The Wrongologist

What’s
Wrong Today:

We became aware of
the breadth of the National Security Agency’s surveillance efforts with Edward
Snowden’s whistle-blowing. But the real story is that our government has increasingly
privatized national security.

Outside contractors
perform much of the work. The news that companies like Booz Allen Hamilton hire
high school dropouts who have secret clearances was stunning to most Americans.

Mother
Jones reports that over the past decade, firms like Booz Allen Hamilton, have
increasingly become major players in outsourced national security work. They
now account for nearly 60% of every dollar the government spends on intelligence.
A majority of top-secret security clearances now go to private contractors who
provide services to the government at stepped up rates.

Here is a look at the
mushrooming intelligence contracting sector:

The New
York Times reported that at
a Senate hearing on intelligence contractors in
September 2011, a witness from the Project on Government Oversight, (POGO) a watchdog group, cited
research from 2008 showing that the government paid private contractors 1.6
times what it would have cost to have had government employees perform the
work. Here is MoJo’s chart on salaries:  

A Government Accountability
Office (GAO) report
documents the potential for hundreds of millions of dollars in savings if the
contractor compensation cap is reduced from its current level of $763,029.

Since the
1990s, federal law has placed a limitation, or cap, on the amount of employee
compensation that contractors can charge to federal contracts. The cap has increased
by 63% in real terms since it was first used in 1998. The cap was set at
$693,951 in 2010 and $763,029 for 2011 and 2012. If the cap were reduced to
either the President’s salary cap ($400,000) or the Vice President’s salary cap,
($230,700), there would have been a
savings of more than $180 million per year from compensation costs that would
exceed a cap set at the President’s salary, and at least $440 million per year
if set at the Vice President’s salary. This means that the outsourcers are
charging more for their skilled staff than for their top management.

A by the numbers look at our private intelligence
industry:

12,000: Number
of Booz Allen Hamilton employees with top-secret clearances

483,263: Number of contractors with
top-secret clearances

1.4
million: Number
of public and private employees, total, with top-secret security clearances, as
of FY 2012

7th: Where employees with top-secret
clearances would rank, by population, if they were a single American city

1: Number
of occupations, out of 35 analyzed by POGO, in which privatization yielded
statistically significant savings: Groundskeepers

4.4
million: Number of
private contractors serving the federal government in 1999

7.6
million: Number
of private contractors serving the federal government 2005

1.8
million: Number
of federal civil servants in 1999

1.8
million: Number of
federal civil servants in 2005

70: Percentage of classified
intelligence budget that goes to private contracts (as of 2007)

90: Percentage of intelligence
contracts that are classified

1,931:
Number of private firms working on counterterrorism, intelligence, or homeland
security, according to the Washington Post

$1.3 billion: Booz Allen
Hamilton’s revenue from intelligence work during its most recent fiscal year,
according to the New York Times

23: Percentage of the firm’s overall
revenue

98: Percentage of the firm’s work that
focuses on government contracts

The Wrongologist managed
outsourced federal contracts prior to leaving the F500. In his experience,
outsourcing a contract is almost always a losing proposition for the
government, involving increased costs (despite claims that contracting saves
the government money) and often, poorer service quality.

Outsourcing any
function brings the potential to obtain inferior work for dollars expended, unless managed very carefully by the government.

Outsourcing can work well
in the private sector, particularly for companies where work ebbs and flows in
response to client requirements. There is limited use for it in government
services, particularly in gathering and analyzing sensitive information!

It would be interesting
to learn how many of these security contracts are sole-sourced, meaning that they are
awarded without competitive bidding.

After years
of Republicans demonizing government service, we see that outsourcing
government services (as opposed to goods manufacturing) generally costs taxpayers more,
offers less accountability and in some cases, limited success.

Most
privatization directly awards contracts to businesses in a politician’s district.
The winning firm contributes to said politician’s election campaigns. The irony
is that politicians, who make a living off of the government stay in their jobs
by demeaning government services and government employees, while simultaneously
directing jobs and money to private business. The outsourcers then give the
government and the tax payers lower value on the way to contributing to the politician’s
campaign. Clearly, this is not a virtuous cycle!

What
incentive do contractors really have to properly serve their government employers?
The contractors aren’t working for us; they are serving their managers and
seeking advancement in their firms, not within the government.

And who do
we have to thank for this self-created mess? 
Congress, so intent on downsizing government that it’s downsized the
quality of the work performed as well.

The basic
justification for outsourcing government work is to get a job done better and
cheaper. But it is highly doubtful that American taxpayers are getting their
money’s worth.

