05.08.08
Businesses require oversight
The latest in a long, long line of scandals plaguing Iraq contracting company KBR, today the Times of London reports that British employees of KBR working in the British Embassy in Iraq have been accused of sexual harassment. One Iraqi woman, a cleaner at the embassy, says that the KBR employee offered to double her pay if she slept with him; when she refused, she was fired:
The Iraqis accuse the embassy of leaving the abuse unchallenged and failing adequately to respond to complaints against several British managers for KBR. The company was allowed to conduct its own inquiry, an arrangement criticised as a very serious conflict of interest.
The complainants — the cleaner and two male cooks who worked in the embassy canteen — say that some KBR managers groped Iraqi staff regularly, paid or otherwise rewarded them for sex and dismissed those who refused or spoke out.
All three Iraqis lost their jobs in the Green Zone. Two KRB employees who worked in the embassy spoke out in support of the women; a few days later, KBR sent them home on paid leave and later fired them. The women also say KBR never interviewed them when conducting their internal review.
Interesting development in Guantánamo trial
From Carol Rosenberg at McClatchy Washington Bureau this story:
A military judge in the trial of Canadian captive Omar Khadr threatened Thursday to suspend the terror trial unless the prison camp releases a detailed log of Khadr’s treatment in more than five years of detention as an alleged al Qaeda terrorist.
Khadr, 21, is accused of throwing a hand grenade in a July 2002 firefight between U.S. forces and al Qaeda suspects in Afghanistan. A Special Forces medic, Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer, 28, of Albuquerque, N.M., died of his wounds. Khadr was 15.
His attorney, Navy Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, wants the log in a pretrial effort to limit the scope of evidence given to a jury of U.S. military officers at his upcoming trial, expected in late summer. He argues the circumstances of some interrogations would exclude some of his statements from the trial.
Read the full story at miamiherald.com
Big Businesses require regulation and oversight
Yet another example in the annals of unethical and illegal activities by managers in big businesses:
The general manager and possibly other senior staff at the Crandall Canyon Mine near Huntington, Utah, where 9 miners died in August 2007, hid information from federal mining officials that could have prevented the disaster and should face criminal charges, according to a Congressional investigation whose results were released Thursday.
The report also said that the mining company should never have submitted a request to remove coal from the section of mine where the collapse occurred, and that federal mining officials should not have approved the proposal, because of foreseeable dangers.
The Congressional committee conducting the investigation sent a referral letter late last month to the Department of Justice asking the department to investigate whether the mine manager, Laine W. Adair, on his own or in conspiracy with others from the mining company, willfully concealed facts or made intentionally false statements to federal mining investigators about the condition of the mine before the August disaster.
On Aug. 6, roof supports in a section of the mine gave way in a major collapse that registered 3.9 on the Richter scale and left six miners fatally entombed. Ten days later, three more miners who were working as rescuers died after more tunnels fell.
Eddy Arnold, 1918-2008
Will the Telecoms get away scot-free?
I’m beginning to fear that they will. Write your Representative. Write Speaker Pelosi. ThinkProgress:
Politico reports that telecom companies have “presented congressional Democrats with a set of proposals on how to provide immunity to the businesses that participated in a controversial government electronic surveillance program.” House leaders have not yet accepted the companies’ proposals, and many lawmakers are still insisting that the telecoms be held responsible for participating in the administration’s wiretapping program.
Big Business: regulations needed
Look at this story in ThinkProgress:
The Boston Globe has recently revealed that two Defense Department contractors operating in Iraq — KBR and MPRI — have avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Social Security and Medicare taxes by hiring its employees through “shell companies” based in Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.
Today, the AP reveals a third contractor assisting the U.S. military’s mission in Iraq that is also dodging Social Security and Medicare taxes. Immediately after winning a DoD contract worth more than $2 billion nearly ten years ago, Combat Support Associates established CSA Ltd. in the Cayman Islands allowing it to avoid paying the taxes and evade scrutiny from the U.S. government:
The subsidiary, CSA Ltd., now employs about 2,000 American citizens in Kuwait, where they support U.S. forces moving in and out of Iraq. Yet as a foreign corporation doing work outside the United States, CSA Ltd. does not pay Social Security and Medicare taxes for these workers.
