Tag: ek Politics

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Costly Afghanistan Road Project Is Marred by Unsavory Alliances

By ALISSA J. RUBIN and JAMES RISEN, The New York Times

Published: May 1, 2011

The money paid to Mr. Arafat bought neither security nor the highway that American officials have long envisioned as a vital route to tie remote border areas to the Afghan government. Instead, it added to the staggering cost of the road, known as the Gardez-Khost Highway, one of the most expensive and troubled transportation projects in Afghanistan. The 64-mile highway, which has yet to be completed, has cost about $121 million so far, with the final price tag expected to reach $176 million – or about $2.8 million a mile – according to American officials. Security alone has cost $43.5 million so far, U.S.A.I.D. officials said.

…

Despite the expense, a stretch of the highway completed just six months ago is already falling apart and remains treacherous. The unfinished portion runs through Taliban territory, raising questions about how it can be completed. Cost overruns are already more than 100 percent, all for a road where it was never certain that local Afghans wanted it as badly as the American officials who planned it.

…

Within weeks of starting work, a construction camp was hit with rocket-propelled grenades, said Steve Yahn, the former chief engineer for the Gardez-Khost Highway project. Afterward, the provincial governor and the police chief told the Americans that if they had hired the right people for security, the attack would never have happened. “We got the message,” Mr. Yahn said.

That is when Mr. Arafat and 200 of his men were brought in to protect work crews. He was recommended by tribal elders from the Zadran tribe, said Paktia’s governor, Juma Khan Hamdard.

…

“On paper, the G.K. road was paying an enormous security detail of local-hire Afghans,” said one United States official. The highway contractors “would make a big deal out of their camps’ getting hit from time to time, and some of their guys would get shot in night attacks, but every instance I ever heard about coincided with payment negotiations with the Afghan security detail, of whom Arafat was the chief point of contact,” the official said.

It is impossible to determine how many of the attacks on the highway may have been staged by Mr. Arafat or his men. Despite all the money spent on security, however, there have been 364 attacks on the Gardez-Khost Highway, including 108 roadside bombs, resulting in the deaths of 19 people, almost all of them local Afghan workers.

…

“Since I have left the security of the road, it’s chaos there,” Mr. Arafat said. In fact, security officials have not seen any significant incidents since Mr. Arafat’s departure, they said.

A military officer who asked not to be identified said that contractors working in remote stretches of Afghanistan constantly faced such dilemmas. Do you keep paying off insurgents, or others, to keep the peace, even though they could use the money to buy weapons and sustain the insurgency?

“It’s a tradeoff,” said the officer. “It’s Afghanistan; there is never a good answer.”

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

There’s an apocryphal story about how someone asked Mao whether the invention of fire had been a good or bad thing for the Chinese people.

His answer?  “Too soon to tell.”

In like manner I respond to the news of Bin Laden’s death.

Is he dead yet?  I’ve read some unsupported reports that he was buried at sea which, if true, will only lead to Hitler in Argentina exile theories and Elvis sightings.  How involved was Pakistan in protecting him if he was finally found in a villa 500 yards from the 15th tee at the officers’ golf course on the main military base in Islamabad?  Is it just co-incidence that this happened on the 8th anniversary of ‘Mission Accomplished’ and trashed the last 10 minutes of Celebrity Apprentice?

Too soon to tell.

Details that answer those questions may emerge in time, but to me the far more important question is- will the U.S. accept yes for an answer?

For the last 10 years we’ve gutted our Constitution, imprisoned innocents indefinitely without due process, tortured, murdered, and started wars of aggression all ‘in pursuit’ of Boogey Man Bin Ladin.

Now that he’s ‘dead’ will we stop?

Too soon to tell.

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Canada kinda kicks off their election today eh?, and I’m hesitant to speak about it since I don’t know much aboot Canada except they have great beer and it’s called back bacon (and it’s not ham, eh?).

