As our ultimate goal is self-improvement, it has been decided that the best way for the political articles to prosper is for them to be housed on a blog focused entirely on the political stuff. Thus, Politisink was born! The domain was an older, failed attempt to do a politics blog back in 2006 that I abandoned when I went to grad school. I am sure maybe two people in the world know that, and one of them is married to me. Now, Politisink is repurposed as the new site that will keep an eye on crazy mofos and the crazy stuff they want to do to our country. The Wingnut Web and other political articles will now be posted there (though what has appeared here will remain as I am far too lazy to move everything over) while the TarsTarkas.NET Blog will go back to posting cult movie news, Karen Mok photos, Battle Beast things, and other weird stuff that I see fit (until some other random article balloons up into a cultural phenomenon and takes over the blog again!) Don’t worry, there will be plenty of cross-promotion so those who don’t start checking Politisink out right away can catch up, and for those of you who will skip right by this article because it doesn’t have a picture of a hot chick or posts from morons on message boards in it. Actually, let’s just throw in crazy picture for old times sake!

Frog King not care for your freedoms, only tasty flies!

That’s better! Now, the writers here will be joining us at Politisink, both dm and skiplogic are already contributing away. Soon I’ll try to add on a few more, because, why not? That’s how you become an internet powerhouse and

So in conclusion, check out Politisink.com, where politics circles the drain!

EDIT: Okay, I rewrote part of this because it sucked!

“Inherently governmental functions” is a kind of ambiguous category that means “things you don’t contract out.”  The military official has proposed a five year time frame to assess these things that contractors are doing that they should not be.  Off to a good start.

~28,000 positions with contractors overseeing the contracts of other contractors.  About half of those we’re just going to wait five years on.

CACI is providing contracting oversight officials.  They have a shady history.

107,000 contractors in Afghanistan right now.

One of the commissioners actually works for a contractor.  Watch him debating Jeremy Scahill here and here.

I got a relevant question on SA: “how did mercenaries become legal” Answer here.

The LOGCAP contract is fundamentally insane.  POGO:  More Misbehavior by KBR Suspected on LOGCAP III Contract

Contractor seriously states above contract was “97-99% competitive” whatever that means.

The most immediately relevant example is a 32-page report [PDF] on how to destroy WikiLeaks that was subsequently leaked to WikiLeaks, a “security” breach that obviously constitutes a threat to national security itself.  I’ll post some excerpts to show the logic that goes into protecting our freedoms.

The first example pretty much speaks for itself.

The next concerns a report on an incident that violated the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC).  The nation’s protectors went on to clarify that, due to an executive order and an amendment inserted into the Senate resolution approving the CWC which,  “[S]tated United States‘
interpretation of how RCAs [Riot Control Agents--the chemical in question] might be used for specific defensive purposes.”

In a similar vein,  after blocking a provision that would have bombed aerial bombardment of civilians from being inserted into the Geneva Conventions, former British Prime Minister Lloyd George remarked that he was reserving Britain’s “right to bomb niggers.”  Many in the Pentagon must be very grateful at the moment for his pioneering work.

The document goes on to ask if the activities performed by WikiLikeaks is “Free Speech or Illegal Speech?”  It might be useful to recall the recent 5-4 Supreme Court decision about what’s considered free speech for this last excerpt.

I feel safer with the random guys on the internet from Iceland.

“How Progressive is the U.S. Federal tax system? A Historical and International Perspective” Emmanuel Saez and  Thomas Piketty, Journal of Economic Perspectives , 21(1), 3-24, Winter 2007

“Striking it Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States”, updated August 2009

With the estate tax currently suspended, the tax burden is currently shifted even further downward.  Online tax revolts aside for a moment, Carly Fiorina, the candidate challenging Boxer for the Senate, is also proposing to eliminate it permanently:

The plan also includes the elimination of the estate tax. “I think we should abolish the estate tax. The estate tax hits small businesses particularly hard. It hits agriculture particularly hard,” Fiorina said. “I keep stressing small businesses and family-owned businesses because they create two-thirds of new jobs in this country, they employ half the people. When you have a family-owned business that estate tax weighs heavily.”

