R.P. Barr

Backstabbing in Virginia: the governor's race

We just had an election here in Virginia, and I hear pundits all over the news babbling about the meaning of it all.  So far, everything I've heard is wrong.

 Democrat Creigh Deeds was not properly supported by the Democratic Party.  It is possible that Mr. Deeds does not know how to run a statewide campaign.  If that is so, the party should have provided him with advisors who could show him. 

 The fact is that most voters today make up their minds by watching television.  Newspapers are a dying media.  The internet and Twitter is not a good news source for state campaigns. One has to dig too much to find real news.  And only the faithful read the candidate's web sites.

 Republican McDonnell had at least three times the television ads that Deeds had.  And they were better.  McDonnell looked right into the camera surrounded by his family and said what a fine fellow he was.  Deeds had a couple anti-McDonnell ads, and one that showed newspaper editorials endorsing him.  Deeds never looked the voters in the eye.  He never talked about his vision for Virginia.

 He may have done that in stump speeches or in the debate, but I didn’t see those, and most other voters didn’t either. 

 I suspect that either during his long career of public service, or during the primary, Mr. Deeds ran afoul of some powerful Democrats.  The outgoing governor, Tim Kaine is Chairman of the Democratic National Committee and surely in a position to steer money toward one of the only two governors races that were held this year.  He should have matched the Republicans and seen to it that the standard bearer had at least an even chance.  He didn’t.

 Or else, the same idiots who planned Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the presidential nomination are now designing Democratic strategy.  Clinton lost because her campaign targeted major states and skipped over the smaller ones.  Obama won because he executed a full-on charge to get every vote he could, everywhere he could.  Maybe the general urban prejudice against someone from western, rural Virginia convinced the powers that be that Deeds couldn’t win, so they held on to their money and let him go down.

 That is cynical and unworthy of a party that is supposed to be big-tent inclusive.  By not providing a strong campaign, they’ve let down the voters.  And by letting McDonnell sweep the election, they’ve screwed over all of us here in Virginia and given the Republicans momentum for 2010.  Kaine and the rest of the Democratic leadership should be ashamed of themselves.

Supporting Those Who Abuse Those Who Serve

 In the modern version of American warfare, there are as many government contractors in the field as there are military personnel.  That wasn’t always true.  When I was drafted back in ’68, I was worried about my chances of survival until I learned that only 1 in 11 military personnel in Vietnam were actually engaged in combat.  The rest were in support positions.  I decided the odds were in my favor.

When the decision was made to go all volunteer, it was also decided to privatize a lot of those support jobs.  The military would need fewer enlistees and those it recruited would not be burdened with KP and other unpopular duties.  And then, look at all those contracts that could be issued to companies who show their appreciation with campaign contributions.  What a windfall for legislators.  End the unpopular draft and create a goldmine.

The government has yet to figure out how to properly manage contractors.  The official who signs the contracts must be of high rank, but the person who oversees the contractor is not.  Any time the overseer has a dispute with the contractor, he must send his complaint up the chain of command.  That means that a series of managers have to champion the cause of an underling to their superiors with sufficient vigor that each succeeding superior will champion the cause to his boss.  Meanwhile, the contractor goes directly to the top of the chain with his complaints about the lowly overseer.  Who do you think wins?

Aside from the general inefficiency of such a system, it accounts for a series of abuses, including contracts with contractor employees that include a clause prohibiting the employee from suing the contractor for anything.  All disputes are to go to arbitration.

In a union shop, this is not a terrible thing.  The arbitrator must be agreed to by both sides.  And, even though the company pays the arbitrator, he knows that if he leans too much toward the company’s side, the union will never agree to use him again.  In the non-union world, the arbitrator knows that the company will use him again and again, while the hapless employee will not.  No wonder that companies love arbitrators.

That’s why I can’t understand the people who say unions are unnecessary today.  They say that if a worker is wronged he can run to a lawyer and sue.  The big corporations with arbitration clauses encourage this argument.

Of course, we assume that a really dreadful wrong would still be righted in the courts somehow.  Try telling that to Jamie Leigh Jones who was gang raped by her Halliburton/KBR colleagues in Iraq.  The Department of Defense under Bush/Cheney leadership denied that they had jurisdiction to prosecute, although they did.  The Justice Department did not prosecute either.  And, Ms Jones could not even sue for damages because of the arbitration clause in her contract.

