Friday, May 02, 2003
Mouldering morsels
Yeah, so I should have gotten it together to post these yesterday, when they were fresh. Sobeit…
Boeing
The day’s top news story concerned Boeing’s plans for its next generation of airliners. They intend to simplify their product line, taking it from six types (717, 737, 747, 757, 767, 777) to three (small, medium, large). The first of them will be the intermediate 7E7, a twin-aisle 220-350 seat plane which will replace the poor-selling 757 and 767 models. Boeing’s chief reason for this complete retooling is that the three sizes of planes will share as many components as possible, much as the 757 and 767 do now. For example, the cockpits for all three new models would be essentially identical, and therefore the cockpits for all three could be assembled at the same plant. I suppose the same could be said for many of the subcontracted components.
This is news in Seattle, of course, because Boeing is making noise about choosing to assemble the new 7E7 somewhere else. Difficult as it may be to imagine, given the history of the 20th and now 21st centuries, it is not impossible that there would be no airliner assembly hereabouts in the foreseeable future ... with the emphasis on compatability among models, reports the Times, if the 7E7 is built elsewhere, then so too will its smaller and larger cousins.
The prospect of a common fleet underscores the importance of landing the 7E7 assembly line: Whoever wins that bidding war would be positioned to build all of Boeing’s future models.
“If we pull this off, we’ll ruin Airbus. We’ll reinvent the whole business,” said one senior technical employee. “But if Boeing doesn’t build the 7E7 in Washington, they’ll never build another plane here."
Boeing is currently putting together its list of requirements (what some might call demands and others might even consider terms for extortion) from the state of Washington that would, umm, encourage the company to keep its airliner assembly program in the region. One potential sticking-point, not mentioned in yesterday’s article, is the rejection by Washington’s voters of Referendum 53 in last November’s balloting. The voters sided against the state’s political establishment, Boeing, retailers, and good sense (and with the construction industry and a few other interest groups) in overturning the legislature’s reworking of unemployment taxation structure. The referendum may eventually be found to be unconstitutional, however, which would mean that the revamping of the unemployment tax would remain as intended by the legislature (to Boeing’s, and the people’s, advantage), so stay tuned.
Terrorism notebook
Seems that the Transportation Security Administration is cutting another 3000 screeners from their payroll, on top of the 3000 cuts announced last month. In all, that’s 11% of the TSA’s screening personnel. House Republicans, always wary of government employees, think the TSA has grown too big, too fast. No layoffs at Sea-Tac, we’re told.
The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (NCTAUUS ... no cutesy-pie acronyms for this one) will get to see the 500,000 pages of documents that the Bush administration had been reviewing and withholding from them. No word on how heavily those documents, some of them classified, have been redacted. Though I’m sure we could find some GSA purchase orders for a few cases of thick black markers.
The tax battle
The Bush obsession with dividends continues to drive the Congressional Republican effort to plunge stakes into the hearts of all non-millionaire Americans. In a story originating in the L.A. Times, we learn that Senate Republicans propose “lowering” the tax cut from Bush’s monstrous $726 billion to a merely unconscionable $350 billion (or is it $550 billion after all?) by, among other things, dropping the increase in per-child tax credits after one year. In general, they would concentrate on removing relief for married people and families with children, while retaining the rich people’s tax advantages. Why does this naked attack on the vast majority of taxpayers generate no outrage among politicians, pundits, or the people?
Meanwhile, Alan Greenspan’s syntax wasn’t nearly as sphinx-like as usual when he testified about the tax cut plan before a Congressional committee. He stated that rising deficits would force increases in interest rates (and as Fed chair, he does have some inside knowledge about that) that would at least equal—in the opposite direction, of course—any effects of the unneeded “stimulus” from Bush’s tax cuts. To say nothing of the added cost in debt service costs on each dollar of the vast increase in debt that would have to be serviced.
