The Real News Network has the story Sen. Warren and End of the Minimum Wage Debate.

Regarding Elizabeth Warren’s appearance in this video, putting on my best Ronald Reagan impersonation voice, “There she goes again, trying to introduce facts and data into legislative deliberations.”

No wonder people were so afraid of electing Elizabeth Warren to the Senate. Maybe they suspected that she would forcibly introduce some reality into the Washington Fantasy Land.

I have come into possession of the following proposal for the next Sturbridge Town Meeting:

To see if the Town will vote to amend the General Bylaws, Chapter Eight to add the following new Section entitled Department Head Residency Requirements:

SECTION 8.60 RESIDENCY REQUIREMENT

SECTION 8.61: PURPOSE:

In an effort to enhance the quality of employee performance through greater personal knowledge of and experience with the community’s conditions; and, to develop a greater personal stake in the community’s progress, while reducing the potential for absences and tardiness; and to ensure the ready availability of trained and critical management personnel in emergencies; and to foster the general economic benefits which result from spending ones salary in the employing community, while sharing associated local tax burdens and creating a greater sense of ownership within the community; the Town of Sturbridge hereby establishes the following residency requirements:

Section 8.62: NEWLY APPOINTED DEPARTMENT HEADS:

1. All newly appointed Department Heads (i.e. Post the adoption of this bylaw) as identified in the Town’s Organizational Chart shall establish residency in the Town of Sturbridge within 12 months of the successful conclusion of their 6 month probationary period.
2. Failure to establish such residency within the established time-period shall be deemed to be a resignation from the office held by the Department Head.

SECTION 8.63 DEPARTMENT HEADS APPOINTED PRIOR TO ADOPTION OF THIS BYLAW:

1. All currently serving Department Heads as identified in the Town’s Organizational Chart shall establish residency in Town of Sturbridge within 18 months of the effective date of adoption of this General Bylaw.
2. Failure to establish such residency within the established time-period shall be deemed to be a resignation from the office held by the Department Head.

 

SECTION 8.64 RESIDENCY DEFINED:

 

1. As generally defined and accepted by the Courts, Residency shall be construed to be the actual domicile of the individual where he/she normally east and sleeps and maintains his/her normal personal and household effects.

 

SECTION 8.65: DEPARTMENT HEAD DEFINED

1. For the purpose of this general bylaw a Department Head shall be defined as any one of the following:
   1. Any position currently determined as such on the Town of Sturbridge Organizational Chart under the organizational block of the Board of Selectmen; or
   2. Any position/individual under the organizational block of the Board of Selectmen who is made eligible for year-end merit/incentive bonuses; or
   3. Any future department head positions as may be established from time-totime under the Town of Sturbridge Organizational Chart under the organizational block of the Board of Selectmen or any position/individual made eligible for year-end merit/incentive bonuses under the organizational block of the Board of Selectmen.

SECTION 8.66 TEMPORARY HARDSHIP WAIVERS:

1. The Board of Selectmen may issue Temporary Hardship Waivers when in their judgment a substantial documented hardship exists (e.g. medical issues of a serious nature involving immediate family, clearly defined/documented financial hardship, or other hardships that clearly dictate the need and value of issuing a temporary waivers).
2. Temporary Hardship Waivers will be granted for no more than six months and may be extended for an additional six month period if in the judgment of the Board said extension is in the mutual best interests of both the Department Head and the Town.
3. Temporary Hardship Waivers shall in no case be used as a means of providing anything other than short-term relief from this bylaw when clearly documented circumstances exist that warrant said waiver, and in no case shall waivers be extended beyond a total of 12 months (i.e. two 6-month extensions

 

I understand that the Sturbridge Board of Selectmen will take up this proposal at their next meeting on Tuesday, April 9, at 6:00PM in the Sturbridge Town Hall.  If you are not already incensed at the idea of this proposal, perhaps in the following comments I can convince you to amass at the meeting to oppose the very idea of such a bylaw.

