Obama Abandons Democratic Party

Obama's proposal to break up the Commerce Department is just another example of his kowtowing to the Republicans and abandoning Democratic party ideals.  Government needs reorganization, but breaking up a long existing cabinet department is not the way to start.  The Republicans probably want him to eliminate EPA or Education, and he thinks it is smart to hit Commerce instead, but it's still a recipe for disaster.  The Department of Homeland Security has been a disaster.  The country is no safer than when the agencies in Homeland Security were under different cabinet departments, but it has been a great financial boon for private contractors, most of whom have Congress under their thumb through their lobbyists and campaign contributions.  It's government welfare for rich contractors. 

Obama is a worthless coward.  People make a big deal of his approving the raid on Osama bin Laden and continued drone strikes, but in both cases he was just saying yes to hardliners in the military and intelligence communities.  Closing Guantanamo would take guts, and he won't do it, because he doesn't have the guts.  Elizabeth Warren makes him look like a little crybaby.  It's no wonder he didn't want her anywhere near him; the comparison is devastating. 

Republican Primary as Reality Show

The Republican primaries are basically a reality show.  The candidates are more like the housewives of Orange County than commanders in chief.  That’s why somebody who was just promoting a book, Herman Cain, came to be one of the leading contenders, if only for a few weeks  The debates and campaign speeches have been in general uneducated and banal, except for Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman, who have espoused reasonable positions, although I may not agree with them.  I think Ron Paul is wrong in his opposition to the Fed, but he is right that we are in serious economic trouble.  I think Huntsman is right on most important issues -- economic and foreign policy -- but too conservative on social issues like abortion and gun rights.  But Romney is campaigning as if he were a California housewife.  He may be the most intelligent housewife, but just a housewife nevertheless.  The others -- Santorum, Gingrich, Perry -- are good at puffery, but just full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.  Republican voters are not voting for a commander in chief but just on who is going to be voted off the island.

USAA and the Decline of the American Military

I’m a big fan of USAA insurance, but I think it’s significant that USAA now needs to advertise, when previously it tried to limit policyholders rather than attracting them.  In the old days USAA insurance was only available to military officers.  Because of patriotism and the draft, a lot of excellent people became military officers.  Many of them did not become career officers, but left after their initial period of service to return to civilian life, where they often became successful businessmen, lawyers, doctors, and other prosperous members of society.

 Vietnam destroyed respect for the American military, but because of the draft during the first part of the war, there were still a lot of good people who became officers.  With the end of the draft and rising disrespect of the military, particularly by “good” families, fewer and fewer people who were destined to become community leaders served as officers.   As a result USAA’s pool of excellent customers has been shrinking.  Now, instead of having a favorable opinion of former officers, Americans tend to have an unfavorable opinion, making it more difficult for former officers to rise to prominence in the civilian community.

As an example, look at recent Presidential elections.  The last military officer to serve as  President was George H. W. Bush.  He was defeated for his second term by Clinton, who avoided service in Vietnam.  Clinton defeated Bob Dole, a World War II hero, to win his second term.  Al Gore, Clinton’s Vice President, served in Vietnam, probably because as the son of a senator, he inherited a now antiquated family tradition of national service.  When he ran for President, however, he was defeated by George W. Bush, who did not inherit his father’s tradition of national service, and who avoided service in Vietnam by joining the Alabama National Guard, where he seldom did anything, even in Alabama.  For his next term Bush ran against Sen. John Kerry, who served in Vietnam and was awarded a Purple Heart medal.  The Republican Swift Boat veterans ridiculed Kerry’s service, in what to me was the most egregious attack on veterans by a major political party.  In order to win Bush a second term, the Republicans defamed all veterans by attacking Kerry for being a veteran.  In a turnaround, the Republicans nominated a veteran, war hero John McCain, in the next election.  McCain was defeated by Obama, who is not a veteran but is too young to have been influenced by Vietnam and the draft.  Although he did not serve in Vietnam, Bush II was probably eligible for USAA insurance under their old rules, although none of the other Presidents would have been.

The Presidential elections illustrate how Americans have turned against those who serve in their country’s military.  The result has been a significant downgrading of the USAA customer base, from leaders of American communities to those relegated to a lower social and economic status because of their service in the military.

Predictable Iowa

There was nothing interesting about the Iowa caucuses.  Mitt Romney got more or less his expected 25%.  Rick Santorum was the not-Romney candidate of the moment, and got about the same vote.  Ron Paul got the votes he was expected to get, high for a non-mainstream candidate, but not enough to make him mainstream.  If the vote had been held 10 days earlier, the not-Romney vote would have gone to Newt Gingrich.  If it had been 20 days earlier, the non-Romney vote would have gone to Herman Cain. 

Mitt was smart to move the non-Mitt vote to Santorum instead of Gingrich, because Santorum will be a weaker challenger.  But none of the non-Mitts really had much support of their own. 

