Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle

VS

$100 billion or so later, we are fighting with ground-based robots. We’ve seen earlier versions of these little puppies in movies like The Hurt Locker, where Army bomb disposal units we happy to send in these little fellers into harm’s way for a little “look-see,” but like their aerial counterparts, the shootin’ and blastin’ drones, they clearly represent the way of the future for combat missions. This particular robot’s mission? To be the “first contact” between U.S. forces and “the enemy.” This is a first, and we can expect deployment into Afghanistan in the very near future.

“The SUGV was developed as part of the U.S. Army's Future Combat System, an ambitious collection of manned and unmanned systems that were supposed to be linked together through a single network. After that estimated $100 billion program was canceled last year, mainly out of cost considerations, the Defense Department opted to keep the SUGV as part of a new strategy to bolster infantry combat teams.” The November 11 Sphere.com. But with debates over numbers of troops we can afford to send into Afghanistan, they represent the next best hope for military commanders short on troops and long on mission requirements. We had one way to deploy more combatants without sending more military: the wonder and glory of “contractors” (ok, mercenaries) in Iraq, but their gleaming popularity seems to be waning, except for “outsourced” diplomatic guard duty, which continues to be a sore spot for many.

Wanna know exactly how popular they were in Iraq (before they were denied a renewed operating license by the Iraqis)? The November 10^th NY Times: “Top executives at Blackwater Worldwide [famous “contractors”] authorized secret payments of about $1 million to Iraqi officials that were intended to silence their criticism and buy their support after a September 2007 episode in which Blackwater security guards fatally shot 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, according to former company officials.” Isn’t there a law against Americans paying off foreign government officials? These days, Blackwater has a cool new name – Xe Services – guess they hope you don’t confuse them with their past. Robots seem more honorable somehow, and they can be very effective.

According to the Army, 52% of their casualties come from “first contact” with the enemy. Add a video-game-trained soldier with a joystick and you have the Army’s answer to the “walking the point” without risking death or dismemberment. Reconnaissance without pain. The future holds the same probable development sequence as the aerial technologies that have been deployed – reconnaissance, real-time-human-controlled firing of weapons, human-selected-robot-controlled firing of weapons, and arrrrghhhh! – robot-selected-robot controlled firing of weapons.

Considering that today cruise missiles can be and often are launched with an internal visual menu of potential targets (complete with strategic priorities) where the missile makes the “decision” in the field, this is nothing new. But with the ground-based systems, the robots will soon be reacting to hostile fire directed at them, making an entirely new set of “decisions” on what targets to kill – targets that have not been “pre-identified” by human decision-makers.

The moral and ethical issues are quite profound, but fortunately, we may never have to reach into that morass, since making a buck probably dictates that these capacities are all but certainties. After all, if “we don’t do this, our enemy will.” Where have I read that before? Sphere.com: “Military robots have fast grown into a multibillion-dollar business. Massachusetts company iRobot has already delivered around 2,700 robots to militaries around the world. Some of those were part of a December 2007, $300 million U.S. Defense Department contract that iRobot won after prevailing over an upstart that purloined its technology. A second Massachusetts firm, Foster-Miller, won a contract in 2008 for another $400 million to supply thousands of its TALON robots. Both iRobot's PackBot and Foster-Miller's TALON are mostly used to locate and detonate improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, which have proved to be one of the Taliban's deadliest weapons.”

Who can argue with using robot to defuse bombs? And who wants to see American soldiers die when they don’t have to. But the other kind of robots? Don’t you just hate “computer glitches”? Oh well… Jobs now; death later.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.

The Water Wars

Jobs, energy, education… the United States, for that matter, the world, seems to be a story of the misery imposed on the exploding population of humanity from shortages. Is nature trying to eliminate “nature’s senior predator” with war, plague, pestilence and famine? Do those four horsemen ride with God’s mandate? The big shortage I’ve blogged about in Kenya – the drought-plagued African Rift Valley – WATER… is very much a part of the American landscape as well. An excerpt from a book I published last year on Kindle:

As urban growth in desert landscapes continues, looking at cities like Las Vegas (flying over Lake Mead shows you just how far the water table has fallen) and Los Angeles, and as aquifers in places like Montana and Idaho are rapidly being drained, the 21^st century may well be remembered as the time when we ran out of water. The April 4, 2007 New York Times noted that while the western states are struggling with a drought that began in 1999 combined with the impact of global warming and population growth, even with $2.5 billion in new water projects, water wars loom as battle lines are being drawn. The Ogallala Aquifer (which runs beneath eight states, between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi River, and provides water for the grain-producing states) was once the size of Lake Huron, but at a net consumption of five feet of water per year, some time in the next two or three decades, that water will be gone, and those [mid-west] states face the possibility of turning into a vast and infertile dust bowl.

As rain water runoff pours down the “Los Angeles River” – a drainage ditch with a fancy name – on those rare occasions that it “rains in Southern California,” I am reminded of the water wars waged with the Northern California Owens Valley so many years ago (rent the move Chinatown if you want to see a dramatic rendition – great film), the agreement among the Western states (made at Bishops Lodge outside of Santa Fe New Mexico in 1922) to divvy up the waters of the Colorado River and the trickle of water than remains to flow into Mexico after American thirst and water waste has had its fill. I read scary articles about the radiation leak in north central New Mexico (from Los Alamos) into the aquifers that slake so many of the homes around Santa Fe. California’s Imperial Valley grows desperately-needed food with scare water diverted into this desert region (never really suited for farming) from everywhere but the Imperial Valley.

As massive dams built to store water and generate electricity slow from the inevitable build-up of silt, the future of water… and hence the United States… is increasingly on the line. Just about everything man builds – sooner or later – wears out. California, a state where even San Francisco is really a desert, is a place where water issues are always at the top of the political agenda. Water restrictions are common, but while eastern states have too much water, the western region is a desiccated mess. And the tales of desalinization seldom take into consideration the considerable energy needs and massive costs of such a long-term infrastructure project.

