Category Archives: DOJ, DC and inside the Beltway

Grover, Grover, Grover, You’re Busted Dude

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The internet is an interesting tool. It is especially fascinating that some crafty people can go backwards in the internet cache and capture evidence.

What say you Grover this time? To all the Republicans, to the Democrats, to the Conservative Union, to Congress and to the NRA….take notice. To the IRS, to policy makers, to the lobby groups, the terrorists are among us due to you. It should be noted, this was during the Clinton administration.

A PARTICULAR HAT TIP TO GLENN BECK, THANK YOU SIR. Great work to Tom Trento for his stick-t0-it’ned-ness.

NEWLY DISCOVERED DOCUMENT EXPOSES NORQUIST’S LIES
A newly discovered document proves that Grover Norquist, top GOP moneyman, sponsored in October 23rd 2000 an anti-Israel pro-HAMAS and pro-Hezbollah rally in front of the White House in Lafayette Park. The rally was run and led by the Muslim Brotherhood terrorist Abdul Rahman al-Amoudi who pleaded guilty to financing terrorism and conspiracy to assassinate then-Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah.  Al-Amoudi is currently serving a 23 year sentence in federal prison. Al-Amoudi who is co-founder of the Islamic Institute with Grover Norquist is seen on video in the Oct 23 rally screaming his support for al-Qaeda and Hezbollah both of which are specially designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO).

The newly discovered document found on the Islamic Institutes website in their weekly Friday brief demonstrably proves that Norquist’s organization was the organizational and contact body for the event dubbed: “March and Rally in Washington Against Israeli Aggression,” and states:

On October 23, 2000, there will be a march and rally in front of the White House in Washington, D.C., to protest Israel’s aggression against the Al-Aqsa Mosque and its escalating use of violence toward the Palestinian people. The march and rally are being organized by the National Task Force for the Crisis in Jerusalem (NTFCJ), a coalition of national American Muslim organizations of which the Islamic Institute is a part. The march begins at 11:00am at Freedom Plaza, and will move to Lafayette Park in front of the White House where a rally will begin at 12:00pm.

It is highly important that the Muslim community in the U.S. demonstrates a show of solidarity by attending this event. A strong presence will emphasize the call of American Muslims for peace and justice in Jerusalem and Palestine. Buses are being chartered nationwide to bring supporters to Washington. For further information, contact the Islamic Institute via phone or e-mail, or the American Muslim Council at (202) 789-2262(202) 789-2262.
Members of the NTFCJ are: the American Muslim Council, the American Muslim Alliance, American Muslims for Jerusalem, the Council on American Islamic Relations, the Islamic Circle of North America, the Islamic Institute, the Islamic Society of North America, the Muslim American Society, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, and the Muslim Student Association.

When asked by Glenn Beck if he (Grover Norquist) sponsored the event Norquist replied that it was a mistake by and intern and that his organization, the Islamic Institute, had no direct involvement or planning of the rally – a direct contradiction of the Organizations weekly brief.

Clearly the Islamic Institute was the primary sponsor, primary planner, primary organizer and primary leader of the anti-Israel in October of 2000 and in possible violation of 18 U.S. Code § 2339A – Providing material support to terrorists.

Friday’s 4pm Show:

HEY, US CONGRESS – “THROW THE TERRORISTS OUT!”

4.13.15

On Monday April 13 and Tuesday 14 Muslim Terrorists walking around the United States Congress will demand that our elected Representatives change federal law thereby making it harder to investigate Muslim terrorists. I know, crazy stuff, but it is happening right in broad daylight! Thank Allah that we at The United West are experts at investigating Muslim Brotherhood terrorists and exposing their influence operations for all Americans to understand and properly respond. To accomplish this we are launching a five-part investigative series entitled: “Muslim Terrorists Lobby 114th Congress.” Our show today focuses on what the Members of the 114th Congress should do when the terrorists enter their offices. And what is that? THROW THEM OUT THE DOOR! Why in the world should an elected Member of Congress give any time to KNOWN terrorists who have a written agenda that includes destroying the essence of the Capitol building in which they are meeting! Watch this show as it is FULL of critically important information to help all Americans properly, professionally and legally DEFEAT this Muslim Brotherhood political influence operation.

 

When the U.S. Strategy is to no Longer Lead

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Symptomatic of when a country is war weary, the rules of engagement are re-tooled, removing hostilities and the will to win fades away, the wake of destruction becomes worse. How many times has this occurred? Korea, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria and more. If it is not up to the United States of America, then who?

