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ecause of vile and mean work of enemies of the Party and of the people, who have fabricated the provocation against me.” It would appear that such an important declaration was worth an examination by the Central Committee. This, however, was not done. The declaration was transmitted to Beria while the terrible maltreatment of the Politbiuro candidate, comrade Eikhe, continued. On February 2, 1940, Eikhe was brought before the court. Here he did not confess any guilt and said as follows: “In all the so-called confessions of mine there is not one letter written by me with the exception of my signatures under the protocols, which were forced from me. I have made my confession under pressure from the investigative judge, who from the time of my arrest tormented me. After that I began to write all this nonsense.... The most important thing for me is to tell the court, the Party and Stalin that I am not guilty. I have never been guilty of any conspiracy. I will die believing in the truth of Party policy as I have believed in it during my whole life.” On February 4, Eikhe was shot. (Indignation in the hall.) It has been definitely established now that Eikhe’s case was fabricated. He has been rehabilitated posthumously. Comrade [Yan] Rudzutak, a candidate-member of the Politbiuro, a member of the Party since 1905 who spent 10 years in a Tsarist hard-labor camp, completely retracted in court the confession forced from him. The protocol of the session of the Collegium of the Supreme Military Court contains the following statement by Rudzutak: “... The only plea which [the defendant] places before the court is that the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) be informed that there is in the NKVD an as yet not liquidated center which is craftily manufacturing cases, which forces innocent persons to confess. There is no opportunity to prove one’s non-participation in crimes to which the confessions of various persons testify. The investigative methods are such that they force people to lie and to slander entirely innocent persons in addition to those who already stand accused. [The defendant] asks the Court that he be allowed to inform the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) about all this in writing. He assures the Court that he personally had never any evil designs in regard to the policy of our Party because he has always agreed with Party policy concerning all spheres of economic and cultural activity.” This declaration of Rudzutak was ignored, despite the fact that Rudzutak was in his time the head of the Central Control Commission– which had been called into being, in accordance with Lenin’s conception, for the purpose of fighting for Party unity. In this manner fell the head of this highly authoritative Party organ, a victim of brutal willfulness. He was not even called before the Politbiuro because Stalin did not want to talk to him. Sentence was pronounced on him in 20 minutes and he was shot. (Indignation in the hall.) After careful examination of the case in 1955, it was established that the accusation against Rudzutak was false and that it was based on slanderous materials. Rudzutak has been rehabilitated posthumously. The way in which the former NKVD workers manufactured various fictitious “anti-Soviet centers” and “blocs” with the help of provocatory methods is seen from the confession of comrade Rozenblum, a Party member since 1906, who was arrested in 1937 by the Leningrad NKVD. During the examination in 1955 of the Komarov case, Rozenblum revealed the following fact: When Rozenblum was arrested in 1937, he was subjected to terrible torture during which he was ordered to confess false information concerning himself and other persons. He was then brought to the office of [Leonid] Zakovsky, who offered him freedom on condition that he make before the court a false confession fabricated in 1937 by the NKVD concerning “sabotage, espionage and diversion in a terroristic center in Leningrad.” (Movement in the hall.) With unbelievable cynicism, Zakovsky told about the vile “mechanism” for the crafty creation of fabricated “anti-Soviet plots.” “In order to illustrate it to me,” stated Rozenblum, “Zakovsky gave me several possible variants of the organization of this center and of its branches. After he detailed the organization to me, Zakovsky told me that the NKVD would prepare the case of this center, remarking that the trial would be public. Before the court were to be brought 4 or 5 members of this center: [Mikhail] Chudov, [Fyodor] Ugarov, [Pyotr] Smorodin, [Boris] Pozern, Chudov’s wife [Liudmilla] Shaposhnikova and others together with 2 or 3 members from the branches of this center.... “... The case of the Leningrad center has to be built solidly, and for this reason witnesses are needed. Social origin (of course, in the past) and the Party standing of the witness will play more than a small role. “’You, yourself,’ said Zakovsky, ‘will not need to invent anything. The NKVD will prepare for you a ready outline for every branch of the center. You will have to study it carefully, and remember well all questions the Court might ask and their answers. This case will be ready in four or five months, perhaps in half a year. During all this time you will be preparing yourself so that you will not compromise the investigation and yourself. Your future will depend on how the trial goes and on its results. If you begin to lie and to testify falsely, blame yourself. If you manage to endure it, you will save your head and we will feed and clothe you at the Government’s cost until your death.’” This is the kind of vile thing practiced then. (Movement in the hall.) Even more widely was the falsification of cases practiced in the provinces. The NKVD headquarters of the Sverdlov Province “discovered” a so-called “Ural uprising staff” – an organ of the bloc of rightists, Trotskyites, Socialist Revolutionaries, and church leaders – whose chief supposedly was the Secretary of the Sverdlov Provincial Party Committee and member of the Central Committee, All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), [Ivan] Kabakov, who had been a Party member since 1914. Investigative materials of that time show that in almost all regions, provinces and republics there supposedly existed “rightist Trotskyite, espionage-terror and diversionary-sabotage organizations and centers” and that the heads of such organizations as a rule – for no known reason – were First Secretaries of provincial or republican Communist Party committees or Central Committees. Many thousands of honest and innocent Communists have died as a result of this monstrous falsification of such “cases,” as a result of the fact that all kinds of slanderous “confessions” were accepted, and as a result of the practice of forcing accusations against oneself and others. In the same manner were fabricated the “cases” against eminent Party and state workers – [Stanislav] Kosior, [Vlas] Chubar, [Pavel] Postyshev, [Alexander] Kosarev, and others. In those years repressions on a mass scale were applied which were based on nothing tangible and which resulted in heavy cadre losses to the Party. The vicious practice was condoned of having the NKVD prepare lists of persons whose cases were under the jurisdiction of the Military Collegium and whose sentences were prepared in advance. Yezhov would send these [execution] lists to Stalin personally for his approval of the proposed punishment. In 1937-1938, 383 such lists containing the names of many thousands of Party, Soviet, Komsomol, Army, and economic workers were sent to Stalin. He approved these lists. A large part of these cases are being reviewed now. A great many are being voided because they were baseless and falsified. Suffice it to say that from 1954 to the present time the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court has rehabilitated 7,679 persons, many of whom have been rehabilitated posthumously. Mass arrests of Party, Soviet, economic and military workers caused tremendous harm to our country and to the cause of socialist advancement. Mass repressions had a negative influence on the moral-political condition of the Party, created a situation of uncertainty, contributed to the spreading of unhealthy suspicion, and sowed distrust among Communists. All sorts of slanderers and careerists were active. Resolutions of the January, 1938 Central Committee Plenum brought some measure of improvement to Party organizations. However, widespread repression also existed in 1938. Only because our Party has at its disposal such great moral-political strength was it possible for it to survive the difficult events in 1937-1938 and to educate new cadres. There is, however, no doubt that our march forward toward socialism and toward the preparation of the country’s defense would have been much more successful were it not for the tremendous loss in the cadres suffered as a result of the baseless and false mass repressions in 1937-1938. We are accusing Yezhov justly for the degenerate practices of 1937. But we have to answer these questions: Could Yezhov have arrested Kosior, for instance, without Stalin’s knowledge? Was there an exchange of opinions or a Politbiuro decision concerning this? No, there was not, as there was none regarding other cases of this type. Could Yezhov have decided such important matters as the fate of such eminent Party figures? No, it would be a display of naiveté to consider this the work of Yezhov alone. It is clear that these matters were decided by Stalin, and that without his orders and his sanction Yezhov could not have done this. We have examined these cases and have rehabilitated Kosior, Rudzutak, Postyshev, Kosarev and others. For what causes were they arrested and sentenced? Our review of evidence shows that there was no reason for this. They, like many others, were arrested without prosecutorial knowledge. In such a situation, there is no need for any sanction, for what sort of a sanction could there be when Stalin decided everything? He was the chief prosecutor in these cases. Stalin not only agreed to arrest orders but issued them on his own initiative. We must say this so that the delegates to the Congress can clearly undertake and themselves assess this and draw the proper conclusions. Facts prove that many abuses were made on Stalin’s orders without reckoning with any norms of Party and Soviet legality. Stalin was a very distrustful man, sickly suspicious. We know this from our work with him. He could look at a man and say: “Why are your eyes so shifty today?” or “Why are you turning so much today and avoiding to look me directly in the eyes?” The sickly suspicion created in him a general distrust even toward eminent Party workers whom he had known for years. Everywhere and in everything he saw “enemies,” “two-facers” and “spies.” Possessing unlimited power, he indulged in great willfulness and stifled people morally as well as physically. A situation was created where one could not express one’s own volition. When Stalin said that one or another should be arrested, it was necessary to accept on faith that he was an “enemy of the people.” Meanwhile, Beria’s gang, which ran the organs of state security, outdid itself in proving the guilt of the arrested and the truth of materials which it falsified. And what proofs were offered? The confessions of the arrested, and the investigative judges accepted these “confessions.” And how is it possible that a person confesses to crimes which he has not committed? Only in one way –because of the application of physical methods of pressuring him, tortures, bringing him to a state of unconsciousness, deprivation of his judgment, taking away of his human dignity. In this manner were “confessions” acquired. The wave of mass arrests began to recede in 1939. When the leaders of territorial Party organizations began to accuse NKVD workers of using methods of physical pressure on the arrested, Stalin dispatched a coded telegram on January 20, 1939 to the committee secretaries of provinces and regions, to the central committees of republican Communist parties, to the [republican] People’s Commissars of Internal Affairs and to the heads of NKVD organizations. This telegram stated: “The Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) explains that the application of methods of physical pressure in NKVD practice is permissible from 1937 on in accordance with permission of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party</p> 20008638 2015-01-24 23:13:00 2015-01-24 23:13:00 open open nikita-khrushchev-speech-to-20th-congress-of-the-c-p-s-u-20008638 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Sleep 1 http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2015/01/24/sleep-20008631/ Sat, 24 Jan 2015 23:07:15 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>Posted but not written by: Louis Sheehan FROM THE DECEMBER 2007 ISSUE How To Sleep Like a Hunter-Gatherer Not all people sleep in "giant sleep machines," like we do. Wednesday, January 02, 2008 RELATED TAGS: SLEEP Share on printShare on facebookShare on twitterShare on emailMore Sharing Services108 What’s really going on inside your head when you sleep, dream, or are wide-awake? In his fascinating new book, The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness (Random House, $24.95), science writer Jeff Warren explores some familiar and some less familiar states of consciousness, everything from daydreams to lucid dreams. Warren talked to scientists and Buddhist monks, slept in sleep labs, and spent time in a secluded mountain cabin to experience firsthand various states of consciousness. Along the way, he discovered perception-shifting information about how people sleep in different cultures. Westerners prefer a quiet bedroom, sleeping alone or with a partner. Egyptians commonly sleep with several family members in the same room and, even in a noisy city like Cairo, with the windows wide open. In the excerpt below, Warren meets with one of the few anthropologists who study the culture of sleep. —Jane Bosveld When I flew down to Atlanta to interview Carol Worthman, the director of the Laboratory for Comparative Human Biology at Emory University, she greeted me in her office, among the stacks of research monographs and the photos of her with beaming tribal groups from several continents. I asked why she had first thought to study sleep, and she smiled. “It was a true ‘aha’ experience. I was sitting in my office when a friend of mine who was studying mood disorders called me up and asked me what anthropologists knew about sleep.” She laughed and paused for a moment of dramatic emphasis. “Nothing!” She widened her eyes behind the thick lenses. “We know nothing about sleep! I think of all the places I’ve slept around the world, all the groups I’ve studied. . . . I mean, here I was, part of this discipline dedicated to the study of human behavior and human diversity, and yet we knew next to nothing about a behavior that claimed one-third of our lives. I was stunned.” So Worthman began to comb the literature, interviewing ethnographers, sifting through fifty-odd years of published work. What she found, she said, shouldn’t have surprised her: “The ecology of sleep is like the ecology of everyday life.” Sleep, it seems, comes in many cultural flavors. Worthman flipped open a book and showed me photographs of big families piled into large, sprawling huts, little kids peeking up from the arms of Mom, older generations wrapped leisurely around the fireplace. “Forager groups are a good place to start, because for much of human history we’ve been occupied with their mode of existence,” she said. “There are the !Kung of ­Botswana and the Efe of Zaire. For both of these groups, sleep is a very fluid state. They sleep when they feel like it—during the day, in the evening, in the dead of night.” This, said Worthman, is true of other groups too—the Aché of Paraguay, for example. Late-night sleep, when it happens, is practically a social activity. In addition to procreation, the night is a time of “ritual, sociality, and information exchange.” People crash together in big multigenerational heaps—women with infants, wheezing seniors, domestic animals, chatting hunter buddies stoking the fire—everyone embedded in one big, dynamic, “sensorily rich environment.” This kind of environment is important, said Worthman, because “it provides you with subliminal cues about what is going on, that you are not alone, that you are safe in the social world.” The more Worthman learned about the communal and interactive nature of non-Western sleep, the more she came to see Western sleep as the strange exception. She laughed again. “It’s funny, because as an anthropologist I’m used to getting weirded out a bit—I mean, you wouldn’t believe the things people do. So after collecting all this material I look at my own bed and go, ‘This is really weird.’” Western sleep, said Worthman, is arid and controlled, with a heavy emphasis on individualism and the “decontextualized person.” Contact is kept to a minimum. The apparent conflict with marriage co-sleeping norms, she notes elsewhere, “has been partially mitigated for Americans by the evolution of bed size from twin, to double, to queen, to king.” She lifted her thin arms and drew a big box in the air. “I mean, think about it—this thing, this bed, is really a gigantic sleep machine. You’ve got a steel frame that comes up from the floor, a bottom mattress that looks totally machinelike, then all these heavily padded surfaces—blankets and pillows and sheets.” It’s true. Most of us sleep alone in the dark, floating three feet off the ground but also buried under five layers of bedding. I had the sudden image of an armada of solitary humanoids in their big puffy spaceships drifting slowly through the silent and airless immensity of space. “Whoa,” I said. Worthman nodded. “I know, I know, so weird.” By contrast, village life is one big, messy block party, crackling with sex, intrigue, and poultry. In these cultures, interrupted or polyphasic sleep is the norm, which jibes with findings about still other cultures, like the Temiars of Indonesia and the Ibans of Sarawak, 25 percent of whom are apparently active at any one point in the night. Even more intriguing are some of the culturally specific practices around sleep. Worthman flipped to a sequence of photos showing a tribe of bare-chested Indonesians gathered in a big circle. “These are the Balinese, and this is an example of something called ‘fear sleep’ or ‘todoet poeles.’ See these two guys?” She pointed to the first picture, where two men cowered on the sand in the center of the group. “They just got caught stealing from the village kitty, and they’ve been hauled out for trial.” The villagers all had angry faces and open mouths. The two men looked terrified. “You can see the progression. He’s starting to sag”—in the next photo one of the thieves had his eyes closed and had begun to lean over—“and here in the last photo you can see he’s totally asleep.” The same thief was now slumped and insentient, snoozing happily amid the furious village thrum. “Isn’t that amazing?” Worthman shook her head. “In stressful situations they can fall instantly into a deep sleep. It’s a cultural acquisition.” We moved out of her office and made our way down to the laboratory, where Worthman pulled out a big cardboard box. “We wanted to look at sleep in non-Western cultures firsthand, so we decided to initiate a study.” She opened the box. “We went to Egypt, because, well, hunter-gatherer types are interesting, but they’re not really relevant now. Cairo is an old civilization in a modern urban environment. We wanted to look at a pattern that everyone knows is historic in the Mediterranean area. They sleep more than once a day—at night and the midafternoon.” I nodded. Of course, the siesta—or Ta’assila, as it’s known colloquially in Egypt. Worthman reached into the box and lifted out a set of black paisley headbands, all of them threaded with thin wires and dangling sensors. “So we studied six households in Cairo, and we made everyone wear one of these headbands at all times. One of these little sensors is a motion detector, the other is a diode that glues onto the upper eyelid in order to detect whether or not you’re in REM sleep.” Thus outfitted, the families went about their daily business, supplying a steady stream of information for the visiting anthropologists. What they found was that Egyptians on average get the same eight hours that we do, they just get it by different means: about six hours at night and two in the afternoon. They also sleep in radically different sleep environments—rarely alone, almost always with one or more family members, in rooms with windows open to the roar of outside street traffic. “Listen to this.” She pressed play on a tape recorder and the sound of traffic blared out of the little speakers. She raised her voice to yell: “I mean, I’m a pretty sound sleeper, but I couldn’t sleep in Cairo. It was too noisy!” I yelled back, “I see what you mean!” It sounded like 200 years of industrial noise pollution pressed into a single recording. She slid me a photo of a Cairo street, a narrow alley crisscrossed with laundry and jam-packed with donkey carts, trucks, cars, camels, and buses. “Every imaginable form of human transport, right below your window!” She hit stop and the room went quiet. “Despite all this ambient noise, Cairoans don’t seem to have any trouble falling asleep.” For Worthman, the conclusion was obvious. All these different sleep patterns suggested that the regulatory processes governing “sleep-wake transitions” could be shaped by cultural conditions. Sleep, it seemed, was putty—some cultures stretched it out, some chopped it up, and others, like our own, squeezed it into one big lump. From The Head Trip by Jeff Warren. Copyright © 2007 by Jeff Warren. Published by arrangement with Random House, an imprint of Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House Inc.</p> 20008631 2015-01-24 23:07:15 2015-01-24 23:07:15 open open sleep-20008631 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Zobrist http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2015/01/24/zobrist-20006664/ Sat, 24 Jan 2015 08:46:59 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>Posted but not written by: Louis Sheehan Zobrist in Oakland By Dave Fleming January 14, 2015 Since 2009, the best player in baseball has been Miguel Cabrera. According to FanGraphs’ version of WAR, Miggy has compiled 37.9 Wins Above Replacement. He’s done a lot of splashy things over the last six years: netting three batting titles, two MVP awards, and a Triple Crown. His career is on an impressive trajectory: the most comparable player to Miggy, according to Similarity Score, is Hank Aaron. Then Frank Robinson. Then Ott, Griffey, and Pujols. Since 2009, the third best player in baseball has been Robinson Cano, who has compiled an fWAR of 34.6. Cano’s hitting statistics would seem impressive for a first baseman: that he is a talented second baseman who has missed just fourteen games in six seasons is why Cano is on a similarly impressive beeline to Cooperstown. Player R HR RBI BA SB fWAR Miguel Cabrera 631 215 719 .331 19 37.9 Robinson Cano 573 156 595 .314 36 34.6 WAR is an advanced metric, but Cano and Cabrera do just as well when viewed by traditional numbers: they hit homers, produce runs, and have averages comfortably above .300. Both American League players, Cano and Cabrera have done extremely well in the annual MVP race: Year Miggy Cano 2009 4th 17th 2010 2nd 3rd 2011 5th 6th 2012 1st 4th 2013 1st 5th 2014 9th 5th Miggy finished 9th this year, while Robby finished 17th in 2009. Other than that, they’ve both ended up in the top-five in the writer’s vote. They are both very well compensated for their steady production on the field. Robinson Cano made headlines by landing a 10/$240 deal with the Mariners last season, while Cabrera signed an 8/$248 extension that doesn’t even start until 2016. They are two of the best players in baseball, and they are two of the highest-paid players in the game. And they’re two of the most famous players in baseball. A casual fan of baseball knows who Miguel Cabrera is, just as a casual fan has probably punched a tab for Robinson Cano when the attendants pass out those All-Star ballots during games. So we’ve found parallels between the best and third-best player, according to WAR. Who’s the #2 guy? Player fWAR Miguel Cabrera 37.9 Ben Zobrist 35.4 Robinson Cano 34.6 You knew it, right? Partially, it’s the way I set up the article….emphasizing the all-round flashiness of Miggy and Cano. The middle guy had to be an odd-ball. And Zobrist is sabr-famous for being one of those players whom the advanced metrics love. Him and Alex Gordon, I guess. Just to illustrate how much of an odd-ball Zobrist is, we can look at his traditional numbers, compared to Robby and Miggy: Player R HR RBI BA SB fWAR Miguel Cabrera 631 215 719 .331 19 37.9 Ben Zobrist 515 99 454 .270 95 35.4 Robinson Cano 573 156 595 .314 36 34.6 Zobrist has 116 fewer homers than Cabrera, and sixty-one points in batting average. He’s a bit closer to Robinson Cano, but Cano still beats him comfortably in those splashy hitting categories. Everyone knows that Robinson Cano is a great player…not too many people think of Zobrist in the same light: Year Miggy Zobrist Cano 2009 4th 8th 17th 2010 2nd - - 3rd 2011 5th 16th 6th 2012 1st 18th 4th 2013 1st - - 5th 2014 9th - - 5th This article isn’t really about Robby or Miggy, but it’s worth mentioning where FanGraph’s version of WAR closes the gap between Miggy, Zobrist, and Cano. Throwing some lesser-known stats at you: Player wRC+ Off BsR Def fWAR Miguel Cabrera 166 298.0 -11.5 -72.0 37.9 Ben Zobrist 125 134.0 16.8 73.4 35.4 Robinson Cano 138 180.7 0.4 12.8 34.6 wRC+ is Weighted Runs Created Plus…it is a slight variant on OPS+, in that it measures offensive production with the context of league and park factors. Zobrist, who has spent his career in the pitching-friendly (and fan-repellant) Tropicana Field, draws closer to Robinson Cano, who enjoyed the pull-friendly confines of the new Yankee Stadium until he signed with the Mariners last year. wRC+ doesn’t suggest that Zobrist is a better hitter than Cano or Cabrera….it merely suggests that he’s closer - at least to Cano - than the numbers initially seem. But it’s the final three categories that show us when Zobrist gains on Cano and Cabrera. Off, BsR, and Def are offensive, base running, and defensive measures of runs contributed above average. Zobrist is well behind Cabrera in Offensive Runs Above Average, and he’s a good distance behind Cano. But Zobrist gains some ground on the bases (BsR), and he gains considerable ground on defense: as a hitter he isn’t in the same zip-code as Cabrera, but once his defensive and base running contributions are considered, he is directly comparable to the Tigers first-baseman. He isn’t the same hitter as Cano, but he’s a better defensive player and a better baserunner…once park effects are neutralized, Zobrist comes out a tick ahead of the Seattle superstar. This shouldn’t be read as any kind of knock on Miguel Cabrera or Robinson Cano: both players have strong cases as the best players in the game. My hope is to point out that Ben Zobrist has been that good, too. * * * Of course, Ben Zobrist isn’t likely to remain that good: the position-flexible star will turn thirty-four in May, so it’s unlikely that he’ll continue to keep pace with his younger rivals. That said, the Oakland A’s have acquired one of the best players in baseball (and Yunel Escobar) for the budget price of John Jaso and two prospects (or one prospect and one clone of ex-Baltimore slugger Boog Powell.) They’ll pay $7.5 million for Zobrist, and have a full year to woo him to the charms of the Bay Area, and extend him. At the very least, the A’s can give Zobrist a qualifying offer and net a first-round pick when someone else signs him. This has been a quietly astonishing offseason for Oakland: they’ve traded away a player than ranked fourth among AL batters in fWAR, and then acquired a player who ranked seventh by the same metric. To give that some perspective, the NL equivalent would have the Marlins trading away Giancarlo Stanton, and then acquiring Anthony Rizzo. Even if these were the only moves Oakland made, it’s be a fascinating offseason. But Oakland’s essentially redrafted their team. They traded away their best power hitter for a guy who had a decent half-season at Double-A. They traded their best (or second-best) starting pitcher to Chicago. They traded away both halves of their enormously valuable catching platoon. And…first actually…they signed Billy Butler. My sense is that the A’s are trying to catch their likely division rivals by going big on defense. Yunel Escobar, though an unreliable hitter, is a solid defensive shortstop. Ben Zobrist is strong anywhere on the diamond. They traded away the brilliant Josh Donaldson, but Brett Lawrie is one of the few third basemen in baseball who can match Donaldson as a defender. Their outfield can claim two big pluses in Crisp and Josh Reddick, and Sam Fuld can catch ‘em. A platoon of Vogt and Josh Phegley should be an improvement over Derek Norris behind the plate. (Just a note on the strike-through text: as I was editing this article, I found out that the A’s have traded Yunel Escobar for National set-up man Tyler Clippard). There’s a debate about what kind of defensive team the A’s were last year. Our site credits Oakland with +32 runs saved, a tally that ranks them third in the AL, behind Baltimore and Kansas City. Comparing Oakland rates against their likely division rivals in 2015: Team Def. Runs Saved Oakland +32 Seattle -11 Angels -16 John’s Defensive Runs Saved suggests that Oakland was much more efficient at saving runs than the Mariners or Angels. But FanGraphs’ version of team defense value - Defensive Runs Above Average - thinks the gap is a lot closer: Rank Team Def. Runs Above Avg. 18th Angels 3.6 19th Pirates 1.2 20th Athletics 0.2 21st Yankees -6.7 22nd Mariners -9.5 By this team metric, the Oakland defense is pretty middle-of-the-pack. Tellingly, the defenses of the Angels and Mariners are also underwhelming. (The best defensive team in baseball last year, by this metric, were the Cincinnati Reds.) The acquisitions of Zobrist and Escobar suggest that Oakland views improving their defense is one way for the cash-poor organization to keep pace with the Mariners and Angels. This makes intuitive sense: one by-product of a good defense in a pitcher’s park is that it will make all Oakland pitchers look better: it’s possible that Billy Beane is hoping a strong defense will have the ancillary benefit of shining up the stats of some of the team’s young arms, which he can deal down the road for prospects and/or undervalued players. Whatever the final plan (and it seems that things are very much still in motion), the Oakland A’s have been involved in two blockbuster moves that don’t quite feel like blockbusters. They’ve remade their team into one that figures to be one of the strongest defensive teams in baseball next year. It’ll be interesting to see how it works. * * * While we’re on the subject of Ben Zobrist, should we be talking about him as a deserving candidate for the Hall-of-Fame? I choose the words of that last sentence carefully: it is unlikely that Zobrist is a candidate for the Hall. Although advanced metrics have gained considerable traction in how players are evaluated, I don’t know if we’ve reached a point where voters are going to elect a player who has a lifetime average of .264, 114 homers, and 511 RBI’s. Zobrist has led the league in exactly one category: sacrifice flies. He probably isn’t getting the bronze plaque. That said, Zobrist’s peak, at least according to fWAR, compares very favorably with the peaks of Hall-of-Fame second baseman. Actually, let me change that sentence: Zobrist’s peak is a Hall-of-Fame level peak. Here are the fifteen best second baseman by fWAR, from Age-28 to Age-33: Rank Player WAR, Age 28-33 1 Rogers Hornsby 58.4 2 Joe Morgan 53.1 3 Nap Lajoie 42.7 4 Jackie Robinson 41.6 5 Eddie Collins 37.6 6 Charlie Gehringer 37.0 7 Craig Biggio 36.1 8 Ben Zobrist 35.4 9 Chase Utley 35.3 10 Rod Carew 35.2 11 Ryne Sandberg 32.5 12 Roberto Alomar 31.4 13 Eddie Stanky 29.2 14 Frankie Frisch 28.5 15 Bobby Doerr 27.3 Zobrist ranks in the middle of the pack: the only players not in the Hall-of-Fame are Chase Utley (a fine candidate) and Eddie Stanky (an underrated player). Zobrist does not have the career length of the players ranked with him: he wasn’t a regular in the majors until he was twenty-eight years old. But his peak years are excellent: if he is able to remain productive for three or four more seasons, he’ll be an interesting test case. In the meantime, the Oakland A’s have acquired the most Oakland A’s-ish player in baseball. It’s something for all of us to cheer about. Dave Fleming is a writer living in Wellington, New Zealand. He welcomes comments, questions, and suggestions at this site and at dfleming1986@yahoo.com. COMMENTS (8 Comments, most recent shown first) evanecurb The most surprising statistic in the entire article is the fact that Ben Zobrist is 34 years old. 1:42 PM Jan 17th MarisFan61 (btw, MWeddell meant underrated, of course) 3:12 PM Jan 16th DaveFleming Since rgregory posted the top-9 in Win Shares over the last six seasons, I thought I'd post the top-9 in fWAR: 37.9 - M Cabrera 35.4 - Zobrist 34.6 - Cano 34.0 - Longoria 33.9 - McCutchen 31.8 - Beltre 30.5 - Votto 29.6 - Bautista 29.0 - Pedroia Both metrics have Miggy, Cano, Zobrist, McCutchen, and Votto. Win Shares rounds out with Adrian Gonzalez, Ryan Braun, Pujols, and Matt Holliday....two 1B and two corner OF's. fWAR - which makes a positional adjustment for a player's hitting - prefers Longoria, Beltre, Bautista, and Pedroia....guys on the tougher side of the defensive spectrum. I am the MOST surprised that Zobrist cracks both lists. 9:17 PM Jan 15th rgregory1956 Just as another point of reference, here are the players with 140+ Win Shares over the past 6 years: 190 M Cabrera 185 Cano 175 McCutchen 170 A Gonzalez 155 Votto 152 Braun 151 Pujols 147 Zobrist 143 Holliday 4:26 PM Jan 15th OldBackstop A west coast timezone guy with flex positions for last minute scratches? I'm drafting him. 8:07 AM Jan 15th MWeddell Zobrist is definitely over-rated, so I don't disagree with the main premise of the article. However, when we evaluate his Hall of Fame case, by excluding WAR before age 28, we are cherry-picking the statistics to favor Zobrist. If we consider all career WAR through a player's age 33 season, Zobrist ranks 37th among major league second basemen. I'm sure that there are a lot fewer than 37 second basemen, excluding Negro League players, that are in the Hall of Fame, so his case falls apart. Players surrounding Zobrist on the 2B leaderboard of WAR (Fangraphs version) through age 33 are Dick McAuliffe, Buddy Myer, George Grantham and Ian Kinsler. 7:46 AM Jan 15th DavidTodd Ben Zobrist, I love it, David Ortiz, Troy Tulowitzki and Jose Bautista are 4,5, 6, right. 1:49 AM Jan 15th MarisFan61 Thanks for this. I've posted in Reader Posts that I wish Zobrist somehow would do what he needs to do to be regarded at all as a Hall of Fame candidate. If I had a ballot, he'd have my vote. I like to talk about things that don't show up in metrics, and can't. Zobrist's "position-flexibility" is a thing that doesn't, but which potentially could; it would be complicated, but I think it eventually could be accounted for. Of course multi-positionality often means mediocrity, but sometimes, like with Tony Phillips as well as Zobrist, it means versatility in the best sense -- and it is very valuable to a team. Even considering how well Zobrist comes out in what you looked at, I think his actual value has been even greater, because of this "versatility value" that isn't in there. 12:08 AM Jan 15th Posted but not written by: Louis Sheehan [ One of my intentions with this blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. Further, this ‘blog’ will contain various drafts of unknown writings just to be saved in the event they are needed by me, etc.