Saturday, May 14, 2011

Good news and bad news

It's not just the Labour Party – the Left is in meltdown all over Europe

Tempting though it is to blame Ed Miliband for Labour’s poor performance in the local and regional elections, I doubt Labour would have fared much better under another leader. As David Goodhart pointed out in The Independent, Labour’s success has traditionally been dependent on an alliance between the traditional working-class and middle-class liberals and that coalition has now collapsed:

Labour has lost around 4 million working-class voters since 1997, and at the last general election, for the first time, Labour’s middle-class vote (in the ABC1 sense) was higher than its working-class (C2DE) vote. To win an election, Labour needs to win back lots of those blue-collar voters; the trouble is that Labour’s middle-class voters, especially the liberal graduates among them, have increasingly divergent values and interests.

The draining away of working-class support isn’t a problem confined to the Labour Party. Left-wing parties all over Europe are facing similar difficulties. Labour was punished by the British electorate last year, polling its lowest share of the vote since 1983, but not as severely as the Social Democrats were by the Swedes, polling their lowest share of the vote since universal suffrage was introduced in 1921. This was the first time in the Social Democrats’ history that it lost two elections in a row. Only 22 per cent of those Swedes in work voted Social Democrat in 2010, a number that fell to 13 per cent in the Stockholm region.

The same picture emerges wherever you look. In the European election in June, 2009, the Left took a hammering. In Germany, the Social Democrats polled just 20 per cent of the vote, their worst result since the Second World War. In France, the Socialist Party only mustered 16.5 per cent, its lowest share of the vote in a European election since 1994. In Italy, the Democrats polled 26.1 per cent, seven percentage points less than they received at the last Italian election. As David Miliband pointed out in a recent lecture: “Left parties are losing elections more comprehensively than ever before. They are fragmenting at just the time the Right is uniting. I don’t believe this is some kind of accident.”

So what are the causes of this meltdown? It’s particularly baffling given that the whole of Europe was adversely affected by the recent problems afflicting the international banking system. One of the reasons socialists believe history is on their side is because they think capitalism is inherently unstable, lurching from one crisis to another. Yet the financial crisis of 2007-08 has sent voters scurrying towards the Right, not the Left. What’s going on?

first they came for the gays

As an end in itself, it's undoubtedly a good thing that Uganda's infamous “Kill the gays” bill was not voted on before the end of the current parliamentary session on Wednesday afternoon. But the larger battle for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender – and straight – human rights to be upheld in Uganda will get nowhere until activists look at the bigger picture.
By THERESA MALLINSON.

Since the beginning of this week there's been an international outcry about the resurrection of Uganda's anti-homosexuality bill. The bill, first debated in parliament only last Friday, was set to go to the vote on Wednesday, until the matter was mysteriously dropped from the parliamentary schedule.
Among the many international online petitions calling for the bill to be withdrawn, Avaaz and Allout's were the most prominent, with the former currently boasting more than 1,250,000 signatures, and counting. “48 Hours to Stop Uganda's Gay Death Penalty!” exclaimed Avaaz. “We've stopped this bill before, and we can do it again. Ugandan President Museveni is scared of losing valuable international aid from the West – after a massive international outcry last year, he stopped the bill from coming to a vote. But political unrest is mounting in Uganda, and religious extremists in parliament are hoping confusion and violence in the streets will distract the international community from a second push to pass this hate-filled law. We can show them that the world is still watching. If we block the vote for two more days until parliament closes, the bill will expire forever.”
So the vote has been stopped, again. But it's far from clear whether the bill will in fact expire or if it can be brought before parliament's next session in its current form. What is clear is that there's no “forever” about the current good news. If the bill has passed its voting date, the MP who initiated it, David Bahati, has said he will simply propose a new bill, calling for the same harsh penalties for homosexuals. Among other things, the bill calls for the death penalty for people who have previous “convictions” for homosexuality, are HIV-positive, or engage in homosexual acts with minors. Although Bahati has publicly said the death-penalty clause will be dropped, the proposed legislation has not been formally amended to reflect this. It's worth noting that homosexuality is already a criminal offence in Uganda, punishable by sentences of up to 14 years.

Drivel from the man who never held a 9-5 job, who never ran a business.

