Author: A.T.

Let’s Form A Shadow Cabinet (And How To Make 700 Times Your Money In Three Months)

Human error is responsible for thousands of U.S. auto accidents each year.

Tesla’s auto-pilot isn’t perfect either.

We know this because car companies are required to report auto-pilot accidents.

Tesla doesn’t like that requirement, so the Trump transition team is moving to scrap it.

That’s the bureaucratic nub of it.

This 11-minute video brings it to life — and death — in living color.  

The next segment in the same show reviews a list of Trump hires . . . segues into an interview with Tim Snyder that describes our slide into oligarchy . . . and asks what the hell do we do now?

The whole thing is only 9 minutes, but if you’re pressed for time, at least watch that last piece, because Professor Snyder proposes forming a shadow Cabinet to whom the press could turn for comment . . . not only on the bad stuff the Trump team is doing, but also on the good stuff we’d like to do.

Musk invested $277 million in electing Trump.

Since Trump’s election, his net worth has increased by about 700 times as much (about $200 billion).

Autocrats and oligarchs are thrilled with Trump’s win — Putin foremost among them — but so are most MAGA supporters.

At least for now.

They know Trump’s going to:

. . . give them great healthcare at a fraction of the cost (after 9 years’ hard work, he has a concept of a plan) . . .

. . . drive down the cost of groceries by: (1) adding tariffs to the price of the food we import; (2) deporting low-wage workers who bring to market the food we produce here . . .

. . . reduce the deficit by lowering taxes on the uber-wealthy and further strangling the IRS.

It behooves us, I think, to stay engaged.

 

The Threat To Democracy Is Real — And Imminent

So says Senator Chris Murphy:

. . . I don’t think there are signs that the media is folding. They are folding. They are. We’re watching them fold. I don’t exactly know why Elon Musk decided to fold his entire operation into the White House, but maybe it has something to do with the fact that he got rich off of government policy, whether it be tax credits on electric vehicles or subsidies for his space business. He’s just much better off being integrated into power. I don’t know why Comcast decided to sell MSNBC, but maybe it has to do with the fact that they decided they don’t want to get crosswise with Donald Trump because they have lots of business interests that intersect with the government. I don’t know why Jeff Bezos, for the first time ever, told The Washington Post not to endorse, but maybe it’s because his bread is often buttered by government policy. I don’t know why ABC decided to settle a bogus lawsuit, but maybe …

Listen . . . when the media decides to start hedging, or not telling the full story, combined with people being reluctant to engage in political opposition because they fear they will land in jail, that’s just not a democracy any longer.

And it’s not like we’re six months away from that. It feels like we might be a month away from a world in which people start to retreat from politics for fear of criminal prosecution, and the media just uses kid gloves in dealing with the regime.

Worth reading or listening in full.

So what do we do?

I called 1-800-CHATGPT.  (No joke.)

“How do we keep from losing our democracy?” I asked.

“That’s a big question,” she replied, and proceeded to give me a sensible response, albeit no silver bullet.  She concluded by asking me “what sparked your interest in this?”

I said, “The possible prosecution of Liz Cheney.”  And off she went with another interesting response about the rule of law.

I have no idea how 1-800-CHATGPT and “LLMs” can possibly work, but it is clear we are hurtling toward a brave new world.

I would like to see it be a world of democracy and decency.

“Stay engaged,” 1-800-CHATGPT advised.

 

More China — Must Read

Tuesday, two misconceptions and this from “The Daily” — How China could shut off our hot water — and everything else.

Today, Tom Friedman: How Elon Musk and Taylor Swift Can Resolve U.S.-China Relations.

“China had its Sputnik moment — his name was Donald Trump,” Jim McGregor, a business consultant who lived in China for 30 years, told me. “He woke them up to the fact that they needed an all-hands-on-deck effort to take their indigenous scientific, innovative and advanced manufacturing skills to a new level.”

Wait ’til you read.

 

How Israel Turned The Middle East Around

But first:

MOVIES

I had forgotten why I was on this list — like you, I’m on a lot of lists — and, truthfully, the trailer for Regarding Us left me worried it could be well-meaning but preachy. 

I decided to go anyway because the invite promised a post-film discussion with Martine Rothblatt, who founded United Therapeutics (market cap $16 billion) and SiriusXM radio and designed — and pilots — her own electric helicopter, and, well, I don’t think you will ever read a more astonishing Wikipedia bio than hers.

Plus, it was only 17 bucks.

I hopped on the subway, took an aisle seat by the door in case it was excruciating, and settled in with a bag of popcorn.

