I am currently reading The Secret History of the American Empire: Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and the Truth About Global Corruption by John Perkins about which Joe Queenan writes a brutal take down. It is a book I picked up at the airport, and I have some of the same reservations about the book expressed by Queenan.

In another forum and before I read Queenan’s review, I wrote:

The author strikes me as more than a bit self-aggrandizing and not necessarily reliable on all points. But, the book strikes me as reliable enough to get me riled up.

In particular, he seems to report pretty well on the con game run through World Bank and IMF getting third world countries to take on huge debt to finance projects that benefit local elites and foreign corporations and which get paid back by squeezing the poor and middle-class.

Ted Evanoff reports on a national study showing that Indiana trails the U.S. in average income for its citizens.

Income in Indiana rose 2.7 percent last year to $34,103 per person, trailing the nation’s 2.9 percent rise to $39,571 per person, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis reported Tuesday.

Overall, the state ranked 39th. The highest income states were in the northeast, mid-Atlantic, and far west. (Sounds mainly like the states that voted for John Kerry in 2004 — coincidence?)

On an 80 – 12 vote, the House passed SB 388 concerning property tax levies for mental health services. According to the bill digest:

Permits a county that wants to impose a property tax levy for the first time after 2008 for a community mental health center or a community mental retardation and other developmental disabilities center to submit a first year budget for approval by the department of local government finance. Provides that the first year levy for the approved budget is outside the property tax levy limit. Increases the circuit breaker property tax credit that applies to property taxes first due and payable in 2009.

It now goes back to the Senate with amendments. The Senate can either consent to the amendments or attempt to resolve the conflict between the Senate and House versions in conference committee.

Jim Shella posted an entry about Gov. Daniel’s veto threat over any bill that reduces instructional time for public school students.

This has to do with Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tony Bennett’s recent decree that “starting in 2009-10, he would not approve waivers that allowed schools to fall short of 180 full days of classes. . . . Many districts fall short with days in which students attend for a half-day and then leave while teachers attend training sessions or hold parent-teacher conferences.”

Bennett’s decree means that teachers will receive less training, school districts (a/k/a ‘taxpayers’) will have to come up with more money, or teachers will be obligated to commit more time to their job for the same amount of pay.

More school isn’t necessarily a bad idea, but the mandate should probably come with some provision for funding it.

Update More on Gov. Daniels’ veto threat and the Democratic amendment to HB 126 that prompted it. Specifically, the Democratic amendment allows for up to 10 hours of parent-teacher conference time for grades 1 to 6 and up to 12 for grades 7 through 12. It also allows for up to six half days per year for teacher training.

The Governor and Bennett issued statements about the importance of more time in the classroom for students, but say nothing about paying for it.

In my experience, media and government officials are reasonably comfortable with folks spinning for their cause — “advocacy” we call it in the legal business — but if they peg you as a liar, you’re probably sunk.

Jon Ketzenberger’s reporting on the Indiana Live Casino in Shelbyville seems to indicate the casino is doing the latter instead of the former. They claimed that Obama’s people told them to pull an ad campaign that used his “Change you can believe in” slogan and a likeness of Obama that was not authorized. This wasn’t true. They also claimed that Justin Timberlake would participate in the ribbon-cutting. He said he never made plans to attend.

Not exactly cultivating trust for the casino.

The random paths down which my curiosity take me often surprise me. In the past couple of days, I have done some cursory reading about the Peruvian Amazon Company and the abuses it committed in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Apparently, the rubber industry took off in the late 1800s and early 1900s. A lot of the available rubber trees of the time were located in parts of the Amazon with little-to-no government control or oversight. An entrepreneur by the name of Julio Cesar Arana arose to take advantage of the rubber boom with his Peruvian Amazon Company. According to one entry:

Starting in 1850 rubber became a hot new commodity in the industrializing countries of Europe and North America, and the Amazon’s monopoly on “black gold” tapped from Hevea brasiliensis trees scattered in the rainforest spawned what the contemporary Brazilian writer called “the most criminal organization of labor ever devised.” A Peruvian rubber baron named Julio Arana founded the Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company and grew fabulously wealthy by exploiting the Bora, Witoto, Andoke, and Ocaina Indians on the Putumayo River, which forms the border between Peru and Colombia. Reports of systematic torture, an orgy of sadism, the perverted mutilation of men, women, and children, women being kept as concubines by the Indian and Barbadian muchachos or captains, of the rubber gangs, reached Roger Casement, who had exposed similar atrocities ten years earlier in the Congo. By the time Casement got there, three-quarters of the population on the Putumayo had been wiped out in the previous six years, and there were only 8000-1000 left.