Korea

Sudan

Cambodia

Sinjar Mountain, Iraq

Libya

Dafur

Syria

 

Ambassador: US handed Cambodia to the ‘butcher’ 40 years ago

American envoy, a German-born Jew, recalls horrors of Pol Pot’s regime, regrets Washington’s ‘abandonment’ of allies

PARIS (AP) — Twelve helicopters, bristling with guns and US Marines, breached the morning horizon and began a daring descent toward Cambodia’s besieged capital. The Americans were rushing in to save them, residents watching the aerial armada believed. But at the US Embassy, in a bleeding city about to die, the ambassador wept.

Forty years later and 6,000 miles (nearly 10,000 kilometers) away, John Gunther Dean recalls what he describes as one of the most tragic days of his life — April 12, 1975, the day the United States “abandoned Cambodia and handed it over to the butcher.”

Time has not blunted the former ambassador’s anger, crushing shame and feelings of guilt over what also proved a milestone in modern American history — the first of several US interventions in foreign countries climaxed by withdrawals before goals were accomplished and followed by often disastrous consequences.

“We’d accepted responsibility for Cambodia and then walked out without fulfilling our promise. That’s the worst thing a country can do,” he says in an interview in Paris. “And I cried because I knew what was going to happen.”

Five days after Operation Eagle Pull, the dramatic evacuation of Americans, the US-backed government fell as communist Khmer Rouge guerrillas stormed into Phnom Penh. They drove its 2 million inhabitants into the countryside at gunpoint, launching one of the bloodiest revolutions of modern times. Nearly 2 million Cambodians — one in every four — would die from executions, starvation and hideous torture.

Many foreigners present during the final months — diplomats, aid workers, journalists — remain haunted to this day by Phnom Penh’s death throes, by the heartbreaking loyalty of Cambodians who refused evacuation and by what Dean calls Washington’s “indecent act.”

I count myself among those foreigners, a reporter who covered the Cambodian War for The Associated Press and was whisked away along with Dean and 287 other Americans, Cambodians and third-country nationals. I left behind more than a dozen Cambodian reporters and photographers — about the bravest, may I say the finest, colleagues I’ve ever known. Almost all would die.

For the general public, the pullout is largely forgotten, overshadowed by the mass, hysteric flight from Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War three weeks later. But for historians and political analysts, the withdrawal from Cambodia signifies the first of what then-US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger termed “bug-outs.”

“It was the first time Americans came anywhere close to losing a war. What worries me and many of us old guys who were there is that we are still seeing it happen,” says Frank Snepp, a senior CIA officer in Saigon and author of “Decent Interval,” which depicts the final years of the Vietnam War. After Cambodia and Vietnam came Laos; there would be other conflicts with messy endings, like Central America in the 1980s, Iraq and — potentially — Afghanistan.

Today, at 89, Dean, a German-born Jew, and his French wife reside in a patrician quarter of Paris, in an elegant apartment graced by statues of Cambodian kings from the glory days of the Angkor Empire. A folded American flag lies across his knees, the same one that he clutched under his arm in a plastic bag as he sped to the evacuation site. Captured by a photographer, it became one of the most memorable images of the Vietnam War era.

In the apartment’s vestibule hangs a framed letter signed by President Gerald R. Ford and dated Aug. 14, 1975. It highlights that Dean was “given one of the most difficult assignments in the history of the Foreign Service and carried it out with distinction.”

But Dean says: “I failed.”

“I tried so hard,” he adds. “I took as many people as I could, hundreds of them, I took them out, but I couldn’t take the whole nation out.”

The former ambassador to four other countries expresses more than guilt. He is highly critical of America’s violation of Cambodian neutrality by armed incursions from neighboring Vietnam and a secret bombing campaign in the early 1970s which killed thousands of civilians and radicalized, he believes, the Khmer Rouge. Once-peaceful Cambodia, he says, was drawn into war for America’s interests, a “sideshow” to Vietnam.

The US bombed communist Vietnamese sanctuaries and supply lines along the Vietnam-Cambodia border, keeping Cambodia propped up as an anti-communist enclave, but it provided World War II aircraft and few artillery pieces to Phnom Penh forces fighting the Khmer Rouge.

“The US wasn’t that concerned about what happened one way or the other in Cambodia but only concerned about it to the extent that it impacted positively or negatively on their situation in Vietnam,” says Stephen Heder, a Cambodia expert at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

Opinion on what went wrong in Cambodia remains split to this day. One view is that the country was destabilized by the American incursions and bombings; another is that Washington failed to provide the US-propped Lon Nol government with adequate military and other support.

