Alternet has the article How Billionaire ‘Philanthropy’ Is Fueling Inequality and Helping To Destroy the Country. It gives another side to my feeling that philanthropy from billionaires might seem laudable, but if they had not used predatory practices to gain near monopolies so that they could have billions of dollars to give, the world might actually be a better place.

I’ll show an extensive quote from one section of the article to demonstrate why I am so upset with MIT for accepting a large donation from the Koch brothers to build a cancer research center and name the building after the Koch brothers.

David and Charles Koch, together worth $35 billion, have perfected this philanthropic misanthropy perhaps better than anyone else. Their Kansas-based Koch Industries is the second largest private company in the country after Cargill, with annual revenues estimated to surpass $100 billion. Together they control thousands of miles of oil pipelines from Alaska to Texas; fertilizers, minerals and biofuels; Brawny paper towels, Dixie cups and Lycra.

A research team at American University found that from 2007 to 2011, Koch foundations gave $41.2 million to 89 nonprofits and sponsored an annual libertarian conference. The report details how Koch Industries’ $53.9 million federal and state lobbying budget routinely goes hand-in-glove with Koch-affiliated nonprofits’ “public advocacy” for reasons having little to do with the public and everything to do with the brothers’ sprawling business interests. Koch lobbyists advocate for bills like the Energy Tax Prevention Act — which sought to roll back the Supreme Court ruling allowing EPA regulation of greenhouse gases — that are then supported in congressional testimony by “experts” from Koch-funded nonprofits.

Though private foundations cannot legally “be organized or operated for the benefit of private interests,” the study’s authors note that IRS enforcement is largely “sporadic and somewhat mysterious,” and even in the case of an investigation communications between the foundation and the government are generally kept from the public. The Koch nonprofit machine has exploited this loophole for all it’s worth, testifying before congressional committees at least 49 times since 2007.

For decades, Koch philanthropy has also waged ideological warfare within U.S. universities, contributing over $30 million to 221 universities since just 2011. Here, the payoff couldn’t be plainer. A 2012 report in Academe documented the Koch-funded coup in Florida State University’s economics department, showing how “in exchange for his ‘gift,’ the donor got to assign specific readings, select speakers brought to campus and instruct them with regard to the focus of their lectures, shape the curriculum with new courses and specify the number of students in the courses, name the program’s director, and initiate a student club.”

The Charles G. Koch Foundation gave FSU $1.5 million to sponsor two assistant professors, fund fellowships and shape curricula promoting free-enterprise doctrine. It then created an advisory board to distribute money to faculty and ensure their work aligned with the foundation’s ideology.

The Kochs have tapped many useful allies, academic and non, in their collegiate ploys. A year before the FSU story, Inside Higher Ed exposed how administrators at Clemson University cultivated the Koch Foundation to build its “Institute for the Study of Capitalism,” receiving $1 million for the effort. BB&T, the financial institution whose former chairman and CEO John Allison heads the Koch-backed Cato Institute, regularly pays universities to chair favorable professors, typically in economics. Cooperative institutions are rewarded with Koch dollars as a bonus. American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop found 10 such universities, where BB&T-chaired professors coincided with Koch cashflow.

Perhaps what they have done to economics departments in other schools will give pause to a certain reader of this blog who told me that we shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth with regard to the MIT donation.  This reader has many personal connections into and pride for the Sloan School at MIT and the economics department at MIT.  Would he be so proud if those schools started teaching and preaching Kochian economics?

Any MIT alumni or alumnae out there want to join my protest movement of stopping all gifts to MIT and making sure they know why you are stopping?

The New York Times business section has the story Trash Into Gas, Efficiently? An Army Test May Tell.

In a former Air Force hangar outside Sacramento, his company, Sierra Energy, has spent the last several years testing a waste-to-energy system called the FastOx Pathfinder. The centerpiece, a waste gasifier that’s about the size of a shower stall, is essentially a modified blast furnace. A chemical reaction inside the gasifier heats any kind of trash — whether banana peels, used syringes, old iPods, even raw sewage — to extreme temperatures without combustion. The output includes hydrogen and carbon monoxide, which together are known as syngas, for synthetic gas, and  can be burned to generate electricity or made into ethanol or diesel fuel.

The naivete of this report would be astounding if I hadn’t mentioned this is on the business page. Do the reporters have the technical expertise to know why this story is highly doubtful from the get go?  Actually, a college course in physics or perhaps even a high school course might give you the knowledge you need in order to raise some fundamental questions.

