Support the troops? Not Bush supporters. When pilots are downed or crash in Iraq, they radio for help. If no one answers, it may be because a Bush crony sold the Pentagon a lemon.

It turns out that Bush supporters are supplying the military in Iraq with defective emergency radios (Andy Pasztor, WSJ):

A criminal investigation of an L-3 Communications Holdings Inc. unit that supplied defective parts for military radios has expanded to include at least several other programs involving the unit, government officials familiar with the case said.

It is too early to tell how widespread the problems stemming from the unit's alleged quality-control lapses may be. Several federal agencies recently warned managers of weapons programs throughout the Pentagon about the parts problem and the broader investigation, which includes the Pentagon's most advanced artillery shells.

Government officials say expansion of the investigation, which is led by the Los Angeles U.S. attorney's office, means L-3, a New York defense contractor, could be subject to greater penalties if found guilty of wrongdoing.

L-3 has blocked public release of a list of programs for which the unit, Interstate Electronics Corp., supplied parts, saying it is proprietary information, according to the Defense Contract Management Agency, the Pentagon office responsible for overseeing contracts and sometimes for tracking suspect parts. A spokesman for Interstate Electronics said, "We have provided all information that we have to government representatives."

The widening probe comes months after government agents raided the offices of Interstate Electronics in Anaheim, Calif., which provided defective electronic parts for hand-held radios designed to communicate with downed pilots and search-and-rescue teams. Boeing Co., the prime contractor for the Air Force radio contract, has recalled some of the emergency-locator units and is under pressure to recall others. The raid and the subsequent investigation were reported previously.

[...]

The L-3 unit didn't make the defective parts but purchased them from two Southern California companies, which makes it more difficult for Pentagon officials to track their use. Boeing said it has taken corrective action with regard to the radios and is cooperating with investigators. A Raytheon spokesman said the company is aware of the investigation.

The Defense Contract Management Agency, however, on Friday issued a notice stating that certain "printed wiring boards" installed by the L-3 unit failed to meet manufacturing standards, and such parts "are used in many different military program applications such as" the emergency radio locator and Excalibur programs. The alert urged program managers to "evaluate the risk presented by potentially nonconforming" circuit boards. The notice indicated that substandard parts may have been used from 2002 to 2004.

The notice also said the circuit-board makers, TTM Technologies Inc. of Santa Ana, Calif., and Sanmina-SCI Corp. of Costa Mesa, Calif., used insufficient copper plating, and that 80% of the parts made by TTM failed subsequent analyses.

Four out of five of the parts made by TTM failed — so the Bush administration sends them to Iraq to "communicate with downed pilots and search-and-rescue teams." This isn't supporting the troops: it's killing more of them.

What's the Bush connection? One of them is the Chairman of TTM Technologies, a Mr. Jeffrey W. Goettman, who contributed $2,000 to the Bush campaign from his home in McLean, Virginia, a 15-minute drive from the White House. And Bush contributors, as we know, rule the administration.

Bush supporters always manage to find a way to sufficiently compensate themselves for their crimes. Jure Sola, the Chairman and CEO of Sanmina-SCI and another Bush contributor, paid himself $1.3 million in salary and bonuses and granted himself over $23 million in stock options for ensuring that American military emergency radios were equipped with "insufficient" copper plating.

How would you feel if when you called 911, you were hung up on? That's what the Bushies have done to our pilots. How can volunteer soldiers be asked to fight a war with defective radios and bad artillery shells?

What's next? Will we learn that those yellow-ribbon "Support the Troops" SUV magnets are carcinogenic? At least we know that, from the point of view of Bush cronies, they are a total lie.

{ 8:48 AM }

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President Bush welcomes Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah
to his ranch in Crawford today. [4/25/05, AP]
I guess Jeff Gannon wasn't available.

{ 3:39 PM }

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The case of the missing $11,500,000,000,000. Where will all that money, saved by idle Paris Hiltons if the US estate tax is attacked, end up?

