EU Bans Pesticides Linked to Bee Deaths

The European Food Safety Agency (EFSA) has recommended a 2 year suspension on pesticides linked to bee deaths, and it appears the EU will implement the ban, to be formally announced

Three neonicotinoids will be banned from use for two years on flowering crops such as corn, oil seed rape and sunflowers, upon which bees feed. Neonicotinoids have been widely used for more than decade and are used as seed treatments rather than sprays, meaning the insecticide pervades the growing plant, as well as its nectar and pollen. They are less harmful that some of the sprays they replaced, but scientific studies have increasingly linked them to poor bee health. Many, including the National Farmers' Union, accept that EU regulation is inadequate, as it only tests on honeybees and not the wild pollinators that service 90% of plants. The regulatory testing also only considers short term effects and does not consider the combined effects of multiple pesticides.
The chemical industry has warned that a ban on neonicotinoids would lead to the return of older, more harmful pesticides and crop losses. But campaigners point out that this has not happened during temporary suspensions in France, Italy and Germany and that the use of natural pest predators and crop rotation can tackle problems.

The Chemical Industry has come out swinging, with massive lobbying to protect the billions of dollars in sales.  In the summer of 2012, they thought they were winning, but that soon changed.

One Syngenta executive, mentioning in passing his recent lunch with Barack Obama, claimed that "a small group of activists and hobby bee-keepers" were behind that campaign for a ban. 

At that time, the European Crop Protection Association – of which Syngenta and Bayer are members – welcomed the continuing EFSA evaluation. But in January, as the EFSA prepared to issue the damning verdict of its experts, the industry immediately turned on it. Syngenta's lawyers demanded last-minute changes to a press release to prevent "serious damage to the integrity of our product and reputation" and threatened legal action.
The EFSA stood its ground, prompting Syngenta to demand all documents, including handwritten ones, relating to the EFSA's decision and the names of individuals involved. A month later, it told EFSA officials it was considering the "identity of specific defendants" for possible court action. On a more conciliatory note, Syngenta told the EFSA it was considering "large-scale" bee-monitoring studies to "close data gaps", despite previous claims its product had been introduced only after "the most stringent regulatory work". Critics have condemned companies for keeping trial data secret.

Novartis sued for kickbacks

They just can't seem to keep their nose out of trouble.  Novartis in 2010 was found guilty in 2010 of all kinds of criminal behavior, paying $422 million in fines.  They settled charges of

Specifically, the civil settlement resolves allegations that Novartis illegally promoted Trileptal for a variety of uses, including psychiatric and pain uses, which were not medically accepted indications and therefore not covered by those programs. In addition, the agreement resolves allegations that the company paid kickbacks to health care professionals to induce them to prescribe Trileptal and five other drugs, Diovan, Zelnorm, Sandostatin, Exforge and Tekturna. The federal share of the civil settlement is $149,241,306, and the state Medicaid share of the civil settlement is $88,258,694.

Novartis also signed a Corporate Integrity Agreement (CIA) with the Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Inspector General (HHS-OIG). The company is subject to exclusion from Federal health care programs, including Medicare and Medicaid, for a material breach of this CIA and subject to monetary penalties for less significant breaches. Among other things, the CIA requires the board of directors (or a committee of the board) to annually review the company’s compliance program with the help of an outside expert and certify its effectiveness; that certain senior executives annually certify that their departments or functional areas are compliant; that Novartis send doctors a letter notifying them about the settlement; and that the company posts on its website information about payments to doctors, such as honoraria, travel or lodging. The five-year agreement further requires the implementation of a compliance program addressing promotional activities.

Less than three years later, they're baaaaack!  Now they have had two new suits filed by the government for new charges of kickbacks, bribes paid to doctors, lavish meals, fishing trips, and "speaker" events held at Hooters.  The new charges, still within the 5-year settlement period could result in them being excluded from Medicare and Medicaid programs altogether according to the article in Forbes. 

Novartis also charges $100,000 / year for their life saving drug Gleevec as I mentioned in a previous post.  Here are a few of their most recent No-No's.

Payments and ‘lavish’ dinners given to doctors, for instance, were purportedly kickbacks to speaker and attendees to  induce them to prescribe different Novartis meds. However, the feds say some programs never actually occurred or doctors never spoke about the drug at issue. Some presentations were made on fishing trips off the Florida coast or at a Hoosters restaurant. Just imagine the intense focus on a slide presentation under such circumstances (you can read the legal filings in the latest lawsuit here and here).  And Novartis did not scrimp on the doctors, either. The drugmaker “frequently” treated them to expensive dinners hosted at high-end restaurants, according to the feds. For example, a dinner for three, including the speaker, at a Washington, DC, restaurant cost $2,016, or $672 per person. Novartis also paid a $1,000 honorarium to the speaker for this program.  One of the two attendees had attended the same program a short time earlier. At another program held on Valentine’s Day in 2006, Novartis paid $3,127, for a meal for two at a West Des Moines, Iowa restaurant, or $1,042 per person. But as the lawsuit alleges, the return on these indulgences was worth the investment.

 As for Novartis, the drugmaker ”disputes the claims in both cases and will defend itself in these litigations… Discounts and rebates by pharmaceutical companies are a customary, appropriate and legal practice as recognized by the government itself. The suit on Myfortic is a significant expansion of the Anti-Kickback Statute that is inconsistent with law and policy in this area and the theory in this case threatens to undermine pharmaceutical company discounting practices that benefit both consumers and payers, including the government. Physician speaker programs are an accepted and customary practice in the industry. These are promotional programs designed to inform physicians about the appropriate use of our medicines. Novartis invests significant time and resources to help ensure these programs are conducted in an ethical and responsible manner. We are dedicated to doing it right” (here is the complete Novartis statement).

Stay tuned.

Crater Lake Oregon

If you have the opportunity to go there, by all means do it.  A giant crater in a blown out volcano filled with crystal blue water almost two thousand feet deep.  Hint, best viewed July - Sept because of its high elevation.

Let us now praise Brian Druker

Brian Druker is a cancer researcher at OHSU and was featured in this article in the Oregonian today.  He is hoping to generate a national dialog on pharmaceutical companies and their pricing of blockbuster drugs out of reach of most patients, many of whom will die without them.  One of those is Gleevec which Dr Druker helped develop for Novartis in the 1990's, and costs about $100,000 a year per patient.