– Louis Sheehan ] Feel free to ignore this blog! I am intending to use it as a repository of various writings: drafts, doodles, etc. If there ARE any articles here, they are posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan </p> 20006664 2015-01-24 08:46:59 2015-01-24 08:46:59 open open zobrist-20006664 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Here Are Some Of The Things Chris Christie Left Out Of His State Of The State Speech Factcheck.org http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2015/01/16/here-are-some-of-the-things-chris-christie-left-out-of-his-state-of-the-state-speech-factcheck-org-19980122/ Fri, 16 Jan 2015 12:07:56 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>Here Are Some Of The Things Chris Christie Left Out Of His State Of The State Speech Factcheck.org Posted: 01/15/2015 8:30 pm EST Updated: 3 hours ago POSTED BUT NOT WRITTEN BY LOUIS SHEEHAN The following post first appeared on FactCheck.org. In his State of the State address, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie exaggerated some figures and boasted about progress that doesn’t look so impressive when compared with national trends. Christie boasted that New Jersey’s unemployment rate has dropped from 9.7 percent when he took office to 6.4 percent (as of November). But New Jersey was doing slightly better than the national average when he took office, and is now doing slightly worse. The governor touted the creation of 150,000 private sector jobs. But New Jersey’s rate of private sector job growth is less than half the national average; in fact New Jersey ranked 49th out of 50 states in private sector job growth. Christie crowed about New Jersey being “No. 4 in per capita income.” The state is actually third in per capita personal income, exactly where it was the year before Christie took office. It ranked second for more than two decades before that. Christie said that state property taxes “increased more than 70 percent” in the 10 years prior to him becoming governor, and that they’ve increased by “less than 2 percent” in each of the last four. That ignores the impact state rebates have played in lowering the property tax burden before he was governor, and the impact of the rebate cuts he implemented as governor. Christie made the misleading claim that “taxes were raised 115 times in the eight years before 2010,” the year he took office. But that list includes fees, not just taxes, and the governor himself proposed 23 fee hikes in the 2015 budget. Christie is a potential candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, and the New York Times noted that his annual State of the State speech on Jan. 13 sounded like “a defensive move by a politician anticipating the shots that could be leveled against him.” But Christie spun the numbers to make his case that “New Jersey is better off than it was last year at this time, and it is certainly far better off than it was just five years ago.” Unemployment Rate In his speech, Christie asked New Jerseyans to consider “where we were and how far we have come,” noting that the state’s unemployment has been cut by a third in the last five years. Christie, Jan. 13: Five years ago, our unemployment rate was 9.7 percent. Over 440,000 New Jerseyans were out of work. Today, the unemployment rate is 6.4 percent. It’s true, as Christie said, that when he took office in January 2010, the state’s unemployment rate was 9.7 percent and over 440,000 New Jerseyans were out of work (442,318 to be exact, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics). And Christie rightly notes that the state’s unemployment rate in November, the latest month available, was 6.4 percent. But here’s what was left unsaid: When Christie took office, New Jersey’s unemployment rate at 9.7 percent was slightly better than the national unemployment rate of 9.8 percent; but New Jersey’s rate in November was higher than the national rate, which was 5.8 percent. (The national rate dipped again in December to 5.6 percent.) In addition, New Jersey’s 6.4 percent unemployment rate was also worse than its neighbors, Pennsylvania (5.1 percent), New York (5.9 percent) and Delaware (6.0 percent). Job Growth Christie also boasted that New Jersey has “created over 150,000 private sector jobs in New Jersey in five short years.” The actual figure, according to BLS, is 142,700. That may sound impressive, but that statistic wilts when viewed in light of national trends. In fact, the rate of private sector job growth in New Jersey, 4.5 percent, is well below the national average of 10.2 percent. Under Christie, New Jersey ranks 49th out of 50 states in private sector job growth (beating only Maine). In terms of overall job growth, which includes public sector jobs, New Jersey under Christie is dead last. Christie also noted that, “Since last January, the total number of people employed in New Jersey has grown by over 90,000, and the number of unemployed has dropped by nearly 30,000.” Those figures are pretty accurate, according to population surveys conducted by the U.S. Census for BLS. The number of employed New Jerseyans grew from 4,157,733 in January to 4,250,823 in November. That’s an increase of 93,090. And the number of unemployed New Jerseyans dropped from 317,118 in January to 291,870 in November. That’s a decrease of 25,248. But Christie was wrong to say those were people employed in New Jersey. The survey does not ask where people are employed. As the Asbury Park Press noted, “Economists have said many of them likely are working in New York and Pennsylvania, where the job market has been stronger.” Also left out of Christie’s narrative, the New York Times noted, New Jersey has only recovered about half the jobs lost in the Great Recession, while the nation as a whole has recovered all those jobs and then some. Nationally, about 8.6 million jobs were shed from February 2008 to February 2010. Since then, the national economy has added about 10.4 million jobs. By comparison, New Jersey lost 253,800 jobs between February 2008 and February 2010; but has only recovered 121,800 of them. Per Capita Income Christie also bragged about the state’s unique assets in helping to lure businesses. He noted, for example, that New Jersey is “No. 4 in per capita income.” Actually, New Jersey’s ranking is better than that. New Jersey placed third in per capita personal income in 2013 (excluding the District of Columbia), according to the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis. But that impressive ranking is not new and has not improved under Christie. New Jersey ranked third in per capita personal income every year between 2009 and 2013, except in 2012 when it ranked fourth. And it ranked second in the country every year for more than two decades prior to 2009. Property Taxes Christie said when he came into office, New Jersey’s “property taxes had increased more than 70 percent in 10 years. We averaged a 7 percent growth in property taxes per year.” It’s true that, on average, property taxes increased about that much statewide between 1999 and 2009, according to figures from the state Department of Community Affairs. Homeowners and tenants paid an average of $4,239 in property taxes in 1999 and $7,281 in 2009. However, Christie’s claim doesn’t factor in rebates that some received over that time that ultimately lowered their property tax burden. When factoring in the average tax rebate homeowners and tenants received — $111 in 1999 and $1,037 in 2009 — property taxes increased by closer to 51 percent over that time period. Christie also said that since he’s been in office, “we have had four years of less than 2 percent annual property tax growth.” That’s not exactly right. Property taxes increased 1.6 percent in 2012 and 1.3 percent in 2013, after Christie signed a bill capping annual property tax increases at no more than 2 percent. But there was a 2.4 percent increase in 2011. Figures for 2014 have not yet been released. Christie’s claim of 2 percent annual growth also ignores large cuts in the property tax rebate program that he has made to help balance the state budget while in office. According to an analysis of previously available state data by the news website NJ Spotlight, average net property taxes (including rebate deductions) increased by 18.6 percent, or 6.2 percent annually, between 2009 and 2012, when taxes, on net, went from $6,244 to $7,405. Taxes Versus Fees In his speech, Christie boasted about not raising taxes in his past five budgets and, by contrast, he said “taxes were raised 115 times in the eight years” before he became governor in 2010. That’s misleading. Christie’s list of 115 “taxes” actually includes both taxes and fees. And the governor himself has raised numerous fees. In fact, Christie proposed 23 fee hikes in his 2015 budget. Christie made the distinction between taxes and fees in his 2013 State of the State address, when he said there had been “115 increases in taxes and fees” in the eight years before he was inaugurated. But this time he dropped the word “fees.” We point this out because politicians, including Christie, draw a distinction between taxes and fees. What’s the difference? Some members of the public may not see a major disparity between extending the sales tax to cover limousine services and adding a fee on new cars with low-fuel efficiency — two of the items in the Republican-compiled list. Whatever you want to call them, both measures amount to additional money paid by state residents. But politicians certainly put taxes and fees in separate categories. For example, Christie said his 2015 budget “requires no new taxes on the people of New Jersey,” when he presented his latest budget to the Legislature in February 2014. But a few months later, his administration was explaining 23 proposed fee increases. And, in fact, the budget included a proposed tax on e-cigarettes and “closing tax loopholes,” which the administration estimated would bring in $205 million in revenue. The nonpartisan state Office of Legislative Services’ analysis of the governor’s proposal showed $240 million worth of “revenue initiatives requiring legislation,” including the e-cigarette tax; penalties for bad electronic payments of income, corporate and sales taxes; and a change in online sales tax collection. Whether those items amount to raising taxes or “closing tax loopholes and leveling the playing field,” as the governor’s budget summary put it, may be a matter of opinion. But the same could be said of the list of 115 taxes and fees instituted before Christie took office. The Record newspaper in Bergen County, New Jersey, wrote in a May 12, 2014, article on Christie’s proposed fees: “Christie is not the first governor to turn to increasing fees and fines as a way to generate new revenue while also escaping the stigma of hiking taxes,” noting that former Democratic Gov. James McGreevey had raised more than $1 billion in 2004 through fee increases and that Christie had increased New Jersey Transit fees in 2010 to make up a budget shortfall. During the 2008 presidential election, we fact-checked former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s claim that he “did not raise taxes” while governor and found that he had raised fees by hundreds of millions of dollars. PolitiFact New Jersey first published the list of 115 taxes and fees in 2011, when a state Republican senator made the claim about the “tax” increases that Christie repeated in his speech. That list includes increases in sales taxes, cigarette and alcohol taxes, income taxes on high-income earners, as well as numerous increases in fees, including on divorce, vehicle registration, casino hotel rooms and new tires. Christie can’t have it both ways. If fees are taxes — as is implied when Christie says “taxes were raised 115 times in the eight years before 2010″ — then Christie is guilty of proposing at least 23 tax increases in his budget last year. Also, Christie’s proposal to require out-of-state online retailers to charge sales tax to New Jersey customers puts him at odds with conservatives who oppose more sweeping federal legislation, the Marketplace Fairness Act. The conservative Freedom Works calls it “the Internet sales tax.” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, another potential Republican presidential candidate, calls it a “job-killing tax hike.” Christie’s 2015 budget calls his measure “extending to [online retailers] the same obligation that other New Jersey businesses already have to collect sales tax on sales to New Jersey customers.” The measure was signed into law by Christie last summer and applies to online companies that act as a sales platform for retailers with a physical presence in New Jersey (think eBay or Overstock.com). New Jersey tax law stipulates that consumers are obligated to pay sales tax — in this case called a “use tax” — if an online retailer doesn’t collect it. But many residents may not be aware of that. The Office of Legislative Services estimated the change in state law would bring in $25 million in additional revenue. – Robert Farley, D’Angelo Gore, Lori Robertson and Brooks Jackson, with Carolyn Fante </p> 19980122 2015-01-16 12:07:56 2015-01-16 12:07:56 open open here-are-some-of-the-things-chris-christie-left-out-of-his-state-of-the-state-speech-factcheck-org-19980122 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan Pennsylvania Lawmaker Claims Yuengling Beer Is Banned From Tom Wolf Inauguration The Huffington Post | By Sam Levine http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2015/01/16/pennsylvania-lawmaker-claims-yuengling-beer-is-banned-from-tom-wolf-inauguration-the-huffington-post-by-sam-levine-19979986/ Fri, 16 Jan 2015 11:50:00 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>Pennsylvania Lawmaker Claims Yuengling Beer Is Banned From Tom Wolf Inauguration The Huffington Post | By Sam Levine Posted: 01/15/2015 11:08 pm EST Updated: 34 minutes ago GOVERNOR TOM WOLF Not written by, but rather, merely posted by Lou Sheehan Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan A Pennsylvania lawmaker claims the Yuengling brewery has been banned from donating free beer to the inaugural ball of Pennsylvania Gov.-elect Tom Wolf (D). State Rep. Mike Vereb (R) said during a radio interview Thursday that he thought Wolf's transition team was punishing Yuengling because the company's president, Richard L. Yuengling, has supported so-called right-to-work laws in Pennsylvania, which would make it more difficult for labor unions to organize. Vereb said that he wasn't sure if Wolf personally was aware of the Yuengling ban. "What we found out last night is that there will be beer at this event, but there is a specific restriction and request to not have Yuengling product there,” Vereb said. “Somebody, there’s a bureaucrat in this transition team that does not like Dick Yuengling because of his stance that he took in defending Governor Corbett on right-to-work a few years back." Pennsylvania is not among states with right-to-work laws. Labor leaders called for a boycott of Yuengling in 2013 after the brewery president announced his support for such a law. A Wolf spokeswoman declined to tell The Philadelphia Inquirer whether the beer, which has been brewed in Pennsylvania since 1829, had explicitly been banned from the inauguration ball. "We met our beverage needs, and we have a variety of choices for attendees from a number of breweries including Pennsylvania-based breweries," spokeswoman Beth Melena told the Inquirer. The Inquirer reported that some large employee unions made donations to help sponsor the event, which will be held on Tuesday. Wolf, a businessman, defeated one-term Gov. Tom Corbett's (R) bid for re-election in November. Vereb said he was baffled that anyone could say no to free beer. "I really believe it’s bureaucracy at work. Who turns down free beer? It’s un-American," he said in the radio interview. Not written by, but rather, merely posted by Louis Sheehan </p> 19979986 2015-01-16 11:50:00 2015-01-16 11:50:00 open open pennsylvania-lawmaker-claims-yuengling-beer-is-banned-from-tom-wolf-inauguration-the-huffington-post-by-sam-levine-19979986 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Mother Jones Mitt Romney Has a Huge New Conflict-of-Interest Problem If he jumps into the 2016 race, will Romney reveal the investors and investments of Solamere Capital, the $700 million private equity firm he runs with his son? —By David Corn http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2015/01/16/mother-jones-mitt-romney-has-a-huge-new-conflict-of-interest-problem-if-he-jumps-into-the-2016-race-will-romney-reveal-the-investors-and-investme-19979939/ Fri, 16 Jan 2015 11:39:01 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>Mitt Romney Has a Huge New Conflict-of-Interest Problem If he jumps into the 2016 race, will Romney reveal the investors and investments of Solamere Capital, the $700 million private equity firm he runs with his son? —By David Corn In 2012, Mitt Romney's career as a businessman who earned many millions of dollars became a net loss, as political foes slammed him for running Bain Capital, a private equity firm that invested in US companies that downsized and shifted jobs overseas and that obtained financial stakes in foreign companies that depended on US outsourcing for profits. At the same time, Romney, who refused to do a full release of his tax returns, was hit with questions (he didn't answer) about mysterious personal investments in offshore accounts. Should he mount a third presidential effort, as he has told GOP funders he is considering, all of these issues are likely to return. But there's another matter that will be be added to the pile of financial controversies for Romney to face: Solamere Capital, the $700 million private equity firm cofounded by his son Taggart that Romney has helped run since March 2013. Who has Romney been investing with, and what has he been investing in? These are questions that Romney 2016 will confront and that, no doubt, the firm will not want to answer. In March 2013, Mitt Romney became chair of Solamere's executive committee and a member of its investment committee, and Solamere's bare website currently lists him as the executive partner group chairman. The site only describes the company as "a collection of families and influential business leaders leveraging their broad networks and industry expertise to invest strategic capital." But the firm has recruited scores of investors willing to give the Romneys millions, and it has invested in an untold number of other funds and companies. Any of these parties—the investors or the investments—could pose a conflict of interest for a presidential candidate or raise a significant question. Has Solamere invested in companies that outsource? Or in overseas firms that compete with US firms? Has it drawn investments from people or corporations at home or abroad that want to curry favor with a possible president? Might the companies and private equity firms Solamere invests in have an interest in lobbying a future Romney administration? There is no way for the public to know; the firm does not disclose any information on its investors or investments. So how will Romney respond to these and other questions about his work for Solamere? Advertisement Advertise on MotherJones.com Shortly after Romney ended his presidential bid in early 2008, Tagg Romney and Spencer Zwick, who had been the Romney campaign's financial director, formed Solamere, which was named after a ritzy part of Utah's Deer Valley where the Romney family owned a ski mansion. As the New York Times reported, "Neither had experience in private equity. But what the close friends did have was the Romney name and a Rolodex of deep-pocketed potential investors who had backed Mr. Romney's presidential run." The pair brought in a third partner, Eric Scheuermann, who did have years of private equity experience. In its early days, the firm seemed part of the Romney network. At one point, Solamere shared an address with Romney's political action committee. It solicited investments from the well heeled, generally seeking a minimum of a $10 million buy-in. According to the Times, Mitt and Ann Romney sank a "critical, early" $10 million into their son's venture, signaling that the firm had Mitt's blessing, which Tagg and his crew could use as a selling point as they chased after funding from others. In 2008, Solamere set out to raise $200 million, and by May 2009 it had attracted $186 million from 39 investors, according to Securities and Exchange Commission records. Tagg Romney, Zwick, and Scheuermann, the records noted, would receive an estimated $16.8 million in management fees in the first six years. The records do not indicate the identities of the 39 investors who kicked in the initial financing. But other public records show that corporate titan Meg Whitman, a longtime friend and political ally of Mitt Romney, invested more than $1 million in Solamere. The University of Utah put about $1 million if its endowment into the firm's fund. H. Lee Scott Jr., the former CEO of Walmart and short-time member of the board of Goldman Sachs, was an early investor, became a partner, and served on Solamere's investment committee. Tagg Romney told the Times that his early investors included a few NASCAR drivers, two NFL quarterbacks, and nine heads of other private equity firms. One of Solamere's initial investments was in a North Carolina financial-services firm operated by former officials of a financial company run by Allen Stanford, who was later convicted of running a massive Ponzi scheme. These officials had come from the Charlotte office of the Stanford Financial Group, which had been closed by the feds for selling phony certificates of deposit. During the 2012 election, with Zwick helping to run Solamere and simultaneously raising money for Mitt Romney's presidential bid, government ethics advocates questioned the probity of the coziness between Romney's political funders and his fellow Solamere investors. Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution told the Boston Globe that Solamere was an example of how business and political elites operate "in the first-class compartment." Four months after Romney flamed-out as a presidential candidate, Solamere announced that he would "play a greater role" at the firm, chairing its executive committee and participating on its investment committee. "We believe that Governor Romney's experience and insight in private investing will enhance Solamere's distinctiveness," the firm said in an email to investors. With Mitt Romney more involved, Solamere expanded. And demand to be in business with Romney was high. The firm, according to Fortune, was seeking about $300 million for a second round of investment. In the email to investors, Solamere noted, "we feel strongly that there is value in not raising too large of a fund, and therefore anticipate keeping the size to a level we feel we can appropriately manage within our desired band of target returns." But in May 2014, Solamere Capital filed reports with the SEC noting it had created two new funds, with 200 investors investing a total of $472 million. (Five months later, Solamere reported these two funds had actually drawn $527 million from 215 investors.) Investor interest had been so intense that the firm had raised its self-imposed limit on the size of the funds to accommodate all the investors who wanted to be in bed with Mitt and Tagg Romney. These new funds would invest in other private equity funds and invest directly in private companies. Solamere freely mixed politics and business. In June 2013, as it was hunting for investors, the firm sponsored a policy conference convened by Mitt Romney at an exclusive resort in Park City, Utah, which attracted Rand Paul, Chris Christie, and Paul Ryan as speakers. At the same time—and in the same place—Solamere hosted a conference for investors. As the Washington Post reported, "The concentration of wealthy Romney backers in one place is a natural draw for politicians with national ambitions. But, as Solamere investors acknowledged, the gathering also provided them with potential targets, lending the retreat an aura of personal enrichment along with the focus on public policy." With Mitt Romney now an active participant in Solamere Capital, the implications for his potential presidential campaign are more serious. In the last days of the 2012 campaign, several liberal good-government groups and unions sent a complaint to the US Office of Government Ethics charging that the financial disclosure form Romney had filed as a presidential candidate was not in compliance with federal law because, in part, it did not list Solamere's holdings. On the form, Romney noted his family's investments in several funds, including Solamere's first fund, but he did not reveal what Solamere invested in—meaning the ultimate investment was not disclosed. As the complaint noted, "precisely because private equity firms typically invest heavily in a few select companies…there is a far greater chance that ownership of these funds could lead to a conflict of interest." The Office of Government Ethics did not respond to the complaint, and the matter died. Romney's Solamere issue will be different this time around. He's not a passive investor. He has helped run the firm and guide its investments for the past two years. He knows where the money is coming from and where it is going. There will be demands for him to reveal who he has been hobnobbing with financially so it can be ascertained if he is burdened by conflicts of interest—or if he has been making money in a manner at odds with his public policy pronouncements. But firms such as Solamere thrive on privacy. Their investment picks are their secret sauce, and many of their investors might prefer being unnamed. Solamere Capital did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for Mitt Romney also did not respond. In the 2012 campaign, Romney was the candidate who defied transparency. (In one memorable moment, an irritated Ann Romney huffed that she and her husband had disclosed "all you people need to know.") Kevin Madden, a top Romney adviser in 2012, recently noted that the Obama campaign successfully turned Romney's tax return question into a "character issue" that damaged Romney. With Jeb Bush releasing tens of thousands of emails from his time as Florida governor and signaling he will make public at least a decade's worth of tax filings, Romney, should he enter the contest, could run smack into the same challenge. But even if he wants to avoid problems similar to those of the 2012 campaign, can he reveal the inner workings of a private equity firm that was fueled by political capital? Might such revelations hurt his political prospects or harm his son's company? With Solamere, Romney has a new private equity problem. Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan [ One of my intentions with this blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. Further, this ‘blog’ will contain various drafts of unknown writings just to be saved in the event they are needed by me, etc.– Louis Sheehan ] Feel free to ignore this blog! I am intending to use it as a repository of various writings: drafts, doodles, etc. If there ARE any articles here, they are posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan </p> 19979939 2015-01-16 11:39:01 2015-01-16 11:39:01 open open mother-jones-mitt-romney-has-a-huge-new-conflict-of-interest-problem-if-he-jumps-into-the-2016-race-will-romney-reveal-the-investors-and-investme-19979939 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan A New Policy to Rescue Ukraine George Soros FEBRUARY 5, 2015 ISSUE http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2015/01/14/a-new-policy-to-rescue-ukraine-george-soros-february-5-2015-issue-19974039/ Wed, 14 Jan 2015 23:49:01 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>Not written by, but rather, merely posted by Louis Sheehan A New Policy to Rescue Ukraine George Soros FEBRUARY 5, 2015 ISSUE A New Policy to Rescue Ukraine George Soros FEBRUARY 5, 2015 ISSUE soros_1-020515 NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS Justyna Mielnikiewicz Masha, a hairdresser from Luhansk who joined the pro-Ukrainian Donbas Battalion last spring, at a training camp near Dnipropetrovsk, held in an old summer camp still decorated with Soviet-era Young Pioneers, July 2014; photograph by Justyna Mielnikiewicz from her series ‘A Ukraine Runs Through It,’ which has just been awarded the Aftermath Project’s 2015 grant for photographic work documenting the aftermath of conflict. It will appear in War Is Only Half the Story, Volume 9, to be published by the Aftermath Project next year. The sanctions imposed on Russia by the US and Europe for its interventions in Ukraine have worked much faster and inflicted much more damage on the Russian economy than anybody could have expected. The sanctions sought to deny Russian banks and companies access to the international capital markets. The increased damage is largely due to a sharp decline in the price of oil, without which the sanctions would have been much less effective. Russia needs oil prices to be around $100 a barrel in order to balance its budget. (It is now around $55 a barrel.) The combination of lower oil prices and sanctions has pushed Russia into a financial crisis that is by some measures already comparable to the one in 1998. In 1998, Russia ended up running out of hard currency reserves and defaulting on its debt, causing turmoil in the global financial system. This time the ruble has dropped by more than 50 percent, inflation is accelerating, and interest rates have risen to levels that are pushing the Russian economy into recession. The big advantage Russia has today compared to 1998 is that it still has substantial foreign currency reserves. This has enabled the Russian Central Bank to engineer a 30 percent rebound in the ruble from its low point by spending about $100 billion and arranging a $24 billion swap line with the People’s Bank of China. But only about $200 billion of the remaining reserves are liquid and the crisis is still at an early stage. In addition to continued capital flight, more than $120 billion of external debt is due for repayment in 2015. Although, in contrast to 1998, most of the Russian debt is in the private sector, it would not be surprising if, before it runs its course, this crisis ends up in a default by Russia. That would be more than what the US and European authorities bargained for. Coming on top of worldwide deflationary pressures that are particularly acute in the euro area and rising military conflicts such as the one with ISIS, a Russian default could cause considerable disruption in the global financial system, with the euro area being particularly vulnerable. There is therefore an urgent need to reorient the current policies of the European Union toward Russia and Ukraine. I have been arguing for a two-pronged approach that balances the sanctions against Russia with assistance for Ukraine on a much larger scale. This rebalancing needs to be carried out in the first quarter of 2015 for reasons I shall try to explain. Sanctions are a necessary evil. They are necessary because neither the EU nor the US is willing to risk war with Russia, and that leaves economic sanctions as the only way to resist Russian aggression. They are evil because they hurt not only the country on which they are imposed but also the countries that impose them. The harm has turned out to be much bigger than anybody anticipated. Russia is in the midst of a financial crisis, which is helping to turn the threat of deflation in the eurozone into a reality. By contrast, all the consequences of helping Ukraine would be positive. By enabling Ukraine to defend itself, Europe would be indirectly also defending itself. Moreover, an injection of financial assistance to Ukraine would help stabilize its economy and indirectly also provide a much-needed stimulus to the European economy by encouraging exports and investment in Ukraine. Hopefully Russia’s troubles and Ukraine’s progress would persuade President Vladimir Putin to give up as a lost cause his attempts to destabilize Ukraine. Unfortunately neither the European public nor the leadership seems to be moved by these considerations. Europe seems to be dangerously unaware of being indirectly under military attack from Russia and carries on business as usual. It treats Ukraine as just another country in need of financial assistance, and not even as one that is important to the stability of the euro, like Greece or Ireland. According to prevailing perceptions, Ukraine is suffering from a more or less classical balance of payments crisis that morphed into a public debt and banking crisis. There are international financial institutions devoted to handling such crises but they are not well suited to deal with the political aspects of the Ukrainian situation. In order to help the Ukrainian economy, the European Union started preparing an Association Agreement with Ukraine in 2007 and completed it in 2012, when it had to deal with the Viktor Yanukovych government. The EU developed a detailed roadmap showing what steps the Ukrainian government had to take before it would extend assistance. Ukraine has undergone a revolutionary transformation since then. The roadmap ought to be adjusted accordingly, but the cumbersome bureaucratic processes of the European Commission do not allow for that. Accordingly, Ukraine’s problems have been cast in conventional terms: • Ukraine needs international assistance because it has experienced shocks that have produced a financial crisis. The shocks are transitory; once Ukraine recovers from the shocks it should be able to repay its creditors. This explains why the IMF was put in charge of providing financial assistance to Ukraine. • Since Ukraine is not yet a member of the EU, European institutions (like the European Commission and the European Central Bank) played only a secondary part in providing assistance to it. The IMF welcomed the opportunity to avoid the complications associated with the supervision by a troika consisting of the EU, the European Central Bank, and the IMF that was used to deal with Greece and others. This new arrangement also explains why the IMF-led package was based on overly optimistic forecasts and why the IMF’s contribution of approximately $17 billion in cash to Ukraine is so much larger than the approximately $10 billion of various commitments associated with the EU, and even smaller amounts from the US. • Since Ukraine has had a poor track record with previous IMF programs, the official lenders insisted that Ukraine should receive assistance only as a reward for clear evidence of deep structural reform, not as an inducement to undertake these reforms. • From this conventional perspective, the successful resistance to the previous Yanokovych government on the Maidan and, later, the Russian annexation of Crimea and the establishment of separatist enclaves in eastern Ukraine are incidental. These events are seen as simply temporary external shocks. This perspective needs to be altered. The birth of a new Ukraine and the Russian aggression are not merely temporary shocks but historic events. Instead of facing the remnants of a moribund Soviet Union, the European Union is confronted by a resurgent Russia that has turned from strategic partner into strategic rival. To replace communism, President Putin has developed a nationalist ideology based on ethnic grounds, social conservatism, and religious faith—the brotherhood of the Slavic race, homophobia, and holy Russia. He has cast what he calls Anglo-Saxon world domination as the enemy of Russia—and of the rest of the world. Putin has learned a lot from his war with President Mikheil Saakashvili’s Georgia in 2008. Russia won that war militarily but was less successful in its propaganda efforts. Putin has developed an entirely new strategy that relies heavily on using both special forces and propaganda. Putin’s ambition to recreate a Russian empire has unintentionally helped bring into being a new Ukraine that is opposed to Russia and seeks to become the opposite of the old Ukraine with its endemic corruption and ineffective government. The new Ukraine is led by the cream of civil society: young people, many of whom studied abroad and refused to join either government or business on their return because they found both of them repugnant. Many of them found their place in academic institutions, think tanks, and nongovernmental organizations. A widespread volunteer movement, of unprecedented scope and power unseen in other countries, has helped Ukraine to stand strong against Russian aggression. Its members were willing to risk their lives on the Maidan for the sake of a better future and they are determined not to repeat the mistakes of the past, including the political infighting that undermined the Orange Revolution. A politically engaged civil society is the best assurance against a return of the old Ukraine: activists would return to the Maidan if the politicians engaged in the kind of petty squabbling and corruption that ruined the old Ukraine. The reformists in the new Ukrainian government are advocating a radical “big bang” reform program that is intended to have a dramatic impact. This program aims to break the stranglehold of corruption by shrinking the bureaucracy while paying the remaining civil servants better and by breaking up Naftogaz, the gas monopoly that is the main source of corruption and budget deficits in Ukraine. But the old Ukraine is far from dead. It dominates the civil service and the judiciary, and remains very present in the private (oligarchic and kleptocratic) sectors of the economy. Why should state employees work for practically no salary unless they can use their position as a license to extort bribes? And how can a business sector that was nurtured on corruption and kickbacks function without its sweeteners? These retrograde elements are locked in battle with the reformists. The new government faces the difficult task of radically reducing the number of civil servants and increasing their pay. Advocates of radical reform claim that it would be both possible and desirable to shrink the ministries to a fraction of their current size, provided that the general population would not be subjected to severe cuts to their living standards. That would allow the discharged civil servants to find jobs in the private sector and the employees retained on the payroll to be paid higher salaries. Many obstacles to doing business would be removed, but that would require substantial financial and technical support from the EU. Without it, the “big bang” kind of radical reforms that Ukraine needs cannot succeed. Indeed, the prospect of failure may even prevent the government from proposing them. The magnitude of European support and the reforming zeal of the new Ukraine are mutually self-reinforcing. Until now, the Europeans kept Ukraine on a short leash and the Arseniy Yatsenyuk government did not dare to embark on radical structural reforms. The former minister of the economy, Pavlo Sheremeta, a radical reformer, proposed reducing the size of his ministry from 1,200 to 300 but met such resistance from the bureaucracy that he resigned. No further attempts at administrative reform were made but the public is clamoring for it. That is where the European authorities could play a decisive role. By offering financial and technical assistance commensurate with the magnitude of the reforms, they could exert influence on the Ukrainian government to embark on radical reforms and give them a chance to succeed. Unfortunately the European authorities are hampered by the budgetary rules that constrain the EU and its member states. That is why the bulk of international efforts have gone into sanctions against Russia, and financial assistance to Ukraine has been kept to a minimum. Petro Poroshenko and Vladimir Putin; drawing by James Ferguson In order to shift the emphasis to assisting Ukraine, the negotiations have to be moved from the bureaucratic to the political level. The European financial bureaucracies find it difficult to put together even the $15 billion that the IMF considers the absolute minimum. As it stands, the European Union could find only €2 billion in its Macro-Financial Assistance program, and individual member states are reluctant to contribute directly. This is what led Ukraine to pass on December 30 a stopgap budget for 2015 with unrealistic revenue projections and only modest reforms. This is an opening bid in the negotiations. The law allows for modifications until February 15, subject to their outcome. European political leaders must tap into the large unused borrowing capacity of the EU itself and find other unorthodox sources to be able to offer Ukraine a larger financial package than the one currently contemplated. That would enable the Ukrainian government to embark on radical reform. I have identified several such sources, notably: 1. The Balance of Payments Assistance facility (used for Hungary and Romania) has unused funds of $47.5 billion and the European Financial Stability Mechanism (used for Portugal and Ireland) has about $15.8 billion of unused funds. Both mechanisms are currently limited to EU member states but could be used to support Ukraine by modifying their respective regulations by a qualified majority upon a proposal by the European Commission. Alternatively, the Commission could use and expand the Macro-Financial Assistance Facility, which has already been used in Ukraine. There is indeed a range of technical options and the European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker should propose a way forward as soon as the Ukrainian government has presented a convincing set of priorities. 