another site
News stories increasingly
feature accounts of militarized police forces employing weaponry
and tactics more commonly seen on the battlefield. As Steven
Greenhut observes, such accounts raise a question rarely asked
about policing policies today: Do they unnecessarily endanger the
public’s safety?
from Hit & Run http://reason.com/blog/2013/11/01/steven-greenhut-on-how-the-police-endang
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There was a time when the only complaint the SEC’s 4000 employees had was that some porn sites charge just too much – after all, the SEC’s “enforcement” budget is limited, while the worldwide supply of pornography is virtually endless. It’s time to add one more grievance to the list of all those overworked regulators who have yet to put someone, anyone, from the big banks in jail as a consequence for nearly destroying the western way of life, or do more than merely wrist slap Steve Cohen with a penalty that costs more than three or four Picasso paintings: lunch breaks.
As Bloomberg reports, the latest scandal at the SEC has nothing to do with the agency’s terminal and embarrassing inefficiencies, and everything to do with how much time the SEC’s unionized workers are allotted to eat lunch.
In a dispute that has sent pangs of resentment — and perhaps hunger — across the agency, the SEC’s union chief has warned workers to keep lunch breaks to a half hour or risk being disciplined as “absent without leave.”
“Despite the fact that most SEC employees are often told that they may take an hour for lunch, technically, we are only entitled to thirty minutes,” wrote Greg Gilman, president of the union, in an e-mail sent to SEC workers last week. “Do not fall into the trap of believing that because you are a ‘professional’ the rules do not apply to you.”
Fueling the union’s angst is a new SEC plan to require the use of security cards that record the times people enter and exit the building in its offices across the country, a move Gilman wrote would “substantially increase surveillance.” He said that data from the system in place at the Washington headquarters is increasingly used in cases against employees accused of skipping out of work.
Wait, the SEC has… a labor union? Why yes.
Relations have been tense between the SEC’s management and its union, which represents some 3,000 of the agency’s 4,000 employees. Gilman has also criticized a recent decision by Chairman Mary Jo White to give added retirement and vacation benefits only to managers and has accused the commission of reneging on part of a student-loan repayment program.
Well, that pretty much answers all lingering questions about why the SEC is arguably the government’s most worthless organization.
But back to much more pressing things – like why said union can not spend an extended lunch siesta time doing more of what it does so well: nothing.
Gilman’s Oct. 24 note said the group, part of the National Treasury Employees Union, is seeking the services of a federal mediator to help resolve the matter.
“The ‘time-clock’ issue at headquarters has grown into a festering problem,” he wrote, adding that it has “resulted in a larger volume of high stakes discipline cases” against attorneys, accountants and examiners. The practice also goes against a deal the union negotiated with the SEC a decade ago that Washington office security turnstiles wouldn’t be used for “monitoring time and attendance,” Gilman wrote.
Now, to be on the safe side, he urged employees to take precautions.
…
As for lunches, Nester said it is true that the current union bargaining contract calls for only a 30-minute daily break. Even though it is not in the agreement, all workers are permitted two 15-minute breaks as well, he said.
And all so very much deserved…
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via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/Gv7mSs5VsxE/story01.htm Tyler Durden
There was a time when the only complaint the SEC’s 4000 employees had was that some porn sites charge just too much – after all, the SEC’s “enforcement” budget is limited, while the worldwide supply of pornography is virtually endless. It’s time to add one more grievance to the list of all those overworked regulators who have yet to put someone, anyone, from the big banks in jail as a consequence for nearly destroying the western way of life, or do more than merely wrist slap Steve Cohen with a penalty that costs more than three or four Picasso paintings: lunch breaks.
As Bloomberg reports, the latest scandal at the SEC has nothing to do with the agency’s terminal and embarrassing inefficiencies, and everything to do with how much time the SEC’s unionized workers are allotted to eat lunch.
In a dispute that has sent pangs of resentment — and perhaps hunger — across the agency, the SEC’s union chief has warned workers to keep lunch breaks to a half hour or risk being disciplined as “absent without leave.”
