I do wor­ry about the pos­si­ble mis­use of such and I am con­cerned that per­haps this abuse could be far-reach­ing in some areas, par­tic­u­lar­ly coun­tries that may come under the con­trol of far-right author­i­tar­i­ans as seems to have hap­pened in Egypt(and what hap­pened in Iran 32 years ago) and may soon be hap­pen­ing in Greece and a few oth­er Euro­pean coun­tries.

A Strat­for posi­tion paper is jubi­lant that the youth and edu­ca­tion lev­els of ille­gal His­pan­ic immi­grants are above the Amer­i­can and Mex­i­can norm and will prof­it the US in pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and tax remit­tance for years to come, ush­er­ing in Chi­na lev­el wages. Kick­ing the can down the road, as far as an aging work­force, is now prac­ti­cal and prof­itable if we can just get those use­less old folks to take the shot.

Maybe, if we’re good lit­tle plebs, it will just be prison instead of tax­es.

There is no doubt that “aus­ter­i­ty mea­sures” are implic­it­ly geno­ci­dal in being tar­get­ed at the most vul­ner­a­ble mem­bers of soci­ety.

The cap­i­tal­ist eco­nom­ic cri­sis pro­vides the per­fect pre­text for the rul­ing class­es to elim­i­nate social ben­e­fits won by the work­ing class over the past cen­tu­ry and impose “col­lat­er­al dam­age” tar­get­ed at “use­less bread eater” pop­u­la­tion groups.

@Stu: I think I have a good idea at just who might be tar­get­ed here in Amer­i­ca.........

Uh oh, it looks like the sadists are get­ting antsy again.

Well, on the plus, now Greece can lay off all those PE teach­ers. Just think of the sav­ings!

Greece on the bread­line: the chil­dren of Athens too hun­gry to do PE

Jon Hen­ley is in Athens find­ing out how ordi­nary Greeks are pulling togeth­er to cope amid the finan­cial melt­down

Post­ed by
Jon Hen­ley in Athens
Tues­day 13 March 2012 11.35 EDT The Guardian

Dozens of read­ers have sent me sug­ges­tions about places to go and peo­ple to meet in my search for sto­ries behind the head­lines in Athens, and I’m fol­low­ing up as many as I can. Oth­ers have sent me their own con­tri­bu­tions.

Tales of sol­i­dar­i­ty come from Vic­to­ria Prekate, an Athens sec­ondary school teacher and psy­chol­o­gist, who relates how her col­leagues in schools in the cap­i­tal have been respond­ing:

It has been a com­mon secret among PE teach­ers for some time now that they don’t expect pupils to do PE any more, because many of them are under­fed and get dizzy.

They need to be dis­creet, as these under­priv­i­leged chil­dren don’t wish to be exposed to their peers. In my pre­vi­ous school, the teach­ers arranged among them­selves to give the school can­teen some mon­ey, so that the can­teen could give the child a snack, with­out embar­rass­ing the child.

How­ev­er, this was not enough. In many schools today, it is the par­ents’ asso­ci­a­tions who come togeth­er, gath­er food and dis­creet­ly arrange to allo­cate it to those fam­i­lies of the school who are suf­fer­ing. In co-oper­a­tion with the teach­ers, they know which chil­dren in the school are hun­gry and in need of help. Again, they try to do it as dis­creet­ly as pos­si­ble.

“Many fam­i­lies, sud­den­ly left with­out work, are in shock and there is nowhere to turn. Social ser­vices are col­laps­ing. They are not pro­fes­sion­al beg­gars. They are ordi­nary peo­ple like you and me, sud­den­ly left with noth­ing. I know one area, where schools have spe­cialised in what they gath­er: 1st pri­ma­ry school gath­er rice and legumes, 2nd veg­eta­bles, 3rd meat and chick­en etc.

...

So is this all seen as the sort of fruit­ful sac­ri­fice that cre­ates a pro­duc­tive future because there are some seri­ous long-term impli­ca­tions to your nation’s econ­o­my when you starve your chil­dren.

@Pterrafractyl–Indeed there are long term impli­ca­tions for not feed­ing chil­dren. There are short term and long term results from not feed­ing adults either.

