Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Ron DeSantis and Big Sugar

March 23, 2023March 23, 2023 by philg

Continuing our discussion of The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival, by Ron DeSantis… in the opening post regarding this book, I noted that a Boston progressive had confidently condemned DeSantis for aiding and abetting actual slavery that the Florida sugar industry was managing (humans arriving and departing the U.S. on ships in chains). It turns out that Ron DeSantis might be Big Sugar’s worst enemy. The bad blood started when Big Sugar backed Ron’s gubernatorial primary opponent in 2018. DeSantis was quitting Congress because he knew that he wouldn’t be able to accomplish anything with Democrats about to obtain a majority in the House.

By April [2018, the campaign luck] changed. A shadowy political group started blanketing the airwaves throughout Florida with false attacks against me. The group was funded by entrenched corporate interests in Florida, led by U.S. Sugar Corporation, Putnam’s biggest supporter. The ads were false and completely ridiculous. But we couldn’t answer them, because I did not have enough money at this early point of the campaign. And Big Sugar’s ads were airing nonstop on virtually every conservative-leaning news source on TV and radio. At about the same time, Putnam started airing ads to boost his own image and to portray himself as a strong conservative. To Republican voters who did not know anything about Putnam, these ads presented a compelling narrative.

Ron eventually overcomes Big Sugar’s candidate and Democrat Andrew Gillum. Once installed in Tallahassee, Ron’s agenda quickly comes into conflict with Big Sugar’s interests.

Before taking office, I flew up to DC to meet with President Trump. My goal was to convince him to direct the Army Corps to manage the lake in a more balanced manner. “Mr. President, I need your help regarding the discharges of algae-laden water from Lake Okeechobee,” I told him. “What do you want, money?” the president asked. “Well, eventually, yes, but immediately I need help with the Army Corps of Engineers,” I replied. “Oh, the Army Corps is the worst!” he thundered. “I mean, they are good people, but they have the worst red tape in the entire government!”

During my first week in office, I acted. I issued a far-reaching executive order to reorient Florida’s water policy in a better direction, convened a task force that could offer recommendations for legislative reforms, appointed independent members to the governing board of the South Florida Water Management District, and proposed historic funding to support water quality, infrastructure, and restoration. While Big Sugar did not like it, most people across the political spectrum in Florida were thrilled. We ended up securing major funding support and enacting water quality legislation. We made clear that the old ways of doing business were over.

In May 2022, the Tampa Bay Times wrote “Gov. Ron DeSantis has openly sparred with the industry since his two terms in Congress and during the 2018 gubernatorial primary, when he won the endorsement of the Everglades Trust…” From June 2022, Miami Herald: “DeSantis vetoes bill favoring sugar growers over Everglades”.

“How Big Sugar gets what it wants from Congress” (Colorado Independent 2011)
“[Democratic Senator from Vermont] Peter Welch accepts thousands in campaign donations from sugar industry PACs” (VT Digger 2022)

ARIA’s Christmas sugar display…

Full post, including comments

Condemning the apartheid state of Israel in Harvard Yard

March 22, 2023March 15, 2023 by philg

Israel has been in the news lately due to a proposal to change the country’s judiciary to be more like what we have here in the U.S. (Wikipedia) This will result in “tyranny” replacing “democracy” (nytimes). (Perhaps Israelis can flee this tyranny and seek asylum in Syria or Lebanon?)

Photos taken on March 12, 2023 in Harvard Yard include a Palestine flag in a window and some messages urging a boycott of a Harvard group trip to Israel.

This was in the same building as the “BGLTQ” office (not 2SLGBTQQIA+? or LGBTQ?):

Wikipedia:

According to Amnesty International’s 2020 report on Palestine, “Section 152 of the Penal Code in Gaza criminalizes [male] consensual same-sex sexual activity and makes it punishable by up to 10 years’ imprisonment.” Palestine has no civil rights laws that protect LGBT people from discrimination nor harassment

We had previously walked by the Lutheran church featured in Bulletin board at the Lutheran chuch (2019). Their pro-Palestinian material was not visible from the exterior, but they do have a rainbow and a Black Lives Matter sign:

Down at the river, there are rainbow benches, but no BLM benches;

Full post, including comments

Abortion care as a wedding gift?

