So claims California State Controller John Chiang who says he will refuse to implement temporary pay cuts ordered by Gov. Schwarzenegger, but that he couldn’t do them anyway because the payroll system is a 70’s fossil written in COBOL and any such changes would take months to implement.

In a ironic twist, some formerly retired state employees who were working on the payroll system were laid off last week by order of the Terminator. I’m guessing if he wants them back it’ll be as consultants on their terms at, oh, $150 an hour or so.

Among other things, I’ve been a database programmer. While Chiang could be bluffing, I doubt it. I used to program in DOS in Clipper and still sometimes get phone calls from companies who have an ancient Clipper program from 1988 that is mission-critical and they can’t find the source code, desperately need a change made, and can I help. Well gosh, maybe you should have upgraded it 10 years ago?

California has tried to modernize its payroll system throughout the past decade, dating back to former Controller Kathleen Connell. It has faced numerous delays as state legislators have avoided investing the $177 million it now will cost.

If the original programmers are no longer available, then moving to a new system gets much more complicated because it’s not always obvious what the code is doing and why. Also, you need to convert all the data to the new system, and that can be extremely arduous. Most important of all, this is a payroll system and it must work perfectly because employees get really cranky if the computer shorts their pay.

It’s looking more and more like Schwarzenegger shot himself in the foot on this. Good.

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“Countrywide conned customers into loans that were clearly unaffordable and unsustainable, turning the American dream of homeownership into a nightmare,” said Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut’s attorney general, in a statement on Wednesday. He also called Countrywide “an insolvency enabler.”

Connecticut Man1 at Drinking Liberally in New Milford says “Popcorn time! I have my own personal reasons for enjoying this show” and indeed he does.

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From Steve Clemons at Washington Note.

Will anyone notice? Barack Obama’s team just threw its key Muslim advisor under the bus.

Is this because, as Clemons points out, Obama has been giving speeches running to the right of Bush on Israel?

I think that this is outrageous — and those on the left who appreciate Obama and what he may mean for this country must become as tenaciously committed to what is right and what is good — and fighting for that — because those on the other side of these debates are trying to compel Obama to dilute himself.

Is he diluting himself, or another Slick Willie, or just crafting what he says to the occasion?

He might not like Hamas. I might not like Hamas. But there can not and will not be a lasting peace there until all the players, including Hamas, are part of the negotiations. Even Israel is talking with them.

Cartoon from The Financial Times, May 26. Yes, McCain does it too. Love that British understatement.

Last week, Mr McCain chucked a televangelist under the bus. Mr McCain had previously courted the Rev John Hagee, in spite of the fact that he holds a number of unorthodox views. Mr Hagee believes, for example, that the European Union is headed by the Antichrist and will unleash the war that leads to the Apocalypse. This is a serious misunderstanding of the role of the EU – but not a sackable offence.

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If so, then thousands of state employees will be paid $6.65 an hour rather than their regular pay. It doesn’t look good for a budget plan before then either, the Democratic Party is telling legislators to not spend the entire five days at the party convention at the end of August.

Even Republicans oppose Schwarzenegger’s plan to have a “temporary” (yeah, right) 1% increase in sales tax. The State Controller says he will not implement the pay rates, and Schwarzenegger says he’ll sue to force compliance.

The probably spells the political end of Schwarzenegger, who is termed out. I doubt anyone will be interested in any Senate run he might try after his complete reversal on his campaign promises.

The admission of defeat, that there’s no way to balance this budget without revenue increases, is truly astonishing. What’s more, the broad-based sales tax he’s proposing, the most regressive imaginable, really would tax Californians at virtually every point of the day. He’s become a caricature (if he wasn’t one already).

The proposal amounts to an admission of failure. Running in 2003 as a novice politician after careers as a bodybuilder and actor, Schwarzenegger thought he could cut taxes, control spending and balance the budget, ending what he called “those crazy deficits.”

