by Amy Goodman - The Capital Times / Common Dreams
The global financial crisis deepens, with more than 10 million in the U.S. out of work, according to the Department of Labor.
Unemployment hit 6.7 percent in November. Add the 7.3 million "involuntary part-time workers," who want to work full time but can't find a position. Jobless claims have reached a 26-year high, while 30 states reportedly face potential shortfalls in their unemployment insurance pools.
The stunning failure of regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission was again highlighted, as former NASDAQ head Bernard Madoff (you got it, pronounced "made off") was arrested for allegedly running the world's largest criminal pyramid scheme, with losses expected at $50 billion, dwarfing those from the Enron scandal. The picture is grim - unless, that is, you are a corporate executive.
The $700 billion financial bailout package, TARP (Troubled Assets Relief Program), was supposed to mandate the elimination of exorbitant executive compensation and "golden parachutes." As U.S. taxpayers pony up their hard-earned dollars, highflying executives and corporate boards are now considering whether to give themselves multimillion-dollar bonuses.
According to The Washington Post, the specific language in the TARP law that forbade such payouts was changed at the last minute, with a small but significant one-sentence edit made by the Bush administration. The Post reported, "The change stipulated that the penalty would apply only to firms that received bailout funds by selling troubled assets to the government in an auction."
Read the fine print. Of the TARP bailout funds to be disbursed, only those that were technically spent "in an auction" would have limits imposed on executive pay. But Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and his former Goldman Sachs colleague Neel Kashkari (yes, pronounced "cash carry"), who is running the program, aren't inclined to spend the funds in auctions. They prefer their Capital Purchase Program, handing over cash directly. Recall Paulson's curriculum vitae: He began as a special assistant to John Ehrlichman in the Nixon White House and then went on to work for a quarter-century at Goldman Sachs, one of the largest recipients of bailout funds and chief competitor to Lehman Brothers, the firm that Paulson let fail.
The Government Accountability Office issued a report on TARP Dec. 10, expressing concerns about the lack of oversight of the companies receiving bailout funds. The report states that "without a strong oversight and monitoring function, Treasury's ability to ensure an appropriate level of accountability and transparency will be limited." The nonprofit news organization ProPublica has been tracking the bailout program, reporting details that remain shrouded by the Treasury. As of Tuesday, 202 institutions had obtained bailout funds totaling close to $250 billion.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said recently, "The Treasury Department's implementation of the TARP is insufficiently transparent and is not accountable to American taxpayers." Barney Frank, D-Mass., chair of the House Financial Services Committee, said earlier, "Use of these funds ... for bonuses, for severance pay, for dividends, for acquisitions of other institutions, etc. - is a violation of the terms of the act."
Republican Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa said of the loophole, "The flimsy executive compensation restrictions in the original bill are now all but gone."
Put aside for the moment that these three all voted for the legislation - the law clearly needs to be corrected before additional funds are granted.
The sums these titans of Wall Street are walking away with are staggering. In their annual "Executive Excess" report, the groups United for a Fair Economy and the Institute for Policy Studies reported 2007 compensation for Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs (Paulson's replacement), of $54 million, and that of John Thain, CEO of Merrill Lynch, a whopping $83 million. Merrill has since been sold to Bank of America, after losing more than $11 billion this year - yet Thain still wants a $10 million bonus.
Paulson, Kashkari and their boss, President George W. Bush, might not be the best people to spend the next $350 billion tranche of U.S. taxpayer money, with just weeks to go before the new Congress convenes Jan. 6, and Barack Obama assumes the presidency Jan. 20. As Watergate leaker Deep Throat was said to have told Bob Woodward, back when Paulson was just starting out, "Follow the money." The U.S. populace, its representatives in Congress and the new Obama administration need to follow the money, close the executive pay loophole and demand accountability from the banks that the public has bailed out.
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
John Byrne - The Raw Story
Bank takes $10 billion bailout, then cuts tax rate 33 percent
Say you got a ten billion dollar loan to shore up your finances, and you paid your employees $10.9 billion, and you raked in $2.3 billion for the year.