In fact, according to the AP, “company officials” have acknowledged their immunity from U.S. law, noting that CSA Ltd. “is outside the jurisdiction of U.S. courts, so federal labor rules and anti-discrimination laws don’t apply either.” Indeed, the Globe noted that because of such practices, “workers cannot receive unemployment compensation when their jobs end and may be deprived of other protections under US law.”
But Congress has taken notice of these contractors’ unethical practices. The House passed a bill last month — despite Republican opposition — to “stop federal contractors from using foreign subsidiaries to evade Social Security and other employment taxes.”
In the meantime, companies such as KBR, MPRI and CSA Ltd. continue to avoid paying millions in taxes:
The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates shutting the employment tax loophole would bring in about $846 million in revenue over 10 years. That figure could be higher, lawmakers say, since it’s unclear how widespread use of the opening is.
Indeed, assuming that the American employees of CSA Ltd. make only $30,000 per year (online job ads place salaries much higher), the company would still “owe about $4.6 million in employment taxes.”
The Pentagon vs. the troops
The Pentagon singularly fails to support the troops. ThinkProgress:
According to Pentagon records, “[m]ore than 43,000 U.S. troops listed as medically unfit for combat in the weeks before their scheduled deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan since 2003 were sent anyway.” Veterans groups say this “reliance on troops found medically ‘non-deployable’ is another sign of stress placed on a military that has sent 1.6 million servicemembers to the war zones.”
A science conference in South Korea
Interesting report by Sherry Baker. Some snippets:
I’m just back from Seoul, South Korea, for the World Science Forum: Brain Power after spending a few days in Hawaii recovering from the high energy event. My bet is, the Forum is an event you probably heard zilch about I sat at one of two press tables and was the only US journalist as far as I know. The US press wasn’t interested, apparently.
But the government-sponsored meeting was clearly a Big Deal for S. Korea and it revealed developments which can be called “mind-blowing” in more ways than one. …
Robots that learn and beat programmed humanoid mechanical creatures at games because the able-to-learn robots are thinking, trying, learning on the spot their “brains” are based on how the human brain works ( a sort of back-engineering). Brain/computer interfacing techniques that may sound like sci fi but are already being tested on animals and, in some cases, humans.
The Bank of Canada takes a different approach
Refreshing article by Julian Beltrame. Interesting to note the free-market attitude, which the US solution spurned.
The governor of the Bank of Canada says he will take a tough stand with financial institutions that wind up near bankruptcy because of poor decisions.
Mark Carney says the central bank won’t bail out Canadian financial institutions like the U.S. government did when the Bear Stearns brokerage, one of the giants of Wall Street, ran afoul of the subprime mortgage mess.
“If you cannot make a judgment (on the value of an asset), you should not own the security,” Carney told a Senate committee yesterday.
“There is very high value, if a situation came about, to ensuring the shareholders and senior managers bear the full consequences of their actions,” he said.
“The Bank of Canada has a role to become lender of last resort, but we would do that on the advice of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions that the institution is solvent, not because the institution needed money.”
Carney said the central bank would come to the rescue of a chartered bank in the case of a temporary liquidity problem — if the institution had sufficient capital to be considered viable.
But he added if investors and managers thought there would always be a safety net, they would be encouraged to take inordinate risks in order to maximize profits.
The FBI and the NSLs
I recall that the revenue agent Garland Bunting, who tracked down and brought to trial hundreds of distillers of illegal spirits over the years, was asked by the lawyer for the plaintiff during a break at a trial, “How many cases have you lost?”
“Well,” Bunting replied, “if I lose this one and then one more, that would be two.” (BTW, his fascinating story is recounted by Alec Wilkinson in the entertaining (and educational) 1985 book Moonshine: A Life in Pursuit of White Liquor. Well worth getting. Click the link.)
I was reminded of that by this article on how the FBI has lost each case in which it was challenged on its use of National Security Letters. Of course, the FBI are still using them by the thousands: they’re irresistible—no red tape of judges, and the people served are prohibited from revealing that. It’s the perfect tool for an authoritarian government.
National Security Letters have been the FBI’s favorite toy for the past several years, and who can blame them? With none of the hassle of a warrant and a gag order that ensures stealth, the NSL is a counterterrorism investigators best friend. The FBI issues tens of thousands of NSL requests each year (nearly 50,000 in 2006). After a major review by the Justice Department’s inspector general last year found a host of abuses, FBI Director Robert Mueller promised that the FBI would clean up its act. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the number of NSLs issued has gone down — just that agents are on alert that they can’t be so sloppy.
