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In the fall of 1945, I was temporarily stationed in Paris for a couple of months awaiting reassignment to some other location in Europe, for the Army of Occupation. Two months in Paris was pretty pleasant duty I must admit even if everything was still on a wartime footing, rationing and all. What I noticed, traveling around the city, was how really old all the buildings were. Nowhere was there any sign of new construction or repairs (since Hitler had ordered the city destroyed, but the local Nazi commanding general had disobeyed Hitler’s orders, the old girl was very old but good as new. I spoke pretty good French at the time and could converse with the locals which is how I learned the City was under rent control, had been for 50 years, and according to my French host:…”had not seen one brick of new construction for that entire 50 years.” Not a single new building had gone up. There was simply no profit to be made under rent control, so there was no speculative building, neither residential nor commercial. No construction debris, no blocked roads or sidewalks, but, also, no new housing to keep up with the population growth. As it is with Santa Cruz: great place to visit but you can’t afford to live there.
Howard F. Sosbee 1400 Weston Ridge Road Scotts Valley CA, 95066 831, 335, 8401 hfs@sosbee.com <mailto:hfs@sosbee.com>

It was good of Dan Misko (July 28, 2018) to enumerate some of Trump’s accomplishments, especially when so many writers have been so critical of him. By the same token, it is altogether right and proper to mention some of his colossal negative achievements starting with packing the Supreme Court with anti-labor, antisocial, and antigovernment judges. Trump’s other non- achievements include, but are not limited to: foreign trade and overall foreign relations chaos, hurricane emergency management, especially Puerto Rico, but that is all old hat. Wait another day for another shocker. And, for those who want to to comment on his immigration policy, here, courtesy of “the Word Finder”, a Rodale Books publication: are some alternative adjectives: “organized, unsparing, abysmal, fiendish, inhuman, lawless, innate, execrable, ruthless, hellish, ignorant, atrocious, intolerable, abominable, and so on and so on. You get the idea.
Howard F. Sosbee 1400 Weston Ridge Road Scotts Valley CA, 95066 831, 335, 8401 hfs@sosbee.com <mailto:hfs@sosbee.com>

We keep wondering: how much worse can it get? Then Trump takes a swing through England, the EU, and finally meets one on one with Putin in Helsinki, and we ask again: How much worse? Answer: a lot worse! But what can we do? We can’t restrain his travels or conversations with other world leaders, or what he admits, or commits, in any of these conversations. We can only hope, and hope is all we have seen so far, that the Congress does something, or that things quiet down until the 2018 midterm elections in which we hope (there’s that word again) hope the Trump opposition forces step up and send a loud and clear message that theTrump thing is not working for America, not making it “Great Again” in any sense of the word.

Howard F. Sosbee 1400 Weston Ridge Road Scotts Valley CA, 95066 831, 335, 8401 hfs@sosbee.com <mailto:hfs@sosbee.com>

Monday’s (July 2, 2018) op-ed by Daniel Wirls of UCS C was such an inspired solution to one of the Constitution’s worst provisions (that is: lifetime tenure of Supreme Court justices) that it would justify a constitutional convention all by itself. Throw in gerrymandering, voter suppression, voting convenience, gun control, DACA, and on and on. I would suggest an amendment making it a federal crime to do anything that restricts the vote for any class of voter, such as eliminating Sunday voting, extreme gerrymandering, voter ID, same day registration, motor voter registration, and so on. Republicans are doing everything they can think of to keep the poor and colored from voting. Small ”R” right-thinking people must do everything we can think of to increase their participation in our elections.
Howard F. Sosbee 1400 Weston Ridge Road Scotts Valley CA, 95066 831, 335, 8401 hfs@sosbee.com <mailto:hfs@sosbee.com>

The catastrophe created by Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy of separating children, including infants, from their families is truly beyond comprehension. The more we learn about the particulars of this exercise, the more unbelievable it gets, for example: Trump had no intention of reuniting the families, nor is he remotely interested in seeing its effect on the lives or mental health of its victims. What kind of man have the Republicans placed at the head of our once great and generous nation?

