Will Blog for Food

A Districtless Congress

The US is divided up into political districts. Each voter gets to vote for one member of the House of Representatives and two members of the Senate in this bicameral national assembly. There are 435 voting members of the House so there are 435 congressional districts. The member from your district supposedly represents your interests, but none of the others do. In the Senate the political districts are the states. There are 100 senators, two from each state. The two senators from your state supposedly represent your interests but none of the other 98 do. So 1/435 or 0.22% of the members of the house represent your interests, and 2/100 or 2% of the members of the senate represent your interests.

This is a pathetic situation, and it's even worse if you did not vote for any of the congressman or senators who supposedly represent you. Say you're a Democrat and the congressman elected from your district (whom you didn't vote for) is a Republican. Then arguably you have no representation at all in the House. The same could be said of the Senate if you didn't vote for either of the senators who actually got elected. In other countries where they use other methods for making up the national assembly or congress like, for example, proportional representation, the percentage of the members representing each voter's interests is much higher. For example, if 28% of the electorate (including you) voted for the Green Party, then 28% of the seats in the national assembly would be Green Party members.

In a districtless congress each voter would vote for each representative, and each representaive would represent the interests of all voters. For example, if there are 300 seats in the congress and 500 candidates running for those seats there would be 500!/(300!)(200!) possible congresses or ways that this congress could be made up. In theory each voter could list each possible congress in order of his/her preferences, and then all the voters' specifications could be amalgamated to get the one congress that best represented the electorate as a whole. The problem is that it would be impractical for each voter to study the qualifications of each candidate and then come up with a list of all possible congresses. It would be too much work. However, there are ways to expedite this process as explained in more detail here. If each voter just listed the candidates (instead of the congresses) in order of preference, this list could be translated by software into an ordered list of congresses. Furthermore, the list of candidates could be simplified by using the recommend- ations of the voter's political party or other trusted experts in part or in whole. A customized list could be generated by taking eclectic recommend- ations cafeteria style. Or there could be different lists available to the voter depending on the voter's profile related to his/her political objectives. A simple questionnaire given to the voter could generate a list according to the voter's predilections. There are a lot of different ways any particular voter's list could be generated with the voter having complete control and the final say.

One way of amalgamating the list information is by range voting. Using this method each possible congress would be given a numerical rating, and the ratings for each congress would be added up over all the individual voters to determine the winner - the one with the highest overall social rating. There is no need to rank the possible congresses in order over the entire electorate since only the top rated one would be chosen. Therefore, Kenneth Arrow's model for social choice and his impossibility results as presented in Social Choice and Individual Values are invalid.  In fact Arrow's model which calls for a full social ranking doesn't apply to most political as well as most economic situations. The only thing it seems to apply to is combining judges' rankings in Olympic figure skating where it is important to know not only first place but also second and third. In political and economic situations it's necessary only to know the top rated or first place result.

The Republican Plan: Leave the Democrats a Total Mess!

The Republicans will probably lose the next election. But instead of their successors inheriting a country in good fiscal condition and in good standing in the world, the Democrats will inherit a mess - a fiscal mess and a mess in Afghanistan and Iraq. As the Democrats struggle to right the ship of state, the Republicans will lose no time in blaming them (the Democrats) for the mess itself. Bush is spending like a drunken sailor having accumulated more debt than all the Presidents preceding him including Ronald Reagan who accumulated more debt than all the Presidents preceding him. And they have done it primarily by reducing taxes for the rich. Sure the poor have had their taxes reduced too but by a pittance with the net effect being a gigantic transfer of the national wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich and to large corporations. Dick Cheney said, "Reagan proved deficits don't matter." And the sub-text to this is that, when there is the inevitable turnover of administrations, the Democrats will have all they can do to clean up the mess and fight off the accusations that it's their responsibility, and the Republicans will have no problem winning back the Congress and the Presidency in the next election cycle. When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, the US was the world's largest creditor nation ^i.e. more money was owed to the US by other nations than was owed to any other nation. Now we're the world's largest debtor nation ^i.e. the US owes more money to other nations than does any other nation.

Regarding Ronald Reagan, his chief of staff Donald Regan told the New York Times in 1986 that "some of us are like a shovel brigade" following the circus elephant, cleaning up his droppings along the parade. This same quote could also be applied to the Republican philosophy towards the Democrats which might be stated as follows "Leave the country a mess for the Democrats to inherit. They'll be so busy cleaning it up that they won't have any time to implement their own policies. Neither will they have any money. Blame them for the mess and capitalize on it for the next election." Bill Clinton actually cleaned up a lot of the mess. He inherited a long string of budget deficits and turned this around actually accomplishing several budget surpluses during his term in office. The Republicans could have none of this, however. Bush promptly turned this around running huge deficits again. Clinton's surpluses were just play money for Bush to squander. After all, what they want to acccomplish is to bankrupt government run social programs like social security and medicare. They want to make them insolvent so that they will have to be privatized, one of George Bush's goals. Their mantra is "privatize government functions and turn them over to corporations." God help us  when medicare is turned over to the likes of United Health Care whose CEO William McGuire takes home huge pay packages. His pay in recent years has topped $100 million annually and he's sitting on top of $1.6 billion in stock options.  

How does United Health Care, the provider of AARP Secure Horizons Medicare Advantage plans, do it? By denying health care to those who truly need it. Administrative costs for private insurance skyrocket mainly to pay high salaries to CEOs and other executives whereas in other countries with single payer government provided health insurance, administrative costs are very low. The medicare Advantage plans offer enticements to get people to convert from traditional medicare like a free physical exam once a year, an optional  dental plan and free eyeglasses every  two years. However, the enticements start evaporating as soon as you enroll. You start getting sheafs of paperwork which, if you had the patience to sift through it, would inform you that your benefits under the plan are diminishing. It's sort of like that credit card you were enticed into getting. Then you get a bunch of paperwork that's too small to read informing you that your rate has gone up. And why doesn't medicare in its infinite wisdom provide a free annual physical? It's been shown that early detection of disease reduces health care costs in the long run. It's because they want to make medicare as unattractive and costly as possible while making  private health insurance relatively more attractive so that more people will shift from traditional medicare to private health insurance which is what the Advantage plan really is. And you can get the Advantage plan for the same price as medicare .... for now. Once  they get you on it, they'll eventually cut the link so you can't go back to traditional medicare and then watch your monthly premiums go up.

