Year: 2014

A FUN FACT ABOUT RONALD REAGAN

In his eight years as President — veto power and all — Ronald Reagan added more to the National Debt than all previous presidents combined.  He was not forced to do it to pull the country out of a depression.  He was not forced to do it to fight a world war.  Yet the iconic conservative did it anyway.

Keep that in mind when you hear, as we did from Jim DeMint on “Face the Nation” Sunday, that President Obama may by the time he leaves office do the same thing.

(Though only if you include the $1.5 trillion 2009 debt he inherited from George W. Bush for the fiscal year that began even before he was elected.  And only if you include the fact that, actually, with the deficit falling so fast, he probably won’t.  And he did have a depression to avert; and two Republican wars to inherit, not just an invasion of Granada.)

The Debt as a proportion of GDP was gradually worked down from 121% in 1946 to 30% the year Reagan/Bush took and sent it soaring back up . . . until the Democrat, Bill Clinton turned that around and got the ratio dropping again . . . until the Republican, Bush 43, turned it back around to soaring again . . . until the Democrat, Barack Obama, turned it back around to falling once more.

Just sayin’.

(President Reagan, the iconic conservative, also agreed to tax wealth — dividends and capital gains — just as heavily as work.  To today’s Republican Party, that is anathema.)

FOOD SCRAPS

Peter Jackson:  “I enjoyed Friday’s notes on food waste and agree: we waste way too much food.   Thought I’d share what I do with my 200 pounds of rinds and egg shells: I feed it to my chickens. Backyard chickens are becoming popular everywhere (even in Brooklyn, I’ve read!).  Where I live, maintaining compost through the winter is a challenge because it freezes.  Feeding it to the chickens has a dual benefit: 1) it turns food waste in to eggs, which I eat and 2) it turns the food waste in to chicken waste, which is even better fertilizer for the garden in the summer. And, if I may be slightly icky, frozen chicken poop is better than frozen melon rinds in the compost pile all winter.  Also: we just started selling the eggs to friends. We make $36 a week on the surplus eggs. Know what we do with it? We invest it. Between that and the garden, our food costs have dropped by a couple hundred a month in the summer.  And I’m no country hick! I grew up in DC and make software for a living!”

BOREALIS

John Seiffer: “Another reason WheelTug should do well: preventing accidents like this one.”

WORM MAGIC

George Mokray (reacting to yesterday’s item on food waste disposal with his solution):  “I grow worms in my kitchen.  Been doing it since about 1977.  Here’s a video I made about it back around 1990.”

☞ The worms turn his carrot peels and apple cores into soil.  You gotta watch.  If there are any fishermen in your family, his solution becomes irresistible.

HUMAN MAGIC

Don’t feel as though you have to watch all six frantic minutes . . . it’s “Moulin Rouge” meets David Copperfield and you may get dizzy . . . but how do they DO it?

HOW THEY DO IT

Spoiler alert!  This somewhat cheesy but ultimately completely fascinating 40-minute British TV documentary shows you how a whole bunch of magic is done:

Magic s Biggest Secrets Finally Revealed S01E07 – YouTube

If I were a magician, I would never let you see this.  The first rule of magic is to never reveal the deception.

But I’m not a magician, and you were put on this planet with a will of your own.  If you think it’s immoral to reveal the secrets . . . don’t watch.

Have a great weekend.

INFRASTRUCTURE

We spend 2% of GDP on infrastructure versus 4% for the Europeans.  This will not end well.

Here’s an idea: why not adequately fund the IRS?  There are several good reasons to do so, but one is the added billions in tax revenue (of an estimated $400 billion unpaid each year) we’d then have available for needed projects.

Actually, those billions are available now: bond buyers are falling all over themselves to lend us money at low rates.  We should grab it and get to work.

But it wouldn’t hurt to collect some of the extra billions in tax revenue that are due, as well.

THE POSTAL SERVICE AND THE UNDER-BANKED

Here’s another idea (and this one is catching on).  From The New Republic:

 . . . [A] new government report detailed an innovation that would preserve one of the largest job creators in the country, save billions of dollars specifically for the poor, and develop the very ladders of opportunity that Obama has championed as of late. What’s more, this could apparently be accomplished without Congressional action, but merely through existing executive prerogatives.

What’s the policy? Letting the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) offer basic banking services to customers, like savings accounts, debit cards and even simple loans. The idea has been kicked around policy circles for years, but now it has a crucial new adherent: the USPS Inspector General, who endorsed the initiative in a comprehensive white paper.