Scott Harper is reliably reported to be a right wing asshole of the Reagan variety (it is Canada, eh?), but his Conservative Party is likely to be the leading party at the polls (Palimentary districts are called ‘Ridings‘ and there are 308 of them).

Victory in each seat is a first past the post plurality and for years and years the Liberal Party (think of them like Third Way Democrats) have been the opposition party.  This year that will change.

The NDP is pretty sure to eclispe the Liberals by dozens of seats

There’s a slim possibility the New Democratic Party (Social Democrats) and the Bloc Quebecois (those cheese eating French secessionists) will be able to put together a majority.  Far more likely is that the so-called Liberals form a majority with the Conservatives (who’d a thunk?) BUT it’s also probably the end of the Liberal Party as a force in Canadian politics.

It’s not just the UK Liberal Democrats austerity thing that kills them, it’s because there are fiddly little advantages to being the #2 party like appearing second on ballots which will advantage the NDP the next time around whether the Liberals sell out or not.

Some links-

• The Canadian Election, by Ian Welsh, 2011 May 2
• Canadian 2011 federal election, April 30th update, By: trthomas, MyFDL, Saturday April 30, 2011 5:54 pm
• Canadian Election Monday – voting is IMPERATIVE! (Also: Tory majority IMPOSSIBLE! YAY!), LostClown, Corrente, Fri, 04/29/2011 – 8:26pm
• Canada’s Left Wing New Democratic Party Surges in Polls; Is Electoral Reform Near?, By: Jon Walker, Firedog Lake, Wednesday April 27, 2011 4:32 pm
• On the NDP Surge in Canada, by Ian Welsh, 2011 April 26

308 the Canadian 538, eh?

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Culture of Complicity Tied to Stricken Nuclear Plant

By NORIMITSU ONISHI and KEN BELSON, The New York Times

Published: April 26, 2011

Despite a new law shielding whistle-blowers, the regulator, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, divulged Mr. Sugaoka’s identity to Tokyo Electric, effectively blackballing him from the industry. Instead of immediately deploying its own investigators to Daiichi, the agency instructed the company to inspect its own reactors. Regulators allowed the company to keep operating its reactors for the next two years even though, an investigation ultimately revealed, its executives had actually hidden other, far more serious problems, including cracks in the shrouds that cover reactor cores.

Investigators may take months or years to decide to what extent safety problems or weak regulation contributed to the disaster at Daiichi, the worst of its kind since Chernobyl. But as troubles at the plant and fears over radiation continue to rattle the nation, the Japanese are increasingly raising the possibility that a culture of complicity made the plant especially vulnerable to the natural disaster that struck the country on March 11.

…

A 10-year extension for the oldest of Daiichi’s reactors suggests that the regulatory system was allowed to remain lax by politicians, bureaucrats and industry executives single-mindedly focused on expanding nuclear power. Regulators approved the extension beyond the reactor’s 40-year statutory limit just weeks before the tsunami despite warnings about its safety and subsequent admissions by Tokyo Electric, often called Tepco, that it had failed to carry out proper inspections of critical equipment.

The mild punishment meted out for past safety infractions has reinforced the belief that nuclear power’s main players are more interested in protecting their interests than increasing safety. In 2002, after Tepco’s cover-ups finally became public, its chairman and president resigned, only to be given advisory posts at the company. Other executives were demoted, but later took jobs at companies that do business with Tepco. Still others received tiny pay cuts for their role in the cover-up. And after a temporary shutdown and repairs at Daiichi, Tepco resumed operating the plant.

…

In Japan, the web of connections between the nuclear industry and government officials is now popularly referred to as the “nuclear power village.” The expression connotes the nontransparent, collusive interests that underlie the establishment’s push to increase nuclear power despite the discovery of active fault lines under plants, new projections about the size of tsunamis and a long history of cover-ups of safety problems.

Sound like anyplace we know?