On an ePage featuring an ad of “Endless Pools,” the November 5^th Los Angeles Times wrote of what California is proposing for its less-than-moist future: “Lawmakers capped months of discussions, weeks of tedious negotiations and years of chasing a water deal with approval of major legislation in a marathon session that ended [November 4^th] as the sun rose… The package, which includes an $11.1-billion bond that must go before voters, would nudge California in new directions on water policy while giving something to each of the major factions that have warred over the state's supplies… The measure, likely to reach the governor's desk [in the week of November 9^th], would establish a statewide program that for the first time would measure if too much water is being pumped from underground aquifers. It mandates an overall 20% drop in the state's per capita water use by 2020 and creates a new, politically appointed council to oversee management of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, the state's water hub…”

“The bond has to be approved by voters, a gamble in a time of gaping budget deficits and job losses. The big infrastructure projects it would fund are probably years away from construction. Mending the crippled delta is far from a sure thing… The package's broad scope is in part a recognition that the good old days are gone, and that the state must embrace new approaches to meet its water needs… ‘This is California slowly and painfully coming to terms with a static water supply,’ said Phil Isenberg, a former legislator who has grappled with water issues for years. ‘There are big problems and [we] have to do a bunch of different things.’”

Nature probably doesn’t care if the legislation passes or not and probably is agnostic to whether human beings actually take any steps at all to moderate water usage. She probably doesn’t even care if the cause is climate change or wasteful consumption practices; when there isn’t enough, the water just runs out. If communities die and people cannot sustain life without the precious droplets, so what if they make for some future archaeologist’s PhD thesis study of ancient man’s abandoned civilizations?

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.

What’s Left in India

To anyone who has ever traveled to India, it is almost an unfathomable amalgamation of inconsistency. Well over a quarter of this great nation lives on a paltry 40 cents or less per day. Somewhere north of 320 million (out of approximately 1.2 billion people) fall within a global definition of middle class or better; yet, the vast majority of India’s people are profoundly poor. India is like first world, second world and a third world nations layered on top of each other, living together under one democratic system, a sea of humanity that seems as if it really shouldn’t exist in relative harmony. Languages vary from region to region, and their legal system has embraced English as a necessary tongue of commercial expediency (definitely a language learned almost exclusively by the upper and middle classes).

New high tech complexes, in and around places like Hyderabad or Chennai or Bangalore, offer gated and guarded “mini-cities” technology parks with modern streets, chrome and glass buildings, fiber-optic linkage and state-of-the-art residential offerings. Immediately outside these gates often lie crumbling or inadequate infrastructure, from streets to waste treatment, and immeasurable squalor and poverty. Open sewers. Legions of beggars. sJury-rigged ramshackle “homes” that shelter millions. Cities offer ultra-modern amenities – spa, clubs, restaurants and shopping malls with the latest fashions (pictured above) – while sheltering teaming millions in dirt and truly ugly inhumane conditions right around the corner.

That harmony may be more of a cacophony, one in which peaceful co-existence is rapidly deteriorating. India has always had its share of political violence and rabble-rousing, but a disturbing factionalism has been rising violently, particularly in the eastern quadrant of the country – extreme left-wing Maoism. The November 1^st New York Times: “In the last four years, the Maoists have killed more than 900 Indian security officers, a figure almost as high as the more than 1,100 members of the coalition forces killed in Afghanistan during the same period… If the Maoists were once dismissed as a ragtag band of outdated ideologues, Indian leaders are now preparing to deploy nearly 70,000 paramilitary officers for a prolonged counterinsurgency campaign to hunt down the guerrillas in some of the country’s most rugged, isolated terrain.”

The Maoists don’t just want a voice within the massive Indian political spectrum; they want to topple the current government and take over entirely. Their efforts have found traction among impoverished tribes and deprived masses whose plight has become that much more transparent in the accelerated growth of the Indian economy, an expansion of the middle class that has completely left most Indians behind.

The Times: “Once considered Robin Hood figures, the Maoists claim to represent the dispossessed of Indian society, particularly the indigenous tribal groups, who suffer some of the country’s highest rates of poverty, illiteracy and infant mortality. Many intellectuals and even some politicians once sympathized with their cause, but the growing Maoist violence has forced a wrenching reconsideration of whether they can still be tolerated… ‘The root of this is dispossession and deprivation,’ said Ramachandra Guha, a prominent historian based in Bangalore. ‘The Maoists are an ugly manifestation of this. This is a serious problem that is not going to disappear.’…

“[I]n the state of Chattisgarh, Maoists dominate thousands of square miles of territory and have pushed into neighboring states of Orissa, Bihar, Jharkhand and Maharashtra, part of a so-called Red Corridor stretching across central and eastern India... Violence erupts almost daily. In the past five years, Maoists have detonated more than 1,000 improvised explosive devices in Chattisgarh. Within the past two weeks, Maoists have burned two schools in Jharkhand, hijacked and later released a passenger train in West Bengal while also carrying out a raid against a West Bengal police station.”

The cry of poverty in India is overwhelming; the solution to the horrific human condition, even in times of explosive economic growth, is elusive. Populism has elected xenophobes, anti-Muslims and uncompromising ideologues along the way… movements that have been tempered with the underhanded cash flow of the richest segments of society. But this new Maoist movement, spreading its violent wings with a strong presence in 20 out of India’s 28 states, is indeed a power to be reckoned with, one that threatens the very existence of this great democracy.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.

Avarice and Greed? Meet Arrogance and Overconfidence!

A couple of years ago, at my college reunion, alumni were treated to a series of lectures in many subjects. Among those we attended, my wife and I were fascinated by a presentation at the Yale School of Management – based on numerous studies sponsored by the University – which effectively repealed the notion of a marketplace governed by a rational person driving the pricing structure based on informed economic self-interest. OK, everyone should have known better simply based on the word “informed.”

