Burger Tampering in America; The GOP's Done for in '02; Broken Pentagon
Burger tampering, the nation's greatest fear. A couple is suing Burger King for $15.5 million because three employees in the kitchen of a Burger King outlet on an upstate New York highway were accused last year of spitting or urinating on Whopper sandwiches, spraying them with oven cleaner or throwing them on the floor before serving them. One of the perps, Daniel P. Musson, 18, of Henrietta, has pleaded guilty to first-degree tampering with a consumer product and agreed to cooperate with investigators. You could argue that urine and oven spray should be admissible as flavoring agents, enhancing a flavorless product. It's the throwing on the floor I don't understand.
Gamaliel Dominguez says his guts reacted poorly to the maltreated Whopper and seeks $3.5 million in damages, plus $10 million in punitive damages. His wife, Clara, is asking for $1 million in damages and an additional $1 million in punitive damages because she fears that her husband's problems will affect her health.
What a lucky couple! For years I've been hoping to find a severed finger in my burger, or a dead mouse in the ketchup. Then I can sue the fast food company or Heinz, and retire. But no such luck. I did once get poisoned on American Airlines. At least I think AA was the culprit. It was my fault for using miles to upgrade to first, on a flight from Chicago to Heathrow. They served lamb, cooked before takeoff and then reheated, and the next day in Cork I had a terrible gut ache and began to throw up. After a few days of thinking it would pass, I finally drove myself to the hospital. Salmonella. I lay in bed with an IV till I recovered. It cost me a bundle. I thought about suing American Airlines, but couldn't face the hassle.
When I was at school we spent hours spiking a can of food with something noxious, then writing to the company in outrage, demanding princely compensation for the emotional injuries we had suffered. The most I got was a replacement jar of Nescafe.
It's so hard to get good help these days. A decent Mexican restaurant in Eureka, two hours north of where I live, had to change location and name after word got about that an employee, angered over some altercation with a customer, had spat in the soup, just like the waiter at the Scribe hotel, in Orwell's Down and Out in London and Paris.
Orwell's waiter was presumably making an overall point about the class system, just like those hayrick burners of the rural 19th century who fill the pages of any history of pyromania. There's a well-regarded work of anthropology called Weapons of the Weak that sets forth deeds like hayrick burning or being drunk on the job, or simply doing a lousy job, all as part of resistance to oppression. I guess the fellows who trashed the Burger King burgers could have opted for that defense.
Why the Republicans Will Do Badly in 2002
I caught sight of Bush's Interior secretary, Gale Norton, on a weekend show pledging that at the end of Bush's first term the air and water of this great country would be cleaner and safer than ever. She couldn't muster any evidence for this bizarre prediction, but Norton certainly does understand one thing: if you're going to rape the environment and get away with it, do it with a demure demeanor. Don't act crazy, so every urban American promising himself a trip to Yellowstone one day won't fear that there'll be a McDonald's sitting next to Old Faithful when he finally hauls himself and his wife along there in the golden years. The craftier course is to adopt strategies like the devolution of regulatory power from federal to state and local authorities?bodies over which industry enjoys an even tighter stranglehold than they do the feds.
But there are plenty of Republicans in Congress who remember the debacle of the midterm elections of 1996, when the Democrats were able to paint Gingrich as an environmental Attila, and the matching debacle of 1998 that finished Gingrich off. Republican Sens. Lincoln Chafee, Olympia Snowe, James Jeffords and Susan Collins have already chided some of the moves as misguided and dangerous for the future political health of the party. It took nearly four years to hear similar warnings about Clinton from Democrats.
In the waning hours of the Clinton era the Democrats laid a series of simple traps and the Bush crowd are falling into it. Take the rules about arsenic in drinking water, in Western states. After a 1994 lawsuit the Clinton administration did nothing for six years. Finally, after it was clear Al Gore was headed for a part-time teaching job at the Columbia J-school, they put an anti-arsenic regulation through as a presidential directive. Same with other last-minute rules and edicts. Along comes Bush, who nullifies the arsenic rule, just as the Democrats knew he would. Now they can paint him as the poisoner of children, even though they happily sanctioned the same poisoning for six years.
For Republicans, the environment is a deadly issue. For Democrats it's almost their only winner, aside from choice. It doesn't matter whether the issue is arsenic or Bush's entirely reasonable refusal to be stampeded about the supposed role of CO2 emissions in any presumptive global warming. It doesn't matter whether the Clinton-issued last-minute directives on logging in roadless areas of national forests are a fraud, or whether Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt okayed test-drilling for oil in the old Navy reserve in Alaska and supervised dreadful attrition of the Endangered Species Act. No matter how demure Norton may talk, the Republicans are going to be painted as nature rapers in the midterm elections in 2002 and it will cost them dearly.
Polls show that even Republicans oppose drilling in ANWR and loosening drinking water standards, and that more than 50 percent support strengthening laws that have long been bugaboos of the industrial right wing, such as the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act. The evidence for this can be seen in the growth of a new environmental group that is already putting George Bush's feet to the fire: Republicans for Environmental Protection. These are Republicans and hardcore environmentalists. And they are gaining more clout inside the party. Martha Marks, president of the group, claims a strong spike upward in membership after the Norton nomination, with as many as 1000 signing up in the last two months.
Broken Pentagon
"There is a general agreement that the U.S. military establishment is in serious need of transformation. The multibillion-dollar question is: What kind?...