Druker says he has long wrestled with the knowledge that the drug he helped develop is being priced out of reach for some.

While people have wondered if he made money off of the overpricing of Gleevec, Druker says he doesn't get royalties. "I've never gotten a penny of the sales of Gleevec."

Other countries' governments set drug prices, and Druker says while he thinks it's a good idea, he thinks what's more realistic in the United States would be government pressure to bring down the cost of life-saving medications.

He envisions a discussion that includes drug companies. "This is a debate that needs the attention of Congress."

He hopes other physicians join the fight. "There's strength in numbers. If we don't speak out, who will."

Good for him, and thank you Dr Druker. 

Update,  this issue was also highlighted in the NY Times.

Save the Post Office

Think Progress reports that Peter DeFazio has introduced a bill to relieve the USPS of some millstones around their neck, as well as a "We the People" petition to the White House to take action on the subject.

DeFazio recognizes that facts alone will not influence his colleagues to take up and pass the legislation, so he has also turned to the White House’s petition platform, We The People, to petition President Obama to take a stand against the health benefit requirement. He also points out many of the other flaws in how Congress has managed the postal service:

Some of the issues he addresses are: 
About 80% of USPS financial losses since 2007 are due to a Congressional mandate to prefund 75 years of future retiree health benefits over 10 years. In 2012 USPS lost a record $15.9 billion, but $11.1 billion of that loss went to prefund healthcare. This must change.
USPS shouldn’t move to 5-day delivery. This would only save 3%, risk further revenue losses, and slow mail delivery.
USPS needs to re-establish overnight delivery standards to ensure the timely delivery of mail and prevent the closure of mail plants.
USPS needs to generate more revenue by ending a 2006 ban prohibiting USPS from offering new products and services.

Go to the We The People website at the link above to give your support.

Middle Class under attack

Bernie Sanders has referred to the Pew Report on Income Inequality as a factor that must be addressed in the deficit reduction argument.  He observed that the Middle Class in the US is disappearing due to the lack of middle class jobs, thus depriving the bottom 93% of any of the economic progress made since 2008.  All of the progress has gone to the top 7% at the expense of everybody else.  He observed that the Walton family (WalMart founders) own more wealth than the bottom 40% of Americans.  Tax policy that doesn't recognize that poverty is growing amidst a rising economy (and a much richer Walton Family) gives lie to the notion that a rising tide lifts all boats.  Spending reductions at the expense of the 93% will only make the problem worse.

Pier Carlo Padoan, Chief Economist and Deputy Secretary-General of the OECD says,

The situation is grave. According to current consolidation plans, most governments aim to improve the budget primarily via restraining spending. Social security transfers are planned to decline in cyclically-adjusted terms in about half of all OECD countries, while adjusted household income taxes will increase in most of these countries. The net redistributive effect of all measures combined is likely to be negative. This has to be avoided.

In other words, austerity at the expense of the 93% is class warfare and will result in increased poverty and resentment.

To clarify, Bernie Sanders and Pier Carlo Padoan did not mention Class Warfare directly, in fact they studiously tiptoe around the term, it is my conclusion and I believe it is recognized but unspoken on their part.

See my previous comment on the Pew Report.

After the Big Fall, Still Falling for Most

The evidence of stagnation for most of us is all around, unemployment, underemployment, a disappearing middle class and growing income inequality.  The Pew Research Center released a study of net worth changes in the recovery years - 2009-2011 and found depressing results, at least for most of us.

During the first two years of the nation’s economic recovery, the mean net worth of households in the upper 7% of the wealth distribution rose by an estimated 28%, while the mean net worth of households in the lower 93% dropped by 4%.

On an individual household basis, the mean wealth of households in this more affluent group was almost 24 times that of those in the less affluent group in 2011. At the start of the recovery in 2009, that ratio had been less than 18-to-1. 

 The different performance of financial asset and housing markets from 2009 to 2011 explains virtually all of the variances in the trajectories of wealth holdings among affluent and less affluent households during this period. Among households with net worth of $500,000 or more, 65% of their wealth comes from financial holdings, such as stocks, bonds and 401(k) accounts, and 17% comes from their home. Among households with net worth of less than $500,000, just 33% of their wealth comes from financial assets and 50% comes from their home.

Rants on the Right

This story about a New Hampshire Republican State Legislator Stella Tremblay.

Last Friday, Rep. Stella Tremblay, R-Auburn, posted the following comment on conservative pundit Glenn Beck's Facebook page:

"Just as you said would happen. Top Down, Bottom UP. The Boston Marathon was a Black Ops 'terrorist' attack. One suspect killed, the other one will be too before they even have a chance to speak. Drones and now 'terrorist' attacks by our own Government. Sad day, but a 'wake up' to all of us. First there was a 'suspect' then there wasn't."

From the New Hampshire Republican Party.

 "It is hard to believe that just days after the cowardly acts of terror took place in our backyard that Rep. Tremblay would thoroughly discredit herself with her bizarre, embarrassing and unfounded comments," said Matthew Slater, executive director, N.H. Republican State Committee. "New Hampshire Republicans strongly reject her outlandish views and believe that anybody who holds such bizarre beliefs should not be taken seriously."

Wired Magazine has a run-down on the fringe conspiracy theories

• The government wants to impose martial law.  Boston was the catalyst.
• world-spanning conspiracy of Michelle Obama, a network of Russian oligarchs, and an army of stagehands armed with fake blood. Oh, and deceased suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev? He was taken alive. Naked.
•  Abdulrahman Ali Alharbi, a student and Saudi national who was injured in the bombing is part of a wider Saudi plot, Michelle Obama again has a sinister part.
• “Uncle” Ruslan Tsarni, the suspects’ uncle, as a member of the conspiracy. Tsarni’s accomplices? “Halliburton executives, suspected CIA assets, Chechnyan crime bosses, oligarchs stealing billions from banks and laundering money with seeming impunity, fire-eaters, peacock-feathered stilt-walkers, and a girl swinging on a trapeze pouring vodka into ice sculptures shaped like naked male and female torsos,”.  It’s not clear what the swinging girl had to do with this. 

