WheelTug On CNBC August 8, 2013December 29, 2016 Did you happen to catch WheelTug CEO Isaiah Cox on CNBC’s Squawk Box yesterday morning? It was another in their series on “The Disrupters” — disruptive technologies. And it began with a quote from Bob Crandall, a dean of the airline industry who ran American Airlines from 1982 to 1998. WheelTug is “attractive and viable.” He’s recommended it to people in the industry. He’s even considering investing in it himself, which, if he did, would now apparently cost him $180 per WheelTug share (the previous private placement round, at $90, just having closed). We still have a long way to go — and may never get there — but it’s encouraging to know that each publicly-traded Borealis share represents ownership of, among other things, approximately one (non-tradeable) WheelTug share. And that the “other things” could one day have value, too. Because, as you’re doubtless sick of hearing me remind you (but it just makes me feel so happy to think about it), if this little five-inch wide motor that fits inside a wheel can drive a fully loaded airliner at 20 miles an hour, might its underlying technology not have application elsewhere? In cars? Or elevators? Or forklifts? And if this Borealis technology is real and can ultimately produce value for us shareholders (no guarantee of that! invest only with money you can truly afford to lose! use “limit orders”!), then might not some of its other technologies, and perhaps even its Canadian iron ore deposits, one day prove to have value as well? Given my obsession with all this, I probably watched the interview more closely than most. The first thing I noticed was that our CEO does not seem nearly as weird as our company (you will recall, for example, that our company is headquartered, at least nominally, in Gibraltar, and recently filed a 1,200-page prospectus to begin trading its shares on the Prague Stock Exchange — doesn’t everyone? — except that so far no shares seem to have traded). He seems presentable, amiable, and eminently rational. Given the time constraint, he didn’t even mention the most basic of selling points: that with our little motor, the pilot no longer has to wait for a human driving a $1 million tug to back his jet out from its gate. Nor the savings from not sucking into an engine the occasional hammer or suitcase accidentally left on the tarmac. Nor the diminished air and noise pollution. Nor a host of less obvious advantages. But he packed an awful lot into the time he had — and did a wonderful job highlighting a key difference with the competition: with our solution, the airline puts up no money and can have the wheel removed at any time it doesn’t live up to expectations or some better system comes along. With Safran/Honeywell’s solution, a disinstall would be a lot harder. Which may be one of the reasons the competition has thus far signed up no airlines and we’ve signed up eleven. I keep trying to figure out what could go wrong. Maybe GE or Boeing or someone is about to reveal an even better solution — and without violating any of the patents protecting WheelTug and its motor. Maybe Boeing and Airbus will simply never allow the cash savings to the airlines, the time savings to the passengers, the capacity savings to the airports, and the environmental savings to our planet that WheelTug would confer. So there are certainly risks. This is a speculation. Yet if this were a normal, NASDAQ-listed-type speculation — a junior drug company, for example — one could easily imagine its sporting, say, a $500 million cap, as investors gambled that, well, they just might pull it off (in which case, it could be worth billions). Currently, with Borealis around $11 a share, it sports a $55 million market cap, up from the $15 million market cap of 14 years ago, when I first wrote about it. As usual, I can think of no better end note than . . . at the very least . . . . . . isn’t this fun? Enjoy the video!