2. Larger matching funds from the European Union would enable the IMF to increase its lending to Ukraine by $13 billion and to convert the existing Stand-By Agreement into a longer-term Extended Fund Facility program. This would bring the total size of the IMF program to fifteen times Ukraine’s current IMF quota, an unusually large multiple but one that already has a precedent in the case of Ireland, for example. 3. European Investment Bank project bonds could yield €10 billion or more. These funds would be used to connect Ukraine to a unified European gas market and to break up Naftogaz, the Ukrainian gas monopoly. These changes would greatly improve Ukraine’s energy efficiency and produce very high returns on investment. It would help create a unified European gas market and reduce not only Ukraine’s but also Europe’s dependence on Russian gas. The breakup of Naftogaz is the centerpiece of Ukraine’s reform plans. 4. Long-term financing from the World Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development for restructuring the banking sector. This should yield about $5 billion. The 2009 Vienna Initiative for Eastern Europe, which proved to be highly successful in limiting capital flight and stabilizing the banking system, should be extended to Ukraine. The foundations for such an extension were already laid at the inaugural meeting of the Ukrainian Financial Forum in June 2014. 5. Restructuring Ukraine’s sovereign debt should free in excess of $4 billion scarce foreign exchange reserves. Ukraine has almost $8 billion in sovereign debt coming due in the private bond markets in the next three years. Instead of a default that would have disastrous consequences, Ukraine should negotiate with its bondholders (who happen to be relatively few) a voluntary, market-based exchange for new long-term debt instruments. In order to make the exchange successful, part of the new financial assistance should be used for credit enhancements for the new debt instruments. The foreign assistance needed for this purpose would depend on what bondholders require to participate in the exchange, but it could free at least twice as much foreign exchange over the next three years. 6. Ukraine must also deal with a $3 billion bond issued by the Russian government to Ukraine coming due in 2015. Russia may be willing to reschedule the payments by Ukraine on the bond voluntarily in order to earn favorable points for an eventual relaxation of the sanctions against it. Alternatively, the bond may be classified as government-to-government debt, restructured by the group of nations officially called the Paris Club, in order to insulate the rest of Ukrainian bonds from their cross-default provisions (which put the borrower in default if he fails to meet another obligation). The legal and technical details need to be elaborated. Perhaps not all these sources could be mobilized in full but where there is a political will, there is a way. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has proved to be a true European leader with regard to Russia and Ukraine, holds the key. The additional sources of financing I have cited should be sufficient to produce a new financial package of $50 billion or more. Needless to say, the IMF would remain in charge of actual disbursements, so there would be no loss of control. But instead of scraping together the minimum, the official lenders would hold out the promise of the maximum. That would be a game-changer. Ukraine would embark on radical reforms and, instead of hovering on the edge of bankruptcy, it would turn into a land of promise that would attract private investment. Europe needs to wake up and recognize that it is under attack from Russia. Assisting Ukraine should also be considered as a defense expenditure by the EU countries. Framed this way, the amounts currently contemplated shrink into insignificance. If the international authorities fail to come up with an impressive assistance program in response to an aggressive Ukrainian reform program, the new Ukraine will probably fail, Europe will be left on its own to defend itself against Russian aggression, and Europe will have abandoned the values and principles on which the European Union was founded. That would be an irreparable loss. The sanctions on Russia ought to be maintained after they start expiring in April 2015 until President Putin stops destabilizing Ukraine and provides convincing evidence of his willingness to abide by the generally accepted rules of conduct. The financial crisis in Russia and the body bags from Ukraine have made President Putin politically vulnerable. The Ukrainian government has recently challenged him by renouncing its own obligations toward the separatist enclaves in eastern Ukraine, under the Minsk cease-fire agreement, on the grounds that Russia failed to abide by the agreement from its inception. After Ukraine’s challenge, Putin immediately caved in and imposed the cease-fire on the troops under his direct command. It can be expected that the troops will be withdrawn from Ukrainian territory and the cease-fire will be fully implemented in the near future. It would be a pity to allow the sanctions to expire prematurely when they are so close to success. But it is essential that by April 2015 Ukraine should be engaged in a radical reform program that has a realistic chance of succeeding. Otherwise, President Putin could convincingly argue that Russia’s problems are due to the hostility of the Western powers. Even if he fell from power, an even more hardline leader like Igor Sechin or a nationalist demagogue would succeed him. By contrast, if Europe rose to the challenge and helped Ukraine not only to defend itself but to become a land of promise, Putin could not blame Russia’s troubles on the Western powers. He would be clearly responsible and he would either have to change course or try to stay in power by brutal repression, cowing people into submission. If he fell from power, an economic and political reformer would be likely to succeed him. Either way, Putin’s Russia would cease to be a potent threat to Europe. Which alternative prevails will make all the difference not only to the future of Russia and its relationship with the European Union but also to the future of the European Union itself. By helping Ukraine, Europe may be able to recapture the values and principles on which the European Union was originally founded. That is why I am arguing so passionately that Europe needs to undergo a change of heart. The time to do it is right now. The Board of the IMF is scheduled to make its fateful decision on Ukraine on January 18. —January 7, 2015 Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan [ One of my intentions with this blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. Further, this ‘blog’ will contain various drafts of unknown writings just to be saved in the event they are needed by me, etc.– Louis Sheehan ] Feel free to ignore this blog! I am intending to use it as a repository of various writings: drafts, doodles, etc. If there ARE any articles here, they are posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan </p> 19974039 2015-01-14 23:49:01 2015-01-14 23:49:01 open open a-new-policy-to-rescue-ukraine-george-soros-february-5-2015-issue-19974039 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan A Critic at Large January 19, 2015 Issue The Power of Congress Before L.B.J., progressives saw bipartisanship as a blight. What happened? By Sam Tanenhaus http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2015/01/14/a-critic-at-large-january-19-2015-issue-the-power-of-congress-before-l-b-j-progressives-saw-bipartisanship-as-a-blight-what-happened-by-sam-tanen-19970683/ Wed, 14 Jan 2015 08:36:47 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>A Critic at Large January 19, 2015 Issue The Power of Congress Before L.B.J., progressives saw bipartisanship as a blight. What happened? By Sam Tanenhaus Not written by, but rather, merely posted by Lou Sheehan The tension between big-tent inclusiveness and ideological purity has bedevilled our two major political parties for many years, but for Democrats it became especially vexing in the middle decades of the twentieth century. From 1932 to 1964, the Democratic Party won seven out of nine Presidential elections and enjoyed an almost continuous majority in the House and the Senate. But who, exactly, was winning and what did victory mean? The answer was clear in only two intervals. The first was the initial phase of the New Deal, when Franklin Roosevelt’s economic-rescue proposals were swiftly passed into law by Congress and embraced by a nation traumatized by the Great Depression. The second came during the three-year period after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, when Lyndon Johnson and Congress went on a legislative spree that ended with the midterm election in November, 1966. “The Fierce Urgency of Now” (Penguin Press), Julian E. Zelizer’s account of wins and losses in the Johnson years, combines history with political science, as befits our data-happy moment. The information comes at us steadily—there are useful facts on almost every page—but the narrative is spartanly furnished. There’s little portraiture, not much drama, and only enough mood-setting context to let us know what America was up to while L.B.J. and Congress were contriving new ways to strengthen the social safety net and exhaust the national treasury. The emphasis falls instead on the high, and sometimes low, workings of legislative government, as bills inched through committees and subcommittees, nicked and scarred in “mark-up” sessions; the feint-and-parry of parliamentary maneuver; and, above all, the votes. This patient no-frills approach offers illuminations that a more cinematic treatment might not. And if Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton, at times betrays the head-counting instincts of a House whip, well, head-counting is the nuts and bolts of congressional lawmaking, as scholars like Nelson Polsby and David Mayhew pointed out a generation ago, and as Ira Katznelson, Sarah Binder, and Frances Lee have done more recently. “Overshadowed by presidents and social movements, legislators remain ghosts in America’s historical imagination,” Zelizer observed in “The American Congress,” the large and very useful anthology he edited in 2004. Its analyses, by him and thirty-nine others, begin with the Continental Congress and go all the way up to the Clinton and Bush years—not likely to be known as the Gingrich or DeLay years, even as these scholars cut the Leaders of the Free World down to their proper constitutional size. The idea of an imperial Presidency was always an exaggeration. “A President, these days, is an invaluable clerk,” Richard Neustadt, the dean of Presidential theorists, pointed out in 1960.The clerk at the time was Dwight Eisenhower, the general and war hero twice elected in landslides, only to be frustrated, like so many popular Presidents before and since, in skirmishes with well-organized adversaries on Capitol Hill. Congressmen were the heavies then, just as they are today. And yet, however much we say that we dislike our representatives, we keep sending many of them back to Washington. Together, Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid, each his party’s leader in the Senate, have spent fifty-eight years there. In the House, John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi have logged a combined fifty-two. These four, and some others, compose our democracy’s only long-term elected class. What distinguished L.B.J. from almost all his predecessors and successors was his profound rootedness in Congress, where he spent a dozen years in the House and another dozen in the Senate. As Majority Leader, he became as famous as a senator could be, thanks to his resourcefulness and his genius for compromise and his almost feral magnetism. But it was seldom clear what L.B.J. really wanted, apart from dominating the game and intimidating the other players. Robert Caro has turned the question over on a spit in four immensely detailed volumes and still seems undecided. Real-time observers were mystified, too. “The test will come when he runs out of ideas,” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., remarked in August, 1964. “Up to this point he has been living intellectually on the Kennedy years.” A year later, L.B.J. had signed Medicare and the Voting Rights Act into law, seven days apart. But in politics the truly new idea is a rarity. Much of the agenda presented with such fanfare in the nineteen-sixties, first by Kennedy and then by Johnson, had been in congressional circulation since the nineteen-forties and fifties, and Johnson was well versed in its fine points. As early as 1949, Senator Hubert Humphrey, who had a master’s degree in political science, was proposing one bill after another on national health insurance, Social Security extensions, and federally financed school construction. Not one had a chance of becoming law then, because the votes weren’t there. They’d gone missing in F.D.R.’s second term, when an alliance of Republicans and Southern Democrats formed “the conservative coalition,” a bloc that functioned as an autonomous congressional party, supplanting the two nominally major ones. By the time L.B.J. became President, Congress had been, as Zelizer says, a “graveyard of liberal legislation” for more than a quarter century. As late as 1960, some thought a vigorous new President might single-handedly revitalize Congress. This was a delusion. In August, a few weeks after Kennedy promised a “New Frontier” in his acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention, the Times’ Tom Wicker cautioned that if Kennedy won he would meet the fearsome “roadblock in Congress,” the House Committee on Rules, which, under the control of a “six-man conservative junta,” was “virtually a third branch of Congress—equal to and sometimes superior to the Senate and the House.” It was controlled by its chairman, Howard Smith, of Virginia, who decided which bills reached the floor for a general vote and which did not. In the Senate, Southern domination was even greater. Johnson had spent his years as Majority Leader in continual negotiation with the chamber’s true “master,” Richard Russell, Jr., the Georgia segregationist whose weapon was the filibuster—not the lone-wolf stunts performed recently by Rand Paul and Ted Cruz but martial epics, involving a “platoon” of men who delivered four-hour monologues on a rotating basis. “The Senate might be described without too much violence to fact as the South’s unending revenge upon the North for Gettysburg,” the journalist William S. White wrote in “Citadel,” a best-selling account of the Senate published in 1957. White, a Texan, was by no means a critic of the Senate. He was enamored of its rituals and thought it had a “touch of authentic genius.” At a lunch organized by Johnson, not long after the book was published, each freshman senator found a copy of “Citadel” at his place setting with two inscriptions, one by White, the other by L.B.J., who urged them all to study it “as a sort of McGuffey’s Reader,” one of the freshman, Joseph Clark, recalled. Clark, who called Congress “the sapless branch,” belonged to the growing and restive corps of liberal Democrats who found the Senate less the genteel club that White described than a mildewed establishment. Part of the problem was bipartisanship. “L.B.J. has no idea of his own but consensus,” Schlesinger noted. The criticism rings strangely today, when consensus and bipartisanship have become the holy grails of government, but in the mid-twentieth century they seemed symptoms of stasis and even atrophy. Humphrey, who was in the vanguard of a fresh style of Democratic politics—“issues-based” rather than interest-group-appeasing—inveighed against the “rotten political bargain” that Southern Democrats, including Johnson, had sealed with Republicans. Genuine political progress, he maintained, had to begin with institutional reform. There had been talk of overhauling Congress, within the institution and outside it, for generations. In 1879, when Woodrow Wilson was a senior at Princeton, he wrote a celebrated essay advocating a British-style “cabinet government,” in which the heads of State, Treasury, and so on would simultaneously serve in the Senate, thus linking the legislative and executive branches in a unified system of majority rule. He elaborated on the idea in his dissertation, “Congressional Government,” printed fifteen times between 1885 and 1900. Its targets included the House’s many committees and their ducal “elders.” Whenever a bill “goes from the clerk’s desk to a committee-room it crosses a parliamentary bridge of sighs to dim dungeons of silence whence it will never return,” Wilson wrote. “The means and time of its death are unknown, but its friends never see it again.” It is impossible to imagine anyone today writing such a book and wishing to enter politics, much less being elected President twice. Yet when Wilson arrived at the White House, in 1913, he tried to improvise the “straightforward, inartificial party government” he had championed. He went to Congress to deliver the State of the Union address rather than submit a written message, as every President since Jefferson had done. He also made the “President’s room” in the Capitol an actual office for meetings with committee chairmen. But the institutional friction was too great. Later, when a proposal was held up by filibuster, Wilson urged a cloture rule cutting off debate. The Senate adopted one, but it set the bar unreachably high: a two-thirds-majority vote, which stayed in place until 1975. In 1941, the American Political Science Association appointed a “Committee on Congress” to explore possible wide-ranging reforms. Some in Congress were amenable and put the leader of the A.P.S.A. team in charge of a Joint House-Senate Committee. After many hearings and much delay, a “reorganization” was approved in 1946. It eliminated lots of committees, taking the House from forty-eight to nineteen and the Senate from thirty-three to fifteen. (Today, there are twenty-one and twenty, respectively.) But the reorganization didn’t include the A.P.S.A.’s most important suggestions: changing the rigid next-in-line “senility system” of chairmanships, reducing the power of the Rules Committee, taming the filibuster with a less onerous cloture rule. The streamlining concentrated even more power in the hands of those who already had it. CartoonBuy the print » Nor did the reforms address the muddled identities of the two major parties. In 1944, reflecting on the legislative stalemate of the prewar years, F.D.R. concluded that the two parties were dysfunctional, “split by dissenters.” That year, he suggested to Wendell Willkie, the moderate Republican he had run against in 1940, that the two form a new “liberal” party. (A decade later, Eisenhower, under attack from isolationists who threatened his ability to conduct his foreign policy, talked of a new party of “progressive moderates,” perhaps one modelled on Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moosers.) But a second and even more influential A.P.S.A. report, “Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System,” published in 1950, sifted through the problem of party discipline. This report grew out of a project supervised by E. E. Schattschneider, a professor at Wesleyan and a leading exponent of Wilsonian party government. A political party that “does not capitalize on its successes by mobilizing the whole power of the government is a monstrosity reflecting the stupidity of professional politicians who are more interested in the petty spoils of office than they are in the control of the richest and most powerful government in the world,” Schattschneider had written. This argument became the overriding theme of the 1950 report. Schattschneider’s team of fifteen scholars and policy experts had talked to congressional leaders, to officials in the Truman Administration, and to state and local politicians. It concluded that the two major parties were “probably the most archaic institutions in the United States”—scarcely more than “loose associations of state and local organizations, with very little national machinery and very little national cohesion.” The Republican or Democrat sent to Congress was seldom screened by the national party and so felt no obligation to support the party’s program, if he even knew what it was. Once in office, he delivered patronage and pork to his constituents back home. He operated free of a coherent agenda and belonged to no “binding” caucus. The parties, in other words, were failing because they weren’t sufficiently ideological, partisan, and polarizing. The solution was a “responsible party system”—centralized, idea-driven, serious-minded. Each party needed stronger central “councils” that met regularly, not just in Convention years, to establish principles and programs. Candidates should be expected to campaign on these platforms and then to carry them out, with dissidents punished or expelled. The party in power would enact its program, and the minority party would provide strong criticism and develop alternatives to present at election time. Schlesinger, for one, glimpsed “the shadow of an infatuation with the British party system.” He was right. Some drafters of the A.P.S.A. report had admired recent events in England, where the Labour Government elected in 1945 had nationalized the railroad and coal industries and, over Tory opposition, introduced a national health service. Labour had campaigned on the promise of a welfare state, and voters had known what they were getting. By comparison, American government looked sluggish and ineffectual. President Truman got nowhere with his health-care proposal, largely because of vehement and well-funded opposition from the American Medical Association. Schattschneider had something to say about that, too. As he had written in his 1942 book “Party Government,” the two parties “let themselves be harried by pressure groups as a timid whale might be pursued by a school of minnows.” To the rising generation of liberal legislators, party government made sense. At the 1948 Democratic Convention, Hubert Humphrey spoke in passionate support of a civil-rights plank. (Its provisions included an anti-lynching law and a fair-employment-practices commission.) Instead of trying to appease the party’s Southern bloc, he met it head on. “The time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights, and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights,” Humphrey said. It was an electrifying speech; some sixty million people heard it on the radio, and as many as ten million more saw it on television. The plank was voted in, and the entire Mississippi delegation, along with half of Alabama’s, stalked out. Humphrey, suddenly famous, won his Senate race in November and in 1949 landed on the cover of Time. Truman paid heavily. The Southerners went ahead with their threat to form their own party. The States’ Rights Democratic Party nominee, Strom Thurmond, won a million votes, and captured four states in the South. Humphrey had created a wedge issue within his own party. It was the beginning of the liberal insurgency that climaxed in the Great Society and gave rise to a new politics. Purging dissidents was the first step toward building a new congressional party. A second was drawing together like-minded legislators and voters who for the time being were kept apart by the two-party system. If Southern Democrats and Midwestern Republicans could form a congressional majority, Northerners in both parties might do the same. By the time L.B.J. became President, this possibility had been tossed around for years. In 1958, after the Democrats’ victories in the midterms cut into G.O.P. strongholds from New England to California, Richard Rovere, this magazine’s political correspondent, predicted “a coalition of Northern Republicans and Northern Democrats, led by the latter.” The two groups contained members who were “ideologically indistinguishable,” he wrote. But the moment hadn’t yet come for them to unite. Zelizer does the arithmetic: “In 1957 and 1958, southern Democrats and midwestern Republicans controlled 311 out of 435 seats in the House, and they held 71 out of 96 seats in the Senate. Even after the midterm elections of 1958, which increased the number of northern liberals in both chambers, the conservative coalition retained a ninety-two-vote majority in the House and an eighteen-vote majority in the Senate.” This was why the Speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn, though sympathetic to the liberal contingent, tamped down talk of a new majority dominated by “bomb-throwing liberals,” as they were called in the press. Matters didn’t much improve in 1960. Kennedy was elected President, but he only just squeaked in, and the Democrats actually lost nearly two dozen members of the House, many of them liberals. And Kennedy’s métier was not legislation but foreign policy and soaring rhetoric. The visionary flights of the New Frontier excited intellectuals and the young, but in Congress Kennedy’s proposals—a tax cut, a major education bill, civil-rights legislation—fizzled back to earth like dud rockets. Congressional Democrats were the ones who set about trying to push through a progressive legislative agenda. And L.B.J., who had steadily backed away from the Dixie contingent, was helping to coax the new agenda along. In 1959, when he was still in the Senate, he had put together a committee on unemployment and assigned a freshman liberal, Eugene McCarthy, to lead it. After holding more than two dozen hearings in a dozen states, the committee issued its report, in March of 1960. As the historian Dominic Sandbrook has written, the report “called for federal assistance and public works in areas suffering from chronic unemployment, national standards of unemployment insurance, action to fight racial and other discrimination, a youth conservation corps, expanded vocational training and federal funding for retraining the jobless.” (The last of these proposals was enacted as the Manpower and Development Training Act, in 1962.) The paramount cause for liberals was civil rights. The movement was gaining momentum in arenas far from Washington. Like other contemporary historians, Zelizer stresses the importance of Martin Luther King, Jr., and other black leaders, who boldly calculated that the drama of the freedom rides and lunch-counter sit-ins, and, later, of clashes with white law enforcement in Birmingham and Selma, would force the President and Congress to act. He similarly gives credit to the efforts of Republican congressmen, including William McCulloch, of Ohio, an indispensable advocate for civil-rights legislation. The layer that Zelizer adds involves the Democratic Study Group, a coalition of liberal House members (some of them well versed in the A.P.S.A.’s 1950 report), led initially by Eugene McCarthy and then by such people as the Missouri Democrat Richard Bolling, who turned it into the first modern congressional caucus. These “de facto lobbyists” for institutional reform, as Zelizer wrote in his 2004 book “On Capitol Hill,” became the model for later Republican insurgencies. The strategies identified today with the Tea Party Caucus (closed-door meetings, public-relations blitzes, bloc voting, continual pressure on weak-kneed House leaders) were pioneered by the D.S.G., which originated with twenty-eight signatories to a liberal manifesto in 1957 and grew to an estimated hundred and twenty-five members—almost half the Democrats in the House—by 1964. The D.S.G. pushed the House to increase the size of the Rules Committee in 1961, weakening the conservative junta. And when the Rules Committee sat on the Civil Rights Act, Bolling collected enough signatures on a petition to force a hearing in January of 1964, the first step in a long march; the obstacles included a sixty-day team-relay filibuster orchestrated by the Senate’s Southern bloc. Johnson’s landslide victory gave him the liberal mandate he needed to push through the agenda for the Great Society, but he couldn’t have done it if the right hadn’t been undergoing its own ideological sorting—a convulsion within the G.O.P. that transferred power from the East Coast to the Sun Belt in the person of Barry Goldwater. Goldwater was a gift to liberals. One of just six Republican Senators to vote against the Civil Rights Act, he seemed the iron-jawed tribune of antigovernment extremism. He warned that the new bill would lead to a “federal police state,” turning citizens into informers, an opinion shared by the John Birch Society. Zelizer is probably right to say that Goldwater “built the Great Society,” if only because he accomplished what the liberals couldn’t: he made civil rights, and the liberal causes that followed, seem intrinsic to American idealism. One measure of the new order was the D.S.G.’s rising influence. The group had backed forty House incumbents, of whom thirty-nine won. It also picked forty successful challengers. The membership was now larger than the entire Republican caucus, and it exulted in its power. Two Southern Democrats who had supported Goldwater were stripped of seniority rights, the kind of “sanction” the A.P.S.A. report had called for. The Democratic Study Group successfully pressed for another reform that the report had recommended: changing the makeup of committees to favor the majority party. The “Goldwater Congress,” in James Reston’s phrase, became the first instance of unlimited majority rule since the beginnings of the New Deal. “F.D.R. passed five major bills in the first one hundred days,” Johnson boasted to an aide before the 1966 midterms. “We passed two hundred in the last two years.” Actually, Roosevelt had passed fifteen. But Johnson had one enormous advantage that Roosevelt lacked: a booming economy. “We may now turn to issues more demanding of human ingenuity than that of how to put an end to poverty in the richest nation in the world,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an architect of the War on Poverty, wrote in a 1965 essay titled “The Professionalization of Reform.” Such issues might include “the problem of perfecting, to the highest degree possible, the quality of our lives and of our civilization.” Cartoon“You’re gonna take a left at the nondescript white wall, keep going till you pass a nondescript white wall, then head right when you hit a nondescript white wall. If you see a nondescript white wall, you’ve gone too far.”Buy the print » Moderate Republicans, afraid of being branded Goldwaterites, fled to the sanctuary of the Johnson program. Most “believed that the President’s measures were in the national interest,” Geoffrey Kabaservice points out in “Rule and Ruin,” his history of the modern Republican