What would you say you owed in taxes? One percent?
That's what you'd pay if you were Goldman Sachs, Inc. The high-flying brokerage -- and former home of Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson -- has announced it's paying just $14 million in taxes this year.
Last year, their tax bill was $6 billion, or 34.1 percent. That represents a year-over-year drop of 33.1 percent.
Goldman attributed its lower tax rate to "more tax credits as a percentage of earnings" and "changes in geographic earnings mix."
Tax accounting advisor Robert Willens told Bloomberg News the rate drop seems "a little extreme."
"I was definitely taken aback," Willens told the business wire. "Clearly they have taken steps to ensure that a lot of their income is earned in lower-tax jurisdictions."
Texas Democrat Rep. Lloyd Doggett, who serves on the House Ways and Means Committee, said Goldman, like other banks, shifted income to countries with lower taxes to reduce its tax burden.
"This problem is larger than Goldman Sachs," Doggett told Bloomberg. "With the right hand out begging for bailout money, the left is hiding it offshore."
Paulson was CEO of Goldman Sachs until mid-2006, and earned $35 million at the firm in 2005. He drew a $16.4 million salary in 2006 -- even though he served as chief executive for just half the year.
by Adrianne Appel - Inter Press Service
BOSTON - A new U.S. investigative panel is demanding answers from the U.S. Treasury about how the agency has spent money from the 700-billion-dollar bailout fund.
The Congressional Oversight Panel, a four-person board authorized by Congress and led by consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren of Harvard Law School, is charged with finding out what Treasury has done with the billions it has already spent.
"We are here to ask the questions that we believe all Americans have a right to ask: who got the money, what have they done with it, how has it helped the country and how has it helped ordinary people?" the panel says in its first report, which lays out its work.
The panel has begun gathering documents from Treasury and also is holding a series of public meetings across the U.S., to hear the public's concerns about the bailout and the economy. The panel expects to have some answers for Congress and the public by Jan. 9, when it will issue a report on its website, cop.senate.gov.
"We will be running very hard over the next 40 days," Warren told members of Congress recently. Also on the panel are Rep. Jeb Hensarling, a Republican from Texas; Richard Neiman, Superintendent of Banks in New York; and Damon Silvers, a lawyer with AFL-CIO.
"The recession has visited every household in the country. More than 100,000 families last month headed into bankruptcy courts. Americans are watching Washington's every move with great concern," Warren said.
In a desperate attempt to ease lending, the Federal Reserve Tuesday dropped the federal funds interest rate to between 0 and .25 percent, the lowest in decades.
The Warren panel lacks subpoena power but will work together with Special Inspector General Neil M. Barofsky, who will wield significant legal power, and the General Accounting Office, in auditing and overseeing the funds.
"The public has a right to know how financial institutions that have received public money are using that money," the panel says. "Treasury should be responsible for holding individual institutions accountable for how they use the public's money."
After considerable protests from the public, legislators approved on Oct. 3 700 billion dollars in special funding for the U.S. Treasury, which was requested by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson who said the funds were needed to prevent a wholesale collapse of the U.S. financial sector.
Paulson has since doled out the equivalent of 1,900 dollars per U.S. family to banks and financial institutions, according to Warren's panel. None of the Treasury funds have been aimed at slowing foreclosures.
Paulson gave 40 billion dollars to insurance giant AIG, 165 billion dollars to 87 banks, including Citigroup and eight other of the largest financial institutions in the U.S., plus an additional 20 billion dollars to Citigroup. The nine large banks were required to give the U.S. a limited amount of stock and returns in exchange for the money.
The Treasury bailout program, run by Assistant Secretary Neel Kashkari, did not require the banks to use the money in any particular way. Kashkari told Congress recently that Treasury has not audited the money to see how it is being spent.