People Versus Copper August 7, 2013August 6, 2013 $15 AN HOUR – THE DISCUSSION CONTINUES Artie: “I’m somewhat shocked by your reader’s suggestion that we let ‘the market’ determine wages. We sort of had that earlier in our history with the slaughterhouses, the coal mines, the migrant farmers, etc., and it took the blood and violence and the unions to somewhat level the playing field and get people a liveable wage. [And weekends! We got weekends! — A.T.] Now that the unions are being decimated, we’re heading back to the good old days. . . . Another interesting aspect of this argument is that there are other markets in play: I would contend that Wall Street is forcing a hard heartedness on corporations that perhaps exceeds what they would manifest were they privately run. Executives are expected to seek financial growth consistent with market ‘expectations,’ both as a condition of their continuing employment and as a determinant of their compensation. This kind of pressure, especially in the midst of an economic downturn, but even well before, has forced downsizing as well as cuts in compensation and in benefits, most notably health care insurance and pensions. As my former CEO, Verizon’s Ivan Seidenberg used to say, ‘We’re driving costs out of the business.’ He made it sound so benign.” Patrick Johnson: “I still strongly disagree with you on this. I trust you don’t believe the government should set a minimum price for a copper pipe or a share of IBM stock so why is it a good idea to set a price for labor? If government setting the prices of things was the path to prosperity wouldn’t Mao’s China and the Soviet Union been powerhouse economies? I respect anyone who works. However, sadly I don’t believe that all work adds enough value to pay everyone who works at a level to support a high consumption lifestyle. And if it doesn’t add sufficient value, how can an employer pay a higher wage level and stay in business? I want work to be valued and compensated but I only think market prices work.” ☞ Well, in the chasm between Patrick (my esteemed performance-tracker, by the way, in case you forgot his great contribution to this page) and Artie (who said most of what I would have said just now in response to Patrick) lies a very important difference of views. As a centrist type, I am all about rejecting the extremes (as I’m sure Patrick and Artie would, too) — communism at one end, Darwinian capitalism at the other — and finding a good balance in between. That’s why it’s frustrating yet oddly validating when President Obama is simultaneously lambasted as a Marxist from the right and “Republican lite” from the left. People are not copper. Copper doesn’t suffer if it’s sold cheap; copper’s children don’t lack for the investments in their future that ultimately benefit us all (by increasing the odds they will grow up to be productive citizens and good neighbors); and we have no special interest in seeing copper triumph. If copper can be replaced by a more cost-efficient material (especially when you price into your cost calculations the “externalities” our free markets rarely do), that’s totally fine. We don’t want the government setting prices for everything. But we do want a strong middle class, because, as Nick Hanauer so eloquently reminds us in that short video everyone in America needs to watch, it is the middle class — not the rich — who are the job creators. And most of us want a society in which, if you work hard and play by the rules, you can have the basics you need for a decent life. Which these days includes things like an Internet connection that no one would have dreamed of a century ago. A decent life shouldn’t be handed to you; but working at a fast food restaurant isn’t a walk on the beach. (I know: I’ve just taken a walk on the beach — like five minutes ago — and greatly prefer that to tending the boiling oil at McDonald’s, which I would pay a lot more than $7.25 not to have to do.) Those of us who patronize those restaurants are doing so voluntarily, which means we value the work of the people employed there. Do we want our employees — in a sense, for the few minutes we’re getting our oriental chicken salad, they are working for us — to be paid even less than the current $7.25 minimum wage so our bill might be a few pennies cheaper, or our dividends, as McDonald’s shareholders, a few pennies more? That’s what Republicans — who mostly oppose the minimum wage altogether, let alone raising it — would like to see. Which means that in a bad economy, with people desperate for work, keeping the government out of this would allow wages to fall from $7.25 to perhaps $6 or $5 or $4 . . . and that would also likely put downward pressure on wages of those currently earning modestly above minimum wage. Which would likely hurt the economy (less buying power), leading to larger deficits and less job creation. There was no minimum wage in 1929, which may be one of the reasons the middle-class-decimating Depression was as bad as it was. When you think about it, if you’re okay with “collective bargaining” — as even some Republicans are (a third of union members voted for Romney) — isn’t the minimum wage . . . sort of, vaguely . . . the ultimate collective bargain? We the people, through our elected representatives, decide that — for a variety of reasons, both moral and self-interested — it would be a good thing to set a floor on wages. If you buy that, then the question simply becomes: how high should that floor be? As we’ve been discussing these past couple of weeks (here and here), $15 — though higher than I first thought practical — might actually make a great deal of sense.
