Category Archives: Current Events

Selecting a Presidential Candidate

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There were three articles in the Sunday, September 02, 2012 Denver Post that were pertinent to the choice for voters. The first was titled “Evaluating Obama’s grade on economy by Robert J. Samuelson of the Washington Post. People usually “vote their pocketbook,” so the state of the economy is crucial to both Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney. Mr. Samuelson leads his article with, “President Obama’s economic report card is at best mediocre. I’d give him a C-plus while acknowledging that presidents usually don’t much influence the economy…For the first six months I’d award him an A-minus; for the rest a C-minus or D.” The latter grade is based on the insistence of Mr. Obama at focusing on the health care law (for his legacy) despite the fact the complex law discouraged job creators from expanding their businesses. The battle over the health care law also created gridlock between the two political parties that dominates politics in Washington, D.C.  Mr. Samuelson writes that there is no way of knowing whether Mr. Obama’s missteps have weakened the economy. “My guess is that Obama’s errors have had a modest effect.”

The second article is by Dave Maney, and is titled “Third vision needed.” The article proposes that Republicans are good at clearing impediments to economic change while Democrats are good at identifying those needing help. The author writes that Democrats “…prescribe an attack on healthy parts of the body to somehow cleanse it and make the sick parts well again. It’s like stabbing yourself in the stomach because you’re having a heart attack—it brings zero relief but lots of additional pain” But then he turns to the Republicans and says “We just need to go back to the way things were in 1984, and we’d be in great shape.” That is characterized as being equivalent to telling an ailing patient in his 70s that they would feel better if they were still 40. I didn’t read an alternative between the two visions presented by the two parties except something to the effect that we need to do things differently in the different world.

My favorite article was titled “American optimism in eye of the beholder” by Ann Sanner and Calvin Woodward of The Associated Press. According to the article, young people continue to be optimistic while older people are pessimistic. There are examples of those in their 50s who have lost optimism for their retirement goals because of the layoffs and reduced value of investments. One fifty year old woman is quoted as saying that she firmly believes in the American Dream “…but in the sense of dreaming it, not grasping it. I’m not seeing anything to strive for; I guess….I’m settling.” “Nearly two thirds lack confident that life for today’s children will be better than it has been for today’s adults…”

There are several disturbing statistics about the pessimism of older voters and the continued optimism of younger people despite their college debts and the dismal employment situation. Mr. Obama has noticed younger people are happier with the current economic situation, and he has arranged many of his campaign appearances on college campuses. No one can accuse him of not being politically astute.

Health Care Outsourcing

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I recently posted a blog about indications some of the technology and call center jobs that had been outsourced to India are being pulled back because of quality problems related to communication problems. Don Lee of the Los Angeles Times has an article describing how some healthcare companies have begun to shift clinical services and even decision-making on medical care to primarily India and the Philippines. The practice is not new, but the health care law commonly called “Obamacare” is encouraging more jobs to leave the U.S. The new law requires that 80-85 percent of insurance premiums to be spent on medical care. That requirement, which I understand was put into the law to control insurance company profits, will have the unintended consequence of insurance companies reducing as many jobs as possible with outsourcing.

Jobs that had been previously outsourced involved medical activities such as reading X-rays and other diagnostic tests. Task now being outsourced include “pre-service nursing” to evaluate patient needs and to determine treatment methods. WellPoint, owner of Anthem Blue Cross, has formed Radian Services as a separate business unit to set up the outsourcing. A WellPoint spokesperson said there had been 925 jobs outsourced. The explanation why the outsourcing was being done through a separate business unit is that “…it has the technical expertise and can ensure compliance with laws.” My reaction to that quote is that the real reason is to protect WellPoint from lawsuits that might or are likely to be filed when someone has problems with their medical care.

The article says that companies can save 30 percent of labor costs by outsourcing jobs to the Philippines. However,  having medical treatment decisions made overseas sounds risky considering that companies are returning call center and computer work for quality reasons.  It isn’t surprising that nursing organizations are cautious. Patient privacy is also a concern because people’s medical information is being sent to other countries. I didn’t find the quote that “…nearly all countries have laws for protecting patient privacy…” to be all that reassuring.

One person who had processed medical claims for WellPoint was laid off after a colleague went to the Philippines to do training on how she did her job. I doubt that person would be too impressed that the part of a new law designed to control insurance company profits contributed to the decision to have the work done more cheaply in the Philippines.

