On the Affordable Care Act

I am a little tired with both the sophistry on the part of major Democratic party operatives, as well as a failure to communicate and make good proposals from Republicans. This is regarding the "repeal and replace" movement for the Affordable Care Act (ACA, Obamacare).

The Democrats have occupied, as is there wont, the presumptive moral high ground by saying that the Republicans are seeking to serve billionaires and millionaires. They also say that 20 million people could lose their healthcare.

There are several issues with the ACA but the biggest issue is that it is not working well in many markets, premiums have been driven up by 20 percent or more, and in about 2 percent of counties nationwide no plan is available. The insurers are losing money by providing an ACA plan.

The second most important issue is that the ACA is unfair because it divides people into three categories (1) those that lose or gain nothing, such as employees at private companies, (2) those that gain very substantially via subsidies, and (3) those that are forced to pay through the nose. Specifically, I have an engineer colleague who is paying $1800 a month for a bronze plan in Silicon Valley for himself and his wife. This amounts to an income transfer on a large scale, a little like Venezuela.

The third most important issue is that the individual and employer mandates that were the basis of the ACA are not being applied. For example, I have a friend in his 40s that pleas a hardship exemption. If he gets sick, he will of course be eligible for care.

The Democrats are trying to avoid these issues, which are facts not opinion, by proposing single payer health care. I'm sorry but there's a bug in the program you wrote so please don't ask me to pay for another one.

It's significant to note that Romney care, the system that was passed in Massachussetts did not have these problems. I personally would much prefer a state by state or province by province solution as was used in Canada.

I believe both parties, Republican and Democrat need to agree on the issues, and on what is needed in terms of generalized health care. It is Catholic doctrine that all should have access to health care but the means is a political problem.

I think we need to focus more on making individuals responsible for their own freedom, in their use and abuse of their bodies. I think physicians have to have a preventive rather than just a healing role. I think that solutions such as Health Savings Accounts are to be looked into. I think it is good to ask ourselves what we need to do to control the costs of health care, for example by having health insurance co-operatives. The HMOs were supposed to play this role but it does not seem to be working very well. I do think that in medicine money plays an inordinate role. My cousin once removed in Scotland is going to be a doctor and he will have a very good salary in a system that some eschew as "socialized medicine."

Let's stop arguing and try to be creative. I think the parties need to come together to address these issues in a non partisan way rather than play to their basis which is what is happening presently,.

Mothers Day 2016

Mother’s Day is today and millions of women will receive gifts from husbands, children, boyfriends, and significant others. According to Fox Business, an average of $172 will be spent on each mother, including countless roses in churches, mosques, and synagogues. Sadly and unjustly forgotten in this celebration are the American women that have lost a child to abortion.

This post by Thomas Leveson of the Boston Globe evokes the sacred bond of love that exists between a mother and a child. It reminds us that, spiritually speaking there is not one person in the womb but two. Born or unborn, we are all in a state of being and becoming and life is not just about a single decision such as that to terminate the life of an unborn.

In Veronica Roth's novel Allegiant, her hero Tris Prior speaks of what love is and how it involves a perpetual choosing "I used to think that when people fell in love, they just landed where they landed, and they had no choice in the matter ... but it's not true ... I don't just stay with him by default, I stay ... every day that I wake up, I choose him over and over again."

Perhaps this is the deepest lie in the worldview of those that advocate freedom of choice, that there is a choice that we can make that can break these sacred bonds once and for all that killing is an easier choice than being a mother. I think it's more like getting a cheque from a company that gives pay day loans.

Jenna Cook of Yale University was abandoned by her own mother in China. She grew up in Massachussets and in the summer of 2012 returned with her adoptive mother. She writes "I went to China to find the mother who abandoned me on a street corner. Instead I became the focus of an entire nations buried pain."

Once a mother, always a mother. My ex wife Martine lost two children to miscarriage, in 1986 and in 1989; I do not think she has ever forgotten those children, even more devastatingly on January 5, 2006 we learnt the news of the sudden death of our adult son, Joseph.  Such pain is a dull aching anguish that stabs to the heart, like the dagger with which the Nazgul stabbed the hobbit Frodo on Feathertop on the Lord of the Rings, it is a death that keeps on dying.