What’s
Wrong Today:

From the News Hour:

After 12
years of war, senior US officials now say direct talks with the Taliban are
scheduled to begin within the next few days. The news came as President Obama
wound up a meeting with French President Hollande at the G-8 summit in Northern
Ireland.  The possibility exists that
direct talks with the Taliban may begin in the next few days.

A first
attempt of negotiations between the United States and the Taliban failed in
2012 ― the US did not fulfill an agreed upon prisoner release.

The US
military handed over “full responsibility” to the Afghan security
forces in Kabul on the same day as the Taliban announced the opening of an office in Doha, Qatar:

The Islamic Emirate
was the name the Taliban called Afghanistan when they were last running the
country in 2001. The Taliban were also allowed to raise their white flag (video) over Doha. The statement from the Qatari
officials was telling: The Assistant Foreign Minister for Foreign
Affairs Ali bin Fahad al-Hajri, who was the chief guest at the opening of the
Political Office of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan yesterday:

Neither the
Taliban nor Qatar made any mention of talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government. Afghan president Karzai said
initially that he would send members of his Peace Council to Doha. But he also demanded an immediate move of the talks to
Afghanistan. The News
Hour quoted President Hamid Karzai:

But moving the talks to Afghanistan does not to fit in the US or the Taliban’s
plan, and the Taliban doesn’t want to engage with the Karzai government. So Karzai has tried to torpedo them, leaving the talks in
danger. From The
Guardian:

Karzai, angry at the
US going behind his back, also stopped
discussions with the US about a the status of forces agreement (SOFA) that the
US requires if it is to keep troops in the country after 2014. Afghan Spokesman
Aimal Faizi:

Repeated
phone calls by John Kerry, the US secretary of state, appeared not to have
mollified Karzai, who accused the Obama administration of duplicity. Karzai was
apparently irritated by a press conference in Qatar at which the Taliban
effectively portrayed itself as a government in exile.

You mean
nobody bothered to inform Hamid Karzai that we would be meeting with the Taliban?
Is our foreign policy now being run by the Keystone Kops?  Or is our new Secretary of State, Mr. Skull
and Bones, simply not up to the job?

Poor Secretary
Skull and Bones: Putin keeps him waiting in Moscow for three hours and then gives
him five minutes and a stern lecture, and now Karzai won’t return Kerry’s
“repeated” phone calls and accuses the Obama administration of
duplicity.

Killer comment from Kate Clark:

Commentary:

Does this strike anyone else as a reprise
of our negotiations to end the war in Vietnam? Basically, the Afghanistan
talks will end up being three separate discussions about how to make peace between
the Afghan government and the Taliban, while allowing the US to make a graceful
exit. In 1968, Nixon called this Vietnamization.

With the Vietnam
negotiations which began in 1970, Henry Kissinger had to appease the South
Vietnamese government while negotiating with the North. It couldn’t be done. We
had a cease-fire in 1973. In 1975, we simply pulled out.

The North had won; they reunified
their country a year later. Game over.

So
after 12 years of fighting in Afghanistan to protect women and children from the brutal Taliban (which we
were led to believe was part of the task), the most powerful
military country on Earth has finally decided it’s better to talk to their
enemy than keep fighting them.

What
happened to: “We don’t negotiate with terrorists”?

What has
changed on the ground since 2008, when Obama could have negotiated an endgame similar to the
way the 2013 negotiation will play out?

1. Afghanistan was
further devastated.

2. There were 564
US military deaths in Afghanistan at the end of 2008; There are 2145
through June 2013, an additional 1581 of our best young people died, and what did
we gain?

3. The US is
unilaterally negotiating with the Taliban without pretense of multilateralism
or concern for Afghan sovereignty.

4. We will leave
behind a civil war.

All of the above brought to you by
the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009.

If this is the end
game, then what did we spend 12 years fighting for? We did get Osama bin Laden,
in Pakistan. It’s possible we
taught the Taliban a lesson. It’s possible that we’ve exhausted both their resources
and their spirit.

It is also possible
that the Taliban has won.Their Doha office has the look of a government in exile.

Most US troops will soon
leave Afghanistan. After a discrete period of time, Congress will likely cut
off most of the money to the Afghan government. At that point, Afghanistan, like Vietnam, will have to
find a new internal equilibrium on its own.

What’s
Wrong Today:

The Wrongologist
has a few bones to pick with United Airlines.

He and Ms. Oh So Right were
scheduled to fly at 6:00am on Monday from Sacramento, CA to Chicago, and on to
Newark, NJ. The plane was rejected by the Captain because a flap couldn’t move.
Makes you wonder how the plane landed the night before, and how the crew that
flew it in didn’t know about the problem. Anyway, fight was cancelled.

