Paul Soglin: Waxing America

COVID-19 "To Tell the Truth" Post #4

Best weapon to defeat the corona virus: tell the truth

In any organization,a manufacturing company, a school system, a government, leadership is required if the system is to work effectively. Great leadership, and management, is built on trust.  Trust requires the truth. Stay with the ad, the story is worthwhile.

 

 

 

Donald Trump: What Ought To Be The Truth (I Am A Liar) part 1

I thank Todd Gitlin in The Media Rapture of Donald Trump for bringing to the surface the most profound understanding of our President-elect.

BUT LET ME STAY for a moment with the uncanny depth of what journalism failed to grasp about Donald Trump, for it also goes to a systemic incapacity. Tony Schwartz, Trump’s onetime ghostwriter, told Jane Mayer: “More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true. (my extra emphasis added)

Fact checkers be damned. They are irrelevant, of no consequence, and downright irritating at times.

Not only is  our next president unfazed when the New York Times asks, "Why Does Donald Trump Lie About Voter Fraud,"  but the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Paul Ryan, can respond to 60 Minutes, "It doesn't matter to me..."

Remember those 1100 Carrier jobs that Trump saved? It seems the numbers are not quite accurate, as the union president responded: Trump Lied His Ass Off:

Trump last week claimed he talked Carrier into keeping 1,100 jobs in Indianapolis, but that number turned out to actually be 800 because Trump and Carrier counted 300 jobs not initially at risk of being shipped overseas.

Trump offered the furnace and air conditioning manufacturer financial incentives to save from jobs being shipped to Mexico, a move that would have saved Carrier about $65 million a year.

The Truth is Dead, long live the Truth.

Note: This post is Part 1, since we know there will be repeated obituaries for the Truth.

Trump Joke of the Week: President-elect is Toothless Cat

Everyone from Bernie Sanders to Politico is on to the Trump tax cut gambit.

Candidate Trump threatened Carrier with tariffs if it moved jobs out of the United States.  Now Carrier will keep most of the jobs in Indiana after President-elect Trump, declawed and de-fanged, wheeled and dealed with Carrier and gave them major tax breaks to stay put.

Tax cuts to companies, income and property (this does not include TIF, secured by job guarantees and/or building improvements), are not justified: Kauffman Foundation, Three Tax Topics.

The scary part of all of this is the direction towards corporate socialism in the name of building the economy.

New York Times on Wisconsin Results

Today's New York Times Not Your Grandmother's Wisconsin:

 

...Paul Soglin is the mayor of Madison, Wisconsin’s capital city, in cerulean Dane County. He supported Senator Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary, and said he talked at least once a week with a field organizer from the Sanders campaign during the primary. But once Mrs. Clinton locked up the nomination, it was radio silence from the Clinton campaign...

 

 

The Trump Infrastructure Scam

Whoever controls the countryside controls the cities.

Mao Zedong

It was one of my first city council meetings in 1968, when we reviewed a subdivision plat and the debate turned to the water and the sanitary and storm sewers.  Chairman Mao's Little Red Book was in vogue. As the city council debate unfolded, one thing became clear: whoever controls the water and the sewers controls everything.

Now a debate is unfolding on Donald Trump's infrastructure plan, and its financing, practicality, and control.

Paul Krugman, writing in the New York Times, raised the right question this week:  Infrastructure Build or Privatization Scam?

The economist notes the Trump plan means that:

• The public will lose significant future income that is not justified by private financing. For an example of privatization that is a total ripoff, look at the City of Chicago giving away its parking system.
• The Trump plan is financing "with much less transparency, and hence greater opportunities for giveaways to favored interests."  Can you say "Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, and Wells Fargo?"
• Finally, Trump is determined to privatize public assets.  What that means is you and I pay, and his buddies own.

Not to be left out of the discussion, Tim Worstall writes in Forbes: Paul Krugman's Terrible Misunderstanding of Trump's Infrastructure Plans.  Worstall launches into an argument that privatization of water systems in Europe demonstrates the benefits of privatization.

Rubbish. Or more appropriately, sewage.

Twenty years ago I encountered a candidate for mayor of Madison who argued that a suburban community's private garbage collections system was cheaper (true) than Madison's. A classical sprawling series of developments with single family homes, no on street parking, and no morning rush hour, the suburb's collection cost per ton was lower that ours. While they sped along their vacant streets, our sanitation workers were navigating city traffic (they do start at 5:00 am) and parked cars.

A comparison has to go deeper than the hollow chant of privatization.

When it comes to water, the greatest cost is not labor, it is the cost of energy. Local utility electrical rates are the most critical cost. But there are other factors that determine your water, and the complimentary sewer bill:

• Environmental demands using pricing mechanisms designed to conserve water such as watering of lawns.
• Attacks on the water system, such as salt applied to city streets which infiltrate deep wells, raising chloride levels, posing a health threat and expensive to remediate.
• Magnesium and other elements that must be filtered to insure a healthy water supply - expensive to remediate.
• Postponed maintenance resulting in a massive backlog of repairs that will cost this nation billions.
• Faulty systems that did not have a long enough useful life.  In the 1950's and 60's, as new subdivisions spread across the United States, many cities allowed - under pressure from the private developers - the installation of untested piping, which is now failing at a rapid rate. Expected to last 100 years or longer, it is showing a life of sixty years.
• The need to drill new wells and build new pumping stations as a result of industrial pollution during an era of no EPA regulations.
• The need to replace lead pipe.

Notice that many of the costs associated with the rising cost of water and the disposal of waste are a result of either environmental failures, or Donald Trump's friends in the Republican Party pressuring government to reduce expenses and cut costs.

The great irony is that by pressuring government to cut spending, Grover Norquist and his ilk ("Shrink government to a size where you can drown it in a bathtub.") have ultimately driven up costs, created inefficiencies, and left us with the horrid conclusion that the private sector is the solution.