We do not have the right to believe that we are forgotten by our children; I will certainly never. Science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin went on to write her great novel “The Left Hand of Darkness” after having an abortion. Catholic social activist Dorothy Day had an abortion, she went on to have a second child, founded the Catholic Workers Movement to help the poor, and recently had her memory celebrated (along with Martin Luther King and Thomas Merton as three outstanding Americans) by Pope Francis during his visit in 2015.

According to the report dated November 15, 2015 “Abortion Surveillance in the United States - 2012” by the United States Center for Disease Control and Prevention, adolescent women aged 18 or 19 accounted for 66 percent of adolescent abortions; this corresponds to one abortion for every 30 women in this age group.

According to another Center for Disease Control and Prevention report, in the year 1959 cited  one out of 20 children was born to an unmarried woman. In the year 2000, that had increased to one out ofthree. Three thousand years ago the Bible admonished us to provide care for widows and orphans. Courage is not only physical, it does not only involve killing. So ... just where are the brave American men to marry these mothers and adopt their children?

In the year 2000, I was praying in silent witness against abortion in front of the Planned Parenthood clinic in Sunnyvale, California. I held a blue velvet banner with a picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe and baby clothes and toys attached to the sign. I will never forget the African-American women that approached me and told me that she had been forced to have a second-trimester abortion by her then boyfriend. She had already bought baby clothes and was drawn to the sign; she needed to tell what had happened.

America should inform themselves from the statistics of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Let’s accept that like the methamphetamine and prescription drug abuse epidemics, abortion is a public health issue with a socio-economic dimension. For too long it has been treated as as a matter of individual legal rights, as something to be punished, or simply a moral problem. Let's be pragmatic, eschew bitterness, and be silent no more. According to the United Nations Population Fund 2013 report “Lest more girls go missing” there is a missing girl for every ten boys in India due to sex selective abortion. According to the 2015 CDC report cited above, African-American women accounted for 36.7 percent of abortions; this is triple the ratio for Caucasian women in the population.

Pope Francis writes in “The Name of God is Mercy” that “the important thing is to get back up, not to lie on the ground licking your wounds.” There are many families that cannot have a child and who would be willing to help someone who was not able to provide for a child of their own. Until 2006, the Archdiocese of Boston was able to provide adoptions; there is no reason that this cannot be the case again. There are many mental health counselors that can help these women heal if our government would recognize that people can be hurting.

Let’s remember that it is Mother's Day and that there are suffering mothers and fathers among us. It is a time for mercy as well as for celebration. I am so grateful to my own mother for having chose to bring me with five other children into this world, I am so grateful for her sacrifices.

As Paul Simon wrote in his 1964 song Sounds of Silence “Silence like a cancer grows” and more of the same is not a solution to any problem.

"Even the smallest person can change the course of the future"

I worked under Zafer Diab's direction when he was the software manager at Conexant in Cupertino in 2004. Zafer Diab​ and I share a lot such as our Christian faith, a love of California, the French language, a knowledge of high definition TV technology, having lived in Canada, a love for soccer but most of all a respect for peoples and the complexities of human traditions.

Here is what he posted for Christmas 2015.

"Let's not be so focused on whatever God we worship, rather lets believe deeply in the human being inside each person and live every moment in mutual respect. In this day of Christmas when Muslims also celebrate the birth of their prophet, lets share peace and love and also share joys and pains. To live thus is the best and the only way to fight terrorism."

Somehow it seems that we have forgotten the most basic of things, such as how we related to others that are different, and how we share this planet.  Here is another example, from my friend Vincent Gerace and his wife Juliana from St. John Neumann's church in Irvine. For some context, it is currently 43 degrees Fahrenheit in Southern California so it is cold, it is 68 degrees in Boson.

