J. M. Verville

This has become really an obvious need as society is rapidly ageing and the socialized system cannot take care of everyone forever.

As the ages we live to increase we naturally must raise the retirement age — this is not a big surprise. It should come as a surprise to nobody. People just do not have kids like they used to and we do not get enough tax payers.

PARIS, June 16 (Reuters) - France’s government announced on Wednesday it would raise the retirement age and increase taxes for top earners in a long-awaited reform aimed at balancing the heavily indebted pensions system by 2018.

Under the plan, which is likely to meet trade union resistance, the minimum retirement age will be lifted gradually to 62 in 2018 from 60, and levies on capital gains, stock options and other investment income will all shift higher.

“There is no magic trick when it comes to pensions,” Labour Minister Eric Woerth told reporters, unveiling proposals drawn up after three months of consultations with sceptical unions.

“We cannot ignore the fact that the French population is ageing. We have to confront this fact. Our European partners have done this by working longer. We cannot avoid joining this movement,” he said.

President Nicolas Sarkozy hopes the reform will convince investors he is serious about cleaning up state finances, which are set to register record deficit and debt levels in 2010, and enable France to cling to its prized AAA sovereign debt rating.

Even with the proposed change, France will still have one of the earliest legal retirement ages in the developed world. Germany plans to raise its retirement age to 67, while Britain and Italy are standardising at 65.

Reuters

This is some pretty stunning news that could bode well for a country that has been suffering for far too long. This could be the answer to a lot of problems if the Afghan government properly utilizes this:

The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.

An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and Blackberrys.

The vast scale of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth was discovered by a small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists. The Afghan government and President Hamid Karzai were recently briefed, American officials said.

NY Times

The government needs to take measures to insure that this isn’t just something that international corporations jump on and exploit with no positive effects for the people of Afghanistan.

Hopefully, this will be turned into what is needed to boost their economic productivity and turn it into a capable nation.

This is interesting:

In what is measuring up to be the biggest environmental disaster in U.S. history, the government is nearly helpless to stop the oil flowing from the Deepwater Horizon well that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20.

The White House said Sunday that it expects the spill to grow by 20 percent after BP gets started with its latest effort to contain the spill, beginning Monday or Tuesday. The White House also said it is tripling its environmental cleanup crew.

But the additional spillage is opposite what BP Managing Director Bob Dudley said on “Fox News Sunday” — that the decision to cut open the pipes in order to put a cap on the well will likely not add to the amount of oil flowing into the water.

“What we need is a clean cut across the top of that riser package at the bottom of the sea. The amount of oil will not change. The oil was coming out anyway from just above it at a broken area of the pipe at the end of the pipe. So that is not going to change the flow,” he said.

President Obama’s top environmental adviser Carol Browner said Sunday the government is responding with what she called the largest environmental mobilization effort ever, but it looks like it could be up to BP to dig a new well before the gushing spill stops pouring into the Gulf of Mexico.

“There’s not just one being dug, there are two. Because we insisted — the government insisted that there be a second one in case something went wrong with the first one,” Browner said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

That’s after BP’s “top kill” effort to plug the hole with hundreds of thousands of pounds of mud failed. BP is looking at the next alternative — trying to grab the oil that’s spilling into the water and move it onto a vessel that will pull the oil onshore. 

“Obviously that’s not the preferred scenario. We always knew that the relief well was the permanent way to close this, to get it killed so there wasn’t oil coming up while the relief well was being drilled was the second option. Now we move to the third option which is to contain it,” Browner said.

Fox News

I think the most surprising thing is that we did not have a concrete contingency plan lined up from the beginning. How can we start drilling with such potential for disaster and yet not have a solid, proveable series of steps we could go through in order to avert disasters of this proportion?

It is the fault of the government, naturally, for not having required more stringent regulations on what to do in disaster situations.

And just as a note: there should be more blame heaped upon the President merely because God knows the media would be crying for blood if it was the Bush administration, and that it would somehow all link back to big corporate interests controlling Bush but as people have pointed out, Obama has received a lot of support from corporations.

