Second-rate Software

I have spent the past month or so trying to publish a family memoir via Lulu.com. The site has received decent reviews, particularly for projects of this type. I found it far from decent; it proved to be a very frustrating experience dealing with Lulu. It could be that I am dumb and/or ignorant about computers and software, but, since I was able to earn my living in computer software for 40 years, somehow I don't think that is the case.

Now I haven't been on the Lulu site every day, but just about every time I tried to do something I ran into problems. While there were a fair number of problems (e.g., program loops, program stops because of unknown and undocumented errors, etc.), the following were the ones that really frosted me.

Problem 1: Lulu claims to be able to handle Word files. Well, Word files that printed perfectly on my printer mysteriously had a page added to them by Lulu so that the pagination was thrown off and Lulu also had problems with some pages that, again, were perfectly centered on my print-out. Solution for me - abandon Word and switch to a PDF file.

Problem 2: I had proof copies sent to me via priority U.S. Mail. I then wanted to have my final order of hard copies sent to my house. After an hour I gave up trying to change the mailing address and provider; I now await transporting a heavy package from the post office to my home.

Problem 3: After asking for tech support I was able to produce a paperback version of the memoir. However, there is no way to change from priority to standard mail. So, I'm stuck paying 21% more for the books.

Problem 4: The on-line support staff is fairly junior as they tend to send you to web pages rather than answer basic questions.

My father would call this a learning experience. I agree. It's too bad Lul.com can't learn from it. I certainly have.

The New World

From McClatchy

Minimizing Risk

Nouriel Roubini and Matthew Richardson want to motivate banks to have a lower risk profile. They think that the way to do it is to tax the banks. Yes, the current proposed legislation does have a form of tax, but it's designed more to have the banks pay for a future bailout rather than as a risk preventer, which is the aim of Roubini and Richardson (R&R).

R&R want a tax based on two elements: an insurance premium that the bank pays on debts that are guaranteed by us, whether explicitly or implicitly and a fee that would compensate those who are hurt by the next systemic financial crisis. They reckon that a major financial crisis occurs every fifty years or so and costs about a 5% loss in GDP. This assumption translates into a $14 billion annual tax on the banks.

R&R and friends have also published a paper entitled "Measuring Systemic Risk" which analyzed the risk to the large banks as of June 2007. Mirabile dictu, they concluded that the firms at greatest risk were the ones who failed in real life.

Not a Poster Child

I'm talking about the Minerals Management Service of the Department of the Interior. In 2008 Interior's Inspector General documented a "climate of ethical failure" at the Service; there were payoffs of money, sex and drugs and a host of other violations of law and ethics. In 2007 the IG found that the Service was not collecting moneys due us. Now the GAO has found that the Service is not exactly a dedicated steward of the environment; certain information is protected from the prying eyes of its staff who have responsibilities for the environment and doesn't do a very good job of analyzing risks of extracting oil and gas. And, of course, there is this little problem off the coast of Louisiana.

Well, they're only spending our tax dollars. What are our leaders doing about this?

Proposed Financial Reform Explained

Mike Konczal does an excellent job of dissecting the financial reform bill that will be debated this week. The following chart summarizes his thoughts.

The Long Downturn?

That's the title of an article by Robert Brenner of UCLA in which he argues that the Great Recession is more than a financial meltdown. As his title indicates, it has been coming for some time due, at heart, to overcapacity which has led to reduced profitability.

He doesn't say where his numbers come from but one table shows the decline in world economic health from 1960 to 2007. Some examples:

• GDP growth year to year - In the 1960s the U.S. GDP grew 4.2%, a rate not matched in the ensuing decades; in the period 2000 - 2007 the annual growth was 2.3%. Germany is even worse; 4.4% to 1.2%.
• Labor productivity as measured by GDP per worker - From 2.3 to 1.7 for us and from 6.7 to 1.2 for Germany.
• Real compensation per employee - How he measures this I don't know but it went from 2.7 to o.6 for us and 5.7 to 0.2 for Germany.
• Profit rates - 14.6% in the 1960s for U.S. to 10% in the 21st century. Germany 17.7% to 9.5%.

And the list goes on to employment, plant and equipment, spending, all downward spirals.

