HorsesAss.Org

Yesterday Gov. Chris Gregoire was in Clark County to visit with the bidness guys and gals, and the whaaaaambulance was screeching away full throttle. I’m sure someone in the room voted for her. Well, actually, I’m not sure about that, but it’s a theoretical possibility at least.

Like we’ve never heard this one before, but the first thing to do is blame the workers. From The Columbian:

Elie Kassab, president of Prestige Development, said he advertised in The Reflector last year to fill eight entry-level jobs and had 221 young applicants. “The biggest problem we have is the 50-cent minimum wage increase,” he said. The minimum wage, tied to the Consumer Price Index, jumped 48 cents to $8.55, the nation’s highest, on Jan. 1.

Yeah, I’m sure that extra $3.84 per hour to hire eight workers is killing him. You really can’t make this stuff up.

If blaming minimum wage workers isn’t your cup of tea, you could always blame environmental regulations:

Contractor Roy Frederick drew applause when he urged Gregoire to take another look at strict new state stormwater runoff rules that require builders to set aside more land for retention ponds.

“Tell your Department of Ecology to do a cost-benefit analysis on these stormwater regulations,” he said. “It’s a giant train wreck. It has stopped development in Clark County.”

I guess it had nothing to do with the housing bubble, securitization of mortgages or fraud in the house building, financing and selling sector, nor the continued credit crunch caused by zombie banks pocketing taxpayer money instead of lending. Nope, nothing at all.

The whining is not limited to our state, however. The house building industry is peeved over in Oregon as well. From The Oregonian:

Portland-area homebuilders say things are bad enough with the recession. Now they suspect members of the Metro council – elected officials who have much to say about how and where the area grows – are philosophically bent against them.

Tom Skaar, president of the Home Builders Association of Metropolitan Portland, says council members think growth means “sprawl” – so he wrote in a letter to Metro Council President David Bragdon

Well, growth has historically meant sprawl, at least since the construction of the interstate highway system.

To be fair, construction and associated businesses are a valuable and needed part of any economy. There are, of course, good and decent builders, real estate agents, sellers of furniture and such who are being wiped out. This is bad, and it’s every bit as tragic as a factory worker or high-tech worker getting wiped out.

It seems not to have really sunk in among the developers, however, that things are unlikely to return to normal any time soon, and may not ever be quite the same. Clark County functioned for years as a safety valve for Oregon, absorbing huge population gains while providing sub-standard urban services in many respects. Many children attend school in portable classrooms, sidewalks go nowhere, parks go undeveloped and public safety services struggle for money.

The citizenry of Clark County has already paid for the bubble, through taxes and hidden costs such as traffic congestion and environmental challenges. We simply cannot afford to keep growing in the fashion we did the last 15 years or so. There’s no money left, anywhere. It’s vaporized, along with the fish.

So while it is in everyone’s interest to have economic recovery happen, and the construction sector should share in that, it’s going to take enormous sums of public money (and it already is, through the TARP and FDIC.) That means the interests of the community as a whole need to be taken into account, not just the pet peeves of bidness guys grinding the same far right axes they’ve been grinding for the last thirty years.

Times are tough for many people. Everyone deserves a seat at the table, but nobody should own the table.

Elections have consequences, you know.

After reporting a quarterly loss of $56 million ($968 million in its commercial airplane division), Boeing announced plans to cut 10,000 jobs in 2009.

That number includes the 4,500 job cuts previously announced, mostly in the Puget Sound area.  And how many of the remaining 5,500 job cuts will target our region?  According to the P-I, “some“… with the cuts being spread across the company geographically.

Considering that almost half of Boeing’s 162,000 employees are in WA state, I suppose we should expect to absorb almost half of these newly announced cuts.

I few thousand here, a few thousand there… pretty soon this starts to add up to a bad recession.

Click for Part 3

Recently, Afghan President Hamid Karzai asked “This war has gone on for seven years, the Afghans don’t understand anymore, how come a little force like the Taliban can continue to exist, can continue to flourish, can continue to launch attacks?” What sounds like an innocent query by someone truly bewildered by the strength of his political opponents is more of a rhetorical question than anything else. Karzai knows exactly how and why the Taliban are flourishing. He’s hoping that Americans, and the incoming Obama Administration, will finally start to ask themselves this question as well.

The answer lies primarily in the opium fields that yield over 90% of the world’s supply of heroin. Just as Mexican cartels have made themselves untouchable throughout much of their own country on drug profits, the Taliban are funding their massive resurgence through the same means. Unlike the Mexican cartels, however, they have a much more nationalist and anti-Western outlook, making this drug war failure potentially far more disastrous to our national security than anything encountered before it.

[Read more…]

Yes you can. Please join us for an evening of politics under the influence at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. Start time is 8:00 pm at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. Some folks show up earlier for dining.

