Nov. - Mayor Jimmy Walker Died, Larry King Born

Life of Walker by Walsh.

NYC Mayor William H. ("Jimmy") Walker (1926-32) died this day in 1946 at 65. He was installed by Tammany Hall and did well for a few years, overhauling the Sanitation Department. But he became enamored of being the "Mayor of the Jazz Age" and being called "Gentleman Jimmy", and became known for spending a lot of time at the speakeasies.

When the stock market crashed during his first term, Cardinal Archbishop Patrick Hayes pronounced the cause as Mayor Walker and his permitting of casinos and girlie magazines. Al Smith (Governor, 1923-28) supported Walker, who was reelected in 1929, but FDR (Governor 1929-32), with his eye on the presidency, was less forgiving. In the end, a corruption scandal (pay-to-play by municipal contractors) blew up and Walker resigned.

Larry King, born Lawrence Harvey Zeiger in 1933, King is the son of immigrants who ran a Brooklyn bar & grill. He got his start with a Miami radio station and for many years ran a hugely successful interview and call-in show. Now 80 years old, he "hung up his suspenders" at CNN but continues to appear on a variety of shows.

HEALTH CARE | A Great Website

To see what a health care website landing page should look like, visit The Health Sherpa.

It's like Google – a clear, uncluttered place to start your research. Type in your zip code.

The health care website is meant for people who don't have insurance. They are likely to be young and stretched for the money to pay premiums. Many are likely to be below-average in computer-savviness or familiarity with bureaucracy. So the site should be super-simple.

We know what we actually have been given by the national system and many state systems -- a nest of options, slow response times ending with no response at all.

This being the USA, however, three people have created thehealthsherpa.com to provide simple access to what people need to know, which is the availability of options in their area.

Unfortunately, thehealthsherpa.com doesn't yet have access to the NY State data (see below) so the site doesn't work yet for us in this state.

A possible danger with independent sites that offer better access to healthcare data than existing exchanges is that scammers are operating in the same space. A sample story is that of a self-proclaimed good Samaritan who charged a baffled health insurance searcher $100 and then walked off with the person's Social Security number, bank information etc.

Consumers should be warned not to provide sensitive personal data until they are sure they are on an official site.

Meanwhile, here is what I got when I went to thehealthsherpa.com and gave them my NYC zip code.

New York State: We're Working On It

New York has their own healthcare exchange, and hasn't shared that data with us yet. We are working around the clock to import their data from state records.

If you'd like to be notified when we add NY plans, you can sign up for our email list below.

Newsletter Signup

In the meantime, you can find and compare plans on New York's exchange.

Visit NY Exchange

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Email: info@thehealthsherpa.com
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SANDY | NJ Payout–Slow and Opaque

Governor of NJ comforts Sandy victim.

During my half-year stint as Chief Economist at the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice in Newark, I wrote a report tracking the payout of the public and private funds set aside for victims of Sandy.

Sandy caused damage equal to 5.8 percent of the NJ economy (gross product), more than twice its 2.8 percent share of the New York economy.

The report showed, overall, that the hardest-hit were the poor and near-poor, who were under-insured and under-prepared for the storm. If they had assets, they lost a major part of them. If they did not have assets, they died or suffered trying to stay alive.

In my report I compared New Jersey's response to that of New York. Most of the comparisons were not favorable to New Jersey, which was slower to pay out money to victims and was less transparent about how donations and Federal aid was being spent. In June I moved on to serve as chief economist to the Warrior Family Foundation.

This morning I read in The New York Times a story by Kate Zernike that reports: "Most U.S. Hurricane Aid Still Undistributed in New Jersey" (p. 28):

[Last month New Jersey] had distributed only about a quarter of the $1.2 billion that the federal government had awarded to help New Jersey homeowners and renters recover from the storm. [In addition, there were] complaints about heavy bureaucracy and a lack of transparency.
State officials responded that] the federal housing department  required several layers of additional approval... to prevent the kind of fraud that followed Hurricane Katrina.

Chicago Prof Mahoney Praises Card Law by Maloney

Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NYC) gets her pen after Pres.

Obama signs the law she introduced, the CARD Act.

Man bites dog. The NY Times Business Section highlights a Chicago School economist who set out on a routine debunking of credit-card regulation and along the way decided the data show the opposite.

He meant to show the law did not benefit consumers... and found that it actually did benefit them. In fact the law was a $20.8 billion gift of lower fees to credit-card holders, not just in 2010 but every year.

Credit-card users are paying $20.8 billion less per year, just because of the law, concludes Prof. Neale Mahoney, along with his three NBER co-authors -- Sumit Agarwal, Souphala Chomsisengphet and Johannes Stroebel -- the last of whom is a professor at NYU Stern School.

But where did this law come from? The Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure (CARD) Act resulted from a long struggle. Surprisingly for a newspaper published in New York City, Floyd Norris does not mention that the law was introduced by New York City's Congresswoman from the Silk Stocking District, Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, and was supported by then-Senator Barack Obama on the Senate side.