I think he does have some, perhaps even a strong, basis for his claims. Clearly, we have moved very far away from the manufacturing economy of the post-WWII economy. Equally obvious is the decline of the middle class.

Brenner concludes that the administration's financial efforts over the past months have been directed primarily to saving the banks, rather than solving the deeper economic problems. He has a point.

Death Comes to All of Us

The question that John Mueller and Mark Stewart raise in Foreign Affairs is whether the money we spend on counter-terrorism is a wise investment. Mueller has been questioning these expenditures - which total $1 trillion since 9/11 without counting Iraq and Afghanistan - for quite a while and will soon be publishing a book on the subject.

We should worry more about dying in an accident than at the hands of a terrorist as death by accident is almost a thousand times more likely than death by terrorism. Here's a chart comparing risks of fatalities.

You can see that the only serious terrorism risks are in Northern Ireland and Israel; this should not come as a surprise. Whereas the risk in this country is 1 in 3,500,000. We'd have to have a 9/11 catastrophe every year to bring the risk down to 1 in 100,000. The amount of money we are spending on counter-terrorism is not well spent, although it makes the politicians think they are doing something for the country.

What else could we have spent $1 trillion on in the past nine years?

McClatchy Reports on the Credit Agencies Hearing

It's a pretty strong example of greed overcoming obligations to the financial community.

My emphases.

WASHINGTON — The chairman and chief executive of Moody's Corp. said Friday that he didn't know that his company continued to give investment-grade ratings to complex financial instruments backed by shaky subprime mortgages even after it downgraded billions of dollars worth of such deals in the summer of 2007.

His admission came during a daylong hearing by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which is looking into the origins of the nation's worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Moody's chief Ray McDaniel, under questioning, said that he didn't think his company had continued to rate complex deals backed by U.S. mortgages after it and competitor Standard & Poor's jolted the markets in July 2007 with massive downgrades of earlier deals.

"I apologize, I do not recall that," McDaniel said.

The panel's chairman, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., then presented him with documentation that both Moody's and S&P gave investment-grade ratings to a Citigroup deal in December 2007, worth almost $400 million, backed by shaky subprime loans that by then clearly were toxic.

The point Levin was making — and made repeatedly — is that credit-rating agencies did whatever was needed to get lucrative fees, some as high as $1.4 million, for rating complex deals.

Later, McDaniel stressed that preserving market share "is not as important as ratings quality."

While other Wall Street executives have expressed contrition when they appeared before Congress, McDaniel and former S&P President Kathleen Corbet were unapologetic on Friday.

Throughout the day in earlier testimony and in e-mails released by Levin, however, former Moody's and S&P officials told how they were pushed out or quit in frustration because managers badgered them to "massage" complex deals until they could land the business.

A McClatchy investigation in October documented how top managers from the structured finance division, which rated the complex deals, were moved into the top executive suites at Moody's and effectively took over the company.

McDaniel and Corbet said they were unaware that their analysts felt pressured to sacrifice the quality of investment-grade ratings to maintain market share and earn the huge accompanying fees.

Investment-grade ratings gave investors the illusion of safe bets, allowing big Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs to peddle the securities across the globe. Moody's and its chief competitors were key players in the prelude to a near meltdown of global finance in September 2008.

Called to appear before the panel, Richard Michalek, a former Moody's vice president and senior credit officer, described the ratings process for deals that could bring more than $1 million in fees as a "must say yes" atmosphere.

Frank Raiter, a former managing director at S&P and the head of the group that rated pools of residential mortgages, told the panel that analysts routinely sought direction from top management about the shaky deals they were being asked to rate.

"The guidance was not forthcoming from the top," he said, later adding, "I retired because I got tired of the frustration."

Levin read e-mail after e-mail from inside the ratings agencies about deals that never should have been rated, much less received investment-grade ratings.

"These e-mails are just devastating to the kind of culture that is going on here," he said.

Most striking was testimony from Eric Kolchinsky, a Moody's managing director who in 2007 was in charge of the division that rated the complex deals called collateralized debt obligations. CDOs are securities backed by pools of U.S. mortgages that have been packaged together into bonds and sold to investors.