I’m not even sure I’ll watch it because I’m sure I won’t understand most of it.  While fluent in C and Basic I don’t understand Fedese (if there is indeed any understanding of it and it’s not just insincere shamen babbling nonsense in tongues to confuse and impress the ignorant).

Clearly Samuelson economics works and in the words of Krugman (who only has a Nobel Prize in Economics)-

(R)ight now, we’re living in a world in which basic economics points to conclusions utterly at odds with what Very Serious People are supposed to believe, in which radical outsiders base their views on standard economics while orthodox types turn to heterodox, highly dubious speculations.

Econ 101, buttressed if you like by fancier New Keynesian models, says that contractionary fiscal policy is, well, contractionary. Yet much of the world of movers and shakers bought into the exotic notion that expectational effects – the confidence fairy – would make contractionary policy expansionary. And they clung to this belief even as the supposed historical evidence in favor of expansionary austerity was thoroughly debunked.

The blogosphere is full of intelligent questions that will never be asked but my favorite so far was propounded by Sen. Bernie Sanders (via dday).

Sanders’ report found-

(N)umerous instances during the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 when banks took near zero-interest funds from the Federal Reserve and then loaned money back to the federal government on sweetheart terms for the banks. The banks pocketed interest on government securities that paid rates up to 12 times greater than the Fed’s rock bottom interest charges. … “This report confirms that ultra-low interest loans provided by the Federal Reserve during the financial crisis turned out to be direct corporate welfare to big banks,” Sanders said. “Instead of using the Fed loans to reinvest in the economy, some of the largest financial institutions in this country appear to have lent this money back to the federal government at a higher rate of interest by purchasing U.S. government securities.”

Chairman Bernanke, in light of this report, do you consider it good policy for the US to hand over money to the nation’s largest banks directly through this kind of scheme? Would it make just as much sense, if you find it good for the economy, to make the same investment strategy available to small businesses, states or the US government itself to deal with their budget problems? After all, it would take a true idiot not to make fantastic amounts of money if they can borrow at zero and loan money back at high rates. Why should individuals be deprived of this money-conjuring strategy?

Furthermore, shouldn’t those profits, rather than boosting the balance sheets of the large banks, have been put back into the economy? Shouldn’t that have been a condition of the direct subsidy?

I dare someone to ask that.

Anyway, your questions and reactions below and hopefully by tomorrow we’ll have some idea of what Bernanke actually said.

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

First I’d like to draw your attention to this excellent 3 part series by Alexandra Odynova of The Moscow Times–

• The Day a Soviet Paradise Stood Still, 22 April 2011
• On the Trail of a Deadly Chernobyl Killer, 25 April 2011
• A Liquidator Searches for the Truth at Chernobyl 25 Years On, 26 April 2011

From a section of the last piece titled More Disasters Ahead?–

The key problem, he (Glushchenko) said, is plant lifetime – which is limited at 25 to 30 years but routinely extended for financial reasons by many countries.

Of the 444 reactors currently in operation worldwide, 178 have exceeded their lifetime. In Russia, 19 out of 32 reactors will be working past their expiration date by 2013, Glushchenko said.

There is no better illustration to his point than the Fukushima plant, which was commissioned in 1971 and also had its official lifetime extended.

Despite warnings from global nuclear safety bodies, Fukushima continued to operate – until a tsunami hit in March, disabling the emergency generators and putting the reactor on the brink of a meltdown. A handful of “nuclear samurais” are still trying to clean up the disaster, much like Glushchenko and his team did at Chernobyl 25 years ago.

“Liquidators” is what the 600,000 Russians who worked on containing Chernobyl called themselves.  From The Telegraph–

Chernobyl’s managers initially tried pumping water into the reactor core but when this proved unsuccessful they turned to dumping boron carbide and a total of 4,000 tons of lead, sand and clay on the facility.

The material was dropped from helicopters, and pilots on the initial flights received abnormal doses of radiation as they hovered in stationary mode over the reactor.

Later they dumped their loads while moving over the reactor, causing additional destruction around the area that may have assisted the spread of the radiation.