No Iraq Poverty War
A story that has been very badly covered is that the Americans at the opposite end of the economic spectrum from Bush/Cheney’s multimillionaire benefactors and beneficiaries are in far worse shape than they’ve been in a long, long time. This Associated Press story reports on the poorest of the poor—black (and, incidentally, Latino) children living in households where after-tax income isn’t merely below the poverty line but less than 50% of the poverty line level. The number of such children—living in the richest society in the history of the world, with taxes for the wealthiest being cut willy-nilly—has skyrocketed in the last few years. The 932,000 black children in these dire circumstances in 2001 represent the highest total in this category ever; the earliest data on the problem were analyzed in 1979.
Whether or not this is due to welfare “reform”, as suggested by J. Lawrence Aber of the National Center for Children in Poverty and Marian Wright Edelman of the Children’s Defense Fund, isn’t the point. In the article, Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation disputes Aber and Edelman’s emphasis on welfare reform, though he doesn’t point to any alternative explanations whatsoever; from his side, it seems, saying “they’re wrong” is explanation enough. Sadly, no one in the press or the political classes calls the bluff of Rector and his ilk.
A society that fails to look after its most vulnerable citizens while coddling those who already possess and consume beyond all possible necessity is failing to meet its responsibilities to itself and to the world.
Capital Watch
Orrin Hatch, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, says he won’t even think about starting hearings on the Leung-FBI spy case until the Justive Department and the Bureau have finished reviewing it. That would probably be an appropriate position to take, if one believed that Ashcroft’s DOJ was actually interested in studying and, more to the point, reporting on the situation. My cynical guess is that they’ll continue to “investigate” at least until it’s too late for it to have any effect on the 2004 election cycle. Imagine the screams for special prosecutors, congressional investigations, and the like if something even a thousandth as big as double-agents, sexual liaisons between FBI agents (plural) and their sources, obstruction of justice, money-laundering, and so forth had happened a few years ago.
Meanwhile, the smallpox vaccine compensation limit law was signed by Dubya. Top award is $50,000 a year. Not to worry, though ... so few people have volunteered for this stupid vaccination program that it won’t bankrupt poor little Aventis Pasteur (a, gasp, French company, by the way).
And Ashcroft’s DOJ, in a Supreme Court brief, urged the retention of “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, arguing that it’s OK to make “ceremonial references to God” because that doesn’t promote an official religion. Apparently, their legal theory is that the First Amendment refers solely to a prohibition on an official national religion for the United States. Apparently too, they don’t (want to) understand that one nation and under God are completely separate phrases in the Pledge; the latter became part of the Pledge well over half a century after the former. Though I wrote something about the Pledge a couple of months ago, I didn’t look into the precedents with that theory in mind. My understanding from innumerable Court decisions in the last two centuries, though, is that the First Amendment has been applied rather more extensively and broadly than that.
Across the nation
Due to the Wen Ho Lee case, as well as the problem of missing computers and other “systemic management failures”, the Energy Department will open the contract for managing the Los Alamos National Laboratory to competitive bidding when the current contract expires in 2005. The University of California has run Los Alamos since 1943, and its contract has never before been competed.
On the face of it, this sounds like an appropriate action. Interestingly, however, as was reported in the San Francisco Chronicle back on January 20 of this year, the leading competitor for management contracts such as Los Alamos is ... the University of Texas. Hook ‘em, Horns!!
Tuesday, April 29, 2003
Silence
I don’t have a good explanation for it. The days have slipped away quietly, as thoughts drifted. I simply couldn’t pull the trigger to comment on anything in particular. Maybe it’s the onset of near-acceptable weather up here in the Pacific Northwest.
At least there’s cheery news on the baseball front. On Sunday, Kevin Millwood of the Phillies, the club that will forever own my heart and mind, threw the season’s first no-hitter!! And today, the Seattle Mariners, holding the early lead in the very tough American League West, went to New York and beat the snot out of the hated Yankees. I don’t care that the pitcher they beat was Roger Clemens, one of the greatest hurlers in the history of the game ... any Yankee loss is an event to savor and relish.
