Rebane's Ruminations

The John Henry Law

George Rebane

For several years I have attempted to explain and prognosticate the future of labor in the developed world (e.g. see ‘The Great American Labor Squeeze’).  I will try to simplify the cause of the growing systemic un/der/employment, that is ignored throughout our political spectrum, by introducing what we shall call the John Henry Law –

The company that pits its labor against another’s use of technology loses.

The workings of the John Henry Law are made clear by the lead graphic in ‘New People, New Jobs’.  The law simplifies understanding of the vicious circle that all competing enterprises must join.  If you don’t maintain your place in that commercial whirlwind, another will take it, and you will see the impact in your profit/loss accounting.  The individual's corollary to the law is - The worker who pits his labor against technology loses.  Labor is a cost, technology reduces costs.

Next case please.

Conservatives miss impact of SCOTUS ruling (updated 2jul12)

George Rebane

Taxes for value not received or those that force behaviors are penalties.

The last 24 hours has seen a tsunami of tortured analyses by conservatives doing their best to eek out something that resembles a silver lining in the SCOTUS Obamacare ruling.  Unfortunately, considering the scope of what came down, there is none.

The Republicans in DC are talking into every mike available about how clever the ruling was, and that Obama’s goose is now really cooked because the court finally confirmed that he’s been lying all along about the individual mandate not being a tax.  BFD! The sumbich can’t open his mouth without lying, and his growing list of lies fills file boxes.  Most of the electorate out there still believes that Obama’s got a mysterious, never-ending “stash” from which they will continue to get more out than they put in until the cows come home.

Respected blogs like The Blaze prattle with hopeful pieces titled ‘Five Reasons Why the Obamacare Decision might not be as bad as you think.’  Well, they continue to miss the big reason why the decision was a disaster for all Americans who understand the history and the present of government overreach.  (My own inadequate attempt at this was ‘SCOTUS backs Obamacare’ and its comment stream.)

The argument that Chief Justice Roberts closed the door on the notorious Commerce Clause of the 14th Amendment is specious.  The ruling did no such thing.  Congress can continue to make all kinds of restrictive laws citing the Commerce Clause just like they have always done.  That door was not closed by SCOTUS.

But what really happened, which people on the Right seem to not see, is that a new and bigger gate to government overreach has been identified, designed, crafted, and opened by John Roberts.   Now Congress has the additional Supreme Court invited power to mandate any behavior they wish to extract from individual citizens through private enterprises to public institutions.  All they have to do is to specify what they want us to do, buy, sell, trade, declare, surrender, … , and tell us how big of a check we have to send to the IRS should we refuse to do so.  And woe be to us if we don’t pay our punishment fines, … er, constitutionally permitted taxes.

Obama’s nudge expert Cass Sunstein must be rolling on the rug laughing.  Everything that this socialist has hoped for in government’s ability to coerce and corral behavior is now law of the land.  The new and glorious gate has been opened, and Roberts has had the good grace to write Congress the owner’s manual on how to properly go through it every time they deem that a new stricture is required to make us behave better.

For the record, liberty lost.

[2jul12 update]  For a while there I was beginning to think that no one else really understood the real catastrophe that the Roberts Ruling has loosened on the nation.  It felt lonely, and I began to re-examine my reasoning on the matter, since even Charles Krauthammer (‘The Bonze’) gave no evidence that he saw what sure seemed obvious to me.  Fortunately, over the weekend some established heavyweights on the national commentary scene weighed in, and now I consider myself to be a member of a small and, hopefully, growing minority.  (What the hell, I never was any good at joining all those consensus clatches.)

John Yoo, UC Berkeley Law School professor, said, “Some conservatives see a silver lining in the ObamaCare ruling. But it's exactly the big-government disaster it appears to be.”, and then writes in ‘Chief Justice Roberts and His Apologists’ –

Worse still, Justice Roberts's opinion provides a constitutional road map for architects of the next great expansion of the welfare state. Congress may not be able to directly force us to buy electric cars, eat organic kale, or replace oil heaters with solar panels. But if it enforces the mandates with a financial penalty then suddenly, thanks to Justice Roberts's tortured reasoning in Sebelius, the mandate is transformed into a constitutional exercise of Congress's power to tax.

In ‘A Vast New Taxing Power’ (2jul12 WSJ online edition) we read that

… the punishments in the tax code for inactivity come in the form of not being able to claim benefits that Congress in its graces bestows. Such as: If you don't borrow to buy a home, you don't get a mortgage interest deduction.

Congress has never passed a tax on a lack of gasoline or a tax on a failure to buy gasoline, any more than Congress can regulate inactivity under the Commerce Clause by telling people to buy gasoline or else pay a penalty. The reality is that Washington would love to regulate the ordinary economic choices that used to be beyond its purview, and now it will be able to abuse the ad hoc "tax" permit that the Chief Justice has given it.

And Holman W. Jenkins Jr opines in the 1jul12 WSJ that Chief Justice Roberts’ ruling in favor or Obamacare was even

Worse, (that) in doing so, he may have read any constitutional limit on Congress out of the Constitution while pretending to do the opposite. Congress cannot compel you to do anything Congress wishes, but it can impose taxes on you until you finally have no rational alternative but to do whatever Congress wishes.

Ruminations – 29jun12 (updated)

George Rebane

George Soros funded progressive activist organization Media Matters is again shifting its longstanding campaign to shut down Fox News into high gear.  Their last year’s effort lobbying sponsors to drop Glenn Beck was so successful that they are next targeting Hannity on a fast track to shut down the whole network in this election year.

