Hillary’s a Piker

The BBC informs us that some other governments are as adept as ours at averting their eyes from obvious corruption among the elite.

Malaysia’s anti-corruption agency has said hundreds of millions of dollars found in Prime Minister Najib Razak’s personal accounts were donations, effectively clearing him of wrongdoing.

But it did not disclose who the donors were or what the donations were for.    

It was investigating allegations funds were transferred to Mr Razak from the 1MDB state investment fund he set up.

The allegation is that he transferred nearly $700m (£450m) from the debt-ridden fund to his own personal account.

This guy makes the Clinton Foundation look honest by comparison.

Just Another Clinton Foundation Scandal

From The Guardian:

Hillary Clinton’s overlap of private and political activities was once again in the spotlight on Thursday after a Wall Street Journal report that since Clinton helped broker a settlement in a legal tax case against UBS while she was secretary of state, the Swiss bank has increased its financial support and involvement in Clinton Foundation projects.

In February 2009, the IRS sued UBS and demanded that it disclose the names of 52,000 possible American tax evaders with secret Swiss bank accounts. In the months that followed – thanks to involvement of Clinton as secretary of state and Swiss lawmakers – a legal settlement was negotiated. On 19 August 2009, it was announced that UBS would pay no fine and would provide the IRS with information about 4,450 accounts within a year.

Since the deal was struck, disclosures by the foundation and the bank show the donations by UBS to the Clinton Foundation growing “from less than $60,000 through 2008 to a cumulative total of about $600,000 by the end of 2014”, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The bank also teamed up with the foundation on the Clinton Economic Opportunity Initiative, creating a pilot entrepreneur program through which UBS offered $32m in loans to businesses, the newspaper reported. Other UBS donations to the Clinton Foundation include a $350,000 donation from June 2011 and a $100,000 donation for a charity golf tournament.

Additionally, UBS paid more than $1.5m in speaking fees to Bill Clinton between 2001 and 2014, the newspaper reported.

Competition Raises Prices

Here’s how little understanding some folks have of economics.

Yesterday Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf vetoed a bill that would have privatized the sale of wine and liquor while liberalizing the rules for selling beer in the Keystone State. Wolf counterintutively argues that replacing the state monopoly with private businesses would be bad for consumers. “During consideration of this legislation,” he says, “it became abundantly clear that this plan would result in higher prices for consumers.” He also worries that letting private businesses sell beer and wine would result in “less selection for consumers.”

To be fair, Wolf probably knows perfectly well that competition lowers prices – the real motive behind his veto was most likely to protect the public employee unions.

The Truth Is What I Tell You It Is

President Obama's Deputy National Security Advisor, Ben Rhodes in an interview on Israeli TV on April 6:

Rhodes also claimed the new arrangements ensure “anytime, anywhere” inspections of any and every Iranian facility — contradicting complaints by Israel that no such provision is guaranteed.

Asked directly if the IAEA would have anytime, anywhere access, Rhodes said, “Yes, if we see something that we want to inspect.”

“In the first place we will have anytime, anywhere access [to] the nuclear facilities,” he said, referring to “the whole supply chain.”

CNN's Erin Burnett Tuesday:

Taxing Drivers for Every Mile Driven

Here’s a great example of governments getting caught up in the Law of Unintended Consequences. The feds have offered incentives for buyers of electric and hybrid vehicles, and they have mandated (and the market has forced drivers toward) greater fuel efficiency in gasoline vehicles. But the states are dependent upon gasoline taxes for a significant portion of their budgets.

Solution: Tax people by mileage driven, coming soon to Oregon, (a system cleverly named OreGO), with twenty-eight other states considering such programs.

Oregon’s Department of Transportation has been working on it for 15 years as a way to eventually replace the gas tax, which has been flat due to an influx of high mileage vehicles and people driving less.

Right now the program is voluntary and being capped at 5,000 participants, but an ODOT official told Fox News the ultimate goal is to make it mandatory and change the way states pay for roads — forever.

However:

Two of the three OReGO systems track and store a car’s every move.

Jefferson Davis to Get the Heave-Ho in Apache Junction

Some stretch of highway in AJ is apparently going to be renamed.

Gov. Doug Ducey says he'll have the state transportation department review the name of a highway memorializing the Confederacy's president, Jefferson Davis.
Ducey said Friday that he'd like to see those stretches of highway renamed after Arizonans. 

Rep. Reginald Bolding earlier this week called for a highway marker on U.S. 60 in Apache Junction that bears Davis's name removed and the highway renamed. He said honoring supporters of slavery isn't right.

I don't have a strong feeling about this – or to put it more bluntly: “Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.” In part that may be because I never knew there was such a highway designation. It's also hard to see what connection ol' Jeff has to Arizona (or to Apache Junction).

