McCain won the night by acclamation with a brilliant attack on Hillary that not so subtly highlighted his own unique qualification for the presidency. Citing his record on controlling spending, he ridiculed Hillary's proposed $1 million earmark for a Woodstock museum. He didn't make it to Woodstock, McCain explained. He was "tied up at the time."
Several thousand Christian conservative voters rebuffed an olive branch from Republican White House hopeful Rudolph Giuliani Saturday, over his support for abortion rights.
The former New York mayor tops Republican national polls in the quickening 2008 race, but was unable to win over a cross-section of a crucial party voting bloc at a huge "Values Voter" conference in Washington.
In a presidential candidate straw poll of 5,775 evangelical voters at the meeting and online, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney came out on top, narrowly ahead of former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee.
.....The poll may also have been susceptible to stacking of online votes by campaigns -- Huckabee won 51 percent of votes of 952 people who voted in person at the conference, and Romney took only 10 percent.
Three men were charged Monday in the fatal campus shooting of a University of Memphis football player, authorities said.
Taylor Bradford, 21, was shot September 30 shortly before police found him fatally wounded in his car, which had crashed into a tree.
All three men were charged with murder in the perpetration of attempted aggravated robbery.
.........There will be a moment of silence at a football game at the university the night after Bradford was killed.
The classical theory of comparative advantage has driven US trade policy for the past fifty years. That policy, in combination with technical innovations that have lowered costs of transportation and communication, has opened the global economy. Yet paradoxically, this opening has rendered classical trade theory obsolete. That in turn has left the US economically vulnerable because its trade policy remains stuck in the past and based on ideas that no longer hold.
The logic behind classical free trade is that all can benefit when countries specialize in producing those things in which they have comparative advantage. The necessary requirement is that the means of production (capital and technology) are internationally immobile and stuck in each country. That is what globalization has undone.
Several years ago Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, captured the new reality when he talked of ideally having “every plant you own on a barge”. The economic logic was that factories should float between countries to take advantage of lowest costs, be they due to under-valued exchange rates, low taxes, subsidies, or a surfeit of cheap labor. Globalization has made Welch’s barge a reality. However, in doing so it has made capital mobility rather than country comparative advantage the engine of trade. And with that change, “free trade” increasingly trades jobs and promotes downward wage equalization.
The U.S. and European response to Welch’s barge has been competitiveness policy that advocates measures such as increased education spending to improve skills; lower corporate tax rates; and investment and R&D incentives. The thinking is increased competitiveness can make Europe and the US more attractive to businesses.
Unfortunately, competitiveness policy is not up to the task of anchoring the barge, and it can even be counter-productive. The core problem is corporations are globally mobile. Thus, government can subsidize R&D spending, but the resulting innovations may simply end up in new offshore factories. Moreover, competitiveness policy easily degenerates into a race to the bottom. For instance, if the US cuts corporation taxes, other countries may match to stay competitive. The result is no gain for the US, while profit taxes are lowered and tax burdens shifted on to wages, which widens income inequality.
Worse yet, capital mobility prompts countries to adopt unfair policies to increase their relative business attractiveness. These policies include disregard of environmental damage; suppression of labor to keep wages low; direct subsidies; and under-valued exchange rates. All are visible in China, which is the poster-child for such abuses.
A critical consequence of Welch’s barge is the creation of a “corporation versus country” divide. Previously, when corporations were nationally based, profit maximization by business contributed to national economic success by ensuring efficient resource use. Today, corporations still maximize profits, but they do so from the standpoint of their global operations. Consequently, what is good for corporations may not be good for country.
.....The emergence of barge-like corporations has reduced the scope for effective competitiveness policy, increased the temptations for unfair policy, and created a wedge between corporate and national interests. This poses two critical policy challenges. First, there is need for rules against unfair competition, which is where exchange rate rules and labor and environment standards enter.
Second, there is need to close the wedge between corporation and country. In the U.S. that calls for such measures as ending preferential tax treatment of profits earned offshore; making it illegal for corporations to reincorporate outside the US to escape US tax laws; and new tax arrangements that encourage jobs and value creation within the US.
......These economic challenges are compounded by political difficulties. In Washington, elite policy thinking is funded and lobbied for by corporations. Consequently, corporations control trade policy at a time when corporate interests differ from the national interest. That is also increasingly true in Brussels. Fifty years ago what was good for GM may really have been good for the US. With Jack Welch’s barge, that may no longer hold.
