The World According to Tony Polombo

Our Concentration of Wealth

2012-01-01T14:30:00.001-05:00

The increasing concentration of wealth by the top 1% in the US has been talked about and was the subject of the Occupy demonstrations on Wall Street and elsewhere and summarized nicely in this video presentation. But does it really make much of a difference to our prosperity as a whole? I believe it does.

To start with, let’s show an example of the difference of wealth in the hands of ordinary middle class people as opposed to the wealthy.

Say we have 100 families each with a yearly income of $50,000. This allows each of them to buy or rent somewhere to live, buy at least one car, a TV, a cell phone, food at the supermarket and occasionally a restaurant and perhaps a vacation among other things. These are purchases that keep the economy going.

Now if we take that same $5 million away from those families, perhaps from outsourcing their jobs and give that money to the CEO who runs the company, what happens?

For one thing, the families now without a steady income will start to severely curtail their spending which puts a strain on the businesses trying to sell to them. In the meantime, the CEO who gets the $5 million is not likely to spend much of it because he already has everything he wants. Even if he wanted to spend it, he has no need for 100 houses, cars, TVs, etc. that the 100 families would buy which greatly decreases demand.

And make no mistake about it. The high unemployment we are going through is mainly about lack of demand for goods and services. Although corporations are making handsome profits, it is not resulting in the hiring of workers because there is no need for additional capacity due to the lack of demand. This blows a hole in the label of “job creators” given to the wealthy.

In addition to its contribution to our present unemployment, there are a few other adverse effects that this concentration of wealth has brought us. One is that the wealthy have far more control over our elections than in past years. Yes, money has always been part of elections, but with the Supreme Count decision Citizens United, unlimited amounts of money can go into political advertisements and the source of the money doesn’t even have to be revealed.

Another is that it is difficult to run an effective campaign for Congress without already being wealthy which most of our Congressmen are.

It is not difficult to understand why voters feel that members of Congress don't understand or, even worse, don't care about their concerns. How could lawmakers with wealth, based on their own cushy circumstances, have similar feelings to ordinary Americans on jobless benefits, inheritance taxes, bank bailouts and income taxes?

Perhaps worst of all is the class disparity we are now dealing with between the haves and have-nots. Most Americans have had positive feelings about the wealthy because they envisioned themselves as possibly becoming rich themselves. After all, this was America, the Land of Opportunity where as former presidential candidate Herman Cain was quoted as saying "If you're not rich, blame yourself."

But an interesting essay in Esquire, We Are Not All Created Equal had these words about what it calls a new reality.

The Great Outcry that has filled the country with inchoate rage is the bloody mess of this fundamental belief in the justice of American outcomes crashing headfirst into the new reality. The majority of new college grads in the United States today are either unemployed or working jobs that don't require a degree. Roughly 85 percent of them moved back home in 2011, where they sit on an average debt of $27,200. The youth unemployment rate in general is 18.1 percent. Are these all bad people? None of us — not Generation Y, not Generation X, and certainly not the Boomers — have ever faced anything like it.

And if it’s that difficult for young people coming out of college, what is it like for older workers who have always had a more difficult time in the workplace dealing with age discrimination?

The fear here is that the huge concentration of wealth by a few is making it more and more difficult for everybody else to enter and stay in the middle class. What can we do?

There are solutions that we can try but needless to say, those politicians who are supported by the wealthy will be opposed to them. But here goes anyway.

First, we need to repeal the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. Our treasury needs that revenue.

Secondly, we need to stimulate the economy by spending money on our decaying infrastructure. This puts people to work and like in the example above with the 50 families, they will spend money that puts others to work. With interest rates being so low, it will never be cheaper.

And finally, what can we do to bring at least some of our manufacturing back to the US? Admittedly, it’s difficult to compete with the salaries in

China

and elsewhere. But would the cost in labor make such a huge difference in the end cost of the product? Or put another way, would US consumers pay a little more for something that is labeled as ‘Made in the

USA

’? I think the answer is Yes.

Sam Walton proudly displayed ‘Made in the USA’ goods at his Wal-Marts when he was alive. But since then, it has used its significant buying power to force manufacturers to close plants here and source in other places like China as detailed in this PBS Frontline Documentary Is Wal-mart Good for America?

While these practices to lower prices made Wal-Mart grow, mass retailers like Wal-Mart and Sears have not been doing so well lately (as opposed to upscale retailers such as Nordstrom). Perhaps there will be a realization that low prices are only so good until too many of their customers lose their jobs as a result.

But some of the jobs outsourced to China are actually coming back to America. But it’s a good news, bad news scenario as detailed in the NYT article U.S. Manufacturing Gains Jobs as Wages Retreat

Some manufacturers are hiring again in America, softening a long slide in factory employment. But for a new generation of blue-collar workers, even those protected by unions, the price of employment is likely to be lower wages stretching to retirement.

The wages for the new hires [at General Electric], however, are $10 to $15 an hour less than the pay scale for hourly employees already on staff — with the additional concession that the newcomers will not catch up for the foreseeable future. Such union-endorsed contracts are also showing up in the auto industry, at steel and tire companies, and at manufacturers of farm implements and other heavy equipment…

So much for the belief in greedy unions causing our problems. With the threat of moving production back to

China

, GE has its workers over a barrel. They either accept a job whose pay doesn’t allow a middle class lifestyle or go without a job. Meanwhile, the CEO, the Board and stockholders at fabulously profitable GE enjoy the profits while the workers are squeezed out of every dollar possible. Another example of wealth going to the top.

What we take from all of this is that we cannot have a strong economy without a strong middle class to provide enough demand for our goods and service. The wealthy can only spend so much. After all, how many houses or cars can one person use? And those at the bottom can only spend at a subsistence level which does not make produce enough demand.

With many in the middle class struggling, 2012 is an important election year for the wellbeing of our people. Right now there is a battle going on for control of our government. On one side are the Republicans who are representing the interests of the wealthiest 1% who already have an inordinate amount of power. On the other side are the Democrats who (usually) tend to look out for the interests of the other 99% of us. When President Obama and the other Democrats are running for office this year, all they have to do is ask the voters whether they want someone looking out for the interests of the 99% or those of the top 1%. That should help a lot of those undecided voters make up their minds!

Do Businessmen Make Good Presidents?

2011-12-01T11:32:00.003-05:00

Vote for me! Unlike those other guys who are politicians, I’m a businessman. I’ll run the government just like a business.

George W. Bush used his MBA from Harvard to boast of his business prowess. And more recently there is Mitt Romney who touts his experience at Bain Capital taking over and liquidating companies and not his time as the governor of Massachusetts to boost his qualifications for the presidency.

And then there is Herman Cain who has no experience in elected office running for president based on his experience as the CEO of Godfather’s Pizza.

Is business experience in itself adequate preparation for running a government? To begin to answer that question, it has to be pointed out that a business and a government are very different.

A business takes in money to make as much profit as possible. A government takes in money in the form of taxes to provide services for its citizens. Of course, it is beneficial to spend the tax receipts as efficiently as possible. But while a business can and does cut workers to meet the bottom line, a government shouldn’t indiscriminately cut government workers and recipients who rely on the safety net programs just to try and balance a budget.

And then there is Herman Cain’s abysmal ignorance of foreign affairs as shown in his beki beki stan stan quote along with the embarrassing silence when asked a question about Libya. I believe much of this is the mentality Cain has as a former business CEO. As the CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, he likely didn’t have to be familiar with all of the details of how the pizza was made. Other people who worked for him were in charge of that.

So it’s easy for him to say that if he wins the presidency, he will surround himself with advisors to help him so he doesn’t need to know about foreign policy or much of anything else. But running a government is different. Especially for a president, decisions on foreign policy can mean the difference between life and death for people. More importantly, if a presidential candidate is not curious enough to learn about the issues he may face, how will he know enough to intelligently choose who will be advising him?

After 9/11, George W. Bush relied on Donald Rumsfeld who advised him to invade Iraq based on questionable WMD intelligence – a decision that was a disaster. As bad as that was, can you imagine Herman Cain dealing with a catastrophe the likes of 9/11?

But when questioned about his lack of foreign policy knowledge, Cain responded that “we need a leader, not a reader”, a line he may have gotten from The Simpsons.

Ignorance is not bliss. We need candidates who have a working knowledge of the issues of the day. If that means they are politicians and not businessmen, so be it.

But ignorance is not bliss for voters either. It’s easy to think like Cain and say that one will rely on the experts to make decisions for us. But experts disagree, sometimes strongly. While we cannot all expect to become experts, we can at least become critical thinkers by at least acquiring a basic understanding of the issues and expecting no less of those who want to lead us!

Taking to the Streets

2011-11-01T16:54:00.003-04:00

With the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations gathering momentum spreading from city to city, one cannot help but marvel how remarkable these are. Unlike in other countries like France where mass demonstrations against the government are routine, many Americans normally display indifference toward the political process. Even in 2008 when the country was excited over the prospect of electing its first black president, the voter turnout was only about 56%.

And in off-year elections, turnouts are much smaller. Perhaps there is an attitude here in the US that no matter whom we vote for, it really doesn’t make that much of a difference in our daily lives. And if voting is too much trouble, certainly demonstrating in the streets is more than most people want to do. But having said that, it’s hard to forget the demonstrations against the unpopular Vietnam War where unlike for our present wars, people were drafted to serve so indifference was not an option.

Our problems with unemployment and uneven distribution of wealth have been going on for some time now. But most of the distress has been shared by the older people in the workplace. After a career earning a decent living, many of these people have been discarded as being useless to the job market. But while these people have found the road to re-employment to be a rocky one, the young college graduates have had far fewer problems – until about the last couple of years. Now many of our college graduates are finding that they have no professional employment opportunities in their chosen fields after earning their diplomas. And now they are on the hook for paying off sometimes massive college loans. While those at the top of the economic food chain are doing quite well, their path to a middle class lifestyle has been shut off. So once again indifference is not an option.

And while many compare the Occupy Wall Street movement with the Tea Party protests, there are significant differences. Most notably, the Tea Party protests have been heavily financed by those on the political right, especially the Koch Brothers. For more on this, please check out a previous posting The Koch Brothers - The Most Powerful People You've Never Heard Of. With this financial support, the Tea Party has been able to work the political system to their advantage.

By contrast, the Occupy movement has been about calling to our attention that our political system is broken. The power being wielded by those with the most money to buy control of our government is overshadowing any control that ordinary citizens have by way of the vote. It has even led to outside observers such as the German magazine, Der Spiegel to ask Has America Become an Oligarchy?

The Occupy Wall Street movement is just one example of the sudden outbreak of tension between America's super-rich and the "other 99 percent." Experts now say the US has entered a second Gilded Age, but one in which hedge fund managers have replaced oil barons -- and are killing the American dream.

At first, the outraged members of the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York were mainly met with ridicule. They didn't seem to stand a chance and were judged incapable of going up against their adversaries, Wall Street's bankers and financial managers, either intellectually or in terms of economic knowledge.

Indeed, they have given shape to a development in the country that has been growing more acute for decades, one that numerous academics and experts have tried to analyze elsewhere in lengthy books and essays. It's a development so profound and revolutionary that it has shaken the world's most powerful nation to its core.

Just for this alone, we owe a debt of gratitude to the courageous people who are participating in these demonstrations and are in some cases enduring police brutality and pepper spray for a cause they believe in – a cause called democracy!

Repeal Obamacare?

2011-10-01T15:42:00.000-04:00

In watching the Republican debates, one thing sticks with me more than anything else. When the discussion moves onto the subject of healthcare, the mantra that is repeated over and over by the candidates is “Repeal Obamacare”.

I get it that they do not like the president’s healthcare reform bill that was signed into law. But the fact is that it passed not only in the House but also in the Senate, not just by a majority but a supermajority of 60 to avoid a filibuster. Instead of accepting it as the law of the land and trying to make it work, the Republicans, especially the Tea Partiers want to repeal it. Government does not work well when laws are passed and then are repealed as soon as the other party regains power. But for people who hate government, this helps to reinforce their narrative that government doesn’t do anything well.

But more importantly, the “Repeal Obamacare” demand begs the question, “And replace it with what?” It’s a question I have yet to hear from any of the debates’ moderators.

A number of the law’s provisions have already gone into effect, such as the ability of children to have access to health insurance without being denied for preexisting conditions. And with so many recent college graduates unable to secure jobs that have health benefits, the ability to add them to their parents’ insurance polices up to age 26 means that they are not forced to go without health insurance. Would they like to repeal these provisions?

One of the big gripes is the individual mandate that requires everybody to buy insurance. But without it, the whole system collapses. Starting in 2014, everybody will be able to obtain health insurance without worry about preexisting conditions. This is a vital part of the law so that everybody can be covered. But we cannot realistically force insurance companies to accept all of the sick people without adding all of the healthy people to the risk pool. And with the price of health insurance being too much for many poor people, we cannot make them buy coverage without subsidizing the cost of the insurance for them.

But still there is the question of whether this law will really work once everybody can enroll in 2014. Many of those on the political left feel that the law may be fatally flawed without the inclusion of a so-called public option where the federal government offers insurance to keep the private insurers honest in their pricing, a provision that the insurance industry successfully fought to keep out of the law.

So what has happened since the passing of the law? We now have Health Insurers Pushing Premiums Sharply Higher

Major health insurance companies have been charging sharply higher premiums this year, outstripping any growth in workers’ wages and creating more uncertainty for the Obama administration and employers who are struggling to drive down an unrelenting rise in medical costs.

The higher premiums are particularly unwelcome at a time when the economy is sputtering and unemployment is hovering at about 9 percent. Many businesses cite the cost of coverage as a factor in their decision not to hire, and health insurance has become increasingly unaffordable for more Americans. The cost of family coverage has about doubled since 2001, compared with a 34 percent gain in wages.

Consumer advocates contend that the latest requests exceed any documented rise in costs, with some companies enjoying three years of record profits and paying millions of dollars in dividends and executive compensation.

And therein lies the rub when entrusting our system solely to the private insurance market. Corporations like these exist for one and only one purpose – to make as much profit as possible. While Medicare has an overhead of about 3-4%, private insurers can have an overhead of over 20%, much of that money going to profits instead of providing healthcare.

If health insurance premiums get any more out of control, we may someday be forced to add the public option that was left out of the original law. Or better yet, offer Medicare for everybody, otherwise known as single-payer.

But let’s get real. With the present anti-government zeal of those on the right, trying to improve the present law may well be impossible unless the 2012 elections give control of the Congress along with the White House to Democrats. And the law doesn’t really kick in for most Americans until 2014 – assuming the law doesn’t get overturned in the meantime by a conservative Supreme Court as unconstitutional because of the requirement that everybody buys insurance.

Meanwhile, we still have about 50 million Americans uninsured, a figure that is inflated according to those on the right but in any event is a huge number of uninsured. What happens to them if the law gets repealed or overturned?

If that happens, we may have no other workable option to provide universal health insurance coverage at an affordable cost than by eliminating the insurance middle-men with single-payer Medicare for all.

It gives credence to Winston Churchill who once said that 'You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else!'

Should We Take Rick Perry Seriously?

2011-09-01T11:58:00.000-04:00

Recently, David Brooks, one of the conservative columnists at the New York Times wrote an interesting op-ed President Rick Perry? which concluded:

[Mitt] Romney might be able to beat back the Perry surge. In the meantime, it’s time to take Perry seriously. He could be our next president.

For those of us who are not part of the Tea Party right, Governor Perry is an interesting if not scary curiosity. He is one who has such an intense dislike of our federal government that he once suggested the secession of Texas from the US. Now he wants to head that same federal government.

So should we take Rick Perry seriously? Could he really be our next president? I say ‘yes’ to the first question and ‘not likely’ to the second one.

Certainly his opponents have to take him seriously. For right now, he is being given free reign by his opponents, especially former Republican front-runner Mitt Romney in the hopes that he will self-destruct before having to take him on. That may well happen. But this passive strategy of underestimating Governor Perry could well backfire, especially if the unemployment rate continues at or near this high rate through the 2012 election as is being forecasted by many economists. So Romney now and if Perry gets the nomination, President Obama will have to take him seriously enough to call him out on some of his extreme views. Certainly badmouthing a beloved program like Social Security as a Ponzi scheme is not going to endear him to many people.

At present, Governor Perry has taken a sizeable lead in the polls over his Republican opposition. Does that mean that he is a shoo-in for the nomination? Not necessarily.

Perry has certainly created a lot of buzz around his campaign. That’s nice but it doesn’t necessarily lead to victory. Sarah Palin created a lot of buzz for John McCain’s floundering campaign when he picked her as his VP running mate. Everybody wanted to have a chance to interview Sarah. What outrageous thing would she say next? But eventually the novelty wore off and her lack of experience and knowledge became a liability to McCain’s campaign.

More recently, Michele Bachmann was the ‘flavor of the month’ after her win in the Iowa Straw Poll. She was on just about every political interview show as we wondered what would happen to our country under a President Bachmann. Then Perry came along and she has now been overshadowed in the polls. If buzz will win the Republican nomination, then he has a clear edge over Romney. But the mainstream Republicans may well decide that Romney would be more electable in the general election and go with him.

But even if Perry gets the nomination, he has provided a tremendous amount of ammunition that can be used against him in the general election.

His book Fed Up! published only last November presented a number of controversial (at least to those who are not Tea Partiers) views by someone who at the time had no stated intention of running for president. But with these views in print, he will eventually have to explain himself in response to the many questions that voters and the media will undoubtedly have waiting for him.

He is running on his record as governor of Texas. But as detailed in a recent NYT editorial, Gov. Perry's Cash Machine he has taken crony capitalism to a new level.

The exchange of campaign contributions for government contracts, favors or positions is all too common in Washington and around the country. It has been developed to an especially high art — or more to the point, a low art — by Gov. Rick Perry in Texas. For a presidential contender who insists that big government is the country’s biggest problem, it is particularly cynical.

There are nearly 600 boards, commissions, authorities and departments in Texas, many of which are of little use to the public and should have long been shut down or consolidated. They are of great use to the governor, who more than any predecessor has created thousands of potential appointments for beneficent backers and several pro-business funds that have been generous to allies.

So much for the virtues of small government. And while “pay to play” is considered business as usual by many in Texas, he will have a lot of explaining to do now that he is under the national media spotlight.

But no matter how many disagreeable things we may find out about Gov. Perry during the campaign, if he wins the nomination, President Obama will have to do more than simply ask people to vote for him because of Perry’s negatives. He must give enough people positive reasons to vote for him — especially on the all-important issue of jobs.

Soon we will hear President Obama’s plan for addressing our job crisis. And with the economy in such terrible shape and all of the suffering that entails, he needs to present a bold plan that will give us hope that things will get better someday. Sure, the Republicans in Congress will oppose just about any idea he comes up with. But if that happens, he must make his plan the centerpiece of his campaign to offer a contrast to the Republican ideas of little more than tax cuts, slashing regulation, and cuts in government spending.

If the president decides to play it safe and offer something less bold in an attempt to compromise with the Republicans, his base supporters may finally throw up their hands in despair and decide to stay home for next year’s election. And then yes, Rick Perry could very well be our next president. God help us all!

Taking our Government Hostage

2011-08-03T20:44:00.000-04:00

Now we can reflect on the budget cuts that were forced on us in return for not allowing our government to go into default.

It is important to note that every part of our budget is there because enough of our elected representatives voted for it. You or I may not agree with parts or it but that is the nature of democracy. If there are parts of the budget that we want reduced or cut altogether, we can always put a bill through Congress to try and do that. That’s the way the democratic process works.

So if we agree that like it or not, what’s in the budget is legitimate, then it follows that we must try to come up the revenues to pay for it. This pay as you go method worked well enough in the 90’s under President Clinton to not only balance the budget but also result in a surplus.

But then President Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush did something that was unprecedented. He dramatically raised spending by choosing to conduct two wars while at the same time cutting taxes, mostly benefiting the wealthy. Previously, wars were paid by raising the top marginal rate, sometimes to as much as 91%.

So the predictable result was a return to deficits and the resulting borrowing that has greatly added to our debt level that we are trying to address now. But it also makes it clear how to reverse the process – and that is to not only cut spending but also end the Bush tax cuts since both the overspending and tax cuts clearly contributed to the problem.

But those on the political right have used the Big Lie over and over by saying that “It’s not a revenue problem but is instead a spending problem.” When in reality, it is both. The revenue problem is not only because of the reduced tax intake from the Bush tax cuts, but also from so many unemployed who are paying no taxes.

The Bush tax cuts were scheduled to expire at the end of 2010. President Obama wanted them to continue for the middle class and below and end them for those in the upper 2% of income. But the Republican Senate in what can only be described as an act of extortion, threatened to filibuster all legislation, including the extension of unemployment benefits unless the tax cuts for wealthiest Americans were extended. The president gave in to the demand.

The crisis over raising the debt ceiling was nothing more than an extortion attempt to get what the failed Ryan budget plan tried to get through the normal legislative process. In a previous posting Republicans Backed Into a Corner, I detail how Ryan and other Tea Party Congressmen were booed and heckled when they explained their budget plan making radical changes to Medicare to their constituents at their town hall meetings.

This is because there is a solid majority in polls who have strongly said that they do not want major changes to Medicare. In addition, most people polled believe that the richest Americans should contribute more in tax revenues as part of a balanced approach to addressing our budget deficits and resulting debt.

But a belligerent minority got their way through the Tea Party’s demand for deep budget cuts including entitlements but without any additional tax revenues whatsoever or let the US go into default by not allowing the debt ceiling to be raised.

Of course we can question the soundness of a philosophy that wants to take a wrecking ball to government and never agree to tax increases under any circumstances. For example, is there ever a possibility that taxes can be too low? Is there a possibility that we can ever have an inadequate amount of government to meet the common needs? Surely they are not asking for no government or taxes. So the question is how much of each do we need. And this is what is legitimately worked out in the democratic process which involves compromise.

But this is not about the pros or cons of the Tea Party philosophy. It is about the way they imposed their views on our public policy in a thoroughly undemocratic way through taking our government hostage. It is for this reason that they and their other Republican enablers deserve condemnation. The Democrats must call them out on this in the upcoming elections before the democratic process in this country gets even more poisoned by unethical tactics like this.

And to show that there is no remorse whatsoever over how this was all accomplished, we have this breathtakingly blunt quote in the Washington Post by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell which says it all.

McConnell said he could imagine doing this again.

“I think some of our members may have thought the default issue was a hostage you might take a chance at shooting,” he said. “Most of us didn’t think that. What we did learn is this — it’s a hostage that’s worth ransoming. And it focuses the Congress on something that must be done.”

Obama the Fighter?

2011-07-01T06:17:00.019-04:00

Consider the words in this presidential speech:

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today.

These words could well have been spoken by President Obama since they are as relevant today as in 1936 when Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered this campaign speech. While it is easy to think that today’s polarized political atmosphere is worse than it’s ever been, that is hardly so. In times of economic stress, there is plenty of fear and worry to go around – along with those who would like to exploit these for their own political gain. And what period in our history had more economic stress than the Great Depression?

Perhaps the biggest battle between those on the political left and political right is over how active the government should be in regulating the economy to make sure that it works well for everybody. Those on the left usually subscribe to the Keynesian economics school.

Keynesian economics advocates a mixed economy—predominantly private sector, but with a large role of government and public sector—and served as the economic model during the later part of the Great Depression, World War II, and the post-war economic expansion (1945–1973), though it lost some influence following the stagflation of the 1970s. The advent of the global financial crisis in 2007 has caused a resurgence in Keynesian thought.

On the other side are those on the political right, most notably those in the Austrian School of economics who believe that less government intervention in the economy is better and more government intervention leads to socialism.

Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek criticized Keynesian economic policies for what he called their fundamentally collectivist approach, arguing that such theories encourage centralized planning, which leads to malinvestment of capital, which is the cause of business cycles.

What makes it so difficult to take sides on is that on one hand total government control of the economy doesn’t work as the downfall of many Communist nations has demonstrated. Even China has resorted to some free market economy ideas and its takeover of Hong Kong has not dimmed its free market vigor. But no government control whatsoever of the economy doesn’t work either. Lack of adequate regulation can cause large numbers of people to get hurt as the recent Wall Street meltdown demonstrated. And what about a safety net for those who are in distress through no fault of their own? So there is a middle ground that probably works best. But where is that middle ground? That is where reasonable people disagree.

