Rick Raw: Recession Over?–Not by a Long Shot

By Rick Grant Commentary rickgrant01@comcast.net

Some private think tank called the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) suddenly announced on Sept. 21, that the U.S. recession was over 15 months ago, in June 2009. This announcement was met with expressions of disbelief.

Ah yes, I could almost hear the screams of outrage across the land, raging like a giant class 5 tornado. Get real, I say.

Unemployment is still at almost 10%, new jobs are nonexistent, and foreclosures remain shockingly high. The struggling housing markets are stuck with millions of foreclosed homes for sale with no buyers.

Of course, the NBER group’s proclamation only further agitated the legions of angry people. It means nothing to the millions of people whose lives have been irrevocably ruined by the recession.

The economic apocalypse effectively eliminated the middle class, and created a new poor class of people, unaccustomed to living in poverty. Most of these skilled workers or professionals, like engineers ,will take any type of employment to dig themselves out of their financial hole. It’s just not there.

My class, senior citizens, were hit especially hard, since we received no cost of living increase in our Social Security pay, and President Obama reneged on his promise to give seniors a stimulus check for $250 to compensate for the loss of the cost of living increase.

We were already struggling to make ends meet before the economic apocalypse. Now, we are living on the brink of poverty. Holding our heads just above water. Any financial emergency would drown us.

Yes, at 70, I’m able and willing to work, but no one will hire me. So, I’m stuck. I scrape by on part time writing assignments and have drastically reduced my standard of living. I published an esoteric book that will never be a best seller. And I’m working on a memoir that I hope will sell well.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. Between my wife and my Social Security pay, combined and our respective modest pensions, we’re better off than most of the unemployed who have run out of out of work benefits. What is their future. Only darkness!

The news only keeps getting worse. The number of Americans living in poverty grew to levels unseen in 20 years. 43.6 million people fell below the poverty line. The number of Americans without health insurance also rose last year to 50.7 million.

So how in the hell can NBER make such an audacious claim. What are they basing their conclusions on–a palm reader? Yes, according to the Wall Street Journal, "More of us are poor." Duh! What a generalization.

The "WSJ" goes on to say, "The president wants to plow ahead with the same policies that aren’t reducing poverty. Instead of rebuilding America as an economic powerhouse, Obama and Congress both offer only short-term fixes that may pay political dividends."

Bob Herbert in "The New York Times" goes further with his doomsday scenario. "It may take a full blown depression before politicians react constructively to this economic disaster."

Meanwhile, the gap between the wealthiest citizens and the poorest people only grows wider. Dan Rodricks in the "Baltimore Sun" said, "Yet, the moment someone dares to point out the gap beween the rich and poor, Republicans throw the class warfare flag."

When Roosevelt instituted his "New Deal" and put people to work on infrastructure projects, it helped to ease the suffering from the Great Depression. However, when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, drawing the U.S. into WWII, the economy rebounded because of the war effort involved every part of society. WWII ended the depression.

Today, we need stronger leadership than Obama is giving us. We need someone to cut through the BS and political noise to jolt the economy with a big surge of aggressive change–not politicians trying to get reelected.

I say to the NBER to shut up and do something constructive instead of giving us false hopes.
(Quotes gleaned from "The Week.")

Rick Raw: Nuclear Weapons Reduction to Zero is An Impossible Dream–New START Treaty Goes Before Senate

By Rick Grant Commentary rickgrant01@cdomcast.net

In April, President Obama and Russian President Dimitri Medvedev signed the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. For the treaty to take effect it requires a two-thirds majority in the Senate. The truth is: The Treaty is not worth the paper it’s printed on.

In this acrimonious political climate, the debate will be politically charged between the hawks (Republicans) and doves (Democrats). Nonetheless, the treaty will probably be ratified after every blowhard politician has his or her say.

Ostensibly, the United States will have to destroy more missiles than Russia. But, the Ruskies will have to destroy more warheads. The treaty allows both sides to pull out of the treaty for any reason.

The Russians have threatened to pullout if the United States continues to develop its missile defense plan, which was started during the Reagan administration, then called Star Wars. They don’t want the missile defense plan because they don’t have the technology to implement such an anti-missile system that would destroy incoming ICBM in space–advantage United States.

Idealists like Obama see a world without nuclear weapons–zero, nada, zilch. The initiative is a noble endeavor, but it’s not going to happen. With nuclear nations like Pakistan, India, Israel, and the fear of Iran developing nuclear weapons, the U.S., like Russia, will keep a hefty stockpile of nukes.

