George W. Obama and immigration fantasies
In the waning days of his presidency, George W. Bush listed the failure of immigration reform as one of his biggest disappointments and deplored the tone of the immigration debate. It had, he said in December 2008, undermined “the true greatness of America which is that we welcome people who want to work”.
The way things look a year and a half into the administration of Barack Obama, he too may end his presidency deploring the failure to fix America’s dysfunctional immigration system. The tone of the debate is even more rancorous now than it was when Bush pushed reform and it features the same arguments, including the fantasy that you can fully control the frontier between the U.S. and Mexico, the world’s busiest border.
That illusory target was set in the Secure Fence Act of 2006, signed into law by George W. Bush on October 26 of that year. It provided a definition of the term “operational control”, one of the most frequently used buzz phrases of the debate. (The other is “securing the border”). Under the letter of the law, operational control means “the prevention of all unlawful U.S. entries, including entries by terrorists, other unlawful aliens, instruments of terrorism, narcotics, and other contraband.”
Note the word “all”. Then contrast it with what is at stake: almost 7,500 miles of land borders (with Mexico and Canada), 12,300 miles of coastline and a vast network of airports, seaports and land crossings. In the long-running debate, sound bites alone could fill a library and one of the best came from Janet Napolitano when she was governor of Arizona: “Show me a 50-foot wall and I show you a 51-foot ladder.”
That quote has history on its side. There has never been an impenetrable border. Not the Great Wall of China, the 5,500-mile mother of all walls, not the Berlin Wall, not the Iron Curtain, the lethal system of walls, fences, minefields and watch towers manned by guards with shoot-to-kill orders that sliced 2,500 miles through Europe.
Napolitano, now head of the Department of Homeland Security, the 160,000-strong bureaucratic behemoth charged with ensuring “operational control”, no longer uses the wall-and-ladder simile. Instead, she talks of the need for “comprehensive immigration reform”, as does her boss, Barack Obama, and as did George W. Bush.
Bush’s attempt to push through a reform addressing all aspects of the complex, emotion-laden issue fell through because he could not convince legislators in his own Republican party that there should be a path to citizenship for the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants already in the United States. Obama does not have enough votes in the Senate for a reform bill.
Performance reviews – a global scourge
It is time to kill the annual performance review, for decades a feature of corporate life around the globe, dreaded both by those who do the reviewing and those who are reviewed.
It is a corporate sham and one of the most insidious, most damaging and yet most prevalent of corporate activities. It is a pretentious, bogus practice that produces nothing that could be called a corporate plus. It is universally despised yet few people do anything to kill it.
So says Samuel A. Culbert, a consultant and professor of management at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in a just-published book entitled, Get Rid of the Performance Review! The book grew from a 2008 article in the Wall Street Journal which, Culbert says, prompted a thousand letters to the editor and a flood of online comments, mostly in favour of his argument.
It is not new, but presented in particularly blunt language. A decade ago, a book by Tom Coens and Mary Jenkins entitled Abolishing Performance Appraisals made similar arguments, based on a study of 26 companies where morale, effectiveness and profitability had improved after they abolished appraisals.
Doubts about the process emerged as far back as 1957, with an article in the Harvard Business Review by Douglas McGregor, a management professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who suggested replacing the conventional boss-subordinate meeting with an approach allowing the employee to set personal short-term goals and evaluating himself.
An Uneasy Look at Performance Appraisal, the headline said. There has been a lot more unease since then, so why does the practice persist? And why would a date on a calendar be relevant to determining when someone’s performance needs reviewing?
Culbert zeroes in on two culprits. The first is a management theory – Management by Objectives – which came into vogue after the end of the World War II and provided for managers to set goals for their departments and then figure out what individual employees need to do to achieve department goals.
Performance reviews kill morale. A VERY over used word is “professionalism”. Professionalism means knowing your job well, and doing it efficiently and effectively every time.
But these days “professionalism” means, look good, smell good, and speak pleasantly enough to appear more competent than you really are. And it reaches the highest levels. That mindset is what creates the problems that corporate life causes the rest of society.
What ever happened to honest effort? What ever happened to REAL teamwork? These days bullshit is what gets you promoted and paid. Just look at the executives at Goldman Sachs and BP.
In Mexico, a drug war of choice?
Here is a short history of Mexico’s drug war, as told to a joint session of the U.S. Congress by President Felipe Calderon on May 20.
