WELCOME TO OPINIONS BASED ON FACTS (OBOF)
&
THINGS YOU
MAY HAVE MISSED (TYMHM)
YEAR THREE
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Name
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Published
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OVERVIEW
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 14
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Dec 18, 2012
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 15
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Jan. 02, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 16
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Jan. 08, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 16
EXTRA
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Jan. 11, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 17
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Jan. 15, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 18
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Jan. 22, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 19
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Jan. 29, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 20
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Feb. 05, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 21
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Feb. 14, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 22
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Feb. 20, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 23
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Feb. 27, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 23 SPECIAL
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Mar. 06, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 24
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Mar. 07, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 25
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Mar. 12, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 25-EXTRA
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Mar. 14, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 26
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Mar. 19, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 27
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Mar. 26, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 28
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Apr. 02, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 29
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Apr. 08, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 30
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Apr. 17, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 31
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Apr. 23, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 32
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Apr. 30, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 33
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May 07, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 34
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May 18, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 35
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May 21, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 36
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May 30, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 37
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June
05, 2013
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OBOF & TYMHM PART 38
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June
11, 2013
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IN THIS ISSUE
1. Opening Thoughts.
2. Government corruption.
3. Corporations are Colonizing us.
4. Fix Government - not Social Security.
5. Pentagon may be wasting a Billion Dollars a
year.
6. The Quiet Closing of Washington
OPENING THOUGHTS !
By Floyd Bowman
Publisher "Opinions Based On
Facts."
June 11, 2013
The paragraph listed
below in green, was in last weeks posting.
It is now
June 5, 2013 and I am feeling well enough to continue with this true
story. However, during the past two
weeks there have been some developments, making it wiser for me to curtail this
story for now. It might be that in a few
months or years, if I am still here, I can finish this bazaar true story,
involving the Government of the U.S.
We all know that there
is some corruption in Government. As of
yesterday, I turned 89 and I have done a lot of living in those 89 years. Even so, recently, I have personally gained
some knowledge that puts a new, brighter, light on CORRUPTION
in the Federal Government. You
can't imagine the depth and extent to which CORRUPTION exists. We, the people, have no say anymore. Nothing, I mean nothing, can be accomplished
without money under the table and lots of it.
On the Rachael Maddow
Show, MSNBC, Wednesday, June 5, 2013, she listed eleven (11) former legislators
who, now are involved in the LOBBY
business. After serving 12 years as a
Senator from Nebraska
Fmr. Sen. Kit Bond, of Missouri (R) after serving 24 years in the
Senate has joined a lobbying firm. Fmr.
Senator Jon Kyl (R) Arizona, after 26 years as a legislator, left and joined a
D.C. lobbying group.
Fmr. Senator Evan Bayh (D) Indiana, now a lobbyist. Fmr. Sen. Bob Bennett (R) Utah, now
lobbyist. Fmr. Sen. Byron Dorgan (D)
North Dakota, yes you guessed it, now a lobbyist. Fmr. Sen. Chris Dodd (D) Connecticut, now a
lobbyist. Fmr. Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D)
Arkansas, now a lobbyist for WalMart.
Fmr. Sen. Judd Gregg (R) New Hampshire, now named CEO of a lobbying
group. Finally, Fmr. Sen. Scott Brown
(R) Massachusetts
WHY BOTHER LOOKING
AT THESE
PAST LEGISLATORS.
Yes, why bother? These people haven't broken any laws, that we
know about, in becoming a Lobbyist.
Don't they have a right to do whatever they choose after leaving a
Government post? Well, of course they
do.
The PROBLEM is the system that lets them do this. Tremendous amounts of money under the table
in their elections in the first place and then, by virtue of performing as a
lobbyist, more money under the table to the present law makers.
In addition, by virtue
of their past service, their knowledge of how to get around in the capitol is
very valuable and, no doubt, pays them well for their effort. SO, they made good money above and below the
table when they were legislators, now they receive a wonderful pension, medical,
etc. and now more money as a lobbyist.
We the
people, have nothing to say about what happens to us and our wonderful
country. DEMOCRACY, IS ALL BUT GONE, I
AM SORRY TO SAY. ALMOST ALL ELECTIONS
ARE NOW BOUGHT AND PAID FOR. THE CORRUPTION IN OUR COUNTRY IS RUNNING
RAMPANT. Things I have recently
encountered have brought me to this point and I am not, at all, happy about
it. I am afraid nothing short of a revolution
in this country is going to save our DEMOCRACY.
Take note of the following article.
