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Duke Energy just doesn’t give a gnat’s posterior. Not for public safety, not for the law.

Duke Energy flaunts its lawlessness like ancient King David and Bathsheba flaunting their adultery by cavorting in the streets.

Duke, the largest electrical power company in the country, illegally pumped as much as 61 million gallons of coal-ash wastewater into Cape Fear. Duke did it on purpose and now it’s denying it, saying it was just routine maintenance. But the usually-moribund North Carolina Department of Environmental and Natural Resources and environmental groups have Duke caught red-handed.

This latest release of dirty water by Duke comes on the heels of its massive spill of toxic coal ash into the Dan River a few weeks back. The federal government is investigating that reportedly accidental release, which resulted from the rupture of a pipe.  So far Duke and North Carolina state regulators are sharing blame for the poor maintenance that led to the rupture.

Letting maintenance slide has become the norm in the age of low taxes on the wealthy. Lots of communities in the Unites States are used to that. Think about New Orleans levees before Katrina or the I-35W Mississippi River Bridge in Minneapolis.

But in its latest willful polluting of our water, Duke acted alone, and now even North Carolina state regulators are pissed off.

What are we to make of Duke’s flagrant violation of state and federal environmental regulations? Was Duke’s management emboldened by weak enforcement under the rabidly anti-regulation Republican Governor Pat McCrory, who previously worked for Duke? Or perhaps they thought the Republican legislature would eventually pass a law exempting Duke from following any environmental or product safety laws?  And why not? Duke contributed to the election campaigns of most of them.

Duke Energy is a corporation, but a corporation is run by people. One reason that Duke’s executives such as Chairman of the Board Ann Maynard Gray and Chief Executive Officer Lynne J. Good think they can act with impunity is that have no fear of real consequences.  Even if fired summarily by the board of directors (and fat chance of that unless the company is losing money), a C-level executive has probably already made enough money to be set for life. And these guys—and in the case of Duke Energy, these guys and gals—never go to jail.

It’s about time that changed. We should throw away centuries of jurisprudence and tear the corporate veil to shreds. The corporate veil is the legal principle that a corporation is a separate legal person from its executives, employees, board members or shareholders. It seems to me that when the fictitious person called a corporation does something illegal the real people who make the decisions—the executives—should pay the fines from their own pockets and go to jail. It is true that employees and executives who act alone and break the law sometimes go to jail, but when a corporation breaks the law or makes a bad mistake, it usually just pays a never-large-enough fine and no one ends up in prison.

I think both Ann Maynard Gray and Lynne J. Good would look as sharp in a saggy orange prison uniform as Taylor Schilling, star of Netflix’s “Orange is the New Black.”  The rest of the Duke Energy Board, by the way, consists of 13 white males, one white female and a male who used to be Obama’s U.S.  Ambassador to the European Union and looks as if he could be white or African-American.  Having an individual or two on the board with the President’s private phone number stored in his cell phone probably makes the rest of these wealthy and connected scofflaws sleep a little more easily at night.  And it probably doesn’t hurt that they live far away from the communities and natural areas damaged by their dumping.

Anybody want to go to war over Crimea?

Anyone want to see American soldiers die? Anyone want to see Ukrainian soil soaked with the blood of innocents? Anyone want to see the unspeakable tragedies of Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria repeated?

Anyone want to risk a nuclear conflagration?

And for what? To keep Ukrainian ownership of Crimea, a predominantly Russian-speaking peninsula which was part of Russia for centuries and whose ties to Russia go back even further? To keep Crimea part of an oligarch-dominated kleptocracy masquerading as a democracy with a political culture as corrupt as Russia’s?

What is the difference between what is happening in Crimea and what happened in Ossetia and Abkhazia, which we let Russia take from Georgia during the Bush II Administration? Why go to war today when we didn’t go to war back then?

Once we have made the decision not to go to war, Mitt Romney, John McCain, Ted Cruz, Dick Cheney, The Wall Street Journal and others criticizing Obama’s actions in the Ukraine crisis don’t have a leg to stand on. None of these critics have actually used the “w” word, not even in its many euphemisms, which leads me to believe that Republican criticism is all about getting elected and not about meeting a particularly knotty global challenge.

The critics of how Obama is handling the Ukraine crisis make two arguments:

1. Russia would not have acted so aggressively if Obama didn’t have such a wimpy foreign policy, as demonstrated by our backing down on sending a military presence to Syria
2. We should do be doing more right now in the way of economic sanctions of Russia

The critics of the president seem to forget that when he proposed military action in Syria, the nation objected vociferously, so much so that Obama couldn’t summon a majority in Congress to support putting American lives at risk to intervene in a truly monstrous civil war. Thanks in part to Russia and Iran, we did get Bashir Assad to stop using chemical weapons, which was the reason Obama wanted to engage the military. While the American people—fomented by the mainstream and right-wing media—are enraged at Russia and Putin for annexing Crimea, going to war is another story.  I could find no survey of how the American people feel about going to war over the Crimea, but I’m guessing that the results of such a survey would not make Putin quake in his boots.

