It takes guts to go up against the security forces with fire bombs and fireworks.

I think using snipers with high powered military rifles against protestors is pretty cowardly.

Fukushima Leaks Again

I’ve written before about how this crisis is going to run for decades. Just because the media has lost interest doesn’t mean that radiation has stopped leaking. And we can depend on TEPCO continuing to mismanage the problem.

James Pilant

New Highly Radioactive Leak At Fukushima Plant

* Worst radioactive water leak at Fukushima since last August

* Utility says water unlikely to have reached ocean

* Tepco strongly criticised for reaction to 2011 meltdowns (Adds company quote, radiation measurement, more details)

TOKYO, Feb 20 (Reuters) – The operator of Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant said on Thursday that 100 tonnes of highly contaminated water had leaked out of a tank, the worst incident since last August, when a series of radioactive water leaks sparked international alarm.

Tokyo Electric Power Co told reporters the latest leak was unlikely to have reached the ocean. But news of the leak at the site, devastated by a 2011 earthquake and tsunami, further undercut public trust in a utility rocked by a string of mishaps and disclosure issues.

“We are taking various measures, but we apologise for worrying the public with such a leak,” said Masayuki Ono, a spokesman for the utility, also known as Tepco.

“Water is unlikely to have reached the ocean as there is no drainage in that tank area.”

via New Highly Radioactive Leak At Fukushima Plant.

Post Office Banking?

I think this is an idea whose time has come (again!). Instead of payday loans and check cashing places we let the post office do it. The idea that the Post Office should provide banking services was one of the platforms of the Grange back at the turn of the 20th century.

Post Office banking would save people without current banking services hundreds of dollars a year and run out of business a good number of unsavory businesses who prey on the poor.

James Pilant

Poll: Americans Like Elizabeth Warren’s Call To Replace Payday Lenders With Post Office Banking

Nearly a fifth of the country doesn’t know what to make of the idea of getting basic banking services from the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), according to a new poll, but support for the idea outweighs opposition by a substantial margin among the rest of the populace.

The poll found 44 percent in favor of and 37 percent opposed to the idea put forth recently by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) to have the USPS replace check-cashing and payday-lending businesses. The survey found 19 percent unsure of their position. That significant level of uncertainty in the YouGov/Huffington Post survey of nearly 1,000 people suggests that public opinion of the postal banking idea could still break in either direction. (While YouGov is an online polling system, it is not a haphazard one, and its methodology has been embraced as scientific by polling expert Nate Silver.)

The idea behind the proposal Warren made in early February is actually much older and comes from two seemingly disparate public policy problems. The first is payday lending itself. That predatory industry siphons more than $3 billion per year out of the country’s poorest communities by charging average annual interest rates of nearly 400 percent to people too desperate for cash to worry about the fine print. State-level crackdown efforts in the past have proven largely ineffective because the industry wields significant influence with lawmakers and because it simply changes tactics to evade the few regulations that do make it past their army of lobbyists. Federal oversight is finally coming to the industry after it had slipped through the regulatory cracks for years, and that scrutiny has caused major banks to drop their internal high-interest cash advance programs that duplicated some of the payday lending industry’s worst practices.

via Poll: Americans Like Elizabeth Warren’s Call To Replace Payday Lenders With Post Office Banking.

Tom Perkins, Fruit.

For every dollar paid in taxes, you should have one vote. Right. Let’s have a monied aristocracy and disenfranchise millions of Americans. We can redo the Medieval era! How about some sumptuary laws banning the peasants from wearing silks or bright colors? How about requiring some bowing and scraping to our betters like Tom Perkins who equates Progressives with Nazis.

Don’t you want the opportunity to jump off the sidewalk to the more comfortable gutter when the silk clad Wall Street investor parades his glory for all to see? Perhaps, he will momentarily recognize your presence and cast an approving look for a split second in your direction. Won’t you feel a sense of pride in that?

Perkins delusions of grandiosity are all to prevalent among our modern gilded age would-be aristos. Talk of being “job creators” and contempt for the “47% takers” has gone to their brains. You can see from this post, that their every word is a vital message requiring air time and editorializing in the media world.

If you or I say something highly intelligent, the media might at most yawn, but this wealthy buffoon can get his fifteen minutes of fame over and over again.

James Pilant

Tom Perkins is desperately trying to extend his 15 minutes of infamy.

The 82-year-old venture capitalist, who recently made a lot of people angry by comparing progressives to Nazis, told an audience in San Francisco Thursday that people who pay more money in taxes should get more votes.

“The Tom Perkins system is: You don’t get to vote unless you pay a dollar of taxes,” Perkins said, according to CNNMoney. “But what I really think is, it should be like a corporation. You pay a million dollars in taxes, you get a million votes. How’s that?”