Kolchinsky recounted how in the first two quarters of 2007, his group generated more than $200 million in revenue for Moody's by giving complex deals investment-grade ratings _ which told investors that they were safe bets. In the late summer of 2007, however, Kolchinsky was informed by superiors that bonds issued a year earlier were about to be severely downgraded.

That should have required a new methodology for ratings on deals that were still pending, but when he tried to do that, he was told not to. It amounted to securities fraud, in his opinion.

"My manager declined to do anything about the potential fraud, so I raised the issue to a more senior manager," he testified. He said that the complaint resulted in a change to methodology. "I believe this action saved Moody's from committing securities fraud. Because of the culture, I knew what I did would possibly jeopardize my role at Moody's."

He was right. A month later, he was sent a nasty e-mail asking why his market share slipped from 98 percent to 94 percent in the third quarter. The e-mail came, he said, just days after Moody's had downgraded more than $33 billion in bonds backed by subprime mortgage loans. Less than two months after challenging the integrity of the ratings, Kolchinsky was removed from his post and given a lower-paying job elsewhere in the company with far less responsibility. He eventually left.

Under questioning from Levin, Kolchinsky acknowledged that he and his staff rated the complex Goldman Sachs deal that this month became the subject of fraud charges brought against Goldman by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The SEC alleges that Goldman failed to disclose to investors that hedge fund mogul John Paulson helped pick the mortgages in the deal with an eye toward betting that they'd fail. Kolchinsky said this information was never shared with Moody's.

"I did not know and … I am fairly certain my staff did not know either," Kolchinsky said.

Asked by Levin whether that would have affected the rating the deal received, Kolchinsky said yes.

"From my perspective it is something I would have wanted to know. It is more of a qualitative, not quantitative assessment. It changes the incentives of the structure," Kolchinsky said. "It just changes the whole dynamic of the structure."

In one e-mail presented by Levin, an S&P employee inquiring about evidence that subprime lender Fremont General was showing problems with poor underwriting was told not to worry about it. Levin seized on this e-mail when grilling Susan Barnes, an S&P managing director, angrily asking her why relevant information and poor performance was discarded.

"Why doesn't the supervisor say, 'Damn right, it's relevant,'?" demanded Levin, eventually coaxing a response from Barnes.

Barnes said that, "The assumptions we use in our criteria have obviously not panned out the way we had expected."

In written remarks, Corbet gave no ground. She said all deals were rated by teams of analysts, who were supervised by individual managers. Her role as president, Corbet said, was to set overall strategy and work with her parent company, McGraw-Hill.

McDaniel also offered no apology. Instead, he said that his company took steps to remedy what was going wrong as information became available. Former Moody's executives testified to the contrary.

McDaniel said that Moody's warned of declining underwriting standards for mortgages as early as 2003. However, Moody's continued to rate the complex deals backed by U.S. mortgages, which became a huge portion of the company's business.

Moody's is under pressure on many fronts. California Attorney General Jerry Brown this week filed a court action seeking to force Moody's to comply with a subpoena he issued for information seven months ago. A special Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, charged by Congress to report on the causes of the crisis, issued a subpoena to Moody's, complaining that the company has failed to provide information in a timely manner.

Perspectives on the Size of Big Banks

Here are two ways to look at how big the really big banks have become:

• In 1995 the six largest banks had assets which equaled 17% of GDP. That number today is 63%.
• What percentage of bank assets are owned by the ten largest banks? In 1990, 24%; in 2000, 44%; in 2009, 58%.

Another way to look at the banks' sway is to ask are appropriate laws being enforced?

• In 1970 the Federal Reserve was given the power to limit the size of banks. It has exercised this power zero times.
• In 1994 a law was passed that no bank could own more than 10% of total deposits. Was it ever enforced? Not as far as Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Chase are concerned as they are in violation.

And a relevant quote from none other than Mr. Exuberance, Alan Greenspan, “In 1911, we broke up Standard Oil. So what happened? The individual parts became more valuable than the whole. Maybe that’s what we need.”

Adding to the cost of our wars

The Army Times reports that each month 950 veterans who are being treated by the Veterans Administration try to kill themselves; 7% (6 victims) succeed. The VA extrapolates that double that number who are not being treated by the VA kill themselves.

