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Tagged DJ Rippert

¡Viva la Revolución!

Posted on March 5, 2012 by Peter Galuszka| 2 Comments

Estimado Jefe!

Usted nunca debe salir de la ciudad, señor! Ahora que usted está ausente, la revolución comienza! Amados lectores de ya no ver los artículos que glorifican a los ricos y privilegiados. Vamos a ayudar a la tierra y los pobres y redistribuir los fondos de cobertura. ¡Viva la Revolución!

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Tagged goozeviews

Adios, Amigos

Posted on March 2, 2012 by James A. Bacon| 3 Comments

Tomorrow, mis amigos, I’m off to the Club Med in sunny Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. I don’t plan to do any blogging, but I will check in periodically to make sure that Peter G. hasn’t launched a Bolshevik putsch in my absence! I’m looking for a total R&R experience — lots of reading, a little writing (non-blog), some pilates and treadmill work and perhaps some wind surfing.

Rest assured that rum will be swilled in copious quantities, food consumed — hmmm, huevos rancheros son ricos — and dice games played. (The Bacons and friends are farkle fanatics.) One of the things I love about Club Med, aside from the unlimited booze, is the cosmopolitan crowd. Lots of French and Spanish spoken there. I speak mangled French and managed to pick up a couple hundred words of Spanish from Rosetta Stone over the past month. I can hardly wait to make a fool of myself. (My son has vowed to disown me if I try communicating en espanol. Just try it, muchacho!)

Oh, yeah, one more thing about Club Med: Las mujeras frances no se llevan las camesitas on the beach. That’s probably not grammatical but you catch my drift!

– JAB

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General, Politician and Entrepreneur

Posted on February 28, 2012 by James A. Bacon| 4 Comments

G.W. was more than just a guy with wooden teeth who wore a wig, more than a general and president. He was a successful entrepreneur.

by James A. Bacon

President’s Day is more than a week past, not that anyone paid much attention to it anyway (except for Peter G., who penned this piece comparing the myth-making surrounding the founding fathers to the propaganda of Josef Stalin). It’s the day we commemorate the contributions of America’s two greatest presidents, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Of the two, Washington has faltered the most in the popular imagination. Nobody believes the chopping-down-the-cherry-tree tale anymore, and even fewer even appreciate the moral of that fable, “I cannot tell a lie.” “Hey, dude, didn’t you ever hear of situational ethics?” Indeed, for many, Washington was a Founding Hypocrite who espoused liberty for whites while depriving blacks of their freedom. At least Lincoln is revered in modern memory for abolishing the Peculiar Institution.

But Washington is worth remembering, and not just for his role as the nation’s first president or the general who led the 13 colonies to independence. He was one of Virginia’s, and arguably the nation’s, most successful entrepreneurs and businessmen.

: G.W.’s gristmill

This brief essay in Real Clear Markets praises Washington for his entrepreneurial acumen. Washington transformed Mount Vernon from a failing tobacco plantation inso a diversified agroindustrial empire that cultivated wheat, milled it, branded it and sold it throughout the colonies, in England and even in Portugal. His enterprises included a fishery, a gristmill, meat processing, textile and weaving manufactory, brickmaking… (my favorite)…. a distillery. He owned a cargo-carrying schooner and he invested in land development schemes from the Dismal Swamp to the Ohio River basin.

And, yes, George Washington did own slaves. He did not create the institution, he inherited it. But unlike those morally self-righteous voices who criticize the founding fathers for falling short of 21st century ideals without appreciating from where those ideals originated, he wrestled with the inconsistency between his ideals and his material self interest. Tell me how many people today embrace principles that undercut their source of wealth and power to the benefit of someone else? How many left-wing trust fund babies give away the ill-gotten lucre accumulated by their robber-baron ancestors? Not many.

Acutely aware of the contradiction between ideals and practice, Washington worked tirelessly in the last few years of his life not merely to free his slaves upon his death but to create the conditions to ensure their well being — providing for their education and the support of children and the elderly — when they became free. When we see how Martin Luther King’s soaring rhetoric — judging a man by the content of his character rather than the color of his skin — has degenerated today into squalid identity politics, race hustling and envy-driven wealth-transfer schemes, Washington stands all the taller in my esteem.

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Posted in 2012, Race and race relations, Uncategorized

Tagged James A. Bacon

This Guy Just Won’t Shut Up!

