Tag Archives: ethics

When Greed Meets Tinker Bell

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State pension funds are another time bomb of malaise (to the tune of a $1.4 trillion shortfall) waiting to explode, and Rhode Island provides an example of the difficulty we each, in our own state, face in defusing it.

Rhode Island passed a massive overhaul (as such things go; they have a long way, yet, before they’ve completely cured their problem) of their state retirement system last year, including such unheard-ofs as raising the retirement age, suspending pension increases for several years, and generating a hybrid retirement plan that combines traditional pensions with 401(k)-like accounts.  Rhode Island’s General Treasurer, Gina Raimondo, says that this reform will save Rhode Islanders $4 billion over the next 20 years (compared to a 2013 budget that proposes spending $8 billion in that year alone, small potatoes, indeed, but a critical start).  This minor reform also seeks to redress astonishing conditions that include 58 percent of retired teachers and 48 percent of state retirees receiving more in their pensions than in their final years of work.

But it’s too much change for some.  The public “service” unions (service: you service me) object: it’s somehow wrong for their members to be responsible for their own retirement funding.  Even a little bit.  Instead, these public “service” unions protest that it’s all unfair.  Rhode Island is reneging on promises to workers, they say.  Bob Walsh, Executive Director of the National Education Association of Rhode Island, goes so far as to insist

What they did was illegal.  We’re deep into a real assault on labor.  It worries me that people who purport themselves as Democrats do this.

Never mind that there’s nothing at all illegal about these changes.  It’s a well-established principle in American jurisprudence that when the conditions extant when a contract was agreed (stipulating arguendo that the agreement was made in good faith by all parties) no longer exist, or have so radically changed that the terms can no longer be met, the contract can be abrogated and either a new one negotiated or the parties involved go their separate ways.  In extreme cases, this is what bankruptcy achieves; although, when the conditions have changed as radically as these have, bankruptcy isn’t necessary.

Never mind, also, these are promises that couldn’t be kept in any event, and both the state government and the public “service” unions at the time knew they could not be kept.  Or they blindly believed real hard in government’s ability to keep collecting funds from…somewhere.  Tinker Bell is alive and well in Public Service Land.

Never mind, finally, that this public “service” union greed at the expense of taxpayers makes “labor” a valid target.

One tear-jerker that the unions are trotting out is this:

North Providence retiree Jamie Reilly left her job as a secretary at age 50 [remember that raising of the retirement age?], thinking her 30 years of state employment would mean good benefits during her later years.  But now she said she may be forced to re-enter the workforce at age 55 because the state has put off pension increases.

“I counted on that money,” Reilly said….  “You work all your life and you plan, and they take it away from you.”

Worked all her life?  She worked 30 years and wanted to be retired for 40.  Workers in the private sector don’t get it that easy; they work until they’re in their mid-60s—a working life 50% longer.

And this one:

Cranston firefighter Dean Brockway said higher retirement ages mean he will have to work several years longer than he expected, and he wonders how he’ll climb stairs in heavy gear in his 60s.

“Could I do something else? I don’t know,” he said. “A lot of us chose to dedicate our lives to public service because to us it’s an honor.  Could I be a carpenter?  I don’t think so. This is what I do.”

Brockway has a legitimate concern, but it’s no different from the concerns of a private sector employee whose work is primarily physical labor.  But if he’s not going to look for alternatives, if he’s not going to try to retrain into something less physically demanding (certainly no stroll in the park for a middle-aged or older person, but assuredly not impossible), he loses sympathy for his plight, which begins to be self-imposed.  Certainly, there’s no more obligation for Rhode Island’s citizens to indemnify him against the outcomes of his choices than there is for them to indemnify similarly situated private sector employees.

Raimondo understands this in all its practicalities—how affordable are the existing programs:

These problems won’t go away.  The longer you wait, the bigger the problems get.  People looking for easy, short-term solutions. … Well, there are none.

Raimondo doesn’t believe in Tinker Bell.

Hmm….

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According to Matthew Payne in The Wall Street Journal, Democratic Party Presidential Candidate Barack Obama held a rally on the University of Wisconsin campus last Thursday.  But there were conditions attached for the students’ to gain permissiontickets to attend.

In order to get a ticket for the speech, students were forced to go to Mr. Obama’s campaign website and pledge their support for the president—in the process giving the Obama campaign a gold mine of contact information in a key swing state.

Worse, the University was complicit in this:

The university even provided direct links to the website—free advertising to 40,000 students in one of Mr. Obama’s most important demographics.