"There is a casual impression that this money is being used to pay bonuses for top executives and dividends for shareholders," James Crotty, professor emeritus in economics at the University of Massachusetts, told IPS.
"There are ways to measure what's happening to the lending. This may be something to question Treasury vigorously about," Warren said. Great Britain has kept track of its bank bailout money, and required concessions, unlike the U.S., she said.
"The money was given to financial institutions in return for those institutions to lend to small and medium enterprises. There was an explicit quid pro quo," she said.
Paulson and Kashkari, both formerly of Goldman Sachs, have spent additional millions to hire private firms and some of the same institutions that received bailout money, to help administer the bailout program.
Much secrecy surrounds the spending of the money, with the amount of money in some contracts blackened out and the work actually underway by the contractors not described or audited.
"We are disturbed that so much of [the bailout] activities are opaque. There is a lack of adequate oversight and a lack of transparency," Beverley Lumpkin, an investigator with the Program on Government Oversight, a Washington non-profit, told IPS. POGO praises the panel's work so far.
"We like the questions they ask. We feel they are pretty much tracking the major questions that need to be looked at," Lumpkin said.
Despite the spending of these funds and more than two trillion by the U.S. Federal Reserve, the economy remains in turmoil, marked by job losses and climbing unemployment, business closings, more than 2 million home foreclosures in 2008 and a severe drop in the value of the stock market.
"The funds haven't done what they are supposed to do. They hoped interest rates would come down and that loans would take place. It doesn't appear that either of those things have happened," Crotty said.
The nation's largest banks are not loaning money to each other out of fear that they will lose it if a bank defaults, due to their heavy investment in risky, unregulated products based on mortgages with sky-high interest rates and unfair terms, many of which are now in foreclosure and without value. This in turn has crimped loans to businesses and brought the economy almost to a halt.
"Virtually all the things that indicate the health of the economy are deteriorating rapidly. Everything looks horrible at the moment," Crotty said.
ThinkProgress
“I didn’t compromise my soul to be popular,” President Bush told Fox News in an interview yesterday. “Look, everybody likes to be popular,” he said. “I mean, do people approve of the economy? No. I don’t approve of the economy. … I’ve had, hell, a lot of serious challenges.”
At a press conference today, President-elect Barack Obama is expected to announce securities-industry regulator Mary Schapiro as his choice to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission. Obama also plans to name economic adviser Dan Tarullo to an open seat on the Federal Reserve Board and Gary Gensler to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D-IL) will not appoint anyone to fill the Senate seat vacated by Obama. When asked if an appointment is forthcoming, Blagojevich’s lawyer Ed Genson said, “No. Harry Reid said that they’re not going to accept anybody he picks. Why would he do that?”
Iraqi shoe-throwing journalist Muntader al-Zaidi has reportedly “apologized to Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki for embarrassing him before the watching world.” Writing to Maliki, Zaidi pleaded: “I remember in the summer of 2005, I interviewed your Excellency and you told me, ‘Come in, this is your house.’ And so I appeal to your fatherly feelings to forgive me.”
A new military plan for troop withdrawals from Iraq presented to President-elect Barack Obama this week falls short of the 16-month timetable Obama outlined during his election campaign. The plan, proposed by Gens. David Petraeus and Ray Odierno, envisions withdrawing 7,000 to 8,000 troops from Iraq in the first six months of 2009, but “would leave 12 combat brigades in Iraq by June 2009.” More »
President Bush will convene a gathering of ex-Presidents next month to discuss the transition. Former Presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and George H. W. Bush will attend, along with Barack Obama. Dana Perino said “the gathering will be a chance for them to discuss life in the White House, politics, and domestic and world affairs.”
Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-CA) turned down a position in the Obama administration to be U.S. Trade Representative. “My concern is how much weight this position would have had, and I reached the conclusion that it would not be a top priority, or even second or third priority,” Becerra said. The Obama team “may have already soured on Becerra thanks to his hemming and hawing over the post.”