The Inspector General, who conducted the study with the help of a team of experts in international postal banking as well as a former executive from Merrill Lynch, correctly frames the proposal not as a challenge to mega-banks, but as a way to deliver needed amenities to the nearly 68 million Americans—over one-quarter of U.S. households—who have limited or no access to financial services. Instead of banks, these mostly low-income individuals use check-cashing stores, pawnshops, payday lenders, and other unscrupulous financial services providers who gouged their customers to the tune of $89 billion in interest and fees in 2012, according to the IG report. Post offices could deliver the same services at a 90 percent discount, saving the average underserved household over $2,000 a year and still providing the USPS with $8.9 billion in new annual profits, significantly improving its troubled balance sheet. The report calls simple financial services “the single best new opportunity for the posts to earn additional revenue.” . . .

WHAT TO DO WITH FOOD WASTE

Except for the time I borrowed a friend’s apartment in West Hollywood for two weeks (next to the one where Sal Mineo was stabbed to death, but I digress) while I wrote a magazine story on the making of Dino DeLaurentiis’s remake of King Kong (“the most original motion picture event of all time,” as he billed it, but again I digress) and jammed the kitchen drain pipe by putting grapefruit rinds down the Dispos-All (that’s the point I was getting to) — it happened 40 years ago, and I remember that sink, and the plumber I had to call, as if it were yesterday — I’ve never had a Dispos-All . . . though apparently something like 50% of American households do.  (Wikipedia tells all.)

My friend Debra Shore is Chicago’s water commissioner.  Her latest newsletter:

In the U.S., we waste an average of 213 pounds of food per household per year.

So I am often asked, “Is it better to throw food waste out in the garbage or to dispose of it in the sink using a garbage disposal?”

The best thing you can do with food waste from your home is to compost it–place food scraps in a compost heap or bin along with yard waste and allow it to decompose naturally. I own a Compost Tumbler, an elevated bin with a handle that you rotate every few days. The compost produced can then be used as a natural fertilizer spread on your lawn, used in your garden or flowerbeds, given freely to friends and neighbors. Compost has additional benefits of improving soil structure, increasing drought resistance, reducing the need for fertilizer, water, even pesticides. But, of course, many people don’t have yards or don’t want the obligation of managing their own food scraps and yard waste.

So, the next best option is–drum roll here!–to use a garbage disposal, that is, to put food scraps down the sink and have them chewed up by what’s called in the business a food waste disposer (FWD) and conveyed along with other household waste to a sewage treatment plant. Does that surprise you? It may.

Here’s why using a garbage disposal is better for the environment than throwing food waste out to be trucked to a landfill. Food waste–principally vegetables and fruits–can comprise up to 20 percent of the garbage collected in cities. The average household has 213 lbs. of food waste a year. That’s a lot of weight to be trucked to landfills and a big cost to municipalities.

When organic matter decomposes in landfills, it produces methane gas, a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (21 times the global warming potential of CO2). Landfills have methods to capture this methane gas, but they are not nearly as efficient as wastewater treatment plants. When food scraps are sent via the waste stream to wastewater plants, the anaerobic digesters there capture the methane generated by decomposition of organic matter and convert the gas to electricity or to biofuel–renewable energy!

The Metropolitan Water Reclamation District currently captures between 50 and 80 percent of the methane generated at the treatment plants using it to heat the digesters and facilities. At some times of the year, however, the plants produce more methane than they can use so the excess is flared off. Happily, plans are underway to develop new facilities at the Calumet and Stickney plants to generate, capture and reuse even more of the methane produced by the sewage treatment process and use it to produce electricity or biofuel.

East Bay Municipal Utility District in Oakland, CA was the first wastewater treatment plant in the nation to convert post-consumer food scraps to energy via anaerobic digestion.

A pilot program in Philadelphia seeking to reduce the amount of food waste going to landfills will install garbage disposals in 200 homes. There the city has gathered baseline data on the amount of food waste in garbage–roughly 10 percent–and hopes to see a reduction once the disposals are in use. Every ton of garbage diverted from landfills saves the city $68 in tipping fees whereas the disposals are estimated to use less than one percent of a household’s total water consumption and to cost less than 50 cents a year in electricity to operate.

(The Chicago Conservation Corps and InSinkErator, the largest manufacturer of food waste disposers, are collaborating on a similar study in Chicago’s Uptown and Maple Park neighborhoods. For information on that project, contact (866) 271-1085 or ChicagoInSinkEratorproject@gmail.com)

A 2011 study reported that if 30,000 households switched from disposing of food waste in a landfill to using a garbage disposal, the reduction in global warming potential would be equivalent to a savings of 4.6 million miles driven in the average American car or “100 community members going carbon neutral for a year.” Think of what that might mean if all of the 1.9 million households in Cook County had–and used–garbage disposals!

