As a result of the failure of both media and government to actually serve the interests of the people is it any wonder that more than three-quarters of the public holds the Congress in contempt?
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Americans remain down on Congress, with 15% approving and 78% disapproving of the job it is doing. This approval rating is similar to the low levels seen this year, and is five percentage points above the all-time low of 10%, last recorded in August 2012.
This came out of the morning Situation Report from @glubold of Foreign Policy magazine. The secret sauce, for those interested, is to read NightWatch for a mix of what might happen and what the news is too clumsy to cover, then check the various FP feeds to see what has actually come to pass.
This is a domestic rather than international issue, but it’s one that is liable to bite us hard.
The Pentagon is starting to touch the third rail of budgetary spending: military compensation, retirement and benefits spending. As Chuck Hagel completes his “listening tour” of troops and their families, a quiet effort has begun to review military retirement and compensation that will grow louder as its work begins to surface. Hagel is finishing up his domestic road trip today, visiting airmen at Charleston Air Force Base, S.C., and then Marines at Camp Lejeune, N.C. Hagel, we’re told, wants to hear from troops and families about the challenges they face during a period of shrinking budgets. He’s listening but he’s also starting slowly to float the idea that compensation benefits and even retirement plans may have to be pared back in order to make the Pentagon’s ledgers add up. Personnel costs alone cost the services between 55 and 65 percent of their budgets and rising – a fact the Pentagon brass say they’ve been saddled with for years. But now as budgets tighten, it’s a fact that can’t be ignored.
Airmen, marines, sailors, and soldiers who served their time and were discharged with a clean DD214 are going to see their retirement benefits slashed. The 55% – 65% of budget being personnel was an eye opener for me – if I pay attention to domestic matters it’s almost always system costs, system life cycle, and changing military doctrine. This looks like a brewing battle between our veterans and defense contractors who are desperately trying to keep their nose in the Pentagon’s feeding trough as the normal 25% post war budget cuts begin.
The NSA spying scandal shows that America's pursuit of terrorists has turned into a mania. Spying on citizens is as monstrous and unlawful as Guantanamo Bay and drone warfare. The German government's response has been woefully weak.
America is sick. September 11 left it wounded and unsettled — that's been obvious for nearly 12 years — but we are only now finding out just how grave the illness really is. The actions of the NSA exposed more than just the telephone conversations and digital lives of many millions of people. The global spying scandal shows that the US has become manic, that it is behaving pathologically, invasively. Its actions are entirely out of proportion to the danger.
“If Congress goes along [by approving President Obama's 2014 DOD budget request], Pentagon spending levels will exceed any previous high by any other president in any year in peace or in war since the death of President Roosevelt in 1945, except for President George W. Bush from 2006 to 2008.”
“…current military spending is lapping at historic highs, not lows.”
The Defense Budget Is Even Larger Than You Think: part two of two
Given the warped measures that high-spending advocates and the Defense Department use to calibrate past, present and future defense spending (described here Monday), it is important to find an independent, objective yardstick to measure Pentagon spending trends accurately.
Unfortunately, there isn't one.
If there were, this debate would be over, and I could retire.
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The Bureau of Economic Analysis in the Commerce Department might be tasked with the job of finding one, but it actually plays a major role in devising the Pentagon's self-serving measures of inflation. The Office of Management and Budget has its own deflators that are only slightly different.
Both embrace the proposition that a large portion of cost growth in Pentagon spending should be counted as inflation: the Pentagon experiences more inflation than other agencies and should get more money-the argument goes.
In the 1980s, the Congressional Military Reform Caucus argued that the Pentagon should be held to an independent but analogous measure of inflation, and identified the Producer Price Index as most appropriate. Others, especially the Defense Department, disagreed.
The differences will not be resolved here, but the question remains: what would the Pentagon's budget history look like if it lived by the rules followed by most everyone else – especially the rest of the federal government, and the American economy?
I received a cryptic note from a colleague earlier tonight:
“This one has time AND location data.”
The email contained a link to the Global Terrorism Database, which is maintained at the University of Maryland at College Park, which is an easy walk from a green line stop on the D.C. Metro. I poked around the site a bit and discovered that everything from 1970 through 2011 is available for download if you just fill out a form.
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The total content is large so I pulled out the 5,066 events from 2011. There are an amazing 127 attributes for each event, but it’s a sparse row setup, very easy to process. I unrolled just a few key items – city, country, and region. This resulted in over 15,000 lines indexed with their twelve digit event IDs. The first rough visualization I did was immediately exciting in terms of what was visible.
This is the new warfare. It is the obvious next step in asymmetrical conflict. Lower risk for Americans, and probably cheaper. But, I wonder, is it making more enemies than it is eliminating? If I lived in a little village in the Afghan mountains and, in the middle of night, a drone strike blew up one of the houses, killing a neighbor family, I might have some serous attitude about it.
There is a growing anti-American attitude taking root in Europe, one already well-established in the Islamic world, and parts of Asia. The long term consequences of this are not going to be happy. But our foreign policy barely deals with it.
More and more judicial decisions, particularly those of Republican appointed judges, overwhelmingly favor corporations over people. These decisions get almost no coverage in the media, but they have real and far-reaching consequences. Here's an example of what I mean.
I attach two-day old SECDEF estimates for Congress of what will happen if sequester continues into next fiscal year. Big idea: emphasis on RIFs of military and civilian personnel in preference to furloughs of DoD civilians. SECDEF doesn't mention any specific numbers, but following would not surprise me:
*Active Army military personnel: RIF of 70K to 110K, dropping currently projected end strength of 490K to 380K to 420K..
*DoD civilians: RIF of 10 percent to 25 percent across DoD, meaning, for Army, RIF of roughly 27K to 68K Army civilians and, for DoD, RIF of 80K to 200K DoD civilians including Army.
As a result of the failure of both media and government to actually serve the interests of the people is it any wonder that more than three-quarters of the public holds the Congress in contempt?
