The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Brussels Airlines routes around the damage

Cranky Flier thinks Brussels Airlines has done a remarkable job keeping its passengers moving after its principal hub closed for repairs last week:

Two days after the bombing, Brussels Airlines started to get things running, but only on its short haul network. It deployed its Avro RJ100 aircraft to Antwerp, a mere half hour north of Brussels Airport, to fly within Europe. That may sound ideal, but the airport has a runway less than 5,000 feet long. The Avro can handle that with ease, but it’s not great for much else.

Meanwhile, Liege, which is about 45 minutes southeast of Brussels Airport, picked up a bunch of flights with the A319/A320 fleet. Liege is the cargo hub of Belgium, but it doesn’t usually do much in the way of passenger flights. The airline is offering free shuttle bus service to both airports from Brussels.

The next day, Friday, Brussels Airlines got at least a piece of its long haul network off the ground. With those flights service a fair bit of connecting traffic, Liege wasn’t the best option. Instead, Brussels moved those flights to operate from Lufthansa’s Frankfurt hub as well as from the Swiss hub in Zurich. (Swiss is owned by Lufthansa as well.)

This was a brilliant move. It allowed Lufthansa Group/United/Air Canada travelers to continue to connect on to these African destinations. And for those who were starting or ending in Brussels, Lufthansa-operated flights were added from Frankfurt and Munich to Liege to help feed people into the new network. Brussels Airlines is flying from Antwerp to Zurich as well.

I'm always encouraged to see a business responding effectively after a major event, especially in aviation.

Student debt and deflation

As someone with both student debt and mortgages, our encroaching deflation (and consistent below-target inflation) frustrates me. Take a look at this special report by Crain's showing how bad the problem of student debt has become in general:

The share of college grads owing at least $30,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars jumped from 6 percent to 30 percent in the eight years ended in 2012, according to the College Board, while the average debt of new graduates in Illinois ballooned 85 percent, to $29,984, over the last decade. Among 46 Illinois schools reporting data to the Princeton Review, 19 say 2014 graduates' debt averaged more than $30,000. Debt for graduates of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago was $42,097, topped only by downstate MacMurray College's $50,039. Neither school commented.

A study published in 2014 by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, noting that small businesses account for about 60 percent of net jobs and rely primarily on personal debt for startup capital, found "a significant and economically meaningful negative correlation" between growth of student debt and small-business formation.

February's unemployment rate for 25- to 34-year-olds was a seasonally adjusted 5.1 percent, not much higher than the 4.9 percent overall rate and down from 9 percent four years ago. Yet median compensation for 30-year-olds in 2014 has dropped over the last decade to mid-1980s levels, according to the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C.

So let's review:

  • You need a college degree to meet the minimum qualifications for most jobs.
  • College costs have risen at multiples of inflation for 20 years or more.
  • Students have to borrow more money than ever before to get the college degrees they need to get jobs.
  • The resulting debt service depresses consumer spending, reducing demand for goods and services, and making the jobs even scarcer.
  • Republican Party policies aimed at reducing taxes and government spending, especially in the wake of the 2008 crash, have also suppressed demand for services.
  • Republicans have also simultaneously chipped away at the social safety net built up by bipartisan governments from 1934 to 1976, making repaying debt even harder for people living on the edge.
  • Let's not forget the Republican-drafted, Bush-approved bankruptcy law of 2005 that makes it impossible to get out from under crushing student-loan debt in most circumstances.
  • All of these Republican policies cause—cause—lower inflation verging on deflation, which makes it harder to repay debts. Keep in mind that the biggest beneficiaries of lower inflation are the bankers who contribute disproportionately to Republicans.

As we say in software, the transfer of wealth from young students to old bankers is a feature, not a bug, of Republican economic and tax policies.

You want to know how to keep student debt from destroying the Millennials? Simple. Government stimulus to get us out of the deflation trap, and allowing student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy.

You want to know how to do those things? Simple. Elect Democratic majorities in Federal and state legislatures, and vote for Hillary Clinton on November 6th.

Haven't escaped my notice today

I've been running around all day and only have a couple of minutes to list some things I've read on my phone while running around. All day.

There were a few other things in there, but these were the ones I paid most attention to.

 

Qualifications for president

Via Fallows, I'm now reading the transcript of Donald Trump's recent meeting with the Washington Post editorial board. It's...I don't even know how to describe it. He makes no sense. Example, from early on:

[Fred] HIATT [WaPo editorial page editor]: The root of many people’s unhappiness in Baltimore was the perception that blacks are treated differently by law enforcement. And the disproportionate – do you think it’s a problem that the percentage of blacks in prison is higher than whites, and what do you think is the root of that situation?

TRUMP: Well I’ve never really see anything that – you know, I feel very strongly about law enforcement. And, you know, if you look at the riot that took place over the summer, if that were stopped – it all, it mostly took place on the first evening, and if that were stopped on the first evening, you know, you’d have a much nicer city right now, because much of that damage and much of the destruction was done on Evening One. So I feel that law enforcement, it’s got to play a big role. It’s got to play a big role. But that’s a pretty good example, because tremendous amounts of damage was done that first evening – first two evenings, but the first evening in particular. And so I’m a very strong believer in law enforcement, but I’m also a very strong believer that the inner cities can come back.

HIATT: Do you see any racial disparities in law enforcement – I mean, what set it off was the Freddie Gray killing, as you know. Is that an issue that concerns you?

