By Climate Guest Blogger on Sep 2, 2010 at 7:31 pm
Are MSC-certified ‘sustainable fisheries’ in fact unsustainable?
Small fisheries that use highly selective, low-impact techniques, such as hook-and-line fishing or hand picking, are often sustainable, but make up only a tiny fraction of MSC-certified fisheries.
As part of ClimateProgress’s effort to focus attention on the grave threat to ocean life, today’s guest blogger is marine-biologist-turned-filmmaker, Randy Olson.
Fisheries economist Jennifer Jacquet and a team of A-list marine biologists today took the Marine Stewardship Council out behind the woodshed and left it limping away with a sore posterior. It came in the form of an Opinion piece in Nature appropriately titled, “Seafood Stewardship in Crisis.”
A favorite Republican talking point lately is that the businesses are not creating jobs because they are “hamstrung by uncertainty.” According to this argument, the specter of taxes and regulation is paralyzing companies, and if only Congress would preserve the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and promise to not produce any new regulations, a flood of business investment would ensue. Last night on CNBC, Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) told supply-side guru and Reagan disciple Larry Kudlow that the way to get businesses to “unleash” the nearly $2 trillion in cash and assets they’re currently sitting on is to extend the Bush tax cuts for the rich and then cut marginal income tax rates even further. “C’mon, we know what works,” Pence said:
C’mon, we know what works. Larry, you know what works better than most Americans, and that is across-the-board marginal tax relief…We’ve got to demand, whether it’s this fall, whether it’s after the election, or whether it’s in a newly minted Congress next year, we’ve got to demand that we preserve tax relief, no American sees a tax increase on January 1, and then promote across-the-board tax relief on marginal rates that’ll really unleash all that more than $2 trillion in trapped capital in this economy.
Watch it:
It seems like some variation of “c’mon!” has become the Republican leadership’s go-to argument these days, but Pence shouldn’t be so smug when it comes to the efficacy of marginal income tax cuts to spur business investment. As The Wonk Room explains, business investment following the Clinton-era tax increase far outstripped that following either the Bush or Reagan supply-side tax cuts. “The failure of investment to respond to supply-side tax cuts greatly undermines the central premise of the theory underlying the policy,” wrote economists Michael Ettlinger and John Irons.
The Commonwealth Fund is estimating that about 3.4 million workers, employed by roughly 1 million small businesses, will take advantage of the new health care tax credit offered under the health care law by 2013. “Overall, 16.6 million employees of small businesses are eligible for the tax credit.”
How much would employees and employers save? The study breaks it down:
To illustrate how the tax credit might work in practice, a company with 10 or fewer workers and aver- age wages of $25,000 would be eligible for the full tax credit. Assuming that the company has a per-worker family premium of $9,435 and contributes 50 percent of the premium, it would be eligible for a tax credit of $1,651 per worker, or 35 percent of its premium contribution in the years 2010–2013, leaving it with a balance of $3,067. Beginning in 2014, the company would receive 50 percent of its premium contribution or $2,359, leaving it with a balance of $2,359. A tax-exempt organization in that year would receive a slightly lower credit (35% of its premium contribution) of $1,651 per worker.
This report will help give some context to the anecdotal accounts about small businesses applying for the credits and also lower expectations about how many firms will actually take advantage of the benefit. The study predicts a relatively modest pick up for two reasons 1) until 2014, small businesses will still face all of the barriers to entry that they do now and 2) companies that already provide coverage are more likely to apply for the credit. Conversely, encouraging small businesses to begin offering coverage will probably require a far more significant price incentive. The full credit may help small businesses begin offering insurance, but since the credit declines over time and as the size of the company decreases and the average wages of their employees goes up, many employers may be reluctant to hop into the insurance business until 2014.
As ThinkProgress noted yesterday, Deficit Commission co-chair Alan Simpson recently started a political firestorm by complaining that veterans benefits allocated for servicemembers exposed to Agent Orange run “contrary to efforts to control federal spending.” He even went as far as to say that “the irony” is that “the veterans who saved this country are now, in a way, not helping us to save the country in this fiscal mess.”
Now, veterans advocacy group VoteVets, the nation’s largest progressive veterans organization, is calling on President Obama to fire Alan Simpson. Citing not only his comments about veterans benefits but also his earlier remarks comparing Social Security to a “milk cow with 310 million tits,” VoteVets asks that Obama remove Simpson from “his current position so that the commission can continue its work in a way that will give the military community — and all Americans — confidence in the conclusions it reaches”:
The nation’s largest progressive veterans organization, VoteVets.org, is calling on President Obama to relieve former Senator Alan Simpson from his chairmanship of a deficit reduction commission for defamatory comments about veterans. [...]
