Victor Bremson's Reflections

I think a lot about a Spanish movie I saw 5 years ago called the “Butterfly”, "La Lengua de las Mariposas". It is a fairly simple movie about a young boy and his teacher during the Spanish Civil War. The teacher wants to teach about the awe that can be experienced in studying nature, like the tongue of a butterfly. The teacher doesn’t want to participate in the hatred that is filling Spain between those on the right and those on the left. But of course the extremists on both sides demand total allegiance to their point of view. As the teacher is driven away, to be executed the young boy runs after the truck yelling ‘butterfly’s tongue’. The boy was saying I understand.

I find myself identifying more and more with the teacher. A friend of mine recently shared a reading that highlighted the idea that ‘the human race defines insanity’. The main support for this argument was that we have killed over 100,000,000 of our own species in the last 100 years. Mostly because of our nationalistic or religious beliefs.

I was with a friend this weekend who supports our war in Iraq. The center of his argument is that we have to kill them before they kill us. He readily agrees that their were no weapons and no terrorism links and claims our president was justified in lying to the people in order to mobilize for war.

How do we stop this insanity?

We get so locked into our myths. They are all around us. Oil is plentiful and cheap. Our God is better than your God. Might make right. Non-violence responses don’t work.

Here is the only truth my friends. It comes from the teaching of the mystics.

Taking time to understand the complexity of a butterfly’s tongue, the vastness of space, the mystery of gravity, the experience of true love or the existence of a universal consciousness allows us to begin the journey towards sanity. Those of us that have begun this journey are changed forever. We certainly are not perfect but we no longer waste energy questioning the existence of God. Instead we begin to dream again and write poetry expressing things like gratefulness and blessing. In this state of being the idea of killing our brothers before they kill us is just not an option.

Victor Bremson
July 9, 2005

We are traveling by car to Los Angeles to attend a wedding and visit family and friends. We are stopping on the way to celebrate our son’s interim graduation from UC Davis with a Masters in Statistics and to share time with him and Bessie. I call it interim because he is on the way to a PHD in Transportation. We stopped in Ashland, Oregon to attend a couple of plays on the way down. We will be on the road for two weeks.

Ashland is truly a great resort town if you love theater and great people. The B&B’s and restaurants are wonderful and the theater is always great. There is an emphasis on Shakespeare but plenty of other plays to meet everyone’s need. For example there is a musical going on outside of the main theater grouping right now that salutes Carole King. One of the local problems is that a group of nudists are trying to make the downtown area a clothing optional zone. We didn’t get to see any on this trip.

We saw two plays yesterday. The first was a 40’s farce called Room Service. The Marx Brothers made a movie of it. It was a good laugh. At night we saw Love’s Labor Lost, a Shakespeare comedy about men learning about the importance of love. I enjoyed it more than Roberta. I would like to gain a greater appreciation for Shakespeare’s writing. Roberta suggests that we should read the plays first. But the themes still come through and the pageantry is wonderful.

We always meet interesting people along the road who teach us about life. Here are a few examples:

We met a beautiful young woman who was clerking in a children’s bookstore. She had many tattoos on her arm. She is a young mother who is pulling her life together. She spent 5 years addicted to Crystal Meth before she spent a year in jail. She said that Meth makes you feel like you are all powerful and that even after you are clean for 10 years you still crave that feeling. It is her young child that keeps her clean. She moved back home to Ashland to get away from the big city to raise her child. She said that she needs to get her child out of here before high school. Most everyone in town smokes pot and thinks that it ok but the kids want something with a bigger pop and don’t realize how quick that Meth can get them. We know that Meth is pandemic in small towns across America. It probably explains some of the fear that is rampant out there.

We met a young lady who is a waitress in a small restaurant. She is from Renton, WA but going to school here to work in the criminal justice system. She wants to work with young people in trouble. She believes you can still help these people. Her boy friend is away right now at National Guard Training. He joined before the war and now they are both praying that he doesn’t get called up. They don’t like the war.

