The Wrongologist – Page 212 – Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Symbolism Weakened in South Carolina

On Monday, South Carolina’s governor Nikki Haley announced a plan to remove the Confederate battle flag from the grounds of the SC state house. That got many Republican presidential candidates off the hook after a weekend in which most delivered waffles about the subject.

But, everything you need to know about the conservative Republican position on the Confederate flag in 2015 was summed up by Bill Kristol on the very same day:

OK. Time to talk about history. The South seceded, and then fought a war to preserve slavery. It was not a war of Northern aggression. It was a war of Confederate choice, and the choice was made first by South Carolinians, who were the first to announce their secession.

SC’s Declaration of Causes of Secession was issued on December 20, 1860, after the election, but three months before Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office. If you choose to read at the link, you’ll see the entirety of their complaint had to do with slavery. They were angry:

• That slaves were escaping from their territory and Northern States were refusing to send them back
• That blacks had been granted citizenship in some Northern states
• That the election of Lincoln would lead to slavery’s exclusion from the new territories

Here is a snippet: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the Common Government, because he has declared that that “Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,” and that the public mind must rest in the belief that Slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.

Lincoln was explicit during the early years of the war that he fought back, not for slavery, but to preserve the union. Today, some modern “confederates” use those quotes from Lincoln to argue that the war wasn’t about slavery, but that is revisionist history.

The people who started the war, in every confederate state, were explicitly doing so to preserve slavery. Read the other secession statements. Read the speeches of leading confederate politicians. Read the founding CSA documents, in which the CSA states were free to do anything they wanted except end slavery. In fact it’s clear that the main purpose of even having a confederation was to preserve slavery.

The Confederate flag was basically forgotten after the civil war until the civil rights movement when the battle flag was resurrected by those in the south who were against the federal laws prohibiting lynching, segregation, and vote blocking. In other words, that flag has been used only by those promoting white supremacy. Heritage? Of course, but for a flag that represents something that existed for four years?

The flag is just a start. Why are there Civil War reenactments in the South? Battle field reenactments where they honor their defeat of the north, focused on battles they won in a war that they lost. Imagine if Mexican Americans had an Alamo reenactment where they storm the Alamo and kill Davy Crockett.

Taking down the Confederate flag over the South Carolina Capitol, along with Walmart and EBay stopping sales of the flag, and the number one Confederate flag manufacturer ending production are all important steps, but they are the just a few steps on a long road.

The next big question is will country music follow the lead of Governor Haley and distance itself from the Confederate flag? The rebel flag is deeply interwoven into country and southern rock music, that relationship is both deep and wide.

This stuff is symbolic, and a very important symbol is being phased out.

This is meaningful.

See you on Sunday.

Sectarian Divide Could Destroy Iraq

Yesterday we explained that, although Kurds are Sunnis, they fight ISIS, which is a Sunni movement. Today, we look at an example of how the Sunni-Shia divide elsewhere in Iraq seems deep enough that it might never be resolved.

The Wall Street Journal has a report on the efforts to resettle Sunnis into areas that were held by ISIS and liberated by Shia: (brackets and editing by the Wrongologist)

ISIS was driven out of Mohamad Mutlaq’s hometown in central Iraq six months ago, and since then, he and his family have tried every few days to…go home. But…each time [Sunnis] approach a bridge to cross back into the town of Yathrib, Shiite tribesmen at a checkpoint beat the Sunni refugees, saying: “Don’t even try to come back…”

The WSJ calls Yathrib a failure in Iraq’s efforts to repopulate ISIS-held Sunni areas, and it points to Tikrit as a success. Tikrit was recaptured from ISIS three months ago, and it is now at the center of a government campaign to rebuild and repopulate the area. But, the challenges are huge:

Tikrit and Yathrib, both in Salahudeen province, illustrate the challenges Iraq faces in trying to resettle…nearly three million displaced people in areas recaptured from ISIS.

Most towns and villages retaken from ISIS remain largely unpopulated as the government struggles to build a process that will return residents to their home towns. Security preparations, mine clearing and infrastructure rebuilding contribute to delays. Yathrib has been empty for six months since its 60,000 people fled ISIS. From the WSJ:

Instead, they couldn’t get past the checkpoint run by a Shiite tribe known as Bani Saad. An Iraqi army unit and three Shiite militias are posted inside the town, but there is little sign of any reconstruction.