The Pope August 6, 2013August 5, 2013 Last week’s remarks by Pope Francis were a really big deal. Janet Tavakoli: “The Pope’s remarks are a huge change from Ratzinger’s hate-speech. Moreover the Pope accepts homosexual priests (albeit wants them to honor their vows). He also made it clear that he not only accepts homosexuals but will forgive priests who break their vows. In the weird world of Catholicism this is unprecedented. An earthquake. (I was interested to hear the remarks of New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan. The Cardinal claims ‘acts’ are a sin, but not the person. Well, guess what? The Church would say the same thing about an unmarried man or woman — me — engaging in heterosexual acts.) Although the Church doesn’t recognize gay marriage (yet), the Pope’s remarks were a bombshell. And the Pope says he’s not judging people.” Janet, who knows a little bit about finance, and who has written a novel about the Jesuits (Tag line: “when control of the Vatican is at stake — money talks, and nobody plays fair”), was particularly interested in the Pope’s remarks (here, at 3:11) about Monsignor Battista Ricca. Ricca is alleged to have had an affair with a Swiss Guard, among others. “The Pope appointed him to clean up corruption in the Vatican Bank,” Janet emailed me, “so of course, Ricca had to be blackmailed. The Pope made it pretty clear that 1) his internal investigation did not match with printed reports of Ricca’s having real-time gay partners, but that 2) even if the reports of his past life and breaking vows are true, God forgives and forgets, so those looking to use this as leverage against Ricca are out of luck. In one swoop, the Pope disarmed them. So a priest is gay? Who is the Pope to judge. So he had a wild past? If he asked for forgiveness and received it, the past is just that.” Janet imagines “it may have gone like this: Ricca agreed to be the pope’s investigator, and others sought to neutralize Ricca with embarrassing information — real or fabricated. The pope just said: ‘So what, even if it was once true? You can’t blackmail me, because I’m not embarrassed about anything, and Ricca shouldn’t be either; Ricca has my support. Write anything you like. Then try to get a better life.'” “A Pope,” Janet says, “has never done anything close to this in the history of the Church.” WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD Really.
Ronald Reagan Supports the $15 Minimum Wage August 5, 2013August 5, 2013 $15 AN HOUR The Daily Beast came up with this really great McPoverty calculator. You enter how much extra you’d be willing to pay for a Big Mac and it tells you how high McDonald’s could then raise wages. I entered 18 cents and got this: The average price of a Big Mac is $4.56, and many fast-food workers make $7.25 an hour. I’d be willing to pay 18 cents more for my Big Mac. Congratulations! Thanks to you, workers are now making $13.07 an hour, or $27,184.04 a year. (Not great, but at least above the poverty line.) (Presumably, they are figuring you’d be willing to see all prices on all the menu items hiked by the same small percentage, not just the Big Mac.) Alvin Bluthman: “When Ronald Reagan was President of the Screen Actors Guild, and on strike for an increase in ‘scale,’ he urged the public to understand that what he was seeking would increase the price of a movie ticket by less than one cent per ticket.” ☞ And here’s the kicker: when Ronald Reagan was elected President of the Screen Actors Guild, movie tickets cost 15 cents. So an extra penny was 7.5%. “Less than a penny” might have been 5%. Which is 23 cents on a Big Mac. Which, according to the McPoverty calculator, could bring McDonald’s wages up well past $15 an hour. President Obama should be calling not for a $10.10 minimum wage phased in over 3 years (although I’m very glad he has) but for a $15-tied-to-wage-inflation minimum wage phased in over, perhaps, 60 months. (Give employers the choice of doing it monthly or, if their payroll systems don’t allow, annually, halfway through each year.) Or do you know what? The Fast Food Association of America, or whatever it’s called, should just adopt this on their own. That’s what Henry Ford would have done. And neither he nor Ronald Reagan was an enemy of capitalism. SIGA Jim Leff: “Dengue Fever is a scary, scary thing. It’s starting to go epidemic in the New World, and a cure would be a much bigger moneymaker than SIGA’s smallpox drug.” ☞ So the stock jumped a little on Friday’s very early-stage announcement that they’re working on one. And perhaps on the news that the company suing SIGA has merged with another small company, prompting Wedbush (“Ranked 2012 Top Stock Picking Firm”) to reiterate its $11 price target for SIGA.
