The World According to Opa

As corporations cash in on lucrative contracts, they encroach on the political process, driving up military spending and influencing military and foreign policy.

August 31, 2011 — When I received my draft notice for service in the Vietnam War, I had the best job of my life up to that time. I was a cameraman for a local television station in my hometown. I had worked my way up to the position after having been in the properties /art department for a year, and I loved it. I always came to work early and I usually stayed late. I volunteered for weekend work videotaping the following week’s worth of afternoon children’s programming: Fireman Frank, Cap’n Scotty, Captain Bernie and Friends. I did so not so much for the overtime as for the sheer joy of the work. When the station needed volunteers to go out on remote recording jobs, athletic competition events, church services, civic and seasonal events, mine was always the first name on the list.

When I told my department head about my draft notice, he advised me to get all the training I could from Uncle Sam. He also assured me that my job would be waiting for me when I got back. Of course, that was the law back then; employers had to rehire draftees after they completed their two years of service obligation. So, that became my plan. I would get some education in communications equipment repair, avoid combat if I could, and come back to this great job.

Of course, things don’t always turn out like we plan. After taking the Army’s battery of tests at the beginning of my Basic Training, I found out that I would have to reenlist in the Regular Army and be in for four years rather than two to get the training and MOS (military occupational specialty) I wanted. Otherwise, the odds were high that I’d be given a combat MOS like Infantry, Armor or Artillery. Reluctantly, knowing that I would be nullifying my draftee civilian job guarantee, I signed up for it. Later, caving into the siren song of OCS (Officers’ Candidate School) and subsequent training as an aviator, I never got the training in electronics. Somebody else did though.

In today’s all-volunteer military, many of the MOSs and inherent training opportunities our young people used to have are no more. Tasks in technical fields are now performed by civilian contract employees so that force structures could be reduced and more military personnel could be released for combat MOSs. In fact, over the past 30 years or so, this country has undergone a total transformation in the way it prepares for, conducts, and mops up after war. The Pentagon has overseen a large-scale effort to outsource all aspects of its operations to private corporations. But despite the claims of privatization proponents, there’s scant evidence that private firms perform better or at lower cost than public-sector agencies. More troubling, as corporations cash in on lucrative contracts, they encroach on the political process, driving up military spending and influencing military and foreign policy. Sadly, this contributes to the high unemployment rate for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. Who has work state-side for an Infantry grunt?

It gets worse http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Panel-Widespread-waste-and-apf-350120231.html?x=0&.v=1. According to the Commission on Wartime Contracting which was established by Congress in 2008, as much as $60 billion in U.S. tax dollars has been lost to waste and fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade. This waste, the commission’s report says, is due to lax oversight of contractors, poor planning and corruption. In its final report to Congress, publicly released today, the commission said the waste could grow as U.S. support for reconstruction projects and programs wanes, leaving Iraq and Afghanistan to bear the long-term costs of sustaining the schools, medical clinics, barracks, roads and power plants already built with American money.

Didn’t President Eisenhower warn us about the Defense Industrial Complex?

Gee, $60 billion – that would go a long way toward resolving pay inequities for our nation’s teachers.

Despite the popular image of defense contracts being for the building weapons systems like aircraft, missiles, or tanks, contracts for services are actually more typical. I know, I was in the business for ten years after retirement from active duty. Service workers, not production workers, accounted for nearly three out of four contract-created jobs in 1996, up more than 50% since 1984 — this according to a Dollars and Sense magazine article in 2004 http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/National_Security/PriviteNationalSecurity.html. Growing legions of contracted employees install, maintain, trouble-shoot, operate, and integrate military hardware. Similarly, research and development work is increasingly farmed out. (Navy technical centers outsourced 50% of research, development, test, and evaluation work by 1996. This was up from 30% in 1970.) Other, lower-skill, service contract firms perform a vast number of other functions from base maintenance and catering and support, to security detail and military training. Most of these jobs are being performed by locals.

Overall, the Commission on Wartime Contracting said, spending on contracts and grants to support U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan is expected to exceed $206 billion by the end of the 2011 budget year. Based on its investigation, the commission said contracting waste in Afghanistan ranged from 10 percent to 20 percent of the $206 billion total. Fraud during the same period ran between 5 percent and 9 percent of the total.

The commission’s report includes recommendations for Congress. Among them are: government agencies should overhaul the way they award and manage contracts in war zones so they don’t repeat the mistakes made in Iraq and Afghanistan. The commission also recommends the creation of an inspector general to monitor contracting and the appointment of a senior government official to improve planning and coordination.