And finally, the Urban Legends folks at Snopes.com have a page devoted to debunking the lunacy.

Hidden Money Costs 99% of Us

In this Opinion Story, an Economics professor talks about the revelations brought by the Secrecy For Sale project and the ICIJ.

The heads of the worlds major banks - those who demanded and got trillion dollar bailouts and who now demand austerity programs to balance government budgets - preside over institutions that make money helping the rich escape taxation. Hiding money in the ways and amounts lately revealed by the ICIJ is a deep kind of social corruption. It goes beyond questions of legality to the heart of modern political economy.

The real question is whether the people hurt by this behavior will change the system that promotes and rewards it.

See this video on how easy it is to hide money.

Where it hurts to breathe

You can count yourself fortunate if you live in Oregon because in most parts of the state air pollution is relatively tame, but the top 5 polluted cities in the US are all to the South in California.  But some cities in Iran, India, Pakistan and China are ranked at the top of the WHO's most polluted cities.

There are a lot of stories about Bejing, but despite being at a dangerous level to human health, Tehran and Delhi have even worse, with levels of pollutants that are very dangerous to human health. 

A report in the Lancet says that worldwide, a record 3.2 million people died from air pollution in 2010, compared with 800,000 in 2000.  Most of those deaths are in Asia.

 In China, Alistair Thornton, a China economist at the research firm IHS Global Insight says “Digging a hole and filling it back in again gives you G.D.P. growth. It doesn’t give you economic value. A lot of the activity in China over the last few years has been digging holes to fill them back in again — anything from bailing out failing solar companies to ignoring the ‘externalities’ of economic growth..

 Given that we're all on the same planet, the pollution doesn't stay in one place, and about 30% of the pollution in West Coast States comes from Asia principally China.  Ironically, we export the coal from the West coast to China, which gets returned by air.

US coal is already being exported to China through Canada. Just south of the west coast port city of Vancouver, the Westshore Coal Terminal ships 22 million tonnes of coal a year, of which 59% goes to China. There are now plans to build dozens of new terminals in the states of Washington and Oregon, on the west coast of the US, and export 150 million tonnes of coal a year to Asia.

 Now how dumb is that?

And now for a unique service

Speaks for itself. 

Scenes from the Oregon Coast

No trip to the coast is complete until you've had a fish dinner at Mo's Fish house.  The one in Florence, OR has a colorful mural.

Meat and antibiotic resistant bacteria

The US big food producers feed antibiotics to all their animals raised for food, leading them to become the breeding ground for super-bacteria resistant to a large range of antibiotics, and they cause over 3.6 million cases of food borne illness / year.  According to the NY Times,

More than half of samples of ground turkey, pork chops and ground beef collected from supermarkets for testing by the federal government contained a bacteria resistant to antibiotics, according to a new report highlighting the findings.

 Many animals grown for meat are fed diets containing antibiotics to promote growth and reduce costs, as well as to prevent and control illness. Public health officials in the United States and in Europe, however, are warning that the consumption of meat containing antibiotics contributes to resistance in humans. A growing public awareness of the problem has led to increased sales of antibiotic-free meat.

The big Agribusiness and pharmaceutical industry groups say the results don't establish conclusive proof, so they'll pursue business as usual. They also claim the study was probably flawed, which leads me to ask if the burden of proof is on the FDA and consumer groups (representing me) or Big Agribusiness (representing big money)?  As I've noted before, the Big Agribusiness folks are lobbying for laws that will cause whistle-blowers to be prosecuted as criminals, they like making their own rules.

According to the Environmental Working group,

Pharmaceutical makers have powerful financial incentives to encourage abuse of antibiotics in livestock operations. In 2011, they sold nearly 30 million pounds of antibiotics for use on domestic food-producing animals, up 22 percent over 2005 sales by weight, according to reports complied by the FDA and the Animal Health Institute, an industry group.

 The results of the food sampling from the supermarkets is alarming, more than half the stuff in the meat and poultry section is laced with antibiotics and super bugs.  If you're going shopping for meat, consider buying it from the organic section, and always assume all meat and poultry is possibly contaminated, so use safe food handling techniques..

Koch on the Doorstep

If the Koch brothers have their way, they'll soon control a big chunk of the mainstream media.  The NY Times is reporting that they are exploring a bid to buy the Tribune Company’s eight regional newspapers, including The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Orlando Sentinel and The Hartford Courant.  According to the Times,

The Los Angeles Times is the fourth-largest paper in the country, and The Tribune is No. 9, and others are in several battleground states, including two of the largest newspapers in Florida, The Orlando Sentinel and The Sun Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale.  “It’s a frightening scenario when a free press is actually a bought and paid-for press and it can happen on both sides,” said Ellen Miller, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan watchdog group.

Seton Motley, president of Less Government, an organization devoted to shrinking the role of the government, said the 2012 presidential election reinforced the view that conservatives needed a broader media presence.

“A running joke among conservatives as we watched the G.O.P. establishment spend $500 million on ineffectual TV ads is ‘Why don’t you just buy NBC?’ ” Mr. Motley said. “It’s good the Kochs are talking about fighting fire with a little fire.”

Stay tuned...

Lindsay Graham says Torture Him!

It would be comical if nobody listened to him, but he is powerful in conservative circles.  Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) suggested on Friday that the Obama administration should toss the court system and Constitution out the window when handling the missing suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings.
In a series of tweets that came hours after it was revealed that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the suspect at large in the Boston marathon bombings, is a United States citizen, Graham urged the Obama administration to nevertheless consider treating him as an enemy combatant.  He also complained that there weren't any drones being deployed over Boston.

He is a buffoon, but as I said he is a powerful one and that makes him dangerous.  Other saner opinions being published suggest our criminal justice system is the proper venue for this case, and most importantly, our Constitution requires it.

Quotes on Torture Alberto Mora

Alberto Mora
General Counsel, U.S. Navy

(2001-2006)

Alberto Mora was appointed general counsel for the United States Navy in 2001. One of Mora's great uncles had been imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp; another was tortured before he was hanged.
If the individual doesn't have the right to be free from torture and to enforce those rights, to some sort of judicial process, then individual rights cease to have significant meaning. The notion of rights become trivialized because if the right to be free from cruelty is not a right, then what else is left? Property rights, some types of free speech rights, these are important, but nothing is as important as the preservation of human dignity through freedom from cruelty.

