Posts from — April 2011

CNN-Money has a gallery that they call the Meanest budget cuts. Their choices for the seven cruelest cuts in the bill just passed are:

• Community health centers $600M
• Land mine removal $14M
• WIC [Women, Infants, & Children] food program $500M
• Heating assistance $390M
• Housing assistance for Native Americans $50M
• US Institute of Peace $10M
• Administration on Aging $16M

There is nothing about reducing the travel budget of Congress, one of the first things cut in businesses, or for the other money that Congresscritters have stuffed into their budget, but it’s necessary to stop supporting the purchase of milk for poor children, or removing the land mines that kill them.

The BBC reports that at the insistence of the government Tepco to compensate Japan’s nuclear plant victims

The Japanese government has ordered the operator of the nuclear plant damaged by last month’s quake and tsunami to pay compensation to affected families.

About 48,000 families who lived within 30km (18 miles) of the Fukushima Daiichi plant will be eligible.

The compensation is described as provisional, with payouts – expected to be 1 million yen ($12,000, £7,331) per family – beginning on 28 April.
…

Announcing the compensation, Tepco President Masataka Shimizu offered “heartfelt apologies” to residents hit by events at the plant. He said the company would cut costs to finance the payments.

“We want to streamline operations with no exceptions in what we consider,” he said. “We are obviously thinking about pay cuts for our board and managers.”

Earlier TEPCO had offered ¥1,000 [$12] per person and was told to bugger off by the locals.

There is also news that they are finally admitting that the spent fuel rod pool in Reactor 4 that I have been complaining about for a month, might possibly be a “problem” as a result of a probable meltdown caused by the uncovered fuel rods.

[Read more →]

They’re Having A Birthday!

yaaaaaaawwwwwnnnnnnnnn

[Editor: April 15, 2007 they showed up.]

[Editor: Income [left], Property [top center], Excise [right] – the Tax Triplets.]

Keith Kisser at Invisible Library is having his eighth blogiversary™.

Oh, yes, there’s this .

Friday Ark

So I was checking to see if Boehner, Cantor, and Ryan were in the House and passing the budgets that cause the deficit to explode again – they all were.

People forget that the iconic National Debt Clock was turned off after the debt started to be reduced under Clinton. It had to be re-started and an extra digit added when the Republicants took over the White House as well as Congress during the Hedgemony.

So, during the search I ended up at Dennis Hastert’s Wikipedia entry, and learned about a little perquisite that is given to former Speakers of the House – “archiving” money. Since Hastert resigned to become a lobbyist, according to the Chicago Tribune he has been receiving $40,000 per month to pay for office space, staff, and the lease on an SUV to “put his papers in order”. He is going suck up about $2.4 million during the five years that he gets this “assistance” and he doesn’t have to explain what the $6+K/month leased SUV has to do with “archiving”.

Did you know that the surviving spouse of one of the thousands of military people who were killed in the Hedgemony’s wars gets $1154 per month, if they can jump through all of the VA’s hoops.

Hastert gets a six-figure Congressional pension plus health insurance, and a surviving spouse is left just above the poverty line.

If they want to get serious about the deficit, this is the sort of gratuitous waste of money that has to end.

Canada is having an election and the leaders of the major parties [with the exception of the Green Party, because its leader is a girl and she asks embarrassing questions] finally had their French-language debate [after rescheduling because it conflicted with a National Hockey League playoff game].

The winner of the debate in the minds of many Canadians, according to the CBC, was a citizen who asked a direct question: Quebec woman becomes instant star after debates

The aftermath of Wednesday night’s French-language debate had the four political campaigns all spinning that their leader won, but it was a 53-year-old woman questioner who seemed to have won the hearts of many viewers.

Muguette Paillé, a 53-year-old unemployed woman from Sainte-Angèle-de-Prémont in Quebec’s Maurice region, asked the leaders about job creation, particularly for older workers, during the French-language debate.
…

Asked whether she feels she got an answer to her question, Paillé said she felt the leaders showed empathy, but what she wants is a job.
…

Paillé’s question to the leaders was: “The employment rate is very high in the region. Steady jobs are scarce. It is hard for someone like me — I’m 53 — to find work. So I would like to know how you intend to create jobs in Quebec, particularly in my region, and how it will help people over the age of 50 find permanent jobs.”

