Hope is not a plan

I find this intriguing given the recent GAO report on possible tax havens. The BBC's Panorama show is covering the issue of tax havens with a very interesting perspective. In light of the astonishingly high debt of the government of the United Kingdom, the willingness to overlook tax havens as being just part and parcel of general capitalism is waning.

Panorama highlights the recent case of the buying of financial records from an LGT Trust IT employee by the German government:

This week, Klaus Zumwinkel, disgraced former boss of the German Post Office, became the first big name to be convicted of tax evasion thanks to Kieber's evidence.

He was forced to pay back 3.9m euros, was fined one million euros and given a two-year suspended jail sentence.

...and goes on to remind us that a full eighteen of the world's major tax havens are Crown Dependencies or British protectorates, suggesting that the UK is in a unique position to do some clearing up work all on its own.

The Panorama show in question has already aired, but you can read the summary here.

The World Health Organization is calling for immediate action in Zimbabwe, following WHO's report that 63,000 people are infected with cholera, with over 3,000 dead already due to the epidemic. This is expected to become steadily worse due to a confluence of negatives including a drought that is cutting citizens off from clean water, the overloading of the non-funded Zimbabwe health care system, and a government that steadfastly refuses to acknowledge that there is a problem.

Eric Laroche, the assistant director-general of the WHO, has called for drastic action to be taken over the cholera outbreak. Laroche warned the outbreak would continue unless "political differences are put aside," impoverished Zimbabwean health workers are paid, and the country's health system is bolstered.

Bright Matonga, Zimbabwe's ironically named deputy information minister, insists that things are fine:

"We had a cholera outbreak. It was very intense at the end of last year. We called for help and the help came from the World Health Organisation (WHO) and other NGOs. Really the situation now has improved vastly.

"We are able to quickly detect, quickly prevent, quickly educate people. We are on top of the situation although you can never say it is under control. "

Click here to read WHO's press release on the epidemic
al Jazeera article

President Obama announced today that executive salaries, benefits, and severance packages will be capped at firms that are receiving government financial aid, on the basic premise that a firm that was in such dire straits probably needs some fiscal responsibility to get out of the situation.

"For top executives to award themselves these kinds of compensation packages in the midst of this economic crisis isn't only in bad taste – it's bad strategy – and I will not tolerate it as president" Obama said at the White House on Wednesday.

Al Jazeera's John Terrett reporting from New York said the Bush administration had imposed some rules on how firms spent bailout payments but that they had been considered to be quite lax.

Unsurprisingly, this has sparked concern of a talent drain from firms receiving aid to those (typically smaller) firms that are not currently receiving aid. Of course, one has to wonder how talented the executives at failing firms actually are.

Given the current contraction in financial jobs even at the executive level, I'm okay with people fleeing from firms with salary caps. If they want to go from less money to no money, that's fine by me.

al Jazeera article
BBC article

The story in Gaza over the last year has been, among other things, that of the United Nations people on the scene not being listened to by the local authorities, be they Palestinian or Israeli.

This time around, the issues is the theft of 3,500 blankets and 400 food parcels by Hamas from a UN warehouse in Gaza. The Hamas official statement pretty much spells out the reasoning, despite being a nominal repudiation of the UN statement:

The Hamas Social Affairs Minister in Gaza, Ahmed al-Kurd, denied that members of the Islamist movement had removed aid from a UN building.

He accused the UN of giving aid to local groups with ties to Hamas opponents.

In other words, Hamas wants to be the official patron, and is stealing from the UN to do it, deflecting the release of aid from people who need so they can claim authority in the area.

Notably, at the same time Mahmoud Abbas is in Strasbourg, pushing the EU parliament for a war crimes investigation following the Israeli attack on Gaza.

It is no surprise that there's frustration in Gaza.

BBC article
al Jazeera article

EU peacekeepers in Bosnia have stepped up their search for accused war criminal Ratko Mladic, in a move that some might take as a sign that they think they'll find him soon. Mladic's compatriot Radovan Karadzic was picked up last year following a similar upswing in searching of his old haunts, some ten years after his participation in the atrocities of the 90s in Bosnia.

As always, it's good to see that there is no statute of limitations on crimes against humanity.

BBC article

Lieutenant General Rail Rzayev died this week after being shot in the head outside his home in Baku. Rzayev was the head of the air force of Azerbaijan, potentially but not necessarily adding some extra significance to this killing beyond the tragedy of a murder.

