Author: A.T.

Our infrastructure’s crumbling — so we slash taxes that could have been used to revitalize it.  Thank you for your leadership, Republicans. Instead of providing millions of good jobs, you add another trillion to our Debt and — because your cuts overwhelmingly favor the wealthy — widen yet further our grotesque inequality.  (Beware, Fellow Plutocrats — The Pitchforks Are Coming.)

As we eat into our physical capital — bridges, sewers, and such — we’ve now set a course to eat into our environmental capital, despoiling our air and water for short-term profit.  Thank you for your leadership, Republicans.

We’ve abdicated our role as world leader, alienating our traditional allies aligning with autocrats . . . and stand alone among the nations of the earth in eschewing the Paris Climate Accord.  Thank you for your leadership, Republicans.

In the wake of the surprise attack on our democracy (it’s ridiculous to think Putin didn’t change the outcome of the election) — the existence of which the House Republicans won’t even acknowledge — Republican legislators do nothing to protect the security of our elections going forward.

And have I mentioned health care?  Student loan interest rates?  The shameful way we’ve dealt with desperate people seeking asylum?

(“There is no excuse for a rich country like the United States to make demons out of people fleeing for their lives,” writes David Millibrand. “They deserve to have their cases assessed, and where it is not safe for them to go home (the test for refugee status), they should be allowed to stay and be given a chance to build a life.  What we do know is that refugees who do stay pay more in taxes than they consume in benefits and contribute to this country in myriad ways.”)

The trade war????

It’s equal parts tragic and maddening to see our needless — and rapid — decline.

Putin and Trump stoke division, when what we clearly need are problem-solving compromise and cooperation.

But the good news is: if massive numbers of people turn out to change course in November, we can.

And the further good news is that small signs keep popping up that we might.

My next door neighbor, a lifelong Republican, gave $5,000 to the DNC last week!

Better still, from the rural America, comes this report (thank you, John Grund):

I live in the very blue city of Portland, Oregon, but for some 50 years now, have honored our farm roots in red Polk County, about 60 miles south, by going to see the annual Monmouth-Independence Fourth of July Parade.  For some time, I have watched for the relative size of the delegations of the Polk County Democrats and the Polk County Republicans to gauge the political winds.

For years, probably ever since Reagan, the Republicans have had the best of it. They were loud, proud, and numerous in their blue blazers or skirts and hats for the ladies, with professionally printed signs and nice classic convertibles. The Democrats were usually a loose gaggle of folks in overalls, making their way on foot – long hair for the men, short hair for the women, handwritten signs. And every year the Democrats would work their hearts out, and lose and lose and lose.

This year was different. The Democrats came first – more than I’d ever seen in the parade before, probably 50 in all. They were still on foot, and still armed with homemade signs, but this time the signs spelled out Democratic accomplishments – Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid – and needled the Republicans for racism, intolerance, and fear. The Democrats received polite but sincere applause. There were “Black Lives Matter” and “Health Care for All” signs. That was surprisingly bold for the Polk County Democrats, but even more surprising was the Republican contingent near the end of the parade.

First, it was small, just about a dozen or fifteen youth, with matching jeans and polo shirts. There was one flatbed trailer. The usual political signs were there, but this year with less red and more generic green. None of the signs for local candidates included the word “Republican.” That’s not unusual in the county, but the local candidates weren’t on the trailer, either. No one in the audience remembered to clap. There were no MAGA hats, no mention of Trump at all. The weird MAGA, 911truth, Infowars guy who usually brings his own float was nowhere to be seen.

Democratic Congressman Kurt Schrader was in the parade a short distance behind the Democrats. Oregon’s 5th congressional district includes a lot of rural territory, but also the south Portland suburbs that tend to keep it blue. Schrader’s Republican adversary didn’t turn out.

My optimistic thought: Republicans are ashamed of Trump, and their party. I’m not sure it is an enthusiasm gap per se – I think they’ll still make it out to the polls and vote, but they are aware of the stench that is sticking to the G.O.P.