What a waste of time, energy, and money!  And how discouraging to think that this is how Americans elect a President. 

Iowa Caucuses

Based on the results I have heard, a tie between Romney and Santorum, the Iowa caucuses appear to be an enormous waste of time.  If they contribute anything to the Presidential election, it just shows how broken our electoral system is.  Part of the problem is due to the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, basically making it legal for rich people to buy an election.  And part of the problem appears to be that the Republican Party is dysfunctional, offering such lousy candidates, and that Republicans in Iowa are idiots, turning out to vote for such incompetents. Poor America!

Obama's Failure on Consumer Protection

After failing to nominate Elizabeth Warren to head the new consumer protection agency, Obama proposed Cordry. See this Vanity Fair article on Warrren. However, when the Senate blocked Cordry with some filibuster trick, Obama just accepted it. He has obviously been bought by the big banks and other financial interests. Obama should at least have made a stink. He's been quiet as a mouse, hoping the public will forget and the Wall Street money will keep rolling in. The average person has no one to stand up for him, except Elizabeth Warren, whom Obama has thrown to the wolves.

Jews Need to Clean Up Their Act

In Boomerang, Michael Lewis points out the absence of Jews in the German financial community.  We all know why this is so.  But the problem now is that the American financial community is largely led by Jews, and it turns out to be corrupt, while the gentile German banking community turns out to be largely honest, if gullible.  Not all Jews are dishonest, but events like this tend to reinforce unfavorable stereotypes of Jews. If Jews want to overcome these "Shylock" stereotypes, they need to clean up their act.   Unfortunately they are dragging America down into the gutter with themselves. 

Women Leaders

At this moment in the financial crisis, the only people I trust are women:
Elizabeth Warren,
Christine Legarde, and
Angela Merkel.

When Barney Frank was discussing his legacy on PBS yesterday, one the things he emphasized was the consumer protection provisions of the Dodd-Frank law.  Elizabeth Warren was largely responsible for that, and then when push came to shove, Obama abandoned her, clearly as a result of pressure from the crooks on Wall Street, led by Jamie Dimon of Chase Bank. 

Christine Legarde did a good job as French Finance Minister and is currently sorely missed as France tries to deal with the European financial crisis.  However, she will be able to help as head of the IMF.  I trust her to do the right thing more than I did her disgraced predecessor, Dominique Strauss-Kahn. 

Angela Merkel gets a lot of bad press from financial journalists and commentators, in part because they see her Germanic honesty as a rebuke to American dishonesty.  People seldom mention that she is from the old East Germany, and grew up in conditions far different from the prosperous unified Germany that she now leads.  She, more than others, remembers the trials and sacrifices that West Germany undertook to unify with East Germany.  When they look at the sacrifices they are being called on to make for Greece, et al, the Germans can say, "Been there; done that."  However, before the sacrifices were for fellow Germans; now the sacrifices are for countries and peoples with whom the Germans share much less.  Although Europe needs to be saved, Merkel is right not to have Germany commit suicide to save its poorer partners.

Germany More Moral Than America

I just finished reading Michael Lewis' chapter in Boomerang about Germany.  His theme for Germany is "clean on the outside, dirty on the inside."  But much of what turns out to be dirty on the inside is America's subprime mortgage debt, which was sold by unscrupulous American bankers to honest, trusting German bankers.  In many ways it is the most damning portrait of the American banking system that I have read of the books I have read about the economic crisis.  According to Lewis, the Germans were honest; the Americans were dishonest.  It makes be less forgiving toward American bankers.  I am now more inclined to believe that the crisis was not something that just happened, but it was caused by Americans who knew that they were doing bad things.  I now think that somebody needs to go to jail, along the lines of the "Daily Show" last night, complaining that Martha Stewart went to jail for something that was absolutely nothing compared to what the big shots on Wall Street did, none of whom has gone to jail.  It illustrates that America has become a third rate country where you can buy your way out of jail by bribing the President and members of Congress with political contributions.

More Welfare for Millionaires

The Denver Post has had an excellent series on tax breaks for corporations.  These breaks were supposed to encourage businesses to move into poor areas called enterprise zones, but eventually enterprise zones covered most of the state and just constituted another tax break for almost any corporation doing business in Colorado, in some cases giving tax breaks to corporations that eliminated jobs, rather than creating them.

This is also an example of the "beggar thy neighbor" policies pursued by many government jurisdictions, from nations to cities.  One of the big Republican arguments for lower business taxes is that other nations have lower taxes; if we don't match their low rates, all companies will leave the US, they say.  Within the US, companies move to the states with the lowest business taxes.  Most big companies incorporate in Delaware because it has the most lenient laws governing corporations.  In the Denver area, the Aurora suburb is bidding to take the annual stock show away from Denver proper by offering all kinds of tax advantages to it and the Gaylord hotel chain which would build a new hotel near the stock show grounds. 

