Day 4 of National Emergency: Susie Buffett Exposed, Goldman Sachs Takeaways, Energy Savings, and a Female VP

Over breakfast Gilda, who reads the Omaha World-Herald on line to keep abreast of what’s happening where Ellie, Donny and their family live, informed me that Susie Buffett, daughter of Warren Buffett, has been exposed to the coronavirus (https://www.omaha.com/livewellnebraska/health/warren-buffett-s-daughter-susie-exposed-to-coronavirus/article_0008f06b-07f2-5c6c-9571-9cb42b9b7579.html?utm_medium=social&utm_source=email&utm_campaign=user-share).

To which I responded, “The virus has no knowledge of your Dun & Bradstreet profile.” (For those not familiar with D&B, it is a longstanding financial rating service of companies.) 

Donny’s brother Rob sent along notes he took from a Goldman Sachs conference call with some 1,500 companies over the weekend. Among the major takeaways:

• 50% of Americans will contract the virus (150 million people) as it is very communicable. This is on a par with the common cold (Rhinovirus) of which there are about 200 strains. The majority of Americans will get a common cold 2-4 times per year.
• Of those impacted by COVID-19, 80% will be early-stage, 15% mid-stage and 5% critical-stage. Early-stage symptoms are like the common cold and mid-stage symptoms are like the flu; treatment is stay at home for two weeks and rest. 5% will be critical and highly weighted towards the elderly. 
• In the U.S. about 3 million die every year, mostly due to old age and disease. Coronavirus might accelerate those deaths because of respiratory issues and may put undue stress on the healthcare system.
• Though COVID-19 will impact the economy and stock prices, experts predict they will bounce back later this year or in 2021.

Time Out for the Census: With time on your hands it’s a good moment to fill out your family’s census form on line. Gilda did ours earlier today. Go to my2020census.gov.

Energy Savings: Gilda keeps records of our electric energy usage. Here’s what she analyzed today on how we’ve fared since we made several energy enhancements:

In 2013 ConEd billed us for 14,563 kilowatts.

After changing most of our lightbulbs to LEDs the next year, our usage dropped to 12,337 in 2014.

In 2015 we installed solar panels. ConEd-provided kilowatts fell to 5,961. 

In 2018 they fell again to 4,447 after we installed Nest thermostats with an away-from-home factor. 

Even after Gilda retired in January 2019 and was home for more hours, usage dropped for last year to 3,494 kilowatts. 

Grumpy Old Men: There were no knockout blows delivered Sunday night between the last two Democrats—both septuagenarian men—sparring for their party’s presidential nomination. Their debate in a CNN studio in Washington without a live audience resembled trench warfare, lots of skirmishes with shifting positions but no outright victor, unless you applaud Joe Biden, and to a lesser extent the older by a year Bernie Sanders, for standing up for more than two hours without making any gaff that could boomerang back into their faces. 

The big news of the night was Biden’s unequivocal statement that he would pick a woman as a vice presidential running mate. Sanders said he would likely do so as long as she supported his revolutionary agenda. Both said women and minorities would comprise the majority of their cabinet officers. 

They also agreed climate change is an existential threat to America and the world—second only to Donald Trump serving four more years as president—but they differed in their approaches to abating global warming.

Speculation on Biden’s choice for vice president included names most anyone interested in politics would recognize—Warren, Klobuchar, Harris, Abrams and Cortez-Masto, to name a few. Realistically, only the last three would add sizzle to the ticket among Black and Latino voters so necessary for a Biden triumph. Klobuchar would help secure Rust Belt states, the ones Hillary Clinton failed to sew up in 2016. Biden has warmed to some of Warren’s progressive policies, but the public didn’t as evidenced by her failure to win any primary including that of her native state of Massachusetts.

All in all, Biden succeeded in shifting the political discussion and speculation from who will win the presidential nomination to which woman could be a heartbeat away from the next presidency. 

Oy! A Common Refrain In the Age of Trump

Oy.

Oy vey.

Oy-yoy-yoy. 

Oy—a Yiddish exclamation of chagrin, dismay, exasperation or pain.

