From NEWSMAX:

…Irzyk also writes about his two personal encounters with Gen. George S. Patton, whom he calls “one of the most unique individuals our country has ever had.”

“He was like a valuable diamond with many, many facets,” Irzyk said. “He was the the purest warrior our country has ever had. He was the best field commander, not staff officer, that we ever had.”

In stark contrast to World War II, Irzyk sees the Vietnam War as a time when the U.S. lacked a long period of unified leadership – and the troops sent to Southeast Asia went with a minimum of training…

Click here to read the full article.

From USA TODAY:

The latest information in the Air France case, released Friday by French investigators, is spurring renewed calls for better pilot training and other measures.

“If this was a technical problem (with the jet), we’d be saying we need to fix this,” says John Cox, a former airline pilot and safety consultant who has written on loss of control for the British Royal Aeronautical Society. “There have been those of us in the industry that have been arguing for this for decades.”

What is needed is better training so pilots are not as startled and confused during emergencies, and better tools to warn them when their planes are about to go out of control, the experts say…

Click here to read the full article.

By Polly Cleveland, on May 30th, 2011

In my last post on meat markets and securities markets , I argued that competitive markets require government oversight to prevent fraud and monopoly. The post drew a response from Libertarian friends: didn’t I know that government regulators would immediately be captured by the regulated industry, resulting in worse fraud and monopoly?

Industry capture? Yes, I learned about that in 1969, when I went to work for Ralph Nader in Washington DC. Although Nader began his career with Unsafe at Any Speed (1965), calling for federal automobile safety regulation, he was hardly a naïve supporter of regulation. My project showed how agribusiness had captured the US Department of Agriculture. Another ongoing project showed how trucking and railroad interests had captured the US Commerce Commission.

In 1970, I joined a team of twenty “Nader’s Raiders” in a project on Power and Land in California. We found agribusiness capture everywhere: unnecessary water projects benefiting giant landholders; government-supported producer cartels like Sunkist; inadequate regulation of pesticides; special tax breaks for forest owners like Boise Cascade; or public university research developing labor-saving machinery, like the tomato harvester, as a response to unionization. In 1974, I published a piece on the California dairy industry, showing how excessive health standards—and totally unnecessary price supports—drove up milk prices and squeezed out small dairy farmers.

So what can we do about capture? A long line of “muckrakers,” from Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell to Ralph Nader, have advocated traditional “good government” approaches: constraints, openness and professionalism. Plus a good dose of “eternal vigilance.”

Constraints include bans on bribery, rules against conflict of interest, and restrictions on industry-government revolving door employment. Openness includes public hearings on proposed policy, access to government records as embodied in the Freedom of Information Act, and of course freedom of the press to expose misconduct without restrictions or fear of retaliation.

As for professionalism, some 2000 years ago, the Chinese invented civil service. Government bureaucrats had to pass tough exams, went through rigorous training, earned good pay and gained great public respect. At its best, professionalism gives public employees a sense of mission and a devotion to a broad public interest.

Take my father. A US Naval officer during World War II, he could have returned to the Borden Cheese Company as a well-paid executive. Instead, he joined the US Diplomatic Service; I grew up mostly overseas, in Rumania, France, Australia, Thailand and Yugoslavia. Like so many of his generation, my father saw public service as a noble calling, superior to mere business. After retiring from the Service, he directed Meridian International, which promotes international cultural exchanges.

With the Reagan Revolution of the 1980’s—“government is the problem, not the solution”—the traditional “good government” approaches yielded to “kill the government”. When my husband and I worked on drug policy reform in the 1990’s, our Libertarian fellow anti-drug war activists saw hope only in drastically cutting government.

Like any simplistic solution to a complex problem, “kill the government” collides with the Law of Unintended Consequences.

I described one consequence in an earlier post on Cornered, by Barry Lynn: since the lapse of anti-trust enforcement in the Reagan era, international monopolies and oligopolies have exploded. Powerful giants, like Wal-Mart and Goldman Sachs, can far more effectively capture government than the associated dairy producers of California.

In addition, as we found in the California study, the lower the staff and funding of a regulatory agency, the less it can conduct independent research on potential problems, and the more it must rely on industry expertise and “voluntary compliance”. How could Bernie Madoff bamboozle the Securities and Exchange Commission all those years? Easily!

