Mitt Romney was CEO of a “downsizing consultant company”

Bain Capital was Mitt Romney’s company.

“Bain Capital turns a profit on floundering corporations by buying them at low cost, stripping away any projects that aren't profiting or which have potential, and laying off any excess workers.”
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bain_Capital

If you want a graphic view of what Romney did at Bain Capital watch; “Up in the Air”. George Clooney’s character plays a heartless man whose job is firing people.

If the company in “Up in the Air” was Bain Capital Romney would have been George Clooney’s character’s boss:

The stark reality of global warming will soon overwhelm all the nutcase science deniers of the Republican Party.

When that happens it’s “game over” for the GOP. 

Democrats could have pushed hard for remedies to global warming. They didn't because politicians live for the next election cycle and jobs, not global warming, is on the minds of voters. (Al Gore campaigned on global warming but we had full employment back then.) When global warming takes center stage on everyone’s mind, everyone's mind; Democrats can easily rally to have a “War on
global Warming”.

But the Republicans can’t escape from the cement shoes of their anti-science religious extremist base.

The "mainstream press" occasionally hints at global warming:

"O'Lenic said he was not quite ready to blame global warming for the soggy mayhem." 

From: 

Flood watch, transit woes continue as rains pound region 

By Anthony R. Wood and Jeremy Roebuck

INQUIRER STAFF WRITERS

Extreme weather from global warming affects every part of the USA.

Like many US residents I have relatives and friends in several states. My relatives in Colorado, Montana and Arizona have drought conditions most of the time with bouts of extreme precipitation and mudslides and/or deep snowfalls.

My relatives in Florida contend with the hurricanes, drought and deluges like we have here in Pennsylvania. Central USA already has the most extreme weather on the planet and it’s getting even more extreme. God help those people.

Heat waves, flooding and extreme snowfalls are becoming ordinary events here in the Mid-Atlantic States. The fire season out West has changed from a few weeks in the summer less than a decade ago to almost all year long in the last few years. 

“And the sky’s are not cloudy all day” doesn't fit at home on the range anymore. The sky is often overcast from a fire.

Texas pleads for help as fires sear state 

The state forest service is spending about $1.5 million a day to fight the blazes, officials say. Budget cuts and lax preventive measures are contributing factors. 

By Ashley Powers and Molly Hennessy-Fiske, Los Angeles Times 

September 7, 2011, 5:23 p.m.

A 200 foot tall wall of fire coming toward your home has got to be more frightening than the arsons, hurricanes and floods we have dealt with in Coatesville. I have relatives and friends out West that live with the constant threat of forest fires. I’m not really sure how my friends in Bastrop, TX are doing. On Monday their home was still there.

The strong aversion the ordinary press and especially TV news of linking extreme weather with global warming is beginning to crack. Someday soon even the relentless anti-science propaganda from the Koch Brothers and fossil energy cartels will be swept away by the harsh reality of global warming.   

When that happens and the destructive path we are on sinks in; a public sense of general panic will bring down the science deniers and sweep away their Republican Party brokers. Hopefully, that will happen very soon; before it really is too late. 

No jobs for young white males so why do people tell young black females to get a job?

There are no jobs or virtually no jobs for young middle class white males just out of college so why does anyone think a middle class young black woman or young black man has a chance of getting a job?

There is a growing industry driven by global warming and peak fossil fuel but that’s another post.

Teaching jobs are one of the last holdouts of middle class employment; mostly because they are still union jobs. We tell people to get an education and get a good job while the Republicans all across the nation are relentlessly destroying middle class jobs such as education jobs to get at unions.

If we keep letting them do it; once the Republicans are done their education pogroms the only jobs left will be in the service industry to serve the .01%; as in "Victorian Service Industry" - Servants and Housemaids.

So what do we tell the students in the Coatesville schools; get a good education and you can work as a maid or care for horses on one of our Chester County fox hunting estates?

Or is the best though extremely dangerous profession available to them the illegal drug business?

That IS the way we are headed but it doesn’t have to happen that way.

For starters please stop voting Republican.

Republican Party is a quasi-totalitarian religious cult. It’s not the country club Party of Eisenhower anymore:

  "Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid." (President Eisenhower, writing to his brother Edgar in 1954.)

