Category: Bureaucracy

This Will Only Hurt a Bit, Now Bend Over

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Well, it looks like public pressure is working, because that’s about the only reason that the seven top executives at Goldman Sachs would send a memo to the board of directors asking for no bonuses this year.

Hopefully, this will spread across the industry.

It’s also happening in Europe, where UBS will not pay bonuses to top staff in 2008.

In fact, it’s going further, to change the incentives for a quick buck:

Starting from 2009, top managers’ bonuses will be blocked for at least three years instead of being paid immediately and executives will receive variable pay if UBS results warrant.

Which means that the quest for a quick buck for a quick bonus has just become more difficult.

Lieberupdate

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One of Lieberman’s frequent allies in the Senate, Tom Carper (D-DE), is saying that there should be real consequences to Lieberman’s behavior.

You think? Not only did Lieberman campaign for McCain, he campaigned for Republican candidates for the Senate, and he has publicly said that the Democratic Party breaking 60 Senators would be a catastrophe.

One interesting development in all this is that the caucus vote to decide this will be a secret ballot.

Secret ballot….Hmmmm…This means either that the Senators in the Democratic caucus can use this to avoid enmity* from Lieberman, or they can use it to avoid consequences with their constituents.

I do not know what way this will cut.

*Except to the degree that he has been vindictive, retributive, and evil son of a bitch towards Democrats ever since he got skunked in the 2004 Presidential primaries, so they will be the victims of his bile regardless of how they choose.

A Clarification on the 50 State Strategy Post

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It appears the the contracts were all written to expire at the end of November, and this may simply be an administrative screw up of, well, Democratic Party proportions.

If contracts are written this way at the DNC, so as not to encumber a successor chair, this is completely whack. There should be a 4-8 week overlap, so that you do not have a vacuum while the new guy is finding his feet.

Original post here.

What This Means

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This graph, from The Big Picture, means some combination of the following items:

  1. The economy of the past 18 years has sucked so badly that people have increasingly given up looking up.

  2. The basic unemployment number has been screwed with by administrations on both sides of the aisle, and significantly understates the unemployment rate.

  3. That the economy has shifted significantly in the past 2 decades, and high levels of long term unemployment are the norm.

My money is mostly on number 2, though reverse Robin Hood is part of it.

Short term solution is more aid to the long term unemployed. The long term solution is fixing the BLS data, and creating a more just society.

Truth be told, I’m surprised that the divergence did not occur around 1983, when Reagan and His Evil Minions™ screwed with the unemployment numbers with things like counting active duty military as a part of the workforce, to keep the unemployment number below 10.

Check out Daniel Gross in Slate, who argues that the normal unemployment numbers are complete crap.

How to Know When a Burocracy is Out of Control

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When its budget is growing so fast that auditors cannot keep up..

Case in point, the Pentagon:

Government reports are not known for plain language, much less candor. But in a report issued in March, Pentagon Inspector General Claude M. Kicklighter summed up what had been growing increasingly evident for years: Defense spending has been growing so rapidly that auditors can no longer keep track.

“We currently are not able to provide sufficient audit coverage of [Department of Defense] acquisition programs given the dollars expended by the department,” Mr. Kicklighter wrote. “The rapid growth of the DOD budget since FY 2000 leaves the Department increasingly more vulnerable to the fraud, waste and abuse that undermines the department’s mission.”

And they want to browbeat the next president into increasing their budget even more.

And in the Never Ending Quest for Budget Dollars…..

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Yep, some of the whiz kids at the National Defense University are pitching the idea that they need funding to protect us all from terrorists who would use Wizard of Warcraft to rehearse attacks on all of us.

Yes, it’s real, see, they’ve got PowerPoints, and everything, complete with a conversation using code words, simulated, of course.

See how they simulate some seriously Kule d00dz haxor terrorists?

So they need to pay someone play Warcraft in order to look for this non-existent problem.

I want the job….I REALLY want the job.

In reality, if terrorists want to engage in virtual training, they will do it on a private server…Just like you see people do with Doom….

After all, who wants to be in the middle of planning to nuke the VP residence, when some n00b comes up and starts asking stupid questions?

If this is why my taxes are so fracking high, I’d rather pay for Sarah Palin’s bridge to nowhere.

And in the World of Ineffective Abusive Security Techniques …..

