Michael Maiello's blog

Bill de Blasio Would Make a Great President

Michael Maiello — Fri, 03 May 2019 20:04:50 +0000

Rumor has it that Bill de Blasio will be announcing a run for president some time next week and the response I’ve seen has been all snark and chortles, even from the left. I get it — in such a crowded field, another candidate almost seems absurd on its face at this point. Another issue is that de Blasio is not a particularly popular mayor here in New York City, which invites jokes that we residents are trying to export him to the rest of the country.

I’ve lived in New York City since 1999 so I’ve seen Giuliani, Bloomberg and de Blasio. By far, de Blasio has been the best and most progressive mayor we’ve had since I’ve been here. His signature accomplishments have touched me personally. Just before our son was old enough to enter the public school system, de Blasio managed to provide universal public pre-K. This helped our son start his education earlier and saved us potentially tens of thousands of dollars. Yes, private programs cost that much here and they are overbooked, year after year.

Under Giuliani and Bloomberg, the police were ever-present in city life and the administrations defended the practice of police officers randomly stopping people (well, not all people in practice) and searching them for contraband. We were told, as I was reminded in a Twitter exchange with fellow New Yorker Josh Marshall, that allowing the police to stop and search people at the slightest suspicion was all that stood between us and a return to the high levels of street crime seen from the 1970s through the early 1990s. Mayor de Blasio put an end to stop and frisk policing and the city still grows safer each year.

Mayor de Blasio has acted out of concern for the health of city workers, for a higher minimum wage and for tenant rights. If he does join the presidential race, he’d be on the left side of the scale and has a record as a progressive mayor in a city that’s larger than a lot of states to prove it.

He’s unlikely to win, but so are they all. He has enemies in the party who are ready to kneecap him, starting with our governor Andrew Cuomo. But he deserves serious consideration rather than snickers, by any voter who counts themselves progressive.

Topics:

Politics

Never a Lovely So Real: The Life and Work of Nelson Algren

Michael Maiello — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 15:12:37 +0000

I'm hoping you all remember friend of Dagblog, Colin Asher, who has spent the last seven years working on a literary biography of Nelson Algren, once one of the most famous and celebrating working novelists in the United States and always a solid progressive and friend to the working class.

I haven't read Colin's book yet, but I have read the article in The Believer that was the genesis of the project. Colin's onto something big here, perhaps one of the last untold stories of McCarthyism. He's also a terrific writer and this is going to be a great introduction to Algren's work for a lot of us. It's not every day you get to discover a lost novelist of quality.

The book's been getting great reviews, including five stars from Publisher's Weekly and serious treatment from The Nation and The New Yorker.

You can make Algren spin in heaven by purchasing this book from Jeff Bezos. Such is life.

Topics:

Arts & Entertainment

You Can Never Undo Losing an Election

Michael Maiello — Wed, 27 Mar 2019 02:53:05 +0000

Picture it... November 2000. George W. Bush loses the popular vote to Al Gore but is declared President anyway because a Supreme Court made up of key people appointed by George W. Bush’s father decided that vote counting should cease in a state where George W. Bush’s brother was governor. I was 25 years old. I thought, for a months, “there’s no way this will be allowed to stand.”

It was allowed to stand.

It was so allowed to stand that about halfway through the first year of George W.’s first term, it seemed silly to even still complain about the popular vote. It was quickly water under the bridge. I’d been brought up to believe that the possibility of an electoral college victory without at least a plurality of the popular vote was just something that could theoretically happen, not something that would be accepted with a shrug. I thought maybe W’s election would lead to a reconsideration of the electoral college.

Nope.

Guy brought us to a disastrous war on false pretenses and it didn’t even matter. Heck, he was re-elected.

Trump lost the popular vote by way more than Bush did. His electoral college victory was secured by razor slim majorities in a few places. We had the gerrymandering and the restrictive voter ID laws and the Russians and the sense that the guy who won had never wanted to win in the first place and surely... somebody will do something about the fraudulent president?

Nope. We’ve now seen it twice. It doesn’t matter how you lose an election, it only matters if you lose an election. My goodness, remember the days when we talked of not “normalizing” this guy as if he’d be gone soon? I never had much faith in Mueller’s project, by the way. Impeachment is impossible without a willing Senate and I do think people have given Putin way too much credit as a mastermind. In 2000, I think Al Gore’s decision to distance himself from the very successful Bill Clinton killed him worse than Ralph Nader did. He should have won by a wide enough margin that Nader shouldn’t have mattered. Similarly, Hillary Clinton should have trounced Donald Trump. The race shouldn’t have been so close that “Fake News” decided it. But, that’s all over now.

