FROM MUTUAL ADMIRATION SOCIETY TO SERIOUS BROMANCE ... DONALD TRUMP & LOU DOBBS

While Fox News has always been a joke, this Lou Dobbs "interview" leans toward the pathetic, and is more than a little weird ...

- Mark

BAKERSFIELD'S AMAZON HQ2 PROPOSAL IS IN ... GUESS WHAT AMAZON'S GOING TO NOTICE?

As many of you may have heard, Amazon is looking to expand in North America, and sent out a general request for proposals. Well over 200 cities across North America have made their case for being Amazons second home, or its HQ2. My hometown, the city of Bakersfield, has submitted its proposal (it begins on page 7). And why not? Wherever they land, Amazon is expected to invest $5 billion in the region, and promises to create 50,000 jobs with an average salary of $100,000.

This is pretty heady stuff for a city like Bakersfield, where the median household income is about $56,000 and unemployment is regularly 1.5 to 2 percentage points higher than the state average.

Acknowledging that the city doesn't meet Amazon's minimum city population range (1 million residents), the city of Bakersfield's proposal cites abundant and cheap land, a business friendly environment, and our proximity to Interstate 5 and Highway 58.

While these enticements might be a good starting point for building Amazon's confidence in our region, the reality is our city's proposal ignores other aspects of Amazon's RFP guidelines, which they will no doubt notice.

For example, with one of the lowest college graduation rates in the country, Bakersfield will find it hard to meet the "corresponding educational attainment" Amazon's RFP requires. Filling the estimated 50,000 tech oriented jobs Amazon will require "over the multiple years" will be similarly difficult.

But there's more.

Amazon's headquarters in Seattle, Washington.

In the areas of "Cultural Community Fit" and "Community/Quality of Life" outlined in Amazon's RFP, the city of Bakersfield and its surrounding region simply doesn't provide "a compatible cultural and community environment for [Amazon's] long-term success." Specifically, with its current headquarters located in Seattle, Washington, Amazon has its foot in Asia, is on Canada's doorstep, and is looking for a region that supports "a diverse population, excellent institutions of higher education" and an overall "high quality of life" that includes a civic embrace of "educational opportunities." 

This was the backbone behind the creation of the Silicon Valley and Seattle's high tech corridor, which Amazon understands. This means Amazon needs creative people. Creativity requires individuals have the capacity to express themselves both professionally and personally.

Ten years ago, in 2007, a Bakersfield city councilman proposed making the city of Bakersfield an English-only, non-sanctuary city. Think how much Amazon's foreign-born, H-1B visa holding, workforce would thrive in this kind of environment.

The Bakersfield city councilman's "non-sanctuary city" effort failed. But he was later rewarded by being elected county supervisor. He's currently a big supporter of Sheriff Donny Youngblood, who pressed the Kern County Board of Supervisors over this past summer to vote on a measure that would - yeah, you guessed it - make Kern County a non-sanctuary county. Sheriff Youngblood has also refused to sign most U-Visas presented to him. U-Visas allow undocumented immigrants who are victims or witnesses of crime to stay in the country while their case is settled.

Global companies like Amazon notice this kind of stuff.

Then, last year, the city of Bakersfield's elected officials, at all levels, turned their backs on a one-eighth-cent library tax that would help fund our county's often closed, and woefully understaffed, library system.

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Turning your back on a healthy library system is not a good thing when you want to pretend your community supports literacy and education, and when your region was once referred to as the "Appalachia of the West."

Again, companies like Amazon notice this kind of stuff.

Then we have our regions attitude towards the LGBT community. As God-fearing Christians, many of our region's political leadership have made it clear they are not really interested in promoting the rights of our LGBT community, no matter how creative they might be. The Bible, you know.

I think it's pretty clear that companies like Amazon notice this kind of stuff too.

I also appreciated how our city's proposal included downtown Bakersfield as one of the potential sites, with a computer rendition of what Amazon's HQ2 would look like with the state's High-Speed Rail (HSR) project running through the area.