Despite all of the market research, the analytics of experts, it seemed as if those who trade in the marketplace, particularly the non-expert day-traders, made their decisions under the assumption that with a little bit of reading, they could out-perform the marketplace. Statistics showed that, in fact, these non-expert day-traders trailed market averages with the reports of the occasional mega-success of one of their compatriots fueling their raging fires of overconfidence.

In fact, when Yale began making market predictions based on psychological factors, their estimates proved so much more accurate that the “rational economic man” predictions of professional analysts that the big financial institutions began absorbing the Yale predictors into their own analyses. The result? The professional analysts’ reports became more accurate, but the value of the psychological predictors was lost now that everyone was using the same formula.

But psychological variables still dominate the market-valuation process. One of the interesting economic iconoclasts to come around in the last few years is 46-year-old Malcolm Gladwell, a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996 and best known as the author of the books The Tipping Point (2000), Blink (2005), and Outliers (2008). In a July 2009 article in The New Yorker, Gladwell examined the dominant theme that tried to explain the colossal failures of Wall Street that gave rise to our economic collapse. Popular notions of insufficient governmental regulation or incompetent analysis and decision-making were insufficient explanations to Gladwell. He felt there was a bigger cause: irrational and obvious overconfidence.

Is America, land of the free, home of the brave, where “cowboy” is a term of endearment, simply a culture that is too aggressive for its own good? But isn’t that what made America great? Perhaps the recent economic overconfidence (hubris) of a few was accelerated by the insecurities of the many (the sheep who followed out of fear that not following would have reflected their true ignorance). The November 6^th theDeal.com excerpts this analysis from Gladwell’s July piece entitled Cocksure: Banks, battles, and the psychology of overconfidence. (Read Gladwell's piece here.)

Several years ago, a team headed by the psychologist Mark Fenton-O'Creevy created a computer program that mimicked the ups and downs of an index like the Dow, and recruited, as subjects, members of a highly paid profession. As the line moved across the screen, Fenton-O'Creevy asked his subjects to press a series of buttons, which, they were told, might or might not affect the course of the line. At the end of the session, they were asked to rate their effectiveness in moving the line upward. The buttons had no effect at all on the line. But many of the players were convinced that their manipulation of the buttons made the index go up and up. The world these people inhabited was competitive and stressful and complex. They had been given every reason to be confident in their own judgments. If they sat down next to you, with a tape recorder, it wouldn't take much for them to believe that they had you in the palm of their hand. They were traders at an investment bank.

TheDeal.com’s observation: “However, Gladwell also notes that overconfidence, particularly on Wall Street, can be an advantage since investment bankers borrow billions on the terms that they are able to pay it back. He cites Harvard biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham, who writes, ‘In conflicts involving mutual assessment, an exaggerated assessment of the probability of winning increases the probability of winning. Selection therefore favors this form of overconfidence.’”

And when you join this litany of psychological dysfunctions with hubris, the results can be staggering. As Goldman Sachs bankers soaked up their laden paychecks, bonus compensation and stock appreciation, their CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, justified his company to the London Times saying: “We help companies to grow by helping them to raise capital. Companies that grow create wealth. This, in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth. We have a social purpose.”

Yeah, I’ve been keeping an eye on that job growth, Lloyd, 10.2% national unemployment (17.5% if you counter part-timers and those who’ve given up but still want full-time job) – nice work! The November 9^th DailyFinance.com added: “[Blankfein] has put an unusual spin on the bank's activities. He says his firm is doing ‘God's work.’ This may seem like an audacious statement coming from a man whose company has been harshly criticized for planning to give many of its employees multi-million pay packages just a bit more than a year after the collapse of the credit markets.”

Hmmmm! Dekom on what needs to happen: When you have a bevy of overconfident, arrogant and overpaid cowboys holding the well-being of an entire nation in their sweating palms, you need to watch them like a hawk and corral their excesses with a vicious herd dog and the sounds of a strident whip! Crack! Snap! Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.

Splitting the Baby in Half – The Great Healthcare Abortion Debate

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi struggled and failed to make legalized abortions a part of the costs covered by the proposed healthcare legislation. A number of conservative Democrats (there was only one Republican supporter – Louisiana Rep. Anh "Joseph" Cao, elected in a heavily Democratic district because his opponent was battling corruption charges) railed at this concept, and in the end, the version of the healthcare legislation that did clear the House (here comes the Senate and the likely Republican/independent filibuster; the bill could be DOA as a result)… but with a catch: “Her attempts at winning them over had failed, and Ms. Pelosi, the first woman speaker and an ardent defender of abortion rights, had no choice but to do the unthinkable. To save the health care bill she had to give in to abortion opponents in her party and allow them to propose tight restrictions barring any insurance plan that is purchased with government subsidies from covering abortions.”

So I thought to myself, what is the most controversial statistical analysis that bolsters a conservative agenda but clearly supports the notion of legalized abortion? And then I remembered a section in Steven Levitt’s & Stephen Dubner’s mega-best seller, Freakonomics (Harper, 2005, 2006, 2009). Levitt is an award-winning and highly respected economist at the University of Chicago who has specialized in challenging generally accepted theories and “common knowledge” with the credible evidence of detailed statistical analysis.

The premise, which will undoubtedly get under some of my readers’ skin, is that the exceptionally significant reduction in violent crime in the 1990’s was not the result of better police enforcement, an increase in the rate of incarceration of criminals (such as under the three strikes legislation adopted by most states), or enlightened social policies. Instead argue Levitt and Dubner, it was the legacy of the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision banning restrictions on abortion set forth in the famous Roe vs. Wade decision.

Their conclusion was that legalized abortion literally gave unwed mothers and those who knew they really would not be responsible mothers the option of terminating a pregnancy – people at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder had a choice. Since, the authors assert, these mothers would have most likely produced children without credible parental guidance and care, those children most “at risk” for social maladjustment and living in the crime-plagued lower economic neighborhood, the reduction in birthrates in this limited group of “potential criminals” had its obvious effect decades later when those who would have been born would have been old enough to commit the projected crimes.

