2centsworth.info

I got this from page A13 of today’s New York Times (January 12, 2007).

In February 2003, prior to the US invasion of Iraq, General Shinseki (the then US Army Chief of Staff) said the following in testimony before Congress:

“Something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers are probably, you know, a figure that would be required to stabilize Iraq after an invasion.

We are talking about post-hostilities control over a piece of geography that’s fairly significant, with the kinds of ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems…

And so it takes a significant ground force presence to maintain a safe and secure environment, to ensure that people are fed, that water is distributed, all the normal responsibilities that go along with a situation like this.”

After these remarks before Congress, the Bush administration led by Donald Rumsfeld first vilified and then marginalized General Shinseki who then faded away into retirement.

Three years and three thousand combat deaths later, General Abizaid, the departing commander of US forces in the Middle East told Congress:

“General Shinseki was right that a greater international force contribution, U.S. force contribution and Iraqi force contribution should have been immediately available after major combat operations.”

General Shinseki has not made any public statements since retirement and certainly isn’t telling anyone “I told you so…” He doesn’t need to.

Years later, with Iraq’s infrastructure still in a shambles, and outright civil war going on between Shia and Sunni, the Bush administration wants to send another 20,000 troops and commit additional $ billions to Iraq reconstruction… Way Too little, way too late.

I read an interesting column in the February 2007 issue of Dr. Dobb’s (a software development journal). The column is by Ed Nisley and he is discussing a report on the problems with electronic voting machines in Cuyahoga County, Ohio during the recent Federal election. The column is entitled Root the Vote: Wetware… It doesn’t seem to be on the Dr. Dobbs website (www.ddj.com) yet but it may show up next month.

I don’t think I have ever talked to someone who is professionally involved with computers or software who isn’t anything but appalled by the idea of purely electronic voting.

As Ed Nisley comments in the column, the current issue is how difficult it is to implement a new voting technology with a temporary once-a-year or once-every-couple-of-years organization largely staffed by volunteers. This years problems were due to poorly designed machines, poor organization, and a lack of training. The issue in the future will be deliberate, subtle, difficult-or-impossible to detect, vote tampering.

In my electoral district we use the “fill in the oval” paper ballots which are then scanned electronically. In my opinion, that is the way to go. Most people are able to figure out how to fill in the ovals, there is a permanent ballot that can be recounted. The thousands of paper ballots would be difficult to alter without its being noticed.

Given the tendency towards dirty tricks in US politics and the generally corrupt relationship between government officials and government contractors, I think purely electronic voting is a recipe for disaster for our democracy…. Just imagine the closed room conversations… “Not only can we guarantee a smoothly run election… For only a few million more we can make sure your guys win!”

If we end up with a significant fraction of the votes being counted in a purely electronic manner then we will also get deliberate biasing in the outcomes. And it will be, essentially, undetectable. You can at least argue about a “hanging chad.”

In fact, the first we will know that there is anything wrong is when some techie gets sufficiently disgusted (or decides he wasn’t paid enough) and we wake up to find we’ve just elected Mickey Mouse president.

Ed Nisley called attention to a recent New York Times article (U.S. Investigates Voting Machines’ Venezuela Ties – October 29, 2006) about the Venezuelan government buying a US company that makes electronic voting machines… That were purchased for use in Venezuela’s elections. Apparently this is being investigated by the Bush administration… One is being asked to believe that a Republican administration is suddenly interested in free and fair elections in South America?

If you want to find out more, check the following links:

Cuyahoga Election Review Panel – Final Report

Election Science Institute – DRE Analysis for May 2006 Primary

Avi Rubin’s blog

VerifiedVoting.org

I read a brief article… buried in the back of today’s Wall Street Journal (Thursday, December 28, 2006) about our recently resigned Secretary of the Interior, Gale Norton.

I am sure she’s done nothing illegal… After all she is a lawyer and a Washington political appointee… But reading the article did make me a bit queasy.

The reason for the article is that Royal Dutch Shell just announced that they had hired her as their general counsel, presumably for the sort of munificent salary that goes with that sort of job these days.

Now call me cynical but do you think that job offer was in any way related to her role as Secretary of the Interior?

Or the fact that during her tenure the Department of Interior, erh, omitted to bill the oil industry for royalties they owed the US taxpayer? To the tune of, some minor amount…. Oh yes, there it is… $10 billion (according to the General Accounting Office). And yes, Martha, Royal Dutch Shell was one of the biggest beneficiaries.

