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Monday Wake-up Call – October 13, 2014

Happy Columbus Day! We start a new weekly feature today, the Monday Wake-up Call, with a music video to get your body and mind up and going on Monday, along with links to a few of last week’s articles that you probably missed, and the Wrongologist found interesting.

Here we go: The Monday Wake-up video is “Life in Wartime” by the Talking Heads. This version is from their movie, “Stop Making Sense”. Get up and dance:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obAtn6I5rbY

Now, a breakfast buffet of links to underreported news:

There have been a tsunami of TV ads for the Senate campaigns. Candidates, political parties and outside advocacy groups have aired 991,835 Senate campaign spots from January through October 6th 2014.

Got Drones? Here is a list of everyone authorized to fly drones in the US.

It costs the US $500,000 to take out an ISIS Toyota truck. War has always been about inflicting greater costs on the enemy than the costs that you take, but the new business model is way more efficient. The US Military-Industrial Complex (USMIC) now controls the entire deal. They supply the arms to the insurgents, and to the allies, some of whom give them to the insurgents. Then we destroy them. The costs may be higher, but the USMIC makes way more profit.

There is a huge methane hotspot in the 4 Corners: Satellite imagery has revealed a methane hotspot that is leaking methane (a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide but not as long lasting) into the atmosphere near the “Four Corners” area where the borders of Utah, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico meet.

Why the Ebola fight can’t be won in Africa. Ian Welsh links Western efforts to fund/finance development in Africa over the past 50 years to the current public health crisis.

Research shows the Ebola virus can be found in survivors’ semen for months after recovery. So, it’s not enough to survive the disease, men can be infectious for up to 90 days after their symptoms are gone. Not Typhoid Mary, its Ebola Eddie…Yikes!

Edward Snowden’s girlfriend is living with him in Moscow. Apparently, she moved in with him in July, but the US media didn’t think you needed to know, since we were told that his life in Russia was grim, and that was the price he paid for being a whistle-blowing turncoat. The joke is that Snowden has not only profoundly changed how the world thinks about government spying on its citizens, as well as its allies and enemies, he has built a happy life for himself.

An idea to frame your week:

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process, he does not become a monster. And when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you

(Friedrich Nietzsche, “Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future”)

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – October 12, 2014

“Be afraid. Be very afraid.” In 20 letters, it’s the platform and program of the GOP:

Complete version: Be afraid of Africans, Hispanics, Democrats, Liberals, Muslims, Atheists, Foreigners, Gays, etc. If fact, be afraid of just about everyone except the GOP. Because those OTHERS will take your money, take your job, take your gun, infect you with diseases, break into you house, rape your women folk, strengthen and enlarge your government, spend your taxes, use your resources, raise your prices, insult your God, hurt your feelings (saying ‘Happy Holidays’ instead of ‘Merry Christmas’), corrupt your children, impoverish your descendants, enlarge your government, make life in your suburb or your condo no better than that of a slave on a plantation… and did we say enlarge your government?

If the above makes sense to you, then vote the Republican ticket in November. The GOP won’t accomplish anything, but they will validate your paranoia, and that will feel so good!

Stock Market gives back all of the year’s gain in one week:

The Supremes non-decision causes a wedding:

Malala winning the Nobel makes many parents jealous:

ISIS recruiting steals American Slogan, “E Pluribus Unum”:

Friday Music Break – October 10, 2014

Today, we review the song “Sixteen Tons”. Here is the chorus:

You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store

The song is about economic exploitation of coal miners. Depending on your view of history, the song was written by Merle Travis in 1946, or George Davis in the 1930’s as “9 to 10 Tons”. Of course, older readers know of the 1956 Tennessee Ernie Ford version of the song. It sold 20 million copies as a single!

Part of the exploitation was that miners were paid in scrip, not in cash. Scrip is non-transferable credit vouchers which could be exchanged only for goods sold at the company store. Workers also lived in company-owned dormitories or houses, the rent for which was automatically deducted from their pay. This had the feature of lowering the costs of labor for the mining companies, while making it impossible for workers to accumulate any cash savings. In the US, the associated debt bondage persisted until after the 1914 Ludlow Massacre.