Can we afford four years of a more “flexible” President, even less accountable than he recognizes himself to be today?

More Dishonesty

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Fox News is reporting another example of Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama’s politically motivated distortions.

Recall that Obama, after seeing Congress explicitly reject his DREAM Act, implemented it anyway via an Executive Order in which young illegal immigrants, meeting certain criteria and paying the requisite fees for a special visa, are allowed to stay in the US on temporary work permits.  In a recent interview with the Denver Post, Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney had this to say on the matter:

The people who have received the special visa that the president has put in place, which is a two-year visa, should expect that the visa would continue to be valid.  I’m not going to take something that they’ve purchased[.]

Naturally, Obama objected, insisting remarkably that this represented a Romney flip-flop on immigration.  Speaking through his Director of Hispanic Press, Gabriela Domenzain, Obama had this:

Romney’s latest immigration pivot raises more questions than it answers.  He still has not said whether he would continue the Administration’s policy that provides a temporary reprieve from deportation for young people who were brought here through no fault of their own[.]

And then he acknowledged that Romney’s latest remark was entirely consistent with his already established position.  Speaking again through Domenzain, he added this:

We know he called the DREAM Act a “handout” and that he promised to veto it.  Nothing he has said since contradicts this and we should continue to take him at his word.

Indeed.  Romney has had a consistent position on immigration from the jump.  What he said in the Post interview was that, unlike Obama, Romney declines to use the children of illegal immigrants (or any children, come to that) as pawns for personal political gain.

What’s Going On Here?

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US military members tend strongly to vote Republican.  Yet in election swing states, absentee ballot requests are shockingly low.  There are a couple of possibilities for why this is so: on the one hand, our soldiers and spouses, and those who support them, don’t care enough about voting in this year’s elections to request their ballots.  This is hard to credit.

On the other hand, they’re not getting the information they need to get their ballots so they can vote.  We know some things about this.  For instance, we know that the Joint Chiefs of Staff is not in the chain of command for our soldiers, but it is charged with providing the command chain with training, equipage, and support for the commanders’ soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines.

We also know that the Chairman of the JCS, General Martin Dempsey, is too busy hectoring ex-military and civilians for exercising their free speech rights to have any time left providing that support—which, among other matters, includes making it possible for our soldiers and spouses, and those who support them, to vote absentee.

Here’s how well he’s doing on soldiers’ absentee voting, and how will others specifically charged with the task are doing.  This table, taken from the Military Voter Protection Project‘s report, shows how far the numbers of requested absentee ballots have fallen from the numbers in 2008 (the complete report is available at the MVP Project link).

State

Total Requested
in 2008

Current
Requested
in 2012

Percent
Difference

Florida

121,395

65,173

-46%

Virginia

41,762

12,292

-70%

North Carolina

19,109

7,848

-59%

Illinois

9,858

3,532

-64%

Ohio

32,334

9,707

-70%

Alaska

13,766

6,535

-52%

Colorado

5,104

2,986

-41%

Nevada

4,919

1,750

-64%

We also know some other things about this shameful failure.  DoD spokeswoman Cmdr Leslie Hull-Ryde is insisting that 2012 is much different than 2008: the 2008 elections had contested primaries for both major parties, but this time only Republicans had a contested primary.  That’s their excuse, apparently: there must be primaries by both parties, else the Pentagon is relieved of its duty.  Hull-Ryde added, proudly,

We are in complete compliance with the law.  (The Federal Voting Assistance Program) strives to ensure that every absent military and overseas citizen voter has the tools and resources to receive, cast and return an absentee ballot and have it counted—regardless of who they vote for.

When I was on active duty in the USAF, such “meets standards” performance, noted on an Officer Efficiency Report or an Airman Proficiency Report, was the kiss of death to a career.  We were expected to do better than that.  Moreover, DoD was authorized $75 million for last year and this to set up the mechanisms—including those voting assistance offices—for getting this voting information to its service members.  Yet it has chosen not to, to any great extent, despite the fact that the 2009 Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act requires them to.

Pam Mitchell, acting director of the FVAP, compounds the matter, bragging that there are over 220 voting assistance offices seat up worldwide, and claiming with a straight face,

I strongly believe that voting assistance is the best that it has ever been.

Never mind that she has a vested interest in downplaying this failure.  Never mind that the 220 offices of which she’s so proud is a trifling number compared to the thousands of locations around the world at which we have soldiers and spouses, and those who support them—or just soldiers and their support—stationed.  It seems the FVAP isn’t striving very hard.

