw.

I gifted the short editorial here.

Here are some highlights:

Mr. Trump said at his Wednesday news conference. In so many words the President said the Iranians had him over a barrel—of oil. If he had fought on, the market “would go down at levels that nobody ever saw before, maybe except for 1929,” he said. “The one President I did not want to be was the late, great Herbert Hoover.”

There you have it: Mr. Trump was driven by fear of high oil prices and a falling stock market going into the midterm elections. . . .

The U.S. had options but Mr. Trump blinked at the risk. Instead, after two months of cease-fire weakness while the public soured and oil reserves declined, the President acknowledges he gave in to Iran’s economic pressure. . . .

The more hope Messrs. Trump and Vance express in the Iranian regime’s transformation, the more desperate they sound. How else to read their sudden defense of Iran’s missile program, after stopping it had been a declared U.S. war aim? Wishful thinking can’t cover up this deal’s origins in White House fears. As the President himself admits.

I understand that readers might presume that I take an uncharitable look at Trump because I mostly vote for Democrats, and because I have concluded that Trump is a narcissistic, corrupt autocrat with no respect for the country he leads. So of course I would write that his only principle in foreign policy is his own personal political advantage. But I am not alone. The Wall Street Journal shares my opinion.

But the blind cult of Trump is fraying. MAGA "America First" isolationists feel betrayed, and wonder if we are being led around by Israel. Israel hawks feel betrayed, so Trump is getting hurt in both directions. The Epstein mess makes Trump look like he is hiding something, which, of course, he is. Trump's fixations on the 2020 election, on the ballroom, on gold adornments, on the reflecting pool, on a grandiose arch, seem like sideshow distractions to all but people deep in the cult. I would like to think that bona fide Christians are uncomfortable with the way that he presents himself as a tight-with-Jesus Christian warrior. It looks like blasphemy and idolatry to me, but polls show that evangelical Christians are OK with Trump, so far at least.

The Wall Street Journal represents what remains an important part of the GOP coalition: the business establishment. That is a group that wants orderly, rule-of-law enforcement of contracts and patents, predictable interest rate policy, limited regulation, and low taxes on the wealthy. The establishment wants the government to leave it alone unless, and until, they need to be rescued, at which point they become socialists and claim that they must be subsidized to save capitalism and jobs for the downtrodden. I watched this happen in 1985 (savings and loan crisis), 1987 (Black Monday), 1991 (insurance crisis), 1998 (Long-Term Capital collapse), 2000 (internet bubble pops), 2021 (9/11 attack), 2008 (mortgage bubble triggers Great Financial Crisis), and repeatedly in Trump's terms of office whenTrump bailed out farmers to mitigate the effects on them of tariff retaliation, and at key points in the past decade when the government bailed out SpaceX and Tesla. 

The Wall Street Journal is inconsistent and hypocritical, but the newspaper is clear about its interest in defending the business establishment. Trump wants business to do well and he wants the stock market to soar, but he wants it so he can brag about it and be glorified by it. The WSJ is getting clear that Trump's goal is his own wealth and glory, not the country's, and that while the goals theoretically run in parallel, in fact they do not. Trump will happily flout the rule of law, and orderly, predictable process to achieve his goal of personal influence. For the WSJ government ownership of businesses is bad per se, it is socialism. For Trump, the government owning a piece of a business is a source of personal power -- a very good thing. It is a string he can pull to get something he wants. 

Trump is not governing the country on behalf of the WSJ. He is governing it on behalf of the audience of Fox News which glorifies and empowers Trump personally. They are different and, increasingly, they are in opposition. 

Things fall apart.

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Vietnam déjà vu

I got fury in my soul, fury's gonna take me to the glory goal
In my mind I can't study war no more
     Laura Nyro, Save the Country, 1968

Does bombing a foreign country change hearts and minds there?

Yes. It backfires.

Dropping bombs on Vietnam

I imprinted on the music that I heard in my youth, approximately 1963 to 1973. I also imprinted on the lessons of the Vietnam War of the same era. I studied that war by osmosis, the way I listened to music. I was surrounded by it. 

