The Big Picture
2018 saw its share of thrills and spills. Politics was a grudge match with partisanship on full display. The economy was a roller-coaster that took us on a wild ride to nowhere. Society and culture responded with moments of madness and merriment. Amid the tumult, my own life was amazingly tranquil, with little significant change to report.
We heard a lot of attacks on the media in 2018, much of it from thin-skinned leaders who don’t appreciate hearing truth to power. We saw worse than talk – 63 journalists were killed in the past year for trying to tell the truth, including five newspaper reporters assasinated in Annapolis and the gruesome execution of Jamal Khashoggi. Perhaps the biggest question we are left with after the last twelve tumultuous months is this – Who is the real enemy of the people? Is it the free press that gathers information and reports it to the people or the autocratic rulers of the world who want to be worshipped with unquestioning adulation and retaliate against anyone who dares criticize them?
Politics
After two years of unrelenting Trumpism, the Democrats struck back in the November midterms by gaining a record 40 seats in the House of Representatives to seize control of the “People’s Chamber” for the first time in eight years. They have signaled an increased oversight of the White House and a progressive agenda that will surely run into a dead-end in the Republican Senate, where legislation goes to die. Besides the huge margin of victory, this election marked a first for so many marginalized groups in America. Among the new class of representatives are the first Muslim women, the first Native American woman and the first transgender person to serve, and in another first, over 100 women will be members of the House, nearly 25% of the total. Despite Trump’s efforts to make America white male again, the demographics don’t lie. America is more diverse than ever, and this trend cannot be erased, no matter how many walls Trump tries to erect to keep the rest of the world out. The world is already here.
The year was also characterized by the drip, drip of Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference and the Trump campaign’s ties to Russian oligarchs. In the past year, Mueller has gotten convictions against Trump’s former campaign chair and vice-chair, former National Security Advisor and former personal lawyer, among more than 36 people who have been indicted. The big questions remain: what did Trump know and when did he know it? Mueller’s team is closing in on the Trump family and its mob-like operations, looking at foreign money laundering, pay to play bribery, scam charity, tax evasion, etc. Look for more indictments in 2019 as Mueller wraps up his investigation and reports to the Congress and American people his findings of corruption, conspiracy and obstruction. Then we will see if Republicans are willing to go down with the Trumpian Titanic or abandon his sinking, stinking ship of state.
While Trump’s approval rating cratered to the mid-thirties, his remaining supporters refuse to believe anyone except their beloved hero and his continuous denials of impropriety. At his rallies, dwindling but devoted supporters continue to cheer his every lie and chant their favorite refrain, “Lock her up,” though by now it is unclear who is the she they want incarcerated. What is clear is that Trumpism is a cult. His followers place blind faith in Trump, believe his every word and support him till death do them part. They have already drunk the Kool-Aid. Veep Pence looks like he’s been hypnotized with his dear-in-headlights stare. The rest of us can do nothing but shake our collective heads in amazement at the gullibility of his remaining band of true believers.
Society and Culture
Facebook’s Privacy Scandal
Like two billion other people, I’m a regular Facebook user. What we learned about Facebook’s business model in the past year is troubling on so many levels. They make money by collecting your personal information and selling it to advertisers, including Russian trolls. To understand this scandal and why every FB user should care about it, I’ll need to get a little nerdy, so stay with me.
In June 2014, a researcher named Aleksandr Kogan developed a personality-quiz app for Facebook. About 270,000 people installed Kogan’s app on their Facebook account. But as with any Facebook developer at the time, Kogan could access data about those users plus all their friends. And when Kogan’s app asked for that data, it saved that information into a private database instead of immediately deleting it. Kogan provided that private database, containing information about 50 million Facebook users, to the voter-profiling company Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge Analytica used it to make 30 million “psychographic” profiles about US voters, even though they are a British company.
If this were the extent of it, Facebook probably wouldn’t have faced such criticism, although allowing a third-party app to harvest personal information from its members and all their friends, without their permission, is clearly a privacy concern. But it turned out that Cambridge Analytica had significant ties to some of President Trump’s most prominent supporters and advisers. Rebekah Mercer, a Republican donor and a co-owner of Breitbart News, sits on the board of Cambridge Analytica. Her father, Robert Mercer, invested $15 million in Cambridge Analytica on the recommendation of his political adviser, Steve Bannon. Cambridge Analytica also used its “psychographic” tools to make targeted online ad buys for the Brexit “Leave” campaign, the 2016 presidential campaign of Ted Cruz, and the 2016 Trump campaign.
If any British Cambridge Analytica employees without a green card worked on those two U.S. campaigns, they did so in violation of federal law. Its CEO was caught on tape offering to bribe and blackmail public officials around the world with the data Cambridge Analytica had amassed. Meanwhile, Facebook’s role in our elections has been scrutinized amid reports that it amplified Russian propaganda by allowing the sale of political advertisements to purchasers literally paying with Russian rubles.