Each month the VA's suicide phone line receives 10,000 calls.

Last year 1,621 male veterans of our 21st century wars attempted suicide, 84 succeeded; 4 of the female veterans of these wars killed themselves, 247 tried.

Battle of the sAges

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Serving Main Street

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Thomas Hoenig, President of the KC federal Reserve Bank, continues to argue for all of the banks in this country, not just the behemoths. In his opinion the Treasury should not have to petition anyone to put a dying bank in receivership; such a process is too likely to be subverted by the political clout of the big guys. And, in restricting the Fed to supervise only the behemoths, the proposed legislation ignores completely the 6,700 other banks in this country and makes the Fed the "central bank of Wall Street, not the central bank of the United States".

The American Athlete in the 21st Century

Last night Josh Selby, a high school basketball player, announced on national television that he would be attending Kansas in the fall. I guess because I am not a follower of college (or high school) basketball it's to be expected that I would have no interest in this news. Yet, I find it disheartening that so much is being made of this decision. Why this should be the case I don't know as it is simply another example of the depths to which this country's media has sunk.

It sounds as though Selby is really gifted in basketball, but where will he be twenty years from now? Will he be able to build a life for himself apart from basketball? It looks as though his life till now has been just basketball - and adults have led him on. He attended three high schools solely because the coaches were so desirous of having him on their team and one has to assume that the school principals seconded the coaches.

Maybe now something will be done

William Black points out three examples of problems in our financial industry that were exposed this week:

1. Citi lied to Fannie and Freddie about the quality of the mortgages Citi had sold to them. Citi claimed the mortgages were "conforming". 60% were not.
2. WaMu's testimony on Capitol Hill convinced Black that their accounting was fraudulent.
3. And, the Goldman case makes three.

Then, of course, last month we had the Lehman Brothers case. And this week ProPublica highlighted the Magnetar case, which is almost identical to the Goldman case.

How can our leaders not tighten up financial industry regulations?

The Goldman Sachs Charge Simplified

McClatchy has a fairly simple explanation of what Goldman is alleged to have done.

Finally, Someone is complaining about private military contractors

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

And that someone is General McChrystal. He thinks we rely on them too much. There are too many of them. And they cost too much.

Could he have been influenced by this story which claims that the trainers for DynCorp did not adjust the sights on the rifles being used by the Afghans DynCorp was being paid to train? That was why the trainees marksmanship never improved. Despite the shoddy reputation DynCorp has acquired, someone wants to buy the company for $1.5 billion. The buyer is the canny investor Cerberus. You may recall that we, the taxpayers, bailed them out of their investments in Chrysler and GMAC.

Not a good week for Goldman Sachs

They got hit with a charge of fraud for a CDO deal they made with Paulson & Co. A member of the board of directors is leaving in connection with the Galleon scandal.

Not yet airborne

The Congressional Oversight Panel is not happy with the Treasury's handling of the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP). Their primary concern is the almost glacial pace of making any significant impact on the foreclosure problem. In an interview with ABC, the Panel Chair contrasted HAMP and Tarp thusly, "When Wall Street had a problem, we managed to find solutions and find them very fast. We are not doing the same for the real economy and that's where the emphasis should be."

There are still 200,000+ homes entering foreclosure each month. The Panel feels that there are ten homes that will be lost for every home that will be "saved". "Saved" is a relative term as some of those who are in the program will, in fact, very likely, default when the five-year modification period ends.

The Panel is also concerned with the changing playing field that has arisen because of the Treasury's introduction of new programs. It's confusing plus it may induce lenders to wait for a better program.

Warren expands upon the report in this video.

McGovern Does Not Give Up Easily

Congressman Jim McGovern from Massachusetts actually took some steps to shut down the Iraq war; and I'm talking about 2008. He did not succeed, but, at least, he did something, which is more than can be said for our other Massachusetts Congressmen. Now he's trying to shut down our misadventure in Afghanistan. He's teamed with Russ Feingold, another guy who actually seems to work for us, and Bill Jones, who is a Republican, with legislation to force the administration to specify a timetable for withdrawal from another of our 21st century quagmires.