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Mario Labbé, a frequent flying record executive in Montreal, has discovered that his name was erroneously on the no-fly list.

After many attempts to have this corrected, Mr. Labbechanged his name to François Mario Labbé, which ended his monthly harassment.

I’m not sure what concerns me more, that one can be put on the no-fly list with no recourse, or that you can fix it by tweaking your name.

So, I guess Osama bin Laden could fly around the United States as LeRoy Ricks, Professional Elvis Impersonator.*

*3 Shows a day in Vegas……Think about it. It’s the last place that anyone would look for bin Laden.

US Air Force Looking at Another Way to Be Unhelpful in Afghanistan and Iraq

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Because the USAF just canceled the Common Battlefield Airmen Training(CBAT), a program to train airmen for conducting operations outside the airfield perimeter.

We have seen a greater involvement of USAF personnel in ground combat operations, particularly in areas such as EOD, and this will decision is profoundly unhelpful to the needs of the soldier on the ground, but it’s always been the policy of the USAF top be profoundly unhelpful to the needs of the soldier on the ground.

Your Government at Work

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It appears that the US U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service made a tiny error on the new Migratory Bird Conservation and Hunting Stamp (Duck Stamp), which is must be carried for all duck and waterfowl hunters. It costs $15.00, and proceeds go to acquiring and protecting wetlands for said waterfowl.

That would be fine, except for the fact that the most recent version of the self adhesive version of the stamp contains a serious misprint

The correct number, 1-800-STAMP24 (1-800-782-6724), is for people wishing to order additional duck stamps. Levin said two digits of the phone number are transposed on the card that holds the self-adhesive version of the stamp. That incorrect number, 1-800-872-6724, translates to 1-800-TRAMP24. Callers to ‘Intimate Connections’ [a phone sex service] are warned that they must be 18 years or older before proceeding.

This gives the phrase F@#$ a duck a whole new meaning.

Lockheed Martin Loses BAMS Protest

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This means that Northrop-Grumman can resume work on the Naval drone contract, based on the Global Hawk airframe.

If you go to the full article, you see that the number of protests is skyrocketing, almost doubling over the past 4 years, which is raising costs, and pushing back schedules, on the projects involved.

The problem is that a contract award protest is risk free at this point, so throwing the dice for another bite at the apple is a good move from a business perspective.

USAF Cyber Command Suspended

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It looks like the formation of the 8000 man Air Force Cyber Command has been put on hold.

This is probably a good thing. It’s an activity that is best done in a way that benefits all the services, and the USAF would no doubt spend much of the formative years of such an effort with a primary focus on making itself the sole provider of these services.

That’s what happened with drones, and Bob Gates slapped them down on that one too.

Navy Ignoring Riverine Warfare

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So the US Army is forced to up their own “Swift Boat” corps, and members of the 101st Airborn are now on boats.

I’m sure that they will do a good job, and it appears that these guys are gung ho about this, but the Navy should handling things like patrolling the Euphrates river.

As Galrahn notes, “Imagine a world where the Navy’s leadership was excited about doing the Navy’s job as those Army guys reportedly are.”

“Creeping Militarization” of Foreign Policy

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SecDef Robert Gates is said that increasing militarization of foreign policy is something that he has to push back against at a speech a week ago at U.S. Global Leadership Council.

I think that this is an explicit refutation of Rumsfeld, and his attempts to make the Pentagon the decision authority on all levels, particularly in Iraq, where the State Department and other civilian agencies were explicitly cut out of any decision making, or even consultation.

I believe that Gates is right, but I do not believe that he will get much traction on this in this administration, particularly given the given the trajectory of U.S. Africa command (Africom):

Africom is slated to begin operations in September. It marks the Pentagon’s first centralized operation for Africa, like the Defense Dept. now has, for example, Eucom for Europe or Centcom for the Middle East. The Pentagon, though, has envisioned using Africom as more than a military command. It is designed to help build U.S. soft power in Africa, through what it calls “active security” missions — like building schools and digging wells.

(Matt Mahurin) To many African political leaders, this sounds a lot like an imperialist enterprise. They say Africom’s “active security” will result in the construction of military bases across the continent in order to interfere with sovereign political systems — and access the region’s oil reserves. Currently, the Pentagon has only one African base, at Dijbouti in the perpetually unstable, resource-poor Horn of Africa.

Which appears to be moving in exactly the opposite direction.