Political Irony

Why would anyone think that Jeb Bush would be any different from his family? Not just his father and his brother, but also his grandfather, who profited from the rise of Nazi Germany.

It bad enough that Jeb Bush has said that he still supports the invasion of Iraq and that he might use torture in order to keep the country safe. But talk is cheap. It is his behavior that gives away how corrupt he really is.

When John Ellis “Jeb” Bush was governor of Florida, he started moving large amounts of the state’s investment funds into Lehmman Brothers. In 2005, he moved $250 million of pension funds for Florida police, teachers, and firefighters, earning Lehman more than $5 million in fees.

Then, in 2007 when he left office, Bush took a job with Lehman as a consultant, even though he had no experience in banking or finance, making around $1.3 million a year. That’s pretty good payback, but it didn’t stop there.

Soon after Bush started working for Lehman, his former colleagues on the Florida State board that makes decisions about pension funds gave Lehman additional business, moving an additional $420 million into the same fund that Bush used, and a whopping $842 million into Lehman’s mortgage-backed securities.

What’s suspicious about this is that warnings about financial troubles at Lehman Brothers had already begun to emerge. You know, the troubles that led to the collapse of mortgage-based securities and the “Great Recession”. A comprehensive study of the collapse of Lehman Brothers said that “signs of financial distress” were there starting in 2005, the year that Bush started throwing money at Lehman.

It only took a few months before the whole thing came crashing down. Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy in 2008. Florida sustained losses of up to $1 billion, destroying pensions of public workers. And Jeb Bush took a job with another bank, which he gave up only when he decided to run for president. Another revolving door.

According to an ethics group, “This is a breathtaking conflict of interest.” And a Senator who served on the panel that investigated the bank crisis of 2008 said that what Bush was able to do “shows once again that there is utterly zero deterrence preventing public officials from being on the receiving end of pay to play when they leave office.”

People are entitled to say that we should not judge Jeb Bush by the absolutely disastrous presidency of his brother. But how can we forget the horribly corrupt but perfectly legal things done by Jeb Bush himself, which enriched him while costing Florida close to a billion dollars.

Most of the electricity in Hawaii is generated using petroleum, but their power generation facilities are old and are not keeping up with population growth. As a result, last year Hawaiians paid around 36 cents per kilowatt hour, compared to the US average of 12 cents/kwh. The plan was to convert to using LNG (liquefied natural gas) to produce electricity.

But then Governor David Ige announced that instead of spending the money to convert to LNG, he was changing the plan so that the state would convert to 100% renewable resources (such as wind and solar) by the year 2045 – just 30 years. If the island state can achieve this, it will make them the world’s most important laboratory for the fight against climate change.

Some people have said that this is an impractical goal. However, just a few years ago Hawaii set a goal of having 15% of electricity generation to come from renewable sources by 2015. Back then, many said that goal was unrealistic. But due to the rapid drop in the price of renewable energy, by 2014 they were already generating 21% of their energy from renewable sources. The lesson they learned was that change only comes when it is demanded.

There will be obstacles to be overcome, but the state is working together to overcome them. The state’s major utility is on board, and they have found an unlikely ally. Around half the energy in Hawaii is used by the US military, and the military has become concerned about energy endangering security. The Army says that they have seen a quadrupling in electricity outages across the US. These are caused by extreme weather events, which are increasing due to global warming, and by aging equipment and infrastructure. And in Hawaii, power generation plants are located on the coasts, making them vulnerable to tsunamis and rising sea levels.

With plummeting costs for photovoltaic panels and wind turbines, renewable energy is now competitive with fossil fuels. It won’t damage our economy to convert, in fact it will make us more secure. The only thing standing in our way is politics. It is good to see Hawaii taking the lead in solving this problem.

Preparing your tax returns can be, well, taxing. Unfortunately, some of that difficulty may be on purpose.

H&R Block was able to get language added to the bill funding the IRS that instructs the agency to add a bunch of questions to the form for the Earned Income Tax Credit. How many questions? Enough to turn the current one-page form into at least a four-page monster. And many of the questions are redundant – they are already answered by the main tax form. So it appears that the only reason for the added changes is to scare poor people into paying a tax preparer to fill out the form for them.

This isn’t the first time tax companies have lobbied against simplifying tax returns. The Obama administration has been pushing for automatic tax filing, where the IRS uses income information it already has to fill out your tax form for you. But the idea has been blocked due to lobbying from H&R Block and Intuit.

Republicans, especially their presidential candidates, seem unified in their desire to rid the country of illegal immigrants. Yes, I know, they are only in favor of this in order to get votes from their troglodyte base, but it still would be helpful for someone to look into what it would take in order to actually remove every undocumented worker from our country.

Well, someone has done this. A center-right think tank did the work and here are their numbers. As a preface, I admit that anyone can argue with their numbers, but only if they present some actual facts that disagree with their numbers.

“The cost to remove the entire undocumented immigrant population in the U.S. and prevent future unlawful immigration over the next 20 years is $400-600 billion.” One can hardly imagine that it would cost much less. Can you even imagine the effort it would take to track down all the illegal aliens and deporting them? This cost only includes what it would take to “apprehend, detail, legally process, and transport the immigrants, plus the ongoing price to keep additional undocumented immigrants out of the U.S.” The true cost would probably be even higher, as there would be no money spent on prevention, such as the cost of “finishing the border fence, drastically increasing the number of ICE and Border Patrol officers, building additional detention facilities, and addressing the years-long immigration court backlog.”

Now here’s the interesting part: That would not be the most costly thing. Their (conservative) estimates are that even if we could magically remove every illegal immigrant from the US at no cost, there would be a tremendous hit to the economy. The real GDP would decline by $1.6 trillion.

What’s ironic about this is that people want to deport illegal immigrants because “they are stealing our jobs”. But if we actually deported them, we would lose far more jobs because of the economic hit.

Indeed, the same report says that reducing legal (not illegal) immigration in order to “protect” American workers would actually hurt American workers more than it would help.

I’ve always said I’m a pragmatist. I’m tired of people blaming our problems on immigrants (illegal or otherwise). (If we want to deport someone, how about if we start with the bankers who caused the Great Recession?)

Seriously, let’s have some proposals for immigration reform that increases legal immigration and focuses on skills. That would benefit our economy and not waste money on stupid border walls.

Ten years ago, Dubya signed the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which included massive giveaways to the oil, gas, and nuclear industries. But the most infamous part of the law became commonly known as the “Halliburton Loophole” (named after the corporation led by Dick Cheney before he became vice-president). Indeed, the law was championed by Cheney and Kenneth Lay. Lay was the soon-to-be-disgraced founder and head of Enron, which was shut down because of massive fraud and corruption.

And yet we still have the Halliburton Loophole, which helped usher in the current disastrous era of oil and gas fracking. The loophole exempted the oil and gas industries from critical sections of the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974 and the Clean Water Act of 1972.

Fracking involves blasting millions of gallons of water mixed with toxic chemicals into wells to break up the rock, freeing oil and natural gas. Hundreds of peer-reviewed medical studies have linked fracking to cancer, asthma, and birth defects. The toxic chemicals contaminate drinking water. Over 270,000 wells have been fracked, and over 10 million Americans live within a mile of a fracked well.

And all of this was made possible by almost a billion dollars in lobbying by the energy companies.

© Mark Wilson