The Massacre was the result of a strike against the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, owned by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company, and the Victor-American Fuel Company. The strike resulted in the violent deaths of at least 19 people.

Howard Zinn in The Politics of History described the Ludlow Massacre as:

The culminating act of perhaps the most violent struggle between corporate power and laboring men in American history

The Ludlow Massacre quickly evolved into a national rallying cry for labor unions and eventually helped lead to New Deal labor reforms. But over the years, the tragedy in Ludlow Colorado has been largely forgotten.

Here is the Wrongologist’s favorite version of the song by Jeff Beck and ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons, who toured together this year. They are supported by Tai Wilkenfeld on bass:

Note that the performance ends at 3:49.

Now, please ask yourself how much you are worth. Then look around you and realize that you are also a part of the most underpaid workforce since the days of the company store.

If politics is about power, then the powerful will always have the advantage. There will be an endless loop of the more powerful crushing the less powerful, with any change in the balance of power simply a random fluke, like what happened after Ludlow catalyzed the United Mine Workers.

If politics can be about policy, then power will not have an insurmountable advantage, and progress can happen again.

Stock Buybacks: Who Benefits?

Bloomberg reported this week that companies in the S&P 500 are poised to spend $914 billion on share buybacks and dividends this year, or about 95% of their corporate earnings. Data compiled by Bloomberg and S&P Dow Jones Indices show that money returned to stock owners exceeded profits in the first quarter and may again in the third quarter of 2014.

The proportion of cash flow used for stock repurchases has almost doubled over the last decade while it’s slipped for capital investments. So, who is benefiting? From Bloomberg: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

Buybacks have helped fuel one of the strongest rallies of the past 50 years as stocks with the most repurchases gained more than 300% since March 2009. Now, with returns slowing, investors say executives risk snuffing out the bull market unless they start plowing money into their businesses.

The S&P 500 Buyback Index (yes that is a thing) is up 7.5% percent this year through October, compared with the 6.5% advance in the S&P 500. It did better in the past, beating it by an average of 9.5% since 2009. Excluding the two years in which we had a recession (2001 and 2008), dividends and stock buybacks have represented 85% of corporate earnings since 1998. So, there has been little reinvestment in the business going on. Stock repurchases have helped buoy the bull market since 2009 by about $2 trillion.

Consider that corporate revenues have had an average growth rate of 2.6% per quarter in the past two years, while per-share earnings grew at 6.1%, more than twice as fast, says Bloomberg. Since earnings per share (EPS) is the ratio of the total earnings divided by the number of shares outstanding, you can either increase the numerator or decrease the denominator in order to grow EPS.

Corporate America has decided it is easier to reduce shares rather than to grow earnings.

This translates into bad long-term corporate strategy. During the same period, the portion of earnings used for capital spending has fallen to about 40% from more than 50%. This use of cash to fund buybacks has left US-based companies with the oldest plants and equipment in almost 60 years. Bloomberg says that the average age of fixed assets reached 22 years in 2013, the highest level since 1956, according to annual data compiled by the Commerce Department.

Today, shareholders are the most mobile of corporate stakeholders. The days of “buy and hold” investing are over; it is now just for the smallest of investors. For example, high frequency trading (HFT) represents 70+% of trading by volume. The HFT “investors” often hold share ownership for fractions of a second. The HFT firms are in bed with professional fund managers who own large chunks of equity in public companies. Together, these shareholders ONLY want corporate strategies that maximize short-term profits and increasing dividends. Coupled with the growing trend of limited, or little, voting rights for stock ownership by the public, professional managers have a free hand to get wealthy without responsibility for longer term corporate performance. This plays into the hands of CEOs and other C-level managers who derive most of their compensation from increasing value of stock. Equilar, an Executive Compensation firm, reports that about 63% of S&P CEO compensation is in the form of stock.