…

In October, a concrete shelter, called a sarcophagus, was completed to prevent further leakage of radiation from reactor number four and allow the other reactors at the Chernobyl plant to continue producing power for Ukraine.

How are things going at our new Chernobyl?

Leaks Probed as Japan Moves to Cool Reactors

By MITSURU OBE, The Wall Street Journal

APRIL 26, 2011, 5:35 A.M. ET

(A)n apparent leakage in the pressure vessel of the No. 1 reactor has left the fuel partially exposed above the level of the cooling water, with a steady supply of fresh water keeping it cool. By filling up the entire containment vessel, Tepco hopes to submerge both the fuel and the pressure vessel in water.

…

Concerns also have grown about a possible leak in the spent fuel pool of Reactor No. 4, said Hidehiko Nishiyama, spokesman of the government’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency. The pool holds the most fuel rods among the complex’s six reactor buildings, including both spent and active nuclear fuel.

…

A week-old operation to drain radioactive water from the complex continues to suffer fresh setbacks. While the operator has focused on dealing with water in Reactor No. 2, seen as the most radioactive in the complex, the flooding situation has slowly deteriorated in Reactors Nos. 3 and 4, where the levels of water in the basements of their respective turbine buildings have increased in the last 10 days.

Radiation contamination also has spread from the turbine building of No. 3 to the Reactor No. 4 turbine building, raising the possibility that water in No. 4 may need to be cleansed of radiation before being stored in one of the makeshift tanks Tepco is planning to build.

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

I won’t link Ezra directly because as far as I’m concerned he’s not just a poor writer and below average intellect, he’s also a thoroughgoing Beltway Buttkissing hypocritical “pretend” liberal.

But that won’t stop my pointing out like a broken clock, he’s right for once.

Ezra Klein: Obama is "a moderate Republican of the early 1990s"

by Gaius Publius, Americablog

4/26/2011 01:05:00 PM

(T)his is just the logical endpoint of two years spent arguing over what Barack Obama is – or isn’t. … We’ve obsessed over every answer except the right one: President Obama, if you look closely at his positions, is a moderate Republican of the early 1990s.

First, the “Obama is a Republican” meme is getting mainstreamed. Great news. Time to call it right, in the same way that Krugman is starting to call it right – out loud.

Second, Klein seems to be bending over to praise Republicans; either that, or he’s an admirer himself, and sincerely so. We need to acknowledge that about Klein. (In that sense, this is a “state of the Klein” piece as much as a “state of the Obama” article.)

(h/t lambert)

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

It doesn’t matter that the house always wins because hey, you might get lucky.

The Casino Next Door

How slot machines snuck into the mall, along with money laundering, bribery, shootouts, and billions in profits

By Felix Gillette, Business Week

April 21, 2011, 5:00PM EST

Jacks is about the size of a neighborhood deli. There is a bar next door and a convenience store around the corner. Inside, jumbo playing cards decorate the walls. The room is filled with about 30 desktop computers. Here and there, men and women sit in office chairs and tap at the computers. They are playing “sweepstakes” games that mimic the look and feel of traditional slot machines. Rows of symbols-cherries, lucky sevens, four-leaf clovers-tumble with every click of the mouse.

…

It’s a high-margin, cash-rich business. According to Mecham, each terminal at a thriving cafe typically grosses $1,000 to $5,000 per month. A medium-size business with, say, 100 machines would therefore gross around $250,000 a month, or in the ballpark of $3 million a year. All of which would suggest that in less than a decade, Internet sweepstakes cafes in the U.S. have grown into a collective $10 billion to $15 billion industry.

…

Customers are easy to find. Mecham says sweepstakes cafes cater primarily to two demographics: the old and the poor. “Lower-income customers are coming in because they’re bad at math,” he says. “It’s like the lottery. The lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math. They’re coming in to try and catch a big break.”

Are you sure this place is honest?