President Obama urged businesses to “step up” and hire workers, pressing banks and other corporations to do more to help an economy that he said would take “several years” to recover fully.

Does he think business do not hire people when they need them?

That they let tasks go undone? Why? To spite him?

In a town-hall style meeting conducted by CBS News on Wednesday, Obama said the weak housing market and high gasoline prices were the biggest “headwinds” dragging on the economy.
“We’ve got a lot more work to do to get businesses to invest and to hire,” he told the audience in remarks broadcast on Thursday.

No, he needs to shut up and stand aside. Companies hire and invest as their business dictates.

“It’s going to take us several years for us to get back where we need to be.”

Two more years and we can be done with him.

The strength of the U.S. economy is likely to be the main factor that determines whether Obama will succeed in holding on to the White House next year.

Rebellions of the poor, by the poor, for the poor

Khadija Patel

As mothers in bygone times threatened naughty children with “the bogeyman”, every fresh uprising, revolt or violent protest in Africa evokes the question: “Could it happen in South Africa?” While comparisons with Tunisia and Egypt may be a little over the top, they’re not unreasonable. The tit-for-tat mud-splattered electioneering now assailing us shows how fractious SA remains. But when the desperately poor people protest about a decade of service-delivery neglect, warnings of an “Arab spring” in the form of a “South African winter of discontent” are not so fantastical.

Moeletsi Mbeki shocked a lot of people when he predicted that the poor in South Africa would do as Tunisians did and revolt against the government by 2020. His outrageous statement was reprinted, replayed and rehashed until not even President Jacob Zuma could dodge responding. Bound by duty, if not by principle Zuma, had to offer some reassurance about the country’s future. He was confident: “There will never be a Tunisia in South Africa. We have a constitutional democracy here; every person has the right to say what he wants and to vote.” And for further emphasis, he added, ‘It is impossible. I repeat: It is impossible.”

As our street poles are again turned into sacrificial flag-bearers of the country’s politics, it seems outlandish to believe a challenge to the government could come from anywhere but the polls. This is a 17-year-old democracy that’s been a harbinger of freedom and equality to the rest of the continent. As Zuma rightly pointed out, this is not a Middle Eastern kleptocracy with a geriatric sitting on a blood-soaked throne. This is a democracy that was hard won, a democracy that will not easily be surrendered. And, while praise of our freedoms is inevitably accelerated as an election draws nearer, there is as well an ever-widening gulf between the government and the people on the street. The people may not be taking to the streets to chant, “Liberty, Freedom, Bread” as the Tunisians or Egyptians did, but under the guise of service delivery protests the country is already witnessing a rebellion of the poor.

Pockets of protest first hit the country in 2004, and since then disgruntled residents in almost every corner have taken to the streets with a litany of complaints ranging from service delivery, joblessness and more recently the ANC’s selection of candidates ahead of local government elections. The protest against the ANC candidate list that wreaked havoc in the Mpumalanga town of Ermelo earlier this year left one dead and more than 100 were arrested. And while it was not a protest against service delivery in the strictest sense, it was close to being an all-out insurrection of a disenfranchised community against its local government. But closer to Johannesburg, residents of the Zandspruit informal settlement near Honeydew took to Beyers Naudé Drive last month to demand housing, sanitation and the resignation of their ward councillor. Gauteng MEC for local government and housing, Humphrey Memezi was confident when he visited Zandspruit last weekend that a group of "unruly" residents was responsible for the protests in the area. Unruly elements aside, this is a community of 40,000 with minimal access to services and an estimated unemployment rate of close to 70%. There clearly is a problem that runs deeper than a small band of troublemakers.

The right to protest is not exclusive to the left

A new left-wing group defending the right to protest needs to defend the right of those they disagree with, too.
by Patrick Hayes

Last Thursday, a newly formed left-wing campaign group, Defend the Right to Protest, held an emergency meeting in London in response to police tactics at anti-cuts and student fees demonstrations. The following day, a member of the right-wing protest group the English Defence League (EDL) was served with an anti-social behaviour order (ASBO) restricting his right to protest. Has Defend the Right to Protest complained loudly about this shocking restriction on someone’s democratic rights? Not at all. Yet if this collection of left-wing activists is serious about defending the right to protest, it should unequivocally condemn the state’s curtailment of everyone’s rights of association and organisation – including those with whom we might disagree.

