OBOF TYMHM & MORE PART 31

WELCOME TO OPINIONS  BASED  ON FACTS (OBOF)

&

THINGS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED (TYMHM)

YEAR THREE

 

Name	Published
OVERVIEW
OBOF & TYMHM PART 14	Dec  18, 2012
OBOF & TYMHM PART 15	Jan.  02, 2013
OBOF & TYMHM PART 16	Jan.  08, 2013
OBOF & TYMHM PART 16 EXTRA	Jan.  11, 2013
OBOF & TYMHM PART 17	Jan.  15, 2013
OBOF & TYMHM PART 18	Jan.  22, 2013
OBOF & TYMHM PART 19	Jan.  29, 2013
OBOF & TYMHM PART 20	Feb.  05, 2013
OBOF & TYMHM PART 21	Feb.  14, 2013
OBOF & TYMHM PART 22	Feb.  20, 2013
OBOF & TYMHM PART 23	Feb.  27, 2013
OBOF & TYMHM PART 23 SPECIAL	Mar.  06, 2013
OBOF & TYMHM PART 24	Mar.  07, 2013
OBOF & TYMHM PART 25	Mar.  12, 2013
OBOF & TYMHM PART 25-EXTRA	Mar.  14, 2013
OBOF & TYMHM PART 26	Mar.  19, 2013
OBOF & TYMHM PART 27	Mar.  26, 2013
OBOF & TYMHM PART 28	Apr.   02, 2013
OBOF & TYMHM PART 29	Apr.   08, 2013
OBOF & TYMHM PART 30	Apr.   17, 2013
OBOF & TYMHM PART31	Apr.   23, 2013

 

 

IN THIS ISSUE

1.  Opening thoughts.

2.  Social Security dirty little secret.

3.  The Dis-Uniting of America.

4.  Koch Brothers to control media.

5.  Texas Fertilizer plant kills more than Boston.

 

OPENING  THOUGHTS

By Floyd Bowman

Publisher "Opinions Based On Facts."

April 23, 2013

 

BOSTON BOMBING:

I haven't written anything about the Boston bombing for one good reason.  Just because I haven't written about it doesn't mean that I am not as concerned as everybody else.  I have just felt that you have all coverage about it on a 24/7 basis and there isn't anything I can add that you don't already know.  Therefore, I will use my space for things you may not know or have missed.  My thoughts and prayers are certainly with all in Boston and especially those that were directly affected.

THE PRESIDENT'S BUDGET:

I haven't said much about the President's budget.  Like the Boston Bombing, there has been 24/7 coverage on it and the disappointing parts in recent weeks.  I think, in one of my recent postings, I did state that I was disappointed in his cutting of benefits for Social Security and Medicare.  It is against everything he has been saying for years and I couldn't, and still can't, understand why he has done this. 

HOWEVER, after thinking about it for some time, maybe I can see some logic to it.  I may be very wrong, but I hope not.  You see, when he submitted that budget he knew that it would never pass.  He could see to that if it should get so far as his desk. 

