Bain Birth Pain

When W. Mitt Romney started Bain Capital in 1984 he had trouble raising money from old-money American families. So he had to look further afield. An article in the LA Times identifies some of the international investors who helped Mitt Romney get off the ground. They provided a third of the capital used to start Bain. These include:

• Sir Jack Lyons, a Briton who used a Panamanian shell company and a Swiss money manager to hide his identity. Lyons was convicted of stock fraud, had his knighthood stripped and only escaped prison because of his poor health.
• Salvadoran expatriots living in Miami. In one family, the de Solas, one brother was connected to right-wing death squads in El Salvador, while another is serving a prison sentence for fraud.
• Robert Maxwell, a British publishing baron, who after his drowning was discovered to have stolen hundreds of millions from his company's pension funds.

Some of Bain's initial investors were not so notorious: a Monsanto exec, a guy who started the Panamanian stock exchange and an ambassador.

These offshore investors used Panamanian shell corporations and secret bank accounts. These were notorious havens for tax evasion and drug money laundering scams during in the 1980s, when Romney was starting Bain. It was so bad that the United States invaded Panama in 1989 and captured its dictator, Manual Noriega, who had been on the CIA payroll since the 1950s. Noriega was jailed and convicted on drug charges. After serving a prison term in the US, he was extradited to France and then Panama where he's still in prison.

Republicans love to play the guilt by association game with President Obama, constantly linking him to Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers just because he had met them. But Mitt Romney's claim to fame, Bain Capital, was started in that shady underworld of secret foreign bank accounts and shell corporations. These people gave him millions of dollars. They got him off the ground.

What kind of influence will people like this have over Romney? Do they have information, which if released, would discredit him? Could they then use such information to blackmail him? These are exactly the kind of questions the FBI asks when people are considered for security clearances. When the FBI asks, you don't have a choice about answering. Has the FBI asked these questions?

Maybe this is another reason Romney he doesn't want to release his tax returns.

Go Start A Business in Pakistan or Russia

"If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business. you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together" ---President Barack Obama 13 July 2012


The above quote from last Friday sent the right into a fit of adolescent hysterics. Cries of "Nanny State" were heard all over the right wing blogsphere as conservative pundits rebelled against "Dad" and screamed, "No fair! I can do whatever I want on my own!! I don't need anyone's help. ANYONE!!!" (stomp...stomp...stomp...door slams to teenager's room).

The president is correct, of course, and Sally Kohn's recent piece over at Fox News illustrates just how accurate the president is on the role of government in our lives.

My grandfather was a small business entrepreneur. He owned a clothing store in Penns Grove, New Jersey, and families came from across the southern part of the state to get slacks and blouses and jumpers for their kids. My grandfather employed two people who earned decent, middle class wages and made a good living for himself, probably upper middle class for that region. And good for him. He worked hard and earned it. 

But there were things that helped my grandfather’s business that he didn’t have to pay for. The roads trucks drove on to bring him products to sell. The court system that incorporated his business and protected the patents of what he sold. The police force that made it safe for people to shop there. The public schools that taught his employees how to read and do math, so my grandfather didn’t have to teach them. Make no mistake about it — my grandfather succeeded because of his hard work and initiative. But government played a supporting role.

Yeah, that's exactly right. For all their talk of "nanny states," the right count on government support just as much as anyone else. Ridiculous as these adolescent ravings are, this is even worse.

Today, hedge fund managers and big business CEOs pay lower tax rates than middle class families. In fact, the tax rate for the very wealthy is the lowest it’s been in over 60 years.

That’s right: We’re not even debating whether the wealthy should pay more than middle class workers. President Obama wants the very rich to pay the same rate as the rest of us. Those who have succeeded in our country, in part with the help of our public infrastructure, should just bury their money in off-shore accounts and loopholes? That’s un-American. Those who do well in America should do well by America — and pay their fair share of taxes so others have the same opportunity to succeed.

