Category Archives: Government Ethics

An Innocent Man Was Probably Executed on Gov. Rick Perry’s Watch…Not That Anyone Cares

Is it possible that the G.O.P would nominate and/or the American people would elect for president a man who as governor more likely than not executed an innocent man?

An even more disturbing question would be: Could Gov. Rick Perry be elected president despite his efforts to keep investigators from learning the truth about the Cameron Todd Willingham case both before and after Willingham’s execution?

It seems we will have an answer to these questions in the 2012 campaign.

Apparently, these questions were not of much concern among Texans. According to a recent Politico article written by Alexander Burns and Maggie Haberman, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison who ran against Perry in the gubernatorial primary in the 2010 campaign asked focus groups what they thought about the idea that an innocent man may have been executed on Gov. Perry’s watch. For the most part, the question was a non-issue. According to several (unnamed) former Hutchison staffers, they quoted one individual as saying “It takes balls to execute an innocent man.”

Of course Gov. Perry continues to insist that Willingham was guilty of setting the fire that killed his three girls even though nine independent leading fire experts who have since reviewed the case all say the prosecution’s expert relied on science that has since been discredited.

Gov. RICK PERRY (R), Texas: This is a guy on his- on- in the death chamber, his last breath, he spews an obscenity-laced triad [sic] against his wife. That’s the person who we’re talking about here. And getting all tied up in the process here is, frankly, a deflection of what people across this state and this country need to be looking at. This was a bad man.

These are Willingham’s last words Gov. Perry was referring to:

No question, the words that Willingham directed at his wife are pretty rough. Willingham could have taken the high road but he didn’t. A bad man? Maybe. But to suggest that because Willingham’s last statement, which I agree is obscene and arguably low class, somehow “proves” that he killed his own children tells me that the Texas governor has a very low standard of proof.

Willingham’s spouse believed in his innocence in the beginning but as the execution date drew nearer, she changed her mind and made statements in the media that she believed he was guilty. How many men, innocent or not, in a similar situation would feel betrayed say something similar?

At Gov. Perry’s first debate appearance at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, when challenged about his executive order that would have required girls age 12 and over to get the HPV vaccine, he said that the way he went about it was wrong but explained that he was concerned about these young girls getting a deadly cancer. He “errs on the side of life,” a statement I couldn’t believe he could actually say with a straight face given his unwillingness to err on the side of life with regard to capital punishment.

Toward the end of the debate, Brian Williams asks Gov. Perry the following:

Governor Perry, a question about Texas. Your state has executed 234 death row inmates, more than any other governor in modern times. [Applause] Have you struggled to sleep at night with the idea that any one of those might have been innocent?

Gov. Perry responds:

No, sir. I’ve never struggled with that at all. The state of Texas has a very thoughtful, a very clear process in place of which—when someone commits the most heinous of crimes against our citizens, they get a fair hearing, they go through an appellate process, they go up to the Supreme Court of the United States, if that’s required.

Never struggled with the thought that there’s even the slightest possibility that an innocent man has been executed on his watch at all? The fact that five men who were once on death row who were exonerated on his watch doesn’t give Gov. Perry even a little pause? Five men who would have been executed had Gov. Perry had his way? And even after the recent revelation via exculpatory DNA evidence that an innocent man, Claude Jones was executed just before Gov. George W. Bush handed the governorship to Perry and ascended to the presidency?

If Gov. Perry is so certain of the guilt of every single individual who has been executed on his watch, why does he continue to stymie investigations into the Willingham case? Perhaps even more importantly, why does Gov. Perry continue to block efforts to allow Hank Skinner to have DNA testing which would determine once and for all if Skinner is the murderer Gov. Perry thinks he is before executing him this coming November?

What is Gov. Perry so afraid of?

