Perhaps we'll learn as details unfold that Hasan — himself a suicide killer — was one of the Army's psychiatrists and psychologists who were pressured during the first five years of the Iraq War to not diagnose screwed-up soldiers as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Instead, the Army's doctors were diagnosing soldiers as supposedly having "personality disorder," a pre-existing condition for which they wouldn't qualify for treatment. The military had a financial motive — keep healthcare costs down — in addition to the motive of covering up the huge PTSD problems of returning soldiers.
Who knows Hasan's motives at this point? (The WashPost has some good tidbits on his being a shrink assigned to study soldiers' trauma.) But perhaps his horribly twisted thinking was exacerbated by his legitimate frustration that Army docs like him were pressured for years to screw the screwed-up soldiers sent to them for diagnoses and treatment.
It's for sure that Hasan, like every other mental-health practitioner in the military, knew about that scandalous situation. Since 2007 or so, it has been laid out well in many mainstream outlets.
A 100 percent guaranteed actual publicity photo -- not Photoshopped or otherwise altered -- of Pilgrim's Pride founder and former CEO Lonnie "Bo" Pilgrim, the dead-chicken mogul who drove his company into bankruptcy (and who once employed Abu Ghraib starlet Lynndie England.)
Today's WSJ front-pager on the depressing impact of the closure of a Pilgrim's Pride chicken plant on a small Georgia town has great detail and good human-interest angles. But "At Chicken Plant, a Recession Battle" could have at least mentioned a major point and a big-time human-disinterest angle about the chicken-shit company.
The major point: Bernie Madoff, supposedly the big bad symbol of our times, had nothing on Pilgrim's Pride when it came to hubris. Pilgrim's Pride, in fact, is more symbolic than Madoff of the excessive greed that led to the global economic crash. Madoff didn't cause the crash; the crash exposed his Ponzi scheme.
Meanwhile, self-righteous religionist Lonnie "Bo" Pilgrim and his family ran around like chickens with their heads cut off as they siphoned money from their publicly traded company in all kinds of murky self-dealings before it landed in bankruptcy last December. Their behavior was typical of the excessive greed that caused the Wall Street meltdown.
On the day that Iraq's shaky government forces assumed control of the war that the U.S. government started six years ago, the first day of a heralded auction of Iraq's massive gas and "sweet oil" fields started leaking trouble. The first round of bidding for the giant Rumaila oil field in southern Iraq stalled when the companies balked at the government's offer of a fixed $2 a barrel — not a share of the profits.
Eight of the world's top 10 non-state oil companies jumped in to bid. But not one of them bid for a major gas field in still-violent Diyala province, west of Baghdad.
And adjacent to the country's northern fields, Mosul was in chaos. Judges and lawyers went on strike Monday, protesting abuses by police. Security forces are being attacked and killed every day. A dead policeman is worth $100 and a cell phone, Al Jazeera reports in video and print coverage much more sophisticated than that in any American press outlet. Security forces protect themselves by driving "at very high speed" and are armed with rocket launchers and machine guns.
"Iraqis danced in the streets and set off fireworks Monday in impromptu celebrations of a pivotal moment in their nation's troubled history," the Washington Post overstated in a story that didn't back that up. Yes, those who dared to venture outside were dancing.
The situation's so shaky that even many Iraqis are protesting the U.S.'s mostly symbolic pullout. Indoors and, in some areas, outdoors, citizens and government officials protested the pullout, pointing out that Iraq's own troops aren't capable of maintaining the semblance of order that now exists.
There are still 130,000 U.S. troops in the country, but they've backed off from their visible presence on the country's city streets. By tomorrow, the streets of Baghdad, Mosul, and other cities will be empty of the Americans' hulking vehicles and troops, Iraqi and U.S. officials said. But yesterday, those streets were already mostly deserted by Iraqis too fearful to step outside.
Coming this week to Europe, but advance reviews negative.
Likely critical response in London to Obama's road show: Solid performance, but poor script.
Apparently ungrateful that the U.S. dragged them down into a financial abyss, most of the rest of the planet's nations are rejecting the U.S. lead in helping them make the long climb back to the surface.
The major European countries, plus China and most every other country, are balking at following the U.S. example of trying to spend the way out of this financial crisis — just as most of them except Britain balked at following the U.S. lead into Iraq.
All of the considerable charm of Barack Obama is unlikely to work its magic at his inaugural global summit meeting.
As world leaders began gathering in London, the Australian Prime Minister disclosed that negotiations over the level of a fiscal stimulus needed to prevent a worldwide depression will take place at the following G-20, which will not be hosted by Gordon Brown.
This came as leaders from China, Germany and Australia lined up over the weekend to warn that they were not yet ready to agree to further tax giveaways or benefits increases despite pressure from the US and Britain. Fears are rising that agreement at the London summit on Thursday may focus on more easily achievable goals, such as tax havens, rather than ensuring commitment to specific goals on spending and protectionism.
Can you blame the G-20 countries? There's such a thing as too much Street cred.
And now the U.S. is contemplating an even bigger bailout of G.M. and Chrysler, which makes the rest of the globe nervous about the rise of protectionism.
They may not approve of the continued bailout of Detroit, but they can't help but secretly admire the U.S. government's ouster of GM CEO Rick Wagoner. And at least the U.S. government still has clout on this side of the Atlantic. (See my analysis earlier this morning of Wagoner's bonuses and pay hikes during GM's four-year slide into near-oblivion: "Ousted CEO Wagoner got 167 percent raise, $1.8 mil bonus while GM ailed even before meltdown.")
This sea could be ink, or it could be blood. At this point, it hardly matters that it's both ink and blood, because the U.S. budget's about to capsize in it.