I’m thinking that it was less America’s actions in Syria and more our reaction to what Russia did in Georgia that emboldened Putin to annex Crimea. I’m sure someone in the Kremlin has read the surveys that show that the American people are sick of war and tired of the human and financial costs of military interventions.

Once military action is off the table, the Obama response makes perfect sense. The Administration has decided first to implement sanctions that only hurt the Russians. Only if those sanctions don’t work will he consider sanctions that would also hurt the world, European and American economies.  And once the Administration has decided to limit sanctions to what will hurt Russia, it makes perfect sense to show them only a little at first, before ratcheting up the pain. The more steps there are in the response, the more flexibility we have in negotiations.

But what kind of negotiations are we talking about?

What the United States and the West should be doing now is making sure that Russia stops with Crimea. Steps we could take include supporting a truly democratic election process in Ukraine, funneling massive economic support into Ukraine, weaning Ukraine and other western nations from their dependence on Russian oil and gas and even placing or threatening to place NATO troops on the Ukraine-Russian border as peacekeepers, with the approval of Ukraine of course.

Meanwhile, we should engage in negotiations with Russia to recognize the annexation of Crimea in return for economic support of the Ukraine and promises to stay out of Ukraine politics. Let Russia have Crimea, but make them pay for it. They will.

A common mantra of the right-wing when the subject comes to spending by large organizations to influence elections is that unions do it more than business does. Recently the right has encapsulated this argument into a comparison between one family—the Kochs—contributes and what unions contribute to elect their preferred candidates.

But a chart by investigative journalist Lee Fang and website Republic Report republished in Nation shows that any comparison between election spending by the Kochs and unions is as much of a conflation as the 2004 comparison between the military records of George Bush and John Kerry.

The differences in numbers between right-wing and left-wing political spending are so large that the mere act of placing them in the same sentence without including amounts qualifies as a lie. The chart, titled “Koch Bust” is a bar graph showing the total political spending in the 2012 election by Koch Brothers-backed groups and by unions. The Kochs contributed more than $412 million, while the combined contributions of the 10 biggest unions equaled a mere 153.5 million. That’s 2.7 times as much money spent by the Kochs to elect candidates than spent by the major unions.

The total includes money contributed directly to campaigns or to support issues of importance to campaigns by individuals, political action committees and indirectly. The Republic Report refutes the facts and figures supplied by The Wall Street Journal and others, which claim that unions far outspend the Koch Brothers. The numbers from the right-wing neglect to include “dark money,” which are contributions that aren’t reported until after the election. Some $408 million in Koch election contributions came as dark money, so leaving that source of campaign financing is duplicitous to say the least.

There are three levels of deception in saying that unions spend more than the Kochs to influence elections:

1. The lie itself, which implies that left-supported candidates enjoy a major advantage over poor little conservatives. This lie plays into the “sinking ship” mentality that conservatives like to employ to describe the current supposedly embattled status of the right. Of course nothing could be further from the truth in a country where a qualified candidate for a judgeship gets voted down because he did his job as a defense attorney or a law permitting discrimination could pass a state legislature.
2. The idea of limiting the terms of comparison to Koch versus unions, which leaves out the outsized contributions by Sheldon Adelson, Phillip Anschutz, groups controlled by Karl Rove, the Wal-Mart family and other wealthy individuals and families.  Let’s also not forget about the National Rifle Association.
3. The implication that the fact unions are also taking advantage of the shambles that the Supreme Court created in the Citizens United decision makes the decision okay and proves that it doesn’t give a special advantage to corporations. Of course there are left-leaning campaign contributors, too, such as George Soros and Tom Steyer, but they are severely outnumbered and don’t give as much money.

On the surface, the real trump card for the right in the campaign spending argument could be the fact that Barack Obama outspent the Republican opponent in both his presidential victories. In fact, the winning candidate in presidential campaigns virtually always outspends the opponent, for the simple reason that the winner has managed to raise more money. The candidate with more money also usually wins statewide and local elections. It’s as if money votes first and then the voters go to the polls to confirm the decision that money has made.

But the fact that Koch and Adelson couldn’t impose their will on the presidential election does not disprove that these American oligarchs have too much influence on the outcome of elections. Besides having the ability to give more to each election, they can also give to more elections. Someone with a few hundred bucks to contribute may just give it to his or her preferred choice for president or senator. The rich folk are spreading it around. Thus we end up with a Congress full of right-wingers who propose legislation that surveys show the majority of Americans are against.

We may be entering a new age of court sponsorship similar to Renaissance Europe when landed nobility adopted painters, sculptors, playwrights, choreographers and writers, supporting their efforts and in return reaping some of the glory of creation. But in this new age, it’s not aristocrats by birth who provide the support but the aristocrats of money such as Larry Elison, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Gordon Moore, union-hating liberal Michael Bloomberg and the nefarious David Koch. And the support is going not to the arts, but to research scientists.