“Small businesses”

March 8 (Bloomberg) — Lobbyists for small businesses, construction companies, manufacturers and other trade groups are racing the clock to convince Congress to reinstate the federal estate tax they’ve fought for years to abolish.

The National Federation of Independent Business and more than 40 business organizations wrote Senate and House leaders last week asking for quick action on a proposed 35 percent levy on inheritances worth more than $10 million per couple. The Associated General Contractors of America is urging members to contact lawmakers about the plan.

The groups have changed positions in a bid to head off higher taxes on the horizon: Unless Congress acts, current law would raise the tax next year to 55 percent on estates after they exceed $2 million per couple, from nothing this year.

“Clearly, we can’t live with what’s going to come in 2011,” said Chris Walters, an estate-tax lobbyist in Washington for NFIB, the trade group for small businesses.

And the wingnuts conflicted about social security and medicare are one thing, but this is something else entirely:

FROG JUMP, TENN. — But for one important detail, Stephen Fincher could be a perfect “tea party” candidate: a gospel-singing cotton farmer from this tiny hamlet in western Tennessee, seeking to right the listing ship of Washington with a commitment to lower taxes and smaller government.

The detail? Fincher accepts roughly $200,000 in farm subsidies each year.

With all of the screaming about “socialism” coming from these quarters, I suggest we at least show it to them.  A plan devised by two Swedish economists named Gosta Rehn and Rudolf Meidner would be a good start:

Rudolf Meidner’s share levy, unlike so many modern taxes, was extraordinarily difficult to evade. On the other hand it was not at all punitive. Unlike traditional corporate taxation, it did not subtract from the cash-flow or resources which the enterprise needed for investment. It diluted shareholder wealth without weakening the corporation as a productive concern. According to the original plan every company with more than fifty employees was obliged to issue new shares every year equivalent to 20 per cent of its profits. The newly issued shares — which could not be sold — were to be given to the network of ‘wage earner funds’, representing workplaces and local authorities. The latter would hold the shares, and reinvest the income they yielded from dividends, in order to finance future social expenditure. As the wage earner funds grew they would be able to play an increasing part in directing policy in the corporations which they owned.

From Deadheads in Davos to Nobel-laureate economists, from paleoconservatives to New Democrats, American leaders in the nineties came to believe that markets were a popular system, a far more democratic system than (democratically elected) governments….in addition to being mediums of exchange, markets were mediums of consent.  Markets expressed expressed the popular will more articulately more articulately and more meaningfully than did mere elections.  Markets conferred democratic legitimacy; markets were a friend of the little guy; markets brought down the pompous and the snooty; markets gave us what we wanted; markets looked out for our interests.

Except when they didn’t, especially starting in 2008.  A different Nobel-laureate economist, Joseph Stiglitz, said of the economic crisis, “In this sense, the fall of Wall Street is for market fundamentalism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for communism….This moment is a marker that the claims of financial market liberalization were bogus.”  This is not the first time the ideology has been discredited either.  In 1926, three years before the onset of the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes wrote about a “disposition towards public affairs, which we conveniently sum up as individualism and laissez-faire,” that sounds all too familiar, right down to its origins:

Nevertheless, that age would have been hard put to it to achieve this harmony of opposites if it had not been for the economists, who sprang into prominence just at the right moment. The idea of a divine harmony between private advantage and the public good is already apparent in Paley. But it was the economists who gave the notion a good scientific basis. Suppose that by the working of natural laws individuals pursuing their own interests with enlightenment in condition of freedom always tend to promote the general interest at the same time! Our philosophical difficulties are resolved-at least for the practical man, who can then concentrate his efforts on securing the necessary conditions of freedom. To the philosophical doctrine that the government has no right to interfere, and the divine that it has no need to interfere, there is added a scientific proof that its interference is inexpedient. This is the third current of thought, just discoverable in Adam Smith, who was ready in the main to allow the public good to rest on ‘the natural effort of every individual to better his own condition’, but not fully and self-consciously developed until the nineteenth century begins. The principle of laissez-faire had arrived to harmonise individualism and socialism, and to make at one Hume’s egoism with the greatest good of the greatest number. The political philosopher could retire in favour of the business man – for the latter could attain the philosopher’s summum bonum by just pursuing his own private profit.

