When you steal from one author, it's plagiarism; if you steal from many it's research - Wilson Mizner, Sayingyu
We live in a country run by a consummate liar whose most egregious lies have resulted in the deaths of more than 4,000 American servicemen and women, the infliction of life altering wounds on more than 20,000 servicemen and women, and the creation of millions of refugees in foreign countries.
We live in a country where a general of the U.S. Army whose first concern should be the welfare of his troops, lies to Congress about the quality of water supplied to troops working in the far off land that the consummate liar has done much to destroy. This is a general to whose command the welfare of those he commanded was entrusted.
Yet we whine about a plagiarist.
Early in July it was disclosed by Sen. Byron Dorgan that Maj. General Jerome Johnson misled (a Washington euphemism for lying) Congress in April 2007 when he testified that there were no problems with water supplied to American troops by Kellogg Brown Root, described as the largest defense contractor in Iraq.
According to the New York Times, beginning in 2006 whistleblowers let Congress know that there were problems with the nonpotable water KBR supplied the troops. The Pentagon's inspector general confirmed that KBR had not provided safe water for hygiene uses at several Iraq bases. The Pentagon learned of this in a communication from the inspector general on March 31, 2007. Three weeks later Gen. Johnson testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that problems with the water supplied by KBR were not widespread.
It was a minor breach of trust by the general. After all, when your commander-in-chief is a man whose lies have ruined millions of lives, a drop or two of bad water is hardly anything to get excited about.
Nor, it seems, is a bit of plagiarism even when the plagiarist has been nominated to a Federal District Court judgeship. It is hardly surprising that an administration that routinely lies would be unperturbed by a bit of plagiarism and would naturally consider confession of misconduct adequate to remove the stain from a reputation.
Michael E. O'Neill, a former to aide to Sen. Arlen Specter is law professor at George Mason University. He is considered a fine legal scholar who has had a brilliant career and is clearly of the sort of cloth from which federal judges are cut. There is only one flaw in the fabric and it would not even be noticeable if some journalist from the New York Times had not only discovered it but then seen fit to hold the fabric up for all to see. Alan Liptak is the journalist. He discovered that Mr. O'Neill has plagiarized on more than one occasion. One of those occasions involved an article he wrote in 2004 for the Supreme Court Economic Review, a journal published by the George Mason School of Law.
The purloined passage dealt with something called "bounded rationality" which, according to Mr. O'Nell "is not a refutation of the rational actor model," quoting word-for-word from a book review published in 2000 in the Virginia Law Review. Explaining the copying Mr. O'Neill said it was a result of a "poor work method." "I didn't keep track of things. I frankly did a poor and negligent job." He got that right. In 2007 the review issued a retraction of the article.
The White House is unperturbed by a bit of plagiarism sanctioning, as it has, lying to create foreign policy. Emily Lawrimore, a White House spokeswoman said Mr. O'Neill had been completely forthcoming" and had "expressed remorse for his actions. " She also said that the background searches the White House conducts are "very thorough" and "would capture issues such as this one." Not everyone agrees with the White House.
Deborah Rhode who teaches legal ethics at Stanford described the retraction of the article in the review as "extremely unusual" and told the Times reporter that plagiarism was a "textbook case of conduct that casts doubt on someone's fitness for judicial office."
Mr. O'Neill, in contrast, said the 2004 plagiarism was "fairly insignificant" and asked whether it was "something to kill someone's career for?" One answer was given by Daniel Polsby, the dean of the George Mason law school. He said as a consequence of the plagiarism Mr. O'Neill "stepped away from tenure and will reapply for it." That may not be necessary. Mr. O'Neill, answering his own question has refused to withdraw his nomination for a federal judgeship and if an unethical administration has its way, Mr. O'Neill will have life tenure as a federal judge. That's much better than humbly applying for restoration of a privilege lost through misconduct held up for all the world to see.
The Lord rewards him according to his works. - The Second Epistle of Paul the Apostle to Timothy
Rewards. That's the newest game in Washington D.C.
Almost simultaneously Republican presidential nominee John McCain and the U.S. Census Bureau have come up with clever ideas to make the United States of America a better place. The Census Bureau would like for more people to fill out the forms it sends out ever four years and John McCain would like for someone to invent a really good car battery.
Both have concluded that the secret is to offer rewards. Both are great ideas.
