Hasta La Gadget!

If the definition of madness is doing the same thing and expecting different results, then someone needs to check in on Sony. Every six months, the company announces a handset in the hope of making some tiny level of impact on the mobile industry. An…

This week’s Sabbath is also the start of the Hebrew month of Elul, which means that our majestic High Holidays begin to appear on the horizon.

Elul may be the final month of the year – but, in Jewish spiritual life, Elul is far more a beginning than an end. The month is a warming up, rather than a winding down. Traditionally, Elul is a time of preparation, a stretch of spiritual exercise, when, in some communities, special gatherings are held at or before daybreak to sing prayers that shake the spirit awake.

Throughout this past year of commenting on our weekly Torah readings, the writings of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalmish Shapira of Piaseczno – in his final years, the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto – have kept me company. When at a loss, when my mind has drawn a blank, I have often turned to one or the other of the Piaseczner Rebbe’s books and collections of sermons, and usually I have found something that has set my own thoughts in motion.

And another source of inspiration, week by week, is reflecting on our community here at Harvard.

In a conversation with students in 1921, Rabbi Shapira remarked:

“It is well known and one must remember that it is impossible to be constantly in a spiritually elevated state – perforce, there will be highs and lows. In fact, one who has never experienced falling from a spiritual height has likely never ascended to an especially lofty point.”

Living in spiritual community means helping one another up – and it means recognizing that, whatever our individual accomplishments, each of us can be thankful for a helping hand quite often, so that each of us can go on to extend one. In that sense, for all the ups and downs of spiritual life, spiritual community is a vehicle of ascent.

This week, in the Torah, on the verge of entering into the Land, our ancestors are told that there will be a particular place, “which the Eternal One your God will choose, from among all your tribes, to place the Divine name there – and there, where God indwells, you shall seek, and there you shall go; and there you shall bring your burnt offerings and your sacrifices and your tithes, the offerings of your hands, and your vowed donations, and the firstlings of your herds and flocks.” (Deuteronomy 12:5-6) The reference is to the eventual Temple in Jerusalem, the focal point of our ancient ancestors’ devotion.

The way in which this week’s Sabbath falls upon the calendar this year results in this reading from the Torah being juxtaposed, in our synagogues, with the prophetic reading for the beginning of a new month – from the book of Isaiah – in which we hear a notable skepticism about focus on a mere structure and its practices:

“Thus says the Eternal One, the heavens are My throne, and the earth My footstool – what is this House that you would build for Me, and what place is my abode?” (Isaiah 66:1)

Even sacrifices, of the sort offered in the ancient Temple, may be regarded with a dim view by the Divine as represented by the prophet in this message:

“One that slaughters an ox is like one who strikes a man, one that sacrifices a lamb is like one who breaks a dog’s neck, one who raises up a meal offering is like one who offers pig’s blood, one who burns incense like one who blesses an idol. Those ones, too, have chosen their ways, and their souls delight in their abominations.” (Isaiah 66:3)

It is a stunning rebuke – all the more so for being directed at familiar, ancestral rituals, prescribed in the Torah itself.

It is not that the prophet is against the central shrine and capital. “Gladden Jerusalem,” he says, “and delight in her, all you who love her – celebrate celebration with her, all you who have mourned over her!” (Isaiah 66:10)

What the prophet detests, in the Divine name, is empty ritual, religious practice whose real purpose is self-satisfaction and aggrandizement. If that is the nature of the service offered in the sanctuary, it is so disgusting that the prophet – and, he says, God – can hardly bear to look at it.

“But upon this one I shall look – upon the poor and contrite of heart, who trembles at My word.” (Isaiah 66:2)

Coming together in a place of dedication, approaching a sacred time together, is an ascent – an ‘aliyah, in the Hebrew terms of our tradition – a pilgrimage.

What one should discover upon entering into a place of ascent, and upon embarking on a spiritual journey, is not pretentious ritual experts who have convinced themselves that the rites and ceremonies in which they are well practiced make them the superior darlings of the Divine, entitled to condescend in showing new arrivals how to be. God forbid.