Now, I could start to wax poetic about great baseball games I’ve seen, or the many ballparks I’ve visited, or any of a dozen other baseball topics, but that’s not why I’m here in the blogosphere. This isn’t a baseball blog.
I just had to remind myself that, yes, I’m still among the living…
Sunday, April 20, 2003
Summer trippin'
NOTE: no political content
My summer vacation plans are beginning to round into shape. The basic necessity is that I will be in Denver July 9-13 for the national convention of the Society for American Baseball Research. I haven’t missed a SABR National since attending my forst one in 1990.
I’ll fly into Denver a full week ahead of time. At DIA, I plan to rent a car and take a weeklong driving trip in the Great Plains. There are four states nearby—North and South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana—that are calling out to be added to my life-list. I expect to swing past Devils Tower, the Custer battlefield, the Badlands, Mt. Rushmore, and Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Or maybe someplace else that strikes my fancy during that week. Suggestions are welcome.
If I set foot in all four of the above-named states, my life-list will then stand at 46 states. I’d been stuck on 41 for a long, long time before checking off Louisiana a little over a year ago. Still haven’t been to the two “off-shore” states, nor have I ever visited Arkansas or Mississippi.
George W. Bush's tax return
No, not his 2002 return. We looked at that a few days ago. This time we’re talking about 1998.
That’s the year in which Dubya and his ownership group sold the Texas Rangers baseball team to a group headed by his friend and heavy contributor Tom Hicks of Clear Channel Communications. I discussed some of the details of that transaction in one of my first postings back in January.
A few days ago, following a link seen in a comment I read on the indispensible Daily Kos, I came upon a 2002 posting by someone called The Anonymous CPA. In that essay, the argument is made that the profit from the sale of the Rangers, reported by the Bushes as long-term capital gains, should instead have been categorized as ordinary income. The latter would be taxed at the taxpayer’s highest rate (in the Bushes’ case, that was 39.6% in 1998), while long-term capital gains are taxed at 20%. It makes an immense difference when it comes down to writing a check to the IRS, because the amount of Rangers profit claimed by Dubya came to precisely $16,999,685!
The gap between 20% and 39.6% of that amount? The number of dollars that George W. Bush might reasonably be deemed to have failed to pay in 1998 federal income tax? Oh, just a measly little $3,331,938, before adding penalties and interest.
By the way, you’ll find a .pdf of the Bushes’ 1998 federal income tax return right here.
Wednesday, April 16, 2003
Holiday spirits
Today is my sister’s birthday. At sunset tonight, the eight days of Pesach begin. Which means that, as often happens, her birthday cake will be flourless. In the old days, that meant (ugh) Passover spongecake, but we’ve since discovered the joys of chocolate torte.
I’ll attend the moderate-sized seder of my sister’s havurah group tonight, bringing with me a brisket pot-roasted with green tomato chutney. Tomorrow night, we’ll have a more family-oriented seder, hosted by my sister with assistance from yours truly.
Our reading of the Hagadah will be particularly poignant this year. The story of our people’s tribulations, escape, and redemption is always a thrill, but in the current environment of nearly unbearable tensions in the Cradle of Civilization, with modern-day pharoahs calling for divine retribution on all sides, the words will probably ring even truer than they ordinarily do.
I’m aware that many Christian congregations participate in community seders these days. That spirit of ecumenism has been a vitally positive sign in many places. I do wonder whether Dubya has ever joined one. And whether he’s participating in a seder somewhere this year, perhaps sharing the table with Messrs. Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, et al.
And I must cattily ask myself whether, as the seder celebration comes to its finale, Mr. Bush might be muttering a slight alteration in the traditional salutation:
"Next year inJerusalemDamascus!"
How awful that such thoughts force themselves into my mind in these troubled times.