One subscribes to the Geneva Convention because it makes enemy soldiers more likely to not resist capture than to resist capture. If an enemy soldier knows he'll be treated humanely if he's captured, he's not likely to fight to the last bullet. On the other hand, if an enemy soldier understands he's likely to be abused, then that increases his likelihood that he'll continue to fight and that American soldiers will be hurt or killed as a result. So there are a variety of factors that underlie the Geneva Convention and there's a large body of scholarship, all of which it is the principle domain of the JAGs to understand. 

When you saw the package of documents, you also saw Secretary Rumsfeld's signature, which shocked you, but you saw a handwritten note as well.

At the very bottom of the top page, Secretary Rumsfeld, in his handwriting, notes in reference to the request for authority to apply stress positions in standing for periods of time, something like, "Why are they limited to four hours a day? I stand at my desk from eight to ten hours a day."

...
if we were to apply cruelty now, it would necessarily imply a repeal and repudiation of our historic commitment to human rights as a foreign policy objective. Ever since World War II and arguably before then, the nation has been aggressively promoting human rights very successfully, successfully in the sense that it's altered other nations' and other individuals' behavior around the world. And all of this has been to the benefit of the United States and our long-term national security interests. And if we were now to allow the use of cruelty as a national policy, that was to say that other countries could also apply cruelty as a matter of their policy. It would repudiate all of the major human rights conventions that have been largely the result of American advocacy since World War II. How could we do that?

Quotes from the torture report

Malcolm Nance, Navy SERE 1997 - 2001
Malcolm Nance is a former master instructor and chief of training at the U.S. Navy's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape
school, who has himself been waterboarded as part of the training.
A long-time intelligence specialist who speaks five languages, including Arabic, Nance has been deployed on counterterrorism operations in the Balkans, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa.
I have no idea who the idiot is that took the entire history of the brutality and inhumanity and -- of all of the American captives in the history of this nation and would flip that on its head and take the techniques from the torturers and murders who had held our service people and civilians and hostages in captivity, and could somehow take that template which we called SERE school resistance training, and say, hey, this would be a great template for Guantanamo Bay.

Whoever did it, did it consciously, knowing that they were choosing totalitarian tactics, which we were defending against, and applied them as an American technique to handle detainees. Now, was it pain, was it revenge, was it just mindless attempt to get deeper into the war? I don't know. But all I know is that it will hurt us for decades to come. Decades. Our people will all be subjected to these tactics, because we have authorized them for the world now. How it got to Guantanamo is a crime and somebody needs to figure out who did it, how they did it, who authorized them to do it, and shut it down because our servicemen will suffer for years.

I was watching al-Jazeera, and I was listening to the Arabic, and it was a captive who had been released from Guantanamo Bay. And he got up on television, and he started showing a stress position against a wall. And I said, hey. That's a stress position. You know. Stress positions are what we do at SERE, you know, in an effort to show how pain can be inflicted upon a person with no marks. And this guy was saying, I was held up for hours and hours. And I thought hours? Hours? In that position? I said I couldn't go five minutes. Most of our students can't go a minute. But they were forced up and they were held up. And I thought, oh, my God.

I e-mailed a buddy of mine. I said, "Hey, I just saw something on al-Jazeera. Why is this guy describing SERE tactics?" And he goes, "I don't want to be the one to tell you, but they came and they got our manuals," you know. JPRA, Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, asked for all of our manuals to be sent to them. Each of the SERE schools. Our manuals on how we carry out our "simulated totalitarian evil nation, which has a complete disregard for human rights and Geneva Convention."
...
People who are, you know, pro waterboarding. Let's be frank here. If you believe in this, and you think it's a technique we need to have on the book, you're pro torture. Period. There is no black -- there is no grey area here. You are either for torture, all right, which means that you are against what it is that this country stands for, for the last 200 years. Or you are anti torture, and it means that you are standing up for the honor of this nation. That's the only way that I'll describe this discussion.
Someone needs to go to jail. That's all there is to it. This is disgusting. Thousands of service members, thousands, went through that process and were tortured around the world. People died to -- so that we could have those techniques brought out and shown our service member how to resist it. It's disgusting. How could they dare take this? How could they so -- how could they dishonor us like that? Every ex-captive in this nation should be standing up against this. They literally went and took the techniques of the North Vietnamese and said we could use it to break them? I didn't know that, by the way. I'm pretty pissed. I mean this is ridiculous.

Oregon texting violations

If you are on an Oregon Jury, they tell you the rule is, "No Cell Phone use in court".  However a juror in Salem on an armed robbery trial couldn't help himself, texted someone, and got thrown off the jury and in jail.  Pay attention out there if you're on a jury.

Boston Marathon Bombing

Here is a picture of the subjects of interest, believed to be the guys who made the bombs.  Call the FBI if these are the guys in the apartment upstairs playing the loud music.

The Dark Side

 Dick Cheney said 5 days after 9/11

"We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we're going to be successful. That's the world these folks operate in, and so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective." 

 He then had the Department of Justice concoct a (now repudiated) legal justification to sanction torture.  Despite the reluctance of the current Obama Administration to cooperate, the Constitution Project sponsored a bipartisan blue ribbon panel to document torture during the Clinton, Bush and Obama Administrations.  They took the better part of three years, interviewed hundreds of people all over the world, and documented it all in a 575 page report that is a black eye for the United States government's disregard of the rule of law for 2 decades, and continues today.

The three administrations did it all, torture - many times torturing people to death, "suspending" the Geneva Convention rules against torture whenever they pleased, kidnapping suspects and sending them to countries that tortured them, and of course we still incarcerate them at Guantanamo without charges or trial or due process.

There were the torture instigators, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, and Yoo.  There were a number of principled people who opposed them, Alberto Mora, John McCain and Nance Pelosi to name a few.  One quote from Alberto Mora, General Counsel for the Navy (Retired) in a later interview stood out,

The argument that we have to apply abuse to detainees in order to protect American lives I find to be violative of our deepest values and to the very safety of our country. We fight not only to protect lives, we fight to protect our principles.

Well said.