It was an idea universally acknowledged during my youth that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was a tactical victory and a strategic mistake. The Pearl Harbor "sneak attack," changed American minds. Instantly opposition evaporated to our "gettin in" on the war waging in Europe. Attack us, and Americans united in opposition to the attacker. That was settled history, and remains so.

America's youth had learned the origin story of American independence: the brave Minutemen fighting the large imperial power, using guerilla tactics against the Redcoats. We knew something about the Boston Massacre. British troops fired upon protesters. The bad guys were Britain, its king, and their troops.

The Pearl Harbor story fits into that mindset. The attacker is the bad guy bully, and its attacks backfire in the long run. Vietnam fit the pattern in the minds of the anti-war youth.

The U.S. sought regime change in Vietnam. It wanted a pro-American, anti-communist regime. Ho Chi Minh admired the U.S. and its founding documents, but he was a communist, and that was enough for our leaders. Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon spoke of the need to win the "hearts and minds" of the Vietnamese people. One reason Vietnam was so hard to pacify was because so many "innocent-looking" civilians, supposedly on our side, were secretly helping the Vietcong. President Johnson understood we had a persuasion problem. He said:

So we must be ready to fight in Vietnam; but, the ultimate victory will depend upon the hearts and the minds—of the people who actually live out there.

The tactic to win the hearts and minds was the military. We would create pain so great that they would give up. We reported comparative body counts. We celebrated killing 10 enemies for only one of ours. Anyone we killed was an enemy or potential enemy, so that counted. Surely pain would cause them to give up. A saying attributed to Johnson summarized the plan:

 When you've got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.

President Trump's original war aim was regime change in Iran. It was a reasonable desire, and indeed a less evangelical, less Islamist Iran has been an American goal since the Iranian Revolution in 1978. Trump called on the Iranian people to rise up; demonstrators were brutally repressed. The U.S. has a tool: overwhelming military power that could administer pain to the Iranian regime and public. I presume that our bombing the girls school was an accident -- a mistake in targeting -- but I note that our government is not offering a big mea culpa. Stuff happens. There is a logic to not admitting grievious error because what we were doing was creating pain, and what is more painful than having schoolgirls killed as collateral damage? It is Iran's fault for not capitulating, as we had demanded.

Our bombing of Iran was a tactical success. The lesson of Pearl Harbor and Vietnam hold true. Bombing does not displace a government or dispirit the people being bombed. It energizes them. Iran's leadership regime remains in place, stronger than before. The U.S. is withdrawing from the region.

When Trump first campaigned back in 2015 and 2016 he seemed to have learned that lesson. He was, arguably, the peace candidate, and Hillary Clinton was the hawk.

He forgot the lesson, or got persuaded by Israel hawks that this time is different. It wasn't different.

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Trump describes the American glass jaw.

I have felt squeamish about saying that the U.S. has a "glass jaw."

It felt disloyal and un-American to report a dangerous weakness in my country's ability to defend ourselves. 

Trump revealed it in Paris.

Let me explain: "Glass jaw" is a boxing term for a fighter who is knocked out easily from a punch to the face. It means the fighter has an easily discovered vulnerability.

Iran did not need to invade the U.S. to win a war with us and get us to withdraw from the region with its regime intact, its control over the Strait of Hormuz enhanced, its regional influence increased, it being promised some $300 billion for reconstruction, and the U.S. now putting pressure on Israel to stop its attack of Lebanon. It did not need to capture our Capitol. It just needed to rattle our stock market. Trump isn't particularly sensitive to the costs of war or to inflation. But he cares about the stock market.

Take 59 seconds to watch a bit of this press conference in Evian, France, where he praises the genius of the stock market:

Click here

He told reporters that "every time we said something amazing, like 'we're going to settle,' the stock market went up. And every time we said something negative, like 'guess what, we're not going to be able to settle,' it would go down, very big. . . "

Trump said, “If we didn’t do this deal, we could have dropped more bombs for another three weeks,…four weeks, two years….you would never have the Hormuz Strait open. . . ." 

The stock “market would have, instead of going up….would go down at levels that nobody ever saw before, maybe, except for 1929. I did not want to see economic catastrophe. If you kept this going, that could have happened.”

Trump tells lies with ease, but not everything he says is a lie. He is accurately describing the stock market over the past months. The stock market rose and fell on war news, as did oil prices and therefore oil stocks. 