In his memoirs, Kissinger says the US had no choice but to expand its efforts into the neighboring country, which the North Vietnamese were using as a staging area and armory for attacks on US troops in South Vietnam. And as Cambodia crumbled, he writes, anti-war elements, the media and Congress combined to tie the administration’s hands, preventing further assistance.

Dean is bitter that Kissinger and other power brokers in Washington did not support his quest to persuade ousted Cambodian King Norodom Sihanouk to return from exile and forge a coalition between the Khmer Rouge and Lon Nol. It was Dean’s “controlled solution.”

“We were also on the telephone with Washington shouting, ‘Help us. We are going under. We are going to leave this country unprotected,’” Dean said in earlier oral testimony. But Washington seemed unmoved.

“Ambassador Dean never had (President Richard) Nixon’s or Kissinger’s support because both of them wanted out of Indochina,” Snepp says.

By early 1975, the embassy’s cables, most of them declassified in 2006, were becoming increasingly frantic.

Meeting me one day, a haggard Dean, who had lost 15 pounds, asked rhetorically: “Isn’t there any sense of human decency left in us?”

“Phnom Penh was surrounded by explosions and a night sky of blossoming flares and streaks of tracer bullets,” I wrote in one of my stories at that time. “Children were dying of hunger, the hospitals looked more like abattoirs and the Cambodian army lost as many men in three months as the US did in a decade of war in South Vietnam.”

The Khmer Rouge were tightening their stranglehold on the capital, shutting down the airport from which the embassy had flown out several hundred Cambodians. An April 6 cable from Dean said the Cambodian government and army “seem to be expecting us to produce some miracle to save them. You and I know there will be no such miracle.”

Congress was cutting the aid lifeline to Phnom Penh. The American public had had enough of the war.

Among Cambodians in the know, some anti-American feeling was growing.

“The Americans give temporary aid but ultimately they think only of themselves. We in Cambodia have been seduced and abandoned,” Chhang Song, a former information minister, said one night in early 1975.

But among Phnom Penh residents I found only smiles — “Americans are our fathers,” one vegetable vendor told me — along with a never-never-land mindset that things would turn out to be all right. Somehow.

“I honestly believe we did not do enough. There was something better that could have come out other than a genocide of 1.7 million people,” Dean says, explaining in part why he, a Jew, felt so strongly. “Now you must understand, I was born in Germany and suffered under Nazi oppression, so how could I turn over a people to the butcher?”

Dean’s abiding emotions are shared by others of his former staff.

Alan Armstrong, the assistant defense attache, is still trying to complete a novel to exorcise what he went through. It is called “La Chute,” “The Fall.”

“I was paid by my government to smile, break bread (with Cambodians) and then betray my friends and colleagues. That’s a heavy burden to bear no matter how many years roll by,” says the retired US Army colonel. “The downfall of the Khmer Republic not only resulted in the deaths of countless Cambodians, it has also crept into our souls.”

Historians, distant from the passions of the actors, differ over Dean’s efforts and American culpability.

Benedict Kiernan, a Yale University professor who has written extensively on Cambodia, says that given rifts within the Khmer Rouge leadership a political compromise earlier in the war might have been possible, resulting in a left-wing dominated coalition and not a fanatical revolution.

“Anything was worth trying to stop the Khmer Rouge before they got to Phnom Penh,” says Heder, the academic, who reported in Cambodia during the war and was among those evacuated from the capital.

Milton Osborne, an Australian historian and diplomat who served in Cambodia, describes Dean’s “controlled solution” as a “forlorn hope,” with the Khmer Rouge determined to win totally and execute Phnom Penh’s leaders. “By 1974, it was not a question of if, but when,” he says.

Snepp believes that Dean, desperately grasping at straws, was “living in fantasy land.”

Washington may have abandoned its ally, but the Cambodian elite also bears responsibility for its own demise. Snepp views President Lon Nol — corrupt, inept, superstitious and half-paralyzed — as one in a long line of similar leaders the United States would back in the following decades.

“What we have seen in all cases is that unless the US has a politically viable domestic partner, neither limited nor massive military intervention is going to succeed,” says Heder.

Timothy Carney, the embassy’s political officer, drawing on his record as ambassador to several countries, says that “tolerating corruption saps the legitimacy and support for whatever authority we are trying to prop up in a country.”

