Author:

Whose Brilliant Idea is This Anyway?

What’s Wrong Today:

For seven months, Pakistan blocked ground
convoys from resupplying NATO troops based in Afghanistan, wanting an apology
for the deaths of 24 Pakistani soldiers killed in a U.S. strike last
November. They also wanted a new $5000 per container fee for every shipping
container transiting the country.

On July 3rd
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton apologized and Pakistan reopened the border
and even dropped the request for the new shipping fee.

 â€œI offered our sincere condolences to the
families of the Pakistani soldiers who lost their lives,” Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton said in a statement Tuesday, following a telephone call with
Pakistan’s Foreign Minister, Hina Rabbani Khar. “Foreign Minister Khar and I
acknowledged the mistakes that resulted in the loss of Pakistani military
lives. We are sorry for the losses suffered by the Pakistani
military. We are committed
to working closely with Pakistan and Afghanistan to prevent this from ever
happening again.”

Until Pakistan got
its apology, the border remained closed, forcing NATO to transit all supplies
through a costly aerial route in Kyrgyzstan, which is exorbitantly
costly, averaging a shipping cost of $15,800 per container. (That’s
significantly more than the $6,200 a Pakistan-routed container costs, even after
tacking on the $5,000 fee Pakistan wanted.)

In total, shifting supply routes back to Pakistan
could save $100
million per month.

 So, What’s Wrong?

It was reported in
the Pakistan Express Tribune that resumption of
supply lines in Pakistan appears to be good news for the Afghan Taliban, as
well as local militants, as the
closure had deprived them of
millions of dollars they used to indirectly receive as protection money.

A
prominent militant leader, known for his close ties with the infamous Afghan
Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, told The
Express Tribune that the Afghan Taliban and local militants who are
active along the Pak-Afghan border were “seriously annoyed” by the ban.

The
leader, who is also one of the key leaders of the Difa-e-Pakistan Council, said
that the Afghan Taliban had even protested when his council was holding
nationwide demonstrations pressing Pakistan against the lifting of the ban.

“The Taliban had
frankly told me that the ban had caused them huge financial losses during the
last eight months,” the militant leader said.

“We are offended
over the resumption of the NATO supply lines from Pakistan to Afghanistan but
at the same time we are glad that at least our Taliban brothers in Afghanistan would be happy over this
decision,” he said, adding: “Believe me it is good news for Taliban and
militants.”

The
Express Tribune also reported that:

“it is an admitted
fact that US and NATO pay a handsome amount of money to the militants in return
for safety and security of their supplies to Afghanistan via two land routes in
Pakistan.”

The Express Tribune is a respected source of news in Pakistan.  The Wrongologist was able to find a 2nd
source for this surprising story in the Tierney Report,
prepared for Rep. John Tierney (D-MA) in June, 2010.

 The report, entitled: “Warlord Inc.: Extortion and Corruption along the U.S. Supply Chain” 
indicated that the contractors employed by the
DoD to truck supplies of food, fuel and ammunition from Pakistan to Afghanistan
are responsible for their own security while enroute to Afghanistan. To do
this, the Report says that these contractors subcontract their private security
to various:

“warlords,
strongmen, commanders and militia leaders who compete with the Afghan central
government for power and authority.”

So, the US Government
is indirectly paying protection money to the Warlords who control the truck
routes, some of whom are undoubtedly Taliban.  

Here is the
Wrong writ large: The US pays militants in Afghanistan to prevent them from
attacking convoys containing our military supplies that will be used to fight militants
in Afghanistan.

The DoD is full of smart guys, so it must
occur to them that the funds they are indirectly paying to the Afghan militants
also fund attacks on NATO personnel by the Taliban.  

