The Big Picture
2013 was a transitional year in many ways. The global economy showed signs of recovery and potentially better times ahead, depending on where you stood in the economic pecking order. The U.S. National Security Administration was caught spying on every single American and most of the world’s leaders, leading for renewed calls to protect the privacy of citizens and respect the Constitution’s prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure. The Catholic Church chose a Latin American as its new Pope for the first time. The climate continued its steady deterioration amid concerns that we may be reaching a tipping point far faster than previously predicted. In the U.S., the new Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) stumbled out of the gate, but offered the promise of health insurance to 40 million Americans who currently lack coverage.
Branded a traitor by his government and lauded as a courageous whistleblower by his admirers, Edward Snowden shocked the world with his leaked revelations about the extent of government spying on the lives of ordinary citizens and many of our “allies” around the world. No one escaped the dragnet. Just ask German Prime Minister Angela Merkel how she felt when she learned the NSA had tapped her personal cell phone. The rest of us began to wonder if anything we did online was private. Companies we trusted to protect our privacy with noble mottoes like “Do No Harm,” turned out to be in cahoots with the U.S. government, turning over our emails, our web searches, our blog posts, our contact lists and anything else we did online to the government’s spies. The phone companies also willingly handed over our billing records to the NSA so they could determine which of us was talking with a potential terrorist. Politicians scrambled to defend the program while citizens sued the government and sought anonymous email accounts to avoid detection. Back in 1984, we ridiculed George Orwell’s predictions of a dystopian future dominated by Big Brother. It turns out he was right about everything but the date. It took an extra 30 years, but the brave new world has arrived, a place where Lies are Truth, War is Peace, Evil is Good for you and Big Brother stalks your every move.
Time Magazine’s Man of the Year, Pope Francis, surprised pundits by his selection as the first Latin American and then went on to stun the world with pronouncements in support of the poor and downtrodden and his love for all mankind that ironically mirrored comments made by the founder of the Christian religion 2000 years ago. It’s miraculous having a Pope who actually believes the Sermon on the Mount. Will the Catholic Church’s hierarchy and the political oligarchs who patronize it really take the Pope’s message of equality, fraternity and forgiveness to heart? Don’t bet on it.
Climate change deniers had a tough year in 2013. Mounting evidence of melting ice caps and increasingly powerful storms culminated in the devastating typhoon that roared through the Philippines in November. Clocking winds at over 200 miles per hour, it was the largest cyclone to ever hit land, so powerful that it blew past the top of the scale that meteorologists use to measure tropical storms. A category five hurricane is the top of the current scale, but that is for storms with mere 150 mile per hour winds. Experts are now scrambling to add a new category six to account for Typhoon Haiyan (aka Yolanda), which caused upwards of 10,000 deaths and billions of dollars in damage. How do the climate deniers explain away such heretofore unforeseen superstorms? They claim the climate has always changed, even before humans started pumping 500 billion tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. They have a point there, but fail to realize that while it took nature millions of years to alter the climate at its own geologic pace, human beings have altered it in less than 200 years. The climate change repudiators ultimately cite fossil fuel industry apologists who proclaim that we can’t afford to stop burning their products, since they power our world. I just wish the fossil fuel industry could answer this one question: why can we afford to spend billions on emergency relief when natural disasters strike places like the Philippines and New Jersey shore, but we can’t afford to invest those same sums in clean alternatives to fossil fuels to help prevent these disasters in the first place?
In October 2013, the U.S. Affordable Care Act suffered a lackluster launch of the federal government’s web site meant to enable Americans who lacked health insurance to sign up. The site crashed repeatedly and failed to process initial applications. Later, people with individual health plans started receiving cancellation letters from their current health insurers, notifying them that their plan did not meet minimum coverage requirements. Critics on the right immediately seized upon this as proof positive that Obama was a lying, socialist, fascist idiot and that the entire thing should be scrapped. Since it was only the 42nd time that House Republicans had voted to repeal Obamacare, they decided to shut the government down for a few weeks too. Despite the theatrics and a $24 billion hit to the economy, they failed to stop it once and for all.