We were
told by customer service that there was no other possible way to get from Sacramento
to the East coast until the following day. Except that the Wrongologist was
able to get the United call center to change his reservation to San Francisco to Newark direct, leaving
3 hours later. San Francisco is a $300, hour and a half ride away, so, we grab a cab, and we make
the flight, to find that we do not have the extended seat room that we paid $68.00
for.

That will
be the subject of a rant with their call center today.

Also, United
has “upgraded” its in-flight entertainment to DirecTV™! Sounds great, 250
channels of sleep-inducing goodness, but it is pay-per-view and United no
longer offers any free in-flight entertainment. And the DirecTV™ costs $7.95
for the flight. Another marketing triumph by United Airlines! Almost no one
sitting near the Wrongologist purchased the entertainment. This looks like it
will have a similar usage arc to the phone calls from your seat upgrade that
United struck out with in a decade ago.

Finally,
we land in Newark, 16 minutes early. Nice! Except that we wait on the ground
for ONE HOUR, ostensibly for a gate.

Back to
the leg room issue: American Airlines, which is merging with US Airways, has announced plans to add more seats to its Boeing 737s and
McDonnell Douglas MD-80s.

Mark
Gerchick, formerly of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and who now
writes about air travel, told NPR  that 20 years ago flyers could expect about
34 inches of legroom in economy; the standard is now around 31 inches, with
some airlines going as low as 28 inches. Mr. Gerchick:

Surprisingly,
American claims passengers will
benefit from less leg room since FAA rules require that it add another
flight attendant to its 737 crews once the number of seats on the planes goes
over the current 150. (The FAA requires at least one flight attendant per 50 seats.)

Really? Another
“Flight Attendant” per flight? Actually, it’s one more “Sales
Associate” per flight. Sure, in a real emergency, an additional attendant may
be a good thing, but since airplanes are our safest form of travel, those
emergencies are thankfully very few and very far-between.


And since free food and drinks have/are disappearing, at least in coach, there
is no doubt that the additional person will be there to sell, sell, sell. Not
that there’s anything wrong with that.

The Dallas Morning News has
a detailed graphic showing how the number of seats on
American’s 737s and MD-80s have changed over time. But that isn’t the whole
story, since the size and placement of the seats themselves have changed. Most
modern economy cabins include economy-plus seats with extra legroom, which reduce
the space available to other passengers. American claims that some of the 2.5
inches lost per passenger will be made
up by thinner seats.

Yep, less padding in the seats. Foam padding: Another up sell opportunity! 

So the
Wrongologist, on his United flight was a victim of two trends that all airlines
are driving, and they pull in opposite directions:

On the one
hand, even full-service airlines like United and American are trying to cram as
many passengers into the back of the plane as possible.

On the
other, you have the airlines’ desire to up-sell to customers who are unwilling
to pay for business or first class. Airlines are happy to offer better entertainment
services to passengers in coach—but only in return for a fee.

In
the old days of US aviation, when the government regulated air travel routes so
there was limited competition, airlines charged enough to be at least marginally profitable flying at 50% of
capacity with lots more legroom in coach.  The crunch began in the 1990’s, with low-cost
carriers like Southwest cutting into United’s market share.

United
filed for bankruptcy on December 9, 2002, the largest airline to do so, along
with Pan-Am, Eastern, Delta, and US Airways (twice).

Back
then travelers and their employers paid the going rate. Most of the casual and
leisure travelers didn’t fly–it was too expensive. Things changed drastically
post-deregulation. Now to remain profitable, airlines have to pack as many
people in as they can and must fly at
~90% of capacity to stay reasonably profitable.

Being
uncomfortably cramped is the price we pay for being able to fly at today’s
prices (particularly for leisure travel) which are far lower in inflation-adjusted
terms than what was the standard price prior to deregulation.

And
the era of one-size-fits-all coach cabins is gone. The sad thing is if we did
return to less crowded, more comfortable flying we would also have to return to
paying far higher fares than what we pay now.

Happy Father’s Day to the fathers among us! Enjoy the cartoons along with your new
tie…

Wall Street’s Mantra:

Working in the Data Mine goin’ down, down:

 Crossfire with Ben and Barack:

The 5 Stages of Surveillance Grief:

What’s
Wrong Today:

The BLS’
April Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey
(or JOLTS) report shows
there are 3.1 official unemployed per job opening, the same as for the past two
months. The JOLTS report includes part-time
jobs and does not make a distinction between part-time, full-time openings.
The JOLTS report lags by a month the published unemployment rate.

To create
the JOLTS report, the BLS takes a random sampling of 16,000 businesses and
derives their numbers from that.  The survey also uses the CES, or current
employment statistics, not the household survey as their base benchmark,
although ratios are coming from the household survey, which provides the tally
of unemployed.

The April
2013 unemployment rate was 7.5%. It went up to
7.6% in May.