Media Matters named Sean Hannity the 2008 Misinformer of the Year. In bestowing the honor upon Hannity, the media watchdog organization writes, “Never has he so enthusiastically applied his talents for spreading misinformation as he did to the 2008 presidential race, focusing his energies primarily on President-elect Barack Obama.”
And finally: During a private gathering of former White House chiefs of staff, Vice President Dick Cheney — a former chief of staff to President Ford – had some sage advice for incoming chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. “The best thing you can do is keep your VP under control,” he said, causing the room to break up in laughter.
Recommended Reading:
by William Rivers Pitt - The Smirking Chimp
I met a chef from Texas who was like an oak tree with tattoos, and made a mean barbecue sauce. He'd been in the 101st Airborne and was about to be deployed to Iraq, but destroyed his knee in a training exercise and wound up getting discharged. He knew the war was nonsense and thought the Bush guys all deserved to rot in jail, but he still wanted to go to Iraq, and wept whenever a soldier he knew died over there because he should have been there and maybe could have saved that person if his knee hadn't buckled.
I met a woman in Texas who sat down in a fire-ant-infested mud puddle because her son died in Iraq. Everything was "Mission Accomplished" and high approval ratings, but she didn't get it and wanted an explanation from the man who'd sent her son to die for a banner on a ship and a bump in the polls. So, she sat in a mud puddle outside his house and waited for an explanation, and by doing so, began the final and inexorable turning of popular opinion against the war. The mothers of dead soldiers all had a face after this one mother sat in that mud and waited for an explanation that never came.
I met a journalist, a fourth-generation American of Lebanese descent, whose horror and disgust at the mainstream media's insipid cheerleading coverage of the Iraq war in 2003 compelled him to travel to Iraq and do some reporting on his own. Through his unfiltered and most decidedly unembedded perspective, we learned of the Iraqi hospitals overflowing with feces and urine, of villages targeted by Coalition forces for reprisal attacks, about bodies rotting in the streets of devastated towns, about dogs feasting on those corpses as they bloated in the sun, about gas lines lasting two days and about what America's war really looked and smelled like when the media's self-serving airbrush treatment was not applied.
I met a tank driver who had served along the Berlin line during the cold war, who marched next to me at antiwar demonstrations carrying an upside-down American flag. Whenever some outraged patriot challenged him, this man would reel off his service number, his billet, his AO and his record, and then dare his challenger to say something about his love of country. "The flag like this means 'Distress, Send Help,'" he would always say. "This country needs help."
I met a kid from upstate New York who was slinging burgers with this perplexed look on his face because he didn't know what to do with himself, so he was slinging burgers until he figured out what to do. For as long as he could remember, he had wanted to be a soldier and had bent his whole life towards that end. He ran the farthest, worked the hardest and even joined a competitive shooting league so his aim would be the best. He got himself into one of the best military schools in the country, and then Bush and Iraq and everything else happened and he knew it was wrong, and knew he could not devote his life and honor to all that, so he quit the military academy and abandoned his dream of military service, and was flipping burgers until he could figure out what else he could do.
I met a woman who was a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, who worked next to Doug Feith and his merry men down in the Office of Special Plans. She saw them gin up all the false and misleading reasons for an invasion of Iraq we eventually saw on TV and read in the papers, and she decided to go public about what she'd seen. Very few mainstream media outlets wanted to talk with this Air Force lieutenant colonel about what she knew and what she'd seen because it made a mess of the accepted storylines coming out of the White House, the Pentagon and the Office of Special Plans.
I met an Air Force pilot who was protesting the war because he was pretty sure he'd committed serious war crimes on several occasions by following the orders he'd been given to drop bombs on places in Iraq we were not supposed to drop bombs. If he could have turned himself in for his crimes, he probably would have, because he had a haunted face and he knew that "I was just following orders" only goes so far. Nobody would arrest him, because he was a hero of course, so he was protesting the war with that haunted look on his face.