2020 is coming. If His Fraudulency wins again, it doesn’t matter how. Our system protects its winners.

Topics:

Politics

Is the US Heading for Anti-Hate Speech Laws?

Michael Maiello — Fri, 22 Mar 2019 15:25:35 +0000

Was reading this morning about people in New Zealand being criminally prosecuted for downloading, distributing and even making statements in favor of the Mosque shooting. New Zealand is a free and open society where freedom of expression is protected, but free speech rights are not quite so clear as they are here in the U.S.

I'm a first amendment absolutist and always have been. But everybody has limited means and energy and so my personal willingness to "protect your right to say whatever..." really does have a lot to with what's being said. Ban a sexy book from the library and I'll get mad. Shut down a Klan parade and I'll kind of shrug and say, "I guess it's wrong, but I can't really be bothered to advocate for those scum bags." I guess I've come to a point where I believe you can be a first amendment absolutist without having to throw down for every fight.

Pew said in 2016 that Americans are more tolerant of offensive speech than anyone in the world. But I wonder if that tolerance is slipping. While I don't think everything that happens on college campuses flows into society (sheesh, it's just kids practicing at life) you can certainly find anecdotes about the young wanting to enforce community standards of safety and comfort over allowing people to say whatever they like.

You certainly see people enthusiastically pointing out that this or that internet service or social network is "privately owned" and not protected by the First Amendment. When I was growing up, the idea of corporate censorship was commonly discussed as a huge problem. These days, you have to explain that yes, a corporation can censor you unfairly even if they haven't violated your constitutional rights.

I sense a general softening on attitudes towards free speech. It might just be me, but I think that after so many social media fueled mass shootings, the riots of 2016, fake news and the still untapped malicious capabilities of the internet that people are going to shift gradually towards allowing more regulation of speech. It will mostly be speech that none of us want to engage in anyway and if the courts sense that the public has moved in that direction, they will find ways to allow it. We'll always have amendment #1, it will just have been a bit polished away. Maybe we'll become a bit more like other countries and it will be okay for you to be a jerk and put a confederate flag bumper sticker on your car but anything more overt will be off limits.

It's hard to say this, as a free speech absolutist, but I'm not sure we'd be worse off for it, were something like that to happen.

Topics:

Politics

Amazon’s Big Swingin’ Di—

Michael Maiello — Sat, 09 Feb 2019 14:49:25 +0000

Well, The National Enquirer seems to have stepped in it by trying to go toe-to-toe with Jeff Bezos and his unlimited wallet. The lame supermarket tabloid published details of Bezos’ affair (which I do not know because I never got caught up in the story) which has led to an impending divorce and Bezos wanting to know how those losers got information about his private life and having the means to launch his own investigation. The tabloid retaliated by threatening to publish a “below the belt” photo of Bezos unless he ended his investigation and declared no wrongdoing. Bezos took to Medium to expose their threat.

The head of American Media Inc is David Pecker and the New York Post, write on cue, came up with “Bezos Exposes Pecker” as a headline. I don’t usually root for Bezos. People with his level of wealth are undeserved royalty, I think he and his ilk have too much say in how our society operates and that it’s antidemocratic. I’m not excited about their HQ2 showing up in Queens given the subsidies we New Yorkers will be paying and the strain on infrastructure like the subways, but I’m all in for Bezos here and hope AMI goes down.

Not going to look up the link but I saw a headline from a major outlet that said something like “why do smart people still send nudes?” I didn’t read the article because the answer seems obvious to me — because they feel like it. This kind of thing shouldn’t have long term consequences. For Bezos, it doesn’t and won’t.

While it’s surely that AMI made a mistake in fighting Bezos because Bezos is bigger, richer and can quickly turn AMI into prey, I think there’s something else going on here, which is that after AMI exposed the Bezos affair, they left him with nothing left to lose. He’s getting divorced. The affair is out, he and his longtime wife are splitting. There’s nothing else AMI can credibly take from him, so he’s free to take them down.

Well, they could publish the “below the belt” shot, I suppose. But good for Bezos if his response is “so what?” Maybe the lesson here is “let them.” Because it doesn’t really matter if people see you naked. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s really nothing to be especially guarded about. Who cares?

The whole notion of “revenge porn,” and I think this qualifies, is predicated on the embarrassment and shame of the victim. It can be overcome and neutralized by purposeful shamelessness. You don’t need billions of dollars to immunize yourself against this kind of thing.