But back to FDR and the Great Depression. The economy was in massive upheaval with huge numbers (even compared to today) of unemployed approaching 25%. FDR’s Republican predecessor Herbert Hoover’s agenda of letting the free market solve the crisis on its own clearly wasn’t working so FDR decided that the government had to get involved in the form of the New Deal which in effect, was a massive government injection of demand into the economy to get it running again. And while the New Deal certainly helped in those grim times, the country didn’t finally escape the Great Depression until World War II which although it was fought to preserve our liberty, it was in effect a massive government spending program that generated jobs.

But despite the crying need for government help in this dire situation, FDR still ran into bitter opposition from those on the political right. So what does he do? Reasoning and compromise are the first choices. But in the face of such intractable opponents, FDR decided that the only way to make progress was to fight as in these passages from the same speech.

They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.

I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.

But while FDR chose to take the fight to those who were against him, President Obama has chosen to use reasoning and compromise to try and achieve his ends. And normally, this is the way the political process works. But he is dealing with a Republican party whose Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell said that “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” And the parts of the Republican Party who may well be willing to deal with President Obama do so at their own peril when the even more militant Tea Party activists get done with them.

FDR did much to take his case to the people in the form of his famous fireside chats back when radio was each household’s principal link to the world.

During his first term as Governor of New York, Roosevelt faced a conservative Republican legislature so during each legislative session he would occasionally address the citizens of New York directly. He appealed to them for help getting his agenda passed. Letters would pour in following each of these "chats," which helped pressure legislators to pass measures Roosevelt had proposed. He began making the informal addresses as President on March 12, 1933, during the Great Depression.

Today President Obama faces an economy that is generally considered to be the worst since the Great Depression. And like FDR he is facing equally bitter opposition, some of those who also hate him whether it is because of his race or otherwise.

But fighting means occasionally losing and getting ones nose bloodied. However, it seems as though the president’s ego doesn’t allow him to be on the “losing” side of a fight even if it’s only temporarily.

A notable example that comes to mind was the so-called public option during the negotiations on health care reform. In the absence of a single-payer system (which former Illinois State Senator Obama supported but then later deserted as president) the public option was the only way that private insurance companies would have enough competition to keep the system honest. So he supported the public option until it became apparent that there would probably be enough votes in Congress to defeat it. Then he became strangely silent on the issue.

It’s easy to say that whatever President Obama is in favor of, the opposition party will be there to thwart him. But leadership is about fighting for what one thinks is right even if it means being on the losing side once in a while. Yes, he may well be voted down in Congress but the president also has the powerful bully pulpit at his disposal to take his case to the people, just like FDR successfully did with his fireside chats. If he were to get enough people on his side by using his considerable persuasive powers, he could well prevail on a number of important issues.

In addition, presenting his case to the people would have another tremendous benefit. It would engage the average citizen in the political process – something that is sorely lacking in this age of political control by the moneyed and corporate interests.

Right now those moneyed and corporate interests are having it their way. In the last decade, the rich have become much richer while those in the middle and lower classes have struggled. Large corporations have done very well, but those who work for them have struggled. For those on the right, their priority is now cutting government spending presumably to try and cut the deficit that they have largely created over the last 10 years.

But severely cutting government spending during a period of high unemployment only tends to create more unemployment. And make no mistake, unemployment is our most urgent short-term crisis in need of attention. In line with the Keynesian economics that worked for FDR, government has to be the spender of last resort to boost the economy and create more jobs. Simply putting more money into the hands of people at the top with the hopes of it “trickling down” simply hasn’t worked.

But those people at the top have somebody to fight for them. And that is usually those on the political right. Although they obscure things by raising social issues like abortion, gay rights, and gun control, the predictable result of their policies is that those on the top of the economic food chain are the beneficiaries to the detriment of others.

Those in the middle and lower classes need someone to fight for them too! President Obama was elected in 2008 as the man to do that job. But he has disappointed so many on the left who can only wonder if he is really on their side but is unwilling to fight for what he believes in. Or even worse, is he just more of a corporate centrist than the populist fighter for the middle and lower classes he claimed to be during the campaign?

Without a primary challenger, the question becomes irrelevant. For those who feel that electing a Republican president would be a disaster, like it or not, President Obama is the only hope for our economy getting any better.

A couple of crucial tests are coming up.

One is the August 2nd upcoming deadline on raising the debt ceiling. Most observers feel that not raising the debt ceiling by the deadline would place the US in default and have catastrophic consequences on the world economy. While President Obama must agree to some spending cuts, he must also fight to raise taxes on the wealthiest to help give the government the revenues it needs to operate. The Republicans will undoubtedly resist. But the majority of the electorate is in favor of these tax increases and will be on the President’s side.

And if the unemployment numbers do not markedly improve by the 2012 election season, our cool and calculating president may then decide that this may lose him the election and he will then be finally forced to fight for programs that will create jobs.

So we may well make President Obama into a fighter after all whether it is by his choice – or not!

Will We Ever Get Our Jobs Back?

2011-06-01T00:34:00.276-04:00

This is the time of year when the media likes to do stories on graduation ceremonies to talk about the prospects of these new entrants into the work world. Although some have struggled from time to time, these younger fresh faces have usually done relatively well in the job market, at least compared to many of the older workers who have been shut out of the job market for being “overqualified”.

But if nothing else, this recent NYT article Outlook Is Bleak Even for Recent College Graduates confirms that if anything, the job market in recent years has gotten even worse.

Now evidence is emerging that the damage wrought by the sour economy is more widespread than just a few careers led astray or postponed. Even for college graduates — the people who were most protected from the slings and arrows of recession — the outlook is rather bleak.

Employment rates for new college graduates have fallen sharply in the last two years, as have starting salaries for those who can find work. What’s more, only half of the jobs landed by these new graduates even require a college degree, reviving debates about whether higher education is “worth it” after all.

The article goes on to say…

Among the members of the class of 2010, just 56 percent had held at least one job by this spring, when the survey was conducted. That compares with 90 percent of graduates from the classes of 2006 and 2007.

Even these figures understate the damage done to these workers’ careers. Many have taken jobs that do not make use of their skills; about only half of recent college graduates said that their first job required a college degree.

Taking a first job that doesn’t require a college degree isn’t the end of the world in itself. For example, I worked as a bartender for several months after graduation before finding my first professional job. But I’m sure that many of these current graduates fear that they may be waiting a long, long, time for that first professional job – and for good reason! Because unlike previous recessions, many of our recent job losses are not cyclical but instead have been permanently lost to offshoring.

Back in August, I posted Our Jobs Crisis which argued that if anything, we are underestimating how serious a threat this present shortage of jobs is for America’s future. And that it is no longer just low skill jobs that are being offshored but also many professional level jobs that were previously immune to economic downturns. While each political party is pointing fingers at the other asking where the jobs are, the endless distractions with other issues causes me to fear that neither side really cares or even worse, knows what to do about it.

Yes, our economy is slowly recovering based on economic output. Corporations are making handsome profits. But the jobs are just not there. They are simply not hiring – at least not here in the US. Will we ever get our jobs back? Maybe, but there is plenty of reason to fear the worst.

By now, most of us are aware of how we are losing jobs to offshoring. More and more companies are deciding to take advantage of cheaper labor rates elsewhere in relocating their factories. It has gotten to where many product categories at our stores are only available as imports.

But if we are to believe software developer and author Martin Ford who wrote The Lights in the Tunnel, offshoring is only the tip of the iceberg next to the far greater threat to our economy from automation.

Economists almost universally believe in something called the "Luddite fallacy" -- which basically says that advancing technology will always create more jobs than it destroys. In other words, any fear that technology will never cause widespread, long term unemployment is a fallacy. This has always been true in the past. Will it hold true indefinitely? Will advanced technologies such as robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) ultimately change the economic rules?

The previous link has not only a way to purchase a hard copy of the book but in the interest of bringing this issue to light also offers a free downloadable PDF version of the book to read and share. I read it and found it to be compelling and yes, disturbing reading.

Like this passage which should send chills up the spine of a college-educated “knowledge worker”…

For knowledge workers, there is really a double dose of bad news. Not only are their jobs potentially easier to automate than other job types because no investment in mechanical equipment is required; but also, the financial incentive for getting rid of the job is significantly higher.

As a result, we can expect that, in the future, automation will fall heavily on knowledge workers and in particular on highly paid workers. In cases where technology is not yet sufficient to automate the job, offshoring is likely to be pursued as a interim solution.

So while we lament about our jobs going to other countries with lower wages, if this scenario is correct, the job gains of the low wage countries will be only temporary until they too lose many of these same jobs to automation.

As this trend continues, it is not hard to see massive amounts of unemployment worldwide. And with fewer people earning a paycheck, the demand for these products decreases which forces manufacturers to cut back on human labor even further to try and cut costs – the classic deflationary spiral which unchecked leads to a depression.

And when manufacturing jobs like this are eliminated, the result is that the upper management and stockholders make more money while the workers suffer economic hardship. This increasing concentration of wealth at the top not only can create instability (such as what we had in Egypt and Libya) but results in even less overall consumer demand for goods and services.

Imagine that your job is to sell as many $50 cell phones as you can in one hour. You are offered two doors: Behind door # 1 sit Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, the two richest people in America. Behind door # 2 are a thousand average people. You may well be tempted to choose the first door just so you’ll get to meet Bill and Warren, but in terms of getting your job done, you would probably agree that door # 2 is clearly the best choice. This is because the demand for the mass market products that drive our economy depend much more on the number of potential customers than on the wealth of any particular customer. You are not going to be able to sell 40 cell phones to one person, no matter how wealthy they are.

So is this doomsday scenario really going to come about someday? Nobody really knows for sure. As noted before, most economists subscribe to the luddite fallacy and thus feel that new technology along with eliminating jobs creates enough new ones that we don’t have to worry. But Ford’s argument is that with technology now accelerating exponentially, automation instead of helping man to do his job will soon in many instances be able to replace him altogether in the workplace – and in ways that were unforeseen only a short time ago. Interestingly enough, one of the “Indicators to Watch For” in his book to tell us we are getting into trouble is “Diminishing prospects for college graduates”.

If these predictions come true, our leaders are going to have some very difficult problems to solve if there aren’t enough jobs to support much of our population and along with it, our economy. One suggestion Ford offers is to tax corporations simply based on profits instead of the present system of payroll taxes which gives companies incentives to reduce headcount by offshoring or automation. This additional tax income can then perhaps be used to support government created jobs to do things that we need such as rebuilding the infrastructure while at the same time creating the demand for products and services our economy needs to survive. But while this solution would appeal to liberals who believe in FDR/New Deal types of programs, conservatives who say they hate big government would never stand for it. But the conservative solution, which is about allowing the rich to become richer in the hopes of their someday providing more jobs certainly isn’t working.

Whatever solution we come up with, we have to start taking mass unemployment as the extremely serious problem it is and start to come up with answers now!

Republicans Backed Into a Corner

2011-05-01T01:03:00.043-04:00

The 2010 mid-term elections here in the US were all about how the Republicans were going to improve the economy and create jobs. And balance the budget. How they were going to do this in an economy that was arguably the worst since the Great Depression was anybody’s guess. But enough people were convinced to give them another chance and voted them control of the US House of Representatives along with a number of state governorships.

This lead to my posting right after the election Put Up or Shut Up Time for the Republicans.

[The Republican] plan to balance the budget is to extend the tax cuts to all including the wealthiest 2% along with mostly unspecified “spending cuts”. We don’t know exactly what they have in mind but the most consistent story is that defense, Social Security, and Medicare cuts are not on the table which is the lion’s share of the budget. With precious little else to cut, how do they propose to balance the budget while not only refusing to raise taxes but also swelling the deficit with more tax cuts for the wealthy? The math just doesn’t add up! But then again, they now have a chance to propose their own budget in the House to answer these questions.

But by forcing the extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest during the Congressional Lame Duck session last year, the Republicans were already starting to back themselves into a corner. The only possible ways out were to make cuts in defense, Social Security, Medicare, or all three.

But Social Security and Medicare are extremely popular programs and recent polls have shown that over 3 out of 4 Americans have rejected the idea of any cuts to these programs.

So by process of elimination, there are only two remaining alternatives for the Republicans to choose from. One is to propose cuts in defense which usually goes against conservative ideology but would mitigate or avoid having to deal with the "third rail" associated with messing with Social Security and Medicare. Or give in to the right and try and sell the public on making all the cuts to Social Security and Medicare without touching defense.

The Republicans chose the latter and apparently felt that Congressman Ryan could sell this to the American public. But the more Americans read the fine print of Ryan’s plan, the less they are buying it.

Here from his "Roadmap" site is Ryan’s proposal for Medicare.

It preserves the existing Medicare program for those currently enrolled or becoming eligible in the next 10 years (those 55 and older today) - So Americans can receive the benefits they planned for throughout their working lives. For those currently under 55 – as they become Medicare-eligible – it creates a Medicare payment, initially averaging $11,000, to be used to purchase a Medicare certified plan. The payment is adjusted to reflect medical inflation, and pegged to income, with low-income individuals receiving greater support. The plan also provides risk adjustment, so those with greater medical needs receive a higher payment.

So instead of the government acting as the insurer as in Medicare, it will offer payments for individuals to shop around for their own private insurance. Just the idea of people in this age group with all of their mental and physical infirmities shopping around for the best deal on their health insurance boggles the mind!

But what happens if (most say when) the premiums for the so-called Medicare certified plans grow faster than what the government is willing and able to pay for? The policyholder must then make up the difference or go without health insurance.

This would be a really tough sell to get present Medicare beneficiaries to accept. But to get around that, this plan is being sold as affecting only those presently under the age 55. As long as it’s someone else getting screwed, that’s not so bad! The plan for Medicaid which insures low-income people leads to a similar problems that may result in some losing coverage.

And here is part of Ryan's proposal for Social Security.

Offers workers under 55 the option of investing over one third of their current Social Security taxes into personal retirement accounts, similar to the Thrift Savings Plan available to Federal employees…Makes the program permanently solvent…with an eventual modernization of the retirement age.

Of course the “modernization of the retirement age” means raising it, a position openly advocated by New Jersey Republican Governor Chris Christie. But postponing the retirement age creates an additional hardship for those who do physical labor for a living in addition to those near the present retirement age who have been especially hit hard by unemployment. Raising the maximum taxable earnings for Social Security above $106,800 would likely address any future shortfalls without having to cut benefits. But this goes against the Republican ideology that taxes should never be raised!

Perhaps the most controversial part is Ryan's proposal for Tax Reform.

Simplifies tax rates to 10 percent on income up to $100,000 for joint filers, and $50,000 for single filers; and 25 percent on taxable income above these amounts…Promotes saving by eliminating taxes on interest, capital gains, and dividends; also eliminates the death tax [the Republican epithet for the estate tax].

So instead of the present highest marginal tax rate of 35% for the wealthiest under the present extended Bush tax cuts (compared to about 39% under Bill Clinton when the budget was last balanced), Ryan advocates cutting it even further to 25%. And while those who work for their income would still have to pay taxes, those more well to do who can afford to live on just investment income get a free pass on taxes.

More and more people are starting to see a pattern here. It is difficult to continually advocate governmental policies that are seen to benefit the wealthy at the expense of everybody else. Any while Mr. Ryan is a pretty slick salesman for his budget policies when he appears as a TV talking head, his recent experiences at local town hall meetings have resulted in booing and heckling by some of the attendees.

Rep. Dan Webster (R-FL) along with many other Republicans around the country suffered a similar fate during one of his recent town hall meetings while trying to defend the Ryan plan.

Republican governors adopting policies that have made budget cuts in areas like education while at the same time supporting tax cuts for corporations are also getting some pushback sometimes in the form of recalls from some of its citizens.

Don’t think the Democrats haven’t noticed the turmoil among some Senate Republicans in deciding if they really want to stick their necks out in support of the Ryan budget plan that passed the Republican controlled House. So with no danger of losing and in the spirit of "cooperation"…

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) announced on Wednesday that he would host a vote on Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) budget as a means of forcing moderate GOP senators to weigh in on the legislation’s controversial proposals.

While the Tea Party purists may choose to ignore the growing voter dissatisfaction with the Ryan tax and budget proposals, the more moderate Republicans may well feel that they have been backed into a corner trying to defend these proposals that may well lead to some heavy losses in 2012. And what about the promised creation of more jobs? Of course they say that will come along if we agree to even more tax cuts. So how many Republicans will continue to try and defend the Ryan proposals in the face of such strong and emotional opposition? Stay tuned!

Post Script - May 25, 2011

Democrat Captures House Seat in Special Election

The results set off elation among Democrats and soul-searching among Republicans, who questioned whether they should rethink their party’s commitment to the Medicare plan, which appears to have become a liability heading into the 2012 elections.

Two months ago, the Democrat, Kathy Hochul, was considered an all-but-certain loser in the race against the Republican, Jane Corwin. But Ms. Hochul seized on the Republican’s embrace of the proposal from Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, to overhaul Medicare, and she never let up.

Obama's Dilemma in Libya

2011-04-03T05:20:00.015-04:00

di·lem·ma [di lémmə]n

1. situation with unsatisfactory choices: a situation in which somebody must choose one of two or more unsatisfactory alternatives

Suppose it was you sitting in the Oval Office and had to quickly decide whether or not to intervene in Libya to prevent the imminent slaughter of thousands, what would you have done?

It seems like a pretty easy decision. Prevent the slaughter of thousands or stand by while it happens. But of course this “easy” decision to prevent the slaughter is laced with maddening complexity. Last weekend as part of a roundtable on Meet the Press, Ted Koppel did an eloquent summary of the reasons why this decision may be just as unsatisfactory as the alternative.

The question hasn't yet been answered as to why it is that Libya, of all countries in that region, has won the humanitarian defense sweepstakes of 2011. We have seen many countries, both in that region and throughout the world, where civilian loss and civilian suffering has been much, much greater. Congo for the past 12 years, we've lost about five million people. Sudan, three million people, never any talk of military intervention. Take a look at what's going on in the Ivory Coast today. Secretary Clinton was talking about the number of refugees that might have come out of a Gadhafi attack on Benghazi. You've got 700,000 refugees in the Ivory Coast right now--close to a million, in fact. Why, why Libya? Hasn't been answered.

[Then there is] Syria. Remember that the current president's father, back in 1982, when he had a little rebellion on his hands in the city of Hama...wiped them out…Eighty thousand people were killed in Hama. What do we know about the rebels in Libya? One of the few things we know about them is that there was from that region of Libya a disproportionately high number of young men who joined al-Qaeda in Iraq. Are these the folks that we want to associate ourselves with? We know for a fact that Gadhafi is a bad guy, but we know very little about the people who seek to replace him.

We don’t seem to mind military operations for humanitarian purposes – as long as we don’t have to deal with seeing casualties on TV.

I just wanted to invoke the law of unintended consequences…Remember Somalia. There was never a more humanitarian mission than when President George H.W. Bush, the elder Bush, when he ordered U.S. troops into Somalia to avoid the starvation of hundreds of thousands of people. Ultimately, that led to a dead Ranger being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. We pulled out of Somalia just in panic; and a few weeks later, when Rwanda happened, the United States was so shell-shocked that it was unable to do anything and 800,000 people died.

This doesn’t include a host of other questions about, for example, what happens if the operation is unable take Qaddafi out without US ground troops which the president has promised not to send. And make no mistake, if Qaddafi is still left in power, he will still be able to carry out his threat of genocide as soon as the opportunity presents itself.

And then there is the question about whether President Obama should have first obtained permission from Congress to start this military action against Libya. While this would have been desirable, how practical was it under the circumstances? The president did consult with leaders in Congress. And US Senate Resolution 85 which urged the UN Security Council to take further action against Libya including the possible imposition of a no-fly zone, was passed by unanimous consent on March 1. But time was very much of the essence to prevent Qaddafi’s troops from reaching Benghazi and carrying out his threat to start killing his citizens. What if Congress were to get deadlocked on this decision like they have on so many previous occasions? If you were President Obama, would you want to take the chance of that happening?

Despite all of the windbagging about allowing Congress to vote on this, I’m sure that many are privately relieved that they don’t have to go on record as to how they would have voted. For now, they have the luxury of waiting and seeing how it all turns out and then taking whatever position in hindsight makes them look best.

But President Obama had no such luxury. He had to make the choice of either agreeing to intervene in Libya for humanitarian reasaons and take all of the criticism and second guessing that goes with it if things had turned out bad. Or he could have decided to stay out of it all and endure the worldwide condemnation if Qaddafi had been able to carry out the slaughter of his people. That is indeed a dilemma!

Nobody knows how this will all turn out. But it’s hard to imagine any thoughtful and reasonable person not trying to prevent a massive loss of life when an opportunity like this, especially when a coalition of others is asking for your help. I think that under the extremely difficult circumstances, the president made the best choice possible.

Nicholas Kristof in his NYT op-ed Is It Better to Save No One? sums it up this way.

Critics argue that we are inconsistent, even hypocritical, in our military interventions. After all, we intervened promptly this time in a country with oil, while we have largely ignored Ivory Coast and Darfur — not to mention Yemen, Syria and Bahrain.

We may as well plead guilty. We are inconsistent. There’s no doubt that we cherry-pick our humanitarian interventions.

But just because we allowed Rwandans or Darfuris to be massacred, does it really follow that to be consistent we should allow Libyans to be massacred as well? Isn’t it better to inconsistently save some lives than to consistently save none?

The Assault on Education

2011-03-13T23:42:00.006-04:00

Shortly after the Republican victory in November, I posted Put Up or Shut Up Time for the Republicans since the Republican narrative during the fall campaign was that they could balance budgets strictly by cutting spending without increasing taxes. But since they were unwilling (or unable) to specifically name programs they wanted to cut, it would be interesting to see what they would finally come up with.

On the federal level, the proposed cuts were for a grand total of about $61 billion out of a deficit of about $1.5 trillion including cuts to Planned Parenthood which critics feel has nothing to do with saving money.

Planned Parenthood, like other health care providers, provides a range of services for women. Every year, Planned Parenthood screens millions of women for cervical cancer, breast cancer and sexually transmitted diseases. The organization offers flu shots, diabetes screening and a host of other health services to women who might not otherwise have the means to get them. Nearly half of Planned Parenthood's clients qualify for Medicaid.

But Planned Parenthood also provides access to safe, legal abortions, and that has earned it the lasting enmity of those who would make that procedure illegal. The budget bill passed by the House would cut all funding, including Medicaid, from Planned Parenthood, likely putting it out of business.

While the Republican controlled House can pass just about any bill cutting any spending they wish to target, they know it is little more than a symbolic gesture since the Democratic majority in the Senate and the Democratic president will never let bills like this become law. But it sure makes for a great opportunity for conservatives to appeal to their base!

But it’s a far different story at the state level where Republican governors and legislatures that are in control can more easily pass spending cuts that suit their ideological views. And it seems like the most prominent target of the cuts is education.

The most visible story is in Madison, Wisconsin where the governor not only demanded pay cuts from its teachers, but also most of their collective bargaining rights. The interested reader can check out my previous posting, Making Sense of the Wisconsin Standoff.

But here in Pennsylvania, Republican Governor Tom Corbett has proposed what the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette calls a Brutal Budget that makes massive cuts in spending for education.

A governor's budget is more than a ledger; it's a blueprint of priorities. This year, in the hands of Tom Corbett, it's also a sharp and bloody ax swinging at essential programs, particularly education.

In issuing his first budget, Gov. Corbett made it clear he means to keep his campaign pledge to rein in state spending and his $27.3 billion proposal contained no new or increased state taxes. But gouging funding levels for state universities will undercut his agenda for creating and retaining jobs, and hitting school districts with the deepest cuts undoubtedly will trigger tax hikes at the local level.

This is all so wrong on so many levels. Of course, the governor's object is to balance the budget without raising any state taxes. But if the result is triggering tax hikes at the local level, doesn’t that count as a tax hike? After all, the money is still coming out of the taxpayers’ pockets.

The purpose of state supported universities is to provide educational opportunities to its residents without their having to pay very expensive private university tuitions. For many of not most people, college would be otherwise unaffordable. So while again there is no state tax hike, aren’t the resulting tuition hikes still money that will be coming out of the taxpayers’ pockets? And if college then becomes unaffordable for some, isn’t that too much of a price for those people to pay?

Perhaps the most insidious damage would come from the cuts to the local school districts. In general, public schools are financed by a combination of local property and state taxes. So the cut in state taxes will mean either an increase in property taxes (for those school districts that can afford it) or cuts in the classroom (for those that cannot).

At least in theory, public education is supposed to be the great equalizer providing an opportunity for upward mobility for those in the lower economic classes. But decreasing the state funding for education only puts more strain on poorer areas with a lesser tax base thus increasing the gap between the haves and have nots. And while it is often the poorer school districts that need to offer more money to entice the best teachers to teach there, it is the affluent school districts that will best be able to attract the best teachers.

