Monthly Archives: March 2011
Former SEIU Official Reveals Secret Plan To Destroy JP Morgan & Crash The Stock Market
Former SEIU Official Reveals Secret Plan To Destroy JP Morgan & Crash The Stock Market – The Blaze
A former official of one of the country’s most-powerful unions, SEIU, is detailing a secret plan to “destabilize” the country.
Specifically, the plan seeks to destroy JP Morgan, nuke the stock market, and weaken Wall Street’s grip on power, thus creating the conditions necessary for a redistribution of wealth and a change in government.
The former SEIU official, Stephen Lerner, spoke in a closed session at a Pace University forum last weekend.
The Blaze procured what appears to be a tape of Lerner’s remarks, many of which many Americans will no doubt sympathize with. Still, the “destabilization” plan is startling in its specificity.
Lerner said that unions and community organizations are, for all intents and purposes, dead. The only way to achieve their goals, therefore – the redistribution of wealth and the return of “$17 trillion” stolen from the middle class by Wall Street – is to “destabilize the country.”
Lerner’s Remarks – Edited Version:
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Lerner’s Remarks – Full Version:
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Read the rest of the Business Insider analysis here.
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Glenn Beck Discusses Lerner’s Plot:
Obama 2009: We Can’t Impose Democracy… Obama 2011: We’ll Impose Democracy
Obama 2009: We Can’t Impose Democracy… Obama 2011: We’ll Impose Democracy – Gateway Pundit
You’ve heard it before… All Obama statements come with an expiration date. All of them.
In 2009 Barack Obama told reporters that the U.S. cannot simply impose democracy on another country.
“The message I hope to deliver is that democracy, rule of law, freedom of speech, freedom of religion – those are not simply principles of the west to be hoisted on these countries. But, rather what I believe to be universal principles that they can embrace and affirm as part of their national identity, the danger, I think, is when the United States, or any country, thinks that we can simply impose these values on another country with a different history and a different culture.”
But, that was in 2009.
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Today Barack Obama told Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey that the US intends to impose a democracy in Libya.
The Washington Examiner reported:
The White House is shifting toward the more aggressive goal in Libya of ousting President Muammar Gadhafi and “installing a democratic system,” actions that fall outside the United Nations Security Council resolution under which an international coalition is now acting, according to a conversation between President Obama and Turkey’s prime minister.
Obama and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke late Monday and “underscored their shared commitment to the goal of helping provide the Libyan people an opportunity to transform their country, by installing a democratic system that respects the people’s will,” according to a White House report on the phone call.
The rhetoric matches Obama’s reiteration on Monday that it is still U.S. policy that “Gadhafi needs to go.”
But it is a marked contrast to the U.S.-led military mission as defined by the U.N. resolution.
The Shaky House Of Assad
The Shaky House Of Assad – Wall Street Journal
Every Arab country is unhappy in its own way, and it turns out Syria is no different. A wave of protests the past four days, starting in the city of Deraa on Friday and spreading, makes Iran’s chief Arab ally a latecomer to the spring of Muslim discontent.
The unrest has taken Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and the U.S. foreign policy establishment by surprise. Syria was supposedly immune to Arab contagion.
Earlier this month, Foreign Affairs magazine published “The Sturdy House That Assad Built,” arguing that the Arab wave would not only “pass Syria by” but see Damascus “relatively strengthened” by the collapse of Egypt and other pro-American regimes. The West, urged German political scientist Michael Bröning, better think of new and better ways to “engage Assad.”
The Obama Administration had already embraced this policy. The White House put an ambassador back in Damascus charged with pursuing a new detente. John Kerry and Nancy Pelosi have pushed the same line.
The demonstrations and the Assad regime’s bloody crackdown ought to give the champions of engagement pause. It turns out Syria’s young and underemployed are no less frustrated with corruption and repression than are their peers from Tunis to Tehran.
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Syria only looked “sturdy” until its people pushed on the doors of the house of Assad. Trouble started after hundreds of people in Deraa marched peacefully to protest the jailing of 15 schoolchildren who had written antiregime graffiti. Security forces opened fire, killing at least four.
Protests continued through the funerals of the men killed. The offices of the ruling Baath Party in Deraa and vehicles were torched. Thousands yesterday marched in the nearby towns of Jasim and Inhkil. Demonstrations have also been reported in Damascus, Aleppo and other cities.
Like Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, Syria’s regime isn’t squeamish about using force against domestic opponents. Bashar Assad’s kinder and gentler father, Hafez, ordered the massacre of 20,000 or so people during the 1982 uprising in the town of Hama. His son’s allies in Iran certainly won’t complain if Hama rules are applied in Deraa.