The United States Constitution requires that a census be taken every ten years pursuant to laws enacted by Congress which has determined that citizens must respond to forms they receive so that the census can be properly completed. Many people refuse to complete and return the forms and Congress and the Census Bureau have been trying to figure out how to get people to comply with the law. If the traditional approach were used, criminal sanctions would be imposed on those who refuse to obey the law. (Those who refuse to file income tax returns can explain how that works.) To address the problem of non-compliance in returning census forms, however, Congress and the Census Bureau are considering a solution that is thrilling in its simplicity. They have concluded it is more cost efficient to offer incentives to those who comply with the law than to prosecute those who don't. Prior to the 2000 Census there was talk of having some kind of sweepstakes. That idea has resurfaced and a $1 million prize has been suggested. That amount seems a bit on the penurious side, given the fact that there are close to 300 million people living in this country. They could easily triple that without adversely affecting the budget.
Rewarding those who comply with the census law is, of course, just a first step in reforming our justice system. If encouraging compliance with the law by the use of rewards instead of punishments catches on, other proposals equally attractive will almost certainly follow. The money needed to pay those who abide by the law can be found in money saved by not having to build and staff prisons. Once we have established the appropriate reward for the citizen who returns the census form, it will be necessary to determine the appropriate rewards in other ways.
Those who do not break any traffic laws during a given year may be rewarded by being entered into a lottery for a modest sum. Those from families with criminal proclivities who do not, for example, rob any banks, would be entered in lotteries with considerably higher rewards. After all, the level of the reward should be commensurate with the level of the foregone criminal activity.
And offering money as an incentive to forego criminal activity is no less imaginative than is John McCain's suggestion on how to encourage creativity.
Sen. McCain has suggested that the government (which most Republicans believe should stay out of people's lives unless it is chasing terrorists on private phone lines or e-mails or determining what women should do with their bodies) , should offer incentives for creativity.
He has suggested that taxpayers offer a $300 million prize to whoever builds what he refers to as "a better car battery," one that "has the size, capacity, cost and power to leapfrog the commercially available plug-in hybrids or electric cars." He wants, said he, to "inspire the ingenuity and resolve of the American people."
Until those words were spoken, few, if any citizens, realized that it was the prospect of a taxpayer reward that inspired creativity. Most people thought that the truly creative among us such as Bill Gates, believed their rewards were to be found in the satisfaction of a job well done and the profits that followed the commercial success of their efforts. McCain's comments suggest that he has no confidence in the ingenuity and creativity of the American people unless the federal government steps in and offers them extravagant rewards for their efforts.
Surely, everyone would agree that both ideas have great merit. If implemented, only time will tell whether rewarding the compliant or the creative will produce better results for society.
To be ignorant of one's ignorance is the malady of the ignorant - Amos Bronson Alcott, Table Talk
This is an appendix. Not the removable kind. The kind that adds information to something previously reported. It is an appendix about George Bush and the Environmental Protection Agency.
Last week I told you about some of the things that went on between George Bush, science and the EPA. In every case George Bush won and science and the EPA lost. Here is what is happening as you read this. George Bush is scampering as fast as he can to make sure coal fired power plants can be built near several national parks. He isn't personally scampering. His EPA is.
According to a recent report, the EPA is proposing a rule change to take effect before George Bush becomes nothing more than a bad memory. It would alter the way the impact of a new pollution source is calculated when determining if it can be built. Under the existing rule, peak periods of pollution are used to determine the effect of a new pollution source. If the pollution source would adversely affect a site at peak period times it could not be built. Under the proposed rule annual averages would instead be used thus making it easier to build polluting power plants near national parks.
Congress has designated 156 national parks, wilderness areas and wildlife refuges as Class-1 areas giving them maximum legal protection. Senator Lamar Alexander, the third-ranking Republican in the U.S. Senate, represents Tennessee, a state that includes the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, says that if the new rule is enacted Congress should promptly enact legislation to overturn it. In a letter to Stephen Johnson, the EPA Administrator, Mr. Alexander said the proposed rule "provides the lowest possible degree of protection" for those areas. The EPA disagrees. It says the rules are simply refinements to regulations that measure Class-1 air quality standards. When the Bush administration, the least refined in United States history, defines something as refined, warning hackles rise. Mr. Alexander's hackles are not the only ones that rose.
Federal air-quality experts at both the EPA and the National Park Service describe the proposals as a step backward. John Bunyak, policy chief at the National Park Service's planning and permit branch said the new rule "[C]ould allow additional pollution sources to locate in a particular area, where they wouldn't have been under the old rule," Clayton told the Christian Science Monitor. EPA regional staff experts say that the new rule provides "the lowest possible degree of protection" against spikes in pollution.
Echoing the staff experts' concerns, Mark Wenzler, clean air director of the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), says the new rule would permit "phony pollution accounting" methods. The EPA fact sheet, in contrast, says the "proposed rules would provide greater regulatory certainty and reduce complexity without sacrificing the current level of environmental protection."