What one should discover is humble fellow seekers, good spiritual company on the pilgrim path – sources of inspiration who are inspirational not least because they also look to you for uplift, and are eager to learn about what impels your own spirit on the climb toward a holy destination.

“And then it shall be that at every new moon and every Sabbath, all flesh shall come to worship before Me, says the Eternal One.” (Isaiah 66:23)

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Ryan Reynolds has been very vocal on Twitter ever since his character Deadpool made his big screen debut earlier this year. 

Tweet after tweet, he makes us laugh, cry and ugly laugh-cry. But no other tweet amused us quite as much as his birthday message to Billy Ray Cyrus Blake Lively last week. 

Well, while catching up with Reynolds during the launch of his #Hug2Give campaign with Eddie Bauer and American Forests on Tuesday in New York, the actor revealed Lively’s reaction to the hilarious tweet. 

“I got a two-for-one there, really,” he joked to The Huffington Post. “I got to be slapped in the face by my wife later and I got to say hello to Billy Ray Cyrus. It was pretty great.” 

Reynolds knows his social media game is strong, but he’s really just trying to emulate that beloved antihero.

“[Deadpool] is a good get-out-of-jail-free card on Twitter,” he said. “You can just sort of say what you want to say.”

Amen. 

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The 2016 Republican Party platform is best known for embarrassments. Retrograde views on LGBT rights and a bold stand against pornography became punch lines for late-night talk show hosts. But for a few minutes on July 12, GOP convention delegates assembled in Cleveland battled over an issue that their party hadn’t worried about for decades: corporate power.

Hawaii delegate Adrienne King told the crowd of mild-mannered professionals at Huntington Convention Center that big companies were abusing their market dominance to freeze out smaller competitors and limit consumer choice. Breaking them up, she argued, would protect the free market from manipulation. The party’s official statement of principles needed to express support for action against underhanded bigwigs that rig prices and intimidate small firms. Republicans, after all, used to go after these guys all the time.

“I’d like to remind my fellow delegates that the original trust-buster was Republican President Theodore Roosevelt,” King said.

This caused a bit of a stir. For decades, Republican leaders in Washington had preached to the party faithful that government was their primary economic enemy. King was complicating the doctrine.

“Many things that Teddy Roosevelt supported are not things that we stand for as a party,” retorted one delegate bitterly. “He was actually a progressive president, not a conservative free-enterprise one.”

Another insisted that Roosevelt had only broken up “government” monopolies, while someone else supported King, accusing big airlines and hotels of colluding to raise prices. Still another suggested their effort would trick Republicans into endorsing nefarious new government regulations.

King’s proposal was eventually voted down. But not before she revealed that many of her Republican peers ― including well-to-do attendees of political conventions ― believe the free market has as much to fear from Big Business as it does from Big Government.

The fact that this debate took place at all shows an important and generally overlooked shift in GOP thinking that has been underway for months. In a March hearing, three Republican senators questioned whether Federal Trade Commission Chair Edith Ramirez was being tough enough on everything from Google’s control over search engine results to corporate consolidation in the market for agricultural seeds. House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) issued a report this summer upbraiding the Department of Justice for treating high-level bankers who broke the law as “too big to jail.” Just this month, three Republicans, including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), cried foul over Verisign’s monopolization of the market for .com internet domain names.

None of these actions would have been conceivable 10, five or even two years ago. Businesses, according to the old conservative orthodoxy, were good. And the bigger, the better. Targeting a big company was tantamount to punishing success. How, after all, could a company get to be big if it weren’t very good at what it did?

