Give (It) Up...

     Truth is, I never intended to head this direction, at least not while pushing my cart through my local Costco.  Like most "middle" class folk, I was starting to notice the $2 and $3 jumps in most of the prices there: bags of frozen vegetables, jams & preserves, granola-like energy bars, those bulky but everyday items that end up in your pantry or freezer because at such wholesale retailers, they're generally cheaper than the smaller (if more usable) sizes one finds in everyday grocery stores.  But from what I've read, this is just the beginning of prices increasing as even the major chains deplete their pre-tariff inventories.  And if I was noticing it, imagine what the struggling single mom, or middle-class couple still renting or eeking by on their mortgage, was seeing.  Of course, looking back to my childhood days when I was that 7-year old hanging onto the grocery cart as my mom shopped, I didn't think about any of that: rising prices, nutritious or junk, artificial or organic, white or wheat.  I only knew that mom was getting something for dinner and perhaps milk for cereal, and not letting me have those marshmallows or a candy bar, at least not on this shopping trip.*  But it's not just the everday person.  Bloomberg reported that the next income level is feeling the pinch as well, as job and funding cuts begin to take their toll.  Said part of the article: Upper-income Americans are increasingly falling behind on credit card and auto loan payments, signaling an underlying vulnerability in the US economy as the labor market slows.  Delinquencies on such debts from those making at least $150,000 annually have jumped almost 20% over the last two years, faster than for middle- and lower-income borrowers, according to the credit-scoring firm VantageScore.  This was reflected in the dismal job numbers released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics which showed only 30,000 jobs added in the past 3 months.  As explained by Investopedia: The primary purpose of the BLS, an arm of the U.S. Department of Labor, is to research, assemble, and publish a range of statistical data on the labor market, prices, and productivity.  This government agency goes to great lengths to ensure the accuracy, impartiality, and accessibility of its reports and the statistics it produces are among the most influential economic indicators of the American economy.  But Trump didn't like that recent jobs report so he fired Erika McEntarfer, the head of the bureau, claiming that she had "rigged" the numbers, wrote USA Today (when she was confirmed in a bipartisan Senate vote last year, JD Vance had endorsed her).

     So read what you will but for the most part, even the quietest (or censored) of media will tell you that the effects of Trump's tariffs are now starting to arrive.  But regardless of where your political stance resides, let's back up from that grocery cart and see the broader view.  For the end consumer, one would likely look at that jam or bag of burgers and feel that waiting another week wouldn't be a problem, even though that was likely what was said last week as well.  Got enough in the freezer so might as well wait until it goes on sale, one would hope.  Now multiply that by 10 or 20 or 50 million other shoppers doing the same thing.  Now jump back another step and look at the view from the stores (even the big chains such as Costco which monitor sales religiously) who now have to tell their suppliers that there is still quite a bit of their product unsold on the shelf so they should cancel the next order (or lower their prices).  Now jump back yet another step and look at the view from the manufacturers who have to tell their suppliers to lower their prices so that they, the manufacturers, can pass on the savings and get their sales moving again.  Only the farmers (another step back) says that a chunk of their workers are gone, and that their cost for seed and such is also going up so there's not much they can do (other than perhaps go into debt or enter bankruptcy).  So the farmers or clothing or other producers look to Mexico, or Brazil, or Vietnam, or China, and find that because of the import tariffs, importing supplies won't be much or any cheaper.  So the orders to the farmers drop as the orders from the manufacturers drop since the orders from the stores drop, and the middle-class consumer just takes a gulp and waits for tax season to arrive.  Wrote Barron's: The impact of this year's tariffs could amount to an income loss of $2800 in 2025, according to the Budget Lab of Yale, as of July 13...Some retirees have turned to credit cards to cope with steadily rising prices on essentials from groceries and medical care. Adults age 70+ are the fastest groups of borrowers, with debt rising 4.2% year over year, and 36.2% over the past 5 years, according to the Kaplan Group.