So imagine you are in the meeting at the
Pentagon in big conference room when this dilemma is discussed:

Our smart guys say that paying protection
money is the “cheapest” and “lowest risk” strategy to use in order to get
critical supplies to our troops in Afghanistan. Fewer drivers die, fewer
shipments are lost, our troops are better equipped. Nobody makes the argument that
this strategy violates long standing Pentagon rules about oversight
of vendors, nobody makes the case that indirectly arming our enemy can make
us a laughingstock, much less prolong our enemy’s ability to fight.

In this Catch 22 of military logic,
the Taliban probably can increase the frequency and severity of their attacks
on NATO, now that their indirect US funding is restored.

If Taliban attacks
increase, then NATO will need more supplies to put down the new Taliban attacks,
which will mean paying more “protection” money, which means they can fund even
more attacks.

Will we ever kiss this conflict goodbye?

 
Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends,
We're so glad you could attend,
Come inside! Come inside!

Emerson, Lake & Palmer, 1974

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Mitt Romney’s Mendacity

What’s Wrong Today:

Over the past few days, Mitt Myth Romney has taken credit for GM being alive and Osama Bin Laden being dead.

On April 28, the Romney campaign turned facts on their heads regarding the auto bail-out. When asked whether Mitt’s skepticism about the auto industry bail out would hurt him in Michigan, Eric Fehrnstrom, key Romney operative said:

“His position on the bailout was exactly what President Obama followed…He said, ‘If you want to save the auto industry, just don’t write them a check. That will seal their doom. What they need to do is go through a managed bankruptcy process’….Consider that the….only economic success that President Obama has had, is because he followed Mitt Romney’s advice.”

Two days later, Mr. Romney went to work on the killing of Osama Bin Laden, saying, while answering press questions in Portsmouth NH:  

“Even Jimmy Carter would have given that order,”

Romney said that he would have sent in the Navy Seals, while recalling the former Democratic president who was derided by critics for weak leadership during the 1979-1980 Iran hostage crisis.

So, What’s Wrong?

Mr. Myth apparently is unaware that the media keeps records of what people in the public eye say.

First, the auto bail out: The Wrongologist has previously reported on what Romney actually said about the auto industry bailout. Here it is:

On February 12, 2012, Romney said:  â€œThree years ago, in the midst of an economic crisis, a newly elected President Barack Obama stepped in with a bailout for the auto industry. The indisputable good news is that Chrysler and General Motors are still in business. The equally indisputable bad news is that all the defects in President Obama’s management of the American economy are evident in what he did.”

/snip/

“The president tells us that without his intervention things in Detroit would be worse. I believe that without his intervention things there would be better.”

(Emphasis by the Wrongologist)

 Why didn’t Myth think of this before the Michigan primary, when he was being hammered both for his op-ed piece quoted above and the November 2008 piece in the NY Times, entitled, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt”? 

Romney needs this new auto industry spin to play in Michigan, Indiana and Ohio in order to take the White House.

Second, getting Bin Laden: Romney’s position today is, of course “I would have gone after him. Even Jimmy Carter would have gone after him.”

Well, there you go again. Here is what Romney said in 2007 while running for the Republican nomination while speaking with AP reporter Liz Sidoti:

SIDOTI: Why haven’t we caught bin Laden in your opinion?

GOVERNOR ROMNEY: I think, I wouldn’t want to over-concentrate on Bin Laden. He’s one of many, many people who are involved in this global Jihadist effort. He’s by no means the only leader. It’s a very diverse group – Hamas, Hezbollah, AL-Qaeda, Muslim Brotherhood and of course different names throughout the world. It’s not worth moving heaven and earth and spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person. It is worth fashioning and executing an effective strategy to defeat global, violent Jihad and I have a plan for doing that.

(Emphasis by the Wrongologist)

Back then, Sen. John McCain was his rival for the nomination and stated at the time that Romney’s comments about the importance of catching Osama bin Laden reflect a “naivetĂŠ” about the war on terror. Here is what John McCain said:

“[I]t takes a degree of naivetĂŠ to think he’s [bin Laden is] not an element in the struggle against radical Islam…” 

In the Second presidential debate on foreign policy, Oct. 7, 2008, then-candidate Obama said:

 â€œIf we have Osama bin Laden in our sights and the Pakistani government is unable or unwilling to take them out, then I think that we have to act, and we will take them out. We will kill bin Laden. We will crush al-Qaida. That has to be our biggest national security priority.”