Was this a case of one exception slipping through the system?  No, according to a story  last year in The Nation, there have been 742 sexual assaults against military and civilians serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Of the cases against civilians, the Department of Justice had prosecuted 4—or maybe 6.  The DOJ spokesperson who testified before Congress wasn’t sure of the exact number.

It is news now because the fledgling Senator from Minnesota, Al Franken--inspired by Ms Jones plight--has proposed his first legislation.  It’s not a whole bill, just an amendment to a Defense spending bill.  His amendment [S.Amdt. 2588 to H.R. 3326 (Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2010)] reads:

To prohibit the use of funds for any Federal contract with Halliburton Company, KBR, Inc., any of their subsidiaries or affiliates, or any other contracting party if such contractor or a subcontractor at any tier under such contract requires that employees or independent contractors sign mandatory arbitration clauses regarding certain claims.

Of course the amendment passed overwhelmingly with bipartisan support, 68 to 30 with two not voting.

I was interested in the 30 pro-rape Senators who voted against the amendment.  They are all Republicans.  Men who voted to cut off funding to Acorn for counseling pseudo-pimps and prostitutes, which is apparently a worse offense than the sexual assault of women in war zones by their colleagues.

I checked the U.S. Senate web site and found that these are the pro-rape Senators.  I hope their opponents remember this vote the next time they come up for re-election.

From Alabama: both Jeff Sessions and Richard Shelby

From Arizona: both Jon Kyl and John McCain

From Georgia:  both Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson

From Idaho: both Mike Crapo and James Risch

From Kansas: both Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts

From Kentucky: both Jim Bunning and Mitch McConnell

From Louisiana: David Vitter

From Mississippi: both Thad Cochran and Roger Wicker

From Missouri: Christopher Bond

From Nebraska: Mike Johanns

From Nevada: John Ensign

From New Hampshire: Judd Gregg

From North Carolina: Richard Burr

From Oklahoma: both Tom Coburn and James Inhofe

From South Carolina: both Jim DeMint and Lindsey Graham

From South Dakota: John Thune

From Tennessee: both Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker

From Texas: John Cornyn

From Wyoming: both John Barrasso and Michael Enzi

Detecting racism

Are attacks on the president’s health care proposal racist?  Of course, but that is not the whole story.  There are those who are legitimately concerned about features of the plan.  The way to tell the difference between the racists and those who are issue-driven is to measure the volume, the inflammatory words they use and whether they disseminate disinformation.

 For example, would Joe Wilson have heckled Bill Clinton addressing a joint session of Congress?  God—and everybody else--knows that Clinton was vilified by Republicans at a level beyond anything before seen in the modern era, but no-one shouted back at him when he addressed Congress.  Race may not have motivated Wilson’s opposition to health care reform, but it gave him that extra little push when Obama was speaking.

 Similarly, would Kanye West have taken the microphone away from Rihanna or Janet Jackson?  Of course not, but a white country singer did not deserve the same respect.  Racism is all around, and does not even have to be in the front of our minds. 

 I learned about the subtleties of discrimination in high school.  Ours was a consolidated school that drew students from three towns.  It was also all white until the school accepted a couple black students in my senior year.  My government class was all white.  This was the situation when my teacher asked me to select students from the class for parts in a role-playing exercise.  I studied the class roster and very carefully picked those individuals that I thought would do the best jobs.  When I handed in the list, my teacher glanced at it and asked me if I was aware that all of the people I had selected were from my town.  I had not realized that.  Where they were from had even entered my mind.  There had been no discrimination in my heart, but by picking those whose virtues I knew best, I had in fact discriminated.  So, I made up a new list, and was gratified at how good the people were whom I had inadvertently slighted before.  The moral is that discrimination is proven by the results of an action, not by the stated intent.

Racism has become a very nasty charge.  For instance, I continue to be confused by those who deny the holocaust.  Denial is not only an offence to those who perished, but also to those who worked so hard for their extermination.  I would think that those who hate the Jews, the Gypsies and the assorted other targets of the holocaust would claim that the millions who were murdered was a good start, a splendid effort that was stopped too soon.  But, look, the anti-Semites who speak out do not praise the Nazis for their efforts, they claim that the Third Reich is misunderstood and blamed for things that did not occur.  That is how ugly the charge has become, that even those who promote and plot the murder of other races and ethnicities today deny the achievements of the most successful pogromists of all time.