"On the programmatic level, the Pentagon is clearly broken...
"Visioneering is a mentality bordering on superstition?and in this regard, the new age swamis are not unlike the oracles mocked by Edward Gibbon in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire?a book that ought to be required reading for the inmates of Versailles on the Potomac, but will not be read, because it is too long to be put into a power point presentation. Mediated by domestic politics, the elixir of techno-revolution has become wildly disconnected from the dirty reality of conflict?which should have been evident in our inability to hit tactical targets in Kosovo, the Russian nightmare in Chechnya, and Israel's growing desperation in the Al Aqsa Intifada."
A fellow in the Pentagon wrote those bitter words. True, he published them only in a personal, not an official, capacity, in the latest edition of Defense Week, a Washington-based newsletter, but that doesn't lessen the force of these considered sentiments from Franklin Spinney, a veteran and well-respected aviation expert with the Pentagon's Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation. Spinney is a contributor to a useful new book, Spirit, Blood and Treasure: The American Cost of Battle in the 21st Century, edited by Donald Vandergriff and published by Presidio Press.
Spinney is decrying the much-advertised "revolution in military affairs," which promises a new generation of robotic sensors based in unmanned airplanes linked to computerized decision-making centers that will in turn fire long-range guided weapons at the foe, presumptively roguish nations like Iraq or Libya.
These chipper scenarios remind Spinney of the last time the Pentagon crackled with promises of the white heat of electronic technology being applied to military affairs, in the era of Robert McNamara in the 1960s, in the war against Vietnam. The dream then was "a near-real-time see-decide-strike system" trying to block transport of supplies and guerrillas from North Vietnam down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The big idea then was to plant camouflaged sensors in the jungle that were linked to a computer center in Thailand, which would then direct air strikes on the targets detected by the sensors. It didn't work. The supplies and fighting people flowed down the trail undeterred. And though the electronics are now more advanced, there's no reason to assume they'll work now, because, as Spinney puts it, the "new age swamis" premise the logic of their solution on an argument from design. "Today's menu of miracles envisions computerized battlefields, where commanders are never confused, where fear does not affect rationality, where the fog and friction of combat are curious anachronisms and mental clarity is always the rule, and where weapons can be fired from safe antiseptic distances to strike the enemy inventory of targets with unerring accuracy."
In Spinney's view the Pentagon's current modernization program is doomed to fail in part because all pretense at rational accounting within the Pentagon has collapsed, this at a time when we're "spending more dollars per unit of combat power than we were at the height of the Cold War (taking out the effects of inflation)." He cites the V-22 Osprey debacle, the 53-percent cost overrun and one-year slippage of the first LPD-17 San Antonio-class landing ship, and yet another stretch-out of the F-22's Raptor test plan as examples of the present accounting and acquisition debacle.
The long-term Pentagon mess was certainly worsened by the "Reinventing Government" drive led by Al Gore back at the dawn of Clinton-time. Gore proclaimed that the Pentagon had begun to operate "using quality management the same way a well-run business uses it." But, as usual, it turned out to be the businesses that were making a killing at the Pentagon, an even better one than they had before the REGO reforms went into effect. An investigation by the Defense Dept.'s inspector general discovered that the REGO reforms dovetailed nicely with the interests of military contractors such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin. The inspector general's report noted that the REGO procurement reform "qualifies most items that the DoD procures as commercial items," which are exempt from oversight. This led to a situation in which the Pentagon was almost blindly accepting the costs and prices claimed by the contractors. The report noted that the rapid pace of mergers of defense companies during the Clinton-Gore years only exacerbated the problem. "If anything, the risks may be greater today because there is such market dominance by a few very large suppliers," the inspector general wrote. "In this environment, getting cost information and maintaining audit rights is a prudent business practice. Failure to do so will be very costly for the Department and ultimately the taxpayer."
The procurement debacle was summed up in the case of Mark Krenik, an Air Force employee who did well for a while with the reinvention of his government job. Krenik worked in an office called Single Agency Manager, or SAM. That office purchases computer audiovisual equipment, supplies and services for many DoD organizations. Ultimately Krenik pled guilty to false claims totaling more than $500,000. Sen. Chuck Grassley described the case in a 1998 hearing into the huge mess of Pentagon accounting. "In his office, there was no separation of duties. Therefore, Mr. Krenik himself was able to cover the waterfront. He developed requirements for goods and services; he wrote purchase orders; he steered contracts to favored vendors; he received and accepted deliveries; he signed receiving reports; and he submitted invoices for payment. It was a piece of cake for Krenik to fabricate phony invoices and receipts, and then get paid. With separation of duties, it would have been very difficult?if not impossible?for him to do what he did. But there was no separation of duties. How did Mr. Krenik get caught? Not by effective internal controls. An alert bank teller in Maryland got suspicious. Mr. Krenik sent the payments to his own bank account. The teller noticed the large deposits in his account were abnormal. She called the Secret Service. Mr. Krenik was caught, and is presently serving a two-year probation."
As a measure of how short "Reinventing Government" along private, corporate lines fell in curbing or even confronting the staggering fraud and waste that is endemic to the Defense Dept., consider that in 1998 the General Accounting Office and the Defense Dept.'s inspector general found that the Pentagon had made more than $2.3 trillion worth of bookkeeping errors, a sum that is larger than the entire federal budget. They also pointed out that the Pentagon had no idea where nearly $120 billion worth of equipment was located, including trucks, tanks and ships.