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BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Burma’s Suu Kyi ‘to face trial’
Burma’s Suu Kyi ‘to face trial’
Burmese pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi is to face trial for breaching the conditions of her detention under house arrest, her lawyer has said.
Ms Suu Kyi will stand trial on 18 May, the lawyer, Hla Myo Myint, said.
She was taken to a prison from her home in Rangoon, where she has spent most of the past 19 years, to hear the charges.
A US man whose uninvited visit to her home led to the charges, will also be tried on immigration and security offences, the lawyer added.
“ If somebody shows up at her door step in violation of Burmese law she can not be held responsible for it ”
Lawyer Jared GenserThe American man, John Yettaw, was arrested after swimming across a lake to her house and staying there secretly for two days.
The charges are yet to be confirmed by the government.
But it looks as though this is a device to keep her detained until elections due in 2010 which the generals think will give them some legitimacy, says BBC South-East Asia correspondent Jonathan Head.
Another of her lawyers said they would contest the charge.
“The charge is going to be violating the conditions of her house arrest and what her lawyer is going to argue is that of course that’s ridiculous because, yes under the terms of her arrest she cannot invite people to visit her but she of course did not invite this person to visit her,” Jared Genser told the BBC.
“If somebody shows up at her door step in violation of Burmese law she can not be held responsible for it.”
Security stepped up
A spokesman for her National League for Democracy (NLD), Nyan Win said he had been informed of the plan to try Ms Suu Kyi and two women who live with her by her lawyer, who visited Ms Suu Kyi in her off-limits house on Wednesday.
She was driven in a police convoy from her house to the prison, eyewitnesses said.
Reports say security has been stepped up at the Insein prison.
The Nobel Peace laureate has been under house arrest for much of the past 19 years.
The latest detention began in May 2003, after clashes between opposition activists and supporters of Burma’s (Myanmar) military government.
The house arrest was extended last year – a move which analysts say is illegal even under the junta’s own legal limits.
It is now due to expire at the end of May.
Earlier this month, the military government rejected an appeal for the 63-year-old to be freed, despite NLD claims that she was suffering from low blood pressure and dehydration.
Ms Suu Kyi was detained after the NLD’s victory in a general election in 1990. Burma’s junta refused to allow the party to assume power.
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Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/8049187.stmPublished: 2009/05/14 05:54:41 GMT
© BBC MMIX
Legal Defaulters:
Sri Lanka state enterprises to get tax write-off: report
Apr 13, 2009 (LBO) – Sri Lanka’s pampered state-enterprises, often overstaffed, and usually distinguished with poor customer service, are to get tax-write offs, a media report said, as the private sector is squeezed by yet new taxes.
State institutions that will qualify for the tax write-off will include public corporations, government-owned business undertakings, ministries, and departments, The Sunday Times newspaper said.
“Some of the institutions borrow money from the Treasury to pay taxes to the government as there is no law to write-off their default taxes,” the newspaper said quoting an unnamed revenue official.
Sri Lanka’s bloated government, which has become an unaffordable burden on the poor, frequently uses people’s money to make up for the mis-management of state enterprises.
Mihin Lanka, a state-run budget airline, has become the flagship white elephant in recent times attracting widespread criticism as it burned up billions of rupees and left bad debts with state banks and other entities to be re-paid by people’s money.
State enterprises are usually stuffed with political henchmen while vocal unions and a powerful political philosophy that glorifies state intervention prevent their re-structuring or privatization to reduce the burden on the people.
“State institutions dependent on government funding to meet their tax liabilities will qualify to have certain taxes in default for over two or more years written off, under new legislation to be approved by Parliament soon,” The Sunday Times newspaper said.
State-run Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation which has borrowed 150 million rupees from the Treasury will qualify for relief under the Default Taxes (Special Provisions) Bill presented to parliament this week, The Sunday Times newspaper said.
While a state broadcaster is getting Treasury handouts Sri Lanka’s private television broadcasters had been slapped with crippling new taxes in recent years on their content.
“An advisory committee, headed by a retired judge of the Supreme Court, the Court of Appeal or the High Court, will be appointed under the new law,” the newspaper said.
“The committee will be consulted on any tax write-off by the Commissioner General of Inland Revenue.”
The Commissioner General of Inland Revenue will also start a special default tax recovery unit. The unit is expected to come up with a report in six month identifying taxes in default.
