Obama to Create Thousands of Jobs: In Iraq

Πηγή: Huffington Post
By Peter Van Buren

Oct 14 2011

The U.S. is prepared to spend up to five billion dollars to create more jobs for police officers, paying $100-$150k a year. The Government can't find enough people to take the jobs, and is looking for recruits, no experience necessary, all training provided, right in your hometown.

One catch: the jobs are for Iraqis, in Iraq. No Americans need apply.

The secret mantra of the Iraq war has always been "training," specifically the always-just-out-of-reach goal of training the Iraq security forces to take over from the U.S. The cry has been heard for years: George W. Bush even made "we'll stand down as they stand up" a campaign slogan in 2008.

Now, as the war in Iraq proceeds through its eighth year, the State Department was on Capitol Hill October 12 in front of the Subcommittee on National Security, Homeland Defense and Foreign Operations begging a skeptical Congress for more money. "Training" is again being cited as the cure-all for America's apparently insatiable desire to throw money away in Mesopotamia. The latest tranche of taxpayer cash is for one billion dollars a year, every year for five years, to pay police instructors and cop salaries in Iraq.

A Long Train

The U.S. has been training Iraqi cops for years, under the auspices of Army and State contractors. In fact, the U.S. government has spent $7.3 billion for Iraqi police training since 2003. Now, with the Army shifting to teaching Iraqis how to operate the hi-tech weapons they will be buying from the U.S., the State Department is picking up the cop training gig full-time. A job announcement last year hired contract police instructors to go to Iraq, where, under the watchful eye of State's own internal Stasi, Diplomatic Security, they are preparing to start teaching at thirty locations around the country.

Given that the Army and State have been teaching police work in Iraq now for several years, the student cops must either be the world's slowest learners, or have the world's highest job turnover. Sadly, it looks like the latter. Iraqi cops tend to have very short life expectancies and that is why, even with the healthy salary offer of $150,000 a year (the average per capita income in Iraq is only $3800; cops in the US make concededly less than what State is willing to pay in Iraq. Starting salaries run $40-65k a year), State can't find enough, um, bodies, to fill up the recruit classes.

The Hard, Short Life of an Iraqi Cop

As an example of how life is for an Iraqi law officer, this week alone attacks included two suicide car bombs minutes apart at Baghdad police stations, killing at least 25 people in the capital's deadliest day in a month. More than 70 people were wounded. In one instance, the street in front of a police station had been closed from 2004, but was reopened about four weeks ago, sadly allowing the suicide bomber to get close to the station house. In other attacks the same day, a bomb wounded a police brigadier general in north Baghdad, while two police were shot in south Baghdad.

These attacks took place in an Iraq still occupied by some 41,000 American soldiers. Come January 2012, the U.S. Army posture will diminish to an as yet undetermined number, likely around 5,000 troops. The State Department hopes to conduct its police training under these conditions, protected by its own mercenary army of 5000 security contractors, using hand-me-down Army gear.

Corruption, Mismanagement and Torture

The killing of Iraqi cops is probably the main issue holding back recruitment. However, the lack of organized control by their parent organization, the Iraqi Ministry of Interior (MOI), is another impediment to a well-run police force, regardless of how much training they receive.

In December 2006, the Iraq Study Group reported that the Iraqi Interior Ministry was filled with corruption, infiltrated by militia and unable to control its own police. In July 2007, the Los Angeles Times reported that Iraq's MOI had become a "federation of oligarchs" where various floors of the headquarters building were controlled by rival militia groups and organized criminal gangs. The report described the MOI as an eleven-story powder keg of factions where power struggles were settled by assassinations in the parking lot. In its September 2007 report, the congressionally-mandated Independent Commission on the Security Forces of Iraq described Iraq's MOI as a "ministry in name only," "dysfunctional," "sectarian" and suffering from "ineffective leadership." To make matters worse, the police have been implicated in multiple incidents of torture.

Who Will Guard the Guards?

There remain significant questions on if State will be able to oversee the huge police training program.

The State Department's International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) bureau came under fire from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) for its management of the contract with DynCorp to train police. A 2010 audit concluded that "INL lacks sufficient resources and controls to adequately manage the task orders with DynCorp. As a result, over $2.5 billion in US funds are vulnerable to waste and fraud." Most of $1.2 billion State was given to train Iraqi police remains unaccounted for. Though not directly related to police training, State's own Inspector General just found that INL mismanaged another Dynacorp contract in Afghanistan to the tune of $940,000, in large part because of lack of staff to oversee the project.