Syria, the Spanish Civil War, and NATO

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I’ve read two separate warnings about Syria that make that civil war even more frightening. The first by Patrick J. Buchanan observes that the Spanish Civil War was “…the Great Rehearsal for World War II. He asks in his title whether the Syrian conflict is a “Dress Rehearsal for a Mideast War?” The other warning is that NATO might be drawn into the conflict if Turkey pursues retaliation against Syria for shooting down one of its planes.

The brutal Spanish Civil War began in 1936 and lasted three years. It pitted Franco’s Fascists against an agglomeration of Socialists, Anarchists, and both Stalinist and Trotskyite Communists. Stalin sent emissaries and officers to command the Nationalists (while he emptied the Spanish treasury of gold as payment for the help). Mussolini sent troops to fight with Franco and Hitler sent his Condor Legion. The planes of the Condor Legion gave air support to Franco and also firebombed the non-military town of Guernica.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt publically claimed neutrality about the war, primarily because he did not want to lose the Catholic vote. Some factions of the Nationalists were persecuting, torturing, and murdering Catholic priests. FDR said, “We shun commitments which might entangle us in foreign wars…” FDR did approve shipments of military supplies to France and understood that they would be sent to the Spanish Nationalists.

The NATO connection is the source of the other recent warning that history could be in the process of repeating. Politicians had established vast national alliances in the early 1900s in what was thought to be a counterbalance against the threat of war. The alliances instead caused the domino effect leading to World War I when Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. I’ve always had trouble mentally following the complicated series of events that followed. The assassination led to the Austro-Hungarian invasion of Serbia and Serbia appealed to its Russian ally for help. Russia began mobilizing its army. Germany took the mobilization to be a threat and declared war on Russia. They attacked France through neutral Belgium because France was Russia’s ally. The violation of Belgian neutrality brought Great Britain into the war. The United States joined the war a bit later.

NATO was originally established to oppose the now defunct Warsaw Pact. Turkey, a member of NATO has called for a full meeting to discuss the Syrian downing of a Turkish fighter jet and claims that another was fired on by the Syrians. Syria has a formal defense pact with Iran and is heavily supplied and supported by Russia. The Russians and Chinese have blocked all UN efforts to take action against Syria.

The news out of Syria today does not encourage that the situation will improve. Three senior government officials have been killed in a bombing, creating speculation that others will probably now chose to join the defectors in Turkey. There is a prediction that Assad will go into hiding or to a country that would harbor him “within 36 hours.”Russia is thought to believe a collapse of the Assad regime would be an opening for the U.S. to gain power in the Mideast. I don’t know that I agree. Iran, al Qaeda, and Hezbollah are probably ready to fill any vacuum.

The Syrian army recently was reported to have pulled chemical weapons out of storage. An escalation of hostilities has the ominous possibility of some desperate Syrian commander deciding Saddam Hussein was justified in using chemical weapons against Kurdish villages.

I won’t speculate about the outcome, but I have this disturbing image of someone intentionally carelessly smoking inside an ammunition bunker.

Contractors in Iraq

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A recent posting was about Iraq after American combat troops withdrew in December 2011.  I was curious how many contractors remain, and there are some interesting web sites that provided details. One is a primer for someone who is going there as a contractor, and it contains information about the risks and how to prepare yourself to deal with them.

Some of the risks to the contractors are kidnapping, unexploded ordinance, and being shot at. The advise for avoiding kidnapping is to have “…a camouflage passport, which is a faux passport ‘issued’ by a non-existent country. Camouflage passports are used to throw off terrorists and abductors, who may be looking to single out a person from a specific nation.” The advice for unexploded ordinance “…is to stay well clear.” The advice for what to do if you are shot at certainly makes sense. It is to “…move and move fast.” Life insurance is highly recommended.

NPR estimates there are 15,000 workers in the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and several consulates, which makes it the largest U.S. diplomatic operation abroad. There are as many as 5,000 security contractors carrying assault rifles and flying armed helicopters. There had been as many as 17,000 security contractors the year previously. One official responded to a question about what the contractors do if there is an attack. He answered, “We run. We go. We do not stand and fight.”