Also getting tax-write off would be co-operative societies registered under the Co-operative Societies Law including Co-operative Rural Banks.
Sri Lanka’s consumer affairs minister Bandula Gunewardene told reporters last week that under the current economic framework a ‘true open economy’ has come to the country where state enterprises compete with the private sector.
He said LakSathosa, a state-run retailer has opened 103 shops and was operating without taxes and the co-operative movement was given new life and was also operating without paying taxes.
People in Sri Lanka rarely question why some enterprises operating with political or state backing are allowed to operate tax free with capital also given interest free by the Treasury from taxes charged from other people.
In 2008, Sri Lanka’s revenues fell 95 billion rupees below target. Excessive state expenditure is usually made up by borrowings or printed money from the central bank, which results in high inflation or loss of foreign reserves.
Though Sri Lanka is nominally a functioning democracy where everyone is equal, the salaries and pensions of state workers, including politicians, are tax free.
The pensions of even the least paid private sector worker is taxed via a state-run compulsory savings scheme, the Employees Provident Fund, which is increasingly coming under fire for its lack of independent management.
An attempt to give an amnesty to private tax payers however came under heavy fire from politicians a few years ago.
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Violence Silences Voices of Sri Lankan Journalists – NYTimes.com
April 5, 2009
By SETH MYDANS
RATMALANA, Sri Lanka — A blue plastic bag sits crumpled on the floor, easy to overlook, in the office of Lal Wickramatunga, the managing editor of The Sunday Leader.
Inside the bag are the clothes and shoes of a dead man — the things his brother Lasantha, 52, was wearing on Jan. 8 when eight masked thugs on motorcycles smashed the window of his car and shot him to death.
“I keep them as an inspiration,” Mr. Wickramatunga said, “because if we don’t take what happened and make Sri Lanka a better place, then Lasantha will have died in vain.”
His brother was editor in chief of the newspaper and was one of at least eight journalists who have been killed in recent years in what appears to be a broad Sri Lankan government campaign to silence dissenting voices.
Many others have been kidnapped or assaulted, according to the reports of press monitoring agencies. Many have stopped writing or have capitulated in self-censorship. Dozens are under arrest, and dozens more have fled the country.
No one has been brought to trial for an attack on a journalist, the press monitoring agencies say.
The press advocacy group Reporters Without Borders ranked Sri Lanka 165th last year out of 173 countries in terms of press freedom — by far the lowest democracy on the list. It called Sri Lanka the fourth most dangerous country for journalists, after Iraq, Somalia and Pakistan.
Mr. Wickramatunga’s killing came two days after attackers blew up the control room of the country’s main independent television station, and two weeks before another newspaper editor was beaten in his car and fled the country.
His final article was about his own killing before it happened, an essay titled “And Then They Came for Me.” It ran the following Sunday in the newspaper, which is printed in this town on the southern outskirts of Colombo, the capital.
“Electronic and print-media institutions have been burnt, bombed, sealed and coerced,” he wrote. “Countless journalists have been harassed, threatened and killed. Read the rest of this entry »
Sri Lankan army ranks media freedom low priority | The Australian
Amos Roberts | March 23, 2009
Article from: The Australian
THE sign on the army spokesman’s wall rang the first alarm bells.
Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara had pinned his statement of faith to a map used to brief journalists visiting Sri Lanka: “It’s the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us the freedom of the press,” it began. It went on to say the soldier, not politicians, “ensures our right to Life, Freedom and the Pursuit of Happiness”.
I was recently in Sri Lanka to report on the final stages of a civil war that has been raging for a quarter of a century.
As I write, 200,000 civilians are caught between the Sri Lankan army and the Tamil Tigers.
Unfortunately, it became a story about the difficulty of reporting at all and, in the case of local journalists, about its perils.
For the foreign correspondent, everything in Sri Lanka begins and ends with the armed forces: where one can travel; what one can film; even to whom one can speak. And dealing with the military is like travelling through the looking glass, although a blunter analogy would be with George Orwell’s 1984.
They lie brazenly and the lies aren’t even credible.
The UN may tell you that at least 2000 civilians have been killed in fighting since January, but Sri Lanka’s Secretary of Defence, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, says there are none.
Absolutely none. “If you want to believe me, believe me, no civilian casualties.
“We have taken all the precautions to avoid civilian casualties … The world has to appreciate this, if somebody doesn’t appreciate this — bad luck,” he told me.