March 21, 2023March 14, 2023 by philg

I just RSVP’d for a family wedding. Here’s what I found in the wedding registry:

In other words, to mark an event traditionally associated with reproduction guests can give the gift of abortion care (for pregnant people).

Since I absolutely have to be there and might have to zip to Los Angeles the day after (helicopter ferry trip), it was time to give some money to our commercial airline oligopoly. United tried to sell me trip cancellation insurance, noting explicitly that COVID-19 is “foreseen”:

Readers: If you are are giving abortion care as a wedding gift, what is the correct amount to give?

Full post, including comments

A public library in Portugal

March 20, 2023March 13, 2023 by philg

As a companion to my pieces on what public libraries offer in Palm Beach County (in Florida, where books are purportedly banned) and in Maskachusetts, some March 13, 2023 images from a library in Ponta Delgada, Portugal.

What’s the neighborhood like? Here’s the building next door, a museum of sacred art:

Who uses the library on a Monday late afternoon? A lot of studious school kids:

Does the library promote social justice? Here are the books recommended for adults:

I would love to see someone actually read that 700-page book on Max Weber (who envisioned our current bureaucratic world)!

Are there books on skin-color-based victimhood promoted to children? I don’t think so. Here’s the rack:

(I thought that “O Protesto” might be about a mostly peaceful social justice protest, but the star is a gorilla rather than a martyr in the struggle against racism.)

The library seems to take a more neutral position on what to read than do its counterparts in the U.S. A larger majority of books are simply shelved spines out. My Portuguese wasn’t good enough to enable me to identify the 2SLGBTQQIA+ section within the teens’ room so I don’t know whether they have anything corresponding to what we found in Cambridge last week:

The library devotes a fair amount of space to Portugal’s Nobel laureate in literature, José Saramago. I had no idea that he wrote a badly-reviewed travel guide to Portugal.

The library has a complex layout due to its location in a historic building. There is a nice little café for patrons.

Overall, there seems to be much less emphasis on the divisions among groups within Portuguese society than one finds in U.S. libraries regarding divisions among groups within American society.

Full post, including comments

The Cambridge Public Library

March 19, 2023March 12, 2023 by philg

A March 12, 2023 trip to the Cambridge, Maskachusetts public library…

Let’s stop first in the bathroom, a gender-neutral experience:

The kids’ section is heavy on Black-themed books, but all of the children present appeared to identify with non-Black skin colors. About 20 percent of the patrons, including plenty of kids, were protected by Cochrane-approved face masks (“Here’s Why the Science Is Clear That Masks Work” (NYT)):

A few of the books in the kids’ section (one authored by President Biden):

Downstairs in the adult non-fiction area…

Sunday afternoon on the ground floor…

Let’s move to the Teen room:

Before women invented the Mac and iPhone, they invented television. There was no corresponding “Because I was a boy” title. The 2SLGBTQQIA+ books were not featured as prominently as I’d hoped, but discreetly shelved.

The old building’s best rooms are dedicated to science fiction:

Summary: In the social justice and 2SLGBTQQIA+ departments, despite the hysterical media coverage about “book bans” in Florida, there was little to distinguish the Cambridge Public Library from the Palm Beach County libraries.

Full post, including comments

Three-year anniversary of Boston school closure for coronapanic

March 17, 2023March 17, 2023 by philg

Today is the three-year anniversary of the Boston public schools closing. From boston.gov:

Mayor Martin J. Walsh and Boston Public Schools Superintendent Brenda Cassellius today announced the district-wide closure of all Boston Public Schools for students, effective on Tuesday, March 17. At this time, schools are expected to reopen on Monday, April 27, following April vacation.

(The schools fully reopened, with a forced masking and vaccine coercion, about 1.5 years later.)