Party. That’s one reason Medicare passed, despite the strenuous lobbying of the American Medical Association. “Approximately thirty-seven legislators who had been considered ‘friends’ of the A.M.A. were defeated” in 1964, Zelizer writes. Wilbur Mills, the tightfisted Arkansas Democrat and the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, had been blocking health-care proposals since the fifties, but had come around. He dropped hints of a compromise. L.B.J., with his instinct for congressional politics, deferred to Mills. Years of dismantling bills had made Mills expert in their intricacies, and many of the wrinkles had been worked out in advance. When committee members submitted alternative versions of the program, Mills adroitly mashed all the proposals together. The committee had only thirteen days to draft a final version. That was all the time it needed. No modern Presidency follows the arc of classical tragedy as neatly as Johnson’s. He began as awkward steward to a slain hero he resented, grew into full command of his powers while beset by self-doubt and self-loathing, and finally seemed to will his own descent. The story has been told many times, but Zelizer is especially good on the unravelling of the Great Society. At the start of 1966, L.B.J. could reel off mouthwatering numbers on jobs and wages, yet brace for losses in the midterm elections. It had happened to F.D.R.; it could happen to him. He chose to push ahead for more programs, more agencies, rather than to scale back. This heavy-handed style invited suspicion. The social critic Paul Goodman said that L.B.J.’s government, instead of safeguarding citizens, was reducing them to the status of “clients.” “Dependency” became the new term of art. Four days before the midterms, Zelizer writes, Johnson stood “in front of a turquoise backdrop, ideal for broadcasts on color television,” and in three ceremonies signed eight bills that would funnel huge sums into Great Society programs, including $6.1 billion into schools. The Democrats lost seats, in part thanks to a group of constituents many had taken for granted: working-class, pro-union, Northern whites who remained loyal to the New Deal but suspected that Great Society programs weren’t meant to help them—were, in fact, coming at their expense. Zelizer again has the numbers: “Only thirty-eight out of seventy-one Democrats elected” in 1964 “were reelected to the House in 1966. Just twenty-three of the forty-seven freshman Democrats who had been elected in Republican districts in 1964—not counting the freshmen who had defeated Democratic incumbents—were victorious.” Two years earlier, the conservative coalition seemed finished. Now the liberal one did. Emboldened conservatives attacked “Great Society play money,” rallying votes against a modest bill to exterminate rats in city neighborhoods. Moynihan was now jeering at antipoverty programs in the pages of The Public Interest: “Toss a rock in the lobby of the Office of Economic Opportunity headquarters in Washington today, and one will hit, at random, a steely-eyed budget examiner intent on a systems analysis of health services in Hough, a bearded youth determined to overthrow the ‘entrenched autocracy’ of the Democratic Party machine in some Eastern industrial slum, a former regional director of the Peace Corps worried about Comanche reaction to the latest batch of VISTA volunteers, and a Negro lawyer concerned how to double the number of Head Start projects in his home state before the next election.” L.B.J. began warning that if Congress didn’t raise taxes the country would suffer a “ruinous spiral of inflation” and “brutally higher interest rates.” The other option, scaling back the costs of the Vietnam War, seemed out of the question. Against the best advice, he had been sending in more troops; ultimately, the number exceeded half a million, and total Pentagon spending reached Second World War levels. Johnson was afraid to pull out, for fear of being labelled soft on Communism. Still a creature of Congress, he remembered the convulsions over the “loss” of China and the Korean War. Johnson had been Minority Leader during much of Joe McCarthy’s rampage and found himself powerless to stop it. This time, the protest was coming from the left on campuses and among the intellectuals and the press. The broad public hadn’t yet turned against the Vietnam War. It was the battle at home that was cause for alarm. Strife over civil rights was moving west and north. Protests in Birmingham and Selma had given way to riots in Watts, which erupted less than a week after L.B.J. signed the Voting Rights Act. Riots in Detroit and Newark followed, in the summer of 1967. Such conflict doomed the “third civil-rights bill”—a housing law that would have redressed discriminatory real-estate practices in the North. The bill cleared the House, but it was killed in the Senate by Everett Dirksen, the Illinois senator who had been instrumental in passing the first two bills. There had been racial violence in Chicago, and although whites had committed most of it, Zelizer explains that “Dirksen, like a growing number of Republicans, blamed civil rights activists tied to the black power movement.” After losing a skirmish with Wilbur Mills over taxes, L.B.J. muttered, “I’m not master of nothing. . . . We cannot make this Congress do one damn thing that I know of.” Former allies turned against him, too. Eugene McCarthy, who had helped him mount an eleventh-hour run at the 1960 Presidential nomination, became the Pied Piper of the “Dump Johnson” movement organized by antiwar Democrats. College students converged in New Hampshire for the 1968 primary, and McCarthy’s strong second-place finish proved crippling to Johnson. After Robert Kennedy jumped in, Johnson concluded that he might not even get nominated. He withdrew, and the leaden mantle passed to his Vice-President, Humphrey. Captive to his own rotten bargain, Humphrey insisted that the calamitous war policy was working and so was lumped in with his party’s despised establishment elders. Humphrey and McCarthy, both Minnesotans and pioneers of the new liberal politics, battled through to the nominating Convention in Chicago. The factions of the “responsible” Democratic Party had stayed together about as long as the Beatles. But, like the Beatles, they left an enduring legacy, if not one that they had envisioned. Even as the new liberal party had been forming, a new conservative party had been, too—along the axis that united the Dixie states and the Southwest. Lasting majority rule, however, would elude conservatives just as it had Democrats. Beginning with Richard Nixon, in 1968, Republicans won five of the next six Presidential elections, only to be repeatedly thwarted in Congress, outnumbered and bullied and kept off committees, just as the liberals had been. Like the liberals, they were exasperated by the deals their leaders kept making with the other side. In 1973, House bomb-throwers, following the example of the Democratic Study Group, formed the Republican Study Committee. Forty years later, it helped orchestrate a government shutdown. To date, the most ingenious practitioner of responsible party politics has been Newt Gingrich. All its principles can be found in his “Contract with America”: the stark agenda (balance the budget, cut back welfare), the institutional reforms (term limits, limits as well for committee chairs), the implicit threat to discipline heretics. With it came the ideologically unified party that progressives had once dreamed of, complete with caucusing, late-night strategy sessions, and political-action committees. The result was not only a House majority, won in 1994, but British-style cohesion. Under Gingrich, the House of Representatives became, at last, the American House of Commons. “The Republican Party in the House is the most disciplined political party we have ever seen in the history of America,” Barney Frank said at the time. Gingrich’s reign was short-lived, but many of his reforms went forward. In 2004, House Speaker Dennis Hastert announced a new House rule: no bill would go to the floor for a vote unless “a majority of the majority” supported it. He meant a majority of Republicans, in order to reduce the danger of bipartisan passage. (This is what stopped the immigration law passed by the Senate in 2013 from reaching the House.) And when the numbers weren’t there the conservative party remained firm in its opposition. L.B.J. had mustered as many Republican votes as possible for Medicare, lest it be seen as a “Democratic bill.” President Obama didn’t have that option. It was gone from politics, though it took him a while to realize it. In 1950, when the American Political Science Association report was published, Schlesinger wondered whether the new sorting-out was feasible “without a reorganization of our parties on taut ideological lines” that might inflame antagonisms rooted deep in the native temper. The report, drawing comfort from the very consensus it wished to do away with, confidently insisted that sharpening their disagreements wouldn’t put a forbidding “ideological wall” between the two parties. The Second World War had destroyed all the colossal isms save one, Communism, and it had no future in America. Even as Democrats and Republicans became more partisan, both sides would gravitate toward the center, where most voters were, and both would offer competing solutions to problems most voters could agree needed solving, such as securing voting rights and providing health care for the elderly. The authors of the report did not consider that partisan conviction might create its own pathology. Today, no one is confused about who is a Democrat and who is a Republican. But it hasn’t made it easier for the parties to govern, separately or together. ♦ Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan [ One of my intentions with this blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. Further, this ‘blog’ will contain various drafts of unknown writings just to be saved in the event they are needed by me, etc.– Louis Sheehan ] Feel free to ignore this blog! I am intending to use it as a repository of various writings: drafts, doodles, etc. If there ARE any articles here, they are posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan </p> 19970683 2015-01-14 08:36:47 2015-01-14 08:36:47 open open a-critic-at-large-january-19-2015-issue-the-power-of-congress-before-l-b-j-progressives-saw-bipartisanship-as-a-blight-what-happened-by-sam-tanen-19970683 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Universal Credit Rating Group, which was launched jointly by Russia and China, will release its first ratings already this year. Moody’s Downgrade Moscow, St. Petersburg Ratings MOSCOW, January 13 (Sputnik) — The first ratings of Universal Credit Rating http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2015/01/14/universal-credit-rating-group-which-was-launched-jointly-by-russia-and-china-will-release-its-first-ratings-already-this-year-moody-s-downgrade-m-19969876/ Wed, 14 Jan 2015 05:29:47 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>Universal Credit Rating Group, which was launched jointly by Russia and China, will release its first ratings already this year. Moody’s Downgrade Moscow, St. Petersburg Ratings MOSCOW, January 13 (Sputnik) — The first ratings of Universal Credit Rating Group (UCRG), which was created with the participation of Russia and China, are expected as early as 2015, the Head of the Research Department at RusRating Alexander Ovchinnikov told Sputnik on Tuesday. "In our opinion, the first ratings [will] appear … during the current year," Ovchinnikov told Sputnik. According to him, the project is in its final stage. "[The information is] gathered, the headquarters in Hong Kong [is] [working] …, and accreditation with the local regulator is underway. Moreover, there are preliminary agreements [with] other local agencies and investment funds joining the project soon," Ovchinnikov said. The RusRating analyst emphasized that the agency was created as a reaction to the bankruptcy of American investment funds with unreasonably high ratings. "When the issue of creating an agency alternative to the "Big Three" [Standard & Poor's, Moody's, and Fitch Group] was raised, we in fact offered [a] project that was ready to be launched and was supported by the governments of Russia and China," Ovchinnikov said. According to the analyst, UCRG satisfies the demand of those investors who have repeatedly criticized the Big Three agencies for standardized approaches that overestimate the opportunities of the developed economies while underestimating those of the developing ones. UCRG was officially created in June 2013 as a partnership between the Chinese Dagong, the Russian RusRating and the American Egan-Jones ratings agencies. According to Ovchinnikov, new members will also be engaged in the partnership in the future. Not written by, but rather, merely posted by Lou Sheehan Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan [ One of my intentions with this blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. Further, this ‘blog’ will contain various drafts of unknown writings just to be saved in the event they are needed by me, etc.– Louis Sheehan ] Feel free to ignore this blog! I am intending to use it as a repository of various writings: drafts, doodles, etc. If there ARE any articles here, they are posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan </p> 19969876 2015-01-14 05:29:47 2015-01-14 05:29:47 open open universal-credit-rating-group-which-was-launched-jointly-by-russia-and-china-will-release-its-first-ratings-already-this-year-moody-s-downgrade-m-19969876 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Fitness Trackers Only Help Rich People Get Thinner And even for people who can afford it, buying a FitBit doesn't lead to better health. Using it does. Olga Khazan Jan 12 2015, 10:46 AM ET http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2015/01/12/fitness-trackers-only-help-rich-people-get-thinner-and-even-for-people-who-can-afford-it-buying-a-fitbit-doesn-t-lead-to-better-health-using-it-d-19964055/ Mon, 12 Jan 2015 20:00:16 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>Fitness Trackers Only Help Rich People Get Thinner And even for people who can afford it, buying a FitBit doesn't lead to better health. Using it does. Olga Khazan Jan 12 2015, 10:46 AM ET POSTED BUT NOT WRITTEN BY LOUIS SHEEHAN Last year I bought a Lumo Lift, a device that tracks calories and buzzes whenever its wearer slouches. I wore it for about two weeks, wrote an article about it, and put it in a drawer. There it has sat, forlorn and uncharged, ever since. My experience is apparently not unusual. The authors of a new editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association point out that fitness trackers, like the FitBit and Jawbone, only work if they're worn consistently, in the right way, and by people who actually need to become more healthy. And despite the gadgets' proliferation in recent years, each one of those factors is kind of a long shot. The authors, Mitesh Patel, David Asch, and Kevin Volpp of the University of Pennsylvania, point to a survey showing that only about one or two percent of Americans use wearables. (Depending on the definition of "wearable," other surveys have found a much higher number—about 20 percent.) Among those who buy them, about half are younger than 35 and nearly a third earn more than $100,000 a year, the JAMA authors write. In other words, they're not likely to be the people who need the most help to lose weight. Related Story Slouching Towards Not Slouching On top of that, they note, more than half of people who buy fitness trackers stop using them. A third do so within six months. And for the rest, consistency is a struggle: An earlier report from PricewaterhouseCoopers found that among people who own any kind of wearable device, only 10 percent wear it every day and 7 percent wear it a few times a week. The rest are fair-weather FitBitters, donning their devices a few times a month or less. The PwC report, too, found that the young, wealthy, and educated are more likely to own the devices. So does this mean that fitness trackers—an industry that's expected to grow to $50 billion by 2018—aren't very good at actually increasing fitness? The authors of the JAMA article don't go quite that far. "If wearable devices are to be part of the solution, they either need to create enduring new habits, turning external motivations into internal ones (which is difficult), or they need to sustain their external motivation (which is also difficult)," they write. Wearable devices tend to better hack our lazy, hedonic-treadmill brains if they are integrated into smartphones, the devices we rarely leave home without, or send out visual or auditory reminders. One option might be for employers to deploy fitness trackers in workplace-wide fitness competitions ... but these types of contests, Patel and his colleagues note, tend to engage the already-active fitness buffs of the office, and not the people who just need to get off the couch. Instead, the authors recommend something along these lines: Individuals form teams that provide peer support and promote a sense of accountability to use the device and stay engaged in the new behavior—perhaps aiming for everyone to achieve a minimum amount of activity (eg, 7000 steps per day), rather than simply rewarding the power walkers. For example, teams might be selected at random in a regular drawing, but winning teams would only be eligible to collect their reward if the team had achieved its targeted behavior on the previous day. Of course, whether people would stay in a job where they were rewarded based on the jogging abilities of their co-workers is another question. </p> 19964055 2015-01-12 20:00:16 2015-01-12 20:00:16 open open fitness-trackers-only-help-rich-people-get-thinner-and-even-for-people-who-can-afford-it-buying-a-fitbit-doesn-t-lead-to-better-health-using-it-d-19964055 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan scape plan squirrel escape plans An unwary ground squirrel will often scramble away when surprised. But a vigilant squirrel at a site that recently hosted a snake is more likely to do an acrobatic leap. http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2015/01/12/scape-plan-squirrel-escape-plans-an-unwary-ground-squirrel-will-often-scramble-away-when-surprised-but-a-vigilant-squirrel-at-a-site-that-recentl-19964042/ Mon, 12 Jan 2015 19:55:35 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>Why ground squirrels go ninja over nothing Rodents recently spooked by snakes wave their tails as wariness signal BY SUSAN MILIUS 7:00AM, JANUARY 5, 2015 California ground squirrel SECRET NINJA A California ground squirrel is much more capable than it looks when it comes to battling rattlesnakes that lurk to feast on baby-squirrel nuggets. DAS_MILLER/FLICKR, (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) Magazine issue: Vol. 187 No. 1, January 10, 2015 EMail logo EMail Print logo Print Twitter logo Twitter Facebook logo Facebook Reddit logo Reddit Google+ logo Google+ SPONSOR MESSAGE Whole scientific careers have gone into understanding why a harmless handful of fluff like a California ground squirrel taunts rattlesnakes. Now Rulon Clark and his team at San Diego State University are exploring the puzzle of why the squirrels also seem to taunt rocks, sticks and the occasional shrub. On spotting a snake, a California ground squirrel (Otospermophilus beecheyi) stares and sniffs, or if the snake is uncoiled, may even kick sand at it. And in bursts, the squirrel flags its tail left and right “like a windshield wiper,” Clark says. A rattler can strike a target 30 centimeters away in less than 70 milliseconds. But ground squirrels twist and dodge fast enough to have a decent chance of escape. Also, adult squirrels from snake country have evolved some resistance to venom. So taunting is worth the risks as a signal to neighboring squirrels and to the snake that its ambush attempt has been discovered. After getting publicly and lengthily squirreled, snakes often just slip away. Posted, but not written by, Louis Sheehan Escape plan squirrel escape plans An unwary ground squirrel will often scramble away when surprised. But a vigilant squirrel at a site that recently hosted a snake is more likely to do an acrobatic leap. Credit (diagram): B.J. Putman and R.W. Clark/Behavioral Ecology 2014 Yet the squirrels also nyah-nyah tail flag at places where snakes might be but aren’t. To see if flagging indicates wariness, Clark and his colleagues built a squirrel startler that shoots out a cork using the classic spring that launches gag snakes out of cans (see video below). At spots with no sign of real snakes, squirrels mostly nibbled seeds in apparent tranquility with only a rare tail flag. The pop of a cork typically sent these squirrels scampering off on four speed-blurred paws. But when a squirrel revisited a worrisome spot where it had recently seen a snake (tethered by researchers), there was more and faster tail flagging. When the cork popped, more than half the squirrels flipped. “All four legs came off the ground and their tails were torquing around,” Clark says. Those just-in-case tail flags could tell a still-hidden snake that this is one wary squirrel ready for extreme body displacement, Clark and Breanna Putman report in an upcoming Behavioral Ecology. Earlier work showed that frequent flaggers often escaped attacks. So flagging may persuade a smart snake to wait for an easier target. Credit: Rulon Clark/YouTube </p> 19964042 2015-01-12 19:55:35 2015-01-12 19:55:35 open open scape-plan-squirrel-escape-plans-an-unwary-ground-squirrel-will-often-scramble-away-when-surprised-but-a-vigilant-squirrel-at-a-site-that-recentl-19964042 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Omaha Daily Bee, January 11, 1915 http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2015/01/12/omaha-daily-bee-january-11-19960548/ Mon, 12 Jan 2015 03:17:28 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn99021999/1915-01-11/ed-1/seq-1/ Posted by Lou Sheehan</p> 19960548 2015-01-12 03:17:28 2015-01-12 03:17:28 open open omaha-daily-bee-january-11-19960548 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan ‘Cowardice: A Brief History,’ by Chris Walsh By JAMES BOWMANJAN. 9, 2015 http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2015/01/10/cowardice-a-brief-history-by-chris-walsh-by-james-bowmanjan-9-19952428/ Sat, 10 Jan 2015 03:24:15 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW ‘Cowardice: A Brief History,’ by Chris Walsh By JAMES BOWMANJAN. 9, 2015 “Cowardice” is not quite one of those words, like “honor,” whose meaning was once understood by everyone but is now understood by almost no one. Yet its meaning has lately become more elusive. Are suicide bombers “cowardly,” as we are so often assured they are, or insanely courageous? Is it more cowardly to refuse to fight or to fight for fear of being called a coward for not fighting? Some people claim to have the answers to such questions about this once familiar and unproblematic subject, but they tend to disagree. There is no consensus as to who is a coward and who is not — or even about whether the question is one of any importance. Cowardice, whatever it means, must seem a matter of individual choice, like everything else, and the implied judgment made by the term probably requires that we decline to use it at all. Chris Walsh, an associate director of the College of Arts and Sciences Writing Program at Boston University, purports to offer a historical investigation of the subject in “Cowardice: A Brief History,” but his book is much more of a social and cultural survey of attitudes toward cowardice during various periods of American history. The limitation, by and large, to American examples is presumably for the sake of keeping the book to a manageable size and the brief history briefer rather than longer, but the lack of foreign comparisons obscures what distinguishes the American attitude from that of the old European honor culture. Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan [ One of my intentions with this blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. Further, this ‘blog’ will contain various drafts of unknown writings just to be saved in the event they are needed by me, etc.– Louis Sheehan ] Feel free to ignore this blog! I am intending to use it as a repository of various writings: drafts, doodles, etc. If there ARE any articles here, they are posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan The book can be seen as a kind of extended footnote to William Ian Miller’s “The Mystery of Courage” (2000), and it has some of the same problems, not least a tendency to mystification. Miller’s book is one of Walsh’s central texts — along with Stephen Crane’s “The Red Badge of Courage,” James Jones’s “The Thin Red Line” and a sermon titled “The Curse of Cowardice,” delivered in Hanover, Va., by Samuel Davies in 1758 to recruit soldiers for the French and Indian War. These Walsh keeps coming back to after ranging further afield among an impressive array of primary sources. But then, for a subject like cowardice, nearly all the sources are primary. Perhaps the most important thing we learn from this book comes from its very existence. Ours could be the first time and place in which cowardice has been thought a subject worthy of academic study. Near the beginning, we find a Google graph showing that the word is much less used today than it was 200 or even 100 years ago. The decline is a steady one until shortly after the beginning of the present century, when there is a small but unmistakable uptick. The author is surely right to say that this is owing to popular debate about terrorism since 9/11, but I wonder if the graph for “honor,” “courage,” “virtue” or any other words that now sound “judgmental” would not describe a similar pattern. The book’s “working definition” of a coward, naturally hedged with numerous qualifications, is “someone who, because of excessive fear, fails to do what he is supposed to do.” “Excessive” begs the question. What makes this fear excessive? The fact that it provokes cowardice — which is then defined by the excessive fear. But it bespeaks a definitional need to probe within, to find the coward’s true feelings in order to authenticate his cowardice. Does he have “excessive” fear? Yes? Then he’s a proper coward instead of, presumably, only pretending to be one. But surely it is one definition of a coward, and perhaps a better one to be working with, that it is something no one ever pretends to be. Continue reading the main storyContinue reading the main storyContinue reading the main story By contrast, courage is often pretended — perhaps so often as to approach always — which is what makes it so much more rewarding as a subject for study. If the mask is fascinating because of what it hides, what it hides is mere fear, which is rather lacking in nuance. What is there to say about it once it has been named? A quick survey of books with “fear” in their titles suggests that all are written for the purpose of dismissing or getting rid of it. Giving way to fear, which is what the coward does, is more interesting, however, because of its public dimension, since it is the rare act of cowardice that entirely escapes public observation. The coward emulates the writer or analyst (or vice versa), by bringing into the light of day that which belongs to the shadowiest realm of the psyche. About Henry Fleming, the problematic hero of “The Red Badge of Courage,” Walsh has this to say: “When he thinks that having made his ‘mistakes in the dark’ meant that he was still a man, the implication is that any sin so thoroughly a matter of social perception is no sin at all.” It is not really as sin that Henry sees his own act of cowardice; rather it is as a potential cause for (public) shame. If it is also a sin, that does not concern him: only the prospect of being known as cowardly. This is in the nature of the thing. We all care more about being publicly acknowledged as sinners than about committing sins in the first place, but cowardice is itself nearly always a public acknowledgment. Or at least that is the traditional way to look at it. Part of Walsh’s purpose is to tease us with the idea that maybe there is more to it than that. Maybe bravery itself conceals a kind of cowardice. Of the scene in which Henry runs from battle so desperately that, if you didn’t know the direction of his flight, you wouldn’t know if he was charging or fleeing, Walsh writes: “Cowardice and courage become merely arbitrary names we give to physiological reactions to environmental conditions.” At least that’s what the coward tells himself! There is a similar definitional problem with “duty,” to which the book devotes a chapter. “Examining specific mentions of ‘duty’ in relation to cowardice,” we read, “suggests an increasingly common understanding that duty is trivial, absurd or downright pernicious.” This is no doubt true, but of course such things could only be said in a context of denial that the duty in question is a duty at all. What seems dubious, logically, is retaining the idea of duty while disparaging it in such terms. Or is it? Maybe, just as there could be said to be a cowardly shadow to someone who acts courageously because he is afraid to be a coward, so there is also a kind of ghostly dutifulness in someone who takes on the duty of defying the very idea of duty. This kind of thinking seems to me oversubtle, a backhanded way of justifying bad behavior. But insofar as there is a demand for a book on cowardice from a reputable university press, it must be because a sizable contingent of people will not think of it in this way. For whatever reason, we want to be told that the standards by which people used to be judged have to be re-examined — as cowardice has been in the last century, mainly on therapeutic grounds — if not abolished altogether. Those who are interested in such standards, whether pro or con, will find this book an indispensable addition to their libraries. COWARDICE A Brief History By Chris Walsh Illustrated. 292 pp. Princeton University Press. $27.95. James Bowman, a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, is the author of “Honor: A History” and “Media Madness.”</p> 19952428 2015-01-10 03:24:15 2015-01-10 03:24:15 open open cowardice-a-brief-history-by-chris-walsh-by-james-bowmanjan-9-19952428 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan Wal-Mart: An economic cancer on our cities In Asheville, N.C., a dense downtown generated jobs and tax revenue and restored the city's soul Charles Montgomery http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2015/01/10/wal-mart-an-economic-cancer-on-our-cities-in-asheville-n-c-a-dense-downtown-generated-jobs-and-tax-revenue-and-restored-the-city-s-soul-charles-m-19952347/ Sat, 10 Jan 2015 02:53:15 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>Sunday, Nov 10, 2013 11:30 AM PST Wal-Mart: An economic cancer on our cities In Asheville, N.C., a dense downtown generated jobs and tax revenue and restored the city's soul Charles Montgomery Not written by, but rather, merely posted by Louis Sheehan Downtown Asheville, North Carolina (Credit: SeanPavonePhoto via Shutterstock/Salon) Excerpted from "Happy City" Most of us agree that development that provides employment and tax revenue is good for cities. Some even argue that the need for jobs outweighs aesthetic, lifestyle, or climate concerns—in fact, this argument comes up any time Walmart proposes a new megastore near a small town. But a clear-eyed look at the spatial economics of land, jobs, and tax regimes should cause anyone to reject the anything-and-anywhere-goes development model. To explain, let me offer the story of an obsessive number cruncher who found his own urban laboratory quite by chance. Joseph Minicozzi, a young architect raised in upstate New York, was on a cross-country motorcycle ride in 2001 when he got sidetracked in the Appalachian Mountains. He met a beautiful woman in a North Carolina roadside bar and was smitten by both that woman and the languid beauty of the Blue Ridge region. Now they share a bungalow with two dogs in the mountain town of Asheville. Asheville is, in many ways, a typical midsize American city, which is to say that its downtown was virtually abandoned in the second half of the twentieth century. Dozens of elegant old structures were boarded up or encased in aluminum siding as highways and liberal development policies sucked people and commercial life into dispersal. The process continued until 1991, when Julian Price, the heir to a family insurance and broadcasting fortune, decided to pour everything he had into nursing that old downtown back to life. His company, Public Interest Projects, bought and renovated old buildings, leased street-front space out to small businesses, and rented or sold the lofts above to a new wave of residential pioneers. They coached, coddled, and sometimes bankrolled entrepreneurs who began to enliven the streets. First came a vegetarian restaurant, then a bookstore, a furniture store, and the now-legendary nightclub, the Orange Peel. When Price died in 2001, the downtown was starting to show signs of life, but his successor, Pat Whelan, and his new recruit, Minicozzi, still had to battle the civic skeptics. Some city officials saw such little value in downtown land that they planned to plunk down a prison right in the middle of a terrain that was perfect for mixed-use redevelopment. The developers realized that if they wanted the city officials to support their vision, they needed to educate them—and that meant offering them hard numbers on the tax and job benefits of revitalizing downtown. The numbers they produced sparked a eureka moment among the city’s accountants because they insisted on taking a spatial systems approach, similar to the way farmers look at land they want to put into production. The question was simple: What is the production yield for every acre of land? On a farm, the answer might be in pounds of tomatoes. In the city, it’s about tax revenues and jobs. To explain, Minicozzi offered me his classic urban accounting smackdown, using two competing properties: On the one side is a downtown building his firm rescued—a six-story steel-framed 1923 classic once owned by JCPenney and converted into shops, offices, and condos. On the other side is a Walmart on the edge of town. The old Penney’s building sits on less than a quarter of an acre, while the Walmart and its parking lots occupy thirty-four acres. Adding up the property and sales tax paid on each piece of land, Minicozzi found that the Walmart contributed only $50,800 to the city in retail and property taxes for each acre it used, but the JCPenney building contributed a whopping $330,000 per acre in property tax alone. In other words, the city got more than seven times the return for every acre on downtown investments than it did when it broke new ground out on the city limits. When Minicozzi looked at job density, the difference was even more vivid: the small businesses that occupied the old Penney’s building employed fourteen people, which doesn’t seem like many until you realize that this is actually seventy-four jobs per acre, compared with the fewer than six jobs per acre created on a sprawling Walmart site. (This is particularly dire given that on top of reducing jobs density in its host cities, Walmart depresses average wages as well.) Minicozzi has since found the same spatial conditions in cities all over the United States. Even low-rise, mixed-use buildings of two or three stories—the kind you see on an old-style, small-town main street—bring in ten times the revenue per acre as that of an average big-box development. What’s stunning is that, thanks to the relationship between energy and distance, large-footprint sprawl development patterns can actually cost cities more to service than they give back in taxes. The result? Growth that produces deficits that simply cannot be overcome with new growth revenue. In Sarasota County, Florida, for example, Minicozzi found that it would take about three times as long for the county to recoup the land and infrastructure