Our innkeepers are a hoot. They had previously retired and moved to the Oregon Coast. She was a schoolteacher and he a chemist. They lived on the coast for two years and became bored to death. They moved back to Ashland where they decided to buy this home and turn it into a B&B. They are going to do it just as long as it stays fun. She is a great hostess and cook from Alabama and he is a chemist who loves to talk about cosmology. If you come through Ashland try the Redwing at 541-482-6944. It only has three rooms.

We met an older woman and her family vacationing here from Erie, PA. We got into a discussion about Wal-Mart while our traveling partners were shopping. She was an expert on this subject as she generally liked the store and wasn’t going to take any of my practiced reasoning. She believes that they have great selection and doesn’t buy the argument they are pushing everyone out of business. She said after all that there was a K-Mart in her town as well. There are several Wal-Mart’s near her. However she still shops at her local market. It is too far to drive to the Wal-Mart just for a little food. She admitted that her sister works there but only because her husband gets health insurance from his company. She didn’t know that 80% of the workers there need to get help with medical care from the state they live in. She said Wal-Mart spent a lot of money helping people but didn’t know that they spend a tiny portion of their profit on community and spend much more advertising how generous they are. And finally she did seem sad that her downtown area was no longer vibrant and she did wish that she could still go there, walk around and see her friends. I was very gentle and we enjoyed our conversation.

Anyway I wanted you to know that I am still out here trying to change the world despite the great drive, food, entertainment and fun. Off to Davis.

Victor Bremson
June 22, 2005

I got into a conversation in a hotel bar in Sacramento last night with an alien (just kidding) from a Red State who voted for George Bush. He allowed me to ask him questions about how he thought. We talked for over 15 minutes. I thought about asking him if I could do an autopsy but I think that would have been pushing it to far.

Who is he?

Male, 35 years, wife, 2 children, accounting text salesman, middle income, Protestant but does not attend church. Hunter and gun owner. Describes himself as a libertarian. Voted for Clinton. Gets his news from the internet like the Drudge Report and the NY Times.

What are his basic beliefs?

Pro-life. Believes Abortion is murder.
Outraged at partial birth abortion.
Believes some cases such as rape, incest, life of mother deserves special circumstances.
Anti-taxes. Believes American’s pay too much taxes. Furious at the State of New York because he needed to pay them a $9 tax in order to register his car in Ohio. It had something to do with not being able to get auto insurance in Ohio.
Believes liberals are elitists who just don’t get it.
Hates the State of Israel. Blames our policies towards Israel on most of our problems in the Middle East. Would give the land to the Palestinians. Believes Jews stole the land.
Not anti-Semitic, has Arab friends.
Sort of supports our invasion of Iraq but seemed not totally sure.
Seemed to be tolerant towards homosexuality.
Believes CNN and Fox News sort of cancel each other out.

On Kerry and Bush.

Has what he calls the Memorial Day Picnic rule. Presidents are chosen by whom most people would be comfortable with at a Memorial Day Picnic.
Didn’t like the fact that Kerry was not consistent on his position on the war.
Actually said he could support Dean easier because he knew where Dean stood.
Was not willing to believe that Bush lied on WMD. Bush believed the bad information.
Dan Rather and CBS lied. He was quite sure of that.
Believes that Kerry would have raised his taxes. Don’t trust Democrats on taxes.

Trying to Find the Middle Ground.

I tried to find a middle ground with him on the issue of our children. I said I wish that people who voted for Bush were as concerned about education, healthcare and childcare for all our children as they were for the unborn. He said he was sorry that he needed to go the bathroom and left.

Victor Bremson

April 28, 2005

INVESTMENT UPDATE
January 31, 2005

I have written from time to time about my investment strategies for a very tough time. I have been catching up on my reading and analysis lately and this memo is a quick summary of some of things that I am learning. I hope that these comments are helpful to you regardless of the amount that you have to invest. I would love to hear your thoughts.