All of this takes money away from basic activities that governments perform, from defense to education to building and maintaining roads.  Colorado just voted down a small increase in taxes for education, but it has millions to subsidize big corporations in "enterprise zones," or to get the stock show to move ten miles out of town. 

Rich Doctors Are America's Problem

This op-ed by David Brooks says that the largest proportion of the richest 1% of Americans are doctors.  He says 16% of the wealthiest are doctors, compared with 8% being lawyers, for example.  That's why health care costs are going through the roof, why Medicare is out of control, etc. 

He doesn't break down the doctors' incomes, but it's pretty well known that the richest doctors are the specialists, the heart guys, the bone guys, etc.  Many of them getting rich on Medicare because old people have heart attacks, broken hips, etc.  The general practitioners, who keep people healthy, rather than repairing them after they are sick, don't make nearly as much. 

It's a system where the rewards are misallocated, and that threatens to destroy the whole American economy.

Another Congressional Letter

I hope that you saw "Morning Joe" this morning on MSNBC. In case you did not, here is a link:


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036789/#44886865

They discussed Warren Buffett's release of his income tax. It shows he is correct that rich people who make most of their money from investments pay a lower percentage of their income in taxes than much poorer working people do. This country clearly hates people who work for a living, just like it claims to love veterans, but then won't give them a job when they come home from Iraq or Afghanistan. As a Vietnam veteran, I know that anybody who fights for this country for any but the most patriotic reasons is a fool. This country will kiss you on the lips while the TV cameras are on, and then stab you in the back when they go off. No one representing me in Congress is a veteran. When Senator John Kerry ran for President, George W. Bush's huge political apparatus "Swift Boat Veterans" reviled him (and every other Vietnam veteran) because Kerry was a veteran, Bush was not a real veteran. He spent the war getting drunk and becoming an alcoholic in the Alabama National Guard. Then after 9/11 he sent many National Guard troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, despite the fact that the National Guard has been his refuge from combat.

The best part of the "Morning Joe" clip above is the presentation by former Obama automotive czar Steve Rattner, which shows how badly income in the US has skewed toward the rich in the last few years. This is a corrupt government. Democrats and Republicans have betrayed the American people, by selling themselves to the wealthiest one percent. I have not joined the Occupy Wall Street protesters, but I am mad, too. This is a failed government run by cowardly, incompetent or evil people. The corrupt characters in HBO's "Boardwalk Empire" would be right at home in today's Washington.

On veterans again, I am very disappointed that the Army's Walter Reed Hospital has been closed and wounded Army soldiers transferred to Bethesda Naval Hospital. People like you don't understand that the Army and Navy are different. Or you probably don't care. But the Army and Navy have different cultures and traditions. It is truly insensitive to take someone who has spent five or ten years in the Army, and then when he gets badly wounded, to add to his problems by putting him in a Navy environment. No wonder so many of our troops have mental problems. But you don't care; you saved some millionaire ten dollars on his taxes.

Killing American Citizens

The US should only kill an American citizen when he poses an immediate threat of deadly harm and there is no other way to stop him.  I am not sure that these conditions were met in the recent assassinations of American citizens Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan.

According to the press, Awlaki encouraged other Americans to kill their fellow citizens and to oppose the US government, but it's not clear that he personally killed any Americans, or anybody else, for that matter.  He was more an accessory to murder than a murderer.  Secondly, its not clear that there was no other way to stop him than to kill him by remote control drone.  That may have been the easiest way to kill him, but not the only way.

I think there should at least have been an effort to take him prisoner and return him to the US.  I also think we should have tried to capture and return Osama bin Laden.  The problem is that the US legal system is unable to deal with terrorists, because Americans are so afraid of them.  Guantanamo should have been closed years ago, but Americans are afraid of the men there.  There was some talk of a terrorist trial in Kentucky, and Sen. Mitch McConnell almost had a fit he was so scared.  This is a man who refused to fight in Vietnam, and got his patron, Sen. John Sherman Cooper, to help get him out of military service during the war, although officially he got a medical discharge.

These legal niceties are what our troops are supposed to be fighting to protect, but we are afraid to apply them.  In many ways Osama bin Laden won,  because people like Barak Obama and Mitch McConnell are afraid to stand up for them.  Of course, the real cowards were George W. Bush, who spent the Vietnam War becoming a drunkard in the Alabama National Guard, and Dick Cheney, who avoided service by churning out babies.    These are men who liked running the country, but had no concept of what it was to serve the country.  They were missing in action on 9/11.  Bush flew away to Nebraska or somewhere, and Cheney retreated to a spider hole under the White House.

State Slouches Toward Failure in Iraq

Recent articles in the NYT and WP paint a pretty discouraging picture of the State Department's future role in Iraq.  A serving Foreign Service officer has written a book about what a failure State's past activities have been, "We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People."  He also published an op-ed in the NYT, which says, "Iraq is still plagued by corruption, sectarianism and violence. And ... I don’t have much faith that the department can turn things around." 

