Category: Incompetence

IMF Internal Report Says That the Screwed the Pooch in Greece

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An internal report reveals that IMF staff gave engaged in favoritism toward the EU and the Euro in the handling of the ongoing Greek financial crisis:

The International Monetary Fund’s top staff misled their own board, made a series of calamitous misjudgments in Greece, became euphoric cheerleaders for the euro project, ignored warning signs of impending crisis, and collectively failed to grasp an elemental concept of currency theory.

This is the lacerating verdict of the IMF’s top watchdog on the fund’s tangled political role in the eurozone debt crisis, the most damaging episode in the history of the Bretton Woods institutions.

It describes a “culture of complacency”, prone to “superficial and mechanistic” analysis, and traces a shocking breakdown in the governance of the IMF, leaving it unclear who is ultimately in charge of this extremely powerful organisation.

The report by the IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) goes above the head of the managing director, Christine Lagarde. It answers solely to the board of executive directors, and those from Asia and Latin America are clearly incensed at the way European Union insiders used the fund to rescue their own rich currency union and banking system.

………

In an astonishing admission, the report said its own investigators were unable to obtain key records or penetrate the activities of secretive “ad-hoc task forces”. Mrs Lagarde herself is not accused of obstruction.

“Many documents were prepared outside the regular established channels; written documentation on some sensitive matters could not be located. The IEO in some instances has not been able to determine who made certain decisions or what information was available, nor has it been able to assess the relative roles of management and staff,” it said.

The report said the whole approach to the eurozone was characterised by “groupthink” and intellectual capture. They had no fall-back plans on how to tackle a systemic crisis in the eurozone – or how to deal with the politics of a multinational currency union – because they had ruled out any possibility that it could happen.

………

This pro-EMU bias continued to corrupt their thinking for years. “The IMF remained upbeat about the soundness of the European banking system and the quality of banking supervision in euro-area countries until after the start of the global financial crisis in mid-2007. This lapse was largely due to the IMF’s readiness to take the reassurances of national and euro area authorities at face value,” it said.

………

In Greece, the IMF violated its own cardinal rule by signing off on a bailout in 2010 even though it could offer no assurance that the package would bring the country’s debts under control or clear the way for recovery, and many suspected from the start that it was doomed.

The organisation got around this by slipping through a radical change in IMF rescue policy, allowing an exemption (since abolished) if there was a risk of systemic contagion. “The board was not consulted or informed,” it said. The directors discovered the bombshell “tucked into the text” of the Greek package, but by then it was a fait accompli.

………

The injustice is that the cost of the bailouts was switched to ordinary Greek citizens – the least able to support the burden – and it was never acknowledged that the true motive of EU-IMF Troika policy was to protect monetary union. Indeed, the Greeks were repeatedly blamed for failures that stemmed from the policy itself. This unfairness – the root of so much bitterness in Greece – is finally recognised in the report.

“If preventing international contagion was an essential concern, the cost of its prevention should have been borne – at least in part – by the international community as the prime beneficiary,” it said.

So, even with institutions in the tank for the Euro, the currency continues to fail.

I still say that the solution is to get the Germans out of the Euro, sooner, rather than later.

And the CIA’s History of Ineptitude Continues

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What a surprise. The weapons that the CIA is showering on its pet rebels in Syria have largely been resold on black markets:

Weapons shipped into Jordan by the Central Intelligence Agency and Saudi Arabia intended for Syrian rebels have been systematically stolen by Jordanian intelligence operatives and sold to arms merchants on the black market, according to American and Jordanian officials.

Some of the stolen weapons were used in a shooting in November that killed two Americans and three others at a police training facility in Amman, F.B.I. officials believe after months of investigating the attack, according to people familiar with the investigation.

The existence of the weapons theft, which ended only months ago after complaints by the American and Saudi governments, is being reported for the first time after a joint investigation by The New York Times and Al Jazeera. The theft, involving millions of dollars of weapons, highlights the messy, unplanned consequences of programs to arm and train rebels — the kind of program the C.I.A. and Pentagon have conducted for decades — even after the Obama administration had hoped to keep the training program in Jordan under tight control.

The Jordanian officers who were part of the scheme reaped a windfall from the weapons sales, using the money to buy expensive SUVs, iPhones and other luxury items, Jordanian officials said.

The theft and resale of the arms — including Kalashnikov assault rifles, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades — have led to a flood of new weapons available on the black arms market. Investigators do not know what became of most of them, but a disparate collection of groups, including criminal networks and rural Jordanian tribes, use the arms bazaars to build their arsenals. Weapons smugglers also buy weapons in the arms bazaars to ship outside the country.

………

The training program, which in 2013 began directly arming the rebels under the code name Timber Sycamore, is run by the C.I.A. and several Arab intelligence services and aimed at building up forces opposing President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. The United States and Saudi Arabia are the biggest contributors, with the Saudis contributing both weapons and large sums of money, and with C.I.A. paramilitary operatives taking the lead in training the rebels to use Kalashnikovs, mortars, antitank guided missiles and other weapons.

If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results, then McLean, Virginia is America’s version of Bedlam.