My pessimistic thought: Just as they have turned against democracy in general (“[Republicanism] refuses to share power, to wait its turn, to see the importance of liberalism as its foil.” – Andrew Sullivan), the Republicans now think that old-fashioned political persuasion the in public square doesn’t matter anymore. They have figured out that they just need to reach their base voters through targeted Facebook appeals (with or without the Russians’ help), and that it is better to not let the rest of America or the world listen in on that process.

Whether my optimistic or pessimistic thought turns out to be true, the answer is still the same – motivate good-hearted people to vote, every time.

Amen.

One of you asks: “A $30 painting in 1905 sells for $115 million in 2018.  What is the annual rate of return?”

Answer: 14.357%.  Before netting out the costs of insurance and auction fees.  The math is cut and dry; the painting and its provenance, more colorful.

But let’s talk about something important: your health.

Rather, let’s ask Nobel laureate Paul Krugman to talk about it, in case you missed his column last month: G.O.P. to Americans With Health Problems: Drop Dead.

All your friends need to understand this:

. . . The campaign against the Affordable Care Act has been based on lies every step of the way.

First there were lies about what was actually in the act. Remember “death panels”?

Then there were lies about the law’s effects. For a while, the Koch brothers-financed group Americans for Prosperity was running ads featuring supposedly real stories of Americans facing terrible hardships because of the A.C.A. But none — none — of these stories stood up to fact-checking. So the ads became vaguer and vaguer, and eventually featured actors pretending to be A.C.A. victims rather than featuring real victims, who were apparently too hard to find.

But the most enduring lie from A.C.A. opponents — not just Trump, but all of them — is their claim that they want to protect Americans with pre-existing conditions. They don’t, and they never did.

You can see why they claim otherwise. A huge majority of voters, including 59 percent of Republicans, want to maintain rules that prohibit insurance companies from denying coverage based on someone’s medical history. So there is a powerful incentive to pretend that you’ll protect people with past health problems.

But the falseness of the pretense has always been obvious.

This falsity was obvious on sheer logical grounds even before Republicans began proposing supposed replacements for Obamacare. If you’re going to guarantee coverage regardless of medical history, you have to induce people to sign up for insurance while they’re still healthy, so that insurers have a manageable risk pool. That means some combination of subsidies to make insurance affordable and penalties for going uninsured — in other words, it requires a system that looks a lot like the Affordable Care Act.

So demands that the A.C.A. be scrapped always meant taking away coverage from the people who need it most; Obamacare opponents just hoped people wouldn’t notice that fact. And the truth is that they mostly got away with it until last year, when Republicans had to offer specific health care legislation.

At that point the game was up. It immediately became clear that every Republican alternative to Obamacare would, in fact, hang Americans with pre-existing conditions out to dry. And the public backlash against that revelation is basically the reason the G.O.P.’s repeal effort failed. But it only failed narrowly. And if Republicans still hold Congress next year, anyone who has a history of medical problems and doesn’t get health insurance from his or her employer will lose coverage.

In fact, even getting a job with insurance coverage might not be enough: If the Trump-supported lawsuit succeeds, employers could refuse to cover new employees’ pre-existing conditions.

What may seem puzzling about all this is the cruelty. O.K., Donald Trump is obviously a man utterly lacking in empathy. But don’t other Republicans feel a bit bad about the prospect of taking health care away from millions of Americans who have done nothing wrong besides having past medical problems?

Actually, no. Consider Rick Scott, the governor of Florida (and current Senate candidate), whose attorney general has joined the lawsuit to eliminate protection for pre-existing conditions. While refusing to say whether he supports the suit, Scott declared, “We’ve got to reward people for caring for themselves.” Right, because if you get cancer, or arthritis, or multiple sclerosis — all among the pre-existing conditions for which people used to be denied coverage — it must be your own fault.

By the way, a note to older Florida voters: You may think that none of this matters to you, because you’re covered by Medicare. If so, think again: If Republicans win in November, they’ll be coming after Medicare next, to offset the cost of their tax cut. Who says so? They do.

So, as I said, voters need to understand the stakes in these midterms. They will determine whether people with medical problems get the health care they need.