If anything, it should merely be pointed out that they are not so different from one another.

This is an interesting article to show you what can happen when you have an extremely centralized, planned economy:

 The stunning figure was revealed by Cuban leader Raúl Castro himself: The Cuban government and its enterprises might have more than one million excess workers on their payrolls.

That’s more than one million unproductive workers, out of what official Cuban figures show is a total of 4.9 million people working in formal jobs in a country of 11.2 million people.

And that’s part of the explanation, several economists said, for a calamitously over-centralized and unproductive economy that, for example, forces a tropical island to import an estimated 60 percent of the food its people consume. The Cuban government has historically insisted on keeping people officially employed, even in unproductive jobs. Unemployment was last reported at 1.6 percent by the National Statistics Office (ONE).

About 95 percent of the jobs in Cuba’s formal sector are with the government — ministries, their agencies and enterprises — though salaries are so low, averaging about $20 a month, nationwide, that many Cubans also have off-the-books work to make ends meet.

Miami Herald

People do not have enough money as it is, and the economy is slow, sluggish and not growing… We have people who are not working productive jobs and are merely employed for the sake of employment.

Good job, Marxism.

You show us every day how your ideology should be treated as a 20th century relic of stupidity.

This must come as a large surprise to the many people who thought of Obama as being someone on the left, and this is worthy of being chronicled:

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is proposing to open vast expanses of water along the Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the north coast of Alaska to oil and natural gas drilling, much of it for the first time, officials said Tuesday.

The proposal — a compromise that will please oil companies and domestic drilling advocates but anger some residents of affected states and many environmental organizations — would end a longstanding moratorium on oil exploration along the East Coast from the northern tip of Delaware to the central coast of Florida, covering 167 million acres of ocean.

Under the plan, the coastline from New Jersey northward would remain closed to all oil and gas activity. So would the Pacific Coast, from Mexico to the Canadian border.

The environmentally sensitive Bristol Bay in southwestern Alaska would be protected and no drilling would be allowed under the plan, officials said. But large tracts in the Chukchi Sea and Beaufort Sea in the Arctic Ocean north of Alaska — nearly 130 million acres — would be eligible for exploration and drilling after extensive studies.

NY Times

As per usual, the Times are phrasing it a little funny to give you the impression that Obama has already green lighted drilling in these areas. We know that is not the case. Rather, we should be aware that this is simply opening it up for the exploration for oil and possible future drilling.

It makes sense and I do not disagree with the policy — it just ought to be thrown out there and brought to your attention.

This is the point where we have to wonder if this is the beginning of the end.

The shrewd Chinese have not sustained such high growth rates by being dummies, and they are looking with doubtful eyes to the current US government on whether or not we can resolve our crisis. The current plans do not look fruitful not to mention we have to truly consider whether we could have even expected the US economy to exist as it has traditionally existed, without change; that view now seems naive.

We are looking at a situation where the confidence in the US economy is eroding:

Chinese premier Wen Jiabao has said he is ‘a little bit worried’ about the safety of his country’s investments in US bonds. Photograph: Greg Baker/AP

China sold $34bn (£21.5bn) worth of US government bonds in December, raising fears that ­Beijing is using its financial ­muscle to signal that it has lost confidence in American economic policy.

US treasury figures for the period ending in December 2009 show that, following the sale, China is no longer the largest overseas holder of US treasury bonds. Beijing ended the year sitting on $755.4bn worth of US government debt, compared to Japan’s $768.8bn.

Since the sub-prime crisis that began on Main Street USA grew to engulf the global economy, China’s leaders have repeatedly expressed concerns about US policy. December’s $34bn sell-off made only a tiny dent in Beijing’s total holdings of US assets, which amount to well over $1tn when stakes in American companies, as well as treasury bills, are taken into account.

The Guardian

Certainly an amazing and revolutionary concept. I have heard the argument before and it does make sense on one hand, and I am inclined to believe that at least limiting or changing the nature of funding could be helpful to Africans; it is almost as if the regular people never get to see the benefits of the money because it is put through either corrupt governments or put into projects that do not actually benefit the people.

