How We Betrayed What We Stand For – Part Four & Conclusion

WC has argued for a long time that the United States betrayed its values and principles in its treatment of illegal detainees after 9/11. The conclusions are so clear that WC has been baffled by those who claim otherwise, or those who claim not to care. WC was appalled when both the Obama Administration and Congress failed to at least examine how and why it happened.

The Constitution Project assembled a Task Force on Detainee Treatment. It’s bipartisan, its members’ credentials are impeccable and its Report is out. And that Report is a devastating indictment of our country’s conduct. Without the power to compel testimony or the production of records, working solely from publicly available information, the Task Force has meticulously documented a pattern of behavior that constitutes war crimes.

While the Report contained specific Recommendations, it’s doubtful that our pusillanimous, ineffective Congress will act on them. Or even read them. But you, WC’s readers, should. Over the next few weeks, WC will review portions of the Report and offer his comments. 

Key Links:  Part One / Part Two  / Part Three / The Constitution Project / On-Line Report on Detainee Treatment

The last six Findings are a bit of a mixed bag. While important, they lack the punch of the earlier ones. Still, they are worth a look.

What has made President Bush’s creation of Guantanamo an intractable problem is the unwillingness of other countries and the United States to deal with the individuals detained there. Some are very likely violent radicals; others may have started as innocent and law-abiding, but years of mistreatment, unlawful detention and exposure to bona fide radicals have radicalized them as well. What troubled the Task Force and troubles WC is that there is no plan for resolving the mess we have created. Those who could be released on an ad hoc basis have been; the rest will require more thought, effort and planning. That doesn’t seem to be happening. So Guantanamo continue to exist, a dubious, embarrassing and failed experiment in ignoring our own laws. And probably a useful recruiting tool for the bad guys.

One of the obstacles to releasing the remaining prisoners is the claim that among those already released there is a high rate of terrorist activity. “Recidivism” isn’t the right word, since few if any have ever been convicted of committing a crime. But those “recidivism” figures are dubious. It’s contradicted by independent evidence suggesting the reported recidivism rate is seriously inflated. It includes, for example, wholly unsubstantiated “suspicion” of terrorist activity. Since the claim of “recidivism” is one of the primary justifications for keeping the Guantanamo prison running, the claim needs to be examined carefully.

There is a tendency in American government to stamp as “Secret” any facts that are merely embarrassing to those in power. That’s happened in the case of our country’s torture and outsourced torture of the kidnapped and illegally detained victims of our national paranoia. It’s not an issue of national security; it’s an issue of personal security for the torturers and their enablers. The federal courts are emasculated on issues of purported national security. Only Congress, through reform legislation, or the Executive, through declassification, can bring light where there is shameful darkness. The Task Force concluded the continuing secrecy was indefensible.

Findings 20 and 21 point to the failure by Congress to implement the Convention Against Torture. The United States signed the Convention in 1988. The Senate ratified it in 1994. Almost two decades later, implementation is almost entirely incomplete. Neither the required criminalization nor the required restitution have been enacted into law. This from a country that styles itself a champion of liberty. The current Congress is seemingly incapable of tying its own shoelaces, let alone addressing critical issues of human rights. But the Convention must be implemented.

President Obama takes credit for stopping U.S. torture of detainees. But the Task Force found that in some instances the President accomplished that by redefining what the U.S. regards as torture. Portions of the Army Field Manual that prohibited sleep deprivation and stress positions were deleted. Appendix M, authorizing up to 40 hours of continuous interrogation, were authorized. That conduct violates the Convention Against Torture. And it is an embarrassment for any country that thinks of itself as a nation of laws. The Army Field Manual should be restored to its pre-2001 form.

There is strong evidence that U.S. detainees transferred to Afghanistan, including persons released from Guantanamo, are subsequently tortured by the Afghan security forces. It’s another violation of the Convention Against Torture. The Convention bars a country from releasing persons to a country where they are likely to be tortured, whether the release is by the Armed Forces or by the CIA. Those releases also violate the Leahy Law:

None of the funds made available by this Act may be provided to any unit of the security forces of a foreign country if the Secretary of State has credible evidence that such unit has committed gross violations of human rights, unless the Secretary determines and reports to the Committees on Appropriations that the government of such country is taking effective measures to bring the responsible members of the security forces unit to justice.

The U.S. financial support to Afghanistan, or at least to the National Directorate of Security, violates U.S. law. We’re giving vast amounts of money and military equipment to known human rights violators. There is a loophole, but the Task Force found no evidence that the requirements for the loophole had been satisfied.

CONCLUSION

Some of WC’s readers may remember the Watergate scandal, and Presidential Counsel John Dean’s most famous single line: “Mr. President, there is a cancer on the Presidency.” Treating the cancer that was Watergate was painful and protracted but necessary.

WC believes that the pattern of kidnapping and torture committed by the United States is another cancer on our country. The failure to properly address it has the potential to permanently injure our democratic government.

It’s never a good idea to ignore a cancer. The Task Force’s Report is a good start. WC offers his sincerest thanks and admiration to the Task Force members and staff. But until the events the Task Force describes are addressed at the national level, the cancer will remain. And, eventually, it may very well kill our way of government.

How We Betrayed What We Stand For – Part Three

WC has argued for a long time that the United States betrayed its values and principles in its treatment of illegal detainees after 9/11. The conclusions are so clear that WC has been baffled by those who claim otherwise, or those who claim not to care. WC was appalled when both the Obama Administration and Congress failed to at least examine how and why it happened.

The Constitution Project assembled a Task Force on Detainee Treatment. It’s bipartisan, its members’ credentials are impeccable and its Report is out. And that Report is a devastating indictment of our country’s conduct. Without the power to compel testimony or the production of records, working solely from publicly available information, the Task Force has meticulously documented a pattern of behavior that constitutes war crimes.

While the Report contained specific Recommendations, it’s doubtful that our pusillanimous, ineffective Congress will act on them. Or even read them. But you, WC’s readers, should. Over the next few weeks, WC will review portions of the Report and offer his comments. 

Key Links:  Part One Part Two  The Constitution Project / On-Line Report on Detainee Treatment

As bad as Guantanamo is and was, as bad as the photos from Abu Ghraib showed prisoner treatment there to be, probably the most shameful United States conduct was the euphemistically titled “extraordinary rendition.” We out-sourced our torture to other countries. The United States engaged in the wholesale practice of kidnapping individuals, “disappearing” them to other countries for interrogation and torture, not necessarily in that order.

The Task Force weighed in on “extraordinary rendition” as a part of its Report.

Finding 9

The United States has harshly criticized countries that have practiced extra-judicial (i.e., illegal) seizure of persons. In several South American countries, the practice has toppled regimes. It is the hallmark of dictators, of despots. When WC first read Jane Mayer’s article in The New Yorker in February 2005, it turned WC’s stomach. Our country, the land of freedom and liberty, had sunk to the level of a tin pot dictatorship. The second reaction was fury that the Bush Administration had so badly betrayed everything that the U.S. aspired to represent.

Finding 10

The “diplomatic assurances” were despicable, flimsy excuses. They were the moral equivalent of excusing a lie because your fingers were crossed. We shipped kidnapped persons to places like Egypt precisely because they had proven track records of doing whatever they thought necessary to extract information from their own citizens. The whole point was that those countries could and would do things to prisoners that the U.S. couldn’t or wouldn’t. We out-sourced our torture, just as we out-source manufacturing. The U.S. found someone who was willing to do it and didn’t care about the political ramification. Although Hosni Mubarak may be having second thoughts now.