Some excerpts: “In the first year after Rose v. Wade, some 750,000 women had abortions in the United States (representing one abortion for every 4 live births). By 1980 the number of abortions reached 1.6 million (one for every 2.25 live births), where it leveled off.” (page 138)

“One study has shown that the typical child who went unborn in the earliest years of legalized abortion would have 50% more likely than average to live in poverty; he would have been 60% more likely to grow up with just one parent. These two factors – childhood poverty and a single-parent household – are among the strongest predictors that a child will have a criminal future.” (pages 138-139).

“One way to test the effect of abortion on crime would be to measure crime date in the five states where abortion was made legal before the Supreme Court extended abortion rights to the rest of the country… And indeed, those early-legalizing states saw crime fall earlier than the other forty-five states [before the unborn children would have come of age under Roe vs. Wade-permitted abortions]… 13% compared to the other states…” (page 141)

“Sure enough, the states with the highest abortion rates in the 1970s experienced the greatest crime drops in the 1990s, while states with low abortion rates experienced smaller crime drops… Since 1985, states with high abortion rates have experienced a roughly 30 percent drop in crime relative to low-abortion states.” (page 141)

If you want to know more, read the book; I just hit the headlines on this topic. These controversial statistics seem to provide a hornet’s nest of issues to be debated. How do you feel about these findings?

I’m Peter Dekom, and I thought this was most interesting.

Breaking Up is Hard to Do

If you are rich and powerful, person or company, wouldn’t you at least allocate some of your wealth to make sure that neither your wealth nor your power were taken from you? Maybe even enhanced a little bit? If you are poor and powerless – or even if you are middle class and hanging on to what you have – wouldn’t you part with some of your wealth to make sure you got a bit more of the pie? Oh, you don’t have that wealth to get folks elected; you have to wait until people are so pissed off at the political system that money from special interests just plain doesn’t matter anymore.

In short, the system favors the special interests with the money to influence the system until things get so completely out of hand that someone has to come in and vacuum the whole mess. Kind of destroys that notion that free markets and laissez faire will always operate in the best interests of the country. Yet purists demand that the government let go… unless the government is granting business tax credits or oil depletion allowances… that we are becoming “socialist,” although I cannot think of something more socialist than “public schools.”

Just as millions of Americans are watching their life savings and pension benefits destroyed by reason of the economic malaise caused by a business-supported frenzy of over-borrowing, we learn that the fat cats at the top of the big companies are pulling down huge increases in their pensions. The November 3^rd TheDeal.com: “Here are some startling statistics: The Wall Street Journal has found that pensions for top executives rose an average of 19% last year as companies' share prices tumbled on average 37%, according to an analysis of SEC filings. ..Consider, too, that the average corporate pension fund lost 24% or so of its total value last year, compelling some companies to freeze their pension funds and to stop matching employee contributions, and the news is that much more gut-wrenching.” We already know about the huge bonuses these folks have already taken, but this excess seems interminable.

The special interests seem almost impossible to contain, and the sheer size of the aggregation of corporate power appears to make the biggest of the big immune from any semblance of rational governance, from shareholders to government regulators. Bernie Madoff scoffs at the efforts of the SEC to regulate rogue traders (such as himself). The BBBs (bailed out big banks) must have been literally laughing all the way to themselves as the government gave them billions to restart the credit markets, but they took that money and used that capital to milk the system while leaving the small business and commercial credit market in worse shape than when they got the TARP payments in the first place!

The Brits are beginning to figure out that just allowing these financial institutions to become and remain as large as they have become is an evil within itself. The November 3^rd Washington Post: “The British government announced Tuesday that it will break up parts of major financial institutions bailed out by taxpayers, highlighting a growing divide across the Atlantic over how to deal with the massive banks that were partially nationalized during the height of the financial crisis… The British government -- spurred on by European regulators -- is forcing the Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds Banking Group and Northern Rock to sell off parts of their operations. The Europeans are calling for more and smaller banks to increase competition and eliminate the threat posed by banks so large that they must be rescued by taxpayers, no matter how they conducted their business, in order to avoid damaging the global financial system.”

When you look at how many former “big bankers” are highly-placed officials in any U.S. administration, Republican or Democrat, it is little wonder that these big financial institutions have the clout to fight any such efforts in the United States. Let’s face it, the system of allowing big financial institutions to grow to whatever size they can achieve, by merger or acquisition, is an obvious complete and utter failure by any objective measure (look at how these institutions have fared in this meltdown when compared with small businesses and individual consumers!). “‘We still need to see exactly which parts the [British] banks will need to sell off to judge whether the goal of having smaller banks is really achieved,’ said Richard Portes, an economics professor at the London Business School. ‘But there are lessons here for the United States. The supposed economies of scale of massive financial institutions are outweighed by the difficulties in controlling risk inside them.’” The Post. Duh!

Compare the economic gains of these special interests to this report from the November issue of Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine (as reported November 3^rd on AOL news): “Nearly half of all U.S. children and 90 percent of black youngsters will be on food stamps at some point during childhood, and fallout from the current recession could push those numbers even higher, researchers say...The estimate comes from an analysis of 30 years of national data, and it bolsters other recent evidence on the pervasiveness of youngsters at economic risk… According to a [United States Department of Agriculture] report released last month, 28.4 million Americans received food stamps in an average month in 2008, and about half were younger than age 18. The average monthly benefit per household totaled $222.” Even if you think the numbers are a 100% exaggeration, the statistics are still staggering.

When crass pragmatists insist that it is political folly to think that the government can remotely impact the same kind of break-up in the U.S., because these special interests are way too powerful to contain, I would like to point out the most fundamental lesson of history: when special interests so overwhelm the best interests of the vast majority of the citizens of any nation, the political system that gave rise to the inequality will eventually fail – either through insurrection (France in 1789), conquest (the southern Soong Dynasty in 1279), separation of component states into new political units (Soviet Union in 1991) or simple collapse (Anasazi Indians of Arizona/New Mexico sometime around 1300, accelerated by climate change). It is, if I recall, how the United States came to exist in the first place in 1776.

