Grantcoulson's Blog

 
    Do not think about, write about or deal with  human behavior without determining the effects of incentives.

Winning Goalie Refuses To Go To White House Reception

Thomas gives Obama the brush-off
Turns down White House invitation
By QMI Agency
   

Tim Thomas isn’t just a good goalie, he’s a rather feisty right winger, too.

The Boston Bruins were honoured Monday at the White House for capturing the Stanley Cup last spring, and virtually everyone showed up — even the usually invisible Tomas Kaberle.

But the star of the 2010-11 Bruins stayed away. Thomas — the lone American on the team to get his name on the trophy — opted to snub U.S. President Barack Obama.

Apparently there is no "Tim" in "team."

Even the Bruins brass couldn’t convince the goalie to attend … heck, he could have put on his mask and gone incognito.

"Everybody has their own opinions and political beliefs and he chose not to join us," Bruins president Cam Neely told Comcast Sportsnet New England. "We certainly would have liked to have him come and join us, but that’s his choice."

General manager Peter Chiarelli said he had discussed the issue with Thomas for several months. Chiarelli said he could suspend the 38-year-old goalie for skipping a team event but that he wouldn’t.

Thomas is known for having strong conservative leanings and has been called a "Tea Party patriot."

He released a statement on his Facebook page Monday evening.

"I believe the Federal government has grown out of control, threatening the Rights, Liberties, and Property of the People," Thomas wrote.

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     Aside from distorting the economy, degrading the standard of living, passing the Patriot Act, confiscating wealth and dealing out massive gobs of Federal money to moribund industries, everything is OK.

"This is being done at the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial level. This is in direct opposition to the Constitution and the Founding Fathers vision for the Federal government.

"Because I believe this, today I exercised my right as a Free Citizen, and did not visit the White House. This was not about politics or party, as in my opinion both parties are responsible for the situation we are in as a country. This was about a choice I had to make as an INDIVIDUAL."

Thomas won the Vezina Trophy last season as the NHL’s top goalie and the Conn Smythe Trophy as the MVP of the playoffs.

Reaction was mixed, with some media members criticizing Thomas of political opportunism, with others respecting his willingness to take a stand.

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    Good for him. These people have to understand that they can have respect or a government job.

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

Do not think about, write about or deal with  human behavior without determining the effects of incentives.

     This could be subtitled: Regardless of reality, we’re entitled or The rhetoric should match the decade.

Caterpillar Rally

By Hank Daniszewski, Scott Taylor and Greg Colgan, QMI Agency

LONDON, Ont. – Prime Minister Stephen Harper and U.S. heavy equipment giant Caterpillar Inc. came under fire at a massive rally Saturday for locked-out locomotive workers.

Thousands of labour supporters from as far as the U.S. and northern Ontario filled downtown Victoria Park for a massive show of support for the nearly 500 unionized workers at locomotive-builder Electro-Motive Diesel, now three weeks into a lockout.

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    As the United Auto Workers are finding out, strikes don’t  really work in the face of economic reality. Only government unions have power and the handwriting is on the wall for them.

With London hobbled by the nation’s second-highest metro jobless rate, and fears the EMD jobs could be transferred to a low-cost plant in Indiana, emotions ran high at the rally organized by the Ontario Federation of Labour.

“Get your ass down here, Prime Minister Harper,” Mayor Joe Fontana, a former federal Liberal labour minister, told the whipped-up crowd.

He said the EMD workers, their lockout triggered by a wage-slashing contract offer, “have given their blood, sweat and tears for this plant and built the best locomotives in the world . . . You can’t buy their skills for $15 an hour.”

Labour organizers estimated the crowd at 15,000, but police said the number was more like 5,000.

The rally became a national focal point for many in organized labour, fearful a move by a big multi-national like Caterpillar to reduce wages could set a precedent.

Ken Lewenza, national president of the Canadian Auto Workers union, which represents the EMD employees, blames the Harper government for the loss of 450,000 manufacturing jobs.

He said the federal government should have blocked the sale two years ago of Electro-Motive to Caterpillar, which bought it from a U.S. equity firm that had picked it up from General Motors a few years earlier.

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    Getting the government to intervene would not have changed the international marketplace.

A $58-billion company, with plants and workers worldwide, Caterpillar owns EMD through its Progress Rail Services subsidiary. Caterpillar is a known hardnose in union bargaining, having wrestled wage and other concessions from unions in the U.S.

