Scammers 2018

Yesterday I got a phone call from a woman who identified herself as an agent of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). She claimed that I was under criminal investigation by the IRS and that I must contact them immediately. Actually, even at my advanced age, I quickly realized that it was not a woman or the IRS but a robocall scammer trying to defraud another senior citizen who stubbornly refuses to give up his landline.

You might ask why I answered the call in the first place given the unfamiliar number on my caller ID? Well, I do that for most of these incessant calls but sometimes it’s just easier to pick up the phone rather than fiddling around for reading glasses to see the number.  

A few days earlier I received an even more fraudulent message. The caller said it was my grandson. I do have grandsons of college age but due to the fact that they almost never call me, I expressed puzzlement about which one it might be. He then even asked “Don’t you recognize my voice?” It sounded a little like the one who was on a campus visit to Notre Dame so I went along.

He went on to say that he and some friends had gone out for a couple of drinks, gotten involved in an auto accident, been arrested for DUI, and jailed in Florida. It was obviously not a robocall but Florida is a long way from Indiana. I cursed him out and hung up the phone.

Who was the young man who makes a living by making calls like these? Who are the criminals who organize and run this fraudulent operation designed to prey upon grandparents?  Who was the woman who actually recorded the message from the IRS? Does she realize that when she records the message that she is acting in a criminal enterprise? What about the people who write the script and handle the technology? How can these people live with themselves or sleep at night?

I know that these operations are big business. The calls are incessant indicating that they must have some success. Seniors are being duped all over the country. I’ve read stories about granny withdrawing thousands from her savings account to rescue her imprisoned grandson.  You just need to search for IRS scammers to get an idea of the extent of that scam.

When I worked in sales, a popular form of advertising was “direct mail.” Statistics showed that the response rate was about 2%. If you sent our 1000 mailing pieces, you would usually get about 20 replies depending on the quality of the list you purchased. If you got back 20 “leads,” it would usually result in enough sales to pay the cost of the mailing and still produce a profit.  

Advertising is much more sophisticated and scientific these days but it still works on the same principle. Look at all the catalogs and flyers you get in the mail each day. Of course, advertising giants like Google and Facebook have become household words by applying mass mailing techniques online. Lately, the Federal government has been turning its attention to the so-called privacy practices of legitimate businesses like Google and Facebook.

Still, I don’t see why government could not stop the obviously fraudulent scammers and robocallers who invade our privacy throughout each and every day. I know one could say that people should be able to take care of themselves and avoid these obvious scams, but government does require warning labels on cigarette packs, and makes it a crime to drive without fastening one’s seatbelt.

With modern technology it should be easy enough to track toll-free-numbers that make millions of automatic calls, and require background checks to weed out the criminals. It is time we got these criminals off our phone lines. Free speech is one thing but our Constitution does not allow freedom of speech to machines or robots.

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Syria 2018

Missile attacks on chemical weapons facilities in Syria last week by combined American, British, and France forces make me wonder if we are pursuing the right course in that beleaguered country. Although the attacks were in response to apparent chemical attacks against Syrian rebels, and seemed to have been carried out with a precision that minimized the damage to civilians, I think they raise serious questions.

What are we doing in Syria in the first place? Or rather, why have we been involved in the civil war that has been raging in Syria since the early days of the administration of President Obama? You can even say that if it weren’t for our involvement in the Syrian civil war on the side of the rebels, there would have been no civil war in the first place. Actually, without our support of the rebels, ISIS might never have gained a foothold in Syria.

One of the reasons I voted for Donald Trump in 2016 was the belief that he would take a more pragmatic approach to foreign affairs than candidate Hillary Clinton had done during her stint as Secretary of State during the Obama administration. Clinton and Obama had worked together to foment the so-called “Arab Spring,” a movement designed to oust dictators and bring democracy to the Arab world.

The ouster of a dictator or strong man in Libya did not result in democracy but in chaos and anarchy that still persists today. The rebels we supported and armed might even have participated in the infamous attack on our embassy in Benghazi. Obama and Clinton also encouraged an uprising in Egypt that ousted another strong man but only led to the emergence of the fanatical Moslem Brotherhood that commenced to impose Sharia law as well as brutally persecute Christians. Eventually, the Egyptian army had to take over and now the country is ruled by a military strong man.

What can possibly make us think that the overthrow of the Syrian strong man, Bashar Assad, will not have similar results. A glance at a map of Syria today shows an incredibly divided country that is acting like a vacuum sucking others into a potential devastating confrontation.

The forces of the Russian backed Assad government control most of the central part of the country. In the north a large portion of the country is in the hands of American backed Kurdish forces that have played a leading role in driving out ISIS. For their efforts in both Syria and Iraq, the Kurds want an independent state of their own.

American backed rebel forces still control parts of the country but during the Obama administration, officials liked to distinguish between extremist and moderate rebels. If recent history is any guide, moderates in places like Libya and Egypt were quickly overwhelmed by more extremist and violent elements.

