Gnome February 13, 2009March 12, 2017 Ken Doran: “Re yesterday’s post, just wondering . . . do they serve chicken ptarmigan in Gnome?” ☞ Oh, God. Did I misspell that too? Do you know WHICH Nome I meant? The little one, outside Zurich! (Gno? You’re gnot buying that? Well, okay: I goofed.) Kathy Allan: “I thought you would get a kick out of this from the Newseum. Just put your mouse on a city anywhere in the world and that day’s newspaper pops up. Double click and the page gets larger. Then you can either read the pdf version or click through to the paper itself in the upper right corner.” ☞ Way cool. But incomplete. They have the Anchorage Daily News and the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner – and the Nyíregyháza, Hungary Kelet Magyarorszag for that matter – but not the Nome Nugget. Kathy again: “Who is F…used when you want to provide your own commentary? Did I miss something? It’s not one of your initials or your party affiliation, so what gives?” ☞ “F” is the right-pointing “finger” wingding most people see here at left. But some browsers display it as an F. If I were smarter, I could fix that, but life is short and suffering (yours, that is) builds character. GOOD IDEA, SKIP! Mark W. Budwig: “My favorite Republican tax cut proposal is the the one to lower the corporate tax rate to 25% from 35%. Boy, now there’s a real job generator! Can’t you just hear the boardroom conversation? ‘People are losing jobs by the millions! Demand is in the toilet! But now we have a real chance to hire workers we don’t need to produce goods we can’t sell, all because of the lower taxes on the profits we won’t have!’” Next week: Mark Twain, I hope; and Faster Sparky, Faster!
Your Own Local Phone Number in New York Or New Zealand February 12, 2009March 12, 2017 SKYPE Joe: “SkypeIn numbers are on sale for $30/yr. Get one. People can call you as if they were calling a regular telephone and not know the call comes directly to your computer. You can choose the state of your area code. People will think they are calling you in that state even if you’re poolside in Rio or in your hotel room in Gnome. (If you’re not at your computer, you can set it to forward to your cell or else take a message.) They will be charged for a local call, and you’ll be charged nothing at all. You can also make free unlimited calls easily almost anywhere in the world.” ☞ Or choose a number in 21 countries, just as if you really had an office in Australia or Chile. You can try it out for $12 for 3 months. OUR PLACE IN THE WORLD My friend Doug Rediker has just published an article examining how the current financial meltdown may affect our place in the financial world. It begins . . . German Chancellor Angela Merkel called [January 20] “a special day for billions of people all over the world” while French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced “we are eager for him to get to work so that with him we can change the world.” In most quarters of the globe, there appears to be a common belief that President Obama will preside over an American government that is ready, willing and able to engage the rest of the world and re-assert its leadership on the most important issues facing the world today and in years to come. Unilateral actions are out, we are told, and multi-lateral cooperation is back on the table. The first real test of this more global approach is likely to be on display in April, when leaders of the world’s twenty largest economies come together in London to discuss possible solutions to the global financial crisis. This will be the first G-20 meeting at which the Obama administration will be a full-fledged participant . . . ☞ . . . and goes on to imagine how the meeting might go. GETTING BY ON HALF A MILLION A YEAR Alan Wenker: “Reading this article in the New York Times got me thinking it’s time for you to update your book, Getting by on $100,000 A Year (AND Other Sad Tales). ☞ Indeed. I wrote that in 1978. It seemed laughable that people could have trouble on $100,000 a year back then – but to many NEW YORK MAGAZINE readers the laugh was that anyone could possibly get by on so little. The Times has raised the bar to $500,000. (Yet, for all the inflation adjustments, it’s a very old story. When someone suggested to Herbert Hoover’s Treasury Secretary, Ogden Mills, that you could live comfortably on $50,000 a year – a huge sum back then – he replied: “On $50,000 a year you can’t even keep clean.”)
