An important correction: Someone familiar with Vermont electric utilities has informed me that I was wrong and made a substantial error in this diary.IBM did not receive public funds from the $69 million smart grid stimulus grants awarded to the consortium of VELCO and Vermont’s electric distribution utilities to fund statewide smart grid investments. Sorry for my mistake and confusion with this.

BP

IBM Vermont was in the newspaper Sunday. No, it wasn’t for threatening to leave the state but for their use of smart grid style technology. The technology is impressive, the investment impressive and the savings for IBM will be real. Also mentioned, but almost lost in the jumbled-up Burlington Free Press article is the fact this is funded in part by a $69million smart grid stimulus grant from the Dept. of Energy. Our tax dollars at work!

An ethos of common purpose helped secure Vermont's $69 million smart-grid stimulus grant from the U.S. Department of Energy in 2009, said IBM Senior Engineer Jeff Chapman.

"We're all paying a part of that $69 million, and we all want that return to be good," he said. "We want tangible results."

Although IBM’s almost ritualized “we could leave Vermont at the drop of a hat” threat is not mentioned directly it lies near the surface. The make or break nature of saving electric power costs is made clear. We are told complacence [regarding energy savings] would kill the plant's price point and if you don’t get that hint they remind "We compete head-on with Asia," (bags are packed!)

I am all for government spending on practical energy programs. Saving Vermont jobs is also laudable if this helps accomplish that. However, in these tight budgetary times a little more than a half mumbled thanks from IBM for forking over $69 million in taxpayer money might be worth their effort.  

Now let’s go cut some food stamp benefits, entitlement programs and balance that ole budget so we keep taxes low.  

Golf is in the headlines and in the deep thoughts of one Vermont Tiger. On what should have been a carefree charity golf tournament at the local country club one golf playing Vermont Tiger-blogger was suddenly seized by fear of a tax. It seems that “while riding from tee to tee,” he noticed that 16 of the 19 event sponsors were financial firms. Storm clouds of worry over burdensome regulations and related horrors rapidly formed. Troubling imaginary scenarios appeared on the horizon.

This begs the question: If these firms, and their owners, are the ones that continue to step forward to support their communities, even in a truly lousy economy, why would Vermont work so aggressively to penalize their success through onerous taxation, burdensome regulation, and constant muckraking?

More importantly, to what extent does every additional dollar of taxation, or page of regulation reduce their ability to make important community donations? How many actual cents of that taxation comes back directly to our communities after it has worked its way through the Vermont government bureaucracy?

Poor man, a good ride from tee to tee spoiled by fevered concerns. Concerns of constant muckraking? Can this chronic whining perhaps reach a peak?

Nationally at least the call may be going out to stop the whining. None other than Former Bush speechwriter David Frum went so far recently as to chide whining Wall Streeters and this week The Washington Post writes that mega level executive pay is reaching  unexpected places. Frum said this:

By the numbers, you may wonder what the rich have to complain about. Corporate profits are up, and the S&P 500 has surpassed 2008 levels. President Obama has signed a renewal of the Bush tax cuts. …Millions of Americans have lost jobs, homes, and savings in a financial crisis and recession caused by the recklessness and incompetence of some of this country’s most eminent and best-compensated financiers.

Maybe awareness of the growing gap between the very wealthy and the un-wealthy is at last drawing some needed attention. One indicator of economic inequality puts the US behind Cameroon and Ivory Coast and just ahead of Uganda and Jamaica. The Washington Post says that as the income gap widens it isn’t just executives in Wall Street firms that are getting rich but lesser ones from companies in even relatively mundane fields such as the milk business.  

Over the period from the ’70s until today, while pay for Dean Foods chief executives was rising 10 times over, wages for the unionized workers actually declined slightly. The hourly wage rate for the people who process, pasteurize and package the milk at the company’s dairies declined by 9 percent in real terms, according to union contract records.

 New DNC Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) made remarks today at the Netroots Nation gathering praising Howard Dean’s tenure as DNC Chairman.

“Over the past few years, we’ve maintained a strong democratic organization staffed in all 50 states thanks to the 50-state strategy put in place by Howard Dean,” Wasserman Schultz said. “And I can tell you that I am looking forward to sitting down with Chairman Dean next week so I can pick his brains clean on what he thinks that we should be doing to continue the fight to make sure that we can elect progressives all across the country.”

  I would bet Howard’s brain, if requested has been available for picking for the past two years or more. Better late than never but wonder if this isn’t an effort at getting all the ducks in a row. I understand there is an election coming up.    

 Might there be a video arms race of sorts underway?    

A free trial offer by Taser has enabled Burlington police to begin testing shoulder mounted video devices that can, at their discretion record incidents and encounters. It’s just another tool Taser makes to protect us. So relax. The Free Press reporter notes at the start of the article that one possible use

[officers]…can use the tiny camera mounted on his shoulder to record his interactions with drunks and loiterers along Burlington’s Marketplace.

At least he sounds convinced that only those already guilty of something will be videoed.  

The camera’s default mode continuously captures and then overwrites 30 second loops of video. At any time, an officer can either turn off the camera or start recording video.

Usage policy advises sensibly that:

Officers “will try to avoid recording videos” of naked people, or in places where people would reasonably expect privacy

and a nod is given to respect First Amendment rights

“unless an obvious violation of criminal law is occurring, or if the officer is in the same vicinity for other legitimate law enforcement purposes.”

   Yup, it’s still going on.  