“Despite the fact that most SEC employees are often told that they may take an hour for lunch, technically, we are only entitled to thirty minutes,” wrote Greg Gilman, president of the union, in an e-mail sent to SEC workers last week. “Do not fall into the trap of believing that because you are a ‘professional’ the rules do not apply to you.”
Fueling the union’s angst is a new SEC plan to require the use of security cards that record the times people enter and exit the building in its offices across the country, a move Gilman wrote would “substantially increase surveillance.” He said that data from the system in place at the Washington headquarters is increasingly used in cases against employees accused of skipping out of work.
Wait, the SEC has… a labor union? Why yes.
Relations have been tense between the SEC’s management and its union, which represents some 3,000 of the agency’s 4,000 employees. Gilman has also criticized a recent decision by Chairman Mary Jo White to give added retirement and vacation benefits only to managers and has accused the commission of reneging on part of a student-loan repayment program.
Well, that pretty much answers all lingering questions about why the SEC is arguably the government’s most worthless organization.
But back to much more pressing things – like why said union can not spend an extended lunch siesta time doing more of what it does so well: nothing.
Gilman’s Oct. 24 note said the group, part of the National Treasury Employees Union, is seeking the services of a federal mediator to help resolve the matter.
“The ‘time-clock’ issue at headquarters has grown into a festering problem,” he wrote, adding that it has “resulted in a larger volume of high stakes discipline cases” against attorneys, accountants and examiners. The practice also goes against a deal the union negotiated with the SEC a decade ago that Washington office security turnstiles wouldn’t be used for “monitoring time and attendance,” Gilman wrote.
Now, to be on the safe side, he urged employees to take precautions.
…
As for lunches, Nester said it is true that the current union bargaining contract calls for only a 30-minute daily break. Even though it is not in the agreement, all workers are permitted two 15-minute breaks as well, he said.
And all so very much deserved…
| |
via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/Gv7mSs5VsxE/story01.htm Tyler Durden
In the ongoing race between Healthcare.gov and the Nasdaq to prove which system is more terminally broken, it is still a toss up. And while the issues of Obamacare’s website are well-known to most by now, it is increasingly becoming a daily occurence that one or more aspects of the Nasdaq just break at the most random of times, such as hour ago, when the Nasdaq Options Market was halted due to “unsolicited outs over FIX” and has yet to announce if and when it will resume trading today.
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via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/d00l78apdSg/story01.htm Tyler Durden
In the opening days of
Obamacare’s October 1 launch, federal officials touted high
web-traffic numbers, but repeatedly refused to provide enrollment
data for the federally facilitated exchanges.
On October 3, White House spokesperson Jay Carney, pressed for
enrollment numbers,
said, “No, we don’t have that data.” On October 7, in an
appearance on the Daily Show, Health and Human Services Secretary
Kathleen Sebelius repeated the claim when questioned about
enrollment: “I can’t tell you,” she said, “because I don’t
know.”
But that simply wasn’t true—at least not during the first few
days.
Leaked meeting notes from high-level war room briefings inside
the federal health bureaucracy on October 2 and October 3 report
that federal officials were aware of the exact number of federal
enrollees on the first and second days in which the exchanges were
running.
And,
as seemed likely at the time, it turns out that the numbers
were very, very low.
According to the
notes, which were released by the House Committee on Oversight
& Government Reform and taken from daily briefings in the
Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight, the
federal office directly in charge of the exchanges, there were just
six successful enrollments across the 36 federal exchanges on
launch day.
The second day was a little better. By the morning of October 3,
officials reported that the number had reached triple digits on the
second day of operation. “As of yesterday, there were 248
enrollments,” it says, with the enrollment figure in bold. Later
that same day, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told
reporters asking for enrollment figures that “we do not have that
data.”
It’s possible that Carney didn’t have the numbers at the time.
And I suppose it’s even possible that, four days later, HHS
Secretary Sebelius hadn’t seen the numbers either. But that
explanation is not particularly believable, especially in the case
of Sebelius, whose is the nation’s top health bureaucrat and is
therefore expected to keep informed of such things. And on the
vanishingly small chance that it is true that neither Sebelius nor
Carney were at all aware of the enrollment numbers themselves, then
that reveals that both remained, perhaps by choice, clueless and
out of the loop regarding crucial details about Obamacare’s
operations.