There’s another more subtle consequence: by denigrating public service, and demonizing “bureaucrats”, “kill the government” creates a vicious circle. Ill-paid, ill-regarded public servants become less concerned about the public interest and more vulnerable to capture. They’re less likely to blow the whistle on waste or corruption, more likely to see their work as a stepping stone to a better-paid private job. For example, earlier this year the Federal Communications Commission voted 4 to 1 to approve Comcast’s purchase of NBC. Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker, who voted yes, then resigned from the FCC to become a lobbyist for Comcast.

My father understood that, at its best, government is “we the people”, cooperating for our collective benefit. The contempt and spite directed at public servants these days threaten to give us government at its worst: unresponsive, paranoid, and captive to narrow interests

The story of a little white boy who wanted to sit in the back of the bus, and a bus driver who could not let that happen.

http://blog.al.com/press-register-commentary/2011/05/pint-sized_freedom_rider_makes.html

I particularly like his concluding paragraphs, which can be said of every movement for change:

We are all familiar with the great names who led America to a better place in race relations. But the famous African-American leaders were just the figureheads of that long overdue crusade.

The grunt work of that struggle was done by people few of us know or ever will. But their sacrifice and dedication were mighty.

There is much to be said for the contributions made by the countless anonymous people like Lena Gibson who endured and never lost hope and, most of all, learned to roll with the punches – the never-ending punches.

KZ

The Watchdog stepped out of the Budapest taxi and, while paying the fare, admired the bushy mustache of the driver.   Pointing at the fellow’s mouth and then his own, the Watchdog smiled and declared “Great mustache!” He received an approving smile in return, and thus a kinship was established, what we might call the fraternity of the mustached.

Note we say “fraternity” rather than “siblingship,” not out of ignorance of correct political speak, but only because we have not yet encountered a female so benefited by upper lip  follicles  , the gender seemingly being disadvantaged in this regard.

Of course the Watchdog did not signal any disapproval of the driver being beardless.  To do so might be misunderstood as suggesting a lesser degree of virility which in turn, if generalized, could be taken as a nationalist aspersion and evoke an international incident.  No, better to let the bald face fact speak for itself!

Sitting on a third floor balcony overlooking Margaret Park situated in the middle of the Danube River which separates Pest from Buda, it is very pleasant to watch the children at play and young adults practicing sports and martial arts at afar.   Other than being much less crowded, the surroundings could readily be mistaken for New York’s Central Park .

The weather is most pleasant, the sun is getting ready to set, and a draft beer, a salad and vegetarian pasta, all accompanied by Roma (Gypsy) music, await the Watchdog below.

It is good to be here, it is good to be alive, and it especially good to know that one fits in… if only in the fraternity of the mustached.

On China
by Henry Kissinger                                                  
Penguin, 586 pp., $36.00

NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS:  It is hard to fit Henry Kissinger’s latest book, On China, into any conventional frame or genre. Partly that is because the somewhat self-deprecatory title conceals what is, in fact, an ambitious goal: to make sense of China’s diplomacy and foreign policies across two and a half millennia, and to bring China’s past full circle in order to illuminate the present. In form, the book is highly idiosyncratic, for it is not exactly a memoir, or a monograph, or an autobiography; rather it is part reminiscence, part reflection, part history, and part intuitive exploration.

To borrow a current phrase, it is a “hybrid vehicle,” and a more accurate title, it seems to me, would have been something like Variations on a Theme in China. If we keep that in mind as a working subtitle, then we can see how the book follows six sequential themes: China’s early history, China’s inadequate attempts to modify the imperial system of the later dynasties, the formative years of Maoist consolidation, Kissinger’s own experiences while orchestrating President Nixon’s 1972 China visit, China’s later cycles of “opening up” and repression under Deng Xiaoping, and a surprise final section that ingeniously links pre–World War I British and German expansion to some of the current problems facing the United States and China today.