In 2004, a U.S. ban on the sale of assault weapons to civilians was lifted. High-powered firearms started flowing south across the 2,000-mile border. Violence increased. “One day criminals in Mexico, having gained access to these weapons, decided to challenge the authorities in my country,” he said.
Calderon did not say what happened on that “one day,” by implication the day the president had no choice but to fight back.
There is another version of history, which goes as follows: Calderon won elections in 2006 with a margin so thin (0.58 percent) that it prompted cries of fraud, persuaded his left-wing opponent Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to declare himself the real winner, and gave Mexico the unusual and embarrassing spectacle, for weeks on end, of two men claiming they were the legitimate president.
So, ten days after eventually being sworn in, Calderon announced that he had ordered the army into his home state of Michoacan to make war on Mexico’s drug cartels.
One of Calderon’s most vocal critics, former foreign minister Jorge Castaneda, loses no opportunity to say this was a war of choice, not prompted by any specific outrage but by a perceived need to legitimize a contested presidency. Calderon badly misjudged the strength of the criminal mafias, the alternative version goes, and now is stuck with a war he cannot win, not even with U.S. support. The death toll in the wars the cartels are fighting against the state and against each other stands at around 23,000 and is rising by the day.
To staunch the bloodshed, Congress should consider reinstating the assault weapons ban, Calderon told Congress. “If…you do not regulate the sale of these weapons in the right way, nothing guarantees that criminals here in the United States, with access to the same weapons, will not in turn decide to point them at U.S. authorities and citizens.”
I agree with some comments here that say that there are some drugs who are as addictive as cannabis and which are marketed as “medicines” and sold to us by doctors. It’s all about earning money, a lot of money from us all. Legalizing drugs like cannabis and marijuana is not as profitable as forbidding it. It’s hard to say who would lose more money if cannabis would be legalized, the cartels or those who provide funds and weapons for this drug war: http://www.financialcrisisblog.org/forum /Corporations/Who-would-lose-the-most-m oney-if-cannabis-was-not-deemed-illegal- for-most-423672.htm
What is sure is that the money spent into this drugs war could be invested in better purposes.
Obama, Karzai and an Afghan mirage
Last year, under the leadership of President Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan slipped three places on a widely respected international index of corruption and became the world’s second-most corrupt country. It now ranks 179th out of 180, a place long held by Somalia.
According to a United Nations report published in January, Afghans paid $2.5 billion in bribes in 2009, roughly a quarter of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (not counting revenue from the opium trade). The survey, based on interviews with 7,600 people, said corruption was the biggest concern of Afghans.
On the military front in a war more than halfway through its ninth year, attacks on U.S. forces and their NATO allies totaled 21,000 in 2009, a 75 percent increase over 2008, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) a week before Karzai’s visit to Washington. The GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, noted that Taliban insurgents had set up a “widespread paramilitary shadow government…in a majority of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces.”
The Pentagon, also in advance of Karzai’s visit (in the second week of May), reported that Afghans support his government in only 29 of the 121 districts the U.S. military consider most strategically important.
“The insurgents perceive 2009 as their most successful year,” the Pentagon said. “The Afghan insurgency has. ..a ready supply of recruits drawn from the frustrated population, where insurgents exploit poverty, tribal friction and lack of governance to grow their ranks.” As to corruption: “Real…change remains elusive and political will, in particular, remains doubtful.”
In case all this has led you to the conclusion that the Afghan glass is half empty at best, that’s not the way President Barack Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton portrayed it during Karzai’s visit. Yes, there were difficulties ahead, they said, but overall things were looking up. “We are steadily making progress,” Obama said. “Progress in Afghanistan is real,” echoed Clinton.
Was this a matter of two leaders seeing a mirage, or a 21st century version of the “we see light at the end of the tunnel” assurance Americans heard during the Vietnam war? Or was it simply overdue recognition that Obama is stuck with Karzai no matter how unpopular he might be or how much credibility he lacks?
@avid
Perhaps you should try to clarify the so called ‘capability’ which the USA has but was not able to defeat the so called enemy in Korea and Vietnam?
Rex Minor
Dirty money and the war in Afghanistan
In a long report on the war in Afghanistan for the U.S. Senate’s Committee on Foreign Relations last summer, one sentence stood out: “If we don’t get a handle on the money, we will lose this war to corruption.”