There is an odd silver lining to this glass jaw, and Trump's frank admission of it. Anti-war voters of both parties can reflect that a transactional president, one who entered a war because he thought it might be easy and enhance his popularity, with the potential bonus of grabbing some cheap oil as a spoil of war, is not psychologically and morally committed to pursuing the war for decades. I don't doubt that Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon genuinely thought we had some moral obligation to defend democracy, capitalism, freedom, and Western Civilization to stop Soviet and Chinese communism. We had a duty, so the Vietnam war persisted even when it became unpopular.

Trump doesn't appear to have a sense of duty or honor or responsibility to any higher principle. He was in it for the money and the glory. If this is a loser on both counts -- and that is how it is working out -- he stops and leaves Bibi Netanyahu and Israel-hawks in both Israel and the U.S. surprised and disappointed.

The war is a loser, and Trump is cutting his losses. 

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Iran won.

What will we know for sure about what President Trump called "the little excursion in Iran?"

There will be disagreements about the Iran Memo of Understanding and eventual peace settlement.

I expect to be lied to by both sides. 

Here is what I think we know for sure:

--  We didn't get regime change in Iran. The same team is in place, but now with younger people with a fresh sense of national purpose and pride.

--  The bombing of the girls school and the death of 100-plus schoolgirls will not go away. A hundred years from now Iranians will remember that we bombed a school for girls. 

--  As with Obama's Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the eventual Trump nuclear deal will leave Iran wanting to get nuclear material. The technology is available. But they have learned that they have something better than a nuclear bomb, which would invite nuclear retaliation: They can hold the world's economy hostage by threatening the Strait of Hormuz.

--  Before the start of the war on February 28, the Strait of Hormuz was an international waterway, with free passage for everyone. Now the Iran and Oman control the strait, and we are negotiating to have it be free of Iranian tolls, while Iran is negotiating to regulate them with administrative and environmental fees. 

--  Before the start of the war the U.S. was the security guarantor for the oil-rich countries of the region. We had a deal with them: They trade in petrodollars and keep oil flowing to the world; we keep safe their glass cities, luxury hotels, hedge fund headquarters, and energy infrastructure. That is over. The war proved we cannot protect them. The protection comes from making cooperation arrangements with Iran. 

--  The U.S. military is huge, but ineffective. The weapon systems of World War II and the Cold War are obsolete. A thousand drones at $10 million are more effective than one aircraft carrier at $5 billion. And you don't need to sink the aircraft carrier. You just have to scare the insurance companies that insure oil tankers.

--  The U.S. burned its allies with insults and trade wars, so it does not lead a coalition of democracies. When it really counts, the U.S. is on its own.

--  The U.S. got led by Israel and is now scrambling to unwind the mess it got itself into. Israel has become a political liability. U.S. hawks on behalf of Israel have been discredited. Even Trump is abandoning them, and no credible American politician will try to replace Trump as a full-throated champion of Israel. 

--  The U.S. has a glass jaw militarily. The way for supposed small powers and middle powers to end wars with the U.S. on favorable terms is to cause political distress for the president. The weak spot for the U.S. is the next election. 

--  President Trump and conservative media will call this a tremendous victory for Trump and the USA.

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Sacrilege is a message.

     “Michelle Obama is a man. Am I right, America?”

          Josh Hokit, at the White House lawn after winning his fight, June 14.

The whole event was a desecration. This was just a little extra.

Desecration has purpose and effect. It is political speech. It is a message: 

There is nothing sacred about the U.S. Not its places, institutions, or norms. We have power and will use it however we want, so, fuck you.

The cage fight took place on the White House lawn. Award ceremonies took place at the Lincoln Memorial. The event was a commercial event with paid ticketing, advertisements, and sponsors. People who accuse Trump of being thoughtless and impulsive are not wrong. But he has superb instincts about political messaging. The event was a political message of Trump marking his territory like a dog urinating on a wall, fresher and higher than the previous dog, or a graffiti-tagger putting something new and bigger on top of another tag. 