When WSJ visited, they saw pockmarked walls of empty homes. Acres of grape vineyards have gone unattended for months. The ceilings of most houses leading into Yathrib are completely collapsed, suggesting they were blown up with improvised explosive devices. Yathrib residents and tribal leaders say Shiite militias aided by the town’s Shiite neighbors have blown up some buildings, while members of the Shiite militia stationed in the town say ISIS fighters blew up the buildings before retreating:

Residents of Yathrib and its neighboring Shiite hamlets are descendants of the same tribe, split into Sunni and Shiite branches. Shiite tribal leaders accuse their Sunni brethren of enabling ISIS to stage attacks against them from the town last summer. They have demanded their Sunni neighbors be allowed to return only on certain conditions.

The neighboring Shiite tribes suggest punitive measures for Sunni Yathrib residents. They included blood money payments, buffer zones between the town and its Shiite neighbors, and even a separate water supply. The Sunni and Shiite areas would report to separate local administrations.

Some of Yathrib’s Sunnis acknowledge they supported ISIS but refuse to apologize for it. The Shiite leader whose tribesmen guard one crossing into Yathrib, said his tribe would accept only blood money paid by the Sunni tribes themselves, not the government, saying:

If the government brings back the people of Yathrib without meeting our conditions, we are going to kill them all.

Tikrit is a different story. Last week, there was an orderly return of 1,400 families to Tikrit, a fraction of the 160,000 people originally displaced from the city.

Iraq’s government claims the return of Tikrit residents is an example of Sunni cooperation with the Shiite-majority militias known as the Popular Mobilization Forces. Those forces led battles across Salahudeen province, and now are in charge of the repopulation effort. The plans for the orderly return of the population took months to get established, and local Sunni tribes that joined Shiite militias to fight ISIS have helped those militias and local officials set up an elaborate screening process. From the WSJ:

Other tensions remain. Sunni policemen stationed around Tikrit said some Shiite militiamen have refused to withdraw from the city despite government orders. In the city itself, they remain an intimidating presence, where residents complain their homes have been searched aggressively and some stores have been looted.

The Obama administration knows that the resettlement process is a make or break issue. If there isn’t a broader and successful reconciliation in Iraq, efforts to beat back ISIS will fail.

Yugoslavia went through the same thing after Tito’s death. There the conflicts were between Christians and Christians and Muslims.

The result was the creation of new nation-states organized largely around religion.

If it was ok for Yugoslavia, why not for Iraq?

A State for the Kurds?

The Kurds are on the verge of creating a homeland of their own, despite Iraq and US efforts to avoid it. If they do, the Middle East may never be the same. The Wall Street Journal had an interesting report about the possibility of an independent Kurdish state:

Amid an imploding Middle East ravaged by religious hatreds, the Kurds are providing a rare bright spot—and their success story is finding fresh support and sympathy in the West. By contrast with the rest of the region, all the main Kurdish movements today are broadly pro-Western and secular.

There are 30 million Kurds in the ME and only 4.5-6 million live in Iraq. Their language, Kurdish, is part of the Indo-European family of languages—close to Persian (Farsi) but unrelated to Arabic or Turkish.

Unlike Iranians, who are mostly Shiite Muslims, most Kurds are Sunnis. Despite that, they are confronting the Sunni ISIS, and the Shiite-supported Syrians.

Here is a map of the potential Kurdish state:

In Iraq, the autonomous Kurdish Regional Government, (KRG), was adopted by the new Iraqi constitution after the US invasion. Kurds control their own affairs. This has allowed the Kurds to achieve a boom in investment and construction that has produced new highways, hotels and shopping malls.

The Kurdistan government in northern Iraq maintains its own armed forces, known as the Peshmerga (literally, “those who confront death”), and no Iraqi troops are allowed in the region. The KRG controls its own borders, and Westerners can fly into the region’s capital, Erbil, without a visa. Kurdish is used everywhere as the official language, and few young Iraqi Kurds can speak fluent Arabic.

Yet, political divisions hamper the Kurds’ fight against ISIS, and their prospects for self-rule. Only a minority of Peshmerga brigades on the front lines are under KRG command, while the rest still report directly to one of the two rival political parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party or the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.

From a regional perspective, Iran has a significant Kurdish minority that it has suppressed in the past. Now, it is strengthening ties with the KRG, since Iran views the KRG as an ally in the fight against ISIS.

In Syria, the civil war has enabled Kurds to set up a wide area of self-administration in the northeast of the country, eliminating the border between Syrian and Iraqi Kurds, who now travel back and forth across it without visas.