His comments came on the heels of outrageous comments about seniors and others on Social Security, as well as women. The veterans pointed to those comments as well, but wrote that Simpson’s attacks on ill veterans compelled them to write. They said firing Simpson was a matter of honoring our veterans. [...] “We ask that you remove [Simpson] from his current position so that the commission can continue its work in a way that will give the military community–and all Americans–confidence in the conclusions it reaches,” the letter concludes.
Additionally, last night on Countdown With Keith Olbermann, Paul Sullivan, executive director of the veterans advocacy group Veterans for Common Sense appeared to call for Simpson to be fired as well, saying he was “absolutely not” the right person to be co-chairing the commission. When Olbermann asked Sullivan if the the ex-senator should be fired, Sullivan replied, “Let me put it to you politely. There’s lots of work for out of work politicians in Washington. I’ll leave it at that.” Watch it:
At the top of a good article on the prospects of a renewal of the Israeli settlement moratorium, my friend Eli Lake of the Washington Times unfortunately deploys a bit of right-wing Israeli jargon, referring to “the disputed territory of the West Bank.” The West Bank is “disputed” in the same sense that control of Kuwait was “disputed” by Iraq, in other words, a claim taken seriously by no one other than the occupying power. The United States, the Palestinians, and the rest of the international community, as well as large part of the Israeli polity, recognize this — including, notably, settler patron saint Ariel Sharon, who recognized Israel’s presence in the West Bank as an “occupation” in 2003.
This may at first seem a rather semantic point, and so it is, but in this conflict semantics tend to be really important. Treating the West Bank as “disputed” rather than “occupied” not only denies that international humanitarian law regarding the disposition of occupied territories applies there, it also suggests that, having lost over 75% of their homeland, the Palestinians should have to negotiate over the “disputed” remaining 25%. As with Netanyahu’s attempt to treat the settlement freeze as a “concession” rather than a pre-existing Israeli obligation, it’s a shrewd bargaining tactic. In terms of building trust between the parties, however, it’s not helpful.
Considering various methods by which the moratorium — the actual impact of which, as the New York Times reported in July, has been minimal — might be extended, Lake talked to Ori Nir of Americans for Peace Now, who “said one possible compromise would be for Mr. Netanyahu to decline to formally renew the moratorium, but for the defense minister, Ehud Barak, whose Labor Party favors the settlement construction freeze, to issue far fewer construction permits for the West Bank“:
“What is possible and maybe even likely to happen is that while the moratorium will not be officially extended, wholesale planning and construction in settlements will not resume because the Defense Ministry is responsible for issuing these permits, and Defense Minister Barak has both the interest and ability to issue these permits very sparingly,” Mr. Nir said.
An interesting idea, though one that also challenges previous Israeli claims that the growth of settlements are a legal bureaucratic process that cannot be stopped. In fact, they can be stopped at any time, though at a political price.
On that point, Daniel Dayan, chairman of the largest settler organization in the West Bank, the Yesha council, told Lake that the settlers “have succeeded in creating political leverage that will not allow Netanyahu to extend the moratorium,” and that even a “de facto” construction freeze of the sort Nir suggests would be opposed by his council:
“Even if the moratorium is not formally extended but the tenders for construction are not signed that will mean a de facto extension of the moratorium and that would be totally unacceptable for us,” he said.
Mr. Dayan added, “It would be inconceivable that less units would be built during Netanyahu than under [the last Israeli prime minister] Ehud Olmert, and if that is the case, we will use the political leverage we have within the Israeli political system in order to override that policy.”
Given the prominence of both the settlers as a movement and the settlements as a key issue overhanging negotiations, Dayan has been getting quite a bit of play, most recently last week, in this article by the Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes, in which Dayan suggested that the Palestinian issue could be dealt with simply by committing a crime against humanity and expelling them to Jordan, and calling that “Palestine.” And he’s one of the “reasonable” settlers.
Maggie Mahar — whose book Money-Driven Medicine is a bible for those of us trying to figure out why Rick Scott’s Columbia/HCA paid $1.7 billion in fines to the federal government — has published a new more detailed analysis of what drove the company to acquire so many hospitals and commit such shameless Medicaid fraud during the period Scott was its CEO.