No calories=no pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, i.e. no work.

This falls direct­ly inline with my post about List, von Clause­witz etc.

When the Nazis occu­pied a coun­try, they raised the price of food sig­nif­i­cant­ly, while keep­ing the price of beer and alco­hol sta­ble.

It thus became cheap­er to get your calo­ries from liquor, thus ren­der­ing a por­tion of the occu­pied pop­u­la­tion inca­pac­i­tat­ed.

The Nazis were also very aware that the forced labor pro­grams (which sep­a­rat­ed men and women), the loot­ing of the wealth of the occu­pied nations and reduc­tion in food rations for the occu­pied pop­u­la­tion all had long term impli­ca­tions for the coun­tries they con­quered.

Long after the occu­pa­tion end­ed, the beat­en nations lagged in pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, pop­u­la­tion growth, longevi­ty and liq­uid assets.

This was done with a von Clause­witz-style post­war in mind.

@Dave: Sad thing is, every­thing you have said here in that com­ment is true and com­plete­ly ver­i­fi­able.

Truth is, many nations in Africa also had some sim­i­lar prob­lems under West­ern colo­nial­ism as well, most notably, their lack of real eco­nom­ic growth after their for­mer over­lords had left. Might there one day be an ini­tia­tive to per­haps re-col­o­nize Africa, even if per­haps just eco­nom­i­cal­ly so? (I hope not, of course, but one must won­der some­times).

And the glob­al onslaught on the notion that a soci­ety that can take care of its own con­tin­ues...:

LA Times
Rep. Paul Ryan’s bud­get plan, with Medicare changes, is back
A back­lash from seniors buried the Repub­li­can pro­pos­al last year, but the Wis­con­sin con­gress­man insists his deficit-slash­ing ideas are on the right track.

By Lisa Mas­caro, Wash­ing­ton Bureau

March 16, 2012, 5:37 p.m.
Report­ing from Wash­ing­ton-
For a moment last year, Repub­li­can Rep. Paul Ryan’s star shone bright­ly as he unveiled his par­ty’s bold deficit-whack­ing bud­get pro­pos­al ‑that is, until seniors rebelled over his plan to dra­mat­i­cal­ly change Medicare.

The back­lash was swift and deci­sive. Democ­rats attacked the GOP, say­ing the plan would destroy the Medicare safe­ty net, and the earnest Wis­con­sin wun­derkind slid from the spot­light. When he walked the halls of the Capi­tol, he popped in his iPod ear­buds, tun­ing out the noise.

Now Ryan, the House Bud­get Com­mit­tee chair­man, is return­ing to cen­ter stage as the GOP dou­bles down on his con­ser­v­a­tive bud­get pri­or­i­ties — includ­ing tax cuts for the wealthy and a new ver­sion of his plan for major changes in Medicare

With an edgy new cam­paign-style video and a flur­ry of Ryan appear­ances timed with his upcom­ing bud­get release, Repub­li­cans believe theirs is a win­ning strat­e­gy: one that will show­case the GOP as will­ing to make tough choic­es to reduce fed­er­al deficits and present vot­ers with a con­trast to Pres­i­dent Oba­ma. Democ­rats believe just as strong­ly that the Ryan strat­e­gy will be a win­ner for them.

A Medicare over­haul, in par­tic­u­lar, is a risky move in an elec­tion year when the GOP is try­ing to top­ple Oba­ma, defend its House major­i­ty and win the Sen­ate. Ryan won plau­dits from some bud­get hawks and think tanks for being will­ing to tack­le the dif­fi­cult pol­i­tics of Medicare cuts. But aver­age vot­ers over­whelm­ing­ly sup­port keep­ing Medicare as is. They also favor Oba­ma’s approach of tax­ing wealthy Amer­i­cans more heav­i­ly to bring bud­gets into bal­ance, rather than offer more tax cuts, polls show.

...

