What Is A Short Form Financial Statement California: Fill & Download for Free

This happened about 12 or 13 years ago, while I was living (again) with my parents. I was born and raised in southern California, and my parents decided they needed a change so they made the trek up to a small town in Idaho. My older brother had already moved out, and being the stubborn early 20’s young woman that I was, I decided to stay back in Cali with my best friend at the time, and his roommate. They had a very small 2 bedroom apartment which meant no room for me. But I was desperate and so my “bedroom" was the living room. And I slept on the couch bed every night. And it was horrible. But there was no way in hell I was moving to Idaho. I have a very close, very strong relationship with my parents. But moving to Idaho from Southern California was not going to happen.So as luck would have it, I lost my just-above minimum wage job and couldnt find another…and unemployment only lasts for so long. I put it off as long as I could but I eventually had to make the inevitable call to my parents, crying, telling them that I gave in and could I please come live with them. So appx a week later, my dad drove down with his pickup truck and trailer and we packed up my stuff and I went on to live with them for the next 4 years.Not long after I moved up to Idaho I got a job at a family owned Italian restaurant. One summer evening after working the day shift, I drove home and went in the house and said hi to my Mom who was cooking dinner, basic pleasantries, blah blah. I asked her where Dad was, and she said he was outside mowing the lawn. This wasn't a cookie cutter house on any ordinary street. This was a huge 3 story log cabin with an I-can't-even-imagine-how-many-square foot lawn. Point being, it was big, and it took the better part of the day to mow the front and back, even on a riding mower.I went upstairs to change out of my work clothes and shortly after, my Mom called me down because dinner was ready. She asked me if I would go get Dad and tell him to come in. I went down to the garage, not there. I went around to the back porch, not there. I went back to the front yard, not there. I looked over to the neighbor's yard to see if Dad had walked over to say hi to Robert and Helen…not there. The riding mower was put away so I knew he was done mowing. I went back up to the wrap-around deck and looked below every 10 feet or so to see if he was watering the garden. Still no Dad.At this point in his life, Dad was still in relatively decent health. He hadn't yet developed the problems that had plagued him in the few years before he passed. He was slowing down a bit, he had hypertension and chronic back problems but he was still able to keep the house and lawn and everything else in pristine shape. He was a perfectionist and a stickler about keeping things neat and organized. It's amazing that I didn't develop those habits from him….especially financial stuff. God, when the monthly bank statements came in the mail and the balance in the account was off even a penny, he would go back and look through everything just to see where his mistake was. Off topic. Back to that day.I kept making my way around the house via the deck. I came to the north side of the house and looked over the railing, where the lawn dips down about 5 feet. I had to stick my head out quite a bit to see two legs laying on the lawn. It took me several seconds to realize the gravity of the situation. Dad was laying on the lawn. Did he pass out from heat exhaustion? Was he actually okay, and he was laying on the grass looking at or fixing something? Did he have a heart attack and die? Did he have a stroke? All I knew was that something was not right and he was down there all alone and needed help. I screamed as loud as I could, “DAD!!!” No answer. My adrenaline kicked in and I ran across the deck at lightning speed. My Mom was still inside the house looking for Dad but I didn't have time to stop and go in and yell for her to come out. Instead, once I reached the window I pounded my fist on it as hard as I could. She would know what it meant.I finally got down to the grass where my Dad lay, motionless. I started crying, yelling, Dad, Dad. What's wrong? Although he was on his side, almost on his stomach, I could tell that he was breathing. Faintly, but breathing. I shook him. I pried his eyes open. My Mom came running out. She was hysterical. I was as well, but more on the inside. I tried to keep my shit together, for her sake. I knew this wasn't good. I shook him more. He finally jolted awake and had this scared, confused, little boy look on his face. He was genuinely scared of what was happening. Mom and I cried when he awoke but our happiness soon turned to fear, as Dad was completely unaware of his surroundings, where he was, how he got there, he even looked as though Mom and I were strangers. None of us knew what had happened and how extensive this situation was. Dad didn't remember why he passed out or what he was doing when it happened. I grabbed my phone and told