Meanwhile, the WP reported on the huge undertaking that the State Department is committing itself to by taking over in Iraq where the military is leaving off.  After downsizing from hundreds of thousands of US military troops, about 50,000 remain in Iraq.  Their functions will supposedly soon be taken on by the State Department Foreign Service.  According to Wikipedia, there are about 15,000 Foreign Service officers total, staffing over 200 American embassies and consulates, as well as the State Department in Washington.  Thus, the only way the State Department can even hope to cope with this mess is by hiring tens of thousands of contractors.  The idea that State can manage tens of thousands of contractors, when according to the book mentioned above, it can't even manage the small scale programs it was running with its own officers , is ludicrous.  Hillary Clinton is being the good soldier by taking on the mess left behind by the military, but it is bound to impact negatively on what in other countries is the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.  State's expertise is political and economic analysis, not program management.  The military managed not to lose in Iraq (at least not yet), but it is leaving a mess.  The op-ed above says:

When my team tried to give away fruit tree seedlings to replant ruined orchards, a farmer spat on the ground and said, “You killed my son and now you are giving me a tree?”       

and

One Iraqi I met observed that the United States had sponsored expensive art shows in his neighborhood three years in a row, but did nothing about the lack of functioning sewers, electricity and running water. “It is like I am standing naked in a room with a big hat on my head,” he told me. “Everyone comes in and puts ribbons on my hat, but no one seems to notice that I am naked.”      

The WP compares the Iraq undertaking to the Marshall Plan, but after World War II, the US had clearly won.  There was little danger of Americans being assassinated in Paris.  The French and other Western Europeans still had competent bureaucrats to administer the American aid.  Before the war, Western Europe had been more or less on a par with the US politically and economically.  They shared similar cultures.  None of that is true in Iraq. 

It's possible that nobody really expects this to work.  Maybe it's just a cover for the US to pull its military out of Iraq.  But State will be left with egg on its face.  And Iraq will still be a mess. 

I don't think the US is serious about helping Iraq, especially when I look back at my experience in Poland after the fall of Communism.  Newt Gingrich and the Republicans, with the cooperation of Bill Clinton and company, basically told the Poles, "You're on your own, unless there is some money-making deal we can line up an American company to get in on."  Poland came out okay, but I think it's because the EU became Poland's Marshall Plan.  America basically dumped Poland, but Western Europe came through.  Maybe Turkey or China (or Iran) will come through for the Iraqis. 

Why I Left the Foreign Service V

North Korean Nuclear Proliferation Issues.  One of my responsibilities in Rome was maintaining a dialogue with Italy and the EU on North Korean nuclear issues, in particular the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO).  During the six months more or less that I was in Rome, Italy held the presidency of the European Union, so that our dialogue was on sort of a double basis, one dialogue as the US to Italy, and the other as US to EU.  At that time the US was part of KEDO and had promised funding for proliferation resistant light water reactors for North Korea, and in the interim, funding for fuel oil to North Korea to generate electricity by conventional power plants.  As part of the Gingrich/Republican budget cuts, the US did not appropriate funding for its part of the fuel oil.  Therefore to prevent the US from breaching its agreement with North and South Korea and Japan, part of my job was to go hat in hand to the Italians and ask them bilaterally, or as the head of the EU, to help make up the difference between what the US had appropriated and what it owed under the agreement. 

I had just gone through a similar situation in Warsaw when the US cut off funding for our joint science cooperation program years before the agreement was to expire.  Once again, I was in the position of saying that the US would not fulfill its international agreements.  I always did what I was told, but I was not a happy camper.  I did not like representing an America that was a deadbeat dad, that made promises and then didn't fulfill them.  I don't remember where I left this matter.  The Italians were somewhat horrified that the US might default, and thus legally entitle North Korea to resume its proliferating ways.  But I don't recall that they said definitely that they would help.  I think we were only asking for about $2 million. 

But I didn't like it.  If I had wanted to do this kind of thing, I could have become a criminal lawyer or a bankruptcy lawyer.  I wanted to be a diplomat for the greatest nation on earth; I didn't want to be like Hitler's German diplomats negotiating the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.  The American government was too corrupt and dishonest for me, and so I left. 

Helms-Burton and Children's Visas.  Another nail in coffin of my career came late in my stay in Rome.  I was at a reception for a satellite launching, celebrating a satellite that the US was going to launch for Italy.  The launch did not take place as scheduled, but that wasn't the issue.  At the reception I struck up a conversation with a man who worked on communications satellites for the Italian phone company.  He said something like, "You must really hate me to deny a visa to Disney World to my daughter, just because I work for the Italian phone company."  I was taken aback and asked him what had happened.  He said his daughter had been denied a US visa under the Helms-Burton Act because the Italian phone company had some tenuous connection to Cuba through its cooperation with the Mexican phone company.  Later I went and talked to the head of the consular section in Rome, and it sounded like this was indeed the case. 

