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Waste Management

While the federal government dishes out voter-friendly tax cuts and goes on spending sprees abroad, the country's top accountant says we're racing toward a fiscal crisis. Who will bear the brunt? You. Meet your new best friends in Washington: the Government Accountability Office.

06.01.07

Trillions, plural. Trillions of dollars-between two and three, actually. That's how much Congress has spent annually since the Bush administration set up shop in the White House and started writing checks. Given how little we know about certain activities we aren't meant to know about, it's hard to get even the slightest grasp on how much of those trillions are flushed down our federal toilet, which is presumably outfitted with one of Reagan's fabled $640 toilet seats.If anyone can get a grip on it, though, it's the nation's top accountant, David Walker, 56, the GAO's comptroller general, whose job it is to audit, oversee, and report on every penny Congress spends. So incensed is he by the numbers that he's mobilized a national campaign to sound the alarm. In fact, he is the alarm."What we have here is a fiscal cancer," says Walker, referring to America's bloated national debt and deficit. Perched on a couch in his office, Walker-despite the urgency of his message-has the smooth tone of a man whose frankness buttresses his professional objectivity. "The question is, What are we going to do to treat it? Are we going to change our behavior? Are we going to engage in some meaningful treatments in order to create a more positive future and be the first republic to stand the test of time? Or are we just going to continue the status quo?"With the costs of Medicare and Social Security about to skyrocket in light of the coming era of Baby Boomer retirement, the question Walker raises is not whether we'll need to raise taxes and cut spending, but where and by how much. According to GAO estimates, at the current rate of spending, by 2040, the government will be able to do little more than pay interest on the federal debt; spending on entitlement programs-Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid-will by then consume all federal government revenues. By 2051, the economy could be in ruins. It's a simple equation: The bigger the debt, the slower the economy grows; the slower the economy grows, the slower wages climb. Add reduced retirement benefits and higher payroll taxes, and the outlook is, in a word, bleak. "That is … going to affect [Americans] in a very real, pocketbook kind of way," Walker told the Senate Budget Committee in January."People are shocked when they hear the numbers. Absolutely shocked," says Walker, who is spending a good part of his time on the road explaining those numbers. Since September, 2005, he has been headlining the Fiscal Wake-Up Tour, the hottest ticket in public finance and fiscal responsibility on the face of the planet, engaging the public in a realistic dialogue about the United States's financial future, with the hope of fostering an understanding of the dire path we're on and what needs to be done to change course.As head of the GAO, Walker works in downtown D.C., in the office headquarters, a federal building largely indistinguishable from those surrounding it. A paragon of bureaucracy, it has chrome and wood-grain accents in the lobby, giving it a decidedly 1940s feel, a sense of a proud world war victor's monument to civil-service efficiency. Like every other building in the area, it was built so as not to eclipse the Washington Monument in height, sprawling horizontally rather than vertically. From where Walker is sitting, he says he can already see America speeding toward a national crisis."We're in the transparency, performance, and accountability business," he says of the GAO. "We're in the business to state the facts and speak the truth, and not just do oversight, but provide insight and foresight to try to help others to see the way forward." That means that the GAO's reports are open for partisan interpretation. A chief proponent of oversight, Representative Henry Waxman, Democrat of California, has used GAO reports to launch investigations into nearly every nook and cranny of the executive branch, including alleged improprieties by the Environmental Protection Agency (for its 2005 reversal of a statement that said an energy facility off the coast of California needed to meet clean-air standards) and the State Department (the allegedly false claim regarding Saddam Hussein's government's alleged purchase of uranium from Niger). Waxman is also looking into the White House's "loss" of emails that related to contacts with the Department of Justice regarding the recent firings of U.S. Attorneys.Today, Waxman is animated, talking with me in a room in the Capitol where lobbyists and politicians gather around chestnut tables to do business as the latter make their way to and from their voting duties on the adjacent House floor. "The work done by [the GAO] points us in the direction where our oversight is most needed," he says. "In addition to looking at waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer dollars, I think it's important for us to look at government agencies and whether they're serving the public purposes for which they were created, or whether they're becoming dominated by politics or becoming ineffective for other reasons.""When one party controls the Senate, the House, and the White House-and it really doesn't make any difference what party it is-that's generally not good for transparency, accountability, and fiscal responsibility," says Walker. But with Democrats taking control of both chambers of Congress after six years of Republican leadership and ever-surfacing misdeeds, oversight has quickly become a buzzword on Capitol Hill. The freshman Democratic senator Claire McCaskill, Missouri's former state auditor, told the Kansas City Star upon her election that the "GAO is going to love me as a senator" and vowed to have the "GAO's products permeate everything I do in my job." Senator Joe Lieberman, an Independent from Connecticut, at a GAO press conference in February, spoke of how a hearing on Hurricane Katrina recovery led him to see just how concerned the American people are with accountability: "None of the witnesses asked for more money. They all wanted to talk about how the money there is being spent."More recently, Congress has put additional pressure on the inspectors general-the internal auditors of executive agencies-to ramp up their efforts, especially in light of findings such as the Department of the Interior's discovery that its Minerals Management Service might end up forfeiting more than $7 billion in royalties from oil companies over the next five years due to errors in leases signed in the 1990s, despite having discovered those errors in 2000.\n\n\n