The NPCA's list of threatened parks includes the Great Smoky Mountains, Mammoth Cave, Capitol Reef, Zion Canyon and Mesa Verde. If the EPA rule takes effect and is not overturned, higher levels of pollution in our national parks will become, together with the war in Iraq, one of the enduring legacies of George W. Bush.
It is, not clear that Mr. Bush is aware of this. It seems that if George Bush's White House gets an email it doesn't like it doesn't open it.
That 's what the administration did with an e-mail report it got from the EPA in December of 2007, the month the agency responded to a 2007 Supreme Court order that it determine whether greenhouse gases represent a danger to health or the environment. The EPA's conclusion: greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled.
Someone at the EPA thought such a conclusion should be shared with George "Ignorance is Bliss" Bush. The EPA could have saved itself the trouble. When Mr. Bush received the e-mail it told the EPA its e-mail would not be opened. And it wasn't. As a result the EPA waited six months and then released what the New York Times described as a "watered-down version of the original conclusion contained in the un-opened e-mail that greenhouse gases are a pollutant." Instead, according to the Times, the agency's recent report simply "reviews the legal and economic issues presented by declaring greenhouse gases a pollutant." The paper further says that for five days preceding the report's release the White House put pressure on the EPA to eliminate large sections of the e-mail it refused to open that supported regulation of greenhouse gases.
Here's a tip for my readers. Refusing to open e-mails because you don't like the new it brings may work in George Bush's White House world. It's probably not good practice in the real world of which George Bush is not an inhabitant.
Blind and naked Ignorance
Delivers brawling judgments, unashamed,
On all things all day along.- Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Merlin and Vivien
If there's one agency that has consistently enjoyed the benefits lavished on it by an ignorant president who continuously diminishes its standing in the world of science, it would be the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. No other agency has so thoroughly given in to the importunings of a president who lives in constant fear of what science might offer if left to its own devices; science being a branch of knowledge that cannot be controlled by him or Dick Cheney.
A hint of things to come started with Mr. Bush's refusal to sign the Kyoto Treaty on global warming. That was an issue he preferred not to address since, to Mr. Bush's way of thinking, it wasn't the problem others thought it was and, more especially, was a problem he was prepared to address quite differently from the rest of the world.
Then came Christie Todd Whitman's 2003 departure from the EPA., an agency she headed from the beginning of the Bush administration. Her tenure was marked by criticism from those outside the administration who thought she did too little to advance regulatory remedies to extant environmental issues, and White House insiders who thought she was doing too much. Irrespective of who was right, her departure marked the beginning of a change at the EPA that continued throughout the rest of the Bush years.
In October 2003 the agency announced a new set of rules permitting power plants, oil companies and other industries to avoid requirements of the Clean Air Act of 1970 which says, among other things, that industrial plants that upgrade facilities were not required to install modern pollution controls. In December of that year the EPA announced that mercury emissions from coal-burning power plants should not be regulated the same as other toxic air pollutants. According to the New York Times the proposal would place legally mandated mercury regulation "under a less stringent section of the Clean Air Act that governs pollutants that cause smog and acid rain, which are not toxic to humans."
In December 2006 we learned of another of the administration's encounters with science that involved eliminating some of the libraries maintained by the EPA, as effective a way of silencing critics as there is. (Presumably anticipating the departure of George Bush, on June 17, 2008 the EPA told Congress that the libraries were being reopened and books returned whence they'd gone during the Bush sponsored knowledge blackout.)
Concurrent with the library closings the EPA announced a new protocol pertaining to national air-quality standards. Instead of having independent scientists and professional scientists within the EPA set safety standards, staff scientists were instructed to come up with what is called "policy-relevant" science. Only after those standards are constructed are the agency's professionals permitted to comment.
The most recent skirmish between science and the EPA occurred in December of 2007. California applied for a waiver from the provisions of the energy bill signed by Mr. Bush that established a federal goal to reduce automobile emissions by 40 percent by 2020. California wanted to accelerate that schedule and effect a 30 percent reduction by 2016. EPA staffers believed the waiver should be granted as had other waivers sought by California. Overruling staff, Stephen Johnson, the EPA administrator, said that California's request did not "meet compelling and extraordinary conditions" and turned down the waiver.
In response to that decision and another made in March 2007 to issue smog regulations that were less strict that those recommended by an EPA science advisory board, the House of Representative's Oversight and Government Reform Committee began an investigation. Among other things it wanted to know if the White House had pressured Mr. Johnson.
As part of its investigation the committee subpoenaed more than 10,000 documents but some 25 of the sought after documents were withheld. Government Reform Committee Chairman Howard Waxman, a California Democrat, and his committee would like to review the withheld documents, believing they may permit the committee to discover the level of involvement, if any, by the White House in the EPA decision in regard to California.