Posted on February 27, 2012 by James A. Bacon| Comments Off

Jim Bacon talks budget, transportation and public policy wonkery on WRIR radio with Will Snyder. Click here to start the podcast. Scroll ahead to 40:00 to get to the good stuff.

Bacon talks even more transportation with Norm Leahy at The Score Radio Network. Click here for the podcast.

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“Our Bodies; “Our Idiot Selves”

Posted on February 24, 2012 by Peter Galuszka| 10 Comments

By Peter Galuszka

Forty two years ago, a feminist group titled “the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective” got together to start researching their own books about female health since they distrusted what they considered the male-dominated medical establishment.

A substantial part of their research had to deal with birth control since the pill had been out for several years although the Roe vs. Wade U.S. Supreme Court decision, allowing limited abortion, was still three years away. Their book “Our Bodies, Ourselves” became a best-seller.

Flash forward 42 years to Virginia. The General Assembly is embroiled in a fiasco over conservative attempts to force-introduce state power into the sexual lives of women through laws that would force women exercising their legal right to an abortion to have ultrasound exams in their first trimester of pregnancy to somehow shame them into not going through with the procedure. Another would declare “personhood” as being that point when an egg is fertilizer and a human life is created.

The result, of course, has been one of the biggest legislative disasters in years. Virginia is the butt of jokes on Saturday Night Live and the Daily Show. Republican Gov. Robert F. McDonnell’s multi-year-young effort to recast himself from social to moderate conservative is in shambles, his future in national politics in doubt.

So, how did we get here? The story appears to be one of ignorance and incompetence, so very unlike what happened in Boston four decades ago. The key issue is that legislators apparently didn’t understand that to determine the age of a fetus accurately, the use of a probe that is put inside a woman’s vagina is needed. They had apparently assumed that the ultrasound could be achieved in a less upsetting way by smearing the pregnant woman’s abdomen with a jell and then using a sound wand. According to The Washington Post, Sen. George Baker, a Fairfax Democrat had doubts and asked fellow Democrat, Sen. Ralph S. Northam, a doctor from Norfolk, who said he’d check. It turned out that yes, an invasive vaginal probe was needed.

The news completely changed the politics of the bill. But one wonders why legislators didn’t know this from the beginning. If they did, they weren’t exactly forthcoming about it.

One answer could be by studying the background of Del. Kathy Bryon, a Lynchburg Republican, who has been a legislator since the late 1990s. She introduced one of the bills that would require the transvaginal ultrasound. Ms. Bryon is a grandmother whose personal education did not go beyond high school. She worships at Thomas Road Baptist Church, home base for the late and controversial televangelist Jerry Falwell. When not working on public matters, she and her husband run a small telemarketing company.

Bryon was also an official of the Tobacco Indemnification and Community Revitalization Commission, a body set up back in the late 1990s to handle hundreds of millions of dollars in funding the state is receiving from a 1996 lawsuit with 45 other states against four big tobacco firms, including Phillip Morris USA. The Commission was supposed to use some of its funds to help out tobacco belt towns with economic development projects.

It did get a black eye when its former executive director, John Forbes II was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison for diverting $4 million from an alleged educational program to his own use. Although Bryon was not been linked to the Forbes scandal, she has been criticized for helping arrange a $12 million grant in public, tobacco fund money to help build the “Center for Health and Medical Sciences.” It is part of Lynchburg’s Liberty University, which, of course, is a religious school affiliated with the late Jerry Falwell’s church.

Thus, Byron’s involvement seems one of local political logrolling, Lynchburg-style, than a sophisticated understanding of women’s health issues. A case in point: the ultra-conservatives pushing the ultrasound idea didn’t get the difference between a transvaginal probe and a sticky abdominal jell and just how the former presented an even more profound violation to a woman’s rights. The fact that the U.S. Supreme Court says she has a right to an abortion in limited cases makes Bryon’s ignorance and activism even more disturbing.

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Posted in Abortion, Courts and law, Health care, Politics, Uncategorized

Tagged goozeviews

“The Iron Lady”

Posted on February 5, 2012 by Peter Galuszka| 5 Comments

By Peter Galuszka

“The Iron Lady,” a biopic starring Meryl Streep, has brought fresh attention to the policies and philosophies of Margaret Thatcher, the ground-breaking leader who served as Great Britain’s Prime Minister for 11 years – from 1979 to 1990.