“Here is a corporation that wants to take $20 an hour from the workers and put it into the pockets of executives and shareholders,” Lewenza said.

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     This is known as argument by envy, one of the highest forms of logic.

The contract offer that triggered the lockout would dramatically cut wages and benefits for EMD workers, many of whom are paid double what Progress Rail pays workers at its locomotive plant in Muncie, Ind.

Lewenza said Harper — he visited the London plant in 2008 — assured EMD workers their jobs are more secure because of corporate tax cuts.

“PM Harper, you can make something that is morally wrong legally wrong,” said Lewenza, pointing out the absence of any Conservative MPs at the rally in a city represented by three Tory backbenchers.

Federal New Democrat leader Nycole Turmel denounced Harper for “hiding” on the lockout issue and urged the EMD workers not to give up.

The rally attracted a who’s who of big labour, including Sid Ryan of the Ontario Federation of Labour that organized the event and Ken Georgetti of the Canadian Labour Congress, who also slammed Caterpillar.

“They want to take away what we have struggled to build for decades,” Georgetti said, saying the EMD lockout has become the focus of labour across Canada.

Caterpillar and its operating divisions, Progress Rail and EMD, have remained silent during the three-week lockout, consistently declining interview requests.

On its website, Electro-Motive Canada has said the London factory “is not sufficiently flexible and cost competitive in the global marketplace. These factors put EMC’s London plant at a competitive disadvantage.”

Wages at the plant, which exports locomotives around the world, range as high as $35 an hour. The union says the offer would cut wages in all job classifications, with the deepest cut about $18.50 an hour for half of the workforce.

Bob Scott, the CAW plant chair at the London factory, said Caterpillar is tangling with the wrong workforce.

“Caterpillar, you want a fight? You got one. You pissed off the wrong membership here.”

<insert>

    The 50′s called, they want their rhetoric back.

While the rally attracted many from private and public-sector labour unions, it also drew non-labour supporters. One, a nun, said the lockout is a justice issue.

“Too many people are being excluded from the benefits of the economy and it is tearing at the fabric of society,” said Sister Sue Walker of the Sisters of St. Joseph in London. “Now is the time for the 99% to stand together.”

<end>

    Social justice–that’s the ticket.

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

   Do not think about, write about or deal with  human behavior without determining the effects of incentives.

    When you’re up to your ass in alligators, your choice of breakfast cereal is less important than you might imagine.

Brown Asks California to Cheer Rail Project
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
Published: January 18, 2012

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Jerry Brown on Wednesday threw his unequivocal support behind a $100 billion high-speed rail line that has come under fire here in California and across the country, embracing it in a strikingly optimistic State of the State speech in which he asserted that government should pursue ambitious ventures even during times of economic strife.

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      This is not a “time” of economic strife, it’s a fundamental change.

With his speech, Mr. Brown firmly linked his political fortunes to the proposed 520-mile bullet train connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles as he urged lawmakers to release the $9 billion in state bonds needed to begin the project this year. His focus on the train line, along with a new emphasis on dealing with the state’s water problems, suggested that Mr. Brown was trying to turn the page after a year in which the legacy of his second turn as governor seemed in danger of being defined by a series of budget battles and spending cuts.

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    Nine billion out of 100. Everyone should already be feeling better.

He made clear that the state’s fiscal problems were hardly behind it: Mr. Brown, a Democrat, formally called for putting before voters in November an initiative that would temporarily increase income taxes on the wealthy and sales taxes. And signaling a potential point of conflict with Democratic lawmakers, the governor said he would insist on further cuts to balance the budget if the tax initiative failed.

Still, Mr. Brown’s speech, coming after five economically tumultuous years here, was notable for its optimism.

“Every decade since the ’60s, dystopian journalists write stories on the impending decline of our economy, our culture and our politics,” he said, adding: “California has problems, but rumors of its demise are greatly exaggerated.”

Mr. Brown championed the rail project at a time when it has seemed increasingly endangered. The cost has doubled to $98.5 billion. The notion of starting the work in a sparsely populated section of the state has been ridiculed. And support for rail projects in Congress has all but died.

This month, an independent review panel created under state law raised questions about the financial feasibility of the plan and urged lawmakers to delay it. Within days, Mr. Brown pushed through a shake-up at the California High-Speed Rail Authority, the agency overseeing the project.

