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21st Century Potemkin Village

Monday, June 3, 2013

A wise man once said: “Some things in life are bad. They can really make you mad. Other things just make you swear and curse.” This one is probably of the swear and curse variety. Seems that the upcoming G-8 summit is being held in a little Northern Ireland town that has been particularly hard hit by the depression. Not to worry, our lords and masters will not be having their noses rubbed in their dirty doings:

What they’ve done is they have filled the shop front window with a picture of what was the business before it went bankrupt or closed. In other words, grocery shops, butcher shops, pharmacies, you name it, they have placed large photographs in the windows that if you were driving past and glanced out the window, it would look as if this was a thriving business. It’s an attempt really by the local authority to make the place look as positive as possible for the visiting G8 leaders and their entourages, and it’s really tried to put a mask on a recession that has really hit this part of Ireland really very badly indeed.

(via Northern Ireland Town Fakes Prosperity for G8 Summit | @pritheworld)

But it’s not really the local authorities. The Austerity King is to blame:

This is one big initiative really stemming from the Foreign Office in London. This is David Cameron’s gig. It’s his invitation, it’s his decision to host the G8 in County Fermanagh, which is, don’t forget, part of the United Kingdom. It’s also on the island of Ireland, it’s in Northern Ireland, but he will be the hosting head of government and it’s his say so. Much of the money that has been spent in and around the host town of Enniskillen, about more than £300,000 worth, that’s getting on from half a million dollars, the bulk of the cash and certainly the driving force behind the plans to tidy up the place, that’s all coming from London.

Well, I suppose there’s a bright side. Little Enniskillen is the beneficiary of the only stimulus spending in which Cameron is prepared to engage. Devoutly must we hope, fervently must we pray, that Cameron’s Potemkin village will make a laughingstock out of its creator.

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Cheers for Chris Murphy

Saturday, June 1, 2013

My wife has often remarked that while Elizabeth Warren is getting some mostly deserved attention for her progressive views, our own Chris Murphy is every bit her equal, something he’s recently proven by “no” vote on a proposed resolution to authorized President Obama to arm the Syrian rebels. From Chris’s email about the subject:

Last week, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 15-3 in favor of giving President Obama the power to arm the Syrian rebels fighting against President Bashar al-Assad in their nation’s civil war. I was one of the three votes in opposition, joined by Senators Tom Udall and Rand Paul.

It was not an easy vote for me. I visited with Syrian refugees during my trip to the Middle East earlier this month. I met families who lost fathers, and daughters burned by government bombs.

I believe that Syria represents a grave human rights crisis, and I wholeheartedly support increasing humanitarian aid to the war-torn nation. But as of today, I draw a different conclusion when it comes to U.S. military intervention.

The fact is, we have failed over and over again in our attempts to pull the strings of Middle Eastern politics. At some point, we need to learn the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan. Right now, I do not believe it is our national interest to send weapons into a conflict that could simply lead to more, rather than less, people being killed.

I don’t know if Obama asked for this power, but it’s passing strange that the same Republicans that insist he is a dictator striving to take away our precious right to kill each other are perfectly willing to give him carte blanche to get us into yet another war.

There is, as Chris observes, a pattern to these things. We interfere, and when all is said and done, the situation we leave behind is worse than the one we found when we moved in. It’s almost a given that nothing that replaces the current Syrian dictator will be an improvement, from our perspective, over what’s there now. It’s not like the rebels are going to implement a liberal democracy or anything. We’ll simply get another theocratic Middle Eastern regime. More power to them if they can get rid of their dictator, but our interests are best served by taking a hands off approach.

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Friday Night Music

Friday, May 31, 2013

This one is apropos of nothing. Sometimes I get desperate. I came across Kinky as I scrolled through my iTunes library, and I thought, why not?

 

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It’s good to make the laws

Friday, May 31, 2013

This is a good thing…

California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones and state insurance regulators from four other states have reached a settlement of up to $2.3 million with Cigna over handling practices for long-term disability insurance.

The settlement is the result of claims handling reviews by insurance departments in California, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.

