I see two freighters trolling with a big net between them, picking up a current of garbage, and then maybe using it as fuel, rather than storing it (incinerating plant would have to be built in to the freighters).

This could be funded by the plastics council, and therefore, plastics manufacturers, since most of the garbage out there is plastic.

We always hear the first clause these days, touted as some kind of rationalization for free, ad-sponsored journalism online.

I have not heard the second clause in a long time. Yet, if consumers want an independent, brave, hard-hitting, press, they are going to have to pay for it themselves. No journal that depends solely on ad revenue will ever be truly independent of its ad clients. Ad clients will never be given negative coverage.

On the other hand, the more a journal depends on reader/subscriber revenue, the more it will tell it’s readers what they find useful. The bottom line is: you have to buy news you can use, people.

The goal, he said, is to create “a truly national deterrent” to hiring unauthorized labor that would “change the practices of American employers as a class.”

I could not agree more with this goal.  If employers were very clearly facing stiff fines and jail-time penalties for hiring illegal immigrants, they would never hire them.  Immigrants would then have no motivation, or much, much less motivation, to enter illegally and look for work.

The Bush administration’s dramatic roundups of illegals in workplaces was shameful grandstanding.  It put unfair blame and penury on illegals and let employers off scott free.

Hopefully this more enlightened policy will only continue, get stronger and more widespread, and prove truly effective at vastly reducing illegal immigration, and illegal employment.

Employers should also be more widely encouraged, or mandated, to use E-Verify to validate employee’s residency/citizenship credentials.

Illegal immigrants are, in the great majority, hard working people who just want to provide for themselves and their families.  If they risk their lives and freedom, and forsake their family ties back home, to try to work here in the United States, we can only imagine how bad working conditions must be in the places they left behind.

An effective anti-illegal immigrant policy will have two fronts:

1. maximally deter employers here in the US from hiring illegals, thereby removing the motivation for illegal immigration.
2. pressure – or help – the countries from which illegal immigrants come to improve their own socio-economic environment, thereby, again, removing the motivation for emigrating.

The program is a boon and lifeline to the industry, not to the homebuyer.  It amounts to a price inflating subsidy on a product — in this case, homes.  Homes are pricing with some portion of the credit factored in, because owners and buyers know not to haggle over the last couple grand.  Uncle Sam will take care of that: hand it to the buyer at the end of the year if the buyer gives it upfront to the homeowner.

This subsidy has only  given people who were going to buy soon a little kick in the pants to buy now.  This is great for realtors and loan originators, because nothing was moving for them before the credit went into effect.  Like Cash for Clunkers did for deserted car showrooms, the First Time Home Buyer Credit is bringing lookers into the empty open-houses.

So it amounts to a small bailout of the real estate industry, which deserves to rot in the grave it dug for itself with its absurdly easy credit, fraudulent mortgages, and bogus securitization.

If the real estate industry really wants to see business, it could try reforming itself by:

• dealing in realistic prices (read: lower),
• building superior quality,
• hiring legal construction labor,
• lending responsibly,
• and what I’d like really like to see: renovating lots that already exist rather than continuing to clear the far out exurbs for new development no one wants to drive to.

You may argue that the industry has already reformed its lending, it is now very hard for people who don’t have stellar credit to get a mortgage.  True, it is.  So, the only buyers able to use this subsidy are very responsible people, who know how to save and manage their money.  Not the kind of person who,

• a: is likely to be pursuaded to make a 30 year commitment by the tease of a tax credit.
• b:  is likely to need the credit to make the purchase.

Let the credit expire, let prices adjust naturally, and let the industry sink or swim on its own merits.  As generous as it may look to home buyers, this was really a bailout of real estate agents and morgtage lenders.  They’re all over DC lobbying for an extension.  If buyers felt so passionately about it also, you’d expect them to be up on the Hill, too.  But they’re not, are they?

Here are some anecdotes from people I know:

1. A retired elderly couple with a good private insurance plan:  The wife developed a debilitating, and ultimately fatal, degenerative spinal disease.  She was required to spend months in the hospital while suffering intense pain.  Her insurance company canceled her coverage when she reached the 90 day maximum for days spent hospitalized.  Her husband couldn’t conscientiously take her out of the hospital.  She needed constant care and medication.  He ended up paying for her hospitalization out of his own pocket until she passed away, and he was nearly bankrupt when she did pass away.

   He was going to be faced, if she had kept on living, with a horrible decision about how to take care of his wife when his savings ran out.  The insurance company insisted on dropping hospital coverage after ninety days, when everyone knows that the very purpose of insurance is to cover the unpredictability of ill health over any given period of time, not an arbitrarily determined ninety days.