Bad Public Service

This story in WW is just unbelievable, this guy must have been a Wall Street CEO to have this kind of nerve.  I'm calling up Kitzhaber now.  I'm talking about Oregon education czar Rudy Crew, who makes $280,000 and had the nerve to take on a moonlighting position with an Educational Recruiter, while still getting paid for full time work, and paid really well at that.  His contract apparently allows him to do it too.  My State representatives are about to get a letter...  Shame on that man and the fools who hired him.

More Revolving Door Goings On

We see the revolving door scenario alive and well, Ron Wyden's former chief of staff has gone to the dark side.  Looks like a big catch.  I hate it.  I hope Ron tells them to go perform an impossible act on themselves.

Josh Kardon, former longtime chief of staff to U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), has a new lobbying client—Exxon Mobil Corporation. The oil giant wants access to the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, of which Wyden is the new chairman. Kardon, who works for the Capitol Hill Consulting Group in Washington, D.C., declined to comment about taking on Exxon Mobil as a client.

Homeland Insecurity

The bombing at the Boston Marathon is puzzling, where was the security?  According to the Washington's Blog there was plenty of it, hundreds of Police, National Guards, they even had bomb sniffing dogs at the start and finish line, so how did it happen?

Homeland Security is an enormously expensive group, but paradoxically the budgets for domestic bombing prevention has been gutted, first by Bush then even more under Obama.  This is an amazing failure.

We also might ask, "Why is Terrorism on the rise"?  How about Oil Wars for a starter?  Here is an analysis from the Washington's Blog.

Killing innocent civilians is one of the main things which increases terrorism. As one of the top counter-terrorism experts (the former number 2 counter-terrorism expert at the State Department) told me, starting wars against states which do not pose an imminent threat to America’s national security increases the threat of terrorism because:

One of the principal causes of terrorism is injuries to people and families.

The Iraq war wasn’t even fought to combat terrorism. And Al Qaeda wasn’t even in Iraq until the U.S. invaded that country.
And top CIA officers say that drone strikes increase terrorism (and see this).
Furthermore, James K. Feldman – former professor of decision analysis and economics at the Air Force Institute of Technology and the School of Advanced Airpower Studies – and other experts say that foreign occupation is the main cause of terrorism
University of Chicago professor Robert A. Pape – who specializes in international security affairs – points out:

Extensive research into the causes of suicide terrorism proves Islam isn’t to blame — the root of the problem is foreign military occupations.
***

Each month, there are more suicide terrorists trying to kill Americans and their allies in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other Muslim countries than in all the years before 2001 combined.
***
New research provides strong evidence that suicide terrorism such as that of 9/11 is particularly sensitive to foreign military occupation, and not Islamic fundamentalism or any ideology independent of this crucial circumstance. Although this pattern began to emerge in the 1980s and 1990s, a wealth of new data presents a powerful picture.

More than 95 percent of all suicide attacks are in response to foreign occupation, according to extensive research [co-authored by James K. Feldman - former professor of decision analysis and economics at the Air Force Institute of Technology and the School of Advanced Airpower Studies] that we conducted at the University of Chicago’s Project on Security and Terrorism, where we examined every one of the over 2,200 suicide attacks across the world from 1980 to the present day. As the United States has occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, which have a combined population of about 60 million, total suicide attacks worldwide have risen dramatically — from about 300 from 1980 to 2003, to 1,800 from 2004 to 2009. Further, over 90 percent of suicide attacks worldwide are now anti-American. The vast majority of suicide terrorists hail from the local region threatened by foreign troops, which is why 90 percent of suicide attackers in Afghanistan are Afghans.

I Love Oregon

What a place to live.  Here is a picture of the coast near Yachats.  Currently my screen wallpaper.

Humpty Dumpty and offshore tax havens 2

The ICIJ revelations are starting to ripple around the world as many nations realize they're being ripped off and are starting to react.  See my earlier post on the subject here.  The report has set off a scramble by governments to calm public anger over widespread tax dodging by the rich when governments are cutting budgets and calling on citizens to pay higher taxes.

In another announcement last week, Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker said his country plans to lift bank secrecy rules for European Union citizens who have money stashed in the country, ending decades of bank secrecy in Luxembourg.

“We are following a global movement,” Juncker told parliament in a state-of-the-nation address. The new transparency regime would begin in January 2015. 

The New York Times also weighed in on the issue as well as documenting how our tax policy is stacked in favor of the one percent who own about 40 percent of the nation’s wealth.

"Over the years, some of the wealthy have been enormously successful in getting special treatment, shifting an ever greater share of the burden of financing the country’s expenditures — defense, education, social programs — onto others. Ironically, this is especially true of some of our multinational corporations, which call on the federal government to negotiate favorable trade treaties that allow them easy entry into foreign markets and to defend their commercial interests around the world, but then use these foreign bases to avoid paying taxes.
General Electric has become the symbol for multinational corporations that have their headquarters in the United States but pay almost no taxes — its effective corporate-tax rate averaged less than 2 percent from 2002 to 2012 — just as Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee last year, became the symbol for the wealthy who don’t pay their fair share when he admitted that he paid only 14 percent of his income in taxes in 2011, even as he notoriously complained that 47 percent of Americans were freeloaders. Neither G.E. nor Mr. Romney has, to my knowledge, broken any tax laws, but the sparse taxes they’ve paid violate most Americans’ basic sense of fairness."

US Debt and Lying With Statistics

A study in 2010 by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff resulted in a book This Time is Different that has been lauded by just about everyone on the planet as a masterpiece of economic research.  It's ultimate conclusion is that countries with debt/GDP above 90% of GDP experience slower growth than those who don't, and has been the foundation of the "Austerity" mania infecting the GOP and conservatives worldwide. 

Paul Ryan's Path to Prosperity budget states their study "found conclusive empirical evidence that [debt] exceeding 90 percent of the economy has a significant negative effect on economic growth." The Washington Post editorial board takes it as an economic consensus view, stating that "debt-to-GDP could keep rising — and stick dangerously near the 90 percent mark that economists regard as a threat to sustainable economic growth."

The only flaw in the argument is that the authors had an Excel typo that affected the results, they used some dubious mathematical assumptions, advanced unjustified cause - effect reasoning, and cherry-picked their data.  This Article goes through their work and points out that if the errors their work was corrected, they would have come to the opposite conclusion! 