And in Turkey, decades of outright denial of the existence of Kurds, (they called Kurds “Mountain Turks”) led to a bloody war between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. The fighting ended only after a cease-fire was proclaimed in March 2013. The PKK was once an ally of the Assad regime, and is still classified as a terrorist group by the US and Turkey.

But, in the just-concluded Turkish elections, Kurds voted for the Kurdish People’s Democratic Party, or HDP, which won 13% of the national vote and gained 86 seats in the Turkish parliament. The Kurds demonstrated they can serve as check against the anti-democratic aspirations of Turkey’s President Erdogan.

But neither the Iraqis nor the US want an independent Kurdistan, despite the possibility that Kurdistan as an independent state would be a buffer against the expansion of ISIS. They act as a “Northern Front” in the war against ISIS, and ISIS will be forced to commit resources to the area, as demonstrated by the Kurds seizing the crucial border crossing, Tal Abyad, cutting ISIS supply lines and uniting Kurdish areas that now stretch from Iraq halfway to the Mediterranean Sea.

Yes, an independent Kurdistan would mean the “fragmenting” of Iraq, which Mr. Obama does not support. But Iraq was never a real country; it was cobbled together after WW1 by European bureaucrats drawing arbitrary lines on a map, with no thought to historical or cultural realities. Like Humpty Dumpty, no one knows how to put those historical anomalies “Syria” and “Iraq” back together again. They’re going to be a mess for a while.

The Kurds are different. They have the makings of a state − an area that enjoys the allegiance of its people, has civil order that allows it to raise taxes and create an effective army. It is doubtful that the US will formally recognize a Kurdish state anytime soon, but the ME is a place where that is irrelevant.

No need to recognize the Kurds as a state, just treat them like one. Buy their oil (as Israel does), and give them weapons and humanitarian aid.

They may richly repay the investment.

Monday Wake Up Call – June 22, 2015

Wrongologist reader Rene asks: “why doesn’t the Wrongologist say something about the Greek crisis”?

Most people believe that Greece needs debt relief. The creditors should discount some of the amount that Greece owes, since there’s no way they can pay it all back. But, that hasn’t happened and it’s unlikely that it will, since it’s politically impossible. Why? It is very hard to explain in a short post, but Forbes has a great summary of the facts:

The money is owed to the taxpayers of other European Union and Euro Zone countries. And what’s more, [their] taxpayers know this.

So, this is the issue: To solve the Greek debt problem, something like 50% of their debt has to be written off. That would equal 1.5% to 2% of GDP for each country in the Euro Zone. So it’s not happening.

Even though the money has already been lost by lending it to Greece in the first place, the response by the Euro Zone is troubling. From Ambrose Bierce in the Telegraph:

The European Central Bank, the EMU bail-out fund, and the IMF, among others, are lashing out in fury against an elected government that refuses to do what it is told. They entirely duck their own responsibility for five years of policy blunders that have led to this impasse.

Worse, Europe is now provoking a Greek bank run in their effort to force Greece to its knees, issuing a report that warned of an “uncontrollable crisis” if there is no creditor deal, followed by soaring inflation, “an exponential rise in unemployment”, and a “collapse of all that the Greek economy has achieved over the years of its EU, and especially its euro area, membership”.

So Europe’s guardians of financial stability are deliberately accelerating a financial crisis in an EMU member state, saying they are out of the Euro Zone if they don’t comply.

The IMF is forcing a contradictory austerity policy in Greece – with no debt relief, exchange cushion, or offsetting investment. Moreover, they are applying a completely different standard in Ukraine, announcing on Friday, that it will: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

Continue to support Ukraine through its Lending-into-Arrears Policy even in the event that a negotiated agreement with creditors in line with the program cannot be reached in a timely manner.

This despite the fact that the IMF, by its rules, does not lend to nations that are likely to default.

In the case of Greece, the creditors are acting in concert. They are doubling down, assuming (possibly rightly) that terror tactics will cow the Greeks at the last hour.

The European governments must approve any bailout extension, but we are now so close to the expiration of the second bailout on June 30th that it is too late to get a deal approved by then. But IMF Chief Christine Lagarde has 30 days before she has to report a Greek non-payment of €1.5 billion on June 30th to her board, the real drop dead date appears to be July 20th, when a €3.5 billion payment is due to the ECB.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to see how the two sides will agree to anything other than a short-term deal before the July 20th date. Any “third bailout” of restructuring Greek debt as suggested in the Forbes article above, may be impossible.

