Yahoo News

OTTAWA (Reuters) – U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered a rare public rebuke to close ally Canada on Monday, criticizing it for excluding key nations from a meeting to discuss the resource-rich Arctic.

Good. I really don't know anything about the issue. Sec. Clinton may be wrong, but I bet it felt so right.

Rebuke Canada. Daily.

I bet Canada was silent.

Head hung low.

Its ears turned red in shame.

As red as the marijuana leaf they brazenly have on their flag.

Obama Stuff

Lost in the big debate over healthcare reform, I have been noticing and meaning to note about some stuff Pres. Obama has been doing...like

Nuclear missile reduction with Russia (don't think we should disarm completely but paring it down is fine.)

Green lighting some nuke plants (which I thought should have been a big part of the stimulus - hell, we should have 100 of them pre-planned and approved for truly shovel ready action if we are to do stimuli at all...stimuli ha ha)

Green lighting some offshore oil drilling Is that part of his Obama = Bush plan? I dunno.

White House officials hope Wednesday's announcement will attract support from Republicans, who adopted a chant of "Drill, baby, drill" during 2008's presidential campaign.

Put this with the Afghan surge and I see some stuff I like.

Oh, and the Volcker rule which I think is great, but that is not law, so we will see how Congress can fuck that up.

Economic Convergence

Samson/Laquercraft a very large furniture manufacturer originally from Taiwan is opening a factory in Bangladesh. The reason they chose Bangladesh?

It will be Samson's first plant outside China. The company says it can fill some of its product needs at a lower expense in Bangladesh.

The 500,000-square-foot plant will be in the port city of Chittagong in southeast Bangladesh, along the northern coast of the Bay of Bengal. Company officials have been working on the project for about two years. Construction began in October and initial production is set for July.

The plant will produce a line of lower-medium to medium-priced solid and veneer casual dining sets for Samson's U.S. marketing companies, Legacy Classic and Lacquer Craft USA. The company isn't currently producing such sets in China that hit the price points it can achieve in Bangladesh, said Lacquer Craft President Mohamad Amini.

While China remains its main manufacturing hub, the company said it chose Bangladesh because of its lower-cost labor. Amini estimated that labor costs are about 40% of what they are in China.

Of course, they are bringing over Chinese managers and technicians to start the plant up, but that's not new as they did that when they moved to China, too. Laquercraft was one of the first Taiwanese factories to move to China to take advantage of lower labor costs there.

Since furniture is a relatively new industry to Bangladesh, it will take time to train workers and also to get the supply chain in place, Amini said. This includes anything from finish to hardware suppliers.

"There is no furniture presence there," he said, adding that the lack of a furniture infrastructure reminds him of China 15 years ago. "Although we are very optimistic about what we can do there, we will have our share of challenges. But we have done this in China so we know what to do to accomplish our task."

Amini said a team of supervisors, technicians and engineers from China will help get the plant running and train workers.

Prediction: In 20 years, it will be Bangladeshi supervisors, technicians and engineers flying into Somalia to set up the next factory.

Health Care Costs

Assume: The US healthcare system is more expensive than other systems in other countries, some of which have government healthcare.

Does this mean that governments can deliver products or services at cheaper prices than the "free market" system?

In other words, would you place a bet that a US government agency could compete on quality, price, and timeliness with Walmart in delivering products, or Supercuts for haircuts? Or, if you think healthcare is more like a sports car than a T-shirt - could they beat Mazda, Porsche, etc.?

I doubt anyone would take that bet - even assuming some tax payer subsidy. If Bill Gates wanted to provide a free t-shirt to every American, would you advise him to talk to Wal Mart or the Department of Defense for the best deals?

So, either healthcare is very different from everything else in the world, where free enterprise usually does much better than government, or, maybe there is something "wrong" with the "free market" system in US healthcare.

It could be the way its set up. It could be the rest of the world free-riding on our drug prices. It could be mandates. Whatever. The US healthcare market is huge - you would think someone would want to be the WalMart of this market - providing cheap care for the masses. Actually, they are opening clinics with nurse practitioners, so maybe Wal Mart wants to be the Wal Mart of healthcare.

Note, this has nothing to do with the uninsured, or paying for poor folks medicine. That's just a money question. A very important money question, true. (I think the main battle there is where is the cut-off for subsidy. I may be willing to pay for the hard-working family that makes 20,000 a year. I am not so sure about paying for the same family if they make 40,000.)

But why the hell are our costs higher than other countries? That seems strange. Even if we went single payer tomorrow, I'd like to know why we are paying so much in the first place.

First step, I'd like to see some things tested to see if they are the problem...for example - mandates. Set up a bare bones plan and let many companies offer that insurance, see if it lowers costs. Another thing, if the rest of the world squeezes prices and the medical companies make up for it in the USA, well, that's not going to be fixed by going socialist (or maybe it would be if the companies then had to average their pricing out.) Require global pricing and re-importation for all products - we should not pay more for an MRI machine than Japan does, or buy drugs for more than the Canucks pay.

I think if you want to bend the cost curve - you need to test some of these ideas out. Informed decisions are better than guess work*. I would personally imagine that the private sector could beat the pants off the government, even maybe when it had monopoly bargaining power, taking in consideration price, quality, and timeliness.

Now, if I am wrong, bring on the gubmint, but let's not do that as first step and regret it later....remember if America can have such a different cost in the "free market" it may have the same trouble when its gubmint care.

*Since Obamacare has passed, we should see what really happens when the system is tweaked -even if you oppose Obamacare, it would be useful to see what the hell actually happens. I don't think anyone really knows.

Red Meat

This 60 Minutes story has Red Meat for everybody.

In the video, the man driving the car is Gregg Bergersen. He's a civilian analyst at the Pentagon with one of the nation's highest security clearances. His companion is Tai Shen Kuo, a spy for the People's Republic of China.

Kuo was born in Taiwan, but he's a naturalized American citizen who owns a number of businesses in Louisiana; Bergersen worked at the Pentagon's Defense Security Cooperation Agency which manages weapons sales to U.S. allies.

And the Taiwanese wonder why we won't sell them the most advanced military technology...and our dude was an idiot for falling for a false-flag operation. (Taiwanese spying for China said he was really spying for Taiwan...)

Bergersen knew a secret the Chinese desperately wanted to know: what kind of weapons America was planning to sell to Taiwan, the rebellious Chinese island that mainland China wants to reclaim.

CBS must really want to keep their Beijing office open and think that saying this makes up for the story on their spies. Hmmm, maybe Beijing doesn't care about their espionage being revealed but goddamn you better call Taiwan a rebellious province of China!