costs involved in developing housing in a sprawl pattern as compared with downtown. If all went well, the county’s return on investment for sprawl housing would still be barely 4 percent. “Cities and counties have essentially been taking tax revenues from downtowns and using them to subsidize development and services in sprawl,” Minicozzi told me. “This is like a farmer going out and dumping all his fertilizer on the weeds rather than on the tomatoes.” The productive richness of the new Asheville approach becomes even clearer when you consider the geographic path taken by dollars spent at local businesses. Money spent at small and local businesses tends to stay in a community, producing more local jobs, while money spent at big national chains tends to get sucked out of the local economy. Local businesses tend to use local accountants, printers, lawyers, and advertisers, and their owners spend more of their profits in town. National retailers, on the other hand, tend to send such work back to regional or national hubs, and their profits to distant shareholders. Every $100 spent at a local business produces at least a third more local economic benefit and more than a third more local jobs. The arrival of a Walmart in any community has been shown to produce a blast radius of lower wages and higher poverty. Price, Whelan, and Minicozzi helped convince the city of Asheville to fertilize that rich downtown soil. The city changed its zoning policies, allowing flexible uses for downtown buildings. It invested in livelier streetscapes and public events. It stopped forcing developers to build parking garages, which brought down the cost of both housing and business. It built its own user-pay garages, so the cost of parking was borne by the people who used it rather than by everyone else. All of this helped make it worthwhile for developers to risk their investment on restoring old buildings, producing new jobs and tax density for the city. Retail sales in the resurgent downtown have exploded since 1991. So has the taxable value of downtown properties, which cost a fraction to service than sprawl lands. The reborn downtown has become the greatest supplier of tax revenue and affordable housing in the county—partly because it relieves people of the burden of commuting, and partly because it mixes high-end lofts with modest apartments. All of this, while growing what one local newspaper emotionally described as, “a downtown that—after decades of doubt and neglect—is once again the heart and soul of Asheville.” By investing in downtowns rather than dispersal, cities can boost jobs and local tax revenues while spending less on far-flung infrastructure and services. In Asheville, North Carolina, Public Interest Projects found that a six- story mixed-use building produced more than thirteen times the tax revenue and twelve times the jobs per acre of land than the Walmart on the edge of town. (Walmart retail tax based in national average for Walmart stores.) (Scott Keck, with data from Joe Minicozzi / Public Interest Projects) By paying attention to the relationship between land, distance, scale, and cash flow—in other words, by building more connected, complex places—the city regained its soul and its good health. Excerpted from “Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design” by Charles Montgomery, published in November 2013 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2013 by Charles Montgomery. All rights reserved. </p> 19952347 2015-01-10 02:53:15 2015-01-10 02:53:15 open open wal-mart-an-economic-cancer-on-our-cities-in-asheville-n-c-a-dense-downtown-generated-jobs-and-tax-revenue-and-restored-the-city-s-soul-charles-m-19952347 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Afghan government likely to withstand a burgeoning Taliban insurgency within the coming year after the US combat troops withdrawal. © Flickr/ isafmedia http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2015/01/07/afghan-government-likely-to-withstand-a-burgeoning-taliban-insurgency-within-the-coming-year-after-the-us-combat-troops-withdrawal-flickr-isafmed-19936731/ Wed, 07 Jan 2015 04:14:02 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>Afghan government likely to withstand a burgeoning Taliban insurgency within the coming year after the US combat troops withdrawal. © Flickr/ isafmedia Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan WASHINGTON, January 6 (Sputnik) – The government of Afghanistan will most likely be able to withstand a burgeoning Taliban insurgency within the coming year after the US combat troops withdrawal, two analysts told Sputnik. "I am pretty confident we are not going to see a collapse of the [Afghan] regime in 2015. There will likely be an ongoing insurgency but the Afghan state and its security forces are not a house of cards that are going to be blown away by the Taliban wind," expert advisor to Stratfor, a global intelligence firm, on Middle Eastern and South Asian affairs Kamran Bokhari told Sputnik Monday. Bokhari, who is also the author of "Political Islam in the Age of Democratization", said the reality on the ground is much different from that of the 1990s, when the Taliban was able to advance in Kabul after the collapse of the Soviet-backed regime. © REUTERS/ Lucas Jackson According to the analyst, the Taliban would be unable to become a guerrilla group out of an insurgent terrorist force, because the United States will still be providing air support to Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF). Therefore, US air power will prevent the Taliban from massing troops and will help disrupt its logistical movements. Moreover, Afghanistan's cooperation with Pakistan would be critical, Bokhari noted, as it would help to "squeeze the Taliban from both directions." The analyst noticed there has been more collaboration with Pakistan since new Afghan President Ashraf Ghani came into office. Finally, Bokhari underlined that Afghanistan over the past few years has been witnessing the emergence of an actual state, a development the country has not seen since the Communist regime in Kabul fell in the early 1990s. © US Army / Staff Sgt. Shane Hamann Meanwhile, the Afghan government is also pursuing peace talks with the Taliban. Khalil Nouri, founder of an Afghan think tank, the New World Strategies Coalition, also said the Taliban may need to come to the negotiating table because it is unlikely that they will fight their way into power. "Mullah Omar [spiritual leader, commander of the Taliban] needs to consider this. The Taliban have very little chance of coming to power again primarily because they have little mass popular support. When the majority does not want you, then you are doomed," Nouri told Sputnik. The United States will not abandon Afghanistan because it has too much of a strategic interest in it, he added. Afghanistan will become an "Observation-Tower-State" that will help the United States monitor Russia, China, Iran and Pakistan more closely, according to the expert. "The US and NATO have invested too much time and capital in Afghanistan. That will not go to waste, as it did during the post-Soviet withdrawal in 1989, when the United States turned its back on Afghanistan," Nouri said. Nouri was less optimistic than Bokhari about Afghanistan's future development and indicated that poor economic conditions and corruption would likely destabilize the state before a Taliban reemergence does. The United States withdrew combat troops from Afghanistan in the end of December 2014 after a 14-year occupation. The withdrawal raised fears of growing insurgent violence and questions on whether or not the ANSF can adequately defend the country. According to the UN, a record number of civilians were killed in Afghanistan in 2014. The new US mission that started on January 2, Resolute Support, will focus on training and advising the ANSF. On January 1, President Ghani wrote on his Twitter that "from now on, we must take the responsibility of securing Afghanistan," and the United States "will train/advise the ANSF to prevail." Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan [ One of my intentions with this blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. Further, this ‘blog’ will contain various drafts of unknown writings just to be saved in the event they are needed by me, etc.– Louis Sheehan ] Feel free to ignore this blog! I am intending to use it as a repository of various writings: drafts, doodles, etc. If there ARE any articles here, they are posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan </p> 19936731 2015-01-07 04:14:02 2015-01-07 04:14:02 open open afghan-government-likely-to-withstand-a-burgeoning-taliban-insurgency-within-the-coming-year-after-the-us-combat-troops-withdrawal-flickr-isafmed-19936731 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan The Tragedy of the American Military The American public and its political leadership will do anything for the military except take it seriously. The result is a chickenhawk nation in which careless spending and strategic folly combine to lure America int http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2015/01/06/the-tragedy-of-the-american-military-the-american-public-and-its-political-leadership-will-do-anything-for-the-military-except-take-it-seriously--19932237/ Tue, 06 Jan 2015 08:46:06 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>The Tragedy of the American Military The American public and its political leadership will do anything for the military except take it seriously. The result is a chickenhawk nation in which careless spending and strategic folly combine to lure America into endless wars it can’t win. James Fallows JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2015 Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan In mid-September, while President Obama was fending off complaints that he should have done more, done less, or done something different about the overlapping crises in Iraq and Syria, he traveled to Central Command headquarters, at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida. There he addressed some of the men and women who would implement whatever the U.S. military strategy turned out to be. The part of the speech intended to get coverage was Obama’s rationale for reengaging the United States in Iraq, more than a decade after it first invaded and following the long and painful effort to extricate itself. This was big enough news that many cable channels covered the speech live. I watched it on an overhead TV while I sat waiting for a flight at Chicago’s O’Hare airport. When Obama got to the section of his speech announcing whether he planned to commit U.S. troops in Iraq (at the time, he didn’t), I noticed that many people in the terminal shifted their attention briefly to the TV. As soon as that was over, they went back to their smartphones and their laptops and their Cinnabons as the president droned on. Usually I would have stopped watching too, since so many aspects of public figures’ appearances before the troops have become so formulaic and routine. But I decided to see the whole show. Obama gave his still-not-quite-natural-sounding callouts to the different military services represented in the crowd. (“I know we’ve got some Air Force in the house!” and so on, receiving cheers rendered as “Hooyah!” and “Oorah!” in the official White House transcript.) He told members of the military that the nation was grateful for their nonstop deployments and for the unique losses and burdens placed on them through the past dozen years of open-ended war. He noted that they were often the face of American influence in the world, being dispatched to Liberia in 2014 to cope with the then-dawning Ebola epidemic as they had been sent to Indonesia 10 years earlier to rescue victims of the catastrophic tsunami there. He said that the “9/11 generation of heroes” represented the very best in its country, and that its members constituted a military that was not only superior to all current adversaries but no less than “the finest fighting force in the history of the world.” If any of my fellow travelers at O’Hare were still listening to the speech, none of them showed any reaction to it. And why would they? This has become the way we assume the American military will be discussed by politicians and in the press: Overblown, limitless praise, absent the caveats or public skepticism we would apply to other American institutions, especially ones that run on taxpayer money. A somber moment to reflect on sacrifice. Then everyone except the few people in uniform getting on with their workaday concerns. The public attitude evident in the airport was reflected by the public’s representatives in Washington. That same afternoon, September 17, the House of Representatives voted after brief debate to authorize arms and supplies for rebel forces in Syria, in hopes that more of them would fight against the Islamic State, or ISIS, than for it. The Senate did the same the next day—and then both houses adjourned early, after an unusually short and historically unproductive term of Congress, to spend the next six and a half weeks fund-raising and campaigning full-time. I’m not aware of any midterm race for the House or Senate in which matters of war and peace—as opposed to immigration, Obamacare, voting rights, tax rates, the Ebola scare—were first-tier campaign issues on either side, except for the metaphorical “war on women” and “war on coal.” VIDEOMilitary Spending is Broken Why does civilian technology grow ever cheaper and more reliable while military technology does the opposite? An animated explainer narrated by James Fallows. This reverent but disengaged attitude toward the military—we love the troops, but we’d rather not think about them—has become so familiar that we assume it is the American norm. But it is not. When Dwight D. Eisenhower, as a five-star general and the supreme commander, led what may have in fact been the finest fighting force in the history of the world, he did not describe it in that puffed-up way. On the eve of the D-Day invasion, he warned his troops, “Your task will not be an easy one,” because “your enemy is well-trained, well-equipped, and battle-hardened.” As president, Eisenhower’s most famous statement about the military was his warning in his farewell address of what could happen if its political influence grew unchecked. At the end of World War II, nearly 10 percent of the entire U.S. population was on active military duty—which meant most able-bodied men of a certain age (plus the small number of women allowed to serve). Through the decade after World War II, when so many American families had at least one member in uniform, political and journalistic references were admiring but not awestruck. Most Americans were familiar enough with the military to respect it while being sharply aware of its shortcomings, as they were with the school system, their religion, and other important and fallible institutions. Now the American military is exotic territory to most of the American public. As a comparison: A handful of Americans live on farms, but there are many more of them than serve in all branches of the military. (Well over 4 million people live on the country’s 2.1 million farms. The U.S. military has about 1.4 million people on active duty and another 850,000 in the reserves.) The other 310 million–plus Americans “honor” their stalwart farmers, but generally don’t know them. So too with the military. Many more young Americans will study abroad this year than will enlist in the military—nearly 300,000 students overseas, versus well under 200,000 new recruits. As a country, America has been at war nonstop for the past 13 years. As a public, it has not. A total of about 2.5 million Americans, roughly three-quarters of 1 percent, served in Iraq or Afghanistan at any point in the post-9/11 years, many of them more than once. The difference between the earlier America that knew its military and the modern America that gazes admiringly at its heroes shows up sharply in changes in popular and media culture. While World War II was under way, its best-known chroniclers were the Scripps Howard reporter Ernie Pyle, who described the daily braveries and travails of the troops (until he was killed near the war’s end by Japanese machine-gun fire on the island of Iejima), and the Stars and Stripes cartoonist Bill Mauldin, who mocked the obtuseness of generals and their distance from the foxhole realities faced by his wisecracking GI characters, Willie and Joe. From Mister Roberts to South Pacific to Catch-22, from The Caine Mutiny to The Naked and the Dead to From Here to Eternity, American popular and high culture treated our last mass-mobilization war as an effort deserving deep respect and pride, but not above criticism and lampooning. The collective achievement of the military was heroic, but its members and leaders were still real people, with all the foibles of real life. A decade after that war ended, the most popular military-themed TV program was The Phil Silvers Show, about a con man in uniform named Sgt. Bilko. As Bilko, Phil Silvers was that stock American sitcom figure, the lovable blowhard—a role familiar from the time of Jackie Gleason in The Honeymooners to Homer Simpson in The Simpsons today. Gomer Pyle, USMC; Hogan’s Heroes; McHale’s Navy; and even the anachronistic frontier show F Troop were sitcoms whose settings were U.S. military units and whose villains—and schemers, and stooges, and occasional idealists—were people in uniform. American culture was sufficiently at ease with the military to make fun of it, a stance now hard to imagine outside the military itself. “Full-victory—nothing else”: General Dwight D. Eisenhower gives the order to paratroopers in England the night before they board planes to join the first assault in the D-Day invasion of Europe. (U.S. Army Signal Corps/AP) Robert Altman’s 1970 movie M*A*S*H was clearly “about” the Vietnam War, then well into its bloodiest and most bitterly divisive period. (As I point out whenever discussing this topic, I was eligible for the draft at the time, was one of those protesting the war, and at age 20 legally but intentionally failed my draft medical exam. I told this story in a 1975 Washington Monthly article, “What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?”) But M*A*S*H’s ostensible placement in the Korean War of the early 1950s somewhat distanced its darkly mocking attitude about military competence and authority from fierce disagreements about Vietnam. (The one big Vietnam movie to precede it was John Wayne’s doughily prowar The Green Berets, in 1968. What we think of as the classic run of Vietnam films did not begin until the end of the 1970s, with The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now.) The TV spin-off of Altman’s film, which ran from 1972 through 1983, was a simpler and more straightforward sitcom on the Sgt. Bilko model, again suggesting a culture close enough to its military to put up with, and enjoy, jokes about it. Let’s skip to today’s Iraq-Afghanistan era, in which everyone “supports” the troops but few know very much about them. The pop-culture references to the people fighting our ongoing wars emphasize their suffering and stoicism, or the long-term personal damage they may endure. The Hurt Locker is the clearest example, but also Lone Survivor; Restrepo; the short-lived 2005 FX series set in Iraq, Over There; and Showtime’s current series Homeland. Some emphasize high-stakes action, from the fictionalized 24 to the meant-to-be-true Zero Dark Thirty. Often they portray military and intelligence officials as brave and daring. But while cumulatively these dramas highlight the damage that open-ended warfare has done—on the battlefield and elsewhere, to warriors and civilians alike, in the short term but also through long-term blowback—they lack the comfortable closeness with the military that would allow them to question its competence as they would any other institution’s. The battlefield is of course a separate realm, as the literature of warfare from Homer’s time onward has emphasized. But the distance between today’s stateside America and its always-at-war expeditionary troops is extraordinary. Last year, the writer Rebecca Frankel published War Dogs, a study of the dog-and-handler teams that had played a large part in the U.S. efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Part of the reason she chose the topic, she told me, was that dogs were one of the few common points of reference between the military and the larger public. “When we cannot make that human connection over war, when we cannot empathize or imagine the far-off world of a combat zone … these military working dogs are a bridge over the divide,” Frankel wrote in the introduction to her book. It’s a wonderful book, and dogs are a better connection than nothing. But … dogs! When the country fought its previous wars, its common points of reference were human rather than canine: fathers and sons in harm’s way, mothers and daughters working in defense plants and in uniform as well. For two decades after World War II, the standing force remained so large, and the Depression-era birth cohorts were so small, that most Americans had a direct military connection. Among older Baby Boomers, those born before 1955, at least three-quarters have had an immediate family member—sibling, parent, spouse, child—who served in uniform. Of Americans born since 1980, the Millennials, about one in three is closely related to anyone with military experience. Interactive graphic: The first map above (in green) shows per-capita military enlistments from 2000 to 2010, grouped by 3-digit zip code. The second (in red) shows the home towns of deceased soldiers from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Enlistment rates vary widely—in 2010, only 0.04 percent of the Upper East Side of Manhattan (zip code prefix 101) enlisted, while the U.S. Virgin Islands (prefix 008) had an enlistment rate of 0.98 percent. When it comes to lives lost, U.S. territories (particularly Guam) shoulder an outsized burden. (Map design and development: Frankie Dintino. Sources: Department of Defense, US Census Bureau) The most biting satirical novel to come from the Iraq-Afghanistan era, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, by Ben Fountain, is a takedown of our empty modern “thank you for your service” rituals. It is the story of an Army squad that is badly shot up in Iraq; is brought back to be honored at halftime during a nationally televised Dallas Cowboys Thanksgiving Day game; while there, is slapped on the back and toasted by owner’s-box moguls and flirted with by cheerleaders, “passed around like everyone’s favorite bong,” as platoon member Billy Lynn thinks of it; and is then shipped right back to the front. The people at the stadium feel good about what they’ve done to show their support for the troops. From the troops’ point of view, the spectacle looks different. “There’s something harsh in his fellow Americans, avid, ecstatic, a burning that comes of the deepest need,” the narrator says of Billy Lynn’s thoughts. “That’s his sense of it, they all need something from him, this pack of half-rich lawyers, dentists, soccer moms, and corporate VPs, they’re all gnashing for a piece of a barely grown grunt making $14,800 a year.” Fountain’s novel won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 2012, but it did not dent mainstream awareness enough to make anyone self-conscious about continuing the “salute to the heroes” gestures that do more for the civilian public’s self-esteem than for the troops’. As I listened to Obama that day in the airport, and remembered Ben Fountain’s book, and observed the hum of preoccupied America around me, I thought that the parts of the presidential speech few Americans were listening to were the ones historians might someday seize upon to explain the temper of our times. Always supportive of the troops: Crowds in Macon welcome back 200 members of the Georgia National Guard's 48th Infantry Brigade Combat Team returning from Afghanistan, September 2014. (David Goldman/AP) I. Chickenhawk Nation If I were writing such a history now, I would call it Chickenhawk Nation, based on the derisive term for those eager to go to war, as long as someone else is going. It would be the story of a country willing to do anything for its military except take it seriously. As a result, what happens to all institutions that escape serious external scrutiny and engagement has happened to our military. Outsiders treat it both too reverently and too cavalierly, as if regarding its members as heroes makes up for committing them to unending, unwinnable missions and denying them anything like the political mindshare we give to other major public undertakings, from medical care to public education to environmental rules. The tone and level of public debate on those issues is hardly encouraging. But for democracies, messy debates are less damaging in the long run than letting important functions run on autopilot, as our military essentially does now. A chickenhawk nation is more likely to keep going to war, and to keep losing, than one that wrestles with long-term questions of effectiveness. Americans admire the military as they do no other institution. Through the past two decades, respect for the courts, the schools, the press, Congress, organized religion, Big Business, and virtually every other institution in modern life has plummeted. The one exception is the military. Confidence in the military shot up after 9/11 and has stayed very high. In a Gallup poll last summer, three-quarters of the public expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the military. About one-third had comparable confidence in the medical system, and only 7 percent in Congress. Too much complacency regarding our military, and too weak a tragic imagination about the consequences if the next engagement goes wrong, have been part of Americans’ willingness to wade into conflict after conflict, blithely assuming we would win. “Did we have the sense that America cared how we were doing? We did not,” Seth Moulton told me about his experience as a marine during the Iraq War. Moulton became a Marine Corps officer after graduating from Harvard in 2001, believing (as he told me) that when many classmates were heading to Wall Street it was useful to set an example of public service. He opposed the decision to invade Iraq but ended up serving four tours there out of a sense of duty to his comrades. “America was very disconnected. We were proud to serve, but we knew it was a little group of people doing the country’s work.” Moulton told me, as did many others with Iraq-era military experience, that if more members of Congress or the business and media elite had had children in uniform, the United States would probably not have gone to war in Iraq at all. Because he felt strongly enough about that failure of elite accountability, Moulton decided while in Iraq to get involved in politics after he left the military. “I actually remember the moment,” Moulton told me. “It was after a difficult day in Najaf in 2004. A young marine in my platoon said, ‘Sir, you should run for Congress someday. So this shit doesn’t happen again.’ ” In January, Moulton takes office as a freshman Democratic representative from Massachusetts’s Sixth District, north of Boston. What Moulton described was desire for a kind of accountability. It is striking how rare accountability has been for our modern wars. Hillary Clinton paid a price for her vote to authorize the Iraq War, since that is what gave the barely known Barack Obama an opening to run against her in 2008. George W. Bush, who, like most ex-presidents, has grown more popular the longer he’s been out of office, would perhaps be playing a more visible role in public and political life if not for the overhang of Iraq. But those two are the exceptions. Most other public figures, from Dick Cheney and Colin Powell on down, have put Iraq behind them. In part this is because of the Obama administration’s decision from the start to “look forward, not back” about why things had gone so badly wrong with America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But such willed amnesia would have been harder if more Americans had felt affected by the wars’ outcome. For our generals, our politicians, and most of our citizenry, there is almost no accountability or personal consequence for military failure. This is a dangerous development—and one whose dangers multiply the longer it persists. Ours is the best-equipped fighting force in history, and it is incomparably the most expensive. By all measures, today’s professionalized military is also better trained, motivated, and disciplined than during the draft-army years. No decent person who is exposed to today’s troops can be anything but respectful of them and grateful for what they do. Yet repeatedly this force has been defeated by less modern, worse-equipped, barely funded foes. Or it has won skirmishes and battles only to lose or get bogged down in a larger war. Although no one can agree on an exact figure, our dozen years of war in Iraq, Afghanistan, and neighboring countries have cost at least $1.5 trillion; Linda J. Bilmes, of the Harvard Kennedy School, recently estimated that the total cost could be three to four times that much. Recall that while Congress was considering whether to authorize the Iraq War, the head of the White House economic council, Lawrence B. Lindsey, was forced to resign for telling The Wall Street Journal that the all-in costs might be as high as $100 billion to $200 billion, or less than the U.S. has spent on Iraq and Afghanistan in many individual years. [ One of my intentions with this blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. Further, this ‘blog’ will contain various drafts of unknown writings just to be saved in the event they are needed by me, etc.– Louis Sheehan ] Feel free to ignore this blog! I am intending to use it as a repository of various writings: drafts, doodles, etc. If there ARE any articles here, they are posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan Yet from a strategic perspective, to say nothing of the human cost, most of these dollars might as well have been burned. “At this point, it is incontrovertibly evident that the U.S. military failed to achieve any of its strategic goals in Iraq,” a former military intelligence officer named Jim Gourley wrote recently for Thomas E. Ricks’s blog, Best Defense. “Evaluated according to the goals set forth by our military leadership, the war ended in utter defeat for our forces.” In 13 years of continuous combat under the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, the longest stretch of warfare in American history, U.S. forces have achieved one clear strategic success: the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Their many other tactical victories, from overthrowing Saddam Hussein to allying with Sunni tribal leaders to mounting a “surge” in Iraq, demonstrated great bravery and skill. But they brought no lasting stability to, nor advance of U.S. interests in, that part of the world. When ISIS troops overran much of Iraq last year, the forces that laid down their weapons and fled before them were members of the same Iraqi national army that U.S. advisers had so expensively yet ineffectively trained for more than five years. “Did we have the sense that America cared how we were doing? We did not,” Seth Moulton told me about his experience as a marine during the Iraq War. “We are vulnerable,” the author William Greider wrote during the debate last summer on how to fight ISIS, “because our presumption of unconquerable superiority leads us deeper and deeper into unwinnable military conflicts.” And the separation of the military from the public disrupts the process of learning from these defeats. The last war that ended up in circumstances remotely resembling what prewar planning would have considered a victory was the brief Gulf War of 1991. After the Vietnam War, the press and the public went too far in blaming the military for what was a top-to-bottom failure of strategy and execution. But the military itself recognized its own failings, and a whole generation of reformers looked to understand and change the culture. In 1978, a military-intelligence veteran named Richard A. Gabriel published, with Paul L. Savage, Crisis in Command: Mismanagement in the Army, which traced many of the failures in Vietnam to the military’s having adopted a bureaucratized management style. Three years later, a broadside called Self-Destruction: The Disintegration and Decay of the United States Army During the Vietnam Era, by a military officer writing under the pen name Cincinnatus (later revealed to be a lieutenant colonel serving in the reserves as a military chaplain, Cecil B. Currey), linked problems in Vietnam to the ethical and intellectual shortcomings of the career military. The book was hotly debated—but not dismissed. An article about the book for the Air Force’s Air University Review said that “the author’s case is airtight” and that the military’s career structure “corrupts those who serve it; it is the system that forces out the best and rewards only the sycophants.” Today, you hear judgments like that frequently from within the military and occasionally from politicians—but only in private. It’s not the way we talk in public about our heroes anymore, with the result that accountability for the career military has been much sketchier than during our previous wars. William S. Lind is a military historian who in the 1990s helped develop the concept of “Fourth Generation War,” or struggles against the insurgents, terrorists, or other “nonstate” groups that refuse to form ranks and fight like conventional armies. He wrote recently: The most curious thing about our four defeats in Fourth Generation War—Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan—is the utter silence in the American officer corps. Defeat in Vietnam bred a generation of military reformers … Today, the landscape is barren. Not a military voice is heard calling for thoughtful, substantive change. Just more money, please. During and after even successful American wars, and certainly after the standoff in Korea and the defeat in Vietnam, the professional military’s leadership and judgment were considered fair game for criticism. Grant saved the Union; McClellan seemed almost to sabotage it—and he was only one of the Union generals Lincoln had to move out of the way. Something similar was true in wars through Vietnam. Some leaders were good; others were bad. Now, for purposes of public discussion, they’re all heroes. In our past decade’s wars, as Thomas Ricks wrote in this magazine in 2012, “hundreds of Army generals were deployed to the field, and the available evidence indicates that not one was relieved by the military brass for combat ineffectiveness.” This, he said, was not only a radical break from American tradition but also “an important factor in the failure” of our recent wars. Partly this change has come because the public, at its safe remove, doesn’t insist on accountability. Partly it is because legislators and even presidents recognize the sizable risks and limited payoffs of taking on the career military. When recent presidents have relieved officers of command, they have usually done so over allegations of sexual or financial misconduct, or other issues of personal discipline. These include the cases of the two famous four-star generals who resigned rather than waiting for President Obama to dismiss them: Stanley A. McChrystal, as the commander in Afghanistan, and David Petraeus in his post-Centcom role as the head of the CIA. The exception proving the rule occurred a dozen years ago, when a senior civilian official directly challenged a four-star general on his military competence. In congressional testimony just before the Iraq War, General Eric Shinseki, then the Army’s chief of staff, said that many more troops might be necessary to successfully occupy Iraq than plans were allowing for—only to be ridiculed in public by Paul Wolfowitz, then Shinseki’s superior as the deputy secretary of defense, who said views like Shinseki’s were “outlandish” and “wildly off the mark.” Wolfowitz and his