him I was calling an ambulance, and Dad begged me not to. About a month before, he spent a week in the hospital with pneumonia and it was tough on him. He didn't want to go back. The neighbors across the street saw what was going on, one of them happened to be a doctor. He urged my dad to go to the hospital, but he refused to go. My Dad was so stubborn.The next few days were touch and go…if my Mom or I had to go somewhere leaving Dad home alone, we had to hide the car keys because we were afraid he was gonna try to drive somewhere and seeing as how he was acting very….peculiar, we definitely didn't want him operating heavy machinery.In the weeks that followed, Dad started acting normal again. He never did go to the hospital but he did see his primary care doctor. It wasn't until then that we found out the cause of his passing out on the lawn that day. Dad had high blood pressure ever since he was in his early 40’s…due in part to stress at his job at the time, smoking cigarettes, among other contributing factors, I'm sure. He was on blood pressure medicine for many years but after every couple of years it would become ineffective and his doctor would switch medications. A couple days before his fainting episode, his doctor changed his medication. Nothing out of the ordinary. But what the doctor failed to realize was that he had prescribed him the wrong dosage…he was having my Dad take about 3x the amount that he should have been taking, which caused his blood pressure to get so low that he passed out.That day was the scariest of my life. When I saw my Dad laying there on the lawn, unresponsive, helpless, I thought he had a heart attack and died. The thought of him having a heart attack some day was something that was always in the back of our minds, honestly. We knew it could happen someday due to his history with hypertension and family history. I was so grateful that my Dad wasn't taken from us that day, that he was okay and he would still be around to give me the lectures that I had heard from him 17,000 times and the constant nagging of me needing to save money for the inevitable rainy days that would come my way, and “Don't forget to lock your doors!”Little did we know that the very thing that I thought took my Dad's life that day, actually did just 2 years ago this past July. He fought so hard through health problems and stress and…I think he was just tired. I know that he wasn't mentally ready to go. But I think physically he was. He was the strongest, kindest, most warm-hearted man I've ever known and I miss him terribly every day. Heaven is so lucky to have him.

In January 1973, I graduated with an MBA from USC and immediately went to Singapore to work for Chang Ming Thien (the father of my college room mate) a businessman with no formal education who had worked his way up to become the CEO of United Malayan Banking Corporation in Singapore. Besides being the CEO of UMBC he was also the CEO of several other public companies and owned real estate in Singapore as well as other countries as far away as Bel Air, California.My first job for M. T. Chang was to do a feasibility study for the building their family was putting up called the High Street Centre. During the course of my work I noticed the company appeared to be owned not by the Chang family but by curiously through large number of small holding companies which were shareholders of the company which owned High Street Centre. My curiosity took me down to the Registrar of Companies where I looked up the corporate records of each of High Street Centre’s owners and their financial statements. It turns out all of these many companies started life with no assets other than cash which they’d borrowed from United Malayan Banking Corp, they all initially borrowed S$100,000 (more or less) from the UMBC, their balance sheets showed an initial $100,000 in liabilities with $100,000 in cash deposited at the UMBC (naturally), all accumulated expenses (incorporation fees and bank interest charges) were carried on their books as Capitalized Costs.About 20 of these companies in unison bought stock in yet another company, this company now had 20 X S$100,000 = S$2 million cash in the bank and NO DEBT. This company then bought the piece of property on which the High Street Centre was to be built for cash AND then went right back to the UMBC to borrow (since they had no debt to start with) ALL of the money needed to build the High Street Centre. Once construction started this company (totally controlled by the CMT family) could start taking deposits for shops and flats from the High Street from other outside investors. I realized that Chang Ming Tien was able to build and own the High Street Centre using not a single penny of his own money, every cent he used was UMBC depositors’ money. Almost certainly, this was contrary to Monetary Authority of Singapore regulations.Around the same time, the Chang Family bought over the Overseas Trust Bank in Hong Kong, shortly after that OTB (later a huge scandal in HK involving Patrick Chang, MT Chang’s younger son when OTC