There ought to be no doubt that the EDL case represents a severe infringement of an individual’s rights. Over the next three years, 19-year-old Joel Titus is forbidden from attending any demonstration that is connected with the English Defence League or being ‘part of a group of 10 or more people whose actions could cause alarm or distress’. His ASBO from Uxbridge Magistrates Court also claims he must not ‘display a sign or placard or use defamatory or insulting language which could cause alarm or distress’. (What might constitute causing alarm or distress remains unclear.) He is also forbidden from entering mosques, Islamic prayer rooms or a defined area of Whitechapel in London.

What did Titus do to deserve such a punishment? Absolutely nothing EDL-related. Titus was instead convicted of a ‘section 4 public order offence’ and for obstructing a police officer as a result of an incident at a pub in Hillingdon, north London last year – an incident which the Metropolitan Police has confirmed to spiked wasn’t associated with EDL activities.

Not a recipe for Greeks but still instructional

Ireland's future depends on breaking free from bailout

By MORGAN KELLY

With the Irish Government on track to owe a quarter of a trillion euro by 2014, a prolonged and chaotic national bankruptcy is becoming inevitable. By the time the dust settles, Ireland’s last remaining asset, its reputation as a safe place from which to conduct business, will have been destroyed.

Ireland is facing economic ruin.

While most people would trace our ruin to to the bank guarantee of September 2008, the real error was in sticking with the guarantee long after it had become clear that the bank losses were insupportable. Brian Lenihan’s original decision to guarantee most of the bonds of Irish banks was a mistake, but a mistake so obvious and so ridiculous that it could easily have been reversed. The ideal time to have reversed the bank guarantee was a few months later when Patrick Honohan was appointed governor of the Central Bank and assumed de facto control of Irish economic policy.

As a respected academic expert on banking crises, Honohan commanded the international authority to have announced that the guarantee had been made in haste and with poor information, and would be replaced by a restructuring where bonds in the banks would be swapped for shares.

Instead, Honohan seemed unperturbed by the possible scale of bank losses, repeatedly insisting that they were “manageable”. Like most Irish economists of his generation, he appeared to believe that Ireland was still the export-driven powerhouse of the 1990s, rather than the credit-fuelled Ponzi scheme it had become since 2000; and the banking crisis no worse than the, largely manufactured, government budget crisis of the late 1980s.

Rising dismay at Honohan’s judgment crystallised into outright scepticism after an extraordinary interview with Bloomberg business news on May 28th last year. Having overseen the Central Bank’s “quite aggressive” stress tests of the Irish banks, he assured them that he would have “the two big banks, fixed by the end of the year. I think it’s quite good news The banks are floating away from dependence on the State and will be free standing”.

Honohan’s miscalculation of the bank losses has turned out to be the costliest mistake ever made by an Irish person. Armed with Honohan’s assurances that the bank losses were manageable, the Irish government confidently rode into the Little Bighorn and repaid the bank bondholders, even those who had not been guaranteed under the original scheme. This suicidal policy culminated in the repayment of most of the outstanding bonds last September.

Disaster followed within weeks. Nobody would lend to Irish banks, so that the maturing bonds were repaid largely by emergency borrowing from the European Central Bank: by November the Irish banks already owed more than €60 billion. Despite aggressive cuts in government spending, the certainty that bank losses would far exceed Honohan’s estimates led financial markets to stop lending to Ireland.

He Served the Empire Abroad

The Regime Killed Him in His Home

by William Grigg

Jose Guerena survived two combat tours of Iraq, only to become a casualty of the Regime’s longest war — the one waged against its domestic subjects in the name of drug prohibition. The former Marine was slaughtered by a SWAT team during a May 5 assault on his home in Arizona.

Guerena’s wife, Vanessa, heard a noise outside the couple’s home near Tucson at about 9 a.m. Jose, who had just gone to bed after pulling a 12-hour shift at the Asarco Mine, suspected — correctly, as it turned out — that his family was threatened by an armed criminal gang. Grabbing his AR-15, Guerena instructed his wife and four-year-old son to hide in the closet while he confronted the intruders. According to Mrs. Guerena, the stormtroopers from the Pima County Regional SWAT team never identified themselves as police; they simply stormed into the home and started shooting.