For Henry Kissinger, ancient China was a subtle place. That in turn led to its special resonance in the present: “In no other country,” he writes, “is it conceivable that a modern leader would initiate a major national undertaking by invoking strategic principles from a millennium-old event,” as Mao often did in discussing policy matters. And Mao “could confidently expect his colleagues to understand the significance of his allusions.” How could it not be so? For “Chinese language, culture, and political institutions were the hallmarks of civilization, such that even regional rivals and foreign conquerors adopted them to varying degrees as a sign of their own legitimacy.” “Strategic acumen” shaped China’s earliest international policies; and to support its central position it could call on a remarkable series of potential followers and aides…  (more)

NEW YORK TIMES:  Bill Clinton and Michael R. Bloomberg have circled each other warily for a decade, ever since Mr. Clinton landed in Harlem after leaving the White House and Mr. Bloomberg ascended from a hugely successful business career to become the mayor of New York City. They have appeared together at a few civic functions, dined out a couple of times a year and hacked at golf balls on the same course.  

But until now they have never joined forces on a project with global reach that could advance both of their legacies. They are taking on an issue — climate change — that may well shape the world’s economic and social future for decades to come.

Mr. Bloomberg’s billions of dollars and Mr. Clinton’s billions of friends are a potent combination, but can this unlikely power coupling make an impact in stemming rising seas or cooling the planet? …  (more)

About a year ago, after months of investigation complete with undercover purchases, a posse of federal agents made a predawn move on a Pennsylvania farm and discovered a sizable stash of pure, unadulterated . . . milk.

The government’s pursuit of Daniel Allgyer, an Amish dairy farmer in Lancaster County, continued last month with a federal complaint seeking to stop his hustling of unpasteurized milk, which has long been popular among the crunchy set but illegal to sell across state lines. A lawyer for some of Allgyer’s eager customers told The Inquirer, “He is being treated as if he were a drug lord.”

It’s an apt analogy. The federal government’s war on so-called raw milk is in many ways a microcosm of its assault on drugs and, once upon a time, alcohol…

Click here to read the full article.

Germany may be the first country to end nuclear power.  The people are demanding it and the leaders seem to be listening.

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,15114349,00.html

Too bad Obama is so deep in the pockets of the industry that he is unable to lead on this issue and is taking the steady course of supporting nuclear.  But, I don’t think his support will even be enough to overcome the realities of nuclear — too expensive, too slow coming on line, too dangerous — and a whole lot of other choices that make much more sense and can end oil/coal dependence more quickly.  Reality will lead and the government will eventually follow.

KZ

Gil Smart writes in a Sunday News column “Give the people what they want”:

“Our political class as a whole, Democrats included, remains intent upon giving the people what they don’t want. We haul out the charts showing how Medicare will consume ever-more resources. In a review of Ryan’s plan, the Congressional Budget Office noted, ‘If revenues and federal spending apart from [Social Security and medical programs] remain near their past levels relative to GDP, the increase in spending on Social Security and the health care programs will lead to rapidly growing budget deficits and mounting federal debt.’

“But who says we need to keep allocating money as we always have? How about, for starters, we end the wars in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan, close our military bases in Germany and Japan and elsewhere, and put the savings toward these programs the people want?

“Isn’t it the job of the political class, in a democracy, to reflect and work to achieve what the people want?”

Yes, the military / industrial / lobbying complex spends as much money on our self appointed role of the USA being the police person of the world as just about all of the other nations in their world combineed spend on their military.  To do so is their livelihood and wastes perhaps 3% of our Gross National Product (GNP) and sacrifices many of our young and the population of other nations.  (Total military spending amounts to 6% of GNP.)

But we waste 6% to 8% of our GNP on our peculiar health system.  France which has health care rated as the best in the world spends 11% on GNP, which is even high compared to other industrialized nations.  We spend over 17%!

The only way we can protect our elderly (and thus their children upon whom they would otherwise depend) is to reform health care either through “Medicare for all” or an improved Obama Care based on what Geisinger, Mayo Clinic and Kaiser have been doing for years.   We must merge our hospitals into our health care insurers so that the financial incentive is to keep the population healthy, not to encourage doctor visits and hospital stays.

The military / industrial / lobbying complex is no more venal than the leaders of our physician organizations, those running our ‘fee for service’ hospitals and the executives at our stand alone insurance companies. (Independent senator Joe Lieberman hobbled Obama care on pressure from Hartford insurance companies from his state of Connecticut.)  In the good old capitalistic manner, they are having a feeding frenzy at the public trough.  They are not only compromising our health  (the USA is rated around 16^th in the world) but they are bankrupting our nation.

If we can free ourselves from the clutches of the military and medical parasites, the USA can once again obtain rapid growth, eliminate deficit spending (as we did during the  Clinton years)  and provide for the needs of our people.