Can we at least start with the same rate? Conservatives used to champion the flat tax but now any talk of "paying their fair share" results in howls of socialism and nanny state waste. Kohn's right. This whole conversation is completely ridiculous.

We succeed because of our individual initiative but also because of the public investments that help springboard that success. Don’t believe me? Then go start a business in Pakistan or Russia. American entrepreneurs succeed in part because they’re in America. And in America, we don’t get ours and then yank away the ladder of opportunity for the next generation. 

We can slash Medicare and Social Security and public schools and college grants and all of the stepping stones that poor and middle class families have historically relied on to help climb the ladder of prosperity. Or millionaires and billionaires can pay the same tax rate as the middle class.

One of the greatest lies that has been perpetuated by the right (and sadly believe by far too many) is that we have to gut government to save the middle class from socialism. In truth, this lie is told to further protect the wealth of people that wouldn't have it without the support of the federal government.

Perhaps the federal government should stop giving them handouts if they are going to continue to bite the hand that feeds even them.

Cracked?

Found this old piece from two years ago that I never shared. I think I had planned on it right around the time Andrew Brietbart passed suddenly and thought it might be in poor taste at the time since Klinghoffer makes a  dig at him.

Yet now that the late Mr. Brietbart has been "cultified" with the "Brietbart is Here" photos, I think it's just fine to highlight two or three of Klinghoffer's points.

But more characteristic of conservative leadership are figures on TV, radio and the Internet who make their money by stirring fears and resentments. With its descent to baiting blacks, Mexicans and Muslims, its accommodation of conspiracy theories and an increasing nastiness and vulgarity, the conservative movement has undergone a shift toward demagoguery and hucksterism. 

Once the talk was of "neocons" vs. "paleocons." Now we observe the rule of the crazy-cons.

Pretty much a daily occurrence on all the right wing blogs. No doubt it is profitable and has become a very large industry, but can it influence elections on a consistent basis? I don't think so.

When I became a conservative, that is what I signed up for: a profound vision granting transcendent significance to public life and hope in private life. The goal wasn't to defeat Democratic officeholders or humiliate left-wing activists. It was, and still is (among those who remember) to save civilization.

Now, the goal is to destroy it even if they are ignorant to this plain and simple fact.

Why Romney Might Not Want to Reveal His Tax Returns

Because Romney was Bain, the release of his tax records will expose most of Bain's activities, as well as the activities of other Bain execs.

I have relatives who own a private company like Bain, so I know a bit about how privately held corporations work. My brother-in-law's company runs absolutely everything through the business. They have "stockholder meetings" in Utah during ski season. The company leases "company cars" for teenage children of execs. They have a company-owned chalet in Utah. The company has luxury boxes at pro football and hockey games. They have subsidiaries in Arizona and Florida that they visit during the winter. Flying to and staying in all these vacation destinations is a tax-deductible "business expense."

Many wealthy people freely intermingle personal and business expenses to maximize their tax savings. I don't know exactly what Bain did along these lines, but the potential for savings is astronomical. Depending on how they incorporated, the entire Bain management staff could wind up paying next-to-no personal taxes at all, as well as having the company foot the bill for everything from their cars, houses, clothes, kids' braces and mistresses' apartments. Things that mere mortals have to pay for by themselves.

So even if Romney didn't do anything illegal, releasing his tax records will expose to the world the sweetheart deals that execs get. It will name names and will give investigators thousands of leads to follow up on. Every day after the records are released until the election there will be a non-stop litany about this foreign account, that dummy corporation, this sports car for Tagg leased by Bain, that deduction for Ann Romney's sewing circle.

And it's not just protection from Democratic attacks. Romney's tax records could well reveal many embarrassing facts that will outrage Republicans: he may have donated to worthy social causes that they cannot abide, such as Planned Parenthood.

