The aftermath of a library bid-rigging scam illustrates how a success in the eyes of prosecutors may yet result in an extended loss for the victimized organization. As the most recent coverage of this local story by the Sacramento Bee indicates, “Prosecutors want a receiver to look into two houses, two rental properties, seven cars and more than 20 bank accounts in search of $815,000 they say was looted from the Sacramento Public Library Authority by three people, including two former library officials, who were convicted last year in a kickback scheme.” (Details available at http://www.sacbee.com/2012/05/12/4484789/sacramento-library-attempts-recoup.html)
The story of the event is an old, if unremarkable, tribute to avarice. Two public servants abused their respective positions of facilities director and security director to operate a scheme where they rigged bids for contracted work to pad prices in exchange for kickbacks. A third crony, the security director’s wife, operated the billing service which generated padded invoices. The case itself took five years to wind its way through the legal system, resulting in criminal convictions for all three crooks. Meanwhile, at the first hint of being exposed, one of the crooks, the facilities director, did his best to transfer his assets into a trust that would provide at least some insulation from legitimate efforts of the victimized library system to recover its stolen funds.
So far, so good. Authorities who followed up on the whistle-blower information that led to the arrest and conviction of the crooks in question may declare victory and administer well-deserved pats on the back for their public service. This service contributed to the larger public security objective of proving that crime does not pay and of criminal convictions that are sending all three embezzlers to jail for several years. Why, then, would the taste of victory elude the victimized library system? The answer lurks towards the end of the article in a little note about the cost of hiring a receiver to facilitate asset recovery.
At $300 an hour, the receiver’s billings may easily eclipse the library’s losses – regardless of whether this effort ends up yielding all or even a portion of the original $815,000. Calculate it this way. Receivers exercise significant authority in administering the affairs of the entity or interests assigned to their care. Their work can and does frequently extend over years, not hours or days. If a receiver is an attorney or judge, $300 looks like a good deal, as billing rates go. However, what has to happen for this work to bear fruit? Someone has to track down assets, which often begins with the more mundane kind of search in which certain investigators and court-records experts specialize. In this particular case, there may well be enough work to employ two people at half-time for a year. This works out to 20 hours per person, times 2, for at least 50 weeks. And this is a conservative projection, amounting to 2,000 hours. Such talent may normally charge $75 an hour, but expect the billing rate to remain $300, which brings the working total to $600,000 in billable fees for just the first year. But wait, there is more. The attorney or other senior individual overseeing this work must also bill to this effort – legitimately so – for things like case management and directing of searches, interpretation of results, and ongoing reporting to the court that appointed the receiver in the first place. Conservatively, then, this means at least another 20 hours per month for case management at $300 an hour. This makes up another 240 hours (or $72,000) to add to the working total. Result? The first year ends up costing at least $672,000 – regardless of how much of the original $815,000 has been recovered. The more complicated the sheltering of assets by the crooks, the more difficult and time-consuming it will be for the receiver to lay hands on them. Consequently, this process is likely to extend well past one year. Look at how long it took to get to this point from the initial legal action in 2007. At this rate of work and expenditure, by the end of Year 2, the recovery process may well have cost $1,344,000 (which is $672,000 times 2) for an unguaranteed recovery of $815,000.
Alternatively, one can argue that it would have been much more cost effective for all individuals involved in library facility contracting to have done their jobs properly, including paying close attention to contracting and independent periodic audits to detect early signs of foul play. If the people who should have done this did not perform this function, then they were stealing their paychecks. And one could argue that they owe the library system recompense. Perhaps it would be too impractical or too difficult to seek this form of restitution. How about garnishing the retirement checks of the two library officials while they are serving time? If they have comfortable public pensions (since both are now at least 65), then the incarcerated facilities director and security director could well be receiving annual payouts of $100,000 or more. Given their prison sentences of 5 and 14 years, garnishing these pensions while the two directors serve just 10 years between them as guests of the state would average $500,000 from each, with a total of $1,000,000. This sum represents almost $200,000 more than the amount of the loss they inflicted. Under the circumstances, it would appear more beneficial to the victimized library to go after the pensions this way than to take on the uncertain return of receivership.
It may feel better to undergo the travail of retrieving ill-gotten gains of these crooks, but the effort may be out of all proportion to the expense. Alternatively, the more unspectacular option of finding a way to garnish their pensions – even if only for the time that they spend behind bars – would yield better and more certain returns. Either way, the societal message remains transmitted that this crime did not pay after all.
-- Nick Catrantzos
Saturday, May 12, 2012
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
Calibrating Military Force between Nation-Building and Whack-a-Mole
Effective national security demands reasoning out how and when to use the military, which also requires knowing one's enemy.