Taking our freedoms for granted and ignoring the obvious failings of the system are nothing more than condoning the beginning of the end. And in that end, the special interests stand to lose more than anything they could possibly have gained in the interim… but who thinks that far ahead? We really must!

I’m Peter Dekom, and I reluctantly approve this message.

The Falling of a Large Shoe

If you are a small business, dependent on lenders to provide you a bridge loan from the time your buyers order your products to the time when you manufacture and deliver those goods (or the “factoring business” – selling accounts receivable to fund your operations) or to stock your shelves with goods to sell, this economic collapse has been a real bitch. All the talk of “the recession is ending” and the surge in the stock market has to appear strange to a businessperson who has been either getting loans or selling receivables routinely for decades, but who has had that credit dry up and blow away for the last year plus. Sorry faithful employees for decades, your job has been discontinued pending the end of the credit freeze or sorry faithful employees for decades, we are folding the tent.

The HUGE failure of TARP wasn’t even the untracked government give-away or even the horrific bailout of institutions that are now creating mega-millionaires among their traders and bankers, feeding on the distressed economy and the misery of others. It is that the government pushed capital into these large institutions in order to unfreeze the credit markets (but failed to attach a string that mandated this result!), and these ingrates used that capital for their own accounts, shoring up their balance sheets and buying their leveraged way back into the equity markets. What they most certainly did not do is create an unfrozen credit market.

Without government-backed lending in the housing market, residential real estate would be even more moribund than it already is now. The automotive business got direct cash infusions at every level of the government. GMAC – a lender for car loans, GM and Chrysler – the obvious manufacturer, and even the consumers – under the “cash for clunkers” program. It seems that to get meaningful government assistance in this country, the key is to fail BIG. Further and generally, publicly-traded companies usually have access to easier channels of debt financing – bonds, commercial paper and even some bank lines (because they have credit ratings), which funding sources are simply not available to most small businesses.

The financial biggies are not the only ones playing with and hording their cash. It seems all the rage to horde these days. The cover story on the November 2^nd Wall Street Journal notes: “In the second quarter, the 500 hundred largest nonfinancial U.S. firms, by total assets, held about $994 billion in cash and short-term investments… ‘Everyone is hording cash,’ says Carsten Stendevad, head of Citygroup Inc.’s financial-strategy group. He and others call that a hangover from the financial crisis of a year ago, when companies couldn’t raise money or had to pay much higher rates than usual.” Well, folks, that good for the big public players, but the little companies that account for 40% of America’s jobs still can raise or borrow money!

The has been one company that has catered to small businesses, factoring and providing these bridge loans as its core competency – CIT Group, Inc. On November 1^st, this most significant player in this arena filed for protection under Chapter 11 (reorganization) under the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. Management released this statement: “With the overwhelming support of its debtholders, the Board of Directors voted to proceed with the prepackaged plan of reorganization for CIT Group Inc. and a subsidiary that will restructure the Company's debt and streamline its capital structure.”

The November 2d DailyDeal.com: “The Chapter 11 filing is one of the biggest in U.S. corporate history, following Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., Washington Mutual Inc., WorldCom and General Motors Corp., points out The Associated Press. CIT's bankruptcy filing shows $71 billion in finance and leasing assets against total debt of $64.9 billion…” The fifth biggest, to be precise (not quite the order of magnitude of the biggest), and one of the largest providers of lending capital to small businesses all across the United States. Taxpayers invested $2.3 billion in CIT last fall, and that money is gone… but the government support for this institution paled in comparison to what it provided to the biggest of the big, financial institutions that have grown fat (at least for now) in the recent market rise.

There is a modicum of hope in this “restructuring.” With 85% of its bondholders participating in a vote to take 70 cents on the dollar (the equity players are relegated to 6 cents on the dollar), at least this is not a free-fall Chapter 11; there is order to the chaos, CIT had little choice than to pull the bankruptcy trigger since a slew of bonds were about to mature this week, and the lender had no chance to pay those off or restructure under the current marketplace. The holding company (and not most of its subsidiaries) filed for bankruptcy, but whether this causes a ripple of smaller bankruptcies among the small businesses, particularly retailers who have relied on CIT to buy inventory, remains to be seen.

Looking at this side of the marketplace is not particularly sexy and some of these financial blogs aren’t the most exciting pieces to read, but the impact on our daily lives from news like this can be very significant. With consumers hanging on to seeming locked pockets and unemployment ratcheting up month-by-month (breaking the magic 10 percent number for October – 10.2%, to be precise, announced November 6^th), the failure to restore the ordinary and routine credit markets threatens to send this economy back for another round of painful recession, no matter how the political economists spin their financial analysis. The government better figure this one out sooner rather than later or watch the value of the “stimulus” package disintegrate in a sea of new bankruptcies, job loss and further erosion in consumer confidence.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.

Letter from the Af-Front

On September 10, 2009, recently appointed career U.S. Foreign Service Officer, 36-year-old Matthew P Hoh, sent a four page letter to the Director General of the Foreign Service & Director of Human Resources, Ambassador Nancy J Powell, resigning from the service and specifically from his position as Senior Civilian Representative, Zabul Province, Afghanistan. A former Marine captain who had served in Iraq, Mr. Hoh resigned in protest to the continued U.S. presence and battle in Afghanistan.

“I fail to see the worth in the continued U.S. casualties or expenditures of resources in support of the Afghan government in what is, truly, a 35-year old civil war.” Noting that in one more year, the U.S. presence in Afghanistan will equal that of the failed Soviet effort during the 1980s, Hoh added that we were attempting to impose a form of government on this nation that is “unknown and unwanted by its people.” Hoh is not the first person to note the profoundly tribal nature of a nation that is seen as a single political “unit” only in the eyes of the outside world.