A chemical reaction that occurs in a blast furnace at temperatures above the combustion point of the material put into the furnace will do a fast oxidation (FastOx) that is usually called combustion.  So there may be some materials whose combustion point is higher than the temperature of the blast furnace, but most will simply combust (also known as burn, also known as incinerate).

There are something like 118 elements (maybe 102 found in nature) in the chemical periodic table.  Unless we are talking about nuclear or radioactive reactions, one element does not turn into another element.  So the output from this process may contain “hydrogen and carbon monoxide”, but it also includes 99 other elements in the same proportions by weight as were put into the blast furnace.  What do we do with those elements after the hydrogen and carbon monoxide are extracted as syngas?

To generate the heat of a blast furnace requires some kind of fuel.  There is no mention in the article of this fuel as one of the inputs.  How much will the fuel cost compared to how much economic benefit will be derived from the useful products (minus the cost of disposing of the non-useful products)?

One of the useful outputs according to the article is carbon monoxide which is usually considered a product of incomplete combustion.  In minute quantities, carbon monoxide is lethal if inhaled.  I sure hope they have some great technology to make sure none of it escapes.  (Of course, they could have meant carbon dioxide which is not directly lethal except for it being a greenhouse gas that we already are producing in excess.)

As for solving the military’s supply line problems with supplying fuel in combat situations, how is supplying the blast furnace with fuel any easier than supplying diesel or gasoline to the field?  To get the byproducts out of the blast furnace and turn it into anything that can power a tank would require some kind of technology not mentioned in this article.

Tangelia Sinclair-Moore posted the article, A Scandal That’s Exposing Ugly Truths About the School Privatization Agenda  by David Sirota, on her Facebook page.

…Before all of these controversies, of course, there were plenty of ways to see that something other than concern for kids has been driving “reformers’” push to privatize public schools.

You could, for example, contrast privatizers’ pro-charter-school propaganda with Stanford University’s study showing that most charter schools perform no better — and often worse — than traditional public schools.

You could juxtapose the Reuters story screaming “Private Firms Eyeing Profits From U.S. Public Schools” next to the New York Times headline blaring “Hedge Funds’ Leaders Rally for Charter Schools.”

You could consider that the most prolific fundraiser in the education “reform” movement is not someone with a stellar record of education policy success, but instead Michelle Rhee, the former Washington, D.C., schools chief whose tenure was defined by a massive cheating scandal.

I naively thought that this was an ideological battle.  Thanks to Tangelia for posting this so that I could see that it really was all about money.  I should have known.  We all should have known.

I also had thought that Michelle Rhee was a true reformer, but I started having some doubts when I started reading her diatribes against some of the public school teachers.

Eugene Robinson of Washington Post Writers Group has written the op-ed A Lack of Spine on Egypt.

“America cannot determine the future of Egypt,” the president said. Which means the least we can do is stand for what we believe.

In the beginning, I almost bought the twisted logic that the Egyptian military was restoring democracy rather than staging a coup. How could I think that ousting a democratically elected president could be restoring democracy?  Maybe we didn’t like Morsi’s brand of democracy, but, as Barack Obama now admits, “America cannot determine the future of Egypt”.  We cannot tell them what to do, but we can decide what crimes we will refuse to abet.  By continuing our military aid, we are abetting the crimes the Egyptian military is now perpetrating. Using snipers to kill unarmed civilians is just beyond the pale no matter what orders you give to the civilians that they refuse to obey.

I wonder if it will take us 50 years to admit our role in this situation like it seems to have in the case of the 1953 coup in Iran. (See CIA Admits It Was Behind Iran’s Coup)

Two videos from The Real News Network. Don’t blame me if you are silly enough to follow the links below.

Why are Egyptian Liberals Celebrating a Massacre?

US Foreign Policy: The Moral Hazard of “Relative Evil” Necessary to Fight “Absolute Evil”

August 20, 2013

To any of my relatives who should stumble onto this post, I plead with you not to click on the following link.

Max Blumenthal: Something Snapped when Israel Attacked Gaza

August 21, 2013

Israel, Anti-Semitism, and Negotiations Without End

This is the final segment in this series.

If we use the history of native Americans as an example, perhaps in a future generation there will be memorials to the Palestinians who were pushed off their lands, the Jewish residents of Israel will feel bad about what was done, but they will get the “benefits” of living in a state without having to give any further thought to an uprising by the few remaining Palestinians.  After all, after the cleansing is complete enough, what can the people of that future generation do?

Perhaps the Israelis of the current generation should consider one difference between the native Americans and the Palestinians.  After the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, there will still be a huge population of Palestinians outside of Israel that will harbor resentment and a desire to return to their native lands.  Isn’t that the way the Jewish Israelis managed to get the state of Israel recognized by The United Nations?