This sounds good to me. However, some in Congress will undoubtedly say that this so-called, suspected waste is just the cost of doing business. It’s to be expected. They will further complain that establishing a new inspector general’s post with inherent staff and administrative costs will just be more “creep of scope” by the federal government. Accordingly, our currently “dysfunctional” Congress will likely be unable to make any decision at all, and the commission will have wasted its time and efforts to expose some of the unintended consequences of the privatization of our national security.

Since Congress is not likely to do anything about this waste, fraud and abuse of taxpayers’ money anyway, I have a more challenging suggestion. Let’s go back to the good old days before the privatization of our nation’s security began. Let’s put more of our young men and women to work gaining technical knowledge and skills in the military that can help them transition to civilian employment after their enlistments.

Generals and Admirals of our armed forces wouldn’t like it, and the captains of defense industry corporations wouldn’t either. They would undoubtedly lobby Congress with millions of dollars in campaign contributions — most of it going to Republicans. But wouldn’t the rest of us be better off?

Please don’t hesitate to post a comment below to express your own opinion.

Disgusted with the current state of affairs in this country? You’re not alone.

August 15, 2001 — Have you noticed the recent terminology change in the public debate? Conservative politicians are referring to the rich as “job creators?” Republicans vying for their party’s nod to run against President Obama in 2012 are using the term over and over. Why? Psychology — they are brainwashing their constituents into believing that lower marginal tax rates, special deductions and government subsidies available only to the rich and hugely profitable industries will ultimately benefit the economy and them with more employment opportunities. It’s an extension of the old “trickle-down” theory of economics.

This is not unlike the terminology change from “inheritance tax” — another straightforward, value-neutral descriptor — to the emotionally charged term, “death tax.”

Subtle word changes like this impact the public debate by purposely replacing straightforward terms with emotionally charged words that are intended to skew the dialogue in favor of a tiny minority in this economy, the rich — excuse me, “job creators”. It’s part of the class warfare that Warren Buffett recently referred to, the warfare that he said was started by his class and which they are currently winning.

Business investments, which often do come from the wealthy, do not lead economic recovery. Business investments only follow it to take advantage of improving economic conditions. Corporations and job creators are sitting on trillions of dollars rather than investing these dollars to expand production capacity. Why? Well, Republicans and the Chamber of Commerce are saying that it’s uncertainty in the marketplace, fear of how new regulations and provisions of the new health care law will affect business. Okay, that may be partly true. But what’s more true is that businesses do not expand production and services where there is no growth in demand. Instead, businesses cut pack on domestic labor and look for new customers. In the current environment, this means expanding businesses overseas, in China and India for example, where populations are becoming more affluent even as our population is becoming less so http://articles.latimes.com/2011/aug/08/business/la-fi-consumers-overseas-20110808.

Disgusted with the current state of affairs in this country, and especially the weather here in Texas lately, a good friend recently said to me that his new idea of the American Dream is to learn German and move to Bavaria.

Please feel free to post a comment whether you agree or not.

It’s no accident that our nation’s debt as a percent of  Gross Domestic Product (GDP) started to climb precipitously in the 1980s.

April 5, 2011 –– As President Obama meets with House and Senate leaders today to try to find some way to avoid a government shutdown at week’s end, current polls are showing that the same percentage of Americans blame Democrats for gridlock on the budget process as blame Republicans. So, neither party has an obvious political advantage for this budgetary brinkmanship. Notwithstanding, the Tea Partiers must be absolutely ecstatic seeing how much influence their party favorites are having on this process. If the facts were known, however, if sensible voters in both parties understood just why we have a deficit in the first place and who it is that will benefit from all the proposed cuts in government spending, maybe it would be different.

So, before we start cutting essential programs to balance the budget for next year, let’s see why it is that we have a deficit and a debt problem. It actually has little to do with fiscal measures taken to respond to the recent recession. Despite what Speaker Boehner says, it’s not a spending problem as much as it is a revenue problem, and the problem has been with us for decades.

Pay particular attention to the last couple of seconds of animation on the last graph in this video showing the accelerated growth of gross national debt and when this accelerated growth began. It moves pretty quick.

