Month: August 2016

And Now We Have Very Serious People Coming Out Against the TPP

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So, now we have a former Reagan and Clinton trade official and a retired general arguing that the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a security risk to the United States because it will hasten the hollowing out of American manufacturing, which makes the US dependent on foreign manufacturers in places like China and Vietnam for the crucial building blocks of military equipment.

This is a rather interesting counterpoint to the Obama administration’s argument that we have to pass the TPP as a counter weight to Chinese influence in the region.

The first OP/ED appeared in the New York Times. The second appeared in The Hill.

It doesn’t get any more establishment than that.

I’m actually beginning to think that Obama won’t be able to get it through during the lame duck session.

I hope that this is not irrational optimism.

Those Old Family Ties

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Bummer of a Birth Mark, Jim

One of the stories floating around right now is that Mylan Pharmaceuticals jacked up the price of EpiPens by over 400% over the past few years.

Given the state of the American pharmaceutical industry, we’ve seen something similar from the 3 manufacturers of insulin colluding on price hikes,  it’s not a particularly surprising or unique state of affairs.

What is news however is that Heather Bresch, the company’s CEO, is the daughter of Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), and Mylan is one of the most generous donors to him.

In fact, a former Mylan lobbyists, Michael Garrison, appointed  president of the University of West Virginia by Manchin when he was governor had to resign in disgrace when he bent the rules to give Heather Bresch an unearned MBA.

So now this linkup is hitting the mainstream news:

The growing congressional scrutiny of pharmaceutical giant Mylan over the high cost of EpiPens could prove awkward for Sen. Joe Manchin.

 The West Virginia Democrat’s daughter, Heather Bresch, is chief executive of the company, which appears to have hiked the price of the epinephrine auto-injector by 400 percent since 2007. The device, which is used to treat severe allergic reactions, now costs more than $600 per dose.

 This price increase has become a public relations disaster for Mylan and at least four of Manchin’s Senate colleagues are either pressing the company to reduce the cost of EpiPens, asking it to explain the price increase or requesting federal regulators to investigate the matter. Manchin is not a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has shown the most interest in probing Mylan’s pricing practices, and so far the senator is not discussing the issue.

Manchin has spent his time in the Senate being a Joe Lieberman Democrat, so I have absolutely no sympathy for the fact that he is getting jammed up by this.

Oops!

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It turns out that because of sloppy law writing in Missouri, theft is no longer a felony in the Show Me State:

On an opinion that went largely unnoticed, the Missouri Supreme Court issued a ruling Tuesday that had the effect of making most stealing offenses no longer felonies thanks to an apparently inadvertent change to state law way back in 2002. The far-reaching decision sent criminal defense attorneys across the state scrambling.

The case – State v. Bazell – was brought by a woman who had been convicted of multiples felonies for stealing firearms, among other things, in a burglary case. The court said the firearm felonies should be knocked down to misdemeanors because a portion of the state’s criminal code designating certain types of offenses as felonies is written in a way that doesn’t make it applicable to the state’s definition of stealing itself.

“If the words are clear, the Court must apply the plain meaning of the law,” the opinion said. “When the meaning of a statute is clear, the Court should not employ canons of construction to achieve a desired result.”

………

Subparagraph 3 covers a whole assortment of stealing crimes, including the stealing of explosives, credit cards, motor vehicles, property deeds, anything worth between $500-$25,000 and in any case in which the suspect physically takes something from the victim’s person. Additionally, subparagraph 8 – which designates stealing anything worth more than $25,000 as a Class B felony – has similar language, and thus is no longer applicable as well, public defenders believe.

Because of Tuesday’s ruling, anyone who was charged with a felony for those kinds of crimes has a chance to get it brought down to a misdemeanor, as long as it’s for a crime after 2002, when the language was added, Flottman said.

Son of Missouri Harry S Truman must be spinning in his grave.

Son of Missouri Mark Twain must be laughing somewhere.

Words to Live By

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I came across a Chassidic story related by Martin Buber:

There is a famous story told in Chassidic literature that addresses this very question. The Master teaches the student that God created everything in the world to be appreciated, since everything is here to teach us a lesson.