Clearly, there has been no flip-flop by the President.

It’s fairly easy to see what Myth is trying to do and what he is thinking:

“What does this particular audience need to hear me say at this particular time?”

This is the only possible explanation that consistently accounts for everything Romney says today, much of which invalidates what he has said, even as recently as a few months ago.

Romney has no core beliefs; he is always a tabula rasa, the etch-a-sketch his staff talked about.< /font>

Finally, about the Carter comment: What has Romney been doing the past eight years? Certainly not trying to change the world like former President Carter, who is as decent a man as there is. While Republicans don’t want President Obama to take credit for getting bin Laden, they’ve never stopped snipping at President Carter for what he tried to do.

Myth’s comment is just plain catty. But then, this is the guy who insults the cookies when he’s the guest.

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40% of Past Due Student Debt is Held by People 40 or Older

What’s Wrong Today:

A
new report from the Federal
Reserve Bank of New York shows that nearly one-third of all Americans with
outstanding student loans are over 40, while 4.2 % are over 60. While borrowers
in their 30’s had the highest average balance, at $28,500, those in their 40’s
were close behind, with an average balance of $26,000. Wanting to finally rid yourself of your debt, no matter what it’s from? You can go to debtconsolidationnearme.com or similar sites and see how they’re able to help you.

The outstanding student
loan balance now stands at about $870 billion, larger than both the total
credit card balance ($693 billion) and the total auto loan balance ($730
billion).

Here is the distribution of
student debt by age:



So, What’s Wrong?

  • Student loan debt is treated differently
    than other kinds of consumer debt. Among the differences:  
  • Student loan debt is
    not dissolved in bankruptcy

  • Student loan debt
    cannot be refinanced (even if a new lender offers lower rates or better terms)
  • Student loan lenders
    can garnish Social Security benefits without a court order

These “enhancements” were passed in successive
versions of the Higher Education Act over the past 15 years. The fact that the banking
industry lobbied for the ability to garnish SS benefits tells you they had very
low expectations regarding when these loans would be paid off. 
 
BTW, these are federally guaranteed loans!

Pretend you were in
congress when these changes to the law were being considered: Your task is to
help amend the laws about the collection of student debt in this country. What’s
the one thing you want to change about student debt that you don’t have for any
other type of debt, the one thing that radically shifts the relationship
between student loan creditors and debtors both practically and symbolically?

It would be this, from
the Debt
Collection Improvement Act of 1996:

“Notwithstanding
any other provision of law… all payments due to an individual under… the Social
Security Act… shall be subject to offset under this section.”

This means that when it
comes to collecting student loans, the government can take funds from your
Social Security check. There ARE limits to this: the first $750 a month can’t
be touched, and only 15 percent of benefits above that can be taken to pay back
student loans.

But this is still a radical
break in the social contract and it has no equivalent in private debt.

In the original text of the
Social
Security Act, you will see that Social Security payments were not
“subject to execution, levy, attachment, garnishment, or other legal process,
or to the operation of any bankruptcy or insolvency law.”

Yet
in the 1990’s, congress was willing to break the social contract for of all
things, loans people take out to educate themselves.

Also, student loan debt has
no statute of limitations as it regards social security payments, and the
law was upheld by the
Supreme Court in 2005
. This is one of the very few kinds of debt without such limitations.

Credit cards face a statue
of limitations. As this site
puts it, ”Creditors
have a limited time window in which to sue debtors for nonpayment of credit
card bills… In most states, the statute of limitations period on debts is between
three and 10 years.”

But for student loans,
the Department of Education notes,

”[b]y virtue of
section 484A(a) of the Higher Education Act, statute of limitations of no kind
now limits Department’s or the guaranty agency’s ability to file suit, enforce
judgments, initiate offsets, or other actions, to collect a defaulted student
loan.”