The audience responded to his claim as any sane humans would: with laughter. After all, that’s not really how democracy works. And not that Perkins would care, but his proposal wouldn’t really be fair given that poor Americans already fork over a larger share of income to Uncle Sam than their richer counterparts, according to a 2009 report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

Unfortunately, Perkins wasn’t joking around, telling the CNNMoney reporter offstage, “I intended to be outrageous, and it was.”

via Tom Perkins: People With More Money Should Get More Votes.

A Purchasable Public Broadcasting System?

If a multi-millionaire can buy a documentary or just the news on PBS, then it is no longer public.

There is no need for analysis here. Bought news is wrong. It is doubly wrong coming from what is supposed to be television in the public interest.

There is a simple choice here. Either this kind of bought journalism on PBS stops and stops now or public funding must cease.

If PBS wishes to become the Plutocratic Broadcasting System, that can be arranged.

Without public money they will be free to beg, crawl, kowtow, and abase themselves in any manner they see fit.

Prostitutes are often forced into the profession. The producers of news at PBS have no such excuse.

James Pilant

When did PBS become the Plutocratic Broadcasting Service? – Salon.com

In a world of screaming cable television hosts and partisan media outlets, PBS is supposed to be the last refuge for honest news. This is ostensibly why taxpayers still contribute money to the public broadcasting system. That money is appropriated to try to guarantee that there remains at least one forum for unvarnished facts, even if such facts offend those with money and power.

The problem, though, is that because our government spends so little on public media as compared to many other industrialized countries, our most prominent public media outlets are becoming instruments for special interests to launder their ideological agenda through a seemingly objective brand. Starved for public resources, these outlets are increasingly trying to get their programming funded with money from corporations and wealthy political activists — and that kind of cash comes with ideological expectations.

Case in point is the Public Broadcasting Service, as evidenced by the major report we published this week at PandoDaily. In that story, we meticulously documented how PBS’s flagship affiliate, WNET of New York, solicited funding from former Enron trader John Arnold. The $3.5 million Arnold contributed was earmarked for a “Pension Peril” series now airing in PBS NewsHour broadcasts on stations throughout the country.

If that was the entire story, it might not be much of a story. However, at the same time the billionaire Arnold is funding PBS’s pension-related coverage, he is also sponsoring the nationwide legislative push to slash public employee pension benefits. Indeed, with his massive contributions to super PACs, think tanks and local front groups, Arnold is financing a national movement to convince legislators to, in the words of his foundation, “stop promising a [retirement] benefit” to public workers.

This is likely why the Arnold-backed PBS pension series has loyally echoed the billionaire’s anti-pension themes. Knowing its benefactor’s message, PBS has echoed the Arnold foundation by promoting cuts to public workers’ retirement benefits as the primary solution to state budget problems. PBS has done this in its “Pension Peril” segments without mentioning that pension fund shortfalls are dwarfed by the amount state and local governments are spending on taxpayer-funded corporate subsidies. PBS has also done it without explicitly disclosing its connection to Arnold.

via When did PBS become the Plutocratic Broadcasting Service? – Salon.com.

Women Get Less Paid Leave

I don’t understand. Women have reproductive circumstances that call for leave but otherwise their need for leave should be identical with males. Therefore, you would conclude that women would and should get more leave than men.

But they get less.

How does that work? What kind of decision making produces this outcome?

I had a look at the study and found no conclusions as to why this disparity exists. But it does tend to vindicate the view that there is still a long way to go before women attain equality in the workplace.

James Pilant

Women Get Less Paid Leave From Work Than Men | ThinkProgress

Women are far less likely than men to get paid leave from their workplaces, according to a new survey commissioned by American Women, the National Partnership for Women & Families, and the Rockefeller Family Fund. They are also less likely to get extended leave when they need it.

In a survey of likely voters in 2014, less than a third of women — 27 percent — reported that they were paid their full wage when they took leave, but nearly 40 percent of men were paid full wages. Meanwhile, 30 percent of women didn’t receive any pay at all, but that was true for less than a quarter of men.

Women were also less likely to get paid leave when they needed to take off more than seven days to care for themselves, a sick family member, or after the arrival of a new baby. Yet men and women have a similar need for this kind of leave.

A lack of paid leave doesn’t just make it hard for new parents or those caring for the sick and elderly to balance those needs with the demands of work. It can have serious impacts on women’s financial stability. A woman who gets 30 or more days of paid family leave is over 50 percent more likely to see her wages increase afterward than those who can’t take any paid time off. Women who receive partial pay or no pay at all during leave often struggle to get by, with a third borrowing money, dipping into their savings, and/or putting off bills, while 15 percent end up relying on public assistance. Even worse, a quarter have to quit or are let go from their jobs when a new child arrives because they can’t take paid leave.

via Women Get Less Paid Leave From Work Than Men | ThinkProgress.