 The people who do not want illegal immigrants to be benefited by the health care bill aren’t really worried  about the expense.  Down deep, they do not want non-English-speaking, dark-skinned people to receive health care at all.  Shut them out of our hospitals and let them die on the sidewalks, or go back where they came from and starve there.  Even the most vocal of the health care opponents will deny that that is their intent, but it is the effect they seek.

 Not all conservatives are racist.  Neither are all liberals.  Not all whites and not all blacks.  But, look at the downstream effects of what people promote.  As I learned in art school, your work is what you intend it to be, and it must stand on its own without explanation or excuse.

Flu Review

A few weeks ago, I dismissed the novel H1N1 “swine flu” as a flash in the petrie dish.  I could have said that it was bound to spread, because that is the nature of the flu, but didn’t.  It is still a rather mild disease, but thanks to a cool start to summer, the flu lingers.  WHO has raised the classification to a Stage 6 pandemic, i.e. a disease that has occurred in a number of countries and continents.

 This is a good thing, because without a large death toll the experience has taught us many valuable lessons.  Not least of which is that what we have learned will not generate enough change to protect us against a really bad pandemic.

 For instance, the so-called “Spanish flu” of 1918 was also an H1N1 strain, and came in three waves.  The first of which was rather mild.  Is this spring’s H1N1 a precursor of something more sinister to follow?  Probably.  Most experts are predicting a comeback in the fall along with the  other flu strains.  Will it mutate to become as deadly as the 1918 variety?  Nobody knows.  Mutations are random.

 Another thing that this flu has in common with its ancestor besides the alpha-numeric designation, is that it strikes mainly at those in the prime of life, unlike other diseases that concentrate on the very old and the very young.

The good news is that medical science is much more advanced than in 1918.  Already there are expectations of a vaccine.

The bad news is that with global travel being what it is, quarantines are very limited in what they can achieve.  Last month we also learned that the number of hungry people in the world has topped a billion for the first time.  If these people cannot get enough food, how likely are they to receive adequate medical care?  In short, the world has a number of fertile breeding grounds for contagiouos diseases to develop.

 In this country, which has the best medical care in the world—if you can afford it--many businesses have dropped medical coverage for employees, or have transformed their work forccs from full-time with benefits to part-time without.  Part-time workers don’t get paid if they stay home sick.  At my facility, we sent an employee home on sick leave because her child had the flu.  Part-time employees wouldn’t even tell their employers about sick family members.  And, where do we find the most part-time workers?  In retail and food service jobs—exactly where they are most likely to spread whatever they catch. 

State budgets, which have been quietly underfunding health care for years, are being cut across the board due to the economic downturn.  Hospitals and local health departments were overwhelmed by this spring’s bush league flu.  Unless there are serious increases in funding, they will be staggeringly inadequate for a serious pandemic.

 The inescapable conclusion is that we have a significant portion of the public who will not seek medical treatment until they are very sick.  By that time, with a disease like the flu, they will have had many opportunities to pass along the infection to others.  The increasing scarcity of medical care could lead to civil unrest.  If you don’t think so, talk to hospital workers about the crush in the ER this time around, the fist fights that broke out, and the potential for riots.

On the positive side, a catastrophic pandemic would probably lead to a serious overhaul of our medical care establishment, something not likely to happen as long as the public is less emphatic than the insurance/pharmaceutical/medical industries. 

And, then, the  world is over-populated already.

When pain is a bad thing

 Once again the use of torture is in the news.  Dick Cheney is claiming that waterboarding enabled intelligence officers to obtain “actionable” information, and that lives were saved.

 If you have seen 24,  you have seen Jack Bauer torture baddies to get vital information.  These were Hollywood moments, to be sure, but every instance had two things in common:  first, Bauer knew that his victims had important information about an impending attack, and second that the information he wanted was extremely time-sensitive (everything had to be completed within 24 hours after all).

 My question, as yet unanswered, is how many of the Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib prisoners fit that profile?  In the absence of hard information, I suspect that much of the enhanced questioning was done on speculation.  The hypothesis was that each subject probably knew something that we would like to know.

Sometimes the questioning paid off, sometimes it didn’t.  Sometimes the information was current, sometimes it was just background, or nice-to-know.

 Since the Second World War and the growth of interrogation science, there have been many techniques developed that are effective, and humane.  The people who would cast aside that science in favor of 12^th Century brutality are non-professionals, whose motivations are political or emotional or both. 