Unfortunately it reminded me of some books I had read when I first joined the Foreign Service.  One of my friends from law school had been reading them, and said they had quite a lot about the Foreign Service.  They were "The Winds of War," and "War and Remembrance" by Herman Wouk.  They are a fictional account of several families, some American military officers and diplomats, and one a Jewish family living in Europe.  A Jewish mother and child are trying to get out of Europe and go to Palestine, soon to become Israel, but she can't leave without a visa (shades of "Casablanca").  The German embassy in Rome is willing to give the mother a visa, but not her child.  It was just too close to what America was doing to this Italian engineer.  Punishing children for the crimes of their fathers is not something I am enthusiastic about, especially when the father's  crime is just working for a company that has some weak connection to Cuba.  I think by the time this happened, I had already decided to retire, but this made me glad that I had. 

This was not Ronald Reagan's "shining city on a hill." 

Why I Left the Foreign Service IV

Unwelcoming Reception in Rome.  When I agreed to go from Warsaw to Rome, Embassy Rome said that they had an apartment for me.  They said that I could not have my predecessor's apartment, which frankly I found a little odd, but I thought, "Okay, they say they have a nice apartment, and it's Rome."  When we arrived, however, after our contretemps with the government shutdown leaving Warsaw, it turned out that the embassy had given the apartment that they had promised to me to a DEA agent.  I was a little ticked, because I thought that the State Department, which ran the administration for the embassy, should have given a little break to one of its own officers, and told the DEA agent that this apartment was allocated and that he would have to wait for the next apartment.  That was my first clue that something was amiss in Rome.  It took months for the embassy to find us an apartment.  Meanwhile we camped out in temporary housing in an apartment house that the embassy had for people assigned temporarily to Rome to do short-term jobs. 

In addition, between by predecessor's departure and my arrival, the embassy had redesigned the science office suite.  The way they had set it up, all of my assistant's visitors had to pass through my office to get to her office.  The doors should have been arranged so that her visitors could enter her office directly from the reception area.  I don't know what the suite had looked like before, but by the time I got there, the construction was completed. 

Most importantly, the embassy did not want me.  I had not realized that my assignment by the State Department was the result of a fight between the Embassy and the State Department headquarters in Washington.  The previous Science Counselor had been a friend of the Ambassador's.  He had been a political appointee in Ambassador Bartholomew's office, when Bartholomew had been an Under Secretary of State, and had traveled to Rome, when Bartholomew as assigned to Rome.  However, the time he could serve as a political appointee, a Schedule C employee, ran out, and the State Department would not let him stay longer.  I presume there was a big fight between the Embassy and Washington to try to get permission for him to stay.  When that failed, the Embassy apparently decided that it wanted a particular Civil Service employee in Washington to replace him.  The Foreign Service tries to look after its own, and apparently tried to block a Civil Service employee from taking a plum Foreign Service position in Rome.  Thus, the call out of the blue to me in Warsaw asking if I would be willing to go to Rome.  But after I arrived, it became clear that the Embassy had not given up and still wanted to get rid of me and get the Civil Service employee.  Making my life difficult by not finding housing, for example, was part of that strategy.  The Ambassador succeeded.  I retired, and I think the State Department relented and approved the Civil Service employee as my replacement. 

I guess I sound pretty weak in this description, not fighting the Embassy harder, but in my defense, ever since I didn't fight the draft and agreed to go into the Army and off to Vietnam, my desire was to serve my country, not to have my country serve me.  I was willing to put up with hardships that were imposed by external forces, like the North Vietnamese Army, or living and working at an embassy in a poor country with few amenities.  But I was not willing to accept hardships or mistreatment that were imposed by the American Government itself, in the government shutdown, or by the unwelcoming reception in Rome.  It was not the government that I volunteered to serve.

I should add that in contrast to the unwelcoming official reception in Rome, several of the officers there were personally very welcoming, from the Deputy Chief of Mission (the #2 in the Embassy) to my assistant, who got furloughed when I got un-furloughed in order to travel from Warsaw to Rome during the shutdown. 

Why I left the Foreign Service III

Rome: Tethered Satellite. Firing of space agency chief.

One of the best parts of my job as Science Officer in various embassies was that I was the representative of NASA, and everyone loved NASA.  In addition to being glamorous, NASA had stuff to give away, like observation time on the space telescope, rides on the Shuttle, etc.  The local space agency always wanted to stay on my good side.  When I came to Rome, I inherited an agreement under which the Shuttle would carry a tethered satellite for the Italian Space Agency.  This satellite would be reusable.  It would ride in the Shuttle cargo bay, and when the Shuttle was in orbit, it would be released on a long tether to collect data away from the pollution of the Shuttle. Then, when the Shuttle was getting ready to return to earth, the satellite would be reeled in, much like a fishing line would be reeled in.  The satellite would be stored in the cargo bay and returned to earth until it was flown on another mission.  It promised huge savings because satellites are so expensive to build, impossible to repair in space, etc. 