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    If this project is like other government rail lines, it will be cheaper to provide taxis.

“Critics of the high-speed rail project abound, as they often do when something of this magnitude is proposed,” he said in his speech, adding: “The Panama Canal was for years thought to be impractical, and Benjamin Disraeli himself said of the Suez Canal, ‘Totally impossible to be carried out.’ The critics were wrong then, and they’re wrong now.”

State Senator Ted W. Lieu, a Democrat, called the train “a symbol of what California can do,” but suggested that the project was as much about Mr. Brown as anything else.

“He is a much more practical governor now than maybe 30 years ago,” Mr. Lieu said. “But he is still a dreamer. High-speed rail is very evocative and is one of those things that I think he would like to be part of his legacy.”

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    More symbols of “what California can do” will be forthcoming–destroy a once thriving economy–look ridiculous–borrow far beyond the means to repay would be some of them.

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

      Do not think about, write about or deal with  human behavior without determining the effects of incentives.

M-O-O-D in the U-S-A

    Jeff Carter
  

    It’s awful tough to make a generalization on the mood of an entire nation, especially one as diverse as the US. However, there are enough clues out there with a common thread that tell me there is one dominant theme that is an election winner. The candidate that grabs that theme and speaks coherently about it will win.

It’s economics. It’s not JOBS JOBS JOBS. But it is a prescription on how we will get out of this no growth high debt mess.

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     No growth–high debt–could they possibly be related?

Americans have gotten a tremendous economic education lesson over the last four years. They have witnessed and experienced first hand what different economic paradigms do to daily life. When the facts are stacked up, it’s clear that some things work, and some things ought to be relegated to the economic dumpster behind policy makers buildings. Here are just a few economic lessons we have learned. Add your own in the comments.

We had a financial collapse from too much leverage. The government was the backstop of that leverage via Fannie, Freddie, FHA, and all kinds of other programs.

Lesson: If you keep the government out of finance, banks can’t build up artificial leverage to take extreme risk that will bankrupt a country.

<insert>

     Seems reasonable to me–leverage is really a bad idea.

We had regulations on the books that supposedly would stop corporate fraud. Sarbanes-Oxley was passed after Enron, Dodd-Frank passed after the 2008 debacle.

Lesson: Even with regulations on the books Jon Corzine and MF Global managed to steal $1.2 Billion from their own customers. Excessive regulation doesn’t prevent bad things from happening. Better to structure private markets in the correct way to do your regulating for you.

The government passed the most massive government spending package in history with the March 2009 stimulus. This was supposed to jumpstart the economy.

Lesson: The multiplier effect of government spending is 0. We have had almost zero economic growth for Obama’s entire term, with high unemployment. More people are on food stamps, unemployment benefits, and other government assistance than any time in American history. It only proves that if the government is going to give out free money, there will be plenty of hands out and minds working on how to get a piece of it.

<insert>

    For years, it was accepted that, if government spent money, it would have more impact than if private enterprise spent it. This is, and always has been, quite stupid so it was taught as Gospel in university courses on economics.

The government promoted green energy by spending money on several solar power firms, ethanol firms, ethanol subsidies. Most of those firms were later found to be large donors to the Obama campaign.

Lesson: Governments cannot pick winners and losers. Ethanol subsidies drove up the cost of food that destabilized much of the Middle East and other parts of the world. Green energy is a technology better left to private venture capitalists that can invest with constraints. The free market does a better job of picking energy resources and allocating money to them than a centralized government.

<insert>

    I disagree with this, whatever the government picks is a loser. If it is on the margin, subsidies will make the enterprise a loser.

The government bailed out big banks, and let smaller banks fail.

Lesson: When government gets involved in private industry, excesses occur. We are left with zombie banks that have terrible balance sheets and can’t go back to lending in the way that they once did. This causes a lack of economic growth over the long term. Better to let the banks go broke, take short term pain, and then let new healthier banks begin the process of rebuilding again.

We have watched the slow motion economic destruction of Keynesian Europe, and don’t want it to come here.

Lesson: As Rick Santelli says, “Stop Spending.” Ron Paul’s continued poll numbers hinge on his ability to tap into the people worried about the economic future of the country. His prescriptions for getting out of the situation are basically wrong (gold standard, end the Federal Reserve etc), but his tone is correct.