In the words of Woody Allen:

“More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”

So wake up Euro Zone! To help with a gentle wake-up, here as we start summer, is the last in our series of spring bird visits to the fields of Wrong. Here is the Song Sparrow:

For those who read the Wrongologist in email, you can see the video here.

Monday’s Hot Links:

Dispatches from the Clown Car:

Rick Santorum says Iranians can’t be trusted because they are theocrats. Sure. We all know that Christian theocrats are trustworthy.

Jeb Bush says a tolerant country should allow religious discrimination. Day is night. Black is white. Discrimination is tolerance. Welcome to the fun house that is Conservative politics today.

Rick Santorum Argues Heterosexual Parents Are Every Child’s ‘Birthright. Really? Aren’t caring, loving parents a birthright? Why should we care about parents’ sexuality as long as they’re committed to loving and protecting their children?

Chinese physicists have developed a laser-based deep space propulsion system that harnesses more power than conventional solar sails. China is actually developing/investing in science, technology and innovation. Has anybody alerted our misleaders in Congress? Maybe we can find something else to develop besides military weapons.

Cambodia is training an elite squad of African rats to sniff out landmines. A team of 15 rats were imported from Tanzania with the help of a Belgian NGO, which trains rats to sniff out mines. The rats will try to locate the huge quantities of unexploded mines that have killed nearly 20,000 people since 1979.

Heinz says they’re sorry for a code on a ketchup bottle that links to porn site. A Heinz Ketchup buyer was exposed to porn from a website similar to www.watchmygf.xxx after Heinz allows a domain to lapse, and an adult entertainment firm buys it.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – June 21, 2015

We know that when faced with a tragedy, some people exploit it for narrow ends. But we got to see just how low Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) could go. Appearing on The View, Senator Graham at first said a couple of things that seemed mainstream:

It’s not who we are, it’s not who our country is, it’s about this guy…and this guy’s got tons of problems and to kill people in a church after sitting with them for an hour shows you how whacked out this kid is.

Fine. He’s going with the lone wacko meme instead of the domestic terrorist meme.

Then he goes further. Despite the fact that the Justice Department had labeled the attack a “hate crime,” Graham wouldn’t go there: (emphasis and brackets by the Wrongologist)

There are real people who are organized out there to kill people in religion and based on race, this guy’s just whacked out…But it’s 2015. There are people out there looking for Christians [in order] to kill them.

Excuse us Mr. Graham, there hasn’t been anything so far to indicate that this was a hate crime against Christians for being Christian. And when you suggest that it is about that, two bad things happen:

• It denies the legitimacy of the trauma this caused black people in and outside South Carolina, irrespective of their religious beliefs
• It feeds the paranoia of white Christians, many of whom already have a borderline persecution complex

He ignores that the killer’s roommate said he was “big into segregation” and wanted to start a race war, and that he had Confederate Flag vanity plates. The eyewitness survivors of the attack said that he complained about black people raping white people.

Under the circumstances, it is safe to say that this was a hate crime, and also that it was a hate crime directed against black people for being black. This guy turned his anger on black people. The next guy might target secularists because politicians like Mr. Graham use this tragedy to say that people are out to get Christians.

A primary job of our leaders is to tamp down paranoia when it appears. But, Sen. Graham isn’t interested in calming people’s fears, he is a merchant of the politics of fear. He wants you to be afraid all the time, which is how he builds support for his domestic policies and his foreign adventures.

That he is consistently re-elected speaks volumes about South Carolina. Only 672,941 people of South Carolina’s roughly 3.8 million voters voted for him in 2014. Since he is now a GOP presidential candidate, he wants to win the SC GOP primary. So he is only speaking to those 672,941 SC voters.

That implies that he has no moral compass.

On to cartoons. South Carolina was the dominant story, but we heard from Pope Frank, Obama’s trade deal passed the House, and there is a new $10 bill on the way.

We shouldn’t fool ourselves about root causes:

The usual suspects offered the usual denials:

The Pope’s faith-based climate teaching met resistance:

Pope Francis has difficulty reading right-wing signals:

Obama rides Republicans towards a trade deal:

There should be no debate on who will be on new $10 bill:

Reform The College Accreditation Process

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting report, “The Watchdogs of College Education Rarely Bite”, which reviews the current state of four-year college accreditation. It makes a case that accreditation, at least for the four-year colleges, needs an overhaul.