Despite the Pentagon’s decision to fail [sic] on this, soldiers and spouses, and those who support them, can request absentee ballots at the MVP Project link above and at  the Heroes Vote Initiative Web site, http://heroesvote.org.

One more thing: think the military vote is too trivial to matter?  Aside from the utter immorality of depriving these men and women who are willing to sacrifice everything in order to protect us and our freedoms—including our right to vote—of their right to vote, think about the numbers involved.  Compare the present reduction in military votes cast (again, a segment of our population that tends strongly to vote Republican) with the closeness of past Presidential elections in Florida and other swing states, the 2008 Senatorial election in Minnesota, the gubernatorial elections in Washington, and so on.

Lies of my President, Part 2

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This is Part 2 of my series on the lies told by Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama in the nearly four years in which he’s been in office.  As I said earlier, I’m not concerned with his broken campaign promises so much as I am with his dishonesty while in office.

This post consists entirely of a letter from Senators David Vitter (R, LA), Jeff Sessions (R, AL), and John Cornyn (R, TX) to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar regarding “claims” made by the Secretary about energy production in the US.  I lay these lies off on Obama because, in the end, Interior is a Department within the Executive Branch and because Salazar, like all Cabinet appointees, is Obama’s man, serving at Obama’s pleasure (who can demand the Secretary’s resignation at any time, even though formal firing is done via Congressional impeachment), and so his words are what Obama instructs or permits him to speak.

Dear Secretary Salazar:

We are concerned with the veracity of statements you made in recent weeks regarding domestic energy production on our federal resources.  These statements are similar to claims made by other members of the Administration including the President himself.  As you may know, the federal government owns almost 2.5 billion acres of mineral estate, an area larger than the entire land mass of the United States.  As director of the Bureau of Land Management, Robert Abbey, testified this month, oil production on our federal property is actually down 14% and offshore production from federal areas is down 17% from only a year ago.  Just last week, the Congressional Research Service issued a report revealing that 96 percent of the increase in domestic oil production since 2007 has occurred on non-federal lands.  It further revealed that in 2011 production on federal public lands has actually declined by an average of 275,000 barrels per day.  Oil production on private lands is indeed up year-over-year, but the Administration does not manage private lands and should not attempt to take credit for private market decisions.

Oil production on federal lands increased in 2009 and 2010 as a result of leasing and permitting decisions made before your Administration took office.  However, the falloff in leasing and permitting actions under the Obama Administration is apparent, and even your own Energy Information Administration anticipates continued falloff in production in 2012 and beyond.

We also ask that you rectify the President’s claim that we only have 2% of the world’s oil.  Nothing could be further from the truth, as even the Washington Post reported last week.[1] He bases this statement on US “proved reserves” but the US Energy Information Administration has stated that proved reserves is “not an appropriate measure for judging total resource availability in the long-term.” As Secretary of Interior, surely you are aware of the vast oil resources we possess both onshore and offshore that are currently off limits due to this Administration’s combined actions.  America is endowed with resources that exceed a TRILLION barrels of oil.[2]

According to the Institute for Energy Research, “USGS estimates that unconventional US oil shale resources hold 2.6 trillion barrels of oil, with about 1 trillion barrels that are considered recoverable under current economic and technological conditions.  These 1 trillion barrels are nearly four times the amount of oil resources as Saudi Arabia’s proven oil reserves.
We provide the following examples of what we would view as further inaccurate statements by the Administration regarding the state of federal energy production and resources:

  1. Claim: “Expanding offshore oil and gas production is a key component of our comprehensive energy strategy to grow America’s energy economy, and will help us continue to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and create jobs here at home.” Secretary Ken Salazar, DOI Press Release 1/26/2012

Fact: You made the two most pivotal decisions to shrink domestic offshore energy production over the last three years that could have been made.  First, you eliminated the 2010-2015 OCS lease plan that would have opened areas of the Atlantic, four geologic basins off S.  California, one geologic basin off N.  California, while expanding areas in Alaska, including the Cook Inlet.  Instead, you have proposed a new 5-year plan that excludes all of the areas of the OCS where the moratorium was lifted in 2008, and reduces the number of planned lease sales by roughly half.  Essentially, the moratorium lifted by President Bush and a Democrat Congress in 2008 will continue in effect for a decade under your plan.