So, the next time you are tempted to ‘like’ or ‘share’ a news feed seen on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, you better stop and ask yourself where that content is coming from. It probably is not from who you think it is. The REAL fake news is hiding in plain sight on your social media news feed.
Net Neutrality Lost
Under the direction of its new Chairman, Ajit Pai, former Verizon legal counsel and head of the Federal Communication Commission (FCC), decided to totally abandon the business of regulating the Internet. Declaring any such oversight unnecessary, the Republicans overturned an Obama administration rule that kept the Internet neutral, meaning Internet Service Providers (ISP) could not treat content differently by speeding up their own while slowing down others. Shortly after this decision, firefighters trying to contain the worst wildfires in Northern California found their Internet access slowed to a crawl. After investigating, the State found out that their ISP had deliberately throttled their data speed, endangering their mission. That is precisely why the government needs to regulate ISPs and other mega-media titans who control the Internet. Otherwise, they will put profits over the public interest every single time. Meanwhile, the data breaches just keep on coming and getting larger. But why bother to pay for better security when you are immune from accountability?
Kavanaugh Supreme Court Hearing
In the most riveting TV drama of the year, a man and woman separated by 35 years of bygone history faced off in a public hearing on Kavanaugh’s nomination for the Supreme Court. What followed was a three-week political soap opera and a round robin of she-said-he-said accusations and denials, with more women speaking out against Kavanaugh as the drama unfolded. The hearings were a social Rorschach test, each person finding their own meaning in the charges and counter-charges from each side. Most men sided with Kavanaugh, noting that our conduct as teenagers should not be the standard for adulthood. One of my golfing buddies summarized the attitude perfectly when he observed, “If you dig far enough into any man’s past, you will find something that he’s not going to be proud of.” This is the “boys will be boys” bromide that argues men simply can’t help what their testosterone makes them do.
Women, predictably, were sympathetic to Blassey Ford’s detailed recollection of an incident that obviously traumatized her for decades. Based on their own personal experiences with oversexed men, women found it totally believable that a couple of football players after a couple of six packs could assault a girl three years their junior at an unsupervised drinking party and totally get away with it, knowing the girl would never dare say anything and even if she did, no one would ever believe her. Sure enough, the Republicans rejected Blassey Ford’s testimony and put their man on the Supreme Court regardless of his past. What’s a little sexual misconduct compared to cementing a conservative majority on the nation’s highest court for a generation? So what if the judiciary falls victim to the same partisan rancor tearing the country apart? As long as Republicans win, they don’t care about the collateral damage.
What Would Jesus Do?
One of the biggest mysteries of Trumpism is the continuing Christian evangelical devotion to Trump, despite the ungodly revelations about his lust, gluttony, greed, wrath, envy and pride (6 of the 7 deadly sins). If Jesus came back today, would he attend a Trump rally and scream for locking up political opponents, journalists, Muslims, child immigrants and anyone else who doesn’t worship the Donald? Somehow, based on the Man’s own words as recorded in the Gospels, I seriously doubt it. He told his disciples, “If you want perfection, sell your possessions and give them to the poor and you will have treasure in Heaven.” He said, “Let the little children come to me for of such is the kingdom of Heaven. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven. Love thy neighbor as I have loved you.” I haven’t heard Trump lead any chants remotely like that at his political rallies.
At the age of seven, I became a Protestant evangelical, thanks to my father, who converted to an obscure evangelical sect called the Christian & Missionary Alliance. For the next ten years of my life, we attended church every Sunday and Wednesday evening prayers. I learned to read from the King James version of the Bible and credit its medieval language with expanding my vocabulary far beyond my years. In those days, I was taught to never drink alcohol, smoke, do drugs, gamble, swear or have sex outside marriage. Even dancing and Hollywood movies were taboo social evils.
The idea that anyone who attended my church 60 years ago would have supported an unrepentant sinner like Donald Trump is utterly preposterous. They wouldn’t even vote for a devote Catholic like John Kennedy, let alone a womanizing gambler like Trump. This leads me to wonder what ever happened to evangelical Christians. How can they support a man who the Bible tells us is headed straight to hell without even a stopover in purgatory? How do you throw away everything you say you believe to embrace a man whose behavior is more Satanic than Angelic?
So far, the only explanation that I can come up with is that White evangelicals now believe that they are the chosen few and have decided that they hate everyone who isn’t a White evangelical. They have become a reclusive cult with a persecution complex. Trump feeds them red meat when he demonizes Latin immigrants, Middle Eastern Muslims and Black athletes and praises White supremacists as “fine people.” Besides, who else still believes Trump’s incessant falsehoods? I guess if you believe that an invisible magical friend follows you around everywhere and protects you from evil, you are willing to believe that Trump is the greatest President EVER and our economy is the greatest EVER and White people are the greatest humans EVER! SAD!!!
