TANC Has Tanked

We wish that we could claim that because Cat-E-Whompus wrote about TANC, that the walls of Jericho had come tumbling down. However large our ego here at the blog, we can only take credit for being one voice speaking out against this big lumbering dinosaur of a project that threatened to trample the rights thousands of property owners in the North State.

Collectively, however, our voices have been heard--at least in Sacramento. The Sac-Bee reports here that SMUD--aka the Sacramento Municipal Utility District--has 'pulled the plug' on TANC.

Apparently, SMUD decided that the TANC project wasn't going to 'pencil out' for them and pulled out, leaving TANC with a gaping 35% hole in the project's budget. I suspect that SMUD figured out that there was a gathering storm of opposition by property owners and North State environmentalists to TANC that was going drag the name of SMUD through the political mud.

So, for now TANC has tanked; their existing schedule 'public outreach' has been cancelled.

TANC's dead for now, but like Frankenstein, it could lurch back to life via the machinations of its remaining municipal power company backers, which includes the city of Redding's power company. We can sleep better for now, but we still need to keep and eye out for signs of life in this thing down the road.

TANC's Lines of Mass Destruction

If you live in that part of California commonly known as the North State--including Redding, Cottonwood, Red Bluff, Corning, Chico, Orland--and many other towns and cities in the area, you should make it a priority to get up to speed on the plans of TANC, which is an acronym for the Transmission Agency of Northern California. Here is a link to their web site. Below is a picture of what you may be looking at out your front window if TANC gets their way.



TANC has a plan to run approximately 600 miles of 230-kilo volt (kV) and 500-kilo volt transmission lines and substations through the North State. Following is an overall map (courtesy of Stop TANC!)




These proposed transmission lines will--if built--transmit so-called 'renewable energy.' This energy will be generated in northeastern California and northwestern Nevada, and then carried by the proposed lines down to Sacramento and the Bay Area.

The North segment of the line is planned to run from the point of origin through Burney to Redding where it will connect into a substation in Olinda. From there, there are three proposed routes between Redding and Tracy. This segment is called the the Central Segment on TANC's web site. Their site says about this segment:

"The Central Segment would begin at the Olinda Substation and extend south to Tracy. It would include a new, 160 to 180 mile, double-circuit, 500-kV transmission line through the Central Valley, with an interconnection to a new substation in southern Sacramento County. Three alternative corridors have been preliminarily identified for the Central Segment: the western, central, and eastern alternatives. From the proposed new substation in southern Sacramento County, each of three alternative corridors would continue 40 to 45 miles southwest to a proposed new substation near the Tracy Substation."

Readers, please note this carefully. There is a VERY LARGE amount of private real property threatened by the TANC project. TANC can and will use the power of eminent domain to seize your property if it is located in the path of the route that they select. While TANC must compensate you if they take your property, the fact that they will be doing this is taking of property at a time when property values are very depressed is no accident. You can bet your bippy that TANC is looking to secure the routes for their big ugly power lines at today's depressed real estate prices; this way, we as citizens of the North State will be even bigger losers in this deal than we otherwise would be.

However, residents of the big metro areas to our south stand to benefit a great deal from our misfortune if this project goes through.

Kick us while we are down, seems to be the TANC philosophy.

You can go to here to see Google Earth Maps depicting the three alternative TANC power line routes. You can enter your street address and email id and the site will display a map that zooms in, showing you where your property is situated relative to the TANC routes.

If you haven't done this, you should; its an eye-opener. In my case, I found that the westerly route bypasses my property by about a half mile (whew!) but many are not so lucky. Depending on the route that TANC selects, thousands of people could find their property value destroyed--at least what little remains here in the depth of the recession--to provide homeowners and businesses in Sacramento and the Bay Area with so-called 'Green Power.'

There is a Stop TANC! web site; you will find it here. If you are concerned about TANC like I am, the site has a number of public officials you can call, write, or email. Congressman Wally Herger leads the list in my book. You can email him to express your dismay at this project here.

Support a Public Health Insurance Option

Dear Readers and Friends,

With nearly 50 million Americans lacking health insurance, and premiums rapidly rising, it's time to address the health care crisis in our country. All Americans deserve access to affordable, quality health care -- and today, nearly one-in-six of us don't have it.