I wonder what gets into the minds of Selectmen and City Councilors that they think that passing laws like this is a good idea and will improve the performance of town or city employees. I won’t try to guess at motivations, but I will try, as calmly as I can, to explain why these types of laws are horrible, inhumane, and bad management techniques.

I think a lot of damage has already been done to the morale of the town employees at the mere proposal of such a bylaw.  The description of the purpose of such a bylaw is an insult and an affront in its wording.  The only way we, as residents, can try to mitigate the damage is to show up en mass to let the town employees know how much we disapprove of this proposal, and that we will not allow such proposals to even make it to Town Meeting to sully the reputation of Sturbridge as a place to live, work, and do business.

I know that there are various theories of management.  During my working career there was Theory X and Theory Y.

From WikiPedia we  have definitions of these theories.

For Theory X, WikiPedia gives the definition:

In this theory, which has been proven counter effective in most modern practice, management assumes employees are inherently lazy and will avoid work if they can and that they inherently dislike work.

For Theory Y, WikiPedia gives the definition:

In this theory, management assumes employees may be ambitious and self-motivated and exercise self-control. It is believed that employees enjoy their mental and physical work duties. According to them work is as natural as play. They possess the ability for creative problem solving, but their talents are underused in most organizations. Given the proper conditions, theory Y managers believe that employees will learn to seek out and accept responsibility and to exercise self-control and self-direction in accomplishing objectives to which they are committed.

To me, the Sturbridge proposal is an example of the theory  that you have to be an A-hole to be an effective manager.  I  don’t know if this has ever been called Theory A.  I, for one, have never aspired to be a Theory A nor a Theory X manager, I never want to aspire to be such a manager, and I never want to have it be thought that I support such management practices even if only in my name.

I would never work under such conditions,  I would not want to foist such conditions on people who would work for me, and I  do not think it should even be legal for an employer to insist on such conditions.

Let’s consider a few circumstances that a human being might find themselves in, that the BOS may not have considered.  This is not meant as a list of items for which they ought to write complex rules and exemptions.  This is just part of an infinite list of considerations that make this law impossible to rescue.

1. What if the spouse of the employee works for another town that has similar residency requirements?  Is it supposed to be easy to decide which one gives up the job or if they need to divorce?
2. What if the spouse has a private sector job that makes it difficult to move?  A doctor may have offices in the residence.  Or the spouse may be a Mayor or some other political office holder that insists on residence to hold the position?
3. What if a child in the family has a long term commitment to the town in which they currently live? Perhaps the child has been in the school system for 9 or so years and has more than 18 months before completion? What if the child is in a special education program for children with special needs?  Does the Town of Sturbridge want to assume the cost and the disruption that changing schools would entail?  Perhaps the current residence has extensive modification for someone, child or adult, with special needs.
4. Is the Town of Sturbridge offering to defray the cost of selling a house, buying a new house, moving the contents of the house, and upgrading the new house for the special needs person?  How could the town be so cruel as to insist on residency and not pay for its rule?
5. Perhaps the worker has to care for a person who cannot be moved and will live longer than the 18 months of waivers provided in this bylaw?  Are we expecting a prospective employee to make life and death decisions to take an offered job?
6. What if the employee lives in a house that has been in his or her family for hundreds of years?  Are they expected to give that up for a job that won’t last nearly that long?
7. Do we want to hire people with such poor qualifications that the only job they can get is one with such inhumane rules?

I just don’t understand how people can think that the Golden Rule says, “Do unto others, as the worst that may have been done to you?”  As a citizen of Sturbridge, do you want the rest of Massachusetts, the country, and the world to think this is the Sturbridge mindset?  If you don’t speak up against this, what are people to think?

PBS has the story and video Former Sen. Olympia Snowe: It’s Time for Voters to ‘Reward’ Bipartisanship.