The New York Times article that details the enormous amounts given by these and other billionaires to support scientific research zeroes in on the big problem of the ultra-wealthy selecting research topics: they decide what’s important and not scientists or the government, which represents all of us. Traditionally, peer-review groups at campuses and research facilities or government agencies decided what research deserved funding. When the government did it, it mostly let scientists make the decisions and awarded research on merit and importance and not politics, except partially during the Bush II faith-based Administration. It is true that industry has often had an outsized say in setting scientific policy; for example, when Truman decided to implement the results of a white paper advocating commercialization of nuclear power and denied funding for recommendations in a white paper on solar energy.  But having influence is not quite the same thing as making the decision without any checks or balances.

Now government support for scientific research is down, as Congress would prefer to keep taxes on the wealthy at historic lows over investing in our future. The billionaires are stepping into the breach, but only in the areas that they care about.

As might be expected, most of the billionaires giving large dollars for science research donate to fight a disease with which they are familiar. David Koch and Michael Milkin have both had prostate cancer. Google’s Sergey Brin’s mother had Parkinson’s. American oil oligarch Harold Hamm had diabetes. Leon Black’s wife had melanoma. Eli Broad’s son has Crohn’s disease.

This privatization of America’s science research policy is as bad for the country as the privatization of prisons, education and war-fighting have been, but the privatization of actual decisions of who gets how much is even worse. We would be much better off having scientific groups decide on funding for specific projects than non-scientists with lots of money.

In the past, higher taxes on the wealthy helped to finance the American science that cured polio and other diseases, put men on the moon, earth-quaked buildings and computerized the world.  The growing inequality of wealth—the rich getting richer and everyone else falling behind—gives the wealthy an unfair say in the personal lives and futures of everyone. Their control extends beyond the ability to buy more goods and services, as they buy more political influence, more campaign ads and even more scientists. Who is is to say whether the billionaires will share breakthroughs with the rest of the world—perhaps they will want to make money on the new discoveries. We see what happens when private entities own drug discoveries—some drugs are a thousand dollars a pill, while no American company is willing to make flu vaccines because the profit margin isn’t great enough. Privatization of science will likely lead to similar inequities.

I also wonder if the billionaires will employ their standard business practices in the pursuit of scientific knowledge. Will David Koch suppress any research into food allergies that link them to global warming or the burning of hydrocarbons? Will Jeff Bezos insist on introducing Amazon’s employee-unfriendly wage and workplace practices into the science organizations he supports? Will scientists working for Michael Milkin be more likely than average to falsify data?

A much better approach would be to raise income taxes on high incomes, and end the special tax rate for capital gains tax and the carried interest exemption. In other words, raise taxes on the wealthy and use part of that money to increase public support of scientific research.

When representatives of nations get together to carve up territory to fabricate other nations, their process usually resembles that of unethical sausage makers. Take the abominations created by the winners of World War I: Yugoslavia was created out of Croatia, Bosnia, Slovenia and other geographical territories containing discrete cultures. Slovak-speaking Slovakia and German-speaking Bohemia were stitched together to form Czechoslovakia.  Modern Iraq comprises two territories that had frequently been in cultural clash since the Akkadians and the Sumerians of ancient times, plus land on which Kurds lived.

Funny, with all this slicing and dicing of territory, no one in the Western European imperium of that era thought that either the Kurds or the Armenians deserved their own country. That certainly wasn’t the case when the Hashemite family lost the war to control the Arabian peninsula to the Saudis in 1930. Britain helped the Hashemites (a family, not a people or ethnic group) install themselves as royalty over most of the homeland of the Palestinians, AKA Transjordan.

Many of the geopolitical troubles over the last few decades derive from these decisions almost a century ago to impose statehood on badly mashed-up geographies.

The aftermath of World War II wasn’t much better, with the British botching the independence of the Indian subcontinent and the weird division of much of Africa into nation states that disregarded ethnic boundaries.

In the case of the Crimea, however, the Russians brought it on themselves, or perhaps it’s more correct to say that Khrushchev brought it on Russia by giving Crimea to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (part of the Soviet Union) in 1954 for administrative reasons.

If you go back far enough in history, many have laid claim to the Crimean peninsula, including the Cimmerians, Bulgars, Greeks, Scythian, Goths, Huns, Khazars, Kievan proto-Russians, Mongols, Tatars, Ottoman Turks, Venetians and Genovese. But since the 18th century, the Russians and then the Soviet Union, dominated by Russia, controlled Crimea until the breakup of the Soviet Union. Almost 60% of the population identifies itself as Russian (36% are Tatars, who are primarily Muslims and just 12% are Ukrainians). Although Ukrainian is the official language, most people speak Russian, most government business is conducted in Russian and most TV and radio stations broadcast in Russian.

Never fear, dear readers. I’m not getting ready to support the recent Russian saber-rattling in Crimea, whether it is conceived as army maneuvers or an invasion.  Russia is dead wrong to try to use military power to control events in a neighboring nation, just as the United States was wrong to invade Argentina (1890), Chile (1891) Panama (1898), Dominican Republic (1903), Honduras (1907 and 1911), Haiti (1913 and 2004), Mexico (1914 and 1923), Guatemala (1920, 1954 and 1966), Grenada (1983) and Colombia (2003). Except for Mexico, none of these countries borders the United States. In none of these countries is English a dominant or even prevalent language. There is no deep American cultural history in any of these countries.