What do you think?:

“For God’s Sake, Please Stop the Aid!”

The Kenyan economics expert James Shikwati, 35, says that aid to Africa does more harm than good. The avid proponent of globalization spoke with SPIEGEL about the disastrous effects of Western development policy in Africa, corrupt rulers, and the tendency to overstate the AIDS problem.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Shikwati, the G8 summit at Gleneagles is about to beef up the development aid for Africa…

Shikwati: … for God’s sake, please just stop.

SPIEGEL: Stop? The industrialized nations of the West want to eliminate hunger and poverty.

Shikwati: Such intentions have been damaging our continent for the past 40 years. If the industrial nations really want to help the Africans, they should finally terminate this awful aid. The countries that have collected the most development aid are also the ones that are in the worst shape. Despite the billions that have poured in to Africa, the continent remains poor.

SPIEGEL: Do you have an explanation for this paradox?

Shikwati: Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need. As absurd as it may sound: Development aid is one of the reasons for Africa’s problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn’t even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid.

Spiegel

I really do see his point and I think that it is worth some thought.

It is always interesting when one of the most powerful espionage organizations takes enough interest in your corporation to forge a partnership — there is a lot we will be able to conclude from this:

The world’s largest Internet search company and the world’s most powerful electronic surveillance organization are teaming up in the name of cybersecurity.

Under an agreement that is still being finalized, the National Security Agency would help Google analyze a major corporate espionage attack that the firm said originated in China and targeted its computer networks, according to cybersecurity experts familiar with the matter. The objective is to better defend Google — and its users — from future attack.

Google and the NSA declined to comment on the partnership. But sources with knowledge of the arrangement, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the alliance is being designed to allow the two organizations to share critical information without violating Google’s policies or laws that protect the privacy of Americans’ online communications. The sources said the deal does not mean the NSA will be viewing users’ searches or e-mail accounts or that Google will be sharing proprietary data.

 Washington Post

The NSA has deemed that somehow, some way the security of the American internet mogul Google will effect the security of Americans — otherwise, this would in no way fit into a part of the NSA overall view of what its mission and purpose are. The NSA addresses the security issues of Americans particularly on the front of communications intelligence — their entire court for national security is the internet.

What we can conclude is that somehow there are anti-US elements attempting to use Google for purposes that would effect Americans adversely on a large scale, and in all likelihood, we are looking at the Chinese government perpetrating some form of organized attack on Google.

It is still a little odd…

The questions I have: (more…)

An interesting story out of the UK concerning hospital conditions:

A grandmother was so disgusted by the filthy conditions and neglect on a hospital ward that she bathed and cared for the patients herself.

Janet Halsall, 74, was admitted to Hinchingbrooke Hospital in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, for three days to have a scan on her liver, when she was shocked to see staff repeatedly ignore pleas for help and leave fellow elderly patients to ‘fend for themselves’.

The kind-hearted pensioner was so appalled by the conditions in the hospital that she bathed, washed and tucked in the frail elderly patients herself.

Can it really get any better than it currently is?

And so the government gets more control of the financial system:

WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama on Thursday is expected to propose new limits on the size and risk taken by the country’s biggest banks, marking the administration’s latest assault on Wall Street in what could mark a return, at least in spirit, to some of the curbs on finance put in place during the Great Depression, according to congressional sources and administration officials.

The proposal represents a sharply different philosophical shift from the view of banking over the past decade, which saw widespread consolidation among large financial institutions to create huge banking titans. If Congress approves the proposal, the White House plan could permanently impose government constraints on the size and nature of banking.

Mr. Obama’s proposal is expected to include new scale restrictions on the size of the country’s largest financial institutions. The goal would be to deter banks from becoming so large they put the broader economy at risk and to also prevent banks from becoming so large they distort normal competitive forces. It couldn’t be learned what precise limits the White House will endorse, or whether Mr. Obama will spell out the exact limits on Thursday. (more…)