The fear of global thermonuclear war was born out of the nuclear arms race in the 1960s. Nuclear paranoia got started in 1960 during the Eisenhower administration.
We were rapidly building up our nuclear missiles even then. World War III loomed, and kids were duck and covering under their desks in school, like that would matter

People were building fall out shelters in their backyards. These tombs were useless because they would suck in a nuclear blast’s shock wave through the air vent. Worse yet, they wouldn’t keep out the nuclear radiation.

The U.S. military led by the U.S. Air Force Strategic Air Command (SAC) devised a secret sinister nuclear war plan (just recently declassified) called SIOP (sigh-op) short for Single Integrated Operational Plan.

If invaded by the Soviets by any large scale attack, either conventional or nuclear, we would unleash a fusillade of nuclear warheads at targets in the Soviet Union, which would turn a large portion of Russia into a radio active wasteland. The all-out attack would kill millions of people, and radiate millions more, who would die of cancers in a couple of years.

Until SIOP was developed each branch of the military was building their own nuclear arsenal. The idea behind SIOP was to bring some order out of chaos. And so it was that SIOP was used to justify building as many nukes as they could crank out.

Basically, the SIOP analysts used a worst case scenario as a model, to wit: If Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, or communist China attacked in an alliance or individually, either with conventional weapons or nukes, the U.S. would initiate a massive retaliation destroying pre-targeted sites using nuclear weapons. It was dubbed "the doomsday scenario."–DEFCON 1

As the U.S. build up its nuclear missile arsenal, the Soviets were racing to catch up. Eventually, they had enough nuclear missiles aimed at us to launch a first strike, which would automatically trigger the launch of our missiles at Soviet targets. This Mexican stand off was called "mutually shared destruction."

By the 1960s, nuclear bombs were enhanced with hydrogen isotopes (thus the term thermonuclear)–giving them megaton power. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was in the kiloton range–thousands of tons of TNT as opposed to millions of tons of TNT.

Eventually, nuclear missile scientists were able to reduce the size of megaton bombs so that ten warheads could fit on one ICBM–the Titan II-- each aimed at a different target. The warheads separate in space and are guided to their respective targets.

The U.S. arsenal of nukes hit its peak in 1967 with 31,255–a staggering figure. The Soviets quickly matched it and even exceeded our massive stockpile.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the Cold War disappeared from the lexicon. At the time, the U.S. had 19,008 nukes.

Now the nuclear club includes the U.S., Russia, China, Great Britain, France, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea–an unpredictable rogue state run by a crazed megalomaniac. There are other threats that keep s security specialists up nights, including dirty bombs and electromagnetic pulse weapons that fire all electronics.

Any attack on our allies–members of NATO, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Israel, would be regarded as an attack on the U.S., and our response would be nuclear. These countries know that, and it makes them think twice about mounting an attack on any of those countries. This is called–nuclear deterrence, or ultimate destruction.

So how many nukes is enough to brandish scary nuclear deterrence? No one has figured that out. But Russia is having a hard time protecting its aging stockpile, much of which has been already destroyed and filmed for proof.

If, for instance, Iran attacks Israel, they or the U.S. would retaliate with nuclear weapons. When the first nuclear bomb–a primitive device that wasn’t even tested–hit Hiroshima, the Genie was out of the bottle and the nuclear age was born.

The bottom line: We will always live in a world with nuclear weapons as a deterrent. How many is irrelevant. Now there is more than enough nukes to make the Earth uninhabitable. We must have the Big Stick (Nuclear Missiles) to threaten our enemies into not attacking us.
(All facts were gleaned from a "Time Magazine" piece by Fred Kaplan titled "No More Nukes?"

Rick Raw: Drinkers Live Longer–New Study Finds Moderate and Even Heavy Alcohol Consumers Live Longer than Non-drinkers

By Rick Grant Commentary rickgrant01@comcast.net

Granted, there are scientific studies that can justify just about any vice or habit. There is probably a study that finds people who stab themselves in the chest with a Bowie knife have shorter lives than people who don’t.

Alcohol consumers, who drink moderately, like me, have long believed that it’s good for your health. Now, we have a study to substantiate that belief. A new paper in the journal "Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research" suggests that for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, abstaining from alcohol does tend to shorten life expectancy, even when former problem drinkers are accounted for.

Shockingly, teetotalers’ mortality rates are higher than those of even heavy drinkers! Hallelujah, pour me a beer. That’s all we needed to justify our drinking lifestyle. The study also revealed that moderate drinking, which is defined as one to three drinks per day, is shown to have the lowest mortality rates.