And just to add insult to injury is the governor’s refusal to impose a so-called severance tax on the expanding Marcellus Shale drilling in Pennsylvania – the only major drilling state in the country not to tax this industry. But the governor needed some way to thank those who so generously funded his campaign!

Indeed it cannot be denied that many states are in financial difficulty. And unlike the federal government, state governments cannot resort to deficit spending to solve shortfalls like the federal government can. But while some states have perhaps not spent some of their tax dollars wisely, far and away the leading cause of the state deficits is the recession. After all, people out of work pay little or no taxes. The same goes for companies that shut down or move away. And with all of the people out of work comes an additional strain on government services to provide a safety net.

With the present Congress no longer willing to provide funds to fill the holes in the state budgets, cuts on the state and local level will be inevitable which will not only cause more pain but result in the loss of even more jobs. The lesson to be learned is that no matter what the anti-government protesters and politicians say, slashing government spending in a recession will do nothing to make things better — and a whole lot to make things worse!

Making Sense of the Wisconsin Standoff

2011-02-20T19:34:00.006-05:00

When it comes to unions, few are indifferent. Some feel they are an indispensable part of a free society. Others feel they are responsible for overpaid, inefficient workers that can suck the lifeblood out of a struggling company.

My father was a union cement mason. And although our lifestyle was far from extravagant, we always had food on the table and clothes on our backs so I grew up with a healthy respect for the value of a union livelihood. I will certainly concede that some of the criticisms of unions have an element of truth to them. Yes, some unions have been guilty of greed and outright corruption. But so have some of the companies they have negotiated with.

Unions came into being to satisfy a need. It would be safe to say that if all employers treated their employees fairly and with compassion when it came to pay and working conditions, there would be no unions. Of course working conditions (at least in America) are a whole lot better than say, the brutal conditions before and during the Industrial Revolution which led to the formation of labor unions and the right of collective bargaining. Indeed, there are those who feel that the ability to collectively bargain is an essential human right.

With this in mind, we have the standoff in Wisconsin which has been said to be A Watershed Moment for Public-Sector Unions.

In the half century since Wisconsin became the first state to give its public workers the right to bargain collectively, government employee unions have mushroomed in size and power — so much so that they now account for more than half of the nation’s union members.

But the legislative push by Wisconsin’s new governor, Scott Walker, a Republican, to slash the collective bargaining rights of his state’s public employees could prove a watershed for public-sector unions, perhaps signaling the beginning of a decline in their power — both at the bargaining table and in politics.

By flooding the State Capitol in Madison with more than 10,000 protesters, labor unions are doing their utmost to block Mr. Walker’s plans. They helped persuade Democratic state senators to slip out of the building this week to deny Republicans the quorum they needed to pass the legislation.

Depending on ones viewpoint, what the Democrats did was either illegal or an example of civil disobedience. But after all of the setbacks that unions have suffered in recent years, the threat of losing its collective bargaining rights demanded that a line be drawn in the sand. If this attempt at neutering the union were to be successful, there would surely be others who would use the same tactics against other unions across the country to bust them.

And make no mistake; this is first and foremost about union busting. The deficit that was the pretense for demanding the union pay and benefit cuts was a result of Governor Walker turning an inherited budget surplus into a deficit by offering a business tax cut upon assuming office that has been said to benefit those who voted for him. In addition, the union was willing and able to negotiate the requested pay and benefit cuts but the governor was unwilling to sit across the table from them, but instead demanded that they first give up much of their collective bargaining rights.

Then there is the smell of partisan politics. While claiming the need to strip collective bargaining rights from its public employee unions, the governor excluded the police and firefighter unions who have benefit packages that are at least as generous. Why? Most believe it is because these unions tend to support Republicans unlike teachers unions who tend to actively support Democrats.

A number of liberal commentators observing the standoff in Wisconsin fear that since unions are about the last group of any significance that funds Democratic candidates, crushing whatever is left of the unions would give the Republican contributors even more power over our elections (as if they need it.)

Unions in America have long ago fallen on hard times. Today, only about 7% of private sector American workers are in unions. Not coincidentally, corporate America is reaping handsome profits while the typical American worker is not sharing in the prosperity to say the least. Harold Meyerson in a Washington Post op-ed article Hard Times for Workers on Labor Day 2010 writes:

Unlike European workers, unlike their own parents and grandparents who lived in a much more heavily unionized America, U.S. workers are now powerless to stop their employers from pocketing all the change.

Through the weakness of our labor laws, the reports say, private-sector American workers can no longer form unions. Human Rights Watch documents how corporations that are model (and highly profitable) employers in Europe and frequently collaborate with unions there descend to American employer norms -- denying workers the right to join unions -- when they come over here. Freedom House, citing the near-impossibility of forming unions in this country, laments that the United States cannot be classed among the 41 nations that afford their workers full freedoms.

So for me, the union in Wisconsin is definitely David going up against Goliath as represented by the Republican governor and his state assembly. For those who are interested, The New York Times offers one of their Room for Debate articles Wisconsin's Blow to Union Power which includes differing views on this issue from across the political spectrum. I fully agree with the view that the right to collective bargaining is part of The Essence of Democracy.

But collective bargaining there must be -- not a single-minded devotion to the interests of the most fortunate. That is why Wisconsin workers are right on the issues in Madison -- and why the emulation of Governor Walker by other Republican governors is a step backward away from the civilized world. The unions have made a stand for free people!

Fear of Fracking

2011-01-26T17:39:00.006-05:00

Last week, the Murrysville (Pennsylvania) Council had an overflow crowd at a hearing to receive public comment on a proposed ordinance on gas drilling.

Usually, such routine functions of a small town government have about the same interest and attention from its residents as watching paint dry. Many Americans seem to be indifferent about participating in its democracy. Even presidential elections in recent years have only persuaded little more than half of its voting age population to turn out at the voting booths.

A friend of mine asked me to join her at the hearing since she was scheduled to be one of those offering pubic comment. We decided to get there early just in case to make sure we got a good seat. But we were too late. Despite cold weather and questionable road conditions, the council room was already filled to capacity and fearing a violation of the fire code, the remaining attendees were offered folding wooden chairs to watch the proceedings from the front lobby - some through the open double door into the meeting room and others watching the video monitor showing the meeting as covered by the local cable access channel.

As more people tried to squeeze into the lobby, those of us near the entrance door to the meeting room were asked to move forward and closer together. The resulting squeeze of humanity inside that lobby made for a much worse fire code violation than the one they were worried about in the council room. But not wanting to tell some people they had to leave, the powers-that-be winked and looked the other way.

At one time not long ago, the words “Marcellus Shale” would only be shared in conversation among those dealing in the field of geology. But since then, the words have been associated with a source of abundant locally produced natural gas and the jobs to go with it. More recently, the words have been linked to concerns about gas drilling polluting local water supplies and making people and their farm animals sick.

Last summer, HBO premiered the documentary Gasland and introduced us to the special method used to extract this gas called hydraulic fracturing or "fracking".

Hydraulic fracturing or "fracking" is a means of natural gas extraction employed in deep natural gas well drilling. Once a well is drilled, millions of gallons of water, sand and proprietary chemicals are injected, under high pressure, into a well. The pressure fractures the shale and props open fissures that enable natural gas to flow more freely out of the well.

I found the documentary to be compelling watching and urged others to watch it in one of my previous postings, Please Watch 'Gasland'. (Now available on DVD) It is hard to watch this movie and not feel sympathy for the people who most likely had their well water supply polluted with the toxins that make up the fracking fluid.

But for those living where the Marcellus Shale drilling is likely to occur, they are feeling fear. Fear that some of the bad experiences that others have endured from the drilling may happen to them.

So now we get the answer on why all of those people were so motivated to witness and speak up at the Murrysville Council hearing. It was fear.

They know of other communities who welcomed the gas drilling with open arms but later questioned, Marcellus Shale gas: A blessing or curse?

For the many farmers in the area, the prospect of collecting a royalty from a natural gas well is exciting.

But for others, there is a real fear that the side effects of natural gas drilling — from polluted water wells to potentially good paying jobs that will take workers away from farms — will outweigh the benefits.

Obviously not all of the drilling will cause any of the problems these people fear. But if something does happen to their water, is there anybody there to protect them? On a federal level, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is supposedly there to protect their water. But the federal laws are so riddled with loopholes that proving EPA jurisdiction can be either impossible or impractical.

Thousands of the nation’s largest water polluters are outside the Clean Water Act’s reach because the Supreme Court has left uncertain which waterways are protected by that law, according to interviews with regulators.

As a result, some businesses are declaring that the law no longer applies to them. And pollution rates are rising.

Another loophole exempts the oil and gas industry from the Safe Water Drinking Act - a loophole that Congress is trying to close.

The Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals Act (H.R. 2766), (S. 1215) -- dubbed the FRAC Act--was introduced to both houses of the 112th United States Congress on June 9, 2009, and aims to repeal the exemption for hydraulic fracturing in the Safe Drinking Water Act. It would require the energy industry to disclose the chemicals it mixes with the water and sand it pumps underground in the hydraulic fracturing process (also known as fracking), information that has largely been protected as trade secrets. Controversy surrounds the practice of hydraulic fracturing as a threat to drinking water supplies. The gas industry opposes the legislation.

So if the feds don’t have jurisdiction over protecting our water from being polluted by gas well drillers, who does? The answer is that the individual states must assume this duty. For those who believe that the federal government should stay out of the regulating business and leave it to the states, that is a good thing. But state regulation instead of federal regulation has two significant drawbacks here. One is that instead of a uniform law protecting all states equally, there is a hodgepodge of different state laws of differing effectiveness in protecting its people.

In Pennsylvania, it’s the Oil and Gas Act from 1984 which predates the use of fracking to to drill for gas.

Section 208: Protection of Water Supplies (58 P.S. § 601.208)
If, during the drilling and extraction process, a well operator pollutes or diminishes a public or private water supply, the operator is obligated to restore or replace that water supply.

Fair enough. But how do you replace the water supply of someone whose well water has been polluted? Living off of water that must be transported in is not a satisfactory replacement.

Section 505: Penalties (58 P.S. § 601.505)
A violation of the Act is a summary offense and is punishable by a fine of not more than $300 or imprisonment of not more than 90 days, or both.

This is obviously not an adequate punishment for someone who would say, pollute the water supply of a whole community.

This brings us to the second drawback of state enforcement. With state governments running deficits and needing to cut services, manpower and resources to enforce these laws have been cut to the bone. Much of the frustration of the affected landowners shown in Gasland was due to an inadequate or non-existent response from the state agencies.

So can the citizens of Murrysville ask their Council to help with the regulation the states cannot or will not do? In most cases the answer is no.

There is interest among municipal officials to use zoning and subdivision and land development ordinances to regulate gas drilling and extraction. To a large extent, the Pennsylvania Oil and Gas Act preempts local regulation and puts regulatory authority into the hands of the PA Department of Environmental Protection.

It appears that there are two extreme views when in comes to deciding whether we want to allow the oil and gas companies to use this relatively new method of hydraulic fracturing or fracking to extract natural gas which entails some risk to our water supplies.

In one camp, we have those who have the most to financially gain from the drilling and want this to happen with the least amount of interference from those pesky regulations. Surely we can trust the drillers to do it right. Just like we trusted BP to do it right?

In the other camp, we have those who are fearful that the existing regulations are too weak and that their enforcement will be lax. The only way for them to deal with the fear of fracking is to try and have the drilling banned altogether in their communities.

But past legal precedent has shown that totally banning a legal activity such as gas drilling is not likely to stand up in court.

So this only leaves a middle position of allowing the drilling but making sure that there are enough regulations with teeth in them along with adequate remedies against the drillers in case something goes wrong. This means that in Pennsylvania, we need to persuade our state legislators to strengthen the provisions of the existing Oil and Gas Act to get them up to date with the newer fracking technology.

And last but not least, we need to persuade our members of Congress to pass H.R. 2766 and S. 1215 which would repeal the exemption for fracking in the Safe Drinking Water Act and allow the federal government through the EPA to get more directly involved in protecting our water supplies – which is their job in the first place!

Keeping College from Becoming a Ripoff

2010-12-29T14:04:00.005-05:00

When I made my decisions on what I wanted to be and where I would go to school back in the early 70s, my family's modest finances made me determined to be as frugal and practical as possible. Although I had a number of interests, my aptitude in math and science (especially electricity) suggested that I become an electrical engineer, a job that paid well and would give me reasonable job prospects.

Then it was a choice of college. Deciding to stay local to be able to commute and thus save money on room and board, my choices were between a good public university, Pitt, and Carnegie-Mellon, a private university renowned for its engineering school.

But Carnegie-Mellon costed three times as much and I didn’t believe it would provide an education that was three times better. So rather than apply someplace our family couldn't afford, I foolishly put all my eggs in one basket at Pitt. Fortunately, Pitt accepted me. And since I still commuted from home, I was able to find an evening and weekend job in a restaurant near home that allowed me to pay my own tuition in full. (Today with the price of tuition skyrocketing, minimum wage jobs do not pay enough to do this anymore.)

So what was the result of all of this? I received an education that was adequate but was decidedly more impersonal due to the large size of the school. And without experiencing any of campus life by living there, my social life was frankly not much of a life at all.

But I got through it all and although I took several months after graduation to find my first professional job, it happened and I then started to earn a comfortable living – all without any college debt to worry about. This all worked perfectly until my engineering job was eliminated in my late 40s. I then discovered that those over 50 with college educations nowadays are not in demand to say the least. So although my college education is now useless in finding work, it served me well for much of my adult life.

One thing I noticed back in the times when employment prospects were more normal was that many of my colleagues did not have engineering degrees like I did. Instead of learning a trade like I did in engineering school, there were many others who graduated with an assortment of liberal arts degrees. But that was OK. At that time, a prospective employer often used a college degree to judge whether somebody had enough brainpower to be able to make a meaningful contribution to the company. If they were smart enough, they could be then be trained in whatever specialized work the company needed. It all worked quite well – but that was then.

In a previous posting, Our Jobs Crisis, I argue that unlike previous downturns that were cyclical in nature, this one is structural in which many of the jobs we have lost through outsourcing and other overseas competition may likely never come back. Even more alarming, many of these lost jobs have been in college educated professions like engineering and even law.

In my time, going to college with the expectation of using that diploma as an entry into the middle class was a reasonable one. But today, many college graduates who have borrowed heavily to get that diploma (especially to go to that prestigious private school) have encountered a nightmare where their degree is no longer in demand while at the same time they are expected to start paying off their debt – which cannot usually be discharged through bankruptcy.

While many of the degrees they offer may no longer have as much economic value in the workplace as before, schools that make money from student tuition have no real incentive to warn prospective students about all of this. Jack Kelly in a recent op-ed, The costly college scam, summed it up this way.

The biggest consumer ripoff in America today is a college education.

The scam exists for the benefit of college teachers and administrators who make a comfortable living ripping off the gullible. If only people capable of doing college work were admitted to college, and only courses with academic value were offered, there would be fewer colleges and far fewer faculty.

But in addition to the traditional colleges, the for-profit education and career training industry has grown explosively in no small part due to the GI Bill which pays for veterans’ education. This worked well for our veterans after World War II when the economy was rapidly expanding, but in today’s economy with its chronic shortage of jobs, it appears that the schools are reaping all of the benefits far more than the students which has resulted in a Senate investigation of industry practices.

A wide-ranging examination of for-profit colleges by the U.S. Senate has homed in on how the schools recruit and educate veterans -- a lucrative source of federal funds for [Pittsburgh]-based Education Management Corp.

From August 2009 to July 2010, EDMC -- which runs the Art Institutes, Argosy University, South University and Brown Mackie College -- took in about $60.5 million from the Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs. According to data compiled by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, EDMC was the third largest recipient of such funds in that span, behind Apollo Group Inc. -- which runs the University of Phoenix -- and ITT Technical Institute.

The HELP Committee, led by Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, has been holding hearings on the practices of for-profit schools -- exposing aggressive and sometimes fraudulent recruiting tactics, and the high debt loads and failure rates of their students.

So am I saying that we should all give up on higher education and accept a career that pays little more than minimum wage? Hardly. It is marketable knowledge and skills that allow some to command a higher wage than others.

For those who desire it and are fit for a white collar occupation, college is certainly worth considering. But with the selective job market we now have, it is crucial to research up front how present graduates in a certain field are doing before investing the considerable amount of time and money to obtain a particular degree. While college does have certain benefits outside of career training, the expense also has to justify itself in the form of increased income after graduation. And white collar occupations are far from immune to outsourcing; in fact some of them have been hit especially hard in recent times.

Is a private college really worth all of the extra expense (and debt) over a publicly supported one? As I noted earlier, my educational experience in a large public university like Pitt was a somewhat impersonal one. Private schools offer smaller class sizes and more personal attention. But the same can be said for the smaller branch campuses of public universities like Pitt. In addition, community colleges are a great value and worth considering for a year or two before transferring to a 4 year college.

Of course, not everybody is cut out for college or a white collar career. Learning a trade that is in demand can provide just as much pay and satisfaction as many white collar careers. With the many unemployed sitting at home watching TV, commercials for different training institutes are blanketing the airwaves. But there is always the disclaimer in the fine print that employment and salary are not guaranteed. Do these places really enable their students to find jobs as advertised? Or do they leave their graduates high and dry with little more than a pile of debt to deal with? It takes some research up front to find this out – preferably by talking to previous grads of these institutions.

So although college can be a ripoff, it doesn’t have to be. When dealing with anybody who asks us to part with some of our money, we have the responsibility to be informed consumers – and education is no exception!

Post Script - January 12, 2011

Being an informed consumer is especially difficult when the schools who are supposed to be providing objective information on the employment prospects of its graduates resort to fudging their figures or are outright lying about them.

A recent NYT article Is Law School a Losing Game? is about the rude awakening many recent law school graduates have received when they discovered that the expensive degree they borrowed money to earn isn't yielding any job offers in the field despite law schools encouraging even more students to enroll.

[Michael] Wallerstein, who can’t afford to pay down interest and thus watches the outstanding loan balance grow, is in roughly the same financial hell as people who bought more home than they could afford during the real estate boom. But creditors can’t foreclose on him because he didn’t spend the money on a house.

He spent it on a law degree. And from every angle, this now looks like a catastrophic investment.

Well, every angle except one: the view from law schools. To judge from data that law schools collect, and which is published in the closely parsed U.S. News and World Report annual rankings, the prospects of young doctors of jurisprudence are downright rosy.

In reality, and based on every other source of information, Mr. Wallerstein and a generation of J.D.’s face the grimmest job market in decades.

This article is a 'must read' for anybody studying for or contemplating a legal career.

To get a perspective from someone on the street, I forwarded a link to the article to a friend of mine who is a lawyer to get some feedback. Her response below is pretty self-explantory.

It's very sobering, but not a surprise, we have usually have at least 2 unemployed attorneys volunteering for us to get experience, and our youngest attorneys have loan balances close to $200,000. (our starting salary is less than $40,000). I have no idea why anyone still thinks law school is a good idea.

Our Tax Cut Insanity

2010-12-12T22:05:00.002-05:00

Imagine this scenario. A shopper brings $100 to the store to shop for groceries. After filling the cart she goes to check out and discovers that the total comes to $125. So what happens then?

In the practical world, she would ask the checkout person to take away $25 worth of groceries from the bill. Or if she felt that all of her purchases were really necessary, she can put the shortfall on her credit card to pay back later.

Of course she could have complained about how much food has gone up. Or perhaps about how the store charges what she feels is too much for her food. She could have even promised herself that next time, she would go to the store with only a $75 shopping list of groceries.

But try as she may, she just couldn’t find $25 worth of groceries she could do without. So she puts the extra $25 worth on her credit card for this and future trips to the store.

So why not bring $125 each time to the store? Because she is convinced that each time she goes to the store, she will find a way to cut out that extra $25 and not have to put in on the credit card. But that never happens and the credit card balance keeps going up and up.

This grocery store scenario is a pretty good match to the behavior of Congress when it comes to our annual federal budgets here in the US. We don’t have enough tax money coming in to pay the total bill. So we borrow the rest and vow to spend less next year so we don’t have to borrow more.

But it never works out that way. While we all have our own ideas on where to cut the budget, there is not enough of a consensus to ever make it happen. For example, most liberals feel that we spend far too much on our military. But most conservatives feel that the military budget is untouchable. And many conservatives feel that we spend too much on entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare. But liberals feel these are untouchable. So the process of making any significant cuts in the federal budget invariably leads to Congressional gridlock.

So it would stand to reason that if we can’t cut spending to balance our budget and not put more on the credit card, we need to raise taxes to make up the difference. But instead, the supply side economists starting with David Stockman who was President Reagan’s budget director, advocated for and helped to pass tax cuts with the idea of stimulating the economy to make up for the lost tax revenue. But instead, the lack of tax money simply resulted in a greater shortfall and the need to put more money on the credit card.

Paying less in taxes with the idea of “starving the beast” to reduce the size of government has long been a part of the conservative ideology. But tax cuts without corresponding spending cuts only puts us deeper in the hole which requires us to borrow even more.

But instead of learning our lesson under Reagan that tax cuts do little more than create larger deficits, President George W. Bush passed another major tax cut in addition to a major spending increase in the way of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. The result was more record deficits and more borrowing – mostly from the Chinese. With the Chinese now owning so much of our debt, trying to deal with them on their often unfair trade practices that have drained us of jobs has become increasingly difficult.

A legacy left from the Reagan and Bush tax cuts is an attitude by the conservatives that we can get all of the government we need without having to pay enough taxes to balance the budget. Instead of being “deficit hawks” we now started to get Republican excuses for the deficits.

Vice-President Dick Cheney famously told former Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill, that "deficits don't matter." What's interesting and alarming, however, is that different Republican factions believe deficits don't matter for opposite and incompatible reasons.

Supply-siders believe deficits don't matter because tax cuts so boost investment and productivity that the economy grows its way out of debt. The opposite, "starve the beast" faction, epitomized by tax tactician Grover Norquist, hope tax cuts will indeed create deep deficits that will then force spending cuts. But both things can't be true.

Under George W. Bush, the merry ideology calls for tax cuts in all seasons for all reasons. Spending has increased faster than under Clinton, and deficits have ballooned, yet tax cutting marches on.

Another huge byproduct of the Bush tax cuts was their benefit to the wealthiest which has resulted in a huge concentration of income and wealth at the very top of the food chain.

With the middle and lower classes now suffering economic hard times, it is hopeless to try and balance the budget by asking more taxes from them. This is what I argue in a previous posting Make the Rich Pay Their Fair Share!

Due to technical reasons, the Bush tax cuts could not be passed as a permanent measure but instead are due to expire at the end of 2010. Logic would dictate that the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans that created so much of the deficit should be allowed to expire. But for Republicans, tax cuts are a religion and the Senate Republicans have vowed to kill all legislation including unemployment compensation extensions until the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans (their political base) are extended first.

Despite these tax cuts having been shown to do little more than increase the deficit and our credit card balance (the National Debt) now approaching $14 trillion, the conservatives’ insane fervor for tax cuts continues unabated, even for those who claim that they believe in balanced budgets. The classic definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results certainly applies here.

Even David Stockman, the man who helped to start it all has finally admitted to the insanity in a recent 60 Minutes interview.

(Extending the Bush tax cuts is) rank demagoguery. We should call it for what it is. If these people were all put into a room on penalty of death to come up with how much they could cut, they couldn't come up with $50 billion, when the problem is $1.3 trillion. So, to stand before the public and rub raw this anti-tax sentiment, the Republican Party, as much as it pains me to say this, should be ashamed of themselves!

Put Up or Shut Up Time for the Republicans

2010-11-14T11:36:00.003-05:00

It was a pretty depressing election for Democrats. From their viewpoint, the only consolation that evening was that Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell lost. But the Republicans as expected took control of the House of Representatives. Can you say Speaker John Boehner? I knew you couldn’t.

For the Republicans, it was good news and bad news. The good news was that they won enough seats to recapture the House. The bad news is that they now have to help govern instead of just criticizing and obstructing the Democrats from the sidelines.

Anybody can be a critic. But it takes a lot more to be a doer.

Not that there’s anything wrong with criticism. It’s an indispensable part of a free election system. The other guys stink. We can do things better. Vote for us.

But what made things so maddening for the incumbent Democrats during the election was the claim that if the Republicans were elected, they would do things better — but without ever giving any real specifics on how they would do it.