“I saw this guy pointing me at the window, Vanessa recalled in a television interview. “So, I got scared. And, I got like, ‘Please don’t shoot, I have a baby.’ I put my baby [down]. [And I] put bag in window. And, I yell ‘Jose! Jose! Wake up!’”

“A deputy’s bullet struck the side of the doorway, causing chips of wood to fall on his shield,” recounts theArizona Daily Star, paraphrasing an account provided by Pima County Sheriff’s Office (PCSO) functionary Michael O’Connor. “That prompted some members of the team to think the deputy had been shot.” Guerna never fired a shot; the marauders who invaded his home fired no fewer than seventy-one. As is standard procedure in such events, the invaders claimed that Guerna had fired on the officers, as he had every moral and legal right to.

Neither Jose nor his wife had a criminal history of any kind. The attack on their home was described as a narcotics enforcement operation, but there are no reports that narcotics were found at the residence – - even though the invaders reportedly “seized” (that is, stole) something that belonged to the victim.

“Tucson is notorious for home invasions and we didn’t want it to look like that,” insisted PCSO spokesman O’Connor, exhibiting the dull-witted refusal to acknowledge the obvious that typifies tax-feeders of his station. He also maintained that the death squad “went lights and sirens and we absolutely did not do a `no-knock’ warrant,” a claim refuted by the only surviving witness, Vanessa Guerena. Such details are morally inconsequential, since there was no reason — apart from the institutional vanity of the PCSO and the indecent eagerness of the armored adolescents who compose its SWAT team — to conduct a paramilitary raid to serve a routine search warrant.

“I never imagined I would lose him like that, he was badly injured but I never thought he could be killed by police after he served his country,” lamented the wife of the murdered ex-Marine, who died on his feet, a rifle in his hand, and his face to an unexpected enemy. The grim but unavoidable truth is this: We shouldn’t be at all surprised that a Regime capable of sending Americans abroad to terrorize Iraqis in their homes would employ the same state terrorism against Americans here at home.

Welcome to your eco-prison cell

The Cube

Apparently our unwillingness to live in cramped, low-energy homes reveals our psychological flaws.

by Rob Lyons

I think estate agents would refer to it as ‘compact and bijou’. It’s The Cube, the eco-home that’s showing just what sustainable living is all about. It should have been called The Cell.

The tiny house, which was on show at April’s Edinburgh Science Festival and is the brainchild of Dr Mike Page of the University of Hertfordshire, has an internal footprint of just three metres by three metres, yet has all the modern conveniences. There’s a tiny lounge with a flat-panel TV. If you want to dine with a friend, you need to swap half the sofa round with the sliding table. On the next level - reachable by a staircase so tiny that there’s only enough room for one foot at a time - you’ll find the composting toilet, the walk-in shower and the kitchen. (Is that even legal?) From there, you can clamber into the narrow bed, which could only accommodate two people if they both happen to be skinny vegans who don’t suffer from claustrophobia.

Everything is extremely well-insulated, including triple-glazed windows. Heat is provided by a heat-pump attached to the outside wall while electricity is generated through solar panels on the roof. Of course, they won’t work during the night, but you’ll have made so much money flogging electricity to the grid during the day - thanks to the insane prices at which electricity companies are obliged to buy micro-generated power - that you could actually earn £1000 per year.

All this could be yours for £50,000, assuming you’ve got some land to stick it on and you’re prepared to live in such cramped conditions. Considering you could buy a far larger luxury caravan with better facilities for less money (though not so well insulated), you may wonder why you would bother. But Page isn’t really interested in building eco-homes; in fact, he’s a psychologist. What he’s really interested in is why there is no demand for such eco-living, given that we now have lots of technology available to reduce our ‘impact’ - our ‘ecological footprint’.

It’s this conundrum that Page takes up in a contribution he co-wrote with a colleague, Nadine Page, for a British Psychological Society publication, The Psychology of Sustainability in the Workplace. ‘Climate change is a psychological problem’, they baldly assert. For example, the authors note how when they talk to businesses they often encounter a reluctance to act on advice that could cut greenhouse-gas emissions and costs, complaining that ‘we frequently find senior managers reluctant to proceed… the problem is not technological nor financial: it is psychological’.

