Stock Market Cartoon

Detroit officials bristle at UN visit, scolding over water shut-offs

Detroit officials are fuming after two visiting United Nations lawyers scolded the city for cutting off water to delinquent customers and described the shut-offs as a “human rights” violation. 
The response follows a three-day visit to Detroit -- which desperately is trying to bail itself out of bankruptcy -- from two representatives with the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.
“It is contrary to human rights to disconnect water from people who simply do not have the means to pay their bills,” Catarina de Albuquerque, one of the two representatives, said Monday at the conclusion of their visit. 
“I heard testimonies from poor, African American residents of Detroit who were forced to make impossible choices -- to pay the water bill or to pay their rent.”
But the mayor's office blasted the U.N. review as one-sided. Alexis Wiley, Mayor Mike Duggan’s top aide, said the city is "very disappointed" with them. 
"They weren't interested in the facts," she said. "They took a position and never once [before Monday] reached out to the city for data."
The policy change shuts off water to businesses and residents who either are 60 days past due or owe more than $150.
Detroit -- the country's largest municipality to file for bankruptcy -- reports making 27,000 shut-offs from Jan. 1 to Sept. 30.
Most shut-offs were halted for several weeks this summer to give residents an opportunity to enter a payment plan, but they have resumed with 5,100 shut-offs in September alone.
Detroit officials have defended the decision, arguing that customers collectively owed more than $115 million in delinquent water-and-sewer department payments before the city took action and that their efforts are improving the situation.
The department said it collected about $2.5 million in 2012 and 2013 and about $3.7 million in the first nine months of this year.
Ordinary residents aren't the only ones subject to the policy. Service was shut off to one city council member. And an investigation by a local news organization found city officials have collected on the more than $80,000 owed by the Joe Louis Arena, home of the NHL’s Detroit Red Wings, and roughly $55,000 past due from Ford Field, where the NFL’s Detroit Lions play home games.
Wiley also said Detroit is helping residents by improving customer service, getting 33,000 people in the payment plans and cutting residential calls for water assistance by more than 50 percent.
De Albuquerque and the other representative, Leilani Farha, visited Detroit after activists appealed to the U.N. for assistance. Among them was the American Civil Liberties Union, whose Michigan director Kary Moss said: "It's unfortunate that, in the Great Lakes State, we need a visit from an international body to remind us of our most fundamental obligation to our citizens. Water is life." 
The representatives met with residents and with Duggan and water department officials for about two hours Monday morning.
De Albuquerque and Farha, also known as U.N. special rapporteurs, cited such other problems as the city’s drastic population decline, rising unemployment and the utility passing on higher costs associated with an aging system.
De Albuquerque said she has seen shut-offs in other U.S. cities and developed nations, but nothing like Detroit. "Our conclusion is that you have here in Detroit a man-made perfect storm," she said. "The scale of the disconnections in the city is unprecedented."
De Albuquerque and Farha say the mayor’s plan to help delinquent customers fails to help the chronically poor and those who face shut-offs. Farha also said at least some residents said their past-due bills were the result of city billing or accounting errors.
However, they called their conversation with Detroit officials "constructive." They also said they can't enforce recommendations but want to help the city and residents resolve the situation.
Some advocates took the issue to federal court, but the judge overseeing Detroit's municipal bankruptcy trial ruled last month he lacked authority to force the utility to stop the shut-offs.