Yesterday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and ACLU announced that they’d succeeded in getting the FBI to back down from an NSL request issued in late 2007. The request had gone to the Internet Archive and had requested personal information about one of the Archive’s users, including the individual’s name, address, and any electronic communication transactional records. It just so happens that the Archive’s Digital Librarian Brewster Kahle is on EFF’s board of directors, and he decided to fight the request. Except it wasn’t easy due to the gag order that accompanied the letter: “Because they initially were not allowed to discuss the NSL over the phone, Kahle and his attorneys had to drive to one another’s offices whenever they wanted to talk about the case.”
More at the link.
What to do with tax rebate
Soon you may receive a check from the IRS. While the amount probably will not be significant in your own life, it can be life-changing as a microloan. Take a look at the Kiva.org microloan opportunities. You can make multiple small loans or put the whole amount in one loan. Once the loan is repaid, you can withdraw the money (that is, you get it all back), or make more microloans, or donate some or all of the amount. Thus instead of taking the money directly, park it at Kiva.org for a while and help someone start a new life. Here are some requests for loans.
Adoption rules abroad are tightening
Mary Kane has a report in the Washington Indpendent that will be of interest to those thinking of adopting a child from another country. It begins:
For the first time since international adoption began growing in popularity two decades ago, so many countries have either shut their doors to adoption, tightened their rules or increased domestic adoption that it’s now far harder to adopt overseas. This is changing the course of a “revolution” in which Americans flocked abroad to bring home orphans in record numbers and create a new and different community of adoptive families.
“Everything’s not closing down, but there’s no question there’s a constriction happening,” said Adam Pertman, author of “Adoption Nation: How The Adoption Revolution Is Transforming America” and executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, a research organization. “I haven’t seen anything like this in 15 to 20 years.”
More at the link.
UPDATE: A follow-on article, also by Mary Kane.
Mending mental-health coverage
Mike Lillis of the Washington Independent has a good article on the efforts being made to bring health-insurance coverage for mental illness in line with the coverage for physical illness. As of know, the difference is shameful. His article begins:
For the estimated 60 million Americans suffering from mental illness, treatment can be an elusive and costly ordeal. Many health care plans don’t cover mental care, and those that do usually provide lesser benefits for mental disorders than for physical ailments. Co-payments, for mental patients, are usually higher. In addition, the last major federal law tackling the problem is 12 years old.
Now Congress is hoping to fix some of that. Bills passed in both the House and Senate would require most employer-based health plans to eliminate the current pay discrepancies between coverage for mental and physical conditions. Supporters say that equating the two — and thus establishing “parity” — is long overdue. Helping their push, the stigma that’s contributed to the legal discrimination has slowly faded as scientists uncover the biological and genetic causes of mental disorders.
“There is no shame in mental illness,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal.) said following passage of the House bill in March. “The great shame would be if Congress had not taken action.”
But much work remains. Significant disparities between the Senate and House bills have forced sponsors into informal but delicate negotiations. The saga has aligned senators of both parties, the White House, business groups and the insurance industry — all of whom support more business-friendly reforms — against House lawmakers pushing for broader patient benefits.
VW’s 230-mpg car
A two-person car with tandem seating, but 230 mpg—and a firm 2010 availability date. The only thing better is the 300-mpg Aptera. Read more.
Need to learn touch typing?
The lucky among us took touch typing in school—I still remember the class clattering away (on manual office typewriters) to the beat of The Syncopated Clock. (The teacher rightly believed that a steady typing rhythm improved speed and accuracy.) But some come to the keyboard later—or earlier—and then must learn touch typing alone or else be caught in hunt-and-peck hell. Fortunately you can find many good software packages that teach touch typing, including free software as on this little list.
I strongly urge you to master touch typing INCLUDING the top row. Our teacher was adamant about that, and wanted us to be able to type numbers and symbols as rapidly and accurately as we typed text. I thank her today.
Bay Rum and Tangerine
This morning I picked Mama Bear’s Dominica Bay with Tangerine, a very pleasant fragrance indeed. And with the Sabini ebony-handled brush it also makes a fine lather. The Gillette Fat Boy holding a Treet Black Beauty blade did a fine job, and I continued the citrus theme by using the orange-fragranced Rituals Skincare pre-shave oil for the oil pass. Finally a splash of Dominica Bay Rum and a splash of Royall Mandarin, and I’m a happy and smooth-faced fragrant camper.
