Tag Archives: government

Free Speech, Belgian Style

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Didier Bellens, CEO of Belgacom (Belgium’s largest telecommunications company) has been fired.  He complained too much about government regulation and taxes.

As The Wall Street Journal described it,

Over the years, Mr Bellens has launched a number of broadsides against the government.  Friday’s dismissal comes after the latest attack, in which he asked a business club breakfast in the chic Brussels suburb of Uccle, “Who’s the worst shareholder?”  His answer: “The Belgian state.”

Yep.  The Belgian government owns 53.5% of Belgacom.  And the government disapproved of Bellens’ political—even business—speech.  Last Friday, Prime Minister Elio di Rupo fired Bellens, announcing

The repeated, accumulated outbursts have irreversibly damaged the confidence of the Belgian state in Mr Bellens[.]

There can’t even be an argument that Bellens hadn’t been performing up to snuff from a business perspective.  Stefaan Genoe, a telecommunications analyst at brokerage Petercam, had this about Bellens’ results:

Overall, Belgacom has evolved very well strategically during his tenure.  It has a very healthy balance sheet.

Dividends are still attractive, at 8 or 9%[.]

And the Progressives in our own government want to Europeanize us.

Hmm….

A Typical Bureaucracy

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Via the Washington Examiner comes this Obamacare bureaucracy organization chart.  Maybe it’s satirical.

This damning charge about Obamacare preparation by that bureaucracy comes from the same link:

Federal officials did not permit testing of the Obamacare healthcare.gov website or issue final system requirements until four to six days before its Oct 1 launch, according to an individual with direct knowledge of the project.

How does that work, exactly?  Oh, wait—maybe the WE is overstating the case a bit—does any bureaucracy with that organization look like it’s capable of making any decision more complex than whether to get a cup of coffee on the way back from the rest room?

Plus this: The officials running the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services decided they would act as the systems integrator, the central coordinator for the entire program.  Pay no attention to the fact that the CMS is, itself, an agglomeration of lots of disparate organizations.  Or that the officials “in charge” there have no concept of organizational, much less systems, organization.

But RTWT.

And this, from The Wall Street Journal, on President Barack Obama’s Rose Garden version of a Shamwow Infomercial pitch–Operators are standing by! [I stole that line from Chris Stirewalt]–and his touting his 800 number as the fix to all the…kinks…in his Obamacare:

[W]e called the hotline on Monday and the automated menu redirected us to Healthcare.gov, which in turn told us to get in touch with someone at the call center.

Yeah.

Crony Obamacare-ism

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The Daily Caller notes that

During a Sept 9, 2008 speech to a crowd in Lebanon, Va., then-presidential candidate Sen Barack Obama praised CGI Federal’s ability to create new jobs for Americans as the result of investment in broadband Internet infrastructure.

Move forward, just a bit.  The Washington Examiner notes that

Federal officials considered only one firm to design the Obamacare health insurance exchange website that has performed abysmally since its Oct 1 debut.

Rather than open the contracting process to a competitive public solicitation with multiple bidders, officials in the Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid accepted a sole bidder, CGI Federal

even while knowing that CGI had “uneven record of IT pricing and contract performance.”

Bean Counting

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Late news, again, concerning another Obamacare-related rollout screw up.

The Internal Revenue Service is unable to account for $67 million in spending related to the implementation of ObamaCare, according to an IRS watchdog report released Wednesday.  …the money was part of a $488 million fund established to cover implementation costs between 2010 through 2012.

And this laugher:

The [Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration’s] report recommended the IRS improve its record-keeping….

Well, NSS.

Seriously, though: this isn’t rounding error—it’s more than 13% of the funds allocated to the IRS for the purpose.  Yet this is the gang that’s intended to pry into your most personal affairs—your health records and your income and your spending habits—to determine whether you should have bought health “insurance” and did not, or whether you’re entitled to a subsidy, paid for by your fellow Americans, to help you buy that “insurance.”

Yet they are fully checked out on determining whether your group’s political leanings meet standard.

What if They Had a Government Shutdown?

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…and nobody cared?

A lot of financial sector data, for instance flow from the Federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Department of Commerce.  However, these data also flow from private sector entities—organizations like the Institute of Supply Management (a host of forward- and backward-looking management surveys across a wide range of economic sectors), ADP (weekly jobs reports), the University of Michigan (confidence surveys), the Conference Board (roughly complementary confidence surveys), and so on.

Intuit makes, among other things, accounting and tax software—and it collects (with permission) employment data from 200,000+ businesses.  Its monthly employment reports, based on based on these real-time aggregated data, are current.  The best the government can do here (even when it isn’t shutdown) is eight months to a year behind real-time.

Etc.

And there’s Google and Bing.

Separately, but related, comes this…admission…from the just “shutdown” government:

The EPA said its plan for dealing with a shutdown would classify 1,069 employees, out of 16,205, as essential.

The Feds are saying that some 93% of its EPA employees are nonessential.  It’s reasonable to extend from that that the vast majority of these nonessentials are, in fact, surplus.  The EPA is a relatively extreme example, but it illustrates the degree of fat in the Federal government that could be cut—that is being cut by the present shutdown, at least for the duration.

Next there’s the actual impact of this government shutdown.  80% of all Federal employees are still at work (the EPA, et al., notwithstanding).  Parks are closed, which inconveniences several travelers (other than WWII veterans who forced their way into their War Memorial with the help of some Republican Congressmen and the acquiescence of the Memorial’s guards, who had more sense than their Park Service employers), and other frankly similarly minor items, but the government remains fully functional.

Finally, there’s this Federal hardship: First Lady Michelle Obama’s office announced via Twitter: “Due to Congress’s failure to pass legislation to fund the government, updates to this account will be limited.”