 The Inquisition proved how inefficient and ineffective torture can be—unless, the purpose is to terrorize and not to gather information.  Grab someone from the street and accuse them of witchcraft and secret pacts with the devil.  Inflict sufficient pain for the person to break down and confess.  Then ask who his associates are.  Then repeat the process with the associates.  Swap the word “witchcraft” for any other offence you like and the results are the same.

 I was once involved in a case in which a Louisiana man’s name popped up in the federal computers as an associate of drug dealers.  If that happened to you, how would you clear yourself?  This man had no idea how his name gained that  association.  It turned out that when another individual was arrested with drugs,  promises of a reduced sentence were made to him if he named his druggie business contacts.  So, he provided the investigators with a list of names.  The investigation of the Louisiana man came up negative, but the stigma remained.  And, this was for a reduced sentence.  Imagine if the druggie had been waterboarded!

 A second issue is the safety of apprehending officials, whether law enforcement, military or intel operatives.  I go back to my stint as a store detective for a major retailer in New York City when I picked up a teenager who had taken something.  He had never been in the store before, but on the way up tp the security office, he bragged about his knowledge of our operations.  He described all of our detectives, where they were likely to be stationed, and how they treated the people they apprehended. 

In Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, I led a training team to provide classes at the police academy to their customs and police.  On a Thursday, one of my colleagues taught a session in martial arts.  On Saturday, he went for a jog near our hotel on the other side of the city from the academy.  Along the way, three different people called out to him with references to his prowess: a guard at a movie theater, a taxi driver, and someone I’ve forgotten.  The word gets around.

 Terrorists and criminals share a small community.  They know what happens to their colleagues who are captured, and then act appropriately when someone comes for them.  If they believe that they will be tortured, they have nothing to lose by fighting to the death.  And, that means that they will take down some of the good guys with them.

 If the detainees are spirited away and held incommunicado, then imaginations take hold.  “Suppose they do this” becomes “did you hear what they did?”

I treated my prisoners with respect, because the next time I went after someone I wanted that person to know that his or her safety was only at risk during the flight-or-fight stage.  I wanted the suspect to know that surrender was much the better choice.

 

Days of Swine and Doses

My current employment finds me updating my organization’s pandemic flu plan.  It’s a thorough and measured stage-by-stage response ranging from being watchful to a 1918-like cataclysm.  Such planning is prudent and necessary.  I helped a similar project when I worked for the Feds when my agency contemplated an avian flu disaster.  What I want to say now is that we are not experiencing a pandemic today.  One may develop, but it’s got a long way to go.

 By World Health Organization standards, a pandemic involves widespread international infection, and the disease must be easily spread.  The H1N1 (formerly known as “swine”) flu has been reported in nine countries.  331 casees total in all the world.  So much for widespread.  Only two countries have reported fatalities.  In a normal year, regular old seasonal flu kills 36,000 Americans.  This new strain isn’t even in the same league.  Of the U.S.swine-flu cases all of them have been among people who have gone to Mexico, their families, or classmates.

  Let’s break that down.  Typical incubation time for the flu is 48 hours before symptoms present themselves, and for 24 to 36 of those 48 hours the unknowing victim is contagious.  So, our Mexican travelers sat on airplanes, shopped, went to work, etc. fully capable of spreading the disease, but didn’t.  And, don’t think that there are a bunch of silent cases out there that will suddenly spring out at us.  Once the symptoms began to make the travelers feel sick, they probably didn’t rush to the doctor the first day.  Even if they did, a confirmed diagnosis often took 2 days.  This second two-day period gave those who were infected during the silent stage a chance to develop symptoms.  In short, if casual contact spread this flu, we would have a lot more cases.  We don’t.

 It is possible that this virus could mutate and become more virulent.  That’s why we make contingency plans.  Remember the avian flu?  It never got off the ground because mutations are random.  It takes millions of combinations before a really effective change leads the virus in a new direction.  The governments of the world slaughtered millions of birds, effectively destroying the chances of those millions of mutations to occur.  Aggressive actions now are curbing the chances of the new flu to become successful.

 What is going on is that hundreds of bureaucrats knocked themselves out for the avian flu, and because they were successful, their wonderful pandemic plans never got used.  Because the avian flu fizzled, the disaster planners never got the recognition they deserved.  It’s like the cold warriors who have seized the radical Islamic movement like a life preserver in a stormy sea.  Careers are made by disasters.  There are no heroes without villains.  There are folks out there who are really hungry for a pandemic.