For background, you may want to click here to read more about the long-standing Azeri-Armenian conflict over the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region that remains nominally but not functionally a part of Armenia. Given that a 14 year ceasefire was breached just under a year ago, it's possible that someone with a stake in the conflict and the potential separation of Nagorno-Karabakh decided to try and assassinate a relevant Azeri military official. Certainly, the word is that the Azeri air force would be key in any attempt to retake N-K.

On the other hand, he may have been killed by some junkie who needed cash. This is why we don't rush to judgment.

al Jazeera article
BBC article

Dogma is the enemy of success.

One of the dogmas of the past eight years, as well as a significant portion of the contemporary Republican party, is the idea that private industry always does things better than government. The natural consequence of this dogma is the action of extensively privatizing tasks that were formerly employed by government. What we've lacked, however, is quantitative evaluation of whether or not privatization actually benefits us, the taxpayers. The lack of evaluation is not surprising, of course. People believe in their religion and are loathe to test it.

Last year, a GAO study showed that outsourcing to non-governmental contractors costs us money. In one example cited in that report, replacing government employees with private contractors cost the American people from 16 to 26% more.

This is not, on the face of it, surprising. We get a "patriotism discount" on people's service in many jobs. Just consider the salary an American soldier takes down and compare it to the salary of a Blackwater operator. Government leverages many things, including its massive scale and the willigness of citizens to sell their time for less than it is objectively worth, in service to their nation.

In its report titled Aviation Security: TSA's Cost and Performance Study of Private-Sector Airport Screening, the GAO tackles the value of private contractors versus government agencies in the context of airport security.

Shortly after the founding of the Transportation Security Administration in the wake of September 11, the Screening Partnership Program (SPP) was set up. The purpose of the SPP is to allow air ports to "opt out" of full TSA service and "have security screening conducted by personnel from a qualified private contractor working under Federal oversight."

As part of its own financial review (aimed toward making TSA more cost effective), the TSA contracted with Catapult Consultants to evaluate the SPP program as it's been in place in a number of test airports for several years. TSA concluded from its this study that air ports using private contracted screeners underthe SPP program were not costing TSA less money than air ports where all screening was done by TSA staff.

Enter Republicans representatives Dan Lungren from my home state and John Mica from Florida. They asked GAO to evaluate the quality of TSA's internal review, to determine if its conclusions about the SPP program to date were justified.

Or, put less kindly, the lack of positive savings challenged their dogma, and that concerned them.

GAO looked at both the original Catapult study and how TSA used the data from that study. In fairness to the concern of our two representatives, GAO determined that TSA's evaluation that air ports using the SPP program cost 17% more was on the high end, as it did not account for overall costs and savings to the government. For example, part of the money paid out to a private contractor through SPP is fed back into the Federal government via taxes that are not levied on money going out directly to TSA employees. TSA agreed with GAO's evaluation, noting that their (TSA's) interest was not in how the program affected the Federal government overall, but how it affected TSA's budget.

However, the original Catapult study did account for these costs changes. When GAO returned to the original catapult data and factored in these are costs and savings, they found that the overall effect of the SPP program on aggregate costs to the Federal government was to increase costs by about 9%.

So, to be clear, even a fair, comprehensive evaluation of private contractors shows that they cost more.

GAO noted that there's not a lot of wiggle room for a private contractor to change how it operates in the area of air safety to find savings. Indeed, this is as it should be, and if we return to our Blackwater comparison, we see that when we put people in critical tasks without the appropriate rules for those tasks, bad things happen. Still, by the dogma of privatization, private industry should just be able to be cheaper than government.

So, if the SPP program costs more, why would any airport use it? GAO asked this very question, and found that some airports were using SPP at TSA request because TSA was, at the time of the programs inception, not able to actually staff all the airports that needed staffing. In other words, private contractors were gap filling while TSA was ramping up. In a couple other cases, airport officials indicated that they thought the private contractor would provide better customer service than TSA employees. Interestingly, interviews of airports that had chosen to stick with TSA found that some of those decision makers thought that TSA was doing a good job with which they were satisfied.

The upshot of all this is that, within a reasonable margin of cost difference, contracting this job out is mostly a wash. It doesn't provide a savings, and is by default a little more expensive (notably, this is the kind of "extra fat" that Republican budgeters call for trimming in lieu of tax increases, so perhaps that alone suggests the SPP is a problem). Unless we can find a quantifiable cost benefit in the perception of increased customer service with some private contractors, it's hard to justify these contractors except in the explicit case of gap filling when TSA has not yet met its staffing needs.

In their paper Spillway-Induced Salmon Head Injury Triggers the Generation of Brain αII-Spectrin Breakdown Product Biomarkers Similar to Mammalian Traumatic Brain Injury (bit of a mouthful, that), Miracle et al have applied tools that were originally developed to help us deal with head trauma to the task of figuring out the ecological impact of different spillway designs on our fisheries.