Jitterbug! February 11, 2009March 12, 2017 WHAT PAULSON SAID TO CONGRESS THAT SEPTMEBER DAY This six-minute clip with the Chair of the House Capital Markets Subcommittee includes an account of how $550 billion in money market funds were withdrawn in an hour, with the expectation a further $5 trillion fleeing by 2pm – leading to the collapse of the financial system and the global ecoomy by the next day if nothing had been done. Worth a listen. WHAT THE PRESIDENT SAID MONDAY NIGHT On the subject of his press conference . . . John Kasley: “I lavished in complete declarative sentences with nouns and verbs, subjects and predicates washing over me. Whole paragraphs with consistent subject matter just formed and became waves lapping at the shores of our minds. In a country that was founded on an idea, we have a leader who understands ideas. This is a class act. It’s a pleasure to admire the President of the United states again.” THE TREASURY, ETC. The big picture is that there is now an extraordinary team at Treasury, the Fed, the FDIC, in the White House, and in central banks around the world, all pretty much focused on averting catastrophe, and with extraordinary tools to do it. I think they will succeed. Not to say things will be booming any time soon; just to say the world will not end. WHAT TO DO NOW I think we must just come to accept that the years ahead may be rather like the Seventies, when the economic chickens were coming home to roost in consequence of the guns-and-butter policies of Vietnam matched with the War on Poverty* . . . only worse, because back then the National Debt was less than half what it is now in proportion to our economy; and the financial markets, while depressed, were plodding along pretty much as usual. So this will be worse . . . but, then again, better, too, because no matter what, most of us will have, in this next decade, things virtually no one in the Seventies had. Cell phones! Computers! Google! Twice as many “classics” to choose from on 50 times as many channels! Viagra! Audible.com! Skype! Air bags! DVRs! And even without these things (and those soon to come), there was a good bit of happiness to be found during the economic malaise of the Seventies (disco!), as there even was in the Thirties (jitterbug!), should it get that bad (but it likely won’t). Safe-ish investments include the afore-suggested recently-issued TIPS (to foil deflation, if we have it, because you can find some selling for less than the $1,000 per bond at which they’ll be redeemed; and to foil inflation, if we have it, because they are at least largely inflation-adjusted) . . . and perhaps even a little gold and silver (through electronically traded funds with the symbols GLD and SLV). There are now, or eventually will be, spectacular investment opportunities, if you can truly afford the risk (GLDD anyone?), but we will only know what they are and when it would have been smart to buy them after the fact. (This is why clairvoyance holds such appeal.) My own guess – which is obviously nothing more than that – is that we may test the 6,500 level on the Dow, in which Alan Greenspan 12 years ago saw “irrational exuberance.” There would be a certain symmetry, or at least cruel financial poetry, in that once-scary high (through which the Dow just continued to rocket) becoming this year’s scary low. *This time it’s been Iraq and the War To Improve the Lot of the Wealthy.
Listen to the President February 10, 2009March 12, 2017 But first . . . LOOKING FOR A MOVIE? See Defiance. It would be gripping in any event, but the fact that it happened – well, that just takes your breath away. LOOKING FOR A PLAY? See the limited Broadway run of 33 Variations, which had its first preview last night to a packed audience ranging from Gloria Steinem to a seeing-eye dog in the seat in front of me. You don’t need to be able to see to appreciate Beethoven (just as he did not have to be able to hear to compose his Ninth Symphony – he was completely deaf by then). But the set and staging are in fact wonderful. So, too, the script: wonderful. The piano: wonderful. The whole notion: wonderful (the 50 top composers in Vienna were presented with a simple waltz and asked to compose a “variation” on it to be compiled in a book; Beethoven became obsessed with this little waltz and composed 33 variations – why? that’s the question that obsessed the modern-day musicologist who traveled to Bonn to find out). And Jane Fonda’s first Broadway performance in 44 years (no, not as Beethoven, you ninny)? Wonderful. A toe-tapper it’s not. For that, of course, you want Jersey Boys. But it’s an evening you won’t forget. LET GAYS SERVE? Owen West, a conservative ex-marine, who initially opposed allowing gays to serve in the military, now makes the case for reversing course. And now . . . THE PRESIDENT’S PRESS CONFERENCE If you missed it, click here. I think it’s important that we watch these things, because this isn’t business as usual. Everyone should join the conversation.
This Column Only Seems Short Click the Links February 9, 2009March 12, 2017 CRASH COURSE Sam Linder: “You pointed us to chrismartenson.com a while back and for that I cannot thank you enough. His Crash Course really opened my eyes to a whole new world!” ☞ Thanks, Sam. He’s added chapters since then, so all the more reason to reprise this. It’s a lifetime of financial perspective and economic education in one evening. (Or 30 minutes a day for a week.) AVERTING DEPRESSION Paul Krugman said it so much more clearly than I did Friday. Congress really needs to do this – and err on the side of too much spending, not too little. RECOVERY.GOV Take four minutes to listen to your President make the case. Especially the part about oversight, accountability, and recovery.gov. And then take 13 minutes more to hear Virginia Governor and DNC Chair Tim Kaine elaborate and take questions.