. . . is often dumped on a Friday night — or in this case, July 4th Eve — on the expectation relatively few people will see it.  So first, in case you missed it, listen to the July 3 audio of Rachel Maddow (44 minutes – no commercials!).   The Republican senators in Russia stuff (no Democrats allowed).  (You can watch that piece of it here.)  The bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee findings that, yes, the intelligence community’s findings were sound: Putin really did interfere with our elections.  No effort is being made by the Republicans to get that to stop.  (Oh — and the Malaysia stuff?  Corruption on a massive and truly colorful scale, which the deputy finance chair of the Republican National Committee apparently believed he could get the U.S. Justice Department to drop if he were paid $75 million.)

And then there is this WheelTug news that may encourage those of you who, like me, have been holding shares of Borealis even longer than I was holding the pint of egg whites in my freezer (“exp April 10, 2007” — but delicious when I finally defrosted last week).

Two pieces of news, actually.

The main one: WheelTug has earned the public endorsement of Ratan Tata, one of the world’s most highly respected industrialists (remarkable bio here) — who I now see graduated from my rival high school and then Cornell and Harvard Business School. Only a decade and a billion dollars separate us.  That he is a pilot whose Tata group has interests in two airlines suggests he knows a bit about the field.  It’s good to see yet another smart person cheering us on.

Also, the Czech arm of Deloitte has issued this analysis of the savings WheelTug will offer airlines: ranging from a low of $441 per flight to a “medium case” of $1,157 per flight to a best case of $3,356 per flight.  Times maybe 1700 flights per plane per year = anywhere from $750,000 to $5.7 million.  Times 14,000 737s and A320s in service, virtually all of which could benefit form the ability to maneuver around the gate without a tug, and you have (at least theoretically) anywhere from $10 billion to $80 billion in annual savings . . . of which the WheelTug business model is to lease the systems for half the savings.

So with WheelTug grandparent Borealis trading at $5 a share — a market cap of $25 million — there would seem to be considerable upside.

(Speculative!  To be bought only with money you can afford to lose!  And with “limit” orders because it is VERY thinly traded!)

Have a great a continuation of this crazy 9-day weekend.

Putin is winning — big time.  But that’s no reason to be miserable all the time.  Have beer on me.  Or a nice egg white omelet.

He’s not fond of Canada’s leader or the leaders of the U.K., Germany, or France.  But in Putin and Erdogan and Duterte and Xi — and Kim — he finds strong men he can do business with.  Has he been played?  Let’s hope not.  But . . .

. . . Despite replete evidence that he was swindled, Trump said during a Fox News interview, “I made a deal with [Kim Jong Un]. I shook hands with him. I really believe he means it.” The problem with a raging narcissist is that he must deny reality in order to avoid embarrassment. . . .

Putin, through Trump, has ended the American century.  And the Republicans in Congress — who once called him a pathological liar — simply cower.

Not the sort of July 4th one would have wished for.  (But have a great one.)

Cry, the beloved  country.

Too dark?  Stop Mourning, Democrats, writes Joe Scarborough.  Organize for November and begin to fix this mess.

I’m as nonviolent as they come.  So, too, I presume, Hamilton Nolan, who wrote this piece.  But that’s why everyone who shares a desire for peace and civility — for working out our problems with reason and good will and a willingness to listen — should read it.

It leads with a photo of a blazing limousine.

And begins:

Do you think that being asked to leave a restaurant, or having your meal interrupted, or being called by the public is bad? My fascism-enabling friends, this is only the beginning.

One thing that people who wield great power often fail to viscerally understand is what it feels like to have power wielded against you. This imbalance is the source of many of the most monstrous decisions that get made by powerful people and institutions. The people who start the wars do not have bombs dropped on their houses. The people who pass the laws that incarcerate others never have to face the full force of the prison system themselves. The people who design the economic system that inflicts poverty on millions are themselves rich. This sort of insulation from the real world consequences of political and economic decisions makes it very easy for powerful people to approve of things happening to the rest of us that they would never, ever tolerate themselves. No health insurance CEO would watch his child die due to their inability to afford quality health care. . . .