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The government is owned by the people, and the people should know what their government is doing.

In fact, oversight has become so significant that Waxman decided to add the word to the official name of the committee he chairs. Now called the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, it holds sweeping investigative power over matters of Congressional interest, and Waxman has put those powers-and the GAO-to use in a manner that would have been considered anathema to Congressional Republicans and the Bush administration during their halcyon "What checks and balances?" days-and for precisely that reason. "The administration should recognize that … they don't own the government," says Waxman. "The government is owned by the people, and the people should know what their government is doing."As the federal budget has ballooned in recent years, many of the recipients of government funds have retreated from the constraints of accountability. One particularly troubling area for both the GAO and the new Congress has been the escalating reliance on contractors to do the work of the government. In February, The New York Times reported that the total annual value of federal contracts doubled from $207 billion in 2000 to approximately $400 billion last year. Meanwhile, "contract actions," defined as both new contracts and payments on existing ones, have become increasingly easy to get: In 2001, 21 percent of government contracts were handed out without hearing other bids. In 2005, a shocking 52 percent were awarded without competition.At the same time as that report was published, the GAO released its biennial update on areas of the federal government at high risk of waste, fraud, and abuse. Not surprisingly, several agencies' contracting and procurement operations made the list, including those of the Department of Defense. In a follow-up report, the GAO revealed that a contract with a Kuwaiti company to provide food service to troops in Iraq for $3 a meal was inexplicably re-awarded to Halliburton, which was paid $5 a meal by the government and which then subcontracted the service back to the Kuwaiti company at the original rate. (The $2-a-meal profits were subsequently recovered from Haliburton.)"In Iraq, we're using contractors in new and unprecedented ways, in numbers that we've never seen before in our history," says Walker. "If we decide that it makes sense to contract for something, what are we doing to make sure that we're being very clear about what we're asking the contractors to do, so that we can hold them accountable for results? And what mechanisms do we have in place to provide adequate oversight to ensure that the taxpayers are going to get good value for their money?"The reconstruction efforts in Iraq have not only highlighted the challenges of keeping government contractors accountable-they have shown how difficult it can be to have meaningful inspection of a government that has displayed outright disdain for oversight. Just before the election last fall, Republicans slipped a provision into a defense spending bill that would eliminate the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction by October, 2007. After a public outcry-and an election that spoke volumes about the public's mistrust of the government's management of the war and reconstruction-legislation was passed to keep the SIGIR office open at least through the fall of 2008. No wonder Republicans wanted that office shut down: In March, it released a scathing report on the government's failure to provide a strategy, structure, or even an understanding of potential problems faced in the reconstruction.The GAO has met similar resistance in its attempts to oversee the government's work in Iraq. Early this year, the State Department refused to grant the GAO's request for accommodations in the department's Green Zone facilities for three auditors at a time over a six-month period, stating that it lacked the resources to facilitate such a stay. On behalf of the GAO, a group of 21 Democratic senators sent a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice expressing their concern about the administrators of a war costing taxpayers $280 million a day, who can't seem to find the resources to put up three additional people.Iraq is, of course, not the only major area of concern for the GAO today, though it's certainly one of the biggest. As Walker's nationwide tour shows, there is one area that the GAO has been urging Congress itself to examine more closely: the nation's increasingly imbalanced long-term fiscal outlook."Where we're at right now, we're running large deficits in the short term, and people's efforts are to reduce or eliminate that," says the comptroller general. "But the real problem's not the short term: The real problem's the long range. We've gone from $20 trillion in liabilities and unfunded commitments in 2001 to $50 trillion in 2006, and those numbers are going up 2 to 4 trillion a year just due to the passage of time."\n\n\n

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If something doesn't change, Generation X and Generation Y, and ultimately their kids and grandkids, will have to pay off this [national debt]-with compounded interest. I don't think that's right, and I'm trying to make sure that we're doing something about it.