The general counsel job is, I gather, the Big Oil equivalent of stuffing a few twenties down her cleavage after the lap dance.

This is the sort of “soft corruption” I see as endemic in our government and business elite. Nobody handed Ms. Norton an attache case of hundred dollar bills, they may not have explicitly offered her a job… But she knew she would be “taken care of” after she left office.

UPDATE: In the New York Times (Dec. 30, 2006) Business section there is an article U.S. Official Overseeing Oil Program Faces Inquiry. This is all about, you guessed it, the Department of the Interior again. The Department of Justice is investigating whether the director of the multi-billion dollar oil trading program was being paid by oil companies hoping for contracts under the program. (So maybe the attache cases of cash aren’t so far fetched.)

The director of the program, Gregory W. Smith, and three subordinates are suspected of steering huge oil trading contracts to favored companies. As the article states… If the allegations prove correct, they would constitute a major new blot on the Interior Department’s much-criticized effort to properly collect royalties on vast amounts of oil and gas produced on US land or coastal waters. In other words, once again, the taxpayers are being ripped off and GW’s appointees and the oil industry are benefiting.

The NYT article then goes on to point out that the Department of the Interior’s Minerals Management Service is now the target of multiple investigations by Congress and the Department’s own inspector general.

Our dear leader, George W. Bush, is out there calling up the glorious memories of World War II and urging us to “stay the course” in Iraq (which he continues to associate with 9/11 and the war on terrorism; go figure).

I would suggest that reminding us of World War II was a bit risky. It’s been 5 years since 9/11. My recollection is that 5 years after Pearl Harbor we had clearly won the war.

Five years after 9/11 I doubt that anyone other than Dick Cheney thinks we are even close to winning in Iraq or the war on terrorism. If we’d had GW running things in 1942, we’d all be speaking German or Japanese at this point.

I doubt that even the most rabid Republican thinks that the history books will ever put GW in the same league as Roosevelt. Or if they do it will be because of his “New Deal” program of tax cuts benefiting the obscenely rich. [And while we are on the subject of WW II, I don't recall anyone suggesting that Truman was a war profiteer.]

When it comes to GW and “stay the course”, an analogy that is more appropriate would be the Titanic.

Like a lot of other baby-boomers I have been helping my parents figure out the complexities of the Medicare Plan D drug program. So far it seems to be accomplishing its primary purpose… Channeling billions in tax dollars and subscriber premiums to the major pharmaceutical companies.

It would have been nice, however, if they had made at least some effort to serve the interests of the retired folks that are the supposed beneficiaries of this program.

• My Mother doesn’t currently need any prescription drugs but they have bullied her into signing up anyway with their policy of escalating the premiums for anyone who does not sign up right away. So now she pays a monthly premium to the program and gets nothing in return.
• Some months after they signed up, my parents received a coupon booklet and envelopes for sending in their monthly Plan D subscription fees. But last week they received a letter from the Social Security Administration saying that the Plan D fees were being deducted from their Social Security benefits. The letter said that they (my parents) had requested this. Since they had most definitely NOT requested this and since this meant that they were paying twice for their Plan D program, my Mother called up the Social Security Administration to ask what was going on… The bureaucrats at the local Social Security office said the letter had nothing to do with them (even though it said Social Security on the letterhead).Apparently any of the insurance companies administering a Medicare Plan D program (in this case AARP) can simply garnish a subscriber’s Social Security payments by simply typing something into a computer. My parents contacted AARP who admitted it was a mistake and promised to discontinue deducting the Plan D premiums from my Father’s Social Security paymets. That was in July, as of September, Social Security is still deducting the premiums and AARP is still cashing my parents premium checks (they continued to send them in the naive assumption that AARP was going to discontinue garnishing the SS payments). When contacted, an AARP supervisor agreed that the SS deductions were in error, and again promised to stop them in future. She indicated that AARP would not directly refund the overpayments. The best she could offer is a credit against future monthly premiums.

I see a very unfortunate trend in the US these days. Thanks to the huge influence of lobbyists on both the Federal and State legislatures, private companies are now able to directly interfere with, and benefit from, taxpayer financed programs and services. With Medicare Plan D we have over 40 private corporations that can directly access every citizen/taxpayer’s Social Security account. The Republicans talk about smaller government and privatization but what really seems to be happening is the wholesale diversion of tax dollars to politically well-connected corporations. The Medicare Plan D program is the domestic equivalent of Halliburton’s military support contracts in Iraq.