The U.S. national interest in this season of Arab uprisings is to have anti-American regimes fall while helping pro-American regimes to reform in a more liberal (in the 19th-century meaning of that word) direction. Rather than waste effort wooing Assad, the U.S. should support his domestic opponents at every opportunity.
A weaker Syria might cause less trouble in Lebanon through its proxy, Hezbollah, and be less able to spread weapons and terror throughout the Mideast. Even bloody-minded authoritarians are less sturdy than they look to Westerners who mistake fear and order for consent.
Daily Benefactor News – Power Lines Hooked Up To All Six Reactors At Crippled Japan Nuclear Plant
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Power Lines Hooked Up To All Six Reactors At Crippled Japan Nuclear Plant – Fox News
The operator of Japan’s leaking nuclear plant says power lines have been hooked up to all six reactor units, though more work is needed before electricity can run through them.
The plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, announced the hookup Tuesday but cautioned that workers must check pumps, motors and other equipment before the electricity is turned on.
Reconnecting the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear complex to the electrical grid is a significant step in getting control of the overheated reactors and storage pools for spent fuels. But it is likely to be days if not longer before the cooling systems can be powered up, since damaged equipment needs to be replaced and any volatile gas must be vented to avoid an explosion.
Nuclear plant workers resumed work Tuesday morning to restore power and cooling functions at the crippled reactors after smoke was detected at the Unit 2 and 3 reactors, Kyodo News Agency reports.
The operator of the plant told the Kyodo News Agency that firefighters and the Tokyo Electric Power Co. sprayed water onto the spent nuclear fuel rods at the Unit 3 and 4 reactors.
Work resumed after a pool holding spent nuclear fuel heated up to around the boiling point, a nuclear safety official said. With water bubbling away, there is a risk that more radioactive steam could spew out. “We cannot leave this alone and we must take care of it as quickly as possible,” said the official, Hidehiko Nishiyama.
People at Fukushima city’s main evacuation center waited in long lines for bowls of hot noodle soup. A truck delivered toilet paper and blankets. Many among the 1,400 people living in the crowded gymnasium came from communities near the nuclear plant and worry about radiation and weary of the daily routine of the displaced.
“It was an act of God,” said Yoshihiro Amano, a grocery store owner whose house is 4 miles from the reactors. “It won’t help anything to get angry. But we are worried. We don’t know if it will takes days, months or decades to go home. Maybe never. We are just starting to be able to think ahead to that.”
Public sentiment is such that Fukushima’s governor rejected a meeting offered by the president of Tokyo Electric Power Co., or Tepco, the utility that runs the nuclear plant.
“What is most important is for TEPCO to end the crisis with maximum effort. So I rejected the offer,” Gov. Yuhei Sato said on national broadcaster NHK. “Considering the anxiety, anger and exasperation being felt by people in Fukushima, there is just no way for me to accept their apology.”
The nuclear crisis has added a broader dimension to the disaster unleashed by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that pulverized the northeast coast, leaving more than 9,000 dead by official count and twice that in police estimates.
Three of Japan’s marquee companies – Sony Corp., Toyota Motor Corp. and Honda Motor Co. – announced halts to production at plants in Japan. The reason is a shortage of parts – a result of so many ruined factories in the disaster area.
Fears about radiation are reaching well beyond those living near Fukushima and the 430,000 displaced by the earthquake and tsunami to encompass large segments of Japan. Traces of radiation are being found in vegetables and raw milk from a swath of farmland, forcing a government ban on sales from those areas.
Seawater near the Fukushima plant is showing elevated levels of radioactive iodine and cesium, prompting the government to test seafood.
China, Japan’s largest trading partner, has ordered testing of imports of Japanese food. The World Health Organization has urged Japan to adopt stricter measures and reassure the public.
Government officials and health experts say the doses are low and not a threat to human health unless the tainted products are consumed in abnormally excessive quantities. But the government measures to release data on radiation amounts, halt sales of some foods and test others are feeding public worries that the situation may grow more dire.
“We acknowledge this situation has caused anxiety among the general public but even if the accident hadn’t happened we would be monitoring and taking action if the government’s very conservative standards are exceeded,” the government’s spokesman, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano, said at a briefing.
In the first five days after the disasters struck, the Fukushima complex saw explosions and fires in four of the plant’s six reactors, and the leaking of radioactive steam into the air. Since then, progress has been made cooling the active reactors and replenishing spent fuel pool, though setbacks have occurred.
