"An educated electorate is a prerequisite for a democracy."
Mon, Feb. 8, 2021, 3PM (CT). POSSIBLE TOPICS: Voting info; “Vote By Mail” apps; TX DMV announces 4/13 end date for waiver of vehicle title, registration; Local officials urge COVID-19 vaccine distribution to focus on the high-risk and vulnerable; New effort to track economic equity in Harris County; Oil and gas cleanups are on Biden’s agenda. Will Texas embrace it?; Pete Buttigieg: I want the United States to be leading the world in high speed rail; Sen. Lindsey Graham says Trump will ‘get his share of blame in history’ for the Capitol riot; Ingraham: Biden defense chief starting ‘ideological and un-American purge of the US military’; Yellen: US could reach full employment next year if Congress passes Biden’s stimulus plan; It’s not just GameStop worrying Wall Street about a bubble; MORE. Guest: [AUDIO/VIDEO] #KPFTHouston 90.1FM
This program was recorded early in the morning on SUNDAY, January 17. Due to Covid-19, shows are being prerecorded beginning March 13, 2020 and until further notice. We miss our live call-in participants, and look forward to a time we can once again go live.Thinkwing Radio with Mike Honig(@ThinkwingRadio), a listener call-in show airing live every Monday from 3-4 PM (CT) on KPFT-FM 90.1 (Houston). My co-host and Editor is Andrew Ferguson.
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For the purposes of this show, I operate on two mottoes:
An educated electorate is a prerequisite for a democracy.
You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.
“There’s a reason why you separate military and police. One fights the enemy of the State. The other serves and protects the People. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the State tend t become the People.” ~ Commander Adama, “Battlestar Galactica” (“WATER”, Season 1 episode 2, at the 28 minute mark.)
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Next Election: May 01, 2021 – Uniform Election. Early Voting: April 19th – April 27th
If you are denied your right to vote any place at any timeat any polling place for any reason, ask for (or demand) a provisional ballot rather than lose your vote.
Fill out a declaration at the polls describing a reasonable impediment to obtaining it, and show a copy or original of one of the following supporting forms of ID:
A government document that shows your name and an address, including your voter registration certificate
Current utility bill
Bank statement
Government check
Paycheck
A certified domestic (from a U.S. state or territory) birth certificate or (b) a document confirming birth admissible in a court of law which establishes your identity (which may include a foreign birth document)
City and state leaders came together Saturday to discuss vaccination distribution efforts in high risk and vulnerable communities.
Mayor Sylvester Turner said the city plans to fight racial inequities and disparity by targeting minority communities in vaccine distribution. He cited recent data showing minorities are less likely to get the COVID-19 vaccine.
“For the city of Houston, those percentages are 43 percent for Anglos, 21 percent for Hispanics, 15 percent for Asians, and 18 percent for African Americans,” said Turner.
MIKE: For comparison (and food for thought), according to DATA USA/HOUSTON, “The 5 largest ethnic groups in Houston, TX are:
Additionally, 37% of the population was Hispanic or Latino of any race. Since the 1990 Census, Houston’s population has become majority-minority.
According to Turner, the city needs to be more intentional and directional in the distribution of the vaccine.
“For example, we have kind of pulled away from the mass distribution sites,” Turner said. “Mass distribution sites are good for numbers but not necessarily the best for equity.” …
[Turner said,] “I have already sent an email to The Texas Medical Center and some hospitals asking that we work more constructively to share what we get. So asking hospitals to share and work even more closely with the county, with the city and with our community providers.”
A new department in Harris County set to launch in March will seek to bring a sense of equity to economic opportunity across the county. The initiative comes after county officials have previously made equity a major focus of several other spending conversations, including mobility, flood control and public health.
The Department of Equity and Economic Opportunity is the culmination of two years of research, community input and stakeholder meetings, said Sasha Legette, a member of the Harris County Precinct 1 policy team that played an instrumental role in getting the project off the ground.
In the long term, officials said they hope to develop policies and programs that help business owners, individual workers and job seekers, officials said. In its first year, the focus will fall on the county’s own contracting process. …
Two additional studies are also underway this year—one in transportation and one in public health—that are meant to further guide how equity can be incorporated into those areas. The public health study will ultimately yield a strategic plan for the county for how it can better bring health care to underserved communities. …
In East Austin, one plot of land near a decommissioned natural gas and oil-fired power plant now produces fruits and vegetables in a community garden. In South Houston, land that was contaminated by an old landfill will soon be occupied by a commercial solar farm.
Based on his recent executive order on climate, President Joe Biden wants to see more projects like these that combine efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions with jobs cleaning up contaminated sites that are disproportionately located in communities of color.