When I arrived in Colombo I knew it would be impossible to access the battleground, but I hadn’t appreciated how much of the country had become a no-go zone for journalists.
Without special permission from the Ministry of Defence, you can’t even visit Vavuniya, a town in the north where civilians fleeing the conflict are being brought and which has never been in rebel hands.
The army also told me I couldn’t visit wounded civilians in the eastern town of Trincomalee, “because that’s the way we want it. Simple answer.” A visiting crew from Al Jazeera complained about travelling around Sri Lanka only to film soldiers putting their hands over the camera lens.
Eventually, the army invited about 50 frustrated reporters on a day trip to one of the “welfare villages” where displaced Tamil civilians are being settled outside Vavuniya.
Although it’s surrounded by razor wire and soldiers prevent anyone from entering or leaving, the army would have you believe that no one is actually being detained. We were told we could wander freely and speak to whomever we liked.
But soldiers wandered with us and some people said they’d been instructed not to speak to the foreigners.
I did get permission to travel to Jaffna after I told the Defence Secretary I wanted to interview a government minister there. In addition to a permit from the Ministry of Defence, I required authorisation for every piece of equipment I carried, right down to my AA batteries.
It takes a full day to get there — an hour’s flying time and a seven-hour security nightmare. Air force personnel search every passenger and tear apart every piece of luggage. They were particularly suspicious of my swimming goggles. I was interviewed and photographed by what appeared to be military intelligence. I arrived in Jaffna on a bus with curtains drawn across the windows — and was reprimanded for peeking.
But if it’s difficult to report in Sri Lanka as a foreigner, it can be deadly for the locals — especially if you’re brave enough Read the rest of this entry »
Polish newspaper: Israeli security rude, aggressive toward residents
Haaretz – Israel News
Last update – 04:33 24/05/2007
By Amiram Barkat, Haaretz Correspondent
The Krakow city council is looking into the behavior of Israeli security guards who accompany Israeli youth groups to Poland, Polish media have reported. The guards have been accused of acting rudely toward local residents
and even using unnecessary force against them, including handcuffing people perceived as threatening to the Israeli young people. According to one newspaper, “Israeli security do what they wish with the Poles and treat
residents and tourists as potential terrorists.”
More than 20,000 Israeli teens visit Poland each year on Education Ministry programs to learn about the concentration camps and death camps. It has been argued that the visits are one-dimensional, ignore 800 years of Jewish history in Poland, and give participants the impression that the Poles were no less responsible than the Germans for the murder of Jews.
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The Nazi’s murdered 9 to 11 million people including Romas (Gypsies), the disabled, homosexuals, Communists and other political prisoners, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Polish citizens, Soviet POWs and most notably, 6 million European Jews. On April 15th, a large part of the world will pause to remember the Holocaust of World War II but will we also remember Deir Yassin which took place on April 9th, 1948 just 3 years after the Nazi Death Camps were liberated?
Early in the morning of April 9, 1948, commandos of the Irgun (headed by Menachem Begin) and the Stern Gang attacked Deir Yassin, a village with about 750 Palestinian residents. The village lay outside of the area to be assigned by the United Nations to the Jewish State; it had a peaceful reputation. But it was located on high ground in the corridor between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Deir Yassin was slated for occupation under Plan Dalet and the mainstream Jewish defense force, the Haganah, authorized the irregular terrorist forces of the Irgun and the Stern Gang to perform the takeover.
In all over 100 men, women, and children were systematically murdered. Fifty-three orphaned children were literally dumped along the wall of the Old City. It was reported that 25 men from the village were taken to a stone quarry along the road between Givat Shaul and Deir Yassin and shot to death.
Of about 144 houses, 10 were dynamited. The cemetery was later bulldozed and, like hundreds of other Palestinian villages to follow, Deir Yassin was wiped off the map. By September, Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Poland, Rumania, and Slovakia were settled there.
The center of the village was renamed Givat Shaul Bet. As Jerusalem expanded, the land of Deir Yassin became part of the city and is now known simply as the area between Givat Shaul and the settlement of Har Nof on the western slopes of the mountain.
The massacre of Palestinians at Deir Yassin is one of the most significant events in 20th-century Palestinian and Israeli history. This is not because of its size or its brutality, but because it stands as the starkest early warning of a calculated depopulation of over 400 Arab villages and cities and the expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinian inhabitants to make room for survivors of the Holocaust and other Jews from the rest of the world.