One commentator I read said a Romney aide intimated that Mitt would quit the campaign before releasing these records. If his tax returns reveal him to be a closet liberal, that would be the smoking gun his conservative enemies could use to deny him the nomination and choose a real conservative instead.

The Pressure Builds

First, the Christian Science Monitor...now, these guys...

 “The cost of not releasing the returns are clear,” said conservative columnist George Will, on ABC’s “This Week.” “Therefore, he must have calculated that there are higher costs in releasing them.”

“There’s obviously something there, because if there was nothing there, he would say, ‘Have at it,’” GOP strategist and ex-Bush aide Matthew Dowd said. “So there’s obviously something there that compromises what he said in the past about something.”

“Many of these politicians think, ‘I can do this. I can get away with this. I don’t need to do this, because I’m going to say something and I don’t have to do this,’” Dowd said. “If he had 20 years of ‘great, clean, everything’s fine,’ it’d all be out there, but it’s arrogance.”


On “Fox News Sunday,” the Weekly Standard’s editor Bill Kristol added his voice to the list as well, calling for Romney to “release the tax returns tomorrow” and “take the hit for a day or two.”

Add in Governors Barbour, Bentley, and former RNC Chair Michael Steele and Mitt Romney has a really big problem now.

Again the Victim Card

Why is it every time when Republicans come out on the short end of the stick in a public debate they bemoan the meanness and pettiness of polarized partisan politics? Our latest entrant in the "we're the victim" derby is one Michael Gerson, former speech writer for George W. Bush. His piece in the Washington Post whines about how mean President Obama is being to poor defenseless W. Mitt Romney for picking on Romney's record at Bain and questioning Romney's connections to the company after he gallantly galloped off to run the 2002 Olympics.

Romney can't figure out exactly when he quit the company. He won't release tax returns that would clarify the issue. He's being roundly ridiculed for claiming he "retroactively" resigned from Bain in 2002 effective in 1999. 

Gerson worked for Bush from 2000 until 2006. In case Gerson forgot, there was a presidential campaign in 2004 in which his boss's cronies spewed the coarsest lies about John Kerry's record in Viet Nam. Lies that were far worse than any of the partisan snipes the Obama campaign has leveled against Romney. The whole Swiftboating incident was especially vile because while Kerry was dodging bullets in Viet Nam Bush was lounging on an air base in Texas  (or was it Alabama?), or snorting coke, or AWOL—it's all kind of hazy.

Also, in case Gerson forgot, the current line of attack against Romney and Bain was begun by fellow Republican Newt Gingrich. Remember the slick 28-minute video "When Mitt Romney Came to Town"? In it Gingrich's campaign slammed Romney and Bain for their heartless firings of workers in companies that Bain gutted, milked for "fees" and then forced into bankruptcy (and there were lots of them).

The video that savaged Romney was financed by Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate who's now promised to spend a hundred million bucks to get Romney elected. I suppose that's Adelson's way of apologizing for the hack job.

In 2008 Republicans launched a similar attack on Barack Obama with Rev. Jeremiah Wright. They tried to link Obama to Wright and cast him as an angry black man. It didn't work because Obama's connection to Wright was tenuous, and Obama just isn't an angry black man.

But with Bain it's much different. Romney claims his Bain experience is what qualifies him to be president (his experience as governor of Massachusetts is far more relevant, but totally alienates The Base). Bain is Romney's baby: after 1999 he still owned 100% of its stock, was still listed as CEO and had complete control. Bain operated same way before and after 1999: milking other companies for cash and sticking it in their own pockets. And Romney did still have well-documented business dealings with certain Bain interests.

The stupid thing is, by Republican lights Mitt Romney did nothing wrong at Bain. All he did was fire people from struggling companies, help companies send jobs to foreign countries to maximize their profit, and take advantage of the corporate bankruptcy system. Why hide from it? Why try to weasel out of his connection with Bain for the three years that also include Bain's biggest success stories?