This is not managing a business, it is liquidating a business. While it may be in the individual executive’s short-term interest (company stock appreciation and bonuses) ultimately, it will kill the US economy. Look for more complaints about the American workers when they are unable to compete, using worn out, or obsolete equipment.

We need different ideas to inform our effort to steer the ship of state to higher GDP growth and full employment. How about tying executive performance to adequate return targets for all STAKEHOLDERS rather than to a maximized return to shareholders who no longer buy and hold shares?

You can only go so far with financial engineering before you actually have to improve your business with real revenue and profit growth. Companies have done about all that they can in terms of maximizing the ability to do these buybacks.

What would be wrong with trying some new ideas?

Meds Are Too Damn High

On Sunday, 60 Minutes ran a segment about the high cost of drug therapies. They exposed the rip-off prices Big Pharma charges for certain Cancer drugs. Moreover, the clear message was that if you have a life-threatening disease, it is likely that some drug company has come up with a treatment that may extend your life, at a price. How much would you pay for another year of life? In 2012, of the 12 cancer drugs approved by the FDA, 11 cost over $100,000 per year.

Who wouldn’t pay that (if they could) in order to stay alive? 60 Minutes quoted Dr. Leonard Saltz, chief of gastrointestinal oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering:

And remember that many of these drugs, most of them, don’t replace everything else. They get added to it. And if you figure one drug costs $120,000 and the next drug’s not going to cost less, you’re at a quarter-million dollars in drug costs just to get started.

The big lie told to the American people is that these high prices are necessary for innovation. 60 Minutes asked John Castellani, the CEO of the industry’s lobbying group, PhRMA, to explain why drug prices have to be so high:

The drug companies have to put a price on a medicine that reflects the cost of developing them, which is very expensive and takes a long period of time, and the value that it can provide.

This is, of course, BS. You never buy anything because it costs more to develop. You wouldn’t pay more for a car because GM wasted extra money in R&D without results. You buy the car because the car is safer in a collision.

The same with drugs: we should pay what they’re worth, not what it cost to develop them, particularly if you knew about your options, or were able to negotiate, like you can at the car dealership. The neoliberal meme at work is that profits motivate someone to invent. Perhaps Big Pharma just forgets about Dr. Jonas Salk, who gave his polio vaccine to the public free of charge, demonstrating the big lie spoken by the Big Pharma lobbyist.

Of course sociopathic entities, (that would be our beloved Corporations, who are people now) do not grasp altruism and empathy.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves drugs if they are shown to be “safe and effective”, but does not consider what the relative costs might be once the new medicine is marketed. From Bloomberg:

By law, Medicare must cover every cancer drug the FDA approves. (A 2003 law, moreover, mandates payment at the price the manufacturers charge, plus a 6% cushion) In most states private insurers are held to this same standard. Physician guideline-setting organizations likewise focus on whether or not a treatment is effective, and rarely factor in cost in their determinations.

The reality is that the drug companies are taking advantage of the current US law (that they lobbied for) to price their Cancer drugs.

Are these prices a rip-off? Prices for some of these drugs have increased the longer they are available, even though there is no increased research, no additional expenses in order to produce the drug. For example, Bloomberg notes that Gleevec, from Novartis, possibly the greatest cancer drug ever invented, cost $24,000 a year when it was introduced in 2001; now it costs $90,000 per year, nearly quadrupling in price. The typical new Cancer drug coming on the market a decade ago cost about $4,500 per month (in 2012 dollars); since 2010, the median price has been around $10,000. Two of the newest Cancer drugs cost more than $35,000 each per month of treatment.

A final quote from Bloomberg: (Emphasis by the Wrongologist)

While generic drugs… now make up 86% of all medicines used in the US, that hasn’t reduced total spending on prescription drugs. In 2012, Americans spent $263 billion, or 11% more than the $236 billion in 2007, according to government data.

Fifty million people went without needed prescriptions in 2012 because they couldn’t afford them. It’s high time something is done about this.

A possible solution is to change the law so that Medicare negotiates volume discounts with the pharmaceutical companies, adding a fixed markup over costs, including R&D, plus the cost to produce and market the drug, and then adding a “fair profit” say, 20%.