Reuters| China, Russia seek to block UN report on Darfur
Fri Mar 16, 2007 2:32 PM ET
By Richard Waddington
GENEVA (Reuters) – China and Russia joined Arab and Muslim states on Friday in urging the U.N.’s human rights watchdog to ignore a report from a mission to Darfur that blamed Sudan for continuing war crimes against civilians there.
The two permanent United Nations Security Council members argued the mission, led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Jody Williams, last month failed to gain access to the vast western region of Sudan and had not fulfilled its mandate.
Despite warnings from Western and some African states that failure to act would undermine the credibility of the newly formed Human Rights Council, Muslim and Arab states and their allies backed Sudan’s line that the report had no legal basis.
“The so-called mission failed to make an onsite visit. The report cannot be considered objective … and has no legal basis,” China said in a statement to the 47-state Council, which was echoed by Russia.
The mission’s report said the government of Sudan had orchestrated and taken part in war crimes. It appealed for the Council to take “urgent further action,” to protect civilians.
Some African states, which are manning a 7,000-strong peacekeeping force in Darfur but are split over how to respond to the human rights crisis there, spoke out strongly about the need to accept the report and act on it.
Denial of access was not grounds for dismissing it, Zambia said, noting South Africa under apartheid and the then Rhodesia, also under white rule, routinely refused entry to such missions.
DESERVE BETTER
“The people of Darfur deserve better,” said Zambia’s ambassador Love Mtesa.
After initially agreeing to the mission, the government of Sudan refused visas to the five-person team because it said one of its members had previously spoken of genocide in Darfur and could not be objective.
The U.N. investigators, asked by the Council in December to examine reports of abuse in Darfur, were forced to conduct their work from neighboring Chad and in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, headquarters of the African Union.
Observers estimate 200,000 people have been killed and more than 2 million driven from their homes since a revolt broke out fours ago. The government responded to the uprising by arming militias which have been accused of atrocities.
The Sudanese government denies responsibility for abuses and blames rebel groups that have refused to sign a 2006 peace deal.
The report, the latest international probe to point the finger at Khartoum over the violence in Darfur, also accused rebels of crimes against civilians.
“This report has no legal standing. This faulty report should not be discussed,” Sudan’s Justice Minister Mohamed Ali Elmardi told the Council.
Williams told the Council it was its credibility that was on the line — not that of the mission — if it failed to act on her team’s recommendations.
“Innocent civilians continue to suffer and die. They do not need more reports. They are pleading for protection,” she said.
“Our job is to attempt to try to alleviate the suffering of the people of Darfur who are being raped, pillaged and burned while political wrangling goes on here in the hallowed halls of the United Nations,” she said, to applause.
© Reuters 2007. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content, including by caching, framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters and the Reuters sphere logo are registered trademarks and trademarks of the Reuters group of companies around the world.
Monkeys, Elephants and Statesmen
March 15, 2007
Monkeys, Elephants and Statesmen
by William Shipman
William G. Shipman is chairman of CarriageOaks Partners, LLC, and co-chairman of the Cato Institute’s Project on Social Security Choice.
Though he gave it his best shot, President Bush failed to overhaul Social Security. Even so, his efforts have brought at least one lasting benefit. Social Security reform is now part of our national discourse, whereas before it was almost impolite to bring it up. Politicians can now discuss the issue without fear of touching the third rail of politics. Now that the issue is out, and given that the challenge of unfunded entitlements continues, presidential contenders need to tell us their vision for the future of Social Security.
In so doing, candidates will likely adopt one of three political strategies to position themselves as thoughtful stewards of our retirement, without subjecting their campaigns to risk. Two of the strategies are time-tested. The third is not, but it may offer the best opportunity for victory.
The first, and most common, strategy is that of the monkey: See no evil, speak no evil. Candidates who adopt this strategy hope other events will crowd out Social Security reform, and they certainly won’t bring it up.
The second strategy is that of the elephant: When in danger, head for tall grass. Politicians who follow this path understand Social Security is fundamentally flawed, financially unsustainable and will eventually be unable to provide scheduled retirement benefits. Their overriding objective is to preserve the system’s tax-based financing and government-determined benefits. These candidates will encourage us to believe Social Security is the most successful government program ever and that it provides guaranteed and risk-free income.
