Author Archives: willykay

Who’s the phoney, Farm Bureau? Hawley or McCaskill – or is it just plain old racism?

12 Sunday Aug 2018

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I was surprised by the decision of the Missouri Farm Bureau to endorse our lackadaisical Attorney General Josh Hawley in his run for the U.S. Senate. You might be surprised by my attitude since the Farm Bureau has for some time been reliably Republican, a position practically dictated by the perceived competition between out-state (GOP) and urban (Democratic) interests. But it’s true.

Remember when our Attorney General and GOP senatorial contender Hawley first tried out a little lame trash talk trash about Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill? He called the down-to-earth Missouri Democrat, one of the few Missouri pols to hold town halls – even during the height of the raucous Tea Party anti-Obamacare frenzy – a phony who was out of touch with Missouri voters. Rich B.S. indeed, as we have shown in an earlier post, coming from an elite Washington lawyer who, according to emails to colleagues, only returned to Missouri in 2011 to enter politics.

But more important to the question at hand, are farmers likely to get anything out of Hawley that’s good for them? Consider the question of Trump’s mindlessly escalating trade war which has triggered massive agricultural tariffs: Not good for Missouri Farmers, especially in the long run since Trump doesn’t seem to know how to find a way out now that he’s escalated the hostilities.

McCaskill has the backbone to call Trump out on an an impulsive and sloppy approach to the issue. Hawley, on the other hand, resolutely sticks to vague GOP talking-around-the-issue-points. Despite the looming potential for disaster for many Missouri farmers – if not this year, next – Hawley will just “trust” that the attention-addled reality TV-star and failed construction mogul Trump knows what he’s doing when it comes to economic theory and all will work out before there are too many bankruptcies in that out-state Missouri that loves to hear GOPers tell it like (they think) it is.

Nor do these highly flexible folks, such as our prim little Josh Hawley seem to want to stand up for the principles that they espoused so fervently during the Obama years: you know, that stuff about bailouts – bailouts that, incidentally saved our auto industry and which were repaid. But hey, a $12 billion in one-year farm bailouts to be  handed out right after a budget-busting, deficit-building tax cut for the wealthy – no big deal to folks like Hawley – who doesn’t seem to care about much more than fighting the far-right religious wars and pushing conservative evangelical orthodoxy down the throats of the rest of us. How’s that for phony?

So why has the Farm Bureau decided to go with Republican comfort food? even though it could end up killing them? Don’t despair. I think I may understand just what the real appeal of GOP – and Josh Hawley – right or wrong, weak or strong, might be.

In an article in the St. Louis Post Dispatch today on why so many Trump supporters voted against the anti-union Proposition A,  a union man – after praising the ways his union gave  him a good life – and apparently unaware of Trump’s bad history with unions –  justified his support for Trump and, presumably, anti-union Trump supporters like Hawley, by appealing to the demographic fears that the “good old days” of white privilege will disappear if too many of those brown folks make it over the southern border:

“I like what Trump is doing for the country, though I don’t agree on all of his policies,” [ Scott] Long said. “If you want to be a citizen, you shouldn’t just walk across the Southern California border. … I like how Trump wants to close the border down.”

And, even more explicitly:

Dennis Brinkler, a union electrician who voted against the legislation, also cited immigration as a reason he’s supporting Trump and state Attorney General Josh Hawley, an anti-union Republican who is challenging Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Democrat, in November.

If you doubt that there’s an underlying racist theme there, the same article cited some union leaders who attributed union support for Republicans like Trump and Hawley explicitly to “protests of police shootings of unarmed black men” and fear of black protest against a repressive status quo:

“Some of the guys I represent in their 50s, it’s hard for them to grasp shutting down a highway because of an incident that may have happened with the police, and often that’s people on our side of the party,” White said, referring to protests in Ferguson after Michael Brown was killed by a police officer four years ago. “That’s hard for a lot of the old white guys to grasp.”

There you  have it. Trump’s calling card: playing on white resentment and the old folks’ racial fears.

