This morning, the Department of Transportation should receive the two Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests I submitted on behalf of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. The letters, which request communications and documents related to the proposed Central Valley HSR Corridor [PDF] from Borden to Corcoran, California, as well as congressional liaison records in the possession of both the Department’s Office of the Secretary of Transportation (OST) and the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA).
CEI has become increasingly concerned with the disregard for transparency the Obama administration has shown with respect to this $715 million American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) “stimulus” project. A week ago, President Obama issued Executive Order 13576, which called for “Delivering an Efficient, Effective, and Accountable Government.” In the executive order, the president claims that “[t]he implementation of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111 5) (Recovery Act) has seen unprecedented transparency.” But in the case of the ARRA-funded Central Valley corridor, nothing could be further from the truth.
The grant was announced on October 25, 2010, a little over a week before the November election. Rep. Jim Costa (D) was able to hold a nice “bringing home the bacon” press conference. Convenient, eh? Furthermore, after harsh criticism from state politicians, citizens, and the press, the California High-Speed Rail Authority requested more flexibility from the U.S. Department of Transportation in order to potentially begin constructing the Phase 1 high-speed rail system on a different segment that might enjoy a greater chance of being somewhat more financially viable, such as Los Angeles-Anaheim or San Francisco-San Jose.
Transportation Undersecretary for Policy Roy Kienitz wrote back to California and essentially told them, “Tough titty!” “Once major construction is underway and approvals to complete other sections of the line have been obtained, the private sector will have compelling reasons to invest in further construction,” said Kienitz. Huh? The private sector has a “compelling reason” to invest in a rail segment in the rural Central Valley, and one that might not be operational unless California secures additional federal funding and private-sector support, as Proposition 1A and AB3034 forbid the use of California taxpayer dollars to subsidize operation [PDF]? I really don’t think so, and neither does CEI.
Dropbox was accessible with no password, Oops: “Dropbox confirmed today that for some time yesterday, any users account was accessible without a password. The glitch was a programming error related to a code update and accounts were only vulnerable from around 1:54 pm PST to 5:46pm PST. A statement was issued by Dropbox explaining the issue:”
Mozilla, where is Firefox OS?: “There is a strong chance that Windows 8, when it arrives in 2012, will be the last conventional, installed-application, file system-driven consumer operating system. With the popularity of mobile computing, there has been an overarching shift towards simpler, application-oriented interfaces — and on the desktop, the last few years have seen a dramatic shift in how we interact with our computers. Gone are the days when you would run multiple applications; gone are the days when your operating system would have to carefully manage memory and multitasking — today, the vast majority of users simply use a web browser.” FCC to fight ‘cramming’ o phone bills: “Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski announced Monday that he plans to propose new rules that would make it harder for mobile carriers to hit customers with “mystery fees” on their monthly bills.”
Foreign Policy just ran another “Postcards from Hell” feature detailing the worst of the worst from their “Failed States Index.” It’s worth a look. Sixty images depict the consequences of corruption, endemic violence, totalitarianism, and central planning. Unfortunately, FP doesn’t seem to recognize the connections between these problems. The “failed state” is one of too little power, except sometimes when it has power and it still fails; but then we can blame things like wars, mineral wealth, or climatological factors, right?
Immediately, they blame the problems of the Somali people on their lack of a clear, central authority (no mention, of course, of government-perpetrated oppression in Somalia, or the dubious humanitarian credentials of the U.N.’s blue-helmets). If only Somalia had a strong, central government like Eritrea! Then we wouldn’t have to worry about those pesky pirates! But wait, Eritrea makes it on FP’s list too. At least an oppressive state can qualify as a failed state.
North Korea shows up a bit later, which inspires one to ask why this state, the model of centralization, failed. It surely can’t be because the state has too little power. Instead, the obvious answer must be that Pyongyang’s policy of collectivization and top-down economic planning produces massive poverty. But does FP draw this conclusion? No. Apparently, the DPRK’s economic woes are the product of a “bad harvest.” A bad harvest that has been recurring for 50 years, presumably. How strange that the south, with its similar weather and geography, has not been devastated by climatic caprice. Forget the knowledge and calculation problems associated with the lack of a price system, collectivized capital, and no markets — in the 21st century, we’re still at the mercy of the rains.
