WELCOME TO OPINIONS BASED ON FACTS (OBOF)
&
THINGS
YOU MAY HAVE MISSED (TYMHM)
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OBOF YEAR FOUR INDEX
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Mar. 21, 2014
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Agenda
1. Thoughts from Floyd.
2. Government spying on government.
THOUGHTS FROM FLOYD
The Post
Office, is it being forced down the same road as Social Security?
In 2006, the United States
Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 (PAEA).
This bill required that the USPS prefund
its future health care benefit payments to retirees for the next 75 years in an
astonishing ten-year time span.
In my opinion,
this is an approach to privatizing the postal service and has been in the works
for many years. The opportunity to get
started towards privatizing came in 2006 under the Geo. W. Bush
administration. Anyone and every one
knows there is no government or private operation that can turn enough money to
make a profit when, at the same time, you have to adhere to the terms of the
2006 Act.
It is said that
the Postal Service looses money and that something has to be done to stop this
loss. The government has now set up an
impossible set of circumstances that preclude any possible operation in the
black. In my opinion there is, and has
been, a conspiracy by the Conservative Faction in our Country to force the
Postal Service into bankruptcy so that the service can be privatized, making
Wall Street richer than ever to say nothing of conservative politicians.
There are a couple of interesting
points that contribute to accomplishing this goal, that are explained by Ralph
Nader. He points out that in 2006, the United States Congress passed the
Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 (PAEA). This bill required
that the USPS prefund its future health care benefit payments to retirees for
the next 75 years in an astonishing ten-year time span.
Under the PAEA, USPS is
required to make $103.7 billion in payments by 2016 to a fund that will pay for
future health benefits of
retirees of the next 75 years. This health benefit prefunding mandate
covers not only current employees that will retire in the future, but employees
yet to be hired who will eventually retire. On top of this, none of the
money that the USPS contributes to this fund can be used to pay for current retiree health benefits. So
the USPS must make payments for current retirees' health benefits in addition to its required health
benefit prepayments for future retirees. This is
something that no other government or
private corporation is required to do and is an incredibly unreasonable burden.
In my opinion, this plan will build
a nest egg for the government to take over when they force USPS into extinction.
In fact, I would bet that the money
isn't even there. This sounds the same as what has happened with the Social
Security Trust Fund, which isn't there anymore.
Furthermore, a July
2009 report2 from the U.S. Postal Service's Office of
Inspector General reveals not only that the prepayments for future retiree
health care benefits required by PAEA bear no relationship to the USPS's future
liabilities but also that they aren't actuarially calculated. The Office
of Inspector General's report even questions the basic assumptions the Office
of Personnel Management (OPM) uses to calculate the USPS's retiree health care
obligations and suggests that they are likely unreasonable.
OPM assumes health care
cost inflation significantly higher than industry accepted standards. OPM
assumes health care cost inflation of 7 percent, while the
standard used across government and private corporations is around 5 percent. All of this means that the unreasonable requirements
under PAEA are even more perverse in that they may result in an overpayment of
nearly $13.2 billion by 2016 -- funding the future retiree health care
obligations by 115 percent.
The deep hole of debt
that is currently facing the U.S.
Postal Service (USPS) is entirely due to the burdensome prepayments for future
retiree health care benefits imposed by Congress in the PAEA. By June
2011, the USPS saw a total net deficit of $19.5 billion, $12.7 billion of which
was borrowed money from Treasury (leaving just $2.3 billion left until the USPS
hits its statutory borrowing limit of $15 billion).3 This $19.5 billion deficit almost
exactly matches the $20.95 billion the USPS made in prepayments to the fund for
future retiree health care benefits by June 2011.
If the prepayments
required under PAEA were never enacted into law, the USPS would not have a net
deficiency of nearly $20 billion, but instead be in the black by at least $1.5
billion. Should the Postmaster General's predictions4 of a nearly $10 billion loss by the end
of the year prove accurate, the USPS would have a net deficit of almost $24
billion. However, it would also have been required to make a total of
nearly $26.5 billion in prepayments in accordance with PAEA by that point. Eliminating
these prepayments, in this scenario, would allow the USPS to be in the black by
$2.5 billion -- instead of seeing a net deficit of $24 billion.