This book has been cited by just about everybody on the planet as the intellectual proof that high debt retards growth, and now it has been revealed to be dangerously wrong.

See this blog entry in the Washington Post for a response by Rogoff.

Wanna Save Earth?

If your thing is to save the planet, you're not alone, in fact there is a conference this week (4/15 - 4/19) of 300 scientists and NASA people who are advocating a space-telescope to locate potential asteroids nearby, and a meteor protection system to prevent potentially catastrophic meteorite strikes on Earth.  Here is a link to the live feed of the conference.  The schedule includes an April 17 talk on planetary defense featuring Bill Nye The Science Guy and Geoff Notkin of the Science Channel's Meteorite Men.

The Next Bubble, Income Inequality

One of the most disturbing trends in this country is the rise of extreme wealth and income inequality.  One publisher, BusinessInsider.com, described it as 3 million overlords and 300 million serfs.  The situation is a classic bubble scenario that will potentially erupt in real class warfare, not just verbal clashes.  If you look at charts of corporate profits as a percentage of GDP vrs Wages, they are moving in different directions, and now are at historical extremes.

What could change it?  Maybe a revelation in Corporate thinking that recognizes that their employees are also customers, and the customers, (employees) won't buy goods if they're broke.  Don't hold your breath.  The accumulation of wealth in the 1% at the expense of the rest is a spring tightening, that will ultimately break with unknown consequences.

The Only Way Out is a Box."

It was back in 2009 in the first 100 days of the Obama administration, promising to return America to the "moral high ground" in the war on terrorism, President Obama issued three executive orders to demonstrate a clean break from the Bush administration, including one requiring that the Guantanamo Bay detention facility be closed within a year.

The president said he was issuing the order to close the facility in order to "restore the standards of due process and the core constitutional values that have made this country great even in the midst of war, even in dealing with terrorism."  The decision to close the detention facility received immediate backing from Obama's general election opponent, Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain.

McCain, in a joint statement with South Carolina GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, said he supported Obama's decision to "reaffirm America's adherence to the Geneva Conventions, and begin a process that will, we hope, lead to the resolution of all cases of Guantanamo detainees."

That was over 4 years ago, and now the feeling among the detainees is a sense that the current legal process leaves them in limbo indefinitely, and the only way out of Guantanamo is death. So much for a break from Bush.

IRS owns your Emails, and they can track you with GPS

The ACLU has released a not-very-comforting Freedom of Information Act request return from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) showing just how easy it is for the tax agency to read people's online communications without a court-issued warrant.  Basically, if they want to read your Emails, they can do it, no warrant, no judicial approval, they can just do it.

A 2010 presentation from the IRS Office of Chief Counsel stated that "4th Amendment Does Not Protect Emails Stored on Server" and that internet users should have "No Privacy Expectation." Under the current rules, if an email has been opened or if it's more than 180 days old, then the people who check whether you've been good or bad on your tax returns don't need a warrant for full access.
The same presentation states that agents are free to place GPS tracking devices on their targets without a warrant and that cars parked in a driveway are not covered by the Amendment's "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures."

Good Citizen Exxon? You gotta be kidding

In a bizarre story of corporate double-talk, a group called the National Safety Council has awarded Exxon the Green Cross for Safety award for "excellence in safety, security, health and environmental performance".  The National Safety Council thinks Exxon is a stellar corporate citizen.  The only thing Exxon has excelled at is getting massively rich plundering the world and polluting the environment.  Or maybe they are excellent in defending themselves in class action litigation - they managed to drag out the Exxon Valdez settlement for 20 years, and over 8,000 of the affected people in Alaska have died since the spill, never getting their settlement. 

It turns out the National Safety Council is a group of corporate plunderers, whose board is made up of Exxon executives and representatives of other stellar corporate citizens like Dow Chemical, Exelon Nuclear, and DuPont. Irony lives.

Four years after Bailout, Banks are even bigger

After a lot of hot air from Congress and the administration on the subject of Too Big to Fail, Bernie Sanders and Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) have submitted bills in the Senate and House mandating the breakup of financial institutions that can, by virtue of their size, cause a financial meltdown and also have a permanent get out of jail free card.

"The bill would require the Treasury Department within 90 days to determine what financial institutions meet the "too big to fail" label and enjoy implicit government support. Among those banks that must be included on the list are Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo.

Then, the government would have one year to break up those institutions so that "their failure would no longer cause a catastrophic effect on the United States or global economy without a taxpayer bailout." The bill does not detail exactly how the banks should be broken up.

The legislation marks the latest attempt by lawmakers to tackle the "too big to fail" issue, which has lingered on a topic of discussion years after the financial crisis and passage of Dodd-Frank. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, as well as some regulators, have pointed out that massive banks still enjoy a discount when it comes to raising funds, an indication that financial markets believe those institutions enjoy implicit government backing that would become realized if the institutions faced collapse.".

Legal Shakedown in Oregon

All I can say to this story is Wow, somebody's gotta stop these folks.  It seems that a law firm in Salem, Crowell Law, is filing "illegal downloading" lawsuits against ordinary citizens alleging they used Bit Torrent to download movies, thus avoiding paying for them.  Anybody who has rented a movie knows that you can probably get any title you want for less than $20, but the lawsuits are demanding $7,500 in the next two weeks, or risk facing a judgment of as much as $150,000.  One of the movies in question was a bloody Steven Seagal title "Maximum Conviction", which needless to say was not considered for an Oscar.

Apparently this breed of lawsuit is relatively new in Oregon but Crowell has now named over 1,000 people in Oregon in nine different suits since Fedruary.  This is being described in the Oregonian article as a "reverse class-action in which hundreds of defendants are named. That allows plaintiffs pay a single filing fee -- typically a few hundred dollars -- as opposed to filing and paying for hundreds of individual suits".

This is a fear tactic plain and simple.  Lawyer Kelly Rupp who represents one of the accused said "This movie is worth $12.99 on Amazon. But these cases don't seek that. If all 371 'John Does' on this lawsuit ultimately pay $3,000 or $2,000, they're shaking down Oregon residents for more than a million dollars."

UPDATE:  05/14/2013.  A Federal Judge in Medford isn't buying into their shakedown, she dismissed 34 suits in Southern Oregon.  Good for her.

