Words and Meanings

Net-net, my value proposition is based
on maximizing synergies and being first
to market with a leveraged, value-added deliverable.
That's the opportunity space on a
level playing field.
--SPELL (March/April)

America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till selfish gain no longer stain
The banner of the free!
--America the Beautiful

The two pillars of political correctness are:
a) willful ignorance
b) a steadfast refusal to face the truth
--George MacDonald
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In today's mail was my grammar newsletter, a real estate magazine and some poverty statistics. Words and meanings jumped out rather readily.

From Real Estate Forum came non-performing assets (= "duds') and high net-worth individuals (= "rich"), but an editorial assured us that prosperity is just around the corner for those poised to exploit this economic breather.

Next was the statistic that $14,600 is the official poverty line for a single person household in Florida, and 16% of children in Florida are "poor", defined as living in families earning below 100% of the federal poverty level (National Center for Children in Poverty.) About 12% of the state is poor, running neck-and-neck with President Obama's state of Illinois, and my county, Leon, is 25% poor. (Leon also includes the state's capital.)

Almost one in five kids lacks health insurance in the state (18.8 by the last pre-recession figures.) Barabara Ehrenreich wrote about the Nouveau Poor in a recent NYT essay, "Too Poor to make the News." She writes, "In good times and grim ones, the misery at the bottom just keeps piling up, like a bad debt that will eventually come due."

When one is not in the "high net-worth" category, one tends to get looked over.

Running on Empty

Don't know much about history
Don't know much biology
Don't know much about a science book
Don't know much about the French I took
--George Bush Theme Song
aka Don't Know Much About History, Sam Cooke

As GM Goes, So Goes the Nation
--slogan when GM was the nation's
powerhouse industry
______________

Sometimes the stories just write themselves.

Today's Tallahassee Democrat featured three stories on page 7A not about the FSU football team:

1. 51,000 U.S. Jobs Vanish in July
2. GM Posts 15.5 Billion 2nd Quarter Loss, 3rd-Worst in its History
3. Big Oil's Biggest Quarter Ever, $51.5 Billion in All

"[GM] is running short on time if it keeps burning through more than $1 billion in cash every month." The auto company reported the loss Friday, "the third-worst quarterly performance in its nearly 100-year history."

"Employers cut their payrolls by 51,000 net jobs [in July], bringing the total reduction in the nation's job count this year to 463,000. The ranks of the unemployed increased by 285,000 people in the month, continuing a steady deterioration in the job market that began at the end of last year (Jobless Rate Hits a High, Dims Hope For Recovery.)

"Workers without advanced skills have been hit the hardest. Among people without a high school diploma, the rate has increased to 8.5 percent, from 7.2 percent."

On the bright side, "Oil giants Chevron Corp. and Total SA wrapped up a string of gargantuan, record-breaking earnings reports Friday, a stretch in which six of the major international oil companies topped $50 billion in combined profit for the first time." Clearly, those poor sods in the ranks of the undereducated unemployed had not gotten themselves into the right business. Stocking shelves at WalMart and serving customers at Burger King is simply not good for one's vita nor portfolio.

What does this mean? These newly fired 51,000 will not be buying new GM vehicles, and even if they did, could they afford the gas? Another bright side: they won't need them anyway, as they don't have jobs to travel to.

"On the campaign trail, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama responded to the gloomy economic news by calling for a fresh round of $1,000 rebate checks to be sent to taxpayers. The $65 billion cost would be covered through a tax on oil companies' windfall profits. "

I'm sure we all love the scent of freshly minted T-bills in the morning, and who could be against handing out money, especially when one is to be the recipient of said funds? But does anyone see the absurdity inherent in this gesture?

In fact, we may soon go the way of Zimbabwe, which just this week decided to drop the last 10 zeroes off the price of everything (Inflation champ Zimbabwe lops 10 zeros off currency.) Alas, 10 billion dollars is back to being a dollar. Viola!

Zimbabwe knows a thing or two about inflation. A loaf of bread had jumped to $200 billion the previous week, an unseemly figure. The tabulating machines simply couldn't handle those astronomical figures. Now, as if by magic, that same loaf is down to a mere $20. The inflation rate in that beleaguered nation, the highest in the world, is 2.2 million percent a year.