In the final days, Carney’s task was to persuade, unsuccessfully, Cambodian leaders to flee the country.

The night before the evacuation, Dean and his deputy drank some of the ambassador’s fine French wine so it wouldn’t fall into Khmer Rouge hands. The next morning, sitting in his office for the last time, he read a letter from Prince Sirik Matak in which the respected former deputy prime minister declined evacuation and thus sealed his own death. It read: “I never believed for a moment that you have this sentiment of abandoning a people which has chosen liberty. I have only committed this mistake of believing in you the Americans.”

Dean today describes it as the “greatest accusation ever made by foreigners. It is wrenching, no? And put yourself in the role of the American representative.”

His embassy closed down at 9:45 a.m., the evacuees driven 10 blocks to a soccer field shielded by a row of apartment buildings from Khmer Rouge gunners about a mile away. The Sikorsky “Jolly Green Giant” helicopters were setting down. The Marines fanned out to form a security cordon around the landing zone.

But fears of possible reprisals by Cambodians proved unfounded.

Children and mothers scrambled over fences to watch. They cheered, clapped and waved to the 360 beefy, armed Marines. A Cambodian military policeman saluted Armstrong smartly. Disgusted and ashamed, he dropped his helmet and rifle, leaving them behind.

I tried to avoid looking into faces of the crowd. Always with me will be the children’s little hands aflutter and their singsong “OK, Bye-bye, bye-bye.”

By 12:15 the last helicopters landed on the deck of the USS Okinawa waiting off the Cambodian coast. Tactically, the 2 1/2-hour operation had been flawless.

In Phnom Penh, Douglas Sapper, an ex-Green Beret who stayed behind to save his company’s employees, recalled the reaction of Cambodians who realized what had happened: “It was like telling a kid that Santa Claus was dead.”

Five days later we received a cable from Mean Leang, an ever-jovial, baby-faced AP reporter who had refused to seek safety. Instead he wrote about the brutal entry of the Khmer Rouge into the city, its surrender and gunpoint evacuation. “I alone in office, losing contact with our guys. I feel rather trembling,” he messaged. “Do not know how to file our stories now … maybe last cable today and forever.”

Barry Broman, then a young diplomat, remembers a Cambodian woman who worked upcountry monitoring the war for the embassy who had also refused evacuation.

“One day she said, ‘They are in the city,’ and her contact said ‘OK, time to go.’ She refused. Later she reported, ‘They are in the building,’ and again refused to leave her post. Her last transmission was, ‘They are in the room. Good-bye.’ The line went dead.”

 

Did you get Fired and Replaced by a Foreigner?

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H1B Visa Cap is Suitable For:

Foreign students on F-1 OPT, F-1 CPT or STEM extension

Foreign professionals in specialty occupations, such as programmer analysts, physical therapists, accountants, database administrators, market research analysts, engineers, management analysts, graphic designers, pharmacists, financial analysts, and others with Bachelor’s or equivalent degree

Foreign nationals who have spent at least one year outside United States after reaching the 6-years limit on H1B, to come back and work in a specialty occupation

U.S. companies to employ qualified foreign nationals in jobs that require a bachelor’s degree and specialized skills

So this begs the question, just how deep is the collusion and are there recourses for people that were fired as you read on….

Senators seek probe of claims US workers fired, forced to train foreign replacement

A popular visa program allegedly is being misused by U.S. companies to lay off thousands of American workers and replace them with foreign labor.

And, adding insult to injury, many of the laid-off workers allegedly have been forced to train their replacements, in what one anonymous whistleblower called a “humiliating” experience.

The allegations have caught the attention of a bipartisan group of senators — including immigration hawk Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., and the No. 2 Senate Democrat, Illinois’ Dick Durbin — who are calling for a federal probe. A letter sent by 10 senators urging an investigation specifically cited reports of the firing and hiring practices at Southern California Edison, California’s second-largest utility. The incidents are concentrated in the IT field, and involve American workers being replaced by H-1B visa holders.

“A number of U.S. employers, including some large, well-known, publicly-traded corporations, have reportedly laid off thousands of American workers and replaced them with H-1B visa holders,” the senators wrote.

In the letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, and Labor Secretary Thomas Perez, the senators urged the departments to “investigate the unacceptable replacement of American workers” to see whether laws were broken.

The H-1B program is supposed to be used to bring in, on a temporary basis, skilled workers with highly specialized skills not readily available in the U.S. They are often used in the technology sector to bring in engineers and computer programmers.