Hoh noted that the seemingly great unifying force in Afghanistan is neither support for the Taliban insurgency nor the quest for a freely elected central government; it is the anger of a people at the “foreign soldiers and taxes imposed by an unrepresentative government in Kabul.” In short, the mere presence of NATO troops and the clearly and overwhelmingly corrupt government in Kabul – represented by the election-fixing face of President Karzai – are the driving forces for continued violence and instability in this region.

Hoh states that “We are mortgaging our economy on a war, which, even with increased commitment, will remain a draw for years to come. Success and victory, whatever they may be, will be realized not in years, after billions more spent, but in decades and generations. The United States does not enjoy a national treasury for such success and victory.” Congress and the President are asking the same questions, and the answer seems to be uncompromisingly simple: this is, realistically, an unwinnable war for the allies; the answer is to find a reasonably dignified exit strategy and soon.

Had the United States and its allies made the most of the almost immediate collapse of the Taliban government in 2001 – funneling money into infrastructure like schools, electrical power generation, roads, hospitals and jobs, literally improving the lots of the people of Afghanistan – it might have been a different story. But we deployed that money in the absurd quest for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, with profoundly embarrassing results. That misstep cost us the possibility of any semblance of affordable “victory.” For us, that possibility no longer exists.

Hoh’s letter drew the attention of many, and senior diplomatic officials, including the U.S. Ambassador to Kabul, Karl W. Eikenberry, and Richard C. Holbrooke, the administration's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, convinced Hoh to remain with the service in a new and elevated capacity, but Hoh soon realized that his original decision was the correct one. He wasn’t a “peacenik” he told the press, and viewed the Taliban and al Qaeda with equal enmity: “There are plenty of dudes who need to be killed.” But maybe this theater of operations isn’t the place where American goals can be properly and efficiently effected.

In the end, with dwindling economic resources at our disposal and our role as the preeminent global power slipping away almost as quickly as the dollar depreciates, we have some exceptionally difficult decisions to make. Matt Hoh had the courage of his convictions, based on his “up close and personal” experiences on the ground in Afghanistan. That senior American diplomatic officials wanted him to remain even after they received his letter of resignation lets you know, beyond the slightest doubt, that they actually believe Hoh is correct. So do I.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.

“Guests of the Ayatollah” – Happy Anniversary!

“Death to Carter, death to Shah!” was the chant of the revolutionaries that toppled the Iranian monarchy as they attacked the American embassy on November 4, 1979, taking 53 Americans hostage. They held the Americans for 444 days, toppling more than the Iranian establishment – President Jimmy Carter’s seeming helpless in finding either a military or diplomatic solution to release those Americans probably created the tipping point that pushed Ronald Reagan into the White House at the expense of the incumbent Carter.

Here we are thirty years later, and the revolutionary spirit that gave birth to the Islamic Republic is no longer viewed as ennobling and honorable to the Iranian leadership – simply, that firebrand notion is destabilizing to the “old world” powers in charge in Tehran today. These original instigators are now the enemy of the Iranian incumbency; they are a part of the dreaded “reform movement” – personified by the Islamic Iran Participation Front (the party that battled Ahmadinejad unsuccessfully in the last election – the IIPF – even though he was one of those revolutionaries) – people who have, perish the thought, taken to the streets to protest the government. These legendary hostage-takers, heroes to the Ayatollah Khomeini and the revolution so many years ago, have, for the most part, become anti-incumbent reformists.

They’re not pro-American by any means (but more than the Ayatollah Khamenei would like), but they are appalled at the elitist leadership that appears to be running the country today: “‘The fact that so many of the students of ’79 eventually came to a reformist position in Iranian politics is not such a mystery when you remember that the reformist position in Iranian politics is not necessarily a pro-Western position,’ said Michael Axworthy, a former diplomat and Iran expert who lectures at the University of Exeter. ‘What they’re after is what they thought the revolution was about, which is representative politics in the Islamic context.’” November 3^rd NY times.

Some of the greatest heroes of the 1979 revolution have found the warmth their country provides for them today: prison. Mohsen Mirdamadi was one of their leaders in 1979, and he became the General Secretary to the IIPF – today, he is an enemy of the state. These reformists favor dialog with the rest of the world, and they still cherish their attack against the former Shah: “While they are not pro-Western, they support engagement. They often talk about the original ideals of the revolution, including justice and freedom, which they say the state has abandoned — especially in its violent crackdown on the election protests, which echoed the harsh actions of the Savak, the Shah’s hated and feared secret police, in the years leading up to the revolution…”

“The political turmoil following Iran’s [recent] election has highlighted how power politics have evolved since the popular uprising that ousted the Shah three decades ago. In the early years, Ayatollah Khomeini managed to consolidate power in the hands of the Islamists, sidelining more secular and nationalist forces. Since then, power has shifted from the old revolutionaries to a new generation associated with the Iran-Iraq war and the Revolutionary Guards, a military force mandated to take whatever steps necessary to protect the revolution.” The Nov. 3^rd Times.

The scene in Tehran on November 4, 2009 – three decades later? “Large stretches of the Iranian capital erupted in chaos and violence today as antigovernment protesters and security forces clashed on the 30th anniversary of the takeover of the U.S. Embassy by radical students… As Ahmadinejad's allies blasted U.S. foreign policy during an official rally attended by tens of thousands of schoolchildren bused in the for the event and government supporters, a leading reformist cleric and architect of the Islamic Revolution issued a provocative statement describing the storming of the U.S. mission in Tehran as a mistake… And as thousands of government supporters and schoolchildren draped in Iranian flags chanted, ‘Death to America,’ opposition protesters warned the Obama administration -- which is seeking to engage Iran to defuse a confrontation over Tehran's nuclear program -- that now's not the time for a deal. [Emphasis added]

“‘Obama, Obama!’ the protesters chanted, according to footage posted on the Internet. ‘Either you're with them, or with us.’… Security forces fired tear gas and rubber bullets and attempted to surround demonstrators to prevent them from forming large gatherings. Protesters chanted, ‘Death to the dictator’ and ‘Russia is the den of espionage,’ playing on the official description of the former U.S. Embassy compound as a ‘den of espionage.’… Moscow is an ally of the Islamic Republic.” November 4^th NY Times. Happy Anniversary Islamic Republic! Goodwill hunting, Russia!