The Stimulus Package February 6, 2009March 12, 2017 But first . . . LOVE WILL PREVAIL Have you got three minutes, fifty-four seconds for this really nice song and video? It aims to prevent 18,000 marriages from being torn asunder. FOR EXAMPLE Ellen Degeneres’s. She seems so happy describing her wedding – why can’t Ken Starr just accept that she, like any American, has certain inalienable rights; among them, the pursuit of happiness? DANTE AND THE NANNY TAX Gus Johnson: “For Mr. Sullivan to conflate the tax problems of a few nominees with the systemic corruption, malfeasance and incompetence of the past eight years is disingenuous. You should remind your readers of what FDR said in one of his speeches where he quoted Dante. To wit: ‘Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the constant omission of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.’” Dick Theriault: “Of COURSE there is bias. That’s why we have parties in the first place. And as of yesterday when I received my new registration card, I am also a Democrat – after 60 years as a Republican. I probably would still be, if the Current Crop had not totally perverted the principles of the party.” And now . . . THE STIMULUS PACKAGE This is getting serious, folks. If there are a few pieces of the stimulus package you particularly don’t like (preventing STD’s? reseeding the mall?), fine; let’s get rid of them (I think those are already out anyway). But we need to do this, do it big, and do it now. We’ve thrown in tons of tax cuts – too many, in my view . . . a quarter-trillion-dollar nod to our friends on the right side of the aisle. That part, they like. It’s the spending they don’t like. It is criticized either for taking too long to kick in (but trust me: we’ll still need it when it finally does; and the mere anticipation of it has its own salutary effect). Or for being too much (but trust me: it’s going to prove to be not enough; there will be more). Whatever its size or composition, the cost of the package – whether tax cuts or spending – will all be put on the National Credit Card. So the critical thing: what are we borrowing the money for. With the tax cuts, to the extent they are spent at all (most of it will be saved or used to pay down debt), they will largely be spent on things that don’t make us stronger over the long term: A TV made in Korea? A ski trip? More frequent restaurant meals or a new car? More clothes made in China? Apart from these boots (made in Brazil, reduced from $500 to $151*), do you really need more clothes? Consumer spending will give a little temporary bump to the economy and maybe keep some sales clerks and busboys employed a little longer, but what will we have left to show for it? We will have simply borrowed a giant sum of money to spend-beyond-our-means yet a little longer and postpone even greater pain. It’s not spending we should be borrowing for, it’s investing. If the money goes to weatherize homes and modernize our electric grid and build windmills and digitize health records and fund basic science and rebuild our aging schools and bridges (and dredge our waterways), we will have a more efficient, competitive, prosperous economy to show for it. And the latter frame is one people can come to understand and have confidence in. Confidence trumps fear and leads to a virtuous cycle. (As they can also understand and perhaps take some comfort in the portions of the bill designed to keep cops on the street, firefighters employed, and unemployment benefits extended.) The former tax-cut/consumer-spending frame: “Don’t worry, we’re all going to go out to the mall and spend an extra $2,000 that Uncle Sam borrows to give us. We don’t have to change our behavior at all! We just have to accept more tax cuts and start spending again – that will get America back on track.” The latter investing/infrastructure frame: “Don’t worry, we’re going to go through some tough times, yes, but with the clear goals of becoming energy independent – saving multiple trillions each decade we’d otherwise send overseas for oil and gas – and becoming leaders in and exporters of green technology . . . and rationalizing our healthcare delivery system to make it more efficient . . . and modernizing our infrastructure . . . and improving the competitiveness of our schools and their graduates . . . and maintaining our lead in higher education and basic research . . . and hang in there, because through that hard, smart effort America will get back on track.” You can tell which frame sings more true to me. And no, not all the stuff of that second frame is in the current bill; but as I say, this is not going to be over any time soon. There will be more to come. * And take another 20% off with your “FF20” promo code at checkout.
