Category: Corporate Statism

Rerun

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

You can understand why the U.S. government was so unhappy with Bradley Manning when we get to connect the dots on information like this:

“Days after the Deepwater Horizon blow-out, a message came in to our offices in New York from an industry insider floating on a ship in the Caspian Sea. He stated there had been a blow-out, just like the one in the Gulf, and BP had covered it up.To confirm this shocking accusation, I flew with my team to the Islamic republic of Azerbaijan.

“Outside the capital, Baku, near the giant BP terminal, we found workers, though too frightened to give their names, who did confirm that they were evacuated from the BP offshore platform as it filled with explosive methane gas.

“Before we could get them on camera, my crew and I were arrested and the witnesses disappeared.

“Expelled from Azerbaijan, we still obtained the ultimate corroboration: a secret cable from the U.S. Embassy to the State Department in Washington laying out the whole story of the 2008 Caspian blow-out.

“The source of the cable, classified “SECRET,” was a disaffected U.S. soldier, Private Bradley Manning who, throughWikiLeaks.org, provided hot smoking guns to The Guardian.The information found in the U.S. embassy cables is a block-buster. The cables confirmed what BP will not admit to this day: there was a serious blow-out and its cause was the same as in the Gulf disaster two years later—the cement (“mud”) used to cap the well had failed.

“Bill Schrader, President of BP-Azerbaijan, revealed the truth to our embassy about the Caspian disaster:

“Schrader said that the September 17shutdown of the Central Azeri (CA) platform…was the largest such emergency evacuation in BP’s history. Given the explosive potential, BP was quite fortunate to have been able to evacuate everyone safely and to prevent any gas ignition. … Due to the blowout of a gas-injection well there was ‘a lot of mud’ on the platform.”

“From other sources, we discovered the cement which failed had been mixed with nitrogen as a way to speed up drying, a risky process that was repeated on the Deepwater Horizon.
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Comcastic

~ susie ~ 9 Comments

I am supposed to believe there is such a thing as real competition in this country. I just got off the phone with Comcast, telling them I wanted only the bare minimum of services, reduced from what I currently have.

I keep going through this exercise, and I keep forgetting how Kafkaesque the whole thing is: By cutting off premium and HD channels, I can save (wait for it) $1.89 a month. Wow.

No one ever believes me when I tell them, either. Comcast just threw in a $15 a month credit and free HBO and Showtime if I keep the same service for $2 more. This is some crazy shit.

UPDATE: Hello to all the visitors from Shakesville. I’m really enjoying your comments on this.

Taxmageddon

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

Watch the Thom Hartmann video, it’s quite informative. Don’t you love how this game is played? The temporary Bush tax cuts, the very same ones that helped ballooned the deficit to record levels, are about to expire and the Capitol Hill Chicken Littles are running around screaming “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” So letting them expire will throw the country into recession? For those of us outside the Village, how would we even know the difference? We’re already out of work, or working for peanuts.

Now, you realize where this is going: This is the scary story that’s supposed to provide cover for the usual suspects who want to make the Grand Bargain on Social Security. The Greek chorus is gathering, chanting about the “obvious” solutions (hint, hint). “We’ll let you have a little stimulus now, provided we can slash the hell out of your earned benefits later!”

And because this is a complicated idea, most people won’t understand, the librul media can’t explain because they’re too hooked on access to make waves, only a few reporters will bring up the idea of simply raising new revenue, and the hollowing of Social Security and Medicare will soon be a “bipartisan” victory. Don’t you love politics?

Tax hikes and spending cuts set to take effect in January would suck $607 billion out of the economy next year, plunging the nation at least briefly back into recession, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday.

Unless lawmakers act, the economy is likely to contract in the first half of 2013 at an annualized rate of 1.3 percent, the CBO said, before returning to 2.3 percent growth later in the year.

Canceling those tax and spending policies would protect the recovery in the short run and encourage more vibrant growth, around 4.4 percent, in 2013, the CBO said. However, unless lawmakers adopt policies that would reduce budget deficits by a comparable amount down the road, the CBO said, the national debt would continue to climb, imperiling future economic growth.