  1. Claim: The proposed 5-year offshore lease plan will “make more than 75 percent of undiscovered technically recoverable oil and gas estimated on the OCS available for development.” Secretary Salazar, DOI Press Release 11/08/2011

Fact: These numbers distort the facts.  The Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) is 1.76 billion acres.  Of that 1.76 billion, less than 35 million acres are actually leased (less than 2%).  Your proposed 5-year lease plan does not open a single new lease planning area, and therefore we have no way of knowing what estimates of “technologically recoverable” oil in all of the areas that remain off limits are because you have chosen to keep them off limits.  Most of our OCS has not been explored for decades, and providing access to only a fraction gives us no clue what is truly there.

A more accurate statement is that your 5 year plan opens 75% of the oil and gas in areas where we think it exists because we have drilled there.  We don’t know about the vast majority of the OCS that isn’t leased, much of which has not been assessed with the benefit of new information for a quarter century.

  1. Claim: “Since we put in place new safety standards in the wake of the Gulf oil spill, we have approved more than 400 drilling permits.  In fact, we are now permitting at levels seen before the spill, all while meeting these important new standards.” Secretary Ken Salazar, 3/12/2012

Fact: There exists no evidence that permitting for production has indeed reached pre-moratorium levels.  In fact, the families impacted in the Gulf are still reeling from the impacts of the slowed pace of permitting.  Exploration and permitting have yet to recover to pre-2010 levels on account of the moratorium and ensuing permitorium on shallow and deepwater permits.  According to one recent study, “Prior to the deepwater drilling moratorium, the US oil and natural gas offshore industry was forecasted to grow significantly due to identified prospects, mostly in the deep water.  With the establishment of the moratorium and the subsequent slowdown in the issuance of drilling permits at all water depths, an estimated $18.3 billion of previously planned capital and operational expenditures did not occur in 2010 and 2011.”[3] The study further concludes that the permitting challenges have already cost 90,000 jobs.  It is of importance to note that the moratorium was never endorsed by the National Academy of Engineers, as you had attempted to represent.  An Inspector General investigation was required to uncover the political influence and misrepresentation by the White House and your office in an important scientific document.

  1. Claim: “The fact of the matter is that we are producing more from public lands, both oil and gas, both onshore as well as offshore, than at any time in recent memory.  And when you look back at the years of 2009, 2010, and 2011, we’ve continued to make millions and millions of acres of the public estate available both on the land, as well as on the sea.” Secretary Ken Salazar, 3/12/2012

Fact: As we pointed out earlier in this letter, there is significant lag time to production after the process of leasing.  Presumably this is the reason for your repeated observation that “there is no immediate fix” for higher gas prices.  After a company has leased property they then have to explore, develop and produce, with each stage requiring new permits and compliance with federal processes.  The production gains we saw in 2009 and 2010 were the result of leasing and permitting that occurred in the Clinton and Bush Administrations, and was just beginning to come online.  However, by 2011 we began to experience the impacts from the moratorium and falloff of leasing and permitting under your leadership.  Total oil production on federal lands is down 14% over the previous year, offshore is even worse at down 17%, and federal lands saw the fewest number of new onshore leases since 1984.  You also failed to hold a single offshore lease sale in fiscal year 2011.

As a further example, in 2008 the industry spent $2.6 billion to obtain 487 leases in the Chukchi Sea for production offshore Alaska.  So far, not a single well has been drilled on any of these leases.  There have also been numerous new regulatory roadblocks and permit withdrawals from federal onshore production since you took over leadership of the Agency.  Examples of onshore leasing challenges include your withdrawn and slowed leasing in the West, including Montana and the Dakotas.

In July of 2008, then as a United States Senator, you had an opportunity to support increasing domestic energy production, if the price of gas increased beyond a certain threshold.  You repeatedly objected to increasing domestic energy production, even if the price of gas were to have reached $10 per gallon.

Although gas prices are not $10 per gallon, they are increasingly impacting our economy and fellow Americans, particularly low-income and middle-class families.  We are hopeful that similarly to Secretary Chu, you have reevaluated your position on gas prices and will redirect your efforts to alter what the agency has done to limit future production, and will instead work to develop our truly vast domestic oil resources, resources that well exceed “2%” of the world’s oil.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/pinocchios-obama-gets-a-downgrade-romney-an-upgrade/2012/03/21/gIQAX7uPSS_blog.html#pagebreak
[2] NORTH AMERICAN ENERGY INVENTORY, Institute for Energy Research, December, 2011. http://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/energy-overview/oil-shale/
[3] The State of the Offshore U.S. Oil and Gas Industry, An in-depth study of the outlook of the industry investment flows offshore, Quest Offshore Resources, Inc., December 2011.

Sincerely,

Jeff Sessions
David Vitter
John Cornyn