Make America Great Again?

“Make America Great Again” has been Trump’s rallying point that has found resonance in many people.  Why?  And, what does “Great” mean anyway?  Does it mean to be the mighty world military power?  We are already there.  Does it mean to be the dominant economic power?  Again, we are already there.  From what I understand, most Trump’s supporters are middle class white Americans who feel they have lost something and want it back.  So what is it that they want to make America “Great” again that they feel they can get from Trump?  Some people feel that that slogan is a substitute for "Make America White Again.”  But I don’t think so.  I think the issues are a more deep, although many of Trump’s supporters may not be able to articulate them.

Let's look into this:  Do Trump supporters really want to bring manufacturing jobs back?  I don’t think so.  Like I said, most Trump supporters are middle class Americans with jobs or some sort of income in the $70K range.  But let’s assume that “getting jobs back” is the driver for their support.  Trump says he will bring companies back to the US from places like China, Mexico, etc.  News Flash:  JOBS ARE NOT COMING BACK!  Why?  The answer is technology.  Look at the labor intensive manufacturing and consider the skill labor required in tool and die and production lines:   Robotics and 3-d printing will wipe out over 90% of the labor required to manufacture anything – no jobs being brought back from manufacturing.  How about farming and food production – Labor intensive farming has been driven out by “industrial” farming with technology.   So, those jobs that have left will never come back because the cost of labor in “those countries” is less than the current cost of technology in this country.  When the cost of labor in “those” countries is brought up to a livable wage, what then?  That is what Trump is saying indirectly – he says he will use tariffs to equalize the cost of foreign production and that will bring manufacturing back to the U.S. because it will make it cheaper to produce it here. The problem with that policy is that any companies that might come back will bring back high technology and automation – not jobs.  At least not skilled manufacturing jobs!

The reality is that there are 7 billion people in the world and more every day.  Because of high technology, there will not be jobs for unskilled people and many fewer jobs for skilled manufacturing people.   One may argue, what about construction and service industry jobs?  Construction is a small percentage of our labor requirements and technology and automation will reduce the demand even more.  The success of service industry jobs depends on a strong and growing middle class to drive the demand for service.  But Republican policies are getting rid of Unions and the middle class.  No middle class, no service industry jobs, or at least very few service industry jobs.  How about a “gig-based’ society?  Taxi drivers, Uber drivers, day laborers and other casual support labor like day nursing, etc.  But between the cost of insurance, gas and auto maintenance, that minimum wage or the five dollars an hour Uber drivers end up making isn't going to cover living expenses it will never allow people to save up for a new car, since for Uber and most day workers cars ware out prematurely from excessive use. But with the onset of driverless cars, there will be no need or “gigs” for drivers.  How about being an entrepreneur?  Yes that is possible for a very small number of people.  Again, success in this area is based on a strong and large middle class not everyone can start an internet business selling products to others who have no money.

How will they earn their daily bread to survive?  That is the challenge that politicians and all of us have to face.  There are about a little under 6 million jobs currently open in the U.S. according to Bureau of Labor Statistics. Trump may be shocked, but the number of unfilled manufacturing jobs in the US is at a 15-year high; however these require skills such as electrical maintenance of automated manufacturing facilities. Estimates are that here are more than 500,000 software jobs for which companies have been unable to find candidates.  The U.S. workforce needs to be prepared for today's economy, not yesterday's. Flight of manufacturing and unfair trade, as Trump claims, is an issue, but it pales in comparison to workforce readiness.

The "first step in solving a problem is recognizing a problem exists" and Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have certainly articulated the problem that exists - inequality.  The problem is that Trump has no real solutions that will impact the middle and lower class in a positive way.   A good start should be equity in sharing the costs of society. Some redistribution of wealth from the richest downward while upgrading educational opportunities seem logical next steps. But that doesn't solve the long term problem.   Large scale public works projects, improvement of the ACA (not its abolition), and real regulation of a crooked financial system will go a long way to help.  The bottom line is that the rich will not share their wealth and privilege voluntarily out of the goodness of their hearts.  A wealth and privilege often unearned except by accident of birth or through destructive lying and cheating and predation.  So society, through government, must be compel them to share these cost of government through a more equitable distribution of wealth through taxation and policies that ensure that this nation's people get to share in this nation's prosperity.

But labor and economics are only part of the problem we have in this country.   Fox News and talk right wing radio have been hard at work for over 20 years, hand in hand with the GOP, creating a movement (predominantly white and male) who feel that everyone else is conspiring to steal the country from them, or even trying to destroy it.  They believe that they represent "real America" and the rest of us do not, and that they're uniquely entitled to set the tone in this country.  The danger to our system of government will endure as long as many millions of citizens are in the grip of what amounts to a cult.    