$15 an Hour August 2, 2013August 1, 2013 BOREALIS In the Keep Hope Alive department, comes this headline yesterday: WheelTug Wins ATW Magazine 2013 Eco-Technology of the Year Award. Those of us who’ve bought the Borealis lottery ticket (as I used to think of it, though by now the odds seem a little less long) — with money we can truly afford to lose — may see this as one more inch in the long road forward. THE MINIMUM WAGE Have you watched or read the President’s Chattanooga speech? “A Better Bargain for Middle Class Jobs” — I plan to post the transcript Monday. We’ve made a ton of progress since 2009. But there’s so much more we should do — the infrastructure investments, so compellingly — but also raising the minimum wage. The President wants to raise it over the next three years from $7.25 to $10.10 an hour. But what would that do to business? Walmart’s low-wage policy has produced everyday low prices for consumers — and wealth for the Walton family nearly equal to the collective wealth of the bottom 50 million American families combined, according to this must-read article. Think about that for a second. Or perhaps for 50 million seconds. Got the picture? Okay: so, according to that same article, if Walmart paid all its employees a minimum of $12 an hour — not quite 60% what Costco pays its average employee — and if all that wage-hike got passed through to consumers, with none of it affecting Walmart’s profits . . . which as an occasional Walmart shareholder I wouldn’t terribly mind — Walmart prices would rise barely 1%. So the $10.10 President Obama is calling for would have an even tinier effect. Truly not the end of the world for America’s shoppers. A few weeks ago, I offered “The Capitalist’s Case for a $15 Minimum Wage” — Nick Hanauer being that capitalist. Many of you replied with thoughtful concerns. Patrick Johnson: “I am wary of the government setting the price of anything, including any specific good or the price of labor. The market is generally the most efficient at setting market clearing prices. When government tries to do it, they frequently get it wrong resulting in gluts or shortages.” ☞ Wary is good and appropriate. The question is: would raising the minimum wage to $15 (and then indexing that to inflation) be a net positive, as capitalist Nick Hanauer argues? I think he makes a strong case that it would. Drew Bubser: “Hanauer’s statement . . . ‘If the minimum wage had simply tracked U.S. productivity gains since 1968, it would be $21.72 an hour — three times what it is now’ . . . is a canard. Most productivity gains have been in manufacturing, farming and transportation, not the low-wage sector. A more honest index would be the inflation rate, where in 1968 the minimum wage was $1.60, resulting in a 2013 minimum wage of $10.71.” ☞ I agree. I thought this was an unnecessarily aggressive piece of Hanauer’s argument. I wish he had qualified it with some acknowledgement of your point. Then again, (a) even $10.71 is still more than the President and H.R. 1010 call for (the more so when you add in the next three years’ likely inflation, which will make for an even bigger gap between the proposed $10.10 and the likely by-then $11.75 or so inflation-adjusted 1968 number); and (b) to the extent the nation has become more productive, why shouldn’t even its least-skilled citizens share in that success? No one is saying the guy who trims a CEO’s hedge or makes the hotel bed of a vacationing software engineer or cleans the toilet of plant manager should get paid as much as the CEO or the engineer or the manager. But don’t even the poorest members of our society, with the worst, most unpleasant jobs, contribute to our happiness? I really appreciate not having to clean my own toilet or make my own hotel bed or trim my own hedge. (Note to self: get a hedge.) Douglas Kretzmann: “Here in Oz [Australia], the minimum wage is indexed to the age of the worker. So a 16-yr-old earns about US minimum wage, but after the age of 20, the minimum wage is also a living wage, about $17/hour with paid annual leave and sick leave. For casual employees who don’t get leave, the rate rises. Non-standard hours (outside of 8am-5pm) also raise the rate. My nephew working part-time at Ikea gets $23/hour, which covers his living costs while he completes advanced degrees in electrical engineering and physics. This strikes me as a remarkably humane way of managing the minimum wage — I’d like to see the US emulate this. Dream Big!” ☞ Ah, but won’t companies go out of business if they have to pay higher wages? Or just replace workers with machines? And what about inflation? Walmart might be able to manage $12 an hour — see above — but $15? These are crucial questions, so the first answer would presumably be to phase in the increases to Hanauer’s proposed $15 gradually, to give the economy time to adjust; and the second answer would be to note the distinction between minimum-wage jobs in industries where we compete globally (of which, Hanauer says, there are relatively few) and minimum wage jobs that can’t be outsourced. In the latter case, so long as all the fast food places (say) have to pay their employees more, no one fast-food restaurant would find itself at a meaningful disadvantage. Fast-food places