Police in Chicago, Illinois suburbs are citing terrorism as a reason for "no mercy" speed traps where every motorist stopped by police -- other than fellow police officers -- receives a traffic citation. A Chicago Sun-Times analysis found that a total of thirty towns had a policy where more than 90 percent of drivers stopped must be ticketed.
"There's a lot of people who come in and out, and with all this terrorism and everything else that's going on, we have zero tolerance," North Chicago Police Sergeant Sal Cecala told the Sun-Times. "There's no breaks for the officers to give."
Stagecoach Cartage and Distribution from El Paso, Texas, was given approval to operate in Mexico late Thursday night, and Transportes Olympic of Nuevo Leon, was cleared to operate in the United States.
U.S. trucking companies want the government to keep regulations allowing truckers to drive 11 hours in a row, rather than the previous limit of 10.
The American Trucking Associations filed a petition Friday with the federal government asking officials to issue a new version of two-year-old regulations on truckers' hours to replace regulations struck down by a court in late July.
The trucking group argued that since the court's late July ruling was focused on procedural issues rather than safety concerns, the Transportation Department should keep similar regulations in place.
Public Citizen notes that the TIFA data, upon which FMCSA’s time-on-task multipliers were ultimately based, indicates that “the risk of fatal-crash involvement more than doubled from the 10th hour to the 11th.” Public Citizen Br. 48-
49 (citing 2005 RIA at 45 (J.A. 1665)). The actual time-on-task multiplier for the eleventh hour used in FMCSA’s model, however, was “only 30% higher than the . . . multiplier for the 10th hour.” Id. at 49 (citing 2005 RIA at 61 (J.A. 1681)). Public Citizen contends that the two steps FMCSA used to transform the TIFA data into the time-on-task multipliers were unexplained, and that they had the effect of improperly minimizing the crash risk associated with the 11th hour of driving.
First, as explained above, instead of using the crash risk figures for each hour of driving that the TIFA Study had calculated directly from the actual crash data, FMCSA derived a cubic curve of crash risk as a function of time on task. To derive the curve, FMCSA first plotted the TIFA figures for Hours 1 through 12, and then used an aggregate measure for Hour 13 and beyond. It did not, however, plot the 13+ figure at Hour 13, but rather at Hour 17. See 2005 RIA at 59 (J.A. 1679). As shown in the accompanying graph, the curve that fit those 13 points yielded a crash risk at Hour 11 that was substantially below the figure that the TIFA Study had calculated directly from the actual crash data.
General Motors revealed two drivable concept cars with new engines that burn gasoline in virtually the same way that a diesel engine burns diesel fuel.
The engines will get 15-percent better fuel economy than ordinary gasoline engines, GM estimates, but will not need the expensive exhaust treatment that diesel engines require.
Several car companies have been working on this type of engine technology, commonly known as homogeneous charge compression ignition, or HCCI. The technology promises the fuel economy of a diesel engine, which is typically much more efficient than a gasoline engine, but with the much cleaner exhaust of a gasoline engine.
Mexican motor carriers selected to participate in the proposed cross-border program could receive financial assistance from the Mexican government to make them more competitive.
Apparently, government financial assistance has been promised to truckers and trucking companies that participate in the cross-border program to help them carve out a competitive edge. The money would be used to develop infrastructure like loading docks, support trucks and light-service trucks – elements that would make their business operations more competitive with their U.S. counterparts, according to a translated article from the Mexican publication T21.
Tirso Martinez, president of CANACAR – a Mexican trucking association – said in the article that the funding was approved by the Mexican Secretary of Economy, but had not yet been put in place.
WASHINGTON (AFP) - Investors are fixating on the Federal Reserve after its discount rate cut Friday, hoping the US central bank will take stronger action to ease the credit crunch roiling markets worldwide.
The Fed took markets by surprise Friday by slashing its discount rate, the interest rate charged on loans to commercial banks, by a half-percentage point to 5.75 percent.
Equity markets cheered the decision, announced before Wall Street opened: the Dow Jones industrial jumped 1.82 percent, the first time it closed higher in seven sessions. The news lifted the major European stock markets out of earlier losses.
Yet the central bank did not touch its key federal funds rate -- the overnight rate banks charge each other -- despite investor cries for relief.