Too True

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Over at The Nation, James Carden exhibits a shocking grasp of the obvious, and notes that Neocons are freaking out over Donald Trump because he represents a reduction in their influence, status, and paychecks, not because they are deeply concerned about the future of the nation:

The past year has been a difficult one for the leaders of the neocon right. First, their campaign to torpedo President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran came to naught. Then their preferred candidate for the Republican nomination, freshman Florida Senator Marco Rubio, ran a lazy and uninspiring campaign and was easily routed by Donald Trump. And now, with Trump about to be crowned king of the Republican castle in Cleveland, the neocons are experiencing something of an existential meltdown over the prospect of a future Trump administration.

Last week, a Politico piece surveyed the broken hearts among the neocon elite, in which they were described as being marooned on “The Lonely Island of Never Trump.” Just how lonely is that island, however, is open to question. If Politico is to be believed, nearly the entire GOP foreign-policy establishment is ready to bolt and join Team Hillary.

………

Kagan, Cohen and Boot quite rightly denounce Trump’s promise to ban Muslim immigrants. Yet their newfound concern for the well-being of Muslims is striking, given that they were among the most vocal supporters of the Bush administration’s “Global War on Terror” and the Iraq debacle which, according to the Nobel Prize–winning organization International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, has “directly or indirectly, killed around 1 million people in Iraq, 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan, i.e. a total of around 1.3 million.”

………

Indeed. Are we really supposed to rue the possibility that the armchair warriors who’ve done the yeoman’s work of constructing an intellectual framework for endless foreign interventions and an overweening surveillance state might be excluded from the next administration?

It is hard to escape the conclusion that it isn’t Trump’s policies that are really bothering the neocons. Rather, it is the possibility that, come January 20, 2017, they could be frozen out of the corridors of power for the next four years. But what must really sting is this: Republican voters, given a choice between a neocon revival or Donald J. Trump went resoundingly for the latter. Deep down, I suspect, they know that they have no one to blame for Trump but themselves.

These guys have a hell of a racket:  They are wrong about everything, and the profiteers who benefit from this evil incompetence get them gigs at think tanks, and pay to publish their books.

As Upton Sinclair once observed, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Guys Like this Need to Sell Cosmetics for a Living

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Admiran (Ret) William McRaven, former head of JSOC, is ranting incoherently about the fact that civilian authority actually exerts authority over the military:

A long-percolating feud between Navy brass and the Senate has erupted into open conflict, with the retired admiral who oversaw the daring 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden publicly accusing lawmakers of harboring deep disrespect for military leaders.

In an unusually blunt column published Sunday in the Tampa Tribune, William H. McRaven, a retired four-star admiral, former Navy SEAL and former commander of the secretive Joint Special Operations Command, blasted members of Congress for a “disturbing trend in how politicians abuse and denigrate military leadership, particularly the officer corps, to advance their political agendas.”

Although McRaven did not single out lawmakers by name, he made clear that he was angry at the Senate for its treatment of Rear Adm. Brian L. Losey, the commander in charge of the Navy’s elite SEAL teams and other commando units. Losey, who formerly served under McRaven, was denied promotion last month and is being forced to retire after several senators from both parties pressured the Navy to hold him accountable for retaliating against multiple whistleblowers.

Calling Losey’s fate a “miscarriage of justice,” McRaven called him “without a doubt one of the finest officers with whom I have ever served. Over the past 15 years no officer I know in the SEAL Teams has given more to this country than Brian.”

Speaking on the Senate floor April 6, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) said Rear Adm. Brian L. Losey was “an honored naval officer” but was “a serial retaliator” who deserved to be denied a promotion. (United States Senate)

………

McRaven’s description of Losey as an innocent victim is at odds with the findings of the Defense Department’s inspector general, which concluded that he had repeatedly violated whistleblower-protection laws.

The agency investigated Losey five times after subordinates complained that he had wrongly fired, demoted or punished them during a vengeful but fruitless hunt for a person who had anonymously reported him for a minor travel-policy infraction. After conducting separate investigations that involved more than 100 witnesses and 300,000 pages of emails, the inspector general upheld complaints from three of the five staffers and recommended that the Navy take action against him.

The Navy, however, dismissed the findings that Losey had violated the law and was poised to promote him last fall to become a two-star admiral until details of the case were revealed publicly for the first time in October by The Washington Post. That prompted several senators to object to the Navy’s plans. They turned up the pressure with a variety of legislative tactics until Navy Secretary Ray Mabus relented in March and announced that Losey’s promotion had been nixed. 

The travesty here is not Congress holding a corrupt general accountable.  It is the US Navy refusing to hold a corrupt general accountable.

These attitudes pervade the culture of the senior officer corps(e) in the US military. 

It is an entitled attitude that breeds corruption and incompetence.

Yet Another of My Cousin’s* Brilliant Ideas

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As you may be aware, Senators Richard Burr (R-NC) and Dianne Feinstein* (D-CA) have proposed a bill requiring that all encryption include a back door for the authorities. It appears that the bill as written also outlaws things like MP3 and JPEG files:

The proposed bill put forward by Senators Richard Burr (R-NC) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) to force US companies to build backdoors into their encryption systems has quickly run into trouble.