American presidents have always given the same reason for all these invasions: to protect American lives.  Sound familiar? Of course it does, because it’s the essence of Putin’s rationale for using military force in Crimea. Putin is as transparently devious as the United States has been in all of its invasions of neighbors. We were wrong in every single instance and Russia is wrong now.

But wrong doesn’t seem to matter much when large and militarily powerful nations flex their muscles in their sphere of interest.

Every option seems onerous for the West and especially for the United States, still broke from prosecuting two goalless and mismanaged wars. Civil war in Ukraine, a broader conflagration with Russia, or an economic boycott of the world’s leading producer of fossil fuels makes both the West and Russia suffer. Economies are so intertwined in the new world order that any major showdown will hurt both parties. Putin knows that misery to his people and loss of income to his friends will come, which is why he is moving carefully while asserting what he thinks is Russia’s right to hegemony. Similar concerns explain why the United States and our allies are also responding gingerly.

It’s time to start thinking creatively. Let’s start by making a distinction between the Crimea and the rest of eastern Ukrainian in which Russian speakers predominate. Where Russia ends and the Ukraine begins is subject to dispute in the eastern part of the Ukraine. It’s one flat prairie for a long stretch. Crimea, by contrast, although hanging on as if by one finger to Ukraine, is a discrete territory which in every way is more Russian than Ukraine. If I were dictating foreign policy for the United States and our allies, I would let Russia have Crimea in return for three concessions:

1. Russia agrees not to interfere in any way in Ukrainian elections.
2. Russia removes any troops it has from the non-Crimean part of Ukraine.
3. Russia continues to provide support to the Ukrainian economy by selling natural gas to it at discounted rates and giving loan guarantees for at least 25 years.

The trade of Crimea for money and stability is not appeasement, as Russia will pay a price for the return of Crimea. It really is a win-win for everyone except for the small number of ultra-nationalist Crimean Ukrainians. It avoids both a military and an economic conflagration. The Ukrainians get a lot more out of the deal than the Mexicans, Guatemalans or Haitians did from U.S. invasions and Russia doesn’t really get that much—just return of a small piece of land over which it has had cultural control for many centuries. It corrects a mistake that Khrushchev made some 60 years ago.  Would that all the mistakes of the so-called nation-builders were that easy to correct.

Richard Berman is the kind of unethical public relations executive who gives the PR profession a bad name. His métier is to use right-wing money to establish and operate so-called think tanks that spew out spurious and misleading position papers, opinion articles and reports that support his clients’ positions on issues.

His Employment Policies Institute (EPI), for example, works diligently against raising the minimum wage, health care mandates for employers and mandatory sick leave. Berman tries to hide both the fact that his think tanks are propaganda machines and the names of his clients.  This deception often works, as he provides fodder for Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing media.

Berman and EPI hit a new low in a full-page article in the New York Times that takes the form of an open memo to President Obama about the 600 economists that the President cited as favoring raising the minimum wage.  The memo essentially repeats quotes from or about (we’re never sure) eight of the 600 economists that suggest that they are Marxists or anti-American.  The first six are identified as Marxists, where as the seventh makes the mistake of criticizing U.S. foreign policy and the eighth questions the official account of 9/11. A legend at the bottom of the ad says, “Many of the 600 economists you rely on are radical researchers or full-time employees working at union-backed organizations.”

Calling opponents communists, Marxists or socialists is an old trick of the right wing that predates Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, who provoked the country into a massive witch hunt against so-called communists and fellow travelers in the late 1940s and early 1950s with lies about identifying huge numbers of communists working in government positions. McCarthy’s red baiting resulted in large numbers of teachers, film professionals, lawyers and others losing their jobs because at one time or another they had joined or went to meetings of left-wing organizations.  It took a lawyer for the U.S. Army to jolt the country out of this “red terror” with his comment that McCarthy had lost all sense of shame by accusing the army of harboring communists.

The ad is odiously misleading on many levels. Let’s start with the simple fact that there is nothing wrong with having socialist or Marxist leanings. It doesn’t mean that you are anti-democratic or anti-American. It also doesn’t mean that your economic research or analysis is suspect. Samuel Bowles, Immanuel Wallerstein, Richard Wolff and David Gordon are all well-known 20th-century Marxist economists or economic theorists who have published viable research.

But even if you accept that Marxist economics is not a viable alternative to classical economic theory, the ad still smells like yesterday’s tilapia. For one thing, there’s the conflation of “radical researcher” and “union-backed groups.” Both radicals and unions are thrown into the same grouping. The not-so-hidden message is that there is something radical and inherently bad about labor unions.

Moreover, there is the use of the word “many” to describe the numbers of suspect economists on the list.  Why can’t Berman’s group give us an exact number? They found eight to smear, but that’s 1.33% of the 600. Take them off the list and there are still 592 economists who support raising the minimum wage. The ad is able to stipulate 45% as the exact percentage of those economists not labor specialists who support the minimum wage increase, leading me to believe that if there were many more than eight who had Marxist leanings, the ad would have used that number.