I met a corporal who fired artillery during the opening credits for "Shock and Awe." He'd been in uniform well before the invasion, and recalled his commanding officer's instructions for the green recruits who didn't know better. "You're not liberating anyone with this war," the CO said to the confused consternation of the new troops. "We're going in to get Iraq's oil, and you're going in to protect the guys around you, and that's the deal." The corporal nodded along with all the other old salts who knew better, and they went in, and the greenies learned a lot of new things in a hurry.
I met a woman in New York City who had lost beloved family in a pillar of fire and smoke and jet fuel when the Towers went down. She was part of a group whose members had all lost someone on that day, and they went from city to city demanding that Bush and America not use the deaths of their loved ones as a rallying cry for some stupid, useless, brutal, illegal bloodbath of an Iraq invasion. She knew all about how everything changed after 9/11, and she was right, and that's why she spoke out.
I've met a lot of other people like this. I met a staff sergeant whose Iraq tour got bumped back three weeks because someone in his unit failed a drug test, but after three weeks he still had to go. I met a Green Beret who wants to meet me again in 30 years so he can tell me all the stuff I don't know, but need to. I even met a guy with two prosthetic legs who would go from bar to bar and get people to buy him drinks because he said he was a wounded Iraq veteran. He wasn't; he was a spoiled brat from California who passed out drunk on some train tracks and got run over and lost his legs, and that was terrible for him, but he got no mercy from the real Iraq veteran who figured out this kid was lying, and that kid will never come back to my bar again, ever.
I want to meet the guy who threw his shoes at Bush on Sunday. I think he and all these others I've met would have a lot to talk about. They all have so much in common.
It won't happen, of course. But I do want to meet the man who threw his shoes. I would like to shake his hand, too.
_______
About author
William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know and The Greatest Sedition Is Silence. His newest book, House of Ill Repute: Reflections on War, Lies, and America's Ravaged Reputation, will be available this winter from PoliPointPress.
April Gallop files suit for failure to warn people inside Pentagon despite advance knowledge, as well as prior knowledge and complicity in terror attacks
A career Army officer who was injured in the attack on the Pentagon on 9/11 is suing Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld for failing to issue a warning that American Airlines Flight 77 was about to hit the building despite receiving knowledge of its approach some 20 minutes in advance.
Retired Army officer April Gallop, a ranking specialist with top secret clearance who began working at the Pentagon in 2000, has also filed suit against US Air Force General Richard Myers, who was acting chairman of the joint chiefs on 9/11.
Gallop was knocked unconscious when the roof collapsed in her office and her 2-month-old baby sustained a serious brain injury after suffering the consequences of what Gallop describes as "two explosions". Gallop does not believe that a Boeing 757 struck the building on 9/11. The lawsuit charges that the attack was "engineered by other means, a planted bomb or bombs and/or a missile," citing the lack of plane debris witnessed after the attack, along with evidence from the "black box" discovered at the scene, which indicated that the plane passed low over the building immediately before the fireball was observed, as well as the complete failure of ground and air defenses which protect the Pentagon.
The official 9/11 timeline confirms that NORAD and the FAA knew that Flight 77 had been hijacked and was likely headed towards Washington at 9:24 a.m, 19 minutes before the Pentagon was struck. The gap between the second plane hitting the World Trade Center and the incident at the Pentagon was a full 40 minutes.
"The ex-G.I. plaintiff alleges she has been denied government support since then, because she raised 'painful questions' about the inexplicable failure of military defenses at the Pentagon that day, and especially the failure of officials to warn and evacuate the occupants of the building when they knew the attack was imminent" said Gallop's attorney William Veale in a press release.
The suit charges that Cheney, Rumsfeld and Myers conducted a conspiracy to facilitate the attacks and alleges that other unnamed individuals had foreknowledge. The preliminary statement of the lawsuit charges that the attacks were staged so as to "Generate a political atmosphere of acceptance in which the new Administration could enact and implement radical changes in the policy and practice of constitutional government in our country."