The money in this context meant the funds, from multiple illicit sources, that finance the Taliban who are fighting the United States and its allies in a war that is now in its ninth year. Dirty money is greasing corruption on a scale so monumental that Afghanistan ranks 179 (out of 180) on the latest index compiled by Transparency International, a watchdog group based in Berlin.
Part of the reason for the country’s dismal standing: for much of the war the U.S. military ignored the booming drug trade (Afghanistan accounts for around 90 percent of the world’s opium, the raw material for heroin) and the drug money flowing to the insurgents, estimated at up to $400 million a year. Add kickbacks contractors pay directly to the Taliban to avoid having their projects blown up or their workers kidnapped, add money diverted from development funds and soon you talk about serious money.
“There is a realization now that the best way to stop the conflict is to cut the flow of money,” Gary Haff, the chief financial investigator with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) told a conference of anti-money laundering experts in Hollywood, Florida, this week. “We need to identify and disrupt the financial infrastructure that supports the Taliban and al-Qaeda.”
That falls under the heading of better late than never and is easier said than done. An important new weapon in the assault on the financial infrastructure was only deployed last summer, initially with a skeleton staff. It is now growing rapidly and by the end of the year, according to Haff, the DEA alone will have 85 agents in the new unit, the Afghan Threat Finance Cell (ATFC), working alongside financial specialists from the Departments of Defense, Treasury and Justice.
That is a big step forward from the days, earlier in the war, when planes were loaded with bales of opium at the Kabul airport in full view of U.S. troops manning the perimeter. It is also a long way from the days when military commanders argued that neither going after the drug lords nor trying to deny financing to the enemy was part of their brief.
MISSION IMPOSSIBLE?
Is the US army there to fight the afghans or to control their finances and weaponry. Or the new slogan win the mind and hearts of the people there?
Just be brave and fight them, others before you have fought them and did not care about diversios.
If one is worried about the grug trade, just get hold of all the US citizens on drugs and supply them with the mexican and colombian drugs openly or sent all the drug addicts to rehablitation centres in the US. the afghan drug dealers would be soon out of business, and the farmers would restart growing fruit orchards.
Rex Minor
Goodbye America, Hello China? Think again
For the growing number of Americans who see China heading for inevitable global dominance, nudging aside the United States, a brief walk down memory lane helps put long-term predictions into perspective.
Not so long ago, Japan was seen as the next (economic) number 1. American executives studied the 14 management principles of The Toyota Way, developed by the automobile manufacturer that grew into the world’s biggest car maker and is now recalling millions of defective vehicles.
Between the mid-1980s and early 1990s, books with titles such as Trading Places – How We Are Giving Our Future to Japan and How to Reclaim It (by Clyde Prestowitz) were required reading in Washington. Learned panelists expounded on the wondrous efficiency of “Japan Inc.”
A glut of “Amazing Japan” books, Chicago Tribune writer Ronald Yates noted in 1987, hammered home the same theme: Japanese technology is superior, Japanese management is better, Japanese products are unrivaled, Japanese people work harder, Japanese are smarter, Japan is No. 1.
Skip over the two decades of economic stagnation of Japan Inc. that soon followed the hype and fast forward to the present. The book which best reflects today’s American worries is entitled When China Rules the World: the End of the Western World and the Birth of the New Global Order, by British author Martin Jacques. His forecast is part of a growing library of essays, analyses and books on the 21st century belonging to China.
If history is any guide, there’s a better than even chance that the “goodbye America, hello China” school of thought will prove as embarrassingly wrong as the 1980s assessment of the relative strengths of Japan and the United States.
Long-term predictions tend to be more often wrong than right and the decline of the U.S. is a topic of seasonal regularity.
The comparison with Japan is a tired old chestnut. Japan has less than half the population of the U.S. while China has more than four times the population of the U.S. China has serious problems, but so has America. America can remain the leading nation, but only by working hard and smart, so your advice to “relax” is absurd. Anyway, my money is on India to be the leading nation in a hundred years time.
Who wins in U.S. vs Europe contest?
In these days of renewed gloom about the future of Europe, a quick test is in order. Who has the world’s biggest economy? A) The United States B) China/Asia C) Europe? Who has the most Fortune 500 companies? A) The United States B) China C) Europe. Who attracts most U.S. investment? A) Europe B) China C) Asia.