As a small business owner, I have had to purchase my own health insurance for the past eight years, after my divorce ended my health coverage under my ex-wife’s excellent corporate plan. I have overpaid for a bare bones health policy that never seemed to cover anything that I ever needed to see a doctor about. Office visits cost me $120, prescriptions were $30 a piece and if I had ever ended up in the hospital, my plan would have only covered 60 percent of the cost, leaving me to figure out how to pay for the rest or go bankrupt. I got the cancellation letter from my health plan in October, along with an offer to sign up for a new plan at twice the cost. What the letter failed to mention was that the Covered California health exchange was offering real health policies with real coverage for less than I previously had paid for my bare bones policy. So my answer to the President’s critics is this: try walking a year in my shoes and those of millions of other Americans who have been shut out of the health care system because of where they work or a pre-existing condition or the greed of insurance companies who have been pocketing 25 percent of insurance premiums in pure profit. I did a back-of-the-envelope ROI on my health plan last year and determined that I spent $4,000 on premiums and deductibles while my health insurer might have spent $400 tops for two doctor visits, giving them an ROI of 90 percent. Is it any wonder that the rest of the developed world has decided that health care should be not for profit? We should have chosen Medicare for everyone instead of a system that ranks profits above people’s health.
The Business World
The global economy continued to recover, but it was an uneven and bumpy road. As Dickens wrote in his time, “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.” For Wall Street financiers and corporate barons, life couldn’t get much better than 25 percent average returns on stocks and 50 percent profit margins for the best-performing companies. For Main Street and the working class, the recovery was nowhere in sight. The average American worker got a 1.1 percent raise last year. Unemployment remained high at 7 percent and over half the new jobs created in 2013 did not pay a living wage. If you multiple these inequalities by 30 years of trickle-down economics, you get CEOs earning 1100 times their average employees’ salary. I’m sorry, but I don’t believe any single human being is worth more than 1,100 of his fellow humans, especially when the CEO gets rewarded for firing 1,100 of his own employees.
Five years ago, in the depths of the Great Recession, I wrote about the monumental choice facing American business. It could either embrace a high skill, high performance, high wage strategy like Germany, or pursue a low skill, low performance, low wage strategy like China. Mounting evidence suggests that the vast majority of businesses have opted to chase China in a race to the bottom. The rules of the game are simple: whoever manages to squeeze the most work out of the fewest number of employees while paying the lowest possible wages wins. By winning, I mean the owners and their financial shareholders reap huge profits. The employees and customers lose. Economists estimate that more than half of the wealth created in the last five years has gone to the top five percent of society. For everyone else, wages are stagnant and job security is a fleeting fancy. This may be great for the luxury class of conspicuous consumers, but it is tearing the fabric of our society asunder and eviscerating the middle class.
America has always experienced tension between its democratic ideals, based on freedom and equality, and its capitalist economy, based on servitude and inequality. Our economic history traces the development of an agricultural society based on slavery in the South and indentured servitude in the North, which transformed into an industrial society based on capitalists and laborers. In the new information economy, the concentration of wealth in fewer hands has accelerated, along with the monopolization of key sectors of the economy. Meanwhile, working Americans surrender most of their precious freedoms when they enter their workplace and have been reduced to wage slaves, surviving from paycheck to paycheck while accumulating increasing debt. I find it hard to believe that we can continue to live out our political ideals of liberty and justice for all without applying these same ideals to our economic life. Something has got to give; it’s just uncertain whether we will sacrifice our freedom or our unequal distribution of wealth. While we all profess undying belief in freedom, powerful special interests are gaming the system to transfer the nation’s wealth to the top echelon. When we must put our money where our mouth is, we’ll see who wins.
As for Training Education Management LLC, I am happy to report that I enjoyed the best year since before the Great Recession. I was fortunate to find a few remaining firms who actually believe in a high skill, high performance business model and they kept me quite busy with a backlog of work stretching to the beginning of the Great Recession. In addition to two steady local clients in Southern California, I also managed to make three overseas trips to serve clients in Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe and Malaysia, three distinctly different parts of the globe. The global economy is great if you can go global with it. Developing nations continue to invest more heavily in human capital than America does, at a rate nearly double ours. I’m more than happy to help them, even as I wonder why American companies are so reluctant to spend a small part of their windfall profits on upgrading the skills of the American workforce instead of rewarding CEOs and stockholders with even more obscene sums of money.