Of course, the very best way to dispose of food waste is to waste less of it in the first place.  I keep telling you: don’t eat.

KYTH, first suggested here several months ago at $22.70, seems to have fine prospects.  I sold most of mine yesterday at $49.65 not because of anything negative but because those fine prospects seem now to be at least somewhat less overlooked.

That’s quite different from BOREF, which dropped to $12.95 a share yesterday morning on 5,000 shares (someone perhaps put in a “market” rather than a “limit” order?).  With a normal stock, a sharp drop like that would be in reaction to some big news — imagine if Apple dropped 15% overnight — but there’s been no negative news, and what may have been a single sale of 5,000 shares is not, it seems to me, necessarily indicative of anything.  It may have been a reaction to this story that came out a few hours prior to yesterday’s trading.  But to me that story is more encouraging than not.  WheelTug may or may not win the day, but it sure seems to be very much in the race.   I was able to buy a few more shares of grandparent Borealis at $13.10 — though only with money I can truly afford to lose.

NEW JERSEY CRIME

This story has nothing to do with Governor Christie, even though the perp was one of his personal troopers.  I just found it irresistible — especially the part about the video tape.  I mean: talk about being caught dead to rights!  And he is a state trooper!  Earning (with overtime and benefits) well into six figures!  We all love New Jersey.  (No, really!)  But it has been providing more than its share of color lately.

SOCHI WITHOUT THE COMMERCIALS

Paul deLespinasse:  “I’m not sure I ever sent you my piece about watching foreign TV for free over the internet.  Beelinetv.com lists 45 languages from Arabic to Vietnamese, and for each a choice of stations streaming over the Internet. It was through this website last May that I discovered a station in Moscow, Moscow-24 with the most wonderful variety programming of any Russian channel I have visited.  After watching it for six months I feel like a Moscow resident, though, I only spent four days there 25 years ago. Call me a virtual resident.  . . .  All this listening has greatly improved my oral comprehension of Russian, and I have filled many notebook pages with new words.  . . . One of my favorite programs is an interview show where an excellent interviewer talks with artists, entertainers and athletes, and almost always has one or more cats sitting beside him or crawling over him. If it is not his own cat, a note on the screen advises that if you want this cat, here is the Moscow telephone number to call. The program, Pravda-24, has its own Facebook page!”

Fair enough . . . though I wonder whether they’ll show Britain’s Channel 4 documentary, “Hunted,” linked to yesterday, in which Russians torture gays and lesbians with the tacit blessing of church and state.  I suppose the Jews will be next.  We know how this goes.  The worst of human nature.

THE PORT AUTHORITY

This item does concern Mr. Christie.  I had hoped just to link you to this segment of “The Last Word” with Lawrence O’Donnell, but could only find the transcript.  It’s a brief but fascinating history of the Port Authority — and shows how Governor Christie degraded it in much the same way President Bush degraded FEMA.  Heck of a job, Guv.

O’DONNELL: How important is the Port Authority? The greatest city in the Americans would be nothing without its port. In the 19th century, the port of New York surged past its east coast competitors to become not just the busiest port in the United States, but the busiest port in the world.  Including rivers and bays, Philadelphia had 37 miles of Waterfront.  Baltimore had 120, Boston, 140, while the port of New York had almost 800 miles of waterfront.

By 1915, the port of New York handled about half of our country’s exports and imports. And bi-state cooperation between New York and New Jersey had become crucial to the future of the port. A few years earlier, the governor of New Jersey, Woodrow Wilson, a more elegant speaker than the current governor said, the states recognize that a wise cooperation is imperative in the common interest. But they lack the means, the instrumentalities that would serve them in their new community of action.

It was in the last year of Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, 1921, that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey was born, and the port had the instrumentality it needed to continue to thrive. The Port Authority was the child of the progressive movement. The primary aim of the progressive movement was cleaning up government, which was then rife with corruption at every level.  The progressive movement gave us many improvements in governing including career civil service systems so that government professional could no longer be fired at the whim of a political regime.  And the Port Authority was designed on the progressive movement principles, appointed instead of elected commissioners, overlapping terms. The design, or should we say, the dream, was to eliminate partisan decision making.  Eliminate or minimize patronage and use sound engineering and economic analysis in Port Authority projects.

Eighty-nine years later, here is Chris Christie’s appointed deputy executive director of the Port Authority, Bill Baroni, testifying to a United States state Senate subcommittee chaired by New Jersey’s senator Frank Lautenberg who asked about the latest increase in the tolls on the world’s busiest bridge.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. FRANK LAUTENBERG (D), NEW YORK: Whether you like it or not, you don’t have an easy pass. You’re there at our request and we expect you not to give us a song and dance but to answer the question specifically. OK? So I’m asking you, when did the governor get word the past you were going to boost the —

BILL BARONI, FORMER PORT AUTHORITY EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Well, Senator, I’m not going to get into conversations that I have with —

LAUTENBERG: No, you — no, you’re refusing to answer the question?