A well-designed political system would have a built-in feedback system to ensure that those making the decisions are also subject to the consequences of those decisions. Minor versions of this are floated every now and then: Put Congress on Obamacare! Pay elected officials what their average constituents earn! But in aggregate, of course, we have nothing like this feedback mechanism in America. The titans of money congregate on Wall Street and the titans of government congregate in DC and they all make decisions that often disenfranchise and impoverish and frustrate the dreams of people far away, and then they go to nice restaurants and go home to nice houses and have nice, well-paid careers for decades to come. That is our system. There is little incentive for those who work within that system to change it in a way that might create the sort of negative feedback that can be unpleasant. Therefore it is the job of the public to do just that. Doing so is, in fact, a public service. It promotes good government. . . .

My politics are a click to the center of Hamilton’s.  I’m old.  I’m a Harvard MBA.  But read his argument.

It’s elicited death threats from the right.  But what do you think?

And maybe this is a good time to re-link to to Nick Hanauer’s Beware, Fellow Plutocrats, The Pitchforks Are Coming.

It begins:

You probably don’t know me, but I am one of those .01 percenters that you hear about and read about, and I am by any reasonable definition a plutocrat. And tonight, what I would like to do is speak directly to other plutocrats, to my people, because it feels like it’s time for us all to have a chat. Like most plutocrats, I too am a proud and unapologetic capitalist. I have founded, cofounded or funded over 30 companies across a range of industries. I was the first non-family investor in Amazon.com. I cofounded a company called aQuantive that we sold to Microsoft for 6.4 billion dollars. My friends and I, we own a bank.

I tell you this to show that my life is like most plutocrats. I have a broad perspective on capitalism and business, and I have been rewarded obscenely for that with a life that most of you all can’t even imagine: multiple homes, a yacht, my own plane, etc., etc., etc. But let’s be honest: I am not the smartest person you’ve ever met. I am certainly not the hardest working. I was a mediocre student. I’m not technical at all. I can’t write a word of code. Truly, my success is the consequence of spectacular luck, of birth, of circumstance and of timing. But I am actually pretty good at a couple of things. One, I have an unusually high tolerance for risk, and the other is I have a good sense, a good intuition about what will happen in the future, and I think that that intuition about the future is the essence of good entrepreneurship.

So what do I see in our future today, you ask? I see pitchforks, as in angry mobs with pitchforks, because while people like us plutocrats are living beyond the dreams of avarice, the other 99 percent of our fellow citizens are falling farther and farther behind. . . .

. . . So I have a message for my fellow plutocrats and zillionaires and for anyone who lives in a gated bubble world: Wake up. Wake up. It cannot last. Because if we do not do something to fix the glaring economic inequities in our society, the pitchforks will come for us, for no free and open society can long sustain this kind of rising economic inequality. It has never happened. There are no examples. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state or an uprising. The pitchforks will come for us if we do not address this. It’s not a matter of if, it’s when. And it will be terrible when they come for everyone, but particularly for people like us plutocrats.

. . . Rising inequality doesn’t just increase our risks from pitchforks, but it’s also terrible for business too. . . .

There’s more.  Read it all.  Knowing that he gave this TED talk long before Trump and Putin worked their magic.  Long before the Republicans passed yet another massive tax cut for the rich and powerful.

And read Hamilton Nolan’s warning, as well.  He’s no plutocrat, but he’s on the same page.

Click here to help fund the massive turn-out we need in November.

Three-minute 1943 War Department video warning in re: the insidious appeal of fascism.

One-and-a-half minute 2018 video of a California woman and a college grad she correctly took to be Mexican.

If you watch both, I think you’ll see the connection.

Have a great weekend?

In light of Anthony Kennedy’s announced retirement, it seems to me we should all be saying something like this:

Mitch McConnell is the Senate majority leader.

Mitch McConnell sets the rules.

And here are the rules he set:

He said that with Merrick Garland, a moderate consensus candidate, it was not enough to know how the majority voted in 2008 and 2012 . . . the President could not be allowed to exercise his Constitutional right to fill the vacancy.

No, he said: with less than a year until the 2016 election, we had to wait to see how they’d vote in 2016.

So we did — and millions more voted for the Democrat than the Republican. Not enough to win the presidency, but enough to confirm the nation’s preference.

(And still he didn’t give Garland a hearing.)