     It all sounds so simple when one hears that since our debt is $36.6 trillion, a 1% cut by the Fed would save the country $360 billion (as posted by Trump in Truth Social about his quest to remove Fed chair, Jerome Powell, although it is not within the power of the executive branch to fire a chair of the Federal Reserve).  But as Barron's noted, it doesn't work that way: Short-term Treasury bills, which is the only part of the debt which is heavily affected by the Fed-funds rate, make up just $5.7 trillion of the total publicly traded debt, said the piece.  But the amount of outstanding T-bills is dwarfed by the $15.7 trillion of outstanding Treasury notes, with an average interest rate of 3.05%, and the $5.03 trillion of outstanding bonds, which have an average interest rate of 3.3%.  As the article concluded:  As Trump continues his campaign against Powell, look for him to produce more whimsical numbers that are meant to point to Powell's supposed part in creating Federal deficits, for which Trump doesn't seem to accept any blame.  But make sure to take Trump's numbers with a grain of salt.  Or even better, with a saltshaker full.  Now I don't pretend to understand any more than soundbites and Trump is close to an expert on soundbites (although as Barron's noted, "he surely isn't the king of arithmetic"-- six of his earlier firms went bankrupt).  So why are so many of my conservative friends (and a good chunk of the population) still so happy with how everything is going, even as money grows tighter, jobs and research funds are cut, pollution regulations are dropped, and military generals are fired and replaced by Fox News personnel (okay, I'm exaggerating the extent of Pete Hegseth's appointees, unless you just want to be the Fox News commentor about to become the lead attorney of Washington, DC).  It was a question David Brooks asked in The Atlantic: How is it that half of America looks at Donald Trump and doesn’t find him morally repellent?  He lies, cheats, steals, betrays, and behaves cruelly and corruptly, and more than 70 million Americans find him, at the very least, morally acceptable.  Some even see him as heroic, admirable, and wonderful.  What has brought us to this state of moral numbness?  But then one could also ask, how is it so many televangelists (we're talking religion here, not politics) live in mansions, have private jets, and build near-arena-sized theaters to hold their services, all while  taking $10 here and there from those least able to afford it?  Carnival barkers apparently still exist everywhere (and it would appear that those elixirs are still selling like hotcakes).  

     But ignore all that  Colonel Parker stuff.  There's enough to see and read everyday, little of which tells you anything you don't already know or feel.  But when a good part of my hearing disappeared one morning, I was a bit curious to say the least.  Backing up once again: this time of year is, despite the heat, right on schedule for crickets.  Each night, our backyard turns into a loud symphony of mating calls from these little critters rubbing their legs or wings back and forth (if you've even had a single cricket land in your house during this period, you understand how loud that noise can be if multiplied by several hundred other crickets; wrote Bug Pursuits: Depending on the species of cricket, the sound waves can reach up to 100 decibels, which is loud enough to be heard from up to a mile away!  In fact, some species of cricket have been recorded making noises up to 120 decibels, which is as loud as a chainsaw or a rock concert.  In comparison, a typical conversation is around 60 decibels and a lawnmower is around 90 decibels.).   This cricket symphony is always one of my favorite parts of summer.  So on that one night, I rolled my head in bed and, even in my groggy state, noticed that I could hear a completely different frequency in one ear as compared to the other; now this got my attention.  I lifted my head, plugged one ear and turned side to side, then did the same with the other.  Part of my hearing had gone, or at least hearing a certain frequency had gone (think of only one ear getting some water in it and changing the sound of what you're hearing).  It was as if two completely different groups of crickets were outside.  Ah well, it'll be better once I fully wake up in the morning, I thought, slowly going back to sleep with that wishful thought in my head.  But in the morning, same result.  What I could "hear" in one ear was vastly different from what I could hear in the other.  Must be a sinus infection, a head cold, or I had somehow slept wrong, or had gotten some water in that ear.  Must be, I thought (hoped).  In the end, it did go away later that afternoon.  But it made we think: what if it didn't get better, if a droopy face, or an eye with blurred vision, or a weakened leg, didn't "return" to normal?  

     Part of these depressingly reflective thoughts likely came from reading this in The London Review: ‘It’s quite interesting to see myself slipping away,’ Billy Connolly says.  ‘I don’t have the balance I used to have.  I don’t have the energy I used to have.  I can’t hear the way I used to hear.  I can’t see as good as I used to.  I can’t remember the way I used to remember.  And they all came one at a time and they just slipped away.’  You could say that this is no more than an account of growing old.  But not quite.  My former colleague Nicholas Mostyn writes gloomily that ‘we will likely lose speech, mobility and continence and be beset by excruciating pain – but no doctor will ever give us a terminal diagnosis.’  Many of us are reliant, as I am, on a patient, tireless, uncomplaining and infinitely generous spouse for whom, as for us, no end is in sight.  Scottish comedian Connelly has Parkinson's.  So does my wife's cousin.  And Alan Alda.  Stephen Sedley, also a victim of the disease, wrote the piece for the LRB, adding: Simple things like buttons start to defeat you...You become a messy eater.  You start to converse in monosyllables.  Every step is taken in the knowledge that it can end in a fall and every fall in a fracture.  You avoid answering the phone in case you sound drunk.  Your voice dries up mid-sentence.  A decent night's sleep becomes a distant memory.  You may have visual hallucinations.  If all of that wasn't bad enough, my wife discovered that someone she used to work with has advanced ALS. 

