Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning (NYT-article)
http://www.alternet.org/story/149369/8_smears_and_misconceptions_about_wikileaks_spread_by_the_media?page=entire AlterNet / By Julianne Escobedo Shepherd and Tana Ganeva 8 Smears and Misconceptions About WikiLeaks Spread By the Media Shredding the corporate media's malicious attacks on WikiLeaks. December 31, 2010 The corporate media's tendency to blare misinformation and outright fabrications has been particularly egregious in coverage of WikiLeaks. As Glenn Greenwald has argued, mainstream news outlets are parroting smears and falsehoods about the whistleblower site and its founder Julian Assange, helping to perpetuate a number of zombie lies -- misconceptions that refuse to die no matter how much they conflict with known reality, basic logic and well-publicized information. Here are the bogus narratives that keep appearing in newspapers and on the airwaves. 1. Fearmongering that WikiLeaks revelations will result in deaths. So far there's no evidence that WikiLeaks' revelations have cost lives. In fact, right before the cables were released, Pentagon officials admitted there were no documented instances of people being killed because of information exposed by WikiLeaks' previous document releases (and unlike the diplomatic cables, the Afghanistan files were unredacted). That's not to say that the exposure of secret government files can't somehow lead to someone, somewhere, someday, being hurt. But that's a pretty high bar to set, especially by a government engaged in multiple military operations -- many of them secret -- that lead to untold civilian casualties. 2. Spreading the lie that WikiLeaks posted all the cables. WikiLeaks has posted fewer than 2,000 of the 251,287 cables in its possession. The whistleblower released those documents in tandem with major news outlets including the Guardian, El Pais and Le Monde, and used most of the redactions employed by those papers to protect the identities of people whose lives could be endangered by exposure. The AP detailed this process in a December 3 article, but this did not stop officials and pundits from howling that WikiLeaks indiscriminately dumped all the cables online. Much of the media mindlessly repeated the claim. Greenwald and others have battled to kill the myth that the whistleblower site threw up all the cables without taking any precautions to protect people, but it keeps coming up. Just this week NPR issued an apology for all the times contributors and guests have implied or outright voiced the falsehood that WikiLeaks blindly posted all the cables at once. 3. Falsely claiming that Assange has committed a crime regarding WikiLeaks. The State Department is working really hard to pin a crime on Julian Assange. The problem is that so far he doesn't appear to have broken any laws. Assange is not a U.S. citizen, he does not work for the U.S. government, and the documents WikiLeaks posted were procured by someone else. As Greenwald has repeatedly pointed out, it's not against the law to publish classified U.S. government information. If it were, hundreds of journalists would be in prison right now. While the government tries to conjure up a legal justification for prosecuting Assange, the media is helping out by fanning the narrative that he's some criminal mastermind. Major outlets continue to host guests who accuse Assange of criminal behavior without quite specifying what his crime is. In a much derided CNN debate between Bush Homeland Security adviser Fran Townsend and Glenn Greenwald hosted by Jessica Yellin, Greenwald had to repeatedly bat away the assertion that Assange has profited from criminal acts. The effort to tar Assange as a criminal -- spearheaded by government officials and helped along by the media -- may have a chilling effect on future whistleblowers. 4. Denying that WikiLeaks is a journalistic enterprise. Public officials and pundits continue to claim that WikiLeaks is not a journalistic outlet, even though it procured the scoop of a decade. But much of what WikiLeaks does is identical to the activities of other news sources. WikiLeaks receives secrets from anonymous sources, which it then reveals to the public -- news is nothing if not a checks and balances system for the government, a fundamental right of a free press. Secondly, it curates those secrets before revealing them -- a journalist selecting relevant and appropriate material from a confidential document is not that different from WikiLeaks redacting certain parts of the cables. Because WikiLeaks' actions fall under the First Amendment, all journalists should be outraged if the American government attempts to prosecute. If WikiLeaks is prosecuted for conducting a journalistic enterprise, what rights will be stripped from journalists in the future? One of the most respected journalistic institutions in the world, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, is speaking out.
Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning (NYT-article)
Some of the more fanciful reactions to the WikiLeaks thing remind me a bit of a standard tactic used by the pre-'94 South African government, only somehow in reverse. Whenever an anti-apartheid activist got bumped off it was almost like clockwork, the SA government response would come, Actually he was one of ours, working undercover. I mean, we don't go about killing people ... - though this was often disseminated by subtler means than press releases. That way the victim's own constituency could be blamed for the murder. Now some are saying of Assange, Actually he's one of theirs ... Me, I don't know. One can never know, really, though naturally one's partial knowledge informs one's positions. What's important is one's response to an idea as a proposal, i.e. where one stands on the idea of this or that being true. Regards -Dawie Coetzee From: Keith Addison [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: biofuel@sustainablelists.org Sent: Sat, 1 January, 2011 6:30:18 Subject: Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning (NYT-article) http://www.alternet.org/story/149369/8_smears_and_misconceptions_about_wikileaks_spread_by_the_media?page=entire AlterNet / By Julianne Escobedo Shepherd and Tana Ganeva 8 Smears and Misconceptions About WikiLeaks Spread By the Media Shredding the corporate media's malicious attacks on WikiLeaks. December 31, 2010 The corporate media's tendency to blare misinformation and outright fabrications has been particularly egregious in coverage of WikiLeaks. As Glenn Greenwald has argued, mainstream news outlets are parroting smears and falsehoods about the whistleblower site and its founder Julian Assange, helping to perpetuate a number of zombie lies -- misconceptions that refuse to die no matter how much they conflict with known reality, basic logic and well-publicized information. Here are the bogus narratives that keep appearing in newspapers and on the airwaves. 1. Fearmongering that WikiLeaks revelations will result in deaths. So far there's no evidence that WikiLeaks' revelations have cost lives. In fact, right before the cables were released, Pentagon officials admitted there were no documented instances of people being killed because of information exposed by WikiLeaks' previous document releases (and unlike the diplomatic cables, the Afghanistan files were unredacted). That's not to say that the exposure of secret government files can't somehow lead to someone, somewhere, someday, being hurt. But that's a pretty high bar to set, especially by a government engaged in multiple military operations -- many of them secret -- that lead to untold civilian casualties. 2. Spreading the lie that WikiLeaks posted all the cables. WikiLeaks has posted fewer than 2,000 of the 251,287 cables in its possession. The whistleblower released those documents in tandem with major news outlets including the Guardian, El Pais and Le Monde, and used most of the redactions employed by those papers to protect the identities of people whose lives could be endangered by exposure. The AP detailed this process in a December 3 article, but this did not stop officials and pundits from howling that WikiLeaks indiscriminately dumped all the cables online. Much of the media mindlessly repeated the claim. Greenwald and others have battled to kill the myth that the whistleblower site threw up all the cables without taking any precautions to protect people, but it keeps coming up. Just this week NPR issued an apology for all the times contributors and guests have implied or outright voiced the falsehood that WikiLeaks blindly posted all the cables at once. 3. Falsely claiming that Assange has committed a crime regarding WikiLeaks. The State Department is working really hard to pin a crime on Julian Assange. The problem is that so far he doesn't appear to have broken any laws. Assange is not a U.S. citizen, he does not work for the U.S. government, and the documents WikiLeaks posted were procured by someone else. As Greenwald has repeatedly pointed out, it's not against the law to publish classified U.S. government information. If it were, hundreds of journalists would be in prison right now. While the government tries to conjure up a legal justification for prosecuting Assange, the media is helping out by fanning the narrative that he's some criminal mastermind. Major outlets continue to host guests who accuse Assange of criminal behavior without quite specifying what his crime is. In a much derided CNN debate between Bush Homeland Security adviser Fran Townsend and Glenn Greenwald hosted by Jessica Yellin, Greenwald had to repeatedly bat away the assertion that Assange has profited from criminal acts. The effort to tar Assange as a criminal -- spearheaded by government officials and helped along by the media -- may have a chilling effect on future whistleblowers. 4. Denying that WikiLeaks is a journalistic
Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning (NYT-article)
/government/transnational. Regards Dawie Coetzee From: Zeke Yewdall [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org Sent: Sun, 26 December, 2010 23:14:50 Subject: Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning (NYT-article) Alot of the US has a strange attraction to worshipping the almighty free market. Any sort of public or regulated business ideas Socialism, public health care, etc is attacked with a fervor usually reserved for religious disagreements. People might claim to believe in God, but what their rhetoric points towards is believing that the free market is infallible and incapable of doing wrong. This belief persists completely in the face of facts and reality in many cases. You might as well be trying to convert Christians to shamanism if you try to talk public health care capitalists. Z On Sunday, December 26, 2010, Doug [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I just do not understand the US system. I am an Australian, we have a mandated Pension system that inputs from memory 9% of a workers wages into a Superannuation scheme (of our choosing). Most seem to use an Industry fund (sort of Union related: has low fees usually good returns, depending on the market.). To my kmowledge there has been no Super Fund collapse in Australia as yet. The Australian Health scheme is similar to the Canadian one. The cost to residents is low, you can also increase the benefits with Private insurance if you so desire (but the basic benefits are adequate). The cost to our Government is less than the US per-person cost, every Australian citizen is covered. If I was an American (US) citizen, I feel I would want much more for my tax $ than is currently seen in the US system: I really cannot see where the inefficiencies could be, feel that a fairer system should be achievable. I wonder why Obama is having so much difficulty changing the US medical system? regards Doug On Sat, 25 Dec 2010 12:18:40 am Keith Addison wrote: Hello Dan, Michelle and all Michele, I don't know that the Federal Government would be - on the hook - PBGC only insures Pensions from Private companies in this case it's the retired workers who could be out. It's a lesson in the need for good financial planning and not putting all of your eggs in 1 basket. This reminds me of the Enron collapse. So many people had all of their retirement tied up in Enron, when the company went under, so did they. So you blame the pensions themselves, instead of Enron and the Washington people (?) who enabled the whole scam? Pensions should not exist. I'm not 100% in touch with all the details of this issue because there's simply been too much of it and I've had no reason to focus on it that closely. But IMHO that would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater. In other countries than the US, pensions not only exist, they also function as intended, providing millions with an essential resource that they depend on. Just because the whole system of welfare, healthcare and benefits in the US is now dysfunctional is no reason to damn them as worse than useless. Shouldn't you rather be aspiring to help restore their valuable functions instead of just baling out? They are plagued with problems and seldom funded correctly. At least with a 401k I can make my investment decisions and I know that what I get depends on what I contribute. How many deserving people would that exclude? How many Americans have died (been killed?) so far because they were effectively denied healthcare? A Grim Record: One In Seven Americans Is On Food Stamps December 8, 2010 http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/12/08/131905683/a-grim-record-one-in-s even-americans-is-on-food-stamps No prizes for guessing what kind of food they eat. Best wishes Keith Dan From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Michele Stephenson Sent: Thursday, December 23, 2010 11:36 AM Subject: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning (NYT-article) For those of you who live in the US an article of interest... For those who live outside looking in, it's no big surprise Private Company and Industry pensions plans have all but gone away. The substitute is the 401K that no one is really responsible for except the investor to make the best choice for Self. However, for those who work for local and state govt agencies this is something to watch and investigate especially if you are currently receiving a pension or will receive a pension in the next years to come. What is as important if not more important to watch is how these issues will be resolved. In the article below, if the judicial system does not get involved, then mediation is an option which usually results in a cut in benefits. I doubt
Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning (NYT-article)
Noam Scheiber describes something resembling a lateral rather than hierarchical organization although he still assumes some overarching control frame it seems which is a departure from pure lateral networking. That is more the way nature organizes things and hopefully if Schieber is right this reorganization will take a hint from the great creator of Nature. Hardt and Negri allude to such things in the book Multitude. I'd guess that most organizations a generation from now will be pretty small by contemporary standards, with highly convoluted cell-like structures. Large numbers of people within the organization may not even know one another's name, much less what colleagues spend their days doing, or the information they see on a regular basis. There will be redundant layers of security and activity, so that the loss of any one node can't disable the whole network. Which is to say, thanks to Wikileaks, the organizations of the future will look a lot like Š Wikileaks. ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (70,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning (NYT-article)
You make it sound like the company is to return 100% of the money to the group who pays in. That is not the case. The company is to find as many people who want to pay in to the fund, while not needing to ever draw from that fund. Everything that does not get drawn is then free for the company to use as it pleases. This is exactly have unemployment and social security works. It takes from the many to give to the (hopefully) few. When that few grow to close to the many, the system breaks down. You need to add more many or take away more few. As far as setting fixed caps on payouts because adjusters were just paying what ever they felt like, seams logical. Its like buying a burger. I would feel cheated if I paid for a 1/2lb burger and got a 1/4 instead and you paid for a 1/2 but got a full 1lb, just because your server felt like giving you more, or me less, on any given day. This is bad business for any business. The more product that is moved, the higher profits are. Could that insurance corp have afforded to pay out a bit more to people? Very possible. On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 12:09 PM, Tyler Arnold [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Yes, that's because insurance companies' business model is to 1) accept money in return for a promise to give it back when needed and then 2) don't give it back. That's it. Their profit is inversely related to their payouts. I used to work for a small software startup which made a kind of auto insurance claims management/decision support software that was supposed to account for the fact that newbie claims adjusters were all over the map when it came to payouts. Our software would use custom calculations based on different scenarios to set the upper and lower limits of a given payout and would prompt the claims adjuster to find a number between those limits. It worked really well -- I learned that our main customer was thrilled with it when they discovered that after using our software for one year they had saved $50 million USD in payouts. That's $50 million that was given to them by California drivers in the expectation that the money would be paid back out in the event of an accident; money which the company kept for itself instead. So instead of buying $50 million worth of car repair and medical bills or whatever people needed, it paid for $50 million worth of hookers and blow for insurance company executives.* I no longer work for this company, but I hear they are doing very well. * This may not literally be true. I don't care. -Original Message- From: Zeke Yewdall [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Dec 28, 2010 6:41 PM To: sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org Subject: Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning (NYT-article) Same here. That's quite common in rural areas here. Often property taxes via special levies that we vote upon fund the equipment, etc, but the staff volunteers their time. The insurance companies don't like this and charge higher premiums than houses in town with a paid fire department but we're also finding out after 170 houses burned in the forest fire this fall that so called insurance is quite a scam as they are trying to avoid paying the benefits that were supposedly paid for. On Tuesday, December 28, 2010, Jason Mier [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: i have never, and will never live in an area where the fire department is a paid service. all the FD's around me are volunteer, except for the village, which is paid via property taxes, and when the opportunity arises, i do in fact volunteer my time to the department. any other scheme is by and large, foolish. From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org Date: Tue, 28 Dec 2010 21:16:45 +1100 Subject: Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning(NYT-article) Luckily , in Australia, virtually all the Rural Fire services are staffed by volunteers (although there are some paid positions in support areas, Govt funded). I live on rural acreage, some fdunds go to the RFS as donations, but there is no compulsion. I was really surprised with the claim about US rural FS: Australia has on occasions sent brigades from Australia to help fight the big fires in the US ( the US has reciprocated for Australia on occasions). The insurance link to fire brigades also happened in Australia in the 1800´s: there was a plaque attached to the front of the house proving you had insurance. (These are now a collectors item). House insurance now contains a levy that helps fund the Urban fire services. AS I stated, Rural Fire Services are volunteers, with some Govt funding for equipment overheads. regards Doug On Mon, 27 Dec 2010 05:53:34 am Erik Lane wrote: On Sun, Dec 26, 2010 at 6:32 AM, Ivan Menchero [EMAIL PROTECTED]wrote: Ivan PS: I am surprise the have not privatize the fire department in the USA! so you pay
Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning(NYT-article)
As someone else stated, when people are allowed to pay when they have a fire, then only people who have fires will pay. That does not work. Remember that rural fire coverage is not paid for by taxes (i am sure there are grants and such that people can make use of) but by the local fees. It takes a lot of payments (both in the number of people, and the years they pay them) to cover fires, as most people have less then 1 fire in their life on average. On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 1:17 PM, Tyler Arnold [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Except that $75 has very little to do with the actual cost of fighting the fire; and accepting the money at the time of the fire would have done just as much to offset the cost of the fire as accepting it earlier would have. So saying the system works if you pay isn't quite true: the luckless resident offered to pay, would have paid, could have paid -- so if the system works if you pay then the system could have worked right then and there. But it *didn't* work because the $75 and the refusal to put out the fire is nothing more than a childish moral scold that benefits nobody, penalizes everybody, and only gratifies the shriveled hearts of right-wing authoritarians. -Original Message- From: Dan Beukelman [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Dec 30, 2010 12:26 PM To: sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org Subject: Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning(NYT-article) The situation cited below is interesting. The person who’s house burned for $75.00 actually lived in the country. The rural residents don’t pay taxes for fire service (they could if they wanted to). So, since the rural residents didn’t want to tax themselves to provide a fire service a nearby town said they could provide to any individual that wanted to pay for it. This guys son had a house fire also, also hadn’t paid his $75.00 annual fee, but was allowed to pay it once the house caught on fire. Once that happened many people conveniently forgot, assuming that they could just pay when the fire happened, if no fire, save your $75.00. Anyway a new rule was implemented saying that if you don’t pay your $75.00 you are out of luck, that was done to encourage as many as possible to pay for this service and not wait until their home catches on fire. Had it not been for the nearby town offering fire service for a fee, no one would have responded. The neighbor to the guy who’s house burned, had paid his $75.00 and his house was protected from the fire spreading. The system actually works pretty good, if you pay, but these residents decided themselves that they didn’t need government provided fire service. From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Doug Sent: Tuesday, December 28, 2010 4:17 AM To: sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org Subject: Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning(NYT-article) Luckily , in Australia, virtually all the Rural Fire services are staffed by volunteers (although there are some paid positions in support areas, Govt funded). I live on rural acreage, some fdunds go to the RFS as donations, but there is no compulsion. I was really surprised with the claim about US rural FS: Australia has on occasions sent brigades from Australia to help fight the big fires in the US ( the US has reciprocated for Australia on occasions). The insurance link to fire brigades also happened in Australia in the 1800´s: there was a plaque attached to the front of the house proving you had insurance. (These are now a collectors item). House insurance now contains a levy that helps fund the Urban fire services. AS I stated, Rural Fire Services are volunteers, with some Govt funding for equipment overheads. regards Doug On Mon, 27 Dec 2010 05:53:34 am Erik Lane wrote: On Sun, Dec 26, 2010 at 6:32 AM, Ivan Menchero [EMAIL PROTECTED]wrote: Ivan PS: I am surprise the have not privatize the fire department in the USA! so you pay a monthly insurance' and if you do not pay and there is a fire in your house you are out of luck! Unfortunately there are at least some fire departments that already do work like that. Here's a story about one that let a house burn, and the outrage over it was slim to none, that I saw. I'm very disappointed in the way things are going. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/ No pay, no spray: Firefighters let home burn Tennessee house in ashes after homeowner 'forgot' to pay $75 fee Below: 1. - x - Jump to video People step up to help Gene Cranick http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/#slice-2 - video http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/#slice-2 2. - x Jump to vote Results below http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/#slice-3 - vote http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/#slice-3 3. - x Next story
Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning (NYT-article)
Hello Peter Yes, I saw that piece by Josh Ogden. There've been quite a few such conspiracist pieces about WikiLeaks of course, some of them rather obviously orchestrated, if rather ineptly. I think Young Master Ogden should perhaps try reading what he's written in the mirror (and the forthcoming instalment too while he's at it). I could deal with it point by point, but it's hardly worth the effort, it kind of debunks itself. He just can't see past the labels, can he? The mainstream media is this, and therefore... Time Magazine is that, and therefore... And so on. (Yawn.) I don't altogether agree with Noam Scheiber's piece, and I certainly wouldn't bank on it, but it does have some substance at least, something to chew on. I'd agree that WikiLeaks is a powerful shove in that direction, as Scheiber says, but the important point is that it's not the only such shove. If it were it would probably amount to nothing in the end, but it's a part of a well-established, multi-faceted, and ever-spreading trend in that direction, nearly all of which goes under the MSM radar, and which will eventually succeed - this direction: For in logic a free market would be a local, mom-and-pop, and largely agrarian economy, which would work just fine, and which is exactly what the world doesn't have. Actually it does have it. Even when it's overshadowed, marginalised and dysfunctional, it's still there, and in a growing number of cases it's not at all dysfunctional. All best Keith Hi All ; Nice, Dawie. Yes, very succinct and insightful. This piece be might be pertinent: http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/80481/game-changer?page=0,0 Game Changer Why Wikileaks will be the death of big business and big government. Keith, let me say that nothing would make me happier than if you were correct, alas there is another more sinister viewpoint. Is WikiLeaks.org the Internet's 9/11? Best Regards, Peter G. Thailand www.gac-seeds.com WikiLeaks: Now a Household Term By Josh Ogden Neithercorp Press - 12/24/2010 A couple of months ago, if I had stood up at a dinner party and proudly declared that I had to take a Wikileak, nobody would have gotten the joke. I would have made a fool of myself! What changed? Well, I may still be a fool, but now everybody and their grandmother knows what WikiLeaks is, and I think if I hear Assange's name one more time, I'm going to have a brain aneurysm. Did WikiLeaks do something different? The November 28 release of US diplomatic cables (dubbed 'Cablegate') may have been larger in file size than previous data dumps, but has it yet revealed anything as visceral or intense as the 17-minute video (released in April of 2010) in which 12 people, including two Reuters journalists, are gunned down by an AH-64 Apache helicopter? The difference lies, almost entirely, in the way the corporate media is now treating the subject. There has been a clear shift in the posture and strategy of mainstream news sources, US officials and prominent political figures. WikiLeaks.org has been thrust to the forefront of the global news cycle. As we all know, the most important news is often that which is reported least; those stories which are aggressively censored and sometimes even retro-actively removed from mainstream news feeds. Suddenly, the innermost circles of controlled media appear to be playing a different game with WikiLeaks. They have pointed their spotlight at it. This is what originally raised my suspicions that something must be amiss. Perhaps most suspicious of all was when Time magazine began extensively covering WikiLeaks, and named Julian Assange as Readers Choice for Person of the Year. Though that honor officially went to Facebook.com creator and NSA darling Mark Zuckerberg, the sustained focus on Assange and WikiLeaks by Time and other elite publications was a major red flag. It became apparent that the globalist establishment had taken a special interest in WikiLeaks, and that they wanted it to become a household term. Many people believe that when a story dominates the international news cycle for weeks on end, it's because that story is important, or because it's something the public wants to read about. They have it backwards. Media monopolists have known for a long time that they are the ones who decide what's important, and they get to decide what the public wants to read about. In the spirit of the examples set by Time Magazine and old Bill Hearst, media does not reflect public interest and opinion, it aims to manufacture it. It's this reversal of causality that makes media consolidation so dangerous. Julian Assange and his associates may have made WikiLeaks.org, but the mainstream media made it famous. Questions Abound Is Mr. Assange an asset? Is the intelligence cooked? Did some George Soros foundation provide funding for WikiLeaks? What games are afoot here??? First off, let me address the Soros angle. John Young of Cryptome.org has conducted
Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning (NYT-article)
Yes, that's because insurance companies' business model is to 1) accept money in return for a promise to give it back when needed and then 2) don't give it back. That's it. Their profit is inversely related to their payouts. I used to work for a small software startup which made a kind of auto insurance claims management/decision support software that was supposed to account for the fact that newbie claims adjusters were all over the map when it came to payouts. Our software would use custom calculations based on different scenarios to set the upper and lower limits of a given payout and would prompt the claims adjuster to find a number between those limits. It worked really well -- I learned that our main customer was thrilled with it when they discovered that after using our software for one year they had saved $50 million USD in payouts. That's $50 million that was given to them by California drivers in the expectation that the money would be paid back out in the event of an accident; money which the company kept for itself instead. So instead of buying $50 million worth of car repair and medical bills or whatever people needed, it paid for $50 million worth of hookers and blow for insurance company executives.* I no longer work for this company, but I hear they are doing very well. * This may not literally be true. I don't care. -Original Message- From: Zeke Yewdall [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Dec 28, 2010 6:41 PM To: sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org Subject: Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning (NYT-article) Same here. That's quite common in rural areas here. Often property taxes via special levies that we vote upon fund the equipment, etc, but the staff volunteers their time. The insurance companies don't like this and charge higher premiums than houses in town with a paid fire department but we're also finding out after 170 houses burned in the forest fire this fall that so called insurance is quite a scam as they are trying to avoid paying the benefits that were supposedly paid for. On Tuesday, December 28, 2010, Jason Mier [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: i have never, and will never live in an area where the fire department is a paid service. all the FD's around me are volunteer, except for the village, which is paid via property taxes, and when the opportunity arises, i do in fact volunteer my time to the department. any other scheme is by and large, foolish. From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org Date: Tue, 28 Dec 2010 21:16:45 +1100 Subject: Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning(NYT-article) Luckily , in Australia, virtually all the Rural Fire services are staffed by volunteers (although there are some paid positions in support areas, Govt funded). I live on rural acreage, some fdunds go to the RFS as donations, but there is no compulsion. I was really surprised with the claim about US rural FS: Australia has on occasions sent brigades from Australia to help fight the big fires in the US ( the US has reciprocated for Australia on occasions). The insurance link to fire brigades also happened in Australia in the 1800´s: there was a plaque attached to the front of the house proving you had insurance. (These are now a collectors item). House insurance now contains a levy that helps fund the Urban fire services. AS I stated, Rural Fire Services are volunteers, with some Govt funding for equipment overheads. regards Doug On Mon, 27 Dec 2010 05:53:34 am Erik Lane wrote: On Sun, Dec 26, 2010 at 6:32 AM, Ivan Menchero [EMAIL PROTECTED]wrote: Ivan PS: I am surprise the have not privatize the fire department in the USA! so you pay a monthly insurance' and if you do not pay and there is a fire in your house you are out of luck! Unfortunately there are at least some fire departments that already do work like that. Here's a story about one that let a house burn, and the outrage over it was slim to none, that I saw. I'm very disappointed in the way things are going. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/ No pay, no spray: Firefighters let home burn Tennessee house in ashes after homeowner 'forgot' to pay $75 fee Below: 1. - x - Jump to video People step up to help Gene Cranick http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/#slice-2 - video http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/#slice-2 2. - x Jump to vote Results below http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/#slice-3 - vote http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/#slice-3 3. - x Next story in Life Storm, blizzard warnings stretch along Atlantic http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40810424/ns/weather/ - related http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/#slice-4 - - Advertisement | ad info http
Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning(NYT-article)