We're not quite there. But our central bank may decide to do some fancy dancing Zimbabwe-style before we make it through the disastrous results of the last seven years of corrupt fiscal policy.

We reckon "In God We Trust" is a great motto, since we no longer have General Motors.

Food for Thought

I wouldn't put on an electric blanket for any reason. . .
the main thing, Wally, is that I think that kind of comfort
just separates you from reality in a very direct way
--My Dinner With Andre (1981)

Give us this day our daily bread
--Matthew 6:11

Well we're movin' on up
to the east side.
To a deluxe apartment in the sky
--Movin' on Up, Barry and Dubois
__________

After doing my first serious grocery shopping in two weeks I, like Capt. Renault in that other white house, am shocked at the recent price increases.

Here are a few: milk is now $4.00 a half gallon (organic), up from $3.00; smoked Gruyere cheese, $11.19/lb from $8.69; eggs (non-organic), $2.49 from $1.17, now rivaling the cost of the eggs from free-range hens. Percentage of increase is (+) 33%, 29%, 112%, respectively.

After expressing my shock and awe to the deli clerk, she confirmed the huge increase in all things dairy and deli. She leaned over the counter in a conspiratorial whisper -- "I just heard on t.v. about a woman in Africa who eats dirt 'cause she can't buy food. I never thought about that." She'll be thinking about it as her choices of what she can put in her shopping cart dwindle.

The weekend WSJ covered the rise in grain prices owing to increases in seed, fertilizer and oil costs. Hersey, Tyson, Kraft and Kellogg Co. will all raise prices this year ("Farmers Wonder if Boom in Grain prices is a Bubble," 1/31/08.) "Food prices are widely expected to push even higher this year, even if the U.S. enters a recession. . .because food is typically on of the last goods to be affected by a downturn."

In a queer comment supporting the persistence of the price rise the article reports, "Once people enter the Middle class and move up the income and food ladder, they rarely regress." On that note, a look at those who aren't movin' up.

The current cost of living increase for Federal payments is 2.3%. The baseline Social Security medical disability payment for a single individual is $567/month, which is $6,804 annual income. The poverty line (=Federal Poverty Level, or FPL) for a single individual household in the contiguous 48 States -- defined as the "minimum level of income necessary to achieve an adequate standard of living -- was $10,200 in 2007; it is slightly higher in Alaska and Hawaii.

In Florida, the food stamp allotment for a single-family household earning the above medical disability payment of $567/month has been reduced over the past couple of years, from $111/month to $95/month. This is (-) 17% reduction in payments. For further comparison, I'll throw in my personal rent increase for 2008: (+) $25/month. This is a (+) 16% annual increase in monthly rent payments.

From these few examples, it is obvious that a 2.3% cost of living increase is a misnomer and a fantasy, unless you were in Nepal. These folks are not moving up due to Federal largesse.

By comparison, Shell Oil saw a 60% increase in earnings last quarter."According to the US Labor Department, gasoline and home heating prices rose 29.4 percent in 2007. Meanwhile, the Energy Department predicts a 38 percent rise is heating costs this winter over last winter, with average families paying $551 more for heating oil over the course of the current fiscal year (Big Oil Posts Record Profits.)"

Ranger offered on the same day a story from the barber shop. No Edwards or Clinton, he goes to Cost Cutters, which had just raised the cost of a trim $2.00 -- a 20% increase -- and had ceased offering a military discount.

The barber shared that neither she nor her husband, who both work, nor her two children, have health insurance. If they get sick they must go to the neighborhood clinic, which is run on a sliding fee scale but which only offers basic services. (For instance, they have a dental clinic a few days each month, but the only services are cleaning or tooth extraction.)

That's the real deal for almost 49 million of your fellow uninsured Americans. Using the 2007 census of just over 301 million residents, roughly one in six of your fellows has no health coverage. Does George W. Bush know anyone in this dire predicament?

What happens in Iraq and Afghanistan is not relevant to the lives of the people for whom any of the above quoted figures are significant. Save in that their lives are sure to be made more difficult as a result of the price hikes and decreasing benefits which are sure to blight them further.