Bermuda:

Although they have only 1 percent of the world's inhabitants, they hold a quarter of United States stocks and nearly a third of all the globe's assets.

They're tax havens: 70 mostly tiny nations that offer no-tax or low-tax status to the wealthy so they can stash their money. Usually, the process is so secret that it draws little attention. But the sums - and lost tax revenues - are growing so large that the havens are getting new and unaccustomed scrutiny.

For example: When London's Tax Justice Network (TJN) reported a month ago that rich individuals worldwide had stashed $11.5 trillion of their assets in tax havens, it caused a fuss in Europe. "Super-rich hide trillions offshore," blazed a British newspaper headline.

Although that report received little notice outside Europe, there are rumblings of concern in the United States. That's not surprising. Nations lose an estimated $255 billion in tax revenues a year because of the havens, according to TJN. The US alone probably loses $60 billion a year, a tax expert estimates.

The loss hits not only prosperous industrial countries, but also developing nations. As a result, dozens of church groups* and other nongovernmental organizations concerned with world poverty are joining tax reformers in what will probably become a major political battle. They aim to stem the outflow of money from poor nations into tax havens - an outpouring that may exceed today's global foreign aid of some $60 billion a year.

"If we are serious about reducing poverty, one of the first things we need to tackle is an international financial system run by the rich, for the rich, at the expense of the poor," states David Woodward, director of the New Economics Foundation, a London think tank.

Corrupt officials in poor nations, illegally, and multinational corporations, mostly legally, siphon huge amounts of money into bank accounts and shell companies in 70 tax havens, such as the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, and Jersey.

"It's going to be the next major issue," forecasts Lucy Komisar, a New York journalist writing a book on offshore banking. She compares the drive against tax havens with the civil rights movement of the 1960s, in which she participated, and the feminist and environmental movements of more recent decades.

*Internationally, there still appear to be religious groups that are interested in alleviating poverty. This is in direct contrast to the United States, where many church groups are preoccupied with outlawing consensual adult sex, protecting a clerical class of pedophiles, and creating poverty and disease through a wide variety of political mechanisms.

Meanwhile, can we sic Eliot Spitzer on this tax haven thing?

{ 3:13 PM }

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Est-ce vrai? There are many forms of societal dominance: military, economic, and linguistic:

The top 20 global languages - defined in terms of their use as a first or second language - provide an interesting reflection on the fortunes of those languages that have spread by organic growth and those that have expanded by means of mergers and acquisitions. At the top of the league table is Mandarin Chinese, which has 1,052 million speakers, more than twice as many as the next highest, English, with 508 million. Third is Hindi with 487 million and fourth Spanish, with 417 million. Of course, English is a far more global language - though primarily as a second language - than Chinese, the vast majority of whose speakers live in China. But with the present rise of China - and indeed India - it would not be difficult to imagine Mandarin and Hindi becoming far more widely spoken by 2100. By way of contrast, French, which until the early 20th century was, with English, the global language of choice, albeit with rather more prestige, now lingers in ninth place in the table, with a mere 128 million speakers - little more than half the number of Bengali speakers, and just above Urdu.

History teaches us that the future will always be shaped in large part by the unexpected and the unknowable: language is a classic case in point. Even the mightiest languages have fallen, and the future of the mightiest of our time - English - can never be secure or guaranteed, whatever the appearances to the contrary. Languages follow something like Darwin's law of evolution: they come and go, though their life spans vary enormously. Of the approximately 7,000 language communities in the world today, more than half have fewer than 5,000 speakers, and 1,000 fewer than a dozen: many will be extinct within a generation. But which languages, a millennium from now, will still be prospering, which will be the dominant global languages, and which will be the lingua franca? From our vantage point in the early 21st century, this remains entirely unpredictable.

From a review of Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World by Nicholas Ostler.

Want to brush up on your Mandarin? Start at LanguageGuide.org.

{ 10:57 AM }

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