Tanks, But No Tanks? Congress Reverses Army Decision And Moves To Order Half A Billion Dollars Worth Of New Unwanted Tanks | Jonathan Turley
jonathanturley.org
Many of us have criticized our politicians for years for abandoning the national interest in favor of petty or corrupt interests. I have worked in this town for decades and I have never seen the situation quite this bad where lobbyists seem to have unprecedented and open control of Congress. No greater example can be found than the move this week to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on tanks that the Army does not want and experts overwhelming say the country does not need.
Both Republicans and Democrats (the same people complaining about the cuts in budget under the sequester) joined together to order $500 million of new Abrams M-1 tanks that no one wants. Why? Because of a powerful lobby and a company who sweetened the pot by spreading the contracts around to key districts. The Army has other uses for the $436 million that would make the country safer but members want their cut of the defense pork. Then of course there are also those countless educational, scientific, and public welfare programs slashed for lack of money.
The money has changed two budget hawks into pork profiteers. Rep. Jim Jordan and Sen. Rob Portman have insisted that the Army will order the tanks which will likely add to hundreds now rusting in storage areas. They are joined by liberal Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown. Ohio will benefit most from building the tanks. The Lima plant is operated by the land systems division of General Dynamics, which spread around $11 million last year on lobbyist members of Congress.
Jordan makes no apologies for insisting that money needed for national security should be shifted to an unwanted program: “Look, (the plant) is in the 4th Congressional District and my job is to represent the 4th Congressional District, so I understand that … But the fact remains, if it was not in the best interests of the national defense for the United States of America, then you would not see me supporting it like we do.” Really? Experts have lined up to say it is not in our best interests. The military has told you it is not in our best interest. But you are not convinced?
By the way, our tank fleet, on average, is less than 3 years old.
Source: NPR
U.S. Kicks Drug-War Habit, Makes Peace With Afghan Poppies | David Axe
wired.com“They’re a source of stability,” Maj. Charles Ford, the bookish operations officer at 3-41 Infantry, says of Afghanistan’s poppies. Sitting in a plywood-walled office at a Forward Operating Base in Kandahar city in early April, Ford cites all the people in Afghanistan who rely on poppies for some or all of their income: the Taliban, granted, but also millions of everyday farmers and their families as well as all levels of corrupt Afghan government from the subdistricts up to Kabul.
Fortunately for all these groups, there are some 400,000 acres of poppies in Afghanistan — “enough to go around,” according to Ford, who is responsible for devising his battalion’s combat strategy. Plentiful and lucrative — 15 pounds of poppy paste, the output of a typical acre family plot, sells for around $600 in a country where $.25 buys bread for a day — the illicit crop offers “access to prosperity” for much of Afghanistan. And that access is all that most Afghans really want.
Leave the poppies alone, and most Afghans will happily go about their business farming and selling the colorful crop — or so Ford’s line of thinking goes. …
Conversely, attempting to eradicate poppies — as has been the Army’s policy in the recent past — could mean destitution for countless Afghans. Sure, destroying the flowers might deprive the Taliban of one of its major revenue streams, but the violent popular backlash against eradication would probably represent a net victory for the insurgent group.
What I'm Listening To... August 31st 2012
I had a short week this week due to illness, so many of my “usual weekly podcasts” didn’t get their turn. Still, pressuring myself over it would defeat the purpose. I just kept on listening to what appealed, and today it was these two items:
- An episode of The Invisible Hand titled “Perverse Incentives”. I’ve already posted some material from this show (see it here). It was an interesting topic… incentives that produce the opposite of the desired effects. When you start thinking about it, these are way more common than you’d think! See the posted excerpt for more of my thoughts…
- This weeks episode of This American Life. The show was called Loopholes. This show is always entertaining. The bulk of this episode was about a somewhat nefarious man you’d have to characterize as a con artist… however, his con only seemed to hurt the insurance companies. Some real morally ambiguous ground here. I ended up rooting for the con-man. This episode doesn’t fit with what I repost to the blog, but I quite recommend it as an hour’s entertaining listening. The con-man story is second, and takes about 2/3 of the show.
That’s it, happy long weekend to those who get one. For general info on What I’m Listening To, click here.
NCLB waivers: South Dakota's ACT problem
I wrote last month that South Dakota’s proposed school accountability system seemed to reward schools that let their worst students drop out.
Under the plan, test scores would have accounted for 50 percent of a school’s grade, while HS completion rates were worth 10 percent.
The South Dakota Department of Education addressed that in its final waiver request. Now, they’re asking that test scores and high school completion be worth 25 points each.
But another perverse incentive occurred to me last night regarding ACT scores.
Under the state’s proposal, ACT scores would account for 10 percent of a high school’s grade. If 60 percent of your students score a 20 or better on the math section and 60 percent score an 18 or better on the English section, your school gets 6 out of the 10 points.
The problem is that, unlike the Dakota STEP, not every student takes the ACT - 81 percent of SD’s 2011 graduates did so - and that would not change under South Dakota’s proposal.
Today, high schools encourage their marginal college prospects to take the ACT. That might change under the new plan, which punishes schools for low ACT scores but does not punish them for students who never take the test.
By contrast, Iowa’s NCLB waiver request would require all HS juniors to take the ACT or SAT. Their legislature has been asked to appropriate $2.5 million to pay for those tests.