RR has long maintained that the radical leftwing has had in its agenda the silencing of opposition voices for the simple reason that open debate of issues and solutions has always been harmful to their cause.  The self-declared middle roaders always gather to downgrade such campaigns by claiming that they are just symmetrical efforts by both left and right to silence each other.  To my knowledge no such conservative campaign has ever been exposed by the Left (witness the response of the local echo chamber on these pages) beyond their empty accusations.  Can anyone produce a strategy and planning document like this that was written by the Right?

SCOTUS backs Obamacare (Addended)

George Rebane

The notion that we have a conservative lean to SCOTUS vanished this morning as the high court announced its decision on Obamacare.  The only scrap thrown to conservatives was the ruling that the act’s individual mandate to buy health insurance was really a federal tax, and not the exercise of a federal power under the 14th Amendment’s commerce clause (something its backers have strongly denied).

So now the nation is looking into its largest tax increases since WW2 as it struggles to end Depression2.  To progressives this makes no nevermind , since they don’t believe that tax rates affect economic activity.  There are other provisions of the court’s voluminous ruling which will become clear as it is dissected word by word, and then, of course, litigated.

But the clear impact of the ruling is that US healthcare will now become a commons like its European forbears, especially the British National Health Service.  And it will suffer the same fate, only on an accelerated time scale since our nation’s debts and unfunded liabilities are already astronomical.  Specifically, fewer people will study to be healthcare professionals, thereby making healthcare resources more scarce and expensive – it all has to be paid for by someone.  And state rationing will become inevitable as the costs of delivery are further disconnected from impacting the patient.

When we now look at the Arizona and Obamacare rulings as a piece, we ask what can we hope from SCOTUS in slowing our gallop to becoming a socialist state on the way to revolution or autocracy.  The Great Experiment – can Man govern himself? - that the Founders set up for us now seems on the brink of failure.  This November will let the historically challenged electorate decide – we live in the age of spin and sound bites.  To be sure, the socialists are already happy dancing in the streets, and promising to redouble their efforts in "building a new world."  Stay tuned.

[Addendum] Commenter MickeyMcD points us to a piece on mises.org, one of my favorite websites.  From there I filched the above graphic and reproduce the following by Murray Rothbard -

Our very real medical crisis has been the product of massive government intervention, state and federal, throughout the century; in particular, an artificial boosting of demand coupled with an artificial restriction of supply. The result has been accelerating high prices and deterioration of patient care. And next, socialized medicine could easily bring us to the vaunted medical status of the Soviet Union: everyone has the right to free medical care, but there is, in effect, no medicine and no care.

And Erick Erickson's 'I'm not down on John Roberts' fills in the details on the political vs constitutional aspects of the court's ruling.

New People, New Jobs

George Rebane

The systemic and growing unemployment in these pre-Singularity years is an ongoing topic on RR, and a stringently ignored social phenomenon by our political elites of all stripes.  A graphic that illustrates this unemployment growth is the graphic below showing how manufacturing activity varies over time along with employment in the sector.


Note how the normal cyclicity of business activity in manufacturing ratchets down the number employed.  Workers are laid off in recessions during which manufacturers implement labor and other cost saving methods for survival.   When better times return, the productivity changes are in place and few, if any, new hires are needed to continue business growth.  And this phenomenon is not restricted only to manufacturing, but repeated in almost every other sector of business.  The only sectors that seem to be immune are those requiring expertise in STEM areas.

So the real problem is still how can we help the rapidly growing cohort of (non-STEM) unemployables.  Even as the employer of last resort, the government can’t hire all of them and force a diminishing fraction of the population to pay for it all.  It would invite a bloody revolution in a new age in which technology will no longer create as many jobs as it destroys (more here).

Nevertheless, there are several technological advances available that look promising for delaying the day of reckoning, at least until some newer technology comes along to delay it even more.  I want to discuss three and summarize how I think they would help us in the near term.  These are 1) body worn multi-media input/output (I/O) devices connecting us to the cloud; 2) online education that bypasses the atrocious public schools which are beyond timely repair; and 3) computing/storage implants that connect directly to our neuro-system.

States enforcing federal laws

George Rebane

Today SCOTUS handed down a decision to strike down major provisions of Arizona’s attempt to enforce fallow federal laws against illegal aliens – both illegal immigrants and illegal entrants.  The 25jun12 WSJ reports – 

The court backed a section of the Arizona state law that calls for police to check the immigration status of people they stop. … That section was one of four at issue before the high court. The others make it a crime for immigrants without work permits to seek employment, make it a crime for immigrants to fail to carry registration documents, and authorize the police to arrest any immigrant they believe has committed a deportable offense. Those other three provisions were struck down.

The question which now comes begging is ‘what other federal mandates – laws, regulations, executive orders, … - are the states no longer required or permitted to use their own resources to enforce?’

The SCOTUS ruling has an effect on Dream Act Jr that President Obama seeks to impose by executive order.  My KVMR commentary on this has been addended.

When you don’t know grammar

George Rebane

In these pages over the years I have taken a gentle jab at the growing gaggle of grammatical gaffes that now rain down on us from every quarter of society.  My own concern was not so much about formalism for the sake of formalism, but promoting formalism for the sake of clear communications.  In any event, I felt lonely in the occasional corrections I offered to friends and commenters.

Well, it turns out that the problem has grown to national proportions, and my quiet sufferings have been shared by many across the land - enough so as to warrant a full-fledged report on the matter, with appropriate illustrated correctives, that appeared in the 19jun12 WSJ.  Please read ‘This Embarrasses You and I’.