Economy
The nine-year economic expansion looks to be on life-support as the markets returned near zero gains for the year amid wild volatility in stock prices. All signs point to trouble ahead for the economy. We are overdue for a recession after nine years of recovery, and Trump’s trade war with China and deficit spending are accelerating its arrival. A recent poll of business leaders revealed that the majority expect a recession by 2020. The only question is how bad will it be?
Tax Cut Blues
Last year’s GOP tax cut for the rich was sold as a means to jump-start the economy and provide everyone a raise as companies shared their newfound wealth, trickle-down style, with their employees and customers. Instead, the growth effect appears to have petered out after two robust quarters. Rather than let the money trickle down, most of the tax savings has gone to stock buybacks and corporate acquisitions which benefit institutional investors, company executives and Wall Street bankers, the One Percenters who now control over half of all wealth.
On Main Street, the average raise for employees was a mere 2.7 percent in 2018, only half a point higher than the previous year. Moreover, this meager increase was entirely wiped out by inflation of 2.9%, leaving the average American two cents an hour poorer in 2018. Over half of all American workers didn’t even receive a raise (including me), while executive pay hit another all-time high, now averaging 361 times the pay of those earning the Federal minimum wage, which, at $7.25/hour, hasn’t budged in over a decade. The only bright spots are states that have raised the minimum wage, as California has done. This has helped lift up the poorest workers and set a higher floor for all wages.
It turns out the tax cut’s real consequence is to further promote income inequality at a time when it is already approaching the all-time high we saw in the Roaring Twenties ahead of the Great Depression. The other consequence is to accelerate the federal deficit and create more US debt, up to nearly a trillion dollars next year alone, since tax revenues have plummeted to pay for the corporate tax cut while spending continues to increase, especially for the military. Trump has already created more debt in two years than Obama did in his last five years in office. So much for running the government like a business!
The Training Business
I had another banner year, riding the continuing crest of investments in training and human capital. At this stage of my career, I’m not trying to expand, just maintaining the status quo of semi-retirement. I’m very fortunate to have three steady clients who offer just enough work to keep me engaged and living comfortably, while still allowing for travel, golf, jazz and the other finer things life has to offer. I will face a more permanent decision in two years when I will decide whether to retire altogether or continue as a part-timer for as long as health will allow. I can see plenty of pluses on both sides.
I traveled quite a bit for business but confined my vacations to California. In all, I managed to visit Dubai, New Orleans, Austin, Phoenix, Chicago, Detroit, Seattle, DC, Oklahoma, San Francisco, San Diego and Yosemite, the latter two on vacation with family. No matter how far and wide I roam, I always treasure coming home to the air-conditioned climate of Southern California.
Training/Talent Development Remain Hot
Human development remained a priority for organizations of all types in 2018. As aging Boomers retire in record numbers (over 3 million in 2018 alone), organizations are finding a shrinking labor market requires more aggressive recruiting and better job offers. Recruiters are reporting that job candidates often have multiple offers and sometimes resort to “ghosting” (disappearing) employers for whom they had previously agreed to work. Employees are also abruptly walking out the door these days, not bothering to give notice, but just jumping at the next best opportunity. With the labor force participation rate down to 62% of adults and unemployment at 3.7%, the labor market will continue to tighten for at least the next few years.
Training naturally follows hiring patterns, for when employers are hiring, they are also training those new hires. According to ATD, training budgets and activity both increased modestly from 2017, signaling continuing growth in the profession. Still, the looming skill shortage is far larger than the resources currently allocated to solving the problem. If we are not going to import skilled labor from abroad, we will have to develop it at home. Employers report having a record number of job openings for skilled labor that they cannot fill. Who is going to pay for the reskilling of the American workforce? It will take a massive investment involving both public and private sectors. So far, too few have stepped forward to fill this critical need.
Awful but Lawful
Thanks to world leaders like Mohamed Bin Salman, Kim, Xi, Duterte, Putin, Trump and their many minions, I’ve added a new category to my annual review – awful but lawful. These are actions that decent people view as awful but remain perfectly legal for the rich and powerful, at least as of this writing. Oh, don’t try any of these things yourself; only the truly powerful can get away with treachery at this level of depravity.
- If you’re MBS, crown prince of Saudi Arabia, you can lure a prominent journalist into one of your consulates and order him killed and cut up with a bone saw to hide the evidence. When caught, blame it on your underlings who will take the fall for their dear leader and then seek advice from the Trump administration on how to lie in public and get away with it. To top the year off, order your armed forces in Yemen to kill and starve over 14 million civilians, creating the worst humanitarian crisis on the planet.