"What an amazing Christmas. Juliana and I came out of Mass on Christmas Day and encountered Maryanna (Megan) and Joseph, two homeless kids. Their mother died and they had been on the streets for 4 days. Juliana got us all to pray together, thence gave them some money and told them to call us in the evening if they didn't have a place to stay. All day we called friends and homeless shelters only to learn that undocumented minors would be turned over to INS for processing. To them that meant they'd be deported to Tijuana with no relatives to go home to. They called us on Christmas evening and said they had no placed to stay, so we picked them up and got them a room in a hotel. This morning when we met them again, we learned that their uncle called them in the middle of the night and agreed tot are them to his home in San Francisco. We dropped them off at the Amtrak station in the morning."

I certainly won't deny that some fantastic progress has been made today in California. For example, the city of San Francisco recycles 90 percent of its waste today and has set itself a goal of recycling all of its waste by 2020 but the way we treat people, including the terminally ill, the homeless, and the unborn could use some change.

When we suggest that private initiatives such as Uber, self driving cars, and others will reduce global warming we are fooling ourselves. Wouldn't be better to start by improving our public transportation system.

Powerful people such as Mary Nichols, David Boies,  Ted Olson, Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris and Senator Harry Reid have certainly contributed to the public debate about what the future should bring. In the spirit of democracy it is time for them to accept that they are only one out of 40 million people in California and to take a haircut to their ego.

People need access to electricity and that is simply common sense. I talked to a Hispanic student, Brendan, at Harvard University he came from a poor community. That is fantastic but we also need better access to education such as is being done by President Michelle Bachelet in the Chile University System

In the Lord of the Rings, Galadriel says "even the smallest of persons can change the future." It is time for the powerful people I have named to accept that hope and change does not only come from them. As the saying goes, one is either part of the problem or part of the solution.

It's certainly true that this raises some very difficult issues such as regarding reproductive freedoms, how we deal with nuclear power or with relations with the Muslim world, economics, and reform in our health care system. Still this is the only road that lies ahead and there is no point burying our head in the sand.

As Vincent Gerace goes on to write : "This reminds me of another story of two people, Mary and Joseph, who also were homeless. They took shelter in a cave."

Ain't it the truth. What is wrong with us?

Like Frodo in the Lord of the Rings, I wish it would not have happened in my time. Still all we can do in life is to make the best of the times and opportunities that we have been given and that is what I am doing.

A Call to Action

Christmas Eve 2015 the high temperature was a record of 20 degrees Celsius or 68 degrees Fahrenheit. Coming out of from Midnight Mass at Boston Cathedral I told the priest the I was from California and he thanked me for bringing the good weather.

I'm not sure that was a compliment. It's pretty obvious that if Santa Claus can't have snow for his sleights in Boston then a lot of children will only get coals for presents, haha.

There is nothing new in the world since 1974 when I first met Dennis Ritchie at the University of Waterloo. There was already an energy crisis and the science behind global warming was already known simply there were a lot more opportunities for publication back then. Socialist and co-operative movements had a history of 100 years at that time. Notwithstanding what Chad Griffin states in "Redeeming the Dream" it was easy to meet and interact with gay people. Ideological lines between those favoring community ownership of wealth and private ownership were drawn in the line. The world was not that far from nuclear Armageddon or straining of resources from over population. Religious differences were already close to sparking an explosion as is evidenced by what happened a few years later in Iran.

The difference, so it seems to me, is that we had a little more common sense back then. It may seem strange to describe the 1970s this way but it was a more sensible time. Vladimir Brezhnev did not push the button, nor did Richard Nixon nor Mao-Tse-Tung. At a more personal level.  Neil Docherty and myself bitterly disagreed but we were able to set aside our differences and when we could not to conflict in an honorable way on the Chevron

Dennis Ritchies death in 2011 went almost unnoticed initially as compared to the death of Steve Jobs. It was first announced by a blog post by Robert Pike of Google, What was truly amazing about Ritchie and his generation was that they were engineers with a spirit of humility.

This is what California can bring to the world.

There's no doubt that the state has welcomed a lot of people with oversized egos including Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, David Boies, and Barry Bonds. This is nothing new. In their time, James Lick and William Randolph Hearst were no different but they left a legacy that built California. These people need to be shepherded using reason, respect, and restraint that is all.

A lot will have to be done to turn California around and the first thing is to come up with a plan to combat global warming. Here again, engineering has not changed and the same common sense solutions using nuclear fission are absolutely required as well as the possibility of recycling nuclear waste into plutonium.