To the chagrin of conservatives, our culture has been etching away at shame for a long time. We clearly have a long way to go, though. Maybe Amazon’s been a mixed bag for the culture, by expanding access to so many goods and services while killing local businesses, among other things, but Bezos might do some unambiguous good here just be publicly refusing to be ashamed of himself.

Do what makes you happy. Don’t let anyone with a website or supermarket rag make you feel sorry for it, no matter what.

Topics:

Politics

Three Week Refuge from The Purge Open Thread

Michael Maiello — Fri, 25 Jan 2019 20:59:22 +0000

Have a wonderful weekend, friends!

Try to be nice to Peter (not verified).

See, the thing is, Trump was playing Battleship and Pelosi was playing checkers, and you can't play Battleship without a wall, so Trump quit.

Topics:

Politics

The Shutdown is Killing the Capital Markets

Michael Maiello — Wed, 23 Jan 2019 16:38:50 +0000

So many of us are rightly worried about how long the Transportation Security Administration can keep pushing people through screening lines for free that, or how much food the federal government can inspect for safety for free, that we're just ignoring the huge work slowdown at the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Bear with me, friends. If you have more important priorities than the SEC, I feel your pain. However, if the SEC can't process regulatory filings, then companies can't go public. If companies can't go public, that means they can't raise rounds of capital by selling stock. Many of these companies are owned by a combination of insiders, venture capitalists or private equity investors. Going public is not only how those investors realize their returns, but how these companies pass from Series A-D rounds of funding in order to raise capital for their public phase of growth.

Without asking anybody to cry for the fat cats and lucky entrepreneurs who are putting off their multimillion dollar paydays, I think we have to recognize that completely shutting down an avenue that companies use for capital raising is... bad for the economy.

At the same time that companies cannot go public, investors cannot register new hedge funds, mutual funds, exchange traded funds, or business development companies. So, we get no new issues and, at the same time, no new pools of capital to invest in new issues. This, at the very least, slows the velocity of the economy.

As with the missed wages of federal employees, the shutdown advocate's response can only be, "but the government won't be shut down forever and so these companies can all IPO later in the year." But it's not a great answer for a few reasons:

Some companies might need funding sooner rather than later. This is often the case with biotechnology companies (and don't get me started about slowdowns at the FDA).
All of these companies can't IPO at once as there is finite demand for new issues. Shutting down the government compresses the IPO calendar. Underwriting banks are going to have to make some decisions and some companies might never get their chance if the calendar is too compressed.
Making the VCs and Private Equity firms wait longer hurts their returns since their ability to deliver for their investors relies on them earning the highest return in the shortest amount of time. That can hurt the whole funding model for emerging businesses and can also hurt the public and private pension funds invested in these vehicles.

To end on a scarier note -- you also need the SEC to review and approve filings for issuing corporate bonds. While many companies can get by with ultra short term commercial paper, companies that issue high yield bonds generally don't allow those bonds to mature -- they refinance them in order to maintain and extend liquidity. Without an SEC around to facilitate that process, we could see companies crashing into a wall of liquidity that would make 2008 look like... well... 2008 without a functioning government.

Topics:

Business

How the Shutdown Could Wreck the Economy

Michael Maiello — Mon, 14 Jan 2019 16:24:17 +0000

The China trade war seems to be costing both the U.S. and China, as trade wars do. President Trump is probably correct that China is suffering more, but if you look at Apple's warning about diminishing iPhone sales, you see that punishing China has something of a boomerang effect for American multinationals. Of course, anything that hurts Apple hurts the entire semiconductor supply chain, so there are far reaching consequences. Still, if Trump's argument is that China will eventually give because it's feeling more pain, then I think I can at least entertain the notion.

The problem is that while he's picking this fight, he's also delivering self-inflicted wounds to the U.S. economy by yanking pay from 800,000 workers. David Kelly, the Chief Global Strategist for JP Morgan Funds puts this into context:

"If the shutdown were to continue for the entire first quarter, it would thus directly knock roughly 1.1% annualized from GDP and 2.1% annualized from wage income (assuming the hourly output and wages of the impacted federal are similar to those of the general workforce). These effects would, of course be amplified by the multiplier effects of spending not done by these workers due to a lack of ready income and by all the federal contractors who are also not being paid."

Dang. If the trade war with China moves us from around ~3% annualized to ~2% annualized and the shutdown costs us a little more than 1%, then we're growing more slowly than inflation and things could feel recessionary even if we don't technically have a recession (2 quarters of negative GDP growth.)