It’s no accident that our nation’s debt as a percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) started to climb precipitously in the 1980s. Government started receiving diminished revenues owing to Reagan Era tax cuts while, at the same time, started borrowing more and more to sustain increased defense spending and growing demands on entitlement programs by maturing baby boomers. Promised increases in revenues from an expanding economy never truly materialized. What little increase was realized from this tax cut stimulus (trickle-down economics) evaporated with new government subsidies and tax loopholes for corporations. Deficits then continued owing to the Bush-Cheney individual income tax cuts that overwhelmingly favored the wealthiest of Americans and borrowing to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Today, our tax code is full of loopholes created and exploited by big corporations. They, in turn, spend millions that they don’t pay in taxes to control our government with their army of lobbyists found on K Street in Washington.

Yes, do tell Congress to balance the federal budget and pay down our national debt. But tell them not to do it on the backs of our most vulnerable citizens. Tell them not to do it at the expense of our nation’s health and safety. Tell them not to do it and forego infrastructure and technology investments needed for a brighter, more competitive America. The right way to balance the budget and reduce our nation’s debt is to get corporations out of our nation’s business, reform election campaign financing, and restore the middle class subsidizing real people, not corporations.

Feel free to comment whether you agree or not.

Benjamin Franklin famously responded to a question about what form of government the United States would have under the newly ratified Constitution saying, “We have a republic as long as we can keep it.”

February 22, 2011 — The Republican governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, won the November 2010 election by six (6) percentage points over his Democratic challenger, Tom Barnett.  Pretty impressive, right? But does six percentage points translate to a mandate for social change on the magnitude taking place in Wisconsin this week? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_gubernatorial_election,_2010.

Hmmmm… It seems to me that the governor of Wisconsin is the governor for all citizens of Wisconsin, even those folks who voted for Mr. Barnett. Notwithstanding, our representative form of democracy means that the governor will have his way on this public workers’ union business regardless of what the average Wisconsin voter may think about it. This is because the Republican Party also controls the state’s legislature, by a large margin in the State Assembly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_State_Assembly, and by lesser numbers in the Senate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_Senate. But would the majority of Wisconsins really support this move if they knew all the facts? I wonder, but we’ll likely never know; the only poll on the question I’ve seen so far suggests bias in the way the question is being asked http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/rasmussen-poll-on-wisconsin-dispute-may-be-biased/.

Just because a person votes Republican doesn’t mean that they necessarily believe workers should not have the right to negotiate collectively for pay and working conditions.

Wisconsin is indeed facing a budget crunch, although its difficulties are less severe than those facing many other states. Revenue has fallen in the face of a weak economy, while stimulus funds, which helped close the gap in 2009 and 2010, have faded away. In this situation, it makes sense to call for shared sacrifice, including monetary concessions from state workers. Accordingly, union leaders have signaled that they are, in fact, willing to make such concessions http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/22/wisconsin-budget-battle-c_n_826478.html. But the governor isn’t interested in making a deal. This is partly because he doesn’t want other government workers, those who are more supportive of him and of Republican principles to have to share in the sacrifice, or so I’ve been given to understand from my reading on the subject http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/opinion/21krugman.html?_r=2.

Even though Wisconsin is facing a terrible fiscal crisis, the governor has been pushing through tax cuts that make the deficit even worse. The bottom line, I think, is that he wants to end workers’ ability to bargain collectively and is therefore refusing to negotiate. Hey – why negotiate when you’re holding all the cards, right?

But why bust the unions when you can balance your budget in other ways? It’s really not helping Wisconsin deal with its current fiscal crisis. Nor is it likely to help the state’s budget prospects in the long run. Contrary to what you may think, public-sector workers in Wisconsin and everywhere else this country are paid less than what private-sector workers with comparable qualifications are paid http://www.businessinsider.com/wisconsin-public-sector-wages-2011-2. So it’s not about the budget; it’s about power.

In principle, every American citizen has an equal say in our political process. In practice, however, some of us are more equal than others: Billionaires can field armies of lobbyists; they can finance think tanks that put the desired spin on policy issues, and; they can funnel cash to politicians with sympathetic views (as the Koch brothers have done in the case of Governor Walker) http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/us/22koch.html.

On paper, we’re a one-person-one-vote nation. In reality, we’re more like an oligarchy, a situation in which a handful of wealthy people dominate. And, although some define it differently, when business controls the state, this is called fascism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism. The more power wealthy business interests gain, the less power individual citizens retain.

Benjamin Franklin famously responded to a question about what form of government the United States would have under the newly ratified Constitution saying, “We have a republic as long as we can keep it.” Well, it is my belief that we are perilously close to losing it, if we have not in fact already lost it.