The bubbling in Unit 2′s storage pool is worrisome. If unabated, the water could boil away, exposing fuel rods that would throw up more radiation. At extremely high temperatures, the zirconium cladding around the rods could melt and explode.
Nishiyama, the agency official, said the rods had been partly exposed; an agency spokesman Shinji Kinjo believed the rods remained covered.
An official of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said in Washington that Units 1, 2 and 3 have all seen damage to their reactor cores, but that containment is intact. The commission’s executive director, Bill Borchardt, said that “things appear to be on the verge of stabilizing.”
The Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency said that radiation seeping into the environment is a concern and needs to be monitored. “We are still in an accident that is still in a very serious situation,” said Graham Andrew, senior adviser to IAEA chief Yukiya Amano.
IAEA monitoring stations have detected radiation 1,600 times higher than normal levels – but in an area about 12 miles from the power station, the limit of the evacuation area declared by the government last week.
Radiation at that level, while not high for a single burst, could harm health if sustained. If projected to last three days, radiation at those levels would U.S. authorities would order an evacuation as a precaution.
The levels drop dramatically the further you go from the nuclear complex. In Tokyo, about 140 miles south of the plant, levels in recent days have been higher than normal for the city but still only a third of the global average for naturally occurring background radiation.
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It’s Weird News Tuesday Again!
400-Pound Sumo Wrestler Runs Marathon – Orange News
A 400lb sumo wrestler has become the heaviest man to ever complete a marathon.
Kelly Gneiting ran the Los Angeles Marathon in 9 hours 48 minutes 52 seconds, reports the LA Times.
He smashed the past Guinness world record of 275 pounds and also beat his predecessor’s 2008 marathon time of 11:52:11.
“I’d like to see the Kenyan improve his marathon time by two hours,” he joked.
Mr Gneiting jogged the first eight miles and walked the final 18, saying afterward that he lost track of where he was after mile 10 because he felt “delirious”.
He finished the 26.2-mile race despite heavy rains and strong winds.
For much of the race, he was also forced to obey traffic signals and walk on the sidewalk because he was walking far more slowly than the 13-minute-per-mile-pace used for calculating street reopenings.
“I was really struggling in the last five miles but I said to myself: “If I have to crawl, I will”,” he said.
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Drunk Burglar Found Sleeping On Victim’s Couch – Stuff
Burglary must be tiring work, if the attempt made by one Northland teenager is anything to go by.
The drunk 17-year-old girl was found asleep on a couch in a family’s Kerikeri house on Friday night, after allegedly stealing money and other items, Senior Sergeant Peter Robinson, of Kerikeri police, said.
The family, including young children, were home at the time of the bungled robbery and were shocked to find the inebriated teen dozing in their living room.
Mr Robinson said the case was “pretty unusual”.
The girl has been charged with burglary and will appear in Kaikohe District Court on Friday.
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Man Sets Up Hotel For Chickens – Modern Ghana
A Cornish man has set up a hotel for chickens to provide five star service for pampered hens while their owners are away.
David Roberts, 31, came up with idea for the Chicken Hotel in response to the growing popularity for people to rear their own hens.
Many people thought he was joking at first but he now runs a thriving business on his farm in Helston, and has bookings as far ahead as Christmas.
During the day the feathered ‘guests’ range freely in the fox-proof grounds before being rounded up and put to bed in their luxury coops at night.
Mr Roberts, who is helped by Ariel Roukaerts, 31, built the accommodation himself. Rates start at £2 per coop per night plus 75p per chicken, including ‘meals’.
He even transports the birds to and from their homes if the owners require it, and offers a nursery for chicks and an incubation service for eggs that need hatching.
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Mom Forces Son To Stand On Street Corner For Bad Grades – WKMG
Wearing a sign around his neck that read, “Honk if I need an education,” 15-year-old James Mond III stood for nearly four hours on a Tampa, Fla., street corner.
Fed up with his bad grades, his mother sent him there hoping to teach him a lesson about the importance of an education.
Ronda Holder never finished high school and doesn’t want the same for her son.
So she sent him out Wednesday with a sign telling the world about his 1.22 GPA.
His middle school has since enrolled him in after-school tutoring.
The Department of Children and Families is investigating whether the incident might be a form of maltreatment.
Holder says she doesn’t care about the critics. She wants her son to have an education.
Plenty of people honked.