Second, legalize all drugs starting with the easy one; marijuana.

Prohibition of Alcohol gave birth to worldwide organized crime and Prohibition of Narcotic Drugs is continuing the growth of worldwide organized crime. We keep fighting the “War on Drugs” and the drug dealers and arms dealers keep winning.

If drugs were legal there the local economy of Chester County like car dealers, retail stores and restaurants would take a hit but there would be less “hits” with bullets.

SEE:

MONDAY, AUGUST 1, 2011

The political climate is ripe to END THE WAR ON DRUGS

This is the best description of the modern Republican Party that I have seen so far:

Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult 

Saturday 3 September 2011 

by: Mike Lofgren, Truthout | News Analysis 

Barbara Stanwyck: "We're both rotten!" 

Fred MacMurray: "Yeah - only you're a little more rotten." -"Double Indemnity" (1944) 

Those lines of dialogue from a classic film noir sum up the state of the two political parties in contemporary America. Both parties are rotten - how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election? Both parties are captives to corporate loot. The main reason the Democrats' health care bill will be a budget buster once it fully phases in is the Democrats' rank capitulation to corporate interests - no single-payer system, in order to mollify the insurers; and no negotiation of drug prices, a craven surrender to Big Pharma. 

But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP. 

To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy. 

It was this cast of characters and the pernicious ideas they represent that impelled me to end a nearly 30-year career as a professional staff member on Capitol Hill. A couple of months ago, I retired; but I could see as early as last November that the Republican Party would use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine legislative procedure that has been used 87 times since the end of World War II, in order to concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would use that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the US and global economies as hostages. 

The debt ceiling extension is not the only example of this sort of political terrorism. Republicans were willing to lay off 4,000 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees, 70,000 private construction workers and let FAA safety inspectors work without pay, in fact, forcing them to pay for their own work-related travel - how prudent is that? - in order to strong arm some union-busting provisions into the FAA reauthorization. 

Everyone knows that in a hostage situation, the reckless and amoral actor has the negotiating upper hand over the cautious and responsible actor because the latter is actually concerned about the life of the hostage, while the former does not care. This fact, which ought to be obvious, has nevertheless caused confusion among the professional pundit class, which is mostly still stuck in the Bob Dole era in terms of its orientation. For instance, Ezra Klein wrote of his puzzlement over the fact that while House Republicans essentially won the debt ceiling fight, enough of them were sufficiently dissatisfied that they might still scuttle the deal. Of course they might - the attitude of many freshman Republicans to national default was "bring it on!" 

It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant. 

In his "Manual of Parliamentary Practice," Thomas Jefferson wrote that it is less important that every rule and custom of a legislature be absolutely justifiable in a theoretical sense, than that they should be generally acknowledged and honored by all parties. These include unwritten rules, customs and courtesies that lubricate the legislative machinery and keep governance a relatively civilized procedure. The US Senate has more complex procedural rules than any other legislative body in the world; many of these rules are contradictory, and on any given day, the Senate parliamentarian may issue a ruling that contradicts earlier rulings on analogous cases. 

The only thing that can keep the Senate functioning is collegiality and good faith. During periods of political consensus, for instance, the World War II and early post-war eras, the Senate was a "high functioning" institution: filibusters were rare and the body was legislatively productive. Now, one can no more picture the current Senate producing the original Medicare Act than the old Supreme Soviet having legislated the Bill of Rights. 

Far from being a rarity, virtually every bill, every nominee for Senate confirmation and every routine procedural motion is now subject to a Republican filibuster. Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself. 

John P. Judis sums up the modern GOP this way:"Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority. It is the party of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but also of the government shutdown in 1995 and the impeachment trial of 1999. If there is an earlier American precedent for today's Republican Party, it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to and who later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery." 

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner…. 

READ THE WHOLE POST on truthout AT: 

Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult

The possibility of a successful terrorist attack in NYC is greatly reduced.Updated/Revised

If you are on the streets of NYC you are on camera. The NYPD helicopter in the video below can pick out the heat signature of a squirrel in Central Park or a lit cigarette from a mile away:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The incompetent arrogance of the Bush Administration kept multiple intelligence of the impending terrorist attacks from reaching anyone that could deal with it.