BARONI: Senator, I’m not going to —

LAUTENBERG: You’re refusing to answer the question?

BARONI: Senator, I’m not talking about conversations I had —

LAUTENBERG: This isn’t a conversation. Are you running a protection agency there?

BARONI: Excuse me?

LAUTENBERG: Talk straight about what went on. And I asked you a simple question and you say you’re not going to discuss it.  You have to discuss it. You’re an important executive at that agency.  You work for the people, whether you think so or not.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

O’DONNELL: The next year, 89-year-old Frank Lautenberg died in office, and later that same year, Bill Baroni testified about the George Washington Bridge again.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BARONI: Who told him to put the cones out? On September 5th, Mr. Wildstein requested a one-week study be conducted. And then that began that Monday morning. And TBT, the bridge folks and the Port Authority police department began putting the cones out and as opposed to creating a three-lane special lane for Fort Lee. It was a one lane special lane.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

O’DONNELL: Bill Baroni was not under oath during that testimony, but the next time he testifies about the George Washington Bridge, he will be.

Joining me now is Jim Doig, author of Empire on the Hudson a book about the history of the Port Authority. He’s a visiting professor from Dartmouth College and Martin Robins, a former Port Authority official and
now with the transportation center at Rutgers University.

Professor Doig, how far have we come from the creators’ vision of what the Port Authority should be to what we find the Port Authority to be now in this age of — this period now of very clear scandal of the Port Authority.

JIM DOIG, AUTHOR, EMPIRE ON THE HUDSON: Well, until five or six years ago, many of the themes that you identified, that is nonpolitical administration and keeping patronage and short-term narrow politics out of the agency pretty much existed. It was successful. When Chris Christie became governor, he had a very different view. He saw the possibility of putting a fair number of his associates, friends, those who worked on political
campaigns into office. And that finally led to more than 50 patronage appointees and did change the extent at which point authority was independent of narrow politics.

O’DONNELL: Let’s listen to something else that Senator Lautenberg said in that hearing a couple of years ago about how bad things have gotten at the Port Authority.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

LAUTENBERG: There have also been allegations about a controlled political patronage at the Port Authority where substantial positions with six-figure salaries were given to former political bloggers, local mayors and others with questionable credentials.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

O’DONNELL: We now know, of course, that political blogger he was referring to was David Wildstein.

And Martin Robins, you worked at the Port Authority. It has to be difficult for you to watch what’s happening to it now.

MARTIN ROBINS, FORMER PORT AUTHORITY OFFICIAL: It is very difficult. I hear constantly from acquaintances, former colleagues, retirees how dispirited they are by the loss of mission and that existed at the Port Authority over a many-year period.

O’DONNELL: Professor Doig, have we been relying on basically the good will and good intentions of the governors of New York and New Jersey? And could what is happening now have been happening at anytime if we had a governor in one state or the other or both who wanted to load it up with patronage jobs, and wanted to use the Port Authority to his own ends?

DOIG: Well, we did actually have such a governor, Governor Harry Moore.  He was a New Jerseyan in the late ‘20s and mid ‘30s. He was twice governor. He was interested in adding patronage positions, and also in helping to select the kind of engineering approach that might be used at the George Washington Bridge.

But then, the commissioners who had a sense of independence, they resisted him. They blocked his ability to act in that way.  And therefore, he had to back away from that.  And that, I think, helped to maintain or reinforce the independence of the agency.

O’DONNELL: Martin Robins, what would be the two or three changes you would make now to get the Port Authority back on track?

ROBINS: Well, the first change I would make is to eliminate the position of deputy executive director.

O’DONNELL: That’s the one that Bill Baroni had?

ROBINS: Yes.  And I think that is a fatal flaw, the way that it has been established.  Now, a deputy executive director per say is not an offensive position if the position were chosen by the executive director.  But because the deputy executive director is now chosen by the governor of New Jersey, it creates two separate lines of authority, which makes it impossible for the executive director, particularly under the circumstances that we’ve just seen that unfolded last year, it becomes impossible for the executive director to manage the agency as he ought to.

As Patrick Foye testified in December, he said that he could not fire David Wildstein who worked for Bill Baroni. And that is a stunning admission, but it is unfortunately a very true state of affair, but it should not be that way. So that is my number one priority.

O’DONNELL: OK. We only have time for that number one tonight. We’re running out of time. I’m very sorry.

Jim Doig and Martin Robins, I’ve been looking forward to that conversation for days. I want to keep it going. Thank you very much for joining us tonight.