The legislation is simple. The press release says that it

• Would require the president to provide a plan and timetable for drawing down our forces in Afghanistan and identify any variables that could require changes to that timetable.
• Would safeguard U.S. taxpayer dollars by ensuring all U.S. activity in Afghanistan be overseen by an Inspector General.
• Does not set a specific date for withdrawal.

I know that it's extremely unlikely that the legislation will get very far. But, finally, some of our leaders are actually trying to lead and lead in a sensible direction.

Bacevich and Moyers

Andrew Bacevich was interviewed by Bill Moyers last week. Bacevich had some interesting - and dispiriting - comments as to how things stand there. Here are some excerpts:

BILL MOYERS: These civilian casualties that we've been hearing about, they're inevitable in war, right?

ANDREW BACEVICH: Sure they are. But I think that what's particularly important about the incidents that we're reading about is that they really call into question U.S. strategy. I mean, when General McChrystal conceived of this counterinsurgency approach in Afghanistan, one of the, sort of the core principles is that we would act in ways that would demonstrate our benign intentions. We're supposed to be protecting the population. And when it turns out that U.S. forces are killing non-combatants, and there are repeated incidents that have occurred, I think it calls into question the sincerity, the seriousness of the strategy. Or it calls into question the extent to which McChrystal is actually in control of the forces that he commands.

There doesn't seem to be any noticeable change, and any noticeable reduction in the frequency with which these incidents are occurring. So, I mean, were I an Afghan, I think I would not place a whole heck of a lot of credibility on the claims that, you know, "We're here to help."

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BILL MOYERS: General McChrystal himself has said that we've shot - and this is his words not mine—an amazing number of people over there who did not seem to be a threat to his troops.

ANDREW BACEVICH: I think that is—that's clearly the case. When McChrystal was put in command last year, and devised his counterinsurgency strategy, the essential core principle of that strategy is that we will protect the population. We will protect the people. And the contradiction is that ever since President Obama gave McChrystal the go-ahead to implement that strategy, we have nonetheless continued to have this series of incidents in which we're not only not protecting the population. But indeed we're killing non-combatants.

----------------------------------------------------

Well, here in the year 2010, nobody in the officer corps believes in military victory. And in that sense, the officer corps has, I think, unwittingly really forfeited its claim to providing a unique and important service to American society. I mean, why, if indeed the purpose of the exercise in Afghanistan is to, I mean, to put it crudely, drag this country into the modern world, why put a four-star general in charge of that? Why not—why not put a successful mayor of a big city? Why not put a legion of social reformers? Because the war in Afghanistan is not a war as the American military traditionally conceives of war.

It is the longest war in American history. And it is a war for which there is no end in sight. And to my mind, it is a war that is utterly devoid of strategic purpose. And the fact that that gets so little attention from our political leaders, from the press or from our fellow citizens, I think is simply appalling, especially when you consider the amount of money we're spending over there and the lives that are being lost whether American or Afghan.

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ANDREW BACEVICH: First of all, we need to assess the threat realistically. Osama bin Laden is not Adolf Hitler. Al-Qaeda is not Nazi Germany. Al-Qaeda poses a threat. It does not pose an existential threat. We should view Al-Qaeda as the equivalent of an international criminal conspiracy. Sort of a mafia that in some way or another draws its energy or legitimacy from a distorted understanding of a particular religious tradition.

The Rubber Room Is Closing...

at least in New York City. The room was a gathering place where the school system sent teachers who were waiting for disciplinary hearings. The teachers do nothing useful for the school system there. They simply collect their full salary and benefits and, maybe, catch up on their private reading or surf the net. The teachers may have been justly or unjustly accused. They can stay there for years. It costs the city around $50,000,000 a year to keep the room open while paying the teachers.

In the Fall when the room closes, the accused will do some work for the school system. It won't be teaching but at least the taxpayers will get some return for their money.

He has to see the birth certificate...

or he won't go to Afghanistan. That's the word of Lt. Col. Terrence Lakin. Of course, he's talking about the birth certificate of Barrack Obama. Lakin reasons that if Obama is not eligible to be president as he is not native-born, then Lakin does not have to obey him.