as a whole might be disadvantaged relative to supermarkets (or to simply eating less*); motels might be disadvantaged relative to staying with friends (or to couch surfing — here! or even here! — or to staying home** — but what if Hanauer is right? What if greater prosperity at the bottom of the ladder led not just to less suffering, less grinding poverty, less despair — but also to a more vibrant economy? (As in the old notion of Henry Ford’s paying his workers enough so they could afford to buy what they were making.) What our Republican friends seem to want is an economic race to the bottom for all but a privileged few: kill the unions, kill the minimum wage, raise interest rates on student loans . . . but cut taxes on the rich, pay CEO’s whatever their interlocking boards of directors decide they’re worth (354 times their average employee last year, according to this, up from “just” 42 times in 1982) . . . and it will all work out for the best. But maybe not. Maybe a vibrant middle class lifts boats — including yachts — better than an ever more powerful plutocracy. (One of the funnier bits in BUYER AND CELLAR*** has Alex making a reference to having to take your shoes off at the airport and Barbra simply staring back, uncomprehending. Why would you have to do that?) This is the point the President has been making for years — it’s more effective to build an economy from the middle out rather than the top down. It’s the point of Nick Hanauer’s “job creators” video. And it’s why his proposal for a $15 minimum wage may not be as far-fetched as it sounds. *Eating less: good for your health, good for you budget, good for placing less strain on the planet. ** The staycation! The virtual meeting! — also good for your budget and the planet. *** Full disclosure: yada yada yada. Go see it.
I’m Stuck! The Infrastructure App August 1, 2013July 31, 2013 So our national infrastructure gets a D+ from the American Society of Civil Engineers — and we have millions of unemployed people eager to work modernizing it. If we contracted with private enterprises to hire them to do the work those people would stop drawing government checks and start paying taxes and their added income would juice up their consumption and boost the economy. Repairing bridges is so much cheaper than fixing them once they’ve collapsed (what with adding 4 hours to everyone’s commute for eight months, and stuff like that) . . . but the Republicans in Congress refuse to pass the American Jobs Act or anything else that would take advantage of today’s long-term interest rates to make this completely crucial investment in our future. To my way of thinking, their refusal to do this falls little short of treason, but they don’t much care for my way of thinking (even though Lincoln and Eisenhower, both Republicans, were two of the nation’s greatest infrastructure presidents ever, and the business community and rich people would so benefit along with everyone else if we got to work getting back into shape) . . . so at least, now, there’s an app for that: I’m Stuck! You put it on your phone and, if enough of us use it, drive Congress CRAZY until they finally cave in to blindingly compelling common sense. (Enough of us probably won’t do it, but we should try anyway. And how do we report the giant problems we don’t see until they happen, like that bridge collapse, levee breach, dam burst or power black-out? The good news, for those of us long-term holders of GLDD, is that our inland waterways and harbors need a lot of dredging.) McKinsey — no left-wing consultancy — estimates that we’re falling $160 billion short in our spending on infrastructure. Aren’t the Republicans supposed to be the stern parents who get you to do your homework and eat your vegetables while the Democrats smoke weed? Well, the economic equivalent of doing your homework and eating your vegetables is: maintaining your infrastructure. Delaying gratification to invest in a brighter future.
Dodd-Frank: Good for Consumers, Good for the Country July 30, 2013July 31, 2013 POPE HOPE My brother-in-law the gay Catholic priest is thrilled, and I dare say Jesus would have been, too: “Pope Francis & Gay Priests: A ‘Sea Change’ Is At Hand As Pontiff Reaches Out To LGTB Community.” DODD-FRANK HOPE On the third anniversary of its passage, only 39% of the massive Dodd-Frank financial reform bill’s regulations have been completed. But watch former Senator Dodd and former Congressman Frank discuss it. Just as people are beginning to realize all the good Obamacare may do them and the country, so it looks as though Dodd-Frank may have been a solid piece of work as well, despite the best efforts of the G.O.P. to kill, gut, stymie and neuter it. BUBBLE SOCCER Seriously: can you imagine anything more fun than this? I want one of these thing for when I ride the subway. “BUYER AND CELLAR” So here was the original New York Times review in April — “seriously funny” — and here is the front page of the New York Times Arts & Leisure section yesterday, calling it “the most talked about new comedy of the season . . . It goes down as easily and tastily as lemon sorbet, and the only pain in your stomach it creates is the kind that comes from laughing too hard.” I own a piece of this show. Buy a ticket!