superior, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, ostentatiously marginalized Shinseki from that point on. In that case, the general was right and the politicians were wrong. But more often and more skillfully than the public usually appreciates, today’s military has managed to distance itself from the lengthening string of modern military failures—even when wrong. Some of this PR shift is anthropological. Most reporters who cover politics are fascinated by the process and enjoy practitioners who love it too, which is one reason most were (like the rest of the country) more forgiving of the happy warrior Bill Clinton than they have been of the “cold” and “aloof” Barack Obama. But political reporters are always hunting for the gaffe or scandal that could bring a target down, and feel they’re acting in the public interest in doing so. Most reporters who cover the military are also fascinated by its processes and cannot help liking or at least respecting their subjects: physically fit, trained to say “sir” and “ma’am,” often tested in a way most civilians will never be, part of a disciplined and selfless-seeming culture that naturally draws respect. And whether or not this was a conscious plan, the military gets a substantial PR boost from the modern practice of placing officers in mid-career assignments at think tanks, on congressional staffs, and in graduate programs across the country. For universities, military students are (as a dean at a public-policy school put it to me) “a better version of foreign students.” That is, they work hard, pay full tuition, and unlike many international students face no language barrier or difficulty adjusting to the American style of give-and-take classroom exchanges. Most cultures esteem the scholar-warrior, and these programs expose usually skeptical American elites to people like the young Colin Powell, who as a lieutenant colonel in his mid-30s was a White House fellow after serving in Vietnam, and David Petraeus, who got his Ph.D. at Princeton as a major 13 years after graduating from West Point. And yet however much Americans “support” and “respect” their troops, they are not involved with them, and that disengagement inevitably leads to dangerous decisions the public barely notices. “My concern is this growing disconnect between the American people and our military,” retired Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under George W. Bush and Barack Obama (and whose mid-career academic stint was at Harvard Business School), told me recently. The military is “professional and capable,” he said, “but I would sacrifice some of that excellence and readiness to make sure that we stay close to the American people. Fewer and fewer people know anyone in the military. It’s become just too easy to go to war.” Citizens notice when crime is going up, or school quality is going down, or the water is unsafe to drink, or when other public functions are not working as they should. Not enough citizens are made to notice when things go wrong, or right, with the military. The country thinks too rarely, and too highly, of the 1 percent under fire in our name. A new F-35, part of the first delivery of an anticipated 144 planes, in a hanger at Luke Air Force Base, in Glendale, Arizona, before an unveiling ceremony, March 2014 (Ross D. Franklin/AP) II. Chickenhawk Economy from the archives The Draft: Why the Country Needs It "If citizens are willing to countenance a decision that means that someone's child may die, they may contemplate more deeply if there is the possibility that the child will be theirs." Read the full story by James Fallows in the April 1980 Atlantic America’s distance from the military makes the country too willing to go to war, and too callous about the damage warfare inflicts. This distance also means that we spend too much money on the military and we spend it stupidly, thereby shortchanging many of the functions that make the most difference to the welfare of the troops and their success in combat. We buy weapons that have less to do with battlefield realities than with our unending faith that advanced technology will ensure victory, and with the economic interests and political influence of contractors. This leaves us with expensive and delicate high-tech white elephants, while unglamorous but essential tools, from infantry rifles to armored personnel carriers, too often fail our troops (see “Gun Trouble,” by Robert H. Scales, in this issue). We know that technology is our military’s main advantage. Yet the story of the post-9/11 “long wars” is of America’s higher-tech advantages yielding transitory victories that melt away before the older, messier realities of improvised weapons, sectarian resentments, and mounting hostility to occupiers from afar, however well-intentioned. Many of the Pentagon’s most audacious high-tech ventures have been costly and spectacular failures, including (as we will see) the major air-power project of recent years, the F-35. In an America connected to its military, such questions of strategy and implementation would be at least as familiar as, say, the problems with the Common Core education standards. Those technological breakthroughs that do make their way to the battlefield may prove to be strategic liabilities in the long run. During the years in which the United States has enjoyed a near-monopoly on weaponized drones, for example, they have killed individuals or small groups at the price of antagonizing whole societies. When the monopoly ends, which is inevitable, the very openness of the United States will make it uniquely vulnerable to the cheap, swarming weapons others will deploy. The cost of defense, meanwhile, goes up and up and up, with little political resistance and barely any public discussion. By the fullest accounting, which is different from usual budget figures, the United States will spend more than $1 trillion on national security this year. That includes about $580 billion for the Pentagon’s baseline budget plus “overseas contingency” funds, $20 billion in the Department of Energy budget for nuclear weapons, nearly $200 billion for military pensions and Department of Veterans Affairs costs, and other expenses. But it doesn’t count more than $80 billion a year of interest on the military-related share of the national debt. After adjustments for inflation, the United States will spend about 50 percent more on the military this year than its average through the Cold War and Vietnam War. It will spend about as much as the next 10 nations combined—three to five times as much as China, depending on how you count, and seven to nine times as much as Russia. The world as a whole spends about 2 percent of its total income on its militaries; the United States, about 4 percent. Yet such is the dysfunction and corruption of the budgeting process that even as spending levels rise, the Pentagon faces simultaneous crises in funding for maintenance, training, pensions, and veterans’ care. “We’re buying the wrong things, and paying too much for them,” Charles A. Stevenson, a onetime staffer on the Senate Armed Services Committee and a former professor at the National War College, told me. “We’re spending so much on people that we don’t have the hardware, which is becoming more expensive anyway. We are flatlining R&D.” Here is just one newsworthy example that illustrates the broad and depressingly intractable tendencies of weapons development and spending: the failed hopes for a new airplane called the F-35 “Lightning.”

 Today’s weapons can be decades in gestation, and the history of the F-35 traces back long before most of today’s troops were born. Two early-1970s-era planes, the F-16 “Fighting Falcon” jet and the A-10 “Thunderbolt II” attack plane, departed from the trend of military design in much the same way the compact Japanese cars of that era departed from the tail-fin American look. These planes were relatively cheap, pared to their essentials, easy to maintain, and designed to do a specific thing very well. For the F-16, that was to be fast, highly maneuverable, and deadly in air-to-air combat. For the A-10, it was to serve as a kind of flying tank that could provide what the military calls “close air support” to troops in combat by blasting enemy formations. The A-10 needed to be heavily armored, so it could absorb opposing fire; designed to fly as slowly as possible over the battlefield, rather than as rapidly, so that it could stay in range to do damage rather than roaring through; and built around one very powerful gun. There are physical devices that seem the pure expression of a function. The Eames chair, a classic No. 2 pencil, the original Ford Mustang or VW Beetle, the MacBook Air—take your pick. The A-10, generally known not as the Thunderbolt but as the Warthog, fills that role in the modern military. It is rugged; it is inexpensive; it can shred enemy tanks and convoys by firing up to 70 rounds a second of armor-piercing, 11-inch-long depleted-uranium shells. The tragedy of the F-35 is that a project meant to correct problems in designing and paying for weapons has come to exemplify them. And the main effort of military leaders through the past decade, under the Republican leadership of the Bush administration and the Democratic leadership of Obama, has been to get rid of the A-10 so as to free up money for a more expensive, less reliable, technically failing airplane that has little going for it except insider dealing, and the fact that the general public doesn’t care. The weapon in whose name the A-10 is being phased out is its opposite in almost every way. In automotive terms, it would be a Lamborghini rather than a pickup truck (or a flying tank). In air-travel terms, the first-class sleeper compartment on Singapore Airlines rather than advance-purchase Economy Plus (or even business class) on United. These comparisons seem ridiculous, but they are fair. That is, a Lamborghini is demonstrably “better” than a pickup truck in certain ways—speed, handling, comfort—but only in very special circumstances is it a better overall choice. Same for the first-class sleeper, which would be anyone’s choice if someone else were footing the bill but is simply not worth the trade-off for most people most of the time. Each new generation of weapons tends to be “better” in much the way a Lamborghini is, and “worth it” in the same sense as a first-class airline seat. The A-10 shows the pattern. According to figures from the aircraft analyst Richard L. Aboulafia, of the Teal Group, the “unit recurring flyaway” costs in 2014 dollars—the fairest apples-to-apples comparison—stack up like this. Each Warthog now costs about $19 million, less than any other manned combat aircraft. A Predator drone costs about two-thirds as much. Other fighter, bomber, and multipurpose planes cost much more: about $72 million for the V-22 Osprey, about $144 million for the F-22 fighter, about $810 million for the B-2 bomber, and about $101 million (or five A‑10s) for the F-35. There’s a similar difference in operating costs. The operating expenses are low for the A-10 and much higher for the others largely because the A-10’s design is simpler, with fewer things that could go wrong. The simplicity of design allows it to spend more of its time flying instead of being in the shop. In clear contrast to the A-10, the F-35 is an ill-starred undertaking that would have been on the front pages as often as other botched federal projects, from the Obamacare rollout to the FEMA response after Hurricane Katrina, if, like those others, it either seemed to affect a broad class of people or could easily be shown on TV—or if so many politicians didn’t have a stake in protecting it. One measure of the gap in coverage: Total taxpayer losses in the failed Solyndra solar-energy program might come, at their most dire estimate, to some $800 million. Total cost overruns, losses through fraud, and other damage to the taxpayer from the F-35 project are perhaps 100 times that great, yet the “Solyndra scandal” is known to probably 100 times as many people as the travails of the F-35. Here’s another yardstick: the all-in costs of this airplane are now estimated to be as much as $1.5 trillion, or a low-end estimate of the entire Iraq War. The condensed version of this plane’s tragedy is that a project meant to correct some of the Pentagon’s deepest problems in designing and paying for weapons has in fact worsened and come to exemplify them. An aircraft that was intended to be inexpensive, adaptable, and reliable has become the most expensive in history, and among the hardest to keep out of the shop. The federal official who made the project a symbol of a new, transparent, rigorously data-dependent approach to awarding contracts ended up serving time in federal prison for corruption involving projects with Boeing. (Boeing’s chief financial officer also did time in prison.) For the record, the Pentagon and the lead contractors stoutly defend the plane and say that its teething problems will be over soon—and that anyway, it is the plane of the future, and the A-10 is an aging relic of the past. (We have posted reports here on the A-10, pro and con, so you can see whether you are convinced.) In theory, the F-35 would show common purpose among the military services, since the Air Force, the Navy, and the Marine Corps would all get their own custom-tailored versions of the plane. In fact, a plane designed to do many contradictory things—to be strong enough to survive Navy aircraft-carrier landings, yet light and maneuverable enough to excel as an Air Force dogfighter, and meanwhile able to take off and land straight up and down, like a helicopter, to reach marines in tight combat circumstances—has unsurprisingly done none of them as well as promised. In theory, the F-35 was meant to knit U.S. allies together, since other countries would buy it as their mainstay airplane and in turn would get part of the contracting business. In fact, the delays, cost overruns, and mechanical problems of the airplane have made it a contentious political issue in customer countries from Canada and Holland to Italy and Australia. Interactive map: Parts from the F-35 are sourced from over 250 locations around the globe, spanning 11 countries and, in the U.S., more than 90 congressional districts. Hover over any red dot to see a list of contractors. (Map design and development: Frankie Dintino. Source: Center for International Policy.) The country where the airplane has least been a public issue is the United States. In their 2012 debates, Mitt Romney criticized Barack Obama for supporting “green energy” projects, including Solyndra. Neither man mentioned the F-35, and I am still looking for evidence that President Obama has talked about it in any of his speeches. In other countries, the F-35 can be cast as another annoying American intrusion. Here, it is protected by supplier contracts that have been spread as broadly as possible. “Political engineering,” a term popularized by a young Pentagon analyst named Chuck Spinney in the 1970s, is pork-barrel politics on the grandest scale. Cost overruns sound bad if someone else is getting the extra money. They can be good if they are creating business for your company or jobs in your congressional district. Political engineering is the art of spreading a military project to as many congressional districts as possible, and thus maximizing the number of members of Congress who feel that if they cut off funding, they’d be hurting themselves. A $10 million parts contract in one congressional district builds one representative’s support. Two $5 million contracts in two districts are twice as good, and better all around would be three contracts at $3 million apiece. Every participant in the military-contracting process understands this logic: the prime contractors who parcel out supply deals around the country, the military’s procurement officers who divide work among contractors, the politicians who vote up or down on the results. In the late 1980s, a coalition of so-called cheap hawks in Congress tried to cut funding for the B-2 bomber. They got nowhere after it became clear that work for the project was being carried out in 46 states and no fewer than 383 congressional districts (of 435 total). The difference between then and now is that in 1989, Northrop, the main contractor for the plane, had to release previously classified data to demonstrate how broadly the dollars were being spread. Whatever its technical challenges, the F-35 is a triumph of political engineering, and on a global scale. For a piquant illustration of the difference that political engineering can make, consider the case of Bernie Sanders—former Socialist mayor of Burlington, current Independent senator from Vermont, possible candidate from the left in the next presidential race. In principle, he thinks the F-35 is a bad choice. After one of the planes caught fire last summer on a runway in Florida, Sanders told a reporter that the program had been “incredibly wasteful.” Yet Sanders, with the rest of Vermont’s mainly left-leaning political establishment, has fought hard to get an F-35 unit assigned to the Vermont Air National Guard in Burlington, and to dissuade neighborhood groups there who think the planes will be too noisy and dangerous. “For better or worse, [the F-35] is the plane of record right now,” Sanders told a local reporter after the runway fire last year, “and it is not gonna be discarded. That’s the reality.” It’s going to be somewhere, so why not here? As Vermont goes, so goes the nation. The next big project the Air Force is considering is the Long Range Strike Bomber, a successor to the B-1 and B-2 whose specifications include an ability to do bombing runs deep into China. (A step so wildly reckless that the U.S. didn’t consider it even when fighting Chinese troops during the Korean War.) By the time the plane’s full costs and capabilities become apparent, Chuck Spinney wrote last summer, the airplane, “like the F-35 today, will be unstoppable.” That is because even now its supporters are building the plane’s “social safety net by spreading the subcontracts around the country, or perhaps like the F-35, around the world.” Admiral Mike Mullen, the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a press conference in Baghdad in August 2011. (Joseph Epstein) III. Chickenhawk Politics Politicians say that national security is their first and most sacred duty, but they do not act as if this is so. The most recent defense budget passed the House Armed Services Committee by a vote of 61 to zero, with similarly one-sided debate before the vote. This is the same House of Representatives that cannot pass a long-term Highway Trust Fund bill that both parties support. “The lionization of military officials by politicians is remarkable and dangerous,” a retired Air Force colonel named Tom Ruby, who now writes on organizational culture, told me. He and others said that this deference was one reason so little serious oversight of the military took place. T. X. Hammes, a retired Marine Corps colonel who has a doctorate in modern history from Oxford, told me that instead of applying critical judgment to military programs, or even regarding national defense as any kind of sacred duty, politicians have come to view it simply as a teat. “Many on Capitol Hill see the Pentagon with admirable simplicity,” he said: “It is a way of directing tax money to selected districts. It’s part of what they were elected to do.” In the spring of 2011, Barack Obama asked Gary Hart, the Democratic Party’s most experienced and best-connected figure on defense reform, to form a small bipartisan task force that would draft recommendations on how Obama might try to recast the Pentagon and its practices if he won a second term. Hart did so (I was part of the group, along with Andrew J. Bacevich of Boston University, John Arquilla of the Naval Postgraduate School, and Norman R. Augustine, the former CEO of Lockheed Martin), and sent a report to Obama that fall. [Here is that memo.] He never heard back. Every White House is swamped with recommendations and requests, and it responds only to those it considers most urgent—which defense reform obviously was not. Soon thereafter, during the 2012 presidential race, neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney said much about how they would spend the billion and a half dollars a day that go to military programs, except for when Romney said that if elected, he would spend a total of $1 trillion more. In their only direct exchange about military policy, during their final campaign debate, Obama said that Romney’s plans would give the services more money than they were asking for. Romney pointed out that the Navy had fewer ships than it did before World War I. Obama shot back, “Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines.” It was Obama’s most sarcastic and aggressive moment of any of the debates, and was also the entirety of the discussion about where those trillions would go. Jim Webb is a decorated Vietnam veteran, an author, a former Democratic senator, and a likely presidential candidate. Seven years ago in his book A Time to Fight, he wrote that the career military was turning into a “don’t break my rice bowl” culture, referring to an Asian phrase roughly comparable to making sure everyone gets a piece of the pie. Webb meant that ambitious officers notice how many of their mentors and predecessors move after retirement into board positions, consultancies, or operational roles with defense contractors. (Pensions now exceed preretirement pay for some very senior officers; for instance, a four-star general or admiral with 40 years of service can receive a pension of more than $237,000 a year, even if his maximum salary on active duty was $180,000.) Webb says it would defy human nature if knowledge of the post-service prospects did not affect the way some high-ranking officers behave while in uniform, including “protecting the rice bowl” of military budgets and cultivating connections with their predecessors and their postretirement businesses. “There have always been some officers who went on to contracting jobs,” Webb, who grew up in an Air Force family, told me recently. “What’s new is the scale of the phenomenon, and its impact on the highest ranks of the military.” Of course, the modern military advertises itself as a place where young people who have lacked the chance or money for higher education can develop valuable skills, plus earn GI Bill benefits for post-service studies. That’s good all around, and is part of the military’s perhaps unintended but certainly important role as an opportunity creator for undercredentialed Americans. Webb is talking about a different, potentially corrupting “prepare for your future” effect on the military’s best-trained, most influential careerists. If more members of Congress or the business and media elite had had children in uniform, the United States would probably not have gone to war in Iraq. “It is no secret that in subtle ways, many of these top leaders begin positioning themselves for their second-career employment during their final military assignments,” Webb wrote in A Time to Fight. The result, he said, is a “seamless interplay” of corporate and military interests “that threatens the integrity of defense procurement, of controversial personnel issues such as the huge ‘quasi-military’ structure [of contractors, like Blackwater and Halliburton] that has evolved in Iraq and Afghanistan, and inevitably of the balance within our national security process itself.” I heard assessments like this from many of the men and women I spoke with. The harshest ones came not from people who mistrusted the military but from those who, like Webb, had devoted much of their lives to it. A man who worked for decades overseeing Pentagon contracts told me this past summer, “The system is based on lies and self-interest, purely toward the end of keeping money moving.” What kept the system running, he said, was that “the services get their budgets, the contractors get their deals, the congressmen get jobs in their districts, and no one who’s not part of the deal bothers to find out what is going on.” Of course it was the most revered American warrior of the 20th century, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who warned most urgently that business and politics would corrupt the military, and vice versa. Everyone has heard of this speech. Not enough people have actually read it and been exposed to what would now be considered its dangerously antimilitary views. Which mainstream politician could say today, as Eisenhower said in 1961, that the military-industrial complex has a “total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—[that] is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government”? Seth Moulton, a few days after his victory in last fall’s congressional race, said that the overall quality and morale of people in the military has dramatically improved since the days of a conscript force. “But it’s become populated, especially at the highest ranks, by careerists, people who have gotten where they are by checking all the boxes and not taking risks,” he told me. “Some of the finest officers I knew were lieutenants who knew they were getting out, so weren’t afraid to make the right decision. I know an awful lot of senior officers who are very afraid to make a tough choice because they’re worried how it will look on their fitness report.” This may sound like a complaint about life in any big organization, but it’s something more. There’s no rival Army or Marine Corps you can switch to for a new start. There’s almost no surmounting an error or a black mark on the fitness or evaluation reports that are the basis for promotions. Every institution has problems, and at every stage of U.S. history, some critics have considered the U.S. military overfunded, underprepared, too insular and self-regarding, or flawed in some other way. The difference now, I contend, is that these modern distortions all flow in one way or another from the chickenhawk basis of today’s defense strategy. At enormous cost, both financial and human, the nation supports the world’s most powerful armed force. But because so small a sliver of the population has a direct stake in the consequences of military action, the normal democratic feedbacks do not work. I have met serious people who claim that the military’s set-apart existence is best for its own interests, and for the nation’s. “Since the time of the Romans there have been people, mostly men but increasingly women, who have volunteered to be the praetorian guard,” John A. Nagl told me. Nagl is a West Point graduate and Rhodes Scholar who was a combat commander in Iraq and has written two influential books about the modern military. He left the Army as a lieutenant colonel and now, in his late 40s, is the head of the Haverford prep school, near Philadelphia. “They know what they are signing up for,” Nagl said of today’s troops. “They are proud to do it, and in exchange they expect a reasonable living, and pensions and health care if they are hurt or fall sick. The American public is completely willing to let this professional class of volunteers serve where they should, for wise purpose. This gives the president much greater freedom of action to make decisions in the national interest, with troops who will salute sharply and do what needs to be done.” I like and respect Nagl, but I completely disagree. As we’ve seen, public inattention to the military, born of having no direct interest in what happens to it, has allowed both strategic and institutional problems to fester. “A people untouched (or seemingly untouched) by war are far less likely to care about it,” Andrew Bacevich wrote in 2012. Bacevich himself fought in Vietnam; his son was killed in Iraq. “Persuaded that they have no skin in the game, they will permit the state to do whatever it wishes to do.” “Our military and defense structures are increasingly remote from the society they protect,” Gary Hart’s working group told the president. Mike Mullen thinks that one way to reengage Americans with the military is to shrink the active-duty force, a process already under way. “The next time we go to war,” he said, “the American people should have to say yes. And that would mean that half a million people who weren’t planning to do this would have to be involved in some way. They would have to be inconvenienced. That would bring America in. America hasn’t been in these previous wars. And we are paying dearly for that.” With their distance from the military, politicians don’t talk seriously about whether the United States is directly threatened by chaos in the Middle East and elsewhere, or is in fact safer than ever (as Christopher Preble and John Mueller, of the Cato Institute, have argued in a new book, A Dangerous World?). The vast majority of Americans outside the military can be triply cynical in their attitude toward it. Triply? One: “honoring” the troops but not thinking about them. Two: “caring” about defense spending but really viewing it as a bipartisan stimulus program. Three: supporting a “strong” defense but assuming that the United States is so much stronger than any rival that it’s pointless to worry whether strategy, weaponry, and leadership are right. The cultural problems arising from an arm’s-length military could be even worse. Charles J. Dunlap Jr., a retired Air Force major general who now teaches at Duke law school, has thought about civic-military relations through much of his professional life. When he was studying at the National Defense University as a young Air Force officer in the early 1990s, just after the first Gulf War, he was a co-winner of the prize for best student essay with an imagined-future work called “The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012.” His essay’s premise was cautionary, and was based on the tension between rising adulation for the military and declining trust in most other aspects of government. The more exasperated Americans grew about economic and social problems, the more relieved they were when competent men in uniform, led by General Thomas E. T. Brutus, finally stepped in to take control. Part of the reason for the takeover, Dunlap explained, was that the military had grown so separate from mainstream culture and currents that it viewed the rest of society as a foreign territory to occupy and administer. Recently I asked Dunlap how the real world of post-2012 America matched his imagined version. “I think we’re on the cusp of seeing a resurgence of a phenomenon that has always been embedded in the American psyche,” he said. “That is benign antimilitarism,” which would be the other side of the reflexive pro-militarism of recent years. “People don’t appreciate how unprecedented our situation is,” he told me. What is that situation? For the first time in the nation’s history, America has a permanent military establishment large enough to shape our dealings in the world and seriously influence our economy. Yet the Americans in that military, during what Dunlap calls the “maturing years of the volunteer force,” are few enough in number not to seem representative of the country they defend. “It’s becoming increasingly tribal,” Dunlap says of the at-war force in our chickenhawk nation, “in the sense that more and more people in the military are coming from smaller and smaller groups. It’s become a family tradition, in a way that’s at odds with how we want to think a democracy spreads the burden.” People within that military tribe can feel both above and below the messy civilian reality of America. Below, in the burdens placed upon them, and the inattention to the lives, limbs, and opportunities they have lost. Above, in being able to withstand hardships that would break their hipster or slacker contemporaries. “It’s become just too easy to go to war,” says Admiral Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “I think there is a strong sense in the military that it is indeed a better society than the one it serves,” Dunlap said. “And there is some rationality for that.” Anyone who has spent time with troops and their families knows what he means. Physical fitness, standards of promptness and dress, all the aspects of self-discipline that have traditionally made the military a place where misdirected youth could “straighten out,” plus the spirit of love and loyalty for comrades that is found in civilian life mainly on sports teams. The best resolution of this tension between military and mainstream values would of course come as those who understand the military’s tribal identity apply their strengths outside the tribe. “The generation coming up, we’ve got lieutenants and majors who had been the warrior-kings in their little outposts,” Dunlap said of the young veterans of the recent long wars. “They were literally making life-or-death decisions. You can’t take that generation and say, ‘You can be seen and not heard.’ ” In addition to Seth Moulton, this year’s Congress will have more than 20 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, including new Republican Senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Joni Ernst of Iowa. The 17 who are already there, including Democratic Representatives Tulsi Gabbard and Tammy Duckworth and Republican Representatives Duncan D. Hunter and Adam Kinzinger, have played an active role in veterans’ policies and in the 2013 debates about intervening in Syria. Gabbard was strongly against it; some of the Republican veterans were for it—but all of them made arguments based on firsthand observation of what had worked and failed. Moulton told me that the main lesson he’ll apply from his four tours in Iraq is the importance of service, of whatever kind. He said that Harvard’s famed chaplain during Moulton’s years as an undergraduate physics student, the late Peter J. Gomes, had convinced him that “it’s not enough to ‘believe’ in service. You should find a way, yourself, to serve.” Barring unimaginable changes, “service” in America will not mean a draft. But Moulton says he will look for ways “to promote a culture where more people want to serve.” For all the differences in their emphases and conclusions, these young veterans are alike in all taking the military seriously, rather than just revering it. The vast majority of Americans will never share their experiences. But we can learn from that seriousness, and view military policy as deserving at least the attention we give to taxes or schools. What might that mean, in specific? Here is a start. In the private report prepared for President Obama more than three years ago, Gary Hart’s working group laid out prescriptions on a range of operational practices, from the need for smaller, more agile combat units to a shift in the national command structure to a different approach toward preventing nuclear proliferation. Three of the recommendations were about the way the country as a whole should engage with its armed forces. They were: Appoint a commission to assess the long wars. This commission should undertake a dispassionate effort to learn lessons from Afghanistan and Iraq concerning the nature of irregular, unconventional conflict, command structures, intelligence effectiveness, indigenous cultural factors, training of local forces, and effective combat unit performance. Such a commission will greatly enhance our ability to know when, where, how, and whether to launch future interventions. Clarify the decision-making process for use of force. Such critical decisions, currently ad hoc, should instead be made in a systematic way by the appropriate authority or authorities based on the most dependable and persuasive information available and an understanding of our national interests based on 21st-century realities. Restore the civil-military relationship. The President, in his capacity as commander-in-chief, must explain the role of the soldier to the citizen and the citizen to the soldier. The traditional civil-military relationship is frayed and ill-defined. Our military and defense structures are increasingly remote from the society they protect, and each must be brought back into harmony with the other. Barack Obama, busy on other fronts, had no time for this. The rest of us should make time, if we hope to choose our wars more wisely, and win them. To read more about the arguments for and against the F-35, see this list of articles and official statements compiled by James Fallows. [ One of my intentions with this blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. Further, this ‘blog’ will contain various drafts of unknown writings just to be saved in the event they are needed by me, etc.