Then why?  Why do this at all?  He can now say that he has made the ultimate compromise to the Republicans and they still won't accept his budget.  He can say that he has given them exactly what they have been wanting and they still won't take it.  They won't take it because, in addition to the cuts he compromised on, he did ask for some cuts in tax loopholes.  That is a red flag to the Republicans, as that converts to the word "REVENUE."  That is a no, no word for them.  Yet they can't say that he hasn't compromised in a big way.  Only time will tell.

~~~

Cash flow imbalance:

 Social Security's Dirty little secret

By Allen W. Smith

  Guest columnist

April 23, 2013

 

Most of the public debate on Social Security is focused on the wrong problem.  The real Social Security problem — the one that threatens the future of the program — has been hidden from the public for the past 30 years.

It began with the enactment of the Social Security Amendments of 1983.  This legislation was intended to allow Social Security to build up a large reserve, which could later be drawn down to pay benefits to the baby boomers.  But, instead, the 1983 law laid the foundation for the systematic raiding of the trust fund over the next 30 years.

The $2.7 trillion in surplus Social Security revenue, generated by the 1983 payroll tax hike, was spent on wars and other government programs as it came in.  The money was replaced with government IOUs, called "special issues of the Treasury." These IOUs are not at all like the marketable Treasury bonds held by China and America's other creditors.  They are nothing more than an accounting record of how much Social Security money has been spent for non-Social Security purposes.

The true status of the Social Security trust fund should come as no surprise to anyone who has kept a close watch on the raiding over the past three decades  It was clear to U.S. Sen. Ernest Hollings, of South Carolina, more than two decades ago. On Oct. 13, 1989, Hollings warned:

"… the most reprehensible fraud in this great jambalaya of frauds is the systematic and total ransacking of the Social Security trust fund … in the next century. … the American people will wake up to the reality that those IOUs in the trust fund vault are a 21st-century version of Confederate bank notes."

Even PresidentGeorge W. Bushpublicly admitted that Social Security money was being spent for non-Social Security purposes.

On Feb. 10, 2005, during a speech at Blue Bell, Pa., he made the following statement:

"Now one of the myths about Social Security is there's a pile of money sitting there accumulating, because you put money in, the government saves it for you, and then when you retire you get it out.  That's not the way the system works. Every dime that goes in from payroll taxes is spent. It's spent on retirees, and if there's excess, it's spent on government programs.  The only thing that Social Security has is a pile of IOUs from one part of government to the next."

The surplus Social Security revenue, which was supposed to be used to pay benefits to the baby boomers, is gone.

The only money that Social Security has is its annual revenue. That revenue became insufficient to pay full benefits, beginning in 2010.  The government had to borrow $49 billion that year, in order to pay full Social Security benefits. In 2011, $45 billion had to be borrowed to cover the gap between revenue and the cost of paying full benefits.  The gap between revenue, and the cost of paying benefits, will get larger and larger, as time passes, and the Social Security trustees estimate that the gap will be a whopping $318.7 billion in 2030.

Those people who argue that Social Security has enough money to pay full benefits until 2033, without any government action, are just plain wrong.  It doesn't have enough current revenue to even pay this year's benefits.

This is the hidden Social Security problem.  This is the big national secret that government knows all about, but most Americans know nothing about.

Allen W. Smith of Winter Haven is a professor of economics, emeritus, at Eastern Illinois University.  He has been researching and writing about Social Security financing for 12 years.

~~~

The Dis-Uniting of America

Robert Reich

NationofChange / Op-Ed

Published: Thursday 18 April 2013

 

We come together as Americans when confronting common disasters and common threats, such as occurred in Boston on Monday, but we continue to split apart economically.

Anyone who wants to understand the dis-uniting of America needs to see how dramatically we’re segregating geographically by income and wealth.  Today I’m giving a Town Hall talk in Fresno, in the center of California’s Central Valley, where the official unemployment rate is 15.4 percent and median family earns under $40,000.  The so-called “recovery” is barely in evidence.

 

As the crow flies Fresno is not that far from California’s high-tech enclaves of Google, Intel, Facebook, and Apple, or from the entertainment capital of Hollywood, but they might as well be different worlds.  Being wealthy in modern America means you don’t come across anyone who isn’t, and being poor and lower-middle class means you’re surrounded by others who are just as hard up.  Upward mobility — the old notion that anyone can make it with enough guts and gumption — is less of a reality.

The probability that a poor child in America will become a poor adult is higher now than it was 30 years ago, and higher in the United States than in the United Kingdom, which has a long history of class rigidity. Almost 1 out of 4 of the nation’s children is in now in poverty, but you wouldn’t know that in Washington, where our representatives are now busily cutting safety nets children depend on, or in many state capitals that continue to slash budgets for education and social services.

Many of America’s wealthy don’t see why they should pay more taxes to support the less advantaged because they have no idea what it means to be less advantaged, while many in America’s middle class can’t afford to pay more because their real wages continue to decline.