Ryan’s new bud­get is expect­ed to include a revised pro­vi­sion backed by Sen. Ron Wyden (D‑Ore.) that address­es some of the crit­i­cisms. It would still give future seniors a fixed amount, but it would allow them to use the mon­ey to stay in the tra­di­tion­al Medicare pro­gram. They would have to pay out of pock­et if the costs of the pro­gram were high­er than the gov­ern­ment sub­sidy — or buy an alter­na­tive plan. Wyden is like­ly to oppose the Ryan bud­get’s oth­er pro­vi­sions, lim­it­ing the pati­na of bipar­ti­san­ship the GOP hoped for.

...

Less par­ti­san bud­get experts say Ryan deserves cred­it for being will­ing to talk about Medicare spend­ing, but that most seniors under his plan would face con­sid­er­ably high­er costs for health­care, in some cas­es many thou­sands of dol­lars a year. Some also call his pro­pos­als unre­al­is­tic for refus­ing to con­sid­er any increase in tax rev­enue to rein in the nation’s debt. Of con­cern to some, the bud­get is expect­ed to avoid agreed-upon Pen­ta­gon cuts in favor of deep­er reduc­tions to oth­er domes­tic pro­grams.

Ryan dis­miss­es such chal­lenges. To him, loss­es such as the one the GOP suf­fered in last year’s spe­cial elec­tion are mere­ly bumps along a career path try­ing to avert a nation­al debt cri­sis. A pro­tégé of Repub­li­can Jack Kemp, Ryan calls him­self a next-gen­er­a­tion sup­ply-sider who match­es the ear­li­er con­ser­v­a­tives’ zest for low­er tax­es with a new empha­sis on deficit reduc­tion.

“To me it’s sort of a moral issue. There is right and there is wrong. There are absolutes in life, and it is wrong to know­ing­ly do noth­ing to pre­vent a cat­a­stro­phe from hap­pen­ing,” said Ryan, a Roman Catholic who says he prays dai­ly for the coun­try to be on bet­ter fis­cal foot­ing.

...

Paul Ryan, Sup­ply Side Jesus‘s prayer war­rior in chief.

The offer is still on the table? Uh oh

FYI, Robert Mundell, the econ­o­mist known as the “God-father” of the euro, a major fig­ure in the devel­op­ment of sup­ply-side eco­nom­ics, and an advo­cate of a glob­al cur­ren­cy (so we can all become Greece, yay!) wants you to know that there’s just no way we can afford things like like a fis­cal stim­u­lus any­more. Sor­ry plebs:

Bloomberg
Free Lunch­es Push­ing U.S. to Insol­ven­cy, Columbia’s Mundell Says
By Alli­son Ben­nett and Tom Keene — Mar 20, 2012 11:39 AM CT

Polit­i­cal com­pe­ti­tion for votes and lack of fis­cal dis­ci­pline are push­ing the world’s largest econ­o­my toward sol­ven­cy issues, accord­ing to the Nobel Prize- win­ning econ­o­mist Robert Mundell.

“The pub­lic is look­ing for free lunch­es, and the polit­i­cal com­pe­ti­tion for votes makes the politi­cians offer them free lunch­es,” Mundell, a pro­fes­sor of eco­nom­ics at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty, said on Bloomberg Radio inter­view with Tom Keene and Ken Pre­witt. “That’s what gets us in to the dif­fi­cul­ties of insol­ven­cy.”

The U.S. plans to finance a bud­get deficit fore­cast to exceed $1 tril­lion for a fourth year, and out­stand­ing U.S. mar­ketable debt expand­ed to $10 tril­lion in Feb­ru­ary.

Even as the job­less rate has fall­en from a high of 10 per­cent in Octo­ber 2009 to 8.3 per­cent in Feb­ru­ary, it remains almost 2 per­cent above the aver­age of the past decade and the cen­tral bank has called unem­ploy­ment “per­sis­tent.”

“You could have fis­cal stim­u­lus back in the day of Keynes, when the gov­ern­ment was a small pro­por­tion of gross domes­tic prod­uct and there was no insol­ven­cy prob­lem,” he said, refer­ring to British econ­o­mist John May­nard Keynes. “You can’t just issue more bonds to pay for deficits and expect it to solve the employ­ment prob­lem.”

The euro area is fore­cast to have fis­cal spend­ing of 3.3 per­cent of GDP in 2012, com­pared to 7.1 per­cent in the U.S. this year.