A January
2010 report5 reveals that from 1972 to 2009, the U.S.
Postal Service overpaid the Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS) by about $75
billion and proposes that this be paid back to the Postal Service immediately.
On top of this, an August 2010 report6 projected that the USPS had overpaid the
Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS) by about $6.8 billion by the end of
FY 2009. Combined, these overpayments amount to about $82 billion.
It has been suggested
in these reports that these overpayments to the federal pension systems be
refunded and credited toward the U.S. Postal Service's retiree
health benefit prepayment requirements under PAEA. Having funded about
$38 billion of their $103.7 billion obligation under PAEA, an $82 billion
refund would allow the USPS to fully fund these retiree health benefit
prepayments and end future payments. It would even allow them to pay down
a significant portion of their debt: leaving about $16.3 billion left over to
pay any remaining obligations.
In my opinion, all the money that
USPS has paid, as listed above, is gone, just like the Social Security Trust
Fund money. They are trying everything
they can to get rid of SS and make it a privatized program and that is exactly
what they are trying to do with the Postal Service.
~~~
Report
on CIA Black Sites and Torture May Provoke a Constitutional Crisis
Joshua Holland
Bill Moyers / Op-Ed/Interview
Published: Wednesday 12 March 2014
On Tuesday, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein
(D-CA) accused the Central Intelligence Agency of violating federal law and
undermining Congress’ constitutional oversight powers. She alleges that CIA officials monitored
secure computers used by Capitol Hill staffers to prepare a report that reveals
the agency’s Bush era legacy of black 00 detention sites and enhanced
interrogation programs – methods many have denounced as torture.
This is the latest development in a long-standing feud
between the intelligence agency and Congress. Wrangling over the report, which runs over six
thousand pages and cost the government $42 million to prepare, has led to what
some are calling a “constitutional crisis.”
Three national security reporters in McClatchy Newspapers’ DC office —
Jonathan Landay, Ali Watkins and Marisa Taylor — first reported the alleged snooping last week. BillMoyers.com caught up with Landay to get
some background. Below is a transcript that has been lightly edited for
clarity.
Joshua
Holland: What are the allegations
here, and who is making them?
Jonathan
Landay: We’ve talked to people
who have told us that staffers of the Senate Intelligence Committee determined
that the computers they were using in a special CIA facility to review reports
that were going into their study of the CIA’s now-defunct detention and
interrogation program — that those computers were being monitored by the
agency, in violation of an agreement that they had with the agency.
Holland: This story starts with this report about the so-called enhanced
interrogation program, the detention program. What do your sources indicate is in the report
that the CIA wants to keep under wraps?
Landay: That is the question at
the heart of the matter, and that’s something that we have not been able to
ascertain. That report is still very
much locked up by the Senate Intelligence Committee, nearly 15 months after
they approved a final draft. They are in a major battle with the CIA over the
report and in particular their demands for additional documents.
The Senate Intelligence
Committee staff, we are told, determined that their computers were being
monitored when they were confronted by the CIA over the fact that they had
printed out and removed, allegedly without authorization, secret documents —
documents stamped “top secret” — from an electronic reading room that they had
been provided by the CIA in which to do their work and in which to review
classified documents.
We don’t know exactly what’s in the report. Only people who have been able to read the
report know what’s in it. And that’s
because not even the executive summary has been released at this point. But members of the committee have said in
public, in hearings and elsewhere, that there are very disturbing findings in
this report, that the report shows that the information that was gained through
waterboarding and these other so-called enhanced interrogation techniques,
which a lot of experts consider to be torture, had very little value at all.
The committee chairwoman, Dianne Feinstein, has said
publicly — and this would be in response to the film Zero Dark Thirty — that these
interrogation methods did not produce the intelligence that led the CIA to
identify Osama Bin Laden’s last hiding place in Pakistan, and they objected to
the film because, in their view, the film left viewers with the impression
that, in fact, it was through the use of methods like waterboarding that the
United States was able to glean the information that led them to Osama Bin
Laden’s last hideout.