In the city of Homs, a rebel stronghold, practically all of the Christian population has either been killed or forced to flee. It is possible that the rebels we have armed in the past might eventually turn their arms against us. Isn’t it amazing that we want to disarm our own population but think nothing of providing Moslem militants with the latest sophisticated weapons?

Finally, the Wall street Journal has just reported that the defeat of ISIS has led to the emergence in Syria of a rival Moslem terrorist group led by Al-Qaeda, a Sunni Moslem group formed originally by Osama bin Laden. Is this one of the reasons why Shiite Iran is also intervening in Syria.

Some, like the editors of the Wall Street Journal, argue that an American presence in Syria is now necessary to counter Russian and Iranian imperialism. I wonder if that is a good or practical reason. It seems to me that Russia’s Putin has done a much better job of restoring peace and ending the bloodshed in Syria than we have.

We have demonized Russia’s President Putin in this country but if you take an objective look, it would appear that his measures have done a much better job of restoring peace than ours. A few years ago Putin restored Russian sovereignty over the Crimea in a practically bloodless coup. Since that time has anyone heard of civil war, bombings, or general anarchy in that area? Would anyone in the Crimea today like to live in Syria?

Instead of confronting the Russians and Iranians in Syria we should be working with them to find a solution that must involve all those who have thrown in with the Assad regime. Arming rebels and calling for Assad’s ouster has caused untold misery in Syria.

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Gender Gap 2018

Equal pay day arrived for women this week. According to gender rights advocates, a woman must add to her 2017 income almost three and a half months of work in 2018 to make as much as a white man made in 2017. In other words, a woman in Connecticut only makes 79% of what a white man makes in income. Black and Latina women are even more disadvantaged. Black women make only 58%, and Latina women come in last at 47%. For some inexplicable reason black men don’t seem to be counted.

These familiar statistics were recently re-iterated in an opinion article that appeared in the Connecticut Mirror written by Ashika Brinkley, a board member of the Connecticut Women’s Educational and Legal Fund (CWEALF). Ms. Brinkley claimed that her statistics came from the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) and provided a link to the report. I checked it out and found this disclaimer:

Source Note: What a woman makes for every dollar a man makes is the ratio of women’s and men’s annual median earnings for full time, year round workers. The “wage gap” is the additional money a woman would have to make for every dollar made by a man in order to have equal annual earnings. Overall figures calculated by NWLC are based on 2016 American Community Survey Data.

The term “annual median income” is very significant. It means that half the people in the group made more than that figure and that half made less. Statistically, median income only represents an average and not anyone’s actual earnings. Annual median income can therefore be skewed by high earners on one end, and low earners on the other.

Moreover, gender gap ratios do not actually compare salaries of full time employees working the same job. Such reports just use averages based on the salaries of men and women across companies, industries and job titles. How this information is gathered is a mystery to me? I suspect Census data or IRS compilations are used but these figures often show great variation.

Interestingly, Ms. Brinkley’s opinion piece did not list even one incident of wage discrimination in Connecticut even though she is calling for legislative action. A few years ago a spokesperson for the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities reported, “the number of women who complain about not getting as much as their male counterparts is small.”

I would venture to guess that there is little wage discrimination in Connecticut and that the disparities in income are largely based on choices that people choose to make. All government employees, for example, work on gender-neutral pay scales. Teachers, police officers, firefighters, mail carriers, all get the same pay for the same work. Even high income occupations are no longer the exclusive male bastions of the past. The medical and financial professions have become increasingly open to women and will become more so since the majority of college graduates today are women. No modern corporation would dare to have differing wage scales for men and women. Of course, most engineering students are still men and over 90% of art history students are women.

If there is no wage discrimination, why is there an income gap between women and white men, and why is the gap for Black and Latina women even greater? As mentioned above average median income figures can be skewed by very high earners on one end, and very low earners on the other. I was surprised to discover a while ago that the majority of women in well-to-do Westport are stay at home moms. I imagine that many of them do some kind of part time work where their incomes will be only a fraction of their husbands.

On the other hand, it is a sad fact that the low income of single, unwed mothers will statistically drag down average median income for women. A recent op-ed in the Wall St.  Journal by Wendy Wang cited statistics indicating that poverty is practically an inevitable result when women have children before they have jobs or marry. She claimed that the obvious success of Asian immigrants in this country is basically due to a traditional “success sequence” of education, work, marriage, and children in that order. In China, where she grew up, illegitimacy was unthinkable. Even in modern China, the out of wedlock birth rate is only 4%.

A few years ago a statistical survey came to the comical conclusion that it was better for a woman to live in depressed Bridgeport where the gender gap was narrow, than in posh Darien or New Canaan where it was the widest. It used to be said that if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. But if you don’t understand the problem, you can’t be part of the solution.

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