Gov. Perry would have us believe that the “very clear process” in Texas is so perfect that there is just no way that a wrongfully convicted person could be executed. He is either in denial or doesn’t care if the occasional innocent person is killed by the state (and even if Willingham wasn’t a murderer, he was still “a bad man” so who cares right?). The death penalty is just the sort of a punishment that neither Gov. Perry nor the State of Texas can live without. Judging by the thunderous applause at the very mention of Texas’ 234 executions at the Reagan Library, sadly Gov. Perry is hardly alone in a Republican Party where the majority of its members ironically and hypocritically call themselves “pro-life.”

Double Standards

Now, I’m not one to regularly bang the feminist drum around here… But this is f’ing ridiculous:

Officer Sashay Brown returned to work in May after having her second child. At first, she worked a desk job. Soon after, though, she was forced to patrol the city streets under a new department policy that was meant to force officers who had made dubious claims of health issues back to the street. The Washington Examiner first reported the new policy last week.

“Because of my condition, I am unable to wear my [bulletproof] vest,” Brown wrote in her June 12 request to be detailed back to her station on limited duty. “Wearing my vest is extremely painful and could clog my ducts and slow down the production of my milk supply.” She was then checked out by a department doctor, who advised that Brown be given a limited-duty desk job.

In a June 24 memo to Brown, medical services branch director William Sarvis wrote, “I have reviewed your case and determined that you will not receive authorization to participate in the limited duty work program.”

Sarvis said that until department doctors determine Brown is fit for full duty, she’d either have to take sick leave, or unpaid leave if she didn’t have sick days left.

I’ve been known to offer criticism for some police policies, such as the paid vacations administrative leave that officers often get placed on after shooting someone in a questionable fashion. Or, of the viability at all of public sector unions that work to allow “spiking” of pensions to ensure that officers retire at higher pensions than they ever received in salary. That goes without even getting into the militarization of police in the drug war and the “thin blue line” mentality towards whistleblowers that seems to pervade the industry.

I just don’t understand how you can have a workplace where all that goes on, but if a woman who wants to continue working, and has been advised by the department’s own doctor to go on limited duty, she gets told she has to take sick time or unpaid leave.

I simply can’t imagine such a double standard to be evidence of anything other than outright discrimination.

My family and I spent the past weekend with some friends in northern California, both of whom are police officers. We were discussing work, vacation time, etc, and the husband asked me how my employer accounts for sick time, and I told him that sick time is paid, accounted for separately from vacation time, and generally not really worried about unless someone abuses it to the point where it needs to be addressed. His response: “At least in the private sector you’re allowed to address it. We have some guys taking the max 25-30 days sick every year and can’t do a thing.”

I’m sure the new department policy in this case was put in place to crack down on people abusing the system — something that likely has been going on for many years. Applying the policy in what appears to be such a tone-deaf discriminatory manner is not likely to win them any PR points, and might get them slapped with a lawsuit. Well done, morons!

Will Individualized Medicine Increase Health Inequality?

Ezra Klein has a rather thought-provoking post today about human genome sequencing and its ability to allow doctors to better-tailor treatment to the specific needs of an individual patient. It presents a phenomenal opportunity to both make medicine more effective, and IMHO to make it cheaper by spending less time and energy on substandard treatments. Ezra raised a different point, though, and I think makes a logical error that warrants further discussion:

If that’s the path that medical advances ultimately take, one byproduct will be an immense explosion in health inequality. Right now, health inequality, though significant, is moderated by the fact that the marginal treatments that someone with unlimited resources can access simply don’t work that much better than the treatments someone with more modest means can access. In some cases, they’re significantly worse. In most cases, they’re pretty similar, and often literally the same.

But as those treatments begin to work better, and as we develop the ability to tailor treatments to individuals, we should expect that someone who can pay for the best treatments for their particular DNA sequences to achieve far better health-care outcomes than someone who can’t afford the best treatments and has to settle for general therapies rather than individualized medicine.

I believe Ezra makes assumes the premise that the “best” treatments are also the most expensive treatments. I believe this to be unsupported by evidence.