“The Unit­ed States is not in as bad a sit­u­a­tion as Europe,” he said, “but it’s get­ting that way.”
‘Polit­i­cal Glue’

As the Inter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund said Greece may require addi­tion­al fund­ing or a third debt restruc­tur­ing, the odds of the fis­cal union break­ing up by the end of 2013 have reached 36.5 per­cent, based on bets made at Intrade.com. Mundell, often referred to as the father of the com­mon cur­ren­cy, sees a dif­fer­ent out­come.

“It’s polit­i­cal glue inside Europe to keep it togeth­er — the euro is the best thing going for it since the cre­ation of the com­mon mar­ket,” he said. “The end game is going to be deep­er inte­gra­tion in Europe and more cen­tral­iza­tion of the fis­cal author­i­ty.”

Scalia, in his own words:

...

1) Scalia chal­lenges the “right” to health­care

Approx­i­mate­ly 20 min­utes into the argu­ments (pages 19–20 in the tran­script), Jus­tice Scalia asked Solic­i­tor Gen­er­al Ver­ril­li why, if the gov­ern­ment could force peo­ple to enter the mar­ket for health insur­ance, the gov­ern­ment could­n’t also force peo­ple to enter the car mar­ket in order to bring down the cost of cars for every­one. Ver­ril­li respond­ed that forc­ing peo­ple to buy cars would be dif­fer­ent:

GENERAL VERRILLI: In the health­care mar­ket, you’re going into the mar­ket with­out the abil­i­ty to pay for what you get, get­ting the health­care ser­vice any­way as a result of the social norms that allow — that — to which we’ve oblig­at­ed our­selves so that peo­ple get health­care.

JUSTICE SCALIA: Well, don’t oblig­ate your­self to that. Why — you know?

GENERAL VERRILLI: Well, I can’t imag­ine that that — that the Com­merce Clause would — would for­bid Con­gress from tak­ing into account this deeply embed­ded social norm.

JUSTICE SCALIA: You could do it.

...

Yes, you could indeed reject the social norm that we take care of eachother. It’s eas­i­er than you might think!

Cue the intel­lec­tu­al bank­rupt­cy jokes: Newt Gingrich’s health care think tank files for bank­rupt­cy in Atlanta fed­er­al court

If I did­n’t think the cre­ation of a per­ma­nent under­class, low-end wage sup­pres­sion, and the nor­mal­iza­tion of dehu­man­iz­ing atti­tudes weren’t three of the unspo­ken objec­tives of its cham­pi­ons, I’d call the “end wel­fare as we know it” reforms to be a demon­stra­ble fail­ure. But since we’ve been locked in a mul­ti-decade long strug­gle to break gov­ern­ment and ‘starve the beast’, I have to acknowl­edge anoth­er Mis­sion Accom­plished!

Hap­py East­er every­one!

AIG’s CEO would like you to know that the euro­zone finan­cial cri­sis is a sig­nal to the rest of the world that retire­ment ages need to be raised to 80. Every­where. I’d be curi­ous to hear his views about exec­u­tive com­pen­sa­tion. Well isn’t that spe­cial.

Don’t you just love neo-lib­er­al glob­al­iza­tion? Appar­ent­ly retire­ment is no longer affordable....our tech­no­log­i­cal­ly advanced economies are ‘too com­pet­i­tive’ now to allow for retire­ment because all that tech­nol­o­gy allows one work­er to do so much more than ever before. So the only way to get even more ‘pro­duc­tive’ work­ers in a tech­no­log­i­cal­ly advanced econ­o­my is to pay the work­ers less and get rid of retire­ment, I guess. Remem­ber, profit=productivity, for some unex­plained reason...it’s a mys­tery of the cos­mos. Stop ask­ing ques­tions. Just accept the wis­dom of your elders. It’s sup­posed to be for the kid­dies, because noth­ing helps record youth unem­ploy­ment like ensur­ing their grand­par­ents can’t retire. It’s about build­ing ‘con­fi­dence’. Final­ly, no more lazy 79 yr olds wast­ing their lives on the couch. Especal­ly the retired con­struc­tion work­ers. Get a job you bums! Boy, that felt good to get off my chest. I’m feel­ing more con­fi­dent already.