Our long term solution has to be based on education and a strong capability of inductive and deductive thinking by our educated workforce.  But learning is difficult for people, especially ones who want to or are trained to take the “easy road” to success.  The anti-intellectualism characteristic of Trump and many of his supporters is not the path to the country’s solutions.  Instead they follow Trump who lies to them that brawn work will come back and make them richer than the educated workers in high technical jobs.   Until we make education a national priority and value it as the treasure it is, and provide consistent retraining opportunities that lead to real jobs in high technology, we're going to have a large group of angry people out there supporting wannabe dictators like Trump.

The New Opiate of the Masses - the Allure of a Heaven of Riches

The social and support structure in the United States seems to be collapsing, and that collapse, that might suck into it the collapse of the economy and our democracy, is making the world more dangerous.  After the progress that was made after World War II the destruction of social support network began with the Reagan administrations and the neo conservative movement that took over the government.  It is clear that the evil in humanity began to overtly exert its negative influence when Reagan became President.  That evil was kept in check after the second world war by our strong national moral rectitude and our care and respect for the welfare of citizens,.  Over the last 35 years, however, that economic and social stability, that was won mostly by the blood of labor, has been chipped away by Republican policies that have been growing out of control since the 1980s.  Karl Marx once equated religion as the "the opium of the people."  By cultivating extreme religious positions in the 1980s and 1990s, the Republicans hid a more bizarre narcissistic ideologies based on profit.  It is those narcissistic ideologies based on profit that are the true "opiate of the masses" - and people are being recruited into this new religion by the promise a "wealth heaven" if they are true to these ideologies, a heaven that one can never reach, unless one is there already.  These bizarre ideologies have been, and are, being used by right wing politicians to misguide and keep the middle and lower economic classes off balance and used as expendable "soldiers" in their quest to control all aspects of the U.S. and world economy.

With the concentration of wealth in the small percentage of the population, the levels of inequality are returning to the corrosive levels of the "Gilded Age" and the royal system of government in Europe of the distant past.  The world economy is becoming a boom-and bust engine that enriches the "well to do" while starving everyone else.  People can no longer afford to live on the subsistence wages that are being forced on them.  This trend in the destruction of our social-economic-political system is an a downward spiral.  Through the republican controlled media, for example:  Fox News and right wing radio commentators and conservative controlled newspapers (six corporations control 90% of the U.S. media ) people have been "brain washed" and forced to retreat from anything that does not reinforce their own prejudices.  In turn they create an increasing intense or irrational dislike or fear of people that don't think like them and of people from other countries - a xenophobic population.  Right wing politicians take advantage of this to "control" the opinion of the population and advance their economic policies such as less public support for education.  Accelerating the decay of our democracy.  Indeed our democracy is deteriorating into nothing more than an ill informed electorate.

This limited education of the electorate, destruction of our social and economic support network, coupled with the promotion of these bizarre ideologies has allowed people like Trump to based his presidential candidacy on racist, homophobic, xenophobic, islamophobic positions and find a significant portion of the electorate willing to accept his positions.  He has had the benefit of the Republican party, since Ronal Reagan, cultivating these people.  It has been this preparation of an ignorant electorate that has allowed a horrible and deplorable candidate become a real contender.  Anyone who helps him advance his racial, religious and ethnic bigotry is part of that bigotry.  I agree with Mrs. Clinton, this portion of the electorate form a deplorable group of citizens.

I also agree with her that there "… are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.”  However, she is not filling the need of these people, she is not presenting the change that we need, she speaks in platitudes and theory.  The people want to see strong positions and she does not seems to have the talent, either in her or behind her to understand and put the democratic platform in these strong positions.  Bernie Sanders is able to do that, Elizabeth Warrant is able to convey those strong positions.  Unless Clinton changes her presentation and offers what people want, the electorate's  minds will be dominated by the person selling the new opiate of the masses. 

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I have not been writing too many blog entries this  year and I have tried to concentrate on travel and adventure blogs - travel with my son.  However, with this new presidential election, I can't bring myself to just stand on the sidelines and not say anything.   I need to post my views and opinions on the candidates' positions.  I hope you find them challenging for discussion and are willing to communicate your reactions and opinions to me so that we may have a intelligent exchange  on these and other topics. comments and feedback can be made through this blog or they can be directed to my email: riverarg@gmail.com.  