collapsed not many years after MT Chang passed away in a hotel under strange circumstances). Prior to it’s collapse Patrick Chang himself boasted to me how his father had managed the take over of Faber Merlin (a real estate and hotel company listed in HK) without spending a single penny of anyone’s money. This scam was even marginally legal in the manner in which it was planned and executed, it was nothing short of brilliant, all MT Chang had to do was LIE to his business partner.Faber Merlin was a real estate company listed on the HK Stock exchange, it’s major visible asset being the Merlin Hotel is Tsim Sha Tsui. Kowloon. It may have owned other parcels of real estate but back then I really had no intimate knowledge of the company. In 1974 the HK Stock Market had basically collapsed, the result of the Arab Oil Crisis when the price of oil soared from about $10 a barrel to $50 a barrel over a very short period of time. Business conditions were miserable. Faber Merlin’s CEO back then was a businessman named J. J Rapier, Chang Ming Thien at the time was just a director at Faber Marlin.Chang Ming Thien had a talk with JJ Rapier where he suggested to Rapier that since business conditions were so bad and since real estate prices were so low that it would be a great move for Faber Merlin to raise some money to buy up some of these distressed properties and take advantage of the depressed economic conditions. Rapier thought it sounded good but that Faber Merlin’s price was itself low and that it would be difficult to raise money selling stock at these depressed prices. Chang’s solution was to have Faber Merlin float a rights issue, existing shareholders would be given the right to buy new shares in the company at a discount from the market price. These rights were like very short term warrants, the rights themselves had a value (market price minus exercise price) and any shareholder not wishing to exercise their rights could always sell them for cash, a win/win situation for the company and for the shareholders.Raper told Chang that there could be a problem with everyone selling their rights and not exercising them, Chang told Raper there would be no problem, that his company, Overseas Trust Bank would underwrite (guarantee) the entire rights issue, that any and all unexercised rights would be taken up and exercised by OTB. Raper thought that sounded very good, virtually fool proof but that Rapier himself had a problem coming up with the cash to exercise HIS rights, the rights he would receive on the shares he owned himself. Chang assured Rapier that this would be not be a problem as OTB would extend sufficient credit to Rapier so that Raper could exercise his rights and buy into the rights issue. Looking at the prospect of receiving a hefty cash inflow even when business conditions were dire, Raper could not say no to such a beneficial proposition so Faber Merlin went ahead and proceeded with their rights issue as planned.In the days leading up the the expiry of the rights, J. J. Rapier suddenly found it impossible to contact Chang, it was as though Chang Ming Thien had vanished off the face of the earth. Nobody at OTB other than CMT himself had the authority to lend Rapier the money needed to exercise his own rights. The rights expiry date came and went, all of Rapers rights expired BUT (true to Chang’s word) all of these expired rights were taken up by the Overseas Trust Bank and exercised. When the dust settled, OTB owned more shares than J. J. Rapier. M.T. Chang resurfaced and immediately called a shareholder’s meeting. Now that his OTB held the majority of shares in Faber Merlin, Chang immediately fired Rapier and his entire board of directors, immediately replacing the entire board with his own cronies. His next move was to address what he was about to do with all the new cash raised from the rights issue. Chang’s decision was that since business condition were fragile, the most prudent thing to do was to keep the cash on deposit at (surprise) the Overseas Trust Bank. Thus Chang had managed to engineer the takeover of Faber Merlin without a single penny leaving his pocket or the Overseas Trust Bank’s coffers.In the end, Rapier himself was a pretty sharp businessman, following the theft of his company he dug around and found that the OTB itself had broken Hong Kong bank regulations when the rights were exercised, he realized that OTB has broken it’s reserve requirements when it plowed all that money into exercising those Faber Marlin rights so he sued. Eventually they settled for US$10 million, Rapier took that money back to England and retired, I assume he sold his remaining Faber Merlin stock. Some years later, long after I stopped working for Chan Ming Tien’s group of companies after realizing he was nothing but a con-man, I opened the newspaper to read of the collapse of the OTB, it’s CEO, Patrick Chang handcuffed at the HK Airport trying to flee with a bag full of cash and jewellery.Overseas Trust BankI learned an awful lot during the 2 years I worked in Singapore and Indonesia as a young man in my twenties fresh out of University on my first “real” job. It doesn’t pay to build your business on a foundation of deception and fraud. Yes, you can fool some of the people some of the time but in the final analysis you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