Just as the film was about to start, Martine and her stylish wife Bina plopped into seats behind me.  (Martine was “Martin” when they married and had kids.  She transitioned 30 years ago.)

Up came the credits, Martine’s name as Executive Producer, and — yikes! — my name a few frames in.  So that’s why I was on the list.  It had been so long in the making, I’d forgotten that I chipped in.

So now I was even more worried — what if it really was excruciating?

But it was great.  And will be streaming soon on Apple+ and I need you to do me a favor.  Spend $12.99 to “pre-order” it now.  Healthy pre-order demand will earn the film a bigger promotional push, and thus your $12.99 will be a small contribution to a kinder, gentler world.

(A movie in theaters now with a 93% Rotten Tomatoes rating — related to Regarding Us by the Catholic church — is Conclave.  Even my wonderful brother-in-law the priest loved it.)

And now:

GEOPOLITICS

It’s tragic what Hamas did to the Gazan people by slaughtering and kidnapping so many Israelis — just as it was tragic what Japan’s leaders did to their people by bombing Pearl Harbor.  But for all the tragedy in Gaza, which is unspeakably awful, there may now be glimmers of hope.

How Israel Turned the Mideast Around.

Your comments welcome, as always.

 

Two TV Personalities Walk Into A Courtroom . . .

JUSTICE

Trump and his post-Gaetz pick for Attorney General go back a long way.  He seems to have successfully bribed her.  Check out the time-line!

It’s no secret that he gets away with a lot of stuff.

Consider the contrast:

TV personality Martha Stewart lied to the feds about something relatively trivial — and went to prison.

TV personality Donald Trump lied about his theft and concealment of top-secret documents — and fired the FBI director.

Or would have in a few weeks if that director had not — tragically, in the view of many — “obeyed in advance.”

FAIRNESS

Oklahoma Jeff:  “With regard to yesterday’s post, fair pay is good for everyone, but I disagree with the Pay the People! premise that the American economy is rigged against anyone.  My dad’s small business billed less than $100 the winter I started high school, but I had need-based scholarships to send me to college, where I earned a degree that landed me in two low-paying careers (journalism, teaching).  College also gave me some knowledge of the stock market, enough (with the only investment book I would ever need) to let me retire early anyway.  I would say the American financial system is stacked in my favor.  Furthermore, this constantly telling Americans they are victims may have contributed to their voting for a senile, sociopathic sexual predator for president, just hoping he was right about someone else being to blame for their miseries.”

→ An important perspective, but if there should be any minimum wage, what should it be?  And if there should be any income or estate taxes on the uber-wealthy, what should the rates be?  (Not the nominal rates, but the true rates after loopholes.)  One could argue that the federal minimum wage, last raised 15 years ago, is just right at today’s $7.25 an hour — that this is about where most Americans think it should be set, so that’s where their elected representatives have set it.

And one could argue that the marginal federal tax bracket for someone earning $10 million a year from investments is just right at 20%, while the marginal federal tax bracket for a self-employed, single plumber earning $50,000 a year net of deductions and exemptions is just right at 37.3% (income tax 22% plus 15.3% FICA) — that this is about where most Americans think it should be set, so that’s where their elected representatives have set it.

I think most Americans — clearly not all — think otherwise.  And that the uber-wealthy and their lawyers and lobbyists have had more than their share of influence on those elected representatives.  Mostly Republicans, but some Democrats, too.

NEXT STEPS

Obama head speechwriter Jon Favreau on The Conversation Democrats Need to Have.

Candidate for DNC chair Ben Wikler with Jon Stewart on the Daily Show.

Please get ready to spend $12.99 to pre-order a movie I’m going to tell you about in a day or two.

 

Two Potentially Undervalued Stocks

But first . . .

PITCHFORKS FOLLOW UP

The Patriotic Millionaires‘ new book, Pay the People! Why Fair Pay Is Great For Business And For America, has been chosen by Malcom Gladwell and the Next Big Idea Book Club for their December must-read list. Nick Kristof is touting it as well.

It begins:

Seventy-one percent of Americans think the economy is rigged against them. We have news for them: they are right. Over decades, politicians of both parties coddled the political donor class, screwed working people, and broke the social contract by passing laws that structured the economy in such a way that the wealth created by millions of working people was driven into the hands of a tiny number of very rich people.  In 1973, the top 1% took home 9% of the income in the country. In 2023, the top 1% took home 26.5% of the country’s income. One researcher estimated that since 1981, as much as $50 trillion has moved from the bottom 90% to the top 1%. What happened in the United States is pretty simple. As Americans worked harder and the economy grew, working people stopped getting their fair share and the richest among us made out like bandits. They did it with the help of expensive lobbyists and enabling politicians, and they destabilized the entire country in the process.