After all, throwing people out on the street and outsourcing jobs to China is just business. Nothing personal.

Not A Shock, Really

Why is it again that people with money support the Republican Party? I wonder what the folks at Bain would say about this...hmm....

John McCain Warned You About This...

It sounds like a plot from a spy thriller: a wealthy American casino magnate trying to buy the American election is caught paying a Macau influence peddler and funneling profits through the Hong Kong Triads, infamous for running the Chinese opium trade.

Sheldon Adelson, the man who has publicly pledged to spend a hundred million dollars to get W. Mitt Romney elected, is under investigation for violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). Both Nevada and the feds are looking into Adelson's dealings in Macau with a man named Leonel Alves, a Chinese-Portuguese lawmaker who has hooks in several different levels of Macau's government.

Adelson's company, Las Vegas Sands, paid Alves almost three-quarters of million dollars in "legal fees" for his help in getting casinos and other luxury properties built in Macau.

In addition:

Nevada officials are now poring over records of transactions between junkets [money-laundering organizations used to circumvent mainland China's laws against large money transfers to Macau], Las Vegas Sands and other casinos licensed by the state, people familiar with the inquiry say. Among the junket companies under scrutiny is a concern that records show was financed by Cheung Chi Tai, a Hong Kong businessman. 

Cheung was named in a 1992 U.S. Senate report as a leader of a Chinese organized crime gang, or triad. A casino in Macau owned by Las Vegas Sands granted tens of millions of dollars in credit to a junket backed by Cheung, documents show.

I have been on Adelson's case for a long time because of his connections to foreign countries. He seems more concerned about the welfare of Israel and Macau than he does about the people in his home state of Nevada, which has been particularly hard hit by the recession.

Just a month ago John McCain predicted that a scandal would erupt from Adelson's unlimited contributions and his foreign connections. Because of the secrecy inherent in the corporate world,  the nature of multinational corporations, and the lack of disclosure requirements after Citizens United, it's impossible to guarantee that foreign money isn't being used to influence American elections.

So, if profits from Adelson's casinos in Macau are being funneled through Chinese Triads, into Sheldon Adelson's pockets, then into Super PACs supporting Mitt Romney, don't say John McCain didn't warn you.

You Know It's Trouble...

...when The Christian Science Monitor starts talking about it.

When did Romney leave Bain?

The documents, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, place Romney in charge of Bain from 1999 to 2001, a period in which the company outsourced jobs and ran companies that fell into bankruptcy.

But at least three times since then, Bain listed Romney as the company's "controlling person," as well as its "sole shareholder, sole director, chief executive officer and president." And one of those documents — as late as February 2001 — lists Romney's "principal occupation" as Bain's managing director. The Obama campaign called the SEC documents detailing Romney's role post-1999 a "big Bain lie." 

And Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter said the presumptive GOP nominee may have even engaged in illegal activity. "Either Mitt Romney, through his own words and his own signature, was misrepresenting his position at Bain to the SEC, which is a felony," Cutter said, "or he is misrepresenting his position at Bain to the American people to avoid responsibility for some of the consequences of his investments."

Mitt could mitigate this problem by releasing all of his tax returns but he as refused to do so thus far.
Why?

The Romney Doctrine

In the last few days there's been a lot of arguing about exactly what W. Mitt Romney did at Bain, and when he stopped doing it. The essence of the story, as reported in the Boston Globe, is this:

[A] Massachusetts financial disclosure form Romney filed in 2003 states that he still owned 100 percent of Bain Capital in 2002. And Romney’s state financial disclosure forms indicate he earned at least $100,000 as a Bain “executive” in 2001 and 2002, separate from investment earnings.

There are reports of much closer ties between Bain and Romney during this period, but they're coming from the Huffington Post, and I trust them little more than I trust Fox News.

Usually people have to wait until they're elected president to have a doctrine named after them. Mitt Romney already has one teed up: "I wasn't directly responsible." He sounds like a concentration camp guard, using the CEO version of "I was just taking orders."