The correct answer in each case is Europe, short for the 27-member European Union (EU), a region with 500 million citizens. They produce an economy almost as large as the United States and China combined but have, so far, largely failed to make much of a dent in American perceptions that theirs is a collection of cradle-to-grave nanny states doomed to be left behind in a 21st century that will belong to China.
That China will rise to be a superpower in this century, overtaking the United States in terms of gross domestic product by 2035, is becoming conventional wisdom. But those who subscribe to that theory might do well to remember the fate of similar long-range forecasts in the past. At the turn of the 20th century, for example, eminent strategists predicted that Argentina would be a world power within 20 years. In the late 1980s, Japan was seen as the next global leader.
The latest pessimistic utterances about Europe were sparked by a debt crisis in Greece which raised concern over the health of the euro, the common currency of 16 EU members. Plus U.S. President Barack Obama’s decision to stay away from a U.S.-EU summit scheduled for May in Madrid, with a new EU leadership structure that should have made it easier to answer then U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s famous question: “Who do I call when I want to talk to Europe?”
There are still several numbers to call in the complex set-up, giving fresh reasons to fret to those crystal-gazers who see the future dominated by the United States and China, the so-called G-2.
Pundits who see the European way of doing things as a model for the United States (and others) to follow are few and far between, not least, says one of them, Steven Hill, because most Americans are blissfully unaware of European achievements and, as he puts it, “reluctant to look elsewhere because ‘we are the best.’”
As foreigners traveling through the United States occasionally note, the phrases “we are the best” and “America is No.1″ are often uttered with deep conviction by citizens who have never set foot outside their country and therefore lack a direct way of comparison. (They are in the majority: only one in five Americans has a passport).
EU has today also the largest military by Libon treaty and the most dangerous weapon on Earth set on french SSBN:The M51.
American intelligence and fortune-telling
– Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own —
Hot on the heels of what President Barack Obama called a potentially disastrous “screw-up” by the civilian intelligence community, here comes a devastating report on shortcomings of military intelligence in Afghanistan, by the officer in charge of it. He likens the work of analysts to fortune-telling.
The report is highly unusual both because of its almost brutal candor and the way it was published, outside military channels. Even more unusual: the three authors hold out journalistic skills as models to emulate for gathering and putting together intelligence.
“Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy,” write the authors, Major General Michael Flynn, the most senior intelligence officer in Afghanistan, his advisor Captain Matt Pottinger, and Paul Batchelor of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).
“The … vast intelligence apparatus is unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which U.S. and allied forces operate and the people they seek to persuade. Ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the powerbrokers are and how they might be influenced, incurious about the correlations between various development projects and the levels of cooperation among the villagers, and disengaged from people in the best position to find answers … U.S. intelligence officers and analysts can do little but shrug in response to high-level decision makers seeking the knowledge, analysis and information they need to wage a successful counterinsurgency.”
While finding and finishing off enemy leaders is an important part of intelligence work, the report says, there have been only token efforts to acquire knowledge about the population, the economy, the government and other aspects of the environment the U.S. and its allies in the 43-member coalition are trying to secure and eventually leave behind.
I think the US Government could employ Madame Zora (www.TheWhatBox.com) for their fortune telling needs!
War and Peace, by Barack Obama
– Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. –
It is a timeline rich in irony. On Dec. 10, Barack Obama will star at a glittering ceremony in Oslo to receive the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. That’s just nine days after he ordered 30,000 additional American troops into a war many of his fellow citizens think the U.S. can neither win nor afford.
Whether the sharp escalation of the war in Afghanistan he ordered on December 1 will achieve its stated aim – disrupt, dismantle and eventually defeat al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan – remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: more troops equals more fighting equals more deaths — of soldiers, insurgents and the hapless civilians caught in the middle. Not exactly a scenario of peace.
In Oslo, Obama will become the fourth American president (after Jimmy Carter, Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt) to be handed the coveted peace medal and invited to give the traditional Nobel Lecture. It is meant to spell out the award winner’s vision of peace, a challenging task for a man who just picked a much bigger war from a range of options that included reducing the U.S. military presence.
Resolving the contradiction will require the mastery of words of Leo Tolstoy, author of the epic novel War and Peace about the run-up to the unsuccessful invasion of Russia by Napoleon.
The deployment Obama announced at the U.S. military academy at West Point will bring U.S. forces to around 100,000, more than three times as many as when the president took office in January. The combined strength of American troops and soldiers from 42 other nations will be 140,000 – the same level as the peak of Soviet forces during an eight-year war that ended in a humiliating defeat.