You have to wonder about a system that certifies Lakin as a doctor and a colonel. One assumes that people certified as such are reasonably sane.

Where we are now

Jeff Madrick has a really good summary in the NY Review of Books of where the economy is in April 2010:

A year and a half after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and the near collapse of the global financial system that followed, the US Congress still has adopted no new rules to reregulate financial institutions. Well over three years have passed since the housing market began to unravel after an unprecedented boom fed by Wall Street speculation. Some financial firms borrowed more than forty times their capital at the height of speculation in 2006 and 2007 to invest in mortgage and other securities. Yet today, there are still no significantly higher capital requirements for them. There are no restraints on multimillion-dollar banker compensation, except on the executives of companies that took and have not yet paid back bailout funds from the Bush administration’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Most of the major firms, including Goldman Sachs and even struggling Citigroup, already have.

There are no adequate new restrictions on the private credit-rating agencies such as Moody’s, which doled out AAA ratings in increasing numbers even as mortgage securities became far more risky in 2006 and mortgage defaults started to rise. There are no new requirements to trade derivatives openly and transparently, and they are still being traded in obscurity. The value of these highly leveraged and typically volatile instruments was based on other more stable securities, such as treasury bonds, which enabled investment firms to take on more risky investments while avoiding regulatory restrictions. And there are no new regulations to protect consumers from credit card or mortgage fraud, despite rampant deception and abuse of homeowners.

Meantime, financial institutions are thriving again. After many posted large losses in 2008, the banking firms earned record profits in 2009, and are set to pay as much as $145 billion in bonuses to their employees. The rest of the American economy is largely suffering. A congressional oversight panel headed by Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Warren reported in December that lending to businesses and consumers by major banks was down from the previous year, especially by the twenty banks that received the biggest bailouts. The unemployment rate hovers around 10 percent. When those who have given up looking for jobs or are taking temporary jobs are included, about one in six Americans who want to work full-time cannot do so. Household incomes are suffering in general and because of high levels of debt, few experts see a strong economic recovery in the making. Three years after housing prices fell by an average of one third, they are still not rising. As a result of the recession the federal deficit keeps increasing as tax receipts flounder, preventing the federal government from introducing programs to rebuild infrastructure, improve education, and provide health care for all Americans.

You have to wonder

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Twice in the past few days I've learned that a letter I or a friend sent was returned because it was supposedly undeliverable. Yet, my friend received a letter from the address to which she mailed her letter and my letter was properly addressed. Both envelopes were handwritten. I wonder whether the post office is scanning addresses and the scanner does not like some handwriting.

Leaving Afghanistan

One of the prerequisites for our leaving is a functioning police force, but, based on this article in Der Spiegel, such a force is unlikely anytime soon despite our having poured in over $6 billion in training funds and the Germans having spent eight years training and the Italians having made a significant contribution.

The basic problem is getting good recruits. 90% of those being trained are illiterate, which, by itself, creates problems. But many of them have a hard time concentrating for more than a half-hour; some even have trouble walking a straight line. So, modern equipment sits on the shelf. And, we must remember that Afghanistan is not a Western country. It is a very different world; family and regional ties are stronger than any training or lectures we give these recruits.

When will we face reality?

Making the numbers look better

Most public firms release financial statements each quarter. Naturally, these statements have an impact on the firms' stock. Banks have been pilloried over the past year or two for taking too many risks. So, of course, banks want to be seen as being righteous stewards who do not take undue risk. That's why they play games with the quarterly results. One game they play involves the borrowing they use to fund securities trades, which was a prime factor in the blow-up and is seen as being not exactly a risk-averse practice. The NY Fed has shown that the big banks always seem to have considerably less of this type debt at the end of the quarter than they have during the quarter. I wonder why this is so. Perhaps, I'll ask my 9 year-old grandson if he knows.

They are dogged

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The Westboro Baptist Church certainly knows how to get into the media - insult ("insult" is too weak a word) the dead, be they U.S. soldiers or West Virginia miners. Now they claim the mine explosion was God's work. He was retaliating to threats to the church and its esteemed pastor; the threats emanated from West Virginia.