I’m in a bit of a unique position to answer this, I suppose, as I also note on my companion answer to the corresponding conservative question. I’m a never-Trumper and I believe in careful, measured, restrained, deliberate progress. My more liberal friends are convinced I’m a conservative, but most conservatives seem convinced I’m somewhere left of Karl Marx.I grew up a short distance away from the birthplace of the Republican Party, which was a liberal and highly progressive party when it was created, I might point out. I had immediate family in the Grange, a progressive Republican organization of farmers for most of its history. I was probably in college before I met a Democrat.But, by the time I was old enough to be aware of politics, most people around me listened to WTMJ and Charlie Sykes and Republicanism had turned conservative and reactionary. The Tea Party was highly active and successful in my hometown and school district. My home county broke 60–30 for Trump.How did an area of LaFollette progressive farmers barely 100 years ago become what it is today?Progressivism started failing them. Them, specifically.And this is largely what I think liberals have tended to fail to consider.I understand that I’m likely to be a bit stereotypical here in lumping liberals in with city people. There are liberals in the rural areas, sure. Most of them will have already realized a lot of what I’m writing.But for the most part, most of the outspoken liberals out there are not rural folks. The ones that dominate the Democratic Party are typically from urban areas.This is, as I have looked into the history of things, an artifact of the 20th century. There were formerly progressive wings in both major parties. But into the 20th century, the Republican Party tended to move more and more rural rather than just North. Republicans had always tended to be more pro-capital through the late 19th Century, while labor was more of a Democratic Party plank. There was a pro-labor progressive movement that for a brief time really held sway over the Republican Party with leaders such as Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, Robert “Fighting Bob” LaFollette, and William Howard Taft.Rural organizations like the Grange were the progressive pro-labor force in the agricultural regions like the Midwest.As the Republican Party lost its progressive wing in the early 20th century into intraparty fighting between the more measured Roosevelt progressives and the more radical LaFollette Republicans, the conservative pro-capital wing regained control of the Republican Party with party leadership such as Warren Harding and Herbert Hoover.Woodrow Wilson solidified a pro-labor progressive contingent within the Democratic Party when the Republican coalition fell apart in 1912. This was primarily aimed at unionization, which in turn tended to more heavily favor the increasing industrialization and urbanization of the country. By the time that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected to office, Republicans were increasingly becoming the party of the rural areas and the Northeast and Democrats were increasingly becoming the party of the cities.That split was torn open by the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other progressive reforms of the late 1960’s. The conservative “Dixiecrats” of the rural South finally abandoned party loyalty for ideological loyalty and switched sides when conservative leadership within the Republican Party worked out a deal to provide them with continued seniority, starting with Strom Thurmond.This urban-rural divide has continued to accelerate to today, evident in electoral maps such as these from the 2016 national election:That looks like a huge sea of red.Adjusted for population, it looks more like this:I don’t bring this up to get into a debate about the electoral college, only to point out that urban-rural divide.1. It’s not about ideology or even partisanship, it’s about the “rural consciousness.”If you haven’t read Katherine Cramer’s outstanding work in The Politics of Resentment, you really really should. As I read it, I was stunned at how well she described my hometown and the people in it. I don’t know if one of the test groups she had was actually in my town, but it might as well have been. It was eerily familiar.Cramer discovered that rural people very much have their own social identity, and they feel that it is both under attack and worthy of preservation.And that is not unjustified. The politics are dominated by the increasingly concentrated populations of the urban areas. Without geographical representation like the electoral college or what liberals point out is an unfair weighting of the rural vote, there is a fear, one that is often realized, that the city folk will simply come in, invade them, and impose their city-minded views on them.When you hear rural people wanting “deregulation” and complaining about “overreach,” they’re just latching on to terms that describe what they experience. I can’t tell you how many farmers or rural county executives I know that are pissed to hell at the state because it seems like every year, there’s some new unfunded mandate or regulation or new tax. There may be and usually are very good reasons for these things, but they aren’t explained to my people. It’s just another edict from Madison and Milwaukee.They have lower tax bases and lower economies of scale because of the lack of population density. Progressive policies often fail to take that into account, and raise revenue by raising statewide property taxes. This massively disproportionately hits rural people, who tend to be land rich and money poor. Land is a great asset, but it’s not a liquid one. So, when we’re barely breaking even most years and two shitty seasons away from complete insolvency and China and California and giant agricorps are dumping cheap milk and pork into the system, we’re kind of fucked when you start demanding another thousand bucks a year from us.Minnesota is trying something that might help in the form of a tax credit for agricultural land when school districts want to pass a referendum, so that farmers that are disproportionately impacted by property tax hikes don’t get hit as hard. This is a good idea, and a way to try to help show that progressive policies don’t have to end up breaking them.2. You can be pretentious AF at times.Mal: You backed out of a deal last time. Left us hanging.Jayne: Hurt our feelings.Mal: You recall why that took place?Badger: Had a problem with your attitude, is why. Felt you was… what’s the word…?Jayne: Pretentious? [Mal gives Jayne a dirty look]Badger: Exactly! You think you’re better’n other people!Mal: Just the ones I’m better than.Firefly, “Shindig”My people consider liberals to be smug elitists that look down on them, and both sides are not unjustified.Look at what you see on TV representing my people. The positive end of that stick is the naivety of Parks and Rec. What do we more commonly see ourselves portrayed as? Called on national television?Rednecks. Inbred hicks. Toothless hillbillies. Racists and homophobes clinging to guns and Bibles. (Yeah, I know, if you take Obama’s entire quote in context, it’s speaking precisely to this problem, but that sound bite was all my people heard.)Look, this isn’t entirely your fault, liberals. I grew up with Jew jokes and black jokes and rampant homophobia. A family member who was a coach once yelled to one of his kids, “Run like a Mexican with a TV on his shoulder!” I’m not kidding. It’s that bad.I don’t want to make excuses for any of that.But here’s why context matters: we didn’t have any of those people in our community, with the exception of homosexual people, though we certainly didn’t know any of those. Homosexuality was one of those things that was pointedly ignored. I had a great aunt and an uncle who lived with “a friend” for all of my life. My family still won’t acknowledge the truth of it.It wasn’t really until I got to college and grew up that I began to realize with some horror why that is, in fact, really that bad. It’s not unjustified to look at those back home who don’t understand that and probably never will with some degree of that horror. The liberal disdain for it is not wholly undeserved.I’ve tried to explain it to my people. Most of them won’t listen. You can look at the comments I receive from certain people when I’ve written about white privilege as exhibit A. I get basically the same trying to explain it to people back home.When I used to try to explain it to them, I was considered one of them smug, pretentious elitists who got a degree and thinks I’m better than them right now. It took time for me to learn how to have those conversations in a way that helped them realize the real harm those things cause.What liberals tend to fail to realize is that it’s a lack of experience with those groups of people.Liberals tend to make a moral judgment about these people because of these things. These people, in their view, must believe these things because they are terrible, immoral people. They believe that these people must be irredeemable because who doesn’t know that such things are wrong today?That’s not it. It’s a lack of realness to them. The only place that most of these minority communities exist to them is on television, which is never set where they are. It’s set in the cities, far away from them. They don’t see their reality represented back to them with any fairness.My family has had to learn hard why black jokes aren’t cool after my sister married a black man from Chicago.It was suddenly real to them.An increasing Hispanic population in my home area working a lot of the dairy jobs has created an interesting split. The people who interact with them constantly like the dairy farms that hire them have done a 180 on Mexican jokes and anti-Hispanic rhetoric. People who