~~~
Corporations
are Colonizing Us with Trade Deals, and Wall Street Wants In
Richard (RJ) Eskow
Campaign for America’s Future / Op-Ed
Published: Friday 7 June 2013
ABOUT Richard (RJ) Eskow
Richard
(RJ) Eskow is a well-known blogger and writer, a former Wall Street executive,
an experienced consultant, and a former musician. He has experience in health insurance and
economics, occupational health, benefits, risk management, finance, and
information technology.
After 237 years, we’re becoming a colony again. Our Nation’s losing the right to
self-determination it fought so hard to win, and it’s happening on a scale
unseen since the days of George III.
As is so often the case these days, this wholesale loss
of our rights is being underwritten by corporate interests.
And, as usual, it’s being called “bipartisan” – by
corporations who “buy” both Republican and Democratic “partisans.”
Terms
of Surrender
Republicans cheered George W. Bush for saying, “I will
never place U.S.
But both leaders pushed trade agreements that surrender
our sovereign rights to faceless bureaucrats in international bodies – bodies
that are dominated by multinational corporations.
Where are those cheering crowds now? Republicans backed a president who supported
agreements which put Americans’ rights – and their environment – “under the
command” of foreign bodies. And unless something changes Democratic
voters will soon see their president give up even more control of our economic destiny.
WTO
Stands For “We’re Taking Over”
Public Citizen, which has been
doing excellent
work on
this issue, reports on three U.S.
The WTO and the WTO “Appellate Body” – two bodies most
Americans don’t even know exist – overruled these laws in a preemptory manner
that would have outraged the Continental Congress.
We didn’t elect them. We can’t communicate with them. But they’ve
issued three decrees which we must obey:
1) We are not to know where the meat we’re eating comes
from.
2) We must accept the fact that we may unknowingly wind
up eating the flesh of dolphins, arguably the most intelligent nonhuman species
on the planet. And,
3) We must continue to allow the distribution of products
designed to addict our children to a deadly and habit-forming substance.
How’s that for “controlling our own
destiny”?
The Next Front
The next stage of our war for economic independence is
being determined in trade talks that are being conducted in deep secrecy by a
president who once promised “the most transparent administration in history.”
Laurel Sutherlin calls the Trans-Pacific
Partnership “a worldwide corporate power grab of enormous proportions,” and
that pretty accurately sums it up. (It’s
hard to write about these deals without sounding hyperbolic, even if you’re
only being descriptive.) As Sutherlin
points out, the TPP “is among the largest and potentially most important ‘free
trade’ agreements the world has ever seen …”
And yet, as Sutherlin notes, “one can hardly be blamed
for not being familiar with it yet. The
corporate cabal behind it … has done an exceptional job of maintaining an
almost total lack of transparency as they literally design the future we will
all inhabit.”
Although 600
corporate representatives have seen drafts of the agreement, access has been
denied to even high-ranking members of Congress. Dave Johnson excerpts some provisions being considered in the
secret talks, and they’re truly terrifying.
In fact, as Lori
Wallach and Ben Beachy point out in a must-read editorial, the treaty’s provisions
are so unpopular that the last negotiator felt it could only be
concluded in secret. And now sovereignty-killing provisions are being considered
for a trade agreement with member nations of the European Union.
Wall
Street Wants a Piece
Now Wall Street’s
trying to use these draft agreements to undermine our ability to protect
ourselves from bank predation or another financial crisis. They’ve already tried to use the WTO’s archaic
and destructive financial rules (Americans for Financial Reform has the details). Now Bloomberg News reports that banks and insurance companies
are trying to use new proposed trade deals to overrule or further dilute
portions of the Dodd-Frank Act.
That legislation was weakened by bipartisan negotiation,
and a number of agencies have “slow-walked” its implementation by delaying the
completion of draft regulations. But
that’s not enough for trade groups like the U.S.
They see this as an opportunity to unleash their member
companies, corporations with names like Citi and AIG, to plunder and pillage –
we mean, “unleash the innovative creativity of the financial sector” once
again.
Easily
Confused
They don’t say that, of course. One of their
favorite gambits is to say that it’s too “confusing” to deal with different
countries’ rules. A group of compliant House Republicans, for example,
recently wrote to complain that “the regulatory landscape (is) too difficult
for financial firms to navigate.”
Imagine, the five
largest banks in America
They don’t want a “common” set of rules. They want the “lowest common denominator” of
rulemaking, established by international, corporate-controlled bodies
accountable to no one.
Freedom
Ain’t Free
There have been
some heroes in this fight. The
organizations cited above have done excellent work. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has been
speaking out forcefully. So has Florida
Rep. Alan Grayson, who has started a petition against the proposed inclusion of WTO-like oversight
bodies in the new European trade agreement.