By multiplying the number of probable drug users, the dose frequency, term of the prescription and the length of an exclusivity period, we could determine the cost/dose required to achieve that return. Parenthetically, the government should directly fund antibiotic research and also control the price of those drugs to give the company a fair fixed profit (at a lower return than if the R&D had been paid by the companies).

The drug industry needs to think about how it can limit Cancer and other drug costs, and how to price affordably — before someone decides to do the thinking for them.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – October 5, 2014

Our country is hated abroad, and frightened at home. We have reached a point where we could reasonably refer to the great American Republic in the past tense. We have edged into a post-constitutional era, no longer a nation of laws, but an autocracy run by law evaders and law ignorers, a culture in which corruption is no longer a form of deviance, but the norm.

We all live in a Mafia-run neighborhood:

By now, everyone knows about the evils of bankers and their Washington facilitators: Wall Street lobbies Congress for favorable deals, Congress then approves them at taxpayer expense. When things are this bad, the very structure of our society is threatened, and voters have to stress fundamentals over issues. We need to move beyond the divisive cultural issues, all the single issues, even critical things like the environment, war and peace, and the “economy”, and focus on structural issues. We have to leave the culture wars and even big political differences behind, and make alliances among voters–because right now, none of us are being heard.

Will White House security improve with new leadership?

However, a new threat jumped the fence:

For months, the Ebola outbreak was confined to West Africa, a region more than 8,000 miles away. But this week a patient was diagnosed with the deadly virus in Dallas, Texas, bringing Ebola hysteria right on home. We have heard typical reassurances from the CDC, while some politicians have engaged in fear-mongering. But, unless lots of Americans plan on exchanging bodily fluids with people who live or work in West Africa, we’ll be fine.

Politicians talk about terror and say: “we could all be killed”. They speak about Ebola and say: “we could all be killed”. Mothra could also come back, and you know the nation isn’t prepared for Mothra. Where will we get enough Raid? Do we have Godzilla’s cell number? OK Obama, what are we supposed to do?

Meanwhile, the actors in the Middle East continue to mis-hear each other:

And in HK, not only no hearing, there is no listening:

Friday Music Break – October 3, 2014

Two Mexican guitarists walk into an Irish bar…It’s not the start of a bad joke, it’s the start of the story of one of the great guitar duos of our time. Rodrigo y Gabriela were 15 when they started playing together in Mexico City, playing in a metal band called Tierra Ácida. They moved to Ireland, where for 8 years, they played pubs and performed in the street, honing their craft. Then they caught on, and became huge global stars. They have been toured the world, backing several successful albums.

The Wrongologist has arrived late at the Rodrigo y Gabriela party, but he is happy to be there anyway. Here are three performances for your enjoyment.

First, from their current album, 9 Dead Alive, “Sunday Neurosis & Misty Moses”. All of the songs on 9 Dead Alive are dedicated to notable people who have died. “Sunday Neurosis” is dedicated to psychotherapist Victor Frankl, while “Misty Moses” honors Harriet Tubman:

Next, their song, “Tamacun” that was featured in the pilot episode of Breaking Bad in January, 2008. Here, they are playing it live at Glastonbury in 2010:

When you listen to them, it is difficult to believe that their history began in heavy metal. They have covered Metallica’s “Orion” and Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”, both of which are huge hits on YouTube. Here are Rodrigo y Gabriela at Red Rocks in August this year, joined for their encore by Metallica bassist Robert Trujillo, performing a Metallica Medley, featuring:
“Orion”
“For Whom The Bell Tolls”
“The Frayed Ends of Sanity”
“Battery”

Is Secession From the USA a Possibility?

According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Sept. 19th, 23.9% of Americans polled from Aug. 23 through Sept. 16 said they strongly supported or tended to support the idea of their state breaking away from the country. The poll had 8,952 respondents. About 53% of them strongly opposed or tended to oppose secession, slightly less than the percentage that kept Scotland in the UK.