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Rocker Sammy Hagar Claims Aliens Tapped Into His Brain – The Guardian
There’s no better way to put this: Sammy Hagar believes his mind was taken over by aliens. Years ago, before he played with Van Halen or Montrose, before he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the American singer claims extra-terrestrials tapped into his consciousness in the California foothills. “I know there’s something out there,” he explained, “and someday they’ll come.”
Hagar’s intergalactic theories have come to light with his new memoirs, Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock, written with Joel Selvin. “I was lying in bed one night … dreaming,” he recalls in the book. “I saw a ship and two creatures inside of this ship. I couldn’t see their faces. I just knew that there were two intelligent creatures, sitting up in a craft in the Lytle Creek forest area about twelve miles away in the foothills above Fontana. And they were connected to me, tapped into my mind through some kind of mysterious wireless connection.”
In a new interview with MTV Hive, Hagar said he wanted to write a lot more about UFOs, but Selvin “talked [him] out of it”. “He’d be like, ‘Aw, people don’t want to hear that shit’.” But Hagar “could write a whole book just devoted to [aliens],” he said. “I love it, man. I’m into it deep.”
Although Hagar’s vision of an alien spaceship was part of a dream, he insists he was seeing something real. “[It] friggin’ happened,” the 63-year-old explained. “Aliens were plugged into me… Either a download or an upload. They were tapped into my brain and the knowledge was transferred back and forth. I could see them and everything while it was happening… Like an experiment: ‘[Let's] see what this guy knows’.”
Nor was this his first close encounter. When he was four years old, he claims, he saw something he didn’t include in his book. “I saw what I considered to be, well, at the time I thought it was a car with no wheels,” he said. We lived out in the country and I saw this thing floating across a field, creating this big dust storm. I threw rocks at it and shit. And I don’t know what happened after that.” Asked if he thinks he “blacked out”, Hagar replied: “I guess. I just have no memory of it. And that wasn’t a dream. It was during daylight.”
Daily Benefactor News – 19,000 Jobs Worth $1.1 Billion In Wages Lost Nationally Since Offshore Drilling Moratorium Imposed
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At least 13,000 jobs have been lost since last summer’s moratorium on offshore oil production, surpassing projected job losses in a 2010 study by thousands, according to the Louisiana State University professor who authored the study.
Joseph Mason, author of “The Economic Cost of a Moratorium on Offshore Oil and Gas Exploration to the Gulf Region,” estimated that the new regional job losses due to the moratorium on offshore oil production in the Gulf region is now 13,000 – up from his original estimate of 8,000.
Mason also estimated the national job losses to have increased from 12,000 to 19,000; regional wage losses to be $800 million, up from $500 million; national wage losses to be $1.1 billion, up from $700 million; lost tax revenues on the state and local level to be $155 million, up from $100 million; and lost tax revenues on the national level to be $350 million, up from $200 million.
Mason testified before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Subcommittee on Energy and Power last Thursday.
In his written statement at the House hearing, he wrote: “Each day, more exploration and development activity in the Gulf is lost. The lost output will not be regained and the lost wages cannot be spent.”
He continued: “We knew all along that even the most honorable businessmen could not support their workers without revenue income in the long term. We are now progressing into that long term. As rig workers and other employees directly related to oil and gas development tighten their belts or leave the region, the rest of the region suffers.”
A recent Gallup poll shows that six in 10 Americans favor increasing offshore drilling for oil and gas in U.S. Coastal areas, which is up 50 percent from May 2010. The same poll says 49 percent of Americans are now in favor of opening Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for Oil exploration, up from 43 percent in 2008.
Last December, the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie conducted a study that projects that by 2015 associated job losses could reach 125,000 per year. According to the Obama administration statistics, 122,000 jobs have been lost as a result of the moratorium.
The statistics come at a time when Democrats are criticizing Republicans for not creating jobs.
At a press conference Wednesday criticizing Republicans for not bringing forth a jobs plan, Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) and Robert Andrews (D-N.J.) said they would not push the Obama administration to lift the moratorium on offshore drilling.
When CNSNews.com asked Andrews if he would call on the Obama administration to lift the moratorium on offshore production, the congressman said he would not.
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No Wonder They Hate Governor Walker… Oshkosh Teachers Got 90 Sick Days A Year
No Wonder They Hate Governor Walker… Oshkosh Teachers Got 90 Sick Days A Year – Gateway Pundit
No wonder they hate Governor Scott Walker.
Oshkosh teachers were getting 90 sick days a year… They only worked 180 days a year.
Charlie Sykes reported:
This is what the Walker reforms look like in practice. One dazzling detail: up until now Oshkosh teachers got 90 sick days a year.