This month, Congress is working on new reform legislation that will make quality health care available and affordable for all Americans. In particular, Senators Dick Durbin, Patrick
Leahy, and Chuck Schumer are working for a public health insurance option that would foster greater competition in the marketplace, create more choices for consumers, and lead to
lower costs and better quality.

Please join me in supporting their work to pass strong health care reform legislation this year by signing the online petition at http://ga3.org/campaign/healthpetition?source=hc_taf

Or, click the link below:
http://ga3.org/campaign/healthpetition?rk=odtv479aen1DW

Can You Really Count on Your Health Insurance?

When it comes to health care, I can't wait for socialized medicine. And fortunately--at age 62, I don't have too long to wait. If I was younger, I would start thinking about moving to Canada.

I strongly believe that we desperately need a single payer health care system in our country. There are several reasons for that opinion, not the least of which is that most people I know who are on Medicare like it. The biggest reason however is that it really is the only way to fix the health care cost crisis that this country is in. I'll say more on that in another post.

One huge factor however is the way ordinary people who have health insurance are treated by their insurance companies. Actually I should say mistreated.

This article I found in the Los Angeles Times spells it what these companies do in detail. Here are a few highlights:

"Executives of three of the nation's largest health insurers told federal lawmakers in Washington on Tuesday that they would continue canceling medical coverage for some sick policyholders, despite withering criticism from Republican and Democratic members of Congress who decried the practice as unfair and abusive.

An investigation by the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations showed that health insurers WellPoint Inc., UnitedHealth Group and Assurant Inc. canceled the coverage of more than 20,000 people, allowing the companies to avoid paying more than $300 million in medical claims over a five-year period.

It also found that policyholders with breast cancer, lymphoma and more than 1,000 other conditions were targeted for rescission and that employees were praised in performance reviews for terminating the policies of customers with expensive illnesses."

There is considerably more to this story, so I highly encourage readers to link to the story.

Wow! These three insurers cancelled coverage for 20,000 people! who developed expensive illnesses!. The stockholders of these companies and the managers and executives (who received incentive bonuses) must have done well financially, because the companies collectively saved 300 million bucks!

The executives who appeared in front of Congress claimed that the persons whose policies they rescinded lied about pre-existing conditions, and that therefore they were justified.

The reality is that many of these people had had their policies a long time. Then they got sick, seriously ill. At that point, these fine upstanding examples of private enterprise started looking at the records, trying to find any excuse to get them out of paying the bill. Even a small occurrence--sometimes it was something that showed up on a test report that their doctor felt so innocuous that he didn't even find necessary to discuss with them -- suddenly became all the excuse the insurance company needed to rescind their policy.

The Congressional investigation found that the employees of the these insurance companies were praised in their performance reviews.

And you know what else? This is routine standard operating procedure. It goes on all the time. If you are insured and if you bought an individual policy where you had to go through medical underwriting, you can be sure that if you get seriously ill, these folks are going to be scrutinizing your coverage.

The executives very politely refused to tell Congress that they would cease doing this.

Congress needs to vote in a strong public plan as part of the health care effort. They also need to pass legislation that outlaws consideration of preexisting conditions, and rescission of policies because of them.

They need to do it yesterday. We need to write and call our representatives and DEMAND that they pass this legislation now.

A Changing Viewpoint - Part IV

In my previous post in this series, I began by saying that if I was rich, I would be a Republican. Let me explain why I said that. Here's my income disparity chart that I introduced in Part III:




If you examine the statistics at the end, you can see what I mean. Since 1981 when the statistics really start, until 2006 the United States was governed for eight years by Reagan, four years by Bush the elder, eight years by Clinton, and then six years of Shrub--I mean Bush--the younger. Of course, Bush the younger finished his term two years later. In twenty-five years of rule, we had Republican Presidents for all but eight of them.

What about Congress? The following chart shows that.


As you can see, the Republicans had majorities in the either the House, the Senate or both during much of those years.

One of the major mantras of conservatives in general, and therefore Republican politicians, is that small government is good, big government is bad, and that taxes can always be cut further. During the period from Reagan's election until Barack Obama took office earlier this year, the disparity of income between the lower incomes and the higher incomes became greater and greater.

Let's take a look at what happened to tax brackets. The data below is taken from Wikipedia; you can view the entire history of tax in the United states including these years here.