Personal Front
My family and I have had a banner year in many ways. With more work came more income to fix up the house, pay off the credit cards, refinance the mortgage to a lower rate and enjoy a bit more golf. Number one son Vince went back to college, this time to study computer science, something he loves and excels at. Number two son Steven is finishing up high school with a burst of achievement and has applied to a number of fine local universities for next year, hoping to follow his father’s footsteps in the business world. Granddaughter is toddling all over the house and already has a vocabulary of over 100 words.
In fact, things were going along wonderfully until late November, when my house was burglarized while I was on a trip to Zimbabwe. The thieves broke a window to get in and ransacked my house, creating a huge mess. They got away with a substantial stash of jewelry and other small items that could be quickly converted to cash. My girlfriend Tania suffered the biggest loss. We all felt terribly violated by this break-in and immediately took defensive steps, such as installing a home security system. Still, we all sleep a little less well these days, knowing that our sense of security has been shattered. It seems the have-nots are not waiting for someone else to address their poverty. Instead, they are coming after the haves directly and stealing what they cannot earn legitimately. I have been forced to enhance security and live in fear every time I leave my home. I feel compelled to join the growing ranks of survivalist vigilantes who are guarding against World War Z, or at least, against the bad guys from the wrong side of town. This is just one more example of how our society is unraveling.
Priceless Moments
2013 gave us plenty of absurdities. Here are a few of my favorites:
To Toronto Mayor Rob Ford:
Thanks for making the Ford family name the butt of late-night talk show comics. At least we don’t claim any common ancestors that I’m aware of, although my great-great grandfather Daniel Ford did emigrate from Northern Ireland to New York via Montreal, so I guess we have a Canadian connection. And thanks for making our own American politicos look responsible in comparison to your crack-smoking, drunken stupors.
To Washington “Redskins” Football Owner Dan Snyder:
I understand you aren’t offended in the least by your team’s derogatory name for Native Americans, but if we are going to name sports teams by skin color, could we at least do it accurately? How about the Washington “Blackskins Owned by the Wealthy Whiteskins (BOWWs)?” Take a BOWW, Mr. Snyder.
To the NSA Agent Reading My Email:
Sorry I couldn’t come up with anything racier this year than liberal democratic editorials and emails to colleagues in Muslim nations like Saudi Arabia and Malaysia. BTW, could you please retrieve a document I accidentally deleted back on August 28th? Also, next time, when you hack my account, would you please delete my Trash folder?
To pop star Miley Cyrus:
Thanks for introducing the world to “twerking,” in the time-honored American tradition of dirty dancing. I guess the strategy in the pop world nowadays is to show off your body so that no one notices your mediocre voice. Ella Fitzgerald and Barbra Streisand, where have you gone? Is it hopelessly old-fashioned to expect singers to be able to actually sing without performing a public lap dance?
To Arts & Entertainment TV Execs, who hired, fired, then rehired Phil Robertson and put his Duck Dynasty clan on their network:
You feature a reality show about a rural Southern family who made their fortune on duck calls and whose Bible-thumping, survivalist lifestyle is the storyline of the show, and then you are shocked, shocked I say, to discover the patriarch is a foul-mouthed, racist homophobe? If it looks like a Redneck and it talks like a Redneck and it acts like a Redneck, then guess what?
To the Oxford English Dictionary:
Thanks for adding the newest word to the 600,000 English lexicon – “selfie.” What better tribute to the narcissistic, me-first culture that defines modern life than a new term for “a self-portrait shared online with others, usually taken with a mobile phone camera.” I add that they are usually out of focus and taken in front of some cheesy cultural touchstone. In a burst of creativity, netizens quickly invented derivatives such as “halfie” (half a head), “shelfie” (in front of a bookshelf),”beardie”, “baldie”, and “blondie” (all self-explanatory).
To 2014:
Thanks for rescuing us from the wreckage of 2013. Though we are often our own worst enemies, may time somehow transform us into sentient, caring beings who overcome the world’s evils with an abundance of good. Best wishes in the coming New Year, the Year of the Horse.
