Category: Politics

Congress Spends More Time Dialing for Dollars Than on Legislative Work – U.S. Term Limits

Congress spends more time on re-election fundraising than on the legislative duties they were hired to do. Party bosses expect as many as 6 hours daily.

“This problem cannot be fixed by voting incumbents out,” he continues. “This proves, what we have been saying all along. Incumbents have an overwhelming political advantage because we pay them to raise money for their re-elections. Challengers don’t stand a chance.”

Source: Congress Spends More Time Dialing for Dollars Than on Legislative Work – U.S. Term Limits

If Trump is impeachable for a “quid pro quo” regarding help in an election, then what are we supposed to do about the 538 people in Congress who spend over half of their time on the phone with donors, selling their votes on various bills for campaign contributions? I suppose you can tell me it’s because it involved a foreign country, but I’m absolutely certain that many of the prominent members in Congress have similar dealings with foreign countries as well. I’m still gobsmacked at the hypocrisy of the whole thing. “Quid pro quo” is literally how anything gets done in politics, or business in general, for that matter. Does anyone think that the US has handed over billions in aid to a foreign country for all these years, for absolutely no consideration in return, until Trump came along, and asked for some inside information on a political rival?! I’m not saying anything specific to Trump here. This whole complaint wouldn’t make sense to me, even if Bill Clinton did it. (And I’m sure he did.) It just doesn’t seem to me to rise to the level of “high crimes,” or even misdemeanors. This IS politics.

Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg Will Walk Away With Millions – Barron’s

What’s more, upon termination Muilenburg can walk away with another $30 to $40 million. And his supplementary executive pension is worth another $11 million, according to these statements.

Source: Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg Will Walk Away With Millions – Barron’s

Welcome to the corporatocracy of America, where you can fail badly enough as CEO to get fired — but not be held legally culpable — and then be handed tens of millions of dollars to get lost.

Then you get to go sit on the boards of several other public companies, and get millions a year from each one to show up to a few meetings and rubber stamp corporate documents.

It truly is a good-old-boy’s club. Hey, it’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it.

Carl Miller on Twitter: “Here’s a fake news merchant telling me how it actually works.”

This is a clip from a report by the BBC that creating, boosting, and then selling fake content has become a real job in other countries. This particular report has an interview with a man from Kosovo, and (thanks to the last election) the work in Russia is now well understood, but I remain convinced there’s an entire industry for it in China. The US is the fake-news chew toy for the rest of the world, and Facebook is ground zero. The election next year is going to be a mess.

House passes compromise defense bill, creating a Space Force

“I will sign this historic defense legislation immediately!” President Donald Trump tweeted.

Source: House passes compromise defense bill, creating a Space Force

“Historic.” “Compromise.” “Space Force.” $738 BILLION. I wish more people on the Right would ask, “BuT hOw WiLl We PaY fOr It?!” when it comes to military spending.

The Keystone Pipeline oil leak is almost 10 times worse than initially thought – CNN

The amount of land impacted by an oil spill in North Dakota is almost 10 times larger than initially reported, officials say. The disclosure comes about a month after the Keystone 1 Pipeline leaked about 383,040 gallons of oil.

Source: The Keystone Pipeline oil leak is almost 10 times worse than initially thought – CNN

So I see the oil industry has learned the IT industry’s trick of initially underreporting the severity of breaches. Including the part about doing it by orders of magnitude.

Or maybe they both learned it from the government, which always over-reports economic growth, and under-reports joblessness.

Christian comedian John Crist admits to ‘destructive and sinful’ behavior after multiple women come forward

Popular Christian comedian John Crist, who just landed a Netflix special, admitted to “destructive and sinful” behavior and canceled his upcoming tour after multiple accusations of unwanted sexting, harassment and manipulation.

Source: Christian comedian John Crist admits to ‘destructive and sinful’ behavior after multiple women come forward

Hey, it’s like Trump says: “Let him who hasn’t had sex with a porn star, and directed his lawyer to pay her to keep quiet, while his 3rd wife was pregnant with his 5th kid, cast the first stone.”