As an addendum to author Sue Shellenbarger’s coverage of the use of ‘and’, I would like to add one more function for the necessary comma before the ‘and’ and ‘or’ that delineates the last item of a list of semantically orthogonal items.  And that is to allow the insertion, without comma, of alternative or compound items into such a list.  An example - 'Get me the hammer, pliers or visegrips, screwdriver, and nails.'

Finally, Shellenbarger did not cover a most egregious instance of poor grammar in the use of the apostrophe to indicate possession by nouns in the singular and plural number.  Apparently it has become a state secret to know when and where to insert the apostrophe.  You see people using it in front of the ‘s’ when referring to the plural – for example, ‘We visited the Smith’s last night – that occurs almost always when something is labeled by capital letters – for example, ‘Look at all the GMC’s parked in a row.’  Not many know the difference between 'your' and 'you're'.  And perhaps most difficult is the use the apostrophe to designate the possessive of a plural – ‘The students’ registration cards were lost.’ – in which case most people just give up.

Wireless Communication Breakthrough

George Rebane

A major breakthrough in wireless communication was announced by the University of Waterloo, Canada.  ACM reports that Dr A.K. Khandani and his team have demonstrated (and patented) a full-duplex, single channel methodology for wireless communication that promises to revolutionize all wireless communications.  Full-duplex means the ability to concurrently transmit and receive at the same time, and to do that over the same channel or frequency will at least double the bandwidth available for future communications.

My own excitement about it is enhanced by its potential uses in the human body as new implantable electronics begin to use the body itself as communications medium through which such devices continuously ‘talk’ to each other.  I believe that this functionality will speed the introduction of machine-augmented-man (MAM) capabilities that have been covered in RR.

In any case, I thought RR readers should be among the first to know as this technology start being adopted.  More here.

Dream Act Jr = American Nightmare (Addended)

George Rebane

[This the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 22 June 2012.]

Our imperial President has announced another scheme to end-run the Congress and the Constitution with what some are calling Dream Act Jr – the senior version ran into a hornets’ nest of anti-amnesty sentiment in Congress.  In case you haven’t heard, the junior version would “suspend the deportation of some young undocumented immigrants” and provide a legal means for their staying in the country.

This end-run initiative is well coordinated with the left-leaning media which provided both prequels and sequels to the President’s announcement.  The flagship softening up barrage was launched in the 25jun12 issue of Time magazine with its cover story ‘We are Americans – just not legally’ written by Antonio Vargas, a Phillipine-born illegal alien and self-declared homosexual who was brought here as a child.

Anticipating the President’s thrust, the article goes on to detail the plight of such young people, who, through the criminal act of their parents, came to grow up in the United States, and in the process didn’t think much about their legal status.  That the mis-labeled and confusing ‘immigration problem’ has garnered so much national attention, has allowed such soft transformations of logic and semantics to take place, so that Time’s claim of two flavors of Americans – legal and illegal – now goes down unnoticed, and is tacitly accepted by many of our citizens.

Time’s choice of Vargas as an educated Asian and homosexual journalist is an intended double bulwark against any critique of his one-sided presentation.  In such arguments the reader is regaled with anecdotal recounting of the good character, productive lives, and shared American dreams of these illegals.  In fact, the point is made to no longer call them ‘illegal immigrants’, for as Vargas educates us, “… I'm an undocumented immigrant or, put more rudely, an ‘illegal.’”  Forget about the now politically pejorative yet correct ‘illegal alien’, these individuals are just immigrants in America, the land of immigrants, who somehow don’t have some arcane piece of paper with their name on it.

NBC – Lamestream’s poster child

George Rebane

NBC (National Bamboozle Company), one of the premier leftwing media outlets, has been a main motivator for the widely used ‘lamestream’ label.  Now it turns out they have achieved a new level of sleazebag journalism.  This week’s Congressional contempt citation to Attorney General Eric Holder has the network presenting extended background coverage as they scramble to tell its viewers about the ‘Fast and Furious’ gun-walking scandal.  Otherwise their loyal audience wouldn’t have a clue as to what all the sudden fuss is about between Holder and Congress that now includes President Obama claiming ‘executive privilege’ for Holder’s zipped lip.

While consumers of the more comprehensive and professional news outlets – both broadcast and web-based - have known about this disgraceful and inept cover-up for well over a year, viewers of NBC have received just ten seconds of FaF coverage over the last 18 months.  That’s not a typo, Fox News reports research showing NBC's TOTAL mention of that ill-conceived and executed DoJ program took an entire TEN SECONDS over the last year and a half, while the rest of the country was being continually updated on the dirtbag tactics, denials, and retractions coming out of the administration.

As these pages have pointed out over the years, this leads to an extremely uninformed and ignorant constituency of Americans who get their only (credible?) news from lamestream outlets.  It explains away their outrage when they arrive at conservative blogs like RR to discover major happenings and issues that their pabulum purveyors decided to deny them.  I’d be pissed too, and damned ashamed to admit my ignorance.  In those cases a good offense is always the best defense, especially in the eyes of the equally blinded.  But the informed just shake their heads and go on with their lives – timely and accurate information is now another line that divides our nation.

Ackerman to leave The Union

George Rebane

I was surprised to read this in the 20jun12 online paywalled edition of The Union.  H/T to RR reader.

Jeff Ackerman, publisher of The Union, announced today that he will be leaving the newspaper after 10 years of serving the western Nevada County community.