According to the Romney Doctrine, he wasn't running Bain after 1999 and therefore wasn't "technically" responsible for whatever it did. Yet the company was his baby—his legacy, he owned it, he received a salary twice as large as the average American and he still claims credit for Bain's success stories, like Staples, during that period.

Time for an analogy. Let's say there was a wealthy Massachusetts businessman who owned a really expensive sports car. Before he set off to Utah on a skiing trip he gave his teenaged sons the keys to that car. He didn't transfer the registration or the car insurance, saying he might do so when he got back from vacation.

When the sons used the car to drive old ladies to the grocery store, the businessman  bragged about what great sons he had raised. But when they got speeding tickets, then drove drunk, and finally crashed the car into a line of people outside a popular Boston club and killed three girls, the businessman said that he had disowned those rotten kids the instant he handed over the keys to the car.

Technically, the businessman wouldn't be criminally liable for those girls' deaths. He couldn't go to jail. But his insurance company would have to pay up, and the parents of those girls would sue him for millions. And probably win.

When Romney rode off to rescue the Olympics, he gave the keys to the corporation to his Bain underlings. But unlike the sons who drove recklessly, the underlings operated Bain no differently after 1999: they made money for Romney and themselves, damning the consequences to American jobs. "Technically" Romney didn't fire the people who lost their jobs due to Bain's machinations, but he set the pattern, still received a salary and still had complete ownership of the company.

Romney wants to have it both ways. He takes credit for the positive things Bain did during his absence, and disavows the bad things. By trying to weasel out of his association with Bain after 1999, Romney has conceded that Bain destroyed American jobs and hurt America.

While "technically" winning this argument about his direct involvement, morally and ethically Romney has lost.

Don't Tell Me What To Do!!!

Andy over at Electoral-Vote.com echoed me the other day about mandates.

Congressional Mandates Go Back over 200 Years 

Although it is almost 3 months old now, an article by a Harvard Law professor, Einer Elhauge, about early congressional mandates may be of interest to people who missed it. In 1790, the first Congress mandated that ship owners buy medical insurance for their seamen. (The idea was revived by Richard Nixon in the form of a general employer mandate to provide health insurance for employees, but it didn't pass.) Then in 1792, Congress, with 17 framers of the Constitution as members, passed a mandate requiring that all able-bodied men buy a gun. President Washington signed the bill. In 1798, Congress realized that its 1790 employer mandate didn't cover hospital stays, so it mandated that individual seamen buy their own hospital insurance. The bill was signed by President John Adams. 

 If Congress can order seamen to buy hospital insurance, can it not order teachers or short-order cooks or undertakers to do so? Arguments that the framers of the Constitution were against individual mandates are clearly untrue: some of them actually voted for one or more and specifically for a health insurance mandate. Furthermore, Presidents Washington and Adams signed bills with mandates that they could have vetoed. It is surprising that although independent authorities have verified Elhauge's story, it has gotten so little publicity although it was mentioned on the Smithsonian Institution's Website last week.

Yep.

Folks, the federal government has been telling us what to do from Day One. Falling back on the Founding Fathers isn't going to cut it anymore. They did the same thing that our leaders today are doing because they recognized that there was a greater good served by these sorts of laws.

We live in a culture with other people and we can't simply do what we want all the time...a phrase I find myself saying quite a bit these days with a junior high school kid in my house. Hmm....

Another Myth Torpedoed

Conservatives in this country are under the impression that they can tap into their adolescent rage, make a statement, and then it's reality. Take, for example, the one that states that "the president is destroying free enterprise." This comes from a general notion that the president and his fellow Democrats are over-regulating business.

Yet a recent article in Politico says otherwise.