Honest? As honest as the day is long!

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

The Management Myth

By Matthew Stewart, The Atlantic

June, 2006

After I left the consulting business, in a reversal of the usual order of things, I decided to check out the management literature. Partly, I wanted to “process” my own experience and find out what I had missed in skipping business school. Partly, I had a lot of time on my hands. As I plowed through tomes on competitive strategy, business process re-engineering, and the like, not once did I catch myself thinking, Damn! If only I had known this sooner! Instead, I found myself thinking things I never thought I’d think, like, I’d rather be reading Heidegger! It was a disturbing experience. It thickened the mystery around the question that had nagged me from the start of my business career: Why does management education exist?

Management theory came to life in 1899 with a simple question: “How many tons of pig iron bars can a worker load onto a rail car in the course of a working day?” The man behind this question was Frederick Winslow Taylor, the author of The Principles of Scientific Management and, by most accounts, the founding father of the whole management business.

Taylor was forty-three years old and on contract with the Bethlehem Steel Company when the pig iron question hit him. Staring out over an industrial yard that covered several square miles of the Pennsylvania landscape, he watched as laborers loaded ninety-two-pound bars onto rail cars. There were 80,000 tons’ worth of iron bars, which were to be carted off as fast as possible to meet new demand sparked by the Spanish-American War. Taylor narrowed his eyes: there was waste there, he was certain. After hastily reviewing the books at company headquarters, he estimated that the men were currently loading iron at the rate of twelve and a half tons per man per day.

Taylor stormed down to the yard with his assistants (“college men,” he called them) and rounded up a group of top-notch lifters (“first-class men”), who in this case happened to be ten “large, powerful Hungarians.” He offered to double the workers’ wages in exchange for their participation in an experiment. The Hungarians, eager to impress their apparent benefactor, put on a spirited show. Huffing up and down the rail car ramps, they loaded sixteen and a half tons in something under fourteen minutes. Taylor did the math: over a ten-hour day, it worked out to seventy-five tons per day per man. Naturally, he had to allow time for bathroom breaks, lunch, and rest periods, so he adjusted the figure approximately 40 percent downward. Henceforth, each laborer in the yard was assigned to load forty-seven and a half pig tons per day, with bonus pay for reaching the target and penalties for failing.

When the Hungarians realized that they were being asked to quadruple their previous daily workload, they howled and refused to work. So Taylor found a “high-priced man,” a lean Pennsylvania Dutchman whose intelligence he compared to that of an ox. Lured by the promise of a 60 percent increase in wages, from $1.15 to a whopping $1.85 a day, Taylor’s high-priced man loaded forty-five and three-quarters tons over the course of a grueling day-close enough, in Taylor’s mind, to count as the first victory for the methods of modern management.

Of course, at the end of the song John Henry dies (h/t Avedon @ Eschaton).

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

DOJ Sits On Its Thumbs A Year After Macondo’s Mouth Of Hell Roared

By: bmaz Friday April 22, 2011 5:31 am

Jason Anderson, Aaron Dale Burkeen, Donald Clark, Stephen Curtis, Roy Wyatt Kemp, Karl Kleppinger, Gordon Jones, Blair Manuel, Dewey Revette, Shane Roshto, Adam Weise

These are names you should know. These are the first, and most blatant, victims of the Deepwater Horizon explosion at Macondo. Their actual names do not quickly come to the tongue, nor are they so easy to find. In fact, you know what I had to do to find them? Go through the same process this guy did. And, still, the first link I found them at was his post.

…

(N)othing, not diddly squat, has been done. And if the corporate powers that be in this country, and the political puppets who serve them, including Barack Obama, Eric Holder and the currently politicized Department of Justice, have anything to say about it (and they have everything to say about it) nothing significant is going to be done about BP, TransOcean, Halliburton and the Gulf tragedy, or anything related, in the future.