Ackerman will be taking an expanded scope of responsibilities for Swift Communications, The Union's parent company for which he has worked for nearly three decades. Ackerman will move north to Oregon as publisher of The News-Review in Roseburg.

“In addition, Jeff will have the added responsibilities as Swift content development and new revenue assessment leader, a role for which he's imminently and uniquely qualified,” Swift Communications President and Chief Operating Officer Bob Brown said in a statement.

Ackerman began his career with Swift 28 years ago and has served as reporter and editor, as well as publisher at North Lake Tahoe Bonanza, Nevada Appeal and The Union; and general manager of Sierra Nevada Media Group.

Dave Schmall will take over as publisher at The Union in Grass Valley, effective July 2. Schmall joined Swift Communications in February and previous to that, served as publisher of the Marysville Appeal-Democrat.

For more on this story, see Friday morning's print edition of The Union.

That droning you hear …

George Rebane

These pages have long covered the advances and uses of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or ‘drones’ for surveillance and interdiction.  My usual examination of new technology in such areas includes its portent as a tool to install and maintain tyranny.  I suppose that suspicion is built into my double helix.  Well, apparently that genetic predisposition is shared by quite a number of people across the country, but it is definitely absent in the progressive elites and their local echo chambers.

This has been made clear in the comment streams on this (e.g. here) and other blogs that report the approaching menace of surveillance drones filling the skies over America.  UAV manufacturers are running over each other in the effort to sell their wares to every imaginable jurisdiction and government agency in the land.  What again did Lenin say about ‘the capitalist will sell us the rope with which we will hang them’?  All of this, of course, goes along with the proliferation of armed enforcement capabilities throughout federal and state governments (e.g. Department of Education buying shotguns and arming their ‘agents’).

Now we read that people across the country are beginning to be alarmed about the next step Big Government is preparing to make sure that we will remain docile and under control.  The 19jun12 online Washington Times reports ‘Talk of drones patrolling U.S. skies spawns anxiety’ that details the concern about this arising in Congress.  In the meantime be prepared for our collective cohorts to start pooh-poohing such concerns, and ascribe those concerned to the dimwitted divisions of the political Right.  ... while we quietly watch and wonder.

Judea Pearl, Turing Laureate

George Rebane

Judea Pearl, Professor of Computer Sciences UCLA, received the A.M. Turing Award last night at the awards banquet of the Association of Computing Machinery at the Palace Hotel, San Francisco.  He now joins the forty-three previous laureates of the ‘Nobel prize of computing’, of whom twenty-five were in attendance to honor him.

Jo Ann and I joined the gala celebration as guests of the awardee, and sat with family and friends, most of whom we have known for decades.  (I am a lifelong member of the ACM.)  The awards banquet also honored other contributors to the field and culminated in the Turing Award presentation.  Here is ACM’s official, yet still modest, recounting of Judea’s accomplishments.

The Pearls became family friends soon after Judea Pearl collaborated on a project with a ‘black studies’ company I was running in the 1970s.  Judea’s wife Ruth (an accomplished software engineer in her own right) is a consummate hostess.  Jo Ann also had (still has) a reputation for putting on mean soirees that, with the passing hours, devolved into impromptu performances ranging from poetry recitations, through heated debates on various arcane and absorbing topics, to planned revivals of long ago salons of the Englightment.

We were often at each other’s house for such dinners, parties, and special noodling sessions.  These always included music that had us singing with guitars and keyboard for accompaniment.  Judea is an accomplished guitar player, keyboardist, and has a great singing voice.  He’s also a world class choral conductor and has performed numerous times at the LA Music Center.  (I was the less practiced one on both instruments, making up in volume for what I lacked in technique.)

A couple of shared memories from a rich catalog.  For Ruth’s birthday one year Judea invited us and another couple to a small westside bistro in LA.  We knew that something special was going to happen because Judea brought his guitar; but what could that be since we were eating in a restaurant?  Not a problem, soon the main course was finished, and after dinner drinks were in hand.  The lights were low and the atmosphere was perfect as Judea reached behind his chair for his trusty guitar and putting a foot on his chair, he launched into a medley of love songs to his bride of many years.

The other patrons in the restaurant were enthralled along with those at our table.  I recall Judea ending his special gift to Ruth (and the rest of us) with a rendition of a soulful Spanish adagio for solo trumpet and guitar from a piece I could not place.  It was a night to remember, as Judea kissed Ruth to the applause of the entire restaurant.  (Solo trumpet?  Did I fail to mention that Judea also has a unique gift, the ability to purse his lips, puff his cheeks, and perfectly simulate the sound of a virtuoso trumpet?)

Another memory is when I got a call late one afternoon from Judea saying that Ed Feigenbaum was in town and could drop by for some dinner and talk; would I care to join them?  (The techie reader will recognize Feigenbaum as a renown giant of AI, ‘father of expert systems’, and Turing laureate who taught for years at Stanford - now professor emeritus.)  Long story short.  After one of Ruth’s ‘oh it’s nothing’ fabulous meals, the three of us retired to the patio and spent the next four (five?) hours talking about the state of machine intelligence, who was doing what, and possible directions the science would take and its impact on society.  At the time Judea had already published his landmark 1986 paper and was working on his 1988 book on Bayes nets (I was one of Judea’s doctoral students doing research in Bayes learning).  It was clear that the torch would soon be passed from Feigenbaum’s expert systems to Pearl’s Bayes nets (with causality soon making its early murmurs).  Truly another memorable night.
   