It looks like it will be worse than expected. It looks like Donald Trump will systematically destroy the foundations of our country while a vast majority of the Republican Party shows itself to be a spineless entity only interested in staying in office with no regard for truth, justice and the tenets of their sainted Ronald Reagan.

Oy vey—Yiddish for “Oh, how terrible things are.”

Let’s start with some basic agreements. First ISIS and al Queda are terrorist organizations. They can attack us and kill scores at a time but they are not existential threats to America, at least not in a physical sense. They do no more physical damage than Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., or Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va.

The danger from Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik in San Bernadino, Calif., or a Nidal Hasan at Fort Hood, Texas, is that we will overreact and start to dismantle constitutional protections. We should fear the loss of liberties we all take for granted.

We are in no danger of sharia law overtaking our judicial system.

Second thing to agree on, existential threats may come from governments with the power to undermine our democracy, our safety and our economic system. Those threats can come from two countries—Russia and China.

Or they may come from within, from politicians who issue falsehoods while denying the truth, who divide to conquer, who fail to see real existential threats while promoting false ones, who undermine belief in our country’s principles and institutions by substituting their own misguided values and by not sharply rebuking and disavowing the bigoted rants of fringe groups, thereby giving them undeserved legitimacy.

OY-YOY-YOY: Yiddish for an exclamation of sorrow and lamentation.

It is widely believed by intelligence experts inside and outside our government that Russia tried to influence our recent election by hacking into Democratic Party and officials’ computers.

Donald Trump doesn’t believe that. But then Donald Trump believes it is okay to retweet falsehoods as legitimate news. So does his choice to be national security advisor, retired general Mike Flynn. So does his choice to be chief strategist, Stephen Bannon.

But as troubling as those individuals are with their careless and carefree regard for the truth it pales in comparison to the hundreds, if not thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Republican politicians and voters who are not protesting their insanity.

Now that the election is over, GOP senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham, especially the former, now seem ready to fight for the integrity of the government rather than for the in-the-moment-victory of a Republican presidential candidate no matter how flawed he might be or how crass his behavior toward them was during the last 18 months. 

Under the existing rules of our electoral system, Trump won the election, though not a mandate, as he claims, as close to three million more voters opted for someone besides him to lead America. He won the Electoral College vote, but that shouldn’t mean all truth and logic gets dissolved in his acidic view of reality. The optimal word in that last sentence is “shouldn’t.” 

Oy.

Trump is creating an alternative universe where intelligence does not exist if it doesn’t match his gut instincts and his desire to make a buck. He has mastered the art of the sham and the public diss. How exquisitely perverse was his dangling interest in Al Gore’s explanation of climate change and environmental vigilance only to rebuff it quickly by nominating an Environmental Protection Agency chief who rejects it all and has no appreciation of the link between fracking and the thousands of earthquakes that have shook his home state of Oklahoma.

Cabinet departments were established to further the benefits of their disciplines and constituencies. Yet Trump has chosen a labor secretary who doesn’t believe in a minimum wage and who is anti-union. Trump has chosen a housing secretary with no prior experience in public housing other than the fabrication (by others) that he grew up in public housing rather than near it. He’s chosen as United Nations ambassador someone with no foreign relations experience. During the campaign Trump blasted Hillary Clinton for being close to Goldman Sachs, yet he picked three current or former Goldman Sachs bankers as teammates (Steve Mnuchin as Treasury secretary, Bannon and Gary Cohn, the current Goldman president, as director of the National Economic Council).

The Bill of Rights was adopted to protect and enshrine freedom of speech, religion and assembly. Yet Trump disparages—bullies, actually—those who make fun of him, those who burn the flag as a protest, those who adhere to Islam, those who assemble peacefully. 

Republican values are being torn down by Trump. From Teddy Roosevelt and Richard Nixon such values included stewardship of the land and natural resources. Yet Trump surrounds himself with fossil fuel advocates and climate change deniers even as the oceans rise, the polar cap melts, residents of cities like Beijing and New Delhi choke under pollution from coal and fossil fuel exhausts. Do we really want to return to the days of smog in Los Angeles when children, seniors and those with respiratory ailments were advised to stay indoors? Is that how Trump will make America great again? 