Less than 24 hours after the draft Compliance with Court Orders Act of 2016 was released, more than 43,000 signatures have been added to a petition calling for the bill to be withdrawn. The petition, organized by CREDO Action, calls for Congress to block the proposed law as a matter of urgency.

Meanwhile, in the technical world, experts have been going through the legislation and pointing out glaring holes in the draft bill. Bruce Schneier, the guy who literally wrote the books on modern cryptography, noted that the bill would make most of what the NSA does illegal, unless No Such Agency is willing to backdoor its own encrypted communications.

“This is the most braindead piece of legislation I’ve ever seen,” Schneier – who has just been appointed a Fellow of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard – told The Reg. “The person who wrote this either has no idea how technology works or just doesn’t care.”

He pointed out that it isn’t just cryptographic code that would be affected by this poorly written legislation. Schneier, like pretty much everyone, uses lossy compression algorithms to reduce the size of images for sending via email but – as it won’t work in reverse and add back the data removed – this code could be banned by the law, too. Files that can’t be decrypted on demand to their original state, and files that can’t be decompressed back to their exact originals, all look the same to this draft law.

In the, “Has no idea how technology works or just doesn’t care,” issue, I will go for both.

This bill is a mindbogglingly stupid idea.

*Full disclosure, my great grandfather, Harry Goldman, and her grandfather, Sam Goldman were brothers, though we have never met, either in person or electronically.

Schadenfreude Alert

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Michigan Governor Rick Snyder and his Evil Minions™ are being sued under the RICO statutes:

Gov. Rick Snyder, high ranking former members of his staff and others are the target of a new federal racketeering lawsuit over the city’s water crisis. The lawsuit also targets the city of Flint.

A group of 15 citizens filed the civil lawsuit seeking financial compensation for property damage, loss of business and financial losses attributed to the city’s water crisis; as well as compensatory damages for future medical care and punitive damages.

………

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday, April 6, in Flint U.S. District Court, alleges Snyder, his former Chief of Staff Dennis Muchmore and others attempted to balance the Flint city budget through a pattern of racketeering activity.

“He wants to run the state like a business,” attorney Marc J. Bern said of Snyder. “Well. The citizens of Flint, as shareholders in the corporation of the state of Michigan, I don’t think they were treated in an appropriate way.”

The lawsuit alleges that officials misrepresented the suitability of the Flint River water as the city’s drinking water source for roughly two years and billed Flint residents at rates that were the highest in the nation for water that was unusable, resulting in the city’s budget deficit being reversed.

………

The complaint names Snyder, Muchmore, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality and multiple members of its staff, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services and members of its staff, the City of Flint and members of its public works department, multiple engineering companies that were hired to evaluate the city’s water system, former Mayor Dayne Walling and three of the city’s former emergency managers.

………

The suit claims officials committed mail fraud by continuing to mail water bills to Flint residents, which they allege fraudulently misrepresent that the city is providing safe, clean water to its residents.

They further allege officials continued to make statements claiming the water was safe despite being aware of growing concerns over the quality of the water.

The lawsuit also alleges the defendants committed wire fraud by allowing residents to pay their water bills online or with credit cards despite knowing the water was toxic.

A RICO lawsuit requires attorneys to prove that the wrongdoing was part of an ongoing enterprise. If successful, the law allows triple the amount of damages to be paid.

I’m not generally fan of the expansive use of the Rico statutes, but this does appear to be a reasonable use of the law.

H/t Charlie Pierce

This Really Does Sound Like Another Rat-F%$#ing

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It appears that the surge in Democratic Party registrations in New York State that the Sanders campaign is being bungled by the authorities:

Since shortly before the late deadline to register to vote in the April 19th presidential primary in New York, state Board of Elections spokesman Tom Connolly said his office has been fielding nearly 100 calls a day from voters who are “pissed off” about their registration status, for one reason or another. On social media, there are dozens of reports from voters who say they checked their registration online recently and found that their party affiliation had been switched, which is disqualifying because New York’s primaries are closed, or that that their registration couldn’t be found altogether.

We could not verify the details of the majority of those accounts, but the discoveries alarmed many would-be voters, most of them seemingly Bernie Sanders supporters. Sanders fans are already on tenterhooks over long lines at the polls in Arizona, which the Justice Department is now investigating, and polling place electioneering by former president Bill Clinton in Illinois and Massachusetts, which local election officials declared proper, among other factors that they argue have skewed the primary process for Hillary Clinton.

Apparently my voter registration (less than a year old) has been purged. Way to go #NewYork

— Dan Haefeli (@danhaefeli) April 4, 2016


At the New York Board of Elections, Connolly said that his office looks into all complaints, and though the volume has been higher this year than his office has ever seen, “I’ve yet to come upon any example of any kind of mal-intent or inappropriate change of a voter’s record.” (Emphasis mine)

Rather, he said, the increased call volume can be explained by heightened interest in this year’s primary and New York’s newfound relevance to the nomination. As for the complaints themselves, the circumstances vary, but he said there’s a rational explanation for each instance of seeming irregularity. For one, he explained that the complaints are largely coming from Democrats—”a lot” of them Sanders supporters. (There have also, he noted, been some Donald Trump supporters who are angry that they missed the deadline to change their party to Republican.) Because many voters only turn out for presidential elections, and Democrats didn’t have a primary in 2012, it has been eight years since many people thought about their registration, he said.

