(1) complete withdrawal of all US troops according to a fixed timetable;
(2) exclusion of al-Qaeda and other international terrorist groups from areas controlled by the Taliban;
(3) a government in Kabul headed—at least nominally—by men the Taliban would see as good Muslims and Afghan patriots;
4) negotiations on a new Afghan constitution involving the Taliban and leading to the transfer of most powers from the center to the regions;
(5) de facto—though not formal—Taliban control of the region of Greater Kandahar, and by the Haqqanis of Greater Paktika;
(6) a return to the Taliban offer of 1999–2001 of a complete ban on opium poppy cultivation and heroin production in the areas under their control, in return for international aid.
Marja must be controlled in order to eventually control Kandahar. Kandahar must be controlled to control Afghanistan. Afghanistan must be controlled to control Pakistan. Pakistan must be controlled to prevent Saudi Arabia terrorists from getting on a flight at J.F.K. Airport in Jamaica, Queens.
...when was the last time anyone at the Pentagon broke a story that wasn't pre-approved? It's very, very rare. And the reason why it's so difficult -- and this gets to the information operations and the public affairs -- it's a very difficult story to tell because you're lifting up the curtain on what have become very common practices for journalists to do.
This is not just normal public relations -- there are entire operations in the Pentagon whose goal is not just to influence the enemy's population but in fact the more important goal is to influence the U.S. population. And the line that used to be, or was supposed to have been the red line between public relations and information operations, meaning one you use on Americans and one you use on the enemy, they are tearing that firewall down. So you have generals with public media handlers and they have these contracting companies that are collecting data on who's tweeting what and they have different Twitter “sock-puppets” that they've put up to try to manipulate all these different social media.
I would guess American news organizations spend maybe 10 million a year, maybe 20 million to cover Afghanistan. The Pentagon itself is spending 5 million just to have one information operations unit there, and they have hundreds of them. So the actual military in Afghanistan is putting hundreds of millions of dollars of resources into manipulating the media. And the media is spending $10 -20 million.
But I would also call out a group of very influential national security reporters who work at most of the major media outlets. And if you look closely at their resumes, they all belong or have been paid by, or have worked for very influential think tanks. Now again, what's the big deal? These think tanks -- Center for New American Security is sort of the most egregious example -- are funded by defense contractors. These think-tanks also employ a lot of retired generals. And,, more importantly, they are promoting very specific pro-war policies.
Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors.
Two years ago, 137 workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were ordered to use a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens.
Bleak working conditions have been documented at factories manufacturing products for Dell, Hewlett-Packard, I.B.M., Lenovo, Motorola, Nokia, Sony, Toshiba and others.
But significant problems remain. More than half of the suppliers audited by Apple have violated at least one aspect of the code of conduct every year since 2007, according to Apple’s reports, and in some instances have violated the law. While many violations involve working conditions, rather than safety hazards, troubling patterns persist.
Executives at other corporations report similar internal pressures. This system may not be pretty, they argue, but a radical overhaul would slow innovation. Customers want amazing new electronics delivered every year.
“We’ve known about labor abuses in some factories for four years, and they’re still going on,” said one former Apple executive who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements. “Why? Because the system works for us. Suppliers would change everything tomorrow if Apple told them they didn’t have another choice.”
But Mr. Lai was focused on Foxconn Technology, China’s largest exporter and one of the nation’s biggest employers, with 1.2 million workers. The company has plants throughout China, and assembles an estimated 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronics, including for customers like Amazon, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Nintendo, Nokia and Samsung.Employees who arrived late were sometimes required to write confession letters and copy quotations. There were “continuous shifts,” when workers were told to work two stretches in a row, according to interviews.Those accommodations were better than many of the company’s dorms, where 70,000 Foxconn workers lived, at times stuffed 20 people to a three-room apartment, employees said. Last year, a dispute over paychecks set off a riot in one of the dormitories, and workers started throwing bottles, trash cans and flaming paper from their windows, according to witnesses. Two hundred police officers wrestled with workers, arresting eight. Afterward, trash cans were removed, and piles of rubbish — and rodents — became a problem. Mr. Lai felt lucky to have a place of his own.
Last year, the company conducted 229 audits. There were slight improvements in some categories and the detected rate of core violations declined. However, within 93 facilities, at least half of workers exceeded the 60-hours-a-week work limit. At a similar number, employees worked more than six days a week. There were incidents of discrimination, improper safety precautions, failure to pay required overtime rates and other violations. That year, four employees were killed and 77 injured in workplace explosions.