Mr. Bush refused to turn them over claiming executive privilege. In a letter to the committee supporting that claim, Attorney General Michael Mukasey said the release of the documents could inhibit the candor of future deliberations between the president and others dealing with political issues.
He could have argued that their release would have disclosed George Bush's ignorance about matters environmental. That would be a convincing argument since most presidential observers would agree that if anyone were ever to be entitled to claim that ignorance is protected by executive privilege, it would be George Bush.
He who doesn't lose his wits over certain things has no wits to lose. - Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Emilia Galotti [1772]
A clarification: In a couple of recent columns I may have left the impression that it was only former employees of the federal government who get sweetheart deals after they have left their former employer. Nothing could be further from the truth. The private sector is even more creative than the public sector that is presided over by George Bush when it comes to such things.
Payments private sector employees receive after leaving their employment require nothing of them whereas those getting the government dole have to work in order to receive their compensation.
It is impossible in a space as short as this, to chronicle all the rewards bestowed upon executives in the private sector who have left their employers. A few examples suffice. And in considering their severance packages it is well to keep in mind that while working these men and women received somewhere in the neighborhood of 262 times the pay of the average worker. In other words, they were not threatened with impoverishment upon leaving the pay of their employers.
When Merrill Lynch & Co. decided that Stan O'Neal, its CEO, was not doing an adequate job, the board got rid of him. It gave him the 5th largest exit-pay package ever received by a U.S. executive: $161.5 million in stock and retirement benefits. Home Depot's former CEO, Bob Nardelli, received a severance package of $210 million even though the company stock did not fare well under his governance and he was liked by neither employees nor customers.
Hank McKinnell, the former CEO of Pfizer, received $213 million when he left the company and Lee Raymond of Exxon Mobil received $351 million when he left. The reason they got more than Messrs. O'Neal and Nardelli, presumably, was because their departures were not linked to poor performance.
Thanks to a report in the Wall Street Journal, we now know that many companies have compensation packages for executives who neither retire nor are fired. Those are the executives who are summoned to a higher calling while still employed. They die.
According to the Wall Street Journal, many corporations provide for post-mortem severance packages that rival the inter vivos packages described above. The lavishness of these payments is not new. What is new is that as a result of a federal rule change the size of these payments is required to be reported in such a way that those reading shareholder proxy statements can understand them.
According to the WSJ, when Eugene Isenberg, CEO of Nabors Industries Ltd. throws off his mortal coil the company will throw off benefits for him that exceed the most recent first quarter earnings of his company. The amount of his severance package is $263.6 million. The family's sorrow that will surely accompany the death of Brian Roberts, CEO of Comcast, will be ameliorated by the severance package valued at $298 million his family will receive. XTO Energy Inc. has provided a $3 million life insurance policy to its CEO, Bob R. Simpson and wanting to further assuage his survivors' grief has also agreed to provide a $111 million bonus.
As generous as the post-mortem payments are, (and they usually consist of providing insurance, vesting stock options, etc.) the most creative way of describing the payments is that used by the Shaw Group of Baton Rouge, La. It has agreed to pay its CEO, James M. Bernhard Jr., $17 million for a covenant not to compete for a period of 2 years following his death. Normally, when an employee signs a covenant not to compete the employee is agreeing not to enter into a line of work that is in competition with the former employer and it assumed that the employee is able to work somewhere on this earth. In Mr. Bernhard's case, however, when he moves into celestial heights (not the name of a subdivision in Louisiana) the company will pay him not to compete against it.
Although the foregoing suggests that executives are getting what they deserve, labor doesn't doesn't seem to get the same rewards - just or not.
Richard Ferlauto, director of corporate governance and pension investment for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, observed that Mr. Isenberg's death benefit "is a great present to his estate" but would have a significant - and deleterious - effect on the company's balance sheet.
Mr. Ferlauto doesn't understand that those kinds of payments are what make America the kind of economic place of which George Bush is so proud.
I am against government by crony.
--Harold Ickes, resigning as Secretary of the Interior, February 1946
It was a longer hill to climb than the one climbed by former Attorney General John Ashcroft, but former Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson has reason to be happy with the rewards he received upon arriving at the summit.
So do the 9/11 responders who were feeling forgotten.
John Ashcroft's entrée into the world of private enterprise was announced in January 2008. It was then we learned of the procedure that the Justice Department adopted when dealing with corporations. In a perfect world, those companies might be charged with criminal conduct but in a Bush world they are permitted to avoid prosecution. In a Bush world, culpable corporations enter into deferred prosecution agreements. They are not criminally indicted but instead agree to have their conduct monitored for a set period by the Justice Department or someone hired by the Justice Department.