Thanks for the tip ass­hole:

Bloomberg
AIG Chief Sees Retire­ment Age as High as 80 After Cri­sis
By Boris Cerni and Zachary Trac­er — Jun 4, 2012 6:54 AM CT

AIG Will Con­tin­ue to Expand Glob­al­ly, CEO Says

Amer­i­can Inter­na­tion­al Group Inc. (AIG) Chief Exec­u­tive Offi­cer Robert Ben­mosche said Europe’s debt cri­sis shows gov­ern­ments world­wide must accept that peo­ple will have to work more years as life expectan­cies increase.

“Retire­ment ages will have to move to 70, 80 years old,” Ben­mosche, who turned 68 last week, said dur­ing a week­end inter­view at his sea­side vil­la in Dubrovnik, Croa­t­ia. “That would make pen­sions, med­ical ser­vices more afford­able. They will keep peo­ple work­ing longer and will take that bur­den off of the youth.”

The cri­sis, now in its third year, threat­ens to destroy Europe’s 17-nation cur­ren­cy union as Greece con­tem­plates exit­ing the euro and Spain sees its bond yields rise and bank­ing indus­try fal­ter. Ger­man Chan­cel­lor Angela Merkel hard­ened her oppo­si­tion to joint debt shar­ing in the euro region as U.S. Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma sin­gled out Europe’s lead­ers for not doing enough to arrest the cri­sis.

Greece aban­don­ing the euro could be a dis­as­ter for the coun­try and Europe must work to keep that from hap­pen­ing, said Ben­mosche, whose com­pa­ny was the world’s biggest insur­er before it took a U.S. bailout.

“Peo­ple in Greece have to see there is no easy way out of this” and the gov­ern­ment must get them to work longer, he said in the June 2 inter­view on the Adri­at­ic coast. “If not, and if they go to their own cur­ren­cy, I think they will see huge infla­tion and it will be dev­as­tat­ing for peo­ple on fixed incomes.”
Life Expectan­cy

Greece, where the aver­age life expectan­cy is 81.3 years, has an effec­tive retire­ment age of 59.6, among the low­est in Europe, accord­ing to data com­piled by Bloomberg. French Pres­i­dent Fran­cois Hol­lande, the Social­ist who was sworn in last month, has pledged to cut the retire­ment age to 60 from 62 while increas­ing cor­po­rate and bank tax­es and intro­duc­ing a 75 per­cent levy on earn­ings of more than 1 mil­lion euros ($1.2 mil­lion).

Peter Han­cock, CEO of AIG’s Char­tis prop­er­ty-casu­al­ty unit, said last week the insur­er has assigned staff from Argenti­na to advise their coun­ter­parts in Athens as the com­pa­ny pre­pares for a pos­si­ble Greek exit from the euro, with the com­mon cur­ren­cy at its low­est against the U.S. dol­lar since June 2010. Argenti­na default­ed on a record $95 bil­lion of debt in 2001 and lat­er aban­doned a decade-long 1‑to‑1 peso peg to the green­back.

“We have gone through the cri­sis in Argenti­na and oth­er coun­tries over time, so we have expe­ri­ence,” Ben­mosche said.

...

Ben­mosche has sold non‑U.S. life insur­ers, a con­sumer lender and oth­er busi­ness­es to pay back its tax­pay­er res­cue, which swelled to $182.3 bil­lion as the U.S. extend­ed more cred­it and low­ered the inter­est charged. The Trea­sury Depart­ment has cut its stake to 61 per­cent from 92 per­cent through three share sales total­ing about $17.6 bil­lion. In the most recent two, AIG bought back a total of $5 bil­lion in stock.

...

Ben­mosche said peo­ple and busi­ness­es in the U.S. lack con­fi­dence and are hes­i­tant to invest as finan­cial reg­u­la­tion and tax poli­cies remain unset­tled.

“I am opti­mistic that we’ll con­tin­ue to grow, and if we get past this peri­od of uncer­tain­ty and gain con­fi­dence again in the U.S. eco­nom­ic sys­tem, that will help lead the world out of the sit­u­a­tion we are in today,” he said.