The recession which is almost upon us was scheduled for next year after the Democrats had taken over, but it might arrive early. The Republicans will do whatever they can to stave it off so that  the mess flops down on the Democrats' lap. That'll give them something to do so they won't be able to reverse Republican "progress": bankrupting government and turning it over to private corporations, militarizing the  US economy and dominating the rest of the world. Those are the neocon goals. And then the Republicans can get on with their work of governing: the Blue Sky initiative which increases the level of pollutants  corporations can release into the atmosphere, the Wildlife Protection Act which allows oil drilling in game preserves, the Clean Water Act which raises the allowable levels  of arsenic in our rivers, the Labor Protection Act which makes it easier for corporations to get rid of unions and harder to get a  union started, the Child Health Act which defunds children's health insurance, the Product Inspection Act which lowers the standards for product safety and decreases the number of inspectors and so on and on. According to CNBC's Erin Burnett

A lot of people like to say, uh, scaremonger about China, right? A lot of politicians, and I know you talk about that issue all the time. I think people should be careful what they wish for on China. Ya know, if China were to revalue it’s currency or China is to start making say, toys that don’t have lead in them or food that isn’t poisonous, their costs of production are going to go up and that means prices at Wal-Mart here in the United States are going to go up too. So, I would say China is our greatest friend right now, they’re keeping prices low and they’re keeping the prices for mortgages low, too.”

Spoken like a true Republican!

The Democrats will seek to "work together" with the rest of the world, a sign of weakness that's anathema to  the Republicans. The Democrats might try to protect American good paying jobs so that they're not shipped overseas, again something anathema to the Republicans who believe that corporations should get their labor "input" wherever they can get it most cheaply. Currently, China is a good source of cheap labor. Americans will have to gain wealth the traditional Republican way: by rising to a high corporate level or via real estate or the stock market. Of course, you could be an entrepreneur and come up with the next "must have" product. Forget about good paying middle class jobs. There  won't be any. If you're not a player in the real estate or stock markets, you will only be able to get a job as a telemarketer or a barista at Starbucks. Low paying jobs will proliferate. After all the rich need somebody to watch their children and work in their yards. But not to worry. Instead of that good paying middle class job with benefits, you will be offered a tax break!

Scott McClellan Implicates President Bush in Outing of CIA Spy Valerie Plame

Former White House Press Secretary Scot McClellan in a new book due out in April has implicated Bush, Cheney and their Chiefs of Staff, Andrew Card and "Scooter" Libby (who is already in jail on a charge related to the case), as well as Karl Rove in the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame. Plame who has written a new book, "Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House," has maintained all along that her identity was leaked by the highest levels of the US government, an act that is manifest treason in a time of war and absolutely impeachable.

Here is the quote from CNN:

Amid a swelling controversy about the leak of Valerie Wilson's name, McClellan went to the White House podium in October 2003 and told reporters that Karl Rove, the president's top political adviser, and Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, had not been involved. In an upcoming book, McClellan says five administration officials were "involved" in his "unknowingly" passing along false information about the involvement of Rove and Libby in the leak of Valerie Wilson's identity. "There was one problem. It was not true," McClellan writes in his new book, "What Happened," which is to be released in April. "I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president's chief of staff and the president himself."

We have this comment from No Quarter:

If outing a CIA intelligence officer collecting intelligence on our enemy during a time of war is not treason, then what is? George Bush commuted the prison sentence of Scooter Libby to help buy his silence. Why? McClellan’s revelation blows the cover on that sham. Bush was involved. Of course we will now witness the spectacle of Republicans, who delighted in castigating Bill Clinton for his confusion about the meaning of sex, themselves doing verbal gymnastics as they search for the true meaning of “involved”. Horseshit! This is an impeachable offense. George Bush not only helped obstruct justice, but continues to obstruct justice. The President is no longer an idle bystander. He is a participant in a cover up. He knew that Rove, Libby, Card, and Cheney were involved in leaking Valerie’s name. Yet the coward, the man who failed to complete his Reserve duty, went AWOL on his staff. He sent Scott McClellan out to lie to the press. We already knew that Bush was neither honorable nor a man or his word. Despite his vow to remove anyone involved in leaking the name of Valerie Plame Wilson, he kept Card, Rove and Libby safe in the White House until Federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald blew the whistle. And even then, Bush refused to do the right thing. He acted immorally and illegally. Why should Scooter come clean when he knows his co-conspirator will get him off? And he did.

But wait. Now Scot McClellan's editor is saying something different.

Bloomberg News’ reports that: McClellan doesn’t suggest that Bush deliberately lied to him about Libby’s and Rove’s involvement in the leak, said Peter Osnos, founder and editor-in-chief of Public Affairs Books, which is publishing McClellan’s memoir next year.”He told him something that wasn’t true, but the president didn’t know it wasn’t true,” Osnos said in a telephone interview. “The president told him what he thought to be the case.” So Bush is a Moron? He’s not some janitor with an opinion. He’s ostensibly the Commander-in-Chief. And this begs more questions. Who did the President ask for information about this matter? Cheney? Card? Who lied to the President? Notably, no one lost their job even though the President supposedly belatedly discovered that he wasn’t given the straight poop? God save us from these deviants.

So ... Scott McClellan "unknowingly passed along false information." OK, so he didn't lie himself. Evidently he found out it was false just prior to writing his book, exonerating himself. But "five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president's chief of staff and the president himself." So the President was involved in McClellan's passing along false information, but, according to Peter Osnos, the President's "involvement" was also "unknowing." He, therefore, didn't lie. So someone had given the President false information, the President had assumed it was true, and then told Scott McClellan to get out there and repeat it to the American public. Wouldn't you think that the President would have made damn sure that information of this importance was absolutely true, would have verified it absolutely before telling Scott McClellan to get out there and repeat it?

So who among those five top officials implicated by Scott McClellan knew the information was true (and therefore lied) and who among them unknowingly passed it along? Does Scot McClellan know or is he just whistling Dixie to sell books?

This is a very serious charge to implicate the President and Vice President of the United States specifically in a lie without clarifying and qualifying his implication as to exactly what their involvement was or at least to say he wasn't sure what their involvement was. But no, he comes right out and suggests in the strongest terms that they lied (without using the word "lied") and doesn't elaborate at all on what he means exactly by saying they were "involved." If he meant they were't involved in lying but were involved in some other way, he should have said so. Are we to believe that Scott McClellan and the editors of his book are so dumb that they would imply an accusation directed towards the President of the United States of treason and then not immediately qualify that if it were not true? Parsing the words and the meaning will not cut it in this case. Either Scott McClellan and his editors are guilty of the grossest negligence in writing this book, or the President is a liar and should be impeached. Plain and simple.