HHS has attempted to drum up uncertainty about the figures in
the leaked documents. “These appear to be notes, they do not
include official enrollment statistics,” an HHS spokesperson said
in a statement, according to The Washington Post. But
while the notes do mention that some insurers didn’t get the
enrollment forms they were expected to receive, they express no
doubts about the specific enrollment numbers presented. Indeed, the
notes from the first day’s meeting list exactly which insurers have
reported successful enrollments.
The more likely explanation here is that Carney and Sebelius
simply lied because the enrollment numbers were embarrassingly
low.
These early denials came while top administration
officials were still
suggesting that the problem with the exchanges was too much
traffic, and major improvements in the exchanges were right around
the corner. They hoped that the exchange problems would be resolved
rapidly, and didn’t want to reveal how poorly the launch had
gone—which might generate more bad press, and perhaps scare more
people away. It’s possible, in other words, that the denials were a
result of cluelessness and incompetence—but more plausible that
federal officials knowingly lied because it was convenient for
their purposes.
from Hit & Run http://reason.com/blog/2013/11/01/leaked-memos-reveal-that-federal-health
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California Democratic Sen.
Dianne Feinstein’s bill to “reform” the National Security Agency’s
surveillance systems is moving forward, having
passed a vote in the Senate Intelligence Committee Agency,
11-4. Tech privacy experts are banging their faces against their
keyboards for good reason.
Here’s how Feinstein promotes the reform in her own
statement: “[It] prohibits the collection of bulk communication
records under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act except
under specific procedures and restrictions set forth in the
bill.” Emphasis added.
The specific procedures and restrictions set forth? It’s what
they were already doing. This isn’t a ban. It’s
permission. The Electronic Frontier Foundation
notes:
Don’t be fooled: the bill codifies some of the NSA’s worst
practices, would be a huge setback for everyone’s privacy, and it
would permanently entrench the NSA’s collection of every phone
record held by U.S. telecoms. We urge members of Congress to oppose
it.We learned for the first time in June that the NSA secretly
twisted and re-interpreted Section 215 of the Patriot Act six years
ago to allow them to vacuum up every phone record in
America—continuing an unconstitutional program that began in 2001.
The new leaks about this mass surveillance program four months ago
have led to a sea change in how Americans view privacy, and poll
after poll has shown the public wants it to stop.But instead of listening to her constituents, Sen. Feinstein put
forth a bill designed to allow the NSA to monitor their calls. Sen.
Feinstein wants the NSA to continue to collect the metadata of
every phone call in the United States—that’s who you call, who
calls you, the time and length of the conversation, and under the
government’s interpretation, potentially your location—and store it
for five years. This is not an NSA reform bill, it’s an NSA
entrenchment bill.Other parts of the bill claim to bring a modicum of transparency
to small parts of the NSA, but requiring some modest reporting
requirements, like how many times NSA searches this database and
audit trails for who does the searching.But its real goal seems to be to just paint a veneer of
transparency over still deeply secret programs. It does nothing to
stop NSA from weakening entire encryption systems, it does nothing
to stop them from hacking into the communications links of Google
and Yahoo’s data centers, and it does nothing to reform the PRISM
Internet surveillance program.
Reason’s Ron Bailey previously
warned about this terrible legislation and noted the much
better alternatives by other congressmen that actually would limit
bulk data collection and preserve Americans’ online privacy.
from Hit & Run http://reason.com/blog/2013/11/01/the-nsa-reform-bill-that-isnt-pushes-for
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Today, one of America’s best-known welfare programs with 47.6 million participants or 15% of the total population, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program also known as “foodstamps” or EBT, is due for a substantial haircut: beginning Friday, there will be a phased in $5 billion reduction (6% of the program) for the 12 month period starting November 1st 2013. So what happens next?
Nick Colas of Convergex explains.