Events involving U.S. contractors in Iraq since the troop withdrawal do not bode well for diplomatic relations between the two countries. A New York Times article by Michael S. Schmidt and Eric Schmitt published in January 2012 describes how Iraqi authorities had detained “…a few hundred contractors in recent weeks…” The detentions were mostly at the airport in Baghdad and at checkpoints around the capital. My interpretation of the full article is that Iraqi officials held up the issuing of visas, weapons permits, and authorizations to drive certain routes and then detained the contractors for failure to have current documents. The contractors were held for as long as several weeks, and some were told to leave Iraq or face arrest. Another ominous signal was that the Maliki’s son began evicting Western companies and contractors from the heavily fortified “Green Zone.”

Why would anyone want to work as a contractor in Iraq when there are so many risks and now the Iraqi government is actively working to make those people less than welcome? The answer is, of course, money. There are reports that the guards in private security firms are paid between $400 and $1000/day. I’m not certain either of those amounts would justify the risks, but some people apparently think they do.

I remain baffled by the events in Iraq. I certainly believe all the polling data that most Iraqis resented the presence of American soldiers, although I also believe that most of those soldiers would have much preferred to have been somewhere else also. They were there because their commander told them they had a mission to make Iraq safer for Iraqis. They gave the Iraqis the chance to make that a reality; although it isn’t yet certain the Iraqis will actually take advantage of the opportunity they have been given.

There were many accusations that the Iraqi war was really about the U.S. coveting Iraq’s oil. We apparently didn’t do a very good job of grabbing that oil while our soldiers were there, because it is estimated 90 percent of the government’s income is from oil. That income depends on tens of thousands of foreign workers.  Mr. Maliki is apparently more interested in solidifying his standing with Iran than making workers providing the money for his budget comfortable that they will be safe.

Maybe it is true that the Iraqi War was a mistake. Maybe they didn’t deserve the sacrifices of our soldiers, their families, and the rest of our country. I’ll say again that Iraq has been given a wonderful opportunity to make their country into a peaceful place to live because of American and English blood and treasure. We’ll see what they ultimately decide to do with that opportunity. I’m not optimistic that their current leader is interested in more than corruption and abuses of power while bowing to the Iranians. I hope I’m wrong. Our dead and injured soldiers and their families certainly deserve a better outcome.

Iraq after American Troops

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I’ve been reading about Iraq after American combat troops withdrew in December 2011.  The common criticism of the Iraq war was that it was “about nothing but oil,” and there is some interesting recent news about Iraq and oil. An article by Kay Johnson in the Associate Press titled “Again a power in OPEC, Iraq could shift landscape” reports that Iraq has been rapidly expanding oil production. The increase in oil being produced in Iraq is likely to complicate OPEC’s efforts to influence world prices.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Malaki leads a Shiite-dominated coalition that has close ties with Iran, and Iraq is officially backing Iran’s push to set lower production limits to keep oil prices high. However, it is countermanding Iran’s desires by expanding oil production. “Iraq recently reached production of 3 million barrels per day, a level not seen since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein. It is on track to become OPEC’s second largest producer in the coming year, surpassing Iran and trailing only Saudi Arabia.”  It is estimated that Iraq could double production, which is the basis for the predictions of Iraq’s increasing influence on OPEC and the world.

What this means in Middle East and world politics is complicated. The increased economic clout available to Iraq from oil production (which provides 95 percent of government revenues) could result in economic prosperity and freedoms previously unimagined in that country. However, strife between the Sunnis and Shiites continues to be a problem. Shiite pilgrims trekking toward a shrine in Baghdad were recently attacked with car bombs. There were 93 people killed and 312 wounded according to an article from Mohammed Tawfeeq of CNN.  June 14 was the deadliest day in the country since the U.S. withdrew its troops.

I’ve posted several recent reviews and blogs about the Iraq war. The blog posting on June 13, 2012 has the comment, “…victory will not come from the service and sacrifice of the soldiers who fought in Iraq. That will happen, if it happens, within the culture of Islam. The soldiers have only functioned as the soil for the seed of freedom. The ultimate victory, if it is achieved must happen within Islam.”

Terrorism in Iraq is no longer justified by the presence of foreign soldiers. Now the people of Iraq have to decide whether indiscriminate killing of civilians based on how they worship is justified. I suggest they look at the genius of the American founders in insisting on allowing freedom of religion. I would speculate that any reasonable person would conclude that the “American experiment” resulted in a life style for citizens that the rest of the world envies. I see from afar that Iraq is at a crossroads, and I sincerely wish the best for them.