$10G to watch grass grow: Coburn report details worst examples of gov't waste

As American taxpayers worried about the terror threat from the Islamic State, the crisis at the border and the economy, the U.S. government spent their money to give rabbits massages, to teach sea monkeys to synchronize swim and to literally watch grass grow.
These and other examples of wasteful government spending were detailed by Republican Sen. Tom Coburn in his annual “Wastebook,” his final edition since he is retiring early next year.
“I have learned from these experiences that Washington will never change itself,” Coburn, R-Okla., said in a statement. “But even if the politicians won’t stop stupid spending, taxpayers always have the last word.”
The first example cited in the report is the millions spent on what one attorney called the government’s “dirty little secret”: paid administrative leave for troublesome employees. Workers who were placed on leave for disciplinary reasons, such as misconduct, security concerns or criminal issues, received $20 million while on leave this year.
These workers, according to Coburn, were essentially on a paid vacation that can last for months or years. The GAO also detailed this phenomenon in a report Monday. According to the GAO, during a three-year period more than 57,000 employees were placed on leave for 30 days or more, costing taxpayers $775 million in salary alone.
Another wasteful project with a big price tag is the Pentagon’s plan to destroy $16 billion in military-grade ammunition that it deems no longer useful. Sounds pricey, right? Well add in the fact that on top of that, the feds plan to spend $1 billion just to destroy the ammo.
“The amount of surplus ammunition is now so large that the cost of destroying it will equal the full years’ salary for over 54,000 Army privates,” the report notes.
Other examples vary from the serious, to the aggravating, to just plain bizarre. One that takes the cake is the $10,000 the government spent to watch grass grow --- seriously.
That project is the brainchild of the Department of Interior’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which is paying for the growth of the smooth cordgrass to be observed on a Florida reserve. The money covers “the cost to monitor grasses, restore two acres as a demonstration and publish a guide on best practices for cultivating the cordgrass, known formally as Spartina alterniflora.”
Still more examples show that while some Americans are struggling to make ends meet in a rough economy, there is a group in the U.S. getting major perks: animals.
In one instance, the government shelled out $387,000 to provide rabbits with a relaxing daily massage. The critters were treated to a “mechanical device that simulates the long, flowing strokes used in Swedish massages” to study the effect of massages on exercise recovery, according to the report.
Another animal getting a fun extracurricular activity courtesy of the U.S. taxpayers are sea monkeys. The government dropped $50,000 on a project to study the swirl of sea monkeys’ collective movements. The researchers did so by choreographing a synchronized swimming routine for the tiny shrimp.
The government also spent $856,000 to throw mountain lions on a treadmill and $171,000 to watch monkeys gamble. They also spent $331,000 on a study that led to a mind-blowing discovery, that "hungry people get cranky and aggressive."
“With no one watching over the vast bureaucracy, the problem is not just what Washington isn’t doing, but what it is doing.” Coburn said in the statement. “Only someone with too much of someone else’s money and not enough accountability for how it was being spent could come up some of these projects.”
Other notable examples include $90 million spent to promote U.S. culture around the world, $414,000 spent on a U.S. Army video game that some in the intelligence community have worried could inadvertently train terrorists and $4.6 million spent on “lavish” homes to house Border Patrol agents in areas temporarily.
Coburn, known as “Dr. No” for his strong stance against excess spending in Washington, announced in January he is retiring from the Senate early due to ongoing health issues. The Republican had already announced he would not seek reelection but decided to leave his term two years early, in January 2014.
A Coburn spokesperson told FoxNews.com that the senator has said that answers about if and how the “Wastebook” will continue will have to wait until next year. The spokesperson said Coburn hopes every lawmaker will make monitoring government waste a priority, but that one does not have to be a current lawmaker to do so.'

US working closely with Kurds to save Kobani, report says

U.S. and Kurdish commanders are collaborating closely to ensure that the Syrian border town of Kobani does not fall to Islamic State militants, in a change of earlier policy, according to a published report. 
According to The Wall Street Journal, U.S. and Syrian Kurdish military leaders are coordinating air and ground operations around Kobani, with one Kurdish general even helping to spot targets for U.S. airstrikes and delivering battlefield intelligence reports daily to American military planners. 
The extent of this new cooperation was demonstrated earlier this week, when American C-130s made 28 separate airdrops of weapons, ammunition, and medical supplies to Kurdish forces fighting to hold the city. The Journal reports that the planned airdrops were presented this past Friday to President Obama, who gave the operation immediate approval. According to the paper, the airdrops were proposed after an assessment that Kobani's defenders could run out of ammunition in as little as three days without them. 
The weapons were Kurdish arms, shipped from Irbil in Iraq to Kuwait, where U.S. soldiers sorted them into drop-ready packages, the Journal reports. 
In addition to revealing the close cooperation between Washington and the Syrian Kurdish forces, the airdrops also reveal a change in U.S. goals for the airstrikes that have targeted Islamic State fighters in Syria for the past month. 
Initially, the Journal reports, the goal of striking positions near Kobani was purely to kill as many members of Islamic State, also known as ISIS, as possible. On Friday, the same day the supply drops reportedly were proposed at the White House, Army Gen. Lloyd Austin, head of U.S. Central Command, cautioned reporters at a Pentagon news conference that "it's highly possible that Kobani may fall." Meanwhile, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said the ISIS focus on Kobani had created "a rather target-rich environment ... for American and coalition air strikes."
However, that changed as ISIS came close to capturing the town, forcing the Kurdish fighters into a desperate battle as thousands of refugees made a run for the Turkish border just a few miles away.
"By stopping them, and by doing tremendous damage to them, you begin to blunt the sense of momentum, particularly in Syria," a senior defense official told the Journal. Another senior U.S. official put it more bluntly: "This is a war of flags. And Kobani was the next place Islamic State wanted to plant its flag ... Kobani became strategic."
Meanwhile, Turkey Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Monday that it would allow Syrian Kurdish refugees to cross through Turkish territory on their way to Kobani from Iraq to fight ISIS. However, The paper reports that no such forces had arrived as of Tuesday.