Even though that’s not official policy, the administration has been increasingly frugal in issuing regulations, according to a POLITICO review of government data and more than two dozen interviews with current and former administration officials, lawmakers in both parties, business leaders and liberal activists. The analysis of the federal rule-making database shows Obama as of Tuesday had issued 1,004 final regulations since arriving in office. That’s fewer than his two immediate predecessors, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. This year, Obama is also on pace to put out the fewest “economically significant” regulations of any year in his presidency. 

Oh really? How exactly does this happen?

Republicans “just assert stuff and the facts have never encumbered them. I think there’s a sense that Democrats are regulation-bound or regulation-minded and so the assertion sticks. I don’t think it’s any more complicated than that,” said Harold Ickes, who served as deputy chief of staff to Clinton and then counted delegates for Hillary Clinton when she ran against Obama. 

No shit.

Well, there goes another myth torpedoed.

They've voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act (or parts of it) how many times? Ah well, as long as they aren't childish or anything about losing...

They sure are hard at work on that one issue they ran on...what was it again?...Oh, yes, JOBS. 

Masters of the Universe? Not So Much...

In the last month or so we've had a never-ending litany of financial misconduct from the same folks who brought us the meltdown in 2008:

• JPMorgan's "London Whale" losses, which double or triple every time Jamie Dimon turns around.
• The Libor scandal, in which banks across the world conspired to manipulate interest rates.
• MF Global, which somehow misplaced a billion dollars in customer funds.
• Bit-player Peregrine, who similarly mislaid a paltry $215 million of their customers' money.

And the beat goes on...

Most of these losses are due to lax regulation: i.e., these guys can't be trusted any further than Robert Reich could throw them.

Yet Mitt Romney is campaigning hard for even less regulation of Wall Street. Not surprisingly, these guys are opening the sluice gates to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars into Super PACs and anonymous non-profits to get Romney elected. It really makes you wonder how they got all that money they're spending so freely on Romney.

These so-called financial wizards are no masters of the universe. They can't even master simple arithmetic.

Can Global Warming Cause an Ice Age?

Though some parts of the country have been hammered by powerful storms and roasted by hellish heat waves, climate change skeptics insist that this is just normal variation and not proof of global warming. But a year and a half ago many of those same skeptics were saying that the extensive snowfalls that hit the northeast "proved" that climate change was a hoax, and that we were really on the brink of an ice age. Why is one snowy winter sufficient to disprove climate change, while a 100-year trend of ever-increasing average temperatures no proof at all?

Other articles, like this one from Pravda, claim that theories of Anthropegenic Global Warming ignore long-term historical trends and that we're really entering another ice age. The article insists that humans aren't generating the increased CO2 levels, but rather natural warming is causing CO2 levels to rise. The mechanism they propose is potentially reasonable for previous ice age cycles, but this time it's different: this time seven billion people are pumping megatons of CO2 into the air every day. CO2 levels are increasing much faster than the historical norms they're referencing.

It's interesting that the Koch brothers and the Communist propaganda organ Pravda are on the same side of the climate debate. Could it have anything to do with the fact that Russia is one of the world's biggest oil exporters?

Forecasting climate change is complex and difficult science. But predictions that NASA scientist James Hansen made 20 years ago in an article in Science are proving to be true. From the article's abstract:

Summary. The global temperature rose by 0.20C between the middle 1960's and 1980, yielding a warming of 0.4°C in the past century. This temperature increase is consistent with the calculated greenhouse effect due to measured increases of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Variations of volcanic aerosols and possibly solar luminosity appear to be primary causes of observed fluctuations about the mean trend of increasing temperature. It is shown that the anthropogenic carbon dioxide warming should emerge from the noise level of natural climate variability by the end of the century, and there is a high probability of warming in the 1980's. Potential effects on climate in the 21st century include the creation of drought-prone regions in North America and central Asia as part of a shifting of climatic zones, erosion of the West Antarctic ice sheet with a consequent worldwide rise in sea level, and opening of the fabled Northwest Passage.