The text of the lawsuit lists a mountain of evidence indicating that top members of the Bush cabinet had a hand in the attacks, focusing not just on the Pentagon, but prior knowledge of the attacks and the inconceivable response to all four hijacked airliners on 9/11.
The suit cites the Project For a New American Century strategy documents as proof that top Neo-Cons were yearning for "a new Pearl Harbor" in order to whip up support for a pre-planned geopolitical agenda.
"By helping the attack succeed, defendants and their cohorts created a basis for the seizure of extraordinary power, and a pretext for launching the so-called Global War on Terror, in the guise of which they were free to pursue plans for military conquest, “full spectrum dominance” and “American primacy” around the world; as they have done," reads the lawsuit.
Attorney William Veale says that if the lawsuit gets past a motion to dismiss, it may be the key which will unlock a plethora of disturbing questions about 9/11.
"What they don't want is for this to go into discovery," William Veale told Raw Story. "If we can make it past their initial motion to dismiss these claims, and we get the power of subpoena, then we've got a real shot at getting to the bottom of this. We've got the law on our side."
Click here for the full text of the lawsuit.
By Harold Pollack, The American Prospect / Alternet
Several people made mistakes in my wife's care. The worst and most deadly mistake was ours.
I held my wife Veronica's hand as the technician applied cool gel to her chest. At first, the ultrasound images were the fuzzy black-and-whites I remembered from before our daughters Rebecca and Hannah were born. After a few touches to the LCD screen, a breathtaking three-dimensional movie began to run. It featured Veronica's heart, its thick walls beating yellow against a black background.
The technician maneuvered a trackball to reveal the various parts undulating in unison. Colored regions displayed blood velocity and turbulence through the different chambers. Suspended in virtual space, Veronica's heart looked every millimeter the impregnable pump I had always assumed it was.
Veronica is 46, does four hard workouts every week on the stepping machine, eats sensibly, and has a resting pulse of 60. So when she woke me at 2 A.M. and calmly reported funny chest pains radiating to her shoulder blades and down her arms, the obvious came to mind, but it was hard to really believe. Veronica and Rebecca had been coughing and feverish for a week. The three of us had embarrassing cold sores. Acid reflux, a sore diaphragm -- anything seemed more likely than a heart attack.
You need a hard head and a soft heart to manage a loved one's medical emergency. It's surprisingly easy for smart people to be nudged by circumstance and human frailty into doing careless or foolish things. We had two sleeping daughters across the hall. The thought of them waking up to flashing ambulance lights was daunting. We worried about leaving them or dragging them to an emergency room. Still, Veronica had never felt anything like this. We had to do something. So we threw on some clothes, and drove to the 24-hour urgent-care center a half-mile from our house.
***
Several people made mistakes in Veronica's care. The worst and most deadly mistake was ours: going to this urgent-care center. Veronica's symptoms demanded a 911 call. I knew better -- or I certainly should have. I am a certified expert, director of the University of Chicago Center for Health Administration Studies. I've served on expert panels of the Institute of Medicine, no less.
I was swayed to discount what was happening -- Veronica, a clinical nurse specialist, was, too -- by disbelief, by her recent illness, and by her general fitness. We were also swayed by the expected hassle and expense of an ER visit. We envisioned paying a large bill to be prescribed some Tums. Last year, Veronica went out-of-network for urgent care. That cost $700.
In part, we hesitated because that was exactly what the modern health-insurance system is designed to make us do. A quarter-century ago, the RAND Health Insurance Experiment (HIE) established the basic argument for deductibles and co-payments in insurance. HIE remains the most important policy experiment in American history. Its most potent finding was that people who got free care used 40 percent more services than did others assigned to cost-sharing plans. Yet the free care produced little measurable additional benefit for the average patient. These results are often cited in support of co-payments and deductibles designed to discourage inappropriate care. Policy-makers and payers are particularly concerned about the real and alleged over-use of emergency care. Charging higher co-payments is one obvious response.