And student debt is
growing: According to the Project on
Student Debt, the
average debt load for graduating seniors in 1996 when the law was passed was
$12,750.  Now it is over $23,200. 

Student loan
debt
held by parents is growing even faster than
loans taken out by students. Parents’
loan debt has more than doubled over the last decade, now exceeding
$100 billion dollars or 10 percent of all outstanding student loan debt, as tuition costs and unemployment rates of
college grads both continue to rise. FinAid.org founder and publisher
Mark Kantrowitz says:  

“Parents of every income level are
increasingly borrowing for their children’s college education. It doesn’t
matter whether the parents are low income, middle income or upper income.
There’s been dramatic growth in the percentages of parents who’ve been borrowing,”

Some
parents who co-signed loans or borrowed money for their children’s education
now face the loss of their portions of their retirement nest eggs, home equity
and other assets. As student loan debt has topped U.S. credit card debt,
“America faces the very real possibility of another major threat on par
with the devastating home mortgage crisis,” according to a new study by
the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys (NACBA).

Parents
have an average of about $34,000 in student loans and the payback figure rises
to $50,000, including interest, over a standard 10-year loan repayment period.

Looking at student loan
delinquencies by age, we find that 40% of past due balances are held by people
over 40, while 4.8% is with people over 60:



The
bad news on this chart is:
70 percent of people with past due loans are thirty years of age or older. So,
a lot of people who are well into midlife are apparently unable to meet their
student loan obligations.

No one should think that they
can escape payment of any properly arranged loan, but there should be rules to
help students out in either a high unemployment economy, or when their parents who
took out a loan to help their kids, retire.

For certain, we should not
have removed the social security benefits exemption from student debt
repayments.

To continue to garnish social
security benefits to make these payments is WRONG!

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New Hampshire: Live Free, or Learn?

What’s
Wrong Today:



Most of us have overdosed on New
Hampshire politics for the past few days, but the big story in the Granite State was not the primary. 


 


It was the vote last Wednesday by the
NH House (255-112) and the NH Senate (17-5) to
override Governor John Lynch’s July veto of H.B. 542, a law which allows
parents to demand alternative school curricula for anything in the approved
school curriculum that they find objectionable.



Under H.B. 542, the “Parental Conscience
Act”, NH parents can reject everything from methodology to the topics or
content of assigned readings in individual classes. It allows them to direct
their school district to provide their preferred system, or text, or belief for
their little John or Jane to study. 



So, What’s Wrong?

Though this may sound appealing at first
blush, the law is so broad that it makes public education essentially an a la
carte menu: HB 542 essentially forces a self-designed curriculum of
homeschooling into the public school system. Parents who object to use of
certain books or the teaching of certain ideas can in effect, make the school
system introduce home schooling in the public schools.

“Even though the law requires
the parent to pay the cost of the alternative, the school district will still
have to bear the burden of helping develop and approve the
alternative,” Gov. Lynch
noted in his statement on his veto last summer. “Classrooms will
be disrupted by students coming and going, and lacking shared knowledge.”


Think of the grand time parents can
have squabbling about the content of specific subjects like evolution or sex education and
anything else that challenges their religious or political worldview with
teachers.Think about them bitching about how the incremental costs were determined.


The bill arose out of a
“squabble” between a student and his parents
and his high school for making him read Barbara Ehrenreich’s
“Nickled and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America,” for his personal
finance course. 


The student’s father said: “We’ve
eliminated Christmas, we’ve eliminated all these things because we don’t want
to step on anyone’s toes but here we’re going to hand out this book? … This is
anti-God, anti-religion, it’s racial, I mean it crosses a wide spectrum of very
touchy and very insulting issues to most human beings and I think that even
with a parental consent it’s not enough. They need to boot that book out of
there.”