     So why bring any of this up?  Because broadly speaking, most of us are givers.  When tragedy strikes, our hearts soften and something touches us to remind us that we're the lucky ones and that we should be grateful, not because it didn't happen to us but because we should just be grateful and help those in need.  In the case of my wife's friend, now losing her ability to move, friends are rallying around her to help bring things to a close in the gentlest way possible: doing her laundry, finding homes for her cats, helping with basic chores.  She has little to no money so all of this is being done by those just wanting to help.   But when our snail- and electronic mail boxes are flooded with pleas for help, often accompanied by pictures of maimed animals or people, or groups asking for help fighting "the good fight," how does one sort through it all?  Perhaps we pick a few local organizations we know or have worked with, along with a few national ones which have been around for decades; perhaps even places we've visited first hand and witnessed the struggle they've endured to keep doing so much good with so little.  So we write a check to a few and toss out all the others; or we volunteer; or we campaign and spread the word, or we gather extra clothes and blankets to send off.  But we help.  I don't think much about this since I am little different than most.  But imagine if you were instead a charity managing millions or perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars.  Even with a broad category such as "saving animals" or "ending hunger," deciding where and how to distribute donor money can be daunting.  Here's how Give Well put it when assigning "moral weights" in making such decisions: Anyone deciding to donate to one charity over another is implicitly using moral weights, even if they aren't explicitly engaging with them.  We include moral weights in our cost-effectiveness analyses because they are an important part of any giving decision and we think it is valuable to be transparent about them.  Engaging with questions like this is difficult and uncomfortable, but necessary.  We need to compare each program we consider funding to the other programs we may fund instead, which means we have to set moral weights (i.e. subjective valuations) for the outcomes of each program, e.g. saving the life of a toddler, doubling the consumption of a household of four for one year, or averting a stillbirth.  These values, even if they are uncertain, enable us to understand whether programs are likely to help people with a similar amount per dollar donated or whether one is likely to be much more helpful to the people our recommended programs serve...Translating the suffering and death of real people into units of value can seem callous.  Unfortunately, we don’t have enough funding to avert all preventable deaths or address all preventable suffering.  We need a way to decide where to allocate scarce resources, and we want to allocate them in a way that has the greatest impact.

     So let me throw in one more story, not to add to a list of unfairness but perhaps to show how random life can be, and can also not be.  In the last post I mentioned Father Gregory Boyle who founded Homeboy Industries and has worked with gang members for decades, even becoming the first to be invited --along with 3 heavily-tattooed, formerly imprisoned gang members-- to the White House by George & Barbara Bush.  Father "G" recalled the story of Shady, part of a female gang (which at the time represented just 1% of the gangs in LA) and one whose brother was just killed by a rival gang.  She and her gang were out to avenge his death.  But she had a dream the night before, one of being in church and seeing her brother's coffin yet afraid to approach it and look inside.  In the dream, a dove flies out of the coffin, circles the ceiling of the church, and lands on her shoulder.  "What's it mean, G,?" she asks of the Father.  He replies that of course a dove signifies peace and that perhaps she should consider giving up her weapons and the urge for vengeance and such; as he says, what he replies to most gang members.  "But I have never felt so calm and settled inside," she cries, "as if something inside me had changed."  And with that, and clutching her baby on her hip, she reaches into the car to hug G, still crying but in a good way.  The next day, while a passenger in the back seat of a crowded car, random gun fire breaks out as they drive by a street.  Those in the car fire back but only one person is hit.  It was Shady, killed when one of the bullets broke through the back window.  Writer Maria Popova wrote in Orion: We make our own omens by the meaning we confer upon chance events, and it is the making of meaning that makes us human, that makes us capable of holding something as austere and total as the universe, as time, as love without breaking.

    

     Author Maris Kreizman wrote in her recent book: I see now how unquestioningly I bought into the promises of democratic institutions that I later came to realize were at best deeply flawed, at worst irreparably broken.  I didn't consider how enormously privileged it was to believe that such systems could work in the first place.  The American Dream of my parents, and of boomers more broadly, has become less and less attainable for the next generation, and especially for the people who were never intended to dream such dreams in the first place: Black and Brown people, poor people, differently abled people, gender queer people.  And ultimately, these systems didn't even work out well for me.  So here I am coming out as a late bloomer, a fortysomething former "good Democrat" who got angry and became radicalized and is stronger for it.  Who finally has more faith in mutual aid than in government assistance.  Who will never again donate to a political campaign when there are people right outside my door I can help directly.  Who is still actively choosing every day to break away from the self-centeredness of rugged individualism in favor of community and solidarity. 