Who accredits colleges? The US Department of Education (DOE) recognizes 38 accreditors who act as gatekeepers of federal aid to college students. Federal student aid can only be used at accredited schools. About 90% of accredited four-year colleges are overseen by an accreditor from one of the six geographic regions. These six oversee more than 3,000 US colleges, public and private. Other colleges are overseen by faith-based accreditors, or groups that review vocational schools.

The WSJ found that in the past 15 years, those six accreditors have rescinded the membership of just 26 educational institutions. Their report is silent on how many colleges are on probation. Typically, schools on probation have 5 years to make it back to an accredited status.

They found a link between college graduation rates and student default rates on college loans:

(Some may be confused by the graph’s notation of average graduation rates and loan default rates. The red bars reflect the number of colleges with those rates, not a graphical representation of the percentages.)

The article examined graduation rates and student loan defaults. Not a bad start if you wanted to measure a school: we should want high graduation rates, and we want low student loan default rates, both as matters of public policy. They compared these numbers to a baseline, the average for schools that have lost accreditation since 2000. The question implied by the WSJ is if a school has a lower graduation rate or a higher default rate than the baseline numbers, should they keep their accreditation?

The WSJ methodology took the list of accredited colleges that were posted on the accreditors’ websites. For each of those colleges, the Journal then examined DOE statistics on graduation rates, student aid and loan default rates. The analysis was limited to four-year colleges that offered at least a bachelor’s degree. Colleges where students received no federal aid weren’t included in the analysis.

The DOE is barred by law from telling the 38 accreditors how to do their job. The Obama administration recognized the problem and in 2013, proposed an end-run, tying access to loans and grants to a new ratings system that would compare colleges on measurements such as graduation rate, student debt and income after graduation. It was greeted by mixed reviews by the education establishment, who felt as usual, that the data would be misinterpreted and bad decisions would follow.

The idea had little Republican support, since they would prefer to eliminate the DOE, not expand its brief. Most Republicans, starting with Rick Perry in 2012, object to the federal government’s financing of students, and have called for the downsizing or elimination of the DOE. A few candidates for 2016 have followed Perry’s lead. It’s the position of Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio, who all think that setting standards should be a local responsibility.

The Republican opposition is not new. Opposition to the DOE began in 1979 when it became a Cabinet-level department. It is opposed mainly by conservatives, who see the department as undermining of states’ rights, and libertarians who believe it is an unnecessary and illegal federal intrusion into local affairs. Republicans all believe in letting Mr. Market do his job. That of course, is the position favored by the for-profit schools who have been big donors to Republican candidates.

So, how does a family with a prospective college freshman move forward? Say they are trying to compare two schools, one with a higher graduation rate than the other. Is the school with the higher graduation rate better? Or could the other school with a lower rate be better because it takes chances on more students?

Similarly, higher loan default rates should be viewed in context. Engineering schools tend to graduate students who find jobs quickly and easily, but that doesn’t mean every school should become an engineering school.

We need to connect the dots and understand that we can’t produce more college grads by pretending all kids are prepared for it. They are not. Our colleges enroll many woefully unprepared kids, who can’t make the grade, but can run up large debts.

The way to get more kids through college: Force a good K-12 education back into K-12 where it belongs.

Republicans Vote Their Conscience

The “lawgivers” in DC moved forward on two deeply held Republican ideas this week, and neither stand up to close inspection.

Yesterday, the Senate passed a bill banning torture. It is an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that will permanently bar the “enhanced interrogation techniques” that were used by the CIA during the George W. Bush administration. It passed 78-21. It limits the interrogation of detainees by any US government employee or agent to only using techniques that are listed in the publicly available Army Field Manual on human intelligence collection. This is a good thing.

The 21 no votes, which are really a vote for torture, were all by Republicans. That’s 21 US Senators, all from one political party, including the Senate Majority Leader and his Majority whip, who voted to continue torture as an official policy of the US government.

Presumably, these 21 will run on their support for torture the next time they come up for re-election. Interestingly, the vote split Texas’ two Republican Senators, with Cruz voting for the bill, and Cornyn voting against it. The Houston Chronicle quoted an aide to Cornyn:

The senator is concerned that limiting intelligence professionals and law enforcement to interrogation techniques detailed in publicly available manuals would give would-be terrorists the ability to train and prepare against them.

Really? You think it is possible for the average jihadist to “prepare” for the techniques described in the Army Field Manual? And that preparation will compromise our intelligence gathering? As Charlie Pierce said:

This country can be America, or it can be a country that tortures. It cannot be both.