And now . . .

ILLIQUID STOCKS

BKUT jumped 29% yesterday morning, from $520 to $673, on volume of — are you ready for this? — 2 shares.

We don’t own any.

But we do own BKUTK, its non-voting twin, suggested in this 2012 post and re-suggested in March . . . for two reasons:

> At 7 times earnings and less than half book value, it seems ridiculously cheap.

> Our non-voting shares — though otherwise identical — generally sell at a nutty discount to the voting shares.  Yesterday, they were $475 bid, $510 asked.  So you could have paid $510 — or $673 for the exact same thing, minus the right to vote.

If your goal were to gain control of the bank, the voting shares are all you’d care about.  But that’s not likely your goal, and the $18.50 annual dividend is the same; and whatever improvements the new controlling shareholders made would accrue to both classes of stock.

UPDATE:  In a dramatic late afternoon selloff, BKUT collapsed from $673 to $570 — on volume of 4 more shares.  (BKUTK remained steady at $510.)

SPECULATIVE STOCKS

If BKUTK is the quintessential illiquid “value” stock, to be bought only with money you can truly afford to lose (but almost surely won’t), then PRKR is the quintessential speculative stock, to be bought only with money you can truly afford to lose (because you really might).

PRKR believes Qualcomm owes it a vast amount of money plus a vast amount of interest (and, in an ideal world, treble punitive damages, which I believe are 100% deserved but 2% likely to be awarded).  As I and others have written, the stock could be worth 5X or 10X its current 94 cents a share.

I’m not sure how much news we can expect between now and the trial.  One thing to hope for is the announcement of a trial date.  That could boost the stock a little (fully disclosure: I have such an outsized position in this one, I will take advantage of opportunities to prune back from what is now a preposterously large bet to more like a merely really, really large bet).

In the meantime, I found this article esoteric but encouraging.  It relates to a petition PRKR filed with the United States Supreme Court, asking that the Federal Patent Appeals Court be required to say more than just one word when denying an appeal.  If a plaintiff’s appeal is denied, and the Court has given it due consideration, how about a sentence or two explaining why it was denied?  That’s what most federal appeals courts do; why not this one?

As you know, the Supreme Court accepts very few — I think fewer than 1% — of the cases it’s asked to hear.  So the odds of their taking this one are low; and even if they did and PRKR won, that win would have no direct effect I can think of on the company’s several active lawsuits (the biggest being against Qualcomm).  So this is not a huge deal.  But as you’ll note from the article, this petition has now garnered no fewer than eight amicus briefs — most petitions to the Court get none or just one or two — and the publicity among people in the patent world, let alone a favorable ruling from the Supreme Court, it seems to me, help to make clear that PRKR is not a “patent troll,” but rather a serious inventor with serious patents that — thus far — has fallen victim to a legal system that greatly disadvantages the very kind of invention and innovation that helped make the country great.

So — “it can’t hurt.”

Have a great weekend!

If you’re really rich and can, thus, afford Broadway, two shows that I think will leave you smiling: Death Becomes Her and Maybe Happy Ending.

 

Pitchforks

I have frequently linked to Nick Hanauer’s “pitchforks” warning.

It is so worth reading if you haven’t; and hard not to think, 10 years on, that the first pitchfork just came — appallingly and unforgivably, but perhaps understandably — in the form of a 3D-printed ghost gun.

An awful lot of people are singing the murderer’s praises — literally (and this is just one example).  A lot of others are taking the opportunity to put the tragedy into perspective — this way (60 seconds) and this way (90 seconds, from Pastor Paul Drees).

It’s not clear to me that, despite their winning the votes of many who are hurting badly, Trump and his fellow billionaires are attuned to — or much care about — their pain and frustrations.

From the Patriotic Millionaires newsletter (worth reading in full):

Perhaps the biggest signal that Trump’s presidency is going to be a good time for billionaires is the fact that he has tapped a number of them to work directly in his administration.

[If confirmed], the total net worth of Trump’s Cabinet would be $11.8 billion, [100 times] the worth – $118 million – of President Biden’s current Cabinet.

And when you include non-Cabinet members like Musk, Ramaswamy, and Stephens, the figure balloons to $382.2 billion – which is more than the GDP of 172 countries.

Trump has made it no secret that he intends to deliver, and deliver big, for the wealthy.

The stock market has already rallied in anticipation. Between November 4th (the day before the election) and November 12th, America’s 815 billionaires saw their fortunes jump by $276 billion.

