It's not that they aren't pretty...

President Obama’s 2011 budget eliminates funding for manned lunar expeditions and rolls back tax breaks for fossil-fuel companies and families bringing in more than $250,000 a year—all of which lends credence to what he told the New York Times this morning:

“We simply cannot continue to spend as if deficits don’t have consequences, as if waste doesn’t matter, as if the hard-earned tax money of the American people can be treated like Monopoly money.”

Defense, Medicaid/Medicare, Social Security and education are held harmless from such belt-tightening, though, and the US nuclear weapons program stands out among those agencies slated to get increases—here, to the tune of $5 billion more over the next five years. Los Alamos National Laboratory alone gets a 21.6 percent (from $1.8 to $2.2 billion) budget increase for 2011.

Read about what this means for New Mexico after the jump. Continue reading »

Corporate greed, or top-secret-special meritocracy? Nuclear Watch of New Mexico has uncovered a somewhat astounding little figure: Michael Anastasio, the director of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), earns $800,348 a year—almost twice as much as US President Barack Obama (who makes $400,000, with a $50K cushion for “expenses”). The proof is here, on one of the federal government’s “transparency pages” aimed at helping hungry reporters track down how stimulus money (of which LANL has received over $200 million in government contracts) is spent.

At $800,000, Anastasio is no Lloyd Blankfein (CEO of Goldman Sachs; $42.9 million last year), no Rex Tillerson (Exxon Mobil; $32 million)—but his salary is nothing to be sniffed at, either. Los Alamos gets its money straight from the US Department of Energy, whose budgets are funded by…well, you and me (provided we pay our taxes).

In a press release today, Nuclear Watch pointed out other problems: that LANL’s business–national security–doesn’t exactly stimulate New Mexico’s economy. Case in point (from the Nuclear Watch release):

According to Census Bureau data, in 2007 Los Alamos County had the 4th highest median household income ($101,098), while New Mexico was the 45th state in median household income ($41,509) with the 3rd highest poverty rate. Politicians and the Department of Energy constantly remind New Mexicans that the nuclear weapons industry is vital to the state’s economy. Despite that, historically New Mexico has slipped to 47th in per capita income in 2007 from 37th in 1959. In contrast, Bechtel has experienced record setting revenues for each of the last six years ($31.4 billion in 2008).

Another fun news tidbit surfaced today: Apparently, the federal government’s claims of “jobs saved” by federal stimulus money is a tiny bit fudged. It even starts to sound like the government is inflating its numbers until a Health and Human Services Department staffer fires back at the Associated Press with this gem:

“If I give you a raise, it is going to save a portion of your job,” HHS spokesman Luis Rosero said.

Right, so…then you have two jobs, at least for government accounting purposes?

I digress. The point is, if the government’s claiming more jobs than actually exist, one might wonder whether certain government contractors are doing the same.

Postscript: Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch informs me that Tom Hunter, the director of Sandia Lab, makes an even prettier penny: $1.7 million.

Yesterday, at a meeting of the Santa Fe Council on International Relations, retired Los Alamos National Laboratory engineer Arvid Lundy spoke on a range of subjects related to the very salient theme of Iran’s nuclear weapons project.

After close to an hour of photos, statistics, histories and thoughts on Iran, SFReeper asked Lundy to clarify a point to which he had alluded: that were no one to intervene in Iran’s nuclear plans (for power or otherwise), Iran would end up with nuclear weapons “sooner.” So…no matter what happens, they’ll have nuclear weapons at some point?

“I think it’s likely,” Lundy replied.

Continue reading »

From MSNBC.com and Moody’s Economy.com, a website by the same folks who helped bring you the bogus credit ratings behind the subprime mortgage crash, now comes the “adversity index,” a nationwide data-mash of cities that are better off and worse off in the recession.

Readers will be pleased to learn that Santa Fe, according to this 20,000-mile analysis, is a “recession-resistant area.”

Now, that has been the case in past recessions—and so far, in this one, this city has held out better than many others.

But.

There’s a big but. And it has to do with the rationale for putting Santa Fe on that list in the first place. Here’s what Moody’s posits as our relative strengths and weaknesses.

Strengths
* Well-educated workforce.
* Above average household income.
* Long-term employment growth is relatively stable.

Weaknesses
* High house prices have deterred in-migration in recent years.
* Relatively high unit labor costs.
* Nearby research labs are susceptible to federal defense-related budget reductions in coming years.

Santa Fe benefits from a “well-educated workforce”? Where did they come up with that? Maybe they mean the transplant retirees with ranch homes who graduated Princeton back before it let women in.

As for that “above average household income”—well, it depends how you figure the average. And in what part of town you look.

As for Santa Fe’s “weaknesses,” Moody’s doesn’t like our “relatively high unit labor costs.” That would be the “living wage,” folks. According to these jackasses, it’s bad that a motel cleaning lady with two kids can make nearly $10 an hour, instead of just over $7.

Apparently, Santa Fe makes the “recession-resistant” cut because it’s a “military center,” like many other cities on the list. Actually, there’s a couple other cities that would count as New Mexico’s military centers, but not Santa Fe. This town is all state and local government, and tourism. Tourism goes down, the government runs short of cash, the local infrastructure deteriorates and then nobody wants to live here.

This package looks like an example of what happens when journalists let numbers overwhelm the story—it comes off as somewhat detached from reality. For instance, Bend, Oregon is on the recession-resistant list. That town was just featured on NPR, in a story titled, “Bend’s Highflying Economy Takes A Nose Dive.” Unlike this MSNBC-Moody’s package, the NPR story actually interviewed people in Bend.

“Want to live in a sunny town that’s immune from recession?” the story begins. Then try a couple of southeastern military base hellholes, or a sprawling area in rural Washington “that will pay glowing dividends for thousands of years: nuclear waste from the Manhattan Project and the Cold War.”

Oh. Great! Nuclear waste will save us from breadlines. Maybe Santa Fe should just move to Los Alamos.

Bill Dedman, whose byline tops this package, has a pretty top-notch reputation among investigative reporters. And he acknowledges—even in the story’s headline—that nuclear waste and foreign wars are not wise pillars for economic sustainability. But he concludes that Rochester, Minnesota, home of the Mayo Clinic, has an economy to “envy”—as long as health care spending remains high.

That’s like saying as long as we maintain the status quo in our wasteful, bloated and broken private health care system—a system that sucks a massive amount of money out of the economy while providing subpar service those lucky enough to have health insurance—then some people in one town in Minnesota will be OK.

Instead of slavishly following Moody’s flawed measures of economic health, maybe we should take a tip from Bhutan. There’s more to life than margins.

Greg Mello at the Los Alamos Study Group in Albuquerque got the word this afternoon:

Earlier this afternoon we heard, via a copyrighted publication, that the $1 billion (B) nuclear weapons infrastructure bailout was dropped from the conference agreement on the stimulus bill.

More and more organizations picked up on the issue over the past week and were sending out alerts. One way or another somebody became convinced it had to go.  The House Appropriations Committee (Chair: David Obey; Energy and Water Subcommittee Chair, Pete Visclosky) opposed it from the start.

At this time we know nothing about the $50 B increase in nuclear power and related loan guarantees.

The fate of the weird extra $6.4 B in cleanup funds, which would abruptly double the size of the program for one year, is also unknown.

Mello wasn’t sure who in Congress was responsible for nixing the nuclear weapons funding, which he covered in a bulletin yesterday.

The Project on Government Oversight also had this news an hour or so ago.