Putting Together a Piece of a Family History Puzzle

Searching for family and family history is like a jigsaw puzzle, you find lots of little pieces and you put them together.  Those pieces begin to fit and begin to form a picture of the history of the family.  However, with the death of older generations in the family - aunts and uncles and grandparents - putting together the puzzle of the history becomes very difficult.  We are so involved surviving the challenges of daily life:  School work; making and surviving our careers; rearing children; making friends and fitting into society; providing for the shelter, food and medical care that we all need that we spend little or no time watching and recording the evolution of our family.  Sure, we share stories and some of those stories stick and a small portion of those are sometimes passed to the next generation.  But most often they are not.  What I have noticed is that the family memory fades and disappears and the family fragments.

Unfortunately it is not until we have more time (like after retirement) that some of us begin to let our curiosity guide us into family history.  Some of us look online to sites that help organize family from a historical perspective, some of us begin to research and may be lucky to find some tidbit of information or an event of one of our ancestors that is of interest and feel pride and comfort with a link to the past.  Some of us imagine what the struggles might have been and write stories about them.  And, some of us might have the time and flexibility after retirement to do first had research and interviews of family members trying to document their stories.  Unfortunately, by the time one is of an age of retirement, we are lucky if we find living members of the previous generation, or direct stories of members of two generation ago from members of the previous generation who had managed to have put attention and remembered stories that were passed on.  Those, however, become less and less reliable if the stories are more than one generation before, or if the person remembering has some bias and want to protect that they think is the family "honor."   Most often, pieces of this family "puzzle" become distorted because a complete piece is not found and we try to fit what we know into the "family picture," often distorting the picture.

A case in point was the inconsistency of the origin of the Garza family in the village of Villa de Garcia, the town where my mother's family is from.  All my cousins have been told that the direct line of the Garza family, my grandfather's line came from San Luis Potosi when he moved his family back to Villa de Garcia.  Implicitly it is assumed (and believed) that we have no connection to the Garza family in Villa de Garcia.  But his piece of information did not fit rest of the family facts and it seems to not only be from, but form a different puzzle.  As it turns out a great grandmother had moved away when her husband died sometime in the early 1900s.  How they managed to survive the Mexican Revolution of 1915 would make for a fantastic story!  From the pictures that survive and from their historical landholdings, these were people with money and high social status - the targets of the revolution.  My grandfather and his two sisters were raised in San Luis Potosi.  My Grandfather (Serafin) married a woman from Guadalajara (Maria del Pilar Barrera) had three or four of the seven kids in San Luis Potosi (my grandmother had the oldest child from her first marriage - David Negrete) before coming back to Villa de Garcia in the early 1930s.   

Serafin's Grandfather who died (probably after 1900)

Serafin (my grandfather) about 1930

Why didn't the San Luis origin of the Garza family didn't fit the family facts?  We know that the Garza family had incredibly large land holdings in the Villa de Garcia area, most likely small remnants of land grants made by the King of Spain to the "De La Garza" family in the 1600s.  sometime in the 1700s a branch of the De La Garza family dropped the "De La" and became just Garza (there is evidence of this but I have to look for direct proof in church records).  My grandfather's cousins had large landholding, Hacienda-size houses (I remember the house of one of my mother's uncles, Raul, had 10 to 12 bedrooms, inside courtyards, large groves of fruit, avocados, oranges and pecans as part of their back yard.  He also sponsored the circus  ("Circo Osorio") that came to town every year - own by another cousin of his).   

Some of my grandfather's cousins had businesses and my grandfather had large pieces of land with up to 250 horses on his farm at one time in the early 1930s.  Some of his other relatives had businesses and controlled or managed government owned centers such as the natural caverns of Garcia.  His cousins did not come from San Luis Potosi, and he could not have acquired such wealth in such a short time?  Where did all this economic power come from?  My grandfather had to be from Garcia and had moved away on a temporary basis but came back to his holdings.  Luckily, my aunt, the only living relative of my mother's side, remembered the fact about her grandfather dying and her mother moving to San Luis Potosi when I interviewed her and questioned her about this inconsistency.  (Unfortunately, much of the Garza farms did not survive the dry years of the middle 1930s, the same dry years that caused the "dust bowl" and the devastation of the American farmland in Texas and Oklahoma and led to such books as the "Grapes of Wrath" also impacted farms in Northern Mexico and led to the sale of cattle, horses and land by Serafin and other cousins. )