On its first flight, however, the reel jammed, the tether broke, and the expensive satellite drifted off into space beyond the reach of the Shuttle.  For a change, being the NASA representative was not so great.  The crew of that Shuttle visited Rome, and while it was not billed as an apology tour for losing the satellite, that's basically what it was.  Meanwhile, the head of the Italian Space Agency was in political trouble.  While his problems were not directly linked to the failed satellite, losing the satellite did not help his position.  I was unhappy, because I was feeling snake bit.  I had had little to do with the mission, which had been planned long before I arrived in Rome, but I was there when it happened.  It turned out that because I was retiring, the head of the Italian Space Agency and I left Rome about the same time.  He was going to take some time off before moving on to his next venture.  While my only fault was being in the wrong place at the wrong time, it added to the dissatisfaction I was feeling about the job.  If the best part of my job, working with NASA, turned sour, there was not much left. 

Why I Left the Foreign Service II

Rome: Fisheries.  Constitutional responsibilities and Ambassador's letter. 

When I arrived in Rome, the State Department was in the process of being sued by four environmental organizations because the State Department, and the Embassy Rome Science Office in particular, had failed to enforce the driftnet fishing regulations of the United Nations.  My assistant was deeply involved in this issue and got daily updates from the trial in New York.  As usual for the government, the State Department lawyers could not try the case in court; Justice Department lawyers represented the US in court supported by State Department lawyers.  The reports always were that the US was winning, but when the verdict came in, the US lost.  The US was ordered to make the Italians enforce the UN regulations with regard to driftnets, and the Federal District Judge in New York would ensure that it did.  This meant that my office's dealings with the Italians on fisheries issues were all subject to review by the judge.  The main thrust of the regulations was to limit the length of the driftnets used by Italian fishermen who were fishing for swordfish.  They said Italians used driftnets that were too long and therefore caught too many swordfish, thus depleting the swordfish population.  

I thought first of all that this decision was an infringement on the executive branch's authority to conduct foreign relations, although I guess it is arguable that the UN resolution was a treaty, over which the courts have authority like domestic laws.  But this meant that my office's actions on fishery matters in Rome were under the constant review of a court in New York.  Anyway we had a big meeting, with a huge delegation from Washington meeting with an even larger Italian delegation, which agreed on guidelines drawn up in large part by my assistant and her counterpart, who was a young staffer for the head of the Italian Agriculture Ministry division of fisheries.  The linchpin of this arrangement turned out to be an Italian Greenpeace member who focused on the swordfish issue.  Whenever there was an issue, it would go to the Federal Court, the court would refer it to the environmental organizations that had won the case; they in turn would ask the opinion of the Greenpeace representative in Italy.  If he approved, the environmental groups would approve, and the court would approve.  

Just a day or two before I was scheduled to leave Rome for retirement, the Agriculture Minister summoned the Ambassador to discuss the swordfish issue.  I went along with the Ambassador because my assistant who was the expert and had negotiated the agreement was sick.  The Minister said that the agreement negotiated by the delegations was not workable because it was too tough on Italian fishery enforcement personnel.  It required them to do frequent, thorough inspections of driftnets, catches, etc.  The majority of swordfish fishermen were based in Sicily, and they were upset at the inspections.  Thus, they turned to the Mafia to get the inspectors off their backs, and the government inspectors found themselves under constant death threats from the Mafia.  The Minister said it was too much to put his men in such danger; we needed to give them more leeway.  He wanted to ease the terms in the agreement regarding inspections somewhat.  The changes were fairly minor and the Ambassador was willing go along, but I reminded him that he didn't have authority to agree on the spot with the Minister, because any change had to be approved by the District Court, which essentially meant getting the approval of Greenpeace.  The Ambassador was not happy to find his authority limited, which I must admit I stressed, because I didn't like it either.  I thought the State Department (and the Ambassador) had been unfairly, perhaps unconstitutionally, placed under the authority of the judge.  We got the changes approved on my last day in Rome, but the Ambassador and I parted on unfriendly terms.  On my last day of active duty in the Foreign Service, he sent me a short, bitter letter criticizing my work on the driftnet matter, the only such letter I received during my career.  Since I was retiring, it didn't matter to me.  But to me the whole mess was another example of the fact that the government did not work correctly.  I found it entirely inappropriate that Greenpeace Italy should control the American government's policy on fisheries issues, rather than my office, the Ambassador, and the fisheries officials in the State Department.  In Italy, Greenpeace could not get the Italian Government to do what it wanted; so, through its American branch it sued and got US courts to order the State Department to order the Italian Government to do what Greenpeace thought it should do.  I guess Greenpeace gets kudos for originality and persistence, but I don't think it says much good about the way our government works.  This was an issue that Greenpeace should have worked out within the Italian Government, or between the Italian Government and the UN, without US intervention. 