One clever student asks “What lesson can we learn from atheists? Why did God create them?”

The Master responds “God created atheists to teach us the most important lesson of them all — the lesson of true compassion. You see, when an atheist performs and act of charity, visits someone who is sick, helps someone in need, and cares for the world, he is not doing so because of some religious teaching. He does not believe that god commanded him to perform this act. In fact, he does not believe in God at all, so his acts are based on an inner sense of morality. And look at the kindness he can bestow upon others simply because he feels it to be right.”

“This means,” the Master continued “that when someone reaches out to you for help, you should never say ‘I pray that God will help you.’ Instead for the moment, you should become an atheist, imagine that there is no God who can help, and say ‘I will help you.’”

ETA source: Tales of Hasidim Vol. 2 by Martin Buber.

This has always been my philosophy:  If you have to use God to justify your actions, you are doing something wrong, it turns out that I have some esteemed Jewish authorities who agree.

BTW, I also love it how Jewish stories use “Clever” as a euphemism for asshole.

Look for the Union Label, When You Are Researching or Grading That Test………

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The Nation Labor Relations Board has ruled that graduate assistants are employees and have the right to organize:

Punctuating a string of Obama-era moves to shore up labor rights and expand protections for workers, the National Labor Relations Board ruled Tuesday that students who work as teaching and research assistants at private universities have a federally backed right to unionize.

The case arose from a petition filed by a group of graduate students at Columbia University, who are seeking to win recognition for a union that will allow them a say over such issues as the quality of their health insurance and the timeliness of stipend payments.

Echoing longstanding complaints from blue-collar workers that they have become replaceable cogs in a globalized economic machine, the effort reflects a growing view among more highly educated employees in recent decades that they, too, are at the mercy of faceless organizations and are not being treated like professionals and aspiring professionals whose opinions are worthy of respect.

“What we’re fundamentally concerned about isn’t really money,” said Paul R. Katz, one of the Columbia graduate students involved in the organizing efforts. “It’s a question of power and democracy in a space in the academy that’s increasingly corporatized, hierarchical. That’s what we’re most concerned about.”

Columbia and other universities that weighed in with the board before the ruling argued that collective bargaining would lead to a more adversarial relationship between students and the university that would undermine its educational purpose.

The idea that this could, “Lead to a more adversarial relationship,” is laughable.

The current relationship is akin to slavery, particularly at Columbia.

From the Department of “Well, Duh”

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Over at the Washington Post, Catherine Rampell answers the burning question about millenials, “Why aren’t they getting married or buying houses, and why are they still living with their parents?”

Spoiler alert, it’s because they have crap jobs and they are up to their ears in debt, something which seems to escape all those sage analysts who have spilled barrels of ink over this:

Millennial homeownership rates are way, way down. And believe it or not, that’s probably a good thing.

 ………

 Homeownership rates among Americans under age 35 are barely more than half the national number, at just 34.1 percent. This too is a record low and about a fifth below its peak from the go-go years of the mid-2000s.

………

 Many colorful theories abound for millennials’ abandonment of homeownership. There are, for example, lots of think pieces about millennials’ purported love of the sharing economy and associated communitarian disavowal of all kinds of ownership — whether that be of houses, cars, bikes or even clothes.

But this explanation is wrong, at least when it comes to housing.

 So why are young people delaying getting that deed?

One, they’re putting off getting married, which many still see as a prerequisite to homeownership. (Though a large chunk of millennials, I should note, instead view homeownership as a prerequisite to marriage.)

Two — and this is part of the reason they’re delaying marriage, too — is that they’re poor.

 Relative to earlier generations, today’s cohort of young people is making less money, given their levels of education; more indebted with student loans; more likely to be underemployed; struggling harder to sock away savings; and facing shallower income-growth trajectories.

She’s right, and it’s blatantly obvious to anyone who isn’t busy yelling, “Hey, you kids get off my lawn!”

But for the average pundit, bemoaning the sad states of today’s youth is a an article that writes itself.

It’s catnip for hack writers.

Ummm ……… the Solution Here Is Straightforward. Better Pay and Benefits.