2. I have a friend who works for a government defense contractor.  She has a good administrative position, and a middle class salary.  The contracting company is British.  It has a contract with the US Government in the DC area.  The company offers her an insurance plan, but it is unaffordable.  The monthly premiums are too high for her to insure herself and her children, and still buy food and pay her rent.  She’s single, her ex-husband cannot contribute. She earns too much to get state coverage for her children, and too little to afford the plan offered by her employer. They have no choice but to go without any insurance whatsoever.

   This strikes me as very nearly criminal hypocrisy by this British contractor. The company is run from the UK, a country which DOES have public health insurance, where all of its UK employees automatically covered in some form or another. It comes over here to exploit a lucrative US Government contract, and profits from the the fact that it is not obligated to provide an affordable plan to the US citizens it employs.

   The US Government is just as guilty here. It has outsourced work that should be done by government employees to a foreign company that refuses to provide American citizens benefits equivalent to those they would receive, were they directly employed by the US Government.

Sadly, in the U.S., being privately insured, or being a full-time employee, is still no guarantee of trouble-free insurance. This is plain and simple thievery on the part of the insurance companies. I don’t want to lower the bar on what I want from health care reform, but without a doubt, reforming the laws that govern private insurance would go a very long way all by itself.

If you a have story about an experience with private insurance that you think illustrates what is wrong with healthcare in the US today, tell us about it in the comments.

Obama’s speech tonight did a good job of spelling out his ideas in more detail. Gave me somewhat more of an understanding of how it might come together. Still a lot ifs and hows, but definitely something the country needs to work towards, not use as a divisive, polarizing wedge issue.

This interview on You Tube is a nice digest of the book.

Why read the book?  It’s a lot more persuasive than Mr. Olberman’s production, very well written, and loaded with facts and statistics that make Klein’s argument seem incontrovertible.

Is it?

Milton Friedman sounds quite convincing defending himself in interviews.  No surprise there, he managed to convince many very smart and strong minded heads of state all over the world to give his ideas a try.

Regretfully, I haven’t read much about Milton Friedman.   But from what I can gather from this book, he was a free market purist.  He believed that the free market could solve all ills, and that the smallest state intervention in the free market was the worst of all possible problems.  Klein claims, and seems to prove quite well, that Friedman’s theories, when put into practice, are as extreme, draconian, and murderous in reality as the theories of Communism taken to an extreme and put into practice.  

Students of Friedman spread out from the University of Chicago in the 60s to practice what they had learned.  What they realized, and with Friedman’s encouragement did not shy away from, is that the drastic economic reforms that are required to create a truly free market economy are impossible to impose on a democratic society.  The people will vote against them every time.  So a great shock that paralyzes a democracy, that numbs people to the point that they cannot fight back, must occur for the reforms to be put into place.  Once the reforms are in, the people will recover and grow into the new free market system.

The great shock, when the theory was first tried in the 70s, was murderous dictatorship, as experienced in Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia.

When Poland and China in the late 80s, and Russia in the early 90s, moved towards capitalism, the reforms were again authoritatively managed.

More recently, his theories have been put into practice following natural disasters, such as the Tsunami of 2004, Katrina in 2005, and in the worst realization of his ideas ever, in the man-made disaster that is Iraq.

Looking back on the 20th century with this book as a lens, I get the impression that to oppose Communism, the Western world needed an ideology as extreme and radical as Communism.  Milton Friedman gave it to us: pure, unfettered capitalism.  The United States, to Friedman’s great chagrin, was far too socialist, and it’s democracy far too strong, to experiment with his ideas.  So he and his students experimented elsewhere, starting in Latin America.

When Communism finally collapsed, it could be argued that Friedmanism was the only idea left, and that it could now progress unopposed.  And it certainly did.  In the US, the non-regulation of new derivatives in the early 90s, the dot com bubble, the housing bubble, the increasing gap between the rich and the poor, the contractor free for all  in the Iraq war, were all signs and symptoms of freer and freer markets.   Friedmanism had nothing  left to defeat except itself (isn’t that how it is with all extremist ideas?), which finally seems to have happened in 2008, with the credit crisis and the collapse of the financial system.  

So lo and behold, in 2009 we find even investment bankers believing in the third way, the middle way, the more socialist way.  Which brings me back to my lesson, that anyone advocating living an idea to it’s extremes is a crackpot to be avoided at all costs.  It will be interesting to see who is the first to show us what socialism taken to an extreme looks like.

The real solution:  Make addictive drugs legal like addictive cigarettes and alchohol, and spend millions on anti-drug education and addiction treatment.  Any employer could still require employees to be drug free, and test.  Jobs involving public health, safety, and transportation could and should, of course, require drug free employees.

De-criminalizing drugs would cause the prices of banned drugs to plummet, thereby removing all motivation for cartel and gang crime.  The Taliban in Afghanistan would lose a significant source of their financing. We might start winning a real war.

And growers might find more useful crops more remunerative.