Mosquitos July 29, 2013 FORGET AFRICA — I WANT THIS IN MIAMI! Okay, don’t forget Africa — at all. But seriously . . . how great would this be (unless you’re a mosquito)? Mike Molletta: “While I am on opposite sides of your political view, I enjoy your hopeful outlook for the future and thought of you when I saw this. Entrepreneurial innovation that helps others is what we need more of as opposed to financial engineering.” ☞ Amen, brother. High frequency mosquito repellant from my iPhone seems no more worthwhile than high-frequency trading by Goldman Sachs. But this thing? It just might work! (And, BTW, it’s not possible you are on the opposite side of my political view. I’ll bet there’s a lot more we agree on than disagree.) T-TIP Gently stick a T-TIP in our economic ear — a U.S.-European Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership — possibly coming next year — and, as described in Richard Rosecrance’s Sunday Times op-ed, add half a percent of growth to both giant economies . . . which, especially over decades, is not as small as it sounds. (If we otherwise might have expected 2.5% annual growth, say, adding half a percent, to 3%, adds 20% to the growth rate.) One more reason to be hopeful. WT Speaking of which, here’s an item on WheelTug from airlinereporter.com, a site “based in Seattle with writers located around the world” which has a rosy disposition of its own: “Many people see airlines as an ‘evil’ business and that flying ‘is not like it used to be,'” they write; “AirlineRepoter.com tries to remind folks that flying is still a magical experience and it is not like the way it used to be; in many cases it is better.” Certainly a load safer and cheaper and less environmentally taxing than it was in the golden age, and with better entertainment and productivity options, to boot. Now, if only we didn’t have to wait for a tug to back us out from the gate; and if only we could board and deplane in little more than half the time, by using the rear door as well as the front (“the WheelTug twist“). Just might happen.
Banning Nipples July 26, 2013July 26, 2013 BALANCE Bruce: “I appreciated your response to Cat. I hope that we all think ourselves ‘fair’ yet acknowledge the existence of bias. Nonetheless, it is a painful reminder to me of the success of Karl Rove’s ‘both sides lie’ strategy: Craft the most extreme, false, and self-enriching position possible. Shout it as loudly as possible. Use unofficial sources to turn it into ‘official’ reality. Spend time confusing people. Then simply say, ‘Oh, of course we might be extreme, but that is because both sides lie. We are just as correct as they are.’ As you allude, on most of these issues, the Republican argument is that the Earth is flat. The Democrat argument is that the Earth is round. Both sides lie. The Earth is not a perfect sphere, but rather somewhat ovoid. The Republican tactic is not to convince skeptics that the Earth is flat, it is just to convince the faithful that they are being lied to when told that it is round.” It’s what the tobacco companies (long defended by Republicans) did for decades. It’s what the climate change deniers (almost all of them Republicans*) do. It’s what the wealthy-are-the-job-creators-so-cutting-their-taxes-helps-the-middle-class* proponents (Republicans!) do. It’s what George W. Bush did when he insisted that “by far the vast majority of my tax cuts go to the bottom end of the spectrum.” It’s what Bush and Cheney did to launch the disastrous Iraq war. It’s what Mitt Romney did in his very first campaign ad. It’s what the Republicans are working so hard to do to discredit the virtues of Obamacare (it’s not perfect, but a big step forward). What they did to destroy ACORN, thus shifting the balance of power yet further from the already powerless. But I digress. *Including their House Science & Technology Committee chair. **Not true! Not true! Not true! NIPPLES If you thought North Carolina was bad yesterday, watch Rachel’s five-minute follow-up: Let’s say you wanted to ban nipples. You want to make it a crime for which a woman would serve 30 days in jail if anybody saw her nipple in public for any reason? Let’s say you wanted to do that. Let’s say also you wanted counties and cities in the United States of America to be able to establish an official state religion. Here, in this