Diary

It now officially looks as if fall is here – the prettiest time of year, enhanced for me by the fragrance of drying leaves, which reminds me of my youth in southern New York. I don't think I could enjoy living in a place without four seasons and deciduous trees. Because of all the temperature variation over the last few months, it seems is if we were shortchanged on summer and winter is approaching ahead of schedule. I have books to read but may delay starting them, since there are visitors arriving soon.

One of my distractions over the last few weeks has been active investment. The stock markets are always unpredictable, but they become more predictable just after the middle of the business cycle, which varies in timing from country to country. The recession of 2007-2009 was quite severe worldwide, and the recovery continues. In my case, the recession immediately followed my retirement in late 2007, and I promptly lost about forty percent of my assets, without much income other than a very small pension. Normally, the economy and stock market would have recovered by about 2012, but it's only happening now. Fortunately, I have enough luck or skill to succeed in investing during times like this, and in about a month's time I've made enough profit to buy a new car. I've been thinking of replacing my current car, which is nearly fifteen years old and getting rusty from the road salt in Vermont. Still, I find the capitalist system unfair. Once you accumulate a certain amount of money, if you invest it properly you never have to work again. Ordinary workers become your de facto employees without your ever having to deal with them. As a stockholder in their companies, you benefit from the income and growth of their corporations without lifting a finger. If their employee benefits are reduced or if the workers are replaced by robots, you make even more money. I'm not rich, and I still may end up having spent only about a third of my life as an employee, with the rest a free ride. I've been retired for ten years and have more money now than I did when I retired.

The Trump presidency continues to disturb. At this stage, what is startling to me is that, despite the fact that the majority of the people, including some of his own staff, recognize his weaknesses and the danger that he presents to the U.S. and the world, he remains in office. I attribute this mainly to political cowardice on the part of Republicans. The fact that the Republican Party is in ideological disarray probably has something to do with it. Do they want lower taxes or lower budget deficits? You can't have both. To the extent that Trump has any policies, he supports a massive windfall to the rich at the expense of a higher national debt that may be impossible to pay off. Even if I were a Republican I would be appalled by the party's ideological incoherence.

The most unsettling thing to me about Trump is the message that he repeats constantly to energize his supporters, who represent about a third of the American population. To paraphrase Trump's message loosely, it's "I ain't gonna pay the niggers no more." The crux of his policy since taking office has been to rescind everything accomplished by Barack Obama, without offering any intelligible explanation. The subtext is pretty much "because the nigger did it." Similarly, Trump portrays illegal immigrants as dark-skinned people who are stealing American jobs. Whether or not he actually believes this is a moot point, because it is his primary political tactic, and it works. He has been coached by people like Steve Bannon to get support from economically challenged whites by using this technique. The dishonesty of Trump and Bannon lies in the fact that most of Trump's supporters are more or less in the same economic boat as the people whom he implicitly disparages, and Trump isn't doing anything to help them. The only noticeable beneficiaries of the Trump presidency are Trump, his family, his associates, and possibly the Russian government. Most observers have seen by now that Trump doesn't understand politics or have any strategic vision. A closer look also shows that he is completely indifferent to the disenfranchised.