Following the negative report by SIGIR, State did the logical thing: they slammed the door on the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction auditors. State's coordinator for Iraq transition, Patricia Haslach, told Congress that SIGIR has almost no jurisdiction over State Department spending in Iraq, including that five billion sought for police training. State's reluctance to submit to the audits is understandable; SIGIR stated that 400,000 Iraqis received training and are on the force, but the "capabilities of these forces are unknown because no assessments of total force capabilities were made."

The Bright Side

Undersecretary of State Pat Kennedy reminded Congress October 12 without irony that "We have a robust contracting oversight system firmly in place and being executed by our Bureau of Administration. The Bureau of Diplomatic Security is overseeing its competitively awarded security task orders using the enhanced oversight and management system put in place over the last several years."

Pat Kennedy also said that providing assistance to the Iraqi police and security forces "will eventually reduce the cost of our presence as security in the country improves and we can rely on Iraqi security for our own protection."

And it is not like State has just been sitting on its hands. In July 2011, out of Iraq's 400,000 cops, the State Department invited nine of them to the U.S. for three weeks with local police forces in Vermont, Pittsburgh and Denver, cities that no doubt offer a lot of points of commonality with policing in Iraq.

With plans like that, what could go wrong?

One nation, underemployed

Πηγή: Reuters
By Sally Kohn

Oct 7 2011

In our national desperation to create jobs, we’ve forgotten that quantity doesn’t necessarily mean quality. For instance, Rick Perry boasts of creating jobs in Texas, but Texas is tied with Mississippi for the highest percentage of minimum wage jobs in the nation. According to the latest jobs numbers, the United States gained 58,000 jobs in September, with an additional 45,000 communication workers returning to work after a strike. But as any busboy cleaning up after a Wall Street banker can tell you, not all jobs are created equal.

Of course, the 9.1% of unemployed Americans in our country would gladly take even the worst of jobs to put food on their tables. But as recent Census data reveals, 46.2 million Americans lived in poverty in 2010 — many of whom have jobs, just not jobs that are good enough. In fact, for all American workers, the Census Bureau found that media household incomes (adjusted for inflation) declined by 2.3% in 2010 over the previous year — even as worker productivity and corporate profits rose.

America needs an economic recovery not just on paper but on principle — where the quality of life for workers rises as the quantity of jobs and our overall economy grows. Which is why it’s deeply troubling that so many in our government are trying to undermine the quality of current jobs, let alone create more and better jobs for the future.

Union jobs = good jobs

There’s a reason the protesters at Occupy Wall Street are linking arms with unions. Unions raise wages for all workers. Studies have shown that a large unionized presence in a given industry raises wages for all workers in that field. In draconian, anti-union “Right to Work” states, all workers make on average $5,438 less per year than workers in states that allow free bargaining. Not to mention the fact that many benefits non-unionized workers now expect on the job — from health insurance to sick leave — were first established because unions fought for them and such benefits became the norm.

In the prosperous 1950s, nearly one-in-three American workers belonged to a union. Today, thanks to attacks on union rights by big business conservatives, closer to one-in-ten workers is a union member. In the intervening decades, data show that as unionization rates have declined, so have middle class wages and income.

Some voters are put off by the political power of unions, understandable in a political system that is more controlled by special interests than ordinary citizens. But unlike corporations that lobby Washington so they can make more money, unions are advocating for better jobs — to raise your quality of life, increase your pay and benefits and put more money in your pocket. The conservative case against unions is entirely political. From an economic perspective, unions are essential to creating good, middle class jobs.

Public sector jobs = good jobs

Big business conservatives have also increased their attack on government jobs and workers. These critics claim that government is inefficient and wasteful and that the private sector can teach our kids, build our roads and administer our social services in a more cost-effective and competent manner.

But a recent study by the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight found that, in 33 out of 35 areas, the government paid more to private contractors then it would have cost for the government to perform the work itself. What’s interesting is that, last year, the conservative Heritage Foundation released a study showing that public sector workers earn on average 22% more than their private sector counterparts, and public workers get more generous benefits packages as well. It turns out that privatizing public services is just a scam to dismantle good public sector jobs while taking your tax dollars and giving them to private companies that drive down wages and benefits for workers while driving up profits and CEO bonuses.