One account I read described “Suarez of Bolivia” (I believe this is Nicolas Suarez Callau) keeping a harem of native women for use of him and his friends to create a reliable labor pool. Less spectacular was the process of a sort of de facto enslavement of rubber workers. They would have access only to company stores to buy supplies and staples. They would have to buy these things on credit and then could never seem to get out of debt through their labor collecting rubber.

When I read of episodes in human history such as this, I become more convinced of the proposition that there is nothing “natural” about natural rights. In the absence of an effective government, there are no rights. And unfettered capitalism, like an unchecked fire, certainly has the capacity to do more harm than good.

Roger Casement is also a name of which I had been unaware. He was a British civil servant who reported the abuses in the Congo and then Peru, was made a knight in 1911 for his efforts, but was subsequently hung for treason in 1916 due to his efforts supporting Irish independence and collaborating with the Germans during World War I.

Incidentally, I stumbled across this aspect of early 20th century history while reading about Percy Fawcett, a British explorer who ultimately disappeared in the Amazon – quite an interesting character.

It seems like every morning brings a new ranking in which Indiana is bringing up the tail end. On Saturday, I mentioned the survey showing Indiana being 5th to last in national well-being, including 48th place in the subcategory of healthy behaviors, ahead of only Mississippi and Kentucky.

Now I see that Indiana ranks 2nd to last in its budget process in terms of the processes’ compatibility with balancing the budget. Reading the description on this one gave me the impression that the survey was somewhat arbitrary. Indiana got knocked around for not having a constitutional balanced budget requirement — and I don’t think it got points for its somewhat unique provision limiting the state’s ability to take on debt. The state also loses ground because the governor doesn’t have a line-item veto.

This morning comes the news that Indiana ranks next-to-last in online records.

Indiana tied with Montana, Oregon and Wyoming for the second-worst ranking in a 50-state survey of government information accessible online, conducted as part of the annual Sunshine Week campaign. The state with the sparsest information online was Mississippi.

The survey found that although official records are increasingly available on the Internet, some important information is missing.

Might I add, “God bless, Mississippi?” They keep saving us from last place. (Although according to the Tax Foundation, Mississippi ranks 19th in “business tax climate” (pdf) — so they have that going for them.)

I don’t know the long-term cultural impact of the Jon Stewart/Jim Cramer interview. (Some have suggested the “have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last” moment from Joseph Welch to Joseph McCarthy — I have my doubts). But I think it should put a stop to the occasional moaning about how our young people get their news from The Daily Show. As it turns out, that’s a good thing, because Stewart is practicing a bit more journalism and a bit less stenography than your average news show.

To me, this might be the money quote from Stewart: “These guys at these companies were on a Sherman’s march through their companies, financed by our 401(k)s – and all the incentives at their companies were for short-term profits, and they burned the fucking house down with our money and walked away rich as hell.”

According to a wire report I saw in the Journal & Courier, Indiana ranks 5th to last in a new nationwide survey of well-being that queries people on mental, physical and economic health. We are ahead of West Virginia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Ohio and Arkansas. Ohio surprises me, but the rest of those are traditionally dead-end states that Indiana probably doesn’t want to emulate.

The survey broke findings down by congressional district. Indiana’s 2nd District, home to South Bend, ranked 423rd out of the 435 districts nationwide for overall well-being. It ranked last for healthy behavior.

In general, the highest well-being scores came from states in the West, while the lowest were concentrated in the South.

An explanation for the survey is here. More information is available here.

These new, state-level data are the results from The AHIP State and Congressional District Resource for Well-Being. The Well-Being Index score for the nation and for each state is an average of six sub-indexes, which individually examine life evaluation, healthy behaviors, work environment, physical health, emotional health, and access to basic necessities. The questions in each sub-index are asked nightly of 1,000 national adults, aged 18 and older.

My own district, the fourth district, has the best well-being rank in the state leading in work quality and access to basic necessities. This isn’t exactly high praise, however, since that puts us at 240th out of the 435 congressional districts. Healthy behavior, however, is where Indiana really seems to fall apart. The Fourth District ranks 2nd in terms of Indiana’s Congressional Districts for healthy behavior, but nationally it is 393rd. Indiana is 48th out of 50 in terms of healthy behavior. Only Kentucky and Mississippi are worse. Generally speaking, this means we eat poorly, we smoke too much, and we don’t exercise. Maybe we should rethink opposition to things like smoking bans and health information on menus. I’m a little surprised at how aggravated being this low on a pretty controllable aspect of the index makes me. Don’t smoke, eat better, and exercise, after all, are things that are within all of our power.