Instagram Photo: Ms. Rachel

     Teresa Mitchell Clausen knows about that.  As Sentient Policies reported, "she understands the value of farming in the state.  As a teenager, she worked in the fields, which helped shape her vision of what a healthy food landscape could look like."  So when Foster Farms began pulling its influence and lobbying muscle to build a 3.5 million factory chicken farm near her place in Oregon, she sprung into action.  Said the story: The thing about being a farmer is that your name meant something,” she says. “You were someone who tilled the soil, harvested the land, fed your community, provided livestock, row crops.  It was an essential part of who we are.”  Now, she says, corporate agricultural operations are coming in, making promises and “pulling the heartstrings of farmers,” eventually manipulating them into participating in a large-scale system where they are just a “pawn in the game.”  She stood up, she organized, she went to court...and she won!  Now enter the Mr. Rogers of today, Ms. Rachel.  The young mom with 16 million subscribers and over 10 billion views on You Tube (and now Netflix which reported that her show "was the most-watched season of children's television on the streamer during the first half of the year."), Rachel Griffin Accurso is also taking a stand.  Her episode of bringing a double-amputee 3-year old child from Gaza onto her show has generated put downs by Fox News commentators, along with one Israeli group printing an open letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi asking for an investigation to see if Accurso is acting as a "foreign agent."  But as she told The Washington Post: Speaking out for kids in this situation is more important than my career...Children deserving access to water, food, education and medical care is not controversial.

     At dinner the other night, our friend asked each of us a typical interview question: what's the best piece of advice you've received?  My wife turned it around to mean not something she had heard, but rather something she tries to do each day...be kind.  Another guest answered that she has learned not to let her plans for the future cloud what she has in the present.  My reply was equally simple...be grateful.  But when it came to our hostess, she answered that we should all try and change our thinking from "I have to...," or "I need to..." to "I get to," emphasizing that we are fortunate enough to have such choices.  We get to wash the dishes, and we get to pick up the kids at school, and we get to walk the dog.  For most of us, we will likely never encounter a gang member, or face bullets flying, or feel starvation, or have Parkinson's, or have our children caught in a flood.  Or for that matter, become a billionaire.  But most of us will feel the higher prices in the stores, and know that the once-easy choices we made will probably now be more difficult in many areas.  But still --and in my biased opinion, this may be what separates us from most of the mega/MAGA rich-- as long as we're able, we will help out and give.

     "Segregation, determination, demonstration, integration, aggravation, humiliation, obligation to our nation," as The Temptations once sang, the world is (once again) a "ball of confusion."  But maybe if we followed my friend's advice and just turned around our thinking --resolution not disillusion, evolution not revolution-- we would join those brave individuals standing up, and we would join them in saying, enough.  "Bless the beasts and the children," sang The Carpenters.  "Light their way when the darkness surrounds them."  We all have that light.  Maybe more if us need to begin turning it on.  As NASA wrote about the image below: ...this photo was needed to show Earth’s vulnerability and that our home world is just a tiny, fragile speck in the cosmic ocean.  And yet, in the vast darkness of space, a tiny beacon of light still shines, still standing up, still fighting the good fight...our planet, the place we all call home.

Earth from the edge of our solar system.  Photo: NASA

*To be honest, we grew up very poor, living in subsidized housing tracts, what would likely be labeled on the east coast as "the projects."  And when you grow up poor, you feel lucky to have food on the table, something you're aware of even as a child.  Oddly enough, even with our dirt roads, (when a chain supermarket brought in gravel to line its parking lot, we kids felt as if good times had made it to our end of the city) seafood was plentiful, much of it dried to a stiff hide as tough as leather (jerky would have been as soft as a fruit roll compared to these dried sides of cuttlefish and such, an apt description of "tough as old boots").  But once warmed up, those dried fish filets wrapped in a cheap napkin, were handed out, one to me and one to my friend.  We were in heaven.  The two hours or so it would take our tiny teeth to tear, soften & chew these dried fish filets meant 2 hours or so of glued-to-the-TV time for us (and 2 hours of quiet for my mom).  Who needed sweets when 2 of these filets cost less than 50 cents?  And we were happy, my mom included.