Finding 11

But it wasn’t enough that the U.S. shipped illegally kidnapped persons to compliant countries for torture. The U.S. sent CIA officials there to watch the process and, apparently, offer “helpful suggestions.” Which deepens the U.S.’s complicity in these war crimes.

And they are war crimes. The documented conduct in numerous “extraordinary renditions” is a blatant, inarguable violation of the Convention Against Torture. And, as the Task Force notes, the U.S. has denounced the conduct when practiced by other states. The Task Force recommends that the U.S. “fully comply with its legal obligations under the Convention Against Torture in cooperating with pending investigations and lawsuits in the United States and abroad.”

The United States is supposed to be a nation of laws. WC is waiting for the criminal activity of extraordinary rendition to be prosecuted for the war crimes that it was. Or at least openly investigated and disclosed. But he isn’t holding his breath.

Findings 12 through 16 deal with the misconduct of medical professionals, including physicians and psychologists, and their violations of their ethical and legal standards. While important, WC judges them to be less important than some of the other Findings. WC will pass them by, with this link for interested readers.

In the next post on this topic, WC will review the Findings that involve moving forward from where we are. . In the meantime, WC strongly urges every thinking American to read the Report.

 

How We Betrayed What We Stand For – Part Two

WC has argued for a long time that the United States betrayed its values and principles in its treatment of illegal detainees after 9/11. The conclusions are so clear that WC has been baffled by those who claim otherwise, or those who claim not to care. WC was appalled when both the Obama Administration and Congress failed to at least examine how and why it happened.

The Constitution Project assembled a Task Force on Detainee Treatment. It’s bipartisan, its members’ credentials are impeccable and its Report is out. And that Report is a devastating indictment of our country’s conduct. Without the power to compel testimony or the production of records, working solely from publicly available information, the Task Force has meticulously documented a pattern of behavior that constitutes war crimes.

While the Report contained specific Recommendations, it’s doubtful that our pusillanimous, ineffective Congress will act on them. Or even read them. But you, WC’s readers, should. Over the next few weeks, WC will review portions of the Report and offer his comments. 

Key Links:  Part One The Constitution Project / On-Line Report on Detainee Treatment

Some of the Findings in the Report deal with the ongoing embarrassment that is the Guantanamo Detention Center.

Finding #4

This is the only Finding on which the Task Force was not unanimous. Even the fairly lame Finding – “should be addressed” – proved too controversial and triggered dissents from two Task Force members. WC thinks the dissenters vacillation is curious, more a product of NIMBY than reasoned law. The response appears to be a reaction of fear, that the detainees would be moved to prisons near them than reasoned thinking. WC finds the idea of an off-shore U.S. prison, where the law has little or diminished effect, and security trumps the U.S. Constitution, abhorrent. For WC, this is the weakest point of the Report.

The United States has also ignored the recommendations of its own 9/11 Commission.

Finding #5

One reason there isn’t a “common coalition” is that most of the United States’ “friends” want nothing to do with the illegal treatment of detainees practiced by our country. Those countries, perhaps, have a little more respect for the Geneva Conventions than the Bush Administration.

The Task Force had harsh criticism for the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, a primary legal advisor to the President.  The criticism came in three forms.

Finding #6

A government lawyer is required to tell his or her client what the law is, not to bless the illegal intentions of the boss, just because he is president or vice president. We’ve sunk a long ways from Watergate, haven’t we? Back then lawyers would quit rather than fire a special prosecutor in violation of the law.

The second criticism of USDOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel centered on their failure to pay attention to the advice and recommendations of others.

Finding #7

The failure to consult with an consider the recommendations of the FBI are ironic: they are part of the same Department of Justice, after all. And the State Department might have pointed out the risk being created for every American arrested abroad. It’s not unreasonable to suspect that if we mistreat foreign detainees, other countries will also.

Finding #8

Finally, the Task Force criticized the failure of transparency by the Office of Legal Counsel. Transparency, of course, is a difficult question when legal advice is privileged. But where you are talking about ignoring and subverting treaties among nations, about engaging in conduct that violates American law and was the basis for war crimes prosecution after World War II, the attorney-client privilege cannot be the primary or only consideration. As just one consideration, government cannot function when the Executive branch secretly determines that the action of the Legislative branch should be ignored.

The Task Force turned next to the matter of “extraordinary rendition,” the kidnapping of foreign nationals for torture. WC will take up those recommendations in a later post. In the meantime, WC strongly urges every thinking American to read the Report.

How We Betrayed What We Stand For – Part One

WC has argued for a long time that the United States betrayed its values and principles in its treatment of illegal detainees after 9/11. The conclusions are so clear that WC has been baffled by those who claim otherwise, or those who claim not to care. WC was appalled when both the Obama Administration and Congress failed to at least examine how and why it happened.

The Constitution Project assembled a Task Force on Detainee Treatment. It’s bipartisan, its members’ credentials are impeccable and its Report is out. And that Report is a devastating indictment of our country’s conduct. Without the power to compel testimony or the production of records, working solely from publicly available information, the Task Force has meticulously documented a pattern of behavior that constitutes war crimes.

While the Report contained specific Recommendations, it’s doubtful that our pusillanimous, ineffective Congress will act on them. Or even read them. But you, WC’s readers, should. Over the next few weeks, WC will review portions of the Report and offer his comments. 

Key Links: The Constitution Project / On-Line Report on Detainee Treatment

Finding 1

We engaged in torture in violation of international law and in violation of treaties to which the United States is bound. The flimsy excuses and justifications generated by John Yoo and David Addington were examined with care by the Task Force and unanimously rejected. 

The Task Force’s Appendix 1 supports in devastating detail the basis for this Finding.

Finding 2

Let’s be clear about this. The Task Force concluded that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are legally culpable for the torture and treatment of detainees. The details in Appendix 2 to the Report are detailed, gruesome and damning. An appallingly long list of other government officials went along with the pretexts and rationalizations; some even pressed for more “enhanced” techniques. The FBI, to its credit, refused to participate.

Worse, in a transparent implied admission of guilt, the White House tried to game our system of government, arguing that if the Geneva Convention applied to the military, it didn’t apply to the CIA, authorizing the CIA to engage in the euphemistically named “enhanced interrogation.” The Geneva Conventions bind the United States, not “all of the United States except the CIA.”

The Task Force’s Appendix 2 establishes the elements of this finding beyond a reasonable doubt.

Finding 3

The second worst problem with torture as an information gathering technique is that it doesn’t work. The victims will say almost anything to make it stop. Many of the techniques were intended, over time, to make the victims pliable and suggestible. At that point, the detainees will adopt any suggestion.

And if the illegal detentions and street sweeps do pick up someone who is genuinely a terrorist, torture makes it impossible to  prosecute them for their crimes. The torture will come out at trial. Even the sorry excuses for trials before so-called military tribunals.

The Task Force acknowledges that it was not permitted to review classified information, and that the government claims it possesses valuable information obtained by torture that must remain classified. The excuse is thin. It’s unlikely there’s still a reason to hold whatever the torturers got secret and, in the circumstances, the burden is on the government to show anything was “extracted” that’s valuable enough to justify leaving criminals unpunished. Some of the claimed valuable information is more than ten years old now; it stretches credibility to claim declassification would jeopardize national security.