The exact wording of the question asked was: “Do you support or oppose the idea of your state peacefully withdrawing from the United States of America and the federal government?”

The LA Times reported the results by region:

You can see the interactive results here. They can be filtered by age, region, income, party affiliation, etc. Any way you slice it, the data are startlingly clear: Almost a quarter of those surveyed said they were strongly or provisionally inclined to leave the US, and take their states with them. Given the size of the polling sample, the online survey’s credibility interval (digital for “margin of error”) was only 1.2%, so the poll seems to be an accurate representation of where the country stands.

Politically, conservatives and Republicans seem to like the idea of leaving more than Democrats. Among people who said they identified with the Tea Party, supporters of secession were in the majority, with 53%.

Secession got more support from Republicans than Democrats, more from right-than left-leaning independents, more from younger than older people, more from lower- than higher-income brackets, more from high school than college grads. In general, men were slightly more predisposed to secession than women. Those making $25,000 a year were 11 points more favorably disposed to rebellion than those making more than $150,000 a year. But there was a marginally higher level of support in every group, especially the Rocky Mountain States, the Southwest and the old Confederacy.

Fifty years ago, most Americans would have laughed at the idea of any state or region seceding, calling it the talk of a radical or a crackpot out of touch with reality. But, with Americans becoming increasingly frustrated by the protracted economic recovery, and by big government, they seem to be expressing an interest in returning to smaller jurisdictions. In the last year or so, we’ve seen:
• Actual secession votes in California and Colorado
• More than 125,700 Texans signed a secession petition
• Secession petitions were circulated in Maryland, Arizona, and Michigan
• Wisconsin Republicans came close to voting on a secession plan this spring

Had the poll first presented lists of “This is what you will no longer have from the Feds, and have to get along without, or pay for them yourself”, the vote might have been different. Consider, for example: the FAA, all those little City, County, State “Grants”, Court Systems, Law/Medical, and various Copyright, Food inspections, education grants/research etc. Who will pay for these things?

As in Scotland, the vote might have been different if the estimated increase in taxes and other payments to fund secession were included in the discussion.

For example, earlier this year the personal finance website WalletHub.com conducted a study of the amounts individual states are paying in federal taxes compared to the amounts they are receiving. WalletHub analyzed data from the IRS, the US Census Bureau, the US Commerce Department and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

As it turns out, it is red states that are overwhelmingly the Welfare Queen States, with Mississippi scoring the first (worst) position with 45.8% of its funding coming from the federal government. Yes, that’s right. Red States — the ones governed by folks who think government is too big and spending needs to be cut — take in more federal spending than they pay out in federal taxes.

They talk a good game, but are sticking the Blue States with the bill. WalletHub’s research demonstrates that, as a rule, the states that are the most likely to rail against “big government” are the most likely to be benefiting from it.

Secession is not illegal, unilateral secession is. A state can secede with the approval of the Federal Government by means of Constitutional amendment. A state that wants to secede legally and peacefully has to convince not only their own population but the rest of the country as well.

Think about Arizona seceding. It would be surrounded by the country it had just left and the country it seemingly hates most (Mexico) with little hope of defending itself, educating itself or paying its own way. Plus, a large number of their citizens are on Social Security and Medicare from (gasp) the United States of America. Decidedly not smart.

The question is, what do these results mean for the country?

The US hardly seems on the verge of a successful secession movement. But the poll results scale up to represent 60 million unhappy people in America, who are willing to consider secession.

This should scream out to our leaders that we are susceptible to the sophistry of a demagogue, or to a serious political reform movement.

Is Our Politicians Learning? The Answer is “No.”