Unions representing teachers and other Oshkosh school district workers agreed to freeze wages, pay more for their benefits and allow administration to change health insurance providers in exchange for a one-year extension of their collective bargaining agreements.
The tentative contracts with the teachers’ union, paraprofessionals’ union and non-teaching employees’ union were hammered out in just two days and would cut district payroll costs by at least $4 million in the 2011-12 school year alone….
-The district would no longer pay the employees’ 5.8 percent share of pension contributions. This would save about $2.9 million.
-Employees would pay for 12 percent of their health insurance premiums instead of 5 percent. This would save about $1 million.
-District administration would be allowed to seek bids for cheaper health insurance providers or redesign insurance plans.
-Teachers would no longer receive 90 sick days per year. Instead, they would receive 10 sick days per year that could accumulate up to 90 days. Unused days would not be paid back.
-Seniority rules would no longer apply to paraprofessionals and non-teaching employees when filling vacancies or giving promotions. However, seniority rules would still apply to teachers.
Illinois State Senator Moves To Texas: ‘I’m Tired Of Subsidizing Crooks’
Illinois State Senator Moves To Texas: ‘I’m Tired Of Subsidizing Crooks’ – Washington Examiner
Roger Keats (R), a former Illinois state senator and Cook County Board president, is packing up and leaving the Land of Lincoln for good. The 62-year-old Keats was a good government reformer who helped clean up the rampant corruption in the Chicago-area courts uncovered by Operations Greylord and Gambat.
But now he’s throwing in the towel, and he and his wife are heading for Texas. “I am tired of subsidizing crooks,” Keats told the Wilmette Beacon.
In “Good Bye and Good Luck,” a letter to all the friends and political supporters he’s leaving behind after 60 years, Keats says he is leaving what he calls “the most corrupt big city… and most corrupt state in America” with “a heavy heart.”
“But enough is enough!” he writes. “The leaders of Illinois refuse to see we can’t continue going in the direction we are and expect people who have options to stay here.”
Indeed, Illinois has already lost a quarter of its population and will lose another seat in the next Congress.
And that’s not the only sign of serious, and possibly irreversible, decline.
“Illinois just sold still more bonds and our credit rating is so bad we pay higher interest rates than junk bonds! Junk Bonds!” Keats points out.
“Illinois is ranked 50th for fiscal policy; 47th in job creation; first in unfunded pension liabilities; second largest budget deficit; first in failing schools; first in bonded indebtedness; highest sales tax in the nation; most judges indicted; and five of our last nine elected governors have been indicted. That is more than the other 49 states added together!…
“We are moving to Texas where there is no income tax while Illinois’ just went up 67%. Texas’ sales tax is half of ours, which is the highest in the nation. Southern states are supportive of job producers, taxpayers and folks who offer opportunities to their residents. Illinois shakes them down for every penny that can be extorted from them.”
As a recent study by Americans for Tax Reform found, migration from high-tax states like Illinois to states with lower taxes and less government spending like Texas will dramatically alter the composition of future Congresses as more and more Americans, like the Keatses, vote with their feet.
Leftist SEIU Thugs Invade Bank, Demand Forced Union Membership
Leftist SEIU Thugs Invade Bank, Demand Forced Union Membership – The Blaze
About 80 medical workers and their union representatives took two yellow school buses to the headquarters of ESSA Bank in Stroudsburg, Pa., last Wednesday. The SEIU demonstrators weren’t there to complain about the bank. Instead, they demanded to meet with bank president and CEO Gary Olson who also chairs the Pocono Medical Center board of directors.
SEIU represents the hospital’s service workers. A portion of the hospital’s 550 service employees – technicians, laborers, housekeepers – are currently on a three-day strike, demanding that management allow them to make union membership and dues-paying compulsory.
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Earlier this month, two SEIU members infiltrated an ESSA shareholders meeting on March 4, once again demanding Olson’s ear. Union members in that case were escorted out of the building by security.
Showing up at Olson‘s place of work is not a new agitation tactic for the unions who have recently stormed state capitol buildings and even shown up at individuals’ homes to protest. But what about all the other employees of the business just trying to do their jobs?
“We’re asking that Mr. Olson take five minutes of his time to talk to us. We‘ve tried to make numerous appointments and we’ve heard nothing,” SEIU representative Neal Bisno told one ESSA employee who asked them to leave. But when the employee insisted the bank was trying to run a business and would not tolerate the disruption, workers started to clap and chant more union slogans.