The New Economic Perspectives blog has published William K Black’s article The FBI’s 2010 Mortgage Fraud Report Reveals Why the Banksters Love Holder.

The cutest quote from the article is:

One of the difficulties we have is that because the last two administrations have fanatical devotees of the cult of the Virgin Crisis – the myth that the ongoing crisis was the first in modern times conceived without sin (control fraud) – that it is exceptionally difficult to know what their creed is.

However, the short quite that is most indicative of the shortcomings of l;aw enforcement is the following quote”:

The U.S. Attorney for Sacramento, one of the epicenters of accounting control fraud, was foolish enough to attempt to explain why he did not investigate or prosecute the banksters:

Benjamin Wagner, a U.S. Attorney who is actively prosecuting mortgage fraud cases in Sacramento, Calif., points out that banks lose money when a loan turns out to be fraudulent. “It doesn’t make any sense to me that they would be deliberately defrauding themselves,” Wagner said.

Wagner’s inability to keep his pronouns straight even when they were in the same sentence – “they” refers to the CEO, “themselves” refers to the bank the CEO is looting – was so embarrassing that he did not even try to respond to his critics. 

Black compares the prosecutions after the S & L crisis to the ones after the current crisis to emphasize how much the current law enforcement entities have fallen down on the job. The current executives in our law enforcement agencies seem to have forgotten all the resources at their disposal that have been useful in past frauds. Instead they turn to the perpetrators to tell them what they should and shouldn’t do to investigate the crimes. I am not talking about reformed perpetrators, either. These are the perpetrators who continue with their crimes. We know how well that worked out with the Whitey Bulger case. If even murder isn’t enough to get the FBI’s attention, then how can we expect them to be bothered by a few trillion dollars of fraud?

The Business Desk of the PBS NewsHour has the article ‘Structural Unemployment?’ Why Not Throw Money at the Problem?  In the article, Dean Baker, gives a well reasoned explanation as to why the current level of unemployment is cyclical, not structural.  The usual Keynesian stimulus is the solution.

In short, this story — that employers would be hiring workers if workers just had the right skills — is not supported by the evidence. If employers can’t find the workers they need, they raise wages. This is how a market economy works.

The problem with the structural unemployment story is that it is very difficult to identify any substantial segment of the labor market where there are rapidly rising wages. In the last decade, even the wages of college grads have not kept pace with the rate of inflation. If college grads just got their share of productivity growth, their wages would be rising by more than 1.5 percentage points a year above the rate of inflation. In fact, there is no major occupational category, even among workers with a college degree or higher, where wage growth has kept pace with productivity growth over the last decade.

We don’t see rising wages, therefore we can assume that employers are not having trouble finding workers; end of story.

This simple fact, and others that follow from it, has led to a growing consensus in the economics profession that the economy’s problems stem from a lack of demand rather than from structural issues.

As a rebuttal to Baker’s rebuttal, Paul Solman, of The Business Desk, offers an ill thought out experiment as proof.

Look, I have my own thought experiment — the “Mass Massage Mobilization” or MMM — in which every American would be given tax incentives or subsidies to get one-hour-long massage per week. That would employ 7 to 10 million newly trained massage therapists, depending on how hard you want to work them. No college degree would be necessary, and everyone, pretty much, would be better off. (See chapter 9, “Touch,” in the book “Born to Be Good” from Berkeley’s Dacher Keltner, for the psychological benefits to giver and receiver alike.)

But to make the MMM a sustainable solution, at some point, people need to be willing to pay for their massages. Either that or we move more and more to a socialist answer to the problem of unemployment. That may be okay, but it’s hard to ignore the problems that socialism typically brings with it — the sort of problems that conservative economist Ed Yardeni raised when we did a story on government infrastructure spending with liberal economist Bob Frank of Cornell during the depths of the Great Recession.

I would expect Solman to understand Keynesian Economics better than he shows in his thought experiment.

In my thought experiment, there is several trillion dollars in infrastructure spending that we need to keep our infrastructure from falling apart.  Hiring private sector companies and workers to build and repair this infrastructure would fulfill a much needed gap in our economy without increasing government workers very much.  The money these companies and people would earn would circulate back through the economy creating many other jobs.  As the burst of infrastructure spending was completed and infrastructure work fell to a normal level, the demand created by these other jobs would sustain the economy.  The distribution of jobs would shift from infrastructure work toward other work that was in insufficient supply at the time to meet the demand at the time.