The seriousness of that threat, however, is unclear. Apple has found violations in hundreds of audits, but fewer than 15 suppliers have been terminated for transgressions since 2007, according to former Apple executives.“We could have saved lives, and we asked Apple to pressure Foxconn, but they wouldn’t do it,” said the BSR consultant, who asked not to be identified because of confidentiality agreements. “Companies like H.P. and Intel and Nike push their suppliers. But Apple wants to keep an arm’s length, and Foxconn is their most important manufacturer, so they refuse to push.” BSR, in a written statement, said the views of that consultant were not those of the company.“The only way you make money working for Apple is figuring out how to do things more efficiently or cheaper,” said an executive at one company that helped bring the iPad to market. “And then they’ll come back the next year, and force a 10 percent price cut.”
Many major technology companies have worked with factories where conditions are troubling. However, independent monitors and suppliers say some act differently. Executives at multiple suppliers, in interviews, said that Hewlett-Packard and others allowed them slightly more profits and other allowances if they were used to improve worker conditions.In December, however, seven months after the blast that killed Mr. Lai, another iPad factory exploded, this one in Shanghai. Once again, aluminum dust was the cause, according to interviews and Apple’s most recent supplier responsibility report. That blast injured 59 workers, with 23 hospitalized.
“There’s a real culture of secrecy here that influences everything,” the former executive said.
Given Apple’s prominence and leadership in global manufacturing, if the company were to radically change its ways, it could overhaul how business is done. “Every company wants to be Apple,” said Sasha Lezhnev at the Enough Project, a group focused on corporate accountability. “If they committed to building a conflict-free iPhone, it would transform technology.”“You can either manufacture in comfortable, worker-friendly factories, or you can reinvent the product every year, and make it better and faster and cheaper, which requires factories that seem harsh by American standards,” said a current Apple executive. “And right now, customers care more about a new iPhone than working conditions in China.”
JPMorgan are the good guys, you see. Just ask Jefferson County, or talk to the lawyers in Chase’s mothballed debt-collections department, or the investors who lost hundreds of millions of dollars while JPMorgan profited big on a SIV, or the Lutheran nonprofit defrauded on a CDO it built for Magnetar, or illegally foreclosing on and overcharging hundreds of troops while they were abroad, or the homeowners who got trampled in the foreclosure scandal, or the former Chase regional VP who regrets the $2 billion in toxic loans he made in 2007 under “pressure from the top,” or the consumers who get screwed by Vertrue, etc. etc.
The current high-tech navigation system still has problems that need to be worked out. Furthermore, "the equipment can also be set to issue alarm signals to warn against shallows, a ship deviating from its course, other ships or danger zones -- producing a cacophony of noise that encourages some captains to simply ignore the signals."
The height of these ships can result in serious problems if something goes wrong. "For example, when a lot of water floods into the ship, it can slosh back and forth below deck and, because of the enormous weight of the water, push to the ship to the side."
Everything about these ships is huge - the ship itself, the number of passengers, the number of languages spoken. That size means problems when abnormal situations occur. "The bigger the ship, the more people crowd through the corridors during a major fire, the more confusing the jumble of languages becomes and the more difficult it is for the officers to control the ship.""Once the giant ships, with their thousands of passengers, capsize they quickly turn into death traps, because it makes it very difficult for the sailors to lower the lifeboats."
We don’t have a draft anymore; less than 0.5 percent of Americans over 18 serve in the active-duty military. We do not declare war anymore; the last time Congress actually did so was in 1942 — against Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania. We don’t buy war bonds or pay war taxes anymore. During World War II, 85 million Americans purchased war bonds that brought the government $185 billion; in the last decade, we bought none and instead gave the richest 5 percent of Americans a tax break.
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For example, a former L.P.S. employee who worked in “attorney management,” overseeing firms that performed legal work for foreclosures, told Nevada investigators that L.P.S. required him to resolve issues raised by the firms at a rate of 30 foreclosure files every hour. That’s two minutes apiece. The employee soon left L.P.S.Former workers at another division described their work as “surrogate signers.” They said their job was to forge signatures on documents. These people were hired through temporary agencies; one said she was paid $11 an hour and told that her job was “to sign somebody else’s signature on documents,” the lawsuit said. She told investigators that she signed roughly 2,000 documents a day for months.Another former worker said that when a banking executive came by for a tour, the signers were told “to lie” and tell the executive they were signing their own names, the lawsuit says.Notarization worked much the same way, the complaint said. One former worker said she realized that she might have notarized documents she had also signed as a surrogate.
"At the end of Eisenhower's first term, the defense budget was $380 billion in today's dollars; at Nixon's, it was $398 billion; and at George H.W. Bush's, it was $435 billion. At George W. Bush's, it was $478 billion and at the end of Barack Obama's, the baseline budget will be no less than $475 billion and probably closer to $525 billion."
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