In my conversations with people in Texas, it seemed that the privatized nature of the road was what got folks the angriest. Bad enough that drivers would face tolls, that ranchers would have their land cut out from under them, but all for the financial gain of a foreign company?......
"What really drives this is economic," activist Terri Hall told me. "It's about the money. We're talking about obscene levels of profit, someone literally being like the robber barons of old. And this is one thing that government actually does well, build and maintain roads."
Hall is an unlikely defender of the public sphere. A conservative Republican and an evangelical Christian who home-schools her six children, she first got interested in road policy when TxDot announced plans to toll the road near her house, which runs into San Antonio. Outraged, she brought it up with her local State Rep, and when that didn't work, she began organizing. She founded the San Antonio Toll Party (like the Boston Tea Party, she notes) by pamphleting at intersections and calling friends. "It's really like the old days, during the American Revolution...just fellow citizens trying together to effect change."
.....Hall had arranged to meet me in the San Antonio exurbs, in a home design center that doubled as a cafe. Outside, a thunderstorm lashed the windows with rain. As she spoke, her newborn son propped next to her swaddled and napping, it occurred to me that she was living the twenty-first-century version of the American dream. She and her husband had moved to Texas from California in pursuit of cheap housing, open space and a place to raise their family. Their web-design business was successful; their children healthy. Why, I found myself thinking, was she so upset about a road?
[Texas Transportation commissioner] Ric Williamson must often ask himself the same thing. Just as the White House was blindsided by the opposition to the Dubai ports deal, just as NASCO was shocked to find that a simple schematic map attracted angry phone calls, just as the Commerce Department was shocked to find a simple bureaucratic dialogue the subject of outrage, so too have Perry and Williamson seemed ambushed by the zealous opposition of people like Hall.
But what people like Williamson don't seem to understand is how disempowered people feel in the face of a neoliberal order whose direction they cannot influence. For corporatists within both parties (Williamson, it should be noted, was a Democrat while in the Statehouse), selling port security or road concessions to a multinational is inevitable, logical, obvious. To thousands of average citizens in Texas and elsewhere, it's madness or, worse, treason. Both the actual TTC and the mythical NAFTA Superhighway represent a certain kind of future for America, one in which the crony capitalism of oil-rich Texas expands to fill every last crevice of the public sector's role, eclipsing the relevance of the national government as both the provider of public goods and the unified embodiment of a sovereign people.
For Williamson, this is progress; for Hall, it's an outrage and a tragedy. "We have so little control over our own government," she told me, the alienation audible in her voice, thunder punishing the air outside. "We are really the last beacon of freedom in the world--the land of the free and home of the brave--and we're letting it slip away from under our noses."
Most strikingly, only 25 percent of Americans are positive about the direction of the nation, down from 41 percent in 2002. In only a handful of the 47 nations are there declines of similar magnitude -- Uganda, the Czech Republic, France, Canada and Italy. Obviously, one factor here is the decline in the job rating of George W. Bush and of Congress (and the response in other countries to squabbling politicians in Prague, Paris, Ottawa and Rome).
......That's my reaction as well to the finding that by a two-to-one margin Americans say their children will be worse off than we are. There's a similar response in Canada, Britain and Brazil. The even more negative verdicts in Western Europe and Japan can be explained as a cool assessment of the combination of low birthrates and overgenerous welfare states.
But what basis do Americans have to suppose that, for the first time in history, a younger generation will be worse off than their parents? Perhaps it's just a feeling that things cannot possibly get any better. In any case, we seem to be in a pronounced national funk.
We might take some comfort in some of the trends of opinion in the rest of the world. In China and India, large majorities think the next generation will be better off -- a vote of confidence in their surging economies, which are providing cheaper products for us and are growing as markets for American goods and services. In Latin America, most believe that people are better off with free markets. (The highest percentage was in Hugo Chavez's socialist Venezuela!) In Africa, most express great optimism in the future -- a sign that the world's most troubled continent may be at last turning around.
A federal court issued a split ruling Tuesday on the government’s rules governing truck driver hours of service, rejecting a petition by a group representing owner-operators but granting a separate request by a public safety advocate group.
.....“We are analyzing the decision issued today to understand the court’s findings as well as determine the agency’s next steps to prevent driver fatigue, ensure safe and efficient motor carrier operations and save lives,” FMCSA said. “This decision does not go into effect until Sept. 14, unless the court orders otherwise.”