Suppose 10 different people all happen to have the same malady. To use a common one, let’s say that the malady is hypertension. Multiple drugs today exist for the treatment of hypertension. Some of them may be specific variants (branded or generic) of medications all within a specific class, but often multiple classes of drugs may be used to treat hypertension. Those multiple classes will affect different people in different ways, but my guess is that a typical doctor will offer a “standard” treatment regimen for hypertension and only deviate from that standard if something doesn’t appear to be effective. What’s further important to note is that different doctors may have different “standard” regimen, based on their own experience rather than exact current medical literature.

What the idea of genome sequencing may bring to the table is that medical research can form stronger predictions of a particular person’s response to certain medicines based upon their specific genes, and it is easier to tailor the treatment to the patient. This doesn’t mean that the rich person’s treatment will be more expensive than a poor person’s, but it does mean that someone who has genome sequencing will likely have more effective treatment than someone who does not. What it also means is that someone who has genome sequencing may actually have less expensive medical treatment than someone without, as less effort and dollars can be used adding treatments that are statistically likely to be ineffective.

And herein lies the rub. Will a rich person have better access to genome sequencing than a poor person? Not if we have Ezra’s wet dream: government socialized health care. Once effectiveness at reducing costs is shown, government in its awesome authoritarian-ness will undoubtedly use the desire for cost-cutting in medical treatment to demand genome sequencing of anyone participating in Obamacare. Sure, we civil libertarians will soundly object to government getting access to everyone’s DNA, but I’m sure they’ll tell us, much like they do with the TSA pornoscanners and told us with our social security numbers, that there’s NO CHANCE the genome information will ever be used for anything other than our medical care, and will be completely confidential. And since nobody listens to us civil libertarians today, they’ll get it done.

If Ezra looks at the potential from this angle, I think he’d change his tune. If he sees genome sequencing as a potential cost-cutting measure, rather than an inequality-increasing measure, I’m sure he’d actually push for wider adoption of it. And like any government authoritarian impulse, if something is good [and if we’re paying for it with tax dollars], we might as well make it mandatory, right?

Auto Bailout; Can’t Prove A Counterfactual, But You Can Infer

So the big debate is whether the gov’t should sell their post-IPO shares in GM. At current prices, they’d [unsurprisingly] be losing money on the sale, compared to the amount put up in the bailout.

So we have to ask — was it worth it? To determine that, we can’t base our entire calculation on the return of the bailout. A bailout is offered with the expectation that you might not get *any* return — you bail to prevent the craft from sinking; anything else is gravy. So to determine the worth of the bailout, we have to ask what would have happened in the absence of a bailout. Thankfully, the Center for Automotive Research released their prediction back in 2008:

Researchers at the Center for Automotive Research (CAR) in Ann Arbor, Michigan, estimate the impact on the U.S. economy would be substantial were all—or even half—of the three Detroit-based automotive manufacturers’ U.S. facilities to cease operations. The immediate shock to the economy would be felt well beyond the Detroit Three companies, negatively impacting the U.S. operations of international manufacturers and suppliers as well. Nearly 3 million jobs would be lost in the first year if there is a 100 percent reduction in Detroit Three U.S. operations.

“Our model estimates that a complete shutdown of Detroit Three U.S. production would have a major impact on the U.S. economy in terms of lost wages, reductions in social security receipts, personal income taxes paid, and an increase in transfer payments,” said Sean McAlinden, CAR chief economist and the study’s leader. “The government stands to lose on the level of $60 billion in the first year alone, and the three year total is well over $156 billion.”

Yikes! Sounds bad!

But would the automakers “cease operations”? Would they disappear into an economic black hole, never to be seen again, with only confused and unemployed UAW workers left behind like the un-Raptured masses?

Or would they, as Warren of Coyote Blog suggested way back when, be freed from working for an unproductive corporate environment and re-deployed in ways that their contributions will actually generate value?