Although hydropower offers us tremendous possibilities as a renewable resource that is fairly stable, making it not only a clean resource but one that can act to load balance for other, potentially more uneven resources (such as solar and wind power). One of the major downsides of large-scale waterworks, however, is that they necessarily have to operate in places where wildlife - specifically, fish - live. This not only impacts us in that it affects our ability to maintain a stable environment, but in that damage to fish affects our ability to maintain stable stocks of those fish. Fewer fish, less food.

We attempt to keep fish such as salmon, that need to transit our rivers to spawn, from dying in hydropower facilities by having bypass spillways to send them through. However, a spillway is still not a river, and fish moving down a spillway encounter massive hydraulic pressure change as well as impacts as they are knocked against walls. Traditionally, the only way we have of evaluating this damage is by inspecting fish at the end of the process for obvious harm - lost scales, bleeding, and so forth.

In their work, Miracle et al tried looking for a biomarker that has been used to identify brain trauma in mammals. BIomarkers are molecular signals that indirectly show that something else is happening. For example, when your liver is failing, excess bilirubin builds up in your body, leading to jaundice. The bilirubin itself is not the cause, but it is a an indicator that something else is going wrong. Biomarkers are useful for things like brain injuries, where the injury may not be immediately apparent, but it is critical that treatment be applied sooner rather than later. The researchers behind this paper went ahead and looked for a biomarker for brain injury and found it in salmon.

This is incredibly useful because it's entirely possible for salmon to suffer brain injuries during spillway travel that are not reflected in outside harm - just like a boxer can suffer a bad concussion despite a lack of obvious bruising on their face. Just like that boxer will have problems later in life, fish with sub-acute brain injuries may have issues as they grow up, making them poor survivors, and in turn leading to problems with our fisheries.

And again, that's less food for us.

Miracle and her co-authors have developed the beginnings of a tool that may let us design better, "greener" hydropower that will let us have our electricity and our fisheries, all at the same time.

Once again, here's the article.

Science like this is what we'll need to carry us forward into a new generation of sustainable living.

In a commentary piece reprinted on the Rand site, Brian Jenkins asks if Mexico could become a failed state, and offers some reasonable if currently unpopular suggestions for ways to boost what is in many ways our closest neighbor:

The United States could, of course, take two bold steps: It could dramatically reduce the Mexican traffickers' profits - and therefore their power to corrupt - by treating drug consumption as a social problem and investing more in domestic demand reduction and treatment, as many policy-research studies have recommended. Source-country control and interdiction are the costliest and least effective components of the US war on drugs. As long as US demand remains high, criminals will draw huge profits.

The United States could also move to legalize and fully integrate the more than 12 million illegal immigrants in the country, the majority of whom are from Mexico, and adopt a system of work visas that reduces the need for running the border and takes the profit out of human smuggling. Thus far, the United States has addressed illegal immigration from a legal and economic perspec-tive, but there is a national security aspect to it, as well. It is simply not in the national security interest of the United States to have a floating underworld population of 12 million people who are vulnerable to blackmail and other pressure. The security of the nation would be better served by legalizing and fully integrating them into society, however unpopular that may be with certain sectors of the American electorate. In any case, neither of these approaches seems likely to be implemented.

The Japanese government announced that it will spend the last half billion in its roughly two billion dollar rebuilding pledge for Afghanistan to pay all 80,000 Afghan police officers for the next half year, as well as building 200 schools and 100 hospitals, and training a bunch of teachers.

This seems, on the whole, like a good idea. One hopes there's a transition group in place to help the Afghan government figure out how to readjust its budget once the entire police force is no longer subsidized.

This article also effectively supplies us with the information that Afghanistan has a ratio of about 1 police officer per 400 people. This is, interestingly, about the same ratio as the LAPD and its served population.

AP article

I don't yet have the necessary background knowledge to really offer much comment on this, but I've been surprised at how little coverage this week's mutiny of the Bangladesh Rifles has been getting. The mutiny seems to have largely ended, with combatants laying down arms following an offer of general amnesty by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.

The original complaints concerned pay and treatment, with particular grievances toward the officers of the regular Bangladesh military who command the Rifles. Many of these same officers were kicked out, kidnapped, or killed during the brief mutiny.

If you consider this in an American context, it would be rather like the Department of Homeland Security taking on the National Guard.

BBC article
al Jazeera article

(Note that this is a top story on al Jazeera, among the big front-page stories on the BBC, and hard to find on CNN.)