When the school refused to ban the
book, the family ultimately pulled their son out and are now homeschooling him.


And that’s only part of the wider
agenda of conservative legislators in New Hampshire. They are attempting to
systematically gut one of the oldest public school systems in the United
States. 


  •  A
    failed bill last
    session would have let
    parents reduce their property taxes by taking their children out of the public
    school system; another would have lowered the age at which a child could
    legally drop out to 16 from 18. 

  • Pending
    bills seek to pull New Hampshire out of Federal funding for schools and to give
    businesses tax credits for establishing scholarships at private schools.


  • A
    truly bizarre bill seeks to amend the state constitution to permit the state to
    stop funding the public schools and shunt funds to religious schools. 


  • On
    the curriculum level, check out HB
    1148    , requiring that the teaching of evolution include “the theorists’
    political and ideological viewpoints and their position on the concept of
    atheism.”  

There
will always be conflicts between parents and school districts over curriculum
and philosophy and quality of education. But these are attempts to create an
educational system where children simply will not be exposed to ideas that their
parents fear, or which challenge their thinking.


You can’t
make this stuff up. The point is that with the clown car called the NH
Legislature, apparently, you won’t have to. They are willing to do all the
heavy lifting for you.


This won’t
just stop the teaching of evolution. It will stop the students’ evolution.

These New Hampshire legislators are
simply WRONG!

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Afghanistan- “Welcome my friends to the show that never ends” – ELP

What’s Wrong Today


We know that President
Obama is going to pull our troops out of Afghanistan not later than 2014, he
said so. What? we are not leaving in 2014?


This may not be a big
surprise to you, but I had thought that President Obama meant what he said. After
all, we ARE getting out of Iraq, right?


What is
really going on in Afghanistan: intense negotiations to keep US forces there
for another 10 years after the 2014 deadline. Just as in Iraq, there is a big
debate in-country about whether they should allow us to stay and there is no
debate at all here at home.


So,
What’s Wrong?


How is
it possible that a third rate country that can’t decide if it is going to be a
democracy or a feudal Islamic society or some amalgam of the two is talking and
voting on extending our stay in their country, and we in the most advanced
democracy on the planet are not?


Hamid
Karzai is convening a loya jirga, a traditional Afghan meeting of elders, beginning
tomorrow to debate the value of the Afghanistan’s future relationship with
the United States.
This gathering has drawn criticism from his political opposition as well as by some
in our government. Karzai’s opponents see the three-day jirga as a way for his
administration to acquire a veneer of popular support for its agenda with
Washington. Others believe that the reliance on the Jirga undermines the newly
empowered parliament, although the Parliament will consider the extension of
our stay at some point.


Here are comments this week by
our current General, John Allen, the commander of the NATO-led International
Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in an interview with the Afghan-based Tolo
News Service:


“The
post-2014 US presence in Afghanistan would be limited to intelligence
gathering, special operations capabilities and training of the Afghan forces”… “the
US footprint in Afghanistan beyond 2014 still needs to be determined”…”probably
what you would see in 2015 is advisors, trainers, some people to enable Afghan
operations, some intelligence building capabilities and some special
operators…”


“A
strategic partnership with Afghanistan is a “big deal” for the United States,
said Gen. Allen, adding the partnership would be “the logical extension of
that feeling that we have for Afghanistan”. “There will be a
government-to-government relationship. I think it will create the opportunity
for excellent economic relationships as well. There will probably be a security
relationship that will emerge from the strategic partnership.”


The two
countries have yet to agree on key issues about the proposed arrangement.
Afghan officials have sought concrete commitments on how much the United States
will continue funding Afghan soldiers and police — who are now almost
completely reliant on American funding-as well as timelines on when the Afghans
will become in charge of detentions and night raids. For our part, American officials want to have
access to long-term bases for their troops to pursue counter  terrorism
operations or address other regional issues that may arise.


