US Politics: Debt Teafault

[The Iceman of the North]

And given that drone strikes cause collateral damage, do other military intervention tactics avoid them? How does that balance against the protection of U.S. service members? If drone strikes are as likely to cause collateral damages as sending in ground troops, then it's a win for the U.S. because we do not risk the lives of our enlisted. The balance will still be in our favor even if the drone strikes cause more collateral damages, up to a certain point.

How would ground troops cause more 'collateral damage' than drone strikes (unless you believe those troops are incompetent)? And why should the protection of U.S. service members be more important than the protection of innocent civilians?

[Shryke]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alex-palombo/what-19th-amendment_b_4124137.html

As of November 5, Texans must show a photo ID with their up-to-date legal name. It sounds like such a small thing, but according to the Brennan Center for Justice, only 66 percent of voting age women have ready access to a photo document that will attest to proof of citizenship. This is largely because young women have not updated their documents with their married names, a circumstance that doesn't affect male voters in any significant way. Suddenly 34 percent of women voters are scrambling for an acceptable ID, while 99 percent of men are home free.

They found a new way to screw over women and I don't even think they realized it!

[ants]

How would ground troops cause more 'collateral damage' than drone strikes (unless you believe those troops are incompetent)? And why should the protection of U.S. service members be more important than the protection of innocent civilians?

You seriously don't think ground troops don't result in heaps of collateral damage??? I mean, they even usually manage to shoot themselves at some stage in a campaign.

[The Iceman of the North]

I was talking about 'less' than drones, not none.

[TerraPrime]

How would ground troops cause more 'collateral damage' than drone strikes (unless you believe those troops are incompetent)? And why should the protection of U.S. service members be more important than the protection of innocent civilians?

I don't know that ground troops do, or not. But I can envision a couple of ways.

1. Timeliness of deployment - based on intelligence, troops are mobilized or drones are launched. It takes more logistics set up to send in the troops than to launch a drone, I'd guess. So in some cases, ground troops may be hitting targets when the real terrorists have already fled the area.

2. Stress-induced miscalculations - humans are prone to make mistakes under stress, and soldiers are not immune to that. When you place soldiers in areas where they can be sniped at or where they can be ambushed, they can over-react to threats.

These may or may not be true in real life, but I think possibility is there.

As for why the U.S. government would care more about lives of American soldiers than innocent civilians of another country, I think that's just what governments are supposed to do - look after the welfare of its citizens. To the U.S. government, the lives of the enlisted *should* be given more weight than the lives of civilians in other countries, though obviously not exclusively so.

[Sixshells]

2. Stress-induced miscalculations - humans are prone to make mistakes under stress, and soldiers are not immune to that. When you place soldiers in areas where they can be sniped at or where they can be ambushed, they can over-react to threats.

Drone pilots and the people giving them orders are not immune to stress and miscalculations too. Just because the pilot is thousands of miles away from the scene doesn't mean that a drone is not directed by humans.

[danro]

Not risking his own life probably reduces stress on the drone pilot. I doubt drone pilots shit themselves from fear very often, something that is not that uncommon for ground troops.

[polishgenius]

Drone pilots and the people giving them orders are not immune to stress and miscalculations too. Just because the pilot is thousands of miles away from the scene doesn't mean that a drone is not directed by humans.

It does mean the pilot is not at risk of death and therefore far more likely to be clear-headed and objective, though.

[Sixshells]

There are other sources of stress than being at risk of losing their own life. There have been several times mention on this forum of drone operators suffering from burnout or PTSD, so they are exposed to forms of stress, even if not of the same kind than ground troops do.

http://www.npr.org/2011/12/19/143926857/report-high-levels-of-burnout-in-u-s-drone-pilots

A new Pentagon study shows that almost 30 percent of drone pilots surveyed suffer from what the military calls "burnout." It's the first time the military has tried to measure the psychological impact of waging a "remote-controlled war."

The report, commissioned by the U.S. Air Force, shows that 29 percent of the drone pilots surveyed said they were burned out and suffered from high levels of fatigue. The Air Force doesn't consider this a dangerous level of stress.

However, 17 percent of active duty drone pilots surveyed are thought to be "clinically distressed." The Air Force says this means the pilots' stress level has crossed a threshold where it's now affecting the pilots' work and family. A large majority of the pilots said they're not getting any counseling for their stress.

ETA: Not simply stress, but fatigue cause people to make more mistakes.