NYC doesn’t rely on Feds. 

NYPD Counterterrorism and Intelligence Units have taken control of security and intelligence for the City of New York

“It became obvious that we couldn’t rely on the Federal Government to protect this city.” Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly.

 There is a state of the art one hundred million dollar command center in lower Manhattan.

The NYPD Intelligence Officers are embedded into 11 foreign police departments. Terrorist activity around the world is monitored by NYPD Intelligence Officers on the scene.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

See Day of Destruction Decade of War MSNBC

Don Pulver at the Coatesville City Council Meeting of August 23, 2011

I love them all but I don’t trust the Coatesville City Council as much as I trust Don Pulver.

Not because the Council members are un-trustworthy but because they have a track record of un-intended mistakes that can foul up the plans of both the City and developers and businesses interested in investing here. Such as coming close to losing the Marriott Hotel last November, see: 

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 2010 

Mr. Pulver, “It has to happen, now or never.”

The Oliver Tyrone Pulver Corporation is not some homebuilder who develops a 15 home subdivision and then dissolves the corporation 7 years later leaving commitments unfulfilled. Don Pulver is one of the top real estate developers in the nation and his word means something.

“Oliver Tyrone Pulver Corporation is a privately held commercial real estate development firm with a 40-year history of developing over 13 million square feet of first-class office buildings in major cities and suburbs. 

By selecting the most desirable locations and developing the highest quality buildings, Oliver Tyrone Pulver has established a strong track record of successful projects providing highly desirable office space for tenants and high returns for equity partners.” 

From: 

Tower Bridge-Unparalleled Record

A conventional stormwater retention basin is in place on the southwest side of the development right now. 

Ross Weiss, Pulver's attorney leads the presentation to the Coatesville City Council on August 23, 2011:

The plan that was approved: “The hotel’s on the right hand side and the hotel’s on the left hand side, but in-between the two structures was a parking structure. So in effect what we all would see when the project is finished was three structures. Since the project has been underway and it has been re-evaluated as is normally the course as the project proceeds, Dave Gibbons the engineer for the project… made a suggestion to Don and that is:
Would you consider moving some of the surface parking to the opposite side of the proposed office building.

And as a result of that we would not need to have a parking structure in between the two buildings…

What Dave came up with was to remove the parking structure keep the hotel and office buildings where they are proposed to be located but to put additional surface building on the opposite side of the proposed office building.

What was proposed to be where this new parking is going to go was the stormwater management. And Dave’s suggestion, which Don agreed with, was to put the stormwater management under the parking. That would enable the surface parking to go on top of where the stormwater management was supposed to be and it would enable us to remove the necessity for a structure that is no longer needed. The parking would still meet all the City’s requirements for the amount of parking necessary for both the office building and for the hotel…

The Planning Commission unanimously recommended to you the City Council that you approve the revised plan to replace the parking structure with all surface parking.

We’re not here tonight to have the plan approved…

What we have to do next is go back take a look at the documents that were executed as part of the land development project and make amendments to the documents consistent with the revisions to the plan…

How important is this to the project:

 It’s very important; as Don explained to the Planning Commission when we were here a couple weeks ago, the project is scheduled to be complete in March of next year. That’s not very far from now.

But in order to stay on track the parking has to go from what was proposed to be temporary parking until the office building was to be constructed and the structured parking constructed to now be permanent parking.

We don’t need all of the surface parking in order to satisfy the requirements of the hotel. The requirements of the hotel will primarily be satisfied with the parking in between and not with the parking on the other side of the new office building.

But in order to stay on track and get the construction done in the sequence that is necessary, what is proposed to be temporary parking under the approved plan pending the construction of the office building will now become permanent parking. And that construction has to commence by October or November.

Therefore we are respectfully requesting that City Council act as quickly as is reasonably possible to get the agreements revised which we will work on with John to get the plan approved so that we don’t miss any time and jeopardize the March opening…

This is just idle speculation: 

The presentation concerning the changes in the plans for the hotel, office and restaurant took 8 minutes and 37 seconds. A fairly heated discussion over access to the City’s land on the other side of the Brandywine between Ed Simpson and Oliver Tyrone Pulver Corporation took 10 minutes and 28 seconds.  