First Brazil, Now Chile. So Much For Obama ‘The Uniter’
Anti-U.S. Protests In Chile Ahead Of Obama Visit – Emirates 24/7
Two demonstrations were held in Chile Sunday protesting the upcoming visit of President Barack Obama and rejecting a recently signed U.S.-Chilean nuclear agreement.
Some 2,000 people marched in downtown Santiago against Obama’s visit on Monday in an event organized by the environmental group Greenpeace. The protesters were angry that Chile signed a nuclear energy agreement on Friday with the United States despite Japan’s huge atomic crisis.
Like Japan, Chile lies on the Pacific Ring of Fire, a horseshoe-shaped region that is prone to severe earthquakes. Just last year Chile suffered its own monster 8.8 quake and accompanying tsunami which killed more than 500 people.
Opposition lawmakers and environmentalists say the atomic agreement is too risky for a country with such dramatic seismic activity.
“Nuclear energy is energy of death,” read one sign. “Neither invasion of Libya nor nuclear energy” read another.
Chile, a net energy importer, has two small experimental nuclear reactors, used for medicinal and technological applications. It has a formal commitment not to make any decision in the next 10 years about building a nuclear plant.
Some 300 people, including influential union leaders and members of Chile’s Communist Party, earlier marched in the downtown Plaza de Armas carrying banners that read “Obama Persona No Grata” and “Gringos Go Home.”
“This demonstration is to reject Barack Obama’s militaristic policies,” protest organizer Ricardo Sole told AFP.
Obama is scheduled to arrive Monday from Brazil, meet with Chilean President Sebastian Pinera and deliver a speech to the region.
Obama’s Health Care Reform Is Unhealthy For Hospitals – John D. Hartigan
Obama’s Health Care Reform Is Unhealthy For Hospitals – John D. Hartigan
Over the last few months, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has exempted a long list of unions and employers from an Affordable Care Act provision that would have made it too costly for them to continue some of their health care insurance plans. But, in sharp contrast, HHS apparently doesn’t intend to do anything at all about a new health reform mandate that could eventually force hundreds of badly needed U.S. hospitals to shut their doors.
Many of these hospitals are already struggling to make ends meet because Medicare only reimburses them for 90 percent of what it costs them to take care of Medicare patients. But, instead of helping them out, this rule change does the opposite. In a misguided effort to pressure them to become more efficient, it arbitrarily assumes that they can achieve the same productivity savings as the economy at large and decrees that these hypothetical cost savings must be deducted from any Medicare reimbursements they receive after September.
The trouble with this is that it lumps hospitals in with manufacturers like IBM and General Electric and takes it for granted that they can ultimately save almost $30 billion per year by replacing their workers with equipment or by squeezing their operations into tighter quarters. Nothing could be further from the truth.
First of all, hospitals are far too labor intensive to be able to slash payrolls as easily as manufacturers. They can automate functions like lab work and record keeping, but there’s no way they can substitute equipment for nurses, orderlies, housekeepers, nurses’ aides, kitchen workers or maintenance men. Moreover, hospitals can’t downsize as readily as manufacturers either. Hospitals that close floors have to uproot the patients on those floors and crowd them in with patients on other floors, and there are obvious safety and tolerability limits to how far that kind of doubling up can be pushed.
Given these constraints, very few of the 4,686 U.S. hospitals providing patients with Medicare Part A services are going to be able to boost their productivity enough to make up for the new reimbursement reductions. To quote Medicare’s own chief actuary, Richard Foster: “While such payment update reductions will create a strong incentive for providers to maximize productivity, it is doubtful that many will be able to improve their own productivity to the degree achieved by the economy at large. … Thus, providers for whom Medicare constitutes a substantive portion of their business could find it difficult to remain profitable. … Simulations by the Office of the Actuary suggest roughly 15 percent of Part A providers would become unprofitable within the ten year projection period.”
That’s a shocker. What Mr. Foster is telling us is that deducting the legislatively presumed productivity savings from Medicare reimbursements would gradually turn more than 700 of our hospitals into chronic money losers. And — while he doesn’t spell out what would happen when those hospitals eventually had to shut down — there’s no doubt that the impact would be devastating. Patients in rural areas would have to travel long hours to get to the nearest hospital still open for business, and patients everywhere would have to put up with critical shortages of beds, operating rooms and ICUs, as well as badly overcrowded clinics and emergency rooms.
Not only that, care would almost certainly have to be rationed. Grandpa might not get his heart bypass. His daughter might not get her mammogram. And his grandson would probably have to wait months for surgery to repair a sports injury.