You’ve seen my argument for raising it:

higher wages = greater demand = stronger economy = greater job growth = virtuous cycle

Right?

To which I append:

stronger economy = higher tax revenues & lower safety-net payouts = lower deficits

Well . . . for those who may be unconvinced, here is a rather more detailed analysis from the New York Times.

And before you dismiss the editorial page of the Times — what do liberals know about growing an economy? — I would remind you that whether it be the contrast of FDR with Hoover or the contrast of Clinton with Bush or the contrast of Obama with the other Bush, it’s liberals who’ve grown the economy and invested in the future far more aggressively than conservatives.  (Eisenhower was pretty great with the Interstate Highway, but he’d sure never make it through a Republican primary today.)  The comparison of how Wall Street does under Democrats versus Republicans is even more striking.  Invested in the S&P 500 only during Republican administrations since 1929, $10,000 would have grown to only about $12,000 — versus about $572,000 under Democrats (if I’ve updated the numbers since August 2012 right).   Which is surely no proof that everything we liberals think about the economy is always right.  But I think it’s grounds to think our views should not be dismissed out of hand, either.

BRAVE NEW SKYSCRAPERS

You’ve got to watch this — a far more efficient way to build tall buildings.  And solar turbines placed between each rotating floor.  The floors all rotate!  Only 90 construction workers on site versus 2,000; the rest doing pre-fab work safely off site.  The first — 68 storeys — on the drawing board for Dubai.  a-MAY-zing.

HUNTED

And you’ve got to watch this (if YouTube hasn’t spiked it for length or copyright reasons): the British documentary, “Hunted.”   What seemed abstract — that it’s not easy being gay in Russia, and there are restrictions on speech — turns out to be terrifying.  Millions of Russian gays — like German Jews in the Thirties — viciously unwelcome in their own country, with the tacit blessing of church and state.

UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE

Friday I underestimated the number of long-term uninsured the Republicans have decided to set adrift — apparently it’s more like 1.7 million.  Republicans say they stiffed the unemployed out of concern for the deficit.  Nonsense, argued Hayes.

This graphic builds on Chris’s rant:

Patrick: “How long should jobless benefits for a given individual go on?  Three years? Forever?  Financial cost aside what about the disincentive it creates for work?”

☞ With this, as with other such questions (should there be a minimum wage?  how high?  fifteen bucks an hour?  fifty?), I think it’s a matter of balance.

The most obvious thing to say:  It should depend largely on the economic climate.  When jobs are really hard to come by, even when you really try to find them — as now — unemployment insurance should be extended.  When jobs are abundant, it should revert to its base level.

Lots of potential fine-tuning beyond that.   It  might vary by state, depending on the economic circumstances of that state.  (Oh, wait — it already does!)  And to avoid creating a disincentive to work, the benefits might be kept low — oh, wait, they already are!  And states should require you to be actively looking for work (and do).

Some states might want to add programs wherein the long-term unemployed accept part-time tasks in return for their checks (cleaning up parks? attending skills enrichment programs?).  They may already do that, too.

Inevitably, there will probably be freeloaders who don’t really need the benefits.*  But would you cut off more than a million truly desperate families because another 5% are getting a free ride they don’t really need?  At what point — 20%?  30%? — do you cut off the legitimate recipients?  (And is the solution to cut everyone off, or to do a better job of identifying those 5% or 20% or 30%?)

Reasonable people can disagree on the specifics.  But I don’t think  many would argue jobs are abundant these days.

Which is why the minimum wage is also relevant here.  If we got rid of it, at the same time as we cut off unemployment insurance, we might be able to accelerate our race to the bottom: desperate, starving Americans competing with each other to clean hotel room toilets for $4 an hour, allowing (or the bright side) for higher hotel-chain profits and/or lower room rates. Gradually, we can move toward the kind of set up that’s so nice for the upper class in many countries: they can have five or six servants and two Mercedes, while the help walk or bike to work, live under bridges, and send their kids to beg in the streets.

None of which, obviously, Patrick, certainly — or even the most right-leaning Tea Party-er — intends.  But before they dismiss Nick Hanauer’s argument on who the job creators really are — and his argument for a $15 an hour  minimum wage — they should really think through what’s happened to the American “working class” in the last few decades, and how that bodes for our future.

*Just as, to take another example, there are scattered cases of  voter fraud — people so motivated to go out and vote that they actually risk prison by knowingly voting illegally (an odd combination of civic responsibility and civic irresponsibility, don’t you think?) — and that’s bad.  But what balance do you strike in dealing with that?  Better to make voting harder for millions of poor people than to allow a few dozen, or even a few hundred, votes to be cast illegally through identity fraud?

