February 25 Week In Review

Week In Review

February 25 2013

by Bill Onasch

Stupid Is....

Mike Hall exclaims on the AFL-CIO Blog,

“[House Speaker] Boehner’s sequester could cost more than 750,000 private- and public-sector workers their jobs this year alone, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).”

Erskine Bowles, President Clinton’s Chief-of-Staff, and co-chair of President Obama’s bipartisan deficit commission, characterized the coming “sequestration” slashing across all government programs great and small as “stupid, stupid, stupid!” It’s an assertion that can’t be refuted. It ranks right up there with Lunch Box Joe Biden’s advice to nervous women home alone to start blasting away with a shotgun in the vicinity of unseen suspected prowlers.

But Washington Post veteran Bob Woodward, who has been exposing White House deceit since the days of Watergate, reminds us the sequester deal originated with the current administration--to get an interim deal, the Budget Control Act of 2011. Woodward has a lot of documentation compiled while producing his book The Price of Politics. He writes in Saturday’s Post,

“Obama personally approved of the plan for Lew and Nabors to propose the sequester to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). They did so at 2:30 p.m. July 27, 2011, according to interviews with two senior White House aides who were directly involved. Nabors has told others that they checked with the president before going to see Reid. A mandatory sequester was the only action-forcing mechanism they could devise.”

They undoubtedly thought this plan would be “action-forcing” because even Congress could not be so stupid as to actually carry out random sequestration. But they may have underestimated the lack of intelligent design guiding their Capitol Hill adversaries. We now sit as petrified backseat passengers, without even seat belts or air-bags, watching headlights closing rapidly in a game of chicken.

The action the White House hoped for–and still craves–is a Grand Bargain where the other boss party shares responsibility for unconscionable, not to mention unpopular cuts in entitlements and other useful public sector programs. Bowles, and his Republican accomplice, deficit commission co-chair Warren Simpson, have not only bravely spoken against stupidity but have issued new dire deficit doomsday warnings.

Most economists dismiss imminent danger of deficit disaster and some of the top ones even call for stimulus rather than austerity. Some of the prime targets of the administration–such as Social Security and the US Postal Service--are self-financing and contribute nothing direct one way or another to budget deficit.

The only indirect ways Social Security impacts deficit is when Congress borrows money for other uses from Social Security and when Congress decides in an election season to stop collecting part of the SS payroll tax. In both cases, Congress incurs a debt to Social Security that must be repaid with interest. It requires a cynicism bigger than the national debt to use these examples to label old folk’s pension money as a budget buster.

As for Medicare, a recent e-mail blast from the pro-single-payer Physicians for a National Health Plan says,

“The traditional Medicare program allocates only 1 percent of total spending to overhead compared with 6 percent when the privatized portion of Medicare, known as Medicare Advantage, is included,” according to a study in the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law.

That’s the vaunted superior efficiency of the private sector at work.

It is not fair to either him or us for our leaders at the House of Labor to center their fire exclusively on Speaker Boehner. He’s only the mischievous clown in this circus. The ringmaster resides several blocks away. Some past ruling classes used to at least provide bread along with their circuses for the proletariat. Austerity precludes substance for our bodies--and the diversion of the Washington Big Show isn’t even entertaining any more.

A Different Leak In the Other Washington

First came the announcement there was one leak. By the end of the week, the number of breached radioactive waste containers buried in the Hanford, Washington site that made the fuel for the first atomic bombs, was up to six. The authorities quickly issued the familiar, suspect announcement that there is no immediate risk to public health. But Washington’s Governor went on to say, “This certainly raises serious questions about the integrity of all 149 single-shell tanks with radioactive liquid and sludge at Hanford.”

The plant, opened in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project, is located about five miles from the Columbia River which flows through Washington/Oregon in to the Pacific. It ceased production of plutonium in 1989 and has been in a clean-up mode ever since. The EPA estimates that about 475 billion gallons of contaminated water have been discharged into the soil.