There's only one problem with this HSR-linked site. Almost every elected Bakersfield city and Kern County official have made it clear they are opposed to bringing the HSR project to Bakersfield. Oh, and our local congressman, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, is an ardent opponent of the HSR project too.

And, yes, companies like Amazon notice this kind of stuff.

In sum, what Amazon will notice as they go through their proposals is that the characteristics critical for the creativity and entrepreneurialism they require - an embrace of diversity and tolerance - are not always supported or welcome in Bakersfield. Cheap land and a "friendly" business environment can only go so far.

Too bad. Amazon is exactly the type of company that could help turn Bakersfield and Kern County into the region our city's proposal is trying to present, or portray, to Amazon.

And, yes, Amazon will notice this too.

- Mark

AMERICAN MIGRANT STORIES, IN KERN COUNTY

Last week, on October 19th, California State University Bakersfield's Center for Social Justice (CSJ) and the Immigration Justice Collaborative (IJC) co-sponsored the screening of "American Migrant Stories" at the university's Walter W. Stiern Library.

 
The Center for Social Justice - which I co-direct - secured funding from The California Endowment to follow the IJC around Kern County as they put on virtual "legal clinics" for Kern County's undocumented population.

The IJC has been putting on legal clinics throughout Kern County since November, 2016.

KGET 17 News reported on CSU, Bakersfield's Oct. 19 screening, which you can access by clicking here.

The documentary is produced by the Orozco Brothers, and will be presented again in Bakersfield (TBA) within the next two months.

Additional screenings, outside of Kern County, are being arranged.

- Mark

MOST VALUABLE BRAND NAMES, BY COUNTRY (and, no, Coca-Cola's not one of them)

Via Visual Capitalist we get a look at the most valuable brands in the world, by country ...

For more information on most valuable brands, by country, click here.

- Mark

GEORGE W. BUSH TAKES ON TRUMPISM IN AMERICA

Former President George W. Bush, who stayed away from the limelight, and from criticizing his successor, just went after Donald Trump and what he's doing to America's civic virtues. Via the Washington Post, here's a sampling of what President Bush had to say today (Oct. 19) at a George W. Bush Institute held in New York:

• “Bigotry seems emboldened. Our politics seems more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and outright fabrication.”
• “We’ve seen nationalism distorted into nativism.”
• “We’ve seen our discourse degraded by casual cruelty. . . . Argument turns too easily into animosity.”
• “It means that bigotry and white supremacy in any form is blasphemy against the American creed, and it means the very identity of our nation depends on passing along civic ideals.”
• “Bullying and prejudice in our public life … provides permission for cruelty and bigotry.”
• “The only way to pass along civic values is to live up to them.”

As someone who was a regular critic of President George W. Bush while he was in office, you can count me as impressed with our former president. The Washington Post has a 3 minute clip of former President Bush's speech here.

You can read the entire WP article by clicking here.

- Mark 

TRUMP'S CASCADE OF EMBARRASSMENTS CONTINUES

The Washington Post discusses Donald Trump's late response to the death of 4 U.S. soldiers in Niger, and his subsequent bungling of the "narrative" during his phone calls to a soldiers' family. 

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Trump's now accusing the dead soldiers family and a sitting member of Congress of lying about his comments to Sgt. La David T. Johnson's widow ("He knew what he was signing up for, but I guess it hurts anyways").

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Oh, and Trump also took the time to take a swipe at President Obama, and previous presidents, for how they handled the return of fallen soldiers. Classy.

And the cascade of embarrassments continue.

- Mark

MORE "WINNING" ON THE GLOBAL STAGE, COURTESY OF PRESIDENT TRUMP

Donald Trump doesn't understand what multilateral treaties mean, nor does he understand why the Iranian nuclear deal is actually working. And, yeah, it's embarrassing to watch as an American.

Below is a quick 3-minute overview of what the Iranian nuclear deal was designed to do. This clip came out when the multilateral treaty was signed (2015), but before it was implemented (2016).

The British government thought so much of Donald Trump's comments this week, and his rejection of the treaty, that their Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) took the time out to explain why the Iranian nuclear deal has worked in this post.