It only took Iran 30 years for their version of “special interests” to subvert the stated goals of those who fomented the revolution in the first place. With the country solidly in the hands of a group of privileged insiders, “reform” and “reviving the revolutionary spirit” are the last things on the minds of Iran’s leaders. Funny how the lessons of history are lost so quickly on those who are in power? The clock is ticking. Still think we should bomb Iran to kill their nuclear program… and kill all those who are beginning to lean solidly in our direction? Interesting, no?

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.

The Noose Around Local News

We heard the funeral bells chiming for the print publishing business, tolling mournfully in the distant cloudy skyline for the loss of newspapers. But if you look at your local television newscasts, you might have noticed a litany of trends, all pointing to the downsizing of what was once the pot of gold in local broadcasting. It’s all about saving bucks, because the local advertisers – particularly retail stores and auto dealers – are pretty much scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to funding their marketing efforts. The money ain’t what it used to be.

For decades, local news was the profit driver for most local television stations. The importance of the “other” programming was often that it was a lead-in for big-dollar-generating local news. When network programming failed, the audiences that followed their “end-of-prime-time” dramatic program into the local news dwindled and the local stations complained to the networks. Low ratings = low lead-ins to local news. We can still see the vestiges of that attitude as NBC affiliates are beginning to rebel at the low ratings for the new “primetime” Leno talk show. While NBC (the network) might be making more money by saving on production costs – even with lower ad revenues – local stations, already feeling the contraction of local advertising revenues, are screaming that they are losing viewers for their local news programming.

First to go have been those “friendly faces” we have seen locally for decades – the identity of many local newscasts to the local audience – the highly-paid anchors. These individuals have typically been the largest draw-down against local news ad revenues and have been the easiest part of the budget to cut. Where union rules permit, the news-gathering field reporters have also increasingly been given cameras to carry, and even when they have a crew, gone is the 4-person traveling assemblage of workers: producer, sound person, camera person and talent; it’s down to two people on average, and the “one-person-band” is increasingly common.

Today, sportscasters and weather people often have their tasks relegated to those new “anchors,” who increasingly do it all at many local stations. Some station groups, like Sinclair Broadcasting, have taken to centralizing their weather reports and use one weatherperson, telecasting from a Baltimore studio, to do the local weathercasts for all of their stations scattered about the United States . Thus, this weather specialist will record the weather insert separately for each station in the Sinclair web; to a local, they have no way of knowing that their “local” weathercaster is really sitting in a studio thousands of miles away.

Part-time workers and “outside stringers” (folks who freelance and sell footage or services on an out-sourced basis) are finding their way into the mainstream, people without permanency or any fringe benefits. Anchors may be asked to run their own teleprompters (using floor pedals), and in-studio technical personnel may find themselves operating several cameras at the same time, using automation equipment with simply “point and shoot” joysticks. Bye-bye in-person camera operators. Pooling several local stations into a single crew to cover the same event (as opposed to sending separate crews) and even sharing of basic functions – news-gathering facilities, even helicopters and aircraft – among previously competitive stations has become an accepted practice.

In the end, changing technologies, an impaired economy and an over-saturation of communications choices and bandwidth – both on the air and online – have narrowed the economic possibilities of what we once knew and may have taken for granted. We see this everywhere; I’m even writing a book about it. Looking for the “little evidence trails of change” around us can explain these changing times so much better than reading the statistics.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I thought you might be curious.

Education Ain’t No Fun Vacation

This one’s for you, Walter. But education can and should be fun. There are no easy solutions to beefing up our public primary and secondary schools, but we can start with a simple reality: with about 13,000 separate and relatively autonomous local school districts in the United States, the “one sure thing” you know you are paying for is administrative inefficiencies with profound amounts of wasteful duplication. The U.S. is one of the few “educated nations” that does not have a real national educational policy, and we pay for it with inconsistency, local bias, missed national targets and waste.

I was distressed to hear from a friend of mine, training in the Los Angeles Unified School District, that teachers are kickin’ it old school: eschewing dust-gathering computer terminals and insisting that dated and worn text books should be the main learning tools. We are a nation of teacher-technophobes, relying on educational policies crafted decades ago before every kid living in a computer household is computer-literate somewhere between ages 3 and 4. With budget cuts, we have never had a greater need for programmed learning – where carefully programmed computers lead a child, step-by-very-personalized-step, through basics in grammar, foreign languages, basic math and science, history, etc. allowing the contracted teacher-base to focus on those children who are struggling with the lesson plans. And get this: kids love computers already! Duh!

Where are the distance-learning structures that can reach into the one-room school house (yes, you can still find these on Native America reservations and pueblos) and provide real, albeit virtual, classrooms that bring every child into an appropriate classroom with an appropriate specialized teacher? We call it a computer terminal with a cheap video camera, the kind folks use to upload those YouTube videos. And for kids who have grown up in homes without computers, it’s time to democratize the playing field. Pay your best teachers to work in difficult schools! Hey, corporate America, start adopting schools, donating computers and providing volunteers to serve an adjunct teachers and role models.

And let’s start dealing with the damnable impact of too many collective bargaining agreements protecting way too many incompetent teachers. Sorry unions, but the future of my country and the viability of my children’s ability to function are way too important to subordinate to protecting mediocre teachers who need to leave the school system forever. Can’t teach your kids through modern computers, OUT! How many of you actually know that YouTube is the second largest search engine on earth?! OUT!