The recent college graduates, soldiers and single mothers protesting on Wall Street and across the country don’t just want crummy jobs — they want good jobs. President Obama’s plan is a good start in the right direction — a plan that will stimulate the economy and get Americans working again through public sector investment.

Our goal must be an economy not just in which all Americans have jobs but good jobs — so we can provide for our families, send our kids to college, save for retirement and have some money left in our pockets to spend. Whether they’re out in the streets or crying at their kitchen tables, that’s what all Americans are clamoring for.

Why Does Obama Keep Trying to Raise Taxes?

Πηγή: The National Interest
By Jacob Heilbrunn
September 14, 2011

One of the charges hurled at President Obama from sympathetic Democrats is that he is a compromiser. But this indictment does not hold true when it comes to tax policy. Obama has consistently advocated one approach when it comes to taxes: raising them. Again and again, Obama has insisted that taxes need to go up. When he announced his jobs program before Congress, he said it would all be paid for. A day later the answer of how that feat would be accomplished was divulged by Obama: he wants to raise taxes.

In pursuing this policy, Obama is trying to redistribute wealth. He unequivocally states that the rich—those couples earning $250,000 or more in his definition—must pay more to help finance government programs and, in theory, reduce the debt (though historically Congress has simply taken the money and run with it). If America were flush, Obama's espousal of higher taxes might make sense (though $250,000 goes a lot longer in Dubuque than it does in Boston, which is one reason why Obama's definition of the rich is questionable). A prosperous America could rescind the Bush tax cuts in toto—so that everyone, not just the wealthy, contributes to what has become a tax system that relies disproportionately on the contributions of a slender portion of the tax bracket. But the broader problem is this: who on earth would want to impose higher tax rates during what amounts to a new Depression? The result would almost certainly be to further depress economic activity. Today's Wall Street Journal points to what it terms a looming "2013 tax cliff" that the country is about to run over.

There is a strong case for redoing the tax code—for, in fact, lowering marginal tax rates (and a case as well for lowering the payroll tax temporarily, as Obama suggests). This could be accomplished by genuine reforms that would purge the tax code of all sorts of distortions in the form of various exemptions. Perhaps the congressional super-committee will come up with a sweeping proposal to accomplish that. In fact, the Bowles-Simpson commission already went some ways toward accomplishing that mission.

But the Obama administration has even more urgent problems when it comes to the economy. For one thing, the Washington Post today provides new and disquieting details about the administration's rush to approve a half-billion-dollar loan to Solyndra, a manufacturer of solar panels that just declared bankruptcy. This is perilous territory for the White House, uniting as it does the administration's backing for unproven, green technologies, economic stimulus and, at best, a carefree approach to taxpayer dollars. It appears that the White House bullied federal reviewers into approving the loans so that vice president Joe Biden could make the announcement in September 2009:

One e-mail from an OMB official referred to “the time pressure we are under to sign-off on Solyndra.” Another complained, “There isn’t time to negotiate.”

“We have ended up with a situation of having to do rushed approvals on a couple of occasions (and we are worried about Solyndra at the end of the week),” one official wrote. That Aug. 31, 2009, message, written by a senior OMB staffer and sent to Terrell P. McSweeny, Biden’s domestic policy adviser, concluded, “We would prefer to have sufficient time to do our due diligence reviews.”

Now taxpayers are on the hook for $535 million. How will Obama reconcile this with his claim of reducing government waste and focusing on creating new jobs?

Voter discontent seems clear. In New York a conservative Republican, Bob Turner, has won a congrssional seat that the GOP has not held in almost one hundred years. Yet the Republican presidential field has largely been mired in abstruse debates about whether or not Social Security is a vital government program or simply a Ponzi scheme that can be tossed overboard as so much useless ballast.

The most pressing issue America faces is job creation. Without economic growth, the deficit will never be reduced. Income is declining. One in six Americans now lives in poverty, according to the Census Bureau.

But it's highly questionable whether Obama's jobs plans will reduce those numbers. The outstanding issue—the one Obama does not touch—is the issue of debt from mortgages that went bellyup. Obama may depict raising taxes on the sliver of Americans—the top 1 percent, which has seen a rise in income—as a panacea for a nation that seems to be experiencing structural decline, but it is no solution at all. Instead, it is hard to avoid the impression that the president is campaigning not to save the economy but his own job.