MAJOR WARNING ABOUT MY COMMENTS. There is no major consensus among writers as to the investment future for the next few years. I tend to be bearish and afraid of the US dollar. One of the prime people that I listen to takes the opposite tack. He says don’t bet against the dollar. When pressed why he says that it is more intuitive than anything else. He says that I am seeing the negatives in my country but not clearly seeing the balancing problems in the other countries such as China. Despite what I am going to say below I still follow his advise on some of my investments.

Here are my general conclusions: (I will partially expand later)

1. Be highly diversified. Try not to be invested in US stocks as the center of your strategy. Be active in both international and emerging economies equity and bond markets.
2. Stay away from 10 year government bonds , high yield bonds and bond funds that are highly leveraged. The inflation rate is rising faster than the price indices are telling us. Inflation is getting worse, especially for people with lower incomes or fixed pensions. This means interest rates could be going up quicker than we are being told. The fed will continue to raise rates. The only question is how fast.
3. Choose old economy stocks that pay reasonable dividends and that have good management. There are good mutual funds that specialize in these holdings.
4. Real Estate is usually a good hedge against inflation but there is also great risk here due to the high values in certain cities. I am still invested in Reits but I have begun to reduce my holdings.
5. Energy Companies. We are still running out of oil despite the fact that energy stocks have paid good returns the last few years. I have been looking at natural gas trusts in Canada, Oil Companies like BP that are continuing to diversify away from gas and alternative energy companies like Fuel Cell Energy and Gamesa.
6. Gold and Commodities. Both of these markets have high valuations right nowbut both will do well against inflation.

Some supporting comments:

INFLATION, US DOLLAR AND STAGLATION

The major inflation index does not include the inflation rate for energy or food. This means that it is tends to follow interest rates and the cost of imported products. Interest rates are artificially low right now because the fed wanted to hype the equity market in order to ensure that our equity markets didn’t collapse after the fall of the high-tech economy and 9/11. They are gradually trying to remove the artificiality from the rates. As far as I can tell the reason that rates have not gone up faster is because of slow job growth and slow employee wage growth in the US. Recent reports have indicated that people are slowly falling below the poverty line because of the lack of jobs and salary growth. The conventional wisdom is that the Bush tax cuts were also needed to keep the equity markets from falling further. There is much argument though about the need to make them permanent.

Low priced imports from China, India and other places has held inflation down and interest rates down. People are tending to be more careful with their money and checking prices very carefully. The problem is that this is leading to a massive trade deficit with China and others. They in turn are investing in our ten year bonds. This is good as long as they don’t stop or try to sell what they have already bought. This would cause disruption in our interest rates and they would go up quickly with inflation. The massive US budget deficits need to be reduced in order to reduce this risk. This is of course very difficult to accomplish.

The 100 pound monkey continues to be what is China going to do with its official currency. It is reportedly 40% undervalued. This means that we are paying 40% less for that item than we should be. This is leading to huge growth in China and ruin for businesses in the US. Consider this last fact when you hear an argument that says inflation is not that bad. No one knows for certain what will happen when China is forced to move to fix its currency. There is some soft evidence to suggest that China is preparing todo something.

The conventional wisdom is that the economy always does better the third year of a president’s term of office. Things are allowed to go down during the early part of the 4 year term so that they can be going up before the elections.

Stagflation is the worse economic result for most people. It means that prices go up and investment values/asset values go down. This might be good for the environment but terrible for those without a good job.

US and INTERNATIONAL EQUITIES—

Value stocks have led the charge in the last few years. Growth stocks and high-tech stocks have not done as well with high-tech being the worst. The conventional wisdom is that US Stocks are still selling at a very high earnings multiple, meaning that they are overvalued. People continue to invest in them because they have been told that equities make the best long-term investment. Warren Buffet buys great companies and never sells. He likes big, well managed, companies who pay good dividends. He buys at good prices.

