All your government surveillance is privatized

As I said in the previous post, we're having the wrong arguments about domestic surveillance. All the chatter is about Snowden and Obama and Bush. What's being lost in the noise is talking about the policy. The bigger scandal than the surveillance is that the surveillance is being contracted out to private corporations. Take for instance Snowden's last employer from whence he apparently hacked his documents, Booz Allen Hamilton.

The company employs about 25,000 people, almost half of whom hold top secret security clearances, providing “access to information that would cause ‘exceptionally grave damage’ to national security if disclosed to the public,” according to a company securities filing.

In January, Booz Allen announced that it was starting work on a new contract worth perhaps as much as $5.6 billion over five years to provide intelligence analysis services to the Defense Department. Under the deal, Booz Allen employees are being assigned to help military and national security policy makers, the company said…

Think Progress points out Booz Allen Hamilton is just one of many contractors.

According to a 2013 report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, a total of 483,263 contractors held Top Secret clearances in 2012, the highest level one can obtain, with another 582,524 holding them at the Confidential and Secret levels.

Think about that for a moment. How many more young and possibly delusional computer geeks might there be lurking in corporate cubicles with no accountability to the taxpayer at all? Some of those guys might be accessing your personal internet communications, not because they have to, but because they can.

Beyond that, it's not even cost effective. It's a myth that the private sector can deliver public services at a lesser cost. Private industry is profit driven, above all else. Atrios is right when he says "the security/surveillance state industry is just a giant grift, a big scam there to enrich certain communities in Northern Virginia."

Of course surveillance is just one area of government being run by and enriching private industry. Military contractors like whatever Blackwater is being called right now for foreign security forces and Halliburton for military support services are also sucking billions out of our national treasury for services the government could provide at a much lesser cost. It's not just the grift, it's the graft. These corporations are cheating us and even if they get caught cooking the books, or outright stealing, nothing happens to them. They still get paid and they get their contracts renewed forever. That's at the heart of the "small government" scam.

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Yes, austerity kills economies

Just when you think there's no hope left for this country, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) does something spectacular:

So it was a little striking to see her using the Senate Budget Committee, which she chairs, to hold a hearing on the negative effects of austerity. This isn’t a flip on policy; her budget does, after all, include some stimulus spending. But instead of the usual routine of emphasizing the importance of medium-run deficit reduction, while paying lip service to the need to prevent premature cuts, Murray used the hearing to focus almost exclusively on the latter concern.

The CBO’s latest projections and the Reinhart-Rogoff debacle, she argued, “make it clearer than ever that now we need to focus above all else on our fragile economic recovery, and that the case for austerity in a time of economic weakness is simply wrong.”

Lots of charts and wonkery at the link, but the other important point is The Heritage Foundation has devolved under DeMint from a pseudo think tank that at least made some attempt to advance logical argument into a hotbed of pure conservative crackpottery. Steve Benen makes the case for why any remaining pundits of good conscience should be embarrassed to afford Heritage any credibilty at all.

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GOP credo: feed the rich, starve the poor

The Republicans are hellbent on destroying any and all government assistance for the olds, poors and other needy Americans. Their most inhumane target remains cuts to food assistance programs. Krugman blasts the GOPers today and notes:

And why must food stamps be cut? We can’t afford it, say politicians like Representative Stephen Fincher, a Republican of Tennessee, who backed his position with biblical quotations — and who also, it turns out, has personally received millions in farm subsidies over the years.

Prairie Weather has the full numbers. Congressman Fincher and his family have received roughly $8.9 million in government handouts over the last 10 years. In fact, Rep. Fincher is the second largest recipient of farm subsidies in Congress. And did I mention this farm bill that severely slashes food assistance for poor children, including the WIC program which insures the bare basic nutrional requirements for babies, also includes a $9 billion increase in crop insurance to the sole benefit of big agribusiness guys like Fincher?

That, in the world according to Fincher, we can afford. No problem because cotton farmers need that help. Those poor kids and poverty stricken olds can just go rummage in garbage bins for their daily bread I guess.

Once again, on the stupid or evil scale, we're putting this down as pure evil.

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I feel the bridge fall under my feet

Austerity maniacs are literally going to kill us. When you have a major political party which is effectively one half (or sometimes more) of our government refusing to spend a red hot penny on the public commons while they bleed our national treasury to wantonly pass out tax breaks to the obscenely wealthy, this is what you get.