So now – with barely 4 months to November – and by Senator McConnell’s own rules — we have to wait to see how the people feel.  Which party gets more votes.

If it’s the Republicans, so be it.

But if it’s the Democrats, then — even if Senator McConnell retains the gavel — he must work with the Democrats and the President to find a moderate consensus candidate.

Perhaps even Merrick Garland.

This is 13 minutes, but you just have to watch, and then (if it strikes you as it struck me) share it — respectfully — with any of friends or relatives or co-workers who may be Fox viewers.  

Scarborough, as they probably know, remains a staunch Conservative who was until recently a lifelong Republican — and for several terms an Alabama-schooled Southern congressman from Northern Florida.  

Gibraltar, 25 June 2018 – WheelTug plc, the innovative aircraft electric taxi company, announced today the signing of two Russian airlines. The slot agreement is for several dozen narrowbody aircraft.  The airlines have chosen to make their own announcements at a future date.

The additions bring the total number of WheelTug systems reserved to well over 1,100.  Worldwide, WheelTug have now agreed terms with more than two dozen airlines; the Russian airlines are the fifth and sixth WheelTug signings of 2018.

Democrats are appalled by today’s Republican Party (obviously), but so, too, traditional Conservatives . . . George Will publicly quit, Joe Scarborough publicly quit, William F. Buckley, Jr. is rolling over in is grave . . . and, yes, traditional Republicans.  E.g., Steve Schmidt, who ran McCain’s campaign against Obama.  He just quit, too:

29 years and nine months ago I registered to vote and became a member of The Republican Party which was founded in 1854 to oppose slavery and stand for the dignity of human life. Today I renounce my membership in the Republican Party. It is fully the party of Trump.

And my Uber driver, a former Missouri Republican legislative assistant.

He told me, as he dropped me off on a ride in from Long Island (where he is represented by this appalling guy) that he couldn’t help overhearing my phone conversation (wherein I extracted big bucks from a San Diego couple) and asked, with some urgency, that I have someone contact him about volunteering.

There are, of course, a great many people cheering Trump on, from out-and-out Klansmen to the corrupt and greedy (and worse and worse and perhaps worst of all) to tens of millions of really wonderful people struggling to make ends meet, looking for someone they think feels their pain (I would argue Trump feels nothing for anyone but himself) and who they think has a solution to their problems.  If only he can vanquish the bad guys on their behalf (the press, the FBI, the Canadians) he will get them “great health care at a tiny fraction of the price.”

He claims he never read the compendium of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside, though (because he constantly lies) it is more likely that he did, as Ivana alleged.

Either way, it’s Germany 1934.  (General background here.)

Which is why everything turns on the mid-term elections.

Will “checks and balances” be restored?  Will the better angels of our nation’s nature prevail?

Will we be the America that massacred native Americans and broke our treaties with them?  Or the America that rode to Europe’s rescue and then conceived the Marshall Plan?  The America that lynched thousands of Negros?  Or the America that elected Barack Obama?  The America of Senator Joe McCarthy and his reptilian aide Roy Cohn (Trump’s mentor)?  Or the decent, hopeful America of Abe Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower and Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush and Colin Powell?  And, well, Steve Schmidt and Joe Scarborough and George Will and my Uber driver?

I think we will be the latter.

Reason #1: I inherited the happy gene.

Reason #2: I believe in the American people (millions more of whom, even with Comey’s interference and Putin’s massive attack, voted against Trump than for him).

Reason #3: We have so many great candidates.

Beto O’Rourke to beat Ted Cruz in Texas!

Former Governor Phil Bredesen to flip Bob Corker’s seat in Tennessee!

While it would be very close if we can pull it off, we have a much better chance of taking the Senate than most people realize.

And the House?

Take the time to enjoy these short videos introducing two of the many wonderful candidates who could help us win it big:

MJ Hegar’s story about “doors” — like the one from her helicopter the Taliban shot down and the one her father threw her mother through.

Scott Wallace’s story — what a family history of service to this wonderful country!  You will be inspired and given fresh hope.

As always, if you’re in a position to help, click here.  Each organizer hired now has time to snowball, via the volunteers she or he recruits and trains, into thousands of incremental voter registrations and many thousands of incremental votes.