Mahar captures a company who was driven not by a desire to improve patient care or outcomes, but the need to constantly expand and acquire new properties. It focused on the price of its stock rather than the quality of its service and it was this mindset that forced Columbia/HCA to cut corners, price gauge and place the safety and health of its patients at risk:
Their goal was growth, and they believed speed was essential. Sometimes they bought a hospital just to close it down, so that it wouldn’t compete with a nearby Columbia property. Scott cared little about the needs of the communities where he bought. “His arrogance and disdain for the concern for communities, was appalling,” said Paul Torrens, MD, MPH, professor of health services management at the UCLA School of Public Health. [...]
In Ohio “Attorney General Betty Montgomery was so outraged by what she characterized as the ‘peremptory, bullying’ tactics that Columbia employed in its failed attempts to acquire Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Ohio and Massillon Community Hospital that she took the company’s Ohio chief aside and delivered a blunt threat,” Business Week reported. “Says Montgomery: I told him that if you want to do business in Ohio, just play it straight from now on. Otherwise, I will fight you in court any time, anywhere.’”
In 1997, when Lawrence Hospital, a community-owned facility in Lawrence, Kan., refused three buyout offers from Columbia, the company took an option on property nearby and sought to build a competing hospital. “‘We like to say here that they approached us in a very aggressive manner to marry them,’ Ray Davis, chairman of the hospital board, told the New York Times. ‘And when we said no, they decided they were going to kill us.’”
[...]
Ultimately, Scott epitomized those CEOs of the 1990s (Enron’s Ken Lay, et. al.) who saw their company, not as an organization that produced a product that they could be proud of–but as a stock. Share price was all. Questions about whether the company was delivering value to its customers were moot. This explains why Scott would be happy to slash nursing staff, bribe doctors to “put heads on beds” (whether or not those patients needed to be hospitalized), and lie to Medicare.
All this correlates well with today’s article about one Columbia/HCA acquisition deal gone bad and contrasts sharply with Scott’s strong defense of his tenure, all the while providing a glimpse into some of the so-called “mistakes” that he has ostensibly taken responsibility for. This isn’t just a few accounting errors or regulatory oversights, it’s an entire business mindset that’s based on short term success but and inch deep commitment.
National tea party organizer and profiteerEric Odom recently launched Liberty.com, a conservative website meant to “eclipse the influence of MoveOn.org in campaigns across the country.” Partnering with an umbrella group, the site launched with a formidable $700,000 budget and 70,000 members, and has the “intention of becoming an all-encompassing conservative grass-roots organization that weighs in on federal and state political races and issue-oriented movements.” The site features multi-media news and opinion content, along with fundraising and action components, supporting its mission “to keep the right honest, the press nervous, and the left unpopular and out of power.”
“We’re looking to compete directly with MoveOn.org. We’re looking to be a player for a long time. No one else on the right is doing what we’re doing,” said Liberty.com spokesman Yates Walker, who served as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne, and until recently was a consultant for the campaign of Christine O’Donnell, a tea party-backed U.S. Senate candidate from Delaware. Yates also worked for the special election campaign of Doug Hoffman, who ran for a House seat from New York’s 23rd district last year.
In a video posted on Liberty.com yesterday, the site baselessly accuses O’Donnell’s moderate Republican primary challenger, Rep. Mike Castle (R-DE), of having an extramarital affair with a man. During a video podcast about the race, a voice off screen can be heard asking, “Isn’t Mike Castle cheating on his wife with a man?” “That’s the rumor,” the woman on camera responds with a sly smile. Watch the exchange:
When asked for comment about the unsubstantiated charge, Walker — who is listed as the media contact for Liberty.com and is described in numerousarticles as its spokesperson — told Politico’s Ben Smith, “We asked the question, we didn’t specifically say it,” adding that the supposed gay affair is “common knowledge” in Delaware. “We thought we’d throw it out there,” Walker said, explaining that he has no qualms about propagating the empty rumor because Castle is a “a threat to American sovereignty.” Walker “didn’t offer any evidence for the claim,” Smith notes.
It’s ironic that Walker would so casually throw groundless rumors about people’s purported sexual impropriety “out there,” considering that he himself has been accused — and acquitted — of serious sexual misconduct. ThinkProgress has learned that, as a student at Cincinnati’s Xavier University in 2006, Michael “Yates” Walker was indicted on rape charges and held on a $250,000 bond, quietly leaving the school shortly thereafter. The Xavier Newswire reported on November 13, 2006:
Xavier University senior Michael “Yates” Walker was released on $250,000 bond Tuesday evening after being indicted on three counts of sexual misconduct and two charges of rape. Walker could face up to 35 years in jail if convicted.