don’t interact with that community regularly are still set in their old ways. And it’s causing a lot of friction, not just between the Hispanic community and the bigoted population, but between the two white communities.My people are pretty welcoming to people they actually know. When something happens, we’ll all pitch in to the fundraiser or grab chainsaws to get a tree off someone’s house after a bad storm. Doesn’t matter who you are, or what you look like, or what your sexual orientation or non-binary gender is.But this isn’t reported. This isn’t what makes it to portrayals of my people on television. Nobody makes a nationally-broadcast-over-aerial television show out of rural Wisconsin that depicts the positives of rural life, as it really is.Even on cable, every show I’ve ever watched doesn’t honor the rural consciousness. It treats us as a joke or an exaggeration at best. At worst, we are a land of serial killers and deplorables and poor people.And if we weren’t hanging on by a raggedy thread, maybe we could take it. Maybe. But we are.My people feel humiliated by you.And ultimately, humiliation is the root of all terrorism.There are some serious fences to mend here, and it’s going to take a lot of effort to rebuild some measure of trust. That’s made a lot harder by something I’ll discuss later.3. Marketing MattersThere’s little to no difference between marketing and propaganda. I literally used commercials to teach propaganda to my high school students.You can say that Republicans are propaganda masters all you want. It’s marketing. And they’re damned good at it.Say what you want about their policies, Republicans have long been waaaaaaaaaaaaay the hell better at selling their policies, especially to rural America.Matthew Bates isn’t wrong about why they have an advantage here: a win for them is to do nothing. Their whole schtick is “do absolutely nothing new and do a lot less of what you’re already doing” and they’ve sold it incredibly well. Whether it’s catchy bits like Reagan’s “welfare queen” or the line “government is the problem,” Republicans have been doing an excellent job of selling the idea that government is not an instrument of the people for doing good for society.They’ve successfully gotten a significant chunk of people to believe that the Constitution doesn’t actually say in multiple places that the purpose of government and of taxation is for the general welfare, or at a minimum, redefined what that means to “rich people gonna rich and that’s the way it should be.”They’ve sold a philosophy that what’s good for the golden goose is good for the rest of you regular ganders and made people think that’s morally correct.They’ve mastered oversimplification of complex issues for the average person.Their actual mascot should really be this guy:Oh, think, my friends, how can any Medicare system ever hope to compete with a gold parachute for a health insurance CEO? Remember, my friends, what a handful of enterprising entrepreneurs did to the famous, fabled walls of socialism! Oh, Venezuela’s price controls come a tumblin’ down!They are incredibly effective atCreating a “problem,”Selling a “solution” which they can conveniently offer at a discount price,Profiting wildly from that solution; andLeaving the whole thing in shambles behind them for someone else to clean up.And most of all, they are fantastic at convincing people that the alternative to getting screwed over by them is somehow worse.Why do rural people eat this up? Because it seizes on something that feels pretty damned real to them: government is constantly putting more burdens on them and they don’t feel like they’re getting what they pay for. Democrats have done a bang up job promoting mass transit and electric cars and all sorts of things… that they will never see. In the meanwhile, their hospitals are closing and their schools are shrinking and losing good teachers and the buses don’t go past their place and their roads are falling to shit and their health insurance keeps going up. It sure seems like Democrats are helping the city people and not them.If you drove a Tesla out to my people, they’d laugh their asses off at you. It seems like a completely impractical car to them. It’s too nice to get it dirty and has waaaay too many bells and whistles.And that’s what they see AOC telling them to buy.Liberals are goddamned horrible at marketing their policies to my people.This is especially true in the era of Trump. Liberals have been essentially running on a platform of “well, we’re better than that shit-filled dumpster fire, right?”That isn’t good enough.You want progress? You have to sell it, to them.These policies are undeniably good for a lot of people who haven’t bought into them.Universal health care would absolutely be good for a lot of people who aren’t currently voting for Democrats or on board with more liberal policies. Many of them are paying out of control premiums and deductibles and going into medical bankruptcy. Rural hospitals are going under or cutting back essential services, all of which makes it that much harder