It seems counterintuitive that demand for ER services would be sensitive to price. If you slice off your finger with a steak knife, you won't be thinking about the money. Yet it turns out that many ailments -- Veronica's included -- are ambiguous, and so price matters. RAND investigators found that individuals in cost-sharing plans reduced ER use by one-third when compared with the free-care group.
Co-payments did discourage wasteful use among HIE participants. ER visits in relatively non-urgent categories such as sprains and back pain were 47 percent less frequent in cost-sharing plans. Unfortunately, co-payments also discouraged appropriate use. Participants enrolled in the cost-sharing plans were 23 percent less likely to seek ER care for "more urgent" problems, including fractures and asthma.
Most patients cannot reliably distinguish appropriate from inappropriate ER use. In many cases, even experts find the distinction fuzzy. I once co-wrote a study of a managed behavioral health plan that imposed a 50 percent co-payment on psychiatric ER visits. Do we really want to impose these barriers? When someone feels that funny chest pain, how long do we want her to dither before seeking help?
Veronica and I made a critical decision in choosing the urgent-care clinic. Your first medical provider in an emergency determines who will frame the initial hypotheses of your illness, who will coordinate your care, and, often, the person who hears the cleanest direct account of what is wrong. I had never been inside this imposing structure, which advertises and charges as an emergency-department affiliate of a local hospital. We arrived to find it nearly empty. The staff promptly took an electrocardiogram (EKG) that looked normal and administered aspirin and nitroglycerin. Veronica took a gastrointestinal cocktail of antacid and lidocaine in case this was acid reflux. It seemed to help, which I found reassuring. They administered a chest X-ray. After bumpy preliminaries, they administered the standard cardiac-enzyme tests. (continue reading)
by RJ Eskow - The Smirking Chimp
When my Southern pals used to say "The South is gonna rise again," I doubt this is what they had in mind: A cadre of Southern Senators, heavily financed by foreign automakers and special interests, declaring war on the American Dream of good wages and decent benefits. When did they decide that hard-working people trying to make a better life for themselves are the enemy?
These Senators may want to think twice. Southern states have been benefiting from Northern taxes for years. If they start another War Between the States, the Federal gravy train might suddenly stop at the Mason-Dixon line.
Studies by the nonpartisan Tax Foundation have consistently shown that these Senators' states receive far more from the Federal government than they pay back in taxes. That's an irony that could lead to some Blue State bitterness: They love to preach about fiscal responsibility and lower taxes, but they keep dipping their beak into the Federal trough.
I believe the applicable Southern phrase is "a handful of gimme and a mouthful of much obliged."
The numbers in the Foundation's most recent study (warning: pdf) speak for themselves: Mitch McConnell's Kentucky took in $1.45 from the Feds for every dollar it paid in taxes. That's a 45 cent free ride. Bob Corker's Tennessee received at 30-cent Federal giveaway. And Richard Shelby's Alabama extracted a whopping 71-cent subsidy from Northern taxpayers.
What about Michigan? They lost 31 cents for every dollar they paid. In other words, McConnell, Shelby, and Corker have been skimming a percentage off these autoworkers' taxes for years on behalf of their constituents. Now, when the same Michigan taxpayers need help, these Senators are telling them to get lost.
It may not be wise for these Senators to push Northern voters too far. Taxpayers in Michigan, New York, Illinois and the other "donor states" may decide thay can't afford to keep subsidizing their Southern counterparts in a time of crisis - especially if all they get in return is "Drop Dead" on a Christmas card.
These are tough times. We should be pulling together, not exacerbating our divisions. And nobody would win a new War Between the States: Not the Democrats, whose 50-state strategy is just beginning to pay off. Not the Republicans, who Dick Cheney rightly noted are at risk of becoming the "Herbert Hoover Party." And probably not these Southern Senators, either. They could go down in history as the guys who killed a mighty sweet deal.