Troops Ripped Off by Bush Administration

Wounded troops returning home before the end of their tours of duty are being forced by the Bush Administration to return their signing bonuses. The following is from Bush's Contempt for Our Soldiers:

It’s good, though, that the administration is watching out for every penny of taxpayers’ money, and holding THOUSANDS of soldiers accountable for fulfilling their missions or paying us taxpayers back: Although Bush called Jordan Fox’s mother last May to ask how her son is doing — Fox was sidelined when he was hit by a roadside bomb that injured his back and destroyed his vision in his right eye — his administration now wants the wounded soldier to return the re-enlistment bonus because he didn’t fulfill his obligation by three months.

We have blogged about this before. While Bush pursues photo-ops showing him jogging with the troops, his administration is demanding that wounded troops pay back their signing bonuses. This is the way Bush "supports our troops." When is the American public going to wake up and see that the "support our troops" rhetoric is diabolical claptrap and that the underlying reality is that the troops are just being used as cannon fodder while the contractors make the big money. Would it be too much to ask of our government that, if a soldier is injured to the extent he can't serve out his tour, they would just give him his signing bonus in appreciation of his sacrifice for his country? In fact this should be written right into the contract. Vet's groups should demand it and should alert young men and women who are signing up to make sure those words are in the contract to begin with: "If I'm wounded in the line of duty and can't serve out my tour, I will not have to pay back my signing bonus." Picket the recruiting stations if necessary. More from ThinkProgress.

At the same time contractors, according to No Quarter, have been gouging the US government with impunity. Huge amounts of cash unaccounted for. No-bid contracts. Halliburton, KBR and others have been getting rich off the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. See here and here.

Just days after Stewart Bowen, the Special Inspector General released a new report which explains how KBR has been gouging taxpayers from inside the Green Zone, the Army announced that the company (which was split off from Halliburton this year) will divvy up another $150 billion with two other contractors -- Fluor and Dyncorp -- over the next ten years. The results of Bowen's audit come as no surprise, because they track the kinds of abuses that whistleblowers and others working for the company and the military have said are quite common. For example, one of Bowen's conclusions is that the company lacks adequate inventory controls, and hasn't kept good track of the fuel it is disbursing. That problem should remind everyone of the situation that ultimately led the military to cancel a gasoline contract years ago. In a report on that earlier scam, GAO report found "a pattern of contractor management problems" at KBR, including ineffective planning, a poor materials requisition system and inadequate supervision of subcontractors. At one point investigators working for Rep. Henry Waxman reported that KBR had charged an extra $165 million to transport the gasoline into Iraq. The situation caused an embarassed Pentagon's Defense Energy Support Center (DESC) to stop using KBR and take responsibility for its own fuel supply in April 2004. (A year after it lost the contract, KBR reportedly attempted to disrupt fuel deliveries by other subcontractors.) Now, three years later, KBR seems to be up to its old tricks. The "inadequate controls" over the gas inventory provide another opportunity to cook the books and bilk the taxpayers. All from the comfort of the Green Zone. And who was going to catch them if Bowen didn't conduct the audit? In its 2004 report, GAO criticized military officials for failing to properly oversee Halliburton's work. GAO reported interviewing military officials who "told us that they knew nothing about LOGCAP before they deployed and had received no training regarding their roles and responsibilities." But now that they are promising KBR and the other companies another ten years and up to $150 billion worth of contract work, the Army says hold on, it has found a solution: To beef up its ability to provide adequate oversight, it hired another contractor. I.e., because it isn't competent enough to oversee contractors who are being hired to do the work it used to do (that's the whole point of the logistics contract to begin with), the Army has decided to hire a British-American company -- SERCO -- to oversee the three logistics contractors. If you're beginning to think there's something absurd in all this, you wouldn't be alone. But the Army has apparently anticipated your objections. In section 1.3 of the SERCO contract -- which you can find here -- it says, "It is not the intent of this contract to have the contractor perform inherently Governmental functions, or to have the contractor make discretionary decisions for the Government relating to the program or contract support," even though that's essentially what the contract does! This new arrangement will also make worse one of the big unresolved issues identified by Rep. Waxman and Senator Byron Dorgan over the course of their years of investigations: By adding another layer of contracts, the government has made it all the more difficult for government officials themselves to oversee the actual work. No company can be expected to provide this kind of accountability -- companies are designed to make money for themselves and their shareholders, not safeguard the taxpayers. The buck ultimately stops somewhere in the Pentagon's chain of command where, instead of overseeing the actual work (keep in mind that KBR has some 200 subcontractors working in Kuwait and Iraq) they will spend increasingly more time evaluating SERCO's work. And even then, SERCO has influence over the process. (See page 31 of SERCO's contract -- "Contractors Self-Assessment") All of this outsourcing of government functions is part of a broader pattern that started long ago, but is now epidemic in scale, according to Waxman, who recently updated his review of federal contracting during the Bush administration. The report -- Dollars, Not Sense: Government Contracting Under the Bush Administration -- measures the magnitude of this Wholesale outsourcing of government. The figures are staggering: Between 2000 and 2005, federal procurement spending rose by over 80%, no-bid and other contracts awarded without full and open competition increased by over 100%. The amount raked in by the administration's corporate cronies and other contractors rose from $203.1 billion in 2000 to $412.1 billion in 2006, a new record. Talk about major major major major opportunities to fleece the taxpayers! As Waxman reports, the kind of abuses witnessed in Iraq are now ubiquitous across the entire federal government: He identified 189 contracts valued at $1.1 trillion that have been plagued by waste, fraud, abuse, or mismanagement. Which is why a new example pops up just about every day. On Thursday, for example, Robert O'Harrow reported that a $2 million no-bid contract given by DHS to Booze Allen ballooned to $124 million. Like the LOGCAP contract (which Cheney's Pentagon first gave to KBR during the Bush I administration), this one was supposed to save us money. Yet as O'Harrow reports, it turns out that the average annual cost of a contract employee has been $250,000 -- almost twice that of a federal employee, according to an estimate recently cited by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The conclusion to be drawn is that Bush and Cheney are rapidy transforming the entire government into a turnkey operation run by their corporate cronies. And ten-year contracts like the LOGCAP one given to KBR will ensure that they don't run out during the next two terms (i.e. last until Jeb arrives?). The outsourcing of inherently governmental work in recent years has reached an extreme level. And whether it's intelligence operations, running security and background checks, providing contract oversight, processing of FOIA requests, even counting our votes -- the corporatization has gone to ridiculous extremes. Although doing so may not illegal, per se, it's one of those huge crimes that is so pervasive that it's hard to perceive.

This report points out the proliferation of layers upon layers of sub-contracting that the military-industrial complex routinely employs in order to run up the cost and profits of "cost plus" contracts. This is standard operating procedure for the military-industrial complex, but the Bush Administration has taken it to new heights. And the Bush-Cheney government has turned over huge chunks of inherently governmental functions to corporate enterprise which amounts to the corporatization of the US government. The Republican notion of public service is to get into government in order to give lobbyists and corporations exactly what they want and then to get out and take a lucrative job with those same grateful corporations.