Insurance officials found the insurer did not give due consideration to the medical findings of independent physicians, discounted information provided by Social Security disability decisions and failed to give appropriate consideration to workers’ compensation records.

(via Sacramento Business Journal)

…but not a necessary thing.

It’s an outgrowth of yet another federal law that encourages corporate crime. This time, perhaps, the result was unintended, but no one, to my knowledge, has made any effort to make the simple legislative fix that would stop this sort of behavior.

If a tree falls and hits your home, and your insurance company denies your claim, you can sue the company and a judge decides if you’re covered and how much you should get paid. The insurance company’s initial decision denying coverage is entitled to zero deference. In fact, in the case of any ambiguity, you get the benefit of the doubt. After all, you’ve been paying premiums, and if they meant to exclude something, they should have made that fact very clear.

Not so if you have been paying premiums through your salary or wages for a disability plan provided by your employer. In that case your health and disability insurance plans are covered by the Employees Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA). The insurance company “manages” the plan on behalf of your employer, and by virtue of that fact is considered a “fiduciary”. Fiduciaries can only be successfully sued if you can prove that they have done something that is “arbitrary and capricious”. That’s a very difficult burden. But the situation is really even worse than that. A worker without income is in no position to pay a lawyer, so any lawyer taking the case has to be willing to accept that difficult burden on a contingent basis. The potential payoff on a percentage basis can be small, considering the amount of work involved. You can recover attorney’s fees from the company if you win, but simply proving that they acted arbitrarily and capriciously isn’t enough. To get attorneys fees you have to prove they were even worse than that. So you are unlikely to take a case unless it’s clear that the decision the company made was not just arbitrary and capricious, but bordering on bat-shit crazy. The result, of course, is that very few cases are filed, and only a small percentage of them are winners. I’ve handled several, and I’ve concluded that the only way to win is to get a lawyer involved at the very beginning of the process, long before most people think to do so. When it’s time to sue the case is already lost, because, guess what, you don’t get a trial. All the judge can do is decide if the company’s decision was arbitrary and capricious based on the evidence the company had before it, and if the worker didn’t provide sufficient evidence of the right quality, then whose problem is that?

Knowing they can almost never be successfully sued, might, don’t you think, encourage companies to deny coverage? If the rules were changed to make the worker’s burden of proof the same as in other insurance situations, a nice little cottage industry of lawyers would rise up and keep the insurance companies honest. You wouldn’t grow rich on such cases, but you’d make a living, and it wouldn’t be necessary for the attorneys general to come in and nick CIGNA for pocket change and some institutional changes they’ll ignore as soon as the heat is off.

Filed in Corporate Crime | | Comments (0)

A Riddle

Thursday, May 30, 2013

What’s the difference between a bank and a crime syndicate?

Did I hear “None”?

Well, there is one. One has a banking license and one doesn’t.

Filed in Corporate Crime | | Comments (0)

A Dangerous Grifter

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

I’ve pointed out in the past that right wing grifters do more good than harm, siphoning off conservative money into their own pockets so that it can’t be put to productive political use. But there’s an exception to every rule, and this grifter may be the exception to this rule.

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Great Minds Think Alike

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Tom Tomorrow agrees with me:

http://s3.amazonaws.com/dk-production/images/33680/lightbox/TMW2013-05-29color.png?1369352665

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An Unsung Hero

Monday, May 27, 2013

If you’re a Red Sox fan you may still be coming down from their dramatic, ninth inning, come from behind victory yesterday. You may be singing the praises of Iglesias and Ellsbury. Yes, they contributed their mite, but the real hero’s name shall never be celebrated, even here, though I can at least document the achievement of this nameless-to-history titan of sports. For I was there, and I know.

We took our seats in the bleachers just before the game started, well within shouting distance of the visitor’s bullpen. My seat was two seats from the aisle, and shortly after I arrived the day’s future hero arrived, with his bride, and the twosome sat next to us, he on the outside seat. He was drunk when he arrived and like a true hero, he made the sacrifice of keeping himself drunk throughout the game, the better to perform his service to the cause.