What were the smart people thinking on the same day? From John Ioannidis, Stanford Medical School, and author of “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”… “A fiasco in the making? As the coronavirus pandemic takes hold, we are making decisions without reliable data”:

A population-wide case fatality rate of 0.05% is lower than seasonal influenza. If that is the true rate, locking down the world with potentially tremendous social and financial consequences may be totally irrational. It’s like an elephant being attacked by a house cat. Frustrated and trying to avoid the cat, the elephant accidentally jumps off a cliff and dies.

How was that guestimate of 0.05%? Roughly 7 million people have died from COVID-19 (WHO) out of a total human infestation of formerly lovely Planet Earth of 8 billion. If we assume that everyone has been exposed to SARS-CoV-2 by now, that’s a population-wide fatality rate of 0.0875%. How did Professor Ioannidis do in predicting the mostly peaceful protests of summer 2020, the inflation of 2021-2023, increased alcoholism and opioid addiction, and the good citizens of Martha’s Vineyard turning their backs on hapless migrants?

One of the bottom lines is that we don’t know how long social distancing measures and lockdowns can be maintained without major consequences to the economy, society, and mental health. Unpredictable evolutions may ensue, including financial crisis, unrest, civil strife, war, and a meltdown of the social fabric.

What were the stupid people thinking on March 17, 2020? Let’s check this blog for three same-day stories:

Will the human race be more susceptible to obsessive compulsive disorder going forward? (if hand-washing and mask-wearing worked to stave off coronadeath, we would breed a subspecies of OCD humans)
Coronavirus is a national emergency, but let’s not do anything drastic “on Friday, March 13, the Boston Public Schools decided to close for six weeks… but not start the closure until the following Tuesday (today, March 17). If the problem is serious enough to require a six-week closure, why open the schools on a single Monday after everyone has had a chance to pick up the virus somewhere over the weekend (if anyone needed to come the school to retrieve an item, that could have been done over a period of days, without gathering everyone together in close quarters for 6+ hours).”
More from the British on coronavirus “The only thing that would potentially save us from these shutdowns is a vaccine, say the authors. But other sources are saying that a vaccine probably won’t work, right? The virus evolves so fast that last month’s vaccine won’t help with next month’s infection.”

The Honest Man of American Medical Research weighs in on coronaplague (my March 23, 2020 post about Ioannidis)

[Oh yes, Happy Saint Patrick’s Day! It is ironic that Irish-influenced Boston shut down schools on the day honoring someone who was famous for teaching.]

Full post, including comments

How is First Republic Bank different from Silicon Valley Bank?

March 17, 2023 by philg

Readers: Please help me keep these bank failures straight. “First Republic Stock Plunges After Bank Rescue Plan, Dividend Suspension” (WSJ, today):

First Republic Bank shares fell more than 30% Friday after a multibillion-dollar rescue deal orchestrated by the biggest U.S. banks failed to convince investors that the troubled lender is on solid footing.

The move erased the gains that came Thursday, when a group of banks including JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., Bank of America Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co. deposited $30 billion in First Republic in an effort to restore confidence in a banking system badly battered by a pair of bank failures.

“It’s not clear whether it’s viable as a stand-alone entity,” said Julian Wellesley, global banks analyst at Boston-based Loomis Sayles & Co. “So it’s likely, in my view, to be taken over.”

The sudden collapse recently of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank—the second- and third-largest bank failures in U.S. history, respectively—have sparked concerns that anxious customers could drain deposits from other small and midsize banks.

What do SVB and First Republic have in common other than both being supervised/regulated by the San Francisco Fed? Was First Republic as devoted to diversity and inclusion as SVB?

As Congress and the D.C. Fed flooded the U.S. with money in 2020, what was First Republic thinking about? “First Republic Expands Commitment To Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (August 31, 2020):

First Republic has engaged Management Leadership for Tomorrow (“MLT”), a national nonprofit that equips and emboldens high-achieving Black, Latinx and Native American individuals to secure high-trajectory jobs, while partnering with employers to provide access to a new generation of diverse leaders. The organization’s advisory services help institutions to better foster an environment of success for the underrepresented colleague experience.