Water, water everywhere and hardly a drop not contaminated. Tepco workers still struggling with damaged reactor cores must inject water to keep them cool but, this results in radioactive water leaking into basement-levels of the damaged plants. Also over 15 million gallons of water that was pumped and sprayed over the plants during the height of the emergency must be cleaned-up. An engineer for the Union of Concerned Scientists says Tepco’s problem  “resembles a board game with 16 squares and one empty spot,”    

The next step coming in two weeks called “…better than nothing”  

A potential turning point comes roughly two weeks from now, when Tepco plans to begin a treatment process in which water is sucked from the basement rooms and fed into a special tank, then treated with chemicals that eliminate its radioactivity. The process creates a byproduct of radioactive sludge, which is generally mixed with bitumen, poured into drums, then sealed and buried. The water itself can either be cycled back into reactors or discarded into the ocean.  

The treatment system is being set up by Areva, a French company that uses the technology at its La Hague nuclear reprocessing plant, off the Normandy coast. Since 1997, Greenpeace — after taking water samples from La Hague’s discharge pipe — has made repeated claims that the supposedly decontaminated water in fact contains radioactivity levels above the regulatory limit.    

The process “is not 100 percent, but it’s better than nothing,” David Lochbaum [Union of Concerned Scientists] said. “The alternative: you let the water simply evaporate and radioactivity carries to all parts far and wide.”  

The future of the site: Making nuclear lemonade?  

One plan recently reported under consideration would be convert Fukushima Dai-Ichi into a nuclear waste storage site. This means permanently storing the nuclear waste at the site of the damaged reactors.  

The Atomic Energy Society of Japan is studying the proposal, which would cost tens of billions of dollars, Muneo Morokuzu, a professor of energy and environmental public policy at the University of Tokyo, said in an interview yesterday. The society makes policy recommendations to the government.  “We are involved in intense talks on the cleanup of the Dai-Ichi plant and construction of nuclear waste storage facilities at the site is one option,” said Morokuzu.

Here is an updated version of a non-partisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities chart.

Notice that in addition to the Bush tax cuts, two wars plays no small roll in this scenario.

Expiration date:

…simply letting the Bush tax cuts expire on schedule (or paying for any portions that policymakers decide to extend) would stabilize the debt-to-GDP ratio for the next decade.   While we’d have to do much more to keep the debt stable over the longer run, that would be a huge accomplishment.

  About two short months after winning re-election as auditor last November Tom Salmon thanked his team, said it was an honor to serve with them and announced he would not seek re-election.  

He had appeared to have zeroed in on a run for the US Senate( he purchased  salmonforussenate.com domain name )

On  Politico.com he was quoted about the prospects of  a U S Senate run against Bernie Sanders, he said:

"Right now, I am 65 percent in. When I hit 75 percent it will commence exploratory.

Slate.com took notice of this and what they called his incomprehensible quote and declare our man Salmon’s senate quest likely to be The most doomed campaign of 2012

All that could be water over the dam for Salmon. Now just a few months later and obviously no longer “65% in”; he offhandedly changes course.  The Vermont Press Bureau reports:

Salmon said there’s a 30-percent chance he takes on Sanders and a 20-percent chance he challenges Shumlin.Also under consideration for the Bellows Falls native: defending his incumbency in the auditor’s office (“If someone from the Progressive Party masquerading as a Democrat runs for the auditor’s office and looks like a favorite, I can’t let that happen to my office”); or some kind of nonpolitical endeavor.

 I have no special plans today but at least it’s not supposed to rain. Heard something or other about the rapture happening today so I found a partial list here with a sampling of 23 times the world was supposed to end but as we know didn’t.

Surprisingly four are predictions from the same group, The Millerites in the early 1800’s kept reworking and fine tuning the date, however perhaps to their disappointment or even relief the end failed to happen. They ultimately disbanded many becoming Seventh Day Adventists.    

In Czarist Russia 1900 one horribly aggressive group, The Brothers and Sisters of the Red Death believing the end was near had 100 members sacrifice themselves before authorities intervened. This group also forbade marriage but allowed intercourse if the sinners immediately suffocated themselves with a large red cushion.  

Here is one more recent example that apparently had no serious consequences or did it?  

OCTOBER 23, 1976—GEORGE KING One day in 1954, taxi driver George King was drying dishes in his Maida Vale flat in London when he suddenly received a message from Mars that the world would end twenty-two years hence.

Fortunately, King and his followers, organized as the Aetherius Society, were able to avert the catastrophe by concentrating 700 hours of prayer energy into a prayer book and releasing it in forty-eight minutes on the appointed day.

August 2006 a Federal Judge ordered Unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s personal belongings from his wilderness cabin auctioned off online in what he stipulated as "reasonably advertised Internet auction.” After years of challenges in court by lawyers for Kaczynski the online auction will start this week. Items available to own will be

…his diploma from Harvard University, where he enrolled at 16, and his master’s and doctorate degrees from the University of Michigan. Unabomb44 shows a photo of a clean-cut Kaczynski standing proudly in a forest. Another snapshot captures Kaczynski with his father and brother, David, who later turned him in to the FBI.

But there are also the bow and arrows he used to hunt as he withdrew from society. There are axes and other tools he fashioned himself. Mostly there are papers — 20,000 pages of loose-leaf and notebooks filled with his slanting cursive that describe what he saw as a broken structure of power that Kaczynski took it upon himself to fix.

For those who may not recall, between 1978 and 1995 Unabomber Kaczynski injured 23 and killed three people he was captured in 1996. Millions of dollars in court ordered victim restitution is owed by him and this week’s auction proceeds will go toward that debt after 10% for the auction house. No estimate of the value was offered but a US Marshal observed the ironic revenge aspect of the online auction“We will use the technology that Kaczynski railed against in his various manifestos to sell artifacts of his life”.

Who buys this stuff? It is anticipated that the manuscripts (with all references to victims removed) might be purchased by museums or universities.

Wonder if there isn’t a different way to fund compensation for victims of violent crime other than monetizing a famous madmen’s ephemeral as trophies and possible long term investments.