More significantly, moderate use of alcohol improves heart health, circulation, and sociability.

Yes, a couple of drinks takes the edge off one’s day, and makes one more sociable. But, getting drunk at a bar and driving home is definitely not healthy.

The study also reveals that even heavy drinkers who have not yet fried their liver or heart, or have slowed down to moderate drinking or quit, live longer than non-drinkers. This study does not account for the damage that heavy drinking can do to the body. Clearly, if you survive that hurdle, you live longer than abstainers.

The obvious question is why would abstaining from alcohol lead to a shorter life?
In the "Time Magazine" piece by John Cloud, He states that "the authors of the paper note that those who abstain from alcohol tend to be from lower socioeconomic classes and less able to afford the expense of drinking."

No way-- I vehemently disagree with that conclusion. Poverty breeds all social ills such as heavy drinking. The poor will get their alcohol one way or another by buying cheap wine, beer, or moonshine.

However, in Cloud’s piece, he paraphrases the paper by saying, "But even after controlling for nearly all imaginable variables–existing health problems, socioeconomic status, level of physical activity, number of close friends, quality of social support, et al–the six member team led by psychologist Charles Holahan of the University of Texas at Austin found that over a 20-year period, mortality rates were highest for those who were not current drinkers, regardless of whether they used to be alcoholics. The second highest mortality rates for heavy drinkers, and the lowest for moderate drinkers."

So the key words in this paper are "moderate drinkers" will live the longest. "The 1,824 participants ranged from 55 to 65 at the beginning of the study. The sample included a disproportionate number to men (63%).

Just over 69% of the teetotalers died during the 20 years, 60% of the heavy drinkers died, and only 41% of the moderate drinkers died. The scientists factored in the fact that heavy drinking is associated with a higher risk of cirrhosis and several types of cancer, particularly of the mouth and esophagus. Still, heavy drinkers are likely to live longer than non-drinkers if they survive the effects of heavy drinking.

The study authors are careful to note that even though drinking is associated with longer life, it can be dangerous. It can severely impair your memory and lead to non-lethal falls and other painful mishaps.

Yes, you could wake up in a strange bed, or like inebriated Rip Torn, thinking he was breaking into his own house, and being arrested for breaking into a bank. Of course, alcohol addiction can lead to divorce, loss of job, and a painful recovery.

So, moderation is the key when consuming alcohol. I drink two beers at suppertime and a glass or two of wine while I watch television. I never get drunk and I never drive after consuming alcohol. At 70, I’m in great shape. But, who knows, my neighborhood might blow up due to a gas leak, or an airplane might fall on my roof. And no, I’m not planning to stab myself in the chest with a Bowie knife. Cheers

Rick Raw: Obama Rolls Out Plan to Jump Start Sagging Recovery–More Empty Rhetoric

By Rick Grant Commentary rickgrant01@comcast.net

In a Labor Day speech in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, President Obama rolled out a new plan to jump start the sagging recovery. Clearly, it was a desperation move to save the Democrats from a blood bath in the midterm elections and show he is working hard to reignite the recovery.

More significantly, his speech had rough edges to show he means business and save his own ass from plummeting poll numbers. For reasons that are not completely his fault, Obama is in floundering around in deep trouble.

Throughout his presidency, Obama has been plagued by partisan politics. Republicans have dug their heels in and refused to cooperate with him. Effectively, Republicans have sabotaged his initiatives, with extreme prejudice. It’s open warfare on the Hill led by General (Sen.) John McCain, riding a white horse.

Obama’s plan to throw $50 billion at new infrastructure improvements such as road repairs and new bridges was empty rhetoric, considering the bill would not pass this year, and probably wouldn’t pass in the future. Besides, the new jobs would go to Mexicans, since they dominate most construction crews.

The President qualified his remarks with the caveat, " Now, the plain truth is, there’s no silver bullet or quick fix to the problem." Indeed, there are 30 million unemployed people with no prospect of ever finding a job in the foreseeable future that would agree with him. Now, the recovery has stalled, mired in a partisan impasse on the Hill.

On a conference call with reporters on Monday, a senior administration official acknowledged that the infrastructure bill will not add any new jobs until at least 2011–that is if it passes at all.

"This is not a stimulus, immediate-jobs plan. This is a six-year preauthorization of transportation projects that is front-loaded with money to try and spark the economy once Congress passes it." the senior administration official said.