Always controversial, Thatcher pioneered much of the conservative framework still in play today, such as privatizing state-owned companies, bashing labor unions, cutting budgets, pushing for flat taxes payable at equal rates by rich and poor and promoting the idea of individual opportunity as a national driver.

As we now see two decades later, while initially successful, a lot of Thatcherism turned out to be bunk and we are suffering for it now. That said, I have to admit that Thatcher is a fascinating personality.

My own involvement came in 1987 when I was a magazine correspondent in Moscow. She was visiting Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader and man she could “do business with.” She and Ronald Reagan set up the policies that helped lead to the transition of the Soviet Union although neither should get too much credit for destroying that Communist-run state. The real cause of death was decades of internal rot, but that’s another subject.

When Thatcher walked up to the podium at the Foreign Ministry press center on the Garden Ring Road in downtown Moscow, the air practically went electric. She was a truly stunning presence. Her direct manner of speech in her high-pitched voice had the audience riveted. She answered questions with great speed and wit. She was a crystallographer by training but had a natural sense of politics and theater.

Reagan, whom I also heard in Moscow, seemed like a purely stage-managed Hollywood production. He entered the stage with a friendly wave and a stunning brown suit, but he seemed extraordinarily simple-minded, as if he didn’t really understand what was going on and was reading from a very good TelePrompter.

Thatcher, to be sure, had plenty of enemies. She came to power when the U.K. was in a recession far worse than the one the U.S. has recently endured. When I visited the West Midlands in the early 1980s, British television news was a steady stream of job cuts. She beat back union and government control that had dominated the economy since World War II and with great fanfare privatized a few big, government-controlled corporations. She led the Brits in their pathetic war with Argentina over the Falklands and took a tough line against the Irish Republican Army. In the process of the latter, her tough stances spurred a number of deadly bombings. Post-Thatcher negotiations finally
sorted things out.

Her model of privatization and budget spending became the role model in the last decades of the 20^th century and the decade so far this century. Longer term, her results have been mixed. The Russians were encouraged to follow the Thatcher model with privatization and ended up with the oligarchs and Vladimir Putin. Bill Clinton was actually a Thatcherite and his go-easy regulatory policies regarding Wall Street, along with George W. Bush’s ineptitude, helped set the U.S. up for the Great Recession.

Still, the movie is a good touchstone to ponder the Thatcher years. Despite an excellent performance by Streep, the movie is marred by its boringly-long portrayal of an elderly Thatcher suffering from dementia. It really doesn’t go too far in examining her policies. The movie, like Thatcher herself, seems a promising idea gone wrong.

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Posted in Budget, Economic development, Politics, Regulation, Social services, Taxes, Uncategorized

Tagged goozeviews

The Ultrasound Abortion

Posted on January 29, 2012 by Peter Galuszka| 11 Comments

By Peter Galuszka

Abortion is always a very unpleasant topic just as it must be horrendous for a woman to be in a position to make such as choice. Still, it is her constitutional right, the law of the land.

So, after years of trying, Virginia’s conservative legislators are on the verge of putting themselves, and the power of the state, in between a pregnant woman and her doctor with a measure that would require that an ultrasound examination be performed before the abortion takes place. In six other states that have such a provision, the mother would be “offered” a chance to see the result although not required to do so, according to Guttmacher Institute.

Experts agree that there’s no medical reason for an ultrasound in the first trimester of a pregnancy. Rather, such a requirement is a naked psychological ploy to assault the mother with feelings of guilt and play on her emotions to not go through the procedure. Even though abortion is legal within limits, this extra requirement would be both medieval and insulting. Not to mention sexist: men don’t have to endure such state-sanctionned manipulation.

In Virginia, however, women may soon have to. By an 8-7 vote, the Republican-controlled Education and Health Committee has endorsed the ultrasound requirement and have sent it to the full Senate, which, thanks to the GOP’s refusal to share power, it is likely to pass, given the 20-20 imbalance of power and Republican Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling holding the deciding vote. Ultrasound bills are being pushed by Sen. Jill Vogel, R-Fauquier County and Sen. Ralph Smith, R-Roanoke County.

What’s so utterly hypocritical of many conservatives is how they pick and chose their fights. Most of the time, they are lecturing us that we need to get government and its regulations away from people’s everyday lives. We need smaller government and should leave as much as possible to personal choice.