………

In another instance of New York state confusion, Bernie Sanders supporter Jonathan Carrillo, a Long Island resident who makes a living DJing under the name Jase, registered as a Democrat the week of the deadline and, last Friday, checked his registration online and found himself listed as a Republican. This would make him ineligible to vote in the upcoming Democratic primary. Having followed the news and online chatter about irregularities in other states’ primaries, it occurred to Carrillo to record part of his call to the Nassau County Board of Elections.

In subsequent conversations, election workers pulled his file and found that a 2013 DMV form shows he chose Republican when getting a license, something he seriously doubts.

“I think it’s very unlikely that back in 2013 I randomly decided to join the Republican Party against my interest and while opposing their views,” he said. “I would never do this intentionally.”

Am I the only one who thinks that this is not entirely innocent incompetence?

Well, That Didn’t Take Long

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As some of you know, even though Obama shut down the Keystone XL project, significant portions of the pipeline, the plain old Keystone (no XL) have already been completed in the upper Midwest.

And that part just had an oil spill:

The Keystone pipeline will likely remain shut down for the rest of the week while officials investigate an apparent oil spill in southeastern South Dakota.

 Oil covered a 300-square-foot area in a farm field ditch 4 miles from a Freeman-area pump station, about 40 miles southwest of Sioux Falls. It was discovered Saturday. TransCanada hasn’t released the amount of oil.

 About 100 workers are investigating where the oil came from and removing the contaminated soil. No pipeline damage had been found as of midmorning Tuesday, company spokesman Mark Cooper said.

 TransCanada also said it had found no significant environmental harm. State officials were monitoring the cleanup, and so far TransCanada has “taken the necessary steps,” said Brian Walsh, an environmental scientist with the South Dakota Department of Natural Resources.

 The pipeline runs from Alberta, Canada, to refineries in Illinois and Cushing, Oklahoma, passing through the eastern Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri. It’s part of a pipeline system that also would have included the Keystone XL pipeline had President Barack Obama not rejected that project last November.

The Keystone pipeline can handle 550,000 barrels, or about 23 million gallons, daily. Cooper didn’t immediately know the status of the oil that normally would be flowing through the pipeline.

I am so not surprised.

Oil pipelines are difficult, and TransCanada sucks it managing and maintaining them.

What Bill Moyers Said

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There are two Democrats whose resignation from office right now would do their party and country a service.

Their disappearance might also help Hillary Clinton convince skeptical Democrats that her nomination, if it happens, is about the future, and not about resurrecting and ratifying the worst aspects of the first Clinton reign when she and her husband rarely met a donor to whom they wouldn’t try to auction a sleepover in the Lincoln Bedroom.

In fact, while we’re at it, and if Secretary Clinton really wants us to believe she’s no creature of the corporate and Wall Street money machine — despite more than $44 million in contributions from the financial industry since 2000 and her $675,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, not to mention several million more paid by other business interests for an hour or two of her time — she should pick up the gauntlet herself and publicly call for the departure of these two, although they are among her nearest and dearest. And we don’t mean Bill and Chelsea.

No, she should come right out and ask for the resignations of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Democratic National Committee Chair — and Florida congresswoman — Debbie Wasserman Schultz. In one masterstroke, she could separate herself from two of the most prominent of all corporate Democratic elitists.

Each is a Clinton disciple and devotee, each has profited mightily from the association and each represents all that is wrong with a Democratic Party that in the pursuit of money from rich donors and powerful corporations has abandoned those it once so proudly represented — working men and women.

………

This is why Emanuel and Wasserman Schultz must go. To millions, they are enablers of the one percent, perpetuators of the Washington mentality that the rest of the country has grown to hate. What a message such servants of plutocracy send: Democrats — a bridge to the past.

Hillary is not going to do this, but it would be a savvy political move.

Also, putting Emanuel and Wasserman-Schultz in the political cross-hairs would be good for the party and their constituents.

I Can Haz Prosecushuns?

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We have a new development in the Flint water crisis, the Michigan Governor has retained private counsel, including a prominent criminal defense attorney:

Gov. Rick Snyder has hired two outside attorneys in connection with the Flint drinking water crisis, including a criminal defense attorney retained to serve as “investigatory counsel,” a Snyder spokesman confirmed Thursday.

Eugene Driker, a civil defense attorney, and Brian Lennon, a criminal defense attorney, were each awarded a contract worth $249,000 through Dec. 31, after which those contracts can be extended, Snyder spokesman Ari Adler told the Free Press.