The USA has a civic religion. The country was not installed and consecrated by a pope who crowned a country's leader. The Constitution begins with "We the People." We formed it. We made it special. We have substituted civic institutions, places, and symbols for religious ones. Children stand to say the "Pledge of Allegiance." We stand for the National Anthem, and when someone kneels for it, even respectfully, a great many people object. We debate from time to time whether to limit the First Amendment's free speech clause to say that burning the U.S. flag is not permitted speech. 

I have been to the Lincoln Memorial. It feels like a temple. Imposing. Silent. Words engraved on the wall stating our purpose as a country.

Josh Hokit was celebrating his victory. With what, exactly, with his comment about Michelle Obama? He was celebrating the power of transgression. He could be racist and misogynist and offensive. He could be obscene, in the Greek drama sense. He could put before the people that which should be off-screen, i.e. obscene. 

I wrote yesterday of my great disappointment with Republicans, people who had happily voted for Ronald Reagan, who said he never took off his suit jacket in the Oval Office out of respect for it, and John McCain, whose sense of military honor kept him tortured in a North Vietnamese prison for extra years rather than be released out of order of men held longer.  Republicans voters have understood honor and personal character in the past.

Barack Obama's election seemed to have changed something in Republicans. Trump's accusation that Obama was illegitimate from the beginning found political traction within Republican voters. Obama's education and credentials were fine; he had been a state senator then a U.S. senator. But he is black -- half black, a half-breed -- and therefore uncomfortably foreign, an outsider. His wife became part of that illegitimacy. She spoke about wholesome food and healthy exercise, a good anodyne concern. They were married, scandal-free, and had two children. But there needed to be illegitimacy somehow. The right-wing trope emerged. Michelle Obama was in fact a man, making her a fraud and Barack Obama gay. The story has persisted for a decade, advocated by Elon Musk's father, by right wing trolls, by social media commenters. It is untrue, physically impossible, but persistent.

The accusation created an idea, or cemented an idea out there in the zeitgeist that the U.S. government is a fraud. That our institutions are a fraud. That playing by the rules is a sucker's game. That polite is for sissies. That norms are to be broken because actions are legitimized by the power to take them.

Donald Trump staged a cage fight award ceremony at the Lincoln Memorial to de-sanctify the Lincoln space and what it represents. Josh Hokit's comment was not out of place. It was part of the process of vandalizing. 

Perhaps, a decade from now, when Trump is gone, Republican voters and officeholders will have swept up the mess and remember themselves as never, ever having been part of the Trump movement. MAGA, they will say, was about making America great, not vandalizing it. They will pretend to forget, and then they won't need to pretend. They will have re-written their memories.

Republicans are like the foolish, stupid young men who celebrated the Knicks victory by, of all things, setting fire to a school bus. They will regret it later, I hope, but they were caught up in the moment of feeling empowered by destroying things.

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Well, THAT waa a disappointment.

I expected an answer from my congressman.

I expected an evasive, buck-passing, worthless answer, but still some recognition that there is an issue here that he needed to finesse.

No. He blew me off. 

U.S. Rep. Cliff Bentz

I wrote Republican U.S. Representative Cliff Bentz, my Oregon Second District congressman -- twice -- with the same request. Both times I used the official web page request form to ask Bentz whether he supported President Donald Trump's settlement agreement with the IRS that would awarded Trump $1.776 billion to give to January 6 rioters and anyone else Trump's appointees chose. The Congress has the "power of the purse" if they choose to exercise it. 

My presumption is that it would be an uncomfortable question for Bentz or for any other Republican senator or Representative. In the world after Trump's opposition to Rep. Thomas Massie (KY), Senators John Cornyn(TX) and Bill Cassidy (LA), and the Indiana state senators, there can be no question in Bentz' mind that open disagreement with Trump could be fatal to his career. A vaguely-positive non-committal mumble might be OK, but there is no way Bentz can say aloud that he understands it to be an outrageous self-dealing corrupt theft.

But if your political office gives Bentz, and every other Republican representative and senator, the power to stop an outrage, by speaking out against it and becoming part of a voting block to stop the slush fund deal, but he does nothing, then Bentz and the others are politically accountable for their inaction. They should have to explain themselves.