The report, “Economic Effects of Reducing the Fiscal Restraint That Is Scheduled to Occur in 2013,” comes as policymakers are bracing for the most consequential battle over government tax and spending policies in years. The George W. Bush-era tax cuts are set to expire on Dec. 31, along with a payroll tax cut proposed by President Obama. Meanwhile, sharp cuts are scheduled to hit the Pentagon and other federal agencies to meet a deal cut during last summer’s showdown over the nation’s debt limit.

Anxiety is growing over how the impact of those tax and spending cuts would affect the nation’s economic recovery come January, when what’s been nicknamed “taxmageddon” hits. After the November election, a lame-duck Congress will have barely two months to resolve a grinding standoff over taxes and spending — a battle that brought the United States to the brink of default last summer.

NRC chief to resign

~ susie

The foreign press is warning of the potential for a major catastrophe for the northern hemisphere from the remaining fuel pools at Fukushima – but the American media is strangely silent. Their focus is on Reactor 4, which is open to the elements and at high risk of disaster in the event of another major earthquake:

More than a year after a devastating earthquake and tsunami triggered a massive nuclear disaster, experts are warning that Japan isn’t out of the woods yet and the worst nuclear storm the world has ever seen could be just one earthquake away from reality.

The troubled Reactor 4 at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant is at the centre of this potential catastrophe.

Reactor 4 — and to a lesser extent Reactor 3 — still hold large quantities of cooling waters surrounding spent nuclear fuel, all bound by a fragile concrete pool located 30 metres above the ground, and exposed to the elements.

A magnitude 7 or 7.5 earthquake would likely fracture that pool, and disaster would ensue, says Arnie Gundersen, a nuclear engineer with Fairewinds Energy Education who has visited the site.

The 1,535 spent fuel rods would become exposed to the air and would likely catch fire, with the most-recently added fuel rods igniting first.

The incredible heat generated from that blaze, Gundersen said, could then ignite the older fuel in the cooling pool, causing a massive oxygen-eating radiological fire that could not be extinguished with water.

“So the fear is the newest fuel could begin to burn and then we’d have a conflagration of the whole pool because it would become hotter and hotter. The health consequences of that are beyond where science has ever gone before,” Gundersen told CTVNews.ca in an interview from his home in Vermont.

There are a couple of possible outcomes, Gundersen said.

Highly radioactive cesium and strontium isotopes would likely go airborne and “volatilize” — turning into a vapour that could move with the wind, potentially travelling thousands of kilometres from the source.

The size of those particles would determine whether they remained in Japan, or made their way to the rest of Asia and other continents.

“And here’s where there’s no science because no one’s ever dared to attempt the experiment,” Gundersen said. “If it flies far enough it goes around the world, if the particles stay a little bigger, they settle in Japan. Either is awful.”

Essentially, he said, Japan is sitting on a ticking time bomb.

And this isn’t very reassuring, considering how many similarly flawed plants of the same kind are here in the U.S.:

Gregory Jaczko, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, announced Monday he would resign from the five-member commission that oversees US nuclear power plant safety after a tenure in which he wrangled with other members of the commission over the direction of safety regulations.

Mr. Jaczko’s chairmanship, which began with tumult three years ago over the NRC’s controversial decision to cancel the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository – now concludes on the heels of a tumultuous year attempting to implement “lessons learned” from the Fukushima nuclear meltdowns. He announced his resignation amid an ongoing battle over his proposals to tighten safety regulations at US nuclear power plants in the wake of the Japanese disaster.

Even your sofa isn’t safe

~ susie

Yet another example of just how fucked we are.

The problem with flame retardants is that they migrate into dust that is ingested, particularly by children playing on the floor. R. Thomas Zoeller, a biologist at the University of Massachusetts, told me that while there have been many studies on animals, there is still uncertainty about the impact of flame retardants on humans. But he said that some retardants were very similar to banned PCBs, which have been linked to everything from lower I.Q. to diabetes, and that it was reasonable to expect certain flame retardants to have similar consequences.


“Despite all that we have learned about PCBs, we are making the same mistakes with flame retardants,” he said.


Linda Birnbaum, the top toxicologist at the National Institutes of Health, put it to me this way: “If flame retardants really provided fire safety, there would be reason for them in certain circumstances, like on an airplane. But there’s growing evidence that they don’t provide safety and may increase harm.”