Further, U.S. employers can hire foreign workers for up to six years and must pay them the same rate they would pay other workers with similar qualifications, or the prevailing wage for that job and location, whichever is higher. This is done to prevent foreign workers from depressing U.S. wages and from being exploited.

But reports have surfaced that the replacements are happening at an alarming rate. And former Southern California Edison workers have complained to lawmakers that they were replaced by less-skilled workers at lower costs.

Anonymous workers who were displaced by the visa holders also submitted written testimonials to lawmakers detailing their firings. Several claimed they were forced to train their replacements, and threatened with losing their severance if they did not.

“We had no choice in this,” one anonymous worker who claimed to have been one of those let go from Southern California Edison, said in a letter. The worker described how when the two vendors were picked – Infosys and TCS, both major Indian companies – SCE employees were told to “sit with, video chat or do whatever was needed to teach them our systems.”

If they did not cooperate, according to the testimonial, “we would be fired and not receive a severance package.”

Another worker described this process as “humiliating.”

In a statement, Southern California Edison said it abides by the law and will cooperate with any investigation that concerns the issues mentioned in the senators’ letter.

The company explained that it’s reducing its information technology department from 1,400 to 860. Of those left, 97 percent are permanent California residents and 3 percent are on H-1B visas.

Southern California Edison said it’s contracting with IT vendors to fulfill certain contracts and that most of those workers are permanent U.S. residents and aren’t working under H-1B visas.

“By transitioning some IT operations to external vendors, along with SCE eliminating some customized functions it will no longer provide, the company will focus on making significant, strategic changes that can benefit our customers,” Southern California Edison’s emailed statement read.

But the senators, in their letter, raised several questions about how the replacements were being done. They said it appears the workers are often not employees of the U.S. company laying off workers – but are contractors working for foreign-owned IT consultants.

The H-1B program stipulates that applicants must have a valid “employer-employee relationship” – and the senators questioned whether that was the case here.

They also asked whether the companies “engaged in prohibited citizenship status discrimination” (against American citizens); and whether the visa petitions showed “any evidence of misrepresentation or fraud.”

Sessions said in a statement that the SCE allegations “ought to be the tipping point that finally compels Washington to take needed actions to protect American workers.”

The letter from senators follows a hearing last month by the Senate Judiciary Committee, which invited Southern California Edison to testify, though the company declined.

Ronil Hira, a professor at Howard University, said at the hearing that the utility outsourced work to two companies, and those companies employed H-1B staffers who were then trained by the employees they were replacing. “There could not be a clearer case of the H-1B program being used to harm American workers’ wages and working conditions,” Hira said.

Republican senators seeking the investigation are Sessions, Charles Grassley of Iowa, James Inhofe of Oklahoma, and Bill Cassidy and David Vitter of Louisiana.

Democratic senators seeking the investigation are Durbin, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Claire McCaskill of Missouri.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, also signed the letter.

Purple Hearts and the Failed VA

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Victims of Fort Hood shooting receive Purple Hearts

WASHINGTON — Nearly six years after they were attacked by one of their own, the victims of the 2009 Fort Hood shooting have received the Purple Hearts that the Army previously deemed were not owed to them.

At a Friday ceremony at Fort Hood, Texas, base commander Lt. Gen. Sean MacFarland presented the medals to those who were wounded and the families of those who were killed when Army Maj. Nidal Hasan went on a shooting rampage at the installation on Nov. 5, 2009.

“It is our sincere hope that today we will in some small way help to heal the wounds that you have suffered,” said MacFarland, the commander of Army III Corps, which is based at Fort Hood.

Thirteen people were killed and 31 were wounded during the attack before Hasan was subdued. Of those killed, 12 were soldiers and one was a civilian contractor.

MacFarland noted that the carnage could have been much worse had it not been for the bravery of those who responded to the incident.

“We also remember the acts of courage and selflessness of soldiers and civilians which prevented an even greater calamity from occurring that day,” he said. “When shots rang out on Fort Hood, our soldiers and first responders ran toward the sound of gunfire” to “take down the shooter.”

In the wake of the attack, the Army said the Fort Hood casualties were not eligible for the Purple Heart or its civilian equivalent, the Defense of Freedom Medal, because they were not killed or wounded in combat or in an attack by a foreign terrorist organization.

Families of the victims lobbied Congress to change the wording of the law to make their loved ones eligible for the Purple Heart and the recognition of sacrifice that goes along with it.

In the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act, lawmakers loosened the criteria by redefining what should be considered an attack by a “foreign terrorist organization” for purposes of determining award eligibility.