The U.S. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (a.k.a. Food Stamps) is the largest means-tested social support program in the country, with $6.3 billion in direct monthly cash transfers to individuals for the purchase of food. Some 47.6 million people (15% of the total population) are in the SNAP program as of the most recent data (July 2013) and these individuals receive an average of $132 per month. This support is set for a cut on Friday, with a $5 billion reduction (6% of the program) for the 12 month period starting November 1st 2013. From a Wall Street perspective, these numbers may seem small at 0.0003% of GDP. From the perspective of Main Street, however, is means a cut of $36/month for a family of four receiving full SNAP benefits. Record levels for stocks, record level for SNAP participants… An odd societal disconnect, to be sure.
We’ve written about the U.S. Supplemental Assistance Program (SNAP, also known as food stamps) in these pages over the years even though the topic bears no direct relationship to corporate earnings, interest rates, the Federal Reserve, or any other recognized business topic. The reason for this focus is threefold:
In the spirit of bringing our two warring readerships together, I would propose the following statement: “Something has changed about America since the Financial Crisis, and the still widespread popularity of the SNAP program is emblematic of that shift.” Or, in the words of Bill Parcells, “You are what your record says you are.” The American economic record, based on the Food Stamp data, is still pretty lousy:
We’ll sidestep the inevitable political discussion for a moment longer, and point out that things are about to change in the food stamp program. On November 1st, everyone in the SNAP program will see lower payments. Here’s the hows and whys:
Let’s see if we can dodge the political bullet for one more paragraph, with a few more fact-based points:
To sum up (apolitically, of course)… The amount of money 15% of the U.S. population uses to purchase food is about to go down, and by enough so this group will notice its absence. It may not matter to the economic data on which Wall Street hangs its fedora, but it is certainly enough to spark a political response. How this plays out, I honestly have no idea. We are in uncharted waters here, as the historical record clearly shows.
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via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/xsfc6risCqk/story01.htm Tyler Durden
Today, one of America’s best-known welfare programs with 47.6 million participants or 15% of the total population, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program also known as “foodstamps” or EBT, is due for a substantial haircut: beginning Friday, there will be a phased in $5 billion reduction (6% of the program) for the 12 month period starting November 1st 2013. So what happens next?
Nick Colas of Convergex explains.
The U.S. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (a.k.a. Food Stamps) is the largest means-tested social support program in the country, with $6.3 billion in direct monthly cash transfers to individuals for the purchase of food. Some 47.6 million people (15% of the total population) are in the SNAP program as of the most recent data (July 2013) and these individuals receive an average of $132 per month. This support is set for a cut on Friday, with a $5 billion reduction (6% of the program) for the 12 month period starting November 1st 2013. From a Wall Street perspective, these numbers may seem small at 0.0003% of GDP. From the perspective of Main Street, however, is means a cut of $36/month for a family of four receiving full SNAP benefits. Record levels for stocks, record level for SNAP participants… An odd societal disconnect, to be sure.
We’ve written about the U.S. Supplemental Assistance Program (SNAP, also known as food stamps) in these pages over the years even though the topic bears no direct relationship to corporate earnings, interest rates, the Federal Reserve, or any other recognized business topic. The reason for this focus is threefold:
In the spirit of bringing our two warring readerships together, I would propose the following statement: “Something has changed about America since the Financial Crisis, and the still widespread popularity of the SNAP program is emblematic of that shift.” Or, in the words of Bill Parcells, “You are what your record says you are.” The American economic record, based on the Food Stamp data, is still pretty lousy:
We’ll sidestep the inevitable political discussion for a moment longer, and point out that things are about to change in the food stamp program. On November 1st, everyone in the SNAP program will see lower payments. Here’s the hows and whys:
Let’s see if we can dodge the political bullet for one more paragraph, with a few more fact-based points:
To sum up (apolitically, of course)… The amount of money 15
% of the U.S. population uses to purchase food is about to go down, and by enough so this group will notice its absence. It may not matter to the economic data on which Wall Street hangs its fedora, but it is certainly enough to spark a political response. How this plays out, I honestly have no idea. We are in uncharted waters here, as the historical record clearly shows.