And you can bet that the oh-so-educated and refined  Hawley is going along with it, helping to demagogue the thinly disguised racism of Trump’s immigration policies. As the St. Louis American put it after Hawley defended Trump’s cruel and ill-considered immigration policies, particularly the forcible separation of children from parents seeking asylum in the U.S., an undeniable human rights violation carried out so incompetently that many of the children cannot be reunited with the parents:

[…] Hawley backed and defended Trump’s political play of using the forcible separation of children from their families to force Democrats to support the construction of his absurd border wall and pursuit of more punitive immigration policies. Hawley should return to whatever rock he crawled out from under and leave it to actual human beings with blood in their veins to enact public policy. Hawley is a representation of a new generation of Republicans willing to accede the party and its values to the disaster of the Trump administration.

I expect Hawley’s – probably more timid – dog whistles will increase over the next couple of months as Big Daddy Trump gets even more explicit about  his overt racism. Sadly, it looks like lots of Missourians are inclined to be responsive

* 1st word in title changed from “whose” to “who’s” (8/18, 4:35). Thanks to comment noting the original error.

Republican Billy Long, charter member of the Party of Corruption

09 Thursday Aug 2018

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When GOP Rep. Billy Long (R-7) first ran for Congress there were whispers that, in today’s parlance, he was more than familiar with the swamp that his idol, Donald Trump – evidently facetiously – promised to drain. With the arrest of New York GOP Rep. Chris Collins for insider trading, the swamp gas miasma around Long has thickened. Collins has been stripped of his position on the House Energy and Commerce Committee and he is under investigation by the House Ethics Committee. The question is why isn’t Rep. Long under similar investigation – or maybe he is and we just don’t know about it?

As The Daily Beast reported last year, Collins authored four bills that would likely have benefited the company. Two of them, separate versions of the same bill introduced in the 114th and 115th Congresses, had just one cosponsor: Rep. Billy Long (R-MO), a member of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health, which has oversight over the Food and Drug Administration. While no one has accused him of any legal wrongdoing, Long also held stock in Innate. Long signed on to both pieces of legislation the day they were introduced. The first was filed in December 2016, and didn’t make it out of subcommittee before the session ended.

Then in January, Long bought between $15,000 and $50,000 in Innate stock, apparently as part of a Fidelity retirement account. In July, Collins once again introduced his bill, which would have expedited FDA approvals for treatments such as Innate’s, and Long was once again an immediate co-sponsor.

Long’s staff is of course denying that Long had any insider info from his colleague Collins with whom he coordinated to pass legislation that would enhance both their financial bottom lines – instead, his spokesperson claims, he just happened to decide to buy the Innate stock ” ‘when it became a daily topic on the nightly news in January of 2017,’ a timeline that suggests that Long, not a financial brokerage, made the decision to purchase Innate stock.” However, the circumstantial evidence amassed by Talking Points Memo (TPM) that Long and other GOP colleagues may have received insider information from Collins is somewhat compelling. As TPM notes:

[…] they all say they were just following the market and doing their own research. It had nothing to do with Chris Collins. Well, lots of reporting says Collins was pitching colleagues on it hard. And it seems like quite a coincidence that 5 members of Congress, all Republicans bought in. This seems to bear a lot more scrutiny.

Certainly, we know that Rep. Long is inclined to go easy when it comes to forestalling corrupt behavior, as would befit a guy with a reputation for being on the make. Remember Long’s 2017 vote to gut the Cardin-Lugar anti-corruption rule, “a major bipartisan law that helps safeguard trillions of dollars of payments to the US and governments around the world.”

However, given that most GOPers in the House voted the same way, – the party of corrupton perhaps? – I’m not holding my breath and would recommend that you also refrain to do so if you expect to see Long perp-walked out of Congress. The law got Collins fair and square, looks like Long may weasel out – and his fellow GOPers will probably be just fine with that -particularly those who may be equally guilty of conspiring with Collins to line their personal pockets.

Who’s the elite insider? McCaskill or Hawley

09 Thursday Aug 2018

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Ever notice how politicians who haven’t anything much to deliver try to exploit “culture”?

When Josh Hawley, Missouri’s current Attorney General and, as of last Tuesday, the GOP candidate seeking Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill’s senatorial seat, was in High School, he was driven two hours round trip to the expensive, private, Catholic Rockhurst High School in Kansas City. No reason for the local banker’s son to mix with the hoi polloi in his home town of Lexington, population ca. 5000. There’s no doubt that the banker’s son’s privileged upbringing helped fit him into the rarified east coast circles, first in Yale and Stanford, and later in a high-powered law firm and the conservative non-profit that he inhabited for 15 years prior to returning to Missouri in 2011.