The situation cited below is interesting. The person whos house burned for $75.00 actually lived in the country. The rural residents dont pay taxes for fire service (they could if they wanted to). So, since the rural residents didnt want to tax themselves to provide a fire service a nearby town said they could provide to any individual that wanted to pay for it. This guys son had a house fire also, also hadnt paid his $75.00 annual fee, but was allowed to pay it once the house caught on fire. Once that happened many people conveniently forgot, assuming that they could just pay when the fire happened, if no fire, save your $75.00. Anyway a new rule was implemented saying that if you dont pay your $75.00 you are out of luck, that was done to encourage as many as possible to pay for this service and not wait until their home catches on fire. Had it not been for the nearby town offering fire service for a fee, no one would have responded. The neighbor to the guy whos house burned, had paid his $75.00 and his house was protected from the fire spreading. The system actually works pretty good, if you pay, but these residents decided themselves that they didnt need government provided fire service. From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Doug Sent: Tuesday, December 28, 2010 4:17 AM To: sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org Subject: Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning(NYT-article) Luckily , in Australia, virtually all the Rural Fire services are staffed by volunteers (although there are some paid positions in support areas, Govt funded). I live on rural acreage, some fdunds go to the RFS as donations, but there is no compulsion. I was really surprised with the claim about US rural FS: Australia has on occasions sent brigades from Australia to help fight the big fires in the US ( the US has reciprocated for Australia on occasions). The insurance link to fire brigades also happened in Australia in the 1800´s: there was a plaque attached to the front of the house proving you had insurance. (These are now a collectors item). House insurance now contains a levy that helps fund the Urban fire services. AS I stated, Rural Fire Services are volunteers, with some Govt funding for equipment overheads. regards Doug On Mon, 27 Dec 2010 05:53:34 am Erik Lane wrote: On Sun, Dec 26, 2010 at 6:32 AM, Ivan Menchero [EMAIL PROTECTED]wrote: Ivan PS: I am surprise the have not privatize the fire department in the USA! so you pay a monthly insurance' and if you do not pay and there is a fire in your house you are out of luck! Unfortunately there are at least some fire departments that already do work like that. Here's a story about one that let a house burn, and the outrage over it was slim to none, that I saw. I'm very disappointed in the way things are going. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/ No pay, no spray: Firefighters let home burn Tennessee house in ashes after homeowner 'forgot' to pay $75 fee Below: 1. - x - Jump to video People step up to help Gene Cranick http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/#slice-2 - video http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/#slice-2 2. - x Jump to vote Results below http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/#slice-3 - vote http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/#slice-3 3. - x Next story in Life Storm, blizzard warnings stretch along Atlantic http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40810424/ns/weather/ - related http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/#slice-4 - - Advertisement | ad info http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26613008/ msnbc.com msnbc.com updated 10/6/2010 12:48:23 PM ET 2010-10-06T16:48:23 - Share [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Print http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/# http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/ - Font: - + - - Firefighters in rural Tennessee let a home burn to the ground last week because the homeowner hadn't paid a $75 fee. Gene Cranick of Obion County and his family lost all of their possessions in the Sept. 29 fire, along with three dogs and a cat. They could have been saved if they had put water on it, but they didn't do it, Cranick told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann. The fire started when the Cranicks' grandson was burning trash near the family home. As it grew out of control, the Cranicks called 911, but the fire department from the nearby city of South Fulton would not respond. We wasn't on their list, he said the operators told him. Cranick, who lives outside the city limits, admits he forgot to pay the annual $75 fee. The county does not have a county-wide firefighting service, but South Fulton offers fire coverage to rural residents for a fee. Cranick says he told the operator he would pay
Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning(NYT-article)
Except that $75 has very little to do with the actual cost of fighting the fire; and accepting the money at the time of the fire would have done just as much to offset the cost of the fire as accepting it earlier would have. So saying the system works if you pay isn't quite true: the luckless resident offered to pay, would have paid, could have paid -- so if the system works if you pay then the system could have worked right then and there. But it *didn't* work because the $75 and the refusal to put out the fire is nothing more than a childish moral scold that benefits nobody, penalizes everybody, and only gratifies the shriveled hearts of right-wing authoritarians. -Original Message- From: Dan Beukelman [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Dec 30, 2010 12:26 PM To: sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org Subject: Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension isa Warning(NYT-article) The situation cited below is interesting. The person whos house burned for $75.00 actually lived in the country. The rural residents dont pay taxes for fire service (they could if they wanted to). So, since the rural residents didnt want to tax themselves to provide a fire service a nearby town said they could provide to any individual that wanted to pay for it. This guys son had a house fire also, also hadnt paid his $75.00 annual fee, but was allowed to pay it once the house caught on fire. Once that happened many people conveniently forgot, assuming that they could just pay when the fire happened, if no fire, save your $75.00. Anyway a new rule was implemented saying that if you dont pay your $75.00 you are out of luck, that was done to encourage as many as possible to pay for this service and not wait until their home catches on fire. Had it not been for the nearby town offering fire service for a fee, no one would have responded. The neighbor to the guy whos house burned, had paid his $75.00 and his house was protected from the fire spreading. The system actually works pretty good, if you pay, but these residents decided themselves that they didnt need government provided fire service. From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Doug Sent: Tuesday, December 28, 2010 4:17 AM To: sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org Subject: Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning(NYT-article) Luckily , in Australia, virtually all the Rural Fire services are staffed by volunteers (although there are some paid positions in support areas, Govt funded). I live on rural acreage, some fdunds go to the RFS as donations, but there is no compulsion. I was really surprised with the claim about US rural FS: Australia has on occasions sent brigades from Australia to help fight the big fires in the US ( the US has reciprocated for Australia on occasions). The insurance link to fire brigades also happened in Australia in the 1800´s: there was a plaque attached to the front of the house proving you had insurance. (These are now a collectors item). House insurance now contains a levy that helps fund the Urban fire services. AS I stated, Rural Fire Services are volunteers, with some Govt funding for equipment overheads. regards Doug On Mon, 27 Dec 2010 05:53:34 am Erik Lane wrote: On Sun, Dec 26, 2010 at 6:32 AM, Ivan Menchero [EMAIL PROTECTED]wrote: Ivan PS: I am surprise the have not privatize the fire department in the USA! so you pay a monthly insurance' and if you do not pay and there is a fire in your house you are out of luck! Unfortunately there are at least some fire departments that already do work like that. Here's a story about one that let a house burn, and the outrage over it was slim to none, that I saw. I'm very disappointed in the way things are going. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/ No pay, no spray: Firefighters let home burn Tennessee house in ashes after homeowner 'forgot' to pay $75 fee Below: 1. - x - Jump to video People step up to help Gene Cranick http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/#slice-2 - video http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/#slice-2 2. - x Jump to vote Results below http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/#slice-3 - vote http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/#slice-3 3. - x Next story in Life Storm, blizzard warnings stretch along Atlantic http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40810424/ns/weather/ - related http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/#slice-4 - - Advertisement | ad info http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26613008/ msnbc.com msnbc.com updated 10/6/2010 12:48:23 PM ET 2010-10-06T16:48:23 - Share [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Print http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/# http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/ - Font
Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning (NYT-article)
What insurance company was your main customer? From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Tyler Arnold Sent: Wednesday, December 29, 2010 2:09 PM To: sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org; sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org Subject: Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning (NYT-article) Yes, that's because insurance companies' business model is to 1) accept money in return for a promise to give it back when needed and then 2) don't give it back. That's it. Their profit is inversely related to their payouts. I used to work for a small software startup which made a kind of auto insurance claims management/decision support software that was supposed to account for the fact that newbie claims adjusters were all over the map when it came to payouts. Our software would use custom calculations based on different scenarios to set the upper and lower limits of a given payout and would prompt the claims adjuster to find a number between those limits. It worked really well -- I learned that our main customer was thrilled with it when they discovered that after using our software for one year they had saved $50 million USD in payouts. That's $50 million that was given to them by California drivers in the expectation that the money would be paid back out in the event of an accident; money which the company kept for itself instead. So instead of buying $50 million worth of car repair and medical bills or whatever people needed, it paid for $50 million worth of hookers and blow for insurance company executives.* I no longer work for this company, but I hear they are doing very well. * This may not literally be true. I don't care. -Original Message- From: Zeke Yewdall [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Dec 28, 2010 6:41 PM To: sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org Subject: Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning (NYT-article) Same here. That's quite common in rural areas here. Often property taxes via special levies that we vote upon fund the equipment, etc, but the staff volunteers their time. The insurance companies don't like this and charge higher premiums than houses in town with a paid fire department but we're also finding out after 170 houses burned in the forest fire this fall that so called insurance is quite a scam as they are trying to avoid paying the benefits that were supposedly paid for. On Tuesday, December 28, 2010, Jason Mier [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: i have never, and will never live in an area where the fire department is a paid service. all the FD's around me are volunteer, except for the village, which is paid via property taxes, and when the opportunity arises, i do in fact volunteer my time to the department. any other scheme is by and large, foolish. From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org Date: Tue, 28 Dec 2010 21:16:45 +1100 Subject: Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning(NYT-article) Luckily , in Australia, virtually all the Rural Fire services are staffed by volunteers (although there are some paid positions in support areas, Govt funded). I live on rural acreage, some fdunds go to the RFS as donations, but there is no compulsion. I was really surprised with the claim about US rural FS: Australia has on occasions sent brigades from Australia to help fight the big fires in the US ( the US has reciprocated for Australia on occasions). The insurance link to fire brigades also happened in Australia in the 1800´s: there was a plaque attached to the front of the house proving you had insurance. (These are now a collectors item). House insurance now contains a levy that helps fund the Urban fire services. AS I stated, Rural Fire Services are volunteers, with some Govt funding for equipment overheads. regards Doug On Mon, 27 Dec 2010 05:53:34 am Erik Lane wrote: On Sun, Dec 26, 2010 at 6:32 AM, Ivan Menchero [EMAIL PROTECTED]wrote: Ivan PS: I am surprise the have not privatize the fire department in the USA! so you pay a monthly insurance' and if you do not pay and there is a fire in your house you are out of luck! Unfortunately there are at least some fire departments that already do work like that. Here's a story about one that let a house burn, and the outrage over it was slim to none, that I saw. I'm very disappointed in the way things are going. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/ No pay, no spray: Firefighters let home burn Tennessee house in ashes after homeowner 'forgot' to pay $75 fee Below: 1. - x - Jump to video People step up to help Gene Cranick http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/#slice-2 - video http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/#slice-2 2. - x Jump to vote Results below http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns
Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning (NYT-article)
Dan, I'm very sorry to say that I'm paranoid enough to not want to say. You may cynically assume that I am lying, of course, and if corporate power didn't routinely stomp little people like me to death worldwide without a second thought, I would cynically agree with you. -Original Message- From: Dan Beukelman [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Dec 30, 2010 12:47 PM To: sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org Subject: Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension isa Warning (NYT-article) What insurance company was your main customer? From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Tyler Arnold Sent: Wednesday, December 29, 2010 2:09 PM To: sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org; sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org Subject: Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning (NYT-article) Yes, that's because insurance companies' business model is to 1) accept money in return for a promise to give it back when needed and then 2) don't give it back. That's it. Their profit is inversely related to their payouts. I used to work for a small software startup which made a kind of auto insurance claims management/decision support software that was supposed to account for the fact that newbie claims adjusters were all over the map when it came to payouts. Our software would use custom calculations based on different scenarios to set the upper and lower limits of a given payout and would prompt the claims adjuster to find a number between those limits. It worked really well -- I learned that our main customer was thrilled with it when they discovered that after using our software for one year they had saved $50 million USD in payouts. That's $50 million that was given to them by California drivers in the expectation that the money would be paid back out in the event of an accident; money which the company kept for itself instead. So instead of buying $50 million worth of car repair and medical bills or whatever people needed, it paid for $50 million worth of hookers and blow for insurance company executives.* I no longer work for this company, but I hear they are doing very well. * This may not literally be true. I don't care. -Original Message- From: Zeke Yewdall [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Dec 28, 2010 6:41 PM To: sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org Subject: Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning (NYT-article) Same here. That's quite common in rural areas here. Often property taxes via special levies that we vote upon fund the equipment, etc, but the staff volunteers their time. The insurance companies don't like this and charge higher premiums than houses in town with a paid fire department but we're also finding out after 170 houses burned in the forest fire this fall that so called insurance is quite a scam as they are trying to avoid paying the benefits that were supposedly paid for. On Tuesday, December 28, 2010, Jason Mier [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: i have never, and will never live in an area where the fire department is a paid service. all the FD's around me are volunteer, except for the village, which is paid via property taxes, and when the opportunity arises, i do in fact volunteer my time to the department. any other scheme is by and large, foolish. From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org Date: Tue, 28 Dec 2010 21:16:45 +1100 Subject: Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning(NYT-article) Luckily , in Australia, virtually all the Rural Fire services are staffed by volunteers (although there are some paid positions in support areas, Govt funded). I live on rural acreage, some fdunds go to the RFS as donations, but there is no compulsion. I was really surprised with the claim about US rural FS: Australia has on occasions sent brigades from Australia to help fight the big fires in the US ( the US has reciprocated for Australia on occasions). The insurance link to fire brigades also happened in Australia in the 1800´s: there was a plaque attached to the front of the house proving you had insurance. (These are now a collectors item). House insurance now contains a levy that helps fund the Urban fire services. AS I stated, Rural Fire Services are volunteers, with some Govt funding for equipment overheads. regards Doug On Mon, 27 Dec 2010 05:53:34 am Erik Lane wrote: On Sun, Dec 26, 2010 at 6:32 AM, Ivan Menchero [EMAIL PROTECTED]wrote: Ivan PS: I am surprise the have not privatize the fire department in the USA! so you pay a monthly insurance' and if you do not pay and there is a fire in your house you are out of luck! Unfortunately there are at least some fire departments that already do work like that. Here's a story about one that let a house burn, and the outrage over it was slim to none, that I saw
Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning(NYT-article)