Next, the House Appropriations Committee on Tuesday released a fiscal year 2016 funding proposal that, among its provisions:

• Dismantles the Affordable Care Act
• Eliminates funding for the Title X family planning program
• Includes something called the Health Care Conscience Rights Act that is essentially more Hobby Lobby, although on steroids

It would eliminate Title X funding unless the program meets a certain ideological (read: abstinence-focused) criteria:

None of the funds appropriated in this Act may be made available to any entity under title X of the Public Health Service Act unless the applicant for the award certifies to the Secretary that it encourages family participation in the decision of minors to seek family planning services and that it provides counseling to minors on how to resist attempts to coerce minors into engaging in sexual activities.

And here’s the part of the proposal that would let your school or boss determine whether or not your insurance covers contraception or any other form of healthcare they may not like:

Notwithstanding any other provision of this title, no provision of this title (and no amendment made by any such provision) shall… require a sponsor (or, in the case of health insurance coverage offered to students through an institution of higher education, the institution of higher education offering such coverage) to sponsor, purchase, or provide any health benefits coverage or group health plan that includes coverage of an abortion or other item or service to which such sponsor or institution, respectively, has a moral or religious objection, or prevent an issuer from offering or issuing to such sponsor or institution, respectively, health insurance coverage that excludes such item or service.

Yes, it enables more unwanted pregnancies, less breast and cervical cancer screenings, more undiagnosed sexually transmitted diseases, and more economic burdens pushed onto the states.

According to a data from the Guttmacher Institute, each dollar invested in Title X saves $3.80 in Medicaid expenses related to pregnancy and childbirth. Another Guttmacher analysis found that the services provided by Kansas’ Title X clinics in 2010 helped save the state more than $61,000,000 in public funds. According to the report:

That accounts for savings from reduced maternity and birth-related costs, along with reduced costs related to miscarriage and abortion and savings related to [sexually transmitted infection] screening and cervical cancer prevention services.

You can certainly count on Republicans. If there is an efficacious solution to a problem, as in this case, you can disregard it for a faith-first solution that costs more, while creating unnecessary cruelty and inhumanity.

Republicans want to stand the First Amendment on its head.

This is who they are. They will piss on the Pope if he speaks about climate change. And their leadership, plus a total of 39% of Republicans in the Senate support torture, since torture seems mas macho.

You have a chance on Election Day to tell them what you think about their “conscience”!

Can Entrepreneurs Succeed in the Federal Government?

Have you ever heard of US Digital Services (USDS)? Neither had the Wrongologist before reading an interesting article in Fast Company, “Inside Obama’s Stealth Startup”, that describes how President Obama is recruiting top tech talent from companies like Google and Facebook. Their mission is to reboot how government works. Here is a first-person tidbit: (Brackets and editing by the Wrongologist)

Lisa Gelobter…got [a call] out of the blue last summer in New York, inviting her to some kind of roundtable discussion in Washington for tech leaders. Lisa had just spent time on the upper management teams at Hulu and BET. She decides, reluctantly, that she’ll go take the meeting, which includes this guy named Mikey as well as this other guy named Todd, and turns out to be in the Roosevelt Room in the West Wing. Then President Obama opens the door and surprises everyone, and over the course of 45 minutes gives the sales pitch…They need to come work for him. They will need to take a pay cut…But he doesn’t care what it takes—he will personally call their bosses, their spouses, their kids to convince them. The crowd laughs. But he gravely responds: I am completely serious. He needs them to overhaul the government’s digital infrastructure now.

‘What are you going to say to that?’ asks Lisa.

Todd and Mikey, the pair who helped bring people like Lisa Gelobter to DC are Todd Park, former chief technology officer of the US, and Mikey Dickerson, who led a team of 60 engineers at Google and supervised the crew that fixed the Healthcare.gov website last year.

Since that time, Park and Dickerson have been steadily recruiting a team of startup-savvy techies, mainly from top private-sector companies, and embedding them in agencies of the US government. Their purpose is to remake the digital systems by which government operates, to implement the kind of efficiency and agility and effectiveness that we admire at Silicon Valley’s biggest successes, across everything from the IRS to Immigration Services.

Dickerson has insights learned from the Healthcare.gov experience, which became an $800 million boondoggle, involving 55 contracting companies: (Emphasis by the Wrongologist)

And of course it didn’t work…They set aside hundreds of millions of dollars to build a website because it was a big, important website. But compare that to Twitter, which took three rounds of funding before it got to about the same number of users as Healthcare.gov—8 million to 10 million users. In those three rounds of funding, the whole thing added up to about $60 million.