– Louis Sheehan ] Feel free to ignore this blog! I am intending to use it as a repository of various writings: drafts, doodles, etc. If there ARE any articles here, they are posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan </p> 19932237 2015-01-06 08:46:06 2015-01-06 08:46:06 open open the-tragedy-of-the-american-military-the-american-public-and-its-political-leadership-will-do-anything-for-the-military-except-take-it-seriously--19932237 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan 13 Enif http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2015/01/06/13-enif-19931009/ Tue, 06 Jan 2015 02:55:05 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>ORDERS F10T8F80 F185T24F87 F185T18F117 F187T8F80 F226T6F117 F226T8F80 F226T4F147 F226T11F186 F226T8F228 F254T11F228 F40T20F147 F40G=DAZE F10AF105 F80AF129 Lou Sheehan, Louis Sheehan F87AF152 F117AF172 F147AF180 F185AF193 F186AF212 F187AF129 F226AF193 F228AF212 F254AF180 F240L F240W167W13W84 F6U F101U F102U F177U F217U W8B30F6 F6W95W248W38 F101W181W150W125 F102W181W150W125 F177W181W150W125 F217W181W150W125 F143L F148L Lou Sheehan, Louis Sheehan F215L F218L F143W76W95W8 F148W76W95W8 F215W76W95W8 F218W76W95W8 F12L F12W166W84 W37B1F216 I37T1F216 F216L F216W243W8 F39U F58U F69U F183U F154G=JUNO W38B30F51 F51W33W121W117 F244W33W121W117 F39W58W238W159 F39T1F58 F58W9W213 F69W9W213 F183W9W213 W58B1F211 F211L F211W38 F48L F48W26W166W84 W68B1I F209L F245L F209W95W8 F245W95W8 F138R11 F174AF56 W79B1F138 F196W121W117W20 F21U F32U F155U F157U F166U F197U F241U F197X F155X W84B30F149 F149W13W58W38 F21W166W207W180 F32W166W207W180 F155W166W207W180 F157W166W207W180 F166W166W207W180 F197W166W207W180 F241W166W182W247 W103B1I W115B1I F230W1W217W103 W234B1I W245B2F230 V100F230 F219T2F230 F219W1W223 W223B1I W161B1I W166B1F86 I166T2F86 F86L F86W84 W172B1I F200L F202L F200W8 F202W8 W182B1I W186B1I F182X F182W166W84 F20L F60L F151L F176L F194L F20W103W181W8 F60W103W181W8 F151W103W181W8 F176W103W181W8 F194W103W181W8 W243B1F220 I243T1F220 F220L F220W8 F249W182W166W84 W250B1I END Total Orders = 134 </p> 19931009 2015-01-06 02:55:05 2015-01-06 02:55:05 open open 13-enif-19931009 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan The Real Story of How America Became an Economic Superpower Adam Tooze's study of the two world wars traces a new history of the 20th century. DAVID FRUMDEC 24 2014, 5:23 AM ET The Atlantic http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2015/01/06/the-real-story-of-how-america-became-an-economic-superpower-adam-tooze-s-study-of-the-two-world-wars-traces-a-new-history-of-the-20th-century-dav-19930939/ Tue, 06 Jan 2015 02:38:41 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan The Real Story of How America Became an Economic Superpower Adam Tooze's study of the two world wars traces a new history of the 20th century. DAVID FRUMDEC 24 2014, 5:23 AM ET Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan Wikipedia/The Atlantic Very rarely, you read a book that inspires you to see a familiar story in an entirely different way. So it was with Adam Tooze’s astonishing economic history of World War II, The Wages of Destruction. And so it is again with his economic history of the First World War and its aftermath, The Deluge. They amount together to a new history of the 20th century: the American century, which according to Tooze began not in 1945 but in 1916, the year U.S. output overtook that of the entire British empire. Yet Tooze's perspective is anything but narrowly American. His planetary history encompasses democratization in Japan and price inflation in Denmark; the birth of the Argentine far right as well as the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia. The two books narrate the arc of American economic supremacy from its beginning to its apogee. It is both ominous and fitting that the second volume of the story was published in 2014, the year in which—at least by one economic measure—that supremacy came to an end. “Britain has the earth, and Germany wants it.” Such was Woodrow Wilson’s analysis of the First World War in the summer of 1916, as recorded by one of his advisors. And what about the United States? Before the 1914 war, the great economic potential of the U.S. was suppressed by its ineffective political system, dysfunctional financial system, and uniquely violent racial and labor conflicts. “America was a byword for urban graft, mismanagement and greed-fuelled politics, as much as for growth, production, and profit,” Tooze writes. Related Story How the Great War Shaped the World The United States might claim a broader democracy than those that prevailed in Europe. On the other hand, European states mobilized their populations with an efficiency that dazzled some Americans (notably Theodore Roosevelt) and appalled others (notably Wilson). The magazine founded by pro-war intellectuals in 1914, The New Republic, took its title precisely because its editors regarded the existing American republic as anything but the hope of tomorrow. Yet as World War I entered its third year—and the first year of Tooze’s story—the balance of power was visibly tilting from Europe to America. The belligerents could no longer sustain the costs of offensive war. Cut off from world trade, Germany hunkered into a defensive siege, concentrating its attacks on weak enemies like Romania. The Western allies, and especially Britain, outfitted their forces by placing larger and larger war orders with the United States. In 1916, Britain bought more than a quarter of the engines for its new air fleet, more than half of its shell casings, more than two-thirds of its grain, and nearly all of its oil from foreign suppliers, with the United States heading the list. Britain and France paid for these purchases by floating larger and larger bond issues to American buyers—denominated in dollars, not pounds or francs. “By the end of 1916, American investors had wagered two billion dollars on an Entente victory,” computes Tooze (relative to America’s estimated GDP of $50 billion in 1916, the equivalent of $560 billion in today’s money). That staggering quantity of Allied purchases called forth something like a war mobilization in the United States. American factories switched from civilian to military production; American farmers planted food and fiber to feed and clothe the combatants of Europe. But unlike in 1940-41, the decision to commit so much to one side’s victory in a European war was not a political decision by the U.S. government. Quite the contrary: President Wilson wished to stay out of the war entirely. He famously preferred a “peace without victory.” The trouble was that by 1916, the U.S. commitment to Britain and France had grown—to borrow a phrase from the future—too big to fail. Tooze's Wilson is no dreamy idealist. His animating idea was a startling vision of U.S. exceptionalism. Tooze’s portrait of Woodrow Wilson is one of the most arresting novelties of his book. His Wilson is no dreamy idealist. The president’s animating idea was an American exceptionalism of a now-familiar but then-startling kind. His Republican opponents—men like Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Elihu Root—wished to see America take its place among the powers of the earth. They wanted a navy, an army, a central bank, and all the other instrumentalities of power possessed by Britain, France, and Germany. These political rivals are commonly derided as “isolationists” because they mistrusted the Wilson’s League of Nations project. That’s a big mistake. They doubted the League because they feared it would encroach on American sovereignty. It was Wilson who wished to remain aloof from the Entente, who feared that too close an association with Britain and France would limit American options. This aloofness enraged Theodore Roosevelt, who complained that the Wilson-led United States was “sitting idle, uttering cheap platitudes, and picking up [European] trade, whilst they had poured out their blood like water in support of ideals in which, with all their hearts and souls, they believe.” Wilson was guided by a different vision: Rather than join the struggle of imperial rivalries, the United States could use its emerging power to suppress those rivalries altogether. Wilson was the first American statesman to perceive that the United States had grown, in Tooze’s words, into “a power unlike any other. It had emerged, quite suddenly, as a novel kind of ‘super-state,’ exercising a veto over the financial and security concerns of the other major states of the world.” Wilson hoped to deploy this emerging super-power to enforce an enduring peace. His own mistakes and those of his successors doomed the project, setting in motion the disastrous events that would lead to the Great Depression, the rise of fascism, and a second and even more awful world war. What went wrong? “When all is said and done,” Tooze writes, “the answer must be sought in the failure of the United States to cooperate with the efforts of the French, British, Germans and the Japanese [leaders of the early 1920s] to stabilize a viable world economy and to establish new institutions of collective security. … Given the violence they had already experienced and the risk of even greater future devastation, France, Germany, Japan, and Britain could all see this. But what was no less obvious was that only the US could anchor such a new order.” And that was what Americans of the 1920s and 1930s declined to do—because doing so implied too much change at home for them: “At the hub of the rapidly evolving, American-centered world system there was a polity wedded to a conservative vision of its own future.” President Woodrow Wilson (far right) stands with other leaders of the Council of Four at the Paris Peace conference in 1919. (Wikipedia) Periodically, attempts have been made to rehabilitate the American leaders of the 1920s. The most recent version, James Grant’s The Forgotten Depression, 1921: The Crash That Cured Itself, was released just two days before The Deluge: Grant, an influential financial journalist and historian, holds views so old-fashioned that they have become almost retro-hip again. He believes in thrift, balanced budgets, and the gold standard; he abhors government debt and Keynesian economics. The Forgotten Depression is a polemic embedded within a narrative, an argument against the Obama stimulus joined to an account of the depression of 1920-21. As Grant correctly observes, that depression was one of the sharpest and most painful in American history. Total industrial production may have dropped by 30 percent. Unemployment spiked at perhaps close to 12 percent (accurate joblessness statistics don’t exist for this period). Overall, prices plummeted at the steepest rate ever recorded—steeper than in 1929-33. Then, after 18 months of extremely hard times, the economy lurched into recovery. By 1923, the U.S. had returned to full employment. Grant presents this story as a laissez-faire triumph. Wartime inflation was halted. Borrowing and spending gave way to saving and investing. Recovery then occurred naturally, without any need for government stimulus. “The hero of my narrative is the price mechanism, Adam Smith’s invisible hand,” he notes. “In a market economy, prices coordinate human effort. They channel investment, saving and work. High prices encourage production but discourage consumption; low prices do the opposite. The depression of 1920-21 was marked by plunging prices, the malignity we call deflation. But prices and wages fell only so far. They stopped falling when they become low enough to entice consumers into shopping, investors into committing capital and employers into hiring. Through the agency of falling prices and wages, the American economy righted itself.” Reader, draw your own comparisons! Grant’s argument is not new. The libertarian economist Murray Rothbard argued a similar case in his 1963 book, America’s Great Depression. The Rothbardian story of the “good” depression of 1920 has resurfaced from time to time in the years since, most spectacularly when Fox News star Glenn Beck seized upon it as proof that the Obama stimulus was wrong and dangerous. Grant tells the story with more verve and wit than most, and with a better eye for incident and character. But the central assumption of his version of events is the same one captured in Rothbard’s title half a century ago: that America’s economic history constitutes a story unto itself. America's "forgotten depression" through the lens of Dow Jones industrial averages from 1918 to 1923 (Wikipedia) Widen the view, however, and the “forgotten depression” takes on a broader meaning as one of the most ominous milestones on the world’s way to the Second World War. After World War II, Europe recovered largely as a result of American aid; the nation that had suffered least from the war contributed most to reconstruction. But after World War I, the money flowed the other way. Take the case of France, which suffered more in material terms than any World War I belligerent except Belgium. Northeastern France, the country’s most industrialized region in 1914, had been ravaged by war and German occupation. Millions of men in their prime were dead or crippled. On top of everything, the country was deeply in debt, owing billions to the United States and billions more to Britain. France had been a lender during the conflict too, but most of its credits had been extended to Russia, which repudiated all its foreign debts after the Revolution of 1917. The French solution was to exact reparations from Germany. Britain was willing to relax its demands on France. But it owed the United States even more than France did. Unless it collected from France—and from Italy and all the other smaller combatants as well—it could not hope to pay its American debts. Americans, meanwhile, were preoccupied with the problem of German recovery. How could Germany achieve political stability if it had to pay so much to France and Belgium? The Americans pressed the French to relent when it came to Germany, but insisted that their own claims be paid in full by both France and Britain. Germany, for its part, could only pay if it could export, and especially to the world’s biggest and richest consumer market, the United States. The depression of 1920 killed those export hopes. Most immediately, the economic crisis sliced American consumer demand precisely when Europe needed it most. True, World War I was not nearly as positive an experience for working Americans as World War II would be; between 1914 and 1918, for example, wages lagged behind prices. Still, millions of Americans had bought billions of dollars of small-denomination Liberty bonds. They had accumulated savings that could have been spent on imported products. Instead, many used their savings for food, rent, and mortgage interest during the hard times of 1920-21. But the gravest harm done by the depression to postwar recovery lasted long past 1921. To appreciate that, you have to understand the reasons why U.S. monetary authorities plunged the country into depression in 1920. Grant rightly points out that wars are usually followed by economic downturns. Such a downturn occurred in late 1918-early 1919. “Within four weeks of the … Armistice, the [U.S.] War Department had canceled $2.5 billion of its then outstanding $6 billion in contracts; for perspective, $2.5 billion represented 3.3 percent of the 1918 gross national product,” he observes. Even this understates the shock, because it counts only Army contracts, not Navy ones. The postwar recession checked wartime inflation, and by March 1919, the U.S. economy was growing again. As the economy revived, workers scrambled for wage increases to offset the price inflation they’d experienced during the war. Monetary authorities, worried that inflation would revive and accelerate, made the fateful decision to slam the credit brakes, hard. Unlike the 1918 recession, that of 1920 was deliberately engineered. There was nothing invisible about it. Nor did the depression “cure itself.” U.S. officials cut interest rates and relaxed credit, and the economy predictably recovered—just as it did after the similarly inflation-crushing recessions of 1974-75 and 1981-82. But 1920-21 was an inflation-stopper with a difference. In post-World War II America, anti-inflationists have been content to stop prices from rising. In 1920-21, monetary authorities actually sought to drive prices back to their pre-war levels. They did not wholly succeed, but they succeeded well enough. One price especially concerned them: In 1913, a dollar bought a little less than one-twentieth of an ounce of gold; by 1922, it comfortably did so again. James Grant hails this accomplishment. Adam Tooze forces us to reckon with its consequences for the rest of the planet. Every other World War I belligerent had quit the gold standard at the beginning of the war. As part of their war finance, they accepted that their currency would depreciate against gold. The currencies of the losers depreciated much more than the winners; among the winners, the currency of Italy depreciated more than that of France, and France more than that of Britain. Yet even the mighty pound lost almost one-fourth of its value against gold. At the end of the conflict, every national government had to decide whether to return to the gold standard and, if so, at what rate. World War I made the U.S. the world’s leading creditor and the unofficial custodian of the gold standard. The American depression of 1920 made that decision all the more difficult. The war had vaulted the United States to a new status as the world’s leading creditor, the world’s largest owner of gold, and, by extension, the effective custodian of the international gold standard. When the U.S. opted for massive deflation, it thrust upon every country that wished to return to the gold standard (and what respectable country would not?) an agonizing dilemma. Return to gold at 1913 values, and you would have to match U.S. deflation with an even steeper deflation of your own, accepting increased unemployment along the way. Alternatively, you could re-peg your currency to gold at a diminished rate. But that amounted to an admission that your money had permanently lost value—and that your own people, who had trusted their government with loans in local money, would receive a weaker return on their bonds than American creditors who had lent in dollars. Britain chose the former course; pretty much everybody else chose the latter. The consequences of these choices fill much of the second half of The Deluge. For Europeans, they were uniformly grim, and worse. But one important effect ultimately rebounded on Americans. America’s determination to restore a dollar “as good as gold” not only imposed terrible hardship on war-ravaged Europe, it also threatened to flood American markets with low-cost European imports. The flip side of the Lost Generation enjoying cheap European travel with their strong dollars was German steelmakers and shipyards underpricing their American competitors with weak marks. Such a situation also prevailed after World War II, when the U.S. acquiesced in the undervaluation of the Deutsche mark and yen to aid German and Japanese recovery. But American leaders of the 1920s weren’t willing to accept this outcome. In 1921 and 1923, they raised tariffs, terminating a brief experiment with freer trade undertaken after the election of 1912. The world owed the United States billions of dollars, but the world was going to have to find another way of earning that money than selling goods to the United States. That way was found: more debt, especially more German debt. The 1923 hyper-inflation that wiped out Germany’s savers also tidied up the country’s balance sheet. Post-inflation Germany looked like a very creditworthy borrower. Between 1924 and 1930, world financial flows could be simplified into a daisy chain of debt. Germans borrowed from Americans, and used the proceeds to pay reparations to the Belgians and French. The French and Belgians, in turn, repaid war debts to the British and Americans. The British then used their French and Italian debt payments to repay the United States, who set the whole crazy contraption in motion again. Everybody could see the system was crazy. Only the United States could fix it. It never did. Peter Heather, the great British historian of Late Antiquity, explains human catastrophes with a saying of his father’s, a mining engineer: “If man accumulates enough combustible material, God will provide the spark.” So it happened in 1929. The Deluge that had inundated the rest of the developed world roared back upon the United States. The Great Depression overturned parliamentary governments throughout Europe and the Americas. Yet the dictatorships that replaced them were not, as Tooze emphasizes in The Wages of Destruction, reactionary absolutisms of the kind re-established in Europe after Napoleon. These dictators aspired to be modernizers, and none more so than Adolf Hitler. From left to right, Britain's Neville Chamberlain, France's Édouard Daladier, Germany's Adolf Hitler, and Italy's Benito Mussolini and Count Ciano prepare to sign the Munich Agreement in 1938. (Wikipedia) “The United States has the Earth, and Germany wants it.” Thus might Hitler’s war aims have been summed up by a latter-day Woodrow Wilson. From the start, the United States was Hitler’s ultimate target. “In seeking to explain the urgency of Hitler’s aggression, historians have underestimated his acute awareness of the threat posed to Germany, along with the rest of the European powers, by the emergence of the United States as the dominant global superpower,” Tooze writes. “The originality of National Socialism was that, rather than meekly accepting a place for Germany within a global economic order dominated by the affluent English-speaking countries, Hitler sought to mobilize the pent-up frustrations of his population to mount an epic challenge to this order.” Of course, Hitler was not engaged in rational calculation. He could not accept subordination to the United States because, according to his lurid paranoia, “this would result in enslavement to the world Jewish conspiracy, and ultimately race death.” He dreamed of conquering Poland, Ukraine, and Russia as a means of gaining the resources to match those of the United States. The vast landscape in between Berlin and Moscow would become Germany’s equivalent of the American west, filled with German homesteaders living comfortably on land and labor appropriated from conquered peoples—a nightmare parody of the American experience with which to challenge American power. Could this vision have ever been realized? Tooze argues in The Wages of Destruction that Germany had already missed its chance. “In 1870, at the time of German national unification, the population of the United States and Germany was roughly equal and the total output of America, despite its enormous abundance of land and resources, was only one-third larger than that of Germany,” he writes. “Just before the outbreak of World War I the American economy had expanded to roughly twice the size of that of Imperial Germany. By 1943, before the aerial bombardment had hit top gear, total American output was almost four times that of the Third Reich.” The basis of the modern European order was America’s rise to dominance a century ago. That dominance may soon end. Germany was a weaker and poorer country in 1939 than it had been in 1914. Compared with Britain, let alone the United States, it lacked the basic elements of modernity: There were just 486,000 automobiles in Germany in 1932, and one-quarter of all Germans still worked as farmers as of 1925. Yet this backward land, with an income per capita comparable to contemporary “South Africa, Iran and Tunisia,” wagered on a second world war even more audacious than the first. The reckless desperation of Hitler’s war provides context for the horrific crimes of his regime. Hitler’s empire could not feed itself, so his invasion plan for the Soviet Union contemplated the death by starvation of 20 to 30 million Soviet urban dwellers after the invaders stole all foodstuffs for their own use. Germany lacked workers, so it plundered the labor of its conquered peoples. By 1944, foreigners constituted 20 percent of the German workforce and 33 percent of armaments workers (less than 9 percent of the population of today’s liberal and multicultural Germany is foreign-born). On paper, the Nazi empire of 1942 represented a substantial economic bloc. But pillage and slavery are not workable bases for an industrial economy. Under German rule, the output of conquered Europe collapsed. The Hitlerian vision of a united German-led Eurasia equaling the Anglo-American bloc proved a crazed and genocidal fantasy. Tooze’s story ends where our modern era starts: with the advent of a new European order—liberal, democratic, and under American protection. Yet nothing lasts forever. The foundation of this order was America’s rise to unique economic predominance a century ago. That predominance is now coming to an end as China does what the Soviet Union and Imperial Germany never could: rise toward economic parity with the United States. That parity has not, in fact, yet arrived, and the most realistic measures suggest that the moment of parity won’t arrive until the later 2020s. Perhaps some unforeseen disruption in the Chinese economy—or some unexpected acceleration of American prosperity—will postpone the moment even further. But it is coming, and when it does, the fundamental basis of world-power politics over the past 100 years will have been removed. Just how big and dangerous a change that will be is the deepest theme of Adam Tooze's profound and brilliant grand narrative. Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan [ One of my intentions with this blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. Further, this ‘blog’ will contain various drafts of unknown writings just to be saved in the event they are needed by me, etc.– Louis Sheehan ] Feel free to ignore this blog! I am intending to use it as a repository of various writings: drafts, doodles, etc. If there ARE any articles here, they are posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan </p> 19930939 2015-01-06 02:38:41 2015-01-06 02:38:41 open open the-real-story-of-how-america-became-an-economic-superpower-adam-tooze-s-study-of-the-two-world-wars-traces-a-new-history-of-the-20th-century-dav-19930939 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan Enif http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2015/01/06/enif-19930922/ Tue, 06 Jan 2015 02:35:31 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>ORDERS Lou Sheehan F247G=HIVE W68B1I F12U F48U F240U F149U F249U W84B30F244 F244W13W58W38 F149G=JUNO F48T4F240 F240W13W167W2 F48W166W26W64 F12W166W26 W161B1I W166B1I W182B1F21 I182T2F21 F21L F21W166W84 F249W166W182W247 W186B1F182 I186T4F182 F182L F182W11W180W207 F32L F157L F166L F241L F32W182W166W84 F157W182W166W84 F166W182W166W84 F241W182W166W84 F216T2P F216L F216W55W111W37 P192AC F155W166W84 F197W166W84 W234B1F86 F86L I234T4F86 F86W247W182W166 F183T4P F186T4P F183L F183W38 F186W121W117 F228W121W117 F183X F143U F148U F215U F218U F80U F87U F117U F147U F211U F41U F154U W38B30F187 F187W33W121W117 F226W33W121W117 F10W33W121W117 F80W33W121W117 F87W33W121W117 F41G=JUNO W58B1F39 I58T3F39 F39L F39W38 W79B1F174 F196T5F138 F196T7F174 F196AF29 F138AF56 F174AF56 F254T41F40 F185AF112 F254AF193 F40AF198 F58L Louis Sheehan F69L F58W58W38 F69W58W38 F211W58 F143W9W23 F148W9W23 F215W9W23 F218W9W23 F40Q F117W33W121W117 F147W33W121W117 W223B1I F20U F60U F151U F176U F194U F200U F202U F209U F245U F51U W8B30F51 F51W95W248W38 W37B1I W89B2I F230W217W1W245 W103B1F230 W115B1I F6L F101L F102L F177L F217L F220W181W8W243 W172B1I W243B1I F219U W245B1F219 W250B1I F20T1F51 F245T3F51 F20W181W103W217 F60W181W103W217 F151W181W103W217 F176W181W103W217 F194W181W103W217 F200W181 F202W181 F209W95W76 F245W95W76 F6W181W8 F101W181W8 F102W181W8 F177W181W8 F217W181W8 END Total Orders = 139 </p> 19930922 2015-01-06 02:35:31 2015-01-06 02:35:31 open open enif-19930922 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan

2014

Gravity http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/ http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping Mon, 07 Jul 2008 06:52:48 +0200 http://www.blog.ca en 1.0 http://www.blog.ca http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/ Ralph Nader Toys Built in China http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/12/23/ralph-nader-toys-built-in-china-19884449/ Tue, 23 Dec 2014 19:44:51 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan Here's a question to ponder this Holiday season -- what do toy brands like Barbie, Mickey Mouse and Thomas the Tank Engine have in common? What about the companies that produce these toys -- Mattel, Disney, Fisher Price and other major toy companies such as Crayola and Hasbro? Many parents might say that the shared commonality of these toys and their corporate manufacturers is their young children's affinity for them, especially around the holiday season when corporate advertising and marketing launches into overdrive. Many parents may be planning or have already purchased these and other toys as holiday gifts for their youngsters. Here's one common factor that many parents will likely not consider about the toys they purchase as gifts. According to a recently released 66-page report from the nonprofit organization China Labor Watch (CLW), these aforementioned popular toy brands and many others are manufactured in Chinese factories that have been found to have repeatedly committed a vast number of worker rights violations. This most recent CLW investigation was a follow-up to one conducted and reported on in 2007. Disturbingly, many of the same abuses reported then were discovered once more, seven years later. Despite efforts to bring attention to these harmful labor conditions, the conditions in Chinese factories persist, and Americans continue to buy up these products by the millions. As for the American companies that sell them, finding ways to shirk any responsibility for deplorable factory conditions is their primary public relations concern. The CLW report states: Many toy companies divide their toy orders among dozens or hundreds of factories in order to ensure that their orders in any given factory only consists of a small proportion of that factory's total orders usually no more than 20 percent. Toy companies will also use this as a basis for avoiding responsibility for poor labor conditions. For example, if CLW uncovers labor rights violations at a Disney supplier factory in China, Disney might respond that it only maintains a small number of orders in the plant and is unable to influence the factory's behavior. Parents should consider the following harsh realities uncovered by CLW: Workers who create these toy products often make just over a dollar an hour, nowhere near a living wage. Many live in cramped company dormitories with inadequate bathroom facilities for the number of people who occupy them. Many receive inadequate or no safety training. Many are forced to work excessive overtime hours in violation of Chinese labor laws. Many are provided inadequate safety equipment or work on poorly maintained and potentially dangerous equipment. None of the factories investigated by CLW conducted fire safety training, and one even locked emergency escape doors and had fire escape routes obstructed. Unfortunately, the grievance procedures for factory workers to file complaints or report incidents are ineffective or nonexistent. Here's one that might strike a chord with the smartphone generation -- a 2013 CLW report on Mattel factories reported that in one factory, "A worker who checks his cell phone will have that day's working hours reset to zero, effectively not paying the worker for the actual work that he did." These are only some of the numerous issues reported. Taken as a whole, the report describes a truly nightmarish and inhumane work environment that would appall many in the Western world. Behind the friendly plastic smiles of Mickey Mouse and Thomas the Tank engine lays immense human suffering and worker abuse. Eighty-five percent of all children's toys that are sold in the United States come from China. Furthermore, these toys often come with too many hazards -- burning, choking risks for small children, or toxics in or on the toys. It can be difficult for parents to know what toys are safe for their youngsters. Some are recalled by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. (See cpsc.gov for the latest recalls.) A few examples of recent recalls: A singing monkey toy, sold in Cracker Barrel restaurants, has a battery compartment that can overheat and cause burns. Another is a "Dream on Me" playhouse that reportedly can collapse and pose a strangulation risk to young children. Yet another is a "Hello Kitty" whistle, distributed by McDonald's, in which a small internal piece can come detached and be swallowed or choked on by young users. The proposed remedy from McDonald's: "Consumers should immediately take the whistle away from children and return it to any McDonald's for a free replacement toy and either a yogurt tube or a bag of apple slices." All of these dangerous products were manufactured in China. The Business Supply Chain Transparency on Trafficking and Slavery Act (H.R. 4842) was introduced earlier this year by Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) It would require U.S. companies to disclose its contracting practices in annual reports that find instances of "child labor, forced labor, slavery, and human trafficking." It would also require the Secretary of Labor "to develop and publish annually on the Internet website of the Department of Labor a list of top 100 companies adhering to supply chain labor standards, as established under federal and international guidelines." This would be an important step in holding toy companies accountable for the inhumane conditions they permit by doing business with abusive factories in China. In the meantime, being a socially-conscious shopper is one way to let these corporations know that Americans do not approve of products built on the backs of Chinese serf-labor. One easy method is to check the country-of-origin label on products to see where they came from. Parents should know about the products their children request and not give into demands or nagging because the youngster wanted the products to fit in with their friends. These toy companies want their young consumers to be compliant, vulnerable and ever-hooked on fashionable fads. Is such crass commercialism worth the cost of human suffering? Follow Ralph Nader Feel free to ignore this blog! I am intending to use it as a repository of various writings: drafts, doodles, etc. If there ARE any articles here, they are posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan [ One of my intentions with this blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. Further, this ‘blog’ will contain various drafts of unknown writings just to be saved in the event they are needed by me, etc.