What most pundits seem to be missing though is that this isn’t a partisan issue. What Schwarzenegger is trying to say in a blundering way that backfired on him is that the state is facing a massive deficit due to vastly decreased revenues caused by the real estate slump. No amount of posturing and political windbaggery can change that.

Republicans predictably want to cut costs and Democrats want to raise taxes. But there’s not much left to cut and voters will probably decapitate any politician who votes to raise taxes.

No easy answers here. Meanwhile, thousands of state employees wonder how they will pay the bills if no budget is passed before August 31 and their pay is cut.

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Did you try Experian’s FreeCreditReport.com only to find out it wasn’t free after all? Lots of folks are complaining. The NY Times has more.

“It’s what I call a protection racket; the companies are charging you a fee and they’re making a promise that it’s going to improve your credit, and protect against identity theft, but in fact it does neither,” said Edmund Mierzwinski, consumer program director for the United States Public Interest Research Group. “The sites are designed to trick people into taking on overpriced, useless credit monitoring, and they do so by attempting to make it appear as if you’re going to get something for free.”

To cancel the $14.95 monthly billing for Triple Advantage that you probably didn’t know you signed up for, call 888-829-6560. Be prepared for lots of evasion and stalling on the other end as they try to stop you from canceling.

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China’s economy is slowing down. So says the NY Times, Calculated Risk, and Clusterstock, citing a number of indicators, like less exports, declining real estate prices, and collapsing stock market. Given that China has no experience with the bust part of the boom-bust cycle of capitalism, one wonders what will happen when things get bad.

From former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich.

The real competition lurking behind the upcoming Olympic games is between democratic capitalism and authoritarian capitalism.

In terms of this large underlying competition, think of our upcoming presidential election as our own Olympic games. It will showcase to the world whether, and how well, democratic capitalism still works.

Illuminating isn’t it that even Reich is wondering if the US style of capitalism is working…

Former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray on that Chinese authoritarianism.

If it wasn’t for the border crossings, an eight hour drive from the Eastern border of Uzbekistan would take you into China. There you would be among the Uighurs, a people culturally and linguistically extremely close to the Uzbeks. Like the Tibetans, the Uighurs are culturally, religiously and ethnically oppressed by the highly racist Chinese state. But the Uighurs are Muslims and they do not get the press coverage of the Tibetans, even though their oppression has been still more systematic and brutal. Over a million Uighurs have been displaced by the Chinese state in the last three years alone. Thousands are murdered - either executed or disappeared - every year.

The War on Terror has enabled Russia, China, Karimov and other Central Asian leaders to characterise any manifestation of a desire for freedom in the region as Islamic terrorism and extremism.

One good thing about the Olympics going to Beijing is that the western media has run a few articles on the plight of the Uighurs, of whose existence I suspect few western reporters knew a couple of weeks ago. It is entirely predictable that the Chinese government is responding by organising “terrorist incidents” to try to blacken the Uighurs as part of Al Qaida. Do not be taken in by this rubbish.

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The Times of London ponders the lessons Obama needs to learn from Deer Hunting With Jesus by Joe Bageant, a redneck socialist, about the hardscrabble redneck town where he grew up and lives today.

It’s partly a scathing portrait of a small Virginia town divided by money, class and race; mostly it’s a lovesick and frequently hilarious rant about the poor, hopeless working-class Americans who “stay dumb and drink beer and vote Republican because no real liberal voice, the kind that speaks the rock-bottom, undeniable truth, ever enters their lives”.

Recent polls show Obama is doing surprisingly well with working class whites, who used to be, and still could be, the natural constituency of the Democratic Party. But the Democrats need to a) listen to rather than ignoring or insulting them, b) shut up about guns because rifles in the country are way different from handguns in the city, and c) demonstrate that a Democratic plan will genuinely make their lives better.

For more, check my review of the book from July 2007.

Joe Bageant website.

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