The third strategy is that of a leader, a unique and unusually gifted character who understands Social Security’s overarching challenges and what’s at stake. This leader wants to be president so he can change the future; he won’t change his views because he wants to be president. He knows if elected he’ll probably be responsible for reforming Social Security. He also understands he has a responsibility to tell the American public beforehand what he’ll do if elected.
First of all, he’ll spell out the three principles of reform that will guide him. The first is that any reform must ensure that the elderly are able to retire with financial security and dignity. The second is that younger workers will be able to keep more of the fruits of their labor. And the third is that any reform must benefit, not burden, the economy. Under his plan, no one will be required to leave Social Security but everyone will be allowed to. Every American will be given this freedom to choose.
For those who elect to leave, a little less than half of their present payroll taxes will no longer be paid to the government but rather saved for themselves, in accounts of their own, over which they will have property rights. These savings will be invested in highly diversified portfolios of wealth-producing assets designed to meet their retirement needs. People would be able to make choices, taking the reality of risk into account while achieving necessary investment returns.
Upon retirement, everyone will be able to purchase an annuity that guarantees a monthly check for the rest of his life, sheltering him from market and mortality uncertainties. He could receive additional retirement income with the remaining assets, or leave them to his children, or bequeath them to any person or organization he chooses. Everyone would be free to make these decisions.
Over time, the government’s retirement benefit obligations would decline, as we provided more for ourselves from our accumulated wealth. With just a 5 percent saving rate, our retirement income would be greater than the government’s scheduled benefits — let alone those that can be financed by projected payroll taxes. We will also have saved our children and our grandchildren from liabilities they simply could not afford.
Under this plan, over time, Americans will depend less on the government and more on themselves. Relieved of their unnecessary tethers to the state, they’ll be able to make more choices about their lives.
The clever candidate should bypass Congress, and sell his platform directly to the American people. If the people want these freedoms, they’ll demand them from their representatives. This candidate will tell voters what the future holds both with and without reform, explaining the risks and rewards of each. He should ask them if they want the freedom to choose how to prepare for their retirement. He should ask them if they want to determine their future or if they want the government to decide. He should tell them, in no uncertain terms, his vision for the future of Social Security.
This article appeared in the Washington Times on March 14, 2007.
Inter Press Service News AgencyBRAZIL-US: Social Activist Declined Invitation to Meet Bush
Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Mar 12 (IPS) – Rodrigo Baggio, founder of one of the best social inclusion projects in Brazil, which has spread to eight other countries, turned down an invitation to meet President George W. Bush during his recent visit to Sao Paulo.
It was “a question of ethics,” he said, due to the lack of respect shown by the organisers of the visit, who wanted to impose extraordinary conditions for the meeting and who “invaded a ‘favela’” (shantytown) where his Committee for Democracy in Information Technology (CDI) runs an informal school, Baggio told IPS.
Over a month ago, the non-governmental organisation received a request from the U.S. Embassy in Brasilia to suggest one of the CDI’s Information Technology and Citizens’ Rights Schools (EIC) in Sao Paulo, to be visited by a “U.S. authority” who was not named.
CDI suggested a school in the Paraisópolis favela, which is home to around 84,000 people. On Feb. 7, the favela was “invaded” by 40 U.S. military troops and a number of Brazilian police officers, without advance warning or any explanation, Baggio said.
Apart from the disrespect this showed to local residents, it was a rash thing to do as it might have sparked shootouts with the drug traffickers and criminal gangs that operate in that neighbourhood, he said. “We wouldn’t have suggested that particular school if we’d known that it was President Bush himself who was to visit it,” he added.
Having ruled out a visit by Bush to Paraisópolis, the Children of Morumbi Association was selected instead. This social project opens new horizons for 4,000 poor children and teenagers from several Sao Paulo neighbourhoods through arts and sports activities, especially music.
Baggio and two other leading social activists were invited to talk with Bush in the course of the visit, which would be his last engagement in Sao Paulo on Friday evening, after his official meetings with Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
But the executive director of CDI turned down the honour, and the opportunity to talk about his work and ideas to the leader of the world’s most powerful country, because of the incidents that had violated the “ethical values” he defends, and because he concluded that “it would not even be a brief dialogue.”
The organisers of the visit demanded a “rehearsal” beforehand, to prepare the “questions and answers” he would ask the president.
