Left In Lowell

Before you listen to Jay Booth tomorrow at 7:30am where he will talk about a bill up in the state legislature, and my own radio show at 10am, I will be on at 7am with guest host Faye Morrison on WUML’s Sunrise. [91.5 FM]

From reader and Tyngsboro selectman Jay Booth, an action alert. As David says in the cross-post on BMG, is there any reason not to like this proposal?

There is currently a bill in the works to let municipalities join the state’s Group Insurance Commission (GIC) for healthcare. The short version is that the state healthcare pool has had yearly cost increases of 6-7% because of economies of scale while municipalities have had to contend with closer to 15%. As political junkies statewide are aware, cities and towns have been struggling for funds since local aid cuts in 2002 at the same time as our healthcare and pension obligations began accelerating. State aid has been flat over the last 4 years (meaning that it has dropped in real terms once you consider inflation) while Prop 2 ½ restricts our property tax increases to 2.5%, meaning that we can barely even keep up with cost-of-living raises for our employees.

According to a survey by the Mass Municipal Association and the Mass Taxpayers Foundation, municipal healthcare costs rose by 63% from 2001 to 2005, going from an average of 7.4% of the budget to 10.6% over the same period. The average yearly increase over the period was 13%.
The town of Tyngsboro is budgeting for a 15% increase in our healthcare line-item next year, which would be in line with previous years. For our little town, that comes out to over 300,000 dollars that we have to cut elsewhere in the budget just to keep our existing employees insured. Every year. And it’s compounding.

The proposed legislation, filed by the MAPC, preserves local decision making over all important aspects. The local unions and local officials would still set the rates of contribution (80/20 split, 70/30 split, etc) between themselves and unions will have the opportunity to bargain with management over the prospect of joining at all. Each employee will also stand to benefit from the savings on their end of the healthcare split with their town. At these cost savings, it makes sense to pass this legislation as soon as possible.

Please contact your legislators and encourage them to co-sponsor the bill by contacting either Senator Richard Moore or Representative Rachel Kaprelian’s office. If you’re not quite sold yet, tune into WCAP tomorrow at 7:30 AM, I’ll be discussing it there as well.

You can find your legislative info for Lowell here or go here for a list of all state Reps and Senators. Give yours a call tomorrow!

Goddamn. Just went off to read AMERICAblog and BMG and saw that we invaded an Iranian diplomatic mission in northern Iraq in the last 24 hours. Missions are considered part of a country’s legal territory.

I predict this whole Middle East conflict just went from bad, to far, far worse.

[Update: of course we claim that the Iranian officials simply came out to be arrested. The AP originally reported that (bold mine): “Iraqi officials said Thursday that multinational forces detained as many as six Iranians in an overnight raid on Tehran’s diplomatic mission in the northern city of Irbil….The forces stormed the Iranian mission at about 3 a.m., detaining the five staffers and confiscating computers and documents, two senior local Kurdish officials said….A resident living near the mission said the foreign force used stun bombs in the raid and brought down an Iranian flag that was on the roof of the two-story yellow house.” Now that AP story has changed. What the hell is going on here??]

[Update II: We are sending carrier groups to the Gulf - the part of our military which is useless in Iraq. The intention, of course, is escalation with Iran. This is all adding up to not good.]

[Update III: LondonYank at dKos gives her perspective that this move just may have lost us a lot, if not all, credibility with one of our few remaining native allies in Iraq - the Kurds.]

Tomorrow on Thinking Out Loud (10am, 91.5FM, stream it here live), in continuence with our month of “housing crisis” discussions, we’ll be talking to Community Teamwork, Inc’s Ed Cameron, Associate Executive Director of the Division of Housing and Homeless Services.

Ed will talk about CTI’s efforts to combat homelessness, and also the City of Lowell’s new 10-Year Plan to End Homelessness (kickoff will be on Monday, Jan 29, 9:30am - 12:00 at the conference room at the Wannalancit Mills, 600 Suffolk St). It should be a very informative show, so tune in!

Josh Marshall of TPM points out Fred Kaplan’s Slate article, which says that by the army’s own recently-authored counter-insurgency manual, Bush’s “surge” (aka escalation) falls so far short of doing any good at all, it’d be laughable if it weren’t our kids over there, and the Iraqis we wanted to “free,” getting hurt and killed.

You see, that manual - co-written by well-thought-of army Lt. General (promoted to General and soon to be in charge of the Iraq theatre) David Petraeus - states that if you want to clear out an insurgency, for every 1,000 people in an area, you need 20 combat troops. Not regular troops, actual combat troops, and that’s a distinct difference. Using basic math, Fred Kaplan tells us that would add up to requiring about 120,000 combat troops in Bagdad alone, if you wanted to forget the rest of the country. We have 70,000 combat troops in the entirety of Iraq right now. Adding 20,000, even if they are just deployed to Iraq and you pull all the troops around the country into the capital, you’d still be 30,000 short. Just in Bagdad.

I doubt that the Iraq training program for its army can anywhere near make up the shortfall. Once again, this president is putting thousands of our boys and girls in harm’s way, ignoring every fact on the ground, and failing to listen to experts. His faith-based war leadership is going to get more people killed, all for nothing. Yes, I will say it out loud: they will be meaningless deaths. It’s time to bring our troops home.

[Hat tip to commenter KBusch at BMG]