Our thoughts turn to Boston — as they should.  But Fresno and other places like it across America remain ignored.

~~~

Koch Brothers to Pursue

 Control in the Media

We know the Koch Brothers, Charles and David Koch, as deniers of climate change, billionaire oil moguls, and environment destroyers, but now we may know them as major newspaper controllers. Until now Koch Industries has avoided investments in media. However at a recent annual seminar in Aspen, it was discussed that Koch Industries purchase the entire Tribune Company or at least the bundle of eight newspapers, valued at $623 million. The purchase would put the Koch brothers in charge of a large chunk of America’s largest print media, including newspapers like the Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, and the second-largest Spanish-language daily newspaper, Hoy. 

The plan to finally invest in media is part of the Koch brothers’ plan to influence media narrative and convince Americans that a smaller government is better. Currently they feel that “the conservative voice is not being well represented” in the media. Acquiring power in the media comes with a three-pronged strategy that was unveiled in Aspen three years ago. The plan has three prongs, educating grass-roots activists, influencing politics, and media, in order to push the country towards a smaller government in which there is less regulation and taxes. The first two have already began to be dealt with, as we have seen from the millions they have poured into getting their own legislative agendas passed and their funding of ALEC. They have even gone as far as warning thousands of their employees of the consequences they will face if they didn’t vote Republican in the latest election.

According to unnamed sources that attended the seminar, the goal is for the Koch brothers to have “their voices being heard.” Koch Industries wants to change the way the mainstream media portrays them, feeling that they have been unfairly covered due to their political beliefs. They are not fans of how the freedom of press has allowed for them to be represented and the easiest way to change this is to control the media itself.

If the Koch brothers succeed in the large purchase of all, or parts, of the Tribune Company we can be sure that there will be significant changes to the major print sources they will control, creating another significant outlet for their conservative agenda.

~~~

Texas Fertilizer Plant Bomb Kills More than Boston, but it’s One of Ours.

William Boardman

NationofChange / News

 Published: Monday 22 April 2013

 

Does Homeland Security Apply to The Whole Homeland? 

Boston’s bombings have brought out all kinds of conspiracy theory and bigoted reactions, even though nobody knows anything with much certainty yet.  The West Fertilizer Company explosion on April 17 resulted from an actual, American conspiracy of a very familiar sort, a conspiracy of deliberate corporate denial or deceit – for an example, think about tobacco companies – combined with government inaction. 

When an explosion in Texas kills an as yet uncertain number of people, leveling almost half the town, that’s just as sad as the Boston event for those directly involved, but it doesn’t make as compelling television.  And it doesn’t make compelling politics. 

The northeast Texas town of West, population 2,800 or so, overwhelmingly white, mostly of Czech descent, was largely unknown to its fellow citizens until its fertilizer storage and processing plant blew up, after burning for about half an hour, due to currently unknown causes. 

The explosion in West registered 2.1 on the Richter scale, much more powerful than the Boston bombs that didn’t register as earthquakes at all.  The explosion in West killed more people, injured more people, and destroyed much more property than the bombs in Boston, where property damage was negligible, less than a serious storm.   

Ten Times as Many Runners in Boston as Residents in West, Texas

Almost ten times as many people run in the Boston Marathon as live in West, Texas. The Boston event draws about half a million spectators to a city of 625,000, numbers that dwarf the Texas town that is home to little more than one one-hundredth of one per cent of the total Texas population of more than 26 million.   

The explosion in West, Texas, was so powerful it blew out windows two miles away. People heard it for miles, and some felt it as much as a hundred miles away.  It destroyed perhaps more than a third of the town, including a school (empty) and a retirement home (133 residents). Railroad tracks were destroyed some distance from the blast, which pushed the closer rail across the ties against the farther rail. 

Some sense of the intensity and unexpectedness of the explosion is captured in short cell phone videos, including one taken by a father in his vehicle with his daughter, watching as the West Fertilizer Co. burned.  Then the blast overwhelms the camera, making the picture indecipherable even as the daughter clearly yell to her father, “Please get out of here!  Please get out of here!”

Unlike an unpredictable and uncontrollable terrorist bomb, a fertilizer plant explosion is totally predictable and nearly controllable. Everyone knows fertilizers can be made into bombs. That was a fertilizer bomb that destroyed the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. Fertilizer plants, like the one that burned in Bryan, Texas, in 2009, have been a well-known danger for almost a century. 

West Fertilizer Wasn’t Much Regulated By Anyone

Known danger isn’t necessarily a danger attended to, as the Wall Street Journal reports: 

 “The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality said Thursday that the West Fertilizer Co. facility that exploded Wednesday was built in 1962, before state and federal requirements for toxic emissions were established. As a result, the facility was grandfathered until state law required it to get a permit in 2004. The company didn’t acquire the permit until after a 2006 investigation by the environmental agency found it in violation of the law.

“The agency said it had investigated the facility in 2002 after dust complaints and found “no nuisance conditions.” A citizen complaint about odor prompted the June 2006 investigation that determined the facility was operating without authorization.

“In a follow-up site visit on September 2006, the agency noted no concerns, and issued the necessary permit on December of that year. It also conducted another site investigation on January 2007. Other than the 2002 and 2006 incidents, the state agency said it ‘has not received any complaints regarding this facility’.”    