CDI and Baggio personally are always open to dialogue, even with Bush, as the president of a nation, in spite of his image being tied to the war in Iraq, “violence in the world,” and environmental negligence, because he withdrew from the Kyoto protocol, Baggio explained.
But the way preparations for the visit were conducted, with the “invasion” of Paraisópolis and the implied orchestration of the rehearsed meeting, led Baggio to decide not to attend.
Furthermore, Bush’s speech emphasising U.S. aid for social investment in Latin America was “in contradiction” with the decision to close the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) office in Brazil, which will only remain open this year to “finalise projects” that are still pending, Baggio said.
The invitation extended to Baggio was in recognition of the excellent work of CDI, which has created 701 EICs in almost every Brazilian state, and 179 in another eight countries — six Latin American nations as well as South Africa and the United States. Every year they train 70,000 information technology professionals.
As a member of the business community and an information technology teacher in Rio de Janeiro, Baggio began using computers to facilitate dialogue between young people from different social backgrounds in 1993. In 1995 he founded CDI to put information technology in the hands of poor communities, especially favelas, starting with used computers and later creating the informal schools, with the support of several companies.
The initiative, which uses the teachings of Paulo Freire, author of “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”, and a literacy teaching method that respects local culture, expanded beyond his expectations. Regional centres were created to coordinate the network of EICs, and the project has won several international awards.
Nearly 40 percent of CDI’s budget comes from foreign sources, including U.S. foundations.
One success story is that of Ronaldo Monteiro, who was sentenced to 12 years in prison for kidnapping a businessman in the 1990s. Locked in a maximum security jail, he participated in one of CDI’s courses for prison inmates. He became a teacher, and then a coordinator of the courses.
He later founded his own non-governmental organisation for prisoners to provide information technology services, earning income to help support their families. When he was released he carried on in the community, to help former prisoners like himself integrate back into the world of work, and encouraging them to start up their own small companies. “Now his chief supporter is the businessman he kidnapped,” Baggio said.
The transformation brought about by CDI also works at the community level. In a favela in the northeastern state of Paraíba, an EIC created three years ago not only trained information technology workers, but was instrumental in the recovery of local people’s traditional source of income.
The habit of dumping rubbish among the mangroves had resulted in the disappearance of the crab population, which was important locally for food and trade. EIC students used their new knowledge of information technology to launch an environmental education campaign, and in four months people stopped polluting the mangroves and the crabs came back. (END/2007)
Texas wants to strike rule on retiree health costs
International Herald Tribune
By Mary Williams Walsh
Monday, March 12, 2007
The 50 states and the largest cities in the United States will soon be required to disclose the value of the health care they have promised their retired workers. The prospect of that disclosure, under a new accounting rule, is not a happy one for governments.
Cities or states that have already calculated the price of their retirement promises have often found the figures to be alarmingly high, angering taxpayer groups and posing a potential threat to government bond ratings. New York City, for instance, disclosed in the fall that its obligation for retiree health care was $53.5 billion.
Texas wants to opt out of the process, and hopes to persuade other states to join it. State Senator Robert Duncan, a Republican from Lubbock, has introduced a bill that would make the new accounting rule inoperable in Texas.
“The way we look at it is that this is probably not an accurate measurement for the type of retirement programs that we do,” said Duncan, who sits on the Legislature’s finance committee. A similar bill has been introduced in the Texas House.
In a related step, the Texas state comptroller, Susan Combs, recently wrote to the chairman of the accounting rule-making board, saying she doubted that the new rule had any validity in Texas. She requested a meeting “to discuss possible resolutions to this problem.” She also sent copies of her letter to her counterparts in the 49 other states, urging them to join Texas in seeking to block the new accounting rule.
As chief financial officer of Texas, she said in her letter, “I am having trouble appreciating the purpose of this standard.”
At the accounting board, however, rule makers are having trouble appreciating the idea that a legislature could tamper with their work.
“This standard was passed in 2004, after many years of due process,” said Robert Attmore, chairman of the U.S. Governmental Accounting Standards Board, an independent body known as GASB that sets the rules for state and local governments. “It’s kind of late to be raising these issues.”
Other accounting experts echoed his dismay.
“Our legislature does crazy things,” said Michael Granof, an accounting professor at the University of Texas. “We have a law for blind hunters. This is probably the dumbest bill since that.”