EpiPen Price Rage And Lousy Cable Service 

But the GOP is slowly rediscovering antitrust policy ― one of the most powerful economic weapons the federal government can deploy against corporate abuse. Antitrust laws give government the power to block mergers between big companies, break up companies that are too big to fail, or force megafirms to offer lower prices when they don’t face serious competition. A century ago, antitrust was the most fiercely debated issue in American public life, championed by both Teddy Roosevelt and his Democratic rival, Woodrow Wilson. But antitrust enforcement began a long period of atrophy under Ronald Reagan that lasted into the Barack Obama years. A year ago, the field remained a Washington backwater, where government lawyers would float along before hoisting themselves to a more lucrative safe harbor in the private sector.

That seems to be changing. Antitrust isn’t careening around cable news yet, but in the nation’s capital, the migration of the policy wonk herd has been unmistakeable. It’s not just a Republican thing. In April, Obama issued an executive order calling for federal agencies to combat anti-competitive behavior. This summer, two liberal think tanks published reports taking aim at corporate monopoly powers. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) gave a no-holds-barred speech in June calling out not only big banks, but Google, Apple, Amazon and Walmart by name. In July, antitrust language landed in the Democratic Party’s 2016 platform for the first time since 1988.

And the public is paying attention. When pharmaceutical giant Mylan hiked the price on its lifesaving EpiPen simply because there was no other game in town, it generated fury from just about everyone who didn’t own stock in the company.

There’s a solid economic rationale behind Washington’s new big thing. Monopolies and oligopolies are distorting the markets for everything from pet food to cable service. There’s a reason why cable companies have such persistently lousy customer-service ratings. They know you have few (if any) alternatives. Today, two-thirds of the 900 industries tracked by The Economist feature heavier concentration at the top than they did in 1997. The global economy is in the middle of a merger wave big enough to make 2015 the biggest year in history for corporate consolidation.

But Washington often looks the other way when the economy impales itself (see: mortgages, subprime). Somebody has to make the gore impossible to ignore.

An Earthquake, A Revelation

Most political junkies have never heard of the man chiefly responsible for the current Beltway antitrust revival: Barry C. Lynn. A former business journalist, Lynn has spent more than a decade carving out his own fiefdom at a calm, centrist Washington think tank called the New America Foundation. In the process, he has changed the way D.C. elites think about corporate power.

“Barry is the hub,” says Zephyr Teachout, a fiery progressive who recently clinched the Democratic nomination for a competitive House seat in New York. “He is at the center of a growing new ― I hesitate to call it a movement ― but a group of people who recognize that we have a problem with monopolies not only in our economy, but in our democracy.”

Many Southerners who relocate to the nation’s capital try to temper their accents for the elite crowd that dominates the District’s social scene. Lynn, a South Florida native, never shed his drawl. He pronounces “sonofabitch” as a single word, which he uses to describe both corrupt politicians and big corporations. He is a blunt man in a town that rewards caginess and flexibility. But like King, Lynn’s critique of monopolies does not reflect a disdain for business itself.

After spending the first leg of his career in Latin America as a reporter for The Associated Press and Agence France Presse, Lynn landed a job in D.C. as executive editor of Global Business ― a magazine that catered to C-suite corporate society. It was a great gig for a 33-year-old. In 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement and the World Trade Organization treaties had unleashed a brave new corporate world, and companies were hungry for information about how to exploit the international legal terrain. Lynn enjoyed the work. In the early years, his interest in globalization was tactical ― how would firms solve these new puzzles created by international law?

His sanguine outlook was shaken by a 7.3-magnitude earthquake that devastated Jiji, Taiwan, on Sept. 21, 1999. The disaster claimed 2,505 lives. Its aftermath served as an economic revelation for Lynn.

“All these factories in the United States shut down,” Lynn says. “And they shut down because the earthquake messed up the airport for the city where all of their semiconductors were made.”

A Warning Ahead Of Its Time

Globalization had allowed firms to travel anywhere for labor, resources or tax savings. But these new capabilities didn’t just help companies cut costs. Instead, Lynn observed, critical manufacturing activities were now heavily concentrated in specific, often unstable, locales. An earthquake in Taiwan could mean sudden layoffs for Dell and Hewlett-Packard employees in the United States whose jobs depended on semiconductor shipments from a single city half a world away.