“A diversity of backgrounds, opinions and perspectives has always been fundamental to our success,” said Jim Herbert, Founder, Chairman, and CEO of First Republic. “Management Leadership for Tomorrow has a proven track record of success in helping companies find and develop leaders from underrepresented communities.”

Individuals who self-identify as members of ethnic minority groups currently total 48% of First Republic’s workforce, with over 55 languages spoken at the company. Building upon First Republic’s long-standing culture of inclusion and diversity, MLT will provide strategic and tactical support to help further diversify the company’s workforce. In addition, the organization will collaborate with First Republic to enhance colleague and culture development programs that drive a sense of belonging and engagement.

If we count employees identifying as “women” as being in a victimhood class and we consider these 48% who were victims via “ethnic minority group” identification, the majority of the bank’s employees were victims and yet the goal was apparently to go bigger in the victimhood department. Here’s the person who was CEO for 37 years, through 2022:

James Herbert was replaced, in the CEO/COO roles, by a diverse duo:

But what exactly did these diverse executives do to cause the meltdown? And why didn’t the San Francisco Fed notice anything amiss? Let’s check a 2018 New York Times article:

The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco has installed Mary C. Daly, a labor economist who currently serves as the head of research, as the institution’s new president beginning Oct. 1. … Ms. Daly, who is openly gay, will become the third woman among the 12 presidents of the Fed’s regional banks. As a senior executive at the San Francisco Fed, she has been a leading voice for addressing what she has described as a “diversity crisis” in the economics profession and at the Federal Reserve. At the San Francisco Fed, she pushed successfully to balance the hiring of male and female research assistants.

Dr. Daly attacked the diversity crisis at the San Francisco Fed, but ignored the insolvency crises brewing at SVB and First Republic? If diverse teams are smarter and more capable and the San Francisco Fed had more diversity than other regional Federal Reserve Banks, why are two of the biggest failures in the SF Fed’s territory?

“Getting from Diversity to Inclusion in Economics”, Remarks at the Gender and Career Progression Conference (London, England) by Mary C. Daly, Executive Vice President and Director of Research, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco

Full post, including comments

Ron DeSantis’s book

March 17, 2023March 12, 2023 by philg

I have begun to read The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival, despite my general aversion to this genre of literature. I consider reading Ron DeSantis’s book to be a duty both as a blog publisher and as a new Floridian. Progressive academic friends in Cambridge feel that they already know Mr. DeSantis. One noted, during my most recent visit, that DeSantis is responsible for importing slaves into the United States to pick sugar cane. “They come on boats in chains,” he said, “and aren’t paid.” Why don’t journalists from New York-based media enterprises ask Mr. DeSantis about his slave importation operation at press conferences? “They know that he won’t answer.” Why didn’t the progressive himself go down to Florida and picket outside the Governor’s Mansion for the slaves to be released? He’s a member of the laptop class and can work from anywhere. He couldn’t explain why he wasn’t willing to invest the price of a plane ticket to protest the actual slavery that he has identified on U.S. soil.

For folks who don’t feel that they already know everything worth knowing about Ron D, read on…

The book starts out rough, in my opinion:

Most Americans instinctively know that something has gone wrong with our country over the past generation.

How is Ron going to win with this message? Successful politicians generally tell Americans that they are the world’s greatest people living in the world’s greatest (and richest) country. A vote for the politician is a path to slightly increased greatness, not a recovery from a nosedive. The language gets a little softer later in the introduction:

Our nation needs immigration policies that recognize and enforce the country’s sovereignty, not just by having a wall at the southern border but also by quickly repatriating those in the country illegally. An erroneous claim of asylum should not give a foreign national a ticket to settle in the interior of our country. Nor should the legal immigration system have policies such as the diversity lottery and chain migration; instead, the immigration system should be merit-based; favor assimilation, not mass migration; and be geared toward benefiting the wages of working-class Americans.

Ron D will not deport migrants, but repatriate them.

Looking for useful life advice?