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Over at Aviation Week, there is much hand wringing over the fact that their workers are retiring, and they can’t find replacements:

There are two statistics that haunt the U.S. aerospace and defense (A&D) industry when it comes to its workforce: 10% and 2.6%.

 The first, according to Aviation Week’s 2016 Workforce Study, is the percentage of the overall workforce who were qualified to retire in the past year. The second is the percentage that actually did.

 Industry faces a potential crisis in its workforce, just not the one that formerly predominated. For sure, defense prime contractors, OEMs and top-tier suppliers continue to fear the mass departures possible as the baby-boom generation begins reaching the traditional retirement age—65—en masse. At the same time, employers would like a little more actual turnover because they are eager to staff their companies with the new and younger talent offered by technology-oriented “millennials” because they fear losing those Gen Y workers to the lure of Silicon Valley.

 “While retirements are of concern, so too is attrition,” the study says. “As the industry comparison illustrates, the attrition rate for A&D is low, with only the chemical industry coming close to a comparable rate.”

 ………

 But the business risk of seeing so many skilled, experienced workers leave in a relatively short time remains a deep concern, and for good reasons that have been widely documented. According to a National Bureau of Economic Research July working paper by Nicole Maestas, Kathleen J. Mullen and David Powell, economies face a double whammy of lost productivity and lost labor capacity as working populations exceed 60 years old.

Gee you need something in short supply, if only there were some medium of exchange that would allow you to adjust the value that you assign to it based on that scarcity.

If you are losing skilled staff, then you need to set pay or benefits or job security at a level that will attract a sufficient number of skilled replacements.

Teacher Tenure Survives is California

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The California State Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal on the Vergara case, where a Silicon Valley venture capitalist tried to eliminate teacher tenure.  

It’s not surprising.  Their original opinion by  Los Angeles Superior Court judge Rolf Treu was well nigh incoherent, and the appellant court vacated it pretty much as soon as it hit their desk:

Over four years ago — May 2012 — a group of nine public school students filed a lawsuit, Vergara v. California, challenging five laws that govern how teachers can be fired in California, including the teacher tenure law and the “last in, first out” law that says teacher layoffs must be done in reverse order of seniority.

The suit was paid for by the nonprofit Students Matter, founded (and largely funded) by telecom millionaire David Welch.

The plaintiffs argued that the laws allowed “grossly ineffective” teachers to keep their jobs, and violated the California Constitution by having a disproportionate effect on poor and minority students. Judge Rolf Treu agreed. In his August 2014 decision, Treu wrote, “The evidence is compelling. Indeed, it shocks the conscience.”

But in April of this year, the court of appeals overturned the decision. The three-judge panel ruled that it was up to the individual schools and school districts to assign teachers.

“Critically, plaintiffs failed to show that the statutes themselves make any certain group of students more likely to be taught by ineffective teachers than any other group of students,” the court wrote. “The court’s job is merely to determine whether the statutes are constitutional, not if they are ‘a good idea.'”

That last bit is legalese from the appellate court for, “What the f%$# are you smoking?”

From what I’ve seen, I tend to agree with the basic thesis that teacher tenure in needs some reforms, but people like Welch are looking at privatizing schools (charters) and damaging labor unions, and any consideration of education is either deception or self delusion.

As an aside, I would note that tenure in public school teaching is an artifact of a broken management system, where principals are given free reign to be arbitrary and capricious, with very little in the way of other meaningful protections.

And Not a Peep from the Nobel Peace Prize Winner

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In response to massive and indiscriminate bombings of civilian targets in Yemen by the Gulf States, there was a massive march in Yemen’s capital, Sana’a.

So, the Saudis bombed them:

The Houthi Ansarullah Movement that controls most of north and west Yemen staged what was by all accounts an enormous demonstration in the capital of Sanaa on Saturday. It may have been the single largest demonstration in the country’s history. While it was unlikely actually to have involved a million people, it did probably tens of thousands, and it showed how strong grassroots support for the Houthis is in the north.