Facts don't change, people do. Fortunately.

Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal'

by David Mamet

March 11, 2008

John Maynard Keynes was twitted with changing his mind. He replied, "When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?"
My favorite example of a change of mind was Norman Mailer at The Village Voice.

Norman took on the role of drama critic, weighing in on the New York premiere of Waiting for Godot.

Twentieth century's greatest play. Without bothering to go, Mailer called it a piece of garbage.

When he did get around to seeing it, he realized his mistake. He was no longer a Voice columnist, however, so he bought a page in the paper and wrote a retraction, praising the play as the masterpiece it is.

Every playwright's dream.

I once won one of Mary Ann Madden's "Competitions" in New York magazine. The task was to name or create a "10" of anything, and mine was the World's Perfect Theatrical Review. It went like this: "I never understood the theater until last night. Please forgive everything I've ever written. When you read this I'll be dead." That, of course, is the only review anybody in the theater ever wants to get.

My prize, in a stunning example of irony, was a year's subscription to New York, which rag (apart from Mary Ann's "Competition") I considered an open running sore on the body of world literacy—this due to the presence in its pages of John Simon, whose stunning amalgam of superciliousness and savagery, over the years, was appreciated by that readership searching for an endorsement of proactive mediocrity.

But I digress.

The Gandhi Nobody Knows

Gandhi vs Norman Borlaug

by Richard Greiner

I had the singular honor of attending an early private screening of 'Gandhi' with an audience of invited guests from the National Council of Churches. At the end of the three-hour movie there was hardly, as they say, a dry eye in the house. When the lights came up I fell into conversation with a young woman who observed, reverently, that Gandhi’s last words were “Oh, God,” causing me to remark regretfully that the real Gandhi had not spoken in English, but had cried, Hai Rama! (“Oh, Rama”). Well, Rama was just Indian for God, she replied, at which I felt compelled to explain that, alas, Rama, collectively with his three half-brothers, represented the seventh reincarnation of Vishnu. The young woman, who seemed to have been under the impression that Hinduism was Christianity under another name, sensed somehow that she had fallen on an uncongenial spirit, and the conversation ended.

At a dinner party shortly afterward, a friend of mine, who had visited India many times and even gone to the trouble of learning Hindi, objected strenuously that the picture of Gandhi that emerges in the movie is grossly inaccurate, omitting, as one of many examples, that when Gandhi’s wife lay dying of pneumonia and British doctors insisted that a shot of penicillin would save her, Gandhi refused to have this alien medicine injected in her body and simply let her die. (It must be noted that when Gandhi contracted malaria shortly afterward he accepted for himself the alien medicine quinine, and that when he had appendicitis he allowed British doctors to perform on him the alien outrage of an appendectomy.) All of this produced a wistful mooing from an editor of a major newspaper and a recalcitrant, “But still. . . .” I would prefer to explicate things more substantial than a wistful mooing, but there is little doubt it meant the editor in question felt that even if the real Mohandas K. Gandhi had been different from the Gandhi of the movie it would have been nice if he had been like the movie-Gandhi, and that presenting him in this admittedly false manner was beautiful, stirring, and perhaps socially beneficial.

An important step in the canonization of this movie-Gandhi was taken by the New York Film Critics Circle, which not only awarded the picture its prize as best film of 1982, but awarded Ben Kingsley, who played Gandhi (a remarkably good performance), its prize as best actor of the year. But I cannot believe for one second that these awards were made independently of the film’s content—which, not to put too fine a point on it, is an all-out appeal for pacifism—or in anything but the most shameful ignorance of the historical Gandhi.