The Task Force turns next to the ongoing embarrassment that is the Guantanamo detention center. WC will take those Findings up in a later post. In the meantime, WC strongly recommends every thinking American read the Report. 

Buddy, Can You Spare $1.6 Trillion?

The American Society of Civil Engineers has issued its quadrennial Report Card on America’s Infrastructure. It makes grim reading; overall, the United States gets a grade of D+ on its job of maintaining the infrastructure in the country: the dams, bridges, waterways, electrical grids, schools and other public construction we need to succeed and prosper.

Between now and 2020, ASCE projects we need $3.6 trillion in public funds to make the necessary repairs and replacements. Pre-sequester, we’d budgeted just $2.0 trillion. It’s likely less now.

Infrastructure Systems	Total Needs	Estimated Funding	Funding Gap
Surface Transportation	$1,723	$877	$846
Water/Wastewater Infrastructure	$126	$42	$84
Electricity	$736	$629	$107
Airports	$134	$95	$39
Inland Waterways & Marine Ports	$30	$14	$16
Dams	$21	$6	$15
Hazardous & Solid Waste	$56	$10	$46
Levees	$80	$8	$72
Public Parks & Recreation	$238	$134	$104
Rail	$100	$89	$11
Schools	$391	$120	$271
TOTALS	$3,635	$2,024	$1,611
Yearly Investment Needed	$454	$253	$201

.

You’d think that the collapse of an interstate highway bridge in the middle of Minneapolis-St. Paul would have sounded some kind of alarm. You’d have been wrong.

Of course, the Teabagger-dominated U.S. House is committed to fiscal austerity, no matter the price. They claim the budget deficit must be reduced “for the benefit of our children.” As Paul Krugman and others have pointed out, they used to claim it was to avert a fiscal crisis, but the fiscal crisis, despite all that Neocon earnestness, has stubbornly refused to happen. So the message has changed to “protecting the legacy for our children.”

But there is more than one kind of legacy. One kind involves collapsing bridges, catastrophic dam failures and mouldering school buildings. That legacy involves digging a hole from which the economy may never recover. A path to third world status. The other involves a fiscal deficit.

Can we be perfectly clear about this? The Republican Party is placing shabby, failed politics ahead of the long-term health of the national infrastructure and, in the near term, the long-term health of the economy and the nation. And they want to call it “protecting our children’s legacy.” And yet people still vote for these clowns.

National Anthems

National anthems are one of the very odd aspects of modern culture. America’s national anthem is a bad poem by lawyer and very amateur poet Francis Scott Key called “The Defence of Ft. McHenry,” written in 1814. Key gave the poem to his brother-in-law, Judge Joseph H. Nicholson, who saw that the words fit the popular melody “The Anacreontic Song“, by English composer John Stafford Smith. It was the official song of the Anacreontic Society, an 18th-century gentlemen’s club of amateur musicians in London. The octave-and-a-half drinking song was popular in America at the time. Nicholson stole the tune, set Key’s poem to it and took the poem to a printer in Baltimore, who anonymously made the first known broadside printing on September 17. Much, much later, in 1931, it was made the national anthem.

The song celebrates the survival of a naval fort guarding Baltimore following the British Burning of Washington and the British Raid on Alexandria, Virginia, although you won’t glean that from the part sung at baseball games. While we only sing the first stanza, the national anthem in fact has four stanzas. The American national anthem is solemn, pompous, plodding and famously difficult to sing. It’s against the law to be disrespectful during a playing of the national anthem.

But sacred cows make the best hamburger, as the late Jay Hammond used to say. And no one is better at cutting down sacred cows than Terry Pratchett. The fictional city of Ankh-Morpork, the biggest city on the Discworld, has an anthem, too. Unlike the U.S. anthem, the stanzas after the first one are largely reduced the “ner, ner, ner” since that’s what folks sing anyway. Here, in its glory, is the Ankh-Morpork National Anthem:

When dragons belch and hippos flee
My thoughts, Ankh-Morpork, are of thee
Let others boast of martial dash
For we have boldly fought with cash
We own all your helmets, we own all your shoes
We own all your generals – touch us and you’ll lose.

Morporkia! Morporkia!
Morporkia owns the day!
We can rule you wholesale
Touch us and you’ll pay.

We bankrupt all invaders, we sell them souvenirs
We ner ner ner ner ner, hner ner hner by the ears
Er hner we ner ner ner ner ner
Ner ner her ner ner ner hner the ner
Er ner ner hner ner, nher hner ner ner (etc.)
Ner hner ner, your gleaming swords
We mortgaged to the hilt

Morporkia! Morporkia!
Hner ner ner ner ner ner
We can rule you wholesale
Credit where it’s due.

Ankh-Morpork boasts it has never been invaded. It’s true that invaders have entered the City many times (the City gates are rusted open), but in each case, after a few days they find they no longer own their horses or armor, and a month after that are just another minority with its own graffiti, ethnic restaurants and complaints. It shouldn’t be a surprise; it’s all there in the anthem.

In mocking national anthems, Pratchett is reminding us that patriotism is well and good, but that when it slips into jingoism, into chauvinism, that patriotism becomes dangerous, not just to other countries but to the health of our nation. Pratchett explored this in more detail in his terrific novel, Jingo [Amazon link]. The most virulent strain, American exceptionalism, is especially dangerous. Most recently, it got us into a horrific and wholly unnecessary war in Iraq, as just one example.

There is much to admire in the United States. But there is room for improvement, too. Anyone who tells you, “My country, right or wrong,” is a fool or a liar, and not to be trusted. Pratchett coats the lesson with humor. WC isn’t sure that the super-patriots understand it’s a joke.

Something to think about the next time you have to listen to the national anthem.

WC Helps the GOP Out: Admitting the GOP’s Real Problem

WC will selflessly offer serious, substantive advice to the Republic Party. Why? Because it’s just too painful to watch. The poor thing needs help, if only to avoid having the Republican-led U.S. House drag the country into another recession.

Everyone who has read a self-help book knows the process. The first step to problem-solving is to identify the problem. The second step is to address the problem in a mature, competent way. And the third step is to take action to prevent the problem from recurring.

Step 1 – Identifying the Problem.

Recognizing the Problem

When was the last time you heard the Republicans mention the previous president? Acting as if there was no George W. Bush administration is a kind of bizarre denial. It’s pretty obvious why the GOP pretends Bush/Cheney didn’t happen. Here’s a partial list.

• The worst national security lapse since Pearl Harbor (9/11) despite being warned explicitly in advance.
• Two unfunded land wars in Asia.
• In the case of the invasion of Iraq, either a war based on an intentional lie or the most staggering intelligence failure in American history
• A huge cut in the U.S. income tax at the time of those two unfunded, multi-billion dollar wars
• An unfunded new Medicare prescription medicine mandate
• Deregulation of the housing finance industry, leading to the worst economic disaster since 1929.
• Unilateral abandonment of U.S. compliance with the Geneva Accords, government-sponsored torture and a host of war crimes.

Remember, WC said this was just a partial list. But, yeah, there was this very lengthy and very embarrassing series of utter failures by a guy who was a Republican. But the problem isn’t that a Republican president committed this horrifying series of blunders.

The problem is that the Republican Party won’t come to grips with that reality. The Republican Party pretends the 8-year Bush Administration didn’t happen. It’s an astonishing kind of group denial. If it happened in an individual that person might be diagnosed as neurotic.

Step 2 – Dealing with the Problem.