[Sci-2]

PAC dollars used to employ family members raise ethical questions

"60 Minutes" correspondent Steve Kroft looks into a practice that has long been an open secret in Washington - politicians using political action committee funds to employ family members.

Eta:

Leadership PACs=Slush funds, says fmr. FEC chair

In theory, a political action committee was supposed to be used by party leaders to raise money for a range of needy candidates' campaigns or by a member of Congress to raise money to advance his or her political career. But in reality, they can be used to pay for everything from babysitters to expensive personal junkets. And the money is often donated by lobbyists or special interest groups seeking influence in Washington.

[lokisnow]

I see where you're coming from with this and I don't necessarily disagree, but my response would be that if we know where these militants are from our drones, why aren't we sending their location information to counterinsurgency groups in Yemen or Pakistan or other country that they're operating in, giving those counterinsurgency groups a chance to apprehend and prosecute the terrorists?

That's gotta be a simple risk-reward calculation. Look at Zero Dark Thirty and how complex that operation was, and even without anything (officially) going wrong with the first helicopter, it still malfunctioned. You send it people, it's high risk, and the risk is that you wind up with a Black Hawk Down situation. Having hostages or a firefight gives the country in question enormous political leverage and enormous leverage in the Press. There's potentially massive, career ending downsides to making the calculation of sending in the Counterinsurgency guys, so again, like in Zero Dark Thirty the potential reward, the upside, has to be of comparable value or greater value. Drones have a far more efficient risk reward calculation. They give small political leverage to the country in question, and most importantly have almost ZERO leverage in the press. The newscycle is bored with the low levels of deaths in a given drone strike and is done talking about them in less than a single day. If drone civilian deaths show up in the morning news, it's highly unlikely that story will survive to the evening news. That means it's a momentary blip on the radar of the american public, each given drone story is only 1/30th of 1/720th of news stories that make it to TV. So utterly no press leverage.

If there were good stories with the drone strikes, stories that had a hook that triggered a strong emotional response, then you'd rise above the 1/30th of 1/720th fraction, which is why the American Citizen story gained traction. It has a clean hook and elicits enormous emotional response, so that's a line worth pursuing, an avenue that has possibility for the media. But when every story is the same, " X number of civilians (all indistinguishable from the X civilians in previous identical reports) killed in drone strike" that is not a line worth pursuing that is an avenue that is boring and repetitive to the media. There is no incentive in reporting on it or pursuing it.

So with the drone strikes, I think that if you want to fix that problem, you don't start with the politicians, you start with the media and with the money. The politicians just religiously follow the stupid and self-serving trends and tendencies of media behavior and if you change the media behavior, trends and tendencies, then you will also cause all the politicians to change. I say that as someone who works in television, btw.

[awesome possum]

In case anyone was unsure of just how obscene the CEO-to-worker pay comparison is in this country, here's a hint: it's obscene enough for corporate America to fight a proposed SEC rule that would require companies to calculate the ratio of their CEO's pay to the median pay of all their employees

Nothing seems to get U.S. corporations' dander up like a threat to the pay and perks of their chief executives.

That's one explanation for corporate America's superheated, turbocharged, over-the-top reaction to the CEO pay ratio rule recently proposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The rule requires most large public companies to calculate the ratio of the pay of their chief executive officer to the median pay of all their employees. Its general terms were mandated by the Dodd-Frank Act, which imposed numerous regulatory changes on corporate and banking behavior in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown.

Wall Street, big banks and corporate lobbying groups have mustered their troops to fight the most important Dodd-Frank provisions. But the opposition to the CEO rule has a different flavor entirely. It's not unusual for the business community to claim that a new regulation will spell the end of industry. In this case, they're arguing that it will threaten the SEC too.

It's not hard to see why. Unlike most SEC regulations, the CEO rule isn't really designed to provide information for investors. Rather, it's designed to provide information for the larger community — for society, if you will. Its aim is to provide ammunition for the argument that the share of corporate profits going to top management, and by extension corporate shareholders, has gotten out of control.

[The Marquis de Leech]

To think Nixon actually ran on a platform of specifying a maximum CEO/employee pay ratio. Forty years later, it's not a case of trying to specify a maximum, it's a case of trying to find out what the bloody thing is! Absolutely insane.

[DanteGabriel]

To think Nixon actually ran on a platform of specifying a maximum CEO/employee pay ratio. Forty years later, it's not a case of trying to specify a maximum, it's a case of trying to find out what the bloody thing is! Absolutely insane.

Hush, it's class warfare to even take note of how much executive pay has outgrown worker pay.