Rome: Tethered Satellite.  Firing of space agency chief. 

Rome: Help on North Korean Nuclear Proliferation. 

Rome: Denial of Visas to Children.  Helms-Burton and "Winds of War." 

MTCR and Skawina in Poland

Before I move on to Rome, there were some other disappointing events in Poland.

MTCR.  Before the fall of Communism, there had been some security failure at the embassy in Poland, so that even after the fall, there was a lot of concern about security of classified material.  As a result, there were a limited number of paper copies of classified cables, with few distributed to anybody except the office that had "action," i.e., that had to act on or respond to the cable from the Department of State.  In other embassies, more people might have gotten "info" copies, so that they would know more of what was going on in the embassy.

Besides overseeing the science cooperation, which was cancelled, I also had responsibility for environmental issues and some nuclear related matters, one of which was export control  matters such as the Zangger List, which controlled exports of items which might be used for nuclear proliferation.  In that capacity, I often dealt with a Polish diplomat at the Foreign Ministry,. Ambassador Strulak, who worked on a variety of proliferation issues.  One day while I was talking to him, he asked me if I could find out why the US had blackballed Poland's membership in the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR).  This came as a shock to me, because I had worked on MTCR issues for years in the Department of State, and I had seen nothing about the MTCR in the embassy cable traffic.  It turned out that the "action" on MTCR cables went to the political section, and I did not get a copy in the science section, although after years of working on the issue, I had to be one of the experts on the MTCR.  In fact that is why Amb. Strulak had asked me about it.  On one of his visits to Washington, he was asking around in the State Department about why Poland had been blackballed, and someone had told him to ask me in Warsaw, because I was an expert.  Until then Amb. Strulak never knew that I had worked on missile proliferation as well as nuclear proliferation.

By then, however, I had been out of the loop for several years, working on other issues.  However, I called back to my old office and talked to the man then running it, Vann Van Diepen.  I had known Vann since he was in intern and I was an analyst in the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research.  However, Vann told me there was nothing I could do, because President Clinton had personally decided to blackball Poland.  It's not unusual for an issue that can't be agreed between agencies to go to the White House for decision.  I also knew what the problem was: The MTCR was unwieldy because it basically operated on consensus.  The US wanted to get a more controllable management structure before it got too big, and adding Poland would have made it bigger.  On the other hand, the Poles wanted to cooperate so badly that they would not have been a problem in reaching consensus.

Anyway, I was disappointed that no one thought it worthwhile to consult me or even to inform me that this matter was on-going, when I had been the main working level person handling this issue a few years earlier in Washington.  It was as if they didn't think the science office could handle a policy issue.

Skawina.  Although they didn't think I should be involved in political matters, it was pretty much accepted that I handled environmental issues.  This main mainly meant working with the Polish environment ministry, and supporting an organization called the Ekofundusz (or Eco-fund).  The Ekofundusz was a non-governmental group funded by forgiven US debt.  Instead of being repaid, the US authorized the Ekofundusz to finance environmental projects in Poland that it found worthwhile.  I don't remember its budget, but most of the projects were relatively small, maybe in the tens of thousands of dollars.

For me one of the best things about the Ekofundusz was that it provided a refuge for liberal environmentalists who had supported the overthrow of Communism.  In the mid-1990s when I was there, the old former Commies were back in power in many places, including the environment ministry.  The Ekofundusz was like a Brookings Institution or Heritage Foundation, it gave the anti-communist environmentalists an office and a little salary until they had a chance to get back into government.  This is the same kind of thing that the Maria Skladowska Curie Fund could have done for anti-Communist scientists and engineers, but by cutting off the funding, the Republicans cut them off at the knees.  Fortunately, because of the vagaries of the law, the environmentalists' funds were not cut off.

In addition, USAID had a much larger environmental program as part of its agenda.  One of its projects was to build a scrubber for an old electric power plant near Krakow, called Skawina.  I frankly didn't pay much attention to it, although AID was better than the political section about keeping me informed.  So, I knew we were building this scrubber, and we turned it over to the Poles.  After a while, I began to hear from my Polish contacts that the scrubber didn't work.  Basically, it blew exhaust from the power plant through a process in which lime stone was supposed to remove most of the sulfur from the gas.  When I began to look into it, it turned out that it didn't work.  The chemical properties of Polish limestone were not suitable for the process.  It was somewhat galling, because the main Poles complaining were old Communist apparatchiks who were happy to see the US fail, but they were right that the system did not work.  One took me to a much bigger power plant with working scrubbers; they were built by the Dutch, but were based on General Electric designs.  I think that when I left Warsaw for Rome, Skiwina was still not working.