Corporations like this arrangement since they avoid trial on criminal charges. The Justice Department likes it because it is full of Bush appointees who like corporations and know that they are run by good people, many of whom paid good money to help Mr. Bush get elected and don't deserve to have their reputations sullied by criminal charges. The price corporations pay for not being prosecuted (which is not the same thing as a bribe) is that the corporation that is not being prosecuted pays a fine and has to also pay the cost of the monitor hired by the Department of Justice.
Here is one example of how that worked in practice.
In 2005 the Justice Department began investigating five companies that make almost all the parts used in surgery to replace hip and knee joints in the United States. The companies were accused of paying kickbacks to surgeons and were charged with conspiracy to violate the anti-kickback laws. One of the companies investigated was Zimmer Holdings, a medical supply company in Indiana. After completing its investigation the government agreed to defer prosecution of Zimmer in exchange for its agreeing to pay a fine of $169.5 million and paying Ashcroft, the former head of the department to serve as monitor. Mr. Ashcroft was to be paid between $28 million and $52 million for the 18 months of monitoring.
Ashcroft is not alone in profiting from his work in government.
During his HHS tenure from 2001-05, Thompson was criticized for his failure to aggressively track and treat health problems arising among many of those who were the first to respond to the 9/11 bombing. Like Mr. Thompson, George Bush was criticized for refusing to adequately fund efforts to help those workers, despite repeated promises that that was one of his first priorities. His budget request for 2009 cut funding for those programs by 77 percent from what was appropriated in the FY 2008 budget. The 2008 budget appropriated $108 million and the 2009 budget $24 million.
Commenting on the $24 million a White House spokesman said the reduced amount reflected Mr. Bush's "continued commitment to World Trade Center Workers." Sen. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, said: "With the announcement of his final budget, the President had one last opportunity to demonstrate that he would not forget the sacrifices made by those who responded to 9/11 and are now sick from the toxins released during those attacks. I am disappointed and saddened to see that the President chose not to acknowledge the clear health care needs of these heroes." Estimates of the cost of monitoring and treating Ground Zero workers are about $218 million a year.
The disappointment Clinton expressed has been ameliorated by the great news that notwithstanding the cuts in the budget, the administration has generously handed an $11 million contract to Logistics Health, Inc. of which Mr. Thompson is president. He didn't have it as easy as Mr. Ashcroft since three other companies were considered and there was always the outside chance cronyism would not prevail. It did.
Under the contract the company will be paid $11 million. It will give annual physicals to World Trade Center responders, diagnose and treat their illnesses and provide a pharmacy benefit to the injured workers. It's not the many hundreds of millions that a concerned president might have provided. But it's a little something and, best of all, it helps out yet another one of George Bush's old friends.
As his administration winds down it is safe to say that lots of his friends will find lucrative employment in the private sector. That's the least he can do for those who have willingly worked for a man described by some as the worst president in history. There have to be rewards other than the guilt by association with which they will be forever tainted.
Comparisons are odious. - John Fortescue, De Laudibus Legum Angliae (1471)
It would be unfair to compare Myanmar Junta leader, Than Shwe's response to Cyclone Nargis to George Bush's response to Hurricane Katrina. For one thing, the two disasters were separated by thousands of miles. Furthermore, Burma initially rejected all foreign aid. Mr. Bush only rejected aid from Cuba.
Of course, both Mr. Bush and Mr. Than knew in advance of the approaching disasters. On May 6, 2008, a spokesman for the Indian Meteorological Department said Burmese agencies had been given 48 hours' notice of the cyclone's advent, including its point of crossing, its severity and all related issues. There was no acknowledgement of the warning from the Myanmar government.
Mr. Bush was told the Sunday before Katrina struck that the city's flood defenses could fail in such a storm. The National Weather Service issued a special hurricane warning saying most of New Orleans would be uninhabitable for weeks and "water shortages will make human suffering incredible by modern standards." Unlike Mr. Than, Mr. Bush acknowledged these warnings. He said the government was fully prepared to help.
He was wrong, of course - but not on purpose.
Monday morning Mr. Bush was again warned about the potential devastation of Katrina and was told the government might lack the capacity to deal with it. He did not let that interfere with the day's planned activities. Mr. Bush talked about immigration issues with the head of the Department of Homeland Security. He then shared a birthday cake photo-op with his old friend, Senator John McCain, and, after learning that the 17th Street canal levee in New Orleans had breached, went off to Arizona to promote Medicare Drug benefits. By late afternoon he was at a California senior center where he again discussed the Medicare drug benefit. At 8 p.m. that night the governor of Louisiana told the president she needed everything Mr. Bush could provide to deal with the emergency. Mr. Bush said nothing. He went to bed.