Ten years later, he published his greatest work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, which revolutionized economics until the 1970′s when our leaders decided to try the magic markets thing again.

What I’m getting at is how strange it is that this remarkably stupid doctrine keeps managing to come back with disastrous consequences. Concerning the market–the one that’s rebounded to bring us a “jobless recovery” despite increasing unemployment and underemployment–public relations legend Edward Bernays noted in 1928:

…[I]t would be rash and unreasonable to take it for granted that because public opinion has come over to the side of big business, it will always remain there. Only recently, Prof. W. Z. Ripley of Harvard University, one of the foremost national authorities on business organization and practice, exposed certain aspects of big business which tended to undermine public confidence in large corporations. He pointed out that the stockholders’ supposed voting power is often illusory; that annual financial statements are sometimes so brief and summary that to the man in the street they are downright misleading; that the extension of the system of non-voting shares often places the effective control of corporations and their finances in the hands of a small clique of stockholders; and that some corporations refuse to give out sufficient information to permit the public to know the true condition of the concern.

Yet people continue to invest in it despite being more or less told to piss off when they complain about the absurd pay going to executives that should theoretically be going to them:

Group Inc.’s board of directors has received several demand letters from shareholders relating to compensation matters, including demands that Group Inc.’s board of directors investigates compensation awards over recent years, take steps to recoup alleged excessive compensation, and adopt certain reforms. After considering the demand letters, Group Inc.’s board of directors rejected the demands.

Still, they never learn.  In a recent column about the prospects of shareholder activism, the “executive director of the Millstein Center for Corporate Governance and Performance at the Yale School of Management” was quoted as saying, “Up until now, it’s been sort of a Soviet system…We have been operating in the United States under the myth that boards have been accountable to shareholders.”  What does this have to do with the Soviet Union? Its collapse didn’t bring about any magic change according to the population.

Update:

It would also be nice to see something new on this front:

You may recall the Kabul embassy guard scandal [1] that broke last fall—the photos documenting drunken, lewd behavior by embassy guards—all to the embarrassment of the U.S. State Department. Shortly thereafter, the Department fired [2] eight guards and announced it would not renew [3] the contract of ArmorGroup North America after it expires in July, but that it would grant the contractor a six-month extension “to allow for an orderly transition between contractors.”In the meantime, since ArmorGroup is still on the job until the end of this year, the State Department wants to toughen its oversight of the private security contractor, and it intends to do that by hiring another contractor [4] to oversee this one.

First the small point. I keep my television off for many good reasons, rarely turning it to C-SPAN when something really neat is happening like Congress passing Healthcare Reform, but if you need even more reasons to hate your digital set, especially in an election year, you have to look no further than Carly Florina. She is running for the Senate in California and if you haven’t already heard her name you’d surely recognize her campaign from their crazy ridiculous Demon Sheep TV ad. It’s a retarded ad to begin with, but even more so the people behind its production, Fred Davis III of Strategic Perception Inc., understand that in today’s viral video-obsessed internet world the more bizarre and weird the videos you produce are, the more people will talk about how their weird and bizarre your videos are and the person(s) attached to that video, thereby getting people to talk about the person the ad campaign is promoting.

What’s that mean for the American TV watching audience? For one it means you’ll probably be talking to your friends a lot this summer and fall about all the utterly stupid, nightmare inducing, repugnant, fact-less, commercial hallucinations you were seeing on television every day until you decided to put a shotgun to the screen so you could end the madness. Already the Florina campaign has a new epic 10-minute spot where they depict Senator Barbara Boxer’s head as a floating doom zeppelin of bitch coasting through the cities and green valleys of California (presumably where the Demon Sheep graze) to find her next meal in the form of a newborn Republican baby. Maybe this weird political campaign Florina is running is just a product of us wacky Californians and the chemicals in our drinking water, but what if every candidate with as much money as Florina talked to Fred Davis III and asked to get an equally batshit retarded TV campaign going? This balloon ad will not be the weirdest part of a political campaign we see this year, mark my words.