That summary gives an indication of why Texas has a reputation for lax enforcement of what few environmental regulations it has.  And if that were the whole story for West Fertilizer, it might not be so bad. 

Even the EPA Wasn’t All That Attentive to Toxic Materials

But it turns out the company had trouble with the feds, too. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) actually fined West Fertilizer in 2006 for failing to plan for emergencies, or even to assess its risks carefully. The fine was $2,300. And the company agreed to make daily inspections, to put barriers around their ammonia tanks to keep vehicles from hitting them, and to install a water spray system in case of a leak. 

The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) inspected West Fertilizer in 1985 and cited the company for one serious and two lesser violations. The fine was $30. Apparently OSHA has not inspected the plant since 1985. 

In a more current report to the EPA, state, and local agencies in 2011, West Fertilizer said there was no risk of fire or explosion at the $4 million-a-year fertilizer processing and distribution plant. The company had filed a plan for handling the risk of its toxic materials, including 54,000 pounds of anhydrous ammonia, mostly stored in two 12,000-gallon storage tanks (only one of which exploded).    

What Danger?  I Don’t See Any Danger?  You See Any Danger? 

According to the report, reviewed by the Dallas Morning News, the company said its worst-case scenario would be a 10-minute release of ammonia gas that would kill or injure no one. The second-worst-case scenario, West Fertilizer said, would be a leaky hose, that would also cause no harm. The same report said the plant had no alarms, automatic shutoff system, firewall, or sprinkler system. 

The Texas regulators had noted that West Fertilizer was 3,000 feet from a school and surrounded by populated areas. 

The evening of the explosion, the Dallas Morning news editorialized about the sort of local zoning decisions that could lead to the kind of high-risk neighborhood created around the fertilizer plant in West. After first praising the organization, planning, and execution of first responders to this disaster, the editorial asked: 

“So why didn’t local planners demonstrate an equal level of forethought and imagine what kind of problems could arise when you place a middle school, a retirement complex, apartments and houses next to a fertilizer plant with a 12,000-gallon tank containing highly volatile chemical compounds?

“Someone needs to be called to account for the scores of deaths and injuries caused by this explosion….  We cannot have people living and going to school next to sub-nuclear ticking time bombs.”   

Why isn’t it About Homeland Security in West, Texas? 

But of course we can, and we have, and we will go on doing so. This isn’t Boston, this isn’t about terrorists, and in the strange doublethink of post-9/11 America, this isn’t even about homeland security. 

The people who don’t want dangerous work sites inspected are much the same cohort as those who don’t want any limits on guns and sometimes for the same reason. Sometimes carnage is good for business. 

So industrial and commercial deaths will go on happening in a shadow world, at an “acceptable” level, often going unreported and almost always unexplored, even though the industrial death rate beats terrorism by a factor of hundreds. 

Tobacco companies and others aren’t terrorists, no matter how many people they kill – but only because they aren’t interested in terrorizing us. On the contrary, they, like any corporation with a lethal product to sell, are much more interested in reassuring and telling us how cool and free and independent we are to choose their essentially suicidal offerings.   

What Does Monsanto Have to Do With Any of This? 

Which brings us, oddly enough to Monsanto, which is the defendant in a federal would-be class action lawsuit filed in 2007 by Texas Grain Storage, Inc, the company now known as West Fertilizer Co. Sometime around 1970, West entered into a business relationship with Monsanto that continued for decades, and the lawsuit (in which many documents remain sealed) appears to center on a 1997 contract between the two companies, under which West agreed to annual purchases of the herbicide Roundup. 

In the case apparently filed in 2008, some 30 lawyers at a dozen firms have represented Texas-Grain-now-known-as-West. The most recent filing in the case was in 2010, when a Texas magistrate judge ruled against making the case a class action. West has appealed and the appeal is still pending. 

Soon after the fertilizer plant explosion, Waco police on the scene said the cause was unknown. No cause has been officially announced yet. 

Nevertheless, USA Today confidently assured the world that blowing up West Fertilizer was “not terrorism-related.”   

More opaquely, a Monsanto spokesman said on April 18, “The long dormant lawsuit filed by Texas Grain had nothing to do with fertilizer or the operation of the West, Texas plant.” 

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

~~~

If the good Lord is willing and the creek don't rise, I'll talk with you again next Tuesday April 30, 2013.

 

God Bless All of You

&

God Bless the United States of America.

 

Floyd