The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza | Lisa Hajjar
jadaliyya.com“The principle of the lesser evil is often presented as a dilemma between two or more bad choices in situations where available options are, or seem to be, limited….Both aspects of the principle are understood as taking place within a closed system in which those posing the dilemma, the options available for choice, the factors to be calculated and the very parameters of calculation are unchallenged. Each calculation is taken anew, as if the previous accumulation of events has not taken place, and the future implications are out of bounds.” - Eyal Weizman
[…] The siege of Gaza was part of a larger transformation of Israeli power and control, from direct physical occupation to “unilateral” withdrawal in 2005 and “humanitarian management” thereafter. In 2007, Israel decreed Gaza a “hostile entity,” and imposed tight restrictions on the inflow of all essential resources. The stated objective was to “put Gaza on a diet” while preventing a “humanitarian crisis,” which was understood as mass starvation. Gaza became a walled-in laboratory within which thresholds of suffering could be tested and pushed. The proportionality algebraists worked to determine the contents of a humanitarian minimum, a concept that does not exist in IHL. To challenge the siege in the HCJ, as Adalah and eleven other human rights organizations did, lawyers had to wrangle with the Israeli military over how little—calories, vitamins, electricity, building materials—was too little to avert crisis. In larger terms, Israel’s obligations as an occupying state were pushed aside by the cult of proportionality.
The growing field of humanitarian forensic architecture and the proportionality assessment of ruins evince a larger transformation by which “the expression of care for victims was replaced by attempts to uncover the mechanisms of violations.” Marc Garlasco has become the preeminent practitioner in this field and the best example of the kinds of collusions between humanitarians and militaries that define the humanitarian present. Garlasco served for seven years as a US military expert in targeting and “battle damage assessment.” He acquired the skills to predict the likely number of civilian casualties in specific bombings, and how to calibrate the amount of force and the directionality of strikes to achieve “pinpoint” effects. In 2003, he joined Human Rights Watch, where his expertise was used to “interrogate” ruins. This information was the substance of assessments and allegations of violations of proportionality. After Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in the winter of 2008-9, the United Nations sent an investigating commission headed by Richard Goldstone. Garlasco’s reading of the ruins for Human Rights Watch formed a significant empirical element of the Goldstone Report.
Weizman sums up the trajectory of the humanitarian present that culminates in forensic architecture: Developments in precision bombing ushered in aerial targeted assassinations, along with capacities to predict civilian casualties. Together, these allowed for proportionality analysis prior to bombings and ex post facto assessments by humanitarians who could study and interpret the details of attacks. The result is that “today’s forensic investigators of violence move alongside its perpetrators.”
Read →
So there’s this problem with a lot of young artistic media. The big thing that prevents art from getting made is that it’s labor-intensive, and this is especially true in the case of stuff like films, video games, or even comic books. It’s a Herculean effort to get these things made, and takes a team, and that team needs to eat.
So, you need money. Where does it come from?
Cost recovery - double dipping or a pigovian tax?
In these days of government budget deficits, cost recovery has become a popular catch-cry. While it has legitimate uses in terms of making the “polluter pay”, there is a darker side to cost recovery.
When it is used to fund the targeted regulation of a particular industry or group its use should (generally) be commended. However, when governments force regulators to achieve efficiency improvements year-on-year or when they decide that the budget is just too bloated and needs some razor sharp cutbacks, then cost recovery offers an enticing way of raising revenue and side-stepping the government’s budget cuts.
So what’s a regulator to do? And what should the regulators’ regulator (ie. the Treasury Department) do about this?
In the first instance, one needs to recognise that the government is creating a system of incentives that perversely induces regulatory agencies to turn to any and all methods of raising revenue.
Without sufficient revenue the ability of a regulator to perform its compliance monitoring and enforcement role diminishes, which in turn leads to all sorts of unhappy consequences for the agency.
While the good fight may be fought for a while, eventually budgetary pressures become so intense that the agency is forced to look at raising revenue in ways it didn’t originally envisage. Cost recovery is a particularly tempting revenue-raising method because it is cloaked in righteousness - of course it is right to ask the polluter to pay for policing!
Eventually though, cost recovery leads to a changing of the relationship between regulator and regulatee. And over time it often leads to perverse regulatory outcomes and regulatory capture.
For example, the terms “due process”, “transparency” or “good governance” inevitably lead to the government regulator being transparently accountable for the funds it sources from the industry it regulates. Indeed, industry often demands that the regulator opens its books and proves that it isn’t wasting time and money and that it is operating efficiently.
And if the method of cost recovery is not selected very carefully - taking into account the expectations and norms of the industry being regulated - one can create a scenario where there is a breakdown in discussions and communication between the industry and the regulator. For example, if hourly rates are used to charge companies for the regulator’s time and resources provided to them, these companies have a real incentive NOT to seek the attention of the regulator.
Other perverse incentives are created as well, but we’ll leave the details of this for another time.
Turning back to what Treasury Departments should do about inappropriate cost recovery…there is only one solution and that is improved rules and improved monitoring. A decent set of cost recovery guidelines that set limits on how cost recovery can/should be implemented are the first order of business.
Essentially, through cost recovery guidelines, the Treasury is looking to ensure that the “optimum” level of cost recovery is utilised. Enough so that the polluter indeed pays, but not so much that perverse incentives are created.
A key aspect of the guideline - which ensures the reader understands how they should apply cost recovery - lies in its opening paragraph. This should state, quite emphatically, that “Cost recovery is not the same thing as covering your capital and operating expenditure”. This point is the key to the successful and appropriate use of cost recovery by a regulator.
And, of course, appropriate risk-based compliance monitoring should be undertaken by Treasury…just to give regulators the message that they will be looked at and that their performance will dictate just how closely Treasury will run the rule over them.