Why the Jobs Argument Against Military Cuts Is Bogus

Πηγή: Truthout

By Robert Naiman

Wednesday 17 August 2011

For the first time in a decade, significant cuts in projected military spending are on the table. If the "Super Congress" doesn't reach a deal on $1.2 trillion in debt reduction over the next ten years by Thanksgiving, $1.2 trillion in automatic cuts will be triggered, half of which must come from the military; and if the Super Congress does reach a deal, the prospects are good that cuts in projected military spending will be a significant part of the story.

Obviously, however, the prospect of significant military cuts has well-heeled opponents. The military-industrial-Congressional-lobbyist-think tank-corporate media complex is not just going to roll over and play dead. In the next three months, we can expect a steady stream of pro-military-spending propaganda. Expect to hear a lot about China, Iran, North Korea and "global terrorism" as the beneficiaries of the military-industrial complex try to justify why we must continue to spend much more on the military than we did while opposing the Soviet Union during the cold war.

But another argument against cuts to projected military spending is sure to rear its ugly head: we shouldn't cut military spending, because that would cost American jobs.

In the current political context, this "jobs" argument is 100 percent nonsense. Here's why.

The (first-order) Keynesian economics story for government spending to boost employment has three basic elements:
The economy is not always at full employment. Sometimes, there are a significant number of people who are "involuntarily unemployed" - they would like to work for the prevailing wage but cannot find a job.
When this situation occurs, it is not automatically self-correcting over a time horizon that most people are willing to tolerate. The economy can remain at much less than full employment for years.
There's something that the government can and should do to address this situation: engage in deficit spending to boost aggregate demand and put people back to work.

There are three important things to remember about this story:

1. It's a story that only makes sense when the economy is not at full employment. When the economy is at full employment, there is no general argument for government spending to increase overall employment. Of course, even when the economy is at full employment, we still want the government to do things. But spending money with the goal of increasing overall employment is not one of them.

Suppose there are a bunch of unemployed people, and a bridge collapses. Now, you have two arguments for repairing the bridge. One is: the bridge needs to be repaired so people can use the bridge. And another is: we have all these people unemployed and the government can put some of them to work. But suppose, on the other hand, that the economy is at full employment when the bridge collapses. Now, you still have the argument that the bridge needs to be repaired so people can use it. But you no longer have an argument that we can put unemployed people to work. Everyone who's going to repair the bridge is already doing something else. They're going to have to stop doing something else to repair the bridge. The government, in repairing the bridge, is not boosting employment. This isn't an argument against repairing the bridge. It's an argument against claiming that boosting employment is a benefit of repairing the bridge, if the economy is already at full employment.

2. The second key thing about this story is that when the economy is at less than full employment, and the government spends money with the goal of boosting employment (in addition to whatever other goals the spending might be intended to achieve), it's key that this be deficit spending. In this first-order Keynesian story, the idea is for the government to add money to the economy in order to boost demand. If the government builds a bridge, and then immediately raises taxes in order to pay for the bridge, it hasn't done anything to boost employment, because it withdrew exactly as much money from the economy as it added. The money that the government spent on the bridge supported employment, but the money that the government withdrew from the economy in the form of taxes also supported employment. In order to boost employment by building the bridge, the government must not currently raise taxes to pay for it - it must borrow the money instead, and pay it back over time, as the economy improves. In order to increase employment, the government deficit must (temporarily) increase.

3. The third key thing about this basic first-order Keynesian story is that it does not matter how the government increases its deficit in order to boost employment. There are important second-order stories that you can tell about how some things the government can do to increase its deficit are better at boosting the economy than others, a matter to which we return below. But the basic story is that the government must increase its deficit, whether by increasing spending without raising taxes, or by cutting taxes without reducing spending, or both.

Now, it's certainly true that if the government is currently employing people making bombs to drop on other people's countries, and the government now decides it doesn't want to purchase as many bombs to drop on other people's countries, that's going to reduce the number of people employed by the government in making bombs to drop on other people's countries.

But just as the government cannot increase employment by building a bridge when the economy is at full employment, the government cannot increase employment by building bombs when the economy is at full employment. Likewise, if the economy is at full employment, then the government cannot decrease employment by building fewer bombs. If the economy is at full employment, the people who were making bombs will go do something else (build bridges, perhaps.) There is no long-term argument for government spending to boost aggregate employment, valid for all seasons of the business cycle. There is only a short-term argument for government deficit spending to boost employment when the economy is in an employment recession. Moreover, in the basic, first-order story, all government deficit spending is equal in terms of its impact on employment, so while, if the economy is in recession, in the short run having people make fewer bombs can reduce employment, there is no reason to expect cutting military spending to have any greater effect in reducing employment than any other measure which has the effect of reducing the government deficit, such ascutting domestic spending or raising taxes.