For example, we are now running a budget deficit of about $1.3 trillion which to Republicans is unacceptable. Their plan to balance the budget is to extend the tax cuts to all including the wealthiest 2% along with mostly unspecified “spending cuts”. We don’t know exactly what they have in mind but the most consistent story is that defense, Social Security, and Medicare cuts are not on the table which is the lion’s share of the budget. With precious little else to cut, how do they propose to balance the budget while not only refusing to raise taxes but also swelling the deficit with more tax cuts for the wealthy? The math just doesn’t add up! But then again, they now have a chance to propose their own budget in the House to answer these questions.

And then there is the pledge to repeal “ObamaCare” and replace it with something better. But no matter how one feels about health care reform, there were a number of significant breakthroughs that were a result of the passing of this bill. For example, children can no longer be rejected for insurance based on preexisting conditions. (For adults, this kicks in by 2014.) Children graduating from college who cannot find a job with insurance benefits can stay on their parents’ policy until age 26. And now those with health insurance cannot be dropped by their insurer simply because they got sick. Lifetime individual dollar limits for coverage have also been dropped.

So for those who wish to repeal “ObamaCare”, which of these benefits do they want to see taken away? Or maybe they intend to keep the good parts while getting rid of those parts that they (or more likely the health insurance companies that financially support them) don't like. Admittedly, the stuff about repealing health care reform is little more than blowing smoke. Even if it somehow got past the Senate, the president would be ready with his veto pen. But it would sure be interesting to see how they would do their own healthcare reform bill. And because of the Republicans regaining control of the House, we will finally get to see what substance they are offering behind all of the rhetoric.

But past history has not been encouraging. For example back in 1994, the Republicans defeated "HillaryCare" and in the following years after gaining control of both Congress and the White House, the number of people without health insurance skyrocketed with no real attempts at reform during that period. Now that the Democrats have finally passed a health reform bill into law, the Republican game plan is to again defeat it but this time by repealing it.

Call it political spin, but I now believe that the Republican regaining of the House may well be a blessing in disguise for the Democrats — and maybe the country in general.

We know the Republicans are good at winning elections. But can they govern once they win? Or are they like the dog that chases after cars and then doesn’t know what to do when it catches one?

New Jersey Republican Governor Chris Christie in this recent Meet the Press appearance sums it all up with his usual brutal honesty:

MR. GREGORY:
When you talk about the response from the voters on Election Day, something's very curious. We know some of the feelings about the Democrats, about President Obama 's policies, but look at this from the exit polls in terms of the opinion of political parties . Republicans didn't fare too well either; 52 percent unfavorable rating. What does that say about the Republican Party today?

GOV. CHRISTIE:
You know, I think what it says is what I was saying all over the country, that's it's put up or shut up time for our party. You know, we lost our way last decade, David. We did, and people expect us to do better. And if the Republican Party wants to come back, they're going to have to do what they said they were going to do. I mean, because if they don't, we're going to be sent to the wilderness for a long time, and we're going to deserve it!

Stonewalling the Media

2010-10-31T23:49:00.006-04:00

As the Democrats await their fate in the upcoming election, there is one Senate race that even among all of the crazy races has perhaps captured the most attention. And that is the Nevada US Senate race between Democrat and Majority Leader Harry Reid and Republican and Tea Party favorite Sharron Angle.

Sure there are many other races where Tea Party candidates have adopted positions that are well out of the political mainstream (even for many Republicans!), but Sharron Angle is in a league of her own.

Brian Greenspun, the publisher and editor of the Las Vegas Sun in his editorial Nevadans can show how smart we are (Or, by electing Sharron Angle, we can prove the reverse is true) sums up just a few of Angle’s provocative positions.

Angle would dismantle Social Security and Medicare, calling them biblical sins; do away with Veterans Affairs; not require insurance companies to pay for mammograms, and screenings for prostate and other cancers that we know can save lives with early detection; or refuse to require background checks for sex offenders. These are all norms of American daily living that people take for granted and expect that those who we elect won’t take them away. Angle would.

Even worse, she has stated publicly how she really feels about Nevadans crushed by this meltdown. She believes people who need unemployment benefits to keep their homes and food on their tables, until there are jobs to be had, are just spoiled!

The list goes on and on. There is her position that even women who are impregnated by rape or incest should not have access to abortion. And then there are her proposed Second Amendment “remedies” in response to actions by Congress she disapproves of. A little armed insurrection anybody?

But this is not about criticizing her ideas as strange as they may be to many of us. Elections are about competing ideas and candidates should air their different views to allow the voters to make their own informed choices.

But what angers me (and should anger you too) is the strategy of Angle (and many other Tea Partiers) of stonewalling the media when they try to do their job of asking follow-up questions of the candidates to defend their positions. Or as the Sun editorial puts it:

People’s right of access to information about their government is paramount. People who wish to seek and hold public office have no right to withhold themselves and their views from voters. Angle, obviously, disagrees with the First Amendment to the Constitution, the Founding Fathers who wrote it and the vast majority of Americans who live and die each day defending it.

Angle has been seen many times walking away from media questioners, but the latest is the straw that breaks the camel’s back for me. Check out the video of the latest attempted interview of her in this link.

Reporters from the CBS and NBC affiliates surprised the tea party favorite at McCarran International Airport, where they asked her questions about national security and unemployment. Angle responded, "I will answer those questions when I am the senator."

Pressed further, she added, "The two wars that we are in right now are exactly what we are in."

How profound. This is more than just an isolated incident; it represents an attitude on her part. Appearing on conservative-friendly Fox News, she came out with a whopper that even left the Fox interviewer flabbergasted.

"We wanted [the press] to ask the questions we want to answer, so that they report the news the way we want it reported."

The strategy these candidates use is to put out some right-wing talking points (some say it's demagoguery) to fire up the base, but at the same time avoid answering questions by the media (except for friendly questioning on Fox) to explain or defend their positions.

For example, Kentucky Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul cancelled a scheduled appearance on Meet the Press rather than explain his controversial remarks on the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Sarah Palin never appeared on any of the Sunday political talk shows during her VP run in 2008. It was only when ABC’s Charles Gibson asking her about the Bush Doctrine and CBS’s Katie Couric asked her about which newspapers she read that her lack of knowledge on the issues became painfully apparent. And then there was the recent infamous incident in Alaska where Republican Alaska Senate candidate Joe Miller’s private security guards handcuffed a reporter for approaching the candidate with questions after a public town hall meeting.

One would think that when a candidate refuses to answer questions, the voters would respond by not voting for that person! But Angle, Paul, and Miller all lead in the polls this weekend before the election so this basically dishonest strategy is apparently working. (But fortunately not for California GOP gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman.)

We shouldn’t let them get away with it! It should stand to reason that if certain candidates are going through all of this trouble to avoid defending their positions, isn’t it reasonable to ask what they are hiding? Isn’t it possible that some of their extreme positions would be indefensible in the face of media scrutiny? And that they know it!

Freedom to Hate

2010-10-10T23:20:00.008-04:00

I can’t help but wonder if the framers of the US Constitution’s First Amendment would have placed at least some restrictions on hate speech if they had seen some of the most infamous examples in history such as from the Nazis, the KKK, and most recently the Westboro Baptist Church, a virulent anti-gay hate group in Topeka, Kansas headed by Fred Phelps which has gotten national attention for their picketing of military funerals.

It is their worldview (not mine) that since God hates homosexuality and the US Government and its military tolerates homosexuality, the tragedies that America has suffered like 9/11 along with the military deaths from the wars are a retribution from God.

For those seeking to understand more about the WBC, a fascinating one hour BBC documentary (which you can watch online in the following link) The Most Hated Family in America is written and presented by Louis Theroux who not only reports on the family’s strange (to say the least) views, but also probes some of the church members on their beliefs and even tries to reason with them (without success). It is scary to hear how all of these people think exactly alike in what amount to a cult environment.

The US Supreme Court has recently heard arguments from the family of Marine Lance Corporal Matthew A. Snyder who initially won a lawsuit against the WBC for “defamation, invasion of privacy, and intentional infliction of emotional distress” as a result of their picketing Corporal Snyder’s funeral only to have a higher court throw out the award based on First Amendment protections.

Ruling on this case is not so easy since hate speech unlike in most countries in the world is protected by the First Amendment. But there are also the rights of citizens not to be harassed by hate from others.

However, even the First Amendment does not provide absolute protection of free speech. There are Exceptions to the First Amendment such as for obscenity, child pornography, libel and slander. But the most applicable exception here is known as Time, Place and Manner Restrictions.

Even speech that enjoys the most extensive First Amendment protection may be subject to “regulations of the time, place, and manner of expression which are content-neutral, are narrowly tailored to serve a significant government interest, and leave open ample alternative channels of communication.” In the case in which this language appears, the Supreme Court allowed a city ordinance that banned picketing “before or about” any residence to be enforced to prevent picketing outside the residence of a doctor who performed abortions, even though the picketing occurred on a public street. The Court noted that “[t]he First Amendment permits the government to prohibit offensive speech as intrusive when the ‘captive’ audience cannot avoid the objectionable speech.”

This has led to the use of so-called Free speech zones.

Free speech zones have been used at a variety of political gatherings. The stated purpose of free speech zones is to protect the safety of those attending the political gathering, or for the safety of the protesters themselves. Critics, however, suggest that such zones are "Orwellian", and that authorities use them in a heavy-handed manner to censor protesters by putting them literally out of sight of the mass media, hence the public, as well as visiting dignitaries.

There is a misconception that the Westboro picketers are always in the immediate vicinity of the funerals. But there have been a number of laws passed to restrict how close the picketers can get to funeral services. In the case of the Snyder funeral, the picketers were said to be about 1000 feet away and their presence was apparently not even known to the Snyder family until they saw the protesters afterwards on the local newscasts.

The ACLU whose position protecting the right of the WBC to picket is in this blog posting (by a gay person no less). Instead of trying to outright prohibit the hate speech of the WBC which would almost certainly be struck down by the First Amendment, separating the picketers and the object of their wrath by enough of a distance appears to be a workable compromise. The only question left would then be to determine how much separation is enough to prevent needless intrusion without being overly restrictive on free speech. In cases like this, it always comes down to the same question: Where do we draw the line?

Make the Rich Pay Their Fair Share!

2010-09-23T23:44:00.008-04:00

Today, the Republicans unveiled their "Pledge to America".

House Republicans offered their “Pledge to America,” a combination campaign platform and legislative agenda, on Thursday morning, saying that jobs will return if spending slows and tax rates are kept from rising.

The Republican leaders called on the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, to immediately begin a debate on the items on their list, including making lower tax rates for all taxpayers permanent, holding back federal spending, repealing the health-care overhaul enacted this year and reducing the federal deficit.

Most of the Democrats are in favor of keeping the Bush tax cuts set to expire at the end of the year for all except the 2% who make over $250,000 per year. But the Republicans desperately want to keep those tax cuts for the very wealthiest Americans.

So this leaves us with two questions: Is it morally right to increase the tax rate on the richest from about 35% as it is now to about 39% as it was during the Clinton administration? and…Will keeping the tax cuts for the upper 2% permanent truly reduce the federal deficit?

The moral question is a bit trickier than it seems at first. Just saying that because these people are rich we have a right to take more of their money is not a satisfactory argument by itself. After all, it is their money. But while many of us over the last decade have struggled financially, the very richest have gotten even richer because of preferential tax treatment.

The top 400, all of whom are worth at least $1 billion, saw their combined wealth increase 8 percent this year, to the dizzying total of $1.37 trillion, according to analysis from CNN.

This means the 400 richest people in America account for about 2.6 percent of the nation's private wealth.

The idea of giving tax cuts to the very rich was that if they prospered, the rest of us would also prosper. But that has proven to be a false as income inequality is at an all-time high.

Income inequality in the United States is at an all-time high, surpassing even levels seen during the Great Depression, according to a recently updated paper by University of California, Berkeley Professor Emmanuel Saez. The paper, which covers data through 2007, points to a staggering, unprecedented disparity in American incomes. On his blog, Nobel prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman called the numbers "truly amazing."

...while the bottom 99 percent of incomes grew at a solid pace of 2.7 percent per year from 1993-2000, these incomes grew only 1.3 percent per year from 2002-2007. As a result, in the economic expansion of 2002-2007, the top 1 percent captured two thirds of income growth.

But income inequality in itself is not as much of an issue as long as everybody is doing reasonably well. But when the middle and lower classes are getting hammered while at the same time the rich are getting richer, it is no wonder that there is talk of class warfare. Even conservative economist Ben Stein was moved to write a 2006 op-ed, In Class Warfare, Guess Which Side is Winning?

It turned out that [multibillionaire Warren] Buffett, with immense income from dividends and capital gains, paid far, far less as a fraction of his income than the secretaries or the clerks or anyone else in his office. Further, in conversation it came up that Mr. Buffett doesn’t use any tax planning at all. He just pays as the Internal Revenue Code requires. “How can this be fair?” he asked of how little he pays relative to his employees. “How can this be right?”

Even though I agreed with him, I warned that whenever someone tried to raise the issue, he or she was accused of fomenting class warfare.

“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

Morals aside, another part of the article brings us to the second question about how we can reduce the deficit which just about all conservatives claim to be important to them.

Put simply, the rich pay a lot of taxes as a total percentage of taxes collected, but they don’t pay a lot of taxes as a percentage of what they can afford to pay, or as a percentage of what the government needs to close the deficit gap.

Our recent experience has shown that there are only two realistic ways to try and close a deficit gap — cutting spending and/or raising taxes. Even conservative economic gurus such as former Fed chief Alan Greenspan (along now with Florida GOP Senate candidate Marco Rubio) have now admitted that tax cuts don't pay for themselves.

The solution given by those on the political right is never to raise taxes but instead to cut spending to balance the budget. But as Ben Stein observes:

The imperatives for [increased] spending are built into the system, and now, with entitlements expanding rapidly, increased spending is locked in. Medicare, Social Security, interest on the debt — all are growing like mad, and how they ill ever be stopped or slowed is beyond imagining. Gross interest on Treasury debt is approaching $350 billion a year. And none of this counts major deferred maintenance for the military.

It is telling that although the Republicans’ Pledge to America aims to hold back federal spending and reduce the federal deficit, it offers no specifics on how they would actually cut the budget. And let’s face it, if the Republicans are not in favor of cutting defense spending and the Democrats are not in favor of cutting entitlement spending e.g. Medicare and Social Security, what else is there to cut?

So despite those on the right who say that we are all taxed enough, the only way out of this mess is to bring in more tax revenue to pay for what we want and need our government to do. But especially with the lower and middle classes hurting so badly, we can’t ask more of them. But we can certainly ask the wealthy who have prospered so well in recent years from preferential government tax treatment to carry more of the load.

The concept behind what is called progressive taxation is that the wealthy who can most afford it, are required to pay higher tax rates than others who are less able to afford taxation. In addition, raising marginal tax rates on the wealthy has been an important safety valve for when our government has had to make unexpected large expenditures, such as for wars and during the Great Depression (see chart). At times our top marginal rate for the wealthy has been over 90% during wars. What is unprecedented is George W. Bush conducting the Iraq and Afghanistan wars while at the same time, offering a tax cut to the wealthy. No wonder we turned the budget surplus under Bill Clinton into a huge deficit in such short order!

Even most liberals do not favor us returning to the days of 90% tax rates for the wealthy. That is unfair to them! But when The Angry Rich are fighting so bitterly to keep their tax rates from reverting from 35% now to 39.6% when Bill Clinton balanced the budget, that is unfair to the rest of us! When those (especially the wealthy) who make their money from dividends and capital gains get to pay a much lower rate than those of us who work for a living, that is unfair! When hedge fund managers whose annual incomes are sometimes over a billion dollars can through a tax loophole pay at only a 15% rate, that is unfair! When instead of raising the Social Security taxable income above $106,800, we get the absurd idea of raising the retirement age to 70, that is unfair!

So if we are really about fairness, there is one thing that we can do. We must make the rich pay their fair share!

The Koch Brothers - The Most Powerful People You've Never Heard Of

2010-09-01T17:48:00.014-04:00

Frank Rich’s column from August 29, The Billionaires Banking the Tea Party was in my opinion, one of his most significant columns in recent memory. But his column was inspired by an equally significant one by investigative reporter Jane Mayer in The New Yorker, Covert Operations - The billionaire Koch brothers war against Obama which chronicles in detail, not only the extensive money spent but also the building of an entire infrastructure in the form of think tanks and foundations created to promote their libertarian views along with defeating those of progressives.

As Rich writes:

Another weekend, another grass-roots demonstration starring Real Americans who are mad as hell and want to take back their country from you-know-who.

There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “death panel” warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even those carrying the Kochs’ banner may not know who these brothers are.

And here are excerpts from the Mayer article:

The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests.
In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.” The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.
Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said, “The Kochs are on a whole different level. There’s no one else who has spent this much money. The sheer dimension of it is what sets them apart. They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation. I’ve been in Washington since Watergate, and I’ve never seen anything like it. They are the Standard Oil of our times.”

The anti-government fervor infusing the 2010 elections represents a political triumph for the Kochs. By giving money to “educate,” fund, and organize Tea Party protesters, they have helped turn their private agenda into a mass movement.

The article in The New Yorker is a lengthy one that goes into considerable detail about the Koch’s behind the scenes manipulation of the US political process. It is hoped that the above excerpts will encourage the reader to check out this interesting article in its entirety.

So what’s the big deal about the Koch brothers’ participation in the political process? After all, it’s a free country and people should be able to support whom they wish to.

The problem is not whom or what they support. It is an issue of transparency. There is a world of difference between those who support a position simply because they believe in it and others who do it because they are on someone's payroll. For example, if a scientist promotes views that question climate change, much of his credibility would depend on whether or not he was being paid by somebody who has a financial stake in denying climate change. To not be given this information amounts to deception.

Adding to the deception, money can be funneled into non-profit foundations with benign names such as Americans for Prosperity which appears to be a grassroots organization but unknown to most people was established by the Kochs to promote their political agenda. And because organizations like these are non-profits, they are not required to disclose their financial backers.

With this background in mind, I will conclude with my comment to Frank Rich’s article.

I am reminded of when Mickey Mantle made appearances on talk shows touting the benefits of Voltaren, an anti-arthritis drug. But then later it was revealed that he was a paid spokesperson for the drug without disclosing this to the viewers. [link to story] Today, ads that have endorsers, especially celebrities are required to disclose that they are compensated. To do otherwise is considered to be deceptive advertising.

Today, many of the political protests are little more than deceptive advertising in that they are often organized and paid for by commercial interests whose identities are not disclosed.

Regular viewers of the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC know that she has regularly taken on organizations such as Americans for Prosperity [link to video] for promoting the viewpoints of its financial contributors who are largely undisclosed. While it is good that MSNBC (and the NYT) are doing this, do we see the same thing being done at NBC or ABC or CBS whose news shows attract a much wider audience? It appears that they are afraid to take on these organizations for fear of being labeled as “too liberal”. But this is not a liberal or conservative issue. It is about transparency and as long as the mainstream broadcast networks continue to look the other way, this deception of our citizens will continue.

Our Jobs Crisis

2010-08-22T23:49:00.004-04:00

It’s easy to get really depressed over the massive amount of unemployment that is everywhere — especially for those of us without a job. But when it looks like all is lost and hopeless, there is NYT columnist Bob Herbert to remind us that perhaps we may be looking at things a bit too optimistically!

In his August 9th op-ed column The Horror Show, he leads off with this.

The employment situation in the United States is much worse than even the dismal numbers from last week’s jobless report would indicate. The nation is facing a full-blown employment crisis and policy makers are not responding with anything like the sense of urgency that is needed.

We’ve got more and more people in our working-age population and fewer and fewer jobs to go around…there are now 3.4 million fewer private-sector jobs in the U.S. than there were a decade ago. In the last 10 years, we’ve seen the worst job creation record since 1928 to 1938.

We need to take into account that there are roughly 150,000 new workers entering the US job market each month due to normal population growth. So if about 130,000 jobs were lost in July according to the government report, this means that about another 280,000 were added to the unemployed. Those who gave up looking for work or forced to take part time work aren’t counted as unemployed or the figures would be even worse! This means that the longer a period of severe unemployment goes on, the deeper we get into a hole.

According to the NYT article Jobless and Staying That Way, the light at the end of the tunnel is a dim one indeed.

[T]he Obama administration predicts that unemployment will drop to 8.7 percent by the end of next year, and eventually sink to 6.8 percent by the end of 2013.

To reach that level, the economy would have to add nearly 300,000 workers a month over the next three years, according to Peter Morici, a business professor at the University of Maryland. Even in the first half of the year, when the economy grew at a healthy 3 percent, it added fewer than 100,000 jobs a month.

This has led many to question whether what we are experiencing is just a temporary bump in the road or a long patch of bad road ahead with no end in sight. It has been said that this is the worst economy we have had since the Great Depression. And while the numbers during that time were worse, there are a number of reasons why what we are going through is different (and arguably worse) than in previous downturns.

Previous recessions have always been treated as cyclical events. Sure things were slow and people lost jobs, but once the economy picked up, the jobs came back. But what we have experienced in the US especially in the last decade has been the permanent loss of many jobs. So while we are technically no longer in a recession, those who are unemployed are feeling no relief because we have not been able to deal with the fact that many of these jobs will never come back. Global competition has been taking its toll on the manufacturing sector for some time now. But we at least had the comfort in believing that only the low-tech jobs would be sent overseas and that we could rely on a growing white collar economy to offset that. But the growth of the Internet in the last decade along with its ability to effortlessly transfer information from around the globe has totally changed all of that.

What were once jobs we thought were safe such as in engineering and science can now be readily outsourced to India and elsewhere to save on labor costs. There seems to be no safe harbor from all of this. Even legal work is now being outsourced to India. And occupations that can’t be readily outsourced such as teaching are falling on their own hard times due to government budgetary struggles. Surely, the health insurance industry which has been prospering during all of these hard times doesn’t have to resort to outsourcing. But they do.

So how to we place all of these people in new jobs to replace the ones that have been permanently lost? Retraining is a logical place to start and has been suggested by many. But retrain for what? I remember being told several years ago when I first lost my job that Information Technology (IT) was the job of the future and all I would have to do to save my career is go to school to retrain. But as many have found out, IT is the job of the future — but not in this country. If there is indeed a chronic deficit of jobs for jobseekers, we can’t solve this by retraining people for jobs that simply don’t exist in adequate numbers!

This also creates difficult decisions for those who are considering attending college. At one time, a college degree usually provided a reliable ticket to prosperity. But many of the college educated such as Alexandra Jarrin whose heart-wrenching story is told in 99 Weeks Later have been living a nightmare.

Ms. Jarrin had scrabbled for her foothold in the middle class. She graduated from college late in life, in 2003, attending classes while working full time. She used to believe that education would be her ticket to prosperity, but is now bitter about what it has gotten her.

“I owe $92,000 for an education which is basically worthless,” she said.

What makes her situation even worse is that student loans cannot usually be discharged through bankruptcy.

The first step in trying to solve a problem as large as this is for our leaders to truly acknowledge how really serious this problem is. It is inflicting permanent harm on many workers and their families who are in dire straits. Something urgently needs to be done — soon. If the private sector cannot or will not provide adequate jobs, the government must step in to create them. This is what was done during the Great Depression. We have a great deal of urgent work that needs to be done such as rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and converting us to using more renewable energy and fewer fossil fuels. Anti-government naysayers will complain that it wasn’t the government created jobs that ended the Great Depression but was instead World War II. But the effect of World War II was indeed, a massive creation of government jobs.

But government created jobs can only be used as a bridge to when the private sector can finally create enough jobs on its own. It is generally agreed that most of the new job creation is generated by small businesses. If so, we have to concentrate on helping that part of the economy instead of just the big players which is what we do now. Money has to be freed up for loans that will help existing small businesses flourish along with helping those who wish to start their own businesses. Unlike the large behemoths, small businesses tend to do their manufacturing locally and in addition, tend to value more experienced workers — a boon to the older displaced workers who have especially suffered through all of this.

Not surprisingly, we are on the wrong path. A jobs bill intended to help small businesses was recently filibustered by the Republicans. Apparently the true Republican priority is to help big business — the same ones who in many cases are hoarding cash and refusing to hire anybody!

Bob Herbert certainly has it right to label this a crisis. But unfortunately, too many in Washington from both parties are content to make excuses rather than making the tough choices needed to tackle this crisis head-on. We need and deserve better from them!

Just Count Votes

2010-08-18T14:08:00.002-04:00

Once in a while, it’s nice to be able to share some thoughts with a wider audience than those who normally read my postings here. So I sent a Letter to the Editor to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in response to executive editor David Shribman’s August 8, 2010 column, Rethinking Elections.