Yet, oddly, now that he is running for office in a rural, agricultural state, he has asserted that folks in cities like New York and Washington D.C. “look down on the kind of upbringing I had.” Even more laughably, Hawley seems to think that growing up in a farming state equals dirt under the fingernails, declaring that “farming is a way of life, it’s a way of life that you live everyday, it’s a way of life that I grew up in … .” Perhaps they inhaled Eau de Manure at Rockhurst High.

Meeting with farmers at a get-together sponsored by the Missouri Dairy Association, the elite lawyer even came in costume: jeans and boots. Maybe he was taking his cue from GOP Senator Roy Blunt’s blue-jeaned, plaid shirted tour of the state in a rented pickup during his 2010 campaign. Hey, it’s worked a few times for elite, high-living GOP pols why not for the otherwise prim and proper-seeming Hawley.

One problem with Hawley’s salt of the earth act? Claire McCaskill’s backstory.

A middle class daughter of the state who worked as a waitress to secure a Mizzou education, and then worked her way up serving in local and state elective offices before running for a federal position, is, from my perspective, in much better position to understand the needs of the state than Johnny-come-back-lately, Josh Hawley.

And even though McCaskill is ending her second term as a denizen of D.C., Babylon reborn to some Tea-Party turned Trumpie types, she’s been undeniably tireless in her efforts to keep in touch with the temper of the region – her listening tours and kitchen cabinet meetings have taken place regularly, even in off-election years. While she’s struggled to remain true to basic Democratic principles, she’s also listened and learned from those who see the issues differently, sometimes angering those among us who are more progressive in our leanings. But I wager that many of us, such as myself, respect her effort to represent as many of her constituents as she conscientiously can.

McCaskill’s work-ethic and her approach to meeting the obligations of her job also contrast with the pampered Hawley’s easy-going approach. In fact, he seems to have handled both the job of Attorney General and his role as a senatorial candidate in such an anemic fashion that, according to some reports, he’s inspired some in his own party to claim that he’s “allergic to hard work.”

Think it over. Who’s really the birth-right elite insider here, the one who lived a sophisticated life among political movers and shakers in Washington D.C for over a decade and came back to Missouri to play the role of the chosen one in state Republican politics. On the other hand, who’s the politician who’s earned whatever insider status she has by working hard and never forgetting the needs of the people who sent her to Washington D.C.  Remember, you usually get what you deserve – which will be determined in the voting booth come November.*

*Paragraph revised to improve clarity 8/9, 11:22 PM

 

Trump’s negotiation (governing) strategy explained

28 Saturday Jul 2018

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Forgive me. I know it’s bad form to post a piece that does nothing more than quote another blog, but, folks, the following summary of the Trumpian process (strategy?) we’ve all been watching is the most succinct version of the real, true, truth that I’ve seen to date:

Print it out and post it on your refrigerator. Memorize it. Coupled with an effort to discredit reliable information resources (Rush Limbaugh, Fox News as pioneers?) that the conservosphere has lovingly built up over many years,  it’s how President Moron  got elected. (Funny how what Trump characterized as American carnage became a rich, powerful country just days after the Russian gambit succeeded in the 2016 election.)

But once enough of us understand the way Trump plays the game, the rules automatically change. It’s a simple if lethal formula and it’s been successfully put in play by much smarter wannabe dictators. However, our guy has evidently only read the “for dummies” version of the playbook.You’re not supposed to telegraph your lies – or contradict them within hours.

But what did you expect? Trump has shown that he’s no genius after all – not even the very stable variety.

Onward to the midterms.

The gun floodgates open

27 Friday Jul 2018

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It’s hard to know how many guns are floating around  in the United States. Gun ownership is  not well-regulated so exact numbers are hard to come by. Various studies, however, put the number of guns at somewhere between 265 million – 300+ million.

There’s a  little more than 320 million people in the U.S.

That’s a lot of guns. Lots of guns produce consequences.

The U.S. has 5% of the world’s population, but 31% of global mass shooters. Murder by gun runs 25.2% higher in the U.S. than in comparable countries.

As an exercise, try reading  your city’s daily paper tomorrow and count the number of deaths by shooting that are described there. Better yet, do it for a week or a  month.