Despite all this, HHS has no plans to intervene. Brushing off Mr. Foster’s warnings, his superiors insist that the new Medicare reimbursement reductions won’t cause any harm to hospitals or the communities they serve because hospitals can “become more productive” if they “invest in system changes.” But that’s just bureaucratic posturing. In order to survive the reductions, a typical 200-bed hospital would have to achieve long-term productivity savings of about $7 million per year, and investing in “system changes” couldn’t possibly cut payroll costs by that large an amount.
So let’s hope the new productivity mandate is either eliminated or scaled down to a level that’s reasonable. Otherwise, our hospitals risk becoming an endangered species.
The War On Our Military
Daniel Greenfield lays out the case, and it will chill anyone who loves our liberty. Because without our military, our liberty is doomed!
In two generations we have gone from General Patton telling his troops to grease their tanks with the enemy’s guts to an extensive purge of Navy command officers over a series of raunchy video skits. Slowly but surely we are turning the greatest armed forces into the world, into the most politically correct disarmed forces the world has ever seen.
The USS Enterprise crackdown, like the firing of General McChrystal and the push to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, completely ignore military realities for political objectives. A political military is also a useless military. Stalin’s purges of the Russian Army’s commanders left the Soviet Union completely unprepared for the Nazi attack. And the US military is being shaped along the same lines into a political military overseen by men whose chief credential is that they share the same politics as the politicians whom they serve.
A congressional report now says that the US military has too many white males at the top. Women are being kept out of the highest ranks because they lack combat experience. The report calls on the military leadership to “better reflect the racial, ethnic and gender mix of American society”. Which is code for affirmative action. If we didn’t have enough incompetents at the top, we can look forward to an affirmative action military in which the generals will be there because of the color of their skin or their gender, not because they’re the best at what they do.
The mandate that every civic institution has to reflect the multicultural politics of the liberal elites reflects their determination to impose their vision on the country by hijacking its institutions. And every institution touched by their vision has become functionally useless, incapable of performing even their simplest tasks, but always needing more money. America’s great cities have become sinkholes. The Postal Service is on the verge of extinction. And now it’s the military’s turn.
Such dramatic overhauls of the military usually take place because it is culturally out of step with the government. Would be tyrants, such as Turkey’s Erdogan, go after the military because it represents a barrier to absolute power. Others because the military is a barrier to their agenda. Sharon destroyed the once great IDF, purging its commanders and replacing them with political generals in order to push through his ethnic cleansing of the Jewish communities in Gaza, leading to the disastrous performance in the Second Lebanon War. The Democrats may not have anything as ambitious in mind, but they are determined to bring it culturally into line with their agenda. And that will destroy the military as anything other than a politically correct corps that will occasionally show up for UN peacekeeping missions.
Go read it all!
The Audacity Of Golf – Mark Steyn
The Audacity Of Golf – Mark Steyn
By the time you read this, President Obama will be taking a well-deserved break from the 54th hole of today’s scheduled golf game and the grueling responsibility of picking out his Final Four priority high-speed-rail projects on ESPN by relaxing on a beach in . . . Libya? Japan? No, Brazil. Oh, here he is now:
“Tall and tan and young and lovely
The boy from Spendaholica goes walking
And when he passes
Each one he passes
Goes ‘Aiiieeeeee . . .’”
Hey, it worked in 2008, and who’s to say the same old song won’t exercise its seductive charm all over again in 2012? That’s the way the president’s betting. As he told a gathering of high-rolling Democratic donors in Washington last week: “As time passes, you start taking it for granted that a guy named Barack Hussein Obama is president of the United States. But we should never take it for granted. I hope that all of you still feel that sense of excitement and that sense of possibility.”
Well, no, I couldn’t honestly say that I do. I mean, I always like the bit in the movie where 007 says, “The name’s Bond. James Bond,” but generally he follows it by rappelling into a hollowed-out volcano and taking out the evil mastermind while disabling the nuclear-launch codes with three seconds to spare. I’m not sure I get quite the same “sense of excitement” from the Obama version:
“The name’s Bond. James Hussein Bond.”
“I’m afraid you’re growing rather tedious, Mr. Bond.”
Speaking of names, the new stimulus-funded Amtrak station in Wilmington, Del., is to be named after Vice President Biden. Say what you like about Obama, but he made the naming of train stations run on time. We should never take it for granted that a guy named Joseph Robinette Biden is a railroad halt in the northeast corridor. I hope that all of you still feel that sense of excitement and that sense of possibility. I couldn’t be more excited if Robinette Hussein Robinette were president.