RJ Eskow blogs when he can at:
A Night Light
The Sentinel Effect: Healthcare Blog
Reuters
ATLANTA (Reuters) - Best Buy Co's plan to cut corporate staff is a disappointment for some workers at its home city of Minneapolis, but experts say the enhanced severance package offered would be a much used blueprint for companies looking to ride out the recession.
The top U.S. consumer electronics retailer offered voluntary exit packages to most of the 4,000 workers at its corporate complex as weak consumer spending hurts earnings.
The exit package for the average worker includes 7.5 months of salary, health and life insurance for 12 months and free outplacement services. The severance deal is sweeter for higher-level workers.
Best Buy did not disclose how many employees would accept the offer or estimate the cost for the plan.
The company said it would also keep an arrangement that gives many employees more flexible work times and lets them do their job outside the office, as long as they produce, even with the lower staff levels.
Labor and corporate governance experts said the severance plan was more generous than those seen in some other industries, and could help relatively healthy companies like Best Buy weather the downturn better.
Kevin Shaughnessy, partner with national law firm Baker Hostetler LLP in its Employment and Labor Group, said he expects similarly enhanced severance packages to be used by more companies as they cut staff.
"That's a fairly good-sized package. I've dealt with other industries where the packages would be much lower," he said.
The year of company-paid medical coverage offered under Best Buy's voluntary severance plan was a significant plus, he said. Best Buy may also help its remaining staff cope better with downsizing by being generous with those who leave.
"A company that is viewed as generous to its employees typically long-term engenders more loyalty and ultimately greater profitability," said Charles Elson, director of the Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware. "These days any kind of severance given this economy can't be viewed negatively."
Companies from Bank of America Corp to AT&T and Citigroup Inc have also announced tens of thousands of job cuts in recent weeks to save costs and navigate the recession.
MINIMIZING FORCED LAYOFFS
Chief Executive Brad Anderson said Best Buy decided to offer the best severance package it could afford and asked for volunteers in an effort to keep forced layoffs, should they become necessary, at a minimum.
"The lens we tried to use is if we were on the other end of that decision, what would we like to see the company do," Anderson told Reuters in an interview.
News of the staff cuts comforted investors in Best Buy, which missed second-quarter profit estimates in September because it over-invested in store redesign and labor. Best Buy shares are up more than 21 percent since Tuesday, when it announced the job cuts and posted better-than-expected profit. (continue reading)
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The Key to Eliminating Your Slice
Making a proper “full shoulder turn” is one of the most important fundamentals of the golf swing, yet it's one of the most common mistakes made by golfers; and why so many have slice problems. A proper shoulder turn is when you rotate the shoulders so the leading shoulder comes under your chin, without letting your hips turn much at all. Below we explain the ways this eliminates the slice:
• If your shoulder rotation is stopped too early, your arms will tend to continue by fling across the target line and causing an outside-to-inside swing path, resulting in the dreaded banana-ball. A full shoulder turn will help the club fall “on plane”, which greatly reduces the chance of cutting across the target line and slicing the golf ball.
• A full shoulder turn will promote proper weight shift. Remember too keep your lower body from moving laterally. Do not confuse the full shoulder turn as meaning you must get the club back to parallel at the top of the swing. Many great golfers have a compact swing that comes up far short of parallel at the top, but all great golfers take a full shoulder turn when executing a full shot.
• A full shoulder turn will bring you to the top of the swing and assist in getting the hands and arms into proper position.
• Keep your chin up and off your chest so the leading shoulder can rotate and pass under the chin. If the shoulder hits your chin, it will cut the shoulder rotation short and encourage a slice.
• When a golfer does not utilize a full shoulder turn, they tend to rely more on the small muscles (hands and arms) to swing the golf club. This leads to inconsistent ball striking and shots prone to slicing. With a full shoulder turn, you will use more of your big muscles, which are much more consistent, and help you square the club face and avoid a slice. Don’t be in a rush; taking the club back slow will help you to finish the back swing with a full shoulder turn. More body, less arms.
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