I threw in the Gone With the Wind quote since some folks think we should ban that, too.

Drones Don't Like Chinese Cheaters

The government has drones flying over testing centers where college entrance exams are conducted in order to detect 'unusual signals'.

How Segregated Public Housing Came to Be

A historian argues on NPR that inner-city ghettos are the result of conscious public policy begun under FDR.

Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, has spent years studying the history of residential segregation in America. 

“We have a myth today that the ghettos in metropolitan areas around the country are what the Supreme Court calls ‘de-facto’ — just the accident of the fact that people have not enough income to move into middle class neighborhoods or because real estate agents steered black and white families to different neighborhoods or because there was white flight,” Rothstein tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. 

“It was not the unintended effect of benign policies,” he says. “It was an explicit, racially purposeful policy that was pursued at all levels of government, and that’s the reason we have these ghettos today and we are reaping the fruits of those policies.”

Rothstein cites primarily two federal policies; one in regard to public housing:

… policy was that public housing could be used only to house people of the same race as the neighborhood in which it was located, but, in fact, most of the public housing that was built in the early years was built in integrated neighborhoods, which they razed and then built segregated public housing in those neighborhoods. So public housing created racial segregation where none existed before.

The second policy he cites involves FHA financing:

 … the Federal Housing Administration gave builders like Levitt concessionary loans through banks because they guaranteed loans at lower interest rates for banks that the developers could use to build these subdivisions on the condition that no homes in those subdivisions be sold to African-Americans.

Accountability in the Obama Administration

A follow-up on last year's VA scandals:

The nationwide scandal last spring over manipulated wait times at Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals led to the ouster of the secretary of veterans affairs and vows from the new leadership that people would be held accountable. 

Then in February, the new secretary, Robert A. McDonald, asserted in a nationally televised interview that the department had fired 60 people involved in manipulating wait times to make it appear that veterans were receiving care faster than they were. In fact, the department quickly clarified after that interview, only 14 people had been removed from their jobs, while about 60 others had received lesser punishments.Now, new internal documents show that the real number of people removed from their jobs is much smaller still: at most, three. 

The documents given this month to the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, which provided them to The New York Times, show that the department punished a total of eight of its 280,000 employees for involvement in the scandal. One was fired, one retired in lieu of termination, one’s termination is pending, and five were reprimanded or suspended for up to two months.

So – the VA deals with a culture of lies and cover-ups by … lying about what they're doing about it.

And meanwhile, I wonder what's being done about the veterans who need care?

Corruption

This list, from Transparency International, attempts to list almost all the world's nations in terms of corruption. The US is tied for 19th with Uruguay (the highest-rated Latin American nation). We are just behind Japan and just ahead of Ireland.

Looking further down the list, I found the two countries I've lived in recently -- the Philippines (94th) and, just behind them, Ecuador at 102nd. I would have expected Ecuador to do a little bit better (at least relative to the Philippines).

Given that there are 177 countries on the list, these two would seem to have not terrible ratings -- lower middle. But the bottom of the list consists of some of the most horrible places on earth, and really, anything outside the top fifty or so is not a place most folks would like to live (or invest). Hell, Rwanda managed to make it to 49th.

Will the Obama Library (and the Obamas) Desert Chicago for New York?

Apparently the Obamas are strongly considering settling in NYC when he leaves office, and the Obama Library may quite possibly be located at Columbia instead of the U of Chicago, which had seemed a lock. Note the reasons (emphasis added):

Barack and Michelle Obama are seriously considering moving to New York after his presidency, and building the Obama Library at the city’s Columbia University, sources told BuzzFeed News. 

Columbia’s bid on the library — and the notion of the Obamas in New York — has been widely viewed as a kind of courtesy to the Big Apple, with the universal assumption among even the Obamas’ inner circle that the couple would move back to Chicago in January 2017. But sources familiar with the process said their thinking has changed in recent months, the result both of messy Chicago politics and a personal craving for a new beginning when they leave the White House for the last time as residents. The first family fears the Chicago they left is not one they want to return to, and a source close to the family said the long-shot New York library bid has emerged as a serious alternative.

What, Chicago's too screwed up for the Obamas? That's funny.

Things I Don't Care About

... that the media seem to think I do:

1. Why the Obama Administration fired the White House florist.

Doug Ducey's Secret Police

Arizona Governor Doug Ducey is not much liked by the Phoenix newspaper's left-wing columnists. The guv has proposed an office of 'inspector general' to look into the activities of state agencies (offices with similar duties, under various names, exist in several states, and in the federal government). Local columnist Laurie Roberts, not at the best of times very rational, went totally off the rails on the subject, including accusing Ducey of creating a secret police force.