In the Wall Street Journal’s “Al Qaeda Is Far From Defeated” (retrieved April 30, 2012 from http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304723304577369780858510366.html?KEYWORDS=seth+jones), Seth Jones stakes out the position that Al Qaeda is not only not dead but hardly even resting. He makes a compelling argument. But where the essay contrasts Director of National Intelligence James Clapper when citing the latter’s claim that Al Qaeda is largely a symbolic threat at this point, there is less support for Jones’ position than a casual reading suggests. Why? Clapper and Jones are both right.
To frame Clapper’s comment in a larger context, just because a terrorist organization is thwarted in directly carrying out its previously notorious strikes, this does not automatically eliminate its threat potential. Indeed national, even global, movements thrive on the symbolic as a unifying force and spur to action in the face of shifting odds. Were Christians in the Roman arena not sustained by their symbolic and otherwise futile opposition to an apparently indomitable, ruling adversary? History is full of instances where saints and rogues were once dismissed as inconsequential underdogs sustained only by a threadbare, symbolic remonstrance. And yet, some of them prevailed. Witness Gandhi and Walesa to epitomize civilized sabotage, or Castro and Khomeini to exemplify more cutthroat regime change. Before ascending to positions of consequence, any of these figures could have just as easily been dismissed as a fringe character offering only symbolic menace to the prevailing order.
America leads the world in advertising, social media creation, and sensory image manipulation – that is, in most of the instruments of hype that rage through the world like a pestilence. Unsurprisingly, we Americans exaggerate for effect. It heightens contrast and makes our choices easier. Small wonder then that, in political campaigns, nuance takes a backseat to demonizing the opposition while lionizing our own team and camp. So, in a nation that favors bold contrasts, the overpowering tendency is to cast every major decision and, soon, major policy options in extremes that define the endpoints of a pendulum’s arc as it swings from one position to its opposite.
How does this weakness for extremes apply when employing our military as instrument of diplomacy or weapon to fight terrorism? It manifests itself in endless oscillation between the kind of nation-building that our Iraq war represented and the whack-a-mole approach we used when initially subduing the Taliban and Al Qaeda when first taking the fight to Afghanistan.
Relative success of either option, in the long term, is something for future historians to gauge and analyze and dissect for microscopic examination or debate. Meanwhile, what do we do with the military under such circumstances, before all the results of this examination are in? We either try one option or the other. Over time, the American pattern is to try one option, then the other. And it seems to make little difference which we try first.
The more satisfying, at least on its surface, is the whack-a-mole alternative. Thanks to mature, competent special forces (e.g. Navy SEALs) backed by superior military technology (e.g. Predator drones and precision munitions), the U.S. commands an impressive capacity for obliterating identifiable villains. Thus, once riled, we like to strike back and to make it count.
Now there’s the rub: making it count. First, in today’s battle space, not all adversaries make themselves identifiable as state-supported actors operating within a precise geographical footprint for us to target. When they do oblige, to be sure, SEALs and drones alter enemy life expectancies and freedom of maneuver.
There is a second frustration with the whack-a-mole approach. Part of it traces to this “symbolic” residue. We invariably agonize over the possibility that whacking even our sworn adversaries may only treat the symptom while aggravating the disease. And this worry, in turn, paves the way for the urge to engage in nation-building.
Nation-building is broad in scope, hence less achievable than traditional military objectives like taking high ground or defending a castle from frontal attack. Nation-building takes colossal investments of people, time, and resources. It is no simple task to bring popular elections to a downtrodden population whose tribal history has only taught subjugation to one warlord until a stronger one takes his place. Such nation-building goals require foundational steps along the way, most of which lack a traditional military stamp, such as promotion of literacy, formulation of political coalitions, fostering of public communications, and development of infrastructure to support connectivity with the larger world that transcends the boundaries of tribe and village, feud and tradition. Meanwhile, this effort also requires active, ongoing thug suppression to keep gradual processes from being negated by rascals, profiteers, and whatever armed brutes and predators rage otherwise unchecked throughout the landscape in native guise.
The frustrations of nation-building are many, but two of the most chronically insoluble must surely be metrics and sustainability.
The metrics dilemma bedevils a military leader no less than it would any business executive. It is one thing to capture enemy ground or defeat an enemy brigade, quite another to safely declare that democratic institutions have finally taken root. So, how much nation-building is enough? How do we tell we are winning, let alone when we are done?