You Should Be Married?

You may not be aware of this but the federal government has been in the business of propagandizing the positive effects of marriage. Almost a billion dollars has been spent encouraging people to tie the knot.

Are you feeling all “marriagey” now? Yeah, me neither. I got a sneaking suspicion that the advertising blitz didn’t work very well.

And apparently the facts back me up. Please read the attached article.

James Pilant

Nearly A Billion Dollars Spent On Marriage Promotion Programs Have Achieved Next To Nothing | ThinkProgress

The millions the federal government has spent on programs aimed at promoting marriage and boosting marriage rates have had little discernible impact on marriage or divorce rates, according to new research from the National Center for Family & Marriage Research.

Since 2001, the government will have spent about $800 million on the Healthy Marriage Initiative (HMI) by the end of the fiscal year. That year was when the Assistant Secretary for the Administration for Children & Families decided that strengthening marriage was one of the nine main priorities for the agency. Spending increased by $117 million between 2000 and 2010, including a $150 million boost as part of the 2005 Deficit Reduction Act, peaking at $142 million for 2009. HMI programs can use the money on marriage education, skills training, and mentoring programs, as well as public advertising campaigns and high school education programs.

Yet over that same time period, the country’s marriage rate continued its “precipitous decline” that started in the 1970s, falling 26 percent over the decade after 2000, the report finds. The divorce rate didn’t see much of a change.

via Nearly A Billion Dollars Spent On Marriage Promotion Programs Have Achieved Next To Nothing | ThinkProgress.

Felons Should Be Able to Vote

If only because of our ambivalent attitude toward marijuana, we should let people who have done their time, paid their debt to society, have the right to vote. The laws banning felons from voting were passed during a era of tiny prison populations. There were very few felons for most of American history. We didn’t become a mass incarceration nation until the 1980’s. A lot of this is due to the disastrous “war on drugs.”

It’s time to change the way we do things.

If someone has done their time, that should be it.

James Pilant

U.S. Attorney General: Time To Restore Voting Rights Of Every Person Who Has Completed Their Criminal Sentence | ThinkProgress

In the United States, some 5.8 million Americans can’t vote because they have a current or previous felony conviction — more than the individual populations of 31 U.S. states. That figure includes one in 13 African American adults. In Florida, Kentucky, and Virginia, one in five African Americans are barred by these felon disenfranchisement policies, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said Tuesday.

Citing these figures and many others, Holder called out state laws that block ex-felons from voting as a vestige of Reconstruction-era voter suppression, and called for for states to repeal every law that prohibits those who have completed their sentence from voting. Holder’s address Tuesday morning at a criminal justice reform symposium is the latest in his “Smart on Crime” initiative that has included scaled back prosecution of crimes with mandatory minimum sentences, less targeting of those complying with state marijuana laws, diversion out of prison and improvement of offender re-entry, and a move to cut short the sentences of some drug offenders.

via U.S. Attorney General: Time To Restore Voting Rights Of Every Person Who Has Completed Their Criminal Sentence | ThinkProgress.

Lazy Reporting at the Post

Is it ethical to write quick and dirty without any concern for the wider context? Certainly, I can plead guilty on many an occasion. However, I am not paid for this, and the Washington Post reporters appear to be well compensated. I would bet they don’t have two outside jobs either.

So, I am going to hold them to a higher standard.

Yes, they should write articles explaining the budget numbers instead of just reciting them like a 5th grader pulling data off the internet.

James Pilant

More Frat Boy Budget Reporting at the Washington Post | Beat the Press

The Washington Post gave us some good frat boy budget reporting in a front page story on the farm bill this morning. Frat boy budget reporting is when you write a piece that provides no information to the vast majority of readers but lets you go down to the budget reporters\’ frat house and give each other the budget reporters\’ secret handshake. In this case, the piece told us that the farm bill will cost $956.4 billion over the next decade, it will reduce spending on SNAP by $8 billion and save $16 billion in total.

Yes, this is really helpful. At least 0.1 percent of Washington Post readers have any clue what these numbers mean for the budget over the next decade. It is possible and easy to express these numbers in ways that would be meaningful.

CEPR\’s extraordinary Responsible Budget Reporting Calculator would allow any budget reporters to determine in seconds that the total bill is 2.05 percent of projected spending, which immediately would give the vast majority of Post readers a clear idea of the farm bill\’s importance to the budget. They could also quickly recognize that the cuts to the SNAP bill are 0.017 percent of projected spending and the total savings on the bill are 0.034 percent of projected spending.

It\’s really not hard to do budget reporting in a way that provides information to its audience

via More Frat Boy Budget Reporting at the Washington Post | Beat the Press.