CEI Senior Fellow Greg Conko has an excellent piece in today’s Wall Street Journal. Greg doesn’t think it’s right that the FDA is denying terminally ill patients access to potentially life-saving treatments.
The latest case in point is a drug called Avastin. It is approved for treating several types of cancer. But the FDA is moving to revoke its approval for treating breast cancer. This has, understandably, upset many breast cancer patients and their doctors.
The heart of the matter is who shall be in charge of treatment decisions. Should it be patients and doctors? Or should the FDA decide for them?
Greg thinks a decentralized approach is better. Different patients will react to the same drug in different ways. A doctor can see if Avastin works or not for a patient, and they can make the right decision from there. The FDA relies on averages and medians for making its approval decisions, ignoring individuals. The trouble with that is, as Greg points out, there is no such thing as an average cancer patient.
A few weeks ago, I interviewed Greg about Avastin and the FDA here.
Yahoo! News reports that “the Supreme Court has ruled for Wal-Mart in its fight to block a massive sex discrimination lawsuit on behalf of women who work there. The court ruled unanimously Monday that the lawsuit against Wal-Mart Stores Inc. cannot proceed as a class action, reversing a decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. The lawsuit could have involved up to 1.6 million women, with Wal-Mart facing potentially billions of dollars in damages. Now, the handful of women who brought the lawsuit may pursue their claims on their own, with much less money at stake and less pressure on Wal-Mart to settle.”
I earlier explained why the class-action lawsuit against Wal-Mart was baseless, how it was based on politically-correct junk science (like a sociology “expert” hired by the women’s lawyers falsely claiming that white male managers are somehow more sexist than managers of other races, which is hard to square with the fact that women have long had more legal rights in European countries than in the Third World, where practices like female infanticide and marriage by abduction occur), how it ignored the plain language of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and was effectively a form of forum-shopping.
Letting a San Francisco judge and jury hear a class-action against Wal-Mart over its employment practices all over the country amounted to forum-shopping, in that the lawyers suing Wal-Mart deliberately picked one of the most liberal, anti-employer jurisdictions in which to file their lawsuit (the San Francisco Bay area) in order to have that idiosyncratic region effectively decide a national case against the company. This effectively deprives Wal-Mart of a representative jury and judge in the case against it, and it inflicts the jurisprudence of one region on an entire national company, to the exclusion of other regions, whose judges would effectively be unable to apply their long-established precedents limiting the use of junk science in discrimination cases, to the Wal-Mart stores within their region. (Judges vary a lot from region to region in how they handle discrimination cases and how they interpret the rules regarding class-action lawsuits.)
Wiretaps, surveillance, and searches of private property cannot be authorized and executed without a warrant issued by a judge, who (hopefully) maintains the commitment to privacy enshrined in the Constitution under the fourth amendment. However, the Federal Reserve has essentially assumed plenary power for authorizing and executing these privileges against Wall Street banks by means of its almost 2,000 undercover federal regulators who monitor everything from employee lunch conversation to “financial performance,” hoping to catch banks slipping up in regards to regulations and working to provide inside information to federal regulators about the inner workers of these financial firms.
The first problem here is the obvious violation of the right to privacy to which these companies and their clients are entitled under the constitution. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of these undercover Fed cops is that their presence has been both authorized and executed by a politicized bureaucracy (the Fed) instead of first passing through constitutional scrutiny in our judicial system. Worse, this program isn’t even temporary, as the “embeds” (another nickname for the Fed’s army of financial narcs) each have a five-year term at one bank before being cycled to the next one. The self-contradictions of government abound, as it is blatantly illegal to search one’s private property without a warrant but legal to do the same to private enterprise.
Second, the Fed has extended its tentacles too far. Have we learned nothing from the failure of centrally planned economies and their cloak and dagger environment of constant surveillance required to ensure compliance to the government “plan?” Contrary to its incessant claims, government cannot effectively “guide” the private sector — the information that the embeds collect only further enables a bloated bureaucracy of federal regulators to further aggrandize itself while shackling the private sector. Ultimately, the permanent federal surveillance or “oversight” (as regulators prefer to say), seems to only be a euphemism used to hide Big Government’s inherent goal of nationalization.