So that was the basis for all the fuss this weekend at the Rebane household.   Yesterday morning we dropped off our puppy with the Steeles, and headed through a hot and crowded central valley to San Francisco.  Judea and I were able to spend some quality time together before the band started playing.  (The picture with the other white haired professor catches a debate on who has known Judea the longest - I foolishly thought c'est moi.  I came in a distant second to the good professor who has known Judea since they were playmates on an Israeli kibbutz eons ago while the Brits still ran Palestine.)

Jo Ann and Ruth picked up where they left off (top picture).  Ruth also sits on the board of the Daniel Pearl Foundation which is dedicated in memory of their son and has as its mission statement –

The Daniel Pearl Foundation has been formed by Danny's family and friends to continue Danny's mission and to address the root causes of this tragedy, in the spirit, style, and principles that shaped Danny's work and character. These principles include uncompromised objectivity and integrity; insightful and unconventional perspective; tolerance and respect for people of all cultures; unshaken belief in the effectiveness of education and communication; and the love of music, humor, and friendship.

(Full disclosure: Jo Ann and I are ongoing supporters of the foundation, especially its work in bringing greater mutual understanding between Islamic and western cultures.)

‘Whose fault?’ and ‘market morality’

George Rebane

On Russ Steele’s NC2012 there is a comment stream in which people are groping for some middle ground.  I have contributed to it by asking what would one do with such a middle ground, were one to be discovered.  The point being that it’s highly likely that there is no profitable middle ground to be had between today's historically polarized ideologies.  By ‘profitable’ I mean one that suggests a consensus in adopting a plan forward.  Historically we are now beyond that point.

To the body of evidence that supports this proposition, I add Edward Lazear’s 14jun12 WSJ essay, ‘Whose Fault Is Today’s Bad Economy?’  He summarizes his excellent development with his starting paragraph –

Picture this scenario in baseball: Pitcher Smith replaces a starting pitcher in the fourth inning, when his team is down by three runs. The team scores two runs in the next inning, almost tying the score. But in the sixth inning, Smith gives up five runs, putting his team hopelessly behind. After the loss, Smith tells reporters that he did not pitch well in the sixth inning because the team was behind before he entered the game in the fourth.

It’s worth a read and makes an excellent case for stopping the endless exchange of pointing at the actions and policy maneuverings of pre-2009 Republicans and Democrats.

As another measure of the gulf that divides us, take a look at a succinct and extremely revealing description of what the self-described progressive faction characterizes as proper morality within which markets must be “framed”.  Recall, that collectivism always marches under the banners of morality which, for a bunch of atheists, is surprisingly always an absolute that emerges from God(sic) knows where.  In ‘Economics and Morality: Paul Krugman’s Framing’ Lakoff and Wehling of truthout.com argue –

Stratfor’s Geopolitics of the United States

George Rebane

The well-respected geo-strategic intelligence service Stratfor recently updated another one of its landmark essays on major regions and countries of the world – this one on the United States.  The free two-part report is both a review and an education in itself.  Most of us were not taught to see our country from such an extensive, detailed, and lavishly illustrated geopolitical perspective.  I recommend it to RR readers since it does allow us to get more or less on the same page as a start point for the national and international issues that we discuss and debate.  Enjoy.

The Geopolitics of the United States, Part 1: The Inevitable Empire

The Geopolitics of the United States, Part 2: American Identity and the Threats of Tomorrow

Ruminations – 12jun12 (updated 13jun12)

George Rebane

The situation in Europe is coming to a head, and Angela's got the whole world in her hand.  Now it’s definitely Spain’s and Italy’s turn in the barrel.  The remarkable news is that most likely there will be another €100B thrown at Spain’s banks intended to bail them out of bad sovereign debts that Spain’s government doesn’t have the money to repay.  But this money can serve no other purpose than to delay the inevitable; there is nothing Spain is doing to kick-start its economy and stop its descent.

From the prices of Spain’s government bonds today, the markets are saying that there is one chance in 23 that Spain will default within a year.  For Italy that likelihood is one out of 25 in the same period.  Tomorrow these odds will be less favorable.  What’s in your portfolio?  (Put in other numbers here.)

“It is not clear whether the expanded testing regimen boosted student learning.”  So opines a Reuters journalist reporting on the backlash to standardized testing that appears to be increasing across the country.  Parents of poorly scoring students are chanting that their “kids are not a test score”, and are demanding “more teaching and less testing.”   Apparently all these anti-testing factions – from teachers, unions, parents, … - are not concerned about assessing how their little darlins are doing in school as the test scores are heading south.  The journalist’s wonderment is probably shared by the multitudes who don’t know that learning and testing are necessarily independent efforts.  The clear conclusion is that the best way to address junior’s poor performance in reading and math, and all the subjects that require proficiency in reading and math, is to turn a blind eye to the matter by eliminating or dumbing down standardized tests.  (more here)

Many pundits are telling us that this or that faction will sit out the November election because their candidate is not exactly on the mark with certain facets of ideology or promises made.  Most of the discontents and vexed seem to be on the left side of the aisle.  I think they are flat wrong.

But no one who has been paying attention is going to sit out this election.  We are a nation too vehemently polarized to let others decide which of the two ‘evils’ facing us will prevail.  The only ones who won’t vote are the usual double dummies who don’t recognize the fork in the road and keep running into the road sign.  Unfortunately, too many of them are smug conservatives who tell you that it doesn’t really matter who wins, the whole thing is corrupt and rigged, they’re too busy working to pay taxes for those who don’t, …, or they just mumble ‘smurglemurf’ (for you of appropriate vintage, that’s how you pronounce the Lil’ Abner eternal jinx Joe Btsfplk’s name.)