But on to my second and much graver point. With the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Committee it was established that corporations can use as much money as they please to fund political campaigns and candidates for elected office. When a business incorporates and becomes a “corporation” they become legally recognized as a “business entity” instead of a company owned by a bunch of people. This incorporation protects the individuals who run the company if someone happens to sue them, the lawsuit is instead directed to this incorporated “person” and the money derived from the lawsuit comes out of the “pockets” of the corporate “person”, the income and revenue of the business not the business owners.

This idea of corporate personhood has now been stretched so far that under the Citizens United ruling the “corporation” is now basically considered to have all the same rights as an average living breathing American citizen, including the right to throw their money around in any direction they choose, and as much money as they choose. In short this means that big business will now be directly influencing politicians and their campaigns to an even more exponential degree than they were before. Rulings like this will make damn sure that Carly Florina, an ex-CEO from a variety of big tech companies, will definitely have the funds to keep making her epic multi-million dollar feature-length campaign ads. A victory for political theater!

Today the first post-Citizens United corporate funded political campaign ad appeared in newspapers across Texas:

Some Republican for State Representative, sponsored by KDR Development Inc. I can’t find the website for KDR, I don’t know what kind of business they are in, but according to this article on The Economist the president of KDR had run against incumbent Chuck Hopson in a previous election. The ad doesn’t even say “vote for this guy we support him”. It simply says “vote for one of these Republicans over this guy in office cause the guy who runs the company who bought this ad lost out to him in a previous election”. I can only imagine how much more fun this ad game will get.

On a related note, through their interpretation of the Supreme Court ruling, the corporation Murray-Hill Inc. has decided that due to their new found corporate personhood their choosing to back the living, breathing, political figure known as Murray-Hill Inc. Murray-Hill Inc. is running for office in Maryland and part of me really hopes that Murray-Hill Inc. will win the race and be able to enact all that political legislation that Murray-Hill Inc. has worked so hard to get across during his (its?) political career. And just so you know, Murray-Hill Inc. is running for exactly the same reasons you might expect Murray-Hill Inc. to run for public office. Let the mockery that is our brave new corporate-funded political world commence!

At a recent press conference in Islamabad, a Pakistani reporter raised this issue to a noticeably frazzled Secretary of State Hilary Clinton. “What is actually terrorism in U.S. eyes?” the reporter asked. “Is it the killing of innocent people in, let’s say, drone attacks? Or is it the killing of innocent people in different parts of Pakistan, like the bomb blast in Peshawar two days ago? Which one is terrorism, do you think?”

An international law expert from Georgetown University has recently made the same point as the journalist:

CIA drone attacks produce America’s own unlawful combatants

In our current armed conflicts, there are two U.S. drone offensives. One is conducted by our armed forces, the other by the CIA. Every day, CIA agents and CIA contractors arm and pilot armed unmanned drones over combat zones in Afghanistan and Pakistan, including Pakistani tribal areas, to search out and kill Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters. In terms of international armed conflict, those CIA agents are, unlike their military counterparts but like the fighters they target, unlawful combatants. No less than their insurgent targets, they are fighters without uniforms or insignia, directly participating in hostilities, employing armed force contrary to the laws and customs of war. Even if they are sitting in Langley, the CIA pilots are civilians violating the requirement of distinction, a core concept of armed conflict, as they directly participate in hostilities.

He also makes a point at the end that’s extremely important:

And while the prosecution of CIA personnel is certainly not suggested, one wonders whether CIA civilians who are associated with armed drones appreciate their position in the law of armed conflict. Their superiors surely do.

The big reason for the expanded use of drones and the continued use of mercenaries is the political cover they provide.  Doing it through the CIA is a great way to escape congressional oversight (if congress actually intended to exercise it very seriously–as Scott Horton put it in the interview, it’s been “a complete joke”).  It would have been nice for them to at least rubber stamp the war in Pakistan rather than just adding a few lines into the annual DoD appropriations bill.

From the press release:

Two congressional lawmakers have announced legislation that would effectively remove military contractors from war zones.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) introduced the “Stop Outsourcing Security Act” on Tuesday. If passed, the act would force the United States to phase out its controversial use of private security contractors in war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan.

“The legislation would restore the responsibility of the American military to train troops and police, guard convoys, repair weapons, administer military prisons, and perform military intelligence,” the lawmakers’ offices said.