Therefore, in the first-order story, an argument against cutting military spending on the grounds that it will reduce employment in the short run if the economy is in recession is equally an argument against any form of deficit reduction at all, including by raising taxes or cutting domestic spending - dollar for dollar, in the first-order story, cutting domestic spending or raising taxes will reduce employment just as much in the short run, and in the long run, there is no employment story at all, because the government-spending-to-increase-employment story is a short-run story, not a long-run story, relevant to the situation when the economy is at less than full employment, and not relevant otherwise.

Therefore, if the context of debate is a decision to reduce government deficit spending by a fixed amount over ten years (which is what the Super Congress is supposed to do), then the jobs argument against military cuts is total nonsense because, one, the jobs argument is a short-run story, not a long-run story; and, two, over the short run, in the first-order story, every other means of reducing the deficit, including raising taxes and cutting domestic spending, will reduce employment as much as cutting military spending.

So, an honest person who wants to argue in the current political context that cutting military spending is a bad idea because it will reduce employment in the short run must argue a second-order effect: he or she must claim that government deficit spending on the military is more efficient than other forms of government deficit spending being considered in boosting employment.

I doubt we will find anyone trying to argue this, because the data points the other way: compared to other forms of government deficit spending, government deficit spending on the military isless efficient at boosting employment.

In a 2007 paper ("The US Employment Effects of Military and Domestic Spending Priorities"), Robert Pollin and Heidi Garrett-Peltier examined this issue. They compared the estimated effects of a $1 billion increase in spending across several sectors and established the following ranking of efficiency in terms of job creation per dollar: mass transit, education, health care, construction, tax cuts for personal consumption, military. Military spending came in last.

This shouldn't be surprising. One obvious reason why military spending is an inefficient means of job creation is "leakage" from the US economy. Much of military spending takes place outside of the United States, so it's not boosting US employment. Occupying Afghanistan and Iraq and bombing Pakistan and Libya don't do as much to boost US employment as keeping our people employed at home. Keeping troops in Germany and Japan doesn't do as much to boost employment as keeping people employed at home. The military is consuming a lot of goods and services not produced in the United States.

So, the jobs argument against military cuts is nonsense because:
Any jobs argument only makes sense over the short term, when the economy is in employment recession, not over the long term.
In the first-order story, cutting military spending has the same effect on employment as any other means of deficit reduction, including raising taxes or cutting domestic spending.
When you compare different means of government deficit spending to boost employment, military spending is among the least efficient in terms of boosting employment - and that means that, when you compare the employment costs of different means of reducing the deficit, cutting military spending is among the least costly in terms of employment.

A final note: it has long been true in an economic sense that military spending was less efficient than other forms of government spending in terms of boosting employment. But in the United States, ever since the Second World War, there has been an important political caveat to this economic fact. A political-economic culture was created, sometimes called "military Keynesianism," in which government spending to boost domestic production and consumption was often tarred as "liberal," even "socialist," whereas government spending to boost military production was labeled "national security" so that was beyond question. Thus, as a practical political matter, there wasn't a one-to-one choice between military spending and domestic spending, because military spending was politically favored by elites and domestic spending for human needs was politically opposed by elites.

Most of us have lived within this ideological system our whole lives, so it's kind of hard for us to imagine anything different. Within this ideological system, military spending to boost employment made a kind of sense, even though it was inefficient, because other kinds of spending weren't allowed. People became habituated to the idea that there was no point in trying to cut military spending because we wouldn't be allowed to use the savings for domestic spending on stuff we wanted, anyway.

But the dynamics of the debt debate in Washington have created a fundamentally different ball game than the one we have known for the last 50 years. Now, the choices are: cut military spending, or cut Social Security benefits and raise the Medicare retirement age. Now it is one for one: guns or butter. There is a fixed target for deficit reduction. Every dollar that is not taken out of the military budget will be taken out of the economy in some other way, and many of the alternatives on the table - such as cutting Social Security benefits or raising the Medicare retirement age - are things that most Americans are going to vigorously oppose.