[update]  Jo Ann forwarded a piece from Senator LaMalfa wherein he alerts us that the Democrats audacity to rape the taxpayer is going up another notch.  Gov Moonbeam has a bill in the state legislature that would penalize you 20% of any tax overpayment refund you would request that the Franchise Tax Board considers “excessive”.  Many of us overpay during the year so as not to incur and underpayment penalty when taxes are due.  Now the sumbich wants to dunn us for giving the state the use of our excess payment until refund time comes around.  I think these people know no shame.  Now they want you to pay them for restocking your wallet with your own money.  If you want to bitch and moan about this one – and you should – then here is some contact info.

Office of the Governor (voice mail): (916) 445–2841
Assembly Member Bob Blumenfield, Chair, Assembly Budget Committee (916) 319–2040
Senator Mark Leno, Chair, Senate Budget and Fiscal Review (916) 651–4003

[13jun12 update]  Now we hear that the total of unfunded pension liabilities across all jurisdictions in the country has exceeded $4,000,000,000,000 - yes, that four TRILLION dollars.  And no one has a clue on how to make good on those obligations.  The only solution still is to stiff the retired public service workers.  I hope everyone has pictures and videos of the celebrations that took place after the unions got the members of NASP (National Association of Scumbag Politicians) to authorize all those contracts.  That's about the most that they'll have to look at besides very tiny retirement checks in their mailboxes.

Mark Meckler of tea party fame reported today that people who track what the media - including the lamestream - cover, now tell us that it was only four days ago that NBC first reported on 'Fast and Furious', the months old gun walking fiasco that the Dept of Justice authorized along the Mexican border.  This aspect of liberal journalism at work goes a long way to explain why progressives have little clue on what's happening in the world, and respond in outrage to presentations of blatant and well-aged facts.  On RR we do what we can.

For the record: public service unions and national security leaks

George Rebane

Among other more far seeing mavens, RR and its selected cohort of commenters deserve a little chest thump and back slap or two for being years ahead of what has now emerged as national wisdom on the destructive force that is the public service unions operating at ALL levels of government.

Now we have both Democratic and Republican electeds pointing out that the opulent benefits of public sector compensation packages need to be rolled back.  In San Jose, San Diego, Wisconsin, Vallejo, Stockton, Indiana, … the people have spoken, and these people are not only made up of conservatives or tea party members.  I don’t think that this infection of eye opening revelations is going to stop with these jurisdictions.  There is a sea change happening and people are hearkening back to the historical warnings from FDR and George Meany, not exactly rightwing opponents of the labor movement.

What is not surprising is that the local leftwingers have seen none of this, and today remain as blind as ever.  To them last Tuesday’s elections were a victory which they continue to celebrate as the resurrection of the Purple People Eater that is turning all voters into their leftwing version of ‘middle roaders’.  I think that is wonderful.  How can anyone not like an election in which everyone wins.  Most certainly the conservatives want the progressives to hold that warm thought, and continue doing what they have done so far.  Those kinds of ‘victories’ are bankable.

What now is also in the national discussion is the recognized fact that our elected officials sit at least on both sides of the table during negotiations with the public service unions.  And many of them sit only on one side – guess which.  How can you tell on which side your electeds sit on?  Simple, when they all swear on a stack of bibles that they only represent you the voter, and to boot act huffy that you even brought up the subject, you need look no further.  Those officials who understand the problem and their manifest involvements are now beginning to show a smidgeon of contrition here and there.

What recovery? (updated 12jun12)

George Rebane

[This is the submitted form of my regular Union column that was published on 9 June 2012.  Remarkably, The Union published its print and online versions without the inclusion of the figure.]

How’s that recovery working out for you?  It’s seems like we’re watching molasses flow uphill, and we know that is not going to last.  There is no indication that anyone has a plan that would let us catch up with our historical growth curve, and the mavens in Washington and Sacramento are applying every trick they know to destroy the incentives for businesses to create jobs and the unemployed to find work.

All the numbers that drizzle out of the various government bureaus and agencies are confusing and so much hooey.  Harvard economist Robert Barro advises us to keep it simple by just gluing our eyeball to the gross domestic product (GDP) – if that’s not going up at a good pace, nothing else matters.  To give you an idea of a good pace, GDP went up at an average of 3.1% a year since recovering from the post-war recession in 1948.  And to put a bow on it, in the 1982-89 years GDP growth spurted up to average 4.3% a year.

In this so-called recovery we have averaged 2.4% annually since 2009, and that rate has been slowing.  Last quarter it dropped to 1.8%, and the per capita rate has dropped about $1,000 since 2009.  The reason all this is doubly troubling is that historically recession recoveries have enjoyed GDP rates significantly above the 3.1% average when supportive economic policies have been followed.  The bigger the recession, the stronger has been the recovery.  Not this time.

  Most folks don’t pay much mind to GDP; it’s just another number they hear on TV that’s supposed be something like a speedometer, or fuel gauge, or gas pedal, or some other thing to do with America’s economy.  But as things keep going downhill - and make no mistake, we are now going downhill – all of us who vote should know a little something about what GDP is and what goes into its make-up.  The nearby figure helps us understand GDP’s important inputs and outputs – it’s really a simple arithmetic problem that sums a few fairly straightforward parts as shown.