Landay: I’m not sure that they
have the final word. After the Intelligence Committee voted, very narrowly, to
approve the final draft of the report, they also gave the CIA three months in
which to respond to their findings, as well as to recommend redactions of
information that perhaps, in their judgment, would compromise some aspect of
national security. We don’t know how
much of the report we’re going to get to see. There’s a 300-page executive
summary, but the report itself is massive. It’s 6,300 pages. There are thousands of footnotes. And so the committee was waiting for the CIA’s
official response. They were supposed to give that to the committee within 60
days. They finally got it after six months.
But they’ve also been requesting additional documents,
which they’ve not gotten. And that’s
where it appears the fight was hung up — when it became clear to the CIA that
the committee was asking for documents that they shouldn’t have had. Then the CIA went back and checked logs of the
computers in this special facility — which is where the allegation that they
were monitoring these computers came from — and determined that the staff had
removed documents from this facility that they shouldn’t have had.
Landay: “Monitoring” has a number
of connotations. Even my computer here in our newsroom keeps logs of my use of
my computer to make sure that I’m not doing inappropriate things with it. That seems to be the nature of the monitoring
that the CIA was doing. And it doesn’t appear to have been real-time monitoring
— there wasn’t a CIA officer who was sitting in another room watching what
keystrokes the committee staffers were making.
It’s a requirement in the federal government,
particularly on classified systems, to have monitoring in the form of logging
computers so that they can audit the use of those computers. And the question
is whether or not the CIA did this without the express permission of the
congressional staff, whether the congressional staff had told the CIA, “you
can’t do that,” or whether they had agreed to allow this auditing log to be
compiled on the computers they were using.
Landay: The documents are parts
of what’s been referred to as the Panetta Review. When the agency agreed to start providing
millions of pages of classified emails and reports and other materials related
to the interrogation and detention program, they had a team of agency officials
and contractors review documents before they sent them to the committee for its
use, and this team of reviewers would read the documents and summarize what
these documents were and then send the documents, through a firewall, for use
by the committee staff in their database. What the committee staff appears to have
gotten ahold of are the summaries of these documents, which may include
analytical notes that were written by the reviewer.
We do know that, at least in public, several members of
the committee, in particular, Senator Mark Udall from Colorado , have said that this so-called
Panetta Review shows that the official response of the agency to the
committee’s report was misleading. They
said there were flaws in the committee report. But his contention — and the
contention of other committee members — is that the Panetta Review broadly
substantiates the findings of the committee report.
Landay: There’s an annual threat
assessment hearing that is held by the Senate Intelligence Committee and the
Armed Services Committee on both sides of the Congress. During this year’s threat assessment hearing,
Senator Wyden of Oregon
asked the CIA director, John Brennan, whether or not this particular act
applied to the CIA, and the reply came back to Wyden that, in fact, it did. And this law basically bars accessing of
protected computers by people who don’t have the authority to access those
computers or exceed their authority in accessing those computers.
Holland: You and your colleagues wrote, “The extraordinary battle has created an
unprecedented breakdown in relations between the spy agency and its
congressional overseers and raises significant implications for the separation
of powers between the legislative and executive branches.” Can you put this in a larger context?
Landay: The question is whether
the professional staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee, as the legal
overseers of the CIA, had the legal and constitutional power to take these
classified documents and walk them out of a highly guarded CIA facility to
their own very high security offices up on Capitol Hill or that they exceeded
their oversight powers in doing so. And
this has been a constant theme, a constant tug of war in the history of our
republic between the executive and the Congress over the powers of the Congress
to oversee the executive and the ability of the Congress to obtain documents
from the executive. We’ve seen this many, many times before. For example, we’ve seen it in the case of the
demands by the Senate Judiciary Committee — and other committees — for Justice
Department memos or legal opinions authorizing the use of drones or other means
to kill Americans involved in terrorism.
That’s what lies at the heart of this dispute, the
ability or the power of congressional overseers to oversee what is supposed to
be a very clandestine, secretive agency involved in espionage.
~~~
If the god Lord is willing and the creek don't rise, I'll try to talk with
you again next Wednesday of Thursday
God Bless You All
&
God Bless the United States of America
Floyd
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