To Walker, the numbers are less important than the moral issues behind them. Such a mounting deficit could spell a financial disaster in the not-so-distant future: Spending on entitlement programs would be cut drastically, to the point where anyone under 30 today would be unlikely to receive much, if any, of what he or she is currently paying into those programs; taxes would skyrocket, threatening to completely eliminate the middle class in the United States; and if the United States were forced to default on its loans, interest rates would soar and economic growth would stagnate for at least a decade, leading to a long-term national depression.Beyond that, though, we can only speculate on what might happen. Will we be forced to pawn our national supply of bicycles to China? Will Canada create a wall along its border to prevent cheap Minnesotan labor from flooding into Manitoba? Will the hipster youth of tomorrow be forced to do their freelance graphic-design work from the discomfort of Wi-Fi-equipped boxcars? Hopefully, we'll never find out."If something doesn't change," Walker adds, "Generation X and Generation Y, and ultimately their kids and grandkids, will have to pay off this bill-with compounded interest. I don't think that's right, and I'm trying to make sure that we're doing something about it."

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14 images of badass women who destroyed stereotypes and inspired future generations

These trailblazers redefined what a woman could be.

Throughout history, women have stood up and fought to break down barriers imposed on them from stereotypes and societal expectations. The trailblazers in these photos made history and redefined what a woman could be. In doing so, they paved the way for future generations to stand up and continue to fight for equality.

This article originally appeared on December 14, 2016.

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Why mass shootings spawn conspiracy theories

Mass shootings and conspiracy theories have a long history.

AP Photo/Jessica Hill/The Conversation

Shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

While conspiracy theories are not limited to any topic, there is one type of event that seems particularly likely to spark them: mass shootings, typically defined as attacks in which a shooter kills at least four other people.

When one person kills many others in a single incident, particularly when it seems random, people naturally seek out answers for why the tragedy happened. After all, if a mass shooting is random, anyone can be a target.

Pointing to some nefarious plan by a powerful group – such as the government – can be more comforting than the idea that the attack was the result of a disturbed or mentally ill individual who obtained a firearm legally.

In the United States, where some significant portion of the public believes that the government is out to take their guns, the idea that a mass shooting was orchestrated by the government in an attempt to make guns look bad may be appealing both psychologically and ideologically.

Our studies of mass shootings and conspiracy theories help to shed some light on why these events seem particularly prone to the development of such theories and what the media can do to limit the ideas' spread.

Back to the 1990s

Mass shootings and conspiracy theories have a long history. As far back as the mid-1990s, amid a spate of school shootings, Cutting Edge Ministries, a Christian fundamentalist website, found a supposed connection between the attacks and then-President Bill Clinton.

The group's website claimed that when lines were drawn between groups of school-shooting locations across the U.S., they crossed in Hope, Arkansas, Clinton's hometown. The Cutting Edge Ministries concluded from this map that the "shootings were planned events, with the purpose of convincing enough Americans that guns are an evil that needs to be dealt with severely, thus allowing the Federal Government to achieve its Illuminist goal of seizing all weapons."

Beliefs persist today that mass shootings are staged events, complete with "crisis actors," people who are paid to pretend to be victims of a crime or disaster, all as part of a conspiracy by the government to take away people's guns. The idea has been linked to such tragedies as the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, and the Sandy Hook Elementary attack that resulted in the deaths of 20 children in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012.

These beliefs can become widespread when peddled by prominent people. U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has been in the news recently because of her belief that the Parkland shooting was a "false flag," an event that was disguised to look like another group was responsible. It's not clear, though, in this instance who Rep. Greene felt was really to blame.

Conservative personality Alex Jones recently failed to persuade the Texas Supreme Court to dismiss defamation and injury lawsuits against him by parents of children who were killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting. Jones has, for years, claimed that the Sandy Hook massacre didn't happen, saying "the whole thing was fake," and alleging it happened at the behest of gun-control groups and complicit media outlets.

After the country's deadliest mass shooting to date, with 59 dead and hundreds injured in Las Vegas in 2017, the pattern continued: A conspiracy theory arose that there were multiple shooters, and the notion that the shooting was really done for some other purpose than mass murder.

images.theconversation.com

Shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

Making sense of the senseless

These conspiracy theories are all attempts to make sense of incomprehensibly terrifying events. If a lone shooter, with no clear motive, can singlehandedly take the lives of 60 individuals, while injuring hundreds more, then is anyone really safe?