The accounting rule that is causing the commotion takes account of the practice in many states, towns and other jurisdictions around the country that have for decades promised retirement health care to their workers without ever tallying the cost.
Most governments have dealt with these retiree health plans on a “pay as you go” basis, buying a year’s worth of coverage for their retirees every year and reporting those outlays as the cost of the plan.
But those reports miss the accumulating cost of what has been promised over the years to the millions of government workers who have not yet retired. Many of those workers are reaching or approaching retirement age, and health care inflation has been increasing at double-digit rates. In some places, the costs are starting to balloon.
But because the total obligation is not currently disclosed, it is nearly impossible to get an accurate reading on the size of the problem. Some government bodies have promised generous benefits, while others offer bare-bones plans; some have ample resources to pay what they owe, while others may be in over their heads.
Buyers of municipal bonds want to know which are which, so that they can identify the governments that could have difficulty repaying their bonds because of mounting retiree health costs.
“I buy municipal bonds for my clients,” said Robert Smith, president of Sage Advisory Service, a money management firm in Austin.
“I look at this issue very carefully. If you’re going to tell me that you don’t want to admit to this, and have no plan to deal with it, and have no intention of ever prefunding, I’ll tell you, ‘I ain’t buying your bonds. Because I don’t think you’re a good risk.’”
The accounting rule requires only that governments disclose their total obligations — not that they come up with the money right away.
The numbers are to be disclosed in footnotes to the local governments’ financial statements, not on their balance sheets, where, if they were reported, they would make many governments look bankrupt.
Paulson pledges change to bolster competitiveness of U.S. financial markets – International Herald Tribune
International Herald Tribune
Paulson pledges change to bolster competitiveness of U.S. financial markets
Bloomberg News
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
WASHINGTON: Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr. promised Tuesday to make regulatory changes within months to address risks of the U.S. losing its place as the world’s dominant financial market.
“This is a high priority for me,” Paulson said during a conference on the subject in Washington. “There will be things we at Treasury, working with the regulatory agencies, will do in the near term and some other actions over the longer time frame to address these challenges to our competitiveness.”
The Conference on U.S. Capital Markets Competitiveness, sponsored by the Treasury Department, took place as senior officials have begun a series of high- level discussions with top executives from Wall Street, corporations and accounting firms on regulating business.
Many of the executives have urged the rollback of laws passed in the wake of the Enron and WorldCom scandals, sought an overhaul of the regulatory system, and asked for limits to liability for government and shareholder lawsuits.
The conference opened with a panel of executives and investors that included Warren Buffett, the chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, and the General Electric chief executive, Jeffrey Immelt.
Paulson heard varying levels of concern, ranging from John Thain, chief executive of NYSE Group, who said Wall Street was facing stiffer competition from places like Hong Kong, to Ann Yerger, director of the Council of Institutional Investors, who said investors benefited from tougher U.S. regulations.
In his opening remarks, Paulson, the former head of Goldman Sachs Group, indicated that he was interested in shifting governance of the capital markets and accounting industries to a less rigid “principles-based” system from the current rules-based structure.
“In my judgment, we must rise above a rules-based mindset that asks, ‘Is this legal?’ and adopt a more principles- based approach that asks, ‘Is this right?’” Paulson said. “We should consider whether our legal system appropriately protects investors or gives too much latitude to unscrupulous lawyers.”
Buffett questioned whether that approach would work.
“I would think it would be very difficult in our legal system to have a principles-based approach,” Buffett said. “I think our legal system demands rules.”
Paulson suggested that regulations may have become bloated.
“The addition of new regulators over many years, and the tendency of these regulators to adapt to the changing market by expanding, as opposed to focusing on the broader objective of regulatory efficiency, is a trend we should examine,” he said.
International Herald Tribune
International Herald Tribune
For the war’s many brain-wounded, a challenge to find the right care
By Deborah Sontag and Lizette Alvarez
Monday, March 12, 2007
When Staff Sergeant Jarod Behee was asked to select a paint color for the customized wheelchair that was going to be his future, his young wife seethed.
The government, Marissa Behee believed, was giving up on her husband just five months after he took a sniper’s bullet to the head during his second tour of duty in Iraq.
Marissa Behee, a sunny Californian who was just completing a degree in interior design, possessed a keen faith in her then 26-year-old husband’s potential to be rehabilitated from a severe traumatic brain wound.