In Texas, the president’s directive to prioritize such projects could present opportunities for neighborhoods that have been left with the toxic legacies of the early days of the oil, gas and chemical industries. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, Texas has 69 Superfund sites, which are extremely toxic sites the federal government has prioritized for cleanup. The state also has several recently mothballed natural gas plants and thousands of old and abandoned oil and gas wells.
The president’s order, in part, makes revitalizing “energy communities” an official policy of his administration and aims to reduce methane emissions, oil and brine leaks and other environmental harms from former mining and oil and gas drilling sites.
“Such work should include efforts to turn properties idled in these communities into new hubs for the growth of our economy,” Biden’s order said. It directs a slew of federal agencies to identify and coordinate federal resources to revitalize the economies of communities where coal, oil and gas and power plants provided jobs for decades, but now have either shuttered or could soon be jeopardized by a transition to low-carbon energy sources.
But Biden’s vision is at odds with Republican leadership in Texas. Gov. Greg Abbott and the state’s GOP members of Congress have mostly criticized it for prioritizing renewable energy sources over the oil industry, which remains a pillar of the state’s economy.
“Texas is not going to stand idly by and watch the Biden administration kill jobs in Midland, in Odessa or any other place across the entire region,” Abbott said last week during a visit to the Permian Basin, one of the most productive oil fields in the world. [Abbott] signed his own executive order that directs state agencies to “use all lawful powers and tools to challenge any federal action” that threatens the energy sector in Texas.
Biden’s directive to find ways for energy workers to contribute to the nation’s climate goals is a recognition that some of his environmental policies will cost jobs in the fossil fuel industry, said Michael Drysdale, an environmental attorney at Dorsey & Whitney, a national law firm based in Minneapolis. …
In a statement, Gary Rasp, spokesperson for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, said the agency frequently partners with the EPA for projects to remediate contaminated sites.
And Andrew Keese, a spokesperson for the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates the oil and gas industry, said in a statement that if additional federal funding becomes available for oil and gas cleanup initiatives, “the RRC would certainly review the details for such assistance and make decisions that are best for all Texans.”
Experts said local communities don’t need the state’s blessing to pursue these federal cleanup projects. And the mostly Democratic leadership of Texas’ large cities are more likely to embrace Biden’s goals. …
Others, though, doubt cleanups and remediation will provide significant work in Texas. Mike Nasi, an environmental and energy attorney for Jackson Walker, a Texas-based law firm, said that unlike Kentucky or West Virginia, Texas doesn’t have many abandoned coal mines that would be ripe for cleanup work. And he said the state’s existing programs to remediate environmental contamination across the state have been successful. …
Others, though, said abandoned oil and gas wells could offer a prime opportunity for cleanup in Texas. Many oil wells drilled by early Texas wildcatters were never mapped or documented in state records, researchers say. Today, as many as a million of these “orphan” wells — which can emit methane, a potent greenhouse gas — are scattered across the nation, some experts estimate. …
An analysis by … researchers for Columbia’s University’s Center on Global Energy Policy found that a federal program to plug orphan wells could create as many as 120,000 jobs if half a million wells were plugged. But the effort would require significant coordination with states to identify and prioritize those wells. …
MIKE: In this video, Joy Reid interviews newly-confirmed Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg about his plans for high-speed rail in the U.S.
In a post-Covid world where geography has less to do with work-life, high speed rail may finally have found its raison d’etre.
Over several shows this past year, Andrew and I have discussed the future of city mass transit. As parts of the work-at-home work force disperses from central cities, or even cities generally, how will municipal mass transit systems adapt, or even survive? How will they be funded? How will their transit destinations and service hours change? What will they ultimately look like, and in what form may they even exist?
Building high-speed rail to link America’s newly-dispersed work force to central cities may offer a possible new synergy to (generically speaking) metro-transit.
A benefit of making high-speed rail a national project will be similar to have a federally mandated standards for an interstate highway system: Interoperability.
… Trump “is the most popular figure in the Republican Party” and “had a consequential presidency,” Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” Sunday. “January the 6th was a very bad day for America, and he’ll get his share of blame in history.” …
“The bottom line is the impeachment articles, I think, are unconstitutional because the president is in Florida,” Graham said on CBS. “He’s not in office. Impeachment for a president requires the chief justice to preside over the trial. He’s not at the trial because President Trump is not the president. So this is not process.”
Graham went on to say he thinks the Constitution “is being flagrantly violated because, when it comes to Trump, there seems to be no end to all of this. So, the trial is going to result in an acquittal.” …
MIKE: When Graham points out that Trump had a “consequential presidency”, how much equivalency are we permitted to draw to TIME Magazine calling Adolph Hitler 1938’s Man of the Year? Because he had a consequential ‘fuhrership’?