We are seeing all of these effects, just 20 years on.

The funny thing about the climate change skeptics' claims that we're entering an ice age is that scientists have long feared global warming could cause an ice age. The reason is that a current along the American east cost, the Atlantic Conveyor, brings warm water up from the south Atlantic to Europe: this is why western Europe has much warmer winters than land-locked Russia.

The melting of the Greenland ice sheet could bring a flood of fresh water into the north Atlantic, deflecting the Atlantic Conveyor away from Europe. A colder Europe would have more snow cover, reflecting more light back into space, cooling the planet, allowing more snow to fall in North America, which would cool the planet even more and potentially cause an ice age.

I have to admit the Atlantic Conveyor seems rather esoteric. Hansen's paper, however, brings up a different scenario when he mentions volcanic aerosols. It's well known that massive volcanic eruptions can cause world-wide cold snaps. The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa cooled temperatures globally by 1.2 C for five years. The eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 cooled the earth by one-half to one degree Celsius. The Little Ice Age may have been caused by volcanoes. And the Bubonic Plague may have been caused by volcanic eruption in 535.

Now there's a lot of water locked up safely in the polar ice caps. When they melt that water will go into the sea, causing sea levels to rise, and into the air, as water vapor.

If a large volcanic eruption such as Krakotoa were to occur during the Northern Hemisphere winter, temperatures would cool drastically. The water that global warming had freed from the ice caps at the poles could then precipitate out as snow over the entire Northern Hemisphere. This would reflect sunlight back into space, cooling the earth and amplifying the effects of the volcanic aerosols. This could mean years with no summer and no growing season.

Each year of the cold snap caused by the volcano more and more of the snow would stay, and the earth would grow cooler. After the the effects of the volcano wore off it would be too late: the northern hemisphere would be locked in permanent winter, for thousands of years.

If all that water had still been locked in the poles, the area of the volcano-caused snow cover would be inherently limited, and an ice age would be less likely. But since global warming allowed the water in polar ice to migrate across the planet, all that ice could reform further south as snow, cooling the planet significantly.


Of course, a sufficiently large volcanic eruption could cause an ice age by itself. But with so much water freed from the poles by global warming, much smaller eruptions—which happen every few years—could have the same effect, raising the likelihood of an ice age.

U.S. Olympic Uniforms Made in China

So it turns out some of the uniforms for the US Olympic teams were made in China. And members of Congress are not pleased.

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said simply of the USOC, "You'd think they'd know better."

Really? The uniforms were provided by a sponsor, Ralph Lauren, who uses China to manufacture everything at lower cost than they can in the United States. That's because as recently as two years ago Chinese textile workers got paid 65 cents an hour, even less than the more highly skilled workers who manufacture iPads.

This is the natural outcome of the way the American business and sports sponsorships operate. Boehner should be the first one to congratulate Ralph Lauren for putting profit first and country last by shifting production to low-cost China, instead of America where workers live in actual houses and apartments instead of dorms.

You can't really blame Ralph Lauren. It wouldn't make any sense for them to set up a special production line in the United States for the limited number of uniforms they'd make for the Olympic team.

But it puts the lie to the jingoistic pride that Republicans spew whenever they shout that we're number one. Unless number one in offshoring and outsourcing jobs is something to be proud of.

It's embarrassing that American Olympic uniforms are being made in China. But what the politicians should be hopping mad about is the huge security risk this country is running: nearly all the cell phones, computers and electronic components we use in business, government and are manufactured in China and Asia.

The Price of Inequality

I highly recommend reading Professor Stiglitz's book which you can purchase here.

Don't Super Size Me!

Last month New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg made a big splash when he banned the sale of sugary sodas larger than 16 ounces. Late-night hosts like Jon Stewart went ballistic with their outrage, lampooning the decision incessantly.