The ad’s implied accusation, of course, is that anyone who is on the left, has ever criticized U.S. policy or works for a union will “cook the books” in their research. All we have here is repellent name-calling, and is often the case, the name-callers are guilty of the crimes they accuse others of committing. Reputable academics have frequently found EPI’s research to be misleading or based on skewed or cherry-picked data.

What’s most interesting about Berman‘s pot pointing out the dirt smudges on the leftists’ kettles is that the people the ad implies are distorting their research all freely and openly admit the names of their organizations or political sympathies. Berman and his clients hide behind several layers of organizations.

This smear ad reflects the desperation felt by the right-wing and corporations. They know that the current minimum wage must increase by 47% for it to have the same purchasing power as it did in 1968. They know that a good part of the increased profit margins and profits that corporations enjoy compared to 30 and 40 years ago comes from squeezing down the salaries of all workers by suppressing adjustments to the minimum wage for inflation, killing unions and privatizing government jobs. They know that once the minimum wage goes up, they’ll have to give raises to other employees. They like the current arrangement in which a growing part of the income pie goes to owners and executives and a shrinking share goes to employees. They can see that people are fed up with the gutting of the middle class and ready to embrace a higher minimum wage. They understand that a higher minimum wage is probably inevitable.

Money has always been based on faith, even when it was theoretically convertible to gold or another precious metal. Throughout history, governments and economies have sometimes used gold, silver or copper as money, putting their faith in the value of these metals to others. But sometimes they have also used beads or shells or anything that can be counted, stored and transported without deterioration. It would be unwise, for example, to use raspberries as currency, because they spoil so quickly.

A better name for money is “currency,” because the word contains a definition of what money does—allows objects and services to flow without encumbrance between people and organizations. The current of these goods and services—their exchange from person to person—would be much harder if there weren’t some easy thing to count, handle and transfer to serve as a medium of exchange. I can’t negotiate with the supermarket, dry cleaner and bus driver to have them take something I’ve written in return for groceries, cleaning services and in-town transportation. They will take my money, though, and fortunately other companies will pay me the same to write articles, commercials, brochures, blog entries and websites.  Multiply my situation millions upon millions of times and you’ll see how much we as a society depend on having currency. Money is the lowest common denominator of exchange value.

Currency creates value relationships between different items. A loaf of bread may cost three dollars and a ticket to a first-run movie may cost twelve dollars, meaning that theoretically a movie ticket is worth four loaves of bread, except during a famine when four tickets to the movie might not even be tradable for a single slice of bread.

In using money, we engage in an act of faith—faith that what we accept will have just about the same value when we want to spend it.  Usually governments issue currency and our faith in the currency reflects are faith in the government and the economy it controls.

Having more than one kind of currency issued by more than one source by definition creates a value relationship between the different currencies, similar to the value relation between all products and services. Any value relationship is subject to change. For example, the euro, which serves as currency for 23 countries, may be worth $1.40 one month and $1.25 another. Political and economic events and decisions can affect the relationship between two currencies, just as it can affect the relationship between specific goods and services.

Without money, it’s impossible to conceive of any kind of complex economy. And yet only our collective faith in any specific type of money will enable us—society—to use it. If we didn’t believe that it would be accepted as exchange value by others, it would have no value to anyone.

Which is why anyone who invested even one dime in bitcoins was and is a fool.

The Bitcoin system is a computer-controlled private network consisting of s series of private enterprises that have agreed to follow the same protocols for “printing,” distributing and setting the value of bitcoins. The bitcoins exist entirely as numbers in accounts; there are no physical versions such as coins and paper bills. You can’t go to a bank and get a few bitcoins. Like all currencies, bitcoin value floats and is determined on the open market. If you bought one bitcoin a year ago, it’s worth more today—that is, unless you were holding it at Mt. Gox, which just went under. In that case, you may have lost everything. If an American bank fails, the money in your account is insured (up to $250,000 per person per bank). No such protection exists for those holding their bitcoins at Mt. Gox.

I fail to see any advantage of using bitcoins over euros, dollars, yuan or other currencies. All of these currencies are subject to failure—except that individual institutions and businesses fail much, much more frequently than governments do.  Dollars are backed by the “full faith and credit” of the U.S. government and euros are backed by the full faith and credit of the EU. What backs bitcoins? The full faith and credit of the Bitcoin system? What’s that?

Other than currency failure, there is another drawback to bitcoins: Organizations and individuals have to agree to accept payment in bitcoins, whereas they all accept the currency of the country in which they do business. Only if and when a significant number of organizations begin recognizing bitcoins as currency will it have a true exchange value. But the rampant speculation that makes bitcoin’s exchange value jerk up and down dramatically serves as an impediment for corporations to accept them as payment. Who wants to accept a bitcoin worth $579 the moment you sell your product knowing it may only be worth $400 in a week? That’s speculation, which, by the way, is a polite way of saying “gambling.” That’s what buying bitcoins has been from the start—nothing but a gamble.

Some may argue that one could use the bitcoin to hedge against a decline in all world currencies.  What they’re really saying is that an artificial currency that exists only as numbers in computers is a better hedge against a regional or worldwide economic disaster than gold or silver—things that are finite (you can’t print more gold) that you can hold, barter and use to make things.