From
Wonkblog comes this chart from the Economic
Policy Institute’s Heidi Sheirholz. It is a reminder that the US labor market
is still in rough shape — despite the considerable improvement in recent years.
There were 1.8 official unemployed persons per job opening at the start of the
recession, December 2007.  Below is the graph of the official unemployed
per job opening.  The official unemployed was 11,659 million souls in
April 2013:

The ratio
of jobs to jobless has improved an enormous amount since 2009. But to put
things in perspective, it’s still
worse than it was at any point during the last downturn, which started in 2001.

We see the
same story each month, a mostly static pool of jobs available with employers clearly
not hiring.  Job openings declined 3.0% from last month to a total of
3,757,000.  People hired increased by 4.7% to 4,425 million.  Yet, real hiring has only increased 22% since June 2009.  Although job openings
have increased 72% from July 2009, they are still below pre-recession levels of
4.7 million available jobs. 

The story
is not just that there is not enough hiring, but there are not enough job
openings either.

Sheirholz also notes that the number of
unemployed job-seekers appears to outstrip the number of openings in just about
every industry, from construction to retail to education to hospitality. (The
gap is smallest in mining, but there are relatively few jobs there, compared
with the other sectors.)

Looking
at the broader definition of
unemployment, or U-6, the ratio adds up to 5.8
unemployed people per each job opening. U-6 is
defined as those who are unemployed plus those in part-time positions who would
prefer to be in full-time jobs. This is down from nearly 12 people in July of
2009. The April U-6 unemployment rate was 13.9%.  Below is the graph of
number of unemployed, using the broader U-6 unemployment definition, per job
opening.

Another
big problem is that average hourly compensation has not changed much in the
past year. The chart below shows that only 5 industries have increased wages by
more than the rate of annual inflation. That demonstrates the weakness in the
job market at least as well as does the unemployment rate.

As long as incomes do not
keep up with the underlying rate of inflation, the economy will not manage
enough growth to assist job creation. Average hourly earnings were unchanged in
May, and only 2% higher than year ago levels. In other words, consumers are
simply running in place.

Even more concerning is that many of these positions are being
filled by older, formerly retired persons who are taking away employment
opportunities for young people. The unemployment rate for teenagers (16 to 19 years)
increased to 24.5% in May from 24.1% in April.

This is
not a social judgment; it’s economics: Those in the middle income strata, the primary driver
of the US economy, have fallen to the low income strata and the lowest income stratum
has moved toward poverty.

Businesses
say there are unfilled job openings, but if they hire an H1-b foreign worker rather than an American, what have we gained? 

There are plenty of companies that
keep job ads open even when they’re not actively hiring. They just tighten
their selection criteria to select only superstar candidates who are worth
creating a position for simply to get them on board.

Job demand is not that strong; so the
self-sustaining aspect of labor recovery is absent. When you take into account how much of that
“gain” in a lower unemployment rates that we’ve seen have been people
dropping out of the labor force rather than finding jobs, it’s just an overall
tragedy.

No one in Washington even bothers to
talk about unemployment anymore, but it’s still a big problem.

Congress can and should be doing a
lot more to fix this.

 

What’s Wrong Today:

Does anyone remember the Senate’s Church
Committee? It held hearings on the NSA, CIA and FBI in 1975. It was the precursor
to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The Chairman was Sen. Frank
Church, (D-ID). He said at the time that the NSA was so secretive that almost
no Americans had ever heard of it, despite its huge employee base and enormous
budget.

At the time, the NSA had no statutory basis
and no oversight.
You can see the committee’s reports here.
 The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act (FISA) and Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) were inspired by the
recommendations of the Church Committee.

The
FISA Act of 1978 prescribes procedures for requesting judicial authorization
for electronic surveillance and physical search of persons engaged in espionage
or international terrorism against the United States on behalf of a foreign
power. Requests are adjudicated by the FISC, a special eleven member court.

Today,
the FISC oversees requests for surveillance warrants
of suspected foreign intelligence agents inside the United States by federal
police agencies.

Outside
the Beltway’s Matt
Bernius:

Bernius took
the numbers from the Federation of American Scientists archive of those US
Attorney General’s Annual FISA Reports to Congress and crunched them into a
spreadsheet so we could see for ourselves how well the courts are doing:

Starting
in 2005, the Attorney General was also required to report on FISA applications
for Business Records. These involve accessing large amounts of data. Bernius:

In 2005,
the Justice Department began to include information about requests for information about US citizens in the annual
FISA Reports. From 2005 to 2012, there were
53,593 such requests made by the FBI. In 2008 alone, 22.7% of those requests were later
determined to be for the wrong person’s information.