This wasn’t simply a problem of globalization. It was globalization combined with excessive concentration. If there had been many different factories producing these semiconductors all over the world, the earthquake, of course, would have remained a human tragedy. But it would not have forced layoffs on the other side of the globe.

Lynn left Global Business for The New America Foundation in 2001 and began work on his first book, End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation, which argues that globalization and merger mania had injected a new fragility into international politics. Disruptive events ― earthquakes, coups, famines, or at worst, war ― could now wreak havoc on U.S. products that had once been safely manufactured domestically. Production of anything from light bulbs to computers all could shut down without warning.

It was a frightening vision with implications for economic policy and national security alike. It was also ideologically inconvenient for the techno-utopian zeitgeist of its day. Lynn’s book landed on shelves about the same time as Thomas Friedman’s better-known tome, The World Is Flat, which declared globalization a triumph of innovation and hard work for anyone willing to do the hard work of innovating.

Today, Lynn’s predictions of market disruption and political unrest appear to have been ahead of their time. Early globalization champions, including Martin Wolf and Lawrence Summers, are rethinking their judgments of a decade ago. But Lynn turned several influential heads when his book was published. Thomas Frank, bestselling author of What’s The Matter With Kansas?, became a Lynn enthusiast. So did food writer Michael Pollan.

“He was writing about an issue that nobody was paying attention to, and he was doing it with a very strong sense of history,” Pollan says. “Barry understood antitrust going back to the trust-busters a century ago, and how our understanding of the issue shrank during the Reagan administration … The food movement is not very sophisticated on those issues.”

The Big Problem With Big Business

Lynn’s history nerd-dom is eccentric in a town that hyperventilates over every hour of the cable news cycle. Ask about Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, and Lynn will oblige you a polite sentence or two. Ask him about former Supreme Court Justices Louis Brandeis or William Howard Taft, and you’ll need to reschedule your dinner plans.

“He once asked me to read about Roman law for a piece on common carriage,” says Lina Khan, referencing a plank of net neutrality policy not typically associated with the Code of Justinian.

After he published his second book in 2010, Lynn began bringing on his own staff within New America. Khan was one of his first hires. Teachout, a Fordham University Law School professor, was another. Teachout eventually ran for office and published a book of her own on the history of corruption in America. Another of Lynn’s associates, Christopher Leonard, published a book on meat industry monopolies around the same time. These works shared a common theme: Monopolistic businesses create social problems beyond consumer price-gouging, from buying off politicians to degrading the quality of our food.

Analyzing the political power of companies with overwhelming market positions used to be a normal part of antitrust thinking. But over the decades, a narrower conception focused on consumer prices has taken hold in Washington. Even if anti-competitive behavior can be proved, according to this thinking, it’s not a problem unless it raises prices for consumers. Under this view, it’s not necessarily an antitrust problem, if, say, Amazon used its market position to force publishers into charging lower prices for books. If the result is lower prices, everything is fine. It would only become a problem if Amazon used its market power to raise prices.

That’s not how Lynn sees it. When the Authors Guild, the American Booksellers Association, the Association of Authors’ Representatives and Authors United went after Amazon in 2015 for requiring publishers to accept lower e-book prices, Lynn penned a 24-page position paper to the Department of Justice on their behalf. It wasn’t just a question of immediate consumer impact. Amazon’s market position was so dominant, he argued, that the company could restrict or cut off access to books from publishers it wanted to punish for rejecting its pricing requirements. It could “exercise control over the marketplace of ideas in ways that threaten not merely open markets but free speech.”

Monopolies, according to Lynn, are fundamentally political enterprises — not just players in a market.

The episode was part of the furor surrounding Amazon’s high-profile entente with book publisher Hachette, in which the online retailer made no bones about its position.

“We want lower e-book prices,” Amazon wrote in a public letter. “Hachette does not.”