The candidate that talks about how to grow the economy using the private sector and decreasing the size of government will win the election. Last night in South Carolina, they had a Republican presidential debate. Newt Gingrich was most in command of the economic facts and what to do going forward than any other candidate. He is surging in polls today.

What’s also interesting is it took one hour and twenty two minutes last night for the first economic question to get asked. Why is the media not asking questions about the most important issue in people’s minds? Economic policy ought to be the only thing we are talking about since Obama has adopted most of Bush’s foreign policy and it seemingly is working.

The reason Mitt Romney has had a prohibitive lead the entire way is because most people think he has the most experience with real world economics and business and can lead the country out of this prolonged economic turmoil better than anyone else.

Obama will have to run on his economic record. It’s poor. It’s worse than poor. It’s a total fail. His platitudes should fall on deaf ears. Let’s hope Americans have learned their lessons well.

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    The lesson is, “The more economic activity is placed in irresponsible hands, the less real activity there will be.” When this lesson is learned, we may be on the road to recovery. The only way to stop them wasting money is to give them less of it.

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

   Do not think about, write about or deal with  human behavior without determining the effects of incentives.

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

“As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.”

“Power is not a means, it is an end.”

George Orwell

Even With Criminal Charges, Beverly Hills Supe Keeps Pension

Former Beverly Hills Schools Chief Jeffrey Hubbard is set to retain his pension, regardless of whether he’s convicted on charges of misappropriation of funds.

State pension officials have confirmed that former Beverly Hills Unified School District Supt. Jeffrey Hubbard is likely to retain his pension, regardless of whether he’s convicted or acquitted on charges of misappropriation of public funds, writes Britney Barnes at the Los Angeles Times.

Hubbard could face prison time or probation if he is found guilty on any of the three felonies he faces. He would see the loss of his credentials, but there is currently no stipulation in law that would affect his pension with the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, according to a CalSTRS spokesman.

    “Hubbard was charged with two felony counts of misappropriation of public funds in late 2010. A third charge was added in October,” writes Barnes.

Prosecutors have charged Hubbard with unlawfully giving a $20,000 stipend, without school board approval, to his subordinate, Karen Anne Christiansen, and illegally increasing her car allowance when he was serving as Beverly Hills Unified’s superintendent.

Christiansen was found guilty last week and has been sentenced to four years and four months in prison and ordered to pay $2 million in restitution.

Christensen was convicted of steering more than $7.5 million in Beverly Hills contracts to an energy company, Johnson Controls, that had paid her $15,000 on the side for an introduction to Hubbard at Newport-Mesa, writes Tony Saavedra at the Orange County Register.

Deputy District Attorney Max Huntsman said the school district recently negotiated a settlement with Johnson Controls that returns $6 million of the money to the schools, writes Saavedra.

    “Christiansen also was convicted of advocating for a $334 million construction bond that resulted in her consulting firm receiving $2.2 million to manage the proceeds.”

Christiansen was described as “crazed” in her advocacy by Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Stephen A. Marcus.

Christiansen and Hubbard’s relationship were investigated in the hearing. The apparent racy e-mails sent between the two officials began when he was in Beverly Hills and heated up after he moved to Newport-Mesa.

Hubbard is currently still in his position, despite being given a vote of no-confidence by the district’s teachers. He is on paid leave and has been given time to prepare for trial.

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   On salary and given time. This is, undoubtedly, the “social justice” we keep hearing about.

    “So far, the Newport school board has supported Hubbard.”

A hearing has been scheduled for Feb. 23 to decide whether Christiansen should pay $2 million in restitution to the Beverly Hills district.

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     When the elite is created, it creates special privileges for its members. This is why it’s called the elite. One of these privileges is escape from the vexations of responsibility. Couple that with outrageously high compensation packages and you have the very conditions which imply the respect I urge that we proles should visit upon them unreservedly–just kidding.

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

    President Obama wants to cut red tape. Alas it’s the kind of red tape in government agencies which provide money for businesses. Business is already distorted by government “help”. Abolishing helping agencies would save the money required by the well-served civil servants who make up the agencies and remove the temptation of real business to ask for government “help”.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/15/world/mexico-drug-war-essay/index.html?hpt=hp_c2

   Above is a reference to the death toll from Mexico’s war on drugs. As pointed out by many people, violence in the drug trade is “business violence”, violence against rival drug traders. If drug dealing were legal, such disputes would, a) usually not arise, and b), be settled in court and at least 50,000 people would still be breathing.