The
Justice Department only released information about the number of corrective
requests in 2007 and 2008. These requests are sought in cases where the
government discovered that they pulled information for the wrong “John Smith.”
There is apparently no requirement for correction information to be reported.

Since in 20+%
of the cases in 2008, the FBI pulled info for the wrong person, it would be
nice to know if things have gotten any better or any worse. All of the
following charts come from Bernius.

FISA Surveillance Requests (1979 –
2000):

In
21 years, only a single application (in 1997) was denied. The government chose
to withdraw that application rather than amending it.

2000 was the first year in which FISA
applications exceeded 1000. It also marked the first year in which the FISA
court chose to modify an application.

FISA Surveillance Requests (2000 – 2012):

From 2000 to 2012, the FISA court denied 12
applications out of 21,914, and modified another 2%, or 498. The
government withdrew a total of 26 applications.

Bernius:

The FISA courts deal with more than just
applications for individual surveillance. Starting in 2005, the Attorney
General was also required to report on FISA applications for Business Records:

In recent years, the number of these
requests has significantly grown. While the FISA courts have approved 100% of
the applications, a far greater amount of push-back and modification happened
compared to the surveillance applications. In part this may be because these
are requests for far larger amounts of data.

Thanks to provisions in the re-approved Patriot
Act, the Justice Department also began to include information about requests
for information about US citizens in the annual FISA Reports:

According to the Electronic Privacy
Information Center, these applications give the FBI the power to compel the
disclosure of customer records held by banks, telephone companies, Internet
Service Providers, and others. These entities are prohibited, or “gagged,” from
telling anyone about their receipt of the National Security Letter (NSL), which
makes oversight difficult.

The numbers for 2005 to 2008 are
“good-faith” estimates since there was no unified system in place for tracking
NSL requests. A tracking system for these data came online in 2009.

From 1979 to 2012, there were 33,996
FISA applications for individual surveillance. Only 13 were denied.

We are back at the same point today as we
were at the time of the Church Committee hearings: The government wants to have
certain capabilities, but those capabilities run up against our constitutional
right to be free from unreasonable searches and our right to privacy.

At the same time, the effectiveness of
certain programs still relies in part on the enemy not knowing what we’re
capable of doing. That creates a
conundrum, because if the enemy can’t know, then who can know? Congress? The President? Glen Greenwald?

We expect that there will be a tension between the
need for the American public to know and approve of what the government is
doing and the need to keep our adversaries from knowing what we are capable of
doing.  

The biggest problem with the current system (as
best we understand it) is that its “big data” correlation conceit hides the
needles under way too much hay. That can generate false positives that are
treated by law enforcement as positive provable evidence. It also can generate false
negatives, or has enough missing information not to be terribly useful in
preventing imminent threats.  

NSA
might start by assuming that the potential set of terrorists is substantially
less than 7 billion people.

Authoritarian systems are the brittle and often
collapse the fastest. The current NSA debate provides an opportunity for improved government transparency and trust by the people.

That could be
transformative.  

Will Congress and the White House take it?

What ‘s
Wrong Today:

On
Memorial Day the Wrongologist posted this cartoon which demonstrates the arc of
our losses in our many wars:  

We
lost 116,000 in the Wrongologist’s grandfather’s war. We lost 405,000 people in
WWII, the Wrongologist’s father’s war. We lost them in about 3½ years.  If you brought the 1940’s population forward
to today, that would be like losing 1 million Americans.  We lost 58,000 in Vietnam, the Wrongologist’s
war.

These
numbers reflect part of the price Americans paid back then. Leaving aside the
arguments about wars of choice or wars of necessity, we largely accepted those
costs.

The
cartoon also serves to remind us of how
few people have died in the Global War on Terror. In the GOWT, we lost
3000 people on 9/11 and have lost 4,500 Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan in
the past 12 years. This is not to minimize the loss of a single life, but to
bring some perspective to where we are today, 7500 deaths over 12 years equates
to 52 deaths per month, 624 per year on average, compared to 405,000 in 3½
years in the 1940’s. We lost 4,800 on
average for each year of the Vietnam war.

This
loss of human life has been joined with the loss of constitutional freedoms
since 9/11. This came back into focus  this week, as we learned about NSA’s
activities from Edward
Snowden, the NSA whistle-blower. The surveillance state grew exponentially
after 9/11. Many people have said, “I don’t care what the government does, as
long as it keeps me safe.” From Corrente:

So, why have we been so willing to give up
constitutional freedoms to prosecute this “war”? Again, we can’t minimize the
loss of 624 people per year for the past 12 years to fighting terrorism, but have
we lost our sense of proportionality? Are deaths from terror different from
battlefield deaths? Does the possibility that New York, Boston or DC can be
battlefields make a qualitative difference? Enough of a difference to gut the 4th
Amendment, weaken the 1st Amendment or defang Habeas Corpus?