If the fire department accepted the payment at the time of the fire, no one would pay until their house was on fire, the $75.00 - $150.00 / year wouldn’t pay for much of a fire department. The residents were the ones to decide they didn’t want fire service. It’s like saying that I shouldn’t have to pay for a military, until the invaders try to take over my property, then I could be charged a fee for defense. It costs something to have these services available and if it were a – pay at the time of the fire – service the cost would not have been $75.00 but likely hundreds of thousands, which I am sure this guy couldn’t have paid. From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Tyler Arnold Sent: Thursday, December 30, 2010 3:17 PM To: sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org Subject: Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning(NYT-article) Except that $75 has very little to do with the actual cost of fighting the fire; and accepting the money at the time of the fire would have done just as much to offset the cost of the fire as accepting it earlier would have. So saying the system works if you pay isn't quite true: the luckless resident offered to pay, would have paid, could have paid -- so if the system works if you pay then the system could have worked right then and there. But it *didn't* work because the $75 and the refusal to put out the fire is nothing more than a childish moral scold that benefits nobody, penalizes everybody, and only gratifies the shriveled hearts of right-wing authoritarians. -Original Message- From: Dan Beukelman [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Dec 30, 2010 12:26 PM To: sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org Subject: Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension isa Warning(NYT-article) The situation cited below is interesting. The person who’s house burned for $75.00 actually lived in the country. The rural residents don’t pay taxes for fire service (they could if they wanted to). So, since the rural residents didn’t want to tax themselves to provide a fire service a nearby town said they could provide to any individual that wanted to pay for it. This guys son had a house fire also, also hadn’t paid his $75.00 annual fee, but was allowed to pay it once the house caught on fire. Once that happened many people conveniently forgot, assuming that they could just pay when the fire happened, if no fire, save your $75.00. Anyway a new rule was implemented saying that if you don’t pay your $75.00 you are out of luck, that was done to encourage as many as possible to pay for this service and not wait until their home catches on fire. Had it not been for the nearby town offering fire service for a fee, no one would have responded. The neighbor to the guy who’s house burned, had paid his $75.00 and his house was protected from the fire spreading. The system actually works pretty good, if you pay, but these residents decided themselves that they didn’t need government provided fire service. From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Doug Sent: Tuesday, December 28, 2010 4:17 AM To: sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org Subject: Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning(NYT-article) Luckily , in Australia, virtually all the Rural Fire services are staffed by volunteers (although there are some paid positions in support areas, Govt funded). I live on rural acreage, some fdunds go to the RFS as donations, but there is no compulsion. I was really surprised with the claim about US rural FS: Australia has on occasions sent brigades from Australia to help fight the big fires in the US ( the US has reciprocated for Australia on occasions). The insurance link to fire brigades also happened in Australia in the 1800´s: there was a plaque attached to the front of the house proving you had insurance. (These are now a collectors item). House insurance now contains a levy that helps fund the Urban fire services. AS I stated, Rural Fire Services are volunteers, with some Govt funding for equipment overheads. regards Doug On Mon, 27 Dec 2010 05:53:34 am Erik Lane wrote: On Sun, Dec 26, 2010 at 6:32 AM, Ivan Menchero [EMAIL PROTECTED]wrote: Ivan PS: I am surprise the have not privatize the fire department in the USA! so you pay a monthly insurance' and if you do not pay and there is a fire in your house you are out of luck! Unfortunately there are at least some fire departments that already do work like that. Here's a story about one that let a house burn, and the outrage over it was slim to none, that I saw. I'm very disappointed in the way things are going. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/ No pay, no spray: Firefighters let home burn Tennessee house in ashes after homeowner 'forgot' to pay $75 fee Below: 1. - x - Jump to video People step up to help Gene Cranick http
Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning (NYT-article)
Well the only reason to ask for me was because many, if not most insurance companies in the US (for example State Farm – the largest insurer in the US) for property and casualty insurance are “mutual” insurance companies meaning they are owned by their customers. This is not to say that the execs don’t spend the profits on hookers and blow, but the customer owner’s should then vote for a board that will fire those people. There is power in being a customer of a mutual insurance company. You can vote for board members and make sure they are acting in your best interest. From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Tyler Arnold Sent: Thursday, December 30, 2010 5:02 PM To: sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org Subject: Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning (NYT-article) Dan, I'm very sorry to say that I'm paranoid enough to not want to say. You may cynically assume that I am lying, of course, and if corporate power didn't routinely stomp little people like me to death worldwide without a second thought, I would cynically agree with you. -Original Message- From: Dan Beukelman [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Dec 30, 2010 12:47 PM To: sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org Subject: Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension isa Warning (NYT-article) What insurance company was your main customer? From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Tyler Arnold Sent: Wednesday, December 29, 2010 2:09 PM To: sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org; sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org Subject: Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning (NYT-article) Yes, that's because insurance companies' business model is to 1) accept money in return for a promise to give it back when needed and then 2) don't give it back. That's it. Their profit is inversely related to their payouts. I used to work for a small software startup which made a kind of auto insurance claims management/decision support software that was supposed to account for the fact that newbie claims adjusters were all over the map when it came to payouts. Our software would use custom calculations based on different scenarios to set the upper and lower limits of a given payout and would prompt the claims adjuster to find a number between those limits. It worked really well -- I learned that our main customer was thrilled with it when they discovered that after using our software for one year they had saved $50 million USD in payouts. That's $50 million that was given to them by California drivers in the expectation that the money would be paid back out in the event of an accident; money which the company kept for itself instead. So instead of buying $50 million worth of car repair and medical bills or whatever people needed, it paid for $50 million worth of hookers and blow for insurance company executives.* I no longer work for this company, but I hear they are doing very well. * This may not literally be true. I don't care. -Original Message- From: Zeke Yewdall [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Dec 28, 2010 6:41 PM To: sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org Subject: Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning (NYT-article) Same here. That's quite common in rural areas here. Often property taxes via special levies that we vote upon fund the equipment, etc, but the staff volunteers their time. The insurance companies don't like this and charge higher premiums than houses in town with a paid fire department but we're also finding out after 170 houses burned in the forest fire this fall that so called insurance is quite a scam as they are trying to avoid paying the benefits that were supposedly paid for. On Tuesday, December 28, 2010, Jason Mier [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: i have never, and will never live in an area where the fire department is a paid service. all the FD's around me are volunteer, except for the village, which is paid via property taxes, and when the opportunity arises, i do in fact volunteer my time to the department. any other scheme is by and large, foolish. From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org Date: Tue, 28 Dec 2010 21:16:45 +1100 Subject: Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning(NYT-article) Luckily , in Australia, virtually all the Rural Fire services are staffed by volunteers (although there are some paid positions in support areas, Govt funded). I live on rural acreage, some fdunds go to the RFS as donations, but there is no compulsion. I was really surprised with the claim about US rural FS: Australia has on occasions sent brigades from Australia to help fight the big fires in the US ( the US has reciprocated for Australia on occasions). The insurance link to fire brigades also happened in Australia in the 1800´s
Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning (NYT-article)
Hi All ; Nice, Dawie. Yes, very succinct and insightful. This piece be might be pertinent: http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/80481/game-changer?page=0,0 Game Changer Why Wikileaks will be the death of big business and big government. Keith, let me say that nothing would make me happier than if you were correct, alas there is another more sinister viewpoint. Is WikiLeaks.org “the Internet’s 9/11?” Best Regards, Peter G. Thailand www.gac-seeds.com WikiLeaks: Now a Household Term By Josh Ogden Neithercorp Press – 12/24/2010 A couple of months ago, if I had stood up at a dinner party and proudly declared that I had to take a “Wikileak,” nobody would have gotten the joke. I would have made a fool of myself! What changed? Well, I may still be a fool, but now everybody and their grandmother knows what WikiLeaks is, and I think if I hear Assange’s name one more time, I’m going to have a brain aneurysm. Did WikiLeaks do something different? The November 28 release of US diplomatic cables (dubbed ‘Cablegate’) may have been larger in file size than previous data dumps, but has it yet revealed anything as visceral or intense as the 17-minute video (released in April of 2010) in which 12 people, including two Reuters journalists, are gunned down by an AH-64 Apache helicopter? The difference lies, almost entirely, in the way the corporate media is now treating the subject. There has been a clear shift in the posture and strategy of mainstream news sources, US officials and prominent political figures. WikiLeaks.org has been thrust to the forefront of the global news cycle. As we all know, the most important news is often that which is reported least; those stories which are aggressively censored and sometimes even retro-actively removed from mainstream news feeds. Suddenly, the innermost circles of controlled media appear to be playing a different game with WikiLeaks. They have pointed their spotlight at it. This is what originally raised my suspicions that something must be amiss. Perhaps most suspicious of all was when Time magazine began extensively covering WikiLeaks, and named Julian Assange as Readers Choice for Person of the Year. Though that “honor” officially went to Facebook.com creator and NSA darling Mark Zuckerberg, the sustained focus on Assange and WikiLeaks by Time and other elite publications was a major red flag. It became apparent that the globalist establishment had taken a special interest in WikiLeaks, and that they wanted it to become a household term. Many people believe that when a story dominates the international news cycle for weeks on end, it’s because that story is important, or because it’s something the public wants to read about. They have it backwards. Media monopolists have known for a long time that they are the ones who decide what’s “important,” and they get to decide what the public “wants” to read about. In the spirit of the examples set by Time Magazine and old Bill Hearst, media does not reflect public interest and opinion, it aims to manufacture it. It’s this reversal of causality that makes media consolidation so dangerous. Julian Assange and his associates may have made WikiLeaks.org, but the mainstream media made it famous. Questions Abound Is Mr. Assange an asset? Is the intelligence cooked? Did some George Soros foundation provide funding for WikiLeaks? What games are afoot here??? First off, let me address the Soros angle. John Young of Cryptome.org has conducted an investigation into the allegations that WikiLeaks was financed through some George Soros organization, and could not confirm any of these claims. You can read that thread here, along with email responses from representatives of Soros’ Open Society Foundations and tax reports which make no mention of WikiLeaks. Do we trust Soros’ underlings to tell the truth? Not likely! Conclusion: this can be neither confirmed, nor denied. (But if Glenn Beck’s talking about it, it’s probably a dead-end.) Moving on… Julian Assange has a long history of outspokenness against corruption, and considerable “street cred” among hackers. His skills and intelligence are beyond question. But we all know that there are innumerable ways by which people can be made to compromise their ethics. Although I have modified my stance several times already as new information comes to my attention, I do not currently believe that Julian Assange is an intelligence asset. However, I am giving him the benefit of the doubt on that, especially considering his troubling remarks about 9/11. Forgive me if I’m out of line here, but I think the guy who invented deniable encryption should be smart enough to know that skyscrapers don’t just magically demolish themselves when the smoke detectors go off. Which leads me to the next question… Where’s the hard-hitting 9/11 evidence? Among all the data released thus far, I don’t think there has been so much as a single memorandum, or even a sticky note, pertaining to that
Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning(NYT-article)
Luckily , in Australia, virtually all the Rural Fire services are staffed by volunteers (although there are some paid positions in support areas, Govt funded). I live on rural acreage, some fdunds go to the RFS as donations, but there is no compulsion. I was really surprised with the claim about US rural FS: Australia has on occasions sent brigades from Australia to help fight the big fires in the US ( the US has reciprocated for Australia on occasions). The insurance link to fire brigades also happened in Australia in the 1800´s: there was a plaque attached to the front of the house proving you had insurance. (These are now a collectors item). House insurance now contains a levy that helps fund the Urban fire services. AS I stated, Rural Fire Services are volunteers, with some Govt funding for equipment overheads. regards Doug On Mon, 27 Dec 2010 05:53:34 am Erik Lane wrote: On Sun, Dec 26, 2010 at 6:32 AM, Ivan Menchero [EMAIL PROTECTED]wrote: Ivan PS: I am surprise the have not privatize the fire department in the USA! so you pay a monthly insurance' and if you do not pay and there is a fire in your house you are out of luck! Unfortunately there are at least some fire departments that already do work like that. Here's a story about one that let a house burn, and the outrage over it was slim to none, that I saw. I'm very disappointed in the way things are going. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/ No pay, no spray: Firefighters let home burn Tennessee house in ashes after homeowner 'forgot' to pay $75 fee Below: 1. - x - Jump to video People step up to help Gene Cranick http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/#slice-2 - video http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/#slice-2 2. - x Jump to vote Results below http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/#slice-3 - vote http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/#slice-3 3. - x Next story in Life Storm, blizzard warnings stretch along Atlantic http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40810424/ns/weather/ - related http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/#slice-4 - - Advertisement | ad info http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26613008/ msnbc.com msnbc.com updated 10/6/2010 12:48:23 PM ET 2010-10-06T16:48:23 - Share [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Print http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/# - Font: - + - - Firefighters in rural Tennessee let a home burn to the ground last week because the homeowner hadn't paid a $75 fee. Gene Cranick of Obion County and his family lost all of their possessions in the Sept. 29 fire, along with three dogs and a cat. They could have been saved if they had put water on it, but they didn't do it, Cranick told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann. The fire started when the Cranicks' grandson was burning trash near the family home. As it grew out of control, the Cranicks called 911, but the fire department from the nearby city of South Fulton would not respond. We wasn't on their list, he said the operators told him. Cranick, who lives outside the city limits, admits he forgot to pay the annual $75 fee. The county does not have a county-wide firefighting service, but South Fulton offers fire coverage to rural residents for a fee. Cranick says he told the operator he would pay whatever is necessary to have the fire put out. advertisement | ad info http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26613008/ Advertisement | ad info http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26613008/ Advertisement | ad info http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26613008/ His offer wasn't accepted, he said. The fire fee policy dates back 20 or so years. Anybody that's not inside the city limits of South Fulton, it's a service we offer. Either they accept it or they don't, said South Fulton Mayor David Crocker. The fire department's decision to let the home burn was incredibly irresponsible, said the president of an association representing firefighters. Professional, career firefighters shouldn’t be forced to check a list before running out the door to see which homeowners have paid up, Harold Schaitberger, International Association of Fire Fighters president, said in a statement. They get in their trucks and go. Firefighters did eventually show up, but only to fight the fire on the neighboring property, whose owner had paid the fee. Story: 'No pay, no spray' case: Firefighters 'threatened' http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39535911/ns/us_news-life/ They put water out on the fence line out here. They never said nothing to me. Never acknowledged. They stood out here and watched it burn, Cranick said. South Fulton's mayor said that the fire department can't let homeowners pay the fee on the spot, because the only people who would pay would be those whose homes are on fire.
Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning (NYT-article)
Well said! Now see if you could rewind time and try to explain THIS to Pam Brown when she was making 80K USD and living on a SIX bedroom house (may be she should have lived in a three bedroom house and save some for harsher times, I know, hindsight is 20/20). Americans (US) have an aversion for anything to do with social-anything and telling them that they need to pay more taxes is just not a political option. It will have to be a “revolution” if you want to call it, in order for the majority to start to see THIS and then who knows what will happen. But there are a few people making a lot of money and they like to be making that kind of money.. Since I went to the USA in 1989 I always though the Americans lived very good for a long time (at that time a pizza delivery boy would make the same kind of money as my engineering dad) . Now I do not think they live that good and their future is much more grimmer. And I know how difficult is to have to do with less. Difficult, worrisome times ahead, but... try to have a happy New Year, Ivan -Original Message- From: Keith Addison Sent: Monday, December 27, 2010 11:28 PM To: biofuel@sustainablelists.org Subject: Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning (NYT-article) http://www.alternet.org/story/149324/america_in_decline%3A_why_germans_think_we%27re_insane?page=entire America in Decline: Why Germans Think We're Insane A look at our empire in decline through the eyes of the European media. December 26, 2010 By Democrats Ramshield As an American expat living in the European Union, I've started to see America from a different perspective. The European Union has a larger economy and more people than America does. Though it spends less -- right around 9 percent of GNP on medical, whereas we in the U.S. spend close to between 15 to 16 percent of GNP on medical -- the EU pretty much insures 100 percent of its population. The U.S. has 59 million people medically uninsured; 132 million without dental insurance; 60 million without paid sick leave; 40 million on food stamps. Everybody in the European Union has cradle-to-grave access to universal medical and a dental plan by law. The law also requires paid sick leave; paid annual leave; paid maternity leave. When you realize all of that, it becomes easy to understand why many Europeans think America has gone insane. Der Spiegel has run an interesting feature called A Superpower in Decline, which attempts to explain to a German audience such odd phenomena as the rise of the Tea Party, without the hedging or attempts at balance found in mainstream U.S. media. On the Tea Parties: Full of Hatred: The Tea Party, that group of white, older voters who claim that they want their country back, is angry. Fox News host Glenn Beck, a recovering alcoholic who likens Obama to Adolf Hitler, is angry. Beck doesn't quite know what he wants to be -- maybe a politician, maybe president, maybe a preacher -- and he doesn't know what he wants to do, either, or least he hasn't come up with any specific ideas or plans. But he is full of hatred. The piece continues with the sobering assessment that America's actual unemployment rate isn't really 10 percent, but close to 20 percent when we factor in the number of people who have stopped looking for work. Some social scientists think that making sure large-scale crime or fascism never takes root in Europe again requires a taxpayer investment in a strong social safety net. Can we learn from Europe? Isn't it better to invest in a social safety net than in a large criminal justice system? (In America over 2 million people are incarcerated.) Jobless Benefits That Never Run Out Unlike here, in Germany jobless benefits never run out. Not only that -- as part of their social safety net, all job seekers continue to be medically insured, as are their families. In the German jobless benefit system, when jobless benefit 1 runs out, jobless benefit 2, also known as HartzIV, kicks in. That one never gets cut off. The jobless also have contributions made for their pensions. They receive other types of insurance coverage from the state. As you can imagine, the estimated 2 million unemployed Americans who almost had no benefits this Christmas seems a particular horror show to Europeans, made worse by the fact that the U.S. government does not provide any medical insurance to American unemployment recipients. Europeans routinely recoil at that in disbelief and disgust. In another piece the Spiegel magazine steps away from statistics and tells the story of Pam Brown, who personifies what is coming to be known as the Nouveau American poor. Pam Brown was a former executive assistant on Wall Street, and her shocking decline has become part of the American story: American society is breaking apart. Millions of people have lost their jobs and fallen into poverty. Among them, for the first time, are many middle
Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning(NYT-article)
i have never, and will never live in an area where the fire department is a paid service. all the FD's around me are volunteer, except for the village, which is paid via property taxes, and when the opportunity arises, i do in fact volunteer my time to the department. any other scheme is by and large, foolish. From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org Date: Tue, 28 Dec 2010 21:16:45 +1100 Subject: Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning(NYT-article) Luckily , in Australia, virtually all the Rural Fire services are staffed by volunteers (although there are some paid positions in support areas, Govt funded). I live on rural acreage, some fdunds go to the RFS as donations, but there is no compulsion. I was really surprised with the claim about US rural FS: Australia has on occasions sent brigades from Australia to help fight the big fires in the US ( the US has reciprocated for Australia on occasions). The insurance link to fire brigades also happened in Australia in the 1800´s: there was a plaque attached to the front of the house proving you had insurance. (These are now a collectors item). House insurance now contains a levy that helps fund the Urban fire services. AS I stated, Rural Fire Services are volunteers, with some Govt funding for equipment overheads. regards Doug On Mon, 27 Dec 2010 05:53:34 am Erik Lane wrote: On Sun, Dec 26, 2010 at 6:32 AM, Ivan Menchero [EMAIL PROTECTED]wrote: Ivan PS: I am surprise the have not privatize the fire department in the USA! so you pay a monthly insurance' and if you do not pay and there is a fire in your house you are out of luck! Unfortunately there are at least some fire departments that already do work like that. Here's a story about one that let a house burn, and the outrage over it was slim to none, that I saw. I'm very disappointed in the way things are going. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/ No pay, no spray: Firefighters let home burn Tennessee house in ashes after homeowner 'forgot' to pay $75 fee Below: 1. - x - Jump to video People step up to help Gene Cranick http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/#slice-2 - video http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/#slice-2 2. - x Jump to vote Results below http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/#slice-3 - vote http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/#slice-3 3. - x Next story in Life Storm, blizzard warnings stretch along Atlantic http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40810424/ns/weather/ - related http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/#slice-4 - - Advertisement | ad info http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26613008/ msnbc.com msnbc.com updated 10/6/2010 12:48:23 PM ET 2010-10-06T16:48:23 - Share [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Print http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/# - Font: - + - - Firefighters in rural Tennessee let a home burn to the ground last week because the homeowner hadn't paid a $75 fee. Gene Cranick of Obion County and his family lost all of their possessions in the Sept. 29 fire, along with three dogs and a cat. They could have been saved if they had put water on it, but they didn't do it, Cranick told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann. The fire started when the Cranicks' grandson was burning trash near the family home. As it grew out of control, the Cranicks called 911, but the fire department from the nearby city of South Fulton would not respond. We wasn't on their list, he said the operators told him. Cranick, who lives outside the city limits, admits he forgot to pay the annual $75 fee. The county does not have a county-wide firefighting service, but South Fulton offers fire coverage to rural residents for a fee. Cranick says he told the operator he would pay whatever is necessary to have the fire put out. advertisement | ad info http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26613008/ Advertisement | ad info http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26613008/ Advertisement | ad info http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26613008/ His offer wasn't accepted, he said. The fire fee policy dates back 20 or so years. Anybody that's not inside the city limits of South Fulton, it's a service we offer. Either they accept it or they don't, said South Fulton Mayor David Crocker. The fire department's decision to let the home burn was incredibly irresponsible, said the president of an association representing firefighters. Professional, career firefighters shouldn’t be forced to check a list before running out the door to see which homeowners have paid up, Harold Schaitberger, International Association of Fire Fighters president, said in a statement. They get in their trucks and go. Firefighters did eventually show up, but only to fight the fire on the neighboring
Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning (NYT-article)
Same here. That's quite common in rural areas here. Often property taxes via special levies that we vote upon fund the equipment, etc, but the staff volunteers their time. The insurance companies don't like this and charge higher premiums than houses in town with a paid fire department but we're also finding out after 170 houses burned in the forest fire this fall that so called insurance is quite a scam as they are trying to avoid paying the benefits that were supposedly paid for. On Tuesday, December 28, 2010, Jason Mier [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: i have never, and will never live in an area where the fire department is a paid service. all the FD's around me are volunteer, except for the village, which is paid via property taxes, and when the opportunity arises, i do in fact volunteer my time to the department. any other scheme is by and large, foolish. From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org Date: Tue, 28 Dec 2010 21:16:45 +1100 Subject: Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning(NYT-article) Luckily , in Australia, virtually all the Rural Fire services are staffed by volunteers (although there are some paid positions in support areas, Govt funded). I live on rural acreage, some fdunds go to the RFS as donations, but there is no compulsion. I was really surprised with the claim about US rural FS: Australia has on occasions sent brigades from Australia to help fight the big fires in the US ( the US has reciprocated for Australia on occasions). The insurance link to fire brigades also happened in Australia in the 1800´s: there was a plaque attached to the front of the house proving you had insurance. (These are now a collectors item). House insurance now contains a levy that helps fund the Urban fire services. AS I stated, Rural Fire Services are volunteers, with some Govt funding for equipment overheads. regards Doug On Mon, 27 Dec 2010 05:53:34 am Erik Lane wrote: On Sun, Dec 26, 2010 at 6:32 AM, Ivan Menchero [EMAIL PROTECTED]wrote: Ivan PS: I am surprise the have not privatize the fire department in the USA! so you pay a monthly insurance' and if you do not pay and there is a fire in your house you are out of luck! Unfortunately there are at least some fire departments that already do work like that. Here's a story about one that let a house burn, and the outrage over it was slim to none, that I saw. I'm very disappointed in the way things are going. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/ No pay, no spray: Firefighters let home burn Tennessee house in ashes after homeowner 'forgot' to pay $75 fee Below: 1. - x - Jump to video People step up to help Gene Cranick http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/#slice-2 - video http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/#slice-2 2. - x Jump to vote Results below http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/#slice-3 - vote http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/#slice-3 3. - x Next story in Life Storm, blizzard warnings stretch along Atlantic http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40810424/ns/weather/ - related http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/#slice-4 - - Advertisement | ad info http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26613008/ msnbc.com msnbc.com updated 10/6/2010 12:48:23 PM ET 2010-10-06T16:48:23 - Share [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Print http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/# - Font: - + - - Firefighters in rural Tennessee let a home burn to the ground last week because the homeowner hadn't paid a $75 fee. Gene Cranick of Obion County and his family lost all of their possessions in the Sept. 29 fire, along with three dogs and a cat. They could have been saved if they had put water on it, but they didn't do it, Cranick told MSNBURL: /pipermail/attachments/20101228/4a792ccc/attachment.html ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (70,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/ ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (70,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning (NYT-article)
Indeed. Only the worshippers of the free market (here in South Africa they tend to middle-aged white guys with that particular sort of academic background that causes them to pronounce the term free mogget) have a skewed idea of what they are worshipping. For in logic a free market would be a local, mom-and-pop, and largely agrarian economy, which would work just fine, and which is exactly what the world doesn't have. The first myth is that the intercourse of the corporations represents a free market. It does not. I must admit to being drawn to many of the principles of libertarianism. Where the libertarians lose me is where they afford corporations that owe their existence (or incarnation) to legislation the same spiritual status as you and me. I find myself on libertarian websites, having sought an appreciation for personal liberty, and find discussions of stock-market wangling. Libertarians want an economy without State interference, but in which State-borne institutions like a stock market persist. So too with Companies Acts, currencies, trademarks and patents, etc. The second myth is that the corporations fear regulation. The current situation could be described as regulated capitalism, and the unprecedented level of corporate power is an essential part of it. Corporations cultivate regulation, often by subtle means, in order to establish for themselves invulnerable positions. CORPORATIONS NEST IN REGULATION. Corporations cannot exist, in their present form or anything even vaguely like it, without it. The effect of regulation is to ensure that economic activity may happen only in ways of which the corporations alone are capable. This does assume that the regulation is so structured as to achieve that, and that the strictures thereof do not take the form of excessive direct cost (which is quite high: cf. BP. Moderate direct cost represents roundaboutness which also favours the corporations); for the corporations excel at growing proof-of-compliance machines of whatever complexity is required. It is exactly that sort of proof-of-compliance capability that both the corporate parvenu start-up and the mom-and-pop economy lack. Consequently the activist community is being played, by entities quite capable of pulling it off. How often are small victories not found in small bits of restrictive regulation (more often than not suggested and led by the offending corporation itself) when true victory would be the abolition of the privileges - which arise from structures of legislation, e.g. company law, etc. - that allow corporations to operate in the first place? The old private-v-public distinction no longer applies as it did before. The corporations are as much part of the State as the government. There is no relief in socialism, for Régie GM is still the same animal, only potentially moreso. I suggest that the operative distinction in the current context is, rather, personal/community/local v corporate/government/transnational. Regards Dawie Coetzee From: Zeke Yewdall [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org Sent: Sun, 26 December, 2010 23:14:50 Subject: Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning (NYT-article) Alot of the US has a strange attraction to worshipping the almighty free market. Any sort of public or regulated business ideas Socialism, public health care, etc is attacked with a fervor usually reserved for religious disagreements. People might claim to believe in God, but what their rhetoric points towards is believing that the free market is infallible and incapable of doing wrong. This belief persists completely in the face of facts and reality in many cases. You might as well be trying to convert Christians to shamanism if you try to talk public health care capitalists. Z On Sunday, December 26, 2010, Doug [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I just do not understand the US system. I am an Australian, we have a mandated Pension system that inputs from memory 9% of a workers wages into a Superannuation scheme (of our choosing). Most seem to use an Industry fund (sort of Union related: has low fees usually good returns, depending on the market.). To my kmowledge there has been no Super Fund collapse in Australia as yet. The Australian Health scheme is similar to the Canadian one. The cost to residents is low, you can also increase the benefits with Private insurance if you so desire (but the basic benefits are adequate). The cost to our Government is less than the US per-person cost, every Australian citizen is covered. If I was an American (US) citizen, I feel I would want much more for my tax $ than is currently seen in the US system: I really cannot see where the inefficiencies could be, feel that a fairer system should be achievable. I wonder why Obama is having so much difficulty changing the US
Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning (NYT-article)
http://www.alternet.org/story/149324/america_in_decline%3A_why_germans_think_we%27re_insane?page=entire America in Decline: Why Germans Think We're Insane A look at our empire in decline through the eyes of the European media. December 26, 2010 By Democrats Ramshield As an American expat living in the European Union, I've started to see America from a different perspective. The European Union has a larger economy and more people than America does. Though it spends less -- right around 9 percent of GNP on medical, whereas we in the U.S. spend close to between 15 to 16 percent of GNP on medical -- the EU pretty much insures 100 percent of its population. The U.S. has 59 million people medically uninsured; 132 million without dental insurance; 60 million without paid sick leave; 40 million on food stamps. Everybody in the European Union has cradle-to-grave access to universal medical and a dental plan by law. The law also requires paid sick leave; paid annual leave; paid maternity leave. When you realize all of that, it becomes easy to understand why many Europeans think America has gone insane. Der Spiegel has run an interesting feature called A Superpower in Decline, which attempts to explain to a German audience such odd phenomena as the rise of the Tea Party, without the hedging or attempts at balance found in mainstream U.S. media. On the Tea Parties: Full of Hatred: The Tea Party, that group of white, older voters who claim that they want their country back, is angry. Fox News host Glenn Beck, a recovering alcoholic who likens Obama to Adolf Hitler, is angry. Beck doesn't quite know what he wants to be -- maybe a politician, maybe president, maybe a preacher -- and he doesn't know what he wants to do, either, or least he hasn't come up with any specific ideas or plans. But he is full of hatred. The piece continues with the sobering assessment that America's actual unemployment rate isn't really 10 percent, but close to 20 percent when we factor in the number of people who have stopped looking for work. Some social scientists think that making sure large-scale crime or fascism never takes root in Europe again requires a taxpayer investment in a strong social safety net. Can we learn from Europe? Isn't it better to invest in a social safety net than in a large criminal justice system? (In America over 2 million people are incarcerated.) Jobless Benefits That Never Run Out Unlike here, in Germany jobless benefits never run out. Not only that -- as part of their social safety net, all job seekers continue to be medically insured, as are their families. In the German jobless benefit system, when jobless benefit 1 runs out, jobless benefit 2, also known as HartzIV, kicks in. That one never gets cut off. The jobless also have contributions made for their pensions. They receive other types of insurance coverage from the state. As you can imagine, the estimated 2 million unemployed Americans who almost had no benefits this Christmas seems a particular horror show to Europeans, made worse by the fact that the U.S. government does not provide any medical insurance to American unemployment recipients. Europeans routinely recoil at that in disbelief and disgust. In another piece the Spiegel magazine steps away from statistics and tells the story of Pam Brown, who personifies what is coming to be known as the Nouveau American poor. Pam Brown was a former executive assistant on Wall Street, and her shocking decline has become part of the American story: American society is breaking apart. Millions of people have lost their jobs and fallen into poverty. Among them, for the first time, are many middle-class families. Meet Pam Brown from New York, whose life changed overnight. The crisis caught her unprepared. It was horrible, Pam Brown remembers. Overnight I found myself on the wrong side of the fence. It never occurred to me that something like this could happen to me. I got very depressed. Brown sits in a cheap diner on West 14th Street in Manhattan, stirring her $1.35 coffee. That's all she orders -- it's too late for breakfast and too early for lunch. She also needs to save money. Until early 2009, Brown worked as an executive assistant on Wall Street, earning more than $80,000 a year, living in a six-bedroom house with her three sons. Today, she's long-term unemployed and has to make do with a tiny one-bedroom in the Bronx. It's important to note that no country in the European Union uses food stamps in order to humiliate its disadvantaged citizens in the grocery checkout line. Even worse is the fact that even the humbling food stamp allotment may not provide enough food for America's jobless families. So it is on a reoccurring basis that some of these families report eating out of garbage cans to the European media. For Pam Brown, last winter was the worst. One day she ran out of food completely and had to go through trash cans. She
Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning (NYT-article)
not. I must admit to being drawn to many of the principles of libertarianism. Where the libertarians lose me is where they afford corporations that owe their existence (or incarnation) to legislation the same spiritual status as you and me. I find myself on libertarian websites, having sought an appreciation for personal liberty, and find discussions of stock-market wangling. Libertarians want an economy without State interference, but in which State-borne institutions like a stock market persist. So too with Companies Acts, currencies, trademarks and patents, etc. The second myth is that the corporations fear regulation. The current situation could be described as regulated capitalism, and the unprecedented level of corporate power is an essential part of it. Corporations cultivate regulation, often by subtle means, in order to establish for themselves invulnerable positions. CORPORATIONS NEST IN REGULATION. Corporations cannot exist, in their present form or anything even vaguely like it, without it. The effect of regulation is to ensure that economic activity may happen only in ways of which the corporations alone are capable. This does assume that the regulation is so structured as to achieve that, and that the strictures thereof do not take the form of excessive direct cost (which is quite high: cf. BP. Moderate direct cost represents roundaboutness which also favours the corporations); for the corporations excel at growing proof-of-compliance machines of whatever complexity is required. It is exactly that sort of proof-of-compliance capability that both the corporate parvenu start-up and the mom-and-pop economy lack. Consequently the activist community is being played, by entities quite capable of pulling it off. How often are small victories not found in small bits of restrictive regulation (more often than not suggested and led by the offending corporation itself) when true victory would be the abolition of the privileges - which arise from structures of legislation, e.g. company law, etc. - that allow corporations to operate in the first place? The old private-v-public distinction no longer applies as it did before. The corporations are as much part of the State as the government. There is no relief in socialism, for Régie GM is still the same animal, only potentially moreso. I suggest that the operative distinction in the current context is, rather, personal/community/local v corporate/government/transnational. Regards Dawie Coetzee From: Zeke Yewdall [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org Sent: Sun, 26 December, 2010 23:14:50 Subject: Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning (NYT-article) Alot of the US has a strange attraction to worshipping the almighty free market. Any sort of public or regulated business ideas Socialism, public health care, etc is attacked with a fervor usually reserved for religious disagreements. People might claim to believe in God, but what their rhetoric points towards is believing that the free market is infallible and incapable of doing wrong. This belief persists completely in the face of facts and reality in many cases. You might as well be trying to convert Christians to shamanism if you try to talk public health care capitalists. Z On Sunday, December 26, 2010, Doug [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I just do not understand the US system. I am an Australian, we have a mandated Pension system that inputs from memory 9% of a workers wages into a Superannuation scheme (of our choosing). Most seem to use an Industry fund (sort of Union related: has low fees usually good returns, depending on the market.). To my kmowledge there has been no Super Fund collapse in Australia as yet. The Australian Health scheme is similar to the Canadian one. The cost to residents is low, you can also increase the benefits with Private insurance if you so desire (but the basic benefits are adequate). The cost to our Government is less than the US per-person cost, every Australian citizen is covered. If I was an American (US) citizen, I feel I would want much more for my tax $ than is currently seen in the US system: I really cannot see where the inefficiencies could be, feel that a fairer system should be achievable. I wonder why Obama is having so much difficulty changing the US medical system? regards Doug On Sat, 25 Dec 2010 12:18:40 am Keith Addison wrote: Hello Dan, Michelle and all Michele, I don't know that the Federal Government would be - on the hook - PBGC only insures Pensions from Private companies in this case it's the retired workers who could be out. It's a lesson in the need for good financial planning and not putting all of your eggs in 1 basket. This reminds me of the Enron collapse. So many people had all of their retirement tied up in Enron, when
Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning (NYT-article)
I just do not understand the US system. I am an Australian, we have a mandated Pension system that inputs from memory 9% of a workers wages into a Superannuation scheme (of our choosing). Most seem to use an Industry fund (sort of Union related: has low fees usually good returns, depending on the market.). To my kmowledge there has been no Super Fund collapse in Australia as yet. The Australian Health scheme is similar to the Canadian one. The cost to residents is low, you can also increase the benefits with Private insurance if you so desire (but the basic benefits are adequate). The cost to our Government is less than the US per-person cost, every Australian citizen is covered. If I was an American (US) citizen, I feel I would want much more for my tax $ than is currently seen in the US system: I really cannot see where the inefficiencies could be, feel that a fairer system should be achievable. I wonder why Obama is having so much difficulty changing the US medical system? regards Doug On Sat, 25 Dec 2010 12:18:40 am Keith Addison wrote: Hello Dan, Michelle and all Michele, I don't know that the Federal Government would be - on the hook - PBGC only insures Pensions from Private companies in this case it's the retired workers who could be out. It's a lesson in the need for good financial planning and not putting all of your eggs in 1 basket. This reminds me of the Enron collapse. So many people had all of their retirement tied up in Enron, when the company went under, so did they. So you blame the pensions themselves, instead of Enron and the Washington people (?) who enabled the whole scam? Pensions should not exist. I'm not 100% in touch with all the details of this issue because there's simply been too much of it and I've had no reason to focus on it that closely. But IMHO that would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater. In other countries than the US, pensions not only exist, they also function as intended, providing millions with an essential resource that they depend on. Just because the whole system of welfare, healthcare and benefits in the US is now dysfunctional is no reason to damn them as worse than useless. Shouldn't you rather be aspiring to help restore their valuable functions instead of just baling out? They are plagued with problems and seldom funded correctly. At least with a 401k I can make my investment decisions and I know that what I get depends on what I contribute. How many deserving people would that exclude? How many Americans have died (been killed?) so far because they were effectively denied healthcare? A Grim Record: One In Seven Americans Is On Food Stamps December 8, 2010 http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/12/08/131905683/a-grim-record-one-in-s even-americans-is-on-food-stamps No prizes for guessing what kind of food they eat. Best wishes Keith Dan From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Michele Stephenson Sent: Thursday, December 23, 2010 11:36 AM Subject: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning (NYT-article) For those of you who live in the US an article of interest... For those who live outside looking in, it's no big surprise Private Company and Industry pensions plans have all but gone away. The substitute is the 401K that no one is really responsible for except the investor to make the best choice for Self. However, for those who work for local and state govt agencies this is something to watch and investigate especially if you are currently receiving a pension or will receive a pension in the next years to come. What is as important if not more important to watch is how these issues will be resolved. In the article below, if the judicial system does not get involved, then mediation is an option which usually results in a cut in benefits. I doubt for those struggling funds one mediation is all it will take. Mediation could possibly take place with every local and state legislative session resulting in a cut every time. For those funds that do get processed in the court system it will likely go to the respective State Supreme Court and ultimately the US Supreme Court. If localities are legitimately declared bankrupt and no longer required to pay pensions it is the federal govt's responsibility to do so. In effect, we all pay for lack of managment and corruption in Anywhere, USA. And once this precedent is established there will be a landslide of 'toxic' pensions to be dealt with (or not). It is the future. If you don't think so, Iceland is bankrupt from investing in bonds that were rated as A by unscrupulous wall street fund managers/business men/swindlers when they should have been rated as Junk level. Greece is bankrupt. Ireland is bankrupt. Portugal is bankrupt. Spain will possibly be bankrupt by this time next year. And the US's current financial situation, if scrutinized
Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning(NYT-article)