Here is the letter I got in response. I will summarize it because I expect readers to skim it, then give up and stop reading. He says that Trump told us he would issue executive orders and that Trump is trying to stop wasteful spending on programs that people like but we cannot afford. There is nothing whatever about the $1.776 billion slush fund deal. Zero.

I consider Trump a dangerous autocrat, a narcissistic sociopath who is corrupting our politics. He has profound character flaws and he is acting them out. He is being genuine to his character.

I have contempt, though, for craven representatives and senators who enable Trump to be his worst self. I presume that Cliff Bentz knows better. I presume that he has the moral sense that this self-dealing is wrong, that this deal stinks to high heaven. Surely in his former law practice he would refuse to help a client who has some public trust to do anything similar. 

I doubt Trump feels guilty for what he does. Since he is a narcissisic sociopath, he feels entitled to take whatever he can take. But Bentz is not blinded by mental illness. Bentz is protecting himself, doing the wrong thing out of selfishness and fear for his career. Americans in public jobs show selfless courage and duty every day. Police. Firefighters. People in the military. They put their lives on the line. Meanwhile Cliff Bentz lets Trump do as he wants and does nothing. It is beyond disappointing. 

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Easy Sunday: Expunging history.

"The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it."
     Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, translated by Edward FitzGerald.

Trump wants to erase history. 

It is a terrible, self-destructive idea. Democrats should let him do it. 

Trump is encouraging congressional allies to introduce a resolution to expunge both of his impeachments. "It should be done because I did nothing wrong," he told The Wall Street Journal. "It was a rigged deal -- it was a whole rigged situation."

The impeachments of Donald Trump were neither foolish nor partisan. Trump tried to condition military aid the Congress appropriated to Ukraine with the Ukraine's president announcing they were investigating former Vice President Joe Biden so Trump could cite the investigation to damage a political rival. The second impeachment was because, as Mitch McConnell put it, Trump summoned a mob to the Capitol to try to reverse an election by violence.The fact that he was not convicted in the Senate after the first impeachment was because GOP senators wanted to stand by their party leader. After the second impeachment there was a mix of standing by their party, serving the desires of the Republican primary electorate, and a sense that it was unnecessary because Trump was finished and would fade away, so why bother? That was a serious miscalculation.

Trump sometimes does wildly unpopular things in his relentless effort to glorify himself: his face on coins and currency, his name on the JFK Center for the Performing Arts, his longing for a Nobel Peace Prize, his birthday celebration cage fight, his ballroom and triumphal arch, his role-playing as Christ, Rambo, and superheroes, his over-the-top desire for flattery, and his self-flattery. Wanting the impeachments expunged is another iteration of his effort to glorify and sanitize his image.

It will do the opposite. An expungement resolution would bring hearings, testimony, and a reminder of what Trump did. Republicans have tried out a variety of contradictory ways to describe the January 6 attack:

--  The rioters were really Democrats carrying Trump flags -- an assertion that fell apart when it became clear that they were in fact long-time MAGA fans.

--  It was really the FBI that planned and executed it -- an assertion that fell apart for lack of evidence of FBI involvement, and ample evidence that the rioters Trump partisans who were there eagerly, having been summoned by Trump.

--  The rioters were just a very few were out-of-control people who Trump tried but failed to restrain. That fell apart when Trump switched positions from disapproval to approval of their actions, now praising them as patriots.

--  They were peaceful, law-abiding tourists. That fell apart when one looks at the videotape of crowds climbing the building, breaking windows, pushing and shoving police, forcing their way past doors and through windows, their vandalizing the Capitol, and when one reviews their guilty pleas for their violent acts.

Do these look like Democrats?

Do they look like non-violent tourists?

Do they look like they were invited in by the police?

Sure, let's re-litigate the impeachments. Let's show more video of the riots. Let's put Trump back center stage defending what we saw with our own eyes. Let's require Republican House members who voted not to accept electoral votes to explain themselves. Worse, they will now have to claim that there was nothing wrong about January 6. Trump would insist that they do so since it is now the Trump position: "I did nothing wrong." This is an anchor on the popularity for Trump -- but he is probably beyond accountability. It is also an anchor on all Republican Senators and Representatives, including my own, Cliff Bentz. Bentz would be trapped, forced to defend the least-defensible things Trump did.

Give Trump the rope he seeks.