You know, I could save a lot of time writing these things — and you could save a lot of time reading them — if I were sure you watch Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes on MSNBC every night, and Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert on Comedy Central.  They do this far better than me, and they have crack staffs to back them up. I have Renee come in to clean one day a week.  All I’d need do is the occasional Borealis update and a recipe or two.*

But can you be trusted?  And what if you missed the occasional night, and with it this clip of Chris Hayes blasting the Senate for failing to renew unemployment insurance?  It passed by a wide majority, but of course that is not enough, because where a principle is involved (in this case, the principle of not helping 1.3 million long-term uninsured most of whom desperately need that help), you can’t let the will of the majority (in this case, 58 senators) trample the rights of the minority.  Republicans will tell you they stiffed the unemployment out of concern for the deficit.  But that’s why the Chris Hayes clip is MUST SEE.

And why it’s so scary that the Koch Brothers and a handful of other billionaires are trying — with frightening prospects for success — to shift even more power to the plutocracy, and in ways that — with lifetime-appointed Supreme Court Justices of the type who decided Bush v. Gore and Citizens United and who gutted the Voting Rights Act — may become harder and harder to reverse.  Which is why you have to see Jason Jones on assignment in Coralville, Iowa, for Jon Stewart and the Daily Show.  MUST SEE.

They failed miserably in Coralville — but have sure been successful elsewhere.  For example, in gridlocking our government by knocking some Republican moderates out of Congress and forcing the rest into intransigence for fear they will be knocked out.

So much is at stake in November.  Are you registered to vote?  Can you help?

And wait — there’s one more clip you have to enjoy this weekend, if you missed Rachel Maddow’s clip on burning snow.  MUST SEE.

You will thank me, and that’s what I live for.

PFISHING

Yesterday I mentioned the Republican National Committee’s attempt to dupe Democrats into giving them money.  Today I can pass on this report: Google has added a warning label to that portion of the RNC website.   

CAT PEOPLE: GOOD NEWS ON OBAMACARE – II

Ellen Peterson:  “For those people with college age children or recent grads stuck at home without jobs…the CBO report you mentioned yesterday is great news:  Older workers who want to retire but have continued to work just for the health insurance coverage can now walk away, opening jobs for younger workers who need to get a start in life. I am struck by the collectivist thinking of the Republicans, who hold up ” the economy” as the be all and end all, much as the old Soviets held up the Five Year Plan, without ever considering the value of increased personal freedom for individual Americans.”

*Broccoli:  Take the rubber bands off a couple of them and put them in a pot with an inch or two of water.  Cover the pot (unless you’re apartment is freezing; then it doesn’t matter).  Put the stove on high for 8 or 10 or 15 minutes (it doesn’t really matter; the broccoli will get mushier and sort of gray with time, but that can be good, too), then shut it off.  Fork a broccoli bunch over onto a plate, salt and pepper heavily — heavily! — and eat.  Oh, boy, is that good.  And of course the real secret sauce here is — no, not ketchup, which is ordinarily my secret sauce — a tub of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter Light that you keep next to the plate, forking a little of it onto each of the last few bits, because now you are in (and, yes, there is such a place) broccoli heaven.

And, yes, you could go all “grated parmesan cheese” on me, but that only fights with the flavor of the I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter Light.  Why gild the lily?  Just Cook Like A Guy™.

Or dog people, or goldfish people — Enroll America has released this charming clip in which pets encourage their owners to sign up for health insurance before the March 31 deadline.  (Something like 70% of  those below 400% of the poverty line don’t realize they are eligible for subsidies designed to make coverage affordable.)

Republicans are programmed to call Obamacare a disaster (has it been a disaster for you?) when the only change you’ve likely seen is that you never again have to worry that you — or someone you care about — will ever be denied coverage for a preexisting condition or that you or they will exhaust the lifetime cap he or she may not even have realized their policy contained).

The latest misdirections are:

Obamacare is going to cost the economy 2 million jobs.  Not true.  The terrific Steve Benen straightens that one out, here. (“Despite what Americans are being told, the CBO did not find that the health care reform law would cost the nation over 2 million jobs. What it actually said is that the law will empower more than 2 million Americans to leave the workforce if they want to, no longer feeling forced to stay at a job in order to have benefits for them and their family. . . .”)

Taxpayers will be on the hook to bail out Obamacare insurers.  Not true.  But this one will play well for the Republicans because it takes a little time to understand — which makes their deception no less real but easier to get away with.  Chris Hayes explains.  (Basically, the “profit corridor” built into the law — for only the first three years, as things sort out — is a smart way to keep premiums lower than they otherwise would have been by letting insurers buy reinsurance.  The current estimate is that — far from getting hosed — we taxpayers will get to keep $8 billion in reinsurance premiums and pay out nothing at all.