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via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/xsfc6risCqk/story01.htm Tyler Durden
Politico has an
article out about President Barack Obama’s increasingly
frequent off-the-record White House meetings with various opinion
journalists and columnists. Here are some named names:
Participants vary depending on the issue of the day, but there
are regulars. [David] Brooks, the New York Times columnist, is a
frequent guest, as is Joe Klein of Time Magazine. From The
Washington Post: E.J. Dionne, Eugene Robinson, Ezra Klein and Fred
Hiatt, the editorial page editor. On foreign policy: the Post’s
David Ignatius, Bloomberg View’s Jeffrey Goldberg, and the Times’
Thomas Friedman. He also holds the occasional meeting with
conservatives. This month, he met with Washington Post columnist
and Fox News contributor Charles Krauthammer, Wall Street Journal
editorial page editor Paul Gigot, and other influential
representatives from the right.
Also named are New York magazine columnist Jonathan
Chait and NBC News Political Director Chuck Todd. No,
Reason hasn’t been invited. Sniff.
More details:
He also likes talking to the people he likes to read. The
president is a voracious consumer of opinion journalism. Most
nights, before going to bed, he’ll surf the Internet, reading the
columnists whose opinions he values. One of the great privileges of
the presidency is that, when so inclined, he can invite these
columnists to his home for meetings that can last as long as
two-and-a-half hours.
“It’s not an accident who he invites: He reads
the people that he thinks matter, and he really likes engaging
those people,” said one reporter with knowledge of the meetings.
“He reads people carefully — he has a columnist mentality — and he
wants to win columnists over,” said another.
These anonymous quotes from the journalists invited to these
off-the-record bull sessions are kind of hilarious.
Sometimes, the aide will then reach out to the columnist to ask
his or her opinion, which has had the unintended effect of spurring
the columnist to write a piece expressing his thoughts on that very
issue.“It’s like, ‘The president wants to know what you think about
‘x.’ So you go, ‘I guess I better figure out what I think about
‘x,'” one columnist explained. […]Said a columnist who has attended multiple meetings, “When you
can write your column with absolute surety, knowing that what
you’re saying is a true reflection of what the President of the
United States is thinking, how do you not do that?”
from Hit & Run http://reason.com/blog/2013/11/01/obamas-pet-columnists
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Politico has an
article out about President Barack Obama’s increasingly
frequent off-the-record White House meetings with various opinion
journalists and columnists. Here are some named names:
Participants vary depending on the issue of the day, but there
are regulars. [David] Brooks, the New York Times columnist, is a
frequent guest, as is Joe Klein of Time Magazine. From The
Washington Post: E.J. Dionne, Eugene Robinson, Ezra Klein and Fred
Hiatt, the editorial page editor. On foreign policy: the Post’s
David Ignatius, Bloomberg View’s Jeffrey Goldberg, and the Times’
Thomas Friedman. He also holds the occasional meeting with
conservatives. This month, he met with Washington Post columnist
and Fox News contributor Charles Krauthammer, Wall Street Journal
editorial page editor Paul Gigot, and other influential
representatives from the right.
Also named are New York magazine columnist Jonathan
Chait and NBC News Political Director Chuck Todd. No,
Reason hasn’t been invited. Sniff.
More details:
He also likes talking to the people he likes to read. The
president is a voracious consumer of opinion journalism. Most
nights, before going to bed, he’ll surf the Internet, reading the
columnists whose opinions he values. One of the great privileges of
the presidency is that, when so inclined, he can invite these
columnists to his home for meetings that can last as long as
two-and-a-half hours.
the people that he thinks matter, and he really likes engaging
those people,” said one reporter with knowledge of the meetings.
“He reads people carefully — he has a columnist mentality — and he
wants to win columnists over,” said another.
These anonymous quotes from the journalists invited to these
off-the-record bull sessions are kind of hilarious.
Sometimes, the aide will then reach out to the columnist to ask
his or her opinion, which has had the unintended effect of spurring
the columnist to write a piece expressing his thoughts on that very
issue.“It’s like, ‘The president wants to know what you think about
‘x.’ So you go, ‘I guess I better figure out what I think about
‘x,'” one columnist explained. […]Said a columnist who has attended multiple meetings, “When you
can write your column with absolute surety, knowing that what
you’re saying is a true reflection of what the President of the
United States is thinking, how do you not do that?”
from Hit & Run http://reason.com/blog/2013/11/01/obamas-pet-columnists
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