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SpaceX!!! It's going publlic. Buy!

 A compass that reliably points south is just as valuable as one that reliably points north.

I got a market signal. 

Watch out.

In my career as a financial advisor I looked for exit points, moments when the animal spirits of investor enthusiasm went crazy. High points are evident only when looking up from below, i.e, when it is too late. Still, in 30 years as an advisor and another decade as a retiree hoping that my investments will see me through to the end, I looked for times of maximum mania, when as many people as possible have thrown caution to the wind and decided to get in because the gettin' is good. That is when gettin' out is smart.

Fortunately for me, I have a south-pointing compass. A longtime friend and former brokerage client is that compass. Let's call him Tom. He is busy with his law practice, so whenever he calls me with excitement over something that sounds to my ear almost like panic, I know that the party is over. He is very closely attuned to what will sell to a jury or judge. His alertness to mood is what makes him such a successful and persuasive attorney. It makes him extraordinarily sensitive to political signals. He knew Trump would win in 2016, and said so publicly, against all conventional wisdom when he was thought out of touch. Quite the opposite. He felt the vibe. He connects. That is what makes him a good political compass and a reverse compass on investment mania. He hears the vibe of sure-thing-can't-miss-money and he fears missing out. 

That is the error in being part of the crowd in investments. The crowd is always late. The crowd piles on. When the crowd is frantic with excitement every lemming has gotten into the very last line to march over the cliff. 

He called me a week ago urging me to use any connection I might still have at Morgan Stanley to get him an allocation of shares of Elon Musk's SpaceX. Tom wanted to invest the bulk of his brokerage account money. This isn't a risky investment, Tom said. This is different from other investments because Musk has an edge. Trump is afraid of what Musk could do to him and greedy about what Musk can do for him. Trump is perfectly happy to use the power of the federal government to help his friends with subsidies, contracts, regulatory breaks -- whatever a campaign-contributing billionaire needs. If any of SpaceX's three businesses gets in trouble, Trump will bail it out with contracts or subsidies, so there is a guaranteed floor, backed by the full faith and credit of the federal treasury. Tom is counting on Trump's being willing to trade favors for favors, and that is a very good bet.

We have already experienced a proof-of-concept of Musk's power and Trump's willingness to serve. Musk used his influence on Trump, who used his influence on the indexes to make sure that indexes could include SpaceX almost immediately, against previous policy, and notwithstanding a tiny public float that would otherwise block purchase of SpaceX.  All the passive investors who own investments that track the S&P500 or the NASDAQ 100 indexes in their index funds will be buying SpaceX in huge quantities even though the public float of available stock is small in comparison to the required purchases of the index-tracking funds. Mandatory price-insensitive buying creates a squeeze that forces prices up. It is shady; it hurts investors other than Musk and other early insiders; it breaks longstanding consumer-protection practice. But it makes Musk a great deal of money. See? Musk can't get hurt. Musk has an edge. You can't lose.

So what is wrong with that story? Maybe nothing. Maybe Musk can't lose. Musk could invest $50 billion in the midterms to get the "right" judges and the "right" down-ballot state legislators and county officials elected. They are the ones who count the votes, certify elections, and review the appeals. Musk would earn it back with federal contracts Trump steers his way.

But I have seen this movie before. I am reflecting my experience about market sentiment. Excitement and optimism and puffery work as long as people see things going up. Tom isn't looking at earnings, debts, cash flow, or any other metric of investment value and that isn't the source of his investment decision. Tom is attuned to the zeitgeist. It is go-go-go time for Elon Musk, and people are looking at opportunity. They are cheering a winner. Tom is betting on Musk. Momentum is a delicate foundation and at some point Hans Christian Anderson's little girl shouts that the emperor has no clothes. Something breaks the momentum of hope and people start counting. At some point price matters, earnings matter, and numbers matter.  

Devil-may-care manic enthusiasm is a contrary indicator.

I feel like a sad old killjoy, and maybe I am wrong. But Tom is the most reliable indicator I know of when the party is over. He says Elon Musk can't lose.

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Vineyard update: 11:30 a.m. on Friday

The glamorous life of a vineyard owner. 

By 11:30 I had had enough. Saturday is another day, starting again at 6:00 a.m.

