Home Owner Foreclosed on Wells Fargo

In today's NYT, (Eric Lichtblau and James Risen) there is the story that a Mr. Dennis Montgomery bamboozled government officials so as to receive millions of dollars in contracts for an anti-terrorism software technology scheme.  Montgomery claimed, among other things, that his codes could find terrorist plots in al Jazeera broadcasts, identify terrorist's drones, and detect noise from hostile submarines. The CIA came to think the technology was a fake in 2003 but the military was not so notified and contracts were given. In 2006, the FBI was told that Montgomery doctored tests, but Montgomery was given more business; in 2009 , the Air Force approved a deal for his technologies.

Not only fraud was involved, but also, near calamity.  In December 2003, Montgomery reported that hidden in al Jazeera broadcasts was information about specific American-bound flights from Britain, France and Mexico that were hijacking targets. CIA officials rushed the information to Bush, who ordered those flights to be turned around or grounded. Some senior officials even talked about shooting down the planes because they feared use of the planes to attack.

From the WaPo today:

On a Tuesday afternoon in September 2003, during Scott Walker's first term as Milwaukee County executive, scores of union workers gathered at the local courthouse to protest layoffs he had ordered as part of an aggressive effort to balance the budget and avoid what he said would otherwise be necessary tax increases.

They shouted anti-Walker chants, and union officials and Democratic officeholders took turns denouncing his slash-and-burn approach.

The layoffs Walker had announced that summer decimated the county's public parks staff and also reduced the number of county social workers, corrections officers and janitors. As a result, park bathrooms were shuttered and pools were closed. Trash was piled up so high in the Milwaukee County Courthouse that visitors had to sidestep apple cores and coffee cups, and some judges resorted to cleaning toilets, a local newspaper reported.

Despite the deep cuts and the union uproar, Walker cruised to reelection the following spring and remained in his post six more years, until his successful gubernatorial run in the fall.

[snip]

Asked whether his experiences with unions as county executive had influenced his bill to curb state employee benefits and put tight restrictions on their collective-bargaining rights - the same measure that brought the chanting masses to his doorstep - he didn't hesitate.

"Absolutely," he said. "Totally."

[snip]

The guy's a one-trick pony. His playbook is very limited," said Rich Abelson, executive director of AFSCME District Council 48, Milwaukee's largest union. "The result of that is an absolute devastation of the programs and services in Milwaukee County."

Abelson said the union filed multiple lawsuits against Walker over the years for unfair labor practices, and the relationship continued to sour as Walker kept "cutting wages and benefits for working people."

Walker argued that collective bargaining was the biggest hurdle to balancing the budget and that unions had little incentive to give ground because they almost always prevailed in arbitration. He said that the cuts he proposed were intended to prevent layoffs and accused union leaders of being uninterested in compromise.

"If I could go after . . . the pension and health-care contribution, I could have avoided layoffs; I could have avoided other service cuts," he said. "But because of the way the law is, local governments just can't do that."