And the Bush Administration wants more money to pursue this nonsense and give to their rich cronies?

The Military Industrial Complex - Part 1 - Picatinny Arsenal

I worked in the military industrial complex (MIC) for 15 years. I left there over 30 years ago so I can only report on what my experience was then although from all indications not much has changed. Basically, the MIC is a gigantic welfare scheme for middle class functionaries and salary men who sit on their asses all day, say nary a discouraging word and collect their adequate paychecks every two weeks. It's shrouded in secrecy not mainly to protect secrets from foreign enemies but so that the rest of America doesn't know what goes on there: practically nothing. In my view this fact alone makes it corrupt.

In my 15 year career I worked for Picatinny Arsenal in Dover, NJ, Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Livermore, CA, General Dynamics Convair and Electronic Divisions in San Diego, General Dynamics Fort Worth (Texas), and Naval Electronics Laboratory in San Diego. Naval Electronics Laboratory changes its name periodically to protect the guilty so it has become at various times Naval Electronics Laboratory Center (NELC), Naval Ocean Systems Command (NOSC) and Naval Research and Development (NRAD). Can you believe guys get paid with taxpayer dollars just to sit around and come up with another name?

I was a senior in high school in 1959 when on "career day" someone from Picatinny Arsenal came around and told us abourt the "co-op" plan. It sounded pretty good to me. You worked for Picatinny Arsenal a quarter; then you went to college a quarter and so on. You had your choice of five colleges you could attend, one of them being Georgia Tech where I ended up going. The thing I liked about the co-op plan was that I got to live at home every other quarter and commute to work, and I earned enough to pay my college expenses so my college education didn't cost my parents anything. Also I never borrowed any money unlike the college kids today who are stuck with a mortgage sized debt by the time they get out of college. It took five years instead of four to get through college on the co-op plan, and the last year you went to school five straight quarters.

The summer after I graduated from high school was the first quarter I worked at Picatinny. I was in for a shock. They didn't  give me anything to do! Sure I collected a paycheck but I was bored out of my mind. This was my first introduction to the "world of work" or actually the world of middle class social welfare. I "worked" in a different group each quarter hoping to find something that would enable me to pass the time away doing something productive. One quarter I worked in a group that did drawings for machine tools and I ended up copying a lot of drawings. At least it was something to do. Finally, I ended up in this enormous office building with four desk clusters as far as the eye could see. There were no partitions, no cubicles. Guys used to test their eye sight by how many clocks they could see which hung from the ceiling every so many yards. The desks were all pushed together so that your desk was right up against two others and touching the corner of a third. The guy next to me smoked cigarettes all day, and there was a constant waft of smoke coming from his desk which seemed to aim itself right for my nose. This was in the pre-anti-smoking days when there were no restrictions on smoking. The guy had a lit cigarette going in his ash tray all day on which he puffed occasionally.

After coffee in the morning the guys would head on over to the "shop," a boondoggle for which somebody had been able to get money appropriated. It was outfitted with everything a home hobbyist could desire including drill presses, lathes etc. Here is where they did "home projects" ^i.e. they made stuff and carted it home. At Christmas time the shop was especially busy turning out Christmas presents. There was no supervision there. There was a story about one guy who had built a boat maybe not in this particular shop but in one like it. When the boat was finished, it was too big to get out the door so they tore down a wall to get it out, and then he took it home. When they weren't doing home projects, they were sitting around telling war stories. This went on till a little before lunch time when they gravitated back to the office building, looked busy for a bit and then ate  lunch. In the afternoon this process was repeated until a little before it was time to go home when they returned to the office and kibitzed until "quitting time". I heard one guy say, "I haven't done a lick of work in ten years, and, what's more, if I don't get that raise I'm after, I never will do any work here ever again." They had complete job security because in the civil service they couldn't fire you.

On the alternate quarters when I went to school, I had to perform. I had to work in order to get the grades I was accustomed to. There was no fooling around. At Georgia Tech all they cared about is that you had the right number in the right box on the tests. You got no points for almost getting it right or for having basically the right idea or having done some of the steps correctly.

I didn't enjoy at all having nothing to do at Picatinnny where there was such a lax work ethic. This was my introduction to the military-industrial complex where you had to have a security clearance to get in the gate mainly for the reason that they didn't want the outside world to know what really went on there: nothing. People were  literally paid to sit around and do nothing at taxpayers' expense. Only now since the "Republican Revolution" it's all money borrowed from the Chinese so it's not really taxpayers' expense any more. I thought that Picatinny must be exceptional, that surely this same thing, which I considered to be a form of corruption, could not be going on elsewhere, but in my journey through the MIC I found that this was quite typical. My only good work experience was at General Dynamics Convair for three years where the dynamic was somewhat but not completely different. But I'll get to that later.

Basically, how the MIC works is this. They work off of "cost plus" contracts they get from the Pentagon or sometimes they tap into pots of money directly controlled by congressmen. The essence of a cost plus contract is that the government (via Defense Department appropriations) awards (either competitively or non-competitively) contracts to various private industries (or civil service entities under direct government control) a contract to do something. In most cases these contracts are the result of direct lobbying by the industries or entities themselves for money to do some project they have dreamed up which may or may not have any relevance to actually defending the US. In most cases the cost is not defined. In other words the government pays whatever the project costs and then tacks on a certain percentage of the cost as profit, the "plus" in "cost plus." Therefore, the industry or government controlled entity such as civil service has the incentive to make the project as costly as possible. And when the contract ends, in many cases, there is nothing to show for it but a report that never gets read. There is no follow-on; nothing comes of it that becomes a part of the actual defense of the US or is ongoing even as an intellectual asset. There is no rhyme or reason.

The result is that, the more costly the project, the more profit will be realized. A good way of increasing the cost of a project is hiring more personnel. After all, money always ends up in human hands. So department heads, having obtained a "cost plus" project, immediately start hiring people even if there is no well defined role for them to play. That drives up the cost. A department head's status and salary is directly related to the number of personnel working (or not working) under him. In many cases the project or contract itself is a big boondoggle, something a congressman "delivers" to his home district so that his constituents will continue to reelect him for "bringing home the bacon." It sure helps the local economy, but it has turned the US into a national security state, a country that is primarily concerned with militarism as a means of keeping the economy going and as a platform for politicians to run on.