country. Let’s say you want to make teachers in your state teach seventh graders . . . that if you have an abortion, you’re not going to be able to have a baby ever again. Let’s say you want all those things, plus you want to throw 70,000 people off their unemployment benefits immediately, close down 15 of 16 abortion clinics in the state, take $90 million out of the public schools and give that money to the private schools and reorganize the fiscal structure of the state to give millionaires in the state a check for $10,000 each. Oh, oh, oh, oh! And also you want there to be loaded guns in playgrounds. What could possibly go wrong with loaded guns in playgrounds? So say that’s what you have to offer. If that is what you have to offer, congratulations: you are a North Carolina Republican state legislator in the year 2013, and you are in charge there now. You have a Republican governor there, a veto-proof Republican super majority in the house and the senate, should your Republican governor ever want to veto any of your ideas. But why would he? Your ideas are all so good! Especially the nipple one. If this is the kind of agenda you are working on, then the single most important thing you’re working on is what the North Carolina legislature worked on today and into tonight. A version of this is already passed the house. Tonight, it started to get through the senate where Republicans are also in control. Democrats are fighting tooth and nail with everything they’ve got, trying to stall this bill as much as they can, but they are in the minority, and this thing is expected to pass the North Carolina senate by tomorrow and then it will soon be on its way to the governor’s office. Out of everything North Carolina Republicans have been doing this year, this is the most important thing. Because if your agenda is nipple banning and the establishment of state religion and giving millionaires $10,000 checks, then the one thing you are probably worried about with that agenda is what people are going to think of you once you start trying all this stuff, right? The bill that is moving through the North Carolina legislature right now, tonight, negates any reason for Republicans to worry about what people think of them. It is the insulation for everything else they want to do. When the Supreme Court last month gutted the Voting Rights Act, that meant for North Carolina the state no longer needed the go-ahead from the federal justice department if they wanted to change the state’s voting laws. . . . At a time when we have had a lot of draconian voter suppression efforts by Republicans in a lot of states, this [one in North Carolina] is kind of the big kahuna. They are going after early voting. They are going after voter registration drives. For college students, not only will you not be able to use your college i.d. to allow you to vote, but if you vote where you go to college, the state wants to tax your parents as a penalty for you voting in your college town. The voter i.d. part specifically is called the most draconian voter i.d. law in the country. If your i.d. is from public assistance, you can’t use that to vote. If you’re i.d. is because you’re a public worker, because you work for a city or you work for a county in North Carolina, you cannot even use that i.d. to vote. If it’s from the college, you can’t use that. Essentially the idea is your i.d. has to say, ‘I’m a Republican’ and then you can use it to vote. Not really, but close. Of everything North Carolina Republicans have rushed through since they took over in November, this is the keystone to all of it. . . . The only way to get away with aggressively unpopular measures that are radically out of step with everything that has happened in your state in modern times is to make sure that nobody can vote you out of office. That’s exactly what Republicans in the North Carolina senate are expected to finish doing tomorrow, and then send to that governor. Watch this space. And all we have to fix this madness in North Carolina and elsewhere is inspire the kind of turn-out in 2014 not normally seen in a midterm election. Easier said than done; but possible. UPDATE: The North Carolina legislature passed the anti-voting bill, to make it as hard as possible for students and the poor and working poor, many of them African American, to vote.