Even as the American public, politicians, and pundits speak of putting boots on the ground in the Middle East, yesterday, Counterpunch posted Tariq Ali’s interview with Patrick Cockburn on ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Cockburn speaks about why the Iraqi army failed in Mosul in the face of a few thousand ISIS fighters. The point he makes is that the Iraqi army was set up as a corrupt organization. His reporting showed that when the Americans set up the new Iraqi army, they insisted that supplies should be outsourced: (brackets by the Wrongologist)

So immediately a colonel of a battalion nominally of 600 men would get money for 600 men, [but] in fact there were only 200 men in it, and [he] would pocket the difference, which was spread out among the officers. And this applied to fuel, it applied to ammunition…

At the time of the fall of Mosul, there were supposed to be 30,000 troops there. Cockburn estimates that only one in three were actually physically present. From Cockburn: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

Because what you did was: you joined the army, you got your full salary and then you kicked back half that salary to your officer, who spread it among the officers. So I remember about a year ago talking to a senior Iraqi politician, and who said ‘look, the army’s going to collapse if it’s attacked’. I said surely some will fight, he said: ‘no, you don’t understand. These officers are not soldiers, they’re investors’!

Cockburn goes on to say:

They have no interest in fighting anybody; they have interest in making money out of their investment. Of course you had to buy your position. So in 2009, you want to be a colonel in the Iraqi army, it’ll cost you about $20,000, more recently it cost you about $200,000. You want to be divisional commander, and there are 15 divisions, it will cost you about $2 million.

Finally, the conclusion by Cockburn:

Of course, there are other ways of making money. Checkpoints on the roads act as sort of customs barriers and a tariff on each truck going through would be paid. So that’s why they ran away, led by their commanding officer. The three commanding generals got into a helicopter in civilian clothes and fled to Erbil, the Kurdish capital. And that led to the final dissolution of the army.

So, the Iraqi army didn’t become corrupt. It was set up to be corrupt from the start.

If Cockburn knew this, and the Iraqi general he interviewed knew this, then the US authorities in Baghdad knew this as well! It also begs the question of where the money went that we were spending to train the Iraqi military: If it was a fake army, why was Washington spending all this real money?

We need to keep this in mind as the drumbeats build for troops on the ground.

Let’s draw an inconvenient parallel. Robert Farley, Professor at the University of Kentucky Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce, observes that the Obama administration has decided to rely on air power in its efforts to limit the power of ISIS in Iraq and Syria, and asks whether air power could have won in Vietnam:

Taking a look at the strategic, tactical, and joint aspects of the use of air power in Vietnam, we can get to an answer of “Maybe, but…” with an emphasis on the “but.” The US could have used airpower more effectively in Vietnam than it did, but even the most efficient plans likely could not have saved the Saigon regime.

The South Vietnamese government did not have legitimacy and support of its population. If US airpower had been used in the most ‘effective’ possible way, Vietnam might have survived longer than it did, but a corrupt regime that lacked widespread legitimacy with its own population was not going to survive in the long run.

Iraq is analogous to South Vietnam. It is a corrupt regime that lacks support of a significant minority of its citizens. To the Sunni community, amounting to about 20% of Iraqis, ISIS is a better overlord than the Iraqi army or the Iraqi Shia militias.

However, tactically air power may be more successful in Syriraqistan. It can slow ISIS from taking new territory, but it’s not going to dislodge them from where they sit, without killing a lot of civilians.

The question still comes down to “How many civilians are we willing to kill?”, because the first thing an enemy with no air defense learns is not to hang around in the open where they make easy targets. Indeed, today, the White House acknowledged for the first time that strict standards President Obama imposed last year to prevent civilian deaths from US drone strikes will not apply to US military operations in Syria and Iraq.

Obama’s problem was saying the objective was to “destroy ISIS”. We can’t “win” the war against ISIS. We can keep them bottled up, and that’s where bombing can help. We can destroy ISIS’s fuel, weapons supplies, and vehicles.

If we do that for long enough, ISIS could collapse on its own – it’s a creature of war and expansionism, and its crowd of foreign and local fighters will get restless and start turning on each other if they can’t conquer new areas.

If boots are required, they will have to come from the neighborhood.

The Secret Service Must Do Better

Over the weekend, The WaPo reported about an attack on the White House that happened in 2011. The story was reported back then, but without clearly describing how the event was completely botched by the Secret Service. This is from the article:

A bullet smashed a window on the second floor, just steps from the first family’s formal living room. Another lodged in a window frame, and more pinged off the roof, sending bits of wood and concrete to the ground. At least seven bullets struck the upstairs residence of the White House.