And it might just get worse:

Americans will soon be able to make 3D-printed guns from their homes, widening the door to do-it-yourself versions of firearms.

The choices will include the AR-15, the gun of choice in American mass shootings. All 3D-printed guns will be untraceable, and since you can make them yourself, no background check is required.

A settlement earlier this year between the State Department and Texas-based Defense Distributed will let the nonprofit release blueprints for guns online starting Aug. 1, a development hailed by the group as the death of gun control in the United States.

Gun-loving Missouri crack-pots are already trying to get in on the act:

Nearly a year after  he was temporarily booted by Facebook for raffling off an AR-15 rifle, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate is giving away a machine capable of printing parts for a similar firearm.

Austin Petersen, who ran for president as a Libertarian in 2016, issued on Tuesday a press release and a letter to potential donors announcing the giveaway, saying that Republicans had not done enough to protect gun rights.

[…]

Petersen plans to give away the Ghost Gunner 2, which costs about $1,200. The machine is capable of milling parts for a firearm.

Brian Krassenstein of 3-DPrint.com observes that at this point guns manufactured in this manner are not especially durable, but that the technology does exist to print more durable guns and it is advancing regularly.

The floodgates will soon be wide open. Unless something is done, anyone will be able to print an undetectable gun and take it anywhere. And shoot anyone.

This development won’t be a victory for the good life Americans aspire to. It’s already scary to be exposed in public places in America. There’s lots of anger floating around. Lots of politicians using it to make hay. Resurgent racist thugs glorify force. Things may soon get much worse than we imagined they could.

Congress could push back against the court decision legislatively and Sen. Schumer and a handful of Democratic legislators are making sounds about doing something. But as long as Democrats are in the minority, “sounds” will probably be all that is forthcoming.

One thing for sure; if long-shot Austin Petersen were to make it to Washington, we couldn’t count on him to help us.

Maybe somebody should ask GOP senatorial primary front runner Josh Hawley how he feels about 3D gun printers.

 

The Russian Perils of Claire

26 Thursday Jul 2018

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Who is it who really, really wants to keep the congress in GOP hands? If  you wanna know just take a look at who’s targeting Missouri’s Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill, widely perceived to be vulnerable to raging Trumpites when she comes up for reelection this November.

There’s the 1% -the folks like the Kochs who – via their front group, Americans for Prosperity – are throwing $1.8 million dollars in ad buys at her. They think that emphasizing the GOP shaft-the-middle-class tax cut will do the trick. I guess the richest of the rich really like increasing the national debt on the backs of working Americans. (Didn’t Republicans oppose debt once  upon a time? Like when it was a question of providing Americans with healthcare? And there wasn’t any debt increase in spite their efforts to gull the gullible?)

But, hey, we’ve known for years about how wealthy Americans try to purchase elections with their talking – no – their shouting, money. Nothing new to see there. Sadly.

There is, however,  a new wrinkle:  Russians:

The Russian intelligence agency behind the 2016 election cyberattacks targeted Sen. Claire McCaskill as she began her 2018 re-election campaign in earnest, a Daily Beast forensic analysis reveals. That makes the Missouri Democrat the first identified target of the Kremlin’s 2018 election interference.

McCaskill responded with her usual verve:

“Russia continues to engage in cyber warfare against our democracy,” McCaskill said in a press release Thursday evening. “While this attack was not successful, it is outrageous that they think they can get away with this. I will not be intimidated. I’ve said it before and I will say it again, [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is a thug and a bully.”

McCaskill was one of three midterm candidates targeted by “spearphishing” efforts. We’ve known that such attacks (and other types of meddling) were likely for some time but our intrepid GOP-majority congress and the Russia-friendly Trump administration  have dithered and done little to forestall the threat. Missouri’s own Secretary of State, jolly little Jay Ashcroft, has said domestic election fraud is a bigger threat in November – despite no evidence to that effect.

But, hey, Senator McCaskill doesn’t need to worry – no less an eminence than our reality star president has acknowledged the threat. He just declared that the Russians are hard at work to help Democrats.  Because he’s so hard on the Russians (not).

Where’s Roy, Annie, Vicky and the rest of Missouri’s Washington GOP gang?