Some people who didn't like the way the 2000 election turned out are trying to overturn the Electoral College with a power sweep around the Constitution.
[A]s the country contemplates fiddling with the Constitution while Rome burns, six states have enacted the National Popular Vote plan to pack the Electoral College (with the measure having passed both houses of the legislature in an additional four states). This accounts for 73 electoral votes, more than a quarter of those required to activate the plan, which would go into effect when enough states adopt the measure to account for the 270 electoral votes needed to elect a president.
One of the arguments for the measure is that it would make the votes of all Americans, not just those in states with big electoral-vote totals, more meaningful.

A copy of my response printed in the Sunday, August 15, 2010 edition of the Post-Gazette appears below. An additional point I wanted to make but couldn’t due to space limitations was that nowadays with our present Electoral College system, the only ‘meaningful’ voters in our presidential elections (the ones who get almost all of the attention from the candidates and media) are those who happen to live in the so-called swing states with competitive races.

Just count votes

In response to David Shribman's Aug. 8 column, "Rethinking Elections," I am a person who deeply distrusts simplistic thinking. But nonetheless, here is my simplistic view of the electoral process -- including presidential elections.

Whoever gets the most votes should win. Any electoral process that undermines this is fatally flawed and should be replaced!

Admittedly, the end-around that some states are using to try and nullify the Electoral College is a bit underhanded. The chances of doing this by passing a constitutional amendment would be non-existent since the Republicans are happy with the system the way it is.

I suspect that in 2000, Bush supporters didn't feel too bad about their candidate winning despite losing the popular vote to Al Gore. But had John Kerry not lost Ohio by a razor-thin margin in 2004, he would have won despite President Bush winning the popular vote. And then it would have been the Republicans who would have joined the chorus to get rid of the Electoral College.

All this can happen because a candidate winning a state by, say, one vote gets the same result as winning that same state by a million votes, which makes the additional margin of victory effectively meaningless to the national result. Why should some votes count more than others?

I believe that dumping the Electoral College in favor of a national popular vote would indeed be positive reform that would have far fewer unintended (and negative) consequences than the system we have now.

TONY POLOMBO

Delmont

Please Watch 'Gasland'

2010-07-25T23:55:00.004-04:00

So what would you do if you had some farmland acreage and somebody approached you to sign a lease that would pay you about $5,000 per acre to allow them to drill for gas on your property? Filmmaker Josh Fox had such an offer for his family’s 20 acre property near the Delaware River in the northeastern corner of Pennsylvania.

$100,000 is hardly chump change! But before signing anything, Fox decided to check out a story about people in nearby Dimock, PA who were suffering ill effects that they believed were a result of their well water being contaminated by the gas drilling that had already started there. In addition, it was said that people were actually able to light their running tap water on fire! So he investigated and filmed what he saw there. This lead to Fox following up on similar stories from other areas around the country where gas drilling has been taking place for some time.

The collection of stories resulted in a documentary titled Gasland. Video clips from some of these visits are on the official website of this movie.

In June, the movie premiered on HBO and is available to subscribers for viewing on demand through the month of August. Here is a partial synopsis from the HBO website.

Gasland is Fox’s urgent, cautionary and sometimes darkly comic look at the largest domestic natural gas drilling campaign in history, which is currently sweeping the country and promising landowners a quick payoff.

However, as Fox discovers, the drilling process called hydraulic fracturing or fracking, [developed by Halliburton, Dick Cheney’s former company] was exempted by the Bush-Cheney Energy Policy Act of 2005 from the United States’ most basic environmental regulations, including the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Clean Air Act.

Natural gas companies have installed hundreds of thousands of rigs in 34 states…Each well requires the use of fracking fluids – chemical cocktails consisting of 596 chemicals, including carcinogens and neurtoxins, as well as one to seven million gallons of water, which are infused by the chemicals. Considering that there are approximately 450,000 wells in the U.S,. Fox estimates that 40 trillion gallons of chemically infused water have been created by the drilling, much of it left seeping or injected into the ground across the country.

Whew! So what does the oil and gas industry have to say in their defense? Fox was unable to get an on-the-record comment from any of the companies doing the drilling. But when executives from the various companies appeared together in Congressional hearings, it was their position that this fracking process causes no harm to anybody’s drinking water.

In addition, Energy In Depth, a Washington, D.C. based PR group supported by the oil and gas industry, has created a web page Debunking GasLand with a list of claimed factual inaccuracies in the documentary.

Not to be outdone, Fox assembled a group of experts to compile a 39 page web document, Affirming Gasland which Fox calls "A de-debunking document in response to specious and misleading gas industry claims against the film."

Affirming Gasland is especially informative for those who would like to understand this issue more since it copies the text of Debunking GasLand and then does a point-by-point rebuttal that Fox and his experts have prepared. And incidentally, in Affirming the experts are explicitly identified next to their words; Debunking does not identify the sources behind its writing.

Gasland falls short of stating categorically that the polluted well water that the many people in his film are dealing with is the result of the gas drilling. This would require an investigation by a government agency. But there is compelling circumstantial evidence that is part of each person’s story in the movie. The well water was never bad before. After the drilling, the water starts to look bad and people start getting sick.

The drilling companies can (and do) argue that their drilling had nothing to do with the bad water. And the lighting of running tap water that was shown in the film? Naturally occurring methane pockets as a result of drilling the water well. Not their fault. In essence, they are saying “trust us” — just like we trusted BP.

Unfortunately, the federal government in the form of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been mostly absent through all of this, likely due to the federal environmental exemptions given to the gas drillers. This leaves the individual state agencies to serve as the watchdogs. But with state governments under tremendous financial pressure to cut costs, the lack of money and manpower to effectively do their jobs is only getting worse.

One step in the right direction would be for Congress to pass H.R. 2766 and S. 1215 which would repeal the exemption for hydraulic fracturing in the Safe Drinking Water Act and get the EPA on board.

If you haven’t seen it, I hope you will take the time to watch Gasland to help you make up your own mind on the subject. For those without HBO, find a friend who has HBO and watch it together! It is available On-Demand anytime thru August. After that, it will be available on DVD. You won’t be sorry!

In the meantime, here is a 23 minute PBS video interview of Josh Fox which includes video highlights from the movie.

Drilling has been already been underway out west where many thousands of gas wells have been drilled. With the industry now starting to concentrate on the Marcellus Shale formation, some people in Pennsylvania and the surrounding states will soon be asked to sign a lease to allow gas drilling on their properties. Only these people can decide if the money offered is worth it to them.

For the rest of us, we must decide whether the environmental price of hydraulic fracturing or ‘fracking’ to obtain our natural gas is worth it to us. This is an important question. We also need to weigh in the risk of gas wells exploding and hurting people. If nothing else, we owe it to ourselves to become more informed on this issue so we can come up with some intelligent answers!

Remembering Bobby Fischer

2010-07-11T00:08:00.010-04:00

One of the more interesting recent stories was about the exhumation of chess champion Bobby Fischer's body to extract a DNA sample for a paternity test. Obviously, the people fighting for a share of his estate have an interest in all of this. But how is it that a mere chess player can make headlines two years after his death? This must be especially puzzling for those who are too young or weren’t even born when the 1972 World Chess Championship took place in Reykjavik, Iceland between the American chess genius Bobby Fischer and the defending champion, Boris Spassky from the Soviet Union.

Yes, the Cold War was still going on and any rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union was going to attract a lot of attention. But this was extra special. On one hand, there were the Russians who with help from their government, turned out chess champions like a machine. In fact since 1948, every World Championship (conducted every three years) was one Russian competing against another. But here was the brash American hope who in addition, had openly accused the Russians of cheating by arranging the results of games between them in tournaments Fischer participated in. Clearly, Fischer was considered the best player in the world at that time, if not the greatest ever. But he had never defeated Spassky while losing to him three times. Something had to give.

Although chess never had any widespread following before the 1972 championship (at least in America), back in the 1950s, news did appear about a sensational chess prodigy who accomplished unheard of chess feats for someone his age. In fact, he made an appearance on I’ve Got a Secret as shown in this video link. While his face was not yet recognizable to the panelists, he was presented as “Mr. X” because by then his name would be. If you look at this very young looking 15 year old, it’s hard to believe that he was the reigning US Champion as host Garry Moore pointed out. But there was another fact about him that was even more amazing. It turned out that he won a game that was so brilliant, it was dubbed at the time The Game of the Century, and retains that name even to this day! That game was played two years earlier when he was only 13! Chess fans can find the video annotation of that game here.

The 1960s were a period of maturing for Fischer. His dominance in the US Championships each year clearly established him as the best American player and among the world’s best, but he was unable to get to the World Championship match until 1972. The anticipation of him finally getting there was by then receiving worldwide media coverage.

The match in Reykjavik was a media circus. There was not only the anticipated match between the superpowers, but there was further tension as to whether they would even play due to Fischer’s unending list of demands over the match conditions. After blundering away Game 1, Game 2 was forfeited by Fischer for not showing up. His opponent, Boris Spassky could well have not given in to the demands and retain his championship by forfeit. But Spassky in the spirit of sportsmanship didn’t want to win this way. So he decided to give in to Fischer’s demands so he could beat him legitimately over the board. And why not with a substantial 2-0 lead in the match? So Fischer showed up for Game 3 — and beat Spassky for the first time in his life! Here is a video showing some of the goings on in Reykjavik.

Normally, a chess match like this would be covered by the chess publications along with a few wire service reporters. Not this time. Reporters from all over the world converged on the match. National newscasts and even local newspapers and sportscasts provided daily coverage of the match. And New York’s WNET and then PBS made chess and television history with live coverage of the match that drew a record audience.

[The show] spiced the menu with visits from passing grandmasters, writers, and simply friends who happened by. They all happily jabbered about the developing positions, explained strategy and predicted moves. When one of the players in Reykjavik pushed a pawn or slid a bishop, a bell rang in the studio and everyone shut up for a few seconds before bursting into a new round of analysis. New Yorkers loved it, and soon the match spread around the country as other major cities began carrying it on their own PBS affiliates. This was something special.

When Spassky resigned Game 21, Fischer had finally attained his World Championship for which he had devoted his life. At that time he was arguably the most famous person on the planet. Public adoration and great riches were offered to him. But once he finally achieved his ultimate goal at age 29, the question now was “What next?” And perhaps for the first time in his life, Fischer had no answer.

In a previous blog post, Why We All Need Balance I wrote about the extreme difficulties some (including Fischer) can have finding fulfillment in their lives after they have reached the summit. Although he could have made millions by endorsements and playing, more than anything else, the loner in him wanted isolation and he soon dropped out of sight.

When it came time to defend his World Championship in 1975 against another up and coming Soviet superstar, Anatoly Karpov, Fischer who had not played a single serious game as champion was at it again with his unending demands over the match conditions. But unlike Spassky, Karpov apparently did not care so much if he won the championship by forfeit. So this time when Fischer did not show up because his demands were not met, he lost his title without either man playing a single move.

So it was back to isolation. What were seen as mental quirks during his playing days, the occasional anti-Semitic comments and paranoia became far more frequent and severe. Slowly but surely Fischer was becoming a raving madman once he no longer had chess to occupy his mind.

After turning down all of the previous lucrative offers to play, in 1992, 20 years after his championship win in Reykjavik, Fischer who by now was broke, accepted a multi-million dollar offer to play an exhibition match with Spassky. But this time, there was one big catch. The sponsor insisted that the match be played in the former Yugoslavia — which was being punished by UN sanctions. If Fischer were to play and accept the money, he would then be subject to a fine and jail time in the US. At a news conference at the tournament, Fischer waived a copy of the ‘cease and desist’ order from the US government — and then spat on it. From now on his evil rants would not only denounce Jews but also the US. His most infamous and profane rant was during a radio interview in the Philippines where he applauded the recent September 11 attacks on America.

Fischer defeated Spassky again and pocketed the prize money. But now he was a criminal under US law and could never return without being arrested. This meant that he could not be there when his mother died in 1997 followed by his sister in 1998 which likely drove him even more over the edge. He was later arrested trying to leave Japan when it was discovered that his passport had been revoked by the US. He was then held in a Japanese prison for eight months while fighting extradition to America to face charges. It was then that the government of Iceland stepped in and granted Fischer citizenship and asylum for ‘humanitarian reasons’ along with gratitude for his part in putting Iceland on the map during his 1972 match with Spassky. He again lived a reclusive life in Iceland before dying from kidney failure in 2008 at age 64. Only five people attended the funeral in accordance with Fischer's wishes.

So when appraising Fischer’s life, we have to make a judgment on whether he is to be despised for his hate speech against Jews and other Americans or pitied for being mentally ill. What makes the anti-Semitism so difficult to understand was that his mother was Jewish. And now evidence exists to suggest that his real biological father was also Jewish. It’s one thing for somebody to hate Jews. But his poisonous rants were so over-the-top and so completely divorced from reality that it is hard to read or listen to them and not come to the conclusion that this was from a truly sick mind. Dick Cavett who had Fischer on his show three times in the early 1970s, offered this thoughtful retrospective on what was then a very different Bobby Fischer.

As part of his chess legacy, he has given us My 60 Memorable Games which came out in 1969 and is still considered one of the best chess game collections of all time. In addition, he is still considered one of the very best to have ever played the game. (Former World Champion Garry Kasparov who had a more enduring career at the top since Fischer’s exit is now the consensus ‘best of all time’.)

But for his many admiring chess playing fans (including me), it was his fighting spirit that made Fischer so special. Since the player of the white pieces moves first and thus has a small technical advantage (similar to having the serve in tennis), many of the top-flight chess masters have adopted a strategy of playing solid defenses with black to get a draw and then use their turn with the white pieces to squeeze out victories. It’s solid strategy but it leads to a lot of boring draws. Instead, Fischer with black usually adopted more risky fighting defenses going for the win. His great success with the black pieces was responsible for some of his incredibly dominating tournament and match results over his rivals.

I can't sum it up any better than with this passage from the New York Times obituary for Fischer.

Mr. Fischer won with such brilliance and dramatic flair that he became an icon, an unassailable representative of greatness in the world of competitive games, much as Babe Ruth had been and Michael Jordan would become.

It was Bobby Fischer who had, single-handedly, made the world recognize that chess on its highest level was as competitive as football, as thrilling as a duel to the death, as esthetically satisfying as a fine work of art, as intellectually demanding as any form of human activity.

Memo to the Hard Right - It's Our Country Too!

2010-06-23T16:06:00.004-04:00

Last week I watched the MSNBC documentary, Rise of the New Right which if you missed it, can be watched online in the preceding link.

I can’t say there was anything really surprising to me as one who follows politics daily. But even so, there was a sad and frankly uneasy feeling about the political landscape here in the US that has become more of a battleground with those on the hard right wishing more to destroy their opponents than working with them to enact new legislation.

For example, there is this quote from Rush Limbaugh:

We need to defeat these bastards. We need to wipe them out.

Then there is Alan Keyes who said this about President Obama:

We’re either going to stop him or the United States of America will cease to exist.

In addition, there are those who feel the president is illegitimate and should be removed because they believe that he was not born in the US. And then there is Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) who became famous for his Waterloo quotation:

If we're able to stop Obama on [health care reform], it will be his Waterloo. It will break him…

What is even more disturbing is seeing militia training to fight what they call “tyranny” by our government which the dictionary defines as “cruelty and injustice in the exercising of power or authority over others.”

In that defintion, we get a clue on what this is really all about — power!

These people on the hard right are angry simply because they are not presently in power (even if it was due to a legitimate election) and will do whatever they can to get back in power.

Unfortunately, this creates a powerful disincentive to cooperate with the party in power. For example, if the Republicans were to work with the Democrats on passing legislation, the result would likely be a successful Obama administration. But if this happens, how will the Republicans ever get back in power? Even so, a one-dimensional strategy of obstructionism can backfire in the long run. So how better to justify their total non-cooperation with the other side than to label them as illegitimate?

So it will be interesting to see how much the electorate will buy into all of this come the mid-term elections this November. Perhaps the most interesting races will be for the US Senate in Nevada and Kentucky where Sharron Angle and Rand Paul will use their hard right Tea Party ideology to as they like to say “take our country back”.

Maybe they will. But then again they may find out that for those of us who don’t go along with their extremist views — that it’s our country too!

Meddling in our Primary Elections

2010-06-06T07:19:00.009-04:00

Ever since Congressman Joe Sestak scored his stunning upset over long time incumbent Senator Arlen Specter in the recent Pennsylvania Democratic primary election, many questions have been raised over what kind of job was offered to Mr. Sestak by the Obama administration to get him not to run against Specter.

Perhaps just to inflict a little zinger on the Obama administration for supporting his opponent, Sestak did admit in interviews that he was offered a job but has declined to provide any more details.

Since then the Obama administration has taken a "trust us" position in response to repeated questioning on this matter.

“Lawyers in the White House and others have looked into conversations that were had with Congressman Sestak,” Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said Sunday on “Face the Nation” on CBS. “And nothing inappropriate happened.”

“Improper or not, did you offer him a job in the administration?” asked the host, Bob Schieffer.

“I’m not going to get further into what the conversations were,” Mr. Gibbs replied. “People that have looked into them assure me that they weren’t inappropriate in any way.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the “trust us” response from the White House has not exactly put the matter to rest. With Mr. Sestak’s victory over Mr. Specter in last week’s primary, the questions have returned with intensity, only to remain unanswered. Mr. Gibbs deflected questions 13 times at a White House briefing last week just two days after the primary. Mr. Sestak, a retired admiral, has reaffirmed his assertion without providing any details, like who exactly offered what job.

Chances are that the job offer was done carefully and vaguely enough to avoid any problems with the law. But the continued evasion of questions by Obama’s press secretary coupled with the refusal of Obama himself to take questions in a news conference have left a bad taste in many people’s mouths. It is telling that the collection of New York Times Readers' Comments to this article were about as uniformly negative towards Obama as any I've ever seen from this mostly liberal readership.

But even if the job offer was not illegal, did it do a disservice to the Democratic voters in Pennsylvania?

A NYT editorial Unintelligent Design takes a very blasé view of it all.

There doesn’t seem to be anything terribly unethical about the White House offer of an unpaid advisory position to Joe Sestak if he would bow out of the Pennsylvania Democratic primary, in which he later defeated Senator Arlen Specter.

Meddling in Congressional races is an expected and even an important part of any White House political operation, even those that claim to be different from their predecessors. If Mr. Obama had meddled a little earlier and more intensively in the United States Senate race in Massachusetts earlier this year, he might have been able to prevent the election of a Republican, Scott Brown, to the seat long held by Edward Kennedy.

What the editorial writers failed to mention was that the above example is about a general election. A Democratic administration supporting a Democratic candidate running against a Republican candidate makes perfect sense. But a Democratic administration “meddling” in a primary election within its own party raises serious concerns.

Contested primary elections exist for a good reason. Without them, the candidates to choose from in the general elections would be little more than those who were handpicked by political bosses in those proverbial smoke-filled backrooms.

The results of the primary election of course proved that the Pennsylvania Democratic voters preferred Joe Sestak over Arlen Specter on their ballot in November. But if the Obama administration had been successful in preventing Sestak from running, the voters would have never had this choice!

Shortly after Arlen Specter announced his switch to the Democratic Party, he made it a point to stress that he would not be an automatic 60th vote for the Senate Democrats. But after having said that, he has fully cooperated with the Democrats on every crucial vote since then. Having primary opposition in the form of Sestak most certainly had something to do with that.

Now more recently, we have another story about the Obama administration meddling in another primary election.

Press Secretary Robert Gibbs faced fresh questions about another backroom political deal - the first involving a Pennsylvania candidate, now a Colorado hopeful - that put the Obama administration on the defensive. The White House acknowledged that it had contacted former Colorado House Speaker Andrew Romanoff about possible jobs in hopes of persuading him to skip the Senate primary.

One can’t help but wonder how many other deals like these have taken place.

Gibbs defended the White House's involvement in primaries as Democrats struggle to maintain their majorities in the House and Senate in a tough political environment.

"I think the leaders of parties have long had an interest in ensuring that supporters didn't run against each other in contested elections," Gibbs said.

What this really means is that the party leaders are much more interested in preserving the jobs of their incumbents than providing real choice for the voters. This is especially bad in a political system where in the US, the two major parties exert so much control over the election process.

Choice is an absolutely vital part of free and fair elections. If the Obama administration wants to put its political muscle into backing a particular party candidate, that’s bad enough. But to try and actually take voters’ choices away by eliminating primary candidates seriously undermines the democratic process. Instead of just dismissing this as politics as usual, we should be outraged!

Rand Paul - Ideology Running Amok

2010-05-24T14:00:00.007-04:00

It all started when Rand Paul agreed to appear on The Rachel Maddow Show the night after his convincing win in the Kentucky US Senate Republican primary which you can see in this video link. The main topic of conversation turned out to be Paul’s stated concerns about Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights Act which states that:

All persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, as defined in this section, without discrimination on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin. [Private facilities are exempt]

It’s hard to overestimate the significance of this law. It meant the end of an ugly chapter of racial segregation in our nation’s history where "coloreds" had to suffer the indignity of separate restaurants, hotels, rest rooms and even drinking fountains. But Mr. Paul, true to his libertarian roots had reservations about this part of the Act since in his mind, the government had no right to tell private owners of establishments whom they had to serve.

While Mr. Paul’s viewpoint on this subject was known by some in his home state of Kentucky, it wasn’t until Maddow’s interview that this came under national scrutiny.

Many were stunned to hear this from Paul, but for those who have an understanding of libertarianism, this is all very consistent with their ideology of individual freedom coupled with extremely limited government. Many libertarians such as Paul have questioned the right of many established government programs and regulatory agencies to even exist. While Paul has had to defend against aggressive questioning on this subject, Fox News libertarian commentator John Stossel had no qualms about passionately defending Paul in this video tirade which drew a heated response from America Live host Megyn Kelly. Despite Kelly’s arguments to the contrary, Stossel went even further than Paul by actually advocating outrught repeal of this part of the Civil Rights Act.

Of course it can be argued that we must be careful about government intervening in private business decisions. But even as Paul argues, racial segregation is abhorrent. So something had to be done about it. If the method used was objectionable, does he (or Stossel) have a better way? Simply using the “free market” to remedy this as suggested by libertarians is laughably lame if not outright racist. Marie Burns elegantly sums it up this way.

Since most Southern whites favored discrimination, & since all Southern states had larger white populations than they had black populations, why would a business in 1955 just voluntarily "do the right thing"? They wouldn't, even if they wanted to, because they would lose the majority of their business.

Ideological thinking is OK to a point, but it must not ignore the real world problems we need to solve.

Which brings us to the next whopper uttered by Paul in a subsequent interview by George Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America which can be viewed in this video link. In the interview, he singles out President Obama’s criticism of BP for their part in the recent catastrophic oil spill off the coast of Louisiana.

What I don't like from the president's administration is this sort of, 'I'll put my boot heel on the throat of BP.' I think that sounds really un-American in his criticism of business," he said. "I've heard nothing from BP about not paying for the spill. And I think it's part of this sort of blame game society in the sense that it's always got to be someone's fault instead of the fact that sometimes accidents happen.

Paul then went on to make similar remarks about the recent West Virginia mining tragedy. Of course what he ignores is that the criticism is not just about the accidents happening, but more importantly is about the chronically poor safety records of both BP along with Massey Energy, owner of the West Virginia mine where the recent tragedy occurred.

So what is Paul’s solution?

Earlier this year…Paul told the Fox Business Channel that he believes government agencies should reduce their regulation of the energy industry. "Get the EPA out of our coal business down here, get OSHA out of our small businesses. We need to restrain government to let small businesses create jobs," he said.

So does any reasonable person think that these tragedies were due to over regulation? And that less regulation would decrease the likelihood of these “accidents” happening again?

I must admit that as a social liberal, I have long admired the libertarian position against the government regulating what we do in private under the guise of enforcing somebody else’s moral values e.g. Can We Talk About Legalizing Drugs?

But this obsession over the evils of big government has come with a price. Over the last 30 years or so starting with the Reagan administration, government regulations have been significantly cut. And those that are left are often laxly enforced because the manpower in many of the regulatory agencies has been cut to the bone by the Bush administration as part of its philosophical oppositon to regulation.

The result is that although big government’s power has been weakened, instead of this power going to the people as hoped for by libertarians, much of this power has instead been transferred to big business! For example, most mainstream economists agree that the massive deregulation of the financial services industry was behind the reckless behavior causing the recent financial meltdowns on Wall Street. And then there is the recent Supreme Court decision that treats corporations as “people” which now allows them to put unlimited amounts of money into influencing elections.