Snowden’s
whistle-blowing has brought important issues back into public view. The NSA receives
Verizon’s call detail records along with those of all other major
telecommunications providers. It stores all information on who talks with whom,
from where to where, by what means, when and for how long. These are the
meta-data of the calls, not the actual spoken content of the calls, although
those can and may well be tapped elsewhere or by other means.

The
NSA also sucks
user data from all major Internet services, although Google’s Chief Counsel
denied that yesterday on NPR’s The
News Hour. It also taps into various commercial databases, personal medical
data and into the records of air lines and other transportation services.

It does
all this permanently and on a
global basis. The collecting is not
restricted to “foreigners”.

That is
scary but that is not yet the total observation state. Edward Snowden points
to a different danger of such secret data accumulation: (emphasis by the
Wrongologist)

The
Panopticon is a architectural concept for a prison where the guards can watch,
unseen by the inmates, from a tower in the middle into all cells built in a
circle around the tower. It leaves the inmates in a perceived state of permanent surveillance.

Wikipedia describes the Panopticon: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

Bentham devoted
most of his efforts to developing a design for a Panopticon prison, and it is
his prison which is most widely understood by the term. Bentham described the
Panopticon as:

Terrorism
is an authentic danger that can be combated by closer monitoring of Americans’
communication. But do we need, or can we tolerate, a government so powerfully and
deeply embedded in our private lives that they can spot manifestations of such
evils anywhere and everywhere, perhaps even before they occur? Are we willing
to go that far to be “kept safe” from any danger?

From James
B. Rule in the NYT:
(emphasis by the Wrongologist)

From
today’s NYT editorial:

The
President and members of Congress have said we need to have a debate about the
limits of state surveillance. That debate should define what Mr.
Obama means when he points out we
can’t have 100% privacy and 100% safety.

Politicians: Stop falling over each
other to tell us how much you want to have this debate.  We will only have
it because of Snowden’s leak, not because many of you think the process of data
collection should be made public.

If we are to have a national discussion
(and we should), we need answers to these questions:

• Are the
  calls and texts of ordinary Americans mined for patterns that might put
  innocent people under suspicion?

• Why are data
  from every phone call collected, and not just those made by people whom the
  government suspects of terrorist activity?

• How long are
  the data kept, and can it be used for routine police investigations?

With those
answers, we can begin to decide if they are doing this solely to protect us, or
to try to control us.

We
shouldn’t shrug off our weakened 4th Amendment rights as a side
effect of the digital age. We must fight to preserve as much of our personal
information as possible. So if there is a benefit to learning about the NSA’s
activities, it serves as a reminder that the government is serious about obtaining
information in its war on terrorism and that we must be aware of what’s going on and must have a role in setting
limits on it.

Tyranny
is the existence and use of arbitrary Government power against citizens. The
heart of such arbitrary power is secret laws, secretly interpreted, and
secretly enforced. The Bush and Obama administration’s development of the FISA
and Patriot Acts into a structure in US law is a tyranny and makes a mockery of the US
Constitution.  

We
must place limits on these programs before they get out of control. We need to
start by revisiting the Patriot Act.

What’s
Wrong Today:

From
Consumer
Reports:

Those are the types
of deals you could end up with if you get your electronics, furniture,
appliances, or other items from a rent-to-own store.

Money
Magazine reported in 2011 that according to the rent-to-own industry association,
the Association of Progressive Rental Organizations, (APRO), there are
approximately 8,600 rent-to-own stores in the US and Canada. Their customer
base has swelled to 4.8 million people, up 67% since 2007. According to the
APRO’s website, the industry currently has $8.5 billion in annual revenues.

It appears
that with the current low growth economy, growing numbers of Americans are
renting all kinds of products rather than buying them. Like payday lenders,
pawn shops and Buy
Here Pay Here used-car lots, the growth part of the industry has become
tires.

Yes, tires. Why don’t people just rent everything that they wouldn’t need to keep afterwords? Such as rent a computer instead of renting to own…

Tire
rental businesses provide ready credit to consumers who can’t get a loan
anywhere else. The LA
Times reported on Saturday that chains
such as Rent-a-Wheel and Rimco are seeing business boom. Consumers who rent to
own pay double or triple the cost of buying and face aggressive repossession
policies.

But that
access doesn’t come cheap.

The LA
Times:

With
payments as low as $14 a week, rent-to-own is proving irresistible for
consumers desperate for safe transportation.

It’s also
a booming business for specialized tire and wheel dealers that have become beneficiaries
of a struggling US economy. Fast-expanding chains with names like Rent-a-Wheel
and EZ Rims 4 Rent that got their start selling high-end rims to car
enthusiasts have discovered a lucrative market selling tires on time.