"Now This" picked up on FCO's media piece, and incorporated it into the clip below. In very simple terms, it explains why Trump is wrong, again.

And spare me the "Iran is playing geo-strategic games with Saudi Arabia in the Middle East" slapstick. The Iran treaty is about a nuclear weapons program, not a diplomacy or a "peace" treaty.

If you need the difference explained, stop reading my stuff and go work for Trump. Seriously.

- Mark

SECRETARY OF STATE REX TILLERSON'S ENGLISH DECODER DICTIONARY

- Mark

EMINEM'S MESSAGE AND THE PRESIDENCY ... YES, IT'S HARD CURRENCY IN OUR POLITICAL WORLD

One of my faculty colleagues asked about showing Eminem's free style criticism of President Trump in class. Students had been asking about it. The hesitation from my colleague is less about the medium and style of Eminem's presentation, and more about the language. My response, and reasoning, follows below.

I suspect this is for your ****** class, right? If so, absolutely. 

 For those who might feel offended by the accusations and language from Eminem, you might remind everyone of Trump's baseless Birther Moments, his "son of a bitches" comment (with reference to the NFL's kneelers), his Billy Bush-Access Hollywood comments, and how he's exposed the presidency to this level of discourse. No president should be able to engage an audience at the level that Trump has, and expect to walk away unscathed because they expect the trappings of the office to protect them from push back and ridicule. 

 Perhaps more importantly, Eminem is addressing substantive policy and social issues. In her day, Harriet Beecher Stowe did pretty much the same thing. Trump made the decision to bring these issues - in the manner that he did - to forefront of America's political scene. The messenger and the medium shouldn't matter, given our current environment. 

 Have fun with it.

For the two people left in the world who haven't seen Eminem's piece, I'm posting it below, or click here. Fair warning: language content might offend a few people.

- Mark

ANOTHER TAKE ON TULIPMANIA. IT NEVER HAPPENED?

Tulipmania. It's often invoked by economists and historians as a warning against avarice and manias run amok. The setting is the Netherlands in the front half of the 17th century.

As economist John Kenneth Galbraith writes in A Short History of Financial Euphoria, what started as the acquisition of prestige and status, for those who possessed the then novel tulip bulbs, in 1636, turned into wild speculation over successive price increases. Specifically, competition over tulips turned into mania, with single bulbs trading for new carriages and homes, or fetching as much as $25-50,000 each.

Demand reached such heights that the Amsterdam Stock Exchange developed a futures market for the bulb.

The market, as well as the dreams of many speculators, would collapse under the weight of its own nonsense, and spectacular avarice. As sellers demanded that their tulip contracts be enforced, they were disappointed when their petitions fell on the deaf ears of the courts. Because the speculation in Tulips market had little to do with the production of actual goods and services, the courts viewed Tulipmania as little more than a gambling operation. 

As is the case throughout these histories, panic, default, and bankruptcy followed. “No one knows for what reason” the speculation and mania ended, Galbraith wrote, but there’s little doubt common sense finally prevailed in a market spun out of control by deluded buyers and sellers.

I liked the story so much, I included it in my book, The Myth of the Free Market. 

While the stories that emerged after Tulipmania are often filled with tales of economic destruction and chaos, historian Anne Goldgar has another take on the series of events. As the Smithsonian points out, in Goldgar's Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age, we're told that "there weren't that many people involved and the economic repercussions were pretty minor." 

Goldgar goes on to point out that she "couldn't find anybody that went bankrupt" and that "a wholesale destruction of the economy" didn't happen.

If this is true, then why do we speak of Tulipmania as some kind of Aesop's fable warning us about the dangers of avarice and manias merged together? According to the Smithsonian, for this "we have tetchy Christian moralists to blame ...". The idea "that God punishes people who are overreaching" resonated with early Dutch Calvinists who were worried about societal decay after Tulipmania. 

Interesting, to say the least.

For more on the story of Tulipmania (that never happened?), click here.

- Mark