Fair Questions February 5, 2009March 12, 2017 RETIRED MARINE GENERAL QUESTIONS OBAMA He and others dispute the need to study it any further: the nation will be stronger if its gay and lesbian citizens are allowed to serve openly. (“Dr. Laura Miller, a well-respected military sociologist who co-authored a study with the late Charles Moskos, author of the gay ban, said, ‘you don’t need a commission to tell you that you need to retain every able, trained, experienced and productive member at a time when both the stakes and the manpower needs are high.’”) Five years ago, 91% of people aged 18-29 supported allowing gays to serve openly. The number is likely even higher today. CONSERVATIVE READER QUESTIONS *ME!* Matt Sullivan: “I always enjoy, and usually strongly disagree with, your political commentary. I am writing for the first time to ask you a few simple questions: If four of President Bush’s top appointees had failed to pay their taxes properly, would that have been the subject of one of your columns? If following the last election there had been a republican governor of Arizona attempting to sell the very Senate seat that President McCain had vacated, would you have found that to be worthy of a column or two about the obviously corrupt Republican party? If Charles Rangel happened to be a Republican, would his residence shenanigans catch your attention? I suspect that if you honestly considered those questions, your answer would be yes. In some ways, reading your columns all of these years makes me feel as though I know you. If I did know you, I would say to you, ‘Andy, you lose your credibility with reasonable people when you ignore corruption on your side of the aisle.’” ☞ Fair questions. On Blagojevich, it goes without saying (except you’re saying I should say it anyway, so here goes) . . . the guy should be impeached and kicked out and disowned by President Obama and by Democrats everywhere – and he has been. All those things have happened. With alacrity. So I don’t know what I would really be able to add. I assume right-wing radio is skewering him, as it should; but so are John Stewart and Stephen Colbert and Keith Olbermann and everyone else. I don’t see in Blagojevich’s behavior, even added to the behavior of the Louisiana Congressman who a few years ago put $90,000 in his freezer, a “culture of corruption” within our Party. (Now that we have the White House and Congress, it’s doubtless something to guard against – power corrupts. But I like to think we will do a good job avoiding it, as we did the last time we had the White House. The ethics guidelines President Obama issued his first full day at work set a new standard in that regard. They are significant.) If Blagojevich had corrupted the Justice Department but we had failed to make it right . . . or if he had held secret energy meetings and we had refused – even under subpoena – to disclose the names of the participants . . . or if he had blown the cover of a CIA agent and we had tried to keep him in office . . . well, in any of those scenarios I hope I would have gotten up on my high horse and railed against the injustice. But where’s the injustice here? He’s been impeached and faces trial, exactly as should have happened. As to the four (I thought it was three?) appointees with tax issues, I wouldn’t use the word corruption as you have. I’m corrupt if I accept bribes and let you water down the cement in the footbridge. I’m corrupt if I accept bribes to write you a tax loophole. But am I corrupt if I paid all my income taxes but didn’t realize, when I was employed by the International Monetary Fund, that – for tax purposes – I was self-employed? The Senate seemed to think that, in context, this was excusable. Am I corrupt – or just negligent – if I failed to pay employment taxes on household help? It’s important to acknowledge that “negligent” isn’t good either. But it’s also important to note that Ms. Killefer withdrew her candidacy. Similarly, am I corrupt – or just negligent – if I paid all the taxes due on my money income, but failed to realize it would cost me a fortune in taxes to accept the use of a car and driver? Your call; but it’s important to note that Senator Daschle has withdrawn his candidacy . . . and that the President has gone on national TV promptly to say that he – President Obama – screwed up by supporting that candidacy once the tax issue was known. I don’t see this as a pattern of corruption. I see it as a lot of really good (but human) people trying to do their best for their country. Including Charlie Rangel, who would appear at the very least to owe New York a really big apology, and maybe more. All that said, there is inevitably a bias in this column. For those just joining us or who’ve never clicked the Bio tab, I am a Democrat. SWITCH GRASS Dan Nachbar: “I agree that there is no ‘baby’ with corn-based ethanol. However cellulosic ethanol is a very worthy approach. With cellulosic, fuel can be made from darn near any plant matter – in particular all the leaves and stalks that go to waste today after we’ve harvested the edible bits from crops. So, with ethanol, cellulosic is the baby and corn-based is the bath water. The distinction is key and yet the press almost never manages to grasp it.” ☞ Right you are.
Rock Stars February 4, 2009August 20, 2020 NOT SO FAST, SPARKY Dan Nachbar: “I know you get excited but you really must control your enthusiasm and not oversell every alternative energy technology you encounter. This week’s example, thin-film photovoltaics, is indeed a fascinating and promising technology for certain applications. But given the underlying physics, even using very optimistic assumptions, one may be able to generate 10% of the juice needed for the average office building merely by coating its surface with film. That’s still a good thing to do; but uncritically repeating their salespeople’s wild claims of self-sufficiency inevitably leads to disappointment and a tendency to throw the baby out with the bathwater (as happened recently with the media’s love then loathing of ethanol.) Just a bit of restraint and objectivity will avoid undermining the very technologies you are trying to foster.” ☞ In my own limited defense, I never thought ethanol was a good idea and still don’t see any “baby” in it, at least from Iowa corn. But whichever specific solar technologies wind up on top, it seems to me cheap clean energy likely will be a reality before too long. A decade or two or three, not a century. Look how long it took us to get here from the Apple II. No time at all! And the dazzlement is only speeding up. Soon we may even be able to put a man on the moon. CLINTON AT DAVOS – TWO FOR THE PRICE OF ONE? Actually, it’s even more than two. President Obama is a rock star. Michelle Obama is a rock star. Their daughters are rock stars. The Secretary of State is a rock star. Her husband is a rock star. Click here for a report on his visit to Davos. (If the VP is not fully a rock star, it’s only because the bar is set so high. Watch Senator Biden’s “farewell” Senate address for a sense of this remarkable, and deeply decent, man.)