This doesn't leave a lot of cushion in the event of unanticipated shock such as natural disaster, political instability around the world or a debt shock emanating from a weak borrower economy from within the EU (Spain, Italy, Greece and Portugal remain shaky) or from something closer to home. Quoting Kelly again:

"So far the damage has been relatively minor (from a macro perspective – obviously not for the people affected) with the shutdown of some national parks and a halt to the processing of many loans and permits. The Treasury department claims that income tax refunds will be paid on time and TSA workers and air traffic controllers are still working, although not getting paid. However, this could easily get out of hand as it is unclear how long these workers would or could continue to work without pay. If income tax refunds were delayed the impact on consumer spending would be huge. If TSA workers or air-traffic controllers stopped showing up on mass, the impact on the air traffic system and the U.S. economy could be even worse."

There's also a chance that Fitch will downgrade US Treasury debt, following the lead set by S&P back during the debt ceiling revolt of 2011. The ratings agencies will downgrade your credit if your government seems dysfunctional. It's hard to argue with that.

So far, I think the shutdown has been covered as an oddity or an expression of Trump's personality. I'm not sure we're getting the full story on economic risk and since a lot of this stuff will only be reported on a trailing basis, even ending the shutdown now might have serious consequences in April. I'm also still reading a lot of "don't worry, the workers get paid back when the government reopens." Well, I guess that makes sense if people are paid back within the same billing cycle but if this stretches beyond a month, payments will be missed, personal credit will be impacted, fees and penalties will be assessed -- homes could even be lost. So it's not as simple as "They didn't get paid in January but they'll consume more in February when they are made whole." It may be too late to make people whole in February if the January drought forced any personal defaults.

Topics:

Health

Is the Fed Messing Up?

Michael Maiello — Thu, 27 Dec 2018 19:45:24 +0000

I really don't know!

The good thing about the Fed is that if it is messing up, it can always reverse course. Interest rates remain low, but the central bank now has a lot of room to cut or even go back to QE, if the economy seems too tempered.

My gut is that the Fed is probably right that now is an okay time to raise rates modestly. Inflation remains low, but that's generally something the central bank wants to get ahead of. In any event, it's pretty easy for Fed Chairman Jerome Powell to simply stop raising rates so long as inflation isn't forcing his hand. Though that could actually spook the market by making stock investors think that the Fed thinks the economy is weaker than it is. Or not. It's fun how any action by the Fed and by stock prices, can be framed in an explanatory way.

It's hard to isolate the Fed as the problem given all the goofiness emanating from the White House. No knock on Powell here but one of the goofiest moves was to have replaced Janet Yellen in the first place. But, hey, what do I know?

Topics:

Business

We Never Should Have Had Military Forces in Syria in the First Place

Michael Maiello — Fri, 21 Dec 2018 13:44:10 +0000

The collective wisdom seems to be that President Obama blundered when he drew a “red line” over the use of chemical weapons in Syria and then did nothing when Assad’s dictatorship crossed it. I remember things differently. I look at it through the lens of all the things that didn’t happen.

I remember not reading stories about US helicopter crashes, US prisoners of war, US casualties, regional allies letting us down or any sort of quagmire. As intervention in Syria was never popular, I remember Obama not stepping on a political landmine by spending money in Syria at the expense of domestic priorities. Nobody ever writes about the US lives that are not lost when we avoid entanglements in places like Rwanda and Syria

Obama ultimately opted for limited engagement, with the goal of containing the civil conflict to Syria and combating ISIS and this is the policy that Trump basically continued and escalated. Now Trump is withdrawing 2,000 soldiers from Syria and half of the 14,000 soldiers in Afghanistan. It’s hard to know why Trump does anything and I’m no more willing to praise him for being right than I am to praise a broken clock twice a day. But these are the right moves.

We invaded Afghanistan, with cause, in 2001. We shouldn’t have 14,000 soldiers there 17 years later. We shouldn’t have any soldiers there. It’s a failure that people have accepted we would have a permanent military presence in Afghanistan, akin to the forces we have had in place in Korea for more than half a century. Critics of the Syria withdrawal say “You can’t just declare victory and go home.” But the alternative, history tells us, is to never declare victory and to never recall the military. That can’t be acceptable.

In Syria, Trump seems to reason, the ISIS threat is passed and we’re not going to pick a side in the civil war. It’s hard to see this as a bad thing. Yet I’m seeing supposed liberals at the New York Times writing headlines like “Retreat Rhymes with Defeat.”

In our zeal to criticize all things Trump, we risk finding ourselves on the side of perpetual war. Maybe we should be withdrawing forces from more places around the world. We could even shrink the size of our military and devote resources those nice things I keep hearing about like sturdy bridges, bullet trains and healthcare.

Topics:

Politics