This proves that the leaders of the parties at the debate were correct in their assessment that including Elizabeth May of the Green Party, would have been a problem, because they got embarrassed by a woman who simply asked a question.

Capitalism.

The pundits keeps saying that we need to run government like a business, when they really mean, “let’s raid the Treasury”.

I think it’s time to deal with rising health care costs by using the principles of capitalism, rather than corporatism. First, we need to discover the most efficient health insurance model in the US, and that one is easy. Robert Reich points out that Medicare isn’t the problem. It’s the solution.

At an overhead cost of less than 5%, regular Medicare is the most efficient health care insurance in the US. It isn’t even close. Medicare Parts A and B are the best model for health insurance – it is a simple, demonstrable fact.

Now, Medicare Part C, the so-called Medicare Advantage, is not as efficient. The Trust Fund has to pay 12% more for people in Part C, than those in standard Medicare. The reason is simple, it involves the private sector, and the private sector wants to make profits. So, from a business perspective, Part C should be phased out with everyone put into the cheaper standard Medicare. Given that there are about 10 million people in the program, that extra 12% is a significant amount of money. Part C was supposed to save money, but like all privatizations efforts, it ended up being more expensive.

The last part of Medicare is Part D, the drug program, and it is a total mess. It is another privatization project that is totally inefficient and outrageously expensive. It needs to be totally restructured as a government program, like standard Medicare, that negotiates for drug prices using the power of the 50 million enrollees, just like any other business. That’s how things are done in the capitalist system. Since the DoD and VA also have medical programs and need to buy drugs, they should be combined with the Medicare program to give the negotiators real clout when they are buying from all of the foreign corporations that now manufacture the drugs for the American market. If the process works for WalMart, it would be silly not to use it for Medicare. Of course, you have to favor capitalism to accept that.

Even in Canada.

The CBC reports on a new study on corporate tax cuts in Canada:

With the future of federal corporate tax cuts playing a role in the election campaign, a new study says the planned reductions will not stimulate the economy.

A new report from the labour-oriented Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, a non-profit research organization, suggests historic trends show businesses’ fixed capital spending has declined as a share of GDP and as a share of corporate cash flow since the early 1980s, despite a series of federal and provincial corporate tax cuts.

If you cut taxes, corporation won’t invest the extra money, they will hand it out as dividends or buy back stock. When management is rewarded based on profits, it would not be logical for them to reduce their profits by building new facilities. The system is totally focused on this quarter, not the future.

The BBC carries a report that is no more unusual than a “family values” Republican being charge with a sex crime: Israel’s Lieberman closer to corruption charges

Israel’s attorney general is considering charging Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman with corruption.

An indictment on charges of fraud, money laundering, breach of trust, and tampering with a witness was being drafted, the justice ministry said.

Mr Lieberman will have a chance to argue his case in a final hearing before a charge sheet is issued.

Come on, he’s a right-wing Israeli politician, of course he’s corrupt. He carefully responds that he “followed the law” and not that he did nothing wrong. Standard phrasing to indicate that any crimes he may have committed were simply errors in interpretation of the law, not an “actual crime”.

If he resigns after being charged, as he has said he would, than Israel will probably have to call an election.

NPR’s All Things Considered decided to look at Paul Ryan’s budget proposal [transcript and audio link] and invited Paul Krugman and Douglas Holtz-Eakin to review it.

To say that Krugman was dismissive is perhaps understating what happened.

On a related note regarding Ryan’s $8,000 voucher for an individual to purchase health care insurance, an acquaintance just went on Medicare, and his company’s HR department had a party. It turns out that with the company picking up the cost of the “Medigap” insurance and the other costs of Medicare, they still save over $1,000/month. This individual’s group insurance at the small company he works for costs well in excess of $1K/per month and Ryan thinks people will be able to buy a reasonable individual policy for $8K/year in ten-years time.

Robert Reich as a nice little post about why you don’t negotiate with right-wing bullies. If you start by doing all of the compromising, you end up with violence.

Paul Krugman talks about essentially the same thing in the Age of Diminished Expectations

I’m sorry to say it, but I expect the worst from the upcoming presidential speech on deficit reduction. OK, maybe not the worst; I don’t think he’ll call for privatizing Medicare, but who knows? But I do expect a lot of preemptive concessions to the Republicans, which will, as usual, be the starting point for further concessions.