People are attracted to the bitcoin concept because it represents the pie-in-the-sky ultimate in privatization. Instead of using government-issued currency, we’ll use private currency. But the bitcoin adds nothing to make the economy, society or individual asset holders any richer or safer. In fact, the unusual speculation in bitcoins makes it less safe as an investment. It may go up significantly in value, but it’s just as likely to go down.

People like to speculate, especially rich folk who buy paintings, baseball cards and vintage cars hoping they will increase is value. But if you buy a Manet and suddenly the world hates Manets, you still have a pretty picture. With bitcoins all you have is a bunch of numbers on the screen.

I’ll stick to dollars, euros and yuan—with an occasional Swiss franc thrown in for balance.

Today we saw a duel for spin control between our two most prominent newspapers, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

The spin concerned how to interpret the response that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie received in his first town hall meeting since the Washington bridge scandal burst into national consciousness a few months ago.  It was the 110th town hall meeting Christie has held since assuming the mantle of Governor of the Garden State. These town hall meetings have come to symbolize the image of Christie that the mainstream media liked to portray before Bridgegate: open, direct, frank, straight-talking, action-oriented. This town hall meeting took place somewhere in Republican-leaning Monmouth County near the Jersey coastline that Superstorm Sandy battered.

The headlines in the print versions say it all:

WSJ: “Christie Style Is on Display” (which in the Internet version became the more objective “Christie Hosts First Town Hall Since Scandal”)

NYT: “Christie Finds Hostility in Setting He Once Ruled” (which was also changed in the Internet version to “For Christie, Awkward Return to a Setting He Once Ruled”

The first sentences of the respective stories—in print and online—seem to be describing different events:

WSJ

He consoled displaced Superstorm Sandy victims, joked about his undying love for Bruce Springsteen and even used salty language at times as he bantered with detractors and admirers.

It was mostly vintage Chris Christie on Thursday at the Republican governor’s first town hall meeting since last June

NYT

When Chris Christie started to talk over a complaining questioner, a signature tactic of the bellicose, pre-scandal governor, the audience here briefly turned on him.

“Answer the question,” some shouted.

When he took a microphone from a long-winded speaker, the man startled Mr. Christie by snatching it right back.

Each story builds on the basic idea established in the print version of the headline and the first paragraph. The NYT version basically shows a hostile crowd fed up with Christie. The WSJ version depicts an accomplished and popular politician using his skills to have the audience eating out of his hand.

The rival newspapers even differ in where they say the meeting took place:  the dateline in the Times reads Port Monmouth, NJ, while the dateline in the Journal says the meeting occurred in Middleton, NJ. When you input the two place names into Google Maps, they show up as being about four miles away from each other, but we’re definitely talking about the same meeting. We can recognize three or four of the same people in the same position relative to the meeting room in the photos used in both papers.

Which story is true? As a progressive who abhors the crony capitalism at which Christie seems to excel, I want to side with the Times version of the facts and a careful reading of the two stories does reveal that the Times has more specific detail. But based on my decades as a news media analyst, I’m guessing that they’re both wrong—and they’re both right.

The centrist New York Times and the right-leaning Wall Street Journal are both trying to define the storyline going forward: The Journal wants Christie to recover and be the victorious GOP hero in 2016, whereas the Times—I’m not sure what the Times wants when it comes to the Christie story, but let’s assume that despite liking Christie in the past, it has turned against the big guy because of Bridgegate.

Different media and different political leaders and parties vie to control public perception of a story all the time. Centrists and left-leaners saw only the mostly good news in the Congressional Budget Office analysis of the impact of raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour on various aspects of the economy, whereas right-wingers clutched to the probably wrong estimate that such an increase would lead to a three tenths of one percent increase in unemployment. The rollout of the Affordable Care Act and the investigation of the Benghazi incident are two other recent examples of different parties and media outlets trying to place a different spin on the same facts.

But just as often, the entire mass media goes with the same spin, and often it’s wrong. Let’s take two examples from four years ago:

• All the media invoked the Glenn Beck rally on Constitution Mall in Washington, D.C. as proof of the ascendancy of the Tea Party in the lead-up to the 2010 Congressional elections and as proof that the media should be covering only Tea Party campaigns. But the most reputable sources estimated that the rally attracted 85,000, the same number who attended the mostly ignored and forgotten union-oriented rally in favor of progressive policies at the same location a few weeks later. Why was one the symbol of a political sea change while the other wasn’t?
• A 2010 study by the National Center for Health Statistics revealed that that more than 61% of all women live with someone else in a romantic or sexual relationship sometime in their lives without the benefit of marriage. All the news media, top to bottom, ignored or buried this finding, preferring instead to report that the study showed people who cohabit are 6% less likely to be together 10 years after marriage than people who don’t live together before getting hitched. Instead of presenting a truly dramatic change in social mores, the mainstream media preferred to depict a threat to the institution of marriage.