Silencing and Suppressing the Right

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary that will be broadcast early next week due to this week being the station’s regular late spring pledge week.]

The debate about who is trying to silence whom continues.  Over the past decades the evidence has favored the Right since McCarthy was accused of blacklisting half of Hollywood sixty years ago.  But during this election year of intense emotions and strong political positions, it’s good to consider some updates of what our progressive cadres are doing in and out of government.

Have you heard of SWATing?  That’s SWAT like in Special Weapons and Tactics, you know, all the guys in black combat gear with assault weapons descending on armed desperados holed up somewhere.  Well SWATing is when you go in front of someone’s house, dial 911, and report that someone was just killed or is about to be done in.  Very quickly the police with SWAT team in tow arrive and assault the house.

The Washington Times reports that this has now happened to three prominent conservative bloggers across the country who reported on the doings of a leftwing activist Brett Kimberlin.  The encounters have been pretty dramatic, and surprised the hell out of the victims.  Fortunately no one has yet been shot.

Austerity works (updated 14jun12)

George Rebane

RR has been focused on matters economic for some years now as the crises build here and in Europe.  In their efforts to recover, I’ve tried to make the case that Europe and the US have actually been headed in opposite directions.  Cutting to the chase, debt and socialist policies – entitlements, commerce throttling regulations, tax disincentives, and Keynesian theory - have been the culprits.  And the most effective medicine is drastic cuts to spending as opposed to drastic tax increases on the productive sector.

An example of how this works is being demonstrated by Estonia, a country that is in the eurozone and suffered an 18% contraction of its economy when the Great Recession hit.  Even Greece did not contract that much.  Estonia fought back by putting in place what can only be considered as draconian austerity measures.  One reason it could do that was that the Estonians came together as a nation and backed the very politicians who proposed such stern stuff.  What, of course, helped was the cohesion of Estonian culture, but it is the rapid modification of their social policies and spending that turned the corner.  Estonia is now the 'how to' poster child of European recovery.  More details in this current CNBC summary that was sent to me by a correspondent.

While there is still a way to go, Estonia has demonstrated what Germany is telling Europe’s profligate economies – austerity works.

(Full disclosure – I was born in Estonia.  RR has tracked other aspects of Estonian economic policy with respect to its tax code, technology, and monetary policy.  These are available through either google or RR search.)

[14jun12 update]  The WSJ blogged today, again highlighting the high-tech entrepreneurship of Estonians, and the country's government which is receptive to such economic activity (here).  In short, they seem to understand that economic recovery needs both austerity (cut spending) and growth (start and build enterprises).  What is conspicuously absent from the Estonian regimen is raising taxes to stifle work and risk taking.  H/T to a correspondent for sending the link.

The Liberal Mind – ‘Women are dumb.’

George Rebane

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid peeled off another liberal bon mot this morning – “Republicans don’t want women to earn equal pay.”  This electioneering stunt is hoisted every couple of years, regular as clockwork in support of the latest Democrat sponsored bill that is a sop to class action lawyers and would kill jobs for women.  BTW, it’s also redundant since the on the books are two wide-ranging laws – the 1963 Equal Pay Act and the 1964 Civil Rights Act – that prohibit gender-based pay discrimination.

The populist ploy is rolled out regularly on the ‘fact’ that women earn ‘only 70% of what men earn’.  That statistic teeters on aggregate payrolls and is intended for an innumerate audience suffering from logical lightheadedness.  Actually, any pay gap that remains is explained away by a handfull of factors ranging from the professions women choose to the hours and years they remain in the workforce (more here).

All that doesn’t matter to the liberal machine when they decide to pull their populist levers.  The current legislation Reid is showcasing would loosen another blizzard of regulations on businesses with women workers, requiring them to regularly justify to the feds that their women are not being discriminated against.  This makes all the sense in the world to the political class that has no idea how either the economy works or how businesses operate.  Businesses would naturally respond to such a law by minimizing the number of women they hire because the added regulatory burden translates directly into an increased cost of women’s labor in the workplace.  The result is fewer jobs for women.  (The astute reader will recognize that this is just another version of the eternal truth that you get less of what is taxed more.)

But the point I want to make in this report is that the liberal establishment considers women to be some kind of mental midgets for them to buy this propaganda pap.  The denigration of women’s ability to reason is part and parcel of the standard applied by the Democrats on other social issues they sell to their constituents.  Women are not supposed to be able to figure out what that 70% number means, what damage the latest proposed law would do to their economic wellbeing, and why it is trotted out every two years by the liberal leadership.  To the Reids and Pelosis, women in the large are just a bunch of dumb broads who will swallow anything that comes in a bright emotional wrapper.

Finally, these Democrat theatrics have really one purpose, and that is to make their case that Republicans purposely seek to keep women as an underclass in America.  Women are supposed to believe that Republicans are so dense as to continue pissing off half the electorate every two years by opposing equal pay legislation, and maintain an unfair work environment in which women are not treated on the merits they bring to the job.  The final joke on Reid’s claim is the Lilly Ledbetter Act of 2009 about which President Obama bragged in March that it “ensures equal pay for equal work.”  The liberal minds at work.

Lamestream in the Limelight (updated 6jun12)

George Rebane

Ramirez nails the latest.  And did you hear – well, actually it was hard to do that – how the those self-adulating lamestream journalists all went silent the instant that the district attorney released evidence supporting Zimmerman against the hooligan who was pounding his head into the concrete.  Then all the spigots opened again when the judge revoked his bail on misrepresentation of available cash charges.