As you watch the video or read the transcript. You have to keep in mind some of the record of Sen. Olympia Snowe. As the President was trying to get a stimulus bill through Congress, one of the necessities in a stimulus bill is to spend enough money to counteract the negative forces that are keeping the economy in recession. Olympia Snowe touted her most significant effort as cutting about $300 billion from the size of the spending package. Does this sound like the efforts of someone who was being bipartisan? Does this sound like the efforts of someone who even knew what she was doing to the economy?

At one time I had some measure of respect for Olympia Snowe, but don’t you think that there should be some consequences for what she did as a Senator? If she is proud of having prolonged the recession by cutting the dosage of medicine that the economy needed, we owe it to her to withhold our respect for anything she does now.

She is right, that we ought to reward working on behalf of the people of the country – bipartisan or not. We ought to punish those who worked against the best interests of the people – bipartisan or not.

The measure is not bipartisanship, but whether you tried to make the country better or you didn’t.

Sorry, Senator Snowe. You lost all the respect that you might have earned from your earlier career when you became so proud of the fact that you managed to make President Obama’s economic stimulus plan as ineffective as you could – in your bipartisan way. I don’t care if you are bipartisan. I care if you are working for my interests or against them. Your actions only prolonged the deficit spending by delaying the economic recovery.

In other words, your actions belied your stated purpose of promoting long term fiscal responsibility. For that, you earn no reward.

McClatchy News has the story Quietly and behind the scenes, gun research and regulation has been stymied.

It is clever how the NRA says that we don’t need any new gun control laws, we just need to enforce the ones we have. At the same time they sneak riders into bills preventing the enforcement of the laws we already have.

When will the public wake up to the evils of the NRA?

You Tube has Democratic candidates debate: Part 1, 2, and 3

Neither candidate was at the top of his form. I still prefer Markey over Lynch. What do you think?

Here is a special message from the President for the day.

This is a demonstration of embedding video on demand from the Sturbridge Community Public Access Television (SCTV).

The town has a list of programs that are available on demand.

Thanks to the production coordinator, Bruce Butcher, for helping me figure out how to do this.

Your luck with this video may be highly dependent on which web browser you use and which computer you use.

Email me or email Bruce Butcher about your experience with the embedded video above and with the town’s list of videos on demand. Tell us what kind of computer you used and what browser you used.

This one is for me. I also use this blog to keep track of items I might want to refer to again.

Thanks to reader RogerG for posting this on his Facebook page.

Truthout has the article It Can Happen Here: The Confiscation Scheme Planned for US and UK Depositors by Ellen Brown.  I’ll give you a small snippet here to try to give you the gist of the story.  You’ll have to follow the link above to get an full idea of the horrifying picture.

The 15-page FDIC-BOE document is called “Resolving Globally Active, Systemically Important, Financial Institutions.”  It begins by explaining that the 2008 banking crisis has made it clear that some other way besides taxpayer bailouts is needed to maintain “financial stability.” Evidently anticipating that the next financial collapse will be on a grander scale than either the taxpayers or Congress is willing to underwrite, the authors state:

An efficient path for returning the sound operations of the G-SIFI to the private sector would be provided by exchanging or converting a sufficient amount of the unsecured debt from the original creditors of the failed company [meaning the depositors] into equity [or stock]. In the U.S., the new equity would become capital in one or more newly formed operating entities. In the U.K., the same approach could be used, or the equity could be used to recapitalize the failing financial company itself—thus, the highest layer of surviving bailed-in creditors would become the owners of the resolved firm. In either country, the new equity holders would take on the corresponding risk of being shareholders in a financial institution.

No exception is indicated for “insured deposits” in the U.S., meaning those under $250,000, the deposits we thought were protected by FDIC insurance. This can hardly be an oversight, since it is the FDIC that is issuing the directive. The FDIC is an insurance company funded by premiums paid by private banks.  The directive is called a “resolution process,” defined elsewhere as a plan that “would be triggered in the event of the failure of an insurer . . . .” The only  mention of “insured deposits” is in connection with existing UK legislation, which the FDIC-BOE directive goes on to say is inadequate, implying that it needs to be modified or overridden.