The legislation dictated that an act of violence should now be considered an attack by a foreign terrorist organization if the perpetrator of the attack “was in communication with the foreign terrorist organization before the attack” and the attack was “inspired or motivated by the foreign terrorist organization.”

In a review of the incident and the new provisions of law, the Army determined both these criteria had been met.

“Now that Congress has changed the criteria, we believe there is sufficient reason to allow these men and women to be awarded and recognized with either the Purple Heart or, in the case of civilians, the Defense of Freedom medal. It’s an appropriate recognition of their service and sacrifice,” Army Secretary John McHugh said in a statement in February when the decision to award the medals was announced.

John Bircher, a spokesman for the Military Order of the Purple Heart, a veterans service organization, said he’s glad to see that the soldiers who were killed and wounded were finally given the medal.

“I think it’s something that we all felt was due to them but the [old] criteria of the award just didn’t allow for it,” he said. “For the families of those who were killed in the incident, I think this is a nice closure for them.”

The change in the criteria for the medals has implications beyond the Fort Hood shooting. As the ability of overseas terrorist organizations to conduct attacks against the homeland has been diminished by American military action and other measures, U.S. officials have become increasingly worried about the threat of “lone wolf” attacks that could be conducted by individuals who are inspired to commit violence by overseas extremist groups but are not members of those organizations.

In 2013, after being court-martialed, Hasan was found guilty on 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder. He is on death row at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, while post-trial and appellate processes continue.

*** Are the Purple Hearts merely a gesture? Has there been any significant improvement in treatment, waiting times or quality of care? Not so much. Even with complaints, investigations or whistleblowers, veterans see no measured advancement. A change in leadership, more Congressional hearings and an additional $11 billion dollars, there has been no successful breakthroughs.

Agency Says VA Whistleblower Cases Have Surged

U.S. Office of Special Counsel has settled 45 claims, examining another 110 since start of fiscal year

A federal agency charged with protecting the rights of government workers said Thursday it has seen a surge in claims from Department of Veterans Affairs whistleblowers over the past year.

Claims began to increase after details emerged in April last year of long delays in treatment throughout the VA system, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel said. The national scandal led to the resignation of then-Secretary Eric Shinseki in May.

The agency said that since October 2013, when the 2014 fiscal year started, it has settled claims or secured temporary relief for 45 VA employees who say they were punished for reporting problems in both administration and medical care. The agency said it is examining another 110 similar claims.

“Right now, about 40% of our casework is VA-related. In prior years it provided about 20% of casework,” said Nick Schwellenbach a spokesman for the agency. The agency handled 5,200 total cases last year, including whistleblower retaliation claims and other forms of employment discrimination.

In the 2014 fiscal year, VA employees submitted more claims to the Office of Special Counsel than any federal department, including the Department of Defense, which has roughly twice the employees as the VA and had the most claims in 2013.

Mr. Schwellenbach said claims increased, in part, because the VA has done a better job of informing employees of worker protections. The department has also streamlined the process for investigating whistleblower claims.

A VA spokeswoman said the department doesn’t tolerate retaliation against whistleblowers and disciplines employees when claims are substantiated.

 

 