There is a lot of righteous anger in California, fueled by the recall of Gray Davis in 2002, by the failure of Proposition 8, by the foreclosures, and by the feeling that Washington simply is not moving fast enough and is deadlocked by partisan bickering. At the same time Hispanics are deprived of rights due to the lack of bilingual education and there is increasing persecution of the Catholic Church in violation of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo.

As with the crowning of George III in the 18th century, the likely elections of Mrs. Clinton and Mrs. Newsom are likely to fuel the fire. As George Washington realized in the case of London, Washington is not likely to change.

What is needed is to fuel that energy, to take people from the California Democratic and Republican party that are of good will, and to prepare a revision of the California State Constitution redefining our status in the Union. There is no reason we cannot have a status such as that of Puerto Rico.

Revolutions need to be prepared without violence and with care.

We are 12 percent of the United States, that deserves respect, God and right are on our side and our opponents know it, and you can't keep a good man down.

Rent Control in Santa Clara

The cost of living in Silicon Valley has drawn a lot of attention lately. Two neighbouring houses on my street have been sold for more than $900,000. When I bought my house 17 years ago it cost less than $400,000.

There has been a similar effect on renting costs. I know of someone with a two bedroom in San Jose in a middle income neighbourhood whose rent has gone from $1700 to $1850 a month on a one year lease. That's an increase about eight percent which is a lot more than what people are paid. Finally, it can be argued that this leads to an increase in the number of homeless.

Rent is currently controlled in San Jose for apartments other than duplexes built before 1979. The maximum allowable rent increase is eight percent. What is being proposed in San Jose is to extend that protection to duplexes and also introduce a "just cause" ordinance. This would in effect prevent the landlord from terminating the lease under most circumstances. However, the protection would not apply to any apartments built in the past 35 years which are the most expensive.

I'm not in favor of rent controls. When I ran for city council in 2008, one of the planks I was running under was affordable housing. I do think that is a big issue in Silicon Valley, however I do not think rent controls are the best way to address it.

Although rents are increasing all over the United States, the effect is particularly evident in Silicon Valley because we have a booming economy with Santa Clara County being the 15th richest in the United States. When Apple builds a new corporate headquarters costing $6 billion, and when the Santa Clara 49ers build a $1 billion stadium this draws people to the valley and it has a corresponding effect on rent.

In calling for rent controls, people are blaming the landlords while at the same time many of our neighbors are profiting from selling their house. New laws like a just cause ordinance make it much more difficult to evict a problem tenant, such as a user of methamphetamines or a prostitute. Finally, a lot of people in Silicon Valley are very rich but the only property tax is on landowners -- why add to this imbalance.

I think it would be better to change the zoning laws, to provide for the development of more new multi-family units inside single family neighbourhoods. Possibly the city could buy houses during an economic downturn and build on the land. Measures could be taken to help seniors move out of their homes while protecting their economic interests. The new units would be required to be affordable and targetted for the middle class.

The risk in propositions such as those I am making is that renters in these new units would have an advantage over others on the open market. This could be mitigated by limiting leases to 3 or 5 years, or by renting a number of units to deserving individuals such as teachers and police officials. The intent obviously would be to balance this against salary and pension demands. Obviously these proposals would come at a significant cost.

City planning should prepare for higher density housing in Silicon Valley by allowing, through a variety of means, housing at different income levels. It should prepare for better public transit by placing these units as well as stores close to transit lanes.

I realize my views will not be popular with many. I nonetheless think that if rent control is introduced, there will be a number of unprovided for side effects. I have lived elsewhere and the pace of public spending has been much more constrained. The issues of housing cost, jobs, and homelessness are complex and need more than a knee-jerk response.

Big Corporations, Big Unions, and Big Government

Conservatives and libertarians say that in order to make our society better we need limited government. They are partially right. My father used to say that there are three evils, big corporations, big unions, and big government.

Consider the example of China. It is often said that in China, the government is rich and that private individuals including companies are poor. By contrast, in California it can be said that we have state of the art corporations and a backward and inefficient government.