It is beyond naivete to think that the jobs created to get the economy out of recession would have to be exactly the same jobs that would sustain the economy in perpetuity.  Even capitalists know that the economy does not work that way.

However, an economic system is never all one thing or all another.  This is not a binary system where we only use ones and zeros to describe economic activity.  We use real numbers with an infinite range to measure the economy.  To the extent that there is a structural unemployment problem it is due to the shift in economic policy that favors giving all the rewards of productivity increase to a few wealthy people at the top of the economy.  To make the Keynesian solution sustainable, there will have to be policy changes that put the distribution of wealth and income back to the more normal levels that existed before the advent of great redistribution upward that started around the 1980s.

The Real News Network has the video Manning Sentencing Defense Plays Up Psychological Stress, Fails To Use Whistleblower Defense.

SWANSON: Well, I think the information he put out helped to end the war in Iraq by persuading the Iraqi government not to allow U.S. troops to remain with immunity from criminal prosecution after having seen some of the crimes revealed by Bradley Manning. You have the testimony of a former secretary of state and other officials in Tunisia and elsewhere around what we call the Middle East thanking Bradley Manning for his assistance of nonviolent democratic movements that have in some cases overthrown tyrants. He’s a four-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee because of the gratitude of nations around the world. I think–you know, former Nobel peace laureate Mairead Maguire credits him with helping prevent a Western intervention in Syria thus far because there is fear now on the part of many governments that whatever they do could be exposed. And that is all to the good. And Thomas Jefferson and the rest of the founders of this nation would have said that was all to the good. But the prosecution has its own deep impact, and while a few Edward Snowdens may be inspired, many, many sources are going into hiding. And that could be disastrous for a government of, by, and for the people.

Little did I know that yesterday, when I posted and addendum to my previous post Bradley Manning, the Nuremberg Charter and Refusing to Collaborate with War Crimes The Real News Network would provide another reason to make the same point.

I haven’t heard whether or not the release of the helicopter pictures showing a war crime being committed was part of the indictment against Bradley Manning. If this was a defensible act, then the government would have no reason to charge him for that. This robs him of the chance to use the Nuremberg defense. If the releases of the other material were not defensible in whistle blower terms, then what defense could Manning put up than the ones his defense is using?

Just shows that if you are going to commit a defensible act, don’t commit a bunch of ancillary criminal acts for which you will be charged. In starker terms, you can commit millions of good deeds, but if you commit one crime, you are subject to punishment. That’s not odd or ironic at all. That’s life in a civilized society.

People are talking about awards for Bradley Manning for uncovering the war crime. That still might be appropriate. People should not find it surprising that an award winner might also be capable of committing a crime. These are two separate acts. People commit two separate acts all the time.

Can you imagine a Nobel Peace Prize winner being arrested for DUI? Then why is it so hard to see what is happening here, and learn not to conflate honorable deeds with criminal deeds? Fortunately Manning’s legal team could face reality enough to provide him with the type of defense he needed for the crimes for which he has been charged.

The Real News Network has the interview Texas Towns Frack Their Way To Drought Conditions.

Forget about the earthquakes that fracking causes. Here is something that is much more obvious and more quickly detrimental.

If you can’t remember what you are supposed to forget, read my previous post Ohio stiffens regulations after concluding that fracking caused earthquakes.

It’s amazing what a little hype can do. Although there is a 57 page document of the Alpha Version of the Hyperloop Design.

To give you a little background, view The Daily Show video Track to the Future.

I get a kick out of new discoveries and inventions that I read about almost 40 years ago. (Since I have read part of the design document mentioned above, I realize it is not Elon Musk that is making claims that he has invented anything completely different from anything that has ever been studied before.)

Here is what the IEEE Spectrum article Loopy? No, it’s Hyperloopy has to say:

It’s been known for decades that an electro-pneumatic tubular transport can, in principle achieve stupendous speeds. IEEE Spectrum covered the idea back in 1984, in a sidebar, written by contributing editor Eric Lerner, to a feature article on the then-new idea of maglev trains. The sidebar, “Coast to coast in half an hour,” makes Musk’s proposal seem prudent by comparison. It was based on a Rand Corp. study that imagined a transcontinental tunnel virtually evacuated, to eliminate aerodynamic drag.

I read the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Spectrum much more regularly back in 1984 than I do now since I have retired.

I remember trying to calculate if the g forces would kill you. Turns out, it’s not a problem.

To only get to 800MPH with 1g acceleration would take less than 37 seconds.

Download the Excel spreadsheet to check my math. Your browser may think this linked item is just a regular HTML page, but if you save it, you can open it up in Excel and see the formulae.