Biden Reveals Administration's True Agenda

Talk about Gov Regs. Vice-President Joe Biden is now threatening to use his robots in the liberal media to embarrass states for "not doing what they're supposed to be doing."

He was referring to using the funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) stimulus package and specifically to those states whose governors are refusing to accept ARRA money to expand their unemployment programs to cover part-time workers and others not now eligible. Problem is, after the federal largesse runs out, the states are stuck paying for these programs themselves, as the dissenting governors have argued.

But Biden has a plan for these governors, which sounds similar to what the White House is already doing to Rush Limbaugh--shame, smear, scandalize and mock them using the captive media. (Nancy Pelosi has another plan to stop Limbaugh. She's working on a law requiring equality of viewpoints on public radio, meaning probably five liberal hosts to one conservative host, or better, five to none.)

Speaking to the AFL-CIO convention in Miami this past week, Biden also revealed that the stimulus money was earmarked for union jobs (gee, what a surprise, and how come no one in the media ever figured that out and reported on it?).

Here's how he explained it:

"The focus of this administration the first month has been to rebuild American roads, bridges, waterways -- jobs for the building trades union. Investing and getting more people access to broadband -- communication workers. Creating clean energy economy -- jobs that require electrical workers to modernize the grid, steel workers to go out and build the wind turbines, laborers to install the solar panels. Making our communities safer, jobs that require getting cops on the beat and keeping firefighters in firehouses. That's what we're trying to do."

Conveniently, no cameras were allowed into the meeting, but the Biden PR people were gracious enough to release a transcript to the media.

To sum up, if you were around during the Cold War, or bothered to study a little 1950s-1980s history, you'll see the parallel: Biden clearly wants to establish "captive states," just as the former Soviet Union had its "captive nations." (I should throw in "captive businesses" too, which will all fall to unionization once EFCA passes.)

The World's 50 Safest Banks

I was a bit surprised to find any U.S. banks on Global Finance magazine's list of the 50 safest banks in the world.

Wells Fargo was the highest U.S. bank at number 21, followed by U.S. Bank at 26, the Bank of New York Mellon at 35, and JPMorgan Chase at 47.

Top spot went to KfW in Germany. Overall, both France and Germany had six banks on the list. Spain had an impressive five; the United Kingdom proved more mundane with three. Canada can boast of five on the list, and Australia of four.

Global Finance has been publishing the list for 17 years, but the one just released a week ago and quoted here was a mid-year update spurred by the global financial turmoil.

I'd be interested in seeing who's still standing on this list come next January.

Personnel Concepts and the Digital Approach

Personnel Concepts, the virtual founder of the labor law poster industry with its trademarked All-On-One approach, is now catching up with the fact that we live in a digital age. Insiders tell me that a big push is on to convert many products to digital format and also, sometime in the near future, to make these available as instant downloads, saving customers both time and shipping charges.

Already, Personnel Concepts has come out with two digital kits, one to create a fire prevention plan (required by OSHA) and another to produce an emergency action plan (ditto on OSHA). I haven't seen the products work, but I'm told that the end-user just answers a bunch of on-screen questions (after popping in and loading the CD), and the program goes to work creating the documents to be printed out and distributed to the workforce. Next up, I hear, is an Ea-zY Forms Creator (cute, that a-to-z part, but they had to explain it to me!) that encompasses many of the routine forms that employers use frequently.

Check out the products here and here.

A Liberal Economist Who Makes Sense

I actually had never heard of economist James Galbraith until I stumbled upon his testimony before Congress in an article in, of all places, Mother Jones. So you gotta figure the guy is pretty liberal, but in his testimony, he comes across as having some solid answers that the Obama team overlooks or rejects.

Actually, most of our problems--except for foreclosures--could be solved quickly and simply if we just resurrected the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Since that was a Bush initiative (see Bush, George Herbert Walker), however, the Democrats are loath to give it any credit, let alone emulate it. They'd rather let the economy go to hell and stay there--and then blame it forever on the other President Bush (see Bush, Dubya).

Meanwhile, the stock market continues to tank in the face of governmental indecision and inaction, taking with it the retirement dreams of millions of Americans. (Will they still vote for Obama if their savings remain wiped out for years--or forever?)