Because corporate leaders such as the CEOs of Apple, Google, and TelMex do not have the common good at heart, they cannot be trusted. Similarly, people who depend on the government for their survival such as the very poor, the marginalized, and the undocumented cannot always be expected to follow the best ethical standards.

This is confirmed by Aristotle's saying that good government requires governing by the middle class.

At the same time, such corporations are very good at using national rules specifically as regards taxes to escape jurisdiction. One example is the  Double Irish Dutch Sandwich

Corporations seem to have forgotten their fundamental role which is economic. For example,
Google London had its employees participate in a same sex marriage announcement at work. Isn't it in China that this is supposed to happen? And whatever happened to the work-life balance?

Companies such as Apple and Google routinely lobby the United States government so as to bring more people to California from abroad. Google has been reported to be visiting  the White House once a week. It's no surprise that seven billion dollars was spent in the 2012 cycle electoral races.

Consider Apple who has become rich by selling unnecessary luxury devices to people all across the world. Didn't Margaret Thatcher say that spending other peoples money would cause it to run out?

Finally, these huge corporations do not respect the basic rule of subsidiarity which is that they are owned by their shareholders. Google is a good example of this. It's no surprise Sergey Brin is an expert in oligarchy, after all Russia was his birth-place.

What is needed is to reduce debt and increase savings of the lower and middle classes as well as to limit wealth accumulation by the very rich. The existing situation, where interest rates are kept artificially low and total public debt is increased, is unsustainable and is harmful to the common good. A good first step would be to introduce a property tax on financial assets for individuals of high net worth.

I have worked at large multinational corporations such as Philips and banked at companies such as HSBC. I won't deny at all the positive contribution these organizations have had over a hundred years, the problem is the trend.

Some sensible first steps would be to require corporations and unions to keep out of politics, to improve corporate and union governance,  and to institute a property tax on financial assets. It would make sense to take the burden of providing health care and retirement away from employers and unions and have funds for this as in France.

Lobbying should be limited and corporations should be encouraged to invest in the common good both in their neighbourhoods, in California, and abroad. The courts need to stop being complicit in scandals such as the Lago Agrio oil field and in manipulations of the international financial system by vulture funds.

The underlying issue is that without a good system of laws and a good government it does not matter how progressive our corporations in California. In fact, due to a convergence of factors things will only get worse as well explained in the Los Angeles 2020 report. At some point, our corporate leaders need to wake up.

Golden State

In her critically acclaimed novel, Golden State New York Times best-selling author Michelle Richmond describes a future in which California is on the edge of secession. In her personal blog, she describes this as an actually possible scenario based on fiscal reasons.

Michelle Richmond's blog

For California to secede would require a disruptive change. As described by Horace Deidu, disruption is when the strong defeat the weak, more precisely when those with unlimited access to resources have them taken away by those with limited or no resources.

Understanding Disruption

For example, the economic development of India and China in the past fifty years can be considered to be a disruptive change which occurs in the case of asymnetric competition.

On the contrary, Scotland and Greece recently attempted disruptive change and it was not succesful. With Proposition 8, California had a taste of the same thing closer to home.

According to Deidu for disruptive change to be succesful, the weak must not be taken seriously by their strong, indeed their actions are initially welcomed. A second factor for disruptive change to be succesful is for it to take place over an extended time period so that mentalities can change.

Recent political events in California, such as a declaration that the consumption of gasoline needs to be halved, the granting of drivers licenses to illegal immigrants, or the statement that Hispanics form the largest group in the population draw a lot of attention. They also contribute to disruptive change.

So-called progressive businesses in California such as Google, Facebook and Apple that contribute to technological innovation also support policies at the national level by political donations.

There is no resulting innovation however in government, education, or health care and the money goes simply down the drain.

What can be expected is that within the next ten years federal taxes will have to increase to pay outstanding debt. There have been suggestions also that private savings in 401-K accounts be redirected to Guaranteed Retirement Accounts

Currently the federal government owes a large amount of money to Japan and China and taxing citizens is a natural attempt at resolution.

Time will tell how people will react given the burden on seniors. Let's not forget what happened with  Proposition 13.