There’s just so much of this.

Examples abound, and, no, it’s not equivalent on the left and the right.  Just as I’ve argued Congressional dysfunction is not equivalent on each side.

(Republican moderates have been primaried out of office and those that remain are afraid of being primaried, so Republicans eschew compromise.  Democratic moderates have not been primaried by extremists, thus don’t fear it, and, so — from the President on down — they do look for reasonable solutions.)

Republicans were the tobacco industry’s ally in fighting regulation — for decades, they claimed not to be satisfied there was any real scientific proof that smoking caused cancer.  (The fifth former Marlboro Man just died of tobacco-related disease.)

Now it’s climate change — the Republican chair of the House committee on climate change is himself a climate change denier.  Republicans delight in making fun of the overwhelming scientific consensus that disaster looms.  With Fox and the rest, they have actually managed to decrease the proportion of the public that believes climate change is real or worth confronting.

In between it was Iraq: a country President Bush had planned to invade even before 9/11  (see the January 31, 2001, agenda for his very first National Security Meeting — it was all Iraq), and which the Republican FOX Limbaugh machine somehow led 70% of those who voted to reelect him to believe had attacked us on 9/11 . . . just as a high proportion of Republican voters were somehow persuaded that the President is Kenyan — and a socialist for adopting the Mitt Romney / Heritage Foundation approach which, until he did, was the conservative solution to health care.

And this notion that the super-rich are the “job creators”?  It is in fact the rapidly shrinking middle class who are the job creators — as Nick Hanauer (for anyone left on earth who hasn’t seen it) explains so will here.

One could go on forever — here is today’s Republican National Committee attempting to dupe Democrats into giving them money — and I want to say again: it is not equivalent.  Democrats are not perfect or right about everything (and Republicans are not evil or wrong about everything), but one side has taken intransigence to unprecedented levels and the other has not.  One side “believes in science” and the other — with regard to the most crucial issue we face — does not. One side all but invariably takes the side of billionaires and the other side generally takes the side of the middle class and those struggling to climb into it.  Choose your side, but please don’t tell me they are the same, or that the truth always lies someplace in the middle — that the earth is neither flat not round; that the female body can partly resist a rapist’s sperm; that President was born halfway between Kenya and Hawaii; that Iraq sort of attacked us a little on 9/11.

Obamacare is the conservative think-tank’s health care solution that Mitt Romney adopted, with success, in Massachusetts.  It will be a success and increase the health care security of virtually every American.  It would have been even better if the Republicans had allowed a “public option” or anything resembling a single-payer plan of the type the rest of the modern world has settled on.  But it still bends the cost curve down and shifts tens of billions of dollars a year from the very most fortunate (who will pay an extra $38,000 in tax on each $1 million in dividends and capital gains they earn) to provide a great deal more health care security, care, and dignity to everyone else.  Terrible, I guess, if you’re a Darwinian capitalist who believes it’s every man for himself; quite a good thing if you believe we are all in this together, and that a reasonable balance should be struck between communism, at the extreme left tip of the ideological continuum, and undiluted libertarianism, at the extreme right tip.

The good news even for them?  As that Nick Hanauer clip makes clear, when they do allow the masses higher wages and better benefits (within reason), it enriches them — the rich! — as well.

You’re probably not going to this week’s Cowen 35th Annual Aerospace/Defense & Transportation Conference in New York, but here‘s the agenda and list of presenters.  WheelTug‘s CEO is presenting from 9-9:40 this morning; Boeing’s CEO, from 1:20-2 this afternoon.  (I hope snow doesn’t screw it all up.)  Here are the slides WheelTug plans to show.  Of course, it will work better with an accompanying narrative, but you can get a pretty good idea of it.

One point of comparison you’ll see are Winglets — those curvy tips at the ends of most airplane wings that didn’t used to be there until a couple of decades ago.  Now they’re on most planes because they cut fuel consumption by an estimated 4%, or $190/flight.  Just as TV’s no longer come without remote controls, most jets no longer come without winglets — why would you not want to save precious fuel?

WheelTug’s graph showing the savings it proposes to split 50/50 with the airlines leaves that $190/flight in the dust.  I won’t ruin the suspense by telling you just how high its graph climbs, but even at $800/flight, for a plane that averages 5 flights a day, you’re talking $4,000 a day, which is well over $1 million a year.  In my back of the envelope calculations, I’ve been assuming WheelTug might bring $50,000 of that to its bottom line each year. Times thousands of airplanes.   Fill in your own assumptions here.

Back to more important things tomorrow.