A Partial History of U.S. Federal Marginal Income Tax Rates Since 1982

Applicable Year	Income brackets	First bracket	Top Bracket	Source
1982-1986	12	12%	50%	IRS
1987	5	11%	33%	IRS
1988-1990	3	15%	28%	IRS
1991-1992	3	15%	31%	IRS
1993-2000	5	15%	39.6%	IRS
2001	5	15%	39.1%	IRS
2002	6	10%	38.6%	IRS
2003-2009	6	10%	35%	Tax Foundation

As you can see from looking at the data, the top tax brackets dropped in 1987, and have stayed low ever since. The lower brackets dropped too, but no where nearly as much. The effect: under largely Republican rule, the rich paid a lot less tax as they got richer while the poor paid about the same to marginally less tax.

It's obvious from the data (and I am a data driven person) that if someone is rich, they have a big economic incentive to vote Republican. But if you aren't, why are you voting with them if you are? Here's my theory on that:

Conservatives have 'co-opted' several so called social issues. Their cornerstone issue is that of 'right to life.' Opposition to a woman's right to choose to have an abortion has garnered conservative Republicans many voters who economically have no reason to voter the GOP ticket but will do so because the GOP politicians are almost all -- in public anyway -- anti-abortion.

Another issue that the conservative Republican party has tried to co-opt is that they are stronger on national defense than the Democrats. I admit, I fell for that one for a long time. I stand here before you, chowing down on crow.

But as is now obvious, what the Republican Bush Administration did in reality was to monger fear after 9/11 well enough to convince the country and the Congress to go to war with a country that--despicable as its rule was--we didn't need to go to war with, and to sacrifice individual liberties in the interests of 'national security.'

They are still doing that; just listen to any of Dick Cheney's recent utterances. They are all calculated to instill fear in the voters that Democrats will let their guard down and the terrorists will attack again.

Nope, I haven't pulled down my old posts from 2005 and prior. I call it the way I honestly see it at the time I see it that way. Unlike some, I am not so filled with pride that I cannot admit I made a mistake. I'm not running for office!

So to sum up here, for the reasons stated in Parts I, II, III, and now Part IV, I have come full circle. With a little help from my wife, and a lot of help from Paul Krugman's book "Conscience of a Liberal", I am happy to report that I am fairly well divested of most of my 'right wing' tendencies. However, I am still Cat-E-Whompus.

I'm still an unapologetic a card carrying member of the NRA. Fortunately, most of the Democrats seemed to have dropped gun control as an issue due to losing elections over it. That's good, because I'm a lot more passionate these days about the need for universal health coverage than I am about guns.

So Much For Compassionate Conservatism

As this AP story about the California budget impasse shows, the Republicans in the legislature are in line with their party's objective of eliminating the 'welfare state.' The Repubs figure if the can starve it out by not funding it, that will get the job done.

Reagan started it, but they can finish it. Small government, that's what we need. Capitalism uber alles.

Unfortunately, the Republican ideal for government entails taking the social safety net that exists at both the federal and state levels and blowing it to smithereens. It really doesn't seem to bother most of them that the spending cuts they want to make come to a large extent out the benefits that the poor and mentally ill receive in California.

If the Republicans can continue to obstruct in California, everyone who depends on that social safety net will be KMAC-YOYO. In case you're wondering, that's an acronym. It stands for "Kiss My A** Kid, You're On Your Own." There's your compassionate conservatism for you. A bit anemic in the compassion department, don't you think?

Guess what happens if the Republicans get their way. If you think we've got homeless problem in this state now, just you wait. Oh, and lets not forget about crime.

The solution for the budget crisis in California is found in simple medicine that works but tastes bad. We are going to have to raise taxes and cut spending, but with a scalpel rather than the meatcleaver approach that our governator and the Repubs in the assembly are showing.

Cut spending intelligently and raise taxes. Its the only way out of this mess.

In this country and in the state of California, the term 'compassionate conservatism' is an oxymoron. It's a very bad joke.

Why Does Health Care Cost So Much?

Why is McAllen, Texas, one of the most expensive health care market places in the country?

"The most expensive piece of medical equipment is a doctor’s pen." So says Atul Gawande, in his eye opening and widely quoted article titled "The Cost Conundrum" in the current New Yorker Magazine.