Value investing is always a good way to invest. However it is getting harder to find good values. Consider investing now in large cap companies with good dividend rates. There are several mutual funds that do this. I like an American Fund product called Capital Income Builder because the fund invests about 40% of its investments in overseas multi-national companies thereby providing some diversification. There have been a rash of large mergers in the news lately. The reason for this is because many companies have huge cash reserves and they are looking to expand through purchase. Microsoft and Intel are too high tech companies with huge reserves. Microsoft recently paid a large special dividend and is actively buying a percentage of their stock back in the open market.

Europe will eventually have some of the same deficit/program deficits that the US is facing.

CASH INVESTMENTS

Cash investing doesn’t exactly mean cash. It doesn’t make sense to get on investment return if its possible. Short-term bond funds for example are a good place to invest excess cash. You will earn a small investment return and have very low risk. In the event that a major market investment opportunity takes place you will be prepared to take advantage of it. For example often there is a opportunity to take advantage of a market sell off. Short-term funds will easy to sell off in order to take advantage of the buying rebound.

Good luck. Let me know if you have any good ideas.

Victor Bremson

There is a email floating around the web that supports the idea of profiling Arab men between 18-27 because of their history of causing many recent violent crimes against innocent civilians. The email suggests that not profiling these men is stupid and places the rest of us at danger. The memo makes some points and I can certainly be accepting of the emotions and logic behind it. I understand the feeling of fear. However I would like to suggest that we can do better.

Martin Niemoller (1892-1984) wrote the following famous piece about the holocaust. “In Germany they came first for the Communists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me--and by that time no one was left to speak up.”

Consider a possible rewrite of this that might sound something like---In the United States they came first for the young Arab Men and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t one. Then they came for the rest of the Arabs and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t one. Then they came for all the Muslims and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t one. Then they came for anyone who spoke out against the governments actions in Iraq…read a book critical of the US…etc…

Profiling is a terrible thing. It is a form of oppression. It should be considered a tool of last resort and even then it creates a dangerous precedent. The history of oppression is that it usually leads to more oppression not less. It labels people as ‘terrorists’ because of their ethnic background, ‘drug pushers’ because of their skin color, ‘stupid because’ of the color of their hair and ‘greedy’ because of their religion. Justified oppression can also lead to torture of political prisoners, putting people in prison without due process and political censorship.

It allows people to think that they can be safe if only certain segments of the population were better controlled. It is a short-term solution that can lead to long-term oppression as we sacrifice our civil rights as citizens for some possible short-term relief from fear.

There is no way to tell who the next terrorist will be. Extremists will always fool the defenders who think this way. They will recruit others to do their work and use the profiling as part of the justification. It is like thinking that we can build a hundred billion dollar shield that will protect us from nuclear terror. It is not an effective use of resources. It won’t work against smart people and unfortunately terrorists are smart people. We need to be even smarter.

I fly more than most people who will read this essay. I don’t like having to get to the airport early or spend boring time in long lines being searched but I believe that the strength of our great country must come from being one with all of its citizens. The moment we start selecting out the bad ones from the good ones we are no longer a great people. We have just become small and frightened.

This country has great wisdom and understanding about the human condition. We can do much better than profiling by using our gifts to build a stronger more united country and a safer world.

Count me in to help.

Victor Bremson
January 22, 2005

In December of 2004 there was a massive earthquake in Asia followed by a large Tidal Wave that caused widespread destruction and killed possibly 200,000 people.

About 100,000,000 years ago a comet hit the earth somewhere near Manson, Iowa. This comet was about a mile and a half across, weighing ten billion tons and traveling at perhaps two hundred times the speed of sound. Manson became in an instant a hole three miles deep and more than twenty miles across. It would make the Grand Canyon look small. It was probably responsible for killing much of the life on the planet including the dinosaurs. There are millions of these comets flying around out there that have this potential. Despite all our technology we don’t want them all that well.