Around the sixth, with the Sox behind, he started hectoring each Indian reliever as he warmed up. Nothing personal, mind you, just emphasizing to each how much he sucked and assuring him that he would so suck when he took the field. Adroit he was at keeping within the limits of a fan’s right to heap abuse on a player; he was warned, but never removed, more than once proclaiming his sacred first amendment rights were being threatened. No Indian reliever was exempt from his abuse save one, a fellow named Hill, who got a pass, the hero loudly proclaimed, because Hill was a native and resident of South Boston.

Each reliever took the field, and each failed in his appointed task. But the most abuse was heaped on Chris Gomez, the Indian closer, who was instructed in colorful, and often quite funny, terms to blow the save when his time surely came. And blow it he did, in such humiliating fashion that he had to fake an injury to get off the mound, after which his also (quickly. given the circumstances) abused successor surrendered that final, fateful pitch to Ellsbury.

You may say that baseball players are used to this sort of stuff, and pay it no mind. But you can’t convince me of that, nor any of the other folks who were there near the bullpen that glorious day. Ballplayers are people too, and each of those unlucky relievers was primed to fail as he took his fatal trot to the mound. Sure he was a drunken lout, but give credit where credit is due: to the unknown fan. The Sox would have lost without him.

Filed in Sports | | Comments (0)

Friday Night Music

Friday, May 24, 2013

I know it’s ghoulish, but my job in this feature gets easier whenever another aging rock star bites the dust. This week Ray Manzarek, a founder of the Doors, went to Rock and Roll Heaven, so I have an excuse to put up some Doors music. I didn’t even try to find stuff that featured Manzarek. Let’s face it, Jim Morrison was more central to his group than almost anyone else you can name in any other of the great sixties groups. The Stones might have been able to survive without Jagger even. Morrison was unique. Still, Manzarek’s keyboard work was a huge part of the Doors music, and if you watch these videos you’ll surely get an earful of it, if only a few glimpses of Manzarek himself.

There’s actually a treasure trove of Doors stuff on youtube. My first criteria was to avoid Light My Fire, since I’ve posted it before and that would be far too predictable. First up is Touch Me from the Smothers Brother show. I continue to be amazed at the great music that was on that show. I watched it religiously, so I saw it then, but at the time it didn’t seem like such a big deal. Now, if you want actual live clips of some of these groups, there’s the Smothers Brothers or nothing.

From what I gather from today’s wanderings, the only fully recorded live concert the Doors ever did was at the Hollywood Bowl in 1968, that storied year. The full concert is on youtube, whole and in bits and pieces. A great concert. Here’s a few clips; the first two comprising the whole of When the Music’s Over; the third being the whole of The End.

And, part 2:

Finally, The End:

Was Morrison just a trice obsessed with death?

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Just when you think.

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

…they can’t find anyone crazier than the last crazy person they’ve nominated for, or elected to, some office, the Republicans outdo themselves.

The folks at TPM ask how hard do you have to look to find an African-American candidate who thinks the three-fifths clause in the constitution was a good thing. Well, the Virginia Republicans have done it:

The Republican nominee for lieutenant governor in Virginia has called the Constitution’s original clause to count blacks as three-fifths of a person an “anti-slavery amendment.”

In an April 28, 2011 statement while he was a Senate candidate, conservative minister and lawyer E.W. Jackson held up the three-fifths clause as an “anti-slavery” measure. The context of his statement was to attack President Obama after a pastor at a church service he attended referred to the three-fifths clause as a historical marker of racism.

“Rev. [Charles Wallace] Smith must not have understood the 3/5ths clause was an anti-slavery amendment. Its purpose was to limit the voting power of slave holding states,” Jackson, an African-American, said in his statement.

(via TPMDC)

Follow the link if you’re not conversant with the three-fifths clause for a clear explanation of why this statement is topsy turvy. Suffice it to say that if we hadn’t had the three-fifths clause we may-just may-have been able to get rid of slavery without a civil war.

This guy is going to play well with the unreconstructed Confederates, but Virginia has come a way from the days of Jefferson Davis, unlike some states we could name. Having voted for Obama twice, it seems unlikely that Virginians will warm up to the new Republican champion of crazy.

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