Would someone with more expertise than I please read the article and tell me that this story is way overblown.  Otherwise, this article published today could start a bank run on Monday.

Calm down, maybe. Here are two sections I found in the joint FDIC-BOE paper linked to above in the original blog post. Ellen Brown may be right that there is no mention of the U.S., but at least this is what is discussed for the U.K.

17 In the U.K., the Banking Act provides the Bank of England with tools for resolving failing deposit-taking banks and building societies. Powers similar to those of the FDIC are available, including powers to transfer all or part of a failed bank’s business to a private sector purchaser or to a bridge bank until a private purchaser can be found. The Banking Act also provides the U.K. authorities with a bespoke bank insolvency procedure that fully protects insured depositors while liquidating a failed bank’s assets. These powers have proved valuable; for example, during the crisis they allowed the authorities to transfer the retail and wholesale deposits, branches, and a significant proportion of the residential mortgage portfolio of a failed building society to another building society.
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34 The U.K. has also given consideration to the recapitalization process in a scenario in which a G-SIFI’s liabilities do not include much debt issuance at the holding company or parent bank level but instead comprise insured retail deposits held in the operating subsidiaries. Under such a scenario, deposit guarantee schemes may be required to contribute to the recapitalization of the firm, as they may do under the Banking Act in the use of other resolution tools. The proposed RRD also permits such an approach because it allows deposit guarantee scheme funds to be used to support the use of resolution tools, including bail-in, provided that the amount contributed does not exceed what the deposit guarantee scheme would have as a claimant in liquidation if it had made a payout to the insured depositors. That is consistent with the contribution requirement that is already imposed on the Financial Services Compensation Scheme in the U.K. in the exercise of resolution powers10 and simulates the losses that would have been incurred by those deposit guarantee schemes during bank insolvency. But insofar as a bail-in provides for continuity in operations and preserves value, losses to a deposit guarantee scheme in a bail-in should be much lower than in liquidation. Insured depositors themselves would remain unaffected. Uninsured deposits would be treated in line with other similarly ranked liabilities in the resolution process, with the expectation that they might be written down.

The authors of the joint report obviously are fully aware of the issue of insured depositors. I can interpret the lack of mention of the U.S. in two ways. Either they didn’t mention the U.S. insured depositors because they would be handled in a way similar to those in the U.K. Or, they didn’t mention the U.S. insured depositors because they specifically would not be handled in the same as their U.K. counterparts.

Doing a little more searching in the document, I find the following comforting section:

47 Similarly, because the group remains solvent, retail or corporate depositors should not have an incentive to “run” from the firm under resolution insofar as their banking arrangements, transacted at the operating company level, remain unaffected. In order to achieve this, the authorities recognize the need for effective communication to depositors, making it clear that their deposits will be protected.

Since I am searching the document for relevant sections rather than reading the document in its entirety from beginning to end, I do run the risk of missing the context in which these paragraphs appear. This is to warn you, that if you really care, you ought to read the FDIC-BOE document thoroughly yourself.

McClatchy News has the interesting editorial piece Commentary: Iraq war taught us a lesson.

But while the consensus now is that Iraq was a mistake, will we have the sense to apply that lesson to the next proposal for regime change, the next cakewalk? We hear cries for greater U.S. involvement in the Syrian uprising, for a pre-emptive strike to destroy Iran’s capability to create a nuclear weapon.

We should recall the assumptions about Iraq, the complacency and the unwillingness to question those prodding us to go to war. Don’t forget history, lest we repeat it.

No politician today dares pose the possibility that if we took another path other than imposing the strictest sanctions that are humanly possible on Iran we might actually make more progress to our supposed goal of a non-nuclear weapon Iran.

No politician today dares mention the possibility that a different tack on North Korea might get them to turn in a different direction than the one they are taking as we impose stricter and stricter sanctions.

No politician dares ask the question as to whether the strategy we used in Cuba, Venezuela, and now in Iran and North Korea so unsuccessfully might be trying to teach us a lesson that we might want to learn.

So what lessons have we actually learned?