- If you’re Kim Jong Un, you can assassinate over 340 people, including your own brother and uncle, operate a network of prison gulags filled with your critics, and then get invited to a summit meeting with Trump, who praises you for making vague promises to denuclearize someday. Meanwhile, you keep building more nuclear weapons and get sanctions relief from your patron China while earning praise from the President of the United States for being “talented.”
- If you’re Xi Jing Ping, you can declare yourself China’s leader for life and crack down on anyone who dares oppose you and the police state that keeps you in power. You can arrest human rights activists, oppress Christian and Muslim minorities and harvest the organs of prisoners against their will. You can then go on the world stage and pretend that you care about the fate of the planet as you callously continue to gobble up the rest of the world’s remaining natural resources, while emitting more carbon from burning fossil fuels than the United States and Europe combined.
- If you’re Rodrigo Duterte, President of the Philippines, you can order your police to shoot on sight anyone possessing drugs and you can unleash your private posse of vigilantes to carry out more than 4,500 extrajudicial killings on your behalf. When opponents question your authority to declare martial law, arrest them. When victims appeal to the International Criminal Court for justice, withdraw the Philippines’ membership on the court.
- If you’re Vladimir Putin, you can seize the Crimea from Ukraine like taking candy from a baby and get the President of the United States to tell the world he believes you and not his own intelligence agencies when it comes to Russian interference in our election. To top off the year, you can have your opponents murdered on foreign soil with a poison that only Russia makes and then announce with a straight face that you and your murderous regime had nothing to do with it.
- If you’re Donald Trump, you can personally enrich yourself while serving as Commander in Chief by renting rooms in your DC hotel and golf resorts to foreign dignitaries and One Percenters doing business with the U.S. government. You can put your children in charge of key White House policy in violation of anti-nepotism laws. You can tell an average of five lies every single day you are in office and when caught lying, you can attack the press as “fake news” and “enemy of the people,” claims your hero Adolph Hitler made against the German press. You can pay $400,000 in campaign hush money to your paramours and then claim it’s just a private affair while your attorney goes to prison for the crime.
Priceless Moments
Of all the many events and people who made headlines in 2018, here are my favorites:
To Donald John Trump (aka Drumpf, Twitler, Cheetolini, Agent Orange, Groper-in-Chief, Prima Donald, Don the Con, Darth Hater, Hair Furher, Cadet Bone Spurs):
Of all your inane tweets, I really wish you would stop referring to yourself as a “witch” (WITCHHUNT!!!!!). At best, you are a “warlock,” a man who practices witchcraft. At worst, you are a buffoon. Oh, and thanks for ruining my good first name!
To ‘Barf’ Kavanaugh, new Supreme Court justice:
Your carefully choreographed choir boy image blew up on global television amid Blassey Ford’s testimony about your teenage drunken debauchery and sexual misconduct. I’m sure you won’t be the first alcoholic to serve on our nation’s highest court, but you’re the first to have not one, but two, credible reports of sexual assault. Move over, Clarence Thomas, and keep your hands to yourself!
To Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex and former Hollywood actress:
Your fairy tale Cinderella story transfixed audiences on both sides of the Pond. You are proof that the American dream is still alive, even if you must go to England to achieve it. Now the challenge is to see if a bi-racial girl from Canoga Park can make it with the British royal family. You’ll need the greatest acting skills of your career to pull this one off.
To Anthony Bourdain, Chef and TV Star:
Your gifted exploration of international culture and cuisine gave hope that a world in conflict could sit down and enjoy a good meal together. Yet in the end, you could not sustain that hope for yourself and the rest of us. The despair that overtook your life gnaws at all of us like an unquenchable thirst.
To the Students of Parkland, FL who led the March for Our Lives:
Thank you for your courage and for producing my favorite meme of 2018: “We call BS.” Nothing captured the hypocrisy and shamelessness of political elites like this call for honesty in the wake of over 300 mass shootings in the U.S. When politicians tell us that 300 million guns in private hands have nothing whatsoever to do with gun violence, when they insist that everyone, including children, criminals and the mentally ill, should have all the weapons and ammunition they could ever want, Americans are calling BS. The only way any country has been able to reduce gun violence is through controlling who gets to own a gun. Otherwise, with our mindless “thoughts and prayers,” we are simply inviting more mass shootings and adding to a death toll that stands at over 30,000 lives lost to guns every single year. That’s the simple and stark truth about guns that teenagers and adults both understand, though too few of the latter are willing to acknowledge the obvious and do something about it.
To People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA):
Regarding your recent effort to get people to stop using language that might be offensive to animals, I’m all in favor of the humane treatment of animals, including my own cat and tropical fish, but when I use tired clichés like “beat a dead horse” or “bring home the bacon,” it’s not because I favor animal cruelty, I just can’t come up with a more creative expression at that moment.