It’s good to secure access to the City’s property across the Brandywine but I think Don Pulver fully intends to see that it happens. It’s just that there was a lot of emotion generated over access to what most people think is going to be undeveloped open space parkland. Is access to a walking trail park worth losing the income from the hotel?

I believe the seventy five acres mentioned is the land Coatesville originally intended for the golf course. 

I’m just wondering if all the time that the City of Coatesville was trying to make a golf course on those seventy five acres and there was a hue and cry to “Save the Saha Farm”, could some persons have had other intentions besides recreation for those seventy five acres?

LISTEN HERE:

Coatesville City Council member Ed Simpson, “Originally there was supposed to be an access for the City, a right of way access to the property on the other side of the Brandywine.  Since you’re making all these revisions is there any way you could incorporate that into the final plan so that we know where the actual right of way will be?

Mr. Weiss, “The facts have not changed as to that access to your parkland on the other side of the Brandywine. What we’re doing will not interfere with do violence to or change that ultimate action.

Mr. Simpson, “I personally would like to see it included in this next revision. So it’s finalized.”

Don Pulver, “I might add that there are plans to build a restaurant beyond this parking lot. The new parking lot is where the drainage basin was located. And it will be underneath the parking lot as a matter of fact. However, we still have to finish our plans for the restaurant and we haven’t done that yet. We’ve been busy doing these other things so until we do that we don’t know the disposition of that access way.”

Mr. Simpson, “Well then to me it would make more sense to just keep the three story parking garage so that you have room for the restaurant but now you’ll have room for our access.

Don Pulver, “Yes but, the garage was built because we were hemmed in by the drainage issues. Now that we determined that we can put the drainage underground; we really can’t afford the garage is what it comes down to. It’s a very expensive building; it costs like 2 and a half to three million dollars to build it.

 Ed Simpson, “Wasn’t that fully funded public money?”

Don Pulver, “No.”

Ed Simpson, “O, I thought you had all the money in place.”

Don Pulver, “We had the money way back when we had the buildings on both sides of the bypass. But when we got pushed together everything changed and all the numbers got shoved around.”

Ed Simpson, “So at this point you can’t show us a final of where the access will be?”

Don Pulver, “No we can’t.”

Ed Simpson, “OK…

Councilperson Jarrell Brazzle, “Well, we’re guaranteed to have one.”

“Yes”

Because there’s one on the plans now…”

Ed Simpson, “Now all I’m asking for is prior to us giving any sort of yes or no. We need an assurance from you that there’s going to be an access. Whether it’s in writing saying yes you will have an access, here’s where it should go…

Mr. Weiss, “The right of way that was agreed upon when the final plan was approved is not being changed. There is an easement that the City has that gives the right to have that access and to have that right of way…

It’s a separate easement that provides for that access. We’re not doing anything to Change that, but we’re just not at a point in the further development to be able to identify specifically how that connection issue will be made…

But this all was resolved last November and I appreciate you’re concern for that connection but it’s not Don Pulver’s intent to not make that connection available. It just has to have that flexibility. It’s a balancing act of the connection vs. the development of the site…

City Solicitor John Carnes, “The understanding was that at some point, and I think you’re referencing this, there was some flexibility and we would address it possibly later. I think Mr. Simpson is kind of wondering, can we address it now?”

Mr. Weiss, “And I think Don’s answer is that we can’t. But I’m certain that if he could he would want to do it. Because he said that he’ll do it. But right now for the same reason that we had to ask you to approve the plan when it was approved 8 to 10 months ago, that same reason applies now. And that is there is too much uncertainty as to the development to the balance of the site. And I don’t think the city would want to jeopardize the restaurant, the office building and whatever else can be done, for the trail.  Now that’s not to say there won’t be a trail and there won’t be a connection but it just is we’re trying…

Mr. Simpson, “It’s more than just a trail, Mr. Weiss; there’s seventy five acres over there that could be developed, seventy five acres.