But President Obama, like presidents Bush and Clinton
before him, appears to be on the wrong side of this fight. He needs to hear from voters who insist on
transparent talks and a return to full American sovereignty.
Senators and representatives need to get those emails and
calls, too. Better make your voice heard
quickly, while your vote still matters.
~~~
My Word:
Fix Government,
Not Social Security
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Allen W. Smith of Winter Haven
a
professor of economics, emeritus
at Eastern Illinois University
2:07 a.m.
EDT, June 10, 2013
There is
nothing broken about Social Security. The
program has operated successfully for the past 78 years, and it is capable of
doing so for another 78 years.
What is
broken is the federal government, which has embezzled $2.7 trillion of Social
Security's money and spent it on wars and other programs. If that $2.7 trillion had not been taken from
the fund, Social Security would be able to pay full benefits for at least two
more decades without any government action.
That is
the situation in a nutshell.
If
the government repays its debt to Social Security, its short-run problems will
be solved. If the government also enacts
legislation to remove the cap on income subject to the payroll tax, so that
everyone pays taxes on all income, Social Security would be rock-solid for many
decades to come, without any additional government action.
Most
Americans would favor requiring the government to repay its debt to Social
Security, and only high-income earners would object to removing the cap on
income subject to the payroll tax. So,
why can't we enact this proposal into law and stop scaring the American people
about the future of Social Security?
The
enemies of Social Security are trying to kill it, just as they would kill a
poisonous snake. They hate the
continuing existence of government programs aimed at making America
The
primary motive for the large tax cuts under Ronald Reagan
and George W. Bush was to cut the size of the federal government. Their strategy was to cut taxes so the
government would be forced to cut spending. Both Reagan and Bush followed the
"starve-the-beast" strategy, which was to reduce revenue by so much
that government programs would have to be cut, no matter how important or
popular they were.
The
public is being duped into believing that Social Security has structural
problems, which justify cutting benefits. But that is not true. It is the federal
government that has massive financial problems, none of which were caused by
Social Security.
So let's fix
government and leave Social Security alone.
~~~
Pentagon May be Wasting a Billion Dollars a Year in Erroneous Payments
to Contractors
Richard H.P. Sia
The Center for Public Integrity / News
Report
Published: Sunday 9 June 2013
Pentagon has been paying hundreds of millions of tax
dollars a year to people and companies that don’t deserve it, but its financial
management shortcomings are so severe that it’s made little progress in halting
the errors or even measuring their magnitude, according to a report released by
a Senate committee Thursday.
Although the Defense Department reported making over $1.1
billion in overpayments in fiscal year 2011 to military personnel and retirees,
civilian defense workers, contractors, and others, investigators from the
Government Accountability Office said that figure is not credible due to
missing invoices and other flawed paperwork, as well as errors in arithmetic.
The Pentagon is required by law to ferret out programs
susceptible to significant payment errors and then use statistical sampling to
estimate the size of those errors, so that Congress can determine the size of
the problem. But GAO found defense
finance officials didn't have procedures in place to collect and maintain the
data they need to come up with a credible estimate.
Even when the department could find and document mistaken
payments, it frequently did not take cost-effective steps to recover the money,
the GAO said. The U.S.
The Pentagon’s payment system is so weak that sometimes
it doesn’t pay what’s owed. By its own estimate, for example, the
Pentagon made $238.2 million in overpayments and $48.4 million in underpayments
related to travel alone during fiscal 2011, for a total of $286.6 million in
incorrect payments.
But when pressed by GAO, defense finance officials were
only able to identify $1.6 million, or less than 1 percent, of the program's estimated
overpayments as recoverable, explaining that they lacked supporting
documentation for a significant portion of the total.
The
Defense Department "is at risk of foregoing the detection and recovery of
potentially substantial funds owed to the government," the GAO report
said.
Instead of conducting cost-effective audits to identify
funds that can be recovered, GAO said the Pentagon relies on such methods as
self-reporting by defense contractors and other recipients of the money, random
sampling of payment records, and findings by the Defense Department inspector
general or other auditors.
Members of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental
Affairs Committee, which released the GAO report, expressed anger and
frustration over the findings. Several
accused the Pentagon of failing to comply with a 2010 law requiring federal
agencies to identify, prevent and recover payments made in error.
“The Department spends about a trillion dollars annually,
but officials have no idea how much of that money it loses to waste and fraud. This is simply unacceptable,” said Committee
Chairman Tom Carper, D-Del., who co-sponsored the law with Sen. Susan Collins,
R-Maine, and others.
Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., ranking member of the
committee, cited the GAO’s conclusions while promising to reintroduce
legislation requiring the Defense Department to conduct an accurate audit of
its books, as required by federal rules the Department has repeatedly flouted.
“When our largest federal agency cannot produce a viable
financial audit, it should be no surprise DOD cannot account for how much money
it wastes on improper payments,” said Coburn, who vowed to use all the
oversight tools at his disposal to expose and prevent defense finance abuses.
“Improper payments should be low-hanging fruit when it
comes to eliminating government waste—but that clearly hasn’t been the case
here,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., who leads the panel’s Financial and
Contracting Oversight subcommittee.
The problem is an old one at the Pentagon. Twenty years ago, GAO delivered a scathing
report to the same Senate committee documenting a military payroll system that
was so badly managed the Army had inadvertently paid $6 million to 2,269 troops
who had already quit the service, were absent without leave or had deserted
their units. In one case, a dead
deserter was sent a paycheck.
A separate probe at the time revealed that managers at a
defense finance and accounting center had miscalculated the pay of more than
201,000 Air Force retirees in 1986, giving them an extra dollar or two each
month. It took nine years for managers to correct the error, which ended
up costing taxpayers $16 million. Officials
said they decided not to try to recover the money because the some of the
retirees were probably dead, and the effort to collect would be too expensive.
In the report released Thursday, GAO said the Pentagon
acknowledged overpayments in military pay and military retirement pay as part
of the $1.1 billion in erroneous payments in fiscal 2011. In addition, the Pentagon made overpayments of
military health benefits, civilian pay, travel pay, commercial pay to vendors
and contractors and Army Corps of Engineers travel and contractor fees.
GAO faulted the Defense Department comptroller not only
for these mistakes, but for doing a poor job of reporting on the issue to
Congress. In one instance, the
department claimed it would recover $67.6 million in improper military
retirement payments while estimating that only $18.8 million in overpayments
had actually occurred, GAO said.
Defense officials also failed to do “risk assessments” to
determine what kind of corrective action is needed to reduce mistakes, GAO
said. They failed to identify the “root causes” for errors, such as whether
manual or automated controls were insufficient or even working.
In addition, GAO said the department did not comply with
the 2010 law requiring “recovery audits” to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of
procedures to recover money paid improperly to companies whose contracts have a
total value exceeding $500 million in a fiscal year. According to GAO,
defense officials said they were having a hard time tracing transactions and
finding the original justifications for them, preventing them from conducting
effective recovery audits.
If the Defense Department does not implement strategies
to comply with federal improper payment laws, GAO warned, it will remain “at
risk of continuing to make improper payments and wasting taxpayer funds.”
In a written statement released with the report, Robert
F. Hale, the Defense Department’s comptroller, said the department is now
developing risk assessments and corrective actions, reviewing its recovery
efforts to ensure that they are cost effective, and working to ensure its
reporting is complete and accurate.
“I continue to believe this program [to deal with
overpayments] is fundamentally sound and I remain fully committed to comply in
all respects with current statutory requirements,” Hale said.
Efforts to obtain further Pentagon comment Thursday were
unsuccessful.
~~~
The Quiet Closing of Washington
By Floyd Bowman, publisher
"Opinions Based On Facts"
June 11, 2013
The title above, "The Quiet
Closing Of Washington
ROBERT B. REICH, one of the nation’s leading experts on
work and the economy, is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman
School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations,
most recently as Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton. Time Magazine has named him one of
the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written thirteen books, including his
latest best-seller, “Aftershock: The Next Economy and America
The article I have referred to above, is, in my opinion, an
excellent article exposing where our Federal and State Governments are and how
they are trying, or not trying, to function as a Democracy should.
I have read the article three times and I was about ready to
put it in this posting, when I decided to look at some of the comments that had
been made. These comments opened my eyes
to the fact that many completely misinterpreted his article. They thought that what he was saying was the
way he thought our Governments should be operating. That is exactly the opposite of what he was
trying to get across.
In a nutshell, he was pointing out how the Tea Partiers have
literally shutdown Congress and how all, but 13 States, are passing their own
laws to fit their beliefs and, in many cases, contradict the laws of the State
next to it.
His article is lengthy and he sets forth a great deal of
detail, all of which I agree with, and he closes with,
A great nation requires a great, or at least functional, national
government. The Tea Partiers and other
government-haters, who have caused Washington
I am not including his article for the reason I have set forth above,
but if you want to see the entire article just go to his blog. The link is listed above.
~~~
If the good Lord is willing and the creek don't rise, I'll talk with you
again next Tuesday June 18, 2013.
God Bless You All
&
God Bless the United
States of America
Floyd
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