Throw a House Party to Cover Australia in Photovoltaic Film February 3, 2009March 12, 2017 CHEAP ENERGY As suggested here from time to time, if we can just get through the next decade or two, things could be sweet. Imagine, for example, a cheap film on skyscraper windows that generated enough electricity to power the whole building. As described here, an early version is already being sold. (I had to click the link two or three times to get it to display – but it did.) By Barney Gimbel January 27, 2009: 1:20 PM ET (Fortune Magazine) — Inside a converted textile mill in Lowell, Mass., Rick Hess unfurls a roll of brown plastic film attached to a small electric meter. “Three volts,” he says, smiling. “And that’s just from the light in this room. Imagine what this reads when we’re outside.” Hess, who runs solar upstart Konarka, is showing off Power Plastic, a new lightweight, flexible, and cheap material that converts indoor and outdoor light into electricity. Think of it as a solar panel that rolls up like camera film. “Soon you may not even need batteries,” Hess says, holding a prototype of a portable device that will recharge your cellphone in an hour. “We can put this stuff anywhere.” . . . ☞ So take heart. With a modicum of good sense (not a given, but surely a possibility), we’ll get through all this, and our kids will live better than we have. Especially if the quality of life is not measured primarily in terms of the size of your house and your car. LOSING AUSTRALIA? But the challenges are certainly daunting. For example, we may need a lot of that film (or some other breakthrough) to power desalinization plants to rescue a parched Australia. It appears she is in trouble. ATTEND OR HOST A RECOVERY PLAN HOUSE PARTY THIS WEEKEND? We’re all in this together. So if you want to be part of the discussion, click here. But first, for a quick overview of “the plan,” click here. SARAH PALIN AND RUSH LIMBAUGH Intensely popular in certain some quarters, they are the de facto leaders of the Republican Party. According to this in Salon, “A Rasmussen poll out today found that fully 55 percent of Republicans polled think their party should be “more like” Palin.”
Enter Your Zip Code to Volunteer Or Recruit Volunteers of Your Own February 2, 2009March 12, 2017 I HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS! As reported in the New York Times, Honest Tea is now all but the official drink of the White House: Mr. Obama has also maintained the longstanding presidential tradition of weekly lunches with his vice president. For Mr. Obama, lunch generally means a cheeseburger, chicken or fish in his small dining room off the Oval Office. There is also a new addition to White House cuisine: the refrigerators are stocked with the president’s favorite organic brew: Honest Tea, in Mr. Obama’s preferred flavors of Black Forest Berry and Green Dragon. ☞ Now, if we could only get the Republicans on board with this. BIPARTISANSHIP It’s way too early to give up on bipartisanship, so there’s a fine line to be walked when it comes to criticizing Republicans for rejecting it. But in his latest nationally syndicated column, Bill Press expresses the frustration the Administration must feel. And don’t miss Frank Rich. RECESSION HUMOR “The economy’s getting worse. Home Depot announced that they’re laying off 7,000 employees… which is interesting because I’ve been to Home Depot, and I didn’t even know they had employees.” – Jimmy Kimmel US AIR SURVIVORS: SO GRATEFUL TO BE ALIVE, THEY MAY SUE What is going ON here, people? I don’t even know where to start. (“You’re going to crash me into the water, and you’re going to tell me all I get is [$5,000 and] and an upgrade?” asked Antonio Sales, 20, who was traveling with the University of South Carolina’s track team. “That’s more of an ‘OK, you’re not dead, I’ll give you something to hold on to.’ It’s not enough at all.” Teammate Gabrielle Glenn, 20, was more blunt: “That’s it. They should sue.”) CHRISTIAN GROUP AFFIRMS: ONLY ONE PATH TO HEAVEN Sorry, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus – as made clear here, God has no room for you in Heaven. He may have worked some miracles for Moses; but that was then, this is now. It’s not enough that you lead a life of constructive citizenship, kindness, integrity, and love. If you want in, there’s only one way. LOOKING FOR A WAY TO HELP? The President puts it in context in 30 seconds. And then you can enter your zip code here. Or create your own event and recruit your own volunteers here.