Officially,
the reasoning is that the US wants to prevent the Taliban and al Qaeda
regaining their influence in Afghanistan. But permanent bases provide much more
important regional strategic value:


–Iran
would be wary of the US maintaining a long-term presence in Afghanistan. We
would have a base to move against them should that become necessary. This is
particularly interesting if we do leave Iraq.


-We
would continue to have a launching pad for drone attacks on Pakistan or
for other military intervention in Pakistan, should their nuclear weapons
stockpile be threatened by internal disruptions.


–Russia
and China would be reluctant to see US bases near their borders, as this
would clash with their plans to gain unhindered access to natural resources in Central
Asia and Afghanistan.


Staying
looks like a neocon’s wet dream and like it or not, a client state Afghanistan has
strategic value.


Kabul does
not have anywhere near as much choice over whether we stay or go as Iraq had:
If we say we require military bases in Afghanistan and will pay a lot for them,
then it will likely become only a matter of price.


How
much?
We have yet to see any estimates of what it will cost, but supporters of the
idea in Washington will certainly argue that it will be substantially cheaper
than maintaining 100,000 troops like we do today.


Maybe. But,
can we afford to continue to bleed this kind of money when our domestic economy is so
weak and lowering our deficit is so important to the right wing? Can we afford
to be on the wrong side of history again by propping up another unpopular
and corrupt leader? Most important, how can we slide into this commitment
without a debate on its merits?


So, another
administration wants to continue nation-building in the Middle East under the
guise of fighting terror. Once again, without discussion. This is simply WRONG.


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Eric Cantor pulls out of Biden’s Debt Ceiling Talks

What’s Wrong Today:

Don’t know about you, but I never thought that the “bi-partisan” Debt Ceiling negotiations were going to give us a solution prior to the final hours before a general default on the US’ debt obligations.

So when Eric Cantor announced today that he was pulling out of the negotiations, it was no surprise. He says that the group has reached an impasse over taxes that only President Barack Obama and Speaker John Boehner can resolve. Cantor, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal described the last negotiating session as bitterly contentious and said he would not be attending today’s scheduled meeting.

Mr. Cantor said he believed it was time for the negotiations to move up a level. Cantor said. “Given this impasse, I will not be participating in today’s meeting”.

So What’s Wrong?   

First, if you ever find yourself saying “Only John Boehner can solve this problem” your problem cannot be solved.

Second, given the House GOP landscape, there are two players who can cut a budget deal: Eric Cantor and John Boehner. If a deal is to happen, one of them has to do it. That means that one of them is likely to lose his job. The optimistic take is that what we’re seeing is a game of chicken over which one of them it’ll be. Pessimistically, if you had to write a plausible scenario for how America defaults on its debt, or at the least, seriously spooks the market, this is how it starts. By using the debt limit as leverage for a budget deal, the Republican leadership now finds they can’t actually strike a deficit-reduction deal, nor can they go back on their promise to vote against any increase in the debt limit that isn’t accompanied by a deficit-reduction deal. What will follow is a lot of jockeying and fingerpointing, a short-term increase or two, and eventually, a market panic.

Third, what you probably don’t know is that Eric Cantor will benefit financially from a panic:  WSJ’s Washington Wire reported:

 

“Putting his money where his mouth is?  Eric Cantor, the Republican Whip in the House of Representatives, bought up to $15,000 in shares of ProShares Trust Ultrashort 20+ Year Treasury ETF last December, according to his 2009 financial disclosure statement. The exchange-traded fund takes a short position in long-dated government bonds. In effect, it is a
bet against U.S. government bonds—and perhaps on inflation in the
future.”

This means that Cantor took a short position in long-dated government bonds.He made a bet against U.S. government bonds.. Since Mr. Cantor can seriously affect the value of U.S. government bonds, this investment places him in a direct conflict of interest. It doesn’t matter that the investment was a small amount. If a Democrat were found to be investing like Cantor has done, the Republicans would be calling that Democrat “unpatriotic.”

Cantor is operating in a very dangerous way.  And it is so Wrong.

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