 Look at the Egyptians who suddenly found a new reason to persecute the Coptic Christians.  The Christians raise pigs.  Even though there have been no cases of flu reported in Egypt and only two in Israel, Egyptians took this opportunity to slaughter tens of thousands of Christian pigs.

 The second leg of this event is the media who are always eager to find something that will frighten people into watching the news.  Nothing like a pandemic to gen up a little panic.

  There is also the idiot factor.  It is spring, people!  There are allergies and upper respiratory infections all around.  Pork fajitas will not give you the flu.  Do not take Tamiflu unless you have a confirmed diagnosis of the flu and normal rest and ibuprofen don't work.  All we need is for a new strain of the flu to become resistant to flu medication due to overuse of the drugs.

 My recommendation is to keep watching the trend, and wash your hands frequently.  Spray or wipe all common surfaces, like doorknobs and telephone receivers, with antiseptics.  Make sure that you are getting enough vitamins and strengthening your immune system.  And then, wait for this little swine to waddle away.  

Quote: Warren on regulation

I admit that I watch too much television. On the other hand, everytime I leave the house, it costs me money. I have the computer for information plus my wife for conversation, recreation and aggravation. With the television for entertainment and occasional enlightenment, who needs to go out? Well, I do have to make a living—the perennial dark cloud. 

On April 15th, TV provided one of those moments of enlightenment. The venue was Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, the guest was Elizabeth Warren, Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel on TARP. Among other things, she explained how the U.S. economy got into this mess. 

Warren: Okay, so what you’re asking is if we can get this bus pulled out of the ditch—the economy—what does the road look like going forward? Because this really is the big question. 

Let me start that question in 1792. Okay, young country—George Washington’s first term and we had a credit freeze, a financial panic. Every ten—fifteen years there’s a financial panic in our history. You just look at it. And there’s a big collapse, big trouble. People lose their farms –wiped out. Until we hit the Great Depression. 

We come out of the Great Depression saying, “You know, we can do better than this. We don’t have to have to go back to this kind of boom and bust cycle.” We come out of the Great Depression with three regulations: FDIC insurance that makes it safe to put your money into banks, Glass-Steagall (banks won’t do crazy things), and some SEC regulations. We go fifty years without a financial panic, without a crisis. Some recessions, but no crisis, no banks failing, no big crisis.

 …But, then what happens? We say, “Ahh, regulation is a pain. We don’t need it.”  So, we start pulling the threads out of the regulatory fabric and what’s the first thing we get? The S&L crisis: 700 financial institutions fail. Ten years later, what do we get? Long term capital management, when we learn that when something collapses in one place in the world that it collapses everywhere else. Early 2000’s we get Enron which tells us the books are dirty.   And what is our repeated response?  We just keep pulling the threads out of the regulatory fabric. 

So, we have two choices. We’re going to make a big decision, probably over about the next six months. And, the big decision we’re going to make is that it’s going to go one way or the other.  We’re going to decide basically that, hey, we don’t need regulation. You know, it’s fine: boom and bust, boom and bust, boom and bust--and, good luck with your 401K. Or, alternatively, we’re going to say, "You know, we’re going to put in some smart regulations that adapt to the fact that we have those products."  And what we’re going to have going forward is we’re going to have some stability and we’re going to have some real prosperity for ordinary folks."  

Stewart: …And you know, that is the first time in six months to a year that I’ve felt better.

Born to be riled

Most people would consider patriotism to mean supporting their country.  I have spent more than three decades working under administrations I liked, administrations I couldn't stand, and administrations that didn't have a clue, but the point was to make the system work to greatest extent possible for the citizens and taxpayers--all of them.  However, there is a rancid group of conservatives who believe that obstructing less conservative politicians is more important than the welfare of the republic, or the lives and future of the people who live here. 

During the Clinton years, we saw these flag-waving traitors hound the administration into paralysis. Now, among other initiatives, there is a movement afoot to distract the president by asserting—with no proof whatsoever—that Barak Obama was not born in the United States, and is therefore not qualified to be president. 

Why do they say this? Because someone realized that if they requested a copy of Obama's birth certificate under the Freedom of Information Act the request would be denied. Then, they could claim a conspiracy and cover up. Reactionary yahoos around the country would be quick to pick up the theme and cry that Obama was not legally president. 