You can complain about Trump’s “p***y grabbing” and philandering, but I remind everyone that Bill Clinton is the one who got elected, and reelected, despite having a string of well-known, credible rape accusers, while his wife did interviews at all the major news outlets to smear and victim-blame them. We’re living in the Clintons’ America now. Trump is a symptom, not a cause. Now matter how much the media crows about their hatred for Trump, it was their utter lack of ethics in letting the Clintons slide that paved the way for Trump’s presidency.

Meanwhile, the coverup of the Epstein sex slave ring continues unabated, and the media has circled the wagons around protecting the people who took part in it, including — surprise, surprise! — Clinton AND Trump. They have only themselves to blame by lowering the bar even further, and removing any and all credibility from their arsenal the next time they want to take down a conservative over sexual morality issues.

H-1B Visas, Facebook, and Cummins

I ran across an article about Facebook’s use of H-1B visas in my news crawl. This part really caught my eye:

Since 2017, as part of his promise to “hire American,” the Trump administration has been denying record numbers of H-1B visas—those offered to high skilled workers with bachelor’s and advanced degrees, including many engineers at Facebook, Amazon, and Google. In the three years that Trump has been in office, the denial rate for H-1B visas has risen from 10 to 24 percent. The United States issues roughly 85,000 new H-1B visas each year. In 2018, 651 of those visas were granted to Facebook employees, the seventeenth most of any employer in the country.

Source: ‘Do Not Discuss the Incident,’ Facebook Told Employee Fired After Speaking About Worker Suicide – VICE

That got me curious. Around these parts, it’s obvious that Cummins is a big fan of the system, but I had no idea how much. If you click through that link from the article, you can see Cummins sits at 29th out of 30 largest users of the H-1B visa program! That was surprising to me!

From state-level data, we can see that, in Indiana, Cummins is #1, obviously.

I think both sets of numbers rather dramatically understate Cummins’ use of the H-1B visa program. Cummins employs lots of people through Tata, Infosys, KPIT, and, of course, my own employer, LHP. It seems like the counts in their totals that represent people working for Cummins ought be applied to Cummins’ count, and I’m assuming that this is same for the rest of the counts. I’m sure Tata and Infosys have people embedded in many of the other companies as well. I guess it doesn’t matter much in the end, but it would still be nice to remove the “consultancy indirection,” and just get final numbers for all of these companies. It would show who’s taking most advantage of the indirection.

Do other countries, like India and China, run programs like this, to get professionals from the US into their countries? I honestly don’t know, and any searches I do online seem to get redirected back to the H-1B program, because that’s all anyone seems to talk about, so it’s hard to tell.

Almost all visa holders I meet are be from India. Second place seems to go to people from various countries in Africa. China has about the same amount of people as India, and about as many as all of Africa combined, but I haven’t met any Chinese visa holders at Cummins. Mexico and Canada are right here on our borders. I’ve never even heard of someone from those countries working here under an H-1B visa. Why does it seem that the program is almost exclusively Indian? Again, I don’t know.

This is all very complex and fascinating to me. Maybe I should read a book and educate myself about the underlying dynamics. It’s just that I have so many books I’m already not reading…

Top Marginal Tax Rates

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, could be taxed NINETY-NINE POINT NINE PERCENT of his net worth, and STILL be worth a BILLION dollars. Let that sink in. $10M is pretty wealthy. $100M is pretty crazy. “Just” $1B is ludicrous. He is worth $110 BILLION. It just seems to me that — at some point — the country that set the stage for him to be this wealthy — like, say, oh I don’t know… giving Amazon a TOTAL PASS on sales tax for 20 years — needs to get some of that back to help the rest of society.

I know that makes me seem like a communist to some people, but I promise this is only small-“S” socialist thinking. This is just too far out of whack. I think it’s time to go back to more steps of substantially-steeper marginal tax rates. At this point, the top 400 wealthiest people in the country are paying less than anyone else, on a marginal basis.

Marginal Tax Rates Since 1950

I know, I know. I hate our country. If I don’t like it, I can leave. Yada, yada, yada.