With My Aunt, the Oldest Living Member of My Mother's Family

24 Hours in Parras de la Fuente

Parras de la Fuente is a small city that time forgot, except for cars and internet, the town is living in the early 1800s.  Don't get me wrong, it is a wonderful place to visit and even live if you want to live with small-town values, be very family oriented, with people who enjoy the simple things in life, like a walk to the town square to speak with friends and family, sit in one of many of the small squares and small parks to have some ice cream (or tacos) and watch the people and the world go by.  All homes (and buildings) are straight out of the Spanish colonial period with original adobe construction and painted in colorful pastel colors; it is candy to the senses.  I hope it will not be overrun by tourists and developers - although I so some evidence of cheap row-housing in the outskirts of town.  There are no Walmarts, there are no large chain stores, there is only local vendors with mostly local producers producing and selling to the locals.  There are mayor industries, and Parras is or was known for denim production, wine production (since the early 1600s - in fact the wine was so good and cheap that the King of Spain prohibited them from selling and competing with Spanish wine in the 1700s and the 1800s).  It produces a large variety of fruits and vegetables because it has been always considered the "Oasis" of the high planes desert.   Parras de la Fuente also contains the roots of the Rivera family line.

 Scenes from Parras - Stores and Business look like regular houses with few signs

My father has always spoken of his family in Parras, but since they not affect me, I never put much attention.  My last trip there, with my father, was over 45 years ago, and the only thing that I remembered was that it was not a place I wanted to be.  I was just initiating my career in the high tech area, and the last thing I needed was to "waste" time with farmers too concerned about, what I considered, were the simple things in life; growing and harvesting grapes , nuts and fruit, making and drinking wine, spending large portions of your life on family time, relaxing and enjoying the trees, the flowers, the food and the people around you.  At that time I thought all that was backward and a waste of time.  I think differently now, and I'm sorry I did not stop and listen, smell the flowers and drank the wine.

I knew that if I wanted to get more facts on the Rivera family, I had to go to Parras.  I dragged my cousin from Monterrey to go with me and made a one day trip there.  All of my father's uncles, cousins and relatives of his generation and the generation of his father were dead, and since I did not bother to keep any records, I had no idea where to start to look for this "lost" family (actually we were the ones that were lost, they had been there all the time).  The town is a little less than a 3 hour drive from Monterrey on the freeway.  We got there about three in the afternoon.  I drove into the middle of town where we knew one of my father's uncles had owned a large variety story, akin to a small K-Mart store.  I parked in the main street of the commerce center, Reforma street, and my cousin and I proceeded to look for the store - nothing!  One old security guard remembered that one of the variety stores used to be a Rivera Variety Store but that was over fifteen years before.   

Disillusioned,  we began to walk back to the car to try to plan our next move.  We passed two little old ladies (and I mean little and old - about 80 years old) sitting on a bench watching the world go by.  We decided to take a change and asked them if they remember a Rivera-owned store on this street.  They did!  In fact, they used to shop there.  But they been closed for a long time and the owner died.  "But," she said, "there are other Rivera store owners around."  My heart jumped and my disillusionment melted.  "I don't know who they are or where their store is, but I can take you to someone who might know."  She said, and proceeded to walk us to a small hardware store about a block away.  The woman at the small hardware store pointed us to a small shoe shop about half a block away.  We went there and it turned out that the lady minding the store was the wife of the owner whose name was Rivera.  The husband was not there and was not due back until later that evening.  Realizing that not all Rivera's are family, we started asking her questions on the relationship of her husband and I could tell that that was going over like a "fart in church."   Not so much that she did not want to tell us, it's just that she did not know.  She did indicate to us where another store was whose owner was a Rivera - about three or four block away. 

The other store was a small grocery stored manned by a man about 50 and had a strong resemblance to my father's father.  His reaction when I introduced myself was interesting, he said I looked like one of his uncles.  After some comparison of family history (as much as I could remember), I realized we hit the jackpot!  He sent us to his 93 year-old mother on the other side of town.  He apologized he could not leave the store unattended, gave us the address and directions to his mother's house and sent us to go and talked to her.  He also gave us the name of a cousin who is a lawyer and had his law office on the way to his mother's house.

 With Second Cousin Maria Olivia and her mother Maria de los Angeles

His mother, although she is 93, took one look at me and immediately said "you look like Juan."  Her daughter, Maria Olivia, in her late fifties, early sixties, proceeded to talk about family history, trying to determined where we fit in the family tree relation to her.  The rest of the afternoon and the morning of the next day went like clockwork, we visited more family members and by noon the next day I had a draft of the family tree with at least ten branches and over one hundred and fifty entries.  I got some addresses, some phone numbers and some e-mails, and even had some Facebook links.  Overall it was a successful 24-hour trip.  I hope to summarize all the information and return in a few months with more time and start gathering family stories.  I got some interesting tid-bits of stories dealing with of family intrigue, stories of adventurers, and businesses, and can't wait to go back.

 With other second cousins