Now if the government has a project where it is vital that some serious work get done, they sub-contract it out to Jet Propulsion Lab which has a lot of PhDs from Cal Tech or Lincoln Labs which has PhDs from MIT. In fact most of these government entites like Picatinny simply sub-contract the hell out of a contract sometimes several times and then all they really are is contract monitors. In other words there are several levels of guys whose only job is to check on the work of the sub-contractor at the next level below them until you get down to the level where the only real work happens ^i.e. at the level of the PhDs from JPL or Lincoln Labs. The proliferation of personnel as contract monitors and the many layers of sub-contracting adds to the cost and hence to the profits as well as providing a home for the college educated middle class.

As someone said, in the old Soviet Union the employees pretended to work and the government pretended to pay them. In the good old US of A the employees in the MIC pretend to work and the government ACTUALLY does pay them! That was the difference between the USSR and the USA.

After two  years of "working" alternate quarters at Picatinny, where they had made artillery shells for World War II, I got so fed up and bored I decided to drop out of the co-op plan and go straight to school. There, at least, I felt like I was accomplishing something. I went eight straight quarters including summers and managed to graduate the summer quarter after I would have graduated if I had not been on the co-op plan in the first place. Then, having been accepted to graduate school at Stanford on a research assistantship, I went three more quarters there for a total of eleven consecutive quarters without a break. At least I wasn't bored!

A Pit Bull in Sheep's Clothing

As Presidential politics heats up with the candidate debates, a little speculation about tactics and strategy is in order. In an ideal world the candidates would present their positions on the issues, what they're for and against, the voters would evaluate these positions, decide which candidate most closely represents their views and vote accordingly. But this isn't an ideal world. In all liklihood it seems like it will be a contest between Giuliani and Hillary, and it won't be about who has the best ideas. It will be about who can attack and smear their opponent most effectively - what I call the Michael Vick school of political campaigning. After all when you put a pit bull in the ring with a nice dog with good ideas, who's going to win? The Republicans have demonstrated time and again their willingness to attack their opponents' jugulars from the Willie Horton ads, which got Bush 1 elected (thanks to Lee Atwater who later recanted on his death bed), to Michael Dukakis in a tank, to the swift boating of John Kerry etc. etc.

The Democrats should have no illusions. It's going to take a pit bull to win. And that's why I think Hillary is the best candidate for the job. She's the only one that has the cajones to take on Rudy Giuliani, a notorious pit bull with a phony, sheepish grin. He likes to have pit bulls like Bernie Kerik at his side but, alas, Bernie will have to sit this one out. It seems like Bernie was screwing two mistresses near ground zero in an apartment reserved for exhausted fire fighters while his wife was pregnant (what an alpha! -he'd get the male vote though not the female). Ohhhhhh! What about the no show construction jobs. Ohhhhhh! Now he's a liability rather than an asset. But consider the Democrats. John Edwards is too nice a guy.  He's too idealistic.  He wants to help the poor, something that the electorate could care less about. You have to remember that most of them only want to help themselves. They want bread and circuses and football games. Idealism is a liability  when you're fighting a pit bull. Barack Obama is also too nice a guy, too young and inexperienced. The  Republican pit bulls will eat him for lunch. That leaves Hillary. She's been around  the block a few times and knows who she's dealing with.

Hillary, wisely, is positioning herself in the middle with her votes on Iraq and Iran. This disgusts her Democratic left wing base, but politics really isn't about revealing your true intentions as Republicans have demonstrated time and again. What ... are we going to sue George Bush for reneging on his campaign  promises? It's about appealing to the blood lust and greed of the electorate. Hillary is potentially picking up a lot of independent and middle ground voters who don't want somebody who is  weak on terrorism. Then after she's elected, she'll mop up the Iraq mess in short order, I would hope. At the same time, she's taking the wind out of Giuliani's sails who would like nothing better than to pit his toughness against Democratic weakness. If their positions on war are practically the same, Giuliani loses because that's his only issue. Hillary, on the other hand, has a ton of other issues the middle class wants implemented like universal health care, for instance. Hillary can rise above the fray while her operatives run ads using her huge war chest attacking Giuliani for being a cross dresser, associating with pigs like Bernie Kerik, cheating on his wives, putting his emergency headquarters in the World Trade Center in return for a campaign contribution etc. etc. Let the Republicans have to deal with a vast left wing conspiracy. Outfox them. Put them on the defensive. Make their heads spin. There's enough dirt  to go around. Mix this with a little water and - voila! - let the slinging begin!

Meanwhile, Hillary should attack the Republicans where they are strongest - appealing to the venality and avariciousnesss of the American people. Their mantra will be - as it always is - the Democrats will raise your taxes. Now someone in Hillary's camp needs to sit down and look at the Federal budget, then completely  restructure it. Their mantra needs to be: tax the rich, lower taxes for the middle class. And don't be sheepish about this! Forget the poor because, unfortunately, they don't count in American politics. Progressivity needs to be reinstated in the tax structure. Exempt  the first $100,000. of earnings from the payroll tax and uncap it! That should fix social security. Stuff that will appeal to the majority of the voters. That needs to be made very clear. For too long the Republicans have gotten away with transfering wealth from the poor and middle class to the wealthy. That's what they're all about. Their technique is to give everybody a tax cut, with the poor getting a pittance and the rich making out like the bandits they really are. And middle class voters have sold their souls for a mess of pottage, which the kind of tax breaks they have gotten really is.

In the past Democrats have been too nice, principaled and idealistic. They've had good ideas to be sure. Republicans have proven that it's not about good ideas; it's about who has the stronger pit bull, which is why I call it the Michael Vick school of politics. They appeal to the fear, crassness and ignorance not to mention the selfishnnesss and greed of the American people while the Democrats have tried to appeal to their higher nature. Who has won? That's why the Presidential campaign of 2008 will be a mud slinging contest with the one having the largest war chest for TV attack ads (and the strongest pit bull) winning.

Progressive Talk Radio in San Diego

San Diego AM radio station KLSD, which used to broadcast a progressive talk format, ceased that format and turned into sports talk as of Monday November 12, 2007. This pending format change had been bandied about for months on the morning Stacy Taylor show. There was even a rally on August 27 in the parking lot of Clear Channel, a giant media corporation that owns the station, to show "support" for the progressive talk format. It was somewhat strange to see all these fans pledging their support to the advertisers. One lady even donated $10,000. to keep Progressive Talk on the air - but to whom? Clear Channel, a multi-billion dollar corporation? To one of their advertisers? This all seems very bizarre. From my point of view, the change in format had more to do with the sub-prime mortgage crisis than the failure of KLSD listeners to "support" the radio station by buying more of the advertisers' products. Let me explain.