Why I Left the Foreign Service I

As I complain about how things are going in the US, I think that I could have stayed in the State Department Foreign Service, but instead I retired almost 15 years ago.  Could I have made a positive difference if I had stayed in?  Or would I have continually been implementing policies that I disagreed with?  I came down on the latter side.  I thought I would write down why I did so, and consider whether, about 15 years later, it was the right or wrong thing. 

Brazil Space Program.  One of the first serious things that went wrong was years before I retired, while I was serving as the science officer in Brasilia in the 1980s.  NASA was a great asset for the US in relations with other courntries.  Because I was the embassy's representative for NASA, I had good relations with the Brazilian space agency, INPE.  INPE wanted to build some satellites and ground stations to monitor them with, to survey the Amazon.  The US bidder on the ground stations, Scientific Atlanta, for some reason failed to get its bid in on time and lost to a Japanese company.  I persuaded INPE to reopen the bidding, and as a result, Scientific Atlanta won.  Then the Defense Department, I think the office of Steve Hadley (who went on to be NSC chief), denied the export license for the ground stations.  My friends at INPE were livid and my good relationship ended.  I think Hadley was a Richard Perle acolyte in the Pentagon, and Perle hated Brazil. 

Polish Science Fund.  In the 1990s I went to Poland as embassy Science Counselor, where my main job was to oversee science cooperation beteen the US and Poland under a joint fund called the Maria Sklodowska Curie Fund which was to continue for five years.  After about two years, the Republicans under Newt Gingrich were elected, and cut off funding for the cooperation under a clause in the agreement allowing either side not to fund it if funding was impossible.  This was clearly inserted into the agreement for Poland, which faced many financial challenges as it emerged from Communism, but the US used the clause instead.  For the rest of my tour, I was periodically called into the Polish Foreign Minsitry by a senior official and berated for the US not fulfilling its commitment.  Meanwhile, Polish scientsts who had lost most of the government funding also lost what would have been an American lifeline, a sort of anti-Marshall Plan.  As an added insult, the Ambassador eliminated my science office in the embassy, because there was no more joint program to oversee. 

Government Shutdown.  Meanwhile, the State Department asked me if I would like to go to Rome, because the Science Counselor there had been fired for some other budgetary reason. I agreed, but on the day I was leaving Warsaw with the car packed, Embassy Rome called and said don't leave because the government shutdown meant there was no money for travel.  However, my wife and I then had no place to live.  The house the embassy had rented for us was empty and was being returned to the owner.  The idea that the US government would put us out on the streets of Warsaw was so abhorrent to me that it was pretty much the straw that broke the camel's back, as far as continuing to work for the US.  I was usually the good soldier, doing as I was ordered, but this time I was so mad that I called Rome to see if I could get their order reversed.  I did, and we started driving to Rome, but for me the damage was done.  The US government had said, "Hey, you're expendible.  You and your wife can die freezing on the streets of Warsaw.  We don't care." 

Vietnam War.  It reminded me of the day I arrived in Vietnam, and the Army assigned me to Dong Ha on the DMZ, so close to North Vietnam that the dot on the map for Dong Ha projected into North Vietnam.  I went where the Army told me to go, but for the State Department to do that to me and my wife was, I thought, beyond the pale.  There have been a lot of Foreign Service officers assigned to Iraq and Afghanistan (without spouses), but hopefully, the State Department didn't drop them off in some God forsaken village and say, "Hey, we can't afford to come back for you.  You will have to walk back.  Try to avoid the Taliban."  When I was at an artillery firebase near the Laotian border, Firebase Barbara, we had no American infantry support because we were turning over the war to the Vietnamese.  We had two American "dusters" assigned to protect us, old anti-aircraft guns that fired 40 mm rounds with every round a tracer, firepower that tended to inspire some awe in the North Vietnamese.  One night when there was a alert that we might be attacked because of activity spotted by an intelligence fly-over, our battalion headquarters said, "Don't give any gasoline to the dusters.  Their supply people are lazy and incompetent.  We don't want to help them out."  Of course the alternative was to have the dusters not shoot to protect us.  We gave the dusters the gas they needed.  They blew away several square kilometers at the base of the mountain, and we were not attacked.  Did the penny pinchers in Washington really want us to die?  Probably not, but did they really care?  Probably not.  Did they really care about us in Warsaw?  Probably not. 

When we got to Rome, things did not get any better for me from a policy perspective.  More on this later,  Some topics: 

Rome: Fisheries.  Constitutional responsibilities and Ambassador's letter. 

Rome: Tethered Satellite.  Firing of space agency chief. 

Rome: Help on North Korean Nuclear Proliferation. 

Rome: Denial of Visas to Children.  Helms-Burton and "Winds of War."