Krug­man has a the­o­ry on the mad­ness grip­ping the euro­zone and the fix­a­tion of Berlin’s pol­i­cy­mak­ers on aus­ter­i­ty regard­less of the ever grow­ing oppo­si­tion and evi­dence that the pol­i­cy just does­n’t work: What we’re see­ing at play is a deep sense that suf­fer­ing is a nec­es­sary com­po­nent of reform. Rule by Calvin­ism. With­out pain, no knowl­edge on how to be a bet­ter per­son can be gained. So if you thought the cri­sis was all about bal­anc­ing finan­cial ledgers you were wrong. There’s an exis­ten­tial pain/pleasure ledger and it wants to be bal­anced too.

So, with that insight in mind, I hope you’re learn­ing your les­son, Alon­so:

Chil­dren Lose to Bailed-Out Bankers as Cri­sis Forces Cuts
By Ben Sills and Rod­ney Jef­fer­son — Jun 6, 2012 3:24 AM CT

Twelve-year-old Alon­so Arroyo is wor­ried about his friend Dario.

Doc­tors in Spain (IBEX), where the gov­ern­ment is cut­ting health spend­ing while pay­ing 23.5 bil­lion euros ($29 bil­lion) to bail out its third-largest bank, stopped Dario’s pre­scrip­tion of the 2,000-euro a month growth hor­mone both boys need to stop their bod­ies degen­er­at­ing because of a genet­ic con­di­tion. Alon­so doesn’t know his treat­ment was pulled too.

“We’ve devel­oped cap­i­tal­ism to the point where it’s eat­ing us,” said his father, Jose Andres Arroyo, who’s been unem­ployed since his truck­ing firm in Madrid fold­ed three years ago. “How did we do this? We’ve trashed the Euro­pean wel­fare state.”

The two Span­ish boys, who also have learn­ing dis­abil­i­ties because their ill­ness slowed down brain devel­op­ment, have nev­er heard of gov­ern­ment bonds. They don’t know that their country’s banks plowed 300 bil­lion euros into prop­er­ty devel­op­ments, many of which are emp­ty, or that Greek politi­cians lied about their debt. With the Euro­pean finan­cial cri­sis now in its third year, spend­ing con­sid­ered sacred in the good times is becom­ing expend­able as gov­ern­ments weigh the needs of their most vul­ner­a­ble against the threat of los­ing access to debt mar­kets.

Euro­pean Strug­gle

Spain is strug­gling to avoid fol­low­ing Ire­land, Por­tu­gal and Greece in requir­ing a bailout from the Euro­pean Union and Inter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund. Greece is fight­ing to stay in the euro. The U.K., whose four biggest banks paid 32 senior exec­u­tives a com­bined 103 mil­lion pounds ($161 mil­lion) last year, is in its sec­ond reces­sion in three years. In all the coun­tries, peo­ple who know lit­tle of the debt cri­sis are being caught up in it as med­ical aid and day care is scaled back.

“The wel­fare sys­tem was put in place when things were eas­i­er and cheap­er,” said Ger­ard Lane, an invest­ment strate­gist at Shore Cap­i­tal stock­bro­kers in Liv­er­pool, north­west Eng­land. “It’s dif­fi­cult for a state to tar­get those who need to get off wel­fare, but keep it for all those who need it. The def­i­n­i­tion of ‘need’ may change as liv­ing stan­dards fall.”

...

That’s right Alon­so, your pet­ty “needs” are look­ing more and more like “wants”. That mon­ey wast­ed on growth hor­mones could be bet­ter spent else­where. A bank’s got­ta grow too you know!

It’s not a sub­stan­tive obser­va­tion regard­ing a pos­si­ble con­flict of inter­est. It’s just a pesky meme:

U.S. News & World Report
Meme Alleges Clarence Thomas’s Wife Got $1.5M From Health­care Act Foes

By Eliz­a­beth Flock

June 22, 2012

A new meme is mak­ing its way around the Inter­net, show­ing a pho­to of Supreme Court Jus­tice Clarence Thomas with the cap­tion: “This [man’s] fam­i­ly received $1.5 mil­lion from health care oppo­nents... And is about to rule on health care reform.”