The sustainability dilemma is equally enervating. If the only apparent progress in nation-building remains indelibly linked to the presence of American troops, then how long do we stay to perform duties ranging from infrastructure support to thug suppression? Moreover, what kind of victory can we claim if conditions revert to Darwinian tribal hegemony as soon as our troops withdraw? To make matters worse, at what point in a long engagement do we create our own diminishing returns by overstaying our welcome? At some point, as Iraq and, to a lesser and more gradual extent, Okinawa have shown, any foreign military force grows unpopular over time. In Iraq, Americans went from welcome liberators to unwanted foreign occupiers. Invariably, if conditions deteriorate, few scapegoats rival a foreign occupying force to blame for everything that goes wrong. And it makes little difference whether our military acts with the same discipline and focus today as it did yesterday, at the outbreak of hostilities. Meanwhile, nation-building draws troops more and more into unfamiliar territory that most workers would regard as laboring outside of their skill, purview, or competence. Nor is it possible to reformat troops like hard drives, because they cannot forsake traditional military duties without risking their lives. On the one hand, nation-building requires them to extend fraternal assistance to strangers and the disadvantaged. On the other hand, survival requires them to dodge traps, improvised explosives, and gunfire directed at them by adversaries indistinguishable from the people the troops are trying to help.
All of this brings us back to the situation now confronting Mr. Jones, General Clapper, and American policy for military deployments. Jones argues the folly of running out of the Middle East prematurely, which may be interpreted as a call for ongoing nation-building. America’s fatigue with the cost and uncertain return on investment for nation-building would appear to signal an unyielding swing of the pendulum into what has now become its unmistakable arc and endpoint. Back we go to whack-a-mole mode, where what magnifies the allure is a visible saving of resources as long as no actual whacking is in progress. So we wait, as needed, although Jones is right to raise an eyebrow at how transplanting expeditionary forces from Afghanistan or Iraq to Australia makes sense if, as seems to be the case, the moles most likely to qualify for whacking are more likely to emerge from the Near East than the Far East.
These pendulum-friendly strategies no longer constitute a problem so much as a predicament. They are institutionalized options almost capable of operating on autopilot. What distinguishes them from problems, as Richard Farson once proposed in his nonfiction Management of the Absurd, is that they are situations that demand a larger frame to appreciate deeper, predictable causes that require more than analytic thinking to handle. Indeed predicaments require interpretive thinking, of the kind that would discern this cyclical pattern of swinging from one military role to the next. Absent such interpretive thinking, one may only wonder if America’s use of the military in efforts to counter terrorism is destined to get worse before it gets better.
-- Nick Catrantzos
In the Wall Street Journal’s “Al Qaeda Is Far From Defeated” (retrieved April 30, 2012 from http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304723304577369780858510366.html?KEYWORDS=seth+jones), Seth Jones stakes out the position that Al Qaeda is not only not dead but hardly even resting. He makes a compelling argument. But where the essay contrasts Director of National Intelligence James Clapper when citing the latter’s claim that Al Qaeda is largely a symbolic threat at this point, there is less support for Jones’ position than a casual reading suggests. Why? Clapper and Jones are both right.
To frame Clapper’s comment in a larger context, just because a terrorist organization is thwarted in directly carrying out its previously notorious strikes, this does not automatically eliminate its threat potential. Indeed national, even global, movements thrive on the symbolic as a unifying force and spur to action in the face of shifting odds. Were Christians in the Roman arena not sustained by their symbolic and otherwise futile opposition to an apparently indomitable, ruling adversary? History is full of instances where saints and rogues were once dismissed as inconsequential underdogs sustained only by a threadbare, symbolic remonstrance. And yet, some of them prevailed. Witness Gandhi and Walesa to epitomize civilized sabotage, or Castro and Khomeini to exemplify more cutthroat regime change. Before ascending to positions of consequence, any of these figures could have just as easily been dismissed as a fringe character offering only symbolic menace to the prevailing order.
America leads the world in advertising, social media creation, and sensory image manipulation – that is, in most of the instruments of hype that rage through the world like a pestilence. Unsurprisingly, we Americans exaggerate for effect. It heightens contrast and makes our choices easier. Small wonder then that, in political campaigns, nuance takes a backseat to demonizing the opposition while lionizing our own team and camp. So, in a nation that favors bold contrasts, the overpowering tendency is to cast every major decision and, soon, major policy options in extremes that define the endpoints of a pendulum’s arc as it swings from one position to its opposite.
How does this weakness for extremes apply when employing our military as instrument of diplomacy or weapon to fight terrorism? It manifests itself in endless oscillation between the kind of nation-building that our Iraq war represented and the whack-a-mole approach we used when initially subduing the Taliban and Al Qaeda when first taking the fight to Afghanistan.
Relative success of either option, in the long term, is something for future historians to gauge and analyze and dissect for microscopic examination or debate. Meanwhile, what do we do with the military under such circumstances, before all the results of this examination are in? We either try one option or the other. Over time, the American pattern is to try one option, then the other. And it seems to make little difference which we try first.