The contracts, which are to be paid with state funds, are just below the $250,000 threshold for contracts requiring approval from the State Administrative Board, which meets in public to approve state contracts and grants. Adler said that was by design because the governor wanted to hire the attorneys quickly in early February. The administration will be going to the State Administrative Board on March 8, seeking approval for additional spending on the contract with Lennon, he said.

They are claiming that this is about processing documents, but this sounds an awful lot like hizzoner is lining up a defense team in the event of a criminal prosecution.

I Swear, the Iowa Democratic Party Could Not Organize a Piss-Up in a Brewery

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And that’s the best case scenario.

The worst case scenario is that we saw fraud in the tabulation of the caucus results.

Given that it’s the Iowa Democratic party, my guess is that the increasing number of irregulatities:

Iowa Democratic Party officials are reviewing results from the Iowa caucuses and making updates where discrepancies have been found.

Party Chairwoman Andy McGuire the day after Monday’s caucuses said no review would be conducted, and that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s narrow victory over Bernie Sanders was final.

But as errors are being discovered, the final tally is being changed, party officials confirmed to the Des Moines Register on Friday.

“Both the Sanders and Clinton campaigns have flagged a very small number of concerns for us, and we are looking at them all on a case-by-case basis,” Iowa Democratic Party spokesman Sam Lau told the Register.

………

The Register, too, has received numerous reports that the results announced at precincts Monday night don’t match what the Iowa Democratic Party has posted on its official results website.

Just one example: Grinnell precinct No. 1.

At least three caucusgoers there (including Dan McCue and Zack Stewart) and the Grinnell College newspaper reported that Sanders won 19 county delegates and Clinton 7, but party officials said the final tally was Sanders 18 and Clinton 8.

“19-7 is right,” Pablo Silva, a Grinnell College professor who was precinct secretary, told the Register Friday. “It is complicated, but the issue comes down to a problem with the math that can be complicated in large precincts. Short version: On Monday night, the IDP felt we had not done it right, and they attempted to correct what they saw as errors. We’ve been in touch since then. They are acknowledging our results, but, as I write, will wait on the arrival of our paperwork.”

Iowa Democratic Party, you had one job………

Our Noble Allies in the Middle East

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The United Arab Emirates is sending Colombian mercenaries to fight in Yemen.

One wonders if they were hired from the right wing death squads, or the naroterrorist FARC:

The United Arab Emirates has secretly dispatched hundreds of Colombian mercenaries to Yemen to fight in that country’s raging conflict, adding a volatile new element in a complex proxy war that has drawn in the United States and Iran.

It is the first combat deployment for a foreign army that the Emirates has quietly built in the desert over the past five years, according to several people currently or formerly involved with the project. The program was once managed by a private company connected to Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater Worldwide, but the people involved in the effort said that his role ended several years ago and that it has since been run by the Emirati military.

The arrival in Yemen of 450 Latin American troops — among them are also Panamanian, Salvadoran and Chilean soldiers — adds to the chaotic stew of government armies, armed tribes, terrorist networks and Yemeni militias currently at war in the country. Earlier this year, a coalition of countries led by Saudi Arabia, including the United States, began a military campaign in Yemen against Houthi rebels who have pushed the Yemeni government out of the capital, Sana.

………

It is also a glimpse into the future of war. Wealthy Arab nations, particularly Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the Emirates, have in recent years embraced a more aggressive military strategy throughout the Middle East, trying to rein in the chaos unleashed by the Arab revolutions that began in late 2010. But these countries wade into the new conflicts — whether in Yemen, Syria or Libya — with militaries that are unused to sustained warfare and populations with generally little interest in military service.

“Mercenaries are an attractive option for rich countries who wish to wage war yet whose citizens may not want to fight,” said Sean McFate, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and author of “The Modern Mercenary.”

“The private military industry is global now,” said Mr. McFate, adding that the United States essentially “legitimized” the industry with its heavy reliance on contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan over more than a decade of war. “Latin American mercenaries are a sign of what’s to come,” he said.

Hiring mercenaries is not an indication that our “Allies” in the region are the good guys.

Neither is the indiscriminate bombing of civilians by the Saudis.

Our foreign policy is both morally bankrupt and incompetent.

What Danielle Brian and Pete Sepp Said

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Specifically, they said that, “To Safeguard the Military, Congress Must Protect Whistleblowers:

This year the Department of Defense requested $585.3 billion from taxpayers, but it is no secret that Pentagon spending is rife with waste, fraud and abuse.

As Congress considers raising the debt ceiling yet again this fall, it’s essential for taxpayers to know that this money will be spent responsibly and that leaders are setting budgetary priorities instead of rubber-stamping wish lists.

Necessary oversight depends upon the ability of those on the front lines to blow the whistle on waste and mismanagement of funds without fear of reprisal. However these courageous military whistleblowers are endangered, not by some far-flung enemy, but by their own superiors.

The Department of Defense is the only federal agency unable to pass a single audit since the government began the practice over 20 years ago. Congress’s watchdog, the Government Accountability Office, has identified more than 1,000 recommendations for reforms to save taxpayer dollars that the Department of Defense has yet to implement.