16 Monday Jul 2018

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Today Donald Trump kissed up to Putin and sold out the United States. His performance was so horrifying that a former CIA director, John Brennan, characterized it as exceeding “the threshold of high crimes & misdemeanors. It was nothing short of treasonous.” Former National Intelligence Director James Clapper added that, “on the world’s stage, in front of the entire globe, the President of the United States essentially capitulated and seems intimidated by Vladimir Putin. So it was amazing and very, very disturbing.”

All of which tends to confirm what we’ve all known all along: our president owes Putin big-time and is running scared as the extent of the debt is close to being exposed by the special prosecutor.

Even a few Republicans were outraged by the Trump’s craven performance (see here and here). But not all. Not even very many.  As Paul Waldman noted in The Washington Post:

When it comes to Republicans, we’re faced with two related issues. First, there are members of their party who actively benefited from Russian manipulation of our election, and even sought out help that turned out to come from Russia, whether they fully understood it at the time. Second, much of the rest of their party is now arguing that it’s really no big deal if the Russians manipulate American elections, so long as the GOP is the one that benefits. […]

We all know how eager the Trump campaign was to work with the Russian government when the campaign believed the Russians had dirt on Clinton to share. But just as we’ve seen so many times before, Trump’s naked corruption is merely a more unapologetic version of what’s happening within the Republican Party. So the question now is: Is this still going on? Are any Republican candidates currently receiving information obtained through Russian hacking about their opponents?

Which leads me to ask: what does GOP Senator Roy Blunt have to say about how Donald Trump is putting the security of our country at risk? Or my 2nd district GOP representative, Ann Wagner? So far nothing but crickets. And that goes for the rest of the Missouri delegation.

But it’s early times yet – just a few hours after the press conference after all. I’ll be watching to see how our GOP delegation responds after they’ve  had a chance to test the direction of the wind in order to decide where their convictions lay.  Who knows, just because they didn’t condemn daddy right away doesn’t mean they won’t manage to summon up some mild distress as long as it doesn’t look like it’ll get the red-meat pitchfork brigade too fired up.

I’ll be getting back to you when/if I learn who has an incipient backbone and who doesn’t. It’s important. We’ve got vitally important midterms coming up – and Trump’s public stance, in terms of what he says and his policies amounts to a giant “so what?”. All of which leads one to really worry about what deals may have been made – or further elaborated – in the two hours when the dictator and the wannabe dictator conferred unattended.

Fake News Flash – Roy Blunt wins healthcare awards.

11 Wednesday Jul 2018

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Yesterday I wrote about how gobsmacked I was to receive two glossy mailers asking me to thank GOP Senator Roy Blunt for “being a champion of Medicare access,” and for “being a 2018 champion of Health Care Innovation.”  My reaction was due to the fact that Blunt  has been a reliable foot-soldier in the GOP war against expanding healthcare access, including, as I noted,  mumblecore disavowals of pre-existing conditions protections. He’s also expressed his distaste for Medicare in the past.

The next question is just who is trying to help Senator Blunt pull the wool over Missourians’ eyes? The mailers state that they are paid for by the American Life Sciences Innovation Council (ALSIC) and the Alliance for Patient Access (AfPA) respectively. So who do these groups represent? Not too hard to figure out when one consults the InterWebs:

AfPA.jpg

The Alliance for Patient Access, featured in the brochure above, is a straight-out big pharma controlled entity that uses unwitting journalists and greedy or insecure politicians to push “platforms that help drug companies’ bottom lines”:

The AfPA offers cover for lawmakers who carry out the pharmaceutical industry’s agenda, some observers say. In one striking example, the group accepted $7.8 million in 2014 and 2015 to give Medicare “Patient Access Champion” awards to members of Congress, according to its IRS disclosures for those years. The AfPA annual report shows that 50 awards were presented. The awards appear to be a way to thank cooperative legislators while also pressuring them and others to enact the AfPA’s policy agenda. […]

Some say those awards […] shielded lawmakers from criticism for voting against Medicare cost controls, such as an independent rate-setting board and other measures.

 

ALSIC.jpg

The American Life Sciences Innovation Council, which awarded Blunt a similar “healthcare champion” award, isn’t the  501(c)(3) charitable, non-profit educational organization that it seems to be, but instead works to influence “the effects of government regulation on key factors that drive life science innovation,” which is to say,  the bottom line of the medical and pharmaceutical companies whose creation it undoubtedly is. It spends the bulk of its income on activities such as robo-calls touting he “winners” of their awards, as well as mailers like the one above or newspaper ads pushing the same message (There have been several of these ads in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in recent months; I’d bet good money that they’ve appeared in other newspapers around the state.)