“The bill also would require that all diplomatic security be undertaken by US government personnel,” they added.

Yes, all of those things are currently done by private contractors.  The ban on private guards for diplomats is crucial as well because that’s where a lot of the money has been for armed contractors and Blackwater’s first important gig was actually keeping Paul Bremer alive in Iraq.

According to a report published last month, “As of September 2009, there were almost 22,000 armed private security contractors in
Iraq and Afghanistan.” and that “Many analysts and government officials believe that DOD would be unable to execute its mission without PSCs.”  While I wouldn’t be surprised that they believe that, it was not only possible but the way it was done up until the mid 90′s and the last 15 years or so have been far from the most impressive in US military history.  It’s more likely  that the mission needs to be adjusted.

More from  the congressional research service report:

In Iraq there are reportedly more than 50 PSCs employing more than 30,000 armed employees working for a variety of government and private sector clients. In Afghanistan, there are currently 52 PSCs licensed to operate in Afghanistan with some 25,000 registered security contractors. PSCs operating in Afghanistan are limited to 500 employees  and can only exceed 500 with permission from the Cabinet. Because of the legal restrictions placed on security companies in Afghanistan, a number of PSCs are operating without a license or are exceeding the legal limit, including security contractors working for NATO and the U.S. Government. Many analysts believe that regulations governing PSCs are only enforced in Kabul; outside Kabul there is no government reach at present and local governors, chiefs of police, and politicians run their own illegal PSCs. Estimates of the total number of security contractors in Afghanistan, including those that are not licensed, are as high as 70,000. The majority of these PSCs do not work for the U.S. government.

Pretty scary stuff.  I’m anxiously awaiting the reactions from the industry, so I’ll update this post when they get released.

Energy

PG&E is attempting to put an initiative on the ballot to amend the constitution to protect their monopoly:

SAN FRANCISCO — Pacific Gas & Electric Co. is funding a June ballot initiative that would amend California’s constitution to make it much harder for cities and counties to offer residents another choice for buying their power.

The investor-owned utility, which has about 15 million customers in northern and central California, has already spent $6.5 million on Proposition 16, according to state campaign records. The company is the sole source of the initiative’s funding.

The initiative would require a two-thirds, or super-majority, vote before local governments could create a new form of public power called “community choice aggregation,” or CCA. These public power entities, made possible by state legislation passed in 2002 after the state’s energy crisis, allow cities or counties to buy energy on the wholesale market to sell to residents.

The “state’s energy crisis” being a reference to Enron.   Their argument is the standard against more direct forms of democracy with a revealing little twist:

PG&E says a constitutional amendment is needed to protect taxpayers and ratepayers from possible losses incurred by inexperienced local governments entering the risky power wholesaling business.

The reference to increased costs for ratepayers seems to be a tacit admission that they’ll raise rates on the captive consumer base that stays with them–skipping the initiative and passing on $6.5 million in savings would be unthinkable–to make up for the ones they lose. Nevertheless,  it’s related to us as being the potential result of reckless city councils interfering with a benevolent private monopoly with remarkable ease.

Health Care

Blue Cross raising its rates by approximately 34% was so bad that it made national news and seems to have temporarily backfired on them:

The parent company of Anthem Blue Cross has canceled a meeting next week with investors to review its 2010 financial outlook so that executives can prepare for a congressional hearing into its large rate hikes for individual policyholders in California.

A subcommittee of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce has called WellPoint Inc. Chief Executive Angela F. Braly to testify Feb. 24 about premium increases of as much as 39% for many of Anthem’s 800,000 individual policyholders in California.

The canceled meeting understandably pissed off their investors a bit, causing their shares to drop by 2.3% today, though they’re still up from a few months ago due to the assurance they have from Congress that no real reform will take place:

In response, they’ve apparently decided to seek more vulnerable prey whose pleas for help are less likely to be heard:

Patients who are covered by Anthem Blue Cross may have trouble finding a physical or occupational therapist who will accept their insurance. A growing number of therapists are rejecting new contracts with Anthem that pay them half of their normal rate. Anthem has offered the new lower-rate contracts to physical, occupational, and speech therapists. The insurer says it’s cutting the reimbursement rate to help control rising health care costs.