Several of the biggest advertisers on KLSD were mortgage companies who obviously chose to advertise to the demographic that the Progressive Talk format represented. Such companies as Paramount Mortgage with Hayes Barnard intoning syrupy messages to potential customers - "If you ever thought of refinancing your home, now's the time..." From Hayes' point of view, it was always the right time to refinance your home. Countrywide was another client - "Nobody can do what Countrywide can..." You  do not have to be too well informed to realize that a sub-prime mortgage crisis has hit the country lately. Hayes persisted in hawking his mortgages to the very end, but most of the others had given up realizing that the market for sub-prime mortgages had dried up. Many mortgage companies have gone out of business or have gone bankrupt. So that advertising revenue source for Clear Channel is history. That leaves a big hole in their advertising revenue, one difficult to fill. But there are probably no end of advertisers for sports talk radio which represents a different demographic altogether. So I don't think it has anything to do with Clear Channel's ulterior motives unless you consider maximizing profits to be an ulterior motive which I actually do.

The other major advertisers on KLSD were get-rich-quick scheme promoters. There were  some local advertisers such as Corky's Pest Control, but advertising on KLSD Progressive Talk was dominated by non-local mortgage companies and get-rich-quick schemes. Most of these ads were particularly obnoxious making listening to Progressive Talk for me a perplexing experience. I loved Thom Hartmann and Randi Rhodes. I liked Al Franken when he used to be on and even Jerry Springer, but I hated and suffered through the ads which were numerous, and - did I mention - obnoxious. They even had ads for an organization that lobbied against children's health care, a position the exact opposite of every progressive talk show host or hostess. Once I heard an ad for DynCorp, a defense contractor in Iraq, and this was just after a segment in which the host trashed Iraq contractors! Talk about a disconnect. Were the advertisers trying to convert the listeners to a right wing point of view or was Clear Channel management using them cynically to tweak our noses? It got to the point where I found a use for the timer on my wristwatch. When the ads came on, I set the timer for four minutes and turned off the radio. It worked pretty good.

Now they even have a website for ex-listeners to KLSD Progressive Talk who want to commiserate with each other. You wonder what the motivation of "Cliff," the only person who can submit a blog to the site, actually is. His profile says that he's the local San Diego station KLSD Program Director. What?? The one who is overseeing what now is sports talk? You have to wonder about the motivation of these people. Is this a way to let former KLSD listeners down slow? So they won't be too pissed off about having their radio station change formats? Are we out to prove that Clear Channel is not just a cold-hearted profit maximizer? Is this just more PR? Former listeners are welcome to leave comments; I even left one, but what is the point?

I've got good news for former listeners of KLSD Progressive Talk. You can listen to Randi Rhodes and Thom Hartmann via podcast without the advertising. You can get an ipod shuffle for $79. and download the podcasts for free. It's something I should have done even before KLSD Progressive Talk went off the air. I think Ed Schultz charges for his podcast, but I don't like him anyway. You also can listen to Thom and Randi via XM radio, but even though you pay a monthly fee for XM , not to mention the start-up costs, you still have to listen to all the fricken commercials, and you can only listen in your car or in your home. You can listen to a podcast anywhere. It's supremely portable. Randi's daily show is in one long segment and Thom's is in three - one for each hour he's on the air. You can listen to the local Portland station, KPOJ, with no commercials or Thom Hartmann nationwide which does have commercials (not as obnoxious as Air America's), but you can fast forward through them with the ipod.

A word about the local "progressive" DJ, Stacy Taylor. Stacy was bitching for months about being taken off the air, and he encouraged all the brouhaha about listeners joining together in the parking lot to show "support" for the "progressive" format. A caller called in and told Stacy what he very well knows: he could do a podcast out of his home and make his living off the subscribers. Stacy gave this approach very little shrift so you know that Stacy basically just wanted to have some corporation cut him a check every two weeks and wanted an advertising based show on conventional radio despite his "progresssive" blather. I wish Stacy well, but as long as podcasts are available, I'll never listen to him again if he pops up on some other San Diego station. And although the podcasts I subscribe to are free, I would gladly pay a fee if I had to. In addition to the portability of the ipod, you can even listen to it in the car instead of the radio. It's got plenty of volume! And you don't need any fancy docking equipment - just the ipod and a set of earphones.

But there is more than just Air America talk show hosts that you can download sans  advertising. For instance, Meet the  Press, Bill Maher on HBO, language lessons, NPR broadcasts, history of  the Byzantine empire, a course in quantum mechanics - stuff that you'd either have to pay for or suffer through commercials to view. I know  what Tim Russert looks like. I don't really need the video portion. For those folks who want to call in to talk radio, the podcast may leave a little to be desired. However, there are other means of feedback ^i.e. blogs  and email.

A final word about advertising. Those who have read my blog know that I hate it. It's the bane  of my existence. If I never had to listen to or see another ad again for the rest of my life, I'd think that I'd died and gone to heaven. That's why this is an ad free blog. Those who make their  living off it are basically whores, and it's corrupting the  whole political process as Congressmen and  Senators and Presidential candidates have  to raise outlandish sums just to buy TV ads. You know it's not really necessary. I  can find out anything I want to know about a product (or a candidate for that matter) just by googling it on the internet. I can also comparison shop and get ratings and reviews. Why  do I need to be force fed some garbage like all the drug commercials where they tell you "Ask your doctor" about this drug and that drug. My doctor should be telling me what I need after he diagnoses some condition that requires a drug in the first place. It shouldn't be necessarry for me to prompt my doctor. If it is, he's not a very good doctor. And as for the advertising on former KLSD Progresssive Talk, a lot of it, if not all, was predatory and ethically questionable, and I don't see how those  progresssive talk hosts, in good conscience, could cash their paychecks. I say good riddance to KLSD, Clear Channnel and their ilk!

The Sub-Prime Mortgage Mess

In the good old days, if you wanted to buy a house, you went to your local bank, had a talk with your local banker, filled out some paperwork and applied for a mortgage. The banker determined if you qualified, that is, if your income made it possible to comfortably make your mortgage payments, if you had enough money for a down payment, and then loaned you the money to buy the house. You made monthly payments to the bank that included principal plus interest for 30 years. At that time your relationship with the bank ended, insofar as the mortgage was concerned, the bank was happy because it had made money on the loan, you were happy because you owned the house outright and could live mortgage and rent free in your Golden Years and all was copacetic. These transactions were regulated by the government primarily by means of the Glass-Steagall Act which erected a barrier between investment and commercial banking. This was a reaction to the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. On November 12, 1999, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933.  Then it was off to the races for the housing bubble.