People often talk about the need for a student-athlete to “balance” the demands of the classroom with the requirements of sports. For me, I rejected the idea that I would strike a balance between academic achievement and athletic success, because I was not willing to give less than 100 percent to either baseball or my academics. So instead of balancing, I just did everything to the hilt and let the chips fall where they may.

He gave 110 percent while at Yale, in other words? Or 200 percent? I am not sure how to put this into practice since my capacity is about 50 percent on my best day.

We learn about Ron and Casey’s working class and military roots. Ron worked during high school and college, e.g., for an electrical contractor, while Casey’s sister was a USAF C-17 pilot. (Even today, the DeSantis family has minimal wealth.) Ron’s own military service made him skeptical of America’s recent war aims:

It was just as obvious that we would not succeed in establishing a pro-American, Western-style democracy in Iraq. This was simply outside the capability of any military force to achieve. The cultural differences were too vast for Iraq to embrace Madisonian constitutionalism. In fact, the Iraqis considered “freedom” to be submission to sharia law, not the enactment of a liberal democracy.

(The U.S. would be a lot friendlier to the immigrants that we claim to welcome if Michigan and Minnesota adopted sharia law. Why should Muslim immigrants, many of whom are asylees or refugees who are fleeing violence, have to accept a debauched society? They didn’t come to the U.S. because they love the way that the U.S. is, but because they would have been killed if they had stayed in their home countries.)

Ron was inspired by Barack Obama:

Once I left active duty, I began to think more and more about how our country was moving in the wrong direction, especially under the leftist agenda of the Obama administration.

What did he learn as a Congressman?

Ingrained in Beltway thinking is a contempt for average voters, particularly voters who reject leftist ideology.

That’s certainly consistent with my experience of D.C.! Also, Ron turns out to be one of the few Representatives who actually reads the bills.

The book does get more substantive. Leafing through, I found the following, for example:

Our reforms included protections for political candidates against being deplatformed, which is a way for Big Tech to interfere in elections. What is stopping Big Tech companies from shutting off Republican candidates from social media platforms during the stretch run of an election? If someone hosts a get-together for a candidate and provides refreshments, that must be accounted for as a campaign contribution, yet a tech company can upend an entire candidate’s campaign, and that is somehow not considered interference with an election. The reforms also included transparency requirements for the social media companies’ content moderation policies, and required that users be given notice of changes to those policies. The opaqueness of how Big Tech arrives at its censorship decisions means that it is easy for them to move the goalposts to stifle views the industry does not like.

I’m actually surprised that Twitter, Facebook, and Google allow Republican candidates to use their platforms at all. Any of these firms could cite the following analysis of the January 6 insurrection and say that it wasn’t safe to allow Republicans to speak.

January 6th has a higher death count than Covid. And there are no vaccines to prevent insurrectionists.
— Jess Boosted 🦜y (phi/zer) (@BoostedJess) March 9, 2023

I hope that some readers will read along with me!

So far I’m dismayed that Ron hasn’t adapted his message to be more like conventional politicians’. Crushing it in Florida against an all-abortion-care-all-the-time fossil does not mean that he can crush it with voters nationwide in 2024. Americans in general are the most timid and compliant humans ever to occupy this planet. The Floridians who wanted the freedom to leave their houses, breathe without masks, send children to school, not inject their children with experimental drugs, etc., are outliers on the spectrum of American cowerhood. Young/cognitively sharp/competent/energetic/effective sounds good, but Americans in 2020 chose a new president who does not have any of these qualities.

Full post, including comments

Silicon Valley Bank and Moral Hazard

March 16, 2023March 15, 2023 by philg

Dedicated to diversity and regulated/supervised by a San Francisco Fed that was dedicated to diversity (see also “San Francisco Fed elevates a gay woman — its vice president — to the top job” (LA Times, 2018)), Silicon Valley Bank is being described as a casualty of its own wokeness. A friend who used to run a multi-$billion investment fund sent me this article by an economist, which attributes the need for an FDIC bailout… to the existence of the FDIC. Some excerpts:

The wrong way to think about moral hazard

Deposit insurance gives bank executive an incentive to take socially excessive risks. In some cases the risks won’t pay off. But that doesn’t mean executives don’t have an incentive to take excessive risks.