The massive demonstration in Sab`in Park in downtown Sanaa was intended to send a signal to Saudi Arabia and its coalition that the Houthis are enormously popular in the north and that the General People’s Congress, the parliament of Yemen in its present form, shares in that popularity.

If so, Saudi Arabia did not get that message. Its fighter-bombers targeted downtown Sanaa in the midst of the demonstration, which arguably was a war crime (you aren’t allowed to endanger large numbers of civilians in war if you don’t have to). The Saudis are at war with rebel supporters of the Houthis, whom Saudi Arabian inaccurately depicts as a cat’s paw of Iran.

I get that they have a lot of oil, but the House of Saud is arguably the worst government, and their war in Yemen is destabilizing the region, creating a humanitarian catastrophe, and making the United States less secure.

Our support for the House of Saud is worse than a crime, it is a mistake.

Russia Pulls Out of Iranian Air Base

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The airstrike from Iran was was intended to serve a diplomatic purpose, not a military one:

The Russian military said on Monday its aircraft operating from an Iranian air base to conduct strikes in Syria had completed their tasks, but left open the possibility of using the Hamadan base again if circumstances warranted.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry said Russia had stopped using the base for strikes in Syria, bringing an abrupt halt to an unprecedented deployment that was criticized both by the White House and by some Iranian lawmakers.

“Russian military aircraft that took part in the operation of conducting air strikes from Iran’s Hamadan air base on terrorist targets in Syria have successfully completed all tasks,” a Russian Defence Ministry spokesman, Major-General Igor Konashenkov, said in a statement.

“Further use of the Hamadan air base in the Islamic Republic of Iran by the Russian Aerospace Forces will be carried out on the basis of mutual agreements to fight terrorism and depending on the prevailing circumstances in Syria,” Konashenkov said.

While the use of the recent use of the Hamedan air base in Iran  might be more convenient than flying from Russian bases, there is very little military utility for a one off deployment like this.

This was a demonstration by Iran and Russia of a changes in the Middle East order, and it certainly has folks at the Pentagon and Foggy Bottom sitting up and noticing.

And the Middle East Gets Even More Pear Shaped………

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Today in an interview, Yemen’s former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, the guy who got deposed by the guy that the House of Saud is supporting, just said that Russia can have access to all of Yemen’s facilities:

In a TV interview today, Yemen’s ex-president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, appeared to invite Russian military intervention in the country’s conflict. He talked of reactivating old Yemeni agreements with the Soviet Union and offfered “all the facilities” of Yemen’s bases, ports and airports to Russia.

Saleh seemed to be advocating something similar to what happened in Syria, where Russia and Iran joined the conflict on the Assad regime’s side under the guise of fighting terrorism. A video of the interview is here, with a transcript in Arabic here.

Saleh, who was ousted from the presidency in 2012, is allied to the Houthis who currently control the Yemeni capital and large parts of the country, especially in the north. For more than a year Saudi-led forces, who back Saleh’s exiled successor, Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, have been bombing Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen. Meanwhile the Houthis, who have some Iranian backing, have attacked Saudi territory in the border area.

………

“We extend our hands to Russia. We have agreements with the Russian Federation which were with the Soviet Union. The legitimate heir to the Soviet Union is the Russian Federation, we are ready to activate these treaties and agreements that were between us and the Soviet Union.

“We agree on a principle, which is the struggle against terrorism … We extend our hands and offer all the facililties, and the conventions and treaties … We offer them in our bases, in our airports and in our ports – ready to provide all facilities to the Russian Federation.”

The most recent negotiations broke down, which is not a surprise, since the only offer on the table was unconditional and complete surrender by the Houthis.

I don’t expect Russia to take up this offer, but once again, our “Allies” in the Middle East find a way to make a conflict a complete cock up.

And the Infection Spreads

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The Wheels bus system in northern California has decided to start subsidizing Lyft and Uber:

In a first for California, a public transit agency next month plans to begin subsidizing fares of people who take private Uber and Lyft cars to local destinations rather than riding the bus.

Passengers ordering Uber or Lyft car trips within two test areas of Dublin will be eligible to get door-to-destination service at a big discount under a partnership between the ride-hailing companies and the Wheels public bus system in Dublin, Alameda and Pleasanton.