11:30

Vineyard Update: Six a.m. on Friday

I set the alarm for 4:20 a.m. again today.  

I want to be at the Vineyard promptly at 6 a.m. so I can join my nephew to work in the vineyard. I want to get started in then the cool of the morning because the forecast is for 90 degrees in the shade by mid-afternoon. The vineyard has full sun. 

The immediate job at hand is to unhook the two wires that are currently attached in notches on the T-posts that suspend the trellis wires that support the vines. The wires are three inches apart when in the notches. The job is to open up that space and shove the rangy grape vines up into that space between the wires, and then re-attach the wires, which squeezes the vines into a slender, mostly-vertical plant, at least temporarily. Grapes are enormously vigorous plants, at least in the pumice soil at my farm, so vines will burst out of their confined space as the season progresses, but they are still somewhat contained and supported.

Wire in the notch

Before

After

How they look end of season. No longer looking squeezed

In posts I published last summer I mentioned my nephew, Liam Flenniken. He is age 18 now.  He is staying at the farm house this summer, once again doing vineyard labor to earn money to pay for college at Oregon State University, which he will start this fall. He is the 6th generation working on this property, purchased from a Donation Land Claim owner in 1883 by my great grandfather, Stephen Nealon. That makes Liam the great, great, great grandson of the farm's founder, a Union Army veteran. Liam does not aspire to being a vineyard worker. He wants to fly airplanes.

Buried in the mass of leaves are the two wires

A experienced vineyard worker from Valley View Vineyard, Adelberto Paz, gave Liam and me a lesson on the best way to do this job. It is hard work, but not complicated. Like much farm work, it is repetitive. One lifts up the floppy vines and pushes them toward the middle, re-hooks the wires. Again and again. There are 6,000 plants on my eight acres.

I last reported on the vineyard describing the April frosts. The plants looked pretty rough on April 21 with the frost damage to the Pinot Noir buds and leaves, but the damage was spotty, and in two weeks the plants had ample buds. It turned out to be a false worry. The fans that stirred the air did their job. It turns out that the bigger problem I face is managing vine growth. My soil may be too fertile. Workers needed to thin the nodes that would bear fruit -- 12 person-days of work. Ideally the fruit-bearing nodes are spaced four inches apart to give room for the grape clusters and until they were thinned they were too close together.

On May 22, a son of the owner of Valley View Vineyard, Colin Wisnovsky, came to the vineyard and did the first of two fungicide sprays. He is conscientious about suiting up to avoid the sulpher-based spray.

I don't have photograph of me at 6 a.m. yesterday, nor this morning, nor for the next six or eight days working with Liam to squeeze the vines between the wires. I am writing quickly and pushing Publish.

I also lack photos of me mowing the weeds so there is a "lawn" of green between the rows of grapes for most of the vineyard. Nor do I have photos of me covered with pumice dust from tilling the dozen or so rows that I need to till rather than mow. Nor do I have photos of me spraying an herbicide at the base of the plants to control weeds. (The herbicide is an alternative to the Roundup brand herbicide I want to be able to tell grape buyers that it is a Roundup-free vineyard.

Classmates at the college reunion asked me about my Pinot Noirs. Willamette Valley Pinot Noirs have an international reputation and wine connoisseurs wondered when they could buy a case of my wine. Answer: Not for at least a year, and probably two.

Some Willamette Valley Pinots have a small mixture (under five percent) of Southern Oregon grapes because our hotter summers create riper grapes and therefore dark fruit flavors and color which improves their wines. Wines labeled being from "Oregon" not "Willamette Valley" can have any amount of Southern Oregon grapes. My hope is that my grapes will stand alone labeled as coming from the Rogue Valley -- a wine region with a still-small, but growing reputation. My hope is that my wine will get labeled as being grown on100 percent pumice soil, a point of distinction.

I will ask Liam to take a snapshot of me this morning at 6 a.m. to send to the Oregon Department of Revenue to send with a message, "darned right it's work."

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Jon Ossoff is running for president.

Graham Platner has a message that is catching on: America is really screwed up.