Amazon eventually settled with Hachette under a deal that both parties declared acceptable. But before Lynn became interested in the antitrust problems surrounding publishing, Khan had been looking into broader problems for small businesses. In 2012, Khan discovered that new business formation in the United States had been declining for decades. Her finding ran counter to conventional wisdom, which had held that ― aside from a few hiccups like the financial crisis ― bustling Silicon Valley startups were feeding a small business renaissance.

As the Amazon conflict demonstrates, some of Lynn’s chief targets are tech giants. That makes him an odd fit for New America, which was founded in 1999 as Silicon Valley’s think tank in search of a “radical center,” as The New York Times put it. Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt is still on New America’s board of directors, yet Lynn consistently puts the company under the microscope.

When Warren blasted tech monopolies this summer, she was speaking at a conference that Lynn had organized. When Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) asked about “platform” monopolies at a Senate hearing in March, he was echoing Lynn’s objections to digital kingpins, including Amazon, Apple and Google.

But Lynn’s apostasy gets results. The Obama administration conferred with him on an anti-monopoly executive order this spring, and he helped work antitrust language into the 2016 Democratic Party platform. He can’t claim the same kind of direct credit for the Republican Party’s partial conversion to the antitrust cause. But his work is changing the way Washington thinks about corporate power, and that shift is having bipartisan repercussions.

None of this means that the next president will be signing radical new antitrust laws into place. But that’s exactly why Lynn’s work matters. As King noted at the GOP convention, powerful antitrust laws are already on the books. The Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission have broad leeway to take action against big companies. They just rarely pursue it to the full extent of their authority. If the next president listens to Lynn, the FTC chair could become one of the most powerful positions in American government.

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Each Friday in September, RaiseAChild celebrates foster and adoptive parents who have chosen to place the needs of children ahead of their own in a special “Let Love Define Family®” series for Huffington Post Queer Voices. This is the first of five special series installments.

While some people fear and avoid change, Eric and George McCarthy-Zink enjoy challenging themselves with it. In today’s RaiseAChild “Let Love Define Family®” series installment for Huffington Post Queer Voices, Rich Valenza, RaiseAChild Founder and CEO, learns how this impressive couple works together for the good of children in the foster system while also building their family and relationship.

RICH VALENZA: Eric and George, I’d like to start by asking how you two first met.

GEORGE McCARTHY-ZINK: We met 22 years ago in a small town, Palm Bay, Florida.

ERIC McCARTHY-ZINK: We met the “old-school” way, in a club. We’ve been officially married for three years now.

RICH: So you met in Florida and how did you guys decide to become foster parents?

GEORGE: We didn’t start fostering until many, many years after we met. We’ve only been fostering for about five years now. We had always wanted to be parents, but initially, we were really focusing on our careers. We also relocated a lot. We started in Florida, went to Baltimore, to Dallas, to Tucson, St. Louis, back to Florida, to San Antonio, to Phoenix and now just outside Seattle. Eric works in hotel finance so our moves followed his career growth and opportunity.

ERIC: Because we were focused on our careers and moved pretty frequently, the question always was, “What if we are moved again?” So we kept putting fostering and adoption on the back burner saying it wasn’t the right time. But we realized later, it’s never the right time. Sometimes you just have to do it and hope for the best. That’s how our family was built.

GEORGE: Our daughter, Maribella, was our very first foster placement. She will be five years old in September. Now I’m a stay-at- home dad and Maribella officially became ours, through adoption. With training and the help of a lot of people, we figured out that our best opportunity to become a family was to be a foster-to- adopt family. When Maribella was placed in our arms, I knew immediately that she was our daughter. To date, we’ve had fifteen children we have fostered.

RICH: Wait. You’ve fostered fifteen children in the past five years?

ERIC: Yes, in two states: Texas and Arizona. Now, we’re just getting licensed in Washington as well. Some of the placements were very short term, which we knew going into them. We just wanted to keep them out of a shelter until family members were able to take them in.