Walker, a 27-year-old resident of Norwood, is formally accused of the Oct. 12 rape of two Xavier University freshmen girls. According to the Assistant Hamilton County Prosecutor Seth Tieger, Walker invited the two women to his off-campus apartment where he proceeded to serve alcohol to the minors until they lost consciousness. One of the women reported waking up naked the next morning, unable to recall the previous night. The second woman suspected nothing, and accompanied Walker on a date the following evening where Walker attacked her again.
When contacted by ThinkProgress, Walker told us, “I was falsely accused. Most of the charges were thrown out of court and I was found not guilty on the rest.” He also defended Liberty’s campaign against Castle by referring us to other right-wing blogs who have pushed the rumor.
Walker was never convicted. For this reason, Walker should know better than to toss sensational accusations about someone else’s sexual history in light of his own experience.
Poor Carly Fiorina. To make conservative ideologues happy, she has to abandon science and her previous positions on the key issues of global warming and clean energy (see “The dumbing down of Carly Fiorina” and links below).
But to win election statewide, she has to appeal to the majority of California voters, who understand that clean energy is the key to the state’s long-term economic and job growth — and that unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gases will devastate California more than most states.
And so in her first debate with climate and clean energy champion Barbara Boxer, she simply couldn’t give a straightforward answer to the simple question of whether she supported the Big-Oil-funded Prop 23 effort to gut California’s landmark climate and clean energy laws.
The notion that “slut-shaming” and “nose-cutting” have the same deeper meaning–presumably a fear of women’s sexuality, though Digby doesn’t say this–is true as far as it takes you. Likewise the notion that black people should be slaves, the notion that they should be shipped back to Africa, that they should be segregated in communities, that they should not be allowed to intermarry, also have the same root cause–that blacks are unequal to whites. At varying points, Abraham Lincoln, John C. Calhoun, William T. Sherman, and Ulysses Grant held one or all of these views, and all probably died thinking blacks were unequal to whites. But that doesn’t make them interchangeable. Lincoln and Grant aren’t “less evil” versions of Calhoun.
That’s quite right. When assessing political movements it’s crucial to be attentive to both similarities and differences. The view that we should regulate carbon dioxide emissions in order to reduce the odds of a climate catastrophe has some points in common with the eco-catastrophist views that inspired a guy to hold the Discovery Channel hostage yesterday, but for most purposes the differences outweigh the similarities. Similarly, all orthodox Muslims share some values with al-Qaeda but every liberal I know understands that in most contexts the argument that orthodox Muslims everywhere are only slightly different than Osama bin Laden is not a serious effort to explain the world. To simply note that right-wing American Christians share these exact same values too is not better.
So, yes, the Taliban is misogynistic and so are most religious traditionalists. And, yes, the Taliban is nationalistic and so are right-wing political parties in most democracies. And, yes, the Taliban is enthusiastic about war-fighting as a way to achieve policy aims and so is Bill Kristol. This is all true and somewhat important. But it’s also true that American progressives and American conservatives are peacefully coexisting in a functioning republic, whereas the Taliban is waging an extremely violent military campaign against its ideological antagonists. Even though that’s only a “difference of degree” between two strands of religiously inspired populist nationalism, it’s actually a lot more important than the “difference in kind” between secular cosmopolitan Americans and are religious nationalist antagonists.
This bizarre tragedy has exposed the shockingly extreme views of some of the anti-science ideologues, as I discussed yesterday.
Media Matters has a must-read post on the latest example of Gore Derangement Syndrome. Right-wingers from Fox News to Drudge to WattsUpWithThat have tried to pin this crazy guy’s actions on the Nobel Prize-winning former vice president.
Typical is Chris Horner of the Big-Oil-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute, who makes that absurd argument … where else but on the website of Andrew Breitbart (who famously mashed up a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her appear racist, when she was in fact explaining how she was “getting beyond the issue of race”). His post’s self-defaming headline is “An Inconvenient Truth: Enviros’ Doomsday Rhetoric Breeds Eco-Terror.”
Now you know those conservatives are pushing an uber-extreme position when the voice of reason on their side comes from Michelle Malkin (!) and Glenn Beck (!!), but MM ends their post with those two explaining why the argument utterly fails:
