Buda Rabblerouser -- Part 3

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Location: Buda, Texas, United States

Technologist, entrepreneur, writer, idealist, activist. A lot of things in our country and world are screwed up right now (government corruption is a prime example), and we can either just watch things get worse or tackle the problems head-on. We need to choose the latter path.

Saturday, March 29, 2008

The "Great Global Warming Swindle" Swindle

I find the debates between so-called "scientists" about whether or not the climate change we're clearly experiencing is primarily man-made or not fascinating. The most interesting debate I've seen so far was a discussion on Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) TV about the "documentary" The Great Global Warming Swindle, which was first shown on UK television in March, 2007.

ABC showed a revised version of that film on Australian TV in July, 2007, and followed up with a very interesting panel session/debate moderated by acclaimed Lateline reporter Tony Jones. Jones, as you'll see, is a terrific interviewer and moderator. He's cool and calm, but "doesn't play," as my friend Connie likes to say about people who won't back off from what they believe is true. I encourage everyone to watch all nine segments of this debate, which are available on YouTube:




Jones' very pointed and unrelenting questioning of UK filmmaker Martin Durkin on Parts 2, 3 and 4 is a modern classic. Clearly, Durkin chose to only show data or include quotations or references in his film that would support his contrarian -- and dangerously off-base and misleading -- view of the whole climate-change issue. The more Jones probed Durkin's deliberate failure to show the key climate data from the last 20 years, the clearer it became that Durkin is simply someone trying to profit from a very controversial topic -- he could care less whether his movie is accurate or positively contributes to the important dialogue about climate change.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of climate change naysayers (such as Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe) who will contend that Durkin's film substantiates their view that the whole global warming issue is just something trumped up by politicians like Al Gore. These individuals will likely not choose to see Tony Jones' probing questions and especially Durkin's inartful dodges, because people who already have their minds made up often don't want to be "confused by the facts." Durkin's clear effort to play to these neanderthals is the real swindle in "The Global Warming Swindle."

Jerry

Addendum: A few weeks back I sent a note to Dr. James Hansen, who heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and is a world renown climate change scientist, inviting him to read my earlier blog piece on the topic (An Inconvenient Truth -- 36 Years Ago). His response:

Jerry,

Thanks. I get the most threatening e-mails from Texas, but also some of the most thoughtful.. Must be an adventure to live there.

Jim


My response:

Jim,

That was an interesting observation. I've been here (Texas) for 24 years, via San Jose, CA (grew up just south of Chicago, went to U. of IL in engineering).

It turns out that there's the Austin area (I live in a little
southern suburb), and then there's pretty much the rest of Texas. Austin is generally pretty open minded and progressive (the local slogan is "Keep Austin Weird"), and of course it's a big university town and the state Capitol. My guess is that many of the most thoughtful comments you receive come from the Austin area. I don't mean to color everyone with the same brush, but indeed there are a lot of Texans in other, more isolated cities whose attitudes are driven by their philosophy rather than reality.

Thursday, March 20, 2008

Compelling Evidence of the OGE's Attempt to Lose Mr. Mineta's CY2000 Financial Disclosure


If you read the four white papers described in yesterday's blog posting (especially this one ), you know that I believe that the U.S. Office of Government Ethics tried to help Mr. Mineta out by "losing" his Calendar Year 2000 Public Financial Disclosure report, only to "re-find" it after the Project on Government Oversight called them on it in POGO's FOIA appeal letter. That particular disclosure, of course, was the only one for which Mr. Mineta was required by law to provide details of his profit of up to $1 million in Trimble Navigation stock options.

Think that maybe I'm just making all this up? Think again. Listen to these two recorded conversations I had with Ms. Denise Shelton, an Ethics Assistant with the OGE whose job is to fulfill requests for copies of financial disclosures of government officials and legislators:

1. February 23, 2007 (recorded discussion) -- I called Denise shortly after I received a copy of the OGE's initial response, dated Feb. 12, 2007, to POGO's Freedom of Information Act request, in which the OGE seemed to say that they no longer had Mr. Mineta's CY2000 disclosure. As you'll hear, Denise tried very hard to find that disclosure but couldn't, and didn't know why it wasn't anywhere in their records. She also confided that she was the person who destroyed disclosures that were over six years old, and kept a list (which I called a log) of those documents. She also said that she had no record of ever destroying Mr. Mineta's CY2000 disclosure. In other words, she found no record that the CY2000 disclosure had ever even existed. I immediately relayed this information to Scott Amey, POGO's General Counsel, who mentioned this amazing admission in his March 12, 2007, FOIA appeal letter to OGE.

2. April 26, 2007 (recorded discussion) -- After the OGE responded in a letter dated April 12, 2007, to POGO's FOIA appeal letter, I wanted to check with Denise to make sure that she could now find the CY2000 disclosure. Listen to what she says now about not keeping a record of what disclosures are destroyed, and how she got in trouble for saying that. Think maybe that someone at OGE was pretty upset by POGO's FOIA appeal letter, and Denise's admission to me that she kept a list of the disclosures she destroyed?

By the way, I don't think for a minute that Ms. Shelton did anything wrong, ethically or legally. These shenanigans are the responsibility of someone much higher up in the OGE chain of command. It's especially ironic when the very agency chartered with ensuring we have an ethical government plays such unethical games.

Jerry

P.S. For those "geeks" among my readers, these conversations were recorded using a voice modem on my computer in combination with the excellent TRx Recorder software from Australia. While editor of a twice-monthly newsletter for the National Transportation Operations Coalition for seven years, I recorded hundreds of similar discussions. Doing so is entirely legal in both Texas and Washington, DC, both of which legally permit one party consent recording.

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

The Complete Scoop about Former Transportation Secretary Mineta's Violation of the Ethics in Government Act

In digging into the public financial disclosures of top USDOT officials I suspected were collaborating with former Cong. Bud Shuster in the Traffic.com monopoly/scam, I stumbled upon former Transportation Secretary Mineta's likely fraudulent failure to disclose the details of his capital gains income of up to $1 million in Trimble Navigation stock options back in 2000.

The reason for his failure to disclose this information? Because he very likely received a whole lot of extra stock options under the table from the company than he was otherwise entitled to, which may have influenced Mr. Mineta to later propose and support federal policies and programs designed to specifically benefit Trimble.

The combination of a willful failure to disclose required information about a financial windfall, combined with later action to favor the source of that windfall, is a clear violation of the federal Ethics in Government Act. This Act clearly has teeth, too, if those who are responsible for ensuring ethics and honesty in our government will use it. Just ask Ronald Blackley, former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espey's Chief of Staff, who in 1999 was sentenced to 27 months in federal prison for "failing to disclose $22,000 from Mississippi agribusiness interests on his 1993 public financial disclosure report," according to press reports at the time.

Mr. Mineta's possible violation of the Ethics in Government Act is likely much more egregious, both because the amount of the income he failed to report is likely many times greater than Blackley's omission, and the fact that the U.S. Office of Government Ethics apparently tried to "lose" the one financial disclosure on which he was required by law to provide details of his Trimble Navigation stock options transactions.

While I've shared most of the facts in this matter earlier, I've posted those facts in bits and pieces. In order to provide a more complete account of what likely transpired to the authorities with whom I'm in frequent contact, I've now compiled that information into a much more coherent package. This matter is quite complex, so I encourage interested readers to review these documents in the following order:

1. Signficance of Mr. Mineta's Financial Disclosures in 1999-2002.

2. Further Insight from Mr. Mineta's Commerce 'New Entrant' Financial Disclosure in 2000.

3. The U.S. Office Of Government Ethics' Effort to Lose Former USDOT Secretary Mineta'a Calendar Year 2000 Public Financial Disclosure Report

4. Mr. Mineta's Support for GPS and Location Technology as Secretary of Commerce/Transportation

I hope you will find this information as eye-opening as I did when I first discovered it.

Jerry