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• Westboro Baptist Church Is Too Awful Even For The KKK (alan.com)

Bring back the draft

In the February issue of Armed Forces Journal, Lt. Col. Paul Yingling makes a strong argument for reinstating the draft. To me, his strongest point is that the country is really not involved with deciding to go to war and with supporting the war if the war is fought by others; it is only when citizens realize that a particular war will personaally impact them that they really get involved. We saw the nation fully support WWII and, conversely, force us to pull out of Vietnam. In both those wars we all knew people who had been wounded or killed. In WWII, in particular, even kids knew that we were at war and many kids made sacrifices for the war effort. One has to wonder whether we would have entered Iraq if you knew your son would be drafted. Would we have pressed Congress more to do its duty and not defer to the Executive? Yingling believes that Congress has not done its job.

In the April issue of the same publication, Curtis Gilroy attempts to rebut Yingling's argument. I don't think he does an effective job. In fact, Yingling preempts many of Gilroy's reasons for backing the volunteer army.

I don't like ad-hominem arguments, but I note that Gilroy is a Pentagon employee in charge of recruiting. Yingling seems to be a rebel of a sort; he first became known to the general public with his article, "A Failure of Generalship", which was not exactly a paean of praise for our military leaders.

Do as I say

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That seems to be the advice of our new Senator, Scott Brown. His campaign touted fiscal control. Yet, he is backing GE's efforts despite the Pentagon's assertion that such an engine is not needed. to provide an alternative engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter So far GE has received $2.4 billion for its work on building the engine that the Pentagon does not want. Brown is not the first Mass. Senator to support GE. The contract means jobs for GE in Lynn. Hence, Kennedy and Kerry also supported GE.

What's that old-fashioned saying about working for the good of the nation? Will we ever find a Senator who actually does that?

Apathy

Image by Mark Sardella via Flickr

It's a constant source of wonder to me how people can go ape over various government issues but do zippo to try to solve the problems they yell about. For example, Town Meeting is where the voters decide how their money is to be spent by their Town and what by-laws should govern them. Yet here on Martha's Vineyard very few voters attend Town Meeting. In 2009 the town with the highest percentage was Aquinnah with 18%; Oak Bluffs had only 6.3%. As a result, each voter who attended was responsible for approving almost $80,000 of a town's budget; 1221 voters spent $93,000,000.

Another example: there are no contests for Town offices in West Tisbury. There are about twenty openings, none of which has a contest. There is even one where there is not a candidate. Other towns are not as bad, but, again, there are very few contests.

I've lived in a couple of places but, judged by letters to the editor of the local newspaper and overheard conversations, this is one place where no one and nothing is immune to criticism. And yet being a responsible citizen does not seem to be a fact of life here.

If my son or daughter were fighting in Afghanistan...

I would be apes**t at Karzai's comments over the past few days. It looks like he thinks we will not succeed fast enough for him, so he's starting to look for alternatives which will keep him in power. How any rational person could claim, "There was a deep, intensive and destructive intervention by foreigners in the election" is beyond my comprehension. Yet that's what Hamid said last Friday. Here's the Daily Show's view of this.

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I think this is just another indication of the futility and stupidity of this 'adventure'. But, God, if my kid were over there, I'm not sure just what I would do.

Amex is not exactly a model for 21st century computing

Or even for 20th century computing. In fact, you have to wonder whether Amex believes that customers are necessary for a business to succeed. Two recent examples:

• I wanted to cash in some points that had been collecting on my Amex card. I was surprised that my effort was rejected because I was not a member of the rewards program although we've been using the card for years. Then I was flabbergasted that the message that I was not a member was all I received. No phone number to call to get information on the subject. No web page to link to. Hey, if you're not a member, why should Amex try to make you a member.
• On the same day I received a marketing e-mail from Amex, I decided that it was time to cut the cord and pressed the unsubscribe button. That was not enough for them although it has been enough for every other company when I decided to unsubscribe. Amex needs a userid and password. I don't think they used my userid when they sent the mass mailing to me.

I spoke to Customer Service and they think these policies are perfectly fine. I'm happy for them as I will no longer have to speak to robots as I've dropped the card.

Another Candidate for Dumbest Congressman

REp. Hank Johnson has a strange belief that Guam may capsize.