Tuesday afternoon Mr. Bush joined country singer, Mark Willis, for a photo-op, Mr. Bush holding a guitar and the singer smiling at the playful president. Mr. Bush then returned to Texas to finish up his vacation. He let it be known that he would begin work the following day with a task force to coordinate relief efforts.
It took Mr. Than two weeks to meet victims and see the destruction for himself. As soon as Mr. Bush finished his vacation Wednesday, he flew back to Washington, making a detour, however, to fly over New Orleans so he could see for himself how bad things were. A picture was taken of him looking out the airplane window at the devastation below. It's the sort of picture that could not be published of Mr. Than since he hasn't surveyed Nargis' damage to the Irrawaddy Delta.
As different as the responses of the two leaders to their respective disasters were, there is one sad similarity. Many Burmese will die or permanently suffer the effects of the government's unwillingness to permit foreign aid to enter the country until long after the disaster had struck.
By contrast, within days after Katrina struck, FEMA ordered $2.7 billion worth of trailers and mobile homes to house those left homeless. The descriptions used to order those trailers were neatly compiled on a single page of specifications. Joseph Hagerman, a Federation of American Scientists expert who is helping develop new emergency housing is quoted in the Washington Post as saying: "I can't believe that we bought a billion dollars' worth of product with a 25-line spec. There's not much you can do in 25 lines to protect life safety."
He is right. There is now a health catastrophe among the 300,000 people living in those homes.
The problems first surfaced in 2006. Scott Needle, a pediatrician in Bay St. Louis, La., told MSNBC that children living in the trailers were coming in to see him with respiratory complaints that occurred repeatedly. The Sierra Club tested the air in 44 trailers and in 40 of them the concentration of formaldehyde was more than .1 parts per million. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health says workers should not be exposed to that level of concentration for more than 15 minutes at a time. Responding to the initial complaints about trailers safety, FEMA spokesman, Aaron Walker told the network there had then been about 20 complaints in the 115,000 trailers being used and they could easily be resolved by increasing ventilation in the trailers.
Since Mr. Walker spoke, the number of complainants about the trailers has increased. According to the Post, 17,000 residents of the trailers have joined in a class action lawsuit against the U.S. government and the trailer manufacturers alleging health consequences from living in the trailers that include respiratory illnesses and cancer.
Only time will tell if the illnesses affecting the families and the presence of formaldehyde in the trailers furnished by the government is anything more than coincidental. But here is one thing that is definitely coincidental: any similarity between George Bush's response to Katrina and Than Shwe's response to Cyclone Nargis.
In my creed, waste of public money is like the sin against the Holy Ghost. - John, Viscount Morley of Blackburn, Recollections (1917)
A recent Congressional hearing on spending in Iraq put things in a whole new light. And a better light it is.
At a hearing with the catchy title of "Accountability Lapses in Multiple Funds" before the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform all sorts of interesting examples were offered by the representative from the Department of Defense Inspector General's office that made earlier disclosures as to misspent funds in Iraq seem benign.
"Accountability" refers to the fact that the U.S. government spent an estimated $8.2 billion on Iraqi affairs and either forgot to get receipts or, when it got receipts, forgot put detailed descriptions of how the money was spent on those receipts. The reference to "multiple funds" means that it wasn't only U.S. taxpayer dollars that were the victims of "accountability lapses." Monies belonging to the Iraqi government known as "Seized and Vested Assets" were also subject to these lapses. The audit found that $1.8 billion in Iraqi assets over which the United States had authority was paid out in cash with no record of who got the money.
DOD Deputy Inspector General for Auditing Mary L. Ugone (that is her last name - it is not a government pseudonym given someone looking for missing funds) explained the audit was started when the DOD's Criminal Investigative Service found that there were inadequate controls over disbursement of U.S. taxpayer dollars. Funds belonging to Iraq that were disbursed by U.S. authorities, disbursals the U.S. was able to make because of the very close relationship the U.S. enjoys with Iraq's money (and leaders) were also not adequately monitored.
Ms. Ugone told the committee that the Defense Department had appropriated $492 billion to support Operation Iraqi Freedom and that $2.8 billion of seized and vested Assets were to be returned to Iraq to "help rebuild its infrastructure and economy." Ms. Ugone said that $1.4 billion in contract and vendor payments and $6.3 billion in commercial payments lacked minimum supporting documentation and information for proper payment.
Ms. Ugone's testimony was 29 pages in length. At page 16 she describes the payment of $320 million in cash "to an Iraqi representative for Iraqi salary payments" that carried no indication of to whom the funds were provided or how many people were to receive salary payments. It seems appropriate that Iraqi funds be used to pay Iraqi salaries. It would probably have been helpful to indicate who got the salaries.