Musk gave $250 million to Trump’s election effort and is already reaping his reward. Reports are out that, today, Musk became the first person to top $400 billion in wealth – a 66% increase since Trump’s election.

Two weeks after the election, MSNBC ran the headline, “Could Trump and his billionaire buddies turn America into an oligarchy?” Unfortunately, if billionaires have this much wealth, influence, and power even before Trump returns to the White House, we’re already living in an oligarchy. The question should be how much worse will it get.

If you’re a millionaire — one of you recently clocked in at $45 million — you might want to consider joining the Patriotic Millionaires.  If not — if you’re a normal person — you might want to chip in $25 to support their work and get their newsletter.

I love capitalism, when sensibly regulated, and love and admire more than one billionaire myself.  The ones I know support fair taxation.  This guy is not one of them: How One of the World’s Richest Men Is Avoiding $8 Billion in Taxes.

Let us hope that ghost gun was the last pitchfork, not the first.

A MUST-READ BONUS

Don’t Let Donald Trump Take Your Soul, Too — former Trump official Tim Miller on not becoming a nihilist.  (Oh, and look — he even uses The Economist’s word of the year, kakistocracy!)

 

It’s The Economy, Stupid

Courtesy of the White House:

After decades of trickle-down economics that slashed taxes for the wealthy, diminished public investments, offshored jobs and factories, destroyed unions, and ripped at the social safety net, President Biden has written a new playbook that’s growing the economy from the middle out and the bottom up . . .

. . . delivering the strongest recovery in the world, and laying a strong foundation for years to come by:

  • Investing in our infrastructure, manufacturing, scientific development, and communities that have been left behind after decades of neglect;
  • Giving working families and the middle class the chance to get ahead by creating good jobs with family-sustaining wages and by supporting unions;
  • Lowering costs and giving smaller businesses a fair chance to compete.

Over the last four years, we have made remarkable progress:

  • Over 16 million jobs created—the most in a single presidential term in American history—with jobs created every single month;
  • The lowest average unemployment rate of any administration in 50 years;
  • A record 20 million new business applications;
  • A doubling of union petitions;
  • The smallest racial wealth gap in 20 years;
  • More Americans with health insurance than ever before;
  • The stock market at record highs and 401(k)s up;
  • More than $1 trillion in announced private sector investments in clean energy and advanced manufacturing in America;
  • Lowering inflation while supporting a strong labor market—with inflation down faster and lower than almost any other advanced economy, and incomes up almost $4,000 more than prices.

To see all this in pictures — with links to The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, et al — click here.  (And share?)

BONUS

Tales from the Transition.

Amazing.

 

What She Deserves

Robert Reich on What Liz Cheney deserves from Joe Biden:

She doesn’t need a pardon from Biden because Trump’s claim wouldn’t last an instant in federal court. What she deserves from Biden is a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

→ So true.

And speaking of democracy defenders . . .

Kris M.:  “I was excited to read (listen to) On Freedom but about a quarter of the way through I switched to another book.  It requires more reflection than I can give it when I’m mucking my horses’ stalls and filling hay bags.  My plan is to buy a paper copy and use my eyes, so that I can give it undivided attention.  One book that does make great listening: Professor Corey Brettschneider’s The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It.  I found it inspiring; it made me more hopeful and ready to do my part, however tiny a bit part that may be.  (And, it completely changed my impression of John Adams, which had been mostly formed by David McCullough’s biography.)”

Jim L.: “You’ve stopped linking to DNC.  I assume this is due to the horrifying news of mishandled DNC funds (which would have been far less scrutinized had Kamala won).  I can’t be your only reader who’d love to hear your perspective on the topic.  It’s an awful time to be a (strongly anti-MAGA) Centrist, dismayed by all the nonsense.”

→ Never fear, Jim – I’ll be linking to the DNC again before you know it.

In a presidential year, the DNC only nominally controls its funds – it’s the campaign that mostly runs the show.  With hindsight, some money could doubtless have been more wisely spent, some contracts more aggressively negotiated.  But in the heat of a 107-day campaign to save democracy (as many saw it), some bad judgments and bad deals were likely inevitable.

(And it would have cost nothing to go on Joe Rogan.  All so easy in hindsight.)

To put the scale of the campaign’s spending in context — $1.5 billion or so — Americans spend more than that every 107 days . . . on ketchup.  But still — I hear you.

As to your being a centrist . . . hats off to you.  Most Americans, I think, basically are — a little to the left or the right.

If only we had ranked-choice voting, moderates would have a far better chance of winning and “the sensible center” would once again have a powerful voice.