A host of
economic factors are pushing the growth of tire rentals.

Soaring
costs for natural rubber and petroleum used to manufacture tires have pushed up
prices. The average price of a passenger tire in 2012 in the US is 57% higher than in 2006. The prices on some popular sizes have more than doubled.

Consumers,
meanwhile, have an increasingly difficult time affording big-ticket purchases.

Since
2009, median household income has fallen more than 5%. And in the wake of the
recession, the number of households in the country with credit histories too
damaged to qualify for most credit cards has risen to 35% from 27% five years
ago. Individuals can get Credit Cards for No Credit and use them to build their credit score and that will certainly help with small to medium sized purchases but not large purchases like a home.

With more
people shut out of traditional financing, the rent-to-own industry has
flourished. Promising no credit checks, small down payments and the option to
return merchandise at any time with no questions asked, chains such as
Rent-a-Center are raking in huge profits. Tires account for just a small slice
of the $8.5-billion rent-to-own market, but they stand out from the industry’s
traditional fare because – unlike with a new TV – giving back tires means not
being able to drive to work.

The first
rent-to-own tire and wheel dealers appeared in the mid-1990s, targeting young
urban males looking to spiff up their rides. Chains enlisted rap personalities
such as Snoop Dogg and Busta Rhymes to hawk shiny customized rims and
low-profile tires. But after the economy crashed, dealers saw an influx of
customers asking for standard passenger tires. Many new patrons were older and
a surprising number were women, a group the industry had all but ignored.

The market
leader is Rent-a-Wheel. With $100 million in sales, the company last year
ranked as the nation’s seventh-largest independent tire dealer, according to
Modern Tire Dealer. The chain operates 89 stores branded as either Rent-a-Wheel
or Rent-a-Tire, including 13 in California.

Another
chain, Rimco, is also undergoing a transformation thanks to changing customer
demand.

Four years
ago, 70% of Rimco’s sales were aftermarket rims and the rest were tires; today
that ratio is reversed. The chain, a unit of Atlanta rent-to-own giant Aaron’s,
has 28 stores and plans to open seven more by year’s end.

RimTyme is
the tire rental franchise of Rent-a-Center. Eric Malone, who owns eight RimTyme
stores in North Carolina, Virginia and Georgia, was drawn to the business by
the high profit potential. RimTyme averages more than $1.4 million a year in
sales in each of its 25 locations, nearly
double the take at Rent-a-Center’s traditional furniture and electronics stores.

Malone’s employees
make about three repossessions a week. Malone said some new customers file for
bankruptcy protection soon after getting new tires, hoping to shed payments and
dodge the repo man. But they quickly learn that because they signed rental
contracts, not loans, the deals can’t
be modified or discharged in court.

From the
LA Times:

They paid
for the tires. The price was $982, almost triple what the Hankook radials would
have cost at Wal-Mart.

Florence
Cherry: “When you’re working paycheck to paycheck, your options are
limited…These tires were a lifesaver at any price.”

No tires
means no car and an immediate lost job in today’s at-will employment America.
So you get loan-sharked for $1200 for a $300 set of tires, or lose your job,
your home, your car, and have to face laws that all but criminalize being
unemployed.

These
businesses prey on the working poor. But state legislators have no problem with
the industry: 95% of the US populations living in 47 states are now subject to
state laws permitting rent-to-own transactions.

Are tire
repo guys the “small business owners” that the GOP is championing? This
is legalized loan sharking. More extracting of rents from the poorest among us.

Republican
policies are working as intended.

What’s
Wrong Today:

From the Information Clearinghouse:
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) spoke to Charlie Rose last Monday. During the interview
on PBS, Mr. McCain downplayed atrocities being committed by Syrian rebel forces
and suggested that he would be willing
to tolerate extremists taking over Syria because they would most likely not be
allied with Iran.

McCain has
been a forceful advocate of US military intervention in Syria. He has spent
months in television and other media interviews trying to make his case and Mr.
McCain continued that campaign with Charlie Rose. Rose
asked about atrocities on the rebels’ side, and McCain replies: (emphasis
by the Wrongologist)

Rose
later challenged the idea of greater US involvement in Syria’s civil war,
noting that — because many of the forces battling Assad have
strong ties to al-Qaeda — there’s a chance that those who take over in the
event Assad falls would be no friend to the United States. Mr. McCain
dismissed that concern, suggesting that any Sunni al-Qaeda affiliated group
won’t be allied with Shiite dominated Iran. All of this from John (watch me sneak into Syria and shake the hands of Al Qaeda)
McCain:

Rose then
asks what if Syria was ruled by al Qaeda and others who have no desire for a
good relationship with the US. McCain replies: (Emphasis by the Wrongologist)

Seems that
Mr. McCain will overlook pretty much any consequence: He is even abandoning his
usual requirement that the US government should implement whatever
military commanders think is right in any conflict.  McCain: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

Later,
McCain refers to the US implementing a no-fly zone in Syria:

This makes
McCain look to be totally in Israel’s pocket. He seems to be saying that it is
ok if Al Qaeda takes over Syria, and that is acceptable since they won’t be
allied with Iran and Hezbollah.

