Month: August 2007

Why Mercenaries Are a Bad Thing, Part II

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This story has a picture mercenaries in Iraq, and it is not pretty.

They operate with little or no supervision, accountable only to the firms employing them. And as the country has plummeted toward anarchy and civil war, this private army has been accused of indiscriminately firing at American and Iraqi troops, and of shooting to death an unknown number of Iraqi citizens who got too close to their heavily armed convoys.

Not one has faced charges or prosecution.

There is great confusion among legal experts and military officials about what laws — if any — apply to Americans in this force of at least 48,000.

They operate in a decidedly gray legal area. Unlike soldiers, they are not bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Under a special provision secured by American-occupying forces, they are exempt from prosecution by Iraqis for crimes committed there.

What follows is a litany of misdeeds that would get a soldier locked away in Leavenworth for decades, and in Bush’s Texas, get them executed.

Their behavior alienates the local population, endangering our troops, and they are a massive brain drain on the military.

Violence in the context of a military operation must be the monopoly of the military, not mercs.

Who NOT to Bailout of the Mortgate Debacle

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Dean Baker has a very good take on many of the bailout schemes for the mortgage debacle*.

His point is very basic, that, “the hedge fund crew is doing what all good capitalists do when things go badly: run to the government.”

What’s more, he argues, rather convincingly, that they don’t want the problem fixed, but rather that they want enough time to sell these assets to less sophisticated investors.

He gives the actions of Citibank with regards to Enron as an example. They tried to get the Fed and the Treasury to lean on the ratings agencies not to downgrade Ken Lay’s pyramid scheme.

There actually was an effort at a federal bailout of Enron. A former Treasury secretary, who had taken a top job at Citibank, called a Treasury staffer to see if he could stop the credit rating agencies from downgrading Enron’s debt. At the time Citibank held several hundred million dollars of Enron debt. While the staffer refused to intervene, if Citibank had gotten its wish, it would have had the opportunity to dump its Enron debt on less informed investors before the price collapsed.

These examples should frame the debate on a bailout. If the assets held by the hedge funds are sound, and it’s just an issue of stemming a momentary panic, then the Fed should step in as lender of last resort and try to stabilize the market. However, if the issue is just one of giving the hedge fund crew time to dump their bad debts, then the Fed has no business getting involved.

*It’s not just subprime…It’s everything in housing, it’s just moving first in subprime.

Linda Chavez is a Bunco Artist

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So is her Husband, Christopher Gersten.

The Monday WaPo had a very very good article describing how Chavez and Gersten used a phony PAC to bilk people out of money. Only 1% of the money contributed went to politics. The rest went to salaries and expenses of Chavez, Gersten, and her friends and family.

Instead, most of the donations were channeled back into new fundraising efforts, and some were used to provide a modest but steady source of income for Chavez and four family members, who served as treasurers and consultants to the committees. Much of the remaining funds went to pay for expenses such as furniture, auto repairs and insurance, and rent for the Sterling office the groups share. Even Chavez’s health insurance was paid for a time from political donations.

“I guess you could call it the family business,” Chavez said in an interview.

There is nothing illegal about running political committees the way she and her family have done, and Chavez said that none of the money has been spent for personal items and that she has done nothing wrong.

They are useless, both of them. Linda Chavez is little more than a talking head, and Gersten took AIPAC down it’s right wing Likudnik path.

In a community with a moral center, it is unlikely that either of them would ever work again. In Washington, DC, not so much. They probably got high fives from political consultants on both sides of the aisle.

The Problem With Mercenaries

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It appears that about one-fifth of British intelligence officers have quit over the past 3 years.

It appears that, “many of the officers leaving were choosing well-paid private security jobs instead, forcing the ministry to hand jobs to people who do not have relevant training or experience.”

Well-paid private security jobs, i.e. Blackwater and the rest of their despicable ilk.

The US and the UK have declined to sign the 1989 UN Mercenary Convention, and this is just one, of many (will post on this later) problems with this position.

The Rush for Arctic Resources Begins

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After the Russians planted a flag on the sea bed at the North Pole, it was inevitable that some sort of scramble for the arctic regions would commence. Now Canada is building a deep water port facility on Baffin Island.

There are two things driving this:

  • It is believed that 25% of untapped oil and gas reserves are there.
  • The Canadians in particular are banking on global warming to make the Northwest passage viable.

US Government Cripples South Korean T/FA-50 Export Prospects

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It appears that thethe US Government is forbidding the use of an advanced radar on the Korean FA-50 trainer derivative (subscription required).