There is California and then the Rest of the Country

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by Kevin D. Williamson
California’s drought provides a useful lesson. I am glad California is having a drought. Not because I hate California (I love California) or Californians (I hate them only a little, for what they’ve done to California) or Central Valley farmers (some of my best friends . . .) or even Governor Jerry Brown, droll disco-era anachronism that he is, but because the episode presents an excellent illustration of the one fundamental social reality that cannot be legislated away or buried under an avalanche of government-accounting shenanigans and loan guarantees or brought to heel by politicians no matter how hard the ladies and gentlemen in Sacramento and Washington stamp their little feet: scarcity.
California has X amount of water at its disposal, and it has politicians in charge of overseeing how it gets divvied up. Which politicians? The same ones responsible for the current sorry state of California’s water infrastructure, of course. Should be a hoot.
The main claimants are these: Farmers, who by some estimates consume about 80 percent of the water used in California. Agriculture is a relatively small component of California’s large and diverse economy, but California nonetheless accounts for a large share of the nation’s agricultural output. Both of those things are, in a sense, the good news: If market-rate water costs were imposed on California farms, as they should be, then any higher costs could be passed along — not only to consumers, but up and down the supply chain — in a very large global market, where they should be digested more easily. People with lawns, including people with the very large and complex lawns known as golf courses, who account for an extraordinary amount of California’s non-agricultural water use.
In arid Southern California, and especially in the golf-loving desert resort communities of the Coachella Valley, keeping the grass green often accounts for more than half — and sometimes much more than half — of residential water use. How thirsty is grass? Consider that 200 square feet of California swimming pool uses less water over the course of three years than does 200 square feet of California lawn. (Yes, I know: volume versus surface area, but the math still works out.) And about half of the water used on lawns is lost to the wind, because sprinkler systems spray water in the air rather than on the grass. The goddamned delta smelt, a.k.a. “the world’s most useless fish,” whose comfort and happiness demanded the dumping of some 300 billion gallons of fresh water into the San Francisco Bay — and thence into the Pacific Ocean — in 2009 and 2010. That’s enough fresh water to cover the state of New Jersey nearly three inches deep. The smelt’s delicious friend, the salmon, is a co-claimant.
Governor Brown’s response is a textbook example of the central planner’s fatal conceit. He issued an executive order imposing 25 percent cuts on the state’s 400 local water agencies, which supply about 90 percent of Californians’ water but do not supply the farms that consume most of the state’s water. That 25 percent figure looks bold and authoritative, but when was the last time you saw the production, consumption, or price of a scarce commodity in the real world move by such neat increments?
When something disturbs the equilibrium of the world’s oil markets — which happens every single day — then the markets make minuscule, complex adjustments, and continue to make them around the clock — the markets never sleep — with producers and consumers both modifying their behaviors to accommodate the new economic realities as they emerge. Amazingly (but not amazingly), this happens with no Governor Brown in charge of the process. You’ve never seen the price of pork bellies or soybeans simply jump 25 percent and stay there indefinitely, or rice or wheat consumption fall by neat round numbers. But Governor Brown imagines that he can rationally manage by fiat the consumption of the most important commodity in the world’s seventh-largest economy. Good luck with that. Governor Brown’s solution/non-solution has been criticized for failing to impose serious new restrictions on farmers. There are several reasons for this: First, Governor Brown probably does not want to reinforce the impression that his administration is an instantiation of insular coastal soy-latte progressivism staffed by feckless urbanites of the sort who believe that grapes come from Trader Joe’s and who are therefore willing to see the state’s rural interior gutted; second, and to give a decent if often foolish man proper credit, Governor Brown probably is not much inclined to impose heavy new burdens on the state’s relatively poor and downwardly mobile agricultural corridor, and to see large numbers of the poorest Californians thrown out of work; third, farmers already have seen their water allowances docked.
Among tragedies of the commons, California’s water situation is Hamlet, a monumental work fascinating for all of the possibilities it raises and not given to easy resolution. But even given the underlying complications, from the hydrological to the legal (California’s system of water rights is remarkably complex), the fundamental problem is that nobody knows what a gallon of water in California costs. Water allocations are made mainly through politics rather than through markets, with the state’s legal regime explicitly privileging some water uses over others. There are two possible ways to allocate water in California: The people in Sacramento, Governor Brown prominent among them, can pick and choose who gets what, with all of the political shenanigans, cronyism, inefficiency, and corruption that brings. Or Californians can get their water the same way they get most everything else they need and value: by buying it on the open market.
This is an excellent opportunity to apply the cap-and-trade model that many progressives favor when it comes to carbon dioxide emissions, with an important difference: This deals with real, physical scarcity, not artificial scarcity created by regulation. (Incidentally, it here bears repeating that notwithstanding the inaccurate proclamations of Governor Brown and President Obama, California’s drought almost certainly is not the result of global warming; the climate models supporting the scientific consensus on global warming predict wetter winters for California, not the drier winters that have produced the current crisis. California’s climate is complex, but a great deal of it is dominated by desert and arid to semi-arid Mediterranean conditions.)