In both of these stories, myths and political desires superseded a concern for the facts or their real significance. These stories exemplify my belief that at the end of the day, most mainstream media really do agree on the big stuff. Before questioning this opinion, try to find the last time the Times published any story that supported or discussed lifting the cap off income that must be assessed the Social Security tax. Or go back to see how the Times initially covered the Occupy Movement or the proposal by New York Mayor (then candidate) Bill De Blasio to tax those who make a million a  year or more to pay for universal pre-K.   The Times’ position on Occupy and pre-K funding was similar to the Wall Street Journal’s until the people spoke and made their position clear.

What’s a poor truth-seeker to do? For one thing, we should be aware of the predilections and prejudices of all media. We should learn to suspect the reports when they seem to go against common sense or they don’t have a lot of specifics. Another sign that the spin is holding the facts hostage is a reliance on the use of the passive construction, because the passive doesn’t have to include attributions. Beyond that, it’s probably wise to read a variety of media from the left, right and center, and to make sure that the stories come from different sources. For example, you can typically read hundreds of versions of the same story using the same facts but with slightly different headlines every day, since most of the stories we see are reprints, interpretations or revisions of original sources. Quite often whether you read the story in the St. Louis Dispatch or the Los Angeles Times or see it on the local CBS affiliate in Denver, it’s the same story written by the same Associated Press, Gannett or Bloomberg News reporter. If you really want to know what the news is and what it means, you’ll have to consult several independent sources, something that’s much harder to do since the consolidation of ownership of media outlets.

The announcement by the bipartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour will lead to 500,000 jobs disappearing is just wrong. Now I’m not saying that the report’s authors are lying or stupid, just that they are making the wrong assumptions or looking at the numbers in the wrong way.

The CBO admits that its numbers are a guess at best, but that admission is buried in the fine print.  In Appendix A to its report, CBO says that it reviewed a large body of research on what it calls “employment elasticity.”  In economics, elasticity is how sensitive one economic variable is to another. A simple example of elasticity is price and demand: If we double the price of a product, how many fewer people will buy it? Clearly, doubling the price of something that people need or want very badly such as milk or a college education will have less impact on demand than doubling the price of a luxury, such as a meal at a fancy restaurant or jet skis. Or consider what would happen if twice as many people suddenly wanted something of which there was a finite amount, like gold in times of economic turmoil. But twice as many people wanting Doritos might not lead to such a dramatic rise in the price of each box, because, as the man says, “We’ll make more.” Many factors go into creating a relationship between two economic variables.

One truism of economics is that the higher the price the lower the demand. Economists accept it as a given, much as mathematicians accept as a given that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. But in some cases, demand is more elastic (stays the same or close to the same unless there is a steep price increase), as college education has proven to be.

“Employment elasticity” measures how the market will respond when the minimum wage is raised (or lowered).  But all the measurements use methodologies, each of which employs a different series of variables and makes a different set of assumptions. Appendix B of The CBO’s report lists dozens of methodologies and studies of methodologies that it considered. Some concluded that raising the minimum wage would have a negligible effect on unemployment; some said as many as a million jobs would be lost.  Instead of weighing the relative merits of each methodology, the CBO took an average. That’s what the 500,000 is—the midpoint in a bunch of numbers generated by a  bunch of different methodologies. And the methodologies only measure teen unemployment! CBO uses another set of methodologies to infer the effect of raising the minimum wage for the entire economy based on what happens to teens, our most inexperienced and unskilled workers.

I’m inclined to believe the studies that show a minimal impact on unemployment by raising the minimum wage to $10.10 and seven Nobel prize-winning economists, four former presidents of the American Economic Association and more than 600 other economists agree with me.  The Nobel laureates and professors are going to give you their mathematically based models. Let me tell you what happens in the real world.

In the real world, a business increases its profit by either growing its market or lowering costs. Every successful company is constantly looking at both. Part of cost-cutting is to make sure your labor costs are as low as possible. So in theory—let’s call it the efficient company theory—no business ever hires someone they don’t need and can’t make money from because it would unduly raise costs.  In a like manner, no business ever lets someone go just because they cost too much without replacing that person because they need someone to do the job (having not hired too many to begin with).

Now the real world is a little messier, as the following examples suggest: A large business may reevaluate labor needs every six months (or two years) and within the six month period have too many (or too few) employees but hasn’t gotten around to making the routine adjustment. A small business owner may have lost a large share of her business, but is reluctant to lay off people in case business turns around in a month or two. A new labor-saving technology is on the market and a business is evaluating it.  A company has decided not to refill a position once someone retires in three months. Or how about all the employees of residential real estate companies at the very end of the bubble that was destined to end? In all these cases, companies are carrying excess labor, and a rise in the cost of labor may make them change their minds quickly.  These job losses aren’t caused by the increase in wages. The job loss was activated before the increase in wages. They were going to happen no matter what.

I would consider these job losses to be noise or leakage in the economic system, similar to the concept of the natural rate of unemployment, which is the unemployment rate that occurs with full employment, stemming from the fact that there are always people looking for jobs and employers looking for workers. I’ve read that the natural rate of unemployment used to be 4% but is now higher.