And now our President, you know the one who’s not a socialist, has awarded The Presidential Medal of Freedom to big time American socialist Dolores Huerta.  “The Heritage Foundation’s Lachlan Markay reported this week that President Obama has awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Dolores Huerta, a labor activist and honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America.  As Markay notes, DSA describes itself as “the largest socialist organization in the United States, and the principal U.S. affiliate of the Socialist International.”  This is a story the mainstream media declined to cover. But Heritage is getting the story out there regardless.”

Just another verse from the lamestream’s theme song, ‘The Sound of Silence’.  I could go on, but you get the idea …

[6jun12 update] A more significant item 'overlooked' by and in the lamestream is Alabama's passage of the nation's first anti-Agenda21 legislation.  This is especially significant because of the chorus of the nation's useful idiots (especially of the local kind) who claim that Agenda21 is only a figment of fevered rightwing imaginations and has no bearing on America's property rights and individual freedoms.  On The New American we read from 'Alabama Adopts First Official State Ban on UN Agenda 21' -

The Alabama Senate Bill (SB) 477 legislation, known unofficially among some supporters as the “Due Process for Property Rights” Act, was approved unanimously by both the state House and Senate. After hesitating for a few days, late last month Republican Governor Robert Bentley finally signed into law the wildly popular measure — but only after heavy pressure from activists forced his hand.

Virtually no mention of the law was made in the establishment press. But analysts said the measure was likely the strongest protection against the UN scheme passed anywhere in America so far. The law, aimed at protecting private property rights, specifically prevents all state agencies and local governments in Alabama from participating in the global scheme in any way.

"The State of Alabama and all political subdivisions may not adopt or implement policy recommendations that deliberately or inadvertently infringe or restrict private property rights without due process, as may be required by policy recommendations originating in, or traceable to 'Agenda 21,' " the law states, adding a brief background on the UN plan hatched at the 1992 “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro.

Doing the Haffey Sidestep on PERS

George Rebane

Nevada County’s considerable (massive?) unfunded pension liabilities have been downplayed by the county electeds and staff for the last several years.  When this matter has been brought up to the Board of Supervisors by citizens, it has been either dismissed with hubristic silence or called a form of “rural myth” (more here).  This week county CEO Rick Haffey added his contribution by introducing a new version of this dance.  It was published in the 31may12 Union (‘Supes have taken proactive approach to public pensions’), and for those not having access to that newspaper – their website is paywalled – you can download a pdf of it here.

The bottom line, as Mr Haffey corroborates, is that the county will be $119M in arrears, to make up for the anticipated shortfall that CalPERS (the state employees’ pension fund manager) will require to pay county retirees in the outyears.  There is no plan for making up this amount, and Mr Haffey neither provides one nor states that one is in preparation.  On top of that, there is no indication that the county knows how much and when payments on the $119M will come due.  Such a schedule of dollars and dates, even in estimated form, is required to forge a plan to deal with these unfunded liabilities.

We can only deduce from this that the county, in its present make-up of electeds and staff, does not intend to address the problem – do they all plan to be gone then?  Instead, in Mr Haffey’s article he goes into some detail to exonerate the current Rood Center crew in having caused the problem or of having added to it.  The presentation focuses on decisions and provisions going forward that should be taken as long overdue but now prudent behavior on the part of state and local officials.  But there is nothing included on the disposition of the $119M overhang facing the county.

GMC = General Motors China

George Rebane

President Obama bailed out GMC to the tune of billions in order to make sure his union votes stayed bought and paid for.  While doing that he stiffed GMC's bond holders (along with your pension fund?) and lambasted American corporations doing business overseas as part of the overall globalization of trade.  Now we discover that American auto icon GMC is rapidly becoming a predominantly Chinese vehicle manufacturer, giving its American manufacturing and car design technology to the Chinese, and preparing to do the majority of its manufacturing and business there.  All this while leaving a rump stateside manufacturing capability manned by uncompetitive overpaid union workers here to make over-priced cars and trucks for Americans.  It would have been better for the country to allow GMC to go through bankruptcy, letting its creditors dispose of its assets, and simply send every union member a check for votes properly cast.  Maybe next time.

(cue a distant voice from the past, 'What's good for GM is good for America.')

The Great Divide – the debate continues

George Rebane

RL ‘Bob’ Crabb posted ‘Inept vs Insane: The National Feud’ on his blog which by its title alone invited a heated discussion in its comment stream.  I put in my two cents and started a thread that had Bob worrying that people would “put holes in (his) new blog”.  Points were raised and questions put that are best answered on RR, which already has enough holes in it so that a few more here and there won’t matter.

Bob’s main point seemed to be that the polarized politics of the country have very little basis in reason, and therefore if people just cooled their rhetoric, they could find a nice middle way and all would be well for the country.  He couldn’t see that much difference between the two sides.  Well, I have spent the last five years on RR trying to substantiate the proposition that there is a huge difference between free market capitalism and collectivism in all its forms, many of which are clearly on the rise for reasons discussed in these pages.  Anyway, I commented –

“The main difference I see in the contending sides is that one says, your way won’t work because it will put all of us in a poorhouse surrounded by barbed wire; therefore let us go do our thing, and you can do your thing. The other side says your way is unfair, and you have to stay and pay us to make our way work (and we’ll use the barbed wire if we have to).”

Michael Anderson, somewhat incredulously, asked “George, what’s/who’s stopping you from creating a new country where you can “do your thing” within the border of the USA?”