Ring, Ring, Ring

Our telecommunications system is broken. Anyone want to argue the point?

I admit it does many things well. It has never been easier or faster to pick up a phone and call or text a friend or relative, to make a reservation at a local restaurant, to find out what time a movie starts or even to get a map and directions when you are driving in a strange neighborhood.

Yes, the system does all those things well. Very well.

But, still, it is broken. The problem is that millions of us are bothered every day by annoying, unwanted telemarketing calls. Some of us get calls or e-mail chats from people overseas, telling us we could be really rich if we only send them some money,

So, two or three calls a day - maybe five or six - don’t seem like too big a price to pay for our wonderful telecommunications system.

But that’s me, and that’s you. And it’s your friends and neighbors and strangers down the block and in the next city, on farms and college campuses and just about everywhere else. As a society, our communications arteries are getting clogged.

Just look at me. I have just about stopped using e-mail.

Why? Because it is becoming a monumental waste of time.

I do look at my e-mail a couple of times a week. The last time I looked, I had about 500 messages. Now I could mass delete them, but then I could lose something important that I might have overlooked.

But if I looked at them all - say I can open, read, close and delete each one every 30 seconds - that’s 250 minutes. Sixty minutes in an hour, so if I did nothing else, it would take more than four hours to get rid of all the offers for K-cups, new storm windows, solar panels, lawn services and special discounts on trips to Paris, Scotland and Nikola Tesla Airport in Belgrade. And lots of other things.

I can cut it all down to a half hour every week or so by clicking on each message with an address that I recognize and do not want. And I could use all that free time to listen to all the voicemails backed up on my phone.

I’ll pick on all the the coffee pod offers for just a minute, because I really like coffee and because their sales techniques are so similar to other products. Once you look up a supplier and buy something on line - ah, that delicious dark French roast or a delightfully-flavored raspberry dessert coffee - the offers just keep coming and coming. 

Even when you don’t search for anything, the orders still come anyway. I can’t even begin to count how many “final offers” I have gotten from a credit repair firm which calls me from a spoofed local number when its computer-driven calls actually come from some boiler shop in another country.

So how did we get this way? Progress, unchecked. Here’s how it all started.

Telephones were invented in 1876, and a year later the first telephone line between Boston and Somerville, Mass. was completed. New York and Chicago were linked in 1892, and New York and Boston in 1894. But the first phones linked only two customers. You had to buy two phones, and give one of them to whoever you wanted to call.

It took a retired Kansas City undertaker, Almon B. Strowger, to invent a switch that could link any single phone to up to 100 others. Every phone had a button that you pressed a certain number of times to get the phone you wanted to reach. The rotary dial came into use in 1896, but the Strowger switches remained in use for a century.

You see how it happened? Technology was invented, then put into use. Now computers can make calls, so let them make calls. It’s quick and easy and almost free. Don’t want the product, well just hang up. It’s a free country, isn’t it?

Well, no.

While computers can make an almost unlimited number of calls for almost nothing - the number of calls is limited only by the number of human operators who pick up when you give the right response to a sales call - they do have to pay their workers. But, the people who pay the most are the ones who buy whatever it is they are selling.

And, they work on a very low response rate. Depending on the product being sold, the telemarketer can make money if only two or three people out of a thousand make a purchase.

It’s all legal, because the elected federal officials and their appointees have set up the regulations that cover telemarketing to make it legal.

So, what’s my fast and easy way to stop all those annoying calls and e-mails? Simple - we just let capitalism do the job. It’s a simple two word plan. PAY ME.

I think a dime would be fair. Any computer that calls my phone has to pay me ten cents. Heck, if they want to call before 9 a.m. local time or after 10 p.m. local time, pay me a quarter.

And I don’t mean they have to send me a check. That would be silly. Just take the money off my phone bill and pay it directly to my internet service provider.

If they want to spend $10,000 to reach 100,000 people with phones, that’s fine with me. I live in a county with nearly 1.5 million people. If someone wants to spend $150,000 to call those 500,000 households once, be my guest.

If it  doesn’t work, we could always raise the cost of making unsolicited calls to fifty cents or a dollar. And to sweeten the pot, calls from political candidates and their supporters could be made free for three weeks before primary day and four weeks before an election.

Now I admit there are some free speech issues involved here, but there are also some Constitutional issues dealing with the right to privacy and the quiet enjoyment of your property.

Maybe we should require that the home and cell phone numbers of company officers and majority stockholders be given at the start of any unsolicited call. That way we could call them back and thank them personally. 

Maybe while we’re at it, we could sell them some solar panels.

Walls have quite a tradition

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

        Mending Wall - Robert Frost (pubished 1914)

Our great national debate on The Wall may soon come to an end, or it may not.

So far, we have wasted tens of millions of dollars in this particular debate, but that is only a down payment on the billions of dollars it would cost to build what President Trump says is necessary to keep our nation safe.