on those people. A universal health insurance system that could ensure that rural people can still get adequate care at a lower cost than they currently pay is undeniably good for them.I constantly see liberals who just wave this away.They simply refuse to market anything, because they think it’s obvious and only an idiot would not understand that. (And again: that just plays into the pretentiousness problem.)No. That’s not enough. Liberals have to sell it.And yeah, they have the extra disadvantage that they have to play to win when all Republicans have to do is play not to lose. Doing something is a lot harder than doing nothing. And it’s easier to scare people into sticking with a shitty thing that they know than a scary thing that they don’t.Republican policies right now are repackaging their own warm piss in unwashed bleach bottles with hastily scrawled “leminaid” in Sharpie on a taped-on piece of ripped off notebook paper.But seriously, if you can’t beat that, you’re clearly in need a better marketing firm.If you want change, you have to sell it.No, no. Stop. I can hear your complaint already.4. Your bitching about conservatives not playing in good faith is a waste of time.Doctor: It's not fair? Oh, I didn't realize that it was not fair! Well, you know what? My TARDIS doesn't work properly and I don't have my own personal tailor.Doctor Who, “The Zygon Inversion”I can hear fifty liberals reading this far who already just audibly sighed or got angry because they’re pissed at the fact that it’s a massively uphill battle. You’re going to bitch about the electoral college and gerrymandering and voter ID and all the ways that liberals are being deprived of a fair shake in government and conservatives are not engaging in good faith.I’ll be the first right there to tell you that all of that is true.And none of it matters.No, it doesn’t.You know what wasn’t fair? Decades of getting kicked in the teeth as global trade and automation and debt traps pounded rural economies based on agriculture and manufacturing while progressive policies promised help that never came.My people aren’t going to play in good faith because they see no reason to and they have no incentive to trust liberals in their book. Playing dirty is getting them what they want. Compromising never did.At least conservatives are honest about the fact that my people are on their own and can’t expect meaningful assistance from the government. That tracks with their experience. Progressives spent decades overpromising and underdelivering. At least when they elect Republicans, they get what they pay for. If you’re going to get kicked in ass, might as well get lower taxes out of it.As P.J. O’Rourke once noted: “The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it.”I’m not saying you need to take the low road and get in the mud. As my people say, “if you wrestle with a pig in the sty, all that happens is you get dirty and the pig likes it.”I’m saying you need to quit being surprised, have a plan for that, and be better at controlling the messaging around it. Bernie’s socialism shtick is screwing y’all over. It’s the same liberal strategy that’s gotten you where you are: promise a metric shit ton that’s going to be imposed on us whether we like it or not and we all get to live with the catastrophic failure if it implodes.5. Not everything unjust is racist and not everything that is racist is intentionally racist.Words matter. What words we use matters.I tried to tell liberals this when they compared Mitt Romney to Hitler and Mussolini. I was told to go away.And here we are: my people won’t listen to you anymore because everything is racist. Everything is over the top, or at least so they feel.And I get that criticism. I understand that criticism from both sides.There is a ton of injustice in this country and a solid 70% of it is continued trauma and inertia from slavery and its successors. Being anything not white in this country does put you at an inherent, automatic disadvantage compared to the advantage of being white.Some of that has to do with actual racism, and some of that has to do with the disadvantages of poverty, which largely exist because of prior actual racism and there’s a lot of catch-up to do.But when everything becomes a matter of outrageous injustice, it does start to become less meaningful. When the outrage is constant, it starts to become background noise. When everything is racist, eventually nothing really is to conservatives.Appropriately challenging racism and injustice is tough. It’s hard to see something that is deeply upsetting and not want to just yell in rage at it. I get that. I do it myself a lot. It’s rarely successful.I feel statements are very effective. Putting a human face on an injustice is very effective. “This is how what you just said was hurtful to me” can be very effective. (Don’t try this online. Most of the time, you’re dealing with trolls who don’t give a shit. But in person, this can be very effective.)Most conservatives and most of my people aren’t being racist on purpose, and that’s why they