Thursday, March 17, 2011
More trouble in River City, the US and the world
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
There is this possibly irrational conviction that this writers holds, that world order collapses whenever he ventures outside the canyons of New York City. Take the most recent fatal date, Friday March 11. At the time of this writing the news had come down that Japan has suffered not only the biggest earthquake in its history (also fifth most destructive in the planet’s recorded history, at least since Prof. Richter invented his famous scale75 years ago), but that not one but five nuclear energy plants were in danger of exploding, a genuine world threat .It actually happened, with three limited meltdowns, within two days, for want of coolant water. Fortunately the containment walls held – one is still seriously endangered, outcome uncertain - and US is flying in the proper supplies.
This certainly overshadowed yesterday’s threats, the news that Libya’s dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi’s hired forces, armed with modern weapons and military planes, are overwhelming the insurgents , not only in the west, around Tripoli, but also are breaking through in the rebel tribe territory and eliminating his fellow Libyan enemies, opening the specter of Somalia , Srebrenica and Rwanda. This is the fight that the clever dictator has been preparing for during the past 40 years, slowly obliterating the limited democratic institutions inherited from the Italians’ and Brits’ colonial powers, weakening the army command, squashing tribal rulers and organizations of the intelligentsia. He has imported African and other mercenaries as his palace guard, meanwhile stashing away the oil income, making it inaccessible to the world’ s banking and UN regulatory forces.
Meanwhile, the President of the US, looked up to by the civilized nations hoping to stop the slaughter of Libyan rebels by aerial overflights if not direct invasion, is holding off, seeking approval from the African Union and Arab League dictators, the latter itself either torn by their own young seeking democracy, as in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, or barely holding off the masses by money gifts and quick concessions and promises, as in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco and slightly heaving Algeria, Iraq and Syria. President G. H. W. Bush was clever, assembling the Desert Storm coalition of 32 nations before tackling Saddam Hussein for the gulf war starting in 1989, unlike his headstrong son.
Incredibly, the 22-member Arab League has asked the Security Council to impose a no-fly zone. We are still hesitant; the guarding of the rebels against aerial overflights would be very dangerous for the US, possibly leading to land involvements and other military operations, so Obama is wisely holding out for real Gulf Cooperative Council participation. Meanwhile the US is hurting abroad, by collateral deaths of civilians in Afghanistan, engineered and exploited by PR- clever Talibans.
In the US, power-hungry tea party minded Republican governors in WI, MI, FL and other heavily red states are writing budgets and laws that create unemployment, by firing civil servants and schoolteachers . In Wisconsin, creating jobs and getting out of the recession becomes secondary, when the opportunity of breaking the unions and reorganizing the country in the image of the rich, as represented by the billionaire Koch brothers, becomes a 2012 reality. But Gov. Scott Walker’s Wisconsin model of eliminating bargaining rights for public employees has alarmed the non wealthy among the Republican and Conservative, and there may be a groundswell against it, one hopes.
In this context, the Florida events are interesting. Florida’s new governor Rick Scott, a lawyer who in 1987 founded Columbia/Health Corporation of America, US largest for-pay hospital chain, was forced to resign when C/HCA admitted to felonious misbillings of Medicare, and was fined $600M, the largest settlement on record at the time. CEO Scott walked off with $88M settlement and $300M in stock, and became a venture capitalist, with Health Network, WebMD and a pharmacy chain, Pharmaca, in his portfolio. He moved into FL politics in 2010, spending $60M personal money in campaigning, beating Republican Bill McCollum in the primary and narrowly defeating Democrat Alex Sink. Note that South Florida, particularly Broward County has been well known as the illegal pill-mill state, doling out nine times the volume of Oxicontine than the rest of the country/ Hundreds of out of state cars are coming to the 130 Broward County clinics, drivers armed with old x-rays and diagnoses of chronic afflictions, shopping for willing doctors, and buying drugs for peddling in other states. There is a database of distributions that successfully points fingers to doctors and pharmacies, and the legislature has accepted private funds for its maintenance, because Gov. Scott will not allocate funds, claiming excessive government interference in private affairs! Purdue Pharma, Oxicontine maker, has offered $1M towards the maintenance of the pill data base, but Scott has refused to accept it. This is the same governor who also rejected the federally funded high-speed rail, claiming that cost overruns will ruin the state, and will fire 8,600 government workers, slashing expenses by $4.6B and distributing $1.8 as tax cuts, for private industry as tax incentives, towards more employment. It is ironic, when Florida, in a successful attempt to restore a dozen of its non-functioning high schools, has already replaced 50 percent of teachers by young highly motivated ones in such high schools as Miami Central. Those will probably be the teachers that Gov. Scott will have fired. Florida is a strange state, no accounting whom they will elect in high offices.
The President, in a press conference stressing our support for the Japanese allies, also presented his economic goals. First of all, making the US in 20 years 80 percent independent of energy imports, by initiatives in increased drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico, and producing natural gas, despite our concern that the extraction-pushing chemicals can pollute our rivers and drinking water aquifers. While he recognizes that the US only holds 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves, it is enough until the renewable energy resources – biofuels, wind, solar, hydraulic - are sufficiently developed. Sacred capitalist idols Warren Buffet and T. Boone Pickens were quoted to convince the unbelievers.
More about state budgets, particularly Governor Andrew Cuomo’s efforts, soon.