Let’s make this clear, this is not a technology transfer issue. The radar, the Vixen 500E (PDF)

But in declining to permit advanced FA-50 capability, the U.S. side is only exercising rights that were set out when the then-General Dynamics combat aircraft division agreed in the early 1990s to support South Korean development of a fast jet. Under the agreement, the aircraft’s combat capability had to remain below that of the F-16, to avoid competition.

Korea Aerospace will struggle to sell the fighter overseas without the preferred radar, the Vixen 500E active electronically scanned sensor built by Finmeccanica’s Selex unit. But Korean industry officials assume that that was the intention of the U.S. authorities: To ensure the FA-50 would be unattractive on export markets and offer no competition to the Lockheed Martin F-16.

I’m really not sure why anyone with equibalent choices uses US systems, such as choosing the F-15K over the Rafale, which performed better in tests.

USAF Power Grab

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What’s going on here is simple

USAF Says It Would Save 10% As UAS Executive Agent(Subscription Required)

Aviation Week & Space Technology
08/13/2007, page 27

Edited by David Bond

Printed headline: UAS Promises

The U.S. Air Force says it can save as much as 10% of the budding unmanned aerial system budget if it becomes the Pentagon’s executive agent for UASs over the objections of its sister services. Savings would come from common training and sustainment processes as well as shared basing. The service also boasts it can save $400-600 million by consolidating its Predator program with the Army’s Warrior, an upgraded Predator. The Army has been furious over this plan, and the Navy and Marine Corps have expressed reservations. ….

What’s going on here is simple. The Air Force is trying a power grab.

If the future of air combat is drones, and it looks increasingly so, you will have unmanned aircraft that will take off and land on their own (the Air Force is behind the other services on this, probably because once you get that automated, you really don’t need a pilot).

The Air Force sees a future where UAVs are by the same sort of soldiers that perform as artillery spotters, i.e. reasonably well trained enlisted men, and they see irrelevance in their future.

This is their attempt to stay on top of these programs, and to keep officers operating UAVs, whether they really need to or not.

What the Content Industry Wants

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Lovely…Some people bought videos through Google, and nowthey’ve been told that that their videos will be taken away.

This is what the RIAA and MPAA want. They want you to buy stuff, and then they want to keep making you buy it again, and again, and a again, and again.

Patents are already hamstringing innovation in the US, and now it seems that actually buying a video is a thing of the past too.

Hopefully, some lawyer will go medieval on Google’s tuchas.

Expanded Surveillance Will Make Our Infrastructure More Vulnerable to Spying and Attacks

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Here is a very interesting article by Susan Landau.

Her thesis is that the actions taken by the Bush administration and our state security apparatus have the effect of making us more vulnerable to spying and cyberterrorism.

Her very valid point is that the surveillance society envisioned by Bush and His Evil Minions™ will require a back door on every phone switch in the country, and once there, it will be significantly easier for state and non state actors to hack into the switches and listen to our communications.

Krugman on the crash

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Hopfully, Times Select will shortly be free, but I found this from last Friday by Paul Krugman elsewhere:

Very Scary Things

Very Scary Things
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
The New York Times
August 10, 2007

….

What’s been happening in financial markets over the past few days is something that truly scares monetary economists: liquidity has dried up. That is, markets in stuff that is normally traded all the time — in particular, financial instruments backed by home mortgages — have shut down because there are no buyers.

This could turn out to be nothing more than a brief scare. At worst, however, it could cause a chain reaction of debt defaults.

….

But when liquidity dries up, the normal tools of policy lose much of their effectiveness. Reducing the cost of money doesn’t do much for borrowers if nobody is willing to make loans. Ensuring that banks have plenty of cash doesn’t do much if the cash stays in the banks’ vaults.

….

Let’s hope, then, that this crisis blows over as quickly as that of 1998. But I wouldn’t count on it.

Would someone please get him a Nobel?

Old US Tradition: Leave Your Native Allies to Die

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This is sad, and likely repeated thousands of times. Iraqi interpreters and other people who helped US forces are simply being cut loose to be killed by various militias and insurgents in Iraq.

We did the same thing in Viet Nam, and Republicans in the congress are trying to do the same with Filipino soldiers who fought the Japanese during WWII.

If there is anything that we should do, it is allow these people to come to the United States as refugees.

This is Not Just Mortgages.

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It’s clear that even with the massive infusion of cash last week, people are finding it VERY difficult to borrow money.

Lenders in general are pulling back, and highly leveraged operators are holding paper that no one wants to buy.

If the Fed cuts interest rates, it’s likely to boost the Yen, which cause losses and resulting liquidations of people playing the Yen carry trade.

Over the past 35 years we have moved from a production and investment economy to a consumption and leverage economy, and at some point the music will stop, and it will get very ugly, possibly Argentina crash ugly.