Of course, as usual, Obama was making promises he can’t keep to bolster his poll numbers. Talk is cheap. He can’t fool the voters into believing that things will improve due to this new jobs fantasy.

It’s like Obama is living in a fool’s paradise thinking that infrastructure spending will create jobs for the unemployed. It’s too speculative and requires a bipartisan stamp of approval. Well, that’s not going to happen in this belligerent political climate.

These so called jobs are in construction. Not everyone is able or qualified to do road work. The companies hire Mexicans because they work hard for much less pay than American workers.

If a certain construction company gets caught hiring illegal aliens, they are fined and they turn around and do it again. Besides, does an aeronautical engineer who lost his job really want to do road construction? No, but in desperation he might consider it.

The truth is: People are just not feeling the recovery. Jobs are still scarce or non existent and people are struggling with desperation and depression. Obama’s tax incentives to small businesses did not work in the past and people are skeptical about such a nebulous initiative.

Business owners are not expanding or hiring because of the uncertain political future. Everyone is scared to make a big purchase, such as a new car or flat screen TV for the same reason that businesses are holding back.

We retirees have seen our income shrink because we didn’t get a cost of living raise in our Social Security checks. Now we find out our health insurance has gone up significantly. So, we’ve had to make more sacrifices to survive as food prices rise and our dwindling income is not stretching through the month.

More significantly, we retirees were promised by President Obama that he would make up for the lack of a cost of living increase in our Social Security income by giving us a one time $250 stimulus check. Obama reneged on that promise, which really pissed us off. I heard him promise this $250 stimulus in two separate speeches.

Thus, most Americans are disillusioned by Obama’s abysmal track record. He makes pretty speeches and promises, but goes back to Washington and hits the wall of Republican opposition. He lacks the strong leadership to overcome the opposition.

His Labor Day speech did nothing to reassure the American public that has been hit hard by the recession and the total lack of recovery. We want action, not words.

Rick Raw: Judge Stops Stem-cell Research, Blocking President Obama’s 2009 Executive Order

By Rick Grant Commentary rickgrant01@comcast.net

Somewhere on the other side, Christopher Reeves is livid that the advancing science of stem-cell research has now been setback that Judge Royce C. Lamberth. He ruled that Obama’s 2009 executive order expanding stem-cell research violated a 1996 law banning the use of federal money for any research the destroys embryos.

Obama’s order allowed federally funded research to be done on embryonic stem-cells derived from surplus embryos at fertility clinics. These embryos just sit frozen in a liquid nitrogen tank and no one wants them.

Judge Lamberth is a voice from the ignorant religious right rising up like a puritan serpent to skewer the advancement of science. This ruling means an immediate halting of research being done in dozens of labs across the country.

Most stem-cell research has advanced beyond embryo testing. Medical researchers have had great success with implanting stem-cells taken from the organs they are treating, and implanting them to repair damage to that organ. It has worked for heart and liver patients who have had miraculous results. But, the minute you start talking about embryos, the anti-abortion coalition goes berserk.

Of course, pressure from the uptight Republican dunderheads could have influenced the Judge’s ruling. However, the scientists involved with this research and lawyers said the ruling was vague and confusing. The fear among the researchers is the ruling may stop research approved under the more restrictive terms of the Bush administration.

Obama promised to appeal the judge’s ruling. If Judge Lamberth’s ruling is upheld, it will be a "serious blow to medical research," said the" New York Times." The focus of the embryo research is on diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, and spinal cord injuries, like Christopher Reeves suffered.

When he was alive, Reeves fought hard to continue embryo research. Despite his handicap, Reeves traveled with his entourage of medical assistants to appear on talk shows and anywhere he could find an audience.

Michael J. Fox, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease at 32 years old, continues Reeves battle with the religious right to keep all stem-cell research labs doing this important work. This ruling has all the earmarks of the religious right’s political chicanery.

However, the law guiding the Judge’s decision was the 1996 Dicky-Wicker Amendment which explicitly forbids federal funding for research in which a human embryo is destroyed. The Judge ruled that Obama’s executive order violated the spirit of that law.

In "Politics Daily.com" David Gibson makes a strong point when he said that "new research suggests that adult stem-cells may be at least as effective as embryonic stem-cells. So instead of this endless battle over which is the greater good–protecting nascent life or extending the lives of afflicted adults and children–let’s work together to unlock the promise of adult stem-cells."

So, the work continues on adult stem-cells and the embryonic stem-cell research is shutdown for now. The conflict continues. (References for this piece were gleaned from "The Week.")