………

The former Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction told the Center for Public Integrity that he largely credits tips from whistleblowers for his ability to uncover crimes on overseas government contracts in Iraq. However, most of those whistleblowers were not willing to be identified in court documents due to their fear of retaliation.

Military whistleblowers are vital to managing our enormous investment in the Pentagon. Even more important, they are key to protecting our national security and the lives of our service members.

However, these brave Americans face a unique set of challenges when they come forward to report fraud, waste, abuse and illegality within the armed services. Congress addressed many of the most significant shortfalls for civilian whistleblowers when it passed the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act in 2012. But the safeguards for members of the military to exercise their constitutional rights remain hopelessly antiquated.

One expert told a Senate committee last month that such provisions remain “the lowest common denominator in the U.S. code for accountability.”

The Pentagon is arguably the worst run bureaucracy in in the Federal government, and it desperately needs to be fixed.

I am not sure here whether “Fixed” means mended, or if it means spayed or neutered, but either would be an improvement.

And from the Only Country with a More Dysfunctional Weapons Development Program than Ours………

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It appears that India’s Tejas light fighter ,already more than 30 years in development, will face further delays:

Delayed by more than 15 years, India’s homegrown Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) Mark-1 is ready for critical test flights necessary for its final operational clearance (FOC) at the end of the year, but analysts and Indian Air Force (IAF) officials say that clearance will slip again, to next year.

Though he did not provide a date for the test flights, a Defence Ministry official said they will include firings of a variety of weapons, including air-to-air missiles and Israeli-made Derby beyond-visual-range missiles. The Russian-made close-combat missile R-73 has already been integrated on the aircraft.

………

“FOC would most probably slip to sometime in 2016,” Kak said. “But given the track record, these kind of slippages have over the years been accepted as par for the course.”

The Air Force ordered 20 of the Mark-1s after the aircraft’s initial operational clearance in December 2013, and is set to order an additional 20 following FOC. State-owned Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd. (HAL) will produce all 40 aircraft under limited series production and says it has the capacity to produce eight LCA Mark-1s a year once the full order is placed.

But so far the Air Force has received only one aircraft to use for weapon integration and testing, not the four it wanted to have at this stage.

“Weapons integration has been on for quite some time and the LCA has fired the R73 missile and laser-guided bombs during [the Air Force’s] firepower demonstration in February 2014,” said Daljit Singh, retired Air Force air marshal. “However, more weapons are required to be integrated. In addition to weapons integration, test flights are also required to integrate and test other avionics and systems.

This program has been in development for 32 years, and they still cannot deliver the number of aircraft needed for qualification trials, and those that they do develop will have a lower performance engine than the original domestic powerplant.

This is a complete cluster f%$#.

The F-35 is Dysfunctional in Long Range Air to Air Combat as Well

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In the recent discussions of the failings of the F-35 in close in combat, it ignored the other rather obvious bit which is that it is sub par in a longer range combat involving missiles as well:

The Pentagon’s new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is dead meat in a close battle against even a dated two-seat F-16D fighter jet, according to a scathing test pilot report War Is Boring obtained.

Don’t sweat it, JSF-maker Lockheed Martin responded. “The F-35’s technology is designed to engage, shoot and kill its enemy from long distances,” Lockheed’s F-35 team wrote in a press release on July 1

As a rebuttal to the test pilot report, Lockheed’s claim is a cynically useful one — it sidesteps the criticism without really confirming or denying it. But that doesn’t mean the company’s test-report rebuttal is actually true.

Can the F-35 really engage, shoot and kill its enemy from long distances? There are reasons to believe it can’t. The stealth fighter lacks the sensors, weapons and speed that allow a warplane to reliably detect and shoot down other planes in combat. Especially when those planes are shooting back.

In short—the F-35 isn’t much of a dogfighter. And it’s probably not very good at long-range aerial combat, either.

………

To this end, the F-35 does have a high-tech radar, high-fidelity cameras and other advanced gear that can detect airplanes. But foremost, Lockheed optimized these sensors for spotting targets on the ground — and at relatively short distances.

The F-35 can see great. It just can’t see all that great into the air. At least not compared to modern Chinese- and Russian-made jets — the planes the F-35 is most likely to face in battle in some future war.

First, we have to look at how the F-35’s sensors compare to its rivals. The latest Russian radars, such as the one on the new Sukhoi Su-35, at least match the JSF’s APG-81, according to data compiled by Carlo Kopp at Air Power Australia.

While the specific details remain secret, Kopp estimates the APG-81 can detect an aircraft with a radar cross-section of three square meters—a MiG-29, for example—just over 100 miles away. Russian radar-maker Tikhomirov claims the Su-35’s Irbis-E can spot a similar-size target at greater than twice that distance.

………

JSF pilots shouldn’t expect to automatically get the jump on their enemies. And once everyone has detected everyone else and the long-distance shooting starts, the F-35 is in even more trouble.

The American AIM-120, the Russian R-77 and the Chinese PL-12 are all comparable long-range missiles, each with a nominal range of around 60 miles. But the F-35 is slower than rival Russian or Chinese fighters, making it a less effective missile-shooter.