Arlene Blum, a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, told me, “For pregnant women, they can alter brain development in the fetus.” Her research decades ago led to the removal of a flame retardant, chlorinated Tris, from children’s pajamas. But chlorinated Tris is still used in couches and nursing pillows (without any warning labels).


The European Union has banned one common flame retardant, Deca BDE, and has generally been more willing to regulate endocrine disruptors than the United States. Why the difference?


“The money is jingling,” notes Senator Frank Lautenberg, a Democrat of New Jersey. Lautenberg has introduced legislation, the Safe Chemicals Act, that would tighten controls — but it has gotten nowhere.


It’s not easy for a democracy to regulate technical products like endocrine disruptors that may offer great benefits as well as complex risks, especially when the hazards remain uncertain. A generation ago, Big Tobacco played the system like a violin, and now Big Chem is doing the same thing.


This campaign season, you’ll hear fervent denunciations of “burdensome government regulation.” When you do, think of the other side of the story: your home is filled with toxic flame retardants that serve no higher purpose than enriching three companies. The lesson is that we need not only safer couches but also a political system less distorted by toxic money.

Private equity running dental practices – guess what happens.

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

This is a rhetorical question, but here it goes, anyway: Is there anything these Wall Street bastards won’t pervert and destroy with their all-important profit motive? Is there any line they won’t cross?

Isaac Gagnon stepped off the school bus sobbing last October and opened his mouth to show his mother where it hurt.

She saw steel crowns on two of the 4-year-old’s back teeth. A dentist’s statement in his backpack showed he had received two pulpotomies, or baby root canals, along with the crowns and 10 X-rays — all while he was at school. Isaac, who suffers from seizures from a brain injury in infancy, didn’t need the work, according to his mother, Stacey Gagnon.

“I was absolutely horrified,” said Gagnon, of Camp Verde, Arizona. “I never gave them permission to drill into my son’s mouth. They did it for profit.”

Isaac’s case and others like it are under scrutiny by federal lawmakers and state regulators trying to determine whether a popular business model fueled by Wall Street money is soaking taxpayers and having a malign influence on dentistry.

Isaac’s dentist was dispatched to his school by ReachOut Healthcare America, a dental management services company that’s in the portfolio of Morgan Stanley Private Equity, operates in 22 states and has dealt with 1.5 million patients. Management companies are at the center of a U.S. Senate inquiry, and audits, investigations and civil actions in six states over allegations of unnecessary procedures, low-quality treatment and the unlicensed practice of dentistry.

Allegations like Gagnon’s “are not representative” of the more than 500 cases handled by ReachOut affiliates in Isaac’s school district, said Mickey Mandelbaum, a company spokesman.

ReachOut is one of at least 25 dental management-services companies bought or backed by private-equity firms in the last decade. Dentists contract with the companies for marketing, scheduling, staff recruitment, supplies and other services. The companies account for about 12,000, or 8 percent, of U.S. dentists, according to Thomas A. Climo, a Las Vegas dental consultant.

Some of them have been riding a boom in Medicaid outlays on dentistry, which rose 63 percent to $7.4 billion between 2007 and 2010, outstripping the 4.9 percent growth in other dental spending. ReachOut and several of its private equity-backed rivals seek patients like Isaac Gagnon, who are covered by Medicaid, the federal-state insurance program for the poor and disabled.

On May 2, All Smiles Dental Center Inc., a management company owned by Chicago-based Valor Equity Partners, filed for bankruptcy protection. Its hand was forced in part by a Texas Medicaid action cutting off payment to some of its clinics because of allegedly “excessive” and “inappropriate” orthodontic care, according to an All Smiles executive’s affidavit included in the filing. All Smiles was part of a state audit in which 90 percent of Medicaid claims for orthodontic braces were found to be invalid because they weren’t medically needed, according to Christine Ellis, one of the auditors.

In North Carolina, Senate Bill 655 is under attack. Opponents say it will drive family dentists out of business, while supporters say the state is already underserved and that these new dental management companies will bring dental access to the rest of the state:

North Carolina law says only dentists can own, manage and control a dental practice. The question is what constitutes control. An increasing number of dentists are turning to management companies to operate the business side of the practice, from accounting and human resources to lab work. Others are asking management companies to help build offices and buy equipment.