A powerful governor, backed by dark money now further consolidating his power with his own secret police? 

Hey, what's not to like? 

House Bill 2420 cleared its only committee hearing on Wednesday, on a party line vote.Under the bill, the new IG will carry a badge, have subpoena power in his pocket and report directly to the governor. The office will be staffed with a handful of inspectors. 

Ducey's private police force is conceived as a secret agency. 

Hyperventilate much, Laurie?

A Sign of the Times?

The governor of Arizona has submitted his proposed budget, which includes, among other things, cuts in the amount of funding the state provides to state universities.

This of course is controversial and you will not be surprised to learn that there have been demonstrations, populated heavily by university students, at the State Capitol complex.

Having been mostly out of the state for the past 20+ years and only recently returned, I don't feel fully up to speed on complex state issues, so I'll avoid for the moment taking sides on this one.

However, I came across this picture (via Espressopundit) of a group of protesters with signs. You will note the young woman in the front with a sign saying, "I believe that will win".

There are a couple of possibilities here. Perhaps the 'that' that she believes will win is someone or something lurking nearby. Or, alternatively, she meant to say "I believe that we'll win".

If if is the latter, then I'm not sure whether the sign is a stronger argument than she thinks in favor of increased funding, or perhaps (assuming that she is an ASU student) an argument for tougher admission standards.

I suppose we'll never know.

Social Security Records Say There Are 6.5 Million Americans over Age 112

An Inspector General's report says that, according to SS files, there are millions of Americans still alive who were born in 1901 or prior:

Many people are living longer, but not to age 112 or beyond -- except in the records of the Social Security Administration. 

The SSA's inspector general has identified 6.5 million number-holders age 112 -- or older -- for whom no death date has been entered in the main electronic file, called Numident. 

The audit, dated March 4, 2015, concluded that SSA lacks the controls necessary to annote death information on the records of number-holders who exceed "maximum reasonable life expectancies."

The audit even turned up a few thousand born before the Civil War who SSA says are still alive.

Many of the centenarians are still working; well, okay, to be more realistic, somebody using their SS number is working. And that, of course, is why this is a problem – many of the numbers are being used fraudulently.

But don't worry, the government will have no problem taking care of your medical records.

Arizona Redistricting Fight

An interesting case involving Arizona was argued before the US Supreme Court today. Several years ago, Arizona voters passed a proposal to create an independent commission to do redistricting after each census, instead of having the Legislature do it.

The intent is to eliminate gerrymandering, of course. The problem with the law might be that the Constitution (Article I, Section 4) states:

The times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof ...

I am torn on this question on both ideological and pragmatic grounds.

On one ideological hand, I am a hard-core federalist, and believe that 'the laboratory of the states' is the best way to test ideas; on the other hand, as a believer in rather literal interpretations of the Constitution, I think 'the legislature' means, you know, the legislature.

Pragmatically, I detest gerrymandering and would be happy to see more competitive districts open up. On the other hand, I doubt whether in practice most 'non-partisan' commissions will end up being actually non-partisan (Arizona Republicans think the Democrats gamed the system this time. They may be right, but I don't think for an instant that Republicans are above doing the same).

There's another area in which my beliefs are in conflict on this case, though less so than in the examples above. I'm a strong believer in direct democracy where feasible -- i.e., citizens passing laws, as they did in this case, through referenda. However, I don't think citizens have any more right than a legislature to act unconstitutionally, so that concern really doesn't enter into this.

In addition to Arizona, several other states, including California, have redistricting commissions, so the decision may have wide ramifications.

About Golfing and Vacations

Over the past year or so, there has been a rising level of criticism of President Obama over the amount of time he spends golfing and about the alleged frequency and lavishness of his vacations. This reached a crescendo a few days back when the President briefly interrupted his vacation to express his outrage about an American photographer, James Foley, being beheaded by ISIS, and then followed up his comments by, uh, going golfing.

President Obama returned to the golf course on Saturday amid mounting Republican criticism that he is spending too much time hitting the links during several international and domestic crises. 

The early criticism came almost entirely from Republicans, it's true, but now Democrats are joining in, as the New York Times (a publication usually solidly in Obama's camp) noted:

But the criticism went beyond the usual political opponents. Privately, many Democrats shook their heads at what they considered a judgment error. Ezra Klein, editor in chief of the online news site Vox, who is normally sympathetic to Mr. Obama, wrote on Twitter on Wednesday that “golfing today is in bad taste.” The Daily News published a front-page photograph of a grinning president in a golf cart next to a picture of Mr. Foley’s distraught mother and father under the headline, “Prez tees off as Foley’s parents grieve.” 