GEORGE: Eric and I truly understand what fostering is all about. We have lived by a philosophy taught to us buy our first trainer, “A child is with you for as long as they are supposed to be, a day, a week, a month, or a life time. You have no control. Only three people have control, bio-parents, the judge, and God (or whatever you call your higher power).” In addition to our daughter, there was one baby that stayed with us straight from the hospital for eighteen months. She was also our first fostering success story.

Her mom really got it together, overcame drugs, overcame an abusive boyfriend, did what CPS dictated, and improved her life, ultimately getting her baby back.

ERIC: There was a true co-parenting relationship involved in this situation. George and I cheered that mother on through this tough period in her life. And she did it. Ultimately, all of the stories are success stories. We help the children, and in some cases the parents during a difficult part of their life, in that critical moment. We have had children placed with us who did not know how to play, speak, be children and of course were neglected. We helped to protect, nourish, and love them for the time they were with us. Those are successes.

RICH: What is it about you that gives you the strength to do this work? Why do you do it?

GEORGE: Right now we have decided to concentrate on drug exposed and drug addicted infants. If I can give the opportunity for a mom and dad to get it together and get clean, I’m ok with that. Or if we can help take the child out of that situation and break the cycle, then we’ve done something good. That’s why we do it.

ERIC: For me, it is a lot of the same things. I’m saddened that there’s such a drug problem all across the country affecting children. We have had a lot of experience now with drug exposed babies. At one point we had four children all under the age of two, all in cribs and diapers, dealing with various stages of drug exposure. We have been lucky, believe it or not, because of the doctors and nurses during some of our extensive visits in the hospitals and doctors’ offices. They taught us how to deal with different situations associated with withdrawals and exposure, such as baby massage. We have several different techniques that get us through the rough times because of these trainings. We also realized drug exposed and addicted infants have a ton of doctor appointments, therapy appointments, child/parent visits, and medical issues that just pop up due to the exposure. There is a shortage of foster parents who can be at home full time and sometimes that is what these children need, a little extra attention. So that is why George is a stay-at- home dad now.

RICH: When you have multiple babies in cribs, what does that do to you? Individually and as a couple?

GEORGE: It’s very, very stressful. It makes you learn a lot about yourself and your partner. When you have to be focused on so many other things, it forces you to really communicate well. And that is probably the biggest thing that has changed in our relationship, our ability to communicate better than we’ve ever before. We’ve always talked but now we know how to really communicate. We may not always get it right but we try. We also know how to ask for things we need. When “It’s time, I need ten minutes,” no one gets their feelings hurt. Each of us understand “I need to recharge, leave me alone.” It is not personal.

RICH: Do you have any advice to other families?

GEORGE: Seek out help and look at all the options. When we did decide to start building our family, we were focused solely on adoption. At the time, we thought we could never foster. It meant loving a child to give them back. When we found our first agency in San Antonio, we met with their trainer, Linda, who is still a close family friend to this day. She explained the process, listened to us and all of the excuses of why we could not foster, then finally said: “It is time to put on your big girl panties. You are doing this to build your family and to help kids in a bad situation. You can do this.” After the shock of the comment, we realized she was right. We treasure the good experiences, learn from the challenging ones, and make a difference in children’s and other families lives. We have started our family and will continue to grow it in the years to come.

ERIC: My advice is, first, find the right person to help guide you through the process and who can act as a sounding board as Linda did for us. We try to be that person for other families going through the process. Then, just do it. It will never be the right time; you will never be totally prepared. Your friends and support group will rally around you. The kiddos want to be safe and loved, they are not looking for perfection.

Have you thought about building a family through fostering or adoption? RaiseAChild is the nationwide leader in the recruitment and support of LGBT and all prospective parents interested in building families through fostering and adoption to meet the needs of the 415,000 children in the foster care system of the United States. RaiseAChild recruits, educates and nurtures supportive relationships equally with all prospective foster and adoptive parents while partnering with agencies to improve the process of advancing foster children to safe, loving and permanent homes. Take the Next Step to Parenthood at www.RaiseAChild.org or call us at (323) 417-1440.

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