Vladimir Putin and the Snow Revolution

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The “Snow Revolution” part of the title comes from the Epilogue of the book “The Man Without a Face:  The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin,” by Masha Gessen. A dissident put up a Facebook post asking people to wear white ribbons on their arms to show they protested the announced election of Putin to be president of the Russian Federation in December 2011. The author estimated as many as 150,000 people arrived at the protest wearing white armbands or some other white article. The Russian people deserve better if only a few of the allegations and speculations put forward by the author about Putin are true.

Gessen was interviewed by John Williams of The New York Times, and he said she had cataloged disastrous events “…and lay much of it at Putin’s feet. How much of this is concretely provable?” Gessen’s response was that conclusive evidence would have to be obtained by law enforcement, and “None of the murders or acts of terror that have occurred in the last 12 years have been properly investigated.”

How many people arrived to join the Snow Revolution protest? The estimates vary widely, but are significantly lower that what the author predicts. An article on Newyorker.com by Julia Ioffe says the protestors claimed 85,000, the police estimated 25,000, and the media said 50,000. There no dispute that there were thousands of people all over Russia who protested the “…rudely falsified elections.” There is an article with photos of thousands of people in the the streets, and many are holding white ballons. What is important now is what happens with the protest movement. An article titled, “Russia’s Revolutionaries Ponder Next Move” includes a photo of many people carrying white balloons. The protestors are said to face the challenge of creating a unified front.

Russian protest leaders have never pretended that things would be easy. “One peaceful march will not change our country,” protest organizer Boris Nemtsov said on the eve of one rally. “We are in for a long, hard struggle.”

I’ll give a brief review Gessen’s book, which gives background for why there is a Snow Revolution. The book details how Putin made it from being a self-described thug in his youth to becoming the brutal leader of the Russian Federation. He was a bureaucrat in the KGB, and claimed he resigned from that secret police organization when the Soviet Union was collapsing. A man named Sobchak worked himself into being chairman of the Leningrad City Council. He hired Putin as an assistant, because he was said to know “…that it is wiser to pick your KGB handler yourself than to have one picked for you.” There were several steps from there to leadership, and apparently one high level person after another picked Putin as the person to be beside them believing he could be trusted and controlled amongst all the political intrigue. The last in this chain was Boris Yeltsin, who had launched democracy in the Russian Federation with great hope but was forced to resign.

Putin immediately began to transform Russia back into the USSR. He is said to have used state control of the media, murder, corruption, and perhaps even terrorism to retain power. The book discusses how he took control of the government while making himself an incredibly wealthy man. Critics were beaten, imprisoned, or murdered. Some critics died of mysterious poisons which could not be obtained by anyone other than a central government.

The accounts reminded me of a book I reviewed titled “Spy Catcher” by former senior British intelligence officer Peter Wright. There is a description of a container of antidotes for all the known Soviet poisons that was kept with Soviet agents who had escaped the USSR to turn themselves in to British authorities. I believe Wright would also have said that Putin was following the advice of Lenin in keeping control of the country. “Lenin understood better than anyone how to gain control of a country, and, just as important, how to keep it. Lenin believed the political class had to control the men with the guns, and the intelligence service, and by these means could ensure that neither the Army nor another political class could challenge power.

I fear for the author. She is obviously at risk of violence if only a fraction of what she writes about Vladimir Putin is true. She writes in the Prologue that she worked as a journalist in war zones “…but this was the most frightening story I ever had to write:  never before had I been forced to describe a reality so emotionless and cruel, so clear and so merciless, so corrupt and so utterly devoid of remorse.” She lives in Moscow, and told The New York Times interviewer that she had thought of leaving, but “I love my home, my friends, my life. And if Putin doesn’t like me he can leave.”

Recent statistics on this web site indicate there are large numbers of readers in the Russian Republic and Ukrainia. I thought of those readers as I was reading Gessen’s book and prepared the review and this post and wondered how many Russian readers would be Putin supporters and how many would be protestors.

To readers in the United States, I think we should all renew our appreciation of the freedoms we have. I read a joke said to have been told quietly within the Soviet Union. The joke isn’t all that funny, but I think it is pertinent. An American and Russian were arguing about which country was best. The American said, “We are so free that I could stand on a street corner in New York and shout ‘Reagan is an idiot’, and nothing bad would happen to me, although some might stop to argue with me.” The Russian replied, “That’s nothing. I could stand on a street corner of Moscow and shout ‘Reagan is an idiot’, and nothing bad would happen to me, and no one would even argue with me.”