About 50 dental practices in North Carolina, covering about 150,000 patients, use management companies in a state with 4,600 dentists. But industry trends suggest the number could grow, especially if the legislation is defeated or the current rules are weakened.

The state’s dental examiners board is charged with determining whether the management companies violate the law. It approves all contracts under rules established a decade ago, but the board’s attorney says loopholes give the companies too much latitude.

“What the board has seen over the years with these agreements is that they have morphed from true vendors of services to these really complicated, multiple-page agreements … that would be considered de facto control and ownership,” said Ken Burgess with Poyner Spruill in Raleigh.

[…] The legislation would put the current rules into state law and add provisions to address these recent cases. Among other things, the law would prohibit management companies from owning all the equipment at a practice, determining patients and enforcing non-compete clauses on the dentists, and it would give the board broad authority to investigate management companies.

“Some very good, lawful management companies are doing business, but others are crossing that line,” said Dr. Ron Venezie, an Apex dentist and member of the Dentist Society, which is pushing the legislation. “Only a dentist has the education and the training to make dental care decisions working with the patient.”

Bill Black on austerity

~ susie

From the RealNews.com:

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Paul Jay in Washington.

Bill Black is a white-collar criminologist. He was on the committee that investigated banking fraud in the Savings and Loan crisis, and he’s been an often critic of the media and how it covers the current financial and economic crisis. He recently wrote a piece about The New York Times journalists and how they don’t even read some of their own financial guys, like Krugman. And he now joins us to talk about his critique of The New York Times and the media. Thanks for joining us. Bill joins us from D.C., where he’s now visiting. Bill, I think I did the whole introduction, except to say that you’re also the author of the book The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One. Thanks for joining us again.

WILLIAM K. BLACK, ASSOC. PROF. ECONOMICS AND LAW, UMKC: Thank you.

JAY: So talk a bit about your piece about The New York Times. And what was your point?

BLACK: Well, there were a series of articles in The New York Times covering the recent elections in Europe, particularly in France and Greece, but also mentioning Germany and England. And the common denominator in each of these elections was that the people rose up against the parties imposing Berlin’s austerity program, which has forced Europe back into recession and forced the periphery of Europe back into depression. And they rejected this soundly in these votes.
But the amazing thing was that The New York Times reporters were treating this like, well, these people must be financially illiterate, because everybody knows austerity is the only thing that can be done, and austerity must be done, and it’s good and such. So the more they destroy the economy, the more the New York Times reporters seem to think that destroying the economy is the objective.

And Paul Krugman has been very good. He is, after all, Nobel laureate in economics. He writes a regular column for The New York Times, and for months he’s been explaining how insane the austerity program is. But apparently the New York Times reporters don’t read their own Nobel prize winning economists.

JAY: Well, the same thing was happening here during the high tide of the super committee and all the focus on the American debt and deficit. The same thing was happening. The media was just presupposing that you need to have these kinds of cuts and they’re good for the economy, and this kind of notion that if you have austerity, it frees up the society for growth. I mean, that’s the argument, and I guess most journalists seem to buy into that. So what’s wrong with that?

BLACK: Well, it’s the opposite is true. If you’re in a recession, the problem is you don’t have sufficient demand to keep people employed. And so that typically means private-sector demand is seriously inadequate. Austerity means that you reduce public-sector demand at the same time that private-sector demand is already inadequate. Well, if you do that, then you have really inadequate demand and you have really severe unemployment, which is why unemployment has shot upward throughout Europe, why it’s over 20 percent in a number of the nations of the periphery, why youth unemployment is over 50 percent, why immigration is a leading strategy of European kids when they get their college degree. And it’s a policy that is tearing the European Union apart politically, and socially as well.
You know, this is the equivalent up bleeding a patient, and then, of course, they don’t get better, because you bled them, so you bleed them some more, and then you yell at them for—you know, what’s wrong with you? Why aren’t you recovering? And you bleed them some more. And, you know, pretty soon they’re pretty near death’s door and you’re—can’t understand why they’re not praising you and instead they’re voting you out of office.
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