What The S.O.P. Stands For July 25, 2013March 28, 2017 It will not surprise you to know that I thought the President’s speech yesterday was spot on, especially in its focus on putting people back to work modernizing our national infrastructure. Try to find time to watch “A Better Bargain for the Middle Class” . . . and the subsidiary speeches he will be making to flesh out each theme: jobs, education, housing, health care, retirement security and ladders of opportunity. Let us know what you think. # Rachel had two clips Tuesday night your Republican uncle needs to watch. The first was on . . . VOTER SUPPRESSION Watch what the G.O.P. is doing in North Carolina. You will find it hard to believe: . . . [They] are ramming through with basically no debate [a bill that] would [put] an end to same-day voter registration which over 100,000 people used in the state in last November’s election . . . get rid of state support for voter registration drives . . . ban local election officials from extending polling times for an hour if, for example, there’s really long lines still waiting outside . . . lop off a full week of early voting . . . get rid of a program in high schools that reaches out to students who are nearing the age of voting to show them how to be model citizens. . . . We can’t have students registering to vote! We can’t have that! . . . It all goes away under the bill senate Republicans advanced this afternoon. The bill would also require i.d. you never had to show before. An estimated 300,000 registered legal voters in North Carolina will not have that kind of documentation. In an ideal Republican world, it would be just white males with property who voted — as the Founders intended — because so much of the Democratic vote comes from people of color, from women, and from the young and poor who rent rather than own. Well, we’re not going back to 1789. But in virtually every Republican-controlled state — especially now that the Supreme Court has neutered the much-debated and reauthorized Voting Rights Act of 1965 — the G.O.P. (or S.O.P. as I have come to think of today’s incarnation) is working to keep people from voting. What does your Republican uncle think of that? The second clip was on something else important to Republicans . . . HEALTH CARE As aggressively as Republicans are working to make it harder to vote, they are working to block access to affordable health care. Not, certainly, because they want to hurt the sick. Their motives, rather, are (1) to keep Democrats from being seen as having improved tens of millions of lives; (2) to repeal a program that adds 3.8% to the tax on investment income above $250,000, because it is the top 1% — and especially the top 1% of the top 1% — to whom this really matters and to whom the S.O.P. is most fully beholden. To repeat from an earlier column, because I don’t think most people yet get this: At its core, here’s what Obamacare does: it taxes the best off so virtually everyone can get better health care coverage. A terrible idea, from the perspective of the S.O.P. But not a bad idea if you might someday have a preexisting condition or run into the limits of a lifetime cap — or lack health insurance altogether. Or if you like the idea of free preventive care; or the idea of caps on how much of your premium your insurer can keep for itself. Karen Geronymo: “Working 2-3 part time jobs (in healthcare!) for the past 15 years, I have maintained my own health insurance with a $6000-per-person deductible. Despite the fact that I am healthy (thankfully) and take no medicine on a regular basis, my insurance premium (with the same company for the past 5 years) has increased an average of $150/month (yearly), costing me approximately $10,000 per year. That’s crazy! I am looking for some relief as dropping my insurance is not an option that I can afford. I do laugh when I hear someone say that Obamacare is the slippery slope to socialized medicine…considering that most people will be happy to begin ‘receiving’ Medicare when they are of age to do so. Additionally, when someone shows up at the teaching hospital I work in, they receive care regardless of ability to pay….who, but the taxpayer, is paying for that?” Watch this clip. Rachel shows how Republican members of Congress will shortly be working to alarm people, especially seniors, about Obamacare over their summer break — she’s gotten hold of the town-hall playbook they’ll be using. And yet, Rachel says . . . . . . you know, there is a pilot project that has been run in our country on how to implement health reform. The reform law that everybody calls Obamacare is essentially the same thing as the Romneycare health reform that Mitt Romney signed into law and implemented in Massachusetts where I live. Very successful. Very popular. Very effective. She goes on to show how the Romney team sold Massachusetts residents on Romneycare — using pro athletes, among others, to sell the plan — and how Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has used his office to threaten pro athletes not to do the same for Obamacare. But what I love about the clip is Rachel’s interview with Senator Al Franken. What a magnificent senator he has turned out to be (will Senator Jon Stewart be next? Governor Amy Poehler? I’d vote for Tina Fey for anything). Watch, and feel good about Obamacare. GRAPPLES – CORRECTION! Adam’s Apples: “Grapples are not ingeniously ‘cross-bred to taste like a grape.’ They are regular apples infused with grape flavor. Akin to these. Apple breeders are honest hard-working folk who grow great apples that require no additives. The world of apples offers an amazing range of tastes and textures, no chemistry required. Make your way to an orchard or greenmarket this fall to try the real thing.”