Things didn’t pan out for SVB. But that doesn’t mean their executives made an unwise gamble. It’s very possible that SVB’s strategy had a very high expected payoff, and they were simply hit by bad luck (rising interest rates.) Of course from a social perspective their decisions may have been bad, but not necessarily from a private perspective. “Heads I win, tails part of my losses are borne by taxpayers”. Of course I’d take more risk with those odds.

… back in the 1920s people cared a great deal about bank safety. Banks knew this, and managed their balance sheets far more conservatively than do modern banks. That’s why big city banks used to look like massive Greek temples; they had to convince depositors that they had the capital to survive hard times. The vast majority of big banks survived the Great Depression. US GDP in 1929 was about $100 billion and deposit losses during the Great Depression were $1.3 billion. Today, a 50% fall in NGDP (as in 1929-33) would wipe out almost our entire banking system. Modern bankers are far more reckless “despite” regulation. The negative effects of deposit insurance are far more important than the positive effects of regulation.

How do we get to Yglesias’s utopia [of more big banks]? Abolish deposit insurance (he wouldn’t agree). You’ll see a massive shift of deposits toward the larger, more diversified banks, making our system resemble the Canadian system.

FDR opposed deposit insurance, as he (correctly) feared it would create moral hazard. Unfortunately, Congress refused to listen to his good advice.

“FDIC fees are not a tax on the public.” Yes, they are.

“We aren’t bailing out bank executives”. No, we are not bailing out SVB executives, but we are (implicitly) bailing out their competitors.

I disagree with that last statement. The executives at SVB got to keep all of their big earnings from the big years that they had due to their aggressive risk-taking. Mary C. Daly gets to keep her $500,000+/year (including benefits) SF Fed compensation from incompetently supervising SVB. When things fell apart, none of these people had to pay anything back to the FDIC. It is the chumps with low-interest accounts at conservative banks who are left to pay.

Separately, I’m shocked that McKinsey wasn’t involved somehow in SVB! How can there be a group of elites robbing the peasants without McKinsey’s assistance? At least one of the usual suspects was there… “How Goldman’s Plan to Shore Up Silicon Valley Bank Crumbled” (WSJ):

Silicon Valley Bank executives went to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in late February looking for advice: They needed to raise money but weren’t exactly sure how to do it.

Soaring interest rates had taken a heavy toll on the bank. Deposits and the value of the bank’s bond portfolio had fallen sharply. Moody’s Investors Service was preparing for a downgrade. The bank had to reset its finances to avoid a funding squeeze that would badly dent profits.

While few could have predicted the market’s violent reaction to the SVB disclosures, Goldman’s plan for the bank had a fatal flaw. It underestimated the danger that a deluge of bad news could spark a crisis of confidence, a development that can quickly fell a bank.

Goldman is the go-to adviser to the rich and the powerful. It arranges mergers, helps companies raise money and devises creative solutions to sticky situations of the financial variety—a talent that has made the firm billions.

Yet, for SVB, Goldman’s gold-plated advice came at the steepest possible cost. SVB collapsed at warp speed in the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history, setting off a trans-Atlantic banking crisis that regulators are working furiously to contain.

How big was the failure compared to the investments that are needed to build things with silicon? SVB’s pre-coronapanic/free-money-shower value was about $13 billion. A single Samsung fab is on track to cost 25 billion Bidies: “Samsung’s new Texas chip plant cost rises above $25 billion” (Reuters). The bump due to inflation in this one factory, according to the Reuters article, is in the same neighborhood as the SVB market cap, at least in nominal dollars.

We’re not hearing much about Signature Bank’s failure. For 8 years up to and including its seizure by the FDIC, Barney Frank was on the board: “Barney Frank defends role at Signature Bank: ‘I need to make money’” (FT):

FT says that Barney Frank made about $2 million by serving on the board of failed bank. None of that will be clawed back by the FDIC…

Full post, including comments