Mr. Weiss, “And you will have access to it.

Mr. Simpson, “And that’s all I’m asking for. Is there some way we can incorporate it into this agreement that is binding, but you’re asking not to make changes where you’ve already committed to a three story building a three story garage; you’ve committed to it. We bought off on it, we approved it. Now you want to make changes, all I’m asking for is to protect the City’s interests on seventy five acres that we own on the other side of the Brandywine that we were promised access to continue to make sure that we have an access and it is something that we can get in and out of. You can’t just say alright we’re going to give you this property at the end. And then we find out that we can’t get access off RT 82 into it. It does us no good. I mean all we want to do is get back to the original agreement where we got access over to that property, which is seventy five acres. It’s more than just a trail, OK as long as everybody is aware of that. There’s more up there than just a trail.

Mr. Weiss, “On our property it’s a trail and a bridge and we agreed on how wide the bridge would be.  The question is how do you go through the property to get to the bridge. And in order to secure the develop-ability of the balance of the site. Knowing what lenders and investors will look at and get concerned about. That was a reason that we requested it would be resolved. That it would be resolved in the future once we knew where the balance of those buildings was going to go. It will be resolved it’s just that we can’t do it right now.

And I think that on balance, I would hope that Council would agree that the important thing is to keep this project moving. These are extraordinary economic times there’re very few places in this area at all that has anything being built. And we’re fortunate that this project is moving forward in Coatesville. It just is that certain things have to happen for it to occur.

Mr. Simpson, “And I appreciate your concerns but you have to appreciate where we are coming from…

We don’t want to be rushed into something where five years from now that there’s no access and we have seventy five acres that we can’t do anything with. That somebody says, well you had access when they were going to do it and now you let them do this, this, this and this and now we don’t have access. So they’re going to come back on us.  We’re just trying to make sure that we have future access to that property which was agreed upon when all of this started how many years ago? That was the key. You have to admit that access to that property was very important part of the overall success of this total project.

Don Pulver, “Yep”

Mr. Simpson, “We might be cutting off our noses to spite our face if we don’t get that set right now.

Don Pulver, “Well we have the hotel to finish. We have an office building to get built. And the office building is very important because it’s going to create the majority of the jobs here; on the order of two hundred fifty to three hundred in the building itself in addition to the hotel. And then the restaurant is critical to both of those. So they all go together and they all have to get built. That’s all I can say.

Mr. Simpson, “Right and whereas I’m looking at it is if we stay with the three story parking garage, put the restaurant next to it…”

Mr. Pulver, “No, that doesn’t solve the problem. You still have to build the parking, you know, you have to build the drainage basin.”

Mr. Simpson, “OK”

Mr. Weiss, “ All we’re doing is replacing a basin with a parking with surface parking with the basin underneath but the ground is still disturbed and the ground will still be utilized. By moving the parking there we’re not taking anything away in terms of what’s available for use.  

Listen here:

Also see: 

Developer drops garage from Marriott hotel plan 

Published: Thursday, September 01, 2011 

By ERIC S. SMITH 

esmith@dailylocal.com

There is a stormwater infiltration basin under the “Main Street at Exton” mall. Villanova University also has a parking garage with a stormwater retention basin under it. I made a post on the Riverseekerblog concerning urban stormwater solutions:

 Some Urban Stormwater Solutions

I can still remember Ross Kershey saying to buy things during a recession.

That was in American History Class at Coatesville’s Scott High School in the 1960s. 

He said something like buy things of value, like real estate, in a recession when the prices are down, if you can.

Well maybe those of us in that class can advise our children or grandchildren to take Mr. Kerhey’s advice.

Miller-McCune 

 BUSINESS & ECONOMICS 

September 2, 2011 

Old Money Caught in the Great Redistribution 

How the recession transfers wealth from the old to the young. 

By Melinda Burns

Also check this out: 

from the English Updates blog:

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Too Good to Miss

Downingtown, PA video: “Dtown”

John Hutelmyer made a short video about Downingtown, PA:

John Hutelmyer’s video of the Coatesville Classic Bike Race is here:

WEDNESDAY, JULY 6, 2011

COATESVILLE CLASSIC VIDEO