Monthly Archives: January 2014

“The injustice of Virginia’s position in Loving will not be repeated this time.”

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Last week, in anticipation of this morning’s announcement by Attorney General Mark Herring’s office that he will not be defending the infamous “Marshall-Newman Amendment,” Republican delegates were already trying to lay the groundwork for an end run to get their way:

“[T]he attorney general’s job is like a judge. A judge will tell you, ‘Look, I might not agree with the law, but my job is basically not to make law. It is to look at what the law was [and what] the legislature intended,’ ” House Majority Leader M. Kirkland Cox (R-Colonial Heights) said.

That’s right. AG Herring looked at the Virginia constitutional and statutory ban on same-sex marriage, and what the legislature clearly intended by it, and made the determination that it was unconstitutional. Given the recent rulings in Utah and Oklahoma that affirm the reasoning of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Windsor, it’s clear that the Virginia amendment does, and was intended to, violate the due process and equal protection rights of Virginia same sex couples under the Fourteenth Amendment. There is a reason, after all, that the legal team of David Boies and Ted Olson, who so brilliantly argued the Prop 8 case on behalf of the American Foundation for Equal Rights, chose Virginia as their next venue: Virginia’s anti-marriage amendment is considered the most extremely worded and restrictive in the nation.

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Drinking Water – wasted, polluted, and at risk

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Water_faucetWe’ve all been taught that we are mostly made of water, how we need it to live, to drink, to clean, to grow anything we eat, to nourish the trees that produce the air we breathe, and yet our world right down to the county level where we live fails to protect this precious life resource – like we could survive without water.

300,000 men, women and children in West Virginia found that the water in their home faucets from the Elk River made them ill and smelled something like licorice.  It was the scent of 4-methylcyclohexane methanol.  A negligent coal mining company, Freedom Industries, earning 30 million dollars last year, had 13 tanks all sixty years old and one 35,000 gallon tank leaked 7,500 gallons of this chemical through cracks in the containment wall into the Elk River. Incidentally, the waste water treatment plant’s intake pipe took in the tainted water even after it had notice of the chemical spill, and pumped it out to its customers.  Needless to say, the treatment had not removed the chemical waste.

In Virginia, on January 8, 2014, State Senator Charles W. Carrico, Sr. (R-40SD), perhaps eager to mimic West Virginia’s careless regulatory system, offered a bill, SB 217, in the General Assembly that, if it passes, shall increase the likelihood that we’ll have coal waste in our rivers polluting our drinking water.  Continue reading →

Lessons Learned, by John Whitbeck

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John Whitbeck, Park View High School mass meeting, 2013-12-16

John Whitbeck, Park View High School mass meeting, 2013-12-16

John Whitbeck’s post-election-loss message contains some “lessons learned” that you might find interesting.

Those of you who know me well know that I am not one to get down when things don’t go my way.  In fact, I am already excited to move on to the next phase of my work on behalf of Virginians. That phase has become very clear to me after the results of yesterday’s election and let me share a few observations and goals with you.

First, the Republican Party is not as united as it could be and we need to find a way to correct this very soon.  There are several issues that have created factions within the Party and we need to find a way to reconcile these disagreements if we are going to maximize our success in elections.

There are several issues that have created factions? Could one of those issues be that first Dave LaRock, and then John Whitbeck, maligned twenty year Republican incumbent Joe May with epithets usually reserved for opponents representing the other party? And that the 10th CD under John Whitbeck then chose an exclusionary method for nominating…John Whitbeck?
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The Worst Person in the Universe: Congressman Frank Wolf

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Hat tip to Nolan Dalla for awarding Congressman Frank Wolf The Worst Person in the Universe award. Dalla writes:

Rep. Wolf is a longtime Republican congressman from Virginia.  He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives way back in 1980, riding the cozy coattails of Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory.  Since then, Rep. Wolf has been as faithful as a potted plant, deeply rooted to every corporate-funded, neoconservative, right-wing cause.  Like a slice of cold stale pizza, he’s one of the final leftovers of the late Jerry Falwell’s “Moral Majority,” a witch-hunting political movement of Bible-thumpers who once professed to know what’s good for us all, and was dedicated to transforming America into a modern theocracy named “Jesusville.”

In his so-called retirement, Wolf will continue to work with the worst theocratic elements in American society. His retirement statement says, emphasis and annotations mine:

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Saving For A “Rainy Day” – Not Really!

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Saving for a “rainy day” (Photo by John P. Flannery)

Saving for a “rainy day” (Photo by John P. Flannery)

A recent poll said that 40% of our friends and neighbors have made their New Year’s resolution – to save more – in savings accounts, automatic transfers, savings bonds, and certificates of deposit.

We once did save at a decent rate.  Our national saving rate was 12.2% in November 1981.  But the rate fell like a stone starting in 1982 and went as low as less than 1% a number of times between 2000 and 2010.  Easy credit meant you didn’t have to save – so some wrongly thought.

The rate climbed back up when the 2008 recession hit, going from 1.3% in January 2008 to 4.2% in December of 2009.

The latest report from the U.S. Department of Commerce, from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, says our current rate of savings is an anemic 4.2%.