Howard F. Sosbee 1400 Weston Ridge Road Scotts Valley CA, 95066 831, 335, 8401 hfs@sosbee.com <mailto:hfs@sosbee.com>

Reunification of the migrant children with their parents has been ordered by the court. It will not be easy to ascertain where each parent of a kidnapped child has been moved. They are scattered all over the country. So here is how to do it the easy way: 1. Move all of the kids to one central location, one of the detention centers, for example, and designate it the Reunification Depot. 2. Reassemble the migrant parents in manageable size groups and transport each group, in turn, to the reunification depot. Give priority to parents of the youngest kids. Allow the parents to mingle with the kids until they find their own. Then watch the happy reunions. The commercial airlines should be encouraged to provide special low-cost fares, and benefit therefrom any favorable publicity. Families thus reunited should then be allowed to go through the regular immigration process without prejudice.
Howard F. Sosbee 1400 Weston Ridge Road Scotts Valley CA, 95066 831, 335, 8401 hfs@sosbee.com <mailto:hfs@sosbee.com>

Every time a Trump supporter.tries to justify one of Trump’s initiatives, the magic word “mandate” pops up. They rationalize that, since Trump is, in fact, president, his campaign promises automatically become “mandates”. What this argument overlooks is that Trump was not, in fact, elected president. He was “selected” by the electoral college after losing the election by almost three million votes. As for his “mandates”, one should regard what a stump speaker uses to get an audience reaction (such as “lock her up” and “repeal Obama care” and “who’s gonna pay for the wall?”) not in any way as mandated by popular vote. They are what they are: red meat thrown to a hungry audience craving something to cheer about.
Howard F. Sosbee 1400 Weston Ridge Road Scotts Valley CA, 95066 831, 335, 8401 hfs@sosbee.com <mailto:hfs@sosbee.com>

The administration has no regrets over the 2300 or so children they have forcibly separated from their parents, nor are they in any way interested in reunification. Damn! Can anyone think of a worse way for any government to treat its subjects? A somnolent Congress that should be up in arms is nowhere to be seen. So, who you gonna call? If anyone has standing before the federal court system, there must be a deep pocket somewhere that can finance a legal suit to force the Trump administration to bring all, every single one, of the children to one place where parents can come to pick them up. In the meantime, the least that the Fed must do is prepare a photographic record of every child now held and make those pictures available to the parents. Where a match is spotted, the government should pick up the tab of getting them together and supporting the family until legal status is settled.
Howard F. Sosbee 1400 Weston Ridge Road Scotts Valley CA, 95066 831, 335, 8401 hfs@sosbee.com <mailto:hfs@sosbee.com>

We can’t say enough about how ill-advised and destructive and just plain wrong the Trump policy of separating children from parents is turning out to be. It is most certainly a problem that should have been anticipated and planned for, but save some of your worst expletives for what’s coming next. We didn’t think anything could be worse than the temporary separation of children and infants from their parents, but now we learn that the Trump administration has no plan or procedure of any kind to reunite these broken families, nor (and this is even more distressing) do they have any inclination to prepare such a plan. Reunification is going to be a massive undertaking, complex in the extreme, chewing up thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars. Trump (and his minions) probably lack the skills to pull it off, so here it is in a nutshell: They will need to get all, every single one, of the children together in one place were the displaced parents can be brought, in person, to identify and retrieve them. Presto! Instant match-ups on the spot. At that point, someone higher up on the humanitarian scale should be allowed to decide what to do with them in a way that keeps them together. They are not animals.

Howard F. Sosbee 1400 Weston Ridge Road Scotts Valley CA, 95066 831, 335, 8401 hfs@sosbee.com <mailto:hfs@sosbee.com>

One cannot say enough about how ill-advised and destructive, and just plain wrong, the Trump policy of separating children from parents is turning out to be. It is most certainly a problem that should have been anticipated and planned for, but it was not. But save your best expletives for what’s coming next. We didn’t think anything could be worse than separating children and infants from their parents, but now we learn the Trump administration has no plans or procedure of any kind in place to reunite these families, nor (and this is even more distressing) do they have any inclination to prepare such a plan. Reunification is going to be complex in the extreme, plowing through thousands of man hours and millions of dollars. Trump and his minions may simply not have the organizational or management skills to pull it off. They need to get all, every single one, of the children together in one place where the displaced parents can be brought in person to identify and retrieve them. At that point, someone higher up on the humanitarian scale should be allowed to decide what to do with these poor souls willin a way that keeps them together.
Howard F. Sosbee 1400 Weston Ridge Road Scotts Valley CA, 95066 831, 335, 8401 hfs@sosbee.com <mailto:hfs@sosbee.com>