Patrick Johnson:  “I love yesterday’s recommendation, Thinking Fast and Slow! I also wish you great success with Borealis but I’m in Chris Brown’s camp on this one.  I want to share an aspect of investing I learned while at a valuation firm working with clients who invested in startups.  I don’t like startups that have been going 5 years and definitely avoid startups that have been in ‘start up’ mode for more than 10 years.  I think human nature lets the people involved get too comfortable in their roles if things drag on that long.  If the startup doesn’t have to produce tangible results in that time I don’t think they ever do.  But both the investors and the entrepreneurs/workers have their egos or their livelihood tied up in the startup at that point so they don’t make objective decisions.  I have observed this phenomenon many times.

“I sincerely hope I am wrong in this case.  But one more thing to keep in mind, if I am wrong:  When betting a lot on something with spectacular all-or-nothing payoffs, what is the marginal utility of the money you stand to gain? Certainly it would be nice to get rich but how truly useful is that 10th or 50th or 1000th million dollars?”

☞ The marginal utility of those extra millions is extremely high to the organization/s I’d be jazzed to give them away to.  With $1 million, BuildOn can create something like 20 more Third World school houses, to take just one of countless thrilling examples.  But I hear you.  See the item below about the young man disgruntled by his $3.6 million bonus, if you missed it a couple of Sundays ago in the New York Times.

(But note that neither Chris nor Patrick addressed why they think it’s unlikely e-taxi will become a reality or, if it does — as seems highly probably to me — why they think WheelTug, light, proven, patented, and in demand by airlines that are signing up for it, has virtually no chance of success.)

WEALTH ADDICTION

Here’s a chunk of that story, by Sam Polk; but it’s well worth reading the whole thing:

. . . I wanted a billion dollars. It’s staggering to think that in the course of five years, I’d gone from being thrilled at my first bonus — $40,000 — to being disappointed when, my second year at the hedge fund, I was paid “only” $1.5 million. . . .

. . . But in the end, it was actually my absurdly wealthy bosses who helped me see the limitations of unlimited wealth. I was in a meeting with one of them, and a few other traders, and they were talking about the new hedge-fund regulations. Most everyone on Wall Street thought they were a bad idea. “But isn’t it better for the system as a whole?” I asked. The room went quiet, and my boss shot me a withering look. I remember his saying, “I don’t have the brain capacity to think about the system as a whole. All I’m concerned with is how this affects our company.”

I felt as if I’d been punched in the gut. He was afraid of losing money, despite all that he had.

From that moment on, I started to see Wall Street with new eyes. I noticed the vitriol that traders directed at the government for limiting bonuses after the crash. I heard the fury in their voices at the mention of higher taxes. These traders despised anything or anyone that threatened their bonuses. Ever see what a drug addict is like when he’s used up his junk? He’ll do anything — walk 20 miles in the snow, rob a grandma — to get a fix. Wall Street was like that. In the months before bonuses were handed out, the trading floor started to feel like a neighborhood in “The Wire” when the heroin runs out.

I’d always looked enviously at the people who earned more than I did; now, for the first time, I was embarrassed for them, and for me. I made in a single year more than my mom made her whole life. I knew that wasn’t fair; that wasn’t right. Yes, I was sharp, good with numbers. I had marketable talents. But in the end I didn’t really do anything. I was a derivatives trader, and it occurred to me the world would hardly change at all if credit derivatives ceased to exist. Not so nurse practitioners. What had seemed normal now seemed deeply distorted. . . .

. . . Wealth addiction was described by the late sociologist and playwright Philip Slater in a 1980 book, but addiction researchers have paid the concept little attention. Like alcoholics driving drunk, wealth addiction imperils everyone. Wealth addicts are, more than anybody, specifically responsible for the ever widening rift that is tearing apart our once great country. Wealth addicts are responsible for the vast and toxic disparity between the rich and the poor and the annihilation of the middle class. Only a wealth addict would feel justified in receiving $14 million in compensation — including an $8.5 million bonus — as the McDonald’s C.E.O., Don Thompson, did in 2012, while his company then published a brochure for its work force on how to survive on their low wages. Only a wealth addict would earn hundreds of millions as a hedge-fund manager, and then lobby to maintain a tax loophole that gave him a lower tax rate than his secretary.  . . .

Well, I want a billion dollars, too — or at least wouldn’t kick it out of bed — but I’m not going to have it, and I don’t lose sleep over not having it in bed with me, and I just now successfully installed the new toilet seat hinge I told you I ordered last week, and the feeling of power that gave me will just have to do.  Later this week, thanks to one of you who was kind enough to forward an instructive YouTube, I plan to take a stab at the numeric keypad on my microwave; the one that only does “7.”