The judge said cases such as Voltage's allow plaintiffs to "use the courts' subpoena powers to troll for quick and easy settlements." She cited a letter sent to defendants that asks $7,500, saying that amount would increase up to $150,000 without prompt payment.

Exxon to Arkansas, Gee Sorry

Pipelines are great for the economy, maybe not so great for ordinary people.  A pipeline rupture intruded into the lives of some ordinary people in Arkansas and they got a taste of life in Corporate America.

“That neighborhood was like a scene from ‘The Walking Dead,’” state Attorney General Dustin McDaniel said Wednesday after visiting the Little Rock suburb of Mayflower. “I have been reminded by Exxon’s representatives that this is a relatively small spill and cleanup is going just great,” McDaniel said. “I hope they realize that to the homeowners in this area, this is not small — it is catastrophic. And for those who fear for their drinking water, it is not ‘great.’”

Who do you admire most?

I struggle with this question constantly, after all why should there be only one single person?  I think we should have a list of maybe ten or twenty most admired, there's a lot of good people out there.  My choices are biased towards people who "Walk The Talk".

Ralph Nader has devoted his life to Corporate Accountability and Responsibility, founding what would become the organization Public Citizen.  He is almost 80 and still railing against the machine.

Mark Hatfield.  OK I live in Oregon so I gotta have some people from there, and Mark is the one.   Hatfield opposed the Vietnam war, but pledged "unqualified and complete support" for the troops.  What a wonderfully principled guy!

 Nelson Mandela showed the most persistent and principled advocacy for equality of anyone I can name.  He is truly a legend who endured much persecution and deserves reverence.

Jimmy Carter, former US President and  tireless advocate of humanitarian causes.  After his election as Governor of Georgia in 1970 he said  "I've traveled the state more than any other person in history and I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over. Never again should a black child be deprived of an equal right to health care, education, or the other privileges of society.".  He is an honest  principled person.

Mohatma Ghandi who inspired movements for non-violence, civil rights and freedom across the world.

John Steinbeck who wrote about the suffering of exploited innocents most eloquently.

I invite you to name others.

Dems playing with fire on PERS

The "fix" for PERS crafted by the State Democrats will come back to bite everybody, and they know it but are not willing to pay the price to actually fix the underlying unsustainable fiscal issue and alienate their State Employees Unions.  The Senate Bill 822 is going to be forced through without any Republican support and Kitzhaber says he'll sign it.

According to this Oregonian story "The bill amounts to a roll of the dice on investment returns. It still leaves school districts facing layoffs. It doesn't address the heart of the PERS sustainability problem: windfall benefits being generated under the system's money match formula. And it has the Legislature telling the PERS Board, by fiat, to alter its actuarial methods to solve the immediate budget problem -- the kind of move that has gotten states like Illinois in deep pension trouble.".
"Using rates as a supposed savings mechanism is not really savings," said James Dalton, former chair of the PERS Board. "It's pushing obligations into the future and violates some of our actuarial principles."

Actuarial principles are designed to keep us from kidding ourselves into posing a rosy future that likely will never come to pass.  Stay tuned. 

Update, I looked further and saw this excellent post on Blue Oregon.

Fukushima, Oh Rats

One of the reactors at Fukushima keeps losing power.  The problem?  Rats getting zapped and zapping the power system.

Ag Gag and ALEC

The Title sounds like cartoon characters, but it isn't a funny story.  ALEC is the acronym for a conservative business-dominated group called the American Legislative Exchange Council.  They sponsor model legislation written up by their multinational "Sponsors" and attempt to get their laws passed at the State Level.  They are very well funded and their membership roster is a who's who of the conservative power elite in the US.

What about Ag Gag?  I don't know who dreamed up the name, but it is an insidious piece of model legislation aimed at protecting criminal behavior in the Agricultural industry.  It is called the Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act and it's goal is to define anybody taking pictures of animal cruelty perpetuated by any company in the food industry as "terrorists", who can them be prosecuted as criminals.

ALEC has been successful in getting this cancerous legislation passed in 9 States (FL, IL, IN, IA, MN, MO, NY, TN and UT).  If you snap a picture or secretly take a video of animal cruelty at a food producer or animal-research location, you are a criminal.  Some of its corporate sponsors are Pfizer, Wyeth, GlaxoSmithKline, PhRMA, Boehringer Pharmaceuticals, and the National Pork Producers Council.

Learn more about ALEC on this excellent site.

Update 5/14/2013  TN Gvernor Bill Haslam has vetoed the Ag Gag bill passed by the Tennessee Legislature, but only because he thought the bill as written couldn't stand challenges.  The Republicans who wrote the bill promise to have a new improved bill next year.

Obama thinks Social Security needs a cut

Bernie Sanders has been roused to defend Social Security against cuts by President Obama.  Sanders, who chairs the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs, recalled that candidate Obama promised Americans in 2008 that he would not cut Social Security, but that was then I guess.

Obama will include it in his budget, to be unveiled April 10. Federal budgets are not like family budgets—they’re nonbinding spending road maps that serve chiefly as statements of political priorities and punching bags for political opponents. Even if Obama’s budget passes both the House and Senate (it won’t) and he signs it into law, it’s unlikely to have much impact on how Congress decides to spend federal dollars.
That’s not to say that it’s a wholly useless bit of theater. Washington has been at war over how best to reduce deficits and rein in the country’s galloping debt. The budget says, in effect, what Obama might be willing to do to achieve those goals, which in turn puts pressure on congressional Democrats to fall in line.
Obama’s support for that longstanding Republican wish-list item is not really a surprise. It’s been a part of each of his “grand bargain” offers to the GOP for cutting the deficit. White House press secretary Jay Carney had said in his April 1 daily briefing that the proposal “remains on the table.”

The Unfriendly Skies

Let this be a warning when flying, don't complain about the in-flight movie.  A couple with young kids traveling from Denver to Baltimore tried to get the United flight attendants to turn off their monitors showing a child-unfriendly movie (Alex Cross, I haven't seen it but the reviews describe graphic violence and some nudity).  The attendants were not helpful and the parents persisted in complaining about their children being exposed to an inappropriate movie, although they say no voices were raised or threats uttered, but the next thing they knew the pilot diverted to Chicago (for a security threat) and police escorted the family off the plane.