The court vacated the portions of the rule that extended the maximum allowable driving time to 11 hours from the previous limit of 10, and eliminated the so-called 34-hour restart, which allows drivers to reset their maximum allowable hours in a week.
The ruling maintains the limit for drivers’ work time of 14 consecutive hours. Previously, the agency had allowed drivers to work for 15 hours per day, but had let them clock on and off duty.
Leaving the cold Northeast states for the warmer South and West may mean a longer life.
New research on the effects of extreme temperatures found that 5,400 deaths a year are delayed by getting away from cold temperatures. The life expectancy for people whose death were delayed by moving increased by an average of 9.1 years, according to a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Economists Olivier Deschenes at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Enrico Moretti at the University of California, Berkeley, matched data on deaths from 1972 to 1988 to weather conditions on the day of death and county of residence.
Extreme temperatures — both hot and cold — generally tends to spur a spike in deaths. That’s evident from the increased public attention from heat-related deaths, which hit elderly people especially hard. But deaths actually decline significantly in the days that follow, suggesting that the extreme heat hastened the deaths of people who were already weak and would’ve died anyway. “As a consequence, there is virtually no lasting impact of heat waves on mortality,” the researchers write.
Extreme cold weather leads to an immediate spike in deaths as well, but it isn’t offset by a decline in deaths afterward. One extremely cold day in a 30-day window increases mortality by 10%, the study found, mostly the result of cardiovascular and respiratory diseases (leading to hypothermia, pneumonia and other heart or lung problems). People in low-income areas are hit especially hard, as are infants and older adults.
Overall, cold weather accounts for 1.3% of total U.S. deaths a year, a larger impact than homicide, leukemia or chronic liver disease. The researchers note that Minneapolis, Detroit, Cleveland and Chicago are affected the most; as many as 3.3% of their deaths could be delayed by changing exposure to cold days.
The research could help explain the increase in life expectancy over the last three decades, about a quarter of a year per calendar year. The population shift from cold states to warm states, the study found, accounts for 8% to 15% of the gains in longevity.
Under this order, the Executive Branch can ’starve out’ a person by completely freezing their assets, without trial, without the need to present evidence, and without appeal. The Treasury Secretary has sole discretion to determine who is in violation of this order, in ‘consultation’ with the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State. That last part is verbiage; Treasury has the power per this order. Even better, the Secretary of Treasury has the explicit authority to delegate this decision to any flunky or flunkies of his choice per Sec. 6. This order applies to all persons within the United States. If Treasury declares that a person is a ‘SIGNIFICANT RISK’ to commit violence in Iraq, or a ‘SIGNIFICANT RISK’ to support violence in Iraq in any way, or to have assisted in any way a person who is a ‘SIGNIFICANT RISK’ to do so, all their assets are to be immediately frozen.
It is a further violation of the order to make a donation to such a person whose assets have been frozen. (I was being literal when I said ’starve’ them. Such a person would have no legal means of acquiring food, clothing, or shelter. They couldn’t buy it with frozen assets, nor accept it as a gift, and stealing is already illegal.) [See here for the statute on which Bush relies to issue this order.]
Section 5 says that these actions will be taken by the government without any notice to the person whose assets are to be frozen. I see no procedure listed for any appeal from this action to anyone. In theory, a person could argue the matter in federal court. However, merely donating legal services to represent such a person would apparently be a violation of Sec. 1(b). The odds of an unrepresented person successfully challenging an executive order, when said order will be defended by a phalanx of Justice Department lawyers, are low.
Is that scary enough for you? When I first read it, I checked the site to make sure it wasn’t a spoof of some sort, a la the Onion. I may have missed something, but I hit the high points.
Oh, I probably don’t need to mention the obvious, but the lack of due process, lack of evidentiary requirements, and the vagueness surrounding exactly what constitutes a violation make this order a totalitarian dream. And there is no end to the ‘daisy chain’ it creates, either. If you donate money to a person whose assets were frozen because they gave money to a person who was declared to be a ‘significant risk’ to commit or support violence in Iraq, then you are subject to the order, subject to have your assets frozen, and anyone helping you thereafter gets the same treatment. This order is far in excess of the presidential orders from 20+ years ago that were circulated to make us afraid of the government. (FYI, there’ve been executive orders since at least Kennedy that declares the feds are in charge of everything in case of nuclear attack and such.)