The dilemma for families that want to save is that they likely owe in debt at a higher interest rate than what they can get saving their money.  From 1990 to 2008, the nation’s citizens were convinced, Benjamin Franklin’s advice to the contrary notwithstanding, that being a borrower was not so bad.  Unfortunately, if a nation’s citizens don’t save, then the nation has to borrow from other nation-states who do save. Continue reading →

Photos from 2009 Public Advocate stunt show Delgaudio working with his new extremist Library Board appointee

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Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words. We don’t yet know how many words Sterling supervisor Eugene Delgaudio will emit claiming that he didn’t know “much of anything” about Andrew Beacham, his nominee for Loudoun County’s Library Board – but we do know that they will be arranged into falsehoods.

According to Chairman York, who apparently agreed to nominate Beacham “on behalf of” his Sterling colleague (how does he manage to get himself into these predicaments?), “the information provided on Beacham was not very detailed. Beacham’s four-paragraph resume only said he had ‘worked in the field of media production and broadcasting over the last 4 years.'”

In fact, Beacham’s “work” includes publicly defacing the Koran “in support of Florida pastor Terry Jones” and other political theater acts with fringe anti-abortion extremist Randall Terry. He is active with nativist and anti-government groups in Loudoun, and calls himself a “full-time Pro-Life missionary and activist for Christian policies in government” while declaring that “the only good progressive is a dead progressive.”

Beacham did not move to Sterling by coincidence.

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Our Toxic Public Dialogue

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No one should admire the exploitation movie headlining Leonardo DiCaprio as “the Wolf of Wall Street” who holds a false fixed grin for three hours, selling us, inviting us to share the life of a greedy, sex-crazed sociopathic stockbroker, who dupes naïve middle class investors to buy worthless stocks so that DiCaprio’s character can live in a mansion, and have a helicopter, trophy wife, yacht, prostitutes galore, countless lines of coke, morphine, and endless quantities of Quaaludes.

One movie reviewer claimed the movie was “lethally hilarious.”

There’s nothing “hilarious” about porn, drug addiction, prostitution and marathon boiler rooms stealing from hard-working middle class “marks,” all the time glorifying the thugs in suits that laugh at their off-camera victims.  This movie is not “ordinary” movie fare; its aim is unrelenting painful excess that some mistake for the American dream.

The lead FBI agent who pursues DiCaprio’s criminal character, is featured in one of the movie’s final scenes, a disparaging setting, riding anonymously home on the Manhattan IRT with other working “stiffs” – underscoring DiCaprio’s earlier accusation in the flick that the Agent led a sorry life riding the subway home to an ugly wife (whom DiCaprio didn’t know to describe) while DiCaprio stood high and mighty on the deck of his lily white yacht throwing greenbacks at the agent.  Continue reading →

Fun with Dividend and Employment Numbers

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I was reading the other day about the massive dividends currently being paid by the companies in the S&P 500. Dividends, of course, are payments – generally out of profits – made by companies to their shareholders. When a company has “extra” cash (a.k.a profit) it has three choices as to what it can do with it. It can reinvest it in the company (e.g., giving employees raises, opening new offices or facilities, expanding product lines, etc). It can hold and “save” that capital in financial instruments, or it can payout that extra cash to its owners (shareholders) as dividends.

In 2013, the companies of the S&P 500 chose the third option, a lot. To the tune of almost $340,000,000,000 in dividend payments to shareholders. Most shareholders are institutions (e.g., pension funds) or individuals, more often than not the wealthiest individuals.

We know that this has been an infamous “jobless recovery,” as evidenced by the major push to extend emergency unemployment insurance by Democrats and the President (along with some right-minded Republicans). We also know that a major driver of job growth is consumer spending. So while I was reading this article about how corporate dividends in 2014 were projected to be a record breaking $352,000,000,000, I found myself engaging in a thought experiment:

What if, instead of paying dividends, all those corporations gave every employed American a bonus instead? What would that look like? I wanted to do this thought experiment because I remembered how our elected officials were so bullish on the the idea that giving everybody a tax rebate check would help our economy in 2008 (when Geo. W. Bush was still president, not incidentally).

According to the BLS, the civilian employed labor force was 155,294,000 in December 2013. That’s just people with jobs. It doesn’t include the unemployed, the incarcerated, or those in the military.

Given that, it is a simple matter to determine how much of a bonus S&P Corporations could afford to pay every working American. We just divide the number of employed people in America into the value of the dividends paid by the S&P Corporations. (Remember, this money is from dividends, so comes from profits, not revenues. That is, it is “extra” cash these companies have on hand after paying for all operations and interest etc.)

“You have a job, here’s a bonus” bonus = $2,185

Interesting, huh? I would certainly appreciate a $2,000 check from the companies I’ve done my part supporting by participating in this economy.

Put another way, it would take someone working for the minimum wage seven and a half weeks to earn the amount that the nation’s biggest corporations could afford to give them as a bonus, without impacting operations at all.

Of course companies need to pay dividends. And dividends are critical to the long-term stability of the de facto U.S. retirement system, which is based on institutional investment in corporate stocks and bonds. But it seems to me that corporations could afford to reinvest some of that capital in their workforce, in the form of raises. If instead of paying record-breaking dividends, they just paid staggering dividends, they could afford to give all their U.S. employees not insignificant raises, which would have a pretty big impact on boosting our economy.

Just a thought experiment for a Tuesday afternoon.