OK, but Healthcare.gov may have been more complex than Twitter. Fast Company quotes President Obama regarding his big mistake in building Healthcare.gov:

When you’re dealing with IT and software and program design…It’s a creative process that can’t be treated the same way as a bulk purchase of pencils.

So, the Obama administration began USDS to recruit top tech talent to overhaul the government’s digital infrastructure. The point was not to sell these candidates on a career in government, but rather to enlist them in a stint of a year or two at USDS, or even a few months. For decades, lawyers and economists have worked in the capitol between private-sector jobs, so why not technologists? Fast Company quotes Megan Smith, the US chief technology officer:

What I think this does…is really provide a third option. In addition to joining a friend’s startup or a big company, there’s now Washington.

Fast Company reports that the idea of short-term government assignments by software entrepreneurs appeals to Mr. Obama, and that it was built into the USDS design from the start. Mr. Obama:

I’m having personal conversations with folks, meeting with them, or groups of them, and pitching them…And my pitch is that the tech community is more creative, more innovative, more collaborative and open to new ideas than any sector on earth…Is there a way for us to harness this incredible set of tools you’re developing for more than just cooler games or a quicker way for my teenage daughters to send pictures to each other?

Finally! Obama hits one nail on the head.

If the USDS team can successfully rebuild some of the digital infrastructure of Washington, it might not only change government’s functionality, it might transform Americans’ very poor attitudes about their government. And given our ideologically-riven Congress, success might just boost our citizens’ waning belief that America can return to a joint view of the future, but that’s a lot to ask of a group of techies.

Of course, if we have a GOP President and a GOP Congress starting in 2017, then it’ll be back to technology outsourcing, since understanding high tech and the internet is only for capitalists.

Socializing The Losses: Part Infinity

The Wrongologist often writes about privatizing profits and socializing losses, a system where businesses and individuals can benefit from the profits earned by their business, while the public gets stuck with the consequences, the long-term bill. Governments all over America play into this, from doing deals to bring or keep jobs in the state, to underwriting the costs of sports areas, to building infrastructure when a new business comes to town.

Here is another object lesson in socializing the losses. Some towns in North Dakota (ND) are beginning to worry about the debt that they have incurred to build infrastructure to support the boom in shale oil production.

Oil Price reports that oil production in ND exploded in the past five years to well over a million barrels/day, making North Dakota the second largest oil producing state in the country. The likely fallout from the recent fall in oil prices may have serious financial side effects for ND’s towns.

Consider Williston, ND, a town in the center of the shale oil patch that finds itself planning for the worst. The town is deciding how to cope with $300 million in debt, money it borrowed to build infrastructure to meet the rapid growth of people and equipment working in the oil patch. That meant building new roads, schools, and a water-treatment plant, all of which were paid for by the city. The debt was expected to be repaid from increased sales and real estate taxes that suddenly may not be flowing into local and state coffers.

Williams County Commissioner Dan Kalil told NPR that he fears the town has overreached and won’t recover quickly, as global demand for oil is expected to grow slowly over the next few years, and shale oil prices may not bounce back to the mid-2014 levels. He may be correct. Production is down about 5% from its all-time high of 1.2 million barrels per day in December 2014. But more declines are expected with drillers pulling rigs and crews from the field. Rig counts in ND have fallen to 76, far below the 130 that state officials believe is needed to keep production flat.

And ND is experiencing the negative side effects of an oil boom. The huge increase in drilling brought a wave of cash and people to once sleepy towns, fueling a boom not only in oil, but also in crime, prostitution, and drug trafficking. Consider that Williston went from a population of 14,000 in the 2010 census to an estimated 24,000 in 2014.

On June 3rd, the US DOJ, in conjunction with ND’s Attorney General, announced the creation of a “strike force” that would target organized crime in the state. The effort is a direct response to the rise in crime in the shale oil field towns in ND and Montana, which has been fueled by:

Dramatic influxes in the population as well as serious crimes, including the importation of pure methamphetamine from Mexico and multi-million dollar fraud and environmental crimes.

Too many people, too much money, too little economic security in the local economy. The weak oil players pull out, and the debt, crime and now unemployment, remain. And the towns and state government have to sweep up after the companies go.

That’s not all. The boom/bust cycle makes estimating the future population of Williston difficult. How many kids and spouses of oil field workers will settle permanently in the area? Does the school district build, or stand pat? Will more classrooms be paid for by more taxes, or will they be a money loser? In a boom, most oil field workers are temporary; towns need permanent residents in order to build schools.