A fast-flying jet can impart extra energy to any weapon it fires. That means a “supercruising” fighter such as the Su-35 — that is, a fast-flying plane that exceeds the speed of sound without a fuel-guzzling afterburner — can potentially fling its missiles farther than a missile’s advertised range.

Unable to supercruise like its rivals, the JSF can’t launch its own weapons with nearly as much extra power.

More importantly, depending on the variant, the R-77 boasts radar guidance or can home in on heat signatures — a fighter pilot can also use his plane’s radar to point the weapon near its target, at which a passive sensor on the missile takes over.

………

Not that the F-35 has much room for different kinds of missiles. In stealth mode, with its weapons tucked into an internal bay, the F-35 can only carry four AIM-120s. And that’s only if it’s not also carrying its standard load of GPS-guided bombs.

The Chinese J-20 apparently has room for four missiles inside its main weapons bay, along with two more missiles in smaller bays on the sides of the fuselage. The more conventional Su-35 can carry a whopping 10 missiles under its wings and fuselage.

………

“You up your chances of success with a multiple-missile shot,” says Thomas Christie, an analyst who worked with legendary Air Force Col. John Boyd on his “energy-maneuverability” dogfighting concept. In the past, fighter pilots trained to fire two missiles at a time, Christie explains.

Using this method, a JSF flier might get just one shot or two before he’s out of missiles. Meanwhile, Russian or Chinese jets could easily manage twice as many individual engagements — or boost their chances of a kill by firing three or more missiles at a time

As I’ve noted before, this may not as big a deal as one would think, as achieving air superiority comes down to training and tactics, so even with an inferior platform, particularly when backed up by superior numbers and logistics.

With limited sensors, compromised stealth, not enough energy and too few weapons, the F-35 is probably already outclassed in a long-range fight. Never mind merely staying out of short-range dogfights. America’s new stealth fighter should probably avoid aerial duels at any distance.

The F-35 is going to be a major pig, and advances in sensor fusion and computing are are currently in the process of eviscerating what might be its sole advantage, stealth.

From a tactical perspective, as I’ve noted before, this may not as big a deal as one would think, as achieving air superiority comes down to training and tactics, so even with an inferior platform, particularly when backed up by superior numbers and logistics.

The consequences of flushing trillions of dollars down the toilet, particularly when bridges, roads and water mains are falling apart are a much bigger deal though.

White elephants do not come cheap.

Yet Another Reason to Not Give to the Red Cross

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In addition to killing off most of the hemophiliacs in the United States because of their unwillingness to test blood for HIV and discard HIV tainted clotting factor, of course.

It turns out that the America Red Cross raised $½ Billion for post earthquake aid to Haiti, and built just 6 homes:

The neighborhood of Campeche sprawls up a steep hillside in Haiti’s capital city, Port-au-Prince. Goats rustle in trash that goes forever uncollected. Children kick a deflated volleyball in a dusty lot below a wall with a hand-painted logo of the American Red Cross.

In late 2011, the Red Cross launched a multimillion-dollar project to transform the desperately poor area, which was hit hard by the earthquake that struck Haiti the year before. The main focus of the project — called LAMIKA, an acronym in Creole for “A Better Life in My Neighborhood” — was building hundreds of permanent homes.

Today, not one home has been built in Campeche. Many residents live in shacks made of rusty sheet metal, without access to drinkable water, electricity or basic sanitation. When it rains, their homes flood and residents bail out mud and water.

The Red Cross received an outpouring of donations after the quake, nearly half a billion dollars.

The group has publicly celebrated its work. But in fact, the Red Cross has repeatedly failed on the ground in Haiti. Confidential memos, emails from worried top officers, and accounts of a dozen frustrated and disappointed insiders show the charity has broken promises, squandered donations, and made dubious claims of success.

The Red Cross says it has provided homes to more than 130,000 people. But the actual number of permanent homes the group has built in all of Haiti: six.

After the earthquake, Red Cross CEO Gail McGovern unveiled ambitious plans to “develop brand-new communities.” None has ever been built.

Aid organizations from around the world have struggled after the earthquake in Haiti, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country. But ProPublica and NPR’s investigation shows that many of the Red Cross’s failings in Haiti are of its own making. They are also part of a larger pattern in which the organization has botched delivery of aid after disasters such as Superstorm Sandy. [They f%$#ed up Katrina and 911 too, and my father’s recollections of their help during the Anchorage earthquake in 1964 is similar.  He remembers the Salvation Army outperforming them by all metrics] Despite its difficulties, the Red Cross remains the charity of choice for ordinary Americans and corporations alike after natural disasters.

One issue that has hindered the Red Cross’ work in Haiti is an overreliance on foreigners who could not speak French or Creole, current and former employees say.

In a blistering 2011 memo, the then-director of the Haiti program, Judith St. Fort, wrote that the group was failing in Haiti and that senior managers had made “very disturbing” remarks disparaging Haitian employees. St. Fort, who is Haitian American, wrote that the comments included, “he is the only hard working one among them” and “the ones that we have hired are not strong so we probably should not pay close attention to Haitian CVs.”

The Red Cross won’t disclose details of how it has spent the hundreds of millions of dollars donated for Haiti. But our reporting shows that less money reached those in need than the Red Cross has said.

Lacking the expertise to mount its own projects, the Red Cross ended up giving much of the money to other groups to do the work. Those groups took out a piece of every dollar to cover overhead and management. Even on the projects done by others, the Red Cross had its own significant expenses – in one case, adding up to a third of the project’s budget.

The American Red Cross has a long history of over promising, excessive fund raising, and under delivering.

This is not a well run organization in my lifetime.

If you want to give blood, find a local non profit blood bank.

If you want to donate money to the victims of a disaster, find a bit less ponderous and self-aggrandizing organization.

*http://articles.latimes.com/1994-05-29/news/mn-63591_1_blood-banks

This is Disgraceful

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It appears that the Obama administration is ignoring federal law intended to prevent jailing juveniles in adult prisons:

The Obama administration is failing to sanction states that house excessive numbers of teenagers and children in adult jails and prisons, placing them at greater risk for violent attacks, sexual assaults and suicide, two career Justice Department employees plan to testify Tuesday in front of a Senate panel.

Under a 1974 law known as the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act, the Justice Department is required to sharply curtail some federal aid to state governments when those states incarcerate too many juveniles and children in adult jails and prisons. The law also demands that the federal government withhold such funds from states that lock up large numbers of so-called status offenders — children and teens who have engaged in minor offenses such as truancy, curfew violations, drinking alcohol or running away from home.

The law was later amended to require the Justice Department to also cut grant money to states that fail to make fixes after the determination that their criminal justice systems hold “disproportionate” numbers of minority youths.

The two career Justice Department officials are expected to testify that the Obama administration is in violation of federal law by continuing to provide these funds to eight jurisdictions that do not meet one or more of those standards: Virginia, Illinois, Tennessee, Rhode Island, Idaho and Alabama, plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.

Really?

The evidence is fairly clear here. Children incarcerated with adults are more likely to be raped, and they are more likely to become hardened criminals.

This is contemptible.

Hackers: 1 — Maryland MTA:0

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People have been asking for the Maryland Transit Administration (MTA) to make data available to allow accurate real-time actual schedules for some time, but MTA has said that it is too technically difficult and too expensive to make a mobile app, or to make the data available to 3rd parties.

It took a self described “civic hacker” less than a week to do this on their spare time:

Despite promises of transparency and efforts to create “open data” in the hopes of latching onto the “app economy”—words frequently used in government agency press releases—much of the data that would be of the greatest value to citizens often ends up out of reach. For example, if you want to plan a trip on public transportation in many cities (or even just find out when your bus will show up), you often have to turn to Google Maps or another transit-tracking application on your mobile device. In Baltimore, however, that data has been locked behind the firewalls of the Maryland Transit Administration (MTA).

 But now a civic hacker has made that data available to app developers by doing what the MTA claimed would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to complete—simply tapping into websites that the agency has already built. And the hacker did it without spending a dime of taxpayer money. The work took just a few man-days’ worth of spare time and a commercial app development team’s afternoon.

 ………
The reason the MTA gave for not doing a mobile app—or opening the data to third parties—was cost. “The data received from the bus [Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) and Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL)] system to operate My Tracker is not sent in a format that can be easily used to create an application—called General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS). We know in many cases, the information needed to create an application is made public so private firms can attempt to develop an application at their own expense. However, it would cost approximately $600,000 more to be able to format the data from our 25-yr-old CAD/AVL system into GTFS for use by outside developers,” the MTA said.

However, within days of the MTA’s Web app going live, geo-data developer and open government data advocate Chris Whong had already done what the MTA refused to do. Whong took a look at the bus tracker Web app and found that its AJAX interface was polling the site every 10 seconds to get new location data. As it turns out, the app was retrieving JSON-formatted data from the MTA’s servers, encoded in a format called the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS). The MTA had already published the GTFS metadata describing bus routes. Whong wrote in a blog post that it took a few hours of trial and error to confirm the data feed format, but in the end he and a small team of “civic hackers” were able to construct a framework that would allow applications to pull, for free, the very data the MTA said would cost $600,000 to publish. The team also produced a live tracking site on the Heroku application hosting platform to demonstrate the framework and then posted the whole thing on Github to allow others to use it.

And use it they did. The Montreal-based developer Transit App was one team that grabbed onto Whong’s project. “With Chris’ help, we were able to pull the real-time vehicle positions from the MTA system ourselves,” the Transit App team said in a blog post. “Using that data, we generated approximate bus arrival times with our in-house prediction engine. We then compared those predictions with the MTA’s tracker to verify our accuracy. And—with just an afternoon of work—Baltimore finally has the real-time tracking app it deserves. $600,000 under budget.”

My guess as to why the MTA thought that they needed more than ½ a million dollars to do what took one guy a few days is tied in with that whole “Reinventing Government” thing that Clinton started in the 1990s.

Basically, it involved taking a lot of core competencies in government agencies, and outsourcing them to private contractors.

The MTA probably does not possess the internal knowledge base to understand just how trivial doing this was.