Upshot? It’s all fake. Senator Blunt is no healthcare hero or defender of Medicare. He’s just another good ol’ boy wallowing in the swamp.

Roy Blunt hustles to hide his healthcare history

10 Tuesday Jul 2018

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I can remember back in the day, when Obamacare was just a gleam in the of the Democratic-majority  congress and GOP Senator Roy Blunt was one of the point persons in the GOP House effort to preserve the status quo of the American healthcare mess. Nor do I remember that he bucked House or Senate leadership, or, more recently, the Trump administration in any of their efforts to destroy or destabilize healthcare delivery to Americans. He, in fact, continues to spout misleading and dishonest claims about the ACA.

All of which made me scratch my head in wonderment when I received a couple of glossy mailers touting Blunt, who was on the record as saying a few years ago that he thought Medicare was a mistake,  as a “champion of Medicare access,” and as a “healthcare champion.” Whew!  Do you, like me, think that somebody’s shoveling some of that old time barnyard fragrance producer that’s so prevalent in the GOP political world?

Maybe ol’ Roy heard the folks who were making all that noise when Trump and his collection of more or less ornamental GOP congressional garden gnomes actually went after the ACA last summer. Perhaps, as a result, he’s decided that he needs to make some adjustments to his messaging and cover his tracks.

Consider  his message on coverage for pre-existing conditions back in 2010 when he was actively carrying water for GOP forces fighting against improved healthcare delivery:

Access for kids who have pre-existing conditions, who would be against that? But access for adults, who have done nothing to take care of themselves, who actually will have as I’ve just described every incentive not to get insurance until the day that you know that you’re going to have medical expenses, that’s, that’s a very different kind of story.

Now contrast that bit of flim-flam  with ol’ Roy’s line in 2017:

Since my days in the House, I have supported providing insurance options for people with pre-existing conditions. As we move forward, I’ll work with my colleagues to be sure that no one is denied the care they need based on a pre-existing condition.

Admittedly, if you parse this phrase carefully, there’s lots of weasel language. But it’s equally hard to deny that he wants Missourians to believe that he supports the popular Obamacare provision. More importantly, it essentially contradicts his 2010 “personal responsibility” attempt to divert folks from the tragedies that typified healthcare for the millions of Americans suffering from chronic disease – through no fault of their own, contrary to Blunt’s claim.

So where does the “tight-lipped” (for a reason) Senator really stand? For instance, has anyone heard him endorse or condemn fellow-GOPer Josh Hawley’s participation in a court fight that would end protections for those with pre-existing conditions? Shouldn’t that be the next test for the wooden-faced guy who talks out of both sides of his mouth so adeptly.

 

Is the fix in for Lambert airport privitazation?

16 Saturday Jun 2018

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Two days ago (6/14) St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson published a guest column in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch entitled “Turning our airport into a stronger reagional asset.” It was all sweet nothings and tippy toes. Sweet words because the spectre of privatization, first raised by Krewson’s mentor, Mayor Slay, has properly raised hackles elsewhere in city government. As St. Louis Comptroller put it:

… . Currently, the airport is in a strong financial position showing 31 straight months of passenger growth, two credit-rating upgrades, and added international flights.

Privatization would disrupt this growth. Our airport is an asset for the city, and a private entity beholden to shareowners, not consumers, would put bottom-line profit over public service.

But clearly Mayor Krewson has  her eye on a bigger prize for cash-strapped St. Louis since she writes that “this proposal could result in new revenue, potentially hundreds of millions of dollars. We could use that revenue to provide better city services across the board, without raising taxes.” It’s hard to deny that St. Louis is in a hard place right now – but the problem isn’t the airport so one wonders why the airport has to provide the solution. Selling the family jewels in order to buy bread is hardly a “win-win,” just more evidence that the region is on a downward trajectory.

It’s interesting that Krewson mentions the hoped-for financial windfall only after asserting that contracting with a “private entity” to oversee the management and operation at the airport would open the door to “innovation” and improved services. She’s also emphatic that the airport itself would not be sold to private interests, only leased, and she’s at great pains to assure us that care is being taken to be sure that the city’s and the region’s interests will not be sacrificed.