Bloomberg's action is one of several he has taken to address a problem that has been well known for years, and made notorious by the documentary Super Size Me, in which director Morgan Spurlock ate nothing but McDonald's food for a month. (It took him 14 months to lose the 20 pounds he gained in that single month.)

There are solid reasons for people to cut back on their consumption of soda (including diet soda), as I've noted on this blog before. Americans are becoming severely—even morbidly—obese, resulting in rampant diabetes and the attendant miseries of amputation, blindness, heart disease and stroke. Pervasive diabetes is a major contributor to skyrocketing health care costs.

The problem with oversized drink containers is that they cause people to consume far greater quantities of soda than they would otherwise, in large part because once they've drunk their fill no one wants to let the extra "go to waste." Instead it goes to fat.

A common trick for dieting is to use smaller plates and glasses. People eating a meal from a small full-looking plate feel like they're getting more food than if they eat the same amount from a large empty-looking plate. If you've ever gone to a fancy restaurant and said, "I paid how much for that?" when they brought out gigantic plates with apparently tiny portions you know exactly what I mean.

Because of this quirk of human cognition, limiting your choices at the theater concession stand to 8-, 12- and 16-ounce cups, you will never feel deprived by the absence of 32-ounce sperm-whale size. You will drink a more modest 16 ounces and feel completely sated and a little less bloated. And you won't have to visit the rest room half way through the movie.

What's more, the capacity of an average human stomach is 900 mL, or 30.4 ounces. Since no one likes flat, warm, watery soda the 32-ounce size is overkill for anyone except gigantic NFL linebackers who burn 5,000 calories a day by just breathing.

It's ironic that people are screaming bloody murder when Bloomberg reduces the maximum size of soda containers, but when the companies that sell food cut down on the size of the containers and charge the same price no one utters a peep. That's because the companies know the plate-size trick and use it to fool us into thinking we're getting the same amount of food.

For example, the standard size of "family-sized" ice cream containers used to be half a gallon. Several years ago most dairies cut the size of half-gallon containers to 1.5 quarts. They changed the dimensions of the container to make them look bigger, usually making them taller and thinner and putting a half-inch empty space at the bottom of 4.5-inch tall containers. Some dairies then upped the size to 1.75 quarters, to give "almost 20% more!"

Ninety-six-ounce bottles of orange juice have been redesigned with different shapes, bigger spouts and 89-ounce capacities. Half-gallon cartons of lemonade have been reduced to 59 ounces. These companies aren't doing this for our health: they're selling us less food for the same money while using deceptive packaging to hide the fact that they're ripping us off.


And when you're in the juice aisles in the grocery store you have to be extremely careful to make sure that you're actually getting juice: most of the products sold these days contain only a small percentage of real juice. They consist mainly of filtered water and high-fructose corn syrup. To deceive us into thinking these contain real juice, the bottles are often emblazoned with a huge "100%" over a tiny "of daily vitamin C from ascorbic acid," which is typically a chemically produced nutrient.

No matter how you slice it, Bloomberg isn't tromping on anyone's freedom. He's not stopping anyone from buying 32 ounces of soda: just buy two 16-ouncers if your gullet is really that big.

There's nothing wrong with occasionally drinking moderate amounts of soda, or eating ice cream and baked goods if you're physically active enough to burn off the excess calories. But having a Big Gulp every day will put you on the Type 2 train to an early death. And cost the rest of us billions of dollars in extra health care costs and lost productivity.


Who's the real villain here? Bloomberg, for trying to deal with a serious problem like obesity that's killing millions of people and costing us hundreds of billions of dollars each year in medical costs?


Or companies that use deceptive packaging to mislead us and charge us more? Companies like McDonalds, whose share holders demand that profits spiral ever upward, which can only occur if Americans eat more junk food and gain more weight? Companies like PepsiCo (which owns juice bottlers in addition to its soft drink concerns) who have been silently weaning us off pure, nutritious juice to more profitable watered-down "juice drinks" and sodas filled with empty calories from corn syrup?