130 Years After Hitler’s Birth, He Continues to Live as a Symbol of Evil: “Hitler appeared on the cover of TIME on multiple occasions — most famously perhaps on Jan. 2, 1939, when he was named Man of the Year. That choice abided by the dictum of TIME founder Henry Luce, who decreed that the Man of the Year — now Person of the Year — was not an honor but instead should be a distinction applied to the newsmaker who most influenced world events for better or worse. In case that second criterion was lost on readers, the issue that named Hitler dispensed with the portrait treatment that cover subjects typically got. Instead he was depicted as a tiny figure with his back to the viewer, playing a massive organ with his murdered victims spinning on a St. Catherine’s wheel.”
“The Ingraham Angle” host recalled comments Austin made during his confirmation hearing last month, in which he vowed to “fight hard to stamp out sexual assault and rid our ranks of racists and extremists.
“The job of the Department of Defense is to keep America safe [from] our enemies, but we can’t do it if some of the enemies lie within our own ranks,” added Austin, a retired general who most recently sat on the board of the defense company Raytheon. …
“Now the Biden administration rewards them by casting them as potential domestic terrorists? Ticking time bombs of White supremacy? You can always count on think-tank generals whose salaries are funded by rich donors to side with the Democrats on the issue like this.”
“If Democrats were seriously concerned about stamping out extremism, they’d be looking in the mirror,” Ingraham added. “How many wacky, incendiary, inflammatory, defamatory hateful things have been said by their members over the past five years, or just over the past month?” …
MIKE: So Laura is against finding and purging potentially violent White Supremacists/Nationalists — potential seditionists and terrorists, even violent revolutionaries — from the US Military? So Ingraham favors training potential domestic terrorists in military tactics and hardware?
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Sunday the US could see full employment next year if Congress passes President Joe Biden’s proposed stimulus package, but warned the country’s unemployment rate would remain elevated over the next few years without the additional $1.9 trillion in federal support.
“I would expect that if this package is passed that we would get back to full employment next year,” Yellen told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”
“The Congressional Budget Office issued an analysis recently and it showed that if we don’t provide additional support, the unemployment rate is going to stay elevated for years to come,” she added. “It would take (until) 2025 in order to get the unemployment rate down to 4% again.”
Yellen’s assessment comes as the White House is pushing the President’s package through Congress, where it faces resistance from Republicans opposed to its price tag as well as some of its key elements. Lawmakers are under pressure to pass a relief package as Americans continue to suffer financially amid the pandemic’s economic fallout.
Full employment does not mean the unemployment rate is at zero, but, instead, generally that employers have hired as many qualified professionals as they need. …
MIKE: Let’s talk about when deficit spending becomes inflationary versus when it’s not “bad” inflationary.
Now, even the pros on Wall Street are asking if the stock market has shot too high.
S. stocks have been on a nearly nonstop rip higher since March, up roughly 70% to record heights and causing outsiders to say the market had lost touch with the pandemic’s reality. But Wall Street kept justifying the gains …
… [B]y some measures, the broad stock market looks more expensive than it did before the 1929 crash.
All the fervor has Wall Street openly debating whether the market is in a dangerous bubble, after months of batting away the possibility.
Perhaps more worrisome is that prices have been soaring across the stock market at a much faster pace than corporate profits. The two tend to track each other over the long term, so big dissociations give pause. One measure … looks at the S&P 500’s price against profits produced by companies in the prior 10 years, adjusted for inflation. Since 1881, only once has it been more expensive than it is now — during the dot-com bubble. It came close just before the crash that helped usher in the Great Depression. …
Past bubbles have popped after the Federal Reserve started raising interest rates in hopes of cooling off an overheated economy or markets. For now, the Fed seems to be years away from doing that. It’s even said for the first time that it’s willing to keep rates low for a while after inflation tops its 2% target.
With rates so low, investors don’t have much choice for good returns outside of stocks.
Margie Patel, senior portfolio manager at Wells Fargo Asset Management, said the Fed has pretty much signaled to Wall Street that it won’t allow for a big market downturn.
“As long as interest rates are this low,” she said, “it’s really hard for me to see how you could have much of a correction in stocks.”
MIKE: I think we were in a bubble, but the market may now just be in anticipatory mode.
I’m no debt hawk, but I think the $1.9 trillion Covid rescue will boost sales and earnings, and I don’t think there’s anything the Repubs can do about it.
The program includes jobs, unemployment insurance, US domestic manufacturing enhancement (sales & jobs), some infrastructure spending (sales & jobs), acquisition by the Feds of electric vehicles (sales & jobs), a major vaccination program (sales, consumer encouragement, & jobs), and other stuff. The sales and jobs will result in tax revenue which will help repay the debt (or at least reduce the speed with which we incur it).
The debt is worrying, but there’s good debt and bad debt. Investment in production capacity (when there are shortages) and infrastructure is good debt.
Of course, you know what they say when a native Bear like me turns moderately Bullish …
Thinkwing Radio with Mike Honig 