An exhibit attached to the hearing showed that David Dial, of Irmo, S.C. (home of the Okra Strut food festival) received a U.S Treasury check for an entity called IAP for $11,122,582.80 with no indication what it was for other than "Public Voucher for Purchases and Services Other Than Personal." SFC Alderson Williams certified that the "voucher is correct and proper for payment," according to documents accompanying Ugone's testimony. Another exhibit: A U.S. Treasury check for $5,674,075 went to Al Kasid Specialized Vehicles Trading Company c/o Federal Reserve Bank in Baghdad without a description of what it was for. Anyone wanting more examples can go to the Washington Post or the New York Times.
The difference between disclosures at the May hearing and earlier disclosures is that there was less embarrassment associated with the earlier disclosures.
We know from earlier reports that Parsons, a Texas construction company had a $243 million contract to build 150 health clinics in Iraq, paid itself $60 million of that amount for administration and management and, using the remainder, completed 20 of the 150 clinics. We know Parsons had a contract for $99.1 million to build the Khan Bani Saad Correctional Facility North of Baghdad that was to be completed by June 2006. When that date rolled around, Parsons said it could not complete it before September 2008 and it would cost an addition $13.5 million to complete. Pocketing what it had been paid Parsons went off to look in the classified ads or the White House for other work. The contract was cancelled.
KBR overcharged for meals served troops in Iraq and delivered unsafe drinking water to those troops. (It has just entered into a new contract enabling it to share in a $150 billion contract to provide services to American soldiers in Iraq.)
The earlier reports were uplifting since they showed that a fiscally responsible Bush administration knew exactly to whom and for what monies were disbursed. Its only failure was insuring that the work for which payment was made was completed. By not tracking the purposes of the disbursements there is no risk of embarrassing anyone because of the failure of the recipient to complete the work for which it was paid.
As any teenager would say, if asked, "That is SO Iraq."
Be not afraid of greatness; some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them. - Shakespeare, words spoken by Malvolio in Twelfth- Night
There is more than one way for a university to receive national recognition. One is to employ a faculty member who receives a Nobel Prize for his discovery. The other is to be governed by a chancellor who proposes a folly. The University of Colorado, has done both. It makes a citizen proud.
Thomas R. Cech was a professor at the University of Colorado in 1989. That was the year that the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to him and Sidney Altman for their discovery, as the Royal Swedish Academy of Science said, "that RNA (ribonucleic acid) in living cells is not only a molecule of heredity but also can function as a biocatalyst." Dr. Cech's receipt of the prize was accompanied by the usual favorable publicity and redounded to the credit of the University of Colorado where he had been a distinguished member of the faculty since 1978.
Dr. Cech left the university in 2000 in order to become the president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Md., a post he recently announced he was leaving in order to return to the University of Colorado. Stories of his receipt of the Nobel Prize were published, as one would expect in all the major newspapers in the world including the Wall Street Journal. But, now, thanks to the discovery of a solution to a problem that does not exist by G.P. "Bud" Peterson, its chancellor, the University of Colorado has returned to the pages of the Wall Street Journal.
In mid-May it was reported that the chancellor had concluded that what the University of Colorado needed was an endowed university chair for a Professor of Conservative Thought and Policy, "conservative thought" he apparently believes, being somewhat different from normal thought, a belief in which he may actually be correct. Hoping to bring the university accolades similar to those brought by Thomas Cech when he received the Nobel Prize, Chancellor Peterson announced that he was hoping to raise $9 million to fund such a position. His proposal did not go unnoticed. It appeared on the front page of the Wall Street Journal and was accompanied by an actual photograph of the chancellor on the second page of that paper, a sign of greatness bestowed on but a distinguished few.
Rep. Tom Tancredo, one of the more amusing examples of the sort of mindless wonders that inhabit the halls of Congress and, briefly, a candidate for the president of the United States, dislikes things intellectual as much as the next man. In a letter to the university he offered to become the first occupier of this chair if it is funded. He was, of course, only joking. In that same letter he suggested that a 20-foot high fence be built around the university, similar to the fence he has longed to see built on the border between the United States and Mexico. That, too, was a joke.
On a more serious note, other conservative commentators have criticized the idea. David Horowitz, who lives in mortal fear of liberal professors and has identified the 101 most dangerous academics in the country, is quoted in the Journal's article as saying that creation of one token chair will brand the individual like "an animal in the zoo."
One name that has surfaced as a candidate to fill the chair is columnist George Will. Upon learning of the new position he said: "Like Margaret Mead among the Samoans, they're planning to study conservatives. That's hilarious. I don't think it would be a good fit."