If you’re not in Seattle, no worries…stop by the Drinking Liberally web site for dates and times of a chapter within skeetching distance of you.

Where will Oregon eventually come down when it comes to the CRC project to build a new bridge on I-5 between Vancouver and Portland? Not clear. From The Columbian:

A high-level meeting of elected officials did little Monday to reach consensus on how many lanes should be built on a new replacement Interstate 5 bridge.

The Portland City Council and the Metro Council, in a rare joint work session, spent close to two hours in a wide-ranging discussion of the lane issue, bridge tolls and projected effects on greenhouse gas emissions and urban development.

The meeting, however, only underscored the division between Washington and Oregon on a bridge-freeway-transit project that could cost $3.5 billion or more.

An interesting comment from one official:

Metro Council President David Bragdon said officials agree on a number of issues, including the need to replace the bridge and to extend light rail into Vancouver. On the day a light-rail line opens connecting Portland and Vancouver, it would have the highest ridership of any route in the Portland-Vancouver area, he said.

If politics is the art of the possible, hopefully a grand compromise can be worked out between the two states and the two cities. There are hysterical types on both sides of the river, on one side proclaiming a new bridge will inevitably lead to greater sprawl and on the other side proclaiming the end of freedom due to communist choo-choo trains. It’s all so silly, and unsupported by fact.

The bridge project (bridge influence area in planner-speak) is focused on a short stretch of I-5, the main commercial artery on the West Coast. The sub-standard interchanges and bridge present a real safety and efficiency hazard, and it’s long past time a new bridge is planned and constructed.

The detail that concerns me the most is how tolls are presented to the public. If the proceeds are used to pay for construction and maintenance, the public will accept them. If tolls are used to “manage demand,” far fewer people will be happy and there is the risk of an intense public backlash in Clark County. Since the public will have to be asked to approve taxes to run light rail on this side of the river, that’s a big risk to take.

That may not be how some transportation experts see it, as new technology and the hope of influencing congestion through pricing is a somewhat attractive proposition, but it will be seen as punitive and an example of government being out to get the little people. And frankly, since any toll would be new, as passage across the bridge has been free for decades now, there would be a de facto limiting effect anyway. The quick jaunt across the river to purchase merchandise from big box retailers will have to be weighed against the cost of the tolls.

Complicated toll pricing schemes will just muddy the political waters. I sure hope they don’t do it that way.

Bellingham Herald reporter-blogger Sam Taylor, regarding a new cat blog put up by someone in the Olympia press corps:

Meanwhile, has anyone else checked on the journalists there lately? They seem lonely.

Um, meeee—ow?

With the economy in the drink and state coffers running dry, Gov. Gregoire has proposed adding 10 new state-run liquor stores, while allowing the sale of alcohol related items like cork screws and ice, in an effort to pump up revenues.  (Existing law currently prohibits State Stores from selling ice?  That’s just plain silly.)  At the same time, kinda-sorta Democratic Sen. Tim Sheldon will propose shuttering the State Store system entirely, and privatizing the sale of liquor, because… you know… there’s no time better than a $6 billion revenue shortfall to hand off $322 million in revenues to the private sector.

I’ve often heard my fellow Washingtonians complain about their inability to buy a bottle of Makers Mark at 3AM at the local 7-Eleven, but coming from Pennsylvania, with an even stricter state store system—grocery stores can’t sell beer or wine either—I don’t find it much of an  inconvenience.  After all, it’s not like the stuff goes bad, so you can always stock up… and if you really need a bottle of rotgut at 3AM, perhaps it’s best that it’s not so freely available anyway?

But what really galls me in nearly every debate about the state store system, are the knee-jerk arguments from the invisible hand crowd about unfair state competition:

The proposals, particularly increases in nonliquor sales at state-run stores, have drawn fire from grocers as an anti-competitive encroachment on private business.

[… ] Jan Gee, president of the Washington Food Industry, said the independent grocers belonging to her organization would be hurt by increases in the number of state-run liquor stores. … “We want them out of competition with us,” Gee said. “We want them out of beer and wine, and we don’t want them to even be considering an expansion into what they call bar products.”

Yeah… sure… the state sells a limited selection of beer and wine from drab storefronts staffed by well-paid, union workers with good benefits.  How could independent grocers possibly compete with that?

I mean really… if a private business can’t out-compete the state in the sale of ice and corkscrews, perhaps it shouldn’t be in business in the first the place?  They’re gonna have to come up with a better argument than that.

The appropriateness of a state monopoly on the sale of liquor, well, that’s an entirely different debate, but given alcohol’s quantifiable impact on public health and safety, there are plenty of strong arguments in favor of the status quo, however inconvenient it might be to late-night boozers or “antiquated” it may appear to Sen. Sheldon.  In fact, if we really want to increase revenues and cut government expenses, I’d not only keep the state store system and its liquor monopoly intact, but expand it to include a state monopoly on the legal sale of marijuana.