Doug: Obama's failure is due to the corporate ownership of everything in the US. If, for example, the US were to employ a universal type insurance program it would significantly diminish insurance companies revenue and profits. We all know that in the United States that Profits rule and, that any cost profit is good. Corporate interest affects everything from elections to the supreme court and more. Even the corporate media is hiding the truth from the Americans, and most of our people are too ignorant to see it, or to do anything about it. This is a ME society, not a WE society. - Original Message - From: Doug [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org Sent: Sunday, December 26, 2010 8:56 AM Subject: Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning(NYT-article) I just do not understand the US system. I am an Australian, we have a mandated Pension system that inputs from memory 9% of a workers wages into a Superannuation scheme (of our choosing). Most seem to use an Industry fund (sort of Union related: has low fees usually good returns, depending on the market.). To my kmowledge there has been no Super Fund collapse in Australia as yet. The Australian Health scheme is similar to the Canadian one. The cost to residents is low, you can also increase the benefits with Private insurance if you so desire (but the basic benefits are adequate). The cost to our Government is less than the US per-person cost, every Australian citizen is covered. If I was an American (US) citizen, I feel I would want much more for my tax $ than is currently seen in the US system: I really cannot see where the inefficiencies could be, feel that a fairer system should be achievable. I wonder why Obama is having so much difficulty changing the US medical system? regards Doug On Sat, 25 Dec 2010 12:18:40 am Keith Addison wrote: Hello Dan, Michelle and all Michele, I don't know that the Federal Government would be - on the hook - PBGC only insures Pensions from Private companies in this case it's the retired workers who could be out. It's a lesson in the need for good financial planning and not putting all of your eggs in 1 basket. This reminds me of the Enron collapse. So many people had all of their retirement tied up in Enron, when the company went under, so did they. So you blame the pensions themselves, instead of Enron and the Washington people (?) who enabled the whole scam? Pensions should not exist. I'm not 100% in touch with all the details of this issue because there's simply been too much of it and I've had no reason to focus on it that closely. But IMHO that would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater. In other countries than the US, pensions not only exist, they also function as intended, providing millions with an essential resource that they depend on. Just because the whole system of welfare, healthcare and benefits in the US is now dysfunctional is no reason to damn them as worse than useless. Shouldn't you rather be aspiring to help restore their valuable functions instead of just baling out? They are plagued with problems and seldom funded correctly. At least with a 401k I can make my investment decisions and I know that what I get depends on what I contribute. How many deserving people would that exclude? How many Americans have died (been killed?) so far because they were effectively denied healthcare? A Grim Record: One In Seven Americans Is On Food Stamps December 8, 2010 http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/12/08/131905683/a-grim-record-one-in-s even-americans-is-on-food-stamps No prizes for guessing what kind of food they eat. Best wishes Keith Dan From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Michele Stephenson Sent: Thursday, December 23, 2010 11:36 AM Subject: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning (NYT-article) For those of you who live in the US an article of interest... For those who live outside looking in, it's no big surprise Private Company and Industry pensions plans have all but gone away. The substitute is the 401K that no one is really responsible for except the investor to make the best choice for Self. However, for those who work for local and state govt agencies this is something to watch and investigate especially if you are currently receiving a pension or will receive a pension in the next years to come. What is as important if not more important to watch is how these issues will be resolved. In the article below, if the judicial system does not get involved, then mediation is an option which usually results in a cut in benefits. I doubt for those struggling funds one mediation is all it will take. Mediation could possibly take place with every local and state legislative session resulting in a cut every time. For those funds that do get processed
Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning(NYT-article)
It is very complicated! To start in the USA you have the trident of evil Insurance-doctors (HMO)-lawyers they all have to make money and they all blame the others for their higher costs. Liability is HUGE in the USA The ones making money they do not want to make less and they use the we do not want the government telling me what doctor to visit and the, what is or not paid for never mind the insurance is telling them, but it seems to work with most Americans, may be they do not know that the USA is the country that spends the most in Health Care and most citizens do not get anything out of it. The Corporation speech that Andy K mention is true and THAT is the bottom line. A two tier system with government oversight on the private one (many things can go wrong this way) In my opinion is best, if you do not want to wait and can afford it, pay for it and go thru a private clinic (Not the most ethical but I best solution) By the way that is NOT how the Canadian system works and I have been in it and it does work fairly good but I think a person should be able to PAY and get it now. The health care system in the USA will collapse very soon due to the rising costs, we will see what happens. We have solutions from doctors that say well I will not get insurance that way no lawyer will sue me (they have a point! because remember the trident of evil) Is very complicated but one thing is for sure, current situation, it will/is not benefitting the people Ivan PS: I am surprise the have not privatize the fire department in the USA! so you pay a monthly insurance' and if you do not pay and there is a fire in your house you are out of luck! -Original Message- From: Doug Sent: Sunday, December 26, 2010 9:56 PM To: sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org Subject: Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning(NYT-article) I just do not understand the US system. I am an Australian, we have a mandated Pension system that inputs from memory 9% of a workers wages into a Superannuation scheme (of our choosing). Most seem to use an Industry fund (sort of Union related: has low fees usually good returns, depending on the market.). To my kmowledge there has been no Super Fund collapse in Australia as yet. The Australian Health scheme is similar to the Canadian one. The cost to residents is low, you can also increase the benefits with Private insurance if you so desire (but the basic benefits are adequate). The cost to our Government is less than the US per-person cost, every Australian citizen is covered. If I was an American (US) citizen, I feel I would want much more for my tax $ than is currently seen in the US system: I really cannot see where the inefficiencies could be, feel that a fairer system should be achievable. I wonder why Obama is having so much difficulty changing the US medical system? regards Doug On Sat, 25 Dec 2010 12:18:40 am Keith Addison wrote: Hello Dan, Michelle and all Michele, I don't know that the Federal Government would be - on the hook - PBGC only insures Pensions from Private companies in this case it's the retired workers who could be out. It's a lesson in the need for good financial planning and not putting all of your eggs in 1 basket. This reminds me of the Enron collapse. So many people had all of their retirement tied up in Enron, when the company went under, so did they. So you blame the pensions themselves, instead of Enron and the Washington people (?) who enabled the whole scam? Pensions should not exist. I'm not 100% in touch with all the details of this issue because there's simply been too much of it and I've had no reason to focus on it that closely. But IMHO that would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater. In other countries than the US, pensions not only exist, they also function as intended, providing millions with an essential resource that they depend on. Just because the whole system of welfare, healthcare and benefits in the US is now dysfunctional is no reason to damn them as worse than useless. Shouldn't you rather be aspiring to help restore their valuable functions instead of just baling out? They are plagued with problems and seldom funded correctly. At least with a 401k I can make my investment decisions and I know that what I get depends on what I contribute. How many deserving people would that exclude? How many Americans have died (been killed?) so far because they were effectively denied healthcare? A Grim Record: One In Seven Americans Is On Food Stamps December 8, 2010 http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/12/08/131905683/a-grim-record-one-in-s even-americans-is-on-food-stamps No prizes for guessing what kind of food they eat. Best wishes Keith Dan From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Michele Stephenson Sent: Thursday, December 23, 2010 11:36 AM Subject: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension
Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning(NYT-article)
On Sun, Dec 26, 2010 at 6:32 AM, Ivan Menchero [EMAIL PROTECTED]wrote: Ivan PS: I am surprise the have not privatize the fire department in the USA! so you pay a monthly insurance' and if you do not pay and there is a fire in your house you are out of luck! Unfortunately there are at least some fire departments that already do work like that. Here's a story about one that let a house burn, and the outrage over it was slim to none, that I saw. I'm very disappointed in the way things are going. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/ No pay, no spray: Firefighters let home burn Tennessee house in ashes after homeowner 'forgot' to pay $75 fee Below: 1. - x - Jump to video People step up to help Gene Cranick http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/#slice-2 - video http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/#slice-2 2. - x Jump to vote Results below http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/#slice-3 - vote http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/#slice-3 3. - x Next story in Life Storm, blizzard warnings stretch along Atlantic http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40810424/ns/weather/ - related http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/#slice-4 - - Advertisement | ad info http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26613008/ msnbc.com msnbc.com updated 10/6/2010 12:48:23 PM ET 2010-10-06T16:48:23 - Share [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Print http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/# - Font: - + - - Firefighters in rural Tennessee let a home burn to the ground last week because the homeowner hadn't paid a $75 fee. Gene Cranick of Obion County and his family lost all of their possessions in the Sept. 29 fire, along with three dogs and a cat. They could have been saved if they had put water on it, but they didn't do it, Cranick told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann. The fire started when the Cranicks' grandson was burning trash near the family home. As it grew out of control, the Cranicks called 911, but the fire department from the nearby city of South Fulton would not respond. We wasn't on their list, he said the operators told him. Cranick, who lives outside the city limits, admits he forgot to pay the annual $75 fee. The county does not have a county-wide firefighting service, but South Fulton offers fire coverage to rural residents for a fee. Cranick says he told the operator he would pay whatever is necessary to have the fire put out. advertisement | ad info http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26613008/ Advertisement | ad info http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26613008/ Advertisement | ad info http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26613008/ His offer wasn't accepted, he said. The fire fee policy dates back 20 or so years. Anybody that's not inside the city limits of South Fulton, it's a service we offer. Either they accept it or they don't, said South Fulton Mayor David Crocker. The fire department's decision to let the home burn was incredibly irresponsible, said the president of an association representing firefighters. Professional, career firefighters shouldn’t be forced to check a list before running out the door to see which homeowners have paid up, Harold Schaitberger, International Association of Fire Fighters president, said in a statement. They get in their trucks and go. Firefighters did eventually show up, but only to fight the fire on the neighboring property, whose owner had paid the fee. Story: 'No pay, no spray' case: Firefighters 'threatened' http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39535911/ns/us_news-life/ They put water out on the fence line out here. They never said nothing to me. Never acknowledged. They stood out here and watched it burn, Cranick said. South Fulton's mayor said that the fire department can't let homeowners pay the fee on the spot, because the only people who would pay would be those whose homes are on fire. Cranick, who is now living in a trailer on his property, says his insurance policy will help cover some of his lost home. Insurance is going to pay for what money I had on the policy, looks like. But like everything else, I didn't have enough. After the blaze, South Fulton police arrested one of Cranick's sons, Timothy Allen Cranick, on an aggravated assault charge, according to WPSD-TVhttp://www.wpsdlocal6.com/news/local/Firefighters-watch-as-home-burns-to-the-ground-104052668.html, an NBC station in Paducah, Ky. Police told WPSD that the younger Cranick attacked Fire Chief David Wilds at the firehouse because he was upset his father's house was allowed to burn. WPSD-TV reported that Wilds was treated and released. -- next part -- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: /pipermail/attachments/20101226/f4d09f9b/attachment.html ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org
Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning (NYT-article)
Alot of the US has a strange attraction to worshipping the almighty free market. Any sort of public or regulated business ideas Socialism, public health care, etc is attacked with a fervor usually reserved for religious disagreements. People might claim to believe in God, but what their rhetoric points towards is believing that the free market is infallible and incapable of doing wrong. This belief persists completely in the face of facts and reality in many cases. You might as well be trying to convert Christians to shamanism if you try to talk public health care capitalists. Z On Sunday, December 26, 2010, Doug [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I just do not understand the US system. I am an Australian, we have a mandated Pension system that inputs from memory 9% of a workers wages into a Superannuation scheme (of our choosing). Most seem to use an Industry fund (sort of Union related: has low fees usually good returns, depending on the market.). To my kmowledge there has been no Super Fund collapse in Australia as yet. The Australian Health scheme is similar to the Canadian one. The cost to residents is low, you can also increase the benefits with Private insurance if you so desire (but the basic benefits are adequate). The cost to our Government is less than the US per-person cost, every Australian citizen is covered. If I was an American (US) citizen, I feel I would want much more for my tax $ than is currently seen in the US system: I really cannot see where the inefficiencies could be, feel that a fairer system should be achievable. I wonder why Obama is having so much difficulty changing the US medical system? regards Doug On Sat, 25 Dec 2010 12:18:40 am Keith Addison wrote: Hello Dan, Michelle and all Michele, I don't know that the Federal Government would be - on the hook - PBGC only insures Pensions from Private companies in this case it's the retired workers who could be out. It's a lesson in the need for good financial planning and not putting all of your eggs in 1 basket. This reminds me of the Enron collapse. So many people had all of their retirement tied up in Enron, when the company went under, so did they. So you blame the pensions themselves, instead of Enron and the Washington people (?) who enabled the whole scam? Pensions should not exist. I'm not 100% in touch with all the details of this issue because there's simply been too much of it and I've had no reason to focus on it that closely. But IMHO that would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater. In other countries than the US, pensions not only exist, they also function as intended, providing millions with an essential resource that they depend on. Just because the whole system of welfare, healthcare and benefits in the US is now dysfunctional is no reason to damn them as worse than useless. Shouldn't you rather be aspiring to help restore their valuable functions instead of just baling out? They are plagued with problems and seldom funded correctly. At least with a 401k I can make my investment decisions and I know that what I get depends on what I contribute. How many deserving people would that exclude? How many Americans have died (been killed?) so far because they were effectively denied healthcare? A Grim Record: One In Seven Americans Is On Food Stamps December 8, 2010 http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/12/08/131905683/a-grim-record-one-in-s even-americans-is-on-food-stamps No prizes for guessing what kind of food they eat. Best wishes Keith Dan From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Michele Stephenson Sent: Thursday, December 23, 2010 11:36 AM Subject: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning (NYT-article) For those of you who live in the US an article of interest... For those who live outside looking in, it's no big surprise Private Company and Industry pensions plans have all but gone away. The substitute is the 401K that no one is really responsible for except the investor to make the best choice for Self. However, for those who work for local and state govt agencies this is something to watch and investigate especially if you are currently receiving a pension or will receive a pension in the next years to come. What is as important if not more important to watch is how these issues will be resolved. In the article below, if the judicial system does not get involved, then mediation is an option which usually results in a cut in benefits. I doubt for those struggling funds one mediation is all it will take. Mediation could possibly take place with every local and state legislative session resulting in a cut every time. For those funds that do get processed in the court system it will likely go to the respective State Supreme Court and ultimately the US Supreme Court. If localities are legitimately declared bankrupt and no longer required to pay
Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning (NYT-article)
I think the belief persists in the face of facts and reality because reality is something deliberately kept far away from the mind of the believer for one thing, the examination of the truth of that belief system, or facts, is something the average believer is strongly steered away from (and often wants to be) almost in every moment by the mind control machine of the corruptiles. It is not that the belief system is necessarily invalid, but how many people do a reality check on what it actually means? So long as they remain insulated from that reality, they have little reason to lift the veil and see the light of day. When a corruptile says the free market can find a solution to any problem, it isn't actually a lie, it's just that the 'solution' the free market finds to say the issue of world hunger for example, is that millions of people may in fact starve to death. i.e. the reality today. It is a solution in a sense, just not a very human one, but then the free market has nothing to do with humanity or more to the point, morality does it? Why should it? It may be like an organism in some ways, but it sure isn't human. It is decidedly inhuman and often, maybe more often than not, inhumane. I don't know if I'd agree with your last statement Zeke. Have you ever talked public health care with a capitalist who couldn't afford health care? Now there's a person who is stopped by fact. The others under the veil well yeah, don't waste yer breath. They can afford their delusion. Incentives lie where the rubber meets the road, not in TV land where so many people around me live. Joe Zeke Yewdall wrote: Alot of the US has a strange attraction to worshipping the almighty free market. Any sort of public or regulated business ideas Socialism, public health care, etc is attacked with a fervor usually reserved for religious disagreements. People might claim to believe in God, but what their rhetoric points towards is believing that the free market is infallible and incapable of doing wrong. This belief persists completely in the face of facts and reality in many cases. You might as well be trying to convert Christians to shamanism if you try to talk public health care capitalists. Z ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (70,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning (NYT-article)
We too have had people have their house because they did not pay the rural fire coverage fee. What people do not understand is that most, if not all, rural fire departments are a subscription service. If you did not subscribe, you do not receive services. There is not (in most places) a rural fire tax to cover fire services like cities have. I have been on both sides of this one and I know the feeling of wanting to bribe (or pay after the fact) for services that were the responsibility of the land owner and/or renter. On Sun, Dec 26, 2010 at 1:14 PM, Zeke Yewdall [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Alot of the US has a strange attraction to worshipping the almighty free market. Any sort of public or regulated business ideas Socialism, public health care, etc is attacked with a fervor usually reserved for religious disagreements. People might claim to believe in God, but what their rhetoric points towards is believing that the free market is infallible and incapable of doing wrong. This belief persists completely in the face of facts and reality in many cases. You might as well be trying to convert Christians to shamanism if you try to talk public health care capitalists. Z On Sunday, December 26, 2010, Doug [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I just do not understand the US system. I am an Australian, we have a mandated Pension system that inputs from memory 9% of a workers wages into a Superannuation scheme (of our choosing). Most seem to use an Industry fund (sort of Union related: has low fees usually good returns, depending on the market.). To my kmowledge there has been no Super Fund collapse in Australia as yet. The Australian Health scheme is similar to the Canadian one. The cost to residents is low, you can also increase the benefits with Private insurance if you so desire (but the basic benefits are adequate). The cost to our Government is less than the US per-person cost, every Australian citizen is covered. If I was an American (US) citizen, I feel I would want much more for my tax $ than is currently seen in the US system: I really cannot see where the inefficiencies could be, feel that a fairer system should be achievable. I wonder why Obama is having so much difficulty changing the US medical system? regards Doug On Sat, 25 Dec 2010 12:18:40 am Keith Addison wrote: Hello Dan, Michelle and all Michele, I don't know that the Federal Government would be - on the hook - PBGC only insures Pensions from Private companies in this case it's the retired workers who could be out. It's a lesson in the need for good financial planning and not putting all of your eggs in 1 basket. This reminds me of the Enron collapse. So many people had all of their retirement tied up in Enron, when the company went under, so did they. So you blame the pensions themselves, instead of Enron and the Washington people (?) who enabled the whole scam? Pensions should not exist. I'm not 100% in touch with all the details of this issue because there's simply been too much of it and I've had no reason to focus on it that closely. But IMHO that would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater. In other countries than the US, pensions not only exist, they also function as intended, providing millions with an essential resource that they depend on. Just because the whole system of welfare, healthcare and benefits in the US is now dysfunctional is no reason to damn them as worse than useless. Shouldn't you rather be aspiring to help restore their valuable functions instead of just baling out? They are plagued with problems and seldom funded correctly. At least with a 401k I can make my investment decisions and I know that what I get depends on what I contribute. How many deserving people would that exclude? How many Americans have died (been killed?) so far because they were effectively denied healthcare? A Grim Record: One In Seven Americans Is On Food Stamps December 8, 2010 http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/12/08/131905683/a-grim-record-one-in-s even-americans-is-on-food-stamps No prizes for guessing what kind of food they eat. Best wishes Keith Dan From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Michele Stephenson Sent: Thursday, December 23, 2010 11:36 AM Subject: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning (NYT-article) For those of you who live in the US an article of interest... For those who live outside looking in, it's no big surprise Private Company and Industry pensions plans have all but gone away. The substitute is the 401K that no one is really responsible for except the investor to make the best choice for Self. However, for those who work for local and state govt agencies this is something to watch and investigate especially if you are currently receiving a pension or will receive a pension in the next years to come. What is as important if not more important to watch
[Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning (NYT-article)
For those of you who live in the US an article of interest... For those who live outside looking in, it's no big surprise Private Company and Industry pensions plans have all but gone away. The substitute is the 401K that no one is really responsible for except the investor to make the best choice for Self. However, for those who work for local and state govt agencies this is something to watch and investigate especially if you are currently receiving a pension or will receive a pension in the next years to come. What is as important if not more important to watch is how these issues will be resolved. In the article below, if the judicial system does not get involved, then mediation is an option which usually results in a cut in benefits. I doubt for those struggling funds one mediation is all it will take. Mediation could possibly take place with every local and state legislative session resulting in a cut every time. For those funds that do get processed in the court system it will likely go to the respective State Supreme Court and ultimately the US Supreme Court. If localities are legitimately declared bankrupt and no longer required to pay pensions it is the federal govt's responsibility to do so. In effect, we all pay for lack of managment and corruption in Anywhere, USA. And once this precedent is established there will be a landslide of 'toxic' pensions to be dealt with (or not). It is the future. If you don't think so, Iceland is bankrupt from investing in bonds that were rated as A by unscrupulous wall street fund managers/business men/swindlers when they should have been rated as Junk level. Greece is bankrupt. Ireland is bankrupt. Portugal is bankrupt. Spain will possibly be bankrupt by this time next year. And the US's current financial situation, if scrutinized by the IMF credit rating system used on these same bankrupt countries, is on the verge of changing to riskier interest rates based on our debt and GDP and other indicators (just like the above countries with exception of Iceland). What do all these countries have in common? They are followed the same financial paradigm: loans/debt to stimulate economy. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40793765/ns/us_news-the_new_york_times/ Full Text below: PRICHARD, Ala. — This struggling small city on the outskirts of Mobile was warned for years that if it did nothing, its pension fund would run out of money by 2009. Right on schedule, its fund ran dry. Then Prichard did something that pension experts say they have never seen before: it stopped sending monthly pension checks to its 150 retired workers, breaking a state law requiring it to pay its promised retirement benefits in full. Since then, Nettie Banks, 68, a retired Prichard police and fire dispatcher, has filed for bankruptcy. Alfred Arnold, a 66-year-old retired fire captain, has gone back to work as a shopping mall security guard to try to keep his house. Eddie Ragland, 59, a retired police captain, accepted help from colleagues, bake sales and collection jars after he was shot by a robber, leaving him badly wounded and unable to get to his new job as a police officer at the regional airport. Far worse was the retired fire marshal who died in June. Like many of the others, he was too young to collect Social Security. “When they found him, he had no electricity and no running water in his house,” said David Anders, 58, a retired district fire chief. “He was a proud enough man that he wouldn’t accept help.” The situation in Prichard is extremely unusual — the city has sought bankruptcy protection twice — but it proves that the unthinkable can, in fact, sometimes happen. And it stands as a warning to cities like Philadelphia and states like Illinois, whose pension funds are under great strain: if nothing changes, the money eventually does run out, and when that happens, misery and turmoil follow. More U.S. news More retirees moving in with their children As retirement investments erode during the economic crisis, the number of multigenerational family households has been growing — returning to a trend from half a century ago. Full story It is not just the pensioners who suffer when a pension fund runs dry. If a city tried to follow the law and pay its pensioners with money from its annual operating budget, it would probably have to adopt large tax increases, or make huge service cuts, to come up with the money. 'Prichard is the future' Current city workers could find themselves paying into a pension plan that will not be there for their own retirements. In Prichard, some older workers have delayed retiring, since they cannot afford to give up their paychecks if no pension checks will follow. So the declining, little-known city of Prichard is now attracting the attention of bankruptcy lawyers, labor leaders, municipal credit analysts and local officials from across the country.
Re: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning (NYT-article)
Michele, I don't know that the Federal Government would be - on the hook - PBGC only insures Pensions from Private companies in this case it's the retired workers who could be out. It's a lesson in the need for good financial planning and not putting all of your eggs in 1 basket. This reminds me of the Enron collapse. So many people had all of their retirement tied up in Enron, when the company went under, so did they. Pensions should not exist. They are plagued with problems and seldom funded correctly. At least with a 401k I can make my investment decisions and I know that what I get depends on what I contribute. Dan From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Michele Stephenson Sent: Thursday, December 23, 2010 11:36 AM Subject: [Biofuel] Alabama Town's Failed Pension is a Warning (NYT-article) For those of you who live in the US an article of interest... For those who live outside looking in, it's no big surprise Private Company and Industry pensions plans have all but gone away. The substitute is the 401K that no one is really responsible for except the investor to make the best choice for Self. However, for those who work for local and state govt agencies this is something to watch and investigate especially if you are currently receiving a pension or will receive a pension in the next years to come. What is as important if not more important to watch is how these issues will be resolved. In the article below, if the judicial system does not get involved, then mediation is an option which usually results in a cut in benefits. I doubt for those struggling funds one mediation is all it will take. Mediation could possibly take place with every local and state legislative session resulting in a cut every time. For those funds that do get processed in the court system it will likely go to the respective State Supreme Court and ultimately the US Supreme Court. If localities are legitimately declared bankrupt and no longer required to pay pensions it is the federal govt's responsibility to do so. In effect, we all pay for lack of managment and corruption in Anywhere, USA. And once this precedent is established there will be a landslide of 'toxic' pensions to be dealt with (or not). It is the future. If you don't think so, Iceland is bankrupt from investing in bonds that were rated as A by unscrupulous wall street fund managers/business men/swindlers when they should have been rated as Junk level. Greece is bankrupt. Ireland is bankrupt. Portugal is bankrupt. Spain will possibly be bankrupt by this time next year. And the US's current financial situation, if scrutinized by the IMF credit rating system used on these same bankrupt countries, is on the verge of changing to riskier interest rates based on our debt and GDP and other indicators (just like the above countries with exception of Iceland). What do all these countries have in common? They are followed the same financial paradigm: loans/debt to stimulate economy. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40793765/ns/us_news-the_new_york_times/ Full Text below: PRICHARD, Ala. - This struggling small city on the outskirts of Mobile was warned for years that if it did nothing, its pension fund would run out of money by 2009. Right on schedule, its fund ran dry. Then Prichard did something that pension experts say they have never seen before: it stopped sending monthly pension checks to its 150 retired workers, breaking a state law requiring it to pay its promised retirement benefits in full. Since then, Nettie Banks, 68, a retired Prichard police and fire dispatcher, has filed for bankruptcy. Alfred Arnold, a 66-year-old retired fire captain, has gone back to work as a shopping mall security guard to try to keep his house. Eddie Ragland, 59, a retired police captain, accepted help from colleagues, bake sales and collection jars after he was shot by a robber, leaving him badly wounded and unable to get to his new job as a police officer at the regional airport. Far worse was the retired fire marshal who died in June. Like many of the others, he was too young to collect Social Security. When they found him, he had no electricity and no running water in his house, said David Anders, 58, a retired district fire chief. He was a proud enough man that he wouldn't accept help. The situation in Prichard is extremely unusual - the city has sought bankruptcy protection twice - but it proves that the unthinkable can, in fact, sometimes happen. And it stands as a warning to cities like Philadelphia and states like Illinois, whose pension funds are under great strain: if nothing changes, the money eventually does run out, and when that happens, misery and turmoil follow. More U.S. news More retirees moving in with their children As retirement investments erode during the economic crisis, the number of multigenerational family households has been growing - returning to a trend from half a century ago. Full