The University of Colorado is 49th in the country in terms of per-student state funding which accounts for less than 10 percent of the university's total budget. Some may wonder whether a better use could be found for $9 million than the creation of a chair that is described as the first of its kind in the nation and the topic of which could easily be covered within the existing course curriculum at the university. The answer is not hard to find. It could. The discovery of more useful ways to spend $9 million - perhaps on students - would further remove from the conversation the mockery to which the chancellor and his proposal have been subject.
Bud Peterson did not intentionally play the fool and probably doesn't think any of this is hilarious. He was just looking for a way to leave his mark. Perhaps some of his advisors will suggest that there are many other ways to do so.
But all is not despair in the academy. Tom Cech is returning to the university and his return will bring good cheer to its denizens. Sadly, the consequences of the chancellor's folly will have many returns, all of them less felicitous.
The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature, which distinguishes man from animals. - Harvey Cushing, Life of Sir William Osler
Health insurance companies are constantly looking for new ways to make money. Two of the major impediments to their quest are sick people and the drugs they need. Clever, as a good corporation should be, they have figured out how to overcome the second of these obstacles. Two techniques are employed. The first is practicing medicine just the way doctors do even though few, if any, insurance companies have attended medical school.
When a doctor prescribes a specific drug for a patient, the insurance company may decide that the generic equivalent of that drug is just as good for the patient (whom it has never met) as the one that the physician prescribed and refuse to pay for the prescribed drug. In that event, if the patient wants to use the prescribed drug the patient must pay for the drug out of his or her own pocket. There is, however, a built in appeals process that patient and doctor can go through if they would like to prove that the trained doctor's decision is more medically accurate than the corporation's but it is a somewhat cumbersome process. Why the company insists on substituting its judgment for the doctor's judgment is best known to the insurance company. And as creative as this is on the part of the insurance company, it is not the most dramatic example of saving money through creative insuring.
A recent report in The New York Times discloses that some insurance companies have realized increased profits by reducing the amount of money they are willing to pay for certain prescription drugs taken by their insureds. It seems like such an obvious thing to do that the only remarkable thing is that the insurance companies have not thought of it before now.
Before the companies became creative in reimbursing for drug costs, the insured was required to pay a fixed amout (known as a co-payment) for a prescribed drug that that went anywhere from approximately $5.00 to $50. The amount of the co-pay was determined by the company which also classified medications as being a Tier 1, 2 or 3 drug. The insurance company paid the difference between the drug's co-pay and its actual cost to the insurance company. Then, a funny thing happened on the way to the pharmacy. The insurance companies created a Tier 4 into which they placed REALLY expensive drugs.
People taking Tier 4 are the beneficiaries of the new policy. Here is how three randomly selected insurers have made themselves its beneficiaries.
The insurance program run by the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) requires patients taking Tier 4 drugs to pay 30 percent of the cost of the drugs with no limit on how much the insured ultimately has to pay. Among them, Sprycel, a Tier 4 drug that blocks the growth of cancer cells and eliminates the need for chemical infusions. It costs $13,500 for a 90-day supply. AARP requires the insured to pay $4,500 for each 90-day prescription and AARP pays the balance. First Health Life & Health also charges a flat 30 per cent for Tier 4 drugs without any limit on what the insured pays. Kaiser Permanente, by contrast, tempers profitability with mercy. It requires its insureds to pay only 25 percent of the cost of Tier 4 drugs and places a $325 limit on how much the insured has to pay for each prescription.
Increasing insurance companies' profitability is not the only benefit of the new program. For Medicare beneficiaries who have to pay 5 percent of their drug costs after they've spent their way through what's known as the doughnut hole - a period of spending on medication without reimbursement - this new structure gets them through that period more expeditiously. Of course, not all Medicare beneficiaries will see the benefit.
But another benefit that will, however, be obvious to its beneficiary: is the cost savings to employers who furnish health insurance to employees.
Karen Ignagni is president of America's Health Insurance Plans, an organization that represents most of the health insurance industry. She pointed out in the New York Times story that lower outlay for prescription drugs means the insurance companies can charge employers lower premiums, thus providing a cost benefit to employers. Adding those benefits to those enjoyed by the insurers makes it obvious that the new policy is a win-win except, of course, for those who can no longer afford to take drugs.
In George Bush's United States 47 million people have no health insurance. In George Bush's United States 9 million children have no health insurance. Thanks to the creation of Tier 4, we will soon have a new class of citizen. It will comprise people who have insurance but are unable to pay for the drugs needed to keep them in or restore them to, good health. In a few years we will know how many people are members of their class. They will join the uninsureds as statistics.