Obama and his war council are as confident that the U.S. will not share the same fate as they are determined to reject comparisons between the American involvement in Afghanistan and the war in Vietnam. “This argument depends upon a false reading of history,” Obama said in his West Point speech.
The concept of corporate entities was introduced back in the roman ages and has been with us since then.
It is as old and solid a principle of law as any other you could care to name. Almost as old as the concept of legal rights or private property rights. And certainly older then very recent legal concepts such as international human rights.
And even if we removed corporate citizenship, it wouldn’t have any effect on the arms industry.
Corporations are individuals. People are individuals. Corporations can manufacture weapons for governments. People can manufacture weapons for governments.
The situation would be exactly the same. The only distinction would be whether people manufacture and sell weapons as a corporation or a partnership. The legality remains the same.
So if there was as you say, a ‘military industrial complex’ that exists, then the difference between corporate and partnership would mean very little.
A paradox of plenty – hunger in America
– Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. –
Call it a paradox of plenty. In the world’s wealthiest country, home to more obese people than anywhere else on earth, almost 50 million Americans struggled to feed themselves and their children in 2008. That’s one in six of the population. Millions went hungry, at least some of the time. Things are bound to get worse.
This the bleak picture drawn from an annual survey on “household food security” compiled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and released in mid-November. It showed the highest level of food insecurity since the government started the survey, in 1995, and provided a graphic illustration of the effect of sharply rising unemployment.
This year’s picture will be even bleaker – the unemployment rate more than doubled from the beginning of 2008 to now, at 10.2 percent the highest in a quarter century. It is still climbing, and for many the distance between losing a job and lack of food security is very short.
In keeping with the American predilection for euphemisms, the word “hunger” does not appear in the report which classes food security into several categories, from “marginal” and “low” to “very low.”
Marginal food security means, in the lexicon of the USDA, “anxiety over food shortages or shortage of food in the house.” The second category, low, means “reduced quality, variety or desirability of diet,” but not necessarily less food.
The most severe category, “very low,” used to be labeled “food insecurity with hunger” and is defined as “disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake.” That applied to around 17 million people, up from 12 million in 2007. Black and Hispanic families and single-parent households are the most affected.
This is the result of corporate citizenship. Corporations are citizens under our law. They use their well payed lobbyists to champion their interests. While the interests of true citizens are sold away.
The price, a career in politics that is profitable and long.
Term limits need to be instituted in the legislature. The courts must strike down corporate citizenship. Only when the legislature is composed of people who truly wish to serve the interests of the citizen, will meaningful change begin.
Corporate interests give lip service to “values” and living a in a morally upright society where everyone is respected. But at the same time they destroy society by stealing money intended for the honoring of contracts and call it “profit”, and by their blatant disregard for those who’s lives have been decimated by their corruption and greed.
Meanwhile our politicians feed this diseased economy for their own profit. They prove their disgust for the citizenry by not even having the honor to limit their terms for the good of the nation they claim to love so much.
The result is that companies can get away with degrading our food supply. They get away with throwing thousands if not millions, of families into destitution. And they are free to profit from the suffering they cause and are encouraged to do so. This they call economic growth. And we are supposed to believe that this is good for us.
Where are the people of reason who see this? They should be speaking more. They should be making their voices heard and their presence known.
One or two voices pointing out the obvious won’t do it alone. The rest need to speak up as well.
I cannot for the life of me understand why some people are fine with allowing undocumented “strangers” into our country. Especially when I doubt that these same people would be so inclinded to allow unannounced, again strangers into their own homes without questioning who they are and why there were in their homes in the first place. These same people also seem comfortable with the fact that these illegal, undocumentated immigrants do not contribute anything to the United States, especially taxes (which would help during this recession) but, they repeat all the state and federal assistance which comes from tax-payer money. I also find it ironic that the country that these illegal immigrants come from have stricter immigration laws then we do. For instance if you go to a hospital in Mexico and you are not a natural citizen with their type of insurance, Mexican immigrantion laws allows a hosptial to deny you medical treatment until you pay up front. I recognize the importance and the contributions that immigrants have and continue to give to this country. However, those of us who are United States citizens not only have the right to ask our federal governement to secure our borders (especially when this country is being targeted by terrorists) but to also ask those that are here illegally to join the system so that they can contribute what we already have; there is no such thing as a free lunch… especially in this country.