[RJ Matson cartoon]

This is not a joke. Cutting government funding for infrastructure projects verges on criminal negligence. Our bridges are falling down and it will only get worse. [via]

...The 607,380 bridges in the U.S. are 42 years old on average, and 1-in-9 are rated “structurally deficient,” according to the American Society of Civil Engineers, which advocates more spending on such structures.

The deficit is shrinking. We can borrow our own money for practically nothing. Repairing our critical infrastructure would create jobs, improve the economy and reduce the deficit with increased revenues making the cuts unnecessary. The Republicans ongoing refusal to allow these spending bills to even get to the floor for a vote redefines "death by a thousand cuts" as pure homicide. When we weigh this on the "stupid or evil" scale, the obvious answer is pure evil.

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Crumbling infrastructure is our national shame

Miraculously no one was killed when that bridge went down in Washington state this week. It's unlikely we'll be so lucky the next time and there will be a next time because we can't get the funding out of DC. The chart shows our national neglect of our critical infrastructure.



You might have thought the horrifying bridge collapse on I-35W in Minneapolis in 2007 would have been a wake up call, but no. At a time when one in nine of our bridges are deficient in some way, Republicans continue to block all infrastructure spending simply because they see it as win for Obama and they're still trying to squash our economy for their own politcal gain in the next election.

It's stupid. Hell it's evil. We could put people to work rebuilding our roads and bridges and as Atrios said, replace aging waterlines in our cities. Those are so ancient, they're busting open all over America.

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Fiscal conservatives are killing us

It's always useful to remember budgets are only political documents. They're a rhetorical weapon of mass deception. Appropriations are the real deal. And more proof that the GOP really doesn't give a flying leap about budgets, even as they now refuse to go to conference to pass one, Republicans are furiously slicing and dicing funding to circumvent the sequestration cuts.

Of course they never offer specifics but the plan "focuses the biggest cuts" on aid to local school districts, health research and enforcement of labor laws. Also:

Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security and the Pentagon would be spared under the plan approved by the House Appropriations Committee on a party-line vote, but legislation responsible for federal firefighting efforts and Indian health care would absorb a cut of 18 percent below legislation adopted in March. [...]

Capitol Hill's budget would be untouched, however. House GOP leaders, who have boasted recently of their efforts to cut Congress' generous budget, opted against cutting further below levels imposed under the automatic, across-the-board spending cuts that began taking effects in March. In fact, the House would get a 1.6 percent budget increase when measured against current levels.

The foreign aid budget would be sharply cut as well, while a bill funding the IRS budget and implementation of new financial regulations would absorb a 20 percent cut from levels approved just two months ago.

Much more at the link but basically anything that aids or protects the middle class and working Americans or the needy gets the ginsu knife while their wealthy cronies are pretty much completely spared from the Republican whopper chopper. Now all they have to do is figure out how to blame the Democrats for it.

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The cost of repealing Obamacare

Not talking about the costs as related to health care or the deficit. This is simply the cost to the taxpayer for the time it takes Congress to keep producing these "message bills" the crackpot cons insist on repeatedly bringing to the floor in order to impress the rubes back home.

Steve Daines represents Montana, which, at last count, takes in $1.92 of money from big government Beltway solutions for every dollar in taxes Montanas send to the rest of us. And, by the time the House arranged to define the word "quixotic" for the ages for the 33rd time, which was almost a year ago, the collective cost of all the tantrums to American taxpayers — including Montanans — already had topped $50 million. ...

House GOP leadership just agreed to bring futile attempt number 37 forward because they have freshman crackpots who didn't get a chance to show their contempt for President Obummer, the rule of law and the will of the people yet.

Now if somebody would just figure out what Darrell Issa's clown show has cost us so far instead of the endless iterations on the political standings of the playahs, we'd be getting somewhere.[image via]

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Look at all the hungry people

Think Progress looks at real world effects of Meals on Wheels cuts brought to you by the GOP sequester clown car.

Directors of Meals on Wheels programs across the country spoke with ThinkProgress about how they are coping with decreased funding. Some, like Meals on Wheels of Western Broome in New York, are private nonprofits that don’t rely on government funding and will therefore be shielded. But by and large, the heads of these programs described facing deep cuts after having already slimmed down in response to lean times over the past few years.

The list is depressing but olds going hungry is just the obvious result of sequester fever. The long term consequences won't be seen right away. Maybe they'll be too subtle for Big Media to notice.