As the economist Alex Tabarrok puts it: “California has plenty of water — just not enough to satisfy every possible use of water that people can imagine when the price is close to zero.” As noted, the water-rights picture is complicated, but it is not so complicated that California could not 1) calculate how much water is available for consumption; 2) subtract preexisting claims; 3) auction off the remainder, with holders of preexisting water rights allowed to enter that market and trade their claims for money.
A gallon of water used to green up a lawn in Burbank and a gallon of water used to maintain a golf course in Palm Springs and a gallon of water used to irrigate almonds in Chico would be — and should be — on exactly the same economic and political footing. As Professor Tabarrok notes, San Diego residents use about twice as much water per capita as do residents of Sydney, a city whose climate is comparably arid and whose residents are comparably well-off, a situation that is almost certainly related to the fact that San Diegans pay about one half of a cent per gallon for household water. Governor Brown wants to be the man who decides what is and is not a good use of California’s water; in defending his decision not to impose further restrictions on farmers, he said: “They’re not watering their lawn or taking long showers. They’re providing most of the fruits and vegetables of America and a significant part of the world.” That is no doubt true. But the only way to discover what that is really worth — not in sentimental, good-enough-for-government-work terms, but in cold-eyed dollar terms — is to allow real prices for water to emerge. My own suspicion is that California’s almonds and avocados will remain in high demand when the water used in their cultivation is properly priced on an open market. Relatively small gains in the efficiency of agricultural irrigation would go a long way toward helping California live with the water it has. So would converting a few million suburban lawns to desert landscaping. So would ceasing to dedicate large amounts of fresh water to political projects of dubious value. Which to choose? Before that question can be answered, there is the prior question: “How to choose who chooses?” The rational answer is that water consumers should choose how water gets used, provided that each of them pays the real price for his choices. California’s largest crop is grass — by which I do not mean marijuana, but lawns. Until the day comes when a ton of fresh-cut grass fetches a higher price than a ton of avocados, my guess is that California’s farmers will do fine under a market-based water regime. But maybe not. Everyone has his own favorite drought bugaboo: suburban lawns, almond farms, the delta smelt, golf courses, illegal marijuana cultivation, etc.
Given enough time, somebody will figure out a way to blame this all on the Koch brothers, illegal immigrants, or the Federal Reserve. But the fact is that nobody knows — nobody can know — what the best use of any given gallon of water in California is. Californians can put their money where their parched mouths are, or they can let Governor Brown play Ceres-on-the-Bay, deciding which crops grow and which do not. Whether the commodity is water or education or health care, if you care about something, put a price tag on it. You can’t afford for it to be cheap, and you sure as hell can’t afford for it to be free.*** Now look at the legislative issues in your state to determine what similar actions are being taken. While you’re at it, how does your state compare to the others fiscally?

States across the U.S. share the common goal of economic prosperity, but they differ vastly in how they set out to achieve it. The latest edition of the American Legislative Exchange Council- Arthur Laffer Rich States, Poor States competitiveness index examines policies that maximize economic growth and assesses which states are on the path to prosperity and which are more likely headed to the poorhouse.
For the eighth consecutive year, Utah has remained #1. Rounding out the top 10 for 2014 are: North Dakota, Indiana, North Carolina, Arizona, Idaho, Georgia, Wyoming, South Dakota and Nevada. At the other end of the spectrum, New York obtained the lowest ranking at #50. Working backward, Vermont ranked 49, preceded by Minnesota, Connecticut, New Jersey, Oregon, California, Montana, Maine, and Pennsylvania.

 states Alec

The rankings are a combination of past economic performance (economic growth, net migration and employment) and forward-looking policy variables such as taxes, debt, and the presence of right-to-work laws.

States at the top earned their rankings by implementing policies that energized their economies, attracted businesses and entrepreneurs, and expanded employment and income. So what are these energizing policies that could help states at the bottom boost their economies? Based on both past and present rankings, low income taxes and right-to-work laws provide the most bang for the buck.

Analysis provided alongside last year’s rankings showed economic growth in the nine states with no personal income tax averaged 62 percent from 2003 to 2013 while the nine highest income tax states grew by an average of only 47 percent. And states with no income tax experienced twice the rate of population growth (14 percent) as the highest income tax states (7 percent).

The growth gap between high-tax and low-tax states translates into more than a $100 billion in lost annual output for big, bottom-ranking states like California (#44) and New York (#50). And while it may seem counterintuitive, tax revenue increased substantially more in the nine states with no income tax than it did in the highest income tax states. Lower taxes produce a larger economic pie, and a larger pie means bigger slices for all—including the state tax revenue.

States with right-to-work laws that prevent workers from being coerced to pay union dues attract more businesses and workers, which in turn grow their economies. Compared to forced-union states, right-to-work states experienced twice the rate of employment growth from 2003–2013, one-quarter higher income growth, and one-third greater output growth. What’s more, right-to-work states experienced a 3 percent increase in net migration, while forced-union states suffered a 1 percent loss in net migration.

Competition is inherent in any ranking, and competition among the states is a good thing. Fortunately for states at the bottom of the rankings, research and analysis such as Rich States, Poor States provides an open playbook for prosperity.