actually get offended when you call them that. They honestly don’t know why what they just said or did was racist or otherwise unjust. They have a very, very simplified view of what that means.It’s not even that they don’t understand things like microaggressions. They just don’t have the same context for it. They understand trauma, but very differently. They understand disadvantage, but very differently.Take a calming breath. Respond in kindness. Explain how what was said is hurtful and why. Most of my people are not intentionally hurtful. They’re not trying to be racist. They literally just don’t understand why what they did or said was hurtful.6. People do switch sides if they have a good reason, so quit writing off my people as a lost cause.Honestly, this one bothers me the most. I can’t tell you how many liberals who are thoroughly convinced that every Trump supporter and every Republican is a lost cause and will never, ever change.One of your own standard bearers changed sides: Elizabeth Warren. She was a Republican and a die-hard conservative, not that long ago. She was 47 when she switched sides, after she spent a long time dealing with bankruptcies and foreclosures as a lawyer and then through having her grad assistants research that. She was convinced of the Republican line before then, that people failed the consumer game because they were bad at it and made bad choices and scammed the system.She found that people in bankruptcy were often a lot different than the irresponsible deadbeats she’d believed them to be. Eventually, she saw how corporate America had been trapping people into debt cycles for a long time, and that’s how we got the Liz Warren we see today.There are a lot of Obama-Trump voters; people who voted for “hope and change” and then turned around and voted for Trump.And perhaps this shouldn’t be entirely surprising.There were a lot of people, especially the rural voters where I’m from, who voted for Obama thought they were going to get “hope and change.”And they got shit on with the recovery from the 2008 financial collapse. They didn’t get the bailouts or the assistance. They didn’t get their jobs back. They didn’t see most of the recovery. Their industries, their towns, all remained in ruin. God bless David Wong over at Cracked, who fucking nailed it with this piece. And it was written before Trump was elected, so that should tell you that it wasn’t just some liberal soul-searching afterwards. It was a warning.Farm bankruptcies were already rising under Obama as small dairies and crop farmers went under more and more, due in large part to predatory debt traps and then a freeze on credit. The CFPB helped a little, which is why you’re seeing these skyrocket under Trump’s massive deregulation push.But my people felt betrayed by eight years of Obama. They saw their health insurance get more expensive and all the growth in the stock market sure didn’t seem to help them.So, when Hillary ran effectively as Obama’s third term, they were willing to throw their lot in with Trump, who they believed knew the secret sauce to being rich and was going to somehow share it with everyone. They really thought that he was going to somehow strongarm China into playing better and everything else. Many of them still do. They think they’re going to get the change that they were promised under Obama.And believe me, plenty of them feel just as betrayed and ready to burn the whole thing to the ground because they feel just as betrayed by both sides. Some of them are sticking with Trump even though they know he’s burning everything to the ground because at least then they’ll have the government off their backs. If everything’s going to shit either way, might as well go for the one who is going to get rid of all of those pesky regulations about why they can’t drain off the back willows and get a few extra acres.My people are not ideologues, for the most part. They don’t actually care about “small government” conservatism or the “nanny state.” Those are just convenient things they’re repeating as stand-ins for what they really want.They generally just want the basics: a fair shake in life, reasonable rules that make sense, and general security.They want Roosevelt’s square deal.They want to quit being punished for working hard when it does feel like some others are gaming the system.They want a path to retirement.They want to be able to try their hand at a business.They want to send their kids to a good school.They want to live in a safe neighborhood.They want to drive on decent roads.They want a hospital that isn’t hundreds of miles away and that won’t bankrupt them.They want laws and regulations that are logical and not overly burdensome, and most of all: something that they have some say over.They want to put food on the table.They want basic dignity and respect.They want what progressives want to give them. And they’ll gladly pay their taxes if they think they’re actually going to get it.Sell them on how your policies will give them that, and seriously, you can make progressives out of lifelong Republicans.