Conspiracy theories are a way of understanding information. Historian Richard Hofstadter has indicated they can provide motives for events that defy explanation. Mass shootings, then, create an opportunity for people to believe there are larger forces at play, or an ultimate cause that explains the event.

For instance, an idea that a shooter was driven mad by antipsychotic drugs, distributed by the pharmaceutical industry, can provide comfort as opposed to the thought that anyone can be a victim or perpetrator.

Polls have shown that people worry a lot about mass shootings, and more than 30% of Americans said in 2019 that they refused to go particular places such as public events or the mall for fear of being shot.

If the shootings are staged, or the results of an enormous, unknowable or mysterious effort, then they at least becomes somewhat comprehensible. That thought process satisfies the search for a reason that can help people feel more comfort and security in a complex and uncertain world – especially when the reason found either removes the threat or makes it somehow less random.

Some people blame mass shootings on other factors like mental illness that make gun violence an individual issue, not a societal one, or say these events are somehow explained by outside forces. These ideas may seem implausible to most, but they do what conspiracy theories are intended to do: provide people with a sense of knowing and control.

Conspiracy theories have consequences

Conspiracy theories can spark real-world threats – including the QAnon-inspired attack on a pizza restaurant in 2016 and the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection.

They also misdirect blame and distract from efforts to better understand tragedies such as mass shootings. High-quality scholarship could investigate how to better protect public places. But robust debates about how to reduce events such as mass shootings will be less effective if some significant portion of the public believes they are manufactured.

Some journalists and news organizations have already started taking steps to identify and warn audiences against conspiracy theories. Open access to reputable news sources on COVID-19, for example, has helped manage the misinformation of coronavirus conspiracies.

Explicit and clear evaluation of evidence and sources – in headlines and TV subtitles – have helped keep news consumers alert. And pop-up prompts from Twitter and Facebook encourage users to read articles before reposting.

These steps can work, as shown by the substantial drop in misinformation on Twitter following former President Donald Trump's removal from the platform.

Mass shootings may be good fodder for conspiracy theories, but that does not mean people should actually consume such ideas without necessary context or disclaimers.

Michael Rocque is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Bates College.

Stephanie Kelley-Romano is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies at Bates College

This article first appeared on The Conversation on 02.20.21.. You can read it here.

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11 hilarious posts describe the everyday struggles of being a woman

Men have no idea.

Between the bras, makeup, periods, catcalling, sexism, impossible-to-attain beauty standards, and heels, most men wouldn't survive being a woman for a day without having a complete mental breakdown. So here's a slideshow of some of the funniest Tumblr posts about the everyday struggles that women face that men would never understand.

All photos courtesy of Tumblr.

This article originally appeared on 01.09.16

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Cancel all coal projects to have 'fighting chance' against climate crisis, says UN Chief

"Phasing out coal from the electricity sector is the single most important step to get in line with the 1.5 degree goal."

Photo from Pixabay.

A coal power plant.

This article originally appeared on Common Dreams on 3.3.21. You can read it here.

Emphasizing that the world still has a "fighting chance" to limit global warming with immediate and ambitious climate action, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on Tuesday urged governments and the private sector to cancel all planned coal projects, cease financing for coal-fired power plants, and opt instead to support a just transition by investing in renewable energy.

"Once upon a time, coal brought cheap electricity to entire regions and vital jobs to communities," Guterres said in a video message at the virtual meeting of the Powering Past Coal Alliance. "Those days are gone."

"Phasing out coal from the electricity sector is the single most important step to get in line with the 1.5 degree goal," Guterres continued, referring to the policy objective of preventing planetary temperatures from rising more than 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels. "Global coal use in electricity generation must fall by 80% below 2010 levels by 2030," he added.

Meeting the 1.5 °C climate target over the course of this decade is possible, according to Guterres, but will require eliminating "the dirtiest, most polluting and, yes, more and more costly fossil fuel from our power sectors."

Waste Management

While the federal government dishes out voter-friendly tax cuts and goes on spending sprees abroad, the country's top accountant says we're racing toward a fiscal crisis. Who will bear the brunt? You. Meet your new best friends in Washington: the Government Accountability Office.

These trailblazers redefined what a woman could be.

Mass shootings and conspiracy theories have a long history.

Back to the 1990s

Making sense of the senseless

Conspiracy theories have consequences

Men have no idea.

"Phasing out coal from the electricity sector is the single most important step to get in line with the 1.5 degree goal."

Another surprising act of public service from the Satanic Temple.

Every car is different.

Beauty is in the eye of the photoshopper.

Body autonomy means that a person has the right to whatever they want with their own body.

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