There is this possibly irrational conviction that this writers holds, that world order collapses whenever he ventures outside the canyons of New York City. Take the most recent fatal date, Friday March 11. At the time of this writing the news had come down that Japan has suffered not only the biggest earthquake in its history (also fifth most destructive in the planet’s recorded history, at least since Prof. Richter invented his famous scale75 years ago), but that not one but five nuclear energy plants were in danger of exploding, a genuine world threat .It actually happened, with three limited meltdowns, within two days, for want of coolant water. Fortunately the containment walls held – one is still seriously endangered, outcome uncertain - and US is flying in the proper supplies.
This certainly overshadowed yesterday’s threats, the news that Libya’s dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi’s hired forces, armed with modern weapons and military planes, are overwhelming the insurgents , not only in the west, around Tripoli, but also are breaking through in the rebel tribe territory and eliminating his fellow Libyan enemies, opening the specter of Somalia , Srebrenica and Rwanda. This is the fight that the clever dictator has been preparing for during the past 40 years, slowly obliterating the limited democratic institutions inherited from the Italians’ and Brits’ colonial powers, weakening the army command, squashing tribal rulers and organizations of the intelligentsia. He has imported African and other mercenaries as his palace guard, meanwhile stashing away the oil income, making it inaccessible to the world’ s banking and UN regulatory forces.
Meanwhile, the President of the US, looked up to by the civilized nations hoping to stop the slaughter of Libyan rebels by aerial overflights if not direct invasion, is holding off, seeking approval from the African Union and Arab League dictators, the latter itself either torn by their own young seeking democracy, as in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, or barely holding off the masses by money gifts and quick concessions and promises, as in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco and slightly heaving Algeria, Iraq and Syria. President G. H. W. Bush was clever, assembling the Desert Storm coalition of 32 nations before tackling Saddam Hussein for the gulf war starting in 1989, unlike his headstrong son.
Incredibly, the 22-member Arab League has asked the Security Council to impose a no-fly zone. We are still hesitant; the guarding of the rebels against aerial overflights would be very dangerous for the US, possibly leading to land involvements and other military operations, so Obama is wisely holding out for real Gulf Cooperative Council participation. Meanwhile the US is hurting abroad, by collateral deaths of civilians in Afghanistan, engineered and exploited by PR- clever Talibans.
In the US, power-hungry tea party minded Republican governors in WI, MI, FL and other heavily red states are writing budgets and laws that create unemployment, by firing civil servants and schoolteachers . In Wisconsin, creating jobs and getting out of the recession becomes secondary, when the opportunity of breaking the unions and reorganizing the country in the image of the rich, as represented by the billionaire Koch brothers, becomes a 2012 reality. But Gov. Scott Walker’s Wisconsin model of eliminating bargaining rights for public employees has alarmed the non wealthy among the Republican and Conservative, and there may be a groundswell against it, one hopes.
In this context, the Florida events are interesting. Florida’s new governor Rick Scott, a lawyer who in 1987 founded Columbia/Health Corporation of America, US largest for-pay hospital chain, was forced to resign when C/HCA admitted to felonious misbillings of Medicare, and was fined $600M, the largest settlement on record at the time. CEO Scott walked off with $88M settlement and $300M in stock, and became a venture capitalist, with Health Network, WebMD and a pharmacy chain, Pharmaca, in his portfolio. He moved into FL politics in 2010, spending $60M personal money in campaigning, beating Republican Bill McCollum in the primary and narrowly defeating Democrat Alex Sink. Note that South Florida, particularly Broward County has been well known as the illegal pill-mill state, doling out nine times the volume of Oxicontine than the rest of the country/ Hundreds of out of state cars are coming to the 130 Broward County clinics, drivers armed with old x-rays and diagnoses of chronic afflictions, shopping for willing doctors, and buying drugs for peddling in other states. There is a database of distributions that successfully points fingers to doctors and pharmacies, and the legislature has accepted private funds for its maintenance, because Gov. Scott will not allocate funds, claiming excessive government interference in private affairs! Purdue Pharma, Oxicontine maker, has offered $1M towards the maintenance of the pill data base, but Scott has refused to accept it. This is the same governor who also rejected the federally funded high-speed rail, claiming that cost overruns will ruin the state, and will fire 8,600 government workers, slashing expenses by $4.6B and distributing $1.8 as tax cuts, for private industry as tax incentives, towards more employment. It is ironic, when Florida, in a successful attempt to restore a dozen of its non-functioning high schools, has already replaced 50 percent of teachers by young highly motivated ones in such high schools as Miami Central. Those will probably be the teachers that Gov. Scott will have fired. Florida is a strange state, no accounting whom they will elect in high offices.
The President, in a press conference stressing our support for the Japanese allies, also presented his economic goals. First of all, making the US in 20 years 80 percent independent of energy imports, by initiatives in increased drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico, and producing natural gas, despite our concern that the extraction-pushing chemicals can pollute our rivers and drinking water aquifers. While he recognizes that the US only holds 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves, it is enough until the renewable energy resources – biofuels, wind, solar, hydraulic - are sufficiently developed. Sacred capitalist idols Warren Buffet and T. Boone Pickens were quoted to convince the unbelievers.
More about state budgets, particularly Governor Andrew Cuomo’s efforts, soon.
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 7:40 AM 