About 600,000 years ago the world’s largest known volcano that lies under Yellowstone National Park erupted and caused a nuclear winter for 8 years that also wiped out most life on the planet including the possibility of early human life. This explosion would have been 1000 times greater than the explosion of Mt. St. Helens. This volcano explodes about every 600,000 years.

None of these events provide much in the way of warning. And Finally.

In 1965 Thomas Louise Brock began a discovery that points to how resilient life is. They discovered life in some yellowy-brown scum that ringed a hot pool near Yellowstone. This life existed in temperatures far hotter than anything we could imagine. Their discovery led to Kary Mullis receiving the Nobel prize in biology in 1993 for basically discovering that a great deal of DNA material can be found in a tiny sample of a heat resistant enzyme found in the bacteria. In essence we learned that where we find water and some source of chemical energy that life can emerge. Brian Swimme teaches that when scientists try and create a perfect vacuum devoid of everything, the kind of vacuum found only in deepest space, that life also emerges.

I am filled with awe.

Victor Bremson
January 16, 2005

I give thanks to Bill Bryson in a Short History of Nearly Everything for most of the above inspiration.

I recently attended a lecture by Rob Stein of a newly formed Progressive organization called Democracy Alliance. Rob worked in the Clinton Administration and in Democratic Politics. He recently has written a well-researched article on the Conservative movement for the New York Times. I would like to share a few bullets from that presentation as a way to encourage you to read some of Rob’s work more deeply and get involved in helping to create this new thinking in Progressive Politics. I think the audience felt like they had been kicked in the stomach by what they learned.

There is a collection of Conservative think tanks and advocacy organizations in the country that spend about $400,000,000 a year to consolidate an agreed message about certain policies. They don’t agree on everything but are good at putting aside differences in order to win elections.

The main players in this group include organizations like the Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, Cato and fundamentalist church political organizations.
They come from several different wings of the Conservative movement. The Neo-Conservatives are only interested in foreign policy and military spending, the Wall Street Republicans are only interested in tax and economic policy and the fundamentalists are only interested in cultural issues.

What they all have in common is their agreement that POWER is the goal. They want the votes.

They began their coordinated effort back in the 1970’s in response to the war protests on college campuses and they have strongly succeeded in taking over Congress, governships, state legislatures and courts. They have built a powerful message machine that includes the think tanks that produce scripts for its friendly media such as Fox, WSJ Editorial and talk radio.

There is a Progressive movement as well but it is much smaller and not coordinated. Many people are more interested in the environment, poverty or family planning issues than they are POWER. These are all important issues but our message is not coordinated and we are splintered. POWER doesn’t even feel like something a Progressive should be seeking. The Progressives fight over what is important instead of how to win elections. We end up blaming the candidates instead of the fact that we are being outsmarted and outworked by a well-oiled machine.

The good news is that that began to change in this election. We found out that we wanted to win and had time and resources to fight for our candidates. Our losses really disappointed us because we came up against their highly efficient machine and got beat. We thought our hard work would pay off and everything would be good again. Unfortunately, the fight has just begun.

It is time to organize a Progressive Movement where winning elections is more important that winning our individual issues. I think supporting people like Howard Dean for Chairman of the Democratic Party maybe one way to signal our support for this idea because Howard understands this material. However the movement is not dependent on any one politician. The movement needs to become more important than the politicians. The Republicans didn’t care that their candidate was the mediocre George Bush.

I realize that this will cause some of you to argue principle over power. The Conservatives have learned how to do this in order to win elections. We may need to give up some principle in order to hold unto the country that we all want .

Victor Bremson
January 11, 2005

I have been talking to two close friends who care deeply about the future of the family values that we were raised on. Values like making sure that people have a safety lifeline, care about future generations and that government talks straight to its citizens.