Since I have worked in government for a long time, federal and state, I can state concretely that the Freedom of Information Act cannot be used to get personal information on someone other than yourself or a close family member. The government holds a lot of sensitive personal and business information, and will not release it to satisfy anyone’s morbid curiousity. When I worked for the Veterans Administration that agency would block internal agency computer access to a veteran’s records if he became famous. Celebrities and politicians VA records were locked away to preserve confidetiality from unauthorized snooping. 

If you go to the state of Hawaii’s web site (eHawaii.gov) and click your way over to the Department of Health’s screen for ordering vital records. You can read that: 

Certified copies of these records may be issued to authorized individuals…. 

You may order certified copies only of your own birth and marriage certificates or of an immediate family member (e.g., a parent of his/her child's birth or marriage certificate) on this web site. 

Since birth certificates can be used to obtain other documents, and facilitate a lot of mischief in the wrong hands, anyone can see why birth certificates would not be made public.  

In the world of what-if-it-were-true, I would like to point out that George W. Bush, who had the lowest poll ratings of any president in the history of polls, was not impeached for his blatant and obvious crimes. Even Democratic lawmakers declined to raise the issue because they did not want to see the government shut down for the duration of the impeachment procedings. The business of the country takes priority over the satisfactions of justice. Even if someone discovers a foreign birth certificate, no action will be taken to unseat a popular president, especially while his own party controls Congress. 

Of course those people who believe in burning down a house if they don’t like the furniture will disagree. They will agitate to destroy the country in order to avoid the possiblity that someone they don’t like might actually do a good job.

An unsatisfactory answer to the riddle

Unless you read BBC on line, you probably missed the little story [“Unstable Politics Plague Israel” 6 February 2009] that explained why there is no peace in Palestine and why it cannot be achieved. What I never realized—mainly because the press prefers playing up the horse race between personalities—is that in Israel, voters do not elect candidates, they vote for parties. The parties then assign whomever they choose to hold seats in the Knesset. Since no party has achieved a majority in the history of the country, minority parties hold the keys to power. The minority parties must be courted in order to form a coalition, and if the minority partner in a coalition takes exception to a given policy, the government falls. This system effectively prevents Israeli moderates from achieving any long range goals, especially peace with Palestinians. 

Reform, meanwhile, is blocked by the same system as single issue minority parties (those representing as little as 2% of the electorate) believe that the larger parties will not pay enough attention to their agendas. Consequently, since the elections are held every year or two as various disputes bring down the coalition du jour, and the same party leaders play musical chairs with government offices--obviating significant change--voter turnout is decreasing. Except for the extremists in whatever causes,  they see their chance for influence increasing. 

For their part, the Palestinians want a government that can successfully negotiate with Israel. Since that is not possible under an Israeli system of government which gives a handful of militant ideologues veto power over mainstream pragmatists, the frustrated Palestinians turn to non-verbal methods of getting the Israelis’ attention. 

And the tragedy continues.

Peanut butter on the brain

Listening to tonight on NPR’s All Thing Considered, I heard a report about the growing salmonella/peanut butter problem, and Congresswoman Rosa L. DeLauro (D-CT) suggested that food regulation should be taken out of the Food and Drug Administration and put into a new agency.  Why do the news people always go to politicians for thoughts on government?  Politicians know squat about governance.

To understand why things go wrong, simply look at the growth--or lack thereof—of regulatory agencies over the past two (or four) decades and compare that to the growth of the businesses they regulate.

Consultants and geeks like to think automation solves all problems. Computers are wonderful tools, but no computer ever opened a can of peanut butter, or put the cuffs on a bad guy.

If an agency does not have a sufficient number of trained, motivated people, it’s work will be inadequate.  Period.

There is also the matter of better trained managers.  I’m not talking about those temporary workers who arrive at the top, and leave before they know what it is that their agencies actually do.  Professional government managers are promoted primarily for their navigation skills in the halls of bureaucracy.  A surprising number of them are also good managers, but that’s mostly serendipitous.  The system is not geared to training people how to manage people.

We don’t need new agencies, although we could reduce some of the duplication that already exists.  We need agencies that are mission directed and properly funded.

When money is spent, it will go to sexy new programs and not to the old workhorses that have been keeping us safe for generations.  And as the economy gets worse, more things are going to go wrong.  Bet on it.