Nobody wants too much big government. But on the other hand, advocating that those who for example, practice racial segregation or pollute our waters to simply police themselves without some government oversight is sheer madness. Which as Rand Paul has now found out, leads to indefensible positions. Which is undoubtedly why he suddenly decided to cancel his scheduled appearance yesterday on Meet the Press!

The True Cost of Fossil Fuels

2010-05-12T13:16:00.005-04:00

With the recent BP drilling rig explosion off the coast of Louisiana that killed 11 and continues to spill oil into the ocean which has spread to the shore, many of us are once again questioning whether the price we are paying for oil in the form of human lives and environmental damage is worth it.

But the more we find out about this accident, the more resemblance this has to the Preventable Tragedy at Upper Big Branch Mine killing 29 mine workers where the already dangerous occupation of coal mining was made worse by a history of safety violations by the mine’s owner, Massey Energy.

Now we learn that BP has a History of Spills and Safety Lapses.

The oil industry is inherently more dangerous than many other industries, and oil companies, including BP, strive to reduce accidents and improve safety.

Yet some government officials say that they are troubled by the continuation of hazardous practices at BP’s refineries and Alaskan oil operations despite warnings from regulators.

For example, last year the Occupational Safety and Health Administration found more than 700 violations at the Texas City refinery — many concerning faulty valves, which are critical for safety given the high temperatures and pressures. The agency fined BP a record $87.4 million, which was more than four times the previous record fine, also to BP, for the 2005 explosion.

Another refinery, in Toledo, Ohio, was fined $3 million two months ago for “willful” safety violations, including the use of valves similar to those that contributed to the Texas City blast.

“BP has systemic safety and health problems,” said Jordan Barab, the deputy assistant secretary of labor for OSHA. “They need to take their intentions and apply them much more effectively on the ground, where the hazards actually lie.”

So really we have two questions here. Can the oil industry be made safer with better regulatory enforcement and a desire of the companies to clean up their act? Interestingly enough, the article cites ExxonMobil whose reputation took a hit after the Exxon Valdez oil spill off the coast of Alaska as now setting the industry standard for safety. So it certainly can and should be done.

Secondly, is it in our long term interest to be so dependent on oil and other fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas? For so many reasons the answer is no. While the apparent cost of the actual fossil fuel materials is still relatively low compared to alternatives, there are so many hidden costs that are ignored by too many. In addition to the many environmental concerns, the ever decreasing supply of readily obtainable oil and coal not only drives up the price but becomes more dangerous to extract out of the earth. And do we really want to continue the funding of bad actors on the world stage with our petrodollars?

To address these issues, that leaves nuclear and renewable fuels as the only real alternatives. Nuclear now produces about 11% of the world’s energy so it is a proven technology. But the waste it produces must then be safely stored for long periods of time to protect us from its radiation. And as the saga of the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada shows, nobody seems to want nuclear waste in their backyard (or anywhere remotely near it!). For a more complete but not overly technical overview of nuclear and other forms of energy, check out this link.

I wrote in a previous 2008 posting that Renewable Energy May Be the Answer. With the passage of time since then, I now believe it is the answer, especially for the long term. Right now, there are only two things working against it. One is that the industries who already make large profits from fossil fuels such as oil and coal don’t want those profits to go away.

But this is a natural byproduct of technological progress as history has shown. For example, when Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse demonstrated that alternating current (AC) electricity was superior to direct current (DC) for large scale distribution, Thomas Edison whose company was behind the existing DC systems mounted a publicity campaign full of misinformation about the supposed dangers of AC including public electrocutions of animals to try and prove his point. Today there is the same kind of misinformation campaign on climate change largely supported by fossil fuel companies.

The other thing working against renewable energy is that it in many instances it's not quite cost-effective compared to fossil fuels. While we cannot immediately wean ourselves off of fossil fuels, we can help close the cost gap as they did in Brazil which relies on more efficient sugar cane produced ethanol compared to the corn based ethanol produced in the US.

But to make a true comparison between the two, we must also factor in the environmental, human and political costs of the US maintaining an addiction to fossil fuels. Over the long run, this true cost of fossil fuels is one that we cannot afford!

The Importance of Critical Thinking

2010-04-25T21:50:00.009-04:00

A lot of us have been curious about the Tea Party which most of us first saw as a part of organized protests with inflammatory posters depicting President Obama as Hitler or as a socialist or fascist.

So the recent New York Times/CBS News poll and its accompanying NYT article Poll Finds Tea Party Backers Wealthier and More Educated provided some interesting insights on the group.

Tea Party supporters are wealthier and more well-educated than the general public… The 18 percent of Americans who identify themselves as Tea Party supporters tend to be Republican, white, male, married and older than 45.

Their responses are like the general public’s in many ways. Most describe the amount they paid in taxes this year as “fair.” Most send their children to public schools. A plurality do not think Sarah Palin is qualified to be president, and, despite their push for smaller government, they think that Social Security and Medicare are worth the cost to taxpayers.

Tea Party supporters’ fierce animosity toward Washington, and the president in particular, is rooted in deep pessimism about the direction of the country and the conviction that the policies of the Obama administration are disproportionately directed at helping the poor rather than the middle class or the rich.

But even more revealing was an Interactive Feature accompanying the article, Voices of the Tea Party which featured 20 videos submitted by Tea Party supporters on why they support the movement.

Listening to all of them, it's easy to get a general consensus of their feelings. They want a limited government with less spending and taxation along with a balanced budget. And they felt that any government actions to intercede into the economy with a stimulus or bailouts along with more regulation is tantamount to socialism.

While others may criticize these Tea Party supporters as being unintelligent or uneducated, I don’t agree with that. But I do see a general lack of critical thinking on their part.

Of course, it’s easy to say that I feel that way because their views are different from mine. But what strikes me most are their extremely simplistic solutions to complex problems without any underlying thinking to support their (for me) tenuous positions.

This is how Wikipedia begins its article on Critical thinking.

Critical thinking involves determining the meaning and significance of what is observed or expressed, or, concerning a given inference or argument, determining whether there is adequate justification to accept the conclusion as true.

They also write later in the article about important obstacles to critical thinking including:

[T]endency towards group think; the amount your belief system is formed by what those around you say instead of what you have personally witnessed.

I believe this video link neatly sums up the concept of critical thinking.

When Tea Partiers say they are in favor of lower taxes and spending along with a balanced budget, they never say specifically how this is to be accomplished. If they are in favor of maintaining Social Security, Medicare and military spending, what else can be cut that would balance the budget especially if tax increases are not an option? This and other questions like the ones below deserve an answer!

If tax cuts are a panacea as claimed, why did the tax cuts of the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations result in historically large deficits? Where were the deficit hawks when George W. Bush (whom most of the Tea Party view favorably) turned a budget surplus into a huge deficit?

If health care reform is so bad, what would be their solution to providing affordable health insurance to the working poor whose employers can’t or won’t provide coverage?

If providing universal health care in other countries is so bad, where is the outcry in these countries to change their system to what we had in the US before the recent reform bill passed?

While they express their fear of big government controlling our lives, why are they so silent about big corporations controlling our lives? While speaking out against so-called government “death panels”, why were they so silent about health insurance companies enriching their profits by denying life saving treatment to some of their policyholders which is in effect a real death panel?

They say that government doesn’t listen to us. But why do they fail to mention that the biggest cause of this is the millions of dollars of corporate money put into elections and lobbying to make sure that as many of our legislators as possible are bought and paid for?

If indeed President Obama is a secret Muslim who was born in Kenya, why didn’t his presidential opponent, John McCain use this against him in the election? If McCain believes neither of these are true, why is that not good enough to satisfy the rest of the Republicans including many in the Tea Party?

I feel that too many of those in the Tea Party are into group think, which as mentioned previously is a tendency to have a belief system based on those around them rather than on personal observations and experience. And while these people most likely get their information and opinions solely from Fox News, it is clear that Fox has also benefited in the ratings from being a driving force behind the Tea Party movement.

If liberals are viewed with such obvious contempt by these people, what is the chance that they would ever want to listen to an opposing viewpoint from any of them? From personal experience, when listening to those who oppose health care reform, I have often urged them to at least watch the first 30 minutes of Michael Moore’s movie Sicko to at least try to understand the other side of the health care debate. But if it's Michael Moore who is saying it, it must be wrong in the minds of these people and thus I have never gotten any of these people to agree to seeing any part of Sicko. The same attitude is reserved for other liberals such as Al Gore. Because it’s Al Gore warning us about global warming or climate change, it must be wrong. Case closed!

But it’s not necessarily about where we get our information. It’s about whether we question those who give us their information or viewpoints. Admittedly, I mostly watch MSNBC because their liberal viewpoints are usually compatible with my own. But I still insist in my own mind that MSNBC or anybody else has the obligation to provide some factual back up to support their opinions. For example, if an MSNBC host says that Rush Limbaugh made some racist remarks that day, I expect them to show the video clip so I can make up my own mind. And as for Michael Moore and Sicko, he provides factual backup for this and other movies he has made.

The world is (and will continue to be) full of complex problems for our leaders to try and solve. Many issues simply cannot be broken down into simple black and white viewpoints. Relying on simplistic solutions may not do much to solve these problems, but it sure makes for heated conflict between the different sides which makes for good TV sound bites. And there are all too many politicians who exploit this lack of critical thinking to their own benefit getting by with little more than repeating ideological talking points instead of using substance and reasoning to make a point. But alas, listening to substance and reasoning means that we have to rely on more than just sound bites that the media is all too often content to feed us.

The Tea Party supporters say that we are going in the wrong direction. Whether we are or not will greatly depend on whom we elect as our future leaders. To elect the right leaders, it requires making the effort to actually acquire an understanding of the issues that we passionate believe in. It requires empathy to understand the plight of those who are less fortunate than us. And most importantly, it requires us to be open minded enough to seek the truth no matter where it leads us. So do we have what it takes?

A Preventable Tragedy at Upper Big Branch Mine

2010-04-11T22:34:00.007-04:00

Last Monday turned tragic when 29 miners lost their lives in an explosion at the Upper Big Branch coal mine in West Virginia. But this time mixed with the grief over the tragedy was anger at the owner of the mine, Massey Energy which had been cited with a history of violations.

The Upper Big Branch coal mine, where an explosion Monday killed 25 miners (now 29), has a history of serious violations that at points were five times more extensive than the national average, according to federal records.

The mine in Raleigh County, near Beckley, W.Va., was cited for 458 safety violations last year, with 50 of them listed as unwarrantable failures to comply -- citations reserved under federal mining regulations for instances of willful or gross negligence.

Nationwide, an average of 2 percent of safety violations are unwarrantable failures. Slightly more than 10 percent of Upper Big Branch mine's violations last year were unwarrantable failures.

At the time of Monday's explosion, Upper Big Branch mine was facing more than $150,000 in fines for pending safety violations, after routine scheduled inspections resulted in more than 100 citations three times in a 12-month period.

When a mine gets this many citations as a result of inspections that are actually announced ahead of time, it’s safe to say that its management is thumbing their noses at the inspectors and the agencies they work for. But this time, its management is being represented by the outspoken and controversial chairman and CEO of Massey Energy, Don Blankenship.

Whether it is because he is the head of Central Appalachia's largest coal producer, a financier of Republican campaigns whose spending has rewritten constitutional law, the lead organizer of a Friends of America Labor Day rally on the site of a mountaintop mine, or a blunt spoken businessman who has taken on environmentalists -- "greeniacs" and "enviros" as he refers to them -- Mr. Blankenship's statements and actions elicit strong emotions.

Those emotions intensified in the wake of the nation's largest mining disaster since 1984. Critics of Mr. Blankenship cite what they say is Massey's long history of violating safety and environmental rules.

But Blankenship has been controversial not just for his strong anti-regulatory views but also his political influence over West Virginia’s Supreme Court which went as far as Blankenship vacationing with its Chief Justice while the court was hearing Massey's appeal of a $50 million dollar jury verdict against him.

So again we have an ideological battle between those on the political left who feel that stronger and better enforced regulations are necessary to help prevent future tragedies and those on the right who argue that regulations are an evil of big government.

Union miners can at least refuse to work in areas that are unsafe until they are repaired. But most miners today do not have union representation and thus have little leverage against an unscrupulous owner. Especially for those workers who live in remote rural locations in Appalachia, they are forced to make a choice between working in substandard conditions and not working at all.

The Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) has been reacting to violations by issuing what are called “withdrawal orders” which means shutting down only the affected parts of the mine until the violations are corrected. This seems reasonable but how effective is this when a mine has shown a continual pattern of violations?

Officials from the department’s Mine Safety and Health Administration issued 54 withdrawal orders to the Upper Big Branch Mine in 2009 and seven so far in 2010, according to the documents. Fifty-four of those withdrawal orders “were issued when inspectors found Massey subsidiary Performance Coal exhibited an ‘unwarrantable failure’ to comply with federal health and safety standards,” Ward writes.
There’s a distinction to be made here. Issuing withdrawal orders is different than closing the mine altogether, which would require MSHA to get court approval first. In cases of closure, officials would have to prove that mine operators showed “a pattern of violations” — a step that’s been complicated by the skyrocketing number of appeals being filed by mining companies to protest citations. (After all, how do you prove a pattern based on violations that are in dispute?)
Indeed, MSHA never even tried to cite the Upper Big Branch for such a pattern, despite the fact that more than 1,300 citations were filed against the mine in the last five years.

But here is the worst part.

The company was tied to eight fatal accidents at West Virginia mines in 2001 and was blasted by investigators for failing to prevent a 2006 fire that killed two miners. It was cited by federal regulators for 1,342 safety violations over the past five years, including two the day of the explosion. Davitt McAteer, former head of the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration and chief investigator of the earlier Massey accidents, called that "a huge number" and said that Monday's explosion "should not have happened. It was preventable."

So what we have here is the worst of both worlds. Weak regulations that only require wrist slaps for violations in the form of fines (a civil penalty of no more than $220,000) to go with a regulatory agency that is lax in doing its job. For companies such as Massey Energy who had 2009 earnings of over $104 million, these fines (which are often reduced through appeals anyway) along with political contributions to try and influence politicians and judges are no more than the price of doing business.

There are two obvious changes that need to be made — one to address past violations and another one to address future violations and thus save needless loss of lives.

As for the past, we obviously can’t bring the lost miners back. But in the case of Don Massey (and others like him) who may well have committed repeated criminal negligence pursuing profits at the expense of safety, criminal charges (including manslaughter) must be considered when the preventable loss of life has occurred.

As for the future, we need to start enforcing the existing regulations that totally shut down the mines where a repeated pattern of serious violations is found until all of the violations are corrected to the satisfaction of the inspectors. Fines are just a pinprick. Totally shutting down a mine stops the flow of revenue and profits which would really get a company's attention since it would hurt their all-important bottom line.

Everybody agrees that coal mining is inherently a dangerous occupation and that some accidents and deaths are unavoidable. But it stands to reason that if the offending mines were forced to close until the serious safety violations are fixed, the great majority of accidents and fatalities could be avoided. We rightly safeguard passengers from flying in a plane that was found to have serious mechanical issues until it is satisfactorily repaired. Why can’t we do the same to protect our coal miners?

So in the end, it comes down to what we value more — profits or human lives. The only moral decision is to resolutely come down on the side of human life! Regrettably, it has been shown that some, e.g. the mining and health insurance industries, that profits are often indeed more important than human lives. We must do what we can to correct those on the other side whether it is by coercion, legislation, or where appropriate, punishment by jail time.

If we are to truly call ourselves a moral society, we can do no less!

Will the Pope Resign?

2010-04-04T21:36:00.011-04:00

It does seem a bit strange on Easter Sunday to speculate on whether the Pope is going to resign. But it is clearly on the minds of the Catholic faithful along with those in the Vatican as evidenced in Pope's Abuse Record Defended Before Easter Mass.

In an extraordinary departure to the ritual of Easter Mass at St. Peter's Square, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, a senior Vatican official and Dean of the College of Cardinals, staunchly defended Pope Benedict from what he called ''petty gossip'' and hailed his ''unfailing'' leadership and courage in leading the church's response to the crisis.

Petty gossip? Cases of sexual abuse around the world have become so widespread that there is no longer any doubt that many cases of sexual abuse by priests against children have occurred with the Catholic Church being part of a cover up to protect many of the guilty from prosecution. Perhaps the most well known case here in the US is that of the former archbishop of Boston, Cardinal Law.

Cardinal Law came to personify the clergy abuse crisis. He was the first member of the Catholic hierarchy shown to have actively covered up clergy abuse. Immediately after the Boston Globe broke the abuse story in 2002, Law refused to step down. But 11 months later, when priests’ records were released by court order showing that Law took elaborate steps to cover for abusers, he stepped down.

So whatever became of Cardinal Law? Dismissal from the Catholic Church? Hardly.

After leaving Boston, Law was named [by Pope John Paul II] to the prominent position of archpriest of the St. Mary Major Basilica in Rome. He also serves on several Vatican boards and committees and he participated in the 2005 conclave that elected Pope Benedict.

But now there are serious allegations that the Pope himself was part of a cover up as summed up by blogger Andrew Sullivan in his March 16th posting How Is the Pope Different from Cardinal Law?

A priest is discovered to have been actively molesting children. His superior is notified in 1980. One of the things he is told of is the priest's forcing an 11 year old boy to perform oral sex on him. The superior does not contact the police. He approves a transfer of the priest to a different city, where the priest is required to undergo therapy but is also subsequently able to resume his work with access to children. Six years later, the priest is again found guilty of abusing children. This time, he serves a sentence, but he is subsequently allowed to resume work as a priest, with the church authorities hiding his past from future parishes, and is only removed from his position
three days ago.
Joseph Ratzinger was the superior, he reviewed the man's files in 1980, and he was subsequently in charge of reviewing all sex abuse cases as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine Of The Faith in Rome. He was integral to the policy of hushing up as much of this as possible.

Of course, Joseph Ratzinger is now Pope Benedict XVI.

Further damning evidence on Pope Benedict was presented in the 39 minute, 2006 BBC Panorama documentary Sex Crimes and the Vatican which is available for viewing online in this link.

So far, to nobody’s surprise, the Vatican has resorted to a policy of denial and stonewalling with the Pope refusing to directly address the allegations. What complicates things tremendously is that the Pope as a head of state is given diplomatic immunity from prosecution. (Panama’s former dictator Manuel Noriega is an exception but that was justified on the grounds that he was accused of drug trafficking and racketeering.)

Without a practical way to prosecute high ranking Vatican officials, it is easier for them to dismiss these serious charges as “petty gossip” without having to respond to direct questioning. And while previous popes in the history of the church have resigned, the rules of the church clearly state that a pope cannot be forced to resign.

So the question by many including myself is not whether the pope should resign but whether he eventually will resign for the good of his church. While Pope Benedict can probably stay for as along as he wishes, the rapidly eroding support by many of its members will continue to exact its toll. How many churchgoers are going to financially support their church when they see the millions of dollars being paid out to settle lawsuits? How many young people will dedicate their lives to serving in the clergy if they see their church hierarchy as being corrupt? And a church that has its so-called moral leader accused of serious crimes will surely become more and more irrelevant to its members while possibly making some of them go as far as to even question their faith.

Surely, a major housecleaning needs to be done to try and repair the damage to the church. But without replacing the man at the top who controls everything, any efforts at reform will justifiably be looked at as no more than window dressing to preserve the power of its existing bureaucracy. Or in other words, preserving the status quo.

But as the recent sexual scandal around Tiger Woods proved, continued denial and stonewalling will only make matters worse for the church. Without answers from the Vatican, people will assume the worst and come up with their own answers which will further damage the church’s credibility and reputation.

I’m not a betting man. But if I were, I’d bet on the pope eventually resigning for the good of his church. Apparently others are too. Legal online bookmakers like paddypower.com are posting odds on not only the pope’s resignation but also on who will replace him. So far, most of the money is on him resigning causing the odds to be shortened from 12/1 to 3/1. And the current odds as of this posting have fallen to an astounding 6/4!

But lest we forget, this is ultimately not about the pope or even the church. It is about the victims who need our support to get some closure and to move on with their lives as best they can. It is about treating these acts of abuse (and their cover up) not just as a sin, but as a crime that requires prosecution and punishment.

And equally important, the Catholic Church has to put its top priority into protecting its children instead of just protecting its bureaucracy. Hard questions have to be asked about why the priesthood seems to attract so many pedophiles. Again, Andrew Sullivan who is both gay and Catholic offers his interesting perspective on the subject in this posting.

I don't believe…that you can tackle this problem without seeing it as a symptom of a much deeper failure of the church to come to terms with sexuality, sexual orientation and the warping, psychologically distorting impact of compulsory celibacy in the priesthood. If women and married men were allowed to be priests, if homosexuality were regarded in Catholic theology as a healthy and rare difference rather than as a shameful disorder, this atmosphere would end, and these crimes would for the most part disappear and the cloying, closeted power-structure which enabled them to go unpunished for so long would finally crumble. And the church could grow again.

Amen!

Health Care Reform at Last!

2010-03-23T16:29:00.009-04:00

For so many of us in the US hoping for health care reform, the last year has been an emotional roller coaster. At times, it looked encouraging. Some of our legislators were promising that not only would a reform bill pass, but it would also have a strong public insurance option to compete with the private insurers who had been relentlessly raising their rates.

But especially when President Obama seemed so ambivalent about the public option, liberals who felt they were already sold out by the president for taking single-payer (Medicare for All) off the table were left to wonder whether what was left in the bill was even worth passing.

And when Republican Scott Brown (a.k.a. "Mr. 41") won the late Senator Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat, things looked really grim since the Republicans now had enough senators to block any and all Democratic legislation by use of the filibuster. Sure there was an obscure technical way to bypass the filibuster called reconciliation, but President Obama seemed to many of us to be more of a professorial lecturer than somebody who would be willing to fight for a noble cause.

But his State of the Union speech signaled a change in strategy. Instead of staying in the background and letting Congress fight it out, the president finally took ownership of health care reform. When he finally figured out that the health insurance industry was not part of the solution but indeed the problem, he finally started calling them out on their abusive practices.

Most important of all, when he traveled around the country to rally people around health reform, he finally stressed the human cost our present policies were causing by including real-life stories of individuals who needlessly suffered through illness and financial catastrophe. Better late than never, but I think he should have stressed the moral imperative of health care reform from the beginning!

While the Democrats were stressing the human needs that had to be addressed, the Republicans persisted in talking about little more than the dollars and cents to pay for it, ignoring the human side of the problem.

Now that the bill has been signed, instead of helping to make the bill they disagreed with work as well as possible now that it is a law, the Republicans are now talking about doing what they can to repeal it — which is especially ludicrous with the Democrats now in control of Congress and the White House.

The Republican rhetoric about health care reform being socialized medicine doesn’t look like it’s going to go away any time soon. After all, it’s in their DNA going back to Ronald Reagan Speaking Out Against Socialized Medicine back in 1961 to try and head off a proposed plan to provide seniors with health insurance that we now know as Medicare.

In fairness, nobody knows for sure exactly how well this newly signed law is going to work. Unlike simpler plans such as expanding Medicare to all US citizens, this is a hodgepodge of different plans pieced together as a result of the legislative process requiring many compromises to get enough legislators to vote for it. The part I most worry about is that the ban against rejecting adults for coverage due to pre-existing conditions doesn’t go into effect until 2014. In the meantime, these people will have to resort to joining high-risk pools to get insurance which may or may not be affordable for those who most need it.

But if reform does work, the non-stop hysteria by those opposing health care reform over the last year is going to deeply affect their credibility. Medicare was controversial when it was first enacted. Today, only those on the fringe right would ever advocate taking it away from our seniors.

Conservative commentator and former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum, had this to say on the day the health care bill was passed in his controversial blog posting Waterloo.

A huge part of the blame for today’s disaster attaches to conservatives and Republicans ourselves.

At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo – just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994.

This time, when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none.

We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.

There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or – more exactly – with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother?

So today’s defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will now be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it’s mission accomplished. For the cause they purport to represent, it’s Waterloo all right: ours.

I can’t think of anybody more deserving!

The Emergence of the Amateur Professional

2010-03-10T22:05:00.002-05:00

Every time the Olympics come around, there is the inevitable call by some to bring the amateurs back to the Olympics. One of the most memorable Olympic events ever was the 1980 "Miracle on Ice" in Lake Placid when the amateur US hockey team beat the Soviet Union team that consisted of full time “amateur” players.

While there are a number of reasons for finally allowing professional players in the Olympics, the one the stands out is that at the top levels it has become almost impossible to truly distinguish between the amateur and professional athlete.

At one time, the definition between an amateur and professional was pretty straightforward. The amateur is not paid for what he or she does, the professional is.