The Dead Zone

Well, here we are; well, here we are!
Just watch us rolling up a score.
We'll leave those fellows behind so far,
They won't want to play us any more!
--Yale Boola, Hirsch

_________

"When you get in the Green Zone, there is a physiological phenomenon, I think, called Green Zone fog. There is such a sense of winning. they will show you, it’s death by powerpoint. . . .It’s always that their argument is winning. If you press, after the third of fourth time . . .you start to see what we all know, which is [that] the surge is unsustainable. . . . We need a strategic redeployment out of Iraq. . . . Three hundred million dollars a day; 3,700 of our finest soldiers and Marines are dead; 30,000 catastrophically wounded and maimed. And a military [that] right now is well beyond its ability to deal with other contingencies."
--Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-CA), 8/28/07 Thinkprogress.org interview
[printed in 9/15/07 issue of The Washington Spectator]
__________

Military and White House briefings often suffer a disconnect from reality. Briefings have a half-life of about one day and often reflect a wish, versus objective reality.

Officers are especially acculturated to superlatives and grandiose statements. It all begins with our phoney Officer Efficiency Reports (OERs) that guide our phony careers. These phony careers are the basis of our phony wars, making for a closed loop. We actually begin to believe our own rhetoric.

The same goes for our citations for our awards and decorations. It is unacceptable to say, "He is an average soldier and does an average job." That reality is translated into: "Capt. Blank is the most exceptional Company Commander in the Brigade, and possess the potential for positions far above his rank." This stated potentiality implied he knows how to expose his orifices to penetration.

Ranger has always thought that being an officer is a little like being a female porn star. Both have to pretend that they like it in the ass. You are going to get screwed, so in a sense you do learn to accept it. Life in the quid pro quo.

The Army system fails miserably to realize that the actual man described in the Official Personnel File and OER is not the same as the records show. The records are hyperbole, the man, reality. General Petraeus is a fine example of this phenomenon at its highest game point.

He is only a man and events are beyond his control, but that's not the hype. The Army is not filled with Odysseus types, as the death and wounded lists show. We are limited by our cultural blindness and rigid professional training. The military does not accept free thinkers, and Petraeus is no exception.

As fine a man as he may be, he is the product of his West Point education and Army culture. I would argue that his PhD does not make him more qualified to do his current job. It appears to add another layer of competency, but does not advance his current assignment. Only time on the battlefield can do that.

A look at Petraeus's chest shows no individual valor awards, no Combat Infantry Badge. Which is more important for a combat leader -- individual combat experience, or a PhD?

Generals Washington, Scott, Lee, Grant, Pershing, MacArthur, Patton, Eisenhower, Bradley, Westmoreland and Scwartzkopf did not need advanced degrees to fight their armies successfully. Soldiers should attend to basics.

Ranger fondly remembers his superior officer in RVN--Capt. Norm Dupuis [DOO-pus], a direct commission from E-9 to 0-2 in Special Forces. No college degree and beaucoups combat experience. We were staff weanies on a B-team (B53), and our boss, Col. Glock, was a West Point paper flash individual. To make it worse, he was a tanker.

Well, old LTC Glock was fond of briefings and charts, and of course, OERS and threats of adverse OERs. Once in our daily dog and pony show (our version of the power point), Norm used a chart that tallied up how many times we had used the other charts; what a brilliant statement!

As a mustang, Norm was not threatened by OERs because he knew he would eventually revert to an E-9 after the endgame and RIFs. He had the freedom to say, "The only way an OER can hurt me is if you roll it up and poke it in my eye."

And he was right. Due to institutional bias, SF types were heavily rifted (reduction in forces) and eliminated from the officer corps. This still haunts the Army, since their CI institutional combat experience and knowledge was effectively purged, in favor of reversion to a now-outdated Cold War mindset.

Generally speaking, the officer personnel in the 1970's and 80's SF served in the Airborne units in RVN and generally had no SF combat experience. This is also the period that SF became flooded with Ranger tabs, changing the mindset of that organization irrevocably. Poor way to run an Army which needs many skill sets in today's world.

But of course, their briefings continued, tight and professional.