After a 5 minute conversation the authorities concluded there was no security issue and the flight crew over-reacted.  Meanwhile the plane left without them, so they took a later flight.  The plane was late too and a lot of people missed their connections too.  The parents say they have attempted to contact both United customer service and the CEO’s office, but have heard nothing back in response.   Hey United, you guys think maybe this wasn't a good idea?

The Anti-Consumer Administration

In yet another comical example of government giving a gentle slap to Corporate Crime, Richard Cordray had the gall to crow about getting fines totaling $15 million from 4 mortgage insurers for the offenders paying illegal kickbacks in the mortgage industry.  The CFPB even says in their press release that "Illegal kickbacks distort markets and can inflate the financial burden of homeownership for consumers,” Richard Cordray, the CFPB’s director, said in an e-mailed statement. “We believe these mortgage insurance companies funneled millions of dollars to mortgage lenders for well over a decade."

Yeah, so who's going to jail guys?  You can easily spot the CFPB guys, they (along with the SEC and Justice Department) are the ones in clown suits hurling cream pies at the hardened criminals. The criminals identified were Genworth Mortgage Insurance Corp., part of Richmond, Virginia-based Genworth Financial Inc. (GNW); United Guaranty Corp., which belongs to New York-based American International Group Inc. (AIG); Radian Guaranty Inc., a subsidiary of Radian Group Inc. (RDN), of Philadelphia; Mortgage Guaranty Insurance Corp., a unit of Milwaukee-based MGIC Investment Corp. (MTG)

Debtors Prison

It's illegal, it was outlawed in 1830, but it drives profits for outsourced prisons, so bring em on.  People are going to jail for owing money they can't pay, and they can't even get a public defender to represent them, in fact they don't even get a trial, they can be sent to jail by a mayor! 

"Roughly a third of U.S. states today jail people for not paying off their debts, from court-related fines and fees to credit card and car loans, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. Such practices contravene a 1983 United States Supreme Court ruling that they violate the Constitutions's Equal Protection Clause.

Some states apply "poverty penalties," such as late fees, payment plan fees and interest, when people are unable to pay all their debts at once. Alabama charges a 30 percent collection fee, for instance, while Florida allows private debt collectors to add a 40 percent surcharge on the original debt. Some Florida counties also use so-called collection courts, where debtors can be jailed but have no right to a public defender. In North Carolina, people are charged for using a public defender, so poor defendants who can't afford such costs may be forced to forgo legal counsel.

Some cities, meanwhile, have joined states in reviving the use of debtors' prisons. Philadelphia courts in 2011 sought to collect on court-related debt from 320,000 people, involving obligations they owed dating back to the 1970s.

Some judges have had enough. An Alabama circuit court judge last year rebuked a municipal court and private probation company for incarcerating people over their criminal justice debt, calling the arrangement a "judicially sanctioned extortion racket."

SEC and Mary Jo White

She is a perfect example of the revolving door between Wall Street and Government regulators, and she has such a mass of conflicts of interest that she shouldn't have ever been considered, but instead she now heads the SEC, government watchdog of the markets.  Mister President, if you're listening, this stinks.

She has servered all the titans, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, GE - you name it she served them, but now she says she'll make them toe the line.  Uh Huh.  In an article on Truthout Mark Karlin says  

"Mary Jo White will be collecting $42,000 a month in retirement pay for life from Debevoise & Plimpton. As Bloomberg reported, “This means she has a direct interest in Debevoise’s future profits, and therefore an incentive to help make sure only good things come the firm’s way. Debevoise’s partner-retirement plan is unfunded, meaning the firm pays benefits from its continuing business operations.”

"The New York Times reports that White and her husband, who’s also a corporate litigator, have a net worth of at least $16 million and investments that might be valued as high as $35 million. Now, courtesy of President Obama, Mary Jo White’s been named to head the SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission — the very agency that regulates her clients and everyone else doing business in the stock market."

 

Humpty Dumpty and offshore tax havens 1

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.  Gerard Ryle. 

Remember those names, as they are about to rip open the world of offshore tax havens for all to see, and it isn't pretty.  This is a story so huge it's tough to get your mind around it.  As I was going to links to get information, their web site kept crashing, probably getting millions of hits.

It began several years ago when Gerard worked for the Sydney Morning Herald investigating a financial fraud case perpetuated by an Australian company Firepower International, and he followed a trail of leads to Hong Kong and other tax havens.  In 2011 he moved to head the Center for Public Integrity and the ICIJ.  One day, probably in late 2011 or early 2012 (he isn't saying, for reasons that will become clear) he received a computer hard drive with millions of documents (it came by mail in a plain brown envelope).  The total mass of data is reported to be 160 times larger than the trove of State Department cables published by WikiLeaks in 2010.  Somehow he had to analyze the mass of emails, Databases, Spreadsheets and images.   He activated the Secrecy for Sale project and got assistance from hundreds of people around the world to clean, organize and analyze the data.

They are naming names and taking no prisoners in disclosing the movement of about $21 Trillion in tax havens around the world.  There are 130,000 names, details of more than 122,000 offshore companies or trusts, and nearly 12,000 intermediaries (agents or "introducers").  By the way, that sum is about the GDP of US and China combined!

This will perhaps be the biggest story of the decade, maybe of the century.  The people who control this $21 Trillion are not happy campers, they include Russian Gangsters, Drug Lords, major politicians, criminals, big bankers and just plain millionaires.  I hope the person who provided the information never gets revealed.  Here are some links to stories. 
The Guardian - UK  The Sydney Morning Herald The Toronto Star.

Tornado Safety Facts

Brought to you from the Weather Underground, this article lists 5 myths about tornadoes.  I subscribed to two or three of them myself.

Corporate HR is the problem, not the solution

This article should be required reading for all executives, HR is a disaster in most large organizations, and finally someone is exposing it.  Much of my early career was in small companies with no formal HR department and they did just fine without the "impersonal and bureaucratic experience of dealing with HR".

The HR "aptitude screening" process will select those who are superior liars, not the best match for the organization.  I could go into a real rant on the topic, but I'll instead just point out the article.  The practices of HR are abusive and counter productive in our society.  Corporations use HR to drive a race to the bottom for non-management employees.