But when so-called “amateur” Olympic athletes from the Eastern Bloc were not paid a salary but had all of their expenses paid for by their governments, true amateurs who had to train in their spare time while holding a job were at a severe competitive disadvantage. So other countries had to resort to subsidizing their athletes through their governments or private donations which made the idea of pure amateurism little more than a joke.

But in many endeavors, the dividing line between professional and amateur is becoming more and more blurred. Let’s take the definition of a professional.

pro·fes·sion·al [prō féshən’l, prō féshnəl, prə féshən’l]

1. member of profession: somebody whose occupation requires extensive education or specialized training

2. somebody doing something as paid job: somebody who is engaged in an occupation as a paid job rather than as a hobby

3. somebody very competent: somebody who shows a high degree of skill or competence

As 3. suggests, while a high degree of skill and competence can be attained through formal education, there is a growing group of people who have also attained these skills and competencies — the amateur professional. (sometimes referred to as a professional amateur)

The concept and terms have been used, since 2004, as a descriptor for an emerging sociological and economic trend of "people pursuing amateur activities to professional standards."
Amateur professionalism occurs in populations that have more leisure time and live longer, allowing the pursuit of hobbies and other non-essential interests at a professional or near-professional knowledge and skill-level.

Am-pro fields today increasingly include astronomy, activism, sports equipment (e.g. in surfing and mountain biking), software engineering, education, and music production and distribution.
An example of professional amateurism on a large, and socially and economically notable, scale is the international open source and free software operating system project GNU/Linux which along with its many spinoffs has been developed by paid professionals at companies such as Red Hat, HP and IBM working generally indistinguishably together with am pro coders, and has become a major competitor to Microsoft Windows.

Charles Leadbeater, a London think tank researcher in this video talk “weaves a tight argument that innovation isn't just for professionals anymore. Passionate amateurs, using new tools, are creating products and paradigms that companies can't.”

In Leadbeater’s initial example, he cites how the mountain bike was actually invented by enthusiastic amateurs before the mainstream manufacturers discovered its worth and eventually mass-produced it.

Many of the more recent discoveries in the field of astronomy have been a collaboration of amateurs and professionals. And not long ago, it was difficult for writers to share their thoughts with the world except for established authors and journalists. Now there are self-published authors and bloggers, many of whom have produced quality writing that rivals that of the full-time professionals.

Not surprisingly, there are professionals who take the prejudicial attitude that the term “amateur” necessarily means second rate as I wrote in Writing Is My Labor of Love in response to a local newspaper columnist who wrote:

Writing is a tough gig, and the fact that millions of people choose to do it for free is a mystery to us paid writers.

Leadbeater has also published a paper, The Pro-Am Revolution which explores this subject in more depth and can be accessed in this link.

I feel there are two things we need to take away from all of this.

One is that innovation is the lifeblood of among others, the manufacturing and educational processes. Instead of amateur professionals being cast aside as second-rate, we need to acknowledge and encourage their contributions.

Secondly, although many have lost their professional jobs due to a terrible economy, many of these same people have a great deal to offer through experience and knowledge acquired in other fields that they are passionate about. For those who want to or need to make a career transition, they should be judged on their own merits instead of simply formal education.

I conclude with this from Leadbeater.

Some professionals will seek to defend their endangered monopoly. The more enlightened will understand that knowledge is widely distributed, not controlled in a few ivory towers. The most powerful organizations will combine the know-how of professionals and amateurs to solve complex problems. That is true in astronomy, software development and online games. It should be the path that our health, education and welfare systems follow as well.

We Need To Pass Health Care Reform Now!

2010-02-28T23:23:00.003-05:00

OK, I admit it. I don’t have a life. How else can I explain my watching almost all of the 7 hour Health Care Summit last Thursday led by President Obama and attended by Democratic and Republican legislators?

It’s not that I expected all that much. But it was at least worthwhile to see what would happen if the sides engage each other across the table. All too often, we see legislators on both sides share their viewpoints on media outlets that are friendly to their viewpoints. For example, the Democrats appear on liberal friendly MSNBC while the Republicans appear on conservative friendly Fox News.

But to nobody’s surprise, the two sides had irreconcilable differences. The Democrats were worried about insuring as many of the 45 million uninsured as possible. The Republicans were worried about how much covering these additional people would cost.

The Democrats asked whether there was any compromise that would enable President Obama’s proposed reforms to pass with some bipartisan support. The Republicans wanted the process started over from scratch. It is widely accepted in Congress that the more a bill can be delayed, the more likely it is to die. So isn't starting all over just another way to kill health care reform?

Even conservative NYT columnist Ross Douthat had this to say about the Republicans in his op-ed piece Six Hours of Hot Air!

(President Obama’s) Republican opponents, meanwhile, were out to disprove the notion that they have no ideas on health care reform. Not so, America, not so! They have two ideas, malpractice reform and interstate purchasing, which they clung to all day like Al Gore with his lockbox. Also, they had several piled-high copies of the lengthy Senate health care bill, and a slogan to go with them: “Let’s start over from a clean sheet of paper.” What would end up on that paper? Why, malpractice reform and interstate purchasing, of course!

But one thing more than anything else signaled that there was no way to bridge the partisan gap. While the Democratic proposal would insure about 30 million of the 45 million uninsured, the Republican version would insure only about 3 million of them! Many bills have been passed by legislators reaching across the aisle and working for a common goal. For example, if both the Democrats and Republicans really wanted to find a way to insure 30 million Americans, there would be hope of getting something accomplished. But when one side wants to insure 30 million and the other side only wants to insure 3 million, there is no common goal to work for which makes compromise just about impossible.

So the only possible way forward for the Democrats is to go it alone and pass legislation through the Senate by using reconciliation which only requires a simple majority instead of 60 to bypass a Republican filibuster. While the Republicans see this issue mainly in terms of dollars and cents, pro-reform people see this as a moral imperative to alleviate the needless suffering and dying by those who do not have health insurance. For each day we delay, more people suffer and die needlessly. We need to think about this when deciding whether to pass health care reform now or just delay it endlessly!

The Greatest Animal Welfare Scandal of our Time

2010-02-21T23:34:00.007-05:00

One of the highlights of the year for US dog lovers is the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show held each February at Madison Square Garden in New York City. It is considered by many to be the most prestigious dog show in the world next to Crufts in the UK. I like dogs very much but admittedly not enough to own one. I’m lucky if I can take care of myself let alone a dog!

But that doesn’t stop me from enjoying other people’s dogs on the annual telecast that concluded last Tuesday. I root for my favorite breeds on TV along with the spectators at the show.

But the inquisitive part of me wondered about a number of things surrounding these dog shows. One of those was how the winners were picked. I know that it’s not about whether one breed is better than another. That would be like deciding whether vanilla or chocolate ice cream is objectively better. Instead it’s about judging how closely a vanilla ice cream meets its own standard of excellence compared to how closely the chocolate ice cream meets its own standard of excellence. And so it is with dog breeds at these shows.

So at least in theory, every breed has an equal chance of winning. But the history of the show has examples of breeds that have been frequent winners along with many breeds than have never won despite being part of the show for over a century. What’s with that?

So a judge of a group of different breeds literally has to remember every detail of the extensively detailed breed standards of each of a couple dozen dogs he or she has to judge to be able to pick a winner. Can they really do that?

Even more incredible is the best of breed judging which is not normally shown on the telecasts but you can check out the Golden Retriever judging in this video link. Here the judge has to pick a winner from a group of forty dogs who practically look like clones of one another. If the dogs were separated from their handlers and put into a group, one can’t help but wonder how many of the handlers would be able to pick out their own dog?

But most important is the issue of why so many of those dogs within a breed look like clones of one another. The answer is that the dogs are bred to all have the same physical attributes as those in the published standard for that breed. Whichever dog comes closest to that standard is normally declared the winner. But the big problem with this is that inbreeding is often used to set the physical characteristics of the dogs to be able to compete in these shows. And especially when overdone, the health of many of these breeds has been severely compromised.

A 2008 BBC investigative documentary, Pedigree Dogs Exposed is an emotionally gripping story of what they call “the greatest animal welfare scandal of our time”.

The one hour video can be viewed online by opening this link.

The dogs are falling apart. And the number of genetic problems are increasing at a frightening pace.

We are in effect, breeding them to death.

People are carrying out breeding which would be first of all entirely illegal in humans and secondly is absolutely insane from the point of view of the health of the animals. In some breeds they are paying a terrible price in genetic disease.

One of the breeds examined is the Cavalier King Charles Spaniel which was estimated to have as much as one third of the breed affected by syringomyelia, which occurs as a result of the skull being too small for the brain which can result in agonizing pain for the dog.

In addtion, they have an incidence of heart disease about 20-25 times as much as other breeds.

By the time they are 5, half of all Cavaliers will have a heart murmur…By the time they are 10 or 11, almost all Cavailiers will have a heart murmur of some description.

The excellent Animal Planet series, Dogs 101 describes the mitral heart disease of this breed in some detail but doesn’t mention anything about syringomyelia.

And the documentary goes into how many other breeds are suffering similar fates.

Much of the blame for all of this is given to the existence of dog shows. In addtion to breeding more for appearance (which wins dog shows) than health concerns, a number of dog show winners with genetic health problems have been known to produce many offspring because of the lucrative amount of money that champions can bring in breeding fees.

There is nothing wrong per se with breeding purebred dogs for physical traits. This preserves the identity of each of the breeds. The problem is when the health and vitality of the breeds are neglected in favor of physical standards that win dog shows.

But in fairness, the blame must also go to those who mass produce puppies not for the love of the breed but instead to satisfy the demand for some of the most popular breeds.

Most likely, breed standards used in dog shows will have to be relaxed somewhat to allow more healthy dogs to enhance the genetic pool. And health standards at dog shows have to be enforced to not allow dogs who clearly have health problems to compete.

All it takes is enough people who truly care about the welfare of these animals to speak out and do something!

Happy Valentine's Day! - Except in Saudi Arabia

2010-02-14T08:34:00.003-05:00

Valentine’s Day has been declared illegal in Saudi Arabia! In accordance with this ruling, police are raiding gift and flower shops there, confiscating all items that are red, including flowers.

This has to be a joke. Right? Surely, something over-the-top like this can only exist as a spoof. But as anyone who has lived or worked there can tell you, this is no joke!

My job as a sales engineer gave me the opportunity to visit the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on four occasions back in the 80s and 90s. It was a culture shock unlike any other that I have experienced. And it started when I arrived for the first time at customs in Riyadh. Since my flight arrived there at about 2 in the morning, I expected things to go quickly. Wrong! It was a seemingly endless line that wasn’t moving anywhere. After about two hours, when I got near the customs inspectors, it was apparent why it was taking so long. The inspectors were thoroughly looking through each and every item in each and every suitcase. Opening cologne and after shave bottles looking for alcohol. Thumbing through magazines for any possible photos of scantily clad women. Checking any food items to make sure that they contained no pork.

Until very recently, no public theatres were allowed to exist. And TV back then consisted of two channels, Saudi 1 and Saudi 2. Saudi 1 was in Arabic. Saudi 2 in English (presumably for the benefit of foreign expats) had mostly children’s programming along with westerns. This was to avoid programming that gave any significant roles to women. (To this day, women are not even allowed to drive on public roads.)

In such an environment with so little to do when not working, I have never had the urge for a drink any more than when I was there. Fortunately, there was always access to siddique, a black market moonshine that had a faint smell of nail polish remover but tasted acceptable mixed with tonic and lime. Even in as strict a country as Saudi Arabia, prohibition still doesn’t work!

So when there was outrage here in the US over our troops in Desert Storm having their mail opened by Saudi censors when they were stationed there, I knew this was little more than business as usual.

But what is most controversial about Saudi Arabia is its governmental backing of Wahhabism.

For more than two centuries, Wahhabism has been Saudi Arabia's dominant faith. It is an austere form of Islam that insists on a literal interpretation of the Koran. Strict Wahhabis believe that all those who don't practice their form of Islam are heathens and enemies. Critics say that Wahhabism's rigidity has led it to misinterpret and distort Islam, pointing to extremists such as Osama bin Laden and the Taliban.

This has resulted not only in the Saudi government’s strict control of its people but also a tremendous control over the religious education of its youth. Critics have cited that teaching this belief in others being heathens and enemies has led to hate filled people on their way to possibly becoming terrorists.

Freedom House, an organization that is an advocate on human rights issues including religious freedom, published this scathing report titled Saudi Arabia's Curriculum of Intolerance.

This report has been written in response to concerns over whether adequate reforms have been implemented in the Saudi government’s educational system. After September 11, 2001, complaints were voiced around the world, including by the U.S. government, that Saudi schools demonize the West and the “other (religions).”

Senior Saudi government spokesmen have also acknowledged this as a problem, and have repeatedly pledged that reform is underway or completed. Yet our findings contradict Saudi Arabia’s public claims that it has removed all such material from its educational texts.

As demonstrated by excerpts from the dozen current Islamic studies textbooks analyzed in this report, the Saudi public school religious curriculum continues to propagate an ideology of hate toward the “unbeliever,” that is, Christians, Jews, Shiites, Sufis, Sunni Muslims who do not follow Wahhabi doctrine, Hindus, atheists and others. This ideology is introduced in a religion textbook in the first grade and reinforced and developed in following years of the public education system, culminating in the twelfth grade, where a text instructs students that it is a religious obligation to do “battle” against infidels in order to spread the faith.

When 15 of the 19 suicide hijackers who attacked America on 9/11 were discovered to be young Saudi nationals, it is no wonder that many Americans came to the understandable (but incorrect) conclusion that Islam is inherently a religion that is all about hate and intolerance.

But in truth, it is more about Wahhabism and Saudi Arabia. The report continues..

Adherents of Wahhabism constitute a small minority within world Islam, yet, Saudi Arabia is trying to assert itself as the world’s authoritative voice on Islam.

(It has) control of Islam’s two holiest sites and the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca that is one of the five pillars of Islam. This role, along with its vast oil wealth, has been used by Saudi Arabia to lay claim to being the leading power within all of Islam and the protector of the faith, a claim emphasized in the Saudi Basic Law.

If these criticisms of Saudi Arabia are as true as they appear to be, some diplomacy needs to be done to try and prevent the emergence of future generations of terrorists. And if that doesn’t work, they need to be publicly called out for their lack of cooperation. But who is going to do that? The US is in a very awkward position since it is so dependent on Saudi oil. Perhaps this is best done by the other Muslim nations that practice Islam with peace and tolerance but have had to endure a bad rap on Islam because of a small number of their extreme fundamentalists who are out of control!

Let's Finally Get Rid of Those Utility Poles

2010-02-08T12:29:00.013-05:00

After looking at this Pittsburgh Post-Gazette photo taken after the major snowstorm that hit here in Pittsburgh and later Washington D.C., I had an Andy Rooney moment. In my best Andy Rooney voice, I thought out loud, “Did you ever wonder why we still put up with all of those ugly utility poles and wires all over the place?”

As it turns out, back in 2005 the real Andy Rooney did a 60 Minutes essay on this subject titled America Should Go Wireless.

How in the world did we ever allow the power companies and the telephone companies to disfigure our landscape with their tangle of wires displayed on 50-foot tall poles?

They dominate our skyline. If there are good, natural, full-grown trees in the path of the pole-borne wires, power companies regularly disfigure the trees by cutting holes in the foliage. They chop off limbs to let their wires through.

Eliminating the eyesore of utility poles by running lines underground would certainly make our neighborhoods more attractive looking and not coincidentally, increase property values. But converting to underground lines is expensive and tough to justify strictly on the grounds of aesthetics.

But when we consider the hundreds of thousands who lost their power in the Mid-Atlantic states along with Washington D.C. area, it is fitting to ask if we can do something to reduce the number of power outages in the future. And make no mistake, this is far more that an inconvenience to these people when they lose their heat in frigid temperatures. (Gas furnaces also need electricity to run the controls and the air blowers.) Not only is this dangerous to especially the elderly, but many people get sick or even die from carbon monoxide poisoning trying to use alternative means to keep warm.

Many if not most of these power outages were due to the use of overhead lines — or more precisely, trees falling onto the power lines. (Post-Gazette photo)

In the summertime, it is lightning strikes and high winds that wreak havoc on overhead lines.

And when vehicles crash into utility poles, severe injury or death is the usual result.

Most new construction in the last 30 years or so in cities and suburbs has been built with underground wiring instead of utility poles. And this means that for street lighting, lightweight aluminum poles are used that snap off on impact, thus saving lives and preventing serious injury.

But converting existing areas to underground wiring can be expensive and disruptive. Which is why it is said to be impractical. But repairing massive outages like the one this weekend in a timely manner is also expensive. For example, with all of Allegheny Power’s line crews out doing repairs…

Allegheny Power also has also contracted with up to 1,000 outside contractors and brought in hundreds of trained crews from other utilities not hit by the storm in western Ohio and southern New York.

With a state of emergency declared by the areas affected, much of the tab will be picked up by the state governments or more likely the federal government. So why not use some of the federal stimulus money intended for rebuilding our infrastructure on converting some of our overhead lines to underground ones? Admittedly, it is not practical to do it everywhere, but it is reasonable to expect that our utilities keep data on which areas have been the most trouble prone — most likely it's where trees and overhead lines are in close proximity to one another. Can’t we at least prioritize these areas first to give our spending the most bang for the buck?

Getting rid of utility poles is not a cure-all. Some parts of the power distribution system still have to be above ground so there will still be some outages due to weather — but not nearly as many. Which means not nearly as much hardship like that experienced by hundreds of thousands this weekend who lost their power.

We are good at putting our money and efforts into emergencies and disasters during and after they occur. But spending money on trying to help prevent them isn’t worth it to many of us. When will we ever learn?

Is Health Care Reform Still a Priority?

2010-02-03T23:37:00.003-05:00

Before watching President Obama’s State of the Union address last week, I had concerns that health care reform would no longer be a real priority of his administration. I still feel that way now.

It wasn’t just that the President didn’t mention health care until about 30 minutes into his speech. It was the emphasis that the first 3 priorities for this country are jobs, jobs, and jobs. Most likely, this was in response to Republican criticism that he “wasted” all of last year on health care reform instead of jobs which they said should have been his real priority.

But President Obama never intended the health care reform process to take all year. He originally wanted to have a bill passed before the August recess, but that was delayed so his opponents could spend the August recess subverting the reform process during the heated town hall meetings that made the news almost every night. In fact, it took a heroic effort just to get a Senate bill passed by Christmas Eve.

But as vitally important as jobs are, a case can be made that health care reform is even more important. While losing a job is bad enough, getting seriously ill or injured without access to health care for lack of health insurance is more immediately devastating. It can lead to financial catastrophe and the loss of ones home. Even worse, it can lead to needless suffering or even death. In a previous posting, Letting Those 44,000 People Die, a study showed that on average, 122 Americans die each day due to lack of health insurance. Only in America!

I think that much of the problem President Obama has in convincing others to support health care reform is due to his overly studious manner of explaining his positions. As NYT op-ed columnist Charles Blow writes in Lost in Translation:

(President Obama) seems to believe that if he does a better job of explaining his aggressive agenda, then he’ll win hearts and minds. It’s an honorable ambition, but it’s foolhardy. People want clear goals, clearly defined and clearly (and concisely) conveyed. They’re suspicious of complexity.

Obama has to accept that today’s information environment is broad and shallow, and we now communicate in headline phrases, acerbic humor and ad hominem attacks. Sad but true.

While the president explains the nuances of his health care reform package, his opponents are responding with catch phrases like avoiding “the government takeover of health care” which are far more effective at stirring up emotional support. By the way, it annoys me how every Republican who appears on political interview shows unfailingly speaks about health care reform using this phrase. But nobody ever calls them out on it despite the fact that the Democrats’ health care reform is primarily about exerting more control over the insurance companies who are getting rich while denying coverage and not the health care providers themselves.

The president says that if his reform doesn’t go through, many more will lose their insurance. This is like saying that a terminally ill person is going to be sick for a while longer. While that’s true, it greatly understates the situation. Instead of just talking about more people losing their insurance, he needs to say that over a hundred people are dying every day in the US from lack of health insurance and will continue to die each and every day that we delay health care reform! When viewed in this way, the robotic response about "the government takeover of health care” would come off as pretty insensitive, not to mention downright weak. And those whose plan is to delay health care reform until it dies will be seen as being the cold-hearted people they really are.

It’s far too easy for many in Congress to be disconnected from the plight that many of our uninsured have to endure. After all, many of these people are quite wealthy and enjoy excellent health benefits to boot. This would change if they were to see all of the people in line for free health care at the latest of the Free Clinics just held in Hartford, CT. But instead, they stay away (most notably Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman) not wishing to be embarrassed. If the cause of health care reform was conveyed by the president and his supporters with the emotional passion of Ed Schultz in this video after he spent the day at the clinic in Hartford, we might well have had a bill signed into law by now.

But it takes much more than strong rhetoric. President Obama has said in numerous recent appearances that Congress has to "finish the job on health care" but without offering any guidance on how it’s to be done. Right now with newly elected Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown providing Republicans with the 41st vote to ensure a filibuster on any further Senate health care votes, the only way forward appears to be for the House to pass the Senate version as is, warts and all which can then go straight to the president’s desk for signing. The changes the House Democrats feel need to be made can then be passed later on in the Senate through a process called reconciliation which cannot be blocked by a Republican filibuster.

So far, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi says she doesn’t have the votes in the House to pass the Senate version as is. But the Obama team has to assess what other options, if any, there are for passing health care reform. If there are no other viable options, President Obama has to show leadership by getting the House Democrats in line to pass this historic piece of legislation. Once this is done, we can then make our top priorities jobs, jobs, and jobs with a clear conscience!

The Growing Corporate Control over our Democracy

2010-01-24T23:52:00.008-05:00

It is hard to think of a Supreme Court decision in recent times that has caused so much outrage and downright fear that democracy in the US as we know it may well be dead.

A recent New York Times editorial, The Court's Blow to Democracy began this way.

With a single, disastrous 5-to-4 ruling, the Supreme Court has thrust politics back to the robber-baron era of the 19th century. Disingenuously waving the flag of the First Amendment, the court’s conservative majority has paved the way for corporations to use their vast treasuries to overwhelm elections and intimidate elected officials into doing their bidding.

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann in his Special Comment, Freedom of speech has been destroyed said that this ruling may actually have more dire implications than the infamous Dred Scott Decision which held that persons of African descent cannot be, nor were ever intended to be, citizens under the U.S. Constitution.

President Obama who is not known for hyperbole, labeled the Supreme Court decision as "devastating" his latest weekly address. And this from somebody who spent 12 years as a constitutional law professor.

But on the other side was the dependably conservative Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal declaring the decision as A Free Speech Landmark.

…yesterday the Supreme Court issued a landmark decision supporting free political speech by overturning some of Congress's more intrusive limits on election spending.

In a season of marauding government, the Constitution rides to the rescue one more time.

This brings up two important questions. Is a corporation entitled to all of the same constitutional protections as ordinary people? Many have asserted that a corporation is little more than a government created mechanism to limit the personal liability of those who run it and that this mechanism should not be treated in the same way as a real live person.

Furthermore, before the decision, all people, including those who run the corporations were able to participate in and fund elections on their own. Now with this latest ruling, those who run corporations can now also use the corporate profits as they choose to without limits in order to influence elections. Especially for the larger, more profitable corporations, this ‘double dip’ confers enormous financial power over elections to a very small group of CEOs and board members.

Even more important is the question, Will this increase in free speech for the corporations adversely affect the free speech of everybody else? It is worth noting that this decision does not affect the law prohibiting corporations from directly funding candidates’ campaigns. After all, this would presumably have a corrupting effect on the democratic process! But corporations now have the next best option which is to run ads of their own that directly support or oppose candidates. Especially with the enormous amounts of money available to some corporations to influence elections, why would this be any less corrupting?

The political right defends this as free speech, but even they know that the protection of free speech is not absolute. For example, one cannot yell “Fire!” in a crowded theatre because of the harm it could do to others. But because of this decision, the infusion of large amounts of corporate money in elections can do a great deal of harm to the free speech of others.

For example, take a Senate race in a sparsely populated state. If large amounts of corporate money are used to back a particular candidate, it can be almost impossible for the opposition candidate to raise enough money to effectively compete since there are so few available donors there. Something is wrong when a corporation based anywhere in the US, even with some foreign control can exert a stranglehold on a Senate race in say, North Dakota which will have an election to replace retiring US Senator Byron Dorgan. Of course unions can also pour money into campaigns but they do not have nearly the resources of such behemoth companies as Exxon who reported a profit of $45 billion in 2008.