The Livermore Amador Valley Transit Authority, which operates Wheels, said the one-year pilot project could help pave the way for changes in how public transit agencies in the United States serve suburban areas hampered by far-flung bus routes, few riders and little money from fares.

This is going to end in a morass of corruption and incompetence.

See my post on the city of Arlington, VA considering the same here.

Charter School Fail

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In a bit of news that should surprise no one, it turns out that charter school students do slightly worse later in life than public school students:

Charter school boosters have many arguments in favor of fostering a publicly-financed, privately run parallel education system. But at the end of the day, their model should help kids learn more, perform better, get good jobs and earn a higher salary than they might have otherwise, right?

By that metric, it appears that Texas’ charter schools have failed, according to a large-scale study of kids from the K-12 system through early adulthood.

The analysis was conducted by Will Dobbie, an assistant professor at Princeton, and Roland Fryer, the Harvard economist who in recent years helped Houston ISD adopt charter school methods (you might also remember his name from research on Houston’s police-involved shootings). It uses data from Texas state agencies that tracks student achievement and demographics from primary school, through college, and on to the labor market.

Texas is the ideal laboratory for this kind of study. It introduced charter schools way back in 1995, and they now enroll 3.5 percent of the public school population. The schools have thus had time to refine their methods and work out some kinks, while their students have had time to test their mettle in the labor market.

< The findings: On average, charter schools have no meaningful effect on test scores or employment, and actually have a slight negative impact on earnings. The results are slightly better for so-called “no excuses” charters, which feature stricter discipline and extended instructional hours — they increased test scores and four-year college enrollment and had no effect on earnings. Regular charter schools boosted two-year college enrollment, but depressed test scores, four-year college enrollment, and earnings.

The idea behind charter schools has always been that unleashing the market on education will create amazing result.

It has been about as effective as the idea of “Unleashing Chiang” (Kai Shek) on the communists in mainland China was.

You can read the full study here.

Linkage

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 Do try this at home, but kids should make sure that your parents are there:

Am I the Only Who Sees Fail Written All Over This?

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NASA is looking at handing operations of its space station to private business in the next decade:

NASA is giving us some more insight into its plans to get humans to Mars, under the blanket mission called ‘Journey to Mars,’ and during the press conference, NASA Deputy Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems Development Bill Hill revealed that the current hope is to hand off control of the International Space Station to a commercial owner by sometime around the mid 2020s.

“NASA’s trying to develop economic development in low-earth orbit,” Hill said, speaking on a panel of NASA staff assembled to discuss the upcoming Mars mission. “Ultimately, our desire is to hand the space station over to either a commercial entity or some other commercial capability so that research can continue in low-earth orbit, so that research can continue in low-earth orbit.”

The timing fits with the end of The U.S. Government’s current funding of the ISS program, which was extended by President Obama’s administration from its original deorbiting date of 2016 through 2020. Operations were prolonged through 2024 to help give NASA a platform from which to run its near-Earth preparatory missions leading up to the ultimate manned mission to Mars.

If this works as well as the privatization of British rail, I would be very surprised.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?!?!? Trillions of Dollars?

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An auditor has found that the US Army has engaged in trillions of dollars in dodgy spending:

The United States Army’s finances are so jumbled it had to make trillions of dollars of improper accounting adjustments to create an illusion that its books are balanced.

The Defense Department’s Inspector General, in a June report, said the Army made $2.8 trillion in wrongful adjustments to accounting entries in one quarter alone in 2015, and $6.5 trillion for the year. Yet the Army lacked receipts and invoices to support those numbers or simply made them up.

As a result, the Army’s financial statements for 2015 were “materially misstated,” the report concluded. The “forced” adjustments rendered the statements useless because “DoD and Army managers could not rely on the data in their accounting systems when making management and resource decisions.”

………

The new report focused on the Army’s General Fund, the bigger of its two main accounts, with assets of $282.6 billion in 2015. The Army lost or didn’t keep required data, and much of the data it had was inaccurate, the IG said.

“Where is the money going? Nobody knows,” said Franklin Spinney, a retired military analyst for the Pentagon and critic of Defense Department planning.