Warren on our Corporatocracy

I’ve been talking about corporate charters for a long time now, and people either don’t understand what I’m talking about, or think I’m crazy. We give people a charter to create a company, which grants them special, legal protections to build the business. But that charter implies a social contract that they will not abuse the public trust, in exchange for that special treatment.

This has been a sort of gentleman’s agreement, that corporations — as legal “people” in the campaign finance definition — would be good “citizens.” In modern America, many simply haven’t been, and it’s time to hold them accountable, and make them give back to society in a more equitable way. Global-spanning companies shouldn’t be allowed to continue to “socialize the costs, and privatize the profits.”

Just yesterday, Mark Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, wrote an op-ed in the Times saying much the same thing:

“To my fellow business leaders and billionaires, I say that we can no longer wash our hands of our responsibility for what people do with our products. Yes, profits are important, but so is society. And if our quest for greater profits leaves our world worse off than before, all we will have taught our children is the power of greed.

It’s time for a new capitalism — a more fair, equal and sustainable capitalism that actually works for everyone and where businesses, including tech companies, don’t just take from society but truly give back and have a positive impact.”

These people face perhaps the toughest uphill climb possible. The world of corporate governance is a private club, where executives of one huge, public company might sit on the boards of a dozen others, all interconnected. They’re used to getting their way, because, in aggregate, they use their money to influence local, state, and federal governments, to make things easier on themselves, and tougher on their competitors. They aren’t going to care for someone kicking over the castles in their sandbox.

True cost of Medicaid is 2X headline cost?

I recently attended a talk by the CEO of a hospital with $2.6 billion in annual revenue. She noted that patients on Medicaid are 40 percent of the census and that Medicaid pays only 50 percent of t…

Source: True cost of Medicaid is 2X headline cost?

This is a blog post from a professor at MIT, who explains that Medicaid is basically being HALF funded by overcharging people with private insurance. Also, here again, there’s anecdotal data that this is pushing people out of the private system, and into the public one, exacerbating the problem. I believe the private insurance system is teetering on the tipping point of collapse, where even people with “good” jobs won’t be able to afford it.
 
Cummins just announced a layoff that — reading between the lines — I *believe* is entirely related to health-care costs. Most people have absolutely no idea what their plan actually costs. The average cost of an insurance plan for a family is something like $20,000 year, and that’s for a huge company like Cummins, who can negotiate better rates with a huge insurance company. The average employee is only covering a portion of this.
 
If you estimate half of Cummins employees being in the US (say 30,000), and multiply this with the bulk of their health insurance premium (say $15,000), you come up with FOUR HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS A YEAR of health care costs to the company. Half a BILLION dollars! On an EBITDA of $3B, that’s significant!
And that’s just the premiums! That’s not even counting all the administrative overhead to manage the program, or all the subsidiary efforts — like wellness programs and their new health center — designed to reduce health-care related costs, to TRY to keep the premiums manageable! And — as everyone LOVES to point out about corporate taxes — this astounding sum of money is simply passed on to customers in the cost of engines.
 
As more people get ejected from the private side, it drives up the costs even more, leading other companies to follow suit, and prices continuing to rise. Right now, even people with good jobs are opting for super-high-deductible plans, and, if they can’t cover a catastrophic situation, the system will try to recoup those costs from other people in the system, and this dance exacerbates the situation even further.
 
The ideal solution seems to be to get the government to allow me to buy health insurance like car insurance — with lots and lots of competition. Then employers can give me that $20,000, and let me go shop for it. I think the situation would sort itself out in no time. No, health care won’t suddenly be cheap, but I think the costs would get a lot more sane very quickly. At the least, I think that would end the $500 band-aids at the hospital.
 
But, no, the insurance companies like their profits too much to let the market reduce them, so they’re not going to let Congress do anything like this, and the system will fall over, and there won’t be any other choice left but to nationalize it all, and then Anthem suddenly becomes the largest organ of the government. And even though I think a “Pentagon of health care” is a workable backup idea, we all know that won’t happen either.