Instead of your local banker, who had a personal relationship with you, loaning you the money, the "loan originator," a mortgage company such as Ditech or Countrywide, immediately sold your loan to a Wall Street investment banking firm such as Goldman Sachs or Merrill Lynch. These companies assembled portfolios of mortgages from all over in a pool called Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO)and then "securitized" them which means they sliced them and diced them, packaged them up and sold them off to investors. Cleverly, they packaged these Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS) in such a way as to be able to give different investors customized slices or tranches (French for slice). So if you wanted a low risk, low return tranche, they sold you that. If you wanted a high risk, high return tranche, they had a deal for you too. They had everything from AAA rated tranches all the way down to junk tranches. The problem was, unbeknownst to Wall Street, all the tranches were really junk because of the way the loans were originated. Instead of your banker carefully poring over your paperwork (as in the Ditech commercials) and making a determination whether or not you qualified for a loan, as far as the mortgage companies were concerned, everyone qualified because they based the loan on "stated income." You could be working at Wal-Mart for minimum wage but you walk into the mortgage company and simply state or tell them the whopper that you are making $100,000 a year and, guess what, you  qualify for a "jumbo"  mortgage.  And as housing prices were bid up by the increased demand resulting from easily available mortgage money, more and more houses required a jumbo.

The mortage company had the incentive to grant as many loans as possible because they immediately sold them to Wall Street so their "exposure" to the loan was nil. At the same time, they were making a ton of money on commissions. Like any good broker they were "churning" mortgages. They were offering all  kinds of "creative" loan products: nothing down, no problem. You want to lower your payments and take equity out of your house, in other words, use your house like an ATM machine, no problems! So in reality all the tranches were really junk and you had no relationship with Goldman Sachs or whoever it was that bought your loan and tons of others, repackaged them and sold them off to investors all over the  world.  Any particular investor might own a slice of your house, a slice of someone else's house somewhere across the country and so on, all neatly packaged into a AAA rated bond. Credit rating agencies such as Standard and Poor's went along with this charade so that investors really believed the tranches they were buying were AAA rather than junk.

So all the investors were depending on Mortgage Backed Securities which means that the revenue streams from all the collateralized mortgage payments from John and Sally Homeowners formed a pool of money from which the investors were paid. But then what happens when the housing market turns down or when the homeowners' adjustable rate mortgages reset to higher interest levels and all of a sudden their payments go through the roof or both! Pretty soon John and Sally get behind in their payments or stop making their payments altogether. In other words they default. Eventually their house gets foreclosed on. From an investment banker's point off view, it becomes a non-performing asset, a revenue stream that he was counting on to combine with other trickles and then divide up to pay off the tranches, a stream that has dried up. And at this point it's pretty difficult to even figure out who actually owns the house: the bank, the mortgage company, the "loan originator," Goldman Sachs, the investors with their tranches??? In the old days it was the bank, of course! 

John and Sally can't sell their house because all of a sudden it's a buyer's market. They can't get their equity out because the market has dipped and they have refinanced all the equity out of it anyway. They can't refinance because all of a sudden "stated income" doesn't make it any more; credit standards are tighter. Everyone's in a bind. That's why Merrill Lynch and Citibank have had to "write down" billions of dollars. They need to pay their investors that bought their tranches even though they're not getting revenues from mortgages they were counting on. All of a sudden, you've got a mess. But wait, it's even not as simple as that. There's more. The situation is even more complicated because we still haven't taken into account the ABS index, (Asset Backed Security index). This allows investors to "gain broad exposure to the subprime market without holding the actual asset-backed securities." They can "go short" or "go long," in other words, they can place bets on how the sub-prime market will do. Those who have shorted the market, obviously, have done very well.

"We expect ABX to build liquidity and transparency in the synthetic asset-backed market, attracting global investors that seek exposure to this asset class, both on the buy-side and sell-side," stated Kevin Gould, Executive Vice President and Head of Data Products and Analytics at Markit. In order to qualify for index selection, an issuer must have rated bonds for each of the AAA, AA, A, BBB, and BBB- categories. One bond from each deal will be referenced in each sub-index, and bonds must be rated by Moody's and S&P, with the lesser of the two ratings applying. The five sub-indices are based on the rating of the reference obligations which are equally weighted at index launch. Subsequent weightings may change based on the performance of loans in the underlying pools. The minimum deal size is $500 million, and each tranche referenced must have a weighted average life of between four and six years (except for the AAA tranche, which must have a weighted average life greater than five years). No more than four deals can be selected from the same originator, and no more than six deals can be selected with the same master servicer. Unlike the corporate CDS indices, the ABX contract component trades are reference obligation-specific, rather than entity-specific. Also, unlike corporate bonds which are bullet maturity, ABS bonds amortize at variable rates over the life of the instrument. An ISDA Pay-As-You-Go (PAUG) template, the standard for U.S. residential mortgage-backed securities, references each bond. Traditional credit events, as they apply to the PAUG contract, do not form part of the index contract. Hence all settlements will occur through the Floating Payment mechanism covering interest shortfalls, principal shortfalls and writedowns.

This is all pretty arcane, esoteric and far removed from the simple reality of John and Sally Homeowner who just want a place to raise their family and build up their life savings as the equity in their home continues to rise. Is there something to be said for simplicity? Until they fell for the advertising pitches from mortgage companies aggressively marketing re-fi's which allowed them to use their home as an ATM machine, they could have rolled with the tide as the market for homes went up or went down, locked into their constant payments on a 30 year mortgage. But alas, they fell for the pitch. And they are not innocent victims either. Their own greed and lust for consumer goods is at least partly to blame. As home prices went through the roof fueled by all the readily available mortgage money freely given with nothing more than "stated income," taxi drivers starting flipping houses. Now the problem is housing prices have been bid up so high that nobody except the rich can afford to buy them. Instead of living in a mortgage free house in their old age, John and Sally have been effectively priced out of the housing market altogether. Even hedge funds, whose investors greedily "sought exposure" to the sub-prime market, have gone over the edge of the bubble as unsustainable growth has indeed become unsustainable. First the stock market bubble of 2000, now the housing bubble, what's next?

Is it really worth it? Free market capitalists think so. No financial instrument is too sophisticated or too complicated for them. Should the  government regulate this mess? Heck, no. That's why Hedge Funds were created in the first place. Guess what? Unlike mutual funds, they're unregulated. So John and Sally are suckers and sophisticated investors who shorted the ABS index are the gainers. Devil take the hindermost! That's Capitalism for you. Oh, by the way, Goldman Sachs didn't do too bad because it shorted its own mortgage backed securities via the ABD index. So while its customers were getting stomped, Goldman Sachs came out smelling like a rose!