In 2008, Obama offered Hope and Change. This time round he’s offering the Hope of No Change. Life goes on. When your president’s middle name is Hussein, trust me, that’s all the change you guys need. Harry Reid says he doesn’t even want to talk about the possibility of opening discussions to consider raising the possibility of contemplating the thought of the merest smidgeonette of changes to Social Security for another 20 years. Senator Reid, 71, told MSNBC this week, “Two decades from now, I’m willing to take a look at it.” Big of you. No-Change You Can Believe In! The Audacity of Torpor.
There may be more takers for this than my friends on the right would wish. On Libya, the Audacity of Golf seems to have done the trick: Nobody’s in the mood for a no-fly zone in another thankless distant hellhole just as Iraq and Hoogivsastan have dropped off the news. And yeah, gas seems to be going up, and, when 40 percent of Americans work in minimal-skill service jobs, it makes a difference to the economic viability of those jobs whether you’re driving there at a dollar-eighty per gallon or four bucks. “We have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,” said Steven Chu, now Obama’s energy secretary, in 2008. We’re getting there. It’s just shy of ten bucks per in Britain, but there’s no reason a fuel policy for small, densely populated nations can’t work for Wyoming, because we’re investing in all those high-speed rail links. So you’ll be able to commute from your home in Rattlesnake, Nevada to your job in North Rattlesnake, Nevada via the Joseph Robinette Biden Delaware, Lackawanna, Atchison, Topeka, Sante Fe & Canadian Pacific High-Speed Interchange Facility & Federal Stimulus Mausoleum in Wilmington.
How will we power the trains? Nukes? Oh, perish the thought. Not after those whachamacallits in Japan failed to withstand the thingummy from the whoozis. Obviously, if something can’t shrug off one of the five most powerful earthquakes ever recorded, then we shouldn’t have anything to do with it at all, no way, no how. Instead, we should “invest” in “green jobs,” and then you’ll be able to commute to your overnight shift at the KwikkiKrap because the high-speed trains will have giant wind turbines nailed to the roof of the caboose, at least until the next of kin of boxcar-riding hobos caught in the slipstream file a class-action suit. And by then you won’t need to commute to the KwikkiKrap because they’ll have cut the night shift after the drop-off in vehicular traffic was so severe they had to change the sign to “CASHIER CARRIES LESS THAN $3.79 IN CHANGE.” But that proved to be the biggest stimulus to the American sign-manufacturing industry since they had to make all those “THIS TWO-HUNDRED YARD STRETCH OF SCARIFIED PAVEMENT BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE AMERICA RECOVERY & REDISTRIBUTION ACT” sign, so that’s even more good news.
The Audacity of Golf may yet prove a potent message. Many Americans seem disinclined to heed warnings, especially of stuff that Harry Reid assures us is a long way off. Change we can believe in? Thanks but no thanks. We’ll wait till it happens. In New Orleans, they waited till the hurricane hit, and then the cops walked off the job, and the fleet of evacuation buses lay empty and abandoned, and enterprising locals fired on army engineers repairing the 17th Street Canal, and less ambitious types went a-lootin’, and, when the feds showed up to hand out emergency debit cards, they spent them at strip joints, and of the refugees who fled to Texas 45 percent turned out to have a criminal record and the Houston homicide rate went up 23 percent.
So imagine if last week’s earthquake and tsunami had hit Louisiana.
Japan is a dying nation, literally. They’re the oldest people on earth, and their shrunken pool of young ’uns are childless. They’re already in net population decline: The nation that invented the Walkman would have been better off inventing the walker. Today their only world-beating innovations are in post-human robotechnology — humanoid nurses with big-eyed Manga faces doing the jobs that humans won’t do.
Japan is doomed. And yet, watching the exemplary response to catastrophe this week, you sense that their final days will at least be tranquil and orderly. From afar, we shrieked like ninnies, retreating to the usual tropes: No nukes! And more carbon offsets to appease the great Water Gods of the Tsunami!
America is the brokest country in history. We owe more money than anyone has ever owed anyone. And Obama and Reid say relax, that’s no reason not to spend more — because the world hasn’t yet concluded we have no intention of paying it back. When they do, the dollar will collapse, like those buildings in Sendai. When that happens, it will make a lot of difference whether Americans react like the Japanese or Louisianans.
But, in the meantime, Barack Obama goes to Brazil and assures us that life’s a beach: Golf on, Mr. President.
Gatordoug
darcprynce
Dave C