And if it's only Republicans, then Maureen Dowd must have switched parties:

FORE! Score? And seven trillion rounds ago, our forecaddies brought forth on this continent a new playground, conceived by Robert Trent Jones, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal when it comes to spending as much time on the links as possible — even when it seems totally inappropriate, like moments after making a solemn statement condemning the grisly murder of a 40-year-old American journalist beheaded by ISIL. 

I know reporters didn’t get a chance to ask questions, but I had to bounce. I had a 1 p.m. tee time at Vineyard Golf Club with Alonzo Mourning and a part-owner of the Boston Celtics. Hillary and I agreed when we partied with Vernon Jordan up here, hanging out with celebrities and rich folks is fun. 

Now we are engaged in a great civil divide in Ferguson, which does not even have a golf course, and that’s why I had a “logistical” issue with going there. We are testing whether that community, or any community so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure when the nation’s leader wants nothing more than to sink a birdie putt.

There are also, of course, people defending Obama. And if I thought the criticisms of golfing and vacations were really about golfing and vacations, I would agree with the defenders. Hey, it's a tough job and everybody has a right to unwind.

But I don't think that golf and vacations are anything more than symbols, being used as stand-ins for a wider but more difficult-to-define complaint – that Barack Obama is distant and out of touch with the American people and, worse, disengaged and even disinterested in being president.
Howard Kurtz stole what I was thinking about and wrote earlier this week:

It started with the ObamaCare debacle and continued through his seeming passivity or slow reaction time in the wake of the VA scandal, the Bowe Bergdahl mess, the military collapse in Iraq and so on …. 

What is striking now is a growing sense, fairly or unfairly, that Obama is not capable of rising to the occasion, that he just doesn’t like politics, that he’s disengaged, that despite his soaring rhetoric in 2008 he has a passion deficit.

I have often thought (and may have written here previously) that Obama resigned a year ago, and just forgot to tell anybody. It seems a lot of people, of both parties, are coming to the same conclusion.

Don't Blame Me, I'm Just the President

One of the hallmarks of the Obama presidency has been his refusal to accept blame for anything that goes wrong. Recently, things have gone very, very wrong in Iraq, particularly in regard to ISIS taking over a large part of the country, starting not long after President dismissed them as no big deal. 

The president,who has been under harsh media criticism for likening ISIS to an Al-Qaeda JV basketball team in January said, "There is no doubt that their advance their movement over the last several of months has been more rapid than the intelligence estimates and I think the the expectation of policy makers both in and outside of Iraq." 

In short: “Hey, I wasn't wrong – they were.” Who constitutes 'they' changes each time the guy blows something, but there's always somebody else he holds accountable. Never himself.

One of the things I learned very quickly after stepping into my first management role (like most things, I learned it the hard way), was that I was accountable for any of the errors of my subordinates. Barack Obama might be aware of that if he had ever held done any management before becoming president, but a majority of Americans twice decided that being cool was more important than having relevant experience.

Watch out, Chicago. You're Getting Set up to Be Screwed Again

The Cubs' owner is asked about the Atlanta Braves' planned move to the suburbs:

Ricketts said the Cubs have been trying to avoid such an issue. 

"We've been approached by several suburban sites and alternatives to move the Cubs to a new ballpark," Ricketts said, "and although I haven't studied it thoroughly, I imagine that's probably an attractive proposition for us. 

"But we've made it our priority to try to stay where we're at because of what it does mean to the neighbors and what it does mean to the city, both economically and just from the standpoint of quality of life in general."

Note that Rickett never says flatly that the Cubs will stay put (though such a promise would be worthless anyway), he only says they will try.

Would the Cubs actually move out of Wrigley? Probably not, but the threat is ho doubt good enough to extort a few hundred million out of the taxpayers. Rahm Emmanuel is a leading practitioner of crony capitalism, and there's plenty of precedent (e,g., Daley's Soldier Field sweetheart deal for the Bears).

On a side note: It's interesting that Cubs attendance has dropped more than 20% in the past few years. Maybe Cubs fans are wising up. One reason I could never stand the Cubs is that their fans (at Wrigley) are mostly a bunch of drunken boors who know nothing about baseball – they go to the games as an excuse to get drunk and be seen doing something cool.

(Apologies to my Cub fan friends, who are exceptions to that rule).

A Step in the Right Direction

The National Transportation Safety Board is fining General Motors $7,000 per day for GM's failure to respond to the NTSB's demand for information about GM's cover-up of their safety problems.

This is a great idea. At seven grand a day, US taxpayers will have their bailout money repaid in only about four millenia. Better than I thought it was going to be.

A note on the math: $7000 x 365.25 days = $2,556,750/year x 4000 years = $10,227,000,000.

That isn't quite all of what's owed, but it's close.

More seriously: It's way past time to put an end to crony capitalism (by both parties).