The isolation of already housebound clients will literally kill people. A recent study showed social isolation contributes to early death. For many of them, the daily delivery is probably the only daily contact they have with outside human beings. Those who don't die of loneliness will likely end up in hospitals and nursing homes from lack of decent nutrition. Which will end up costing us all much more than the few million they're saving on delivering food.

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Cut the CODELs

Our useless Congresscreatures are busy slashing funding for vital social services for the poors and the olds because they claim government spending is out of control, but they don't have any problem spending millions on pleasure trips abroad under the thin aegis of CODELs. This one is especially egregious because she had to jet over to join only part of the trip.

The House Judiciary Committee reported Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, traveled around the world on an official trip in February that cost $23,646. The Feb. 16-22 trip on commercial flights was to Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia.

Mary Landrieu organized this little jaunt to the far east that "included several members of the Congressional Coalition on Adoption" and for what, you ask?

The delegation was to meet with local community leaders, adoption officials, and other government officials, such as the Vietnamese Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs.

Seriously. If they're so hot to find unneccesary spending they should start here. What's so damn important about these trips? Who the hell do they think they are, the freaking State Department? According to them, we can't afford to feed kids in America and they're jetting off for a week or so to discuss adoption with foreign bureaucrats? This is 2013. We have this thing called teleconferencing. Almost like being there in person.

These guys take these CODEL trips under the radar all the time. You don't hear about them unless they do something unusual like skinny-dipping in Sea of Gallilee.

In 2008, members of the House and Senate spent $13 million on codels abroad. They don't really need to go to any of these places, not even war zones. They should cancel all of them immediately until their deficit fever breaks.

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Yellowstone business owners unhappy campers

Guessing most of these owners vote for Republicans because, small government. That would be the same Republicans who forced the sequester cuts designed to take a chainsaw to the national budget to take effect because, pisses off liberals, or something. Then the business owners discovered this is what "small government" looks like.

Yellowstone Park having to cut something, suspended snow plowing for a couple of weeks to save $400K . Bad for business. Via Kevin Drum, owners decided to pony up the cash to get it done themselves.

But therein lies the perennial rub: Cuts that are welcomed in the abstract are not always appreciated when they hit home. And everything the government does, however small, touches somebody. "You pay your taxes to get certain services," said Bruce Eldredge, executive director of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, a world-class museum in the center of town, which delivered a $10,000 check to the chamber. "We would, I think, probably argue as a community that we pay our federal taxes to make sure the park is open at a specific time."

This is, obviously, the problem of government in a nutshell: everyone wants spending to be cut, but no one wants spending to be cut on them. They want it to be cut on other people.

In particular—and please excuse the wild guess here—I imagine that most people who have a serious jones for cutting federal spending are really only interested in cutting spending on poor people. Cutting other services just isn't what they signed up for. It's the Obamaphones and the food stamps that are wasteful, not the Yellowstone snowplows and small town air traffic controllers.

Exactly. Their spending is necessary. They are the mighty makers. Only wasteful spending is on those shiftless poors. You know, those takers who are dependent on government services these people don't need.

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The true cost of the Iraq war

James Fallows reminds us George W. Bush fired anybody who dared suggest the true cost of Iraq war. Before the invasion the Bush administration falsely claimed it would be over in a few months, with few troops and cost a couple of billion dollars because as Paul Wolfowitz put it, "the invasion would be largely 'self-financing' via Iraq's oil." Of course, it didn't happen that way at all. Not even close.

Furthermore, according to a new study done at the the Kennedy School at Harvard, we've only just begun to pay and the real costs look more like this:

The Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, taken together, will be the most expensive wars in US history - totaling somewhere between $4 to $6 trillion.

Mother Jones created a set of cost charts about this as well. You'll notice the greatest cost driver is the interest. Never let them forget, the Bush administration borrowed a ton of money to pay for this folly.



And then there's the hidden costs which were mostly not covered in appropriations at the time. Taking care of the troops that survived and came home damaged. That was the double edge sword of improved battlefield care of the injured. It kept the death count relatively low compared to previous wars, but now we have an obligation to take care of these veterans for the rest of their lives. Considering how young they were when they were deployed, those costs will survive longer than those who started this abomination will live themselves. Our children, and quite possibly our grandchildren, will be paying this war off until they reach old age.

Funny, you never hear the austerity addicts talking about that spending.

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