Our current state store system grew out of the end of prohibition on alcohol.  I’d say it’s past time to end the failed prohibition on pot as well… and then tax hell out of it.

This time it’s H-P:

Hewlett-Packard Co. is in the process of laying off at least 150 Vancouver workers, and possibly more than 200, as it scraps its local Edgeline printer team and shrinks other engineering groups.

—snip—-

HP “is shifting prototype testing, as well as some work on research designs, engineering specifications and drawings, abroad, including to Singapore,” according to U.S. Department of Labor documents. This inkjet lab move will affect at least 52 Vancouver employees, a labor official said.

—snip—

Employees of HP are taking the news as a blow, especially following reports by the Reuters news agency that Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Mark Hurd received compensation of $42.5 million in 2008.

While the news is not unexpected, as it’s well known H-P has been in the process of destroying the company trying to sell the Vancouver campus, the timing is especially horrible for Vancouver. Tax revenue and house sales will continue to suffer.

As for CEO compensation, I find it hard to believe Congress will actually do anything about it. Now shut up and enjoy your jelly of the month.

Click for Part 2

If there was one success that South American anti-drug efforts had in the past two decades, it was to dismantle some of the larger drug trafficking networks that were operating there. Since the death of Pablo Escobar in 1993, there have been no comparable figures in Colombian society in terms of wealth, influence, and criminality. But the drug trafficking organizations that supplied American drug users didn’t disappear. They moved to Mexico, demonstrating one fundamental rule about the drug war – as long as demand exists, you can never end the trade, you can only hope to relocate it.

Before the 1980s, Mexican drug gangs were little more than nuisances in Mexican society. They’d profit from smuggling marijuana into the United States, and could sometimes subvert institutions through corruption or violence. But today, Mexican drug gangs control much of northern Mexico and, according to Stratfor, an organization of current and retired intelligence officials, they now pose a significant threat to the federal government in Mexico City.

[Read more…]

It’s getting cold out there.

From The Columbian:

Businesses that were drawing down loans to fund these projects have been told by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. that their credit is frozen. These borrowers are being encouraged to seek other financing within the next 90 days. They make up an unknown portion of the 1,000 borrowers whose $400 million worth of loans were seized from the Bank of Clark County on Jan. 16.

“The (FDIC) is going to leave me with unfinished homes that cannot be refinanced, rented or sold,” said a local home builder, who asked The Columbian not to publish his name because he did not want public comments to affect his negotiations with the FDIC.

That TARP thing sure is working well. If it works any better you won’t be able to charge a hamburger.

Unrelated but obvious: anonymous bloggers are a threat to Western Civilization. Anonymous developers get to call newspapers and have their complaints published. Seems equal to me.

From The New York Times:

Inspections of the plant in Blakely, Ga., by the state agriculture department found areas of rust that could flake into food, gaps in warehouse doors large enough for rodents to get through, unmarked spray bottles and containers, and numerous violations of other practices designed to prevent food contamination. The plant, owned by Peanut Corporation of America of Lynchburg, Va., has been shut down.

A typical entry from an inspection report, dated Aug. 23, 2007, noted: “The food-contact surfaces of re-work kettle in the butter room department were not properly cleaned and sanitized.” Additional entries noted: “The food-contact surfaces of the bulk oil roast transfer belt in the mezzazine [sic] room were not properly cleaned and sanitized. The food-contact surfaces of pan without wheels in the blanching department were not properly cleaned and sanitized.”

A code violation in the same report observed “clean peanut butter buckets stored uncovered,” while another cited a “wiping cloth” to “cover crack on surge bin.” Tests on samples gathered on the day of that inspection were negative for salmonella.

Props to Marler Blog.

How much does a tax cut stimulate people who lost their job?

It’s already been a lousy year for workers less than a month into 2009 and there’s no relief in sight. Tens of thousands of fresh layoffs were announced Monday and more companies are expected to cut payrolls in the months ahead.

Lots of lucky duckies at places like Sprint, GM, Caterpillar and Pfizer.

Seriously, I want these Republican Congress-critters who represent some of these districts to go home and tell their constituents they simply must increase the percentage of tax cuts in the stimulus bill, even as job losses mount. They might run into some actual “real” Americans going “WTF are you talking about, I just lost my job and my house!”

Everyone knew the GOP wouldn’t be satisfied with 40% of the package, even though they are in the minority. Enough of this bipartisan artifice, it’s not anything people outside Washington, D.C. care about very much, if at all.

We need to do what we need to do, and if Republicans don’t like it, they can bring it up at the next election.