The meme by Frank Chi, a dig­i­tal strate­gist who advis­es Demo­c­ra­t­ic cam­paigns and pro­gres­sive orga­ni­za­tions, has rein­tro­duced the alle­ga­tion just as antic­i­pa­tion is peak­ing over the Supreme Court’s com­ing deci­sion on the fate of the Afford­able Care Act of 2010.

But while there have been a num­ber of ques­tions about Thomas’s pos­si­ble con­flict of inter­est, the $1.5 mil­lion num­ber may be a con­fla­tion of sev­er­al dif­fer­ent fig­ures.

The num­ber seems to have first been cir­cu­lat­ed by Demo­c­ra­t­ic law­mak­er Andrei Cherny, a can­di­date for Ari­zon­a’s 9th Con­gres­sion­al Dis­trict and for­mer aide and advis­er to pres­i­dents Bill Clin­ton and Barack Oba­ma.

Cherny told an Ari­zona tele­vi­sion sta­tion in April 2012 that Thomas ought be impeached for receiv­ing $1.5 mil­lion from health­care oppo­nents and then not recus­ing him­self from the Afford­able Care Act case. The state­ment was report­ed on by pro­gres­sive site Think Progress.

Cherny was echo­ing con­cerns voiced by 74 mem­bers of Con­gress ear­li­er that year, who signed a let­ter to Jus­tice Thomas warn­ing of a con­flict of inter­est if he ruled on health­care reform. (You can read the let­ter at Kaiser Health News.)

But all of these ques­tions revolve less around Thomas than they do his wife: Vir­ginia “Gin­ni” Thomas, a con­ser­v­a­tive lob­by­ist and attor­ney in Wash­ing­ton.

Gin­ni Thomas has been a vocal crit­ic of the Afford­able Care Act, and she has cer­tain­ly made mon­ey off of that crit­i­cism. In 2009, she found­ed the Tea Par­ty non­prof­it lob­by­ing group Lib­er­ty Cen­tral, which lob­bied against the law. There, she made a salary of $120,000, accord­ing to the group’s 2010 tax fil­ing.

A start­up dona­tion to Lib­er­ty Cen­tral to the tune of $500,000 came from Har­lan Crow, a Dal­las real estate investor, Repub­li­can donor, and friend of Jus­tice Thomas, Politi­co report­ed in 2011. Crow declined to com­ment to the New York Times about whether he was the source of the mon­ey.

Gin­ni Thomas lat­er stepped down as CEO and pres­i­dent of Lib­er­ty Cen­tral, but start­ed Lib­er­ty Con­sult­ing in 2010, which also did anti-health­care reform lob­by­ing, accord­ing to the lib­er­al site Moth­er Jones.

And in Jan­u­ary 2011, it came to light that Jus­tice Thomas had “inad­ver­tent­ly” left out infor­ma­tion about his wife’s employ­ment over the last 13 years—where her earn­ings added up to as much as $1.6 mil­lion, the Huff­in­g­ton Post report­ed.

One of her for­mer employ­ers: the Her­itage Foun­da­tion, where Gin­ni Thomas made hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars between 2003 and 2007, accord­ing to a let­ter from Thomas to the Com­mit­tee on Finan­cial Dis­clo­sure. The foun­da­tion has also been a vocal oppo­nent of the health­care reform law.

Thomas has repeat­ed­ly denied any con­flict of inter­est.

...

Damn inter­webs!!

Wow, the right to die slope appears to be well greased in Bel­gium too. I did­n’t think it was so bad.

Rus­sel Goldman/ABC News 1/14/13 “Bel­gium Euth­a­nizes Deaf Twins Going Blind”

Excerpt “Two deaf twin broth­ers in Bel­gium were euth­a­nized by their doc­tor after real­iz­ing they were going blind and would be unable to see each oth­er ever again, their physi­cian says.....Belgian law­mak­ers are con­sid­er­ing a law that would extend euthana­sia to demen­tia patients and chil­dren, whose fam­i­lies and doc­tors con­sent­ed.”

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2013/01/belgium-euthanizes-deaf-twins-going-blind/