She refused to accept what she perceived to be the more limited expectations of the Veterans Affairs hospital in Palo Alto, California.
“The hospital continually told me that Jarod was not making adequate progress and that the next step was a nursing home,” Behee said. “I just felt that it was unfair for them to throw in the towel on him. I said, ‘We’re out of here.’”
Because Behee had successfully resisted the army’s efforts to retire her husband into the veterans’ health care system, his military insurance policy, it turned out, covered private care. So she moved him to a community rehabilitation center, Casa Colina, near her parents’ home in Southern California in late 2005.
Three months later, Jarod Behee was walking unassisted and abandoned his government-provided wheelchair. Now he works as a volunteer in the center’s outpatient gym, wiping down equipment and handing out towels.
It is not the police job that he aspired to; his cognitive impairments are serious. But it is not a nursing home, either.
Like the spouses of many other soldiers with severe traumatic brain injury, Marissa Behee, now 28, transformed herself into a kind of warrior wife to get her husband the care she thought he deserved.
By now, there is a veritable battery of relatives of brain-injured soldiers who have quit their jobs and, for some extended time, moved away from their homes to advocate for and care for these very wounded soldiers during long hospitalizations.
In the eyes of five such relatives interviewed, the military health care system, which is so advanced in its treatment of lost limbs, has been scrambling to deal with an unanticipated volume of traumatic brain-injury cases that it was ill-equipped to handle.
Largely because of the improvised explosive devices used by insurgents in Iraq, traumatic brain injury has become the signature wound of this war, with 1,882 cases treated to date, according to the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center.
In general, these caregivers said that their grievously wounded soldiers had either been written off prematurely or not given aggressive rehabilitation or options for care.
From the beginning, they said, the government should have joined forces with civilian rehabilitation centers instead of trying to ramp up its limited brain-injury treatment program alone during a time of war. That way, soldiers would have had access to top-quality care at civilian institutions that were already operating at full throttle and might be closer to home.
In fact, many soldiers do have that access. But unlike Marissa Behee, many caregivers only belatedly come to understand how to negotiate the daunting military health care system.
Generally, after severely brain-injured soldiers are medically evacuated to the United States, they are treated first at Walter Reed Army Hospital or Bethesda Naval Hospital.
Relatively quickly, the military, depending on the branch, initiates a medical retirement process that turns the soldiers’ health care over to the Veterans Affairs Department.
If soldiers succeed in deferring retirement, they remain covered by a military insurance policy that, if pressed, pays for private care.
Still, the military hospitals tend to discharge seriously brain-injured soldiers to veterans’ hospitals, regardless of their active or retired status. This is how the system works, and challenging it requires constant haggling, which often leaves the families of the severely wounded soldiers feeling abused, resentful and anxious for those soldiers without an advocate.
“We have been let down by a system that is so bungling and bureaucratic that it doesn’t know what it can and cannot do and just says no as a matter of course,” said Debra Schulz of Friendswood, Texas. Her son, Lance Corporal Steven Schulz, 22, of the Marines, suffered a severe brain injury during his second tour in Iraq.
“Jarod Behee was headed for a nursing home,” confirmed Dr. Felice Loverso, the chief executive of Casa Colina in Pomona, California.
When Behee arrived from Palo Alto, he was in severe condition, essentially nonresponsive, said Loverso, a speech pathologist.
Casa Colina, which now has two other soldier patients and also provides their families housing, first worked to “wake him up,” weaning him from medications he no longer needed.
He quickly started getting therapy bedside, making relatively steady progress and then quite rapid progress after a cranioplasty that repaired his skull.
“Potentially the same good things could have happened to Jarod at the Palo Alto VA,” said Loverso, a former Veterans Affairs employee himself. “I like to think it was due to our aggressive therapy.”
Because of his wound, Marissa Behee said, her husband does not agonize over what has happened to him.
“He wakes up every morning with a smile on his face,” she said.
Steven Schulz, on the other hand, is just cognitively rehabilitated enough to experience anguish, his mother, Debra Schulz, said.
Occasionally, he gets angry at his situation or feels guilty toward his mother, who describes herself as an “Old South yellow dog Democrat” who was not pleased when her son enlisted.
“He has told me that he needed to apologize to me for ever joining the Marines,” Schulz said. “I say, ‘Son, we can’t look back.’”
Sharing a smoke with new found friends by the Li River, Guilin, China
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