Remove the Cap On Social Security and Means Test It

Social security is screwed up. It's a regressive tax on the poorest people. The rich are exempted from paying it, but they still receive it although they don't need it, and then the government "borrows" it to pay for its wars and military-industrial complex. Then politicians complain that it's going to run out of money. Duhhh!! And it's only supposed to be for people who paid into it but a third of the recipients are disabled people so it's not really just a retirement plan for working people but a plan for people who otherwise would be destitute which is what it should be. Then why are the rich who have investment income and don't need it receiving social seceurity benefits?

They tax employees and employers each 6.2% for social security (real name "Old Age, Survivors and Disability" program) and 1.45% for Medicare for a total of 15.3%. Note that this is a regressive tax in that the tax rate is just the same for those earning $1 a year as it is for those earning $90,000. Income tax, on the other hand, is minimal to non-existant for low wage earners so that the poorest wage earners end up paying more for social security and medicare tax than they do for income tax. In addition, self-employed workers such as myself pay a whopping 15.3% (both employee and employer shares) for social security and medicare. There are several things to do both to increase the fairness of the tax and the fairness of the benefits: 1) Eliminate the cap on income after $90,000  so that the rich will pay on their entire income not just part of it. After all these are the people who can afford to pay more. 2) Means test social security so that people with large investment incomes, passive incomes, unearned incomes or whatever you want to call it receive less or no social security income when they retire. 3) Make the social security and medicare tax progressive so that poor people pay little or nothing and rich people pay more than 7.65% if they're employees and more than 15.3% if they're self-employed. By the way poor self-employed are paying a higher percentage tax for social security and medicare than rich hedge fund managers are paying in income tax, and the rich hedge fund managers, earning upwards of $100 million a year, are only paying social security tax of 6.2% on the first $90,000 of their income, a mere pittance. However, there is no cap on the medicare portion of 1.45%, a step in the right direction! 4) Exempt the first $50,000. from social security and medicare taxes instead of all income greater than $90,000. In other words cap the bottom not the top!

Then they want to privatize it. Talk about compounding stupidity with insanity! First of all let's discuss the purpose of it. Shouldn't it be about providing people in their advanced years and old age with a minimally decent lifestyle regardless of their income from other sources such as life savings? If so, rich people shouldn't be getting it at all, right? But they should pay into it because there's no certainty that they will end up being rich. They could lose all their money and then they should be eligible for it. So means testing would guarantee that people not needing it wouldn't get it and people needing it would and in what amounts. The basic principle should be that the well off should help those less well off, a principle that's anathema to the Republican Party but a basic Christian principle. Jesus said to the rich man, "Sell what you have and give the money to the poor" or words to that effect and "It's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven", and "Blessed are the poor..." The basic Christian message is that the rich, because they have been extraordinarily fortunate, should help the poor because they have been extraordinarily unfortunate. Now these right wing Republican evangelicals believe the exact opposite disqualifying them from even being Christians in my view. Their philosophy is really social Darwinism - devil take the hindermost.

And Jesus didn't discriminate between the "deserving poor" and the "undeserving poor." So even the good for nothings who have squandered their money on drugs, made bad decisions one after another their entire life and were too lazy to get off their butts still deserve a minimally decent life in their old age or if they become disabled. Jesus never discriminated between deserving and undeserving poor. But right wing Republican evangelicals do. So-called megachurches with incomes in the tens of millions a year might qualify as Christian if they gave the bulk of that to the poor, but, if they don't, they're not Christian even though they call themselves that, in my opinion. Christianity has become a distortion and perversion of Jesus' teachings, but this is nothing new. Medieval popes collected indulgences (money constituents paid to get themselves or their relatives out of purgatory and into heaven), collected art, fought battles and in general lived the lives of secular humanists. Christianity would not even have been a major world religion if the Roman emperor Constantine had not made it the official religion of Rome in 325 AD. Theodosius made it the state religion in 392 AD. After that all other religions were forbidden. So Christianity has been subverted and perverted for 1700 years or more. This is nothing new.

Matthew 25 says: "When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit upon his glorious throne, and all the nations will be assembled before him. And he will separate them one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will place the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. Then the king will say to those on his right, 'Come, you who are blessed by my Father. Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me.' Then the righteous will answer him and say, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? When did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? When did we see you ill or in prison, and visit you?' And the king will say to them in reply, 'Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.' Then he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, a stranger and you gave me no welcome, naked and you gave me no clothing, ill and in prison, and you did not care for me.' Then they will answer and say, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or ill or in prison, and not minister to your needs?' He will answer them, 'Amen, I say to you, what you did not do for one of these least ones, you did not do for me.' And these will go off to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life."

Jesus' so-called social gospel is at the heart of his ministry. The rich should help the poor. Social security at its heart represents an even lesser requirement in that, for the most part, it represents the average person paying into a fund to eventually help herself. Paying in according to income should go without saying. In fact the more one earns, the higher percentage one should pay. In other words the social security tax should be progressive. On the other hand the payout should be according to need. Rich people don't need to collect social security. Poor people do. But there is no way of knowing who is going to be rich and who is going to be poor. That's why it's an insurance program. And the refusal of most Christian churches, especially right wing evangelicals, to support government programs to help the poor and disadvantaged is why I'm not a Christian. At least not in their sense.

And then they try to parse it that they don't believe in government programs to help the poor, but they do believe in private or voluntary programs to help the poor. Give me a break! Government is we the people acting collectively. I'm sure the rich right wing Republicans were grateful for government help when their houses were about to burn in the recent California fires. There is an appropriate sphere for government activity and vice versa for private  enterprise. Some things can be done more efficiently and effectively by collective or government action, namely building roads, fire fighting and helping the poor. Private old age insurance would simply screw the elderly in order to generate higher profits for stockholders and higher salaries for CEOs.

Another thing: in order to qualify for social security one must work ten years. There are a lot of people who, for one reason or another, have not worked or have not paid into social security for 10 years. So what's to happen to them in their old age. Out on the street? Shouldn't everybody be entitled to some minimal assistance in their old age? Homelessness is a travesty, but that's what happens to poor people who cannot pay rent in the USA. Many of them are veterans. This is a double travesty. Alcoholics and drug addicts should not be given money but in kind food and housing. Nobody should be out on the street.

Current law exempts anyone from paying social security taxes on salaries more than $90,000. That means that someone earning a million dollars (or a hundred million in terms of hedge fund managers) pays the same social security taxes as someone earning $90,000. This is not right. And it isn't right that the Federal Government is actually using money that has been collected for social security and medicare to fund other parts of the government, namely, war and the military-industrial complex. Then the Bush Administration has no money for children's health insurance, the SCHIP program, that, if entirely funded, would represent about two weeks worth of the money spent on the war in Iraq. There's always money for war and tax reductions for the rich. The poor have to beg for crumbs from the table.