Abraham Lincoln is revered for fighting for racial equality. Yet Trump and his minions want to roll back laws that have advanced voting rights of minorities. 

Reagan was the consummate anti-Russian. Yet Trump rejects such Republican orthodoxy. He sees Russia only through the eyes of an entrepreneur, as a market to exploit, failing to see how Vladimir Putin has aggressively sought to undermine Western values and democracies. 

Trump lacks a world view commensurate with the responsibilities of the commander-in-chief of the most powerful nation on earth. There is one silver lining in his leadership. He is a teetotaler, so there’s no danger of his being drunk and ordering some dangerous military adventure as Nixon’s top staff worried in the days before his resignation. Of course, our last experience with a non drinker would not instill such confidence. Abstainer-in-chief George W. Bush got us into two wars in the Mideast in which we are still engaged. 

Trump also poses a downside risk—he says he gets just four hours of sleep a night. Last week AAA said driving on four hours’ sleep is as dangerous as driving while intoxicated. Driving on 4-5 hours’ sleep increases the chance of an accident by 400%. Less than four hours increases the crash risk by 12 times.

Teenagers, older adults and those who have sleep debt are among the group with the most risk of an accident, according to AAA.

So how comfortable should we feel about the decision making skills of a 70-year-old future president who boasts he gets just four hours sleep a night?

Oy vey!

Bernie Intercepts Pope, Hillary Smiles, Walmart Supplanted

News reports said Bernie Sanders met with the pope during his whirlwind trip to Vatican City. But I’m wondering if a more apt description would have been “Bernie intercepts Pope Francis.”

“This morning when I was leaving, Senator Sanders was there,” Francis told reporters onboard his papal airliner. “He knew I was leaving at that time and he had the courtesy to greet me. I greeted him, his wife and another couple.” The other couple were Jeffrey Sachs, an economics adviser to Sanders, and Mrs. Sachs.  http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/us/politics/bernie-sanders-pope-francis-vatican.html?ref=politics&_r=0

Staying on the same floor at the Vatican City residence where the pontiff lives, Sanders and his wife Jane were said to meet the pope in the foyer of the Domus of Santa Marta as Francis was about to embark to Greece to meet with Syrian refugees. No pictures of their encounter were taken but I could envision a Saturday Night Live-like skit wherein Sanders is pacing the hallway agonizing over the pope’s delay in exiting his room while Jane nudges him they have to get to the airport so they won’t miss their flight back to New York. Sanders is acting like a teenager waiting for a rock star to emerge after a concert. His wife is like a parent who only wants to get away from the long haired, tattooed scrum of young fans.

But let’s be serious for a moment. The trip to Rome was an intelligent move. It linked Sanders to a popular pope and could help him secure votes in the Catholic and Latino communities of New York and California. 

Now for some Hillary time: Did anyone else notice during Thursday night’s debate that almost every answer Hillary Clinton gave was preceded by a smile or a giggle and a “Well, …” She really has to work on being less robotic.

The longer Hillary delays in releasing transcripts of her speeches to Goldman Sachs and other financial institutions the more credibility she is giving to allegations she played it soft with Wall Street and would continue to do so as president. 

Here’s what Seth Abramson, an assistant professor of English at University of New Hampshire, had to say on Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/seth-abramson/release-of-clintons-wall-street-speeches_b_9698632.html?utm_hp_ref=politics. It makes you wonder … 

Who’s Number 1? If you’re like me and spend Sundays filling in boxes for The New York Times Magazine crossword puzzle, you might have been puzzled by the answer to 16 Down in the April 3, 2016, issue. The clue: six letters identifying the  “company that passed Walmart in 2015 as the world’s largest retailer.”

Now, I spent more than three decades following Walmart as the editor and publisher of Chain Store Age, a retail industry magazine, Internet site and producer of trade conferences. So I was more than a little surprised to read in a crossword puzzle some pretty earth-shattering news, at least as far as the retail industry was concerned. I was further caught off guard after I filled in the blanks and found the answer to be Internet retail pioneer Amazon.