California’s Potemkin Environmentalism

A celebrated green economy produces pollution elsewhere, ongoing power shortages, and business-crippling costs.
by Max Schulz

In January 2007, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger stood before the California legislature in Sacramento and delivered his fourth State of the State address since his improbable 2003 election. It was a rhetorical tour de force that would win him widespread acclaim. “California has the ideas of Athens and the power of Sparta,” said Schwarzenegger. “Not only can we lead California into the future; we can show the nation and the world how to get there.”
Schwarzenegger especially celebrated California for its leadership on energy and the environment. Just three months earlier, he had signed the Global Warming Solutions Act, committing California to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels—roughly 25 percent below today’s—by 2020, and all but eliminating them by 2050. The Governator then lambasted the Bush administration for failing to tackle global warming: “It would not act, so California did. California has taken the leadership in moving the entire country beyond debate and denial to action.” Such performances have helped establish Schwarzenegger as a national figure, even a statesman, on the environment. In April 2007, he posed for the cover of Newsweek, spinning a globe on his finger under the bannerleadership & the environment, and in September, he even addressed the United Nations on climate change.
Schwarzenegger’s reputation as an environmental trailblazer is in keeping with California’s recent history and self-perception. California’s political leaders, business titans, academics, and environmental activists proudly point to the fact that the state has infused its public policy over the last four decades with an environmental consciousness unmatched in the United States, while also maintaining a dynamic economy, arguably the eighth-largest on the planet, with a gross state product of more than $1.6 trillion. The widely shared assumption is that forward-looking Athenian wisdom has nourished awesome Spartan power.
In truth, however, the Golden State’s energy leadership is a mirage. California’s environmental policies have made it heavily dependent on other states for power; generated some of the highest, business-crippling energy costs in the country; and left it vulnerable to periodic electricity shortages. Its economic growth has occurred not because of, but despite, those policies, which would be disastrous if extended to the rest of the country.

Amazing. 'Authorities do not yet have a motive'

Suspect in flight disturbance had Calif. ID

Published May 09, 2011 | Associated Press

The passengers sat stunned as they watched a man walk quickly toward the front of American Airlines Flight 1561 as it was descending toward San Francisco. He was screaming and then began pounding on the cockpit door.

"I kept saying to myself: 'What's he doing? Does he have a bomb? Is he armed?'" passenger Angelina Marty said.

Within moments Sunday, a flight attendant tackled Rageh Almurisi. Authorities do not yet have a motive.

While authorities said that Almurisi, 28, of Vallejo, Calif., has no clear or known ties to terrorism, the incident underscored fears that extremists may try to mount attacks to retaliate for the death of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden last week.

Federal agents are investigating Almurisi's background. He was carrying a Yemeni passport and a California identification card, authorities said.

Yemen, a nation at the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula, has been a focus of U.S. officials because one of the most active branches of al-Qaida operates in the remote part of the country.

Almurisi went toward the cockpit door 30 minutes before the flight from Chicago was supposed to land on Sunday night, San Francisco airport police Sgt. Michael Rodriguez said. Almurisi was yelling unintelligibly as he brushed past a flight attendant.

Marty, 35, recalled that she and other passengers on the plane were stunned when they saw Almurisi walking down the aisle. She said a woman in a row across from her who speaks Arabic translated that Almurisi said "God is Great!" in Arabic.

Andrew Wai, another passenger, told KGO-TV on Monday that the wife of one of the men who took Almurisi down later said Almurisi was yelling "Allahu Akbar."

"There was no question in everybody's mind that he was going to do something," Marty said.

A male flight attendant tackled Almurisi, and other crew members and passengers, including a retired Secret Service agent and a retired San Mateo police officer, helped subdue him as he banged on the door, police said. The flight attendant put plastic handcuffs on him.

"Everybody was fixated on him," Marty said. "You never think that something like that would happen in your life."

Wai also said Almurisi appeared "fidgety" in his seat when he saw him on the way to the bathroom earlier in the flight.

The Boeing 737 carrying 162 people landed safely at 9:10 p.m. Almurisi was placed into police custody, as some passengers cried.

"Flight attendants were trying to soothe different passengers," Wai said. "We were all looking at our lives flash before our eyes."

Federal authorities took Almurisi into custody Monday morning after he spent the night at the San Mateo County jail, said San Mateo County Chief Deputy District Attorney Karen Guidotti. Almurisi was being held on suspicion of interfering with a flight crew, a federal offense, according to authorities.

No one else was hurt and the airport continued operating normally with security levels unchanged, the officer said.

There were two other mid-air disturbances on Sunday.