Even if a semblance of the oil boom returns, and Williston attracts more workers who come to stay, Dan Kalil fears another boom would mean even more people, traffic and crime.

So, who pays? The taxpayers. The people who don’t pull out when the companies leave. The people who stay have to cover the hole in the budget, and tolerate fewer services when the money guys hit the road. Williston isn’t Detroit, but in both cases, the little people are left holding the bag.

Once again, a town makes a long-term investment, hoping for a return down the road in the form of increased sales taxes and property tax revenues. They sacrifice quality of life, looking for a return in the form of more and better jobs, and better house values. They pay higher prices for most things.

On the other hand, Williston’s Walmart is hiring at $17/hour.

But when you think about it, that is now a subsistence wage in Williston.

Monday Wake Up Call – June 15, 2015

You may vaguely remember that President Obama went to the Tomb of the Unknowns’ on Memorial Day. You probably don’t remember that he said:

Today is the first Memorial Day in 14 years that the United States is not engaged in a major ground war.

Yet, just two weeks later, he sent more “advisers” to Iraq. This will bring the number of US locations in Iraq to five. Mr. Obama and his own advisers continue to believe that the US should defeat or degrade ISIS in Iraq without significant help of Iran and the Shi’ite militias.

Most of Washington’s foreign policy establishment is pushing Obama to “win” in Iraq. To do that, he must exercise at least as much influence with Baghdad as Iran. He must keep a US-friendly leadership in power, and keep the Iraqi military engaging ISIS outside of Baghdad.

Obama’s decision to locate a new base in Anbar province between Ramadi and Fallujah conforms to the FP establishment’s program. The new location only makes sense if American troops are there for some kind of combat role. If they were only going to Iraq to train Sunnis, (the stated role), it could be located anywhere in the country. But, as the Wrongologist has reported, the new advisers will be stationed at Taqqadum, an Iraqi base near the city of Habbaniya, where they will act as a trip-wire for ISIS advances.

Add to this what General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last week about creating a string of “lily pads”, American military bases around Iraq:

You could see [them] in the corridor from Baghdad to Tikrit to Kirkuk to Mosul.

General Dempsey acknowledged that such sites would require many more troops than those already authorized by Mr. Obama. Unfortunately, it didn’t work against the Taliban in Afghanistan, so a good question is why it will work in Iraq. The “lily pad” idea will increase the already high likelihood that the American forces will soon be shooting, and being shot at. This means Gen. Dempsey is suggesting an open-ended American presence in Iraq engaging an open-ended insurgency by ISIS. Any decision to plant additional lily pads will certainly require more US troops in Iraq.

Wake up America, these DC Hawks will never end the war in the Middle East. To bring you gently into consciousness, here is another spring visitor to the fields of Wrong, the Magnolia Warbler:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_dm5InFg1g

If you read the Wrongologist in email, you can view the video here.

Monday’s Hot Links:
Homosexual mounting is a common behavior in bed bugs as male sexual interest is directed towards any newly fed individual. Mounted males discharge alarm pheromones, while mounting males consider the alarm signal a major sex identification cue, suggesting that male bed bugs use alarm pheromone communication to avoid homosexual harassment and mounting. Who funds this crap??

Disney World upped their prices to get in to $125. But it’s the cross-selling that takes the Disney experience to a new price level. Their Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutiques sell a $195 pampering for little girls that includes a makeover, hair-styling, a costume and a princess sash. Sounds like some Wall Street Dad’s idea. Not judging, people can spend their $$ however they want.

Costco has surpassed Whole Foods to become the biggest organic grocer, selling more than $4 billion last year. That means more than 1 out of every 10 dollars in organic food sales are made at a Costco since trade association estimates of the total market are ~$36 billion. But you have to buy a bushel of organic mangoes when you want just one.

The number of people killed by police in the United States during 2015 reached 500 last week, according to The Guardian. The updated findings means that the total is on track to exceed 1,000 by the end of 2015 – and that people are being killed by officers at more than twice the rate most recently detected by the much-criticized FBI system, which recorded 461 killed in 2013.

The Onion said the US has run out of options and that continued intervention will only prolong the US’s suffering. Experts say the best course of action is to keep the US as comfortable as possible until the end. Here is a quote:

We need to accept the fact that the US doesn’t have long—simply helping it pass that time in comfort is the humane thing to do…letting it meet its end naturally is the merciful decision here.

Totally agree. Put us out of our misery. Please.