The significance of the accounting problem goes beyond mere concern for balancing books, Spinney said. Both presidential candidates have called for increasing defense spending amid current global tension.

I’m beginning to think that we will need to experience something akin to the sinking of the Vasa in 1628 (which led to the creation of the progenitor of the Swedish defense procurement agency, the FMV) before we end up with a defense procurement system that actually works.

This is Getting Insane

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We are now scrambling jets to defend its allies in Syria against the Assad regime:

U.S. fighter jets scrambled to eastern Syria this week when Syrian bombers attacked in the vicinity of American and coalition Special Operations forces working with Kurdish and Arab opposition fighters, the Pentagon said Friday.

The unprecedented incident, near the Syrian city of Hasakah, did not result in a direct confrontation or any injury to U.S. or coalition forces.

But it illustrated the increasingly tense and ambiguous Syrian battlefield, where aircraft and ground troops from multiple countries — with multiple agendas and loyalties — are fighting overlapping wars.

Following the initial Thursday incident, the coalition began “actively patrolling the airspace nearby,” a Defense Department official said. Early Friday, “two Syrian SU-24 aircraft attempted to transit the area and were met by coalition fighter aircraft,” which “encouraged” the Syrians to depart “without further incident,” said the official, who spoke on a Pentagon-imposed condition of anonymity.

The Syrian military, engaged in a five-year civil conflict, has generally given a wide berth to U.S. aircraft targeting the Islamic State, as have Russian jets aiding their Syrian ally. But local fighters being assisted by U.S. Special Operations forces on the ground are often opposed to both the Islamic State and the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

………

Marine Maj. Adrian Rankine-Galloway said that the Syrian strikes targeted Kurdish forces in Hasakah on Thursday. Social-media reports indicated that several Kurds were killed in the bombing.

U.S. forces initially contacted Russia, using “deconfliction” channels established to ensure that Russian and U.S. planes over Syria avoid each other, but were told that the bombers in question were not Russian. Ground forces received no response to attempts to contact the planes through a recognized radio channel.

The United States then launched a “combat air patrol,” Rankine-Galloway said. It arrived in the area as the Syrian Su-24 ground-attack aircraft were leaving. While he would not specify from where the U.S. aircraft were launched, the United States maintains a contingent of F-15 fighter jets at Incirlik Air Base in Turkey.

So, now the Syrians are bombing the Kurds.

My guess is that this is a result of the recent Turkish and Russian rapprochement:  The Turks see any form of Kurdish state as an existential threat to their state, and so the Syrian attacks on Kurdish positions are likely an artifact of this.

The US is clearly unamused by this development, since there are reports that fighters sent to intercept the Syrian aircraft was an F-22, probably because they were concerned about Syrian and Russian SAMs.

The US forces are in a bit of a bind though, because the Turks are implacably opposed to any Kurdish autonomous regions.

The only way the US wins this game is not to play.

Pass the Popcorn

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First, we have Trump’s campaign manager turfed out in large part because of his lobbying dealings with the former President of the Ukraine.

Now we have a The Podesta Group, founded by Clinton campaign manager John Podesta, and run by his brother Tony Podesta, lawyering up over their involvement with the same corrupt dirtbag:

A prominent D.C. lobbying firm has hired outside counsel over revelations that it may have been improperly involved in lobbying on behalf of pro-Russian Ukrainian politicians who also employed former Donald Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

As first reported by BuzzFeed, the Podesta Group announced Friday that it has retained law firm Caplin & Drysdale to investigate whether or not the lobbying firm unwittingly did work for the pro-Russian political party in Europe that also hired Manafort.

“Unwittingly” my ass.

………

Working on behalf of the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine, the Podesta Group lobbied in Washington for positions favored by the pro-Russian political party, of which deposed former President Viktor Yanukovych was a member. The lobbying work ended in 2014 after Yanukovych fled Ukraine for Russia, where he remains in exile.

The problem here, as it often is in the world of lobbying, is not what is illegal, but what is legal.

Manafort and Podesta are peas in a pod that only differ in their client list.