Online Forex Trading's Rebekah Manning (referred to in an earlier item) notes that Barack Obama's first proposed budget is a "sea of 140 pages" and that its roughly $1.2 trillion size is itself roughly divided in half between the Department of Defense and everything else. She does a good job breaking it down.
But it's actually the budget that's floating in a sea of red. At least now we can get a truer picture of its staggering numbers.
Economist Joseph Stiglitzpoints out that at least Obama's budget actually includes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan:
Under the Bush presidency, nearly all funding for the wars -- which now totals some $900 billion -- was appropriated outside the regular budget process through a series of "emergency supplemental" appropriations.
The rest of what 2001 Nobel laureate Stiglitz says is worth quoting, even if his post is nothing more than another ad for his book (with Linda Bilmes) The Three Trillion Dollar War:
This mechanism, which was supposed to be used for genuine unexpected emergencies like hurricanes -- had several pernicious effects.
First, it hid the true cost of the war. Every year, the President's budget presented a charade in which everyone knew that the war spending was not included in the budget but would eventually be requested.
Second, money requested through the "emergency supplementaL" was subject to a less rigorous scrutiny than ordinary money, with the result that Congressional budget analysts of both parties had little time to analyze the billions of dollars worth of contracts and other spending. This is one of the reasons for the profiteering and other consequences.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly -- the use of this funding trick meant that Congress never had to make any real choices or trade-offs between war spending and other spending. Instead, Congress played along with this charade, spending money we don't have. This led to ballooning deficits and increased the national debt by nearly a trillion dollars.
Previews of Barack Obama's budget, due for formal announcement later today, show that the new regime has clearly taken a radically different course than the Bush-Cheney regime — and the Clinton administration — did.
It could, but it probably won't. Budgets always get worked over, and this one will be so red-penciled by opponents that you won't be able to read it.
The New York Timesnotes that such a plan will introduce "a politically volatile edge to the Congressional debate over his domestic priorities."
(Click on the video to see BBC's January 23 take on U.S. health care and other issues.)
Returning to Obama's budget: Already draining our resources is the Iraq quagmire, which costs $170 billion a year. Then there's the Afghan War, which will only get more costly. And our latest war is with the recession sparked by wealthy Wall Streeters. The new budget would be a sort of punishment of them, though it's not intended that way.
Aside from such coincidental revenge, the proposed budget is so ambitious and would require such a sharp turnaround from policies of the past 25 years — and wheedling by lobbyists for the powerful industry of HMOs, insurers, and other middlement — that there's little chance of such major restructuring actually happening.
Even without that opposition, such a change would be extremely difficult and could take years to take effect in a big way.
It's hard enough to steer an 18-wheeler truck around a regular corner at a regular intersection. This will be like sending such a truck up Mount Everest on an endless series of hairpin switchbacks. (Those of you in Colorado and the Intermountain West will get my drift.)
Bill Clinton wussed out and didn't spend his own political capital on such health-care reform with his first budget. Instead, he turned it over to a task force led by his wife, who had far less political clout. If Bill Clinton wasn't going to immediately address health care — which was already a crisis when he took over in 1993 — he could have turned it over not to Hillary but to an experienced pol like hard-working Ted Kennedy, who was immersed in such issues and could hammer away at his fellow senators. But the Clintons were too conservative and immediately rejected national health care in favor of a system that created middlemen to soak up money and did very little to help the middle-class.
Barack Obama has promised numerous times to make his administration more "transparent" in divulging information to the public.
And with his administration's first budget about to be unveiled tomorrow — amid a stepped-up Afghan War and the continuing Iraq War draining the country's money during a recession — that's good news.
Until you see what watchdog Steven Aftergood is reporting at Secrecy News:
Department of Defense officials who are involved in preparation of the Fiscal Year 2010 budget request are required to sign a non-disclosure agreement pledging not to divulge budget-related information to unauthorized persons.
More on this at Federal Times, which wrote about this directive a few days ago. (Aftergood credits John T. Bennett at Defense News with the scoop.)
Aftergood points to this passage in Obama's speech last night to Congress:
"We'll eliminate the no-bid contracts that have wasted billions in Iraq, and reform our defense budget so that we're not paying for Cold War-era weapons systems we don't use.
"Finally, because we're also suffering from a deficit of trust, I am committed to restoring a sense of honesty and accountability to our budget. That is why this budget looks ahead ten years and accounts for spending that was left out under the old rules - and for the first time, that includes the full cost of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. For seven years, we have been a nation at war. No longer will we hide its price."
And keep this point in mind. According to Aftergood, such a pledge is unprecedented. Which means that even the secretive Bush-Cheney regime didn't make its people sign them. (Of course, maybe it didn't need to because it was sure that all its employees were marching in lockstep. But it's doubtful that all of them were.)
Read the pledge yourself — most of you aren't required to sign it.
Aftergood does add a caveat — that maybe a little secrecy in preparing a Defense budget — makes sense when you're at war, but he also notes this:
In President Obama's January 20, 2009 inaugural address, he promised a new degree of transparency specifically on budget matters: "And those of use who manage the public's dollars will held to account, to spend wisely, reform bad habits and do our business in the light of day, because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government."
But the light of day evidently does not extend to the budget development process, and perhaps it should not.
And is such a pledge even needed? The watchdog explains:
Defense Department regulations (such as DoD Directive 7045.14 [pdf], section 4.7) already prohibit the unauthorized disclosure of budget planning documents, so the policy itself is not new. But the use of non-disclosure agreements to enforce and encourage compliance with the policy appears to be without precedent.
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