The more satisfying, at least on its surface, is the whack-a-mole alternative. Thanks to mature, competent special forces (e.g. Navy SEALs) backed by superior military technology (e.g. Predator drones and precision munitions), the U.S. commands an impressive capacity for obliterating identifiable villains. Thus, once riled, we like to strike back and to make it count.
Now there’s the rub: making it count. First, in today’s battle space, not all adversaries make themselves identifiable as state-supported actors operating within a precise geographical footprint for us to target. When they do oblige, to be sure, SEALs and drones alter enemy life expectancies and freedom of maneuver.
There is a second frustration with the whack-a-mole approach. Part of it traces to this “symbolic” residue. We invariably agonize over the possibility that whacking even our sworn adversaries may only treat the symptom while aggravating the disease. And this worry, in turn, paves the way for the urge to engage in nation-building.
Nation-building is broad in scope, hence less achievable than traditional military objectives like taking high ground or defending a castle from frontal attack. Nation-building takes colossal investments of people, time, and resources. It is no simple task to bring popular elections to a downtrodden population whose tribal history has only taught subjugation to one warlord until a stronger one takes his place. Such nation-building goals require foundational steps along the way, most of which lack a traditional military stamp, such as promotion of literacy, formulation of political coalitions, fostering of public communications, and development of infrastructure to support connectivity with the larger world that transcends the boundaries of tribe and village, feud and tradition. Meanwhile, this effort also requires active, ongoing thug suppression to keep gradual processes from being negated by rascals, profiteers, and whatever armed brutes and predators rage otherwise unchecked throughout the landscape in native guise.
The frustrations of nation-building are many, but two of the most chronically insoluble must surely be metrics and sustainability.
The metrics dilemma bedevils a military leader no less than it would any business executive. It is one thing to capture enemy ground or defeat an enemy brigade, quite another to safely declare that democratic institutions have finally taken root. So, how much nation-building is enough? How do we tell we are winning, let alone when we are done?
The sustainability dilemma is equally enervating. If the only apparent progress in nation-building remains indelibly linked to the presence of American troops, then how long do we stay to perform duties ranging from infrastructure support to thug suppression? Moreover, what kind of victory can we claim if conditions revert to Darwinian tribal hegemony as soon as our troops withdraw? To make matters worse, at what point in a long engagement do we create our own diminishing returns by overstaying our welcome? At some point, as Iraq and, to a lesser and more gradual extent, Okinawa have shown, any foreign military force grows unpopular over time. In Iraq, Americans went from welcome liberators to unwanted foreign occupiers. Invariably, if conditions deteriorate, few scapegoats rival a foreign occupying force to blame for everything that goes wrong. And it makes little difference whether our military acts with the same discipline and focus today as it did yesterday, at the outbreak of hostilities. Meanwhile, nation-building draws troops more and more into unfamiliar territory that most workers would regard as laboring outside of their skill, purview, or competence. Nor is it possible to reformat troops like hard drives, because they cannot forsake traditional military duties without risking their lives. On the one hand, nation-building requires them to extend fraternal assistance to strangers and the disadvantaged. On the other hand, survival requires them to dodge traps, improvised explosives, and gunfire directed at them by adversaries indistinguishable from the people the troops are trying to help.
All of this brings us back to the situation now confronting Mr. Jones, General Clapper, and American policy for military deployments. Jones argues the folly of running out of the Middle East prematurely, which may be interpreted as a call for ongoing nation-building. America’s fatigue with the cost and uncertain return on investment for nation-building would appear to signal an unyielding swing of the pendulum into what has now become its unmistakable arc and endpoint. Back we go to whack-a-mole mode, where what magnifies the allure is a visible saving of resources as long as no actual whacking is in progress. So we wait, as needed, although Jones is right to raise an eyebrow at how transplanting expeditionary forces from Afghanistan or Iraq to Australia makes sense if, as seems to be the case, the moles most likely to qualify for whacking are more likely to emerge from the Near East than the Far East.
These pendulum-friendly strategies no longer constitute a problem so much as a predicament. They are institutionalized options almost capable of operating on autopilot. What distinguishes them from problems, as Richard Farson once proposed in his nonfiction Management of the Absurd, is that they are situations that demand a larger frame to appreciate deeper, predictable causes that require more than analytic thinking to handle. Indeed predicaments require interpretive thinking, of the kind that would discern this cyclical pattern of swinging from one military role to the next. Absent such interpretive thinking, one may only wonder if America’s use of the military in efforts to counter terrorism is destined to get worse before it gets better.
-- Nick Catrantzos
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