The Republican Party refuses to admit the problem exists, let alone that it is a problem or that the Party needs to deal with the horrifying mistakes of its former titular head. So you get embarrassing spectacles like Senator John McCain (R, AZ) accusing Charles Hagel, nominee for Secretary of Defense, when he says the Iraq War arose from faulty intelligence. Instead of attempting to defend the decision to go to war in Iraq, McCain accused Hagel of attacking the soldiers who had fought and died there. Because, you see, it wasn’t a Republican president who made the decision to send soldiers there. That guy doesn’t exist.

And you have the GOP challenging reform of financial regulation because it will “hurt the country competitively,” because the Great Recession wasn’t triggered by the failure to adequately regulate the financial sector. Because, you know, there was no failure to adequately regulate the financial sector because Bush-Cheney didn’t happen. The Great Recession is the fault of President Obama, or a Democratic Congress, because Bush-Cheney didn’t exist.

The over-stated, over-hyped “debt crisis,” the very tired horse the GOP has long since ridden into the ground, into shambling zombie-hood, is entirely the fault of President Obama because, you know, Bush-Cheney never happened.

It’s all a weird kind of denial. Andrew Sullivan has his proposed cure:

Someone in the GOP needs to take Bush-Cheney apart, to show how they created the debt crisis we are in, by throwing away a surplus on unaffordable tax cuts, launching two unfunded wars, and one new unfunded entitlement. They need to take on the war crimes that has deeply undermined the soul of the United States. They need to note the catastrophic negligence that gave us the worst national security lapse since Pearl Harbor (9/11) despite being warned explicitly in advance, accept weak and false intelligence to launch a war they were too incompetent to fight or win, sat back as one of the worst hurricanes all but took out a major city, and was so negligent in bank regulation that we ended up with Lehman and all that subsequently took place.

These were not minor errors. They were catastrophic misjudgments which took an era of peace, surplus and prosperity and replaced it with a dystopia of massive debt, a lawless executive branch, two unwinnable wars, and a record of war crimes that had their source in the very Oval Office.

When will the Republicans hold themselves accountable for the things that have persuaded so many that this bunch of fanatics and deniers are unfit for government? When will they speak of Bush and Cheney and repudiate them?

WC thinks Sullivan’s treatment will happen the same day the Senator Imhofe introduces a carbon tax, which will be the same day Rep. Broun proposes a national holiday for Charles Darwin.

Some Republican needs to work up the courage to say, “Our party made grievous mistakes. We’ve moved beyond them. We’ve learned from them. Here’s how.” A group of Republicans needs to hold Congressional hearings on, at a minimum, how we got into the war in Iraq and the treatment of “detainees” by the United States. That should include the torture, the “extraordinary rendition” – outsourcing our torture – and the murder of prisoners in Guantanamo and elsewhere.

Under Bush-Cheney, the U.S. abandoned not just Republican values of conservatism and constitutionalism; it abandoned American ideals. The Republican Party has some soul-searching to do if it wants to reclaim those values and ideals.

Step 3: Preventing a Recurrence.

It’s easy to prevent a recurrence: don’t elect arrogant Republicans who think their immediate goals are more important than the Constitution. But WC is here to help the Republicans, at least this once, so let’s recast the solution this way: Republicans should ask themselves, and answer honestly: “Why am I doing this?” If the answer is to benefit anyone other than the country as a whole, they shouldn’t do it. If it’s for a lobbyist, a big campaign contributor, or their own kid, they shouldn’t do it. If it is for some platform item that reflects a special interest, they shouldn’t do it. If it benefits any of those folks, even incidentally, they should ask themselves if the benefit to the country as a whole is great enough to engage in self-dealing. And generally answer “No.”

Note this test works for Democrats, liberals, conservatives, progressives and Randites, too. It doesn’t work for Teabaggers, because they seem to be incapable of logical thinking.

Because when our elected officials take the oath of office, they swear to defend the Constitution, not their constituents. They swear to uphold the United Stats, not line the pockets of their family, friends and campaign contributors.

WC will now relax in the happy glow of service, utterly confident his advice will be totally ignored.

Americans Murdering Americans: al-Awlaki

AGM-114 Hellfire Missile Deployed on a Predator Drone

Here’s the lead paragraph from a New York Times article yesterday:

A federal judge in Manhattan refused on Wednesday to require the Justice Department to disclose a memorandum providing the legal justification for the targeted killing of a United States citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, who died in a drone strike in Yemen in 2011.

Excuse me? “Died in a drone strike”? Don’t you mean “Was murdered in a drone strike”? Sure, the perp was the United States, but it was premeditated murder. Must be a typo.

You say that Anwar al-Awlaki was a terrorist, a despicable, miserable excuse for a human being, who had decided his religion entitled him to murder and encourage others to murder innocent people? But WC has examined the 4th, 5th and 6th amendments to the U.S. Constitution with care and, so far as he can discover, there are no exceptions in the U.S. Constitution allowing the murder, without trial, of despicable, miserable excuses for human beings. The Fifth Amendment, for example, says “No person … shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.” There doesn’t seem to be an exception for despicable, miserable excuses for human beings. It says “no person.”

In fact, what sets us apart from most other countries is that we give the worst kind of thugs the full panoply of constitutional rights. The United States, at least until recently, abhorred and refused summary executions. Timothy McVeigh, the homicidal goon who blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killed 168 people, including children attending day care. He seems by any sensible measure to have been a despicable, miserable excuse for a human being. Yet we indicted, tried and convicted him. We did not simply shoot him when there was some evidence linking him to a horrific crime.

Any sensible, thinking citizen should be very worried if the U.S. government, without trial, operating completely in secret, can simply kill someone because they are a suspected criminal.

One of WC’s anarchist friends asks the question this way: when is a government authorized to do something it forbids its citizens to do? You and I are forbidden under pain of criminal prosecution from killing someone because they are a despicable, miserable excuse for a human being. (WC notes the NRA may feel differently about this. But that’s a topic for another blog post.) We allow the government to kill people – over WC’s objections; WC detests the death penalty – only after long, careful and thorough consideration. Including trial by jury, and right of appeal. Under what circumstances can the U.S. government completely short-circuit that whole process?

The answer is that we don’t know. We do know that there is a policy memo. Attorney General Eric Holder has very loosely described it in a speech to Northwestern University Law School students. Attorney General Holder said in that speech that due process wasn’t judicial process. Actually, it is, at least when it comes to summary executions. And there’s certainly nothing in the U.S. Constitution that gives that summary power to the executive branch. The Times has an article from anonymous sources that have seen the memo. Here’s their summary:

The legal analysis, in essence, concluded that Mr. Awlaki could be legally killed, if it was not feasible to capture him, because intelligence agencies said he was taking part in the war between the United States and Al Qaeda and posed a significant threat to Americans, as well as because Yemeni authorities were unable or unwilling to stop him.

The memorandum, which was written more than a year before Mr. Awlaki was killed, does not independently analyze the quality of the evidence against him.

So if the CIA or NSA or another of the plethora of secret agencies decided that an American abroad was “taking part in the war between the United States and Al Qaeda,” without describing the evidence against him, or analyzing the quality of the evidence, then “Boom,” one Hellfire missile launched from a Predator drone and the American is an expanding cloud of greasy black smoke? Is that what it has come to? Is that what the Teabaggers hallowed Founding Fathers intended?

Let’s do a thought experiment. Instead of Al Qaeda, let’s substitute the last bogeyman that the United States confronted: Commies. And instead of Yemen, let’s substitute that infamous bastion of evil, Cuba. If WC was birding in Cuba, and some faceless Washington bureaucrat decided, without a hearing and without presenting evidence, that WC was “taking part in the war between the United States and Communism” by spending his birding dollars in a Commie country, could WC then be vaporized? Even assuming, for the sake of argument, that the Feds have the power of summary execution. In the absence of knowing the standards applied to decide who gets executed, and without knowing the evidence, how can you possibly answer the question?

All of which takes WC back to Judge Colleen McMahon’s decision of January 2, 2013. Several reporters had filed Freedom of Information requests seeking copies of the memorandum that AG Holder had discussed and various persons had described. She concluded it could not be produced under the Freedom of Information Act:

However, this Court is constrained by law, and under the law, I can only conclude that the Government has not violated FOIA by refusing to turn over the documents sought in the FOIA requests, and so cannot be compelled by this court of law to explain in detail the reasons why its actions do not violate the Constitution and laws of the United States. The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of this pronouncement is not lost on me; but after careful and extensive consideration, I find myself stuck in a paradoxical situation in which I cannot solve a problem because of contradictory constraints and rules — a veritable Catch-22. I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the Executive Branch of our Government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws, while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret. But under the law as I understand it to have developed, the Government’s motion for summary judgment must be granted, and the cross-motions by the ACLU and the Times denied, except in one limited respect.

There will be appeals, and the final outcome may be different. But the bottom line is this: under the laws enacted by Congress and the policies adopted by Presidents Bush and Obama, we are not presently entitled to know the rules under which our government may murder us.

It gives a whole new meaning to the “war on terror.”

If you aren’t frightened, you should be.

The Disease That Is Killing Americans

Dan Wasserman, ©2012

We have an untreated disease that is killing 30,000 Americans each year. Today that untreated disease killed 20 young elementary school students in Connecticut. And 8 adults. WC has no words to describe the horror and the sorrow.

Or the anger.

We call ourselves “exceptional,” but we cannot even have an adult conversation about the existence of this untreated disease. 30,000 people. The population of Fairbanks. Each year.

If someone calls it the “price of freedom,” WC gets to ask “free from what” and “free to do what”? What has the Second Amendment, as interpreted by our culture and, yes, the U.S. Supreme Court, gotten us since Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968? Other than a million deaths and injuries from firearms.

Are we, as a society, as a culture, mature enough to admit that the status quo is unacceptable, and that something has to be done? Or will that admission require still more carnage, still more grieving parents, still more blood?

Reducing the Federal Deficit: A Modest Proposal

The “war on drugs” has made the United States the country on the planet with the most citizens in prison. Our prison population is through the roof, as WC has shown in earlier blog posts.

It’s also costing the federal government and incredible amount of money.

Federal Corrections Dollars by Year (Source: Office of Management and Budget)

That’s $8.5 billion dollars in 2012. That number can be halved if we released nonviolent offenders. And the nonviolent offenders are overwhelmingly drug offenders.

The war on drugs is over. We lost. It was a boneheaded idea in the first place. Addictive drugs trump the fear of criminal sentences; to a junkie, the next fix is more important than a jail sentence of any length. So the idea that harsh sentences will deter drug users was a non-starter. It didn’t stop the federal government from putting nearly 100,000 citizens in prison, about half of the total federal prison population. If they are three-time offenders, and more than a trivial amount of drugs are involved, they are in prison for life. There was an especially poignant example of the unbelievable harshness of this mandatory sentence in the New York Times recently.

So let’s save $4-5 billion by releasing nonviolent drug offenders. The idea behind the harsh sentences has failed. It’s time to move on.

Big Bucket of Worms: Gerrymandering 101

Your Basic Bucket of Worms

Every ten years, Alaska struggles with the matter of redistricting. Ultimately, each redistricting plan winds up being written by the Alaska Supreme Court. Which is why the issue is a Big Bucket of Worms.

The Alaska Republican Party controlled the redistricting process this year, and it shows. WC will offer one example.

Here’s the interim map of the state senate districts, zoomed in on the area just to the north of Fairbanks:

Detail, Senate District Boundaries 7 and 8

As you study the map, you can see it tracks Farmer’s Loop Road eastwards, then follows Summit Drive north. Except for one, odd little shift to the west surrounding Vide Way. Why do you suppose the boundary makes that little jig to the west at the particular spot?

Here’s a hint: Senator Joe Thomas (D) lives on Vide Way. By shifting the boundary, the Alaska Redistricting Committee put Senator Thomas in the same senate district as North Pole, Alaska, a very conservative part of the Interior, even by Alaska standards. Where the incumbent is Senator John Coghill (R). Thomas is a canny campaigner, but Coghill has a famous last name, and is nearly an automatic in the North Pole area.

Gerry-mander Cartoon, Elkanah Tisdale, 1812

The practice of gerrymandering has a long, sordid history in the United States. The term seems to have originated in Massachusetts in an 1812 election, when Governor Gerry drew district boundaries in a vaguely-salamander shape. Governor Gerry’s map was immortalized by Elkanah Tisdale, an engraver in the drawing to the left. And the drawing pretty much immortalized the term. Since 1848, the term has been in Oxford English Dictionary as “a practice that attempts to establish a political advantage for a particular party or group by manipulating geographic boundaries to create partisan or incumbent-protected districts.”

Which pretty much describes what the current Alaska redistricting plan does to Senator Joe Thomas.

The practice, if not the term, seems to have been shipped to most democracies round the world. Exceptional, indeed.

All of which brings WC around to a decision on August 28 involving the recent redistricting in Texas – “Perry-mandering,” if you will. A three-judge panel of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia Circuit found that a set of maps for Texas Congressional, State House and State Senate districts drawn by the Texas Legislature failed to comply with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. They denied granting  preclearance to the maps, meaning that they cannot be used in elections.

Under the somewhat Byzantine rules that govern courts applying the Voting Rights Act, the D.C. Circuit can’t draw corrected maps. The U.S. District Court in San Antonio will have that task. The State of Texas will, of course, appeal complaining about the unfairness of it all, and how Texas shouldn’t be submitted to pre-clearance. And if that sounds familiar, it should.

Because Alaska’s own Captain Zero is presently suing the Federal government, objecting to the application of the Voting Rights Act to Alaska. Because, of course, there is no gerrymandering going on in Alaska.

A Given Definition of “Exceptional”: Islamophobia

Islamophobia, in a single subject, captures the worst and the best of the United States.

There is no question that hate crimes against Islams are at epidemic levels. That domestic terrorism in Wisconsin – ironically against Sikhs, not Islams – is only the most recent horrific example. With the exception of bloggers like Glenn Greenwald at Salon, the carnage is both under-reported and horrific. Here’s part of Greenwald’s list:

• The Islamic Society of Joplin opened a mosque in 2007 in Joplin, Missouri. Almost immediately, the sign in front was set on fire. It was arson. On the July 4, 2012, someone probably thinks they are a patriot was filmed by a surveillance camera throwing burning material onto the roof of the mosque in an attempt to burn it down, causing some fire damage. The FBI offered a $15,000 reard, but the arsonist remains at large. On August 5, the day after the the Sikh temple shooting in Wisconsin, the Joplin mosque burned to the ground, completely destroyed by a fire that began in the middle of the night. It was almost certainly arson.
• In October of last year, a Texas man pled guilty “to a hate crime charge stemming from an arson of a children’s playground at the Dar El-Eman Islamic Center in Arlington,” and admitted that the fire was “part of a series of ethnically-motivated acts directed at individuals of Arab or Middle Eastern descent associated with the mosque.”
• After a mosque in Murfreesboro, Tennessee triggered intense community opposition when it attempted to expand in 2010, a fire that was ruled to be arson damaged the mosque; after facing years of vandalism, bomb threats, and efforts by local and state officials (including state judges) to block its expansion, the mosque was finally able to open only this week only after the DOJ and a federal judge (to their credit) intervened on the ground that the mosque’s religious liberty was being infringed.
• In August of last year, an Oregon man was indicted “on federal hate crime and arson charges for intentionally setting fire to the Salman Alfarisi Islamic Center.”
• In May of last year, a fire at a mosque in Stockton, California, WC’s hometown, was ruled to be arson.
• Last year in southwest Houston, surveillance cameras “captured images of a group of at least three men in masks” attempting to set fire to a local mosque; “prayer rugs at the back of the mosque were doused with gasoline.”
• In 2011 in Dearborn, Michigan, an attack on one of the nation’s largest mosques was thwarted when a man was arrested carrying large amounts of explosives.
• In Massachusetts last year, the Islamic Society of Greater Worcester was set on fire by a man apprehended before the fire could spread.
• A fire that seriously damaged a mosque in Wichita, Kansas on Halloween night last year was ruled to be arson.
• In July of this year, a South Carolina mosque was vandalized; such vandalism against American mosques is incredibly common.
• On the 4th of July this year, the home of a Pakistani Muslim family in Texas, who have lived in the U.S. for 15 years, had the word “Terrorist” spray-painted onto it and then had ignited fireworks left on their doorstep.

Can you imagine the public reaction if these attacks had been against, say, Baptists?

But amongst all this racism, horror, fear and betrayal, you can also find the qualities that define the Americans’ better instincts. In response to the events in Joplin, a teenaged member of that mosque, Joplin high school student Laela Zaidi, began using social media to discuss the importance of the mosque to her community.

Most significantly, a little-publicized online campaign to raise the $250,000 needed to rebuild the mosque has produced extremely quick and inspiring results.

Joplin Mosque Fundraising Effort

Overt Islamophobia is nearly mainstream. It’s socially acceptable bigotry. Shameless opportunists like Peter King and Michele Bachman make McCarthy-esque attacks.

But just when you are ready to despair, a small mosque in an obscure town in the southwest corner of a middle-America state can raise $262,106 in 48 hours to replace a torched building.

In Interior Alaska, the winters are very long and very dark. Such sunlight as there is is thin and feeble. It’s gloomy and depressing. WC heard a mother tell her very young daughter, “Wait and see; there will be two whole minutes more daylight tomorrow.” Against the unrelenting bigotry against Muslims in America, against undisguised racism and irrantionality, we have the fundraising drive for the Joplin mosque: two more minutes of daylight tomorrow.

A Given Definition of “Exceptional”: Regulation and Death Rates

There were 535 deaths in air crashes in 2009 according to the National Transportation Safety Board’s report. Air transportation is closely regulated. Pilots are licensed and carefully examined. Aircraft are regulated and inspected. It’s not perfect, but the death rate is 0.05 passengers per billion miles flown.

There were 32,885 deaths in the U.S. from automobile accidents in 2010, according to the Center for Disease Control. That’s about 1.25 deaths per million vehicle miles travelled. Automobile operator licensing is much less strictly regulated than air pilots; automobiles themselves are hardly regulated at all. As a result, it is 200 times more dangerous driving to the airport than it is on the flight when you leave. Still, most states, even Alaska, do require drivers to have insurance in the event of an accident. You have to pass a driving test and a written test. You have to appear and demonstrate you can still see every five years.

There were 31,513 deaths from firearms in the U.S. in 2010. This makes firearms injuries one of the top ten causes of death in the U.S. Neither firearm ownership nor firearm manufacture are regulated. There are no requirements for insurance of any kind. There are no tests of any kind for the right to possess a firearm.

Unlike aircraft and automobiles, which serve a useful purpose, firearms are created primarily to injure and kill, and to do so at a distance. In any sane world, we’d closely regulate and license the right to carry or use such a tool. We’d require liability insurance before you could carry one around. But this is America. This is the Second Amendment. This is the mass insanity of the National Rifle Association.

Remember, too, that less than half of American households report that they own or possess firearms. Those 31,513 deaths come from half of the population. Automobiles, by comparison, are owned by 89% of Americans. With half of the ownership rate, firearms cause a nearly-equal number of fatalities.

Airplanes carry us places. As do automobiles. Firearms serve no documented useful purpose, except in the narrow area of hunting. There is no evidence that owning a firearm makes you safer; exactly the opposite, in fact.

On the evidence, there’s a direct relationship between the level of regulation and the level of harm. Firearms are about as dangerous as you can get. And are utterly unregulated.

Is WC the only one who thinks this is utterly wrong? Or “exceptional”?

Exceptional? E.L. Doctorow Weighs In

It’s unsurprising that E. L. Doctorow, one of the best writers in the English language, could write a much better essay than WC on the absurdity of any claim by the U.S. to being exceptional. But his four phase analysis of recent history and its blight on everything the U.S. claims to stand for is devastating. WC bows to a master. Doctorow’s Phase Three of the path to unexceptionalism is succinct, spare and precise:

Given corporate control of legislative bodies, enact laws to the benefit of corporate interests. For example, those laws sponsored by weapons manufacturers wherein people may carry concealed weapons and shoot and kill anyone by whom they feel threatened.

Give the running of state prisons over to private corporations whose profits increase with the increase in inmate populations. See to it that a majority of prisoners are African-American.

When possible, treat immigrants as criminals.

Deplete and underfinance a viable system of free public schools and give the education of children over to private for-profit corporations.

Make college education unaffordable.

Inject religious precepts into public policy so as to control women’s bodies.

Enact laws prohibiting collective bargaining. Portray trade unions as un-American.

Enact laws restricting the voting rights of possibly unruly constituencies.

Propagandize against scientific facts that would affect corporate profits. Portray global warming as a conspiracy of scientists.

Having subverted the Constitution and enervated the nation with these measures,  portray the federal government as unwieldy, bumbling and shot through with elitist liberals.  Create mental states of maladaptive populism among the citizenry to support this view.

WC declines to indulge in any tendency to conspiracy, but if you were setting out to destroy everything out country stands for, that’s pretty much how you’d go about it.

Exceptional? A Few Notes on the CIA Inspector General’s Report

WC recently read the Central Intelligence Agency Inspector General’s Special Review of Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogation Activities dated May 7, 2004. The fact that it is heavily redacted – sometimes entire pages at a time – doesn’t stop it from being a whitewash of the years of torture performed by the United States. It is a sickening, nauseating chronology of what happens to a country that loses sight of its values.

Summaries and analysis of the Inspector General’s Special Review are available from the ACLU at its Torture Report site.

But as a service to his readers, WC will summarize the unredacted parts of the Special Review: by twisting law, logic and medical science beyond recognition, the Inspector General concludes that the torture inflicted by the United States on hundreds, perhaps thousands of persons who were not even charged with a crime was not torture. That despite unassailable evidence of post-traumatic shock syndrome there was no lasting harm done to anyone. And that no crimes or violations of treaties occurred.

While the Special Review makes ten recommendations, all of are left to wonder what those might be because they are are all, in their entirety, rdeacted.

The comforting, self-serving whitewash would be a lot more persuasive if it were not for this one paragraph, in a section called “End Game,” which somehow escaped the heavy black pen of the censors:

The number of detainees in CIA custody is relatively small by comparison with those in U.S. military custody. Nevertheless, the Agency, like the military, has an interest in the disposition of detainees and particular interest in those who, if not kept in isolation, would likely divulge information about the circumstances of their detention.

Special Review, Par. 237, p. 96

Let’s be very clear about what the CIA is saying: we are holding detainees – persons not charged with a crime – as prisoners because the CIA is worried that if they were released they’d tell the world the gruesome details of what America has done to them.

So even though the CIA’s Inspector General, over the course of the 100 pages of heavily redacted Special Review, assures his readers we have done nothing wrong, we have committed no crimes, we have violated no treaties, it’s important we keep the folks we tortured locked up so they can’t tell anyone what was done to them.

That single paragraph gives the lie to every unredacted paragraph and partial paragraph in the Special Report. And it compounds the felonies committed by the U.S. We tortured people because they wouldn’t talk; now we hold them prisoner because we fear they will.

So much for exceptional.

War Crimes, War Criminals and Exceptionalism

WC offers serious props to Spencer Ackerman, at Wired, whose Danger Room has taken a long, hard look at the United States’ use of torture in its so-called war on terror. And unflinchingly looked into the possible war crimes committed by the U.S. during the Bush administration.

WC is no expert in the area of international law or the complexities of the various Geneva Conventions. But WC does know that the United States prosecuted Japanese after World War II for waterboarding. It’s a matter of public record. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, was waterboarded 183 times in a single month while the CIA held him at an undisclosed “black site” prison.

When President Obama was elected in 2008, WC hoped for a public investigation into the conduct of the CIA, the FBI and private contractors. Not necessarily with a view to criminal prosecutions, but rather to get at the truth. The thing about playing fast and loose with international conventions is that it cripples your ability to complain when others violate those conventions. And it surrenders the moral high ground. WC would like for his country to be the good guys. It’s not. A careful, credible investigation might have helped restore the nation’s reputation.

That didn’t happen. Instead, there was a closed door, confidential investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice, much criticized by the former Bush administration members and the Neocons for looking at even the lower levels of the darkest chapters in U.S. counterterrorism. WC can’t call it a “white wash” because no one knows exactly what was done. But the absence of a public process, the refusal to “look backwards,” raises suspicions in all but the worst of the Neocons. That “investigation” closed in June 2011 when Holder announced he’d pursue criminal investigations in just two out of 101 cases of suspected detainee abuse. Some of them turned out not to have involved CIA officials after all. Both of the cases that move on to a criminal phase involved the “death in custody” of detainees.

And now, it turns out, State Department counselor Philip Zelikow told the Bush team in 2006 that using the controversial interrogation techniques were “prohibited” under U.S. law — “even if there is a compelling state interest asserted to justify them.” The lightly redacted memo – thought to have been expunged by the Bush Administration – has surfaced in Danger Room, in response to a Freedom of Information request.

No big deal, you say? Think about this: the President of Egypt, Hosni Mubarik, was overthrown for, among other crimes, torturing prisoners. Egypt and Mubarik hosted at least one of the black sites where some of the worst U.S. torture of prisoners occurred. Any records of those black site activities are now in the hands of Egypt’s new government. Zelikow’s letter is now a public record. Those records, in the hands of the International Criminal Court, could lead to an indictment of U.S. citizens involved. It’s true that, shamefully, the U.S. has backed out of being a party to the Rome Statute that underpins the ICC. But the court has jurisdiction of crimes committed by non-members in member states. Egypt, however, is a member state.

In the best case we will be presented with the ugly spectacle of the United States trying to wiggle out of an international crime. Publicly. For a long time. Not very “exceptional.”

Corruption Risk in Alaska – Why a D+ Seems Generous

Q: Why does New Jersey have all the Superfund sites and California have all the lawyers?
A: New Jersey got to choose first.

The State Integrity Investigation describes itself as “a $1.5 million public collaboration designed to expose practices that undermine trust in state capitols — and spotlight the states that are doing things right.” It has conducted a study of the corruption risk – not the current level of corruption – in all 50 states.

The idea was to develop criteria to evaluate the risk of corruption. Judging by the number of convictions – Illinois’s four governors who have gone to jail; Massachusetts’ three consecutive house speakers who are in the pen – was deemed too variable. Aggressive prosecutors, federal enforcement when the state governments get corrupt; it was found to be an imprecise measure. Which is just as well, given Alaska’s recent history.

Alaska got a D+ and ranked 27th, just barely in the bottom half. Close call. We nearly flunked! New Jersey finished first.

The limits of WordPress won’t allow WC to put a full link to the graphic here, but here’s a screen shot of Alaska’s report card:

Not a report card you'd want to show to your parents.

Oddly enough, WC finds the grading to be too generous. If you’ve ever tried to find recent campaign financial reports in the Alaska Public Offices Commission’s on-line database, you know better than to give it a C+, and if you’ve ever tried to find lobbyist reports you know a C is incredibly generous. From the track record of the Alaska Commission on Judicial Qualifications, which is in charge of policing state judges, you’d think the judiciary deserved halos.

Ethics Enforcement Agencies? Two words: Ben Stevens. See what WC means? A C- is very generous. WC’s teachers were a lot tougher with the red pencils than the SII.

If Alaska indeed ranks 27th, the 23 states that are worse must be very bad indeed.

(Memo to The Newt: Perhaps you could direct your considerable energies to your avowed “home state” of Georgia which, on the evidence, could use some help. You have that personal experience in corruption, after all.)

The Anchorage Daily News’ Sean Cockerham has written a nice article on Alaska’s rating, which WC commends to this readers.

The Lies We Tell Ourselves: The Myth of Upward Mobility

It’s a cherished belief: Americans who work hard can succeed and reach a higher point on the economic ladder than their parents. Anyone can be a Ben Franklin or a Henry Ford and rise from abject poverty to the very highest economic success. It’s a big part of America being “exceptional.” “Only in America, land of opportunity.” As Julia Issacs, of the Brookings Institution put it,

For most Americans, seeing that one’s children are better off than oneself is the essence of living the American Dream. Indeed, much of the American spirit is grounded in the belief that with determination and hard work, one can rise from humble beginnings and achieve a comfortable, middle-class life, if not great wealth.

In fact, among the wealthy countries, the United States has the lowest rates of upward mobility. One well-regarded German study found,

The main driver of the difference in the pattern of male intergenerational mobility in the U.S. from that of each of the other countries in our study is the low mobility out of the lowest quintile group in the United States. Indeed, it is very noticeable that while for all of the other countries persistence is particularly high in the upper tails of the distribution, in the U.S. this is reversed – with a particularly high likelihood that sons of the poorest fathers in the U.S. will remain in the lowest earnings quintile. We view this as a challenge to the popular notion of an “American exceptionalism” in economic mobility. Indeed, the combination of a high proba- bility of American sons of the poorest fifth of fathers remaining in the lowest quintile group, the lower probability of “rags-to-riches” (poorest to richest) and slightly lower probability of “riches-to-rags” (richest to poorest), places the notion of American exceptionalism in a new light. The U.S., or at least the population of young U.S. men, seems to be distinguished from other countries by having greater low-income persistence, rather than less, having fewer very large positional changes across generations, rather than more, and possibly having a greater persistence of high income, rather than less.

Congressional Budget Office data support the German conclusion:

Income inequality in the United States

If you are born poor in America, in the bottom 20% of the economy, the odds are heavily against your ever doing better. Partly that’s because the poor in America are in worse shape than the poor in other nations. Nutrition, health and educational opportunities are all lower. At the physiological level, it’s not only hard to learn when you are hungry; it’s impossible to learn if you are malnourished. The extraordinarily high incarceration rates among the poor, usually resulting in single parent households, further contributes to the problem.

As Paul Krugman put it,

Think about it: someone who really wanted equal opportunity would be very concerned about the inequality of our current system. He would support more nutritional aid for low-income mothers-to-be and young children. He would try to improve the quality of public schools. He would support aid to low-income college students. And he would support what every other advanced country has, a universal health care system, so that nobody need worry about untreated illness or crushing medical bills.

Mitt Romney doesn’t support any of these solutions. He thinks we should discuss class inequality, if at all, in “quiet rooms.” None of declining number of Non-Mitts support these things; most are vehemently against them. Ron Paul positively froths at the mouth at the idea. Congress, composed mostly the top 20%, seems much more interested in looking after their kids than looking after America’s kids. So the gap between rich and poor will continue to widen.

Martin Luther King, whose day this is, utterly rejected the idea of discussions in quiet rooms. That was where racial inequality was discussed – and preserved – for decades. When a Republican tells you we can’t afford school lunch programs, or can’t afford better schools, or can’t afford health care? They’re telling you we can’t afford the American Dream. When a billionaire like Mitt Romney tells you that it is inflammatory or class warfare to discuss the issue in public, he is repudiating the American Dream. President Obama, if re-elected, cannot by himself restore the goal of equal opportunity. Especially with the current Congress. But the odds are immensely higher than with a newly-elected plutocrat like Romney.

Lies, Liars and America, Part 3

The late Robert Heinlein, writing in Time Enough for Love, said that there were three kinds of lies: (1) the simple statement of an untruth, by far the most common lie; (2) telling part of the truth and stopping, creating a lie by omission, and (3) the most difficult and least common, telling the truth but doing so unconvincingly so that people think you are lying. Heinlein also lamented the increase in clumsy, stupid lies.

It’s against that background that WC wants to visit the role of truth and the lost art of lying in current politics. This will be a series of blog posts. The specific triggers for this series are

1. Mark Hemingway’s article in The Weekly Standard in which he calls fact-checking – discovering lies – “the liberal media’s latest attempt to control the discourse.”
2. WC recently completed reading James Stewart’s excellent Tangled Webs: How False Statements Are Undermining America: From Martha Stewart to Bernie Madoff.
3. WC probably made a mistake and listened to one of the recent Republican presidential wannabe “debates,” where apparently the statements of the debaters are “not intended to be factual.”

WC has some pretty strong feelings about these three aspects of lying. This third and last post examines the Republican presidential wannabes and their colleagues and the reckless disregard for the truth they show in their debates and campaigning.

What WC Expects in a Politician: Don’t Lie

Mitt Romney ran an anti-Obama advertisement, taking an Obama quote completely out of context, inverting and distorting its meaning in an effort to gain votes. Newt Gingrich claimed the ethics scandal which led to his resignation and a $300,000 fine was a Democratic witch hunt, even though the vote was 395-28 and he admitted the charges in 1997. Gingrich worked to impeach President Clinton for lying under oath about extramarital sex while Gingrich himself was having an affair with a Congressional staffer some 23 years younger than him. Michelle Bachman, based on one alleged anecdote, claimed a thoroughly studied vaccine that can save lives can cause “mental retardation.” In April of this year, Senator Jon Kyl  (R, AZ) claimed on the Senate floor:

KYL: Everybody goes to clinics, to doctors, to hospitals, so on. Some people go to Planned Parenthood. But you don’t have to go to Planned Parenthood to get your cholesterol or your blood pressure checked. If you want an abortion, you go to Planned Parenthood, and that’s well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.

And then had one of his aides say that ’his remark was not intended to be a factual statement.” Planned Parenthood has demonstrated abortions constitute about 3% of its activities.

WC thinks he has realistically low expectations of politicians. Yes, they lie like rugs. Yes, they’ll attempt to impeach their colleagues while they themselves do the very things for which they seek to impeach their colleagues. And yes, Bill Clinton did his share of lying, contributing to the current state of national mendacity.

But when a presidential wannabe like Michelle Bachman claims vaccinations for a cancer-causing sexually transmitted disease causes mental retardation, the claim is so ill-informed, so reckless and so dangerous that the lie endangers the health of our children and the safety of our country. When Gingrich is having an affair with a staffer while seeing to impeach the president for the same conduct, he’s reinforcing every stereotype, and undermining the credibility of the U.S. Senate as a whole. At a time when Planned Parenthood clinics are attacked, firebombed and their professional staff assassinated it’s a near-criminal act to falsely characterize them as abortion mills.

Niccolo Machiavelli, writing in The Prince, said:

Every prince should desire to be accounted merciful, not cruel; but a new prince cannot escape a name for cruelty, for he who quells disorder by a few signal examples will, in the end, be the more merciful.

It’s been generalized to “The ends justify the means.” More plainly, that morally or legally wrong actions are sometimes necessary to achieve morally right outcomes; actions can only be considered morally right or wrong by virtue of the morality of the outcome. Assuming that Machiavelli’s precept had any application in the Italian city-states like Florence, it is contemptible in a nation of laws.

In their zeal for power, in their attempts to defeat President Obama, get themselves elected President or prevail in a decades-old controversy like abortion, these political hacks, consciously or unconsciously, have decided that the end justifies the means. That the glory of their presidency or the holy grail of an anti-abortion amendment justifies any means, however despicable, to obtain it.[1]

WC utterly rejects the thesis. There are practical reasons – if you can’t trust them not to lie now how can you trust them when they are elected? There are moral reasons – there is that Commandment, after all. But for WC it’s mostly because we are a nation of laws, a nation that honors the truth, that rewards those who speak the truth.

As citizens of the United States, WC believes it is our duty to call out lies by those who want to lead us. However painful. However tedious. However Sisyphean.

 

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[1] WC is aware of the aphorism about omlettes and eggs. But doesn’t think it applies here. In any event, this cast of clowns seems more intent on  changing the saying to “You can’t make an omelette without ruthlessly crushing dozens of eggs beneath your steel boot and then publicly disemboweling the chickens that laid them as a warning to others.” And the subject is the government of the most powerful nation on the planet.

Now That’s a Screed: Der Spiegel on Republican Presidential Wannabes

The German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel has weighed in on the Republican presidential candidates and it isn’t pretty.

They lie, deceive, scuffle and speak every manner of idiocy. And they expose a political, economic, geographic and historical ignorance compared to which George W. Bush sounds like a scholar. Even the party’s boosters are horrified by the spectacle…

Harper’s Magazine columnist Scott Horton summarizes:

At a time of mounting crisis, when much of the world is looking to the United States for leadership and initiative, the celebration of sleaze and ignorance that has marked the Republican primary is damaging the reputation of the nation as a whole. Even those who despise the G.O.P. should be concerned about the depths to which the party has sunk.

Ouch. WC supposes for a given definition of “exceptional”?