Maloney first introduced the bill as the Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights in the 110th Congress (H.R. 5244) when she chaired the House Financial Services Committee's Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit. The bill passed 312-112 in the House. Although Sen. Obama supported the bill, it was not voted on in the Senate.

Maloney reintroduced the bill in the 111th Congress (H.R. 627), during which she chaired the Joint Economic Committee. On April 30, 2009, the House passed the bill 357-70, the Senate passed an amended version on May 19, 90-5, and the House passed the amended bill May 20, 279-147.

The bill was signed by President Obama on May 22 at a White House ceremony at which he acknowledged Maloney's key role in it by putting her right behind him when he signed the bill and bestowed on her a pen and a kiss. The law went into effect February 22, 2010.

Give credit where credit is due.

RUSSIA | Nov. 7–The Bolshevik Revolution

Lenin, a few days before the October Revolution, 1917.

On this day in 1917 -- which was October 25 in the old Russian calendar, so it is called the October Revolution in Russia -- Bolshevik partisans in Petrograd overthrew the provisional government under Alexander Kerensky.

Petrograd was the new name since 1914 of St. Petersburg. The name was changed to Leningrad in 1924 and back to St. Petersburg in 1991 after the dissolution of the Soviet Empire.

Kerensky's interim government, ruling Russia since February 1917, had been authorized by Czar Nicholas II. The Bolsheviks under Lenin formed a new government that would become the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics until 1990.

(In 1990, I participated in a Military Conversion conference in Moscow and we were allowed to stay at the October Hotel in Moscow, previously barred to Westerners and reserved for top Communist Party officials.)

Czar Nicholas II and his family, the Romanovs, had ruled Russia for 300 years. Russia included more than 150 million people and one-sixth of the earth's land. But workers had been restless for decades, back at least to 1825 when 3,000 soldiers rebelled on behalf of greater equality and freeing the serfs. This Decembrist revolt was suppressed by Nicholas I, but its ideals of equality of freedom for serfs endured. In 1905, Nicholas II agreed to reforms.  World War I devastated Russia. Hyper-inflation occurred. Russian casualties during the war were the highest of any nation ever in any war. In March 1917, riots broke out and Nicholas II abdicated, with Kerensky forming a government.

That created a vacuum. Vladimir Lenin saw his opportunity and returned to Russia after a decade in exile in Switzerland. With the slogan "Peace, land, and bread!" he gained popular support for his Bolshevik ("Majority") Party, which grew from 24,000 to 200,000 members. Bolshevik Party leaders agreed that the time was right for an armed uprising. They made their headquarters at the Smolny Institute, which was created as a school for girls from wealthy families.

In "Red October" (November 7 in the Western calendar), Bolsheviks took over post offices, bridges, train stations, government organizations, and the state bank without a single shot being fired. People were ready for a change, and most of the Russian armed forces were fighting in the trenches. At 2 a.m. the next morning, the cruiser Aurora fired a blank shell at the Czar's Winter Palace in Petrograd, to signal that it was time to attack it. The revolutionaries found a few members of the provisional government there and arrested them.

The coup was bloodless and undramatic. Soviet propaganda later changed many facts to make it look more heroic.

Although the Bolshevik Revolution was formed as a democratic overthrow of a despotic czar, it was itself despotic. Lenin's successor Stalin is widely believed to have killed 12 million of his own people to maintain his power and ensure the collectivization of farms in the teeth of resistance by independent farmers, the kulaks.

The Bolsheviks were more successful than the Decembrists at creating equality, but they did it not so much by raising the lowest individual incomes as eliminating independent entrepreneurs who were the key to initiative and responsiveness to markets.

When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, he saw that the be competitive in world markets, Russians needed to be more open (glasnost') and market-oriented (perestroika).  As he succeeded in these goals, Russians decided that Communist Party controls needed to be loosened. This process led to the dissolution of the Soviet Federation.

(Thanks to Garrison Keillor and The Writer's Almanac for the post on which this one is partly based.)

Board of Elections - November 5, 2013

Sticker reward for voting from the Board

of Elections. Great - and would be better
with coupons  from companies to reward
voters!

I recently posted something critical of the Board of Elections. I don't take any of that back, but I do like the idea of getting an "I Voted" sticker when I left my polling place yesterday.

It helped offset the fact that the polling place is four blocks south of where I live, and it has been switching between locations that are a block apart. I went initially to the old location.

As I was leaving, having voted, a young woman on her way in marveled at the paper ballots and said: "Most people here have iPhones, and we still are using paper ballots?"

Back to the sticker -- it would have been even more appreciated if it was accompanied by a coupon for a pint or scoop of ice cream from Ben & Jerry's, or something like that. Ben and Jerry and other companies have done that for people dropping off their tax returns at the General Post Office on April 15.