Anyway, back to Mr. Galbraith. He actually broaches an RTC-type solution in his testimony.

Galbraith sees no alternative to putting "several very big banks" that are "deeply troubled" into receivership, breaking them up, firing existing management, and selling them in parts or relaunching them as "multiple mid-sized institutions."

So RTC-ish.

Galbraith also tackles the foreclosure problem on two fronts. The first front is to establish a modern version of the New Deal's Home Owners Loan Corporation. Since the New Deal, to me, was nothing but a complete failure and only exacerbated the depression, I'm not sure about that idea, but his other idea has merit. He proposes having the government buy up all foreclosed homes and renting them back to their foreclosed owners, even with the option of future repurchase. This would at least keep the housing stock from further deteriorating. (Of course, this is not something you could do retroactively either.)

In sum, it's refreshing to find an economist, especially a liberal one, with solutions that hold promise. Now, I wish I could say the same for Obama's twin pillars of indecision, Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers. Then again, it's probably the unrealistic expectations that Obama and his liberal operators place on the whole economic dialogue that leads to the indecision in the first place.

After all, the head man and his team are still looking for that magic wand to wave over the economy--and health care--that will make all the problems disappear while a pile of loot arises magically from the top five percent of taxpayers in America. More likely, "Rome burns while...."

Mad as Hell, MS Temps Won't Take It Anymore

Like Howard Beale (Peter Finch) in Network, whose mantra was "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore," temp workers at Microsoft are Hades-like too as word leaked out that pay cuts are in the works for the temporary force.

One temp from Volt has already set up a Web site to organize a "peaceful protest," maintaining that he and his coworkers all have contracts that must be honored.

One temp agency, Aditi, has already caved and said it would honor the pay cuts as part of the "at will" nature of employment (what happened to the contract? Aditi's site doesn't say).

The other staffing agencies seem to be marching along in lockstep, acquiescing to the pay cuts and passing them on to the temps.

In Network (1976), Howard Beale is a TV newscaster who urges everyone--in tough economic times similar to ours--to stick their heads out their windows in New York and shout his mantra about being "mad as hell."

In the lead-up to this viewer request, Beale makes a little speech that is all too eerily appropriate for today, to wit:

I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's work, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.' Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad!

Massachusetts Plan Fails; Ready for Obamacare?

Massachusetts' health initiative, called Commonwealth Care, has so far failed on all fronts, and now Obama and company have legislation in the works (see Baucus, Max, and Kennedy, Ted) that virtually mirrors the abysmal failure of Mitt Romney's plan (which Romney now repudiates, but probably for presidential aspiration purposes only).

Writing for Boston.com, Suzanne L. King, a physician who practices medicine in Massachusetts, grades Commonwealth Care against the five standards established by the Institute of Medicine; to wit, coverage should be universal, not tied to a job, affordable for individuals and families, affordable for society, and accessible by all.

On number one, Massachusetts' plan is not universal, still missing a few hundred thousand residents. On number two, it retains its reliance on employer-funded insurance while incorporating an individual mandate (see Baucus, Max, and Kennedy, Ted, and soon Obama, Barack). On three, Dr. King writes, "For an individual earning $31,213, the cheapest plan can cost $9,872 in premiums and out-of-pocket payments." Also, co-pays are so high that many can't afford to see a doctor. On four, state costs have soared from $630 million a year to $1.3 billion are are still rising (a lot of the money goes to subsidizing people who can't afford to buy health insurance). And on five, accessibility, the answer segues from four--not only are co-pays expensive, but deductibles are too high in many cases.

Dr. King's solution, and here many might disagree, is just to get rid of private insurance and extend Medicare to everyone. My thought is that Medicare is the 800-pound gorilla already shifting costs from subsidized patients to paying patients, from Medicare to private insurers. Since Medicare doesn't pay all that it costs for the services and procedures it covers, those under private insurance make up the different in higher doctor and hospital fees.

Anyway, be prepared for some form of the failed Massachusetts plan to become the law of the land--and for your health care (unless you're poor and subsidized) to become both costlier and less affordable.

Maybe the key to surviving in our new day and age is just to become poor and a ward of the state. I sure hope not.