Anthem has offered the new lower-rate contracts to physical, occupational, and speech therapists. The insurer says it’s cutting the reimbursement rate to help control rising health care costs.

Water

Senator Feinstein has decided to try and put a brutal end to the ongoing battle to preserve profits for both Central Valley farmers and California’s little known water robber-barons.  For a detailed explanation, check out this article by Yasha Levine at exiled, but it basically works like this:  Stewart Resnick, the politically connected owner of the massive Roll International Corporation, essentially “Enron-ized” a huge share of California’s water:

The story of how the state’s largest water bank — jump-started with $74 million in taxpayer money — ended up as an integral piece of the private empire of Stewart Resnick begins with a lawsuit, or at least the threat of it.

A seven-year drought ending in the early 1990s pitted Southern California water contractors, such as the Metropolitan Water District, against agricultural contractors, such as the Kern County Water Agency. Each region made its case to the state, telling why it deserved to receive the water guaranteed by long-standing contracts. In the drought’s worst years, urban users got 30% of the draw, while Kern farmers received less than 5%.

In 1994, agricultural and urban interests threatened to sue the state for nondelivery. The main parties gathered in a closed-door meeting in Monterey to hash out a settlement. Public interest groups, environmentalists and smaller water contractors — locked out of the meeting — cried foul.

When it was over, the very flow of California water had been redirected.

With the new direction being straight into Resnick’s private control.  This was working out (for him) quite nicely until this year.  The recession and lower than average rainfall have motivated California agribusiness to fight to retain their share of corporate welfare.  Enter Senator Feinstein to play the role of King Solomon in her own very special way:

Sen. Dianne Feinstein ignited a firestorm among fellow California Democrats on Thursday as word spread of her proposal to divert Northern California water to Central Valley farmers.

Feinstein wants to attach the proposal as an amendment to a fast-tracked Senate jobs bill. She is pitching the plan as a jobs measure to address the economic calamity in the Central Valley. It would increase farm water allocations from 10 percent last year to 40 percent this year and next, an amount that farmers say is the bare minimum they need.

Where “farmers” is meant to be understood as agribusiness.

]]> http://www.tarstarkas.net/blog/2010/02/16/california-is-under-attack/feed/ 0 http://www.tarstarkas.net/blog/2010/02/12/blackwater-kicked-out-of-iraq/ http://www.tarstarkas.net/blog/2010/02/12/blackwater-kicked-out-of-iraq/#comments Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:12:55 +0000 dm http://www.tarstarkas.net/blog/?p=4169 The Iraqis have been working on this for years (and lied to about it) but it looks like they’ve finally pulled it off.  Iraq’s interior minister expelled 250 of their employees from the country yesterday:

Making the announcement on Thursday, Jawad Bolani, the interior minister, said: “We have sent an order to 250 former Blackwater employees, who today are working with other security companies in Iraq, to leave the country in seven days and we have confiscated their residence permits.

“All of those concerned were notified four days ago and so they have three days to leave. This decision was made in connection with the crime that took place at Nisur Square.”

Separately, more charges of prostitution and fraud are being reported by the Washington Post :

In court records unsealed this week, a husband and wife who worked for Blackwater said they have firsthand knowledge of the company falsifying invoices, double-billing federal agencies and improperly charging the government for personal expenses…

In their suit, the Davises assert that Blackwater officials kept a Filipino prostitute on the company payroll for a State Department contract in Afghanistan, and billed the government for her time working for male Blackwater employees in Kabul. The prostitute’s salary was categorized as part of the company’s “Morale Welfare Recreation” expenses, they alleged.

If you’ll recall, not that long ago a big fuss was being made over alleged prostitution and fraud and canceling contracts with another organization:

Multiple bills were produced with many co-sponsors, with one eventually being passed and quickly ruled unconstitutional by a federal court.  Legislation to simply restrict companies running wild with mercenaries has not been given nearly as much attention. In 2007, Illinois Representative Jan Schakowsky introduced a bill to do just that, titled the Stop Outsourcing Security Act .  It was promptly sent to die in committee.