One does not have to love unions or believe that their policy positions are always right to recognize that they are among the few influential players in our political system that represent the interests of the middle-class. A retired teacher now myself, I have never believed in tenure for teachers. But I have always believed that workers should have the right to collectively bargain for wages and work conditions if that is what they want.

Indeed, if America has become more oligarchic and less democratic with a shrinking middle-class over the last 70 years — which it has http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/the-u.s.-middle-class-is-being-wiped-out-here’s-the-stats-to-prove-it-520657.html?tickers=%5EDJI,%5EGSPC,SPY,MCD,WMT,XRT,DIA — this is largely true because of the increasing influence the wealthy few have on government and the decline of unions since passage of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_busting.

The injustice I perceive in all of this is exacerbated by the fact that Wisconsin’s fiscal crisis, as in other states, was largely caused by the increasing power of America’s oligarchy. It was, after all, the super wealthy and most influential players in the game, not the general public, who pushed for financial deregulation. This set the stage and tumbled the economic building blocks that became the Great Recession of 2008-9, a recession whose aftermath is the main reason for current budget crunches in so many states. Now this oligarchy is pushing the political right to exploit that very crisis. Except for the fact that there is no humor to be found in it, I would call this whole situation ironic.

I invite you comments, whether you agree with me or not.

Much of the president’s credibility problem, I believe, is based on the fact that he is African-American with a funny-sounding name.

October 6, 2010  —  According to the Rasmussen Daily Presidential Tracking poll for Tuesday the 5th of October, President Obama’s job approval rating shows that 30% of the nation’s voters Strongly Approve of the way that he is doing his job. Forty-one percent (41%) Strongly Disapprove, giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -11 (see trends). His index rating has been steadily declining since his inauguration. But why?

No, he hasn’t delivered all the change that he campaigned on. But, hey… he’s not yet half-way through his first term. Check-out PolitiFact.com’s ObamaMeter. He has tried to work with the minority party in Congress, which was one of his promises to the American people. But Republicans have been united in opposition to everything from health care reform, to stimulus spending, to consumer finance protection, to financial oversight, to tax cuts for 98 percent of Americans, tax incentives for small businesses, and yes, cap-and-trade. Notwithstanding, he has accomplished a great deal and his expansionary economic policies have stopped the recession and started the economy growing again.

Yes, the recovery has been slow and largely a jobless one so far. But this has been because corporations are sitting on their wallets, slow to take advantage of the lowest interest rates for anything much other than buying back shares of corporate stock, which has the effect of driving up share prices. This is why the Dow and the S&P 500 are recovering faster than productivity. The same thing happened in Japan during the 1990s, which makes me wonder why the Fed hasn’t figured this out yet… Low interest rates will not, by themselves, stimulate job growth. Only demand for American-made products and services can do this. See my earlier posting, The Conservative Economist vs. the Liberal Economist.

The unemployment rate is still higher than anyone thought it would be by now. But the Rasmussen Employment

Confidence Index is higher now than it has been for two years, and there are plenty of other positive trends indicating that things are moving in the right direction. But the Republican propaganda machine has been very, very effective at spreading misinfor- mation, misinformation that fosters and foments hate and fear — this despite a plethora of facts that are readily available on-line, in periodicals, and on all the news networks (except Fox) that discredit the smear campaigns.

Americans’ opinions on the economy are improving too. According to a recent CBS News/ New York Times poll,

Americans are more optimistic about the future of the economy than they were last month. Forty-one percent of Americans now say the economy is improving, up eight points from April and more than at any time during this recession. Just 15 percent think the economy is getting worse, according to the poll. Even so, all the president got was a slight bump in his approval rating back in May.

I attribute the apparent dichotomy between the president’s approval rating and what’s really going on with the economy to ignorance, bigotry and gullibility. Much of the president’s credibility problem, I believe, is based on the fact that he is African-American with a funny-sounding name. These reasons, plus having had a father who was from Kenya has made him the target of an e-mail smear campaign. I get them and you probably do too if you spend any time corresponding with friends and family by e-mail and any of these people are associated in any way with the Tea Party, the religious right, or one of the many white supremacist groups in America, including a large number of resurging extremist militia groups.

FactCheck.org has responded to many many inquiries about chain e-mails (what I have called viral disinformation) and has concluded that the vast majority of them are categorically false or, at the very most, distorted half-truths. Should you get a chain e-mail forwarded to you and you wonder about its validity, go to http://www.factcheck.org/ask-factcheck/hot-topics/. You’ll probably find it or a version of it listed there with a link to full expose.

Please feel free to post a comment in response to this post, whether you agree or not.