TRUMP: Well, look, I mean, I have to see what happens with the trial. I—

HIATT: Well, forget Freddie Gray, but in general, do you believe there are disparities in law enforcement?

TRUMP: I’ve read where there are and I’ve read where there aren’t. I mean, I’ve read both. And, you know, I have no opinion on that. Because frankly, what I’m saying is you know we have to create incentives for people to go back and to reinvigorate the areas and to put people to work.  And you know we have lost million and millions of jobs to China and other countries. And they’ve been taken out of this country, and when I say millions, you know it’s, it’s tremendous. I’ve seen 5 million jobs, I’ve seen numbers that range from 6 million to, to smaller numbers. But it’s many millions of jobs, and it’s to countries all over. Mexico is really becoming the new China. And I have great issue with that. Because you know I use in speeches sometimes Ford or sometimes I use Carrier – it’s all the same: Ford, Carrier, Nabisco, so many of the companies — they’re moving to Mexico now. And you know we shouldn’t be allowing that to happen. And tremendous unemployment, tremendous. They’re allowing tremendous people that have worked for the companies for a long time, they’re allowing, if they want to move around and they want to work on incentives within the United States, that’s one thing, but when they take these companies out of the United States. Other countries are outsmarting us by giving them advantages, you know, like in the case of Mexico. In the case of many other countries. Like Ireland is, you’re losing Pfizer to Ireland, a great pharmaceutical company that with many, many jobs and it’s going to move to Ireland.

What...the...fuck is he talking about? Incoherent doesn't seem strong enough a word. The lack of thought, the lack of knowledge, the lack of any ability to discuss a real problem in a real way should be completely disqualifying.

But after the Republican Party has spent 50 years hammering into people the idea that coherent, reasoned, informed thought doesn't get the job done (and by extension, education is worthless and fast-talking liberals are trying to win one over on you), this was kind of inevitable, wasn't it?

Trump's woman troubles

Skipping Mitt Romney's dig that Trump's wives have been foreign-born because "there are jobs that Americans won't do," it's becoming obvious that Trump has a problem with women mocking him. New Republic's Jeet Heer explains:

An old-fashioned sexist boor, Trump tends to divide the world into a simple binary: men are rivals to be bested and women are potential sexual conquests. When he’s confronted by a strong, assertive woman outside the mating arena, his synapses tend to short-circuit, leading him to odd and often self-destructive behavior. Before Carly Fiorina’s presidential bid fizzled out, she was the only Republican who had managed to faze Trump at all. He walked back his initial attempt to insult her looks and found himself booed by the debate audience on November 10 when he snapped, “Why does she keep interrupting everybody?”

If the presidential contest does become a battle between Clinton and Trump, Clinton is likely to enrage Trump in much the way previous women have. This suggests a strategy of using the red cape of gender to enrage the bull-headed Trump—the better to get him to make mistakes that will prepare him for the slaughter. 

Trump’s problem with women is not just personal, of course, but political. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll, half of American women have a “very unfavorable” view of him, which has led The Washington Post’s Paul Waldman to argue that Trump could face “the largest gender gap in history” in his race against Clinton.

That's a problem with running a campaign on instinct, and with a narcissism bordering on delusion (but on the other side of the border than most people). It shouldn't be too hard to goad him into a "self-destructive rage that will destroy his presidential aspirations," as Heer says. He's already come close enough.

During a four-hour WebEx session...

Stuff to read later:

OK, conference call is ending. Time to perambulate the pooch.

In the Navy

At trivia (pub quiz) on Tuesday, we had this question: Name 4 of the 6 U.S. presidents who have served in the Navy or Naval Reserves. We got it wrong, unfortunately, and the answer surprised me.

All six of the men in the list served in WWII, and all six served in the White House successively: Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and George H.W. Bush. (Bush was Reagan's vice president, remember.)

So...was there a secret conspiracy of Naval officers in the 1960s to take over the U.S. government?

Nah. But it's an interesting pattern.

(One of our team explained how Reagan didn't really break the pattern; "He was in McHale's Navy.")

Turning mental illness into a nomination for President

I think we can all agree that Donald Trump believes everything he says. Either he's a genius bullshitter or he has narcissistic personality disorder. It doesn't really matter in the end, but James Fallows still tries to sort it out:

A reader makes what may by now be an obvious point but is still worth reckoning with. He was responding to the post in which I noted Trump’s combination of masterful TV performance and near-total ignorance of the actual job and challenges of being president.

Imagine going through life with the conceptual framework that you simply cannot be wrong. Facts would cease to matter, and education would largely be irrelevant, because you're the one who determines what is and isn't true. In fact, people who claim to have expertise would become the enemy because they would provide information that would exist outside of yourself. If everything you say is the ultimate, universal truth, than anything that exists outside of yourself must be deception.

I think that Trump earnestly believes every single thing that comes out of his mouth, and that the reason his beliefs seem to change is because his reality is fluid.

Sounds about right. But then again, Scott Adams could also be correct. Either way, having this man so close to becoming president scares me more than any of the usual knaves and rogues the GOP has nominated would have.

And there's this:

Articles to read while waiting for my next online meeting

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump won their respective Illinois primary elections yesterday. And in other news:

Time to write some documentation. Whee.

Stuff I read at the library

I'm leaving Harold Washington in a few minutes, now that I've caught up on some reading:

I also watched a time-lapse video of the Chicago River turning green last year. If you want to see this odd Chicago tradition, go downtown tomorrow at 9.