Like the craven and dishonest shell game that has been played by the current administration with regard to torture and destruction of evidence, the US government appears to simply be determined to shine this on with the bare minimum of faux accountability and disingenuous rhetoric to soothe the perturbed masses and maintain status quo with their partners in corporate/political domination of the American populous. That is clearly who they are, and quite apparently who we have become.

So, what could have been the process? Well, that is pretty easily delineated. In fact, I set it out definitively on May 28th of last year. Please refer to the link to the post for a complete list of the factors, nee elements of the crimes, that were already present a year ago. It is startling to realize what was already known then; especially when compounded with what is known now. The only difference today is that we can definitively add the United States government, and the administration of Barack Obama, to the queue of “Criminals in the Gulf“.

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Tiny Fish Spur Widening Worry

Japan Discovers High Radiation Levels in One Species, Stoking Environmental and Safety Concerns

By JURO OSAWA and YOREE KOH in Tokyo and DAISUKE WAKABAYASHI in Kesennuma, Japan, The Wall Street Journal

APRIL 6, 2011

Officials from Tepco and the agency have said repeatedly that the level of radiation that has seeped into the sea over the past two weeks-while measured at highly elevated levels right near the plant-posed no major immediate threat to humans or to the environment, because the water disperses quickly into the vast ocean. But the contaminated fish were caught about 50 miles south of the reactors, well beyond the 12.5-mile evacuation perimeter.

One sample of konago caught Friday contained twice the permissible level of radioactive iodine-131, which has a half-life of eight days and which can accumulate in the thyroid in humans, possibly raising the risk of thyroid cancer. The other konago sample, caught Monday, had just over the permissible limit for cesium, an element with an uncertain impact on human health. Three different types of cesium were discovered, one of which has a half-life of 30 years.

…

The reports of contaminated fish have followed reports of tainted produce including spinach and broccoli, as well as raw milk, in Fukushima prefecture and other areas close to the reactors. The reports of contaminated seafood are potentially more worrisome, because the contaminated seawater, and the fish, move in uncontrollable and untraceable paths.

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

I am not a prophet, but sometimes I have prophetic dreams, like the one where I was at a garden party.

Excuse me. Everyone, I have a brief announcement to make. Jesus was black, Ronald Reagan was the Devil, and the government is lying about 9/11. Thank you for your time and good night.

Mmm-hmm! You were havin’ that dream where you made the white people riot, weren’t you?

But I was telling the truth!

How many times have I told you, you better not even dream about tellin’ white folk the truth! You understand me? Shoot! Makin’ White people riot! You better learn how to lie like me! I’m gonna find me a white man and lie to him right now!

McClatchy Points Out Key FBI Failure in Amerithrax Investigation

By: Jim White Thursday April 21, 2011 5:58 am

In an article published Wednesday evening on their website, McClatchy points out yet another failing in the FBI’s Amerithrax investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people. The article focuses on the fact that the FBI was able to get a clear genetic fingerprint of a bacterial contaminant that was found in the attack material mailed to the New York Post and to Tom Brokaw (but not to either Senator Daschle or Senator Leahy). This contaminant, Bacillus subtilis, is used in some cases by weapons laboratories as an anthrax simulant, because its behavior in culture and in drying the spores is very similar to Bacillus anthracis but it is easier to handle because it is not pathogenic.  I covered the FBI’s failure to link this B. subtilis contaminant to Ivins in this diary in February of 2010.

…

Buried in the McClatchy article is an admission from a source close to the investigation that seems to shed some light on why the FBI continues to insist that Ivins was the sole attacker, even going so far as to concoct an after-the-fact “forensic psychiatric profile” in an effort to bolster their case:

“If they ever had any doubts, once he committed suicide, they had to unite,” this person said. “Otherwise, you’ve driven an innocent man to suicide. And that’s a terrible thing.”

Yes, driving a man to suicide is a terrible thing. But is it any less terrible to continue to insist on the guilt of a man who cannot conclusively be proven to have carried out these horrendous attacks ten years ago?