What I’m saying is that any increase in unemployment because of an increase in the minimum wage is nothing more than noise (or friction as Milton Friedman and others called it). I’m not saying that the noise or friction that prevents companies from being one hundred percent labor efficient is that same 4+% as the friction that explains why unemployment never falls below a certain floor. But even if it were only one tenth as much, that would still compute to hundreds of thousands of jobs that these methodologies may be counting as losses because of a rise in the minimum wage to $10.10. The noise factor almost certainly explains why some estimates are so much lower than others.

The 500,000 who CBO is predicting will lose their jobs if the minimum wage reaches $10.10 would raise unemployment by three tenths of a percent. That’s 500,000 out of more than 166 million jobs. So even if CBO is right, it sounds like they are measuring noise for the most part, which in this case means the number of jobs that would have been lost no matter what.

You can almost hear Chubby Checker intoning “How low can you go?” in the lowest register he could hit.

What made me think of Chubby’s hit, “Limbo Rock” is the limbo dancing that conservatives are doing with the minimum wage. It seems as if right-wingers are falling over themselves in advocating for a new minimum wage—that’s lower than the current paltry $7.25 an hour.  They want to reduce the incomes of our poorest workers as if the hourly wage were a Limbo bar and the object of the game was to lower it as much as possible.

In all cases, the right-wing Limbo-ists (or perhaps I should call them Limbaugh-ists) fervently declare that the lower minimum wage will benefit workers because it will enable businesses to hire more employees. The assumption—which common sense tells us is completely false—is that an employer will hire people they don’t need just because they can get them cheaply and that when wages rise, employers will fire workers whom they still need to operate their business.

How low can you go?

How about $5.00 an hour, which is what retired public relations executive Robert G. Strayton thinks the minimum wage should be. His expertise, which he touts in an article titled “A Minimum Wage that Can Work” in the Wall Street Journal, is as a volunteer interviewer of the poor at a religious charitable organization in southwest Florida. Strayton pulls the $5 an hour number out of the air, just as he pulls out $3 as the future price of the McDonald’s $1 menu if the nation adopted the modest $10.10 an hour minimum wage that President Obama has imposed on government contractors for future contracts. Strayton’s math is shoddy: wages are one part of McDonald’s costs, which also include rent, utilities, raw materials and marketing. By increasing this one factor by 40% ($7.25 an hour to $10.10 an hour), he thinks the final cost will triple. I hope Strayton gets help with his taxes. If labor accounted for 75% of the cost of a $1 item (it doesn’t) and McDonald’s raised salaries 40%, then to maintain the same profit (not profit margin) would require Mickey D to sell the items for $1.30.

Strayton provides no basis for his economic argument except a tired old theory that was disproven years ago. He does give an ethical basis for lowering the minimum wage, which is as insultingly condescending to the poor as it is self-serving for employers: “You’d think no one can value making $5 an hour. But for those in poverty, a primal need is immediate and reliable access to an income of one’s own. When one has nothing, anything becomes priceless. Watch the expression on the face of a poor person when you provide him or her with $2, $3 or $5 to put gas in a neighbor’s borrowed car so he can bring free groceries, clothing, linens, housewares or furnishings from our organization back home. You’ll see then the value of such a ‘trivial’ wage.”  That smile of a grateful poor person must make Strayton feel warm and fuzzy inside as he pours French Bordeaux into Baccarat glasses while enjoying the sunset from the deck of his yacht.

How low can you go?

How about $4 an hour, which is what Michael R. Strain is proposing in an article titled “A $4 Minimum Wage Can Get People Back to Work” published by Bloomberg News.”  Strain, a researcher at the notoriously anti-labor American Enterprise Institute, begins by bemoaning how little is being done by “our leaders in Washington” to address long-term unemployment in the United States, what he calls “the most immediate social and economic challenge facing the U.S. today.”

Strain strains to show how much he cares about the unemployed. “Society owes these workers better — creative public policies to help increase their chance of staying in the labor force. They want to work; they want to earn their own successes, to help the economy grow, and to support themselves and their families. But they can’t, in large part because they happen to be alive and working during a once-in-a-generation economic downturn.”

His answer is to reduce the risk to employers of spending $7.25 an hour for someone who has been out of a job for months or years, thus making employers more likely to hire the long-term unemployed. Strain couples this lower minimum wage with expanded earned-income tax credit or wage subsidies—federal transfer programs that supplement a worker’s wages with tax dollars.

In other words, Strain wants the government to subsidize businesses by allowing them to pay their workers even less than they do now. Strain is certain that employers will increase hiring, but why would they? If a company didn’t need the additional workers before, why would they need them now? What is more likely is that wages will go down and more employees of Wal-Mart, MacDonald’s and other low-wage companies will receive government assistance.  Right now 52% of fast food workers are using Medicaid, food stamps or the Earned Income Tax Credit programs. Do what Strain wants and that number will increase.

Strain calls it public policy, but I call it welfare for the wealthy, the only kind of economic stimulus program that conservatives like.

Shoddy math, false assumptions and a smug, self-serving moral tone always characterize these arguments against the minimum wage, extended unemployment benefits and food stamps.  All of it so they can steal more money from the poor. It’s pretty low, if you ask me. And just when you think that a right-winger has debased logic, reasoning and common sense as much as possible, another one emerges to lower the bar even more.

How low can they go?