This interview actually tells you more about John McCain’s mindset than
he intends. For him the whole conflict exists
solely because Syria is allied with Iran.  If you recall him singing “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb,
Bomb, Iran…” there can be no alternative conclusion.

As an older person himself, the Wrongologist thought
people grew wiser with age, or maybe that’s just Yoda, it certainly isn’t Mr.
McCain.


Then on Thursday, McCain told the Brookings
Institution that
“the Syrian state is disintegrating in much of the country, leaving vast
ungoverned spaces that are being filled by extremists, many aligned with Al Qaeda.”

So, there is no mistaking
the context of Monday’s remarks on Charlie Rose: McCain knows that Al Qaeda controls
much of Syria, but he is still willing to cast a blind eye on them. Indeed,
John McCain and his friend John Kerry, who is giving serious
thought to arming the rebels, are attempting to create a fiction called “vetted, moderate rebel units” in
Syria that the US could send weapons.

While
McCain seems to think that sorting the good rebels from the bad rebels is totally
do-able, the US’s ability to selectively arm certain rebels in Syria has been a
big question mark for a long time, and one of the main reasons for western
hesitancy towards getting involved. 

Look at McCain’s
basic premise:
If Assad wins the war and the Free Syrian Army, the Jihadists and Al Qaeda lose,
the region will descend into extremism. He means that Assad losing would be good for Iran
and Hezbollah, and bad for Israel.

He
ignores that the rebels wiped out Christian villages. They have eaten the organs of their enemies.
They have apparently used Sarin. He thinks we can pick the moderates in this group to support, although he didn’t even know which rebels he met when he secretly traveled into Syria. 

At
this stage of his political life, John McCain is in a permanent stumble. You
could say he’s stumbling forward, or flailing forward. Either way, he
blunders on, slouching toward Middle East chaos and maybe the mushroom cloud.

The Silver
Spoon Team’s Prayer:

Joint
Chiefs Try Explaining Themselves:

Wrongologist’s
Sunday Sermon:

There
are 26 members of the Senate
Armed Services Committee, only seven of them are women. When you consider
that women chair 3 of the 6 Armed Services subcommittees, you can better
appreciate their newfound power. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) chairs the
Subcommittee on Personnel, and she’s been a bulldog on the issue of sexual
assault in the military. In a full committee hearing on sexual assault this
week, the women on the committee pounded away on the witnesses, insisting that
more be done to protect service members and punish wrongdoing.

The military leaders
of the free world were in Senate Hearing Room 216, hunkered down and taking
fire from a 59-year-old woman who had them pinned to a
ridiculous piece of ground to defend and knew it. Sen. Clare
McCaskill,
(D-MO):

When she asked
whether the men wearing the stars had consulted with their colleagues from our
allies, Germany, Australia, and UK, about how it had worked when those military
forces transferred responsibility for prosecuting sexual assault cases from
unit commanders to military prosecutors, all they could say was, “Hey,
thanks, good idea, why didn’t we think of that?”

That struck even
McCaskill’s conservative Republican Missouri colleague, Roy
Blunt,
as a bridge too far. That’s “a terrible answer,” he scolded them.

Republicans
across the spectrum revealed their discomfort with even discussing sexual
assault in the military. But no one did it better than the venerable Sen. Saxby
Chambliss, (R-GA), who basically said “boys will be boys” as he
urged a go-slow approach to reforms:

Yeah,
let’s be careful not to interfere with hormones, because boys will be boys, you
see, so why are we even having this hearing?

And we wonder why it
has taken until now for this issue to get the attention it deserves in the
Senate?

As for the collection
of brass behind the parapets in the hearing room, their argument that changing
the command structure to more effectively prosecute sexual assault would
destroy “unit cohesion” and the military way of doing things seems
ridiculous on its face: How can you
have “good order and discipline” in your unit when soldiers who have
been assaulted are being pressured not to come forward?

It’s time for the
generals and admirals to stand up and own
the unconscionable abuses the current system has produced, take the
necessary steps to change the culture, and end military sexual abuse.

It’s also time for
the vestigial old men of Congress to stop dithering about hormones and the
sanctity of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and get on with this
necessary change.

Obama’s New
Hire:

Congress Gets Ready To Show Off Their
Expertise: