Thursday, September 19, 2013

Moving in retirement to avoid school taxes is the epitome of the politics of selfishness

By Marc Jampole

Last time we cited Tom Sightings, self-proclaimed retirement expert, he was conjuring images of the various dream retirements to which he assumed the American public might aspire.  His catalogue of utopias reflected the pro-suburban ideology that dominates the mass media: golf communities, small university towns, beach fronts and suburban houses. Not one of Sighting’s dream retirements involved living in a city with great mass transit, an abundance of public spaces, cultural activities and entertainment, top-rated healthcare systems, the exciting buzz of cultural diversity and tremendous resources for seniors. In Sightings’ world, cities just don’t exist.

The latest view from Sightings highlights an ideological principle that has dominated U.S. public discourse since the election of Ronald Regan in 1980: the politics of selfishness, the idea that everyone should pursue his or her own private agenda, no matter how harmful it might be to others or to the community at large. Symbolic of the politics of selfishness is Reagan’s favorite joke about not having to outrun a bear, just one’s companion (who will then get ripped to shreds by the bear).  

Sightings doesn’t come out and explicitly say, “Care only about yourself” in his recent U.S. News & World Report article.  What he proposes, in a soft-shoe, gently prodding kind of way, is that retired people move out of their communities to avoid paying high school taxes.

After all, their kids have long graduated from high school, so who cares about the next generation!

Sightings employs the increasingly irritating rhetorical device of building the story around himself (the writer) and his situation. The article begins when he receives the school tax bill which has increased by four percent. He grumbles that his income has not increased by that much.  Continuing the article as a first person narration, Sightings tells us of a dinner his wife and he shared a few days later with a couple who had just moved to a new town to avoid high school taxes.  Sightings quotes the husband: “Who needs to pay those high school taxes, he ventured, when your kids are grown up and gone away?” Sightings continues: “Left unsaid was the other question: Who can afford those school taxes when you're no longer pulling in a paycheck, and instead living on a fixed income?”

After some wishy-washy discussion of the pros and cons of moving to avoid school taxes and a spackling of information about states that reduce property taxes for seniors, Sightings ends the column fully on the side of moving: “But then I see that school tax bill sitting over there on the corner of my desk. It's due by the end of September. And our youngest child graduated from the local school system four years ago. Maybe it's time to start looking for our place in the sun, after all.”

What Sightings doesn’t see, or doesn’t want to see, is that when he sent his children to school, large numbers of his fellow townspeople were paying property taxes to fund public schools who had already sent their children through schools and many more who hadn’t had children yet or never were going to have any. Even parents who sent their children to private schools contributed to educating Sightings’ children. Now it’s his turn and he wants selfishly to shrug his responsibility.  After all, he got his.

There are many great reasons to move in retirement: to be near grown children or to live one’s dream, be it on a quiet shore or in a high rise co-op overlooking the hustle and bustle of Manhattan. “Chacun sa chimère,” as Baudelaire once said (which translates into “To each, his or her illusion.”) It’s also true that some people move to smaller homes in retirement or are forced to move to cut expenses.

But to move just to avoid taxes is as anti-social as robbing a convenience store or embezzling from a nonprofit organization.

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Latest mass shooting shows need for stiffer gun purchase laws and better national database

By Marc Jampole

The Washington Naval Yard mass murder has produced a macabre good news/bad news story:

The good news is that a week before the shooting a Virginia gun dealer didn’t sell an AR-14 assault rifle to the shooter, Aaron Alexis, because Alexis wasn’t a resident of the state, a requirement under Virginia state law.

The bad news is that the dealer did sell Alexis the pump-action shot gun he used to kill 12 innocent people. 

What if Virginia had tougher laws and only permitted sales of all kinds of guns to residents? Or what if gun purchase standards were higher everywhere and we had a robust database of gun offenders and persons with documented behavior that should preclude gun ownership, behavior like hearing “voices speaking to him through the wall,” as Alexis heard?

It should be tragically clear to everyone that stiffened gun control laws would have prevented Alexis from just walking into a store and buying a lethal weapon.  Those who argue that a criminal will find a way to get a gun forget that Alexis, Lanza and most of our mass murderers are not criminals. Something else they all have in common: all manifested behavioral problems that should have precluded legal gun ownership or use.

We now seem to have these national days of mourning and hand-wringing about every six months. The public discourse following these tragedies almost always follows a classic formula: Gun control advocates point out the obvious lesson that we need to tighten gun control, while gun industry toadies and factotums create tortuous arguments to show that the mass murder really proves we need more guns in the street and less gun control.  Major political figures say they will renew efforts to pass gun control laws, but “momentum” peters out in days or weeks.  There’s a spike in both gun sales (out of fear of gun control) and articles in the mass media analyzing the impossibility of getting any gun control legislation passed. Nothing happens.

That’s sad, but what’s even sadder is that these occasional mass murders collectively represent a drop in the bucket of all the U.S. deaths and injuries annually from guns—from accidents, disputes among family and friends, suicides and murder.  If we use a base figure of 32,000 deaths by guns a year, that works out to almost 88 a day. We typically have national days of mourning when a crazed killer takes the lives of 12 or 24 people.  Perhaps we should declare every day a day of mourning.  

The gun lobby has tried to sell us the bill of goods that more people packing will make the streets safer, because the bad guys will be frightened of retaliation. A study released today shows that argument is completely bogus: The study, published Wednesday in the American Journal of Medicine (AJM), compares the rate of firearms-related deaths in countries where many people own guns with the gun death rate in countries where gun ownership is rare. The US, with the most guns per head in the world, has the highest rate of deaths from firearms, while Japan, which has the lowest rate of gun ownership, has the least. The study concludes that guns make a nation less safe. AJM published the study early because of the shootings at the Washington Naval Yard.

Nothing proves the collective self-serving venality of our state and federal legislators like the gun issue. All too many lawmakers have been bought and sold by the gun (and the weapons) industry or are too frightened of the gun lobby’s money to speak up on the issue of gun control. And so the needless death of innocents continues.

Monday, September 16, 2013

Editorial: Breakthrough for Cooler Heads


Can President Obama declare victory and bring the cruise missiles home? After a week and a half of saber rattling by the only President we’ve got, the Russian sponsors of Syria’s dictatorship responded to the ultimatum by Secretary of State John Kerry that Syria could avoid an attack by the United States by handing its chemical weapons over to international authorities. And Syria welcomed the initiative, defusing the crisis.

As much as it frustrates conservative talking pointers, President Obama did not make a mistake in calling Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to account for his military allegedly using chemical weapons in that nation’s civil war, nor did Obama show weakness in deferring to Congress on authorizing a punitive strike against the Syrian government. Obama followed the Constitution, which gives Congress the authority to declare war. If Syria reneges on its commitment to put its chemical weapons under international control but Congress still declines to authorize a strike against Syria, it probably will be for the wrong reason — Republicans in the House and Senate simply won’t go along with anything the President proposes — but in calling for Congress to delay the vote to see if the Russian peace initiative succeeds, President Obama wisely put on hold the proposed American attack on Syria, which could have caused more damage than it would solve.

Corporate news media, who were looking forward to a quick air war to fill in the dead space around the Labor Day holiday, were noticeably disappointed when President Obama announced on Aug. 30 that he would consult Congress before launching the attack. For the next week, the corporate pundits were practically taunting Obama to get on with it, charging that if he failed to follow through with the attack it would be seen as a sign of weakness.

As for the predictions that a failure to attack Syria would result in a loss of respect for the United States, enemies of the world’s Last Remaining Superpower must realize that the President still has plenty of cruise missiles, satellite-guided bombs and radar-deflecting stealth bombers which he can order into the air in a New York minute if a belligerent nation actually posed a threat to the US or one of its allies (and all it would take is a call from Ankara to give Obama the cover to launch missiles and bombers at Syria in defense of our NATO ally Turkey).

Neither does a failure to follow through with the attack result in a loss of credibility for President Obama. Some wags called Obama “Bush Lite” when he threatened the action against Syria. They ignored the fact that Obama was proposing a limited air strike on Syria in response to an actual chemical attack, not the threat that was imagined by then-President George W. Bush and his war-mongering advisers, which was only proved false after they invaded and occupied Iraq. Also, Obama held off on the attack, which allowed diplomats to get to work. It was particularly galling to watch former defense secretary Don Rumsfeld, the architect of the preemptive invasion of Iraq, criticizing President Obama’s “lack of leadership” as the “so-called commander in chief.” At least George W. Bush has the sense and/or decency to keep his mouth shut.

Nor would a congressional rejection of Obama’s request for an authorization to attack be a turning point in his relations with Congress. Many Democrats balked at the war vote because they thought it was a bad idea, which their constituents were overwhelmingly opposed to, but they’ll be back with Obama when it comes to his domestic priorities. As Kevin Drum noted at MotherJones.com Sept. 9, “Presidents suffer defeats all the time. Obama lost on cap-and-trade. He’s lost on plenty of judicial and executive branch nominations. He couldn’t get agreement for a grand bargain. He lost on gun control. What’s more, Republicans have been opposing him on virtually everything from the day he took office. In what concrete way would a defeat on Syria change this dynamic in even the slightest way?”

If anything, the failure of the world at large to react to the Syrian gas attack questioned the credibility of the United Nations Security Council, which so far has been unable to even debate the issue. But the diplomatic initiative that has gone on while Obama was making his case for intervention bore fruit as Russians called for the Syrian government to turn over its chemical weapons to the control of international authorities. Syria’s Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem quickly welcomed the Russian proposal, acknowledged for the first time that Syria possesses chemical weapons and said Syria was willing to cooperate fully with the UN and sign the Chemical Weapons Convention.

That could be the best result of this complicated situation. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is a dictator, but he runs a secular regime that among other things is protecting Christian minorities who comprise as much as 14% of the population in Syria (3 million out of 22 million), as well as refugees from Iraq, many of whom are Christians and moderate Muslims who were driven out of Iraq by fundamentalist Sunnis and Shi’ites after the downfall of Saddam Hussein.

Assad also cooperated with the Bush administration after 9/11. As part of its “extraordinary rendition” program, the Bushies sent Arabs who were suspected of al-Qaeda ties to Syria to be tortured by Assad’s secret police. (At least one, Maher Arar, a Canadian Arab who was arrested at JFK Airport in New York in September 2002 when he was in transit back to Canada, was instead sent to Syria and tortured for 10 months before he was found to be innocent.)

Assad’s opponents include al-Qaeda-affiliated jihadists who are fighting Assad in part because his brand of Islam is too moderate for their tastes. They already have been engaging in reprisals against moderate rebel groups, and some rebel groups have been engaging in war crimes of their own, such as summarily executing captured Syrian soldiers. We have no guarantee that the moderate Muslims who Sen. John McCain and other hawks want us to support in the Syrian civil war would win the power struggle after Assad is toppled; we could end up clearing the way for a fundamentalist, al-Qaeda-affiliated government in Damascus, with access to the chemical weapons that Assad has stockpiled. That’s the reason that President Obama, while he will go ahead with arming some of the moderate rebels, is in no hurry to press for regime change. That’s also why he only proposed a limited air attack.

President Obama has agreed to take the proposal to secure Syria’s chemical weapons to the UN Security Council, though Russia is objecting to a French proposal to back up the proposal with the threat of force if Syria fails to comply. Obama and Congress are wise to give the diplomats time to secure those chemical weapons. If Russia is serious about securing the weapons — and Russian President Vladimir Putin also is concerned about Islamic terrorists getting their hands on poison gas — they may be able to get the job done. Good for them. Good for all.

In the meantime, Republicans in Congress are still threatening to take the US government hostage if Obama does not agree to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, which will start enrolling customers on the new healthcare exchanges Oct. 1. Maybe Obama should invite the Russians to try to mediate a deal with the GOP jihadists. Unfortunately, we trust Bashir al-Assad to turn over his chemical weapons more than we trust Republican leaders to negotiate in good faith to resolve the federal budget and debt obligations for the coming year.

Assuming that President Obama does not negotiate with the hostage takers to do away with the Affordable Care Act, people who do not get insurance coverage through their job but who live in one of the states where Republican governors aremaking it difficult to find out about the new insurance marketplaces can get the information on the plans and subsidies that are available at healthcare.gov. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, October 1, 2013

Populist.com
Blog | Current Issue | Back Issues | Essays | Links
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us
Copyright © 2013 The Progressive Populist
PO Box 819, Manchaca TX 78652


Selections from the October 1, 2013 issue




LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 










New book shows that poverty affects brain and makes it harder to think, work, learn

By Marc Jampole

Thanks to Cass Sunstein for reviewing Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much in the latest New York Review of Books. In Scarcity, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir collect and analyze an impressive amount of research to demonstrate that those who suffer a scarcity of a resource—say food or money—dedicate more of their brain to addressing that scarcity, thereby degrading their ability to attend to their daily tasks, in school or on the job.

According to Mullainathan and Shafir, scarcity “puts people in a kind of cognitive tunnel, limiting what they are able to see. It depletes their self-control. It makes them more impulsive and sometimes a bit dumb. What we often consider a part of people’s basic character—an inability to learn, a propensity to anger or impatience—may well be a product of their feeling of scarcity,” to quote Sunstein. The book cites a ton of empirical research that shows that the effects of scarcity cut across all possible types of scarcity. 

The most striking study mentioned in the review tested Indian sugar cane workers before the harvest when they were broke and after the harvest when they had lots of money. The difference in scores amounted to 9 or 10 points on an I.Q. test, which measures certain intellectual capabilities correlated with success in school and in professional employment.  On an I.Q. test, ten points means a lot: for example, about 28% of the population scores between 106-115, while only 9% of the population scores between 116-125.

In other words, not only do rich and upper middle class children have the advantages of classes and lessons, summer camps, trips abroad, private tutors, SAT prep courses and the doors that money and business contacts can offer. The wealthy also have an inherent advantage in that their brains are not drained by scarcity concerns as the brains of poor children are.  The easiest way to improve our educational system would be to end poverty, which would enable formerly poor children to focus their brain on learning and not on the anxiety of not knowing when the next meal will be.

A few years back, the mainstream media and politicians were completely enamored by an article titled “Growth in a Time of Debt” by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, which concluded that countries with public debt greater than 90 percent of GDP suffered measurably slower economic growth. In This Time Is Different, the two right-wing economists ostensibly fleshed out the theory with examples across the centuries.  Mainstream politicians and journalists throughout the world embraced this “new discovery,” using it to bolster assertions that we had to deal with the debt instead of pumping money into the economy.

The problem was that Reinhart and Rogoff miscalculated in a number of places and even made typographical errors. When their bad math was corrected, it was found that there was no correlation between levels of debt and economic growth.

Many people wanted to believe Reinhart and Rogoff were right because they wanted to cut the budget, regardless of the pain and the economic havoc it caused. Of course it didn’t work out—Europe’s austerity program backfired and the U.S. limited “rescue” of its economy produced uneven and weak results. Through it all, inequality continued to grow, especially in the United States. The distribution of wealth in this country is now less equitable than it has been in more than in a century.

As of this writing, a Google key word search yields about 3,000 mentions of Scarcity, which is not even a drop in the ocean of web pages floating around cyberspace.  It’s still too early to tell, but I’m betting the mainstream news media is going to ignore Scarcity for the most part and few politicians outside maybe Bill de Blasio will reference it. 

But imagine if Scarcity captured the imagination of politicians and pundits the way that Reinhart & Rogoff’s bogus research did, or the way Michael Harrington’s poignant expose of poverty, The Other America, did in the early 1960s?

What if our various governments started to create public policies and new laws to address the implications of Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much? If Scarcity is true (and the Sunstein’s extensive review makes we want to read it as soon as I can), that puts a whole new light on Republican efforts to decrease funding for food stamps and unemployment benefits. The very nature of poverty distorts and weakens the thinking process, so that once people fall into poverty it is very hard to escape.  It makes sense then to be as generous as possible with these benefits in times of economic distress, to keep as many people out of poverty as possible.

Widespread knowledge of the findings by Mullainathan and Shafir would lean the debate over minimum wage and health care decidedly to the left, as think tank pundits and government policy makers quoted the book to assert the need to protect Americans from the negative effect of scarcity in general, and of medical care in particular.

Scarcity also serves as an epiphany for the great challenge facing the United States in the area of education. Rich people are spending more to educate their children while their state and federal representatives continue to cut budgets for public schools.  Meanwhile, a college education has become a major drain on the finances of most families.  Equal opportunity movements focused on voting and jobs in the 20th century. In the 21st century, the real battle ground for equal opportunity may be over education. 

For the past 30 years, we have passed laws and followed policies that increase the number of people facing scarcities of money, food, health care and now education. We have in effect degraded our intellectual stock by putting more panic into more people.  Creating a more unequal society has weakened our collective ability to learn and to work. If our leaders believed the message of Scarcity they would pursue an entirely different set of policies that would resemble the policies our nation pursued in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s. You know, when we had general prosperity, a lower rate of poverty, a more equal distribution of the wealth, strong unions, mostly great public schools—and, not coincidentally, much higher taxes on the wealthy.

Thursday, September 5, 2013

Study implies the American dream has been reduced to a series of financial goals

By Marc Jampole

Debt free and financially secure at retirement. That’s how people now define the American dream, according to a new study by Credit.com.

Here are all the results:

Define the American Dream
Retiring financially secure:  27.9%
Being debt-free:  23%
Owning a home: 18.2%
Graduating from college (paying off student loans):  6.0%
Joining the 1%:  3%
Other: 11.4%
None: .2%
Don’t know/no response: 8.5%

Only one problem with the survey: Credit.com gave these options to the participants, as opposed to asking the open-ended question, What is the American dream? Everything that Credit.com asked about has to do with money: Nothing aspirational or non-material. Just a bunch of financial objectives, each of which may require credit or other financial services.

The natural question is whether Credit.com’s selection of options reflects its natural concern for money matters or does it reflect the social ideals of the 21st century. In other words, is it more subtle propaganda from the financial industry or a true representation of how we now define the American dream?

The concept of the American dream sounds as if it has been around since Europeans rediscovered North America at the end of the 15th century. The actual term, however, can only be traced back to James Truslow Adams (1878-1949), born rich. Adams first use the term in his The Epic of America, written at the height of the depression in 1931. To Adams, the American dream is “of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement...It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.” (Thanks, Wikipedia!)

That pretty much sounds like the dream imagined by Martin Luther King 50 years ago, a dream that’s defined in public terms as a more perfect society. This American dream is defined by opportunity, fairness, democracy and the pursuit of happiness. King tinges the dream with social justice as well, the idea that we must not only create opportunity for everyone, but also make certain that everyone has a minimum living standard deserving of all human beings.

Once James created the concept, it didn’t take American industry, led by the advertising industry, long to privatize and commercial the American dream: Privatization involved making the dream a matter of an individual attaining success as opposed to society becoming just and equitable. Commercialization derived from the fact that industry defined this success solely in terms of material possessions. No wonder the media, entertainment and advertising industries have all been called the “great American dream machine.”

A perusal of the contents of the first few pages of a Google search of “the American dream” reveals that most people writing on the subject combine the public and the private versions of the American Dream.  Virtually every definition spoke of the American dream being the opportunity to work hard and achieve success.

For the most part since the Baby Boomer’s parents came home from World War II, the private part of the American dream has comprised owning a home and living a car-and-mall-centered life in the suburbs. We know the suburban dream has failed. We have created a society with a bottomless thirst for fossil fuels and a natural predilection to waste. It’s a social order that cannot be sustained over time, because of the twin demons of global warming and resource shortages.

I would assert that the suburban lifestyle isolates people and individuals, leading to a greater sense of privilege and self-satisfaction among the happy and successful, a greater sense of isolation and hopelessness among the unhappy or struggling. The privatization of the American dream has inured us to the suffering of others, so that many of us are only too willing to deny food stamps to the hungry and starve schools of funds because we send our kids to private schools or don’t have any.  By only including individual dreams and making them all the attainment of financial goals, Credit.com feeds into this isolating selfishness. 

The Credit.com study ends with a few questions about who will achieve the American dream. About 78% think that they will attain their dream—be it financial security at retirement or owning their own home—but only 41% think that others will attain the American dream. I infer from these twin answers that Americans do not believe that their own success or aspirations are tied to those of others or to society as a whole.  It’s every person for him- or herself as we each pursue our individual success in isolation from everyone else.  This approach will surely work for the wealthy captain of industry, but for the 99% without wealth it is a less sure path than working together and helping each other. Remember that in Martin Luther King’s dream, we all walk together, black and white, rich and poor.

Wednesday, September 4, 2013

NYC mayoral debate shows news media ignorance and focus on the irrelevant

By Marc Jampole

We saw what was wrong with political coverage in the last debate between the major contenders for the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City: the media is ignorant and creates irrelevant sideshows.

The very first question by a Wall Street Journal reporter was ridiculously irrelevant to the issues: share a recent example of each candidate or candidate’s family facing economic uncertainty.  None of the five candidates could answer the question, because all are well-off and all have been enjoying good times for at least a decade, something that the reporter should have known if he had done his homework.  Was he just stupid or did he want to make a point—that these folks are mostly rich or near rich? Or maybe he was trying to trap a candidate into making up a saccharine and unbelievable sob story?

After all the candidates—a very bright bunch if you ask me—all admitted that things were going pretty well for them lately and evoked childhood or parental struggles, the panel of reporters noted that none of the candidates answered the question.  But how could they talk about struggles if they weren’t having them? And why would they? Virtually everyone with a serious chance at a major office these days is doing well. Otherwise, others wouldn’t notice their leadership skills or give money to their campaigns. Some could be struggling with family or personal issues, some may have faced financial problems in the past, but most people running for a major office, be it governor or mayor of the nation’s largest city, are at least well-off.

The question was irrelevant and may have also revealed the reporter’s ignorance.

As part of his answer to this inessential question about financial hardship, John Liu, the only candidate who appeared to be rattled throughout the proceedings, accused the Election Board of setting up two of his aides as part of a vendetta to deny him matching contributions. Instead of ignoring this desperate plea from a desperate candidate, the reporters chose to ask the other candidates if they thought Liu was set up.  Inequitable distribution of the wealth, mass transit for the outer boroughs, the controversial “stop-and-frisk” policy—these issues stayed on hold while the candidates hemmed and hawed about Liu’s irrelevant accusations.

Later in the debate, another reporter ignorantly chided the frontrunner Bill DeBlasio for saying that he would keep confidential his negotiations with the unions covering New York City workers, who have been without a contract for six years now.  Doesn’t the reporter know that it is standard practice to keep collective bargaining negotiations confidential? Confidentiality allows both sides to explore areas that could be controversial, especially if taken out of the context of a full contract. Confidentiality allows either side to make statements and then back down. It allows either side to make accusations for which they can later apologize with no loss of face on either side.

This reporter has obviously never seen any news releases about collective bargaining, most of which include a statement that the party issuing the news release won’t negotiate in public.  Now, the average person in the street hasn’t seen these news releases either, but the average person in the street is not a reporter. A reporter is supposed to know a little bit about what he or she is covering.  This reporter was trying to create a controversy around DeBlasio, but one that is irrelevant because no matter what any of the candidates may say now, every single one of them will keep the union negotiations confidential, because that’s what their lawyers will tell them to do!

The reporter should have known that. In her ignorance, she tried to create a firestorm about an irrelevancy. Again, it didn’t work, because the other candidates except Weiner all agreed they would keep negotiations confidential. The candidates focused on the more important issues of their desire to negotiate a fair contract and whether the workers would receive retroactive pay increases for the full six years.

Next day coverage of the debate boiled down analyzing how the trailing candidates ganged up on DeBlasio. To my mind, the gang-up didn’t really occur. There were short side attacks on most of the candidates, plus several of the other candidates defended DeBlasio from what they said were unfair attacks. For the media to talk about a collectively imagined gang-up rather than the real differences between the candidates sets exactly the wrong standard for election campaigning.

Ignorance and irrelevancy seem to go hand and hand when the news media frame how they will cover the issues. We often blame politicians for making purposely ignorant statements. It is hard to believe, for example, that Chris Christie really has doubts about human-caused climate disruption or that several Republican U.S. Senators really believes that Obama acts from unpatriotic motives.

But last night’s debate among five highly intelligent and mostly competent candidates showed that the news media is also to blame for the deplorable state of political discourse.

Bloody civil war in Iraq should remind us what could go wrong in Syria

By Marc Jampole

Secretary of State John Kerry gave an impassioned rationale for attacking Syria. He tried to build the case for the absolute moral imperative to punish Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons on his own people and to prevent him from doing it again.

Kerry detailed the horror of the act for the listening world. Then he promised that U.S. military actions, with or without the support of allies, would be different from Iraq and Afghanistan, because it would not require “boots on the ground.” In other words, we’re going to do a little bombing, then leave Syria to continue its dance of death.

While I join Secretary Kerry and every other ethical and sane human being alive in condemning the Syrian government for using this weapon of mass destruction, I do not share his thirst for military action.

Kerry can list many reasons to bomb Syria, including the fact al-Assad used chemical weapons on his own people, the fact that we warned him not to do it (another version of the “let’s kill thousands to save face” strategy) and the assumption that failure to act will embolden al-Assad and other U.S. bêtes noire like Iran and North Korea to go farther. 

I can think of only one reason not to use force against al-Assad, but it trumps all of Kerry’s rationales: it will likely backfire and plunge Syria into an intensified cycle of violence between a weakened Ba’athist government and a splintered opposition that includes forces that truly despise the United States.

If you need to remind yourself what will happen in Syria, read the article titled “Bloodier than Ever” in the latest Economist.  I’ll state my case by excerpting the first paragraph:

”…the scale and scope of recent attacks have shaken even the most hardened Iraqis. More than 500 have been killed in bombings this month, after some 1,000 perished violently in July—the highest number since civil strife tailed off five years ago. Yet these figures, tallied by Iraq Body Count, an independent web-based monitoring organisation, are only the most visible cause for alarm. Car-bombings and suicide-bombers have been a fact of life in central and northern Iraq for most of the past decade, but recent attacks reveal a level of co-ordination not seen for several years.”

In other words, the civil war not only continues in Iraq, but is intensifying again. Later in the article, we find out that al-Qaeda launched an attack on prisons at Abu Ghraib and Taji last month, enabling 500 prisoners to escape. Still later, we learn that the violence is spreading to the south of Iraq, formerly one of the most peaceful parts of the country.

What a mess! And the Syrian mess will be just as bloody and violent and last just as long if we bomb Syria.

Let’s face it. With or without a violent U.S. response, the Syrian people are going to go through a lot of suffering over the coming years, certainly if al-Assad prevails and certainly during a continued civil war. It’s likely that the overthrow of the Syrian Ba’athists will produce a permanently fractured state like Iraq instead of the one strong (and hopefully pro-western) government for which we might all hope. It’s also possible that Syria may end up with another blood-thirsty strong man.

Maybe the Obama administration cynically figures that since things are going to be a mess in Syria anyhow, we might as well send a message to Iran and Russia and work off some of our excess weaponry, so we can buy some more from American arms manufacturers.  That Real Politik strategy would certainly be more consistent with the last 75 years of American foreign policy than the moral imperatives that Kerry evokes.  That Kerry was careful to tiptoe around international law lends proof to this supposition, as the United States doesn’t want to box itself into holding any other entity above its own sense of imperial entitlement, not even international law.

Thinking about the suffering of the 1,500 people who died of chemical poisoning makes me physically ill. It was a repulsive act that deserves to be met with world condemnation, economic boycott, increased support of those rebels willing to commit to a western-style democracy and a temporary rapprochement with Iran—anything we can do to destabilize the Ba’athists in Syria short of military action.

Sunday, September 1, 2013

Wrong Way

Graphic by Kevin Kreneck

Saturday, August 31, 2013

Editorial: Stand Up to Bullies / The First Amendment's Broad Reach


When we were children, we were told we had to stand up to schoolyard bullies, and sometimes the only thing that would cause a bully to back off was to bloody his nose.

Nowadays, many schools have zero tolerance for fighting, and would send home both the bully and the bullied after a fisticuffs. That probably makes sense in this age of “Stand Your Ground” laws that allow a bully to pick a fight and then, if the victim throws a punch, the bully can pull a gun and shoot his opponent in “self defense.” But good people still need to call out bullies. Blessed are the peacemakers, as Jesus said, but it doesn’t hurt to know how to defend yourself, in case peace is not at hand.

The bullies have been at work in the legislatures of our nation, as Southern conservatives have consolidated their hold on the Republican Party and made their top priorities attacks on labor unions and minority voting rights.

The attacks on unions helped Republicans cripple one of the bulwarks of the Democratic organizational base — organized labor — in northern states and now voter ID laws which have been passed or are being advanced in 31 states are designed to keep minorities, students and low-income voters — who are much more likely to vote Democratic — away from the polls.

Republicans claim that voter ID laws, which require voters to produce certain state-issued photo IDs — generally drivers licenses and sometimes concealed weapons permits but not state university IDs — are designed to stop voter fraud, but 1) there is very little actual voter fraud and 2) the laws obviously are designed to make it more difficult for students, low-income workers and minorities, particularly in cities, where they are less likely to have a car than Republican voters are. According to the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, 10% of the general voting public lacks an adequate photo ID, but those figures rise to 15% of voting-age citizens making less than $35,000 a year, 18% of Americans over 65 and 25% of African Americans.

In Texas, the state estimated that as many as 796,000 registered voters lacked government-issued photo ID. To obtain those IDs, many would have to spend $22 to get a Texas birth certificate — and possibly more if they were born in other states. That could be considered a poll tax. Also, Texas has license offices in only 81 of 254 counties in the state; some voters would need to travel up to 250 miles to obtain a voter ID. Hispanic voters are twice as likely as whites not to have a car, so they wouldn’t have a driver license.

A federal court in Washington ruled in August 2012 that Texas’ voter ID law violated the Voting Rights Act because it discriminated against minority voters. But two hours after the Supreme Court struck down Section 5 of the law, which had required the state to submit electoral changes for review, the Texas attorney general announced that the illegal voter ID law would be implemented.

If Republicans sincerely wanted to keep the vote honest, they would make a good-faith effort to issue voter IDs in inner cities, where potential voters are more likely to go without a car. Instead, Texas is opening six “mega center” offices — all in suburbs — to make it easier for suburban residents to renew their driver licenses. In Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker signed a strict voter ID law and then proposed to close DMV offices in Democratic areas, while increasing office hours in Republican areas.

North Carolina not only adopted a voter ID law; the legislature also eliminated same-day registration, reduced the early voting period and eliminated pre-registration for 16- and 17-year-olds. Republican-dominated local election boards have escalated attacks on student voting by shutting down polling places on college campus, preventing students from running for political offices and possibly challenging students’ rights to vote. A 1979 Supreme Court case, Symm v. US, affirmed the right of college students at historically black Prairie View A&M University, northwest of Houston, to vote in their campus communities. But Waller County officials still refuse to put a polling place on the Prairie View campus and there’s no telling whether today’s Supreme Court would uphold that 1979 reading of the law.

The US Department of Justice is moving to use the “bail-in relief” under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to bring Southern states with a history of interfering with voting rights, including Texas and North Carolina, back under judicial review.

In the meantime, civil rights groups should organize to make sure that black and Latino voters have photo IDs — making arrangements to transport them to the well-staffed suburban DMV offices, if necessary. While they’re at it, civil rights groups should help young voters also get concealed weapons permits, because nothing will get Republican lawmakers to reconsider Stand Your Ground laws like the prospect of a well-armed black and brown militia ready to respond with force.

But the best way to bloody the Republican bullies’ noses is with ballots, now that black and Hispanic and working-class voters know what is stake. Honest Republicans will make sure those ballots are allowed to be cast and counted — but the Voting Rights Act still empowers the Justice Department to look over their shoulders.

The First Amendment’s Broad Reach

There has been some debate as to whether Julian Assange and Glenn Greenwald are journalists who should be protected by the First Amendment or spies who should be prosecuted — Assange for publishing then-Pvt. Bradley Manning’s leaks of hundreds of thousands of military and diplomatic messages, or Greenwald, the columnist for the London-based Guardian, for enabling Edward Snowden’s disclosure of the wide-ranging surveillance of telephone and Internet messages by the National Security Agency. The US has a strong tradition of press freedom, but that hasn’t stopped politicians from calling for prosecution of both Greenwald and Assange.

The Justice Department has revamped its policies on news media in response to complaints about its covert seizure of phone records of reporters, Faiza Patel and Amos Toh of the Brennan Center for Justice wrote, but the guidelines still include what has been dubbed the “WikiLeaks exception”: Persons and entities that “simply make information available” are excluded from protection.

Patel and Toh wrote that “any attempt to distinguish between press outlets based on how responsible they are perceived to be is well down the slippery slope leading to official censorship. The Supreme Court has understood this risk, making it clear that while ‘[a] responsible press is an undoubtedly desirable goal, press responsibility is not mandated by the Constitution and, like many other virtues, it cannot be legislated.’ Similarly, a news outlet’s agenda doesn’t affect its right to publish. Except in cases of defamation, libel and obscenity, the right to publish is protected regardless of ‘motivation, orthodoxy, truthfulness, timeliness or taste.’ The First Amendment does not protect Assange any less because some believe him to be a celebrity-seeking megalomaniac. Nor does it discriminate against Glenn Greenwald because he is anti-establishment and activist.”

We agree with Patel and Toh that the First Amendment protects the New York Times (which published so me of Manning’s disclosures) not because it is an American company, but because it provides a service to the nation: keeping people informed about the activities of their government so they can participate meaningfully in democratic decision-making. Foreign news sources [such as WikiLeaks and the Guardian] provide the same service and even enrich national debate in the US by providing an outside perspective, which the Internet makes as accessible to Americans as their hometown paper.

Assange and Greenwald may be arrogant, egocentric, narcissistic, stubborn and other terms of enragement in the eyes of authorities and other detractors, but these are not unusual attributes among investigative journalists. They are precisely the sort of troublemakers the Founders intended to protect, because they are the ones most likely to incur enemies in high places.

Call off your dogs, Attorney General Holder. Don’t make Justice Antonin Scalia school you on the First Amendment. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, September 15, 2013

Populist.com
Blog | Current Issue | Back Issues | Essays | Links
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us
Copyright © 2013 The Progressive Populist
PO Box 819, Manchaca TX 78652




Selections from the September 15, 2013 issue


COVER/Aaron Kase
A public school system left behind

EDITORIAL
Stand up to bullies; First Amendment’s reach

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
The new food sovereignty prize emerges

DISPATCHES
Raising minimum wage is political goldmine;
White working-class voters up for grabs;
Ted Cruz — best NRSC vice chair Dems ever had;
Colorado, Montana join states announcing affordable insurance rates;
More medical students choosing family practice;
Cons’ new health plan: go to E.R;
Child hunger common in US, teachers say;
Kristol Klear on Syrian involvement;
Killing 'Obamacare' is killing the GOP;
26 states deny health coverage for working poor ....

DON ROLLINS
Florida tutoring under microscope

BOB BURNETT
Republicans and the Tea Party

RANDOLPH T. HOLHUT
Billionaires will not save journalism

WENONAH HAUTER
This isn’t the American way

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
New derring-do for risk-takers

SAM URETSKY
Education reform: It’s complicated

WAYNE O’LEARY
Irreconcilable differences

JOHN BUELL
The ecology of transportation and democracy

RICHARDESKOW
Cynicism is corporate America’s greatest weapon

BOOK REVIEW/Terence McDowell
Deciphering ‘The Fine Print’

ROB PATTERSON
A prayer for Pussy Riot

POPULIST PICKS
Gasland II; John D. Rockefeller; Harmony Game



Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Invading or attacking Syria would be a big mistake America and the world would regret

By Marc Jampole

Regime change. It sounds so bland, so calm. So scientific. So bloodless.

Here’s what it means: using force to take over another country and then impose a new set of leaders on it or a process guaranteed to produce a new set of leaders. It’s different from a revolution, in which an entire people overthrows the rule of government, which is what happened in Egypt in late 2010. When a small group takes over its own country, that’s a coup d’état, as in Egypt this year.

Some revolutions are good like the American revolution, and some don’t work out so well, and sometimes it starts well until someone bad seizes control of the revolution, e.g., France in 1789 and Russia in 1917.

But no matter what the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II and now Obama administrations may say—no matter how tortuous their reasoning—a coup d’état is never good and regime change by external forces is never good.

Some argue that all we have to do is make a pre-emptive strike and dismantle all of Assad’s jet fighters and his chemical arms capabilities. First of all, that’s easier said than done. Nicholas Jahr emailed me earlier today with this quote from CBS News: “The U.S. has huge military advantage, so there is little doubt cruise missiles could destroy targets ranging from command centers to launchers used to fire chemical weapons” and a sarcastic statement. It all sounds so familiar—didn’t we use similar words to underestimate the resources and overestimate the positive impact of a military move in Viet Nam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Consider, too, that even if we could execute a surgical attack that wipes out Assad’s air force in a matter of hours, wouldn’t Assad rearm with the help of Russia, which certainly could use a foreign market for its military goods?

I’ve also read the argument that Assad is backed by Iran, so we can’t back down. This idea that invading or attacking Syria is a proxy for war with Iran is just crazy.  A much better approach is to deal directly with Iran and in a series of horse trades get them to drop Assad like a hot potato. There is much Iran and the United States could accomplish together if we were somehow able to repair the relationship. But if it can’t be repaired, shouldn’t we squirrel away all the resources we can for potential hostilities with Iran? Why dissipate resources on Iran’s proxy?

Using chemical warfare is horrible. But so is the use of drones and carpet bombing. So is torture.  So is mowing down innocent citizens who have gathered to protest. Where do you draw the line in terms of unacceptable behavior by government, behavior so heinous that it requires the world to invade and seek regime change? We knew about the forced famine in the Ukraine and did nothing. We knew what happened in Chile and not only did nothing, but provided aid to the perpetrators.

Then there is the question of what a U.S. led action will do to Syria. Many of those Syrians sitting on the fence about Assad may start to support him on principle. And we all know that the most likely leaders to replace Assad will be anti-American or will support a turn to conservative Islam or both. What could we possibly win?  Is there any scenario with any possibility of coming true in which the U.S. comes out ahead or in which a great deal of innocent blood is not shed? Keep in mind that the current borders of Syria contain large populations of Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians, Turks, Christians, Druze, Alawite Shias and Arab Sunnis.  Remember what happened to both Iraq and Yugoslavia after the demise of “strong man” government.

There must be some mix of economic sanctions we can still impose. The news that Assad used chemical weapons on his own people may move the Soviet Union finally to pressure the Assad regime. Even showering various rebel groups with weapons and money is a preferable option to attack or invasion.

I’m not up on the theories of the just war, but surely one criterion must be that the war has a possibility of achieving an outcome in keeping with the idea of justice and morality: to the western world, including the United States, that currently means a secular, free-market democracy ruled by mostly benevolent parties and leaders. There is absolutely no chance of such an outcome if the U.S. or a U.S. led ad hoc army invades or attacks Syria.

Monday, August 26, 2013

Another proof we need to tax the wealthy more: funds for investing in guitars & stamps

By Marc Jampole
 
The market for collectibles is booming.  Be it luxury race cars, paintings, stamps, coins, vintage wines or classic guitars, wealthy people are willing to pay a lot more money than they used to for possessions imbued with special value by society or certain elite groups in society.  And why not? They have more money to spend thanks to wage stagnation and a low tax regime.

The climb in what the rich are willing to pay for a 1957 Ferrari or a Cezanne landscape has been precipitous. The Economist, for example, has put together a super index of various indices of luxury valuables. While the stock markets of the developed world have increased by 147% in the past ten years, the Economist says its “valuables index” has shot up by 211% during the same time frame.

The Economist also reports that companies are creating funds that invest in stamps, classic guitars, wine and equine blood stock (racing horses). That’s right—instead of investing in initial start-ups of solar and wind technology companies, rich folk can invest in funds that buy stamps or classic guitars and hope for continued inflation in these “valuables.” 

Those who want to keep taxes on the wealthy at low levels always fall back on the old saw that wealthy people need all that money to create jobs.  But what jobs are created by bidding up the price of 50-year-old guitars or 75-year-old stamps?  None. It’s just an exchange of funds between wealthy folks who have nothing better to do with their money. They certainly aren’t investing it in creating jobs.

But the government would have a lot of things better to do with this money. It could increase unemployment and food stamp benefits, which would give money to people who would spend it immediately for goods and services, creating jobs to fill the additional demand. The government could spend it on fixing our highways and bridges and expanding mass transit, especially between suburbs and city centers, which would create jobs. It could subsidize research into alternative energy and more energy efficient technologies, which would create jobs. It could increase the number of government health, food, safety and environmental inspections, which would create jobs.

We’ve created jobs through government spending before. During the ‘50s and ‘60s when income taxes on the wealthy were much higher than today, federal and state government supported an expansion in higher education that made U.S. universities the envy of the world and a inexpensive bargain for students. During that high-tax era, we also built a wonderful interstate system of highways and improved public schools by reducing class size, hiring more specialist teachers and building state-of-the-art school buildings. As most readers will know, we now remember the ‘50s and ‘60s as an age of prosperity for most Americans. Taxes on the wealthy were not high then; they are too low now.

Thirty some odd years into the low-tax-on-wealthy regime started by Ronald Reagan, we have a crumbling transportation infrastructure, college education is becoming increasingly unaffordable, public pension plans are underfunded and states are throwing needy people off food stamp and unemployment insurance rolls. We have little money to invest in the technologies that will potentially save us from human-induced global warming and resource shortages. Public school districts are firing teachers everywhere. Mass transit systems are cutting routes and vehicles everywhere.

Was it worth destroying our social fabric so that the wealthy could have the money to pay more for an old painting? 

I must admit that the frequent record purchases of art work and other valuables have made gossip and lifestyle columns much more interesting in our age of plutocratic conspicuous consumption. But in most other ways the country was better off when the rich paid more taxes.

Wall Street Journal gets history wrong in blaming college high costs on increased government aid.

By Marc Jampole
 
The Wall Street Journal has launched a campaign to convince the American people that increased government aid, especially under Obama, has caused the incredible rise in the cost of going to college.  In the same day, the false notion that increased government support of education is the real cause of the rise in tuition appeared twice in the Journal: in an editorial  and in an Op/Ed interview of the director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP), which is funded by Project Liberty, a nonprofit organization with neither website nor mission statement.

It’s as ridiculously wrong as saying that blame for the real estate bubble belongs not on the banks that made bad loans, nor the investment bankers who sold these loans knowing they were suspect, but on the Clinton administration for making more money available for mortgage loans. In the case of the real estate bubble, the Wall Street Journal analysis was faulty because no federal official approved or suborned “liar loans” or selling bad paper to unknowing investors.   

In the case of the high cost of college, the Journal and its columnists are trying to rewrite the facts of history. The federal government has made more money available—in loans more than grants—because the cost of college has skyrocketed. The high costs caused government to act.

I wonder of the Journal editorial staff believes that a fish makes a bear dip its paws in the river and eat it. Or that Stalin forced Hitler to invade the Soviet Union.

CCAP director, conservative economics professor Richard Vedder, does have a good point when he chides colleges for building expensive luxury dorms and climbing walls. I have a feeling that most parents would rather see their children in more modest surroundings—perhaps with fewer distractions from studying—and pay less in tuition and housing for their precious scholars. Keep in mind, though, that these colleges are not building these Taj Ma-Dorms for the poor and middle class who need to borrow, but for wealthy and upper middle class students.

Luxury amenities are trivial, though. By far the biggest reason college costs have gone up is because states are contributing less to them.  As the states have gradually cut back on support for education since the beginning of the Reagan era, college costs have ballooned beyond general inflation.

Even while the Journal editorial board blames the Obama administration, which began in 2009, for the 30-year rise in college costs, it finds room to denigrate intellectuals and the academic world. They do it in a transitional paragraph about the potential impact of the new college costs standards that President Obama wants to implement (FYI, I don’t think the standards are a good idea, but I disagree with the Journal’s reasoning):

“And we concede that this latest Obama regulatory onslaught couldn't happen to a nicer bunch than the university elite who did so much to elect him. But while shifting control of universities from lefty professors to the U.S. Department of Education may seem like a transition between six and a half-dozen, it is not.”

I’m willing to believe the Journal when it implies or states that left-wingers people academia. Certainly virtually every scientist has liberal or left-wing views favoring evolution and human-caused global warming. Moreover academic studies in economics and sociology routinely disprove the myths espoused in the Wall Street Journal. Yes, there has been an enormous net transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the wealthy over the past 35 years though tax policy, privatization and union-bashing. Yes, a poor child is less likely to rise to middle class or wealthy status in the United States than virtually any other developed country. No, raising taxes on the wealthy does not destroy jobs, it creates jobs.

So many of the principles of the free market that the Wall Street Journal and its contributors promulgate have been proven false by serious objective academic research. It’s no wonder the Journal and other mass media outlets actively mock and scorn academics whenever they get a chance, be it snide side remarks in editorials or the many geekish, snobbish and ineffectual academics in mass entertainment like ”Frasier” and “The Big Bang Theory.” The believers in the religion of the unregulated free market don’t have the facts on their side, but they do control most of the ink.

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Left-leaning economic columnist Eduardo Porter swallows nuclear power Kool-Aid

By Marc Jampole

Eduardo Porter usually gives a reasoned argument on economic problems and it usually leads to a left-leaning solution such as raising taxes on the wealthy or more government investment. He generally approaches the myths of mainstream and conservative economic writers with a clear head.

It was therefore surprising to read Porter on the front page of The New York Times business section advocating for the increased use of nuclear generated electricity as the solution to the twin challenges of human-induced global warming and resource shortages.  

Porter effortlessly runs through all the usual facts about the absolute need to reduce carbon emissions even in the face of rapidly increasing global demand for energy. But his argument hinges on a study that he says was conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and the International Energy Agency that found that a nuclear generator could produce power at $50-$75 per megawatt/hour, compared to $70 to $90 for coal-generated electricity and in the hundreds of dollars for solar.  Porter conveniently forgets to tell us that Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) was also involved in the study, but a link thankfully provided by the New York Times gives us that information. By the way, NEA is an international organization whose mission is to “assist its member countries in maintaining and further developing, through international co-operation, the scientific, technological and legal bases required for the safe, environmentally friendly and economical use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.” In other words, it’s a shill for the nuclear industry.  It is shocking and disappointing to see a reporter I respect stoop to concealing the source of the statistics he uses!

There is so much wrong with his analysis and his use of these statistics that I don’t know where to begin.  The study itself is open to question because it uses very favorable assumptions for nuclear when it comes to construction costs and interest rates. These assumptions don’t take into account the fact that the world has still not developed a viable way to store or neutralize spent nuclear fuel, which will spew radioactive poisons into the environment for thousands of years.

Beyond these figures which aren’t quite facts, Porter makes a number of assumptions that are questionable:
  • Like so many conservatives, he acts as if electricity delivered on a national grid is the only kind of energy that matters. Not true. For example, solar energy can heat the rooms, food and water house by house for much of the year in much of the world. Solar energy could also be used in neighborhood units that supply electricity to blocks or neighborhoods (and are connected to the holy grid).
  • He assumes that tax and regulation cannot be used to “level the playing field.”  Again quoting the Nuclear Energy Agency study, Porter says that even if a tax of $30 per metric ton of carbon dioxide were placed on coal and natural gas, it would still be cheaper than wind and solar. Why that arbitrary number? Why couldn’t we tax carbon emissions as much as necessary to make solar and wind competitive?  Right now society and every individual that suffers from a pollution-related disease or a weather disaster are paying the social cost of keeping coal-generated electricity cheap. That’s the way it used to be with cigarettes, too, with society paying the cost of lost productivity and increased illness among smokers. Now we tax the hell out of cigarettes and there is no reason why couldn’t do the same with carbon emissions.
  • Porter doesn’t even discuss the possibility of catastrophic nuclear accidents such as what happened at Kyshtym (in 1957), Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. What he says is that younger environmentalists “don’t associate nuclear power with Chernobyl and the cold war.”  I’m not sure what the cold war has to do with anything (except that the original reason that Truman selected nuclear over the solar option in the early '50s may have been that he was enamored with dropping bombs). But anyone who doesn’t associate nuclear power with Chernobyl is an idiot, and in Porter’s world, probably a fictional character.  Porter underestimates the justifiable fear of a nuclear accident that people feel.
Porter ends his radioactive polemic with a cry that we have to get started approving nuclear power plants now if we want nuclear power to play a leading role in combating climate change, because it takes 10 years and $5 billion to build each plant. It would be far better if that money were spent on perfecting solar and wind technologies and in priming the market for these alternative technologies with tax breaks and government purchases.

Coincidentally, this week also brought word that Fukushima is leaking poisoned water again. The many nuclear accidents, the one major catastrophe about every 10-15 years and the lack of a place to store all the poisonous byproducts makes nuclear generation of electricity a failed technology. It replaces one environmental horror story with another.  Instead of pouring more money into the nuclear cesspool, we should launch a major effort to accelerate development of alternative energy and technologies that use less energy, while promoting conservation and making the changes to our infrastructure that will reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, e.g., increase mass transit.

Monday, August 19, 2013

Legal defense for NSA spying falls to new revelations of illegal spying

By Marc Jampole
 
Defenders of National Security Agency (NSA) wholesale spying on Americans have asserted that it was and is legal, thanks to the Patriot Act.

But it turns out that all too often the NSA has broken the law—2,776 times over a one-year period, according to an internal audit leaked by the former NSA contractor and American hero Edward Snowden.  That’s an average of more than 7.6 times per day that the NSA violated privacy rules protecting the communications of those residing in the United States. The New York Times reports that most of the violations resulted from operator and system errors like “inadequate or insufficient research” when selecting wiretap targets.   For example, almost 70% of the violations occurred when a foreigner whose cellphone was wiretapped without a warrant came to the United States, where a warrant was required.   

There is no way to prettify this pig: On its face, 2,776 instances of breaking the law in one year seems to prove that there has been a complete breakdown in agency discipline and that abuse of the Patriot Act is rampant.

The fact that it looks as if most of the violations involved taking a shortcut doesn’t absolve the NSA or the Obama administration. Here are some examples of other shortcuts: not asking for a warrant to wiretap an American citizen; doing complete sweeps of the metadata of millions of Americans; military trials to avoid civilian due process; and, of course, the shortest of all short cuts—torture. We’re not talking about a slippery slope here. What’s at issue is a mindset that is willing to break the rules and in the process trample on the rights of millions and to turn our society into a friendly police state.

It’s lose-lose for the NSA. Saying that the number of errors was miniscule compared to the number of wiretaps they are performing would indicate that the NSA is in fact spying on a disturbingly enormous number of people. So either the NSA makes a ton of mistakes or it’s doing massive spying.  That’s about as lose-lose as you can get!

Barack Obama assumed the office of the President of the United States on extremely high moral ground, which mainly reflected American and world disgust with the bumbling butchery of Bush II that birthed two useless but destructive and expensive wars, a torture gulag around the world and shocking new levels of spying on American citizens.  Barry even won a Nobel Peace Prize essentially for not being George Bush.

After the continued use of drones and continued revelations of spying abuses, Obama has lost all that high ground. You can’t stake a claim to a higher morality merely because you never ordered torture (especially if you have essentially suborned torture by not prosecuting the creators of the illegal torture machine). That’s akin to saying that you’re a better person because you only sell crystal meth to those over the age of 18. Of course, if we apply this analogy to Obama’s NSA, it may mean that you still “forget” to ask for ID most of the time!

Unfortunately the answer is not to vote for Republicans in the 2014 mid-term elections, since the Republican Party as a whole buys into the authoritarian state much more than the Democrats do.  Before we can stem the slow drift towards a police state, we have to turn the Democratic Party back towards a reasoned approach to fighting terrorists, one that depends on legal police and intelligence techniques known to work. It would also help if we had a foreign policy that did not overtly exploit and offend the people who represent the terrorists’ constituency.
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)