So what if GM dies? Letting the GM’s of the world die is one of the best possible things we can do for our economy and the wealth of our nation. Assuming GM’s DNA has a less than one multiplier, then releasing GM’s assets from GM’s control actually increases value. Talented engineers, after some admittedly painful personal dislocation, find jobs designing things people want and value. Their output has more value, which in the long run helps everyone, including themselves.

I can’t find the specific post, but he has another where he suggests that if GM were even to face liquidation, it would not entail the loss of GM’s assets, much of its workforce, or its supply chain. The failure of GM [or Chrysler] would be painful, but fundamentally going through a serious bankruptcy [and/or liquidation] would free GM from its worst corporate problems, possibly returning them to a point where they actually generated value from their operations rather than losses.

Liquidation, of course, is the worst-case scenario. And there were plenty of folks suggesting that liquidation was impossible in the 2008-2010 era, because credit markets had seized and there was NO way anyone in the world would have the capital to buy up assets. But is it true?

Nope. Not at all. You need look no farther than Nortel. Nortel was a MAJOR telecommunications company, existing in one form or another since the late 1800’s, back in the days of the first telephone. It was built into an absolutely enormous conglomerate during the technology boom of the 1990’s, but like many companies in that sector, fell on hard times after the tech crash. They fought through bailouts in 2003 and 2009, but ultimately they declared bankruptcy right in the heart of the credit crunch, hoped to escape intact, but eventually had to go through liquidation. Between then and today, Nortel has basically ceased to exist. A look at the Wikipedia page for the liquidation results suggests that seized credit markets didn’t exactly stop them from finding buyers for their assets.

As an engineer who has dealt with what used to be Nortel and is now a collection of disparate companies that have purchased their assets, I can attest that Nortel has not “ceased operations”. That’s not to say that the changes over the last few years have been pain-free. There has been dislocation, there have been layoffs, and from my discussions with former Nortel employees as well as being a supplier, many things have changed. Fundamentally, though, Nortel’s business units are still in operations under different names. Many Nortel engineers are still employed within the same organization, only with a different letterhead on their business card. And as a supplier, I can say that the disruptions at Nortel have not put all of their suppliers out of business. Being a supplier has become more difficult in many ways — largely because the companies that bought Nortel units are run more efficiently than Nortel was, and this means that supplier competition is tougher — but that is fundamentally a good thing.

Would the experience of Nortel be the same as a potential GM or Chrysler bankruptcy? Obviously, it’s impossible to prove a counterfactual. But that also doesn’t mean that we should accept the claim that bailouts “saved the US auto industry” at face value. Had GM or Chrysler gone bankrupt, it’s likely that their various brands would have been picked up on the open market at various discount rates. Some might have been purchased for their own brand value, others might be purchased to use their factories and design engineers to produce vehicles under different nameplates.

One thinks, then, that the fear was not that the American auto industry would evaporate. The fear, instead, was that the psychological pride of having the “Big Three” would disappear. They didn’t care about jobs, they cared that Americans might be employed working for Toyota rather than for GM. It was nationalism, not economics, that drove decisions. As a result, the US taxpayer is going to prop up a manufacturer with a history of failure and little incentive to change (since one bailout can easily become two or three) solely in order to be able to say that GM still exists. You didn’t save an industry, America. You saved your ego.
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Quote Of The Day

Why we should go after the online poker vendors:

There are plenty of victims of (allegedly) illegal online poker, starting with the desperately-short-of-cash federal and state governments which are deprived of all the taxable revenue ($3 billion, say the feds) from the now-suspected operations. And just ask casino and horse racing executives what they think of the way online poker operators have taken advantage of Congressional fecklessness on the topic.

I can just imagine the response: “It cost a lot of good goddamn lobbying money to to set up these legal gambling monopolies, and now these poker sites want to get in on the action without ponying up the green? F’ em.”

Oh, that’s actually the response from Congress. My bad.

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