You see, Amazon had worldwide sales in 2015 of $107 billion. That’s quite a tidy sum, but it was less than one-quarter of Walmart’s $482.1 billion!

Ah, but Walmart’s perch at the top of the retailing pyramid, a spot it has enjoyed since 1990, has been supplanted by another Internet upstart—Alibaba Group, China’s gargantuan company that accounts for 10% of the country’s retail sales. Alibaba announced this week its 2015 sales will total $490 billion.

GOP's Last Stand

Regardless of who secures the Republican party presidential nomination, one overriding compulsion the Grand Old Party has is to hold back the sands of time. The election of 2012, according to Thomas Byrne Edsall, an academic and 25-year political reporter for The Washington Post, might well be the last chance for conservatives before demographic changes (more Latinos and Asians, more younger voters) deny them the opportunity to win national elections.

Speaking on NPR’s Leonard Lopate radio show last week, Edsall said if Republicans win the White House and seize both houses of Congress they will work feverishly to reverse the “welfare state” first conceptualized 80 years ago by FDR to lift the nation out of the Depression and to provide safety nets to assure we wouldn’t be so stricken again. Even if Democrats win four years later in 2016, it would take at least a decade to re-enact social welfare legislation, Edsall believes, because the rules of the Senate now require a super-majority to effectively pass any new laws.

It’s a harsh reality, or forecast, especially given the need so many in our country have for a helping hand. Republicans would have you believe private institutions and individuals, not government, can and should take care of the needy. Trouble is, as the economy sours, private contributions dry up. Last week, Crain’s New York Business reported, “Goldman Sachs Group Inc. cut its charitable contributions to its donor-advised fund by more than three-quarters to $78 million last year, amid a drop in profits. The smaller donation to Goldman Sachs Gives represents the second reduction in three years. The fund is solely supported by the bank and its partners. In 2010, $320 million was allocated for the charitable fund, down from $500 million in 2009.”

Hard really to blame Goldman Sachs and its partners. After all, the firm’s revenues dropped 26% last year vs. a year earlier. Compensation and benefits were trimmed by 21% to just $12.2 billion. Hey, you know how hard it is to get by on just $12.2 billion? Try it, some time. It’s not unlike Mitt Romney saying last week “not very much” of his multi-million dollar income came from speaker fees in 2010. Only about $374,327.62. A mere pittance. Try living on that, America!

Here’s an interesting bit of information from the Internal Revenue Service (courtesy of a Colbert Report episode last week). According to the IRS, for the year 2009, the top 1% of Americans reported adjusted gross income (AGI) of $343,927.
For the top 5%, AGI was $154,643;
for the top 10%, $112,124;
for the top 25%, $66,193;
for the top 50%, $32,396.
Half of the country earned less than $32,396 in 2009.


Sending a Message: Eartha Kitt chose a White House luncheon with Lady Bird Johnson to express her outrage over the Vietnam War. Tim Thomas, the Most Valuable Player of the reigning National Hockey League champion Boston Bruins, registered a personal political protest today against President Barack Obama by refusing to attend a White House ceremony honoring his team’s Stanley Cup victory last year.

When I first heard this story during Michael Kay’s radio show on ESPN, I agreed with Kay that Thomas, a Michigan native and a conservative Republican, was wrong, that his actions failed to show proper respect for the office of the presidency. Kay, the long-time voice of the NY Yankees, said some Yankees wanted to skip White House ceremonies with President Bill Clinton (baseball players are predominantly conservative, he explained). Owner George Steinbrenner, however, required their attendance because he felt it was a team honor bestowed by the White House, not an individual president.

The Bruins opted not to require Thomas’ attendance. I don’t agree with what Thomas did, but it seems to me he was perfectly within his rights. Athletes and other public figures do not give up their right to express their opinions, and what could be more to the point than snubbing the president?