A 34-year-old man from Illinois tried to open a plane door on a Continental Airlines flight from Houston to Chicago. Investigators questioned him, but did not file charges.

There was a security scare aboard a Delta Air Lines flight from Detroit to San Diego, prompting it to land in Albuquerque, N.M. Authorities did not release any more details, except to say that "no suspicious devices" were found. No one was arrested.

If you are drowning in Debt this is a good investment

Lifeguarding in OC is totally lucrative; some make over $200k

High pay and benefits for lifeguards in Newport Beach is the latest example of frustrating levels of compensation for public employees. More than half the city’s full-time lifeguards are paid a salary of over $100,000 and all but one of them collect more than $100,000 in total compensation including benefits.

When thinking about career options with high salaries, lifeguarding is probably not one of the first jobs to come to mind. But it apparently should. In one of Orange County’s most desirable beach destinations, Newport Beach, lifeguards are compensated all too well; especially compared with the county annual median household income of $71,735.

It might be time for a career change.

According to a city report on lifeguard pay for the calendar year 2010, of the 14 full-time lifeguards, 13 collected more than $120,000 in total compensation; one lifeguard collected $98,160.65. More than half the lifeguards collected more than $150,000 for 2010 with the two highest-paid collecting $211,451 and $203,481 in total compensation respectively. Even excluding benefits like health care and pension, more than half the lifeguards receive a total salary, including overtime pay, exceeding $100,000. And they also receive an annual allowance of $400 for “Sun Protection.” Many work four days a week, 10 hours a day.

Lifeguarding in Newport Beach is a pretty good gig, if you can get it.

There is no denying that lifeguards protect swimmers and play a vital safety role in protecting numerous beachgoers every year. In 2010, the total number of rescues by Newport Beach lifeguards was 2,190. Even so, these salaries seem too generous, and the compensation levels don’t appear fiscally sane.

Currently, Newport Beach has 13 full-time active lifeguards and hires about 210 seasonal and part-time “tower” guards, Newport Beach City Manager David Kiff told us. Lifeguards are organized as part of the fire department. The Lifeguard Management Association represents the 13 full-time, salaried employees in collective bargaining with the city whereas the Association of Newport Beach Ocean Lifeguards represents the part-time, seasonal lifeguards.

In a phone conversation, Brent Jacobsen, president of the Lifeguard Management Association, defended the lifeguard pay in Newport Beach: “We have negotiated very fair and very reasonable salaries in conjunction with comparable positions and other cities up and down the coast.” “Lifeguard salaries here are well within the norm of other city employees.” And therein is the problem: Local public worker pay has become all too generous and out of line with private sector equivalents.

Repudiating the National Debt

"We" (the burdened taxpayers) owe it to "ourselves" (our betters living off the proceeds of taxation).

By Murray N. Rothbard - 22 Feb 1981

In the spring of 1981, conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives cried. They cried because, in the first flush of the Reagan Revolution that was supposed to bring drastic cuts in taxes and government spending, as well as a balanced budget, they were being asked by the White House and their own leadership to vote for an increase in the statutory limit on the federal public debt, which was then scraping the legal ceiling of one trillion dollars. They cried because all of their lives they had voted against an increase in public debt, and now they were being asked, by their own party and their own movement, to violate their lifelong principles. The White House and its leadership assured them that this breach in principle would be their last: that it was necessary for one last increase in the debt limit to give President Reagan a chance to bring about a balanced budget and to begin to reduce the debt. Many of these Republicans tearfully announced that they were taking this fateful step because they deeply trusted their President, who would not let them down.

Famous last words. In a sense, the Reagan handlers were right: there were no more tears, no more complaints, because the principles themselves were quickly forgotten, swept into the dustbin of history. Deficits and the public debt have piled up mountainously since then, and few people care, least of all conservative Republicans. Every few years, the legal limit is raised automatically. By the end of the Reagan reign the federal debt was $2.6 trillion; now it is $3.5 trillion and rising rapidly [ed. Note: $13,365 trillion, by May 2011]. And this is the rosy side of the picture, because if you add in "off-budget" loan guarantees and contingencies, the grand total federal debt is $20 trillion ($120 by May 2011) .

minority opinion