For anybody who is naïve enough to think that corporate influence cannot affect how legislators vote, one only has to look at the battle over health care reform where corporate lobbyists have at times spent money at the rate of $1.4 million per day! It explains why Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) who is heavily funded by the insurance industry, doggedly has fought against any meaningful health care reform despite polls in that state showing that a solid majority of his constituents were in favor of a public option. Just imagine what the health insurance industry can do with their record profits when they can more directly influence elections by advertising for candidates who serve their needs and against those who don’t.

The Republicans are not only taking this in stride but even praising the Supreme Court decision, presumably because their ideology has been to support corporate interests. The same can be said of many of the recent decisions of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority by contentious 5-4 margins.

While the right preaches against the control of big government, they routinely ignore the growing control that big business is exerting over our government and thus our lives. It is hard to say what we can do about passing laws to mitigate the damage since the ruling leaves little wiggle room without becoming unconstitutional. Some have suggested a constitutional amendment to clarify that corporations do not have all of the rights of ordinary people. But getting this passed by two-thirds of both houses in Congress let alone three-fourths of the state legislatures appears to be hopeless considering the widespread Republican support for the Supreme Court decision.

Maybe the sky really isn’t falling. But with already so much corporate control over our democracy now to grow even more, I can’t help but fear for the worst!

The Pursuit of Happiness

2010-01-17T21:18:00.003-05:00

Recently, while flipping through the channels, I came across a show on PBS titled Rethinking Happiness which is the third of a three part series This Emotional Life. Normally, it is difficult for me to stay tuned for a complete 2 hour show. But it not only kept my interest throughout, but even when viewing it again online at my computer.

We can all agree that happiness is essential to our well being. But for something that is so important to us, defining it along with learning how to attain and keep it is surprisingly elusive.

The Wikipedia entry on happiness has this to say.

Happiness is a state of mind or feeling characterized by contentment, love, satisfaction, pleasure, or joy. A variety of philosophical, religious, psychological and biological approaches have striven to define happiness and identify its sources.

Rethinking Happiness uses anecdotal evidence from a number of real life examples to support its scientific findings on the subject. What is most striking is how many of the people shown have been able to achieve happiness despite having to endure severe personal ordeals. Also noteworthy is the exploration of the self-help industry catering to the many seeking happiness that has made people rich while often offering content that is little more than unproven opinion.

The program concludes with these words.

By using scientific methods to identify the causes of human happiness, we’re learning that the secret of happiness was never very secret. We’re connected to each other. We belong to each other. We’re made for each other. Life is a journey through time and happiness is what happens when we make that journey together.

In searching the Web for thoughts on the subject of happiness, I came across How to Find Happiness: 7 Timeless Tips from the Last 2500 Years which is part of The Positivity Blog by Henrik Edberg. It is a collection of interesting and instructive quotations on the subject of happiness from a variety of historic figures through the years that is worth sharing with you.

The view from here says there are three things we need to hope to achieve happiness.

Having all of our needs met. This doesn’t mean all of our wants. It means that if we are constantly struggling just to make ends meet, it’s that much harder to feel happy. It also means having our health. The trouble is that in the US, there are tens of millions of people without health insurance. So when they get sick, they not only have to worry about their health but also whether they will suffer financial catastrophe — certainly not conducive to happiness.

Connection with others who care for us. Loneliness sucks! Even introverts who enjoy their alone time still need to spend time with others. As they say, life is a journey. When things go bad, it is nice to have someone to help support us through those bad times. And when life is good, it can be so rewarding to share those good times with others.
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Finding meaning and purpose in our lives. As is written in the website The One Question:

Until you discover the purpose of your life, you are living a life of mediocrity. Rise and be great, do the great things you were meant to do. Look deep inside you, realize what is your life’s purpose and your meaning of life.

And when you do find purpose, you discover yourself to be a greater person than you ever dreamed yourself to be. The world you live in will never be the same and the opportunities life throws at you will be abundant. The Meaning of Life will be clear.

Put another way, without a purpose in our lives, we are reduced to a lifetime of little more than making money and acquiring possessions. While this may make us feel happy for a while, the happiness is fleeting when we start to feel a void in our lives and ask ourselves if that’s all there is.

We can find purpose in our jobs but also just as importantly in our relationships with others whether it is providing for our families or simply helping others in need. In fact, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote a fascinating op-ed article Our Basic Human Pleasures: Food, Sex, and Giving.

Let’s remember that while charity has a mixed record helping others, it has an almost perfect record of helping ourselves. Helping others may be as primal a human pleasure as food or sex.

And more importantly, it may well be the best way to experience that lasting happiness we all pursue!

Should We Change the Rules on Senate Filibusters?

2010-01-03T00:01:00.004-05:00

With all of the extreme difficulties in the recent passing of the Senate health care bill because of the need for a 60 vote supermajority to prevent a Republican filibuster, much is now being written on whether the way the filibuster as now being used is constructive or merely a way for a minority to promote an obstructionist agenda.

Unlike the US House of Representatives which enforces time limits on all debates, the US Senate has no time limit on debates. So this gives senators in the minority an opportunity to forestall a vote by extending debate (or filibustering) as long as they choose to. At one time, senators had to actually talk continuously to maintain the filibuster but Senate rules now even make that unnecessary. At present, a motion of cloture or ending debate requires the vote of 60 senators.

If nothing else, the filibuster is now being used far more often than it used to be when it was reserved for especially controversial legislation. The idea of extending debate on especially important or controversial legislation has its appeal especially if it leads to some thoughtful discussion that may influence some votes in the process. But when it is used in a routine manner to do nothing more than block legislation based on strict party lines, the minority has a means to paralyze the whole Senate process indefinitely which makes it so controversial.

Not surprisingly, conservative commentators like Ross Douthat in his NYT article The Filibuster, Now More Than Ever? supports another writer who thinks the filibuster as now being employed by the Senate Republicans is a swell idea.

In the absence of a filibuster, a polarized political system would produce wild policymaking swings, with Al Franken writing legislation one session and Jim DeMint writing it the next. Its presence requires even the most ideologically-charged majority to cut some deals before it rams legislation through.

On the other hand, those Senate Democrats now on the receiving end are supported here by Robert Creamer in his Huffington Post article Lieberman Betrayal Illustrates Why Senate Filibuster Rules Must Change.

The current 60-vote requirement to cut off debate empowers a tiny minority of Senators to prevent up or down votes on measures that clearly have majority support in the Senate, and overwhelming support among the American people. It is a fundamentally undemocratic procedure that is now used regularly by the most entrenched economic interests in America to prevent change.

Of course when Republicans were in control of Congress and Democrats resorted to filibusters to block judicial appointments, it was the Republicans who cried foul and demanded that judicial appointments at least be given an up or down vote by the complete Senate. So is this merely a case of whose ox is being gored?

It has been pointed out that the filibuster is a Senate rule and is not in the Constitution which as written allows laws to be passed by a simple majority in each house of Congress (with exceptions such as Constitutional amendments). It is a bit curious that conservatives who so often base their arguments on preserving what they feel is the original intent of the Constitution seemingly have no problem with a Senate procedure that turns this original intent of the Founding Fathers on its head.

While Creamer outlines a number of arguments in his blog for changing the Senate rules on filibusters, the Republicans may want to reconsider their recent overuse of the filibuster for their own self-serving reasons. While the presidency and Congress are now controlled by Democrats, the Republicans naturally would like to have one of their own someday elected to the White House along with regaining majorities in Congress to enact some of the laws that they favor.

But as in the proverb “What goes around, comes around” you can be sure that if the Republicans persist in blocking President Obama’s agenda by continual use of the filibuster, a future Republican president can expect to receive the same treatment. And if neither party is able to govern, we all lose!

Should We Support the Senate Health Care Bill?

2009-12-27T00:01:00.001-05:00

So the Senate finally passed a health care reform bill the morning of Christmas Eve. While the president hailed it as a landmark event, for many others who voted for President Obama especially because of his support for health care reform it was a bittersweet moment. Those who were hoping for real reform in the form of a public option or even a Medicare buy-in for those 55-65 years of age were disappointed to see the proposed bill systematically taken apart by various senators such as Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson in exchange for their votes to reach the magic number of 60 to defeat the Republican filibuster that would have killed the bill.

Indeed, noted liberal commentator Keith Olbermann offered one of his Special Comments which in effect said that the Senate bill was ruined to the point of being unsupportable. Before that former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean said the same thing although he has softened his stance since then and said that he now reluctantly supports the bill.

There is a lot not to like about the Senate bill that was passed. For one thing, those of us without insurance coverage from employers would be required to buy health insurance from the private insurance industry under threat of a fine. Even worse, without any public insurance plan to compete, it is unclear what if any constraints there will be on premiums or if they will even be affordable to everybody. In an attempt to make the insurance affordable, federal subsidies will be available which in effect will amount to a massive transfer of tax dollars to the already wealthy insurance industry.

While the House which has a larger Democratic majority approved a bill that includes a public option and is much more reform-minded, the Senate cannot effectively pass anything with less than the 60 votes needed to avert a filibuster. And with the Republicans not offering a single vote in favor of the bill, the 58 Democrats and 2 Independents must all vote in unison or be defeated.

As NYT columnist Thomas Friedman has suggested, in the Senate we now have what can effectively called one party rule (the Democrats) in a two party system (with the Republicans serving as obstructionists) which makes passing needed legislation most difficult. Without any bipartisan support from the Republicans, the Democrats need absolutely all of their votes to prevail which means that tremendous compromises (which water down the bill) are needed to get the few stragglers such as Liebermann and Nelson to come on board.

The next step will be to reconcile the House and Senate bills to provide a single bill for both houses to vote on. While there are some who still think they can fight to reform the Senate bill into one more to their liking, the Senate stragglers out of the 60 who voted for the bill before have pledged that any changes would result in losing their support for the final bill.

So like it or not, we will most likely have to choose between the Senate version of the bill or no reform bill at all. For all of its warts, getting millions of people finally insured is better than no reform at all. Eliminating refusals to insure people for pre-existing conditions will be a major step forward for these individuals.

But how will this all work out? Will the insurance industry still be able to game the system to get the upper hand while too many people will still be unable to obtain affordable health insurance? The answer is probably yes. But if that happens, there is always the opportunity to pass legislation later on to try and correct those inequities. And it is true that Social Security and later Medicare first had gaps in their coverage that were fixed by later legislation.

While making these mid-stream corrections might well be difficult in this extremely polarized Congress, it’s a whole lot easier to work with an existing program later on than with no program at all which is what we have now. Especially considering that this is the best we can hope for with the Senate rules the way they are, the pragmatists amongst us who support health care reform have little real choice but to hold our noses and support this bill.

Why Did Tiger Stray?

2009-12-13T17:58:00.006-05:00

The announcement by Tiger Woods that he is taking an indefinite leave from golf is the latest chapter of a story about a man so universally admired before he crashed and burned among the accusations and now his admitting of having affairs with perhaps many other women. But the question remains: How could this have happened? This was a man who truly had it all — a fabulous career, incredible wealth, a beautiful wife and two beautiful children.

Before going further, I need to stress that this is not an attempt to justify Tiger’s behavior but is instead to try and explain why it may have happened. Granted, we do not know about the nature of the relationship with his wife, Elin since Tiger has so zealously protected their privacy. But Tiger does have a lot in common with other rich and powerful people who have been part of sexual scandals. And that gives us some clues.

So how did Tiger get to the pinnacle of the golf world? Of course talent has a lot to do with it but that by itself is not enough. To reach the pinnacle of any field whether it’s golf, or politics, or any other endeavor requires an incredible amount of drive and ego. People like this are certainly not like you and me. These people have an insatiable appetite for success and new conquests.

For Tiger, it was not just about becoming a pro golfer. It was about becoming the greatest golfer of all time. Unlike even most other PGA Tour golfers, it wasn’t about trying to win a major tournament or two sometime during their careers. It was about surpassing the all-time majors record of Jack Nicklaus. And despite all of his wins, his hunger for victory remains undiminished. Despite his wealth which may now be close to a billion dollars, he is still a money generating machine with not only his golf winnings and overseas appearance fees but also through his many lucrative endorsements. So when is it all enough? For many such people, there is no such thing as enough.

Presumably, Tiger when he was one of the world’s most eligible bachelors did just fine on the dating scene. But for many of us, that is not enough so we seek something more lasting in the form of a permanent partner and perhaps some children which is what Tiger chose when he married Elin. And for most of us, that is enough. Yes we have to choose one partner but we get something in return in the form of a loving and stabile relationship.

But for those who have this almost superhuman drive, is settling for one partner always enough? Why not try to have what they see as the best of both worlds which is to have the stability of a wife and children and also prowl for women on the side? Here for most of us, common sense gets the better of our egos. Important moral issues aside, for most of us, we know that if we cheat we will likely get caught sooner or later and suffer the consequences.

Surely the famous should know that they are far more likely to get caught getting into trouble in this age when a famous face can now be caught even on a cell phone camera. This is what happened to Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps when he inhaled from a marijuana bong at a party. And then there is the inevitable trail of E-mails, cell phone records along with text and voice messages to satisfy the hunger of the 24/7 news operations and gossip tabloids.

Making it even worse is that a wealthy public figure who engages in sexual escapades is especially vulnerable to blackmail or extortion threats as David Letterman found out. Anybody with a normal ego would know their limitations. But for those with such powerful egos, they can somehow assure themselves that even though most others sooner or later get caught, it won’t happen to them.

But no matter how much a man like Tiger wishes to stray, he can’t do it without willing accomplices. While there is understandable outrage at Tiger’s behavior, there appears to be considerably less outrage at the endless parade of women who are proudly boasting to the world about their alleged affairs with a man they most certainly knew was married.

Interestingly enough, instead of a married man being a turn-off for many women, a NYT blog by John Tierney, Do Single Women Seek Attached Men? offers evidence to the contrary.

Now there’s experimental evidence that single women are particularly drawn to other people’s partners, according to a report in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology by two social psychologists, Melissa Burkley and Jessica Parker of Oklahoma State University.

Noting that single women often complain that “all the good men are taken,” the psychologists wondered if “this perception is really based on the fact that taken men are perceived as good.”

But more to the point…

To the men in the experiment, and to the women who were already in relationships, it didn’t make a significant difference whether their match was single or attached. But single women showed a distinct preference for mate poaching. When the man was described as unattached, 59 percent of the single women were interested in pursuing him. When that same man was described as being in a committed relationship, 90 percent were interested.

Again, this is not meant to justify Tiger’s behavior. But if true, this all goes a long way towards explaining how it could happen.

So now that Tiger has been caught, he now knows that he has to make a choice between philandering and keeping his marriage intact (assuming Elin doesn’t leave him). While leaving golf for a while to sort out their relationship may well be the best thing for them, Tiger’s insatiable drive to be the best golfer ever will never go away. Hopefully, Elin realizes this and won’t make it a choice between her and golf for too long.

Let the Health Care Debate Begin

2009-11-29T23:49:00.005-05:00

So the debate in Congress by the Senate over health care reform is finally about to begin. For those in favor of reform, it has been terribly frustrating to put up with the same tired arguments of “socialized medicine” and “government takeover of health care” from those opposing the Democrats’ proposed bills. It’s one thing to criticize; but the problems faced by those who are unable to obtain affordable health insurance are real. What is the Republican alternative to help these people?

A recent article by conservative columnist and physician Charles Krauthammer Kill these bills, then do health reform right sounds promising because it at least suggests some alternatives. But do they really solve the problem of the uninsured or are they little more than right-wing talking points?

Of course the reader can read the entire commentary in the link above. But I would like to provide some excerpts with some commentary of my own.

The United States has the best health care in the world -- but because of its inefficiencies, also the most expensive.

The quality of health care in the US is not in question. But it doesn’t matter how good health care is if one cannot get access to it due to lack of insurance. There is no question that we spend far more per capita than other countries that do provide true universal health care. Most importantly, it is only in the US where people die or go bankrupt for lack of coverage. Instead of pretending that the US is the best at everything, we should look to adopt what works in other countries.

The bill is irredeemable. It should not only be defeated. It should be immolated, its ashes scattered over the Senate swimming pool.

The bill even in the eyes of supporters has many flaws. But it least it would end the practice of people being denied coverage for pre-existing conditions or dropped because they got sick and had to file a claim. Do any Republican alternatives even address this?

Then do health care the right way -- one reform at a time, each simple and simplifying, aimed at reducing complexity, arbitrariness and inefficiency.

First, tort reform. This is money -- the low-end estimate is about half a trillion per decade -- wasted in two ways. Part is simply hemorrhaged into the legal system to benefit a few jackpot lawsuit winners and an army of extravagantly rich malpractice lawyers such as John Edwards.

The idea behind tort reform is that if we limit damages that patients can sue for, the cost of malpractice insurance would then go down which would help to make health care more affordable.

But in a paper by Americans for Insurance Reform, Stable Losses/Unstable Rates they come up with this conclusion:

Specifically, AIR has consistently found that total payouts (by insurance companies) have been stable, tracking the rate of medical inflation, but premiums have not. Rather, premiums that doctors pay rise and fall in sync with the state of the economy, reflecting profitability of the insurance industry, including gains or losses experienced by the insurance industry’s bond and stock market investments.

They explain further:

Insurers make most of their profits from investment income. During years of high interest rates and/or excellent insurer profits, insurance companies engage in fierce competition for premium dollars to invest for maximum return. Insurers severely underprice their policies and insure very poor risks just to get premium dollars to invest. This is known as the “soft” insurance market.

But when investment income decreases — because interest rates drop or the stock market plummets or the cumulative price cuts make profits become unbearably low — the industry responds by sharply increasing premiums and reducing coverage, creating a “hard” insurance market usually degenerating into a “liability insurance crisis.”

So the assertion is that the low interest rates and poorly performing stock market of this last decade has been the main driver of higher malpractice premiums and not an increase in claims. If so, then the main beneficiary of tort reform will be none other than the insurance industry which has been vigorously lobbying for and financing the opposition to health care reform.

Second, even more simple and simplifying, abolish the prohibition against buying health insurance across state lines.

Some states have very few health insurers. Rates are high. So why not allow interstate competition? After all, you can buy oranges across state lines. If you couldn't, oranges would be extremely expensive in Wisconsin, especially in winter.

But health insurance is an extremely complex product that is subject to regulations that each state has established. As explained by www.newamerica.net in their paper Across State Lines Explained:

Allowing the state laws chosen by the insurance company, rather than the laws of the state where the consumer lives to govern health insurance regulation is what makes this policy so controversial.

But if some states do indeed have high rates because of very few competitors, why don’t other companies become licensed in those states to provide some competition and lower prices now? Maybe it’s at least in part because of the McCarran-Ferguson Act passed by Congress in 1945 which has granted the health insurance industry an exemption from federal anti-trust laws and captive markets with no curbs on price fixing and other anti-competitive practices. In addition, critcs feel that allowing this competition across state lines may provide for better prices for the young and healthy but would still not address the needs of those who cannot get insurance because of pre-existing conditions.

Third, tax employer-provided health insurance. This is an accrued inefficiency of 65 years, an accident of World War II wage controls. It creates a $250 billion annual loss of federal revenues -- the largest tax break for individuals in the entire federal budget.

My, what would the Tea Partiers who watch Krauthammer on Fox News have to say about this idea to raise taxes? In any event, Krauthammer overstates the amount of savings compared to the White House Office of Management and Budget which predicts an estimated $155 billion loss in 2010. Even so, it does raise an issue of fairness. Should people who get their health insurance from an employer get a tax subsidy when those who buy insurance on the open market have to use after-tax dollars? (A similar argument can be made for home owners who can write off mortgage interest compared to renters who get no tax break.)

Even so, this would be a tough sell since it would mean a tax increase for the middle class when many of them are already struggling. Repealing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy who are not struggling would be a better way to help pay for all of this.

Insuring the uninsured is a moral imperative. The problem is that the Democrats have chosen the worst possible method -- a $1 trillion new entitlement of stupefying arbitrariness and inefficiency.

The better choice is targeted measures that attack the inefficiencies of the current system one by one -- tort reform, interstate purchasing and taxing employee benefits. It would take 20 pages to write such a bill, not 2,000 -- and provide the funds to cover the uninsured without wrecking both U.S. health care and the U.S. Treasury.

Insuring the uninsured is a moral imperative. The proposed bill does reek of stupefying arbitrariness and inefficiency. But with the simpler option of single-payer (Medicare for all) not politically feasible, this bill is probably the best we can hope for. Since the Clintons’ attempt at health care reform back in 1993 was blocked, the number of uninsured has skyrocketed during the years of subsequent Republican control of the presidency and Congress. Now that the Democrats are again in the majority and trying to pass health care reform, we again get Republican cries that they can do health care reform better.

So do the Republicans have a better way to do health care reform or are they little more than obstructionists working on behalf of the health care industry as many have charged? For a start, why doesn’t Krauthammer write up his proposed bill so we can all examine and debate its merits or faults? Certainly 20 pages is not a lot to ask of a professional writer. Would the proposed bill truly insure the uninsured (including those with pre-existing conditions) or would it mostly just ignore their existence? Let the debate begin!

The High Cost of Dying

2009-11-23T21:41:00.010-05:00

This Sunday, the 60 Minutes story The Cost of Dying raised some crucial issues on the containment of health expenses for Medicare, the single payer health insurance for US citizens over 65.

Last year, Medicare paid $50 billion just for doctor and hospital bills during the last two months of patients' lives - that's more than the budget of the Department of Homeland Security or the Department of Education. And it has been estimated that 20 to 30 percent of these medical expenditures may have had no meaningful impact. Most of the bills are paid for by the federal government with few or no questions asked.

This is entirely different from the horror stories of private insurers denying procedures that have cut short the lives of people who were otherwise young and vital. In this case, we have a government insurance plan whose leniency allows doctors and hospitals to pad the bill by ordering endless procedures on patients without any real benefit in the way of life extension.

Here is one example from the story.

Meredith Snedeker's 85-year-old mother spent her last two months shuttling between a nursing home and community hospital in New Jersey, suffering from advanced heart and liver disease.
Dorothy Glas was a former nurse who had signed a living will expressing her wishes that no extraordinary measures be taken to keep her alive. But that didn't stop a legion of doctors from conducting batteries of tests. "I can't tell you all the tests they took. But I do know that she saw over 13 specialists," Snedeker told Kroft. Asked what kind of specialists, Snedeker said, "Neurological, gastroenterologists. She even saw a psychiatrist because they said she was depressed. And she told the psychiatrist, 'Of course, I'm depressed. I'm dying.'"
When (60 Minutes) reviewed the medical records, (they) discovered that there weren't 13 specialists who attended to her mother: there were 25, each of whom billed Medicare separately. The hospital told 60 Minutes that all the tests were appropriate, and an independent physician said this case was fairly typical. "You think they were running up the bill to make money? Or running up the bill or giving her all these tests because they really thought it might help her? Or to cover their…rear?" Kroft asked.
"Yeah, to cover their rear," Snedeker replied.
Among the tests conducted was a pap smear, which is generally only recommended for much younger women, not an octogenarian who was already dying of liver and heart disease.

Maybe it was both to run up the bill and cover their rears.

I have a personal experience to share here.

It was almost 30 years ago that my father was dying. We planned to have him spend his last days at home but some complications arose that required us to have him taken back to the hospital. Although he was in a coma by then, neither I or my mother wanted him to die alone so we took turns staying by his hospital bed, she during the day and me at night.

For someone who was obviously only a few days away from dying, it was curious to see the parade of doctors who came by all though the night to visit and sign the chart in front of his bed. I didn’t pay it much mind until I saw the bills from the doctors and hospital a month or so later. There was the list of visits and charges from each of those doctors — an incredible number of them who listed visits in the last few days of his life. And to add insult to injury, there were doctor visits listed for one and two days after his death!

When critics of Medicare bring up its financial difficulties, they overlook that since most people don’t die before reaching age 65, the private insurers in effect pass off almost all of the end of life care issues to Medicare. It would certainly make sense to have a discussion about limiting testing and procedures to where a patient can realistically be made better instead of prolonging an inevitable death with no quality of life. But then we would surely get the demagoguery in the form of “death panels” and “pulling the plug on Grandma” that is presently practiced by those demonstrating against health care reform.

Whether we like it or not, to make Medicare financially solvent over the long run, we do have to exert better control over what is being paid out to stop the abuses of those providers who are taking advantage of the present system to pad their profits through either unnecessary procedures or just outright fraud which alone is estimated at about $60 billion a year.

Finally doing something about all of this waste and fraud would go a long way toward our being able to afford health insurance for those millions in the US who have had to go without it.