Safe from what? Well he says it would protect us from gang members and drugs and rapists and other criminals coming through Mexico.

Not everyone agrees, of course, and all but the most radical of Trump supporters believes that another government shutdown or any other way of getting the billions of dollars to accomplish it would serve no purpose.

Critics ask where the hundreds of thousands of gang members and criminals and drug dealers and rapists who government officials say have been stopped at the border every year have gone to. After all, we aren’t building new jails fast enough to hold them all.

Government figures also say illegal crossings into our country from Mexico have been dropping every year for a decade, so the President’s supporters don’t even believe the facts coming out of Trump’s own government.

It’s enough to make your head hurt.

But, that argument doesn’t get to the point of this conversation, which is about the one thing Trump supporters and Trump haters agree on.

They both think this fight over a border wall is something new.

Not even close to the truth.

Walls have been fought over for so long that the actual details of some events are mostly lost to history.

Want proof? Go ask a rabbi, or maybe a Sunday school teacher. It’s all there in the Bible, in the book of Joshua.

Remember the story? After Moses led his people out of Egypt and they wandered in the desert until a whole sinful generation died off, the Lord promised the Hebrews a gift - a land flowing with milk and honey.

And He gave it to them. God led them to Jericho, a wealthy walled city and ancient trade center, built to protect the people who were already living in that land of mink and honey. And, the  Hebrews couldn’t get in.

They were the people Donald Trump is talking about. They wanted to take the land from its owners, and would commit any crime to get it. But the wall stopped them.

So, God had the ancient Hebrews march around the walls of Jericho for seven days, blowing trumpets. They did, it fell, and the people in the city were slaughtered. There are lots of theological arguments over just why that happened.

There is also some scientific research showing that the ancient city was indeed destroyed. Archeologists say there is evidence of an earthquake and a fire, which supports some of those theological arguments.

But, no doubt about it, this was the first time we know of that a thriving city built a wall to keep out people who wanted to steal from them. Which makes it the first example of a big wall that didn’t work.

Now there are so many examples of walls that failed to keep enemies out that it’s hardly worth mentioning them. 

Think of the great Greek city state of Troy, and the Trojan horse. Or of the ancient city of Constantinople with its epic series of walls, which fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, shocking all of Christendom and marking the end of the Middle Ages.

The best would probably be the Great Wall of China, which runs more than 1,700 miles and took more than two centuries to build. It kept out refugees and armies, and its great doors let in merchants who paid the local tariffs to bring in their goods. And when it was breached by Genghis Kahn, it led to the downfall of a Chinese dynasty,

Now let’s jump ahead nearly 500 years, to the time before World War II, when French Minister of Defense Andre Maginot  created a massive barrier of more than 500 forts along the borders of Germany and Italy, with bunkers up to six stories deep. The German army never actually broke through the wall, although they went over it and around it in a massive blitzkrieg.

 Then it was Adolph Hitler’s turn to build his Atlantic Wall, a barrier constructed over several years with slave labor and enough concrete to build 1,100 Yankee Stadiums. He had tanks and guns and soldiers. Then came D-Day and the end of Hitler’s dream of a fortress Europe.

By now, you should be saying that the wall President Trump is talking about isn’t meant to stop an army - forget for a moment the drug dealers who use airplanes, ships and even submarines to get across the border - but just illegal immigrants and drug dealers and people selling women and children into a live of slavery.

Well, there was a place in the modern era where a big wall was put up to stop people from crossing from one state to another, a big wall of concrete and barbed wire, with guard towers and land mines and searchlights and lots and lots of troops with orders to shoot to kill.

It was called the Berlin Wall, and it defined East Germany as a corrupt and decaying state in the grasp of a petty dictator who cared nothing for human life.

And, by the way, while numbers are still hard to get, we are pretty sure that around 5,000 people went over the wall, under the wall and through the wall at checkpoints between 1961 and 1989. You couldn’t go around it, since it went all around East Berlin.

There were also about 100 people killed trying to get across that wall. Its legacy of shame still endures.

And walls are still a popular way of protecting a border, even if they don’t always work. Now Israel has a wall which President Trump says is 99.9 percent effective in stopping illegal crossings. 

The Israeli government says the same thing - it’s where he gets his figure - but they say it is 99.9 percent effective is stopping terrorist attacks.

But they also have a very efficient counter-intelligence operation on the other side of the wall to detect potential attacks, and every year the criticism of the Israeli government about its walls (there are several) and its policies toward the Palestinians grows.

Now, depending on where you look, there are 20 or 40 or 60 or more nations that are currently building walls to keep out migrants or immigrants or refugees or enemies of one sort or another.

Some are needed, and some do offer protection. Some work well, and some don’t work well at all. Some Canadians have proposed building a border wall to keep out any United States citizens fleeing from Donald Trump.

So, as your national debate over Trump’s border wall continues, here are a few things to keep in mind.