– Louis Sheehan ] </p> 19884449 2014-12-23 19:44:51 2014-12-23 19:44:51 open open ralph-nader-toys-built-in-china-19884449 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan eb Bush Just Took a Big Step Toward Running for President. Here Are 23 Reasons He Should Reconsider. From questionable business dealings to allegations of philandering, the former Florida governor's past is an opposition researcher's dream. http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/12/23/eb-bush-just-took-a-big-step-toward-running-for-president-here-are-23-reasons-he-should-reconsider-from-questionable-business-dealings-to-allegat-19884430/ Tue, 23 Dec 2014 19:39:59 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan Jeb Bush Just Took a Big Step Toward Running for President. Here Are 23 Reasons He Should Reconsider. From questionable business dealings to allegations of philandering, the former Florida governor's past is an opposition researcher's dream. —By Stephanie Mencimer | Tue Sep. 9, 2014 6:30 AM EDT | Updated Tue Dec. 16, 2014 10:10 AM EDT On December 16, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush announced (via Facebook) that he plans to "actively explore the possibility of running" for president in 2016. It's the first step toward formally entering the race. But there are plenty of reasons why Bush should think long and hard before subjecting himself (and his family) to the ruthless scrutiny of a presidential campaign. His history is an opposition researcher's dream—clouded by embarrassing family episodes, allegations of philandering, offensive comments to black voters, and dubious business dealings. Many of these past deeds and misdeeds will no doubt be put under the microscope should Bush run in 2016. Here are 23 reasons why he might want to take a pass—and it's only a partial list: The shopaholic: Customs agents detained Bush's wife, Columba, in 1999 at the Atlanta airport and fined her $4,100 for failing to declare the more than $19,000 in clothes and jewelry she'd purchased in Paris. The addict: In 2002, Bush's daughter Noelle was arrested for trying to purchase Xanax with a bogus prescription. In rehab, she was caught with a "white rock like substance" thought to be crack cocaine. Between 1995 and 2002, she racked up seven speeding tickets, five other traffic violations, and was involved in three wrecks. jeb bush illustration Jeb Bush's Cyber Attack on Public Schools The stalker: In 1994, Bush's eldest son, George P., broke into his ex-girlfriend's house. After fleeing her father, George returned to the scene and drove his SUV into their front lawn. His ex told the police that young George had "been a problem" since the breakup. Her father declined to press charges. The other son: In 2000, cops discovered Bush's 16-year-old son "Jebby" boffing a 17-year-old girl in a car in a mall parking lot. The police reported the incident of sexual misconduct, but Jebby wasn't arrested. The black sheep brother: Volumes have been written about Jeb's siblings, especially former president George W. Bush. But his brother Neil, who helped bankrupt a savings and loan and once toured Asia with the late Rev. Sun Myung Moon while he was promoting the development of a 51-mile underwater highway between Russia and Alaska, will give reporters plenty to chew on. The fraudster: In 1986, Camilo Padreda, who had been a counterintelligence officer for Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in the 1950s, hired Bush to find tenants for office buildings financed with US Department of Housing and Urban Development-backed loans. Bush took the gig, despite the fact that four years earlier Padreda had been indicted for embezzling $500,000 from a Texas savings and loan. Those charges were dropped, but in 1989 Padreda pleaded guilty to defrauding HUD of millions. (Bush was not involved in that scam, and it's unclear whether he was aware of the savings and loan indictment when he teamed up with Padreda.) The international fugitive: In 1986, Miguel Recarey, who'd done 30 days in jail for income tax evasion in the 1970s, paid Bush $75,000 to help him find a new headquarters for his health care company. The company never moved, but while Bush's father was serving as vice president, Bush lobbied the US Department of Health and Human Services to help Recarey access millions in Medicare funds. Bush also helped arrange for Recarey's company to provide free medical care to the Nicaraguan contras. Recarey was later indicted for a massive Medicare fraud scheme but fled the country before trial. He is now an international fugitive. The bribery case: In 1988, Bush formed a company with GOP donor David Eller to market water pumps manufactured by Moving Water Industries, another Eller business, to foreign countries. The company used Bush's White House ties to drum up business. In 1992, at the behest of MWI, the Export-Import Bank approved $74 million in US-backed loans to Nigeria to buy water pumps from Eller's company. The Justice Department later alleged in a 2002 civil suit that about $28 million of those loans were used to bribe a Nigerian official. Bush was not implicated, but in November 2013, a jury found MWI guilty of making 58 false claims to the Export-Import Bank on its applications for the Nigerian loans. A federal judge fined the company $580,000. Bush escaped testifying after the judge determined his testimony wouldn't be relevant to the central issue in the case. The fortunate son: Cuban American real estate developer Armando Codina was the Florida chair of George H.W. Bush's unsuccessful 1980 bid for the GOP presidential nomination. He loved the Bush family so much that when Jeb first moved to Miami in the early 1980s, he made Bush a partner in his real estate company and gave him 40 percent of the profits—even though Jeb had no real estate experience or money to invest. In 1985, Bush and Codina bought an office building partially financed by a savings and loan that later failed. The $4.56 million loan went into default, but federal regulators gave Bush and his partner a pass. Instead of foreclosing, they merely asked them to repay $500,000 of the loan. Taxpayers picked up the rest. In 1991, Bush and Codina sold the building for $8 million. The shady company: In 2007, Bush joined the board of InnoVida, a building materials-manufacturing startup founded by a businessman whose previous company had gone bankrupt under suspicious circumstances. Bush and his fellow board members subsequently failed to notice that InnoVida officials had used forged documents to fake solvency, hidden the company's financial problems, and misappropriated $40 million. The company's Maserati-driving founder eventually went to jail for money laundering, and investors lost their shirts when the company went bankrupt in 2011. Last year, Bush agreed to repay the $270,000 he was paid by the company as a consultant to reimburse defrauded investors. The Big Finance fail: Bush signed on as a paid adviser to the financial giant Lehman Brothers in 2007, just as the firm was on the brink of collapse. The company hoped he would use his political ties to rescue it, but he couldn't even convince Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim to throw some money into that pit. The terrorist: In 1989, Bush successfully lobbied his father, who was then serving as president, for the release of Cuban terrorist Orlando Bosch, who allegedly orchestrated the bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people in 1976 and other terrorist attacks. Bosch, who was in a federal prison on an immigration violation and dubbed an "unrepentant terrorist" by then-Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, was a cause célèbre for Miami's influential Cuban population—a voting bloc that Jeb needed to launch his political career. The black vote: During his first failed campaign for governor in 1994, Bush was asked in a debate what he would do to help African Americans. "Probably nothing," he replied. In 2000, his administration purged 12,000 eligible voters from the rolls because they were incorrectly identified as convicted felons. More than 40 percent of them were African Americans. The welfare wife: During his 1994 campaign, Bush said that women on welfare "should be able to get their life together and find a husband." The Playboy bunny: In 1999, Bush appointed Cynthia Henderson as his secretary of business regulation. Bush later transferred Henderson, who had worked her way through law school as a bunny at the St. Petersburg Playboy club, to another job in his administration, after she got caught taking a trip to the Kentucky Derby on a corporate jet owned by a company she regulated and accepting lodging and tickets to the event from an association of race track regulators. (Henderson's boyfriend, a Florida real estate developer, eventually paid the cost of the trip.) Rumors that Henderson and Bush were having an affair forced him to publicly deny philandering. The socialist: While at the elite prep school Andover, Bush was briefly a member of the socialist club. He also smoked pot. Feel free to ignore this blog! I am intending to use it as a repository of various writings: drafts, doodles, etc. If there ARE any articles here, they are posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan The failed charter school: After wining just 4 percent of the black vote in his first failed run for governor, Bush teamed up with the Greater Miami Urban League to start Florida's first charter school. In 1999, the state implemented a school grading system at Bush's insistence. His own charter school received a D. By 2008, the school had earned a C- and was $1 million in debt; the state shut it down that year. The shady charter school operator: In 2010, Bush gave the commencement speech for the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, an Ohio online charter school owned by William Lager, a big GOP donor who has served on Bush's Digital Learning Council, which promotes for-profit online schools like ECOT. (Lager's companies have also sponsored conferences hosted by Bush's education foundation.) The school was far from a model for the future. At the time Bush gave his speech, ECOT's graduation rate had never exceeded 40 percent. A 2001 state audit found that though the state had paid the school tuition for more than 2,000 students one month, only seven students had logged on to ECOT's computer system. When state auditors couldn't find the rest of the school's alleged student body, ECOT was forced to repay Ohio $1.7 million. School founder William Lager's private companies have earned more than $100 million from online schools that perform worse than any of Ohio's worst brick-and-mortar public schools. The cheaters: In 2010, Bush and his education reform organization, the Foundation for Excellence in Education, created a group of school superintendents and other high-ranking officials called "Chiefs for Change" to advance the Florida model of education, which emphasizes accountability and emphasized giving schools letter grades based on performance, especially standardized test scores. One of the original eight chiefs was accused of inflating the grade of a lackluster charter school funded by a Republican donor. The office of another was caught manipulating test score data. The IRS complaint: In October, a New Mexico advocacy group filed a complaint with the IRS alleging that Bush's Foundation for Excellence in Education failed to disclose thousands of dollars it paid to bring public school superintendents, education officials, and lawmakers to the group's events, where they had private "VIP" meetings with the foundation's for-profit ed-tech company sponsors. The complaint alleges that Bush's foundation disguised travel payments as "scholarships" to hide the fact that the nonprofit was facilitating lobbying between big corporations and public officials. The IRS has not commented on the complaint. Bush's foundation issued a statement dismissing the allegations as politically motivated. The immigration book: Last year, Bush published Immigration Wars, a book that took a hardline position against a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. After going on TV to push the book's anti-path-to-citizenship position—and being accused of having changed his position to avoid offending the tea party—he quickly reverted to his previous stance of supporting citizenship. The Reagan comment: In 2012, Bush said publicly that Ronald Reagan would have had trouble getting his party's presidential nomination today—meaning that the tea party had driven the GOP too far too the right. He told editors at Bloomberg, "Back to my dad's time and Ronald Reagan's time—they got a lot of stuff done with a lot of bipartisan support." Reagan "would be criticized for doing the things that he did." The mother: In April, former First Lady Barbara Bush appeared on the Today Show and said that her son would be "by far the best qualified man, but…we've had enough Bushes." [ One of my intentions with this blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. Further, this ‘blog’ will contain various drafts of unknown writings just to be saved in the event they are needed by me, etc.– Louis Sheehan ] </p> 19884430 2014-12-23 19:39:59 2014-12-23 19:39:59 open open eb-bush-just-took-a-big-step-toward-running-for-president-here-are-23-reasons-he-should-reconsider-from-questionable-business-dealings-to-allegat-19884430 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Israeli bank to pay $400 million to US in tax evasion case http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/12/23/israeli-bank-to-pay-400-million-to-us-in-tax-evasion-case-19884153/ Tue, 23 Dec 2014 18:30:29 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>Israeli bank to pay $400 million to US in tax evasion case Bank Leumi admits to helping US taxpayers hide assets; will hand $270m to Justice Department, $130m to NY Department of Financial Services By AFP and Times of Israel staff December 23, 2014, 5:50 am 4 Feel free to ignore this blog! I am intending to use it as a repository of various writings: drafts, doodles, etc. If there ARE any articles here, they are posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan [ One of my intentions with this blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. Further, this ‘blog’ will contain various drafts of unknown writings just to be saved in the event they are needed by me, etc.– Louis Sheehan ] Israel’s Bank Leumi Group has agreed to pay a total of some $400 million to US and New York authorities to settle a criminal probe, after admitting to helping US taxpayers hide assets, the Department of Justice announced Monday. Get the Start-Up Israel's daily newsletter and never miss our top stories Free Sign up! The bank will also terminate the employment of senior staff as part of the settlement. Leumi agreed to pay $270 million to the US Department of Justice, $156 million of which is a fine for US taxpayer accounts held at the bank’s Swiss subsidiary, and $130 million to New York’s Department of Financial Services. From at least 2000 until early 2011, Leumi sent private bankers from Israel and elsewhere to meet with US taxpayers and help them conceal assets at Leumi locations in Israel, Switzerland and Luxembourg, documents revealed. Leumi, a unit of Bank Leumi le-Israel, also helped US taxpayers prepare and present false tax returns, prosecutors said. As part of a deferred prosecution agreement, Leumi agreed to supply information on more than 1,500 US account holders. “The Bank Leumi Group recognized that the writing is on the wall for offshore banking, and cooperating with the government’s investigation was the only way to proceed,” said Deputy Attorney General James Cole. The bank agreed to a deferred prosecution deal in which it admitted to wrongdoing without pleading guilty and avoiding prosecution. “This deferred prosecution agreement demonstrates both that the Justice Department will hold financial institutions accountable for their crimes, and that we will be fair in recognizing extraordinary cooperation,” said Cole The Justice Department said the case marks the first time an Israeli bank has admitted to such criminal conduct. According to a report in Forbes magazine, the statement of facts in the case included the following main accusations: “surreptitiously sending private bankers from Israel and elsewhere around the world to the United States to meet secretly with US clients at hotels, parks and coffee shops to discuss their offshore account activity; assisting US clients in using nominee corporate entities created in Belize and other foreign jurisdictions to hide their undeclared accounts by concealing the US client as the true beneficial owner of the account; using the Bank Leumi le-Israel Trust Company as a nominee account holder for US clients with accounts in Israel to conceal the US client as the true beneficial owner of the account;maintaining US clients’ undeclared offshore accounts under assumed names or numbered accounts to conceal the US client as the true beneficial owner of the account.” The report also said the bank was guilty of “providing hold mail services so that correspondence and other account information would not go directly to the US client to make it more difficult to connect the client to the secret offshore account; extending loans to US clients from Bank Leumi USA that were collateralized by the assets in those clients’ offshore accounts, so that the clients could leverage their offshore assets to obtain and use capital in the United States while keeping their foreign accounts secret and undetected from the US government; and after the department’s investigation into UBS and other Swiss banks’ criminal conduct in aiding US taxpayers to evade their taxes became public, the Bank Leumi Group opened and maintained accounts for US taxpayers who left UBS and other Swiss banks due to the investigation in an effort to continue to avoid detection by the US government.” </p> 19884153 2014-12-23 18:30:29 2014-12-23 18:30:29 open open israeli-bank-to-pay-400-million-to-us-in-tax-evasion-case-19884153 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan The FBI Is Very Excited About This Machine That Can Scan Your DNA in 90 Minutes http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/12/08/the-fbi-is-very-excited-about-this-machine-that-can-scan-your-dna-in-90-minutes-19817725/ Mon, 08 Dec 2014 01:03:20 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>The FBI Is Very Excited About This Machine That Can Scan Your DNA in 90 Minutes Rapid-DNA technology makes it easier than ever to grab and store your genetic profile. G-men, cops, and Homeland Security can't wait to see it everywhere. —By Shane Bauer | Thu Nov. 20, 2014 6:30 AM EST Email 191 [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan Illustration: Dan Bejar Robert Schueren shook my hand firmly, handed me his business card, and flipped it over, revealing a short list of letters and numbers. "Here is my DNA profile." He smiled. "I have nothing to hide." I had come to meet Schueren, the CEO of IntegenX, at his company's headquarters in Pleasanton, California, to see its signature product: a machine the size of a large desktop printer that can unravel your genetic code in the time it takes to watch a movie. Schueren grabbed a cotton swab and dropped it into a plastic cartridge. That's what, say, a police officer would use to wipe the inside of your cheek to collect a DNA sample after an arrest, he explained. Other bits of material with traces of DNA on them, like cigarette butts or fabric, could work too. He inserted the cartridge into the machine and pressed a green button on its touch screen: "It's that simple." Ninety minutes later, the RapidHIT 200 would generate a DNA profile, check it against a database, and report on whether it found a match. A scanner, quickly: The RapidHIT 200 can generate a DNA profile in about 90 minutes. IntegenX The RapidHIT represents a major technological leap—testing a DNA sample in a forensics lab normally takes at least two days. This has government agencies very excited. The Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, and the Justice Department funded the initial research for "rapid DNA" technology, and after just a year on the market, the $250,000 RapidHIT is already being used in a few states, as well as China, Russia, Australia, and countries in Africa and Europe. "We're not always aware of how it's being used," Schueren said. "All we can say is that it's used to give an accurate identification of an individual." Civil liberties advocates worry that rapid DNA will spur new efforts by the FBI and police to collect ordinary citizens' genetic code. The US government will soon test the machine in refugee camps in Turkey and possibly Thailand on families seeking asylum in the United States, according to Chris Miles, manager of the Department of Homeland Security's biometrics program. "We have all these families that claim they are related, but we don't have any way to verify that," he says. Miles says that rapid DNA testing will be voluntary, though refusing a test could cause an asylum application to be rejected. "We're not always aware of how it's being used. All we can say is that it's used to give an accurate identification of an individual." Miles also says that federal immigration officials are interested in using rapid DNA to curb trafficking by ensuring that children entering the country are related to the adults with them. Jeff Heimburger, the vice president of marketing at IntegenX, says the government has also inquired about using rapid DNA to screen green-card applicants. (An Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman said he was not aware that the agency was pursuing the technology.) Meanwhile, police have started using rapid DNA in Arizona, Florida, and South Carolina. In August, sheriffs in Columbia, South Carolina, used a RapidHIT to nab an attempted murder suspect. The machine's speed provides a major "investigative lead," said Vince Figarelli, superintendent of the Arizona Department of Public Safety crime lab, which is using a RapidHIT to compare DNA evidence from property crimes against the state's database of 300,000 samples. Heimburger notes that the system can also prevent false arrests and wrongful convictions: "There is great value in finding out that somebody is not a suspect." But the technology is not a silver bullet for DNA evidence. The IntegenX executives brought up rape kits so often that it sounded like their product could make a serious dent in the backlog of half a million untested kits. Yet when I pressed Schueren on this, he conceded that the RapidHIT is not actually capable of processing rape kits since it can't discern individual DNA in commingled bodily fluids. Despite the new technology's crime-solving potential, privacy advocates are wary of its spread. If rapid-DNA machines can be used in a refugee camp, "they can certainly be used in the back of a squad car," says Jennifer Lynch, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "I could see that happening in the future as the prices of these machines go down." Democratic members of Congress have urged the FBI to look into the "broad deployment" of rapid DNA in police stations. Lynch is particularly concerned that law enforcement agencies will use the devices to scoop up and store ever more DNA profiles. Every state already has a forensic DNA database, and while these systems were initially set up to track convicted violent offenders, their collection thresholds have steadily broadened. Today, at least 28 include data from anyone arrested for certain felonies, even if they are not convicted; some store the DNA of people who have committed misdemeanors as well. The FBI's National DNA Index System has more than 11 million profiles of offenders plus 2 million people who have been arrested but not necessarily convicted of a crime. For its part, Homeland Security will not hang onto refugees' DNA records, insists Miles. ("They aren't criminals," he pointed out.) However, undocumented immigrants in custody may be required to provide DNA samples, which are put in the FBI's database. DHS documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation say there may even be a legal case for "mandating collection of DNA" from anyone granted legal status under a future immigration amnesty. (The documents also state that intelligence agencies and the military are interested in using rapid DNA to identify sex, race, and other factors the machines currently do not reveal.) The FBI is the only federal agency allowed to keep a national DNA database. Currently, police must use a lab to upload genetic profiles to it. But that could change. The FBI's website says it is eager to see rapid DNA in wide use and that it supports the "legislative changes necessary" to make that happen. IntegenX's Heimburger says the FBI is almost finished working with members of Congress on a bill that would give "tens of thousands" of police stations rapid-DNA machines that could search the FBI's system and add arrestees' profiles to it. (The RapitHIT is already designed to do this.) IntegenX has spent $70,000 lobbying the FBI, DHS, and Congress over the last two years. The FBI declined to comment, and Heimburger wouldn't say which lawmakers might sponsor the bill. But some have already given rapid DNA their blessing. Rep. Eric Swalwell, a former prosecutor who represents the district where IntegenX is based, says he'd like to see the technology "put to use quickly to help law enforcement"—while protecting civil liberties. In March, he and seven other Democratic members of Congress, including progressive stalwart Rep. Barbara Lee of California, urged the FBI to assess rapid DNA's "viability for broad deployment" in police departments across the country. Share on Facebook Share on Twitter</p> 19817725 2014-12-08 01:03:20 2014-12-08 01:03:20 open open the-fbi-is-very-excited-about-this-machine-that-can-scan-your-dna-in-90-minutes-19817725 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan Raoul Villain http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/12/01/raoul-villain-19781460/ Mon, 01 Dec 2014 09:19:28 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>Raoul Villain From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Raoul Villain (1885 – 1936) was a French nationalist. He is primarily remembered for his assassination of the French socialist leader Jean Jaurès on July 31, 1914, in Paris. Villain was acquitted by popular jury in 1919 and later fled to the Balearic island of Ibiza, where he was killed during the Spanish Civil War. Contents 1 Early life and background 2 Attack on Jaurès and result 3 After being acquitted 3.1 Death 4 Notes 5 Sources 6 External links Early life and background Villain was born in Reims, Marne, France on September 19, 1885. As a 29-year-old student in archeology at the École du Louvre, he was a member of the Ligue des jeunes amis de l'Alsace-Lorraine ("League of Young Friends of Alsace-Lorraine"), a nationalist student group.[1] After France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, the French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine were annexed by Germany. This was a source of anger and resentment in France, causing many to feel that a new war with Germany was in order to recover both territories and French pride. Therefore many like Villain were opposed to the pacifist policies of Jean Jaurès. Villain lived for some time in England, at Loughton, where he stayed with Mrs Annie Francis, who described him, according to The Observer on 6 June 1915, as "a gentle and very kind man". Attack on Jaurès and result The still existing Café du Croissant which was located next to Jaurès's newspaper L'Humanité (photo by Rémi Jouan) Villain focused on Jaurès, bought a revolver and began stalking him, scribbling incoherent notes about the socialist leader's habits into his pocket-book. At about 21:40 on Friday, July 31, 1914, Villain fired two bullets through a window embrasure into Jaurès' head while his victim was having supper with his contributors in Le Croissant at the corner of Rue Montmartre and Rue du Croissant.[2] The next day, posters went up all over France announcing the general mobilization, and war was declared three days after Jaurès's death. What would be World War I began. Incarcerated for the duration of the war, Villain was brought to trial in 1919. He was acquitted by a popular jury on March 29, 1919, and Anatole France wrote in L'Humanité: "Workers! A monstrous verdict brings in that assassinating Jaurès is not a crime...".[3] Jaurès's wife, plaintiff, was convicted in costs. After being acquitted After having briefly been arrested in 1920 in Paris after trying to pass some false currency, Villain fled to Cala de Sant Vicent,[4] Ibiza in the Balearic Islands off Spain. Receiving some money through a legacy, he fled France and arrived in Ibiza via Mexico.[5] Villain thought that, by hiding up in the remote northeastern corner of Ibiza, he could live anonymously and be forgotten. In 1933,[5] the Bay of Cala de San Vicent was a very quiet backwater with no development, there was not even a road into the valley. Villain decided to make his home there. Using local labour and help from Paul René Gauguin,[5] the grandson of Paul Gauguin, he built a house from concrete and had almost finished the building by August 1936. On September 13,[5] a small detachment of soldiers arrived on the beach of Cala de San Vicent by rowing boat. Eyewitness reported that they thought that they may have been anarchists of the FAI.[5] These soldiers were part of a larger detachment. The force had arrived on the island to re-secure the island following the mini-coup which had been orchestrated by the Nationalists under the command of Infantry Commander Juli Mestre.[5] Villain had been away visiting a French lady[5] in Santa Eulària des Riu when the soldiers arrived, but quickly returned home when he had heard of their arrival. Feeling vulnerable, he feared that the soldiers would steal his valuables, which he had stashed[5] in the unfinished house. Despite being repeatedly warned[5] by his neighbours not to go back down to the cove, he still went home. Death The House of Raoul Villains in Bay of Cala de San Vicent as it stands in 2013 The officer and troops who arrived on the beach that day seemed very suspicious of this Frenchman, who also antagonised the officer with his explanation of why he had set a crucifix[5] on the hill behind his house. Apart from this outward show of religious zeal, the officer was also suspicious of where Villain had been that day, and decided to confine him to his house.[5] He was considered to be a fascist and a spy and, as such, a threat to their plans to reoccupy the island. The details of what happened next are sketchy, but what is certain is that Villain ended the day with a bullet wound which eventually killed him. That afternoon, three bombers from the Italian air force had flown along the coast over Cala de Sant Vicent and bombed Ibiza town, which could be heard even this far up the coast.[5] It is thought that the troops, on hearing the attack, decided to return to the capital and tried to take Villain and his valuables with them. He reacted violently to this, and as a consequence was shot in the back, with the bullet exiting via his throat.[5] Unfortunately for Villain, he had only been wounded. The officer in charge warned the villagers that had come down to see what had happened, not to assist or disturb the mortally wounded man. Villain lay alone on the sand for two days[4] until he died. The locals then placed his body in a makeshift coffin, draped it in a French tricolour they found in his house, and buried him in the cemetery at nearby Sant Vicent de sa Cala.[5] Notes Vilain, Isabelle. Les Vilain célèbres: Raoul Villain, 3 January 2002. It seems the family name can be written either with one or two 'l'. In the center of Paris, not on the Butte Montmartre (Montmartre Mound) Vovelle, Michel. "1914: Jaurès est assassiné", L'Humanité (archived at waybackmachine.org), 24 April 2004. The White Island, The Colourful History of the Original Fantasy Island, Ibiza. Author: Stephen Armstrong. Published:Corgi. ISBN 0-552-77189-9 Title: The Road to San Vicente. Author: Leif Borthen. Published: Barbury Press. ISBN 9788461181193 [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Posted but not written by: Lou Sheehan </p> 19781460 2014-12-01 09:19:28 2014-12-01 09:19:28 open open raoul-villain-19781460 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan The Firing of Chuck Hagel Elizabeth Drew Kristoffer November 24, 2014 http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/11/28/the-firing-of-chuck-hagel-elizabeth-drew-kristoffer-november-24-19771035/ Fri, 28 Nov 2014 03:19:01 +0100 Beforethebigbang <p>The Firing of Chuck Hagel Elizabeth Drew Kristoffer November 24, 2014 Earlier this year, I went to the Pentagon to have lunch with Chuck Hagel, whom I had known for many years. Because of his packed schedule the lunch was arranged for 11:30 AM, and was to last for forty-five minutes. As we got talking, he let the time slip for another ten minutes and then politely excused himself, explaining that he simply had to move on to the next appointment—a courtesy meeting with the Defense Minister of Peru. The Middle East was falling apart and countries where the US was supposed to be winding down its military commitments were looking anything but ready for stability. The Veterans Administration; sexual exploitation of women in the military; Russian adventurism in Crimea and other parts of Ukraine; decaying weapons; commanders at US nuclear facilities found to be not exactly alert on the job; missile tests by North Korea; mindless across-the-board budget cuts imposed by Congress; coups in Africa; endless demands and requests from legislators; congressional Republicans having their festival of Benghazi hearings–-and the secretary of defense had a scheduled courtesy meeting with the defense minister of Peru. Now, the US and Peru have enjoyed a close working relationsip and the minister was not to be offended; moreover during his previous tenure on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Hagel had been visited by and took time for officials from all over the world and such courtesy continued to be expected. While I had come to admire Hagel as a thoughtful man, there’s a question of whether anyone can make the leap from a senator’s office—with an average staff size of 34 people, to the Pentagon, the world’s largest institution, which employs about 26,000 personnel on site, plus about a half million overseas, plus an active military of about 1.5 million men and women. In general, transitions from Capitol Hill to a cabinet office, in either party, haven’t been markedly successful. The Pentagon has been a sinkhole of failures. Irrespective of all that, there’ve been the dramatic changes from the job that Hagel came to do to and the one that it has become. He came to the office with the assignment of presiding over the ending of two wars, yet each has been expanded (Iraq) or extended (Afghanistan, after thirteen years). Onto which has been grafted the most elusive and formidable of tasks: defeating the hyper-terrorist group ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Even the administration figures who preside over it are aware that the effort in Syria might not succeed: the “moderate opposition” to the Assad regime has been weakened and infiltrated to the point where it barely exists as a force; the US has no real allies on the ground, other than some Kurd forces, who aren’t as strong there as they are in Iraq. It’s been a pipe dream to think that Turkey would want to get involved in any way that might help Bashir al-Assad. The White House is stuck in a policy that has very little chance of working, putting the president and his national security aides in real peril. And Chuck Hagel, who watched all this with dismay, became the odd man out. If its interests in an international situation aren’t great enough or worth the cost, the US can cut its losses and walk away. Or not even try. We’re not trying to fix failed African states—not Somalia (tried that, disastrously) or Congo. States, with their own long histories, have a way of being intractable to being fixed by outsiders—a lesson yet to be thoroughly absorbed by this administration. But even if the president wanted to disengage from Syria, says a senior adviser, “His hands are largely tied because of the brutal executions by ISIS.” It’s considered quite likely that ISIS will continue the beheadings; no one is sure whether the point is to provoke the US into a difficult war, but that’s the effect. A participant in the discussions of US policy in the Middle East says, “As long as ISIS is beheading Americans there’s no way the president can stand up and say that Syria isn’t our problem.” This is an assumption, not a fact. Hagel, who came from the now virtually defunct moderate wing of the Republican party, openly broke with his fellow party members and said he regretted his vote for the Iraq War, in 2002.