Here is a representational photo of where the bullets struck the WH:

The story of how the Secret Service reacted to the attack on Nov. 11th, 2011 is hard to believe. The actions of the Secret Service in the minutes, hours and days that followed the 2011 shooting were largely dysfunctional. Consider these points:
• It took the Secret Service four days to realize a shooting had occurred
• Officers who were on the scene and who thought gunfire had probably hit the house that night were largely ignored, and some were afraid to dispute their bosses’ conclusions
• Nobody conducted more than a cursory inspection of the White House for evidence or damage
• Key witnesses were not interviewed until after bullets were found in the walls

On the night of the attack, President Obama and his wife were in San Diego, but their younger daughter, Sasha, and Michelle Obama’s mother were in the WH, while older daughter Malia was expected back any moment. WaPo reports that with the first couple gone, the Secret Service had slipped into a “casual Friday” mode. An undercover agent in charge of monitoring the White House perimeter for suspicious activity had left with a more junior officer to fill up his service car at a gas station about a mile away.

The shooter was Oscar R. Ortega-Hernandez. The 21 year old had left his Idaho home three weeks earlier, during a time his friends said he had been acting increasingly paranoid. He kept saying that President Obama “had to be stopped.” He arrived in Washington on Nov. 9th with 180 rounds of ammunition and a Romanian-made semiautomatic rifle, (similar to an AK-47) that he had purchased at an Idaho gun shop. Writings by Hernandez and testimony from those who knew him showed that he believed President Obama was the antichrist.

After firing the shots, Hernandez, who had parked his Honda in a no parking zone on Constitution Avenue, sped away, and crashed his car 7 blocks from the White House. He left the driver’s-side door open. In the driver console was the semiautomatic assault rifle, with nine shell casings on the floor and seat, but Hernandez was gone.

And the worst part is that the man who had shot at the White House had disappeared on foot, with the Secret Service still trying to piece together what had happened.

It would be days before Hernandez was connected to the gunshots fired at the White House.

Secret Service officers initially moved to respond. One stationed directly under the second-floor terrace where the bullets struck, drew her .357. Snipers on the roof, standing just 20 feet from where one bullet struck, scanned the South Lawn through their rifle scopes for signs of an attack. In 2011, there was little camera surveillance of the White House perimeter. From WaPo:

Then came an order that surprised some of the officers. “No shots have been fired. . . . Stand down,” a supervisor called over his radio. He said the noise was the backfire from a nearby construction vehicle.

But several agents seemed to know that was not true: A pair of agents said they could smell gunpowder, while another had heard debris fall from the Truman balcony. But they stayed quiet, apparently out of fear of angering their superiors.

It is tough to realize just how far the current-day performance of the Secret Service is from their image as a highly trained, highly professional force. This shooting demonstrates that this organization mostly viewed as an elite force of selfless patriots, willing to take a bullet for the good of the country, is not always up to its job.

Just this month, a man carrying a knife was able to jump the White House fence and sprint through the front door. There have been incidents in the recent past, including a 29-shot barrage aimed at President Clinton in 1994, and the February, 2001 White House shooting, when Robert Pickett shot in the general direction of President Bush’s office from outside the White House perimeter fence.

Then there was Lynette Fromme who waved a gun but didn’t actually shoot at President Ford, and Sara Jane Moore who fired, but missed him.

Hernandez was caught, and in September 2013, he plead guilty to one count of destruction of property and one count of discharging a firearm during a crime of violence. He was sentenced to a term of 25-years imprisonment.

The 2011 event indicates that the Secret Service had a failure of leadership. The agents outside the WH took appropriate action. The guy who gave the “stand down” order retired soon after, and started a security firm. The culture at the time would not allow agents to contradict the bosses. Some of the leadership, including the person at the top, has been changed, but the Secret Service must stay sharp.

There is always more work to be done.

The Wrongologist

Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Author: wrongologist