Ron and Robert both have children and grandchildren. Ron has a PHD, is a incredible teacher and a fighter for progressive social causes. Robert is a retired actuary and loves to sing in his Temple's choir. The three of us have been lamenting on how the Bush Administration is using linguistic jujitsu again, this time about social security. We also realize that they can get away with this because our youth were not really educated about why this program was necessary and how it works. It seems obvious that “separate and divide” youth from elderly is the method of choice from these linguistic experts. This piece is an attempt to share some important facts. The first group of facts is obvious. The following groups are subtler. Please share this youth that you are in contact with. It is really important that the Administration does not gets its way on this program.

The Obvious Facts

1. The Social Security System is a critical lifeline for millions of people. It is not tied to the ups and downs of the US Stock Market. It is guaranteed to be there when you reach the retirement age.
2. It is not just a pension for the worker but it helps to protect the workers family if the worker dies first or becomes disabled. For example their children would receive social security benefits till through their 17th year. The surviving spouse would receive benefits till death. This won't happen in a so-called privatized system.
3. The system was designed around the idea that people were contributing to their own pension. Both the employee and employer contributed to the plan and the employee did not get a tax write-off for doing so.
4. The social security system, but not Medicare, is very solvent. Despite the right-wing rhetoric to the contrary it can be fixed for another 100 years by simply recalibrating retirement age and raising the contribution wage limits.
5. THERE IS NO CRISIS AND YOU SHOULD EXPECT TO RECEIVE SOCIAL SECURITY IN YOUR OLD AGE -NO MATTER HOW OLD YOU ARE.

Some of the more subtle facts:

1. The social security system is actually a regressive tax. A regressive tax is used to describe a tax system in which those with low incomes pay proportionally higher taxes than the wealthy. It is actually a flat tax in that it taxes rich and poor the same rate. The only way that you can make this tax not regressive is to raise the contribution wage limits. Fixing social security means that the wealthiest wage earning segments of our society might have to pay a higher tax.
2. The benefits actually are progressive. People pretty much get the same amount of benefit based on their work years. You don't get more by paying more into the program. This helps the neediest part of our society and does not overly enrich the more successful parts.
3. The federal government use to separate out the deficit from the social security surplus. But the government back about 20 plus years ago decided that it was politically smart to make the deficit look smaller by combining the two. The Social Security System has built huge surpluses over the years that have been used to fund questionable wars, missile shields and tax cuts for the wealthiest class.

Some concepts even more subtle:

1. We have many more serious problems in this country that need to be dealt with first. We have huge under-funded pension plans in both the public and private arena. These funds are guaranteed by US Government insurance guaranties. There is very little talk about these people not getting their pension but they will have a huge impact on the federal budget.
2. Medicare is an example of a program that is in deep financial trouble. This fund is often confused with Social Security. The only way to fix this problem in the United States is to fix our healthcare system. There is no will to do that today.
3. Congress created 401 K Programs as a way to allow employers to create pension plans in which employees could make their own choices. As a result many employers were able to dump real pension plans that paid people a real pension. Employers can contribute little or nothing to 401 K's but still advertise that they offer the benefit. This is a continuation of the effort to take away peoples security blankets in order to achieve higher corporate profitability. Many people lost a significant amount of their 401k investments during the last stock market slide.

We need to be careful not to buy into their language about a crisis in Social Security. If we believe that there is a crisis then we need to do something major to fix it. It is not broken. The use of this kind of linguistic jujitsu is the way the right wing gets their work done. Think about some of the top ten of these sayings, like; death tax, weapons of mass destruction, tax relief, pro-life.....They create the slogans and we are stuck defending facts. Slogans seem more important than facts in this period of our nations life.

Please pass this on.

Victor Bremson
December 21, 2004

With help from my good friends Ron Ein and Robert Schnitzer