3G vs. 4G: What You Should Know Before You Switch: “Those are some of the ways Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint are describing 4G, as they push hard for smartphone users to convert to their new, upgraded networks.”
Fareed Zakaria: Let’s use Facebook and Twitter to create a 21st century Constitution: “One of President Barack Obama’s most scrutinized statements prior to the 2008 election was one in which he concluded that the U.S. Constitution was a flawed document since it was “a charter of negative liberties.” But according to CNN host and Time magazine’s Fareed Zakaria, the president might have been on to something.”
As the crisis in the eurozone continues to spiral out of control, I’ve sometimes thought about what must be going through the heads of economic liberals in Greece, Spain, Portugal, etc. “We told you so!” comes to mind. After all, many have seen the sunset of crippling political policies enacted by previous fascist regimes and military dictatorships only to be followed by crippling far-left policies. It turns out that you can’t simply borrow yourself into prosperity. It turns out that reckless attempts to do so will eventually result in severe, very observable negative economic consequences. And now the chickens are coming home to roost.
Al Jazeera recently produced a short video documentary on Greece’s Liberal Alliance. I think this helped answer my question about the thoughts of libertarians in collapsing Mediterranean Europe:
As legal commentator Ted Frank notes, ABC was rewarded for deliberate scaremongering and deceptive reporting that created needless fear and anxiety among Toyota owners with a coveted journalism award: “Brian Ross of ABC News repeatedly used footage of Sean Kane criticizing Toyota over sudden acceleration without telling viewers that Kane was being paid by plaintiffs’ attorneys pushing bogus product liability claims; he also faked footage of a tachometer speeding out of control to push the “deadly Toyota” meme. All of these scare tactics and hysteria turned out to be utterly false, and refuted by a NASA/NHTSA report finding nothing wrong with the electronics in the automobile. Ross and ABC News haven’t retracted their scare-tactic stories or even apologized, much less slunk off in disgrace. Rather, ABC News submitted Ross’s quack reports for an Edward R. Murrow Award — and got the award, doubling the scandal.”
At Gawker, John Cook calls Ross “America’s Wrongest Reporter” for “his coverage of the Toyota unintended acceleration story,” which had the effect of needlessly “Fostering Global Panic Based on” falsehoods:
“Ross, you will recall, was one of the driving forces behind the Runaway Toyota Panic of ’10, which was later determined by NASA and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to have been largely the result of idiots stepping on the accelerator when they intended to step on the brake, and of other idiots talking about it on TV. Ross was one of those idiots. For some reason, ABC News submitted four of Ross’ Toyota reports to the Radio Television Digital News Association for award consideration. One report they didn’t submit was the one where Gawker caught Ross staging footage to make it seem like a Toyota was accelerating out of control when it was in fact parked with the emergency brake on, doors open, and someone stepping on the gas … In two of the winning reports, Ross quoted safety expert Sean Kane criticizing Toyota and insisting that there were cases of unintended acceleration that “couldn’t be explained by floormats,” which Toyota had recalled in 2009 after some mats became stuck under gas pedals. What he didn’t report was that Kane was being paid by plaintiff’s attorneys who were suing Toyota over unintended acceleration cases, and so had a financial incentive to argue that there was more to the Runaway Toyota scare than just floormats … [Kane's] position—that electronics were involved—was later eviscerated by the NASA/NHTSA report, which found “no electronic flaws in Toyota vehicles capable of producing the large throttle openings required to create dangerous high-speed unintended acceleration incidents.”
As Gawker notes, Ross has a “documented history of shamelessly hyping cooked stories” stretching back to “the 2001 anthrax attacks.”
Jennifer Hughes is in charge of issuing permits for Montgomery County, Maryland’s government. She told WUSA, a local tv station, that it is “technically illegal to run even the smallest lemonade stand in the county, but inspectors usually don’t go looking for them.” Some enterprising children recently set up some lemonade stands outside of the U.S. Open, which is played in Montgomery County. They plan to donate the money they make to charity. Officials quickly shut down the stands and fined the children’s parents $500.
After a round of bad publicity, the county rescinded the fines. They are also allowing the children to re-open the lemonade stands, so long as they’re on an out-of-the-way road.
It’s good that these children are learning about entrepreneurship and running a business at such a young age. One worries, though, about the lessons Montgomery County is teaching them.
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