But not when it comes to one of the most painful and personal decisions a woman makes. Swollen with their moral authority, they want to be there, dressed in a blue hospital gown beside the doctor, laying on a profound guilt trip to an experience that is most times already wracked with grief. They are assuming that women (not men) are too stupid to understand what abortion is despite their right to one that is bound by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The General Assembly needs to keep its nose out of the doctors’ offices. It needs to respect the intelligence of women to make a choice that is legally theirs to make.

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Posted in Abortion, Children and families, Courts and law, Health care, Insurance, Uncategorized

Tagged goozeviews

Does Vlad Have the Right Idea?

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Peter Galuszka| 10 Comments

By Peter Galuszka

As conservatives argue about cutting deficits and keeping low taxes for the rich both in Virginia and nationally, a bigger question is coming up: does Vladimir I. Lenin actually have the answer?

Sounds strange, I know, but not if you read Britain’s center-right weekly business newsweekly, The Economist. In a leader titled, “The Rise of State Capitalism,” they note that the success of state-private economies in China and Singapore, countries such as Brazil and South Africa are flirting with the idea of turning back some of their privatization work and going more with state-owned companies.

As the magazine states: “With the West in a funk and emerging markets flourishing, the Chinese no longer see state-directed firms as a way station on the way to liberal capitalism; rather, they see it as a sustainable model.”

Also underscoring the success of state-influenced economies is a recent and startling Brookings Institution report that rates 200 global urban areas for their economic performance. Shanghai leads the list, followed by cities in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, India and more in China. None is an example of traditional, U.S.-style market capitalism.

Indeed, you have to go pretty far down the list, to spot 19, to find the first U.S. city, which is Houston and that’s all petroleum money. Washington is No. 134. We don’t even get to the Old Dominion until No. 159 and Virginia Beach. Richmond is a stunningly bad No. 191, beating out only comatose Sacramento among U.S. cities.

The study should be a wakeup call to Baconauts and Boomergeddons everywhere that maybe they are barking up the wrong tree. Or maybe, even worse, they are completely clueless. At Mr. Jefferson’s Capitol, legislators are playing shell games with budgets to make Mickey D. McDonnell seem like a modern, Republican governor worthy of a vice presidential run. And, we’re screwing around with public private partnerships such as the massive U.S. 460-area highway to give private biz a cut and let them toll the crap out of the rest of us for years — all in the name of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan who left the scene more than 20 years ago.

While budget hawks complain about the big bad government and public spending on such things as social services and infrastructure, their beloved model is fading into the dust bin of history. I’m no China expert, but I, like everyone, was taken aback by the modern, efficient cities of Shanghai and
Beijing when I visited in October. Unlike the U.S., transportation was clean, efficient and hassle free.

Of course, The Economist must stay true to its OxBridge roots and come out warning that state capitalism with a big spoon of Asian Mandarin sauce might not be the best strategy for the West. But the trends are jolting and deserve a look.

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Posted in Budget, Demographics, Economic development, Economy, Finance, Infrastructure, Labor & workforce, Planning, Taxes, The Economy, Uncategorized

Good Move on Uranium

Posted on January 20, 2012 by Peter Galuszka| 2 Comments

By Peter Galuszka

Gov. Robert F. McDonnell has punted on the uranium controversy and that’s a good thing, assuming the General Assembly doesn’t lift the mining ban anyway.

There are simply too many unknowns about mining the tract owned by Virginia Uranium near Chatham and the state has no knowledge or regulations about mining the highly toxic and radioactive substance.

What’s more, there are big questions about whether it is needed. Market prices are stable and while developing countries such as China and India plan many new nuclear power stations, advanced economies such as Germany are scaling them back after the Fukushima disaster in Japan last year.

McDonnell’s decision comes despite an onslaught of expensive and extensive flackery by the local people who own the farms where the uranium deposit is located and the Canadians who actually control the company. The Virginia Public Access Project reports that Virginia Uranium has paid out more than $150,000 to political candidates and has hired five powerhouse Richmond-based PR firms. It paid all expenses for a dozen legislators who unwisely made a trip to France to see an abandoned uranium mine and who were treated to the delights of Paris on the way.

Virginia Uranium says it’s just dandy that McDonnell recommends delaying lifting the moratorium and continues its campaign, including a full page ad in the Richmond newspaper with drawings showing just how safely the tailings from the mine project would be stored.

The problem is that the issue isn’t just going away. If it doesn’t, the state will have to cough up money as schools go without to come up with regs. Virginia Uranium shouldn’t pay for them — they’d be tainted. But why should the state be burdened when it has so many other things on its “to pay” list?

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