• If it never gets finished, it will be seen as a monument to failure, one which cost $50 or $60 or maybe $100 billion dollars, once all the costs (including land condemnation) are sorted out by the courts over the next decade or so,

• If it does get finished, the cost of patrolling the wall and maintaining the wall and having people working to keep other people from going over or under or through it will take up an ever-ever-larger part of the federal budget, which will almost certainly result in cuts to the military or social security or other programs.

* Unlike other political talking points that eventually fade away even though they remain huge problem - things like the ever-growing national debt, climate change and economic inequality - the Trump Wall will always be right there, in plain sight, a symbol of everything that he and the Republicans who support him are bringing to our nation.

We Can't Afford It

Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz gave us some simple advice the other day, and it  led to most of the country mocking him.

One thing he said was that politics was broken, Republicans and Democrats spend too much time arguing with each other,  and that it would be a great idea if a successful businessman such as himself- a self-made billionaire -to be elected president and run the country.

The fact that he had never been in government - never run a village or a town or a city or a state or ever worked in Washington in any capacity - was just a bonus, he said.

Now, we could happily spend hours talking about what was wrong with those ideas, but it was something else that really got to me.

He said that our nation just couldn’t afford the Democratic proposal of Medicare for everybody. It is just too expensive, he said, looking fiscal responsible and showing he doesn’t have to pander to millions of poor people who don’t make ups significant voting block. But it did pander to a lot of Republicans, which is a good thing do when you want to. Be President.

Well, I do feel strongly that the United States -which has the richest and most powerful economic engine in the western world - should be able to afford the same kind of sweeping public health care you can find in England or France or Spain. Or in Cuba and Australia or lots of other nations around the globe, including Canada and Mexico.

But, that argument avoids the basic question that the reporters covering Mr.Schultz never seemed get around to asking. Just who, exactly, can’t afford it. Well, in their defense, that’s a question that should be saved for a follow-up think piece.

So, let’s think a bit. Just who is it who can’t afford health care for all of us?

Certainly not the United States government. Our federal budget for FY 2019 is 4.4 trillion dollars. Federal income is $3.4 trillion. And yes, President Trump’s budget deficit is up 18 percent from last year, thanks in large part to his big tax cut which went - mostly - to the richest  one per-cent of us. I don’t recall a single Republican opposing that idea. I remember them all smiling at a press conference.

So, let’s say the richest of us can certainly afford to pay some of the costs of a health care policy that will cover all of us. They could leave the country, of course, but every other western industrial nation would tax them for health care as well.

Maybe it’s the overburdened, over-taxed middle class that can’t afford it. Well, you can certainly argue that everyone in the middle class feels they pay too much in taxes. But, you get what you pay for. And, after all, saying you can’t afford something means something different to everyone.

So, can they really afford it? It depends on their income and their expenses, of course. Still, saying I can’t afford a car is different than saying I can’t afford to go on a vacation. Saying you can’t afford to send your child to an expensive private college is different from saying you can’t afford surgery. And saying you can’t pay for health care for all - and get health care for you and your family as well - is a complicated calculation.

If you safe money, no problem. If you break even, no problem. If you have to spend a few hundred dollars, or even a few thousand…well how much have you spent on fire insurance over the years and never had a fire.

Here’s what is happening under our current system, and it’s not pretty.

Under our current system, a lot of people just can’t afford adequate health insurance. Those include the two million people driven into bankruptcy last year because of medical bills. Then there are the people who pay for their medicine by selling their blood.

We don’t know how many there are, and more people sell their blood to buy drugs than to buy insulin -  that’s a whole different issue - but we do know that selling your blood is a thriving business.

 It’s hard too get good statistics, since the plasma industry likes to describe all blood donors as volunteers, even the ones who sell their blood for $30 to $50. And come back every 10 days. 

But we do know there are 400 licensed plasma donation centers in the United States, and the revenue from selling plasma has jumped from 4 billion to 11 billion dollars since 2008.

Do you think the people selling their blood couldn’t afford to pay for Medicare? 

Or, what about the two million people driven into bankruptcy last year because of medical bills. I bet they could have afforded it.

 So, I ask again. Just who is it who can’t afford giving the citizens of the United States the same kind of heath care that citizens all over the world get from their countries? And please don’t tell me that while the system has problems, we also have the best health care in the world, and that giving everyone health coverage would mean rationing that care.

After all, don’t the richest people in the world flock to our hospitals to get that care?

That’s true. And anyone in the U.S. who can spend $200,000 or so to see a top-flight surgeon in our country can still go see them.  Just not you or me. Not now, not ever.

So, if everyone was covered my Medicare, very few of us would get to see the world’s best doctors. Still, the government could make it possible for them to see some doctor or nurse or paramedic. Maybe our nation’s infant mortality rates would start going down.

That rate, recorded at 6.5 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2016, might even be cut in half, leaving the United States just a little worse off than England, France or Israel are today.

Anybody want to argue that we can’t afford that?