Jon Ossoff has a better one: 

"Our national greatness flows not through our blood or our genes, but from our ideas. [Crowd sounds rise from applause into a roar] Americans are not a race, but a people [pause] united not by our ethnicity but by our shared convictions, and THAT is what makes us exceptional."

Jon Ossoff is running for president. This is the crocus; this is the gathering storm, the first clear signs of a move. We see it in the big theme, the staging, the camera angle. He isn't running just for reelection to the Senate. He is presenting himself as a national leader confronting a big theme in contrast to Trump's big theme. Trump is making the U.S. about preserving a traditional heritage of ethnicity, language, and religion. Ossoff says we have a creed of life, liberty, and happiness; equal justice all; and one nation, indivisible. The big stuff.

I am very OK with that. I have been waiting for candidates photographed from below like this one, the Democratic alternative to Trump with a raised fist, having survived the assassination attempt.

There is a path for Ossoff. He has taken the qualifying steps. He won a Senate seat in Georgia in 2020, right after Joe Biden narrowly won the state of Georgia. Ossoff is running for reelection. He has to win in order for him to move forward, but if he wins he solves a problem for Democrats. They need a leader and they are nervous that the one who has seized the spotlight is unelectable anywhere but in bright blue places. Gavin Newsom, for better or worse, is California. Rich, dynamic California. Rich and expensive. California of the homeless people on the streets, California of seven-dollar gasoline, California of million-dollar-plus fixer-upper starter-homes, California of Silicon Valley and Hollywood and electric cars and renaming schools named Abraham Lincoln because Lincoln didn't do enough to empower Blacks.

Ossoff is reassurance. Trump took us to the edge and Democrats will feel relieved if they get through the Trump era with our democracy together-enough that we can hold a 2028 election. Ossoff is back-to-normal. Trump is change; Newsom is a different change. Ossoff is a sigh of relief from change: a moderate from a reddish state, southern but the new South, not the old Alabama-Mississippi unreconstructed South. If Ossoff can win there, and he did once and maybe twice, he can win in Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Arizona.  

My sense is that is where the country will be. Let's just be Americans again. 

Ossoff talks about patriotism and common values. You find clips of him shot like this one. He isn't as good at stirring oratory as JFK, Bill Clinton, or Barack Obama, but he is talking grand themes. Maybe he will get better. 

Ossoff is Jewish. That may be a deal-killer with some in the antiSemitic populist left and right, and Jewish backers feel betrayed by him. He voted to oppose some funding of weapons for Israel. Prominent donors pulled their support and tried to recruit popular governor Brian Kemp to run against Ossoff. Kemp chose not to. Democrats don't know what to do about Israel but being on the side of restraint, pointing out the damage to Gaza, as Ossoff did, is probably skating to where the puck is going. Even Trump said it: Everyone is unhappy with Bibi Netanyahu now. Israel has squandered a brand that took decades and millions of lives to build.

There are two varieties of angry within Democrats. One kind of angry is blue-collar, populist anger. Graham Platner expresses it in an articulate way that Democrats who groaned through the Biden presidency are thrilled to hear. Someone who talks! He seems manly and confident and straightforward, even as he describes his errors and redemption. Platner is one direction for Democrats.

There is another kind of anger: progressive, seize-the-moment, reform-America anger. Blue state/blue district politicians have it: AOC, Jazmine Crockett, Elizabeth Warren. These are people who are disappointed with Presidents Clinton and  Obama, believing they could have done more. Biden campaigned as a moderate but governed as Elizabeth Warren, and if he just hadn't been old and inarticulate and hadn't blown his campaign, we might be consolidating those gains, not reversing them and much more. There is angry appetite for a fighter who will be both true blue and nationally popular and win forty states with a "give them hell" progressive message.

Ossoff will disappoint both those groups. Ossoff is a purple state politician with Republicans in state and local office. He may be too moderate to win a Democratic nomination. He is the opposite of edgy. And yet Democrats chose James Talarico, not Jazmine Crockett in Texas, so maybe Democrats want consolidation. Progressive Democrats want a governing majority; they must be able to win in states like Ohio, Georgia, Iowa, Maine, Tennessee, Texas, Nebraska, Montana, and both Dakotas. It used to be possible.

Trump clarifies the stakes for Americans. Democrats want to nominate someone who can win.

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