The Republicans have no reason to compromise, because they know that Obama will fold and call it a “compromise”. John Boehner has made that clear:

On Saturday night House Speaker John Boehner declared, “The president says, ‘I want you to send me a clean bill.’ Guess what, Mr. President. Not a chance you’re going to get a clean bill.”

The “bill” under discussion is raising the debt limit, and the Republicans are going to use that vote to push through all kinds of ideological garbage that will not help the economy, and sure as hell won’t reduce the deficit.

As a matter of fact on American Public Media’s Marketplace, Heidi Moore covers what business is doing in reaction to the Republican tactics – Debt debate forces companies to ask: What if?

This Republican game of “chicken” has already increased the deficit by raising the interest on long-term US bonds. The “Austerity Hysteria” has caused analysts to reduce their predictions for the growth of the GDP in the first quarter, and businesses and banks will probably start hoarding even more money.

WalMart has a streak going – 7 bad quarters in a row. About that recovery …

Fred Grimm of the Miami Herald has a column that highlights the basic problem with Florida’s legislature: Ethics stops at Legislature door

The Florida Legislature hasn’t been so enthused about ethical niceties. Until now.

Senate Bill 1180 would finally get tough on “soliciting, or demanding money, gifts, or donations.” The bill mandates honest disclosure of personal finances.

SB 1180 provides much of what political reformers have sought . Except the strictures don’t apply to politicians. Just roadside beggars.

Our ethically challenged legislature has fashioned a code of ethics for panhandlers.

The leadership of the legislature spends the other ten months of the fighting court cases over their financial dealings, but they want the homeless to have more moral fiber than they do. If you doubt that, read the high points of the antics of one of the leading lights of the legislature in Fred’s column.

In an obvious Communist plot against the US, the Soviet Union launched Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin into space in a Vostok capsule on the centennial of the American Civil War on April 12^th, 1961.

VVS Major Gagarin, returned after orbiting the Earth for just under two hours, and the race to the Moon was on.

The BBC’s article, Yuri Gagarin: The journey that shook the world, is better than CNN’s, but CNN has video.

Even Google has celebrated, as you will notice if you do a search. The most informative articles are in Russian, so I won’t annoy you with links.

Notes: BOCTOK = Vostok = ‘East’, VVS = Soviet Air Force, CCCP = SSSR = USSR

Tomorrow marks the 150^th anniversary of the attack on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, and the beginning of the Civil War.

In the Miami Herald this past Sunday Leonard Pitts, Jr. addressed the issue of historical revisionism so common in the American South, The Civil War: ‘A conspiracy of amnesia’.

For me it is simple – people were literate and wrote contemporary accounts of what happened. There were newspapers and the acta of the secessionist conventions, so there is absolutely no doubt that the issue for the South was slavery. The issue for Abraham Lincoln was union. That is what the written records from that period show, and there were too many of them, in too many places, for anyone to have changed them all.

Later in the war, when it was obvious the South couldn’t win, there were attempts to change the subject, but at the beginning of the war the reason was not in doubt.

I don’t get into Civil War history to any great extent, because I have no interest in wasting time with delusional people, but there is a relevance to our current situation – compromises.

In a sense, slavery in the United States, under the Constitution is a long list of compromises, beginning with the “Three-Fifths Compromise” in the document itself. I understand the need for compromise in framing something like the Constitution, but there has to be a limit. The failure to take a stand on the extension of slavery after the Constitution came into effect eventually led to the Civil War. By repeatedly compromising on slavery issues, the South was emboldened to constantly threaten secession, which is what happened after Crittenden Compromise as rejected as the last straw for the Free States.

CBS carries the AP story: Japan raises nuclear alert to Chernobyl level. That is the top of heap, a level 7, but the AP story doesn’t provide any information as to why it was done.

For a much more technical discussion of what happened “George Washington” at Naked Capitalism releases his inner geek.

The short form is that the Japanese nuclear safety people started looking at the numbers being compiled by people other than TEPCO, including numbers from monitoring stations in the US, and had an OMG! moment. They have finally realized that the fires at the facility were the result of fuel rods in the spent fuel pools being exposed and spewing radioactive particles. They have discovered that it wasn’t just iodine and some cesium, but there was strontium-90 released. We have gone from half-lives measured in days, through those measured in decades, and arrived at those measured in millennia.