Is Alito for Real? Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. is part of the conservative wing of the U.S. Supreme Court, the group that always seems to be looking to the Founders of the Republic for their intent before deciding a case. But in a decision Monday in which the court ruled police could not place a GPS tracking device on a suspect’s car without a warrant, Alito chastised several of his colleagues “for trying to apply 18th-century legal concepts to 21st-century technologies. What should matter, he said, is the contemporary reasonable expectation of privacy,” according to The NY Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/24/us/police-use-of-gps-is-ruled-unconstitutional.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&nl=afternoonupdate&emc=aua2).

Wow. Is this the first indication Alito has finally recognized all truths, and constitutional rights, do not reside with the Founders? I surely hope so.

News and Views

Stay, Mr. President: President Obama is going to Louisiana today to get another first hand look at the oil spill catastrophe. My advice—stay there until the gusher (it’s ludicrous to call it a leak) is plugged.

Though Obama and his aides profess his total engagement in this crisis, and late yesterday announced postponement of a planned trip to Asia this month, nothing will convey his attachment as much as his physical presence in the Gulf Region throughout the rest of this disaster. Yes, it’s a PR ploy, but this is not just about governance. It’s about politics and perception; the populace often is swayed by visuals. FDR’s fireside chats. JFK’s press conferences. Clinton at Oklahoma City. Bush II’s bullhorn moment at Ground Zero. Obama needs to show he is on the case, literally and figuratively. He needs to take charge of the narrative. He needs to emote more, to connect with people whose way of life, whose livelihood, have been tarnished, possibly forever.

It’s not as if the business of government would come to a standstill if he sojourned in Louisiana. Wherever a president travels or vacations the White House goes with him. He would be tethered to any government agency, here or abroad, through modern communications. Anyone who has to meet with him can travel to Louisiana. Obama needs to stop burnishing his image with photo ops like the one for Paul McCartney Wednesday night and have more pictures taken with workers cleaning up the BP mess. How much better would it have been if McCartney had received his Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song at a ceremony in New Orleans and later sang for a group of workers engaged in the cleanup instead of a select White House audience?

So prepare to stay for the duration, Barack. Order up some gumbo. Some beignets from Café du Monde. If you feel too confined in Bobby Jindal’s back yard, mosey over to Alabama or the Florida panhandle. Just stay in the Gulf. Your Gulf War is with BP. Let’s win this one faster than it’s taken to master that other war half a world away.


Summer Intern: News that a Dutchman, Joran van der Sloot, is in custody in connection with the murder of a Peruvian woman in Lima, Peru, hit home. Van der Sloot was a prime suspect in the disappearance of Natalee Holloway, an Alabama teenager, vacationing in Aruba in 2005. Holloway is presumed dead, her body never found.

Two or three years ago I was reviewing résumés of potential summer interns. Among the three or four I found interesting was one from a young woman from the South. I googled her name, a common reference practice. Up popped stories about Natalee Holloway. Turned out she was one of Natalee’s friends, with her on that ill-fated trip to Aruba, and one of the last people to see her alive.

I didn’t bring her in for an interview, choosing instead to go with a more local candidate.


Jefferson High: The chairman/CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, grew up in East New York, one of the toughest neighborhoods of Brooklyn, a few blocks from where Gilda lived from the time she was eight till 14. Once a bedrock Jewish community, the neighborhood rapidly devolved in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Gilda escaped to upper Ocean Parkway just as she was entering high school. Instead of attending East New York’s Thomas Jefferson High School, Gilda went to Erasmus, one of the borough’s best.

Nearly six years younger than Gilda, Blankfein went to Jefferson. By then the community had become even more depressed. He was valedictorian of his 1971 class. No disrespect, but even I might have been able to be valedictorian of that school at that time.


Summer Camp: Heard a radio ad for an upscale summer sleep-away camp on the radio the other day—seven weeks for $10,000. Wow!

When I started shipping out to sleep-away camp in 1956, my parents paid $600 for an eight-week season. Camp Massad wasn’t upscale—no horseback riding or other exotic features. Not even a swimming pool, just a lake. Today, that $600 price point would translate to an inflation-adjusted $4,683.37.

We sent Dan and Ellie to Camp Laurelwood in Madison, Conn. It wasn’t upscale, either, but the kids really liked it. For seven weeks, Laurelwood today costs $5,500.