To this end she notes that a study of the advantages and disadvantages has been commissioned and she lists several of the “broad range of […] experts” that have been engaged to carry it out. And it is at this point that my sleepy hackles went up: Krewson, hoping to tip the scales just a little more heavily in the direction of the careful process she wants us to believe she has engendered notes that this study will cost the city nothing. Nothing at all. It will be paid for by one of that group of “experts,” Grow Missouri, a local nonprofit that is providing funding for all of the work leading up to the signing of a potential lease.”

What Krewson conveniently omits – at least I didn’t notice it at first – is that Grow Missouri, which, given its financial commitment to underwrite the effort, is a significant stakeholder in the process, is also affiliated with funded by local rightwing billionaire Rex Sinquefield‘s. Show-Me-Institute, a “think-tank” that commits “studies” that studiously confirm Sinquefield’s druthers. It looks like old Mr. Privatizer, megabucks Rex Sinquefield, will continue in his efforts to get government out of government, Lambert representing one more can that can be knocked down. Am I wrong? Can we expect transparency in a process funded by folks who start with a firm agenda to arrive at a pre-determined answer?

Alderman Cara Spencer agrees that the study-group might not be as kosher as Krewson suggests, and also notes that the study group does not include an important stakeholder, further suggesting that it represents an effort to stack the deck:

She said in an interview that there had been a lack of transparency from the start and that the consultants had an incentive to push for a privatization deal because they’d be paid only if one was lined up. “Their incentive is to say yes,” she said.

She also criticized the selection of the Sinquefield-related firm to continue guiding a process that it started. Moreover, she complained that Airport Director Rhonda Hamm-Niebruegge wasn’t part of the committee. “I find the lack of inclusion of the airport director really alarming, quite frankly,” Spencer said.

I initially felt a little suspicious of the careful cooking process that Krewson accorded her oh-so tasty argument in her op-ed, but after taking the final product in, I’ve got to admit, I’m feeling a little sick to my stomach. A teaspoon of sugar might make the “medicine go down,” but too much saccharin has the opposite effect. So much for the sweet words and tippy toes.

It also might not hurt to take a look at a Congressional Research Service Report that notes that, of the two applicants to take advantage of an Airport Privatization Pilot Program authorized in 1996, only one remains in private hands. Among the reasons for the failure of the pilot to recruit more participants and to demonstrate success was the level of regulation that such a monopoly would be subjected to – many of which constitute just those fiduciary and service protections that Krewson promises.

But, hey, it’s Trump (and Sinquefield) time, the day of the almighty buck. With any luck most of those protections will be re-regulated away.

Addendum 1: I misspoke when I noted that Grow Missouri is affiliated with the Show-Me-Institute. My apologies for not checking my sources more carefully. The situation is even worse, however, than such an affiliation would have suggested. Grow Missouri is, in fact, just another one of those of the myriad entities heavily or entirely funded directly by Rex Sinquefield (to the tune of $2.5 million in 2014 alone) in order to realize his political and ideological inclinations.

Additionally, according to a February report in the STL Post-Dispatch, Sinquefield also paid “the city’s application to the Federal Aviation Administration’s privatization pilot program, and is paying the consultants.” Oddly, given Krewson’s statement that the study will cost the city nada, the same report states that he “will be reimbursed.”  An even earlier January Post-Dispatch report contains the following assertions: “the firms would be paid only out of the proceeds of any privatization deal that ends up being worked out, city officials said. […]  Grow Missouri, the Sinquefield-funded nonprofit, would be paid only to reimburse any out-of-pocket payments it makes to the McKenna and Moelis firms and to any other contractors hired by Grow Missouri.” So what’s the story?

Addendum 2: Want even more on the “fix” that may be in process? A joint letter to the editor of the Post-Dispatch (6/17) from State Sen. Maria Chappelle-Nadal and State Rep. Courtney Allen Curtis present pertinent arguments that County residents have little say in the issue although they have paid the heaviest price for airport improvements in the past and are likely to do so again once the private industry profit motive is allowed fuller reign.

State Sen. Jamilah Nasheed  also published a letter today (6/17) noting that the issue must to be discussed publicly and  not turned over to a group of “consultants” who, “far from being an objective group, […] would be paid millions of dollars if the airport is privatized.”