While not as dramatic and catastrophic as reactor meltdowns such as Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and more recently Fukushima, the fresh disclosures in Hanford are a reminder of an inherent danger associated with all things nuclear–waste that remains harmful for centuries, sometimes millennia.

Even in Germany, where in response to a mass anti-nuke movement nuclear power plants are being shut down, and significant advances have been made in promoting solar and wind power alternatives, waste problems were also exposed last week. An article entitled Germany's Homemade Nuclear Waste Disaster in Der Spiegel opened,

“Some 126,000 barrels of nuclear waste have been dumped in the Asse II salt mine over the last 50 years. German politicians are pushing for a law promising their removal. But the safety, technical and financial hurdles are enormous, and experts warn that removal is more dangerous than leaving them put.”

These incidents are happening now in the most scientifically and industrially advanced countries. We shudder to think what’s happening in less developed, less transparent societies.

In recent years, even some scientists and environmentalists have been talking about the need to use nuclear power as a stop-gap measure in the fight against climate change. But the second most inconvenient truth is that in addition to a host of other associated dangers there is no known way of safe, long term disposal of nuclear waste. There probably never will be. We can only wish future generations good luck in dealing with the mess we’ve already made and bequeath to them.

Nukes are not an acceptable option for either war or electricity. If humanity is to have a future we have to disarm the nuclear weapon arsenals of the world–the biggest by far, and the only one ever actually used, belonging to the USA--and replace the burning of fossil and nuclear fuels with clean, renewable energy. That’s a tall order. But, considering the alternatives, we better get busy filling it right here, right now.

In Brief...

¶ Maurice “Grizz” Taylor, CEO of the Titan Tire company, ruffled a few French feathers when he explained to Les Echos why he declined an invitation to take over a plant being closed by Goodyear. “I have visited that factory a couple of times....They get one hour for breaks and lunch, talk for three and work for three. I told this to the French union workers to their faces. They told me that's the French way!” Vive la France!

¶ From the New York Times, “Thousands of Greek workers walked off the job on Wednesday in the first nationwide protest against austerity this year, shutting schools, reducing staffing at state hospitals and disrupting transportation. The 24-hour strike was called by the country’s two main labor unions, which represent about 2.5 million workers and have led public resistance to three years of austerity measures that have raised taxes and cut salaries and pensions. The unions called on Greeks to join them in protest rallies in Athens and other cities on Wednesday to oppose ‘dead-end policies that have squeezed the life out of workers and impoverished citizens,’ slashing average incomes by a third and pushing unemployment to 27 percent.”

¶ Lisa de Moraes writes in the Washington Post, “filmmaker Ken Burns has won his legal battle with New York City over outtakes and notes from his documentary about the wrongful conviction of five teens in the racially charged 1989 ‘Central Park jogger’ rape case....Manhattan Federal Court Magistrate Judge Ronald L. Ellis sided with Burns on Tuesday, writing in his ruling that the city ‘failed to present this court with a concern so compelling as to override the precious rights of freedom of speech and the press’ [that] the reporter’s privilege seeks to ensure.’”

¶ CBC reports, “Thousands of protesters across the province of Quebec, in Ottawa and in Tracadie, N.B., took part in demonstrations denouncing the government's employment insurance reform Saturday.

The government's changes to the EI program compel laid-off seasonal workers to go farther afield to look for work and to accept jobs that pay as little as 70 per cent of their previous hourly wage.”

¶ Fiona Harvey, Guardian environment correspondent reported, “A global temperature rise of 1.5C would be enough to start the melting of permafrost in Siberia, scientists warned on Thursday. Any widespread thaw in Siberia's permanently frozen ground could have severe consequences for climate change. Permafrost covers about 24% of the land surface of the northern hemisphere, and widespread melting could eventually trigger the release of hundreds of gigatonnes of carbon dioxide and methane, which would have a massive warming effect.”

¶ Tara Siegel Bernard in the NYT, “It is no secret that when it comes to paid parental leave, the United States is among the least generous in the world, ranking down with the handful of countries that don’t offer any paid leave at all, among them Liberia, Suriname and Papua New Guinea.”

That’s all for this week.