If it’s teacher salaries that are getting in the way of recruitment (yeah, I know about the “budget woes”), then lets at least not make them pay state or federal income tax on all or at least a portion of their teacher pay (sorry administrators, I don’t think you get the same break). The trade off? Working a bit more during the summer, and growing the school day and the school year by a full month. Arne Duncan (Education Secretary) notes that so many of the Asian and European school systems, who consistently outperform their American public school counterparts, have significantly more class-time than we do. Sorry, after-school athletics, our nation does not compete in a global economy simply because we generate more NFL prospects – there’s plenty of time for both after-school programs and a good education, but we really do need to get our priorities straight.

Finally, let’s apply a bit more common sense to our educational policies. No more expelling troubled students so that we give them the free time they need to build their criminal skills. No more graduating students without the necessary skills they need to cope with life. If we have exceptionally difficult students, hasn’t anyone heard of boot camp? We have a quarter of the world’s incarcerated criminals and only 5% of the earth’s population, or doesn’t anyone see the correlation between delinquency, lack of education and a really stupid crime rate?

Want a summary? Better teachers. Apply cutting edge technology. Stop passing the buck from the school system to the criminal justice system (it should really be the same budget!). And have more classroom time to reflect global competitiveness. I didn’t even have to trash the horrific “No Child Left Behind Act,” because nobody thinks it works anyway. Don’t make the above changes? Watch our standard of living slip like a happy toddler down a water-slide!

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.

Bribery of the Checkpoint Guards

Imagine a world without corruption. Afghanistan would no longer be an issue; the people, however tribal they really are, would trust their leaders. China’s growth would accelerate and local people would explode with even greater pride at what that nation has accomplished. Efficiencies in technology and economic growth would become staggering. In Russia, seemingly random (but mostly certainly not) acts of murder of political and business functionaries would stop, and the only folks to lose their jobs are the tens of thousands of absolutely necessary bodyguards. Mexico’s lower classes would find their standard of living skyrocketing, and drug cartels would find their hold on the trafficking routes slipping away. Many American politicians would live more modestly, and special interest legislation would not carry the same pernicious weight currently felt in government offices everywhere – buildings and bridges would be safer and tax dollars would lose a massive “inefficiency burden” instantly.

But alas, corruption is more deeply rooted in human tradition than heart disease or cancer and probably kills more people. The two words that describe the impact of corruption on the people of the planet are sadness and waste. The slightest payment of the least important government official to look the other way or grant a favor that really shouldn’t be granted… ripples like a small wave that gives birth to a tsunami of incalculable destruction. There are no small missteps of inconsequential impact in the world of corruption. It does tend to be a black and white issue. Bernie Madoff started with a small step and found himself unable to stop the biggest Ponzi scheme in history.

Corruption – graft, bribery, misfeasance – is bad in the United States, but at least we have the press and the FBI in hot pursuit, looking for the missteps and pointing fingers. We do investigate, arrest and convict many of those who have crossed the line. Fallen but heroes no longer, we vilify those who have taken our trust and then deceived us. In many countries of the world, those on top have benefitted greatly from the flow of money and favors and are not about to cut off the epidemic of graft from below. Badly paid third world officials almost uniformly supplement their incomes with extracurricular revenues. It is the way of life in the second and third world, where governments seldom investigate themselves and where rich people avoid hefty and needed tax burdens with the slip of an envelope stuffed with cash to the right tax official.

We’ve paid over a trillion dollars (about $900 billion in direct military costs alone in Iraq according to our own Congressional Research Service) for the pleasure of invading a country, deposing a dictator we once funded, establishing a political system that the people don’t seem to want and most certainly isn’t working as we begin to withdraw and to stop the development of non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Think of the American lives extinguished in this nasty endeavor! Bomb blasts from disenfranchised minorities are still killing scores of innocents at a time, particularly in the Iraqi capital. We refer to these folks as terrorists, Islamist or insurgents. But would it bother you at all to know that government guards were paid to look the other way?

The October 28^th New York Times: “A recent internal report on corruption by the inspector general of the [Iraqi] Interior Ministry specifically mentions the bribery of checkpoint guards: The blast on Sunday at the Justice Ministry, surrounded by checkpoints, killed nearly 160 people, while a similar attack in August on the Foreign and Finance Ministries killed at least 122.

‘These car bombs didn’t come from the sky!’ said Judge Abdul Sattar al-Beiriqdar, spokesman for the Higher Judicial Council. ‘They must have been driven in streets until they reached their target. If there were no corruption, the attackers wouldn’t risk passing through these checkpoints.’”

Simply put, American taxpayers have paid to install one of the most truly corrupt regimes imaginable into this ancient land. The Times: “Money is skimmed off of salaries. Contracts are manipulated and fudged to wring personal profit. Ghost police officers are listed on payrolls so commanders can take the salaries, and other police officers are told they are fired even as commanders continue to take their pay. Criminals and insurgents are freed with a well-placed bribe, criminal records are expunged for payment, detainees are abused by guards in order to extort money from relatives… Beyond the outright financial corruption, there is also political corruption, in which the parties vying for power here look to secure the loyalty of large chunks of the security apparatus, according to Iraqi and Western officials.”

And then there’s the Karzai government in Afghanistan that makes the Iraqi government look like a model for a trustworthy and honest government. Abdullah Abdullah, President Hamid Karzai’s rival, is quitting the runoff election – calling for a boycott of that election (which now has only one candidate anyway) – as a hopeless effort in a profoundly corrupt nation, where even the United Nations observers threw out as fake nearly a third of the ballots of the recent election that forced the runoff . The November 1^st New York Times: “‘All the infrastructure that caused the elections to be flawed and wrecked are still there,’ said Ahmed Wali Massoud, an Abdullah adviser. ‘I don’t know how anyone can go to an election with these conditions.’” Would there even be an election? Would the Taliban violence in the last election escalate? And exactly why are the NATO forces – led by the U.S. – fighting on behalf of a government without legitimacy or probably even a constituency? Your tax dollars at work.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I think we need to look at corruption before we make decisions about sending more troops anywhere!